
          Homegrown Progressives
          By Egerton, JohnJohn Egerton
          Vol. 16, No. 3, 1994, pp. 1, 4-17
          
          Of all the South's home-grown efforts to tackle regional social
problems arising from the depression and the war, none were more
extensive and substantial than those of the Southern Conference for
Human Welfare and the Southern_Regional_Council. When they were
created—the former in 1938, the latter in 1944—they constituted the
primary internal responses to Old South conservatism and white
supremacy. Throughout the Forties, they provided the truest measure of
liberal-progressive thinking in the region.
          They were rivals in some respects, the more intensely so because of
their similarities. Back and forth across the fence, they whispered
criticisms of each other: too much reckless radicalism, too much
conservative caution, too much activism, too much empty talk.


Many people, including a few key individuals who served in both
organizations, wanted them to work together toward mutually shared
goals; some hoped they would merge into a single, broadbased movement,
an activist army for social reform. They never did unite, and neither
grew to the size of a battalion, let alone an army, but both had a
significant impact on the postwar South. If you want to know what was
being said and done by white and black Southerners before 1954 to
place the explosive issue of race_relations on the public agenda, you
have to look closely at the Southern_Regional_Council and the Southern
Conference for Human Welfare.
          The Council (as SRC was known by its regulars), emerged from the
locust shell of its twenty-five-year-old predecessor, the Atlanta-based
Commission on Interracial Cooperation. The Conference (as SCHW and its
subsidiary group, the Southern Conference Educational Fund, were both
referred to), was founded in Birmingham and later based in Nashville
and New_Orleans. The two organizations entered the postwar era in the
summer of 1945 full of hope that the South was on the cusp of a great
advance. By the end of 1947, that breakthrough was still within their
long-range vision but not within their grasp, and the continuing
struggles of both groups were a telling measure of the chronic
division and instability within the South itself.
          Academicians predominated on the SRC staff and board. Both Guy
B. Johnson, the executive director, and his part-time associate, Ira
De A. Reid, were sociologists, Johnson at the University of North
Carolina and Reid at Atlanta University. (Reid was also the only black
staff member.) Howard W. Odum of UNC was the Council's president, and
Charles S. Johnson, the soon-to-be president of Fisk University, was
chairman of the executive committee—and both of them were sociologists
too. George S. Mitchell, an economist, would soon join them, and there
would be others from academia.
          The SRC described itself as a leadership body, not a
mass-membership organization; it had a large board of directors
(seventy-five to a hundred members), and it hoped to develop branch
councils in each Southern state, but its regional roster of
rank-and-file recruits was never large. The staff and board were
broadly representative of the region in terms of race and geography,
but they were solidly, almost exclusively middle_class, and only about
a dozen women (all but two or three of them white) were members of the
charter board and staff. Nothing about the organization could fairly
be called radical. If any NAACP leaders, Communists, Socialists, or
right-wingers were present—or even any elected or appointed public
officials—they kept a very low profile.
          Most of the prominent Southern black leaders of the postwar era
were central figures in SRC, including all those who had started the
dialogue in Durham and had held up their end of the discussion in
subsequent meetings—Charles Johnson, Gordon Hancock, Benjamin Mays,
P. B. Young, Rufus Clement, and others. Many of the best-known white
liberals and progressives in the region also gave their names if not
their energy to the Council (but, for reasons both various and
complex, there were some notable exceptions, including Ralph McGill,
Frank Porter Graham, Lillian_Smith, and Jonathan Daniels). It had
taken nearly two years of delicate maneu-


vering by dozens of active Southern men and women of both races to
bring the Council to life in 1944. But even though the organization
was finally on its feet, it was still a long way from being
unified. Not only did those who kept their distance accentuate the
disunity; internal factions also clashed over purposes and
priorities. Usually, the underlying cause was that same old bone of
contention that Southerners had been gnawing on for ages:
segregation.
          The most conservative faction of Council members came together
around the notion that any overt attempt to eradicate segregation
would be too antagonistic to the ruling elite in the South, and thus
counterproductive. Their strategy was to acknowledge segregation as
the existing law, and to pledge SRC to work within it. This group was
predominantly white but included a few blacks as well. Some were
pragmatists who reasoned that no progress was possible without support
from the white establishment; others believed that the
separate-but-equal philosophy could be made to work, and would be best
for both races in the long run.
          The liberal faction—also biracial—was convinced that
the South was shackled by the ball and chain of segregation, and that
both the black minority and the white majority would be permanently
crippled if they didn't cut themselves free. Here, too, pragmatism and
ideology were at work, with some advocating desegregation as a more
efficient and fair use of human resources, and others saying it was a
constitutional or religious or moral imperative. In general, the
anti-segregationists wanted


