John Egerton - Speak Now Against The Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South

A Mind to Stay Here (1970)

The Americanization of Dixie (1974)

Visions of Utopia (1977)

Nashville: The Faces of Two Centuries (1979)

Generations (1983)

Southern Food (1987)

Side Orders (1990)

Shades of Gray (1991)

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

Copyright 1994 by John Egerton

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Southern Regional Council for permission to reprint an excerpt by William Faulkner from The Segregation Decisions published by the Southern Regional Council, Atlanta, Georgia, in 1956.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Egerton, John.
Speak now against the day: the generation before the civil rights movement in the South/John Egerton.1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-83457-7
1. Civil rights workersSouthern statesHistory20th century. 2. Civil rights workersSouthern statesBiography. 3. Civil rights movementsSouthern statesHistory20th century. 4. Afro-AmericansCivil rights. 5. Southern statesRace relations. I. Title.
E185.61.E28 1994
323.092275dc20

93-47491

Published November 18, 1994

v3.1

For Harry Ashmore, John A. Griffin, and Johnny Popham, elder statesmen of the mythical and whimsical Southern War Correspondents and Camp Followers Association, and in memory of Harold Fleming, their late and esteemed fellow penman and prince of bon mots.

And for Ann, first and last.

We speak now against the day when our Southern people who will resist to the last these inevitable changes in social relations, will, when they have been forced to accept what they at one time might have accepted with dignity and goodwill, will say, Why didnt someone tell us this before? Tell us this in time?

W ILLIAM F AULKNER

T uesday, August 14, 1945: When the word finally came at six oclock that evening, downtown Atlanta exploded in a clangorous din of pent-up anticipation and excitement. Unleashed by President Harry S. Trumans radio announcement that Japan had surrendered and World War II was over, tens of thousands of Georgians erupted into the streets. They poured out of offices and stores, emptied theaters and restaurants, brought traffic to a standstill. Sirens blew, horns blasted, bells rang; people screamed, kissed, danced, drank. In spontaneous and simultaneous unison with their fellow citizens from New York to Los Angeles and practically every town and hamlet in between, the ecstatic Atlantans shook the ground with a wild and deafening celebration.

Before sunset brought the sidewalk temperature down out of the nineties and lowered the steambath humidity by a few points, sweating, shouting newsboys were hawking extras of the Atlanta Constitution and the Atlanta Journal up and down Forsyth and Peachtree Streets and all over the business district. The papers were literally hot off the press, their ink still damp and smudgy, their page-one headlines and stories hastily thrown together. The message they delivered amounted to physical confirmation, virtual proof, of a reality that seemed almost too good to be true.

proclaimed the Constitutions banner headline. Just one week earlier, the paper had reported the destruction of Hiroshima, a Japanese city of more than 300,000 peopleroughly the size of Atlantaby the first atomic bomb ever used in warfare. Editor Ralph McGill, quoting Revelations in a column called The Smell of Fire and Brimstone, hailed the harnessing of the atom as easily the greatest story that has happened in our lifetimebut with deeply mixed emotions, he said the use of atomic power as a weapon of mass destruction was a great and terrifying thing.

McGill wrote an editorial-page column seven days a week in a style that blended sagacity, humor, righteous indignation, and melancholy fatalism. Two days after the Hiroshima blast, he told his readers that Hitler had turned Germany into one great big Ku Klux Klan Klavern, but now justice had finally prevailed, because it was Jewish refugees and other exiles fleeing from the Nazi dictator who had come to America and created the A-bomb that won the war. God is not mocked, the Atlanta editor declared. Other commentators on the page with McGill shared his sense of moral vindication in the wars outcome. The Nazi idea of a master race was utterly demolished by Hitlers defeat, wrote columnist Robert Quillen, and the same fate had befallen the Japanese; victorious America, on the other hand, was not a superior race but a mixture, an idea, a way of life, an attitude.

In the August 15 Constitution, under the headline CITY THUNDERS INTO POSTWAR ERA , celebrating Atlantans expressed their elation at the end of a long war (three years, eight months, and seven days, McGill reminded them) and their nervous anticipation of what lay ahead. The war had interrupted the New Deal programs aimed at rescuing the nationand especially the Southfrom economic quicksand, said one observer; now it was time to face the challenges of peace.

Those challenges took many forms. The economic stimulation that the war had brought to the depressed South in the form of military bases and defense industries had to be converted to the peacetime creation of consumer goods and services. Per capita income in the region was still under four hundred dollars a year (closer to two hundred dollars for blacks), and that was barely more than half the national average. One out of every three adults had left school by the end of the sixth grade. Millions of men and women, white and black, would be returning from the military or from wartime jobs in the North; they would need education and job training, employment, housing, medical and legal help.

A new generation of young leaders, bringing back with them visions of a better life elsewhere, was already showing an eager readiness to help lift the South out of its eighty-year nightmare of postCivil War stagnation. The black thirty percent of the regions thirty million citizens were especially hungry for change; in the view of Atlanta-born Walter White, leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the victory for freedom and democracy abroad was a prelude to the battle for those ideals at home.

With more finality than any occurrence since the end of the Civil War, the American triumph in World War II appeared to mark the conclusion of an old and outdated era in the Southor so it seems now, with the benefit of a half-century of hindsight to sharpen our vision. In the blissful aftermath of that historic conquest, the American people reached a rare state of consensus that momentarily obscured the age-old barriers between them. They were, in that fleeting instant, truly We the People, eager to form a more perfect Union, and the Southerners among them were as caught up in that contagious spirit of righteousness and invincibility as any of their countrymen.