Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s

Lost Revolutions

Lost Revolutions

The South in the 1950s

Pete Daniel

The University of North Carolina Press for Smithsonian National Museum of American History Washington, D.C.

Chapel Hill and London

© 2000 Smithsonian Institution

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Set in Minion and Impact by Eric M. Brooks Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Daniel, Pete.

Lost revolutions: the South in the 1950s / Pete Daniel.

   p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8078-2537-9 (alk. paper) —

ISBN 0-8078-4848-4 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Southern States—History—1951– 2. Southern States—

Social conditions—1945– 3. Nineteen fifties. I. Title.

F216.2.D36     2000

975.043—dc21          99-048066

Photograph on p. iii © Ernest Withers;

courtesy Panopticon Gallery, Boston, Massachusetts.

04 03 02 01       5 4 3

For Lisa and Laura

   Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

BOOK I The Postwar Landscape

1 Going among Strangers

2 Creation and Destruction

3 Deprived and Mistreated

4 A Rogue Bureaucracy

BOOK II Low Culture

5 Fast and Furious

6 Rhythms of the Land

7 A Little of the Rebel

BOOK III Fatal Divisions

8 Brothers of the Faith

9 Restrained Segregationists

10 The Best White Citizens

11 The Sound of Silence

12 Bibles and Bayonets

13 Radical Departure

Notes

Index

Illustrations

Ella Baker, 1940s, 13

Lillian Smith, 15

Lena Porrier Legnon, 18

Harvey Goodwin performing in Little Rock, September 25, 1942, 20

John H. McCray, Pete Ingram, J. C. Artemus, and James M. Hinton, 25

William Watts Ball, 27

States’ rights rally, Birmingham, Alabama, July 17, 1948, 29

Walter Sillers, 31

Lucy Randolph Mason, 35

James Stringer prepares the soil on this Mobile County, Alabama, farm for planting cotton, April 1941, 43

Field hands, Knowlton plantation, Perthshire, Mississippi, early twentieth century, 44

Cotton pickers, Delta and Pine Land Company plantation, Bolivar County, Mississippi, October 1941, 46

Mechanical cotton picker in Arkansas, 1947, 47

Twenty-two mechanical cotton pickers ready to leave International Harvester’s Memphis works in the biggest drive-away in the plant’s history, December 1954, 48

Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson and Senator Alexander Wiley, Wisconsin, 49

Field hands dust cotton with calcium arsenate using hand-operated dusters, Tallulah, Louisiana, about 1935, 64

U.S. Department of Agriculture chemist J. E. Fahey dissolves the chemical residues on apples sprayed with DDT, 1946, 66

Cotton spraying by airplane near Lubbock, Texas, August 1950, 68

U.S. Department of Agriculture chemist H. D. Mann analyzes milk from cows that had been fed hay sprayed with a pesticide, September 1946, 72

T. C. Byerly, 74

M. R. Clarkson, 75

Peter Hlatky inspects U.S. Retained carcasses set aside for special examination, July 1948, 76

W. L. Popham, 79

Clarence Cottam, 83

Byron T. Shaw, 85

Group of men standing beside a moonshine still near Ellijay, Gilmer County, Georgia, 95

Red Vogt, Bill France, and Red Byron, 97

Red Byron driving a modified race car at the three-quarter-mile speedway at Charlotte, North Carolina, in the 1950s, 98

Southern 500, Darlington, South Carolina, 1950, 100

Fonty Flock and Ethel Flock Mobley, standing by Tim Flock’s number 91 car, probably at Lakewood Speedway, Atlanta, Georgia, 103

Sara Christian, Lakewood Speedway, Atlanta, Georgia, 1949, 105

Sara Christian in her Olds ’88, Lakewood Speedway, Atlanta, Georgia, 1949, 106

Louise Smith, 107

Wendell Scott, 108

Junior Johnson, 109

Fireball Roberts, 112

Smokey Yunick, 113

Curtis Turner, 114

Joe Weatherly, 116

Car sponsored by William Cave Johnson Sr., owner of an automotive repair shop in Clarksville, Tennessee, at the New Providence Speedway in Clarksville, August 20, 1954, 118

