by John Egerton
Yet it was precisely these problems of racial and regional inequity—the one sustaining the other—that festered beneath the surface of midcentury life in the region. In no remote sense could these be thought of as new problems. For nearly seventy-five years—since the end of Reconstruction—the political and economic rulers in the states of the Old Confederacy had gradually tightened their oligarchic grip until their control was more secure than it had ever been, even in the days of slavery. With the indulgence and complicity of their Yankee conquerors, they had locked the black minority in a straitjacket of segregation and built a self-perpetuating hierarchy based on political, economic, religious, and racial monopoly.
To sustain this “Southern way of life,” the barons managed for decades to make voting not a right but a privilege reserved almost exclusively for educated, property-owning, middle- and upper-class white males. Inevitably, the same candidates got elected repeatedly to Congress, where seniority and parliamentary skill gave them power and influence far greater than their numbers. And so, over the years, an undemocratic pattern of vested privilege evolved. It was based in large measure upon an informal bargain: In the name of “states’ rights,” political control was restored to white Southerners, economic dominion remained with the North, and the troublesome race problem was controlled by a legal principle called “separate but equal.”
That was the South that emerged around the turn of the century, and it was essentially the same South that remained in place through two world wars sandwiched around the Great Depression. Since the Civil War, the South had stood apart from the rest of the nation more by choice than compulsion. If it had ever intended to step forward as a full and equal national partner, rather than the separate nation it had tried to be, the right time would have been in 1945, when an energetic spirit of reform and renewal was sweeping across America and the world. White colonialism was in eclipse almost everywhere; the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights was a formal affirmation of an idea whose time had come; and the U.S. Supreme Court, in case after case, was telling us that the separate-but-equal doctrine was a legal idea whose time had almost expired. And not only was white supremacy in doubt; the South’s one-party, one-crop, one-church pillars were shaking too.
But Dixie couldn’t bring itself to face the future; it kept looking to the past for its guiding light. Not even the prospect of genuine equality within and among the other states was enticement enough to make the region extend that guarantee to its own citizens, or to stop blaming its failures and shortcomings on “outside agitators”—whether Yankees, Communists, black militants, or the federal government. There’s plenty of discrimination up North, they said; who are they to tell us how to run our states?
There was pervasive racial discrimination outside the South, of course, and complacent Northerners were no more prepared to confront it than were their neighbors below. They took reassurance from the exceptions they saw to the “invisible man” message of Ralph Ellison. Joe Louis had just ended a long and glorious reign as heavyweight boxing champion of the world; William Hastie, appointed by President Truman in 1949 to the federal appeals court bench in Washington, held the highest judicial post ever occupied by a black American; Jackie Robinson of the Dodgers was a dashing, handsome, and highly visible major-league baseball star, and others were already following him to that pinnacle; in 1950, Gwendolyn Brooks became the first black poet to win a Pulitzer Prize, and Ralph Bunche, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize that year, also desegregated the faculty at Harvard University, his alma mater.
Still, the exceptions only proved the rule. Harvard was more than three centuries old when it finally found a chair for Ralph Bunche, and in all of the nation’s colleges and universities that weren’t historically intended for blacks only, the presence of African-American students, let alone teachers, was still highly exceptional. For almost a decade, Judge Hastie would be the only black jurist on the federal bench. When the Supreme Court outlawed segregation in 1954, the American press was about as segregated as the church or the university; only twenty or so black general-assignment reporters worked at white-owned papers (none in the South, except for a few who wrote “colored news”). The election of a black congressman from Detroit in 1954 would bring to just 3 the number of members of his race then included among the 535 men and women serving in Congress. Worse than that, the number of black elected officials at all levels of government, from Washington down to the tiniest American municipality, was probably under a hundred.
It helped not at all for self-righteous white Northerners to turn away with eye-rolling condescension from the poor, struggling, benighted South—or for white Southerners to assume a judgmental air of moral superiority over Yankees. Behind both attitudes loomed large and discouraging realities: The nation, in its social blindness, was not yet ready to address its own racial prejudices, whether in the North or in the South—and the South was still far from coming to grips with the racial problems it had been bringing upon itself since the day the first slave ship docked at Jamestown in 1619.
