Southern Women

By Janis Powell

Vol. 2, No. 3, 1979, pp. 28

With an official proclamation and the announcement of an annual scholarship in her name, October 16 was declared as a day to honor Rosa Parks during a rally in Atlanta’s Central City Park, co-sponsored by the Emergency Land Fund and the Southern Regional Council. It was a part of Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden’s speaking tour promoting the views of their anti-corporate and anti-nuclear Campaign for Economic Democracy (CED). The noonday event, which drew several thousand people, was held “to have the important issues of social change presented directly to the people of Atlanta and to cherish the presence of the South’s number one citizen, Rosa Parks,” according to Steve Suitts, SRC executive director.

In addressing the crowd, well-known activist and actress, Jane Fonda, said women are now the vanguard of social change, pully back “the curtain of apathy” to work for “economic rights as well as civil rights.” Fonda spoke of Rosa Parks’ ongoing contribution to the civil rights movement as being anexample of the innumerable women who have been a leading force in the struggle for equality and justice in this country.

On December 1, 1955, when a bus driver in Montgomery, Alabama, asked four Blacks to give up their seats to White passengers, one of the Blacks, Rosa Parks, refused. This corageous decision to stop obeying unjust laws prompted the formation of a year-long bus boycott by the Montgomery Improvement Association with Martin Luther King, Jr. as its president.

Despite the many acts of violence directed at the Black community for the boycott, Parks stuck by her decision to challenge the racism of the law and on November 13, 1956, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Montgomery’s bus segregation laws were unconstitutional. The boycott marked the beginning of a new era of aggressive nonviolent action on the part of Southern Blacks.

Fonda also announced the establishment of a $5,000 annual college scholarship in Rosa Parks’ name for the young Black Atlantan who demonstrated the most commitment for social activism during the previous year. The scholarship is being set up in conjunction with the National Committee for a Rosa Parks Shrine in Detroit, Michigan. Announcements for the application process will be sent to schools and civil rights groups in the near future.

The visit by Fonda and Hayden was designed to draw public attention to what they called the rapidly growing domination of American life by large corporations and the centralized nuclear power supply system. The Campaign for Economic Development is a brainchild of Hayden, 40, a founder of Students for a Democratic Society, a veteran of the anti-war movement and unsuccessful candidate in the 1976 United States Senate Race in California.

In urgihn that economic rights be the next goal of activists, the couple said they found more and more female secretaries and clerical workers starting to “knock on doors” to organize for issues of economic domocracy. In coming to the South, they said they wanted to honor the woman who started much of today’s activism.

Reflections on Racial Progress in Mississippi:’Freedom Summer’ After Fifteen Years

By Gordon D. Gibson

Vol. 2, No. 4, 1980, pp. 17-19

Mississippi in 1Q64 had long been”the dark hell-hole of the Black experience,” in the words of Prof. William,Strickland of the University of Massachusetts. But in 1964 the Black people of Mississippi and their Black and White allies from all across the country rose up and proved that, even in Mississippi, change is possible. Looking back recently during a four-day symposium, Strickland and many other participants in Mississippi’s 1964 “Freedom Summer” reflected on various facets of change.

The symposium, even with its many flaws, uninvited people or last minute cancellations, was worthwhile. It focused the attention of Freedom Movement veterans (and a few current students who were in nursery school in 1964) on the changes wrought by Freedom Summer and other Movement efforts. One cannot understand the intervening 15 years without some knowledge of this history. One cannot understand the lesson that change is possible and, sadly, still necessary.

If Freedom Summer proved that change, being possible in Mississippi in 1964, is possible anywhere, it also, revealed in retrospect that the changes wrought were tragically insufficient in some respects, astoundingly profound in other respects, and ironic overall.

“What started here woke up the world,” commented Patt Derian, a Mississippi activist and former president of the Southern Regional Council now serving as Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs. That theme was repeated over and over by people who had observed the Movement from afar, people who had by 1964 been jailed scores of times in their efforts to bring change, and even people who, in that earlier era, were often viewed as part of the problem.

Yet too many of the changes were cosmetic and superficial rather than structural. The visionary hope had been “to root out evil and to cast out sin in high places,” but most high places remain high, and too many of them are still seriously tainted if not filled with evil and sin. Where improvement was most desperately needed, in the daily conditions of life for poor people, too little has changed, said most symposium participants. Poor people are still poor, and the system which made them poor and keeps them poor was not brought to its knees.

In its location and sponsorship the symposium on “Mississippi’s Freedom Summer Reviewed” mirrored both the great extent and the superficiality of change. The joint sponsorship of Millsaps and Tougaloo Colleges in Jackson, Mississippi, was itself a major advance over 1964 when then lily-white Millsaps would have resisted even the thought of such a conference. Fifteen years later many of the symposium sessions featuring big-name participants wound up being held, not at Tougaloo, the cradle of the Movement, but in the larger and better facilities of Milisaps. Some Milisaps classes were dismissed so that students could attend symposium sessions, while at Tougaloo mandatory class attendance kept many students away. Part of the symposium funding came from the non-profit corporation which is interim operator of Mississippi’s most successful TV station, once a bastion of segregation but is now under the direction of a bi-racial board and the nation’s first Black general manager. All of these changes between 1964 and 1979 are significant turnabouts in orientation, in thought. But being able to hold part of an inter-racial gathering at Millsaps College puts no money in anyone’s pocket. And it was clear that behind the scenes efforts had succeeded in taking away some of the symposium’s radical potential.

It is hard today to celebrate much over riding in the front of the bus, or to explain to a teenager the significance of being allowed into a once-segregated institution without risking one’s

---

Page 18

life. Still, one must rejoice in some of the changes that, although not directly sought, have flowed in the succeeding years.

Certainly the out-of-state volunteers of 1964 were changed by Mississippi. Although some SNCC veterans still resent the view that Freedom Summer was a “profound experience” for White college kids, it is true that many people were changed and will never be able to look at America as naively and uncritically as they did before 1964.

Willie Peacock was among those in SNCC who had opposed the use of volunteers in 1964, feeling that it would undercut the strides already made toward self-determination and community organization for change. He stated during the symposium that he still feels he was right, and others also mentioned the many projects dropped or diverted as volunteers poured in for Freedom Summer. Indeed, it would be fatuous to say that the Freedom Movement fulfilled itself by radicalizing White northern college students.

Yet the fact is, as former Congressman Allard Lowenstein and others noted, that the volunteers who came to Mississippi learned and took home more than they brought with them. America is still feeling the repercussions of what was learned.

For example, Mario Savio was among those volunteers going back to California with a challenge from Mississippians to confront at home the forces that supported oppression. In the struggle to raise funds for Mississippi, the Berkeley campus became an early battleground for the student revolution of the mid-60s. A succession of movements and causes – anti-war, feminist, environmental, ethnic, handicapped, gay, elderly, and so on – have evolved, sometimes cooperatively, sometimes competitively, and almost always involving some leadership tested in the crucible of Mississippi in 1964.

Concretely, the 1964 challenge at Atlantic City to the seating of the regular Mississippi delegation has changed how Democratic presidential candidates are selected. Without the rules changes that ensued, can one imagine the McCarthy challenge of ’68 that unseated LBJ, the McGovern or Carter nominations of ’72 and ’76? The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, now itself ,lily a memory, has shaped the Democratic Party (and by reflection the Republican too) ever since 1964.

