Southern Liberal Journalists and the Issue of Race, 1920-1944 by John T. Kneebone. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1985.

Reviewed by Patricia Sullivan

Vol. 8, No. 1, 1986, pp. 22-24

The term “liberal” often obscures more than it explains. The adjective “southern” is certain to add to the confusion.

There is an implicit assumption that “southern liberal” means white southern liberal. The image of a southern liberal between the two world wars, the period John Kneebone addresses, evokes an ambivalent figure. The system o~ legalized white supremacy was firmly intact, and many “liberals” endorsed Mark Ethridge’s 1942 statement that “there is no power in the world-not even all the mechanized armies of the earth, Allied and Axis-which could now force the Southern white people to the abandonment of the principle of social segregation.”

Thus, John Kneebone feels compelled to qualify his definition from the start. “Southern liberalism,” he explains, “must emphasize the adjective. Downplaying the southernness of these people tends to identify them with national racial liberalism that takes its traction from a history emphasizing the ideals of Jefferson’s declaration, the abolition movement, the Radical Republicans during Reconstruction, the abolition movement, and Negro protest in the twentieth century.” The liberalism Kneebone writes about has limitations which time brings to the fore. His is a provocative study of a particular style of “southern” liberalism which came of age in the 1920s and 1930s and was moribund by the end of World War II-a victim of its own inner contradictions, underscored the emerging black protest movement.

Southern Liberal Journalists and the Issue of Race, 1920-1944 is organized around the lives and careers of five men: Gerald W. Johnson (1890-1980) of the Baltimore Evening Sun, George Fort Milton (1894-1955) of the Chattanooga News, Virginius Dabney (1901-) of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Ralph McGill (1899-1969) of the Atlanta Constitution, and Hodding Carter (1907-1972) of the Greenville (MS) Delta Democrat-Times. Hardly two generations removed from the period of the Civil War and Reconstruction, the past was very much present in the minds of these journalists. They maintained that the slavery system bore the seeds of its own demise, and, therefore, the Civil War was an unnecessary war. The journalists focused their attention on Reconstruction as the event which traumatized the process of change in the South, and caused the political and social unrest that disrupted the region through the turn of the century. The Progressive era brought back a semblance of order through the enactment of segregation and disenfranchisement law in the South. A delicate balance had been restored, and the subjects of Kneebone’s study dedicated themselves to maintaining social harmony while nurturing the progress promised by increasing urbanization and industrializtion.

These men came of age professionally during the post World War I period. Southern journalists of the 1920s won national acclaim as the voices of reason and tolerance in a region that seemed woefully lacking in both. They applied a critical eye to the southern social scene and challenged the excesses of fundamentalism, the Klan, lynching and prohibition. By the end of the decade, Kneebone explains, an identifiable southern journalism existed. The journalists had assumed their “class” responsibility as social reformers with a twofold mission: to educate the southern white masses, and to explain the South to northerners in order to discourage “outside” interference in southern affairs. They further refined their position during the Agrarian debate of

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the early 1930s when they held forth as proponents of progress through “regulated industrialization.”

Race relations remained largely on the periphery of the journalists’ concerns during the 1920s. In 1930 the number of lynchings, which had been on the decline during the previous decade, increased dramatically. The Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC) responded with an investigation which reinforced the belief that these evils were uniquely lower class in origin. The key to establishing and maintaining good race relations, then, was to modify and cultivate the behavior of the white southern masses. The Scottsboro case also failed to raise any serious questions about the base injustice of legalized white supremacy. While striving to curb its excesses, the journalists worked to insure that the segregation system worked. They were confident that urbanization would contribute to better race relations, and adopted Robert Parks’ model of vertical segregation as their goal in realizing a more equitable society. Black folk remained an invisible people whose patience, endurance and submission were taken for granted as white reformers promoted gradual change within the limits of Jim Crow.

Events during the 1930s tested the position that the journalists had secured for themselves. They enthusiastically endorsed Franklin D. Roosevelt during his first term as the embodiment of Rational Leadership, a true statesman who stood above partisan squabbles. His aggressive legisla. tive program met the crisis of the depression and implemented programs to provide for the larger social good. By 1937, however, their view of the President had begun to sour. Roosevelt’s second term victory was based on a coalition of labor, black and urban voters, suggesting a class appeal which countered the journalists’ ideal of social harmony. The President’s court-packing plan and his attempt to purge conservatives from the Democratic Party in the South completed the disillusionment. Outside interference in regional affairs could never be justified, even if it intended to mobilize political support for New Deal programs the journalists favored. By 1938 their opposition to FDR and the New Deal paralleled that of the South’s most conservative representatives in Congress.

The Depression and the New Deal had released forces for change in the South which challenged the moderating influence of Kneebone’s subjects. Just as they retreated from Roosevelt, another group of Southerners rallied to demonstrate their support of the President in founding the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW). As Arthur Raper, a founding member of SCHW, explained to me a few years ago, the events of the 1930s had shaken the foundation of southern society. “A lot of folks were up on their feet and talking and expecting things that they had never expected before …. Here was … a very basic ferment, and people needed to respond to it in some way.” The SCHW went beyond the CIC (which addressed itself to the “better” elements of the community as agents of gradual change), and made a mass, interracial appeal. Organized by southern New Dealers and labor activists, the SCHW hoped to build a broad-based constituency for progressive political action in the South. The organization concentrated on eliminating voter restrictions which kept the great majority of southerners from the ballot box, and later joined the CIO and NAACP in promoting voter registration and education drives throughout the South. The SCHW acted on the assumption that an expanded electorate, which included working class and black voters, was essential to liberalizing the South. This approach contradicted the basic premises shared by the southern journalists. They believed in cooperative endeavors led by the elite class, and they strongly opposed any type of racial or class activism. These men lacked a basic faith in the “democratic” process, and did not promote enfranchisement of the masses as part of their reform program. They eschewed politics in favor of Howard Odum’s ideal of social planning by “nonpartisan” leaders as the means for advancing the general welfare.

By the end of the 1930s, the journalists were on the defensive. Events overseas, however, seemed to provide a reprieve from pressing social concerns. “Dr. Win the War” had replaced “Dr. New Deal” and the journalists enthusiastically endorsed the war against fascism. World War 11 caused them to abandon the anti-war doctrines which had served as the intellectual foundation of the southern liberal program for gradual reform. Their support for the war undercut an earlier notion that the Civil War had demonstrated the futility of war for principle. Hitler had changed

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all of that. There were moral issue worth fighting for. Gerald W. Johnson acknowledged that “the principle of freedom is a unit to the extent that when any man’s freedom is attacked every man’s freedom is threatened.” George Fort Milton proclaimed, “the world cannot endure half slave and half free.” The war became their cause-and their undoing. For when black Americans internalized wartime rhetoric, and publicly endorsed the indivisibility of freedom and democracy, the journalists were forced to confront the color line. When they did, they qualified those very principles which justified the war against Hitler. By the end of the war, the journalists had become apologists for the segregation system and relinquished whatever leadership role they might have played in the emerging civil rights movement.

