Slavery was the greatest blessing the Negro people ever had.
—Rep. JOHN RANKIN,
Mississippi (HUAC, 1945–48)
If someone insists there is discrimination against Negroes in this country, there is every reason to believe that person is a Communist.
—ALBERT CANWELL, chairman,
Washington Fact-Finding Committee
on Un-American Activities
As the first national party to call for complete social and economic equality, the Communist Party traveled south to join the fight for civil rights in 1929. They chose Birmingham, Alabama, as headquarters for their new Southern District, and labor as their vehicle. Over the next several decades, the Party organized interracial unions in steel, mining, agriculture, and maritime. Southern blacks embraced the opportunity, seeing the Communists through old eyes: the Yankees had returned to give deliverance one more try.
At mass rallies that drew hundreds of blacks and poor whites, Party speakers excoriated Southern racism as the stumbling block to improving the lives of all workers, advocated social and economic equality, and called for the integration of cafeterias and public transportation. They led successful strikes for better conditions for sharecroppers and other workers.
The reaction was swift and violent. “Criminal anarchy” laws were passed which made it illegal to advocate racial equality by print or word of mouth, or to join any such organization. Communists, black and white, were gunned down, lynched, bullwhipped, tarred and feathered, their homes firebombed. Pitched gun battles erupted between sheriff's posses and armed unionists. Hunted, with bounties on their heads, white organizers were forced into hiding, able to emerge only in the dark of night. From their black counterparts they learned many a survival lesson handed down from the days of slavery and abolitionists. It was courage and fortitude that allowed the Party to exist as an active force in the Deep South until the early 1950s.
By 1955, when Rosa Parks sat down in that bus in Montgomery, the Party was largely moribund in the South and the North.1 Red Scare repression had taken its toll, and most of its leaders were either in hiding or fighting in the courts. In 1956, Southern Party leader Junius Scales, in search of a defense attorney, happened by Montgomery and chanced to observe the bus boycott. “It was a marvelous sight to see. Of course, I realized that the handle we'd been looking for these past decades had been found by circumstances. This movement was going to go, and it was in good hands. I never felt more irrelevant. I didn't feel deserted, I just felt we'd done our stint.” But whether or not any Red had ever stepped foot south of the Mason-Dixon Line, the new movement was immediately denounced as Moscow-inspired subversion.
From the start, reactionaries had been quick to see Red in supporters of civil rights. But by 1955 and with the growing strength of the modern civil rights movement, the witch-hunters formed the bulwark of segregation. The racists of HUAC and SISS tied their kites to the national storm and defended American apartheid under the guise of national security and patriotism. What they were safeguarding was a social and economic system that channeled the prerogatives of wealth and power into the hands of a few. The disenfranchisement of blacks was central to their system.
The longtime chairman of SISS was James Eastland of Mississippi, a state where violence and law combined to keep all but 5 percent of its black population from voting. Eastland was the personification of segregation and the owner of a huge plantation in the Mississippi Delta. He claimed the entire desegregation effort was “a plot of a few agitators.”
Another Mississippian was John Rankin, who pushed through the 1945 resolution transforming HUAC into a permanent committee. Rankin was elected with 10,400 votes in a district with a population of more than 200,000. He contended that segregated blacks had been happy until stirred up by “Communist agitators.” He was quite friendly toward the Ku Klux Klan, which he endorsed as “an old American tradition, like illegal whiskey selling.”
Edwin Willis of Louisiana, another two-term chairman and thirteen-year member of HUAC, was elected with a total balloting of 8,962 votes.
Their Northern counterparts were active as well. Francis Walter of Pennsylvania, a fourteen-year member and five-term chairman, was discovered in 1960 to be intimately involved with the funding of the Draper Project, a crackpot scheme to prove that blacks were genetically inferior. HUAC chief counsel Richard Arens was a salaried consultant on the project.
Among the frequent visitors to the file rooms of HUAC and SISS were the state investigating committees which sprang up throughout the South in 1954, the year of the Supreme Court decision on school desegregation. Masquerading under such grave misnomers as the Legal Education Advisory Committee or the Committee on Offenses Against the Administration of Justice, state investigators rampaged for a decade against “Red” integrationists. In 1961, the Texas committee issued a much-publicized report that determined the state's racial “agitation” to be the result of “orders from Moscow.”
Borrowing a page from their federal mentors, the state committees hired a pair of thoroughly discredited professional witnesses. By 1957, Manning Johnson, a black ex-Communist, had been investigated for perjury by the Justice Department, but Louisiana legislators accepted his word as gospel. He targeted Martin Luther King as a “dastardly misleader” taking blacks “down the road to bloodshed and murder.” Johnson pinned the Communist label on a number of civil rights organizations, including the NAACP, where he claimed the “Communist Trojan horse is stabled today.” The following year, J. B. Matthews appeared. Joe McCarthy had dropped him from his stable of informants in the early 1950s, after Matthews had claimed seven thousand Protestant ministers to be supporters of the Communist cause. But in Dixie he was a star witness. He swore before the Florida committee that “Communists or Communist influence” had inspired every racial incident since the 1954 Supreme Court decision, and that 145 national leaders of the NAACP were Communists. Such misinformation was sent to HUAC and SISS, which in turn channeled it to back to the state committees marked with a federal seal of approval. It was then hailed in the Southern press as proof of the Communist menace behind desegregation, and used as the basis for legal action against integrationists. The Ku Klux Klan, White Citizens' Councils, and the American Nazi Party reprinted much of this HUAC “documentation.”
With the movement under national attack as Communist-inspired, white sympathizers became fearful of being tagged as traitors. Many who had been involved dropped out; others on the verge of joining shied away. Some of the whites who remained found their motives questioned by their black allies. Anxious to avoid the Red taint, some national and regional civil rights groups made massive efforts to disprove the charges, publishing rebuttals and purging all those tagged as Communists. Some groups refused to cooperate with others who declined to take such steps. To convince the public that they were not Communists, others even joined in the Red-baiting. Even Martin Luther King purged two key figures—Stanley Levison and Jack O'Dell—from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference under pressure from the White House.
Anne Braden is a longtime civil rights activist. “I always say Joe McCarthy and I got active about the same time, but I really was active before that.” She and her husband, Carl, ran the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), a spin-off of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, one of Eleanor Roosevelt's interracial civil rights groups. In 1954, the Bradens were indicted for sedition and faced fifteen years in prison. In 1967, they were again indicted on the same charges.
I always say my husband and I were some of the luckiest victims of the witch hunt because there were so many people who quietly lost their jobs, or even quietly went to jail. The thing about the case here in Louisville was that it gave a lot of people a way to fight back. Eventually we got a tremendous amount of support around the country. But not in Louisville—everybody in Louisville was scared to death.
It started in the spring of ’54 when this African-American man named Andrew Wade came and asked if we would buy a house and transfer it to him, if he gave us the money for the down payment. It was right after World War Two and he and his wife wanted to move out to the suburbs, like everybody wanted to do in those days.
The housing shortage for blacks in Louisville was appalling. He had tried to buy in a number of places, and as soon as they found out he was black the deal was off. There was an unwritten law that wasn’t just in Louisville, and it wasn’t just in the South either, and it still exists in some places, but there were neighborhoods he just couldn’t buy in, and one of them was the suburbs. We didn’t even think too much about it, we said sure. It just never occurred to us to say no.
Later that became a standard procedure for people in open housing movements—dummy purchases. But there was no open housing movement in Louisville at that time. We didn’t buy the house to start a movement. We had no idea that it was going to cause all the stir it did. Wade was kind of a crusader, but he just wanted a house. Once he was under attack he was determined to stay, and it became a movement. But as he said later, there’d been an earlier incident where a Filipino woman had moved into a white neighborhood and there’d been a lot of protests and rocks thrown at the house, but some neighbors got together and brought her flowers and fruit and everything settled down. So he thought if there was any trouble it would blow over pretty quick.
There were a couple of coincidences that I think made it different. One was the neighborhood he picked. It probably couldn’t have been more inopportune, because it was an area where a lot of white people had moved to get away from another part of town where more blacks were moving. So you had not the most receptive people, and then he moved into the house the weekend before May 17, 1954, which was the Supreme Court decision against school segregation.1 This made the Supreme Court decision come home to them. We became a lightning rod. People couldn’t get at the Supreme Court, but they could get at us. So that contributed to the hysteria.
Almost immediately there was a cross burned and rocks were thrown through his window and shots fired into the house. That was in May, and then people formed the Wade Defense Committee to support him. It was interracial. We didn’t have that many whites, but there were a few. People would take turns going out to guard the house. He and his then wife—she changed her mind later—were determined to stay. The police were supposed to be guarding the place. They kept getting threats, but gradually things quieted down, and we began to think that everything would be all right, although we also were getting a lot of threats.
We had a mob come to our home one night. That was right after they found out that we had sold the house. By the time I got home, Carl had chased them off. But they came to find out if this was true. They couldn’t believe it. They were very angry. They said, “Have you sold that house to a nigger?” Carl said, “Get out of here and quit stompin’ on my grass.”
