On the Way to Change
OSHINSKY, DAVID M.
On the Way to Change Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South By John Egerton Knopf. 704 pp. $35.00. Reviewed by David M. Oshinsky Professor of...
...We must work, as never before, to cure them now.' Even today, Truman's motives are not entirely clear...
...Mrs...
...He demanded a Federal anti-lynching law and an end to segregation in public housing and employment...
...Yet it was one thing to understand this perversion, and quite another to confront it...
...Up until George went into the Army, he was a good Nigger...
...Roosevelt's part...
...As a politician, he could sense the growing impatience of black voters in key Northern states...
...In Washington, meanwhile, civil rights had become an issue of major concern...
...The trouble lay with the region's ruling elite—the handful of planters, businessmen and public officials who controlled matters through a strategy of racial division and electoral fraud...
...Unlike FDR, who had pandered to the racism of Southern politicians in order to get his programs through Congress, President Harry S. Truman gave fresh meaning to the Jeffersonian ideal that "all men are created equal...
...It had few major banks, little money for lending or investment, a handful of accredited colleges, one vital city (New Orleans), and three or four large book stores (all owned by Jews...
...Willis Smith ran a scurrilous campaign...
...Their world was one of distorted myths and memories, of glorious "lost causes," of chivalry, slavery and defeat...
...The results confirmed what some had suspected foryears: The White South was not about to voluntarily change its ways...
...No one disagreed...
...she said...
...This did not seem likely to change...
...Those left behind lived in squalid shacks without running water, indoor toilets, electricity, or window screens...
...They were willing to work for change on all issues except the one that mattered most—the issue of race...
...As a border state Southerner, he understood how the bugaboo of race had retarded economic growth and social development in his region...
...the COLORED ONLY signs were left squarely in place...
...It was true that Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists like Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Constitution, Jonathan Daniels of the Raleigh News & Observer, and Hodding Carter of the Greenville (Mississippi) Delta Democrat-Times had bravely opposed lynchings, religious fanaticism and the Ku Klux Klan...
...There had "never been such a gathering in the South, such a diverse convocation of progressives from every stratum of society," writes John Egerton in this elegant, immensely rewarding book...
...Race-mixing, with all the worst sexual and social and economic consequences, is a Communist plot masterminded in Moscow and carried out through the seemingly innocent offices of sympathizers and dupes and traitors like Frank Porter Graham," read one of Smith's broadsides...
...At last the battle had been joined...
...Reviewed by David M. Oshinsky Professor of history, Rutgers...
...Roosevelt did not challenge the seating arrangement...
...A young white boy had witnessed the Georgia shootings and told the local police...
...It was civil rights that got them killed...
...Mary M. Bethune, the heroic Southern black educator...
...And he said, 'Let me tell you something about them you don't know...
...Most accounts would paint a stirring picture of a boldly rebellious First Lady—some even had her defiantly placing her chair astraddle a chalk line in the aisle beside white and black segments of the audience...
...Tell us this in time...
...The problem, however, was that each one of these men believed that whites were superior, that blacks understood and accepted this "fact," and that a segregated society, providing equal facilities to both races, was preferable to an integrated one...
...author, "A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy " IN 1938 PRESIDENT Franklin D. Roosevelt declared the South "the nation's number one economic problem...
...Their ranks included Senator Claude Pepper of Florida...
...No one of influence did...
...His campaign literature referred to UNC as the "University of Negroes and Communists"?a phrase attributed to Smith's chief media adviser, a 28-year-old radio announcer named Jesse Helms...
...Segregation remained in force throughout the convention...
...In 1954, the Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision against public school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education...
...But when he came out, they thought they were as good as any white people.' That's what he told me...
...And they succeeded, largely, by linking civil rights to the other great issue of that troubled era—the fear of Communist subversion...
...Graham himself had turned her down with the explanation that the time was wrong for "a pop-ular referendum on the race issue...
...The answer to that question is not up to me but to the people of Alabama...
...I told him I didn't understand why...
...Then came World War II, and the emergence of a new, modern South...
...The paradox of the South," a Presidential task force reported in the 1930s, "is that while it is blessed by Nature with immense wealth, its people as a whole are the poorest in the country...
...If we are wrong?God Almighty is wrong...
...publisher Mark Ethridge of the Louisville Courier-Journal, the South's most liberal newspaper...
...In addition, the War itself became a crusade against the vile racism of Hitler and the Axis powers...
...Hunger and malnutrition were rampant...
...Critics called him the "Bilbonic Plague...
...Egerton's title comes from a speech delivered by William Faulkner, a native Mississippian, to the Southern Historical Association in 1955...
...The South lagged behind the nation in every imaginable respect...
...Nothing illustrated this perverse linkage more clearly than the 1950 senatorial race in North Carolina, pitting incumbent Frank Graham against challenger Willis Smith...
...If we are wrong—justice is a lie...
...In Alabama and Mississippi, blacks in military uniforms were beaten and lynched...
...There were some dissenters, of course...
...The white South dug in hard, determined not to change...
...He advocated better schools for blacks, better pay for black teachers, and the hiring of black policemen...
...An epidemic of random murder and mayhem" swept through the region in 1946, writes Egerton, "fueled by white fears that black veterans might become a revolutionary force, and that blacks in general would no longer stay 'in their place...
...More than half of the nation's bases and training camps were built in the South—a tribute to its cheap labor, balmy climate and inexpensive land...
...Its people earned less, produced less, killed more, and died younger than other Americans...
