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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview A-0345, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
Sociologist Guy B. Johnson recalls the string of lucky breaks that brought him to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a career as a sociologist. Johnson had more than a scholarly interest in race, and soon became active in the brewing civil rights agitation of the World War II era. Although he was a founding member of the Southern Regional Council (SRC), Johnson was wary of radicalism and believed that the court system was best equipped to dismantle segregation. In this interview, he describes the creation of the SRC and his response to some of the legal victories for civil rights in the 1940s. Researchers interested in biographical details should look to the first half of this interview as well for information of interest.
Sociologist Guy B. Johnson describes his path to sociology and recalls his participation in the Southern Regional Council in the 1940s.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
I know that you were living in Chapel Hill when you first went to Atlanta to take the SRC job. Would you give me a little bit of your background, personal background? How you got to Chapel Hill, where your home was and so forth?
Yes, I was born in Texas about 45 miles northeast to Dallas in 1901. I'll soon be 90 if I live that long.
What was the name of the town?
The little town was called Caddo Mills, named for the Caddo Indians. It was settled by southern people almost entirely. I had two grandfathers and a great-grandfather who were pioneers.
In Texas?
A North Carolina grandfather, for instance, went there in 1856. My great-grandfather went actually during the closing year of the Lone Star Republic, '44, I believe. They settled in a rich, black soil area, which was already sort of open prairie country. It was easy to get into cultivation. This was excellent soil, and they raised cotton, corn, wheat, oats, and some other things, but the main cash crop was cotton.
Were both of your grandfathers from there? I mean, they both cultivated that land?
Yes. They were both from plantation families, one from Alabama, one from
North Carolina, and had experience on the farm. [laughter]
So you were a third generation Texan?
Yes.
In that sense, that your grandfathers both migrated there from the South. That's amazing.
Both in 1856, my great-grandfather in '44. Incidentally, I was a third cousin of Lyndon Johnson. His grandfather and my grandfather were first cousins. I never met him. My oldest brother knew him because he had some interest in local politics, but I never had the pleasure of meeting Lyndon except seeing him make speeches. We lived in a small town. I guess it had something like 300 people, a farming village. It had had the MK&T Railroad since the early 1880s, which gave them easy access to cities in Oklahoma, St. Louis, Chicago, etc., and greatly added to the possibility of marketing farm products. So I'd say it was a fairly prosperous little community. I don't know of anybody who was really poor, and only two or three people that you might consider fairly well off, not rich at all.
Yeoman farmers?
Yes. There were practically no blacks in that community. I remember maybe
one family. We did use some black
How in the world did you get from that isolated rural community all the way back over here to Chapel Hill?
Well, that's a bit of a story. I did quite well in high school, and then
two years at a little junior college at Greenville, our county seat. Had
quite an impulse to go on and get more education. So I managed to get a
scholarship to Baylor University. I'd been brought up a Baptist, and my
father's father was one of the founders of the Baptist church there. My
father, during all my young life, was the choir leader and one of the
school's superintendents at the Baptist church. So I went to Baylor and
did all right there. I changed my career ambitions from being a minister
to being a teacher. Looking back on it, I can see now that I had made
the decision to do pre-ministerial work at Baylor and then go to Fort
Worth Seminary because I probably thought it was the surest way of being
able to get a little help, you know, tuition and so forth, to stay in
Baylor. Well, the Baptists were doing then what they're doing now. You
know, they're shooting themselves in the foot. The Bible Department
especially was always under attack by old J. Frank [laughter]Origin of the
Species, and they certainly had, oh, who was the early astronomer
who wrote Celestial Mechanics and stuff like that?
Oh yeah, I can't call his name.
So, I mean, these are not the libraries of bigoted [laughter]
Yeah, it was not an old school, but it was in its heyday then.
So I went there, and by this time I had completely decided to be a teacher and not a preacher. I always thought that was a very wise decision. Well, after the masters degree there under Park and Farris, Smalls.
Robert Park was sort of the preeminent sociologist at that time, wasn't he?
Yes, he was. He had a special interest in race and ethnic groups.
What was his background? Did he have any southern ties?
No, oh wait, yes. Not family but, most people don't know this and I don't think I ever heard him mention it, he became sort of a personal secretary to Booker Washington, and worked there at Tuskskege for several years. I strongly suspect that some of Washington's best speeches were drafted by Robert E. Park. I would suspect especially those famous lines in the 1895, what was it, Cotton States Exhibition Speech about the fingers.
Five fingers of the hand.
Although, of course, Washington was quite capable of doing all that himself. Well, anyway, he had had experience as a newspaper man. I forget whether it was New England or in the West. Then he had had this experience at Tuskegee. I forget just where he got his training in sociology, if any.