---

Page 19

Although none of these changes were among the goals of Freedom Summer, although few of them have enriched or ennobled Mississippi, they must be reckoned: a generation radicalized, a host of other movements inspired and peopled, a political party changed.

And therein lies some of the irony of change.

“The Movement” as a whole and Freedom Summer in particular caused many changes and forced response to basic human and community needs from the government and foundations, for without some significant response the problems (and the agitation) would have continued unabated. Yet, while Headstart, CETA, Legal Services, community health care, and various other programs that continue to assist Americans, Black and White, may be seen as a lasting legacy of “The Movement”, some symposium participants cast them in a different light. These programs have made life more bearable without making basic changes in social structure. They formed a way for “The Establishment” to tame “The Movement”, to put it on a payroll, to place it under guidelines, rules, and regulations, and to channel its efforts in less radical directions. “The Movement” and “The Establishment” each re-directed the other.

And as Joyce Ladner, now Professor of Sociology at Hunter College, but in 1964 a Tougaloo student, commented during her address opening the symposium, too many careers have been built in the north on the claim, “I marched with Dr. King.” Too many people waited in the wings while the struggle continued at its greatest intensity, but have now claimed center stage. Too many people have walked through doors that others struggled and even died to open. A Black middle class is prospering and increasing while the poor are still with us.

One of the figures who, though absent, was present at the symposium in frequent references, was Fannie Lou Hamer. Hamer was poor when she was thrown off a delta plantation for attempting to register to vote. She stayed poor during the years that she worked in SNCC and MFDP. She died, still poor, in 1977, a heroine of the Movement’s successes, but still a victim of its failure to bring deeper change. In 1964, after the Freedom Democratic Party challenge at Atlantic City had been turned back with the offer of two token seats and the promise of future change, Hamer said, “I question America.”

Hamer’s statement still reverberates. After the symposium one still wonders about the changes wrought. Could they have been more far-reaching, more fundamental? Could they have avoided re-direction by “The Establishment’s” response? If Freedom Summer was possible in the Mississippi of 1964, almost anything is possible. If something better is possible, and we don’t have it, are we working toward it?

“I question America,” still, 15 years after Freedom Summer.

Gordon D. Gibson is a free lance writer and pastor of a Unitarian church in Jackson.

Stephen Oates. Let The Trumpet Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. Harper and Row, 1982. Paper edition by Plume, New American Library, 1983.

By Lawrence J. Hanks

Vol. 5, No. 6, 1983, pp. 23-24

Let The Trumpet Sound is the first biography of King to appear since David Lewis’ King: A Critical Biography was published in 1970. One still might reasonably ask, “What could Oates possibly add to the telling of such a well-known life since four book length biographies have already appeared?” (Lawrence Reddick’s Crusader Without Violence, 1959;Lerone Bennett’s What Manner of Man, 1964; William Miller’s Martin Luther King, Jr. His Life, Martyrdom, and Meaning for the World, 1968; and the Lewis biography.) To begin with, Oates is the first to use newly available King materials at Boston University and at the King Center in Atlanta. He has also made excellent use of government documents, oral histories and many writings touching upon King’s life and the civil rights movement that have appeared in the last ten years.

Oates allows King to speak for himself whenever possible, infusing the familiar portions of the biography with new vitality. At times, this device makes the work seem autobiographical, with Oates adding analysis: it creates a sense of listening to King.

Writing that he has “no interest in adding to the deification of King as a flawless immortal ” Oates deals compassionately with his frailties. The result is the best and most complete account we now have of King’s life, revealing an individual striving toward philosophical consistency. He wished to be more like Gandhi. yet his desire to take a vow of poverty and discard his middle-class wardrobe struggled with a strong sense of family responsibility and the image of his leadership role. He wanted to take a day for fasting and praying each week but the pace of his schedule often took control. King wanted to take a vacation from the movement and completely develop his non-violent philosophy, but his charismatic presence and fund raising skills always seemed to be required.

King reacted to the frequent charge of being middle-class by largely rejecting the more negative superficial middle-class values; he abhored conspicuous consumption and refused to enrich himself from speech making. donating these earnings to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and other civil rights groups. He refused a number of lucrative jobs in order to stay with the movement.

The sacrificing of personal needs found little compensation in King’s role as leader. There were jealousies, factionalism and genuine strategic disagreements. And, he was extremely sensitive to the common perception of the modern black struggle for civil rights being called the “King Movement.”

While accepting the role as the most well-known figure, King felt that this was a result of his being the chosen leader of the movement rather than a result of personal ambition. He repeatedly pointed out that the real heroes and heroines were the blacks of the South who found the courage to fight for their rights–he was simply an “instrument of history.” He made this point in Stride Toward Freedom and in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech.

Oates’ examination of King’s ordeal with the FBI and the campaign waged against him by J. Edgar Hoover is perhaps the only part of Let The Trumpet Sound that is “new.” Determined to discredit King. Hoover received official sanction from President Kennedy to tap his home telephone and those of the SCLC. Between October 1963 and December 1964 the FBI bugged rooms wherever King stayed. In January 1965, the FBI sent a composite tape of these recordings to the SCLC.

Oates argues that “whether or not the tape with its alleged sounds of sexual activity actually incriminated

---

Page 24

King may never be known.” He dismisses Andrew Young’s and Coretta King’s denials of the tapes’ incriminating potential as attempts “to protect King.” Although it is never explicitly stated, Oates’ contention that King was guilty of infidelity is based on statements made by King to confidants, statements in his sermons and personal statements by confidants. The case is strong, albeit circumstantial, even to those who wish to deify. Since well-known papers such as the Chicago New, the Washington Post, the Atlanta Constitution, and the New York Times all refused to carry the King “sex stories” when they were offered by the FBI, the rumors never became widespread public knowledge during King’s life. Even within the movement, only a few confidants knew about the tape. King perservered to confront Selma, Chicago, Memphis, the Viet Nam war, and to make plans for the Poor People’s March on Washington before his assassination.

At the time of his death, King was becoming a more radical critic of America. He had grown to realize that segregation and disenfranchisement were only symptoms of a larger problem: the economic exploitation of poor people regardless of color. The Civil Rights Bill of [unclear] and The Voting Rights Act of 1965 did little to improve the daily lives of the nation’s poor blacks. The Acts did not bring economic independence to rural Southern blacks or anything substantial to northern ghetto dwellers. Bayard Rustin had argued since 1962 that the civil rights movement should expand its agenda to focus on wealth and poverty in America as well as race. King could now see the merit of Rustin’s position and he was ready to act. The Poor People’s Campaign would have been his first effort toward the goal of bringing about a redistribution of wealth in America.

King theorized that part of the reconstructing of American society “might require nationalization of vital industries, as well as a guaranteed income for impoverished Americans.” While Oates stops short of placing an ideological label on King’s new philosophy, others have argued that King was moving toward democratic socialism (See David Garrow, Illinois Times, 31 March-6 April, 1983, “From Reformer to Revolutionary”). One can easily argue that King, if he were alive today, would support the women’s movement, disarmament, and abhor the growing middle-class consciousness among black Americans.

Having the credentials to insulate himself from the harshest aspects of class and racial discrimination, King could have easily lived a comfortable life. He could have pursued his personal dream and taught theology at a university. Instead, he felt compelled to advocate [unclear] rights and humanity of others that he jeopardized his own self-preservation. Let The Trumpet Sound is a comprehensive and compassionate account of this great life.