SRC to support the budding sentiment for an integrated society, and
thus to be positioned on the breaking wave of history.
          In between were the moderates—perhaps the largest faction of
all. They wanted to avoid at all costs an up-or-down vote on
segregation. Personal views aside, they were convinced that neither
the separate-but-equal group nor the integrationists could win the
larger society over to its philosophy. Fearful of a resurgent backlash
that would cast the South down into its nightmarish past, they
preferred to see the Council concentrate on programs and research that
would deal with Jim Crow laws only obliquely, if at all. In general,
they were philosophically opposed to segregation, but they expected it
to prevail in the South for decades, even generations.
          With Howard Odum presiding and Guy Johnson as executive director,
SRC seldom wandered far off that middle road. So many problems cried
out for attention; there was more than enough to be done, they said,
without getting hung up in ideological debate. The Council spread its
thin resources as far as it could, trying to bring help and hope to
Southerners in need without unduly alarming the guardians of vested
power. A modest annual budget of less than $50,000 was raised, with
the Rosenwald Fund and other foundations providing most of it. In no
sense was SRC an extreme group; everything about it bespoke caution,
diplomacy, moderation.
          The staff had its hands full. Ira Reid was assigned to direct a
two-year study of racial discrimination in the South (soon narrowed to
Atlanta, and then further to public transit in the city). George
Mitchell, former director of a political action committee in the labor
movement (and, like Reid, an ex-New_Dealer), was hired to set up a
program for returning veterans. Dorothy Tilly took over Jessie Daniel
Ames's old assignment as head of what had once been called "women's
work"; she soon developed it into an outreach program that opened
Council branches in several states and enlisted church groups in
various social-concern programs. A monthly magazine, New South, was
launched in 1946 to replace Southern Frontier, the old CIC journal. A
year later the Council started a radio series called "Southern
Roundtable," modeled after a popular discussion and debate program
from Chicago. The moderator was a new SRC staffer, Harold C. Fleming,
a native Georgian and an army veteran just out of Harvard.
          Women were influential members of the Council, out of all
proportion to their small number. Three whites and two blacks filled
important offices or argued persuasively from within the ranks for a
progressive agenda. Josephine M. Wilkins, a longtime leader of the
Georgia League of Women Voters and founder of a social-action group
called the Georgia Citizens Fact Finding Movement, became a Council
vice president. Jane Havens of Florida and Alice Spearman of South
Carolina shared Wilkins's progressive vision. The two leading minority
women were Grace T. Hamilton, executive director of the Atlanta Urban
League, and Charlotte Hawkins Brown, the veteran North_Carolina
educator whose involvement in Southern social reform reached back to
the 1920s.
          Teetering on the highwire between liberal activism and conservative
caution, the Southern_Regional_Council inched along. Virtually every
proposed program of staff action, every resolution praising or
condemning the acts of others, every utterance of organizational
policy or philosophy was subjected to the most intense
scrutiny. Drafted statements in support of the Fair Employment
Practices Commission and federal anti-lynching legislation, or in
opposition to the poll tax and the white primary, were often watered
down by fears of "what this will cost us"—meaning white friends in
high places, money from foundations and other donors, perhaps even the
Council's tax exemption as a nonprofit organization. Ira Reid's study
of discrimination suffered the same cautionary fate; so did George
Mitchell's investigative report on the 1946



racial disturbance in
Columbia, Tennessee. Council resolutions assailing mob violence were
passed in response to the rash of lynchings that summer but they only
highlighted the obvious impotence of law-abiding citizens beseiged by
an epidemic of lawlessness.
          The Council was constantly worried about lack of support, both
financial and popular. All the way through 1947, its revenues were
insufficient to support a budget of $5,000 a month for all
expenditures, including salaries. Dues-paying members to that point
totaled fewer than two thousand. Guy Johnson resigned that summer and
returned to Chapel_Hill; George Mitchell took his place as executive
director and set a goal of five thousand members, with a commensurate
increase in the budget. Ira Reid was also gone by then, having taken a
teaching post in New_York (Harold Trigg, a black educator from North
Carolina, became the new associate director). In the winter of 1946,
Howard Odum retired as Council president, and Paul D. Williams of
Richmond replaced him. Only sixty-five people were in the audience
when Williams spoke at SRC's annual membership meeting in November
1947.
          In his remarks that day, Williams cited the Council's thoroughly
biracial makeup as a model of cooperation and equity for others in the
region to emulate, but not everyone was comfortable with such a
self-conscious focus on race—or on SRC's presumed virtues. Virginius
Dabney, an influential figure of long standing, was one Council member
who believed that calling attention to integration was an enormous
tactical mistake.
          "I can think of nothing more disastrous to the SRC's future than
its identification in the public mind with an effort to abolish the
segregation system," Dabney told Guy Johnson and others. "If SRC
spends not only a good bit of its funds but a large portion of its
energies in fighting segregation, we will lose both the battle and the
war." Responding to increasing national criticism of the South as
violence spread across the region in 1946, Dabney had written a
defensive piece for the Saturday Review of Literature entitled, "Is
the South That Bad?" Said Ira Reid in emphatic response: "Yes!"
           A single question and a one-word answer thus captured the essence
of SRC's—and the South's—perpetual dilemma. Capable, earnest, well
intentioned people, different from one another in many ways but having
in common a lifelong bond to the South, were trying to work together
to build a framework for the region's future. But some wanted to
follow the Old South model, and others thought it had to be replaced,
and those in between were stymied, not knowing which planks to use and
which to discard.
          Howard W. Odum and Charles S. Johnson, ultimate symbols of the
dilemma, were foremost among those who gravitated to the center. They
had been primary leaders of the Southern_Regional_Council experiment
from the very beginning. Johnson had drafted the vital document at
Durham in 1942 that led to the founding of SRC, and Odum had spoken up
at the right moment in Richmond in 1943 and saved the embryo Council
from self-destruction. The two men were philosophical and tactical
moderates who tried to persuade those on either side to join them in
the middle and work cooperatively for the good of all. On most issues,
Odum and Johnson could find common ground. But for all their wisdom
and experience—as sociologists, as policy-makers, as sensitive
human beings—they couldn't see eye to eye on what to do about
the burden of segregation.
          Odum's retirement from Council leadership effectively signaled the
end of his durable dream: to create a powerful regional institution of
research and development that would define the South of the
future. Grand designs had always danced in his head, but he lacked the
heart for conflict—without which no grand design could be realized. For
all his temporizing and his abundant caution, Odum clearly understood
the biracial nature of Southern culture. He knew it was race above all
else that had set the South apart from other regions for centuries. He
knew, furthermore, that the South would ultimately have to attain
integration and equality within itself if it was ever to achieve those
standards within the Nation. He understood those verities
intellectually; it was their practical realization that stymied
him.
          Odum was advancing into the twilight years of his long and
productive career when he quietly gathered up his papers and left SRC
in 1946. It was a parting more significant than it appeared: The man
with the regional plan was stepping down, his dream unfulfilled. He
wrote The Way of the South that year, and published it the next. In
it, he summarized and restated his concept of regionalism more
succinctly than ever before. He saw the United_States divided into six
regions, of which the Southeast was one. These, he said, should be
balanced and complementary—equal but not identical, different but not
inferior or superior, integrated into a national whole but not
homogenized. Through planning and cooperation, "the regional equality
and balance of America" could be achieved. He viewed the ongoing
dispersal of the South's large black minority throughout the country
as a promising development, and favored incentives to support this
longterm process of "voluntary migration."
          The sociologist acknowledged that regional equality presupposed
citizen equality irrespective of race—but this, too, would have to be
achieved voluntarily, and over an indefinite period of time. He
rejected out of hand any



