Speak Now Against the Day Read online

  ALSO BY JOHN EGERTON

  A Mind to Stay Here (1970)

  The Americanization of Dixie (1974)

  Visions of Utopia (1977)

  Nashville: The Faces of Two Centuries (1979)

  Generations (1983)

  Southern Food (1987)

  Side Orders (1990)

  Shades of Gray (1991)

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

  Copyright © 1994 by John Egerton

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Southern Regional Council for permission to reprint an excerpt by William Faulkner from The Segregation Decisions published by the Southern Regional Council, Atlanta, Georgia, in 1956.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Egerton, John.

  Speak now against the day: the generation before the civil rights movement in the South/John Egerton.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-83457-7

  1. Civil rights workers—Southern states—History—20th century. 2. Civil rights workers—Southern states—Biography. 3. Civil rights movements—Southern states—History—20th century. 4. Afro-Americans—Civil rights. 5. Southern states—Race relations. I. Title.

  E185.61.E28 1994

  323′.092′275—dc20

  93-47491

  Published November 18, 1994

  v3.1

  For Harry Ashmore, John A. Griffin, and Johnny Popham, elder statesmen of the mythical and whimsical Southern War Correspondents and Camp Followers Association, and in memory of Harold Fleming, their late and esteemed fellow penman and prince of bon mots.

  And for Ann, first and last.

  We speak now against the day when our Southern people who will resist to the last these inevitable changes in social relations, will, when they have been forced to accept what they at one time might have accepted with dignity and goodwill, will say, “Why didn’t someone tell us this before? Tell us this in time?”

  —WILLIAM FAULKNER

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue: Hinge of History

  I

  1932–1938: A FEUDAL LAND

  1. The Cruelest Year

  2. The State of the South

  3. Bourbon Legacy

  4. A Stirring of New Voices

  5. Eve of the New Deal

  6. The Fireman Cometh

  7. Thunder on the Right

  8. Shaking the Pillars

  9. Pens and Swords

  10. Lightning on the Left

  11. Birth of a Notion

  12. Revival in Birmingham

  II

  1938–1945: ROAD OF HOPE

  1. A Liberating War

  2. The Locust Confederacy

  3. Leaders, Followers, Scouts

  4. Dancing in the Dark

  5. Speaking Their Minds

  6. The Fire This Time

  7. “We of the South Must Decide”

  8. Farewell to the Chief

  Interlogue: Yesterday and Tomorrow

  III

  1945–1950: BREAKING THE MOLD 1. Postwar Opportunity

  2. Epidemic of Violence

  3. Spotlight on Georgia

  4. Old-Guard Politics

  5. New Signs of Reform

  6. Homegrown Progressives

  7. Anticommunism, Southern-Style

  8. Striving for Equilibrium

  9. Democrats and Dixiecrats

  10. Truman’s Triumph

  11. One Last Chance for Change

  IV

  1950–1954: DAYS OF GRACE

  1. Coming to a Choice

  2. Anticommunist White Supremacy

  3. Tiptoeing and Whispering

  4. Courts of Last Resort

  Epilogue: There Comes a Time

  Sources, Resources, Credits, and Notes on Structure

  Annotated Bibliography

  Prologue: Hinge of History

  Tuesday, August 14, 1945: When the word finally came at six o’clock that evening, downtown Atlanta exploded in a clangorous din of pent-up anticipation and excitement. Unleashed by President Harry S. Truman’s radio announcement that Japan had surrendered and World War II was over, tens of thousands of Georgians erupted into the streets. They poured out of offices and stores, emptied theaters and restaurants, brought traffic to a standstill. Sirens blew, horns blasted, bells rang; people screamed, kissed, danced, drank. In spontaneous and simultaneous unison with their fellow citizens from New York to Los Angeles and practically every town and hamlet in between, the ecstatic Atlantans shook the ground with a wild and deafening celebration.

