Southern Changes. Volume 16, Number 3, 1994 – Southern Changes

Homegrown Progressives

John Egerton — Thu, 01 Sep 1994 04:00:01 +0000

Homegrown Progressives

By John Egerton

Vol. 16, No. 3, 1994, pp. 1, 4-17

Of all the South’s home-grown efforts to tackle regional social problems arising from the depression and the war, none were more extensive and substantial than those of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare and the Southern Regional Council. When they were created—the former in 1938, the latter in 1944—they constituted the primary internal responses to Old South conservatism and white supremacy. Throughout the Forties, they provided the truest measure of liberal-progressive thinking in the region.

They were rivals in some respects, the more intensely so because of their similarities. Back and forth across the fence, they whispered criticisms of each other: too much reckless radicalism, too much conservative caution, too much activism, too much empty talk.

Page 4

Many people, including a few key individuals who served in both organizations, wanted them to work together toward mutually shared goals; some hoped they would merge into a single, broadbased movement, an activist army for social reform. They never did unite, and neither grew to the size of a battalion, let alone an army, but both had a significant impact on the postwar South. If you want to know what was being said and done by white and black Southerners before 1954 to place the explosive issue of race relations on the public agenda, you have to look closely at the Southern Regional Council and the Southern Conference for Human Welfare.

The Council (as SRC was known by its regulars), emerged from the locust shell of its twenty-five-year-old predecessor, the Atlanta-based Commission on Interracial Cooperation. The Conference (as SCHW and its subsidiary group, the Southern Conference Educational Fund, were both referred to), was founded in Birmingham and later based in Nashville and New Orleans. The two organizations entered the postwar era in the summer of 1945 full of hope that the South was on the cusp of a great advance. By the end of 1947, that breakthrough was still within their long-range vision but not within their grasp, and the continuing struggles of both groups were a telling measure of the chronic division and instability within the South itself.

Academicians predominated on the SRC staff and board. Both Guy B. Johnson, the executive director, and his part-time associate, Ira De A. Reid, were sociologists, Johnson at the University of North Carolina and Reid at Atlanta University. (Reid was also the only black staff member.) Howard W. Odum of UNC was the Council’s president, and Charles S. Johnson, the soon-to-be president of Fisk University, was chairman of the executive committee—and both of them were sociologists too. George S. Mitchell, an economist, would soon join them, and there would be others from academia.

The SRC described itself as a leadership body, not a mass-membership organization; it had a large board of directors (seventy-five to a hundred members), and it hoped to develop branch councils in each Southern state, but its regional roster of rank-and-file recruits was never large. The staff and board were broadly representative of the region in terms of race and geography, but they were solidly, almost exclusively middle class, and only about a dozen women (all but two or three of them white) were members of the charter board and staff. Nothing about the organization could fairly be called radical. If any NAACP leaders, Communists, Socialists, or right-wingers were present—or even any elected or appointed public officials—they kept a very low profile.

Most of the prominent Southern black leaders of the postwar era were central figures in SRC, including all those who had started the dialogue in Durham and had held up their end of the discussion in subsequent meetings—Charles Johnson, Gordon Hancock, Benjamin Mays, P. B. Young, Rufus Clement, and others. Many of the best-known white liberals and progressives in the region also gave their names if not their energy to the Council (but, for reasons both various and complex, there were some notable exceptions, including Ralph McGill, Frank Porter Graham, Lillian Smith, and Jonathan Daniels). It had taken nearly two years of delicate maneu-

Page 5

vering by dozens of active Southern men and women of both races to bring the Council to life in 1944. But even though the organization was finally on its feet, it was still a long way from being unified. Not only did those who kept their distance accentuate the disunity; internal factions also clashed over purposes and priorities. Usually, the underlying cause was that same old bone of contention that Southerners had been gnawing on for ages: segregation.

The most conservative faction of Council members came together around the notion that any overt attempt to eradicate segregation would be too antagonistic to the ruling elite in the South, and thus counterproductive. Their strategy was to acknowledge segregation as the existing law, and to pledge SRC to work within it. This group was predominantly white but included a few blacks as well. Some were pragmatists who reasoned that no progress was possible without support from the white establishment; others believed that the separate-but-equal philosophy could be made to work, and would be best for both races in the long run.

The liberal faction—also biracial—was convinced that the South was shackled by the ball and chain of segregation, and that both the black minority and the white majority would be permanently crippled if they didn’t cut themselves free. Here, too, pragmatism and ideology were at work, with some advocating desegregation as a more efficient and fair use of human resources, and others saying it was a constitutional or religious or moral imperative. In general, the anti-segregationists wanted

Page 6

SRC to support the budding sentiment for an integrated society, and thus to be positioned on the breaking wave of history.

In between were the moderates—perhaps the largest faction of all. They wanted to avoid at all costs an up-or-down vote on segregation. Personal views aside, they were convinced that neither the separate-but-equal group nor the integrationists could win the larger society over to its philosophy. Fearful of a resurgent backlash that would cast the South down into its nightmarish past, they preferred to see the Council concentrate on programs and research that would deal with Jim Crow laws only obliquely, if at all. In general, they were philosophically opposed to segregation, but they expected it to prevail in the South for decades, even generations.

With Howard Odum presiding and Guy Johnson as executive director, SRC seldom wandered far off that middle road. So many problems cried out for attention; there was more than enough to be done, they said, without getting hung up in ideological debate. The Council spread its thin resources as far as it could, trying to bring help and hope to Southerners in need without unduly alarming the guardians of vested power. A modest annual budget of less than $50,000 was raised, with the Rosenwald Fund and other foundations providing most of it. In no sense was SRC an extreme group; everything about it bespoke caution, diplomacy, moderation.

The staff had its hands full. Ira Reid was assigned to direct a two-year study of racial discrimination in the South (soon narrowed to Atlanta, and then further to public transit in the city). George Mitchell, former director of a political action committee in the labor movement (and, like Reid, an ex-New Dealer), was hired to set up a program for returning veterans. Dorothy Tilly took over Jessie Daniel Ames’s old assignment as head of what had once been called “women’s work”; she soon developed it into an outreach program that opened Council branches in several states and enlisted church groups in various social-concern programs. A monthly magazine, New South, was launched in 1946 to replace Southern Frontier, the old CIC journal. A year later the Council started a radio series called “Southern Roundtable,” modeled after a popular discussion and debate program from Chicago. The moderator was a new SRC staffer, Harold C. Fleming, a native Georgian and an army veteran just out of Harvard.

Women were influential members of the Council, out of all proportion to their small number. Three whites and two blacks filled important offices or argued persuasively from within the ranks for a progressive agenda. Josephine M. Wilkins, a longtime leader of the Georgia League of Women Voters and founder of a social-action group called the Georgia Citizens Fact Finding Movement, became a Council vice president. Jane Havens of Florida and Alice Spearman of South Carolina shared Wilkins’s progressive vision. The two leading minority women were Grace T. Hamilton, executive director of the Atlanta Urban League, and Charlotte Hawkins Brown, the veteran North Carolina educator whose involvement in Southern social reform reached back to the 1920s.

Teetering on the highwire between liberal activism and conservative caution, the Southern Regional Council inched along. Virtually every proposed program of staff action, every resolution praising or condemning the acts of others, every utterance of organizational policy or philosophy was subjected to the most intense scrutiny. Drafted statements in support of the Fair Employment Practices Commission and federal anti-lynching legislation, or in opposition to the poll tax and the white primary, were often watered down by fears of “what this will cost us”—meaning white friends in high places, money from foundations and other donors, perhaps even the Council’s tax exemption as a nonprofit organization. Ira Reid’s study of discrimination suffered the same cautionary fate; so did George Mitchell’s investigative report on the 1946

Page 7

racial disturbance in Columbia, Tennessee. Council resolutions assailing mob violence were passed in response to the rash of lynchings that summer but they only highlighted the obvious impotence of law-abiding citizens beseiged by an epidemic of lawlessness.

The Council was constantly worried about lack of support, both financial and popular. All the way through 1947, its revenues were insufficient to support a budget of $5,000 a month for all expenditures, including salaries. Dues-paying members to that point totaled fewer than two thousand. Guy Johnson resigned that summer and returned to Chapel Hill; George Mitchell took his place as executive director and set a goal of five thousand members, with a commensurate increase in the budget. Ira Reid was also gone by then, having taken a teaching post in New York (Harold Trigg, a black educator from North Carolina, became the new associate director). In the winter of 1946, Howard Odum retired as Council president, and Paul D. Williams of Richmond replaced him. Only sixty-five people were in the audience when Williams spoke at SRC’s annual membership meeting in November 1947.

In his remarks that day, Williams cited the Council’s thoroughly biracial makeup as a model of cooperation and equity for others in the region to emulate, but not everyone was comfortable with such a self-conscious focus on race—or on SRC’s presumed virtues. Virginius Dabney, an influential figure of long standing, was one Council member who believed that calling attention to integration was an enormous tactical mistake.

“I can think of nothing more disastrous to the SRC’s future than its identification in the public mind with an effort to abolish the segregation system,” Dabney told Guy Johnson and others. “If SRC spends not only a good bit of its funds but a large portion of its energies in fighting segregation, we will lose both the battle and the war.” Responding to increasing national criticism of the South as violence spread across the region in 1946, Dabney had written a defensive piece for the Saturday Review of Literature entitled, “Is the South That Bad?” Said Ira Reid in emphatic response: “Yes!”

A single question and a one-word answer thus captured the essence of SRC’s—and the South’s—perpetual dilemma. Capable, earnest, well intentioned people, different from one another in many ways but having in common a lifelong bond to the South, were trying to work together to build a framework for the region’s future. But some wanted to follow the Old South model, and others thought it had to be replaced, and those in between were stymied, not knowing which planks to use and which to discard.

Howard W. Odum and Charles S. Johnson, ultimate symbols of the dilemma, were foremost among those who gravitated to the center. They had been primary leaders of the Southern Regional Council experiment from the very beginning. Johnson had drafted the vital document at Durham in 1942 that led to the founding of SRC, and Odum had spoken up at the right moment in Richmond in 1943 and saved the embryo Council from self-destruction. The two men were philosophical and tactical moderates who tried to persuade those on either side to join them in the middle and work cooperatively for the good of all. On most issues, Odum and Johnson could find common ground. But for all their wisdom and experience—as sociologists, as policy-makers, as sensitive human beings—they couldn’t see eye to eye on what to do about the burden of segregation.