Kneebone demonstrates quite convincingly that the black protest of the World War II period caught his subjects totally off guard. Clearly, there had been very little communication of consequence between most whites and blacks in the South prior to the war. As Kneebone points out, his journalists along with the rest of the CIC leadership had very limited relations with a very limited number of black leaders, and always with the assumption that “white southern liberals would determine the agenda and set the pace for racial reform.” Charles S. Johnson and others were consulted for their endorsement and cooperation, not for their critical judgment or unqualified participation. The journalists had effectively insulated themselves from the ferment within the black community. This ferment took on sustained momentum and direction during the 1930s when Charles H. Houston and a team of black lawyers around the South began coordinating the legal attack on the segregation system which would culminate with the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. Building on the protest surrounding the Scottsboro case, Houston used the courtroom as a classroom to further educate, politicize and organize local blacks. These preliminary efforts helped to revive and expand NAACP membership in the South, which boomed during the war years. The fact that Charles Houston is not mention in Kneebone’s study further suggests the extent to which Kneebone’s subjects ignored the dynamics for change emerging within the black community.

John Kneebone has written a compelling study of the evolution of a predominant strand of southern liberal thought between the wars, and its ultimate demise. However, it is important to note that as Kneebone’s subjects were turning inward, southern liberalism was blossoming through the lives and careers of a number of their contemporaries. Hugo Black, Claude Pepper, Clifford and Virginia Durr, Clark Foreman, Aubrey Williams, Lucy Randolph Mason, C.B. Baldwin, Frank Graham, Palmer Weber, Arthur Raper, Josephine Wilkins and others were also rooted in the southern past. But they looked beyond the Civil War Reconstruction period to the Jeffersonian ideals of the late eighteenth century. These individuals concentrated on givng the democratic process full play in the South, and in the nation. Their concerns complemented the efforts of Charles Houston, Ella Baker, E.D. Nixon, Charles Gomillion, and a host of black leaders throughout the South who were motivated by the promise of the Constitution. Virginia Durr’s Outside the Magic Circle, and Robert J. Norell’s Reaping the Whirlwind are important companion pieces to Kneebone’s Southern Liberal Journalists. Together they help demonstrate the broad range of “liberalism” that should be suggested by the adjective “southern.” They also direct our attention to the New Deal-World War 11 period as an exciting and important era in the history of the South–and of the Civil Rights Movement-and one which historians have just begun to explore.

Patricia Sullivan is Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Civil Rights and lecturer in history at the University of Virginia.

Palmer Weber, 1914-1986

By Patricia Sullivan

Vol. 8, No. 6, 1986, pp. 5-7

In 1948, Palmer Weber and Louis Burnham organized Henry Wallace’s third party campaign in the South. Building on earlier voter registration and education efforts, the Southern campaign focused primarily on the issue of civil rights. Wallace’s Progressive Party also challenged the segregation system and culminated with his tour of the region in the fall of 1948. Despite a violent reception, Wallace campaigned in seven Southern states and was the first presidential candidate to address nonsegregated audiences in the South. On election day, the Progressive Party suffered a disastrous defeat at the polls, but “defeat” was not an operative word for Palmer Weber. A year after the election, he wrote to Wallace praising his enormous courage during his Southern tour, “which gave profound heart to all the oppressed elements in the South.” He chided those who would lose hope: “The mere fact that the battle continues, that we get tired and discouraged is no proper measure of accomplishment. We have no right to even stop so long as one person’s rights are not fully sustained. This is the most simple and accurate moral principal which has sustained you and your leadership.”

Continuing effort on behalf of political, economic and social justice was the leitmotiv of Palmer Weber’s life. It was a life that incorporated a wide variety of experiences and associations, accented with good cheer and enormous generosity of spirit. Palmer often referred to himself as “an accumulation of accidents.” But there was a simplicity of purpose and steady determination that shaped his sojourn. Palmer’s creative participation in the major reform movements of the twentieth century will be remembered by historians. The significance of this life, however, speaks of a man who mastered the art of living.

Palmer Weber was born in 1914 in Smithfield, Va., a small rural town on the James River. Diagnosed at the age of twelve as having tuberculosis, he was sent to the Blue Ridge Sanitorium outside Charlottesville. Palmer remembered this as “a fabulous piece of luck.” While selling newspapers on the wards of the sanitorium he met a variety of adults who undertook to educate him. They included socialists, Gandhiites, Baptist ministers–“a whole collection of people in the midst of dying and getting well, all of whom were concerned about the state of the human soul, the state of economics and politics.” Palmer was reaing Foreign Affairs and Current History at the age of thirteen. He read the first volumes of Plato’s Dialogues, the Buddhist Sutras, and Gandhi’s Young India. It was, he recalled, “a magic mountain type of experience where you had a continual dialogue going on.” At seventeen he enrolled in the University of Virginia with a determination to study philosophy knowing that he “wanted to be a wise man, a good man an ethical man.”

Palmer came to the University on scholarship and to maintain it worked diligently to stay at the head of his

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class. He succeeded in doing so not only in philosophy, but in economics, mathematics, Greek, and biology as well. Virginius Dabney’s history of the University of Virginia describes Palmer as probably the most brilliant student at Virginia during the 1930s. In addition to his studies, he immersed himself in student politics. He was, he recalled, “a Christian-Socialist, Buddhist, Ghandi type person…any kind of variation where it was a questioning of authority or where an effort was made to bring justice.” Palmer organized the Marxist study group, joined in establishing a branch of the National Student League at the University, and successfully led a challenge to fraternity control of student government. His political activities also addressed the broader concerns of race and class stirred by the depression. He helped to organized a union for hospital workers at the University hospital, and worked as a labor organizer at a local textile mill. From the beginning, civil rights was central to Palmer’s political concerns. He raised money for the Scottsboro defendants and campaigned for the admission of Alice Jackson, a black woman, to the University of Virginia. The Jackson case marked the beginning of the NAACP’s twenty-year legal battle for school desegration, culminating in Brown v. Board of Education. In his column for the student newspaper, Palmer called for federal legislation against lynching, decrying the South’s “decades long violation of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the Constitution.” By the time he was awarded his Ph.D., it was not surprising that this most brilliant student was unable to obtain a teaching position in a Southern university.