"coercive enforcement by the nation of a
non-segregation economy advocated by many agitators." Was he, in his
heart of hearts, still unable at that time to see thoroughgoing
equality as a positive good? The record is fuzzy on that crucial
point. His readers, though, were left to draw a virtually inescapable
conclusion: In Odum's eyes, the segregated and inequitable and
divisive "Southern way of life" was not yet a subject open for debate
and negotiation; for the foreseeable future, it would remain the
prevailing reality.
          In his private reverie, Charles Johnson must have read Odum's words
with deepening discouragement. The two men had known each other for
more than twenty-five years; they were professional associates,
collaborators, personal friends. But Johnson had written in the Durham
Manifesto that he and his fellow black petitioners were "fundamentally
opposed to the principle and practice of compulsory segregation in
American society." Quietly but firmly, he had always made clear his
conviction that "separate but equal" was a flawed and failed principle
of law and social custom. He obviously wanted the United_States and
its constituent assemblies to abolish segregation and discrimination
based on race. By those lights, he came dangerously close to belonging
to the band of rivals dismissed by Odum as "agitators."
          Johnson had spent his entire career trying to build bridges—from
the past to the future, from a closed South to an open Nation, from a
prevailing attitude of white_supremacy to a new belief in multiracial
democracy. As a young man, he came to see that race_relations—the
interplay between the white majority and the colored minorities—would
be America's glory or its doom, and he devoted himself wholeheartedly
to a pursuit of the glory. For his pains, he had been called just
about everything in the book: a reformer, an accommodationist, a
liberal, a conservative, an integrationist, an Uncle Tom, a diplomatic
gentleman—and now, an agitator. If he and Howard Odum, the
quintessential centrists, couldn't stand together on the rock of race,
the prospects for the Southern_Regional_Council were bleak.
          Simultaneously with Odum's The Way of the South in 1947 came
Johnson's Into the Main Stream, published by the University of North
Carolina Press. It was a book of "promising signs in the South's
development toward better human relations," and a search for the one
main stream by which all Americans could be transported to full
citizenship. No doubt thinking of his white friends, Johnson wrote
with empathy and insight:

The fear of disturbing the controls of the racial system
frequently places restraints upon progressive action in racial matters
of any sort. Always there are in every locality a few well-meaning
humanitarians willing to do something, but action carries a
responsibility that only the stoutest hearts can sustain for long....
That is undoubtedly why it so often happens that the intellectual
liberals who know what should be done are torn between their private
convictions and their public caution, and the most forthright
declarations of the need for change are made by persons who are
estimated by the community to have so little weight as to be
innocuous.
          As a board member of both the Southern_Regional_Council and the
Southern Conference for Human Welfare, Charles S. Johnson no doubt saw
clearly how much alike the two organizations were, and yet how
different. The leaders of SRC were—to use Johnson's descriptive
phrase—"intellectual liberals ... torn between their private convictions
and their public caution." Those who



directed SCHW were more
action-oriented and more candidly expressive of an equalitarian point
of view. It was precisely because of those "forthright declarations"
that they were widely regarded as radicals and extremists with little
influence on the majority of Southerners.
          It would be hard to make a solid case, though, that they were
really radicals. Middle class, white, Southern males accounted for
almost all of the officers and staff of SCHW, as they did at SRC, and
the Conference's board of directors was roughly three-fourths white
and 85 percent male—again, much the same as SRC's. Even by Southern
standards, they weren't all that far out, either; it would have been
more accurate to call them liberal Christian Democrats—and that, too,
was an apt description of SRC. (Cross-fertilization was heavy between
the two organizations. SCHW President Clark Foreman was a member of
the SRC board, and SRC staff members George Mitchell and Ira Reid were
on the board at SCHW. At least a half-dozen others, including Will
Alexander, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, Lucy Randolph Mason, Aubrey
Williams—and, of course, Charles Johnson—served on both boards.)
          The accusations of Communist sympathy that shadowed half a dozen or
so Conference stalwarts between 1938 and 1942 had driven off almost
all of the suspects; only John Preston Davis's name was still on the
list of SCHW officers and directors—and Davis, former head of the
National Negro Congress, had moved to Pittsburgh and was no longer
active in the organization. If Communist influence had ever truly
penetrated the SCHW, it had long since been filtered out. But
right-wing opponents never tired of hurling the charges—and the
Conference gave them a larger target by refusing to exclude any
potential members solely because of their political beliefs.
          The Conference was generally more liberal than SRC—in its activism
(protesting, circulating petitions, lobbying), its associations (with
Northern liberals, the labor movement, the NAACP) and its
pronouncements on the issues of the day. It went on record in 1946
against "discrimination on the grounds of race, creed, color, or
national origin," calling it "fundamentally undemocratic, unAmerican,
and unChristian." Even so, the leaders chose not to attack Jim Crow
laws explicitly at that time, taking instead the New_Deal tack that
the way to relieve blacks of the yoke of discrimination was to give
them political and economic power. That might have been considered
radical when members of the Roosevelt administration advocated it in
the 1930s, but it was the standard position of the Democratic_Party's
liberal wing now. If there was anything revolutionary about SCHW's
goals in the midForties, it was their announced intention to bring
about genuine majority rule in the oligarchic South, where roughly
three of every four adults didn't vote, and most of the ones who did
were in some incumbent politician's hip pocket.
          Conference President Foreman and James A. Dombrowski, the executive
secretary, were more advanced in their views on race than most of the
other whites in the organization—or, for that matter, those in the
Southern_Regional_Council. Both men had shown by word and deed years
earlier that they recognized segregation as a white problem that was
crippling the South. Still, it was one thing to hold that view
personally, and quite another to espouse it as organizational
philosophy; not even SCHW was quite ready for that. Instead, the
Conference concentrated on labor and voting_rights issues (the
National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax was one of its major
projects)—and unlike SRC, it was aggressive enough to draw a
visceral response from the likes of Mississippi's bombastic Senator
Theodore Bilbo. This "mongrel conference," this "un-American,
communistic outfit of white Quislings" that caters to "negroes, Jews,
politicians and racketeers," was demanding repeal of poll