There was a newspaper out there called the Shively Newsweek, a little suburban newspaper that saw a way of building circulation. So every week they would run something inflammatory, and that was the first place the Red Scare was raised. This little paper said it looked like Communists were trying to stir up trouble. We didn’t take that too seriously, because you always were called Communist in those days if you did anything. Meantime, a few white people came forth to support the Wades, including a small branch of the Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom, the women’s peace group that Jane Addams2 started. They were very much concerned with the issue of racial equality. They sent out a letter to everybody in the neighborhood urging them to welcome this family. Then we tried to get the churches to do somethin’ and they were all scared to death. It was a strong Catholic area, and each priest thought where this happened was in the next parish—it wasn’t in his parish.
This went on all of June. But things quieted down, and we thought it was going to be over soon when one Saturday night the house blew up.
It was just by the grace of God somebody wasn’t killed. The Wades had this little girl, and she was spending the night in town with her grandparents to go to Sunday school the next morning. She did that every Saturday night. We don’t know whether the people that blew it up knew that or not, they may have. The bomb went off right under her bedroom, so if she’d been there she’d have been killed. The Wades had just come home and were out on the side porch on the other side with a couple of people. Nobody was hurt, but all one side of the house was pretty much destroyed. So they moved into town with his family. Then this Wade Defense Committee began camping on the doorsteps of the police and the prosecutor, pushing them to arrest the people who blew up the house.
The house had to be rebuilt. It was insured, but it was tied up in court a long time over questions of ownership. After the first incidents at the house when the shots were fired into it, the original insurance had been canceled. We got in touch with an insurance man that somebody told us cared about justice, and he got Lloyd’s of London to insure the house. He told me years later that he happened to be in London the day after the house was blown up [laughs], and he went into Lloyd’s of London to tell them, “You remember that house you insured for me in Louisville? Well, it got blown up last night.” And the guy said to him, “If you got any more like that, let us know—we’ll take ’em.”
So anyway, it was insured, but it was just sittin’ there in ruins all that summer. In the meantime, there was this effort to get the authorities to arrest somebody.
The police chief called Carl one day and said, “I really want you to come down here and talk to me, because it may be the most important thing you ever do in your life.” So Carl went down. The chief said, “We’ve gotten word that they’ve gotten a confession from the man who set the dynamite at the Wade’s house and there’ll be an arrest in a few days.” But in the meantime they had heard some of these people were planning to blow up our house, and he says they’re going to put guards at our house. We were right across the street from what was then the fairgrounds. And he told him things to do, install lights in the backyard and check under the hood before we got into the car. So we did.
Then time just worried on, a week went by, ten days, and nobody was arrested. They finally took the police away from our house and put them over in the fairgrounds. I remember Carl called this police chief and said, “What’s happening?” He said, “Well, I just couldn’t leave the police there anymore, they’re all getting bit by chiggers.” Carl said, “But you said they had a confession.” He said, “Yes, they do, but they’re trying to get some more corroborating evidence.” This was in early July. Nobody was ever arrested, haven’t been yet, except us. It became kind of an open secret who that confession was probably from. But in the meantime the summer worried on and we kept going down to the courthouse worrying them about what they were going to do about this.
In September, the guy who was then Commonwealth’s attorney, that’s what we call our prosecutors in Kentucky, his name was Scott Hamilton, announced that he was going to have a grand jury investigation. So in the middle of September, the grand jury opened and we were the first witnesses called, which didn’t seem unusual. I believe I was the very first witness. The minute I sat down I could see what was going on, because immediately they began asking about me and not the house and not the bombing.
They wanted to know what groups I belonged to. Was I a member of this? Was I a member of that? Everything you can think of, including the Communist Party, but also was I Progressive Party? What did the Wade Defense Committee do, and what sort of books did I read, what books did I have in my house? Well, I knew what was going on in the country, so that was a familiar line of questioning. I was just horrified. I said that has nothing to do with who blew up Andrew Wade’s house. So I just refused to answer any of those questions and I left and came on home.
So this all got in the paper, and Scott Hamilton subpoenaed all these people from the Wade Defense Committee, and the head of the Women’s International League that had sent the letter. So then he says in the paper the next day that the grand jury’s investigatin’ the bombing and there are two theories. One is the neighbors blew up the house to chase the Wades out of the neighborhood. The other theory was that the purchase and the resale and the bombing of the house had been a Communist plot to stir up trouble between the races and bring about the overthrow of the government of Kentucky and the United States.
Things got more and more hysterical as they subpoenaed more and more people. If you haven’t been in a community where there’s a hysteria, it’s really hard to describe and it’s hard to believe. One of the guys who had been helping guard the house was Vernon Brown. He shared an apartment with an older man. Vernon was fairly young then, but this older man was a riverboat captain who had retired here. He’d been a radical all of his life, had run for mayor somewhere as a Communist years before. So they raided the house where this Brown lived and took all their books, which were a lot of Communist books. Pictures of these books were all over the front page of the paper. People were talking about how we ought to be lynched, they were talking that on the streets—I mean, we heard this.
What came together here was a combination of the anti-Red and the anti-black hysteria, and when you put that together it was overwhelming. My husband and I became the symbols of all of this. To a certain extent also the other white people who were involved, but mainly us. We became the devil. It was a peculiar position to be in.
The climax was on October the 1st. The grand jury indicted Carl, me, and five other white people, including the head of the Women’s International League and Vernon Brown, who had gone out there to guard the house, and this old man he lived with, even though he hadn’t really been involved. They indicted seven of us, but none of the blacks, because the theory of this prosecutor was that we had stirred this up. It became a familiar theme all through the South as the civil rights movement developed that the blacks were perfectly happy until these white radicals came along and stirred ’em up.
Then they indicted Vernon Brown for actually blowing up the house. Vernon had moved out there to live, that’s what the grand jury just couldn’t understand. He was a truck driver at that time and he worked at night so Charlotte Wade wouldn’t be there by herself during the day. Well, the grand jury just couldn’t understand that at all, how he could possibly move into this house. So they charged him with blowing up the house. Later we were all put in jail under a ten-thousand-dollar bond. Gradually most of us got out—the elderly man stayed in most of that winter. Then about three weeks later, five of us were indicted again for conspiring to blow up the house for seditious purposes.
We decided that we needed to get that bombing charge tried, because Vernon Brown wasn’t even in the state when it happened. He was from up in Minnesota and he had gone up there to visit some people. We wanted to keep the focus on who blew up the house. Well, nobody really cared about that anymore. By then, the hysteria was so strong in the community that we were like a voice crying in the wilderness, and so was Vernon saying, “Try this charge, you say I blew up the house!”
Well, they didn’t want to do that. They said they would try Carl first, not on the charge of conspiring to blow up the house, but plain, garden-variety sedition. And they did. Trial started at the end of November and went to December 13th, with the hysteria building all the time.
The evidence at the trial was basically a lot of experts on Communism who didn’t claim to know us or anything. We found out later they got ’em from HUAC. They kept a stable of these people who went around testifying. They were testifying about the program of the Communist Party and that one aspect was that the Communists wanted to take all the land away from the whites and give it to the blacks and that was what we were doing when we bought and resold this house. I mean literally, that’s what they were putting forth.
They raided our house while we were in jail. We had a houseful of books, because we were just booky people. A lot of Marxist books and a lot of other books too. They didn’t really know the difference. They took anything with a Russian name, all my Tolstoy books, and Turgenev and Dostoevsky. But we had Marx and Lenin, too. They had all these books in the courtroom, it was a trial of books in a way. It was a very hysterical situation. Very little about the Wade house, except that this was part of a plot to stir up trouble between the races and take all the land away from the white people.
Toward the end of the trial, they brought in a woman who said that Carl was a member of the Communist Party. He said he wasn’t, but nobody was going to believe that. Anyway, he was convicted and sentenced to fifteen years in prison and a five-thousand-dollar fine. His bond was set at forty thousand dollars, which at that time was the highest bond ever set in Kentucky. He stayed in jail then from December until the next July, as I recall. By that time, we began to get support, and finally some people raised the bond and he got out. Of course, we kept saying the questions still is “Who blew up that house?” But nobody but us was saying that. And they still refused to try the case on the bombing.
They set my trial next. That is the one aspect of the case I still don’t understand. Somewhere between December the 13th when Carl was convicted and February, they lost their nerve. They postponed my trial until March, then till April, then they postponed all the trials of the rest of us. I don’t know why, because if they’d tried me at that point, I would have been convicted too. We would have both been in jail, and we might have been there for fifteen years. They might have shut us up.
One thing I found out—justice is for sale and you can get justice if you have money or you have influence. We didn’t have either of those things. But we were both reporters, we knew how to talk to people and we were able to tell the story. One reason we got support was that we got the truth out to people and they responded.
Meantime, the guy who blew up the house was scot-free. The house was still in ruins, because the courts hadn’t decided who owned it so who got the insurance money. There was a lot of protest, and it embarrassed Kentucky, which was what we wanted to do.
Finally Carl’s conviction was reversed. It was in the spring of ’56, soon after the United States Supreme Court declared state sedition laws inoperative in the Steve Nelson case3 from Pennsylvania. The Court ruled that the federal government had preempted the field of sedition with the Smith Act.
It went on for a few months, with the other charges still hanging fire. Then the prosecutor came into court one day and moved that the other cases be dismissed. At that point, we were saying the same thing we’d been saying for two and a half years—let’s get this settled about who blew up this house.