Undeterred, Palmer Weber found his way to Washington where he worked as an economic advisor to several Congressional committees, and wrote speeches for a number of Senators. Palmer embraced the New Deal as a reaffirmation of national citizenship rights and found opportunities to try and implement his social ideas. He organized a legislative campaign to abolish the poll tax, lobbied for the continuation of the Fair Employment Practices Committee (which prohibited racially discriminatory hiring practices in defense industries), and led the fight for a Soldiers’ Vote Bill. When it became clear that conservatives in Congress could effectively block all New Deal legislation, Palmer joined the newly established CIO-Political Action Committee. In addition to working for the election of New Deal candidates, this first national PAC concentrated on strengthening the New Deal coalition through a nationwide voter registration effort. Largely due to Palmer’s initiative, the CIO-PAC coordinated its effort with the NAACP, in what became the most ambitious voter registration drive in the South up to that time. From 1944 to 1948 the number of registered black voters in the South tripled. In 1946 Palmer became the first Southern white man to serve on the National Board of the NAACP.

In an article on “The Negro Vote in the South,” written while still a student at the University of Virginia, Palmer observed that reform “lost its most valuable ally, when the Negro was denied active citizenship. Equal access to the ballot, Palmer believed, was essential to securing a more just society, and he dedicated himself to that struggle. His commitment and unique abilities helped shape the early civil rights movement. Virginia Durr, who first worked with Palmer in the anti-poll tax fight, recalls: “Palmer could get hold of something, organize it and set it into motion, action, and people began to develop around it. Palmer was the moving spirit behind eveyone else. He was full of vitality and able to attract people. The essential thing was that he had such a burning desire to get this thing done, to get the people in the South the right to vote, and to end the segregation system.”

Henry Wallace’s 1948 Progressive Party campaign in the South was a continuation of the New Deal-inspired movement to open up the political process to the region to whites and blacks. Palmer Weber co-directed Wallace’s southern effort along with Louis Burnham. Looking back on that campaign thirty years later,

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Palmer recalled, “if there was one thing the Progressive Party did positively and effectively in the South it was to challenge the segregation system everywhere–in public facilities, public speaking, blacks running for public office. In every city we conducted registration drives to register black voters. For example, in Greensboro, N.C., at AT College we managed to have about thirty-five black students. They qualified three thousand black voters and the next year they elected the first black city councilman since Reconstruction. Randolph Blackwell ran that campaign.”

For Blackwell, his association with Palmer Weber in the 1948 Wallace campaign helped shape his life-long commitment to advancing economic and political justice. Blackwell remembered, “Palmer had as much influence on my professional development as anybody. We were always delighted when Palmer would come to North Carolina AT during the ’48 campaign. He had a great influence on those of us whose lives he touched to dedicate ourselves to the task of ridding the society of racial discrimination.” (After completing a law degree at Howard, and several years of teaching, Randolph Blackwell went on to work with Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In 1966 he founded Southern Rural Action, a non-profit corporation dedicated to helping small, poor and mostly black communities in the South become self-reliant economically and politically).

The Progressive Party campaign was also the culmination of the New Deal-inspired movement for economic justice and political reform in the South. During the 1950s, Palmer, like so many others, was subject to Congressional investigation of his political beliefs. As organizations and individuals collapsed in the face of McCarthyism, Palmer Weber and his compatriots from the Southern Conference for Human Welfare defended basic civil liberties. He and Clark Foreman helped found the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee. In 1954, Virginia Durr, Jim Dombrowski, Myles Horton, and Aubrey Williams drew national attention when they defied Senator Eastland during his hearings on “subversive activities” in the South. Palmer praised their heroic behavior which he likened to a blood transfusion. “How wonderful you have made it to be Southern again!” He then went on to strategize on how they might “maintain and also spread out the pattern of moral resistance which you five established in New Orleans.”

These early opponents to racial discrimination recognized the obvious–that without securing the liberties guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, the civil rights movement had no foundation. Palmer’s old friend, NAACP counsel and strategist Charles Houston, echoed this sentiment in response to President Truman’s loyalty program. “The only way I can make sure of my own liberty of action and freedom to agitate for what I believe to be right is to fight for the liberty of action and freedom to agitate for every man.” Wall Street, which prized financial acumen over “loyalty” tests, enabled Palmer to make a living for his family. He used that base during the 1960s to organize Businessmen against the War in Vietnam. And helped raise over $2 million on behalf of Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 presidential campaign.

Returning to his home state of Virginia in the 1970s, Palmer turned his attention again to voting rights. Equal participation in the political process had yet to be realized in many black communities throughout the South. Often, at-large systems of voting continue to inhibit black political representation. Following the renewal and strengthening of the Voting Rights Act in 1982, the Virginia ACLU affiliate began a legal challenge to at-large districts throughout the state. Palmer Weber and Leonard Dreyfus generously supported this effort and Palmer helped raise additional financial backing. Thus far, the Virginia ACLU has won every case it has filed. Early this past summer, Palmer convened a meeting of state and national officials of the ACLU to plan a long-term campaign which would implement the Virginia strategy throughout the South. Chan Kendrick, director of the Virginia ACLU, recalled that Palmer was one of the few people who had a sense of how much work still needed to be done. The civil rights movement of the 1960s had eliminated the most blatant forms of legalized discrimination. Full political participation, however, has yet to be realized and remains essential to securing full citizenship. As an organizer during the 1930s and 1940s, Palmer learned that the battle for political and economic justice required continuous, systematic effort.

Palmer commented shortly before his death that “Justice” was a key word for him, much as it was in Plato’s Republic. He asked, “What is your responsibility as a citizen to see to it that the body politic embodies justice?” Palmer spent a lifetime considering this problem and acting on it. He greeted the efforts of others engaged in its pursuit with great enthusiasm and generous support. All the while he was a master teacher, conducting a “floating seminar.” Nearly forty years ago, Palmer commended Henry Wallace “for not faltering on the simple principle of human rights which is not so simple after all, considering it underlies the American revolution of 1776 and the whole panorama of colonial movements throughout the world today.” During a half century of political activism, Palmer Weber never faltered.

Patricia Sullivan is associate director of the Center for the Study of Civil Rights and Lecturer in History, University of Virginia.

Cause at Heart: A Former Communist Remembers by Junius Irving Scales and Richard Nickson. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987.427 pages. $24.95.)

