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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-0364, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
William Gordon was born in 1919 and was raised primarily in Mississippi and
Arkansas. He describes growing up in the rural South, focusing on race
relations, and explains what life was like for his sharecropping family. Sent
off to school in Memphis, Tennessee, as a teenager, Gordon excelled in his
studies and went to Le Moyne College in the 1930s. Following his graduation,
Gordon enlisted in the army and fought in World War II. Gordon focuses on race
relations in his discussion of his school and military years. He describes
various customs associated with Jim Crow segregation in the South. Following the
war, Gordon attended graduate school to study journalism. Gordon wrote for the
Atlanta Daily World beginning in 1948, during which time
he formed a close friendship with Atlanta Constitution editor
and anti-segregationist Ralph McGill. Gordon also formed close connections with
Georgia Senator Herman Talmadge. He discusses in detail his perception of
changing race relations in the 1930s through the 1950s and argues that
desegregation required legal action. Nonetheless, Gordon acknowledges the role
of white leaders, such as McGill and Talmadge, who genuinely sought racial
change. In the late 1950s, Gordon began to work for the United States
Information Agency (USIA) and spent many years traveling through Africa and
Europe.
African American journalist William Gordon recalls growing up in the rural South in the 1920s and 1930s. He describes his relationship with civil rights advocates such as Ralph McGill and Herman Talmadge, and explains his perspective on changing race relations and the fall of Jim Crow segregation.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
I would like to begin by getting you to give me some personal background about where you were born and raised and where you went to school.
Well, that's interesting because I have just been turning out some stuff—I'm working on a project myself—I start with Martin Luther King, but I go back to the days when I was a boy working as a carhop for an American naturalized Greek in Memphis. My wife and I both grew up in Memphis.
Were you born there?
No, I wasn't born there. I was born in Mississippi.
Where in Mississippi?
At a place called Bentonia, Mississippi, about twenty miles from Jackson.
In fact, my wife and I were just there this past summer. I went back to
this small town and the curious thing about it is that we pulled into
the little square of the town where as a boy—six or seven years old—I
remember that my father and I used to come into town and in that square
we used to sell watermelons and everything. The old stores, some of them
are still there. The old railroad track is still there and the railway
station is still there, a little weather-beaten place. But anyway, I
asked some chap who was standing there by his car about some people that
my parents knew whom I was trying to find. He said, "you know, people
your age either have all died or they have moved away." Then he pointed
across the track and said, "go
You found very little . . .
Very, very little. . . . Some of them knew my parents especially this man we tried to find. Just about everybody had moved away.
Is it Bentonia?
Yes, that's correct. Very small town.
What county is it in?
I think it is in Hinds County.
The other thing that struck me was the attitude of the people. Of course, this takes in most of the South, I guess, how those things have changed over the few years in contrast to when I was there. When we moved away from there I was about eight or nine years old. We moved to a place called Ruleville, Mississippi. Of course, we were farmers. My parents were sharecroppers. In those days I still remember a man riding around on a horse with a gun on his hip. He was the overseer and you never argued with him about anything. He just said this and you did it. We would be in the fields chopping, my mother and others. My mother married again—I was her child and I had three stepsisters and one stepbrother. All of them are gone now except one. We would be working along in the fields and this man would ride up on his horse. This was not only true in our case but true for just about everybody there.
I remember one day we had just started to school—I was about eight—and it was held in a rural church for blacks, and the whites went into town where they had their school. We came across a house and there was a big sheet lying over a man's body and his feet were protruding, we could see that. That frightened the heck out of us and we ran all the way to school which was about another mile. When we got there the teacher told us that this was a man who was killed because he had some words with the overseer. Nobody ever investigated the killing.
That must have frightened you to death.
Yes. That's the kind of atmosphere we grew up in. About a year later we moved away.
What year were you born?
1919.
You were born in 1919?
Yes, 1919.
The year 1919 came to be called the red summer because of all the blood that was shed by blacks in riots and whatnot right after the world war I.
Yes. All those cases were down in Texas.
Yes. A huge big riot in Texas and in Chicago and Detroit and in Knoxville, Tennessee.
I didn't remember that. Isn't that interesting!
Also, across the river there in Arkansas up around Elaine, Arkansas, there was a big riot. It was over essentially what you're saying that somebody dared to . . .
You didn't talk back, you never talked back to. . . . No blacks could ever talk back to whites. When a white person said something that was it and you'd just say, "well, sir, what do you want me to do?", or something like that and go ahead then you'd mind your own business. We left Ruleville. I remember one night we heard a knock at the door and it was one of our neighbors' who came from a nearby farm. He told my mother that he had heard from Oliver. See, our father left quickly after that because he had had a word with the overseer and it was best for him to get away quickly.
