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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 B-0006, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
Dr. Guy Johnson was an author, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the first executive director of the Southern Regional Council (SRC). This interview focuses on his work with that organization and with the North Carolina Committee for Interracial Cooperation in the 1920s and 1930s. Johnson also promoted the education of blacks in the 1920s with Dr. N. C. Newbold, and he discusses other colleagues in that endeavor. Johnson describes the annual meetings of the Interracial Commission and the role of women and church groups in the organization, especially Gertrude Weil, Mrs. W. H. Newell, and Charlotte Hawkins Brown. Johnson's growing dissatisfaction with the Interracial Commission led him to accept the leading role at the SRC in 1943. He describes the forced resignation of one of its key members, Mrs. Jessie Daniel Ames, and some of the work she did in the early days of the SRC. As the new director, Johnson dealt with the difficulties in staffing and financing the SRC. He also witnessed controversy among the people with board membership in the SRC and the Committee on Interracial Cooperation. The issue of segregation proved highly contentious for the SRC, leading to disagreements among black and white members. Among the activities of the SRC during the first year were attempts at mass membership and the creation of publications. These activities also fueled conflicts between the SRC and the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, a more radical organization. The interview concludes with Johnson's analysis of the influence of foreign politics in the Southern Conference and the attempts of the SRC to emphasize and deal with post-war economic problems of the South as well as the racial issue. His wife, historian Dr. Guion Johnson, also contributed to this interview.
This interview with Dr. Guy B. Johnson, sociology professor and author, focuses on his work as the first executive director of the Southern Regional Council (SRC) and as a member of the North Carolina Committee for Interracial Cooperation. Johnson discusses the role that women and church groups played in the Interracial Commission, describes the debate over issues such as segregation among SRC members, and outlines the conflict between SRC leaders and the Southern Conference for Human Welfare.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
I wanted to ask you . . . really what I am interested in focusing on is the end of the Interracial Commission and the beginning of the Southern Regional Council and your role then in the new Council. I thought that we could start back a little bit by talking about your involvement in the North Carolina Committee for Interracial Cooperation, how you first got involved in that and some of your general impressions of its activities.
Well, that goes back to 1924, I guess, the year we came here.
Was the state office in Raleigh?
Yes, as far as they had one. Actually, they never had a full time secretary, because they never raised very much money. But for some years, they cooperated with the Virginia Commission and employed a secretary named Reynolds, L.R. Reynolds. His home was in Richmond and he would come down here occasionally, much too infrequently for our good. And mostly, he would just travel around and visit places and talk to people, and then at the annual meetings he would be there telling how many miles he had traveled and how many people he had seen. And he would have this card index he had made up of names, there would probably be several thousand names that he had collected. So, we were paying half the salary and Virginia the other half, but actually very little was getting done. And eventually, the North Carolina Commission decided that they couldn't go on with this arrangement and they felt that they were getting very little attention from him. Now, he had an address, an office in Raleigh. I believe that it was at Mr. Gurney Hood's office, he was on the state banking commission. And he would use this address for his correspondence and he would come down and send out mail, but the return reply mail to him might lie there for a month.
Guy, wasn't the name of the organization the Governor's Commission on Interracial Cooperation?
Well, I don't think that it was ever that. The governor made the original appointments and . . .
The governor issued the invitations. That's it, I knew that the governor was very intimately involved.
That was a little strategy, you might say that . . .
Gurney Hood, wasn't he?
No, in the earliest days, I'm not sure that Gurney was involved. I think that he came in later, but Dr. Alexander was among those who thought up this notion of organizing these state commissions with a little tinge of officialism. And so, they persuaded the governor of the state to issue the call for the first meeting and of course, they would select all kinds of prominent people, white and black. And you would get this impressive looking letter . . .
From the governor?
. . . with the state seal on it, signed by the governor. And this was the way that most of them got set up. And in North Carolina, and I suppose some of the other places, at the annual meeting, the governor would make an evening address. And this was open to the public and all of this had the effect of lending a little bit of offical sanction to the Commission and making it seem respectable in a day when it was really just not popularly accepted that the races got together at a meeting.
Who was the governor of North Carolina when . . .
Oh, when the original call went out? That would have been . . . that must have been around 1920, '21 . . . we weren't here then. Who would it have been? Morrison?
Yes, Cam Morrison.
You could look back in a North Carolina guidebook or something. I have
here, I think, down here in the basement, a copy of a letter from
That was in the late 20's.
He was calling for prominent people to come to the annual meeting and take part in this Interracial Commission. So, that was one little trick we had of trying to make the thing a little respectable. Well, as I was saying, the North Carolina and Virginia Commissions finally stopped their arrangement and let Mr. Reynolds go. He moved to Texas and just what he finally did, I'm not sure. I think that he worked or tried to get a position with the Texas Commission. I believe that I saw him one time when I went to Texas after I had gone with the SRC. But I'm not sure what became of him. He was a genial, well-looking, pleasant, well-meaning man with no real idea of how to . . .
No idea of organizational work.
Very ineffectual. Now, from time to time, they had projects, mostly made possible by some special grants. I think that the General Education Board in those days was making some grants.
There was a man, Mr. N.C. Newbold, who was State Director of Negro Education. In those days, there was complete segregation and very little money appropriated for Negro schools and in fact, the high schools being almost non-existent for Negroes. It was a bit unusual to find the states getting worried about doing something.
Dr. Newbold was a very gentle person, too.
He was very shy.
Extremely shy, he talked in almost a whisper.
But he had a lot of sense in his heart and he was known around the
country as one of the very best of the southern state agents for Negro
education. And under his influence, since he was a kind of spokesman,
you see,
Where did he send his kit? He prepared a kit of books . . .
No, that's another . . .
Another project? Did that go to the libraries or to the public schools?
To the libraries. That's going to be my second . . .
I'm sorry, I'm talking ahead.
So, he got Dr. Edgar Thompson of Duke to collect, to assemble this
bibliography and, oh, I suppose that there were four or five hundred
entries, which I think that he based on what was in the best libraries,
especially Duke and Carolina. And then they published this. It was a
very slim little volume and I forget what it was called, but it was
basically a bibliography of the Negro. And I suppose that it was quite
useful to some of the librarians who, in those days, usually had very
little on this subject. And especially for the Negro libraries
themselves. So, that was useful. Then,
A beautiful case.
