After the marathon tour on the Presidential Special, I set my sights on covering the political conventions. There would be three that year, all of them in Philadelphia, including the newly formed Progressive Party’s.
Once again my news agency denied my request, and once again I demonstrated a determination to go, even at my own expense if necessary. The train fare from Washington was minimal, and a friend in Philadelphia invited me to be her houseguest at no cost. So on July 12, 1948, I took off for the City of Brotherly Love to attend the Democratic National Convention. Without the support of ANP, I was unable to secure press credentials but finally finagled a messenger’s badge, which permitted me to move around freely on the convention floor but deprived me of many special privileges usually accorded the press, such as access to pressroom facilities and press conferences, press releases, copies of speeches, resolutions, committee reports, and other documents. I was able to obtain much of this material, however, through friends in the press corps.
It was at this convention that Hubert Humphrey (mayor of Minneapolis, who was elected that same year to the U.S. Senate) made his famous civil rights address, climaxing an all-night session of the Platform Committee, which had spent hours debating the strong civil rights plank that was finally adopted, as President Truman had promised. Heard around the world, the speech endeared him to so many Americans but at the same time split the Democratic Party wide open. When he concluded, the southern delegations from Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina marched out of the convention hall in a body and ultimately out of the Democratic Party. They established the States’ Rights Party and selected South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond as their standard bearer.1
The Democratic Party was now split three ways. The extreme liberal wing (which disavowed the Democrats when President Roosevelt dropped Henry Wallace as his vice president and chose Senator Harry S. Truman as his running mate in 1944) left the regular party and formed a new Progressive Party. This party held its first convention in 1948, nominating the disgruntled Henry Wallace as its presidential candidate. Thus, 1948 became the first year in the memory of most living politicians that American voters had the choice of four presidential candidates—Truman, Wallace, Thurmond, and Tom Dewey.
Most people seemed to feel that Harry Truman, the regular Democratic candidate, didn’t have a ghost of a chance to win against two strong, splintered, Democratic aggregations (liberal and conservative) and his Republican foe. A large number of Negro voters became strong supporters of Wallace because of his reputation as a great liberal who had proven to be a friend of the poor and underprivileged. Truman’s open commitment to a strong civil rights plank, however, siphoned off much of that support.2
I had an interesting experience with Mr. Wallace while traveling by train through the southland, prior to his announcing his candidacy. This was in the days when dining cars were still segregated. Two tables reserved for Negro passengers were set aside from the rest of the diner by a brownish, woolen curtain much like the old khaki army blankets. I usually referred to this arrangement as having to eat behind the “wool curtain.” When I went in for dinner, all of the tables in the white section of the diner were filled. People were lined up between the coaches waiting for vacant seats. The two tables reserved for black passengers were completely vacant.
After taking my seat at one of these vacant tables, I heard a familiar voice on the other side of the curtain and asked the waiter if that was the voice of the former vice president, Henry Wallace. The waiter looked surprised and answered, “Yes.” I gave him my White House press pass, requesting that he show it to Mr. Wallace and ask if I could have an interview with him.
The waiter soon returned with this message: “Stay right where you are. I’ll be there in a few minutes.” Soon Mr. Wallace appeared from behind the wool curtain and took a seat at the table with me, and we had a nice, long interview. He said he was doing quite a bit of travel in those days and was en route to New Orleans to make a speech. He was thinking of announcing his candidacy for president on the Progressive ticket and was anxious to feel the pulse of the people before making his final decision. Apparently the people’s pulses were beating pretty strongly in his favor because he soon announced his decision to run.3 The incident made a good story for ANP, headlined “Former Vice-President Defies Jim Crow Law to Talk with Negro Reporter.”
Fearing that losing the southern vote and a great slice of the minority vote would cost Mr. Truman the election, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) made every effort to woo the Negro vote. Familiar with my work on the Truman train, the committee asked me to serve on the Democratic Speakers Bureau. I agreed and was sent on a two-month tour of Kentucky, where it was believed I would have the greatest influence, visiting most of the towns of any size in the state. Kentucky senator Alben Barkley shared the ticket with Mr. Truman as the vice-presidential candidate.
When Truman won the presidency,4 I applied for a political post. While I loved my work as a journalist, despite hard work my income as a reporter had improved very little, my twenty-five-dollar weekly salary having been increased to only forty dollars. My request got nothing but an offer of a post without pay on the Publicity Subcommittee of the Inaugural Committee. Finally I suggested creation of a position in the information office of the DNC, and this started to move forward. I was informed, however, that Chicago congressman William Dawson, vice chairman of the DNC, had requested that no Negroes be employed by the party without his consent. I thought I would have no trouble, as I considered Dawson one of my best friends, but I was wrong. Dawson told me point-blank that he would not endorse me for a national position because he didn’t think I was sufficiently well-known.5
For a long time, I held that against the senior Negro member of Congress, but I later realized that he did me a favor, that it was a blessing in disguise. Had I taken the job in the DNC information office, I would have cut short my career and missed out on many opportunities. That year turned out to be a banner year for me. I was selected by the Louisville Defender as one of the ten most outstanding Kentuckians of 1948, along with Vice President Barkley and eight others. In midsummer, I was one of the few reporters invited to cover a meeting of fifteen of America’s most outstanding Negro leaders with Army Secretary Kenneth Royall to discuss the army’s segregation policy, a meeting that is believed to have laid the groundwork for President Truman’s executive order prohibiting discrimination in the military service.