He read this long statement moving that all these cases be dismissed, saying he’d done his best to save the Commonwealth from us dangerous folks, and moved also that the bombing charge against Vernon Brown be dismissed because of course everybody knew that Vernon Brown had blown up the house but he couldn’t prove it so therefore he was asking that that be dismissed too. So legally that was the end of the case.
I guess I’ve learned that the things that happen to you that seem the worst at the time may be the best. That seemed like an awful thing at the time. We had two little children, and we figured we were going to be in prison for at least fifteen years. Looking back on it, it’s the best thing that ever happened to me, because it opened up this possibility of mounting a fight against the repression of the fifties. It gave us the opportunity to meet the cream of America all over the country, the people who were fighting back, and hurled us into full-time civil rights work.
It was not so good for Andrew Wade. He never was able to move back to that house, and they never arrested the people who blew it up. There was a couple in Chicago that inherited some money and they gave Andrew Wade the money to pay off the mortgage. So he sold the house and then bought another in an old part of Louisville, which is what they had not wanted to do three years before.
But for him, the dream of having a nice house out in the suburbs was destroyed. And I guess that got lost in the shuffle for a lot of people. When this thing first started, it was the Wade case, that was in the summer of ’54. Then when we got indicted in September, it was the Wade-Braden case. Imperceptibly over the next year, it became the Braden case, that was the way people knew it around the country. And I’ve often wondered, could we have done more to have kept that from happening? I say this not to criticize anybody, ’cause people were wonderful to us, but I think it’s an indication of the depths of the racism in this country. Here was this white man facing fifteen years in prison, and here was this black man who couldn’t even have a house to live in. We just never could mount the fight that we wanted to. Then part of it was Andrew—he got to the point where he didn’t see much use in fighting anymore. But I still think there was just a terrible contradiction that is related to a lot of the unsolved problems in our country.
While our case was still going on, the world changed on December the 1st, 1955, when Rosa Parks sat down on the bus. That was the beginning of the end of the 1950s, it really was. You had this new movement developing. We got involved in SCEF4 and went to work full-time for very little pay. SCEF was interracial—our job was reaching out to white people to get them involved. We knew we weren’t reaching masses of people, the fears and the hysteria was too great, but we reached some. SCEF provided a beacon light for the whites who did want to give moral support to those who would have had a pretty lonely struggle without it. That’s what we were doing all through that period into the sixties. Then the student movement came along and there was a lot more people willing to be active.
But the witch hunt was not over at all. We had these little state committees in the South. You had the Louisiana Un-American Activities Committee, LUAC we called it, ’cause we called the other one HUAC. FUAC in Florida. Georgia called it something else, but they all had ’em in one form or another. Kentucky set one up late and we kinda laughed it out of existence ’cause we called it KUAC [laughs as she pronounces it “quack”]. We put out a pamphlet: KUAC KUAC.
As I say, the witch hunts were doomed the moment Rosa Parks sat down. By the time you have a mass movement in the streets, things are a little different—and I’ll tell you how it came home to me. You see, we were indicted for sedition a second time.
SCEF had different projects, and one was organizing in eastern Kentucky and some over in West Virginia. We called it the Southern Mountain Project. About ’63, the civil rights movement had really begun to look at economic issues. People began talking about it’s no good to sit at the lunch counter if you can’t afford to buy the hamburger. Out of that, with SCLC and some other groups, we were working to build coalitions between working-class poor white people and blacks, as had been talked about in the thirties and had been silenced in the fifties.
So we had this project in Pike County fighting strip mining, where they tear the top off the mountains to get the coal out and ruin people’s land. People were standing in front of the bulldozers. Coal operators didn’t like that a bit. So one fine day, the guy who’s the prosecutor in Pike County, who turns out to be a major coal operator5 down there, arrested Al and Margaret McSurely who were then working down there, and another guy and charged them with sedition. Well, we were a little surprised, because we really thought the sedition law was dead. So Carl went down to see about getting them out on bond. He calls me up and says, “Well, how would you like to be indicted for sedition?”
Now this was August of ’67, thirteen years after the other case. I thought he was kidding. He says, “No, they’re getting ready to indict us too.” So sure enough they did. We went down to surrender and be arraigned. We stayed in jail about a week in Pike County.
I brought this up because the difference between the 1950s and the 1960s was dramatized to me in the courtroom. We got in touch with Bill Kuntsler and Arthur Kinoy,6 and they went into federal court and asked to convene a three-judge court to rule on the constitutionality of the Kentucky sedition law.
See, the Supreme Court in the Nelson case, which was used to reverse Carl’s fifties conviction, had ruled that the Smith Act had preempted states from prosecuting for sedition against the federal government. But that didn’t keep them from prosecuting for sedition against the state itself or a local government. So this prosecutor in Pike County said he wasn’t prosecuting us for sedition against the federal government, he was prosecuting us for sedition against Kentucky and Pike County! That was kind of interesting, because once we got into the Pike County jail everybody thought it’d be a great idea. [Laughs.]
Kuntsler had warned me, “He’s going to ask you whether you’re a Communist,” and I said, “Well, I ain’t gonna answer that, I never have and I’m not fixin’ to now.”
The courtroom was packed, not like in the 1950s with people wanting to lynch us, these were mostly students. There was quite a student movement in Lexington at that time. So I got on the stand and Kuntsler questions me first about what our program was in Pike County, and what we were trying to do in the mountains, what SCEF was all about, and I answered all those questions. Then this prosecutor Ratliff gets up and pretty soon he kind of swells up like a toad and he says, “Mrs. Braden, are you now or have you ever been . . .” At which point that whole courtroom burst into laughter! One of the young women who was there said to me later, “I always heard people quote that but I didn’t know anybody ever really said it!”
As soon as the laugh died down, he finished the sentence, “. . . a Communist. By which I mean, do you subscribe to the teachings of Lenin, Marx, Trotsky, Mao Tse-tung,” and he named two or three other people.
Then I said, “Mr. Ratliff, in that question you have covered a wide range of political and economic thought and I really don’t see how anybody could give an intelligent answer.” One of the federal judges said, “I don’t either, Mr. Ratliff, ask her somethin’ else.”
Then he said, “Mrs. Braden, is it true, that in your basement in Louisville”—here I am charged with sedition, like I’m going to overthrow the government, and he didn’t ask me if I had any guns or bombs in the basement—“is it true that in your basement you have a printing press?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact we have two of ’em.”
That was it. In a little while, Carl testified, then the judges retired, stayed out an hour, came back, and declared the Kentucky sedition law unconstitutional. To me that whole thing dramatized one of the things the civil rights movement had done for the country. Because in the fifties it took us three years to win. In 1967, it took us a week. And the question that scared people to death in the early fifties was now a joke.
A native Texan from an upper-middle-class family, Thompson speaks with a soft inflection. During the late forties, she and her husband belonged to the Communist Party and worked for civil rights in the Deep South. We meet in her apartment in a Manhattan project.
After the war, in ’46, I worked as an executive secretary for the Civil Rights Congress1 in Houston, Texas. Then I went to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to work in a factory. I worked for a year and a half trying to recruit workers into the United Electrical Workers, part of CIO Dixie.2 Then I fell in love with and married the district organizer of the Communist Party. His name was Samuel Joseph Hall.
Sam was from Alabama, and shortly after we were married we moved down to Birmingham. Once we bought a house, maybe two months after we arrived, he put ads in the Birmingham paper saying he was there as the Communist Party organizer, and that the Communist Party was a legal party and we stood for certain things. That’s what the Party people in Alabama wanted, someone who was Alabama-born to be a spokesman for the Party. We might have had a few hundred members scattered all over the state. A lot of them solid members. People in the black belt who’d been part of the sharecroppers’ struggles in the thirties.
Most of the work was based on the question of Jim Crow. Sam wrote a pamphlet called The Case of the Ten Dollar a Week Robbery which we distributed by the thousands, only to white people, telling them how Jim Crow worked to keep wages down, and what it cost them—ten twenty-two a week—in terms of what people up North doing the same work were getting.
The history of the Party in the South goes back to the thirties with the sharecroppers’ struggles. People openly trying to defy the Klan. I knew a gentleman who once killed four Klansmen when they tried to get into his house. He had bored a hole in the floor and put in a great big wooden pole to block the door, almost like the trunk of a tree, and as they tried to come in, he used his ax on them, then he buried them. The Klan never made it known because people wouldn’t stay with them.
Life was pretty rough. I thought that North Carolina was South, but I didn’t know anything could be like Birmingham, Alabama. Once we were there three or four months, I thought of North Carolina as North! Birmingham was really pretty awful. You could feel the oppression of TCI—Tennessee Coal and Iron, a subsidiary of U.S. Steel. Sam and I lived in Birmingham for about three and a half years until it actually became impossible to function there.
Bull Connor3 was active then. My God, he had interviews constantly where he would say things like if he were in charge, he would take all the Communists in the country, put them on boats, send them off to Russia, but see that the boats sank in the Atlantic.
I remember the first time I went out looking for a job, I went to a paper factory and talked to the personnel person and it all went pretty well. He told me to fill out the application. I filled it all out, but, in little print down at the bottom of the page, was written, “I am not now, never was, and never will be a member of the Communist Party.” So I took the application back and handed it to him. He said, “You know, Mrs. Hall, you didn’t sign this.”
I said, “I can’t,” and he asked why.
