Speak Now Against the Day
Page 93
Virginius Dabney (Virginia editor); March 5, 1990, Richmond
Daniel Duke (Georgia prosecutor); August 22, 1990, Tyree, Georgia
Virginia Foster Durr (Alabama activist); February 6, 1990, Montgomery
William A. Emerson (Georgia journalist); November 29, 1990, Atlanta
Harold C. Fleming (Georgia activist); January 24, 1991, Washington, D.C.
John Hope Franklin (historian); July 27, 1990, Durham, North Carolina
William Gordon (Georgia journalist); January 19, 1991, Silver Spring, Maryland
John A. Griffin (Georgia academician); February 7, 1991, Atlanta
Grace Townes Hamilton (Georgia activist); May 10, 1990, Atlanta
Alexander Heard (North Carolina academician); July 18, 1991, Nashville
John E. Ivey (regional higher education); July 21, 1990, Chapel Hill
Guy B. Johnson (North Carolina sociologist); July 22, 1990, Chapel Hill
Lyman Johnson (Kentucky educator); July 12, 1990, Louisville
Charles M. Jones (North Carolina minister); July 21, 1990, Chapel Hill
Stetson Kennedy (Florida activist); April 11, 1990, Jacksonville
Calvin Kytle (Georgia journalist); January 19, 1991, Cabin John, Maryland
Hylan Lewis (Georgia academician); January 13, 1991, New York
Sidney S. McMath (Arkansas governor); September 8, 1990, Little Rock
John N. Popham III (regional journalist); July 9, 1990, Chattanooga
Edgar Ray (Florida journalist); April 10, 1990, New Smyrna Beach, Florida
Modjeska Simkins (South Carolina activist); May 2, 1990, Columbia, South Carolina
George C. Stoney (regional journalist); June 13, 1990, Nashville
Herman E. Talmadge (Georgia governor); November 8, 1990, Hampton, Georgia
Margaret Walker (Mississippi writer); June 7, 1991, High Hampton, North Carolina
C. Vann Woodward (historian); January 12, 1991, New Haven, Connecticut
Wilson W. Wyatt, Sr. (Kentucky politician); July 12, 1990, Louisville
This book is not an oral history but a synthesis of the written and spoken words of hundreds of people who lived and worked in the South between 1932 and 1955. The principal use I have made of all the interviews, whether tape-recorded or not, has been to corroborate and confirm information I collected from other sources. I have sparingly used direct quotations from the audiotapes; I regard them primarily as contemporary reflections on events that happened a long time ago, not as literal expressions of what these men and women thought and said in those earlier times. No one can fairly be called to recollect, literally and in detail, his or her exact words and actions a half-century after the fact.
Periodicals
Hundreds of periodical publications—daily and weekly newspapers, monthly and quarterly magazines and journals, occasional and irregular newsletters, small-circulation broadsheets—published interesting and important social information about the South from the 1930s to the mid-1950s. The particular issues I consulted in the course of my research were of such number that specific citation here would require more space than I can justify. Listed below in alphabetical order are the titles of most of the periodicals from which I drew substantive information.
MAGAZINES
Alabama
American Mercury
American Veterans Committee Bulletin
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Appalachian Heritage
Appalachian Journal
The Atlantic Monthly
Caralogue and South Carolina Historical Magazine, publications of the South Carolina Historical Society
Collier’s
Common Ground
Council of the Southern Mountains publications
Crisis (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People)
Double Dealer
Ebony
Georgia Historical Quarterly
Harper’s
Journal of American History
Journal of Negro Education
Journal of Negro History
Journal of Southern History
Life
Look
The Nation
Negro Digest
The New Republic
New South/South Today/Southern Voices/Southern Changes (Southern Regional Council)
Newsweek
The New Yorker
North Carolina Historical Review
Opportunity (National Urban League)
Phylon (Atlanta University Review of Race and Culture)
Reviewer
The Saturday Evening Post
Saturday Review
Scribner’s (later Century)
Sewanee Review
Social Forces
South Atlantic Quarterly
South Today (formerly North Georgia Review, formerly Pseudopodia)
Southern Frontier (Commission on Interracial Cooperation)
Southern News Almanac
Southern Packet
Southern Patriot (Southern Conference for Human Welfare)
Southern Review
Southern Visions
Southwest Review
Survey Graphic
Tennessee Historical Quarterly
Time
Virginia Quarterly Review
NEWSPAPERS
The most influential black newspapers of this period were one daily, the Atlanta Daily World, and several large-circulation Northern weeklies, among them the Amsterdam News in New York, the Baltimore Afro-American, the Chicago Defender, and the Pittsburgh Courier. Within the South, the most important weeklies included the Louisville Defender, the Houston Informer, the Norfolk Journal & Guide, and the Lighthouse & Informer in Columbia, South Carolina; Birmingham, Little Rock, New Orleans, Jackson, Memphis, and most other large cities in the region also had black-owned weekly papers.