Sputnik Monroe, 127

The Blackwood Brothers, 132

Sam Phillips, 133

Elvis Presley onstage in Little Rock with Scotty Moore, 136

Carl Perkins, 138

Malcolm, Amos, and Billy Lee Riley, 140

Billy Lee Riley, 142

C. J. Allen and Charlie Rich, 143

Three girls in Sutton’s ice cream parlor, Vicksburg, Mississippi, 149

Elvis Presley and Bernard Lansky, 150

Cast of a Womanless Wedding, 1940, 159

Stage show, Wilson, Arkansas, 1950, 160

Nine O’clock Club, Atlanta, Georgia, New Year’s Eve, 1952, 162

Two students, 163

Chorus line, 164

Black carhops, probably in Columbia, South Carolina, 166

Elvis Presley and B. B. King, Ellis Auditorium, Memphis, 1955, 168

Sandra Scarbrough, 170

Students dancing, 174

Hodding Carter, 190

Donald Davidson, 199

Wesley Critz George, 202

Boswell Stevens, 217

Medgar Evers, 218

Aaron E. Henry at Rust College, 223

Gus Courts’s grocery store, Belzoni, Mississippi, 225

Gus Courts in the Mound Bayou hospital, 226

James McBride Dabbs, 229

Alice Norwood Spearman, 231

William D. Workman Jr., 244

Roadside sign advertising segregated rest rooms, 245

Newspaper carriers preparing to deliver an issue of the Afro-American featuring the lead story, Boycott Spreads, 246

Amis Guthridge, 253

Jim Johnson, 254

Orval Faubus, 255

James Wesley Pruden, 256

Daisy Bates, 259

Wesley Pruden presiding over a Capital Citizens’ Council meeting, 260

Hazel Bryan, 263

Elizabeth Huckaby, 264

The Little Rock nine and Daisy Bates, 266

Jess Matthews, 267

Two women arguing in the crowd outside Central High School, 268

Men in the crowd outside Central High School, 269

Stamps commemorating the Little Rock crisis, 273

Ella Baker, 288

Jane Stembridge, 290

Fannie Lou Hamer, 297

Leslie Burl McLemore, 299

Acknowledgments

The Smithsonian Institution awarded me a Regents’ Fund Fellowship for independent study in 1994–95, and the staff of the National Museum of American History has generously supported this book project.

The staff of the defunct Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources as well as my colleagues in the Division of the History of Technology have encouraged this project. Louis Hutchins worked with me on the Science in American Life exhibit and helped with research on fire ants. Smita Dutta, who worked on both the science exhibit and Rock ’n’ Soul: Social Crossroads, strongly supported my research and writing.

Many scholars who took part in the museum’s fellowship program challenged my ideas and often suggested sources and ideas. Museum interns who helped on the book were Corey Brown, Kris Deroucher, Sarah Haviland, Margaret Hayden, Rebecca Lynch, Story Matkin-Rawn, Robin Morris, Lori Robbins, Maureen Sele, Sonya Hand Stover, Jaime Vazquez, and Andrea Woody.

The following people read and commented on portions of the manuscript: Karen Anderson, Tony Badger, Elspeth Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Laura Edwards, Randy Finley, Glenda Gilmore, Janet Greene, Peter Guralnick, John Hartigan Jr., Laura Helper, Michael Honey, John Howard, Elizabeth Jacoway, Colin Johnson, David K. Johnson, Robert Korstad, Angela Lakwete, Charles McGovern, Hazel Bryan Massery, Grace Palladino, Charles Payne, John Pearson, Roy Reed, William T. Martin Riches, Amy Richter, Beth Roy, Edmund Russell III, Tim Tyson, Brian Ward, Jeannie Whayne, Harold Woodman, and Robert O. Zeller Jr. Dan Carter, James C. Cobb, Sara Evans, and Jacquelyn Hall, who read the complete manuscript, offered invaluable suggestions.

Many friends and scholars have helped by sharing information and allowing me to share ideas, including Andy Ambrose, Angie Blake, Vernon Burton, Ann Chirhart, Gamy Clough, Kari Frederickson, Sylvia Frey, Hank Grasso, Hartmut Keil, John Kirk, James Lanier, David Less, Maida Loescher, Leslie Burl McLemore, Mary Panzer, Judy Reardon, Mary Reardon, Natalie Ring, Helen Rozwadowski, Lee Woodman, and Nan Woodruff. Jim Kelly contributed not only his ideas but also his childhood photograph, taken in 1953 in Sparta, North Carolina, which begins book 1.

The staff at the Red River Grill, including Matt Weiss, Josh Levin, Justin Polanin, and Aziza Nazir, have faithfully added happy hours to Tuesday evening discussions.

The following archivists and librarians provided extraordinary help: Beth Bilderback, Beverly Brannon, Andrea Cantrell, Dwayne Cox, Michael Dabrishus, Tom Johnson, Alice Hildreth, Michael Paulk, Linda Pine, James Rush, Mattie Sink, John Woodard, and Tara Zachary.

Drs. Jerome W. Canter, Brenda Dintiman, Neil Kahanovitz, and Joseph Lamb have attended to my health.

Kate Torrey and the staff at the University of North Carolina Press strongly supported this project. Only an author can fully appreciate the skill that editor Paula Wald lavished on the manuscript.

Graziella Tonfoni has contributed ideas and given enthusiastic support for the project.

Finally, I want to thank my family and friends for tolerating my obsession with this book.