I said, “I happen to be a member of the Communist Party.” I almost felt sorry for the man. He looked like he was just going to keel over.
He said, “I never met a Communist before.” So I said, “You meet them all the time—they’re just not in a position to say so.” Of course, I was lying through my teeth. “My husband happens to be the chairman of the Communist Party in Alabama, so I’m able to tell you.”
He said, “Listen, what’s your phone number? I’ll call you. No, you call me tomorrow.” So the next day I called him and he said, “Mrs. Hall, you’re so lucky, it’s such a beautiful day and you’re so lucky not to be in an office and not to be working. It’s such a beautiful day to be outside.”
After that, I’d get a job and have it for one or two days and then be fired. Sam and I decided it wasn’t worth it.
I registered to vote for the first time in my life in Birmingham. I guess I was about twenty-two then. They asked me questions. Me being a white person, the old gentleman just said, “You don’t believe everybody should vote, do you?” And I said, “Yes, I think everybody should vote.” So he said, “Don’t you think anybody should be limited from voting?” And I said, “Well, I guess people in prison or insane asylums.” That told him what my thinking was, and he sat there and thought for a while, and finally he said, “Okay, I’m going to let you vote.” When I walked out of there I really felt I was voting because he would let me, not because it was my right.
In between meetings, if an emergency came up, someone would have to see Sam. It was usually a black woman. She would come to the house, don an apron, take a broom, go to the front porch, and sweep, so that any neighbors looking out of the window would assume that person was a servant. We used to laugh about that, because who the hell had the money for a cleaning person? [Laughs,] Then the person would come back in the house. We’d sit and write down what we had to communicate, because we knew the place was bugged.
But the main thing was the anti-Communist hysteria. There was a radio program, I forget the preacher’s name. For weeks he would go on every day about the dangers of Communists, the threat of Communism, and how we’ve got this Communist living right here in Birmingham, Alabama—Sam Hall and his wife. And he’d give out our address, 4609 Tenth Avenue North, I think it was. This was every single day, hate stuff, which was continuing to whip up hysteria.
We lived with bomb threats and constant surveillance. We were followed everyplace. Sometimes if I decided I wanted to do some shopping, I would have an FBI man right next to me. We looked as if we were a couple who were angry with each other and weren’t speaking. Sometimes I would even go into a department store and walk into the lingerie department, thinking maybe the guy wouldn’t have the guts to walk in there, and he usually would wait outside until I was leaving. [Laughs.]
If we ever went away for a few days, we’d come back and there’d be a bedroom window screen just leaning against the house, with a big old muddy footprint right inside. I lost things like art books—what the hell they wanted with art books, I don’t know. But they would constantly come in and take things. Once our poker chips were gone. We figured maybe they wanted to get us for gambling. Every time they’d come, they’d find a suitcase to put the loot in and take it away. We were constantly buying luggage because they would always take it.
It was just plain old harassment. This is what they were spending the time and the taxpayers’ money on. We were no threat to them. There was going to be no revolution in Birmingham, Alabama. But the object was to run you out of town and make life difficult. To stir up people with a phony kind of patriotism.
It was unpleasant just taking out the garbage. Sam got to the point where he put the garbage out at night, because every time we’d go in the backyard, our neighbors would sing “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” They were frightened.
Sam Hall came from that kind of people. He had tremendous confidence that someday when the white people learned what Jim Crow cost them—not just in dollars and cents but in terms of being total people—they would change. And when he learned how he’d been lied to, he turned around with anger; he was such a fighter for the rights of blacks.
Victories in Birmingham? Those are things you can’t count. The only victories that you can count are in terms of the people that you affect and the people you give strength to by speaking of their rights, and the people who listen and think that it makes some sense. A black child was shot in the back for having stolen a case of soda pop—then it was ten cents a bottle, so you figure for a dollar and twenty cents this kid was shot in the back. How do you live with that? So you put out leaflets, you go out late at night and throw them on people’s porches. We never passed out literature openly. It just wasn’t the kind of place where you could do that. Someone would have beaten you up or else the cops would have shown up to arrest you.
Alabama has a history of this—there’s a Southern Room in the Birmingham library where they have file folders of stories about all these people getting beaten up. It’s filled with violence against anyone who would speak out for black people. There was an old librarian who was so proud of the fact that she kept things that she didn’t sometimes distinguish what she kept. Wonderful file folders of who got beat up when, the sharecropper fights in the late thirties.
Once a big sign was put out front of our house—“There is no room in this country for wild dogs, snakes, or Communists. Get out.” The Klan threatened us constantly with bombings. We had a loaded shotgun by our bed. Everyone who was in any danger had a shotgun. We kept firecrackers on our windowsills—that’s in case the Klan ever tried to put the house on fire when we were sleeping, we’d wake up. Every time it rained or was very damp, we’d check the firecrackers and if they were damp we’d throw them away and put fresh ones down.
After a couple of bombs had gone off in the black community, we decided the bomb threats were coming too often and maybe it would be a good idea if we didn’t sleep in the house. The back bedroom and the front bedroom were so close together that sleeping in the back wouldn’t really protect us if a bomb were thrown. So we decided we should leave at night after our neighbors went to sleep and come back early in the morning, so the car would always be seen there. For maybe as long as a month we used to leave at night, go out of the county, sleep over in a motel, wake up very early, and try to be home by five-thirty or six o’clock so that if our neighbors looked out, the car would be there and we would be there. But at least we could have a night’s sleep and not worry about hearing a car slow down, which used to be a problem. Every time we heard a car pass the house—it was a quiet street in a working-class community—and we heard it slow down, we’d immediately look out of the blinds to see if there was anything going on in front of the house.
After the Korean War began, we started circulating the Stockholm peace petition.4 With that, Sam was arrested for vagrancy, and they put him in jail. At his trial, the head of the Red Squad said the only work he ever saw this boy doing was working in his garden and hanging out clothes. At which time the Klansmen in the audience all laughed, because they thought it was funny as hell, a man hanging up clothes. The head of the Red Squad finally said, “This boy has a job but his means of support is disreputable.” Actually Sam’s salary came from the Daily Worker rather than the Party organization. Sam got a suspended sentence. After the trial, we left Birmingham. By the time we got up to New York about two days later, we learned that a city ordinance had been passed in Birmingham that every Communist had forty-eight hours to get out or they’d be imprisoned. We never went back. Sam died three and a half years later.
That’s the way it was. We lived openly as Communists for three years in very rough times. I look back on it now and I think to myself, did that really happen? It’s funny, because sometimes people say, “If this would happen to me” or “If I could be that frightened, I couldn’t go through it.” I think people go through what they have to go through and what they choose to endure. I wouldn’t have done it differently. I wouldn’t have run away or said this is too much for me. But when I look back on it, I wonder how I ever endured it.
Clifford and Virginia Durr were old-family Southerners who came North to join Roosevelt’s New Deal Brain Trust. They eventually returned to Alabama and continued their work in civil rights. “My husband was a lawyer and he won the Parks case, you know, Rosa Parks about the buses. Yes, he was the lawyer in that case, with another lawyer named Fred Gray.”
I came up from the South to Washington, D.C., in ’33. My husband was in the Roosevelt administration. He was one of the three heads of the Federal Communications Commission. I got interested in the struggle for the vote, getting rid of the poll tax.1 So through that I came in contact with all the legal people and left-wing people. I belonged to an organization called the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. It was started by the Roosevelts along with some labor leaders. That was back in ’38.
But I was never called up or had any trouble really, though, of course, all the Southerners said all the people who were against the poll tax were Reds. It was only when Eastland got after us—he was the biggest Red-baiter in the Senate—that was ’54, just before the Brown decision. If you supported any rights for blacks, he said you were a Red.
My brother-in-law was Justice Hugo Black, and he was on the Supreme Court, as you know. He took quite a lead in the Brown decision. The first thing my husband and I knew was that Eastland had said if the Supreme Court passed the Brown decision it would show that it was dominated by Communists. And of course he said if the Brown decision was passed that would mean interracial sex mixing, and he just went off on that score. He was trying to do everything in his power to smear the Supreme Court and also the idea of schools being integrated.
Then he said that Justice Hugo Black had a sister-in-law, which was me, and that I had been a member of an organization, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, that had Red connections. Eastland called us down to New Orleans to appear in front of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. He also called Aubrey Williams, who was in Southern Conference, and Jim Dombrowski, who was executive secretary, and Myles Horton of the Highlander Folk School, and he accused us all of being tied in to the Communists. Especially me. They didn’t have any of the blacks in the Southern Conference testify, just the white people. He wanted to paint us as manipulators.
They had a paid informer named Paul Crouch, and he just told a string of lies. He said he’d seen my husband and J. Robert Oppenheimer together at Communist meetings, all of which was totally a lie. He said I had close connections with my brother-in-law, Hugo Black, and he intimated, he didn’t actually say it, but he intimated I had influenced the Supreme Court. He accused me of subverting the White House and being a friend of Mrs. Roosevelt’s—well, I really was a friend of hers but not an intimate, personal friend, but I was in meetings with her a lot. When he accused me of subverting the White House, my husband got furious and tried to hit him, and the marshals rushed in and separated them.
It was just the most fantastic, mad sort of absurdity you can imagine, but he was paid by the United States government to inform. It was just the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever seen, and the purpose of it was to try to implicate my brother-in-law Hugo Black as tinged with Red.
