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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview B-0003, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
This interview covers three separate conversations with Clark Foreman regarding his career in race relations, public service, and politics. His childhood in Georgia and his travels in Europe led to his work for the Commission on Interracial Cooperation in Atlanta with Will Alexander. His enduring reputation as a radical and rumored Communist began during his tenure with the Phelps-Stokes and Julius Rosenwald Funds. He acted out his growing commitment to integration and political equality while supervising New Deal projects for the Department of the Interior, the state parks, the interdepartmental committee on Negro affairs, and the power division of the Public Works Authority. This interview also addresses his attempts to provide more public housing for African Americans, and his opinion of leadership styles within the Interracial Commission and the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. He explains why the Southern Conference needed to endorse the Henry Wallace 1948 campaign, even though it was unsuccessful. He also compares the contributions of socialists and communists to the Southern Conference at state and national levels. Foreman lost jobs over false reports that he endorsed Communism or was too aggressive in his work. The interview concludes with comments by Clark and Mairi Foreman about his work with Black Mountain College, the Navy, and the National Citizens PAC, especially focusing on how his children developed radical views during those years.
Clark Foreman worked in the Atlanta Commission on Interracial Cooperation, the Roosevelt Administration, and the Southern Conference for Human Welfare from the 1920s through the 1940s. This interview traces his efforts to provide equal social services and political rights for African Americans through these organizations and explains how he developed these goals. He also discusses his travels in Europe, his work with Black Mountain College and organized labor, and his criticism of the Red Scare.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
This is an interview with Mr. Clark Foreman in Atlanta, Georgia, on November 16, 1974, conducted by Jacquelyn Hall and Bill Finger for the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina. We want to maybe do a couple of interviews. One today and maybe on Tuesday so we won't go on too long and get you too tired. Maybe today we can talk about your early years in Georgia, your work with the CIC and on up to the Southern Conference. Cover your later years on Tuesday. That sound okay?
That's seventy-two of them to cover.
Well, let's start in 1902. You were born in Georgia?
Born right here in Atlanta, just a few blocks from the Biltmore.
Was your Atlanta background important to you in your early years? The influence of your grandfather?
Well, I don't remember it except what I've heard. My grandfather was the
founder and publisher of the Atlanta Constitution.
My
That's Clark Howell, right?
No, Evan
So you grew up in Atlanta and went to the University of Georgia.
I grew up in Atlanta and I went to the public schools of Atlanta and then to the University of Georgia.
Was there an expectation that you would go into the Atlanta Constitution?
No. My oldest brother was the one who was interested in writing and he had ideas of going into that field, but I never did.
When did you go to college?
In 1916. Wait a minute. I guess it was 1917.
You were pretty young, then.
Yeah. I graduated when I was 19 in 1921. See, I was born in 1902.
What was your experience at the University of Georgia like?
Well, I guess it was a pretty ordinary experience at college. I took a
regular liberal arts course, so to speak. Latin, Greek and so forth.
Very little science. No economics. But the most important thing that
happened to me at the University of Georgia was that in my second year
there one morning at the Chi Phi chapter house where I was living—Chi
Phi fraternity—I came down for breakfast. There was a lot of talk about
a rape that occurred outside of the town of Athens. Where they said that
some Negro man had raped a pregnant white girl and then killed her.
Well, all day long on the campus there was talk about this going on. And
that afternoon I went up to the court house, which was supposed to be a
mobproof [back?]
What kind of things did you say about it in your letters to your family? How did they respond to your concern?
Well, I just said what a terrible, barbaric thing it was. And they wrote back, very sympathetically. My family was broadminded. Both my mother and my father were very broadminded, liberal minded people. Strictly bourgeois people. But they believed very strongly in free speech and the right of the individual.
How did the Atlanta Constitution treat lynchings?
I don't remember what the Atlanta Constitution did, but
I suppose they were pretty good about it. The Athens Banner, which was the local paper in Athens, was very good on the
subject and denounced the lynching. I didn't do anything about it then.
I went on to Harvard. The next year, after graduating at the University
of Georgia I went on to Harvard. I went to Harvard for a year.
That's where you met Corliss Lamont, isn't it?
To show you the state of my mind at that time, just across from me in the dormitory where I lived was Donald CulrossPeattie, who later became quite a writer on botanical matters. And he invited me to go and hear W.E.B. DuBois at the Liberal Club. So I said okay, I accepted. When he came to call for me it was about 6:30 and I said "Well, isn't it awfully early to be going." He said "Well, we're going for dinner." "Going for dinner? I didn't understand that. I can't go." "Why not?" "Well, I can't go and have dinner with a Negro." He thought that was pretty silly and so did my roommates. And we argued about it until I had no rational defense. So I said okay and went. That was my first break, so to speak, from the southern tradition.
