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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-0363, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern
Historical Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill”
Harold Fleming worked with the Southern Regional Council in Georgia from 1947 to about 1959. He recalls some of the opposition that group faced, especially because of accusations of Communism. He links the Communist Scare to a general fear of changing race relations throughout the South, which he started recognizing while commanding black troops in Japan during World War 2. Journalist Ralph McGill helped Fleming get involved with the S.R.C., but McGill, like several others, could not get involved with the organization for fear of losing his job. Fleming compares how several of the S.R.C. leaders, such as Charles Johnson and Lillian Smith, approached the work, and he commends President Harry Truman for taking an early stance against segregation.
Harold Fleming recounts how he became involved with the Southern Regional Council and the kinds of criticisms he faced for opposing racism in the 1940s and 1950s. He especially remembers many Communist trials designed to scare racial progressives and how many limited their involvement in organizations like the S.R.C. for fear of losing their jobs. Fleming compares the leadership styles of those he encountered in the organization and mentions that he was motivated by frustration with the Jim Crow system and its consequences for the South.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
The SRC [Southern Regional Council] could only do so much and it did it not because it could itself generate the power to change and so on, but that it could opportunistically piggyback on the real forces of change that were really working on the South. Amplify and popularize—and some of it was illusion, but—popularize the amount of change that was taking place in order to try to get some momentum and creditability behind it. This is an obligato to the main theme and the main theme had to played by the forces that wielded power. As it turned out—it became increasingly clear to me—that the real sine qua non went on was to reach the point at which a sufficient number of blacks simply said, "we're not going to have it anymore, we won't take it anymore. We'll break all the rules, we just won't do it."
That point came in 1955?
It came in different forms. It came first in the form of litigation. I
would date it from 1950 when the school cases were switched,
equalization cases to desegregation. That was the beginning of it. Up to
that point the whole thing was, as you know, they were all equalization
cases. Equalization of teachers' salaries and. . . . They hit them first
on higher education. Those were equalization suits, too. The strategy
there was a little different because you couldn't achieve equalization
in higher education. There was no way to it. it.
Maybe Thurgood Marshall and them knew that it couldn't be done at the elementary and secondary level either and that the ultimate result would be . . .
That was absolutely the strategy. From the time I got involved in it in mid-'47 it was absolutely clear to me that the really serious people in that movement, however cautious and however qualified and moderate a stance they might adopt, there wasn't a damn one of them that didn't know that desegregation had to happen, and not a one of them that didn't know that that was the right thing to happen. All these other things were stratagems and ploys.
There were some people who were around on the fringes of the movement who perhaps felt that it never had to come to that. They were so few they were meaningless.
What you had in the case of a V. [Virginius] Dabney and so on, these were not people who really felt that you could acheive a just and decent society and a stable new order based on segregation. They knew you couldn't do that; they just didn't want to pay price of saying it out loud. They hoped somehow it could come to pass simply by exposing the weaknesses of the racist South or without ever having to say, "Jim Crow must go."
Or it is possible, I think, that some of them really just could not abide
the thought that segregation was going to go, that there was going to be
a mixing of the races in the South
I think people like that really wanted to moot it. They wanted to let that remain ambiguous. Let's work on these very limited goals today to make this a less unjust and more humane society and system and let the future take care of all that. Sure, sometime in the future the people will do things that we don't want to do and that we don't know how to do. But, we want to work at today's little problems, and let's satisfy ourselves. It's not going to happen in our lifetime, anyway.
There was this belief in a very, very so slow a march of change that nobody would get hurt in the process. Everybody would have time accomodate. Most people alive at the time would never have to deal with the naked reality of it in the end. Future generations. It was that kind of gradualism that took the edge off.
I don't think there was anybody to speak of in the movement who ever was a part of that movement, who broke at all out of the purely paternalistic mold of, "we're good to our slaves, our peons, and our servants"—anybody who got beyond that who didn't begin to see and really feel deep down that sometime it was going to have to happen, and that the movement was in that direction.
It was a terrible price to pay to cut yourself off from your society, your tradition, and to be ostracized. Everybody knew that was what was involved. To be a pariah. To have people to shun you. . . . The most awful example of it was Waites Waring. This was the awful spectre that haunted people like that. To be cut off and renounced and a pariah in their society.
Can you think of anybody white who took that position by the time SRC was formed?
Took what position?
The position that Jim Crow had to go and that we might as well face up to that and deal with it.
Sure, there were a few around. Lillian Smith.
She's the only one that I can find. Will Alexander did in an article in
The Atlantic in 1945.
Yes, but he wasn't much interested in playing that prophetic role. His interest was in strategy.
There were some, like Clifford and Virginia, the Durrs, Dombrowski, Clark Foreman—and they were generally regarded as the people on the left. They didn't have much time for the Southern Regional Council because it was seen as too wishy-washy.
Well, you know, Lillian Smith. . . . That's a fascinating business. I guess you read all that about Lillian Smith and Guy Johnson going at it.
And Saunders Redding.
Saunders Redding.
Saunders Redding was a very good writer.
Yes, he was.
Did you know him?
No, only by reputation and performance.
He was a good writer and he was one of the best.