Lawrence J. Hanks is a graduate student in government at Harvard University. His dissertation research focuses on black political participation in the rural South since the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

The Origins of the Montgomery Bus Boycott

By David J. Garrow

Vol. 7, No. 5, 1985, pp. 21-27

Jo Ann Gibson Robinson moved to Montgomery, Alabama, in the late summer of 1949 to join the English Department at all-black Alabama State College. A thirty-three year old native of Culloden, Georgia, twenty-five miles from Macon, she was the twelfth and youngest child of Owen Boston Gibson and Dollie Webb Gibson, landowning black farmers who prospered until Owen Gibson died when Jo Ann was six years old. As the older children moved away, operating the farm grew more difficult for Mrs. Gibson, who eventually sold the property and moved into Macon with her younger offspring. Jo Ann graduated from high school there as the class valedictorian, and went on to earn her undergraduate degree at Fort Valley State College, the first member of her family to complete college. She took a public school teaching job in Macon and married Wilbur Robinson, but the marriage, heavily burdened by the death in infancy of their first and only child, lasted only a short time. Twelve months later, after five years of teaching in Macon, Jo Ann Robinson moved to Atlanta to take an M.A. in English at Atlanta University and then accepted a teaching position at Mary Allen College in Crockett, Texas. After one year there, Mrs. Robinson received a better offer from Alabama State, and moved to Montgomery.

Mrs. Robinson was an enthusiastic teacher and responded energetically to her new position at Alabama State. She also became an active member of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, which many Alabama State professors attended, and she joined the Women’s Political Council, a black professional women’s civic group that one of her English Department colleagues, Mrs. Mary Fair Burks, had founded three years earlier when the local League of Women Voters had refused to integrate.

It was a blissful fall, Mrs. Robinson later remembered. “I loved every minute of it. ” Just prior to Christmas she made preparations to visit some relatives in Cleveland for the holidays. Storing her car in a garage, she boarded a Montgomery City Lines public bus for the ride to Dannelly Field, the municipal airport. Only two other passengers were aboard, and Mrs. Robinson, immersed in holiday thoughts, took a seat towards the front of the bus. Suddenly, however, she was roused from her thoughts about her family by angry words from the driver, who was ordering her to get up.

“He was standing over me, saying ‘Get up from there! Get up from there,’ with his hand drawn back,” she later recalled.

Shaken and frightened, Mrs. Robinson fled from the bus. “I felt like a dog. And I got mad, after this was over, and I realized that I was a human being, and just as intelligent and far more trained than that bus driver was. But I think he wanted to hurt me, and he did . . . I cried all the way to Cleveland.”

That experience convinced Mrs. Robinson that the ‘Women’s Political Council ought to target Montgomery’s segregated bus seating for immediate attention. “It was then that I made up . . . my mind that whatever Icould add to that organization that would help to bring that practice down, I would do it,” Mrs. Robinson recalled. “When I came back, the first thing I did was to call a meeting . . . and tell

---

Page 22

them what had happened.”

Only then did Mrs. Robinson learn that her experience was far from unique, that dozens of other black citizens, primarily women, had suffered similar abuse from Montgomery bus drivers. Over the previous few years several black women, Mrs. Geneva Johnson, Mrs. Viola White, and Miss Katie Wingfield, had been arrested and convicted for refusing to give up their seats. Earlier in 1949, two young children, visiting from the north and unfamiliar with Montgomery’s practice of reserving the first ten seats on each bus for white riders only, even if black passengers were forced to stand over vacant seats, also were hauled in for refusing a driver’s command to surrender their seats. Some oldtimers in Montgomery remembered how the black community had mounted a boycott in the summer of 1900, when the city had first imposed segregated seating on Montgomery’s street cars, a boycott that had won a refinement of the city ordinance so as to specify that no rider had to surrender a seat unless another was available. Nonetheless, drivers often made black riders who were seated just behind the whites-only section get up and stand so that all white passengers could sit.

Mrs. Burks thought black toleration of those seating practices and other driver abuse, such as forcing black passengers to pay their dime at the front, and then get off and board the bus through the rear, side door, was scandalous. “Everyone would look the other way. Nobody would acknowledge what was going on,” Mrs. Burks remembered. “It outraged me that this kind of conduct was going on,” and that so far no black community organizations had done anything about it.

Black activism did exist in Montgomery, even though it had not yet focused upon bus conditions, despite the widespread complaints. Several years earlier Arthur Madison, a New York lawyer who came from one of black Montgomery’s most prominent families, had returned home and tried to stimulate black voter registration, but white legal harassment had forced him to return to New York. The outspoken pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Rev. Vernon Johns, who had come to Montgomery in 1948, regularly denounced the bus situation, but many blacks viewed Johns as too unpredictable and idiosyncratic to assume a leadership role in the community. The brutal rape of a black teenager, Gertrude Perkins, by two white policemen earlier in 1949had led Rev. Solomon S. Seay to repeated efforts to obtain justice in the case, but white officials had brushed off his complaints.

Another visible black activist was Pullman porter Edgar Daniel Nixon, a member of A. Philip Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and a local leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NMCP). Nixon served as Alabama state president of the NMCP in 1948-1949, and also devoted much time to his Alabama Progressive Democratic Association, a black alternative to a state Democratic Party that continued to discourage black participation despite the 1940s’ demise of the “white primary.” Nixon regularly mounted one initiative after another; in 1954 he succeeded in winning 42 percent of the vote in a losing race for a seat on the party’s Montgomery County Democratic Executive Committee, a tribute not only to the more than 1,500 black voters that Nixon and other activists like businessman Rufus A. Lewis had helped register, but also to the grudging respect that many whites felt for Nixon’s tireless efforts.

Lewis, a well-known former football coach at Alabama State College, had been especially active not only in encouraging black registration but also in trying to unify black Montgomery’s civic activism. Although some colleagues viewed Lewis and Nixon as low-key rivals for top leadership, Lewis’ Citizens Club served as a regular hang-out for politically-minded blacks; his Citizens Steering Committee, formed in the fall of 1952, looked to find ways to exert some black political influence over Montgomery’s city policies.

Equally if not more important to the political life of black Montgomery than Nixon’s Progressive Democrats, the NMCP branch, or Lewis’ Citizens Committee, however, was Mrs. Burks and Mrs. Robinson’s Women’s Political Council. By the early 1950s Robinson had succeeded Burks as president, and the core membership of regularly active participants numbered at least thirty women such as Thelma Glass, Mary Cross, Irene West, Euretta Adair, Elizabeth Arrington, and Zoeline Pierce, who were either faculty members at Alabama State, teachers in the local, segregated public schools, or wives of relatively well-to-do black professional men. More than either Nixon’s circle or Lewis’, these middle-class women were the most numerous, most reform-minded group of black civic activists in Montgomery.

The first notable opportunity for black political influence to make itself felt came in November, 1953, in a special election to fill one vacant seat on the three-member Montgomery City Commission. The black-supported victor, Dave Birmingham, a genuine racial liberal, won fifty-three percent of the vote in a contest that involved little discussion of race and allowed Birmingham to construct an electoral coalition of blacks and lower-class whites.

Impressed by their success in representing the balance of power, black civic activists, led by the WPC, met in late 1953 with Birmingham and his two racially moderate colleagues, Mayor W. A. “Tacky” Gayle and George Cleere, to voice three complaints about the racial practices of the municipally regulated and chartered bus company, Montgomery City Lines. Blacks having to stand over empty, white only seats on crowded buses was a constant insult and problem. So

---

Page 23

was most drivers’ practice of forcing blacks to board through the rear door. Additionally, while buses stopped at every block in white sections of town, it was only every other block in black neighborhoods.