One of the problems brought to the president as the capital prepared for the inauguration in 1948 was the difficulty that Negroes might have finding lodging since they were barred from downtown hotels. The president was also reminded that unless some provision was made to abolish segregation in eating places, Negroes would have problems finding places to dine as we were also banned from downtown restaurants. Several organizations urged the president to issue an order banning segregation in the District of Columbia so that the thousands of Negro visitors attending the inauguration would be treated with the same courtesies and accommodations that were accorded other American citizens.
The only response we received to that suggestion was assurance that families of both races who occupied large houses in Washington had agreed to open their homes to mixed delegations. We were told that rooms in the large home of one white family had been reserved for the interracial delegation from California.
The president declined to issue an order such as we suggested, but the idea, like a large stone tossed into a sea of calm, generated a huge ripple of discontent that never subsided until integration in Washington came to fruition years later. The New York delegation, however, could be credited for giving the Truman administration a preliminary start in civil rights, when it made reservations at the Roosevelt Hotel for its sixty-man delegation. When the racially mixed delegation arrived, hotel management refused to register the eighteen Negro delegates. The leader of the Tammany delegation, who was also president of the borough of Manhattan, flatly stated, “We all stay or we all go.” When he demanded the refund of his certified check, the hotel management held a thirty-minute conference with delegation leaders, after which the hotel agreed to register the entire group.
Close to midnight, when all the delegates were settled in their rooms, a Negro member of the delegation reportedly received a telephone call from William Houston, a prominent black attorney,6 urging him to prevail upon the Negroes to move from the Roosevelt to the Dunbar (Negro) Hotel to prevent Dixiecrats (the coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats who often joined forces to defeat civil rights legislation) from criticizing the president.
The New York delegates refused to budge, and when the black press put heat on Houston for his alleged “Uncle Tom” intervention, he denied having made the call but acknowledged that he had been requested to do so, presumably by someone high up in the party. Several members of the delegation stood by their colleague’s account of the call.
The Truman administration suffered another embarrassment early in 1948 when the Democratic National Committee sponsored its annual Jefferson-Jackson hundred-dollar-a-plate fundraising dinner. My contacts with reporters from daily papers let me know that they always received free press passes to cover these affairs. I complained to the minority advisor at the White House that Negro reporters had never been admitted to these swank affairs. Attempting to assure me that these affairs were not discriminatory and looking for a way to prove his point, he said, “We are offering free tickets to the colored employees of the Democratic National Committee.”
Knowing full well that all “colored employees” of the DNC at that time were janitors, messengers, or mail clerks, I shot back, “I’m not talking about menial workers; I’m talking about bona fide reporters for Negro newspapers.”
The White House aide said they had no more press tickets, but he would give me a free pass to sit at the employees’ table. “This is not a matter of racial segregation,” he contended. “It’s just a matter of seating together people holding free tickets.”
Ordinarily I would have rejected this humiliating arrangement, but in those fighting days, I concluded that sometimes much can be accomplished by making a sacrifice or by entering a situation through the back door just to get inside and obtain an eyewitness view of what was happening.
Word soon got around among Democratic bigwigs that Negroes would be attending this dinner. White southerners protested by staging a boycott in the days when boycotts were practically unheard of. Southerners who had purchased tickets for two tables located directly in front of the head table at a thousand dollars per table deliberately stayed away from the dinner, making the two vacant tables right in front of the president very conspicuous.
Newspapers throughout the country carried pictures of the two vacant tables and reported why southern Democrats were so conspicuously absent. Pictures were also taken of the all-Negro table where I was seated. At least two Negro guests had such fair complexions that the photographer apparently thought this was an integrated table. A copy of this photo was published on the front page of a Jackson, Mississippi, daily on February 24, 1948, with a caption calling Negroes and whites eating together something too strong for southern stomachs and citing it as another reason Democrats in the South were refusing to follow party leaders in Washington.
My accounts of racial prejudice in the nation’s capital were published by Negro newspapers throughout the country, bringing the administration in for widespread criticism for not doing anything about it.
The following year, another Negro reporter, Louis Lautier, and I were issued regular press tickets to the Jefferson-Jackson dinner and seated at the regular press table with other Capitol reporters. The year after that, a representative of each of the local Negro newspapers was invited. Finally press tickets were made available to any Negro newspaper that requested them.
