
          Henry Wallace's Campaign Foreshadowed the Movement as Well as
the Rainbow
          By Sullivan, PatriciaPatricia Sullivan
          Vol. 10, No. 5, 1988, pp. 11, 16-17
          
          Late in the summer of 1948, presidential candidate Henry Wallace
embarked on a week-long tour through the Deep South. For a brief time,
he was able to break through much of the Cold war hysteria that
clouded the Progressive Party, and focus public attention on a
fundamental issue and purpose of his third party campaign. Wallace's
Southern strategy grew out of President Roosevelt's earlier efforts to
address the South as the nation's "number one economic problem."
          In order to carry New_Deal reforms forward, Wallace embraced the
emerging civil_rights struggle as essential to realizing the economic
and political potential of the region, and the nation. He attacked
segregation from North_Carolina to Mississippi, and encouraged black
Southerners in their burgeoning effort to dismantle the structure of
white_supremacy. Henry Wallace's Southern campaign was about hope and
inclusion, and a notable chapter in the politics of progressive
reform. It is also a reminder that the roots of the civil_rights
movement go deeper than the 1950s and 1960s.
          The Progressive Party was part of the ferment, sparked by the New
Deal, which would transform twentieth century Southern politics. The
New_Deal had "aroused the political interests and political hopes
of classes of people left unmoved by traditional Southern
politics," wrote V.O. Key. Franklin Roosevelt's unsuccessful
attempt to purge Southern Conservatives from office encouraged
grassroots efforts to mobilize the New_Deal's constituency in the
South--particularly blacks, and working class whites--a constituency
that was largely disfranchised. During the 1940s Southern New_Dealers
joined with the NAACP and other organizations in a campaign to
eliminate disfranchisement laws enacted at the turn of the century. At
the same time, black civil_rights activists, labor organizers and
Southern progressives supported local voter_registration efforts
throughout the South.
          Following the Supreme_Court's 1944 decision outlawing the white
primary, black voter_registration in the South increased
dramatically. When South_Carolina resisted the Court's ruling, black
activists John McCray and Osceola McKaine organized a separate party,
the Progressive Democratic_Party (PDP). In 1944, twenty years before
the well-known challenge of Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi
Democratic Freedom Party, the PDP took a delegation to the Democratic
National Convention to contest the seating of the all-white
delegation. Osceola McKaine ran for the Senate on the PDP ticket that
November to stimulate black political participation in the Palmetto
State. The number of registered black_voters in South_Carolina
increased during the 1940s from 3,500 to 50,000.
          In tandem with the early voting_rights movement, civil_rights
organizations worked with local communities in preparing for a frontal
assault on the segregation system. As early as the mid 1930s, the
NAACP's Charles Houston and Thurgood Marshall joined with black
lawyers around the South and initiated the legal challenge to racial
discrimination in education. Their efforts would culminate with the
1954 Brown decision. In 1947, CORE staged the first "Freedom Ride"
through the upper South following the Supreme_Court ruling outlawing
segregation in interstate transportation.

          Building on these earlier efforts, the Progressive Party's Southern
campaign provided another means for challenging the segregation
system, while stimulating political interest and
participation. Southerners who organized for Henry Wallace in the
South had been active in the voting_rights movement of the 1940a They
included: Louis Burnham of the Southern Negro Youth Conference; Palmer
Weber, of the CIO Political Action Committee and member of the
executive Board of the NAACP; Virginia Durr, of the National Committee
to Abolish the Poll Tax; and Clark Foreman, president of the Southern
Conference for Human Welfare.
          Other supporters linked the '48 campaign with the movement of the
1950s and 1960s: Dr. Sam Williams, who was Martin_Luther_King's
philosophy teacher at Morehouse in 1948 and later national chairman of
CORE; Rev. and Mrs. Maynard Jackson Sr., parents of Atlanta's first
black mayor; Daisy Bates, who led the effort to desegregate Central
High School in Little Rock; and Randolph Blackwell, then a student at
North_Carolina A &T College who became a top aide in the South to
Martin_Luther_King Jr.
          