The three commissioners, Birmingham in particular, listened politely, but nothing came of the session.

Undaunted, Mrs. Robinson, who served as the WPC and black community’s principal spokesperson, obtained another audience with the commission in March, 1954, and reiterated the three complaints. The WPC, which historian of Montgomery J. Mills Thornton III has accurately termed “the most militant and uncompromising organ of the black community” in pre-1956 Montgomery, also presented the commission with specific details of driver abuse of black passengers. This time the city officials agreed to alter the bus company’s practice of stopping only at alternate blocks in black areas, but they and the city’s lawyers insisted there was no way, under Alabama’s state segregation statutes, that any changes or improvements could be made in bus seating practices. Robinson and other black representatives contended that elimination of the reserved, whites only seats, and a halt to the practice of making blacks surrender seats to whites on overcrowded buses would eliminate the most serious problems, but the white officials rejected the WPC’s proposal that the front-to-back seating of whites, and back-to-front seating of blacks, with no one having to stand over an empty seat or give one up after being seated, would in no way offend the state segregation law.

Mrs. Robinson and her colleagues were unhappy over the city is refusal to show any flexibility. In early May, the Commission did approve the hiring of Montgomery’s first four black police officers, but many black Montgomerians attached greater importance to the ongoing prosecution of a black teenager, Jeremiah Reeves, who faced the death penalty for the supposed rape of a white woman in 1951.

Mrs. Robinson was already thinking of how to put more pressure on the Commission to improve bus conditions when, on May 17, came a news announcement that strengthened her determination. The United States Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka and five companion cases challenging racially segregated public schools, ruled that governmentally-mandated school segregation was unconstitutional and that the sixty-year-old doctrine of “separate but equal” was no longer valid.

Four days after the landmark Brown decision, Mrs. Robinson typed a letter to Montgomery’s Mayor Gayle, with a copy to Montgomery City Lines manager J. H. Bagley. She, thanked Gayle for the March meeting and for the change in the buses’ alternate block stopping practice, but reiterated the WPC’s great unhappiness at the ongoing seating policies. Then she politely voiced the threat she had quietly been recommending to her black leadership colleagues.

Mayor Gayle, three-fourths of the riders of these public conveyances are Negroes. y Negroes did not patronize them, they could not possibly operate.

More and more of ourr people are already arrangin with neighbors and friends to ride to keep from being insulted and humiliated, by bus drivers. There has been talk from twenty-five or more local organizations of planning a city-wide boycott of buses. We, sir, do not feel that forceful measures are necessary in bargaining for a convenience which is right for all bus passengers. We, the Council, believe that when this matter has been put before you and the Commissioners, that agreeable terms can be met in a quiet and unostensible manner to the satisfaction of all concerned.

Mrs. Robinson pointedly noted that many Southern cities, including Mobile, already were using the front-to-back, back-to-front segregated seating plan that Montgomery refused to implement. “Please consider this plea, and if possible, act favorably upon it,” she concluded, “for even now plans are being made to ride less, or not at all, on our buses. We do not want this.”

Despite the extremely gentle and tactful language she employed in her letter to Gayle, Mrs. Robinson was hoping that black community sentiment would support a bus boycott to force the Commission’s hand. Another meeting with the white officials on June 1 registered no progress, but Mrs. Robinson found only modest interest in her boycott idea throughout much of the black community, and placed the idea on a back burner for the time being.

Next to bus conditions, the second civic concern troubling the WPC and other black activists was the decidedly inferior quality of the segregated parks and recreation facilities; available to black Montgomerians. One step the WPG had identified as a partial remedy was the appointment of a black member, such as WPC member Mrs. Irene West, to the

---

Page 24

city’s Parks and Recreation Board. Mrs. Robinson voiced this request at a January, 1955, meeting of the City Commission, but despite supportive comments from Birmingham and Mayor Gayle, nothing happened. Instead, attention turned to the upcoming mid-March city elections, and a public candidates’ forum that E. D. Nixon’s Progressive Democratic Association held on February 23 at the black Ben Moore Hotel.

All three incumbents, plus their major challengers, Harold McGlynn for Gayle, Frank Parks for Cleere, and Sam Sterns and Clyde Sellers for Birmingham, attended the first-of-its-kind event and faced questions about bus conditions as well as the Parks and Recreation appointment. A majority of the contenders endorsed a black appointment to the Parks Board, while others avoided any specifics on either topic. Although the open soliciting of black votes by so many white candidates seemed impressive, one of Birmingham’s challengers, former Auburn University football star and state highway patrol officer Clyde Sellers, saw the convocation, and Birmingham’s sympathy for black concerns, as just the opening that was needed to cut into Birmingham’s previously solid white working class electoral support.

Sellers’ strategic desire to make race an election issue got a coincidental boost on March 2 when a fifteen-year-old black girl, Claudette Colvin, refused to give up her bus seat, well toward the rear of the vehicle, so as to accommodate an overflow of newly-boarding white passengers.

Police officers were able to drag Colvin from the bus only with considerable force. The incident immediately sent the black leadership into action. Mrs. Rosa Parks, a seamstress and long time NAACP member who was adult advisor to the NAACP Youth Council, to which Claudette Colvin belonged, immediately began soliciting financial assistance for the her legal defense, as did Mrs. Parkst good friend Virginia Foster Durr, one of Montgomery’s few racially liberal whites.

Rufus Lewis’ newly formed Citizen’s Coordinating Committee, yet another leadershipunity organization which included E. D. Nixon and the WPC’s Thelma Glass among its top officers, quickly sent out a mimeographed letter, “To Friends of Justice and Human Rights,” seeking Colvin’s acquittal, a reprimand of the bus driver involved, and clarification of the oft-ignored city provision that no rider had to give up a seat unless another was available.

Nixon and Mrs. Robinson, thinking that Colvin’s case might supply an opportunity for a court challenge to the constitutionality of Montgomery’s bus seating practices, interviewed the young woman, but concluded that her personal situation and the particulars of the arrest precluded using the incident as a test case. Robinson and others met, unsuccessfully, with city and bus company officials to seek dismissal of the charges.

Claudette Colvin was quickly convicted for both assault and battery and violating the segregation statute at a March 18 trial, only three days before the city election. When Colvin’s attorney, young Montgomery native Fred Gray–who had been one of Mrs. Robinson’s Alabama State students before attending law school in Ohio–filed notice of appeal, the prosecutor indicated that he would pursue only the assault and battery charge, not the segregation issue.

On the 21st, Sellers narrowly bested Dave Birmingham, who declined a possible runoff because of bad health, while Frank Parks, who had received black support, defeated Cleere. Disappointed both by the Colvin outcome and Birmingham’s loss, the black leadership hoped for other opportunities.

In June, Mrs. Robinson, Gray and other black representatives met once again with city and bus company officials. Despite Gray’s observations about Mobile’s practices, the white officials, particularly bus company lawyer Jack Crenshaw, adhered firmly to their contention that no changes could be made legally in bus seating practices. Popular complaints about the seating situation and driver abuse remained at high levels, but no further organized initiatives were undertaken.