Old habits die hard. Many Northerners persisted in thinking of all Southerners as their inferiors—or worse, as racists living in an otherworldly land of snakes and alligators. In the South, conservative whites held to their belief in the inferiority of blacks and the evil nature of Yankees, while liberals continued to struggle with their conflicting notions of political and social equality—as if the two could be defined and dealt with separately.
As it moved into the fifties, the South was still deeply divided within itself, unable to reconcile its conflicting identities. Was it to be an agricultural region or an industrial one, or both? Would it be hobbled forever with memories of its Lost Cause? Could it overcome its inferiority complex as a vanquished province, a colonial dependency, and become an equal partner in nationhood? Could it find a way to bring all of its sons and daughters into the Southern family—or would tens of thousands of the best and brightest continue the yearly exodus in search of a better chance in another social climate, leaving millions more to languish in a bleak state of deprivation and disadvantage?
The South was a land blessed with natural abundance—with rich, deep mineral deposits and bottomless fountains of fresh water, with soil so fertile that almost no amount of abuse could keep it from fecund productivity. It had enough heat and light and moisture to grow just about anything you planted, from a corn patch to a pine forest. The wooded mountains and hills teemed with wildlife. Even the sea that lapped at the eastern and southern shores of the region yielded a boundless harvest of nourishment, free for the taking. And yet, in the midst of this embarrassment of riches lived the poorest people in America, a biracial majority kept in line by violence, racism, isolation, and ignorance—all for the benefit of a small ruling class of politicians and their “invitation only” electorate.
The resources of the South stood in telling contrast to its vulnerability—one more contradiction in a land of eternal paradox. And for all its natural wealth, nothing it had was worth more than what it valued least: its treasure of human resources, the men and women of talent and character and courage who, down through the years, had given so much to it and for it—and who generally had gotten far less than they deserved from their leaders. The South at its best was quite simply the sum of its people. Many of them were generations deep, others more recently arrived. Some were going or gone; the rest, by fate or by choice, had stayed behind.
Some who left became famous. William Warfield of West Helena, Arkansas, and Leontyne Price of Laurel, Mississippi, had in common their African-American and small-town Southern roots and their careers as concert singers. They also shared two memorable experiences in 1952: co-starring roles in a revival of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess that would play to packed houses on Broadway for two years—and their marriage, an event of some note even in blasé Manhattan, far from the cotton fields back home.
Much more avidly celebrated in the big city and around the country the year before that was a h
ot new baseball star, a twenty-year-old black kid from Fairfield, Alabama, by the name of Willie Mays, center fielder for the New York Giants; he led his team past the Dodgers and into the World Series in 1951, and was the National League’s Rookie of the Year.
The exodus of black Southerners through the thirties and forties was a landmark in the history of human migration. To see it in personal terms, consider the story of William Gordon, born into a family of black Mississippi sharecroppers in 1919. Seventy years later, describing his childhood, Gordon still remembered the instability, the deprivation, the fear in which his family lived—two steps from slavery, one from peonage. They moved a lot; he and the other children seldom saw the inside of a school. But he was smart, and a teacher convinced his parents that they ought to send him away to a city, where he might get a good education. So, on a sweltering summer afternoon in 1933, fourteen-year-old Bill Gordon hopped on a cotton truck in Marked Tree, Arkansas, and rode away into another world across the Mississippi River in Memphis; he spent his first night in the city sleeping under a bridge.
Less than a year later, the Southern Tenant Farmers Union brought a little hope to sharecroppers around Marked Tree, but the youngster had a job and a school by then, and he never considered going back. Gordon finished high school and college in Memphis, worked for a black newspaper, spent two years in the army, got more education and newspaper experience in New York, and finally, in 1948, returned to the South as associate editor of the Atlanta Daily World. For the next ten years (after which he would have another career with the U.S. Information Agency), Bill Gordon tried, in his words, “to give back to my people and the South some of the hope and encouragement and support I had received.” In 1952, with a recommendation from Ralph McGill of the Constitution, he won a Nieman fellowship to Harvard.
