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The Long Night's Journey, 1877-1941 Speaker: Linda Reed
Thank you. On behalf of the University of Alabama in Huntsville and on beha1fbf
President Frank Franz, I am very pleased to welcome all of you to this lecture
series focusing on the history and impact of the Civil Rights Movement in
Alabama.This historic initiative brings to Huntsville, distinguished speakers
who will reflect on events of the past and who will share with us their hopes
for the future.I must once again commend the faculty from the University of
Alabama in Huntsville and from Alabama A&M University, who worked over a period
of more than two years to make this possible. Those faculty include, but are not
limited to, John Dimmock, Lee Williams, Jack Ellis, Mitch Berbrier from UAH, and
James Johnson and Carolyn Parker from Alabama A&M. I am very pleased that you
could be with us.
Good evening. It is my pleasure to take a couple of moments to acknowledge our
sponsors. These are the people who have made it possible for us to do all these
kinds of things. They have given us funds and all kinds of support. They are the
Alabama Humanities Foundation, a state program of the National Endowment for the
Humanities; Senator Frank Sanders; The Huntsville Times; DESE Research Inc.;
Mevatec Corporation; and Alabama Representative, Laura Hall. At Alabama A&M, we
have the Office of the President, Office of the Provost, the State Black
Archives Research Center and Museum, Title III Telecommunications and Distance
Learning Center, Office of Student Development, the Honor Center,
Sociology/Social Work Programs and the History Political Science Programs. At
the University of Alabama in Huntsville, we have
the Office of the President, Office of the Provost, The History Farum Banking
Foundation, Sociology, Social Issues Symposium, The Humanities Center, The
Division of Continuing Education, the Honors Program and the Office of
Multi-Cultural Affairs, Office of Student Affairs and the UAH Copy Center.
Let's give these people a show of appreciation. I've been asked to
announce that the Charles Moore exhibit, and by the way, Charles Moore's
pictures are the ones you see on our brochure that hopefully each of you has
received. The Charles Moore exhibit on Civil Rights Photos will open at the
Union Grove Gallery on the UAH campus, Monday through Friday, 12:30 until 4:30.
Is it already open Jack? It is already open. I also need to ask you to remember
to please turn in to us your evaluation forms. You may leave them with any of
the ladies at the back. If you have to leave them on your chair, that's
fine but please fill out the evaluation forms and leave those with us. We would
appreciate that. I have the pleasure of presenting the young lady who is going
to introduce our speaker. Ms. Melanie Crutchfield, a sophomore premed major from
Columbus, Georgia is a valued member of the Alabama A&M University Honors
Program. She is broadly involved in all aspects of the program. She is a varsity
Honda Campus All Star Challenge Participant and she represented us in Orlando
for this national competition. She will represent A&M University in New York at
the Thurgood Marshall Scholar's Conference. She has distinguished herself
as an up and-coming scholar and she plans to become a medical doctor,
specializing in Pediatric Pathology and Childhood Diseases. I am delighted to
present to you, Ms. Melanie Crutchfield, who will introduce our speaker for this seminar.
Introduction: This evening's presenter, Dr. Linda Reed, returns to our
campus in a capacity that personifies the excellence and accomplishments that
our legacy allows us to expect of our graduates. Dr. Reed is a 1977 graduate of
Alabama A&M University. She received her Ph.D. from Indiana University, with a
specialization in African-American History, Twentieth Century. Her
accomplishments are numerous and distinctive.She presently serves as Associate
Professor of History at the University of Houston and with the Martin Luther
King Jr./Cesar Chavez/Rosa Parks, Visiting Professor at Michigan State
University. Additionally her career has taken her to various positions at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Auburn University, as well as
Indiana University. Her awards too, are many and varied. She is a Ford
Foundation Fellow, a Carter G. Woodson Fellow, a University of Houston City
Council Brain Wit Award Winner and a recipient of the Young Black Achievers of
Houston Award, Question and Review.Dr. Reed has published a variety of books and
essays relevant to the Civil Rights Movement.Some of those include, Fannie Lou
Hamer, Civil Rights Leader, Brown Decision, Historical Context and an
Historian's Reflection, various entries in the Encyclopedia of
African-American Civil Rights and the award winning book, Simple Decency and
Common Sense: The Southern Conference Movement. Her intellectual interest is in
the American South and the General Civil Rights.It is my pleasure to present to
you our speaker for this evening's program, Dr. Linda Reed.
Linda Reed: I think I will hire Melanie to introduce me all around. It is
certainly a pleasure to be back to what is practically home to me, Alabama A&M
University. The secret is out. I graduated in 1977. I think some of us were
talking earlier and one person said, "You probably don't want to say what
year you graduated." So the secret is out. Thank you Melanie!That was such a
wonderful introduction.I want to thank the planning committee for thinking so
highly of my work in terms of what I have done with some of the interpretations
of the Civil Rights Movement, in order to include me in this very stellar group
of scholars and activists from that period. It is really an honor. I said to one
of the persons on the planning committee that I wish I could just come back to
each one of these lectures myself.They are just absolutely fantastic and I am
truly honored to be included among that group of individuals.
I want to share just one story about my time here at Alabama A& M University. I
was telling this to one of the students earlier today. You know, Alabama A&M is
referred to as the Hill and so students may not realize it. Your exercise
program is built in. Well, we're into physical fitness now. I won't
tell you what my weight was when I used to be a student here. I used to have
classes down in this area of the campus. Just before choir practice, I would
walk all the way across campus up to either Buchanan Hall or one of the dorms up
on the highest part of the hill, for a fifteen-minute power nap before six
o'clock choir rehearsal. I was in the choir the entire four years that I
was here. It is just wonderful to think about that built-in exercise program.
That is just one of the stories, but there are so many that I could share about
this wonderful institution. Just one more, and this is really for the young
people who might be students here, or students
anywhere else. One of the things that was said to me in the very first weeks of
the time that I was here was from Dr. Henry Bradford. It was in chapel. He said,
'There is no reason why any of you should leave Alabama A&M University and
not be known on your campus." I have made that part of my life's mission
that wherever I am, people should know who I am and what I stand for, so much so
that as I resigned from being director of the African-American Studies Program
this summer, one of the things my dean said about me was, "Well you know Linda
will come with her issues and she is not always so soft spoken about them, to
put it mildly." I learned a lot while I was here at Alabama A& M and I am very
appreciative of it.
This evening I want to talk about the subject "Simple Decency and Common Sense,
A Message for all Times." Some of you might know that this title is taken from
the book with that same title. America must be concerned with bridging economic
gaps and perhaps a small group, such as the Southern Conference Movement, that
is willing to step ahead of the status quo people of our time, would be a start.
Yes, our problems are of the magnitude to require federal actions but individual
efforts could also help. With a limited time to speak this evening, I want to
talk about the Southern Conference for Human Welfare's founding, about the
significance of my labeling the Southern Conference Movement's Mission as
one of simple decency and common sense and some of the struggles of the other
organizations, the Southern Conference Educational Fund in the period just after
the I 940's, a lot of the work was carried on the l 940's but some of
the work took us into the 1950's.
I want to make a brief mention up front about the Southern Conference Movement
and how it began. I talked a little bit about how happy I am to be back at my
alma mater but also it is very appropriate to talk about the Southern Conference
for Human Welfare and the Southern Conference Educational Fund here because
Alabama is the place where the Southern Conference Movement had its beginning.
In 1938, at President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's urging, the National
Emergency Council, made up largely of Southerners, including the University of
North Carolina's president, Frank P. Graham, and labor organizer Luther
Randolph Mason, studied economic conditions of the South. I will talk a little
bit about that more. But then, there is also the question of why there was a
need for the Southern Conference for Human Welfare in 1938.
During the l 870's and l 880's, as white Southerners struggled to
compete with the North's rapidly growing economy, progressive Southerners
coined the term New South to draw attention to the region's industrial
growth. The South proved hospitable to a variety of industries, textiles,
tobacco, steel, and iron railroads. Southern industries in one way or another
enjoyed the advantages of proximity to raw material, more transportation cost
and cheap labor. With industry concentrated in large cities such as Birmingham,
Alabama; Atlanta, Georgia; Richmond, Virginia; and Louisville, Kentucky, the New
South eventually came to reference as the South of the cities, factories and
blast furnaces as opposed to the rural South. New South people wanted the South
to move forward industrially. What about all of its regions? What about the rest
of the South? The Southern society for the promotion of the study of race
conditions in the South, meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, gives us a clue. In
1900, that organization epitomized the
views of the various New South spokesperson on the concept of white supremacy.
This lily-white gathering set out to solve the Southern racial problem beginning
with placing the blame on black people for the backwardness of the Southern
economy. The conferees failed to produce a single responsible proposal by which
to resolve their grade problem because they defined the South and Southerners as
white and refused to see the black people as an integral part of the Southern
economy. This analysis contained a serious contradiction. As a Southern society
for the promotion of the study of race conditions in the South blamed Africa-
Americans for the region's economic troubles. Indeed, if the economic
situation of the whites improved and that of blacks remained dismal, all would
be well, the white organization believed. The social dominance of whites and
absolute degradation of black people remained the organization's most
important goal. Black Americans must be kept wholly within the limits of Jim
Crow at all cost, according to this organization.
By the l 930's and l 940's, the South remained in many ways the same
as the South of the 1880's and 1890's and also what that organization
talked about in terms of the 1900's, despite the claim of some southerners
that after the turn of the century, the region could be labeled a New South. In
1938, a small group of mostly white southern liberals gave the term a new
meaning. Southern liberals of the twentieth century did not dissociate the New
South totally from its original intended use. In addition to New South denoting
industrial development, Southern liberals used the term to suggest that
Southerners finally needed to dismantle old South values in regard to racial
equality. In a sense, in Southern economic problems of the 1930's, Southern
liberals, unlike most white
Southerners, figured inequities and discrimination against African-Americans as
major drawbacks for the fullest development of the Southern economy. Although
the region had gone far in its industrial growth, Southern liberals argued that
racial inequities slowed economic progress in the realization of the New South.
Blacks, still treated as inferior, continued to be disfranchised, to face
violence at the hands of racist whites, to be denied well paying jobs, to
experience injustice in the judicial system, and to be forced to live in
narrowly circumscribed and substandard housing. Simply put, blacks in the South,
during the twentieth century, like those of the late nineteenth century,
continuously faced conditions of economic, political and social oppression.
Indeed, between 1920 and 1930, over a million black people left the region in
search of a better life in the North and other sections of the country. Yet the
South held the majority of the black population. Liberal Southern whites
eventually allied themselves with those educated African-Americans who stayed in
the American South in their struggle for justice, initially addressing the
economic gap between the racist and later political and social unfairness. The
federal government helped Southern liberals associate industrialism with
Southern values also. However productive the South had been at the turn of the
century, by 1938 the New South prosperity had become precarious. Also, in 1938
the National Emergency Council, a group that President Roosevelt set up to study
economic conditions in the South, described the region as the nation's
number one economic problem, the nation's problem, not merely the South's.
Although the South was the poorest region in the country, the NEC's report
on the economic conditions of the South argued, "It has the potential for
becoming the richest."
The report contended that institutional deficiencies kept the South from
realizing its potential. In discussions on economic resources, education,
health, housing and labor, the NEC addressed the same issues that Southern
liberals tackled to create a just society. The NEC concluded that the
South's white population suffered because of the regions poor economy and
that black people suffered more. The Roosevelt administration and the NEC linked
Southern poverty and racism in an unprecedented way, but having negative
commentary on the South, left Southerners to search for their own solutions.
Southerners generally agreed with the findings of the NEC report, but refused to
support it because they did not feel strong support for President Roosevelt and
there was a great deal of anti-New Deal sentiment. At the same time, Southern
liberals in particular, accepted that the region's economic problems were
tied to its resistance to end racial discrimination. In direct response to the
NEC report, a group of Southern black and white liberals founded the Southern
Conference for Human Welfare in Birmingham, Alabama in November of 1938. The
Southern Conference for Human Welfare and the Southern Conference Educational
Fund, the group that the Southern Conference set up in 1946 for tax-exempt
purposes and to further its work in race relations, fought to create a
democratic South, an effort that faced all kinds of obstacles and difficulties.
Indeed the importance of maintaining white supremacy, especially the economic
dominance of whites over black, was so paramount in the minds of many Southern
whites that they were willing to see the entire region languish in order to
maintain their way of life.
Most Southern whites considered economic dominance central to the maintenance of
white supremacy and remained committed to sustaining racial segregation. Even at the
height of the Civil Rights Movement in the l960's, most white Southerners
resisted efforts to end racial discrimination. Yet, not all whites were
segregationists, as the activities of the inter-racial Southern Conference to
Human Welfare and the Southern Conference Educational Fund made clear. As I
said, it was organized in the fall of 1938, largely through the efforts of
Louise 0. Charleston, a Southern white woman and commissioner in Birmingham. The
Southern Conference to Human Welfare sought to help Southern whites to
understand that to remove limitations on its African-American citizens was to
ensure the region's greater prosperity. The Southern led Southern
Conference became a welfare for its time, became the progressive movement, a
movement that would respond to the NEC report with specific prescriptions to
cure the ills that the report described. The Southern Conference to Human
Welfare's recommendation challenged President Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
the Congress and especially Southern citizens, to improve the regions. The
Southern Conference for Human Welfare singled out, for instance, the unequal
facilities for white and black school children. The organizations membership
reminded its region that a supreme court decision of Plessy versus Ferguson of
1896, that states could set up separate facilities for black people as long as
these places were equal to those that were provided for whites. The problem, of
course, as the Southern Conference for Human Welfare reminded, was that places
for black people never equaled those places that were set up for whites, if any
were provided at all.