By Patricia Sullivan

Vol. 10, No. 2, 1988, pp. 29-31

In 1946 the Interracial Committee for North Carolina (CNC) of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare considered support for a bill pending in the state legislature for the construction of a new hospital. To the obvious annoyance of many of the white members present, Junius Scales inquired how black patients were to be accommodated, and how many black physicians and nurses would be employed. Dr. Frank Graham, president of the University of North Carolina and a founding member of the CNC, responded that the hospital would be segregated and that no black nurses or physicians would be employed. While recognizing that this was a “shameful” situation, Dr. Graham suggested that it was unavoidable if the hospital were to be built at all. Sales recalled that before he could reply, Dr. David Jones, president of Bennett College, took the lectern: “‘I and my people would follow Dr. Graham to the ends of the earth,’ he said. ‘We respect and love him. But my God!’ His voice became an agonized roar…’My God! How long must my people wait until the first faltering word is spoken by white men of good will saying that segregation is criminal–that it is destroying my people.’ His impressive figure trembling with emotion, he appeared to want to say something else, but instead he resumed to his seat amid a stunned silence and sat with his hand over his face.”

Junius Scales came of age during the era of the depression and New Deal, in a South where segregation was still firmly intact. As the hospital incident demonstrated, the majority of white liberals “still clung to separate but equal delusions; were eager to avoid confrontation on the ‘race issue’; shied away from a chance to fight segregation even on favorable grounds; and were all too often ready to seek a ‘solution’ by promising a future fight which usually did not take place.” Scales was sensitive to the pervasive bigotry against blacks prevalent even in the enlightened community of Chapel Hill. “By established custom,” he recalled, “20 percent of the population was consigned to poverty, indignation and isolation because of skin color.” They were a concern only as a reservoir for domestic servants. This gulf between the daily reality of racism and discrimination, and the white liberal response helped stimulate Scales’s interest and subsequent membership in the Communist Party, the only political organization that actively challenged the segregation system and made racial equality a central component of its agenda.

Junius Scales appeared an unlikely Communist. He was born to one of the most prominent families in North Carolina. John Rolfe and Pocahontas were among his maternal ancestors. Scales’s paternal ancestors arrived in Jamestown, Va., in 1623, and after migrating to North Carolina took an active role in politics, serving in the state legislature, U.S. Congress, North Carolina Supreme Court, and the office of governor. Alfred Moore Scales, Junius’s father, was elected to the state senate at the age of twenty five, twice re-elected over long intervals, and declined an appointment as chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court. In addition to a successful law practice, his real estate investments were worth several million dollars by the time Junius was born in 1920. The family suffered severe financial losses at the end of the 1920s, but Alfred Scales took the monetary loss in stride. He had always impressed upon his children the futility of dedicating one’s life to the accumulation of material wealth, and demonstrated the importance of public service through his political activities on behalf of liberal racial policies, women’s suffrage, and religious tolerance.

While Scales shared his father’s abiding concern for the greater good, the traditional outlets for such a pursuit appeared less than satisfactory. Unlike the majority of his contemporaries entering the 1938 freshman class at Chapel Hill, Scales had little interest in social status and refused to pledge for a fraternity. His primary interests were music, literature and ideas. Scales became increasingly sensitive to the widening gap between himself and traditional Southern values, finding that most of the intellectual yeast for undergraduates was provided by “outsiders” from the North and West. (It was at Chapel Hill that he met Richard Nickson, a native of New Mexico, who became a life-long friend and assisted in the writing of this memoir.)

Abernathy’s bookstore, a noted gathering place for intellectuals and radicals which Scales had frequented since high school days, continued to provide a stimulating center for intellectual and political discourse. The critical point in his political development, however, came with his participation in a student-labor conference in Durham, sponsored by the state CIO and a number of black and white academic figures from throughout the state. For the first time in his life, Scales met blacks on an equal basis, and shared a meal with several black students, one of whom was the daughter of Dr. David Jones. Shortly thereafter he joined the American Student Union, and was soon invited to join the Communist Party. After careful consideration, he decided to join the Party on a “trial” basis in the spring of 1939.

Scales quickly became disillusioned with the sectarianism and lack of purpose of the Chapel Hill chapter of the Communist Party. He was preparing to resign when he met Bart Logan, native Georgian and district organizer for North and South Carolina. Scales assisted Logan with a textile strike in High Point, an event that reaffimmed his commitment to the Communist Party as the means for advancing economic and racial justice. He was overwhelmed by the poverty and exploitation that dominated life in the

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textile mill. At the same time, Scales was stirred by the deep commitment of Logan and several veterans from the famous Gastonia strike to help the powerless move beyond fear and apathy by organizing. Scales concluded that more than a strike was taking place; it was a social revolution. For the next eighteen years, Junius Scales would strive to carry this effort forward as a leading member of the Communist Party in North Carolina.

Junius Scales provides an important and often moving account of the Communist Party’s role in labor organizing and civil rights activities in the South during the 1940s. While Scales applies a critical eye to the events of the past, his memoir succeeds in capturing the hope and enthusiastic dedication that motivated him and many of his compatriots some forty years ago. As a key organizer of the Communist Party in the High Point area and Chapel Hill, and later district organizer for the state, Scales sought political answers to local problems, and often succeeded in adapting national Party directives to individual cases. He spent his first year as a Party member working in a textile mill, engaging workers directly, and responding as an organizer to the harsh reality of their lives. After serving in the army during the war. Scales moved back to Chapel Hill. Scales began graduate study in History, and took a leading role in several liberal groups that thrived in the early postwar period, including the American Veterans Committee and the Committee for North Carolina. He avoided sectarianism, and appreciated the efforts of white liberals who perhaps were not moving as quickly as he. As a Communist Scales saw himself as a gadfly-his role was not to subvert liberal groups, but to push them as far as their program and membership would allow. Scales believed that if socialism were to be realized in the United States, it must come through the force of ideas and the ballot box, not by violence and rhetorical coercion.

Scales’s account of the Party’s positive contributions is accompanied by a harsh critique of the dogmatism and moral limitations of Party policy, which often guided his own behavior. Recounting his part in the expulsion of two Party members, he writes, “was always, the glorious ends justified the slimy means and I had to squelch that persistent inner voice which suggested that perhaps the unsavory means were tainting the qualities of the socialist goals.” However, during the 1940s, Scales repressed any doubts he had concerning the Party and concentrated his attention on local issues and concerns. In the early 1940s the Party organized broad labor support in High Point to petition the Federal Housing Authority to provide low cost housing. This effort ultimately succeeded, despite strong opposition from local “slum lords,” and greatly improved the standard of low-cost housing in the area. Voter registration and education were also an important part of Party efforts, in addition to running workers for local office on third party tickets. The Southern Negro Youth Congress provided an organized based for young militant black students, who took an active role in voter registration efforts in the black community. Scales’s moving account of a 1946 SNYC meeting in Columbia, S.C., attended by several thousand, provides a glimpse of the black awakening already underway throughout the South. At that meeting Scales was elected a vice president of the SNYC, the first and only white to serve as an officer of the organization. There was also the successful organization of the tobacco workers in Winston-Salem, a predominantly black union with a powerful leadership that became an active force in local politics. One final example is Scales’s and

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Louis Austin’s timely intervention in the Mack Ingram case, helping to avert the “legal lynching” of a black man convicted of assaulting a white woman with his “glare,” having never gotten within seventy feet of her. Scales and Austin, black editor of the Carolina Times, investigated the story, and fed it to New York Post reporter Ted Poston. The national and international attention that followed led to the appeal of the conviction, and its reversal.