Out of Bentonia or out of Ruleville?
This was Ruleville. We had moved to Ruleville. We hadn't heard from him in two or three weeks. He just disappeared and that was pretty typical of the black sharecroppers in those days, you just went away and then send for your family later. He said, "I'll come for you and take you to Ruleville so you can get away." About three nights later, about midnight, he came with a wagon and we loaded a few things on it. Then we drove to Ruleville and escaped that way by train. We went into Helena, Arkansas, and from there over to a place called Forrest City and then from there to a place called Marked tree. In Marked Tree—I was getting older—we met a different kind of overseer. This man was a white man, Mr. Shaw, who ran a small farm near Marked Tree. He worked in the fields with everybody else.
This would have been about when?
This would have been in the early 1930s.
You would have been about eleven years old?
Exactly. We worked on the farm there. There was a church school not far from where we lived. Whenever the crops wer laid by and there was a break in the spring or summer, we could always go to school. He was very liberal in that respect. He had three kids himself, a daughter and two sons. They went into Marked Tree to school. He used to say, "Learning is good for you, so go to school. I send my kids to school, so you go." We went to school and we had no problem there. We stayed with that man about four or five years. Then, a few of the young fellows—older than I was at the time, seventeen, eighteen or twenty—would disappear, go some place and come back and say, "oh, we found work here, work there, where you can make money." Then we heard about Memphis. I did very well at the school I was attending. The teacher, Miss Olla Walker, whose name I will never forget, came by to see my parents. She said, "Why don't you see if you can arrange for Willie to go to school somewheres I have taught him just about all I can teach him and I think he has good possibilities. If you can find a school for him someplace in a big town where he can live with somebody until school is over, do that." My mother and father agreed to that. About a year later when I was fourteen I left Marked Tree one Saturday with a couple of other boys and we caught a cotton truck heading to Memphis.
Let me ask you a couple of things. When you lived in Arkansas did you or your family have any connection with or knowledge of The Southern Tenant Farmers Union?
We had heard about it but . . .
It didn't affect you, it didn't reach to where you were?
It didn't reach to where we were. It was vague to see something like that. We lived on a farm and to show you what happened in Marked Tree, there was a white family that moved across the road from us, two white families. We always got along fine with them. For some reason there was a comradeship.
Different atmosphere than you found in Mississippi?
Oh, in Mississippi it was completely different. It was different entirely. They would come to our house and if we had something that they needed and didn't have, my mother would let them have it. We would go to their house and it was the same way. The only skirmish we had with a white family at that time was one night. . . . They used to come to our church, because they had no church there. It was the same place where we went to school. At this church they would come in and sit on the front row and listen to the minister. There were two or three of them. Then the next Sunday some more would come. We got quite a few and they kept coming and coming. They liked the singing and they liked the preaching. That always amazed me why they would come to our church. It was a kind of friendliness there that existed.
On one occasion the whites were holding a church service in an empty house and we went to that. We went there and stood up through the service. After it was finished we left—one of our white neighbors took us there—and on the way back in the dark a group of youngsters threw rocks at us. We didn't run and the next day we told this white man who was with us, Mr. Armstrong, and he said he would find out who did that. Several days later he came up and told my father that we wouldn't have any more problems with this anymore. Apparently it was somebody in the neighborhood and he just explained everything to them.
When I left and came to Memphis it was the first time I had ever seen neon signs. It was so exciting and I looked at those lights going around, it was fascinating. I never saw so many people in one group and in one place. Everybody congregated on Beale Street, all the blacks did.
That was a very exciting thing, wasn't it?
It was extremely exciting. We didn't have any place to stay. One of the fellows with us had an aunt there and we went to her house.
Just you and two other fellows?
Yes, that's all.
Young boys?
Young boys, fourteen and fifteen years old. That's all we were. The
oldest one, the man who had his aunt, was about seventeen. He took us to
his aunt's house, but she had no room. So, we spent the first night
under a bridge on the highway. The
Is that right?
I mean off and on. All the way through high school and partly through college—LeMoyne College in Memphis—I worked for him.
Was LeMoyne College in Memphis then or was it up in Jackson?
No, LeMoyne was in Memphis.
But, it's in Jackson now?
It's Memphis but it is not LeMoyne-Owen now.
Where is LeMoyne-Owen?
In Memphis. It was just simply LeMoyne at the time but it changed from that to LeMoyne-Owen because there was an Owen's College there. I got that job with him as a waiter and I stayed there and then I said I wanted to go to school. This kind of interested him because he was an Americanized Greek. He couldn't speak good English. He was bad with English but he was a hard worker. He got to liking me and he said, "yes, you can go to school in the daytime and work here in the evenings." I did that and went to school. I hadn't even finished grammer school. I finished a couple of years of grammar school and then went on to Booker T. Washington High School. I stayed with him until I finished Booker T. Washington and then I went to LeMoyne for a couple of years. Of course, after that I went into the Army.