The Southern Conference for Human Welfare also pointed out the problem with
unequal salaries of black and white teachers and unequal incomes of black and white
tenant farmers as examples of the inequity and wastefulness of a racially
segregated society. Races that could not reap equal benefits for their labor
could not live together harmoniously. It is important to emphasize that the
ideas and ideals underlying the creation of the Southern Conference for Human
Welfare, have a history stretching back to the New South era of the 1880's.
During the 1880's, a number of prominent white Southerners coined the term
New South in a concerted effort to incite actions for Southern economic growth.
In 1938, what some of the white Southerners were saying is that there was a new
way to put it and that way was to be inclusive of everyone. The Southern
Conference for Human Welfare became involved in many issues, even though its
origins grew out of a determination to improve the South economically. From 1938
to 1948, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare's major goal was to
repeal the poll tax, one of those road blocks set up in late nineteenth century
America to prevent black males from voting. In many Southern communities, whites
feared that if African-Americans were allowed to exercise their right to vote,
they would gain too much political power. Recall that in the time of redemption,
that is the return of white rule after reconstruction ended in 1877 with the
inauguration of Rutherford B. Hayes as President, black men voted when they
could vote at all. When they voted, they voted Republican. As a result, during
the 1890's, Southern states, including Alabama, began using several tactics
to deny the vote to blacks. Some states required voters to own property or to
pay poll tax, a special fee that must be paid before a person was permitted to
vote. Both of these requirements were beyond the financial reach of most
African-Americans. Voters also had to pass literacy tests. These tests were
supposed to demonstrate that a voter could
read, write and meet minimum standards of knowledge, but like the property
requirement and the poll tax, literacy tests were really designed to keep
African-Americans from voting. In fact, whites often gave African-Americans much
more difficult tests than the ones given to whites. With some of the speakers
who will come later on, you will get real specific examples of how those tests
when given in the I 950's and l 960's were really ridiculous. If you
ever get a chance to visit the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, there is a little
mechanical device in there where you just spin the wheel and it points out to
you a possibility of how you might have been denied the right to vote on any
particular day. It could include a whole array of things as, "Well, you
didn't know how many bubbles were in a bar of soap" or something that
ridiculous. But those tests did continue in big waves all the way up into the l
960's and that is one of the reasons why you hear about the Freedom
Schools. That was a way to try to educate voters so that they could pass the
test. To ensure that the literacy test did not keep too many poor whites from
voting, some states passed special laws with grandfather clauses. These laws
exempted men from certain voting restrictions if they had already voted or, if
they had ancestors, for instance grandfathers, who had voted prior to black
males being granted suffrage. African-Americans, of course, did not meet the
qualifications and thus had to take the literacy tests. All of these laws kept
African-Americans from voting while not singling out the group name, which would
have been unconstitutional. Even though there were some of these that were
declared unconstitutional in 1950 and the time after, some states continued the
practice. Alabama, Louisiana and North Carolina, were the only three Southern
states that interfered with voters with the specific use of all four measures, that
1s, using the grandfather clause, the property tax, the literacy test, and the
poll tax. Georgia was the only Southern state that did not use the poll tax and
the poll tax remained a problem as late as 1938. Between 1938 and 1948, the
Southern Conference for Human Welfare, through it's institutionalized Civil
Rights committee, brought into formation a national committee to abolish the
poll tax.
One of the key people in the campaign to abolish the poll tax was a woman from
Alabama, Virginia Durr. A lot of you had an opportunity to meet her. I
interviewed her for the scholarship presented in Simple Decency and Common
Sense. She was a very colorful person in terms of her take on life. I guess you
had to be in order to endure as much as some of these individuals did. She was
very forceful in that campaign to abolish the poll tax between 1938 and 1948. Of
course, a lot of the work included distributing literature, speakers and a whole
series of educational kinds of things. The work was quite forbidding. It was not
until the 1960's, with constitutional amendment, that the poll tax was
finally abolished. But, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare made that
whole effort part of its goal. It was a very forthright goal.
There were quite a number of other individuals involved m the Southern
Conference Movement. I have mentioned Louise Charleston, a woman from
Birmingham, Alabama. Joseph Gelzers was a physics professor at the University of
Alabama who was also quite important for the work of the Southern Conference
Movement. There were a number of college presidents, business people, labor
leaders and workers and so with this cross section, a Southern Conference for
Human Welfare boasted of having every segment of society represented and
participating in its serious
.
campaigns and activities. Two of those individuals you have probably learned a
little bit about. One of these people was Mary McCloud Bethune, who was founder
of what we came to know as the Bethune Cookman College, and her dear friend,
Eleanor Roosevelt. They became true pals in a lot of the work in the l
930's all the way up through the time of Bethune's death in the
1950's and Eleanor Roosevelt's death in the 1960's. Both of them
were present at the meeting in 1938. When local racial moors intruded at the
Southern Conference meeting in November of 1938, Governor Roosevelt responded
defiantly. Although whites and blacks had separate accommodations and ate
separately because of Jim Crow laws, they sat wherever they wanted at the
opening session on November 20th and even until late afternoon on November 21st
None of the participants at the conference had complained, but when the police
department learned of the integrated seating, an order came to the Southern
Conference for Human Welfare from the city commissioner, Theopolus Eugene Bull
Conner, the "Infamous Bull Conner," we liked to call him, that the audience had
to segregate, that is, whites on one side of the aisle, and blacks on the other
side, or the group would lose use of the city auditorium. If the Southern
Conference for Human Welfare continued to use the auditorium and the audience
remained mixed, the commissioner threatened to arrest the Southern Conference
for Human Welfare Conference attendees. Doubting that any local official would
dare arrest the first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt sat with the blacks until the
police requested that she move. But, even then, she did so restively and
continued to make her point by placing a folding chair in the aisle just beyond
the center. She sat there during all of the sessions she attended. For the
remainder of the conference, police came to enforce the segregation
ordinance, sometimes creating such anxiety that some participants would not even
cross the aisle to speak to a friend of the other race for fear of being arrested.
As I said, I met quite a number of people who were part of the Southern
Conference Movement. One of those individuals hailed from South Carolina,
Modjeska Simkins. I met Mrs. Simkins when she was, I think, in her late
80's and she lived to be in her 90's, and a lot of these individuals
became very good friends of mine. Modjeska Simkins, when she was alive, loved to
share the story about Eleanor Roosevelt and that seat in the center aisle and,
as Mrs. Simkins would tell the story, she would say, "Eleanor Roosevelt sat that
chair in the middle aisle and she put one hip on one side for the whites and one
hip on the other side for the blacks." She would just really roar in laughter
about that particular incident. These individuals did have a sense of humor
about life and I think it was one of things that kept them going. They had to
have some sense of humor to endure.
Conner's interference resulted in the Southern Conference for Human Welfare
adopting the resolution condemning segregation. And also, the Southern
Conference for Human Welfare promised to hold all of its future meetings in
cities where segregation was not an issue. To that end, the group met in
Nashville, Tennessee; Chattanooga, Tennessee; and New Orleans, between 1940 and
1948. It was in 1948 that the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, as it had
come to be called, dismantled and the Southern Conference Educational Fund, the
institution that had been formed in 1946, continued its mission. Far too late in
1938, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare came to accept that racism and
economics were related one to the other. The weak-hearted left the
movement when the Southern Conference for Human Welfare stood its ground, but a
courageous few continued to work with the Southern Conference Educational Fund
for the next thirty plus years. It is really the work of the Southern Conference
Educational Fund that came to make the many issues of the Southern Conference
for Human Welfare a reality.
What about this issue of Simple Decency and Common Sense? If we have been
listening lately, we hear the words, common sense, quite often. Former President
George Bush talked about the need to use common sense to address the crimes of
inner cities. Other politicians used the words to address many issues. Even a
commercial in Texas and some of the other states around talk about common sense
bank loans. It is possible that I hear the words more often because they are
part of my book title and are quite important in my assessment of two Southern
interracial organizations. The Southern Conference movement then refers to the
Southern Conference for Human Welfare and the Southern Conference Educational
Fund, and their efforts between 1938 and far into the l 970's. These
organizations offered a program of what they called Simple Decency and Common
Sense to rectify the South's imbalances. This rectification called for
identifying the poor economic status of black people as a Southern problem and
then also included black people when the solutions were sought. Neither
organization formally termed the effort of transforming the South as simple
decency, but several individuals linked the concept with the Southern Conference
Movement, often speaking of a simple decency and common sense approach for
bringing about reform. The Southern Conference Educational Fund President,
Aubrey Williams, a native Alabamian and New
Deal administrator with the Roosevelt administration, wrote in 1950, "We need to
take some chances in behalf of decency." In October of 1955, the Southern
Conference Movement monthly publication, The Southern Patriots headlined, "New
Orleans integration petition proves decencies stressed". Black leaders said it
best when they protested senate on un-American activities hearings in the l
950's. Thirty-two leaders collectively from the South border states and the
District of Columbia, in March of 1954, demanded of Mississippi Senator James
Eastman that, "As an act of simple decency and common sense, you make
appropriate apologies to those individuals whose names have been sullied in the press."
What had happened in the un-American activities cases of the 1950's is that
largely white Southerners who had struggled in the efforts with
African-Americans were redbaited, that is, they were accused of being
communists, so it would interfere with the work that they were doing with black
people. Well, the remainder of this letter could apply to some of our present
day crises for the leaders continued, and I quote, "In the opinion of the
undersigned, the action of your subcommittee against the Southern Conference
Educational Fund is an attack upon the Negro community of this nation. This
organization has spearheaded the fight against segregation in the South. When
your statements and those of your fellow committee members smear the fund, the
leadership, you are also disparaging the hopes and aspiration of Negro people.
It is ridiculous to impute this loyalty of the Southern Conference Educational
Fund. Its Board of Directors, composed equally of Whites and Negroes includes
many distinguished civic leaders in Southern States. Its sole concern throughout
the years has been with the evil effects of
racial segregation m education, hospital services, transportation, and other
public facilities. Its goal of harmoniously ending all racial barriers is our
goal. How can you presume to sit in judgment on the patriotism of an
organization which shares with vice President Nixon the conviction that every
act of racial discrimination or prejudice in the United States hurts America as
much as an espionage agent who turns over a weapon to a foreign country."
Reverend J. Echols Lowery, of Mobile Alabama, signed the letter.
In 1958 one supporter said, I certainly want to support the cause of decency in
the South. As we continue to hear the words, common sense, in our time, I hope
we will begin to also see signs of simple decency that ought to be placed right
alongside of common sense. My grandfather used to tease me all the time when I
was so interested in being educated. He used to say, "Well, you learn a lot of
things in school but they don't teach you any common sense. The Southern
Conference Educational Fund set out at many meeting to challenge these issues of
racial justice in the l 950's. Though hardly because of its efforts alone
in the l 950's, the Southern Conference Educational Fund observed the
beginning of the fruition of its dream. Segregation was ending and eventual
demise of overt racial discrimination was within sight. The most important of
these breakthroughs, of course, is the Supreme Court decision in Brown versus
the Board of Education in 1954 and then the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 and
1956, all made evident that blacks were taking charge of the struggle for civil rights.
While individuals in the Southern Conference Educational Fund came to realize
that the struggle for equality was changing in make-up, black civil rights
leaders continued to welcome the help and support of whites sympathetic to their
demands for a
just society. The Supreme Court decision in Brown ended a long struggle for
blacks and white liberals and for the first time since the Plessy case of 1896,
segregationists were placed on the defensive. The Brown decision embraced only
one aspect of racial equality and that was public education and so blacks had
yet many other obstacles to overcome, mainly those blocking the way to equitable
economic and political opportunities. Resistance and oppression dominated the
Southern scene after the Brown decision and added to the already difficult task
of blacks and their white Southern counterparts in the Civil Rights Movement.
Mississippi Congressman, John Bail Williams, labeled May 14, 1954, the day that
the Supreme Court announced its decision, as Black Monday and two months later
he joined other staunch segregationists in forming the first white citizens
council in Indianola Mississippi.