Yes, he was. You could find them, but most of them when they got to that
point left. They got out of the South, which was exactly what I was
planning to do when I went back after college. But then I ran into
McGill
Odum wasn't out there in the . . .
Odum had a very interesting approach. In many ways he was the godfather
of the southern regional idea stemming from his great work, Southern Regions. His idea was to bypass race entirely. He
never envisioned a racial advocacy organization. He wanted to see a
Southern Regional Council that was addressed to the whole broad
development, 20th century development of the South, economically,
socially, culturally, in which race would sort of get lost in the grand
design, the euphoria of marching into the future.
He wasn't really very happy about what happened to the Southern Regional Council when it turned out that. . . . It's funny that a man of his intellect couldn't have seen that there was no way you could stand in some broad ground. A lot of people wanted to do this. They wanted to be a Fulbright, take the high ground, the world view, the grand international role for this country and the South fulfilling its grand tradition in the nation on these broad issues of industrial development. Henry Grady was a perfect prototype for all this.
You don't get any mud on your spats.
No, and it's beneath you to sit around and be screeching about water fountains and busses and bus stations and things like that. That's beneath you. Fulbright would never. Hell, he's a man of renown, a world leader.
Odum sort of falls in that category.
Well, Odum was in a different line of country from Fulbright and Henry Grady. He wasn't a journalist, he wasn't an international figure, he wasn't a senator.
He was a scholar.
He was a major scholar and I think, unlike the others, he was not really in this for his personal aggrandizement. That wasn't what he was about. He was living in his head and he had built the body of work and a vision of the South moving toward a grand destiny of developing and modernizing and leading in the nation. Drawing on all its good traits, so to speak, its good traditions, its insights, its intellectual leadership, its cultural resources. There's a lot to that. But, drawing on those things and in the process without ever having to look at it straight on and talk about it straight out, transcending the race thing, rising above it.
In contrast to him, think of somebody like his boss, Frank Porter Graham, the head of the University. A man who by all rights should have been on a loftier plane, more remote, more aloof, more distanced and yet he was in the thick of everything that went on. How do you account for that, the differences? Is it just personality, the two of them? Or were they ideologically, philosophically separated?
Oh, I think it's to be viewed in the totality of the personal development of the people involved. That's the only way I know to account for it. You have to look at the person's whole formative history to figure that out as to why they react in a certain way. Dr. Frank was a remarkable guy.
Another guy who was not nearly as saintly in some ways as Graham, but take this tortured, ambivalent creature, wonderful guy, Ralph McGill. McGill suffered over this stuff a lot and his ambivalence which most people today, particularily the younger people, just cannot yet fathom. I can't tell you how many of them I have talked too say, "why did he do this, why did he fink out on this ocassion, why did he say this at one time, why didn't he stand up consistently?" It's like saying, "why didn't that quarterback Montana throw the ball that way all the time?" The answer is that he was ambivalent, he didn't want to cut himself off from his society. He was devoted to his journalistic career and he was interested in a whole lot of things. He didn't want to be narrowly defined as a race mixing advocate as Rastus McGill, which is what they called him in Georgia, the segs. But, he couldn't help himself. He would see these naked examples of absolute cruelty and injustice and he would just respond spontaneously. He couldn't help it.
Frank was like that too. He was less ambivalent than McGill and was much more willing and more readily accepted his moral imperatives. I think it was sort of a ‘with God helping me I can do no other, I've reached this stage of preception about it and I just can't duck it, I can't evade it.’
When do you think McGill reached that point?
He reached it very incrementally, and gradually. I don't think he reached it fully until very late in his career, his life.
Around Brown time or later?
Later. When you say fully he was like most of us, he was still reaching it. It's like saying, when have you fully matured? You don't ever fully mature. But he had gotten very confortable with the role by the bus, I would say. Confortable for him, anyway.
Think of him in contrast to Dabney. They were moving almost in opposite
directions. They kind of passed out there. If you look at Dabney's
record he was liberal on paper. In the early 30s he wrote a book called,
Liberalism In The South. He was a classic civil
libertarian. He took a lot of positions in those early years that were
in defense of individual liberties.
He didn't take any position against segregation, though.
No, he never did, except for one time—and even this you have to qualify—in 1943, he took an editorial position in favor for eliminating the segregation laws in Richmond and in the state of Virginia having to do with segregated buses and streetcars and whatnot.
That was the area in which most moderates found it easiest to depart from the full shiboleth of segregation.
In any case, he could find a way to speak in a moderate to progressive
voice at least enough that he had a lot of people
That's true.
But, by the time the bus came he had completely gone over the other edge.
He never became a demagogue on it.
No, he didn't, that's true.
He never was a Kilpatrick.
That's true. But he acquiesed in that.
He was sort of on probation with his own employers, Tenant Bryans' and those people, the owners of the paper.
He acquiesced in the position that Kilpatrick took and in the leadership that Kilpatrick took.
Only in the sense that he agreed not to challenge it.
He wrote pieces favorable to Harry Byrd, and he found himself, I think, on occasion, being critical of SRC.