taxes and other measures the senator held dear. "III were
called upon to name the Number One Enemy of the South today," he
thundered, "it would be the Southern Conference for Human Welfare."
Cleverly, Foreman and Dombrowski used the quote as an endorsement in
reverse.
          During the first year or so after the war, SCHW far outpaced SRC in
size and scope. Its membership was close to three thousand by the end
of 1945, and fiscal receipts for the year totaled almost $85,000
(one-third of it from labor unions). Membership was concentrated in
the Southern and border states, and branch chapters were organized in
some of them, with Georgia and Alabama having the strongest. To boost
its lobbying and fund-raising capabilities, the Conference also
developed large and active membership groups in Washington and New
York. On any given issue, SCHW had both the resources and the activist
inclination to make a bigger impact than SRC.
          It was in 1946, an ominous year of instability and crisis for the
South and the Nation, that the Southern Conference for Human Welfare
reached the pinnacle of its strength—and, almost simultaneously, found
itself caught up in a train of events that led to its own
unraveling.
          From headquarters in Nashville, Foreman and Dombrowski had wide
latitude and authority to act for a compliant board of directors, and
they concentrated on laying the foundation for a mass-membership
organization. Two South Carolinians were hired as traveling
recruiters: Osceola McKaine, the black political organizer who had
co-founded the Progressive Democratic_Party in his state, and
Witherspoon Dodge, the white former minister whose organizing skills
had recently been utilized by the CIO unions. Mary McLeod Bethune,
back at her school in Florida after more than a decade of service in
Washington, also made a speaking tour in behalf of SCHW. As a result
of these and other outreach programs, Conference membership quickly
doubled, and by the end of the year was said to have reached ten
thousand.
          A series of successful fund-raising events outside the South
(starring such famous personalities as Joe Louis, Orson Welles, and
Frank Sinatra) led to heady SCHW predictions of a $200,000 income for
1946 (the actual total turned out to be more like $120,000). Judging
by the national exposure and the rising numbers, any casual observer
might well have been impressed; the Southern Conference was starting
to look like a force to be heeded. In a reorganization aimed at
achieving greater flexibility and clout (and to prevent SCHW from
losing its tax exemption because of political activity), the officers
and directors decided in January 1946 to create a new entity:

the Southern Conference Educational Fund. Under the plan,
SCEF would be a tax-exempt body engaged in teaching, publication, and
other forms of non-political persuasion, leaving SCHW free to pursue
activist goals in the political arena. Both would answer to the same
administrative and governing hierarchy.
          All these new developments were full of promise. But even as they
raised the hopes of Southern progressives, negative currents radiated
out of the Conference. Since the first assembly in Birmingham in 1938,
a steady falling away of erstwhile supporters had continued year in
and year out, until the number and quality of losses gave pause even
to the most loyal defenders. In war and peace, these defections
continued.
          Forget for a moment the ones who never darkened the door: McGill,
Dabney, Daniels, Carter, and other journalists; Odum, Guy Johnson,
Paul Green, the Vanderbilt Agrarians, and other academics; Gordon
Hancock, P. B. Young, Grace Hamilton, Jessie Daniel Ames, and other
blacks and women. Look past the quickly disillusioned, too—Francis
Pickens Miller, John Temple Graves, W. T. Couch, Howard Kester,
H. L. Mitchell. These were not the hard-to-lose; the Southern
Conference never really had them in the first place. But it could ill
afford to do without the services of those who had quickly seen in
SCHW the possibilities of genuine reform, and had worked together for
that goal. Frank Porter Graham, Louise Charlton, H. C. Nixon, Eleanor
Roosevelt, Maury Maverick, Mollie Dowd, Benjamin Mays, Mark Ethridge,
F. D. Patterson, Rufus Clement, and Tarleton Collier were among them;
their absence left a void. Another was Joseph Gelders, the
controversial Birmingham radical and suspected Communist who had been
a key figure in the founding of SCHW; he settled in California after
serving in the army in World_War_II.
          And one more important name: Lillian_Smith. She had stayed away
from the first meeting in 1938—citing, among other things, her
suspicion that Communists were playing too much of a behind-the-scenes
role in the organization. But so many people she admired and respected
kept imploring her to join; finally, she agreed to attend the 1940
session in Chattanooga, and then in 1942, Smith accepted a seat on the
board at the urging of Foreman and Dombrowski, both of whom she liked
and trusted. After Strange Fruit catapulted her to fame in 1944, she
had less time to be involved with SCHW, and in May 1945 she resigned
from the board. But in her characteristically blunt and direct way,
she skipped the polite excuses and told Foreman and Dombrowski exactly
why she was quitting.
          "You see, my dreams of the Conference were so different," she
wrote. "I saw it as a great coming-together of Southerners" in an
assembly free of segregation "by color or religion or bank account or
sex or the kind of job we work at or the political beliefs we hold
.... I wanted us to prove to our country that democracy works." But
for all its talk of majority rule, she said, SCHW was actually being
run in a grossly undemocratic fashion—"like a labor union"—by a
little clique of officers and board members. She wasn't one of those
insiders, and didn't want to be. And so with that, the independent
lady from Old Screamer Mountain took up her lonely post outside the
Southern Conference for Human Welfare, as she had a year earlier
outside the Southern_Regional_Council.
          Not only was the loss of old allies hurting SCHW; from the
perspective of wary Southerners, so was its choice of new ones. When
racial tension flared in February 1946 at Columbia, Tennessee—right
outside the back yard of the Conference, so to speak—Jim Dombrowski
worked with Walter White and the NAACP to investigate, and together
they set up a national defense committee for those arrested in the
disturbance. It was the first time a Southern-based biracial
organization dared to work openly with the activist civil_rights group
from New_York. For that, and for his open criticism of local and state
officials,