You got to Memphis in about '33 and when the War started you would have been twenty years old. Were you at LeMoyne?
I went to LeMoyne before the war started. Let me back up a little bit. I
got a job with Tuskegee and I got this job through some newspaper
people, black newspaper people. I don't know whether you have ever come
across these names, Lewis (The Memphis World, which was published by the
Scott people in Atlanta. It is not published now.
Yes, the Scotts had papers around.
Yes, one in Memphis, Birmingham, Atlanta and all over Georgia.
Were there others besides Memphis and Birmingham that were sort of satellite papers?
Yes, he had them in—Memphis and Birmingham and Atlanta were the three major ones, but he had them in smaller towns like Augusta and Savannah.
When I was high school I started fiddling around with the newspaper and
they asked me to write something about the school, which I did. When I
finished high school I went to college. Oats, who was publishing The Memphis World, who was the head of it, went to
work at Tuskegee. They had this publication called Service
Magazine, which was an official organ of the dietetics
department at Tuskegee. They published that because Dr. Fred
Patterson—I'm sure you met him when he was alive— conceived the idea
that they should properly train cooks and chef cooks at Tuskegee. It
went over very well. My job was to take that magazine and go into hotels
and restaurants. I was articulate enough at that time to talk to the
people about the publication and I did pretty well with that. They kept
me on and I went with that for several years.
Did you work out of Tuskegee or out of Memphis?
Out of Memphis.
You really didn't change your residence, you just took on a job.
I took on a job and I was a resident of Memphis. I would drive around throughout the South.
An unusual time to be doing that.
[laughter]
This was in the 30s?
It was in the late 30s. You couldn't walk in the front door, they would invite you come around and go in through the kitchen. I remember one incident in Birmingham where I walked in the front door. The bellhop, who was white, turned to me and said, "you can't come in here, niggers don't come in the front door of this hotel. You've got to come around the back." I said, "well, I have an appointment with the manager." I had called him up and made an appointment to talk about the magazine and the cooking school at Tuskegee. I think what infuriated him was there was a young woman behind the desk who was very polite and smiling when I came in. She didn't care who I was. Then she called the manager and told him I was there. This young fellow, I guess, didn't like that. He came over to me and I guess he was going to put me out bodily. But, just as he approached me the manager came in and shook my hand. Then that fellow disappeared. It was this kind of thing that you had to be very careful about going in and out of these places. The name of Tuskegee was like magic in the South and it had a good name, because of Dr. [George Washington] Carver and what it stood for, so we could get into these places. I did very well with that and then from there I went into the Army. I spent two and one-half years in the Army and then I came out.
Where did you serve?
I didn't go overseas at all. I was stationed at Gulfport, Mississippi, and McDill Field, Florida, just outside of Tampa, for a long time.
Did you ever hear during those years of any incident in the military where a large number of blacks were killed in a fracas at an Army base and it was hushed up?
I didn't hear of any killing but there were fights and skirmishes.
This particular one was in south Mississippi around Centerville, Mississippi, Camp Van Dorn.
Vaguely I did hear something about that.
I was just curious to know.
But, I did cover where they did have conflicts. At McDill Field every
weekend, Saturday in particular, the Army camp had a private
organization trucking firm that picked up the soldiers and took them
into town. It was a big bus. The blacks were stationed in separate camps
in those days. The main gate and the headquarters base was about a mile
up the way. They had to come through that gate to go and pick up people
to take them into town. Well, on one occasion which I saw and I was
involved in, the truck kept coming in that gate picking up the white
soldiers and coming back. By the time it got to the back gate it was
already filled and there was no room for the blacks to get on. This
happened almost half of the morning. One of the soldiers said, "go and
get a hold of Colonel Wright. I didn't know at that time but Colonel
Wright was the head of the black troops there. He was white from South
Carolina. He was a full-time
When did you get out, Mr. Gordon?
I think it was in 1945.
After the War?
After the War was over I got out. My first son was born and I got out. I had two years of college already and I went back to school.
You had married before the service?
No, while I was in the service.
Was your wife from Memphis?
She's originally from Jackson. She grew up in Jackson.
You knew her in Memphis?
We met in high school in Memphis. She knew me in high school but I didn't know her. After I got out of high school and had two years college we finally met. This is our forty-sixth wedding anniversary. It's amazing when you think back on that.
What was her name?
Jackson, Anne Jackson. JE Did she wait in Memphis for you while you were away or did she go back to Mississippi while you were in the service?