He was critical in the sense that he thought it was unwise to take the
course. I told you that story about my role. The sister paper there was
the News Leader. The News Leader
came out. . . . There was a time there when the News
Leader and the Charleston News and Courier, which
was a terrible paper, with Tom Waring, both of those papers came out
with editorials. They were picking up on something that a paid informer
for the House of Un-American Activities Committee testified about. His
name was Manning Johnson. He was a black guy and I never laid eyes on
him and I don't know anything about him except that at one time he had
been a communist in the South. He was one of these recanters
On the strength of that kind of stuff, Tom Waring and Kilpatrick and there's another guy who wrote a column on the Richmond paper. He was a German with another name. Bart, I think, comes to mind or Balentine? Anyway, he was a big force on that paper.
Anyway, they wrote editorials denouncing SRC as a—they never quite came out and said communist, but what they said was, a haven of communist fronters or apologists for the Communist Party born in sin and so on.
When that happened I challenged both of those things. Tom Waring in his editorials harped on the fact that we (SRC) had received all this money from the Fund for the Republic which he said was clearly communist in sympathy and direction.
I wrote him a strong letter. He also said that it had its origins in the
communist influence. I mustered all our evidence. We had a packet of
things. I said, "look at our Board, you say our Board is made
up of communist sympathizers. We have Catholic bishops on our Board. We
have these people and those people, and these are communists,
communitsts sympathizers?" And also I said, "as for
the Fund for the Republic, you are saying that
He ran the letter but he cut all of that stuff out of it, particularily the stuff refering to him. And he did, he did take a grant from the Fund for the Republic.
I sent all this stuff to Hodding Carter and he was furious. Hodding was on the Board. There's a guy who didn't pull any punches. Hodding wrote a letter to Tom Waring that would have blistered the hide off a goddamn rhinoceros. It was wonderful, it was marvelous and I will never forget it.
On the Richmond thing—I say I did these things but probably our president at the time signed the letter—we wrote a letter to Dabney saying in effect, "we have avoided trying to drag you into controversy because of your intimate association with the founding of SRC, but this is too much. Your fellow newspaper in Richmond says editorially that the SRC was founded by communists. Nobody was more intimately involved in that process than you. Nobody knows better than you do that that's a downright lie and we feel that you have to come forward. You can't just wash your hands of this and let that stand on the record by a paper that is part of the organization you serve."
Oh, how he suffered, he wrote back and said, "I really haven't
felt it to be my role to serve as critic of the editorial
We wrote him back and said, "we certainly sympathize and understand your plight. The last thing we are trying to do is to cause you difficulty or pain; however, the issue here is one in which we think surpasses these kinds of questions and reaches the point of what people of good conscience can permit to happen without challenge. This is the kind of thing that did Germany in and we really expect more of somebody of your character and stature. If you choose not to do it and with great sadness we are going to feel it necessary in defense to make public in whatever way we can the fact that you were involved and your role in the creation of the Southern Regional Council."
When was this, Harold?
It was in the late 50s. It was after I became the executive director which was in '57. It was somewhere between '57, '58.
What did he finally do?
He wrote an editorial, more in sorrow than in anger, disputing the sister editorial. He did what he should have done. It was written in very statesmanlike terms but really setting the record straight. I'm sure it was hard for him and it probably incurred the wrath of his masters up there. He really owed it to SRC not to let them get away with that bullshit.
I must have that stuff somewhere. Certainly it is in the files of the Council.
I would like to see it if you come across it.
I'll check that out.
I've looked at some of his letters and a good bit of the SRC material, but I couldn't find it.
I must have it. I hope I've got it. It was very satisfying for me when that editorial came out. I spent an awful lot of time with that kind of stuff.
Do you think there's anything to the notion, as I was saying a minute ago, that McGill and Dabney seemed to have begun at opposite poles and ended up . . .
I don't know about beginning at opposite poles. Were they that opposite when they began? Dabney was just ahead of McGill on the track.
That's true. But he was on paper as a more progressive person than McGill was in his early years.
McGill was a sports writer when he started on The
Constitution. One of the facts that got him on track was the
Rosenwald Fellowship.
In '38.
Old Dr. Will [Alexander] was a shrewd old boy in many ways. He really knew how to use that Rosenwald Fellowship business. He could spot power and he knew how to use that to get these people on the track, so to speak. You can't tell whether they might have done what they did anyway later on, but it sure put them on a faster track.
What kind of guy was will Alexander?
I don't know. I didn't know him all that well. I knew him late in the
game. He was always very positive and laudatory
He spent quite a bit of time up there, actually.
Yes, he did. He was a kind of a . . . very skillful and assiduous mentor. He prided himself on being a talent spotter in the South. Spotting latent talent and nurturing it and mentoring. That was his creation that program, that "investment in people" thing. Certainly, the southern part of it was.
What was his family situation like? He would go away from home and be gone for months.
Yes. I don't think it comes out in the Stokley-Dykeman book, but he was quite a womanizer, too.
I sort of read between the lines and got that feeling.
They had a hard time dealing with that because it was a biography.
Having been a preacher his lifestyle changed quite radically it seems to me.
I don't think he was a pulpit type preacher, not for very long anyway. He
was one of those ordained folks who was in organizational work from way
back. When he founded the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, along
with others, this
On race, do you think he was pretty traditionally paternalistic or did he have some real vision of what the South needed to do that was in any sense prophetic?