Dombrowski was denounced by the Nashville Banner and other Tennessee
papers, called before a grand jury, and characterized by the American
Legion as "a seasoned, well-trained agitator for the Communist
Party."
          Such charges were old hat, of course; the right wing had fired them
at SCHW since 1938, and at Southern liberals in general for a lot
longer than that. But something profoundly different was at work in
1946. In the wake of World_War_II, the surviving political-economic
systems of capitalism and communism were fighting for world
dominance. The United_States, in league with its traditional allies in
Western Europe, was trying to hold the line against communism in
Eastern Europe and the Pacific rim. The Soviet Union under Joseph
Stalin was pressing its advantage all along the postwar border with
the West (a dividing line that Britain's Sir Winston Churchill, in a
March 1946 speech in Missouri, would call an "iron
curtain"). Communist regimes in China and elsewhere were also putting
pressure on the possessions of the crumbling colonial empires. Soon,
Russia would have the atomic bomb, and the arms race would escalate
ominously. A little later on, one-time South Carolinian Bernard Baruch
would coin a phrase that gave the unofficial but deadly serious
East-West conflict a name: the Cold War.
          On the domestic scene, the United_States was drifting to the right
in reaction to world events. The Soviet Union, never esteemed by
American conservatives, was quickly relegated from World_War_II ally
to Cold War adversary. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the
Central Intelligence Agency, and other forces within the federal
government stepped up their activities as spy chasers, and countered
the espionage work of the Communist world with secret ventures of
their own. Tensions between management and labor over jobs and wages
deteriorated into verbal and sometimes violent battles punctuated by
slanderous assertions of treason; the American labor movement was
under heavy pressure to disavow communism and take a patriotic turn to
the right. Suddenly, anti-communism was not just a rumbling bass note,
like distant, rolling thunder; it was a howling tornado in American
political life.
          For many a left-wing organization like the Southern Conference for
Human Welfare, the consequences were enormous. It was not that they
changed their ways of thinking and acting, and took up a more radical
and adversarial and unpopular stance; what really changed were the
rules of the game. The pressure for political and social conformity
increased, and dissent was equated with disloyalty. In the South,
anti-Communism raced through the culture like an electrical
current. Its power to shock and stun was demonstrated in dramatic
fashion by the example of SCHW and its relationship to organized
labor.
          The most intimate ties had always bound SCHW to the labor movement,
and particularly to the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Many
Southern CIO leaders, including William Mitch, Paul Christopher, and
Lucy Randolph Mason, were influential figures in the Confer-



ence. SCHW also tried to stay on good terms with the rival
American Federation of Labor, and even saw itself as a potential
bridge for the eventual reconnection of the two confederations. In
April 1946, the more liberal CIO announced the beginning of its second
"Operation Dixie" organizing drive (it had conducted another such
campaign four years earlier), and the following month, the AFL started
a Southern drive of its own. But labor was already feeling the pinch
of anti-communism, and when Van A. Bittner, director of the CIO's
Southern initiative, announced the plan to the press, he went out of
his way to say they wanted no help from Communists or Socialists—and
added, "That goes for the Southern Conference for Human Welfare and
any other organization living off the CIO." AFL leaders, guarding the
right flank, quickly upped the ante by characterizing the CIO itself
as a hotbed of communism.
          These two blows—one from the CIO's Bittner, and the other
delivered by George Googe of the AFL, a former vice president of
SCHW—were devastating to Clark Foreman, Jim Dombrowski, and others who
thought their relationship with the unions was
unbreakable. Helplessly, they saw Mitch and Christopher and Mason lose
influence in the CIO as Bittner climbed. The unions not only cut off
most of their financial aid to SCHW; they also fell away from their
prior commitments, nurtured by the Conference, to embrace integration
and racial equality. As Foreman put it later, "the leaders of
'Operation Dixie' resorted to opportunism in the hope of making the
CIO respectable in the South." Needing even less prodding from the
right, the AFL did the same.
           The loss of union money and members had many repercussions for the
Conference. The field organizing work of Osceola McKaine and
Witherspoon Dodge, so successful in the beginning, was now at a
standstill. The two men had not only been recruiting members for SCHW
but for the unions as well—and pushing voter_registration for good
measure. The labor movement had funded these efforts. But McKaine and
Dodge struggled through the summer without receiving salaries or
expense money; finally, they had to resign.
          The Southern Conference had suffered a crippling reversal of
fortune, swift and unexpected, but the full effect wouldn't set in
until later. In the fall of 1946, the leadership decided to move the
organization's headquarters from Nashville to New_Orleans (thinking,
mistakenly, that the cosmopolitan old city might provide a less
hostile environment). The fourth Southwide convention of
SCHW—and the first since the 1942 meeting in
Nashville—was booked into the city auditorium of New_Orleans
for three days, beginning November 28.
          More problems arose. City officials, giving in to local protests,
canceled the auditorium lease to prevent a racially integrated
assembly, and only a last-minute move to the hall of the local
carpenters' union saved the day. Fewer than three hundred official
delegates registered, though upwards of twelve hundred people attended
the opening session. The speakers included Senator Claude Pepper,
Walter White of the NAACP, Mary McLeod Bethune, Aubrey Williams, and
Georgia's lame-duck Governor Ellis Arnall, recipient of the
Conference's Thomas Jefferson Award. For the first time, Frank Porter
Graham and Eleanor Roosevelt were absent; there was no telegram of
support from the White_House, as in past years, and the CIO delegation
was greatly diminished. But the most troubling development arose after
the convention adjourned, at a meeting of SCHW's officers and
executive committee.
          To Jim Dombrowski's complete surprise, Clark Foreman proposed—and
the committee affirmed—a plan to widen the distinction between SCHW and
the Southern Conference Educational Fund, which had been established
earlier in 1946. In effect, Foreman wanted SCHW, under his leadership,
to become a national political-action committee for left-wing causes
(including Henry Wallace's bid for the White_House); the Washington
and New_York chapters would serve as its principal bases. Dombrowski
didn't figure in those plans; his role would be to direct SCEF and its
narrower regional agenda. The way he and many others saw it, he was
being offered a sop, a consolation prize.
          In their five years of close association, Foreman and Dombrowski
had not grown closer. They were quite different in temperament and
personality, with Foreman more of a political schemer (even his
friends acknowledged that he was sometimes aggressive, ruthless,
devious, manipulative), and Dombrowski more inclined to the quiet,
persistent, stubborn pursuit of an idea or a principle. In the months
that followed, the reorganization was delayed, and a compromise
preserved the status quo while each man rallied support from within
the organization. More people departed, including Mrs. Bethune, Lucy
Mason, and Margaret Fisher, director of the Conference's strongest
state chapter in Georgia. Thus stalemated, SCHW limped through the
first half of 1947 with its loyalties divided and its resources
drained.
          By late spring, Foreman was poised to refocus the energies of SCHW
into the Wallace campaign, which was by then a virtual
certainty. Dombrowski was still resistant to reorganization, but at
length he did agree to leave SCHW in favor of SCEF. Before either of
them had made a move, however, one more problem landed in their
laps. In an apparent effort to embarrass both Henry Wallace and SCHW,
the House Un-American Activities Commit-