The whole thing was such a lie, I just refused to testify. My husband refused as well, and Jim Eastland said he was going to send us all to jail for contempt of the committee, and I certainly was in contempt of it. But we never went to jail. Lyndon Johnson was one of the main friends we had in the Senate. And Lyndon I think struck a deal with him.
Down in Montgomery it was just awful. It made people suspicious of us, and at that time the Red Scare was everywhere. My husband’s family’s been in Montgomery for generations, and that really saved us. The great disagreement was that we believed that blacks had the right to vote and we believed in integrated schools. They didn’t agree with us but they stuck by us.
There were cross-burnings and threats, and when they did pass the Brown decision and integrate the schools, I had to take my children out of school and send them off. The teachers would say things like “You tell your uncle Hugo Black that I’m not gonna teach those black children. I don’t care how many laws he passes!” That was hard on the children.
Eastland trying us for being Red was one of the dirtiest things that happened that I know of in the whole long struggle. Because he did it to influence people’s opinion about the Brown decision. He didn’t think he could scare Hugo, but he thought he could make other people think there was something wrong about the decision. He was a very nasty man, no doubt about that.
That whole Cold War period was one of the worst things that’s ever happened to the United States. For forty years this country believed all that junk—that Russia was about to bomb us and the whole country was full of Russian spies. We spent all that money and look at what happened. We ruined Russia, and Russia ruined us. What’s so sad is the American people actually believed it. All that stuff was so wickedly wrong and lying.
In 1946, Lee Lorch joined in the struggle for integrated housing and public schools. During the next thirteen years, he was driven from four university positions, denounced on the floor of Congress, hauled before investigatory committees, and pilloried in the press. Finally, unable to find employment, he and his wife, Grace, left the United States for Canada, where he retired from York University in 1985.
Housing was in very short supply after the war, and for the first year I lived in New York, I shared a room with my father and visited my wife and daughter in Boston on weekends. Then we got a half a Quonset hut over a garbage dump in Jamaica Bay in a temporary housing project for veterans. Finally we found accommodations in a huge housing project called Stuyvesant Town, which was built by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in New York’s Lower East Side, built by them but with enormous financial assistance from the City of New York. This project was large enough for twenty-five to thirty-five thousand people, a small town in itself.
Now Metropolitan had agreed that preference would be given to war veterans. However, they extended that preference only to white war veterans. They refused to accept applications from nonwhites. The NAACP, the American Civil Liberties Union, American Jewish Congress, and some other organizations brought suit. This case went all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. Metropolitan Life Insurance Company did not contest the facts. No, they stipulated to the Court that they would not accept applications from any other than whites. They insisted that a landlord had the right to choose tenants on any basis decided by the landlord. And the Supreme Court of the United States accepted this argument, in a vote of seven to two, Black and Douglas dissenting.
Well, this started a big struggle. After all, we had just been through a war which had shown where racism led. The smell of the gas chambers, the horrors of the concentration camps, were still vivid in the memories of the war veterans, perhaps even more than the rest of the population. The tenants set up a committee to fight this discriminatory policy. I became vice chair of that committee.
We were very surprised to learn that about two-thirds of the tenants surveyed were opposed to Metropolitan’s exclusionary policy. It was hard to believe, because previous struggles to open up housing to African-Americans usually led to the opposition of the bulk of the whites in affected areas. But this turned out to be an accurate measure, and in fact the level of support kept increasing as the militancy of the activity developed.
At that time, I was teaching at the City College of New York. This committee became public after I was recommended for promotion. The appointments committee of the department decided not to reappoint me and refused to give any reasons. Delegations that went to see them also received no reasons. The college president admitted that I had done my work well and that there were no charges against me. I was dropped without explanation.
I soon got another job at Penn State. My wife and I decided we would keep the apartment in Stuyvesant Town, as the lease had not yet expired. We invited an African-American family to occupy this apartment as our guests. This was very widely publicized in the papers. The New York Times reported on it extensively. When I got to Penn State, the acting president told me that he’d been receiving a lot of calls from wealthy alumni wanting to know why the hell I’d been hired and how quickly I could be fired. This was before I’d got my first class—in fact, it was before I spent my first night there. However, that discussion ended more or less amicably and there were no threats made. The year went on. Incidentally, Penn State did not have on its payroll a single nonwhite. I’m not talking just about the teaching staff—there was no secretary, no janitor, no yardman. Meanwhile, in the Metropolitan Life Insurance Project, the support was growing for this family that was living there. They were made to feel very welcome.
Then in late March I was suddenly summoned by the acting president and told that the board of trustees had given him a list of questions to ask me. He had already reported to the board that I’d been recommended for reappointment, and that there had been no criticisms of my work nor of my relations with my colleagues. However, the board had instructed him to ask me the following questions. Would I be willing to give up my apartment and get out of that issue? No. Would I be willing to do it when the lease expires? No. Well, when would I be willing to do it? I told him I was in that fight for the duration. Then he wanted to know, “Are you a Communist?” I said, “Well, I cannot take upon myself the responsibility for legitimizing this type of question. Therefore, without refusing to answer, I’m asking you to withdraw the question.”
Well, he sort of huffed and puffed and said that he was going to report to the board and the board would take action, one way or the other. The next week I got a one-sentence letter: “Your appointment will not be renewed.” That was it. No statement of reasons. No criticisms, no nothing. It’s true there were some highly placed insurance executives on the board. It’s also true that the board consisted primarily of big-time money men. In fact, when the American Association of University Professors intervened,1 the chairman of the board expressed genuine amazement. He said, “Why should a big association take an interest in the dismissal of one young assistant professor?”
On April 10th, 1950, the New York Times had a front-page news story about my dismissal, and the next day ran an editorial calling on Penn State to reinstate me. There was some support among professors and among students, and very strong support in the weekly newspapers addressed to the African-American community. The Pittsburgh Courier editor referred to me as a minor legend for these struggles. The editor in chief of the Afro-American chain of newspapers personally came to Penn State to investigate the situation. Also the Pennsylvania Federation of Labor at its convention in June of 1950 voted overwhelmingly to demand my reinstatement.
After Penn State, thanks largely to the intervention of Judge Hubert T. Delany, who was, I think, the first black judge in New York City, I was appointed to Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. That’s a private university founded after the Civil War by the Freedmen’s Bureau of the government and the Congregational Church for the education of the newly freed slaves. I taught there from 1950 to 1955. And in that period I served as state vice president of the NAACP as well as on the board of the Nashville NAACP. I was chair of the defense committee that was set up for a thirteen-year-old African-American boy who had been charged with raping a forty-year-old white divorcée in her own bedroom while her ten-year-old son and twenty-year-old daughter were asleep in the house and didn’t wake up while all this was supposedly going on. The whole thing was a complete frame-up.
The case was too ridiculous to even have an indictment, although he was kept in prison the entire time. The judge refused bail for him on the ground that the guilt was evident. But then the grand jury didn’t indict. Anyway, I was constantly active in the community. But I was also very active in the educational front, not only in regard to my own students but in regard to the atmosphere into which they would go.
May 17th, 1954, is a watershed date in that period. On that Monday the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its unanimous ruling2 that segregation in public education is unconstitutional. Terror began in the South to invalidate that decision. It was not a self-enforcing decision. In fact, there was no enforcement provision of any sort until a year later, and even then in a very limited way. There was no order issued to desegregate the schools. In order to set an atmosphere of peaceful compliance with this decision and to show there was white support in the South for it, my wife and I endeavored to enroll our daughter in the public school nearest our home. We were living on the Fisk campus, and therefore the nearest school was a school that was, up until then, reserved for African-American children.
I went to see the principal of the school and asked him his opinion, and he said he would welcome her. In fact, he already knew her. You see, all her playmates went to that school. She was ten at the time. We then made application at the school board headquarters and they refused her admission.
At that time the Nashville Tennessean was a very prominent newspaper, and it was busy backing Gordon Browning for governor. Browning was running on a platform of preservation of segregation. He said that one hundred percent of the whites and ninety-nine percent of the blacks wanted things to stay as they were. He would see that they did. This was his program. And of course our action showed that the one hundred percent wasn’t quite one hundred percent. The Nashville Tennessean then began to make inquiries about me, and I was immediately subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee.3
The subpoena was served September 7th, 1954, for me to appear in Dayton, Ohio, September 15th. A week in which to prepare. So anyway, I went to the committee hearing. It was a pretty raucous affair. “Were you ever a member of the Communist Party?” and so on.
I was an unfriendly witness. I refused to answer the bulk of the questions, and eventually I was cited for contempt of Congress. Meanwhile, panic had started at Fisk University. The Nashville Tennessean hammered away at this, day after day, and I was summoned before the board of trustees. I learned later that the board had initially voted seventeen to two against taking any action; but then one of the white members of the board, a local manufacturer, got up and had said that if that decision stands, he will resign from the board and spread his resignation in the press, and that the other dissenting member would do the same.
The board then voted to withdraw that motion and refer it to its executive committee for final action. The executive committee voted ten to one to dismiss me. The ten whites versus the one black on the committee.