. . . a beautiful case of various types of woods, all nicely matched and waxed and varnished. It was like a moveable shelf with a handle on top. And then they built a little case with a lock on it for the traveling. You could just set them in this thing, close it, lock it up and it was ready to be shipped. Well, I did correspondence with a lot of schools and wound up with a list of those who wanted to use it. It was free, you see. They just told when they wanted it and we would ship it and then we would put the key to the lock in an envelope and give them the name of the next recipient. And supposedly, they put this where people could use the books, and put them back in and they would forward it to the next place. Well, this thing circulated quite a bit. I don't remember how many schools, maybe not more than ten or fifteen at all, and we lost very few of the books. I thought that we would lose a great many, but not many. And then, there was one other little project that he had a grant for, and that was to encourage meetings and contacts between white and black college students. And he called this the Division of Cooperation in Education in Race Relations. In addition to being a project of the North Carolina Commission, I think that it was also something of a project in his official office as state director . . .
He also got the cooperation of the religious groups, the
Each school would select its students and Dr. Newbold's money, you see, paid for travel out of this and usually the host university or college would provide a little lunch, and so they would have a program. Some students would talk about what was going on on their campuses and then, usually, there was someone, some older person from the Commission or wherever, who would have something to say. And this had the effect of bringing together a lot of students from both races who might never have had any contact with each other otherwise.
Let's see, can you think of any other projects, Guion?
No, I don't.
These were the main ones, I guess. And if it hadn't been for these special things, there wouldn't have been much to show except for the annual meeting and an occasional district or regional meeting that would be set up.
What actually went on in the annual meetings? Were there meetings in between the annual meetings, or was that the only time that the official members actually got together?
Unless they would set up a special regional meeting. I remember that some
people would say, "Well, it's so hard . . . down at the coastal region,
you don't except many of these people to get to Raleigh or Greensboro or
Durham, so why don't we set up a meeting at Greensville or somewhere
like
How many active members were there, people who actually took an interest and worked in some way?
Well, if it came down to that, I don't know whether you could count more than a hundred, I doubt it.
I doubt it.
Sometimes at the annual meetings, especially when they were having it in Raleigh and having an evening session in the House, then . . .
Yes, and the governor would speak and then you would get a larger attendance.
Then you might have several hundred.
More whites than blacks, on those occasions. But when the governor wasn't speaking and no big out-of-state speaker was present, then there would be more blacks than whites. And the meeting would degenerate into testimonials about discrimination, and this was led chiefly by the Negroes. I remember Mr. Belton especially, from . . . was it Elizabeth City?
I'm not sure, somewhere like that.
I think that it was Elizabeth City.
Now, are these the annual meetings that you are talking about?
These are the annual meetings.
There would be open discussion, usually some sort of a program, somebody would speak. And of course, when they had the secretary, Mr. Reynolds, we . . . well, we did have Cyrus Johnson and . . .
Yes.
Well, when we had a secretary, he would make a report, of course, on his activities.
What was Reynolds' first name?
L.R. I never knew what it really was. He never signed his name in anyway or called himself anything but "L.R. Reynolds."
Was there a separate women's committee?
No.
Never?
No, the women were involved in it and . . .
But they were a minority.
Yes, that's true. We had people like Charlotte Hawkins Brown who were pretty active.
What were the proportions?
Well, I don't know, probably in the general membership, I think they would be fairly high. Probably still a minority, maybe forty or . . .
Well, Mr. and Mrs. Gurney Hood, for example . . .
But in office holding or committee chairmen or anything like that, I don't think they . . .
No, they weren't. It was a male dominated organization.
Gurney Hood?
Yes. He was Commissioner of Banking. And Mrs. Hood was president of the Women's Society of Christian Service of the Methodist Church. You see here again, the Methodist Church . . . all through the South, women took an active role and they were usually members of the Women's Society of Christian Service of the Methodist Church, because the Methodist Church put so much emphasis in its discipline on social problems, promoting good relations.
How do you account for that difference between the Methodist Church and say, the Presbyterian Church?
Well, I think that perhaps the philosophy of predestination of the Presbyterian Church had something to do with their moving slowly toward interracial cooperation. But the Methodist Church always, from the very beginning, when it was first organized in the United States, made a plea for the Negro participation. You see, this is a history of the Methodist Church in the United States that . . .
Well, the first . . . what do you call the annual . . .
The Annual Conference?
The Annual Conference.
Which was held in North Carolina.
After the American Revolution, they had a plan for the abolition of slavery.
Yes.
Which they adopted.
Yes, which they adopted. I remember in going through the early records
for the history of the Methodist Church for my Ante-Bellum
North Carolina, I found a complaint of some of the Methodists
in Wilmington, that the ministers and the missionaries were making too
much of bringing in the Negro. And that the Methodist Church in
Wilmington was composed predominantly of Negroes. Now, this was, you
see, during the Revolution and just after. So, I think that this
accounts for the interests of the Methodist Church. And the women, of
course, carried on. They felt that they could do things that the men
could not do and so they pushed the frontiers back a little bit.
Wesley and Asbury and those fellows, they really preached social responsibilities, didn't they?
Did you know Mrs. W.A. Newell?
Yes.
She was Superintendent of Christian Social Relations for North Carolina.
That's right.
Was she active in the Interracial Commission at the same time that you were?
Well, I'm trying to remember. I'm not so sure that she was very active, but it is a name that goes way back and I think that she was involved.
I could not attend many of the meetings.
Gertrude Weil was very . . .
Yes. Our babies were small at that time and often the meetings were at night and somebody had to babysit, and so I stayed home and Guy went. Occasionally, if the meetings were in the afternoon, I would go with him.
Why weren't Methodist women more active in the Interracial Commission?
Why were they or why weren't they?
Why weren't they?
In North Carolina.
Well, I think that this was a pattern in practically all organizations, wasn't it? Women were usually not very . . .
You mean in an organization where both men and women participated?
Well, yes. Because women had so many organizations of their own, you see, and there were not a great many bi-sexual organizations and when you did have one, you could count on the males dominating it.
I'm thinking of two things. One is that it seems that the church
There would usually be at least one woman on a committee.
On state commissions. One black and one woman. State commissions were appointed, and this has persisted almost to this day. The women in North Carolina were not as active as the women in Georgia. The Methodist women, all denominations, were far less active in North Carolina than in Georgia. That's the reason that when we came back from the Southern Regional Council I said that Georgia was far more liberal, basically, than North Carolina.
I remember one type of thing that women were often involved in in the early commissions, and that was trying to do something to improve the grounds and getting some shrubs or flowers or something around the colored schools. This was the sort of thing where I guess the men were quite willing to let them take the lead.
That was women's work. And if there were refreshments, the women prepared
the refreshments. That again, was women's work.
What about Charlotte Hawkins Brown?
She was very active.
She was very active?