Northern and border-state daily newspapers provided much useful material. By far the most helpful to me were the Baltimore Sun, the New York Times, the Pittsburgh Gazette, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the Washington Post. It is perhaps more than mere coincidence that these papers, together with black-owned publications such as the Baltimore Afro-American, the Chicago Defender, and the Pittsburgh Courier, showed more than a passing interest in the South and its social problems; not surprisingly, all of these newspapers had a strong representation of Southerners in their ranks, whether as reporters, editors, or publishers, and they never seemed to lose interest in the regional drama and its colorful cast of heroes and villains.
This was the last great moment of the print age, the golden twilight of press monopoly before the advent of television. Southern editors and publishers, no less than their Northern counterparts, enjoyed a degree of public stature (sometimes notoriety) that was destined not to survive for long in the video era. Personal journalism was still in vogue, as witness the front-page columns of Atlanta Constitution editor Ralph McGill, the statewide visibility and influence of arch-conservatives like Frederick Sullens of the Jackson Daily News, and such idiosyncratic periodicals as P. D. East’s Petal Paper in south Mississippi and Harry Golden’s Carolina Israelite in Charlotte. These are the major Southern dailies I turned to for coverage of social issues from the thirties to the mid-fifties:
Alabama:
Birmingham Age-Herald
Birmingham News
Birmingham Post
Montgomery Advertiser
Montgomery Journal
Arkansas:
Arkansas Gazette, Little Rock
Arkansas Democrat, Little Rock
Florida:
Florida Times-Union, Jacksonville
Miami Herald
Miami News
Orlando Sentinel
St. Petersburg Times
Tampa Times
Tampa Tribune
Georgia:
Atlanta Constitution
Atlanta Georgian
Atlanta Journal
Macon News
Macon Telegraph
Kentucky:
Louisville, Courier-Journal
Louisiana:
Baton Rouge Morning Advocate
New Orleans Item
New Orleans States
New Orleans Times-Picayune
Mississippi:
Delta Democrat-Times, Greenville
Jackson Clarion-Ledger
Jackson Daily News
North Carolina:
Charlotte News
Charlotte Observer
Greensboro News
Raleigh News & Observer
Winston-Salem News-Journal
South Carolina:
Charleston News & Courier
Columbia Record
The State, Columbia
Tennessee:
Chattanooga News-Free Press
Chattanooga Times
Memphis Commercial Appeal
Memphis Press-Scimitar
Nashville Banner
The Tennessean, Nashville
Texas:
Dallas Morning News
Dallas Times-Herald
Houston Chronicle
Houston Post
Virginia:
Norfolk Virginian-Pilot
Richmond News Leader
Richmond Times-Dispatch
CLIPPINGS—THE SOUTHERN REGIONAL COUNCIL COLLECTION
From the time of its founding in 1944, the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta clipped and collected articles and editorials on a wide variety of topics of interest to the council staff and membership. Scores of daily and weekly newspapers, magazines, journals, and institutional publications were read and clipped on a regular basis, and the accumulated material was separated into broad categories and filed for future reference. As the years passed, the SRC clip files grew to enormous size; eventually it became necessary for the older material to be put away in storage outside the offices of the council.
In the fall of 1989, SRC executive director Steve Suitts and librarian Marge Manderson made arrangements for me to gain access to the 1944–54 clip files. Over a period of weeks and months, I gleaned from that cache of forgotten clippings a rare and absorbing picture of the South in its early postwar years of awakening to social change. To a degree that would have been impossible otherwise, I was able to focus on such things as elections and voting rights, political campaigns, state and local government, court decisions, labor organizing drives, racial violence, church and university developments, and numerous pivotal events and issues; what’s more, I could see how the major stories were presented, not in one or three or a dozen newspapers but in forty or fifty, large and small, white and black, liberal and moderate and conservative.
The clippings—including hundreds of letters to the editors from readers—helped me to gauge how aware people were of the issues of the day, and how important they deemed them to be. I was also able to get from the newspaper accounts a clear sense of where the region’s most influential leaders stood on those issues. So much detailed information on specific topics from a multiplicity of sources strongly reinforced the mass of material I obtained from other fields of research, and greatly increased my confidence to interpret this period of history, to form opinions and draw conclusions about it. Without the SRC clippings, I would have seen some events and issues through a glass darkly, and missed others altogether.
Photographic Credits
The task of assembling photographs to augment and bolster this narrative history proved to be much harder than I expected. Many subjects that I assumed would be preserved on film apparently are not. (To cite one surprising example, I have found no evidence that any photographs were made of the research team headed by Gunnar Myrdal that produced the monumental study of race relations An American Dilemma in 1944) Some institutions, such as the Congress and the Supreme Court of the United States, have restricted the use of cameras during their formal sessions, and thus the record from these sources is barren. Newspapers might be thought to have the most extensive files of photographs, but these are generally not open to the public—and worse, many papers have thoughtlessly destroyed their old photo files in order to preserve space. The future prospects for an adequate photographic record are even more bleak: New electronic scanner technology is making archival negatives and prints obsolete. The time may be coming when it will be even harder to illustrate history than it is now.
