by John Egerton
Dombrowski took the stand. He denied that he was or ever had been a Communist, but beyond that he would say little (though he didn’t take the Fifth Amendment). Eastland called two former Communists as witnesses. One of them, North Carolina–born Paul Crouch—not only an ex-red but an ex-convict, and now a “professional witness”—asserted that Dombrowski was indeed a closet Communist, and told of cell meetings they had allegedly attended together.
Then Virginia Durr was called. She allowed that she was indeed who she said she was, said she was married to Clifford Durr, said she wasn’t a Communist, and then said, “That’s all. From here on out, I’m standing mute.” Eastland and his staff counsel plied her with questions, but she was a stone, coolly pausing now and then to take out a compact and powder her nose. In a written statement, she said she had “total and utter contempt for this Committee.” (Later she would fume that Eastland was “as common as pig tracks.”) The senator recalled Crouch, who claimed that Mrs. Durr had gotten government secrets from Eleanor Roosevelt and passed them on to a ring of Communist spies. The astonishing implication that the President’s wife had betrayed her country sent a nervous buzz through the hearing room.
Aubrey Williams came next, with Clifford Durr as his attorney. Both men were in a state of extreme agitation, Durr for the outrageous accusation against his wife and Williams for his building animosity toward Eastland. The senator sensed this, and treaded cautiously. Williams said he was not and never had been a Communist; Crouch was called to allege unequivocally that he was. Williams dared him to repeat the charges outside the hearing room, saying, “I’ll sue you for everything you’ve got.” Then, in a momentary lapse of his control, Eastland waived the rules he had announced earlier and allowed Cliff Durr to cross-examine Crouch. Their rancorous exchange included Crouch’s assertion that Durr himself had once been a red.
This went on for two days—firm denials of any Communist ties by all of the witnesses, sensational charges to the contrary by Crouch and his cohort, bullying tactics by Eastland and his chief counsel. On the third day, Horton was called to testify, and neither he nor the hotheaded senator were in any mood for each other. Right off the bat, Horton was asked if Jim Dombrowski was affiliated with Highlander; he replied that he’d like to explain why he didn’t want to answer.
“Do you decline to answer the question?” Eastland demanded.
“Mr. Chairman, you listened to an ex-Communist who is a paid informer. Why won’t you listen to the testimony of an ordinary American?”
“Answer my question. Do you decline to answer my question?”
“Mr. Chairman, I would like to state—”
“Do you mean to say that you refuse to answer?” Eastland summoned the marshals. “All right, take him out!”
Two plainclothes officers lifted Horton out of his seat and started for the door. “Mr. Chairman, am I an American citizen or not?” the witness cried. He was taken into the hallway and thrown down on the marble steps.
The hearing room was in an uproar. Eastland called Crouch once more, saying he would be the last witness. Crouch denied any intent to “attack the patriotism” of the Roosevelts or Justice Black, but went on to assert that Mrs. Durr “had full knowledge of the Communist conspiracy and its works when she allegedly persuaded Black to address the organizational meeting of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare in Birmingham in 1938.”
The hired witness had planted the seeds of suspicion, as Eastland had clearly wanted. Just as the hearing was being gaveled to a conclusion, Cliff Durr lunged at Crouch in a rage. “You son of a bitch, I’ll kill you for lying about my wife like that!” he shouted. The marshals quickly pulled him back, and as they did, Durr slumped to the floor, stricken by a mild heart attack.
In this explosive flash of emotion the drama came to a close. Eastland had threatened to hold the witnesses in contempt, but no such action was forthcoming. In the press, meanwhile, it was Eastland and Crouch, not the witnesses, who were held in contempt. Even the conservative Montgomery Advertiser said “the great Southern Commie hunt” was a bust, and the witnesses had been subjected to “character lynching.” Although Eastland promised more hearings “to expose Communism in the South,” there were to be no more. Paul Crouch was finished too, discredited as a government witness and shunted aside by the congressional investigative committees.