  Before sunset brought the sidewalk temperature down out of the nineties and lowered the steambath humidity by a few points, sweating, shouting newsboys were hawking extras of the Atlanta Constitution and the Atlanta Journal up and down Forsyth and Peachtree Streets and all over the business district. The papers were literally hot off the press, their ink still damp and smudgy, their page-one headlines and stories hastily thrown together. The message they delivered amounted to physical confirmation, virtual proof, of a reality that seemed almost too good to be true.

  WAR-WEARY WORLD AT PEACE

  AS BEATEN JAPS SURRENDER

  proclaimed the Constitution’s banner headline. Just one week earlier, the paper had reported the destruction of Hiroshima, a Japanese city of more than 300,000 people—roughly the size of Atlanta—by the first atomic bomb ever used in warfare. Editor Ralph McGill, quoting Revelations in a column called “The Smell of Fire and Brimstone,” hailed the harnessing of the atom as “easily the greatest story that has happened in our lifetime”—but with deeply mixed emotions, he said the use of atomic power as a weapon of mass destruction was “a great and terrifying thing.”

  McGill wrote an editorial-page column seven days a week in a style that blended sagacity, humor, righteous indignation, and melancholy fatalism. Two days after the Hiroshima blast, he told his readers that Hitler had turned Germany into “one great big Ku Klux Klan Klavern,” but now justice had finally prevailed, because it was Jewish refugees and other exiles fleeing from the Nazi dictator who had come to America and created the A-bomb that won the war. “God is not mocked,” the Atlanta editor declared. Other commentators on the page with McGill shared his sense of moral vindication in the war’s outcome. The Nazi idea of a master race was utterly demolished by Hitler’s defeat, wrote columnist Robert Quillen, and the same fate had befallen the Japanese; victorious America, on the other hand, was not a superior race but “a mixture, an idea, a way of life, an attitude.”

  In the August 15 Constitution, under the headline CITY THUNDERS INTO POSTWAR ERA, celebrating Atlantans expressed their elation at the end of a long war (three years, eight months, and seven days, McGill reminded them) and their nervous anticipation of what lay ahead. The war had interrupted the New Deal programs aimed at rescuing the nation—and especially the South—from economic quicksand, said one observer; now it was time to face the challenges of peace.

  Those challenges took many forms. The economic stimulation that the war had brought to the depressed South in the form of military bases and defense industries had to be converted to the peacetime creation of consumer goods and services. Per capita income in the region was still under four hundred dollars a year (closer to two hundred doll
ars for blacks), and that was barely more than half the national average. One out of every three adults had left school by the end of the sixth grade. Millions of men and women, white and black, would be returning from the military or from wartime jobs in the North; they would need education and job training, employment, housing, medical and legal help.

  A new generation of young leaders, bringing back with them visions of a better life elsewhere, was already showing an eager readiness to help lift the South out of its eighty-year nightmare of post–Civil War stagnation. The black thirty percent of the region’s thirty million citizens were especially hungry for change; in the view of Atlanta-born Walter White, leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the victory for freedom and democracy abroad was a prelude to the battle for those ideals at home.

  With more finality than any occurrence since the end of the Civil War, the American triumph in World War II appeared to mark the conclusion of an old and outdated era in the South—or so it seems now, with the benefit of a half-century of hindsight to sharpen our vision. In the blissful aftermath of that historic conquest, the American people reached a rare state of consensus that momentarily obscured the age-old barriers between them. They were, in that fleeting instant, truly We the People, eager to form a more perfect Union, and the Southerners among them were as caught up in that contagious spirit of righteousness and invincibility as any of their countrymen.

  Here, surely, was a rare and momentous turning point in American history, and especially in the checkered history of the South: a crossing from darkness into light, a hinge of time swinging shut on a constricted past and opening to an expansive future. Yesterday—an almost endless ordeal of reconstruction, colonial exploitation, caste and class divisions, segregation, isolation, poverty, depression, and wartime sacrifice—was finally on the wane, if not yet altogether finished. Tomorrow—an age of opportunity, growth, prosperity, recovered self-esteem, national parity, and full citizenship—seemed ready and waiting to be born.