What other events in Cambridge do you remember from that year that pushed you into further breaks from your southern tradition?
I don't remember anything else on the Negro question. W.E.B. Dubois was very fine and made a great speech and I was very impressed by him at the time. I don't remember anything else on the Negro question.
You went on to London from Harvard?
Yes, after a year at Harvard my family gave me $1,000 to go to Europe for
a trip. So I said "Can I just take the $1,000 and make it last as long
as I want to, not go on one of these special tours." They said yes.Outline of History, which I read going
over on the boat and was greatly impressed by it. Particularly the last
chapter when he talked about what could be. He talked about the kind of
society that should be. So when I got to London I thought I ought to
talk to him. I wrote him a note and said I'd like to come talk to him.
He didn't answer. I looked him up in the telephone book and found that I
had sent it to his country place instead of the place he had in town. So
I called up. His secretary said "Who's calling." I said "Mr Foreman."
She put him right on. I said "Mr Wells, I wrote you a letter but I sent
it to your country place and I haven't received a reply so I thought
maybe you didn't get it." He said "Oh, then you're not the Mr Foreman I
talked to this morning." Apparently the only reason I got through right
away to him was that he thought I was somebody else. Anyway I did and he
told me how busy he was and how he couldn't take time away from his
writing and so forth, but wanted to know what I wanted to talk to him
about. I said "I can't go into it on the telephone, but I would like
very much to have a little while with you." He said "Well, you write me
another letter and send it here and I'll see." I did write another
letter and sent it over by special messenger to his apartment and he
replied very promptly and said I could come a few days later. He gave me
an appointment for 15 minutes. When I went over to see him for the 15
minutes, he was very cordial, very nice and I told him why I'd come to
him. I'd read his book and I was very much impressed by it and I wanted
him to advise me what he thought would be the best thing for me to do. I
really was coming to him just the way I would come to a doctor, for
advice as to what I should do with my life to carry out the ideas he had
in that last chapter in the book. He said "Well, no doctor would
diagnose on the basis of such a small amount
What did your father do for a living?
He was the state director of the Mutual Benefit Life Insurance Company.
The time came, I got ready to leave, father said well, he couldn't
So I went to the London School of Economics and there I had a very
different kind of experience. Of course there were all kinds of people
there from all over the world. A great many Negro students, some of whom
I got to know quite well. One of the crucial things that happened was
that I was given a book to review for the school paper. The book was J.
H. Oldham's Christianity and the Race Problem. Now my
parents had been writing me all the time urging me to come on home and
get to work, you know, don't just stay over in Europe indefinitely. But
when I read Oldham's book, he told about the starting of the Interracial
Commission, the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, it was called,
and what a good job they were doing in Atlanta. Well, here I was from
Atlanta, reading a book in London, learning about what was happening
here in my own home town that I had never heard of before. So I decided
to come home and go to work for the Interracial Commission. When I came
home I told father that's what I wanted to do and he said "Well, I know
the head of it very well, Dr Ashby Jones. He's a very close friend of
mine. And I will arrange for him to see you." So he did. I went to see
Dr Jones and he was very kind, but he said I should see Will Alexander,
the director. I went to see Will Alexander and told him that I wanted to
work with the Commission.
He said they would like to have me but that they didn't have any money.
There was nothing in the budget to provide for a job. So he couldn't pay
me until January. I could start in January. Well, this was in August. I
said "Well, look, I don't want to just sit around here from now until
January waiting to work. Why don't I
On the basis of reading one book you were interested enough in race problems to come back and go to work for the Interracial Commission?
Well, I was interested enough to do it before I read the book, I guess. But the book only showed me where I could work. Anyway, I went to work and I was very pleased with that salary because it was quite a good salary at that time. The first one I'd ever earned.
What did you do?
I became the secretary for the Committee for Georgia. Arthur Raper talked
about it yesterday a little bit. And set up these committees around the
state. For instance, I went to Augusta, Georgia, and went to see some
people there. I went to see the leading white people that I knew about
and talked to them. And they said "Look, we don't have any trouble in
Augusta. Everything is fine here. We have the best niggers in the South.
No trouble at all." Then I went to see the Negro leaders and talked to
them and they said more or less the same thing. "We don't have any
trouble in Augusta. Everything's fine here. The white folks just treat
us fine. Everything's good." I said "Well, I noticed when I came out
here, that the paving stopped when it got to the Negro part of town."
