Speak Now Against the Day

by John Egerton

  UNC’s legacy of tolerance and progressivism was tarnished further in 1951. Desegregation of the university—one of the few things Frank Graham had failed to accomplish—was mandated by a federal appeals court that fall, and while no physical violence accompanied the historic event, neither was there a display of charity or hospitality or sportsmanship such as one might expect of a truly great institution. Many individual members of the faculty and student body did welcome the change, but the university administration, having fought it in court for over a decade, put up an official front much like that usually presented by losers in protracted legal battles, with unrepentant, tight-lipped attorneys delegated to rationalize the defeat.

  Four of the entering black students had been attending the makeshift law school thrown up by the state at North Carolina College for Negroes in Durham after Pauli Murray’s application to UNC was sidetracked back in 1939. They had sued for equal treatment as citizens and taxpayers—and twelve years after Murray blazed the trail, they finally won the right of admission to the Chapel Hill campus. One of the students, Floyd B. McKissick, a World War II veteran, practiced law in Durham after graduating from UNC, and later would become national director of the Congress of Racial Equality.

  In 1952, the liberal minister of Chapel Hill’s First Presbyterian Church on Franklin Street, the Reverend Charles M. Jones, was accused of heresy by the governing body of North Carolina church leaders to whom he and his local members answered. Ostensibly the conflict was about liturgy and creeds, but beneath the surface was a festering hostility toward Jones and his supportive congregation, which was made up largely of free-thinking university people, including Frank Graham. Jones had guided his flock to a collective expression of social consciousness that included desegregation of all church functions, and he was well known in the community for his progressive leadership. But the ruling elders forced him out, and though he remained in Chapel Hill as the pastor of a popular new nondenominational church, his resignation from the top Presbyterian pastorate thereabouts was widely viewed as yet another chilling sign of the right-wing ascendency.

  Almost within arm’s reach of the First Presbyterian Church, the celebrated little Intimate Bookshop, founded in the 1920s by Milton Abernethy, had recently changed hands, but Abernethy was still an inspiration to the loose network of avant-garde intellectuals around the campus—and he became their hero in 1953 after he was hauled before a congressional committee and accused of being a Communist. In his student days, the enterprising Abernethy had not only run the bookshop but had also published a literary paper, Contempo, that boasted of original manuscripts from the likes of William Faulkner, T. S. Eliot, and Langston Hughes. The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, with Frank Graham’s political executioner Willis Smith playing a prominent role, aggressively probed Abernethy’s past, alleging that he had run an underground press for the Communist Party from the back room of his shop in the 1930s. The inquisition was an empty charade that came to naught, but its intimidating effect was immeasurable.

  The mention of Langston Hughes in connection with Abernethy brought to mind the black poet’s visit to UNC in the early 1930s. Though his reading before a packed house in the university theater had stirred some controversy, Hughes had been invited to the campus by Paul Green and Guy B. Johnson, and had gone to dinner at a local restaurant with Abernethy and some of his friends. James Weldon Johnson had been even more warmly received at UNC earlier, and Richard Wright was also welcomed before the war—but now, in the forbidding fifties, the very thought of a distinguished black guest was out of the question. What’s more, the hostile pursuit of Milton Abernethy by an official committee of the U.S. Senate underscored a fundamental new reality in Chapel Hill: Intellectual freedom and personal liberty were no longer the guiding principles that distinguished the town and the university.

  Junius Irving Scales learned that lesson the hard way. He had moved to Chapel Hill with his family from Greensboro in 1935, when he was fifteen years old, and thus was immersed from an early age in the liberal spirit of the town and the campus. Scales had impeccable credentials as a Southerner—his father was a wealthy lawyer, his late grandfather had been a colonel in the Confederate Army, and the family was comfortably ensconced in all the right social and political and church circles.

  Between the time of his enrollment at UNC in 1937 and his induction into the army in 1942, Junius Scales experienced a personal transformation of great magnitude. From an early age he had been sympathetic with people who were quite unlike his family and friends—the ones his Sunday school lessons identified as “the least of these”—and in those idealistic years he came to see the lowly black minority and the laboring class of both races as fitting that description. Dabbling in radical politics, Scales eventually became an active and committed member of the American Communist Party, dropping out of school once to undergo training as a labor and party organizer.

  When he came back to Chapel Hill after four years in the military, the university was bursting at the seams with ex-GIs (enrollment soared to eight thousand, triple its prewar level) and the political scene was more volatile than ever. Quickly, Scales became a leader in the student chapters of the American Veterans Committee, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, and the Communist Party; in the fall of 1946 he was elected a vice president of the Southern Negro Youth Congress—the only white officer ever to serve in that organization. The personable and well-connected young radical was soon acknowledged as the leading left-wing spokesman in Chapel Hill.