Throughout the l 950's, Southern legislators proceeded with various means
to evade school integration, the most noble example of which was the Southern
manifesto, whereby Southern senators and congressmen pledged to use all lawful
means to bring about a reversal of this decision. We heard a little bit about
that last year with the campaign from Al Gore because his father was one of the
Southern politicians who refused to sign the Southern Manifesto in the l
950's. The legislators and the white Southern majority proved quite
successful in various strategies to prevent school integration. As late as the
mid-l 960's, most public schools in Alabama, South Carolina and Mississippi
had not been integrated. Most white Southerners, accustomed to the use of
violence to maintain their superior status, proved no exception to this rule in
the decades of the 1950's and 1960's. Indeed, the reason why
historians labeled this period
the second reconstruction is due partly to the many violent acts on black and
white sympathizers by advocates of the status quo that occurred more intensely
during the l 950's and l 960's than at any other time after the civil
war. Moreover, not since Reconstruction had Southerners so avidly tested the
strength of state's rights versus federal authority. While the educational
fund continued to expect that it could change the mentality of most white
Southerners through public awareness and condemnation, a few black leaders
anticipated a massive resistance from the segregationists. In the aftermath of
the Brown decision then, blacks experienced both new hope and dread for pensive
moments based on the reactions of diehard segregationists. Roscoe Dunjee, editor
of the Oklahoma City's Black Dispatch and Educational Fund board member,
pointed to evidence of developments in his state and concluded that in the
mid-1950's the South faced its darkest hour and that, 'The era
presented the most challenging moments simply because white reaction will try to
join with Negro Uncle Tom's to defeat our objective." The NAACP leader, Roy
Wilkins, agreed with Dunjee's assessment and he also warned of the dark
before the dawn. Wilkins reasoned that a great many white people in the South
experienced "a tremendous shock" not because the NAACP and other civil rights
organizations advocated the abolition of segregation but because, Wilkins said,
"For the first time since Reconstruction, they are making absolutely no headway
with the old tested and tried technique through which they have managed to stave
off and defeat similar efforts in the past." Wilkins previously observed that
more blacks, than in the l 950's, had been easily intimidated by white
violence and threats.
During that period, Wilkins said, "Whites only had to make their feelings known
and to pass the word out to their colored people and a movement was stopped in
its tracks, except for a persistent minority." Now that African-Americans loudly
proclaimed that segregation had to end, Wilkins believed such actions has
resulted for the first time in the so-called upper class white people bonding
together in organizations like the White Citizens Council and similar groups to
fight desegregation and that "Their own colored people and the NAACP." Prior to
this time, in Wilkins assessment, they had never had to organize, not in such a
concerted way, but Wilkins and Dunjee saw the end of the White Citizens Council
Movement as soon as it started because, as they understood it, although it was
enjoying temporary success, it was doomed because it had to come out and openly
use methods that would draw to its condemnation nationally. Also, Wilkins and
Dunjee summed up the importance of the Brown decision when they predicted the
demise of the White Citizens Council Movement because, in the ultimate court
tests, the White Citizens Council cannot win now. As I said with the Brown
decision, at least the law now was on the side of people who wanted to bring
about desegregation. They did not have the confidence that the white Southern
majority would slowly convert to the Southern Conference Educational Fund, but
at least Wilkins and Dunjee valued the silent condemnation and non-cooperation
of important segments of the white Southern community.
The idealism of the educational fund in its efforts to make the American public
aware of the horrors of segregation and discrimination remained a significant
part of the Civil Rights Movement. And, of course, there are many stories that
could be shared
about the way in which the White Citizens Council and other organizations would
be condemned. For instance, there were so many bombings in Birmingham that the
city became called "Bombingham" as opposed to Birmingham.
The historian, Gilbert Osaski lists between January of 1955 and January of 1959,
Alabama alone saw over fifty-five acts of violence on the part of whites against
blacks, over half of which occurred in Birmingham. A similar kind of story can
be told in Mississippi and some of the other places around the South. There is
the infamous case of Emmett Till, who was murdered in Mississippi in 1955. There
are numerous horror stories about that. In a march in April and September of
1956, attention centered on Autherine Lucy, when the University of Alabama at
Tuscaloosa, after a three-year court fight, admitted her as its first black
student. The disruption at the school caused by mob violence of white
segregationists, far from outside of the Tuscaloosa area, compelled the
University's board of trustees to expel Lucy for her own safety and because
she accused the University of conspiring with the white mob against her. The end
result, that is, in 1992, Autherine Lucy earned her Masters Degree from the
University of Alabama. She and her daughter graduated together.
For the rest of the l 950's, Fred Shuttlesworth shared many stories of
violence from the Birmingham area and he of course will tell you more of those
stories when he is here. Obvious other horrific episodes of the 1950's, the
long decade of red-baiting, the Little Rock incident and so many others, show
the light of the horror of the Civil Rights Movement and what people had to
endure. White leaders of the educational fund paid for their alliance with
blacks in the Civil Rights Movement. Its president, Aubrey Williams,
did not escape economic reprisal. In 1957, he said he had to end the publication
of the Southern Farmer, a monthly that came out from Montgomery. Williams
concluded, 'They had me labeled as a bad guy from the start and I have
never been able to convince them that I was not even as radical as Thomas
Jefferson." Later in 1957, he went on to say to his close friend James
Dombrowski, who was for a long time President of the Southern Conference
Educational Fund, "I can't get the straight of this. I do not want to
believe that it is due to the Birmingham news article," which reported of his
activities in the Southern Conference Movement and/or "my stand on the Little
Rock debacle, but it comes and just at this time." In other words, he was saying
if they had some problem with me, they could have done this at any other time.
Economic interests were just as important to the majority of Southern whites as
the continued hope to maintain white supremacy. Whites hoped to rob blacks of a
chance of an education that would help them obtain better jobs. Whites were
ahead economically and the Southern white majority would see to it that the
situation remained that way. The question of integration over economics or vice
versa plagued the entire Civil Rights Movement. Blacks were becoming more aware
during the debacle of the Little Rock situation or other massive resistance
incidents of the importance of economic security, which had been a major concern
of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare when it was first founded in 1938.
When the Southern Conference placed emphasis on equal economic opportunities in
the late l 930's, few liberals, black or white, developed means for
achieving that specific goal. The Little Rock incident, because the school
desegregation effort created so much attention, caused many blacks to question whether
the integration of schools was the most important aspect of
African-American's fight for first class citizenship.
P. B. Young, publisher and editor of the Norfolk, Virginia Journal and Guide
newspaper and also a black leader who sought only integration as recently as the
l 950's, believed that equal opportunity in employment constituted the most
essential step to first class citizenship. The cycle was catchy, however. In
order to obtain high status jobs, blacks needed education and training of high
quality. Segregation also needed to be abolished for it, like inferior
education, prevented blacks from progressing to their full potential.
Consequently, Young saw the Brown decision as the removal of the basic reasons
for legal segregation and believed that it would enable blacks eventually to
acquire better homes and also better jobs. Although integration was not entirely
a school question, it remained the center of attention for the rest of the
1950's in terms of the Civil Rights Movement. The debate shifted back and
forth but by the late 1960's, black leaders decided that equal economic
opportunity was the key to equal treatment in all aspects of American society.
By 1960, when the sit-in movement and freedom rides had taken the Civil Rights
Movement yet to another level, and people like Virginia Durr and her husband
encountered almost daily insanities, the situation grew so desperate that when
the New Yorker carried a story about the Durr's from Montgomery, most
people knew from reading the story who the Durr's were. This led to a
letter campaign that came into the Durr's, so they got a lot of support
from other sections of the country. One of the supporters wrote Virginia Durr,
she called herself a friend at a distance and she said, "I
hope this letter will offer a bit of friendship to give you some feeling that
your courage is not wasted. It spreads more seeds than you may ever realize and
it enables you to live with yourself. I wonder how many of the people who snub
you on the streets envy you that." There were a lot of other people who believed
in and wanted to see the Southern liberals and African-Americans succeed. What
was it about the few white Southerners that drove them to ally with blacks in
the struggle?
One liberal, white Southern, Anne Braden, who was born in Birmingham, Alabama
and later moved to Louisville, Kentucky, described the intensity of the Southern
white majority as neurotic and segregationists described that of the liberals in
the same way. So, each side was calling the other neurotic. Anne Braden said
that she, "grew up in a sick society and a sick society makes neurotics of one
kind or another, on one side or another. It makes people like those who could
take pleasure in killing and mutilating Emmett Till, and it makes people like
me," she said. Braden also believed that when a supreme court outlined its
decision on the effects of segregation on the black child, it might have
included some discussion about what segregation did to the white child. If
neurotics were what liberals ought to be called, Braden concluded that even if
the name applied there, there were many neurotics like herself in the South and
that the answer did not rest with the group who called themselves, "Saner and
more practical and more moderate," who insisted that change occur at a slower
pace. She went on to say, "As long as segregation remains a fact in communities
all over the South, there will be people like us who are compelled to act."
Braden's metaphor for an integrated and just society depicted a world
without walls. She saw the Interracial Movement and the Southern
Conference Educational Fund and others as a tearing down of the wall of
segregation and discrimination.
The other thing that people like Braden came to understand is that when they did
their work, there was always not the support that came from the white community,
as they felt was always there for black people in their community. One of those
persons who put into words his expressions about that was Aubrey Williams, who
was president of the Southern Conference Movement, and also Virginia Durr. They
talked about the bitterness that they felt within the struggle because they did
not get very much support from the white community. Williams'
disillusionment, partly due to his physical condition by the late l 950's,
he was dying from cancer, and partly due to a resentment of support that he
sensed that blacks shared from their own, as I said, overwhelmed his views of
the Civil Rights Movement by the late 1950's. At that time what he said was
that he really would like to see more support. I will just share with you part
of what he wrote in terms of his assessment of some of the blacks and whites of
that struggle. One of the things that I described that what historians do is
that we read other people's mail, so I'll share with you part of his
letter also. He said, "There are three kinds of leaders." There are the shark
troops. There are the expendables. These bear the burden of making the attacks
upon the enemies of free men. They must also take any new ground gained from
mankind. Modjeska Simkins belonged to this group. Then there are the
Proclaimers, wherein once new ground is taken, they view the situation as having
been accepted by society. They emerge and give voice and sanction to the new
areas of rights and justice. These are the Ralph McGill's and the Harry
Ashmore's. In this sense, he is
calling them actually moderate, which is not such a good kind of thing. Then
there are the politicians who, once the additional ground has been won and the
Proclaimers have set their seal upon it about face and to make legal what they
had only recently denounced as the wild schemes of radical and impractical idealists.
Modjeska Simkins has been for the span of her life, of the shock troops and the
expendables, though she is still far from being expended. One might steal a
title from a Broadway play now in favor, The Indestructible Molly Brown and say,
"No more appropriate title could be found for Modjeska". Judging history by how
advances have come about in our time, one begins to doubt the validity of their
nomination and credits of and for fame. For if we are to judge the probabilities
of who will go down in history as the leaders of those forces who secured the
final friend of the Negro. It will be some President of the United States or
some individual who have become a symbol. It will not be the Modjeska
Simkins' or the E.B. Mixon's, (I have not mentioned him but you will
hear about him later and his connection to Montgomery) or James Dombrowski. Yet
these and others like them are the people that made it possible for the Ralph
McGill's and the Harry Ashmore's to voice an acceptance of the ground taken.
I do not value Ralph McGill less because I value Modjeska Simkins more. I do not
deny the importance of a Hubert Humphrey but I do say that without a Modjeska
Simpkins, he nor others like him would have done what was able to be
accomplished or attempted to do what was done. In a sense, the Southern
Conference Educational Fund leaders can be likened then to the abolitionists,
who could not take credit for the Emancipation of Slaves, though this group were
the ones who made the abolition of
slaves there sincere purpose. But abolitionists, few in number, as the Southern
liberals of the Southern Conference Educational Fund, predicted slavery's
end and published large quantities of literature with such announcements. Not
unlike the abolitionists, the Educational Fund fulfilled a certain mission by
the role it played in the Civil Rights Movement. So, the Southern Conference
Movement made a difference in the lives of black people and white people that
may not be known outside of Alabama, or the South. I believe that their message
if practiced could help us resolve many of the problems of our present time. We
have to become more inclusive."
Linda Reed will be more than willing to entertain questions at this moment. We
now open the floor for questioning.
Linda Reed: Some other people that are up here probably can help me keep track
of whose hands are going up.
Q: For The December 4th lecture that is going to address the future and the past
of the Civil Rights Movement, I would like for you to share with us, your
opinion about what is happening in South Africa, as far as reparation is
concerned with slavery, and having new individuals in the scene here in America,
such as Clarence Thomas, J. C. Watts and Alan Keyes. In what direction do you
see the Civil Rights Movement taking in the 2 I st century, being that we have
reparation and we have extremely conservative wealth knowing black individuals?
A: Thank you for your question. As I emphasized with a lot of what I said this
evening, as the Civil Rights struggle grew, it came more and more to that
question of economics. think in the 21st century, the question is still a matter
of economics. We have a larger
number of African-Americans for sure who are of a different class; people who
have really good jobs and very high incomes. Then you have a large percentage of
African Americans who do not do well because of poor education, which is one
of the concerns of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. They also do not
have the opportunities because of their lack of education. Also in assessing the
economic status of the country on that issue of reparation, we have come to
understand that the institution of slavery was very important for the
development of America and North America, as we have come to know it. Now people
are bringing that into question and wanting to look at it. Some organizations
and individuals feel that there is a specific part of that which should go to
individuals. There are others who have seen it in such a way that it could be
institutionalized. For instance, institutions that would educate a larger number
of African-Americans and perhaps would have specific kinds of financial backing
and that kind of thing. That question of economics is still a very important
one. So, on that question of reparation, we have seen how divisive it became for
the conference in South Africa. The question still is quite central, that is the
issue of economics is still quite central to many of the other discussions about
how we can all move forward. As many members of the Southern Conference Movement
came to explain it, they had a very practical, or common sense kind of way to
approach it. People who could not reap the same types of benefits from their
labor will not feel that they had been included or feel tied into a productive
community etc., that is tied into crime and all other kinds of things. It was
important for the Southern Conference Movement. I don't know what some of
those individuals would say about reparation but I would think that many of them would
support the principle of it; there is some kind of way that people who are
descendants of the institution of slavery could benefit in some kind of way. It
is a very long and debatable kind of issue. You see some of those same kinds of
issues tied with discussions on affirmative actions. That was a very important
question and I do thank you for it.