One relative newcomer to the city, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., who had succeeded Vernon Johns as pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in mid-1954 and accompanied Robinson’s delegation to the early March meeting with the city, attributed a good part of the inaction to what he later termed “an appalling lack of unity among the leaders” and a “crippling factionalism.” More of a problem than competition among the active leaders, King thought, was the pervasive indifference of many middleclass black Montgomerians to any political or civic concern. Economic vulnerability and fear of white retribution understandably inhibited some, but “too much of the inaction was due to sheer apathy,” King later wrote.

Although Mrs. Robinson still husbanded her hope that the WPC could at some point launch a boycott of the buses, the late summer and fall of 1955 passed with relative quiet; the October 21 arrest of one black woman, Mrs. Mary Louise Smith, for refusing to surrender her seat became known to most of the black leadership only several months later.

On Thursday evening December 1, Mrs. Rosa Parks, the NAACP activist who had assisted Claudette Colvin’s defense, felt tired and weary from her seamstress work at the Montgomery Fair department store when she boarded one of the Cleveland Avenue route buses at Montgomery’s Court Square for her regular ride home. One stop later, after taking a seat in the first row behind the ten whites-only seats, Mrs. Parks and the three other black passengers in that row were ordered by the driver, J. F. Blake, to get up so that one newly-boarding white man–who could not be accommodated in the front section–could sit. Although the other three people complied, Mrs. Parks silently refused, and two police officers were summoned to place her under arrest and transport her to the city jail.

Word of the incident spread quickly. E. D. Nixon called the jail to learn about the charges, only to be refused an answer by the officer on duty. Knowing that attorney Gray was out of town for the day, Nixon called white lawyer Clifford Durr, who like his wife Virginia, already knew Mrs. Parks. The Durrs and Nixon drove to the jail to sign the bond for Mrs. Parks’ release. A Monday trial date was set for the charge of violating the city’s segregated seating ordinance.

While attorney Durr explained to Nixon and Mrs. Parks that they could win her acquittal since there had been no other seat available for her to take when driver Blake demanded hers, Nixon argued that the arrest of Mrs. Parks,

---

Page 25

a widely-known and well-respected person in black Montgomery, was precisely the opportunity the black leadership had long-awaited for challenging the entire bus seating situation. With some hesitance Mrs. Parks agreed, and Nixon went home to plan his next steps.

Later that evening Fred Gray returned to town, learned of Mrs. Parks’ arrest and immediately called Mrs. Robinson, who he knew to be the “real moving force” among the black leadership. Mrs. Robinson in turn called Nixon. They quickly agreed that the moment for launching the long-pondered boycott of the buses was at hand.

Nixon would make the calls to set up a black leadership meeting Friday evening; Mrs. Robinson and her WPC colleagues would immediately start producing and distributing handbills calling upon black Montgomerians to stay off the buses on Monday, December 5. “We had planned the protest long before Mrs. Parks was arrested,” Mrs. Robinson later emphasized. “There had been so many things that happened that the black women had been embarrassed over, and they were ready to explode.” They knew immediately that “Mrs. Parks had the caliber of character we needed to get the city to rally behind us.”

Wasting not a moment7 Mrs. Robinson sat down at her typewriter with a mimeograph stencil and typed the same message on the sheet several times:

This is for Monday, December 5, 1955

Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown into jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person to sit down.

It is the second time since the Claudette Colbert (sic) case that a Negro woman has been arrested for the same thing This has to be stopped.

Negroes have rights, too, for if Negroes did not ride the buses, they could not operate. Three-fourths of the riders are Negroes, yet we are arrested, or have to stand over empty seats. If we do not do something to stop these arrests, they will continue. The next time it may be you, or your daughter, or mother.

This woman ‘s case will come up on Monday. We are, therefore, asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial. Don ‘t ride the buses to work, to town, to school, or anywhere on Monday.

You can afford to stay out of school for one day if you have no other way to go except by bus.

You can also afford to stay out of town for one day. If you work, take a cab, or walk. But please, children and grown-ups, don’t ride the bus at all on Monday. Please stay off of all buses Monday.

The stencil complete. Mrs. Robinson called one of her Alabama State colleagues, business department chairman John Cannon, who had access to the school’s mimeograph room and readily agreed to join her for a long night of work. By daybreak they had run off thousands of sheets, cut them into single copies, and organized the brief flyers into batches for distribution to dozens of WPC members and their friends. After teaching her first morning class, Mrs. Robinson and two students set out in her car, dropping off the bundles to helpers all across Montgomery. Thousands upon thousands of the leaflets went from hand-to-hand throughout black Montgomery.

While the WPC’s network put the boycott into effect, E. D. Nixon made dozens of phone calls to assemble the black leadership. Like Robinson and her WPC colleagues, Nixon knew that for their protest to win mass support, the city’s ministers, not always in the forefront to black civic initiatives, would have to be convinced to give the effort their full and active support. The WPC’s post-haste distribution of the announcements, Robinson and Nixon knew, ought to short-circuit any arguments that now was not a good time for a boycott, even before they could be voiced. As Fred Gray later emphasized, “the ministers didn’t know anything about those leaflets until they appeared.”

Although the Friday evening leadership caucus had some difficulties in overcoming the autocratic style of one black pastor, agreement was reached on further publicizing the Monday boycott and on holding a Monday evening mass rally to assess the first day’s success. The leadership would meet again Monday afternoon to plan the rally, and amidst scores of weekend phone conversations between the various black activists, a consensus gradually emerged that perhaps a new, all-encompassing community organization ought to be created to oversee this unique effort.

Mrs. Robinson and the WPC membership knew that with the protest going public, their state-payroll positions at Alabama State, and the budgetary vulnerability of the college to white political retaliation, required that they

---

Page 26

remain in the background. As Mrs. Burks later noted in explaining why the origin of the boycott leaflets was treated as a closely-guarded secret well into the 1960s, “the full extent of our activities was never revealed because of the fact that we worked at State.”

Monday morning the amazing success of the protest was readily apparent as onlooker after onlooker observed no more than a handful of black bus riders on Montgomery’s largely empty vehicles.

Also on Monday, Mrs. Parks, in a very brief trial, was convicted of failing to obey-the driver’s command to surrender- her seat. Hundreds of black Montgomerians, in a remarkable scene, gathered at the courthouse to show their support. That afternoon, when the black leadership assembled, Rufus Lewis–to be certain that leadership did not fall into unskilled hands–quickly nominated his pastor, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., to be president of their new community group, the Montgomery Improvement Association. A surprised King hesitantly accepted, and the leadership agreed to make continuation of the boycott beyond their one day success, contingent upon mass sentiment at the evening rally.

A huge and enthusiastic turnout for the evening event quickly and convincingly answered that question. Now the community leaders turned their efforts to organizing substitute means of transportation for the thousands of black Montgomerians eager to forsake a transportation system that most had assumed was an unpleasant but unavoidable fact of daily life.

Thursday morning, with the boycott four days old, more than half a dozen MIA representatives, including King, Robinson and Gray, met with city and bus company officials under the auspices of the bi-racial Alabama Council for Human Relations. Even though King emphasized to the whites that “we are not out to change the segregation laws,” but only to win the driver courtesy and first come, first seated front-to-back and back-to-front seating policy that the WPC had been requesting for well over a year, the white officials would not budge from their insistent refusal that no changes in seating practices could be implemented.

The whiles’ complete intransigence, in the face of a black community effort of such impressive proportions, surprised the black leadership, who had entered into those: first negotiations believing that their modest demands ought to make for a quick settlement. Since “our demands were moderate,” King later recalled, “I had assumed that they would be granted with little question.” Only in the wake of that unproductive meeting did the MIA leaders begin to realize that it was the very fact of their challenge, and not the particulars of their demands, that had meaning for white Montgomery.