Odum’s retirement from Council leadership effectively signaled the end of his durable dream: to create a powerful regional institution of research and development that would define the South of the future. Grand designs had always danced in his head, but he lacked the heart for conflict—without which no grand design could be realized. For all his temporizing and his abundant caution, Odum clearly understood the biracial nature of Southern culture. He knew it was race above all else that had set the South apart from other regions for centuries. He knew, furthermore, that the South would ultimately have to attain integration and equality within itself if it was ever to achieve those standards within the Nation. He understood those verities intellectually; it was their practical realization that stymied him.

Odum was advancing into the twilight years of his long and productive career when he quietly gathered up his papers and left SRC in 1946. It was a parting more significant than it appeared: The man with the regional plan was stepping down, his dream unfulfilled. He wrote The Way of the South that year, and published it the next. In it, he summarized and restated his concept of regionalism more succinctly than ever before. He saw the United States divided into six regions, of which the Southeast was one. These, he said, should be balanced and complementary—equal but not identical, different but not inferior or superior, integrated into a national whole but not homogenized. Through planning and cooperation, “the regional equality and balance of America” could be achieved. He viewed the ongoing dispersal of the South’s large black minority throughout the country as a promising development, and favored incentives to support this longterm process of “voluntary migration.”

The sociologist acknowledged that regional equality presupposed citizen equality irrespective of race—but this, too, would have to be achieved voluntarily, and over an indefinite period of time. He rejected out of hand any

Page 8

“coercive enforcement by the nation of a non-segregation economy advocated by many agitators.” Was he, in his heart of hearts, still unable at that time to see thoroughgoing equality as a positive good? The record is fuzzy on that crucial point. His readers, though, were left to draw a virtually inescapable conclusion: In Odum’s eyes, the segregated and inequitable and divisive “Southern way of life” was not yet a subject open for debate and negotiation; for the foreseeable future, it would remain the prevailing reality.

In his private reverie, Charles Johnson must have read Odum’s words with deepening discouragement. The two men had known each other for more than twenty-five years; they were professional associates, collaborators, personal friends. But Johnson had written in the Durham Manifesto that he and his fellow black petitioners were “fundamentally opposed to the principle and practice of compulsory segregation in American society.” Quietly but firmly, he had always made clear his conviction that “separate but equal” was a flawed and failed principle of law and social custom. He obviously wanted the United States and its constituent assemblies to abolish segregation and discrimination based on race. By those lights, he came dangerously close to belonging to the band of rivals dismissed by Odum as “agitators.”

Johnson had spent his entire career trying to build bridges—from the past to the future, from a closed South to an open Nation, from a prevailing attitude of white supremacy to a new belief in multiracial democracy. As a young man, he came to see that race relations—the interplay between the white majority and the colored minorities—would be America’s glory or its doom, and he devoted himself wholeheartedly to a pursuit of the glory. For his pains, he had been called just about everything in the book: a reformer, an accommodationist, a liberal, a conservative, an integrationist, an Uncle Tom, a diplomatic gentleman—and now, an agitator. If he and Howard Odum, the quintessential centrists, couldn’t stand together on the rock of race, the prospects for the Southern Regional Council were bleak.

Simultaneously with Odum’s The Way of the South in 1947 came Johnson’s Into the Main Stream, published by the University of North Carolina Press. It was a book of “promising signs in the South’s development toward better human relations,” and a search for the one main stream by which all Americans could be transported to full citizenship. No doubt thinking of his white friends, Johnson wrote with empathy and insight:

The fear of disturbing the controls of the racial system frequently places restraints upon progressive action in racial matters of any sort. Always there are in every locality a few well-meaning humanitarians willing to do something, but action carries a responsibility that only the stoutest hearts can sustain for long…. That is undoubtedly why it so often happens that the intellectual liberals who know what should be done are torn between their private convictions and their public caution, and the most forthright declarations of the need for change are made by persons who are estimated by the community to have so little weight as to be innocuous.

As a board member of both the Southern Regional Council and the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, Charles S. Johnson no doubt saw clearly how much alike the two organizations were, and yet how different. The leaders of SRC were—to use Johnson’s descriptive phrase—”intellectual liberals … torn between their private convictions and their public caution.” Those who

Page 9

directed SCHW were more action-oriented and more candidly expressive of an equalitarian point of view. It was precisely because of those “forthright declarations” that they were widely regarded as radicals and extremists with little influence on the majority of Southerners.

It would be hard to make a solid case, though, that they were really radicals. Middle class, white, Southern males accounted for almost all of the officers and staff of SCHW, as they did at SRC, and the Conference’s board of directors was roughly three-fourths white and 85 percent male—again, much the same as SRC’s. Even by Southern standards, they weren’t all that far out, either; it would have been more accurate to call them liberal Christian Democrats—and that, too, was an apt description of SRC. (Cross-fertilization was heavy between the two organizations. SCHW President Clark Foreman was a member of the SRC board, and SRC staff members George Mitchell and Ira Reid were on the board at SCHW. At least a half-dozen others, including Will Alexander, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, Lucy Randolph Mason, Aubrey Williams—and, of course, Charles Johnson—served on both boards.)

The accusations of Communist sympathy that shadowed half a dozen or so Conference stalwarts between 1938 and 1942 had driven off almost all of the suspects; only John Preston Davis’s name was still on the list of SCHW officers and directors—and Davis, former head of the National Negro Congress, had moved to Pittsburgh and was no longer active in the organization. If Communist influence had ever truly penetrated the SCHW, it had long since been filtered out. But right-wing opponents never tired of hurling the charges—and the Conference gave them a larger target by refusing to exclude any potential members solely because of their political beliefs.

The Conference was generally more liberal than SRC—in its activism (protesting, circulating petitions, lobbying), its associations (with Northern liberals, the labor movement, the NAACP) and its pronouncements on the issues of the day. It went on record in 1946 against “discrimination on the grounds of race, creed, color, or national origin,” calling it “fundamentally undemocratic, unAmerican, and unChristian.” Even so, the leaders chose not to attack Jim Crow laws explicitly at that time, taking instead the New Deal tack that the way to relieve blacks of the yoke of discrimination was to give them political and economic power. That might have been considered radical when members of the Roosevelt administration advocated it in the 1930s, but it was the standard position of the Democratic Party’s liberal wing now. If there was anything revolutionary about SCHW’s goals in the midForties, it was their announced intention to bring about genuine majority rule in the oligarchic South, where roughly three of every four adults didn’t vote, and most of the ones who did were in some incumbent politician’s hip pocket.

Conference President Foreman and James A. Dombrowski, the executive secretary, were more advanced in their views on race than most of the other whites in the organization—or, for that matter, those in the Southern Regional Council. Both men had shown by word and deed years earlier that they recognized segregation as a white problem that was crippling the South. Still, it was one thing to hold that view personally, and quite another to espouse it as organizational philosophy; not even SCHW was quite ready for that. Instead, the Conference concentrated on labor and voting rights issues (the National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax was one of its major projects)—and unlike SRC, it was aggressive enough to draw a visceral response from the likes of Mississippi’s bombastic Senator Theodore Bilbo. This “mongrel conference,” this “un-American, communistic outfit of white Quislings” that caters to “negroes, Jews, politicians and racketeers,” was demanding repeal of poll

Page 10

taxes and other measures the senator held dear. “III were called upon to name the Number One Enemy of the South today,” he thundered, “it would be the Southern Conference for Human Welfare.” Cleverly, Foreman and Dombrowski used the quote as an endorsement in reverse.

During the first year or so after the war, SCHW far outpaced SRC in size and scope. Its membership was close to three thousand by the end of 1945, and fiscal receipts for the year totaled almost $85,000 (one-third of it from labor unions). Membership was concentrated in the Southern and border states, and branch chapters were organized in some of them, with Georgia and Alabama having the strongest. To boost its lobbying and fund-raising capabilities, the Conference also developed large and active membership groups in Washington and New York. On any given issue, SCHW had both the resources and the activist inclination to make a bigger impact than SRC.

It was in 1946, an ominous year of instability and crisis for the South and the Nation, that the Southern Conference for Human Welfare reached the pinnacle of its strength—and, almost simultaneously, found itself caught up in a train of events that led to its own unraveling.

From headquarters in Nashville, Foreman and Dombrowski had wide latitude and authority to act for a compliant board of directors, and they concentrated on laying the foundation for a mass-membership organization. Two South Carolinians were hired as traveling recruiters: Osceola McKaine, the black political organizer who had co-founded the Progressive Democratic Party in his state, and Witherspoon Dodge, the white former minister whose organizing skills had recently been utilized by the CIO unions. Mary McLeod Bethune, back at her school in Florida after more than a decade of service in Washington, also made a speaking tour in behalf of SCHW. As a result of these and other outreach programs, Conference membership quickly doubled, and by the end of the year was said to have reached ten thousand.

A series of successful fund-raising events outside the South (starring such famous personalities as Joe Louis, Orson Welles, and Frank Sinatra) led to heady SCHW predictions of a $200,000 income for 1946 (the actual total turned out to be more like $120,000). Judging by the national exposure and the rising numbers, any casual observer might well have been impressed; the Southern Conference was starting to look like a force to be heeded. In a reorganization aimed at achieving greater flexibility and clout (and to prevent SCHW from losing its tax exemption because of political activity), the officers and directors decided in January 1946 to create a new entity:

Page 11

the Southern Conference Educational Fund. Under the plan, SCEF would be a tax-exempt body engaged in teaching, publication, and other forms of non-political persuasion, leaving SCHW free to pursue activist goals in the political arena. Both would answer to the same administrative and governing hierarchy.

All these new developments were full of promise. But even as they raised the hopes of Southern progressives, negative currents radiated out of the Conference. Since the first assembly in Birmingham in 1938, a steady falling away of erstwhile supporters had continued year in and year out, until the number and quality of losses gave pause even to the most loyal defenders. In war and peace, these defections continued.