Well, yes, I think that her name appeared on the list of what was called an executive committee, or something.
Did a woman like her tend to be not relegated to those kinds of women's activities as much?
She was fairly forceful and spoke her mind. For those days, she could be quite plainspoken. Of course, you know, she was head of the Palmer Institute.
Yes, and she was extremely busy trying to raise funds for the Institute. And of course, when she died, the Institute almost folded and then finally did. It needed a dynamic person such as she was to hold it together and to get funds, in the North, chiefly, because they were mostly students from low income families who could not pay a high tuition. It was always a struggle for her. She had to spend most of her time raising funds and administering them. She did not have time to give to extra-curricular activities.
Were there any annual meetings where resolutions were passed or stands taken? Were there any controversial issues about the direction of this commission?
Yes, occasionally, there were resolutions. I would have to go back and look through a lot of the old papers to be specific. But there were . . . oh, I'll tell you one thing that was a long standing project, and that was to do something about a school for delinquent girls, wasn't it?
Yes.
The colored girls. You see, there wasn't one. They had a white school.
Now, that's the kind of thing that tended to be a woman's project in some states.
Yeah.
And it was the Negro Federation of Women's Clubs that really got moving and got that program through. It was supported by such people as Dr. Newbold and Gurney Hood, in state government.
Did white women work on that?
Yes, but not to the extent that the Negro women did. There was strong leadership there. I'd like someone to make a study of the history of the Negro Federation of Women's Clubs.
That was the type of thing where there were probably several resolutions, where they were urging the state to move on this project.
Did the issue of segregation ever come up?
Oh, well, there was one time that I remember. There was a young Negro
editor in Raleigh. What was that paper? Not the Raleigh Times . . . the Carolina Times. He was of
West Indian origin and inclined to be a little more articulate than the
natives, and he went to a meeting of the commission in Durham. And here
they had the usual talk, nice discussions and they very rarely got any
heat, any real controversy. But after lunch, he got up and said, "I've
been listening to this and I'm fed up. Nobody has put his finger on the
real problem, and that is social equality. And until an organization
like this has the guts to say that that is the problem and we are all
willing to get up and say that this person of the other race is my equal
socially and every other way, and we are willing to have equal contacts,
then there is no solution to this. Why don't we get down to brass
tacks?" Well, you could just see them, fearful around the room and
several people trying to get the floor, and one or two of the blacks got
up and wanted it known that this man didn't represent their thinking. He
was a sort of threat, he was rocking the boat. And some white man said,
"Well, this is not anything that we can do
That's interesting.
Occasionally, somebody, a black member might have a harrowing or pathetic experience to relate and get them stirred up a little. And several would get up and express sympathy and outrage, but nothing would be resolved.
I remember these testimonials. "In Elizabeth City, on such-and-such a day, this terrible thing took place." Or, "One of our acquaintances was arrested and thrown into jail and beaten up and there was no evidence at all against him." These things would come up.
Did any of these testimonials expect some kind of response? What were they expecting?
They were hoping, I think they were hoping. I remember that Mr. Belton said to me after one of these occasions (it was at a meeting in Durham) that he had been coming to meetings like this for ten or fifteen years and that we always expressed concern and always pointed out these fears, but he said, "I have given up hope. Nothing will ever be done." He said, "We talk about it, and then we go home and forget about it."
There was just nothing . . .
And he felt that it was the failure of the whites to take action, to
follow through on these problems that the blacks had presented. He did
not see that the blacks could do anything, that their hands were tied.
But . . . who was it that started these Negro Betterment Leagues? When I
was on the Commission of the Status of Women and was writing about
organizations
I was wondering whether at the time you felt dissatisfied either with the goals of the Interracial Commission or its effectiveness in achieving them? If you could put yourself back into the historical . . .
Is this the state commission or . . .
This is the state commission.
Well, after some years, I began to get rather skeptical of the value of any organization like this. And not just an organization that was concerned with race, but practically anything. I went through a sort of cynical, skeptical period, in which I think that I had the philosophy that all of these activities that most organizations carried on were really rather trivial and had very little to do with the achieving of their announced goals, but that they had a lot to do with the personal functions, you know. That is, what they did for the members who were taking part.
And, well, I suspect that this is still pretty much the case. Anyway, I
came to where I just had very little use for these things and actually,
I just, I guess that there were years that I didn't have anything to do
with the North Carolina Commission. Especially when I got very busy and
was going here and there and I just thought that it was a waste of time
to go to these meetings and hear the same old stuff. But now, let me say
this. I think, considering the whole intellectual climate and legal
climate of that time, there was actually almost nothing that could be
done in a fundamental way to make any changes. And the most that one
shouldAmerica's Tenth Man
. . . I suppose the thing had about a million circulation. Things like
this, plus their location in Atlanta with access to media, and they
could serve as a kind of a sounding board for the better South. I think
that all in all, they had some good influence, more so than the
individual state commissions. But even so, this was still a limited
influence. It had to be, considering the segregation laws and the
climate of opinion, the alienation between the races that came right on
out of Reconstruction and lasted well on up until after World War I. And
in some
At the time that you were pretty disillusioned with these voluntary interracial organizations to do anything about racial problems, what did you see as possible solutions? Where would you have looked for hope? In the '30's, say?
Well, I thought along two lines there. One was that the black people themselves, if they really organized and worked hard at it, could do a great many things themselves that were not being done. And secondly, that blacks could be more outspoken and militant than they actually were and still get away with it. I think that there was a strong tendency for them to overplay the caution and the "don't rock the boat stuff, you know". And if somehow, they could have raised the whole level of . . . well, militancy, gone up the scale a little bit, the world wouldn't have gone to pieces, they wouldn't have been lynched. In other words, I thought they were too cautious. And then thirdly, I felt that until there was really some basic change in the structural situations, in other words, the legal aspects, that things wouldn't really see any drastic change.
Were you ever involved at all in the NAACP? Which was working to change the legal . . .
No, I would send them a contribution occasionally, and that was considered sort of daring. You wouldn't advertise it.
Were there strong NAACP chapters in North Carolina?
No. For a long, long time, there were scarcely any in the South. Some of the larger cities might have one. And they never had their annual convention in the South until 1939.
They had it in Atlanta?
