Speak Now Against the Day

by John Egerton

  From the smoldering ashes of the Dixiecrat defeat in 1948, a handful of reactionaries had fanned the sparks into a flaming new rebellion, one more lost cause to die for—the same cause of racial and regional chauvinism that had rallied their ancestors. The thin scattering of Southern liberals and progressives and moderates who opposed them had lost their last and only hope of a peaceful and voluntary social reformation. Realistically, they had never had the numbers, the discipline, the unity, or the fervor to pull it off. Their institutions—the church, the academy, the press, the unions, the corporations, the political parties—had failed to lead the way. The rest of the country had stood back—uninformed, unengaged, unconcerned—and waited for the South to do as it promised, to take care of its own problems, when they had been everybody’s problems all along.

  Perhaps Brown and Montgomery were inevitable; without them, we might never have avoided the full-scale outbreak of another civil war. Thurgood Marshall, Earl Warren, and Martin Luther King died for our sins.

  So did Lillian Smith, and James Weldon Johnson, and Buck Kester, and H. L. Mitchell, and Mary McLeod Bethune, and Charlotte Hawkins Brown, and Frank Porter Graham, and Osceola McKaine, and John Henry McCray, and Jim Dombrowski, and Benjamin Mays, and Myles Horton, and Walter White, and Will Alexander, and Lucy Randolph Mason, and Charles S. Johnson, and Aubrey Williams, and Richard Wright, and all the other native sons and daughters who had qualified and testified as sage prophets of the Good South.

  Ralph McGill was among them, too—a Tennessee country boy raised up among the common folk, proud of his heritage but mystified and troubled by the deep strain of racism that seemed to run in the blood. When he became the editor of the Atlanta Constitution in 1938, he was a mainstream white Southerner—paternalistic, progressive in the New Deal spirit, and conservatively accepting of the laws and mores and traditions of segregation. He attacked the Klan and the lynch mobs with a fury, but resisted federal solutions to violence and injustice, believing with a simple, patient faith that his people were decent and would right the wrongs. He quickly saw through Joe McCarthy, but not through his own hot-tempered tendency to red-bait Southerners who he felt were pushing too hard for reform.

  He wasn’t ready for Brown, but he never doubted for a minute that a nine-to-nothing Supreme Court ruling was the law of the land. The only way to resist that, he said, was “secession by armed force,” a wayward strategy that had proved disastrously wrong the first time it was tried, and would be insanely wrong if tried again. So McGill stood for obeying the law, and when the middle ground had eroded away, he landed firmly on the “radical” side of law and order and nonviolence, the side of Martin Luther King and virtually all black Southerners, of most federal judges, of Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP, of Hodding Carter and Harry Ashmore and the tattered sprinkling of white liberals still fearless enough to stand up in their motherland and bear the brunt of white scorn and rage.

  Reluctant though he was to play the role, Ralph McGill grew into it with an increasing sense of mission. His reputation spread. His front-page column in the Constitution was syndicated in the late 1950s, and soon the readers of more than three hundred papers were discovering him. He was always readable, often eloquent; for millions of people, white and black, in and out of the region, he became a symbol of reason and hope, the conscience of the white South. From the late fifties until his death in 1969, he spoke with unrestrained candor about the “chloroforming myths” of white supremacy: that violence was the doing of “outside agitators,” or wasn’t even happening at all; that “separate but equal” could or would ever be achieved; that the white South eventually would do right by its black minority freely and voluntarily, without external pressure; that the segregationists were the real persecuted minority, and that theirs was the legal and moral high ground. McGill knew better, and said so.

  On February 10, 1959, the Atlanta editor came to Lexington for a major address at the University of Kentucky. As a publicist for my alma mater, I was assigned to meet him at the airport and be close at hand during his stay. It was a task I performed proudly, having found in his column a voice that captured my attention and won my admiration.

  He was sixty years old. I was twenty-three. When I looked at him, I thought of my father—they could have worn the same suit and tie. (They would have found a lot to talk about, too: FDR, the Tennessee backcountry, the call of the open road, home cooking, good whiskey, faithful friends.) McGill seemed in person much like he sounded on the printed page—well-mannered and charming, tough and tender, easygoing but serious, a good storyteller and a good listener, sentimental and softhearted but capable of indignant outrage, a gentle man with a sense of humor and a distant air of melancholy. It had taken him a quarter of a century to cast his lot with the Southern advocates of racial and social equality, but for the decade he had left, he would hold fast to that ideal. McGill had his flaws, God knows—but the white South was flat out of saints. Now that I think of it, I wonder if perhaps it was his imperfections that endeared him to so many people. What he demonstrated, more than anything else, was the capacity of white Southerners to change, to repudiate racism and rise up to the standard of justice and equality so courageously sought by their black fellow citizens in the freedom movement sparked by Brown and Montgomery. That was Ralph McGill’s real contribution, his basic message: If he could change, if he could do the right thing, maybe the rest of us could too.

