LEGL 4500/6500 - Employment Law

Dawn D. Bennett-Alexander, Esq.

Terry College of Business

University of Georgia

The poll tax committee was, at that time, part of a Roosevelt coalition. I was in it for the women, but the blacks had stronger feelings. They always said that even when we got the poll tax abolished, they still had registration restrictions to get around. So while they favored abolishing the poll tax, they always realized that they would have to do away with registration provisions and the property and literacy provisions. In some of the states, if a man was illiterate, he couldn’t vote unless he owned three hundred dollars worth of property. The NAACP and the black Elks and all the black organizations supported us.

Abolition of the poll tax would bring more working-class white voters into the Roosevelt coalition, too. The disenfranchising provisions had been aimed at poor whites as well as blacks. The poor whites have continually cut their own throats. They voted for the voting restrictions because they thought it would keep blacks from voting, but at the same time, it kept them from voting, too.

The Southern Conference even joined a 1939 suit in Tennessee to have the poll tax struck down. Our premise was that a money tax was not a voting qualification; it was just a disenfranchising provision. The conference got Crampton Harris, Hugo Black’s former law partner, to represent Henry Pirtle, who had brought the suit, and John L. Lewis gave several thousand dollars to finance the case. But the Supreme Court had already ruled in Breedlove v. Suttles that under the Constitution the states had the right to set qualifications for voters, so Pirtle’s suit, Pirtle v. Brown, failed, too.

Because of the disenfranchisement provisions, the South was ruled by an oligarchy. The planters in the black belt were in alliance with the corporate interests in Birmingham – we called them the "Big Mules." We thought the first step in breaking this oligarchy was to abolish the poll tax, but progress was slow. A bill would be signed out of committee and pass in the house. Then it would be filibustered to death in the Senate. Almost everyone from the South would filibuster, of course. The only support we got from the South was from Claude Pepper of Florida, who introduced the bill to abolish the poll tax several times. Florida had already abolished the poll tax by state action in 1937. Frank Graham helped, of course. He was in the Senate for a while. But I can’t remember getting support from any other North Carolina politician. From 1940 until the poll tax committee folded in 1948, we would get a bill to abolish the poll tax introduced, but it never was approved by the whole Congress.

While we were in Congressman Geyer’s office we set up a committee and each group that opposed the poll tax had a representative on that committee. Our great support and help with money was John Lewis and the CIO. We had all of labor represented on our committee – the AFL, CIO, Railway Brotherhood. We had the NAACP and the Negro Elks. We had the Methodist church, all the civil liberties and the civil rights groups, the American Civil Liberties Union. Oddly enough, one group that did not support us – which I’ve always held against them – was the Women’s party. They were too sectarian. They believed in women’s rights and an equal rights amendment that they were working on back then, but they never supported the anti-poll tax bill. Those were the most rigid, sectarian women I have ever known. They wouldn’t talk to you about anything but their own cause. But we did have some support from the American Association of University Women (AAUW).

I keep telling the women today, if you are just going to work for women’s rights, you’re not going to get anywhere. You have to work for the rights of other people, too. The same is true for civil rights. As long as you work just for the rights of Negroes, you aren’t going to get anywhere. You have to appeal to people on a broader basis than just sectarian rights of groups.

As I see it, the discrimination against Negroes and women was all part of the exploitation of human beings. Rich Negroes exploited poor Negroes; rich women exploited poor women. I certainly believe in women’s rights and black rights, too, but since the beginning of time the haves have exploited the have-nots. People who accumulate money and property and power have always wanted someone else to do all the dirty work – to do the washing and the cleaning up, to nurse the babies and look after the sick. People like to be clean and smell good and live above all the digging of coal and the draining of cesspools. In India the untouchables took care of the outhouse and disposed of the dead animals. The untouchables couldn’t drink out of the village well. It’s human nature to want somebody else to do the dirty work – whether it is women or blacks or slaves or captured prisoners.

After Lee Geyer died, in 1941, the poll tax committee got an office in the Railway Building through Frances Wheeler, our secretary, who was the daughter of Burton K. Wheeler, the senator from Montana. The head of the railroad union, Mr. Keating, was a great friend of his and so we got the space free. I had met Frances through her sister, Elizabeth, who lived near us. Frances was a brilliant young woman just out of Mount Holyoke. She was an interventionist in foreign affairs and far more radical than her father. She wanted to work for the United Mine Workers, but John L. Lewis had a prohibition in his constitution; not only could no Communists work for the Mine Workers, but no married women could. If you got married, you had to give up your job. He didn’t believe in married women working outside the home. Frances had married Allen Saylor, who was in the Federal Communications Commission. Since she couldn’t work for the UMW, Frances became secretary of the poll tax committee.