  But events elsewhere were about to signal open season on radicals, and no Southerner would be more profoundly affected than Junius Scales. In the fall of 1947, just as the anticommunist campaign was kicking into gear and the Truman civil rights committee was condemning segregation and the anti-Truman Democrats were joining the Henry Wallace revolt, Scales announced his allegiance to the Communist Party. Instead of winning him a larger following, however, the “coming out” caused many veterans, union loyalists, church and university activists, and liberals in general to run for cover, leaving Scales and a handful of others to drift ever deeper into a deadly cat-and-mouse game with intelligence agents of the federal government.

  Benevolent motivations had made him a strident critic of inequality. In formalizing his outrage by pledging loyalty to an international political ideology, he had naively become a walking contradiction: a true believer in peace and brotherhood and democracy who was giving himself in blind obedience to a violent and oppressive foreign hierarchy. Junius Scales was about as serious a threat to the peace and liberty of North Carolina and the South as you might expect almost any upper-class, college-educated, Presbyterian idealist from Greensboro or Chapel Hill to be—which is to say, not much of a threat at all. But in the harrowing Cold War struggle that had evolved, he fit the strict definition of a “Soviet agent,” and that made him a prime target of the spy-hunters.

  For seven years the game of chase dragged on. When it started, Scales was passing out press releases while agents lurked in the shadows; when it ended, in November 1954, FBI and Justice Department officials would be telling reporters how they had tracked Scales to Memphis, lured him out of hiding, and arrested him. Almost everything changed in that seven-year period. The Soviet Union was first celebrated as our wartime ally and then denounced as a terrorist regime; the U.S. Communist Party was first pictured as a potent force and then exposed as a house of cards; surveillance was maintained by a relatively small cadre of government spies in the beginning, and an army of counter-subversive agents in the end. Scales was a small fish when he dived out of sight—but when they reeled him to the surface, he was a prize catch.

  Another seven years of legal skirmishing would drag by before Scales, charged with joining an organization in the knowledge that it “advocated the overthrow of the U.S. Government by force and violence,” would finally be convicted in a federal courtroom in his native Greensboro and sent to serve six years in prison. (No more severe penalty would ever be me
ted out under the notorious Smith Act, and the law itself would eventually be declared unconstitutional.) The liberal community of UNC and Chapel Hill was made profoundly uncomfortable by this native son whom most of them knew and many had encouraged in his radicalism. Three of them—Charles Jones, the ex-Presbyterian minister; Raymond Adams, a Thoreau scholar in the English department; and Fletcher M. Green, chairman of the history department—testified to his good character, as did Mary Leigh Pell Scales, the defendant’s mother. Numerous others could have followed them to the witness stand, but they decided for their own reasons to let that cup pass.

  When he went to prison in 1961 (by which time he had repudiated the Communist Party in disillusionment), Junius Scales would have the dubious distinction of being the only Southerner ever tried and convicted in a Southern court on any charge having to do with communism. After years of surveillance and detection, the red-hunters had finally nabbed “a nigger-loving commie,” as some of them delighted in calling him. It hardly seemed to matter that Scales was their only official captive (and even he was released after a little more than a year, with his sentence commuted to time served).

  From 1947 to 1962, the authorities could claim bounty points on Scales, first as a fugitive, then as a defendant, and finally as a convict—and always as an avowed Communist deeply committed to winning equal rights for blacks and organized labor. Reactionary Southern leaders who considered all integrationists and trade unionists to be at least fellow travelers if not card-carrying reds must have looked thankfully upon this bird in hand; he was literally the only one they could point to in illustration of their specious claim. If Scales hadn’t come along when he did, they would have had to invent him.

  Outside the South, anticommunism had little directly to do with race. No doubt W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson gravitated to the Communist ideology at least in part because of their despair and disgust with American racism, but the U.S. authorities who hounded them probably would have been just as aggressive had the two been white men extolling the virtues of Marxist-Leninist ideology and Soviet policy.

  Joe McCarthy showed no interest in race, consumed as he was with the persecution of anyone who didn’t buy his brand of patriotic Americanism. William F. Buckley, Jr., coauthored a militantly pro-McCarthy book in 1954 that gave only the barest mention to race or the South. Even the House Un-American Activities Committee, long controlled by Dixie demagogues Martin Dies and John Rankin, was by the early 1950s a preserve of Midwestern Republicans and assorted other arch-conservatives who found nothing in the race relations of the South half as stimulating as the threat of subversive cells in Hollywood or Manhattan. And, with the United States at war against the international Communist menace in Korea, it was easy for the nation to let the South and its racial problems fall between the cracks, as had happened so many times before.

  The national climate of reactionary anticommunism and rock-ribbed conservatism was all-pervasive in the early fifties. The American Medical Association fought tooth and nail against proposed health-care reforms, calling them “communistic attempts to force socialized medicine on doctors and their patients.” The American Bar Association adopted resolutions in support of states’ rights and segregation that could as easily have been written in Birmingham or Jackson as in Seattle or Cleveland. The Southern Newspaper Publishers Association, in opposing the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights as “a serious threat to the basic American freedoms of religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition,” echoed the sentiments of the national assembly of publishers. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and numerous others were equally as intemperate in their pronouncements.