  That night in Lexington, he spoke about the discredited leadership of the South. Those who would close their schools had already closed their minds, he said. But they were wrong, and ultimately they would fail, for this too would pass; a new day was coming, and new leaders, white and black, were rising among the young: “To be a young Southerner in this day and age is the most delightful, mystical, and wonderful agony of all.” The South was in desperate need of some truth, some honesty, some justice, he said. It had a long way to go. The journey would be difficult, but rewarding. The hour was late, and we needed to be about our task. This was the place to start—right here, right now.

  He had his audience with him, hanging on every word. There was a sense of urgency in the message, and a tense current of wakening energy among those who heard it. I could feel the magnetic power of his voice, rolling like an altar call through the crowded, darkened auditorium.

  “There comes a time,” McGill said, “when you must stand and fight for what you believe, for what you know is right and true—or else tuck tail and run.”

  That time had come in Montgomery for Martin Luther King and the black American minority. Now, at last, it was also coming for Ralph McGill, for the white South—and for us all.

  Sources, Resources, Credits, and Notes on Structure

  In his monumental three-volume narrative history of the Civil War, Shelby Foote acknowledged the striving of both historians and novelists to recapture the drama of a given time by resurrecting the players after all the firsthand testimony has ended. Once the evidence is in, he said, “all else is speculation or sifting, an attempt to reconcile differences and bring order out of multiplicity.” In the bibliographical notes of the trilogy, Foote described his own effort as a fusion of these two kinds of writing, fiction and nonfiction. “The point I would make,” he declared,

  is that the novelist and the historian are seeking the same thing: the truth—not a different truth: the same truth—only they reach it, or try to reach it, by different routes. Whether the event took place in a world now gone to dust, preserved by documents and evaluated by scholarship, or in the imagination, preserved by memory and distilled by the creative process, they both want to tell us how it was: to re-create it, by their separate methods, and make it live again in the world around them. … Accepting the historian’s standards without his paraphernalia, I have employed the novelist’s methods without his license. Instead of inventing characters and incidents, I searched them out—and having found them, I took them as they were.

  Foote went on to explain that he had used no mat
erial in his narrative “without the authority of documentary evidence which I consider sound,” but he also said he had chosen to leave out footnotes in the belief that “they would detract from the book’s narrative quality.” In every detail, he said, “the book is as accurate as care and hard work could make it.” And then, without further ado, he opened the way for his legions of diverse and unselfconsciously eloquent real-life characters to speak for themselves.

  His narrative is its own impregnable defense; it is also my inspiration for attempting the work at hand. In a word, “Colonel” Foote gave me my marching orders—and though like every soldier of fortune I know that I am fully responsible for my own independent actions, I am nonetheless indebted to him for showing me an approach to this challenging task that is very much in keeping with my own ideas and instincts about writing.

  I also recall with appreciation a useful distinction I once heard Foote make: between writers who want to know everything there is to know about a subject before they begin to write about it, and writers who choose a subject and shortly begin to write about it in order to plumb its mysterious depths, hoping to discover what it is that makes it so intriguing. That insight alone would have been enough to make me celebrate Shelby Foote as a writer. His unorthodox example gave me encouragement and a certain permission, if not authority, to undertake my own journey of discovery.

  The further I went on this odyssey, the more I came to admire some of the Southern writers who had taken sizable risks in their attempts to tell us how it was. Several of the most celebrated and enduring nonfiction books about the South to come out of the 1930s and 1940s were characterized by an unconcealed personal perspective. Some of them excluded footnotes and endnotes; others had no bibliographical references at all, and a few even lacked an index—and yet they hold secure and permanent rank in the upper strata of Southern literature. Among these more or less unconventional works of remembrance and belief and history are W. J. Cash’s The Mind of the South, Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream, Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Erskine Caldwell’s You Have Seen Their Faces, James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Clarence Cason’s 90° in the Shade, Saunders Redding’s No Day of Triumph, Stetson Kennedy’s Southern Exposure, Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road, and William Alexander Percy’s Lanterns on the Levee.

  All of these books were published between 1934 and 1949, and all retain to this day the enduring power to engage readers, provoke thought, stir emotions, and linger in the mind. As different as they are, each from the next, these memorable volumes are united by their common grounding in the viewpoints—the beliefs and convictions—of their authors; each book is made persuasive not by its particular point of view or the weight of its documentary evidence but by its revealed knowledge, its insight, its boldness, and the intensity and originality of its language.

  With the inspiration of these and other works to sustain me, I have ventured to look with a fresh eye at the time of my own awakening in the South: the years from the mid-thirties, when I was born, to the mid-fifties, when I became an independent adult. In that generational span of almost a quarter of a century, the South was transformed from a feudalistic colonial province to an interdependent region within a modern nation. Living though I was in the midst of that quiet social revolution, I was almost completely oblivious of it. Now my curiosity has drawn me back into those times to search for a deeper understanding of them. This book is a summary of what I found.