Well, he was better than most in terms of sensitivity and handling
questions. But, everybody was paternalistic, every white. With the
nature of the times the only way you could function was
paternalistically, almost. There was no way to be egalitarian because
there wasn't any equality. If there ever was a time when paternalism was
in flower and had it uses was in the South between the Civil War and
after Reconstruction failed, roughly up to Brown, up
into the 1950s.
I never recall—as I say, I say, I wasn't close to him, I didn't see a whole lot of him—any time he was grossly, and I can recall plenty of other people. I spent a lot of time cringing in those days at some of my elders and betters, how they handled themselves with blacks and what they said and how they said it. They were totally unconscious of the fact that they were really an embarrassment to their race.
I never recall anything like that about Dr. Will. He was a very shrewd old bird, and I think very sensitive to that kind of thing. Whatever he was feeling he wasn't about to put his foot in it through his conduct or his language. For example, he and Charles Johnson were great buddies and collaborators.
And sincerely so.
Oh, yes. They had great respect for each other and they were friends.
Did they socialize? Did they spend private times together?
I just don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised.
Did their wives?
I doubt it. I don't think their wives were in this at all. I think that was fairly characteristic.
I think probably both of them would have judged that ordinary kind of socialibility and socializing would have been counterproductive. I don't think Charles Johnson was ever tempted to go over to Chapel Hill or wherever and play croquet on Dr. Will's lawn. I just think that wasn't prudent. Some of us had enough trouble with that much later on.
Let me ask you to digress just a minute and talk a little bit about your own personal journey to 1947. You've told me a lot of this and I've got it in various places and my notes or in my head, but put it in the context of this conversation. Your own experiences that preceeded your coming to Atlanta and working for SRC in 1947, just talk about that a little bit.
You mean coming back to Atlanta?
Yes, coming back to Atlanta. You were actually born in Atlanta or were you born over in Elberton?
I was born in Atlanta. I didn't go to Elbert County to live until the Depression when I was about eight or nine years old.
You were born in '22.
Yes. I grew up in Atlanta and aside from the time I spent at the homeplace, I lived in Atlanta until I went off to college.
What was the homeplace in Elberton?
It was the old homeplace where my great-grandmother and great-grandfather brought up the whole family including my grandfather. My bachelor great-uncle devoted his life to taking care of his mother in her old age and he kept the place after she died. He lived there alone until the Depression came along. Everybody else had gone.
My mother grew up there. Her mother died when she was tiny, when she was born, actually. She grew up on the place and was raised by her grandmother. So, that was the old homeplace, but we had family all around there. Her father, my grandfather, was an upstanding citizen of Elberton. He was the justice of the peace.
You didn't live there, you just went there summers and that kind of thing?
Yes, up until then. And what happened is that we went there for a summer and we didn't leave because of the Depression. Because our father couldn't support us. we never talked about it with Uncle Willie. It was just one of those things, very southern.
How many in your family?
Just my mother, my brother and I. There was Aunt Jessie who married a very nice man and lived twelve miles away. Family was all around there, cousins, aunts, uncles and whatnot.
How long did you stay there?
It was two or three years. I don't quite have the months straight as to when I went there. It was probably two and a half years.
Then you went back to Atlanta and finished high school?
I did later. I went to the fourth and fifth grades in the country. When I went back to Atlanta I went into the sixth grade.
You graduated form Boy's High School in what year?
1940.
Did you go right into the Army?
No, I went to Harvard.
Straight to Harvard from Boy's High?
Yes.
How far along were you at Harvard when the war took you away?
Well, what happened was when the war came they didn't call us up immediately. One of the options was to sign on and enlist in the Enlisted Reserve Corps if you were in college with the understanding that you were then subject to call at anytime. It wasn't quite like the regular draft.
What happened was they accelerated everything. I went into an accelerated
program at that point. I went to classes during the summer and
everything was squeezed and accelerated. I got
You ended up having to go a whole year to get just the little bit you needed.
Yes, I was an honors candidate. It wouldn't have been profitable to go back for a semester because I had to take those honors exams and things. And, shit, I had forgotten everything I knew. I needed a year. I have a very full year and it was a fun year, a good year. I got back into extracurricular activities, the radio station and all kinds of things.
Your experience in the service involved some commanding of Negro troops, didn't it?
That was very critical, of course. Most people, when they learn a little
about my background, jump to the conclusion that, oh well, shit, you
went to Harvard so I see what happened to him. It wasn't quite like
that. Even before I went off to college I lead a kind of double life. I
was a good ole boy when that was politic, but I was also associated with
what would pass for eggheads in that situation. I read a lot and I guess
the best way to characterize it is that I was still pretty much a victim
of my upbringing and so on. But, I felt that I had achieved a state of
enlightment that justified my looking with
But I didn't know any blacks, and I had never seen Atlanta University in all those years—I didn't even know where it was. I knew what it was but I didn't know where it was. I say I didn't know any blacks, I knew black servants and black domestics. I had a certain degree of intellectual liberation on the question. I would have denied vigoriously that I was prejudiced or part of the southern ethos on this.
But the fact is, I was pretty damn unenlightened and remained so in those prewar and several years at Harvard. There was nothing there that would encourage anybody to become certainly not a reformer if not an abolitionist. Most of the guys I knew there were. . . . There were only two blacks, I think. There were a handful of black undergraduates. I only knew of two when I was there in those years. The whites were no great shakes. There were the prep school guys and the guys from Illinois and so on. They weren't that much different from us.
