
          Palmer Weber, 1914-1986
          By Sullivan, PatriciaPatricia 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 

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, 

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
A&T 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 A&T
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.
          
        