by John Egerton
White people who dared to question the racial status quo were also at risk. Frank Graham and Dorothy Tilly were showered with verbal abuse and threats for years after they served on the President’s Committee on Civil Rights. Lillian Smith was threatened so frequently from the mid-thirties on that she was finally able—some of the time, at least—to brush off anonymous hostility with aplomb. Hodding Carter kept a loaded gun in his desk at the Delta Democrat-Times, explaining that “Southerners will generally treat you politely until they make up their minds to kill you.” Dozens of others were forced to the realization that it took enormous courage to risk your job, your health, your good standing in the community, or your very life by taking even mild exception to the ever-tightening white code of racial conduct,
And once more, anti-red was blended with anti-black. Time and time again in the fifties, people who had been active in the Southern Conference for Human Welfare years earlier had their liberalism thrown back at them with insinuations that they were “security risks,” or somehow lacking in whatever it took to be loyal Americans. The radicals among them—Aubrey Williams, Myles Horton, Jim Dombrowski, and others—came to expect the slanderous accusations that were heaped upon them, but more moderately inclined people such as Francis Pickens Miller, C. Vann Woodward, Herman C. Nixon, and Philip Hammer hardly knew how to respond to such nonsense.
Democratic social reform in the South was being sacrificed on the altar of anticommunist white supremacy, and no force in or out of the region seemed strong enough—or concerned enough—to come to the aid of the reformers. In Washington, the Truman administration was fighting for its life against the conservative Republican insurgency, and no one on the President’s staff was any longer giving much thought to race or the South. With the advent of the Eisenhower administration in 1953, Southerners of both races and black Americans in general would find themselves relegated to the lowest echelons of national interest and priority.
In New York, government agents were busy prosecuting W. E. B. Du Bois on a charge so manifestly weak that the judge issued a directed verdict of acquittal without even hearing the case for the defense. Harassment of the aged scholar got worse after that. His passport was invalidated, as was Paul Robeson’s, and through most of the fifties, these two enormously talented and towering figures in American social history had to endure the shameful attempts of federal officials to discredit and silence them. Robeson lost his popularity, but never his artistic genius or his dignity. Du Bois finally renounced his U.S. citizenship in 1961, when he was ninety-three; two years later he died in Accra, Ghana, his adopted home, ending a singular career that had spanned three-quarters of a century.
Even white Southerners who left the region were not safe from attack. John Henry Faulk, a folksy humorist from Austin, Texas, built a career for himself on the CBS radio network with monologues that reminded listeners of Mark Twain and Will Rogers. But he was blacklisted by Aware, Incorporated, a right-wing snoop group in New York that was feeding malicious material to Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Fearful CBS executives ordered Faulk, a union member and a liberal, to apologize to his accusers and stop criticizing the anticommunist movement; when he refused, they fired him. Shut out of the industry and unable to find work for six years, he finally won a libel judgment against Aware.
The three-and-a-half-year period between the midterm elections in November 1950 and the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown decision in May 1954 was a disillusioning time for white and black Southerners who had come to see that far-reaching social reforms in the region were both necessary and inevitable. Those who had tried for so long to coax and nudge their region out of its reactionary racism didn’t know—couldn’t have known—that the last realistic hope for self-generated reform had gone up in smoke by the end of 1950. They kept on trying, and now and again they made some headway, but for all practical purposes there was not much left for anyone to do—except for those who remained in the center to choose sides. In the organizations and institutions from which liberal and progressive ideas and energy had been trickling for two decades, it was now harder than ever to see, hear, or feel a measurable degree of momentum for social change.
The Southern Regional Council, curiously enough, had a breakthrough on the racial front early in the new decade, finally coming down firmly on the side of absolute equality for all citizens in an open society. After eight years of debate and disagreement, the Council on December 12, 1951, adopted “a statement of policy and aims” that used the word segregation only once but made explicit the intent of the organization to work for the creation of a society in which racial discrimination no longer existed. The document, drafted by staff member Harold Fleming, pledged the members to seek this vision:
The South of the future, toward which our efforts are directed, is a South freed of stultifying inheritances from the past. It is a South where the measure of a man will be his ability, not his race; where a common citizenship will work in democratic understanding for the common good; where all who labor will be rewarded in proportion to their skill and achievement; where all can feel confident of personal safety and equality before the law; where there will exist no double standard in housing, health, education, or other public services; where segregation will be recognized as a cruel and needless penalty on the human spirit, and will no longer be imposed; where, above all, every individual will enjoy a full share of dignity and self-respect, in recognition of his creation in the image of God.