She didn't come from Mississippi, she was from Jackson, Tennessee, but
she lived in Memphis. Her mother was still alive and she lived with her
mother while I was in the Army. When I came out I went back on the GI
bill as a lot of us did and finished up at LeMoyne. When I finished
LeMoyne I went to New York. This is too much of a long story, but you
know the Commercial Appeal in Memphis?
Yes.
One day I walked into the Commercial Appeal—it's a
joint ownership—and I met the general manager and told him I was a
Memphian. I had good letters and everything from reputable people in
Memphis—whites and teachers. I said I would like to have a job as an
apprentice on the paper (
McGill didn't offer you a job?
He was very sympathetic and he said, "I don't have anything now, but your idea is excellent. Let's keep in touch." So I went to New York. You know what happened to PM, it went out of business. I went there as a copyboy and I went to graduate school at night.
Where?
NYU and Columbia. In the daytime I went to Columbia and at night I went to NYU. Then they finally brought all my grades together. I stayed there until I finished school and PM folded. Scott in Atlanta offered me a job.
You got a master's from one of those places?
Master's from NYU. I went way beyond a master's. I went all the up to
about forty some points beyond it. I could have gone for a doctorate but
I didn't want to. I figured I didn't have the time. We had only one
child, our only son, and I just didn't like living in New York. It was
too crowded and too rushy and I just wasn't getting anywhere. When PM
went out of business we came back South and I took a job at The Atlanta Daily World.
When would that have been?
That was in 1948.
Was it C.A. Scott?
Yes.
Who were his brothers?
His brother was W.A. Scott who was killed during the 1930s. They don't know who did it.
Did that ever . . . ?
It was never resolved and they never did solve it for some reason. C.A. is the youngest of the brothers and he is still there.
Did they start that paper the Scott family? The brothers or their father?
The brother started it. He was kind of a genius. He started that daily paper back in the early sus.
Even today there is not another black daily paper in the country, is there?
Except in Chicago.
The Defender is daily?
It finally went daily.
That's a fairly recent development, isn't it?
That's right.
So, from the 40s, The Atlanta Daily World was a daily
newspaper.
From the 30s it was a daily newspaper and then it had a lot of weeklies.
Yes, and they had all those satellite papers.
When I went there in '48 he gave me the job as associate editor and I began to work with him. Then we put this newspaper out and we got very much involved in all kinds of stuff like health problems and community affairs. My interest was to build bridges between blacks and whites. Our readership of whites went up to be about ten percent. They wanted to know what was happening in black communities. We won several prizes from the state.
What did the circulation get to?
Circulation got up to about fifty thousand. It was not nearly as much as it should have been.
But that's not too bad.
Fifty or sixty thousand we got because Scott was a very cautious person.
He didn't want to expand. He never had a chance to really learn what was
out there. That's when I went back and renewed my contact with Ralph
McGill. I went to see him. I was there for two years. They started a
program—they were having some problems at the air bases with social
diseases, syphilis and all that—and the state health [the The
Atlanta Constitution involved and they got us Daily World]
Did the papers sponsor this?
Well, my paper was involved and I was involved on the committee. Being
involved on the committee I was sort of pushed to the front on this
because I came up with some ideas. In order to enhance the thing, to
make it more successful, we had to come up with some ideas about how to
get more people to go into these places. I got a hold of some
entertainers around there, people who knew how to bring crowds together,
and we put on a big health show. We got some comedians and other
different people from New York to come down to Atlanta to put on this
big show. We got the
What year did you have the Nieman?
1953.
You were working at The World up until that time?
That was during that time and even after.
You went to Harvard in '53 and '54?
'52 and '53. That kind of pushed me to the forefront in the community and
I was involved in many civic projects and speaking here and there and at
schools. Everybody that came to Atlanta from abroad or from around the
country would touch base with Mr. McGill and then he would send them
down to me. We would brief them on what the South was like. A lot of
people from abroad came over. They had heard about Atlanta and about
Ralph McGill and they had heard about the South. The real story was to
know the people of the South itself, and it still is, and so I got
involved. After the Nieman Fellowship—I met Henry Kissinger up at
Harvard. He invited me to come to his international seminars. I went to
a couple of those during the summer—they pay your way and everything.
You would just sit there with these people fromThe New
York Herald Tribune. It was a very modest grant and you could
get supplements for that from other foundations and groups if you wanted
to. That gave you extra money and then you could go anywhere in the
world you wanted. You could pick a country and you go there and spend a
year studying that country. All you have to do is keep them informed on
how you are doing by writing a report.
Was that in '58?
Yes. I took my family, I mean my whole family, and we went to Ghana for a year. While I was there, because of my work with all these people coming from around the world to our place to be briefed on the South, the State Department gave me an assist grant while I was there. It allowed me to travel in twenty-five countries in Africa. The whole family could travel. That's how I got hooked into USIA [U. S. Information Agency].