At first the Southern Conference Educational Fund and the Highlander Folk School and the individual witnesses appeared to have come out of the emotional proceedings in good shape. But their image as radical disturbers of the peace was enhanced, and in the tense atmosphere of the Cold War, that was a minus, not a plus. Both SCEF and Highlander would survive, but their effectiveness would always be clouded by unwarranted suspicions.
Even more dispiriting in the greater scheme of things was a dawning realization by 1954 that the progressive, reform-minded organizations and individuals of the South, few and scattered though they were, had too much competitive animosity for one another to gain any realistic chance of mounting a cooperative offensive against racial and regional inequality. On a personal level and as institutions, they were rivals—fighting for territory, for rank-and-file followers, for operating funds (which, incidentally, had to come from Northern liberals because Southerners had clearly shown they wouldn’t support liberal reform efforts).
All of these well-intentioned Southerners, white and black—in SCEF, Highlander, the Southern Regional Council, the state-based NAACP branches, the press, the churches, the universities, the unions—were too divided to have a significant impact. The Communist Party’s old United Front of the thirties was too fresh in the memories of some for them to consider joining any sort of united front themselves, by whatever name. No group and no individual was persuasive enough to summon everyone onto one ark to ride out the storm, lest they sink separately, one by one. By the early 1950s they all appeared to agree, finally, that segregation was the common enemy, but they still couldn’t join forces to fight it. The fractious internal politics of race and reform—characterized by historian Numan V. Bartley as “the soft underbelly of Southern liberalism”—would become even more contentious in the future.
In a curious and ironic way, the composite profile of the liberals could be crudely compared to that of the Old South reactionaries on the other side: They were too male, too white, too middle class, too spooked by communism, too dependent on Yankees for their wherewithal—and, finally, too full of doubt that they could accomplish more as an integrated force for social change than as rival factions of true believers in their own righteousness.
Arkansas Gazette editor Harry S. Ashmore in the newsroom of the Little Rock paper (Illustration Credit 33.1)
Hodding Carter, editor of the Delta Democrat-Times in Greenville, Mississippi, at work in his office (Illustration Credit 33.2)
Edwin R. Embree (left), director of the Julius Rosenwald Fund, being interviewed during the Race Relations Institute at Fisk University in 1947 by New York Times reporter George Streator, a Nashville native and Fisk alumnus (Illustration Credit 33.3)
After half a century of prominence as a scholar and activist, W. E. B. Du Bois was internationally renowned, controversial—and still deeply engaged in intellectual and political issues. (Illustration Credit 33.4)
Benjamin E. Mays was forty-five years old when he returned to his native South in 1940 to begin a twenty-seven-year tenure as president of Morehouse College. (Illustration Credit 33.5)
John H. McCray, cofounder of the South Carolina Progressive Democratic Party in 1944 and editor of the Lighthouse & Informer in Columbia, speaking at a black church in the early 1950s (Illustration Credit 33.6)
Two weeks after the first federal court ruling in the Clarendon County, South Carolina, school desegregation case in May 1951, the state NAACP honored the plaintiffs and others who had joined in the legal challenge to segregation. Taking part were (from left) Modjeska Simkins, J. W. Seals, S. J. McDonald (presenting citation), J. A. DeLaine (organizer of the C
larendon plaintiffs), lead plaintiff Harry Briggs, Sr. (receiving citation), John H. McCray, Flutie Boyd, and James Hinton, state NAACP president. (Illustration Credit 33.7)
The Senate Judiciary Committee’s Internal Security Subcommittee was closely identified with Mississippi’s senior senator, James O. Eastland (left), throughout much of the 1950s and 1960s. Democrat-turned-Republican Strom Thurmond of South Carolina (right) was another of the Southerners who used the powers of congressional inquiry to attack advocates of desegregation in the South. (Illustration Credit 33.8)
