The Southern Conference for Human Welfare and the Decade of Hope, 1938-1948 Author: Huy Q. Trinh Persistent link: http://hdl.handle.net/2345/697 This work is posted on eScholarship@BC, Boston College University Libraries. Boston College Electronic Thesis or Dissertation, 2009 Copyright is held by the author, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted. i The Southern Conference for Human Welfare and the Decade of Hope, 1938-1948 by Huy Trinh submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts Advisor: Professor Alan Lawson Second Reader: Professor Cynthia L. Lyerly Boston College History Department Advanced Independent Research April 2009 All copyright is reserved by the author. ii iii I dedicate this thesis to the memory of my little brother, Khoa Trinh, whose spirit gives me hope every day. iv Acknowledgment My thesis has its beginning in Professor Alan Lawson’s 20th Century and Tradition seminar. A simple question about American exceptionalism evolved into an investigation of southern liberals. Professor Lawson has been there since the beginning to help me through the twists and turns of coming up with a topic, drafting a proposal, researching, and the tedious process of writing and editing. This thesis owes much of its existence to the guidance and patience of Professor Lawson. Unlike students who dreaded facing their advisors when they did not meet deadlines or when their work was inadequate, I looked forward to meeting Professor Lawson whenever I fell behind and needed inspiration. Professor Lawson’s calm demeanor, infinite patience, and wise words helped me through all the difficult periods of researching and writings. His insightful critiques infinitely improved the thesis from its original form. I am forever grateful to Professor Lawson for the countless aid he rendered and advices he gave. I want to thank Professor Cynthia Lyerly for agreeing to be my second reader on an incredibly short notice. Professor Lyerly gave up a weekend to read my hastily submitted thesis so that I could make my deadline. I am grateful for her time and patience. I want to especially thank Professor Paul Spagnoli of the History Department for being a mentor and a friend over the past four years. I first met Professor Spagnoli through the Benjamin Mays Mentoring Program at the beginning of my freshman year and through the years Professor Spagnoli has given me countless advices on academics, life, and everything under the sun. I thanks Professor Spagnoli for keeping me up to date on important events and opportunities that have helped me enhance my academic life at Boston College. I will miss our monthly lunch and meetings together. v I cannot leave out Professor Mark Gelfand in my acknowledgement. Professor Gelfand was the first history professor I ever had at Boston College. His class, “Law and American Society” and his writing seminar introduced me to the serious study of American history. Professors Gelfand not only demonstrated an incredible mastery of the subject by answering every question that us students could throw at him, but his sense of humor, especially his New Jersey jokes, made class fly by. I have almost made a career out studying under Professor Gelfand. I am eternally grateful to Professor Gelfand for introducing me to Professor Lawson and for advising me during the early stages of my thesis. I am confident that without Professor Gelfand’s critiques and suggestions on how to improve my Scholar of the College proposal, I would not get the chance to conduct an advanced independent thesis. And finally, I am thankful to Professor Gelfand for always agreeing to meet me whenever I needed to talk to him and to never mind the fact that I never notify him that I would be coming. Thanking Professor Gelfand is truly a thesis in itself. Next, I want to thank my loving parents, Hai Trinh and Nga Nguyen. They traveled half- way across the globe, from the warm and familiar country of Vietnam to the cold and strange state of Massachusetts, so that their children could enjoy the best education the world had to offer. I can never truly thank them for the long and endless hours they labored to provide me with a loving and comfortable home. Against countless advices from friends and family members, my parents encouraged me to study whatever that I want to study. Their only condition was that I put my heart into the field that I love and become the best student of history and philosophy that I can be. I want to thank my father for spending many afternoons building endless rows of book shelves in my room and for instilling in me the love of reading for learning shake. vi I would like to thank Gaelle Gourgues and Rossanna Contreras of the McNair Program for their generous support over the summer of 2008. Their support allowed me to conduct substantial research into my topic. Their graduate school workshops and events helped prepare me for further academic study in the future. I cannot leave out the staff at the Interlibrary Loan Office at Boston College. They retrieved countless documents and