"Oh yes, that's true, and there's no water, no sewer . . . " There were
no public facilities for the Negroes who lived in Augusta. So I said,
"Isn't that something that we should do something about?" They were all
very interested in doing something about that. Then I went back to talk
to the white people and told them, the white leaders. And they didn't
know about it
What kind of leaders? Were these church leaders or business leaders, bankers?
Both. Church, largely. I don't think there were many bankers in the Negro community in Augusta at that time.
I meant white and Negro.
Well . . . in the white community . . .
The mayor of the town or the ministers . . . .
I don't remember who it was I went to see.
In general, though, in setting up interracial committees, what kind of people were you trying to . . .
I'd try to find out who were the most influential people in town and the most likely to talk to me about it, you know.
But you talked openly about your interest in interracial activities and people would see you and . . . .
Sure, sure.
What kind of accomplishments did you . . . ?
Well, they set up the committee and they did get the streets paved and they did get the public facilities extended into the Negro community.
Did you set up local interracial committees in other towns?
Not in every town, but a few towns. Arthur Raper said Augusta, Brunswick and I don't remember how many others.
What were some of the other issues that you tried to work on?
Issues? No ideological issues. It was just a question of getting the roads paved and getting the facilities evenly distributed.
Those were the limits of what you were trying to do at the time?
Well, as Arthur Raper said yesterday, what we were trying to do was to get the people to working together. And for them, when they sat down together, to decide among themselves, what they wanted to do. How far they were willing to go.
Had you started to become aware of the poll tax?
Not at that time.
Did you learn about it through this kind of exposure to towns across Georgia? More political kinds of issues.
I don't think I did. That development came later and what happened, after
I'd been down in Georgia here for two years . . . . I began to feel
pretty depleted, you know? I felt that all the time I was trying to pull
people along and I was not getting the inspiration that I needed. So I
decided that I should go North for a while. About that time Thomas Jesse
Jones, the director of the Phelps-Stokes Fund, came down to visit the
Martha Berry schools. He stopped by Atlanta to see Will Alexander and
asked me to go up there with him, to the various schools. I did. And I
told him that I was planning to go to New York and he said that he
thought that would be a big mistake, that I should stay down in the
South and get my Ph.D. I said I wasn't willing to go back and ask my
father to support me anymore and that I was going North. So he said
"Well, next year I'm going to be in Africa, so if you come up and work
in the office as my assistant on a part time basis and go to the
University of Columbia and study for your Ph.D. we can give you a good
salary." So that was very good and I accepted that offer. But while I
was up there, I realized that politics was a crucial issue. I don't know
when I realized it or whether I realized it here and then there or just
how. But what I do remember is that Thomas Jesse Jones was horrified at
this and wrote my father a long
Let me ask you something about the Interracial Commission before you go on. You said that you felt depleted, you weren't learning anything or weren't getting any inspiration in your work with the Interracial Commission. What about Will Alexander? You didn't learn anything from him or you didn't feel any . . . ? What was your impression of him?
Well, he was always very friendly. My impression was of a very nice Methodist minister.
He didn't have any vision of change in the South that he communicated to you?
I guess he did have visions in terms of Christian ideology, you know, but it was nothing that got into me. And as Arthur Raper said yesterday, always when people said what are the objectives of the Interracial Commission, he would say "Well, we don't have any objectives as such. What we're trying to do is work together as far as we can." And that made a lot of sense to me then and it still does. Because if I had gone down to Augusta and told those people "Lets do this and let's do that" there would have been much more resistance than if I said "Well, let's get you together and see what you want to do."
It made sense to you but it didn't take you very far, it didn't inspire you.
No, it didn't inspire me because I didn't feel I was getting the education that I needed.
What about Arthur Raper? How would you describe the differences between Arthur Raper and Will Alexander? Or were there any? Were they very close in their . . . .?
Arthur Raper took my place when I left. I didn't know him tool well.
Was Jessie Daniel Ames there at the time? What was she like?
Yes, she was there. She was a very good woman.
Do you remember what kind of work she was doing?
Yeah, largely on getting women together against lynching. I found Mary McLoud Bethune a more inspiring person than most any of the others, although John Hope was a very inspiring person to work with, too.
So you went to work for the Phelps-Stokes Fund?
I went to the Phelps-Stokes Fund and worked there for two years. After
I'd worked there for two years I'd got my M.A. at Columbia. The Julius
Rosenwald Fund, Edward Embree, president of the Julius Rosenwald Fund,
What had you done to . . . ?
I believe I had thought W.E.B. Dubois was right and that political activity was the real answer. I hadn't done anything otherwise. It was just that he thought I was a dangerous radical.
Did you try to push Phelps-Stokes in that direction?