Lost Revolutions

Introduction

After fifteen years of depression and war, in the fall of 1945 southerners anticipated a tranquil and prosperous future. Hedging against a postwar depression, farmers had saved money, but they longed for tractors, pickups, and washing machines. Defense workers regeared for peacetime and anticipated shelves filled with consumer goods. Soldiers returning from the nightmare of war were impatient to push aside trifling southern customs. As democratic war rhetoric sharpened the Sting of segregation, membership in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) increased. In 1944, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the white primary, opening up participatory democracy to all citizens. At few times in southern history had the path to revolutionary change seemed so clear. The road into the 1950s, however, took unexpected turns. The South that evolved in the twenty years after the war emerged out of displacement, conflict, and creativity—not tranquillity.

The decline of labor-intensive agriculture, working-class cultural achievements, and the civil rights movement challenged elite white control and middle-class sensibilities. In most instances, the revolutionary energy generated by these interconnected movements was siphoned off. Washington bureaucrats and lobbyists in the 1950s advised farmers to embrace science and technology, to get big or get out. Machines and chemicals destroyed jobs, reconfigured the landscape, and undermined the environment. In the two decades after the war, some 11 million southern sharecroppers, tenants, and small farm owners left the land, a demographic shift that had enormous implications.

When the last generation of sharecroppers arrived in towns and cities across the country, they quickened cultural change and stamped it with their rural ways. The collision between rural and urban cultures generated creative tidal waves. Rock ’n’ roll music and stock car racing sponsored by the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR), two important manifestations of working-class culture, were the backbeat to migration and the accelerating movement to secure civil rights. Music and racing also helped alleviate the mounting tension among people facing polar changes in their lives.

The civil rights movement troubled whites and gave hope to African Americans. To some southerners, integration was a manifestation of necessary change, but it was also another adjustment to a world that had less use for racism and discrimination. Many whites, however, inherited a flawed history that conflated segregation, the Lost Cause, religion, and sex. Chained to segregation and racial prejudice, state and local politicians revived antiquated rhetoric and portrayed themselves as victims of such handy enemies as the federal government and communism. They became defenders of a neo–Lost Cause.

It is impossible to know how many whites would have traveled down the road to equal rights in the 1950s if any white politician had risked martyrdom to find out. Nor did any white political faction champion compliance with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Significant attempts to unite black and white workers foundered soon after the war, shattered by charges of communism. A timorous clergy avoided engagement, and indecisive white liberals were no match for ruthless segregationists. From the White House to southern governors’ mansions to plantations, white leaders either remained silent or launched counterattacks against black and white activists.

The middle class emerged as a driving force that both supported and opposed the civil rights movement. The NAACP, a middle-class organization, explored a legal path to equal rights and inspired much of the civil rights activity of the 1950s. Citizens’ Councils and other segregationist groups claimed memberships that included the best white people. Working-class blacks and whites also wrestled with civil rights, but leaders seldom solicited their opinions. The 1957 crisis at Little Rock’s Central High School epitomized many of the race and class issues of the era as well as the failure of white leadership.

In early 1960, southerners discovered common ground as sit-ins attracted blacks and whites, men and women, from both the working class and the middle class. The institutions that guided civil rights efforts in the 1950s had no control over the students who sat at lunch counters in 1960. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organized a grassroots movement to secure black voting rights, school integration, and African Americans’ access to public space. Mississippi became the principal battleground of the civil rights movement, and the struggle culminated in the events of the summer of 1964.

The years between World War II and Freedom Summer were ripe with possibilities, but the postwar climate failed to produce political visionaries. In 1948, Dixiecrats embraced the past and the legacy of race and class that had defined so much of southern history. The Brown v. Board of Education decision fatally divided society and provoked whites to make a frantic defense of segregation. It would be ten years before Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and another year before it got around to protecting black voting rights. Southern whites twisted these laws to portray themselves as the victims and begrudged every black advance.

By the mid-1960s, both the rural and the urban South had changed in ways that frustrated, astounded, and often upset southerners. Nevertheless, the cauldron of racism continued to boil and search for vents. White Americans preferred to ignore the implications of segregation when at all possible. It was easier to celebrate Elvis Presley than Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph McGill than Ella Baker.

Lost opportunities littered the southern landscape in the years between World War II and Freedom Summer. One can only imagine how different southern history might have been if politicians, the press, the clergy, and local leaders had supported democratic reforms that bestowed full citizenship on African Americans. And one can only imagine how little would have been accomplished if a handful of blacks and whites had not taken risks to bring about the changes that did come.

BOOK I THE POSTWAR LANDSCAPE

1 Going among Strangers

It’s no wonder the Revival Preachers are all preaching against going to War Work and begging people to coax, their relatives back before they all go to Hell.

