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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-0361, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern
Historical Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill”
Sociologist Hylan Lewis describes his experiences with race in the American South in the period before the civil rights movement gained steam. Lewis witnessed an energized but still uncertain post-World War II African American community that was beginning to discuss how best to fight for equality. At the same time, white southern politicians were devising new strategies of resistance. This interview offers a broad comment on an important and often overlooked moment in civil rights history.
Sociologist Hylan Lewis describes his experiences with race in the American South in the post-World War II period.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
My first visit to Atlanta was about 1935 or maybe a little bit earlier. I was at Howard and I was working with Abram Harris and Ed Lewis in the economics department. I had just finished a year of graduate work at the University of Chicago.
In sociology?
Sociology and economics, yes. Then I went to work with Abram Harris and I
did the statistical work on The Negro as Capitalist,
one of the earlier books that Abram did. I also taught courses in the
economics department at that time as an assistant, so, as both
colleagues and friends of Abram Harris and Ed Lewis.
Ed Lewis is an economist who has done a considerable amount of work on rural economics. He had never been South. He's from London. He was a person who had polio. So, we cooked up a trip to. . . . I was going to introduce him to the South. We bought a secondhand car.
In a way it was your own introduction?
No, at that time I had lived in Virginia. It was my own introduction to the deep South, but I knew the South. I had lived in Hampton, Richmond, in fact, I went to school in Richmond.
Malcolm x said one time, "The South is anywhere South of the Canadian border."
That's correct, if you are black. [laughter]
That summer, summer school was in session, and it so happened that Atlanta University was kind of a mecca at that time and even later. For students, particularly doing not only undergraduate but graduate work as well in the various [social science] disciplines. Billy Geeter, names you probably know, Ann Cook Reed, who later married Ira Reed, they were there. They conducted a very important and well-known theater repertory. John Mack Brown was there. Also, there were people who were visitors there. Sterling Brown was there that summer and Harold Lewis. I remembered because we had a wonderful time with this group of people in Atlanta. The things that I remember, the comraderie, but also the kinds of paradox which grew out of the fact of this oasis, this very stimulating oasis there which was Atlanta University and Spelman College.
I remember we would spend our evenings sometimes just getting in the car
and riding up. These little vignettes would stick in your mind, again, I
mention the paradoxes here. We would drive out into rural Georgia and
park the car at one of these little taverns or roadhouses or we would go
in and get beer. Again, in the Georgia which is the Georgia of
Was that a practice that worked to say I have government orders here?
Well, it's such an unusual thing that you would use any leverage, and I did. It worked in the sense that this person was not used to that, he didn't know it and it was enough to throw him off. This worked both ways. We will have a rambling conversation if you ask these kinds of questions.
To give you another point of that particular picture, that same trip with
Ed Lewis, I took an examination for junior social economist in New
Orleans at the customs house. That is where it
The inconsistencies and learning how to play the game.
Precisely, but there again, they are part of the picture. They make the system work so to speak. In any situation where there were rules and pretend rules. Again, how do you do it, who does it, what happens?
Had you gone to Howard as an undergraduate?
No.
Where did you go?
I went to undergraduate at Virginia Union University in Richmond. I taught at Howard. I went to Howard to work with Abram Harris.
After you finished Virginia Union did you go to Chicago then?
Yes, I had a Social Science Research Council Fellowship. One of the first again to stick with the South. Ah, another paradox. The Social Science Research Council at that time, by dint of the urging of Charles S. Johnson, established a special set of fellowships for the South. Charles Johnson was a student of [Robert] Park in Chicago. Charles Johnson was a member of the board of the Social Science Research Council for New York. They had a big fellowship program. But, Charles Johnson was able to get them to establish a special program for southern students, the disadvantaged southerners. He didn't say black or white, but just that the South was disadvantaged. The first set of fellowships, graduate fellowships, under that aegis, there were three of us from Virginia Union, a student from Fisk, and Sarah Alice Mayfield from Birmingham Southern, who later on married Stuart Weiss, and we all wound up at the University of Chicago. That's another story.
That would have been in the 20s.
No, I finished in '32, so this would have been in '33.
You finished at Union in '32.