To the city and bus company officials such as Commissioner Clyde Sellers and attorney Jack Crenshaw, the real issue was not which precise seating plan was legally permissible, but the defense of segregation’s policies as an exemplar of the underlying doctrine of white racial supremacy. On that question no compromise could be possible; there either was superiority or there wasn’t. “They feared that anything they gave would be viewed by us as just a start,” Mrs. Robinson later reflected. “And you know, they were probably right.”

An often shy and resolutely self-effacing person. Jo Ann Gibson Robinson is now almost seventy and lives quietly b. herself in retirement in Los Angeles. Only with some gentle encouragement will she acknowledge herself as “the instigator of the movement to start that boycott.” Even then, however, she seeks to avoid any special credit for herself or any other single individual. Very simply, she says, “the black women did it.” And she’s right.

Sources and Suggested Further Reading

First and foremost, my understanding of Montgomery is based upon my personal interviews with many of the principals–Mrs. Robinson, Mrs. Burks, Mr. Nixon, Mr. Lewis, attorney Gray, Rev. Seay, Mrs. Durr and the late Jack Crenshaw, as well as Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy, Juanita J. Abernathy, Robert D. Nesbitt, Robert Williams, Rev. Robert S. Graetz, Maude Ballou, Lillie Armstrong Thomas (now Brown), Elliot Finley, Rev. Robert E. Hughes, and Jack Shows. I have also benefitted greatly from the interviews with some of the principals that are on deposit in the oral history collections of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University. Washington, DC; the Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change, Atlanta; and the Highlander Center, New Market, TN, as well as from the interviews that have been shared with me by David Levering Lewis, Milton Viorst, and Worth Long and Randall Williams. I also strongly recommend the Statewide Oral History Program collection of interviews, compiled in 1973,by the Alabama Center for Higher Education, copies of which are on deposit at all of Alabama’s traditionally black colleges.

---

Page 27

There are a number of invaluable, unpublished manuscripts which shed crucial light on the boycott, particularly Mrs. Robinson’s “The Montgomery Story,” which the University of Tennessee Press will publish later this year, and Ralph D. Abernathy’s “The Natural History of a Social Movement: The Montgomery Improvement Association,” a 1958 M.A. thesis in Sociology at Atlanta University. Also extremely valuable are Sheldon Hackney and Ray Arsenault’s “The Montgomery Bus Boycott: A Case Book”; Peter C. Mohr, “Journal Out of Egypt: The Development of Negro Leadership in Alabama from Booker T. Washington to Martin Luther King,” B.A. thesis, Princeton University, 1958; Thomas }. Gilliam, “The Montgomery Bus Boycott of 19551956,” M.A. thesis, Auburn University, 1968; Gordon L. Hartstein, “The Montgomery Bus Protest 1955-1956: What Precipitated, Sustained, and Prolonged the Boycott,” B.A. thesis, Princeton University, 1973; Lamont H. Yeakey, “The Montgomery, Alabama Bus Boycott, 1955-1956,” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1979; Steven M. Milner, “The Montgomery Bus Boycott: A Case Study in the Emergence and Career of a Social Movement,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1981; and Donald H. Smith, “Martin Luther King, Jr.: Rhetorician of Revolt,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1964.

Among published works, the serious student will benefit from not only chapter two of Dr. King’s Stride Toward Freedom (New York: Harper Bros., 1958), but also Preston Valien, “The Montgomery Bus Protest as a Social Movement,” in Jitsuichi Masuoka Valien, eds., Race Relations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), pp. 112-27; Aleine Austin, “Behind the Montgomery Bus Boycott,” Monthly Review 8 (September 1956): 163-67; and Ralph H. Hines and James E. Pierce, “Negro Leadership After the Social Crisis: An Analysis of Leadership Changes in Montgomery, Alabama,” Phylon 26 (Summer 1965): 162-72. Far and away the most valuable and insightful published analysis of the protest, and the place where anyone with further interest should begin, is J. Mills Thornton, III’s “Challenge and Response in the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56,” Alabama Review 33 (July 1980): 163-235.

David J. Garrow is associate professor of political science at the City College of New York and the City University Graduate School. He is the author of Protest at Selma (Yale,1978)and The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr. (Norton, l 981), as well as the forthcoming Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 1955-1968, which William Morrow Co. will publish in the fall of l986.

Palmer Weber, 1914-1986

By Patricia Sullivan

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

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

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

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

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

---

Page 6

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

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

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

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

---

Page 7

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of Movements and a Man.

By David Chalmers

Vol. 9, No. 3, 1987, pp. 20-22

Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. By David J. Garrow. (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1986. $800 pp. 19.96 [sic] )

Society castrates its saints and turns them into idealized plaster-cast statuary. In order to live with them, we trivialize their lives and dilute their message to the point that they no longer make us uncomfortable. St. Francis, whose radical poverty challenged the wealth and power of the Church, became the kindly friend of the birds and animals, and the Martin Luther King of memorial orations and student papers offers an unthreatening message of love and non-violence. In the Epilogue to his Pulitzer-prize winning account of King and the civil rights struggle, David Garrow approvingly quotes Vincent Harding’s complaint that King is being turned into a “rather smoothed-off respectable national hero.” However, if anything threatens to crack the plaster of that respectability, it is not King’s radicalism, but his humanity. As the recent struggles of presidential candidates, TV evangelists, the United States Marines, and the Roman Catholic Church remind us, there are no easy answers to coming to terms with human sexuality, and there is always the danger of discrediting information falling into unfriendly hands, in King’s case, the FBI which set out to destroy him.

At the core of western Christianity is the Jesus who is both suffering human and son of God, and a deep religious conviction was the mainstay of King’s thirteen-year public ministry. King was twenty-six in 1955 when he was called to lead the bus boycott in Montgomery; when he was killed in Memphis, he was thirty-nine. It was in Montgomery, sitting alone in prayer at his kitchen table, that he found himself in the voice of Jesus which told him to fight on and promised “never to leave me, never to leave me alone. No never alone.” From that vision, which echoed through the rest of his life, he came to accept the role from which he realized he could never escape and that he foresaw would lead to his death. This acceptance is central to his life and the account of that ministry which David Garrow appropriately entitles, Bearing the Cross. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

It is a monumental piece of research, based on more than seven hundred interviews (over two hundred conducted by Garrow himself), tens of thousands of pages of material obtained from the government under the Freedom of Information Act (including hundreds of King’s tapped phone conversations), and the careful search of archival and secondary sources. For years, David Garrow, an associate professor of political science at the City University of New York, has been the best-informed and most thoughtful historian of the Southern civil rights movement, freely sharing his work with other interested students. His previous studies on Protest at Selma (1978) and The FBl and Martin Luther King, Jr. (1981) also helped prepare the ground for Bearing the Cross.

Although the Pulitzer award was for biography rather than in the history category, a shift made by the governing board, Garrow is basically interested only in King’s life in the civil rights movement. Until his death, first the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) and then the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) were his life, and his, theirs. What was going on in Washington, Mississippi, Chicago, in the King family, and elsewhere, are presented only from the angle of his participation; the rest simply lies outside of the scope of Garrow’s book.