—Mississippi farmer

In 1994, Mississippi planter Frank Mitchener pointed across a stand of inch-high cotton plants to tiny jewels of reflected light at the edge of the field near the banks of a bayou. The effect came from glass slivers, he explained, the remains of windows shattered when tenant houses were bulldozed thirty years earlier. Before the Delta’s cypress swamps were cleared for agriculture, Mitchener added, the Choctaw had lived on the same high ground beside the stream. Mitchener had often walked across the field with his grandson picking up Choctaw arrowheads and pottery shards mixed with snuff tins, bottles, and other bits of African American material culture. In the mid-twentieth century, advances in farm machinery, the development of synthetic chemicals, and government agricultural programs had doomed most agricultural laborers much as the lure of rich Delta land had tempted whites to banish the Choctaws a century and a half earlier. Most of the Choctaws and African Americans had moved on, but the vitreous reflections and artifacts were emblematic not only of the complex layering of the southern experience but also of the historical forces that had dispossessed the Choctaws, altered the landscape, and created and destroyed both slavery and sharecropping.

Rural change, urbanization, science, technology, racism, and popular culture were interlocking revolutionary components that swept through the South after World War II. The fabric of rural life was torn apart as millions of dispossessed farmers spilled out of the countryside and settled in towns and cities across the country. A landscape that had been dotted with small farms was reconfigured to fit machines and chemicals. The breakup of rural life had profound implications, for southern exiles transplanted rural culture wherever they settled. In urban jobs, the clock—not the sun — ordered their days. As the civil rights movement gained momentum in the mid-1950s, its potential excited blacks as much as its implications frightened whites. The simultaneous rise of agribusiness, stock car racing, rock ’n’ roll music, and challenges to segregation generated immense constructive and destructive energy that forged both hope and fear, joy and sorrow.

The reflected light from the broken windows symbolized the long continuum of labor-intensive agriculture, including slavery. The cotton culture dominated southern agriculture for a century and a half, since land-hungry cotton growers during George Washington’s presidency began clearing new ground across the fertile crescent that spanned the South’s Black Belt and the Mississippi Delta.

The Civil War destroyed the grids that bound together the antebellum South, forcing all southerners, black and white, men and women, rich and poor, to reconstruct a society based on free labor. Former masters and slaves, as well as their white neighbors, understood not only the importance of controlling the sale and proceeds of their crops but also the potential of free labor. After the Civil War, planters and merchants devised imaginative strategies to control labor, credit, and marketing. This restructured but still labor-intensive cotton culture persisted until the mid-twentieth century. It then collapsed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, almost as quickly as a bulldozer could splinter a row of shotgun houses. The enclosure movement that drove millions of southern farmers from the land coincided with depression, war, migration, urbanization, and the civil rights movement. It was a time of intense emotional stress.¹

Tractors, harvesting machines, and chemicals largely replaced the hired hands, tenants, and sharecroppers who had tended southern crops for so long. Most farmers’ lives revolved around the cultivation of cotton plants, the annual routine of breaking the land, plowing, planting, cultivating, picking, and ginning. Other rural southerners, black and white, moved to the rhythm of different crops. Generations of black and white southerners drew their sustenance from the land and their values from rural routines and institutions. Although few were educated beyond being able to write their names, read a few Bible verses, and make basic calculations, they not only subsisted but also created a vibrant culture. The technological wave that swept farmers from the land also preserved remnants of their music, dance, and language on sound recordings and film. No matter how exploitative the system or how roughly rural people were jettisoned when machines and chemicals took their place, the rural culture bequeathed by the last generation of sharecroppers significantly reshaped U.S. culture. Lacking worldly goods and formal education, rural people improvised, broke the rules, experimented, and boldly stamped a southern imprint on music, dance, and language.

World War II job opportunities attracted many rural exiles to towns and cities. Government programs, mechanization, and herbicides continued to displace farmers throughout the 1950s and beyond. In 1940,3 million farms existed in the South; thirty years later, only 1.2 million remained. The tenant ranks had been thinned from 1.5 million to 136,000 over the same years. The number of black farm operators declined from 680,000 to 90,000, and the number of black farm owners dropped from 142,000 to 56,000. At the bottom of the social scale, sharecroppers, who numbered 541,000 in 1940, were not even counted as a category after 1959, when their total sank to 121,000. This population shift had enormous implications, both for the southern countryside and for the towns and cities that absorbed the migrants.²

As southerners left rural areas, small-town businesses went broke, church congregations dwindled, and community vitality flickered and sometimes died. When migrants reached larger towns and cities, the more sedate residents often shuddered at their unpolished ways. They arrived in jalopies, quickly modified their homes and yards to suit rural tastes, and generally presented an untamed demeanor that elicited both loathing and guarded awe. It was the wildness of these migrants—their patched-up cars and clothes, passionate music, and lust for life—that would reshape U.S. culture. Both black and white migrants had to master not only hourly work but also urban segregation codes that were at once more lax and more confining than those in rural areas. In cities, blacks and whites competed for jobs, housing, recreation, and seats on public transportation, and the problem of the color line assumed pressing urgency. In rural areas, most folks knew each other and could make allowances, but in cities, segregation ruled all public spaces. Still, in the vastness of cities, as in rural areas, refuges existed where the color line blurred or vanished.