Senator Kenneth D. McKellar, Democrat of Tennessee, had been in Congress for more than forty years when he campaigned unsuccessfully for reelection in 1952. (Illustration Credit 33.9)
Tennessee Congressman Albert Gore, Sr., stayed on the road to wear out the aging incumbent in the Democratic primary. (Illustration Credit 33.10)
After the Supreme Court outlawed school segregation and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., emerged as the leader of the antisegregation movement in the South, billboards showing King at a “Communist Training School”—Highlander—were posted throughout the region. Among those in the photo with King were Aubrey Williams, Myles Horton, and Rosa Parks (first, second, and fourth from the right of the young minister, wearing dark tie, in front row). (Illustration Credit 33.11)
James E. “Big Jim” Folsom, towering over his wife Jamelle and his “hillbilly band” the Strawberry Pickers, made a second successful run for the Alabama governor’s office in the spring of 1954. (Illustration Credit 33.12)
NAACP Legal Defense Fund lawyers and witnesses paused outside the federal courthouse in Richmond after the trial of the Prince Edward County, Virginia, school desegregation case in February 1952. Standing in front are local attorneys Spottswood W. Robinson (left) and Oliver W. Hill. (Illustration Credit 33.13)
A week before the Supreme Court’s Brown decision was handed down in May 1954, the Southern Regional Council convened a group of the region’s progressives in Williamsburg, Virginia, to discuss affirmative responses to the court’s anticipated ruling. Among those present were Grace T. Hamilton, Dorothy R. Tilly, Oliver W. Hill, and John A. Griffin (second, fourth, fifth, and sixth from left, front row); C. H. Parrish, Rufus Clement, Morris Abram, Brooks Hays, and Charles S. Johnson (second through sixth from left, middle row); and Harold Fleming, Philip G. Hammer, and George S. Mitchell (first, third, and sixth from left, back row). (Illustration Credit 33.14)
President Dwight Eisenhower met with Walter White (right), Clarence Mitchell (center), and other NAACP officials at the White House in January 1954. (Illustration Credit 33.15)
At a Washington social function in 1953, Supreme Court Justices Stanley F. Reed, William J. Brennan, and Tom Clark (from left), Justice William O. Douglas (right), and another listener enjoy a story by finger-pointing Justice Hugo L. Black. Southerners Reed, Clark, and Black stood with their colleagues in the unanimous and historic Brown decision outlawing segregation in 1954. (Illustration Credit 33.16)
Rosa Parks and Myles Horton at the Highlander Folk School in August 1957. Mrs. Parks first attended a Highlander workshop in the summer of 1955, months before her altercation with a Montgomery, Alabama, bus driver precipitated a history-making boycott. (Illustration Credit 33.17)
3. Tiptoeing and Whispering
Controlling the institutions that were susceptible to political, economic, or social pressure was standard operating procedure for the long gray line of Dixie politicians who had kept the South in penury since the 1870s. But in the 1950s, even as social tension bred a fearful silence, the total domination they had previously enjoyed was no longer possible. Outside pressures were being felt now—national, even world pressures—and the scattered voices of dissent within the region did manage to filter through the magnolia curtain from time to time. Segregation was ever so gradually breaking down in the popular culture, as all Americans were reminded whenever they went to the movies or the ballpark, bought a magazine, listened to music, or turned on the television. (The visibility of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man was not only an affirmation of the book’s honesty but a signal of changing times.)
The black minority’s spreading mood of consensus was also apparent; hardly a man or woman among them didn’t share in the firm determination to secure the same blessings of liberty and democracy that white Americans could claim as a birthright. There was measurable progress, too: The number of blacks registered to vote in the South had risen from a quarter of a million in 1944, when the white primary was outlawed, to a million in 1952—from five percent of the voting-age population to twenty percent. Furthermore, the same federal courts that had opened the voting booths to blacks—there being no such thing as separate but equal elections—were continuing to bring the U.S. Constitution to bear upon the inequitable and undemocratic actions of white lawmakers.