  When I was waiting to be born at Crawford W. Long Hospital in Atlanta on a sultry June evening in 1935, Tomorrow was not yet visible on the Southern horizon. An occasional mule-drawn wagon still clopped and rattled over the streetcar tracks in the heart of the city, leaving the stark afterimage of enduring peasantry to linger in its wake. As close as Atlanta came to being the South’s leading metropolis, it was in those lean days not much more than a big county-seat town with an indelible stain of red clay on its sidewalks. In the cities and towns as in the cotton fields and piney woods, the South was still caught in the paralyzing grip of the Great Depression. To make matters worse, the states were plagued with a bumper crop of political demagogues adept at turning the region’s misery to their personal advantage. Georgia was a prime example. Under the cankered copper dome of the state capitol in downtown Atlanta, Governor Eugene Talmadge, a vociferous foe of President Roosevelt and his New Deal programs of relief and recovery, used an iron hand and an acid tongue to rule the state like a feudal baron.

  Atlanta’s population had almost quadrupled since the turn of the century as a steady influx of families from the hardscrabble farms of the South, driven out by the boll weevil and a host of man-made ravages, turned in desperation to the city as their only hope for survival. Though it was not as large as New Orleans or Houston or Louisville, Atlanta was widely regarded as a showcase of the progressive South, a thriving hub of state government, higher education, religion, and commerce. Even so, more than a third of its households in 1935 were without indoor plumbing or electric lights or both, and the generally wretched living conditions caused thousands to suffer and die of illnesses now virtually unknown to us, from hookworm, scurvy, and pellagra (the diseases of poverty and malnutrition) to the epidemic infections of typhoid fever, smallpox, tuberculosis, and polio.

  In the “separate but equal” operation of hospitals, schools, housing projects, and public transportation, whites got the lion’s share of funds that were in reality pitifully inadequate for one system of services, let alone two. Civic and religious leaders fervent for social reform generally steered clear of race and class issues, focusing instead on winning souls to Christ, reducing violent crime, and attacking the evils of alcohol. Prohibition had been repealed nationally, but Georgia and most of the South remained legally dry. Atlanta teemed with moonshine-makers, bootleggers, gamblers, and prostitutes; by one informed estimate, forty percent of the city’s policemen had profit-sharing ties with the illicit liquor trade.

  Atlanta was also a hotbed of the Ku Klux Klan, and thousands of white men (including, it was reported, a majority of the police force) belonged to the secret society as proudly as to the Masons or the Shriners or the Rotary—looked upon it, in fact, as a charitable organization dedicated to the perpetuation of Victorian morality and white Protestant supremacy, two of the prevailing dogmas of the time. (Another reactionary group, the Black Shirts, also had a broad base of popular support; they used a Fascist political message to rally unemployed whites against black workers during the depression.)

  Against these currents of reaction, Mayor James L. Key battled to make progressive improvements, especially in the areas of education and welfare. He managed to legalize Sunday baseball and “picture shows” in the 1930s, but for those successes and his outspokenness (he had called Prohibition a failure, criticized the Klan, and supported voting rights for blacks), he was pushed out of the Methodist Church and finally, in 1936, out of office, losing to a young and ambitious Talmadge-backed candidate named William B. Hartsfield.

  I knew none of this, of course, being only an infant at the time. My father was a traveling salesman, and Atlanta was a temporary outpost in our family’s nomadic migration across the depression-wracked landscape. As I think of him now, it occurs to me that my father had a lot in common with Ralph McGill: a rural Tennessee birth in the twilight of the nineteenth century, an opportunity to discover wider vistas as a young man, a fondness for Southern country folks, a way with words and a sense of their power, a jumble of contradictory emotions on the subject of race, and a troubled mind masked by hail-fellow good cheer. They even looked a lot alike—five-ten or so and stocky, with dark, wavy hair and glasses. As I have peered into the shuttered recesses of regional and personal history, McGill and my father have taken on an almost interchangeable persona in my mind’s eye.