Maybe he invented it [laughter]
Well, I liked him very much. He liked my work and was very encouraging to me.
How long did you stay there?
I was just there that one year. Nobody told me, you know, that you don't
get a masters so easily in one year, especially if you're from a
substandard high school background. Dean Smalls looked over my credits
and decided that I should have had more history. So he wanted me to take
on the side a course in English Constitutional History [Laughter]
Did you finish the master's?
Yes, I did.
In one year?
One year, and I took two extra courses. Smalls wanted me to have another course in something. Oh, it was taught by—well, I had two courses over there—Mrs. Breckinridge and another one by Edith. . . . See, my memory is now beginning to play tricks on me. Edith Abbott, social statistics. So instead of the usual eight or nine courses, plus thesis, I had ten courses and wrote my thesis on the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the postwar period. Got it all typed and submitted in time for graduation.
Got the degree, gosh, in the twelve months.
Before I went there, I would worry considerably about this farm village
boy from Texas with a weak high school
You must have done all right.
I went up there in an open air ceremony, just the social sciences, and Smalls was also Dean of the Graduate School. He called my name and I went up, and he twinkled his eyes, "Congratulations." He spoke in that Latin thing where they award the degree, and I felt like I had done pretty well.
I imagine you did.
Well, and then the problem was getting a job. I won't get into the details, but it was a narrow escape. I worked at a big, wealthy Jewish country club, Idlewile, out south of Chicago, where you had people like the Fleishmans and Marx and Shafuers and Bartzes, and Libby, and. . . .
That was the only job you could get?
That was it. I use to read want-ads and go to these meetings where they wanted applicants to come and listen to a spiel, you know. I soon got used to these and saw that they were all wanting you to travel the Middle West and send encyclopedias or Bibles or whatnot.
Was a degree in sociology just not a tradable commodity?
The market was very low that year for some reason, I don't know.
How long was it before you could get a teaching job?
Oh, I got it right at the end of the summer. Oh, I had interviews. I well
remember at the close of two of these
But you did land a job that fall?
Yes, Bruce Melvin of Ohio Wesleyan called me from downtown Chicago. Said
he'd tried to catch up with me, but he learned that I was working out in
the suburbs. He was frantic to find somebody to be an instructor in
sociology. He said, "Now, I've never laid eyes on you, and I'm not going
to have time to run out there or for you to run downtown, but I'll tell
you: I'm impressed by your recommendations. Your professors all think
well of you. So I'm going to make you an offer, sight unseen." And he
did, and I took it right there. [Laughter]
This was in '22?
'22, and started teaching sociology. And boy, I worked hard. I mean, I
had to bone up and get lectures and discussions things arranged for
three courses. I had help from my teacher at
How long did you stay at Ohio Wesleyan?
One year.
Just one year.
Yes, I had a stroke of luck. I was engaged to this girl from Greenville,
Texas [Guion Griffis]. We had met at junior college, fell in love, and
she was taking some work at the School of Journalism, University of
Missouri, getting ready to set up a Department of Journalism at Baylor
Women's College. She had borrowed money. I had borrowed money from the
local bank with the help of my eldest brother who was cashier. I tell
you, my career really hinges on some close calls. I don't know how I
would ever have borrowed any money unless he had been in that bank.
Well, I think I owed $800.00, and my wife owed about that much, I mean,
my fiance. I went off to Texas that summer in '22 [1923], very
pessimistic. I tried to get some kind of job there in Ohio but nothing
doing. I needed something that was going to make me solvent and a
married man, really. So I went to Texas and stayed with my oldest
brother. When my fiance came up—it was getting, I guess, about the end
of summer school at Baylor Women's College, this would have been in
August—and she bore a very important message. That the head of social
science at Baylor College had had a tragedy in the family and he was all
shaken up and felt that he had to resign and get himself together. So
the Dean wanted her to tell me and ask me if I might be interested in
taking that place [Laughter] [Laughter] [Interruption.]
I said we were lucky where we were. I was already very lucky, but it happens that at Chicago, I roomed for part of the year with a boy from Georgia, named Wiley Sanders. Wiley had studied at Emory under Dr. Howard Odum, and in 1920 Odum got invited to come to Chapel Hill, and he did, September, 1920. He set up the Department of Sociology, the School of Social Work. He wanted Wiley to come on up here with him and be, I think, a teaching fellow, and do graduate work. So he had been here that year, '20-'21. '21-'22, while I was at Chicago, he came there to work toward a doctorate in Social Service Administration.
Wiley did?
