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SRC-31
Conference
Jane Dailey:
Thanks Doug for your very interesting papers. I'll be brief. Recently, an
international team of literary scholars came to the startling conclusion that
Humpty Dumpty was a Virginian. [Laughter] Had he lived in our century,
the rotund albino would no doubt have identified himself as a white
southern liberal. For as he explains to Alice through the looking glass,
when I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, nothing more,
nothing less. Like other white southern liberals, Humpty Dumpty would
also have been interested in issues of labor equity. When I make a word
do a lot of work like that, said Humpty Dumpty, I always paid extra. The
word liberalism has been drawing time and a half for southern historians
for years now. A lot of take our sources seriously have
somehow been translated along the way into a reluctance to question our
sources' terminology and classification. Is it really possible for historians
as opposed to historical actors to talk seriously about a mid-twentieth
century racial liberalism that takes at it's starting point the preservation of
segregation and white social dominance. Gunner Myrtle didn't think so.
In the middle of World War II, Myrtle was mystified by the incongraments
of white southern liberal support for the Jim Crow system of racial
segregation and subordination. You can almost hear him shaking his
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head, "Southern liberalism is not liberalism as it is found elsewhere in
America or the world," announced Myrtle in 1944, "it's a unique species."
It's probably an analytical error to assume with Myrtle that there is a
stable taxonomy of liberalism by which white southerners may be
measured and be found wanting. Even if we take the most basic
definition of liberalism, as most of the world understood it in 1944, as a
commitment to equal rights of all citizens with a liberal democracy, most
southern white liberals fall short. I'm not suggesting that because people
like Virginia Stably and Jesse Daniel Aimes sought to maintain racial
hierarchy that they were not liberals. If there's one thing that we've
learned from the past twenty-five years worth of scholarship on liberalism,
it's that liberalism has historically, if not ideally, been founded on
exclusions of women, of children, of racial and ethnic minorities. What I
am suggesting is the way that we use the word, liberal and liberalism,
today and the way that many mid-century white southern liberals used
these words is fundamentally dissimilar. In this, Gunner Myrtle was
right. Liberalism in the south did not necessarily imply racial equality.
This is why white southern journalists like Dadny and Rumple McGill
could, as Mort Susnick explains, "base their existence to fascism on
democratic ideology while denying that this same ideology implied any
basic change in the south's regional status quo." Liberal on the white
southern context does not mean liberal on the race question. It's
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important to remind ourselves when we talk about liberalism as modern
scholars that white southern liberals of the hyrodium variety simply
believe what two generations of white southern liberals before them
believed, that there was a way to reconcile regionalism (i.e. white
supremacy) and segregation and democracy. At the heart of southern
regionalism and at the heart of white southern liberalism lay an
undemocratic commitment to racial hierarchy. It's the great virtue of Mort
Sesnick's paper to point to this tension, a tension that explains in part the
disillusion many African American's felt with liberalism and their openness
during the 1930s and 1940s to non-liberal alternatives, particularly
communism. This tension may also explain why when another group of
southerners gathered at Highlander and stood up in Montgomery and
Birmingham and Jackson, they spoke in the language of Christian
universalism and not liberalism. Richmond editor Virginia Dabney is as
good an example as any to reveal the limits of liberalism as practiced by
self-identified white southern liberals. Dabney was not, however, the only
southerner advocating an ameliative approach to race centered on
making separate truly equal in the New Deal South. This was, in fact, the
end of Lacy Pea's legal strategy in the 1930s. Rather than mount a
frontal assault on Jim Crow, the NAACP decided to bankrupt it by forcing
the south to live up to the equality explicit in the Plessy decision. There's
a difference, however, in using the separate but equal doctrine
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strategically to reveal its essential infeasibility and unconstitutionality in
trying to implement it in order to save a broader system of racial hierarchy,
as Virginia Stadney aimed to. Treating Virginia Stadney and other
white southerners interested in making segregation more humane as
representative of liberal sentiment pushes those southerners actually
dedicated to liberal democratic ideals to the sidelines as radicals. In this
scheme, all southern liberals are white, the NAACP isn't southern, and
