Radicalism in the South since Reconstruction

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Author: James Smethurst | Rachel Rubin | Chris Green

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RADICALISM IN THE SOUTH SINCE RECONSTRUCTION

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RADICALISM IN THE SOUTH SINCE RECONSTRUCTION

Edited by Chris Green, Rachel Rubin, and James Smethurst

radicalism in the south since reconstruction Copyright © Chris Green, Rachel Rubin and James Smethurst, 2006. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2006 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-1-4039-7409-9 ISBN-10: 1-4039-7409-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Radicalism in the South since Reconstruction / edited by Chris Green, Rachel Rubin, and James Smethurst. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index. ISBN 1-4039-7409-8 (alk. paper) 1. Radicalism—Southern States—History. 2. Southern States—Social conditions—1865-1945. 3. Southern States—Social conditions—1945- 4. Southern States—Politics and government—1865- 5. Social change—Southern States—History. I. Green, Chris, 1968- II. Rubin, Rachel, 1964- III. Smethurst, James Edward. HN79.A13R3 2007 303.48’4—dc22 2006045817 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Macmillan India Ltd. First edition: December 2006 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

Dedicated to Lucy Mason, George Meyers, and Lorenzo Thomas and to our children


CONTENTS

radicalism in the south since reconstruction: an introduction Chris Green, Rachel Rubin, and James Smethurst

1

Essays the afro-american council and its challenge of louisiana’s grandfather clause Shawn Leigh Alexander “the first anarchist that ever came to atlanta”: hiram f. hover from new york to the new south Bruce E. Baker

13

39

mobilizing the reserve army: the communist party and the unemployed in atlanta, 1929–1934 James J. Lorence

57

agnes “sis” cunningham and labor songs in the depression south Ronald D. Cohen

83

the tight rope of democracy: don west’s CLODS OF SOUTHERN EARTH

99

Chris Green black arts south: rethinking new orleans and the black arts movement in the wake of hurricane katrina 129 James Smethurst

viii / contents

the great anti-injunction strike of 1976: context and implications for appalachia Lynda Ann Ewen critik: the institute of the black world (ibw), the political legacy of martin luther king, and the intellectual struggle to rethink america’s racial meaning Bill Strickland southern theater for social change Pat Arnow

149

167 191

Interviews beluthahatchee blues: an interview with stetson kennedy Jorge Arévalo Mateus

211

“we don’t have much time”: an interview with raúl salinas Rachel Rubin

227

“the anti-slavery act of 2002”: an interview with si kahn Rachel Rubin

239

brief notes on contributors

255

index

259

Radicalism in the South since Reconstruction: An Introduction Chris Green, Rachel Rubin, and James Smethurst

“Never take a shit on your own time.” That, according to the lifelong Southern radical George Meyers, was his first lesson, taught to him in 1933 by a helpful co-worker on his first job, at the Celanese textile plant near Cumberland, Maryland. It was his first shift in the spinning department and his stomach was churning from the stench of acetone fumes and the air temperatures of over 100 degrees, so during the “lunch” break (in the middle of the 11:00 p.m.–7:00 a.m. shift) Meyers had dashed to the bathroom. His friend’s emphatic advice may sound amusing with the distance of time, but it was actually a sound and suggestive dictum for a budding activist. Labor struggles always return to the regulation (even legislation) and exploitation of bodies, as crystallized in the slogan from a Harlan County, Kentucky, miners’ strike in 1974: “The Duke Power Company May Own the Brookside Mine but They Don’t Own Us.” Further, who “owns” a worker’s time is one of the foundational philosophical puzzles of capitalism. Meyers’s friend was sincerely urging him to act in his own class-based selfinterest, through what we must recognize was a job action that, while small, revealed the power relations in industry at the most basic level. In 1998, at the age of eighty-five, Meyers suffered a stroke. Hoping to help him pass the time as he recovered, his doctor suggested that he start to write his memoirs. The doctor had no academic aims, but from what he knew of his patient, there was good reason to think it was an enterprise that would occupy him productively for some time. Meyers had a long history as a radical labor leader, stretching from the coalfields and textile mills of Depression-era Appalachia to regional leadership of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and national leadership of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). The Baltimore Sun had recently colorfully profiled him under the headline “Better Red,” giving some sense of the scope of his remarkable life. Moreover, Meyers enjoyed a good story; according to the Sun profile, he “salt[ed] his conversation

2 / chris green, rachel rubin, and james smethurst

with the casual profanity of the mining town he came from, and he still [had] the Appalachian accent of the Western Maryland hills” (Schoettler 1996, 1E). He took a raconteur’s pleasure in relating even the most frightening and discouraging “lessons” he learned along the way. Acting on his doctor’s advice, Meyers began the memoir project and had written more than a hundred pages before he died in 1999.1 Meyers’s incomplete memoir, of which we were lucky enough to be given a transcription, was the concrete inspiration for this project. His story is a fascinating and important one, and although it crackles with the wit and accomplishment of an extraordinary man, it also lays out a case study for radical political activity in the South that has important implications for how we see the history of the South and American history generally. Meyers was the son and grandson of coal miners in the mining town of Lonaconing in western Maryland. His grandparents participated in the struggles of the Molly Maguires in the nineteenth century. All the men of his parents’ and grandparents’ generation in his family died of Black Lung disease more or less as a matter of course. Meyers’s parents were veterans of bloody struggles with coal operators in the 1920s. Of German and Irish ancestry, his family had a background of active support for Irish Republicanism, and many of the people in his community had participated in railroad and miners’ unions. During the Depression, Meyers found work (after three years’ fruitless searching) in the giant Celanese textile mill in Cumberland, Maryland— which employed more than 13,000 workers at its height. (A state prison now occupies the former mill site.) Pitifully underpaid (22½ cents an hour) Celanese workers labored long hours (seven days a week) in extremely dangerous conditions that produced a range of lung ailments; Meyers himself suffered from lung disease on account of his years at the Celanese spinning room. He played a key role in organizing a local of the CIO’s United Textile Workers Union at the plant in 1935, rising to the position of local president. Through his work in the trade union movement, he noted, “I began to notice that what we won, didn’t stay won. No matter how small or how large our victory, it would rarely go into effect before the company found ways to weaken or even nullify it. . . . Finally it dawned on me. We Celanese workers were not just up against a single vicious company. Like workers in other industries, we were up against a whole system” (Meyers 1998). Thinking ever more about the need for systematic change, Meyers rose quickly in the CIO, eventually becoming president of the Maryland and Washington, DC chapter in 1941. During this period, he was introduced to the CPUSA, seeing in it an effective instrument for militant trade unionism and in its long-term vision an answer to the problems of

an introduction / 3

poverty and exploitation with which he had grown up. Meyers became a regional leader of the CPUSA in the 1940s; during the early years of the McCarthy era, he became one of the leading organizers of the CPUSA in the South, charged with rebuilding local organizations that had been damaged or destroyed by anti-Communist repression and with encouraging the growth of the civil rights movement. As he carried out this work, he became close to a range of important Southern radical political and cultural figures, such as Don West (about whom Chris Green writes in this volume) and the musicians Sam and Florence Reece (composer of the ubiquitous labor anthem “Which Side Are You On?” cited by Ron Cohen in his chapter here on songster Agnes “Sis” Cunningham). Not surprisingly, given his public work as a Communist, Meyers was prosecuted under the Smith Act in 1951. In his memoir, he recalls being arrested and handcuffed while changing his son Douglas’s diaper in the back room of his house—once again, one could argue, returning the question of radical struggle to essential bodily processes. The trial lasted three weeks, and in what by now is a recognizable historical script, the first “question” the prosecutor asked was a demand for Meyers to offer the names of members of the CPUSA. Of course, “naming names” was the greatest Communist sin in this period, and Meyers repeatedly refused to answer. For his pains, he was sentenced to thirty days in prison for contempt of court. It was understandably, then, a dramatic moment when Meyers announced in the courtroom that he would answer one question about names: he would reveal who recruited him into the CPUSA. Meyers stalled a bit before answering; the prosecutor got impatient and demanded, “Who? Who?”; and finally, when there was dead silence in the courtroom, Meyers answered: “The Celanese Corporation of America.” In Meyers’s account, “all hell broke loose,” and the judge had to halt the trial temporarily (Meyers 1998). For Communist activity, Meyers served four years in prison (in addition to the thirty days for contempt of court). Upon his release in 1955, he returned to the leadership of the CPUSA while working as a construction worker and installer of aluminum siding. Where beatings had accompanied the McCarthy-era repression, Meyers explained, “The Party in the South was totally crushed,” especially in Florida and Louisiana (Meyers 1998). Meyers was assigned to make many personal trips and visits to reorganize it. He went to work full time for the CPUSA in 1961, eventually serving as its labor secretary until the late 1990s. In short, Meyers was a significant Southern radical labor and political figure. But his story—and his stories, some harrowing, some delightful— are relatively unknown.2 Even more important here than his individual achievements, Meyers’s life illuminates and complicates stereotyped


visions of Appalachia and the South and its relation to the larger political culture in the United States. Meyers’s story, then, works as an appropriate frame for an exciting, but still relatively new, development in the fields of history, literary studies, African American studies, Southern studies, and cultural studies: the emerging body of work devoted to reconsidering the idea of Southern radical exceptionalism.3 This notion of Southern exceptionalism, which has marked even some of the most groundbreaking studies of U.S. literature and culture and the Left, posits that the South largely stood apart from the Left currents that circulated through the United States, particularly before the militant black student movement that began with the 1960 sit-in by North Carolina A & T students at a Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina. If those Southern currents were mapped, such tentative charts were but blurred copies based on the currents that flowed more robustly up North or out West. Those iconic instances where some Southern event—such as the Scottsboro case or the Angelo Herndon case (both of which Meyers references in his memoir)—did have an impact on the Left outside the South tend to be cast within the old carpetbagger model, in which “outside agitators” either excite or exploit the natives largely for their own agendas, which are centered outside the region. There have been exceptions to this idea of exceptionalism, of course, but only with the 1990 appearance of Robin Kelley’s Hammer and Hoe did this misconception begin to change significantly. Since then such scholars as Patricia Sullivan, Michael Honey, and Adam Fairclough, to name a few, have done outstanding work in the rethinking of indigenous Southern politics and culture, especially African American politics and culture and the Left before (and during) the Cold War. However, nearly all of these studies have had a relatively narrow geographical (e.g., Memphis and Alabama), historical (often the Great Depression), institutional (e.g., the Highlander School and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People [NAACP]), or personal (e.g., Myles Horton and Virginia Durr) focus—or some even narrower combination of the above. Such specificity is an understandable byproduct of the need to find a workable frame for a scholarly investigation. Nonetheless, the necessarily fragmentary nature of this scholarship has allowed the overall notion of Southern exceptionalism to stand in many respects. Some of the best revisionist scholarship examining the impact of the Left on the politics and culture of the United States, especially Michael Denning’s landmark The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (1996), leans heavily on such a notion. Even when it is clear that Southern radical activity does issue from indigenous sources, another sort of exceptionalism frequently is

an introduction / 5

applied, in which that activity is seen as anomalous or merely the indication of the road not taken. Radicalism in the South since Reconstruction seeks to open the scholarly conversation about Southern radicalism more widely than has been the case.4 Yet this collection does not attempt to capture or represent a unified Southern radical tradition. The region is too large and diverse, and its history too varied, to speak of a single tradition. In fact, one of the main objectives of this collection is to disturb received ideas about such terms as Southern, the South, tradition, and culture—and how these terms are often yoked together. The essays and interviews included here place a range of historical periods and topics in dialogue with each other so as to get a sense of the range of Southern politics and history, while at the same time encouraging connections to be made among the apparently disparate topics. Our intention is also to disturb what we see as received ideas about what is considered “Southern” and what is not. For example, it is of particular importance to us that this volume includes the interview with Raúl Salinas in order to take up the subject of radical Chicana/o politics and culture in Texas and put that subject in dialogue with other lines of art and activism more typically seen as “Southern.” Our starting point is the end of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow segregation, because these developments coincided with the emergence of what might be considered the modern Left. The infamous Compromise of 1877 took place in the same year as the founding of the first nationwide socialist party, the Workingmen’s Party of America, and it is our sense that these simultaneous developments had momentous effects on the directions both the Left and the South (and, indeed, the United States) took. Issues of race and region took a central place in the programs and activities of radical and Left organization. In this volume, Shawn Leigh Alexander explores the organizational response of the National Afro-American Council to the rise of racial violence and the Jim Crow system at the turn of the twentieth century—which would provide a model for future campaigns for the protection of African Americans’ civil and political rights. Writing about the same era, Bruce Baker uses the activities of the communitarian organizer Hiram Hover, who attempted to bring Shaker principles to workers’ organizations such as the Knights of Labor, to show that the period following Reconstruction was not, in fact, a dormant one for Left activity. From there, the essays span the length of the twentieth century, and—with our inclusion of interviews with several current activists in the South—enter the twenty-first. These essays and interviews, besides covering more than a hundred years, also address a wide range of both political and cultural subjects, for it is our belief that it is impossible to


grasp the full dimensions of Southern radicalism without some sense of the intersection of political and cultural work. While we think that such an interdisciplinary approach to the study of radicalism in any region or nation would be productive, we think it is particularly crucial in approaching the South. We point to the words of the singer and activist Si Kahn who, when asked what distinguishes the Southern radical tradition, answered, “Activists in the South pay more attention to culture. This is the heritage of the Southern labor movement, of Highlander, of the Southern civil rights movement, of mine workers’ culture. So I feel that there is more of a cultural sense, and more of a sense of celebration and community” (Rubin 2007). As a result, Southern Radicalism since Reconstruction is thoroughly interdisciplinary and its contributors include social and political historians, literary scholars, cultural historians, activists, and archivists. Also, while this collection implicitly and explicitly rejects the notion of “outside agitators,” many of the essays highlight a dialectical relationship between “regional” activities and concerns and “national” political organizations and efforts. In fact, another important goal of this book is to demonstrate that Southern radicalism is not only more than a dim reflection of radicalism elsewhere in the United States but also has been central to the development of a Left tradition since the demise of Reconstruction. Alexander’s essay launches the volume not just temporally, but also thematically, for the complications of race in the Southern arena lie at the heart of this enterprise. Bill Strickland takes on the very conceptualization of “America’s racial meaning” in his examination of the Institute of the Black World, the first modern Black think tank, formed in the wake of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1968 murder. Similarly, James Smethurst posits potentially negative effects of a habitual nostalgic and curatorial approach to Black culture in the South, and instead describes a vital, dynamic Black Arts movement anchored in New Orleans—a movement that should, he argues, play a role in crafting the historical meaning of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. It would be misguided, of course, to consider that the question of race only structures those essays that are explicitly “about” African American history and culture; rather “race” includes whites and Chicano/as as well as the interplay of ethnicity, language, and religion. James Lorence, in his essay on the CPUSA’s unemployed councils in Georgia in the early 1930s, confronts a skewed response to these attempts at mass mobilization: some advances were made among white workers, but these were small in comparison to the reception found among African Americans. Chris Green’s essay on the radical white Appalachian poet Don West’s book Clods of Southern Earth uncovers an interracial progressive coalition

an introduction / 7

in the postwar South that was fueled by the circulation of populist poetry in cheap paperback form. Pat Arnow also demonstrates the interracial cultural influence and practice in Southern theater, and Bruce Baker ends his study of the organizer Hiram Hover with a look at Hover’s shift in focus from organizing rural laborers to urban Black workers. Urban versus rural and coastal versus mountain, the ethnicity of Southerners goes beyond race, correlating partially with geography. Answering the mandate we read in Meyers’s memoir, this book presents a cluster of essays about Appalachia. The Southern Appalachian region has long been stereotyped in high and popular culture as a land that time forgot: backwoods “hollers” where frightening and inbred mountain people play transplanted British border ballads to banjo accompaniment and conduct brutal blood feuds. The persistence of this stereotype of the alternately happy-go-lucky and murderous bumpkin can still be seen in images ranging from the recurring character Cletus on The Simpsons to network reality shows. Even more benign pictures of Southern Highlanders often represent a simple rural (and exclusively white) folk with a close, innate connection to the land. In fact, Appalachia figured prominently in the industrial development of the South (and the nation) from the beginning of what became known as the New South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The supposedly pristine landscape of the highlands displayed such nonbucolic sights as iron and coal mines, railroads, as well as steel, textile, and paper mills. The region also featured some of the South’s most important urban industrial centers, such as Birmingham, Chattanooga, Knoxville, and Wheeling. Not surprisingly, some of the bitterest labor struggles of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States took place in Appalachia. In 1921, some 12,000 armed union miners battled, in the largest armed uprising of workers in America, entrenched gun thugs and state militias in the Battle of Blair Mountain, which is now to be strip mined if attempts to have it designated a national historical site fail. Harlan Country, Kentucky (“Bloody Harlan”) became synonymous with naked class struggle in the 1930s as miners in the Communist-led National Miners Union literally battled coal operators and their hired thugs. The United Mine Workers formed a core constituency of the CIO, which gathered unions (often led by leftists like George Meyers), such as the United Steelworkers, the Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers Union, and the United Textile Worker’s Union, and undertook successful organizing drives from Birmingham to Maryland. Not surprisingly, as a center for industry and labor struggle within the South, Appalachia was also a locus for political radicalism in the twentieth century. As Robin Kelley demonstrated in his study Hammer and Hoe, the CPUSA found


a receptive audience in the steel workers, miners, and tenant farmers of northern Alabama—especially among African Americans who formed a high percentage of workers in those industries. It makes sense, therefore, that Hiram Hover, as Bruce Baker shows, would spend much of his career in Appalachian cities such as Knoxville, Asheville, and Hickory (although he was born and raised in New York). Lynda Ann Ewen unveils coalfield activism in the 1970s as a transformative piece of American history that has mostly remained unattended by scholars and other observers. In doing so, she demonstrates that the heroic struggles of miners against exploitation of workers and the land—an image that has gained some familiarity because of movies like John Sayles’s 1987 Matewan—are not simply remote events of the 1920s and 1930s. Taken together with Smethurst’s essay, Ewen’s work also shows us how motivated nostalgia for a South that is somehow always “past” obscures the real struggles of its residents. Chris Green’s careful examination of Don West’s book attends not only to the organizations invested in its circulation but also to the way the poems themselves work movingly toward a self-definition of the Southern Appalachian, which was deployed to foster racial unity in the face of both misrepresentation and erasure. Not merely an ethical or abstract notion, this question of selfrepresentation is inextricably linked to social and political actions. Several essays here indicate how art can play a key role in the discovery of agency that allows a radical movement to take shape. Ron Cohen reveals how the activist and musician Agnes “Sis” Cunningham used music, singing, accordion playing, and composing in the 1930s as organizing and educational tools to reach labor union members, rural farmers, children, and others—and in doing so, demonstrated that women could play central roles in these frequently male-dominated efforts. In her essay on Southern theater in the 1970s, Pat Arnow explores how local theater groups managed to help communities throughout Appalachia (and the rest of the South) articulate a critical self-awareness about how power functioned in their historical circumstances. The pressing importance of self-representation, along with a desire to avoid the potential academic pitfall of pinning a subject down like a butterfly in a glass case and thereby rendering it static, has prompted the editors of this book to include several interviews as well as the more standard essays. In these interviews, three Southern figures—the musician and activist Si Kahn, the political activist Stetson Kennedy, and the poet-performer and activist Raúl Salinas—lend their own voices to this chronicle of Southern radicalism, adding a greater sense of the lived experience of several interwoven strands of Southern radical tradition.

an introduction / 9

We hope that the inclusion of these voices will orient this project toward the future, while taking lessons and inspiration from the past. But our aim in putting together this collection is not simply didactic; we seek to complicate and call into question the very terms of discussion we have raised—including both “Southern” and “radicalism.” We hope that some readers will trace critically the way these terms are deployed throughout this volume, and the different valances and registers the eleven contributors bring to their usage. The meaning of negotiating these terms became clear to us as we worked on this book at the most basic, linguistic level. One could write an essay or teach a course, we discovered, on the historical and political meanings implicit in the choice to capitalize—or not—certain words: Southern, white, black.5 Although many presses and publishers have a style sheet that seems to render the question moot, or a matter of simple style, the fact is that these seemingly tiny choices carry inside them deep history: of intergroup relations, of the legacy of slavery, of who won the war (literally as well as figuratively). The astute reader will notice that this book does not have a fixed style for these choices of capitalization; we have allowed each author to choose. We encourage you to think about what difference it makes. Notes 1. Meyers first recorded his memories on tape and then had them transcribed. An incomplete set of the tapes can be found in the George Meyers papers at Frostburg State University. 2. Some aspects of Meyers’s long career do figure in Vernon Pedersen’s unsympathetic history of the CPUSA in Maryland, The Communist Party in Maryland, 1919–57 (University of Illinois Press, 2000), though Pedersen’s study concentrates almost entirely on Baltimore and metropolitan Washington, DC. 3. As articulated by Bruce Baker in an earlier draft of his essay, “radical” is a broad term designating those people and organizations working to restructure, in a thorough-going and lasting way, the relations of power—economic, social, and political—between labor and society. 4. Of course, Southern activists, from Myles Horton and Don West in the 1930s to the circle around the journal Southern Exposure, have posited and celebrated traditions of Southern radical struggle. But, again, such a broad overview has been generally missing from scholarly discussion. 5. One of us (Chris Green) spends time considering this question with his undergraduate and graduate students and has gathered fascinating materials (style sheets, handbooks of writing, and the like) that show how “authorities” take positions on the question, directly influencing how culture and identity is portrayed (and hence, in part, shaped).


Works Cited Meyers, George A. 1998. “Writings and Reminiscences.” Unpublished manuscript. Rubin, Rachel. 2006. “‘The Anti-Slavery Act of 2002’: An Interview with Si Kahn.” In Radicalism in the South since Reconstruction, ed. Chris Green, Rachel Rubin, and James Smethurst. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Schoettler, Carl. 1996. “Better Red.” Baltimore Sun. May 29 (1E, 5E).


Shawn Alexander’s essay on the work of the Afro-American Council against the establishment and expansion of the Jim Crow system and black disenfranchisement in the South at the end of the nineteenth century shows some of the complexities of Southern radicalism, as it would evolve in its various strands over more than a century following Reconstruction. While the Council’s emphasis on a legal strategy, powerfully, if covertly supported by Booker T. Washington, might suggest that it was not radical in a sense that we might understand it now, its appeal to race solidarity and race pride, and its honoring of John Brown and the line of physical resistance to racism that he has long been taken to represent, strike a far more familiar chord. In fact, the Council’s invocation of race pride; of the right to self-defense; and of the necessity of a variety of political tactics, legal, electoral, and direct action, anticipate not only the early National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) but also, as will be seen in other essays in this volume, “Third Period” and Popular Front Left-led struggles against Jim Crow and for building the unemployed and labor movements of the 1930s and 1940s, and the broad ideological range of the civil rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Alexander’s essay also illustrates a complex dialectical relationship between local political and cultural work and transregional concerns of national organizations. As will be seen again and again through the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, the establishment of Jim Crow in the South makes it of peculiar interest to radical organizations seeking to transform society in the United States. For African American organizations, in particular, the South is not only where most black people still live, but it is also the bellwether of the racial direction in which the nation as whole is headed.

1 The Afro-American Council and Its Challenge of Louisiana’s Grandfather Clause Shawn Leigh Alexander

Though the black American had been freed and enfranchised, “he is only nominally free. His rights are abridged; he is an American only in name,” exclaimed the young black journalist John E. Bruce, a.k.a. Bruce Grit, in 1877 (quoted in Foner 1972, 489). In many ways Bruce was correct: immediately following the election of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, the South resumed its plans of social engineering to the extent that the federal Constitution, existing laws, and northern public opinion would allow. Despite the existence of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which guaranteed African Americans full and equal enjoyment of public accommodations, theaters, and other public amusement, many southern states disregarded the law with impunity. Backed by violence, intimidation, and the invocation of racial politics, southern states rewrote their constitutions and passed legislation stripping their African American citizens of their civil, social, and political rights (Woodward 1951, 1966; Weaver 1969; Ayers 1992; Perman 2001; Alexander 2004). African Americans responded to these social conditions in numerous ways, including practices involving the promotion of self-help, racial solidarity, economic nationalism, emigration, and political agitation. This essay will discuss the political agitation activity of the Afro-American League and Afro-American Council, the nation’s first national civil rights organizations. In particular, it will focus on one aspect of the Council’s southern strategy: its challenge of the Louisiana suffrage law (Meier 1963; Thornbrough 1961, 1972; Factor 1970; Litwack 1998; Alexander 2004). The instigator of the Afro-American League was the journalist Timothy Thomas Fortune. In 1884, Fortune used the editorial page of his newspaper, the New York Globe (subsequently renamed the Freeman and finally the Age), to promote the formation of a national organization to defend

14 / shawn leigh alexander

against the nation’s increasingly hostile reactions to the Reconstruction legislation that guaranteed equal rights to the country’s black citizens (Adams 1902; Drake 1970; Thornbrough 1972; Seraile 1978; Allman and Roediger 1982). The timing of Fortune’s proposal is extremely important in this matter, since he made his suggestion only a few short months after the Supreme Court had declared the Ku Klux Klan Law and the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional. Moreover, the editor’s comments came just a short time after the white citizens of Danville, Virginia, were able to virtually eliminate the black electorate through intimidation, the use of “double barrel shotguns, breach loading shotguns and Smith and Wesson double-action” (Waynes 1971; Shapiro 1988; Dailey 2000). Such examples of unprosecuted lawlessness and nefarious action by the Court prompted Fortune to proclaim: “We are aliens in our native land. . . . The colored people have been told emphatically that they have the ballot, and if they can not use it, it can’t be helped. We are placed at the mercy of every lawless ruffian; we are declared to be the victims of infamous injustice without redress”(New York Globe, October 20, 1883). It is in this climate that Fortune called for a national organization that would coordinate agitation and stand as an “uncompromising defense of the race with which we are identified. . . . Let us agitate! agitate! agitate! until the protest shall wake the nation from its indifference,” he proclaimed (New York Globe, October 20, 1883; Thornbrough 1972, 106). Slowly the Afro-American League developed on the local and state levels, and in 1890 the organization met for its inaugural national convention in Chicago. Over the three years of its existence it did not directly challenge the growing de jure segregation of the South. The group instead concentrated its efforts on the de facto discrimination in the North. The League tested discrimination in restaurants in Minnesota and also in New York with the case of its second president, T. Thomas Fortune versus the Trainer Hotel, which became a kind of embarrassing cause célèbre for the movement because of Fortune’s reported fondness for drink. The group also successfully challenged attempts to segregate schools in Ohio, discrimination in insurance rates in New York, and in its lone southern case issued a suit against the separate coach laws in Tennessee. Despite these small instances of success, however, the League, ever financially deficient, folded in the early months of 1893. Less than a year after proclaiming the organization defunct, Fortune attempted, to no avail, to rekindle the League flame around the antilynching activities of Ida B. Wells, but ultimately the League quietly faded away on the national scene (Alexander 2004, 1–152). The importance, however, is that the protest tradition did not die and among a certain cadre of individuals the desire for an active civil rights

the afro-american council and its challenge / 15

organization continued to be a goal. In September 1898, two years after the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision had declared the doctrine of “separate but equal,” and the year the Court upheld Mississippi’s disenfranchisement legislation in Williams v. Mississippi, this desire became a reality, as the Afro-American League was reborn at the national level as the Afro-American Council. Among the leadership of the new organization were Bishop Alexander Walters, president; Ida B. Wells-Barnett, secretary; and T. Thomas Fortune, director of the executive committee (Plessy v. Ferguson 1896; Williams v. Mississippi 1898; Walters 1917, 98, 104–109; Wells-Barnett 1970, 255–256; Factor 1970, 128–129; Miller 1984, 165–168). With the Supreme Court’s decisions in Plessy and Williams, the leadership of the new civil rights organization understood that they had to make a more concentrated effort in the southern states than the AfroAmerican League had. This new southern strategy was apparent at the organization’s first national convention in December 1898. The organization included in its broad agenda the necessity of directly challenging the growing discriminatory and disenfranchising legislation being passed throughout the southern states. Furthermore, the delegates discussed the importance of getting an antilynching bill passed in Congress and of holding the southern states accountable for the violence that took place in their region (Alexander 2004, 147–161). Following the national convention, Daniel Murray, executive committee member and congressional librarian, was instructed by Bishop Walters to form a bureau to advise the Council on procedural methods of testing laws that restricted the rights of African Americans. During a local Washington, DC, branch meeting of the Council, Murray assembled the Legal and Legislative Bureau, appointed George H. White general counsel, and chose a number of Council members throughout the nation as assistant counselors. These included, among others, advocates such as P. B. S. Pinchback, E. M. Hewlett, Reuben S. Smith, Frederick McGhee, John P. Green, D. Augustus Straker, and Judson W. Lyons (Murray to Walters, January 26, 1899, in Murray; Alexander 2004, 162–174). Among a number of activities, including trying to get Congress to uphold the Fourteenth Amendment and reduce the representation of states, such as Louisiana, that disenfranchised their black citizens, the Bureau moved to lay the groundwork for one of its most celebrated cases, the constitutional challenge to the Louisiana suffrage legislation. In the Louisiana Constitution of 1898, the state legislature established new residency, educational, and property requirements for voting. In addition to these provisions, the constitution established the grandfather clause, which exempted from the requirement persons whose ancestors had


voted on or before January 1, 1867. Since African Americans had been denied the right to vote prior to this date, the exemption was intended to limit disenfranchisement to blacks within Louisiana. The Bureau understood that this new Louisiana Constitution violated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and began discussing their desire to challenge the constitutionality of the Louisiana election law before similar measures spread like wildfire throughout the southern states (Colored American, March 8, 1899; Alexander 2004, 176). The Bureau’s apprehension was justified as North Carolina sought to implement a grandfather-type law in the November elections; other states were also considering altering their constitutions (Perman 2001, 124–172). Such actions frightened Council supporters, but they understood that these were unjust laws and could be fought. As the editors of the Colored American declared, “Set this down and stick to it: The election laws of the Louisiana and North Carolina are unconstitutional” (Colored American, March 4, 1899). The Council’s Legal Bureau took the “wicked” actions of the southland seriously and believed that a challenge of such legislation should be one of the first suits to come from the office of the new Bureau. At the organization’s 1899 national convention in Chicago, the delegates confirmed the Bureau’s desire to institute a challenge to the Louisiana suffrage clause. Also at the convention a permanent Legal Bureau was formed and McGhee was named the director of the department. After the meeting, the group immediately began to make arrangements to file suit and publicize the Council’s intentions. A short time after the convention, Bishop Walters, speaking before the Boston Afro-American Council, addressed the need for the nation to become aware of the deceitful legislation being passed throughout the South designed to disenfranchise the black population. He discussed his organization’s preparations to test the constitutionality of election laws in Louisiana and its plans to file suits in Mississippi and South Carolina as well (American Citizen, October 20, 1899). In his Boston address, Walters quoted heavily from John L. Love’s essay, “The Disfranchisement of the Negro,” published as Occasional Paper no. 6 of the American Negro Academy, an African American educational society formed in 1897 to promote science, art, literature, and higher education, to publish scholarly works, and to defend the black population from vicious attacks (Love 1899; Meier 1963; Factor 1970; Moss 1981). Love’s paper examined the measures that southern governments were using to disenfranchise the black population and dissected the recently revised constitutions of Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina (Love 1899; Moss 1981, 99–100). Walters was impressed by


the paper and understood its value in the propaganda war against the injustices occurring throughout the country. Prior to his Boston address, he had written to John W. Cromwell, the president of the Academy, requesting 1000 copies of Love’s work. Walters planned to distribute the copies in an effort to educate the public concerning the Southern states’ new legal restrictions on the voting and civil rights of African Americans (Walters to Cromwell, October 4, 1899, in Moss 1981, 100; Alexander 2004, 213–214). In the closing days of 1899, the Council’s executive committee met in Washington, DC (Colored American, December 16, 1899; Appeal, December 23, 1899). As the Colored American, edited by Council member Edward Cooper, outlined, the committee had much work on hand, including an “investigation into the constitutionality of certain southern election laws, pushing of the [George] White bill to give the federal authorities jurisdiction in cases of lynching and public disorder . . . and the presentation of important facts and data before the Industrial Commission with hope of inspiring legislation” (Colored American, December 16, 1899). With all of this on its plate, Walters, Fortune, Murray, McGhee, Edward Brown, Pinchback, Bruce, Jesse Lawson, White, and other executive committee members met to map out a plan of attack for the organization for the coming year. The committee proceeded through its semiannual meeting with no derailments. The group agreed to support White, who had worked with Murray and Brown during the past several months on Brown’s antilynching bill, in his effort to pass the bill through Congress (Colored American, January 6, 1900; Nelson 2002, 74). In addition to the resolution on the antilynching legislation, the committee agreed to support Indiana representative Edgar D. Crumpaker’s proposed bill to reduce southern representation. The committee further demonstrated its dedication to a strategic legal challenge of the Jim Crow system by affirming its pledge to challenge the Louisiana election law and urging its members to return to their states and raise funds for the legal costs (Alexander 2004, 219–222). Directly following the executive committee meeting, the organization’s financial committee, led by John H. Hannon, met at the home of Lawson to map out a plan of collecting funds to put the plans of the national body into operation—in particular the group’s challenge to the Louisiana election law. In a circular, the financial committee declared: “The time is now ripe for action on the part of the Afro-American Council, to justify its right to the continued support of the people, by taking steps to meet their laudable desire to test . . . the constitutional provisions in force in the state of Louisiana . . . operative solely upon American citizens of African


descent.” The committee furthered that such action was the right of free men and proclaimed that the world would judge the race’s “fitness for citizenship . . . by unity of purpose to resist” every encroachment upon their rights. Finally, they called upon every “man and woman in sympathy with the effort to bring before the courts” the protests of the Council, and “to make a liberal contribution of money for that purpose and induce others to do likewise” (Colored American, January 20 and 27, 1900). Following the committee meeting, members of the financial committee sent the circulars to all race-loving men and women whom they believed would support their cause. Booker T. Washington was one of the first individuals to receive the appeal. He immediately responded to Lawson with the sum of $100 and a confirmation that he would support the effort in other ways as well. Lawson graciously replied to the Wizard, thanking him for his support, and explained that his donation should remain anonymous, but he added that the Council needed at “least $2000 in hand and the promise of three thousand dollars on demand from reliable sources” before the action could begin. Washington responded by putting out pleas of his own to sympathetic whites who might aid the cause (Lawson to Washington, February 9, 1900, in Harlan et al. 5:436–437). Around the same time Washington climbed on board the Council’s program, Bruce raised his voice in support of the organization, calling the financial committee’s appeal a splendid plea to “the manhood and womanhood of the Negro race.” Bruce believed that the “question of Rights” was the most “important question of the present century” and held that African Americans had to furnish the sinews of this war for rights. He asserted that the black community could win this fight quickly if they get together with their brains and cash, and make up their minds to put down “scoundrelism and thugism wherever it exists and operates against the Negroes in this country” (Colored American, January 27, 1900). To achieve such a victory, Bruce called for all to send money to the Council’s financial committee. Furthermore, he outlined a plan that called upon ministers of all denominations to take up a Sunday collection, for every black society to tax its members from five to twenty-five cents, and for all Sunday and day school children to give a penny apiece to popular subscription for the Council’s war chest. He believed that with such a plan, the race would raise $50,000 to $100,000 “without feeling it, in less than three months.” With this sum or sums, he asserted, the race could “make it very interesting for Southern nullifiers who believe that the Lord made the earth for his saints, and that they are the saints” (Colored American, January 27, 1900). Many of the Council’s supporters concurred with Bruce Grit’s exhortations and called for the community to heed his words and lend their


support to the organization. The St. Paul and Minneapolis Afro-American Council affiliate, the Law Enforcement League, took a unique approach to the issue. After McGhee, the local representative of the executive committee, returned to the region, the group met to determine the best way to raise money for the Council’s legal challenge of Louisiana’s suffrage laws. After some discussion, the group decided to produce a play, A Social Glass, starring McGhee, and donate all proceeds to the Council’s treasury (Appeal, January 13 and 20 and February 3, 1900; Nelson 2002, 74–75). While the Council continued to solicit funds to support the challenge of Louisiana’s election laws, the group was also closely watching another developing legal case in the state. Samuel Wright, an African American from New Orleans, was convicted of assault and attempted rape and was sentenced to death by a Jefferson Parish grand jury. After his conviction, a white attorney, A. L. Gusman, decided to appeal the case and challenge the legality of the 1898 Louisiana Constitution and therefore the legitimacy of the Jefferson Parish grand jury’s decision—a twelve-member rather than sixteen-member grand jury as stipulated by the 1879 Louisiana Constitution. Moreover, Gusman argued that since the state’s new voter regulations were issued through statute, rather than constitutional amendment and ratification, they violated the Louisiana Constitution of 1879, the federal guarantee of due process and undermined the principle of popular sovereignty and the U.S. Constitution’s Article 4 guarantee to each state a republican form of government. The defendant, Sheriff Lucien Marrero, asked for the case to be dismissed on the grounds that the federal court had no jurisdiction in the matter. On February 3, 1900, the circuit court ruled in Marrero’s favor. Within weeks, Gusman initiated an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court (Scott 2005, 190–191). In late February, the Afro-American Council issued an official plea for support of its own case and, echoing Bruce Grit’s previous comments, asked all sympathetic race-loving men and women to contribute some amount of money to the cause. Furthermore, Walters and the financial committee authorized various black newspapers throughout the country that published the appeal to collect funds for the organization and acknowledge the receipt of the contributions in their columns (Indianapolis Freeman, February 24, 1900; Appeal, February 24, 1900). A month after the publication of the appeal, representatives of the race met in the District of Columbia to discuss the necessity of testing the suffrage legislation of various southern states. Those in attendance included White, Fortune, Cooper, Murray, Lawson, William Calvin Chase, and, anonymously, Washington. Though the Council did not preside over the meeting, members of the organization dominated the proceedings.


Furthermore, by the end of the summit those present decided to endorse the activities of the Council in its efforts to challenge the legality of the Louisiana Constitution (Colored American, March 10, 1899; Washington Post, March 5, 1899; Harlan 1971, 393–416, 1972, 297–298; McPherson 1975, 363–364; Harlan et al. 5:457–458; Alexander 2004, 222–223).1 With this larger acknowledgment of the Council’s efforts and the slow accumulation of funds, the organization continued the lengthy process of developing a case against the bigoted legislation. In the coming months the national organization called upon the local branches and African Americans in general to celebrate the Sage of Ossawattomie’s onehundredth birthday on May 9. Walters proclaimed that John Brown deserved their praise because his “love of liberty was a consuming passion which caused him to abhor human slavery and to voluntarily yield up his life for the overthrow of that iniquitous institution.” Furthermore, he “demonstrated his loyalty to the race when he stopped to kiss a Negro child, on his way to the place of his execution.” For these reasons and more, Walters called upon every African American church, school, literary society, and “especially every Afro-American Council to hold exercises in honor of this grand old hero.” Finally, he urged all lovers of liberty who create these celebrations to take up a collection in name of Brown for the Council’s activities against the Louisiana suffrage law (American Citizen, March 16, 1900; Colored American, April 7, 1900). Following Walters’s appeal, a number of Councils began preparing for the celebration when they held their monthly meetings. On the national level, the Council’s financial committee also met during the month of April to discuss the status of the organization’s struggle to gain sufficient funds to launch its Louisiana test case. To aid the monetary cause, Louise Morris, a District of Columbia Council member, with the assistance of other Council supporters, Mrs. M. E. Martin, Mattie Crawford, Lillian Boles, and Jennie Morris, held a musical social event on April 27 (Indianapolis Freeman, April 14 and 28, 1900; Iowa Bystander, April 27, 1900; Christian Recorder, May 3, 1900). Meanwhile, though not openly advocating the Gusman case, possibly because of the criminal element of the case, Council members did become more involved in the activities of the case. Back in February, the black Union veteran and local New Orleans Council member, John Lewis stood bond for Gusman’s appeal. In Washington, DC, Lawson secured the services of Arthur Alexis Birney, son of the abolitionist James Gillespie Birney, to assist in preparing the case and arguing it before the Supreme Court. At the time, Birney was working in the District of Columbia as a partner in the firm Birney and Woodward. Moreover, Washington, though not a member of the Council but an avid supporter of the group


and its activities, began to inconspicuously get involved in the actions in New Orleans. His secretary Emmett Scott went to the Crescent City to meet with John Lewis and discuss the progress of the case and other activities in the region (Scott 2005, 191; Scott to Washington, June 21, 1900, in Harlan et al. 5:565–567). In addition to this action around the Gusman case, the Council continued to raise funds for its own legal challenge in Louisiana. When the organization met for its national convention in September, Lawson was pleased to announce to the delegates that the Legal Bureau was moving forward with its preparations. More importantly, he reported to the delegation that the Financial Bureau had accumulated $391.39 for support of the case and were preparing to cash in on many of the subscriptions promised to the organization (Iowa State Bystander, September 21 and 28, October 26, 1900; Adams 1902). Within a short time after the convention, Lawson wrote to Washington about the progress of the case. Lawson informed Washington that Birney had agreed to handle the Council’s suit in addition to the Gusman case. Lawson wrote to Washington because the Tuskegee principal had recently claimed to have had collected $100 for the cause during his trip to the North and Lawson wanted Washington to send the money either to the Council’s financial committee or directly to Birney, so the group could begin to cover his retaining fee. As Lawson explained, Birney had already begun working on the case and the Council needed to keep up its side of the agreement, especially in the area of initiating the case. In this area Lawson stressed the need to get an individual to attempt to register a voter in the state of Louisiana (Lawson to Washington, October 3, 1900, in Harlan et al. 5:651–653). In the letter, Lawson also expressed his desire to keep Washington’s name out of the press in regard to the Louisiana case. He explained, “on the account of the great work you are doing for our people at the South, and the delicate position which you occupy in connection with that work, I think it best for you to keep in the background in matters like the Louisiana case. Your real friends appreciate your position, and will do nothing that is calculated to embarrass you in that work, or jeopardize your standing before the public” (Lawson to Washington, October 3, 1900, in Harlan et al. 5:651–653). So, with the covert assistance of Washington, the Council moved forward on the Louisiana case. Washington in fact was working as vigorously as Lawson and his committee colleagues. Around the same time Lawson was writing him about the funds he raised while in the North, Washington was corresponding with Giles Beecher Jackson, an African American lawyer and member of the Council from Richmond, Virginia,


about Jackson’s own work on the Louisiana case. Washington was upset with Jackson for not having corresponded with him sooner. Both had been in Boston for the inaugural convention of the National Negro Business League and had discussed the matter at some length. According to Washington’s letter, Jackson was suppose to work on the legal front as well as assist the Council in raising funds to cover the legal fees (Jackson to Washington, October 5, 1900, in Harlan et al. 5:649–651). Jackson apologized to Washington for not corresponding sooner, but explained that he was knee-deep in a local legal battle against the city of Richmond’s attempt to pass a segregated streetcar ordinance. It was his local activities that prevented him from writing and were the reason he had been unable to collect any money for the Council’s cause. He informed Washington, however, that the local organization had agreed to raise money to test the constitutionality of the grandfather clause as well as address its own financial needs (Jackson to Washington, October 5, 1900, in Harlan et al. 5:649–651). More importantly, Jackson discussed his meeting with Albert Pillsbury while he was in Boston. According to Jackson, Pillsbury was not convinced that Louisiana was the proper location for a test case concerning suffrage legislation. Pillsbury expressed a stronger desire for the Council to turn its attention to North Carolina or Mississippi, and strongly believed that the organization would need to institute lawsuits in several states in order to get a favorable decision from the Supreme Court. Finally, Jackson urged Washington to come to Richmond to discuss Pillsbury’s plan in more detail (Jackson to Washington, October 5, 1900, in Harlan et al. 5:649–651). On the heels of Jackson’s letter, Washington received messages from Lawson and Walters thanking him for forwarding the $100 that he had collected. Walters thanked the Sage of Tuskegee for his moral and financial support, and expressed his agreement with Washington that the most important work of the Council was “to test the constitutionality of the Louisiana election laws or similar laws in any state.” In his letter, Lawson discussed another $200 that Washington had personally pledged, as well as how with this money the Council would be able to render Attorney Birney’s services. And finally, contradicting Jackson’s comments, Lawson explained that Birney had been in conversation with Pillsbury and that the Boston lawyer had agreed to take the case once it reached the Supreme Court (Walters to Washington, October 6, 1900, in Washington; Miller 1984, 179–180; Lawson to Washington, October 8, 1900, in Harlan et al. 5:651–653).2 While Washington was working behind the scenes, the Colored American acknowledged the activity of Lawson, Bishop Walters, and


other Council members in their attempt to raise the necessary funds for the Louisiana case. On the local level the branches met in various locales to prepare for the executive committee meeting in late December (Colored American, November 3, 1900; Washington Bee, November 17, 1900; Topeka Plaindealer, November 23, 1900; Colored American, December 1, 1900). As the Council’s executive committee meeting approached and members of the Legal and Financial Bureaus continued to formulate their plans for the Council’s suit, the Supreme Court heard the Gusman case. Arguing along similar lines as Gusman had on the state level, he and Birney maintained that the enactment of the 1898 Louisiana Constitution violated the principles of popular sovereignty and that a large number of the legal voters of the state were eliminated from the electorate and “placed in the thralls of political bondage” making them “aliens in the land of their nativity and exiles in their own homes.” The attorneys therefore argued that with the illegitimate constitution, Wright could not seek redress in the Louisiana court system (Gusman v. Marrero 1901; Scott 2005, 191). Shortly after Birney and Gusman appeared before the Supreme Court, and while he was making final preparations for the annual executive committee meeting, Lawson contacted Washington to update him on the Council’s efforts in Louisiana. Lawson discussed the necessity to hire a local Louisiana lawyer to handle the initial phase of the case. Pillsbury had suggested Armand Romain of New Orleans; the Council agreed and set out to obtain his services. Lawson and Washington also discussed the initial estimation of the cost of the suit. According to Lawson, the case would cost approximately $7,500 and he expressed optimism that the Council could raise the required amount by the end of 1902 (Lawson to Washington, December 17, 1900, in Washington; Walker 1958, 92–93; Alexander 2004, 260–262, 266). Shortly after this correspondence the Council’s executive committee met in Washington, DC. The organizational leadership commented on the progress in the Louisiana case and also discussed the events of the past year. Concerning the Louisiana case, Lawson brought the committee up to date on the group’s selection of Romain to handle the initial phases of the case. Directly following the meeting, the Supreme Court issued its decision on the Gusman case. In its decision, the Court, without Justice Harlan’s participation, ignored the issues of the unconstitutionality of Louisiana’s Constitution and race-based disenfranchisement. The Court dismissed the appeal arguing that Gusman had no standing to bring the case for Wright. The Court maintained that “however friendly he may be to the doomed man and sympathetic for his situation, however, concerned he


may be lest unconstitutional laws be enforced, and however laudable such sentiments are the grievance they suffer and feel is not special enough a cause of action” for Gusman to bring the case before the Court (Gusman v. Marrero 1901; Scott 2005, 191–192). Undeterred by the Court’s ruling, the Afro-American Council pushed forward with its own case. Following the executive meeting, members of the Council dispersed to spread the message of the organization and to try to raise funds for the group’s activities. Bishop Walters, in particular, sought to step up his Council activities in an attempt to acquaint the public with the organization’s goals, philosophy, and activities. Participating in an Emancipation Day celebration in Boston, invoking the glories of African American soldiers and bondsmen in freeing themselves during the bloody struggle of the Civil War, he called upon the audience to support the activities of the Council and urged African Americans everywhere to “continue to struggle for their civil and political rights” (Star of Zion, January 10, 1901). While Walters was pressing forward in the public realm, Washington continued to maneuver behind the scenes. During the month of January, Washington and Jackson corresponded about a number of things, including the Council’s Louisiana case. Jackson discussed an upcoming meeting between himself and Lawson regarding the case, but more importantly they discussed Washington’s upcoming visit to Virginia. Members of the Richmond Negro Business League had scheduled a public lecture for the Tuskegee principal and the two agreed that even though the lecture would focus on the Business League and the necessity for building up industrial strength, a portion of the money collected for admission to the address would go to the Council to aid the Louisiana case. As Jackson explained, “two thirds” of the money raised would “go to a cause very dear to you and myself and every other Negro in the land, which cause is better known to you and I than to anyone else who will be interested in this lecture” (Jackson to Washington, January 24 and 28, 1901, in Harlan et al. 6:14–17, 23–24). Over the next several months the Council on the national and local levels continued to raise the necessary funds for its Louisiana case. In March, the national executive committee converged at Galbraith A. M. E. Church in Washington, DC, to hold one of its most successful meetings. During the session, Lawson reported on the finances for the Louisiana case. Prior to the meeting, the organization had raised $941; delegates then produced another $161, surpassing the $1,000 figure necessary to retain Attorney Birney to institute the suit. In addition to the activity around the Louisiana case, the committee also heard stirring addresses from McGhee, Bishop Walters, Pinchback, and Lucy E. Moten


(Cleveland Gazette, March 16, 1901; Lawson to Washington, March 5, 1901, in Harlan et al. 6:48–49; Nelson 2002, 77). Directly following the committee session, a number of local branches sprang into action and held meetings of their own. The District of Columbia branch held a successful meeting and called up all citizens of the region to throw their money behind the Council’s efforts in Louisiana rather than putting their money into “brass bands and frumpery” for a street parade on Emancipation Day. In Philadelphia, the local group held a plenary session for the annual convention, and many of the committee members were in attendance. According to one Philadelphia member, Gertrude Mossell, Council members McGhee, Fortune, and Bishop Walters were so inspiring that the Wesley church raised $1,220 (Colored American, March 30, 1901). While this flurry of local activity was taking place, Lawson and Washington continued to converse about the Louisiana case. As noted earlier, by March the Council had raised over $1,000. In a letter to Washington in mid-March, Lawson explained that the Council had paid the retainer fees for Birney and Romain, as well as the filing fee with Supreme Court. After these expenses, however, only thirty-eight dollars remained in the Council’s coffers; an additional $600 would be required to pay Romain when he was ready to file the suit in Louisiana (Lawson to Washington, March 12, 1901, in Washington). Lawson was extremely frustrated with the financial status of the organization. Despite the success the Council had experienced during recent months, the group still struggled financially and he did not believe that his Council colleagues were doing all they could for the cause. He did not understand why his colleagues were not being more aggressive in their efforts to aid the Louisiana case. He wrote to Washington expressing his disappointment with the fact that he had not received money promised by branches in Rochester, Chicago, New York City, and Jersey City. What was particularly maddening to Lawson was that several hundred dollars in funds promised by Fortune and Bishop Walters for New York City and Jersey City, respectively, had not been forthcoming (Lawson to Washington, March 12 and 15, 1901, in Washington; Walker 1958, 95).3 Despite the financial committee’s difficulty in raising money for the case, the initial stages of the suit did proceed. The attorneys began outlining a strategic plan, but could not completely agree on the proper course of action. Romain believed that the best strategy was to file suit against the registration laws. Birney and Pillsbury, however, thought that the suit should include both an attempt to register and to vote. In the end, they agreed with Romain. The strategy was to select a plaintiff and have him attempt to register. Upon refusal of the registrar to include his name on


the rolls, a suit would be instituted in his name (Lawson to Washington, May 20, 1901, in Washington). Once the legal team and the Council agreed upon the proper course of action, the Council left the groundwork of the case, including the selection of a plaintiff, entirely in the hands of Romain. The Council was not always pleased with the speed of preparation for the case or the frequency in which Romain kept it abreast with the progress of the situation in Louisiana. However, the infrequency of reports was a minor issue in the minds of Lawson and other members of the Legal Bureau. A more important factor was that the wheels of justice appeared to be turning. Meanwhile, the Council needed to turn its attention to getting the public and its own members to support the suit (Lawson to Washington, April 12 and 30 and May 6, 1901, in Washington). To address this situation, Lawson and other members of the organization went on a public-relations offensive. Central to community apathy, many believed, was the failure of the black press to publicize the test case. As Lawson remarked to Washington, the papers failed “to realize the necessity of speaking out” and they were simply “not pushing the matter.” The only paper that continued to discuss the case, according to Lawson, was Alexander Manly’s Washington Daily Record. The Financial Bureau director speculated to Washington that some of the editors were waiting for some type of subsidy to give publicity to the suit (Lawson to Washington, May 13 and 20, 1901, in Washington; Walker 1958, 96). The problem with such an explanation was that a large number of the Council members, and especially those of the executive committee, were editors of the race papers. Why should they await payment for publicizing the activities of the organization they supported? A more central problem, it appears, was a conundrum similar to the one that the Afro-American League found itself in during its brief tenure—the failure to properly disseminate information. With no national organizer, the Council relied on various individuals, especially the secretary and the president, to disseminate news. There is no record of that information having reached the various newspapers throughout the country. Therefore, individuals had to pick up the slack and either publish information on their own or actively solicit information to broadcast. During the month of May, both Wells-Barnett and Lawson attempted to fill this void. In her article, Wells-Barnett provided a concise history of the organization. She also emphasized the need for people to become more familiar with the activity of the Council’s Bureaus, because that was where the work of the organization really resided. Finally, WellsBarnett briefly mentioned the work of the Council in the Louisiana case and stressed the need for better financial and moral support to enable


the organization to be successful in work carried out by the Legislative Bureau (Wells-Barnett 1901, 415–418). Taking a more proactive role, Lawson went directly to the heart of the cause and published an extensive article on the Louisiana case in the Washington Post. In his article, Lawson condemned the grandfather clause and outlined the steps the Afro-American Council was taking to prove the clause unconstitutional. To further his cause, Professor Lawson quoted extensively from an article by Louisiana senator Samuel Douglass McEnery, which had appeared in the New Orleans Times-Democrat in 1898. In the piece, McEnery warned that the grandfather clause was unconstitutional and if passed would cause the state to lose representation. Lawson believed that the use of McEnery’s words would gain the Council and its cause some sympathy as the article circulated throughout the nation. Following publication of the article, Lawson sent 150 copies to Washington for him to use in his fundraising activities for the Council’s case (Washington Post, May 13, 1901; Lawson to Washington, May 13, 1901, in Harlan et al. 6:108–109; Lawson to Washington, May 20, 1901, in Washington; Alexander 2004, 268–272). Within the next month the Council issued the call for the fourth annual convention in Philadelphia. In this call, Bishop Walters made special reference to the Louisiana case. Having recently received notice from Birney that the case was progressing “satisfactorily,” Walters informed Council members and sympathizers that more money was necessary for the suit. He acknowledged that the organization had raised $1,000, but noted that more was due and additional funds would be necessary before the Supreme Court of the United States rendered its final decision. He assured the black community that the Council was making progress and that it was demonstrating to the nation that African Americans were “interested in [their] civil and political rights.” For this reason, if nothing else, Walters believed that the forthcoming convention in Philadelphia was the most important of all, and urged every “Negro church, college, benevolent society, and other race organizations” to send representatives and the annual dues of five dollars (Star of Zion, June 13, 1901; Cleveland Gazette, June 22, 1901; Alexander 2004, 275). Following the call, many Councils sprang into action and began preparations for the annual convention. In the District of Columbia, for instance, the local organization held a large meeting and fundraiser at the Nineteenth Street Baptist Church. During the proceedings, Lawson informed those present about the progress of the Louisiana suit (Colored American, June 22 and 29, 1901). Councils also met in New York City and Hartford, Connecticut. In both locations, the necessity for financially supporting the organization was the central topic of the meetings.


In New York, members called on all groups to support the efforts of the Council and to send delegates to Philadelphia. In Hartford, the monetary situation of the organization posed a challenge to local Council members and all race organizations. “What is Connecticut going to give toward the $2,000 needed to test the Louisiana case?” the Colored American’s Hartford correspondent asked. “We cannot afford to close our ears to this matter.” The writer then proposed a challenge to the Council supporters and the members of the various churches and societies of the city to send as many dues-paying delegates as possible to Philadelphia, or at least send money to support the test case fund. The correspondent pleaded with his readers to show their “loyalty to [their] race in some way” (Colored American, July 6 and 13, 1901). Several weeks prior to the annual convention, the organization officially filed its suit in Louisiana. By July, Romain had chosen David J. Ryanes as the plaintiff. Because he had lived in New Orleans since March 1860 and, despite his illiteracy, had voted in Louisiana for a number of years before the state passed its new constitutional amendment, Ryanes was the perfect client. On July 10, Ryanes attempted to register to vote. Jeremiah M. Gleason, supervisor of registration for the Orleans Parish, refused his registration based on Article 197 of the Louisiana Constitution (Adams 1902, 26–27; Washington Bee, July 20, 1901; Star of Zion, August 1, 1901; Alexander 2004, 273–275).4 Upon his failed attempt to register, the Council initiated a suit in the name of Ryanes. In the brief filed by the Council’s legal team, the plaintiff alleged that Gleason’s refusal to register Ryanes was illegal and without constitutional authority and that the action was equivalent to the complete denial of his right to vote. Therefore, Romain argued, Gleason’s action was a violation of the Fifteenth Amendment. The legal team contended, moreover, that Article 197 of the Louisiana Constitution constituted an unlawful plan to disqualify Ryanes because of race, color, and previous condition of servitude. The clause therefore constituted a denial of equal protection of the laws and a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment (Adams 1902, 26–28; Walker 1958, 91–92; Alexander 2004, 283–285). As the Louisiana suit got under way, Bishop Walters and the rest of the Council’s executive committee moved to finalize their plans for the Council’s national convention. In late June, Walters had written to Washington asking him if he were going to be present at the Philadelphia convention. To the Bishop’s disappointment, the Wizard explained that he would be unable to attend. Walters believed that Washington’s absence would be a mistake. He understood that the Tuskegee principal was working behind the scenes for the Council, but at the same time he considered


it important for the Council and Washington to show some public connection—even if that might be with Washington’s demonstrating some opposition to the organization’s open endorsement of political agitation. As he recounted, On his part, Walters explained “they will think that I don’t want you to be present. And on Wasington’s part, that you are a cowardly leader, afraid to come. It would be better for all concerned,” asserted Walters if Wasington, “could come in on the last day and make a real conservative speech. It would defeat those who will make capital out of your absence,” he claimed. (Walters to Washington, in Harlan et al. 6:160).

While Washington was declining the invitation to appear in Philadelphia, he was still working on the organization’s Louisiana suit. In late July, he and attorney Pillsbury corresponded regarding the filing of the Ryanes suit (Pillsbury to Washington, July 30, 1901, in Harlan 6:182–183). At the same time Lawson wrote to Washington explaining that he would conceal the Tuskegeean’s contributions to the Ryanes suit with the acronym XYZ, and that all contributions Washington secured from others would appear as XYZ (Lawson to Washington, July 30, 1901, in Washington; Walker 1958, 98–99; Harlan 1983). In spite of this activity, Washington continued to deem it wise to stay away from the Philadelphia convention. A week following the Philadelphia convention, the Ryanes case was called before the Division D Civil District Court of New Orleans. As the hearing opened, Attorney General Guion filed an exception on the part of the State of Louisiana on the basis that the court did not have jurisdiction in the case. Guion argued that the issue was a political one and that Ryanes’s petition demonstrated no valid cause for the court to take action. In case the judge overruled these exceptions, Guion then filed another motion calling for the court to dismiss the suit upon trial. He argued that such action was necessary because the registrar refused to register Ryanes owing to his lack of qualifications, not because of his skin color (New Orleans Times-Democrat, August 13, 1901; Walker 1958, 98–99). In the afternoon session, both sides submitted their arguments to the judge. Attorney General Guion, along similar lines of his comments made during the morning session, argued that Ryanes did not possess the qualifications to vote and that the registrar was carrying out his duty by not allowing the plaintiff to register. Attorney Romain, arguing for the Council, countered Guion by asserting that Ryanes had a constitutional right to vote, protected under the Fifteenth Amendment and therefore had the right to register in Louisiana in order to exercise his federal right


to the franchise. The session ended with Judge Sommerville’s agreeing to deliberate on the case in the coming days (New Orleans Times-Democrat, August 13, 1901; Walker 1958, 99). On August 19, Sommerville called the district court into session and dismissed the suit. According to Judge Sommerville, his decision was rendered in accordance with a number of factors. First, the judge denied that the Fifteenth Amendment gave an individual the right to vote. He further argued that the federal Constitution recognized the right of the state to relegate the suffrage. Second, he pointed out that the grandfather clause of the suffrage clause—section 5—required voters to register before August 31, 1898. Since Ryanes admitted that he did not possess the literacy or property qualifications, according to Sommerville, the plaintiff had waited too long to qualify under section 5 of the Louisiana Constitution. Furthermore, in his decision the judge brought attention to the fact that Ryanes had failed to allege that anyone had been registered under section 5 or that he had been injured in anyway by that provision of the constitution. “It may be that discrimination against him was intended under that section,” Sommerville argued, “but intention is insufficient to entitle him to relief in a court of justice.” Having pointed out that Ryanes did not meet the literacy and property requirements and that he failed to register during the time of operation of section 5, Judge Sommerville therefore dismissed the case on the grounds that Ryanes’s petition showed no cause for the court to issue a writ of mandamus (New Orleans Times-Democrat, August 20, 1901; Walker 1958, 100–101, 102). Upon dismissal of the suit, the Bureau appealed the case to the Louisiana Supreme Court. What is curious, however, is that the black press did not cover the Council’s move to appeal, nor did it accord any space to the actual decision in the initial phase of the case. Once again it appears that the Council failed to inform the public of its activities and in doing so might have undermined its own efforts to elicit greater support from the community. The organization was preparing to continue to push its case through the court system and in doing so it was actively fighting for the community’s rights and it needed to keep the people apprised of its activity. Despite its setback in the Louisiana suit, the organization also agreed to widen its attack on the suffrage provisions of the southern constitutions. This time the organization focused its attack on Washington’s home state, Alabama. In late 1900, Alabama politicians announced their intention to hold a constitutional convention during the year. Immediately the Council became alarmed and its Legal and Legislative Bureau sprang into action. Lawson and Washington discussed the ramifications of the convention, fearing that the delegates would enact a new suffrage provision disenfranchising a large number of black Alabamians.


Their fears were realized and once the Alabama constitutional convention passed the new suffrage provisions, Washington again wrote Lawson asking the Afro-American Council to become further involved in the Alabama situation. He requested that the Bureau prepare a circular that would educate voters about their rights and encourage them to register. He also called upon the organization to prepare a suit to test the Alabama laws. Lawson enthusiastically responded to Washington’s request, assuring him that the Bureau would draw up the circular as soon as they received the registration laws. He further explained that the treasury currently had $100 that might be used to institute a test case in Alabama, since the finance committee collected money for the purpose of testing the constitutionality of all laws enacted to disenfranchise blacks (Lawson to Washington, December 20 and 26, 1901, in Washington). While the Council was waiting for its case in Louisiana to go through the state courts, the organization began its second suit against a southern state’s disenfranchisement legislation. In 1902, the group instituted a suit on behalf of Jackson W. Giles of Montgomery, Alabama. Giles, an educated man who worked as a janitor in the Montgomery post office, was chosen to attempt to register in the Middle District. After being twice denied, the group took the case to court. Upon the failure to render a positive verdict in circuit court, the Council brought the case before the Supreme Court. Wilford Smith, an African American lawyer from New York and Council member, based the case on the guaranties of the Fifteenth Amendment and Section 1979 of the revised statutes of the United States. The Reconstruction Amendment guaranteed Giles the right to vote regardless of his skin color, and the statute protected citizens from restrictions placed on their rights and held those responsible for such restrictions liable to the party injured. At the hearing the plaintiff ’s legal team labeled the Alabama election law a “fraud” and asked the Supreme Court to declare it so. It also requested that the Court force the board to register Giles as a voter. The Court, in a cunning move asked why, if the law was fraudulent, they should add yet another name to its fraudulent list. The jurists claimed that it was “impractical” to order a state to inscribe African Americans on its voting rolls: “If the conspiracy and intent exist, a name on a piece of paper will not defeat them.” Finally, the Court ruled that it had no jurisdiction in the suit, claiming instead that it was a political issue and therefore belonged before Congress, which under the House could reduce the representation of those states that practiced disenfranchisement (Giles v. Harris 1903; Factor 1970, 239; Thornbrough 1972, 241–242; Harlan 1983, 245–247). As the Cleveland Gazette’s editors observed, the “ghost of [Justice] Rodger B. Taney” must have turned “green with envy” in the face of the


Court’s shrewd move to once again place African Americans outside the law’s protection (Cleveland Gazette, May 2, 1903). Despite the devastating blow, however, the Council, Washington, and Giles refused to fold their tents in their pursuit of the legal strategy. The Council’s suit testing the constitutionality of the Louisiana suffrage amendment was pending before the Court, and the Council began looking into supporting a case being developed by its Virginia members. Moreover, Giles and his supporters, including Washington working behind the scenes, vowed to continue their fight against the Alabama legislation (Topeka Plaindealer, September 11, 1903; Alexander 2004, 233–235). In early September, combined with announcing that they were taking on H. T. Johnson’s, editor of the Christian Recorder, discrimination case and other legal activity of the organization, the Council’s legal team assured the community that they had not “relaxed one fractional part of [their] zeal and effort to bring before the Supreme Court . . . the cases involving the suffrage question and that the decision in the Giles’ case” had not weakened their resolve. The Council, the legal team asserted, was pushing forward with the Louisiana case, and believed that when it reached the Supreme Court they would receive a favorable decision (Topeka Plaindealer, September 11, 1903). During the first month of 1904, Smith had again argued on behalf of Giles before the Supreme Court. Smith scored the new Alabama Constitution, asserting that it was passed through fraudulent schemes to circumvent the federal Constitution and deny the right to suffrage to the black citizens of Alabama. He concluded that the Giles case was simply a call for fair and equal treatment based on the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of the federal Constitution. On February 23, the Supreme Court ruled that it lacked jurisdiction in cases where a state court had previously rendered a decision on nonconstitutional grounds. Giles, therefore, had no grounds to bring his suit to the Supreme Court (Giles v. Teasley 1904; Factor 1970, 237–241). Less than a month after the Supreme Court’s ruling, the Louisiana high court finally began its hearing of Ryanes’s appeal. Armed with the two decisions in the Giles cases, Supervisor Gleason’s lawyers were confident that the Louisiana suffrage provisions would stand. The legal team skirted the race issue arguing that the qualification clause of the constitution could exclude black and white citizens of Louisiana and possibly more importantly the lower courts deemed it irrelevant. The team instead focused on whether there was a legal basis to appeal the lower court’s decision. In addition they appropriated the circular logic used by the federal court in its decision in the Giles case, that if the rolls were fraudulent


why argue to have an individual added to the voter list (Ryanes v. Gleason 1903; Walker 1958, 102–104; Scott 2005, 195–196). On April 25, the Louisiana Supreme Court dismissed the Ryanes case based on the first argument of the defense. The court maintained that it lacked jurisdiction because Ryanes had no right to appeal. According to state statute, an individual denied the right to register could appeal the case only if the dispute exceeded $2,000. An appeal to the Supreme Court was only acceptable if the plaintiff met the literacy or property qualifications, sections 3 and 4 of Article 197. Since Ryanes had initially specified that he did not own property and that he could neither read nor write, the Court dismissed the case on the basis that Romain had not proven that the matter exceeded the necessary pecuniary amount. Moreover, with this decision the Court, led by Chief Justice Frank A. Monroe, a former member of the constitutional convention, ruled that Supervisor Gleason’s decision to prevent David Ryanes from registering was proper under the Louisiana Constitution and that the constitution provisions were raceneutral (Ryanes v. Gleason 1903; Walker 1958, 102–104). With this ruling, combined with the Supreme Court’s decisions in the Giles cases, the Afro-American Council effectively lost its attempts at attacking the southern constitutions’ suffrage provisions head on. Though it was a blow to its legal strategy, the organization did not give up its fight. The Council continued to support the call for the reduction of southern representation for the violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, especially the Crumpacker bill. Moreover, among the nonconstitutional legal suits the organization became involved with in the north and the south, the Council also continued to contemplate aiding those affiliated with the Virginia Council in their challenge of the suffrage provisions of the 1903 Virginia Constitution. Furthermore, though they did not go any further in Louisiana, Lawson and Washington continued to discuss the matter of another Ryanes appeal into the following year (Alexander 2004, 261–450). Though it ended in defeat, the Afro-American Council, and for that matter Washington’s activities in Louisiana, represents an important chapter in African American social and political thought. The Council’s legal strategy, though unsuccessful in this instance, represents a radical challenge to the development of Jim Crow. The activities of the Council demonstrate that there was agitation in the age of accommodation. Moreover, the organization’s legal strategy in Louisiana and other locales throughout the nation, between 1890 and 1909, demonstrates continuity between its activity and that of which the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) developed over the past century.