What had been set in motion over the previous twenty years couldn’t be stalled at will, simply turned off like a light switch; it too had a certain self-generated energy and a constituency, just as the forces of segregation did. (If major-league baseball and the U.S. Army could clip the wings of Jim Crow, the argument went, why couldn’t the rest of America?) By far the greatest number of Southern politicians were still openly on the side of white supremacy, but there were a few who looked beyond the present and saw the inevitability of change, and together with the small contingent of reformers outside the political arena, they were resourceful enough to make a contest of the mushrooming struggle over segregation.
Even though politicians seemed to generate the least amount of change, they were still the people to watch, if only because their greatest skill was in blocking change. In fact, when you review what went on in gubernatorial elections and in Southern statehouses during the first half of the 1950s, the standout feature is not militant racism and defiance, but do-nothing denial and caretaker protection of the status quo. The politicians made a big stink about communism and social equality from time to time, but they must not have believed their own talk—nor did their audiences pay much attention—because the political campaigns in the three or four years after the Graham and Pepper losses in 1950 were comparatively quiet and tame. If white Southerners were truly concerned that communism or integration was about to engulf them, they hardly gave a hint of it.
But it was not the presence of a liberal opposition to Jim Crow discrimination that made the early fifties a quiet time; more likely, it was the restored confidence of the reactionaries that they could stop any civil rights initiative in its tracks—in Congress, in the statehouses, or anywhere else. Their confidence was derived from the ease with which they defeated almost every single liberal initiative of President Truman’s, just months after he had trounced them at the polls. To their surprise and delight, the Dixie bloc discovered that they didn’t need a renegade party to get what they wanted; they could accomplish the same goals by joining forces with the Republicans—and by exposing the shallow commitment of Northern Democrats to civil rights and racial equality. The Dixiecrats were a one-issue, one-election fringe party doomed to failure—but the issues that energized them in 1948 were simply transplanted back into the two-party system in the years that followed, there to be reintroduced when they deemed the time to be right.
In only two or three gubernatorial elections during that period did winning candidates ride into office on an aggressive platform of white supremacy; most of the time, the race issue was ignored, as if it were a settled matter. In Mississippi, former governor Hugh L. White won another term in 1951 by defeating Paul B. Johnson, Jr., son of a former governor, in the Democratic primary runoff. White convinced a bare majority of fifty-one percent that “a vote for Johnson is a vote for the Truman crowd and civil rights.” Both men testified to their deep faith in states’ rights and segregation, but the more restrained Johnson said, “I don’t want to win by making the Negro the whipping boy when he isn’t even an issue in the race.”
Governor Herman Talmadge of Georgia won another campaign ag
ainst M. E. Thompson in a close 1950 primary in which Talmadge vowed to stifle black voting with restrictive new registration laws, and to bar the doors of all white schools to black applicants. He won the popular vote by a narrow 49-to-48 plurality, but the state’s grossly inequitable county unit system gave him victory by a margin of almost three to one. By the time he left office in 1955, soon to embark on a new career as a U.S. senator, Talmadge was also an author. You and Segregation, his call to arms against “intermingling and intermarriage,” told the white citizens of the South that they were a sovereign people, and if they would stand together against the Supreme Court, which had “violated the law,” they could be “the Court of Last Resort,” and their decision would be “the ruling verdict.” That came closer to advocating the overthrow of the government by force and violence than any public utterance of a real Dixie red.
The only other aggressively segregationist candidate who even made it to the primary finals in those years was diehard Dixiecrat Ben Laney of Arkansas, who tried in 1950 to win another term as governor by unseating the incumbent, Sid McMath. Curiously, neither candidate had much to say about race. Arkansas didn’t need an old-guard governor who was “bound up, body and soul, with the Dixiecrat movement,” the moderately progressive and reform-minded McMath told the voters—and they agreed, giving him another two-year term by a wide margin. (In 1952, though, McMath lost in a runoff to conservative challenger Francis Cherry, and in 1954 he failed in an effort to unseat Senator John McClellan; it was also in 1954 that Arkansans elected an Ozark opportunist named Orval Faubus to his first term as governor.)