That's why the Army was critical. It was purely accidental that I ended
up as an officer with black troops. In those days there were no other
kinds of officers. All the officers were white. It was a very traumatic
kind of experience. I don't think anybody could have been prepared for
that. You were a white straw boss in a very discriminatory segregated
Army, and you felt discriminated against. You lived where they lived.
Even though you were an officer and you were white you were a
How did it happen that you got that assignment?
It was pure accident. That's what they needed when I came down the pipeline.
The pipeline being Commissioned Officer's school?
Well, yes, but that's another story. I was in the field artillery at Fort Bragg. I was drafted and after I was inducted I went to Fort Bragg which was the Field Artillery Replacement Training Center. I had a wonderful return address, the FART Center. Most of the guys who took basic [training] with me were shipped out in very short order to Italy for the invasion of Italy.
I got acute appendicitis at the critical time there and was operated on at the base hospital. In those days when they did it it was like something between a ceasarian and a hysterectomy. My recuperation time was quite long so I did not ship out.
While I was convalescing they assigned me as a clerk in the headquarters called the Courts and Boards Section, which was court-martials and various boards, selection boards including OCS selection. I never gave OCS a thought because I wasn't eligible. At that time you could be a rifleman in the infantry if you had 20-200 vision—corrected, I mean—but you could not be an officer. There was some funny idea that you needed to have perfect vision to be an officer or near perfect, but you could be very easily be a grunt firing a rifle when you had 20-200 vision. I never did understand that, but I knew it.
Most of the guys I knew, who were my college friends, knocked themselves out to get into something called ASIP, Army (Something) Training Program, which was a real deal. They sent you back to college for one speciality or another. Maybe a language speciality, studying Japanese, or most anything that was thought to be valuable to the Army. And so, you became a college student again. And God, people fell all over themselves trying to get into that program. I didn't and I think God I didn't, I guess. They wiped the program out and shipped them all over to Italy and in no time about half of them were dead.
Instead of that, as I said, I was convalescing from that operation. I got the assignment with the Courts and Boards Section. It was great and I got to know the officers of the Courts and Boards Section. They were a good bunch. Kind of lazy and crazy, a little bit like "Mash." I felt pretty much like a civilian, not quite, but I didn't have to go out and march, jump through hoops or meet reveille. All of that were things of the past. I was really quite comfortable there, you might say.
Then a directive came down which said, "we are urgently in need
of officers for the quartermaster corps and we are waiving the eyesight
thing for candidates." Some of my buddies there who were
officers and who were also with the selection board for OCS said,
"Come on, Fleming, why don't you make something of yourself?
You are sitting around here as a PFC and they are going to replace you
with a WAC one of these days anyway. Here's your chance. Why don't you
apply for OCS?" I did, they shamed me into it. They said,
"you will never have it so good. You
I did apply and I went through OCS. The first thing they told us when we got there, they said, "look, whatever you've heard about the Quartermaster Corps forget it. We've put on a new phase here in this man's war. We've had the Battle of the Bulge and what we have discovered is that service troops have got to be able to fight and therefore you are going to get infantry training here at OCS. It is going to be the same as Fort Benning." And we did.
Was it at this point that you were put with the black unit?.
I graduated from OCS and it was just at the point where they had a very big need for white officers to command the black service troops—quartermaster companies and platoons—because they were doing a build-up for the invasion of Japan, the prespective invasion of Japan. This would have been a mammonth operation, of course, and what they wanted to do was station us at Okinawa as soon as Okinawa was secured. It involved an enormous need for service troops. Service was everything, it was support really. It was trucking, running the supply dumps, the gasoline dumps, the clothing dumps, the grave digging, the whole support mechanism that was required for a million man Army or whatever they had in mind to invade Japan. That's how I was assigned as was everybody else, my comtemporaries, when graduating from OCS. That's what was happening at that point.
Were you sent out to the Pacific?
Yes.
Were you out there when the war ended? Where were you?
In Okinawa.
In other words, waiting to make the landing.
Yes. We got there about a month after the island was declared secure. There were still Japanese guerillas roaming around. They did for quite a while. But, clearly what was going on—they weren't worried about that anymore—they were worried about building up the forces. There was a steady build-up on that island while I was there until victory Day.
I became a company commander and was there until I was shipped home the following June. I was there for about one year.
You were shipped home in June, 1948.
June, 1946.
And you were on Okinawa when the bombing of Hiroshima took place?
Um-hm [Yes].
END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
. . . . The first thing I heard, usually you heard things first by word of mouth. Somebody had been in headquarters where they had a radio and somebody had heard this and that and so, it was pretty imperfect. But, the first thing I heard—I can't remember the exact date of Hiroshima, but I imagine this would have been much later that day or the following day that most of us heard anything—that the United States—it wasn't even called a bomb—had used a new weapon, a fantastic, super powerful, super weapon against the Japanese. The rumor was that the war would soon be over.
My reaction, which was universal, was that we were—hooray! Thank God! I didn't question it. Then gradually one learned more about it. Then the next thing that happened—you'd be interested to know, maybe—the rumors spread like wildfire that the whole island was supposed to be in a state of alert because rumor was that they quite expected the Russians to invade.