Notes 1. Around the same time of the meeting in the District of Columbia, Washington was communicating with Francis J. Garrison about raising money for the Council’s legal action. 2. There is no correspondence that discussed Washington personally contributing another $200 for the Council coffers. The conversation regarding the funds probably took place at the Council meeting when the two discussed the $100 that the Tuskegee principal collected from northern contributors. 3. Lawson wrote to Washington to attempt to get the Wizard to intervene. As he explained, “I am free to admit that I do not understand the game these gentlemen are playing. If they are in earnest about the matter they are taking the wrong way of showing it.” 4. Article 197 of the Louisiana Constitution stated that Ryanes had to pass a literacy test, demonstrate that he owned property assessed over $300, or prove that he or his ancestors had voted on or before January 1, 1867.

Works Cited Adams, Cyrus Field. 1902. The National Afro-American Council. Washington, DC: C. F. Adams. Alexander, Shawn Leigh. 2004. “‘We Know Our Rights and Have the Courage to Defend Them’: Agitation in the Age of Accommodation, 1880–1909.” PhD diss., University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Allman, Jean M. and R. Roediger David. 1982. “The Early Editorial Career of Timothy Thomas Fortune: Class, Nationalism and Consciousness of Africa.” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 6, no. 2: 39–52, 55. Ayers, Edward L. 1992. The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction. New York: Oxford University Press. Dailey, Jane. 2000. Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Drake, Donald E. 1970. “Militancy in Fortune’s New York Age.” Journal of Negro History 55, no. 4: 307–322. Factor, Robert L. 1970. The Black Response to America: Men, Ideals, and Organization, from Frederick Douglass to the NAACP. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Foner, Philip S., ed. 1972. The Voice of Black America: Major Speeches by Negroes in the United States, 1797–1971. New York: Simon and Schuster. Giles v. Harris, 189 U.S. 475 (1903). Giles v. Teasley, 193 U.S. 146 (1904). Gusman v. Marrero, 181 U.S. 81 (1901). Harlan, Louis R. 1971. “The Secret Life of Booker T. Washington.” Journal of Southern History 37, no. 3: 393–416.

the afro-american council and its challenge / 35 ———. 1972. Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856–1901. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1983. Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915. New York: Oxford University Press. Harlan, Louis R. and Raymond W. Smock, eds. 1972–1985. The Booker T. Washington Papers. Vols. 1–14. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Litwack, Leon F. 1998. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Love, John L. 1899. The Disfranchisement of the Negro. Washington, DC: American Negro Academy. McPherson, James M. 1975. The Abolitionist Legacy: From Reconstruction to the NAACP. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Meier, August. 1963. Negro Thought in America, 1880–1915: Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Miller, George Mason. 1984. “‘A This Worldly Mission’: The Life and Career of Alexander Walters (1858–1917).” PhD diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook. Moss, Alfred A. 1981. The American Negro Academy: Voice of the Talented Tenth. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Murray, Daniel. Daniel Murray Papers. Washington DC: Library of Congress. Nelson, Paul D. 2002. Frederick L. McGhee: A Life on the Color Line, 1861–1912. Minneapolis: Minnesota Historical Society Press. Perman, Michael. 2001. Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896). Ryanes v. Gleason, 112 La. 612 (1903). Scott, Rebecca J. 2005. Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Seraile, William. 1978. “The Political View of Timothy Thomas Fortune: Father of Black Political Independence.” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 2, no. 2: 15–28. Shapiro, Herbert. 1988. White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Thornbrough, Emma Lou. 1961. “The National Afro-American League, 1887– 1908.” Journal of Southern History 27, no. 4: 494–512. ———. 1972. T. Thomas Fortune: Militant Journalist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Walker, Audrey A. 1958. “An experiment in non-partisanship by the Negro 1884–1903.” Master’s thesis, Howard University. Walters, Alexander. 1917. My Life and Work. New York: Fleming H. Revell. Washington, Booker T. Papers of Booker T. Washington. Washington DC: Library of Congress. Waynes, Charles E. 1971. Race Relations in Virginia, 1870–1902. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield.

36 / shawn leigh alexander Weaver, Valeria W. 1969. “The Failure of Civil Rights 1875–1883 and Its Repercussions.” Journal of Negro History 54, no. 4: 368–382. Wells-Barnett, Ida B. 1970. Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, ed. Alfreda M. Duster. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Williams v. Mississippi, 170 U.S. 213 (1898). Woodward, Vann C. 1951. Origins of the New South, 1877–1913. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. ———. 1966. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. New York: Oxford University Press.


Raised as a Shaker in New York, Hiram F. Hover arrived in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1885. For the next four years, through the mountain and Piedmont regions of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, Hover would strive to establish a program of change to restructure, in a thoroughgoing and lasting way, the relations of power—economic, social, and political— between labor and society. Through careful research into census, newspaper, and labor records, Baker’s essay rebuilds Hover’s quest, which started with his involvement in the Knights of Labor from whose tenets he established his own group—the Co-operative Workers of America (CWA), which sought to unite black and white farm workers and laborers. By closely examining this era in Hover’s life, Baker demonstrates the deeply interrelated and permeable nature of boundaries—between South and North, between black and white, between labor and religion, between Appalachia and America—which, from our remove, have come to seem hardened. Flow across such boundaries, however, was not a given, and Baker demonstrates that social control also transcended (and reinforced) such dichotomies. Similarly, Baker’s attention to Hover’s boundary crossing does not negate the power held by such constructs; instead, Baker accounts for how power shifts in relation to those boundaries by a precise examination of details. Perhaps the most important job undertaken by Baker is his documentation of a failed figure, for most radical efforts to restructure social relations do not succeed. Rather, these “failures” are part of a much larger pattern of struggle that might—as with the long fight for suffrage in the South, whose myriad actors historians are still seeking to chronicle—result in catalysis and change in a riper moment.

2 “The First Anarchist That Ever Came to Atlanta”: Hiram F. Hover from New York to the New South Bruce E. Baker

When Hiram F. Hover walked out of jail onto Watauga Street in Hickory, North Carolina, near the end of 1889, he must have known that he was leaving behind the work that had consumed him over the past four years, ever since he arrived in Knoxville in late 1885. This passion had cost him his wife, his friends, his right eye, and nearly his life. Hover had come to the South amid the tumult of the 1880s, and the South brought to the surface ideas for which he had long found little use. With these ideas, acquired during his childhood in New York’s Hudson River Valley, Hover tried to change the South to stem forces that were turning landholding farmers into tenants and pushing them into the brick mills sprouting up out of the Piedmont soil. Hover’s plans inspired hundreds of workers in the Carolinas and Georgia, but they also inspired armed opposition from white landlords and employers. The changes Hover tried, and failed, to bring to the South provide an important link between two better-known periods of radicalism in the South—Reconstruction and Populism—and they also help us rethink the role of indigenous and outside sources of radical thought in the late-nineteenth-century South.1 This essay follows Hover’s travels through the South between 1885 and 1889 in order to make two interconnected points. First, Hover’s activities challenge historiography’s conventional periodization of radical challenges to the status quo that mark the early years of Reconstruction as one peak, the establishment of the People’s Party in 1891 as another peak, and most of the 1880s as a despondent trough between. Hover’s challenge to the way power was distributed and exercised drew on traditions of activism developed during Reconstruction, and it fed directly into the agrarian insurgency of the 1890s. Second, Hover’s career compels us to think

40 / bruce e. baker

more carefully about the origins and development of radical thought in the South and about the region’s relationship to the rest of the nation. While earlier generations of southern historians have emphasized the indigenous roots of southern radicalisms, we need also bear in mind that the dynamic social and economic environment of the South of the 1880s encouraged the development of radical ideas, whatever their ultimate provenance. Hover’s ideas about how society should be ordered came from the Shaker community at Mount Lebanon, New York, near where he was born between 1845 and 1847; however, not until he arrived in the rapidly industrializing South of the 1880s did these ideas provide the basis for action (Brewer 1986, 148, 160; Atlanta Constitution, March 11, 1889).2 It should seem hardly surprising that a child growing up around a Shaker community in the 1850s would grow into an adult traveling the South promoting the virtues of cooperation in the 1880s. Originating in England, the Shakers by 1787 had established a communitarian settlement at Mount Lebanon, southeast of Albany and near the Massachusetts border. Most of the Shakers’ beliefs and practices, such as the spiritual and temporal equality of men and women and a determination to resist the middle-class values of the market in favor of cooperative living, went against the grain of nineteenth-century America (Kerber 1988; Brewer 1986, 7; Stein 1992, 136, 148; Sellers 1991). Census records shed some light on Hover’s early adulthood. The 1860 census lists Hiram Hover as a fifteen-year-old farm laborer in Tivoli, New York, on the Hudson River (Federal Manuscript 1860, 1164). If Hover was a member of the Shaker community at Mount Lebanon after 1860, he probably left it when he reached the age of twenty-one in 1868 and had to decide whether to join the society permanently (Graham 1991, 218). The 1870 census finds Hover as a young man managing a hotel owned by his mother-in-law in the town of Schodack, about fifteen miles from Mount Lebanon (Federal Manuscript 1870, 378). By 1880, Hover and his wife were living in a boardinghouse in Milton, New York, still in the Hudson Valley but farther from Mount Lebanon. Here Hover’s occupation is listed as “sewing machine agent,” making it almost certain that this is the same individual who would be making his living as a dress cutter in the next few years (Federal Manuscript 1880, 239).3 In December 1885, Hover and his wife were “traveling . . . in the business of teaching dress cutting” and stopped in Knoxville.4 Knoxville was a logical place for such a venture since it had become a bustling distribution point for merchandise from factories in the North and Midwest to town merchants and country stores in a seven-state area (Creekmore 1991, 103; Eller 1982, 53). There, Hover became involved in the labor movement through the Knights of Labor. By the mid-1880s, extractive

the first anarchist that ever came to atlanta / 41

industries such as logging and mining became significant to the Appalachian region’s economy and new patterns of transportation and distribution of goods took hold. As Ron Eller points out, “industrialization, however, fragmented the region’s social structure, creating a great and growing gulf between the lower-class laboring population and those above them” (Eller 1982, 53). At its most extreme, the social tensions generated by this sort of swift economic change could lead to endemic violence (Montell 1986, 65–85; Waller 1988, 158–205; McKinney 1977, 131–144). With the booming business in Knoxville came the organization of several local assemblies of the Knights of Labor (Garlock 1982, 486). Formed by Philadelphia tailors in 1869, the Knights of Labor began to grow into the first nationwide labor organization in 1883 and 1884, though the order did not make significant progress in the South until 1885. That year, the Knights of Labor won an impressive victory in the Great Southwest Strike against railroad magnate Jay Gould, and the new credibility of the Knights appealed to workers across the cities and towns of the rapidly industrializing South (McLaurin 1978, 38–48). Despite its successes in urbanizing areas, the Knights of Labor struggled to reach the region’s majority of agrarian workers and to find something to say to them (McLaurin 1978, 169–170; Edwards 1997, 240–244; Kann 1977, 49–70). Encountering the Knights of Labor seems to have blown fire back into the embers of idealism smoldering within Hover. Here was an organization that was working for many of the values Hover had been raised on, and the possibilities of the situation fueled an enthusiasm for the Knights of Labor that would eventually bring Hover into conflict with their official policies. After a few weeks in Knoxville, Hover moved east through the mountains to Asheville, North Carolina. With the arrival of the railroad in 1880, Asheville had begun its transformation into a modern city oriented toward tourism, developing a reputation as “a health and scenic resort” (Starnes 2003, 56–57). Once in Asheville, Hover began working with the Knights of Labor Local Assembly. Apparently an energetic Knight, Hover went beyond the usual run of meetings and beyond the protocols of getting proper credentials to organize on behalf of the order. In February and March 1886, Hover traveled around the towns of central North Carolina speaking to workers and urging them to join the Knights of Labor (Concord [N.C.] Times, March 4, 1887).5 The Piedmont, where much of Hover’s activity took place, was a key part of what Edward L. Ayers has called the “unstable and rapidly evolving world of the New South” (Ayers 1992, 116). In the years during and after the Civil War, railroads had turned this from a region linked only distantly to coastal markets to

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an area with easy communication south to New Orleans and north to Norfolk and New York, paving the way for a new wave of commercialized agriculture and industrial development (Tullos 1989, 134–143; Nelson 1999, 47–69). In this area, industrialization took the form primarily of cotton mills. The number of mills in North Carolina nearly doubled in that decade, while in South Carolina it increased by more than five times (McLaurin 1971, 10; Mitchell [1921] 2001). Because he was getting so many requests for information, Hover printed up a broadside of his standard speech, which shows us what he was telling workers.6 For the most part, Hover’s speech represented the current principles of the Knights of Labor, but it differed in a few small yet significant ways (“Preamble and Declaration” 1885). His speech opened with a standard statement of “labor republicanism,” warning that “our greatest danger today comes from monopolies, and the power for evil of aggregated wealth” and that “the same causes that destroyed the mighty empires of the past, if not removed, will destroy our great Republic” (Fink 1988; Rodgers 1992, 24–31). Hover blamed the ills of the workers on “an unjust and ruinous system of usury” but laid out the changes the Knights of Labor planned. His points echoed much of the 1885 “Preamble and Declaration of Principles of the Knights of Labor of America”: bureaus of labor statistics were needed, companies should be forbidden to pay in scrip, and a graduated income tax should be levied to counteract the growing disparities of wealth. In one item, we see the radical slant that Hover brought to the Knights of Labor platform, perhaps from his Shaker background. The Knights of Labor demanded “that the public lands, the heritage of the people, be reserved for actual settlers; not another acre for railroads or speculators, and that all lands now held for speculative purposes be taxed to their full value.” Hover quoted this demand verbatim, but added “that the titles to all lands that have been obtained through fraud shall be nullified, and the lands restored to the public domain.” The Knights of Labor called for a change in policy to prevent future problems. Hover demanded the reversal of past actions and challenged land titles already issued to railroads and speculators. By demanding that stolen lands be seized and redistributed, Hover was linking himself to one of the most radical proposals of Reconstruction (Magdol 1977; Bleser 1969; Foner 1983, 43–45, 55–56, 82–86). After running through nearly all of the Knights of Labor’s demands, Hover went on to add two of his own that had a particular resonance in the South. “I denounce the poll-tax as a relic of barbarism,” he stated, “as an infamy and a fraud.” Hover opposed the poll tax because “all men have a right to exist without paying for the privilege to live.” Here, he seemed to anticipate the way southern states would rely on poll taxes


as one of many devices to disfranchise the poor after 1890. Only a few years before the wave of disfranchisement swept across the South, Hover called for universal suffrage, and in the absence of any qualifiers, listeners might have justifiably understood this to include African Americans and even women (Evans).7 “Another step for the good of all mankind,” suggested Hover, “will be to make universal education the basis of universal suffrage.” The call for universal education was nearly as great a challenge to the status quo, especially when promoted in the towns of the North Carolina Piedmont where farm children were making their way into cotton mills decades before compulsory education laws would be enacted. Hover’s promise of “ten months’ schooling in the year to every child” would leave little time for doffing yarn bobbins or picking cotton. Unfortunately, the national leadership of the Knights of Labor frowned upon Hover’s freelance speaking and organizing. Concerned about uncontrolled growth and the dangers of rabble-rousers, Grand Master Workman Powderly began to crack down on Knights who recruited without the proper credentials (McLaurin 1978, 49). Local Knights of Labor leaders condemned Hover’s unauthorized organizing activity. The Master Workman of the Asheville Local Assembly wrote a letter published in at least two newspapers calling Hover “simply an imposter of the deepest dye” who spoke about “Communists and Nihilists” (Concord [N.C.] Times, April 15, 1886). The state organizer for the Knights of Labor, John R. Ray, wrote a similar letter discrediting Hover and his “communistic revolutionary doctrines” (Concord [N.C.] Times, April 22, 1886). These charges of “communism” had much the same effect here as they would a few weeks later in the aftermath of the bombing at Haymarket in Chicago, but they also threatened the Knights’ political gains, which would see North Carolina Master Workman John Nichols elected to Congress later in the year (McLaurin 1978, 82–85). As the historian Heather Cox Richardson has pointed out, communism in reference to the Paris Commune of 1870 had also been one of the charges leveled at Reconstruction in the early 1870s (Richardson 2001, 85–89, 185). Hover spent April and May wandering the western half of North Carolina, but by August 1886 he had decided to settle in Hickory (Hickory [N.C.] Piedmont Press, August 14, 1886). Like Knoxville but on a smaller scale, Hickory was a busy and growing town at a commercially significant crossroads. In the late 1860s, Hickory had used its location on the Western North Carolina Railroad at a ford in the Catawba River to become a trading center for the area’s tobacco and cotton crops. Most significant to the town’s economy was the Piedmont Wagon Company, which employed seventy-five hands in 1885 and was “one of the most conspicuous examples of New South prosperity in North Carolina” (Freeze 1995, 265–282).

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Sometime around the beginning of January 1887, Hover gathered around him a small group of supporters, white men who were a mix of well-established, middle-aged locals from Hickory and northerners with shallow roots in North Carolina, and established the Cooperative Workers of America (CWA). The CWA drew up a “Preamble and Declaration of Principles” closely modeled on the Knights of Labor constitution and Hover’s 1886 revision of those principles. Hover again called for a repeal of the poll tax and claimed that universal education should be the basis for universal suffrage. But unrestrained now by any allegiance to the Knights of Labor and Powderly’s timidity, Hover drew upon radical notions that can be traced back to the Shakers. In the CWA document, Hover put a much greater emphasis on cooperation as the basis for a new kind of society. Hover demanded a variety of reforms from government, but in the post-Haymarket environment, he did not rest his hopes entirely on politics. Instead, he suggested that members of the CWA “will endeavor to associate our own labors to establish cooperative institutions such as will tend to supersede the wage system, by the introduction of a practical and scientific Cooperative Commercial and Industrial system, and to secure equal pay to both sexes for equal work.” While such proposals echo the ideas of cooperation in the air at the time, for Hover they described not some futuristic utopian ideal, but the cooperative world of the Shakers. Moreover, Hover hoped to initiate a broader attack on private property. While the Knights of Labor based their ideas on a republican ideal of the small producer and sought to forestall greater inequalities in the distribution of private property, they did not seek to redistribute private property. Hover, however, called for fundamental changes in the way property was held and distributed. He repeated his call for the revocation of “the titles to all lands that have been obtained through fraud,” and he went on to demand “that a limit be placed on the individual ownership.” Hover thought that the estates of the rich should be subject to a system of graduated forfeiture, capped at 20 percent. After suggesting such lofty goals, the CWA preamble ended by promising members the more immediate benefit of a system of cooperative stores—a particularly tempting idea to poor, indebted farmers and mill workers (“Preamble and Declaration” 1887). Having founded the CWA in Hickory in early January, Hover decided to begin his organizing campaign in South Carolina, which was still relatively untouched by the Knights of Labor, and thus offered better prospects. Heading southwest from Hickory, Hover traveled through Spartanburg County, South Carolina, organizing a couple of locals at Campton and Campobello, near the North Carolina border, before continuing south to the city of Spartanburg (Greenville [S.C.] Enterprise and


Mountaineer, July 27, 1887; Spartanburg [S.C.] Carolina Spartan, July 20, 1887). There, in the second week of February 1887, Hover spoke to a mixed-race crowd of several hundred people for over two hours. In addition to explaining the principles of the CWA, Hover took pains to differentiate his group from other organizations and the Knights of Labor, whom he “assailed . . . because they, like the Grange, had squandered or stolen much of the money collected from the people” (Spartanburg [S.C.] Carolina Spartan, February 16, 1887). Hover had not yet learned the value of discretion in his career as a labor organizer in the South, and the CWA soon drew unwelcome attention from the local press and authorities. But Hover had even more serious problems back home. By the time he made his speech in Spartanburg, a grand jury back in North Carolina had indicted him and the other members under an obscure 1870 conspiracy law, ostensibly enacted to control the Ku Klux Klan (Trelease 1971, xlvii, 203–204; Raper 1985, 155–198; Hamilton 1914, 559–560; Amis 1886, 231–232). The 1870 North Carolina law and the 1887 indictment provide a useful example of how legal structures put in place during Reconstruction could later be used to suppress, rather than protect, political agitation by workers. The key to the 1870 law was its emphasis on secret societies, but in a period when most labor organizations could be charged with conspiracy or subjected to harsh economic and violent reprisals, a degree of secrecy, at least in the beginning, was essential to organizing (Arnold 2001, 112–116). Under this law, a grand jury in Hickory, spurred on by the owner of the city’s wagon factory, charged Hover and other CWA members with organizing “a certain oathbound secret political organization” designed to carry on such illegal acts as changing state laws about usury and taxation (Indictment against H. F. Hover et al. 1887; Greenville [S.C.] Enterprise and Mountaineer, March 16, 1887). Indictment did not slow Hover’s organizing, though it provided another good reason to organize in South Carolina. His growing success at drawing African American supporters, even as his support among whites was on the wane, must have provided further encouragement. In the first week of March, he appeared in Greenville, South Carolina, and gave an interview to the newspaper there (Pickens [S.C.] Sentinel, March 10, 1887). After Hover came through in March, the city had perhaps fifteen different CWA “clubs” with 500 members, mostly African Americans. One mass meeting drew as many as 300 people. The two leaders were both African American men: a young barber named Lee Minor and an older blacksmith named Tom Briar, who had been a local leader of the Republican party during Reconstruction (Augusta [Ga.] Chronicle, July 5, 1887).

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The indictment of the CWA and the outcry over his interracial appeals did make Hover more cautious. Instead of making public speeches as he had in Spartanburg a few weeks earlier, Hover now cultivated a network of local leaders—mostly middle-aged farm workers—who then carried out the legwork of creating CWA branches. These local organizers, all African American men, fanned out across the southern ends of Spartanburg County and Greenville County and northern Laurens County. According to news reports, each would “[talk] to the colored people wherever he could find them alone, in the fields or in the houses . . . and read the labor catechism and constitution to his hearers” (Charleston [S.C.] News and Courier, July 3, 1887, quoting Greenville [S.C.] News, July 1, 1887). The organizer formed the recruits into “clubs” of as few as five people, electing officers and collecting initial fees to be forwarded back to headquarters in Hickory. Hover’s work in South Carolina began to unravel around the beginning of July, but his own problems began earlier. In late March, he continued to Oconee County in the western corner of South Carolina to organize locals. The authorities there promptly arrested him for vagrancy, and during a lunch break in his trial—with a wink and a nod—Hover took the hint that he might have better luck in Georgia (Wallhalla [S.C.] Keowee Courier, March 24, 1887). In Georgia, Hover also traveled from town to town organizing CWA locals and speaking to African American audiences (Hild 1997, 298–304). Before one such speech in Warrenton, Georgia, on May 19, an irate group of white landowners warned him that they would not tolerate his incendiary ideas. Hover spoke anyway. In the middle of his speech, “a number of men robed in white and masked, rode up to the window and shot through it at the agitator, the shot lodging in the left side of his face and back of his ear, and putting out his right eye completely” (Athens [Ga.] Weekly Banner-Watchman, May 24, 1887). Hover was carried to the hospital in Augusta and then returned to Madison, Georgia, where his wife was staying (Athens [Ga.] Weekly Banner-Watchman, May 24, 1887). She convinced locals there not to lynch him, and after recovering for a few days, Hover and his wife returned to Hickory (Spartanburg [S.C.] Carolina Spartan, June 1 and 8, 1887). As soon as he arrived, he was arrested for running his cooperative store without a license and gave bond to appear at the next term of court (Greenville [S.C.] Enterprise and Mountaineer, June 15, 1887). Things were going no better for the CWA locals recently set up in South Carolina. Although Hover spoke openly about the organization, local organizers had a better understanding of the practicalities of organizing African Americans in the South in the 1880s. They made sure that the locals remained secret, and unlike Hover’s public speeches in larger


towns, they did not invite rural white workers to join, fearing that interracial organizing in the countryside would make them too vulnerable to retaliation. But the existence of a network of perhaps a few dozen locals scattered across parts of four counties drew the attention of the local white elite. In late June, rumors of these “Hoover clubs” began to circulate and enter the newspapers. Within days, a full-scale panic was at hand as the rumors triggered whites’ ingrained fear of a “Negro insurrection.” In response to reports that black workers were meeting secretly at night and were protected by armed sentries, a number of residents wrote to the state adjutant general seeking permission to put down the threat. To calm the area, the adjutant general issued arms to the cavalry company that residents in northern Laurens County had already created and enlisted the group as part of the state militia (Baker 1999, 271–273). Once things calmed down in Laurens County, a similar panic started nearby in southern Greenville County. Responding to rumors of the CWA’s existence passed along by black women, white landowners formed a vigilance committee to respond. On June 29, armed whites rode around the countryside bringing all the suspected leaders of the CWA to an inquisition at Fairview Presbyterian Church. Individuals were questioned one by one and told to disband the CWA locals. In other communities, similar inquisitions occurred over the next few days, and the CWA ceased to exist in the rural area where Spartanburg, Greenville, and Laurens counties meet (Baker 1999, 273–276). The liquidation of his CWA locals and his brush with death soured Hover on the South. In August 1887, facing continued harassment from the local press, Hover left Hickory behind for New York (Hickory [N.C.] Western Carolinian, August 12, 19, and 26 and September 16, 1887). And so he returns to obscurity, but only temporarily. On March 9, 1889, the Atlanta Journal headlined its lead story “Preaching Anarchy: A White Man Who Talks In Secret To The Colored People Of Atlanta.” Hover had arrived by himself in Atlanta around the beginning of February, taking a room in a boardinghouse. During the days, he sold dress charts and taught dress cutting. At the same time, he had circulars printed up advertising evening lectures, and he “left [the circulars] around at the negro restaurants and barber shops and billiard rooms,” a more covert approach than he had used during his time in Georgia two years earlier (Atlanta Constitution, March 11, 1889). Some lectures were held at community halls and others at African American churches. Eventually, the police and newspapers became aware of the meetings, and a mole was sent in to infiltrate one of the meetings and report back on “Anarchist Hoover.” As reported in the Atlanta Constitution, the “small man, one-eyed, [with] dark hair and dark complection” who wore “a green shade over

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one eye” entered the church and, after a couple of hymns and an opening prayer, addressed the few dozen African American men and women in the audience. He opened his speech with scripture: “Defend the poor and fatherless; do justice to the afflicted and needy” (Psalm 82:3–4 [KJV]). To Hover, the “poor and needy” were the “poor colored people, who sit before me to-night,” and the “wicked” were “the so-called ‘good people,’ ‘the best people of the south.’” Contrasting the living conditions of poor black workers in Atlanta to the wealth of Peachtree Street, Hover announced that he had a system for overcoming such problems. He related that he had presented his system to “a few of the leading colored men,” but they had dismissed it. “The gold bugs and plutocrats have corrupted your leaders with their ill-gotten money,” Hover claimed. He explained the principles of the CWA and distinguished between its immediate aims of setting up cooperative stores and its ultimate goal of “the equal distribution of wealth . . . by legislative enactment if possible, by revolution if need be” (Atlanta Journal, March 9, 1889). Both of Atlanta’s major newspapers relentlessly denounced Hover: “Anarchist Hoover Talks Incendiarism And Equal Rights To The Negroes” read one headline, before describing Hover for their readers: “A one-eyed anarchist! A real, shrewd, living anarchist. In all probability he is the first anarchist that ever came to Atlanta—certainly the only one that ever staid here for any length of time” (Atlanta Constitution, March 11, 1889). Journalists described the “bloodthirsty sermon” in which “Hover would talk anarchism and anti-povertyism and equal rights, frequently calling by name some prominent and well-to-do citizen and telling the negroes that all this money was blood money and bread taken from the mouths of negro children” (Atlanta Constitution, March 11, 1889). In reply to his critics, Hover wrote a lengthy statement to clarify his background, his beliefs, and his activities. “I am no anarchist and my name is not Hoover,” he pointed out. “Anarchy means the abolition of government . . . I don’t preach anarchy. The system under which the Co-Operative Workers of America is run has been in operation in this country for one hundred and one years . . . At Mount Lebanon, New York. It is a Shaker community where I was raised. That there has been no great spread of the co-operation is due to the fact that there the system is hemmed in by hide-bound religion.” Hover repeated his criticisms of the unequal distribution of wealth, tying it more specifically to the exploitation of southern black labor. He went on to attack the South’s intolerance of any proposals for change, especially change that would benefit black workers: “You have reveled in the rosy lake of leisure and luxury so long on the profits of his labor” (Atlanta Constitution, March 11, 1889). Despite his protests, Hover seems to have abandoned Atlanta shortly after this,


surfacing again in Greenville in late June 1889, where he advertised a meeting for “all old members of the C. W. of A., and their friends . . . to discuss cause of failure and future possibilities of the order” (Atlanta Constitution, July 2, 1889). The meeting began with about twenty whites and 150 blacks, but conflict broke out between the peripatetic agitator and some of the leaders who had remained behind to bear the brunt of the reaction against the CWA. Hover tried to have Tom Briar thrown out of the meeting, charging him with being “a traitor to his race” who was friends with “the captain of the Ku-Klux” (Greenville [S.C.] Enterprise and Mountaineer, July 3, 1889). Briar refused to leave unless voted out by a majority of the meeting and claimed that while “the Ku-Klux was a thing of the past, you (Hover) are here, a present thief.” Briar went on to claim that two years earlier “I pronounced you then a down-east Yankee thief, and that you was here for no other purpose than to plunder and rob the ignorant colored people of their hard earnings” (Greenville [S.C.] Enterprise and Mountaineer, July 3, 1889). Such a charge was understandable from one who had squandered some of his dwindling political capital on Hover’s schemes only to find himself abandoned. Indeed, whether he was a “down-east Yankee thief ” or just an impractical dreamer, Hover was not an effective labor leader, especially by the standards of that difficult locale. The conflict between Briar and Hover went deeper than just a sense of personal disillusionment; it touched on an emerging rift in the nature and direction of leadership in the African American community in the South. Briar charged that Hover had been advised to get established leaders of Greenville’s black community in the order, but that Hover had remarked that “they were the very men you were fighting, and that they were as much opposed to the colored laborer as the white race” (Greenville [S.C.] Enterprise and Mountaineer, July 3, 1889; Huff 1995, 166). The note of animosity toward these leaders was apparent in Hover’s Atlanta speeches as well, and one report there suggested that “the better class of negroes themselves are heartily in the feeling against Hoover” (Atlanta Constitution, March 11, 1889). Historians have long noted that in the period of Jim Crow some African Americans consciously pursued a strategy of adopting values acceptable to the white elites and deprecating the African American working class as a drag on the race. More recently, Brian Kelly has argued that we should think of Booker T. Washington and other proponents of this approach not as leaders of a monolithic “black community,” but rather as representatives of an “increasingly conservative black middle class, now convinced of the futility of political agitation and increasingly enamored with the Gospel of Wealth” (Kelly 2003, 341). The conflict between Hover and Briar was a harbinger of the kinds of class divisions among African Americans that would soon take on greater importance.

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After Hover realized that he had no support in Greenville and left the meeting, Briar proposed that the meeting hear from a speaker who “read the proceedings of the colored Farmers’ Alliance Association and urged the people to go into something that was known to be good, and had some substance” (Greenville [S.C.] Enterprise and Mountaineer, July 3, 1889). Emerging as an adjunct to the segregated Farmers Alliance in 1886, the Colored Farmers National Alliance and Cooperative Union sought to help black southerners deal with the problems of sharecropping and debt peonage. The historian Omar H. Ali characterizes the Colored Alliance as one phase of a distinctive tradition of “Black Populism,” a “movement consist[ing] of virtually continuous organizing among rural African-Americans between 1886 and 1898” that “addressed a range of concerns” interconnected with white agrarian and Populist movements (Ali 2003, 6–7). In some ways, then, the CWA represents a transition between the Knights of Labor’s post-1886 focus on black farm workers and the Colored Farmers Alliance (McLaurin 1978, 131–148). The CWA’s story ends with the Greenville meeting, but Hover’s story continues downward. Arrested for vagrancy in Greenville shortly after the ill-fated meeting, Hover was released a few days later “with the understanding that he leave the State, not to return to it again” (Greenville [S.C.] Enterprise and Mountaineer, July 10, 1889). Dispirited and intending to return to the North, Hover returned to Hickory. He knew that his wife had left him, but he may not have realized that she had filed for divorce earlier that year, claiming that she and Hover had separated on Christmas Eve, 1888 (Greenville [S.C.] Enterprise and Mountaineer, July 3, 1889).8 Hover seems to have received the news when he turned up on his former doorstep in Hickory. His now ex-wife refused to let him in, but Hover forced his way into the house and beat her. Sentenced to thirty days in jail for the assault, with a few extra days for contempt of court, and unable to pay a $200 peace bond, Hover remained in jail until the middle of November. A document in the divorce file states that “on or about the 15th day of Nov. 1889 the complainant left the state,” and here his trail goes cold again, this time for good (Hickory [N.C.] Press and Carolinian, August 29, 1889).9 Hiram F. Hover’s attempt to reshape economic and racial hierarchies in the South in the late 1880s was at best quixotic, and, viewed less charitably, a distraction from more practical solutions to the pressing problems African American and poor white workers faced. He may even have been, as so many charged, a swindler, a rascal, and a “down-east Yankee thief.”10 Yet his four-year sojourn through the New South raises important questions for the historian seeking to trace the history of radicalism in that region.


While evidence substantiating Hover’s claim that the Shaker community at Mount Lebanon was “where [he] was raised” is elusive, his claim seems plausible in light of the available documentation and suggests that labor historians might need to give more thought to the connections between the Shakers and America’s labor movement. By the late 1860s, though radical sectarianism was in steep decline, a progressive wing of the Shakers “came to see themselves as agents for the transformation of American society” (Stein 1992, 304). Frederick W. Evans, a socialist and brother of the land reformer George Henry Evans who turned to Shakerism, became the leading spokesman for this movement (Stein 1992, 205).11 Publishing an autobiography as well as an influential article on the Shakers in 1869, Evans brought the principles of the Shakers to a broader audience at a time of great ferment in American life (Stein 1992, 205). Further investigation or at least attention to the possibility might find that transient Shakers, especially those encountering the sect during the period when Evans and the progressive Shaker reformers were at the peak of their influence, did find much of value in the Shaker communitarian ideals and views on the value of labor. Hover’s activities from 1885 to 1889 provide a good summary of the labor movement in the South during these years, especially for African American workers and farm laborers. Hover turned his attention to organizing African Americans just as the Knights of Labor in the South became increasingly oriented toward African American rural laborers after the 1886 General Assembly meeting in Richmond challenged the South’s color line (McLaurin 1978, 159–168). More intriguingly, Hover’s 1889 return to the South reveals the possibility that at least in some places the Colored Farmers Alliance rested on earlier organizational activity by black workers.12 Hover’s work in the South reached further into the past than just the heyday of the Knights of Labor, and it sheds light on what became of Reconstruction radicalism after Redemption. Three points bear repeating. First, Hover tapped into ideas and enthusiasms for radical social transformation that had their origins in Reconstruction. His calls for universal education, universal suffrage, and most powerfully, land reform, were echoes of twenty years before, and these ideas found many ready listeners among the South’s working people, black and white. Hover’s adventures also remind us that for many of Reconstruction’s local leaders, especially African Americans such as Tom Briar, the years between 1865 and 1877 were not unique but part of life-long patterns of activism, even if that activism failed to appeal to the black working class by the 1890s. Second, the crushing of the CWA demonstrates that the elites who brought down Reconstruction were able to use the same tactics and tools

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to stifle future challenges to their control of labor. The 1870 secret political societies law in North Carolina was the orderly side of this, but the armed riders in South Carolina, some of them veterans of the 1876 Red Shirts who overthrew Reconstruction, were the argument of final resort. Finally, Hover’s 1889 attempts to resuscitate the CWA point toward the black middle class’s abandonment of the black working class in their attempt to find a solution to the pressures that the industrializing New South brought to bear against its workers. Ultimately, Hiram F. Hover is notable for his very persistence and the sheer improbability of what he tried to accomplish. He took a set of utopian religious ideals—which had encountered substantial obstacles in separatist communities of religious devotees in one of the most socially tolerant and intellectually adventurous regions of the country—and set out to apply them to a part of the country engulfed in an agricultural crisis and rapid industrialization for the benefit of a group of Americans scarcely twenty years removed from slavery. Most labor agitators would have considered the shotgun welcome Hover received in Georgia enough and attempted to plant the ideas of a “Cooperative Commercial and Industrial system” in a part of the country where lynching was not such a widely accepted means of expressing disagreement over political economy. Even if we do not know what became of him after November 1889, Hover’s busy four years in the South help historians expand their understanding of the possibilities for and limitations on radical social change for the South’s most oppressed citizens. Notes 1. I am indebted to Timothy Patrick McCarthy and Kieran Walsh Taylor for their timely and helpful readings of this essay. The late John Seawright of Athens, Georgia, sent me the clue that led to this revisiting of my earlier work on Hiram F. Hover. 2. Available sources have not conclusively proved Hover was a member of the Shaker community at Mount Lebanon, but a significant number of children spent at least some time with the Shakers between 1840 and 1870, often leaving few records of their identities. 3. Newspaper clipping enclosed with H. F. Hover to Terence V. Powderly, May 22, 1886, Terence Vincent Powderly Papers. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. Female suffrage was a standard part of the program of the progressive Shakers.

the first anarchist that ever came to atlanta / 53 8. Complaint, August 1, 1889, Susan F. Hover v. Hiram F. Hover, Divorce Records, Superior Court, Catawba County, North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh. 9. Ibid. 10. For a discussion of crooks and charlatans in the Knights of Labor, see Gregory S. Kealey and Bryan D. Palmer, Dreaming of What Might Be: The Knights of Labor in Ontario, 1880–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 173–203. 11. Murray, John E., “Henry George and the Shakers: Evolution of Communal Attitudes Toward Land Ownership,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 55, no. 2 (1996): 245–256. 12. This point is argued at greater length in the work of Omar H. Ali (2003). In my earlier article on Hover and the CWA (1999, 264), I suggested that the CWA’s organization of African American laborers itself rested on Reconstruction-era organization of Union Leagues and militia companies.

Works Cited Ali, Omar H. 2003. “Black Populism in the New South, 1886–1898.” PhD diss., Columbia University. Amis, M. N. 1886. The North Carolina Criminal Code and Digest. Raleigh: Edwards, Broughton & Co. Arnold, Andrew Bernard. 2001. “Ordering Coal: Labor, Law, and Business in Central Pennsylvania, 1870–1900.” PhD diss., University of North Carolina. Ayers, Edward L. 1992. The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction. New York: Oxford University Press. Baker, Bruce E. 1999. “The ‘Hoover Scare’ in South Carolina, 1887: An Attempt to Organize Black Farm Labor.” Labor History 40, no. 3: 261-282. Bleser, Carol K. Rothrock. 1969. The Promised Land: The History of the South Carolina Land Commission, 1869–1890. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Brewer, Priscilla J. 1986. Shaker Communities, Shaker Lives. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Creekmore, Betsey Beeler. 1991. Knoxville! Knoxville: East Tennessee Historical Society. Edwards, Laura F. 1997. Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Eller, Ronald D. 1982. Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880–1930. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Evans, F. W. n.d. A Shaker’s Views on the Land Limitation Scheme and Land Monopoly, and Mormon Prosecution (n.p.: Mt. Lebanon, Columbia Co., NY). 2, item #108, The Shaker Collection of the Western Reserve Historical Society. Part B, Printed Materials. Microfilm. Glen Rock, NJ. Microfilming Cooperation of America, 1976–1977.

54 / bruce e. baker Federal Manuscript Census of Population. 1860. “Hiram F. Hover.” Tivoli Post Office, North East Township, Dutchess County, NY. ———. 1870. “Hiram F. Hover.” Schodack Township, Rensselaer County, NY. ———. 1880. “Hiram F. Hover.” Milton, Saratoga County, NY. Fink, Leon. 1988. “The New Labor History and the Powers of Historical Pessimism: Consensus, Hegemony, and the Case of the Knights of Labor.” Journal of American History 75, no. 1: 115–136. Foner, Eric. 1983. Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Freeze, Gary R. 1995. The Catawbans: Crafters of a North Carolina County, 1790–1900. Newton, NC: Catawba County Historical Association. Garlock, Jonathan. 1982. Guide to the Local Assemblies of the Knights of Labor. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Graham, Judith A. 1991. “The New Lebanon Shaker Children’s Order,” Winterthur Portfolio 26, no. 4: 215–229. Hamilton, J. G. de Roulhac. 1914. Reconstruction in North Carolina. New York: Longmans, Green. Hild, Matthew. 1997. “Organizing Across the Color Line: The Knights of Labor and Black Recruitment Efforts in Small-Town Georgia.” Georgia Historical Quarterly 81, no. 2: 287–310. Huff, Archie Vernon. 1995. Greenville: The History of the City and County in the South Carolina Piedmont. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Indictment against H. F. Hover et al. “January Term 1887,” in “Secret Political Organization—1887” folder, Superior Court, Catawba County, North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh. Kann, Kenneth L. 1977. “The Knights of Labor and the Organization of Southern Black Workers.” Labor History 18, no. 1: 49–70. Kelly, Brian. 2003. “Sentinels for New South Industry: Booker T. Washington, Industrial Accommodation and Black Workers in the Jim Crow South.” Labor History 44, no. 3: 337–357. Kerber, Linda K. 1988. “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History.” Journal of American History 75, no. 1: 9–39. Magdol, Edward. 1977. A Right to the Land: Essays on the Freedmen’s Community. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. McKinney, Gordon B. 1977. “Industrialization and Violence in Appalachia in the 1890s.” In An Appalachian Symposium, ed. J. W. Williamson. Boone, NC: Appalachian Consortium Press. McLaurin, Melton Alonza. 1971. Paternalism and Protest: Southern Cotton Mill Workers and Organized Labor, 1875–1905. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. ———. 1978. The Knights of Labor in the South. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Mitchell, Broadus. 1921. The Rise of Cotton Mills in the South. Repr., Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001. Montell, William Lynwood. 1986. Killings: Folk Justice in the Upper South. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

the first anarchist that ever came to atlanta / 55 Nelson, Scott Reynolds. 1999. Iron Confederacies: Southern Railways, Klan Violence, and Reconstruction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. “Preamble and Declaration of Principles of the Knights of Labor of America.” Ca. 1885. From “HADC—Preamble and Declaration of Principles of the Knights of Labor of America.” Chicago Historical Society. http://www.chicagohs.org/hadc/visuals/V0010.htm. “Preamble and Declaration of Principles of the Co-Operative Workers of America.” N.d. Broadside. “Secret Political Organization—1887” folder, Superior Court, Catawba County, North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh. Raper, Horace W. 1985. William W. Holden: North Carolina’s Political Enigma. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Richardson, Heather Cox. 2001. The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865–1901. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Rodgers, Daniel T. 1992. “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept.” Journal of American History 79, no. 1: 11–38. Sellers, Charles. 1991. The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846. New York: Oxford University Press. Starnes, Richard D. 2003. “‘A Conspicuous Example of What is Termed the New South’: Tourism and Urban Development in Asheville, North Carolina, 1880–1925.” North Carolina Historical Review 80: 52–80. Stein, Stephen J. 1992. The Shaker Experience in America: A History of the United Society of Believers. New Haven: Yale University Press. Terence Vincent Powderly Papers. Microfilm. Glen Rock, NJ: Microfilming Corporation of America, 1974. Trelease, Allen W. 1971. White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction. New York: Harper & Row. Tullos, Allen. 1989. Habits of Industry: White Culture and the Transformation of the Carolina Piedmont. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Waller, Altina. 1988. Feud: Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860–1900. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

As do many other writers represented in this collection, James J. Lorence delineates the dynamic tension between the local and the national, a connection that both empowered and handcuffed interracial, Communist-led organizing among the unemployed in Atlanta during the Great Depression. On one hand, the complicated focus of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) on “Negro liberation” in conjunction with black and white working-class unity in the early 1930s made it practically the only national organization that would undertake such organizing in the South. On the other, as Lorence points out, the failure of the national CPUSA leadership to fully appreciate the local opportunities and obstacles in Atlanta and to assign enough competent personnel and material resources to work among the unemployed in Georgia ultimately prevented the Left-led movement from following up its initial promise. Similarly the dire economic pressures of the Depression on Atlanta’s working-class populations, the failure of “mainstream” institutions to adequately address those pressures, especially on black Atlantans, and traditions of political activism, again particularly among African Americans, combined to allow the Left-led unemployed movement to make significant initial headway. However, the racial divide of Jim Crow separated black and white workers and enabled severe governmental (and extralegal) repression of the movement. These divisions inculcated by Jim Crow and intense repression in conjunction with shortcomings of the local and the national CPUSA leadership caused the movement to founder, at least in the short term. Nonetheless, despite the decline that Lorence chronicles, his essay also illuminates a continuity between the legal and more direct action tactics of the Atlanta unemployed movement and the activities of other radical organizations in the South, from the Afro-American Council and the Knights of Labor to civil rights, Black Power, and beyond.

3 Mobilizing the Reserve Army: The Communist Party and the Unemployed in Atlanta, 1929–1934 James J. Lorence

Following the onset of the Great Depression, the fortunes of American working families sank as the ravages of a battered economy hit home. While the national unemployment statistics record the misery visited upon the highly urbanized Northeast and Midwest in stark numbers, the South suffered from poverty levels found in relatively few of the more densely populated areas of the United States. As the historian David Goldfield has observed, the cities of the South qualified as the country’s “basket case” in the 1930s (Bartley 1990, 172; Goldfield 1981, 1030; Holmes 1975, 11–12; Mertz 1978, 10–12; Biles 1994, 18). In Atlanta, unemployment grew rapidly, as rural workers drifted into the city in search of work. The crisis was reflected in figures provided by federal agencies, which estimated that in the years between 1930 and 1933, almost 50 percent of the city’s employable workers were unable to find employment. Although Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) organizer Angelo Herndon asserted that it was hard to secure accurate statistics for Atlanta because officials “kept this information carefully hidden,” the city acknowledged that in 1932, 25,000 families out of a population of 150,000 were on relief. Communists maintained that many jobless workers were kept off the relief rolls—a policy that impoverished both black and white workers (Hickey 2003, 192; Herndon ca. 1934; U.S. Dept. of Commerce 1931, 1:258; Smith 1988, 19–20). Throughout Georgia the greatest burden fell upon the African American community, which experienced elevated levels of unemployment. The economic downturn sharpened competition for employment and spawned several efforts to preserve jobs for whites. Both the “back to the land” and the quasi-fascist Black Shirt movements of the early 1930s

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were rooted in the white elite’s determination to maintain social control and preserve its privileged economic status. As this essay will demonstrate, the economic forces unleashed by the Depression challenged long-held social assumptions as African Americans and white radicals organized to meet the needs of Georgia’s underclass. Historians have long known that the CPUSA maintained an active interest in organizing within the state’s African American community, a commitment that found expression in the party’s cosponsorship of the Angelo Herndon defense as well as its work on behalf of the “Atlanta Six” defendants charged with violating Georgia’s insurrection statute. However, the recent opening of the Russian archives to American researchers furnishes fresh source material with which to reconstruct the story of not only these celebrated legal struggles but also the organizational work among the unemployed that lay at the heart of the CPUSA effort in the South. This essay documents the struggle of the unemployed in Georgia and the free speech battle occasioned by the attempt to suppress radicalism in response to Communist activism on behalf of the jobless. Previous scholarship has demonstrated that in the cities of the Northeast and Midwest, jobless workers organized in self-defense in a moment of mass mobilization that gave rise to Communist hopes that the demise of capitalism was at hand. Less well known is the Southern expression of unemployed activism that unfolded within the context of the national economic crisis (Kelley 1990; Blackwelder 1984; Martin 1976; Ferguson 2002; Hickey 2003, 94–97; Moore 1968; Solomon 1988, 1998, ; Allen 2001; Painter 1994; Johnson ca. 1935). An examination of the Georgia movement will demonstrate that the potential for a mass-based worker movement existed, but remained unrealized because of the exertion of overwhelming state pressure against both the dispossessed and their leaders. Throughout the United States, a Left-led unemployed movement soon gained support as Depression victims searched for practical solutions to devastating economic problems. While Socialists competed for the support of the jobless, the first group to offer meaningful assistance to the unemployed on a nationwide scale was the CPUSA, which had long championed the cause of the dispossessed (Rosenzweig 1976; Leab 1967; Piven and Cloward 1979; Prago 1976; Lorence 1996; Folsom 1991). When Atlanta workers mobilized for action, therefore, it was Communists who initially offered leadership in the drive to find solutions for their problems. From the beginning, the demands of the jobless placed a heavy burden on a Georgia welfare system that placed heavy responsibility in the hands of county and local governments. The power of traditional assumptions

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concerning the state’s role in meeting social needs was evident in Georgia’s cautious response to the Hoover administration’s modest attempt in 1931 to coordinate relief efforts through the President’s Organization on Unemployment Relief (POUR). Atlanta welfare officials and business figures predicted that the “unemployment situation will be taken care of to a reasonable extent.” Common to these reactions was an expression of confidence apparently shared by private businesses, private charities, and public officials, not to mention an element of skepticism about federal intervention (Croxton Papers Series 7; Biles 1994, 33). This spirit of optimism was not shared by jobless Atlanta residents, some of whom looked for leadership in the struggle to gain official recognition of their plight. In the South as in the nation, Communists saw the faltering economy of the 1930s as a golden opportunity to advance radical goals and worker political consciousness. Although local traditions and deeply held values militated against the development of a coordinated movement to advance worker causes in Georgia, the CPUSA dedicated itself to the daunting task of mass mobilization in the heart of the South, starting with an appeal to African Americans that emphasized self-determination in the Middle and South Georgia black belt. From the outset, however, CPUSA activists faced serious obstacles in Georgia, beginning with intense racial antagonisms that crippled the party’s preliminary organizational efforts (Di Santo, n.d., 1928, Russian State Archive of Social and Political History [hereafter RGASPI] Delo 1292, Reel 97; Crouch Papers Box 1; Solomon 1998, 80–81; Klehr 1984, 324–325). As early as October 1928, CPUSA field organizer John Di Santo reported modest progress in Atlanta, but identified the key issue for radicals in the South: the party was “faced with a tremendous race problem” rooted in “deep prejudice between the white and Negro workers” that prevented integrated unit meetings because “our [white] comrades refuse to meet together with the Negro in the South.” Decrying the narrow CPUSA base in the South, he argued that the “petit bourgeois” Jews who dominated Southern party units must be augmented by “American workers.” He spelled out his plans for an Atlanta organizing drive focused on the city’s factories, mills, and railroad yards, particularly on the West side, where the African American population was concentrated (Di Santo, November 22, 1928). When Di Santo returned in November, he found at least one African American “doing real communist work” as a “good revolutionist.” From his perspective, the most significant development was the increasingly diverse racial and gender mix in the new party units. The willingness of white women and African American men to meet together represented “a greater victory than even bringing together of the Negro and white men” (Di Santo, November 22, 1928; Solomon 1998, 112–114; Ottanelli


1991, 39–40; Kelley 1990, chaps. 1–3). More the realist, Communist journalist James Allen, editor of the Southern Worker, later asserted that because of the race problem, the South was regarded as “the graveyard of radicals”(Allen Papers n.d., Box 3). Nonetheless, the party stubbornly targeted Atlanta’s African American population, with some success. In January 1930, a hall packed with black enthusiasts heard “Mother” Ella Reeve Bloor call for the “solidarity of black and white workers.” While the Atlanta assistant solicitor general John H. Hudson estimated that by April 1930 there were some 300 Communists in the community, former black party activist R. C. Miller told the House Special Investigating Committee on CPUSA activity in the United States that he had worked with a core of eight or nine dedicated members from the African American community. Miller asserted that in Atlanta there were about 100 Communists and that “mighty near every colored man you met was a sympathizer when he read those [Communist] pamphlets.” This assertion held true for the black community, but among white workers there was much work to be done when the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL) launched an organizational effort in 1930. Party organizers soon discovered that most white workers “had never heard of TUUL and had no conception of its function or its relation to the CPUSA.” Despite the “demoralization” of the Atlanta comrades, an estimated 175 black and white workers did attend a February mass meeting, fifty of them prepared to join the CPUSA, which “showed the possibilities for work in Atlanta” (Report, TUUL, February 12, 1930, RGASPI Delo 2176, Reel 163; Crawford to Hill, March 4, 1930; National Urban League Papers, Series 4, Box 27; U.S. House 1931. Special Committee to Investigate Communist Activities in the United States, Investigation of Communist Propaganda 71st Cong. 2nd Sess., 1930, 208, 219, 221–222; Liberator, January 11, 1930). Encouraged by the growth in Atlanta, Georgia Communists prepared for the nationwide unemployment demonstration planned by TUUL for March 6, 1930. By this time the Atlanta Unemployed Council was “functioning well, formulating plans for March 6 . . . and taking responsibility for drawing in members.” While Communists stubbornly insisted on integrated party units, whites remained reluctant to align themselves with African Americans. Preliminary organization focused on both jobless and employed workers at the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills, where union activists reported support for the unemployed among mill operatives. Denied a parade permit, demonstration organizers nonetheless gained permission to hold an indoor meeting, which was rescheduled for March 9 (Wilson ca. 1930, ACLU Papers, Reel 77; Report, TUUL, February 19, 1930 and “Death Penalty Demanded” 1930, RGASPI Delo 2212, Reel 165; Solomon 1998, 126–127).


As a small crowd gathered for the event, which was billed as a discussion of the unemployment crisis, the Atlanta police lay in wait for the speakers: Communist organizer M. H. Powers and Young Communist League representative Joe Carr. But the speeches were never delivered. Instead, the authorities broke up the meeting and detained the two organizers. Following the arrests, the explosion of a suspicious tear gas bomb ensured that workers would not organize that day. John Hudson alleged that Powers and Carr had urged the crowd to “smash the police force” and “disregard their authority,” which they saw as an effort to overthrow the authorities of the state—a violation of a Reconstruction-era insurrection law originally intended to prevent black rebellion. Charged with attempting to incite insurrection and circulate insurrectionary literature, the radicals were imprisoned and bound over for trial. In response, CPUSA leaders asserted that in the eyes of city officials, “unemployment is a crime.” For its part, the party “proudly [pled] guilty to the charge that it endeavor[ed] to organize workers for struggle for their everyday demands” (“Death Penalty Demanded” 1930; Investigation of Communist Propaganda 1930, 211, 218, 239; Klehr 1984, 333; “Death Penalty” and “The Atlanta Cases,” ACLU Papers 1930, Reel 77; Solomon 1998, 126). Not long thereafter, another disaster befell party organizers when Atlanta authorities broke up an Atlanta Negro Labor Committee meeting that was protesting a Texas lynching and charged its leaders with inciting to insurrection. While the event was integrated, most participants were African American, including Labor Committee organizer Gilmer Brady (Herbert Newton) and local printer Henry Story. Both were arrested, along with white National Textile Workers Union (NTWU) activists Ann Burlak and Mary Dalton. While labor organizing activated local resistance, it was the social implications of public interaction among white women and black men that dictated swift and decisive repression. Together with Carr and Powers, the detainees soon gained notoriety as the Atlanta Six victims of Georgia justice (Wilson ca. 1930; Liberator, June 7, 1930; Solomon 1998, 126; Hickey 2003, 195; Ferguson 2002, 54; Folsom 1991, 266). The Carr-Powers arrests and the Labor Committee detentions left Atlanta Communists reeling. Even before these reverses, CPUSA organizer Tom Johnson reported, the party “was in a bad way,” composed as it was of a few “proletarian members” and “petty bourgeois Jews,” all of them “completely terrorized by developments.” While there was a solid support base among African Americans, little “mass work” had been done and the party had “already been somewhat compromised in the eyes of the workers.” Johnson complained bitterly to New York comrades that the district had no one to replace the jailed activists and urged that a party organizer and an NTWU representative be immediately assigned to


the Atlanta area and given financial support to restore the party’s image among workers. As things stood, the CPUSA was “an illegal party in Georgia in every sense of the word” (Johnson to Bedacht, May 24–25, 1930, RGASPI Delo 1960, Reel 151). This plea for national attention to the party’s problem in Georgia became a constant theme in reports to the Central Committee, as state repression threatened to smother the fledgling movement. Limited resources notwithstanding, sporadic unemployed organizing went on at the grassroots level in Atlanta neighborhoods, where local CPUSA sympathizers fought evictions with spontaneous acts of resistance. Inspired by a group of Maher Street militants, local Communists urged tenants to defy bailiffs by replacing displaced tenants’ belongings. The lesson was that “by protecting your neighbor you are protecting yourself.” In another neighborhood, party activists called for the formation of tenants’ leagues composed of employed and unemployed workers, organizations that could fight for relief, rent reductions, and an end to evictions (“Form Tenants Leagues” ca. August 1930, RGASPI Delo 2151, Reel 162). Although the Atlanta party struggled, these grassroots efforts confirmed Johnson’s vision of local organizing potential. To Johnson, the best response to the paralysis created by the Atlanta Six prosecutions was a temporary CPUSA alliance with local liberal and labor elements in defense of free speech. While it was important to preserve the party’s “independent leadership of the campaign,” he hoped to mobilize local liberal sentiment among moderates who, though anticommunist, tended to favor “more ‘refined’ methods of smashing the party than those in use at present.” Collaboration would allow the CPUSA to “function as a legal party” (Johnson to Bedacht, May 24–25, 1930). While the formal Popular Front was years in the future, this pragmatic collaboration suggested that desperate situations required dramatic solutions. Cooperation between radicals and liberals was easier to visualize than implement. From the beginning, the International Labor Defense (ILD), the CPUSA, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC), and the Georgia Federation of Labor (GFL) disagreed on tactics as each pursued its own objectives. Particularly suspicious were Will Alexander, the liberal leader of the CIC, and Steve Nance, president of the Atlanta Federation of Trades (AFT). Alexander questioned ILD motivations in the identification of appropriate legal counsel and ridiculed “their Communist friends” for following “their old tactics in taking more interest in the propaganda value of the cases than in really trying to get the people properly tried and defended.” In September, ACLU urged the NAACP to open its purse,


since the ILD was “badly in need of financial help.” One result of the ILD predicament was its failure to have a full-time presence in Atlanta, which Johnson found “shameful” as a missed opportunity to “build up a movement there” (Johnson to Secretariat, August 23, 1930, RGASPI Delo 1960, Reel 151; Bailey to White, September 19, 1930; Pennington to White, June 7 and 24, 1930; Alexander to White, June 27 and September 19–20, 1930, Wilson to ACLU n.d., all in NAACP Papers, Reel 9). While legal defense was a critical issue for the indicted workers, the public stance and collective interest of organized labor presented a more complicated set of problems for its adherents. Carefully avoiding a radical image, L. Steve Nance, president of the GFL, distanced himself from the street organizing and unemployment protest that had energized CPUSA activists. Yet not all Georgia labor followed Nance’s lead. Militant Mary Barker of Atlanta, president of the American Federation of Teachers, denounced the charges as “ridiculous and outrageous.” Before long, Secretary Karl Karston of the AFT and Jerome Jones, editor of the Atlanta Journal of Labor, joined the dissenters, who saw a threat to organized labor in the insurrection charges. To Barker and her allies, the issue was clear: “If they [could] railroad Communists for organizing workers, they can do the same to any other labor organizers” (Federated Press ca. 1930 and Wilson, “Atlanta’s Communists,” June 25, 1930, both in Barker Papers, Box 9). A related commitment to free speech was made by Atlanta liberals who joined in a public statement attacking the prosecutions and supporting freedom of assembly. Signed by an array of prominent local figures, including Alexander, Barker, Karston, Comer M. and C. Vann Woodward, Glenn Rainey, Mary Raoul Millis, and many others, the document deplored prosecutions on the basis of political, economic, social, or religious beliefs. More than anything else, the liberals wanted no Communist martyrs, nor did they wish to see “regrettable future repression.” Other local liberals, including ACLU members and the Church League for Industrial Democracy, saw a social and economic environment in which “there will be a nice bloody race riot unless authorities can be persuaded to postpone the cases and then allow them to be forgotten” (Spoffard to Lathrop, October 2, 1930 and “Information on the Situation in Atlanta, Georgia,” October 2, 1930, both in ACLU Papers, Reel 77; Ward to Barker, August 21, 1930 and “Statement” ca. June 1930, both in Barker Papers, Box 9). In fact, race was never far from the debate over party organizing and unemployed activism, since the ugly reality of racial tensions reflected fierce job competition in Atlanta and the surrounding area. By summer 1930, the displacement of black workers had taken on a menacing tone


with the emergence of the “American Fascisti Association and Order of Black Shirts,” an organization dedicated to the systematic replacement of black workers with unemployed whites. Headquartered and most active in Atlanta, the Black Shirts rose to prominence in July 1930 with a series of well-publicized meetings at which African Americans were vilified and white hiring preference was endorsed. Yet the Black Shirt phenomenon produced a display of unity among liberal organizations, religious groups, civic bodies, and the press that resulted in its early demise (Martin 1977, 368–373; Ferguson 2002, 48; Moore 1968, 98–99; Biles 1994, 109; News Bulletin, October 1, 1930, Neighborhood Union Papers, Box 10). So rapid was this dissolution that Alexander could conclude in October 1930 that the Black Shirts had “collapsed beyond the hope of any successful revival.” More realistic was the Atlanta Urban League’s Charles Washington, who in late August reminded his national office that the Black Shirt organizers had touched a nerve by “taking advantage of the present unemployment situation to capitalize on race prejudice.” In agreement with this analysis, the New Republic correspondent Edwin Tribble observed that the Black Shirt “touches the lean pocketbook of the white and lays the cause of his unemployment directly at the door of the Negro” (Tribble, October 8, 1930, 205; “Report,” January 14, 1931, Neighborhood Union Papers, Box 12). Given this assumption, it is not surprising that the Black Shirt movement provided Communists with an effective organizing tool that resonated with the party’s African American base in Georgia. Party publications attempted to link unemployed activism, the Atlanta Six prosecutions, and the alleged function of the Black Shirts as an instrument of management and officialdom in the war against workers. In this view of the workers’ world, adversity would breed defiance, which would translate into organizational gains; and by some estimates, Communism was growing, at least within the impoverished Atlanta black community. In November 1930, the black informant R. C. Miller, who had been expelled from the local CPUSA, told congressional investigators that the radical movement was “on the increase” in Atlanta, while Steve Nance acknowledged that the CPUSA was “showing some activity” in Rome, Columbus, and Augusta (Investigation of Communist Propaganda 1930, 224, 242; Labor Defender ca. November 1930, Solomon Papers, Box 3; Southern Worker, October 25, 1930). It is clear that labor was keenly aware of the challenge presented by the deepening job crisis in Georgia, particularly after the Southern Worker raised the ante by publicizing the CPUSA’s proposed Workers Social Insurance Bill to create a nationwide unemployment insurance program. Downplaying the “many prosperity programs and panaceas” that had


been offered, the Atlanta Journal of Labor called for an adequate universal wage scale. Georgia labor’s lukewarm response to unemployment insurance reflected the tardiness of the AFL in endorsing social insurance measures. President William Green and the Executive Council were slow to embrace unemployment insurance, partly because of their distaste for the British experience with the “dole.” While the Council deliberated, the GFL broke ranks with Green in April 1931 to endorse state and federal legislation to mandate unemployment insurance programs. This action mirrored rising concerns over Communist inroads based on the party’s social insurance proposals. The Augusta Labor Review pointedly observed that condemnation of Communists without addressing the causes that nourished Communism was “like covering an ulcer with talcum powder” (Labor Review, January 30, 1931, ACLU Papers, Reel 81; Journal of Labor, April 6, 1931; Green to Henning, April 3, 1931; Green to Anderson, February 17, 1931; “Green Fights Unemployment Insurance” n.d., all in AFL Papers, Green Collection, Box 6; Southern Worker, August 16 and December 30, 1930). The ugliest manifestation of the underlying disease was widespread joblessness, which had become the CPUSA’s key organizing issue in Atlanta by early 1931. In January, CPUSA District 17’s policy-making Buro in Birmingham reached consensus on the importance of broadbased struggle against evictions and increased efforts to build party-based unemployed councils as mass organizations. Party activists were convinced that “unemployment has decidedly more of a mass character in the South than in the North” because a larger percentage of the workers were fully or partially unemployed. With “so great a proportion of the masses living below the subsistence level,” Southern workers experienced “pauperism” to a greater extent than the laborers of the North. In early February, jobless veterans attempted to hold an integrated hunger march in Atlanta, which was derailed when a parade permit was withdrawn, but not before the demonstrators promised to “stick together” the next time the marchers met. Not long thereafter, protesting layoffs at Fulton Bag, Atlanta Woolen, Exposition Mill, and the Southern Railway, the Atlanta Unemployed Council ridiculed Red Cross, Family Welfare, and Community Kitchen relief efforts as part of a government–capitalist “starvation system.” The organization urged the establishment of neighborhood councils to demand cash relief, a rent moratorium, and a utilities holiday for the jobless, as well as an end to the chain gang labor system on public works projects. To advance these goals, in February 1931 the local Unemployed Council followed up with a petition to force the unemployment question before the City Council and Mayor (Southern Worker, February 7 and 21, 1931; “Don’t Starve” ca. February 1931; “Economic


and Political Situation in the South” ca. 1931; Minutes, District 17 Buro, January 1, 1931, all in RGASPI Delos 2520, 2521, and 2566, Reels 190 and 193). As radical agitation accelerated and the unemployment crisis worsened, middle-class organizations worked to undercut the Communist appeal to the jobless. When both Community Chest and Family Welfare resources proved unequal to the demand created by widespread destitution in the black community, the Neighborhood Union created the Westside Unemployment Relief Committee to fill the vacuum. Determined to “not only help the unemployed today” but to operate for at least two years “in order to hold the family together that they may retain their respectability,” the Committee strove to reach needy families “before they actually [got] into the breadline.” The Union’s efforts represented the successful effort of the west side community to help its own people maintain a semblance of self-reliance; while the Union was a testament to the efficacy of private, middle-class relief work, the unprecedented scope of the Depression crisis made its efforts near futile (Hope to Miller, August 27, 1931; “How the Union Handled the Unemployment Crisis of 1931– 1932”; “Partial Report” 1931; Chairman, Relief Committee, “Report” n.d.; Shively, “Report of the Emergency Committee” 1931–1932; Hope to Raper, August 13, 1931, all in Neighborhood Union Papers, Boxes 3, 6, and 9; Hickey 2003, 203–206; Ferguson 2002, 52–55). In 1931, side by side with the Union, the Atlanta Urban League moved to confront the relief crisis with its own Emergency Relief Committee, which operated a relief kitchen that served nearly 60,000 meals to the needy. In addition, the League cooperated in the creation of the citywide Committee on Unemployed Relief. This program complemented the League’s ongoing effort to fight the displacement of African American workers while working toward “the prevention of an unpleasant inter-racial situation” (National Urban League Annual Report 1931; “Report of the Major Activities of the Atlanta Urban League for 1930”, National Urban League Papers, Series 5, Box 8; Hickey 2003, 204). Meanwhile, Georgia welfare authorities contended that the relief situation was under control. In October 1931, Georgia welfare official Alice E. Stenholm reported to POUR that despite a major transient problem and heavy pressure in Atlanta, Georgia would “be able to meet its responsibility without help” and that it was “not necessary to send in an organizer.” Coca-Cola executive Robert W. Woodruff of Atlanta, POUR state representative, agreed that federal officials should “not stir up things too much in Georgia.” Meanwhile, POUR’s Thad Holt reported to Washington that Rome, Augusta, Columbus, and Atlanta were all “well organized” and that state officials and Georgia business leaders had developed a


“plan for handling the situation” (Holt to Hayes, February 1 and November 19, 1931; Holt “Memorandum,” February 8, 1931; Woodruff to Gifford, November 17, 1931; Stenholm, “Report on Georgia Field Trip,” October 13–14, 1931; PECE/POUR Files, Series 10, Georgia). Given widespread denial among the Georgia elite, the CPUSA saw an opening; yet party activists struggled to take advantage of the opportunity. A frank discussion in the Party’s Atlanta Section Committee revealed that by late 1932 the CPUSA in Georgia was in disarray, with only one party unit in operation. No unemployed groups were active, membership had declined, and mass organization had faltered. These failures were attributed to poor leadership by the incompetent Otto Hall, who had allegedly avoided meetings, pocketed party funds, and wasted scarce resources. An early African American party member, Hall had accepted the Atlanta assignment in full knowledge of the challenges he faced; despite the critics, he was a seasoned veteran who enjoyed the confidence of most national party leaders. Because of his alleged “irresponsibility,” however, local members had become “demoralized”; some Southern party leaders argued that the only solution was his removal from Atlanta organizational work (Minutes of Section Meeting, Atlanta, January 1, 1933, RGASPI Delo 2925, Reel 225). Hall’s transgressions, however, were the symptom rather than the cause of the party’s malady. More damaging was the ongoing problem of building an effective biracial movement in an area unreceptive to such collaboration. As early as April 1931, CPUSA district organizer Tom Johnson forcefully argued in a letter to Earl Browder that the battle for black self-determination must take precedence and that equal rights for African Americans was the “burning political issue in the South.” Johnson advocated the creation of a Communist-led “fighting organization of Negro and white workers” that would “embrace all elements of this united front.” In the South, he argued, the League of Struggle for Negro Rights was best suited to carry out this function. Finally, he was “absolutely opposed” to the establishment of separate black and white organizations, which would force Communists to “compromise [themselves] in the eyes of the Negro masses” (Johnson to Browder, April 9, 1931, RGASPI Delo 2285, Reel 173). The situation was volatile and, despite keen awareness of formidable obstacles and troublesome internal conflicts, the CPUSA understood the opportunity created by the crisis of capitalism. National party directives called upon district organizers to concentrate on unemployed hearings and demonstrations in African American neighborhoods, promote black participation in the national hunger march of November 1931, and create integrated united front committees of industrial and agricultural workers to demand relief. Following the Thirteenth Party Plenum, the Central


Committee Negro Department made African American work on the “unemployment campaign” its first priority, with emphasis on the fight against evictions, the battle for cash relief, and the problem of discrimination in unemployment programs (“Draft Four Month Plan of Work of the Negro Department of the CC as Adopted by the Negro Department,” October–February 1932; “Directives to the Districts on Negro Work in Connection with the National Hunger March” ca. October 1931, RGASPI Delo 2339, Reel 178). By this time, the resources of Atlanta and Fulton County were stretched thin. As of June 1932, city employees were being paid in scrip, which was either discounted or unacceptable to merchants. In black districts the Depression’s impact was profound. While the city’s unemployment rate was probably 30–35 percent, the figure for the African American population may have reached 75 percent, thus creating a window of opportunity for Communist organizers. An early response occurred when CPUSA worker Sol Harper orchestrated a widely publicized eviction fight that resulted in the restoration of furniture to a family residence and the establishment of a neighborhood committee. His report reveals that economic deprivation was beginning to bring working families together to act on their own behalf. To him, “the fight against evictions [was] the way the workers should carry on” (Harper to Minor, April 16, 1932, RGASPI, Delo 2927, Reel 225; Kuhn, Joye, and West 1990, 201–202; Martin 1976, 1–2). The debate within the local party unit occasioned by this modest action laid bare simmering local resentment over limited resources, an obstacle that had plagued CPUSA organizers since 1930. Into this maelstrom came the young African American CPUSA activist Angelo Herndon, who, in June 1932, after jumping bail in Birmingham, set about the task of unemployed organizing in Fulton County. Herndon’s leadership revitalized the unemployed movement in Atlanta. Before long, his talents as unemployed leader and worker educator led to enlargement of local party membership and the development of a more informed analysis of the organizational situation in Atlanta. Almost immediately, he began to plead with Communist leaders for a white organizer who could more effectively cement the interracial tie the party sought to build. By most accounts, he was effective in helping white workers to understand the need for cooperation on economic issues (Washburn Interview, Living Atlanta Collection, Box 39; Herndon to Browder, June 5, 1932, RGASPI Delo 2927, Reel 225; “Add Herndon xxx Party” n.d., ILD Papers, Reel 18; Herndon 1969, 174–175). Herndon later recalled the laborious process of building an unemployed movement in Atlanta, which entailed gaining the confidence


of both white and black workers. After a large open air mass meeting, an unemployment committee began the organization of Unemployed Councils “block by block, street by street, and section by section.” The Councils later helped create the Atlanta Bonus March delegation, harassed and embarrassed county and federal relief officials at every turn, fought against local efforts to launch a back-to-the farm movement, and served as general ombudsmen for the destitute. Herndon observed that these tactics meant that the Councils and Atlanta officials were “deadlocked practically all of the time” (Herndon 1969, 174, 176; Ferguson 2002, 55; Hickey 2003, 195; Martin 1976, 3; Prago 1976, 112–113). Tensions boiled over in June 1932 when the Fulton County Commission slashed relief expenditures by one-third and prepared to close Atlanta’s emergency relief center, while refusing to endorse a tax increase to support more generous relief payments. During debate over the tax increase, Commissioner Walter C. Hendrix insisted that there was “no army of gaunt, suffering people in [Atlanta]” and challenged critics to bring forward any evidence of hunger and starvation. His words enraged unemployed activists, including Herndon, who was convinced that closure of relief stations was a scheme to force the jobless to return to the country to work at slave wages (Folsom 1991, 328; “Workers of Atlanta” June 1932 in Herndon 1969, 336; Martin 1976, 4–5; Atlanta Constitution, June 19–20, 1932; Labor Challenge, September 23, 1935, ILD Papers, Reel 18). At first, it seemed that protest could be contained, as evidenced by an orderly presentation on June 29 of a petition for food or relief by some fifty unemployed mill workers, who thought that their action “would be enough to prove [their] point” to the commissioners. Meanwhile, the Unemployed Council blanketed the city with leaflets urging “all starving people” to come before the commission to assure the body that the relief program could not safely be curtailed. Working secretly at night, the Council went house to house to publicize the demonstration planned for the following day. Even Herndon was surprised at the turnout of 1,000 demonstrators, a thoroughly integrated crowd bent on convincing the commissioners that there was “plenty of suffering in the city of Atlanta.” Seasoned radical Nannie Leah Washburn, a militant Atlanta textile worker, remembered the event as significant for its success in forging an interracial link, a bond that revealed that “the blacks was just like us poor whites.” For blacks, she noted, it was “the first coming out in the open, you know, the blacks to organize unemployed” (Washburn Interview; Herndon 1969, 191; Kuhn et al. 1990, 202–203; Labor Challenge, September 23, 1935, ILD Papers Reel 18; “Hungry Atlantans Demand Food in County Board Visit,” June 29, 1932, Van De Vrede Papers, Box 5; Martin 1976, 5–6; Ferguson 2002, 55).