James DeBrosky, Aubrey Williams, and Howard Kesner are
communists. What were some of these radicals advocating? In the
spring of 1945 as Allied forces occupied Berlin, a panel of experts
consisting in the words of a critic, 'one buck negro, one Jew, one New
York social service official, and Congressman H. Jerry Voyers of
California,' was asked to discuss the question, are we solving America's
race problems on the popular radio show, America Town's Meeting of the
Air. The 'buck negro,' referred to by the outraged letter writer was none
other than Richard Wright, someone who might fairly be considered a
southern liberal, despite the fact that he wrote from outside the south. On
this occasion, as ending on most, Wright spoke directly on the point. At
once let's define what me mean by solution of the race problem, he
advised. If the race problem was solved, we would have no black belts,
no Jim Crow Army or Navy, no Jim Crow Red Cross Blood Banks, no
negro institutions, no laws prohibiting intermarriage, no customs assigning
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negros to inferior positions. We would all simply be Americans and the
nation would be better for it. This was exactly the kind of broadcast that
kept Virginia Stadly awake at night. Desegregated public transportation
was not going to satisfy Richard Wright. Richard Wright wanted
equality, nothing more, nothing less. It is to Virginia Stadley's credit that
he recognized this, although it was precisely this understanding that
underlay his resistance to subsistent change in the south. Doug Smith
tells us that Dadney was opposed to school integration, even the
integration of the graduate school at the University of Virginia, because he
believed that integration would lead to racial imalformation. This
position, as tells us, was a standard chipila of the white
supremacist south (i.e. it was truism, empty of all meaning). Smith says
furthermore that late in life, Dadney continued to express his own
personal disapproval of miscegenation, no doubt a comforting position for
a man that never recognized that African American aspirations had
nothing to do with interracial marriage and sexual relations. African
American aspirations did have to do with interracial marriage and sexual
relations. Restricted marriage laws were the foundation of the Jim Crow
system. Every African American leader, from W.E. Duboise to Martin
Luther King, recognized this. Duboise wrote the right of freedom of
association into the Niagra Movement, the predecessor to the NAACP.
Roy Wilkons upheld that pledge when he insisted that blacks and whites
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belonged on a plain of absolute political and social equality. Martin
Luther King could not have been clearer when he said on television in
1958, I quote him, "the thoroughly integrated society means freedom.
When any society says that I cannot marry a person, that society has cut
off a segment of my freedom." Hannah Orent, by the way, made the
same argument in 1957 when she said that the Supreme Court should
have declared antimiscegenation laws and not segregated schools
unconstitutional. It's worth wondering what the history of the Civil Rights
Movement might have been if the courts had not ducked that question in
1955 and only returned to it in 1967. As far as Virginia Stadney goes,
however, he foresaw the progressive path that desegregation would take
from integrated public transportation to integrated schools to integrated
marriages, its thoroughly liberal path, one that upholds constitutional
notions of freedom of association, even as it protects individual rights. It
was a path that Dadney was unwilling to follow. What could be avoided
in 1945 could no longer be avoided in the 1950s. Jeff Norell claims in
his paper for this conference is that, I quote, "the only southern liberalism
of any significance in shaping events in the 1950s was SRC's." This is a
rather large claim for a world that included organizations like the
Montgomery Prumont Association. It does seem to be the case that the
SRC became more, rather than less, devoted to liberal ideals after it's
eleventh hour denunciation of segregation in 1951. To use Guy
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Johnson's terms, "the SRC aimed it's guns at the distant peaks only after
others had captured the foothills." The organization did endure and it
made a difference. Especially at the local level in the forms of state
visional councils. In South Carolina, for example, the council on human
relations was there to mediate when African Americans turned a direct
action in that state. Perhaps more importantly, though, the southern
regional council changed and advanced towards what even Gunner
Myrtle would have recognized as liberalism. Indeed, one of the clearest
pieces of evidence of the SRC's eventual and decisive turn towards
liberalism is that Virginia Stadney quit.
We do have some time for questions. We're running a little bit late
because we started a little late, but please direct your questions to our
panelists.
?: Jane, could you also ask that people identify themselves when they ask their
questions?
Jane Dailey: Please identify yourselves. Otherwise I'll identify you.