Q: Am I correct to assume that there was a FBI surveillance of the Southern
Conference and if so, were you able to have access to those records?
A: Yes, the FBI was very busy because of J. Edgar Hoover who served as its
director for a very long period of time. When did he get in there? It was a long
time back. To answer the question specifically, Lillian Smith, who I did not
mention in the talk this evening, was a very active member of the Southern
Conference Movement. She hailed from Georgia. She brought out a periodical on a
monthly basis. She believed in all of their efforts and activities. She was a
Southern white woman. Because of that, as early as 1931, the FBI started a file
on Lillian Smith. You can ask for the records but of course the records are
sanitized. You really don't get a chance to see all of the notes that the
FBI kept on these kinds of individuals, both white Americans and black
Americans. You would get part of a statement at the top part of the page, most
of it blacked out, and maybe you would see something written at the end. It
wasn't something that I could make a lot of sense of. What I gathered from
the work that I am doing on Fannie Lou Hamer and having seen the papers of Paul
P. Johnson and seeing some of the notes of the people who were active in taking
the notes, with that, you can get kind of a clearer sense of what kind of the
things the FBI was involved in. With the records of other collections
that were not sanitized to the extent of the ones that you get from the FBI, you
came to understand that they sent infiltrators to meetings, for some of the
support that came in, in terms of clothing, funding and that kind of thing, to
Southern States. The FBI would interfere with some of that material being
delivered. There were very deliberate ways that the FBI interfered. There is a
whole effort called COINTELPRO, where the FBI paid specific individuals to be in
meetings and report back as to specific kinds of things that organizations and
individuals were doing, even to the example of a person like Fannie Lou Hamer
who was very poor, but there is a FBI file on Fannie Lou Hamer. So, for almost
all of the organizations and individuals, there is a FBI file that one could get
a hold of to try to discern some kind of information. It is very difficult
because so much of the pages have been blackened out before it was sent out to
the researcher.
Q: I was wondering whether the utilization of common sense, is that more
pertinent to political matters or social culture commonality? How would you see that?
A: Common sense in the way that a lot of the individuals that we're talking
about from the Southern Conference Movement, for them, it is something like
"Can't you see it, you know, it is right in front of you. Why is it so
difficult that you have such a hard time seeing this the way that we see it?" A
lot of these individuals were very religious. They were members of churches and
they were church leaders. Part of their message was "We're supposed to love
our brother as we do ourselves. They placed part of their emphasis on the
individual level and in that sense you would not mistreat your brother or your
sister. Common sense would tell you, "Why would you continue to do this on a
regular basis?" It is something that is very fundamental to them that they are practicing
on a regular day-to-day basis. They would like to see other Americans, including
white Southerners who believe in white supremacy, to take their approach to
life. To them it is right here. All you have to do is open your eyes. I hope
that helps. I am not sure if that is what you were asking.
Q: What was the role of political parties in the activities of the Civil Rights
Movement as they were played out in the 1950's and 1960's.
A: Now that is s very good question. For the most part, the South of the 20th
century remained the South of the 19th century in the sense that the Democratic
Party, for a long time, was the same Democratic Party from the Reconstruction
period. It aligned itself with white supremacy, white rule, and that kind of
thing. As late as 1958, that was still the case. When Harry S. Truman insisted
on presenting a Civil Rights plank in his platform of 1948, I don't know if
you've had this in any of your history classes, but members of the
Democratic party were so concerned that Strom Thurman, a young George Wallace, a
man who eventually became the governor of Mississippi, marched out of the
convention while the band played Dixie, to protest Harry Truman's support
of Civil Rights. So, that gives you an idea of how strong this was aligned with
the Democratic Party as late as 1948. It is really hard to try to condense all
of these different history lessons but I am going to really try hard. In 1964,
there was the development in Mississippi, a third party called the Mississippi
Democratic party, which challenged the all white delegation from Mississippi.
With that challenge, led famously by Fannie Lou Hamer and some of the people who
supported her, like people from the Southern Conference Educational Fund and
that organization. The Democratic Party promised that
it would be very inclusive in the conventions after 1964. The Democratic Party
kept its promise. The Republican Party up to this time had been the Republican
party of Abraham Lincoln. Of course there was a shift from the Republican Party
for African Americans in the l 930's when more African-Americans voted
the Democratic Party. In the l 960's and thereafter, there was almost a
total flip of what the parties represent. As the Democratic party became more
aligned with the types of issues that the Southern Conference Movement stood for
such as equality, and exclusiveness, more and more of the politicians who had
aligned with that party very strongly, started to align themselves with the
Republican Party. To make a long story short, without other kinds of lessons
that I don't want to go into, there was a parting of the ways almost on the
issue of racial discrimination between the parties. Now in our time, the
Democratic Party is seen as the party more of what the Republican Party was at
first. That might seem a little confusing but essentially that is how it was.
The parties were quite important in terms of how things occurred. When people
were encouraging individuals to vote and to be registered to vote, for a long
time, it was to the Democratic party, but that party was changed in the terms of
not being the party that it had been in late 19th century America.
Q: Perhaps you have mentioned this and I just missed it, but what role, if any
did the
Southern Conference play in some of the major events in the state in places like
Birmingham, Montgomery and Selma, or were those kind of activities beyond the
mission of the Southern Conference?
A: No, they were as active as anyone could be. One of the key roles that the
white members of the Southern Conference Educational Fund played, especially in
the city and
campaigns and some of those other efforts where people ended up being arrested,
they were in the behind the scenes efforts of raising money so that once people
were arrested, they would have funds to be released from jail. Some of them were
out on the front lines, like in the Selma march and other key instances of voter
registration and that kind of thing. Just like we heard some of the horrific
stories about African-Americans, there are similar types of stories about white
Americans who also lost their lives in the process of trying to create a
democracy that was suppose to be in existence already.
Q: How did the older generations like Virginia Durr, Anne Braden and some of
them identify with some of the student organizations and student leaders in the 1960's?
A: I guess the best way to give an example is to use the example of Anne Braden,
who is an older woman; she is in her seventies now. Just last year, many people
celebrated her 75th birthday. Martha Norman is a real good friend of hers. Anne
Braden is white and Martha Norman is African-American. Martha Norman was one of
the student workers in SNCC in the 1960's. They are just like regular pals,
except Anne still does not really appreciate some of the music that some of the
students listen to. I say that because I invited Anne Braden, Martha Norman,
Lawrence Guyot, (who I didn't talk about tonight either) and Ed King, a
white chaplain at Tugaloo College in the 1960's, to visit the University of
Houston. All of these people were involved in the Civil Rights struggle in their
respective areas. I picked them up from the airport and I took them back to the
airport. We were on our way to take Lawrence Guyot to take his flight. Anne and
Martha were going to leave later. We were all in the car. Martha and I started
talking about the music from the1960's. Now of course, I was just a kid
when they were doing
all of this stuff. Up until we started talking about the music, Anne was right
there with us. She was really hanging out. We started talking about the music
and Anne went to sleep. I said to Martha, "You know, she just really does not
like some of the stuff that we like." Martha said, "Yea, that's right". But
they got along just fine. They appreciated their differences. The older people
were very nurturing of what the younger people were trying to do. Of course we
know that it is really the support of Ella Baker, an older African-American
woman, who nurtured, talked with, discussed, gave advice, and mentored young
college students so that the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee could
come into existence in the first place. For many of them, it was no big deal.
For some of them, just like in our time, some of the older people would say, "I
just don't know what these young people are doing." I think that is going
to always be the case. For them, there is a great amount of appreciation in sharing.
Q: The time between Reconstruction of the 19th century and the Civil Rights
Movement of the l 950's and 1960's is a very long time period. How was
it that things became worse and worse?
A: This is s very interesting question. It gets us back to understanding that
this is why many historians termed the Civil Rights Movement The Second
Reconstruction because things did get worse and worse. We also have to
understand that the Civil Rights Movement has always been an ongoing process. If
you could appreciate the interpretation that Vincent Harding, historian, who in
a book called There is a River, uses the river metaphor to help us understand
that from the shores of Africa, people of African descent have always been
involved in the struggle for freedom. When we get to the
l 950's, we are still talking about a struggle for freedom. Although
slavery had been abolished universally in the 1860's, reconstruction had
been something that was provided to try to ensure democracy for all Americans,
including African-Americans; America still had not lived up to its promise of
democracy. Reconstruction from the ]9th century is viewed as a failure. It put
into play some things but it did not uphold the promise. As a matter of fact,
things gradually eroded. What types of examples do we see that things became
worse and worse? With the Brown decision of 1954, the Supreme Court justices
argued the fact that African-American students were allocated to separate
institutions, that this was something that was harmful psychologically. These
were individuals who were told on a regular basis, "You are going to be
relegated to this poor school. You are going to get used books. Sometimes you
might not even get a book. Sometimes you will not have buses to ride to school."
They said this was psychologically harmful. I guess that is one of the examples
of how bad it could get. The NAACP had led court cases in the 1930's and
1940's for the equalization of black and white teacher's pay. Even
with that, people had seen in some communities the small victories. As more and
more people saw that there could be some breakthroughs and there could be some
changes, they were more willing to try to push the envelope to see what other
kinds of things could be opened up. Instead of saying how bad things did become,
I would rather see how people saw opportunities for things to change more and
more. So the momentum grew as opposed to things just getting worse and worse.
Q: (Inaudible)
A: That's a very good question and also a way for me to tie in some of the
things I said about the New Deal. The one big, big part of the historical
picture that I left out was the Great Depression of the I 930's. With so
many Americans suffering in the l 930's, there were many people who
wondered why didn't more Americans turn to Communism and just simply
dismantle the kind of government that we had because this was a government,
especially under Herbert Hoover, that did not seem to sympathize with the
average American who had lost a job and were suffering because of issues of
economics. And so, in some pockets of America, the Communist party did increase
in membership. The belief was that because African-Americans had suffered so
drastically and continued to suffer that more and more of them were turning to
the communist party. If there were whites that sympathized with them, then these
of course were individuals who were part of the communist party. And also, there
was this message that was part of a federal campaign that African-Americans
certainly could not understand their hardship, that if they came to these
conclusions that they had to have direct action campaign then, of course, it was
the communist party who told them this kind of stuff. It was all in a cycle that
went hand and hand but the tie in was two problems from the Great Depression,
which also got back to the issues of economic hardship. As they say in the
Bartels and James commercial, I do thank you for your support.
I want to first encourage you to be sure to turn in your program evaluation
forms. We do have refreshments at the back and we certainly want you to take
advantage of the refreshments. I would also like to say thank you to all of you
who came out tonight. Thank you for those individuals who played a very
important role in getting you to come
out tonight. Be sure to take note of your brochures or your posters to be aware
of the upcoming lectures. Of course, the lecture next week will be on the campus
of UAH and Diane Nash, who was one of the activists involved with the Civil
Rights Movement from the Nashville area, but as some learned from the inaugural
lecture, she and her husband played a very important role in Alabama as well. I
hope that, as I said at the beginning of the program, all of you will make every
effort to attend as many of these lectures in this important series as possible.
Thank you and good night.
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Digitized VHS tape of "The Long Night's Journey, 1877-1941".
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Linda Reed is the speaker in this lecture given at Alabama A&M University.
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University of Alabama in Huntsville
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2001-09-06
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2000-2009
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Reed, Linda, 1955-
Civil rights movements--Southern states--History--20th century
Alabama (Ala.)
Southern States
Humanitarianism
Labor
African Americans--Legal status, laws, etc.
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Lectures
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en
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<a href="http://libarchstor.uah.edu:8081/repositories/2/archival_objects/383">The Long Night's Journey, 1877-1941 - Speaker: Linda Reed - Transcription of Tape 2, 2003</a>
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<a href="http://libarchstor.uah.edu:8081/repositories/2/archival_objects/396">VHS Tape of: The Long Night's Journey, 1877-1941 - Speaker: Linda Reed, 2001-09-06. Box 2, Tape 2</a>
University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives, Special Collections, and Digital Initiatives, Huntsville, Alabama
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Text
The Civil Rights Movement in Alabama
Alabama A&M University
The Long Night's Journey, 1877-1941
Speaker: Linda Reed
Thank you. On behalf of the University of Alabama in Huntsville and on beha1fbf
President Frank Franz, I am very pleased to welcome all of you to this lecture series
focusing on the history and impact of the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama. This
historic initiative brings to Huntsville, distinguished speakers who will reflect on events
of the past and who will share with us their hopes for the future. I must once again
commend the faculty from the University of Alabama in Huntsville and from Alabama
A&M University, who worked over a period of more than two years to make this
possible. Those faculty include, but are not limited to, John Dimmock, Lee Williams,
Jack Ellis, Mitch Berbrier from UAH, and James Johnson and Carolyn Parker from
Alabama A&M. I am very pleased that you could be with us.