Forget for a moment the ones who never darkened the door: McGill, Dabney, Daniels, Carter, and other journalists; Odum, Guy Johnson, Paul Green, the Vanderbilt Agrarians, and other academics; Gordon Hancock, P. B. Young, Grace Hamilton, Jessie Daniel Ames, and other blacks and women. Look past the quickly disillusioned, too—Francis Pickens Miller, John Temple Graves, W. T. Couch, Howard Kester, H. L. Mitchell. These were not the hard-to-lose; the Southern Conference never really had them in the first place. But it could ill afford to do without the services of those who had quickly seen in SCHW the possibilities of genuine reform, and had worked together for that goal. Frank Porter Graham, Louise Charlton, H. C. Nixon, Eleanor Roosevelt, Maury Maverick, Mollie Dowd, Benjamin Mays, Mark Ethridge, F. D. Patterson, Rufus Clement, and Tarleton Collier were among them; their absence left a void. Another was Joseph Gelders, the controversial Birmingham radical and suspected Communist who had been a key figure in the founding of SCHW; he settled in California after serving in the army in World War II.

And one more important name: Lillian Smith. She had stayed away from the first meeting in 1938—citing, among other things, her suspicion that Communists were playing too much of a behind-the-scenes role in the organization. But so many people she admired and respected kept imploring her to join; finally, she agreed to attend the 1940 session in Chattanooga, and then in 1942, Smith accepted a seat on the board at the urging of Foreman and Dombrowski, both of whom she liked and trusted. After Strange Fruit catapulted her to fame in 1944, she had less time to be involved with SCHW, and in May 1945 she resigned from the board. But in her characteristically blunt and direct way, she skipped the polite excuses and told Foreman and Dombrowski exactly why she was quitting.

“You see, my dreams of the Conference were so different,” she wrote. “I saw it as a great coming-together of Southerners” in an assembly free of segregation “by color or religion or bank account or sex or the kind of job we work at or the political beliefs we hold …. I wanted us to prove to our country that democracy works.” But for all its talk of majority rule, she said, SCHW was actually being run in a grossly undemocratic fashion—”like a labor union”—by a little clique of officers and board members. She wasn’t one of those insiders, and didn’t want to be. And so with that, the independent lady from Old Screamer Mountain took up her lonely post outside the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, as she had a year earlier outside the Southern Regional Council.

Not only was the loss of old allies hurting SCHW; from the perspective of wary Southerners, so was its choice of new ones. When racial tension flared in February 1946 at Columbia, Tennessee—right outside the back yard of the Conference, so to speak—Jim Dombrowski worked with Walter White and the NAACP to investigate, and together they set up a national defense committee for those arrested in the disturbance. It was the first time a Southern-based biracial organization dared to work openly with the activist civil rights group from New York. For that, and for his open criticism of local and state officials,

Page 12

Dombrowski was denounced by the Nashville Banner and other Tennessee papers, called before a grand jury, and characterized by the American Legion as “a seasoned, well-trained agitator for the Communist Party.”

Such charges were old hat, of course; the right wing had fired them at SCHW since 1938, and at Southern liberals in general for a lot longer than that. But something profoundly different was at work in 1946. In the wake of World War II, the surviving political-economic systems of capitalism and communism were fighting for world dominance. The United States, in league with its traditional allies in Western Europe, was trying to hold the line against communism in Eastern Europe and the Pacific rim. The Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin was pressing its advantage all along the postwar border with the West (a dividing line that Britain’s Sir Winston Churchill, in a March 1946 speech in Missouri, would call an “iron curtain”). Communist regimes in China and elsewhere were also putting pressure on the possessions of the crumbling colonial empires. Soon, Russia would have the atomic bomb, and the arms race would escalate ominously. A little later on, one-time South Carolinian Bernard Baruch would coin a phrase that gave the unofficial but deadly serious East-West conflict a name: the Cold War.

On the domestic scene, the United States was drifting to the right in reaction to world events. The Soviet Union, never esteemed by American conservatives, was quickly relegated from World War II ally to Cold War adversary. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, and other forces within the federal government stepped up their activities as spy chasers, and countered the espionage work of the Communist world with secret ventures of their own. Tensions between management and labor over jobs and wages deteriorated into verbal and sometimes violent battles punctuated by slanderous assertions of treason; the American labor movement was under heavy pressure to disavow communism and take a patriotic turn to the right. Suddenly, anti-communism was not just a rumbling bass note, like distant, rolling thunder; it was a howling tornado in American political life.

For many a left-wing organization like the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, the consequences were enormous. It was not that they changed their ways of thinking and acting, and took up a more radical and adversarial and unpopular stance; what really changed were the rules of the game. The pressure for political and social conformity increased, and dissent was equated with disloyalty. In the South, anti-Communism raced through the culture like an electrical current. Its power to shock and stun was demonstrated in dramatic fashion by the example of SCHW and its relationship to organized labor.

The most intimate ties had always bound SCHW to the labor movement, and particularly to the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Many Southern CIO leaders, including William Mitch, Paul Christopher, and Lucy Randolph Mason, were influential figures in the Confer-

Page 13

ence. SCHW also tried to stay on good terms with the rival American Federation of Labor, and even saw itself as a potential bridge for the eventual reconnection of the two confederations. In April 1946, the more liberal CIO announced the beginning of its second “Operation Dixie” organizing drive (it had conducted another such campaign four years earlier), and the following month, the AFL started a Southern drive of its own. But labor was already feeling the pinch of anti-communism, and when Van A. Bittner, director of the CIO’s Southern initiative, announced the plan to the press, he went out of his way to say they wanted no help from Communists or Socialists—and added, “That goes for the Southern Conference for Human Welfare and any other organization living off the CIO.” AFL leaders, guarding the right flank, quickly upped the ante by characterizing the CIO itself as a hotbed of communism.

These two blows—one from the CIO’s Bittner, and the other delivered by George Googe of the AFL, a former vice president of SCHW—were devastating to Clark Foreman, Jim Dombrowski, and others who thought their relationship with the unions was unbreakable. Helplessly, they saw Mitch and Christopher and Mason lose influence in the CIO as Bittner climbed. The unions not only cut off most of their financial aid to SCHW; they also fell away from their prior commitments, nurtured by the Conference, to embrace integration and racial equality. As Foreman put it later, “the leaders of ‘Operation Dixie’ resorted to opportunism in the hope of making the CIO respectable in the South.” Needing even less prodding from the right, the AFL did the same.

The loss of union money and members had many repercussions for the Conference. The field organizing work of Osceola McKaine and Witherspoon Dodge, so successful in the beginning, was now at a standstill. The two men had not only been recruiting members for SCHW but for the unions as well—and pushing voter registration for good measure. The labor movement had funded these efforts. But McKaine and Dodge struggled through the summer without receiving salaries or expense money; finally, they had to resign.

The Southern Conference had suffered a crippling reversal of fortune, swift and unexpected, but the full effect wouldn’t set in until later. In the fall of 1946, the leadership decided to move the organization’s headquarters from Nashville to New Orleans (thinking, mistakenly, that the cosmopolitan old city might provide a less hostile environment). The fourth Southwide convention of SCHW—and the first since the 1942 meeting in Nashville—was booked into the city auditorium of New Orleans for three days, beginning November 28.

More problems arose. City officials, giving in to local protests, canceled the auditorium lease to prevent a racially integrated assembly, and only a last-minute move to the hall of the local carpenters’ union saved the day. Fewer than three hundred official delegates registered, though upwards of twelve hundred people attended the opening session. The speakers included Senator Claude Pepper, Walter White of the NAACP, Mary McLeod Bethune, Aubrey Williams, and Georgia’s lame-duck Governor Ellis Arnall, recipient of the Conference’s Thomas Jefferson Award. For the first time, Frank Porter Graham and Eleanor Roosevelt were absent; there was no telegram of support from the White House, as in past years, and the CIO delegation was greatly diminished. But the most troubling development arose after the convention adjourned, at a meeting of SCHW’s officers and executive committee.

To Jim Dombrowski’s complete surprise, Clark Foreman proposed—and the committee affirmed—a plan to widen the distinction between SCHW and the Southern Conference Educational Fund, which had been established earlier in 1946. In effect, Foreman wanted SCHW, under his leadership, to become a national political-action committee for left-wing causes (including Henry Wallace’s bid for the White House); the Washington and New York chapters would serve as its principal bases. Dombrowski didn’t figure in those plans; his role would be to direct SCEF and its narrower regional agenda. The way he and many others saw it, he was being offered a sop, a consolation prize.

In their five years of close association, Foreman and Dombrowski had not grown closer. They were quite different in temperament and personality, with Foreman more of a political schemer (even his friends acknowledged that he was sometimes aggressive, ruthless, devious, manipulative), and Dombrowski more inclined to the quiet, persistent, stubborn pursuit of an idea or a principle. In the months that followed, the reorganization was delayed, and a compromise preserved the status quo while each man rallied support from within the organization. More people departed, including Mrs. Bethune, Lucy Mason, and Margaret Fisher, director of the Conference’s strongest state chapter in Georgia. Thus stalemated, SCHW limped through the first half of 1947 with its loyalties divided and its resources drained.

By late spring, Foreman was poised to refocus the energies of SCHW into the Wallace campaign, which was by then a virtual certainty. Dombrowski was still resistant to reorganization, but at length he did agree to leave SCHW in favor of SCEF. Before either of them had made a move, however, one more problem landed in their laps. In an apparent effort to embarrass both Henry Wallace and SCHW, the House Un-American Activities Commit-

Page 14

tee in June published a lengthy report, allegedly based on nine years of undercover work, condemning the Southern Conference for Human Welfare as a “most deviously camouflaged Communist-front organization.”

Condemnation of the report was widespread, from the Southern press to the Harvard Law Review, but great harm was done nonetheless. Among the many people smeared by innuendo, halftruths, and unsupported assertions of fellow-traveling and disloyalty were Foreman and Dombrowski, Frank Porter Graham, and Herman Clarence Nixon, one of the original organizers of the Conference. Nixon’s untenured faculty position at Vanderbilt University was jeopardized when publisher James Stahlman of the Nashville Banner, a university trustee, tried—but failed—to get him fired. Ralph McGill, who had a weakness for the soft soap of the red hunters, also took up the attack on SCHW, suggesting in his column that the organization was Communist infiltrated. He later printed a partial and narrowly technical retraction of his assertions, after being threatened with a lawsuit.

A long season of anti-Communist reaction had begun in the United States. That probably would have been enough, by itself, to destroy a small and vulnerable organization like the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, but its demise was hastened by self-inflicted wounds. Still and all, SCHW would hang on until the end of 1948. Ironically, the Southern Conference Educational Fund, the orphaned “weak sister” in Clark Foreman’s scenario, would last for a lot longer than that.