            Tactics Previewed the Movement
          
          Progressive Party organizers used tactics that previewed the
sixties movement. Northern student volunteers came South in the summer
of 1948 to help with voter_registration and the petition drive to get
Wallace on the ballot. Black candidates ran for office on the
Progressive party ticket throughout the region. And participants and
supporters routinely challenged the segregation system, a practice
that drew national attention when the former vice president came South
late in the summer of 1948.
          The issue of race overshadowed the candidate's appeal for an
expansion of the New_Deal programs and increased federal aid to the
poorest region in the nation. Wallace attacked segregation and the
one-party system as endemic to the South's economic problems. He
refused to address segregated audiences, and would not patronize
hotels or restaurants which excluded blacks. Several near riots and a
stabbing marked Wallace's first full day of campaigning in North
Carolina, and captured national headlines. Pete Seeger, the young
balladeer of the Progressive Party campaign, recalled that Wallace's
advisors were anxious to cancel the rest of the tour. But Wallace
refused to concede to terror and lawlessness. They continued on,
deeper into Dixie.
          The entourage of campaign workers and reporters traveled
alternately by bus, train, and motorcade, taking most of their meals
picnic style along the highway. "An integrated group, traveling
through the South in 1948...We were sitting targets expecting to be
blown up at any minute," recalled a reporter for the Baltimore
Afro-American. A Life reporter sported a large "I'm for
Thurmond" button in a feeble effort to distinguish himself from the
group.
          Birmingham, Alabama, previewed the violence and police terror that
would distinguish that city fifteen years later. Police Commissioner
Bull Connor, "a Horatius at the bridge of Alabama's states rights,"
was prepared for a showdown. A hostile mob of several thousand greeted
Wallace's motorcade armed with pipes and baseball bats. Connor used a
rope to segregate supporters waiting for Wallace on the courthouse
lawn. A campaign worker read a brief statement, noting Wallace would
maintain his policy of not addressing segregated audiences. Police,
armed with tear gas, stood by as a jeering crowd surrounded Wallace's
car, and began to rock it, hollering "kill Wallace." The police
finally cleared a path for the motorcade. Palmer Weber, who had
instructed everyone to keep their windows closed and not leave the
cars, said they could have been killed in Alabama. Those reporters who
had viewed the Wallace campaign in the South as a cynical effort to
stir up trouble in the South in order to gain votes in the North began
to see it differently. "They were terrorized," Weber
recalled. "They knew they had been on the edge of hell. They
realized if we wanted to create a riot we could have done it very
easily. It was very educational for these reporters," he said with

a trace of sarcasm, "very educational."
          Wallace went on to Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Tennessee
and addressed mostly peaceful gatherings on the steps of local court
houses, in black churches, and in a baseball park. He reached back to
the South's Populist tradition when he reminded audiences that
"greedy men, the Big Mules...have ruled the South for generations
and kept millions of common people in economic poverty and political
bondage. They have fought trade unions bitterly. They have kept wages
in the South below those in the North....Their profits are multiplied
by keeping people divided--section against section, race against race,
farmers against workers."
          But Wallace reached beyond the economic arguments of Southern
populism. Race, he said, was the major obstacle to the South's
economic and political development. He also appealed to the religious
tradition of the region, explaining that segregation was more that an
economic liability. "Social injustice is sin...segregation is
sin," Wallace said, a violation of "the fundamental Christian
and democratic principles in our civilization." Finally, he warned
that, in the postwar world, segregation had serious implications for
national security. In a press conference towards the end of the tour,
Wallace told reporters that segregation was the nation's number one
problem, threatening America's position of leadership in a world where
the majority of the population were people of color.
          James Wechsler of The New_York Post reported that
Wallace "shattered a wide variety of political precedents during
his tour." He faithfully boycotted Southern restaurants and
hotels, sleeping alternately in pullman cars and private homes. He
addressed the first unsegregated public meeting in Memphis since
Reconstruction. He was the first presidential candidate to address
unsegregated meetings in the South. President Truman cancelled his
tentative plans to tour the region that fall, and no future
presidential candidate would ever address a segregated audience in the
South again. Wechsler praised Wallace for "saying a good many
things that needed to be said on Southern property, and establishing
in at least a dozen...places that unsegregated meetings could be held
without a civil war." A founder of the ADA who had viewed
Wallace's campaign as little more than a communist front, James
Wechsler was shaken by the Southern tour. He later recalled, "in
that atmosphere, the ideological distinctions I talked about didn't
seem to loom as large. In the South it was a campaign for civil
rights."
          Wallace's civil_rights effort is vaguely remembered as a political
challenge which forced a reluctant President Truman to address the
issue. Beyond the desegregation of the armed forces, however, little
action followed at the national level. The primary significance of
Wallace's Southern campaign was twofold. In the shadow of the Cold
War, he attempted to educate America about the real and present danger
to its democratic system, which was home grown. And, more importantly,
he participated in the movement already underway to smash Jim Crow and
democratize Southern politics. Palmer Weber reported to Thurgood
Marshall, "the various Negro communities were electrified and
tremendously heartened to see one white_man with guts willing to take
it standing up....By and large I find the Negro leadership fighting
for the ballot as never before. The only limitation is full-time
workers." Wallace and his supporters engaged and endorsed those
Southerners who would carry the struggle forward--at the ballot box,
in the courts, and in the streets.
          Jesse Jackson's presidential campaign is a measure of how far the
country has traveled since Henry Wallace headed South forty years
ago. Born of the struggle that finally transformed the South, Jackson
is carrying the progressive movement forward. By remembering the early
organizing efforts of the 1940s, we can better understand the rich
texture of reform politics in America, and the broad significance of
the civil_rights movement. And, by remembering, honor those civil
rights pioneers for, in Palmer Weber's words, "not faltering on the
simple principle of human rights." Reflecting on the 1948 campaign
as the McCarthy decade got underway, he wrote Wallace, "we owe it
to ourselves to hold that torch firmly and high regardless of the
consequences because that is the way forward. There is more than one
way to measure political success."
          
            Patricia Sullivan is the assistant director of the Center
for the Study of Civil Rights at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for
Afro-American and African Studies, Charlottesville,
Virginia.
          
        