No, they had it in Richmond. That was the first time. That recalls an incident which involves meetings in the South and also involves me and the NAACP. I had been asked by the Virginia State College for Negroes to give their commencement address in 1939. And I prepared this address, or I started, and I was greatly delayed by other things, one of which was getting ready to go to New York and starting to work for Myrdal. And I finished writing this speech partly on the bus going to Petersburg and then put the finishing touches on it in a classroom at the college after I got there. So, I just had the one manuscript copy. I gave the address and it was on Negro leadership and strategy. And the basic point was this, that the NAACP for all its leadership and efforts in this legal field, lacks a really big, broad base of support among the black masses, especially in the South, where they need it the worst. So, I praised them for what they had done and the legal tests they brought and the cases they had won and all this. But I said that I thought they were weak in terms of adult education, of trying to sell their program to the common people. And I said, well, for instance, they have never had an annual meeting in the South. And I know that this goes against the grain, but if they are out front working for these black people in the South, then I think that their leaders might suffer a little inconvience and hold a meeting in the South and get a look at things. Well, I went on like this. And another illustration was this, that if you could get rid of say, the poll tax, and allow many more blacks to vote, someone ought to be paying attention to how many of them actually take advantage of this. And you ought to have a program out there to get them to vote and teach them something about participation.
And I said, "For example, a professor right here, a black professor, has
made a study of the poll tax in Virginia . . . " (You know, this used to
be a prerequisite to vote, you had to take your poll tax receipt with
you to show
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
. . . and how many of them registered? 13,000. One-third." And so, you
see, I was plugging for some kind of adult education program to get out
there and stir up the masses. To do more for themselves and to do more
to take advantage of things that were open. Well, I went on from there
to New York and started working for Myrdal. And then the following
weekend, I happened to get ahold of one or two of the Negro papers, and
here again, I always took four or five of these things and read them,
all through my career . . . I felt that it was very important to do this
and I had my students read them. So, here the Norfolk Journal and Guide had a tremendous blast at me on the
editorial page, a very distorted write up on the front page of the
speech, and the headline said "Commencement Speaker Says that Negroes
Should Not Vote." Something crazy like this, you know. Well, and then an
editorial written by a friend of mine who was the editor . . .
P. B. Young?
P. B. Young, the same one. It just roasted me. Well, the Chicago Defender likewise. They had an editorial, the same
fake write-up, the Baltimore Afro-American, the same
way. I just hit the ceiling. Well, a few days later, Walter White . . .
(he had probably been trying to get me down here and he found out that I
was up there in New York) and he called me and said, "Look, we heard
about your speech down in Virginia and we are going to have a specialCrisis." I said, "Look, don't take this newspaper stuff for
the truth. It's the worst distortion that I have ever read. I will get
this thing typed up and bring you a copy." "Well," he says, "We've
already got this thing written up and I guess that we will go on with
it, but if you will hurry, maybe we can get your response in." So, well,
I did, I wrote a response, and I wrote to these editors of the papers
and I should have known that for all my high regards for the Negro
press, it was and is, after all, a special group. No matter what, they
sometimes engage in some pretty yellow journalism . . . or in this case,
black journalism. I had occasion several times where something had been
written up that I knew about, and it had no relation to what actually
happened. So, I shouldn't have been too surprised. But, I sent these
papers copies of the address and asked if they would please read this
and tell me where in it there was anything that had any resemblance to
what the young reporter had written up. And the reporter was a man . . .
he was working for Young in Norfolk. Now, he never came to me, I would
have been glad to talk to him, to let him borrow the mansucript for
awhile, you know, and to make accurate excerpts. This, again, this is
sorry journalism. You know, you've studied journalism, you've covered a
speech and if so, you very likely go to talk to the speaker. Well, most
of them didn't even answer it. And even my friend, P. B. Young, said,
"Well, we have confidence in this young man, and so we will have to
consider his report fairly accurate." I had a crazy letter from Carl
Murphy of the Baltimore Afro-American. I'm sure that
he didn't read the speech, but he wrote me and said, "Dear Mr. Johnson,
we consider the sources of the newstory concerning your commencement
address to be fair and reliable and we shall consider them to be the
truth. We oppose your choice as a commencement speaker at Virginia State
for the following reasons . . . " He had had a very nasty editorial . .
. He
Well, it turned out that during this same period, I think just a few
days after I went to New York, the NAACP was having its first southern
meeting at Richmond. And I went. A little later, there was a young
fellow from Baltimore who did a small piece of work for Myrdal. I was
talking to him about this, I said, "Oh, you work for Carl Murphy on the
Afro-American?" "Yes." And I told him about this
and he said, "Oh, yes." He just laughed about this and said, "I remember
that. Mr. Johnson, you shouldn't let that sort of thing get under your
skin, that's just journalism. I have written many a piece like that. A
paper has got certain lines, and you learn the line and . . . well, just
don't let it get you down." But I must say, I was mad.
I'll bet.
I've got that famous letter and I've always said that I thought I would frame it, but it will go in my papers for the Southern Historical Collection.
Let me skip on ahead for a little bit . . .
Yeah, we'd better.
We don't have very much time. When did you first realize that the
Interracial Commission was about to be dissolved, or that some kind
of
Well, I think that in 1940, in the early 40's. I was here with Dr. Odum, discussing how he thought that it had about outlived its usefulness and . . .
What was he dissatisfied about?
Well, I suppose that he was dissatisfied because they just didn't seem to be doing very much. Let's see, I guess that Raper had gone, Dr. Alexander had become so involved with, well, first with the Rosenwald Fund (I think that he was the vice- president) and then later with the Farm Security Administration in the New Deal . . .
I think that actually it was the other way around, first with the Farm Security Administration and then with the Rosenwald . . .
Ah, yes, it may be. You see, he was living outside of Atlanta and rarely saw the Commission and . . .
Why didn't he find a new director?
I don't know, this sort of puzzled me. I don't know if they didn't have
enough money or I don't know if he was getting any salary still as
director, I just don't know. That would have to come out of the old
Commission records. But at any rate, it was floundering around and it
had mostly Dr. Eleazer, who
Were you aware of the conflict between Dr. Odum's purposes and Mrs. Ames' purposes during those meetings?
Not particularly, because you see, I was not involved in those meetings.
The Durham meeting was blacks only and the Richmond meeting was one for
the more elder white statesmen. And since Dr. Odum was it from here, I was not involved in that. So, I didn't know until
'43, late '43, what was up. After the Atlanta meeting, he told me about
what they had resolved and that they were going to set up a council. I
knew no more about that until Christmas vacation of '43. I'll get into
that, if you want to know my decision to go down there.
Yes.
But to answer this other question, I didn't know any details about the
conflict between Odum and Ames on this. I later was quite into it. Well,
during Christmas vacation of '43, Dr. Odum and I believe Dr. Alexander,
came to my office one day and said, "Well, we want you to do something.