Did you come back from that and go to work for USIA or did you go back to Atlanta?
They sort of nailed me down on the field when I was out there. When I got back everything had been run, security and all that.
You never went back to Atlanta then?
We went back to Atlanta for about six months. At that time I did some teaching at Morris Brown University. After six months time they called me to Washington and I got involved in that.
You have lived here ever since.
No, back overseas.
You spent a career with USIA from '58 until you retired?
'58 I was in Africa, so it was in '80.
About 1960.
1960 up through 1980.
Twenty years you spent. How many times did you back overseas to live during that twenty years?
We served in Nigeria five and one half years. Then I was sent to Stockholm for two years. In between I would come back and spend two years at home then go back again. My last post was The Hague in Holland.
You had interesting travels.
It was fascinating.
You need to write that story.
I was very fortunate. My wife and I talk about this. We were extremely
fortunate. When I retired in Holland—you had to retire at sixty—we
agreed that there was no need to come back to the states immediately. We
had this house here so we decided to leave the house rented out and then
we'll stay and do some traveling in Europe to see what it was like. We
spent an extra
You got to do some really interesting things.
Then we came back here and settled and then I traveled and did some lecturing in the South. I went to the University of Georgia several times and to Georgia State and to the University of Tennessee. In 1980 we didn't do any traveling because my wife got ill. In 1987 we went back overseas on another trip. We hadn't seen all of eastern Europe so on this trip we went back to Holland and Germany and went all down through Austria into Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary and then back. We wanted to get a feel of what was happening in the those areas.
That's a good overview. I want to back up and ask you a few things about
the 40s. You went back to Atlanta in '48 and went to work for The World and you later became managing editor. Is
that right?
Yes, managing editor.
You left The World when?
In 1958 I got the Ogden Reed Fellowship and went abroad.
In that ten year period when you lived in Atlanta that spans the time
when the South went from rigid, unyielding segregation by law and by
common practice to the post-Brown time when it had to
be clear by then to just about everybody that it was going to change. It
was going to take some time apparently but it was going to change. As
you think back on that now do you
I got a feeling that back in '48, '49 and the early '50s that there was something at work. Of course, Atlanta is unique in the terms of southern cities because of its location and all of that. Memphis was much more rigid in terms of segregation, more of a diehard situation. What I could see merging to the front was more enlightened—the change of attitude by the white leadership, in particular, towards more respect for the blacks by bringing blacks into the total picture of the economy. I could see and feel that. I saw it in the teachers and especially in the white leadership. In Atlanta, in particular, there had long been a close working relationship between the white educated elite and the blacks. They used to meet at Atlanta University. We ran in Atlanta, at the YMCA—we used to run a thing called the Hungry Club and it was integrated. We would invite white speakers and whites would come and sit. . . .
Was it under the Atlanta U. auspices?
No, this was under the YMCA. This is where I met Harold Fleming because The Southern Regional Council was there. They were located on Auburn Avenue.
Was it organized at the Negro YMCA?
It was organized at the Negro YMCA but the whites would come to the Negro
YMCA. I could see a further break in it when
You were a member of that?
I became a member of that and Harold Fleming was involved with that. I met people like Harold Fleming, Johnny Glustrum from Atlanta, and many of the young whites at that time. I could see this all emerging. This is Atlanta now, of course, but, when I went into Memphis I could see a change. The younger whites were seeing in a completely different light than the elders see. They saw the handwriting on the wall.
What would you say to the notion that that period of time from the end of
the War to about 1950 until things kind of turned nasty with all the
anit-communist hysteria and the election defeat of Claude Pepper and
Frank Porter Graham and Jim Folsum and some of those folks, up until
that time there was a period of four or five years when it looked like
maybe the more liberal progressive people in the South, white and black,
might
You are right about that. I think they wanted to do it but they were
silent on the whole subject. A lot of them were, "if I do it I don't
want to be ridiculed by my neighbors." There is still a lot of that
today. People like the Talmadges whom I got to know later on, who were
not as badas—I mean, Herman Talmadge, (
People lost their nerve.
Lost their nerve. I think a lot of that was going on. I was naive about
some of the things because when I went to the woman who used to write
for The Constitution she interviewed me after the 1954
decisions and she said, "what is your feeling about this?" I said,
"well, I think in six months or a year you won't know that segregation
ever existed." She said, "are you sure about that?"
You were wrong about that.
I was wrong about it because the moment these things come to the surface there is always some element in there that is going to exploit it for the worse. It always happens like that.