Several black members of the council’s board—Benjamin Mays, Rufus Clement, Albert W. Dent, and others—had been pressing from the beginning for an unequivocal acknowledgment that segregation was the single most destructive obstacle in the South’s path to parity, and must be eliminated. As the debate dragged on through the late forties and into the fifties, there was a gradual falling away by the defenders of segregation, almost all of whom were white. Immediately after the surviving majority, made up about equally of black and white members, had voted approval of the new statement of policy, Virginius Dabney resigned, acknowledging his inactive status over the past several years and saying that he simply didn’t have time “to perform the duties expected of me.” A little later on, former Virginia Governor Colgate W. Darden, Jr., then president of the University of Virginia, sent a check covering two years of unpaid dues along with his letter of resignation. More candidly than Dabney, Darden noted that “the Council is sympathetic to the abolition of segregation in the primary and secondary schools,” and he was resigning because he could not support that view. Numerous others followed him out.
In coming to grips at last with the issue of segregation, the SRC had made an eleventh-hour choice to stand on the right side, as morality and pragmatism and history itself would eventually define right and wrong in this matter. The choice exacted a high price. The threadbare organization (its annual budget in 1950 was only $39,000—less than it had been five years earlier) had fewer than three thousand members, and almost half of them were delinquent dues-payers like Colgate Darden. The new president of the council, Marion A. Wright, a South Carolina attorney, faced the unenviable prospect of trying to rally a small and underpaid staff, a divided board, and a declining membership to overcome a budget deficit—and then to go into the cage against the segregationist lions.
Right-wing reactionaries stepped up their attacks on the SRC; high-powered snipers like Roy V. Harris of Augusta, Thomas Waring of the Charleston News & Courier, and James J. Kilpatrick of the Richmond News Leader blasted it as a “Communist-front Organization” and a “haven for fellow-travelers.” Even the Georgia attorney general and the state Democratic Party leadership would join Governor Herman Talmadge in accusing the council of engaging in “subversive activities.” Just at the time when it was finally getting focused on its primary mission, the Southern Regional Council was being knocked back on its heels, and the attacks showed how vulnerable it was in the overheated climate of anti-red hysteria.
Every other reform-minded
group in the region was similarly exposed. The Congress of Industrial Organizations had been openly committed to ending racial segregation when it emerged as a liberal alternative to the American Federation of Labor in the late 1930s. Now, though, it was drifting steadily to the right under the relentless bombardment of those who saw the push for racial equality as a Communist plot. By the mid-1950s, when the CIO and the AFL would paste over their differences and enter into a merger, liberal Southerners in the labor movement would be reined in and their ties to reformist organizations curtailed. Two of the most committed of them, Lucy Randolph Mason and Paul Christopher, would face constant pressure to resign their board posts in such groups as the Highlander Folk School and the Southern Conference Educational Fund.
Churches were just as rigid. Anticommunism came naturally to them, given the red party line of atheism and the brutal aggression of Soviet forces against the Catholic peoples of Eastern Europe. Religious groups in the United States seemed unable to separate the threat of Communist imperialism on the international scene from the demagogic exploitation of the “red menace” at home. As for the parallel but generally unrelated issue of social reform, it had become so controversial by the early 1950s that neither congregations nor denominations were eager to tackle it. The Federal Council of Churches and its successor, the National Council of Churches, kept on establishing study commissions and passing resolutions, but below that level there was even less expressed concern in, say, 1951, than there had been five years earlier.
Black churches had found little latitude for open opposition to Jim Crow segregation by 1950, but soon thereafter, the National Baptist denomination headquartered in Baton Rouge mounted a short-lived boycott of city buses in the Louisiana capital, presaging the more successful and historically pivotal bus boycott that would take hold in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. The white churches clearly were not ready for such direct action; consequently, individual white Southerners whose reform motivations were rooted in religious faith and belief were compelled to look outside their institutions for ways to express and live out their convictions.
The case of Claude Williams was perhaps the most extreme example. In his journeys across Tennessee, Arkansas, and Alabama, with a wartime sojourn in Detroit, controversy had dogged his every step. Many people, including some of his closest associates, thought of him as a shadow man, a radical activist if not a revolutionary, a Christian Socialist and, in spite of that, a Communist too, somehow. In the early 1950s, his Presbyterian ruling elders in Michigan chose inexplicably to press a number of charges against him, including “subversion and corruption of faith” and “membership in the Communist Party.” In a bizarre inquisition that lasted for several days, Williams appeared alone and without counsel before a ten-member judicial commission, which declared him guilty as charged and defrocked him.
But he had already parted company with the Presbyterians by then, and was publishing cogent treatises on segregation and sundry other evils under the banner of something he called the People’s Institute of Applied Religion. As far as anyone could tell, the “institute” was just Williams acting alone (his preferred modus operandi), mailing his broadsides from a rural box number outside Helena, Alabama, not far from Birmingham. If Claude Williams was a Communist, he was a cagey one; lifelong protester though he was, he advised his readers in 1948 to forget the Progressive Party and vote Democratic because “we can’t afford the luxury of a protest vote.”
The Highlander Folk School’s ties to the CIO and the AFL were weakened considerably when anticommunist pressures were brought to bear on organized labor in the late 1940s. Myles Horton and his small staff, working with Aubrey Williams of the Southern Farmer, tried to build a long-term working relationship with the National Farmers’ Union during those years, but that too had proved to be unfruitful by 1951. All the while, the Tennessee school had deepened its commitment to racial equality, and that presented yet another set of problems: The mere presence of African-Americans on the Monteagle campus was proof to many of Highlander’s ties to communism.