Although the “Fair Deal” administration of President Truman gave great hopes for a brighter future for American minorities, all advances toward civil rights were initiated by pressure from Negroes, either individually or in groups, and kept before the public by the Negro press. One such event was a prayer service on the Capitol steps in 1948 at the beginning of the second session of the Eightieth Congress (later dubbed the “do-nothing” Congress by President Truman) when 131 ministers representing seventeen states and the District of Columbia assembled in Washington to proclaim a “National Prayer Day” for human rights. The delegation was headed by Dr. W. H. Jernagin, president of the Fraternal Council of Negro Churches of America, which was said to represent seven million Christians in eleven denominations.7 The praying, hymn-singing demonstration was described as the first organized expression of religious leaders aimed at concentrating attention on the need for federal legislation dealing with human rights. The principal speaker was Howard University president Mordecai Johnson, who chided the ministers for their previous lack of political action and urged each of them to “politicalize just as he prays.” His speech was aired on the radio immediately following the broadcast of President Truman’s State of the Union message.
In June 1948, I covered another mass rally and picket line staged in the nation’s capital by a vanguard of seventy-five hundred civil rights supporters led by famed concert singer Paul Robeson. Called the National Non-partisan Delegation for Passage of Civil Rights Legislation, the delegates split into small groups to visit their representatives on Capitol Hill and later held a mass meeting at the Sylvan Theater at the foot of the Washington Monument. The day ended with picket lines at the White House and the headquarters of the Democratic and Republican national committees. The event was credited with arousing considerable awareness of the need for civil rights legislation.
Another pressure movement took place the following month, when a civil rights conference of representatives from twenty-five national organizations met in Washington to draw up a five-point program for civil rights legislation. Called together by the NAACP, the conferees recommended enactment of legislation for a permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC),8 abolition of the poll tax, punitive measures to suppress lynching and mob violence, a ban on segregation in interstate transportation, and revision of the Displaced Persons Act to permit immigration of classes discriminated against. The conference passed a resolution urging President Truman to issue an executive order banning discrimination and segregation in federal services, including the armed forces, and to provide administration leadership to the civil rights program in Congress. Again, the public support marshaled by the Negro press for these measures probably influenced the president’s later decision to issue several civil rights orders.
The sit-in movement of the 1960s also had precursors during the Truman administration. On one occasion in 1947, I covered an incident at a White Tower hamburger stand on Fourteenth Street NW. A small group of high-school boys from New York on a tour of Washington had stopped for hamburgers. The whites and Puerto Ricans in the group were served, but the two or three Negro boys were denied service. So the entire group, without preplanning, occupied all of the seats around the counter and sat there for the rest of the afternoon, preventing any further customer service.
Toward year-end, a group of thirty white and Negro citizens staged an organized sit-in demonstration at the Greyhound bus terminal in downtown Washington in an effort to break down the long-standing Jim Crow segregation policy in the restaurant. The integrated party occupied all of the tables and refused to move unless the Negroes were served. The restaurant, which usually stayed open all night, closed at midnight, but the prospective customers stayed. Employees emptied quart bottles of ammonia on the tables and sprayed the restaurant with DDT. But the “sit-downers” placed handkerchiefs over their faces to deflect the strong fumes and still refused to leave. Police were then called in to remove them, and the officers informed them that while they were within their rights to occupy the tables as long as the restaurant was open to the public, after it had closed they were technically trespassing. The group left shortly after one o’clock in the morning. It was a preview of scenes that would occur at lunch counters and in restaurants across the country a decade later.
Here in Washington, this movement was expanded to the restaurant at National Airport across the river in Virginia, resulting in the Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) issuing an order in late 1948 calling for a complete end to racial segregation at the capital’s airport. The order specifically stated, “Henceforth there shall be no discrimination or segregation as to race, color or creed in any of the airport facilities.” Prior to this, Negroes had not been admitted to the Terrace Restaurant or the airport coffee shop. They could eat, however, at a small snack bar located in the basement of the administration building. In spite of the CAA ruling, the Terrace Restaurant still refused to serve Negroes on the grounds that integration in eating places was a violation of Virginia laws and the manager doubted the CAA had the authority to trump a state statute. The upshot was a lawsuit filed in U.S. district court by six Negroes against Air Terminal Service, Inc., and a statement from the commonwealth attorney for Arlington County, Virginia, that he had no power to enforce Virginia’s segregation laws at the airport, where the federal government had exclusive jurisdiction. With that, Jim Crow crashed at National Airport.
In 1960, when the sit-in movement was picking up steam, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) gave me an award for “news writing (pertaining to) Northern Virginia lunch counter integration,” the coverage of which had been one of my passions for more than a decade.