We want you to be the director of this new SRC." Well, I said, "When
would this be?" "Oh, next week, you'd go on the first of January." I
said, "Well, this is rather sudden." I knew that it stood to
So, we were talking about your arrival in Atlanta and your difficulties in trying to get the new staff of the Southern Regional Council put together.
Yes, and I've already mentioned the general atmosphere of war time and the rationing and the scarcity of everything, the scarcity of personnel, and we were, I guess, talking about the problem of Mrs. Ames' supposed resignation. I don't know that there is much to add to that, except that she finally . . .
Well, she was working full-time in the office and . . .
Yes, she was continuing.
What was she doing, exactly, at that time?
She was, as I recall, carrying on correspondence with these various women's groups that she was working with, through ASWPL, but nothing very active in the field at the moment. I don't think that she went out anywhere on any field trips. Well, I . . .
Well, she had been trying for the last few years of the Interracial Commission to revive the state councils, the state interracial commissions. Had she been successful in that at all, or . . .
No, not much. They were all sort of declining. Partly, I think, this was financial, in that the Southern Commission for quite a while, you know, had a fair sized budget and could give a little bit to the states, but the General Commission budget in Atlanta decreased, and as we mentioned the other day, Dr. Alexander was gone practically all the time. So, there was some lack of leadership at the top and some lack of interest in seeing that they got funded as they had been. And the result was that the state commissions were not getting as much help as they had been. And then also, their newness, I think, had worn off and many people had gotten sort of tired and disillusioned with them. They didn't have very much that they saw that they could do, except hold meetings and talk. And many of the blacks, of course, had gotten fairly disillusioned with these things.
Do you remember how that was expressed? I mean, do you remember particular blacks . . .
Oh, mostly, they just stopped coming to the meetings. And I'm sure that
in several of the state commissions, the meetings just dwindled down to
almost nothing. So, these things were dying on the vine and there wasn't
much chance of trying to revive them, unless you had some more vital
program and
What?
About $40,000. Today, that would pay the executive director's salary, George Esser, for a year.
What happened to Odum's, Alexander's and Johnson's . . . I guess that Charles Johnson would probably be the third major person involved in setting it up?
Right.
What happened to their plans for raising large amounts of money for Odum's Southern Regional . . .
This council? Yeah. Well, two things. I think that one was that they were
all very busy men who were very good at making big plans, but did not
really push through vigorously with the foundations on possible big
grants to the Council. And the second thing was, of course, the war. The
war had already created quite a lot of racial tensions. There were riots
in Detroit and Harlem and Mobile, and of course, this kind of thing was
what started the Council in the first place, these interracial tensions,
but the tensions, I think, also had some affect on the foundations. It
made them more cautious and they didn't know just
It would have had an opposite effect then, from what the race riots after World War I had.
Yes, but even then, there were only one or two foundations that had any interest and that was Rosenwald and the General Education Board. And I think that the General Education Board felt that since it had supported the Commission all those years, that it was about time for them to find some other source. Foundations, you know, have cycles of interest. They will go into certain fields for maybe ten years and then they will want to get out of that and maybe do something else. So, this was one of those cycles where there was just not much support available for something like the Council. So, our budget was very low, it was about $40,000. It might have been $41,000 or $42,000, but not much more than that. That had to cover all the salaries, all the rent and everything.
And did that money come out of the Rosenwald Foundation?
It was General Education Board mostly and a little from Rosenwald. As I
recall, I remember that the General Education Board gave us around
$100,000 over three years. So, that's a little over $33,000 a year. And
Rosenwald gave us
Well, Dr. Alexander was with the Rosenwald Foundation by then.
Yes, it was very discouraging to find that, especially in the succeeding years, you know, that we were not improving much.
Did you talk directly with him at the Rosenwald Foundation about grants for the SRC?
No, I don't think that I ever visited him there. And of course, he was down, I believe, at the charter meeting, although I wouldn't want to swear to that. But at some part of the early stages, he was down here. And I might see him once in a great while at some conference in Washington or somewhere, but not very frequently. I probably had a few things to say to Dr. Odum about, you know, the discouraging financial look, but nobody seemed to be doing something about it.
What reasons did they give?
Well, I don't recall, it's just . . . you know, it's always hopeful. "You know, we are going to see if we can't do something for you." You know, very brief little discussions, in which they always kept your hopes alive. But, you wondered.
So, there you were with no money and very little . . . well, what staff did you have?
Well, to begin with, once Mrs. Ames actually resigned, we had Emily Clay, the secretary, we had an associate director, Dr. Ira Reid, from Atlanta University, part-time. Then, myself and two typists, or secretaries. That's what we started with.
Tell me exactly how Mrs. Ames' resignation came about. I have looked through the Odum papers and found a whole series of correspondence about the problem of what to do with Mrs. Ames, and then there is no correspondence during this period in which she evidently left. And so, I really have never been able to find . . . suddenly she left. And then she writes to everybody saying that she had resigned, but how that exactly came about . . .
Well, I am not familiar with this correspondence to Odum, but does any of it involve me, I mean, the ones that you have read? It's possible that there are one or two things, I'm not sure, but . . .
I don't remember.
It was more likely between Dr. Will and Odum and Charles Johnson or . . . well, Mrs. Ames . . .
The general gist of the earlier correspondence is that Odum should tell her that she is supposed to resign. And he evidently doesn't do it and . . .
Oh, yes. That was the hitch, he didn't make it clear or forceful enough.
And the result was that although they
So, this conversation took place just before the charter meeting?
Yeah. Quite possibly a week or ten days, but not too long before the
charter meeting. And then, about a day or two before the charter
meeting, Josephine came in one day and said, "Mrs. Ames is in terrible
shape, she can't sleep and she is . . . I'm worried about her." I said,
"Well, I hope that she can snap out of it and get to the charter
meeting." And Josephine said, "I hope so, we are going to try to get her
to take a sedative and maybe get some rest so that she will be all
right." And I think the morning of the charter meeting, the report from
Josephine was that she just wasn't too sure that Mrs. Ames was going to
make it. She said, "We gave her some medicine and it just had the wrong
effect. It didn't help her sleep at all, she is just climbing the wall."
But she showed up, a little late, but she
What did she say?
She started off fairly calmly, you could tell that this was a little talk
that she had been turning over in her mind and getting ready for . . .
how she had appreciated the opportunity to work with the Commission all
those years and she hoped that all this work had been of some value to
the South, etc,, etc., She had great joy in knowing so many fine people
around the South, and all this. And especially the women she had worked
with and she
It's so interesting.
Yeah, and well, this went on and on . . .
On about the theme of the domestic servant?