I remember all of that.
God almighty, that depressed me, needless to say.
I don't think anybody talked about the ethics of that [the bomb], not at that time. It was regarded as a godsend.
We had Japanese POW's and this was another cross one had to bear commanding black troops because our men were often assigned to guard them as guards of work details, not as round-the-clock guards. They would send out detachments of Japanese POW's.
For example, I had charge of the work force for the gasoline and oil
supply dump for all of Okinawa. Our biggest problem was
There was a lot of heavy equipment, cranes and all those things which I was responsible for. We had the Jap POW's and some of my men were assigned, while they were working, to stand guard over them. The big fear of the brass, who were mostly southern—that was to be expected because most of the brass in the Army was southern—was fraternization between the black soldiers and the POW's. They didn't trust them worth a damn.
Long before they took the amunition away from other units they blatantly, they didn't make any bones about it, made us turn in every round. I protested about it and it was not a very smart thing to do. I asked, "why? There are still Japanese guerillas on this island. We have brought several of them in. We are out there vulnerable to this and the other companies are keeping their amunition." He said, "damnit, you know why." I said, "I think I do, but I don't think it's fair."
At that point you are just twenty-three years old. Do you think your sensitivity to all this racial stuff had been heightened by your experience in working with those guys or were you still pretty much . . .
This is what did it for me. I mean, it was a very good way to learn about
race relations. In the first place, you could really see it plain if you
had any sense of fairness and if you weren't just under the total mercy
of your prejudices, you could see. And if you got to know any of these
men at all and there were some very nice guys, great guys, and there
were also a bunch
It was not the noble savage thing at all, but it was just the sheer human experience of, "good God, how can these men stand it, why do they do it?" Here they are being called on to follow the rules, shape up, be a good soldier, work your ass off, be ready to die for your country and then they would crap all over you without apology. "Not a single one of you blacks bastards is good enough to be an officer even with your own people. You don't get the Quonset huts, you stay in the tents and mud. All the Quonset huts go to a white unit that landed yesterday even though you have been here six months."
It has that kind of stuff, and I understood why they were bitter. The amazing thing is that they functioned at all. The tendancy was for a lot of them was to use passive resistance with their officers and that was their way of retaliating. "What are you doing here, Jones? Didn't I assign you to go over there and do that?" The response would be, "Naw sir, boss, I don't know nothing about that," a bunch of step-and-fetch-it kind of stuff but done very cynically. Sometimes—very near insubordination—they all had techniques made to screw you good. The whole idea was to drive you up the wall.
I just took a tack with these guys, I said, "Look, you are not
Step-and-Fetch-it, and I'm not Simon Legree, and this bullshit doesn't
go with me. Jones, you know you're suppose to
What a bunch of dumb bastards, these young white Yankee officers. They would come to me and say, "I just want to tell you, Captain, that I feel you got a bad deal and you're from Georgia, aren't you?"
I said, "yes."
"I just want to tell you that I understand how you people feel down there and the first thing I'm going to do when I get out of here is get a charter membership in a Kiu Kiux Kian."
I said, "look buster, you don't know anything about what I feel and I don't want to know what your views are. I don't want to hear any talk like that around here again. If you value your life, shut your mouth and do your job and don't go in for any of this racist crap because you're going to get killed." Some of them did, you know. It was not a smart thing to do.
I didn't philosophize about it with anybody much except Gaylord Nelson. He was my best friend over there.
Was he in a similar role?
Yes.
Did you know others that you subsequently kept up with?
Not really. Gaylord is about the only one. I've seen a few others since but we haven't maintained a relationship.
Gaylord found a guy who was in my company—a corporal—and he turned out to be the Director of Foreign Student Affairs at Howard University. He just stumbled on to him and he brought us together in a surprise meeting. I was surprised he would even want to see me. We had a good time reminiscing and so on. I said, "what did he say when you told him?" Gaylord told him that I've always said that I thought it was unjust as hell. He said I was a follower of Bob Lafollette, a wisconsin progressive, and what did I get from these men but a bunch of shit? They would come in there and say, "you're from Georgia and you're a great guy. There's no justice in the world." I said that to him and he said, "well, he was about as good as you could hope for under the circumstances." I thought that was high praise myself.
Anyway, that's how it all happened. When I came back I was sick of the whole goddamn business. I was mad at the Army and mad at the system. And godalmighty the two-governors controversy broke out in Georgia and the Arnall thing went down the drain, and Talmadge came back in. . . .
Did you go back up to Harvard that fall?
I went back that fall. I spend the summer in Atlanta and went back that fall. Then the two governors thing broke while I was up there. Instead of M.E. Thompson, who was no great tower of strength, succeeding Ellis Arnall, it turned out in the end to be Herman Talmadge.
That summer you were here was when the Walton County lynching took place.
Yes, that's correct.
You were in Atlanta that summer when that happened?
Yes.
You remember that pretty well?
Yes, I do.
Can you relate any personal antecdotes about it in terms of where you were when it happened and what you thought about it or anything?
