Speak Now Against the Day

by John Egerton

  Until the end of World War II, the term “liberal segregationist” was not an oxymoron in the South, but after the war it gradually became uncommon for anyone to be accorded the luxury of such a contradiction. By 1955, when the middle rock had eroded to a razor’s edge, people had to choose to be one or the other, a liberal or a segregationist. A few, like Carter, kept hoping for some sort of compromise to emerge that would allow whites and blacks to live in tolerance and fairness and simple decency as equals in a society that still permitted and protected some racial separation. Ralph McGill’s thinking closely paralleled Carter’s on this, and neither of them was as pragmatically and philosophically accepting of complete integration as Harry Ashmore came to be. Both of them were also more inclined than the Little Rock editor to see the sinister forces of communism lurking behind the drive for racial equality.

  But no one who was white, and thus spared the daily hazard (not to mention the indignity) of segregation and discrimination, could possibly see how absurd and obscene and insane this entire drama was becoming. To get that picture fully, you had to be on the receiving end; you had to be black and brave, visible and outspoken, a lightning rod.

  John Henry McCray was such a man. Like Ashmore and the others, he was a journalist—writer, editor, publisher. His weekly Lighthouse & Informer in Columbia was called “the political bible of the new Negro voter in South Carolina.” It was McCray, with Osceola McKaine and others, who had led the fight for black participation in the political process, and he was also a mainstay of the South Carolina NAACP, helping it to enroll the largest membership of any state in the South. McCray’s popularity among black voters had made him a force to be reckoned with in and around Columbia. Every week in his paper, he had a bone to pick with his adversaries, white and black. “What has the South done for the Negro?” he asked rhetorically, and then answered, “Nothing. Nothing they didn’t have to do. Everything that has been done has been done by the Negro, or by the threat of Federal court action.”

  In 1950, as a record number of black voters waited to pass judgment on the senatorial candidacy of Strom Thurmond and the gubernatorial bid of old-guard segregationist and ex–New Dealer James F. Byrnes, McCray got hit with a charge of criminal libel. He and a white reporter, working independently of each other, were indicted after writing stories about a convicted black rapist and his alleged victim, a white woman. Neither writer had named the victim, but under state law they could be prosecuted for defaming her in the eyes of those who knew her. McCray entered a plea of guilty at a hearing and was given a sixty-day suspended sentence and probation. The white reporter was not prosecuted.

  In a surprise action in 1951, McCray’s sentencing judge ordered him to serve sixty days on the chain gang, saying he had violated his parole by going out of the state to make two speeches. McCray appealed the ruling, but in 1952, the day after then-Governor Byrnes had tried to nudge South Carolina into the Republican column for Eisenhower (only to be thwarted by a massive turnout of blacks voting Democratic), the state supreme court—coincidentally or not—upheld the sentence. McCray’s followers were outraged, but the editor himself reacted calmly. “Somewhere along the way I was bound to catch it,” he wrote philosophically. “I accept it as nothing more than another step in our battle to obtain respect, and our rights as Americans. Remember: It costs to try to push forward the cause of our people. Let no man unwilling to be spent, if this befalls him, enter into the affray. So be of good cheer. I’ll be back here soon, and when I return, I’ll try to make up for lost time.”

  So John McCray went off to the chain gang, not knowing what the South Carolina penal system had in store for him. And in a little while he came back uncomplaining, having “no regrets” for anything he had done to end up in leg irons (“I’d do it again,” he wrote). Thus restored, he took up with renewed enthusiasm the battle he had joined with the white oligarchy.

  The white dissenters against injustice faced trials and tests of courage too, but nothing like this. Whatever else they had to endure, none of them ever came close to a stretch on the chain gang.

  South Carolina was a study. It had produced a remarkable string of white-chauvinist politicians, from John C. Calhoun and Ben Tillman and Cole Blease to Cotton Ed Smith and Strom Thurmond—and on the other side an equally remarkable line of black and white believers in democratic parity: Osceola McKaine, John McCray, Modjeska Simkins, Witherspoon Dodge, J. Waties Waring, and others not so well remembered—like Jack O’Dowd, editor of the Florence Morning News.