A shocked and confused County Commission approved an emergency relief appropriation of $6,000 to meet the needs of families cut off by the original slash in funding. Among those most alarmed by the demonstration were Atlanta officials, who were shaken by the specter of poor whites cooperating with African Americans to make demands on the power structure that had oppressed both. No less threatening was the reality of radical leadership in a genuine mass action, which aroused the militantly anti-Communist business and political leaders of the city. Hostility to radicalism and fears of interracial working-class unity fueled a rising paranoia that spelled trouble for Herndon, whom the Atlanta Daily World believed “to have been the motivating power behind the recent demonstration of black and white unemployed” (Atlanta Daily World, July 23, 1932; Herndon 1969, 190; Ferguson 2002, 55; Hickey 2003, 195; Martin 1976, 6; Folsom 1991, 328). While local elites fumed over the unlikely turn of events, Communist organizers saw a glimmer of hope for the party’s future in Georgia. Newly arrived ILD organizer Clarina Michelson told her New York comrades that “these unemployed demonstrations [were] the best bet to break through the terror” in the South. She noted that after the Commission demonstration, a local unemployed committee of four members had been elected and plans launched for another rally. A new handbill reminded Atlanta workers that the June 30 demonstration had succeeded because hundreds of African American and white workers had made common cause and prevailed by “showing the bosses that [they would] not starve peacefully.” The Atlanta Unemployed Committee maintained that the “biggest surprise handed the bosses” was the image of blacks and whites who “came down together to fight for relief.” The authorities knew that segregation prevented solidarity, which was “why they work so hard to separate [blacks and whites]” (“Workers of Atlanta” July 1932, Michelson Papers, Box 1; Joan Barbour to National Election Board, July 4, 1932, RGASPI Delo 2928, Reel 225). Convinced that the South’s working class was “like a house that’s divided against itself,” Herndon was acutely aware of the “alarm and consternation” aroused by the unprecedented “spectacle” witnessed at the Atlanta courthouse on June 30. In view of the unemployed movement’s gathering momentum, the city police began tracking its leadership. On July 11, close monitoring of the Unemployed Committee’s post office box led to the arrest of Herndon as he retrieved his mail. Atlanta officials moved quickly to reassert their authority by charging him with “suspicion,” which in this case was a poorly concealed code word for “Communist.” Not until July 22 was the young organizer formally indicted for attempting to incite insurrection, thus linking his fate with


that of the Atlanta Six. To Communist organizer Joan Barbour, the “fact that Negro and white workers . . . are organized together” was “enough reason for the authorities to try to smash the [unemployed] organization.” She told Don Burke of the ILD and district organizer Nat Ross that the local party planned to “link [Herndon] up with unemployed struggles” by treating the case as “an attack on the unemployed workers [and] unemployed committees” (Barbour to Burke and Ross, July 13, 1932, RGASPI Delo 2928, Reel 225; Barbour to Editor, Daily Worker, July 21, 1932, ILD Papers, Reel 16; Atlanta Daily World, August 15, 1932; Cooper to Harais ca. July 1932 and “Copy of Indictment of Angelo Herndon”, July 16, 1932, both in Barker Papers, Box 9; Martin 1976, 7–8). Herndon’s imprisonment made him a key symbol for working-class African Americans, who saw him as a heroic figure. Some poor black workers viewed the case as symptomatic of “the racial hatred they had felt for years.” Hosea Hudson, Georgia native and Birmingham CPUSA activist, later emphasized the interracial united front created by the demonstration, which had shown that “nothing . . . was impossible for the working class to master once they [were] organized.” Observing “widespread indignation” in the black community, Socialist Party (SP) circles, AFL unions, and the Atlanta liberal community, CPUSA organizer Harry Jackson argued that the police blunder had created “an extremely favorable situation for the building of a tremendous organized mass defense movement around the Herndon case,” which could rescue the floundering Communist effort in Atlanta. Despite the party’s relative weakness in Georgia, Jackson saw “tremendous possibilities for the movement” (Jackson to Comrades ca. July 1932, RGASPI Delo 2929, Reel 226; Hudson “A Black Worker in the Deep South” n.d. Hudson Papers, Box 3; Hickey 2003, 196). Local activists also emphasized the usefulness of the Herndon case for the developing unemployed movement. Otto Hall, still present in July 1932 despite a lackluster record, urged that the free speech and assembly question be integrated with the “unemployment fight” in Atlanta. He pledged to “make the right for unemployed workers to organize . . . for relief a big issue,” which would allow the party to “break through legally here.” Adding the national party’s view, the imported political organizer Clarina Michelson stressed the importance of the “attack on the unemployed of Atlanta” and the need to “jack up” the ILD in order to get “a real campaign started immediately” (Michelson to Secretariat, August 19, 1932; Michelson Papers, Box 1; “To National Office” et al., July 13, 1932; Hall to Browder, July 21, 1932, both in RGASPI Delo 2928, Reel 225). As the rhetoric over the Herndon case heated up during the 1932 presidential campaign, Communists labored to build the unemployed


movement as a bridge to expanded party membership and influence. Internal correspondence reveals a determination to combine “small struggles of unemployed in the blocks” with “broader struggles around the Herndon case” to build a “mass ILD in Georgia.” In August, Ross reported to the Secretariat that one of the Georgia party’s “outstanding achievements” was the “development of mass unemployed work” in spite of great obstacles. He saw in the impoverishment of local government a “wide opening” for effective unemployed work, since inadequate relief would hasten the development of a united front. Not surprisingly, the unemployment problem was the most frequent topic at party meetings at a time when Atlanta Communists seemed focused on decidedly “nonrevolutionary issues” (Martin 1976, 46–47; “Support the Unemployed Workers in their Struggle for Bread” n.d., Michelson Papers, Box 1; “Workers of Atlanta” ca. 1932; Ross, “Report to the Secretariat,” August 3, 1932; District Committee Minutes, August 7, 1932, all in RGASPI Delos 3003, 2925, and 2930, Reels 232 and 225). By late 1932, however, the internal weakness of the CPUSA in Georgia was clear. Herndon’s defense attorney, Benjamin Davis, Jr., told the ILD’s William Patterson that the “general status of the party and the Defense organization [was] very unsatisfactory.” He discerned no significant gains since the peak reached at the June relief demonstration, a failure that he linked with Herndon’s incarceration. Davis asserted that Herndon had been the “backbone, nucleus, and active spirit behind the work” in Atlanta. He regretted that a man of such high reputation remained in jail “while his structures crumble[d] about him.” In agreement, Ross acknowledged that the situation in Georgia was “no good” despite a “splendid” opportunity for growth (Ross, “Report to the Secretariat,” CC: November 19 and December 9, 1932; Davis to Patterson, October 20, 1932, RGASPI Delo 2929, Reel 226). The party’s problems in Georgia resulted in a search for explanations, which eventually came to focus on the failings of the hapless Otto Hall as Atlanta section leader. Davis acknowledged the handicap imposed on the Atlanta comrades by the absence of financial support, but concluded that the “responsibility must be laid at [Hall’s] door.” Deeply engrossed in planning for the National Hunger March in late November, Ross complained that only five marchers were expected from Atlanta, despite “growing interest everywhere” (“Ross to Secretariat, CC”: November 19 and December 9, 1932; Davis to Paterson, October 20, 1932, RGASPI Delo 2929, Reel 226). By November, he was begging for financial support so that the South could be a factor in the demonstration, but the results were disappointing. Georgia’s twenty delegates fell short of the local Unemployed Council’s goal of “rallying the unemployed masses”


for struggle in Washington, DC. Its main contribution was to add to the march’s diversity with a racially integrated delegation, highlighted by the flair of a “Georgia Negro in a rainbow colored beret, with scarf to match [who] stepped jauntily to the martial music of the ‘Internationale’” (New York Times, n.d. quoted in Solomon 1998, 226; “Ross to Secretariat, CC”: September 1, October 22, and November 19, 1932; Ross to Dear Friend, November 12, 1932; “On to Washington” n.d. all in RGASPI, Delos 2929 and 3011, Reels 226 and 233). The hunger march was fascinating political theater, but by January 1933 most Georgia comrades were focused on the hobbled state economy and the fate of the unfortunate Herndon. From then on, the Unemployed Councils, the ILD, and a broad liberal–radical coalition joined in an effort to free the political prisoner. They finally succeeded after two appeals to the Supreme Court, which in 1937 declared the Georgia law unconstitutional, a verdict that prompted the state to drop its insurrection case against the Atlanta Six and confine the antiquated statute to the dustbin of history (Martin 1976, 182–183; Folsom 1991, 227–229; Ferguson 2002, 4–5, 57; Hickey 2003, 195–196; Solomon 1998, 219– 221, 248–249, 297–298). From the beginning, the Herndon defense attracted a variety of backers, including both the national and the Southern press. In Georgia, support for Herndon was weaker, but did include the black-owned Atlanta Daily World and Macon Telegraph, which saw the case as the use of the courts to persecute African Americans and chase Communist phantoms. The Telegraph reminded readers that “the ultimate purpose of Communism is to provide enough food and clothes and shelter for oppressed people,” while the World observed that Communist demonstrations revealed that “no country is immune to chaos when its economic system breaks down.” By summer the voice of black Atlanta was ready to support an “Angelo Herndon Day” planned and executed by the city’s African American clergy, who were an integral element in the defense coalition (Atlanta Daily World, January 23 and July 7, 10, 12, and 21, 1933; Macon Telegraph, January 30, 1933; Daily Worker, January 27, 1933; “But There Will Come Thousands of Angelo Herndons” March 1933, Solomon Papers, Box 2). The Angelo Herndon/Atlanta Six Defense Committee, based in Atlanta, presented a united front that included the Negro Chamber of Commerce, the churches, labor, college faculty, educators, black businessmen, shop owners, Jewish organizations, Socialists, and the ILD. Created in late January 1933, the Provisional Defense Committee built broad support for Herndon, especially in the black community and among church leaders. By May, however, tensions within the committee


surfaced, as the Socialist contingent grew uneasy with the prominent role played by Communists in the case. A leading figure in the local SP, Mary Raoul Millis, concluded that the ILD and the CPUSA were the active force in the defense, which prompted her dramatic resignation as committee chair at a large public meeting on May 7. At this point, the historian C. Vann Woodward found himself in charge of a disrupted meeting, which ended in the selection of a young white preacher and labor activist, Donald L. West, as temporary local chairman of the organization (West Interviews [Baskin and Southern Oral History Collection]; Martin 1976, 75–78, 110; “Memorandum” ca. May 1933, RGASPI Delo 2929, Reel 225; Woodward Interview, Southern Oral History Collection, #A-341; Atlanta Daily World, January 29 and 31, 1933; Daily Worker, January 30 and February 3, 1933; Macon Telegraph, January 30, 1933, all in ILD Papers, Reel 16; Washburn Interview). Don West, a native of North Georgia, had participated in the founding of the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee and recently returned to Georgia, where he hoped to establish an outreach educational institution. Deeply committed to the Social Gospel, West had also served as Tennessee SP organizer, but by May 1933 he was moving toward the CPUSA. Impressed by the “militancy of the CPUSA, the Scottsboro policy, and the party stand on the Negro question,” West informed Ross that he planned to join the CPUSA and explore the possibility of “holding a joint school.” As chair and office manager for the defense committee, he soon became a fugitive during the Atlanta Red Scare of 1934, when Hudson swore out a warrant for his arrest under the insurrection act. Harbored by friends in the Atlanta black community, West found work on the Herndon defense increasingly dangerous and finally fled to North Carolina in 1934 after several close calls with Atlanta authorities (West Interviews [Baskin and Southern Oral History Collection]; “Memorandum” ca. May 1933, RGASPI Delo 2929, Reel 225; Martin 1976, 111–112). While the Herndon defense exposed radicals to police scrutiny, it also provided an opening for renewed organizational activity among the unemployed. In January, a newly organized Atlanta branch of the ILD vowed to “carry on the fight of the Unemployed Councils” while “condemning the Herndon frame-up.” Because the “situation [was] very favorable,” the group thought it important that Atlanta be organized as a separate district and that the troublesome Hall be removed from the city and replaced by a “capable comrade” to take advantage of the “sentiment in the Herndon case” (W. G. B. “Report on Southern ILD Tour,” January 9–10, 1933, RGASPI Delo 3010, Reel 255; Atlanta Daily World, January 22, 1933; Klehr 1984, 333; Martin 1976, 76–77). Under increased pressure, Hall


responded with the argument that Herndon’s arrest and the accelerated “terror” had been a serious blow to the unemployed movement. He admitted that party units were “not functioning well,” but insisted that he had followed instructions (“Ross to Secretariat, CC”: March 2, 1933; Hall “Report on the Situation in Atlanta” n.d., RGASPI, Delo 3311, Reel 255). Hall was eased out of work in Atlanta in 1933. After Hall’s departure, unemployed organizing was left in the hands of a local party member, with sporadic assistance from the district organizer, Nat Ross. Ross complained to the Secretariat in New York that the “great support of the Herndon campaign” and the promise of a “real organized united front movement around Herndon” were being squandered because of the absence of a full-time party organizer in Atlanta. Symptomatic of the local party’s problem was the frank admission that while an active pressure group was needed, organizers “cannot call them unemployed councils because they are known as communist organizations among the workers” and it was unwise to “scare the workers with a name.” Strong organization was essential, but talk of revolution was to be downplayed. Activists could “[lead] up to the race question and the Communist Party,” but were not to “rush things” or “make the worker suspicious.” Communists now concluded that they must not “expose themselves” yet could not “hide [themselves] so well that [they were] not effective in doing work” (“Weekly Letter, Atlanta, Georgia Section,” November 21, 1933; “Ross to Secretariat, CC”: March 2, 1933, RGASPI Delos 3310–3311, Reel 255; Southern Worker, May 20, 1933). As the CPUSA was driven underground, the NAACP watched nervously, fully aware of the growing sympathy for Communists as a result of the Angelo Herndon and Atlanta Six prosecutions. Daisy Lampkin, writing from Atlanta, told Roy Wilkins in New York that as a result of the Herndon case, there was “great admiration expressed for [ILD defense attorneys] Geer and Davis in the courage displayed” by Herndon’s legal team. Nonetheless, she emphasized the reservations of “sensible Negroes” in Georgia who believed that African Americans “cannot afford to line up with the Communists as Communism will never succeed in Georgia” (Lampkin to Wilkins, February 4, 1933 and Wilkins to Lampkin, January 31, 1933, NAACP Papers, Box G-44 and Microfilm Edition, Box 80, Reel 91; Martin 1976, 69–70). Lampkin’s words revealed the distance between the association and the impoverished African American masses, some of whom had turned to Communists for leadership in their hour of need. In the early years of the Great Depression, desperate people in urban Georgia participated in mass action that called attention to unmet human needs and demanded a government response that would help them cope with the consequences


of a collapsed economy. The Georgia unemployed movement reveals a symbiotic relationship between local activists and Northern organizers who helped bring structure and order to the mass protests of the early 1930s. Consistent with the new history of American Communism, this analysis suggests that there were local initiatives and overriding local issues behind the popular acceptance of radical leadership in the Atlanta unemployed movement. Yet it is also clear that imported CPUSA activists, particularly the dynamic Angelo Herndon, were crucial catalysts in the creation of organizations through which the underclass protested against an unresponsive social and political system. As a by-product of the party’s engagement in the struggle of the unemployed, Atlanta’s white elite encountered an element in the African American community that questioned the hoary folkways of the South and forced an early confrontation with a new, more militant concept of interracial relations. Collaborating with oppressed whites, workingclass blacks made demands on Atlanta’s political leaders that revealed remarkable agency on the part of people often thought powerless. The implications of the new model were clear to adherents of the old order, who brutally suppressed those who advanced an alternative approach to the race question. The message and its carriers were not welcome in Depression-era Georgia, but the principle of interracial collaboration in the cause of social justice was destined to reappear during the next generation of reform. The decline of the Unemployed Councils in Georgia after 1933 replicated a trend evident in other geographic sections of the United States. As was true elsewhere, the predominantly Communist phase of the unemployed movement was at an end. By 1934, the Trotskyist National Unemployed League and the Socialist Workers Alliance were emerging as alternative organizations that competed for the allegiance of the unemployed. In Georgia as elsewhere, the Communist label contributed to the marginalization of the Councils as the Depression wore on. Finally, in 1936 the Popular Front policies of the CPUSA and the strength of the alternative organizations resulted in the national meeting that unified the national unemployed movement behind the new Workers Alliance of America. While the Alliance expressed a new policy of collaboration, its roots may be traced to the beleaguered unemployed movement of the early 1930s. The short-term failure of the Georgia Unemployed Councils resulted from a combination of factors addressed in this essay. Not the least of these was the weakness of the Georgia industrial base. In contrast with the dynamic worker community of Alabama, centered on mining and steel manufacture, that critical mass was missing in Georgia. As African


American Communist Hosea Hudson observed, there were industrial workers in Atlanta, but “they wasn’t [sic] congregated together . . . the working class neighborhood . . . it makes a lot of difference” (Hudson Interview Transcript, Tape 18, I [190], Southern Oral History Collection, Folder 4007). Moreover, CPUSA unemployed organizers were chronically short of funds in the period from 1930 to 1933. This problem was exacerbated by the limited personnel available for organizational work in Georgia. Both CPUSA district organizers and Atlanta section leaders bemoaned the national party’s unwillingness to take the Georgia opportunity seriously and to fund it sufficiently. Beyond money and personnel, the internal squabbling evident in the party correspondence must also be considered in any explanation for the unemployed movement’s weakness. The Atlanta jobless were served by a succession of CPUSA organizers whose talents left much to be desired. With the notable exception of the charismatic Angelo Herndon, neither national organizers nor Georgia comrades distinguished themselves as leaders. It was only the combination of Herndon’s aggressive organizing and the relief crisis of 1932 that brought the movement a modicum of success, which was short-lived as a result of official repression. In the final analysis, the intrusive presence of the state security apparatus was indeed the critical factor in accounting for the failed struggle of the Georgia jobless. There can be no doubt that the employment of the antiquated insurrection law in the Atlanta Six and Angelo Herndon cases played a crucial role in the suppression of mass action by the unemployed. Fear of police power combined with traditional racial assumptions and the vulnerability of African American workers to squelch class-based protest in Depression-era Georgia. State intervention, while not absent in other national venues, was devastating in the South, where the heavy hand of the past compromised the position of a long-suffering working class. Following the Herndon conviction in 1933, the Red Scare of 1934 reminded the powerless that the state remained vigilant in protecting Georgia citizens from the virus of radicalism. Moreover, the volatile textile strike of 1934 further persuaded middle-class Georgians of the dangers presented by alleged Communist infiltration of the labor movement. Similarly, the relentless pursuit of the Herndon case revealed the state’s determination to keep the issue of Communist influence in Georgia before the public. Anticommunism was to remain a prominent theme in the suppression of labor and denial of civil rights for years to come. In defiance of these pressures, the Communist-led Workers Alliance appeared in 1938 to again organize the unemployed under new circumstances and revive the specter of radical agitation. The decline of the Alliance after 1940 spelled the end of the unemployed movement in


Georgia. As the Depression began to wind down, the moment of mass mobilization came to an end. Yet the appeal of radical alternatives to the inadequate responses of conservatives, elite reformers, and middle-class liberals in Atlanta’s time of crisis was substantial. The story of the city’s unemployed movement reveals the reality of class-based protest and momentary, if limited, interracial cooperation among Georgia’s most impoverished citizens as they confronted the devastating economic collapse of the 1930s.

Works Cited Allen, James. 2001. Organizing in the Depression South: A Communist Memoir. Minneapolis: MEP Publications. ———. Papers. Tamiment Institute Library, New York University, New York. American Civil Liberties Union. Papers (Microfilm Edition). Seeley Mudd Library, Princeton University. Barker, Mary. Papers. Woodruff Library, Emory University, Atlanta. Bartley, Numan V. 1990. The Creation of Modern Georgia. 2nd ed. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Biles, Roger. 1994. The South and the New Deal. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. Blackwelder, Julie Kirk. 1984. Women of the Depression: Caste and Culture in San Antonio. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. Crouch, Paul. Papers. Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace Archives, Stanford, CA. Croxton, Frederick. Papers. Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, IA. Ferguson, Karen. 2002. Black Politics in New Deal Atlanta. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Folsom, Franklin. 1991. Impatient Armies of the Poor. Niwot, CO: University of Colorado Press. Goldfield, David R. 1981. “The Urban South: A Regional Framework.” American Historical Review 86:1009–1034. Green, William. Papers. George Meany Memorial Archives, Silver Spring, MD. Herndon, Angelo. 1934. You Cannot Kill the Working Class. New York: Reference Center for Marxist Studies. ———. 1969. Let Me Live. New York: Random House. (Orig. pub. 1937.) Hickey, Georgina. 2003. Hope and Danger in the New South City. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Holmes, Michael S. 1975. The New Deal in Georgia: An Administrative History. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Hudson, Hosea. Interview. Southern Oral History Collection. Chapel Hill. ———. Papers. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York.

mobilizing the reserve army / 79 International Labor Defense. Papers. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (Microfilm Edition), New York. Johnson, Tom. Ca. 1935. The Reds in Dixie. New York: Communist Party of the United States. Journal of Labor. 1930–1934. Kelley, Robin D. G. 1990. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Klehr, Harvey. 1984. The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade. New York: Basic Books. Kuhn, Clifford M., Harlon E. Joye, and E. Bernard L. West. 1990. Living Atlanta: An Oral History of the City, 1914–1948. Atlanta: Atlanta Historical Society and the University of Georgia Press. Leab, Daniel J. 1967. “United We Eat: The Creation and the Organization of the Unemployed Councils in 1930.” Labor History 8: 300–315. Living Atlanta Collection. Papers. Atlanta History Center, Atlanta. Lorence, James J. 1996. Organizing the Unemployed: Community and Union Activists in the Industrial Heartland. Albany: State University of New York Press. Martin, Charles H. 1976. The Angelo Herndon Case and Southern Justice. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. ———. 1977. “White Supremacy and Black Workers: Georgia’s Black Shirts Confront the Great Depression.” Labor History 18: 366–381. Mertz, Paul E. 1978. New Deal Policy and Southern Rural Poverty. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Michelson, Clarina. Papers. Tamiment Institute Library, New York University, New York. Moore, John Hammond. 1968. “Communists and Fascists in a Southern City: Atlanta, 1930.” South Atlantic Quarterly 67: 437–454. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Papers. Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. ———. Papers (Microfilm Edition), Washington, DC. National Urban League. Papers. Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Neighborhood Union. Papers. Atlanta University Center, Atlanta. Ottanelli, Fraser M. 1991. The Communist Party of the United States: From the Great Depression to World War II. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Painter, Nell Irvin. 1994. The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: The Life and Times of A Black Radical. New York: W. W. Norton. PECE/POUR Files. 1930–1932. National Archives, Record Group 73. Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, IA. Piven, Frances Fox and Richard A. Cloward. 1979. Poor Peoples’ Movements: Why They Succeed: How They Fail. New York: Vintage. Prago, Albert. 1976. “The Organization of the Unemployed and the Role of Radicals, 1929–1935.” PhD diss., Union Graduate School.

80 / james j. lorence Rosenzweig, Roy. 1976. “Organizing the Unemployed: The Early Years of the Great Depression.” Radical America 10: 37–61. Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (Microfilm Edition). 1928– 1935. Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Smith, Douglas L. 1988. The New Deal in the Urban South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Solomon, Mark. 1988. Red and Black: Communism and Afro-Americans, 1929– 1935. New York: Garland. ———. Papers. Tamiment Institute Library, New York University, New York. ———. 1998. The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African-Americans, 1917– 1936. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Tribble, Edwin. 1930. “Black Shirts in Georgia.” New Republic, Oct. 8, 205. U.S. Dept. of Commerce. 1931. Fifteenth Census of the United States: Unemployment. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. U.S. House. Special Committee to Investigate Communist Activities in the United States. Investigation of Communist Propaganda, 71st Cong., 2nd sess., 1930. Van De Vrede, Jane. Papers. Georgia Department of Archives and History, Clayton. West, Donald L. Interview. Alex Baskin, Hedy West Papers. Narberth, PA. ———. Interview. Southern Oral History Collection. Chapel Hill. Wilson, Walter. “Atlanta’s Communists.” Nation, June 25, 1930. Woodward, C. Vann. Interview. Southern Oral History Collection. Chapel Hill.


Ronald D. Cohen’s account of the career of Agnes “Sis” Cunningham during the Great Depression details much of the way the intersection between Left art and politics worked on the ground in the South and the Southwest during the 1930s. Some essays in this collection, especially that of Jim Lorence, take up the “Third Period” era of Communist activity in the South during the late 1920s and early 1930s, while others, such as that of Chris Green, focus on the Popular Front era of the later 1930s and 1940s. Cohen’s piece here bridges both periods, showing the discontinuities as well as the linkages between those two periods, from the Gastonia strike of 1929 to the Wallace campaign of 1948. The earlier period was generally one in which the Left attempted to build what might be thought of as a Left “workers” counterculture, both politically and culturally, that would lie outside and be opposed to bourgeois high and popular culture. Cunningham’s early music fell generally into this countercultural workers arts movement, often setting radical poems to music. However, as the 1930s wore on, she became increasingly engaged with the institutions of the Popular Front, particularly the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and her work accordingly became increasingly shaped by popular music and folk forms widely circulated in the South in the service of the labor movement and the struggle against Jim Crow. As can be seen from Cohen’s essay, though one might see Cunningham moving toward a more “popular” art during the Popular Front, her music retained a strong countercultural component as it posed a politicized people’s culture against that of a crass commercial culture. This stance not only says much about the persistence of strains of Third Period practices and attitudes toward art and culture during the Popular Front, but also, as Cohen notes, anticipates and influences the folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s in which Cunningham and her journal Broadside would play a major part.

4 Agnes “Sis” Cunningham and Labor Songs in the Depression South Ronald D. Cohen

By the 1930s southerners in the United States were accustomed to a rich variety of musical styles. Phonograph records and the ubiquitous radio, movies, and traveling musicians and musical shows brought them pop songs, white and black gospel tunes, jazz, blues, and particularly old-time (hillbilly) music, in addition to labor and topical compositions. Labor unions and labor organizations had long used songs for numerous complex purposes: to attract members and supporters, explain workers’ issues and complaints, describe (usually onerous) work experiences, energize workers during strikes and labor discords, relate work disasters, express personal feelings, and much more. A rich body of labor songs had developed during the nineteenth century and was greatly expanded during the first decades of the twentieth century, particularly by Joe Hill and other Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) bards. New labor songs emerged in the 1920s, including in southern mill towns and on cotton plantations, where disgruntled workers, black and white, voiced their dreams and complaints. R. Serge Denisoff has proposed a helpful dichotomy for understanding songs of protest by differentiating between a magnetic song, which “appeals to the listener and attracts him to a specific movement or ideology,” and a rhetorical song, which “points to some social condition . . . but offers no ideological or organizational solution” (Denisoff 1971, 188).1 Agnes “Sis” Cunningham (1909–2004) personified the activist musician, who promoted magnetic songs and touched the lives of many. First, she demonstrated that a woman could be active in labor organizations, schools, and events, although usually men were in charge. Second, and more important, she confirmed that music could be a most useful tool in labor organizing and consciousness raising. Sis’s rich story, rather unusual considering her involvement in so many activist schools and organizations,

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readily highlights the role of radical songs in southern political organizing during the Depression years, particularly among coal miners, sharecroppers, the unemployed, working women, and others among the down and out. The few southern labor schools readily employed songs as part of the curriculum and social events. Many of these songs entered the social life of the broader national labor movement, finding a firm place on the picket line and in union halls. “Like the Wobblies [IWW] before them, the radical labor leaders in the South in the 1930s who seized on the folk idiom in an attempt to further their own social and political ends were simply using the most generally accessible song material available to the local population,” Richard Reuss explains. “In the South, among both blacks and whites, traditional music and other folk arts were integrated into other kinds of daily activity as a cultural totality. Therefore, fusing progressive political sentiments with the folk idiom to create a dynamic agit-prop, working class form of expression were much more successful than in northern urban centers where traditional singing and folk speech patterns had been obliterated, or nearly so” (Reuss and Reuss 2000, 104, 106).2 Although conventional wisdom tells us that popular (i.e., commercial) music has generally avoided overt political content, particularly of a Left-leaning sort, certain musical subcultures have not shied away from complaints and controversial subjects. In Cunningham’s era, for instance, blues inherently dealt with suffering and unrest, although usually in a covert fashion and from a personal perspective. Similarly, southern old-time (white) music sometimes included protest and prolabor/union songs, for example, the Martin Brothers’ (Frank Welling and John McGhee) 1929 recording of “The North Carolina Textile Strike.” Southern composers, performers, and activists—Florence Reece, Ella May Wiggins, Jim Garland, his half-sister Aunt Molly Jackson and sister Sarah Ogan Gunning, and John Handcox captured this mix of native radical politics and working-class trials and hardships. They often identified with such Left-led unions as the (CPUSA affiliated) National Miners Union (NMU), the National Textile Workers, and the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU). Aunt Molly Jackson, for example, was deeply committed to labor unions. She eventually added an authentic voice of the folk to the formation of a northern urban folk music revival originally centered in New York City. Born in 1880, she married at fourteen. Forty years later, and the wife of a coal miner in Kentucky (her second husband), she was a repository of local folk songs. She testified about the terrible conditions in the coal towns and sang her composition “Ragged Hungry Blues” in November 1931 before an investigating team formed by the popular novelist Theodore Dreiser, head of the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners. The writers John Dos

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Passos and Samuel Ornitz and other concerned northern leftists joined Dreiser in conducting hearings into the terrible labor conditions in the Kentucky coalfields. Aunt Molly left the audience of outsiders stunned by her performative power and graphic descriptions of local suffering; within the month she had abandoned Clay County, Kentucky, for New York City, where she attracted much interest. She also penned “Poor Miner’s Farewell,” first published in the Communist-connected Red Song Book (New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1932). Florence Reece, wife of an NMU organizer, likewise wrote the catchy “Which Side Are You On?” during the Harlan County, Kentucky, coal wars in 1931.3 Miners’ and sharecroppers’ songs captured the complaints and heartaches of white and black workers mired in depression long before the stock market crash of 1929. Lawrence Gellert, arriving in the South in 1924 from New York City, soon uncovered a large cache of black protest songs. He proceeded to record and eventually publish them in the radical, and CPUSA connected, New Masses magazine, and subsequently in his books Negro Songs of Protest (1936) and “Me And My Captain”: Chain Gang, Negro Songs of Protest (1939). John Handcox penned “Raggedy, Raggedy Are We” and “There Are Mean Things Happening in This Land” while an organizer for the Socialist-connected STFU. Leftist protest songs were widespread, but not necessarily sung at sectarian labor activities. “The custom of singing protest songs at [Communist] Party functions or Communist-led demonstrations was surprisingly uncommon in Birmingham during the Third Period and was not adopted until the Popular Front [mid-1930s],” Robin Kelley notes in Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. “This is ironic when one considers Birmingham’s rich tradition of labor songs and the extent to which black industrial workers—including Communists—were involved in the regional gospel quartet circuit. . . . But the underground nature of the Party and the repressive terrain in which it operated—from alleys to armed mining camps—impeded the practice of singing even the mildest of Party songs.” The Party’s weekly southern magazine, Southern Worker, first appearing in 1930, occasionally published black and white workers’ songs, with the former mostly drawing upon traditional spirituals. Kelley continues, however: “Singing eventually became the Alabama Congress of Industrial Organizations’s (CIO’s) cultural cornerstone, and members from all over the state were encouraged to articulate the union’s message through song.” Perhaps this is somewhat of an exaggeration, but nonetheless labor-connected folk songs had found a grassroots southern audience (Kelly 1990, 105, 149).4 A wealth of songs came out of the textile strikes of 1919–1934, particularly those centered in Gastonia, North Carolina. Ella May


Wiggins—mill worker, mother of five, union organizer, and traditional singer—penned “Chief Aderholt,” “Come and Join the I.L.D.,” and particularly “The Mill Mother’s Song.” She was gunned down on the way to a union rally during the 1929 strike. Wiggins was followed by the striker Daisy McDonald, who wrote “The Speakers Didn’t Mind” and “On a Summer’s Eve,” both to the tune of “The Wreck of the Old NinetySeven” (a mountain ballad about a 1903 train wreck, itself modeled after “The Ship That Never Returned”). Dozens of songs came out of the 1929 textile strikes, mostly written by women, using the music of both oldtime tunes and current pop songs. The strikers also learned IWW- and Communist-connected songs, such as “Solidarity Forever,” introduced by northern organizers, but preferred local compositions. Within a few years mill workers had written and even commercially recorded various textileconnected songs, some referring to strike activities, but more to onerous working conditions. Dave McCarn recorded “Cotton Mill Colic” (1930), “Poor Man, Rich Man (Cotton Mill Colic No. 2)” (1930), and “Serves ’Em Fine” (1931), the Lee Brothers Trio joined with “Cotton Mill Blues” (1930), and there were various others. But as the songs gained popularity, they also generated a severe backlash. As Vincent Roscigno and William Danaher have argued, “the targeting of balladeers during strike events, and the suppression of these songs after the defeat of the 1934 general strike, clearly speaks to music’s centrality, importance, and power. Indeed, songs of textile life, complaining of the problems of the mill villages, quickly became taboo in many villages and remained so for many years” (Roscigno and Danaher 2004, 131).5 Labor and protest songs were common throughout the South during the Depression, written and performed by a variety of men and women, black and white, most nurtured in rural or mill/coal town poverty. Among the most active was Agnes “Sis” Cunningham. Born in 1909 near Watonga, Oklahoma, to a poor farmer family, she grew up in dire economic circumstances, although she managed to graduate from high school. She next tried college, first at the Oklahoma State College for Women and then at Weatherford Teachers’ College (later Southwestern Oklahoma State University). Following a short stint as a high school music teacher, and already steeped in radical politics, she moved to Commonwealth College in Mena, Arkansas, in 1931, where she remained, off and on, as a student and music instructor for a few years; her brother Bill was one of the unpaid faculty, and for a time acting director. “At suppertime we sang ‘The Internationale,’” she later wrote. “Somebody remembered how much I loved the song. Now I would see that it was sung every day.” Sis also recalled singing “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime,” “Hold the Fort,” “Solidarity Forever,” “Hallelujah, I’m a


Bum,” “Pie in the Sky,” “Casey Jones, the Union Scab,” and other old and new left-wing standards (Cunningham and Friesen 1999, 114). Commonwealth College opened in late 1923 in western Louisiana, and two years later moved near Mena, Arkansas, where it remained until its demise in 1940. Established by the Socialist activists Kate Richards O’Hare and William E. Zeuch as a resident labor college, Commonwealth promoted working-class solidarity and socialist economics, sustained by a body of radical songs. Lucian Koch was the director when Sis arrived, and he promoted more of an activist agenda, using labor drama and literature as a vital part of the curriculum. “In February 1932 the College presented an ‘original’ play by Agnes Cunningham entitled ‘Can You Hear Their Voices?’ before an audience of some three hundred neighbors,” William Cobb has written about the school’s first drama. “Tailored to the rural poor, the plot revolved around a poor farmer who was refused aid by local business and became a revolutionary.” Sis intimately knew her subject. Music joined theater in promoting worker consciousness and solidarity (Cobb 2000, 136). Sis loved her stay at Commonwealth, although there were disturbing internal conflicts between students and staff. The college published her Six Labor Songs, revolutionary poems set to music by Sis: “Wherefore Plough” (Percy B. Shelley), “I Sing the Battle” (Harry Kemp), “Song of the Lower Classes” (Ernest Jones), “Black Man in Prison” (Marion Doyle), “March of the Hungry Men” (Reginald W. Kauffman), and “The Cry of the People” (John G. Neihardt—later the author of the influential book Black Elk Speaks). Neihardt’s words captured a radical sensibility, but it was not easily sung on a picket line: “Down with your pride of birth, and your golden gods of trade/A man is worth to his mother earth, all that a man has made./ We are the workers and makers! We are no longer dumb!/ Tremble, O Shirkers and Takers! Sweeping the earth we come./ Ranked in the world-wide dawn, marching into the day./ The night is gone and the sword is drawn and the scabbard is thrown away!” Sis particularly identified with “Song of the Lower Classes”: “I especially loved this set of lyrics which described a situation very similar to the one endured by me, my family and other working people who ‘grow the bread,’ ‘build the wall,’ ‘dig the coal’ and ‘weave the cloth’ but go hungry, poorly sheltered and ill-clothed. This music, along with a number of my other tunes to poems, was run off on the office mimeo, covers were printed in the College Print Shop and each booklet sewn together on an ordinary sewing machine. They were distributed quite widely at the time, the songs sung—at least on our campus—by students, faculty and visitors alike” (Cunningham 1990, 13). Music, traditional as well as labor oriented, always played a vital role in the college’s turbulent life. “One bright movement in the otherwise


dismal spring of 1930 occurred when the Commoners discovered that one of their neighbors, Emma Dusenberry, was a veritable anthology of mountain folk music,” Cobb relates. “Mrs. Dusenberry was blind and seemed delighted at the interest that her music stimulated” (Cobb 2000, 131). While Sis does not mention Dusenberry in her autobiography, Lee Hays, a dramatics teacher at Commonwealth (and later a member of the Almanac Singers), was particularly influenced by Dusenberry. The students from the East “didn’t think much of Mrs. Dusenberry’s high, cracked, rhythmless voice, and made no bones about their displeasure,” Hays, an Arkansas native who joined the college in 1937, recalled. “But they had to admit that the neighbors did come to hear Mrs. Dusenberry, and that was one of the prime objects of the drama class. . . . People cherished the old lady. She was part of their history” (Koppelman 2003, 28). Waldemar Hille, dean of music at Elmhurst College in Chicago, visited Commonwealth during December 1937, when he first met Hays: “Hays was able to lead and make things hum,” he remembered. “Claude [Williams, a radical minister and Commonwealth’s director beginning in 1937] and Lee collected songs and turned them into labor songs, but while Claude was very much a part of this, Lee was the one who polished them and created the final accepted version” (Willens 1988, 53–54). Lee introduced Hille to Dusenberry, who performed “The Candidate’s a Dodger,” later one of Lee’s favorites. Lee, the school’s song leader, compiled two songbooks in 1938: Commonwealth Labor Songs and Commonwealth Labor Hymnal. The former included a fair selection of current organizing songs, for example “The Internationale,” “Solidarity Forever,” “Write Me Out My Union Card,” “Roll the Union On,” and the “Soup Song,” as well as the more traditional “Down by the Riverside,” “Go Down Moses,” and “We Shall Not Be Moved.” There were also “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” “The Crawdad Song,” and “The Riddle Song.” The Labor Hymnal had a more esoteric selection, with “We’ll Not Be Fools Any More,” “Commonwealth Song,” “The Song of the Lower Classes”—all missing writer/composer credits. There was also the popular “Brother, Can You Spare A Dime,” recently written by E. Y. (“Yip”) Harburg, as well as “Song of the Red Air Fleet,” “Comintern,” and “Red Army March,” indicating a more sectarian orientation. The Labor Hymnal also included the IWW standards “Casey Jones, the Union Scab” and “The Preacher and the Slave.”6 Before working at Commonwealth, Hays had briefly attended the College of the Ozarks, near Paris, Arkansas, beginning in 1934, where he first met Claude Williams, who had a nearby ministry. Lee next moved to Highlander Folk School, a labor school founded by Don West and Myles Horton in 1932 in Monteagle, Tennessee. Zilphia Johnson, daughter of


one of Paris, Arkansas’s leading families and another of Claude Williams’s acolytes, arrived at Highlander in 1935, married Horton, and became the school’s music director for the next twenty years. Lee joined Zilphia the same year at Highlander, where he directed theater and remained before heading to Commonwealth. Zilphia collected over 1,300 topical and labor songs, many of which appeared in the numerous songbooks that Highlander published, including Let’s Sing (1937), Songs of the Southern Summer School (1938), Songs for Workers (1939), Songs of Field and Factory (1940), and Songs [of ] Labor, Folk, War (1943). Don West was also involved with the Kentucky Workers Alliance (KWA), which promoted folk-styled labor songs and published West’s Songs for Southern Workers in 1937. The KWA was a local division of the national Workers Alliance of America, formed to represent state Works Progress Administration (WPA) workers and the unemployed. Richard Reuss has described the organization’s songbook: “Except for a few radical standards such as ‘The Internationale’ and ‘Solidarity Forever,’ almost all of the songs were recent folk-derivative compositions. They were printed as texts and marked, broadside style, ‘to be sung to the tune of ’ well-known traditional pieces, both sacred and secular” (Reuss and Reuss 2000, 99).7 In 1937 Sis attended the Southern Tenant Farmer’s Union convention in Muskogee, Oklahoma. Organized in 1934 by the dry cleaner H. L. Mitchell, the filling-station operator Clay East, and the sharecropper Alvin Nunally in Tryzona, Arkansas, the racially integrated STFU was involved with Commonwealth College beginning in 1937. “Claude Williams had jumped into organizing for the STFU,” Doris Willens, Lee Hays’s biographer, has explained. “He’d turn up at black churches, or schoolhouses, or cabins, to lead the talking and the singing, always ready to switch to hymns if anti-unionists burst in . . . Lee, as Claude’s ‘chief helper for quite a while,’ often accompanied him on organizing trips during his year as a ministry student at the College of the Ozarks. . . . Much of what Lee wrote and sang through the 1930s came out of the STFU experience” (Willens 1988, 40). In 1937 the STFU joined the recently formed CIO-affiliated United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), a partnership that lasted for two years. The socialist Mitchell balked at merging with the Communist-led UCAPAWA, so their cooperation was brief. During the 1937 four-day convention, as Sis recalled, “Each session opened with singing, usually led by A. B. Brookins or John Handcox or a choir from a local church. We sang one or several of the most loved songs: ‘Before I’ll Be a Slave, I’ll Be Buried In My Grave,’ ‘Hungry, Hungry Are We,’ ‘Roll the Union On,’ ‘Strange Things Happening in This Land,’ and, of course, ‘We Shall Not Be Moved’” (Cunningham and Friesen 1999, 158). The STFU was most


successful in organizing agricultural workers in Arkansas and Oklahoma, where Sis felt most comfortable.8 John Handcox’s story is particularly intriguing. Born on the family farm in Monroe County, Arkansas, in 1904, he developed an early interest in poetry. He struggled to survive on the land through the 1920s and into the 1930s, and happily joined the STFU in 1935, where his poetry and songwriting served a valuable function. “The songs I wrote was to try to tell the laboring people, the ones where I was trying to organize, to try to reveal to them the things that they was doing,” he later explained. “It wasn’t because they had asked for it but it was being forced on them by the landlords” (Schroeder and Lance 1993, 185). His work as an African American STFU organizer in Arkansas was cut short in 1937 because of escalating violence, which served as the context for his powerful song “There Is Mean Things Happening in This Land.” Handcox moved briefly to Missouri, then traveled around, fundraising for the STFU with H. L. Mitchell, who suggested he record his songs for the Library of Congress Archive of American Folk-Song. In March 1937 Charles Seeger and Sidney Robertson captured on wax Handcox’s voice and songs, including his compositions “Raggedy, Raggedy Are We” and “There Is Mean Things Happening in This Land,” as well as “We’re Gonna Roll the Union On.” He stopped writing songs for fifty years, living in obscurity, but resurfaced in 1980 and began composing and performing until his death in 1992. Mitchell later testified to Handcox’s importance to the STFU: “It was at this time [1936] that John L. Handcox, the black sharecropper-organizer and troubadour of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, started composing and singing his songs. The most famous of all is ‘Roll the Union On.’ Among America’s labor songs, this ranks third, following ‘Solidarity Forever,’ written by Ralph Chaplin of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and ‘We Shall Not Be Moved,’ first sung by the West Virginia miners in their 1929 strike, but later adopted as the official song of the STFU” (Mitchell 1987, 37). The union also published the STFU Song Book in Memphis.9 Sis collected and performed a wide range of labor songs, from Handcox and many others, that were circulating by the late 1930s. She eagerly shared these songs when she became music director at the Southern School for Women Workers near Asheville, North Carolina, in the summer of 1937. “Here in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, beautiful in the way of the Ozarks, I was able to get a respite—not in any sense a period of calm, but at least a change,” she recalled. “Most of them [the students] were physically exhausted from long hours at the loom, but mentally alert and eager to grab on to every moment of instruction in labor history and class-struggle theory the school could offer them”


(Cunningham and Friesen 1999, 168). Louise Leonard McLaren and Lois MacDonald, YWCA workers, founded the school in 1927 at Sweet Briar College in Virginia, but soon moved to Asheville. Similar to the Brookwood Labor College and the Bryn Mawr Summer School, with early support from Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and other radical women, the Southern School recruited white women between eighteen and twenty-five, with at least six years of schooling and two years of industrial experience. “After 1935, the school abandoned its connections with women’s groups and became more dependent on organized labor,” Mary Frederickson has explained. “However, contrary to union priorities, the school’s leaders continued to insist that workers’ education and the organization of women workers were crucial to the movement” (Frederickson 1980, 164). Men were admitted starting in 1938, however, and the school survived until 1950. As music director Sis compiled a mimeographed songbook for each student, which included her and her father William’s version of “Strange Things Happening in This Land,” adding verses to Handcox’s “There Is Mean Things Happening in This Land.” “There were no black students at this school,” Sis lamented, “and again I came to the conclusion that important changes in our socio-economic setup were way off in the future if the people who called themselves progressive leaders and educators could not face the problem of racial segregation squarely, but kept skirting around it.” In 1940 the school published the songbook Songs of the Southern School for Workers. Before returning to Oklahoma, Sis traveled to Washington, DC, where she picketed with a group of unemployed who had set up a tent city. “I ran into some former Commonwealth students,” she remembered, and was pleased to discover that “they were singing ‘The March of the Hungry Men,’ to which I had written a tune while at the college” (Cunningham and Friesen 1999, 169).10 Back in Oklahoma she worked in the arts and education division of the WPA in Oklahoma City, and remained active in the local Workers’ Alliance, another of Claude Williams’s organizations to aid the unemployed. Through her work with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Oklahoma City, she supported the “Scottsboro Boys” defense. She also backed the loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War and the League Against War and Fascism, and it soon made sense to join the local CPUSA (as had Lee Hays, Don West, and Waldemar Hille). In 1939 and into 1940 Sis was active in the Red Dust Players in Oklahoma—an agitprop group that used music and original skits to bring a radical political consciousness to the state’s rural poor. In all of her activities she used music, singing, playing her accordion, and composing to get across her radical messages to labor union members, rural farmers, children, and all others within reach of her voice


and songs. “Where there was any remnant of tenant farm organization left in Oklahoma in the late 30s, there the Red Dust Players would go,” Sis explained. “The most active of the union folks—people who had built locals of the Southern Tenant Farmer’s Union—had long since been driven off the land. But we were certain that we could find new leaders and that under the jurisdiction of UCAPAWA, the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America, the Union could be revived” (Cunningham 1990, 14). Sis joined Dan Garrison (a descendent of William Lloyd Garrison), Dorothy Schmidt, and a half dozen others in bringing radical theater to the rural poor. Otis Nation, state organizer of the UCAPAWA, arranged their appearances, mostly on Saturday nights. Sis described some of their activities: “Our first booking in the cotton country was southwest of Oklahoma City about 60 miles into the outback. The troupe was all agog, not knowing what exactly was in store. Of them all, I was probably easiest in mind. I had worked among tenant farmers before and had been a member of a poor farm family all my life” (Cunningham 1990, 14). They started with two short plays, and ended with Sis leading the bone-tired audience in singing “Strange Things Happening in This Land,” “We Shall Not Be Moved,” and “It’s Me, Oh Lord, Standin’ in the Need of Land.” For the oil workers near Tulsa, then trying to organize a CIO union, Sis composed “An Oil Derrick Out by West Tulsa.” “We performed in union halls and in homes and on the picket line. The closest we ever came to treading the boards of a real stage was when we gave a performance in an old abandoned movie house in Tulsa,” Sis wrote in 1948. “The crumbling walls literally bulged with five thousand people, cheering, shouting, stamping, whistling, laughing and crying as we went through our act. Our big hit song was one lampooning the hated judge who had just issued the strike-breaking injunction.” Songs for oil workers were easier to write than for the tenant farmers, “where the goal was not a foreseeable one like signing a contract” (Cunningham 1948).11 “The effectiveness of the Red Dust Players—especially our work with the oil union—was borne out by the reaction that came with suddenness and cut off our activities entirely,” Sis related in her autobiography. “We came back from a strenuous weekend late one night in April or May of 1940 to find the homes of some of our members broken into, their letters and papers strewn about, household stuff in a shambles, and books missing” (Cunningham and Friesen 1999, 193). A Red Scare had descended upon Oklahoma, resulting in the police raid on the CPUSA’s bookstore in Oklahoma City and the arrest of party members in August 1940. A series of trials followed, with prison sentences for four party leaders. Sis met Gordon Friesen in March 1941, a journalist and also a party


member, while the trials were in progress and a political chill had descended upon the state. On the run, Sis and Gordon were married in July 1941 and moved to New York City in October. They quickly moved into Almanac House with Pete Seeger, Baldwin “Butch” Hawes, Arthur Stern, and Woody Guthrie, among others (Lee Hays had recently moved out). Sis had already met Pete and Woody in Oklahoma City and was interested in joining the Almanac Singers, a loose group formed the previous year to perform labor and folk songs. Her voice and accordion playing easily fit into the Almanacs’ style. Sis and Gordon had found a temporary musical and political home. Sis’s fascinating life through the 1930s highlights so many aspects of the activist Left and particularly the role of songs in promoting labor/grassroots consciousness and organizing during the Depression. Labor songbooks, filled with older IWW songs and fresh compositions, were readily accessible by decade’s end, although it is impossible to gauge their distribution or use. There were also a few recordings of labor songs, although those connected to the CPUSA were very scarce. Alan Lomax, head of the Archive of American Folk-Song at the Library of Congress, was already collecting songs connected with the working class for a possible book. Some came from published songbooks, others from Lomax’s collecting trips, and still others from commercial recordings. As he later wrote, after a brief discussion of the history of working-class songs: “When the carriers and composers of this tradition were hit by the great depression in the ’30s, when they joined in the union-organizing drive that gripped the whole country in the same period, they naturally made new songs about all these crucial matters. As always before in their history, they took their favorite old tunes and set them to new texts—but these texts were in the vernacular of everyday speech and their style was ‘folk,’ rather than literary.” He discussed his project with Woody Guthrie, and they began organizing a book into subjects and chapters—“Hard Luck on the Farm,” “And You Land In Jail,” “Some From the Old Wobblies,” “Hell Busts Loose In Kentucky.” Woody also wrote introductions for each of the scores of songs, while Pete Seeger transcribed the tunes. He began searching for a publisher, but Pearl Harbor intervened and the book awaited publication until 1967. “In a sense we treasured these songs, because to us they were symbols of the fighting, democratic spirit of a whole sector of the population that is too often viewed as faceless, voiceless, supine and afraid,” he later explained. “Aunt Molly Jackson, Ella May Wiggins, Woody Guthrie, John Handcox and the people they inspired were none of these things. They were courageous and genuine folk poets, who were as deeply involved in political and social change as any politician, union organizer or social critic.” And he concluded: “As a song editor, I believed


that this collection was a testament to an unknown America, the folk poets who had become politically active and still kept their gift for songmaking” (Lomax, Guthrie, and Seeger 1967, 365–366). While Lomax selected none of Sis Cunningham’s songs for what became Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People (except some of the verses to “There Is Mean Things Happening in This Land” by Sis and her father, although the song is attributed solely to Handcox), she was certainly the embodiment of his description of an engaged folk poet. Sis’s musical activism continued until the end of her life in 2004. Following her involvement with the Almanac Singers in the early 1940s, she participated in People’s Songs, the radical musical organization following World War II, as well as in the presidential campaign of Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace in 1948. Taking a hiatus during the 1950s, while she and Gordon were raising two daughters and struggling to survive poverty in New York City, they initiated Broadside magazine in 1962. The influential Broadside published the topical songs of Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Malvina Reynolds, Pete Seeger, and scores of other activist singer–songwriters for three decades. She continued, as well, to compose topical songs, and published two songbooks. Sis’s leftist musical life spanned seven decades, an amazing contribution to promoting and circulating topical songs that captured much of recent history, starting in the Depression South, when Communists and Socialists were sometimes able to work together to promote economic and social justice. Notes 1. See also Clark Halker, For Democracy, Workers, and God: Labor Song-Poems and Labor Protest, 1865–1895 (University of Illinois Press, 1991); John Greenway, American Folk Songs of Protest (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953); Franklin Rosemont, Joe Hill: The IWW & the Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture (Charles H. Kerr, 2003); Archie Green, Only a Miner: Studies in Recorded Coal-Mining Songs (University of Illinois Press, 1972); Archie Green, ed., Songs About Work: Essays in Occupational Culture for Richard A. Reuss (Folklore Institute, Indiana University, Special Publications No. 3, 1993); Guido Van Rijn, Roosevelt’s Blues: African-American Blues and Gospel Songs on FDR (University Press of Mississippi, 1997); Bill C. Malone, Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class (University of Illinois Press, 2002). I wish to thank Patrick Huber, Chris Green, Rachel Rubin, and Jim Smethurst for their very helpful comments. 2. For a sampling of labor songs, see also Edith Fowke and Joe Glazer, Songs of Work and Freedom (Roosevelt University Press, 1960), and Tom Glazer, Songs of Peace, Freedom, and Protest (David McKay Co., 1970).

agnes “sis” cunningham and labor songs in the depression south / 95 3. For background information, see Shelly Romalis, Pistol Packin’ Mama: Aunt Molly Jackson and the Politics of Folksong (University of Illinois Press, 1999); Julia S. Ardery, ed., Welcome the Traveler Home: Jim Garland’s Story of the Kentucky Mountains (University Press of Kentucky, 1983); Timothy P. Lynch, Strike Songs of the Depression (University Press of Mississippi, 2001). For some information on Florence Reece, see Fran Ansley, Brenda Bell, and Florence Reece, “An Interview With Tom Lowry,” Southern Exposure 1, nos. 3–4 (Winter 1974): 137–143. 4. See also Steven Garabedian, “Reds, Whites, and the Blues: Blues Music, White Scholarship, and American Cultural Politics,” unpublished PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2004; Spirit of Steel: Music of the Mines, Railroads and Mills of the Birmingham District (Sloss Furnace National Historic Landmark, 1999). 5. See also Doug DeNatale and Glenn Hinson, “The Southern Textile Song Tradition Reconsidered,” Green, ed., Songs About Work, 77–107; Patrick Huber, “‘Cain’t Make a Living at a Cotton Mill’: The Life and Hillbilly Songs of Dave McCarn,” North Carolina Historical Review 80, no. 3 (July 2003): 297–333; Patrick Huber, “Battle Songs of the Southern Class Struggle: Songs of the Gastonia Textile Strike of 1929,” Southern Cultures 4 (Summer 1998): 109–122. 6. On Claude Williams and sectarian politics at Commonwealth in 1937/38, see Cobb (2000), chap. 8. Following World War II, Hille became involved in People’s Songs with Lee, Pete Seeger, Sis, and numerous others. My copy of the Commonwealth Labor Hymnal is missing its cover, so I am not positive that I have the correct identification, but I believe so. 7. On Williams, see Mark Naison, “Claude and Joyce Williams: Pilgrims of Justice,” Southern Exposure 1, nos. 3–4 (Winter 1974): 38–50. See also John M. Glenn, Highlander: No Ordinary School (University of Tennessee Press, 1996). 8. See also Nan Elizabeth Woodruff, American Congo: The African American Freedom Stuggle in the Delta (Harvard University Press, 2003), chap. 5, for a discussion of the STFU in the Delta. 9. Handcox’s Library of Congress recordings of “Raggedy, Raggedy,” “No More Mourning,” “Join the Union Tonight,” “We’re Going to Roll the Union On,” and “There Is Mean Things Happening in This Land” can be found in Ronald D. Cohen and Dave Samuelson, Songs For Political Action: Folk Music, Topical Songs, and the American Left, 1926–1953 (Bear Family Records BCD 15720, 1996), disc 1. 10. See also Mary Evans Frederickson, “A Place to Speak Our Minds: The Southern School for Women Workers.” PhD diss., University of North Carolina, 1981. 11. “An Oil Derrick Out by West Tulsa” is printed in Cunningham 1990, 16. For a longer discussion of the Red Dust Players, see Cunningham and

96 / ronald d. cohen Friesen 1999, 181–194, 337–338. As a final, and most fitting, tribute to her life and songwriting skills, in 2006 Bruce Springsteen included Sis’s song “My Oklahoma Home” on his We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions cd (Columbia 82876). The song, written with her father Bill, was published in Sis Cunningham, Red Dust & Broadsides: A Piece of People’s History in Songs, Poems & Prose (self published, 1990), 25.

Works Cited Cobb, William H. 2000. Radical Education in the Rural South: Commonwealth College, 1922–1940. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Cunningham, Sis. July 1948. “The Red Dust Players.” Unpublished manuscript in author’s possession. ———. 1990. Red Dust & Broadsides: A Piece of People’s History in Songs, Poems & Prose. New York: Sis Cunningham. Cunningham, Agnes “Sis”, and Gordon Friesen. 1999. Red Dust and Broadsides: A Joint Autobiography. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Denisoff, R. Serge. 1971. Great Day Coming: Folk Music and the American Left. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Frederickson, Mary. 1980. A Place to Speak Our Minds. In Working Lives: The Southern Exposure History of Labor in the South, ed. Marc Miller. New York: Pantheon Books. Kelley, Robin. 1990. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Koppelman, Robert S., ed. 2003. “Sing Out, Warning! Sing Out, Love!”: The Writings of Lee Hays. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Lomax, Alan, Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger. 1967. Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People. New York: Oak Publications. Mitchell, H. L. 1987. Roll the Union On: A Pictorial History of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr. Reuss, Richard A., and JoAnne C. Reuss. 2000. American Folk Music and LeftWing Politics, 1927–1957. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Roscigno, Vincent J., and William F. Danaher. 2004. The Voice of Southern Labor: Radio, Music, and Textile Strikes, 1929–1934. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Schroeder, Rebecca B., and Donald M. Lance. 1993. “John L. Handcox: ‘There Is Still Mean Things Happening.’” In Songs About Work: Essays in Occupational Culture for Richard A. Reuss, ed. Archie Green. Folklore Institute, Indiana University, Special Publications No. 3. Willens, Doris. 1988. Lonesome Traveler: The Life of Lee Hays. NY: W. W. Norton.


Chris Green’s piece on Don West’s Clods of Southern Earth in many respects takes up where James Lorence’s essay leaves off and anticipates where William Strickland’s piece on the Institute of the Black World begins. Lorence’s essay details the growth of a Left-led unemployed movement in Atlanta in the early days of the Depression. This movement ultimately declined because of governmental and extragovernmental repression and the inability of its Communist organizers to build a stable organization and long-term alliances with other organizations in the face of anti-Communism, ingrained racism, and lack of capable personnel who really understood local conditions. As Green points out, West’s book was phenomenally successful for a volume of poetry because of its grounding in what might be thought of as the late Popular Front in the South, a political and cultural milieu that is also detailed in Ronald Cohen’s essay on the folksinger Agnes “Sis” Cunningham. West’s book was written, produced, circulated, and received within a matrix of local, regional, and national Left and liberal-Left political groups, educational institutions, religious organizations, journals, cultural centers, and labor unions, which not only produced sales in the tens of thousands of copies but also generated a deep response among the book’s readers, many outside the usual audience for serious poetry in the United States. Unlike Lorence, who described the moment a decade before, Green presents a period in which the success of the Popular Front allows West to temporarily break through the racism and red-baiting that crippled earlier movements. However, Green also describes how the Cold War revived those familiar divisions, particularly with the Wallace campaign of 1948, as the national Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) moved right and Popular Front organizations like the Southern Conference for Human Welfare were isolated or collapsed altogether. As a result, despite the sales of Southern Clods of Earth and its favorable reviews in both Left and “mainstream” journals and newspapers, West, though still active in politics, education, and the arts, fell into relative obscurity as a writer even in Georgia. As Strickland shows in his essay on the Institute of the Black World, it would be decades before such a broad coalition and constituency for progressive politics, culture, and art would be assembled again in Atlanta, albeit in a different modality.