Wiley B. Sanders. He kept talking to me about Howard Odum, what a
dynamic, ambitious man this way, and how he was going to build up social
science at Chapel Hill. And also, Odum was getting ready to start a
sociology journal, The Journal of Social Forces. He
was planning to do that in '22, which it was already '22, of course.
Wiley was very much interested in this thesis I was writing. He read
some of it and he liked it. He kept saying to me, "Look, Odum will have
this new journal going
While you were at Wesleyan?
Yes. Then I went back to Texas and got married and started teaching at
Baylor College for Women. Let's see, this gets us into the spring of
'24. I had a letter from Odum which said—all this must have been quite
early in '24—he simply asked me if I wouldn't like to write him another
article. Oh, I accepted although I wasn't quite sure what I was going to
write about. I told him I'd come up with something soon. So I wrote him
a paper on the northward migration of the Negro and its consequences. He
liked that, too, and he published that a little later. Then in the
spring he wrote me a special letter. Said, "I've been trying for some
time to get financing from private foundations for an Institute for
Research in Social Science, and I think the money's almost in hand, and
that we'll be able in about a week to make an announcement. But in the
meantime, I want you to know that if this comes through, as I fully
expect,
Was this '25 by then?
Still spring of '24. So we thought it over and accepted. Well, if you knew what most fellowships and scholarships were in those days, you'll see this was really a big offer. A tuition scholarship was usually like $750. There might have been a few as much a $1,000, but very few. The fellowship where you had work responsibilities in return, like I did at Chicago, well, they worked my tail off. You might get $1,500. Well, Odum's were $1,500 each. Oh, I should have said usually university fellowships were $1,000. So odum was offering us each $1,500. So although this would mean quite a comedown in our total salary, it was very good.
And a chance to get your doctorates, both of you.
Both of us. So we drove up here in an old Model T Ford in 1924, and we've
been here ever since. My wife [Guion] died a year ago. She and Odum
didn't operate on the same wave length. He was too wordy and vague to
suit her. Very hard for her to pin him down on her dissertation project
which she wanted, since she was in journalism, he wanted to call the
press as a social force. [Laughter]
This was the chairman of the history department?
Yeah. Imagine that. He said, "Oh well, you might say black and white, but
what other classes did you have?" Well, she tried to tell him a few of
them [Laughter]Antebellum North Carolina. Then after she got her degree, kept
working on it for several years, doubled the size of it, and finally got
out that book in '37.
When did she get the degree and when did you get yours?
We got our degrees in '27. We had been here three years then. I guess
we'd actually worked on the degrees about
And once you got here and into the Institute, starting really in '24, but as an assistant professor, I suppose, in '27 after you got your degree.
Well, an associate professor.
And you just stayed in that capacity, that role, all the way through the '30s?
Right.
So for a period of 15 to 20 years, you were living the life of an academic, teaching, doing research, and writing.
Yes. Specializing in race relations and making a special effort to get acquainted with black leaders wherever I could, all over the country. I soon knew the president of every black college in the state, not every, I should say every state institution, and some of the others. I knew black lawyers, teachers, businessmen, like Spaulding of Durham, who was president of North Carolina Mutual. Then I would go to meetings around the country and make a point of getting acquainted with the black leadership.
Okay, while we're on the '30s and before we move into the '40s, did you go to the meeting of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare in Birmingham in '38?
No, I did not. Well, let's see, to put it bluntly, the youngster or youngsters who came around, talking about this and getting people lined up for the meeting, did not even see Howard Odum. They didn't see me.
Who were these people?
One was Clark Foreman.
Aubrey Williams? H.C. Nixon?
Well, I don't think either. Maybe it was just Foreman.
Just Foreman?
Yes. I knew him just slightly. Then news stories began to come out about planning this meeting. Mrs. Roosevelt was going to participate, and several big names. Odum was a little miffed: "Here I've been working all these years, and it's being proposed that we ought to have a big organization in the South to start getting some popular support for progress. I've got this department and this institute, and we've written books, and now these kids come along and they're not interested in my work."
Well, if I could interject a question here, he or somebody got Frank Graham to do the keynote address down there, and Graham was very visible in that organization, right from the beginning.
Yes. I think Odum felt that these Southern Conference people maybe looked
on him [Odum] as a, you know, non-activist type, just purely study,
scholarship and all that, and felt that he wouldn't do them much good.
Whereas, Graham was anything but
Did the two of them get along all right, Graham and Odum?
They had some rather frequent friction. They were both devoted to. . . .
What, at a distance, looked like the same cause. . .