The changing political climate of the late 1940s limited Scales’s ability to maneuver within the parameters of Communist Party policy, as well as in the society at large. In 1947, he publicly declared his membership in the Communist Party in an effort to counteract anti-communist hysteria. His announcement had the opposite effect, and left him isolated from many of his liberal associates. Meanwhile, the national Communist Party was increasingly on the defensive in the face of federal efforts to outlaw the Party, and the CIO’s expulsion of left-wing unions. Scales explains how the Party leadership turned inward, becoming more sectarian and internally divisive, and less an active force for political change. The early 1950s were painful years for Scales and others whose efforts to remain a creative force on the political scene became increasingly futile. For Scales, it came to an abrupt end on November 18, 1954, when he was arrested by FBI officials and charged with violating the Smith Act.

As Scales undertook a long and lonely legal battle, his disillusionment with the Communist Party and its increasing irrelevance to the American political scene culminated with his departure from the Party. Living outside of the Party, he writes, was “an extremely painful adjustment …. The belief was dead and with it had gone the innocence and joy forever. The truth as we saw it was that the American Communist dream had become a cruel, convoluted hoax.” In spite of his “non-Communist” status, the government relentlessly pursued Scales’s case, which it built primarily on the testimony of paid informers. The government sought to prove that by virtue of his membership in the Communist Party, Scales was guilty of conspiracy to violently overthrow the government. Despite the brilliant legal counsel of Telford Taylor, Scales was convicted by a jury in Greensboro. The legal history of the case and its relationship to the interpretation of the Smith Act and the Internal Security Act, is an important study in Cold War domestic politics. Ultimately, the Supreme Court upheld Scales’s conviction, 5-4, and he entered the federal penitentiary on October 2,1961, to begin serving a six-year sentence.

Scales’s reflection on his prison experience comprises the last part of this memoir and is an integral part of it, for this book is less a history of the Communist Party in North Carolina than the story of one individual’s unending quest on behalf of human decency and justice. Scales’s personal dignity and integrity sustained him in prison. He spent much of his time trying to make the experience more endurable for those around him. For example, he shared his love and appreciation of music with fellow inmates by organizing popular Sunday evening presentations of his favorite operas. Scales’s separation from his devoted wife, Gladys, and young daughter, Barbara, was the most painful aspect of his imprisonment. Prominent liberals organized a movement for an executive pardon. However, J. Edgar Hoover and Nicholas Katzenbach wanted Scales first to prove the fact that he was no longer a loyal Communist by testifying about other Party members. With the full realization that a pardon might not be gained unless he “cooperated,” Scales refused to consider the suggestion. Nevertheless, on Christmas Day 1962, Scales was reunited with his family following an executive commutation of his sentence (thus he remains a convicted felon).

Junius Scales’s participation in the racial and social reform movements of the 1940s may seem little more than a footnote to that history. While he was being tried and serving time, the civil rights movement came to the fore of the national scene with the Brown decision, the emergence of Martin Luther King, the mass protests of the early sixties, and ultimately the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It is ironic that while the Justice Department focused its determined energy on the conviction and incarceration of Junius Scales as a threat to the government, white Southerners blatantly ignored federal law by obstructing the integration of schools, with little interference from federal law enforcement agencies. And, despite the gains of the 1950s and 1960s, many of the promises of the civil rights movement remain unrealized in the areas of jobs, housing, education, and economic security. Moreover, organized labor has been unable to effectively represent the economic and political interests of the majority of American workers. Junius Scales’s “God” may have failed. But the struggle for economic and racial justice which challenged his youthful idealism remains a powerful reality, yet to penetrate the mainstream of American political discourse.

Patricia Sullivan teaches history at Emory University.

Henry Wallace’s Campaign Foreshadowed the Movement as Well as the Rainbow

By Patricia Sullivan

Vol. 10, No. 5, 1988, pp. 11, 16-17

Late in the summer of 1948, presidential candidate Henry Wallace embarked on a week-long tour through the Deep South. For a brief time, he was able to break through much of the Cold war hysteria that clouded the Progressive Party, and focus public attention on a fundamental issue and purpose of his third party campaign. Wallace’s Southern strategy grew out of President Roosevelt’s earlier efforts to address the South as the nation’s “number one economic problem.”

In order to carry New Deal reforms forward, Wallace embraced the emerging civil rights struggle as essential to realizing the economic and political potential of the region, and the nation. He attacked segregation from North Carolina to Mississippi, and encouraged black Southerners in their burgeoning effort to dismantle the structure of white supremacy. Henry Wallace’s Southern campaign was about hope and inclusion, and a notable chapter in the politics of progressive reform. It is also a reminder that the roots of the civil rights movement go deeper than the 1950s and 1960s.

The Progressive Party was part of the ferment, sparked by the New Deal, which would transform twentieth century Southern politics. The New Deal had “aroused the political interests and political hopes of classes of people left unmoved by traditional Southern politics,” wrote V.O. Key. Franklin Roosevelt’s unsuccessful attempt to purge Southern Conservatives from office encouraged grassroots efforts to mobilize the New Deal’s constituency in the South–particularly blacks, and working class whites–a constituency that was largely disfranchised. During the 1940s Southern New Dealers joined with the NAACP and other organizations in a campaign to eliminate disfranchisement laws enacted at the turn of the century. At the same time, black civil rights activists, labor organizers and Southern progressives supported local voter registration efforts throughout the South.

Following the Supreme Court’s 1944 decision outlawing the white primary, black voter registration in the South increased dramatically. When South Carolina resisted the Court’s ruling, black activists John McCray and Osceola McKaine organized a separate party, the Progressive Democratic Party (PDP). In 1944, twenty years before the well-known challenge of Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party, the PDP took a delegation to the Democratic National Convention to contest the seating of the all-white delegation. Osceola McKaine ran for the Senate on the PDP ticket that November to stimulate black political participation in the Palmetto State. The number of registered black voters in South Carolina increased during the 1940s from 3,500 to 50,000.

In tandem with the early voting rights movement, civil rights organizations worked with local communities in preparing for a frontal assault on the segregation system. As early as the mid 1930s, the NAACP’s Charles Houston and Thurgood Marshall joined with black lawyers around the South and initiated the legal challenge to racial discrimination in education. Their efforts would culminate with the 1954 Brown decision. In 1947, CORE staged the first “Freedom Ride” through the upper South following the Supreme Court ruling outlawing segregation in interstate transportation.