Margaret Walker was another black expatriate of the thirties who returned to the South. Her parents, both schoolteachers, were alumni of Northwestern University, and her father was also a Methodist minister in New Orleans. Those connections eased the way for their seventeen-year-old daughter to enter Northwestern in 1932. She returned eight years later with two degrees, three years of experience in the Federal Writers’ Project, and a book of poetry, For My People, that would capture a young-poets’ prize at Yale University after its publication in 1942. Richard Wright and others with whom she worked in the Chicago-based literary project sometimes dismissed Walker as “a little Southern bourgeois girl,” but the spirited young woman showed tenacious determination and a confident sense of self-worth. She wrote For My People in lieu of a master’s thesis at the University of Iowa in 1940, and then, for the better part of forty years, she taught at black colleges in the South, last and longest at Jackson State in Mississippi. Along the way she also married, raised three children, and returned to Iowa for her doctorate in the 1960s. That time, instead of a dissertation, she wrote a Civil War novel, Jubilee. Some critics called it another Gone With the Wind—only better—from a black Southern woman’s perspective.
Not all of the migration was by blacks, and not all of it was out of the South; sometimes people moved in. A few, like Carl Sandburg, were famous before they came south, while others gained a certain celebrity after they arrived. Harry Golden was one of the latter. A Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe, he had been raised on New York’s Lower East Side. Upon moving to Charlotte, North Carolina, in the early 1940s, he managed by the force of his wit and personality to make a local place for himself—and eventually a national splash—with his highly personal journal, the Carolina Israelite. Golden was outspokenly critical of segregation; his most effective weapons were a keen knowledge of history, a storyteller’s gift for gab, and an irrepressible sense of humor. Once he reported seeing three thermometers in a Southern hospital emergency room—one marked “white,” one marked “colored,” and one labeled “rectal.” That, said Golden, “is what I call gradual integration.”
Occasionally, the bright light of international fame fell upon a deep-rooted native Southerner. In October 1949, the resident novelist of Oxford, Mississippi, William Faulkner, wearing a tattered tweed jacket over a T-shirt, stayed unobtrusively in the background as the movie version of his latest book, Intruder in the Dust, had its world premiere in his hometown. A little over a year later, the author was formally dressed in black tie and tails when he stepped into the limelight at ceremonies in Stockholm, Sweden, to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Next to the fame of Faulkner or that of his cross-state contemporary, Greenville’s Hodding Carter, P. D. East of Petal, Mississippi, near Hattiesburg, was an absolute nobody—but he had a knack for getting people’s attention. A self-made journalist like Harry Golden, East had Golden’s satirical turn of mind, but with a more aggressive twist—and he picked a much more volatile place to give it expression. Born and raised in orphaned white poverty, he was thirty-two when he founded the Petal Paper in 1953, just as the race issue was about to explode across the South. For the remainder of the decade and on into the 1960s, he would keep up a lonely and risky monologue of taunting ridicule and cutting wit against the outraged sensibilities of white segregationists. No integrationist himself—at least not when he started the paper—East couldn’t resist skewering racist politicians and their political-action committees, the Ku Klux Klan and the all-white Citizens’ Council. Typical of his gallows humor were the “classified ads” he ran for cross-burning kits and summer-weight sheets of “Cotton Eyelet Embroidery” for Klansmen. (“Klanettes may enlarge the holes for arms, but your head will fit nicely through the eyelets as they are.”)