The new rules of the Cold War game were especially penalizing to the Southern Conference, but they were also hard on the more moderate Southern Regional Council, and on others interested in reformist ideas and progressive change. SRC had a fairly strong and diverse base in Atlanta, primary support from academic and religious circles, and good connections with the press; moving cautiously, it played for time and a change in the political climate. Elsewhere in the region, few if any organizations made much headway in advancing a liberal agenda in the overheated months of 1947 and 1948.

The Southern Tenant Farmers Union had entered the 1940s in a state of impotence and disarray, buffeted by internal conflict over socialism and communism and external hostility to unions of any kind, let alone one that practiced racial equality. Thanks largely to the sympathetic help of Aubrey Williams, the NYA administrator, Mitchell worked for a couple of years with the National Youth Administration in Washington before resuming leadership of the shell-shocked STFU. In 1948, the tiny union was saved from oblivion by an eleventh-hour conversion into the National Farm Labor Union, an affiliate of the AFL; Mitchell would run it on a shoestring from a slum-area office in Washington for twelve years before returning to the South. Though he was active in the labor movement for almost two more decades, neither the irrepressible H. L. Mitchell nor the Southern Tenant Farmers Union would be instrumental in the region’s postwar struggle for reform.

Howard Kester, one of Mitchell’s closest allies in the STFU and another of the old-school radicals of the 1930s, went through a similar eclipse after the war. Throughout the Forties and early Fifties he held a variety of jobs, mostly in the South, all the while keeping an active hand in the tiny Fellowship of Southern Churchmen that he and a handful of others had founded back in 1934 as a liberal expression of their religious faith. Kester was a pioneer among white Southerners working openly for racial integration, starting as a student YMCA leader in the 1920s. His low profile in the postwar years may have

Page 15

resulted in part from a loss of stamina after more than twenty years of activist involvement. No doubt it was also a consequence of the growing hostility to social progressivism in the South.

And then there was the Highlander Folk School. Others, like Don West and Jim Dombrowski, had come and gone from the Tennessee training center for adults, but co-founder Myles Horton remained. By war’s end, Highlander was mainly serving as an instructional component for organized labor. Lucy Mason and Paul Christopher of the CIO served on its board, and so did George Mitchell of the Southern Regional Council, a former CIO official. The AFL also made use of the school’s facilities, and both groups accepted (though at times without much enthusiasm) Highlander’s commitment to racial inclusion and equality in its operations.

When the Cold War blew its frosty breath on labor, Highlander got the same stiff-arm treatment from both the AFL and the CIO that the Southern Conference for Human Welfare received. When the going got tough, labor turned out to be disappointingly similar to other institutions (the church, the university, the press): strong on ideals in the abstract, but weak on their actual defense. And there was another similarity: Many Southern labor officials who worked for change in the region in the Thirties and Forties—Mason, Christopher, William Mitch, Steve Nance, John Ramsay, Ernest Delpit, William Dorsey, H. L. Mitchell, and numerous others—proved to be more committed to the ideals of racial and social equality than were the institutions for which they worked. Most of these men and women continued as individuals to support and serve Highlander, SRC, SCHW, and other liberal initiatives in the region long after the CIO and the AFL had abandoned ship.

In all of the organizations that struggled to extend and expand the liberal-progressive initiatives of the Thirties into the post-World War II period, a familiar litany of common failings could be heard. Whether radical or moderate, aggressive or low-key, they were plagued by a chronic shortage of money and members. None of them managed to raise funds in the South as well as they sometimes did among liberals in the North, and none could have survived for long without those Yankee dollars. What’s more, they couldn’t put together anything that approached the dimensions of a mass movement in the South—and without the numbers, they couldn’t get the press or the populace to take them seriously as an influential force for change.

Failing these two crucial tests, the Southerners then reduced their prospects for success still further by fighting among themselves almost as tenaciously as they battled their common enemies. From one small and resource-poor group to the next—and even within the ranks of some, like the Southern Regional Council and the two wings of the Southern Conference—people who desperately needed to join forces often spent their energy drawing swords against one another. For right-wing reactionaries who were starting to play their anti-communism card, this competitive and divisive behavior of their enemies was a welcome windfall.

It was probably inevitable that the campaign against communism in the Nation would be joined in common cause with the campaign against social change in the South. Racial equality had always struck the Southern ruling elite as an insanely radical notion, probably Communist in origin. Anxiously, they stayed on the lookout for subversive outsiders—agitators sent to stir unrest among the black masses. Whites who harped on racial issues, and those who tiptoed into the social arena by talking about class inequality or the scourge of poverty and ignorance, were maligned as troublemakers—and Southern whites of that ilk were singled out as the most dangerous of all. From the narrow perspective of the rulers, anyone who believed that the existing social contract needed revision was already a fellow traveler and an enemy of the public good.

“Communism has chosen the Southern Negro as the American group most likely to respond to its revolutionary appeal,” wrote U. S. Army Major R. M. Howell in an intelligence report in 1932. Eight years later, Congressman Martin Dies expanded the assertion: “Moscow has long considered the Negroes of the United States as excellent potential recruits for the Communist Party.”

In his militantly anti-communist book, The Trojan Horse in America, Dies said the House Un-American Activities Committee had uncovered evidence of a massive attempt by the Soviets to win black support—mounted, he said, because “Moscow realizes that it can never revolutionize the United States unless the Negro can be won over to the Communist cause.” But even the Texas congressman, fulminating reactionary that he was, conceded that the strategy wasn’t working. Its failure, he concluded, was “a tribute to the patriotism, loyalty, and religion of the Negro.”

African Americans never had much use for communism. According to the most widely quoted estimates, the number of blacks who belonged to the Communist Party in the United States probably never exceeded eight thousand—a tiny fraction of 1 percent in a population of over thirteen million. Aside from a few highly visible converts, blacks kept their sights on the longstanding promise of democracy. You could almost count on the fingers of one hand all of the prominent Americans of African descent who became entangled with the Communist Party in the

Page 16

Thirties and Fortiesߞand several of them were out of the picture by the time the war was over.

Richard Wright gave up on the party in the early 1940s—and then, a few years later, more or less gave up on his country. James W. Ford, thrice the Communist Party’s vice presidential candidate, was seldom heard from after his last appearance on the ticket in 1940. John Preston Davis, linked to communism through the National Negro Congress, an organization he sparked in the Thirties, went on to write for the Pittsburgh Courier, to publish his own journal, Our World, and finally to gravitate to the political mainstream as a paid employee of the Democratic Party. The few who continued to stand on the firing line as left-wing activists in the fight against discrimination eventually paid a heavy price: Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Benjamin J. Davis, Jr., all of whom had butted heads with white authority throughout their careers, were to find in the Cold War deep freeze that their political troubles as “dissidents” were just beginning.

But the near-universal rejection of communism by Southern blacks did nothing to convince the spy-chasers of their loyalty. As far back as the 1920s, secret U.S. police and military units were closely monitoring suspected Communist efforts to recruit black Americans; they kept up the surveillance without interruption for fully half a century, stealthily invading the privacy of thousands of individuals but uncovering virtually no enemy agents. The black minority was not the only target, of course. Throughout most of that period, spying by government operatives on all kinds of left-wing organizations suspected of having the remotest interest in communism—including virtually every group seeking social reform in the South—was a routine practice and an open secret.

Despite all the dire warnings about Communist infiltration in the South, the fact was that only two or three states—Alabama and North Carolina, and possibly Louisiana—registered enough of a red presence during and after the war to leave even a trace fifty years later. The labor movement in Louisiana was said by some to be deeply tinted with a red hue, but in all the charges and counter charges of patriotism and disloyalty that swirled around the CIO and the AFL, it was hard to separate fact from fiction. In any event, the militantly anti-Communist Catholic Church, an unsleeping watchdog and a dominant public force in the state, was always far more influential with the working-class population of New Orleans and south Louisiana than any other religious or political body.

In North Carolina, the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers union local in Winston-Salem had close ties to the Communist Party in the 1940s, and was directly responsible for the rapid growth of the NAACP there. Both the union and the party encouraged active participation in local politics, and those who did get involved soon were able to see positive results: A local black candidate, Kenneth Williams, won a seat on the city board of aldermen in 1947. His backers said he was the first African-American public official in the twentieth-century South to win an election against white opposition.

Another Carolina locale where there was Communist activity after the war was Chapel Hill. Junius Irving Scales, a native of Greensboro and an ex-GI, returned to the University of North Carolina in 1946 to find a loosely united coalition of students and faculty members active in local chapters of the American Veterans Committee, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, and the Communist Party. Scales became an officer in all three groups, which shared many of the same social goals: avoiding World War III, combating racism, promoting organized labor, and raising the South’s standard of living.

In the fall of 1946, the U.S. Communist Party sent thirty-six-year-old Sam J. Hall into the Carolinas as its district chairman. A native of Alabama, he had worked as a reporter for the Anniston Star and a Birmingham labor newspaper before joining the navy the day after Pearl Harbor. Already a Communist by that time, he served honorably in the military for four years, two of them on combat duty. In North Carolina, the short, chubby, amiable, soft-spoken Hall acted and sounded more like a Rotary Club regular than a scheming radical. He didn’t conceal his purposes; he trumpeted them. In February 1947, he ran advertisements in several North Carolina newspapers announcing a Communist recruitment drive, and in a long interview with the Raleigh News Observer he stated his and his party’s aims in terms that could have served as the credo of a devoted liberal Democrat: to help the working class, to defend democracy, to prevent fascism, to erase poverty. Only one aim sounded a little strange: to bring about “the establishment of Socialism by the free choice of a majority of the American people.”

The News Observer story, quoting unnamed sources, reported that “there are not more than 200 to 250 Party card holders in both North and South Carolina, and approximately one-fourth of these are affiliated with the Communist Club in Winston-Salem.” Whether or not those numbers were accurate, the fact was that the party never grew to any strength in the region; by the end of 1947 it had peaked and fallen, its various factions chased in all directions by the deepening anti-Communist hostility of the larger society.

Alabama probably had more Communists in the 1930s than any other Southern state, and Birmingham, the hub of party activity, was a busy left wing political site in spite

Page 17

of regular harassment from Eugene “Bull” Connor and his police department. A weekly tabloid, the Southern News Almanac, began there in January 1940 with under-the-table help from the party; among its principal staffers were Joseph Gelders, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare organizer, and Sam Hall. The lively little journal had its own distinctive character. One of its most curious features, rich with the flavor of religious radicalism, was a regular column contributed by two white preachers: the well-traveled radical Don West, a native Georgian, and Fred E. Maxey of Leeds, Alabama.