It must be understood what a black institution is. It’s not an institution controlled by African-Americans; it’s one attended by them. The control still rests in the hands of those who control the rest of society. With some of the historically black institutions of the South, in those days, every single member of the board was white. This was normally the case with the state-owned institutions. And in most others, the majority was white. The then president of Fisk was the first nonwhite president in its history.
Well, at any event, this issue at Fisk kept going. My case was then put before the full board. All the whites present voted for my dismissal. Most of the African-Americans present voted against my dismissal. I was then dismissed.
I applied far and wide for jobs. Of all the twenty-one hundred degree-granting institutions in the United States, Philander Smith College was the sole institution that had nerve enough to offer me a job. It was a small, historically black institution in Little Rock, Arkansas, operated by the Methodist Church. I started teaching there in September 1955, immediately after my term at Fisk ended.
I was still under indictment for contempt of Congress when we got to Little Rock. I should have been tried by then, but the government kept postponing. Before the 1956 elections, the government requested a further postponement of the trial. We refused to agree. They were anxious to avoid having the trial prior to the election, because the weekly press would be very interested in why the federal government could attempt to imprison somebody who’d been consistently active against racism, and successful in education in historically black institutions, especially since in those days the government was doing nothing to stop the killings that were going on in the South—killings of people who were committing the crime of trying to register to vote while of African ancestry.
Now, Little Rock was soon to become notorious throughout the world when Governor Orval Faubus called out the Arkansas National Guard in full battle dress to surround Central High School and keep out the nine African-American children who had been authorized by court order to attend that school. To my mind, it was unfortunate that the school board had elected to send only nine African-American children to one formerly all-white school, and not to send any white kids to formerly all-black schools. If they had issued a massive desegregation order, the segregationists could not have been able to focus their strength on this single school and against nine children.
There were cars with license plates from all over the Southeast parked in the area around that school. The drivers and passengers were part of the mob which gathered. Now, just by mischance, one of the nine became separated from the other eight. It was a big school covering a whole city block. Eight were together at one corner. And the ninth, a young woman, fifteen years of age, had taken the bus and the bus stop was on the other corner. She didn’t know that the National Guard was there to keep her out, so she started to walk to the school. The Guard closed ranks and wouldn’t let her through, and she went back, confused, shocked, and sat down at the bench at the bus stop. This made the local mob realize that the Guard was there for them—not for the Constitution, not for the children. And they began to heckle this young woman. But one white woman stepped out, succeeded in shaming the mob, got the young woman safely onto a bus, and took her home. That was my wife.
She just happened to be passing by. Our daughter was still in junior high, and Grace had taken her to school. And then had to take the bus back home. The bus went past Central High School, so Grace got off to see what was going on. It was just happenstance.
Before that bus came, Grace had wanted to call a taxi to get the girl out of there and herself as well. There was a drugstore on the corner, and Grace went toward the store to use the phone. The owner slammed the door in her face and locked it. Grace went back and sat with the girl until the bus came.
She didn’t abuse the mob. She didn’t say what would have been easy to say—“You’re a bunch of ignorant hoodlums; go on with you.” What she said to them was, and this was reported in the late edition of the New York Times, “This is a child you’re menacing. What will you think of yourselves six months from now?” A number of the people in that mob—in fact, most of them—were women. Women from the ragged edge of life themselves. Grace recognized in them other human beings, capable of revising their positions. This recognition so startled them that they were no longer equipped to go forth to battle. They were not being challenged as enemies; they were being challenged as human beings.
The result was that they made no effort to stop Grace from taking this young woman away when the bus came. When the bus driver opened the door, a young hoodlum who should’ve been in school but who was playing hooky attempted to follow onto the bus. The driver, a white guy, chased him off and protected Grace and her companion.
So you see, there were all sorts there. But Grace’s remarks had prevented this from developing into physical abuse. Grace wrote about it later. She said, and I think she was quite correct, that those who really benefited from segregation weren’t there. The ones who were there were people who were themselves victims of poverty and ignorance and who saw in releasing blacks from some of their bonds threats to what little status they had. So the struggle had to be for the liberation of all, and for the growth of democratic rights for all. I think that’s an important lesson.
Well, one of the reporters present recognized her. So her name was in the press—not only in Little Rock, but nationally. The New York Times even had a reference to her editorially, praising her by name for this act. Within a few days, Grace was subpoenaed by Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, to appear before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in Memphis, where he was sure of a solid segregationist clique. She was given only two days in which to make the trip to Memphis, get a lawyer, which she didn’t get. Neither of us had been able to get counsel to appear before the committees.
When she appeared before the committee, she attempted to make a statement. They kept shouting at her so that she couldn’t. Eventually they threw her out, said they were going to prosecute her for contempt of Congress, which they didn’t do. The next day the Washington Post had a beautiful editorial, condemning Eastland and praising Grace.
Grace is no longer living. She died October 28th, 1974. And oddly enough, I think that was exactly the anniversary of her appearance before the committee.
After that, a cross was burned on our lawn and dynamite was put in our garage. The dynamite was not fused, it turned out. I was not using the garage except for storage, and they knew that. They phoned anonymously to the FBI to claim I was storing dynamite. [Chuckles.] That’s how I discovered the dynamite, when the FBI showed up at my house. The cross-burning was not very effective either. It wasn’t even completely consumed. They sort of dumped it and ran. I never saw who did it.
The worst of the situation was that our daughter was still in an all-white school. She was beaten, pushed downstairs, had food dumped over her by a number of kids. It was very tough for her, but she stood up. She went regularly to school, and it mustn’t be thought that her persecution was at the hands of every teacher or every pupil. It takes only a few to pull stunts of this kind. She had some support. In fact, Alice was elected to the student council while all this was going on. But vicious things were done. On one occasion some man pretending to be me called the principal of her school, saying her mother had just died and she should be notified of this. The principal fortunately had sense enough to phone me to verify it.
We had to keep changing our phone number because of round-the-clock phone calls. They’d call one o’clock, two o’clock in the morning to prevent you from sleeping. Even an unlisted number would soon get out. We were living across the street from Mr. and Mrs. Bates; Daisy Bates was the president of the state NAACP and was the leading figure in this struggle. What they went through was hell. Gangs would drive by and throw Molotov cocktails through their windows, trying to set their house on fire. Fortunately, they were in a brick house and hard to do. But they had to replace windows very frequently.
And these nine kids were persecuted viciously. Again, the white kids in that school were not uniformly in favor of preserving segregation, and even those who wanted to preserve segregation were not always interested in persecuting the particular kids involved.
But the names of these kids would be taken by the segregationist kids surreptitiously, and the parents of white kids who were friendly to the black kids would get late-night phone calls: “If you don’t want to fish your kid out of the river, tell him to stop being friendly to those niggers.” Warfare on every front, however cruel.
It was terribly hard on my wife’s nerves. I had a job to do. I had a heavy teaching load at this small, badly financed college. But my wife had to sit all day and think about our daughter in school. That was a much greater strain, ’cause we never knew in what straits she’d come home. We couldn’t let her go to school on a bus. I drove her to school and picked her up all the time. Of course, the governor of the state and the segregationist press was busy denouncing us all the time. In fact, a congressman from Little Rock even made a speech in Congress against us.
I mentioned that in 1956 the federal government had requested postponement of the trial, to which we didn’t agree. They thereupon dropped the indictment, which meant I was under no charges of any sort. This way they avoided facing the jssue before the 1956 presidential elections. Immediately after the elections, they reinstated the indictment. [Chuckles.] The trial was eventually held later in 1956, in the federal district court at Dayton, Ohio, Justice Lester Cecil presiding. It was held without jury. My defense attorney was Judge Hubert T. Delany, who had recently retired as a judge in New York City Courts.
When I was before the committee, I had put into the record—and I didn’t have a chance to put a hell of a lot into the record—that I’d never been in Dayton before in my life. That I didn’t understand how they could call me when they claimed to be investigating communism in the Dayton area. I’d even left the state of Ohio thirteen years previously and had never been back.
This testimony showed the judge that the committee had subpoenaed me for other than legislative purposes. A few months later he came down with an acquittal. He said that he had been unable to find that there’d been any reason for calling me.
But the witch hunters had gotten what they wanted. They called me in order to cast a shadow over the effort to desegregate the schools peacefully, and to get me dismissed from Fisk. In this they had succeeded.
In Arkansas, the situation was more complicated. I don’t think they would have dared to have cited my wife for contempt, because her bravery and her humaneness in silencing a mob and getting this child out of danger had attracted national and international notice. For them to have persecuted her further, especially when they had already been condemned for this much persecution, would not have served their purposes.
The president of Philander Smith College, M. Lafayette Harris, later a bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, was actually rather supportive. He vacillated, it’s true; but it was out of concern toward what would happen to the school. Great pressure was brought. The school was financed by collections from the Methodist Church, primarily white Methodists. And segregationists were getting Methodist constituencies to write in and say that they would no longer take up a collection for this school.
There were threats to dynamite the school. In Little Rock, a prominent reporter for one of the best-known of the weekly newspapers was stoned. A photographer for Life magazine was actually arrested, as he put it, for hitting a segregationist in the fist with his face. Anything could’ve happened, especially as the political situation continued to deteriorate.
Governor Faubus kept up the pressure, plus constant statements from other state officials, including the attorney general, all of which had to be reported in the media, both print and air. I was being denounced all the time, especially in the weekly newspapers put out by segregationist circles. So it was there all the time, even though the two daily newspapers were not engaged in any particular crusade against us, in fact, the Arkansas Gazette not at all.