  His father, publisher John M. O’Dowd, was for years a moderate and fair-minded defender of the rights of black citizens in the courts and at the polls. In 1952 he began grooming his son, a graduate of the Citadel and a veteran of the Korean War, to take over the paper. For a couple of years the young editor tried to steer a middle course on the volatile race question. But when the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed school segregation in May 1954, O’Dowd urged his readers to accept it in good grace. In his editorials and in speeches in the community, he was earnest, forthright, candid, realistic. He was also harassed and threatened, and the paper suffered heavy losses in advertising and circulation. Finally, in July 1956, twenty-nine-year-old Jack O’Dowd would bow to extremist pressure and the silence of what he believed was a moderate majority. His father, facing the loss of the paper he had been publishing since 1912, asked his son to resign, and he did. Jack O’Dowd took another newspaper job in Chicago, and never again lived in the South.

  South Carolina and the other states of deepest Dixie (Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana) were to become the molten core of volcanic reaction to desegregation, the hardest places for honesty and courage to survive. And yet, in those very places there were people of vision, whites and blacks alike, who saw the trouble that was coming and dared to describe it. One more example from South Carolina underscores the point.

  James McBride Dabbs, the resident farmer-philosopher of Rip Raps Plantation near Mayesville, had about him an image of Old South gentility. He had been born near there in 1895, and had moved into the big house, his grandfather’s place, in 1937. Dabbs was an English professor, a gentleman planter, a softhearted patrician somewhat reminiscent of Mississippi’s William Alexander Percy. But when the issue of race confronted him in the forties, his intellect and his sense of practicality and his Presbyterian probity brought him to an unshakable conviction that segregation had to go.

  He joined the Southern Regional Council in the 1940s, and later, in 1957, he would be elected its president. Dabbs was a thinker and a writer—a quiet man, not a crusader. He and his wife lived alone in the old plantation house that was a mere shadow of its long-gone glory. What he thought about there, and said eloquently with soft-spoken courage in his books and articles, came down to this: As different as Southerners are in many ways from one another, they all belong ultimately to one culture, and the time had come to recognize that. “We’re first cousins talking about one another, don’t you see, cultural first cousins.” Whatever Southern whites and blacks claim to think about each other doesn’t matter in the end: “I really don’t bother much about their liking one another,” Dabbs said. “The more fundamental fact is that they are alike one another”—and eventually, so his faith told him, they will evolve a diverse but united society better than any the South has ever known.

  Integration was not simply our best choice, wrote Dabbs in the first of his several books, The Southern Heritage; it was our only choice: “It is too late now to live by the past. The wall of segregation is crumbling,” and the South has suffered ever since it “enthroned a god upon the wall and made of segregation a sacred thing” and made Southerners “the people of the wall.” In another realm of its history, the patrician scholar reminded his readers, the South looked to a worthier deity, one whose guidance was credited with saving many a beleaguered and oppressed society, including the people of Israel. Now it was Southerners, the modern-day Israelites, who waited for leadership and liberation. And now, once again,
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br />   there looms against the sky the ancient Southern god, the pillar of fire by night and cloud by day, forever leading us out of the wilderness into the Promised Land. For we are not simply being pushed into the future; we are also going by our own free will.

  It was not just to the choir and the converts that James M. Dabbs addressed himself. His faith was that the rank and file of decent Southerners were the real majority, and his aim was to touch them gently, to appeal to their innate sense of fair play.

  His spiritual and philosophical brother in black in this pivotal time of Southern history was J. Saunders Redding. He too was a professor of English (at Hampton Institute in Virginia, one of the foremost black colleges of the region); he too was a writer, a philosopher, a cultural critic—and, as time would tell, a prophet. And, again like Dabbs, Redding wanted to challenge a larger audience of Americans.