tee in June published a
lengthy report, allegedly based on nine years of undercover work,
condemning the Southern Conference for Human Welfare as a "most
deviously camouflaged Communist-front organization."
          Condemnation of the report was widespread, from the Southern press
to the Harvard Law Review, but great harm was done nonetheless. Among
the many people smeared by innuendo, halftruths, and unsupported
assertions of fellow-traveling and disloyalty were Foreman and
Dombrowski, Frank Porter Graham, and Herman Clarence Nixon, one of the
original organizers of the Conference. Nixon's untenured faculty
position at Vanderbilt University was jeopardized when publisher James
Stahlman of the Nashville Banner, a university trustee, tried—but
failed—to get him fired. Ralph McGill, who had a weakness for the soft
soap of the red hunters, also took up the attack on SCHW, suggesting
in his column that the organization was Communist infiltrated. He
later printed a partial and narrowly technical retraction of his
assertions, after being threatened with a lawsuit.
          A long season of anti-Communist reaction had begun in the United
States. That probably would have been enough, by itself, to destroy a
small and vulnerable organization like the Southern Conference for
Human Welfare, but its demise was hastened by self-inflicted
wounds. Still and all, SCHW would hang on until the end of
1948. Ironically, the Southern Conference Educational Fund, the
orphaned "weak sister" in Clark Foreman's scenario, would last for a
lot longer than that.
          The new rules of the Cold War game were especially penalizing to
the Southern Conference, but they were also hard on the more moderate
Southern_Regional_Council, and on others interested in reformist ideas
and progressive change. SRC had a fairly strong and diverse base in
Atlanta, primary support from academic and religious circles, and good
connections with the press; moving cautiously, it played for time and
a change in the political climate. Elsewhere in the region, few if any
organizations made much headway in advancing a liberal agenda in the
overheated months of 1947 and 1948.
          The Southern Tenant Farmers Union had entered the 1940s in a state
of impotence and disarray, buffeted by internal conflict over
socialism and communism and external hostility to unions of any kind,
let alone one that practiced racial equality. Thanks largely to the
sympathetic help of Aubrey Williams, the NYA administrator, Mitchell
worked for a couple of years with the National Youth Administration in
Washington before resuming leadership of the shell-shocked STFU. In
1948, the tiny union was saved from oblivion by an eleventh-hour
conversion into the National Farm Labor Union, an affiliate of the
AFL; Mitchell would run it on a shoestring from a slum-area office in
Washington for twelve years before returning to the South. Though he
was active in the labor movement for almost two more decades, neither
the irrepressible H. L. Mitchell nor the Southern Tenant Farmers Union
would be instrumental in the region's postwar struggle for reform.
          Howard Kester, one of Mitchell's closest allies in the STFU and
another of the old-school radicals of the 1930s, went through a
similar eclipse after the war. Throughout the Forties and early
Fifties he held a variety of jobs, mostly in the South, all the while
keeping an active hand in the tiny Fellowship of Southern Churchmen
that he and a handful of others had founded back in 1934 as a liberal
expression of their religious faith. Kester was a pioneer among white
Southerners working openly for racial integration, starting as a
student YMCA leader in the 1920s. His low profile in the postwar years
may have