Tom Watson, have you read about Tom Watson? In that book I think he points out that beginning and during the reconstruction period there was a tendency for whites and blacks to get together. The northern interests, a lot of it was political and a lot of it was economic, began to exploit it. They wanted to keep the blacks as cheap labor. We have some of that today. I think those elements were more vocal, they were more aggressive, assertive, than the liberal side.
More numerous.
The Ku Klux Klan got involved in it. And so all kinds of things were used
like in interposition when [Senator Harry F.]
You had a feeling though that it might have worked. Take a man like McGill, for example, I want to hear you talk about him because you knew him personally. Without trying to color any of what you are going to say I think I ought to say that I was a little surprised when I began to read McGill's old columns through the 40s and realized that he was more conservative than I thought he was. He took positions that essentially were really not at all for integration but for separate but equal. How did you perceive him?
To give you an idea we got to be pretty close. To give you an example, I was overseas and I persuaded him to come to visit us in West Africa. We traveled around around Nigeria and we slept in the same room. His bed here and my bed there. Very close, I don't know whether you could get any closer to a man like that.
I think it was a lack of contact between, I hate to use the word, the right kind of blacks and the right kind of whites. I think it was a tendency at effort, it was the lack of that. We didn't have enough of us moving in the direction of showing a different image of the right kind of black. What they saw. . . .
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
I think one of the most important things is that blacks have an
obligation too in this whole effort in trying to enlighten. I think we
are greatly responsible for enlightening people by bringing the right
message and the right story to the whites. There are a lot of them over
there who would like to understand, who would like to do the right thing
but they don't have the info and I think we have to take the initiative.
Going way back to Booker T. Washington, he was attacked many times
because they said he was an Uncle Tom, he was this and that. He was
building this school and he didn't speak out against southern racism and
all that all the time. But Washington made one point when Du Bois
attacked him, he said, "if you were down here living, like I am, before
this white man's shotgun you would limit what you said also. I have an
objective I want to reach and that's not the way to reach it." He
started these programs to try to make blacks more efficient in what they
were doing, whether it was a cook, a maid or whatnot, to give a better
and different image of what black folk were or like. I think a lot of
that has to be done. Harold Fleming once said, "One of the problems is
that we don't see enough of black people." I said, "All these
blacks—negro in those days—here in Atlanta and you don't see enough of
them?" Well, what he meant was that we don't see enough of the right
kind of the ones who are really pushing this thing. The moment they get
to know youThe Times in
London. He and his wife were in Atlanta. He called me on the phone and
said, "Bill, I have two very distinguished guests here and I would like
for them to meet you because you can show them what some of things are
happening with Atlanta and I can show them some things." He wanted me to
point out the black side of things. He said, "I will take a taxi and
come down right quickly and pick you up and we can ride around the
city." I hung up and then I called him right back and I said, "Mr.
McGill, are you aware of the fact that I can't ride in a taxicab with
you and two white people?" He hit the ceiling, he didn't know that. He
hadn't thought about that.
His secretary now who lives in Texas whom we see quite infrequently said, "I used to live"—she's from Alabama and she's as straightforward as anybody you want—"across the road from a colored family and it never struck me as to where they went to school or where they came from or whatnot. I just took it that they there just like everybody else."
They don't know the story and I think we have to someway take them that story. We still have to do it. Even in the foreign service where I worked with people overseas, the United States has to take them their story, it has to be taken to them. We can't wait for it to come to us.
Who were some of the blacks you think of who, looking back now, you see as real prophets of change for the South? People who in the 30s and 40s were saying segregation is really at the heart of the problem here and we've got to get rid of segregation in order to be able to have real equal opportunity for people in this society. Who in those days can you think of who brought that message even to other blacks if not to whites as well?
Well, I can name several. I think Dr. Mays was a very good example of
that with culture and direction. Soft spoken but his message got across.
The late Dr. Clement of Atlanta University, the same way he built that
school on that basis. I could go back even further than that but I don't
think you want to go back any further. Roy Wilkins of the NAACP was one
of the most articulate people we had as a leader. He could get up and
speak. Wilkins was a straightforward speaker. I remember some years ago
when he was alive he spoke before the AFL-CIO and he didn't get up and
say you SOB's know what you are doing and all that stuff. He didn't do
that. What he did was—we talked about segregation—he went down the
unions one by one and named a number of blacks in those unions. He just
named them. They were sitting on the edge
Yes [Crump was the political boss of Memphis]
Somebody asked him one day, "how do you get along with the white
leadership in this city (Memphis) and how do you get along with Mr.