The fellowship was established in 1932. It indicates something about what the times were like and it indicates something too about the fact and the perception of the South and the beginnings of higher education. Again, the South was beginning to get Huey Long, you have Frank Graham and you have . . .
Things going on down there . . .
When North Carolina gets to be known and honored because it has some of the best roads of the South.
That has something to do with it.
These are the kinds of things, this is the South of shacks and you're still in the tobacco road tradition. It was a South of interest. A lot of things happened on that trip that Ed Lewis and I made, not only in Atlanta but also in Mississippi.
If you went to Chicago in '32 how long were you there?
I was there at the University of Chicago on the Social Science Research
Council Fellowship. . . . The munificent sum of $1,000 which
permitted me to pay tuition, pay room and board and actually the
Depression struck and all the banks were closed. I was able to lend my
landlord, who was charging me the magnificent sum of $20 a
month . . . . [laughter]
You actually had money in your pocket.
I had money. I remember the attempted assassination of the mayor of Chicago. I spent that year there, 1932—'33, I spent three quarters there and my money was beginning to run out. Virginia Union asked me to come and teach summer school. I went back to teach summer school. It was after teaching summer school that I teamed up with Abe Harris at Howard.
It was the summer of '33.
I taught the summer of '33.
Then you went to Atlanta with Harris in the fall?
No, not Harris. It was Ed Lewis. It would have been, I guess, '34, the next summer.
The following summer.
Yes, the following summer. I worked at Howard that year so it was '34.
You were just a young guy then, twenty-three, twenty-four years old.
Right.
A couple years into the New Deal and you had your introduction to the South and the deeper South and to Chicago and you're beginning to spread out. Lots of things happening.
In Washington and in Chicago and in Richmond.
Do you by chance remember election day in 1932?
Yes, I was in Chicago.
You would have been there in November '32.
I remember Roosevelt.
Did you have any sense that this was a sea change for America and for blacks in particular?
Oh, yes. I think, again, it was sea change in the sense that one had this
sense and in some ways the realization, expectation that something
important is happening. Of course, the cue comes with the fact that
Roosevelt was able to pick other coalitions at which those blacks who
could vote and could express themselves politically really sought to
move away from the legacy of the Republican party. That was important. I
think it was also important that things were happening. We had a
Depression, people were out of work, ‘Buddy, can you spare a
dime?’ Blacks and whites were feeling the pinch and so on.
Roosevelt had a presence and an aura, an aura about him, which said,
‘happy days are here again." I think, for me at least, again
you are talking
But they didn't impinge upon you.
In that sense of depressing me or. . . .
Your family was in Washington?
At that time both my mother and father were dead.
By then they were?
Oh, yes.
You were on your own?
More or less. One of the problems that we are going to have is that you mention something and it triggers something else.
By the time you got out of Virginia Union you were on your own. You were pretty much . . .
Well, on my own in a sense, I think the longer you live, especially as a kid, you think you are on your own. But in retrospect you know how damn lucky you are because there has to be somebody there. I didn't have any fear or compunction about venturing whether it's professional or personal. A lot of that relates to me, myself, personally what kinds of things develops . . . .
You were asking about the Depression and the
You went to Howard in '34?
No, I went to Howard in '33. I went there in the summer of '33 to work for Abe Harris
Straight out of Chicago you went.
After I taught that summer at Virginia Union I went. . . . Abe Harris was
working on this book and I was a youngster and I had some experience in
social economics and at that time, strangely enough, I knew a bit about
statistics, I knew how to work a calculating machine.
You did?
Yes. [laughter]
Really?
Right. He was an uncle by marriage.
Did you know him? Did you have a relationship with him?
Sure.
What in the hell did you say to him?
I was a kid. I was ten or eleven years old or maybe fourteen, fifteen or
sixteen. It was in the 20s. I didn't go to Hampton. I landed in Old
Point Comfort on the way to Hampton,
You had come down there on a boat?
Yes, on the Washington to Norfolk boat. You're too young to remember that.
Yes. I should have realized there was a ferry service.
The boat service, you had a New York to Florida boat, you had a lots of boats. You were born in '35?
I was born in '35. How long did you stay at Howard?