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Building on these earlier efforts, the Progressive Party’s Southern campaign provided another means for challenging the segregation system, while stimulating political interest and participation. Southerners who organized for Henry Wallace in the South had been active in the voting rights movement of the 1940a They included: Louis Burnham of the Southern Negro Youth Conference; Palmer Weber, of the CIO Political Action Committee and member of the executive Board of the NAACP; Virginia Durr, of the National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax; and Clark Foreman, president of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare.

Other supporters linked the ’48 campaign with the movement of the 1950s and 1960s: Dr. Sam Williams, who was Martin Luther King’s philosophy teacher at Morehouse in 1948 and later national chairman of CORE; Rev. and Mrs. Maynard Jackson Sr., parents of Atlanta’s first black mayor; Daisy Bates, who led the effort to desegregate Central High School in Little Rock; and Randolph Blackwell, then a student at North Carolina A T College who became a top aide in the South to Martin Luther King Jr.

Tactics Previewed the Movement

Progressive Party organizers used tactics that previewed the sixties movement. Northern student volunteers came South in the summer of 1948 to help with voter registration and the petition drive to get Wallace on the ballot. Black candidates ran for office on the Progressive party ticket throughout the region. And participants and supporters routinely challenged the segregation system, a practice that drew national attention when the former vice president came South late in the summer of 1948.

The issue of race overshadowed the candidate’s appeal for an expansion of the New Deal programs and increased federal aid to the poorest region in the nation. Wallace attacked segregation and the one-party system as endemic to the South’s economic problems. He refused to address segregated audiences, and would not patronize hotels or restaurants which excluded blacks. Several near riots and a stabbing marked Wallace’s first full day of campaigning in North Carolina, and captured national headlines. Pete Seeger, the young balladeer of the Progressive Party campaign, recalled that Wallace’s advisors were anxious to cancel the rest of the tour. But Wallace refused to concede to terror and lawlessness. They continued on, deeper into Dixie.

The entourage of campaign workers and reporters traveled alternately by bus, train, and motorcade, taking most of their meals picnic style along the highway. “An integrated group, traveling through the South in 1948…We were sitting targets expecting to be blown up at any minute,” recalled a reporter for the Baltimore Afro-American. A Life reporter sported a large “I’m for Thurmond” button in a feeble effort to distinguish himself from the group.

Birmingham, Alabama, previewed the violence and police terror that would distinguish that city fifteen years later. Police Commissioner Bull Connor, “a Horatius at the bridge of Alabama’s states rights,” was prepared for a showdown. A hostile mob of several thousand greeted Wallace’s motorcade armed with pipes and baseball bats. Connor used a rope to segregate supporters waiting for Wallace on the courthouse lawn. A campaign worker read a brief statement, noting Wallace would maintain his policy of not addressing segregated audiences. Police, armed with tear gas, stood by as a jeering crowd surrounded Wallace’s car, and began to rock it, hollering “kill Wallace.” The police finally cleared a path for the motorcade. Palmer Weber, who had instructed everyone to keep their windows closed and not leave the cars, said they could have been killed in Alabama. Those reporters who had viewed the Wallace campaign in the South as a cynical effort to stir up trouble in the South in order to gain votes in the North began to see it differently. “They were terrorized,” Weber recalled. “They knew they had been on the edge of hell. They realized if we wanted to create a riot we could have done it very easily. It was very educational for these reporters,” he said with

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a trace of sarcasm, “very educational.”

Wallace went on to Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Tennessee and addressed mostly peaceful gatherings on the steps of local court houses, in black churches, and in a baseball park. He reached back to the South’s Populist tradition when he reminded audiences that “greedy men, the Big Mules…have ruled the South for generations and kept millions of common people in economic poverty and political bondage. They have fought trade unions bitterly. They have kept wages in the South below those in the North….Their profits are multiplied by keeping people divided–section against section, race against race, farmers against workers.”

But Wallace reached beyond the economic arguments of Southern populism. Race, he said, was the major obstacle to the South’s economic and political development. He also appealed to the religious tradition of the region, explaining that segregation was more that an economic liability. “Social injustice is sin…segregation is sin,” Wallace said, a violation of “the fundamental Christian and democratic principles in our civilization.” Finally, he warned that, in the postwar world, segregation had serious implications for national security. In a press conference towards the end of the tour, Wallace told reporters that segregation was the nation’s number one problem, threatening America’s position of leadership in a world where the majority of the population were people of color.

James Wechsler of The New York Post reported that Wallace “shattered a wide variety of political precedents during his tour.” He faithfully boycotted Southern restaurants and hotels, sleeping alternately in pullman cars and private homes. He addressed the first unsegregated public meeting in Memphis since Reconstruction. He was the first presidential candidate to address unsegregated meetings in the South. President Truman cancelled his tentative plans to tour the region that fall, and no future presidential candidate would ever address a segregated audience in the South again. Wechsler praised Wallace for “saying a good many things that needed to be said on Southern property, and establishing in at least a dozen…places that unsegregated meetings could be held without a civil war.” A founder of the ADA who had viewed Wallace’s campaign as little more than a communist front, James Wechsler was shaken by the Southern tour. He later recalled, “in that atmosphere, the ideological distinctions I talked about didn’t seem to loom as large. In the South it was a campaign for civil rights.”

Wallace’s civil rights effort is vaguely remembered as a political challenge which forced a reluctant President Truman to address the issue. Beyond the desegregation of the armed forces, however, little action followed at the national level. The primary significance of Wallace’s Southern campaign was twofold. In the shadow of the Cold War, he attempted to educate America about the real and present danger to its democratic system, which was home grown. And, more importantly, he participated in the movement already underway to smash Jim Crow and democratize Southern politics. Palmer Weber reported to Thurgood Marshall, “the various Negro communities were electrified and tremendously heartened to see one white man with guts willing to take it standing up….By and large I find the Negro leadership fighting for the ballot as never before. The only limitation is full-time workers.” Wallace and his supporters engaged and endorsed those Southerners who would carry the struggle forward–at the ballot box, in the courts, and in the streets.

Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign is a measure of how far the country has traveled since Henry Wallace headed South forty years ago. Born of the struggle that finally transformed the South, Jackson is carrying the progressive movement forward. By remembering the early organizing efforts of the 1940s, we can better understand the rich texture of reform politics in America, and the broad significance of the civil rights movement. And, by remembering, honor those civil rights pioneers for, in Palmer Weber’s words, “not faltering on the simple principle of human rights.” Reflecting on the 1948 campaign as the McCarthy decade got underway, he wrote Wallace, “we owe it to ourselves to hold that torch firmly and high regardless of the consequences because that is the way forward. There is more than one way to measure political success.”