  All of this conservative militancy played well in the South, particularly after the Republican victories of 1952. Since concern for the civil rights of black Americans was a long-expressed position of the Communist Party, it was a short and easy step from there for white Southerners to attack all civil rights advocates as reds. If you stood for anything the Communists were for, you were a fellow traveler or a party-liner; if you belonged to the NAACP—staunchly anticommunist though it was—you were a red or a criminal, or both. For conservative white Southerners, the rigid rules of order could be reduced to a simple litany: Subjugate the blacks and fight the unions, the welfare state, big government, higher taxes, and all things socialized. And if white supremacy alone was not enough to keep the blacks down and the whites unified, anticommunist white supremacy would surely do the trick.

  One more significant reason for the potency of the anti-red offensive in the South was the fact that it energized some liberals and leftists almost as much as their conservative counterparts. The Socialist farm-union leaders, Howard Kester and H. L. Mitchell, had bitterly opposed the Communists back in the thirties; individuals and organizations as widely separated as Virginius Dabney and Ralph McGill, Howard Odum and Charles S. Johnson, Lillian Smith and Francis Pickens Miller, the CIO and the Americans for Democratic Action, expressed similar views through the forties and fifties. McGill savagely red-baited the Southern Conference Educational Fund in 1950, and the NAACP was caught up in the same reflex impulse to prove its own purity by being tough on radicals. The fact that all of these critics would themselves be branded as Communists by the far right was solid proof that the real litmus test was white supremacy; those who flunked it were dyed an unacceptable shade of pink, and that was that.

  By 1951—an ominous year of heightened tensions in the South—the reinforced phenomenon of anticommunist white supremacy had come to full flower, and it had more thorns than a thistle. The Korean War alone would have been more than enough to keep the nation on edge, presenting as it did the emotional combination of heavy casualties, a frustrating stalemate, and President Truman’s dismissal of his popular military commander, General Douglas MacArthur. But there was much more going on, from the continuing rampage of McCarthyism to the spy trials of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the indictment, trial, and acquittal of W. E. B. Du Bois on charges that he was a secret agent of a foreign power. (And if that still wasn’t enough, you could turn on the television and watch the Senate hearings on organized crime, a daily drama skillfully directed by first-term senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee.)

  Such developments as these had consequences in the South, but they were lessened by the fact that the events themselves occurred elsewhere. Of far greater impact were those that happened inside the region. The token desegregation of the University of North Carolina that autumn brought to five the number of Southern states (plus six others on the region’s border) where the color bar had been lowered; just since 1948, federal court rulings had ordered public universities in six states not to exclude black students because of their race, and that consistent judicial pattern would be continued until the last of the states—Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina—were finally desegregated in the early 1960s.

  No ugly incidents marred the advent of these changes in Texas, Virginia, Louisiana, and North Carolina in 1950 and 1951, but elsewhere in the South, the violence that was so often associated with racial matters continued to take its toll on all who were caught up in it, victims and perpetrators alike. Only one racial killing was officially classified as a lynching in 1951, and for the next three years after that, there were none—but numerous explosive acts of violence still claimed lives, and by far the most of them involved the deaths of blacks at the hands of whites.

  Some of the most bizarre acts were official state executions. In Virginia, seven black men charged with raping a white woman were swiftly convicted, and after all appeals failed, the seven were electrocuted in the same week—four on one day and three on another. In Mississippi, a black man reportedly involved in a consensual relationship with a married white woman was tried three times for rape before the state supreme court got a conviction it could uphold. Two more years of legal pleadings drew national attention to the case before the defendant, Willie McGee, was put to death in a portable electric chair at th
e Jones County Courthouse in Laurel. Cheers went up from the crowd of about a thousand whites waiting outside; many more listened to a broadcast of the event on a statewide radio hookup.

  The most shocking terrorist act of 1951 took place on Christmas night in Mims, Florida, a little town east of Orlando. Harry T. Moore, a schoolteacher and state director of the NAACP, died with his wife, Harriette, when a bomb planted under their house exploded. An FBI investigation turned up several suspects, but no one was ever prosecuted in the case. Almost forty years later, a former marine and Ku Klux Klansman told NAACP officials that he and other Klansmen had conspired with law-enforcement officials to plan and carry out the murder. One of the lawmen implicated was Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall, who had himself been tried and acquitted of murder a short time before in the suspicious shooting of two handcuffed black prisoners he was transporting to trial.

  According to a subsequent report from the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta, the homes of forty black Southern families were bombed during 1951 and 1952. Some, like Harry Moore, were social activists whose work exposed them to danger, but most were either people who had refused to bow to racist convention, or were simply innocent bystanders, unsuspecting victims of random white terrorism. It was a perilous time to stand on the racial fault line in the South, and it was getting more dangerous by the day.