Well, again, my Howard career. I worked with Abe Harris. When the Labor
Department called—I passed the exam—I went to work
with on the cost of living study for them in Richmond and in
Mississippi. I took leave from Howard at that time. I went back to
Howard and of course at the time Charles Johnson was in the field doing
some of his studies which later on became the Shadows of
the Plantation. He wanted me to go with him but I turned him
down and went back to Howard.
In 1935, [E. Franklin] Frazier was coming to Howard. Frazier came to
Howard in '35 but I was in the economics department. I helped him to get
settled and oriented and so on. That's another story. Later on, as he
was developing the department, he asked me to. . . . I moved into the
sociology
To get your doctorate?
To get my doctorate, yes, which I didn't get until later because I left again to work at the War board . . . I left Howard, resigned Howard, to go to Talladega, Alabama. Buell Gallagher came to see me and he made an offer to me that I couldn't refuse. Everybody thought it was unheard of, anybody leaving Washington to go to Talledega. My colleagues said, "why are you going there? Are you going to be president?" But, it was one of the most stimulating and important teaching experiences I had.
How long did you stay there?
I was with Gallagher, I stayed there—this was 1939-1941.
Two year's.
Not even two years. The War broke out. When the War broke out the OWI,
Ralph Bunch and (I can't think of the guy's name) they called me to
Washington. There were two jobs and one was with the Office of War
Information and the other was to take a commission in the Army, Army
intelligence. I interviewed with the guy there in Washington, in the
offices there—Social Science Research council. I guess it was
Donald Young and he was looking [laughter]
In '45 and stayed there how long?
I left Hampton in '47 and did a study in South Carolina. Black Ways of Kent came out of that. Do you know that
book?
Yes, I do.
I did that in '48. From there I went to Atlanta to teach. I went to Atlanta to teach even before then because I was in New York after Hampton, and I went to the oyster bar one day and Ira Reed—he looked up and it was like he discovered gold—he was going on leave and got somebody to teach at NYU, some place, and said, "come on and teach for me at Atlanta." I taught at Atlanta that summer in '47 or '48. That was a remarkable summer too. After teaching there Mozelle Hill was there and so they wanted me to come back to Atlanta. I went back to Atlanta.
How long did you stay?
I stayed there. . . . In '54 I had a Ford Foundation Fellowship. In '56,
I guess, I spent at Chapel Hill. I went back to Atlanta very briefly.
Again, another offer I couldn't refuse, The Unitarian Service Committee
in Boston. I set some
No, but I was in . . .
Well, that's another whole story in itself.
Just in this period of my focus now from the early 30s to the mid 50s we have sort of staked you down at certain places. You moved around a lot. You were frequently on the move.
Yes, but, I was in and out of Atlanta, but in a full sense from December '48 and then '48 to '55. About seven or eight years.
Yes, until about the mid 50s.
Then I went back down to Washington. I did the Child Hearing Study in Washington.
Let me go back now that I know where you were and ask you about some of the people out of this time. First of all, I'm trying to identify some people who I'm not sure are dead or alive. Two of them are mentioned in one of these papers of yours and that is the Davises.
Which Davises?
John P.
Johnny P. is dead.
Johnny was a lawyer and John A. was . . .
In political science, he's alive. Johnny P. and I knew each other quite
well because we wrote . . . . At the time I was with the OWI he had Our World and later he was a newspaper guy. He was in
and out. Ted Poston, I would see him everyday.
Ted Poston is another guy I wanted to ask you about.
He's dead.
He came from Kentucky, twenty miles of where I spent my growing-up years, Hopkinsville.
Hopkinsville, revolt of the evil fairies.
He must have been an interesting guy. I would have liked to have known him.
Yes. I used to see Ted everyday. My office was right down the hall from Ted. I would always go down there.
How long has he been dead?
Ted has been dead maybe fifteen years. Ted was on the board
What about Roy Ottley?
Roy's dead.
Did you know him well?
Didn't know him, just in passing.
Kind of a fascinating figure with just the little bit I know about him.
Yes.
Lomax was another who was a journalist in your time. What others can you think of who were in the field of journalism who were interested in the South?
Ernie Johnson.
Where was he?
He was in and out of Washington. Then there were the Chicago
Defender, Enoch Waters.
Robert Vann, did you know Robert Vann from Pittsburgh?