Then the following happened. As I’ve mentioned, this was a Methodist school. The leading Methodist school in the U.S. is Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. And just by chance, the head of their math department was going on leave and they asked me whether I would replace him for that one year. So I agreed with the president of Philander Smith that I would take leave to accept this visiting position for a year at Wesleyan University.4
It was under these circumstances that I left Little Rock that year. This was 1957–58, the year of the big struggle; the year of the National Guard; the year that the President of the United States finally had to put the National Guard under federal control, and send in troops to enforce the orders of the federal court. Without, by the way, ever saying that he supported those orders.5
The court order provided that the schools had to be run in a certain way. It didn’t provide that they had to be run. So the state closed down all the high schools in Little Rock for the next year. The kids who came from well-to-do families, of course, could go to private schools; but the poor, white and black alike, were being kept out of school for a year, in order to promote segregation. Well, you can imagine this reflected a worsening of the situation in the area. The growing tension, and the pressures on Philander Smith didn’t let up. And the president wrote me rather sorrowfully that he didn’t see that it was practical for me to come back. I was compelled to agree with him, because I didn’t want to give the segregationists the satisfaction of having them say that they’d been able to drive me out of town and force this institution to bow. This institution resisted the segregationists by inviting me there in the first place, and by supporting me during that year, and by praising my contributions to the school.
I then accepted one of several offers made to me by Canadian universities and have been in Canada ever since.
An outgoing, erudite man, O’Dell started his civil rights activism during World War Two sailing in the National Maritime Union.1 After being blacklisted off the ships, he carried the struggle ashore to the South. In the early sixties, his talents led him to a key position in Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). There he became the target of a Red-baiting campaign by J. Edgar Hoover and the Kennedy administration.
When you’re living behind the Iron Curtain down South, who was Communist by definition was anybody who was fightin’ for civil rights. So here’s James Eastland, senator by virtue of the disenfranchisement of the black population of Mississippi, and he was the chairman of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee.
In 1956, he comes down with his committee, allegedly lookin’ for “communism in the South.” I had moved from an address on Louisiana Avenue in New Orleans to another address. The landlady was keeping some of my library when they tried to issue a subpoena to me.
One of the guys I had sailed with was a white brother named Grady—they subpoenaed him too. He was from Tupelo, Mississippi. Grady had poor health as a child and he had periodic relapses of tuberculosis. He was having one of those relapses at the time and he was in a hospital run by a Catholic religious order. The police officials that came to serve his subpoena had him chained to the bed so he couldn’t escape the hearings they were holding at the New Orleans Custom House.
Now they didn’t know where I was, because I had changed addresses, but they seized my library as evidence that I was a Communist. There were some books in there by Marx and Engels and some others—those weren’t the only books in my library, but I certainly did have some Communist literature. So they made an issue that this proves he must be Communist because he’s readin’ these books. And that was the headline of the New Orleans Tribune. “Local Communist Library Seized!” And then the article opened with “Books by the leading Reds of the world . . .” [Laughs.] Boy, I read that, I said, “These people are going crazy!” During the hearings a lawyer for one of the defendants was thrown down the steps of the Custom House and his arm was broken. It was that kind of an atmosphere.
I had a good lawyer named Milton Friedman. It wasn’t Milton Friedman of this economic foolishness! [Laughs.] This was a Madison Avenue lawyer. I said, “I want to make it clear, I don’t mind going to jail for contempt. I am not going to be friendly to this Eastland Committee. I’m going to speak my mind, and if it’s gonna result in a contempt charge, then I’m ready to go to jail.”
He said, “You can state your position and not go to jail, and the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination is your protection.” With the insistence that at no time would I address Eastland as “Senator” we prepared for the hearing.
They asked the same old thing—“Are you or have ever you been a Communist?” I said, “That is none of your business, you don’t have the right to ask that.”
I told Eastland, “You wouldn’t even be sittin’ there if blacks could vote in Mississippi, and you’re callin’ everybody subversive?” I gave him a fit, man. The net result is that they turned me loose after a very brief session. He never bothered me anymore, didn’t ever call me back. I was just getting warmed up! ’Cause you know, with all the cameras in there and those marble halls, it looks so imposing. It takes a while for a country boy to get used to that. But I got used to it in about an hour, so, man, if he’d come back for a second session, he’d a been in serious trouble.
But their point was to create an atmosphere in the South that “exposed” any progressive people in the civil rights effort as Communists. So white Southerners who were for civil rights had been called nigger-lovers for years, but now you could call them Communists, and the segregationists hid behind that—they weren’t opposed to civil rights, they were just against Communists.
Eastland and Strom Thurmond,2 people like that, they used their position of power to try to stop the civil rights movement. Because if we won the right to vote then some of them would not be in office any longer.
So anyway, that was the 1956 hearings in New Orleans. Then I got a job in Alabama through a friend of mine with a small black insurance company, the Protective Industrial Insurance Company, and I worked in Birmingham. Then I was promoted to manager of the Montgomery district in 1958, and it was in that period that I got involved in the Montgomery civil rights movement and in the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. In Alabama, the NAACP had been outlawed under this atmosphere of anti-Communism. So we formed the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights with the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth as its president. We carried on under that banner.
Then in 1958 the House Un-American Activities Committee came South on the same errand that the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee had done two years earlier, that is, trying to expose the extent of “communism’s” spread in the South. So they passed the names around again and I got subpoenaed.3 Well, that cost me my job, because the FBI told the insurance company that they were going to audit their books if they didn’t fire me. Well, I told my boss, “Hey, man, you don’t need to go through all that, that’s all right, I can get another job.”
From ’58 to ’60, I worked with the Harlem Tenants Movement in New York, organizing tenants. In 1959, I volunteered to be the Southern organizer for the March on Washington for Integrated Schools.4 Part of that march was a petition to Congress to pass legislation immediately to implement the letter and spirit of the 1954 Supreme Court decision and prevent another Little Rock School crisis. The white supremacy resistance had begun to develop through the White Citizens’ Councils and various other Ku Klux—like organizations in the South and there was a need for a federal initiative. We brought twenty-five thousand people to Washington.
So we had this march on Washington, and then in 1960 I was called back to the House Un-American Activities Committee. They were investigating the same thing, communism in the civil rights movement. That’s all they did. They never investigated the Klan, but they investigated anybody progressive. If they said you were Communist, then it was up to you to prove you weren’t. And the very fact that you were subpoenaed, in many people’s mind, you must be Communist. So that was the weapon and that’s the way it was used.
After that I became head of the New York office of SCLC. I had two jobs, I was director of voter registration after 1962 for SCLC, and the director of the direct-mail fund-raising efforts, in which we raised about half the budget of SCLC.
Those are key positions, and the point is, if you want to slow down an organization, you would certainly find some way of going after a key position. Because if our adversaries could cripple an organization by eliminating people in those type positions, that would be to their advantage. And SCLC was gaining a lot of prestige and a lot of momentum, so that’s one way they went at it.
They started chipping away at my position with the King organization. President Kennedy told Martin Luther King I was the number-four Communist in the United States.
King said, “Well, I don’t know how he would have time to do that, ’cause he has two jobs with me!” [Laughs.] He just took it down to its most pragmatic level, he says, “I don’t understand, where would he find the time?”
So then Martin asked to see my file. They went to Burke Marshall, who was head of the Civil Rights Division, who agreed to produce a file when we got down to New Orleans. Martin sent Andy Young down there. And Burke Marshall said he couldn’t get the file from J. Edgar Hoover. It was a bluff.
They started pressuring King right after Albany, Georgia, and continued to pressure him for about a year and a half. And of course Kennedy himself played a role in that. They had a meeting at the White House again, June the 25th, 1963. Kennedy said that Strom Thurmond was going to make an issue of King having Communists on his staff and therefore if he did, then he, Kennedy, would have to back off his civil rights bill. In other words, Kennedy said he wouldn’t even try to defend his own civil rights bill if the Dixiecrats5 like Strom Thurmond made an issue of Communists in the civil rights movement.
Kennedy was saying O’Dell was a Communist because Burke Marshall had said that the FBI had said that the House Un-American Activities Committee had said—you know what I mean! I guess that is a measure of the extent to which intimidation can be developed and crystallized. So that if it’s institutionalized into a political outlook, then everybody has to duck around it if they want their political future not to be tarnished.
When Kennedy met with Martin he was on his way to Britain to meet with the prime minister at that time, who had been involved in the Profumo scandal.6 He said, “There’s a man over there in London whose career is being ruined, and I’m not going to have mine ruined by being associated with the civil rights movement if it’s got Communists in it.” that’s what he implied. And he was using the Profumo affair as an example of how careful you had to be.
Well, we had a meeting and King thought that I ought to resign, and I did. They went on as long as they could. It went all the way up to the President. And so King says, “Well, you know, when the President of the United States says you gotta do something, you have to do it.” The larger question was not to give them an excuse to back out of supporting the civil rights legislation, and they were prepared to use that as an excuse, no matter how frivolous it was. That’s how deep their commitment was. They were looking to the next election, and they didn’t feel they could win in such a battle against the Dixiecrats. If Strom Thurmond and Eastland said somebody’s a Communist, they would just back away from it. They were willing to abide by the scapegoating and keep on steppin’.