Paul Gaston: You all talked about the meaning of words, and they said, they never get
fixed in time. We're all prisoners of them. All of you have sort of
praised Mirgal, and yet he committed one of the worst errors in
naming his book, the subtitle, the negro problem. It wasn't a negro
problem. There wasn't no problem with negros. It was a white
problem. Mirgal had not yet evolved to that point where he
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understood that he was mistaking the problem. We, at the
American Glem, it's a great book, but we're all prisoners of words.
I feel the same way about the use of the term liberalism. Eric
Goldman was writing a book, you younger people may not
remember when it came out as I do, Rileyho destiny, a History of
Modern American Liberalism. A reporter came out to speak to him
about this book he was writing. He said, Mr. Goldman, what does
liberalism mean? Mr. Goldman said, well, I guess it means
dueces are wild. It's enormously important that Doug and Mort
and Jane identify this particular branch of cautious southern
liberalism that folks in the 1920s and 1930s that tried to be
compatible with segregation. It included people like Hogan
Gardner and Virginia Stadney, but it seems to me that the
important thing is not that the white southerners that you described
at the end of your talk made SRC sort of the cockpit of the Civil
Rights Movement in the 1960s, but that liberalism changed. There
remained a very distinctive brand, very hard to identify. Goldman
was right. Liberalism does mean who can survive. It's very hard
to identify. People themselves changed, and they were educated
by their black comrades as well as by their old reading. I think
what I wanted to see and what we see in this department is the
evolution of thought and action. The council still has a lot more to
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learn in the 1960s. It's a constant program of awareness and I
hope somebody will be aware enough sometime to reissue an
American dilemma and entitle it the white problem.
Jack Davis: I hesitate to follow that with my comment, but on the subject of Howard
Odem in regionalism, it's interesting to note that Odem's two sons,
Eugine and Howard T were both ecologists. Eugine was at the
University of Georgia's prominent college, and Eugine was at the
University of Georgia and Howard T., H.T. as they called him, was here
at the University of Florida. I found that interesting for a couple of
reasons. One, that somebody so brainy as Howard, Sr. was usually
produces freaks as offspring. Also, his two sons went into ecology. Yet,
when you think about it, their careers in ecology were not such a great
detour from his. Odem saw, in regionalism, he saw each region as a part
of a larger whole. He saw that within each region there were unique
features within the physical and the cultural environments that constituted
an integrated system, an American system. I would argue then that racial
discrimination was not regional. It was, in fact, systemic. I wonder then,
Mort, if you think that the criticism of Odem and his regional model, or
regionalism, was in fact the disguise?
Morton Sosna: I think that's a very interesting question, especially the way that you
approached it. In my paper, I was mentioning both Odem and
Dadney together, but I would really draw a distinction between
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them. Odem wasn't the committed separate-but-equal
ideologically that Dadney was. I don't think miscegenation was a
major issue for him. I think he thought in terms of the time wasn't
right. I don't think he had a severe ideological. In fact, he
stepped out and he was one of the people preventing the southern
regional council going on record as supporting segregation. To get
back to regionalism, I think you're right, the way you've phrased
Odem's conception of regionalism. One of the things that really
upset him about Myrtle's book was that he not once mentioned his
southern regions of the United States. Hell hath no fury in any
case. I think regionalism for Odem, it was conceived in national
terms. At the same time, the south really had a special place in
that regional framework in so many ways. What I think he was
proposing, and the people who supported regionalism as a
workable ideal was a kind of regional affirmative action program for
the south that would draw in national resources, governmental
resources to do things in connection with educational reform,
economic reform. At the same time, certainly make steps towards
equalizing race relations in the south but never go so far as to
fundamentally challenge the whole assumption of Jim Crow. That
was a workable regionalism as far as Odem is concerned. I would
argue that the war and all the things we've been talking about made
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it so irrelevant and out of place. It was a very advanced deal in
1935. Odem and to some extent Dadney were not only ahead of
people in the south but they were ahead of people in Chicago and
New York on most of these issues.
Jack Davis: As the Civil Rights Movement showed later on, those are the issues that
were needed in all the regions around the country. Wherever blacks went
in this country and wherever they educated for the constitutional rights,
they encountered the same sort of racial discrimination, and in some
cases in great intensity.