Two other Birmingham-based organizations of the early 1940s kept strong ties to the Communist Party: the League of Young Southerners, mostly-white group of youthful radicals spun off from SCHW, and the Southern Negro Youth Congress, an offshoot of the National Negro Congress. LYS was first called the Council of Young Southerners when it was organized at the founding assembly of SCHW in Birmingham in 1938. Helen Fuller of Alabama and Howard Lee of Arkansas headed it in the beginning, and Lee continued his close association with it.

The Southern Negro Youth Congress was larger than LYS, and it lasted longer. Beginning in 1937 with a two-day conference in Richmond, the SNYC met once a year until the war started—each time in a different city—and then erratically after that, until it folded a year after its eighth conference in Birmingham in 1948. In a little over a decade, SNYC nurtured leadership qualities in dozens of young black Southerners, including Ed Strong, James E. Jackson, Jr., and Esther Cooper, all Virginians, and Alabamians Ethel Lee Goodman, Herman Long, and Sallye Davis. (Two decades later, notoriety would follow Davis’s daughter, militant Communist Angela Davis.)

For as long as they existed, LYS and SNYC tried hard to work together across racial lines, and they succeeded to a degree, even though the laws and customs of segregation made that exceedingly difficult. Not all of their members were Communists, and in many ways the two organizations showed refreshing flashes of independence from orthodoxy of any stripe—but still, the party connections were there, as Robin D. G. Kelley showed in Hammer and Hoe, his revealing history of communism in Alabama. (Kelley asserted, incidentally, that Gelders, Lee, and Don West were Communists, though all three of them steadfastly denied the connection throughout their careers.)

Many of the young Southern activists of this period, white and black, found the primary outlet for their idealism in either the League of Young Southerners or the Southern Negro Youth Congress. However much they may have had in common with some of the aims and purposes of communism, most of them were something other than deep-dyed, ideologically devoted Communist Party loyalists. They were interracialists, democratic Socialists, progressive reformers—and in their own way, devoted Southerners too. More than they wanted to destroy the South or turn it over to outsiders, they wanted to make it a place that met the needs of all its native people.

Of course, most mainstream Southerners didn’t see them in that way at all; they saw them as dangerous troublemakers, and treated them as such. The young activists were red-baited with increasing vehemence during and after World War II. The League of Young Southerners folded before the war was over. The Southern Negro Youth Congress held on until 1949, by which time even their former allies in the labor movement, the university, the church, and the NAACP had distanced themselves from the organization.

The “invisible army” of Alabama Communists—including several labor union locals—could never have called itself large or powerful or even united. Its ranks thinned rapidly after 1945. By the time the reactionary forces of anti-communism were ready to smoke out all of Alabama’s subversives in the late Forties and early Fifties, there was no one left for them to attack.

The South—out of step, as usual, with the national march of events—generally experienced less Communist subversive activity than the other regions of the country. As for anti-Communist reaction, it found a warm and inviting climate when it swept in like a winter wind out of the North. Southern politicians were adept at damning Yankees and the feds with one breath, and demanding government support (for agriculture, military bases, protective tariffs) with the next. In the name of Americanism, these same right-wing lawmakers now insisted that the national government they loved to hate should go to any extreme, including suspension of civil liberties, in order to subdue and vanquish the encroaching red enemy.

Significantly, for the first time on a major issue, the Southerners were joined in their anti-Communist extremism by a large and growing reactionary force of arch-conservative Republicans from all over the country. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that the Rebels joined the Yankees. The national epidemic of postwar anti-Communism was essentially a made-in-the-North pathology engineered by right-wing Republicans; whether or not they also shared the anti-integrationist feelings of their Dixie brethren, they certainly gave them a conveniently sheltered platform from which to mount their attacks. Thus protected by outside interests, the segregationist Southern Democrats proceeded to dine freely on red herring for the next generation.

John Egerton is the author of eight books about the South. An independent writer of non-fiction, he has been exploring his native region since the late 1950s from bases in Kentucky, Florida, Georgia, Virginia and Tennessee. His book, Generations: An American Family, won the Lillian Smith Book Award in 1984.

In Birmingham, a Hearing on Human Rights

Anne Braden — Thu, 01 Sep 1994 04:00:02 +0000

In Birmingham, a Hearing on Human Rights

By Anne Braden

Vol. 16, No. 3, 1994, p. 19

Charlotte Keys, who leads a fight against poisoning from an abandoned industrial site in Columbia, Mississippi, said the “American dream has become a toxic nightmare.”

Rose Sanders, who mentors a new generation of African-American youth in Alabama, said “separate and unequal education is active and alive.”

Tamika Elmore, of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement in Birmingham, said African-American youth have been “thrown away … we don’t matter; the society blames us instead of changing conditions that created us.”

The occasion was a hearing at the Carver Theater in Birmingham on October 15. Three international religious leaders took testimony on violations of human rights in the U.S. It was part of a campaign of “education, investigation, and action” sponsored by the National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches exploring the possibility that U.S. racism violates international human rights law.

The Birmingham hearing, one of seven held in cities across the country in October, lasted all day. Community activists from seven Southeastern states testified.

For anyone looking for a ray of hope on today’s horizon, it was a bleak day. Witnesses gave accounts of sickness and death from pollution in Ft. Valley, Georgia; Pensacola, Florida; Sumter County, Alabama; and Warren County, North Carolina; of African-American youth destroyed by academic tracking and “mis-education” in Alabama cities and rural North Carolina; of African-American college students “never taken seriously”; of Native Americans in North Carolina and African Americans in Mississippi caught in a criminal-justice system defined by racism; of African-American workers being “the first to go” in massive industrial “down-sizing” in Birmingham, and African-American women working under killing conditions in poultry plants across the South.

The international leaders in Birmingham came from Zimbabwe, Tonga, and South Africa. They were part of a nine-member team; other sub-groups held hearings in New York, Chicago, Washington, Oakland, El Paso, and Okmulgee, Oklahoma. At an October 19 press conference in Washington, the team issued a preliminary report saying there is “widespread evidence of gross and consistent patterns of racism throughout the fabric of U.S. society.”

The team will submit a report to the National Council of Churches, the U.S. government, and the United National Human Rights Commission at a February 1995 meeting.

“We are not putting America on trial,” said one team member. “Our hope is that America will be able to resolve these issues.” The team stressed special responsibility of churches, including white ones.

But will white church members hear? Although they received extensive advance information, no mass media covered the Birmingham hearing. White Birmingham church members in attendance could be counted on the fingers of one hand.

The team’s preliminary report said; “We found that in many areas, with some notable exceptions, concerns about racism were limited largely to black churches.” It seems painfully evident that, with a few honorable exceptions, white church people have not yet begun to respond adequately to Martin Luther King’s 1963 “Letter from the Birmingham Jail.”

Anne Braden is co-chair of the Southern Organizing Committee for Social and Economic Justice (SOC) and a member of the National Council of Churches Racial Justice Working Group.

Filming ‘The Uprising of ’34’

George Stoney — Thu, 01 Sep 1994 04:00:03 +0000

Filming ‘The Uprising of ’34’

By George Stoney

Vol. 16, No. 3, 1994, pp. 20-24

Social class is something few Southerners are comfortable talking about, though it preoccupies us more than we’d like to admit. For the last five years, off and on, I have been gathering material for a film about textile workers, an undertaking that has turned into a voyage of selfdiscovery I never intended to take.

Co-director Judith Helfand has been my constant traveling companion. A native of suburban Long Island, Judy was having her first extended encounter with my home territory. I was born and raised in Winston-Salem. Although most of my years since have been spent outside the South, I have written about it, and made documentary films about it, ever since I graduated from Chapel Hill in 1937.

Our film was to deal with the textile workers’ attempts to better their working conditions, using the general strike of 1934 as the dramatic core. This, the largest strike in U. S. history in a single industry, involved more than half a million Southern workers, the majority of them women.

Our assignment was set by The Research Consortium for the Southwide Textile Strike of 1934, an unusual assemblage in this day and age, and one that established the importance of this project. Organized in 1985 by Professor Vera Rony, the Consortium comprises academics, community activists, labor leaders, and textile workers – all concerned that the participants in this vast uprising would soon be gone and their momentous experiences lost forever. Consortium founders included Professors James Crawford, Dan T. Carter, Harvey Klehr, Solomon Barkin, and Les Hough as well as labor leaders Sol Stetin, Larry Rogin, Bruce Raynor, and KeirJorgenson. They were soon joined by Uprising veterans Eula McGill, Lloyd David and Lloyd Gossett, and scholars Jacquelyn Hall, Janet Irons, Tom Terrill, Gretchen MacLachlan, John Gaventa, Cliff Kuhn, Robert McMath, and J. Wayne Flynt. They and the forty additional scholars and activists who have joined the Consortium through the years have provided indispensable advice and support to the film project.

The assembled scholars asked themselves if, by exhuming and examining the history of this event, they might cast a more revealing light on the pervasive notion that Southern workers will never organize for their own protection, a belief that is touted by Chambers of Commerce and industrial development commissions across the South. So they would write books, produce monographs and articles and, to reach a wider audience, they thought a film should be made.

Subsequently several Southern State Humanities Councils agreed to support the effort. Additional funding has come from foundations, mostly Southern-based, and

Page 21

a small amount from unions and individuals. Completion funds have been provided by the Independent Television Service which will sponsor the film’s broadcast early in 1995.

Documentary records of some aspects of the strike abound. The extensive violence is headlined in every Southern paper of the period. The University of South Carolina’s newsreel collection has scenes of national guardsmen plunging through mill villages with fixed bayonets and lines of civilian vigilantes standing proudly with their hunting rifles. There is full newsreel coverage of the events of September 15, 1934, when Governor Eugene Talmadge dispatched Georgia’s National Guard to Newnan. Here they rounded up 128 pickets, both men and women, and carted them off to Ft. McPherson where they were kept for a week behind barbed wire without legal procedures or redress.

In the National Archives there are thousands of letters from textile workers (women seem to have done most of the writing) addressed to President Roosevelt and to his wife Eleanor, to Frances Perkins, first woman Secretary of Labor, and to administrators of the National Recovery Administration (NRA). The letters describe in vivid detail the misery of the workers’ lives and the frustrations and dangers they encountered as they tried to form the unions which the textile code said they had a right to organize, but which few Southern textile employers would tolerate.