5 The Tight Rope of Democracy: Don West’s C LODS OF SOUTHERN EARTH Chris Green

Don West composed poetry to catalyze political action. The son of a small farmer turned sharecropper from the north Georgia mountains, West first attended Lincoln Memorial University and then Vanderbilt, where he trained as a preacher of the Social Gospel. After cofounding Highlander Folk School in 1932, West served as a Communist organizer in Georgia, North Carolina, and Kentucky through 1937. From 1938 to 1941, he worked as a Congregationalist minister in Ohio and Georgia, and during World War II he earned national recognition as a public school administrator who taught democracy in rural Georgia. Yet at each step of his varied career, West had written and published poems. He mobilized all his skill as a poet (and an activist and organizer) to help create a society where the working and lower classes could join together across categories of work, race, gender, or locality to struggle for political, social, and economic rights. In May 1946, West’s poetry became the center of his work when the leftist, New York press Boni and Gaer brought out West’s Clods of Southern Earth as their first book. The book selected the strongest of his poems from the previous fifteen years, and its publication (along with his work as an educator) earned West a professorship of Human Understanding and Citizenship at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta. In Clods, West sang as a mountaineer who proclaimed his own ancestors’ resistance to slavery; he sang as a preacher of justice who decried the class system that set black against white; he sang as a white Southerner whose father had died sharecropping and who now dared to ask his fellow working-class whites to, as he puts it in the introductory poem, “clasp the hand of a Blackman / And say: / Brother!” (“Look Here” 13). West sang for 148 pages, an impressive amount of poetry regardless of

100 / chris green

the time period or target audience, which makes the number of copies sold—over 14,000 in the first year (“Boni & Gaer” 1947)—even more impressive. While it is unclear exactly who ordered these copies, the book was bought and distributed within a penumbra of leftists from which the 1948 Progressive Party in part arose, including the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW), readers of New Masses, and the People’s Institute for Applied Religion (PIAR). West’s book served to rally progressive intellectuals and the working class. Designed for accessibility, the poetry authenticated its audiences’ struggles, language, and desires. Labor and civil rights organizations that opposed segregation distributed the book into their networks to foster cross-class interracial unity and action. Released the year after Georgia abolished the poll tax and white-only political primaries, Clods instigated waves of support and backlash. West converted that cultural capital into political clout and led Georgia’s Progressive Party in the 1948 presidential campaign. This essay demonstrates how a chorus of actors used Clods as one rallying point to cohere a cross-class, interracial coalition that intervened on behalf of rights and justice for all American citizens. The history of how this coalition formed, functioned, and dissolved has been laid out by such scholars as Patricia Sullivan in her Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (1996).1 Given their recuperative work, these histories have rarely had the opportunity to evaluate the rhetorical tools that the coalition used to coalesce Americans of diverse identities (races, classes, and regions). To do so, this essay examines the purposeful production, distribution, reception, and influence of Clods. Although nationally few knew West’s name, when Boni and Gaer brought out Clods, papers throughout the country jumped to review it because of its publisher’s reputation. In the 1920s, Charles Boni and his brother founded Boni and Boni, which brought out such foundational modernist, multicultural books as Alain Locke’s The New Negro (1925), William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain (1925), and Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans (1926). Boni’s commitment to radical literatures formed when he and his brother opened the Washington Square Bookshop in Greenwich Village in 1913, which became a meeting place for Villagers such as Max Eastman, Emma Goldman, John Reed, Margaret Sanger, Theodore Dreiser, and Eugene O’Neill (Dardis 1994, 46). Joseph Gaer was also calmly and fiercely committed to helping diverse peoples realize the hope and rights of American citizenship. Gaer was a Jewish immigrant from Bessarabia, and his literary aspirations flourished in California during the 1920s. Thereafter, he became a

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Federal Writing Project field director, worked in the federal government, and was the publicity director of the CIO’s Political Action Committee (PAC) from 1943 to 1946 (Walbridge 1951). In short, Boni and Gaer’s new press joined Boni’s reputation and skill in literary publishing with Gaer’s expertise in crafting political material for the public. Boni and Gaer’s quartet of foci—progressive politics, fascism, the Jewish people, and Soviet Russia—reveals their goal: to rally Americans to support human integrity against internal fascism. From 1946 through 1948, they released twenty-four books. That these books sold well in postwar America represents both the sales savvy of the publishers and the strength of leftist networks.2 Their choice to herald their project with Clods demonstrates that they believed West’s poetry—the only poetry they published—would speak to the core of progressive political hope from the South. Anticipating diverse literacies, Clods sought to articulate the mutual interest of an array of parties whose fates, it argued, were closely tied. Rather than asking its readers to shed their identities and varied literacies, West called for a revision of relations between seemingly discordant groups by revealing their locations within a phalanx of common cause. But the proving ground for West and his publisher’s poetics of relations can only be gauged by tracing the book’s distribution, reception, and use by its varied intended readerships. Thus, I first examine newspaper reviews, whose responses were largely based on regional context. Second, I demonstrate how West’s poetry formed a moral and political manifesto for the hidden readers from PIAR. Third, I examine the extra matter—its blurbs, cover bio, and introduction—to see how West and the publishers worked to bring poetry to nonliterary readers. Fourth, I delve into the specifics of coalition building between the CIO and the SCHW, which sets the stage for the final part of my essay that reveals the role of West’s poetry in the 1948 elections in Atlanta and Georgia. Reviewing West from the North, South, and Left In Southern newspapers, leftist politics were not casually discussed and, when discussed, were commonly dismissed. Nevertheless, readers and reviewers praised Clods for presenting a realistic version of the world they knew. In The Atlanta Constitution, Alex Hite (1946) turns what might be understood as a stylistic problem into praise: “[West’s] writing is powerful and earthy and crude. He is Walt Whitman in overalls.” Glad to read a work that dares to state its morality clearly, Hite calls West “a born crusader” and jovially notes how West “satirizes the pusillanimous Southern poets who make pretty songs about Greek culture and an antebellum

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South.” While not quoting any poetry in the review, Hite undoubtedly refers to “They Take Their Stand (For some professional Agrarians)” (Clods 29).3 Composed in ballad form (ABAB iambic tetrameter), the poem rails against the Agrarians’ denial of the South that West knows: In Dixie Land they take their stand, Turning the wheels of history back For murder, lynch and iron hand To drive the Negro from his shack. (9–12)4

On the previous and facing page (28), West juxtaposes the poem “What Shall a Poet Sing?” which is also a ballad, although one paradoxically constrained to eight lines. Written in an iambic trimeter over-meter, the poem’s rhythm breaks at the beginning of lines with either gasping anapests or harsh trochees. This stifling of the rhythm emphasizes the brutal breakdown of life:5 / ˘|˘ / | ˘ / ˘ What is a poet saying / ˘| ˘ / | ˘ / Down by a Georgia pine / ˘ ˘ ˘ / | ˘ /|˘ Where a broken body’s swaying / ˘|˘ / | ˘ / Hung to a cotton line . . . ? / ˘ ˘ / | ˘ / | ˘ With his folk all burdened down, / [˘] | ˘ / | ˘ / Pinched by hunger’s pang, / ˘ | ˘ / |˘ / Whether he’s white or brown, / | ˘ / |˘ / ˘ What shall a poet sing . . . ? (entire poem quoted; ellipsis in original)


When the final iambs slice the word “poet” in half, the last line paradoxically fulfills the iambic trimeter that has haunted the poem. The consequences of metrical fulfillment are echoed by the aching slant rhyme of “pang” and “sing.” Ending in an open, lingering question about how to address the suffering and grief of poverty and power in the South, the humorous “They Take Their Stand” takes on a throat-clenching quality that assumes the level of condemnation. While on the surface West presented himself as a poet whose work Hite lauded as “blunt” and “crude,” West was anything but—as seen in the metrical nuances of “What Shall a Poet Sing?” Clods’s first review, which appeared in Mountain Life and Work (the voice piece of the Southern Council of Mountain Workers), aptly outlines its structure. In Clods’s first section, “No Anger in a Dead Man,” West takes the stance of a “compassionate observer” who “holds up the wrongs and needs of the Southland, and heralds the waking and rising complaint of the wronged” (“Clods” 1946, 27 and 26). The second section, “Folks A-Living,” conducts portraits of the mountain people with whom West came of age, and they “speak, quietly, often with pathos” (27). After establishing “the passionate appeal” of the first section and the “patient poignance” of the second, the third section, “No Lonesome Road,” deliberately reviews the “social wrongs” that West wants people to address. The section rings with a “note of excitement, of prophecy, of optimism” as West gives “the final realization that in the suffering, the grieving, the struggle, no group and no one bears a lonely burden.” That the review praises West is not surprising: its readers felt heroized in their labors to uplift the poor. Although they may not have been thinking about their origins when Southern uplift and educational workers retreated into the mountains before the onslaught of Jim Crow, certainly they were glad to see what they believed about the mountains—the integrity of its culture as demonstratively American—being deployed in a call to unify the South. Just as West structured each section of the book to create a compelling argument, so he crafted each poem in straightforward language to facilitate engagement with a brief but richly rendered experience. The New York Times Book Review recognized this quality and called West “a homespun writer, with a fondness for short-lined free verse compositions and with a strong didactic bent” (Burger 1946). However, the reviewer continues, those qualities are “not sufficient in themselves to make a poet.” The review exactly excises and recounts West’s thesis about the oppression and division of the Southern “mass of workers” by “a small minority of land-owning Southerners and factory-owning Northerners.” Yet, read in the context of modernist poetry and the ensuing Cold War,

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the reviewer ends by condemning the book: “It is a romantic, simplified South which will be readily recognized by every school boy from Moscow to Vladivostok, but it has several features which will bewilder most Southerners, white and black—and especially those ‘workers’ who have just gotten through sending Bilbo . . . back to congress.” The reviewer notwithstanding, Bilbo’s supporters were a narrow segment of Mississippi’s population: the poll tax in Mississippi, the state that sent Bilbo to the U.S. Senate, caused only 15 percent of eligible voters to vote in 1944, while non–poll-tax states averaged 63 percent (“Votes Cast” 1946). The New York Times Book Review demonstrates that the world of readers who valued poetry in the North was not necessarily cognizant of the complex, oppressive political realities in the South. Nor could they hear poetry as Southerners did. In the New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review, Ruth Lechlitner (1946), who once conducted reviews for New Masses, denounces West’s poetry as “militant regionalism” whose theme is “over simplified and over sentimentalized.” After dismissing his free verse as “chopped-up, cliché-studded, indifferently bad prose,” she attacks his lack of “appeal to the ear,” which she tells the reader must be well done if West is to appeal to a Southern audience who she imagines is “conditioned to the strong rhythm of work in field or factory; to the musical variations of wind-blown tree or cloud or of running creek water; to country dances and songs; to the full sweeping poetry of the Bible.” This appeal to a Whitmanesque verse invokes a different sense of culture than that held by Southerners themselves. Reviewing the book for New Masses, Harold Preece (1946) declares that Clods “has let in a fresh, clean wind” across the hills and rivers “where we thought blood and rope to be eternal phenomena.” While few “croppers and miners” had read Look Homeward, Angel, Preece praised the fact that trade unions had ordered dozens of copies of Clods. To illustrate the poem’s effects, Preece relates witness from a farm-wife with ten children from the mountains of Tennessee, who shared her love of the poem “Naked Words” (19–20), which she had heard West read. Preece quotes the last two stanzas that begin by describing the “Hard old hands” and “Bent young bodies— / Crooked, like old iron pieces” and end with those “bent iron pieces / Sit[ting] in solemn judgment” (24–26, 39–40). Perhaps the most startling and vivid image of the entire book comes at the start of the third stanza: I’ll speak of babies, too, Bent-boned and sallow Sucking on tired breasts

the tight rope of democracy / 105 At dusk time— Of black hands, Hard as hickory In the warped plow-handles They clutch [.] (12–19)

Here the rhythm and sound of West’s “free-verse” speak with accord and power, weaving together lines with alliteration (“babies” and “Bentboned”; “sallow” and “Sucking”; “Hard as hickory”) and the careful spill of assonance and rhyme (“bone” and “sallow”; “Sucking” and “dusk”; “black hands,” etc.). These tight three- and two-beat lines move slowly because they are packed with hard words, and each foot demands its rhythmic space. Key to the careful gait, the feet alternate meters in such a way that stresses are bunched and accentuated as the broken rhythm straddles enjambed lines. Indeed, as the lines break in the middle of syntactic units, the syntax yokes them together, unifying the distribution of beats (rhythm) across lines rather than within lines. Consider, for instance, lines 16–19. Noting line breaks in the text as well as foot changes in the stress notation, I have transcribed the lines into two eight-syllable sets, which correspond with major syntactic units: / | / ˘| / ˘ ˘ ˘ / Of black hands, / Hard as hickory / | / / ˘ | ˘ / ˘ ˘ In the warped plow-handles / They clutch

In this metrical mix, there is an even distribution of stress: four stresses in each eight-syllable syntactic unit. Furthermore, three of those four stresses—which are separated by line breaks—are both clumped in the middle of the syntactic unit while coming at the end and start of the feet. While the poem may appear gnarled and broken, its form, like the bodies of the people it describes, has adapted to its work. West depicted how people’s bodies were shaped by their suffering and survival, and he was aided by the skillful typography of the collection. The typeface, Linotype Benedictine, is set in 12 pt.—a large face for poetry and rare for literary texts. Moreover, the use of 4 pt. leading results in a maximum of twenty-six lines per page, a small number compared to other poetry texts. In an era when textuality was being reduced to tight print in mass-marketed books, the clear layout and type (size and face) convey to the reader that these poems and their stories are worthwhile. Indeed, the clarity and expanse of the type stand out against the normal

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poetic typography of “cultured” books from which the target audience felt excluded. This design by Joseph Gaer harkens back to his skills as the director of publications for the CIO’s PAC. Two months after being reviewed in New Masses, West’s book was offered in the December 17, 1946, issue as a Christmas Premium (28) and continued to be advertised through October 28, 1947, when it sold out. Each issue of New Masses provided a list of books, one of which readers selected as a gift when they subscribed. By including West’s book among those titles, the editors put West on par with Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Karl Marx’s Capital, Ann Petry’s The Street, and Du Bois’s Color and Democracy; though it is unclear how many copies were distributed, the audience for New Masses has been described as “middle-class intellectuals” and Communist “sympathizers” (Harrison 1994, 4). Yet after the Communist support of Stalin and the USSR—both before and after their alliance with Germany—New Masses’s audience had dwindled since its heyday during the Depression when its influence outstripped that of either The New Republic or The Nation (Aaron 1977, 354–364).6 The praise of Mike Gold (1946), the Daily Worker’s literary editor, is not surprising. Gold begins by denouncing the reactionary Eugene Talmadge, who had just won the 1946 gubernatorial election, and states that West demonstrates most Georgians’ anger and dignity: West conducts a “defense of the red-neck Georgia cracker, an elucidation of him as a confused and struggling human figure who is capable of all love and humanity.” While discussing West’s poetry, Gold also describes his countenance as “a tall man . . . with deep set eyes . . . [and the] rugged eye brows, strong chinbone, the high-cheek bone, powerful nosebone of a mountaineer.” For Gold—as for others outside the literary field—a man’s image was an argument for why his poems would be worth reading. Similarly, the back cover (on the paper version) or jacket (on the hardcover version) of Clods presents a large photo of West in an open front shirt and sweater, his eyes deep and shadowed but wrinkled with smiling. A bare tree trunk rises behind him. The decision to print the photo announces the publishers’ intention to play upon West’s demeanor as an intellectual who is down-home, worn, joyful, and white. At the end of World War II, sacrifice, hard work, honesty, and physicality were statements of worthy participation—particularly in light of the trials of trust to come over Communism, when Americans had already begun to worry about identifying fascists in their midst. On August 30 The Atlanta Constitution announced West’s new professorship at Oglethorpe, emphasizing that his book “broke a publishing record when 13,000 copies [sic] were sold” before the book was released (“Poet Don West” 1946). The article explains West’s background as a rural


Georgian who frankly declared that “he comes from stock commonly known as ‘pore white trash.’” This article represents the approval and excitement that the South was feeling at West’s success, as can be seen in reviews from the Mobile Register, the Atlanta Journal, and the Chattanooga Times. Such praise was not at first reflected by Harold, who wrote about Georgia culture in his columns for The Atlanta Constitution—the same newspaper in which Ralph McGill would red-bait West in 1948. Like the reviewer from the New York Times, Martin asserts that even though West dares to speak for “the sharecropper, the mill worker, the man down in the mine,” they will “repudiate him when he says the black man has an equal right to economic opportunity” (1946a). But Martin found himself inundated by reader mail, which led him to grant a retraction: “I was surprised to learn that West is a controversial figure, much loved and deeply hated” (1946b). One reverend wrote in and explained that “there are thousands and thousands of workers who will tell you that paternalism has been replaced by exploitation and bitter hate.” After considering such opinions, Martin agrees, “Don West is one of us. He knows what’s wrong with us. . . . The trouble with us is there are too many folks who say that Georgia is the finest State in the United States and Georgians are the noblest people, and that anybody who questions that is a traitor to his homeland.” Martin would prove prophetic. The Earth below the Grassroots: Clods of Southern Earth’s Hidden Readers The number of copies that Clods had sold was essential to garnering mainstream credence. What the reviewers failed to ask was to whom these copies had been sold. We have seen that New Masses was one node of distribution, and I will later discuss the book’s most public audience, members of the SCHW, with whom West would play out his political moves in 1947 and 1948. Yet 8,000 of the 14,000 copies sold in the first year were purchased and distributed by the PIAR (“Boni & Gaer” 1947; Williams to President 1946). PIAR was founded by Claude Williams in 1940. Williams was West’s fellow student under the guidance of Alva Taylor at the School of Religion at Vanderbilt. After Vanderbilt, Williams went on to develop a system of radicalizing literacy when organizing sharecroppers in Arkansas and Mississippi for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU), from which he was later exiled because of his Communist sympathies. PIAR sought to realize democracy and equality (of wealth and race) via the radicalizing power of religious literacy to join together the tenant farmer, the impoverished family farmer, and the working class. West served as

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a board member and organizer for PIAR, and Williams acted as West’s political confidante in 1946 and 1947. PIAR brought together groups of some fifty people for three to ten days, uniting whites and blacks—many of whom, Williams recounts, “had never sat down for a meal together” (quoted in Troy and Williams 1976, 48)—in common learning. Literacy levels were low, and even those who could read were not prepared to delve into tracts on economics and politics. Yet Williams desired to educate them in just such knowledge. West’s book proved the perfect pedagogical tool for this radical literacy, which can be demonstrated through showing its similarity to hand-designed posters that PIAR used to convey its theories of the social, moral, and economic order. The posters translated stories and concepts from the Bible into contemporary content via pictorial representation and precise language (Troy and Williams 1976, 49–50). For instance, one poster, “The New Earth” presented an equation: “Victory + Faith – World = Righteousness,” which it explained meant, “Victory is the faith that overcomes the world and equals righteousness.” Each word served as an acronym for key terms and supporting Bible verses: F A I T H

— — — — —

ellowshiping with one another (1 John 1:7) dmonishing (Rom. 15:14) nstructing (2 Tim. 3:16,17) rusting one another (James 2: 1–4) elping one another (Gal. 6: 2–5) (quoted 50)

On the one hand, considered bluntly, Williams taught Marxism through religion: “I know that Mark is not Marx . . . I know that Luke is not Lenin and that Joe Stalin is not Jesus Christ. But these men all have one thing in common—they were and they are all despised by a common enemy” (quoted in Belfrage 1944, 272). On the other hand, Williams had developed a system that was capable of uniting, responding to, and guiding America’s lower and working classes. Given PIAR’s goal of catalyzing unity and reforming circumstance through unionization and common action, Clods served as an excellent educational device. Working with images and symbols rendered in accessible language and form, West’s poems articulate the interconnection between people that Williams hoped to reveal. When the poems are working at their best—with the right reader, in the right circumstances—they seem to dissolve the distinctions between region and race, between culture and nature, between self and group. Some of West’s earliest poetry addressed the religious issues that continued to inform his moral resistance. In Clods, “I’ve Seen God” (52) operates with two other poems (“Lord, I Prayed” [31] and “Preachers” [54]) in the first section to muster support


for the Social Gospel: justice and love should manifest in earthly action.7 Beginning with a description of God in the weather and earth, “I’ve Seen God” insists that God is manifest: I’ve seen God— In the tired eyes Of a factory worker Bound by chains Of circumstance. (10–14)

Similarly, “Lord, I Prayed”—a dramatic lyric, composed in couplets, synthesizing William Blake, Langston Hughes, and the blues—explores the consciousness of an impoverished figure who is bound by his situation and is trying to discern who is morally responsible for his actions. Opposing those conditions—that Jesus is most with the impoverished, who are more prone to and more blamed for sin—stands the poem “Preachers” (54–55). Written as a choral apostrophe, the poem takes a similar stance toward religion as “They Take Their Stand” assumes toward poetry: “Preachers” condemns the “platitudes” spouted by preachers from “a limousine,” who do not know the “toil-racked bodies / and gaunt eyes hard and keen” of “working folks” (1, 6, 13–14, 11). The working-person chorus in the poem speaks out against those preachers “Who rant and rave and yell / About a poor man’s sinning” (18–19). They reclaim religion in the name of struggle. Untwining the contradictions instilled in working-class moral systems, West’s poems investigate the systems’ moral foundations and re-weave them in a system that focuses attention on the circumstances of daily life. When the participants of PIAR acknowledged the possibility of their suffering’s resolution through social action, Williams and West succeeded. Yet, aside from the ones attested to by Williams’s biographer, Cedric Belfrage, the methods used are difficult to pinpoint because such work was undertaken with those who had low levels of written literacy. Nevertheless, Williams and PIAR relentlessly distributed and used West’s book. But this dissemination only became possible through an important revolution in publishing—the development of the low-cost paperback book. It is of some irony that the book’s value in the popular literary field increased because of sales that resulted from great economy on the part of the publishers, who discounted the book to bulk buyers such as PIAR, SCHW, CIO, and New Masses.8 While the hardback version of Clods sold for $2, the paperback version sold for only $1. This allowed the wholesale prepublication price to drop under 30 cents and the postpublication price to remain at 37.5 cents per copy, with 7.5 cents going to West’s royalty (West to Claude Williams, November 18, 1946). The goal was not to make money, but to make

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poetry available. Thirty years after the book’s publication, when directing a folk school in West Virginia, West relates that he met “an old disabled miner,” who upon hearing West’s name brought out an “old dog-eared copy of Clods of Southern Earth, in paperback. I’ve always insisted on paperback. . . . I want to publish them as cheap as possible” (K. Sullivan 1979, 56). But just because a book is available and affordable does not mean that a reader, especially a resistant one, will pick it up—a difficulty that was in part overcome through specific networks of distribution and in part through West’s and Gaer’s textual strategies. Defending Poetry The response of common readers in the South differed so greatly from book reviews because Clods was designed for them rather than for participants in the mainstream literary field. What led New York and Atlanta reviewers to call West’s work “crude” led nonliterary readers to praise West’s poetry. The biography on the jacket’s back flap sets the stage for the introduction by recounting West’s working-class experience, which was juxtaposed to his education and his new professorship at Oglethorpe University. This biographic statement demonstrates West’s credentials as an organic intellectual, highlighting his connection to his roots, showing his determined self-education and travel to Europe, and ending with his return to his “native Georgia.” Advancing the sense of native-intellect, the first sentence on the cover’s back flap announced that this was West’s “first book,” when in reality it was his fifth and functioned more as a compendium of his new and selected poems: three-fourths (61) of the poems were reprinted from earlier collections, from which West harvested and revised for the task at hand. So, although West appeared as a beginner, his book was designed to influence readers who would value him more because this was his first book. One can hear the stories of the mountaineers’ native intelligence and ability with language—if not with the formal tools of academic literacy—ringing in the background. Similarly, unlike other poetry books, this book did not highlight the venues in which West had published, minimizing his readers’ associations with these titles: New Masses, the Daily Worker, the Christian Century, Negro Liberator, and Mountain Life and Work. This portrait of literary innocence encouraged most nonliterary readers, but it began the book’s exile in the literary establishment. Inside the book proper, West prefaces the poems with a twelve-page introduction followed by the poem “Look Here, America,” which invited the reader into a relationship with the 133 pages of poetry that follow. West writes in a conversational tone of direct, familiar address, speaking to the reader as “you.” He employs tropes and conventions that any Southern


reader would instantly recognize, such as Southern heritage and family. West’s inversion of these tropes shows that he knows how they work, but that he also thinks they tell mistruths, which he then corrects by sharing stories and experiences that the trope would normally exclude. These revisions evoke material from the storehouse about the target audience’s common experience. That is, West attempts to persuade a wide range of readers of their common substance. Speaking desire, West writes, “You say you want a poem with its roots in the earth . . . and perhaps a poem that may sometimes show the reasons for heart ache and sorrow of plain folks and sometimes point the way ahead. I don’t blame you. I sort of feel that way too” (2). West wins a range of readers through the use of tentative, open recognition in his diction: “perhaps,” “sometimes,” “sort of.” Seeking to disestablish the alienation of cultured authority that threatens to lecture about what is correct, West admits his own lack of knowledge and uses generalities to allow a range of readers to link their experiences. The introduction goes on to argue that the common poverty of Southerners is the result of exploitation by the slave-owners and the resulting Southern oligarchy. West explores his “family background” from “an old Southern family”—a motif he turns on its head, by identifying his ancestors as working poor, as indentured servants of colonialists, and as American Indian (2–6). With grim humor, he unleashes another inversed motif by mentioning that families do not like to talk about how an ancestor was a “‘horse thief ’” and agrees that Americans want better: they want to tell about an ancestor who was bold enough to “steal a continent, a nation; steal the lives and labor of thousands of black men and women in slavery; steal the wages of underpaid workers; steal a railroad, a bank” (4). And some of the victims of that thievery were West’s own ancestors. He then asserts that this story is not abnormal but shared by “the real men and women of the South” who were taught by the whites from “the big houses” to say “the hateful word ‘nigger,’” just as Hitler taught Aryan Germans to speak of Jews (6). Furthering his claim to speak for America, West details his family’s life in the mountains where the Cartecay “crawls and gurgles” over “the cataracts and through the fords.” Drawing upon associations with Appalachia generated in magazines, novels, and movies, West assures his readers that his are “plain people to whom it is natural to ask a stranger to stay all night.” The ethics of kindness, indeed, are what West claims drove them to the mountains to escape “the ever-encroaching wave of slave-holding planters in the lowlands” (7). Through the hard work of making a life in the mountains, they escaped the “[d]isease, starvation, and illiteracy” of those whites “forced to live in the hard, unfertile regions of the South” (8)—a perfect description of one major audience that West sought to mobilize.

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After outlining the daily struggle his family faced (and the deaths of three of his eight brothers and sisters), West shows that he could move from mountain roots to succeed in American education (11). West then dismisses higher education (even as he still realizes the value his readers would recognize in it) and insists, “real education has been beaten into me by the everlasting toil and hunger I’ve seen” in the struggles of miner, textile workers, and sharecroppers. He states that “this education” instills in people the desire “never to rise upon the shoulders of others” but to work together so “the great mass of plain people can also have a richer life.” He concludes by offering the reader his poems: “So I pass these poems on to you who may care enough to read,” inviting the embrace of these “little pieces of life—and death—picked up along the way.” This act of physical giving, of communal holding, of care-taking is then manifested by the poem on the facing page, the only poem in the book entirely set in urgent italic script, “Look Here, America” (13–14). The title phrase, “Look Here, America,” is a locution directed at a listener who needs to pay attention to something about which the speaker feels strongly. The poem begins by recognizing that “America” and “victory” live in “sharecroppers, tenants / Black men and Crackers” (ll. 1–4). In short lines, West is insistent about the need to learn: “And you must listen / And look / And think deep . . .” (4–6, ellipsis in original). He replaces earlier suggestions and generalities with a language of gentle imperative. In the second stanza, West forecasts a future where a “Georgia Cracker” would proudly “clasp the hand of a black man / And say: / Brother! ” (12, 13–15).9 After that hopeful instigation, West repeats the title, “Look here, America,” and pulls the reader back to the page after such a radical consideration of interracial brotherhood (16). “Bend your head toward me,” he calls, listen to these “tales,” and touch these “little pieces / Of twisted life” (17, 20, 21–22). The poem concludes in a dwindling voice in the final stanza set on the next page. America, West implores, “must” look because even he . . . a Georgia Cracker— One of your own mongrels— Am grieved By looking At what I’ve seen . . . (27–31; end ellipsis original in text)

The facing page quietly introduces the title of Part One, which deepens the reader’s consideration as it brews together the threat of purposeful death with the resulting vacancy: “NO ANGER IN A DEAD MAN” (15).


Coalitions “Bowed Over a Few Charred Bones” Publication of Clods capitalized on eight years of careful coordination between the CIO and the SCHW. Attempting to mobilize voters and expand their membership, both organizations were involved in political action in the South. Together, the CIO and the SCHW sought to negotiate alignments between identity divisions—between insider (Southerner) and outsider (Northerner), between black and white, between working/lower and professional/middle classes—necessary to promote progressive politics and pluralistic values. Not only would West’s poetry affirm such alignments, but the esteem that West’s book won would allow West to help radicalize the direction of the SCHW. To appreciate West’s intervention, one first needs to understand the history between the SCHW and the CIO, as well as Joseph Gaer’s influence upon the shape of Clods. The CIO’s move south sought to build upon their voter mobilization in the 1944 legislative and presidential campaign, which Joseph Gaer had helped to mastermind as publicity director of the CIO-PAC (1943–1946). To mobilize a broad voter base who would support labor, the CIO-PAC sought to show people the commonality of need regardless of race, gender, or locality (Foster 1975, 5). To achieve this goal, Joseph Gaer authored pamphlets that served as architecture prototypes for Clods. Familiarity with the rhetorical strategy of this pamphlet genre is also critical because the working class knew it better than the design of contemporary poetry books. This is Your America, Gaer’s first pamphlet, ran thirty-two pages and orchestrates simple, clear writing with full-page photos of landscape— natural and industrial—and facial portraits of men and women coded to show their ethnic backgrounds. The pamphlet begins by appealing to a wide range of work-identities—“a worker, earning your living honestly— /. . . a farmer, a small business man, or a housewife”—based on their belief in a common America (Gaer 1944, 19). Facing the image of a hydroelectric dam, the next page lists the variety of people who had immigrated to America (20–21). While acknowledging diversity to garner identification, the pamphlet’s explanation of pluralist politics comes in answer to the question, “What is it we love about America?” The question is repeated through the following pages, which show America’s natural beauty, the wealth of its urban expanses, and its vast resources (natural and industrial). But the answer comes on the pamphlet’s sixteenth page where a Black man (the first portrait of an African American seen) looks straight at it: “we love freedom above all” (32). Asking “How can you tell an American?” (34), the pamphlet answers, “[anyone] who lives in the United States . . . and who believes in . . . the Democratic

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Way” (37). The “Democratic Way” is forwarded as belief in equality for “all men” regardless of “race, religion or nationality,” belief in freedom of speech and freedom from want, belief in equal opportunity for “men and women,” belief in educational opportunity, and belief “in the right of all workers to organize, protect and improve their conditions.” These beliefs, the reader is then told, are realized by the duties of understanding and participating in democracy “to create a more perfect union.” This point is emphasized by showing a photo of a black woman in a welder’s mask and a group of older white men on the facing page, who are clearly voting at a meeting by raising their hands (39, 42–43). The pamphlet ends by discussing the CIO’s role in the 1944 elections to realize those goals. Gaer authored ten other pamphlets, and 450,000 copies of This Is Your America were distributed, along with over two million other pamphlets, sixty million leaflets, half a million posters, and fourteen million flyers (307–309). The CIO-PAC helped to instill in American workers a particular brand of positive pluralist rhetoric, upon which West’s book would capitalize. Drawing upon her work with the CIO-PAC and the trust placed in her as Southern public relations representative for the CIO, on October 30, 1944, Lucy Randolph Mason wrote a personal letter to the president of the CIO and initiated its substantial financial support of the SCHW. Speaking as a Southerner, she explained, “Both among the progressives outside the labor movement and inside the CIO, many people want to see a coordinated, wide-spread movement in the South, composed of CIO, other labor groups, and all liberal non-labor people who can be drawn in.” Mason articulated her fear of fascism developing in the South and explained that the CIO held the resources necessary to counter the threat and to unite “all the liberal forces [in the South] that have the courage to fight for democracy—democracy at home.” She goes on to argue why the SCHW would be the best instrument: “It represents as no other southern institution does a people’s movement—CIO members, AF of L members, miners, little farmers, social workers, newspaper editors, professors, and too many other groups to be named.” The CIO wanted to spread industrial unionism to the fourteenmillion-person labor force in the South (Zieger 1995, 228). And with unionization in the South, the question of race was key because unions such as the AFL held little promise for African Americans, so validation from the SCHW offered double substantiation to blacks because CIO organizers were also seen as outsiders desiring to “subvert traditional southern values” (Patton 1994, 233). From the end of 1944 to early 1947, the CIO and the SCHW would provide mutual support. By 1945, the CIO had 225,000 Southern members, but cooperation between the CIO and the SCHW began to show signs of stress brought


on by changes in power relations and the organizations’ differences in how to manage the relationship between labor, race, region, electoral politics, and Communism. Furthermore, the CIO was no longer in need of support from nonlabor cultural organizations since they could now strike, so they initiated the ill-named “Operation Dixie” in 1946. Moreover, the SCHW had also begun to come under fire for their connections to the Communists. Thus, when an African American SCHW field representative accused the CIO organizers of racial attitudes akin to those of the AFL, Van A. Bittner (head of the Southern Organizing Committee and experienced UMWA organizer in Appalachia) withdrew support.10 The $28,000 in union contributions in 1945 dropped to under $18,000 in 1946, with the CIO national office cutting off all donations in April (Krueger 1967, 142). Even as the SCHW’s membership would peak in 1946, their total income would be cut in half. Despite the outward conflicts and as a result of the direct collaboration between members of the CIO and the SCHW, Don West’s Clods was released in May 1946. Involved in defending the African American community since his days of activism (he was suspended from high school for protesting the showing of Birth of a Nation at the school), West’s poems unified class and race in terms of rural, working-class moral and religious rhetoric. Accordingly, the book served to articulate the commonality of purposes shared by the CIO and the SCHW. But West’s vision of justice, equality, and democracy—while directed at the situation in the South and Georgia—went far beyond the realm of polite resistance. He spoke of a spontaneous democracy that would arise when people gave aid to each other’s mutual suffering. The highly literate activists from the SCHW formed an influential readership of Clods. The books ordered by the conference were advertised in the November “Southern Farmer Issue” of the Southern Patriot to entice new subscribers with a free copy of West’s book for every three subscriptions ordered (“Christmas Offer” 1946). In mid-1945, there were some 10,000 subscriptions to the Southern Patriot (Krueger 1967, 164), which sometimes published runs of as many as 17,000 copies (P. Sullivan 1996, 202). Highlighting issues critical to both middle-class progressives and lower-class southerners, the Southern Patriot published stories and data about interrelated social problems that could be pragmatically addressed through influencing political and judicial mechanisms: unequal education for the races, the need to raise the minimum wage, medical conditions, problems of women in the workplace, unionization, the poll tax, Negro veterans, support for farmers, white-only primaries, et cetera. Each issue of the eight-page tabloid also dedicated a page to new books, including reviews of Margaret Walker’s For My People (January 1944),

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Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit (March 1944), Howard Fast’s Freedom Road (October 1944), and Henrietta Buckmaster’s Deep River (November 1944). Attention to these texts and their authors’ direct involvement show that the members of the SCHW understood literature as an essential tool of social explanation and engagement. By late 1946 the conference had 10,000 members, the most in its brief history (Krueger 1967, 143). Thousands had joined at the behest of Mary McLeod Bethune, who undertook a speaking tour for the conference (137), and thousands joined because the SCHW established state committees to involve more nonprofessionals and nonintellectuals. This infusion of newly politicized, grassroots members had been a long-term goal of Mason, who had first raised it with the founding of the SCHW in 1938. In April 1945, Mason wrote to Clark Foreman, president of the SCHW, and warned, “I have a deep, uneasy feeling that plans are being made with too little reference to their effect on Southern membership.” In order to survive and be effective, Mason held that the SCHW must “really be a membership organization,” which it could not do “unless its roots are in Southern soil.” West could not have agreed more, except he was talking about clods rather than soil. Don West’s book was a powerful tool for illuminating non-Southerners, validating progressives, and activating new Southern members such as black and white factory workers and sharecroppers. Signaling his appreciation of Mason’s work, West dedicated the poem “My South” (36–39) to her. One of West’s most sensual pieces, the poem drifts over four pages, touching the Southern landscape wherein West writes of his love for those who toil—both of “You whose skin is ebony / . . . / and my own bleached skinned brothers” (34, 36) whose songs of “deep sorrow” (43) he wished to “tune . . . / Into keen blue blades” (48–49). Certainly, Mason would have been flattered by West’s dedication, maybe more so because the poem, whose smooth description of landscape highlights the pain of the final, closely measured stanzas, whose tight rhyme knits together anger, grief, violence, and hope, is also about blood and struggle. The promise of the poem, which began in such lush images of nature, is that people—“ebony” and “bleached”—will stop lynchings when they “clasp” hands “Bowed over a few charred bones” (73, 75). Significantly, Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps would republish the poem (minus the dedication to Mason) when they edited The Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1949: A Definitive Anthology (1949). When West was working as a school superintendent in northern Georgia, he had contacted Hughes, leading Hughes to promote West as a candidate for a Rosenwald Fellowship. Winning this fellowship allowed West to attend Columbia University, where he likely met Boni and Gaer.11 And the publication of Clods announced


West’s entrance into Atlanta in August 1946, as a professor of Human Understanding and Citizenship at Oglethorpe University. Poetry and Progressives in Atlanta Oglethorpe University was a bold experiment designed to enact creative citizenship and democracy. Philip Weltner—who had been the liberal regent of Georgia’s new university system until dismissed in 1934 by Governor Eugene Talmadge—had taken the presidency of Oglethorpe in 1944 after the previous president had led the school into bankruptcy and disaccreditation.12 With Oglethorpe, Weltner sought to heal the “schism of the soul” that had arisen in higher education between the practical and the spiritual ([1947], 4). By the time West arrived in the fall of 1946, the school had 166 students and was well on its way to establishing the $500,000 endowment needed for accreditation. West’s professorship drew upon his skills as an artist, a preacher, and an organizer. He took the initiative to educate students and promote Oglethorpe, becoming a faculty adviser to the student newspaper, the Stormy Petrel, and speaking on the college’s behalf at local high schools. With the attention that swirled about him from the success of Clods, he promoted Oglethorpe at every opportunity. West had a heady time that September, when his book was displayed in the front windows of Atlanta bookstores. He would sign 400 copies at a sitting and was interviewed as a “‘celebrity’” on the radio (West to Williams, September 4, 1946). He had come a long way from “so damn many years scraping the bottom” with the small-run, low-profile editions of his earlier books (West to Horton, April 5, 1946). In a letter to Williams, West reveled that key members of the SCHW were asking him to become an executive board member: “Not that I am horsing to get such a place, but it always amuses me these days to have groups like that [. . .] come courting my affections. It is true these days even of the cp [Communist Party]” (Tuesday morning [September 1946]). West and Williams also were planning how they could reinforce each other’s positions through mutual advertising and distribution of Clods with books about Williams’s work. Notably, West had mailed Williams at least 800 copies of Clods from his personal stockpile at Lula: West’s investment in buying and distributing his own book was key to its success and making his reputation (West to Williams, October 7, 1946, and Monday morning [November 1946]). A month into his tenure West published a poem about “clean and holy” sexuality and citizenship in the school newspaper. Using West’s poem as an example, Philip Weltner, who had long fought for academic freedom, wrote a detailed memo called “Liberty and Law” (1946) that

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asked faculty to mindfully represent Oglethorpe because they were raising funds needed for accreditation. He also noted that the school only had 200 students, so they had to appeal to local high schools. In response, the next week West took his journalism students directly into the center of racial conflict in Atlanta, where they interviewed and wrote stories on the Columbians—a white fascist organization that held ferocious rallies in support of absolute segregation (“Columbian Menace” 1946). In 1947, the Atlanta metropolitan area had about 450,000 residents, some third of whom were black, and 90 percent of blacks were confined to the same crowded areas (Bayor 1996, 161; Silver and Moeser 1994, 37). Atlanta also had the greatest number of Negro-owned businesses in the nation, so as overcrowding increased, wealthier blacks began to rent and buy housing where available, causing the cost of rent to rise, which forced the eviction of white tenants whose homes were sold to those blacks willing to purchase the property. White mobs led by the Columbians dynamited porches and stoned the homes and their residents. Moreover, white business leaders wanted to shift blacks away from downtown and confine them behind a commuter expressway (Stone 1989, 32). But after Governor Arnall abolished the poll tax in 1944 and courts struck down Georgia’s white-only primaries in 1945, an infusion of 17,000 black voters forced the mayor and his allies to compromise and agree to decrease Jim Crow, stop white-on-black violence, and permit black developers to build new residences (Holmes 1981, 52–53). Statewide, 135,000 black Georgians became registered to vote, but with the opposite results (Grant 1993, 36). Many whites rallied to Eugene Talmadge—the former governor whose racist policies Arnall struggled to reform. That July, the Talmadge Democrats mailed thousands of forms and instructed their recipients on how to challenge the voting rights of black registrants (Bernd 1982, 497). As a result, 16,097 black voters were purged and violence kept thousands more from voting (505). Moreover, Georgia’s electoral system judged winners by county rather than by popular vote, so while the candidate to whom Arnall had given his support received more popular votes than Talmadge, Talmadge won the election by winning twice as many counties. But in December, Talmadge died of cancer, and in a planned move, his son, Herman, usurped power from Arnall, using state police to evict him. And when these reactionary meteors began to fall, Don West stepped up to bat. In January 1947, West gave a radio address and called for political organization against the “Talmadge machine,” which West declared moved in “the Hitler pattern” and used the same language about Negroes in Georgia as Hitler had used against Jews. Against “the dust of prejudice in our eyes,” West called for educational opportunities, housing programs,


jobs, and living wages, which “can only be achieved by guaranteeing them for everyone, including the Negro.” That February, the Southern Conference mailed out copies of the broadcast to its members, proclaiming, “Don West’s radio speech . . . should be read quickly by hundreds of thousands of people all over the country” (“Don West’s” 1947). Such was West’s introduction as a popular political leader, from which he began organizing Georgian progressives to support Henry Wallace. That summer Wallace toured the South, and at his final engagement in Washington, DC, which was sponsored by the Southern Conference, he declared the need to form a third party to oppose Truman’s antilabor, prowar policies. In anticipation, two days before the speech, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) released a report citing the Southern Conference’s Communist influences, and Don West was one of the names mentioned. Such red-baiting caused the conference to lose half its members, so in November, Wallace returned South under the sponsorship (and for the benefit) of the Southern Conference. Thirty students from Oglethorpe under West’s guidance ushered Wallace’s speech in Atlanta, which was given at Wheat Street Baptist Church to an audience of more than 3,000, 60 percent of whom were Black, “one of the largest nonsegregated gatherings in Atlanta’s history” (P. Sullivan 1996, 245). Wheat Street was Atlanta’s largest black church, whose reverend, W. H. Borders, had been a key figure in the voting drive and now saw fit to have his church be a meeting place for progressive whites and Negroes. Wallace concluded his talk by discussing the flaring tensions between the United States and the U.S.S.R., emphasizing that red-baiting “is used by men whose great fear is democracy, not Communism” (“Henry A. Wallace” 1947). The Communists, he pointed out, were just offering solutions to problems they did not create, and hence instead of persecuting them, Americans needed to “prove that we can produce abundantly and distribute fairly.” The week before, Ralph McGill, editor of The Atlanta Constitution, joined the fray, writing that the Southern Conference was a “Communist-infiltrated” organization whose officers bore the mentality of “Ku Kluxers” (1947).13 On New Year’s Day 1948, when the Freedom Train rolled into Atlanta, Georgia progressives, led by Don West, launched a movement to place Henry Wallace’s name on the Georgia ballot. The following day, the Constitution’s editorial praised Philip Weltner’s success at Oglethorpe. West’s crevice between a rock and a hard place was growing ever more narrow. Then, in February, Rosa Lee Ingram and two of her sons—who were Negro sharecroppers—were put on death row after a one-day trial by an all-white jury, which convicted them of murdering a white sharecropper. Blacks all around the nation rallied against that “legal lynching”

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(Raymond 1948, 11). Georgia’s Citizen’s Defense Committee began its work under the chairmanship of Reverend Borders, and the NAACP sent in lawyers as did the Communist-aligned Civil Rights Congress. Moreover, the same black lawyer who had snuck West out of Atlanta in 1934 wrote the introduction to a Daily Worker pamphlet about the Ingrams. The Communists and the NAACP were again, as with Scottsboro, fighting over the right to defend a client. This time, however, the NAACP won, and the judge commuted the death sentences to life imprisonment but denied a retrial. West became involved when he was asked, as the only white who might dare to do so, to speak at a rally in support of the Ingrams’ defense, and he speculated that doing so would cost him his job at Oglethorpe. However, other than that the speech occurred at “a public meeting in Macon,” it is unclear when, to whom, or for whom, West spoke (Dunbar 1981, 229). The Daily Worker pamphlet noted that there was a Wallacefor-President rally held in the Macon courthouse in support of the Ingrams, and given West’s old connections with the ILD and his new connections with the Progressives, this might have been the event he referred to. Knowing would be an important clue as to West’s allegiances—did he, for instance, speak for the Georgia Citizen’s Defense Committee at the behest of Reverend Borders? Or did he speak at the Wallace-for-President rally at the behest of the CRC? West spoke as a populist, a Progressive, and a Communist—which were not exclusive categories at all. Still, West lost his professorship that summer, which was a time of purges, with faculty losing jobs in Florida, Indiana, Illinois, and New Hampshire. Thus, his involvement in politics vulnerable to red-baiting forced Weltner to oust West from Oglethorpe before it lost funding. Regardless, on May 8, the Progressives held their state convention in Macon, with West serving as executive vice chairman. That July, when crosses were burned in the front yard of Larkin Marshall, the Progressives’ Negro leader who was running for the U.S. Senate, the Atlanta Daily World (the only daily Negro newspaper in the country), decried the act but did so only after stating its disagreement with the Progressives and questioning “the wisdom of Marshall’s candidacy” (“Let the People” 1948). Later, the same newspaper called West “Oglethorpe’s pet poet,” and it refused to publish more than minimal materials about the Progressives. For, while violent support of segregation and Jim Crow was a daily experience for blacks in Georgia, the majority of the Negro reform elite in Atlanta, who had recently made such great gains, chose not to back the Progressives’ radical politics of full racial equality. On June 11, a few weeks before Paul Robeson visited Atlanta to support the Wallace campaign, McGill, the Constitution’s editor, unleashed


another barrage, calling Robeson a “trouble maker and trouble hunter” (quoted in 1948b). The next week, McGill went after West, as the person in “executive charge” of the Georgia Wallace committee (1948a). Writing that West refused to answer queries about his connections with the CPUSA, McGill cites the appearance of West’s name in the HUAC report on the Southern Conference and quotes the HUAC testimony about West’s appearance in the Daily Worker and in Party records. The following week on June 20, the day before the start of summer, Robeson appeared at Wheat Street Baptist Church and spoke to an interracial crowd of some 1,500. McGill declared that the event was really “an anti-Ralph McGill evening” and reasserted Don West’s connections to the CPUSA (1948b). As the Progressive’s national convention in July approached, McGill, having identified West as the Achilles heel of the Progressive Party in Georgia, fired verbal arrows at West’s strongest and most vulnerable point: his poetry. In a late-June column, McGill (1948c) explains that West published a poem called “Listen, I am a Communist” in the Daily Worker March 13, 1934: “Do you, toilers of the South, Know me?” I am speaking. I, the poet, Don West, Communist, Bolshevik, Red -------.

In this and later columns, McGill lists West’s connections to Communists active in the region. McGill continued attacking West through the summer. Then, in anticipation of Wallace’s October speech to a gathering of radical ministers in Dalton, a Georgia mountain town, McGill reprinted West’s poem “Listen, I am a Communist” in its entirety (1948d). A revised version called “Listen, I’m an Agitator” (24) is the centerpiece of Clods. The poem modulates through proclamations of anger and resistance, punctuated with testimony to the suffering poverty of West’s grandfather and father. And the poem begins with an important shift: Listen . . . ! I’m an agitator — They call me “Red,” The color of Blood,

122 / chris green And — “Bolshevik!” But do you of the toiling South Know me? (1–7)

And as proof that he is “no foreigner,” West says that he was raised on the land where “my Daddy’s sweat/ Salted down the red clay” (47, 66–67). From that point, he reasserts: And I’m an Agitator! And that means I want bread And homes And clothes And beauty For all the hollow-eyed babies.

Against the sway of anger, grief, and love, the poem closes with the plea from this “poet / in overalls,” this “working man,” this “Mountaineer,” this “Agitator” for readers to listen (91–94). West must have taken great satisfaction in Wallace’s speech in Dalton, which was heard by over 5,000 “poor, white mountain people” (Wigginton 1991, 197). And preach Wallace did—of Mammon, monopolies, and Wall Street; of cross-racial brotherhood between CIO workers and farmers. Spoke Wallace, “Ours is the old, old fight against the Golden Calf, against those who bend the knee to Baal, against the worshippers of Mammon, against the hate-mongers, the war-makers, those who divide men, Christian from Jew, American from Russian” (Wallace 1948, 4). However, while realizing both West’s vision and McGill’s nightmare, Wallace’s rally did little good, for only 1,636 votes were cast for Wallace in Georgia (“The Vote” 1948). Thus did West end the most high-profile moment in his life, when he fought for outright racial equality in the South. So after ascending to the progressive pulpit through the popularity of poetry and being a professor of Citizenship, he returned for several years to farming and selling produce. Then, in 1954, he took up a position editing a leftist church newspaper in Dalton until other anti-Communists chased him forth again and he left Georgia for Baltimore. Don West perhaps more than any of the others saw his own identities and concerns reflected in the SCHW’s constituency and struggles. Clods melded those identities and struggles into an inspiring whole as he attempted to bring the SCHW into the lives of the people whose rights it fought for. But afterward, stripped of his professorship, West returned to the land, peddling vegetables, rather than poems, in Atlanta. McGill continued to publish columns condemning West, but the poet kept a low


profile and his wife secured a job teaching school in Florida in 1949 and kept their two daughters with her, only returning to Georgia in the summer (Byerly 1994, 321). Most of West’s customers were from the black community, but even then he was easily chastised if he took too public a role (324). West continued to publish poetry, with his next book, The Road Is Rocky, coming out in 1951, but never again would West—by virtue of the interplay of his poetry with a widespread coalition in crisis—hold the wide prestige he had wielded from 1946 to 1948. Notes 1. Other studies include Anthony Dunbar’s Against the Grain: Southern Radicals and Prophets: 1929–59 (UP of Virginia, 1981); John Egerton’s Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (Knopf, 1994); and Linda Reed’s Simple Decency and Common Sense: The Southern Conference Movement 1938–1963 (Indiana UP, 1991). 2. The two big sellers in 1946 were The Great Conspiracy Against Russia, which sold 161,273 copies that year, and Wind in the Olive Trees (about Franco), which quickly sold 50,000 copies (“Boni and Gaer”). 3. The titles in the book are printed in bold and italics, a typography that continually emphasizes the book’s energy. 4. The poem was first published in New Masses (August 27, 1935: 13). The previous issue of New Masses contained the article “Way Down South” that contextualized the poem by writing about the prison system in Georgia, the current state of Angelo Herndon’s defense, and the black miners, struggle to unionize in Birmingham, Alabama. 5. Depending on emphasis an alternative first foot might read | ˘ / | or | ˘ ˘ |. Regardless, the stress starts on a low key, as if searching for voice. 6. West had long published in Communist or Communist-influenced venues. Granville Hicks had included two of West’s poems in Proletarian Literature in the United States, An Anthology (1935), both of which were modified for Clods of Southern Earth: “Southern Lullaby” (188–189) became “Anger’s Lullaby” (35) and “Dark Winds” (189) became “Factory Winds” (49). 7. In 1933, West published “I’ve Seen God” (52) and “Prayer” (99) in The Christian Century. 8. In 1927, Charles Boni was the first publisher to initiate a foray into high quality paperback publishing, which did not come to fruition in the hands of other publishers until 1939 with the advent of cheaper paper and printing (Boni 1929; Tebbel 1978, 7). 9. Notably, in the January 1932 issue of New Masses, Langston Hughes published the poem “An Open Letter to the South,” which ends, “White worker / Here is my hand. // Today / we’re man to man” (p. 10). West might have read this piece because it was published beside an article about Dreiser and other writers who had gone to the mines in Harlan County.

124 / chris green 10. For more on this set of relationships see Krueger (1967) 140–43; Chris Green (2002) “Working Truth Inside and Out: Don West, Muriel Rukeyser, Poetry, and the Popular Front in Appalachia, 1932–1948.” Journal of Appalachian Studies 8, no. 2: 382–406; and “CIO Stands Alone Organizing South.” 1946. The New York Times April 19: 4. 11. See Embree (1949) 143 and 153, as well as letters from Don West in Langston Hughes’s papers. 12. For more on Philip Weltner, a progressive educator who deserves significant attention, see Weltner’s Recollections (1970) and Noell Wannamaker (1995), “‘Mr. Anonymous, Jr.’: Philip Weltner and Uplift from Progressivism to the Great Society.” Journal of the Georgia Association of Historians 16: 16–51. 13. For more information see Barbara Barksdale Clowse’s Ralph McGill: A Biography (Mercer University Press, 1998) and Jeff Biggers’s (1999) outline of McGill’s accusations in his essay “The Fugitive of Southern Appalachian Literature: Reconsidering the Poetry of Don West.” The Journal of Appalachian Studies 5, no. 2: 492–513. Most notable are McGill’s columns “Out of Envy and Frustration” (August 5, 1948: 10) and “It is Now Officially Communist” (September 28, 1948: 8). McGill red-baited local leftists because the Constitution was struggling for market share against The Atlanta Journal, and McGill thought that by attacking them he could support a slow version of desegregation, which many saw as a Communist conspiracy (Clowse 150).

Works Cited Aaron, Daniel. 1977. Writers on the Left. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Orig. pub. 1961.) Bayor, Ronald H. 1996. Race: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Belfrage, Cedric. 1944. A Faith to Free the People. New York: Dyrden Press. Bernd, Joseph L. 1982. “White Supremacy and the Disenfranchisement of Blacks in Georgia, 1946.” Georgia Historical Quarterly 66, no. 4: 492–513. “Boni & Gaer.” 1947. Publishers’ Weekly, March 22, 1726–1727. Boni, Charles. 1929. The Practical Aspects of a Literary Adventure. New York: Charles Boni Paper Books. Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the Jewish American Archives. Cincinnati Campus, Hebrew Union College, Jewish Institute of Religion. Burger, Nash K. 1946. “Homespun Poems of the South.” Review of Clods of Southern Earth by Don West. New York Times Book Review, July 1, 22. Byerly, Victoria Morris. 1994. “What Shall a Poet Sing? The Living Struggle of the Southern Poet and Revolutionary Don West.” PhD diss., Boston College. “Christmas Offer.” 1946. Southern Patriot, November, 7. “Clods of Southern Earth.” 1946. Review of Clods of Southern Earth by Don West. Mountain Life and Work, Fall, 27. “The Columbian Menace.” 1946. Stormy Petrel, November 22, 2.

the tight rope of democracy / 125 Dardis, Tom. 1994. Firebrand: The Life of Horace Liveright. New York: Random House. “Don West’s Radio Speech ‘Georgia Crisis.’” 1947. Southern Patriot, April, 8. Dunbar, Anthony. 1981. Against the Grain: Southern Radicals and Prophets: 1929–59. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Embree, Edwin R. 1949. Investment in People: The Story of the Julius Rosenwald Fund. New York: Harper. Foster, James Caldwell. 1975. The Union Politic: The CIO Political Action Committee. N.p.: University of Missouri Press. Gaer, Joseph. 1944. The First Round: The Story of the CIO Political Action Committee. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce. Gold, Mike. 1946. “Don West, Symbol of a New and Better Georgia.” Daily Worker, August 17, 6. Grant, Donald L. 1993. The Way it Was in the South: The Black Experience in Georgia. Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing Group. Harrison, S. L. 1994. “Stanley Burnshaw: The ‘New Masses Years.’” Journal of American Culture 17, no. 3: 1–6. “Henry A. Wallace Calls for a Free and Equal South.” 1947. Southern Patriot, November, 1–2. Hite, Alex. 1946. “Poetry Books are Written by Georgians.” Review of Clods of Southern Earth by Don West. The Atlanta Constitution, August 4, B10. Holmes, Robert A. 1981. “The University and Politics in Atlanta: A Case Study of the Atlanta University Center.” Atlanta History Journal 25, no. 1: 49–66. Krueger, Thomas A. 1967. And Promises to Keep: The Southern Conference for Human Welfare, 1938–1948. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Lechlitner, Ruth. 1946. “Overalls Poet.” Review of Clods of Southern Earth by Don West. New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review, September 8, 23. “Let the People Decide.” 1948. Atlanta Daily World, July 7, 6. Martin, Harold. 1946a. “New, Angry Voice from Georgia Hills.” The Atlanta Constitution, September 19, 11. ———. 1946b. “West’s Poems Raise a Controversy.” The Atlanta Constitution, September 26, 7. Mason, Lucy Randolph. Operation Dixie the C.I.O. Organizing Committee papers, 1946–1953, Series 5 Lucy Randolph Mason papers, 1912–1955. William R. Perkins Library, Duke University. McGill, Ralph. 1947. “Mr. Wallace Comes South.” The Atlanta Constitution, November 15, 4. ———. 1948a. “Don West and the Wallace Campaign.” The Atlanta Constitution, June 18, 12. ———. 1948b. “Anger—But No Denials.” The Atlanta Constitution, June 24, 14. ———. 1948c. “Don West Signs Himself Communist.” The Atlanta Constitution, June 27, 2D. ———. 1948d. “All Right, Here It Is!” The Atlanta Constitution, October 18, 8.

126 / chris green Patton, Randall L. 1994. “The Popular Front Alternative: Clark H. Foreman and the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, 1938–1948.” Georgia in Black and White: Explorations in the Race Relations of a Southern State, 1965–1950, ed. John C. Inscoe. Athens: University of Georgia Press. 225–245. “Poet Don West Here on Visit, Will Join Oglethorpe Faculty.” 1946. The Atlanta Constitution, August 30, 5. Preece, Harold. 1946. “‘Listen to the Future!’” Review of Clods of Southern Earth by Don West. New Masses, October 22, 27–29. Raymond, Harry. 1948. The Ingrams Shall Not Die!: A Story of Georgia’s New Terror. New York: Daily Worker. Silver, Christopher and John V. Moeser. 1994. The Separate City: Black Communities in the Urban South, 1940–1980. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Stone, Clarence, N. 1989. Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946–1988. N.p.: University Press of Kansas. Sullivan, Ken. 1979. “Don West, Poet and Preacher.” Goldenseal 5, no. 4: 47–56. Sullivan, Patricia. 1996. Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Tebbel, John. 1978. A History of Book Publishing in the United States (Vol. III): The Golden Ages Between Two Wars 1920–1940. New York: R. R. Bowker Company. Troy, Bill, and Claude Williams. 1976. “People’s Institute of Applied Religion.” Southern Exposure 4, no. 3: 46–53. “Votes Cast and Per Cent of 1944 POTENTIAL VOTERS.” 1946. Washington, D.C.: National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax. Southern Conference for Human Welfare, Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library. Box 33, Folder 6. “The Vote for President.” 1948. New York Times, November 6, 2. Walbridge, Earle F. 1951. “Joseph Gaer.” Wilson Library Journal 25: 478. Wallace, Henry. 1948. “Text of Speech by Henry Wallace Before Conference of Ministers.” 16 Oct. 1948. New York: Progressive Party. M. H. Ross Papers (1930–1987), Southern Labor Archives, Special Collections Department, Pullen Library. Georgia State University. Weltner, Philip. 1946. “Liberty and Law.” Memo to the Faculty. November 7. Oglethorpe University Archives, Weltner Library, Oglethorpe University, Atlanta, Georgia. 2003.276. ———. 1947. “The Liberal Arts.” Address to the Emory Chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa. December 5. Oglethorpe University Archives, Weltner Library, Oglethorpe University, Atlanta, Georgia. 2003.276. West, Don. 1935. “Southern Lullaby.” Proletarian Literature in the United States, An Anthology, ed. Granville Hicks. New York: International Publishers. 198–199. ———. to Claude Williams. Claude C. Williams papers, 1929–1979. Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Walter P. Reuther Library. Box 15, Folders 21 and 23.

the tight rope of democracy / 127 ———. to Myles Horton. 1946. Highlander Research and Education Center, Archives, Wisconsin Historical Society. Box 29, Folder 21. ———. 1947 “Future of Georgia.” In Dombrowski, James A. Letter to State Committees and Local Chapters. February 10. Southern Conference for Human Welfare, Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library. Box 2, Folder 5. Wigginton, Eliot, ed. 1991. Refuse to Stand Silently By: An Oral History of Grass Roots Social Activism in America, 1921–64. New York: Doubleday. Williams, Claude. “Don West Sings.” Claude C. Williams papers, 1929–1979. Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Walter P. Reuther Library. Box 6. ———. Letter to President, Oglethorpe University. October 1, 1946. Claude C. Williams papers, 1929–1979. Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Walter P. Reuther Library. Box 6. Zieger, Robert H. 1995. The CIO, 1935–1955. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

As with the Washington Square Players, the Theatre Guild, and the Provincetown Players in Greenwich Village in 1915, the connections and actions of literary radicals often first exhibit themselves in theater. James Smethurst’s “Black Arts South” chronicles the network of activists and actors around the Free Southern Theater (FST), which came to New Orleans in 1964, BLKARTSOUTH, and the Southern Black Cultural Alliance (SBCA) through their waning years in the mid-seventies and early eighties. In concert with the rise of Black Power from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), these artist-activists drew upon the well-developed matrix of African Americans and whites that had come together to dismantle Jim Crow, support unionization, eliminate poll taxes, and struggle for suffrage in the 1930s and 1940s. Most essentially, Smethurst’s essay performs a vital act of literary history, tracing a wide array of actors through the evolving and complex tissues of their connections. Ron Silliman once suggested that the viscous, ever-changing communities of writers and literature were best described as networks of affiliation and scenes of happening. With New Orleans as the focus, Smethurst demonstrates the manifestations of literary and political connection, both between theaters and audiences as well as between artists and activists. Like the other essays in this collection, “Black Arts South” creates a narrative around the work and connections that seem obvious and necessary; however, the story of this work has gone untold in academic histories. Combined with the fact that Black Arts has only begun to be closely studied by academics over the last decade, perhaps this neglect is due to the furious commitments of participants in Black Arts South to their own audiences and causes (as with other radicals whose job is not to take notes but to create action), but perhaps our lack of awareness results from the very resistance that many Americans have to realizing the deep and extensive radicalism of blacks throughout the South. Smethurst—via his careful compilation of scarce and ephemeral print materials and his long work to interview the actors—grants us the chance to witness this work and to question our own circumstances.

6 Black Arts South: Rethinking New Orleans and the Black Arts Movement in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina James Smethurst

Among the most powerful and persistent myths about the South is that the region is a starting point for both a national African American culture and a truly “American” art. For more than a century various genres of music associated with African Americans of the rural and urban South, particularly spirituals, the blues, and jazz, have been declared the first or, as W. E. B. Du Bois said in the 1903 The Souls of Black Folk, “the sole American music” (186). Such monikers as “the birthplace of jazz” and “the land where the blues were born” mark the South as a special cradle of African American expression that in turn becomes transmuted into a more generically “American” art, a transmutation that a long line of cultural commentators have claimed expresses an American democratic spirit and/or a common humanity. New Orleans, given its long association with early jazz, is a prominent topos of this mythic landscape of a comparatively remote past—despite the more recent musical prominence of the Marsalis family and the Neville Brothers. There is no doubt considerable truth to this posing of the South as an originary matrix of black culture and popular culture in the United States generally. However, there is often a strange nostalgic and curatorial cast to this myth, as if the South, especially the black South (and even more particularly black New Orleans) were a sort of museum in which various cultural forms and artifacts needed to be preserved, suggesting that the important cultural contributions of a region, and a city within that region, are essentially in the relatively distant past, say that of Storyville, the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French Quarter, Jellyroll Morton, the young Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, and so on. If one

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takes this tack, then it is possible to imagine a rebuilding of New Orleans that makes some gesture toward acknowledging and “preserving” some of the more publicized artifacts and landmarks of this African American past without black people. But if one sees New Orleans as a vital cultural center of black art that continued (and continues) to make dramatic contributions to the cultural life of the South and the United States generally, the city and region (and the myth of southern black culture as the origin of American art) is cast in a different light. This essay is certainly not arguing against cultural recuperation and preservation, but one of its arguments is that the nostalgic attitude can have negative and possibly unforeseen results. While discussion of the dangers of nostalgia and the marketing of the past is not new, the virtual destruction of the city of New Orleans, the exile of much of its population (especially its African American communities), and the debates about the nature of the city’s reconstruction in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina lend the question of artistic and cultural legacies a particular urgency. The context of this essay about the Black Arts movement in the South anchored by the city of New Orleans, particularly the Southern Black Cultural Alliance (SBCA), then, is this debate over the historical meaning of New Orleans, its destruction, and its reconstruction. It is a debate that is both of a particular moment and likely to be of considerable duration as the question of cultural legacies and the support of art in the United States continues to be a site of political conflict. In short, this essay both recalls a dynamic cultural movement (much more recent than the heyday of Morton, Oliver, and Kid Ory) and suggests its role in the continuing cultural life of the South and of the United States generally. This southern movement had its own distinct character, but was also bound up with Black Arts and Black Power initiatives and institutions based outside the region, receiving inspiration from high-profile Black Arts figures and institutions in the North and the West, such as Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School (BARTS), and providing important confirmation of the truly national (in the sense of a black nation) character of Black Arts and Black Power to artists and activists outside the South.1 Beginnings of movements are always hard to pinpoint, but one possible starting point for the Black Arts movement in the South (and, indeed, a seminal moment for the Black Arts movement nationally) was the establishment of the Free Southern Theater (FST) at Tougaloo College in 1964 after earlier discussions about the need for a theater that could serve the burgeoning civil rights movement in Mississippi and elsewhere in the Deep South, making it among the first of the Black Arts or proto–Black Arts theaters. The FST’s founders, John O’Neal, Doris Derby, and Gilbert Moses, had come to the Deep South to work in the

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civil rights movement with a considerable background in the arts and in the movement elsewhere. O’Neal, for example, a native of Mound Bayou, Illinois, had decided that he wanted to be a playwright by the time he graduated from Southern Illinois University–Carbondale in 1962. He had also become deeply involved in the black student movement inspired by the sit-in of four North Carolina A & T students at a Greensboro, North Carolina, Woolworth’s lunch counter in 1960, coalescing into the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). O’Neal helped initiate the Student Nonviolent Freedom Committee, basically a Carbondale SNCC affiliate, in 1961. He was also active in more explicitly Left groups, such as Fair Play for Cuba and Students for a Democratic Society, and began a lifelong interest in Marxism. After his graduation and a Student Nonviolent Freedom Committee/ SNCC campaign against the segregation of public facilities in Cairo, Illinois (using SNCC leader James Foreman’s “Segregation in the Land of Lincoln” slogan as a rallying cry) that attracted national attention in 1962, O’Neal found himself conflicted about the direction of his life. He was unsure whether he should move to New York City to pursue a career in theater or go South to join what he saw as the civil rights front lines. New York seemed to him (as to most theater workers) both the center of the commercial “mainstream” theater and of the new American avant-garde. The Living Theater’s production of Jack Gelber’s The Connection particularly excited O’Neal during a visit to New York. But O’Neal opted to go South, believing the struggle there as the most important thing happening in the United States. He worked on various SNCC projects in Georgia and Mississippi before joining Doris Derby, a visual artist, on the SNCC Literacy Project based at Tougaloo College near Jackson, Mississippi. In late 1963, O’Neal and Derby met Gilbert Moses, a Cleveland native who had participated in the famous theater program at Karamu House that had its origins in the early twentieth-century settlement house movement, and who came South to work on a movement newspaper, the Mississippi Free Press. Practically on meeting, O’Neal and Moses (who shortly became roommates) were deep in argument about whether tragedy (O’Neal) or comedy (Moses) was the highest form of theater, initiating the sort of productive, if complicating, conflict that characterized their relationship in the FST. Derby, Moses, and O’Neal’s discussions about forming a movement theater combining grassroots agitation, community cultural access, and avant-garde aesthetics took concrete form as they became involved with a 1964 Tougaloo College Drama Workshop production of Inherit the Wind, which Moses directed. Within a few months of this production, the workshop morphed into the FST, which the founders essentially saw as an arm of SNCC and its campaigns. The general division


of labor had Derby as a visual artist managing set design, Moses in charge of directing and training the actors, and O’Neal running production and the organizational needs of the theater (O’Neal 2005; Dent, et al, 1969, 3, 164–167; Fabré 1983, 56). In 1964, the FST moved to New Orleans to be closer to greater material resources for a black theater than were then available in Jackson. One of these resources was Richard Schechner, a young professor at Tulane University and editor of the Tulane Drama Review (later renamed The Drama Review, or TDR), who had been the college roommate of Moses’s brother at Oberlin College (O’Neal 2005; Dent et al. 1969, 10). The initial idea in recruiting Schechner to the FST was that his connection to the larger “mainstream” theater industry, the theatrical avant-garde, and the academy through TDR would give the FST an increased ability to attract foundation funding, theater workers, sponsors, and bookings, especially the bookings outside the Deep South that were crucial to FST’s fundraising efforts. While the results of FST’s initial applications for money from major foundations were disappointing, Schechner’s theatrical skills and his ability to serve as a buffer or mediator between Moses and O’Neal (who frequently disagreed about repertoire, production values, aesthetics, and the need for fundraising activities) made him invaluable to the theater. The commute between New Orleans and Tougaloo was too difficult for Schechner to maintain on a regular basis, necessitating the relocation of the theater to New Orleans if he were to continue to play an active role (O’Neal 2005; Salaam 2005). Beyond the value of allowing Schechner’s daily participation, Moses and O’Neal saw New Orleans as having a larger black middle class who might patronize a socially engaged African American theater—though this advantage was to a certain extent illusory because New Orleans’s long economic decline, which began to be apparent in the 1960s, limited such patronage. O’Neal and others also saw the removal from the frontlines of the SNCC campaigns and from SNCC territory (the dominant civil rights group in most of Louisiana at the time was the Congress for Racial Equality [CORE]) as a plus, since it allowed the theater to focus on questions of craft in a way that was difficult under the pressure of day-to-day political work in which writing, rehearsal, and the technical work of staging a production could be almost endlessly deferred (O’Neal 2005). This view was not universally shared by the FST’s founders, though, as Doris Derby refused to make the move to New Orleans and stayed with the SNCC Literacy Project (Myrick-Harris 1990, 224). Finally, the desire of some of the founders, especially O’Neal, to attract high-level theater workers from outside the South, principally New York, to the FST was seen as more realizable if the troupe were based in New Orleans.