Yeah, and how there should be a better understanding, more realism on the part of the white woman toward the black woman, because if they got to working together as real equals, you know, then they could do a lot to clear up all this mess.
Did she talk about white women and black men?
No, that wasn't a part of it, as I recall. And then, she had her little farewell oration. And here, she almost broke, her voice got higher and more and more taut and finally, she managed to bring it to a close and she was just short of a hysterical outburst.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
Well, her good friend, the Reverend Dr. Ashby Jones, (he was quite an old
man, he was a Baptist minister, much beloved in Atlanta) had no doubt
been talking with her, and he understood the situation, and he was hurt
because she was leaving the new organization, and her talk sort of
stirred him up and he jumped up the minute that she started to her seat,
and started talking. And he was saying something like this, "Now, Mr.
Chairman, we have listened to this wonderful woman and I am so deeply
touched that I think that this Council cannot afford to lose the
services . . . " and he was going to launch into a personal plea, I
think, or maybe putting it to a vote, you know, that Mrs. Ames be kept
on the staff. And Dr. Odum let him go for just a half minute or
three-quarters of a minute and then Dr. Odum jumped up and put his arms
around Dr. Jones and said, "Now, Dr. Jones, you know that we love
you,
In the last part of her speech, in the farewell part, did she began to say any specifically bitter words or . . .
She verged on it just sort of subtly. There was a little bit of an edge
in a couple of things that she said about Dr. Odum and Dr. Alex, yeah. I
wish that I could remember the words, but I can't. But I was quite aware
that she meant to be a little sharp with them, and she was. Well, now,
that was one of the highlights of the charter meeting. And of course, in
addition to that, we adopted the by-laws, which would govern the
procedures. Now, this had been another one of my chores in the
Was there much overlap between the CIC members and the the new SRC board members?
Well, that . . . yes, there was some overlap, but I'm not sure how much.
I would guess that around a third were CIC carry-overs. Well, then
another thing that happened, another highlight of the meeting, was the
afternoon discussion of policies. Here, they got into the controversy
over segregation. Should this Council come out right now with some
strong declaration against
Oh, really?
Yes.
Who were the whites who were for it?
Oh, I couldn't attempt to recall now, exactly who was . . . oh, for the statement. Well, as I recall, Clark Foreman was one and several other people, white and black, who were in his Southern Conference for Human Welfare.
Do you remember who the major proponents of both sides were?
I think that Benjamin Mays spoke in favor of a statement and certainly
Clark Foreman. Beyond that, I'm afraid that I couldn't recall, but one
thing I do recall, is that the Negro editor, Carter Wesley, from
Houston, who of course, was a very militant man, and very
anti-segregation personally, said, "My position is wellknown. I don't
have to tell you that I despise segregation and I think that the laws
are unfair and unconstitutional. But, after all, we have got to consider
what will be our best strategy here in trying to make some appeal to the
people of the South, trying to get some support, trying to get people to
work with us. And I am quite
Did Mrs. Ames involve herself in that argument?
I'm sorry, I just don't remember. That would be important, but I don't remember. My impression is that she didn't. My impression is, in fact, that she had probably left the meeting after the lunch.
Actually, I have seen the minutes of that charter meeting, and I don't believe that they show her speaking.
Yeah, my impression is that she probably left at lunch time and was not
there for this discussion. Well, all this took quite a while and one
result was that they didn't actually get down to any brass tacks on what
policy they would have and just what they would ask us to try to do. To
me, it was a very frustrating, disappointing session. About the time
that the meeting was breaking up, I recall, it was starting to rain and
it rained like the Devil all through the night. It just
I would, but maybe before we go on with that, let me back up and ask just a few little questions. Why didn't William Cole take that job, do you know?
I'm not sure. I never really asked him, I guess. I had some reticence
about it, because in those days, I wasn't sure who had been approached.
And I would see him occasionally, especially at Southern Sociology
meetings and he had been a good friend for many years, but I never did
bring this up and say, "Lock, I understand that you were approached and
you didn't take it. Why
Well, there is some discussion in the correspondence about the Vanderbilt administration not being willing to give him a leave of absence in order to do this and not approving of his being involved in this. But I've wondered if that might have been partly a way out for him.
Was he at Vanderbilt then, or Tennessee?
Oh, it was the University of Tennessee, yeah. Excuse me.
That might have been involved, that they might have said that, "Yes, if
you go, you have to resign." Now, on this, I was very fortunate. I told
Odum that I would take a leave, that I would take this thing for one
year and try to get it going and then I would probably want to come back
here to my job. So, it was put through the trustees and all as being on
leave. Well, at the end of that first year, I felt that things were
still pretty shaky and I would like to have a little more to show for
the effort. And also in the meantime, you see, my wife had moved down
and she had
How do you account for that lack of dedication?
Well, I suppose that like a good many of the black intellectuals, you
know, this interracial organization work was just a lot of froth. It was
all right to belong to it, but it was just nothing, a lot of talk and
then, of course, to a large extent, they were about right. Well, Ira
would . . . we would agree that he would go to some conference
somewhere, Tennessee or Kentucky, and make a speech. And he wanted to
travel by plane. Now, in those days, you know, planes were not terribly
dependable and very much subject to the weather. These days, they will
take off and land through anything, almost, with all this automatic
gear. But in those days, it couldn't be done. So, he would make a plane
reservation to say, Louisville, Kentucky and then find out at the last
minute that the plane couldn't fly, you know, too much rain. Or he goes
to get on the plane and he is bumped by a military man, and they had the
right, you see. They loaded all
What had his . . .
He was an educator. He had been originally under Dr. Newbold in the state
Department of Education. And then later, a professor at Elizabeth City
State College. And let's see, later he became president. Probably, that
was after his Council work. Well, in looking for other personnel,
sometime very early in that first year, we looked around for a good
public relations person. And here we had a very sad experience. I talked
to newspaper friends and the Associated Press and people like this and
they didn't have anybody to suggest. So, one day, I believe that
Josephine Wilkins suggested that there
Yes, feel free to.
Margaret Fisher, who was eager to get into some work like the Council work. And she was very interested in the New Deal programs and all this, you know, a great admirer of Mrs. Roosevelt and President Roosevelt and so forth. She had had some minor job in some regional program under the New Deal in the Atlanta office, I forget what it was. Well, I said, "Well, we certainly need somebody. I'd like to see her." So, she said, "I'll arrange a little party and you can meet her." So, she had a little party with Lucy Mason and one or two others, and Margaret Fisher and myself. And Margaret Fisher was a very amiable, pleasant person, who had begun, I think, in music and was a singer, soloist in a church choir in Atlanta. And well, naturally, this didn't pay much, and she had taken this other New Deal job, the name of which I forget. And now, she was eager to get into some race relations work.