Good evening. It is my pleasure to take a couple of moments to acknowledge our
sponsors. These are the people who have made it possible for us to do all these kinds of
things.
They have given us funds and all kinds of support. They are the Alabama
Humanities Foundation, a state program of the National Endowment for the Humanities;
Senator Frank Sanders; The Huntsville Times; DESE Research Inc.; Mevatec
Corporation; and Alabama Representative, Laura Hall. At Alabama A&M, we have the
Office of the President, Office of the Provost, the State Black Archives Research Center
and Museum, Title III Telecommunications and Distance Learning Center, Office of
Student Development, the Honor Center, Sociology/Social Work Programs and the
History Political Science Programs. At the University of Alabama in Huntsville, we have
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the Office of the President, Office of the Provost, The History Farum Banking
Foundation, Sociology, Social Issues Symposium, The Humanities Center, The Division
of Continuing Education, the Honors Program and the Office of Multi-Cultural Affairs,
Office of Student Affairs and the UAH Copy Center. Let's give these people a show of
appreciation. I've been asked to announce that the Charles Moore exhibit, and by the
way, Charles Moore's pictures are the ones you see on our brochure that hopefully each
of you has received. The Charles Moore exhibit on Civil Rights Photos will open at the
Union Grove Gallery on the UAH campus, Monday through Friday, 12:30 until 4:30. Is
it already open Jack? It is already open. I also need to ask you to remember to please turn
in to us your evaluation forms. You may leave them with any of the ladies at the back. If
you have to leave them on your chair, that's fine but please fill out the evaluation forms
and leave those with us. We would appreciate that. I have the pleasure of presenting the
young lady who is going to introduce our speaker.
Ms. Melanie Crutchfield, a
sophomore premed major from Columbus, Georgia is a valued member of the Alabama
A&M University Honors Program. She is broadly involved in all aspects of the program.
She is a varsity Honda Campus All Star Challenge Participant and she represented us in
Orlando for this national competition. She will represent A&M University in New York
at the Thurgood Marshall Scholar's Conference. She has distinguished herself as an upand-coming scholar and she plans to become a medical doctor, specializing in Pediatric
Pathology and Childhood Diseases.
I am delighted to present to you, Ms. Melanie
Crutchfield, who will introduce our speaker for this seminar.
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University
Introduction: This evening's presenter, Dr. Linda Reed, returns to our campus in a
capacity that personifies the excellence and accomplishments that our legacy allows us to
expect of our graduates. Dr. Reed is a 1977 graduate of Alabama A&M University. She
received her Ph.D. from Indiana University, with a specialization in African-American
History, Twentieth Century. Her accomplishments are numerous and distinctive. She
presently serves as Associate Professor of History at the University of Houston and with
the Martin Luther King Jr./Cesar Chavez/Rosa Parks, Visiting Professor at Michigan
State University. Additionally her career has taken her to various positions at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Auburn University, as well as Indiana
University. Her awards too, are many and varied. She is a Ford Foundation Fellow, a
Carter G. Woodson Fellow, a University of Houston City Council Brain Wit Award
Winner and a recipient of the Young Black Achievers of Houston Award, Question and
Review. Dr. Reed has published a variety of books and essays relevant to the Civil
Rights Movement.
Some of those include, Fannie Lou Hamer, Civil Rights Leader,
Brown Decision, Historical Context and an Historian's Reflection, various entries in the
Encyclopedia of African-American Civil Rights and the award winning book, Simple
Decency and Common Sense: The Southern Conference Movement. Her intellectual
interest is in the American South and the General Civil Rights. It is my pleasure to
present to you our speaker for this evening's program, Dr. Linda Reed.
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Linda Reed: I think I will hire Melanie to introduce me all around. It is certainly a
pleasure to be back to what is practically home to me, Alabama A&M University. The
secret is out. I graduated in 1977. I think some ofus were talking earlier and one person
said, "You probably don't want to say what year you graduated." So the secret is out.
Thank you Melanie!
That was such a wonderful introduction.
I want to thank the
planning committee for thinking so highly of my work in terms of what I have done with
some of the interpretations of the Civil Rights Movement, in order to include me in this
very stellar group of scholars and activists from that period. It is really an honor. I said
to one of the persons on the planning committee that I wish I could just come back to
each one of these lectures myself. They are just absolutely fantastic and I am truly
honored to be included among that group of individuals.
I want to share just one story about my time here at Alabama A& M University.
I was telling this to one of the students earlier today. You know, Alabama A&M is
referred to as the Hill and so students may not realize it. Your exercise program is built
in. Well, we're into physical fitness now. I won't tell you what my weight was when I
used to be a student here. I used to have classes down in this area of the campus. Just
before choir practice, I would walk all the way across campus up to either Buchanan Hall
or one of the dorms up on the highest part of the hill, for a fifteen-minute power nap
before six o'clock choir rehearsal. I was in the choir the entire four years that I was here.
It is just wonderful to think about that built-in exercise program. That is just one of the
stories, but there are so many that I could share about this wonderful institution. Just one
more, and this is really for the young people who might be students here, or students
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anywhere else. One of the things that was said to me in the very first weeks of the time
that I was here was from Dr. Henry Bradford. It was in chapel. He said, 'There is no
reason why any of you should leave Alabama A&M University and not be known on
your campus." I have made that part of my life's mission that wherever I am, people
should know who I am and what I stand for, so much so that as I resigned from being
director of the African-American Studies Program this summer, one of the things my
dean said about me was, "Well you know Linda will come with her issues and she is not
always so soft spoken about them, to put it mildly." I learned a lot while I was here at
Alabama A& M and I am very appreciative of it.
This evening I want to talk about the subject "Simple Decency and Common
Sense, A Message for all Times." Some of you might know that this title is taken from
the book with that same title. America must be concerned with bridging economic gaps
and perhaps a small group, such as the Southern Conference Movement, that is willing to
step ahead of the status quo people of our time, would be a start. Yes, our problems are
of the magnitude to require federal actions but individual efforts could also help. With a
limited time to speak this evening, I want to talk about the Southern Conference for
Human Welfare's founding, about the significance of my labeling the Southern
Conference Movement's Mission as one of simple decency and common sense and some
of the struggles of the other organizations, the Southern Conference Educational Fund in
the period just after the I 940's, a lot of the work was carried on the l 940's but some of
the work took us into the 1950's.
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I want to make a brief mention up front about the Southern Conference
Movement and how it began. I talked a little bit about how happy I am to be back at my
alma mater but also it is very appropriate to talk about the Southern Conference for
Human Welfare and the Southern Conference Educational Fund here because Alabama is
the place where the Southern Conference Movement had its beginning.
In 1938, at
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's urging, the National Emergency Council, made up
largely of Southerners, including the University of North Carolina's president, Frank P.
Graham, and labor organizer Luther Randolph Mason, studied economic conditions of
the South. I will talk a little bit about that more. But then, there is also the question of
why there was a need for the Southern Conference for Human Welfare in 1938.
During the l 870's and l 880's, as white Southerners struggled to compete with the
North's rapidly growing economy, progressive Southerners coined the term New South to
draw attention to the region's industrial growth. The South proved hospitable to a variety
of industries, textiles, tobacco, steel, and iron railroads. Southern industries in one way
or another enjoyed the advantages of proximity to raw material, more transportation cost
and cheap labor.
With industry concentrated in large cities such as Birmingham,
Alabama; Atlanta, Georgia; Richmond, Virginia; and Louisville, Kentucky, the New
South eventually came to reference as the South of the cities, factories and blast furnaces
as opposed to the rural South. New South people wanted the South to move forward
industrially. What about all of its regions? What about the rest of the South?
The
Southern society for the promotion of the study of race conditions in the South, meeting
in Montgomery, Alabama, gives us a clue. In 1900, that organization epitomized the
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views of the various New South spokesperson on the concept of white supremacy. This
lily-white gathering set out to solve the Southern racial problem beginning with placing
the blame on black people for the backwardness of the Southern economy.
The
conferees failed to produce a single responsible proposal by which to resolve their grade
problem because they defined the South and Southerners as white and refused to see the
black people as an integral part of the Southern economy. This analysis contained a
serious contradiction.
As a Southern society for the promotion of the study of race
conditions in the South blamed Africa- Americans for the region's economic troubles.
Indeed, if the economic situation of the whites improved and that of blacks remained
dismal, all would be well, the white organization believed. The social dominance of
whites and absolute degradation of black people remained the organization's most
important goal. Black Americans must be kept wholly within the limits of Jim Crow at
all cost, according to this organization.
By the l 930's and l 940's, the South remained in many ways the same as the
South of the 1880's and 1890's and also what that organization talked about in terms of
the 1900' s, despite the claim of some southerners that after the turn of the century, the
region could be labeled a New South. In 1938, a small group of mostly white southern
liberals gave the term a new meaning. Southern liberals of the twentieth century did not
dissociate the New South totally from its original intended use. In addition to New South
denoting industrial development, Southern liberals used the term to suggest that
Southerners finally needed to dismantle old South values in regard to racial equality. In a
sense, in Southern economic problems of the 1930's, Southern liberals, unlike most white
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Southerners, figured inequities and discrimination against African-Americans as major
drawbacks for the fullest development of the Southern economy. Although the region
had gone far in its industrial growth, Southern liberals argued that racial inequities
slowed economic progress in the realization of the New South. Blacks, still treated as
inferior, continued to be disfranchised, to face violence at the hands of racist whites, to be
denied well paying jobs, to experience injustice in the judicial system, and to be forced to
live in narrowly circumscribed and substandard housing. Simply put, blacks in the South,
during the twentieth century, like those of the late nineteenth century, continuously faced
conditions of economic, political and social oppression. Indeed, between 1920 and 1930,
over a million black people left the region in search of a better life in the North and other
sections of the country. Yet the South held the majority of the black population. Liberal
Southern whites eventually allied themselves with those educated African-Americans
who stayed in the American South in their struggle for justice, initially addressing the
economic gap between the racist and later political and social unfairness. The federal
government helped Southern liberals associate industrialism with Southern values also.
However productive the South had been at the turn of the century, by 1938 the New South
prosperity had become precarious. Also, in 1938 the National Emergency Council, a
group that President Roosevelt set up to study economic conditions in the South,
described the region as the nation's number one economic problem, the nation's problem,
not merely the South's.
Although the South was the poorest region in the country, the NEC's report on the
economic conditions of the South argued, "It has the potential for becoming the richest."
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The report contended that institutional deficiencies kept the South from realizing its
potential. In discussions on economic resources, education, health, housing and labor,
the NEC addressed the same issues that Southern liberals tackled to create a just society.
The NEC concluded that the South's white population suffered because of the regions
poor economy and that black people suffered more. The Roosevelt administration and
the NEC linked Southern poverty and racism in an unprecedented way, but having
negative commentary on the South, left Southerners to search for their own solutions.
Southerners generally agreed with the findings of the NEC report, but refused to
support it because they did not feel strong support for President Roosevelt and there was
a great deal of anti-New Deal sentiment.
At the same time, Southern liberals in
particular, accepted that the region's economic problems were tied to its resistance to end
racial discrimination. In direct response to the NEC report, a group of Southern black
and white liberals founded the Southern Conference for Human Welfare in Birmingham,
Alabama in November of 1938. The Southern Conference for Human Welfare and the
Southern Conference Educational Fund, the group that the Southern Conference set up in
1946 for tax-exempt purposes and to further its work in race relations, fought to create a
democratic South, an effort that faced all kinds of obstacles and difficulties. Indeed the
importance of maintaining white supremacy, especially the economic dominance of
whites over black, was so paramount in the minds of many Southern whites that they
were willing to see the entire region languish in order to maintain their way of life.
Most Southern whites considered economic dominance central to the maintenance
of white supremacy and remained committed to sustaining racial segregation. Even at the
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height of the Civil Rights Movement in the l 960's, most white Southerners resisted
efforts to end racial discrimination.
Yet, not all whites were segregationists, as the
activities of the inter-racial Southern Conference to Human Welfare and the Southern
Conference Educational Fund made clear. As I said, it was organized in the fall of 1938,
largely through the efforts of Louise 0. Charleston, a Southern white woman and
commissioner in Birmingham. The Southern Conference to Human Welfare sought to
help Southern whites to understand that to remove limitations on its African-American
citizens was to ensure the region's greater prosperity.
The Southern led Southern
Conference became a welfare for its time, became the progressive movement, a
movement that would respond to the NEC report with specific prescriptions to cure the
ills that the report described.
The Southern Conference to Human Welfare's
recommendation challenged President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Congress and
especially Southern citizens, to improve the regions.
The Southern Conference for
Human Welfare singled out, for instance, the unequal facilities for white and black school
children.
The organizations membership reminded its region that a supreme court
decision of Plessy versus Ferguson of 1896, that states could set up separate facilities for
black people as long as these places were equal to those that were provided for whites.
The problem, of course, as the Southern Conference for Human Welfare reminded, was
that places for black people never equaled those places that were set up for whites, if any
were provided at all.