So I left SCLC and I remained on good terms with Martin and the whole staff. They understood what was goin’ on—we all did. The harassment of King continued after I was gone. In fact, it stepped up!7 He said, “Hey, what is this?” Of course, he’d realized it at first. It was what we thought it was in the first place, an attack upon the movement.
But we also knew from the practical politics of it that the Kennedy administration was not committed in principle to civil rights. They were committed as a matter of expediency. There was pressure on them by the civil rights movement to act, and Kennedy’s tendency was not to act. So pressure had to be consistently pushed.
We were having demonstrations all across the south when he went to meet with Khrushchev, and they sent the word down from the Justice Department that we should call off the demonstration because it would embarrass the President! We said, “Well, man, get rid of the problem if you don’t want to be embarrassed!” But you see, this is the way they were operating. They were always weighing the political cost of a given situation and what was the political cost of not doing it. That’s how you got those people killed when James Meredith went to the University of Mississippi—the delay in federalizing the Mississippi National Guard got people killed! It was clear that’s what they should have done in the first place. The same was true of Albany, Georgia, in the summer of ’62. The fact is, we lost the campaign in Albany, Georgia, to desegregate that city because the local official violated our First Amendment right to freedom of assembly and locked up everybody who got in the demonstration. And the Kennedy administration sat there and did nothing. Yet it is the President who is sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States, not the sheriff of Albany, Georgia.
After I left SCLC I went to work for a magazine called Freedomways, a quarterly of the movement that became very authoritative.8 Every now and then the FBI would show up and ask what I thought about the Communist Party. I’d just refuse to talk with them. I never accepted the anti-Communist thing. The Communist Party is a party just like every other party, people come in and out of it. But they were establishing that it was an international conspiracy of some sort. You couldn’t yield to that, because they could do that to any group.
It’s important to stress the special problem that this McCarthy period posed for people in the South struggling for rights that were already in the Constitution but never implemented. The black community in the South had segregation imposed on it from the time of Reconstruction, and so for seventy-five years we had been living under an American variety of apartheid.
I think the assessment of Truman must take into account the role of that administration. It comes through in history as being pro–civil rights. Well, he desegregated the armed forces, that’s true. But he also created the atmosphere which slowed enormously the momentum for civil rights in this country. He gave the segregationists a major weapon when he developed this Cold War anti-Communist hysteria. And McCarthyism grew out of that.
It was the Truman administration that implemented the Smith Act. It was the Truman administration that originated the Attorney General’s subversive list. You can’t separate that out in making an assessment of what the Truman civil rights record was. He had a record of desegregating the armed forces and giving lip service to civil rights, while at the same time he gave real weapons and power to the effort to maintain segregation. And while he didn’t like the Dixiecrats because they destabilized the Democratic Party in terms of his own reelection, the fact is that his administration’s policy with respect to foreign policy was very much in alliance with the Dixiecrats.
They used anticommunism and the McCarthy hysteria to their own purposes, and it became increasingly difficult to carry out civil rights activity in that atmosphere. In South Carolina, for example, schoolteachers were fired who were known to be NAACP members. And in Texas, the legislature passed a law that made it punishable by death to be a Communist.
Yes indeed, this thing went far and wide. They were frightened by organized efforts among these so-called simple black people. They didn’t believe that foolishness—they knew blacks were intelligent. These racists don’t always believe their own racism, they understand the role it plays—that’s for propaganda, that’s for the mass of people to swallow.
Then the other part is, whether they called you anything or not, they created an atmosphere. Look at Mr. and Mrs. Harry T. Moore, who were murdered on Christmas Eve in 1951 down in Florida. They were leaders of the right-to-vote movement and their home was bombed and both of them were killed. They never found who did it.9 This was the green light for all these Ku Klux elements. Whether they ever called you a Communist or not, if they thought you were subversive they had an excuse. They’d just say, “Well, we’re just gettin’ rid of some Communists anyway.” Boom.
1There were moments, though, when the old radicalism still breathed. In 1965, Stokely Carmichael and a handful of SNCC organizers opened a voter-registration drive in Lowndes County, Alabama, the site of a bloody cotton pickers’ strike thirty years before. The nonviolent activists were startled when poor farmers of all ages, especially the older folks, arrived at the meetings fully armed. One old sharecropper told Carmichael, “You turn the other cheek, and you’ll get handed half of what you’re sitting on.”
1Brown v. Board of Education.
2Jane Addams (1860–1935) was die leading figure in the social settlement movement. From 1919 to 1935 she served as president of the Woman’s International League for Peace and Freedom. A founder of the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920, she received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.
3Steve Nelson was tried and convicted under state sedition laws and the federal Smith Act. For his story, see Steve Nelson under “The Fall of the Communist Party.”
4Southern Conference Educational Fund.
5Thomas Ratliff was the prosecuting attorney. A report leaked to the New York Times from the Office of Economic Opportunity (the sponsor of the Appalachian Volunteers, for which one defendant worked) charged that the reasons behind Ratliff’s actions were “economic and political: [Ratliff] made a fortune out of the coal industry and still has coal interests. He is running for Lieutenant Governor on the Republican ticket and thinks it is a good campaign issue.” Ratliff denied that he still owned coal property. Strip-mine operators, however, were quick to grab the credit. Robert Holcomb, president of the Chamber of Commerce and of the Independent Coal Operators’ Association, boasted to a reporter, “You might say we spearheaded the investigation.”
6Two radical lawyers prominent in political defense work through the sixties and seventies.
1Post-World War Two Communist Party organization formed to defend the civil rights of African-Americans. In 1947, the CRC was declared to be a subversive organization by Attorney General Tom Clark.
2Phil Murray, president of the CIO, decided to purge all communists from Operation Dixie, the CIO’s Southern organizing drive, even though the Reds were Murray’s most potent organizing tool. Apparently, he missed at least one.
3Eugene T. “Bull” Connor, Birmingham’s pugnacious police commissioner, later achieved national notoriety for turning police dogs and firehoses on civil rights marchers in 1963.
4Also known as the World Peace Appeal. In March 1950, the World Peace Congress met in Stockholm in an effort to ease Cold War tensions by circulating a worldwide peace petition. In 1951, HUAC denounced the effort as “the most extensive piece of psychological warfare ever conducted on a world scale.. . . a smoke screen for [Communist] aggression.”
1A capital tax levied equally on every adult as a prerequisite to voting. Enacted widely through the South between 1889 and 1910, the poll tax effectively disenfranchised many blacks and poor whites. In 1966, the Supreme Court ruled that the poll tax violated the “equal protection” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
1The AAUP never did conduct a formal investigation of Penn State. In fact, it did little or nothing on most of the cases involving major universities.
2Brown v. Board of Education.
3Purportedly, the hearing was held to investigate Communist infiltration in Dayton, Ohio. Lorch, who had never before set foot in Dayton, was not made aware of this until he arrived.
4For hiring Lorch, Wesleyan came under attack from the News Leader, a reactionary newspaper published out of Manchester, New Hampshire.
5Eisenhower never said a public word in support of school integration, even though he believed American racism was being exploited by the Soviet Union in the race for world leadership. Chief Justice Earl Warren recounts a White House dinner held just before the Supreme Court decision on Brown v. Board of Education during which Eisenhower took him aside and said, “These [segregationists] are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big overgrown Negroes.” After the decision, Eisenhower never spoke to Warren again.
1See Jack O’Dell under “On the Waterfront.”
2J. Strom Thurmond, staunch segregationist and former Democrat from South Carolina, joined the Republican Party in 1964.
3HUAC Counsel: “Do you honestly feel, and are you trying to make this committee and the people of this country believe, that you, a member of the Communist conspiracy, responsive to the will of the Kremlin, are in truth and in fact, concerned with the welfare of the Negro people of this country?” O’Dell: “I wouldn’t try to make you believe anything.” (HUAC hearings, July 30, 1958)
4The second Youth March for integrated schools in April 1959, organized by A. Philip Randolph and led by Harry Belafonte and Bayard Rustin.
5A states’ rights party organized for the 1948 presidential campaign by Southern conservatives opposed to Truman’s civil rights program. Strom Thurmond, then governor of South Carolina, headed the ticket. The segregationist bloc persisted as a potent force in Congress for as long as Southern blacks remained effectively disenfranchised.
6Notorious affair involving British politician John Profumo, who in 1960 was made secretary of war under Prime Minister Harold Macmilian. He resigned in 1963 after lying to the House of Commons concerning his entanglement with Christine Keeler, a teenage showgirl, who was also involved with a Soviet naval attaché.
7For a decade, J. Edgar Hoover pursued a policy of vicious harassment against Martin Luther King, Jr.—attempted blackmail, relentless surveillance, electronic eavesdropping, an army of paid informants, and a carefully orchestrated campaign of character assassination.
8Published from 1961 to 1985, Freedomways was perhaps the most distinguished African-American political-cultural journal of the period. Contributors included Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ruby Dese, Angela Davis, Alice Walker, Harry Belafonte, Shirley Chisholm, Ron Dellums, Jesse Jackson, Derek Walcott, and host of other intellectuals and activists.
9An Orlando journal commented, “Communists, bent on destroying tranquil relations between the white and colored people of Florida, could well have plotted it.”