What we lacked to tell our story were accounts of just how this mammoth and unique effort was organized. Surely, we thought, out of the thousands of those who dared be officials and picket line captains in ’34 there would be plenty of survivors proud to tell what they did. To get their names we turned to the archives of the NRA in Washington, where we found hundreds of protests filed by union locals after the strike, listing members who were blacklisted and, frequently, evicted from companyowned houses as well-actions expressly forbidden in the agreement which Roosevelt drew up to end the three week strike but which most employers ignored.

With these lists we returned to the mill towns of their origin only to discover that, for a great many families, black-listing had meant banishment, sometimes to another state, some-times out of the South altogether. It was a veritable hemorrhage of local leaders, often the best educated and most civically motivated, in a segment of the population that could ill afford to lose them. For a very long time most of those we did find would be reluctant to talk. On the phone they would say, for example:

“You sound like a very nice man and I’d like to help you. But, you know, I’ve got a granddaughter in the mill yet, and it would be held against her if I talked.”

Almost no one on first encounter spoke proudly of what she or he had done in ’34, even though we had clear documentary evidence of their leadership. It would seem that for more than half a century making a living in their town had required them to keep silent; admitting their part in organizing a union so long ago was close to confessing a secret sin.

Very quickly we found it best to approach the matter indirectly, beginning our recording with their account of how their family came to the mill village from the country or from the mountains, then proceeding to their teenage years and struggle to get an education. Finally there would be talk about the Depression which led into tentative remarks about “that mess” in ’34. Often it was only after they got assurances from old comrades-in-arms who had been willing to share recollections with us that they felt free to add their own stories. Some of our most helpful and knowledgeable witnesses agreed to talk only after repeated visits made months or years apart, with contact maintained in the meantime by exchanges of letters and snapshots.

Rejection of any kind usually leads to self-examination. “Is there something about me,” I asked myself, “that makes these people reluctant to talk?” Soon I had to accept the fact that many people, especially the women, were more at ease talking with Judy than with me. The fact that she was a non-Southern who was young and pretty and enthusiastic and who, they assumed, knew absolutely nothing about the kind of life they were describing, seemed to give them assurance. On the other hand, I was a past-middle-aged professor whose inescapable class identification as a middle-class Southerner must have reminded them of the straw boss they once feared or the shoe salesmen in town whose contemptuous remarks made half a century ago stuck in their minds and still stung.

For gaining interviews with spokespeople for the textile industry management (and they have their full say in our film), my class and regional identifications were clearly an advantage. Some of the other males seemed reassured that “this pretty young yankee girl you’ve got there” was accompanied by a fatherly authority figure who could vouch for her.

But, by and large, Judy was taken at face value. I had to sell myself. . . by dressing with deliberate informality; by sitting on the floor during interviews; by singing the old songs they loved (and proving I could recall all the words); by offering my own recollections of hard times as a child that made them more comfortable in talking about their own; and, finally, before the next meeting and the next, sending them notes written from New York on University stationary.

Page 22

Judy’s experiences as ajew in these circumstances is a story she should tell. Sufficient to say, with the mostly born- again Evangelicals it was a distinct advantage, especially when they found out she had actually been to Israel and bathed in the Jordan.

Once we began making our approach on a broader front than the events of ’34 and began talking with these retired workers, their children and grandchildren about the complete fabric of their lives, the extent and bitterness of their own class resentments became manifest. A mere mention of “lint heads”, the pejorative commonly used to describe all folks from mill hill communities even today, would trigger recollections of insults old as childhood. A careless remark spoken by a teacher had caused one women to quit high school after walking for a year “three miles across town to go, and make it back in time to work on second shift.”

As we recorded many such examples of class attitudes, with corroborating evidence from middleclass people who, while usually excepting themselves, agreed that sharp class divisions always existed in these communities, I was forced to think of my own childhood in WinstonSalem. Children from the Arista mill village were almost automatically channeled into one section of a class and the rest of us in another. At R. J. Reynolds Central High “they” disappeared into the shop classes or motor maintenance until they quit to go to work. Few graduated and I never wondered why.

I recalled my father’s often expressed loathing for the sounds of hillbilly music that came echoing from the windows of the Odd Fellow’s Hall sixty yards from my bedroom, a loathing which extended to those “mountain whites” who attended the dances. Seeds of snobbery were planted in me as a very young child that it has taken decades of intellectual effort to overcome. Even now the music best loved by our old textile workers—not the tin pan alley tunes we do both share an affection for but the string band and gospel classics—can make me wince.

For two years of my childhood from seven to nine, after the death of my mother, my three sisters and I were cared for by a farm family in a village some distance from Winston Salem. Here I learned to know, and again to loathe, almost every aspect of the kind of country life and culture that forms the happy nostalgia of most of the textile workers we interviewed. Every other Sunday my father would visit to read to us from the classics and chastise us for picking up countrified pronunciations. Again, further life experience and intellectual effort have given me an appreciation of the strengths of this country culture. Yet the tell-tale signs of my own class prejudices can sneak up on me. How many of all those “vibes” feelings were being picked up by the people whose stories I was trying to record?

Perhaps I exaggerate. Judy thinks I do. But of this I

Page 23

am positive: these early class influences are pervasive still in the textile South, outlasting in many places the mills themselves, making cooperation for civic and political action among white people who otherwise share concerns quite as difficult as we have known when breaching separation by race.

One of the things we hope our film will do is serve as a vehicle for promoting dialogue about race and class. A series of community screenings has been scheduled in public settings sponsored by libraries, museums, schools, universities, and community action groups at which such dialogue can take place. The ninety-minute film has been edited to be shown in sections, each of which will serve as a stimulus for talk about local history, community development, political activism, and race and class relations. We are very much pleased that several Southern state Humanities Councils and the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation have granted us funds designed for support of such screening and discussions. These will be conducted by humanities scholars with the cooperation of local organizations.

Because our work has been so dependent on Humanities Councils and associated scholars we have been faithful in our resolve to honor the witnesses by transcribing their testimony and logging and cataloguing their tapes. This has produced an archive that will be useful to, and made available to, others who want to tell the many stories which can be found in this treasure trove of life experience. An appropriate archive, located in the South, is being chosen.

Thinking back on our five years of work together, Judy and I can see how, on many occasions, our differences in backgrounds and approaches probably worked in our favor. One of our most effective witnesses kept us waiting for more than two years. Judy found her through several documents in the NRA files in Washington, all neatly typed and signed in her clear hand. She had been the secretary of a local union where her father was president. After the strike she also served as secretary for one of the district organizers, all the while working as a weaver in the mill.

Although we had only her maiden name on the documents it was fairly simple to find her through others who had been in the same union local. Rumor had it that she and her husband, also a former “linthead,” had become millionaires. Certainly their address and the outward appearance of their estate suggested as much.

In a series of phone calls Judy learned that this woman had been a delegate to the New York convention where plans for the strike had been made in mid-August of ’34. She was one of the committee arranging visits by national leaders before and during the strike. Here was exactly the kind of detailed information about organization we so desperately needed to fill out our story. But she refused to be recorded, or even have us visit, explaining that her friends, who knew nothing of her involvement in 1934, would not understand why she would boast of them.

A year went by. There were more long chats by phone and more details revealed to fill in our story. But she would not see us.

“0. K. Judy, but we aren’t writing a book! “I remember bursting out in frustration over breakfast in a Waffle House. More calls were made. At some point Judy mentioned that I was a graduate of Chapel Hill.

“My husband went to Chapel Hill, too,” she said. He must have been listening. We were invited over so her husband could “meet the professor.” But no recording!

It was a long, frustrating, fascinating afternoon. While my son, James, the cameraman, sat with his equipment in the van (sometimes people do change their minds) we listened to our hostess describe in detail what our film desperately needed for someone to recount on camera. Her husband cross-examined me about Chapel Hill. What fraternity was Tin? The fact that I was not a fraternity man and, in fact, had worked my way through, seemed to modify his antagonism. He, it turned out, had been forced to drop out after two years, pulled back to the mill by family demands.

It was World War II that enabled this couple to escape from the mills, as it did so many others. He returned with a nest egg that financed a contracting business. She worked as his bookkeeper and partner, meanwhile raising a family. Their present splendor (“a hell of a long way from a shotgun house,” as another former mill worker described it) had not come easy.

Fortunately I had handy a copy of Like A Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World, by the group of scholars from Chapel Hill headed by Jacquelyn Hall. For two hours, while we talked with his wife, he disappeared to read it. (This book, incidentally, has been of enormous help in our work both as a source of facts and a treasured gift for dozens of witnesses who are touchingly moved to know lives like theirs have been recorded with such accuracy and thoughtfulness.)

Finally, as we were leaving with no pictures taken, he reappeared to return the book and said:

“Honey, you can do what you want to. “But it was two weeks more before she finally agreed to the first of two long and most fruitful recording sessions. What occasioned such a complete change of heart? In truth she was not a vainglorious person. I think she genuinely meant it when she told us, early on, that her friends might not understand if they thought her boasting of her early

Page 24

exploits. No, I think what persuaded her in the end was a chance remark I made:

“Your father sacrificed a great deal to make that union local a success. Now that we are doing is honoring him and his work.”

Our recording with her began with a description of what her father did, then went back to her own struggle to get an education so she could help him a secretary. Gradually she was able to admit that she, too, was important in the work, that she, too, was-for example-responsible for getting back pay for workers by repeated appeals to the Labor Board.

“Yes, I did that, didn’t I?” she smiled as she held the documents from the National Archives that told of her work. At eighty-two with the effects of recent illnesses evident and more to come, this woman was defining herself anew. It was a wonderful moment for all of us. One of the rewards of making documentaries is the recording of moments like this that can be shared repeatedly thereafter with thousands.

The suppression of civil liberties, the suppression of human potential that accompanied the ending of the textile strike in 1934 created a social climate that clouds efforts to organize unions even today. In Kannapolis we recorded with workers involved in a massive drive in 1991 for union recognition who told us of being required by Fieldcrest/Cannon to attend meetings where they were shown videotapes “of strikes and violence and troops marching… We knew they were old films but they seemed to have a message in them: this is what joining a union means. . . “Would these workers respond differently had they known in advance the full story of those events?

Near Honea Path, South Carolina where seven strikers were killed in 1934 we were told by workers struggling to hold a union together that they had grown up with whisperings about how Honea Path’s “saddest day” had come. They believed it was strikers themselves who had fired the guns. Would they feel differently had they been shown the coroner’s report and court testimony by eye witnesses that made clear all seven who died were shot in the back as they fled from bullets coming out of the mill fired by guns in the hands of deputies under the command of the superintendent himself.

