Speak Now Against the Day

by John Egerton

  The Minneapolis Tribune sent a young black reporter, Carl T. Rowan—born and raised in rural Tennessee—on an investigative journey through the South in 1951, and his articles were foundation stones for a book, South of Freedom. Rowan also got national attention for a widely reprinted series he wrote in 1953, called “Jim Crow’s Last Stand,” about the five communities in which the pending school cases had originated.

  The Southern press was not ignoring the issue, either, and for the most part its reporting, and even much of its editorial comment, was fair-minded and professional. When the South Carolina and Virginia defendants conceded in court that their separate black schools were manifestly unequal to those for whites and promised to correct the problem, the papers told their readers all about it. They reported, too, when state after state announced new funding plans aimed at convincing federal judges of their good intentions.

  Surveying the states, some newspapers refined and updated their estimates of what it would take to equalize educational spending in the region (most now suggested a billion dollars minimum, and probably more). The Southern Regional Council in Atlanta made a detailed study of the problem, as did the Southern Regional Education Board, the Southern Conference Educational Fund, and other organizations. State and local school officials and politicians across the region clearly knew that a hard choice was looming before them: either to spend their way to equality with massive amounts of money they didn’t have, or to consolidate their duplicative operations into unitary school systems serving both races.

  If there was one aspect of this story the papers didn’t really cover or analyze (neither the Southern press nor its upcountry counterparts), it was the extent to which the ruling elite of the region never seriously tried to deliver on either option. For all their talk, they couldn’t summon the will, let alone the means, to equalize spending. There were too many reactionaries in power who believed in their hearts that blacks were too dumb to learn, that learning only ruined obedient laborers, that a little learning was a dangerous thing, and that whites ought to get the scarce resources in any case. And as for integration, well, there was just no way, they said; even if the double cost of maintaining segregation doomed the region to remain forever a poor stepchild of the affluent North, that would be better than letting all the flowers of white womanhood and girlhood be exposed to “social situations” with black males.

  For a time after the Dixiecrat failure, this hard-core extremism seemed to be weakening. The churches were adopting resolutions of interracial brotherly love, and university students and faculty were expressing a high degree of receptivity to desegregation, and public opinion polls were showing an erosion of Jim Crow sentiment, especially among young Southern whites. But the tactic of red-baiting as a means of discrediting and isolating the advocates of racial equality also gained a new potency in the McCarthy era; it collared such organizations as the Southern Conference and the Highlander Folk School with the tag of extreme radicalism, and that severely limited their effectiveness. The same offensive smear was aimed at the NAACP, which was easily the most aggressive and effective organization working for racial equality in the South, but its Northern base made it less vulnerable to the Dixie reactionaries.

  In spite of its middle-of-the-road caution, the Southern Regional Council was attacked too, and might have withered and died for want of funds and members had it not been for Atlanta’s protective shield—that and a quarter-million-dollar grant from the Ford Foundation.

  You had to experience Atlanta to get the full flavor of its uniqueness as an urban oasis in the Sahara of segregation. On the surface, blacks were still locked out of practically everything—but as Hylan Lewis, who was then on the social science faculty at Atlanta University, would explain it years later, “Atlanta was not a back-door city, like most places in the South. It was still segregated out front, but it had side doors and windows through which people of both races came and went.” For a long time before the mid-fifties, Atlanta was a greenhouse of possibility.

  It had the Atlanta University cluster of black colleges, plus Emory and Georgia Tech. It had the Constitution and Ralph McGill, the Journal, and the Daily World, with the Scott family and Bill Gordon. It had William Hartsfield, a progressive mayor. It had one of the nation’s most active chapters of the American Veterans Committee, a biracial voice for reform. It had the Hungry Club, a black organization that welcomed white guests on its own terms, as equals. It had Protestants, Catholics, and Jews who were committed to racial equality. It had Grace Hamilton and the Urban League, and attorney A. T. Walden, and a strong NAACP chapter led by William Boyd and Clarence A. Bacote. It had some of the South’s most influential women—Dorothy Tilly, Josephine Wilkins, Lucy Randolph Mason, and others. It had the Southern leaders of organized labor in the AFL and the CIO. It had the SRC, with its solid mix of the city’s white and black progressives. And, to keep all this in realistic perspective, it also had Governor Herman Talmadge and a rural-dominated legislature adamantly opposed to social reform.

  The Southern Regional Council saw itself as a forward-looking private agency faced with the necessity of building a progressive alliance in a region of reactionary resistance. The task had never been easy. The SRC had been trying for years to obtain a substantial grant from Ford, which, since the termination of the Rosenwald Fund, had been the philanthropic foundation most interested in Southern issues. For three years running, proposals from the Atlanta group had gone up to the foundation in New York, only to be rejected. Finally, in 1952, a small grant of $10,000 was received, and the following year the amount was raised to $25,000.

  The foundation had two special-focus divisions by then: the Fund for the Republic, which promoted the strengthening of democratic institutions, and the Fund for the Advancement of Education. In April 1954, the Fund for the Republic, having satisfied itself that the SRC was not an incubator for radical anarchists, made a major grant of $240,000 to the organization. (As one requirement, the council adopted an employee loyalty oath that summer—not only to satisfy the Ford Foundation, but also, its leaders explained, to protect itself from the red-hunters.)