Right. Both devoted to the cause of a better South. But, well, the truth
is Frank was one of the world's worst administrators. He was sloppy,
careless, and would often make decisions that were not the best for a
particular problem. Well, I'll cite you one or two examples. There had
been an opening as chairman of the physics department for a couple of
years, and there was some fractionalism in the department. Members
couldn't agree on supporting any one person. Frank was getting a little
impatient about this, but what he should have done was call these people
in and say, "Look, I want you to get together on a recommendation
within, you know, one month. Let me have it, or I am going to take
actions of my own." But he didn't do that. He happened to be off on a
trip, and at Union Station in Washington he met a young physicist. I
forget where he was from, but like Pittsburgh or something. They both
had late trains and had time to kill, and they got to talking and
walking out toward the Capitol and all around that area. So when he
found that this young man was a physicist, he said, "You know, you may
be just what we need at Chapel Hill." [Laughter]
And you cite that as what you think of as a typical example of Graham's administrative sloppiness?
Yeah. Well, I had an experience with him in anthropology which was, in
some ways, even more interesting. See, Odum had two Ph.D.'s, one in
sociology and one in psychology. Sociology was the second one. He got
that at Columbia under Giddings and had one or two courses under Boaz,
the great anthropologist. He liked anthropology and always said it was a
natural ally with sociology, and we ought to put in some anthropology
work. Well, three years after I got my Ph.D., I put in a course in
social anthropology. Odum had talked to Graham and they agreed. "Yes, go
ahead. Build up anthropology courses within sociology, and then someday
it might get to be big enough that we can separate them. But you go
ahead." Then a few years later I put in a second course. So we had that
beginning under the department of sociology. Well, came the Depression
and the WPA projects, and a young archaeologist in the state—who had
just come here as an undergraduate student mind you—he had managed to
get acquainted with practically every archaeologist in the country. Had
a voluminous correspondence with them and had done a lot of field work
and was really probably as good an [Laughter]
Wreacking havoc on the established order here.
Well, that's what happened in the long run. I tried gently to tell
Wauchope about complications, but, well, he was just a young idealist
fellow. This didn't mean a thing to him at all. Graham had said so and
so, and that was it. Well, by the end of the year, students were asking
Wauchope, "What happened to [Laughter]
So he left you in the lurch?
And he hadn't done a damn thing for this project. He turned it over to
the student who did all the supervising. But WPA was satisfied. So he
suddenly got this offer to be head of the Middle-American Institute in
Tulane. [Laughter]
So he left you.
Just what he wanted, and that's where he filled out his career.
I'm going to take a break at this point, just for a second here.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
Prior to the time that you went to Atlanta to be the first executive director of the Southern Regional Council in 1944, there had been some preliminary efforts, first by a group of black leaders meeting in Durham.
Yeah, issued the Durham Statement.
Right, and then the white leaders meeting in Atlanta, and then a joint meeting in Richmond. Did you attend any of those meetings?
No.
You weren't involved in any of that?
These were rather small groups—oh, well, not actually very small, but sort of the top leadership, especially the elders like Odum and Alexander.
When you first heard of these efforts, you, of course, were here in Chapel Hill teaching.
Yes.
I assume it must have been Dr. Odum who told you about this and asked you if you'd be interested in that job.
Yes, in a way. 'Course, I had kept up with these things, and actually the Durham Statement and the Richmond Statement were published. Had some attention in the press. `Course, as a result of the third meeting, which was in Atlanta, I believe.
It was the other way around. It was Durham, and then Atlanta, and then Richmond.
Oh yeah, that's right.
And on that point, the first two were widely publicized but the Richmond meeting got no publicity at all, and I wondered if you knew why.
Well, I suppose it was considered sort of an in-house thing to lay some actual plans. So they did that in '43, and during Christmas vacation Dr. Odum and Will Alexander—I started to say Dr. Charles Johnson, but that should be checked.
Yeah, he was the author of the Durham Statement, Johnson was. He drafted that.
Anyway, I know it was Odum and Alexander who came into my office one morning. I happened to be up there working during the holidays. And they sort of laid this out to me. I judged that they were having trouble or going to have trouble getting somebody to head this thing up.
They had been the two principal leaders of the Interracial Cooperation Agency in Atlanta, is that right?
Oh that, let's see. They had been, yes.
Both of them had been quite active in that and Charles Johnson too. Especially Alexander.
Alexander, because he was head of the old Interracial Commission. So in effect they said, "Here we are now with this directive to get this thing going, and we've got to move in a hurry. You've just got to take this job."
They really put the pressure on.