I wouldn't say I knew him, he was older than me. When I received the
Social Science Research Council Fellowship I went to Chicago by bus and
I stopped off in Pittsburgh and stayed with friends. It happened that
night—again, the campaign was on—I went down in
September of 1932, I went to the Y on Wiley Street and they were in a
campaign and Vann spoke. I will never forget what he said, he said,
"you Republican hogs have been in the trough long enough, it's
time to let us Democratic hogs get in there." [laughter]
He was quite an interesting guy.
He was quite a figure, yes. I knew him and I knew Patterson.
Robert Vann and Vann Woodward come from the same eastern North Carolina history.
I didn't know that.
I came across a piece that Robert Vann wrote for a little local history in that rural county in North Carolina in the 50s, in which he described his growing-up years there with a very touching affection for that time and place. He was not one to mince words. He could lay it out pretty well.
He was quite a character.
Another guy that I got interested in and I wonder if you ever had any contact with, was an editor of a small black weekly in Columbia, South Carolina, named John McCray?
I know the name but I didn't know him.
That guy was dynamite. His stuff was . . .
You had quite a few from Columbia, South Carolina and North Carolina are small papers which were very important.
The academics out of this time I kind of classify in three groups. The ones outside the South is one group.
Ask me and I will try to find it for you. There's another piece which you might be interested in which I have done. I will try to find it for you, "Invisible Blacks of the North."
I would love to see that. I was going to ask you about. . . . The administrators were a group, Charles Johnson and Benny Mays and Hancock.
Hancock was one of my teachers. When you read that you will get some insight. There is a book on Hancock.
Yes there is and a good one at that.
"Gordon the Gloomy Dean." Do you know that story?
No, I don't know that story.
Well, Hancock at that time, this is again in the late 20s and 30s when
Dean Enge of England—this is before your time—was
known as the "gloomy Dean" because he was pessimistic.
Hancock was an actor in a very idiosyncratic way, talking and
personalizing so many things. There were very famous debates between
Hancock and Rayford Logan, well, that's another story. But, he would
come in and say, "ah, Mr. Lewis, Mr. Lewis, see the papers this
morning, see the papers this morning? They called me the
‘gloomy Dean’, they called me the
‘gloomy Dean'. They say all the Deans are gloomy
now." He used to make the speeches about [laughter]
He felt pretty strongly about that, didn't he?
You also had George Schuyler's the "Triumvirate of
Timidity." [laughter]
Who was Miller?
Miller from Howard, Kelly Miller.
There was always this undercurrent of debate and contention about what constituted better strategy, didn't it?
Yes, but you see, this again, depends on where you were. Virginia Union
at that time was very important. Virginia Union, Lincoln University,
Morehouse and some of the others. . . . Virginia Union had a very great
heritage, Abram Harris,
Would you say that Virginia Union more than Hampton? I mean Hampton didn't have this tradition? Tuskegee didn't have it? what about Fisk?
Yes.
Is it an urban rural thing partly? Does that enter into it? Is it easier in an urban setting for people to be more . . .
It's easier, yes, but that was not the main factor. Talladega had it.
Talladega had it. It's people then, isn't it?
It's people, it's people.
Name them for me, Howard, Fisk, Virginia Union, Talladega—where were the really good places? where was the ferment?
What period are you talking?
In this period we are discussing, the early 30s and into the 40s.
If you are talking the 30s you're talking when the number of schools
which had fairly solid pretention to be colleges, dared
Maybe a little Methodist?
Methodist in some, yes. The state schools were Johnny come lately.
They were not part of it.
You had a number of junior colleges which were mixed and some were church
related. If you are talking the period of
Lincoln in Pennsylvania?
Yes, Lincoln in Pennsylvania. These were in the main private
institutions. The tradition of Hampton and Tuskegee, it was quite a
different linkage in tradition. The kind of discipline, the kind of
compromises, everybody makes compromises. For example, I know even when
I was at Talladega, one of the famous institutions, I used to go to
Tuskegee once in a while and the practicing traditions at that time in
context, no negro, no black had ever lived in Dorothy Hall. And the fact
that they opened up Dorothy Hall in the 40s was itself a great
development. But it was known as not a
Hampton as well?
I worked at Hampton in the 40s and it was different.