  Suddenly flush for the first time in its history, going all the way back to the origin of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation in 1919, the SRC quickly set about trying to make itself useful in the upcoming school desegregation effort. Just a week before the Brown decision was handed down, the council sponsored a four-day conference in Williamsburg, Virginia, as the first step in helping the South to adjust to the consequences of the ruling, whatever they turned out to be. Among the participants were George Mitchell, Harold Fleming, Dorothy Tilly, and Katherine Stoney of the SRC staff; Charles S. Johnson of Fisk and Rufus Clement of Atlanta University; Grace Hamilton of the Urban League; Emory University administrator John A. Griffin and old pro Will Alexander; Oliver Hill of the NAACP and Philip Hammer of the National Planning Association; labor leader Paul Christopher and Brooks Hays of Arkansas, the only member of Congress then in an active role in the SRC.

  One other race-related project based in Atlanta and funded by Ford was launched in this period when everyone was waiting for the Supreme Court to rule. In the spring of 1953, the Fund for the Advancement of Education announced that it would sponsor a comprehensive study of segregated education to determine with some precision just how separate and how unequal the schools were. One of the greatest needs, said the fund’s president, Owen J. Roberts—a retired justice of the Supreme Court himself—was for objective facts to help local school officials and citizens make wise decisions. The plan was to base the study at a major educational institution in the South, but by June of that year, no such base had been established.

  Harry Ashmore, executive editor of the Arkansas Gazette, took a leave of absence from his paper to serve as director of the project (a role later characterized by one of his friends in the state legislature as tantamount to “running for son of a bitch without opposition”). The fund had offered “a blank check” to several Southern universi
ties, Ashmore recalled later, but “the undertaking was so politically charged” that no institution, public or private, would accept the risk. There were many individual scholars who were willing and eager to take part, though, and Ashmore became, in effect, the managing editor, working out of Little Rock with a core staff based in Atlanta and a team of about forty social scientists and legal scholars scattered across the South and beyond.

  The Ashmore Project, as it came to be called, was an accelerated exercise in statistical compilation, analysis, and interpretation—not to argue the case for or against segregation in public education, but to provide accurate and reliable information to those who would be debating the issue. No one knew when the decision would be rendered, but it was generally anticipated in the 1953–54 term of the court, and the Fund for the Advancement of Education wanted to release the findings of the study ahead of the ruling.

  On the central staff, Ashmore had five colleagues: Phil Hammer of the National Planning Association’s Atlanta-based Committee of the South; Harold Fleming of the SRC; Mozell C. Hill, chairman of the sociology department at Atlanta University; John A. Griffin of Emory; and Ruth A. Morton of the American Friends Service Committee. Their meetings and collateral sessions with the research scholars and with state school officials took place in an atmosphere of rising anxiety about the coming decision. Working feverishly, the staff assembled the essence of the research and fed it to Ashmore, who put the finishing touches on The Negro and the School. In the conclusion he wrote:

  In the long sweep of history the public school cases before the Supreme Court may be written down as the point at which the South cleared the last turning in the road to reunion—the point at which finally, and under protest, the region gave up its peculiar institutions and accepted the prevailing standards of the nation at large as the legal basis for its relationship with its minority race.

  The University of North Carolina Press agreed to publish the book, and pulled out all the stops to rush it into print the following spring—less than a year after Ford hired Ashmore to pull it all together. The official publication date was pegged to fall somewhere between the availability of review copies in the latter part of April and the last day of the court’s term in the middle of May. The chosen date for the book was Sunday, May 16, 1954.

  At about ten minutes before one o’clock the next day, Washington time—high noon in much of the South—Chief Justice Earl Warren began reading the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. It had been a well-kept secret until that morning; the press wasn’t clued in, and even the justices’ clerks weren’t certain until the word spread just before the court convened. Soon, all of the clerks and staff attorneys were lining the alcove along the side of the ceremonial room, knowing that this was a rare moment.

  Thurgood Marshall was there with some of his colleagues, anticipating a ruling on this, the last day of the court’s term. J. A. DeLaine and Harry Briggs were somewhere in exile from Clarendon County, L. Francis Griffin was in Prince Edward County, and Barbara Johns was at her uncle Vernon’s home in Montgomery, all unaware of what was happening in Washington. When Earl Warren started reading the long-awaited “judgment and opinion of the court,” there was a rapt silence in the great hall.

  It was the first major opinion rendered by the new Chief Justice, a man with no prior judicial experience. He had something that most of the others didn’t have, though—political experience—and that was what rescued him and the court and the nation on this singular occasion. On assuming his duties the previous October, he had found four of the justices—Black, Douglas, Minton, and Burton—ready to overturn Plessy and decide the school cases in favor of the plaintiffs. The other four—Clark, Frankfurter, Jackson, and Reed—had a variety of reservations and doubts. Warren was the swing vote, and from the beginning he was firmly on the side of abandoning the separate-but-equal myth. But political instinct told him that a narrow decision on such a controversial issue wouldn’t win popular support; what was needed was an overwhelming majority—a unanimous vote—to help the nation pull together.