They did, yes. I told them I was not the administrative type. I was quite
happy here in the academic
Is that right? Okay, the other day we spoke briefly about the relationship between Dr. Odum and Dr. Graham, and I noted that Dr. Odum had not been involved in the Southern Conference for Human Welfare but Dr. Graham was. Now, here's a new organization Dr. Odum's involved in and Dr. Graham is not. Is this just a coincidence or do you think there was any particular reason for it?
No, I don't think there was any special reason. 'Course, Odum was known to be very much interested in race and I think, well, probably he felt Graham's interest in that was sort of a sideline. Anyway, he was a very busy University president and you wouldn't expect him to take a very active part. So for whatever reason, I don't know. I don't think he was involved except as a friend and member, as I recall. Well, anyway, I don't think of any. . . .
No significance to that. Some other people who were not involved, who had been involved in other efforts to bring about social change in one form or another, in the field of journalism Ralph McGill, though he was sort of a central figure in those early meetings, the Atlanta meeting and Richmond.
Right, right.
He never actually joined SRC. Never was a member, never was active.
That's true. He was a good friend. We had personal contacts and he would give us some advice. He was supportive as an editor, but there were a number of people like that. They were willing to help but didn't want to have any obligations of membership and so forth.
Was Jonathan Daniels one of those too?
He was almost completely standoffish. [Laughter]
Yeah, he never had anything to do with SRC, did he?
He wouldn't have anything to do with things like this.
Whereas, Virginius Dabney was very active.
Yes, Dabney.
I'm curious about those three men, and sort of the contrast in their particular style as far as this organization is concerned.
I think they were all alike in one way, and that is that they were not going to stick their necks out very far and not get tagged as radicals. But they did differ in personal styles and how much they would cooperative. Now, Dabney soon lost interest in the Council, and I think this is because he felt that at times the Council was, oh, maybe a little too liberal for him. I couldn't prove that, but that was my feeling. Cause that was a common thing to happen among some of these people who were active in the beginning.
You see that pattern, don't you?
Yes. I think some of this was due to what happened at the charter meeting. We had a lot of very frank discussions.
That was in November of '44?
No, no, February of '44.
Oh, the meeting to really form the organization.
Organize it, yes, and elect officers, etc.
Had you already been chosen formally as the executive director?
Yes, well, they were authorized to select somebody. So at that charter meeting I was sort of pro forma. But they did have to straighten out some matters on policy and program and elect a board of directors, and then, of course, me, and a secretary-treasurer and what have you. Well, now, this was a good-sized meeting, and I don't know who had done the actual inviting of people, other than those who had taken part in the Durham and Atlanta meetings. But there were quite a number of prominent people, a few in business. I don't believe there was anybody in politics, but several editors.
McGill was there at that meeting, I believe. He signed the charter at least.
Yeah, but he was not at this meeting.
Already he had sort of made his exit by that time.
Well, I don't think he ever intended to give involved in the details of
organization. He probably figured, well, today they're going to organize
and it's not going to be very interesting. Well, I doubt if there are
very many editors anyway who have the time to get out and spend a whole
day at something extraneous. Well, now, let's see, there was a young man
there who was from the sort of Negro Youth Congress, I believe that's
what it was called. I knew some of those fellows, and I knew
That was a wing of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, if I'm not mistaken.
I think so, yes. Well, the big argument that day was over our policy toward segregation. Oh, I rather expected this all along, and there were a number of people who would be our future members and were already members of the Southern Conference, like [Clark] Foreman, [James] Dombrowski, and then some of their local leaders.
Aubrey Williams?
I didn't meet Aubrey Williams for a while. He was pretty busy in the New
Deal. So we got into a long discussion over segregation. My position
was, look, I think all of us here, or practically everybody here, is
against segregation, and to me it's just a tactical question of whether
you want to begin by tagging the Southern Regional Council as a declared
enemy of segregation. I said I can work with either approach, whatever
it is. Well, I guess I didn't actually say much at the beginning of the
meeting, but, I mean, Odum and Charles Johnson and a whole bunch of
these black leaders knew what my stand would be. The upshot of this
discussion was that some of the black leaders sort of turned the tide
against beginning this organization with an open declaration of warfare
on segregation. [Laughter]Houston Informer, a very able man and, oh,
semi-militant, and a supporter of the NAACP and all that. He said, in
effect, there's lots of problems here. This is not the Southern
Interracial Council, it's the Southern Regional Council, and we've got
to have interests broader than just race problems. It's a matter of
strategy. I think we should refrain from any strong condemnation of
segregation, and outline a whole series of things here that we are going
to work on. I think many of the other oldtimers, like Charles Johnson
and Benjamin Mays and Gordon Hancock, they all agreed. So they wound up
with substantially what those statements, Atlanta and Richmond and
Durham, had said. So it went on from there. But this discussion was
sometimes very heated, very frank, especially by the people who were
very strong in the Southern Conference and by this young Negro Youth
Council fellow.