It was different then?
Yes. Hampton wasn't even a
I understand.
You have different strengths. There was pride. When I was a student at
Virginia Union there was a sense of difference and independence which
distinguished us in terms of pride from
These are very helpful kinds of insights because I'm looking for the genesis of vision and ideas and strategies for change, social change in the South. It's of particular interest and importance to me which of the black colleges and universities provided a lot of that. All you say about Howard here, which I want to get into in a minute, is particularly helpful.
Howard had very little significance for the South that we are talking about now except that some of the people went down South.
Here's Hastie and . . . But that's for later.
That's a different level. In a sense we are talking, what we are talking here, one aspect of what you are talking about is that people will . . . Atlanta is a good example of what you are talking about in the 30s.
If you go back to the 3us, does the name Wallace Van Jackson mean anything to you?
No, sir. I don't know that name.
Wallace Van Jackson was a librarian at Virginia Union when I was there.
Wallace Van Jackson was one of the few persons in the library sense with
some reputation so, Atlanta University recruits him. Wallace Van Jackson
was one of the first persons to protest the legal and customary ban on
Negroes, blacks voting in Atlanta in the 30s. This kind of thing could
happen in Atlanta. You could have people doing things in a place like
I think I see the distinction.
Again, you have this kind of symbiotic relationship and the question is what prices do you pay in order to make a little dent. At that time, even later, even now, you talk about the college presidents of state schools they were the riding bosses of the plantations. They were agents as much . . . They played a dual role, dual agents. They are agents of the quote, "power structure." There was Hale at Tennessee State, Watson at Arkansas. I used to be able to name. . . . Shepard at North Carolina.
It was a coping mechanism.
It was coping but also they were trustworthy and able to keep the natives down.
Had to work both sides of the street.
Some did it better than others and some did it with less cynicism. That's
another story. But, here again, in that context you could have a Charles
Johnson at Fisk, who could do a great number of things which Fisk could
do. Hale would never even attempt it for many reasons. You could have a
Let me get to a couple of specific things of incidents or events or issues or whatnot. There was the Southern Conference for Human Welfare in Birmingham in 1938. Did you have any involvement with that?
No. In '38 I was at Howard.
There was a few years later in October of '43, [1942] a meeting in Durham of a group of blacks headed by Hancock and P. B. Young to draw up a manifesto. Did you attend that?
No. I was not in that loop but I knew about it.
Out of that Durham meeting came a series of meetings in Richmond and Atlanta that lead to the formation of the Southern Regional Council in '44.
Yes, with George Mitchell. I knew George, Horace Cayton.
Talk to me a little bit about some of the people, Ira Reid, Horace Cayton, George Mitchell, Howard Odum, some of the whites and blacks who were instrumental in that period of time just near the end of the War when people were beginning to say or think or wonder whether the end of the War was going to bring an opportunity for a surge forward of social time.
First of all, I think you could separate Horace. Horace and George worked together doing this book on black labor unions.
Horace never lived or worked in the South, did he?
No.
I'm interested in him but I don't think . . .
I knew Horace well. Do you know his book, The Long and Dusty
Road?
I don't know it. His family background fascinates me and all that Seattle connection and Mississippi connection. He's been dead a long time, hasn't he?
Yes. Horace died in Paris about twenty years ago. Horace sent me a
picture of
One of my extreme temptations in trying to decide how to do this book was
to do a book about Atlanta. And you see, I cut for myself a much harder
turf and I think I want to reach out
I sympathize with you.
I'm doing it intentionally because I think if I do this broad thing it maybe will open up a lot of ideas, thoughts, and suggestions for people to go back and mine deep. I'm not going to be the one to do that.
You talked to Bob Thompson, Robert Thompson?
I have, in Atlanta. You came to Atlanta in '47.
'47 to '48.
Let me just pick up at that point. SRC has been formed. Ira Reid is still there at Atlanta U. but getting ready to leave.
You had George and Harold and Charlie Parrish came in from Louisville. Do you have the Charlie Parrish line? C.H. Parrish?
I don't much about him but I know who he is.
There was C.H. Parrish and he was very important. He is dead now.
From Louisville?