From this “movement book,” much can be learned about movements for social change. Overshadowing everything else is how difficult it was to keep going. Unlike a corporation, political party, or government, it did not sell a product candidate, or the exercise of public power. There was no

---

Page 21

firmly institutionalized structure and source of income. The SCLC was essentially one man; King was its policy, image, and, often, funding. He had to make the decisions, give the word on the strategy of the campaigns and the tactics in the streets, reconcile the conflicts within SCLC and between it and SNCC, the NAACP, and the power structures of Birmingham, Chicago, and Washington. Often the fees for his speeches were SCLC’s major source of income. As a result, he was continuously in motion, not just in the South but across the country, speaking, preaching, fund raising, planning, conferring, negotiating, persuading. Mixed in with these were marches, court appearances, jail time, and violence. He was the recipient of blows, missiles, and a stab wound close to the heart, death threats, and pressure from the FBI. The combination of all of these repeatedly brought him to the point of physical and emotional exhaustion.

The civil rights movement was threatening not only to white supremacy, but to black arrangements as well. This meant the hostility of the NAACPs Roy Wilkins as well as the National Baptist Convention’s Joseph Jackson. Cooperation often proved difficult for black ministers more accustomed to domination over their own congregations. The jealousy of Ralph Abernathy, the prickly independence of Fred Shuttlesworth, the imperiousness of Wyatt Walker, the uncertainty about Jesse Jackson’s motives, the alienation of E.D. Nixon and Rosa Parks, and the hostility of Ella Baker produced problems, and there was always conflict between top staffers to be addressed. In his emotionally demanding world, King was closest to his old Montgomery friend Abernathy and particularly came to depend on Andrew Young and Stanley Levison.

Levison’s recent ties with the Communist Party were the occasion for FBI surveillance that wrapped itself around and sought to destroy King’s life. Despite warnings from the Justice Department and the White House, King maintained his relationship with Levison. By Garrow’s account, Levison served King well as editor, advisor, and friend, showing no signs of a separate agenda.

---

Page 22

After Selma, Levison summed up for King the limitations that the civil rights movement faced. The American people were “not ready for a radical restructuring of the economic order.” While they would react strongly against “shocking violence and gross injustice,” they were not prepared to make deep changes in order to free the Negro, and the movement had to act within this limit. It was King who was becoming more radical than Levison, but the question was always how to proceed. He never deviated from his commitment to non-violence, but he came to realize that it had to be a political strategy as well as moral persuasion. By the mid-sixties, no one any longer talked about “redeeming the soul” of the South or of America. The concern was with the power to make changes.

The failure of the Albany campaign in 1962 had been a particularly instructive experience. The key to change was “federal commitment” and provoking violence was the essential way to force its hand. A “Bull” Connor or a Sheriff Jim Clark was necessary to dramatize the situation, bring tensions to the surface, reach a national government that placed “order” above social justice. Action had to be focused. Specific targets were necessary. Attacking segregation in general was too broad. Where voting strength was lacking, it was a mistake to go after the politicians. The economic power structure was more crucial and the local business community could be frightened by the threat of black disorder. Not only were school children used as demonstrators in Birmingham, but crowds of black spectators were liable to erupt into brick and bottle throwing when the police used dogs and firehoses on demonstrators. This and masses of unrestrained black teenagers downtown had more of an impact on businessmen than peaceful picketing and sit-ins.

Coming off of the failure in Albany, the lessons of Birmingham were those of better planning and preparation, the importance of selecting specific goals, and the power of economic boycott, youthful protest, and spontaneous participants. Both King and the Kennedys became convinced that legislation was necessary. The murder of Medgar Evers, on the night of the President’s television address against segregation, surely underlined that persuasion alone was not enough. Protest tactics alone were not enough. Political action and coalitions were necessary for change.

Although the crucial audience had become national, the battle for that attention had to be fought locally. This meant local people, local organizations, and local goals. Despite appearances, local unity was often fragile or lacking; middle-class black people and college students were often hesitant to take part. One of the real achievements in Selma was the participation of the school teachers. Local campaigns could not be sustained for very long periods. There had to be a way to convince local people that it had all been worthwhile. Focus on two or three points could produce a sense of victory, so the campaign could wind up and move on elsewhere. It was sometimes difficult for local people to understand the broader symbolic consequences of small, tangible gains. The irresolvable conflict between King and SNCC was that SCLC was using local turf to fight national battles within the system, while SNCC’s young activists sought to develop grassroots organization and power. SCLC’s strength was the person of Martin Luther King, Jr., not participatory democracy, and King’s jail time was a strategic resource, not an everyday tactic.

Like everything else, the role of the press was ambiguous. Its coverage was the essential gateway to the national scene, but it fed on conflict, praised Albany Police Chief Laurie Prichett for “remarkable restraint” when he didn’t produce any, and undercut civil rights strategy by sharing their inside information with him. The agendas of the press were not always favorable; when King committed himself against the Vietnam War, it was not only Life Magazine but also the New York Times and the Washington Post that denounced him.

For King and SCLC, the problem was always “What next?” As he went north to Chicago to agitate about jobs, housing, and education, he was increasingly concerned about the problems of wealth and class in American society. By failing to speak out against the Vietnam War, he believed that he was shirking his responsibility. Racism, militarism, and economic exploitation were all tied in together. His radicalism and his pessimism grew together. The civil rights movement was too middle class and America as a nation had never committed itself to economic justice. The leaders who preached non-violence through the democratic system were “not given enough victories,” but still within its context he searched for a new strategy. Although no one was really enthusiastic over it, he decided on a “poor people’s campaign.” Waves of the “poor and disinherited” would descend on Washington, practice civil disobedience in the streets, and lobby and pressure Congress. Tired, drained, increasingly melancholy, he more and more referred back to his kitchen vision in Montgomery, and talked of his own death. A march in support of striking garbagemen in Memphis broke down into a riot, so King went back again to Memphis, to Golgotha, to show that it could be carried off nonviolently.

David Chalmers is Distinguished Alumni Professor at the University of Florida and is author of Hooded Americanism, The History of the Ku Klux Klan. He is at work on a history of social change in the 1960s.

The Organization Behind the Man.

David Chalmers

Vol. 9, No. 3, 1987, p. 21

To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr. By Adam Fairclough. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987. 505 pp. Paper, $17.95. Cloth, $35.)

Arriving coincidentally with David Garrow’s overwhelming work on the same topic, this thoroughly researched, thoughtful, and well-written study by a British historian is likely to life under the shadow of being “the other book,” yet there is much that can be learned from it. Fairclough uses Garrow’s earlier writing, expresses appreciation for personal sharing, and does not basically disagree with his interpretation of King and what happened in and to the movement. The difference in emphasis is indicated by the ordering of the sub-titles. Garrow names King first, and Fairclough, the SCLC. Both authors are in agreement on King’s achievements, on the centrality of religion and non-violence in King’s life and King’s centrality in the SCLC, the collapse of the civil rights movement after the Voting Rights Act, and King’s growing radicalism, but Fairclough is writing organizational history, not biography.

Although recognizing housing as the “bedrock” of school and job segregation, neither author has much favorable to say about King’s 1966 campaign in Chicago, which may underline how difficult the basic problem was. In the face of white backlash, a hostile coalition in Congress, black nationalism, urban rioting, the Vietnam war, and the loss of presidential backing, there was little hope for new gains. Fairclough seems to suggest that King and the SCLC might have fared better by concentrating on voter registration and political organization, but the “movement phase” of change was probably over. Movements are hard to organize and difficult to maintain. It is not easy to repeatedly face possible injury, arrest and job loss, particularly when one has a family to support. People have other personal priorities and lives to live. Problems beyond the defeat of legal segregation were too deep to be touched by non-violent demonstration in the streets. Coalitions were fragile, and maintaining unity was difficult. Even during the “great days” in Birmingham, only about ten percent of the city’s black ministers actively supported the campaign.