In larger perspective, had the thousands of local leaders who created “The Uprising of ’34” been allowed to continue as spokespersons for change in their communities instead of being blacklisted or forced to exchange silence and anti-unionism for a chance to make a living, would outrages like the chicken fire at Hamlet, North Carolina which killed because workers were afraid to report safety violations continue to happen?

All these are questions we hope the showing of our film will stimulate. We are half a century late; no doubt about that!

At this writing we have had a number of community screenings in the Carolinas and Georgia. Responses have been largely what we had hoped for. When the lights go up people are eager to talk about their family links to the heritage of the textile workers they have been listening to for 90 minutes. The elderly testify; their children and grandchildren ask more questions. At least for the time being “union” is not “a dirty word around here” as one of the film’s participants describes it.

“So that’s why my neighbors look at me sideways when I tell them I’m a union man,” said one viewer at the Asheville screening who had moved South from New England a decade earlier.

Opposition has also come, most distressingly, from well- heeled contributors to public television who have already caused one statewide network to reconsider its agreement to air the work. Fortunately, Southern scholars, community activists, Humanities Councils, librarians and foundations continue to support us after seeing the film. One way or another they—and we—are determined to see that the memories of the people who speak so eloquently in “The Uprising of ’34” are made available to everyone in the South.

George Stoney is Professor of Film/TV at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.

Bearing Witness

Jewell Handy Gresham — Thu, 01 Sep 1994 04:00:04 +0000

Bearing Witness

Reviewed by Jewell Handy Gresham

Vol. 16, No. 3, 1994, pp. 25-28

Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1942-1965, by Vicki L. Crawford, Jacqueline Anne Rouse, and Barbara Woods (Indiana University Press, 1993).

The papers that make up Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers were originally presented at a conference held at the Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change October 12-15, 1988, co-sponsored by the Division of Continuing Education of Georgia State University. The occasion came about because one strategically placed woman, Marymal Dryden at Georgia State University—in viewing the 1987 powerful television documentary Eyes on the Prize—felt the absence of comparable focus on outstanding women participants alongside men in the Movement. Dryden decided to call a conference of activists and scholars to address the omissions.

Editors Vicki Crawford, Jacqueline Rouse, and Barbara Woods make no claim of presenting a unified chronicle of women in the Civil Rights Movement, nor of providing treatment comprehensive enough to include all major figures. Daisy Bates, for instance, who led the school desegregation struggle in Little Rock, is not among the women treated in a full chapter. Nor is Diane Nash (Bevel) whose critical leadership in the Nashville Student Movement and the newly formed Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee has not yet received thorough attention.

One misses also Atlanta’s Ruby Doris Smith (Robinson) who devoted the productive period of her short life (from age seventeen to her death at twenty-seven) to SNCC. And though Vicki Crawford in her excellent essay, “Beyond the Human Self: Grassroots Activists in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement,” provides an illuminating portrait of Mrs. Annie Devine and others—(three separate chapters are devoted to Fannie Lou Hamer)—the very breadth of her treatment made me long for a companion piece on the bold third member of the female triumvirate of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party: Victoria Gray Adams.

Given the impossibility of providing a full picture through these essays, the editors seek to stimulate further scholarship on movement women and on subject matter largely neglected, minimized, or ignored in books, articles, and films about the period.

The editorial choice to devote three out of seventeen chapters fully or primarily to Mississippi’s Fannie Lou Hamer indicates how much is bound up in the character of this single woman. Mamie E. Locke provides an account of Hamer’s role at the milestone 1964 National Democratic Convention in Atlantic City when she commanded the attention of millions in the desperate fight waged by the MFDP to be seated as the only democratically elected delegates from their native state. With Hamer and Victoria Gray in the lead, the MFDP refused the compromise proffered through Hubert Humphrey with its future promise of a place for blacks and women in future national conventions at the same time that politics was going on as usual in the seating of the all-white male regulars.

Ironically, however, it was the compromise elicited as a direct result of the MFDP struggle that has led directly to increased numbers of women political officials on all levels today.

In “Civil Rights Women: A Source for Doing Womanist Theology,” Jacquelyn Grant provides a glimpse of Hamer’s deep religious faith as the source of her strength and compassionate vision. Bernice Johnson Reagon’s “Women as Culture Carriers in the Civil Rights Movement” is a companion piece to Grant’s. Reagan’s material is so stunningly written as to startle the reader.

Listening to the story of Fannie Lou Hamer took me to a place I had witnessed so many times in Black church services. Someone would rise and through her of his offerings begins to charge up the air. Sometimes after a service has begun some-body will just come out of a corner and with the support of the congregants will do some-

Page 26

thing to bring the space under his or her power. This refocusing and transforming of spaces goes beyond content and data; it deals directly with the power to establish the tone and tenor of the environment. Within the African American oral tradition our stories and our legacies travel through time in a bed of rich cultural sound. I am not talking about simply starting something in a room and changing the space the people in the room have to deal with. It goes much farther because the oral tradition requires the transmission of its lode across generations. When you are a part of such an environment the experiences that are passed in the space become forever a part of who you are. In order to serve and accept the process and keep alive these treasures for others living in your time and beyond, you walk in that space with responsibility for the stories you now carry within your soul…

Four other essays treating women in struggle can be grouped alongside those on Hamer: Carole Mueller, “Ella Baker and the Origins of ‘Participatory Democracy'”; Grace Jordan McFadden, “Septima P. Clark and the Struggle for Human Rights”; Sandra B. Oldendorf, “The South Carolina Sea Island Citizenship Schools, 1957-1961”; and Barbara A. Woods, “Modjeska Simkins and the South Carolina Conference of the NAACP, 1939-1957.”

Mueller’s introductory remarks on Baker might be regarded as a manifesto for the role of movement women:

The source of ideas that guide the transformation and renewal of societies are often obscured by dramatic events and charismatic leaders that fit the media’s emphasis on conflict and celebrity and the public’s demand for mythic leaders and heroic sacrifice. Yet the beliefs that may ultimately inspire the mobilization of thousands (and millions) have often been tested and retested in obscure and out-of-the-way places by individuals who may never write manifestos, lead demonstrations, call press conferences, or stand before TV cameras. As Ella Baker said of herself, “you didn’t see me on television, you didn’t see news stories about me. The kind of role that I tried to play was to pick up pieces or put together pieces out of which I hoped organization might come. My theory is, strong people don’t need strong leaders.”

Mueller writes of Baker’s early pioneering work as NAACP field secretary in the South that provided her with the intimate knowledge of the communities and people contacts so important to SNCC’s later efforts in

Page 27

Mississippi.
The indomitable Septima Clark began her groundbreaking Citizenship Schools for dispossessed black residents of South Carolina’s Sea Islands under the sponsorship of Highlander in 1957. Before SNCC’s work in helping disfranchised black Southerners gain the ballot, hundreds were already on the rolls because of the work of Clark under the aegis of SCLC.

In her treatment of Simkins and the South Carolina NAACP, Barbara A. Woods supplements Mueller in reminding us of the critical role played by the nation’s oldest (and currently embattled) black organization founded in 1909.

If Simkins’s life is reviewed side-by-side with Septima Clark’s, greater appreciation can be gained of the vital institutions of family, church, school, and community that represented the solid foundation in which the black Southern struggle was anchored.

It is significant that all except one of the 1950’s/60’s settings for the women treated in Trailblazers and Torchbearer are in the South. The mass struggle labeled the “Civil Rights Movement” was specifically a Southern movement before it was anything else. In the transitional period of the mid-sixties, as the struggle leaped to the packed inner cities of the North and West, it was transformed into the Black Power phase in which attempts were ultimately made to relegate women to subordinate roles.

In Cambridge, the border state of Maryland, as examined by Annette K. Brock in “Gloria Richardson and the Cambridge Movement,” there was never any doubt as to who the leader of the movement was, including of the warriors in the streets. She was the woman whom Malcolm X called the “Lady General.”

In Charles Payne’s “Men Led, but Women Organized: Movement Participation of Women in the Mississippi Delta,” he raises and examines questions as to why black women joined the struggle in rural Mississippi in the early 60s in greater numbers than men, a phenomenon he found the more interesting because in the more dangerous 5Os, black political activists in the state were primarily men.

Payne rejects the notion that women in the Delta were safer from reprisals than men. Indeed, alongside Gloria Richardson’s story (as of Daisy Bates and others), it seems clear that urban women were not as vulnerable to savage physical attacks from police agents of the state as were their rural counterparts.

Though he accepts the argument that women are more religious than men, Payne also qualifies this view, writing that in the Delta, “the movement grew in spite of the Church” whose ministers—a handful of exceptions aside—were more apt to display courage in the wake of the people’s victories rather than ahead of them.

The inclusion in Trailblazers/Torchbearers of Mary Fair Burke’s account of the Montgomery bus boycott is welcome firsthand knowledge. Considerably understating her own role, Burke’s story of the Women’s Political Caucus—founded by her in 1946 in response to a Vernon Johns’ sermon—underscores the importance of the groundwork laid by women.

Of all the book’s essays, “Behind the Scenes: Doris Derby, Denise Nicholas and the Free Southern Theatre” by Clarissa Myrick-Harris is the most provocative. It falls into the merged period marking the height of the Civil Rights Movement and the beginning of the transitional phase from Southern-based to the black ghettos of the North and West.

Derby and Nicholas were young northerners when they joined the struggle. Denise Nichols’ transition in consciousness from Southern freedom fighter to northern black nationalist and her concern with her self-image as a “light-skinned” black woman suggests the mingled personal and political concerns difficult to separate for African American northerners (and some Southerners) participating in the movement while engaged also in seeking to establish their own identities.

Doris Derby’s work in the New York SNCC office suggests how tens of thousands of young white and black Americans were personally and politically shaped by work or association with northern support programs. The full extent of their participation awaits further explorations.

Though one of the major strengths of Trailblazers and Torchbearers is the placing of content in historical context, the tendency of students of the Movement to lump participants together as if all were part of common events and shared common experiences is evident in Anne Standley’s well researched “The Role of Women in the Civil Rights Movement.”

It is impossible to discuss women of the Southern and northern phases of the struggle in the same historical breath without making necessary qualifications. Standley’s juxtaposition of the philosophy of Joyce Ladnor of the Southern movement, for instance, with Fran Beal of the northern, does not work. In ideology, the strong-minded Beal draws from left principles in American history, Ladnor from a background of radical Christian tenets.