Morton Sosna: I think that's true, and I think other people have talked about this,
but during, especially in the war and the post-war period, the Civil
Rights period, certainly through the 1960s, the south suffered as
kind of a lightening rod for the nations conscious. The people
could ignore what's going on the west coast or the midwest or the
northeast in terms of the injustices and inequities and race, but
somehow was made easier to live with because all of the really
terrible stuff was happening in the south. At least I think that's the
way a lot of people outside of the south felt. The south served, in
the nations' psyche, it was good to have the south. I couldn't read
it in the paper, but I quoted a piece from Margaret Meade.
Meade, during the war, was serving on some national committee to
assess morale on the home front. She traveled all around the
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country. Of course, one of the places she traveled was the south.
In her papers, there's this wonderful memo. She had never been
in the south. She literally writes, oh my God. It's more like New
Guinea than it is like anywhere else in the United States. The
south was different. It really was part of that whole World War II
phenomenon, that shortly afterwards, and even Faulkner wrote in
one of his first post-war novels, that outlanders will just believe
anything about the south providing it's bizzare enough and insane
enough. I think the south taking on a kind of threatening distinctive
otherness, you were really going to back, not to the 1920s, but I
think you were going back to the mid nineteenth century and the
Civil War reconstructive period.
Matt Lassiter: I'm Matt Lassiter from the University of Michigan. I was wondering
if you would respond to comments about your
comments about Virginia Stadney and interracial societies.
During your paper, the first time it came up I thought, he's using this
strategically or this kind of language doesn't make sense in the
context of this larger language he's trying to explain, then you hear
he's still saying this in 1970s. I think the larger point is that the
story does have something to do with these issues is accurate, but
obviously the white segregation critique is all over the place. I was
wondering if you had a statement on that.
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J. Douglas Smith: Absolutely. Thank you for that. James' point is well taken, and it
would be very easy for me to add one or two words, but to say that
had nothing to do with it would be an overstatement. My point
certainly was that the point for African Americans and segregation,
not that they all wanted to go out and marry whites. That was not
the preeminent concern. That's the extent to which I meant to
suggest that. While Dadney and others focus on that, and it's
probably been ten years now when I interviewed Mills Dodwin in
the 1990s, that was still the parting line for him. That mass
resistance was about postponing interracial marriage. I just think
that maybe it would have happened in more frequency, but we're
not going to all of a sudden have one giant interracial world.
African Americans were opposed to interracial marriage as much
as whites were. You see that in literature all the time. James is
quite right to call me on the extreme language that I used to say
that. It had nothing to do with it. I think the point is very well
taken.
Matt Lassiter: Is there a sense that he believes this? There's questions about
what is talking about.
J. Douglas Smith: Dadney, the fact that he continues to make this comment into the
1970s and is certainly not alone in this, I thought it hard to believe
that given the absence of any actual evidence of proof that this was
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really going to happen, that we were really going to become a
nation of mulattos, I sort of feel like to that extent it was something
that people got worked up over and they used this as the reason to
oppose everything else. With a graduate education, in 1935, he
says, that's what's going to happen if we allow this. By the late
1950s he acknowledges that there haven't really been any
consequences for that. I think it's hard pressed to have to
acknowledge that you step along the way that interracial marriage
doesn't lead to a nation of mulattos.
Steve Suits: I want to take up Paul Gaston's southern liberals.
Presley Dunbar wrote his last book I said, you
can see southern white gentlemen. By that I meant
that he was a person who tried to honestly search the best principles to
live by and then actively engaged to try to bring the world to that place. I
happen to agree with his version many times with what the content of that
liberalism should be. I think it's dangerous to start excluding people
because after the fact you see that their version of liberalism was wrong.
I think what's important is struggling through the ideals of their content and
their achievement and doing it with a sense of humility and humanity.
Those are quite vague terms, but in the everyday world they were very
important guidelines. For the of Paul, I would ask that you
remember a little on that point on humility. I've heard this morning a little
of the tone that I would call the H.L. Menten analysis of the south. We
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know what was right and wrong then and we measure people today by
whether they were right or wrong by our standards. That's an important
judgment. It's not very insightful about what was strategies and
opportunities for people to make change then and to realize their version
of an honorable southern gentleman.