  Before the summer of 1935 was over, we had moved again—my father and the three older children by car and my mother with me, the squalling infant, by train—up through north Georgia and across Tennessee to the little western Kentucky village of Cadiz, where my mother’s parents lived. The family needed a safe harbor in which to ride out the economic storm that was battering the entire country, and Cadiz was the only real choice open to them. Luckily, it turned out to be a good move and a permanent one, the last for my mother—and, in a homing sense, for all of us.

  My older sisters years later would recall how shocked they had been by the experience of ending their youthful sojourns in the urban South (Washington, Richmond, Jacksonville, Atlanta) and settling into an impoverished rural environment where malnutrition, disease, and illiteracy were so commonplace as to be largely unnoticed and unremarked. The contrast made a profound impression upon my siblings, even though their comparison was only white to white and South to South; the relative disadvantage of blacks in both settings was enormous, as was the South’s status vis-à-vis the rest of the country, but segregation and isolation rendered such contrasts virtually invisible in the eyes of little children.

  Still and all, the prostrate South that Franklin Roosevelt inherited from Herbert Hoover in 1933 had at least risen to its knees when World War II ended. By almost every measure, it was still dead last among the regions—in education, employment, income, health, home ownership, and political participation—but its soldiers had gone to Europe and Asia and Africa to fight a war for human freedom, many of its women had left home to work in factories and stores, and its economy had been stimulated by
wartime production; now the spoils of victory would soon be up for grabs.

  Television was coming, and jet airplanes, and air-conditioning, and a sparkling showcase of consumer goods, from high-powered V-8 Fords and Chevrolets to electric “iceboxes” with inside lights, and nylon hose with seams up the back. There were GI loans for new houses, and GI Bill benefits to pay for education, and from the farm to the factory there were jobs waiting to be filled. The South had a multitude of chronic ills—Mr. Roosevelt himself had called the region in 1938 “the Nation’s No. 1 economic problem”—but its people, white and black, looked to the postwar period as the long-awaited time of salvation and redemption, the time when second-class citizenship would finally end. At long last, the South had a future worth striving for.

  It was five o’clock in the afternoon, Cadiz time, when President Harry Truman’s peace message came over the floor-model Zenith radio in our living room on August 14, 1945. As a boy of ten, I had no sense of what that dramatic announcement might mean for me or my family or our town, let alone the South and the nation; I only knew that it meant victory for our side. In my delight with that, I was momentarily (albeit unknowingly) bonded in common cause with the newsboys on the streets of Atlanta, the milling throngs in Times Square and Harlem, the Japanese-Americans in internment camps as near to us as Arkansas, the weary Allied troops far across the Pacific Ocean, and the millions of other citizens of the One Nation Indivisible. Safe and secure in my little cocoon of rural tranquillity, I had only to think of adding decibels to the clamorous celebration. Grabbing a long-handled aluminum pan and a big spoon from my mother’s kitchen, I ran out to join the impromptu victory parade on the sidewalk in front of our house.

  From the perspective of the nineties, the Southern landscape of the thirties and forties seems dreamily distant and remote to me, and yet altogether familiar. I marvel at the countless ways in which remembrance and discovery blend into a seamless tapestry of that now-vanished time and place. Like a William Faulkner novel or the photographs of Dorothea Lange or the movie version of The Grapes of Wrath, yesterday’s South evokes memories in which imagination and reality are fused and inseparable. By 1945, Atlanta had undergone vast changes from just one decade earlier, but the passing years since then have tended to flatten the contours and allow a broader perspective that diminishes the differences. Time and space themselves lose their limiting powers when we leave the here and now on a mental journey into the past.