The Southern Conference for Human Welfare also pointed out the problem with
unequal salaries of black and white teachers and unequal incomes of black and white
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tenant farmers as examples of the inequity and wastefulness of a racially segregated
society. Races that could not reap equal benefits for their labor could not live together
harmoniously.
It is important to emphasize that the ideas and ideals underlying the
creation of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, have a history stretching back
to the New South era of the 1880's. During the 1880's, a number of prominent white
Southerners coined the term New South in a concerted effort to incite actions for Southern
economic growth. In 1938, what some of the white Southerners were saying is that there
was a new way to put it and that way was to be inclusive of everyone. The Southern
Conference for Human Welfare became involved in many issues, even though its origins
grew out of a determination to improve the South economically. From 1938 to 1948, the
Southern Conference for Human Welfare's major goal was to repeal the poll tax, one of
those road blocks set up in late nineteenth century America to prevent black males from
voting. In many Southern communities, whites feared that if African-Americans were
allowed to exercise their right to vote, they would gain too much political power. Recall
that in the time of redemption, that is the return of white rule after reconstruction ended
in 1877 with the inauguration of Rutherford B. Hayes as President, black men voted
when they could vote at all. When they voted, they voted Republican.
As a result,
during the 1890's, Southern states, including Alabama, began using several tactics to
deny the vote to blacks. Some states required voters to own property or to pay poll tax, a
special fee that must be paid before a person was permitted to vote. Both of these
requirements were beyond the financial reach of most African-Americans. Voters also
had to pass literacy tests. These tests were supposed to demonstrate that a voter could
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read, write and meet minimum standards of knowledge, but like the property requirement
and the poll tax, literacy tests were really designed to keep African-Americans from
voting. In fact, whites often gave African-Americans much more difficult tests than the
ones given to whites. With some of the speakers who will come later on, you will get
real specific examples of how those tests when given in the I 950's and l 960's were
really ridiculous. If you ever get a chance to visit the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis,
there is a little mechanical device in there where you just spin the wheel and it points out
to you a possibility of how you might have been denied the right to vote on any particular
day. It could include a whole array of things as, "Well, you didn't know how many
bubbles were in a bar of soap" or something that ridiculous. But those tests did continue
in big waves all the way up into the l 960's and that is one of the reasons why you hear
about the Freedom Schools. That was a way to try to educate voters so that they could
pass the test. To ensure that the literacy test did not keep too many poor whites from
voting, some states passed special laws with grandfather clauses. These laws exempted
men from certain voting restrictions if they had already voted or, if they had ancestors,
for instance grandfathers, who had voted prior to black males being granted suffrage.
African-Americans, of course, did not meet the qualifications and thus had to take the
literacy tests. All of these laws kept African-Americans from voting while not singling
out the group name, which would have been unconstitutional. Even though there were
some of these that were declared unconstitutional in 1950 and the time after, some states
continued the practice. Alabama, Louisiana and North Carolina, were the only three
Southern states that interfered with voters with the specific use of all four measures, that
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1s, using the grandfather clause, the property tax, the literacy test, and the poll tax.
Georgia was the only Southern state that did not use the poll tax and the poll tax
remained a problem as late as 1938. Between 1938 and 1948, the Southern Conference
for Human Welfare, through it's institutionalized Civil Rights committee, brought into
formation a national committee to abolish the poll tax.
One of the key people in the campaign to abolish the poll tax was a woman from
Alabama, Virginia Durr. A lot of you had an opportunity to meet her. I interviewed her
for the scholarship presented in Simple Decency and Common Sense. She was a very
colorful person in terms of her take on life. I guess you had to be in order to endure as
much as some of these individuals did. She was very forceful in that campaign to abolish
the poll tax between 1938 and 1948. Of course, a lot of the work included distributing
literature, speakers and a whole series of educational kinds of things. The work was quite
forbidding. It was not until the 1960's, with constitutional amendment, that the poll tax
was finally abolished. But, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare made that whole
effort part of its goal. It was a very forthright goal.
There were quite a number of other individuals involved m the Southern
Conference Movement.
Birmingham, Alabama.
I have mentioned Louise Charleston, a woman from
Joseph Gelzers was a physics professor at the University of
Alabama who was also quite important for the work of the Southern Conference
Movement. There were a number of college presidents, business people, labor leaders
and workers and so with this cross section, a Southern Conference for Human Welfare
boasted of having every segment of society represented and participating in its serious
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campaigns and activities. Two of those individuals you have probably learned a little bit
about. One of these people was Mary McCloud Bethune, who was founder of what we
came to know as the Bethune Cookman College, and her dear friend, Eleanor Roosevelt.
They became true pals in a lot of the work in the l 930's all the way up through the time
ofBethune's death in the 1950's and Eleanor Roosevelt's death in the 1960's. Both of
them were present at the meeting in 1938. When local racial moors intruded at the
Southern Conference meeting in November of 1938, Governor Roosevelt responded
defiantly. Although whites and blacks had separate accommodations and ate separately
because of Jim Crow laws, they sat wherever they wanted at the opening session on
November 20th and even until late afternoon on November 21st . None of the participants
at the conference had complained, but when the police department learned of the
integrated seating, an order came to the Southern Conference for Human Welfare from
the city commissioner, Theopolus Eugene Bull Conner, the "Infamous Bull Conner," we
liked to call him, that the audience had to segregate, that is, whites on one side of the
aisle, and blacks on the other side, or the group would lose use of the city auditorium. If
the Southern Conference for Human Welfare continued to use the auditorium and the
audience remained mixed, the commissioner threatened to arrest the Southern Conference
for Human Welfare Conference attendees. Doubting that any local official would dare
arrest the first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt sat with the blacks until the police requested that
she move. But, even then, she did so restively and continued to make her point by placing
a folding chair in the aisle just beyond the center. She sat there during all of the sessions
she attended. For the remainder of the conference, police came to enforce the segregation
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ordinance, sometimes creating such anxiety that some participants would not even cross
the aisle to speak to a friend of the other race for fear of being arrested.
As I said, I met quite a number of people who were part of the Southern
Conference Movement. One of those individuals hailed from South Carolina, Modjeska
Simkins. I met Mrs. Simkins when she was, I think, in her late 80's and she lived to be in
her 90's, and a lot of these individuals became very good friends of mine. Modjeska
Simkins, when she was alive, loved to share the story about Eleanor Roosevelt and that
seat in the center aisle and, as Mrs. Simkins would tell the story, she would say, "Eleanor
Roosevelt sat that chair in the middle aisle and she put one hip on one side for the whites
and one hip on the other side for the blacks." She would just really roar in laughter about
that particular incident. These individuals did have a sense of humor about life and I
think it was one of things that kept them going. They had to have some sense of humor
to endure.
Conner's interference resulted in the Southern Conference for Human Welfare
adopting the resolution condemning segregation. And also, the Southern Conference for
Human Welfare promised to hold all of its future meetings in cities where segregation
was not an issue. To that end, the group met in Nashville, Tennessee; Chattanooga,
Tennessee; and New Orleans, between 1940 and 1948. It was in 1948 that the Southern
Conference for Human Welfare, as it had come to be called, dismantled and the Southern
Conference Educational Fund, the institution that had been formed in 1946, continued its
mission. Far too late in 1938, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare came to
accept that racism and economics were related one to the other. The weak-hearted left the
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movement when the Southern Conference for Human Welfare stood its ground, but a
courageous few continued to work with the Southern Conference Educational Fund for
the next thirty plus years. It is really the work of the Southern Conference Educational
Fund that came to make the many issues of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare
a reality.
What about this issue of Simple Decency and Common Sense? If we have been
listening lately, we hear the words, common sense, quite often. Former President George
Bush talked about the need to use common sense to address the crimes of inner cities.
Other politicians used the words to address many issues. Even a commercial in Texas
and some of the other states around talk about common sense bank loans. It is possible
that I hear the words more often because they are part of my book title and are quite
important in my assessment of two Southern interracial organizations.
The Southern
Conference movement then refers to the Southern Conference for Human Welfare and
the Southern Conference Educational Fund, and their efforts between 1938 and far into
the l 970's. These organizations offered a program of what they called Simple Decency
and Common Sense to rectify the South's imbalances.
This rectification called for
identifying the poor economic status of black people as a Southern problem and then also
included black people when the solutions were sought. Neither organization formally
termed the effort of transforming the South as simple decency, but several individuals
linked the concept with the Southern Conference Movement, often speaking of a simple
decency and common sense approach for bringing about reform.
The Southern
Conference Educational Fund President, Aubrey Williams, a native Alabamian and New
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Deal administrator with the Roosevelt administration, wrote in 1950, "We need to take
some chances in behalf of decency."
In October of 1955, the Southern Conference
Movement monthly publication, The Southern Patriots headlined, "New Orleans
integration petition proves decencies stressed". Black leaders said it best when they
protested senate on un-American activities hearings in the l 950's.
Thirty-two leaders
collectively from the South border states and the District of Columbia, in March of 1954,
demanded of Mississippi Senator James Eastman that, "As an act of simple decency and
common sense, you make appropriate apologies to those individuals whose names have
been sullied in the press."
What had happened in the un-American activities cases of the 1950's is that
largely white Southerners who had struggled in the efforts with African-Americans were
redbaited, that is, they were accused of being communists, so it would interfere with the
work that they were doing with black people. Well, the remainder of this letter could
apply to some of our present day crises for the leaders continued, and I quote, "In the
opinion of the undersigned, the action of your subcommittee against the Southern
Conference Educational Fund is an attack upon the Negro community of this nation.
This organization has spearheaded the fight against segregation in the South. When your
statements and those of your fellow committee members smear the fund, the leadership,
you are also disparaging the hopes and aspiration of Negro people. It is ridiculous to
impute this loyalty of the Southern Conference Educational Fund. Its Board of Directors,
composed equally of Whites and Negroes includes many distinguished civic leaders in
Southern States. Its sole concern throughout the years has been with the evil effects of
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racial segregation m education, hospital services, transportation, and other public
facilities. Its goal of harmoniously ending all racial barriers is our goal. How can you
presume to sit in judgment on the patriotism of an organization which shares with vicePresident Nixon the conviction that every act of racial discrimination or prejudice in the
United States hurts America as much as an espionage agent who turns over a weapon to a
foreign country." Reverend J. Echols Laury, of Mobile Alabama, signed the letter.
In 1958 one supporter said, I certainly want to support the cause of decency in
the South. As we continue to hear the words, common sense, in our time, I hope we will
begin to also see signs of simple decency that ought to be placed right alongside of
common sense. My grandfather used to tease me all the time when I was so interested in
being educated. He used to say, "Well, you learn a lot of things in school but they don't
teach you any common sense. The Southern Conference Educational Fund set out at
many meeting to challenge these issues of racial justice in the l 950's. Though hardly
because of its efforts alone in the l 950's, the Southern Conference Educational Fund
observed the beginning of the fruition of its dream. Segregation was ending and eventual
demise of overt racial discrimination was within sight. The most important of these
breakthroughs, of course, is the Supreme Court decision in Brown versus the Board of
Education in 1954 and then the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 and 1956, all made
evident that blacks were taking charge of the struggle for civil rights.
While individuals in the Southern Conference Educational Fund came to realize
that the struggle for equality was changing in make-up, black civil rights leaders
continued to welcome the help and support of whites sympathetic to their demands for a
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just society. The Supreme Court decision in Brown ended a long struggle for blacks and
white liberals and for the first time since the Plessy case of 1896, segregationists were
placed on the defensive. The Brown decision embraced only one aspect of racial equality
and that was public education and so blacks had yet many other obstacles to overcome,
mainly those blocking the way to equitable economic and political opportunities.
Resistance and oppression dominated the Southern scene after the Brown decision and
added to the already difficult task of blacks and their white Southern counterparts in the
Civil Rights Movement. Mississippi Congressman, John Bail Williams, labeled May 14,
1954, the day that the Supreme Court announced its decision, as Black Monday and two
months later he joined other staunch segregationists in forming the first white citizens
council in Indianola Mississippi.
Throughout the l 950's, Southern legislators proceeded with various means to
evade school integration, the most noble example of which was the Southern manifesto,
whereby Southern senators and congressmen pledged to use all lawful means to bring
about a reversal of this decision.
We heard a little bit about that last year with the
campaign from Al Gore because his father was one of the Southern politicians who
refused to sign the Southern Manifesto in the l 950's.
The legislators and the white
Southern majority proved quite successful in various strategies to prevent school
integration. As late as the mid-l 960's, most public schools in Alabama, South Carolina
and Mississippi had not been integrated. Most white Southerners, accustomed to the use
of violence to maintain their superior status, proved no exception to this rule in the
decades of the 1950's and 1960's. Indeed, the reason why historians labeled this period
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the second reconstruction is due partly to the many violent acts on black and white
sympathizers by advocates of the status quo that occurred more intensely during the
l 950's and l 960's than at any other time after the civil war.
Moreover, not since
Reconstruction had Southerners so avidly tested the strength of state's rights versus
federal authority. While the educational fund continued to expect that it could change the
mentality of most white Southerners through public awareness and condemnation, a few
black leaders anticipated a massive resistance from the segregationists. In the aftermath
of the Brown decision then, blacks experienced both new hope and dread for pensive
moments based on the reactions of diehard segregationists. Roscoe Dunjee, editor of the
Oklahoma City's Black Dispatch and Educational Fund board member, pointed to
evidence of developments in his state and concluded that in the mid-1950's the South
faced its darkest hour and that, 'The era presented the most challenging moments simply
because white reaction will try to join with Negro Uncle Tom's to defeat our objective."