In New Orleans the FST quickly became more like a professional traveling repertory theater. However, it came to be plagued by a number of contradictions that characterized it over the rest of the decade. In large part, these contradictions arose from the FST leaders’ very different notions of what the theater (and drama in general) should be and what it should do. Some of the debates within the FST, such as to what degree (if at all) and in what capacity white people should take part in the theater, mirrored similar debates in the civil rights movement itself, especially in SNCC (Dent et al. 1969, 111–134; O’Neal 2005; Salaam 2005). Other contradictions were more particular to the FST. The group took seriously the notion of serving a mass southern African American constituency. Yet its members were for the most part young black and white theater workers from the North. O’Neal especially went to New York to recruit promising black actors to the FST. Since the FST National Board of Sponsors was filled with prestigious names—such as James Baldwin, Harry Belafonte, Theodore Bikel, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and Langston Hughes—many New York actors were willing to go South to work with the FST for a time as a sort of career stepping-stone, but few would stay away from New York and the dreams of larger mainstream acting success for very long, especially as roles began to open up for black actors on stage, movie screen, and television (O’Neal 2005; Salaam 2005; Dent et al. 1969, 10). Money, too, was a persistent issue. Some saw John O’Neal as overly concerned with fundraising, suggesting that the theater mount its productions with whatever resources were at hand. O’Neal did see financial security as a key element of the sort of institutional stability that would allow the FST to survive (O’Neal 2005; Salaam 2005; Dent et al. 1969, 13). In time, a certain schism would open up between O’Neal and the main touring unit of the FST and the local people who made up the members of FST’s workshops—though it is fair to say that the FST had multiple and somewhat fluid factions within it that energized as well as disrupted it. The FST also saw itself as having varied and somewhat dissonant missions. One was to present drama that directly addressed and supported the campaigns of SNCC, CORE, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the NAACP Youth Council, and other civil rights organizations in the South. Another was to showcase work by contemporary black playwrights, such as Ossie Davis’s Purlie Victorious. Yet another was to expose poor and often rural African American audiences to “serious” modern drama like Samuel Beckett’s absurdist classic Waiting for Godot (apparently at least in part chosen because of Moses’s search for the sort of comedy that could connect with black existential realities in the Jim Crow South) (O’Neal 2005). Like many early Black Arts theaters, such as BARTS and the Studio Watts drama group in Los Angeles, FST programs


also frequently featured the performance of formally innovative poetry, such as the verbal collages of David Henderson, a veteran of the Umbra Poets Workshop in New York who toured with the FST in 1967. This mixed repertoire frequently puzzled, provoked, and/or stimulated its core audience. The FST was also seriously devoted to the development of a new repertoire, new actors, new playwrights, new directors, and so on, rooted in the local black community (as well as the black communities of the South in general). It instituted a playwrights’ workshop and a writers’ workshop in which the participants were almost all local. However, the FST also continued to import many of its key personnel from up North, especially New York, rather than relying on local people whom the workshop trained. To this end O’Neal would go on periodic recruiting tours to New York where he would try to convince promising actors to join the FST (O’Neal 2005). As Black Power began to emerge as a visible if not completely coherent movement, and as other Black Arts theaters (especially BARTS) gained a national prominence, the FST, too, took on a much more nationalist character, dropping from its repertoire the dramas by white modernist and postmodernist playwrights, and thinking of itself much more as a black theater. Nevertheless, some of the other contradictions remained, such as that of whether to maintain the theater as a relatively elite professional group with actors and directors drawn for the most part from the North, or to become a genuine community or regional theater committed to producing the work of local people and casting “non-professional” southerners in principal roles.2 A pivotal event for the growth of the Black Arts movement in the South was the 1965 return of Tom Dent to his hometown of New Orleans—a city in which he had not really lived since he was a teenager. Dent had been the chief instigator of the seminal Umbra Poets Workshop in New York, which also included David Henderson, Calvin Hernton, Ishmael Reed, Lorenzo Thomas (who would later migrate South to Houston, Texas), and Askia Touré (who worked in SNCC’s Atlanta Project for a time, and who would return to Atlanta in the 1980s) (Thomas 2001). In New York, Dent was also active in such Left-influenced African American organizations of artists and intellectuals as the Harlem Writers Guild (among whose members numbered Maya Angelou, Lonnie Elder III, John O. Killens, Abby Lincoln, Paule Marshall, Julian Mayfield, Louise Merriwether, Douglas Turner Ward, and Sarah Wright) and On Guard for Freedom (a Left-nationalist group whose participants included many of the young black writers, visual artists, musicians, and intellectuals of the Lower East Side, including Wright, Amiri Baraka, Calvin Hicks, Harold


Cruse, Archie Shepp, and A. B. Spellman). Through his connections in New Orleans (where his mother was a concert pianist and his father president of Dillard University) and in New York (where he had worked for the NAACP Legal Defense and for the black newspaper the New York Age), Dent knew an enormous number of African American intellectuals, artists, educators, civil rights leaders, and political activists of all sorts of ideological and aesthetic stripes, from Thurgood Marshall to Malcolm X to CPUSA leader James Jackson to Langston Hughes, locally in New Orleans as well as across the United States. O’Neal, on one of his recruiting trips to New York in early 1965, encouraged the return of Dent with stories of the FST’s work. The encouragement of O’Neal (and Dent’s family) to come back to New Orleans found a responsive listener in Dent. Dent had become tired of the tribulations of living on New York’s Lower East Side as heroin flooded the neighborhood, as well as of the intense conflicts within the early Black Arts movement in New York. These conflicts resulted in the hegira of many other leaders of the movement, such as Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, and Askia Touré, as they sought to escape the turmoil and internecine violence that reached its apogee with the shooting of Larry Neal by members of a deranged faction of BARTS. Dent was also familiar with the work of the FST through Doris Derby, whom he had dated for a while after being introduced to her by Andrew Young (O’Neal 2005; Salaam 1993, 332–333).3 Dent’s stimulating encounter with what the late Lorenzo Thomas called the “shadow world” of black grassroots artists, intellectuals, nationalists, and leftists in New York whom he met through his different jobs as well as through Umbra, On Guard, the Harlem Writers Guild, and simply wandering the streets of Harlem and the Lower East Side, gave him an increased sense of the importance of grassroots artistic and intellectual ancestry to the creation of a new activist black art in his hometown (Thomas 1978; 2000, 118–144). This allowed him to get beyond a feeling of New Orleans’s (and the South’s) backward provincialism that had dogged him since his childhood and had motivated him to leave the region. On his return, Dent gradually discovered a personal feeling of local rootedness that could be related to national and even international political, intellectual, and artistic networks. He searched out the older New Orleans counterparts of this shadow world, such as the jazz guitarist, banjo player, and composer Danny Barker, the poet, printer, and historian Marcus B. Christian (whom Dent had known as a child), and the poet Octave Lilly. Christian and Lilly had long been involved in activist art and politics since the Popular Front era of the 1930s (Dent 1984, 22–26; Salaam 1993, 333–335). One of Dent’s great personal gifts was his success in convincing his peers of the importance of such living repositories


of African American artistic memory and experience as Barker, Christian, and Lilly. Another complementary gift was his ability to woo these older artists from their former antagonistic stance toward the new generation into an appreciation of the work of the young Black Arts cadre (Salaam 2000; Thomas 2001). Dent became increasingly important to both the administration and the artistic activities of the FST. Perhaps his most difficult task was serving as chairman of the theater’s board during the stormy period in 1966, when the FST more expressly moved from being an integrated civil rights institution to a more self-consciously black theater with a strong nationalist bent (though with a few white members practically until the end). As in SNCC, CORE, and other civil rights groups, this move, which saw the departure of Richard Schechner and other important white FST workers and financial supporters, was not accomplished without considerable conflict and tension. Even though he was relatively new to the theater, Dent also had much practice in the mechanics of organizing and maintaining a writers’ workshop, thanks to his leadership of Umbra and his participation in the Harlem Writers Guild. So, as he developed his own skills as a playwright, Dent brought a new stability to the FST’s workshops. Ultimately, Dent ran the writers’ workshop of the FST, which coexisted with a playwrights’ workshop headed by Robert “Big Daddy” Costley, a native of Buffalo who worked as a news director at a local black radio station (Salaam 1993, 335–336). These workshops were not only practical clinics in the nuts and bolts of the writing of plays and poetry but also de facto courses in African American literature that gave the students some models and sense of literary ancestry. Thus, these workshops can be seen as some of the earliest forerunners of Black Studies in the Deep South—though it should be recalled that the curriculum of many black elementary and secondary schools in the South during the Jim Crow era featured work by black authors, if usually formally conservative black writers. The professional touring portion of the theater suspended operations in 1967 because of loss of funding. This resulted in the exit of many key personnel (including Moses and Denise Nichols) to the theater in the North. Although O’Neal, too, was absent during a stint in alternative service as conscientious objector, the workshops continued to function, taking on a greater and semiautonomous existence. Since many of the same people belonged to both FST workshops, a decision was made to merge the two. This enlarged workshop of the FST started presenting the poetry and short plays of its members who, again, were almost entirely local. The combined workshops began to publish the journal Nkombo in 1968 and provided the core of what became BLKARTSOUTH, a


performance-oriented, community-based poetry and theater collective that, as the name suggests, saw itself both as a regional organization and as a part of a burgeoning national movement (Salaam 1993, 333–336; 2000; 2005; Ward 1991, 143–150). BLKARTSOUTH separated from the FST in 1968 largely over the question of whether the primary focus of the group should be building an indigenous New Orleans (and southern) theater and literary organization geared toward developing local artists, local audiences, and a local body of dramatic work, or whether the company would continue to be oriented toward a “professional” standard rooted in the theater world of New York. The BLKARTSOUTH ensemble was far different than the professional touring unit of the FST in that it was made up almost entirely of local New Orleans people and was dedicated to presenting the original work of its members. Nkombo was similarly devoted to the work of writers rooted in southern black communities. By 1969, BLKARTSOUTH began performing outside New Orleans. In part, BLKARTSOUTH was able to organize these performances through the contacts forged by Dent and the FST throughout the region, drawing on Dent’s wide range of acquaintances, the links made through the civil rights movement (particularly SNCC and CORE), and the activists and institutions of the Black Power and Black Arts movements that gained a new prominence in the South, often funded in part through antipoverty program money from government and private (primarily foundation and church) sources. The participation of many of the members of BLKARTSOUTH in such Black Power organizations as the Congress of African People (CAP) and the African Liberation Support Committee (ALSC) was also key in extending the group’s potential audience throughout the South. While the Black Power movement is still often associated primarily with the urban North and West, the South became an increasingly vital site for Black Power activities, especially after the inaugural CAP convention in Atlanta in 1970. To a certain extent this focus on the South was demographic: once CAP and other Black Power organizations designated the election of African Americans to public office as one of their main tasks, the sheer numbers and concentration of African Americans in southern cities and what remained of the old “Black Belt” dictated that the greatest opportunities for success in such campaigns were in the South. Also, one of the legacies of Jim Crow in the South was a certain sense of black self-reliance that resonated with the new nationalism. As Kalamu ya Salaam recalled, in much of the South black people did not have to think about whether they could run schools, businesses, and other sorts of institutions on a large scale because they had already done it.


Some of the strongest chapters of the ALSC and CAP were in the South, particularly in Texas, Louisiana, and North Carolina. At one point nearly half the executive committee of the ALSC was based in the South, including chairperson Dawolu Gene Locke in Houston. Much of the impetus for such important Black Power groups as the Student Organization for Black Unity (SOBU) and the Youth Organization of Black Unity (YOBU) as well as the popularization of African Liberation Day came from below the Mason-Dixon line, especially through the efforts of Owusu Saudukai (Howard Fuller) and Nelson Johnson in North Carolina. Again, the sheer concentration of African Americans in the South, especially students at historically black colleges and universities, made the region a fertile ground for such organizations and initiatives, significantly transforming the political climate at older educational/political institutions and leading to the creation of new ones, such as Malcolm X University in North Carolina and the Ahidiana Collective (which did grassroots political work and ran a community school) in New Orleans. As was true elsewhere and of other Black Arts groups, not only did the growth of Black Power bring the BLKARTSOUTH activists contacts in cities and campuses where they previously had none, but it also allowed them to combine political organizing and artistic performance, often in the same venue and at the same event (Salaam 2000, 2005; Watkins 2002). The tours, as well as the orientation and openness of Nkombo toward southern black artists outside New Orleans, inspired African American artists across the region to set up groups in much the same spirit. Some of these artists had pursued their crafts in relative isolation or in comparatively small and informal groups. Others, particularly actors and playwrights, had been part of college arts programs, both at historically black schools and at schools that had only recently begun to admit African American students. A number of these theater workers became involved in the local “mainstream” and “experimental” theaters of their hometowns as the breakdown of Jim Crow allowed them to audition successfully for these theaters. However, in other ways Jim Crow lived on. As the Memphis actor, director, and playwright Levi Frazier Jr. recalls, the range of roles available to black actors was still exceedingly narrow, leading to considerable dissatisfaction among black theater workers with the status quo.4 At the same time, news about Black Arts initiatives elsewhere circulated among these artists on southern black campuses and in the community, producing tremendous interest and some early efforts to undertake similar initiatives locally. As a result, the poetry-performance tours of BLKARTSOUTH—in which the group would write, stage, and act or present almost all its sophisticated, well-rehearsed, socially engaged


material, and in which all the actors would be black—came as a sort of revelation of what was possible (Salaam 2005). This inspiration was not only by example, but through the direct mentoring of emerging southern Black Arts groups by Salaam, Dent, and other BLKARTSOUTH members. For example, as elsewhere across the South, black community activists and artists in Houston became increasingly excited by the news they received about the new militant black political and arts groups and institutions from Oakland to New York that had received national attention, both in the so-called “mainstream” media and in the African American press. Several of these activists (including Rashaan Cornell Linson, Muntu Thomas Meloncon, Harvey King, Sidney Wilson, and Bill Milligan) met in a local parking lot, where they discussed the need for a political/cultural group that aimed at organizing and radicalizing young black Houstonians. Shortly thereafter, they initiated the Progressive Youth Movement in the old Fourth Ward black community near downtown Houston, but the organization floundered in trying to find a viable program and coherent ideology. One arena in which these activists attempted to serve and transform the community was through antipoverty efforts. One such effort was Project HOPE, through which the FST-BLKARTSOUTH touring group was invited to perform in Houston in the fall of 1969 (“The History of the SUDAN” 1971, 15–16; Salaam 2005). By this time a number of the leading members of the FSTBLKARTSOUTH, especially Kalamu ya Salaam, had become increasingly engaged with the neo-Africanist cultural nationalism of Maulana Karenga, making New Orleans a stronghold of Karenga’s Kawaida movement in the South. To a large extent, this interest in Karenga’s Kawaida philosophy as a guide to daily life (including political action) and as a powerful vision of an alternative liberated African-centered society circulated in the FST-BLKARTSOUTH through Amiri Baraka’s public association with Karenga and Kawaida. In other words, it was Baraka’s heroic stature that initially drew the interest of Salaam and others in Kawaida. Still, Karenga’s ability to elaborate and project his vision through his speeches and writings and through the cultural nationalist US organization had much to do, too, with his impact on the Black Arts and Black Power activists of New Orleans—though Salaam, like Baraka, never shared Karenga’s rejection of the blues and other forms of black popular music. Thus, when Salaam met with the artists and activists of the Progressive Youth Movement after the performances at Project HOPE, he not only presented them with the practical experience of creating and maintaining radical black community-based arts workshops and performing groups he gained through the work of the FST and BLKARTSOUTH, but also shared a


coherent Kawaidist ideological vision that could anchor such politicized arts groups. The resulting SUDAN/Southwest collective, poetry and dance performing groups with allied workshops along the lines of the FST-BLKARTSOUTH, used Karenga’s seven principles (Nguzo Saba) to guide both the daily and the long-term practice of the collective. Linson, the initial director of SUDAN/Southwest, founded the Black Arts Center, which became the anchor of Black Arts activity in Houston in the 1970s, serving as a performance space and school with classes in writing, drama, dance, music, and the visual arts largely supported by various sorts of public and private antipoverty program money—resembling Studio Watts in Los Angeles, the Affro-Arts Theatre in Chicago, Dopkwe House in Memphis, the Black Artists Group in St. Louis, and BARTS in New York, though with more direct interaction with non–African American cultural institutions than in Los Angeles, Chicago, or New York (“The History of the SUDAN” 1971, 15–16; Salaam 2005; Thomas 1998, 313). By the 1970s, a profusion of community-based black theaters, performance groups, art centers, and arts workshops had arisen across the Deep South; like SUDAN/Southwest and the Black Arts Center, many groups were directly inspired or shaped by Nkombo, BLKARTSOUTH, and its tours—as well as by the more high-profile national Black Arts and Black Power institutions outside the region, such as the New Lafayette Theater in New York; the Organization for Black American Culture (OBAC), Third World Press, and the Institute for Positive Education in Chicago; Broadside Press in Detroit; and Spirit House in Newark; and by such publications as Black World, The Journal of Black Poetry, and Black Theatre. Like the FST, a number of those groups had roots in campus theater and arts programs that under the influence of BLKARTSOUTH and the burgeoning national movement migrated into the community. The Dashiki Project Theatre, the brainchild of Theodore Gilliam and other faculty members, graduates, and students of the Dillard University drama program, opened in 1969 in a coffeehouse at a black Catholic church in New Orleans’s Central City. Similarly, the M-Ensemble was launched on the campus of the University of Miami in 1971 but soon migrated to Miami’s Liberty City ghetto.5 In Memphis, a group largely made up of graduate students in theater from the historically black LeMoyneOwen College and the relatively recently integrated Memphis State University (now University of Memphis) and Southwestern at Memphis (now Rhodes College) got together to create the Beale Street Repertory Theater in 1974, inspired in part by a performance of John O’Neal’s revived touring unit of the FST (Frazier 2005). In other cases, groups grew directly out of the community, again often with direct connections to BLKARTSOUTH, as with Chakula Cha Jua’s Ethiopian Theater in


New Orleans (which would stage the first production of Dent’s Ritual Murder in 1976) and the Theater of Afro Arts founded in Miami in 1969 by Wendell Narcisse, a New Orleans native who became the president of the SBCA and joined Dent and Salaam as an editor of Nkombo (Ward 2005). Other groups within this southern African American arts network included the Black Arts Workshop in Little Rock, Arkansas, the Black Belt Cultural Center and the Children of Selma Theater in Selma, Alabama, the Urban Theater in Houston, and the Last Messengers in Greenville, Mississippi. To some degree, the impetus for the SBCA issued from Dent’s desire to continue and extend the work of BLKARTSOUTH, particularly as the older group began to unravel around 1973, with its New Orleans members moving in different directions. Unlike the disintegration of many early Black Arts or proto–Black Arts collectives elsewhere in the United States, there were few sharp conflicts or ruptures within BLKARTSOUTH. Rather its members found themselves emphasizing different priorities while remaining friends. Salaam, for example, became increasingly focused on political organizing through the Ahidiana Collective and his editorship of the Black Collegian. Of all the leading figures of BLKARTSOUTH still active in New Orleans, Dent remained most interested in the arts, and wanted to institutionalize the less formal connections forged by the FST and BLKARTSOUTH with many of the southern black theaters and cultural groups, especially after a successful regional conference that brought many such groups to West Point, Mississippi, in 1972. Dent envisioned the SBCA as an umbrella organization that would allow the development and exposure of black theater, dance, poetry, and other forms of expressive art throughout the South and serve as a medium that would allow southern black artists and community-based arts groups to reach audiences (and gain financial support) beyond the South, which, of all the southern groups, only O’Neal’s FST had been able to achieve (Ward 2001; Salaam 1993, 338–339; 2005). The SBCA was partially successful in its goal of gaining national attention for southern black artists. Black World and Black Theatre did increasingly cover black performance in the South—Black World ’s annual theater roundup in the spring was (and is) a particularly good source for news about these productions.6 As Dent and Salaam pointed out, SBCA members, generally Dent or Salaam, nearly always had to cover these performances themselves because of the extreme difficulty in getting staff from these journals to come South (Salaam 1993, 38–39; 2000; 2005). Nonetheless, while it may have been difficult to attract reviewers to the South, members of northern and western black theaters and arts


institutions did attend the annual meetings of the SBCA, especially the performance festivals in the fall, giving southern playwrights an exposure that they would otherwise have lacked, and leading to the production of works by these playwrights across the country (Frazier 2005; Ward 2001, 2005). Despite the only partial success in its goal of gaining national recognition for southern black artists, the SBCA was far more successful in its goal of inspiring, promoting, and supporting the work of black artists and arts institutions within the South. Its two most important activities were its annual business conference, which generally took place on Memorial Day weekend, and its annual performance festival, which usually occurred on Thanksgiving weekend. These meetings and festivals took place in cities and on college campuses in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. While difficult to verify, the SBCA’s claim that “over eighty percent of all Black cultural organizations in the South have participated in at least one of the festivals, conferences, or business meetings of the S.B.C.A.” suggests something of the group’s reach—a reach unparalleled by any other regional Black Arts organization in the United States (SBCA Flyer 1982). As Levi Frazier (who first attended a 1976 SBCA meeting in Tallahassee) recalls, these meetings and festivals were invaluable in opening doors and gaining exposure for southern artists’ work outside their hometowns. They were also crucial in a very practical sense, allowing formal and informal discussions about how these grassroots groups dealt with common problems of funding, organization, audience, and artistic development, particularly as the national Black Arts and Black Power movements fractured and declined (Frazier 2005; Ward 2001, 2005). This combination of artistic networking and hands-on discussion of common problems (as well as a much lower degree of ideological conflict between Marxists and cultural nationalists than in many other places in the United States) allowed the SBCA to survive until the early 1980s, far longer than most Black Arts and Black Power umbrella groups, even though the SBCA finally succumbed to many of the same forces that undermined radical arts initiatives elsewhere, including the depoliticization and bureaucratization of funding for black community-based cultural groups (or perhaps it might be more accurate to say that the cultural bureaucracy put an increased emphasis on the funding of depoliticized arts initiatives) and the decline of the larger movements across the country (Ward 2001, 2005). In scholarship on the Black Arts movement, the South still remains to a large extent terra incognita. Still, as Askia Touré observed, the SBCA was the largest grassroots black cultural organization in the United States


during that era and was unique in its breadth of regional coverage (1983). Ironically, much of this grassroots success grew in part out of a sense of regional neglect by the broader movement—though few in the SBCA seem to have doubted the legitimacy of and their participation in this larger movement. One might, and some southern Black Arts veterans do, argue that this sense of neglect was in many ways a source of strength, producing a degree of unity in the Black Power and Black Arts movements in the South that mitigated the factionalism that wracked them elsewhere, contributing to relatively long-lived institutions and allowing individuals with very different ideological outlooks to continue to work together in productive ways—even until this moment. However, Black Arts in the South gave (and continues to give) much to black expressive culture in general and the national Black Arts movement in particular. The fact that Black Power and Black Arts existed and thrived in the South, as reported—say, in Black World, The Journal of Black Poetry, and Black Theatre—performed an essential ideological task for those movements. Given the centrality of the South to almost every notion of African American identity and culture, the movements in the North and the West could not have seen themselves issuing from, speaking to, and being for a liberated black nation (or a nation in the process of freeing itself ) without the work of BLKARTSOUTH; other communitybased groups as SUDAN/Southwest, the Beale Street Repertory Theatre, and the Theater of Afro-Arts; the SBCA; the campus-based workshops, institutes, and festivals; and the whole infrastructure of Black Arts organizations, institutions, and events in the South. The Black Arts movement in the South owed an enormous debt to the long and still living tradition of African American artistic, intellectual, and political activism in the city of New Orleans, a tradition that Tom Dent did much to make accessible first to the young artists attracted to the workshops of the FST and later to black cultural workers throughout the South, especially through the SBCA. The work of Dent and the SBCA still reverberates today. Many of the stalwarts of the SBCA kept on at the center of the African American arts scene in their local communities long after the organization’s demise. Both Tom Dent in New Orleans and Wendell Narcisse in Miami continued to form new groups to encourage young black writers until their untimely deaths in the 1990s. The late poet and critic Lorenzo Thomas migrated from New York to Houston in the 1970s, becoming not only a major participant in the SBCA and subsequent black cultural institutions in Houston and elsewhere in the South, but also one of the pioneering and most perceptive scholars of the Black Arts movement (and African American poetry) until his death in 2005. Dent, along with Jerry Ward and Charles Rowell, was much


responsible for the conception and early publication of Callaloo in the late 1970s, seeing it as fulfilling much of the same function as Nkombo but with a much greater openness to black writers from outside the South (and, indeed, outside the United States). Though Rowell took the journal in a far more academic and far less specifically southern direction by the early 1980s, Callaloo remains a major legacy of the New Orleans–based southern Black Arts movement and the spirit of the SBCA. The push to build new African American cultural institutions in historic African American communities that one finds throughout the region today, and the desire to construct networks between these institutions within the region and like institutions elsewhere, owes much to a constituency significantly shaped by the SBCA. One can see the plethora of national African American arts events that now take place in the South, such as the Black Arts Festival in Atlanta and the National Black Theatre Festival in North Carolina (and even in its way, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival) as descending in large part from the vision of Dent and the SBCA. Other artists from the FST-BLKARTSOUTH-SBCA network—including Kalamu ya Salaam, John O’Neal, and Chakula Cha Jua in New Orleans (at least until Katrina), Muntu Thomas Meloncon in Houston, Nayo Watkins in North Carolina, Shirley Richardson and Pat Williams in Miami, and Levi Frazier in Memphis, joined by migrants from the Black Arts movement elsewhere in the United States, such as Ebon Dooley and Ed Spriggs in Atlanta—are now influential arts elders in their communities and across the region. Bringing this essay back to New Orleans today, I want to close on a more somber note. One issue that I think that some cultural historians have sometimes neglected is the way that dramatic changes in the urban landscape of the United States have not only disrupted the cultural life of historically black neighborhoods but also even our sense of grassroots arts activity in the United States, especially our sense of local audiences and artists who essentially remained known only regionally. While the destruction of older African American communities through neglect, socalled urban renewal, gentrification, highway construction, and so on, is a fact all across the nation, it has often been particularly acute in the urban South. As a result, the population of those neighborhoods has been dispersed, and the old cultural, social, economic, and political institutions that anchored them have been similarly scattered or destroyed. Speaking of my own personal experience in researching the larger history of the origins and development of the Black Arts movement, one result of this dispersal and destruction is that it is often hard to find the people who patronized and participated in the small theaters, galleries, arts organizations, and so on, in the 1960s and 1970s, but who never


went on to any fame outside of those communities and that moment— which is to say the vast majority of those who worked in and supported Black Arts, especially in the South. New Orleans before Katrina was something of an exception, a city where many of the better and lesser known participants in Black Arts remained and where, if someone did not know about the theater that had been in her or his neighborhood, she or he could direct you to someone who did. Such guidance is extremely difficult to find in cities where the old neighborhoods have been built over (or simply left a collection of empty lots with a sprinkling of derelict or decaying buildings) and their old inhabitants moved elsewhere. Often in those cities if someone does not know the answer to your question, she or he very often is unsure where the people who would know live any longer (or even if those people are still alive at all). Thus, the question of whether one should rebuild the old historically black neighborhoods of New Orleans—a city where, in spite of much racism, neglect, and destruction of neighborhood infrastructure, there were stable African American neighborhoods with an incredible sense of tradition, as in the much maligned 9th Ward—is a crucial question of, among many other things, our cultural health, and an artistic legacy that has marked and continues to mark our national culture down to the present. Notes 1. For a discussion of the origins and growth of the larger Black Arts Movement, including the movement in the South and its relation to other regional manifestations of Black Arts, see Smethurst 2005. It is worth noting that though the book covers some of the same ground as this essay, albeit in another context, the essay differs from the section of the book that deals with the South via the material presented and to some extent conclusions about Black Arts in the region. 2. It is worth noting that though some might (and did at the time) see O’Neal and his supporters as elitist and opposed to building local black theater institutions with real roots in the community, O’Neal has worked continuously in black New Orleans theater until the present (or at least until Hurricane Katrina). 3. Despite her commitment to SNCC and the movement in Mississippi, Derby, like O’Neal, saw the center of her artistic discipline, painting, in New York City, and so spent part of the year up North. It was in New York that Young introduced Derby to Dent. 4. When I told Frazier that leading Black Arts director Woodie King said something similar about Detroit in the late 1950s and early 1960s—that black actors were only allowed to play “buddy roles” (that is, the “buddy” of the white lead) and never the lead—Frazier commented that in

146 / james smethurst Memphis they were only allowed to play “butler roles” (Frazier 2005; King 2004). 5. For an interesting account of the Dashiki Project Theatre, albeit one that overemphasizes a supposed divergence between Dashiki and the Black Arts Movement, see Coleman 2003. 6. For examples of this coverage in Negro Digest/Black World, see Dent 1971, 1973.

Works Cited Coleman, Stanley R. 2003. “The Dashiki Project Theatre: Black Identity and Beyond.” PhD diss., Louisiana State University. Dent, Thomas C. 1971. “Beyond Rhetoric Toward a Black Southern Theater.” Black World, April, 15–25. ———. 1973. “New Theaters Across the South Join Hands.” Black World, April, 92–95. ———.1984. “Marcus B. Christian: An Appreciation.” Black American Literature Forum 18, no. 1 (Spring): 22–26. Dent, Thomas C., Richard Schechner, and Gilbert Moses, eds. 1969. The Free Southern Theater, by the Free Southern Theater. A Documentary of the South’s Radical Black Theater, with Journals, Letters, Poetry, Essays, and a Play Written by Those Who Built It. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Du Bois, W. E. B. 1903. The Souls of Black Folk, eds. David W. Blight and Robert Gooding-Williams. New York: Bedford Books, 1997. Fabré, Genevieve. 1983. “The Free Southern Theatre, 1963–1979.” Black American Literature Forum 17, no. 2 (Summer): 55–59. Frazier, Levi Jr. 2005. Interview by James Smethurst. December 26. Phone interview. “The History of SUDAN (in Texas?).” 1971. Nkombo 3, no. 2 (March): 15–16. King, Woodie Jr. 2004. Interview by James Smethurst. January 3. New York, New York. Myrick-Harris, Clarissa. 1990. “Behind the Scenes: Doris Derby, Denise Nicholas and the Free Southern Theater.” In Women of the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941–1965, eds. Vicki Crawford, Jacqueline Anne Rouse, and Barbara Woods, 219–232. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. O’Neal, John. 2005. Interview by James Smethurst. December 5. Amherst, Massachusetts. Salaam, Kalamu. 1993. “Enriching the Paper Trail: An Interview with Tom Dent.” African American Review 27, no. 2 (Summer): 327–344. ———. 2000. Interview by James Smethurst. April 23. New Orleans, Louisiana. ———. 2005. Interview by James Smethurst. December 6. Cambridge, Massachusetts.

black arts south / 147 SBCA Flyer. 1982. Copy in author’s possession provided by Jerry Ward. Smethurst, James Edward. 2005. The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Thomas, Lorenzo. 1978. “The Shadow World: New York’s Umbra Workshop and Origins of the Black Arts Movement.” Callaloo 1:53–72. ———. 1998. “Neon Griot: The Functional Role of Poetry Readings in the Black Arts Movement.” In Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, ed. Charles Bernstein, 300–323. New York: Oxford. ———. 2000. Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and TwentiethCentury American Poetry. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. ———. 2001. “Tom Dent and the Umbra Workshop.” Unpublished conference paper, American Studies Association Annual Meeting, Washington, DC. Touré, Askia. 1983. Interview by Michel Oren. July 13. Umbra Poets Workshop Oral History Transcripts, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. Ward, Jerry. 1991. “Southern Black Aesthetics: The Case of Nkombo Magazine.” Mississippi Quarterly (Spring): 143–150. ———. 2001. Interview by James Smethurst. December 28. New Orleans, Louisiana. ———. 2005. Interview by James Smethurst. December 6. Phone interview. Watkins, Nayo. 2002. Interview by James Smethurst. January 14. Phone interview.

In 1976, the largest wildcat strike in American history began in the coalfields of West Virginia. Exploring its context, causes, and results, Lynda Ann Ewen tells an old tale that starts with capital’s rampant exploitation of raw and human resources, traces the efforts of labor to resist, and ends with their minor gains, followed by the devastation of labor and land. Coal in America is a continuing story of vast wealth, resistance, and repression that has resulted in demeaning caricatures of Appalachians, which are still common in newspapers and movies. Thus, it comes as little surprise that few outside of Appalachian studies recognize the pivotal role Appalachian labor has played for workers’ rights over the last century. Moreover, no history of either the Appalachian region or of labor relations has addressed the strike that Ewen has finally set down in this essay. Unfortunately, such stories are more necessary to share than ever. In 2003, individual counties near the mutual boundaries between Kentucky, West Virginia, and Virginia produced between $147,000,000 and $1,082,000,000 worth of coal. However, those same counties reported between 7.5 and 18 percent unemployment, and from 1990 to 2003 the county that produces the most coal—Boone County, West Virginia—had an increase in its infant mortality rate (4.4–5.4 per 1,000) and in the percent of children approved for free- and reduced-price school meals (40.4–58.8). Residents throughout the coalfields of central Appalachia—eastern Kentucky, southern Ohio, western Virginia, and southern West Virginia—are and have been among the most impoverished in the nation, with 48 percent of families living in poverty in some counties, a direct result of a 120 years of systematic exploitation ( for these and other basic facts on the region, see Amy Glasmeier, Appalachia, 2006, Census Mapper, http://www.censusmapper.com/appalachia.htm). Ewen’s essay, in short, speaks about some of those who have struggled to stop this long-term exploitation, as well as the grotesque consequences of not doing so. Nevertheless, the essay ends with promise and shows the most recent iteration of resistance, which has gained a high profile in 2005 and 2006 because of the efforts of local writers and environmental activists to stop mountaintop removal.

7 The Great Anti-Injunction Strike of 1976: Context and Implications for Appalachia Lynda Ann Ewen

The struggle of Appalachian coal miners changed the face of America. In the twentieth century, three great movements swept the coalfields and then spread to the rest of industrial America. In many ways, the exceptionally high standard of living enjoyed by the American working class in the last part of the twentieth century is directly related to the political activities of Appalachian coalfield residents. The statement above runs in direct contradiction to the notion of Appalachia as “backward,” “isolated,” and “tailing” after the social movements of the North and South. The movements arising in the coalfields were not fights against imperialism or for civil or student rights; rather, they were struggles for workplace justice, safety, and health. As such, these movements have been largely ignored as legitimate struggles of the “Left.” Starting with a quick review of the social and political conditions that laid the groundwork for the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, this essay examines two of these movements within the context of the largest wildcat strike (unauthorized work stoppage) of the twentieth century and also examines the contemporary situation. Background Founded in 1890, the United Mineworkers of America (UMWA) became the first major industrial union in America and in the 1930s stood in opposition to the craft union approach of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The union suffered setbacks during their effort to organize eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia, but after decades of bloodletting in which miners battled mine guards, security thugs, and finally the National Guard, they won the right to organize following New Deal legislation that

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legalized collective bargaining.1 The coal miners paved the way by forming an organization that grouped all workers in the mines into one single union, an “industrial” union (Lee 1969). The UMWA president John L. Lewis then sent organizers from the coalfields into the stockyards, and the steel, auto, rubber, and glass factories of the North and Midwest. Coal miners’ union dues supported the organizing drives for the unions that would make up the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) (Boyer and Morais 1971).2 The ties of family, politics, and shared experiences created in this period of the 1930s and 1940s laid the basis for the continued influence of the miners over the U.S. labor movement. The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) was an important influence within the early UMWA and worked closely with Lewis in articulating a radical perspective on working-class organizing. Once in power, Lewis, like many other entrenched union leaders of that time, became more conservative (Alinsky 1949).3 He turned on the radicals and participated in the red-baiting of the 1950s—a legacy that affected the “New Left” radicals in the coalfields in the 1970s and 1980s. With the removal of leftists and radical ideology, the dominant American union perspective became what has been termed “business unionism.” Many union leaders were more interested in the union’s investments and financial flows than issues of speedup, safety, and industrial pollution. Coal miners were given benefits like a day off on their birthdays, but lived in constant fear of roof falls, electrocution, and early retirement via suffocating from Black Lung disease. Lewis resigned in 1959, and the presidency of the UMWA passed to Tony Boyle in 1963. Boyle was a corrupt, manipulative man who saw the union as his own private domain (Finley 1972, Hume 1971). At this point, a number of historical factors intersected, creating the basis for a new wave of struggle. Changing Conditions Social movements arise in response to shifting conditions, and a number of significant changes occurred in the coalfields of the late 1960s. First, the increasing global demand for energy, particularly in light of the oil crises of that time, increased the demand for coal. The industry began to hire younger, less-experienced miners, many of them returning veterans from Vietnam. Second, the corruption of the union itself and the union’s inability to protect the lives and health of the miners were becoming far more apparent. Third, the introduction of new technologies created new health and safety issues that were largely ignored by the union bureaucracy.

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There was a fourth factor of particular interest for any analysis of “Left” activity. In the 1950s, mechanization in the mines had created a forced migration of thousands of coal-mining families into the urban industries of the North and Midwest. The children of these families were taken “back home” at every available opportunity and their ties to grandparents, uncles and aunts, and communities in Appalachia remained strong. These same children, however, were being educated in Northern schools and then in universities. They began to come back to Appalachia, either as VISTA volunteers or as young professionals. And many who did not come home connected to groups organizing in urban Appalachian communities. This infusion of energy, education, and resources reversed the historical flow out of Appalachia. The actual numbers involved were not large, but their influence was widespread. Many of these “reverse migrants” had been influenced by the New Left ideologies and brought with them a radical perspective. They were joined by other young people who, although not Appalachian in origin, wanted to participate in the Appalachian struggle. Several organizations attracting this new generation clearly impacted the coalfield struggles: they included the People’s Appalachian Research Collective (PARC) in Morgantown, West Virginia; the Miners for Democracy Movement; the UMWA itself; and the Black Lung Association (BLA). The PARC was a radical think tank that began to publish its own analyses of Appalachia as a colony and exposes of the corporations controlling coal in their journal, People’s Appalachia (which conducted the first analyses of the political economy of the region from 1970 to 1973); the PARC also provided information and analyses to The Mineworkers’ Journal (the official magazine of the UMWA) and other progressive publications. VISTA workers in coalfield communities were often involved as well. There was a fertile ground. The union membership was ready for a change and Miners for Democracy ran their own ticket, with “Jock” Yablonski (Pennsylvania District 5) as president and Arnold Miller (West Virginia District 17) as vice president. Tony Boyle ordered his henchmen to assassinate Yablonski (whose wife and daughter were also murdered) in 1969. Arnold Miller, a miner with relatively little union experience, was catapulted into the presidency of the union in 1972. Unable to cope with the growing dissidence and insecure in his position, Miller became largely ineffective. Real power passed to the larger districts and the younger miners, who were a sizable constituency. Personal Commentary It is here that I begin to tell the story. How do I know what I know? I guess I was a “participant observer,” as the academics might say. So the account that follows includes what I experienced as a resident of a coalfields town

152 / lynda ann ewen (Rand, West Virginia); as a teacher in a small college in the coalfields (West Virginia Institute of Technology in Montgomery, West Virginia); as a sociologist and writer; and as the wife of the lawyer for District 17, the largest district of the union. My husband was one of those from the younger generation who returned home. John Taylor was the son of a coal miner who had been laid off and migrated to Detroit and the grandson of a coal miner who, in 1916, helped organize the first UMWA local in Monongalia County, West Virginia. John had become a lawyer for Chrysler, got fired, went to work at a Chrysler plant, got fired for his work in the safety strikes, and went back to being a lawyer for a labor law firm in Detroit, where he litigated workers’ compensation and Black Lung claims.4 When he was offered the job of legal counsel for District 17 in Charleston, West Virginia, he jumped at it. I lived through those strikes, meeting the upstart leaders, the elected officials, and their wives and families. I went to the coalfield churches and heard the speeches on the salt piles. I helped pass out literature and met most of the politically active radicals who were attracted to the battles taking place. There have been very few analyses of this wave of strikes that paralyzed one of the most important industries in America. Ironically, while this was going on, the sociologist who was defining Appalachia for academic America was Kai Erikson, writing about a fatalistic people, incapable of change and paralyzed by tradition (1976). In many ways, I want to set the record straight. Or at least provide a counterweight to the distorted perceptions in social science offered by Erikson and Jack Weller, whose disparaging pseudo-scientific analysis of Appalachian culture in Yesterday’s People (University Press of Kentucky 1965, 1995) was the theoretical framework underlying Erikson’s study.5 I also know that once the story here appears in print, it becomes a source for further research and citation. But space allows me to tell only one small part of the larger story of what was happening.6

This shift of power within the UMWA was taking place in the shadow of several major historical events. In 1968, a Consolidation Coal Company mine in Mannington, West Virginia, exploded, trapping and killing seventy-eight miners. The disaster focused attention on the unsafe conditions that had been tolerated by companies, the government, and the union. Public sympathy for the miners was accompanied by marches and demonstrations demanding legislation to protect the safety of miners. In 1969, the Mining Safety and Health Act (MSHA) was passed. The political leadership of the miners was obvious to the autoworkers in Detroit, where the cousins, sons, and nephews of the miners were having fingers cut off by misfiring presses and spitting up blood as they worked the furnaces. And as with the miners, their union was turning a deaf ear to their complaints. In the late 1960s, a series of safety strikes at


Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors created some of the same pressures, and in 1970 Congress passed the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA). Once again, Appalachians had opened the door. In 1972, an impoundment built by Pittston Coal Company at the top of Buffalo Creek in Southern West Virginia gave way, killing 126 people and wiping out entire communities along the creek. This time it was not just the miners themselves but entire communities put at risk by the carelessness and greed of the company. The mechanization of the mines meant that underground machinery now spewed out enormous amounts of fine coal dust. Companies were lax in their provision of equipment to circulate air, and the health effects were now beginning to emerge. Although not a “disaster” in the traditional sense, thousands of older miners were finding it harder and harder to breathe as the coal dust in their lungs clogged the tiny pathways. They were slowly suffocating. Great Britain had acknowledged pneumoconiosis (Black Lung) as a disease in the last part of the nineteenth century. But up into the mid-1960s, medical experts at West Virginia University were still claiming no such disease existed. In 1968, a small group of older sick miners met in the Montgomery City Hall and decided to organize to make the government and companies deal with the ravages of the Black Lung. The BLA was born and soon became the voice of the miners forced off the job by their disease. The union was reluctant to address this issue, and the BLA was often forced into a position of lobbying their own union to act as they fought for legislation. Passed by Congress in 1969, the Black Lung Act (Title IV of the Mine, Safety and Health legislation) was the first national industrial health legislation and was soon followed by legislation related to asbestosis, “Brown” lung, and other industrial diseases. The struggles of the mining communities were again paying dividends for all workers. However, the existence of legislation and the protection of a contract are meaningless if they are not enforced, and enforcement became the issue by the mid-1970s. The Contract It is important to understand both the role of an industrial union and the limits of the union. Under the system of business unionism, a contract is binding. Once the union signs a contract it is, with rare exceptions, legally bound to ensure that its members carry out the terms of the contract. Union workers are obliged to follow prescribed channels for grievances. The problem with issues of safety and health, of course, is that one might get killed waiting for a grievance to get heard. Or begin to die slowly of Black Lung.


When a contract is up for negotiation, the playing field is hardly equal. Companies often stockpile mountains of coal just prior to contract expiration. Industry approaches the table given its legal right to own the mines and the machinery; its right to take profit from the labor of the workers; and the tremendous influences it can bring to bear—through the above rights—on state legislators, Congress, the Presidency, and the courts. Indeed, in West Virginia it is widely acknowledged that coal interests control both the governorship and the legislature. The union approaches contract negotiations defensively. Its major weapon is a strike but the UMWA conducts a contract strike with only minimal benefits. Families eat up savings, fall behind on payments, and cut their standard of living in order to maintain a lengthy strike. A strike does not increase the miners’ power over the means of production. The only effective threat is the withholding of the workers’ labor, at the personal cost mentioned above. This essential inequality of power is exacerbated once the contract is ratified and set in force. To start with, miners are forced to go through a difficult and long grievance procedure in which they may be harassed, intimidated, and even fired at every step for attempting to exert their union rights. Moreover, continual company refusal to abide by the contract forces the union into long and difficult negotiation and legalistic proceedings that drain union resources and stretch scarce personnel. The coal companies in this period had extremely poor records of keeping good faith; instead, they flagrantly and openly violated the terms of the contract, knowing full well that the chances were good that they would not get caught, and if they were that they would only be minimally punished. At the same time, the companies were preaching to the miners that they must abide by the contract. In the early 1970s, working miners began to take matters into their own hands. If the top (the roof of the mine) was deemed unsafe and the union or company did not fix it, miners began to simply walk off work. They increased the pressure on both the union and the company by throwing up picket lines at neighboring mines. The picket lines were supported by other miners who were experiencing similar difficulties. District leaders, closer to the miners than the national leaders, often explicitly or implicitly supported these walkouts. As the frequency of such walkouts and picket lines increased, the miners became more conscious of the power they exercised. The Courts This general process—company violations of the contract, miners’ anger and frustration, and miners’ violation of the contract through the wildcat


strike—was being played out repeatedly in the coalfields at this time. The companies increasingly turned to the courts—the allegedly neutral arm of the justice system—to carry on their labor relations. By 1974, many companies had ceased any attempt to resolve disputes at the mine site and simply filed for injunctions at the first sign of worker distress and strike. However, one of the judges involved felt it necessary to acknowledge this situation, as in the following statement by the Southern West Virginia Federal District Court Judge K. K. Hall: I want to, someplace along the line—this may be a good place. I’ve just about reached the conclusion that the Court—this Court used in a manner that was not anticipated at all, that the way to settle strikes has just come to be by going to the Federal Court and getting him to issue a temporary restraining order without the parties doing something about it . . . The Court finds it distasteful being placed in the position of being the policeman or disciplinarian for the coal companies all the time. (Amherst 1975, 5) [emphasis added]

The spiral of events was predictable. Although miners hauled into court were initially respectful of the legal process and anxious to be law-abiding citizens, the unevenness of the justice meted out, the obvious biases of the judges, and the continued violations of the contract on the part of the companies began to undercut the usefulness of the “judge as labor relations manager for coal company X.” Soon the judges were no more effective in ordering miners back to work than the mine boss had been. The judges then escalated the conflict by increasing the severity of the fines levied, fining individual miners, and finally, in late summer of 1975, jailing the president of local union 8454 in Logan County at Pittston Coal’s Buffalo Creek mine. Sim Howze, president of Local 8454, was a highly respected African American miner and longtime resident of Buffalo Creek. He was also a deeply religious man. Most of the local presidents assured the judges that they would indeed tell their men they had to cross the picket lines to go to work, but when the men were told, the local president clearly did so tongue in cheek. When the judge asked Howze if he would tell his men to cross the lines, Howze would not lie. Instead, he spoke movingly of the importance of the picket line for the welfare of coal miners and their communities. The judge ruled him in contempt and sent him to jail. There is no question but that the disaster at Buffalo Creek, and the complete failure of the state to punish the obvious negligence of the coal company, was a major factor in the militancy of the Logan County miners in this period.7 Howze’s jailing was a turning point for the miners.


Pickets fanned out across the coalfields, and mines were shut down in several districts. Sim Howze was brought back to the stand and asked, under penalty of remaining in jail, whether he would demand that his men cross the picket lines. Howze said “No” and he went back to jail (Buffalo Mining 1975). Mass demonstrations were held at the courthouse and in the streets of Charleston, the state capital, and for almost a month no coal was mined. It is not important what legal nicety the judge used to let Sim Howze out of jail or what legal explanation the judge gave the coal companies for laying back temporarily on injunctions. The fact remains that a large-scale walkout had exerted the political pressure necessary for the temporary resolution of the mounting conflict between the legal system and the coal miners. The union could do little, legally, to resolve the problem. Authorizing the strikes as legitimate would have opened the union to potential lawsuits that might have bankrupted it. The top leadership would have had to be willing to go outside the law to exercise the political and economic muscle of the union, but President Miller was unwilling to take the risk. The companies counterattacked. Appalachian Power Company, Carbon Fuel Company, U.S. Steel, and Amherst Industries filed multimillion-dollar lawsuits against District 17 and the national union as a result of the wildcat strikes; all the companies increased their pressure on the courts to punish work stoppages. Several locals in District 17 were literally bankrupted by the size of the fines levied on them as individual locals. And the miners watched as the price of coal went up and the companies increasingly cut corners on health safety and benefits whenever possible—continuing to violate the contract with relative impunity. By spring of 1976, rank-and-file union leaders generally agreed that they were sitting on a powder keg. The arbitrary use of injunctions by the companies had been publicly exposed during that winter in a series of public hearings held by District 17. In these hearings, covered extensively by the press, witnesses and documents showed conclusively the nature of company violations of the contract and the one-sided role of the federal courts. Company representatives were invited to the hearing to present countertestimony, but only one company appeared. Nonetheless, the judges continued their general policy of disciplining the miners on behalf of the companies, assuming the miners to be guilty unless proven otherwise. In March 1976, the frustrated courts, unable to stem the increasing deluge of wildcats, jailed seventeen miners from the Carbon Fuel Company who had struck for one shift in sympathy with pickets from the Lightfoot mine of Eastern Associates Coal Company.8 The lesson was not


lost on the miners. The President of the United States, Richard Nixon, had broken the law and walked away with impunity, the coal companies could willfully violate the contract, but the state would physically incarcerate the miners for protecting their economic rights. In June of that year, one more of many incidents occurred, but this incident became the spark that ignited the fuse. The miners at Cedar Coal Local 1759 had had a grievance against the company for its refusal to fill a job by the rules of the contract. Urged by the district leadership to avoid more costly strikes, the men undertook the lengthy and expensive grievance procedure to redress a flagrant violation of the contract. The arbitrator sided with the union, but in an effort to concede something to the company, the arbitrator agreed that the job did not have to be posted. Again the union was forced into attempting to overrule an arbitrator’s decision that clearly violated the given contract. The district legal staff filed a suit in court, this time seeking an injunction against the company and hoping that a strike could be avoided. In other words, the union was attempting to do what the companies had been doing all along—obtain a federal injunction to force the company to obey the contract. The judge, sensing the political undercurrent at work, sought to avoid a decision and claimed that he did not have time to hear the case, revealing what the miners had gradually come to understand—that the federal courts functioned as an apparatus of the ruling class to enforce coal production, not to serve justice. In subsequent courtroom proceedings, the judge again revealed his class bias. The following interchange is between the federal judge and the chairman of the mine committee of the striking local. Mr. Forms: Judge Knapp, could I say something, please? Judge Knapp, it disturbs me that through my education as a child I always understood that there would be equal justice, and before vacation we came to this Court, appealed to this Court twice so that we may obtain a temporary restraining order against Cedar Coal Company. Twice we could not be heard in court. Now we still don’t get to hear our side of it. The Court still won’t hear it. The Court: There isn’t any side. Mr. Forms: Yes, there is a side. There certainly is a side. The Court: All right. There isn’t any side to it. The only issue before the Court at this time is failure of you to obey the Court order. If you don’t want to obey it, I can accommodate you. Mr. Forms: If you had heard us in the first place, we would have shown that the company would have been in contempt. The Court: You’re bordering on contempt. I want to inform you of that. If you want to spend the night in jail, why you continue and I’ll give

158 / lynda ann ewen you that opportunity. You’re not telling this Court what this Court ought to do, see. That’s a matter for the Court to determine. Now, if you have any idea that you’re going to think you may be needed in certain government circles if you feel that you are better equipped to run the country and run the government than the people who are running it now, then I think there might be certain people interested in your services. Mr. Forms: Well, I don’t think I stated in any way that I was better equipped— The Court: Well, I don’t know, but you’re trying to tell this Court what this Court should have done and, of course— Mr. Forms: We asked you to hear us. The Court: —nobody tells this Court what this Court is going to do, not even you. Mr. Forms: Okay. Thank you for your— The Court: If you—just one more remark out of you and you’ll be headed for jail. All right. (Cedar Coal 1976, 11–13)

The Great Anti-Injunction Strike of 1976 The men understood from that trial there was no legal recourse for justice: a major strike was on. By this time the issue of the federal injunctions had come to be widely understood, and the strike had general support throughout the coalfields. The pickets from Cedar Coal fanned out across District 17; from there the strike spread throughout Appalachia and into the West. At the height of the strike over 120,000 coal miners across the nation, including Colorado and New Mexico, had walked off their jobs in the largest wildcat strike of the century. The companies, of course, immediately went to court, demanding fines and punishment for the striking miners. The national leadership, again caught in a legal box, implored the men to return to work, but those pleadings fell on deaf ears. The intensity of the strike clearly threatened the federal judges who, under mounting attacks by the miners, began to back down, even to the point of offering personal apologies to the men who had been degraded in the courtroom. But the leadership of the locals at Cedar Coal now realized that their case was merely one example, and that simply settling for a redress of their own particular grievance would not affect the general policy of the companies. The strike now became a political strike, and the general demand became that the federal courts cease using the injunction as a tool of labor relations for the companies. The main strike lasted approximately one month. This mass movement was well organized with clearly defined objectives and conscious leadership from individuals within the lower levels of the union who


had a fairly developed understanding of the forces at work. The intricate web of picket lines, reaching from Wyoming to Virginia to Alabama, was maintained through the use of citizen-band radios. Mass meetings were held at key locations where miners would be given status updates, questions asked and answered, and morale maintained. At the same time, the objective constraints acting on the leadership limited the strike’s overall effectiveness. By bypassing the legitimate legal representative, the national union, the local leadership was denied both the full force of union power and access to union resources. Likewise, the lack of strong leadership from the top office opened the door for those union leaders who placed the interests of their own careers or political caucuses above the overall interests of the union movement. As the strike lengthened, these internal divisions deepened. The question of when to end the strike was an obvious point of struggle. Conservatives within the union, frightened by the unleashing of rank-and-file militancy, wanted the strike ended as soon as it began. Adventurists and careerists within the union, on the other hand, wanted to raise the goal of the strike to the reopening of the contract—a demand that could not possibly be won. The main body of local union presidents agreed to end the strike when it became obvious that the miners’ actions had had a significant impact on the court and that the principal objective of the strike—to halt or slow the use of federal injunctions—had been reached at some level. It was agreed that lengthening the strike would only undercut what the month of striking had accomplished. The miners went back to work having won limited gains. No written agreements were published, but a clear understanding had been reached between judges and miners—the judges now understood that their obeisance to the companies could and would be exposed by the miners. Except for a few sensitive reporters, the press coverage of the miners’ activities in the coalfields was overwhelmingly procompany. During the strike, the press promoted an image of the miner as irrational, superstitious, and violent. The companies attempted to heighten the pressures on the press by forcing two reporters—Andrew V. Gallagher and Rick Steelhammer— into court as witnesses against the miners. Gallagher and Steeelhammer, sympathetic to the miners, refused to divulge sources or identify miners and pleaded the freedom of the press. They were convicted but their convictions were overturned on appeal, and the miners considered them heroes. The Role of the Left The “New Left” at this point had fragmented into a plethora of sects, each claiming to hold the correct vision of the revolution. Members


of several of these organizations had obtained jobs in the mines and were active. Too often, however, the strike was perceived merely as a fertile ground for recruitment and an opportunity to proselytize a group’s agenda. For example, at the height of the activity, one New Left group plastered Charleston with posters urging miners to come to a celebration of Mao Tse Tung’s birthday! The CPUSA, by this time, did not have an organizational presence in the strike. The major leadership of the strike remained in the hands of the indigenous Appalachians, who were rooted in the kinship networks, community, and the union. Perhaps the most important contribution of radicals was in a support role. One organization printed and distributed a newspaper called the Coalfield Defender that quickly became the printed voice of the strike. Obviously the Mineworkers’ Journal, the legitimate press of the union, could not take on this role, although several staff members of the national union had Left backgrounds and attempted to provide what support they could. Leftist professionals—lawyers, doctors, musicians, artists, and professors—were able to organize resources that supported the miners. Professor Helen Lewis was doing invaluable theoretical work on the status of Appalachia as a colony. The “Miners’ Art Group” not only provided paintings and cartoons for the strike, but in a special exhibition at the Smithsonian, were able to bring those images to the nation. Mimi Pickering and Appalshop had documented the Buffalo Creek flood in two amazing movies and Barbara Kopple’s remarkable Oscar-winning documentary Harlan County, USA gave the miners a national movie audience. The strike itself was an objective phenomenon that was not started by “outside agitators,” although some of the conservatives in the union tried to make that charge. As the role of the state became more and more obvious, local leadership began to acknowledge that indeed, their government had betrayed them and that so-called democracy was not working for them. But this awareness did not necessarily mean they embraced revolution because their goals were far more limited. As militant as the movement had been, it was essentially a movement for reform. Conclusion In the presidential election of 2004, West Virginia voted for George Bush. The once powerful UMWA was a shadow of its former self. The single largest employer in the state was Wal-Mart. Statistics for 2005 revealed that West Virginia had the greatest gap between rich and poor of any state and that its poor were the poorest in the country (The Center 2006). What had not changed was the power of the coal industry over the state.


As the deep mines began to be exhausted, the companies began a process called “mountaintop removal.” The tops of mountains were blasted off and huge machines dumped the overlay into the surrounding valleys. The coal was removed and “cleaned” by a myriad of highly toxic chemicals and water. This solution, or “sludge,” was poured behind massive impoundments that make the Buffalo Creek dam look tiny. Obviously, this form of mining is an ecological disaster.9 Mountaintop removal is also a disaster for coalfield communities. The constant blasting creates dust and debris as well as cracking homes; the cleaning process poisons water supplies; and the dumping fills streams and creates tragic flooding. This form of mining is capital intensive—a handful of miners can mine more coal more quickly. They are well paid, but as the statistics have shown, the communities remain poor. The social movement in the coalfields today is the opposition to mountaintop removal.10 Again, a number of politically conscious individuals, many of them veterans of earlier “movement” struggles, have joined forces with local leadership to oppose this kind of mining. In the summer of 2005, a national organization, Earth First!, brought over 100 volunteers, mostly young people, into the coalfields to provide support for the local organizations. It was dubbed “Mountain Justice Summer.” Large demonstrations were organized and individuals who had been trained in civil disobedience and passive resistance were arrested. The mountaintop removal mining operations are almost completely nonunion. Underground mines continue to produce coal, although they account for less and less of the coal production and more are becoming nonunion yearly.11 The attention in the national media to the Sago mine disaster in January 2006 exposed the extent to which Appalachian coal miners are again being exposed to dangers that could have easily been avoided. What happened to the union? The process by which the union began to give away its organized base (e.g., turning to selective strikes, keying its royalties on coal to tonnage rather than the number of union members employed, and allowing nonunion workers at tipples) is the subject of another lengthy essay. And once again, the union is in an ambiguous position vis-a-vis the grassroots struggle. To the extent that the mountaintop removal operations are nonunion (the largest company operating these sites is AT Massey, which has a long history of resisting unionization), the community and the union can unite against the company. But the union’s agenda is protecting jobs, and—most of all—protecting the royalties they collect on the tonnage mined. One might suppose that this conflict was a simple contradiction of “environment” versus labor. But in this case that is not true. Mountaintop


removal has entailed the “forced removal” of thousands of families from their homes, and for those remaining, it has created a living hell. The parents of the children who attend Marshfork Elementary School, where one of these impoundments towers over the school building, live in constant fear. The hundreds of families whose home places were poisoned by the largest ecological disaster in the twentieth century (the sludge spill in Martin County, Kentucky, in October 2000) have never recovered their losses. Much more is at stake here than simply “the environment.” What is happening is an attack on the people and their way of life. Once again, the companies have flagrantly violated the federal and state statutes and have not been held accountable.12 Even the West Virginia Conference of the United Methodist Church recognized this attack when it passed a resolution in 1998 that said, in part: “Whereas, mountaintop removal mining, by destroying homeplaces, is also destroying ancestral ground, sacred ground where generations after generations have lived, gone to church, married, made and birthed babies, taken family meals, slept in peace, died and been buried . . . ” (“Resolution” 1998). At the present time, the struggle is primarily defensive—to save communities, to guard people’s standards of living, and to protect the environment. In Appalachia neither major political party is capable of carrying out these tasks. As the political system becomes more and more synonymous with the corporate world, the desperate need for a political party to represent the real interests of the majority becomes clearer and clearer. But such a party will need to carve out a vision of the future that ensures economic security with democracy. At this point, the conceptualization of “sustainable development” seems to come closest to that vision.13 If Appalachian communities, culture, and values are to be saved from destruction, the “New” Left will have to “re”new itself to the new realities of globalization and the looming danger of a Right-wing fascism. Notes 1. Perhaps the best popularization of these events is the movie Matewan, filmed on location in West Virginia. 2. A turning point in organizing the autoworkers was the great Flint sitdown strike of 1937. This was followed by the Republic Steel massacre in 1938, which paved the way for the steelworkers’ union. Also see Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the U.S. (New York: Publications International, 1979). For an overall view of industrial organizing in the context of the larger history of America see Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States—1492 to Present (New York: Harper Perennial, 2003).

the great anti-injunction strike of 1976 / 163 3. The fact that a leading “guru” of New Left organizing was influenced by the coal miners’ struggles again indicates their national impact. 4. Taylor tells his story in Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin’s Detroit I Do Mind Dying (Boston: South End Press, 1998), 85–106. 5. For a critique of their work see Lynda Ann Ewen, “Buffalo Creek Revisited: Deconstructing Kai Erikson’s Stereotypes” with Julia Lewis, Appalachian Journal 27, no. 1 (Fall 1999). 6. See Lynda Ann Ewen, Which Side Are You On? The Brookside Strike (Chicago, IL: Vanguard Press, 1977). This book reflects the ideological standpoint that I occupied at that time; I would write it differently today. Nonetheless, it was the best selling book that Vanguard (a Left Press that no longer exists) ever published and was widely read in West Virginia. 7. The first repair work done after the flood was to restore the rail line that carried coal out of the hollow. While residents remained without shelter, schools, or churches, the state made sure the coal would run. Taxpayers, not the company, paid the costs of the massive clean up, and the fines on the company were a joke. 8. Personal aside: My husband defended those miners in court. Little did we know that one of those seventeen was the brother of a man that our oldest daughter would marry! The kin connectedness of Appalachians should never be underrated. 9. The Buffalo Creek flood unleashed 132 million gallons of sludge. The Martin County spill involved 250 million gallons. One impoundment currently under construction at Brushyfork will hold eight billion gallons of toxic waste. See http://www.sludgesafety.org/news/. For studies of the accident see the following 2005 articles in the Journal of Appalachian Studies 11, nos. 1–2 by Stephanie McSpirit, Shaunna Scott, Sharon Hardesty, and Robert Welch: “EPA Actions in Post Disaster Martin County, Kentucky: An Analysis of Bureaucratic Slippage and Agency Recreancy” and “Post Disaster Interviews with Martin County Citizens: ‘Gray Clouds’ of Blame and Distrust.” In the same issue see also, Stephanie McSpirit’s “Addendum: The Commonwealth of Kentucky Releases Monies for Independent, Outside Assessment of the Martin County Watershed.” 10. The Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition’s Web site is probably the single most inclusive Web site for information on this struggle: http://www.ohvec. org/. Also, writers throughout Kentucky and West Virginia have joined together with citizens’ groups to confront the issue. See Kristin Johannsen, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Mary Ann Taylor-Hall, eds., Missing Mountains (Nicholasville, KY: Wind Press, 2005); Erik Reece, Lost Mountains (New York: Riverhead Books, 2006). Reece’s articles have also appeared in The Nation (Feb. 27, 2006), Orion (Jan.–Feb. 2006), and Harper’s Magazine (April 2005: 41–60). See also John J. Mitchell, “When Mountains Move,” National Geographic (March 2006), 104–112.

164 / lynda ann ewen 11. A miner in 2004 was three times more productive than a miner in 1978 because of advances in technology—mainly the longwall in underground mining and the shift from strip mining to mountaintop removal in surface mining. In the Eastern coalfields, the percentage of coal mined by surface methods increased from 23 percent in 1978 to 39 percent in 2004. Energy Information Administration, U.S. Government. 12. On May 8, 2002, Federal Judge Charles Hayden II ruled that the federal law protecting streams had been violated, effectively blocking new valley fills in West Virginia and eastern Kentucky. In response, the Bush administration bent over backward for the coal industry and urged the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Army Corps to rewrite the Act to make valley fills and many other types of waste dumping legal in our nation waterways, including old toilets and refrigerators. Judge Hayden’s ruling blocked the administration’s attempt and held the industry at bay for nearly 8 months. On January 29, 2003, a three-judge panel of the conservative U.S. 4th Circuit Court in Richmond, Virginia, overturned Hayden’s decision. This once again gave coal companies in Appalachia a green light to continue destroying coalfield communities and the environment. 13. For the United Nations’ articulation of the concept, see http://www. un.org/esa/sustdev/.