You don't remember his name, do you?
No, I forget that name. This scared the daylights out of some of these people who had fancied themselves to be liberal minded and had taken part in the preliminary statements, but now they got cold feet. A good example of that would be Walter Matherly, Dean of the School of Business at—oh, I don't know if it was Florida State or University of Florida.
Just the discussion itself made him uncomfortable?
Just the discussion, just scared him. They thought, "Well, my, look at
some of these types in here. They're sort of hot-headed, you know.
They're militant. They'll get this organization in trouble and get me in
trouble." [Laughter]
It would have scared him, too.
He would have been worried.
Because none of these men were really integrationists?
No. They certainly wouldn't want it declared with their names on it. So we got off to sort of a shaky start there, but we finally did come up with the board of directors.
And, of course, Odum was there?
Oh yes, yes.
I assume that the position he took on this was very much the same as yours.
Yes.
And, indeed, all of the people who became the sort of central cadre of administrators and executives and board members pretty much bought that position.
Yes, I think so.
So that SRC began as a more of a centrist organization than the Southern Conference, and always saw that organization as being pretty far off on the left wing?
Well, they didn't see it so much as being way off on the left end as, oh,
not being open and frank enough about what it really believed in. Well,
I don't want to get into that, but
Did that feeling of wariness on your part extend to the individuals you knew who were members of both, such as Charles Johnson and Benny Mays?
Oh, no, no.
Or Aubery Williams or Clark Foreman?
Now, it did to Clark Foreman and Jim Dombrowski and a few others, but to old-time leaders like Charles Johnson and Benjamin Mays. . . .
Maybe Will Alexander was . . .?
I knew them and trusted them. So it was a, it's sort of hard to describe it, but I knew Foreman personally pretty well, and I felt that he was somewhat superficial, and a little bit given to publicity-seeking and that sort of thing.
The heatedness of this debate at that first organizational meeting
carried over almost immediately, that is to say, kept going, fed by the
article that Lillian Smith and Saunders Redding wrote in Common Ground that you responded to. Talk about that a little
bit.
Oh yeah, well, I thought it was a little bit silly. The thing had not
really been organized yet, you know, when they wrote this. In fact, I
was there in my office in Atlanta in January, '44. Had just gone down
there to help set up the charter meeting, and here came this article in
Common Ground, which, of course, had been written,
I guess, some months earlier.
It came in the following issue.
Oh, it did?
Yes sir, came in the next issue. Even so, you had to rush to do it, it would seem to me, knowing how much lead time they take.
I substantially stand by what I said there, and I think I wound up by saying, "Over there are the peaks, the goals, that you want, but in between there are a lot of foothills you've got to conquer before you get there. Now, let's get together and work. And that's what the Council hopes to do."
You subsequently asked the SRC to invite Lillian Smith to become a board member, and they agreed, unanimously agreed, and she was asked but she turned it down.
Yes. I had mixed feelings about Lillian Smith. I thought she—how shall I put it—well in some ways she was rather naive, in that she ran in a rather confined atmosphere without putting down some roots in different places. Maybe what I'm trying to say is she was not in a position of responsibility.
She had no institutional base.
She had no institutional anchorage, just sort of a loner. She was not very good at taking part in the details of any organiational work.
You described them [your feelings] as mixed feelings though. What about her was there that you liked or admired?
Oh, I had considerable admiration for her fiction, well, her work in general, you know. What do they call that little journal?
It went through several name changes, North Georgia
Review. Did you meet her, know her personally?
Yes, but not closely. I remember going one night, this would have been in
late '44, I think, she had been asked to speak at Atlanta University. I
went out there and listened and then later I was invited to, I guess,
President Mays's home where a group of about ten or fifteen sat on the
floor and carried on a discussion with Lillian. I was leaving the
building where she had spoken and was going over toward the president's
house, and they were various other, you know, students walking through.
A couple of boys were coming along right behind me. I could hear them
talking with some animation, and just as they passed me one of them
said, "Well, it was all right, but, good God, that women's more
race-conscious for me than I am for myself." [Laughter] [Laughter]
You think maybe it was not segregation?
Oh, I'm sure segregation was involved, but I mean, how much did it
actually bear on them in their daily lives? That's where I was
concerned. And to listen to Lillian Smith talk you'd think they were
just burning constantly with resentment and frustration, and I just
thought that on the whole, no, they lived more normal lives that that.
