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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 a UNC professor of sociology, an author, and the first executive director of the Southern Regional Council. 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 in the Southern Regional Council (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.
Dr. Guy B. Johnson was a UNC sociology professor and author. This interview 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, and he describes the debate over issues such as segregation among SRC members. He also describes the conflict between SRC leaders and the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. The interview ends with Johnson's analysis of post-war economic issues and foreign politics in relation to the Southern Conference and SRC.
[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.
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.
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. America'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.
[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 . . . HeAfro-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 t