By the end of 1952, the twenty-year-old institution faced a crisis of mission. Its work with industrial and agricultural unions was at a virtual standstill. To restore the school’s sense of purpose and direction, Horton and George S. Mitchell, Highlander’s board chairman (and also the executive director of the Southern Regional Council), led the way in planning a program of adult education to help prepare the South for a racially integrated society. From that point on, the durable little institution would invest most of its energy and its meager resources in the historic Southern struggle over desegregation of the public schools.
The Southern Conference Educational Fund had signed up for the same war. From its headquarters in New Orleans, the surviving stepchild of the late Southern Conference for Human Welfare girded for battle with about as much armor as Highlander had—precious little—but with the same intensity of feeling. Coming down from Mr. Jefferson’s Virginia mountain after their ringing Declaration of Civil Rights in late 1948, the remnant of SCEF loyalists, led by James Dombrowski and Aubrey Williams, reaffirmed the organization’s commitment to eliminating racial discrimination and focused its energies in particular on segregation in Southern schools and colleges.
Clark Foreman had left the Southern Conference and the South after the Henry Wallace debacle in 1948, and would stay gone. Moving in the opposite direction was Virginia Durr, another SCHW-SCEF stalwart; she and her lawyer husband, Clifford, returned to their native Alabama in the early 1950s. Cliff Durr started a law practice in Montgomery, and his wife renewed her interest in the work of Williams and Dombrowski in the SCEF—which had become, in the estimate of one historian, “the most militantly antisegregationist force in Southern life.”
Williams was also living in Montgomery; Dombrowski was in New Orleans, George S. Mitchell was still at the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta, Myles Horton was on Monteagle mountain in Tennessee, and Lillian Smith was on Old Screamer in north Georgia. Most of the other white activists whose involvement in Southern social issues over the previous two decades had earned them reputations as radicals or leftists or liberals were no longer engaged in highly vocal or visible struggles with the right-wing defenders of the Southern Way of Life. The blacks who fought against discrimination either had to make common cause with the beleaguered whites or expose themselves to even greater peril in the state and local branches of the NAACP.
But the federal courts had all but destroyed the “separate but equal” myth in higher education, and now they were debating desegregation issues involving public elementary and secondary schools. The “invisible man” culture of segregation was cracking and crumbling in a thousand other facets of American life. The world was changing; by almost every sign and portent, it was becoming clear that segregation and white supremacy defined an unworkable way of life that would soon collapse. The white Southerners who fought for it, who vowed to defend it to the death, still held the whip hand in their states—and, to a large extent, in Congress as well. They had managed to silence almost everyone except the scattered remnant of radicals, but they could feel the rumble of the earth beneath their feet, and they were worried.
And so it happened that James O. Eastland, the senior senator from Mississippi and the ranking Democrat on the Senate Internal Security subcommittee, decided to bring a road show to New Orleans in March 1954, and summon his enemies for a command performance.
Jim Eastland was running for reelection in 1954, and he was fearful that the U.S. Supreme Court would declare momentarily that school segregation was unconstitutional. The very idea made his blood pressure rise. He needed a new club, a bludgeon—something he could inflict heavy damage with before his South got clobbered by the court and the Communists. He wanted to strike a blow for the cause of segregation—and in the process, grab a big win from the voters of Mississippi.
The subcommittee chairman, Republican Senator William Jenner of Indiana, announced in January that the Southern Conference
Educational Fund, an alleged “subversive organization,” would be the subject of a hearing conducted by Senator Eastland. The SCEF board of directors met in Atlanta in February and wrangled over defensive strategy. Whoever was called to testify, they agreed, should stoutly affirm his or her noninvolvement in any way with communism—but beyond that, some members wanted no one to take the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination, while others wanted that choice to be left to each individual. No, said board member Benjamin Mays, that was too vague and evasive; it would invite unwarranted suspicion. The debate dragged on, and ended inconclusively, after which Mays told the others he was resigning. His departure was a loss the SCEF could ill afford; several other African-American members took their cue from the highly respected Atlantan and quit too.
In March, the subpoenas came—for Dombrowski, for Aubrey Williams, for board member Myles Horton, and for former board member Virginia Durr. (The speculation was that Eastland wanted to attack Durr, who was Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black’s sister-in-law, as an indirect way of getting at Black on the eve of the dreaded ruling in the Brown case.) The confrontation was set for New Orleans. When the first act of the drama opened in a somber, mahogany-paneled hearing room on an upper floor of the U.S. Post Office on March 18, only Eastland and his staff were there as inquisitors—not Chairman Jenner or the other Republicans, not Democratic Senators John McClellan of Arkansas or Olin Johnston of South Carolina. Where was everybody? The answer seemed to be that this was Eastland’s show to run as he wished. That he did in an imperious manner, informing the witnesses that he would “let you know what the rules are as we go along.”