  His experiences in academia had taken him to various Southern campuses, to New York and New England, and finally in 1943 to Hampton, where he would remain for more than twenty years. Redding wrote fiction and history with admirable style, but his first strength was in personal essays of social observation and opinion. In the spirit of his intellectual and cultural hero, W. E. B. Du Bois, he stripped away all scholarly pretense to objectivity and detachment and spoke his mind about the myth of race, “a barrier to nearly everyone, white and black, in America,” he wrote,

  a burden on the conscience and on the soul! This is what the books by both Southern apologists and liberals mean. This is what Lillian Smith and Hodding Carter and Howard Odum mean. I can even believe that John Rankin and Richard Russell and James Byrnes and Strom Thurmond signify this in their acts and in their words, and that Theodore Bilbo signified this too. Whiteness does not mitigate the relentless warping by the race situation in America. White men are half-men too—sick men, and perhaps some of them the more to be pitied because they do not know they are sick. Some of them—the good, lucky ones, like Lillian Smith—have succeeded somewhat in objectifying it; but neither for them nor for me is there a neutral ground on which to stand. Neither they nor I can resign from the human race. The best I can hope to do is to externalize the struggle and set it in the unconfined context of the universal struggle for human dignity and wholeness and unity.

  The looming racial crisis of the 1950s led Saunders Redding to declare, “It is time that the scholars’ conscience spoke out in the world.” But the cost of speaking out was escalating rapidly for all who harbored doubts about the direction in which the South was moving. Since long before the 1930s, black Southerners of all classes and callings had been the ones whose words and deeds were the most compelling, for it was they who bore, in mind and body, the brunt of painful blows from segregation and white supremacy.

  Now, for many whites in all parts of the South, a time of agonizing decision was at hand, a time to stand up and speak out for the principles of equality—or else be counted in the ranks of the reactionaries. To choose the former would not be easy, because virtually no white leaders were actively and openly pledged to the democratic and constitutional ideal. By appealing to the basest emotions of greed and hatred and fear, they had built a majority in favor of—or at least acquiescent in—the wrong choice, a majority willing to be led to march backward.

  Southern blacks, though, had a much different perspective. For the vast majority of them, a return to the old patterns of unchallenged white supremacy was out of the question. For them, the choice of equality had long since been made.

  2. Anticommunist White Supremacy

  Chapel Hill was a different place, and the University of North Carolina a diminished institution, without Frank Porter Graham. The picture-perfect little village and the shady campus facing it across Franklin Street still had an idyllic, movie-set appearance—but Mister Chips was gone, and so was an era. The university he had shepherded to greatness entered a new phase in its long history on the spring day in 1949 when he resigned as president and accepted an appointment to the U.S. Senate. Not all of the changes that followed were immediately evident, and not all were for the worse—and some may have had little if anything to do with Frank Graham—but his departure after a tenure of nearly twenty years was unquestionably a great loss, not only for the university but for the state and the South.

  The worst of it was not his resignation, though; it was his defeat in the special election of 1950. For well over a decade, Graham had been the most visible and influential liberal spokesman in the South, the one to whom every would-be reformer and even some conservatives looked with great respect. His figurative mugging in a bitter and vicious campaign not only toppled him from the pinnacle of regional leadership; it also signaled the end of a season of modest social reforms and opened the floodgates of right-wing extremism.

  Deeply wounded by the meanness of his undoing, Graham was an enigma to his friends and enemies alike when he returned briefly to the Senate after the primary. Inexplicably, he sided with his obstructionist Southern colleagues in blocking creation of a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission. Then he inserted a lengthy “farewell statement” in the Congressional Record, a minutely detailed and somewhat defensive explanation of his liberal involvements down through the years; it dismayed his admiring defenders, and struck his enemies as a weak apology.