Works Cited Alinsky, Saul D. 1949. John L. Lewis: An Unauthorized Biography. New York: Random House. Amherst Coal Company v. United Mine Workers of America. 1975. Civil Action No. 75-0510-CH (Federal District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia). Boyer, Richard and Herbert Morais. 1971. Labor’s Untold Story. New York: United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America. (Orig. pub. 1955.) Buffalo Mining Company v. United Mine Workers of America. 1975. Civil Action No. 75-0523-CH (Federal District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia). Cedar Coal Company v. United Mine Workers of America. 1976. Civil Action No. 76-54440-CH (Federal District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia). The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. 2006. “Income Inequalities Grew Over the Last Two Decades.” http://www.cbpp.org/1-26-06sfp.htm. Erikson, Kai. 1976. Everything in Its Path: The Destruction of Community. New York: Touchstone Press. Finley, Joseph E. 1972. The Corrupt Kingdom: The Rise and Fall of the United Mine Workers. New York: Simon & Schuster.

the great anti-injunction strike of 1976 / 165 Hume, Brit. 1971. Death and the Mines: Rebellion and Murder in the United Mineworkers. Grossman Press. Lee, Howard B. 1969. Bloodletting in Appalachia. Parsons, WV: McClain. “Resolution Number Two ‘Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining.’” June 14, 1998. Submitted by the Methodist Federation for Social Action and passed by the 153rd Annual Session of the West Virginia Annual conference of the United Methodist Church.

The efforts to unite a sense of the past with a vision of the future from the standpoint of present political struggles—which so many of these essays have shown to be a hallmark of Southern radicalism—can be seen here in Bill Strickland’s account of the Institute of the Black World (IBW). Formed in the aftermath of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King in 1968, the Atlanta-based IBW attempted to chart a path for the Black Freedom movement by looking back to African American history (and U.S. history generally) to get a sense of the trajectory of African American liberation struggles that might help produce an organic vision of the political direction of where the African American community might go. Strickland, one of the founders of IBW, recounts how a group of scholars and activists (and scholar-activists) from diverse fields and a wide range of political experiences and ideologies, including Strickland, the historian Vincent Harding, the historian Robert Hill, and the literary critic Stephen Henderson, came together to form the first modern African American think tank. Intimately connected to the concentration of historically black colleges and universities of Atlanta’s University Center, though based off-campus, IBW laid much of the groundwork for the development of African American Studies as an intellectual field. Though the initial focus of IBW was primarily the history of African Americans and the United States, from the beginning it had, as its name suggests, an international dimension, involving, among others, Jamaican-born Hill (now known primarily as a scholar of Marcus Garvey and Pan-Africanism), the radical Trinidadian-born activist and intellectual C. L. R. James, and the Guyanese militant and historian Walter Rodney. In this IBW anticipated later notions of the “Black Atlantic.”

8 CRITIK: THE INSTITUTE OF THE B LACK WORLD (IBW), THE POLITICAL LEGACY OF MARTIN L UTHER KING, AND THE INTELLECTUAL S TRUGGLE TO R ETHINK A MERICA ’ S R ACIAL M EANING 1 Bill Strickland

Martin Luther King’s death in 1968 came in the midst of a crisis of meaning and direction both for himself and for the black struggle of which he was so significant a part. In Atlanta, a year following his death, an attempt was made to honor his memory and further his legacy by establishing the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Center, one of whose components was the Institute of the Black World (IBW)—the first modern and independent black think tank dedicated, in Coretta Scott King’s words, “to analyze with uncompromising insistence the problems and needs which face black people today.” Defining their mission as “developing scholarship in the service of struggle,” the group of national and international scholars and scholaractivists at IBW sought to provide an intellectual underpinning to the burgeoning Black Consciousness and Black Studies movements and, most especially, to study black and American history for their respective insights into the struggles of the past and the possible nature of the struggle to come . . . How it came into being and how it attempted to develop a perspective on history and current events that would inform the struggle for liberation is the story that I shall try to sketch out here as accurately as memory permits. But this personal journey of reflection should in no way be construed as a definitive history of IBW.2 That totality is, I think, spiritually impossible to recover because so much of IBW was an experiment in hope and defiance; so much a shared belief in new possibilities; and so much a fulfilling sense both of being useful to others and of mapping out new vistas of knowledge. One can only concur with

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the sentiment expressed in a documentary on, I think, the Montgomery movement that called the period “A Mighty, Mighty Time.” Vincent Harding and the Origins of the Institute of the Black World (1968–1970) Martin Luther King’s legacy, and spirit, were represented in IBW in the personage of his friend and fellow-combatant for peace and social justice, Vincent Harding. Like Martin, Vincent believed in the power of nonviolent social change and (unlike some of the rest of us) in the possibility of the redemption of sin(ners). In the late 1950s, while studying for his PhD in history at the University of Chicago and working with an interracial congregation in the pacifist Mennonite Church, Vincent and a group of fellow congregants toured the South to witness its civil rights movement firsthand. In 1961, Vincent and Rosemarie, his wife and copartner in the struggle, returned to Atlanta to establish the Mennonite House, a pacifist—and during the Vietnam War—a draft-counseling center. Serendipitously, the Hardings chose to live in the same Vine City neighborhood as Martin and Coretta King and the two families became close friends. Given their ideological and religious kinship, it was almost inevitable that Martin would ask Vincent to join him in his various desegregation efforts in the South. Indeed in Albany, Georgia, Vincent was arrested for leading a late-night prayer protest at City Hall after Marian King, the pregnant wife of the Albany leader Slater King, had been knocked down and kicked by Albany policemen. So Vincent was not an armchair philosopher about “the struggle.” He had witnessed it “up close and personal” in some of its most malevolent forms (Garrow 1986, 208; Ward 2002, 6). In 1965, after completing his dissertation at the University of Chicago, Vincent accepted a position as Head of the Department of History and Sociology at Spelman College at the invitation of President Albert Manley (Spelman’s first black president) and the urging of his friend Howard Zinn, the previous Chair, who along with the historian Staughton Lynd had been fired by Spelman because of their allegedly radical views.3 Curiously, Vincent’s relation to Martin and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) did not seem to weigh against him as heavily as did Howard and Staughton’s support of student militancy at Spelman. What is even more curious is that Vincent made no secret of his political leanings, telling Manley that he “was going to be working outside the institution, inside the institution, and around the institution, in a way that would sometimes challenge the institution” (Grady-Willis 1998, 28).

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True to his word, Vincent continued working “outside the institution” principally, but not exclusively, with Martin Luther King. Their most significant collaboration was in Martin’s famous Declaration of Independence from LBJ’s war in Vietnam, delivered at the Riverside Church in New York on April 4, 1967—exactly a year to the day before his assassination in Memphis. That day Martin broke ranks with the administration, and other civil rights leaders, to point to the palpable contradictions of the war: We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. . . . (Carson et al. 1987, 389)

It was this Martin Luther King, the speaking-truth-to-power Martin Luther King, whom Vincent carried in his heart and whose legacy he hoped IBW would further. Thus, as 1968 dawned, pregnant with the explosive events that were about to erupt in black and white America, Vincent, “inside the institution,” had been conceptualizing with his friend Stephen Henderson, Chair of the English Department at Morehouse, about the possible structure and role of a Black University in the Atlanta Center modeled after the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, who had taught at Atlanta University from 1898 to 1910 and again from 1934 to 1944.4 During that first period, Du Bois had authored the famous Atlanta University Studies, his research project to study various dimensions of black life in ten-year cycles “to get at the truth worth knowing.” Vincent and Steve were also influenced, of course, by the demand for Black Studies courses and programs that black students had begun to make at San Francisco State, Yale, Howard, Northwestern, Cornell, and a multitude of other campuses. Thus “encouraged by a number of brothers elsewhere (including Lerone Bennett) [they] began to put some of their thoughts on paper, suggesting the possibility of an Institute for Advanced Afro-American Studies, perhaps as part of the Atlanta University Center” (Harding 1970, iii). Then Martin was killed. Soon after the funeral, Mrs. King asked Vincent “to take leadership in the creation of the Martin Luther King Library Documentation Project—planned as the major documentation center for the post-1954 Movement” (Harding 1970, iv). And in the course of these discussions, Vincent proposed that the Institute for Advanced Afro-American Studies be included in the King Center as well.


Later that year, WCBS-TV in New York asked Vincent and John Henrik Clarke to develop a series on black history for their station. The series was called “Black Heritage.” It consisted of nearly a hundred lectures given by some thirty lecturers and ran from November 1968 through February (Black History Month) 1969. Several of these presenters, James Boggs, Lerone Bennett, Sterling Stuckey, A. B. Spellman, Gerald McWorter, and Bill Strickland, along with Vincent, would go on to play key roles in the planning and subsequent development of the Institute and Black Heritage, which would serve as a model for one of the Institute’s most successful programs, the Summer Research Symposium. But at this point the Institute had not yet been born. In fact the January letter sent by A. B. Spellman, the poet, jazz critic, and colleague of Steve’s in Morehouse’s English Department, invited persons from academia, the arts, and the movement to come to Atlanta in March to consider serving as an Advisory Council for what was still being envisioned as an Institute of Afro-American Studies. The meeting on March 21 had what appeared to be an impossibly jam-packed agenda. It included “a review of developments relating to the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Center; comments from Mrs. King; introduction of the Institute Planning staff; a review of Planning Proposals and decisions to be made about them (including publishing, research, cultural affairs, policy studies and academic relationships); and, a discussion of financial affairs and organization of the Advisory Council” (letter to author from Vincent Harding 3/5/69). Yet, incredibly, everything was done. Out-of-town invitees were even able to leave Atlanta the next day. This whirlwind pace was to mark Institute activities over the next six months as Planning Staff meetings were held in April, May, and June. Black Studies meetings were convened in New York and students from Columbia and Wesleyan who were to make up the Institute’s first student class visited Atlanta in the spring to make living arrangements. In addition, a summer research seminar began collecting data on Black Studies programs around the country to gain some idea of their scope and variety. Thus having touched all conceivable bases, on Monday, September 15, the Institute of the Black World began its official existence. Its public opening ceremony, A Celebration of Blackness, was held on January 17, 1970, the Saturday after Martin’s birthday (Harding 1970, ix). The Institute versus the King Center The original Senior Research Fellows of the Institute came from both inside and outside Atlanta. Steve Henderson, for example, continued to teach at

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Morehouse but he also offered a seminar at IBW on “Contemporary Black Poetry in Perspective,” while other Atlanta residents served on IBW’s Advisory Council.5 From Chicago came Lerone Bennett, Jr., on leave from Ebony magazine, and Sterling Stuckey, a former history teacher then working on his dissertation at Northwestern University. Bill Strickland came from New York, where he was a lecturer in History and Politics at Columbia University’s Urban Studies Program, while Chester Davis, an expert on black education, joined the staff from Sir George Williams University in Montreal. Joyce Ladner, a former SNCC stalwart who had just received her degree in Sociology from Washington University, came to Atlanta from St. Louis and rejoined her sister, Dorie, another SNCC veteran, who was living in the city. Vincent now severed his ties with Spelman in order to don his new hat as Director of the Institute in addition to his responsibility as Director of the overall Memorial Center. With everyone in place, the work of the Institute began on two fronts: teaching and research. Seminars were offered, such as Steve’s seminar on Black Poetry, and Vincent taught a course on Black Biography. Chester conducted a session entitled Black Children and Public Education: An Analysis of Theories and Practices, and Bill taught Black Radical Politics in the 20th Century: 1895–1945. Joyce led an independent study called The Black Family and Social Policy. But their main task, the task that had brought them all together was, of course, the reexamination of the history. So the IBW staff began to probe the history of Blacks in America and the Diaspora and especially the history of the black struggle that had begun in Montgomery and died, according to most characterizations, with Martin in Memphis. But as they dug into that history anew and took note of the different strata of black folk who had taken part in the movement over time and how that movement had spread from the southern working class and church folk in Montgomery to southern and then northern black students and even to young white folk who saw the black struggle as something they could join, imitate, or ally with, they began to appreciate just how unprecedented that struggle had been: never before in American history had black people challenged the society for so long and so unremittingly in every walk of life and in every part of the land—from rent strikes to school boycotts; from sit-ins and wade-ins and peaceful marches to armed struggle. Reviewing that history made it crystal clear that its conventional description as a “civil rights” movement was wildly insufficient and that there was a need to re-imagine the movement that had morphed from nonviolent and legal protest to rebellion and resistance, because the Kingled protest that had begun in Montgomery had flamed in May 1963 into


a black uprising after southern whites firebombed Martin and SCLC’s headquarters in A. G. Gaston’s motel a few weeks after Martin had written “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Birmingham was thus the site of the first urban rebellion, to be followed over the next five years by eruptions in scores of American cities, nearly always in response to some real or perceived instance of police racism. That the society labeled these upheavals “riots” because it could not concede the legitimacy of black rebellion was simply par for the course. But rebellion it was, a contestation between black people and the American state that IBW founding member and grand griot of black history Lerone Bennett described as “the revolution that almost came.” But the IBW Fellows not only immersed themselves in the historical past, they also sought to analyze the new era aborning, deeply conscious that though the new generation on college campuses had risen up, in the wake of Martin’s death, to demand that the curricula they were studying begin, at last, to reflect black people’s lives and history, this generation also represented a new and vexing problem: How to ensure that they, like their forebears, understood and rebelled against their “place” in America because the curious thing was that the segregated and openly discriminatory world carried with it its own education. In it black people had been socialized by—and in—inequality. They understood why, for as long as they could remember, Mississippi had been not merely a state but a symbol of America’s darkest racist menace. They remembered too how the military had decreed that black blood was not really human blood and could not be used even to save white soldiers’ lives. They recalled when the back of the bus had been their normal habitat and how stereotype in Hollywood was, unfailingly, their first and last name. Thus with the disassembling of the obvious signposts of racial hierarchy, together with the decline of the black press and radio stations, and, more crucially, the loss of those great black spokespersons who had, from Frederick Douglass to Martin, articulated the grievances and hopes of the race and acted as stars for black folk to steer by, teaching, preserving, interpreting, and disseminating black history became a politically necessary act. This was the role that IBW sought to assume. This was the call to which scholars and scholar-activists and movement veterans responded from all parts of the nation—and beyond—to gather in the South, where it had all begun, to try and conceptualize a new struggle based on the best understandings of what had gone before. The crystallization of the IBW vision—articulated in its first Black Paper, “The Challenge of Blackness,” by Lerone Bennett as “a center for defining, defending, and illustrating blackness,” soon put it at loggerheads with the Board of the Directors of the Martin Luther King Center, who

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were already discomfited that two of its members had been among those trustees of the Atlanta University schools who had been locked in a university hall by students demanding that the “Negro schools” transform themselves into black institutions (emphasis mine). That two members of IBW’s Planning Staff had taken part in the protest only added to the Board’s skepticism about IBW’s ideology and politics. Consequently, when the Board proposed that IBW narrow its focus to Martin hagiography, be sensitive to the feelings of Atlanta’s black leadership, and perhaps even consider taking a pledge of nonviolence, the IBW staff felt they had to take a stand. In a written communiqué to the Board, the IBW staff made it clear that there were some things about which they felt so strongly that if agreement on them were not reached, then their relationship to the Center would have to be reevaluated. The five principles they insisted upon were “the academic freedom of staff, fellows and students of the Institute; that policies and commitments made not be blithely sacrificed to what is expedient or to what non-Blacks think is right; any concept of a loyalty oath as a condition of association or involvement with the Institute of the Black World be absolutely rejected, as well as any rule that the Institute be circumscribed by the parochial concerns of the Atlanta area or hindered from developing ties with all the people of the African Diaspora; that all agree that the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. belongs to black people born and unborn as does his dedication to the struggle for black freedom and self-determination . . . that is the bond we feel to him and we feel that those who would distort the meaning of that life for their own narrow interests are his enemies—and ours too.”6 It soon became evident that a parting of the ways was unavoidable, so in March 1970, IBW struck out on its own. Prior to the separation, however, IBW had hosted a Black Studies directors conference attended by some thirty-five directors from across the country. It had hosted talks by Margaret Walker Alexander and Horace Cayton on the life and work of their friend Richard Wright. Its international dimension had been affirmed in a two-week visit by the Trinidadian writer, critic, and Renaissance man C. L. R. James, who gave the first W. E. B. Du Bois Lecture, and by the coming onto the staff of Robert Hill, the Jamaicanborn scholar-activist and expert on Marcus Garvey. Then through Bobby IBW met and forged lasting ties with the brilliant young Guyanese historian Walter Rodney, who had recently been barred by the government of Jamaica from returning to his post at the University of the West Indies’ Mona campus.7 So ties to the Black World were being forged both in theory and in practice. Walter became our first “free-lance” Visiting Fellow in the sense that whenever he was in the country from Tanzania—where he had gone back


to teach after the Jamaica fiasco—Walter had carte blanche to settle in at the Institute as one of us. Another person to whom we extended a Visiting Fellowship was the black Marxist Harry Haywood, who, at the time, had recently returned from Mexico. Harry had lived an extraordinary life with implications for revolutionary black political thought that we felt needed to be more widely known. He had fought in World War I, been a member of the African Blood Brotherhood, joined the CPUSA in 1925, and been trained at the Lenin School in Moscow. Harry had also fought in the Spanish civil war, worked with Richard Wright in Chicago, and written a fascinating book called Black Liberation in 1948, which urged black people in the Black Belt South to take advantage of their majority presence and organize themselves into an independent political force. Since this view was considered racial nationalism rather than orthodox Marxism, Harry was eventually expelled from the CPUSA in 1959. Unfortunately we did not have the funds to keep Harry on at IBW for all the research that he needed to do. But in 1978 he did finally publish his autobiography, Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist. Our commitment to Harry was our way of indicating that no matter what America’s political taboos might be, IBW’s position was that no area of the black experience should be off limits to critical enquiry. However, the real problem Harry represented lay elsewhere: the likelihood that our “radical perspective” might alienate us from traditional funding sources. But that was the road we had consciously chosen. We were now on our own to succeed or fail. And to gird ourselves for that struggle, we had to take an uncompromising look at our relationship to the American racial reality we had dedicated ourselves to changing. Toward the Theory of a Small Organization No longer under the protective mantle of the King Center, we felt that we had to reconstitute ourselves on the basis of organizational efficiency, economic self-sufficiency, programmatic relevance, and unassailable political principle. But being politically independent often boiled down to being as economically independent as possible because money (next to sex) is the Big Corrupter. So the question became: What could we do about the fact that in our first year half of our budget had come from white foundations and one white school, Wesleyan, as tuition for its students? To anticipate leaner times, we had to find ways to pare down the budget. And that meant cutting down expenses and cultivating a black support base by developing programs relevant to the black public. It also meant effectively publicizing our work, developing a Black Agenda for

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ourselves, and participating as responsibly as possible in the discourse concerning a Black Agenda for black people as a whole. But how to pare down an annual budget that had originally, in the halcyon days of our innocence, been projected at more than half a million dollars? Certainly we had to fundraise and make effective appeals for contributions. Many of us had also worked as consultants in the past and likely could do so again. But that was a potentially dangerous path because in the search for funds we could easily become sidetracked by other people’s agendas, which made it even more imperative that we have definite organizational goals. But beyond consulting was there any way that we could take the burden of our collective salaries out of the financial mix? Slowly one idea gained more and more currency among us: Was it possible that those of us who could get teaching positions outside Atlanta might take those jobs and still contribute to IBW? Committed to trying over the next few years, many of the original staff, including Vincent, in 1974, relocated to other sites. First to try out the new formula was Steve Henderson, who went to Howard University and in 1973, in conjunction with William Morrow and Company in New York, published the first IBW book, Understanding the New Black Poetry.8 That same year, Joyce Ladner, who had also gone to Howard, published her edited volume, The Death of White Sociology, in which she championed the rise of Black Sociology and quoted from IBW’s first Black Paper, Lerone’s “The Challenge of Blackness,” as her statement of conviction concerning what black sociologists and other black intellectuals should be about: It is necessary for us to develop a new frame of reference which transcends the limits of white concepts. It is necessary for us to develop and maintain a total intellectual offensive against the false universality of white concepts whether they are expressed by William Styron or Daniel Patrick Moynihan. (Bennett 1970, 3–4)

At one level, then, the first salvos had been fired. The intellectual battle over the meaning of America had been joined. The next wave to exit Atlanta included Gerald McWorter (now Abdul Alkalimat), who went to Fisk to try to nurture a “black university” there. Sterling Stuckey returned to Northwestern, which was contemplating its own Black Studies Program. Chet Davis was invited in 1971 to join the new Black Studies Program named after W. E. B. Du Bois at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.9 These offers of employment and other forms of assistance were not simply accidental. Many came from friends, situated in different parts


of the country, who supported what IBW was trying to do and helped us whenever they could. For example, Mickey McGuire recruited Bobby Hill to lecture at Dartmouth (Mickey’s alma mater), where Mickey was now working. The sociologist Andrew Billingsley visited IBW from California along with two of his favorite graduate students at Berkeley, Jualyne, and Howard Dodson. (Howard would soon become a key staff member and, in 1974, Director of the Institute.) This infusion of new blood was to become a recurring feature in IBW’s life. Typically, individuals would visit the office, become involved in one IBW project or another, find themselves drawn to the work, and wind up relocating to Atlanta and/or returning as often as they could. That was the case with Janet (“Jan”) Douglass and Patricia (“Pat”) Daly who had both been teaching at Livingston College in New Jersey, but committed themselves to raising money for IBW after attending IBW’s Summer Research Symposium in 1971. After that experience Jan and Pat and a wonderfully gifted editor, Sharon Bourke, returned that December to join the staff fulltime. They exemplified the dedication and enthusiasm of the second generation of IBW staff persons who made it possible for the organization to survive and, in many ways, to prevail. What We Did We taught. We lectured. We learned from elders such as Harry Haywood and C. L. R. James and Grace and James Boggs and St. Clair Drake. We learned about the West Indies and Africa from George Beckford, Edward Braithwaite, and our own comrades at IBW: Gillian Royes and Bobby Hill from Jamaica and Walter Rodney from Guyana, temporarily in exile in Tanzania. Some of us were able to learn by traveling abroad to Kenya, to Tanzania (to visit Walter), and to Cuba. We also learned from our visitors curious about this implicit boast of being an Institute of THE BLACK WORLD (emphasis mine). In 1982, IBW officially closed its doors. Howard Dodson, who had left in 1979 to work for the National Endowment for the Humanities, returned to Atlanta to relieve Pat Daly, who had been functioning as Interim Director in his absence. Howard, who was soon to be appointed Director of the Schomburg Research Center in Harlem, arranged for IBW’s papers to be transported and archived there. Thus despite persistent funding problems and break-ins of a highly questionable nature, the adventure was that IBW lasted for more than a decade because of the sacrifices of its staff and the help of friends such as Mayor Maynard Jackson (elected as the first black mayor of Atlanta in 1973), who arranged a grant from the city’s Bureau of Cultural Affairs so that

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IBW’s Monthly Report—which had always been distributed for free even when its readership had grown from 1,500 to more than 8,000—could be resumed after a three-year interlude. As time has passed, the study of IBW has itself become a historical project, with younger scholars seeking to locate us within the trajectory of the Black Power movement. But none of us at the time thought of ourselves and our work as furthering the Black Power cause per se. Rather we believed, like Frederick Douglass, that “he who has suffered the lash, should be he who cries out,” that those who had so often been defined by others, should now define themselves. So although we absolutely were for black empowerment and were deeply involved in the Black Studies and Black Consciousness trends, I think it is more accurate to say that the IBW represented something different: a black perspective/black analysis movement. That, I think, more precisely captures who we were and what we were about.10 Notes 1. The German work “critik” is used here because it is more pointed than either the French “critique” or the more neutral English “criticism.” I am trying to convey the sense of a historical dialectic, IBW’s view of itself as an intellectual opposition to the received history. 2. Telling the IBW story properly would require more time and space than this putative effort permits. It would likely require multiple researchers digging into multiple archives in sundry parts of the world. I am, therefore, deeply indebted to the work of researchers Peniel Joseph, Stephen Ward, Derrick White, and Winston Grady-Willis for unearthing facts and details that I, and others, have completely forgotten. 3. Howard had just published the first history of SNCC in SNCC : The New Abolitionists (1964) while Staughton, after leaving Spelman and returning to Yale, became administrator of SNCC’s Freedom Schools in SNCC’s 1964 Freedom Summer Project. Howard was later denied tenure at Yale after going to Hanoi with Tom Hayden and Herbert Aptheker. Communication with Howard Zinn 2/12/06. 4. The year 1968 began, of course, with the January Tet offensive in Vietnam that exposed the “light at the end of the tunnel” fairy tale of General Westmoreland and the Pentagon. That humiliation, including the televised takeover of the American Embassy in Saigon by the Viet Cong, led to Westmoreland’s recall, Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy’s entry into the race for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, and LBJ’s resignation. February saw the killing of three protestors and the wounding of twenty-seven others by members of the Highway Patrol at the historically black Orangeburg State University in South Carolina. In April, Martin was


5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

killed in Memphis and black rebellions exploded in 125 cities across the country with nearly fifty persons killed. In June, Bobby Kennedy was slain in Los Angeles after winning the California primary and apparently securing his party’s presidential nomination. In July, there was a shootout between the Cleveland police and the followers of Fred “Ahmed” Evans when the police stormed a black cultural center, resulting in the death of three police and two militants and sparking several days of violent rebellion by the black community. In November, Richard Nixon was elected president after running a “Put Black People Back in their Place Law and Order” campaign. George Wallace, running on a less-covert racist platform, garnered ten million votes. For a list of the original Advisory Council of IBW, see Appendix 1. For a fuller statement, see Appendix 2. Returning from a Black Writers conference in Montreal in October of 1968, Walter had not been permitted to deplane because his interpretations of the meaning of Black Power to the Caribbean situation had given him such a following that the Minister of Home Affairs had declared, “I have never come across a man who offers a greater threat to the security of this land than does Walter Rodney” (Lewis 1998, 112). There could be no doubt that the book was an IBW work-product since our identity was proudly displayed on the title page: “An Institute of the Black World Book.” This department had attracted a star faculty in all fields: Johnetta Cole in anthropology, Max Roach and Archie Shepp in music; Chinua Achebe and Mike Thelwell in literature; Paul Carter Harrison in theater; the visual artist Nelson Stevens and the dancer Diana Ramos. SNCC veteran Ivanhoe Donaldson taught politics. John Bracey and Ernest Allen taught history and Acklyn Lynch taught cultural history. Chester was asked to teach his specialty, black education. For an example of how the IBW bore witness to the never-ending necessity of an independent black analysis (and to the unflagging support of our friends without whom . . .), see the IBW’s January 1973 Monthly Report in Appendix 3.

Works Cited Bennett, Lerone, Jr. 1970. The Challenge of Blackness. Atlanta: IBW. Carson, Claybourne, David J. Garrow, Gerald Gill, Vincent Harding, Darlene Clark Hine, eds. 1987. Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years: A Reader and Guide. New York: Penguin. Garrow, David J. 1986. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Leadership Conference. New York: William Morrow and Company. Grady-Willis, Winston. 1998. “A Changing Tide: Black Politics and Activism in Atlanta, Georgia, 1960–1977.” PhD diss., Emory University.

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Harding, Vincent. 1970. Introduction. In The Challenge of Blackness, ed. Lerone Bennett, Jr., iii–ix. Atlanta: IBW. ———. 1969. Letter to William Strickland. March 5. IBW Staff. 1970. “Draft Statement of the IBW Staff to the Board of Directors of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Center.” Lewis, Rupert Clarke. 1998. Walter Rodney’s Intellectual and Political Thought. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Ward, Stephen. 2002. “‘Ours Too Was A Struggle for A Better World’: Activist Intellectuals and the Radical Promise of the Black Power Movement, 1963– 1975.” PhD diss., University of Texas.

C HAPTER 8 : APPENDIX 1 A DVISORY COUNCIL I NSTITUTE OF THE BLACK W ORLD MARTIN L UTHER K ING, JR. MEMORIAL C ENTER (1969)

Professor Councill Taylor—Acting Chairman Distinguished Visiting Professor, Anthropology, Atlanta University Center Dr. Walter F. Anderson Professor of Music, Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio Mrs. Margaret Walker Alexander Director, Institute for the Study of History, Life, and Culture of Black People, Jackson State College, Jackson, Mississippi; Poet and Novelist Mr. Lerone Bennett Senior Editor, Ebony Magazine; Author Dr. Horace Mann Bond Director of Research, Atlanta University Professor Robert Browne Economics, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Teaneck, New Jersey; PhelpsStokes Foundation, Overseas experience in Africa and Asia Mr. Donald Byrd Composer and Musician Mr. John Henrik Clarke Editor, Freedomways

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Mrs. Dorothy Cotton Director of Citizenship Education, Southern Christian Leadership Training Center, Atlanta Mr. Ossie Davis Actor Professor St. Clair Drake Black Studies, Stanford University Mrs. Katherine Dunham Director of the Katherine Dunham Dance Group; Choreographer and Anthropologist; Southern Illinois University, East St. Louis, Illinois Dr. Vivian Henderson President, Clark College, Atlanta Mr. Tobe Johnson Professor of Political Science, Morehouse College, Atlanta Mr. Julius Lester Author, Editor, Ethnologist, and Folksinger, New York Mrs. Mary Ellen Marreo Gospel Singer, Atlanta community resident Professor Jesse Noel Latin American Studies, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad Dr. Rene Piquion Permanent Representative of the Republic of Haiti to UNESCO Mr. Eleo Pomare Choreographer, Dancer and Director of the Eleo Pomare Dance Company, New York City Miss Pearl Primus Choreographer and Dancer Dr. Benjamin Quarles Department of History, Morgan State College, Baltimore, Maryland


Mrs. Bernice Reagon Folksinger and Ethnomusicologist, Atlanta Mr. William Strickland Northern Student Movement, Consultant on Afro-American Studies, Columbia University, New York City Mr. Cecil Taylor Composer and Musician, New York City Professor E. U. Essien-Udom History and Political Science, University of Ibadan, Nigeria Rev. C. T. Vivian Urban Training Center, Chicago, Illinois Mr. Charles White Artist, Altadena, California Mr. Hosea Williams Director of Registration and Political Education, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Atlanta Planning Staff Dr. Vincent Harding Director, Martin Luther King, Jr. Library Documentation Project Dr. Stephen Henderson Chairman, English Department, Morehouse College Mr. Gerald McWorter Professor of Sociology, Spelman College Mr. A. B. Spellman Poet, English Department, Morehouse College Mr. Tobe Johnson Political Science Department, Morehouse College Mr. William Strickland Northern Student Movement, Consultant on Afro-American Studies, Columbia University, New York City Mr. Councill Taylor—Acting Chairman Distinguished Visiting Professor, Anthropology, Morehouse College

C HAPTER 8 : APPENDIX 2 D RAFT STATEMENT OF THE IBW STAFF TO THE BOARD OF D IRECTORS OF THE MARTIN L UTHER K ING, JR. M EMORIAL CENTER (1970)

This is a statement written in hope and dread. Hope that through dialogue between black people, the troubling signs of conflict may be worked out, and dread that our kinship as a people has not prevented that conflict from arising. As individuals we have worked with joy and enthusiasm on the Institute of the Black World, the second element of the Martin Luther King Center. We did so because we shared the vision of Mrs. Martin Luther King, Jr. announced at the founding of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Center: This . . . center . . . will emerge proudly out of the heart of the black experience in America . . . (dedicated to meeting) . . . with uncompromising insistence the problems and needs which face black people today.

Recent events now seem to threaten both that vision—and our integrity because we came together not as employees but as kinsmen sharing in a mighty work: setting straight the black record. We envisioned our relationship to you as one of blood and culture rather than authority and ideology. We saw the Institute of the Black World related to all specters of black opinion for each we felt had something to say about the nature of the black experience. We have extended invitations to friends and colleagues. And they have responded beyond our imagination because they too share the dream of black resurrection and liberation. Now, all that seems threatened by a reinterpretation of principles we felt were commonly understood. Those principles are simply that nothing that dares to call itself the Institute of the Black World could possibly exist if it were not first accountable exclusively and solely to black people, if it were not dedicated to serving the black community and aiding it in its liberation struggle, if it were not free to pursue the truth no matter


how disturbing, no matter how sad. Lastly, it could not exist without a spirit of community among those nominally called staff and those nominally called the Board of Directors, for before we were all that those western labels imply, we were something else and it is that heritage to which we owe our first allegiance. Some have been disturbed by the lockup in Harkness Hall. To our mind this direct action technique represents the essence of what black students and concerned black faculty have been doing all over the land. We cannot condemn it elsewhere, and we cannot condemn it in Atlanta. However, when such issues arise, we recognize our responsibility as brothers to meet and consult with our elders and our associates; to the extent that we fail to do this, criticism is justified. But surely this is nothing over which to sacrifice a dream.

Signatures

C HAPTER 8 : APPENDIX 3 IBW, 1972—WHO WE W ERE/WHAT WE DID AN OVERVIEW OF ITS WORK

In our existence as a small organization we have attempted to present a perspective on history and current events that would inform the black struggle for liberation. We have sought to analyze the meaning of our identity in the past and present in order to shape an entirely new future. Our work in making that perspective known has been mainly in the areas of publishing, teaching, and stimulating struggle-oriented study and research, both here and abroad. A more specific idea of what this work entails is described below: Publishing The major ongoing vehicle for sharing our analysis with the black public is our monthly news column, Black-World-View. It is made available to thirty black newspapers and journals across the country and has been used by several black radio stations. IBW’s Monthly Report, which usually reprints the Black-World-View news column, has tripled our mailing list from 1,500, when it began, to its present level of 4,500 readers. It has been used in many kinds of teaching situations in colleges, high schools, prisons, and community study groups to give people a politically informed, historically accurate, black interpretation of current events. The Black Papers, a series of essays in pamphlet form on black history, literature, etc., is presented not as an alternative to white scholarship on these selected subjects, but as its replacement. The series has been published under our joint publishing program with Third World Press in Chicago. The three papers now available are Beyond Chaos, by Vincent Harding; How I Wrote JUBILEE, by Margaret Walker; and The Redemption of Africa and Black Religion, by St. Clair Drake. The first Black Paper, by Lerone Bennett, Jr., is currently out of stock. Originally


published as The Challenge of Blackness, it will be reissued soon in a new form. Also coming is a study of slavery and identity by Sylvia Wynter, entitled Natives in a New World. This past year we have widened our contact with the black community through works published in black journals. These have included articles by IBW staff members in the May and October 1972 issues of Black World, the Summer 1972 issue of Encore Magazine, and the Winter 1972 edition of Black Books Bulletin.1 We have also acted as consultants in the preparation of feature articles which have appeared in Ebony Magazine. William Morrow & Co. has published one of a proposed series of ten books which will carry both the IBW and Morrow imprint. The first one is Understanding the New Black Poetry by Stephen Henderson. The author, one of the founders of IBW, will be familiar to those interested in the development of Black Studies for his ideas about the “saturation” of a curriculum with Blackness. Currently director of Howard University’s Institute of the Humanities, which is newly formed, Steve deals in his new book with “Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic References” (or how we participate with our own “soul” in what our poets write). The second in the IBW/Morrow series, a history of black struggle in the U.S. by Vincent Harding, will be published late this Fall. Lecturing Further use of the media has been explored with local radio stations, and IBW staff members have appeared on three listener call-in shows and interviews. IBW was also featured in a 30-minute discussion on local educational TV about our work. Staff members have given lectures in a number of educational settings. Among them were Bill Strickland’s presentation “A Black Interpretation of the 1972 Elections,” at the annual CAAS (Center for African and AfricanAmerican Studies) conference in Atlanta; Robert Hill’s lecture “Garvey and the Rise of Pan Africanism,” at the University of Wisconsin; and Vincent Harding’s “When I Know Who I Am,” and “Vocation of the Black Scholar,” at the Education and Teacher Education for Cultural Pluralism Conference in Chicago, and at the University of Iowa respectively. Stimulating Study and Research Since our beginning, IBW has worked closely with students, educators, and others interested in developing ways of making education more relevant to black people. But we have also been steadily moving outward from academia toward the larger black community.

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In the academic area, IBW continued work on the Summer Research Symposium (SRS) of 1971. In 1972 the symposium consisted of onsite teacher training and preparation of the SRS materials for mass production so that they can be used by groups actively concerned with black education. One of the completed portions of SRS is an educational package of audio and video tapes entitled “The Role of the Black Scholar and the Struggles of the Black Community.” It includes presentations by St. Clair Drake, C. L. R. James, Vincent Harding, George Beckford, and Walter Rodney. So far these packets are being used by Black Studies departments at five universities. Our library of over 200 audiotaped lectures has proved useful so far in providing the raw materials for research and publication, as well as being used as an educational tool in their original form. Two have proved of great usefulness in meetings with visiting high school groups and with people who come to us for help in their work both in designing curricula for black youth and in creating analytical materials on a popular level. One is a theoretical overview of educational development in postcolonial Tanzania by the Guyanese historian, Walter Rodney, and the other is a critique of a standard high school textbook in American History, by Vincent Harding. More information about our plans to offer these tapes for public distribution will appear in future Monthly Reports. While maintaining working relationships with strictly academic groups, IBW has also established contact with groups as varied as Protestant and Catholic black caucuses, prisoners’ study groups, boys’ and girls’ clubs, housing-project education, and recreation groups, many of whom never before saw themselves as definers of Black Education, but who have taken up such work in order to fill a void. Our involvement with them has not only been rewarding in its own right, but has also provided us with the opportunity to study possible cooperative work between the different kinds of groups who come to us. These individuals and organizations have been introduced to the IBW perspective on the relation between black education and black struggle, and have been provided specific needs. Among others, they have included the Freedom Library Day School in Philadelphia (one of the oldest modern, independent black preschools), the Nairobi Community College in California, and the Black Studies Program at the Green Haven Correctional Institution in New York. IBW also recently designed and conducted a three-week course in the newly established Amilcar Cabral Training Institute for IFCO (Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization). The trainees were black and Chicano. The training of blacks and Chicanos for organizing their


communities has raised exciting questions about the possibilities of forging real and practical links of cooperative work between the two groups. Black Politics and International Contacts Early in 1970, IBW initiated work on a “Black Agenda for the Seventies.” Since that time we have continued to work on this task—with others—in various forms and situations. Most recently we were able to bring this perspective to the consultations which finally led to the National Black Political Convention in Gary last Spring. The work of two of our members was incorporated into the convention’s Preamble and black agenda for political and economic empowerment, human development, and other major areas of black life. African and Caribbean scholars have been on the staff or close associates of the organization from the outset. Black people from all over the world are almost weekly visitors. They are usually in search of information and orientation on the nature of our struggles in America, while we gain a better perspective on the worldwide liberation struggle from them. These visits have led to exchange of, and referrals to, scholars, activists, and organizations, and in several instances to the appearance of items in our Monthly Report. Among our visitors in 1972 were Bro. Mervyn Josie of S.A.S.O. (South African Student Organization); Sonny Leon of the Labour Party of South Africa; Clayton Riley, black film critic; and Lé Ahn Tü of Vietnam. Another aspect of our interest in national liberation struggles is reflected in visits by IBW staff members to meet with Third World groups. In December of 1971, Vincent Harding met with a Vietnamese peace delegation in Paris. In 1972 William Strickland was invited by the Cuban government to visit Cuba as part of a black delegation which examined the progress of the revolution there. His observations will be reported in an article in a forthcoming issue of Black World. Summary A major part of our time and energy last year was spent on fund raising. We realized that this is one of the hazards of independent existence and we appreciate the financial help given to us by our contributors. Our major challenge is to continue the present thrust of our work and to take it to its next logical stages. There is a need for us to make the results available in published form to more and more black people. We need to deepen our research in such subjects as political

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action. And we need to reach everyone in the community who is struggling toward black liberation. Our challenge is to keep going forward. Notes This report is an edited version of IBW’s January 1973 Monthly Report. 1. Vincent Harding, “Our President’s Trip to Peking,” Black World, May, 1972; William Strickland, “The Gary Convention and the Crisis of American Politics,” Black World, October, 1972; Robert A. Hill, “Counter-Point,” Encore, Summer, 1972; Vincent Harding, “Black Reflections on the Cultural Ramifications of Black Identity,” Black Books Bulletin, Winter, 1972.

In this essay, Pat Arnow explores the work of progressive theater companies in southern Appalachia with a close look at one theater, The Road Company, based in Johnson City in the mountains of East Tennessee. Arnow demonstrates how The Road Company was connected to Southern radical theatrical tradition—also explored in Jim Smethurst’s essay on Black Arts in this volume—and how that tradition evolved via interaction with changing audiences, politics, and money through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. In order to make ends meet, local progressive theater companies struggled to balance entertaining performances with politically and culturally volatile subjects designed to activate audience engagement. To do so, the artists—who came both from inside and outside the region—spoke to the community in its own terms and developed plays from community issues. In addition to charting history and the daily work of one theater company, Arnow’s essay shows how this artistic radicalism worked with the wider South via Alternate ROOTS (Regional Organization of Theaters South), an organization of grassroots, progressive Southern theaters that formed at the Highlander Center in 1976. As with other essays in this volume, “Southern Theater for Social Change” not only draws on Arnow’s experience in the movement but also calls upon articles she authored as a writer and editor for publications in the South, including Southern Exposure—a radical magazine in print since 1973—that has consistently reported on issues unmentioned in the academy.

9 S OUTHERN T HEATER

FOR

SOCIAL CHANGE

Pat Arnow

When Bob Leonard started The Road Company in 1975 in the mountains of East Tennessee, he aimed to create plays with local people and their stories.1 He was interested in changing the cultural and social landscape. He was not the only one tracing small town routes—or roots—in the 1970s. His vision was part of a theater and arts movement fueled by the politics of the time and some government funding. Would people embrace, or even come see, an experimental theater company dedicated to shaking things up? Would they be changed by the experience? That would be the challenge to the theater companies. In the 1970s, the modest town of Johnson City, Tennessee, was overwhelmingly white and Christian and had a population of some 40,000 people, almost all of whom had lived in the same mountains for generations. Early in the twentieth century, businesspeople promoted the area in Northeastern papers, promising an inexpensive, docile, white workforce of rural people untainted by unions. The emerging rayon industry heeded the call and built plants nearby. More recently, Tennessee Eastman and Texas Instruments had come to the area, probably for the same reasons. The students at East Tennessee State University hailed from the surrounding counties and often represented the first in their families to attend college. The school and the town’s veterans hospital were some of the largest employers in the area and brought in the few outsiders. Artistic renown was not a part of the résumé of what was then called Upper East Tennessee. The closest cities shone (somewhat unwillingly at times) with literary stars. Asheville, North Carolina, an hour-and-a-half drive from Johnson City over a twisted two-lane mountain pass, spawned Thomas Wolfe. He became famous with his sprawling autobiographical novel Look Homeward, Angel (which so enraged his hometown that it is not surprising that one of his later novels was called You Can’t Go Home

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Again). James Agee, who wrote the Depression classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, came from Knoxville, two hours from Johnson City. But up in this mountainy corner of the state, those interested in the arts tended to leave. Even with generations of family in the mountains, the playwright Jo Carson felt like a misfit growing up in Johnson City. “I couldn’t wait to get out. . . . I intended to move to New York City because I thought that’s where the artists came from,” she said in an interview at the Jo Carson Literary Festival at Emory & Henry College. “At one point in my life—I was in my twenties—I packed my possessions and moved to New York City. . . . I didn’t get any writing done whatsoever because I saw everything coming and going in the theater in the city. Got mugged twice. But I had a good time, and I’m glad I went . . . but I also got homesick for the mountains” (Arnow and Carson 1998, 31). She came back to bafflement. “I was admonished: ‘You could have gotten out. That was your chance. You could have left for good. What on earth are you doing back here?’ Such remarks came from people I admired. It felt very odd. I felt like a stranger come back.” As a stranger, she heard something new: “When I got back, I began to hear the language of this region. There is a poetry in the language of this place. People play with narrative here; they play in a way that doesn’t happen in other places. And it took leaving and coming back to begin to hear it. I began to hear these things, and it was like they had quotation marks around them” (Arnow and Carson 1998, 31). About the time Carson discovered the voice of her region, Bob Leonard heard about East Tennessee. A native of western Massachusetts who did master’s work in theater at Catholic University, Leonard wanted to create a “cross-community” touring company: “I was interested in popular history and how theater could give expression to that as a way to effect progressive social change” (Arnow 1989b, 47–48). Leonard was part of a populist movement. The civil rights and antiwar movements in the 1960s and 1970s had spurred social activism. Feminists contributed the idea that the personal is political—that personal experience could be understood in its context in society. (For instance, childlike dependence might look like a typical feminine trait but actually reflected lack of opportunity in the workplace.) Identity politics might be discredited as divisive now, but in the 1960s and 1970s, blacks, women, gays, the disabled, and other groups began to discover their own common grounds. They became political and social forces. Throwing off the pervasive institutional attitude that overtly political art was not valid and could not be good, some American artists began

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using their work for advocacy. Arts could bring out voices that had not been heard. Arts could lead to change. Of course, this was not a new idea, but in the anti-Communist post–World War II America, art with a political sensibility had an unsavory (suspiciously Left-wing) reputation and was scorned. There was an American tradition of community-based art, however. “I like to begin its modern history with the WPA and the 1940s with Robert Gard and the Wisconsin Idea Theater,” wrote Linda Frye Burnham on the Community Arts Network website that she cofounded. “Its theory is based in the values of cultural democracy. . . . Its methods are based in story, the personal stories of the people in their communities” (Burnham 2002). One of the Depression’s Works Progress Administration programs, the Federal Theatre Project lasted four years in the 1930s. “In its first two years, it had presented 42,000 performances to an audience of more than 20 million people. According to the Theatre Project’s meticulous audience surveys, 65 percent of those attending were seeing a live play for the first time,” wrote Dudley Cocke, director of Roadside Theater in Kentucky. He noted how the “Federal Theatre Project national director, Hallie Flanagan . . . put the federal program’s aims succinctly: ‘National in scope, regional in emphasis, and democratic in attitude’” (Cocke 2000). That is what killed it. As Cocke explains, “For some in power, the Federal Theatre Project was too successful, especially in creating a vast national theater audience that came together across lines of race, class, religion, and geography” (Cocke 2000). A program that brought radical ideas to people across the nation proved controversial. Congress ended it in 1939. There was an earlier movement of community-based theater, too, and the South had a prominent role in it. The Carolina Playmakers on the campus of the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill began in 1918. They produced homegrown plays and became an important force in a worldwide folk drama movement that promoted theater by and for the people. Thomas Wolfe and Paul Green were among its young playwrights. But by the time Ruby Lerner attended UNC in the 1970s, there was little remembrance of the famous folk theater. She remembered that “only the ghosts of the glory of former times floated through Chapel Hill hallways. As theater students we knew only that we were somewhere that had once been considered important and was no longer. A movement which had lasted more than 25 years was a distant memory—rarely discussed— and described in a standard theater text only by the adjective ‘influential’” (Lerner 1986, 9–10). Lerner recalled, “The UNC drama department in the 1970s seemed primarily interested in producing actors who could read soap opera copy well enough not to make fools of themselves in New York

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auditions. The concerns of the program had slowly shifted away from what was probably perceived as embarrassingly ‘regional’ to what might be viewed as more cosmopolitan” (Lerner 1986, 10) Southerners might have been feeling particularly embarrassed by regional portrayals of themselves. Ignorance and brutality were the images pervading mainstream culture. (Think Beverly Hillbillies, The Dukes of Hazzard, and Deliverance.) Southerners needed a more textured vision for themselves. Jon Jory—the producing director of Actors Theater of Louisville, which produced early works by Beth Henley and Marsha Norman, who both became Pulitzer-Prize winning playwrights—held, “What we’ve got to do in the South is build structures that we can respect ourselves. . . . Similarly, there are many plays that speak eloquently to local conditions but can’t survive away from home.” (Flannery 1986, 15). That is something of what Leonard had in mind when he first envisioned a theater. In Boston he met Ed Snodderly, a talented singer/songwriter who played guitar and Dobro. Snodderly hailed from the Southern mountains, a little corner of East Tennessee tucked into the borders of Virginia and North Carolina. The place sounded like what Bob Leonard was looking for. Leonard related: I had lived for long time in Washington, D.C., which was a very transient community. In a kind of romantic way, I imagined an affinity created by mountain living that extended along the Appalachian range from Georgia to Maine. Having been raised in Western Massachusetts in the mountains and in an agricultural economic base, it was a community of people whom I felt an affinity to. But it’s an affinity which isn’t recognized, because as communities we tend to be very isolated. We don’t operate in any crosscommunity way, which is what I had in my mind when I started talking about a touring company that would be working in the Southern mountains, that the company itself would be a tool, a voice, to move from one community to another, to share perceptions (Arnow 1989b, 47).

He assembled a handful of performers, some from the area, some from elsewhere. The National Endowment for the Arts provided funding. A national jobs program, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) paid for staff, too. The Road Company aimed to find an artistic, social, and political niche. The first show the company did was The Momentary Art of Statemaking, the story of the lost state of Franklin formed in 1785 in what later became East Tennessee. Settlers in the mountain wilderness, ignored by the government of North Carolina to which they belonged at that time, had created their own state. It only lasted five years, but the people of the area


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kept the history alive as part of what they perceived as an independent heritage. Jonesborough, the oldest town in Tennessee (and just a few miles from Johnson City), was its capital. The town retained many of its old brick buildings and had become a quaint tourist center. The new company created the play collaboratively and opened at the summertime festival Jonesborough Days in 1975. They also played in parks and a few indoor sites. “We no sooner finished getting the show up than we were out of money,” related Leonard. “One of the things that sustained us through the no-money time was the memory of people standing in the rain in Jonesborough as we performed. They wouldn’t let us quit. We just played on through the rain, and everybody stood there. That was sustenance, way beyond the ticket price” (Arnow 1989b, 47). In at least one way, The Road Company immediately changed lives, giving some local artists new means to stay home and create. One of the first members of the company, Kathie deNobriga, echoes Jo Carson’s sense of wonder at finding a home for her art where she grew up. “It was in the summer of 1976 and I was an $80-a-week CETA employee at The Road Company, an alternative theater ensemble located in the unlikely town of Johnson City, Tennessee. I knew it was unlikely because it was only 20 miles away from the town I grew up in. Having absorbed some of the ‘you’re so good, when are you going to New York?’ mentality that surrounded my early thespian career, I was somewhat shocked to find a theater like The Road Company in my own backyard” (deNobriga 1993). Jo Carson, back from her bruising but enlightening stay in New York, had joined the company as a playwright and sometime performer. Ed Snodderly moved back to East Tennessee, too, and joined the company. To develop another play about the region, the company received funding from the Tennessee Humanities Council, which allowed them to hold hearings at the Power Board in Johnson City. They talked about the massive Tennessee Valley Authority and the electrification projects of the 1930s. This discussion was during the energy crisis, and the themes resonated. “Around 200 people showed up,” recalled Bob Leonard. “We did not present ourselves as experts in the field. We simply were organizers for this discussion. Jo Carson, who was the principal organizer, also listens real well. And she developed a short story out of listening to these conversations, which we then took into rehearsal and developed into a play” (Arnow 1989b, 48). The collaboration between Carson and the company became Horsepower, An Electric Fable. With songs and stories, Horsepower told about the Tennessee Valley Authority bringing electric power and other changes to the Southern mountains. “Those same 200–300 people who

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came to the discussion came to see the play,” said Leonard. “The play was, in a sense, a further investigation of the discussion” (Arnow 1989b, 48). Putting on Horsepower was one of their most successful projects. “We got a group of people who were pulled together because of their interest in the subject matter, not theater. They learned about theater as being pertinent to community issues, and I would venture to bet that a large percentage of those 200 people are still fans of The Road Company,” observed Leonard (Arnow 1989b, 47–48). Developing ROOTS A small professional theater group developing plays and touring the South and beyond was not an isolated phenomenon. And it was not just the activism of the 1960s that planted the seeds of the creativity that bloomed in the next decade. Money helped these theaters grow. Like the WPA’s Federal Theatre Project, which built progressive theater across the country, funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, established in 1965, and the CETA, begun in 1973, provided grants and jobs that turned into small, ambitious theater companies cropping up everywhere. In fact, “by the end of 1979 CETA had become the largest Federal arts program in history,” noted William Cleveland, director of the Center for the Study of Artists and Communities. Recalling the period in American Theatre, Moira Brennan relates that “artists were suddenly demarginalized and recognized for their contribution to the overall health of society. Those who had not previously worked with local communities now saw the rich rewards of doing so and used the inspiration to take great aesthetic leaps that permanently influenced their disciplines. Those who already knew the benefits of community/artist connections tried to parlay the brief state of grace into long-lasting cultural policy” (Brennan 2002, 20). These programs enlarged the work of grassroots, radical companies that had been using theater to advance civil rights in the deep South for more than fifteen years. The earliest and most influential was an innovative black company out of New Orleans. John O’Neal’s Free Southern Theater addressed racism and inspired others to create socially conscious dramas. O’Neal had established the theater in 1963 out of his civil rights work in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: “Our objective was to make art that supported and encouraged those involved in the Southern freedom movement by, for, and about black people” (Arnow 1996, 29). An African American company in the Southern mountains, Carpetbag Theater, began in 1970 in Knoxville, Tennessee. They based one of their


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shows, Red Summer, on a Knoxville race riot in 1919 where a white mob attacked a jail they thought held a black man accused of killing a white woman. When the mob found that the man had been moved to Chattanooga, they attacked black-owned businesses. “We are committed to making the voices of our community heard and we want to give something back to the community—a positive image of itself,” wrote its director, Linda Parris-Bailey, in Southern Exposure’s “Theater in the South” issue (Parris-Bailey 1986, 80). They performed their original plays at community centers, small colleges, churches, and prisons all around the region. Parris-Bailey continued, “There isn’t a tradition in the black community or in the entire low- and middle-class community of ‘going to the theater’ so we go to where the people are.” Roadside Theater in the coalfields of Kentucky began in 1976 with Red Fox Second Hanging, a local story based on nineteenth-century events that involved Northern coal mine speculators and their law-and-order campaign. The theater, which featured all regional performers, “began with the old stories that were still being passed down,” related the director, Dudley Cocke. “We wanted to figure out how to make a theater that made sense in Eastern Kentucky and Central Appalachia. We wanted to reach people who were kin and family.” The company was part of Appalshop, the media production center in Whitesburg. Growing from a War on Poverty program in the 1960s, they produced films, television (Headwaters), and records (June Appal), and later ran a radio station. “People who had heard about what Appalshop was doing in film and video said, ‘let’s do it in theater.’ The spark, the thing that caught on at Appalshop, was that people in the area could tell their own story. They didn’t have to rely on other people coming and saying what the region was like. That was a pretty exciting idea,” described Cocke (Arnow 1989a, 44). In 1976, these and other theaters, working in isolation, got together at the Highlander Center in New Market, Tennessee, looking for a way to connect. They formed a remarkable organization for themselves. The Highlander Research and Education Center had fostered civil rights and social and economic justice the South since the 1930s. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had spoken there. Rosa Parks had attended a workshop before she refused to give up a seat on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Highlander had generated stormy relations with some of its neighbors, who saw the race mixing and political ideas as dangerous and communistic. It was the perfect launching spot for Alternate ROOTS (Regional Organization of Theaters South). “Highlander is the mama of this organization,” declared Carson (Burnham 2005). Ron Short, who worked at Highlander and would later join Roadside Theater, worked on organizing the event with Carson. They invited every

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theater in the South, from outdoor dramas to college theater departments to community theaters. Some 150 people came to the weekend meeting, but soon most of the community theater and outdoor-drama artists left. As Carson related, “By Saturday evening, it shook down to people who wanted to share work and talk about social change. By Sunday morning we had an organization” (Burnham 2005). The name they created played off Roots, Alex Haley’s novel about the search for racial and cultural identity. (Alex Haley himself happened to live near Highlander.) The organization became Alternate ROOTS. Ruby Lerner, who became the first director of Alternate ROOTS, explained, “Our primary interest has been in creating an indigenous body of work which will speak to an audience whose lives and concerns are not usually reflected in mainstream theater.” Most support, Lerner pointed out, went to plays, museums, and music that were “virtually interchangeable art from city to city and are the perfect cultural components of the corporate society.” Attempts to spread such work Lerner called “cultural colonization.” She saw a “well-meaning but misguided belief that the only problem to be solved is one of availability of high culture products to all segments of the community” (Lerner 1986, 10). For Alternate ROOTS Lerner wanted “to promote and support true cultural democracy.” That she defined as “the right of a community (geographic, ethnic, racial, or sexual) to its own cultural expressions” and for the money to support those expressions. “If we have any interest as a society, in building a culture that will reflect the history and diversity of our communities, we will have to understand that ‘culture’ cannot be purchased from Europe or New York. Culture is something we will have to create for ourselves.” Unfortunately, she found that the political sensibility of ROOTS-type theaters was often at odds with the values of those who have the most money to promote culture (Lerner 1986, 11). Despite most funders’ politics, a scrappy organization of small theaters emerged. Over the next few years, Alternate ROOTS expanded to include individual performing artists, writers, musicians, directors, and visual artists. An office in Atlanta and a small staff helped members find places and funding for performances. They put together occasional theater festivals and organized an annual summer meeting that brought together members, aspiring members, friends, and children. Usually, they met on the grounds of a rustic mountain camp, Black Mountain College in North Carolina, a former art school with its own radical history, where they tried out new material, commiserated about funding, and danced, sang, ate, played, and argued. In the early years, as like-minded theaters met and exchanged work, it felt like an organic, indigenous process. “We barely knew that we were


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part of a long tradition of people’s theater,” said Dudley Cocke in High Performance, a magazine of “contemporary issues in art, community, and culture” (quoted in Arnow 1996). John O’Neal, an early member of ROOTS who served as board chair in the 1980s, found “different constituencies in an exciting dialogue (about) ways they could contribute to each other’s development. It was exciting to participate, exciting for audiences. It had forms of energy that the movement had” (Arnow 1996). The Road Company Widens Back in Johnson City, The Road Company developed another play with Jo Carson. Little Chicago was based on rumors that Johnson City had once been a hideaway for bootlegger and gangster Al Capone. Carson interviewed people around town who told her stories of that time, though no one wanted their names published. The musical that emerged enhanced the underworld myths. One piece the company developed was an absurdist and fey show primarily for children. The Flying Lemon Cirque included clowning and juggling, and company members’ sly humor. Although not particularly regional, the play was charming and bookable. They occasionally produced work by other playwrights (such as Tartuffe and Greater Tuna), and they premiered Randy Buck’s Adjoining Trances, a story about the friendship between the writers Carson McCullers and Tennessee Williams. By the mid-1980s, the company had produced nearly two dozen plays that they had taken on some seventeen tours around the South to schools and colleges and community groups. But the performers had grown tired of The Flying Lemon Cirque and retired the show. Unable to scare up grant money, they looked for new ideas and began working on an experimental piece, not involving regional history, community concerns, or popular tastes. Instead, they wanted to reflect their own interests. It was a brave and interesting choice. Their ideas could not have been more at odds with most of their neighbors (at least the way they framed them). The actor Emily Green reeled off the list: “Concern for the earth, women’s issues, unemployment, being single, Ronald Reagan.” She was twenty-eight, a Nashville native who came to The Road Company soon after college acting training at UNC at Greensboro. A study of the evolution of religion, When God Was a Woman, by Merlin Stone, also stirred the discussions. Marlene Mountain, a poet, artist, and feminist who had worked as The Road Company’s secretary until she was laid off when money ran low, shared sheaves of her poetry celebrating goddesses (Arnow 1986).

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Without the constraints of grant money (there was not any) or time (they were all unemployed and had plenty of time on their hands), the ensemble began working with acting warm-ups, games of motion, improvisations, “sound sculptures,” and pantomimes. “We didn’t know what was going to come out of it. But there was an incredible creative freedom—to start from nothing, to start from scratch,” said Margaret Baker, who was a fellow Greensboro acting program graduate with Green and a former teacher originally from Smithfield, North Carolina (Arnow 1986). Leonard explained, The ensemble wanted to work out of its own voice. We had applied developmental techniques to issues that were part of the public forum—things that you might hear about on the nightly news. But there are other community issues which are not necessarily newsworthy, at least as determined by people in the news business. The actors in the company had become welded together more as an ensemble, and we wanted to find out what sorts of things we had common interests in, and were those things reflections of a part of our community? (Arnow 1989b, 48)

From months of development and rehearsals emerged Blind Desire, a wild, eclectic mix of satire, serious political statement, actors in handpainted costumes, a set that was a giant mobile—and even slapstick. “We discovered ourselves, partially because of our own state of affairs, being quite concerned about unemployment, and how does a person, particularly a single woman, negotiate her life in the workplace? The format it took was in future fantasy,” said Leonard. In Blind Desire, Emily Green tells the audience, “Hello. My name is Jean and I need a job.” Behind her, voices try to remind her of her great-grandmother, of her mother, of the ancient goddesses. Timidly, the unassuming young woman continues talking. She lands a job with a giant company, McMankind, and allows herself to be “made over” so she will be suited to her new role. “Hi, my name is Jean, and I have a job! Can I HEP YEW?” she shouts happily as she struts across the stage, showing off her newly learned walk. Later, though, after being completely caught up in her life at McMankind, Jean becomes confused. She begins asking questions. Finally, she listens to the voices that have been whispering to her all along. As Jean makes her way as best she can through this absurd, frightening world of the near future, the other four actors play some thirty characters—supervisors, co-workers, a pair of pompous announcers, a bartender, a preacher, and a bridegroom. The choreographed scenes of mindless McMankind routines are interspersed with what the cast calls their “woowoo” scenes, the dream-like dancing, singing, and snake hissing.