For many southerners, World War II was a great divide. The war challenged their provincialism, offered employment, and reshaped society. After the war, they could not fit their experiences or expectations back into the South of the 1930s. Many southerners, having traveled and tasted relative affluence during the war, became dissatisfied with the rural cycle of labor and debt that had previously characterized their lives; after the war, they stayed in cities and worked for a steady wage. Mississippi planter Cauley Cortwright labeled the war years a time of dispersion and recalled that black families who left for California, Chicago, New York, and Detroit never returned after they moved out. Rural life also changed drastically, as segregation and challenges to rural values emerged as central issues among those who remained. The war also accelerated structural changes that had begun to take place during the 1930s. Despite labor shortages and rationed machinery, many farmers prospered during the war, and the wealthiest eagerly awaited further scientific and technological developments that would ease the demand for labor.³

In the South, then, the war hastened the development of a new agricultural structure, intensified urbanization, rejuvenated musical tastes, reshaped leisure, inspired union organizing, and launched a civil rights movement. The war, more than the New Deal, alleviated hard times for southerners, and during the war, the federal government, already enlarged to fight the depression, expanded and became ever more critical in reshaping southern life. The issue was not government intrusion—by 1940, commercial farmers, wage workers, and sharecroppers all took advantage of federal programs—but rather which group would benefit most.

The war accelerated rural consolidation and further entrenched the conservative forces that advocated management, science, and technology. A reconstruction era after the war would allow the application of science and technology to catch up to ideology. Larger farmers, in the meantime, feared that laborers would move before the structural change to mechanization could be completed, and landlords utilized their positions of community leadership and power to tighten labor control, combining vestiges of the dying system with elements of the new one. Despite higher commodity prices, farmers complained of rising labor costs and tried every stratagem to find cheap labor. One observer labeled the large farmers’ labor obsession a farm labor shortage hysteria. The need for labor varied according to commodity, season, and stage of mechanization.⁴

Planters pressured draft boards to exempt their best workers. In Coahoma County, Mississippi, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) agent admitted that when a sharecropper left for defense work, the draft board would move him to the top of the list. In May 1943, McKinley Morganfield, better known as blues singer Muddy Waters, quit his job driving a tractor on the Stovall plantation near Clarksdale and moved to Chicago. His foreman, he remembered, blew all to pieces when he asked for a $.03 raise to $.25 an hour. Within a week of leaving, he received his draft notice.⁵

Military service instilled in some African Americans a determination to end discrimination. Amzie Moore was drafted in 1942 and served in Burma. Assigned to intelligence, he was ordered to tell African American soldiers that conditions in the United States would be better when they returned. He joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) while in the service and after the war returned to Cleveland, Mississippi, still in a fighting mood. He estimated that in Mississippi one black person was killed every week for nearly a year. He opened a gas station, beauty shop, and grocery store on highway 61 that became headquarters for civil rights efforts. Medgar Evers spent the war in France and England and then, despite his reservations, returned to Decatur, where he immediately began to encourage Mississippi’s black veterans to register and vote. Aaron Henry came from a sharecropping family near Clarksdale, and he, too, cut his activist teeth in the military. These three black men would emerge in the 1950s as key civil rights leaders in Mississippi.⁶

During the war, southerners sensed that important changes were taking place that could alter their lives. They perceived a sharp break from the days of the depression and observed that the war was intensifying changes in society, especially regarding race relations. Indeed, race relations became the most visible element of conflict and change. By the summer of 1942, Bureau of Agricultural Economics field agents in the South uncovered different interpretations of the purpose of the war. Whites, investigator Edward Moe reported in August 1942, believed they were fighting to keep things as they have been in America. They feared a revolution in race relations. Blacks, on the other hand, were reluctant to join the war effort unless their participation awakened recognition of their equal rights, and being accorded those equal rights. Whereas whites muted their enthusiasm for the war because they feared social change, blacks withheld support because they insisted on social change as a reward for patriotism.⁷

During the war, friction along the color line exploded into six civilian riots, more than twenty military riots and mutinies, and between forty and seventy-five lynchings. Blacks challenged discrimination more openly, and whites countered ruthlessly. Fearing federal intrusion, southern political leaders berated the federal government, which had been increasingly involved in southern society since the beginning of the New Deal.⁸