Crump? He said, "I put one hand in Mr. Crump's hand and the other hand
in God's hand." He was shrewd, but I think he was great. He taught the
blacks. . . . No black went into high school in my day without a tie on
and shoes were shined. You could be as poor as Job's turkey but you came
in
I remember when I was a waiter at this drive-in place I used to serve a lot of people, all these young whites from the high schools in Memphis. I could hardly get away from the cars sometimes because they wanted to talk to me about what I did at my school. I would go downtown to some of the stores and shop and the moment I walked in they would engage me in a conversation. The way you carry yourself, I think, cements the bridge-building business. It is extremely important.
When I got the Reid Fellowship it was announced in the newspapers in Atlanta and they thought this was a great thing. I was down at the health department one day getting some information or something and one of the doctors said, "Bill, I just saw where you just got a big grant to go abroad." I said, "yes, but I'm having a little difficulty." He said, "what's that?" I said, "When I was born they didn't issue birth certificates, you just listed it in the Bible and I don't have too much time before I have to travel with my family. I went to the courthouse and the clerk at the courthouse said I would have to write to Washington and to Baltimore to get a certificate certified and that would take weeks. I just don't have that much time." I was hoping he would change their mind. He picked up the telephone and called the head of the whole state department in Georgia. Dr. Sellers, who was appointed by Talmadge, called and in about two minutes he told me to go back over there to the courthouse and said I wouldn't have any trouble.
When I went back over there the guy met me at the door with all the things filled out. I didn't have to say one word. I had many experiences like that.
In the segregated South I'm getting this grant. I needed something, I needed to get my passport and I couldn't get it until I got my birth certificate. Dr. Sellers made him fill it out and the man met me at the door.
Did you have any contact with Southern Regional Council during those years?
Oh, yes. That's how I got to know Harold. . . .
How?
He was working as an assistant to the former Dr. George Mitchell. I used
to go up there all the time for information and he used to invite Harold
down to the Hungary Club and we used to meet. I wrote some articles for
them during that period, during the 50s when I was there about the
changing South. He used to publish a little magazine called The New South. I had several articles published in that. Dr.
Mitchell got ill long before his time. In fact, he even retired at
fifty-five.
Yes, he was young.
He went overseas to Scotland. On that trip to Ghana we stopped in
Scotland and went to visit him. We stayed with him at the house for a
couple of days. But I'm getting off the point. I think that King, Roy
Wilkins, and even Walter White, who preceded Wilkins in the NAACP, were
astute people who knew how to deal with the problem
Were you surprised when the Brown Decision came down?
Do you remember where you were that day?
Very surprised. I remember because I put out the edition of the newspaper. I didn't think it was going to be unanimous like it was, but I thought they were going to resolve it.
You knew— everybody knew didn't they?—for a year or two that this was in the mill, it was being debated in the Supreme Court and that there was going to be a decision. The fact that something was going to happen was pretty well known to everybody, wasn't it?
Oh, yes. Everybody knew that and they felt it. Thurgood Marshall, of course, is another person I should mention. They knew it, but they didn't know how it was going to be, but they knew about it and they were ready for it.
As I said in the beginning, what irritated it was some of these elements
that just took advantage of it and tried to incite feelings and emotions
and got blacks stirred up between it. The Little Rock situation never
should have happened. I used to go to Little Rock when I lived in
Memphis when I was a youngster. You couldn't find a city more cordial
from the white side than Little Rock at the time. Blacks were going to
the University of Arkansas right downtown long before that. With
political ambition as [Governor Orval]
The white South was fond of saying back in those pre-Brown years that if you leave us alone, Yankees or whoever, we
will work this out. Suppose that had happened, suppose this white South
had gotten its wish and had been left alone by the Federal government,
how long would it have taken to bring equality?
I think it would have taken much longer because the people that said it did nothing about it. You had to have something legal to fall back on. I think the best thing that could have happened was the 1954 decision and also the subsequent civil rights laws that they passed.
What about the movement itself, the protest movement of the blacks and allied whites through the 50s beginning with the Montgomery Boycott? What would have happened it that had not developed?
Well, I think eventually it would have fallen apart but it would have taken much longer.
That and the court actions speeded it up.
That's right. Nobody today in the South wants to be called a segregationist, not even Jesse Helms. Nobody wants to be called that now. One thing that interests me. I had been in Columbia, South Carolina, once to meet the governor who was then Governor West. I was crossing the street and there were two young white men standing on the corner, I think they were lawyers, and I heard them in the conversation saying, "you know, it's interesting but we're not going backward, we are going to go forward in the South. It's to our best advantage now to preach for equality for everybody regardless of race." I think there was another dimension here too. With all the foreign elements coming here from abroad, from Europe not Africans but Europeans, it was unthinkable to come South in any country and see one part of your population being held down. It was inconceivable for them to see this—how can you tolerate this kind of thing? If you go to a little country like Holland, for example, it is fully integrated. Our missionaries, for example, here's an interesting story about them. A Baptist mission had been in Nigeria for more than one hundred years. We go abroad to teach these people how to follow Christianity. A lot of Africans, who were subsequently invited here, were amazed that they couldn't go in a white church. With this kind of problem it could get around the world, we couldn't have stood it. It couldn't last.