Yes, he was on the faculty at Louisville and he was very active. He spent a year on staff of the Southern Regional Council. C.H. and Harold and John were very . . . He had a staff position even though he was very important in Kentucky interracial. . . . The story here is not so much the men but the women, as you know so well in that period, the southern women.
Talk about them a little bit.
I know them by name and reputation. I worked with some of them.
Mrs. Tilly, Josephine Wilkins, and Lucy Mason, Lillian Smith.
About Lillian Smith, I just happened to be in Montgomery the first anniversary of the march. They had a meeting at the church. I had taught Abernathy, I knew him well. I was there and [Martin Luther] King, and Lillian Smith were supposed to address the conference. She was ill and so they drafted me and I read Lillian Smith's speech for that very first anniversary. That's my Abernathy connection.
Did you know Lillian Smith?
I had met her, I didn't know her.
Were there any black women in this period of time who were . . .
Grace Hamilton.
Sure, of course.
Some of the church women and the lodge women, I'm trying to think of their names now. Here again, a part of the story we are talking about is a story of people that I would call. When I would make speeches I would refer always to what I called the anonymous greats. Every town has its anonymous greats.
Nameless, people who were really heroic people.
And they're there, wherever you go.
END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
Who ran against Eisenhower?
Stevenson.
What year was that?
'52. In 1950, a kind of a turning point year. Frank Graham was kicked out of the Senate. Claude Pepper lost.
Frank Graham was one of the real beacons.
Does he stand up in your eyes?
Oh, gosh, yes. Frank Graham was a man who had . . .only the South
produces a Frank Graham [laughter]
Elaborate on that a minute.
Extraordinary astute, but he had some of the ‘ole boy’ about him too. Extremely courageous, extremely able to accomplish in terms of the moving, manipulative in a sense. This is a man who almost single-handedly made the difference in terms of Carolina. And he made the difference from his seat as president of the University.
When you say only the South produces figures of this type would you include in your explanation of what you mean by that, any sense that these kinds of people, the Frank Grahams of the South, have any better insight or understanding or proximity to the experience of blacks in this program?
Yes, I think of sensitivity, courage and also a kind of marginality. This
relates again, there's no accident that the same kinds of urgings which
relate to the literature of many southern writers. It relates in some
sense too, to this playing
I was going to ask you if you could name any other whites who you felt . . . . Just give me some names of people. Does Lillian Smith fit this statement?
Without question.
Will Alexander?
Will, yes, but Will was much more of a conscious, witty. . .
Devious?
Conscious witting. [laughter] [laughter]
I see what you are saying. What about Ralph McGill in this context?
Ralph was one of a kind. An extraordinary man who took seriously his career as a newspaperman but also who took seriously a view of people and their nature. I didn't know him but I suspect that he probably is a person—a failed novelist or writer—who wanted to write to the big column, but never wrote it. I think he had a great facility for testing waters. Ralph is quite different from the Virginia journalists—Dabney, Kilpatrick. Interestingly enough, you had Kentucky, you had Louisville, Richmond and Atlanta in journalism. These are people who in a sense transcended—their journalism was a force.
Southall Freeman?
Douglas Southall Freeman, yes, in Richmond. There was a great deal of the old South in Douglas Freeman.
Let me ask you if this sort of characterization rings true to you. If you
put virginius Dabney and Ralph McGill on a scale of liberal to
conservative over this period of time we're talking about, Dabney starts
off in the 30s up here at sort of high liberal and ends up down here as
a reactionary. McGill starts off down here at the bottom, pretty
conservative guy, but by the time Brown comes along
you can go to the bank on McGill.
Absolutely, as I used the words, tested the waters, and with a great deal of courage, and this is why Atlanta was so important. One of the great things about Atlanta is the extent to which there were side doors and windows open. Not back doors but side doors in which people came and went. The point is the difference between the side door and the back door. I think Atlanta probably developed, institutionalized it to an extent.
When you think about the South in this period of time Atlanta is always the nexus with everything.
This interesting mixture of businessmen, newspapermen, politicians, church people, and very important, the sense that here is a city with a chance to grow and to be a New York of the South.
In a way the mayor of Atlanta sort of characterizes this. He started off pretty conservative. He was a Talmadge man, Hartsfield, and by the time the crunch comes . . .