Steve Suits: If I could respond for a second to what you say, I think you're right about
we need to be careful about not necessarily making these judgments after
the fact, but in looking at somebody like Dadney I'd argue that we could
judge Dadney on his own terms based on what the options were at the
time. My point would be that although there were all sorts of people in
the twenty-first century telling Dadney he was wrong, but there were all
sorts of people in the 1940s telling Dadney he was wrong, especially
people like P.B. Young and Jordan Hancock, he had served with for
many years and had a very good relationship. These were the people
telling him that you were wrong, that there are limits to your version of a
better world. The angle that I would like to approach this, and I have a lot
of sympathy for Dadney on a lot of levels, but glorifying Dadney
is somewhat tragic because I think that Dadney did know
better. I think he knew on an intellectual level that he was wrong on
some of these things, but he couldn't quite get there despite the presence
of people at the time who he respected who were telling him that he was
wrong. I think it is fair to make those judgements based on the options of
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that time.
Jane Dailey: I don't think it's the job of the historian to declare people right or wrong by
contemporary standards.
John Due: You have to remember that there was a war going on. I think the greatest
thing by Dr. King ever written was not the 'I Have a Dream,' speech, a
'Letter from a Birmingham Jail' should be required reading. I always
wondered, who was he talking about when he talked about moderates?
Was he talking about council? When he
was talking about moderates. Then somewhere else he was concerned
about liberals and their lack of commitment. Again, he responded to the
harmony that Martin Luther King had with the so-called white fathers. I'm
going to ask that question again tomorrow, by the way.
Morton Sosna: I think David's paper will be addressing that specifically later. As I
recall, it was interesting because while 'A Letter from a Birmingham
Jail,' King does complain about moderates, where are they
basically. How are they going to lead you when you're not saying
anything or doing anything for us. At the same time, he
mentioned, he exempted a few people, including Ralph McGill and
Lillian Smith, who were much more outspoken in antisegregation
that Ralph McGill. Nonetheless, I think it stresses your point, who
did he really mean if he includes both Lillian Smith and Ralph
McGill as if exempting them from the state where he was then
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portraying moderates under.
J. Douglas Smith: I would expect that by 1963 whether Dadney would even be
considered amongst the moderates by this point in time. At least
by this point he's been describing himself as a conservative.
Certainly, in the specific address to the people of the church who
claimed to believe that segregation is wrong, in one respect they're
talking about believing that segregation is wrong, but the time isn't
right, we've been waiting for 300 years. I think that certainly he is
including people who say, keep waiting, keep waiting, keep waiting,
and believe in a very slow gradualism. Yet, this speaks to the
point where this ideology has changed so much in twenty years.
He's not just talking about people, there's no such thing as a liberal
in 1960 who still believes in segregation. He's not referring to
people who still want to support Jim Crow at this point. People
who suggest that Jim Crow is wrong, but we need to take more
time.
Morton Sosna: If I could also respond to Steve's point on liberalism and how you
define it and how you judge it and what he means. The question
now seems to be not happened to southern liberals but what
happened to liberalism. That's what people are raising right now.
When I was working on I was actually working
on that project in the early 1970s, at that time, I couldn't have
fathomed that politicians today would be afraid to even use what
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they called the 'L-word.' It just resonates in a completely different
way now. No one out there on the political horizon seems to be
identifying themselves with or trying to connect themselves with
"liberalism." That's really an astounding page in the last forty-five
John Boone:
Jane Dailey:
years.
I came to this conference because I'm confused. You mentioned the
south. I'm all country. Inside though, I realized, too, that I was an ugly
American. It's worse than anywhere I've been in America. It's worse
than the south. The criticisms by Dunbar, I guess that's why I'm standing
here talking, because he, like Jesus Christ, in the way he founded
anybody in America. It's absolutely the worst country. Don't talk about
sections, talk about what's happening in America. It's very, very bad.
Thank God for this country. I hope the southern regional council can
operationalize so we can get on the real problem. Race is all over, it's
worse in Boston. liberty. It's too narrowly
perceived.
Thank you. I want to thank our paper givers and the audience for your
comments.
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