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They played venues like the theater on the grounds of the Johnson City veterans hospital. There the old veterans who lived in the domiciliary, who liked to attend the shows, clapped politely. Reactions in other venues varied widely. “There were people who have stood up and cheered at the end of Blind Desire, and there are people who did not like it, people who have left during it,” Leonard acknowledged. “People who didn’t like Blind Desire rarely talked about what the play was about. They talked about having trouble understanding it” (Arnow 1989b, 48). When they introduced the play at the 1984 ROOTS festival in Atlanta, critics, more sophisticated in the experimental theatrical form, note a the show. In a review in Atlanta’s Creative Loafing, Tom Boeker noted how well this “improvisational/ensemble recipe” worked: “Where most theaters succeed in creating avant-garde mud pies, The Road Company pulls off a tight and entertaining, albeit wildly eclectic, show.” The Los Angeles Times critic Dan Sullivan called the play “a real winner. . . . Green plays Jean with real respect, the way Judy Holliday did Billie Dawn.” Carl Rausher of the Atlanta Art Papers said that Blind Desire was “the most impressive play, and the highlight of the [1984 ROOTS] Festival” (Arnow 1986). That was saying something. ROOTS had become a beacon. “Alternate ROOTS is the most interesting arts organization I have ever come across,” wrote Linda Frye Burnham (Burnham 1987), then editor of High Performance, after her first encounter with the group at their 10th Anniversary Performance Festival in Atlanta in 1987. “It’s a multiracial coalition of some 200 performing artists from all over the Southeast who are creating ‘original indigenous work,’ that is, new work arising from the culture and history of the place they call home. Instead of relating artistically to the standards of the large urban centers like New York City, they draw from and give back to the unique culture of the South. After ten years of energy and refinement, ROOTS has succeeded in cultivating a magnetic center of its own, a regenerative atmosphere, fertile and exciting” (Burnham 1987). So smitten was Burnham that she moved from Los Angeles to rural North Carolina to be near the stimulation she found at ROOTS. She relates, ROOTS started because artists who had chosen to stay in the South and make new work desperately needed somebody to talk to about it. Ten years later, ROOTS has a polished agenda of artist feedback and professional criticism that has resulted in some of the strongest, most intriguing work being done in performance today. . . . Equally important is the ROOTS frontal assault on deeply ingrained social problems as they apply to the arts and their place in specific communities. I was astonished at the honesty and courage that are the backbone. (Burnham 1987)

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The heady atmosphere of the ROOTS meetings and theater festivals did not always help their members back at home. While praise for Blind Desire heartened The Road Company’s members and impressed their friends, it did not translate into busy tours of grants or guarantee full houses. Even after slick brochures went out to every possible customer in the South—from arts councils to university women’s studies programs—the fall 1985 tour promotion netted only nine bookings. This sparse showing reflected a grim trend for The Road Company’s tour planning. As funding shriveled everywhere, fewer of the colleges and arts councils that might have scheduled show were able to do it. There was also less time to hunt for grants. Since 1981, office staff had dwindled from five to the solo operation it was by the mid-1980s—with Bob Leonard as the entire office staff. The Reagan years had brought about the end of the CETA programs and attacks on the NEA. Leonard and the board of The Road Company looked for more local support. But ticket sales, art auctions, garage sales, and mail and telephone fundraising campaigns staffed by volunteers could not bring in enough to support the company. Government and private grants were still needed for the operating budget. With one or two regional tours a year, a home season of three or four productions, and a play reading series with the work of regional writers, company members continued to survive, though barely. The actor Christine Murdock, who originally came from St. Louis and represented the third generation of a family of performers, was philosophical. She pointed out that work was still steadier in this company than in most acting jobs. She cited Actor’s Equity statistics that the average professional actor earns only about $1,000 a year. While The Road Company members were unemployed more often than they were in the early big-grant years, they still performed more often and made more money than most struggling actors. Other advantages for the troupe included the cost of living, which was much lower in the company’s headquarters of Johnson City than in most theater centers. The company also provided a core for a small but cohesive arts community of a few hundred people in Johnson City and in nearby Jonesborough. “The Road Company has been a catalyst. It’s put us together in lots of different fashions,” said Jo Carson, who had become a board member. It also provided artistic stimulation. Carson appreciated their nerve when they created work like Blind Desire: “The Road Company sticks its neck out in a place where chickens get their heads cut off, and that’s extraordinary to me” (Arnow 1986). But beyond the arts community, The Road Company faced problems gaining local support for its work. Bob Leonard noted that nationally, “no


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more than 2 percent of the American public goes to the theater. Now, if we were in a theater town, I’d be inclined to play for that already-paying public.” But he knew that in most of the small towns where The Road Company performed, even 2 percent of the population would not fill an auditorium for a one-night stand. Leonard admitted that he was sometimes daunted. “It’s tough. I don’t know what will electrify 50 percent of Johnson City. The problem is, I don’t even have access to 50 percent of Johnson City” (Arnow 1986). The company moved into a more comfortable form for the community when they developed a show for a yearlong state celebration, Tennessee Homecoming, in 1986. Echoes and Postcards was full of contemporary mountaineers’ stories, songs, manners, customs, and food (including a bit about Thanksgiving cornbread and another about a girl who dreams of singing like Patsy Cline). Leonard commented, “In Echoes and Postcards we tapped an issue of more universal interest—issues of music and family. And we found a form that was more universally appreciated” (Arnow 1989b, 48). Ed Snodderly and Eugene Wolf sang what they called “new Hillbilly music,” an old-time country/bluegrass/bohemian mix that they later developed into a popular duo, The Brother Boys. (People magazine said that they sounded “like hillbillies whose moonshine got spiked with acid.”) Jo Carson told stories in a style she had honed performing People Pieces all over the country—poetic renditions of the frank and funny stories she had heard all her life. Christine Murdock and Emily Green told corny jokes and tap-danced. The show provided an entertainment that appealed to local and regional audiences. They had less trouble booking this drama that reflected the culture if not the politics of the region. They performed Echoes and Postcards all over the South, took it on a tour of Russia in 1994, and did their last performance of it in San Francisco in 1998. Leonard had moved in 1989 to take a job in the Virginia Tech theater department. For several years he still led The Road Company, but he had moved across the mountains to Blacksburg and could no longer handle full-time flogging of funders and audiences. The actors gamely tried to gain administrative and fundraising chops. They got a building from the city to use as a theater and started working more intensively with the community. Race Matters In reaching out to new communities, The Road Company found an unexpected challenge. Emily Green and Betty Hill-Goah, a local friend of the company who was African American, cowrote a proposal to create a play with members of the black community. Johnson City’s minority

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population was less than 5 percent and was not a vocal group. This boundary crossing would provide an opportunity for the all-white company to open doors. The company would use the style of collaboration it had developed to create the play. Leonard thought the themes of the play would reflect concerns he had heard in conversations with members of the black community. “We had talked about the struggle of life in the projects, the exodus of talented young African-Americans to the urban north, the lure of drugs and drug money, the absence of any black owned businesses as role models for young adults, the painful realization that integration of the schools has removed the school house as the center of the African-American community, and a multitude of other social realities” (Leonard 1993). Nothing happened according to plan. One woman who got involved, Sharon Adams, became a leader. She was not interested in Road Company–style collaboration process but enthusiastically wrote a play solo. Company members, however, found it an awkward work with a conventional form and what Leonard called “romanticized back-porch realism.” The actors were awkward, too, the production amateurish. But the writer and performers resented the professionals’ attempts to help them polish their work. While the process distressed The Road Company members, the content was more troubling to them. To God Be the Glory was conservative Christian to the core. Leonard was especially put off: “I was not prepared to deal with prayer as the basic tool for change, not to mention the possibility of prayer as a form of coercion and denial” (Leonard 1993). Then there was the community reaction. The show was a big success. “Some 45 people were involved in the production as actors, backstage or promotions. The cast and crew were cross-racial. The run of three nights was standing-room only, playing to nearly 500 people—a huge number in our experience of opening new works in Johnson City—and nearly all were new to The Road Company. Sharon’s play was the talk of the AfricanAmerican community,” wrote Bob Leonard in an essay about what happened. “Our established audiences were mystified” (Leonard 1993). Since The Road Company was in the unusual position of providing funding through the grant, the situation was especially awkward. “The Road Company came to feel that we were paying for a show we had little or no connection with and some serious disagreement about.” The partnership did not continue. Such a conflict might have happened with a white group as well. But race overlaid the discussion. The history of meetings at Alternate ROOTS when racial issues arose (wherein even good intentions often turned into disasters) might have served as cautionary tales. ROOTS tried to address these situations,


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and after several agonizing incidents, they succeeded, to some extent. At a ROOTS meeting in 1987, The Road Company’s Margaret Baker performed a piece in the voice of a character she was developing for a one-woman show (outside of the company’s work). She became a Sunday School teacher in the Rock ’o’ My Soul in the Bosom of Just About Anybody Except a Minority Baptist Church. In a broad satire, the white actor told the story of Moses and mixed it up with the story of Little Black Sambo. The playwright Pearl Cleage and the performer Zeke Burnette, who are black, reacted with outrage, not only because of what they saw as an insensitive mockery but also because the mostly white audience were so amused by use of a stereotype they found profoundly demeaning. An emotional, angry discussion followed the performance, and bad feelings remained long after the meeting ended. Two years later, when a white performer, Beverly Botsford, who did African drumming, stood for membership, a black labor-based organizer, Deborah Hills, stopped everything. She said that only African males should perform such drumming. “The whole meeting fell apart,” remembered Botsford (Arnow 1996). By the time Ed Haggard came to a meeting in 1995 with a one-man show that unnerved just about everyone, ROOTS was ready with a new technique for healing discourse. In Son of White Man, the white performer smeared paint on his naked body and said if he had more color, he might have a sense of rhythm, a love of nature. He painted his genitals and said if he had more color he might be more virile. Since he had played the show and received good responses in Canada and the United States, he was surprised when he heard booing. What happened next was designed to work out the hot issues. A white dancer, Liz Lerman, had been developing what she called the “critical response process” to give fellow artists feedback in a useful, nonthreatening way. Along with other groups around the country, ROOTS adopted the method. “We’ve always had trouble with how we critique each other. The point of it is to help the artist,” relates The Road Company’s Christine Murdock. This process curbs broad statements (“That stank!”) but asks for specific points (“I’d like to understand more about what that character is thinking”). The discussion lasted until 3:00 a.m. Kathie deNobriga, who was director of ROOTS then, thought the process worked: “We were successful for the first time in applying our intellectual skills to an emotional response. We held a really principled discussion” (Arnow 1996). Lerman’s process has become a standard for providing feedback to artists. But the worthwhile dialogue about race and performance at the ROOTS meeting did not stem all the hard feelings and could not solve

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all the problems. For an organization in the South that hopes for social change, race will always be central to the discussion. For some of the blacks in the organization (and for some blacks no longer in ROOTS), it is inadequate that some of the white members merely understand some of their racism. Awareness, interest, and guilt do not represent a paradigm shift. Moreover, when blacks assumed leadership in ROOTS, they encountered an institutional structure that resembled a less socially conscious world. After four years as chair of the board in the mid-1980s, the New Orleans storyteller John O’Neal felt that his political needs could not be met by ROOTS. “The organization seems obliged to serve members who are overwhelmingly white middle class. I don’t see how they’re really effective at providing leadership because of the nature and the legacy of racism in the South. The political vision they seem to be driven by would be satisfied by just reducing the evidence of antagonism and not necessarily helping people confront and solve problems” (Arnow 1996). ROOTers have kept trying. In “An Introduction to the ROOTS Reader,” compiled for the online Community Arts Network, Linda Frye Burnham stresses, “We were riveted by the passionate pledge of these children of the Civil Rights Movement to remain substantially interracial and to devote ongoing, meticulous attention to undoing systemic racism in the South and elsewhere. No matter how many times they have stumbled in this resolve, they have continued to return to the family table for 25 years” (Burnham 2003). Money Matters Race may always prove a confounding issue for socially conscious artists, but it is the constant struggle for funding that really threatens survival. By 1980, John O’Neal’s Free Southern Theater had already closed. “Many of the social and political conditions have changed in American society since 1963. The broad-based social movement that gave rise to the Free Southern Theater now lies fallow,” John O’Neal said. He held a New Orleans jazz funeral for the theater (Hill 1986, 72). For The Road Company, the attempts to delve into their community—white or black—became less and less possible. By 1996, the National Endowment for the Arts Expansion Arts Program ended, taking money the twenty-year-old touring group had used to put on plays at their home base. CETA was long gone. A small grant allowed them to work on a new play, Zero Moment. Some funding for artists-in-theschools programs and community arts center funding from a private donor to work with neighborhood children made up a $40,000 budget.


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They were floundering. They never produced their new play, and in 1998 they gave up and went dark. Others managed to hang on, though they constantly struggle for money. “Painters, dancers, actors are tough as weeds and can grow in cracks in the concrete. There was great art, drama, writing and scholarship in America before 1965, when the endowments were founded. Dedicated people create ingenious strategies of survival for themselves. But why should they have to?” wrote Robert Hughes in Time (Hughes 1995). In 2006, Carpetbag Theater still creates plays about the black experience out of Knoxville, Tennessee. John O’Neal presents shows featuring a character he created, Junebug Jabbo Jones, a storyteller and commentator. Roadside still creates plays with a gritty mountaineer sensibility. Like the Federal Theater Project of the Depression, they consciously pursue an audience not accustomed to live professional theater. Besides holding its lively annual meeting and theater festivals, Alternate ROOTS began a training program for creating social change through art. They still have hundreds of members including some of the original ones: Jo Carson, John O’Neal, Dudley Cocke, and Linda Parris-Bailey at Carpetbag. And they still have their fractious annual meeting. Have they and other small theaters producing original works throughout the South made a difference? Did their work lead to social change? Dudley Cocke of Roadside and Ruby Lerner, who once led Alternate ROOTS, certainly think so. “The cultural components of the southern-born Civil Rights Movement—its music and the Free Southern Theater—had a profound effect on subsequent generations of southern artists, black and white, in its vivid demonstration that culture is integral and not peripheral to the process of social change” (Cocke and Lerner 1989). Over the years, The Road Company and other Southern theaters did bring about social change in subtle but sustainable ways. They respected and nurtured local voices and opened up homegrown means of expression. The theater people celebrated local history and customs, not to preserve and pickle the culture but to build pride and strength. At the same time, the artists’ alternative visions and ways of living opened up their communities. Artists who stay for a while become accepted and appreciated. They generate new ways of looking, acting, and participating in the community. They discover new routes that go both ways. Note 1. Some of material in this chapter has been adapted from articles by the author.

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Works Cited Arnow, Pat. 1986. “Unexpected Drama Deep in the Interior: A Chronicle of The Road Company.” Special “Theater in the South” issue, Southern Exposure 14, nos. 3–4 (Fall): 50–53. ———. 1989a. “Roadside Theater.” Interview with Dudley Cocke. Now and Then 6, no. 3 (Fall): 44–45. ———. 1989b. “The Road Company.” Interview with Bob Leonard. Now and Then 6, no. 3 (Fall): 47–48. ———. 1996. “The Alternate ROOTS Dilemma: From Little Black Sambo to Son of White Man.” Southern Exposure 24, no. 1 (Spring): 28–33. Reprinted on the Community Arts Network website http://www.communityarts.net/ readingroom/archivefiles/2003/10/alternate_roots.php. Arnow, Pat, and Jo Carson”. 1998. “The Wealth of Story: A Conversation between Pat Arnow and Jo Carson”. The Iron Mountain Review: Jo Carson Issue 14 (Summer): 31–37. Brennan, Moira. 2002. “Toward a Theatre of Action: The Grassroots Theatre Movement, Aimed at Social Transformation, Finds Savvy New Ways to Flourish.” American Theatre 19, no. 10 (December): 20–24, 89–90. Burnham, Linda Frye. 1987. “Running Commentary: Alternate ROOTS.” High Performance, no. 39. Reprinted at Community Arts Network website: http:// www.communityarts.net/readingroom/archivefiles/2003/10/running_comment.php. ———. 2002. “Building the Creative Class from the Grassroots: How community is built by the eight theaters in ‘Performing Communities.” Community Arts Network Reading Room website http://www.communityarts.net/readingroom/archivefiles/2002/11/building_the_cr.php. ———. 2003. “An Introduction to the ROOTS Reader.” Community ArtsNetwork website http://www.communityarts.net/~commarts/readingroom/ archivefiles/ 2003/10/introduction_to_1.php. ———. 2005. “Founder’s Circle Notes” from the 2004 Alternate ROOTS Annual Meeting. Freelist website http://www.freelists.org/archives/rootsexcomm/07–2005/msg00054.html. Cleveland, William. 2001. “A Look Inside Artists and Communities.” Artists and Communities website http://www.artistsandcommunities.org/search_ forward.html. Cocke, Dudley. 2000. “Change,” Keynote Speech, Kentucky Arts Council, Statewide Arts Conference. 20 October. Roadside Theater website http:// www.roadside.org/changeessay.html. Cocke, Dudley and Ruby Lerner. 1989. “A Call for Cultural Development,” introduction to “Help Yourself: A Cultural Workbook.” Alternate ROOTS. Community Arts Network website http://www.communityarts.net/readingroom/archivefiles/2003/10/ a_call_for_cult.php.


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deNobriga, Kathie. 1993. “An Introduction to Alternate ROOTS.” High Performance, no. 64. Reprinted at the Community Arts Network website http://www.communityarts.net/ readingroom/archivefiles/2003/10/an_introduction_1.php. Flannery, James. 1986. “Southern Theater and the Paradox of Progress.” Fall 1985. Performing Arts Journal. Reprinted in special “Theater in the South” issue, Southern Exposure 14, nos. 3–4 (Fall): 12–17. Hill, Jackson. 1986. “A Farewell Without Mourning: A Jazz Funeral for Free Southern Theater.” Special “Theater in the South” issue, Southern Exposure 14, nos. 3–4 (Fall): 72–73. Leonard, Robert H. 1993. “Negotiations: Learning Hard Lessons.” High Performance no. 64. Reprinted on the Community Arts Network website http://www. communityarts.net/ readingroom/archivefiles/2003/10/negotiations_le.php. Lerner, Ruby. 1986. “Reclaiming People’s Theater: A History.” Special “Theater in the South” issue, Southern Exposure 14, nos. 3–4 (Fall): 9–11. Parris-Bailey, Linda. 1986. “Dark Cowgirls and Prairie Queens.” Special “Theater in the South” issue, Southern Exposure 14, nos. 3–4 (Fall): 80–81.

Further Reading Goldbard, Arlene. 2001. “Memory, Money, and Persistence: Theater of Social Change in Context.” Theater (Duke University) 31, no. 3: 127–137. Lutenbacher, Cindy. 1989. “The Road Company of Johnson City, Tennessee: A Case Study of a Community-Centered, Creative-Collaborative, Original Works, Professional, Southern Theatre.” PhD diss., Northwestern University.

The last section of Radicalism in the South since Reconstruction sets forth the voices of three artist-activists: William Stetson Kennedy, Raúl Salinas, and Si Kahn. Born between 1916 and 1944, the speakers in the interviews share stories that range from the 1940s to 2006, in which span they each tour the South, whether as a musician or as a prisoner. At the heart of each interview is their work to overcome the forced difference of the American economy that turns relation and need into commodity and consumption—that turns interconnection into opposition. Each actor, in other words, seeks to create a culture of unity, wherein art is not separate from politics, which is not separate from relationships, which is not separate from making a living. Kennedy, Kahn, and Salinas do not dull differences via some postmodern equation wherein equality is realized only by reduction to sameness; instead, they strive to touch other people via relationship and respect. All three, however, identify privatization of the human commonwealth as the unbearable transgression that animates their work. To do so, each seeks ways to foster community between people while resisting those institutions, people, and forces that dissect and alienate. In short, these men seek to frustrate those social and economic realities that have led theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu to evaluate the separation between social, artistic, and political capital. They do so not by standing against capitalism as such but by working toward establishing the realities of interconnection between people that frustrate the premises of capital itself (much like the artist/writer Suzi Gablik or the filmmaker/anthropologist Trinh T. Min-Ha). These interviews show how Kennedy, Kahn, and Salinas both look back into the flying debris of history while turning Benjamin’s angel to face the coming sun and gaze with intimacy into the possible. Yet they do so only by standing on the ground, by touching the everyday connections that people make, and by acknowledging the brutality of national American culture and politics, which have been lashed to profit. Given the nature of their projects, this last section appropriately takes the forms of interviews, of oral histories, where individual voices ring more clearly than at any point in this book. The very nature of these genres—which rely on personal recall, gaps, and idiosyncrasies—might seem to call into question the meaning of history and fact. Yet through them we are shown that history and fact only live as they are understood, lived, and used to create the world. And when the words and memories fail the person in the act of handing them onward—as with the case of Kennedy—a path of listening, piecing, and carrying on is clearly set forth for those who come after.

10 Beluthahatchee Blues: An Interview with Stetson Kennedy Jorge Arévalo Mateus

I went to my neighbors and got to be friends, We talked about things we are fightin to win; We’re both different colors, but feel sort of kin, We’re both the same color just under our skin! —Woody Guthrie, “So Long It’s Been Good To Know You” (unpublished version)

Legendary for his endless rambling, in 1951, Woody Guthrie left New York City and headed to “Po’ Boy Estates,” a retreat established by his friend and fellow “stumping” companion, William Stetson Kennedy. Located south of Jacksonville, Florida, on a once-remote family property dubbed Beluthahatchee; Kennedy conceived a kind of artist sanctuary or safe haven from the pressures of the McCarthy era for political refugees, writers, and activists, inviting them to “escape the fray before returning into the fray,” as stated in an ad in National Guardian. Guthrie, in a personal correspondence to Kennedy, expressed his eagerness to visit the last or remaining “48th state” of his national travels. While this was a period of well-documented personal and physical unraveling, from which he clearly sought escape, the possibilities for artistic and romantic renewal at Beluthahatchee were too great for Guthrie to deny (Cray 2004; Klein 1999). During the mid-1940s, Woody Guthrie and Stetson Kennedy had met at Alan Lomax’s New York City apartment, a gathering place for a wideranging group of artists and activists generally associated with the Popular Front. From the mid-1940s to 1949, Guthrie and Kennedy—sometimes with Pete Seeger, among others—often appeared on programs and at rallies and events in New York City, Cleveland, Chicago, and throughout the northeast. Kennedy had already achieved some fame as a folklorist for his

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1942 Palmetto Country, which was largely based on material he gathered while working on the Florida Writers Project with Zora Neale Hurston. However, he was becoming increasingly well-known as a labor journalist and Southern white critic of Jim Crow, especially after the publication of the 1946 Southern Exposure. He also spent much of the later 1940s working for the CIO’s “Operation Dixie” in Atlanta before that organizing drive faltered from the pressure and the splits within the CIO caused by the Cold War. He became even better known (and reviled in some quarters) for his efforts to expose the Ku Klux Klan, which he chronicled in his 1954 I Rode with the Klan. Kennedy and Guthrie, the Oklahoma-born (and Texas- and Oklahoma-raised) “Dustbowl Balladeer,” brought to audiences words and songs that addressed social, political, and economic issues with a rural authenticity that was both engaging and radical. The identification between them stems from each one’s understanding about the inner workings and failings of the “system,” as well as from the moral response it demanded. I suggest that Kennedy’s affinity was also, in part, based on seeing in Guthrie a sufficient degree of the “Okie” from the perspective of an activist, folklorist, and collector of songs who linked his own work with a sense of sympathy with the working-class Florida and Georgia “cracker,” in whom Kennedy saw a close kin to the Okie: The early crackers were the Okies of their day (as they have been ever since). Cheated of land, not by wind and erosion, but by the plantation and slavery system of the Old South, they were non-essentials in an economic, political, and social order dominated by the squirearchy of wealthy planters, and in most respects were worse off than the Negro slaves. (1942: 61)

Guthrie’s understanding of Kennedy’s political strain, and the racial politics of the South, while perhaps more complex and nuanced, is nonetheless apparent in his songwriting from the Beluthahatchee period (1949 through 1953, during which he composed nearly seventy songs),1 a period in which Kennedy attempted to help maintain a Left presence in the region, including running as a progressive write-in candidate for senator in Florida in 1950. Kennedy decided to leave the region in early 1953, a result of McCarthyite pressures and the ongoing threat of Klan violence, living abroad for several years, primarily in France and Eastern Europe, until Kruschchev’s “Secret Speech” about the crimes of Stalin and the invasion of Hungary that shook the confidence of many leftists in 1956. What remains from Guthrie’s visits to Beluthahatchee are handwritten and typed manuscripts and scrapbooks filled with writings, drawings. and photographs, and especially songs, or rather, a song cycle that I term the Beluthahatchee Blues—a previously unexamined corpus of lyrics that

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points to what Guthrie learned from Kennedy and how Kennedy’s battles and enemies became Guthrie’s own. In these lyrics, Guthrie demonstrates his rich encounter with the culture and nature of Kennedy’s home state and region. This collection of song lyrics emanates an acutely raw political, environmental, and race-conscious sensibility that strikingly differs from Guthrie’s better-known songs and song cycles such as The Dustbowl Ballads and The Columbia River songs, or even his pro-union and antifascist songs. While they are not strictly “Blues” in either form, content, or structure—they vary thematically and structurally—they represent Guthrie’s ability to focus on topics that may be construed as “Southern” in sensibility and culture at a time in his biography which has generally been overlooked or regarded, incorrectly, as a period of diminished and fading creative capacities. Consider, for instance, the fecund mixture of resolve, turbulance, and serenity related in the following songs, found in his manuscripts in the Woody Guthrie Archives. While still up North, Guthrie wrote two songs that demonstrate his developing focus on interracial justice: in “Kloo Klacka Klambo” (1949) Guthrie conjures images of a KKK induction ceremony and the reverence toward the Kleagle, and “Peekskill Fiery Kross” (1949) is about the progressive Left’s rally in upstate New York, wherein local whites, according to Kennedy, “exercised the red-baiting prototype of McCarthyism rampant at the time,” mobbing the audience, which included many blacks as well as other fans and supporters of singer/actor/activist Paul Robeson. These songs forecast those that Guthrie would later write in Beluthahatchee. In “Genocide” (1952), for instance, Guthrie declares that he will fight against Columbians and the Klan in the “battle” against white repression. His anger is shown in “Pistol Packer” (1953), where he takes a militant stand against any and all enemies, ever-ready and willing to resort to gun violence, if necessary. In “Beluthahatchee Blues” (1953) Guthrie again refers to guns, although the central theme of the song is one of freedom, or the liberation of “colored hands” and “folks.”2 “Turpentine Camp Blues” (1952) is written from the perspective of a runaway black worker from a Georgia turpentine camp, who cannot get a ride to Florida to visit his sweetheart.3 But “Tuccumcari Striker” (1953) is one of the few “labor songs” among the Belutha lyrics. Nevertheless, Guthrie understood Belutha as deeply linked with the larger struggle; this linkage is expressed in “Hold On” (1953), in which revolution, Beluthahatchee, Columbus (Georgia), New Orleans, Portland (Oregon), New York City, swamps, slaves, and so on, are brought together. Still, Guthrie sought and found in Beluthahatchee a way to escape the turbulance and disappointments he experienced in the North. His annotation to “North Sea’s Flood” (1953), for example, depicts an idyllic


Figure 10.1 “Beluthatchee Blues” was composed in March 1953 and presents Guthrie’s concerns of freedom and liberation. Songs-2 NB-64, p. 249, WGA.


scene of nature and wildlife at Belutha. “Peace Town” (1953) also conveys Guthrie’s joy of discovering a utopian place of inspiration: “I find this Floridian waterish countery [sic] to be a fine spot to fishle up balladsongs out of.” In “Choppin Axe Blues” (1953), he demonstrates his environmentalist, anti–property owner populist stance, noting how it was the “axe choppers” [sic], or workers, who built and developed what became “private properties.” At the same time, with Guthrie imploring the sun to help dry up the “bloody swamp waters of terrible awful racey hates” in “Oh Sun” (1953), not all was ideal in the region. Similarly, “Drain the Swamp” (1953) intimates Guthrie’s fear that while he is out at “the store” some unforseen violence may befall him, in which case, “drain the swamp” takes on a rather morbid meaning—especially given Guthrie’s ability to “rile the locals.” Nevertheless, Guthrie was pleased to be in Belutha, concisely summing up his philosophy of humanist egalitarianism in “Seeds of Man” (1953). In a similar vein, he writes a tribute to his “landlord” Stetson Kennedy in “Beluthahatchee Bill” (1953), for whom he earlier wrote campaign songs, including “Stetson Kennedy, He’s That Man” (1950) and “Talking Stetson Kennedy” (1950).4 Now in his ninth decade, Kennedy’s memory is spotty and/or selective, as he himself would admit. However, using interviews conducted in the late 1970s, as well as in 2004 and 2006, together with selected material from the Woody Guthrie Archives, historical objectivity and factuality, veracity and accuracy are ideals that may or may not be fully achieved, or even ascertained—which is to say, it is best to let Kennedy speak for himself. JAM: You’ve spoken of Guthrie’s more well-known Coulee [Columbia River] songs as a point of departure for the global, regional, and local issues that he was dealing with more directly in the songs composed at Beluthahatchee. You’ve also spoken of different levels at which “protest songs” can operate, and about looking for material in clippings from Southern Patriot and other publications. Can you connect these ideas concretely to Guthrie’s creative output from the time he spent with you in Florida? SK: These are all pretty deep subjects, and I’m wondering if it wouldn’t be good for me to ramble on a little bit about a general background or philosophical [orientation]. Woody and I were very much products of the twentieth century and had our beings in the twentieth century, both in the national concept and the global context. So that the things that were happening to the world during that period shaped us and, to the best of our ability, we tried to shape them a bit and that’s what we’re all about. I was struck by the fact that I didn’t really set out to be a writer,


I wasn’t looking for a literary career, I just simply swallowed this thing about truth shall make you free and such axioms, and so I decided that I would do my thing with the written word. And Woody of course took off in the other direction; he was going to do it and put it to song. And in both cases, we were setting out to be messengers, to the best of our ability. That’s where Woody was coming from, of course, when he wrote or sang “a song that don’t say somethin’ ain’t worth nothin.” That’s what he had in mind and that’s why he didn’t care that much about what tune he put it to as long as he was getting a message across. And so he was a quintessential messenger. That’s not to say that he was not aware and appreciative of the role that music, all kinds of music, plays in enriching human life. There were a lot of play songs and kids’ songs and work songs, but most of his things, it was message [that mattered most to him]. I don’t know how much time he spent on perfecting his voice or instrument, but he was concentrating on what needed to be said, his point of view. I’ve always looked at things as something of a generalist; in other words, we were dealing with philosophy and politics and economics and culture, all of those things. Sort of an across-the-board approach, and that’s one explanation for the extent to which we both dabbled in the same subject matter. JAM: I have a question about the subject matter. One of the central subjects for both you and Guthrie has been racism, racial politics, people treating other people inhumanely based on the color of skin. In Guthrie’s case, being from the Midwest, it’s radically different than your experience, being a southerner, in certain respects. What was Woody reacting to? His father’s alleged membership in the KKK?5 There’s no hard evidence; no one really can document that although Klein alludes to it. In your own case, if I recall correctly, an uncle of yours was a Klan member. Is that accurate? Was either of you reacting to the Klan in his own family? SK: I don’t know how much significance there is to either fact, either Woody’s Klan connection or mine. At one time the Klan counted its members in the millions, in the first half of the 1920s for example. It’s very true that Woody came out of Oklahoma and Oklahoma was borderline south and I recall that when the Supreme Court—one of the very first things it did, and people haven’t given due attention to the fact—was to stop the cities from drawing lines on maps and residential zoning by redlining maps, saying blacks shall live here and whites shall live here. And when the Supreme Court did that, way back, as I recall, in the 1930s or early 1940s, the governor of Oklahoma, Alfalfa Bill Murray [William Henry Murray], declared martial law in Oklahoma. They were going to keep on segregating. So there were blacks in Oklahoma and it was that kind of atmosphere,


so Woody wasn’t all that immune or exempt from exposure. But the Dust Bowl of course was the big thing that struck Oklahoma in his life and hence the large body of Dust Bowl songs. As for racism and Woody, the freight train experience and the hobo jungles—there were plenty of blacks in the hobo jungles, and there was this fraternity among hoboes regardless of race, creed, or color. Woody no doubt had that experience, so that when he came here to Beluthahatchee, Florida, the plantation racist mentality wasn’t all that new to him, but the intensity of it and the universality of it, that was new. Before that, of course, he and I were swapping materials and corresponding very much on the subject of race, because my primary focus was on that. So that he had that sort of preparation for getting off the Greyhound bus in Jacksonville, Florida, in the late 1940s. And I recall one incident, we were in the corner crossroads general store, one of these mom and pop things, and there were both black and white people in there shopping, just a handful. And Woody in a loud voice says to me, says, “You know, I think little colored kids is a whole lots prettier than little white kids, don’t you?” And it almost got us killed right there. We had to get him out of there. So he was that naïve—or no doubt being deliberate, he knew what he was saying, but that was Woody at that time in the South, saying that sort of thing. And I recall one of his songs talking about the yellow line snaking up and down the highway out there reminding him of the Klan. He was talking about the yellow dividing line in the highway; the painted line, and he wrote something about that. So I quite agree that racism was relatively new to him as a subject, a target. And he obviously did a good job addressing it. JAM: When you worked together in New York—a lot of people don’t know how during that time both you and Woody appeared on the same programs. Were you dealing with racial issues, or more with labor issues? Because you would work in New York; then you’d go to Chicago, and so forth; you’d travel around with Lomax, Seeger, that group of people. SK: Yes, that’s very true. I was somewhere in Ohio as I recall, in a two dollar hotel, speaking at, I think, the University of Ohio, to a student group and I heard this voice coming through the walls, and I said, “That’s Woody Guthrie in the next room!” And sure enough, he and Cisco [Houston] were there, and he’d gotten his weeks mixed. He wasn’t due until the following week, he’d gotten there a week early by mistake. And so I invited him to be on my program, you know, and I was indeed talking about the Klan and racism and Woody, I forget what he sang. But anyway, that sort of thing happened and we frequently were on the same program. In retrospect, I don’t know if we were together on all subjects, you know. The programs in Manhattan and upstate New York


or Connecticut that we appeared on, I talked primarily about racism and the manner in which racism was used for union-busting and things like that. So there was this connection. JAM: Was Guthrie often in the audience at these events? SK: Yes. When I first arrived in Manhattan, it must have been 1946 or 1947, I went to an open-air thing in [Greenwich] Village with singers. PM newspaper had my photograph and a thing about the Klan, probably, on the front page. Someone with a spotlight threw the spotlight on me in the audience and talked about having Stetson Kennedy in the audience. But Woody and [Paul] Robeson and I think Pete Seeger, it was a whole bunch of us there and that was my introduction to the scene. Leadbelly was there, very much so. He had gotten into a scrap with his wife or something and we took up a collection, I forget whether it was for Leadbelly or the wife [laughs]. JAM: There’s an interesting relationship too. Were you able to observe Woody with Leadbelly and the racial dynamics of that relationship? Was that something that you were privy to? SK: I wasn’t even aware of it at the time, you know. It was in front of me but I didn’t think of it in those terms, and I don’t think Woody did either. The hobo jungle would take care of that, you know, you just didn’t think in those terms. Reminds me of early on, when Richard Wright was in Chicago with the Writer’s Project and also was on the editorial board of New Masses during the 1940s, and I was corresponding with him about my writing and so on. And Richard Wright had written something, a seminal piece called “Blueprint for Negro Writing” that influenced me greatly. But I recall, later in the 1950s I spent much time with Richard Wright in Paris and recall his saying to me, “You know, it took me five years of getting lost in the grayness of Paris to stop thinking in terms of black and white.” And I thought that was significant. But Woody had already succeeded; I don’t think he was thinking black and white. I’ve written about him under the title, “Natural-born Anti-Fascist” and I think he was a natural-born anti-racist as well. It goes together. JAM: How did you and Woody arrive at that conclusion about anti-fascism and anti-racism? SK: Woody had a . . . you’ll find in his songs and writings a frequent reference to “my people,” and I like that. I think that by “my people” he meant “all people,” you know plain, working-class, salt-of-the-earth people. And that the poor is contradistinguished from the rich, and I remember one of his lines about Pushkin and Whitman and Sandburg


were all saying the right things, but they didn’t think like my people, and they didn’t write like my people or talk like my people, so I guess I’ll just have to keep on writing. So I think that’s where he was coming from. JAM: That’s a beautiful quote, where he wants to “out-sand” Sandburg and “out-wit” Whitman and “out-push” Pushkin. You’ve also mentioned the regional and global issues in Woody’s songwriting. SK: Well, this body of work that you have just shown me that he produced here in Florida, in the South, is fascinating to me, because I’m totally unaware of it. It’s probably of equal importance to the various other genres [and songs]—the Dust Bowl and the World War II [songs]—I think those have also been neglected, equally with the Southern [Beluthahatchee songs]. And of course the Grand Coulee and Columbia River songs were far more than just about rivers. They had to do with a concept that was abroad in the world at the time, a concept of regionalism, that nations and societies could deal with economic problems and a standard of living by looking at regions in terms of the natural resources and the potential for development. So things like the Tennessee Valley Authority were created with tax money and as authorities they had a great deal of autonomy, but they were still public works, and the electricity was, in effect, public property. But the concept, of course, didn’t last long. The private utilities and the systems generally crossed swords with the very idea and bought them out. Remarkably enough, here in Jacksonville, back in grade school, I recall we were boasting to the teachers how Jacksonville was virtually the only municipality in America that owned its own light plant, and therefore electricity was cheaper in Jacksonville than it was anywhere in America. We were proud of the fact, but it didn’t last all that long. So these songs that Woody was singing were part of this broad not only national but global concept of solving some of the world’s problems through regional development. And Woody was very much in the heart of it. JAM: Guthrie seems to move from one paradise, or at least a paradise in his mind, to another: places like Coney Island to Beluthahatchee to Topanga Canyon. These were idyllic places where paradise still existed. Nature was something that he was very drawn to. Could you describe Beluthahatchee during the time Guthrie was here? SK: In this place there were no other people within hearing distance. And it was nothing but wildlife and the water and the subtropical jungle and open sky, [which] must have had that sort of appeal to him. And he writes about it in his two-page piece about Beluthahatchee, which, it turned out, had much in common with something I’d written some


six or seven years earlier called “Po’ Boy Estates.” I sent him a copy, and he reacted as always, at considerable length, with how caught up he was with the idea of, in effect, an autonomous republic—we referred to it as such—we were thinking about getting our own flag. JAM: Did you and Woody get to talk much? SK: “We didn’t talk much [pause] all that much,” as I told Joe Klein. He said, “Why not?” And I said, “Well, because we knew we were in total agreement about everything.” And Klein didn’t get it at all. I don’t think he even made a note, much less publish it. I remember Woody’s first letter to me said, “Don’t be”—this was after he read Palmetto Country—he said, “Don’t be surprised if some day I come staggering up to your door, and we’ll have good long talks.” And I just don’t remember whether we did or not; we just sat around campfires and he played and sang. I don’t know about the talking. JAM: What do you remember about when he played at those campfires? SK: Ramblin’ Jack [Elliot] was, of course, with him very often and, at the time, Jack was only imitating Woody and doing it so well that Woody would say, “You sound more like me than I do.” JAM: Which he didn’t like, really. SK: We tried to talk Jack into developing his own style. JAM: Getting back to your experience being an activist in New York— how did that come about? You moved from your anti-Klan work here in the South toward a more general activism in the North. Are you saying everything fell in under the rubric of populism, including anti-fascism, anti-racism, anti-capitalism? SK: Well, I think some of you fellows who are researching this century need to catalogue those issues of the twentieth century, because, in my opinion, historians have been at great pains not to mention the issues, and they were very real and very large and we were preoccupied with them, severely and collectively. JAM: How do you catalogue those issues? Could describe the operating ideology, when you have activists such as Guthrie and yourself, who had your differences as well as your connections? SK: Well, we were very clear, instinctively I would say, as to what side we were on, as the song says. We never debated which side to be on, and my own answer to myself was, when I have had any doubts what[so]ever


was [sic] I’d say, “If the big shots were on one side, then I belong on the other side.” I may not know what the hell I’m doing, but they know what they’re doing, and they know what side their bread is buttered on, so if Wall Street’s for it, I’m against it. And it’s that simple, and I think it’s true of all of us. Wall Street had research capabilities; they seldom made mistakes as to where their interests were—so we were on the opposing side. JAM: People always discuss or question Guthrie’s “authenticity”; was Guthrie authentic? SK: There’s been some discussion, especially among academic folklorists, who made a discipline of it, as to how authentic Woody was as a folk musician. My answer to them is always that, considering who Woody was and the life he lived and the things he sang about and the way he sang and played, he was pure folk, from every point of view. The fact that he wasn’t all that particular about whether the tune was a bonafide traditional folk tune or not, again bears out my contention that he was, above all, a messenger and he wanted any tune that was familiar to the public, so they wouldn’t have to remember or memorize a new tune, but something that would fit, you know, whatever he had to say. In that connection, he, I forget how the thing came up, but he said, “Stetson’s not a folklorist, he’s a po’ folkist.” I took it as a compliment, and I think he had meant an advocate and one of the folk. Woody didn’t have time for people who were running around collecting things, he had something to say, and he—not that he had anything against them—but he let them do it. While Lomax was collecting, Woody was composing, and Seeger likewise. JAM: Stetson, I’d like to find some way to get your reaction to this body of songs Woody wrote in Beluthahatchee, to find out what you think would be Woody’s process was in composing some of these songs. Can I ask you to reflect on the context and meanings of some of the lyrics? Some of these can be pretty hard to read, but here’s a classic Guthrie concept. This is the song “Naked Seed.” SK: We’re talking about naked seed. Woody’s talking here about “naked naked naked baked seed,” and I guess some relation to the fact that he called his [semi-]autobiographical thing Seeds of Man (1976). With Huntington’s chorea, one of the symptoms in the advanced stages has to do with a preoccupation with four-letter words and sex, perhaps, that’s my recollection of what I’ve heard. And I suppose that explains that element entering into a lot of his things in his latter days. JAM: So you see “seed” here to mean his actual male [seed] not so much his ideological?


SK: Well, as I came back to Woody the messenger, you know; seed, you plant seed and they bear fruit hopefully, and they fall on fertile ground hopefully—there’s sort of a mix here, you could take it either as semen or ideology or both. That’s all right with me. But he’s throwing in things about chain gang and strong box and running wild in the sun and counting clouds and “lots more fun than counting money,” “I’m counting clouds while you’re counting your money.” All this consciousness, political, economic, social, in one little song. And I see he’s got typed at the bottom, “Kennedy Klanny Camp.” So when he’s talking about chain gang and strong boxes he’s got the Klan in mind. The Klan is looking over his shoulder when he’s writing these things. So he’s being race-conscious or anti-racist, at least in his subconscious here. JAM: How did “Taking Stetson Kennedy” and “Kennedy, He’s That Man” (which British punk rocker Billy Bragg recorded in 1998 on the Mermaid Avenue project) come about? SK: I “commissioned” Woody to write some campaign songs for my bid in 1950 for U.S. Senator from Florida, after liberal Democrat Claude Pepper was defeated in the primary by not-so-liberal George Smathers, who was backed by DuPont and other corporate interests. In part, Smather won by referring to Pepper as “Red Pepper,” and alleging that his wife was a “notorious thespian.” I ran as an independent write-in candidate in the general election against Smathers as a “colorblind” candidate on a platform of total equality. Woody wrote the two songs, had to go to Manhattan to record them, [and] complained because the [Times Square] studio charged him for retakes every time he burped. [I] don’t remember whether I paid him or not. Florida radio stations refused to broadcast them. I filed with the FCC, which gave a ruling twenty-four hours before the election ordering them to be played. I sat in a local jook joint to watch reaction [and] almost fell off the bar stool. [During the election] I was arrested inside [a] polling booth and taken to the St. Augustine jail. The younger deputy wanted to pull down a side road and do me in, but [the] older [officer] wouldn’t let him. [A] drunken mob with broken beer bottles in each hand waited all day for me to come vote. JAM: In “Genocide,” Guthrie declares that he’ll fight against Columbians and the Klan in the “battle” against white repression. You’ve stated that this song is Guthrie’s reaction to We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition To the United Nations for Relief from a Crime of the United States Government Against the Negro People (1951). The petition, in which you


participated, presented a chronological list of violence perpetrated by the KKK and other domestic terrorist organizations, further documenting Jim Crow practices. Who are the “Columbians” Guthrie mentions? SK: A terrorist dynamite hit squad formed by the KKK after I started publishing the Klan [meeting] minutes over Superman [radio broadcast]. The Klan [became] afraid to make a move. The chairman of the Klan’s “housing committee,” meaning a group to dynamite black homes as fast as one was established in a “white neighborhood” of Atlanta, he and other Klansmen joined with some skinheads (Nazis) to do the dynamiting for the Klan. They got a nonprofit charter. The leader gloated: “Isn’t it ridiculous, Georgia revoking the Klan’s charter, and then giving us one, when we’re forty times worse than the Klan?” [The State of Georgia] called me as witness, put a half dozen of them in jail. It made national headlines. These KKK and Columbian terrorists were the essence of the genocide. Woody also points out the terror aimed at black voting. Georgia purged all blacks from voting lists during the same time frame. Woody relates votes to all else in life—like Gandhi, who said, “Ultimately, all things devolve into the political.” To which I have added “And all things political devolve into pro-people or anti-people.” And here is Woody, in the middle of the song, saying, “I’m taking my side in this fight.” And then he goes on to say he always has been on the side of the majority millions, as opposed to the racist millions (from the classic union song “Gonna Put My Name Down, Where Do I Sign?”), who will win out against all kinds of “cides” (“killing”). The world needs to realize that in many of his prior songs Woody always talks of “my people” in glowing terms, without taking note that rather many of “his people” are racists, kluxers, genociders, against black and tan peoples . . . So in this and other Belutha songs, Woody is defining his term: “my people.”And ending on the positive note that his host will prevail to such a degree that the wicked millions “couldn’t last long enough to walk up to the front lines to surrender.” “My side against your genocide”—good line! Here he is talking about “my side” rather than “my people,” i.e., democracy vs hate and genocide, [the] final conflict. Not race war, but counterracist war. Beluthahatchee Blues Ain’t satisfied (NB-2, #1, p19) Alligator farm (B1 f1) Amy drawin good horses (NB-2, #3, p93) Anny on the dam (NB-2, #9, p118)


Baby buzzard (NB-2, #3, p111) Ballad of Harriet Tubman (NB-2, #1, p2) Batty bat (B1 f2; NB-2, #3, p39) Beluthatchee Bill (B1 f2 ) Belutchahatchee blues (NB-2, #11, p43) Belutchyhatchee dam (NB-2, #10, p76) Booby trap (NB-2, #3, p22) Choppin axe blues (B1 f5) Dead drunk (NB-2, #9, p62) Dobee brick (B1 f7) Drain the swamp (NB-2, #11, p70) Drymopper (NB-2, #6, p24) Ellis Island outlaw (NB-2, #3, p37) Foolish gold (NB-2, #3, p42) Give a little signal (NB-2, #3, p16) Gnat (NB-2, #3, p32) Harriet Tubman (B2 f11) Hold on (B2 f11; NB-2, #1, p108) Hot burn (NB-2, #3, p17) Hot seat (NB-2, #7, p71) How many times? (NB-2, #10, p74) Jacobs ladder blues (NB-2, #7, p68) Jaxonsville blues (NB-2, #11, p95) Jinga linnng (B2 f14) Judge kennedy & me (NB-2, #10, p101) Kloo klacka klambo (B2 f15) Last mile (NB-2, #7, p70) Londons blind fog (B2 f16) Me and my dad (NB-2, #2, p14) My barditch (B2 f18) My fountain pen (NB-2, #10, p2) Naked seed (B3 f19; NB-2, #3, p41) No more frogs for bait (NB-2, #3, p99) North sea’s flood (B3 f19) Palmetto veedee blues (B3 f21) Peace town (B3 f21; NB-2, #1, p117) Peekskill klu klux blues (B3 f21) Pineytimber blues (NB-2, #11, p93) Pistol packer (B3 f21; NB-2, #1, p118; NB-2, #3, p94) Puzzy is a perty thing (B3 f21; NB-2, #3, p40) Rebel soldier (NB-2, #3, p3) Ring my jail (NB-2, #6, p23)


Seeds of man (NB-2, #9, p58) She don’t know (NB-2, #7, p66) Slim Houston (B3 f24; NB-1, #78, p28; NB-1, #77, p112; NB-2, #10, p118) Stetson Kennedy, he’s that man (B2 f15) Talking Stetson Kennedy (B3 f26) Thistle stop (NB-2, #2, p38) Tuccumcari striker (NB-2, #3, p98) Turpentine camp blues (NB-2, #9, p126) Waco Texas troubles (NB-2, #10, p103) Whoa buck (NB-2, #2, p36) Wormy song (B4 f31) Sources Stetson Kennedy interviews: 4/13/2004; 3/8-15/06. Woody Guthrie Archives (WGA), New York City, New York. Stetson Kennedy Collection, Schomberg Centre for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York City, New York.

Notes 1. These songs are comparatively as significant as the twenty-four Columbia River songs Guthrie composed in thirty days for the Bonneville Power Authority (Portland, Oregon) in the mid-1940s. 2. In a different version of “Beluthahatchee Blues” with only one verse, Guthrie directly refers to the “old Kay Kay Kay!” The brevity of the song is explained in the annotation: “Cut out by Southern white Commission against true fact words.” 3. “Pineytimber Blues” (1953) further presents the plight of the turpentine camp worker. 4. Kennedy explained that although it is generally known that he is “Beluthahatchee Bill,” he himself was not aware that William was his first name, especially since everyone called him Stetson. Not until he requested his birth certificate, as a young man, did he learn about the William part. In correspondence and the song lyrics, Guthrie usually addressed Kennedy as Stets, or some variation; that he identified Kennedy as Bill is telling of their close relationship. 5. See Jackson (2005).

Works Cited Civil Rights Congress, Corp. 1951. We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition To the United Nations for Relief from a Crime of the United States Government Against the Negro People. New York: International Publishers.

226 / jorge arévalo mateus Cray, Ed. 2004. Ramblin’ Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Jackson, Mark A. 2005. “Dark Memory: A Look at Lynching in America through the Life, Times, and Songs of Woody Guthrie.” Popular Music and Society 28, no. 5: 663–675. Kennedy, Stetson. 1942. Palmetto Country. Tallahassee: Florida A&M University Press, 1989. ———. 1946. Southern Exposure. Boca Raton, FL: Florida Atlantic University Press, 1991. ———. 1954. The Klan Unmasked. Boca Raton, FL: Florida Atlantic University Press, 1990.

11 “We Don’t Have Much Time”: An Interview with Raúl Salinas Rachel Rubin

We view our politics through artistic eyes, and we view our art through political eyes. —Raúl Salinas

Raúl Salinas names himself in multiple ways: Xicanindio elder, pinto, Austin poet, global activist, performance artist, teacher. A revered guide for emerging poets and an internationally known advocate for social justice, Salinas has, as the title of his first CD claims, traversed “many mundos.” Born in San Antonio in 1934, Salinas was raised in Austin until moving to Los Angeles in 1956. In 1957, Salinas was sentenced to prison in Soledad State Prison. He was to spend eleven out of the next fifteen years behind bars in some of America’s most brutal prisons: Marion Federal Penitentiary in Illinois, Huntsville State Prison in Texas, Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in Kansas, Soledad State Prison in California. Salinas credits this time with shaping his social consciousness; as Louis Mendoza (2003) has pointed out, Salinas describes his prison experience as “an educational one, with each move to another institution being seen as a different and progressively more difficult degree program” (3). Salinas’s growing consciousness in prison was part of a powerful movement within American prisons that gave birth to what Salinas and others have called the “Prison Rebellion Years” (Gómez 2006) and produced writers and intellectuals such as George Jackson, Eldridge Cleaver, and W. L. Nolan. Within the prisons, classes emerged focusing on minority history and culture—predating, as Alan Eladio Gómez (2006) has pointed out, the Ethnic Studies movement on college campuses a half-decade later (20). At Marion, Salinas developed into a sophisticated analyst of incarceration as a tactic of political repression and into a prolific writer. (His prison

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letters will shortly be published as raúlrsalinas and The Jail Machine: My Weapon Is the Pen). Salinas also developed his artistic sensibility in prison and was part of a “Beat” writing group in Soledad in the late 1950s. He first received attention for poetry while in Leavenworth in 1969, when he wrote what is arguably his most famous poem, “A Trip Through the Mind Jail,” which he dedicated to Eldridge Cleaver. In this work, the poet muses upon the destruction of the neighborhood in which he grew up; the poem, characteristically for Salinas’s early work, exhibits the marked influence of jazz and an interlingual street vernacular that has begged comparisons with the Beats. “A Trip Through the Mind Jail” was not published until 1980, and languished out of print for a long time even after that appearance, but is still considered to be a seminal work of Chicano/a literature. Aided by the intervention of students at the University of Washington, Salinas obtained early release from Marion Federal Penitentiary in 1972. Following his release from Marion, Salinas continued to work as a human rights activist. In particular, Salinas developed a close working relationship with American Indian organizations; he has worked extensively with the American Indian Movement and the International Indian Treaty Council and is a cofounder of the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee. Salinas has joined his voice to many movements, though, fixing his gaze internationally for alliances, political models, and understanding of radical politics. Salinas (who sometimes writes his name as raúlrsalinas) has dubbed himself the “cockroach poet,” a nickname not as self-deprecating as it seems at first glance. In Mexican folklore, the cockroach is a positive figure: savvy, survivalist, and tricky. The popular song “La Cucaracha,” after all, was a tribute to Pancho Villa. Moreover, the name invokes Oscar Zeta Acosta’s Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973), a somewhat autobiographical novel of urban insurrection during the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s. More recently, the first daily syndicated Chicano comic strip is Lalo Alcaraz’s politically satirical “La Cucaracha,” in which the protagonist is a cockroach. Salinas’s more recent poetry continues to connect his prison education with an internationalist vision, as in “Pueblo Querido” (1994): ex-Convictos/Activistas doing righteous gente work involved in sharing homeboy (cockroach poet) with the WORLD! (Algarin and Holman 470)

Currently, Salinas is the director of Resistencia Bookstore, located in Austin, Texas’s Southside neighborhood since 1983. In addition to stocking

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Latino, Native American, African American, gay and lesbian, and women’s books, the store hosts a variety of literary events, including an open mic series, “Cafe Libro.” The bookstore also houses Red Salmon Arts, a literary venue and center for aspiring writers in Austin, and Red Salmon Press, an editorial collective that publishes community newsletters and has also put out several literary collections. In addition, Salinas conducts writing clinics with young people, working through prisons, schools, and social service agencies. RR: Raúl, you are about to receive a lifetime achievement award from a Latino caucus of the Associated Writing Programs. This must prompt a certain amount of retrospection about your life as a poet. Is there a poem of yours that seems to have been the most meaningful to other activists? RS: Oh, “Un Trip Through the Mind Jail,” of course. I mean, that’s a classic, not because I wrote it, but because other people ran with it. A student choir presented “A Trip Through the Mind Jail.” It’s been the subject of a mural. A student did a video project for some class, and she videotaped her friends reenacting it. RR: A choral version, a mural, a video project: it really does seem to have traveled since 1969! I’m not surprised, though. The way the poem moves from condemnation to empowerment is still so moving and relevant. And the panoply of vibrant cultural references, from Juicy Fruit gum, to La Llorona, to graffiti writing, to the names of particular housing projects—those give readers a lot to grab onto. RS: It spans the generations. But I have some that are running favorites with the new generation. The young activists, they like, “We Hafta Shaft NAFTA.” And now I have one called “Loud and Proud,” which is a real, like, blasting antiwar poem. But those are from the past two years. And I don’t submit my work to magazines. People have to hear it or see it and say, “Hey, we want to publish you, man. Can we use this poem?” RR: You don’t publish your poetry? RS: No, not until I’m ready to do a ten-year collection or something like that. I don’t just flip out little poetry books. I mean, they’re too hard. I mean, I live them. Even the love poetry, I’ve got to live it. And it ain’t easy. You know, I’m marginal. I’m not a professional anything. Because “professional” has come to have class reekings. What’s a professional? The title that goes along with it? It’s by nature elitist. Does it mean you’re a hot shit? I don’t think I’m hot shit. So it’s by choice, of course, by choice initially, and then they just compound it and say, “Oh, he didn’t want to be part of us, anyway.” But it doesn’t matter to me, what “professional”

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has come to mean doesn’t matter to me, as long as I can keep producing, keep challenging the status quo. But at Resistencia Books, we’re pretty—maybe not marginal. Maybe that’s not a good term. We’re pretty autonomous. With what little trappings we have attached to us, like publishers, and utilities, we move independently. We move autonomously. We act like we’re free. RR: Does it feel like you’re free? RS: Yes. One of our elders used to say, “If you want to be sovereign, you first have to think and act sovereign.” You know? You have to give up all those powdered eggs, and all that commodity surplus, you know, long johns and shit that they throw out. You have to be independent to be independent. RR: So you’re trying to live without all the plastic junk in a Wal-Mart time, huh? RS: No, we don’t live without it. We navigate through it. We can’t get away from it. We’ve got to buy gas. Hey, well, let’s get a credit card so we can order our books through a credit card. So we do have those kinds of things. But we’re very conscious that those things, even those few things, can trap us if we aren’t careful. And so in that regard, we’re very politically careful how we move. We try not to muddy people’s floors, or step on somebody’s issue. A new bookstore opens up nearby, oh, the biggest chain in the country. People ask, are you guys worried? No, we’re not. Oh, they’re moving in. Well, gentrification, what else is new? You know, being displaced, land dispossession, we know about that. As John Trudell says, “Welfare lines and jails, we’ve all been there.” And it’s our space. We are careful about our space, you know? People like to come here. Queers like to come here, because they’re not going to get beat up, or be looked at with dirty looks. In fact, somebody might give them a nice look. We’ve even had romances develop out of here. RR: Bookstore romances. RS: Revolutionary romances. But we have Middle Eastern people here, after the thing in New York [on September 11, 2001]. And we had our windows busted here that night. I mean, not as a result of that. It was just coincidental, that night. So for the whole next week, while the news was blaring, we had plywood all over our windows. And we were having poetry readings with Middle Eastern folks. You know, we take a position. I mean, Tom Delay is a dog. We’re going to say that. Alberto Gonzalez is a punk, and he’s trying to


subvert the Constitution and the Geneva Convention. We’ve got to say it. Who in hell is Alberto Gonzalez? I mean, I’m sure his mom and dad think he’s a nice guy, but his foreign policy sucks. RR: Hey, please, feel free to tell it like it is. RS: Well, you know, Latinos are afraid to say those kinds of things. Because after all, how many times do we get somebody up there? You know? Then you celebrate, and then you mourn. You celebrate because we made it to the White House, to the Justice Department. Big fucking deal. Then we’re mourning too. RR: Because of who it is who made it. RS: Yeah, well, he’ll be the butt of the scandal. When it’s over, he’ll be the shit head that has to roll, whose head has to roll. You know, it happens all the time. So that’s the kind of folks we are here at the bookstore. And I keep that spunkiness, you know, in spite of my advancing years, and my sometimes-attacks of different illnesses. I keep fighting, and so the youngsters have come to the store, they have been attracted here. I’m trying to teach them, and I am trying to learn myself. As much as I want to teach them as the old leader, I also want to learn with them how they can be leaders, and how I don’t have to be the leader—or be the one people talk to all the time. And the people around the store are really good people. We’re a very small crew. And, you know, we don’t make any money. For New Year’s, we painted the bookstore purple and lime and yellow. But we did it ourselves. And so we struggle. But we’ve got some nice books that other people don’t have. And we have poetry readings, and people feel good when they come here. We love them, you know? This is a hate-free zone. This is a sanctuary. And not just for Chicanos and Indians, you know. If you just come by the front of the store, there’s no mistaking who we are, what we stand for. But we work with the schools. We work with establishment types. That is what was wrong, back in the day, you know, having a real rigid agenda, or party line. And now we’re trying to learn from the Zapatistas, who say, “We must build a world in which all worlds fit.” The Zapatistias just met up with groups of lesbians and transgenders in Oaxaca, you know. They gave the revolutionaries a good talking to. The prostitutes’ union also presented. These are new things, especially in Mexico. We don’t ever want to lose sight of the fact that there are people struggling everywhere. See, that’s the thing. People tell me, “Well, you travel across the country. Would you say the movement is dead,” blah

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blah blah. Hell no, it’s not dead. It’s got new names. I mean, there’s environmentalist youngsters. There’s Latino women. It’s different names, different things, you know? The Iraq war is right out there. You can’t ignore that. But at high schools all over the country, they are working for nonmilitary options for students. I mean, my God, there’s movements going on. RR: It’s looking more and more possible that the war in Iraq will politicize a new generation of young people. Your politicization came in the radical education that was the Prison Rebellion Years. You’ve talked extensively about those years, so I won’t ask you to recount all that now, but tell me—is there still revolutionary potential in the prisons? RS: Well, the potential is there. There’s very little else, I have to say. And I travel the country over, and I go into juvenile jails to do writing workshops, and I go into prisons to do political lectures. Right now, you know, what has happened again inside the prisons, is part of what’s going on outside. We’re not able to reach prisoners easily today. I mean, there’s such an ugly gang phenomenon that just preys on the weak, and caters to people’s vices, and has consequences of death. And to those of us who went through the first phase [of prison activism], we consider that counterrevolutionary. So, what does the prison do? The prison says, “We’ve got prison gangs, man. You can’t come in, in the interest of prison security.” And so that’s why things aren’t happening now as they were then. We had people coming in to teach us. Prisons are a very microcosmic reflection of the outer society. And the times were right. It was post–civil rights, pre–everybody’s movement. The repression was so intense in the prisons because of the increasing numbers of political and politicized prisoners that were entering, that were filling up the jails. And then there were political prisoners from other countries. Everything was right for prisoners to begin to question their encased situations, and who put them there, and how to get out, and why. And so there was an intense educational process going on that helped to do that. RR: When they do let you in, what do you do on your prison visits? RS: What I’ve always done: talk. That’s why I’m considered dangerous. All I do is talk. All Mumia does is talk and write. All John Trudell ever did was talk. All Leonard Peltier did is write. But that’s the power. That’s the real strength. And so as Mumia says, the state would much rather give me an Uzi than a microphone. RR: Besides prisons, what other places do you talk?


RS: Well, I’m a human rights activist. So I do work at all levels. I’m part of the International Indian Treaty Council, so when we have to do international work, we go and present cases to the United Nations. During the Nicaraguan revolution, we went down there as a fact-finding delegation, and then again as observers to the elections. We were working in Chiapas. But at the same time, all those struggles have taught us to stay local. And so we have a very local base that reaches out. And our base is culturalized. RR: What do you mean by “culturalized”? RS: We view our politics through artistic eyes, and we view our art through political eyes. We try to keep sort of a balance. RR: Where does your poetry come into this balance? RS: Poetry is so effective that in most dictatorships, the first to go are the poets. Poetry is a very strong medium of expression and of reaching people. It’s utilitarian. It’s portable. It’s also expedient. We don’t have much time. So poetry’s my main weapon. RR: How do you bring this weapon to the community? RS: Well, I don’t teach poetry. I just do creative writing clinics for marginal communities on alternative campuses and juvenile centers. I do readings, but I get them to read more. It’s about empowering them. And so I get them to write, and to read. But it’s not just writing and reading and writing and poems. It’s about life. We make them think. The state decides who’s deviant, who’s retarded, who’s a slow learner, who’s a gang banger. They do the classifying. We do the unclassifying. RR: That’s harder, huh? RS: Mm-hmm. In my intensive clinics, I bring in the Native ceremonial element, too. So I don’t like anyone—principals, guards—to come in and mess with it when I am doing an intensive clinic. I’m always very demanding about being left alone. They aren’t going to kidnap me. They aren’t going to hurt me. With the youngsters, who might have a short attention span from boredom, or from being badly prepared, poetry is the best medium. We’ll get them to tell us—to tell us one word. “Grandma.” Good, now tell us another word. “War.” Or “poverty.” Then we step back and figure out how to make art from it. RR: Raúl, you were born in San Antonio, and grew up in Austin, sort of on a border between a Chicano neighborhood and a Black neighborhood.

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How did African American culture matter to you, in terms of your artistic and political development? RS: Well, first, in my artistic development, of course I began to listen to the sound, and very much influenced by the music, and I am to this day. Very early on, I was influenced by the African American community—because the music then led to the politics, and then just being a part of the African American community. And then once I went to prison, I saw how brutally they were treated. I mean, we were all treated brutally, but African Americans especially, in Huntsville, Texas—they were picking cotton, right? I mean, it was plantations. Also, as a prisoner, of course, George Jackson was my teacher, like he was so many other prisoners’ teacher. And he gave us dignity and selfworth. He said he wanted to change the criminal black mentality into a revolutionary black mentality. All of us tried to make that transformation, to follow those guidelines. RR: Were there particular organizational structures that were meaningful to you, during this time of transformation? RS: When I was released, I went to Seattle, and there I worked with the MPLA [Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola] group, and then with the African National Congress. RR: How did the Chicano movement fit in here? RS: The Chicano movement to me, and some of my comrades—after much analysis, and with all the awakening that it brought about—it was still a reformist movement, including wanting to either get into the electoral process or create a third party which wasn’t necessarily revolutionary, but patterned after the other two. So there were elements of the Chicano movement, such as myself, who moved into the American Indian movement, and began to do more international work. RR: Can you give me some examples of that international work? RS: Well, the Zapatistas are the main one. Everybody is working on that right now, because the elections are coming up in Mexico. The Zapatistas have issued a Sixth Declaration, which created a lot of discussion—and is still creating it. RR: The Sixth Declaration is the initiation of the “Other Campaign,” or political struggles existing outside the electoral process, right? RS: That’s right. Now groups are traveling all over the country, talking about it, and how to bring communities into the movement, or rather, to get away from the whole concept of leader-activist.


RR: To get away from the concept of leader-activist? What would be the better model? RS: A community worker, responding very directly to the needs of a marginal community, grassroots, marginal communities. RR: Why do we need to get rid of the idea of leaders? RS: Well, for a lot of reasons, one being that the opposition always seeks out the leader or the spokesperson. In many of our cases, what that led to was incarceration or assassination. And many times, if we didn’t do our work, and left somebody to pick up the pieces, then the movement was, so to speak, dead—or at least curtailed. And also because, you know, human beings are human beings, and egos are egos. And leaders, you know, the media pumps them up. Then the establishment crushes them down. RR: Or co-opts them. RS: Yeah, well, that’s the final analysis. So yeah, it’s about empowerment, first of all, and getting away from frameworks that are paternalistic. RR: What do you think a radical artist can accomplish, in terms of creating these new frameworks? RS: What a radical artist can accomplish is to create audiences. In my case, my audiences are the people I work with, so it’s all come back to our determination to build communities. We can break down barriers, including those created by the pop culture iconography. Then we try to articulate the language of causes into music and art and poetry. We have messages to convey. And if we convey them through the vehicle of art and music and poetry, the audience might pick up some things, in terms of survival. RR: What’s on your docket for the near future? Where will you be taking your poetry? RS: I’ll be speaking here in Austin for International Women’s Day. I’ll be with a woman who was sent to prison in Mexico, Ana Ignacia Rodriguez. They call her “La Nacha.” She was a victim of the “Dirty War” of the 1960s and 1970s [which secretly targeted suspected insurgents, student activists, labor leaders, and other political opponents of the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) government]. The next night, the Associated Writing Programs is having its annual conference in Austin. And many Latinos are members, and will be doing workshops and presenting on their books, and all that jazz. It’s all writers, black, brown, red, yellow, white. But within that, there’s a Latino

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component, made up by a group called Clica [Chicano/a Latino/a Internet Community Alliance]. It’s a group of writers, and they’re all establishment writers. I know about two out of the ten. And so they decided to do a Latino night, their own night, separate from the rest of the conference. That evening will be like a party, and they will be honoring Rolando Hinojosa and myself. RR: Since we are talking about honoring poets and writers, tell me who else you think is doing good cultural work today. RS: Well, I don’t like gangsta rap, for sure. We do use positive rap in my classes, to diss gangsta rap. But, you know, the Dead Prez are always great. And Aztlán Underground—they’re a Chicano indigenous rap group that’s almost the cultural arm of the Zapatistas in the United States. On a national level, it’s harder, because, you know, who’s calling the shots? But we have a lot of Native American folks. John Trudell. My God, his stuff is hot. Joy Harjo, Native American poet, she has a real good social consciousness. We’ve got the Freedom Archives. RR: Oh, I’ve just learned about them. Thousands of hours of audiotapes from three decades of struggle, preserved and made available. They’ve got interviews, poetry, music, radio shows . . . It’s amazing, and a great resource for teachers and students. RS: It is. There’s Ashley Lucas. She’s a young playwright ethnographer, and she’s got a play, which is also part of her dissertation, called “Visiting Through the Looking Glass.” It’s a performance piece that she developed out of interviews with people who have loved ones in prison. But her whole focus is not the prisoners, it’s the ones outside. She takes this journey because her dad went to prison when she was nine. And to this day, she has not seen him except through the visiting glass. She’s got a very powerful, powerful play, one-woman performance piece. And she uses a quote from one of my poems in the beginning of her chapter that she just sent me. There’s about four books with epigrams or quotes of mine coming out. RR: So you get to see where other people find launching-places in your work. Do you have a favorite poem of your own? RS: To me, they’re all my children. RR: So you have to love them all equally. RS: Some are lean and lanky. Some are too talkative. Some rattle on and on and on. And some are too short, and some fat, squatty, dark, light. But I love them all. They’re my poems.


Bibliography: Raúl Salinas Books/Chapbooks East of the Freeway: Reflections de mi Pueblo. Austin: Red Salmon Press, 1994. Un Trip Through the Mind Jail y Otras Excursions. San Francisco: Pocho Ché, 1980; Houston, Arte Público Press, 1999. Viaje/Trip. Providence, Rhode Island: Hellcoal Press, 1973.

Audio CDs Beyond the BEATen Path. Austin: Red Salmon Press, 2003. Los Many Mundos of raúlrsalinas: Un Poetic Jazz Viaje con Friends. San Diego/ Austin: Calaca Press/Red Salmon Press, 2000. Red Arc: A call for revolucion con salsa y cool. San Antonio: Wings Press, 2005.

Works Cited Gómez, Alan Eladio. 2006. “Resisting Living Death at Marion Federal Penitentiary, 1972.” Forthcoming, Radical History Review, no. 96 (Fall). Mendoza, Louis. 2003. “The Re-Education of a Xixanindio: Raúl Salinas and the Poetics of Pinto Transformation.” MELUS (Spring). Salinas, Raúl. 1994.“Pueblo Querido.” Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Ed. Miguel Algarin and Bob Holman. New York: Henry Holt, 470–473.


12 “The Anti-Slavery Act of 2002”: An Interview with Si Kahn Rachel Rubin

Prisons have become the solution of choice to every single social issue that we have in this country. —Si Kahn

The sixty-two-year-old musician and organizer Si Kahn has been, for the past forty years, a part-time folksinger and a full-time organizer throughout the South and nationally. But to do his profile justice, it would be wise not to try to separate these two endeavors—singing and organizing—even that much. Kahn’s songwriting and his political work, as he explains here, are intertwined thematically, historically, philosophically, and even financially. After speaking with him for several hours in February 2006, I came to the conclusion that the key to understanding the profundity of these connections lies in Kahn’s insistence on the power of the ordinary: what recognizable moments from life offer as poetic material, what “plain folk” can accomplish when they set out to change their world. As Kahn himself describes in this interview, he went mad for folk music while a teenager in the Washington, DC, suburbs. But his tangible introduction to radical politics came when he went South. Kahn began what has become a forty-one-year organizing career (so far) when he became active in 1965 in Arkansas with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Involved in political actions in which music and singing played a central role, Kahn’s sense of the possibilities inherent in folk music expanded. Kahn explicitly links himself to the political folk song tradition represented earlier in this volume by the career of Agnes “Sis” Cunningham. His own compositions, many of them persona or story songs, tend to

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represent the struggles of working-class people, men and women, particularly workers, farmers, and soldiers. The frequently covered, lyrically gorgeous “Aragon Mill,” for instance, is in the voice of a worker whose future has become uncertain when the mill that employed the town’s residents has closed: At the east end of town, at the foot of the hill, Stands a chimney so tall that says “Aragon Mill.” But there’s no smoke at all coming out of the stack, For the mill has shut down and it ain’t coming back.