...In fact, Mrs...
...Once, referring to the prejudice of his good friend Jimmy Byrnes, Truman said: "Why does a South Carolinian hate to eat at a table with a Nigger...
...As expected, Truman faced stiff resistance from the Southern Congressional bloc...
...Here was the dilemma...
...As farm prices collapsed, andabru-tal drought turned parts of Texas and the upper South into a dust bowl, thousands of families were forced from the land...
...There was no medical care to speak of...
...Truman quickly desegregated the Armed Forces by Executive Order...
...James O. Eastland, Mississippi's junior Senator, accused the President of trying to "Harlemize" America, while Theodore G. Bilbo, Mississippi's senior Senator, introduced a bill to deport millions of blacks to Africa...
...Graham lost the election by 20,000 votes...
...The delegates knew what was wrong with the South, and they knew whom to blame...
...Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black of Alabama...
...The Great Depression had imposed a level of hardship upon the region that not even its long-suffering residents could stoically endure...
...The white conference delegates were Southerners first, and liberals second...
...A dedicated liberal, a longtime champion of labor unions, sharecroppers and underdogs in general, he had turned the Chapel Hill campus into the finest university in the South...
...It was true that educators like Frank Graham and politicians like Claude Pepper had spoken out against intolerance...
...In 1939, a supremely qualified black female had applied to the graduate program in sociology at Chapel Hill...
...For the sake of the sovereign South and its traditional way of life, these demons must be cast out and destroyed...
...He supported the right of blacks to vote, speaking out against the poll tax and the white primary...
...His people distributed a "cropped" photograph showing Graham's wife dancing with a black man...
...In the end, the Southern bloc tabled, filibustered or killed every piece of civil rights legislation that Truman proposed...
...In response to a warning from Birmingham's obscure young Police Commissioner, Eugene "Bull" Connor, the white and black delegates had segregated themselves on different sides of the auditorium...
...But her response to a question from the audience showed the true limits of her reach...
...As dissimilar as they [were], they all sought to make their region a healthier, better educated, better paying, less violent, more charitable, more equitable, more democratic place...
...And as a man of fundamental decency, he believed segregation to be demeaning and morally wrong...
...In rural Georgia, two black veterans and their wives were gunned down by a white mob whose leaders were well-known but never arrested...
...Between 1940 and 1945, the Federal government spent $ 10 billion there on military projects...
...Yet what made the new President so perplexing, says Egerton, was his odd "mixture of racist stereotyping and egalitarian thought...
...If we are wrong —Jesus of Nazareth was merely a Utopian dreamer and never came down to earth...
...A Mississippian was five times more likely to be illiterate than a Pennsylvanian, and 10 times more likely to take another person's life...
...to work and fight until justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream...
...Frank Porter Graham, president of the University of North Carolina...
...We cannot wait another decade or another generation to remedy the evils [of discrimination]," he told their annual convention in 1947...
...The so-called "Negro question" would have to be solved by others—by Federal intervention and by the black community itself...
...This failing was made painfully clear by the circumstances surrounding Eleanor Roosevelt's keynote address to the conference...
...It's prejudice, it doesn't make any sense, but it's there...
...At the Southern Conference for Human Welfare in 1938, the delegates had selected Graham, unanimously, to be their permanent chairman and spiritual leader...
...Many years later, he confronted one of the killers...
...At a small Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, a black Gandhi, 25 years old, addressed the frightened crowd: "If we are wrong—the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong...
...These] blacks had always worked hard...
...And we are determined...
...He became the first American President to address the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People...
...Most Southerners were resigned to their lot...
...Frank Graham represented the best that Southern white liberalism could offer...
...They were good people...
...In 1938 several thousand men and women, whites and blacks, gathered in Birmingham, Alabama, to launch the first meeting of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare...
...The First Lady spoke eloquently about her dream of a just nation in which "no one is pressed down by his brothers...
...and historian C. Vann Woodward, then a young professor at Georgia Tech...
...Defending segregation would be much harder now, if only because the country's returning black veterans were determined to gain the same freedoms they had fought for overseas...
...Most Southerners worked as tenants and dirt farmers, raising two inedible crops—cotton and tobacco—with mule power and endless sweat...
...A year later, abus boycott began...
...The "customs of the district"—white supremacy and racial segregation—were practiced as comfortably by Southern liberals as by everyone else...
...He fought bigotry his entire life...
...The public schools barely functioned because education was still considered a privilege, not a right...
...Defensive, almost fatalistic in outlook, they lived a feudal existence in which everyone knew his place, and only the brave—or foolhardy—ignored the rigid boundaries imposed from above...
...Graham, the former president of the University of North Carolina, had been chosen the previous year to fill an interim vacancy...
...would be talked about for years to come," writes Egerton, "and the story of her seating wouldbe so embellished in the telling and retelling that the truth would slip away and myth would replace it...
...I think that one must follow the customs of the district...
...Well, I could no more tell people in another state what they should do than the United States can tell another country what to do...
...What Graham could not bring himself to do, though, was integrate the very university he ran with such authority and skill...
...Congressman Maury Maverick of Texas...
...These very questions dominated the 1938 Southern Conference for Human Welfare...
...What do I think of segregation of white and Negro here tonight...
...We speak now against the day," Faulkner said, "when our Southern people who will resist to the last these inevitable changes in social relations, will, when they have been forced to accept what they at one time might have accepted with dignity and goodwill, will say, Why didn't someone tell us this before...
Vol. 77 • September 1995 • No. 12