But significant attempts were made during the war to confront segregation and racial discrimination. The Congress of Industrial Organizations (cio) succeeded in uniting black and white workers, which alarmed white politicians and businesspeople. In Memphis, Tennessee, for example, aggressive leftist CIO organizers won bargaining rights at sixty work sites in and around the city. In Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Affiliated Workers of Americacio supported a 1943 strike led by African American women at the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company that won bargaining rights a year later. The leftist-led unionization drive had political implications that made possible the election of an African American alderman in 1947. The power of such unions to challenge segregation and entrenched politicians alarmed the white elite. Although some labor leaders understood that the success of unions depended on uniting blacks and whites, many white workers jealously guarded their privileges and were uncomfortable in integrated meetings. Even as they benefited from defense jobs and government programs, many whites suspected that the federal government and labor unions were intrusive institutions that would ally with northern liberals to force changes in society.⁹

Discrimination came under attack from northerners who settled in the South and ignored traditions demeaning to blacks. They called blacks Mr. and Mrs., paid higher wages, and supported equal rights. Northern white soldiers stationed at southern bases, bored by military routine, detested life in the South and seized on the race issue as a focus of protest. Northern black soldiers resented the South even more. They come to fiercely hate Southern conditions, Moe reported. They talk against discrimination on every occasion and encourage violence as a way out. In 1944, the Supreme Court struck down the white primary in Smith v. Allwright, giving blacks the opportunity to participate in the only meaningful ballot in one-party southern states. In South Carolina, John McCray immediately founded the Progressive Democratic Party and insisted that whites share political power. Southern whites had never been assaulted on so many fronts of the color line.¹⁰

Membership in the NAACP swelled on the rising tide of militancy. Ella J. Baker, a North Carolinian and Shaw University graduate whom the NAACP hired as a southern field secretary in 1940, played a major role in attracting new members. After leaving Shaw, Baker had spent more than a decade in Harlem. Living in New York had offered Baker the opportunity to explore her sense of style and develop her interest in politics and culture. She wrote for newspapers and served as national director of the Young Negroes’ Cooperative League. On weekends, she strolled the Harlem streets dressed in stylish clothes, making small talk with anyone she encountered. Baker was not shy. For a time, she worked at the Schomburg Library, where, as she put it, she began to learn some things. She searched out radical discussions. The Harlem Young Women’s Christian Association attracted women such as Pauli Murray, Dorothy Height, Anna Arnold Hedgeman, and Baker, and the atmosphere crackled with curiosity and ideas.¹¹

Baker seemed uninterested in either a permanent career or a confining marriage. Her ideology was toughened as she associated with New York radicals during the late 1920s and 1930s. Her energetic organizing throughout the South not only increased NAACP membership but also planted grassroots seeds that would grow during the next decade. From 1940 to 1946, she braved white hostility and black indifference, honing ideas and skills that would serve her well later on. For six months each year, she rode Jim Crow trains and busses, always insisting that if the law mandated that blacks be separate but equal, she expected equality. A small woman (she stood five feet, two inches tall), Baker used her commanding voice and fearless presence to cow insulting drivers and conductors. I wasn’t delicate, she later boasted.¹²

Ella Baker, 1940s. LC-USZ62-110575, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Papers, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Baker understood the significance of both the vast migration provoked by the war and the friction along the color line as black and white workers competed for defense jobs, transportation, and housing. The NAACP’s New York office tightly controlled its civil rights initiatives. Disappointed that the NAACP neglected the power of local chapters in fighting for equal rights and recognizing that NAACP head Walter White ignored her ideas, she resigned in 1946. But Baker’s impact on local chapters endured, and her popularity among southern NAACP members would serve her well when she returned to the South as a civil rights activist in the 1950s.¹³

Some southern whites were also active in challenging the color line. In 1925, twenty-eight-year-old Lillian Smith returned to northern Georgia after teaching music at a Methodist mission school in Huchow, China. She took over her family’s Laurel Falls girls’ camp and molded it to fit her own interests, particularly music, drama, dance, writing, painting, and sculpture. She hoped to guide the girls in her camp to understand, as she put it, the dichotomies of our southern way of life. Sports and campfire songs gave way to frank discussions about sexual matters, childbirth, relations between girls and their parents, racial problems, and world events. Increasingly Smith devoted more time to writing and reading widely in psychology and literature. In 1935, Smith and her friend Paula Snelling began to publish what would become a series of radical journals over the next decade: Pseudopodia, North Georgia Review, and South Today. Contributors, encouraged by Smith, denounced segregation and dealt frankly with other controversial issues. In 1944, Smith published Strange Fruit, a disturbing and controversial novel about an interracial relationship. In her outspoken support of integration, she was far ahead of most southern whites.¹⁴

Both Ella Baker and Lillian Smith realized that the war created enormous stresses in southern society. Blacks and whites perceived a decline in morals, speculated about mechanization, fretted about returning veterans, condemned defense workers and cities in general, and feared that the nation would sink into a depression when the war ended. Many African Americans were confident that their war effort would erase the color line. Southerners sensed that their lives would be different following the war and were apprehensive about the future.