Fairclough gives less importance to Birmingham than Garrow does and offers a more favorable picture of Birmingham minister Fred Shuttlesworth. He particularly admires the political sophistication of the older left activists Bayard Rustin, Ella Baker, and Stanley Levison, but even they had no real path to offer after the middle sixties.

Because of his focus on the organization, rather than King, Fairclough often gives a much broader picture of what was going on. He begins with a brief description of the bus boycotts in Baton Rouge and Tallahassee which set the scene for Montgomery and explains what went on during the fatal Memphis garbage strike in 1968. He offers useful thumbnail biographical sketches of James Bevel, Wyatt Walker, Harry Wachtel, James Lawson, Andrew Young, Hosea Williams, C.T. Vivian and other movement leaders, and he carries the story through the Abernathy years after King’s death. In summing up, Fairclough comes back to King again. Desegregation and the ballot did not end discrimination and poverty, but it did knock away major props of institutionalized white supremacy and helped black people achieve dignity. With idealism, dedication, and courage, Martin Luther King, Jr., understood the history and culture, and expressed the aspirations of black Southerners. “SCLC itself was far more than King,” Fairclough concludes, “but his death revealed how completely he dominated it through intellect, personality, moral example, and organizational skill.”

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

By Patricia Sullivan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

Page 30

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

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

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

---

Page 31

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

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

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

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

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

Patricia Sullivan teaches history at Emory University.

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

By Patricia Sullivan

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

Page 16

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

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

Tactics Previewed the Movement

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

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

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

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

---

Page 17

a trace of sarcasm, “very educational.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Women and the Civil Rights Movement: Roles Too Long Unexamined

By Sharron Hannon

Vol. 10, No. 6, 1988, pp. 4-5

The year 1988 wee a time for looking back. Twenty-five years ago a church was bombed in Birmingham, thousands marched on Washington and the President was shot in Dallas. Twenty years ago, assassins’ bullets felled Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. These are not happy anniversaries in our nation’s history but they must be marked.

“Those who cannot remember the peat are condemned to repeat it,” said philosopher George Santayana. That’s motivation enough to look back. But there are other compelling reasons.

We look back because history is cyclical and because you can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been. We look back, too, because we are disillusioned with the present. How did we get here, in this poet-Reagan era, about to install George Bush as our President far the next four years? What wrong turn did we take and when?

By searching the peat perhaps we’ll find pieces of the puzzle that we need to make sense of the world and our lives today.

But that will only tee possible if we look in the right places and ask the right questions. And we don’t do that. No, twenty-five years later, the burning unanswered question from the Sixties (to judge by the number of prime-time TV specials) is whether or not Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

Meanwhile, who is exploring what makes men and women put aside personal concerns for the collective goof, as so many civilrights activists did back then? Who is trying to figure out what confluence of personalities or events produced such a readiness for social action in the Sixties?

Fortunately, these questions aren’t being altogether ignored. In Atlanta in 1988, two conferences were held which explored such topics while providing a generous dose of the “herstory” of the civil rights movement. The first conference was sponsored by the Carter Center last February, the second by the King Center in October. Georgia State University co-sponsored both.

What’a the difference between history and herstory? A lot. The former focuses on the headlines, the big events, the men out in front of the crowds. The latter looks at the day-to-day workings of people’s lives, the behind-the-scene activities that produced the big events, and the women who, unheralded, carried them out.

The Carter Center conference was titled: “Women and the Constitution: A Bicentennial Perspective” and was wideranging in its scope. But an underlying theme was the interconnectedness of the civil rights and women’s rights movements. Coretta Scott King spoke on “The Civil Rights Movement’s Impact on Women’s Rights,” while Mary King tied the package together during the closing session. I sat in the audience with a friend from the University of Georgia, a well-read woman who works in women’s studies. During Mary King’a speech, she leaned over to me and said, “This woman is amazing! I can’t believe I’ve never heard of her before.” Ah, if only we knew more herstory. If only every school child in America grew up with stories of amazing’ women. Instead, we get these stories in bits and pieces–if at all. And we have to put the pieces together ourselves. I’ve been collecting pieces of the puzzle for ten years since moving to the South and getting actively involved in the women’s movement.

I started the search incredibly ignorant, having passed the summer of ’63 in sheer oblivion to national events. I was l6 years-old, had just gotten my driver’s license and had little else on my mind. Perhaps the images of marchers and police with dogs and fire hoses flickered past on our TV screen in a suburban Boston town, but I don’t remember them. It wasn’t until I was in college that I began to catch up with the civil rights movement.

The year was 1968 and I was attending Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., not exactly a hotbed of activity. But few campuses were untouched by the times. That spring the black students at Purdue–every last one of them, I believe, even the football players–marched to the administration building with bricks in hand. There they presented a fiat of demands and unfurled a banner reading, “Or the fire next time.”

It wee a powerful demonstration and as a wide-eyed reporter for the campus paper, I was significantly impressed. Especially by the fact that it had been largely organized by a female student, Linda Jo Mitchell.

Among the demands presented that day was a need for courses in Afro-American studies, and so it happened that the next fall Linda Jo Mitchell came to be teaching a course’ labeled Industrial Management 590A. The course had absolutely nothing to do with industrial management, met at night and was discontinued after one semester. But what a semester that was! Our class was composed of students and a few professors as well, and was integrated by sex, race and age. We read James Baldwin, Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., and had hot and heavy discussions that lasted well past our scheduled hour.

What I didn’t notice at the time was that all these authors were men. It wasn’t until almost twenty years later that I learned about women like Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer and the significant roles they played in those times. At the King Center conference, titled “Trailblazers and Torchbearers: Women in the Civil Rights Movement,” one participant noted: “This conference has done something I didn’t know needed to be done. Using the lens of memory, I look back and see women.”

Overlooking women in history is a shame. It denies half the population role models of courage. But it does more damage than that. It clouds our understanding of how things come to be. For when we overlook women, we overlook grassroots activism. And then we begin to think that the only way things happen is from the top down. And we sit and wait for a leader to come along and change things, relieved of the responsibility of doing anything ourselves. That’s not the lesson we should be taking from the Sixties.

I left both Atlanta women’s conferences inspired to take action. And with Black History Month in February and Women’s History Month in March, the time seems ripe: Let’s share stories of the women of the civil rights movement and learn from them. Fortunately, some of these women have been telling their stories lately. Does your local library have a copy of Mary King’s Freedom Song, (Quill, 1987) or JoAnn Robinson’s The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It, (University of Tennessee Press, 1987). If not, ask them to order these two intriguing memoirs.

Tell friends about these books. And let’s get herstory into the schools. The National Women’s History Project (P.O. Box 3716, Santa Rosa, CA 95402) is a great source for books and other materials for elementary through high school years. Looking through last year’s catalog, I spotted Selma, Lord, Selma about the girlhood memories of Sheyann Webb and Rachel West, and Ready From Within: Septima Clark and the Civil Rights Movement, a first-person narrative.

But let’s go beyond books. In our communities across the South, there are women with stories to tell. Let’s find them and listen to them and honor them. They have something to say to all of us.

Sharron Hannon is a freelance writer end former editor and publisher of Southern Feminist newspaper.