The NAACP leader, Roy Wilkins, agreed with Dunjee's assessment and he also warned
of the dark before the dawn. Wilkins reasoned that a great many white people in the
South experienced "a tremendous shock" not because the NAACP and other civil rights
organizations advocated the abolition of segregation but because, Wilkins said, "For the
first time since Reconstruction, they are making absolutely no headway with the old
tested and tried technique through which they have managed to stave off and defeat
similar efforts in the past." Wilkins previously observed that more blacks, than in the
l 950's, had been easily intimidated by white violence and threats.
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During that period, Wilkins said, "Whites only had to make their feelings known and to
pass the word out to their colored people and a movement was stopped in its tracks,
except for a persistent minority." Now that African-Americans loudly proclaimed that
segregation had to end, Wilkins believed such actions has resulted for the first time in the
so-called upper class white people bonding together in organizations like the White
Citizens Council and similar groups to fight desegregation and that "Their own colored
people and the NAACP." Prior to this time, in Wilkins assessment, they had never had to
organize, not in such a concerted way, but Wilkins and Dunjee saw the end of the White
Citizens Council Movement as soon as it started because, as they understood it, although
it was enjoying temporary success, it was doomed because it had to come out and openly
use methods that would draw to its condemnation nationally. Also, Wilkins and Dunjee
summed up the importance of the Brown decision when they predicted the demise of the
White Citizens Council Movement because, in the ultimate court tests, the White Citizens
Council cannot win now. As I said with the Brown decision, at least the law now was on
the side of people who wanted to bring about desegregation.
They did not have the
confidence that the white Southern majority would slowly convert to the Southern
Conference Educational Fund, but at least Wilkins and Dunjee valued the silent
condemnation and non-cooperation of important segments of the white Southern
community.
The idealism of the educational fund in its efforts to make the American public
aware of the horrors of segregation and discrimination remained a significant part of the
Civil Rights Movement. And, of course, there are many stories that could be shared
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about the way in which the White Citizens Council and other organizations would be
condemned. For instance, there were so many bombings in Birmingham that the city
became called "Bombingham" as opposed to Birmingham.
The historian, Gilbert Osaski lists between January of 1955 and January of 1959,
Alabama alone saw over fifty-five acts of violence on the part of whites against blacks,
over half of which occurred in Birmingham. A similar kind of story can be told in
Mississippi and some of the other places around the South. There is the infamous case of
Emmett Till, who was murdered in Mississippi in 1955. There are numerous horror
stories about that. In a march in April and September of 1956, attention centered on
Autherine Lucy, when the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, after a three-year court
fight, admitted her as its first black student. The disruption at the school caused by mob
violence of white segregationists, far from outside of the Tuscaloosa area, compelled the
University's board of trustees to expel Lucy for her own safety and because she accused
the University of conspiring with the white mob against her. The end result, that is, in
1992, Autherine Lucy earned her Masters Degree from the University of Alabama. She
and her daughter graduated together.
For the rest of the l 950's, Fred Shuttlesworth shared many stories of violence
from the Birmingham area and he of course will tell you more of those stories when he is
here. Obvious other horrific episodes of the 1950's, the long decade of red-baiting, the
Little Rock incident and so many others, show the light of the horror of the Civil Rights
Movement and what people had to endure. White leaders of the educational fund paid for
their alliance with blacks in the Civil Rights Movement. Its president, Aubrey Williams,
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did not escape economic reprisal. In 1957, he said he had to end the publication of the
Southern Farmer, a monthly that came out from Montgomery.
Williams concluded,
'They had me labeled as a bad guy from the start and I have never been able to convince
them that I was not even as radical as Thomas Jefferson." Later in 1957, he went on to
say to his close friend James Dombrowski, who was for a long time President of the
Southern Conference Educational Fund, "I can't get the straight of this. I do not want to
believe that it is due to the Birmingham news article," which reported of his activities in
the Southern Conference Movement and/or "my stand on the Little Rock debacle, but it
comes and just at this time." In other words, he was saying if they had some problem
with me, they could have done this at any other time.
Economic interests were just as important to the majority of Southern whites as
the continued hope to maintain white supremacy. Whites hoped to rob blacks of a chance
of an education that would help them obtain better jobs.
Whites were ahead
economically and the Southern white majority would see to it that the situation remained
that way. The question of integration over economics or vice versa plagued the entire
Civil Rights Movement. Blacks were becoming more aware during the debacle of the
Little Rock situation or other massive resistance incidents of the importance of economic
security, which had been a major concern of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare
when it was first founded in 1938. When the Southern Conference placed emphasis on
equal economic opportunities in the late l 930's, few liberals, black or white, developed
means for achieving that specific goal. The Little Rock incident, because the school
desegregation effort created so much attention, caused many blacks to question whether
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the integration of schools was the most important aspect of African-American's fight for
first class citizenship.
P. B. Young, publisher and editor of the Norfolk, Virginia Journal and Guide
newspaper and also a black leader who sought only integration as recently as the l 950's,
believed that equal opportunity in employment constituted the most essential step to first
class citizenship. The cycle was catchy, however. In order to obtain high status jobs,
blacks needed education and training of high quality. Segregation also needed to be
abolished for it, like inferior education, prevented blacks from progressing to their full
potential. Consequently, Young saw the Brown decision as the removal of the basic
reasons for legal segregation and believed that it would enable blacks eventually to
acquire better homes and also better jobs. Although integration was not entirely a school
question, it remained the center of attention for the rest of the 1950's in terms of the Civil
Rights Movement.
The debate shifted back and forth but by the late 1960's, black
leaders decided that equal economic opportunity was the key to equal treatment in all
aspects of American society.
By 1960, when the sit-in movement and freedom rides had taken the Civil Rights
Movement yet to another level, and people like Virginia Durr and her husband
encountered almost daily insanities, the situation grew so desperate that when the New
Yorker carried a story about the Durr's from Montgomery, most people knew from
reading the story who the Durr' s were. This led to a letter campaign that came into the
Durr's, so they got a lot of support from other sections of the country.
One of the
supporters wrote Virginia Durr, she called herself a friend at a distance and she said, "I
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hope this letter will offer a bit of friendship to give you some feeling that your courage is
not wasted. It spreads more seeds than you may ever realize and it enables you to live
with yourself. I wonder how many of the people who snub you on the streets envy you
that." There were a lot of other people who believed in and wanted to see the Southern
liberals and African-Americans succeed. What was it about the few white Southerners
that drove them to ally with blacks in the struggle?
One liberal, white Southern, Anne Braden, who was born in Birmingham,
Alabama and later moved to Louisville, Kentucky, described the intensity of the Southern
white majority as neurotic and segregationists described that of the liberals in the same
way. So, each side was calling the other neurotic. Anne Braden said that she, "grew up in
a sick society and a sick society makes neurotics of one kind or another, on one side or
another. It makes people like those who could take pleasure in killing and mutilating
Emmett Till, and it makes people like me," she said. Braden also believed that when a
supreme court outlined its decision on the effects of segregation on the black child, it
might have included some discussion about what segregation did to the white child. If
neurotics were what liberals ought to be called, Braden concluded that even if the name
applied there, there were many neurotics like herself in the South and that the answer did
not rest with the group who called themselves, "Saner and more practical and more
moderate," who insisted that change occur at a slower pace. She went on to say, "As
long as segregation remains a fact in communities all over the South, there will be people
like us who are compelled to act." Braden's metaphor for an integrated and just society
depicted a world without walls. She saw the Interracial Movement and the Southern
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Conference Educational Fund and others as a tearing down of the wall of segregation and
discrimination.
The other thing that people like Braden came to understand is that when they did
their work, there was always not the support that came from the white community, as
they felt was always there for black people in their community. One of those persons
who put into words his expressions about that was Aubrey Williams, who was president
of the Southern Conference Movement, and also Virginia Durr. They talked about the
bitterness that they felt within the struggle because they did not get very much support
from the white community.
Williams' disillusionment, partly due to his physical
condition by the late l 950's, he was dying from cancer, and partly due to a resentment of
support that he sensed that blacks shared from their own, as I said, overwhelmed his
views of the Civil Rights Movement by the late 1950's. At that time what he said was
that he really would like to see more support. I will just share with you part of what he
wrote in terms of his assessment of some of the blacks and whites of that struggle. One
of the things that I described that what historians do is that we read other people's mail,
so I'll share with you part of his letter also.
He said, "There are three kinds of leaders."
There are the shark troops. There are the expendables. These bear the burden of making
the attacks upon the enemies of free men. They must also take any new ground gained
from mankind.
Modjeska Simkins belonged to this group.
Then there are the
Proclaimers, wherein once new ground is taken, they view the situation as having been
accepted by society. They emerge and give voice and sanction to the new areas of rights
and justice. These are the Ralph McGill's and the Harry Ashmore's. In this sense, he is
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calling them actually moderate, which is not such a good kind of thing. Then there are
the politicians who, once the additional ground has been won and the Proclaimers have
set their seal upon it about face and to make legal what they had only recently denounced
as the wild schemes of radical and impractical idealists.
Modjeska Simkins has been for the span of her life, of the shock troops and the
expendables, though she is still far from being expended. One might steal a title from a
Broadway play now in favor, The Indestructible Molly Brown and say, "No more
appropriate title could be found for Modjeska". Judging history by how advances have
come about in our time, one begins to doubt the validity of their nomination and credits
of and for fame. For if we are to judge the probabilities of who will go down in history
as the leaders of those forces who secured the final friend of the Negro. It will be some
President of the United States or some individual who have become a symbol. It will not
be the Modjeska Simkins' or the E.B. Mixon's, (I have not mentioned him but you will
hear about him later and his connection to Montgomery) or James Dombrowski.
Yet
these and others like them are the people that made it possible for the Ralph McGill's and
the Harry Ashmore's to voice an acceptance of the ground taken.
I do not value Ralph McGill less because I value Modjeska Simkins more. I do
not deny the importance of a Hubert Humphrey but I do say that without a Modjeska
Simpkins, he nor others like him would have done what was able to be accomplished or
attempted to do what was done. In a sense, the Southern Conference Educational Fund
leaders can be likened then to the abolitionists, who could not take credit for the
Emancipation of Slaves, though this group were the ones who made the abolition of
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slaves there sincere purpose. But abolitionists, few in number, as the Southern liberals of
the Southern Conference Educational Fund, predicted slavery's end and published large
quantities of literature with such announcements.
Not unlike the abolitionists, the
Educational Fund fulfilled a certain mission by the role it played in the Civil Rights
Movement. So, the Southern Conference Movement made a difference in the lives of
black people and white people that may not be known outside of Alabama, or the South.
I believe that their message if practiced could help us resolve many of the problems of
our present time. We have to become more inclusive."
Linda Reed will be more than willing to entertain questions at this moment. We now
open the floor for questioning.
Linda Reed: Some other people that are up here probably can help me keep track of
whose hands are going up.
Q: For The December 4th lecture that is going to address the future and the past of the
Civil Rights Movement, I would like for you to share with us, your opinion about what is
happening in South Africa, as far as reparation is concerned with slavery, and having new
individuals in the scene here in America, such as Clarence Thomas, J. C. Watts and Alan
Keyes.
In what direction do you see the Civil Rights Movement taking in the 2 I st
century, being that we have reparation and we have extremely conservative wealth
knowing black individuals?
A: Thank you for your question. As I emphasized with a lot of what I said this evening,
as the Civil Rights struggle grew, it came more and more to that question of economics.
think in the 21st century, the question is still a matter of economics. We have a larger
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number of African-Americans for sure who are of a different class; people who have
really good jobs and very high incomes. Then you have a large percentage of AfricanAmericans who do not do well because of poor education, which is one of the concerns
of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. They also do not have the opportunities
because of their lack of education. Also in assessing the economic status of the country
on that issue of reparation, we have come to understand that the institution of slavery was
very important for the development of America and North America, as we have come to
know it. Now people are bringing that into question and wanting to look at it. Some
organizations and individuals feel that there is a specific part of that which should go to
individuals.
There are others who have seen it in such a way that it could be
institutionalized.
For instance, institutions that would educate a larger number of
African-Americans and perhaps would have specific kinds of financial backing and that
kind of thing. That question of economics is still a very important one.
So, on that
question of reparation, we have seen how divisive it became for the conference in South
Africa. The question still is quite central, that is the issue of economics is still quite
central to many of the other discussions about how we can all move forward. As many
members of the Southern Conference Movement came to explain it, they had a very
practical, or common sense kind of way to approach it. People who could not reap the
same types of benefits from their labor will not feel that they had been included or feel
tied into a productive community etc., that is tied into crime and all other kinds of things.
It was important for the Southern Conference Movement. I don't know what some of
those individuals would say about reparation but I would think that many of them would
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support the principle of it; there is some kind of way that people who are descendants of
the institution of slavery could benefit in some kind of way. It is a very long and
debatable kind of issue.
You see some of those same kinds of issues tied with
discussions on affirmative actions. That was a very important question and I do thank
you for it.