All the more reason, then, to search exhaustively for the surviving record. The pictures reproduced in this book came from a wide variety of sources. I am especially grateful to Steve Oden, Donald A. Ritchie, Deborah Needleman, Bill Cooper, Mattie Sink, Stetson Kennedy, Wayne Moore, Wayne Greenhaw, and numerous others named in preceding pages for their invaluable help in locating, obtaining, and reproducing these materials.
Photographs following this page
7.1 Florida agricultural workers (Photograph by Marion Post Wolcott, Farm Security Administration: Library of Congress)
7.2 Convict laborers (Photograph by Jack Delano, Farm Security Administration: Library of Congress)
7.3 Textile strike (Photograph by Jack Delano, Farm Security Administration: Library of Congress)
7.4 Southern Tenant Farmers Union leaders (STFU papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina)
7.5 Southern Tenant Farmers Union sign-up (Photograph by Louise Boyle: STFU papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina)
7.6 Providence Farm (Photograph reproduced from a 1980 monograph on Delta and Providence cooperative farms by Sam H. Franklin. Used with permission.)
7.7 W. D. Weatherford (Courtesy of W. D. Weatherford, Jr., through the Weatherford collection, Berea College Library)
7.8 Mechanical cotton picker (A. E. Cox collection, Mississippi State University Library)
7.9 Carter Glass, Tom Connally (Historical Office, U.S. Senate)
7.10 Huey Long (Historical Office, U.S. Senate)
7.11 Joseph T. Robinson (Historical Office, U.S. Senate)
7.12 Maury Maverick (Maverick papers, Center for American History, University of Texas)
7.13 Walter George, Richard Russell, Franklin D. Roosevelt (Historical Office, U.S. Senate)
7.14 Langston Hughes, Charles S. Johnson, E. Franklin Frazier (Courtesy of Mrs. Regina Andrews, through Special Collections, Fisk University)
7.15 Frank M. Davis (Photograph by Griffin J. Davis: Archives and Special Collections, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center)
7.16 Thurgood Marshall, Donald Murray, Charles H. Houston (NAACP collection, Library of Congress)
7.17 Charlotte Hawkins Brown (North Carolina Division of Archives and History)
7.18 Claude Pepper (Historical Office, U.S. Senate)
7.19 Jessie Daniel Ames (Courtesy of Jacqueline Dowd Hall)
7.20 William H. Hastie (Photograph by Underwood & Underwood for the Washington Post)
7.21 Robert C. Weaver (Photograph by Underwood & Underwood for the Washington Post)
7.22 Martin Dies, Joe Starnes, J. B. Matthews (Photograph by Underwood & Underwood for the Washington Star. The Star collection, now the property of the Washington Post, is housed at the Martin Luther King Memorial Library in the District of Columbia Public Library System.)
7.23 Howard W. Odum (Odum papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina)
7.24 Zora Neale Hurston (Photograph by Alan Lomax: Lomax collection, Library of Congress)
7.25 James Weldon Johnson (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale Collection of American Literature, Yale University)
7.26 H. L. Mencken (Still Pictures Branch, National Archives)
7.27 William Faulkner, Milton Abernethy (Courtesy of Wallace Kuralt, through the North Carolina collection, University of North Carolina)
7.28 Howard Kester (Kester papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina)
7.29 H. L. Mitchell, Howard Kester, Norman Thomas (STFU papers, Southern Historical Collection, Un
iversity of North Carolina)
7.30 Herman Clarence Nixon (Courtesy of Judge John T. Nixon)
7.31 Don West (Courtesy of Anthony P. Dunbar)
7.32 Eugene Talmadge (Atlanta Journal and Constitution)
Photographs following this page
15.1 Harold Ickes, Marian Anderson (Photograph by Underwood & Underwood for the Washington Post)
15.2 James F. Byrnes swearing-in (Photograph by Harris & Ewing: Washington Star collection, District of Columbia Public Library)
15.3 Hattie Caraway (Historical Office, U.S. Senate)
15.4 Pat Harrison (Historical Office, U.S. Senate)
15.5 “Cotton Ed” Smith (South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina)
15.6 Lister Hill (Historical Office, U.S. Senate)
15.7 Harry F. Byrd (Photograph by Harris & Ewing: Washington Star collection, District of Columbia Public Library)
15.8 Richard Wright (Photograph by Gordon Parks, Office of War Information: Library of Congress)
15.9 Alfred A. Knopf and W. J. Cash (Charlotte News photograph, courtesy of Charles H. Elkins, Sr., and the Wake Forest University Library)
15.10 Virginius Dabney (The March of Time: Motion Pictures Branch, National Archives)
15.11 Gunnar Myrdal (Still Pictures Branch, National Archives)
15.12 Thomas Sancton (Photograph by Phil Johnson, New Orleans Item: Courtesy of Thomas Sancton)
15.13 Frank Porter Graham, Louise Charlton, Will W. Alexander (Archives and Special Collections, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center)
15.14 A. Philip Randolph (Photograph by Gordon Parks, Office of War Information: Library of Congress)
15.15 Eugene Talmadge, Daniel Duke (Atlanta Journal and Constitution)
15.16 South Carolina Progressive Democratic Party (Chicago Defender photograph: South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina)