LEGL 4500/6500 - Employment Law

Dawn D. Bennett-Alexander, Esq.

Terry College of Business

A variety of groups came together at the conference in Birmingham. I attended as a delegate from the Women’s Division of the Democratic National Committee. Miss Lucy and Joe Gelders represented labor. Cliff and Clark Foreman and Tex Goldschmidt represented a group of young Southerners in the New Deal. Jane and Dolly Speed, who now ran a Communist bookstore in Birmingham, and Rob Hall, the Communist secretary for Alabama, were there. Bill Mitch and others represented the mine workers and the steel workers. I understand that Mrs. Roosevelt was the one who insisted that blacks be included, and Mary McLeod Bethune was her emissary. Frank Graham and many other University of North Carolina people were there. Myles Horton was there with the people from the Highlander Folk School, a settlement house in rural Tennessee that had become involved in the union movement.

The conference leaders had decided to give Hugo the Thomas Jefferson Award, so Hugo and Sister came too. They had traveled on the train with William Dodd, who had been a well-known professor of history at the University of Chicago and who was then ambassador to Germany. Dodd was to introduce Hugo and present him the Jefferson Award. When Hugo and Sister arrived at the house, they were concerned that Ambassador Dodd didn’t seem well. When the time came at the conference for him to introduce Hugo, he couldn’t speak and he had to be led off the stage. Apparently he had had a slight stroke. The Birmingham newspaper columnist John Temple Graves took over and introduced Hugo. Hugo gave a perfectly marvelous speech, quoting Jefferson all the way through.

The conference opened on a Sunday night in the city auditorium in downtown Birmingham. Oh, it was a love feast. There must have been 1,500 or more people there from all over the south, black and white, labor union people and New Dealers. Southern meetings always include a lot of preaching and praying and hymn singing, and this meeting was no exception. The whole meeting was just full of love and hope. It was thrilling. Frank Graham was elected temporary chairman and he made a beautiful speech. He set the tone for the meeting, and we all went away from there that night just full of lave and gratitude. The whole South was coming together to make a new day.

We were to meet the next morning to elect a permanent chairman and then break up into workshops, but when we got there we found the auditorium surrounded by black marias. Every police van in the city and county was there. Policemen were everywhere, inside and out. And there was Bull Connor saying anybody who broke the segregation law of Alabama would be arrested and taken to jail. No ifs, ands, or buts about it.

The city auditorium had a central aisle, and Connor said the blacks had to sit on one side and the whites on the other. Then a great debate began about whether blacks and whites could sit and stand on the stage together.

That same day Mrs. Roosevelt arrived. She was ushered in with great applause. Everybody clapped and clapped and clapped and clapped. She got a little folding chair and put it right in the middle of the aisle. She said she refused to be segregated. She carried the little folding chair with her wherever she went. The workshops were held in various churches and other buildings, and of course they had to be segregated too. Policemen followed us everywhere to make sure the segregation laws were observed, but they didn’t dare arrest Mrs. Roosevelt.

The South’s etiquette of race was challenged in another episode during the conference. Louise Charlton, who had been one of the organizers, was presiding until Dr. Graham was officially elected president. At one point she called on Mary McLeod Bethune. She said, "Mary, do you wish to come to the platform?" Mrs. Bethune rose. She looked like an African Queen, a large woman and homely but with an air of grandeur. She always carried a stick engraved with her name on it that President Roosevelt had given her. She was very proud of that stick. Mrs. Bethune got up with that stick and she said, "My name is Mrs. Bethune." So Louise had to say, "Mrs. Bethune, will you come to the platform?" That sounds like a small thing now, but that was a big dividing line. A Negro woman in Birmingham, Alabama, was called Mrs. at a public meeting.

By that time, I had come around to thinking that segregation was terrible. Just by osmosis mainly. I had met Mrs. Bethune and I had met other Negro people at the Foremans’ house. Before that, I had always known them as servants. The mailman was probably the best educated Negro I had met before I wen t to Washington, except for the few black students at Wellesley. I had never met an adult Negro who could read or write well except the postman. I remember going back to Birmingham and shaking hands with him and saying I was so glad to see him, and I called him Mr. I got hell on that. Cliff’s brother heard me and said, "Now look, Virginia, if you think you are going to get by with calling the postman Mr. you are wrong. Birmingham won’t stand for that." Cliff’s brother is a lovely man, but he was just as rigid as he could be.

I get so upset over the black separatists, who want to put themselves back in a cage, because it was a terrible thing to be white and have to think everybody who wasn’t white was inferior, to look down on them and think they smelled bad and were common and vulgar. It’s just terrible. It was so rude, too. You know, I was brought up to be a Southern lady, and it dawned on me how rude it was to think a black was too dirty and smelled too bad to sit by me. I had been raised by them and say in their laps, slept with them and kissed them all my life. This was what was so crazy about the South.

We grew up with such contradictory feelings. "I loved dear old Suzy. She raised me from a baby and she treated me like a mama. She is the sweetest thing in the world." But, "Of course, I wouldn’t sit by her son on the bus." Think of the men who repudiated their own children. I mean, why didn’t it ever occur to us that most of the light Negroes had white fathers or white grandfathers? What did it do to a man to repudiate his own child? And to say that that child was so inferior his father couldn’t sit on a bus beside him? Can you imagine? Wouldn’t you think that would do something funny to their brains? To say, "That’s my son, but he can’t…"

Clark Foreman told me two of the funniest, most awful tales, and he said they were true. He said there was a country white girl who got pregnant by a black boy – voluntarily. She had the baby and sent him to a black orphanage, because her family had fount out about it. But she wanted to see him after he had been there some time, so she went to the black orphanage where the child was. I guess the child was four or five. He was eating at the table with the other children. The people who ran the orphanage said to her, "Don’t you want to sit by your child?" And she said, "Well, I couldn’t do it. Eat with niggers?" This was her own child! She couldn’t sit by her own child! She could have nursed him at her breast, but she couldn’t eat with him.

Clark told me an even more peculiar story. He had an uncle who lived on the Howell plantation in Georgia and had several half-black children. Clark’s aunt brought them up with her own children. The children knew they were kin. There wasn’t any doubt about that. Everybody knew it. Eventually the black children went to Philadelphia. One of the girls in particular did very well, and her son became a doctor. When she went back to Atlanta one time, she called one of her white half-sisters and said she wanted to see them all. She had been gone so long and she remembered so much about them. Clark said they had a family meeting to decide about seeing this woman, this half-sister. They couldn’t meet with her in the parlor. That would be absolutely breaking every taboo in the South, since she was half black. They couldn’t take her into the kitchen, because she had risen in the world and her son was a doctor. So they decided the lady who would receive her would go to bed and pretend she was sick. Then they could bring the black guest up into the bedroom and all the other aunts could come visit and they could all sit down! He said they had a whole family gathering to decide this. That’s the way things were. It’s hard to believe now. By the time of the first Southern Conference for Human Welfare meeting in Birmingham in 1938, my thinking about race had certainly changed.

On the first full day of the conference there were meetings all day. Cliff made a speech on credit, and I went to the meeting on the poll tax. That night, Frank McCallister came up to me. He was a socialist with the Southern Workers Defense League. He was like Uriah Heep, smiling all the time, and he wanted to know if he could take me home. Cliff wasn’t there at the time, so I needed a ride. I said that was very nice, and so he and another fellow, who was also a socialist, took me home. Right away, they wanted to know if I knew Joe Gelders was a Communist. I said I guessed he was. I hadn’t thought about it very much. They wanted to know if I knew Rob Hall was a Communist and Jane and dolly and all sorts of other people were Communists. I said, "Mr. McCallister, these people are all working for the same thing we are working for. They are trying to fight against the poll tax and get labor organized. They are doing what the New Deal wants to do." "Well, Mrs. Durr, you are young and naïve…." H.L. Mitchell later told me that at that time the socialists thought I was a Junior League dilettante. Of course, I thought I was the greatest in the world, facing up to the lions of Birmingham by coming down to the meeting. I can assure you that none of my friends came, the ones I was raised with. McCallister continued to throw suspicion on this one and that one. I finally got angry at him and I said, "I think you are just trying to break the whole thing up." And he was.

Here we were in Birmingham, Alabama, sitting down together to try to protect the rights of people to organize so they would make more than two dollars a day, trying to get people the right to vote so they could have some influence on their own lives. We were trying to do things that were absolutely fundamental, right on the lowest level of political and economic democracy. And these socialists and Trotskyites did nothing in the world but red-bait. It made me mad. And if you didn’t go along with them, then they’d red-bait you. McCallister red-baited me to a fare–thee-well from then on out. I still get mad when I think about it. And I didn’t even know what a Trotskyite was. I used to think the Trotskyites were some form of fleas. They always made me itch when they were around.

Then things began to get tough. Mabel Jones West, a hired hand for the Ku Klux Klan, launched a terrible attack on the southern Conference for Human Welfare from the extreme right wing. We were all a bunch of reds. She said she "didn’t know what the niggers and the white women were up to." They were eating together and "what did they do at night and where were they staying?" The same old dirt – just get a black man and a white woman in a big auditorium, and by that night, they’ll be in bed. Well, that made me mad, too. It was disgusting, and I was feeling pretty badgered.

Some childhood friends of mine – sweet, dear people – took me out to lunch. One had been in my wedding, and both were very devoted friends. One of them said, "Now, Jinksie, I think I should tell you frankly that I think it’s awful for you to come down here and encourage this rabble to take over. You are going to go back to Washington and we are left to deal with it. I just have to tell you I think it is the most horrible thing you have ever done. I don’t think you could possibly know what you are doing. You are going off and leave us with this rabble on our hands that will just try to take over everything." She was serious about it, too. And her husband was serious about it. I was meeting with quite a lot of opposition.
 
 

Copyright 1985, University of Alabama Press.
 

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