resulted in part from a loss of stamina after more than
twenty years of activist involvement. No doubt it was also a
consequence of the growing hostility to social progressivism in the
South.
          And then there was the Highlander Folk School. Others, like Don
West and Jim Dombrowski, had come and gone from the Tennessee training
center for adults, but co-founder Myles Horton remained. By war's end,
Highlander was mainly serving as an instructional component for
organized labor. Lucy Mason and Paul Christopher of the CIO served on
its board, and so did George Mitchell of the Southern Regional
Council, a former CIO official. The AFL also made use of the school's
facilities, and both groups accepted (though at times without much
enthusiasm) Highlander's commitment to racial inclusion and equality
in its operations.
          When the Cold War blew its frosty breath on labor, Highlander got
the same stiff-arm treatment from both the AFL and the CIO that the
Southern Conference for Human Welfare received. When the going got
tough, labor turned out to be disappointingly similar to other
institutions (the church, the university, the press): strong on ideals
in the abstract, but weak on their actual defense. And there was
another similarity: Many Southern labor officials who worked for
change in the region in the Thirties and Forties—Mason, Christopher,
William Mitch, Steve Nance, John Ramsay, Ernest Delpit, William
Dorsey, H. L. Mitchell, and numerous others—proved to be more
committed to the ideals of racial and social equality than were the
institutions for which they worked. Most of these men and women
continued as individuals to support and serve Highlander, SRC, SCHW,
and other liberal initiatives in the region long after the CIO and the
AFL had abandoned ship.
          In all of the organizations that struggled to extend and expand the
liberal-progressive initiatives of the Thirties into the post-World
War II period, a familiar litany of common failings could be
heard. Whether radical or moderate, aggressive or low-key, they were
plagued by a chronic shortage of money and members. None of them
managed to raise funds in the South as well as they sometimes did
among liberals in the North, and none could have survived for long
without those Yankee dollars. What's more, they couldn't put together
anything that approached the dimensions of a mass movement in the
South—and without the numbers, they couldn't get the press or the
populace to take them seriously as an influential force for
change.
          Failing these two crucial tests, the Southerners then reduced their
prospects for success still further by fighting among themselves
almost as tenaciously as they battled their common enemies. From one
small and resource-poor group to the next—and even within the ranks of
some, like the Southern_Regional_Council and the two wings of the
Southern Conference—people who desperately needed to join forces
often spent their energy drawing swords against one another. For
right-wing reactionaries who were starting to play their
anti-communism card, this competitive and divisive behavior of their
enemies was a welcome windfall.
          It was probably inevitable that the campaign against communism in
the Nation would be joined in common cause with the campaign against
social change in the South. Racial equality had always struck the
Southern ruling elite as an insanely radical notion, probably
Communist in origin. Anxiously, they stayed on the lookout for
subversive outsiders—agitators sent to stir unrest among the black
masses. Whites who harped on racial issues, and those who tiptoed into
the social arena by talking about class inequality or the scourge of
poverty and ignorance, were maligned as troublemakers—and Southern
whites of that ilk were singled out as the most dangerous of all. From
the narrow perspective of the rulers, anyone who believed that the
existing social contract needed revision was already a fellow traveler
and an enemy of the public good.
          "Communism has chosen the Southern Negro as the American group most
likely to respond to its revolutionary appeal," wrote U. S. Army Major
R. M. Howell in an intelligence report in 1932. Eight years later,
Congressman Martin Dies expanded the assertion: "Moscow has long
considered the Negroes of the United_States as excellent potential
recruits for the Communist Party."
          In his militantly anti-communist book, The Trojan Horse in America,
Dies said the House Un-American Activities Committee had uncovered
evidence of a massive attempt by the Soviets to win black
support—mounted, he said, because "Moscow realizes that it can never
revolutionize the United_States unless the Negro can be won over to
the Communist cause." But even the Texas congressman, fulminating
reactionary that he was, conceded that the strategy wasn't
working. Its failure, he concluded, was "a tribute to the patriotism,
loyalty, and religion of the Negro."
          African_Americans never had much use for communism. According to
the most widely quoted estimates, the number of blacks who belonged to
the Communist Party in the United_States probably never exceeded eight
thousand—a tiny fraction of 1 percent in a population of over thirteen
million. Aside from a few highly visible converts, blacks kept their
sights on the longstanding promise of democracy. You could almost
count on the fingers of one hand all of the prominent Americans of
African descent who became entangled with the Communist Party in
the



Thirties and Fortiesߞand several of them were out of the picture
by the time the war was over.
          Richard Wright gave up on the party in the early 1940s—and
then, a few years later, more or less gave up on his country. James
W. Ford, thrice the Communist Party's vice presidential candidate, was
seldom heard from after his last appearance on the ticket in
1940. John Preston Davis, linked to communism through the National
Negro Congress, an organization he sparked in the Thirties, went on to
write for the Pittsburgh Courier, to publish his own
journal, Our
World, and finally to gravitate to the political mainstream as a paid
employee of the Democratic_Party. The few who continued to stand on
the firing line as left-wing activists in the fight against
discrimination eventually paid a heavy price: Paul Robeson,
W. E. B. Du Bois, and Benjamin J. Davis, Jr., all of whom had butted
heads with white authority throughout their careers, were to find in
the Cold War deep freeze that their political troubles as "dissidents"
were just beginning.
          But the near-universal rejection of communism by Southern blacks
did nothing to convince the spy-chasers of their loyalty. As far back
as the 1920s, secret U.S. police and military units were closely
monitoring suspected Communist efforts to recruit black Americans;
they kept up the surveillance without interruption for fully half a
century, stealthily invading the privacy of thousands of individuals
but uncovering virtually no enemy agents. The black minority was not
the only target, of course. Throughout most of that period, spying by
government operatives on all kinds of left-wing organizations
suspected of having the remotest interest in communism—including
virtually every group seeking social reform in the South—was a routine
practice and an open secret.
          Despite all the dire warnings about Communist infiltration in the
South, the fact was that only two or three states—Alabama and North
Carolina, and possibly Louisiana—registered enough of a red presence
during and after the war to leave even a trace fifty years later. The
labor movement in Louisiana was said by some to be deeply tinted with
a red hue, but in all the charges and counter charges of patriotism
and disloyalty that swirled around the CIO and the AFL, it was hard to
separate fact from fiction. In any event, the militantly
anti-Communist Catholic Church, an unsleeping watchdog and a dominant
public force in the state, was always far more influential with the
working-class population of New_Orleans and south Louisiana than any
other religious or political body.
          In North_Carolina, the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied
Workers union local in Winston-Salem had close ties to the Communist
Party in the 1940s, and was directly responsible for the rapid growth
of the NAACP there. Both the union and the party encouraged active
participation in local politics, and those who did get involved soon
were able to see positive results: A local black candidate, Kenneth
Williams, won a seat on the city board of aldermen in 1947. His
backers said he was the first African-American public official in the
twentieth-century South to win an election against white
opposition.
          Another Carolina locale where there was Communist activity after
the war was Chapel_Hill. Junius Irving Scales, a native of Greensboro
and an ex-GI, returned to the University of North_Carolina in 1946 to
find a loosely united coalition of students and faculty members active
in local chapters of the American Veterans Committee, the Southern
Conference for Human Welfare, and the Communist Party. Scales became
an officer in all three groups, which shared many of the same social
goals: avoiding World_War_III, combating racism, promoting organized
labor, and raising the South's standard of living.
          In the fall of 1946, the U.S. Communist Party sent
thirty-six-year-old Sam J. Hall into the Carolinas as its district
chairman. A native of Alabama, he had worked as a reporter for the
Anniston Star and a Birmingham labor newspaper before joining the navy
the day after Pearl Harbor. Already a Communist by that time, he
served honorably in the military for four years, two of them on combat
duty. In North_Carolina, the short, chubby, amiable, soft-spoken Hall
acted and sounded more like a Rotary Club regular than a scheming
radical. He didn't conceal his purposes; he trumpeted them. In
February 1947, he ran advertisements in several North_Carolina
newspapers announcing a Communist recruitment drive, and in a long
interview with the Raleigh News & Observer he stated his and his
party's aims in terms that could have served as the credo of a devoted
liberal Democrat: to help the working class, to defend democracy, to
prevent fascism, to erase poverty. Only one aim sounded a little
strange: to bring about "the establishment of Socialism by the free
choice of a majority of the American people."
          The News & Observer story, quoting unnamed
sources, reported that "there are not more than 200 to 250 Party card
holders in both North and South_Carolina, and approximately one-fourth
of these are affiliated with the Communist Club in Winston-Salem."
Whether or not those numbers were accurate, the fact was that the
party never grew to any strength in the region; by the end of 1947 it
had peaked and fallen, its various factions chased in all directions
by the deepening anti-Communist hostility of the larger society.
          Alabama probably had more Communists in the 1930s than any other
Southern state, and Birmingham, the hub of party activity, was a busy
left wing political site in spite