And then there was William Bradford Huie, an enigmatic Alabamian who had practiced a sort of lone-wolf journalism for twenty years, generally on the right-wing side of politics, but who often managed to confound his critics by popping up in the most unexpected roles. A self-described “yellow-dog Democrat,” he nevertheless admitted voting for Eisenhower in 1952, and he made no claim to racial liberalism. But in 1954, at the urging of novelist Zora Neale Hurston, he went to Live Oak, Florida, to “help establish the truth” in a sensational murder case involving a jailed black woman, Ruby McCollum, and her slain lover, a white doctor named C. LeRoy Adams, who was also the acknowledged father of her child. Huie, well known by then as the author of several books, including The Execution of Private Slovik, was a relentless investigator; before his inquiry was over, he had been convicted of contempt of court and ordered to jail in Live Oak. Whatever his racial or political views, he was never afraid to go where the facts led him.
People like East and Huie—white Southerners who wouldn’t conform to the rigid racial mores of their neighbors—stood up and rocked the boat from time to time in the late forties and early fifties. They appeared to have little in common except this gadfly instinct, and the courage it took to exercise it. Most of them didn’t start out with any deeply felt sense of moral outrage against segregation; they were, after all, products of a society that had always taken white supremacy for granted. But a higher motive eventually claimed their allegiance: a compelling need to tell the truth. It’s hard to say what sparked it—religious conscience, professional ethics, economic practicality, or simply an unwillingness to pretend that the myths and self-delusions of racial privilege had to be accepted in a democratic society. As Gavin Stevens said in Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust, some things you must refuse to bear.
Such refusal might have been tolerated in the Roosevelt-Truman years, but it was becoming unacceptable to most Southern whites by the political season of 1950, and downright dangerous by the time Dwight Eisenhower was elected two years later. No one seemed more vulnerable in this regard than journalists who ran daily or weekly newspapers—and the smaller their papers, the greater their risk. They and only they (with the possible exception of preachers) were compelled by their professional calling to report and comment upon those who made the law, those who broke it, and those who needed its protection. When civil rights rulings by the federal courts brought all these players into foc
us, a common reaction to the unwelcome news thus generated was to stone the messengers.
The Southern press had always had a stubborn streak of independence, if not liberalism, and it could be argued persuasively that in the thirties and early forties, editors and writers from the region were at least as progressive in their social views as were their counterparts elsewhere. (The case is strengthened considerably if you count the expatriate writers, white and black, who were products of the South.) Even in the fifties, no less than ten newspapers and editorial writers from eight Southern states would receive Pulitzer Prizes—among the writers being Harry Ashmore and Ralph McGill.
Newspapering in some parts of the region was becoming a hazardous trade as the fifties unfolded. Every editor who survived at it must have felt that he or she was risking life and limb to perform an unprofitable public service that pleased almost no one. At Greenville in the Mississippi Delta, Hodding Carter caught hell for attacking the Citizens’ Councils, the Klan, and the NAACP; for exposing lynching and opposing federal imposition of civil rights protections; for defending the South and blasting Bilbo and Eastland; for backing Roosevelt in 1944, Dewey in 1948, and Eisenhower in 1952. Some Northern critics called him a phony liberal, and even some beleaguered Southern activists, like Lillian Smith, had no kind words for him.
But only those who were on the firing line daily, like Carter and his wife and colleague, Betty Werlein Carter, could fully appreciate what it was like to meet deadlines and payrolls in an environment of extreme hostility—to turn a profit so you could come back tomorrow and tell your readers something else they didn’t want to hear. And no state was tougher than Mississippi, where a simple call for obedience to the law came to be considered a radical act, and a strong defense of due process or respect for the courts and the Constitution was tantamount to betrayal. The handful of such “treasonous radicals” around the state—Ira B. Harkey in Pascagoula, J. Oliver Emmerich in McComb, Hazel Brannon Smith in Lexington, George McLean in Tupelo, and the quixotic P. D. East in Petal—all looked up to Carter as a model and an inspiration. “What it came down to,” said Ashmore, “was courage, sheer guts. Hodding faced a lot more danger than I did in Little Rock, or McGill did in Atlanta.” Covering the explosive race issue from Greenville in the fifties and sixties was akin to covering the Civil War from a little newspaper office in, say, Vicksburg or Bull Run or Shiloh—and finding daily fault with the Confederates as well as the Yankees.