[Laughter]
I see. Would you say that that was, as you perceived it also, the feeling of people like Charles Johnson and Benjamin Mays and Hancock and P.B. Young and the others who were involved?
Yeah. They were people, you know, who—they had work to do, and my golly,
and they were going to do it. Try to make a success and find ways of
manipulating these white people [Laughter]
Yet the debate over Jim Crow kind of went right on, right through this period, and it increased with intensity as the end of the war neared and the whole post-war period came along.
Well, it gradually came to the point that you knew that the end of that system was approaching. I had long had a great interest in the judicial approach. Well, all kinds of litigation, and had written a little bit on this subject, and had often spoken about it in lectures and in my course on the Negro here at Carolina. I had watched, I expect more closely than most sociologists, the ebb and flow in this whole legal structure.
Because it had been going on for some little while on this whole issue.
Oh yes. I first got interested in it through the white primary cases in Texas.
That was in '44.
Oh no, back in the '20s.
Oh, I see, yeah.
Cases probably you never read, Nixon v. Herndon, Nixon v. Condon, Nixon v. Herndon again. That's a wonderful story.
That redates Smith v. Allwright by
twenty years.
Oh yes, yes. The irony of a Louisiana case, U.S. v. Classic, being the real turning point, and nobody at
the time realized it. The main defense in those early cases in Texas,
which with any decent Supreme Court, should have been decided way back
in the mid-20s in favor of the blacks, the main defense was the primary
is a system set up by parties to chose their candidates and it is not an
integral part of the electoral process.
Parties were essentially private organizations.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's the position South Carolina took.
So there were a couple of Supreme Court decisions back there in those early cases that upheld that view. Then came in '38, I think. . . .
That Missouri case?
No, not the primary case, U.S. v. Classic in Louisiana. Classic was a sheriff in a Louisiana parish,
and there was an
Very significant.
Yes.
And that was the same Supreme Court, if it was '38, that ruled in that
Gaines case in Missouri that allowed the black
student to go to the University. So here was the beginning of a legal
overturn of segregation, and your interest in litigation made that. . .
.
I had been following all of that for years, you know. So you see, it's no wonder then when the crucial white primary case came up again that the Supreme Court said, in effect, well, yes, this is a part of the electoral process. You can't keep doing this.
Okay, if I may interrupt you a minute, that happened in '44, Smith v. Allwright. The Myrdal study came
out in '44.
Oh, wait a minute. Oh, I guess you're right.
In January of '45, Will Alexander wrote an article in Harpers in which he took great pains to look at segregation as
sort of the stumbling block to southern process, and came down
Yeah, that it's crumbling, yeah, because so many little bites had been taken out, you know, Pullman travel, dining cars, certain situations involving interstate commerce and all that, and then the gradual inroads they were making on university segregation. There's a whole flock of cases there that were beginning to open up, oh, say, half of the southern universities.
Yeah, Arkansas had some voluntary desegregation along in there.
Texas, Oklahoma.
Texas and Oklahoma cases were coming. The Kentucky case came a little later.
And it got up to Tennessee and North Carolina.
So another thing, in mid-45, Ira Reed, working for you, did that segregation study, you recall?
Yeah.
Mainly on transportation, and there was another big argument in SRC about, you know, how do we deal with this? What kind of visibility do we give to this? Did you find yourself, by that time, beginning to feel that at some very near point it was going to be necessary for SRC to reconsider this and take a position, or did you feel that it was. . .?
Oh, I just thought the thing was rolling, and that was exactly what I had
always expected. That it was not going to be solved by political action
in the South because they were not
Well, where did that leave SRC as an organization then, in terms of the policy that it operated under? Was it your feeling that it ought to stick to the policy that it had and wait for the litigation?
Well, I don't think I ever considered that [Laughter] [Pause]
In other words, it would be better to wait for the courts to do that than for the organization to take any initiative.
That's what I felt. Just give them a little time, they're going to do it
for you. Then the whole outfit would be made honest overnight, you see.
Then you could start working on the problems of desegregation. I don't
think I ever felt any dilemma there because of what the courts were
doing. I expected it and I welcomed it. Well, I don't know. I guess
maybe I was
In point of fact, it was 1951 before SRC did have a new policy statement.
Oh really, I didn't realize that.
In that year they took a position saying that in order to do the work that they had set out to do, it was just simply imperative for them to say that segregation was harmful to the South and that it needed to be eradicated.
Yeah, that's right.
That was in '51. Before that had been these other things, Myrdal, in a
sense, said that in American Dilemma, and individuals
like will Alexander and increasingly others did. And then the Civil
Rights Committee in '47, responding to—primarily, as I read that, Harry
Truman created the U.S. Committee on Civil Rights primarily in angry
reaction at that lynching in Monroe, Georgia. Four people were killed,
and the federal government was unable to crack that. He created that
committee, and Mrs. Tilly was on it, and Frank Graham was on it.