of regular harassment from Eugene "Bull" Connor and his
police department. A weekly tabloid, the Southern News Almanac, began
there in January 1940 with under-the-table help from the party; among
its principal staffers were Joseph Gelders, the Southern Conference
for Human Welfare organizer, and Sam Hall. The lively little journal
had its own distinctive character. One of its most curious features,
rich with the flavor of religious radicalism, was a regular column
contributed by two white preachers: the well-traveled radical Don
West, a native Georgian, and Fred E. Maxey of Leeds, Alabama.
          Two other Birmingham-based organizations of the early 1940s kept
strong ties to the Communist Party: the League of Young Southerners,
mostly-white group of youthful radicals spun off from SCHW, and the
Southern Negro Youth Congress, an offshoot of the National Negro
Congress. LYS was first called the Council of Young Southerners when
it was organized at the founding assembly of SCHW in Birmingham in
1938. Helen Fuller of Alabama and Howard Lee of Arkansas headed it in
the beginning, and Lee continued his close association with it.
          The Southern Negro Youth Congress was larger than LYS, and it
lasted longer. Beginning in 1937 with a two-day conference in
Richmond, the SNYC met once a year until the war started—each time in a
different city—and then erratically after that, until it folded a year
after its eighth conference in Birmingham in 1948. In a little over a
decade, SNYC nurtured leadership qualities in dozens of young black
Southerners, including Ed Strong, James E. Jackson, Jr., and Esther
Cooper, all Virginians, and Alabamians Ethel Lee Goodman, Herman Long,
and Sallye Davis. (Two decades later, notoriety would follow Davis's
daughter, militant Communist Angela Davis.)
          For as long as they existed, LYS and SNYC tried hard to work
together across racial lines, and they succeeded to a degree, even
though the laws and customs of segregation made that exceedingly
difficult. Not all of their members were Communists, and in many ways
the two organizations showed refreshing flashes of independence from
orthodoxy of any stripe—but still, the party connections were there,
as Robin D. G. Kelley showed in Hammer and Hoe, his revealing history
of communism in Alabama. (Kelley asserted, incidentally, that Gelders,
Lee, and Don West were Communists, though all three of them
steadfastly denied the connection throughout their careers.)
          Many of the young Southern activists of this period, white and
black, found the primary outlet for their idealism in either the
League of Young Southerners or the Southern Negro Youth
Congress. However much they may have had in common with some of the
aims and purposes of communism, most of them were something other than
deep-dyed, ideologically devoted Communist Party loyalists. They were
interracialists, democratic Socialists, progressive reformers—and in
their own way, devoted Southerners too. More than they wanted to
destroy the South or turn it over to outsiders, they wanted to make it
a place that met the needs of all its native people.
          Of course, most mainstream Southerners didn't see them in that way
at all; they saw them as dangerous troublemakers, and treated them as
such. The young activists were red-baited with increasing vehemence
during and after World_War_II. The League of Young Southerners folded
before the war was over. The Southern Negro Youth Congress held on
until 1949, by which time even their former allies in the labor
movement, the university, the church, and the NAACP had distanced
themselves from the organization.
          The "invisible army" of Alabama Communists—including several labor
union locals—could never have called itself large or powerful or even
united. Its ranks thinned rapidly after 1945. By the time the
reactionary forces of anti-communism were ready to smoke out all of
Alabama's subversives in the late Forties and early Fifties, there was
no one left for them to attack.
          The South—out of step, as usual, with the national march of events—generally experienced less Communist subversive activity than the
other regions of the country. As for anti-Communist reaction, it found
a warm and inviting climate when it swept in like a winter wind out of
the North. Southern politicians were adept at damning Yankees and the
feds with one breath, and demanding government support (for
agriculture, military bases, protective tariffs) with the next. In the
name of Americanism, these same right-wing lawmakers now insisted that
the national government they loved to hate should go to any extreme,
including suspension of civil liberties, in order to subdue and
vanquish the encroaching red enemy.
          Significantly, for the first time on a major issue, the Southerners
were joined in their anti-Communist extremism by a large and growing
reactionary force of arch-conservative Republicans from all over the
country. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that the Rebels
joined the Yankees. The national epidemic of postwar anti-Communism
was essentially a made-in-the-North pathology engineered by right-wing
Republicans; whether or not they also shared the anti-integrationist
feelings of their Dixie brethren, they certainly gave them a
conveniently sheltered platform from which to mount their
attacks. Thus protected by outside interests, the segregationist
Southern Democrats proceeded to dine freely on red herring for the
next generation.
          
            John Egerton is the author of
eight books about the South. An independent writer of non-fiction, he
has been exploring his native region since the late 1950s from bases
in Kentucky, Florida, Georgia, Virginia and Tennessee. His book,
Generations: An American Family, won the Lillian_Smith
Book Award in 1984.
          
        