In April 1940 the Southern Conference had its second convention, in Chattanooga. The meeting was dominated by fighting between the people who wanted to go to war against Hitler and the ones who didn’t. I was one of the ones who wanted to go to war. I tried to say out of the fray at the conference, but I was very much on the side of Frank Graham and the people who wanted to pass a strong resolution supporting the Allies.

In 1938, the conference had had the backing of the Roosevelts, but by the time we met in Chattanooga in 1940, Mr. Roosevelt had turned from Dr. New Deal to Dr. Win-the-War. He was cultivating the Southerners to back his war effort. I’m sure he passed the word among the New Dealers not to involve themselves with the conference, because he wanted to keep the support of the Southern congressmen and senators. Not only were they in important positions on the committees, but they were interventionists. They believed in fighting Hitler. Mark Ethridge, editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, and Mrs. Roosevelt attended the conference as Roosevelt’s emissaries and to represent the New Deal point of view. We didn’t have the big luminaries of the New Deal, but we did have people like Frank Graham, and of course I considered myself a New Dealer, too.

I was one hundred percent interventionist, but I always tried to stay friends with the isolationist; he had broken with Roosevelt and was supporting Willkie. Of course, Kathryn Lewis was an isolationist, too. She and I had become good friends and we roomed together at the Chattanooga meeting. Although we supported different points of view, our friendship survived. She went down to that meeting to manipulate the miners, who came pouring in from all over Alabama and Tennessee. They had gotten orders to come and they came. They formed an alliance with the few Communists there to try to get a resolution passed against the Allies. It was certainly a strange partnership. Mark Ethridge and Frank Graham and Barry Bingham were there trying to get a resolution passed in support of the Allies.

Joe Gelders was also backing the isolationist resolution, and he was relying on the miners’ support to get it passed. But the miners were absolutely bored to death. They couldn’t have been more bored with all the technicalities: "I amend this section of the constitution" or "I amend this resolution" and amendments to the amendments. All the parliamentary folderol that goes on was just too much. Finally they all just drifted out, and the isolationist resolution lost.

John L. Lewis was the power at that conference. He had upset the whole corporate system in the country with sit-ins. He had become a national, even international, figure and he fought hard in Chattanooga to get the Southern Conference to embark on a pro-Willkie, isolationist, anti-Roosevelt stand. If those miners had only stayed in the hall, they could have gotten anything they wanted.

Frank Graham certainly didn’t like the isolationist sentiment in Chattanooga. I was very fond of him and admired him, but he fell into the same trap that others did. Instead of blaming John L. Lewis and the mine workers for the isolationist sentiment and the resolutions to stay out of the war, he blamed the Communists. This is typical of that whole era. There would be three Communists there and three hundred mine workers, but they would blame the Communists rather than the mine workers.

It was at the Chattanooga meeting that I first met Jim Dombrowski. Across the hall I saw this handsome man with dark brown eyes. Jim looked like Saint Francis of Assisi. He came up and introduced himself. Kathryn was with me. Jim asked if we would like to come up to the Highlander Fold School, which he had helped Myles Horton found in 1932. He would drive us up for a day or so before we returned to Washington. So we went. Jim drove us up and Myles met us. I had never seen the school before and I just loved it. I adored Zilphia, Myles’s wife, and the other people there.

On Sunday, people at the school sent out word all over the mountains that Kathryn Lewis was there, John L. Lewis’s daughter, and by God, the miners came out again. I bet there were two hundred miners there. They were very silent men, and they all wore black hats. They sat out on the front lawn, and Kathryn had to make a little speech. Myles got them something to eat, but not one of them would take off his hat or come in the house.

Kathryn got along very well with the miners. She knew how to talk to them and so did Jim and Myles. My efforts failed, I can assure you. I would say, "Where are you from?" and "You say your name is Jones? Now, what Jones are you?" I am sure they thought I was an agent of the FBI or something. I got a very poor response. I had to learn that the only way to deal with people like that is to listen. Too much talk makes them suspicious.

I identified with the labor movement, but it took me a long time to realize that the labor movement didn’t identify with me. I remember going to one of the CIO conventions. I was considerably younger and prettier then and I was very earnest and lobbying a great deal. All the men wanted to do was take me out and buy me a drink. They wanted to have a good time. I had a terrible shock. I thought all labor men were going to be great. It was going to be just right down the line in our interests. They were going to be just as interested as I was in getting rid of the poll tax and fighting for the rights of labor. I got the biggest shock of my life to see those fat flunkies sitting around guzzling booze and chasing women. That’s what they did. That’s human, but it was a great disappointment to me. I lost a lot of illusions.
 
 

Copyright 1985, University of Alabama Press.

For information about this book, or to buy it, click here.