Yes, as I recall, I spoke to that committee, witness or something.
And their document issued in, I forget the month, '47, said that
segregation ought to have no place in a democratic society. I mean, it
was a very forthright statement. But SRC still—you had gone back to
Chapel Hill by that time—under George Mitchell, all the way to 1951,
couldn't resolve this
Yes, that's sort of expected. It's funny. He wrote that book, wasn't it on liberalism in the south?
In 1932. Hardly mentioned race.
His liberalism never ran very deep.
You know, hindsight is almost a 20-20 vision, Dr. Johnson, and I know in a way it's unfair for me to ask this question, but I find myself, now, as I look back on that period, say 1945, from the end of the war, until 1950, by which time McCarthyism had sent such a chill through society.
Oh Lord, yeah.
That five-year period looks now, in retrospect, like a golden opportunity that was missed by the South to make some voluntary change ahead of litigation that might have prevented 25 years of turmoil and bloodshed and all that followed. I've said that to some people, and they say, "Well, yeah, I can see that, but things have their own momentum. There wouldn't have been any way you could have rushed it up. It would have taken this long anyway." What's your view on that?
Well, I don't see how an organization which was practically no mass support. . . .
I don't mean just SRC, but I'm thinking about the political front. There's Ellis Arnall; there's Jim Folsom.
Yes, well, I think they represented some forward looking people who were doing what they could.
But that wasn't the South?
But I don't think they could have taken very liberal stances and got any where.
The hard truth is the South just wasn't ready to do that, was it? It couldn't have been persuaded to do what it ultimately was compelled to do?
Right, it just took this shock by the Supreme Court.
And the black protests.
And they learned they could live with it [Laughter]
Yeah, it's amazing. It truly has been revolutionary. A lot of people said back then, "The law says separate but equal, and if we'll make separate truly equal, we're in keeping with the law and we can. . ."
Oh yes, they clung to that myth for a long time, and you had these
perfectly asinine schemes of all kinds tried. I [Laughter]
Okay, good, I'll look that up. That's certainly one I want to read.
And I began by saying, "One morning soon the Supreme Court is going to
pass a new law." [Laughter]
I'm going to read that piece this afternoon. Let me ask you a couple of more things. Do you feel that by 1950 when the coming together of deep racial animosity and turmoil in South with this whole McCarthyism thing really had quieted a kind of liberal urge in the South to the point where, say, from '50 to '54 there was nothing like the activity there had been earlier. Is that true?
I think that's true, yes. That was a very repressive period.
That period of time was pretty quiet.
George Mitchell, I guess he was at a great disadvantage. Let me say, I
started to say privately, but I guess it wouldn't be too privately, that
when some of these
Right, which was really going strong by then.
Well, and of course, they did. They came through the South holding these hearings. I was a little surprised they never got hold of me, because just to be associated with an organization like SRC was enough to condemn you.
So you were opposed to Mitchell?
Yes, just on the grounds of filling that spot now with somebody who didn't have what I'd call a tainted background, you know. I don't know how much they hurt him, but anyway the whole atmosphere was just turned backward for a while. The council lost members, lost contributions, and it came down to the point that Mitchell had to reduce the staff to just a skeleton, and for a few months I think he borrowed on. . . .
His own insurance policy. . .
To cover the salaries of the few he had left.
Those were pretty lean times.
It was just sort of a standstill.
In light of that, as you look on that period, here were people were had tried their dead level best to make the South more progressive within the limits of the law. They were not subversives. They were not radicals. No matter what house committee might say, SRC was never a subversive organization. I mean, for goodness sake, and we know that. And yet, here it was reduced to a handful of people by 1950, totally ineffective, left with no resources. Could you conclude from that that the real institutions of southern society—the press, the universities, the church, not to say the political parties and whatnot—had really failed the region in its effort to look down the road and try to figure out a better way to operate?
Well, I don't know that I'd put it quite that way.
Think of the press that spoke with a more liberal voice in 1940 than it did in '50. Think of the ministers you know who were more outspoken and more progressive in '40 than they could be in '50. And think of this very university here, which had been a citadel of liberalism in the South, and indeed, in the nation, and by the time Frank Graham left here, it did not any longer have that kind of outward thrust and progressive social change motivation. Is that not true?
Well, no, I wouldn't agree with that entirely. I think it's very hard to make generalizations about that kind of thing. There was a certain amount of mythology. . . .
END OF INTERVIEW