  Against the current of several contemporary trends—sanitized school textbooks, neo-orthodox and politically correct histories, ethnocentrism, and cultural balkanization—I have written a narrative interpretation of Southern social history in the mid-twentieth century that makes no attempt to hide my personal perspective. Descriptively, this is a subjective reconstruction of a fragment of the recent past in America, with all the limitations implied by that label. I have tried to establish at the beginning my claim to an opinion, and have gone on from there to draw informed but ultimately individual and personal conclusions about incidents and episodes, issues and people, the place and the times. Throughout, I have sought to make my account understandable, persuasive, and effective; that is the point of good writing. More than that, I have taken care to ensure, to the best of my ability, that what I have written is true, accurate, and fair. If I have succeeded in that, perhaps it will also be convincing—not as the one true story, but as one among many.

  In the pages that follow, my purpose is to provide a general explanation of where and how and from whom I gathered the material for this composition, and to express my gratitude to those who helped me. Though it is true that writers—unlike, say, filmmakers or television producers—must finally follow a solo path in their creative endeavors, it is also true that a work of nonfiction such as this depends in large measure on the supporting efforts of countless others. For me to have undertaken this project alone would have been utterly impossible. From the first dawning of the idea that was to become the book, I began turning to outside sources—to scholars and other writers whose words I sought in conversations and interviews, to books and papers in libraries and archives, to friends and acquaintances and strangers who had personal knowledge of the subject and showed an interest in my questions.

  This book is a synthesis, in the truest and fullest meaning of that term. It is a gathering-up of other people’s words, written and oral, and a combining of those diverse statements with my own to produce a revised account—a reinterpretation—of a period in the South’s past that is still near enough to us to be considered recent, if not contemporary. The gathering process has been long and eventful. In one sense, it began more than thirty-five years ago, when I returned from military duty overseas and discovered at college in Kentucky that I had a strong and abiding interest in the South and in social history. For almost a decade I whetted this appetite, exploring the field tentatively and indirectly through independent reading and occasional articles I managed to get published in newspapers and magazines. Then, in 1965, I joined the staff of an education and race-relations magazine based in Nashville. During six years in that job, followed by almost twenty-five more as a freelance writer living in Nashville, I have come to understand that just as I chose to stay in the South, the South has stayed in me as an absorbing personal and professional challenge.

  But it was many years after I came to Nashville—in mid-1987, to be exact—that the idea for this particular book started to intrude upon my consciousness. That summer, I opened a file on the South of the 1940s and started systematically collecting materials and charting the locations and availability of a variety of resources: books, magazine and newspaper articles, audio and video recordings, archival papers, movies, music. By the spring of 1991, this casual and occasional search had become a more or less continuous pursuit (as well as a book under contract). It eventually took me to every Southern state, to half a dozen others beyond the region, and to the nation’s capital. I was quickly relieved of the mistaken notion that this might be a largely unexplored period of Southern history; on the contrary, the time is rich with written and recorded and remembered accounts. Even so—in this as in all times past—there is a wealth of obscure and unfamiliar material waiting to be resurrected, and I find a special pleasure in blending and merging these known and unknown stories.

  Libraries were my primary destination, but interviews were vitally important too. Various sources are noted below. I begin with the libraries, that most indispensable of institutions for all writers.

  Libraries and Archives

  For any writer of nonfiction to practice the craft without benefit of one or more supporting libraries seems utterly impossible to me. With its diverse resources and staff of skilled specialists, a good library is to a working writer what a strong theater company is to an actor, or a modern operating room to a surgeon, or a well-equipped garage to an auto mechanic: a proving ground where the practitioner’s skill and instinct and judgment are brought to bear against a challenge, a problem,
a puzzle, an unknown force. It is here that the creative strength and focused intelligence of the practitioner are repeatedly put to the test. As a professional writer, I know that each time I begin a new project, I must gain command of the relevant resources in this repository of knowledge or else face failure and defeat. Consequently, I spend a lot of time in libraries, and I owe a substantial debt to these institutions and the people who operate them.

  Several dozen libraries (and many individual librarians, listed here in parentheses) have given me vital and essential support in this venture. Foremost among them are these:

  Library of Congress, Washington—Social Science Division (Annette Hale and numerous others) and Division of Prints and Photographs (Mary Eisen).

  Louis Round Wilson Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—Southern Historical Collection (David Moltke-Hansen, Richard A. Shrader, and others), North Carolina Collection, and Photographic Services Section.

  Jean and Alexander Heard Library of Vanderbilt University in Nashville—Reference Services (Anne Reuland and numerous others), Special Collections (Marice Wolfe, Sara Harwell), Government Documents (Larry Romans), Circulation (Clint Grantham), School of Law Library, Peabody College Library, and Blair School of Music Library.

  The reference departments, special collections, archival collections, or photographic archives of the following:

  Atlanta University (Wilson N. Flemister, Sr.)

  Berea College, Berea, Kentucky (Shannon Wilson)

  Census Bureau Library, Washington, D.C.

  Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

  Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia (Linda Matthews)

  Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee (Ann Allen Shockley, Beth M. Howse)