microfilms at my behest and did it with speed and efficiency. They made researching my thesis a manageable task. Without them, this thesis would have been severely limited in scope. Last and never least, I want to thank my roommates, Matthew Porter and Joseph Gravellese for their encouragement and accommodation while I was writing my thesis. I want to especially acknowledge and thank my roommates of three years and best friend of four, Matt, for being there every day. Matt had been a crucial part of me getting my thesis done. At the cost of delaying his own work, Matt listened to me complaining whenever I had writer’s block, which happened with disturbingly great frequency. Matt makes his delicious Turkish tea whenever I have to write for a long period of time. And Matt’s willingness to drive me to the grocery market whenever I need to get the necessary foods to keep me active during my writing binge will always be remembered. I thank Matt for opening the TV and Xbox in his room to me whenever I need mindless distractions from my thesis. I can write pages and pages of examples of Matt helping me. Finally, I want to thank Matt for being one of the greatest friends I have ever had. I look to Matt’s dedication to his craft of journalism and incredible work ethic as a source of inspiration. Huy Q. Trinh April 19, 2009 vii List of Abbreviations Atlanta Constitution AC Chicago Defender CD Chicago Daily Tribune CDT Civil Rights Committee CRC Commission on Interracial Cooperation CIC Nashville Banner NB National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax NCAPT New York Times NYT Richmond Times-Dispatch RTD Southern Conference Educational Fund SCEF Southern Conference for Human Welfare SCHW Southern Regional Council SRC Washington Post WP viii Table of Contents Acknowledgment iv List of Abbreviations vii Introduction 1 Chapter One 9 The Road to Birmingham Chapter Two 34 The Anti-Poll Tax Crusade (1939-1942) Chapter Three 61 World War II and the Years of Hope (1941-1946) Chapter Four 113 The End of Progress Conclusion 163 Appendix 1 171 The Plight of Cautious Liberals Bibliography 183 1 Introduction “[The South] is exceptional in Western nonfascist civilization since the Enlightenment in that it lacks nearly every trace of radical thought. In the South all progressive thinking going further than mild liberalism has been practically nonexistent for a century.”1 Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma Political pundits, TV commentators, and historians have proclaimed that we have entered the Age of Obama. What this new age means for America’s race relationships is yet to be determined. All would agree, however, that President Obama would not have broken the final barrier and became the first African-American president if not for the civil rights generation that preceded him. The Civil Rights Movement is rightly lauded as a watershed moment in American history. Men and women of all races marched and died together to challenge America to live up to its highest ideal of human liberty and equality. Most Americans would point to the Brown decision in 1954 and the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 as the beginning of the modern Civil Rights Movement. Few know about an earlier and smaller movement that began in the South to enfranchise black voters, to obtain economic opportunity for African Americans, and to abolish racial segregation. The most astonishing aspect of this movement was that it was instigated and 1 Myrdal, American Dilemma, 469-70. 2 led by white southern liberals of an interracial organization known as the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW). When the term “southern liberals” is brought up, it often elicits one of two responses: “Were there any?” and “Is that an oxymoron?”2 Southern liberalism appears to many, then and now, as a strange and rare phenomenon. The South, a region that had fought a bloody war defending its slavery and states’ rights, was never known to have a progressive spirit. Southern liberals stood out in contrast to the traditions of their region. But in spite of their exceptionalism in relation to their region, they reflected the same complicated racial dichotomy that had haunted the South since the first African-American slaves landed on its rich soil. In his classic work on the subject, In Search of the Silent South (1977), the historian of southern liberals Morton Sosna broadly defined white southern liberals as those who perceived that there was a serious maladjustment of race relations in the South, who recognized that the existing system resulted in grave injustices for blacks, and who either actively endorsed or engaged in program to aid Southern blacks in their fight against lynching, disfranchisement, segregation, and blatant discrimination in such areas as education, employment, and law enforcement.3 Southern liberals were thus different from most southerners in their acknowledgement that southern blacks did not fare well under the present racial and economic systems and that crucial changes were needed.