Do you think it is unrealistic to think that these changes that have come as a result of the court actions and the civil rights movement might have been brought voluntarily by southerners of goodwill during that period of '45 - '50? Could it have happened?
It would have been very difficult. I don't think it would have happened. It would have been very difficult because people like McGill, for example, whom you say was conservative, which he was, finally came around to reality. Even after the courts had passed the 1954 decision McGill used to wake up in the morning sometime and his whole front yard would be full of garbage. Somebody had pulled up with a garbage truck and dumped everything out in his yard. There were cases where they would shoot through his house, through his windows. And he had people at the paper who didn't like what he was doing. But he survived all of that because he had this legal base to stand on.
It's a little bit ironic and somewhat troubling to me in a way because of the way I'm proceeding with this project that what I'm doing concludes in '54. I'm stopping in '54, I'm not writing about what happened after. There are other books and other historians and researchers who have already written some wonderful books about that period and there will be others. For my purposes here I'm interested in what happened before and so ironically the impression that I'm afraid is left by that constraint about people like McGill and indeed a good many others is that they were conservative, they were not leading the way to change at that point.
The courage of Ralph McGill, I don't want to say it begins entirely but
it certainly is more highlighted from the day the Brown Decision came down and he said, "this is now the law of the
land and this is what we've got to obey." It was his willingness to say
that in 1954 that caused the garbage to be dumped in his yard in '55 and
for people to shoot in his house and all those things, but that didn't
happen before.
I agree with you on that. It didn't openly happen before but I'm wondering if they had spoken out before if they would have been eliminated.
It's quite possible that they would have just simply been cut off. The
kind of personal relationship that you had with McGill and incidentally
a great many other people have told me exactly the same thing that on a
personal level the man was free of prejudice. He was absolutely
committed to the notion of human relationships on the level of equality
long before Brown. It's just that what he was doing in
his newspaper and what he felt he could do in order to still be
effective and to keep functioning. . . .
Some of the things he did. . . . The night that he died he was at the
home of a black family. There was a young girl before the 1954 decision,
and she wanted to go journalism school. She was a student at Spelman. I
understand that he picked up the telephone on the day that this girl
came into see him and he called Columbia University. They have a
graduate school there for journalism. The dean said he wanted to get
some good black students so McGill called up and
He was quite genuine about those things. That wasn't for any show. More often than not other people never knew those stories.
He never told anything about it and the way I got it was from his secretary. She told me the story. There was a young negro actor in Atlanta who wanted to get involved with something in New York, dramatics or something. He was very good but he didn't have a high school diploma. McGill got behind that and got him into the group in New York City and let him finish his work after he got there. He never said anything about it. I don't know how many different things he did. My oldest son, for example, was in school at the time during the Vietnam War. He had just about finished, he had one year to go. The draft board in Atlanta was very determined to get him out of school and send him overseas immediately. I spoke to Mr. McGill about it and he said, "leave it to me." He wrote a letter to the draft board and explained what kind of family and what he was trying to do. So, William went ahead and finished school.
I would say there were hundreds of things that he did, even before all this legal business came along.
I couldn't tell you how many people have told me stories like that.
Now, that's real genuine leadership. I would like to mention this about
Herman Talmadge. Of course you know he came from a political family in
Georgia which you might call extreme segregationist. When I joined USIA
in the 60s they were fighting about closing the schools if integration
came to Georgia. At the end of your orientation period when you go in
the state department they ask you to go up on the hill if you want and
if you know somebody, anybody, and just tell them what you are doing and
that you're going overseas to represent your country. They would say to
go and talk to your favorite senator or representative. I thought for a
second who was my favorite senator and I thought about Talmadge. I went
to see Talmadge for the first time and I met him. He greeted me very
graciously and he said, "Bill." I said, "Mr. Senator, I'm going overseas
and I want to know what kind of message I can carry to these people
about our country. I'm going to be up against a lot of problems and
they're going to ask me a lot of questions about what we have done. One
of the things they are going to ask is why are we going to close the
schools to keep blacks from going to school with whites." He looked at
me and said, "we are not going to close the schools and you can tell
them that. We're not going to close them in Georgia." It was [of America] [Talmadge]
This has been really helpful. You have given me a lot of help.
I hope I have traced on some of the things. Let me tell you this. Part of
my work with USIA—I went up as far as the deputy assistant director for
USIA which was a top spot. That was a long way from Mississippi. Not
only that, but, what happened during my home assignments, domestic
assignments, we were running this foreign press center downtown in the
national