No. All I can say is that it laid the base for total disgust that built up over the succeeding year. I wasn't even thinking about any kind of reform or crusading at that point. But the idea of settling and having a normal life in that setting when that kind of thing could take place and where you could have a guy saying the things that Talmadge said, reelected governor after all that—Eugene was reelected. I just felt I had to get out. When I came back—the key to all this, you said, "how did you get there?"—by far the most important piece of that was this Army experience. I felt I would actively become an activist of any kind. God knows, I hoped, gone on maturing in attitudes and that kind of thing. I don't think it ever would have occured to me to get into organizational work challenging the system.
Why did you come back? You got away, you went back to Harvard, you could have never looked back if you didn't want to.
I was just coming home to see my family. I didn't come back to go to
work. In fact, I had already put out my letters. I had written several
publishing houses in New York and to everybody I knew up that way that I
was going to be coming up
I had one or two encouraging letters back saying they would like to interview me. I thought that was what I was going to do.
Fall of '47?
Yes. So, this was all accidental this business of settling . . .
'46.
No, '47. I went back to the school that summer.
You got out of the Army in '46 and stayed in Atlanta that summer. You knew you were going back to Harvard that fall. You went back and graduated in '48.
In '47
I mean, graduated in '47.
June of '47. I went back to visit the family and to just have a little breather. As I said, the summer was a poor time for job hunting anyway. I wanted some relaxation. Between the Army and college I had been working my ass off.
But, just by quirk you ended up getting this job?
I read the Atlanta Constitution and here was McGill's
column on the front page. About one out of every five columns he was
saying something quite startling on race. I was naturally amazed, I
didn't realize, a) anybody was doing that, and b) that anybody could get
away with it.
Just out of curiosity I went to see him. I called him up and asked for an
appointment and he said to come on in. I went and spent an hour with
him. I told him where I was and what I
I said, "well, I'm still impressed with what you are saying down
here." He said, "I'm paying for it."
"That's news to me," I said. "It does sound interesting."
He said, "hold on a minute."
He picked up the phone and called George Mitchell and he told him he had this fellow in his office and asked if he could see him and tell him a little bit about the Southern Regional Council. George said to send him over right then.
I walked over to Auburn Avenue to see George Mitchell. After we talked for quite awhile he said, "are you in any rush to get up there to New York?"
I said, "I don't have any deadline." I hadn't planned to go until early September and this was then early August.
He said, "I just lost my Director of Information. He went to work with the steelworkers and I would have lost him anyway because I don't have any money to pay anybody here." Rosenwald had run out of existence, the Rosenwald Fund. He said, "he left me with a half-finished publication. I don't have much money but I can scrape up somehow to pay you if you hang around here for a few weeks and finish it up for me. Can you do that? It will give you a chance to find out a little more about the Council and how it works, who our people are and what they think."
I said, "sure, that sounds okay."
He said, "I wish I had some money because I would offer you a job."
I said, "oh, well, that's alright."
And you left fifteen years later.
You know how that goes. That's how that happened. It was purely accidental. Everything that has ever happened to me was accidental.
That's what history is.
Yes, a series of accidents.
Let me just read you a list of names and you give me just a sort of thumbnail. . . . Peg these people up on the board for me in terms of their vision or their wisdom or their sensitivity to . . .
Are these all people I know?
These are all people you know. [Howard] Odum, we mentioned, Mrs.
I never knew either one of those people very well personally. They were pretty much out of the scene when I was around.
They were still around but really very much in the background.
Odum was holding court in Chapel Hill and Mrs. Ames had left.
She was gone by then?
Yes. I met them, but I knew them mostly by reputation.
Alexander, we talked about. Ira Reid?
He was a very impressive fellow. very bright and very articulate. He had a certain number of adjulators on campus and so on. He was a guy who handled himself well and probably a bit vain. He was a man not to be triffled with but very entertaining and very, very smart. He had a considerable reputation. He was the associate director of the Southern Regional Council for a time but not as a full-time in-house employee. His work was at Atlanta University but he was held that as a kind of part-time, honorific thing. I think he was a very positive influence on the scene there. He didn't last a very long time.
No, he left. What about Charles Johnson?
I think he was a very wise man and an admirable person. I think the only
thing that anybody might say to fault him is that his reputation as a
scholar and writer was. . . . He was heavily indebted to graduate
students whose work he incorporated.
Was he one of the visionaries?
I think he was. By today's standards he probably would be considered an accomdationist, but that would be true of so many people. I don't think he was. He was a man of natural dignity and considerable intellect. Unlike most black college presidents he didn't throw his weight around.
Sort of a diplomat, quiet, behind the scenes.
Quiet. Well, what I mean by that is that he was not dictatorial or authoritarian, which most of them were. That was a very authoritarian occupation.
What about Gordon Hancock? Was he a difficult man?
Well, he was a virginia gentleman in technicolor, I mean, he just happened to be black. I don't mean he didn't take his blackness seriously, he obviously did, but in manner, attitude, and so on. He had this wonderful and gray Vandyke beard. He was a very dapper man.
By the time I got to know him he was showing some age. He was very protective of his reputation and role in all these matters; the creation of the Council. Capable of confrontation. For all the fact of his dignity and bearing and reputation—I don't know whether he was better when he was younger—I didn't think of him as a heavyweight.
Not in Johnson's class?
No. I don't think so.
What about P.B. Young who was one of Hancock's associates?