In Tishomingo County, Mississippi, located in the northeastern corner of the state, people left behind by the war complained that defense workers were throwing away money on liquor, sex, and gambling. A farm owner in his fifties learned that many workers had gotten by with being half-drunk on the job and were doing things that made one’s hair stand on end. He told of a neighbor’s son who in his mid-twenties went to Mobile, Alabama, with his wife and two children to work in the defense industry. His wife had run off with another man, and he had been drunk ever since. It’s no wonder the Revival Preachers are all preaching against going to War Work and begging people to coax their relatives back before they all go to Hell, he observed. A middle-aged Farm Security Administration client charged that workers didn’t behave much better than hogs. There was universal agreement that the farther away people strayed from their roots, the less they could resist temptation.¹⁵

The concerns voiced in Tishomingo County found resonance in other areas. A county agent in Pope County, Arkansas, summed up the conventional thinking about why people stayed in rural areas: Not wanting to go among strangers & strange work & inside work & no fishing & visiting probably biggest reasons.¹⁶ Although urban work was in some ways liberating, it enslaved laborers in an hourly routine and curtailed outdoor activity.

Lillian Smith. Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia, Athens.

Some women remained at home and did farmwork (in Lafayette County, Mississippi, an interviewer found one woman mowing lespedeza when I was there), but an almost equal number of men and women left the countryside for urban jobs. Women’s widespread migration, participation in the workforce, and spirit of independence challenged old stereotypes. Many of the women who found good jobs during the war were never again content to keep house. Women’s work off the farm, like their on-farm egg and butter trade, supplemented income and opened up new opportunities.¹⁷

The war changed the status of women who remained at home in significant ways. Across the South, whites complained about the lack of both fieldworkers and domestic help. When the Clarksdale AAA agent heard in 1944 that cotton pickers would be demanding $2 per 100 pounds, he complained bitterly that many black women were loafing around town instead of working because they received money from their husbands in the service. They were no longer dependent on wage work such as chopping and picking cotton, ironing clothes, and doing housework. The interviewer asked whether it was not the case that more white women were loafing around than black. Yes, he admitted, but [you] can’t do anything about that—many of them never picked cotton and you can’t force white women to work. In January 1945, Charleston News and Courier editor William Watts Ball commiserated with his sister, Sarah B. Copeland of Laurens, South Carolina. Everything is demoralized, the servant question here is certainly as bad as it is in Laurens, he reported. Our cook comes, but not until 9:30 A.M.¹⁸

Just as farmers were eagerly buying machinery with their government payments and their earnings from higher commodity prices, those who returned from cities and the armed forces no longer tolerated what they considered backward farming practices and conditions. They had higher expectations. We’ll have to have electricity to get tenants—good tenants, the owner of a supply business in Harnett County, North Carolina, lamented. They won’t come otherwise; they want their electric refrigerator, radios, and washing machines and all that.¹⁹ Mobility, then, acted as a school of consumer education, and for the first time, many southerners stepped up to sales counters with money in their pockets. Blacks and whites shared rising expectations.

Defense centers became great magnets that pulled in workers. The heavy influx of permanent residents into key southern defense areas strained services, for most southern cities were ill-equipped to handle even peacetime populations. Just as some farmers used federal programs and subsidies to restructure their operations, city governments looked to Washington to solve problems of urban growth brought on by migration. Southern cities expanded and improved their infrastructures using federal coordination and funds.²⁰

Growing cities all faced similar problems. New housing required expansion of the water supply, sewage disposal, streets, and garbage collection. Workers expected public transportation to ferry them to work, shopping, and recreation. Children needed schools, working mothers sought child care, and everyone demanded adequate health care, which required new hospitals and additional doctors. Coordination was essential, especially in a war economy, to avoid shortages of food and fuel. These problems were further complicated by the fact that the working population moved from farm to town, from town to city, and from lower- to higher-paying jobs; had not been routinized to hourly work; and was divided by segregation laws.