Kahn has released fourteen albums of original songs (he has also recorded an album of traditional civil rights and labor songs with Pete Seeger and Jane Sapp). His most recent recording is 2004’s We’re Still Here, advertised as his sixtieth-birthday CD. Following his involvement with SNCC, Kahn was an organizer in some of the trade union movement’s most crucial modern struggles. He worked with the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) during the thirteen-month 1973–1974 Brookside Strike in Harlan County, Kentucky, in which miners fought for safety measures as well as for union scale wages. (The events of this strike inspired the films Harlan County, U.S.A. and Harlan County War). He served as area director of the campaign by the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers’ Union (ACTWU) against JP Stevens in 1976–1980, which won the first collective bargaining agreements for more than 3,000 workers at Stevens plants in the Carolinas. For Kahn, it was of great consequence that music was always a part of these struggles, whether it was group singing at meetings or performances of local bands at picket lines. In addition to dozens of songs, Kahn has also authored two manuals on organizing—Organizing: A Guide for Grassroots Leaders (1982) and How People Get Power: Organizing Oppressed Communities for Action (1972). Most recently, Kahn is coauthor with Elizabeth Minnich of The Fox in the Henhouse: How Privatization Threatens Democracy. Kahn is the founder and continuing board member of the Jewish Fund for Justice, self-described as “the only national Jewish organization solely committed to fighting the injustice of poverty in America” (www.jfjustice.org). For the last twenty-five years, Kahn has been the director of Grassroots Leadership, a team of organizers, activists, and educators headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, who do civil rights, labor, and community organizing, primarily in the South. Since 1999, Grassroots Leadership has focused on a southern and national campaign to abolish for-profit private prisons, jails, and detention centers. Recently, Kahn and Grassroots

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Leadership collaborated with producer JoAnn Mar on a one-hour radio documentary on the privatization of the U.S. prison system, “Crime Pays: A Look at Who’s Getting Rich from the Prison Boom.” “Crime Pays” just won a George Polk Award, one of the four highest journalism awards in the United States, along with the Pulitzer, Bradley, and DuPont-Columbia. (The program can be downloaded for free from the Grassroots Leadership website.) RR: Grassroots Leadership has been your focus for more than two decades. Can you tell me about the organization? SK: Grassroots Leadership is twenty-five years old. We are a very multiracial team of activists. We do civil rights, labor, and community organizing in the south. There’s a dozen of us on the staff. For ten years, we’ve been working on privatization, which we fundamentally see as one of the core issues threatening democracy. RR: How did you arrive at privatization as the focus of the organization? SK: At the core of our work is the whole idea that you have to build coalitions across racial lines. We basically think, yes, separatist organizing is critical at a certain point, whether you call it autonomous organizing or separatist organizing. People have to consolidate themselves around identity and issues. But at a certain point, you need cross-racial politics. So we’re always interested in issues that African Americans and whites can consolidate around. Unfortunately, these kinds of issues aren’t always easy to find. But privatization is a really significant one because it actually does affect people of many different races. And it actually cuts across class lines. So we started organizing around privatization in 1996. RR: So you started from the principle of multiracial organizing, coalition-building across identity categories, and this led you to privatization as the way to “have at” it? SK: That’s right. We were doing hospitals and health care and childsupport enforcement and welfare. And we started doing prisons. Then in 1999, we decided that we would focus all of our energy on trying to abolish for-profit prisons. And that’s the main work we’ve been doing for the last half-dozen years. RR: What shape has that work taken? SK: There are at least half a dozen distinct prongs to the campaign. One is site fights, which oppose the construction of any private prison at a particular place. We’ve actually been successful in blocking a number of them. And we stalled a hell of a lot of them! We do this primarily in

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the South; we don’t have the capacity for site fights in other parts of the country, although they are building these private prisons everywhere. The southern rim has a majority of the private prisons because of the wage differentials, but it’s certainly not exclusive. There are something like thirty states that have some form of privatized corrections where there is a prison, a jail, or detention center. But basically in the South, where they try to build a private prison, we go there. Secondly, we do legislative campaigns at the state level. We’ve done some work at the national level. Good luck to anything like that right now! But in a number of states, North Carolina for example, we were able to get a law passed making it illegal to bring someone into the state to incarcerate them in a private prison. RR: That’s a massive victory. SK: Privately, I call it “the anti-slavery act of 2002.” The parallels are stunning and shocking. So we do legislative efforts. And we oppose not just new construction of privately run prisons, we oppose privatization of existing prisons. And we try to undo private prisons that are in place. In Mississippi, we actually got the governor to shut one of the private prisons. It was astounding to us that we succeeded in this. This held up for two years until Haley Barbour, head of the Republican National Committee, became the new governor and reopened it. Still, two years down is two years down. In addition to the site fights and the legislative work, there’s obviously tremendous educational work to be done. In the last six months, I’ve been on at least a hundred different radio stations or syndicated shows talking about privatization in general, but also about private prisons. Most people don’t understand what privatization is. They confuse it with the private sector, for example. But privatization is about those things that are in what we sometimes call the public domain, the public sector, the commons, the commonwealth, the common good, the public good, the public, all these names that we call it. Those things fundamentally, in some way, belong partially to all of us. Things that are our birthright. Through privatization, they are given away, sold down the river, and put under the control and sometimes the direct possession of major multinational corporations. And that process not only takes away our common heritage, it transfers power to the corporate sector. This is part of what Elizabeth Minnich and I argue in The Fox in the Henhouse. Don’t think of it in terms of dollars and cents, how do we save money, how do we deliver services most efficiently. It really is about a very thoughtful and strategic corporate plan to destroy the public sector, including the public sector unions, including your union, Rachel


[the National Education Association], and to substitute a corporate model for democracy. Privatization is a major tool for accomplishing this. We also run several national corporate accountability campaigns. We ran this campaign involving Sodexho, which was the major investor in Corrections Corporation of America, the world’s largest private prison corporation. We made contact with something like fifty different campuses, where their catering division, Sodexho-Marriott, has meal plans. We got seven of them either to refuse contracts or to throw Sodexho off campus. And we have an organizing effort in the faith community called “KEEPING FAITH: A Religious Response to the Prison Crisis,” which is aimed at mobilizing faith voices against the private prison industry. So you see Grassroots Organizing carries out a range of different types of direct action organizing, advocacy and legislative action, public education, corporate campaigns. RR: Are there historical connections between your current anti-privatization work and the radical political activity you came of age in, through the organizations of the civil rights movement (particularly SNCC)? SK: I do see connections. I see increasing reliance on prisons, in many ways, as a counterattack on the African American community. And certainly not only the African American community. Because while the majority of people in prison are people of color, there are significant numbers of poor- and working-class whites who are there. But to the extent that they are African Americans, which is the majority, I think it’s very much a counterattack on the African American community—for the gains of the Southern civil rights movement. Prisons are fundamentally about race and class. That’s what they’re about. And they are an extraordinary method of social control. Byron E. Price, at Rutgers University, was briefing our staff last week. He’s an African American, originally from Memphis. And he had charts that show that by 2017, the number of African American men in prison will be exactly the same as the number of African American men that were in slavery in 1860.1 RR: That’s chilling. SK: It’s chilling. One of the things that we say a lot in the campaign at Grassroots Leadership is that prisons have become the solution of choice to every single social issue that we have in this country. The first answer is prison. That’s where the funding goes. That’s where the political will goes. Just quick statistics, and then you can ask me more questions. There are a million African American men in prison today, a million. One out

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of three African American men in his twenties is either in prison, on probation or on parole at this moment. This doesn’t count the people who have been there previously. Historically speaking, you almost have to admire the resiliency of the Southern white establishment. You knock one set of problems out from under them, they come up with a different system—this time driven by the private prison industry. This is very much a reinvention of the systems of social, economic, and political control that, in earlier times, were exercised through segregation, through sharecropping and tenant farming, through the convict lease system and then, before that, through slavery. RR: Those “reinventions,” as you’ve just called them, can seem awfully literal sometimes. In Hertford County, North Carolina, a huge for-profit prison has been built on the site of the old Vann Plantation, a major slaveholding site in 1850. Indeed, elsewhere in this volume, we point out that a huge prison was built on the site of the old Celanese Corporation of America, where labor organizer George Meyers had his first industrial job in the 1930s (and acquired Brown Lung disease as a result).2 So your life as the executive director of Grassroots Organizing seems very much descended from your work in the civil rights movement and the labor movement. How about your life as a musician? Does this political lineage have a parallel in your development as an artist? SK: Well, my roots as an artist are very eclectic. I’m a preacher’s kid. My old man was a rabbi, and a very good one, a politically progressive one, actually a very important one. So I grew up in his synagogue, and in a home in which we sang prayers after meals and things like that. I learned to sing from those roots. And I had an uncle who was a very significant figure in the civil rights movement, named Arnold Aronson. He was the executive secretary of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. He and A. Philip Randolph and Roy Wilkins started it together. So I had an inside view to the civil rights movement when I was a teenager that few people had. I stumbled on traditional southern folk music by accident when I was fifteen years old. I was in the Library of Congress and noticed a sign for the Archive of Folk Music. I walked in, and asked what they did, and came home with a record of field recordings. That discovery turned me into a totally hysterical folkie, but bypassing the folk revival and heading straight into the roots. This was in 1959. But I guess I didn’t know that people were still doing this stuff. I knew Pete Seeger was alive, and I went to see him in concert. But the effect of hearing the musicians on the field recordings from the Library of Congress, the African American and Appalachian artists, who were doing


this political material, deeply political material! I’m listening to Leadbelly. I’m listening to Blind Lemon Jefferson. I’m listening to Aunt Molly Jackson and Jim Garland and Sarah Ogan Gunning, and all on field recordings. I’m listening to McKinley Morganfield before he becomes Muddy Waters. To me, it’s history. History. And then, in 1965, I go south to join SNCC. And, oh my God, it’s not history, it’s alive! I suddenly discovered that this music—which, by now, I had significantly internalized: I had learned the songs and learned the histories. I found out—Oh my God, it’s on every street corner. It is a living history. At first I learned this in the African American community with SNCC. And then I go to work with the mine workers, and discover that there are still all these people up there still singing! People like George Tucker and Roscoe Holcomb who are hanging out at Highlander. Florence Reece shows up all the time, Sarah Ogan Gunning is still there. She and I ended up on a stage together at the Vancouver Folk Festival. And whether it’s bashert [Yiddish for destined or fated] or whether it’s serendipity or whether it’s accidental, having become completely passionate about this music, as the music I most love, I end up in one of the places where it is still an absolutely vibrant and living tradition. And I become a part of it. RR: In other words, you are saying that you learned about the “real life” of the music when your activism brought you into daily contact with the communities producing and consuming the music. What role was the music playing in the movements you joined? SK: The strategic and tactical use of music was something you couldn’t miss. There was never a mine workers rally without a bluegrass band. Some of them knew “Solidarity Forever,” and some of them didn’t. They all knew one or two coal mining songs. I was in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, as part of the JP Stevens organizing campaign. We had a white country band and a black R&B band playing at every one of our rallies. Radical music is not just about singing “Which Side Are You On?” RR: What does make music radical? SK: That’s a great question. I would say this: it’s the interaction between the person who is presenting or transmitting and the person who is receiving. I got this great song when I was living in North Georgia. There was a guy named Red Jones who had the jukebox concession for all of North Georgia. And when you took them out of the jukeboxes, you could go in and buy them for five cents, on 45s. And I saw this Buck Owens title.

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Buck Owens, I think, is nobody’s radical. But this song, I thought, “Huh, ‘No Milk and Honey in Baltimore,’” that’s a cool title. The lyrics go: We left the farm quite early one morn Determined to come back no more My wife had an uncle who worked every day In a nut and bolt factory up in Baltimore The day we arrived to start our new lives Our spirits started to soar And I soon had a job carrying hod On a construction job up in Baltimore.

One of the only recorded examples of the expression, “carrying hod,” by the way! The song goes on: But the next thing I knew, my wife took the flu And the doctor’s bill soon made us poor And to make ends meet, I started to sweep The dirty old streets here in Baltimore The smell of the bay, buildings of gray Were more than I bargained for If I had my way, we’d go home today ’Cause there’s no milk and honey here in Baltimore

Isn’t that great? RR: I love it. I don’t know that song, but I am an enormous fan of Buck Owens—and I happen to be from Baltimore. SK: But I think that, certainly, having said that it’s about context and the interaction, it’s also certainly true that music that presents a point of view is considered “political” now. We are now into one of my pet gripes. Virtually every time I’m on the air, one of the initial questions is, “So, you are a political musician.” And I have a very developed set of responses to this. I say, “Yes, I am. But it’s also true that all musicians are political.” And they say, “What do you mean by that?” I said, “Well, do you consider Guns N’ Roses a political band?” They say, “Oh, of course not. It’s just rock and roll.” I said, “But they have a very developed and very enunciated political point of view.” They happen to be misogynist. They happen to be homophobic. But those are political points of view. I object to their using the term “political” simply


because my views are progressive, when people who have conservative to right wing views that they are also putting out through their music are just “musicians.” Either all of us have modifiers attached to the word “musician” or none of us do. Yes, I write political songs. But it’s not the majority of my work. In any concert, on any CD, the majority is a combination of love songs, of family songs, of story songs, funny songs. RR: Of course, all of those can be political, too. SK: Of course they can. And many artists do that and do it very well. The difference is I do not leave out things that people would rather not hear. So I do talk about hard times. I do talk about sexual harassment. I do talk about violence against women, against workers, against children. I just don’t leave out the things that are unpleasant. It’s my refusal to be censored, my refusal to say, “No, I’ll only present part of life that identifies me as ‘political.’” I’m just presenting the whole of life as I see it rather than the parts. RR: That reminds me of your song “Just a Lie,” which refuses to buy into the nostalgia of “The Good Old Days.” What is your favorite cover of a song of yours? SK: That’s so hard. That is so hard. I can give you a number of them. I adore the June Tabor/Oyster Band version of “Mississippi Summer.” Do you know this one? RR: Yes, I do. That’s some wonderful noise. SK: Jim Fleming, who runs a major booking agency, called me up and he said, “Turn on the radio.” [Laughter] And you’ve got those kettle drums, or whatever the hell they are, slamming in at the beginning. It’s like, oh my God! I also love Planxty’s version of “Aragon Mill.” Extraordinary. At least three or four times a year, somebody asks to use one of my songs in a film or a play that brings back Southern textile history. I just signed some permission for something on that. Somebody said this to me—I wish I could remember who because it’s a great line—somebody said, “As the mills disappear, the interest in mill history is flourishing.” I just was putting away a CD from a little town called Cooleemee which is just a mill town, not a union town, just a town. And they have created a historical museum about the mills. A guy did a very good CD of original songs about mill life and about working-class life. It’s really good. And that’s as far as I know. I haven’t met this guy. So maybe it’ll turn out he’s a Yale graduate, a Harvard graduate, maybe. Who knows? But I’ll bet he’s just a mill kid. It has that feel to it.

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RR: While we’re talking about music and work, what about music as work? There tends in the United States to be a rather romantic view of art that doesn’t generally allow for a vision of musicians as persons performing labor for other persons. You identify yourself visibly as a member of the musicians’ union. Can you talk to me about music as job—about what it means to your work (as a musician or as an activist) to think about music as a job? SK: I think the important thing about organizations of artists is that they do bring that side forward. I really would hold up the work that John McCutcheon and Charlie King and John O’Connor have done in organizing my union local, Local 1000 of the American Federation of Musicians, which now has like 450 members, after starting from scratch, really trying to bring forward the artists as workers, artists as employees, artists as people with rights, and then to go for the basics. Insurance. Pensions. In Grassroots Leadership we have tried to confront this question of artists as workers by creating precedents for how politically progressive organizations work with artists. For example, we commissioned a poster series by Ricardo Levins Morales, who started the Northland Poster Collective in Minneapolis. Wonderful graphic art. So we got him to be our artistic director. But we created royalty arrangements. We negotiated permissions fees. We worked with Ricardo to try to create a contract that would be a model for other political organizations. Because by and large, progressive organizations exploit progressive artists, and don’t recognize them as doing comparable labor. RR: Really? What about Grassroots Leadership? SK: As far as I know, I am the only executive director of a progressive nonprofit organization who is covered by a union contract. The board of directors of Grassroots Leadership signed a collective bargaining agreement with Local 1000 for my work. Also, our staff is organized with Local 188, IUE-CWA. But I am AFM as the executive director. RR: That’s pretty unusual, I imagine. SK: Unusual, yeah. The agreement is that I perform, among many other things, musical services for Grassroots Leadership. So you can’t actually book me for a concert. You sign a contract with Grassroots Leadership for my services. All of my performance income from North America goes directly to Grassroots Leadership. I don’t even see it, let alone get any part of it. It doesn’t run through my books. It runs through the organization’s. And that’s a not insignificant part of our income. It’s not huge. But it’s usually twenty-five to thirty grand a year.


Every once in a while I think, “Ooh, I could have kept it.” But I have something almost no musician I know has, which is the benefits that an employee should have. For myself and whatever dependents I have at the time, I have fully paid medical, dental and psychiatric insurance. I have a pension, a serious pension plan, in addition to my TSA. The organization contributes ten percent of my salary to my pension. I get excellent vacation and excellent holidays. RR: Which everybody should have. SK: Exactly. Everybody at Grassroots Organizing gets the same benefits. You start with three weeks’ vacation. It takes you five years to work up to six. But I don’t consider that unfair. People who have been here five years should get a couple more weeks. And it doesn’t take you long to work up to six weeks. And I have a sabbatical, like everybody else, six fully paid months every six years. So I am delighted to be a “wage slave” as a musician. I so much prefer this. If it’s a bad year for me in terms of concert bookings, it affects the organization’s income. But as long as the organization has money, I have an income. RR: What are the day-to-day implications of being a musical “wage slave?” SK: I think this has made it much more possible for me to write than with the panic that my friends quite legitimately run into when, all of a sudden, they aren’t going to get enough gigs to get through the year. It removes a level of anxiety. Since there is not public support for artists, I hope there will be a day when a lot of politically progressive organizations simply hire people to be artists on their staff. That’s one of my dreams. Songwriting should be a job you do. I often say, “I’m a musical journalist.” I have a sense of what I am doing as professional. I believe that if you are a professional songwriter, a skillful songwriter, what you are doing is fundamentally an act of translation. In many ways, no different from, for example, translating French into another language. You start with images, emotions in one literary form, which may be speech. It may be writing. And you translate them into something else, which is song. I know that Utah Philips has a briefcase in which he keeps news clippings that he’s going to write songs about someday. He takes out the news clipping, writes a song about it. Do you know my last CD, We’re Still Here? RR: That’s your sixtieth birthday CD.

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SK: It’s got a song called “The Flume.” I opened the local newspaper up in the mountains. We have a cabin up in the mountains that we’ve had for like twenty-five years, a one-room cabin. I do a lot of my writing up there. And I always buy the local paper to see who’s playing, and if there’s any good cattle sales because I enjoy the auctioneers: another art form. And here was this big article about a flume that had been washed away in the great 1916 flood that had been used to transport logs twenty miles to a sawmill. And I went through it, underlining the key words, and sat down and wrote a song about it. And the deputy sheriff of Wilkes County called me up last year and asked if I’d come sing it at their Annual Employees Day. RR: Did you? SK: I couldn’t go. But I said, “Hey, I’d be happy to come and play it if I could.” There’s a city council member who wants to make it the county song. But I sat there reading the newspaper article, underlined the key words, and wrote the song. I believe that a professional songwriter should be able to do that at any point. You may not, on a given day, want to write a song. Or you may not have something you want to write a song about. But if somebody says, “Si, write this song,” I should be able to turn it around in an hour. Maybe it’s a good song, maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s a song I’d never sing. RR: Well, I know more about the songs you did sing again—on record— or the songs you wrote that other people sing. Can you tell me about a song you’d never sing again? SK: The time I met Sarah Ogan Gunning, we were at the Vancouver Folk Festival. Earl Robinson, who wrote “Joe Hill,” was on the panel. And Earl Robinson got into this incredibly crazy story about Bach and Beethoven. He was supposed to be talking about how he wrote “Joe Hill.” So while he was going on, I started writing a song about what he was doing. And I passed it to Utah Phillips to see if he wanted to do a verse. He didn’t. Sarah didn’t. So when my turn came up, I just sang this song about what had just happened. I came down the next morning to breakfast, and Utah was sitting there. And I sat down with him. And he said, “That was a pretty fast piece of work.” And I said, “Well, there wasn’t a whole lot of time, Utah.” He said, “You reckon you’ll ever sing that song again?” And I said, “Not as long as I live.” And he said, “Remarkably good judgment on your part.” RR: I saw that one coming.


SK: I have no idea where that song is. I wrote it for the moment. But I do believe that songwriting is an act of translation. And as I get interviewed, I tell people who want to be artists, you should be able to do it professionally. Supposing you are a beginning reporter on a paper. And your editor says to you, “Hey, a big semi just jackknifed out on Route 17. Go out there and give me the story.” And you said, “[Sigh] Jesus, Edna. You know, I’m not feeling the story right now. I’ve been thinking much more about political processes. I don’t think I can quite wrap my mind around it. I mean maybe in a couple of weeks if I could kind of think about it, do some meditating, it might come to me. But I don’t feel like I can do this today.” How long are you going to last? If you are a reporter, you should be able to go out and cover the wreck. Hopefully, nobody has been hurt. And you should be back there in half an hour. And the story will be written. It may not win you a Pulitzer. But it should be good enough to be edited and get in the paper the next day. As a songwriter, if you really care about songwriting, you should be able to get your skill level to where you can do that. It doesn’t mean you won’t get hit by inspiration. But that’s what it means. To be able to take a newspaper story, something somebody tells you, a request, and turn that into a song, that’s what it means to be a professional songwriter. That’s what it means to be a songwriter. If you can demystify the songwriting process, then you’ll do all right. RR: Who’s been your most important audience over the years? SK: I think my music is particularly special to the constituencies that I write about. The editor of Bluegrass Now, his name is Wayne Bledsoe, wanted to do a major article on me. And at one point he said, “You know, my mother worked her entire life in the Eden cotton mills [in North Carolina]. I wanted you to know that.” I remember when my first CD came out. A friend of mine who worked in the Warner Robins aircraft plant was sitting there. He and his wife were sitting there listening. And he turned to her and he said, “It’s about us. It’s about us.” So, I don’t tell you those things as typical reactions, but they’re the reactions that matter to me. I get a lot of that from the Jewish community, too, because of my take on Jewishness. And certainly, within the labor movement, there are people who are like, “Damn right. Somebody is still speaking up for labor.” I was on tour in the Netherlands and Germany in January. And some kid—I mean a kid, I mean like twentyone years old—came out afterwards with a clenched fist and said, “Thank

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you for speaking up for socialism.” Nobody in the United States has ever said that in my thirty years of performing. RR: Si, although you grew up in New England, all of your political organizing has been in the South. Would you say that there is something in particular that characterizes the stream of Southern radicalism? SK: Well, that’s a hard question precisely because I haven’t been active other places, and at heart it’s a comparative question. But here is what I do think: activists in the South pay more attention to culture. This is the heritage of the Southern labor movement, of Highlander, of the Southern civil rights movement, of mine workers’ culture. So I feel that there is more of a cultural sense, and more of a sense of celebration and community. There’s much more of a tendency for people to drive long distances across state lines to see how other folks are doing, to go to celebrations. Some people from outside the South have said, “All you guys do is go to each other’s conferences.” I think there is more of a sense of solidarity and community that is partly a cultural heritage, but also partly comes from being embattled and spread out. RR: Do you think of yourself as a Southerner now? SK: No. I think Southerners are born. It’s a deep and complex culture. I think of myself somebody who lives in the South, who loves the South, who is happy to be in the South, who participates in Southern history and Southern culture and Southern change. But as Popeye said, “I am what I am,” which is a northern, Jewish, middle-class, intellectual activist. Si Kahn Discography New Wood, 1974 Home, 1979 Doing My Job, 1982 Unfinished Portraits, 1984 Signs of the Times (with John McCutcheon), 1986 Carry It On (with Pete Seeger and Jane Sapp), 1986 I’ll Be There: Songs for Jobs with Justice, 1989 I Have Seen Freedom, 1991 Good Times and Bedtimes, 1993 In My Heart, 1994 Companion, 1997 Been a Long Time, 2000 Threads, 2002 We’re Still Here, 2004


Notes 1. There were 1,981,395 African American men in slavery in 1860. Price’s chart, to which Kahn refers, makes use of a report by Graham Boyd, “The Drug War Is the New Jim Crow,” NACLA report on the Americas, July/Aug. 2001. Price’s chart also shows that in the year 2000, there were 792,000 African American men in prison, equivalent to the 782,781 African American men in slavery in 1820. In the year 2005, there were 1,040,027 African American men in prison, equivalent to the 1,001,986 African American men in slavery in 1830. In 2008, there will be 1,224,719 African American men in prison, equivalent to the 1,244,000 African American men in slavery in 1840. The statistics on prisoners are from the United States Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Prisoners and Jail Inmates, 2000. The statistics on slave population are from Inter-university Consortium for Political Research, Study #00003: Historical Demographics, Economics, and Social Data; U.S., 1790–1970, Ann Arbor: ISPSR. For more information, see Byron Price, Merchandizing Prisoners: Who Really Pays for Prison Privatization? Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006. 2. See Introduction to this volume.


Brief Notes on Contributors

SHAWN ALEXANDER is the Cassius Marcellus Clay Fellow at Yale University. He is the editor of T. Thomas Fortune the Afro-American Agitator: A Reader, forthcoming from the University Press of Florida. He is completing a monograph on civil rights activity in the post-Reconstruction era, “We Know Our Rights and Have the Courage to Defend Them”: The Spirit of Agitation in the Age of Accommodation. JORGE ARÉVALO MATEUS is curator and archivist for the Woody Guthrie Foundation in New York City. He is pursuing a doctorate in ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University and has published essays, articles, and reviews in Ethnomusicology, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Centro Journal of Puerto Rican Studies, and Seminars in Neurology. He has taught courses in American musical traditions, film music, and world music at the School of Contemporary Arts at Ramapo College of New Jersey and Bergen Community College. Currently conducting fieldwork in New York City and Colombia, Arévalo Mateus is producing his first film documentary, an ethnography-social history about the displacement of Colombian émigré musicians. PAT ARNOW edited Now and Then, an Appalachian magazine at East Tennessee State University, and Southern Exposure, a magazine of Southern politics and culture. She has worked as culture editor of the alternative newsmagazine In These Times and as a research editor at Reader’s Digest. With her husband, Steven Giles, and Road Company ensemble member Christine Murdock, she cowrote a play, Cancell’d Destiny, about an East Tennessee professor’s suicide. The Road Company and the Virginia Tech Theater Department produced the one-woman show, and it was featured at a ROOTS festival in 1990. The Necessary Theatre in Louisville produced the play in 2004, with Laurene Scalf, another former Road Company member, playing the title role. Arnow is now a writer and photographer on the Lower East Side of New York.

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BRUCE BAKER is a lecturer in United States history at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has also written on lynching, social memory, Reconstruction, and folklore and early country music. RONALD COHEN is a professor of history at Indiana University Northwest. His most recent books include Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940–1970 (2002); and an edited collection, Alan Lomax: Selected Writings, 1934–1997 (2003); and (with Robert Lichtman), Deadly Farce: Harvey Matusow and the Informer System in the McCarthy Era (2004). Cohen was president of Historians of American Communism (2000–2003). LYNDA ANN EWEN is professor emerita of sociology at Marshall University and teaches in the Appalachian Studies graduate certificate program. She is codirector of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Gender in Appalachia and is editor of the series “Ethnicity and Gender in Appalachia” for Ohio University Press. Her PhD is from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, in societal development. CHRIS GREEN is an assistant professor of English at Marshall University, where he teaches Appalachian literature. Green has coedited Coal: A Poetry Anthology (2006) and, from 1999 to 2003, he edited Wind: A Journal of Writing and Community, Kentucky’s oldest literary journal. He has published on the relationship between American pluralism, Appalachia, and the works of poets in the 1930s, including James Still, Muriel Rukeyser, and Don West. JAMES J. LORENCE is an eminent scholar of history at Gainesville College in the University of Georgia system and an emeritus professor of history at the University of Wisconsin–Marathon County. In recent years, his research has focused on labor history and film studies. Among his publications are Suppression of Salt of the Earth: How Hollywood, Big Labor and Politicians Blacklisted a Movie in Cold War America (1999) and Organizing the Unemployed: Community and Union Activists in the Industrial Heartland (1996). RACHEL RUBIN is an associate professor of American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where she is currently president of the Faculty Staff Union (Massachusetts Teachers Association). She is author of Jewish Gangsters of Modern Literature (2000), coauthor of Immigration and American Popular Culture (2006), editor of A House Is Not a Home by Polly Adler (2006), and coeditor of American Popular Music: New Approaches to the Twentieth Century (2001).

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JAMES SMETHURST is an associate professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst. He is author of The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930–1946 (1999) and The Black Arts Movement (2005) and coeditor of Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism, and Twentieth-Century Literature of the United States (2003). BILL STRICKLAND teaches political science in the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts– Amherst, where he is also director of the Du Bois Papers Collection. He is a founding director of the Institute of the Black World in Atlanta and has consulted on numerous films and documentaries on civil rights, including the prizewinning Eyes on the Prize, the PBS documentary Malcolm X: Make it Plain, and the Louis Massiah film, W. E. B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices. Dr. Strickland is a member of the executive board of the Du Bois Foundation.


Index

Acosta, Oscar Zeta 228 Actor’s Equity 202 statistics on earnings 202 Actors Theater of Louisville 194 Adams, Sharon 204 Adjoining Trances (play) 199 Affro-Arts Theatre 140 African Liberation Day 138 African Liberation Support Committee (ALSC) 137–138 African National Congress (ANC) 234 African-Americans 3–8, 12–34, 45–51, 52, 89–91, 111, 114–115, 118, 128–146, 155, 166–189, 196–197, 203–207, 216–219, 233–234, 243–245 Atlanta, Georgia 47–49, 56–78, 118–120, 166–177 middle class 49, 52 reform elite 49, 120 tenant farmers 8, 50 Afro-American Council 5, 12–34, 56 Afro-American League 13–15, Agee, James 192 Agrarians 102–103 Ahidiana Collective 138, 141 Alabama 4, 30–32, 76, 142 Birmingham 65, 85, 123, 172 Montgomery 31, 171, 197 Selma 141 Alcaraz, Lalo 228 Alexander, Will 62, 64 Alexander, Margaret Walker 173, 185

Ali, Omar 50 Allen, James 60 Almanac Singers 88, 93 Alternate ROOTS (Regional Organization of Theaters South) 190, 197–199, 201–202, 204–207 founding 197 festival, 1984 201 10th Anniversary Performance Festival, 1987 201 Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers’ Union (ACTWU) 240, 245 American Civil Li berties Union (ACLU) 62–63 American Fascisti Association and Order of Black Shirts 57–58, 64 American Federation of Labor (AFL) 65, 71, 114, 149 American Federation of Musicians 248 American Federation of Teachers (AFT) 63 American Indian Movement (AIM) 228, 234 American Negro Academy 16 American Theatre (journal) 196 Amherst Industries 156 Angelou, Maya 134 Appalachia (see also Appalachian) 1–2, 4, 7–8, 38, 40, 103, 111, 115, 148–164, 190–207 migration 151–152

260 / index Appalachian 8, 99, 103, 111, 148, 160 Appalachian Power Company 156 Appalshop 160, 197 “Aragon Mill” (Si Kahn) 240, 247 Archive of American Folk-Song 93, 244 Arkansas 107, 142, 239 Little Rock 141 Mena 87 Tryzona 89 Aronson, Arnold 244 Arnall, Ellis 118 Associated Writing Programs (AWP) 229, 235–236 AT Massey 161 Atlanta Art Papers (journal) 201 Atlanta Community Chest 66 Atlanta Constitution (newspaper) 101–102, 106–107, 119–121 Atlanta Daily World (newspaper) 73, 120 Atlanta Federation of Trades 62 Atlanta Negro Labor Committee 61 “Atlanta Six” 58, 61, 70, 73, 75, 77 Atlanta University (AU) 166, 169, 173 Aztlán Underground 236 Baker, Margaret 200, 205 Baldwin, James 133 Barbour, Haley 242 Barbour, Joan 71 Baraka, Amiri 130, 134–135, 140 Barker, Danny 135–136 Barker, Mary 63 Battle of Blair Mountain 7 Beale Street Repertory Theater 140, 143 Beckett, Samuel 133 Belafonte, Harry 133 Belfrage, Cedric 109 “Beluthahatchee Bill” (Woody Guthrie) 215

“Beluthahatchee Blues” (Woody Guthrie) 212–215 Bennett, Lerone, Jr. 169–172, 175, 185–186 Bethune, Mary McLeod 116 Beverly Hillbillies (television) 194 Bible 104 Bikel, Theodore 133 Bilbo, Theodore 104 Billingsley, Andrew 176 Birney, Arthur Alexis 20, 21, 23–25, 27 Bittner, Van 115 Black Artists Group (BAG) (St. Louis, Missouri) 140 Black Arts Center (Houston, Texas) 140 Black Arts Festival (Atlanta, Georgia) 144 Black Arts movement 6, 128–146, 190 Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School (BARTS) 130, 133, 135, 140 Black Arts Workshop (Little Rock, Arkansas) 141 Black Belt Cultural Center (Selma, Alabama) 141 Black Books Bulletin (journal) 186 Black Collegian 141 Black Lung disease 150, 152–153 Black Lung Act 153 Black Lung Association 151, 153 Black Mountain College 198 Black Power movement 12, 56, 130, 134–135, 137–140, 142–143 Black Studies 136, 166–167, 169–170, 173, 175, 187 Black Theatre (journal) 140–142 Black World (journal) 140–142, 186 Bledsoe, Wayne 251 Blind Desire (play) 200–202 BLKARTSOUTH 128, 136–142 Bloor, Ella Reeve 60

index / 261 “Blueprint for Negro Writing” (Richard Wright) 218 Blues 83, 109, 129, 213 Boeker, Tom 201 Boggs, Grace Lee 176 Boggs, James 170, 176 Boles, Lillian 20 Boni and Boni 100 Boni & Gaer 99–100 Boni, Charles 100, 116, 123 Bontemps, Arna 116 Bonus March 69 Borders, W. H. 119–120 Boston, Massachusetts 16–17, 22–23 Botsford, Beverly 205 Bourke, Sharon 176 Boyle, Tony 150 Brady, Gilmore 61 Bragg, Billy 222 Brennan, Moira 196 Briar, Tom 45, 49–51 Broadside (journal) 82, 94 Broadside Press 140 Brookins, A.B. 89 Brookwood Labor College 91 Brother Boys 203 Browder, Earl 77 Brown, John 12, 20 Bruce, John E. (Bruce Grit) 13, 17, 18, 19 Bryn Mawr Summer School 99 Buck, Randy 199 Burlak, Ann 61 Burke, Don 71 Burnette, Zeke 205 Burnham, Linda Frye 193, 201, 206 California 227 Callaloo (journal) 143–144 “Can You Hear Their Voices” (Sis Cunningham) 87 Capone, Al 199 Carbon Fuel Company 156 Carolina Playmakers (Chapel Hill, North Carolina) 193

Carpetbag Theater (Knoxville, Tennessee) 196–197, 207 Carr, Joe 61 Carson, Jo 192, 195, 197–198, 202–203, 207 Cayton, Horace 173 Celanese Corporation 1–3, 243 Center for the Study of Artists and Communities 196 Chase, William Calvin 19 Chicano Movement 5, 228, 234 Chicano/a Latino/a Internet Community Alliance (Clica) 236 Children of Selma Theater 141 “Choppin Axe Blues” (Woody Guthrie) 215 Christian Century (journal) 110 Christian, Marcus B. 135–136 Church League for Industrial Democracy 63 Citizen’s Defense Committee 120 Civil Rights Act of 1875 13, 14 Civil Rights Congress 120 civil rights movement 3, 6, 12, 56, 130–133, 135–136, 166, 171, 206–207, 239, 243–245 Clarke, John Henrik 170 Cleage, Pearl 205 Cleaver, Eldridge 227–228 Cleveland Gazette (newspaper) 31–32 Cleveland, William 196 Cline, Patsy 203 Clods of Southern Earth (Don West) 6, 8, 98–123 Reviews 101, 103–104, 106–107, 110 Sales 99–100, 106–107, 109–110, 115, 117 coal mechanization 153 production 41, 148, 150 coal miners 2, 6, 8, 84–85, 148–164 wildcat strikes 148, 154–159 Coalfield Defender (newspaper) 160

262 / index Cobb, William 87 Cocke, Dudley 193, 197–199, 207 Cold War 3, 4, 98, 103, 211–213 Colored American (newspaper) 17, 22 Colored Farmers Alliance 50–51 Columbia River (Woody Guthrie) 213, 215, 219 Columbians 118, 213, 222–223 Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC) 62 Committee on Unemployed Relief (Atlanta, Georgia) 66 Commonwealth Labor Hymnal (Lee Hays) 88 Commonwealth College 86–89, 91 Commonwealth Labor Songs (Lee Hays) 88 Communism (see also Communist Party of the United States) anti-communism 43, 73, 92, 98, 115, 119, 121, 193, 211, 212–213 Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) (see also Communism) 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 56–78, 82, 84–86, 89, 91–94, 98–99, 106–107, 119–121, 150, 160, 174 Atlanta Section 59, 66, 72 Central Committee of 62, 67–68, 72, 75 District 17 65 Negro Department 68 weakness of 67–68, 71–73, 75–77 Community Arts Network 193, 206 community preservation and cultural memory 144–145 Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) 194–196, 202, 206 Compromise of 1877 5, 13

Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) (see also individual unions) 1, 2, 7, 82, 85, 92, 98, 100–101, 109, 113–115, 121, 150 Operation Dixie 115, 212 Political Action Committee 101, 106, 113–114 Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) 132, 136–137 Congress of African People (CAP) 137–138 Connecticut Hartford 27 Consolidation Coal Company 152 Cooper, Edward 17, 19 Co-operative Workers of America (CWA) 38, 44–53 Cooperatives 39, 44, 46, 48 Corrections Corporation of America 243 Costley, Robert 136 CPUSA (see Communist Party) Crawford, Mattie 20 Creative Loafing (journal) 201 critical response process 205–206 Cromwell, John 17 Crumpacker, Edward D. 17 Cruse, Harold 135 Cuba 188 cultural nationalism 139–140 Cunningham, Agnes “Sis” 3, 8, 82–96, 98, 239 Daily Worker (newspaper) 106, 110, 120–121 Dalton, Mary 61 Daly, Patricia 176 Danaher, William 86 Dashiki Project Theatre (New Orleans, Louisiana) 140 Davis, Benjamin, Jr. 72, 75 Davis, Chester 171, 175 Davis, Ossie 133 Dead Prez 236

index / 263 Dee, Ruby 133 Deliverance (film) 194 Denisoff, R. Serge 83 Denning, Michael 4 deNobriga, Kathie 195, 206 Dent, Tom 134–137, 139, 141–145 Derby, Doris 130–132, 135, 145 Di Santo, John 59 Dillard University 135, 140 Dodson, Howard 176 Dodson, Jualyne 176 Dooley, Ebon 144 Dopkwe House 140 Dos Passos, John 84–85 Douglass, Frederick 177 Douglass, Janet 176 “Drain the Swamp” (Woody Guthrie) 215 Drake, St. Clair 176, 185, 187 Drama Review, The (TDR) (journal) 132 Dreiser. Theodore 84–85, 123 Du Bois, W. E. B. 106, 129, 169 Duke Power Company 1 Dukes of Hazzard (television) 194 Durr, Virginia 4 Dusenberry, Emma 88 Dust Bowl Ballads (Woody Guthrie) 213, 219 Dylan, Bob 94 Earth First! 161 East, Clay 89 East Tennessee State University 191 Eastern Associates Coal Compay 156 Echoes and Postcards (play) 203 education 43, 86–91, 98–99, 107–108, 112, 117–118, 167–189 Elder, Lonnie III 134 Eller, Ron 41 Elliott, Jack 220 Emergency Relief Committee (Atlanta, Georgia) 66

Emory & Henry College 192 Erikson, Kai 152 Ethiopean Theater (New Orleans, Louisiana) 140 Ethnic Studies movement 227 Evans, Frederick W. 51 Evans, George Henry 51 eviction fights 62, 68 Ewen, Lynda Ann 151–152 Fair Play for Cuba 131 Fairclough, Adam 4 Federal Theatre Project 193, 207 Federal Writers Project 101, 218 Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) Feminism 192 Fisk University 175 Flanagan, Hallie 193 Florida 123, 142, 212–213, 219, 222 Beluthahatchee (Switzerland, Florida) 211–215, 217, 219, 221, 223 Jacksonville 211, 217, 219 Miami 140–141, 144 St. Augustine 222 Tallahassee 142 Florida Writers Project 212 “Flume, The” (Si Kahn) 250 Flying Lemon Cirque (play) 199 Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley 91 folk music 83–85, 88, 93, 221, 239–240, 244–247 Foreman, Clark 116 Foreman, James 131 Fortune, T. Thomas 13–15, 17, 19, 25 Fox in the Henhouse: How Privatization Threatens Democracy (Si Kahn and Elizabeth Minnich) 242 France 218 Frazier, Levi Jr. 138, 142, 145–146 Frederickson, Mary 91

264 / index Free Southern Theater (FST) (New Orleans, Louisiana) 128, 130–137, 139–141, 196, 206–207 Freedom Archives (Austin, Texas) 236 Freedom Train 119 Friesen, Gordon 92–94 Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills 60, 65 Gaer, Joseph 100–101, 106, 110, 113, 116 Gallagher, Andrew 159 Gard, Robert 193 Garland, Jim 84, 245 Garrison, Dan 92 Garrison, William Lloyd 92 Garvey, Marcus 166, 173 Gelber, Jack 131 Gellert, Lawrence 85 “Genocide” (Woody Guthrie) 213, 222 Georgia 6, 38–39, 46, 56, 58–59, 62, 64, 66, 75–76, 98–99, 100–101, 106–107, 110, 117–118, 121, 131, 142, 212, 223, 245–246 Albany 168 Atlanta 47–48, 56–78, 99, 101, 110, 117–120, 122, 134, 144, 166–177, 198, 201, 212, 223 Augusta 64–66 Columbus 64, 66, 213 Dalton 121–122 Fulton County 68–70 Macon 120 Madison 46 Rome 64, 66 Warrenton 46 Georgia Federation of Labor (GFL) 62–63, 65 Giles v. Harris 31, 33–34 Giles v. Teasley 32–34 Giles, Jackson W. 31–32 Gilliam, Theodore 140 Gleason, Jeremiah 28

Gold, Mike 106 Gómez, Alan Eladio 227 Gonzalez, Alberto 230–231 grants (see funding) Grassroots Leadership 240–241, 243, 248 Grassroots Organizing 243–244, 249 Great Depression 2, 82 in South 56–78, 82–94 as national phenomenon 57–58 in Northeast 57–58 in Midwest 57–58 as radical organizing opportunity 59, 65–66, 68, 70 Green, Emily 199–201, 203 Green, John 15 Green, Paul 193 Green, William 65 Gunning, Sara Ogan 84, 245, 250 Guns N’ Roses 246 Gusman v. Marrero 19–21, 23–24 Gusman, A. L. 19, 21, 23–24 Guthrie, Woody 93, 211–223 Haggard, Ed 205 Haley, Alex 198 Hall, K.K. 155 Hall, Otto 66, 71–72, 74–75 Handcox, John 84–85, 89–91, 93–94 Hannon, John 17 Harburg, E.Y. “Yip” 88 Hard-Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People (Alan Lomax) 94 Harding, Rosemarie 168 Harding, Vincent 166, 168–172, 185–188 Harjo, Joy 236 Harlan County War (television movie) 240 Harlan County, USA (documentary) 160, 240 Harlem Writers Guild 134–136 Harper, Sol 68

index / 265 Hawes, Baldwin “Butch” 93 Hays, Lee 88–89, 91, 93 Haywood, Harry 174, 176 Headwaters (television) 197 Henderson, David 134 Henderson, Stephen 166, 169–171, 175, 186 Hendrix, Warren 69 Henley, Beth 194 Herndon, Angelo 57, in Alabama 68 in Atlanta 68–76 imprisonment of 71 legal case against 4, 58, 70–75, 77, 123 and unemployed demonstration, July 1932 70–71 as unemployed organizer 68–71, 76–77 value to CPUSA 68, 71–72, 76 Hernton, Calvin 134 Hewlett, E.M. 15 Hicks, Calvin 134 High Performance (journal) 199 Highlander Folk School 4, 6, 74, 88–89, 99 Highlander Research and Education Center 190, 197–198, 245 Hill, Joe 83 Hill, Robert 166, 173, 176, 186 Hille, Waldemar 88, 91 Hill-Goah, Betty 203 Hills, Deborah 205 Hite, Alex 101–103 Holcomb, Roscoe 245 Honey, Michael 4 Hoover, Herbert 59 Horsepower, An Electric Fable (play) 195–196 Horton, Myles 4, 9, 88–89 House of Representatives, Special Investigating Committee on Communist Activity in the South, 1930 60, 64

House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) 119, 121 Houston, Cisco 217 Hover, Hiram 5, 78, 38–53 Howard University 175 Howze, Sim 155–156 Hudson, Hosea 77 Hudson, John H. 60–61, 74 Hughes, Langston 109, 117, 123, 133, 135 Hughes, Robert 207 Huntsville State Prison 227, 234 Hurricane Katrina 6, 130, 144–145 Hurston, Zora Neale 212 I Rode with the Klan (Stetson Kennedy) 212 identity politics 192 Illinois 227 Cairo 131 Carbondale 131 Chicago 14, 16, 88, 140, 211, 217–218 Mound Bayou 131 Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) 83–85, 88, 90, 93 Ingram, Rosa Lee 119–120 Institute for Positive Education 140 Institute of the Black World 6, 98, 166–189 International Indian Treaty Council 228, 233 International Labor Defense (ILD) 62–63, 70–74, 120 “Introduction to the ROOTS Reader, An” (Linda Frye Burnham) 206 “I’ve Seen God” (Don West) 108–109 Jackson, Aunt Molly 84–85, 93, 245 Jackson, George 227, 234 Jackson, Giles B. 21–22, 24 Jackson, James 135 Jackson, Maynard 176–177

266 / index James, C. L. R. 166, 173, 176, 187 jazz 129, 135 Jazz and Heritage Festival 144 Jefferson, Blind Lemon 245 Jewish Fund for Justice 240 Jim Crow 5, 12–34, 49, 56, 91, 100, 103, 118, 120, 128, 136–138, 172, 212, 216–217 Johnson, Nelson 138 Johnson, Tom 61–63, 67 Johnson, Zilphia (Horton) 88–89 Jones, Jerome 63 Jonesborough Days 195 Jory, Jon 194 Journal of Black Poetry 140, 142 Journal of Labor 63, 65 JP Stevens 240, 245 Jua, Chakula Cha 140, 144 June Appal (records) 197

King, Coretta Scott 167–170, 183 King, Harvey 139 King, Jr., Rev. Martin Luther 6, 166–169, 171–173, 177–178, 197 King, Marian 168 King, Slater 168 King, Woodie 145 Klein, Joe 220 “Kloo Klacka Klambo” (Woody Guthrie) 213 Knights of Labor 5, 38, 40–45, 51, 56 Knoxville (Tennessee) race riot of 1919 197 Koch, Lucian 87 Kopple, Barbara 160 Kruschchev, Nikita 212 Ku Klux Klan 14, 45, 212–213, 216–217, 220, 222–223

Kahn, Si 6, 8, 210, 239–252 Kansas 227 Karamu House 131 Karenga, Maulana 139–140 Karston, Karl 63 Kawaida movement 139–140 Kelley, Robin 4, 7, 85 Kelly, Brian 49 “Kennedy, He’s That Man” (Woody Guthrie) 215, 222 Kennedy, William Stetson 8, 210–223, 225 Kentucky 84–85, 99, 148–149, 197 Clay County 85 Harlan County 1, 7, 85, 123, 240 Louisville 194 Martin County 162 Whitesburg 197 Kentucky Workers Alliance (KWA) 89 Killens, John O. 134 King, Charlie 248

labor movement (see individual unions and labor organizations) Labor Review 65 labor songs 83–90, 93, 213 Ladner, Dorie 171 Ladner, Joyce 171, 175 Lampkin, Daisy 75 Larkin, Marshall 120 Last Messengers (Greenville, Mississippi) 141 Lawson, Jesse 17, 18, 19, 21–27, 30–31, 34 Leadbelly (Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter) 217, 244 Leadership Conference on Civil Rights 244 League Against War and Fascism 91 League of Struggle for Negro Rights 67 Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary 227 Lechlinter, Ruth 104 Lee Brothers Trio 86

index / 267 Left (see also individual organizations) 4, 5, 6, 82, 93, 98–99, 101, 150–151, 212 LeMoyne-Owen College 140 Leonard Peltier Defense Committee 228 Leonard, Robert 191–192, 194–196, 200–204 Lerman, Liz 206 Lerner, Ruby 193–194, 198, 207 Let’s Sing 89 Lewis, Helen 160 Lewis, John 20 Lewis, John L. 150 liberal-radical coalition 62–63, 71, 73–75 Library of Congress 90, 93, 244 Lilly, Octave 135–136 Lincoln, Abby 134 Lincoln Memorial University 99 Linson, Rashaan Cornell 139 “Listen, I’m an Agitator” (Don West) 121–122 Little Chicago (play) 199 Living Theater 131 Locke, Dawolu Gene 138 Lomax, Alan 93–94, 211, 217, 221 “Look Here America” (Don West) 99, 110–112 “Lord, I Prayed” (Don West) 108–109 Los Angeles Times (newspaper) 201 “Loud and Proud” (Raúl Salinas) 229 Louisiana 13, 15, 16, 17, 19–30, 32–33, 42, 85, 137–138, 142 Constitution, 1898 15, 16, 19, 20, 23, 28, 34 Constitution, 1879 19 New Orleans 6, 19, 20, 21, 23, 28, 128–130, 132–141, 143–145, 196, 206, 213 Love, John 16, 17 Lucas, Ashley 236

Lynd, Staughton 168 Lyons, Judson 15 MacDonald, Lois 91 Macon Telegraph (newspaper) 73 Malcolm X 135 Malcolm X University 138 Manley, Albert 168 Manley, Alexander 26 Mar, JoAnn 241 Marion Federal Penitentiary 227–228 Marrero, Lucien 19 Marshall, Paule 134 Marshall, Thurgood 135 Martin Brothers 84 Martin, Harold 107 Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Center 167, 169–174, 183–184 Maryland 2–3, 9 Baltimore 122, 246 Mason, Lucy Randolph 114, 116 Matewan (John Sayles) 8 Mayfield, Julian 134 McCarn, Dave 86 McCullers, Carson 199 McCutcheon, John 248 McDonald, Daisy 86 McEnery, Samuel Douglass 27 McGhee, Frederick 15, 16, 17, 19, 24–25 McGill, Ralph 107, 119–122, 124 McGuire, Mickey 176 McLaren, Louise Leonard 91 McWorter, Gerald (Abdul Alkalimat) 170, 175 “Me and My Captain”: Chain Gang Songs of Protest (Lawrence Gellert) 85 Meloncon, Muntu Thomas 139, 144 Memphis State University 140 Mendoza, Louis 227

268 / index M-Ensemble 140 Mennonite House (Atlanta, Georgia) 168 Mermaid Avenue Billy Bragg and Wilco) 222 Merriwether, Louise 134 Meyers, George 1–3, 7, 9, 243 Michelson, Clarina 70–71 Miller, Arnold 151, 156 Miller, R.C. 60, 64 Milligan, Bill 139 Millis, Mary Raoul 63, 74 Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Union 7 Miners’ Art Group 151 Miners for Democracy 151 Mineworker’s Journal 151, 160 Mining Safety and Health Act (MSHA) 152 Minnesota 19 Minnich, Elizabeth 242 Minor, Lee 45 Mississippi 16, 22, 104, 107, 131, 142, 172, 242 Greenville 141 Jackson, Mississippi 131–132 West Point 145 Mississippi Free Press (newspaper) 131 “Mississippi Summer” (Si Kahn) 247 Mitchell, H.L. 89–90 Molly McGuires 2 Momentary Art of Statemaking, The (play) 194–195 Morales, Ricardo Levins 248 Morehouse College 169–170 Morris, Jennie 20 Morris, Louise 20 Moses, Gilbert 130–133, 136 Mossell, Gertrude 25 Moten, Lucy 24 Mountain Life and Work (journal) 103, 110 Mountain, Marlene 199

mountaintop removal 148, 161 Muddy Waters (McKinley Morganfield) 245 Mumia, Abu-Jamal 232 Murdock, Christine 202–203, 206 Murray, Daniel 15, 17, 19 Murray, William Henry 216 “My South” (Don West) 116 NAACP Youth Council 133 “Naked Seed” (Woody Guthrie) 221–222 “Naked Words” (Don West) 104–105 Nance, L. Steve 62–63 Narcisse, Wendell 141, 143 Nation, Otis 92 Nation, The (journal) 106 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) 4, 12, 33–34, 62, 75, 91, 120, 135 National Black Theatre Festival 144 National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners 84 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) 194, 196, 202 Expansion Arts Program 206 National Guardian (newspaper) 211 National Hunger March, 1932 72–73 National Miners Union (NMU) 7, 84–85 National Textile Workers Union (NTWU) 61, 84 National Unemployed League 76 Neal, Larry 135 Negro Business League 24 Negro Liberator (newspaper) 110 Negro Songs of Protest (Lawrence Gellert) 85 Neighborhood Union (Atlanta, Georgia) 66 Neihardt, John G. 87 New Lafayette Theater 140 New Left 150–151, 159–160, 162

index / 269 New Masses (journal) 85, 100, 104, 106–107, 109–110, 123, 218 New Republic (journal) 64, 106 New York 40 Mt. Lebanon 39, 48, 50, 52 New York City 14, 27–28, 43, 70, 84–85, 93, 99–100, 128, 131, 133–135, 137, 140, 143, 145, 169, 176, 192, 195, 213, 217–222 Peekskill 213 New York Age (newspaper) 13, 135 New York Globe (newspaper) 13, 14 New York Herald Tribune (newspaper) 104 New York Times (newspaper) 103–104 Nichols, Denise 136 Nkombo (journal) 136–138, 140, 144 Nolan, W. L. 227 “No Milk and Honey in Baltimore” (Buck Owens) 245–246 Norman, Marsha 194 North Carolina 16, 22, 38, 39, 42–43, 45, 52, 74, 99, 142, 144, 198, 242, 251 Asheville 41, 43, 90 Chapel Hill 193–194 Charlotte 240 Gastonia 82, 85–86 Greensboro 4, 131 Hertford County 243 Hickory 39, 43–46, 50 Knoxville 38–41, 43, 196–197 Smithfield 200 North Carolina A & T College 4, 131 “North Sea’s Flood” (Woody Guthrie) 213, 215 Nunally, Alvin 89 Ochs, Phil 94 O’Connor, John 248 Oglethorpe University 99, 106, 110, 117–120

O’Hare, Rate Richards 87 “Oh Sun” (Woody Guthrie) 215 Ohio 14, 99, 217 Cleveland 131, 211 Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition 163 Oklahoma 86, 91–92, 212, 216–217 Muskogee 89 Oklahoma City 91–93 Tulsa 92 On Guard for Freedom 134–135 O’Neal, John 130–137, 140–141, 144–145, 196, 199, 206–207 Organization for Black American Culture 140 Ornitz, Samuel 85 Occupational Saftey Health Act (OSHA) 153 Owens, Buck 245–246 Palmetto Country (Stetson Kennedy) 212, 220 Parks, Rosa 197 Parris-Bailey, Linda 197, 207 Patterson, William 72 “Peace Town” (Woody Guthrie) 215 Pedersen, Vernon 9 “Peekskill Fiery Kross” (Woody Guthrie) 213 Peltier, Leonard 228 People’s Appalachia (journal) 151 People’s Appalachian Research Collective 151 People’s Institute for Applied Religion (PIAR) 100–101, 107–109 People’s Songs 94 Pepper, Claude 222 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 25, 27–29 Phillips, Utah 250 Pickering, Mimi 160 Piedmont 38–39, 41, 43 Pillsbury, Albert 22, 25, 30

270 / index Pinchback, P.B.S. 15, 17, 24 “Pistol Packer” (Woody Guthrie) 213 Pittson Coal Company 153, 155 Plessy v. Ferguson 15 PM (newspaper) 217 poll tax 100, 104, 118, 128 Popular Front 12, 62, 76, 82, 85, 98, 114, 135 Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) 234 popular music 83 Populism 39, 50 Powderly, Terrence 43–44 Powers, M.H. 61 “Preachers” (Don West) 108–109 Preece, Harold 104 President’s Organization on Unemployment Relief (POUR) 59, 66–67 Price, Byron E. 243 prison activism 227–228, 232, 241–244 prison privatization 241–243 Prison Rebellion Years 227, 232 Progressive Party 94, 100, 120–121 Progressive Youth Movement (Houston, Texas) 140 Project Hope (Houston, Texas) 140 Proletarian Literature of the United States (Granville Hicks) 123 protest songs 83–89 “Pueblo Querido” (Raúl Salinas) 228 Pushkin, Aleksandr 218–219 Rainey, Glenn 63 Randolph, A. Phillip 244 raúlsalinas (see Salinas, Raúl ) Rausher, Carl 201 Reconstruction 12, 31, 39, 42–43, 45, 51–52, 53, 61 Red Cross 65 Red Dust Players (Oklahoma) 91–92

Red Fox Second Hanging (play) 197 Red Salmon Arts (Austin, Texas) 229 Red Salmon Press 229 Red Shirts 52 Red Song Book 85 Red Summer (play) 197 Reece, Florence 3, 84–85, 245 Reece, Sam 3 Reed, Ishmael 134 Resistencia Bookstore (Austin, Texas) 228–231 Reuss, Richard 84, 89 Reynolds, Malvina 94 Richardson, Heather Cox 43 Richardson, Shirley 144 Riverside Church 169 Road Company (Johnson City, Tennessee) 190–207 Roadside Theater (Kentucky) 193 Robertson, Sidney 90 Robeson, Paul 120–121, 213, 218 Robinson, Earl 250 Rock ‘o’ My Soul in the Bosom of Just About Anybody Except a Minority Baptist Church (play) 205 Rodney, Walter 166, 173–174, 176, 178, 187 Rodriguez, Ana Ignacia 235 Romain, Armand 23, 25–26, 28 ROOTS (see Alternate ROOTS) Roscigno, Vincent 86 Rosenwald Foundation 116 Ross, Nat 71–72, 74–75 Rowell, Charles 143–144 Royes, Gillian 176 Ryanes v. Gleason 28–30, 32–34 Ryanes, David J. 28–29, 32–34 Sago Mine Disaster 161 Salaam, Kalamu ya 137, 139, 141, 144 Salinas, Raúl 5, 8, 210, 227–237 Sanchez, Sonia 135

index / 271 Sandburg, Carl 218–219 Sapp, Jane 240 Saudukai, Owusu 138 Schechner, Richard 132, 136 Schmidt, Dorothy 92 Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture 176 Scott, Emmett 21 Scottsboro case 4, 91, 120 Seeds of Man (Woody Guthrie) 215, 221 Seeger, Charles 90 Seeger, Pete 93–94, 211, 217–218, 221, 240, 244 segregation (see Jim Crow) Shakers 38–40, 42, 44, 48, 51–52 Shepp, Archie 135 Short, Ron 197–198 Silliman, Ron 128 Six Labor Songs (Sis Cunningham) 87 Slavery 213, 243, 253 Smathers, George 222 Smith Act 3 Smith, Reuben 15 Smith, Wilfred 31–32 Snodderly, Ed 194–195, 203 Social Gospel 74, 99 Socialist Party 58, 71, 73–74, 76, 85, 87, 89, 94 Sodexho-Marriot 243 Soledad State Prison 227–228 Son of White Man (play) 205 Songs [of] Labor, Folk, War 89 Songs for Southern Workers (Don West) 89 Songs for Workers 89 Songs of Field and Factory 89 Songs of the Southern School for Workers 91 Songs of the Southern Summer School 89 South Carolina 16, 38–39, 42,

45–46, 52 Couleemee 247 Greenville 45–48, 50 Laurens County 46–47 Oconee County 46 Spartanburg 44–47 Southern Black Cultural Alliance (SBCA) 128, 130, 141–144 Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) 133, 168, 172 Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW) 98, 100–101, 107, 109, 113–118, 121–122 Southern exceptionalism 4, 5 Southern Exposure (journal) 9, 190, 197 Southern Exposure (Stetson Kennedy) 212 Southern labor schools 86–91 Southern Patriot (newspaper) 115–116, 215 Southern School for Women Workers 90 Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) 84–85, 89–90, 92, 107 STFU Songbook 90 Southern Worker (newspaper) 60, 64, 85 Soviet Union 101, 106 Spellman, A. B. 135, 170–171 Spelman College 168–169 Spirit House 140 Spriggs, Ed 144 Springsteen, Bruce 96 Stalin, Joseph 106–107 Steelhammer, Rick 159 Stenholm, Alice E. 66 Stern, Arthur 93 Stone, Merlin 199 Story, Henry 61 Straker, D. Augustus 15

272 / index Strickland, Bill 170–171, 186, 188 Stuckey, Sterling 170–171, 175 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) 128, 131–132, 136–137, 145, 171, 239–240, 243, 245 Atlanta Project 134 Literacy Project 131–132 Student Nonviolent Freedom Committee 131 Student Organization for Black Unity (SOBU) 138 Students for a Democratic Society 131 Studio Watts 133, 140 SUDAN/Southwest (Houston, Texas) 139, 143 Sullivan, Dan 201 Sullivan, Patricia 4, 100 Sweet Briar College 91 “Taking Stetson Kennedy” (Woody Guthrie) 215, 222 Talmadge, Eugene 106, 117–118 Talmadge, Herman 118 Taylor, Alva 107 Taylor, John 152 tenant farmers 89, 92, 99, 108, 112 Tennessee 14, 74, 142 Asheville 191 Chattanooga East 192, 194–195 Johnson City 190–192, 199, 201–204 Jonesborough 195 Knoxville 192 Memphis 4, 138, 140, 169, 171–172 Monteagle 88 Nashville 199 New Market 197 Upper East 191–192 Tennessee Eastman 191 Tennessee Homecoming 1986 203

Tennessee Humanities Council 195 Tennessee Valley Authority 195–196, 219 Texas 5, 138, 142, 212, 227 Austin 138, 227–229, 233–235 Houston 134, 139–141, 143–144 San Antonio 227, 233 Texas Instruments 191 textile industry 1, 2, 42, 60, 85–86, 247, 251 theater 7, 87, 91–92, 128–146, 190–207 funding 132–133, 136, 142, 194, 196–197, 199, 202, 206–207 Theater of Afro Arts (Miami, Florida) 141, 143 Third World Press 140, 185 This is Your America (Joseph Gaer) 113–114 Thomas, Lorenzo 134–135, 143 To God Be the Glory (play) 204 Tougaloo College 130–132 Touré, Askia 134–135, 142 Trade Union Unity League (TUUL) 60 Tribble, Edwin 64 “Trip Through the Mind Jail, A” (Raúl Salinas) 228, 230 Trudell, John 230, 232 “Tuccumcari Striker” (Woody Guthrie) 213 Tucker, George 245 “Turpentine Camp Blues” (Woody Guthrie) 213 Umbra Poets Workshop 134–136 Unemployed Councils 60 in Atlanta 60, 65, 69–74, 76 unemployed, organizations of 60, 64 in Georgia 6, 56–78, 98 unemployment in Georgia 57–59, 68 in Northeast 58 in Midwest 58

index / 273 United Auto Workers Union (UAW) 152–153 United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers Union (UCAPAWA) 89, 92 United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) 7, 115, 149–152, 154–160, 240 United States Supreme Court 14–15, 19–20, 22–25, 27, 31–32, 73, 216 United Steelworkers Union 7 United Textile Workers Union 2, 7 University Center (Atlanta, Georgia) 166, 169, 173 University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill 193–194 University of North Carolina, Greensboro 199–200 University of Washington 228 Urban League, Atlanta 64, 66 Urban Theater (Houston, Texas) 141 U. S. S. R. (see Soviet Union) U.S. Steel 156 Vanderbilt University 99, 107 Vietnam 177, 188 Virginia 32–33, 148 Blacksburg 203 Danville 14 Norfolk 42 Richmond 21–22, 24, 51 Roanoke Rapids 245 Virginia Tech theater department 203 VISTA 151 Wallace, Henry A. 82, 94, 98, 119–122 Wal-Mart 160, 230 Walters, Alexander 15- 17, 19, 22–25, 27–29 Ward, Douglas Turner 134

Ward, Jerry 143–144 Washburn, Nannie Leah 69 Washington, Booker T. 12, 18–33, 49 Washington, Charles 64 Washington Daily Record (newspaper) 26 Washington, D.C. 15, 17, 19–20, 23–25, 27, 66, 73, 91, 119, 194, 239 Washington Square Bookstore 100 Watkins, Nayo 144 We Charge Genocide (petition) 222–223 “We Hafta Shaft NAFTA” (Raúl Salinas) 229 We’re Still Here (Si Kahn) 240, 249–250 Weller, Jack 152 Wells-Barnett, Ida B. 14–15, 26–27 Weltner, Philip 117–120 West, Don 3, 6, 8–9, 74, 88, 98–124 West Virginia 110, 148–149, 151, 154, 155, 162 Boone County 148 Buffalo Creek 153, 155, 160, 163 Charleston 152, 155 Logan County 155–156 Mannington 152 Montgomery 152–153 Morgantown 151 Rand 151–152 wealth and poverty 148, 160 Westside Relief Committee (Atlanta, Georgia) 66 “What Shall A Poet Sing” (Don West) 101–103 Wheat Street Baptist Church 119, 121 When God Was a Woman (play) 199 “Which Side Are You On” (Florence Reece) 85 White, George H. 15, 17, 19 white-only primaries 118

274 / index Whitman, Walt 104, 218–219 Wiggins, Ella May 84–86, 93 Wilkins, Roy 75, 244 Willens, Doris 89 Williams v. Mississippi 15 Williams, Claude 88–89, 91, 107–109, 117 Williams, Pat 144 Williams, Tennessee 199 Wilson, Sidney 139 Wisconsin Idea Theater 193 Wolf, Eugene 203 Wolfe, Thomas 104, 191, 193 Woodruff, Robert W. 66 Woodward, C. Vann 63, 74 Woody Guthrie Archives (New York City) 213, 215 Workers Alliance of America 76–77, 89, 91

Workingmen’s Party of America 5 Works Progress Administration (WPA) 89, 91, 193 Wright, Richard 173–174, 218 Wright, Samuel 19, 23 Wright, Sarah 134 Wynter, Sylvia 186 Yablonski, Joseph “Jock” 151 Young, Andrew 135 Young Communist League (YCL) 61 Youth Organization of Black Unity (YOBU) 138 Zapatistas 231, 234, 236 Zero Moment (play) 206–207 Zeuch, William 87 Zinn, Howard 168, 177

Radicalism in the South since Reconstruction

South African Politics Since 1994

Washington during Civil War and Reconstruction: Race and Radicalism

The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction

Soviet Policy towards South Asia since 1970

Reconstruction

Reconstruction

Reconstruction in Philosophy

A Region in Turmoil: South Asian Conflicts since 1947

Cinderella in the South

Turn in the South

Turn in the South

Summer in the South

In the South Seas

Summer in the South

Elsie in the South

Out In The South

Summer in the South

The Normans In The South

The Normans In The South

The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism

Declarations of Dependence: The Long Reconstruction of Popular Politics in the South, 1861-1908

Loyalism and Radicalism in Lancashire, 1798-1815

Mathematical Methods in Image Reconstruction

Terrorism, Radicalism, and Populism in Agriculture

English Radicalism, 1550-1850

Mathematical methods in image reconstruction

Mathematical methods in image reconstruction

Race in the American South

The War in South Africa

The South in World Politics

Radicalism in the South since Reconstruction

South African Politics Since 1994

Washington during Civil War and Reconstruction: Race and Radicalism

The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction

Soviet Policy towards South Asia since 1970

Reconstruction

Reconstruction

Reconstruction in Philosophy

A Region in Turmoil: South Asian Conflicts since 1947

Cinderella in the South

Turn in the South

Turn in the South

Summer in the South

In the South Seas

Summer in the South

Elsie in the South

Out In The South

Summer in the South

The Normans In The South

The Normans In The South

The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism

Declarations of Dependence: The Long Reconstruction of Popular Politics in the South, 1861-1908

Loyalism and Radicalism in Lancashire, 1798-1815

Mathematical Methods in Image Reconstruction

Terrorism, Radicalism, and Populism in Agriculture

English Radicalism, 1550-1850

Mathematical methods in image reconstruction

Mathematical methods in image reconstruction

Race in the American South

The War in South Africa

The South in World Politics

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