This is P.B. the elder. I knew his son somewhat better. P.B. was one of
those . . . I don't know whether he was self-made or not but he was like
a self-made man, a bit tyranical. One of the things I remember was that
we had a program going to try encourage reform in the southern
newspapers. When covering the news of the black community and the use of
courtesy titles and all those things we put out a little publication
called, Race in the News. Mrs. Tilly and her church
women took it around to their local editors and said this is what we
want you to do. It really was quite effective. It got a lot of coverage
and Pop wrote it up in the Times. In the southern
papers it helped to sensitize them. One of the things we recommended was
that they hire black reporters not just to cover black news.
I got a letter from P.B. Young resigning from the Board on the grounds that we were trying to put the black press out of business. That tells you a little something about how protective and really hopelessly old-fashioned some of that crew were.
I didn't know him as well personally as I knew some of the other people. I don't mean for that to be the sum total of the man. He played a constructive role, positive role in black leadership in the South.
What about Benjamin Mays?
Great guy.
One of the best?
Yes, absolutely terrific. He was courageous, he had humor, he was a wonderful speaker, majestic presence, coal black with the gray hair. He had absolute integrity and honesty and I liked him a lot. I think he deserved every bit of praise he ever got. He ran a really first-rate college.
Lillian Smith?
I didn't get to know Lillian Smith until later after she had relented about her view of the SRC. I found her quite delightful when I listened—you sort of sat at her feet in those days. By the time I got to know her she had such a reputation and was such a somebody that it wasn't quite a natural relationship. I liked her and admired her greatly, her courage. But, I did feel that she was, particularly in the earlier years, with her indictment of the SRC—a lot of merit in that position—but she did tend toward the ‘holier than thou’ more than was to my taste. But, I think as she got older and mellowed some of that faded away.
Kind of self-righteous earlier?
She had reason to be proud of her role. She really was, compared to most people, in a protected position. She couldn't be hurt economically and as a woman she was shielded somewhat from the kinds of consequences of her behavior that befell others. Her national reputation was a kind of protection.
I just felt she was really a little harsh in her judgements of lesser
mortals that perhaps weren't in quite as much
I went back and checked on several people to see what role they had with the Council if any. I was a little surprised at some of these. These are among the people who never served on the Council, McGill, even though he was a founder he was never a member.
That doesn't surprise me.
John Temple Graves, Jonathan Daniels, George Fort Milton . . .
Jonathan Daniels, are you sure?
I can't find any records and his name doesn't appear in any of the Board lists. Lillian Smith and Frank Porter Graham.
I don't know why but I thought Jonathan Daniels had served a term or two.
Never there and then some who were there . . .
Who was the other one besides Graham?
Lillian Smith.
Oh, you know about Lillian Smith.
JF: Yes, I know about her.
Lillian Smith, however, in later years—I don't know that she was ever on the Board—she took part in the SRC affairs. Then, of course, as you know they named a literary award after her. That was while she was still alive, I think.
Why do you think McGill never . . .
McGill didn't do it because of his precarious, his uneasy relationship with his management.
Did he feel that uncomfortable with it?
Oh, shit. They leaned on him so heavily that you can't believe it. He was like Peck's bad boy. His keeper was Jack Traver, who was a son-of-a-bitch in many ways. Though he was devoted to McGill, his role was to keep McGill out of trouble.
McGill just thought it was the better part of valor—we all understood it, nobody felt miffed and we weren't pressuring—and besides, we used—if at anytime we needed to exploit McGill's connection we had the record there of his role as a founder. He never repudiated and always spoke well of the Council. That was more valuable to us than having him on the Board. He editorialized all our materials and statements and so on.
It seems strange to me after Foreman was gone, after the paper belonged to the Coxs, the so-called liberal Coxs from the North, the democratic liberals from Ohio . . .
Then there's Tarver, having played the protector, became the master himself.
Does this say anything at all about the role that newspapers played in
all of this, the essentially negative role that newspapers played? By
the time we got to Brown the newspapers were not very
much in any pretense of trying to help lead the South out of the morass
of segregation or anything of the sort. Some of the papers earlier on,
it seems to me, had been reasonably progressive.
Some of them were.
They seemed to get less so as time got closer to the crunch. They got quieter.
Some of them did, but some of them were quite good. Almost none of them, with a precious few exceptions, were really fully squared on the issue. They all tended to shuffle.
None that I can find came out ahead of Brown and said,
"we need to address this issue." I can't find a single
paper that did that.
What you can find are papers that said, "we need to prepare for
whatever the court says and prepare to do it in good faith."
You didn't hear them say, "God, we sure hope the court orders
desegregation." I don't know of any papers that said that.
Maybe the Courier Journal.
No, even they didn't.
Even they didn't?
No. They endorsed the Brown decision after Brown came down, but they didn't in any sense prepare people
for Brown.
McGill in his column once in a while do better at that than some of the others, but even McGill was not saying too much. McGill was still sort of fighting the rear guard battle on a lot of these things. He never could come around on things like FEPC or anti-lynching. It's so ironic, that newspaper in 1933 endorsed a federal anti-lynching bill.
When?
1933.
I didn't know that.
Yes, and fifteen years later you wouldn't have caught them dead saying anything like that.