Interestingly enough is the sense that the South par excellence has produced politicians who in some sense were amoral. And this amorality has a kind of spill-over. Amorality means that one can change.
Can go either way.
Precisely. This permitted to some extent people. . . . I'm pretty sure there are significant linkages between Talmadge, University of Georgia, the business community and that sort of thing—the trade-offs that occur. And at some point somebody had to say, "look, we've got a university, let's make a good university."
Or you take a situation like South Carolina. Strom Thurman could go along at being the Dixicrat candidate for president but could end up—or George wallace getting the black votes because of that very thing. Talmadge was like that.
Absolutely. You see here again so was Huey Long.
To some extent you might even say Bilbo was. Although, by the time he got to be an old man had simply gone off the deep end.
Bilbo went off the deep end and he had a kind of mean streak. Many of these guys had mean streaks, but his mean streak had such a nasty aspect which was demeaning.
I have a sense that I'm using up a lot of your time here. I'm going to
have to leave myself before too long but let me ask you some fairly
specific questions. Now that we have discussed this era and both in a
personal way have followed your path through it and now have begun to
talk about some of the
Ellis Arnall, I forgot about him.
Arnall's already gone by then but, Jim Folsom leaves the governorship of Alabama in that year.
Arnall is very important.
Looking back on that period—five years from the summer of 1945 to the fall of 1950—could you see that period of time, in retrospect at least, as a sort of a window of opportunity for the South to have made some really significant strides to fix its own social wagon, or is that too much wishful thinking?
No, I would say ipso facto in a sense. You said '45 to '50 and you're
talking here the end of the War. All that that meant in the suggesting
of the terms of the loosening of some of the things. And also of the
provision of a kind of wave of medium prosperity and hope and of a sense
of the use of governmental and state forces to do things. And what
things could you do—highways, roads, houses, education. This
is a period when you no longer began to think in terms of unpainted
houses in the South. The time when you stopped talking about red clay.
So, yes, the answer was that in some. . . . But, it is also the period
when you have, you see, the demographic [laughter]
All kinds of things are happening.
I think that this kind of loosening of bonds and fetters and the sense of chance—a great deal of movement occurred during that period.
And yet, here's what bothers me. If you do accept the premise that this was a golden opportunity, here was a chance for some real strides and yet it didn't happen in the sense that we ended up having to go the route of the courts and street protests.
But, this is part of the process.
This is part of the process . . .
You see what you are saying is that in a sense, to use the word, a prelude for the transition to civil rights.
Let me take the thought a step farther. We have identified a number of
blacks who recognized all the way back into the 30s, as far back as you
wish to go, that really a major part of the problem with the South is
the whole Jim Crow structure. Everything is held up by that. I think
particularly of the book that Chapel Hill published and Rayford Logan
edited called, What The Negro Wants. There were
thirteen essays from people that were very carefully picked by W.T.
Couch. There were
Can I give you a little footnote on that?
Yes.
This was 1944. If you would have asked some of the people who came out of the Gary Conferences [in 1990 or 1991], I've forgotten the dates, "what does the Negro want?" The answer would be, "what you got?" That's the difference. They [the people in Logan's book] never asked, "what you got?" But you now have people who would. That is a measure of elite. The period that we are talking there was a great discussion of strategy. Should you tackle it head-on or should you tackle it piece by piece? Do you want to get equal salaries or do you want to blow the whole thing up?
This was a wonderful philosophical debate. Strategic, philosophical, political, ideological, religious, anyway you want to characterize it this was a momentous debate.
Absolutely.
To carry my thought a little farther, the blacks understood this. I don't think there is any question. Conservative, middle of the road, left-winged blacks all understood this. They may have had different ideas about how to approach it but . . .
They understood in the sense of how do you fight? As the French say,
"what are the possibilities?" It's not probability,
it's possibilities. In that sense, again, this is a
At the same time that the people who wrote that book for Rayford Logan and the people who went to the conference in Durham and against the criticism of northern blacks that they were being excluded from this debate, it was very consciously done in Durham. It was for southerners.
This was a tactical strategy.
Here are these people . . .
This is to insure that Hancock and others advise.