Migrants confronted confusing urban problems, and they contributed to the chaos. Writer John Dos Passos keenly observed that city life and steady wages astonished migrants. Even a house trailer equipped with electric lights and running water, he pointed out, is a dazzling luxury to a woman who’s lived all her life in a cabin with half-inch chinks between the splintered boards of the floor.²¹

Whereas Dos Passos understood that even a house trailer meant upward mobility to rural migrants, Washington Post reporter Agnes E. Meyer, with obvious distaste and condescension, wrote that in the Gulf of Mexico region, there is a type of war-worker from the country districts of Mississippi, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Alabama, the like of which I have never seen anywhere else. They were illiterate and had transported to Pascagoula and Mobile their native habits of living. They preferred to live in the squalor of trailer parks and tents, she insisted, rather than moving into newly constructed apartments. Those from the mountains, she harshly judged, were the most ferocious and unreliable of the lot. She was mortified by the story of a young man who ran amuck after getting drunk, kicked holes in the walls, broke all the windows, and rammed his knife in the floor so hard that his hand slid down the blade, nearly severing the fingers. The next morning, he woke up in a girls’ dormitory.²²

Although in Meyer’s opinion it would take time to tame such people and train them to work and live in harmony with their neighbors, most migrants adapted easily to urban life and eagerly developed their newly acquired skills. After taking a three-week welding course, Lena Porrier Legnon left a farm near New Iberia, Louisiana, and moved to New Orleans to join her husband at the Higgins shipyard. She boasted that women were better than men welders. Neater welders. She rode the streetcar to work and at night danced and drank in the French Quarter. Unlike many women who worked at welding during the war and then gave it up, Legnon returned to rural Louisiana after the war and continued her trade into the 1980s. Cordell Jackson, who became a Memphis record producer after the war, worked during the war as a riveter at Fisher Aircraft in Fort Worth, Texas. Years later, she still took immense pride in the speed and precision of her wartime work. She also played stand-up bass in the Fisher Aircraft Band. Despite their skills, however, most blacks and women were kept at the bottom of the workforce.²³

Southern cities found it easier to improve services that allowed them to function more efficiently than to solve other problems, especially racism. African American workers, particularly black women, endured discrimination at most job sites throughout the country. Southern segregation restrictions covered all aspects of public life. When blacks in Mobile violated the segregated-seating code on buses, police sometimes beat them and hauled them into court. In one instance, a black soldier from Brookley Field argued with a bus driver over segregated seating and the driver killed him. For black soldiers, the segregated buses were another battlefront, a manifestation of the Double V slogan that reminded black Americans that they not only had overseas enemies but also had racist enemies at home. Many young African Americans fought a protracted war of attrition on buses as their misbehavior antagonized and sometimes provoked whites.²⁴

Lena Porrier Legnon (second from right) and friends at Marty Bourke’s Bar, Bourbon Street, New Orleans, 1942. Courtesy Lena Porrier Legnon.

Growing militancy from the NAACP and the National Urban League put pressure on southern city administrators to equalize separate black and white facilities. A 1944 Atlanta Urban League study revealed that although African Americans composed a third of the school-age population, only 20 percent of the school buildings were used for blacks; blacks received $37.80 per pupil, whereas whites got $108.70; public school property was valued at $887 per pupil for blacks and $2,156 for whites. African American students attended split shifts of three and a half hours, whereas white students received six hours of instruction a day. Similar discrimination existed in library facilities, health care, and other aspects of urban life. The cost would be great, the Atlanta Constitution piously editorialized, but Atlanta, searching its heart and conscience, can no longer hide the fact of this discrimination and cannot further support it.²⁵ By admitting discrimination and promising equal facilities, the Constitution’s editors perhaps heard the early legal footfalls that would challenge the separatebut-equal myth.

During the war, juvenile delinquency raised disturbing questions, especially when girls were involved. Reporter Agnes Meyer discovered in April 1943 that one of Mobile’s worst problems is the sex-delinquency of very young girls. The chief of police had arrested bold girls eleven years old who pursue not only sailors and soldiers but war workers. Meyer learned that girls are frequently the ones who buy contraceptives, and when one druggist refused to sell these articles to a group of very young girls, they informed him contemptuously that he was an old fogey. The Catholic bishop of Mobile, after observing that the problem of sex offenses among minor girls is particularly shocking and grave, concluded, We are fostering and encouraging a future race of gangsters and criminals. Such reports were not confined to the South, but given the region’s obsession with the sanctity of white women, the trend portended major changes in the values of young women.²⁶

Southern cities, then, grew during the war and were forced to confront the full spectrum of urban problems. The extent of the transformation, at least in defense centers and military posts, was staggering. In population growth, social relations, city planning, and, in particular, the use of federal funds to expand services, southern cities challenged rural areas for dominance. Before the war, these cities were dozing seaports or trade centers, but the war shook them awake. Faced with hundreds of thousands of new residents, cities at first buckled under the strain but with federal support built infrastructures that could sustain larger populations. This scenario was repeated in Mobile, Norfolk, Charleston, Brunswick, Pascagoula, and Beaumont, as well as in other cities less critical to the war effort. The demographic shift was significant, for people who had become accustomed to hourly wages, decent housing, better schools, adequate medical care, and other advantages of city