Trailblazers and Torchbearers also contributes to the larger record through the editors’ inclusion of white as well as black women who pursued paths of racial justice. At last someone—Donna Langston—has written about “The Women of Highlander,” including Zilphia Horton whose trailblazing role in strengthening peoples’ move-

Page 28

ment through music puts her in the tradition that Bernice Reagon both writes about and participates in.
Two fascinating contributions, “Methodist Women Integrate School and Housing, 1952-59,” by Alice G. Knotts, and Sharlene Voogd Cochran’s, “And the Pressure Never Let Up: Black Women, White Women, and the Boston YWCA, 1918-1948” are of a piece in bringing to the fore another important feature of the Movement. That is the influence of the mainstream white Protestant church in motivating Southern white women to join the struggle for a just society.

In my own interviews of white movement women, I have been struck by many who told me that they first learned in Sunday school and church of the brotherhood and sisterhood of men and women and so could not later come to terms with practices that denied this fundamental religious tenet.

Knotts’ account of the role of the Board of Mission’s Women’s Division of Christian Service in fostering school integration before the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education is an inspiring one as is Cochrane’s story of the thirty-year struggle of black and white women in Boston working together to “diversify the YMCA, making its practices consistent with its stated philosophy and policies.”

Allida M. Black’s paper, “A Reluctant but Persistent Warrior: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Early Civil Rights Movement,” can be placed in the same category of subject matter as those on Methodist women and the YWCA because, in a sense, Mrs. Roosevelt is a product of many of the same traditions, albeit as a female within the ruling aristocracy. As feminist/humanitarian, Eleanor Roosevelt supported the struggle for black equality at a time when white feminists as a norm had been indifferent or hostile. From her position as First Lady, she extended herself extraordinarily, given the era and the powerful white Southern senators and persistent critics who opposed her.

It is the treatment of women in historical context that excites me most about Trailblazers and Torchbearers. This volume will stimulate further research (editor Vicki Crawford is already at work).

I confess to wishing to see the black and white women of SNCC receive their just due, including the young white women who were first to aid Ella Baker in setting up SNCC’s first office and program: Constance Curry, Sandra Cason (Casey Hayden), and Jane Stembridge. And the numerous summer volunteers in Mississippi of 1964-65.

Among black women, there are so many tales to tell. There must be some reason that Mississippi’s L. C. Dorsey—stalwart fighter during the movement and since—is not even listed in the index of the present volume. There are many others to summon forth from one of the greatest eras in American history when women, men, and children served the cause of human freedom so nobly.

Jewell Handy Gresham, a native of LaFayette, Alabama, is completing a book entitled Spirits of Fire: Women in the Civil Rights Movement. A former English professor, she is now a writer and lives in New York State.

Testimony to the Power

John Cole Vodicka — Thu, 01 Sep 1994 04:00:05 +0000

Testimony to the Power

Reviewed by John Cole Vodicka

Vol. 16, No. 3, 1994, pp. 28-31

Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, by Danny Lyon (University of North Carolina Press, Duke University Center for Documentary Studies, 1992, 192 pages).

There is a photograph in Danny Lyon’s book that disturbs and challenges me every time I look at it. It is one in a series of snapshots Lyon took through the barred windows of the Leesburg, Georgia stockade in the summer of 1963, his camera trained on a cellblock crammed with young African American girls who had been arrested by Americus police earlier in the day. The girls had been demonstrating and now were being held, all thirty-two of them, in a jail cell with no beds and no working sanitary facilities.

“The floor was cold,” thirteen year-old Henrietta Fuller wrote at the time. “You lay down for awhile and soon it starts hurting you so you sit up for awhile and it starts hurting so you have to walk around for awhile. The smell of waste material was bad. I went to the bathroom there to urinate, but didn’t have a bowel movement during the entire nine days I was there. I urinated where the water from the shower drains down.

“At night the mosquitoes and roaches were at us. In the middle of the week the white man gave us some blankets. Two or three of us slept on one blanket.”

The photograph of some of these young girls shows a dozen or more of them staring from their cell into Danny Lyon’s camera, which he held through the broken glass of a barred window. All of the girls are standing—that is, all but one. This one girl, who looks to be no more than ten or eleven years old, is sitting against the wall of the cell, her face almost hidden completely in the shadows.

But there she is, sitting and looking at the camera, at you and me, her face all at once young, innocent, determined, and frightened. She bravely waits—having encountered the white man’s wrath once again—for her

Page 29

freedom, to be recognized as a human being. Her eyes tell you that she is now certain the cell door will soon be opened, that she and the other girls will be released from captivity. And with their freedom, she hopes, will eventually come the liberation of African Americans throughout the South.

Just days after this photograph was taken, it and others were placed in the hands of a U. S. Congressman, who, according to Danny Lyon, entered them into the Congressional Record. “Word quickly came back to Americus, and the girls, who were being held without charges, were released,” Lyon writes. “In Americus, my pictures had actually accomplished something. They had gotten people out of jail.”

Danny Lyon’s photographs of the civil rights movement are now chronicled in an important and inspiring book, Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement. The photographs were all taken between 1962 and 1964, when Danny Lyon was one of several “movement photographers” for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Lyon’s photographs, all in black-and-white, and an accompanying text that includes his narrative as well as notes taken at SNCC meetings, affidavits, and transcribed interviews, present many of the events and images of the civil rights struggle that are largely unfamiliar to all but those who participated in the movement. As Julian Bond writes in his foreword to the book: “[Lyon] saw and recorded the movement: the people who made it, those who would maim and kill to stop it, and those who watched—respectfully, resentfully, or angrily—as it passed by. Dusty roads were the movement’s most likely location, not Capitol malls and monuments. We all remember fire hoses and police dogs. Danny Lyon makes us remember the people and the forgotten places, too.”

Danny Lyon was a twenty-year-old University of Chicago history student in 1962, when he packed his cameras in an army bag and hitchhiked south. Arriving in Atlanta, he hoped to find SNCC headquarters, but learned that the occupants of the now-empty office were in Albany. So he boarded a bus to make the 150-mile journey into southwest Georgia.

“Near me,” Lyon writes, “was another standing passenger, a very smartly dressed man with glasses and a goatee. He said if I was going to try to reach the SNCC people, I ought to do it in the daylight and not at night. Police, in and out of uniform, stood around the parking lot as the bus pulled into Albany. As soon as I stepped off the bus, I was pulled aside by a plainclothesman. ‘Where you going?’ I was asked. ‘That’s the white part of town,’ he said and pointed, ‘and that’s the nigger part of town.’ Wyatt T. Walker, the gentleman I had been speaking with, walked off in one direction and I went off in the other. In the morning I walked over to the black side of town to find the Albany movement.”

Wyatt T. Walker, an SCLC leader and organizer, is one of the many familiar faces Lyon captured on film. Others include James Forman, John Lewis, June Johnson, Bernice Reagon, Charles Sherrod, Ella Baker, Bob Moses, Julian Bond, Martin King, Jr., Bob Zellner, Fannie Lou Hamer—all recognized heroes whose immense courage both inspired movement participants and encouraged bystanders, in the North and the South, to get involved.

But Danny Lyon’s photographs also give us the faces of hundreds of others who are unknown to most of us, and it is these pictures that make Memories of the Southern Civil Right Movement the powerful historical document it is.

Lyon and his camera are there to capture the crowds of African Americans who lined the Birmingham streets along the funeral route for the four girls killed in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. In the faces of the mourners we can see not only the grieving, but also the angry determination to push on for justice.

Lyon’s photographs show us teenage demonstrators in Savannah lying on the sidewalk, waiting to be arrested. In one of these, a white man, neatly dressed, stands almost

Page 30

nonchalantly within a few feet of where African American demonstrators are being carried by police into waiting paddy wagons. Who is this white bystander, hands in pockets, looking on as dozens of youngsters are claiming their right to full citizenship?

There is a series of photographs of the mass meetings held in Danville, Virginia. One shows hundreds of people standing outside a cinderblock church, the crowd so large it has spilled out into the yard. Lyon tells us that during this meeting, word came that the police and a tank were waiting up the road. Hearing this, the meeting broke up, with two carloads of SNCC workers the last to leave the church. The SNCC cars were stopped by heavily armed police, Lyon writes, and the passengers were told to get out. The entire SNCC staff was forced to spreadeagle and allow themselves to be patted down.

“That night,” writes Lyon, “arrest warrants were issued for twenty-two SNCC workers under a state law originally passed after Nat Turner’s rebellion and used to hang John Brown: ‘Inciting the colored population to acts of war and violence against the white population.’ I believe at that time the crime was punishable by death.”

In another image later in his book, the driver of a vehicle is attacking a demonstrator who is blocking traffic on a downtown Atlanta street. Again, there they are—white bystanders looking on approvingly while a black man is choked and beaten only yards from where they watch. What are these white folk thinking?

Again in Atlanta, Lyon’s camera is somehow up close in the middle of a demonstration blocking traffic to protest unfair hiring practices. A mob has begun to abuse the demonstrators with kicks, blows, and burning cigarettes. But this time the photograph shows a white woman who has walked by and confronted the mob, and for awhile,

Page 31

has held them at bay. Lyon writes: “When someone (from the white mob) yells, ‘If you feel that way, why don’t you marry one of them?’ (the woman) sits down and joins the demonstrators.”

The photographs in Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement are certain to stir deep feelings, whether the viewer lived through the tumultuous 1960s or not. As Julian Bond writes, Lyon’s photos “capture the heat and excitement and despair of those two hopeful years. “These pictures, taken three decades ago, serve as reminders not only of our segregated past and the human courage it took to bring Jim Crow to its knees, but also heighten our awareness of just how far we still need to go to overcome the barriers of racism. When I look at that photograph of the young girl in the Leesburg stockade, I am made to realize that although the cell door opened for her in 1962, she is still not free in 1994. This snapshot challenges me in the here-and-now.

Danny Lyon’s sensitive and inspiring book invites us not only to remember this piece of our past, but to call up from within the same rage that moved so many back then to action. It is testimony to the power of grassroots movements. It looks back but at the same time prods us forward. It is a book that, as Lyon writes of SNCC, “is a model for any [one] that wants to turn America into what it could be, but is not.”

John Cole Vodicka directs the Koinonia Prison and Jail Project in Americus, Georgia.