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A. B. “HAPPY” CHANDLER AND THE POLITICS OF CIVIL RIGHTS by JOHN PAUL HILL (Under the Direction of James C. Cobb) ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the complex civil rights views of Albert Benjamin “Happy” Chandler, one of Kentucky’s most controversial and charismatic politicians of the twentieth century. To offer perspective on his positions, this study focuses on Chandler’s statements and actions during several important periods in civil rights history. Chandler served two terms as governor (1935-1939, 1955-1959). During the first, the NAACP launched its first concerted campaign to desegregate the University of Kentucky. During the second, whites in two western Kentucky communities violently protested efforts to desegregate local schools in compliance with the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. Between his two terms as governor, Chandler served six years in the United States Senate (1939-1945) and six years as commissioner of Major League Baseball (1945-1951). As a member of the Senate, Chandler voted on antilynching legislation and on two bills designed to eliminate the poll tax in state and federal elections. During his term as commissioner, the game’s entrenched, longstanding ban on interracial play collapsed when Jackie Robinson took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. In 1968, nine years after he had last held elective office, Chandler nearly became the running mate of George C. Wallace, the arch-segregationist former governor of Alabama who was pursuing the presidency under the banner of the American Independent Party. Despite his flirtation with Wallace, Chandler’s overall handling of the important civil rights matters of the day clearly distinguished him from most of his southern political colleagues. Whereas many white southern politicians during the period espoused diehard segregationist views, Chandler was neither a racial hardliner nor a racial progressive. Balancing personal convictions against the political realities of segregated Kentucky, he was instead a moderate who took several positions during his career that quickened the end of segregation in Kentucky, the South, and throughout the nation. INDEX WORDS: A. B. “Happy” Chandler, Kentucky, African Americans, civil rights movement, civil rights moderates, Rufus B. Atwood, Alben W. Barkley, Franklin D. Roosevelt, NAACP, Major League Baseball, Branch Rickey, Jackie Robinson, Brown v. Board of Education, public school desegregation, George C. Wallace A. B. “HAPPY” CHANDLER AND THE POLITICS OF CIVIL RIGHTS by JOHN PAUL HILL B.A., Transylvania University, 1995 M.A., Western Kentucky University, 1998 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2009 © 2009 JOHN PAUL HILL All Rights Reserved A. B. “HAPPY” CHANDLER AND THE POLITICS OF CIVIL RIGHTS by JOHN PAUL HILL Major Professor: James C. Cobb Committee: Charles S. Bullock John C. Inscoe Robert A. Pratt Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia December 2009 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Several people deserve a word of thanks for helping me with this study. First and foremost, I must thank the members of my dissertation committee. My advisor, Dr. James C. Cobb, painstakingly read each chapter, offering sage advice and encouragement along the way. My graduate school experience was made richer by my association with him. Dr. John Inscoe showed an interest in this study from day one, even though the topic fell outside his main field of study, and made many valuable suggestions on how to improve the manuscript. My other committee members, Dr. Charles Bullock and Dr. Robert Pratt, each took time from their busy schedules to read each chapter. Several other people helped in some way. Michael Combs carefully read the baseball chapter twice and on more than one occasion looked up information for me at the University of Kentucky when I needed it in a pinch. My brother, Michael, proofread every chapter, saving me from some embarrassing errors. Lee Martin and Sarah Fitzpatrick tracked down some important oral interviews for me at UK and sent copies of them my way. Mike Buseman read versions of several chapters and patiently listened to me drone on about Happy Chandler on more than one occasion. Dr. Thomas Appleton, who is working on a biography of Chandler, shared many insights on Happy and opened up his home to me on one of my many research trips to Lexington. I cannot thank him enough. Dr. Carlton Jackson, emeritus professor of history at Western Kentucky University, offered words of encouragement and valuable advice many times during my research and writing of this dissertation. iv I must also acknowledge my colleagues at Andrew College, where I taught from 2006 to 2008. They were all helpful and supportive, but two of them deserve a special word of thanks. Dean of Students Sherri Taylor befriended me my first week at the college, patiently listened to me as I asked one question and then another about getting started as an instructor and “pestered” me to write. President David Seyle maintained an interest in my progress on the dissertation from the time I set foot on the Andrew campus and always made me feel right at home and part of the college’s community. Finally, I must thank my family, especially my parents, Benny and June, for their love, encouragement, and financial support over the years. This works is as much theirs as it is mine. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................... iv INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 1 THE EARLY YEARS: POLITICS AND CIVIL RIGHTS, 1898-1939.....................12 2 THE SENATE YEARS: CIVIL RIGHTS CHALLENGES, 1939-1945 ...................69 3 FACILITATOR OR ORIGINATOR? HAPPY CHANDLER AND THE INTEGRATION OF MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL, 1945-1951 .........................115 4 BROWN AND BEYOND: HAPPY CHANDLER AND PUBLIC SCHOOL DESGREGATION IN KENTUCKY, 1954-1959 ....................................................146 5 THE MINDSET OF A MODERATE? HAPPY CHANDLER, GEORGE C. WALLACE, AND THE 1960S ................................................................................189 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................220 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................................230 vi INTRODUCTION Militant segregationists occupy the pages of most studies of southern whites during the civil rights movement. This pattern is understandable, perhaps. The extremist tactics that segregationists used in their desperate yet futile attempt to preserve the racial status quo in Dixie grabbed most of the headlines, and depictions of their actions helped to highlight the difficulties that blacks faced during their heroic struggle for their long-denied constitutional rights. This tendency to emphasize the most radical segregationists, however, has also fostered the erroneous impression that nearly all white southerners, especially those in positions of power, were fire- breathing white supremacists. According to this line of thought, if a white southern politician did not espouse segregation openly, then he supported it behind the scenes. In a 1977 article for the New Yorker, for example, Calvin Trillin, a journalist who achieved fame reporting on the integration of the University of Georgia for the New York Times, claimed that northern civil rights activists dismissed the possibility that a white leader in Dixie could be anything but a defender of Jim Crow. He argued that these northern activists eschewed the terms “moderate” and “segregationist” and instead labeled white politicians either “smart segs” or “dumb segs.” According to Trillin, police chief Laurie Pritchett of Albany, Georgia, was the embodiment of a “smart seg” because he thwarted integration efforts in that city in the early 1960s through “polite,” nonviolent means. By contrast, Birmingham, Alabama, Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor was a “dumb seg” because he inadvertently helped build support for the civil rights movement when, to the horror of millions of people at home and abroad who 1 witnessed the events unfold dramatically on television, he unleashed fire hoses and police dogs on peaceful black demonstrators in 1963.1 Even the handful of southern white liberals who championed reform dismissed the idea that anyone could occupy a middle ground on civil rights, perhaps believing that anyone who did not attack segregation unreservedly prolonged its life just as much as someone who defended it wholeheartedly. Harold C. Fleming, for example, a native Georgian who served as the longtime director of the Southern Regional Council, an important civil rights organization, derisively characterized self-proclaimed civil rights moderates as “white m[e]n without sidearms.”2 Prominent social critic Lillian Smith, a Floridian by birth and the author of Strange Fruit, the controversial, best-selling novel about interracial love, said so-called moderates suffered from “moral and psychic paralysis,” insisting that they “never made a man or a nation great.”3 As Matthew D. Lassiter and Andrew B. Lewis have demonstrated in their edited collection, The Moderates’