Here are these people, we could make a long list of some names here but we know who they are, and they had the sense that when the War is over we need to act on these problems in the south. Focus for a minute on the whites. If you go back and look at all those people we talked about even including Frank Graham and maybe not Lillian Smith but almost everybody else . . .
I have a quick answer for you.
Ok. Let me just throw the question out and see if you are going to go with me on this. They could not quite bring themselves when that moment came, when that time came, '45, '48, possibilities all over the lot, they could not quite bring themselves to say, "now is the time for a frontal assault on segregation." And indeed, in SRC, the day it opened in 1944, they had a debate over this issue and they didn't resolve it until 1951. Am I right or wrong about blacks being ready and whites, even the liberal whites, not quite being ready at that point?
Yes. In some sense blacks have always been ready but in another sense I used to say sometime, I don't want to defend it at this moment. Another discussion I had with a friend of mine a long time ago I made the apperception, I said, "blacks have never been mousetrapped."
Let me go back to make a comment on your point. The difference maker in
these situations have been young whites who represent a different
generation and a different design for capitalizing. Capitalizing means
making money and achieving power politically. The unsung person here as
a catalyst, Morris Abrams, extraordinarily important in this context.
This coming together in Atlanta of Morris Abrams, John Harrell, Harry
Ashmore, Phil Hammer. What did Morris stress? Money,
housing—there's money to be made in housing—but if
you make money in the housing you also need to think in terms of power
of politics, one man, one vote. Morris is complex—he ain't no
flaming liberal. He's one of the most sensitive guys. I've seen friends
who
There's no question—that's a great metaphor, I think, for
Atlanta. But, if you think that that was a period of opportunity and it
didn't quite work. For one thing, the Cold War came along and gave the
demagogues a great new club to whack everybody over the head with. They
had had it in a sense all along but when McCarthy made it national and
put it in the center of American political debate then the Talmadges and
the Eastlands and all the rest of those people in the South could say
to
But nobody ever took that seriously in the South. Again, these are pretend rules.
Yes, but it was effective, don't you think? Did they not, or did that not have anything to do with it?
Just speculating here, I think the South, as many sects, has had the greatest facility for the use and manipulation, the conjuring of code words for the beast as the enemy.
Outside agitation.
Yes, and that kind of thing. I remember Talmadge was "bloc voters." I think that the communists . . . I say this because I knew and I know very well—this is another story, the whole Communist, FBI bit. But this was an urban northern comment essentially. There were some small linkages . . .
But, they were totally insignificant.
Totally insignificant, but the cry communist instead of cry nigger, if that makes sense, was . . .
Was a much more acceptable thing.
Yes, in some context. It would have been really interesting if you'd had a few cells there.
Yes, to see what would have happened.
The other point about it is that any association of white and black in
any context, the thought then was that only communist would do that. I
will never forget when I was doing
If indeed that was an opportunity that was not seized upon, to what extent would you say that the institutions, the pillars of southern society, failed the ideal, failed to provide the leadership? The church, the press, the university, the political parties—again, I'm close to stating my own conclusions here rather than asking a question but if I think about the church, for example, in the '30s, I see some people and hear some voices saying, "you need to do better by the poor and the downtrodden, you need to be helpful." Even if it wasn't explicitly racial it was at least philosophically a kind of beatitudinal approach to things. But, when you get up into the real heat, up in the late 40s and early 50s, it's not so much that the church begins to preach a different sermon, it's that you don't hear any voice coming out of there anymore.
Yes. The thing that comes to my mind is one of the big to-dos in the
South in the church circles of the 20s and 30s had
Even the social gospel people who came along and worked on all kinds of things in different places and even had some outposts in the South like Koinonia and some of these co-op places in Mississippi and various places like that. But, the mainline church. . . . Well, here's another example. There was a guy named Ashby Jones, a white Baptist preacher in Atlanta, was one of will Alexander's main people in the Institute of Racial Cooperation. This guy, Ashby Jones, stayed right with him through all that period of essentially paternalistic kind of doing good. But, when they got to SRC, when the guys from Durham and the whites from Atlanta got together to talk about forming SRC and the issue of segregation was laid on the table, Ashby Jones got as mad as a hornet. He said, "this is absolutely not what I had in mind. I don't want to talk about it."
That, I think, is the real thing that we are all saddled with in some sense that when it