Patricia Sullivan is the assistant director of the Center for the Study of Civil Rights at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro-American and African Studies, Charlottesville, Virginia.

Five Decades of Activism

By Patricia Sullivan

Vol. 12, No. 1, 1990, pp. 5-9

“THE SOUTHERN MOVEMENT provided a permanent flame from which the rest of the nation could draw inspiration, light and heat. You were always there burning, percolating, in the dark sometimes, but going ahead, holding aloft even the smallest candle which ultimately became the blazing light leading…to freedom,” Ossie Davis proclaimed to several hundred people gathered at the New Pilgrim Church in Birmingham early in December. They had come to celebrate the 51st anniversary of the founding of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW), and the five decades of activism joined with SCHW by the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF) and the Southern Organizing Committee (SOC).

Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, Anne Braden, Modjeska Simkins, Virginia Durr, Rev. Ben Chavis, Hollis Watkins, Bob Zellner, and Pete Seeger were among the anniversary participants–a collective testimony to the rich legacy of the Southern movement for racial and economic justice. In his welcoming address, Birmingham Mayor Richard Arrington highlighted a theme of the meeting. As we look back fifty years, and we look ahead, he said, we learn that “in the freedom struggle there is no ending which is not a beginning.” The weekend provided a special opportunity to talk about the kinds of changes that have been set in motion over the past half century, and celebrate the victories, “even as we look at the walls that are still in front of us.”

WHEN THE SOUTHERN Conference for Human Welfare was founded in 1938, it was “one of the most exaggerated expressions of change in the South,” remembered one of its early members. The Depression and the New Deal had shaken people from decades of political apathy and complacency. “A lot of folks were standing up…and talking and expecting things they had never expected before.” More than twelve hundred Southerners met in the Municipal Auditorium in Birmingham over Thanksgiving weekend in 1938 to organize mass political support for New Deal economic reforms. Race became the issue when Police Commissioner Bull Connor enforced segregation upon the integrated gathering. In a symbolic act of defiance, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt placed her chair in the center aisle of the racially divided auditorium. SCHW organizers vowed that all future meetings would be integrated. Southern moderates quickly withdrew and labeled the new organization subversive.

The SCHW did challenge the structure of Southern society, a society based on disfranchisement laws and legalized white supremacy. From the beginning, SCHW organizers believed that economic and political democracy were essential to remedying “the nation’s number one economic problem.” In the opening round of the voting rights struggle in Congress, Virginia Durr and Joseph Gelders engineered the introduction of anti-poll tax legislation and organized a broad coalition of national support. Building on the expectations and political interests stirred by the New Deal and the war against fascism, SCHW organizers joined with the NAACP, the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC), the CIO and community groups throughout the South in a region wide voter registration effort. After the Supreme Court outlawed the all-white primary in 1944, the number of registered black voters in the South increased dramatically. The Talmadges, Bilbos, Eastlands, and Byrnes led a growing resistance, but a sustained movement for social and political justice had taken hold in the South.

In 1948 Clark Foreman, a founder and Executive Director of the SCHW, referred to the organization’s first ten years as “The Decade of Hope.” The McCarthy era followed; the Southern conservative attack on the Southern Conference movement was reinforced by the redbait-

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ing politics of the Cold War. Born in the promise and activism of the New Deal era, the SCHW would not adapt to the conformist and exclusionary policies legitimized by President Truman’s “loyalty” program. Its activities culminated with Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party campaign in 1948. Under the direction of SNYC’s Louis Burnham and Palmer Weber of the SCHW, the Wallace campaign in the South expanded the campaign for political and economic democracy. Black and white candidates ran for office on the Progressive Party ticket, and Henry Wallace became the first presidential candidate to refuse to address segregated audiences in the region. The Wallace campaign demonstrated, however, that the fragile political coalition organized by the SCHW in the South could not survive an aggressive national Cold War consensus, and the organization quietly disbanded at the end of 1948.

BUT THE SOUTHERN Conference Education Fund (SCEF), established as the educational branch of the SCHW in 1946, continued. Under the leadership of Jim

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Dombrowski, SCEF concentrated on ridding the South of segregation as the essential first step in moving towards the economic and political goals advanced by the SCHW. SCEF aimed to build interracial support for desegregation, and made a special effort to engage whites in the struggle. Its small staff endured constant threats, attacks and investigations as it worked steadily through the 1950s, helping to support indigenous civil rights efforts throughout the South. When Carl and Anne Braden learned that economic pressures were about to force leading black activist Amzie Moore out of Mississippi in the late 1950s, Dombrowski raised the money to secure Moore’s financial independence so that he could remain in Cleveland, Mississippi. In 1960, SNCC Field Secretary Bob Moses met Moore on his first foray into Mississippi; Moore became a crucial link between the student movement of the 1960s and a small but seasoned generation of Mississippi activists.

Jack O’Dell observed that Southern Conference activists had to “work our way around the Cold War and find

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our way back through Montgomery and the civil rights movement.” During the 1960s, SCEF’s history merged with the mass movement that broke through the political lethargy of the 1950s and finally succeeded in ridding the South of legalized segregation and disenfranchisement. In remembering these hard-won victories of the civil rights movement, however, the history has often been distorted, and the “movement” left motionless. The Southern Conference anniversary pointed to the deep roots of movement history and bore witness to the fact that the struggle continues. Nostalgia was noticeably absent from this celebration. While there were several veterans of the early SCHW years in attendance, they seemed impatient to act on with it.

IN A BRIEF TRIBUTE to the enormous changes of the last half century, ninety year-old Modjeska Simkins remembered the concentrated atmosphere of terror and violence that permeated Bull Connor’s Birmingham, a city where the Klan worked openly with the Police Commissioner. Whenever she was in Birmingham, the South Carolina activist recalled, she was always watching “out of the tail of my eye, not knowing whether some of those renegades would attack me.” Bull Connor is long gone, and Birmingham has a black mayor who presides over a progressive city government. But Mrs. Simkins observed that many gains secured in the past fifty years have been rolled back. “We’ve been knocked back down the hill by a do-nothing president,” she said, “and it looks like we’re going to have four or eight more years of ‘almost do nothin’. ‘We got to fight all the way back up the hill.”

Stetson Kennedy explained that many regional problems addressed by SCHW have become national in scope. He cited homelessness and widespread hunger, perhaps more prevalent now than during the 1930s. Absentee ownership used to mean Wall Street; now we think of Tokyo. “Mr. Charlie is gone with the wind, but Mr. Yakamoto is on the way and we don’t know where he stands except that he’s anti- union.”