  After the second round of arguments in December, Warren began his low-key effort to win over the undecided members. Tom Clark came along first; having helped Truman desegregate the armed forces, he knew in his heart that segregation was wasteful, divisive, and ultimately indefensible. Then Felix Frankfurter joined the majority, believing as strongly as Warren that unanimity would greatly strengthen the nation’s resolve to comply. Robert Jackson had a heart attack that fall, and some said it was the glimpse of his own mortality that brought him around; in any case, after he told Warren of his decision, he came directly from the hospital to be present and counted with the majority on May 17.

  The last holdout was Stanley F. Reed, a seventy-year-old Kentuckian, born and raised in rural Mason County, on the south bank of the Ohio River, literally within sight of the Mason-Dixon fault line and the Yankee domain beyond, stretching away to the horizon. At Yale and Columbia and the University of Virginia, he had acquired a taste for both cultures, North and South. His faithful service as a government lawyer was rewarded when Franklin Roosevelt sent him up to the Supreme Court in 1938. Stan Reed proved to be a good and faithful servant of the New Deal philosophy—but that didn’t extend to turning a venerable Southern tradition on its ear. Warren never pressured him, but they talked often, one to one. Finally the Chief Justice gently told his colleague, “You’re all by yourself in this now,” and time was running out. Reed’s heart was in the right place; his doubts were not about the rightness of the choice, but about how the South would receive it. It was not until the weekend before the decision was to be issued that Stanley Reed finally made up his mind.

  The opinion itself was not a literary work of art. Warren wanted it to be nontechnical, nonemotional, nonrhetorical. Make it plain, simple, direct, and reasonably short, he decided; reach out to everybody with a statement of judicial moderation. It could have stood a little more punch, a few soaring phrases—and, some said, more law and less sociology. But the bottom line would have been the same: Racial segregation was inconsistent with the U.S. Constitution.

  “We conclude,” said the Chief Justice, reading from the printed text—and then, looking up at the audience, he added the word “unanimously,” sending a ripple of electricity through the room—“that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” Waties Waring had used a slightly different phrase to say the same thing.

  Thurgood Marshall had been expecting Justice Reed to dissent. “I watched his eyes as Warren read the opinion,” Marshall recalled years later. “He was looking me right straight in the face too, because he wanted to see my reaction when I realized he hadn’t written that dissent.” The two men exchanged unsmiling, barely perceptible nods—silent expressions of mutual respect. Stanley Reed’s clerk saw tears on the justice’s cheeks as Warren concluded. Before he retired in 1957, the Kentuckian would classify Brown as probably “the most important decision in the history of the court.”

  The courage of the three Southerners—Reed, Tom Clark of Texas, and Hugo Black of Alabama—was fully recognized and appreciated by their six brethren. Black, the only Deep South native, the onetime Klansman, the courts senior member and most consistent liberal voice, would never again be welcomed with open arms to the land of his birth and upbringing.

  To open the way for the momentous changes the decision would require, Warren invited the attorneys general of the Southern states to take part in hearings during the 1954–55 term of the court, and thus to have a hand in deciding how the ruling would be implemented.

  President Eisenhower would finally say, much later, that he believed “the judgment of the court was right.” But long before he got around to that, his refusal to endorse the decision publicly left the judges twisting slowly in the wind of increasingly hostile Southern opinion. Privately, the President told friends that appointing Warren to the
court was the worst mistake he had ever made. At a White House dinner in the spring of 1954, Ike had been overheard pressuring Warren to show some sympathy for the Southern whites who wanted to keep segregation. (Warren, the listener reported, bluntly told the President, “You mind your business and I’ll mind mine.”)

  E. Frederic Morrow, a White House aide to Eisenhower and one of only a handful of black officials in the administration, characterized the President as “a gentle and noble man,” but criticized his “failure to show strong moral leadership in the field of civil and human rights,” and said he was “neither intellectually nor emotionally disposed to combat segregation.” Morrow’s assessment is at least tacitly acknowledged by Eisenhower’s close associates and his biographers.

  Into the void of presidential leadership would step the demagogues of Dixie, and in a short time the battle lines would be drawn again in the dirt by a small cadre of willful men intent on repeating the South’s rebellious history. There would be only a handful of them at first: Herman Talmadge, Harry F. Byrd, James O. Eastland, and a few others. Talmadge charged that the court had “reduced our Constitution to a mere scrap of paper” by issuing “a bald political decree without basis in law,” and that Georgians “cannot and will not” accept it. Eastland thundered that “the South will not abide by or obey this legislative decision by a political court.” Byrd would soon become the father of a “massive resistance” movement that most Southern politicians found practically irresistible.

  Governor Byrnes of South Carolina, describing himself as “shocked” by the decision, declined to repeat his earlier threat to close the state’s schools—but wouldn’t say, either, that South Carolinians would accept the ruling as the law of the land. Most of the Southern governors did say at least that much, though—“we are a law-abiding people, and we will approach this calmly and do our duty,” or words to that effect.