  At sixty-four, Graham was a selfless public servant whose defeat had left him with no resources to fall back on—no house, no job, no estate. After turning down several posts offered him by President Truman, he worked briefly at the Department of Labor and then, moving with his wife to New York City, took up a new career at the United Nations. Sixteen years later he would return to Chapel Hill to live out his last years alone, a widower with no children. He was charming and gracious as always, but his sunny demeanor hid an ineffable sadness. He died in 1972.

  The Frank Graham era is still remembered by those who were part of it as the golden age of the University of North Carolina. His friend and fellow alumnus Jonathan Daniels characterized it in 1941 as “the freest university in the South—as free as any in America.” It had been a place of no particular distinction early on, Daniels wrote, describing it as “starved and sleepy, set-upon from without and also at times eruditely complacent within the superior indolence of cultivated minds.” Graham, continuing a reformation started by his predecessor, Harry Woodburn Chase, had skillfully turned the scholarship of the institution from esoteric detachment to utilitarian engagement; in a word, he made the place useful, to the end that it might enhance “the human qualities of the State and the South.”

  Against the opposition of religious and political extremists who accused him of protecting radical crackpots and leading innocent youths into atheism and communism (how could such a faithful Presbyterian be a Communist?), Graham had depended on such progressive activists as Howard Odum and the social scientists, Paul Green and his theater, W. T. Couch and the university press, to lift UNC into the front rank of American universities. They succeeded far beyond anyone’s expansive dreams—making Graham, in the estimation of Jonathan Daniels, “the single most important human force for enlightenment” in North Carolina—or, for that matter, in the entire South.

  Will Alexander certainly agreed. Having left the federal government before Roosevelt died, left the Commission on Interracial Cooperation when it became the Southern Regional Council, and left the Rosenwald Fund when it folded, Alexander retired with his wife to their farm outside Chapel Hill, there to raise cattle, receive visitors, and reminisce about his thirty years as a Southern activist. His many friends, white and black, came from around the country to visit, and he kept his hand in as an adviser and consultant to some of them.

  Alexander declined to support his former boss, Henry Wallace, in the 1948 election, favoring Harry Truman instead, and he raised funds for his old friend Frank Graham in 1950. But by that time the retired administrator and his wife were feeling the chill of Cold War conservatism creeping up around their ankles. Rumors circulated that the Alexanders were �
��buying up land for Eleanor Roosevelt and the Jews to give away to niggers.” A suggestion that “Dr. Will” be awarded an honorary degree by the university died aborning. He was thought by several members of the UNC board of trustees to be trying to engineer the desegregation of the school, and some of those critics joined in an organized effort to force Alexander out of the community.

  Some of his former friends on the campus seemed to be shying away from him, so much so that he decided to distance himself from the academic environment, lest he bring Graham and others under suspicion of guilt by association. After Graham was defeated, a deeper sense of isolation set in, and while some of Alexander’s campus friends still drove out to the farm to visit and others continued to come from out of town, the dean of Southern liberals sensed a permanent change for the worse in his relationship with the liberal community in Chapel Hill.

  The telling signs were not just figments of the old warrior’s imagination: UNC in 1951 was not “as free as any university in America,” as Jonathan Daniels had characterized it a decade earlier. The institution’s trustees chose a wealthy and conservative Winston-Salem businessman, Gordon Gray (then Secretary of the Army under President Truman), to replace Graham, but he was poorly suited for the post, and left it in less than five years. The annual list of new books from the UNC Press after the war clearly showed a declining interest in Southern social problems, in progressive and liberal topics, and in black writers. The social science empire that Howard Odum had built up over a thirty-year period was losing its primacy in applied research and service. Many of the luminaries whose contributions had brought distinction to the campus—Odum, Green, Couch, and others—were either nearing retirement or already gone. But worst of all for Will Alexander was the atmosphere of cautious silence that seemed to permeate liberal circles around Chapel Hill after Frank Graham’s departure. Feeling at times like a stranger and an outsider, Dr. Will was saddened and puzzled by this unexpected turn. The estrangement would linger until his death in 1956.