Was she a young woman?
She was youngish, well, let's see . . . at that time, I was forty-three.
I suppose that Margaret was thirtyish, or early thirties. So I asked her
to come down later to the
Like what?
Well, like walking down the street smoking a cigarette. (interruption by telephone)
How did she perform the job?
Practically not at all. I began to get some flack from people, like Ralph
McGill, editor of the Constitution. And from the . . .
oh, Pop Caldwell, who was head of the AP office in Atlanta. Ralph said
one day, "Who is this girl that you've got doing public relations for
you?" I said, "Well, she was recommended by Josephine Wilkins and Lucy
Mason and seemed aConstitution and he would report on something that happened,
her manner or her apparent lack of savvy about the job she was doing.
So, time and again, I began to get comments like this and then comments
from someone who had seen her going down the street with a cigarette
dangling in her mouth, you know. I must say that this rubs me the wrong
way, too, whether it is a man or a woman. I think that it is sort of an
unesthetic type of thing for anybody to do. And well, mainly, I found
that Margaret was not getting down to any kind of work on say, writing
us some leaflets for example, which we could use in promotion. You see,
we had a plan in that first year, we had a great hope of having a mass
membership. So, we were getting ready to circularize thousands of people
and tell them, "Look, you can belong for a dollar a year." And we needed
several leaflets and we had pamphlets that we wanted to revise,
especially America's Tenth Man, which had been very
popular, and we thought that was a good thing to carry on. Well, I just
gradually got the impression that this woman was just sort of
dilly-dallying along and enjoying talking to people and
But at the time, though, I can imagine . . .
Yes . . . now, let me see, did she send some kind of message? I don't
know whether it was to me or to Josephine Wilkins. Somehow, I got the
word . . . well, I probably shouldn't say this. I started to say that
she wanted some money sent. I am probably wrong on that. It's probably
later that this came up and she contended that I had committed the
Council to a part of these expenses. And we did wind up paying some.
Well, anyway, she . . . as I recall, she did call Mrs. Roosevelt. In
fact, I strongly suspect that she had written her beforehand and had set
up this engagement for tea. And that's the reason that she went, you
see, she was just not going to miss this for anything. And so, when she
got back, oh, she was just walking on air. You know, she was honestly
like a little child, thrilled over having had tea at the White House.
And every day you would hear her telling somebody about this. She just
couldn't get over it, it was the greatest thing that ever happened to
her. And so, more time went on and nothing getting done. And let's see .
. . I discussed it with her a little one day and she said that we
shouldn't expect her to carry all this PR work, none of which she had
really done up to this time, that unless she had a helper or a secretary
of her own or something, you know, that there was notRace and Rumors of Race, in which he had a whole
chapter on the Eleanor Clubs, these mythical things. Well, she said that
she thought that she had been doing what the Council wanted her to do,
though she felt that it was not too clear as to
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
exactly what we wanted. I said, . . . "Well, I'm sorry, I certainly feel
that it has been made clear enough to you." Well, she wasn't so sure
that she understood exactly what her role should be. Well, it may
well
Why were they so supportive of her?
Well, I decided later (in fact, I got it sort of by "the grapevine") that
Margaret was being let out of this New Deal job and that she was
frantically looking for a job. And her good friends were helping her
out. And I said to Josephine once, "Look, you know, I'm sorry to have to
do this, but Margaret simply didn't have the experience and training in
this field and I was sort of relying on your recommendation." And she
said, "Well, now, Guy, I did not push this woman." She was on the
defensive about it. And maybe she was right, she hadn't actually pushed,
but the whole context was, "I want you to meet this woman, I'm going to
have this party and so on and so on . . . and I think that you ought to
consider her for this job." Well, in my mind, that is pressure, you
know, to a certain extent. But I was at fault, in that I should have
How were you going about trying to recruit staff? How did you put the word out?
Well, of course, we had put the word out through a number of the leaders at the charter meeting and in the executive committee. And I wrote several people, like Virginius Dabney, P.B. Young and others, to see if they knew anybody. And nobody seemed to have any suggestions. You know, lots of people had gone to war and others were pegged into their jobs and it was really tough.
What about Mrs. Tilly? Wasn't she in Atlanta?
Oh, yes. Mrs. Tilly was around. And sometime, I guess either that first year or the second year, we took her on part-time to more or less continue the work with church women's groups that Mrs. Ames had been doing.
That's something . . . I was never able to find very much material about Mrs. Tilly's role, because since she was there in Atlanta, there isn't the correspondence that . . . How active had she been? What was her relationship to Mrs. Ames' work toward the end of the Interracial Commission?
She was very close to Mrs. Ames and had done quite a bit of fieldwork, helping Mrs. Ames and the Association for the Prevention of Lynching.
Some people have told me that Mrs. Tilly was the real worker behind the thing and . . .
Well, yes, I've heard this too and . . .
That Mrs. Ames had the ideas but that Mrs. Tilly carried them out. That's what I've heard.
Well, yes, I wouldn't discount that too much. Well, we were fortunate a
little later >(I'm sorry that I can't remember what month, but I
think that it was sometime toward the end of 1944), someone knew about a
young man named Ray Warwick, who had been doing public relations for
labor, I believe, someone in the labor unions. And he was very much
interested in the Council and interracial work. So, we found out where
he was, got ahold of him, and he came down and we talked. And he had had
good experience and was well recommended, and we hired him. And the
contrast between him and our previous person was just so great, I just
felt like Santa Claus had come! I mean, this man, he set right to work,
working on our literature, revising pamphlets, preparing leaflets, doing
news releases. And he soon was very friendly with the editors and the
wire services and he knew a lot of the labor people. So we beganNew South and that we would change over the Southern Frontier, which the Commission had been
publishing . . .
Had it continued to come out?
Oh yes, yes.
Who put it out?
Well, mostly Dr. Eleazer and then, Mrs. Ames. Yeah. Then, for the first couple of issues after the Council started, I did it. I would have to go back and search the record to see exactly when I did this.