Q: Am I correct to assume that there was a FBI surveillance of the Southern Conference
and if so, were you able to have access to those records?
A: Yes, the FBI was very busy because of J. Edgar Hoover who served as its director for
a very long period of time. When did he get in there? It was a long time back. To
answer the question specifically, Lillian Smith, who I did not mention in the talk this
evening, was a very active member of the Southern Conference Movement. She hailed
from Georgia. She brought out a periodical on a monthly basis. She believed in all of
their efforts and activities. She was a Southern white woman. Because of that, as early
as 1931, the FBI started a file on Lillian Smith. You can ask for the records but of course
the records are sanitized. You really don't get a chance to see all of the notes that the FBI
kept on these kinds of individuals, both white Americans and black Americans. You
would get part of a statement at the top part of the page, most of it blacked out, and
maybe you would see something written at the end. It wasn't something that I could
make a lot of sense of. What I gathered from the work that I am doing on Fannie Lou
Hamer and having seen the papers of Paul P. Johnson and seeing some of the notes of the
people who were active in taking the notes, with that, you can get kind of a clearer sense
of what kind of the things the FBI was involved in. With the records of other collections
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that were not sanitized to the extent of the ones that you get from the FBI, you came to
understand that they sent infiltrators to meetings, for some of the support that came in, in
terms of clothing, funding and that kind of thing, to Southern States. The FBI would
interfere with some of that material being delivered. There were very deliberate ways
that the FBI interfered. There is a whole effort called COINTELPRO, where the FBI
paid specific individuals to be in meetings and report back as to specific kinds of things
that organizations and individuals were doing, even to the example of a person like
Fannie Lou Hamer who was very poor, but there is a FBI file on Fannie Lou Hamer. So,
for almost all of the organizations and individuals, there is a FBI file that one could get a
hold of to try to discern some kind of information. It is very difficult because so much of
the pages have been blackened out before it was sent out to the researcher.
Q: I was wondering whether the utilization of common sense, is that more pertinent to
political matters or social culture commonality? How would you see that?
A: Common sense in the way that a lot of the individuals that we're talking about from
the Southern Conference Movement, for them, it is something like "Can't you see it, you
know, it is right in front of you. Why is it so difficult that you have such a hard time
seeing this the way that we see it?" A lot of these individuals were very religious. They
were members of churches and they were church leaders. Part of their message was
"We're supposed to love our brother as we do ourselves. They placed part of their
emphasis on the individual level and in that sense you would not mistreat your brother or
your sister. Common sense would tell you, "Why would you continue to do this on a
regular basis?" It is something that is very fundamental to them that they are practicing
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on a regular day-to-day basis. They would like to see other Americans, including white
Southerners who believe in white supremacy, to take their approach to life. To them it is
right here. All you have to do is open your eyes. I hope that helps. I am not sure if that
is what you were asking.
Q: What was the role of political parties in the activities of the Civil Rights Movement
as they were played out in the 1950's and 1960's.
A: Now that is s very good question. For the most part, the South of the 20 th century
remained the South of the 19th century in the sense that the Democratic Party, for a long
time, was the same Democratic Party from the Reconstruction period. It aligned itself
with white supremacy, white rule, and that kind of thing. As late as 1958, that was still
the case. When Harry S. Truman insisted on presenting a Civil Rights plank in his
platform of 1948, I don't know if you've had this in any of your history classes, but
members of the Democratic party were so concerned that Strom Thurman, a young
George Wallace, a man who eventually became the governor of Mississippi, marched out
of the convention while the band played Dixie, to protest Harry Truman's support of
Civil Rights.
So, that gives you an idea of how strong this was aligned with the
Democratic Party as late as 1948. It is really hard to try to condense all of these different
history lessons but I am going to really try hard. In 1964, there was the development in
Mississippi, a third party called the Mississippi Democratic party, which challenged the
all white delegation from Mississippi. With that challenge, led famously by Fannie Lou
Hamer and some of the people who supported her, like people from the Southern
Conference Educational Fund and that organization. The Democratic Party promised that
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it would be very inclusive in the conventions after 1964. The Democratic Party kept its
promise.
The Republican Party up to this time had been the Republican party of
Abraham Lincoln. Of course there was a shift from the Republican Party for AfricanAmericans in the l 930's when more African-Americans voted the Democratic Party. In
the l 960's and thereafter, there was almost a total flip of what the parties represent. As
the Democratic party became more aligned with the types of issues that the Southern
Conference Movement stood for such as equality, and exclusiveness, more and more of
the politicians who had aligned with that party very strongly, started to align themselves
with the Republican Party. To make a long story short, without other kinds of lessons
that I don't want to go into, there was a parting of the ways almost on the issue of racial
discrimination between the parties. Now in our time, the Democratic Party is seen as the
party more of what the Republican Party was at first. That might seem a little confusing
but essentially that is how it was. The parties were quite important in terms of how
things occurred. When people were encouraging individuals to vote and to be registered
to vote, for a long time, it was to the Democratic party, but that party was changed in the
terms of not being the party that it had been in late 19th century America.
Q: Perhaps you have mentioned this and I just missed it, but what role, if any did the
Southern Conference play in some of the major events in the state in places like
Birmingham, Montgomery and Selma, or were those kind of activities beyond the
mission of the Southern Conference?
A: No, they were as active as anyone could be. One of the key roles that the white
members of the Southern Conference Educational Fund played, especially in the city and
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campaigns and some of those other efforts where people ended up being arrested, they
were in the behind the scenes efforts of raising money so that once people were arrested,
they would have funds to be released from jail. Some of them were out on the front lines,
like in the Selma march and other key instances of voter registration and that kind of
thing. Just like we heard some of the horrific stories about African-Americans, there are
similar types of stories about white Americans who also lost their lives in the process of
trying to create a democracy that was suppose to be in existence already.
Q: How did the older generations like Virginia Durr, Anne Braden and some of them
identify with some of the student organizations and student leaders in the 1960's?
A: I guess the best way to give an example is to use the example of Anne Braden, who is
an older woman; she is in her seventies now. Just last year, many people celebrated her
th
75 birthday.
Martha Norman is a real good friend of hers. Anne Braden is white and
Martha Norman is African-American. Martha Norman was one of the student workers in
SNCC in the 1960's. They are just like regular pals, except Anne still does not really
appreciate some of the music that some of the students listen to. I say that because I
invited Anne Braden, Martha Norman, Lawrence Guyot, (who I didn't talk about tonight
either) and Ed King, a white chaplain at Tugaloo College in the 1960's, to visit the
University of Houston. All of these people were involved in the Civil Rights struggle in
their respective areas. I picked them up from the airport and I took them back to the
airport. We were on our way to take Lawrence Guyot to take his flight. Anne and
Martha were going to leave later. We were all in the car. Martha and I started talking
about the music from the 1960' s. Now of course, I was just a kid when they were doing
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all of this stuff. Up until we started talking about the music, Anne was right there with
us. She was really hanging out. We started talking about the music and Anne went to
sleep. I said to Martha, "You know, she just really does not like some of the stuff that we
like." Martha said, "Yea, that's right". But they got along just fine. They appreciated
their differences. The older people were very nurturing of what the younger people were
trying to do. Of course we know that it is really the support of Ella Baker, an older
African-American woman, who nurtured, talked with, discussed, gave advice, and
mentored young college students so that the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
could come into existence in the first place. For many of them, it was no big deal. For
some of them, just like in our time, some of the older people would say, "I just don't
know what these young people are doing." I think that is going to always be the case.
For them, there is a great amount of appreciation in sharing.
Q: The time between Reconstruction of the 19th century and the Civil Rights Movement
of the l 950's and 1960's is a very long time period. How was it that things became
worse and worse?
A: This is s very interesting question. It gets us back to understanding that this is why
many historians termed the Civil Rights Movement The Second Reconstruction because
things did get worse and worse.
We also have to understand that the Civil Rights
Movement has always been an ongomg process.
If you could appreciate the
interpretation that Vincent Harding, historian, who in a book called There is a River, uses
the river metaphor to help us understand that from the shores of Africa, people of African
descent have always been involved in the struggle for freedom. When we get to the
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l 950's, we are still talking about a struggle for freedom. Although slavery had been
abolished universally in the 1860's, reconstruction had been something that was provided
to try to ensure democracy for all Americans, including African-Americans; America still
had not lived up to its promise of democracy. Reconstruction from the ] 9th century is
viewed as a failure. It put into play some things but it did not uphold the promise. As a
matter of fact, things gradually eroded. What types of examples do we see that things
became worse and worse? With the Brown decision of 1954, the Supreme Court justices
argued the fact that African-American students were allocated to separate institutions,
that this was something that was harmful psychologically. These were individuals who
were told on a regular basis, "You are going to be relegated to this poor school. You are
going to get used books. Sometimes you might not even get a book. Sometimes you will
not have buses to ride to school." They said this was psychologically harmful. I guess
that is one of the examples of how bad it could get. The NAACP had led court cases in
the 1930's and 1940's for the equalization of black and white teacher's pay. Even with
that, people had seen in some communities the small victories. As more and more people
saw that there could be some breakthroughs and there could be some changes, they were
more willing to try to push the envelope to see what other kinds of things could be
opened up. Instead of saying how bad things did become, I would rather see how people
saw opportunities for things to change more and more. So the momentum grew as
opposed to things just getting worse and worse.
Q: (Inaudible)
36
�The Civil Rights Movement in Alabama
Alabama A&M University
A: That's a very good question and also a way for me to tie in some of the things I said
about the New Deal. The one big, big part of the historical picture that I left out was the
Great Depression of the I 930's. With so many Americans suffering in the l 930's, there
were many people who wondered why didn't more Americans turn to Communism and
just simply dismantle the kind of government that we had because this was a government,
especially under Herbert Hoover, that did not seem to sympathize with the average
American who had lost a job and were suffering because of issues of economics. And so,
in some pockets of America, the Communist party did increase in membership.
The
belief was that because African-Americans had suffered so drastically and continued to
suffer that more and more of them were turning to the communist party. If there were
whites that sympathized with them, then these of course were individuals who were part
of the communist party. And also, there was this message that was part of a federal
campaign that African-Americans certainly could not understand their hardship, that if
they came to these conclusions that they had to have direct action campaign then, of
course, it was the communist party who told them this kind of stuff. It was all in a cycle
that went hand and hand but the tie in was two problems from the Great Depression,
which also got back to the issues of economic hardship. As they say in the Bartels and
James commercial, I do thank you for your support.
I want to first encourage you to be sure to turn in your program evaluation forms.
We do have refreshments at the back and we certainly want you to take advantage of the
refreshments. I would also like to say thank you to all of you who came out tonight.
Thank you for those individuals who played a very important role in getting you to come
37
�The Civil Rights Movement in Alabama
Alabama A&M University
out tonight. Be sure to take note of your brochures or your posters to be aware of the
upcoming lectures. Of course, the lecture next week will be on the campus of U AH and
Diane Nash, who was one of the activists involved with the Civil Rights Movement from
the Nashville area, but as some learned from the inaugural lecture, she and her husband
played a very important role in Alabama as well. I hope that, as I said at the beginning of
the program, all of you will make every effort to attend as many of these lectures in this
important series as possible. Thank you and good night.
38
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Lecture Series on Civil Rights in Alabama, 1954-1965
Relation
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<a href="http://libarchstor.uah.edu:8081/repositories/2/resources/21" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">View the Lecture Series on Civil Rights in Alabama, 1954-1965 finding aid in ArchivesSpace</a>
Identifier
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Lecture Series on Civil Rights in Alabama, 1954-1965
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
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uah_civr_000018
Title
A name given to the resource
Digitized transcription of VHS tape of "The Long Night's Journey, 1877-1941".
Description
An account of the resource
Linda Reed is the speaker in this lecture given at Alabama A&M University.
Creator
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Alabama A & M University
University of Alabama in Huntsville
Date
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2001-09-06
Temporal Coverage
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2000-2009
Subject
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Reed, Linda, 1955-
Civil rights movements--Southern states--History--20th century
Alabama (Ala.)
Southern States
Humanitarianism
Labor
Type
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Lectures
Text
Transcript
Format
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Print
Has Format
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Lecture Series on Civil Rights in Alabama, 1954-1965
<a href="http://libarchstor.uah.edu:8081/repositories/2/archival_objects/396">VHS Tape of: The Long Night's Journey, 1877-1941 - Speaker: Linda Reed, 2001-09-06. Box 2, Tape 2</a>
University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections, Huntsville, Alabama
Language
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en
Rights
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This material may be protected under U. S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S. Code) which governs the making of photocopies or reproductions of copyrighted materials. You may use the digitized material for private study, scholarship, or research. Though the University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections has physical ownership of the material in its collections, in some cases we may not own the copyright to the material. It is the patron's obligation to determine and satisfy copyright restrictions when publishing or otherwise distributing materials found in our collections.
Extent
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38
Publisher
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University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections
Source
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<a href="http://libarchstor.uah.edu:8081/repositories/2/archival_objects/383">The Long Night's Journey, 1877-1941 - Speaker: Linda Reed - Transcription of Tape 2, 2003 Box 1, File 3</a>
University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives, Special Collections, and Digital Initiatives, Huntsville, Alabama