Legalized segregation has been outlawed; now we have “desegregated racism.” “Back then, it used to be the Attorney General of Alabama or Mississippi or perhaps the Magistrate of Florida up before the Supreme Court arguing in favor of in justice and discrimination; but now it’s the Attorney General of the United States of America.” Much blood was shed and many lives lost on the road to free elections and voting rights. But, Kennedy asked, how “free” are elections today? Politics has become a state-of-the-art industry, run by the media and highly paid consultants, who manipulate symbols in a way that often results in “the American people voting over and over against themselves.” The notorious Southern demagogues of the past have been replaced by a more sophisticated, polished variety saying “read my lips.”

Community activists joined historians and students in workshops during the second day of the meeting. Individual discussion groups on the economy, labor, women, culture, education, and militarism worked to define current issues within a fuller historical context, and build a common agenda for action in the 1990s.

IN THE “ECONOMY of the South” workshop, John Gaventa, of Highlander Center, sketched the cycles of economic development over the past fifty years. Gaventa explained that the ambitious War on Poverty of the 1960s and the well-publicized industrial transformation of the “Sun-Belt” in the 1970s have run their course; yet steady economic growth and development has bypassed most of the region. The shift from an industrial to a service and financial based economy has proved elusive the gains of the sixties and seventies. Twelve million workers lost their jobs to plant closings in the first half of the 1980s; even more in the latter part of the decade. Companies lured South by the promise of cheap labor, resources, and tax concessions have moved on to exploit even better “deals” in other parts of the world. When U.S. Steel left Gary, W. Va., a town the company built, they took the street lights with them. During the 1980s, virtually no new jobs were created in rural communities; 60 percent of urban jobs are poverty level and offer no mobility. Job growth areas are affluent, white, and offer the best education systems.

WHILE THERE HAVE been dramatic changes in the South’s economic landscape during the last half century, they have been guided by the state’s promotion of a “business climate” which allows for the mobility and unaccountability of capital. Barbara Taylor, Bob Hall, and Pat Bryant described the enormous price exacted from the region’s resources, workers, and environment. Job-related injuries, illnesses and deaths have increased in the last twenty years. The South has become a dumping ground for hazardous wastes; the most significant variable in determining the location of chemical dumping grounds is race, noted Louisiana activist Pat Bryant, a factor that has not been addressed by the environmental movement. The vaginal cancer rate for African-American women in St. John the Baptist Parish is thirty times the national average; the lung cancer rate for African- American men in New Orleans is the highest in the world.

There was much discussion and disagreement about the complex array of problems raised by the panelists. But there seemed to be general agreement that politics is the only way out. Now that all Southerners finally have the

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vote, it is possible to work towards the goal of economic democracy which guided the founding of SCHW a half century ago. Economic development, participants agreed, needs to be considered within the broad context of issues addressed in the other workshops.

In discussing the role of women in the South’s progressive movement, panelists outlined a history of interrelationship of race, class, and gender, and suggested a broad context for the women’s movement in the 1990s. Jewell Handy Gresham told how the abolitionist movement gave birth to the modern women’s rights movement. As a national woman’s movement developed, a tension developed and has persisted between those who would focus on white, middle class goals, and those who view the women’s rights movement as an integral part of the larger struggle for human rights. Georgia State Representative Nan Orrock insisted that the issue of reproductive rights must be understood as more than the issue of abortion rights, and, indeed, provides an opportunity for broadening the focus of the women’s movement. The crisis in health care, the issue of child care, and the failure of the public education system should be part and parcel of the reproductive rights movement. Orrock urged the organized women’s movement to make a more conscious effort to incorporate working-class women and women of color into positions of leadership, and at the same time warned progressive activists that to dismiss the women’s movement as an exclusively white middle class phenomenon.

WHILE LOOKING towards the future, participants sought to recover a history that would illuminate the larger contours of the struggle for racial, economic and political justice. The workshop on racism identified historical amnesia as a major contributing factor to the nature and persistence of racism in America. Judge Margaret Burnham told about the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC), a pioneering organization of African-American youth whose history paralleled the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. From 1937 until 1948, SNYC activists participated in organizing workers and registering voters throughout the South, helping to build the progressive coalition of voters that showed such promise in the immediate postwar years. SNYC enjoyed the support of prominent African-American leaders, fraternal organizations and churches. By the late forties, however, SNYC was isolated and ultimately destroyed by redbaiting, and since then its history has been largely neglected and forgotten. Yet that history tells about the power of effective organizing before the FAX machine and foundation grants, when chicken dinners were a major source of fund raising. And it tells about the essential role young people have played as organizers and leaders in the freedom struggle. The importance of reaching out to youth, and encouraging them towards their unique and vital potential was a central concern throughout the two day meeting, eloquently addressed by Brenda Davenport, Rev. Chavis, Representative Mabel Thomas, and others.

THE FINAL PROGRAM began with a candle-lighting ceremony honoring the heroes and heroines of the Southern movement. Ossie Davis and the Children of Selma paid tribute to Hosea Hudson, Joe Gelders, Mary Mcleod Bethune, Clark Foreman, Aubrey Williams, Modjeska Simkins, Ella Baker, Myles Horton, Palmer Weber, Lou Burnham, Virginia and Clifford Durr, James Dombrowski, Fred and Ruby Shuttlesworth, Anne and Carl Braden, and, joined by participants, named countless others who have led the South, and the nation, forward. Pete Seeger called the name of Fannie Lou Hamer. Virginia Durr remembered Hugo Black. Other voices named Paul Robeson, E. D. Nixon, Septima Clark, and many more. “With the help of God and struggle and leadership and song and living and burying and marching and singing we have come a long way toward helping this country define what its Constitution outlined way back in 1787,” celebrated Ossie Davis.

And the struggle continues, was the refrain. The unfinished agenda of the freedom movement has been redefined by the challenges and possibilities of the late twentieth century. What does equality mean in a society where adequate education, health care, and housing is beyond the reach of growing numbers? How, asked Ossie Davis, do we effectively challenge the divine right of greed, which reigns in America? The answer, suggested Rev. Ben Chavis, lies in the fundamental changes released by the unravelling of the Cold War and the dramatic gains made by democracy movements in other parts of the world. Shaped by the tradition and promise of democracy, the Southern Organizing Committee for Racial and Economic Justice and countless other groups and activists are building a strong link into an uncertain future. But the times, noted Jack O’Dell, make us mindful of Martin Luther King’s admonition that “the arc of the universe is long and it bends towards justice.”

Patricia Sullivan is the assistant director of the Center for the Study of Civil Rights at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro-American and African Studies, Charlottesville, Va.