I may be mistaken as to the time that we changed over, but I thought that
it was in '44. Well, at any rate, I had decided that since we had a new
organization, why not a new publication, and New South
would be a good name for it. I talked to Ira Reid about it and he
thought well of it. And I guess that I put it up to the executive
committee and they said o.k. Oh, that reminds me now of something about
Clark Foreman. I had a call one day and it was from Clark Foreman. And
oh, he was just angry. He says, "Look, I hear that you are planning to
publish something called New South." I said, "Yes, we
are writing the stuff right now. We will soon have the first issue
ready." He said, "YouNew South." I said, "Well, look, since
when?" He said, "We've often had this in mind." I said, "Well, now, look
Clark. You have not published anything called New
South?" "No." "You don't have anything in hand or any plans to
immediately start publishing?" "Well, no." "You have not copyrighted the
title?" "No." "Well, now, you don't own this title any more than anybody
else and we are ready to go and we have been authorized to do it and we
are going ahead." Oh, he was just mad as hell at me. I must say that I
had several experiences with him like this. So, I was not one of his
strong admirers.
Well, tell me a little bit more about the conflict between the Southern Conference and the Southern Regional Council, about why he dropped out of the Southern Regional Council.
Well, when I said dropped out, I think that this would be that he just didn't show up at meetings as much as he had been the first year.
Had there been some incidents that foretold this estrangement?
Well, as I said, I think that the Southern Conference sort of felt
threatened by the new organization. And
Were there discussions about how . . .
There was a little discussion at our charter meeting. And then,
occasionally when I would see one of them, there would be a little
discussion about it. And the general feeling was that the Southern
Conference is an action organization, political action, etc. It doesn't
claim to have tax exemption, because after all, it is frankly in the
business of trying to influence legislation, etc. The Council is
chartered as a non-political, educational . . . etc., with tax
exemption. Tax exempt on its corporate income and donors exempt on their
contributions. And it would work through educational and non-political
programs and that was generally understood, I think. And this was
another reason, incidentally, for the feeling during the charter
meeting, when they were discussing segregation statements, that, "Well,
if you are going in for that, you are working for legislative change and
just might as well kiss your tax exemption good-by. And then, you are
not going to get very many people to donate to it." I thought that, at
least to me, it was clear enough why we were rivals, of course. But
there
Were you at that meeting?
No. No, the fact is that I never attended a
And so, . . .
I'm surprised, because in those early years, at least, they tried to get fairly respectable, influential people.
Oh, yes. They had a lot of people like this, yeah. And I never understood why at least he didn't call on Odum or Vance or me.
Did he ever make an effort to contact you?
No. Except that I would get the literature; he put me on the mailing
list, you see. Now, they did a lot of this. They would send the Southern Patriot out free to hundreds and maybe
thousands of people. And of course, they would ask you to suscribe or
make a contribution. I think that maybe one
Well, I gathered that in the process of arrangements for the Atlanta
meeting and in some of the things that went on
No, I don't know what that could be. Because after all, I'm not quite sure that he was elected on this board, he was not on the executive committee, I don't know what else he would expect.
I may be wrong, but . . .
But you see, he may be referring to some of these conflicts with me, like
this New South thing. Now, here I had read their
literature all these years and there is not one word about their
planning to publish a New South. I knew that the man
was just pulling a big bluff on me and just because maybe he and
Dombrowski had felt that someday they would publish something by this
name, but I wasn't going to be put off by this. He was quite angry about
it and . . . then on another occasion, I had a very unpleasant session
with him and Dombrowski, which . . . and you wouldn't believe this, but
it almost came to physical blows. We kept hearing little things from
some of our members as to what Clark Foreman had said, or what
Dombrowski had said and finally, a staunch member from North Carolina
told
Nobody wants to admit that they are not interested in action.
Right. Well, in about . . . shortly after I had heard this thing from
North Carolina, a man from Louisiana was in the office and said that
they were considering setting up a state branch of the Southern
Conference and he had heard something of this same sort of thing, about
the difference
And as time went on, it was obvious that this sort of thing was actually
a financial burden. ThatNew South plus the pamphlets, pretty soon you were
going to be paying more in printing and postage and so forth to service
these people than you were getting from them on the average. And so we
began to recede from this idea of a mass membership. And later on, as
you may know, sometime up in the years after I left there, they made
this new policy official, that there be no more members as such, and
they went back precisely to the thing that the old Commission had,
namely that the Council is a big board of directors. So, that little
experiment in mass membership didn't pan out at all.
Do you have an idea what the proportion of blacks and whites . . . black and white response, was?
No, I don't. Many of them would be people that some of us knew and we
could tell, but there were many just little ordinary people who just
wanted to pay their dollar and we had no way of knowing what their race
was. I suspect that the majority were white, because certainly the
miling lists that we bought were much more likely to have white names on
them, I think. You know, people's names would be on the list in the
first place because they belonged to some organization or they suscribed
to some journal or something of that sort, and they were likely to be
white. Well, let's see, in '45, with the war closing, when we thought
that we could see the warour
problems." And some of them felt this way about that conference. And I
had to argue with them and tell them that it would be open to everybody,
that we wanted black participation. So, they finally authorized it. We
got busy, we got some businessmen, lawyers, educators, black and white,
or at least we invited them. And we set it up at the Biltmore Hotel. We
had a morning session and an afternoon session. We had some government
people there. And we got an expert on freight rates. This was one of our
little non-racial ideas. You may not be aware of the long standing
freight rate situation, by which ever since the Civil War, the Northeast
has dominated this. And with Pittsburg owning
McCarran?
I think that's what it was. Now, what this was about, I don't remember,
but they had a report that was considered very important. It probably
had something to do with trade and commerce. Well, I thought that it was
a very interesting program. But, it turned out that only a couple of
blacks came. Here we had hoped to get people like P.B. Young, Gordon
Hancock from Richmond, and all kinds of people to come. And whites came
from long distances, we had a good crowd. We had a Negro businessman
from Florida, he had a little part on the program and I guess that is
the reason that he came. And there were one or two others, and that was
all. But we had a good program and good press and then later, we put
together the main papers and got out our little publication called The South, Economic Opportunity Number One. Oh, an
interesting thing happened. Right at the end of this meeting (this was
in April of 1945, April 12 or 11) . . . this young man from Washington
had been talking, he was the last speaker. And he did a very good job.
He was a Yankee, he was not a southerner. I had not known him before,
just a little contact after he had come to Atlanta. And he wound
So I tried to get everybody's attention and told them that Mr. Roosevelt
had just died at Warm Springs. And then later that day, Josephine
Wilkins stopped me and said, "Guy Johnson, you put that man up to that?"
I said, "Up to what?" She said, "That last speaker up there saying, ‘You
don't solve anything by going to Washington to have tea with Mrs.
Roosevelt.’ " I said, "Josephine, I never put him up to anything, he has
no acquaintance with any of this business about Margaret Fisher. Just
forget it." Then, of course, that summer the war did end. We had
employed George Mitchell, who had been with the southeastern
END OF INTERVIEW