I tried to push him but he wasn't pushable. He was a Welshman. Jesse
Jones. I remember I was working in his office at the time that Lindbergh
flew to Paris. He came in and said "Oh, isn't this wonderful, wonderful.
Only a Nordic could have done this." I was horrified. Here was a
blackish Cephalic Welshman with a long head, as un-Nordic as you could
be and still be white. I said "Nonsense." Well, I
Did Will Alexander think you were a little too aggressive as the secretary of the Georgia Interracial Committee?
I don't think so because Will Alexander, when Edwin Embree sent him the letter that he got from Jesse Jones, Will Alexander wrote a long letter to Embree recommending me, on the basis of which Embree gave me the job.
There weren't any conflicts between you and the other staff members of the Interracial Commission?
No. Alexander and I didn't have any conflicts, no.
What exactly did you do at the Phelps-Stokes and at the Rosenwald Funds?
In the Phelps-Stokes Fund, while Jesse Jones was in Africa, my job was just sort of to take care of things in the office and see that letters were answered. I didn't really have to do a great deal of anything except to go to Columbia and get my M.A. degree.
Then you moved over to the Rosenwald Fund, to do what?
Then I went to the Rosenwald Fund. And the story with the Rosenwald Fund
was this: When Julius Rosenwald set up the Rosenwald Fund, he gave $25
million with the provision that it all had to be spent within 25 years.
But he gave it in Sears Roebuck stock. So in those first five years they
gave away money every year, but at the end of the year stock had gone up
so much that they had more money than they began with. It was 1928 when
I went . . . . So Embree was very much worried then that he wasn't going
to be able to get rid of all this $25 million within the 25 years he had
to do it. So my job was to think up new ways of giving away this money.
Which pleased me a lot. His idea really was for me to go out
Did you publish the results of that study?
I did later on as my Ph.D. thesis. I'll tell you about it. At that time
there was no county in the South which provided a free library service
for all the people. I thought that was a pretty bad thing and that the
Rosenwald Fund could do a good job by giving assistance to a number of
counties provided they would give free library service to all the
people, rural and urban, Negro and white. So we found 13 counties that
agreed to match our money on a four or five year period and set up these
county libraries systems. Which I imagine now is a pretty general
pattern in the South. After a couple of years with these libraries and
schools and so on and so on, along with the declining stock market,
Embree was no longer afraid of not being able to give away the money. He
was
Why did he want you to go to Europe for a year?
Get rid of me. I was on his hands and he had his money and he didn't know what to do.
Wasn't that a little odd just to say I'll pay your way to Europe. He could have said "Go out and find a job" couldn't he. He didn't have to keep you around and send you to Europe. He must have been impressed with your work or something.
Well, maybe he was. Who am I to say he wasn't?
Was the only reason he wanted to get rid of you because he was worried about his money or did he think you were moving along in directions that he—
There was no indication of anything except financial. And he gave me this
year's salary and said go to Europe. On the way over to Europe, on the
boat, I met my wife, who was a Canadian. And she was going to Paris to
do stories for her paper. She was the women's editor of the Toronto Daily Star.
You were going to Paris also?
Yeah, I was going to Paris also. Then from Paris I went on
That's very romantic. Traveling all through eastern Europe and then swinging back through Paris to get married.
So you just knew her one summer and then married her the next summer?
Yeah.
Did you have any idea at that point that you would return South and she would leave Toronto . . .
Nope.
Did you think you would stay in the North? After you got married did you think you would go to Canada?
Well, what happened on that was I got a letter from her saying that she was arriving on such and such a date in July. And the next day I got a letter from Edwin Embree saying that he wanted me to come back to the United States. There was an important job over here to be done. So I wrote him a letter. I couldn't tell him at that time when I would be able to come back because I didn't know.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
I wrote him and told him that I would be coming back the first part of August but I couldn't tell him just exactly when.
Did he give you an indication of what the job was?
No. The day before Mairi arrived I got a cable from him saying "Cable
when you will arrive." So we got married after a few days and I sent him
a cable saying "Just married. Would like to stay a couple
Had you decided to get married before she came?
No. How could I decide to get married before she came?
You mean you decided in three days after she arrived on the boat?
Yeah.
You were a bold young man.
As my mother said, how could you tell? How could you be sure? But we both were sure and it's worked out very well.
Did you write a book when you were traveling around Europe?
Yes.
Did you expand your dissertation about Negro education?
No. That had all been published before I left. At Columbia you have to
publish your dissertation before they'll give you the Ph.D. That was
fortunate, too, because the Rosenwald Fund took care of that. They paid
for the publication of the dissertation. Anyway, when Mairi arrived, her
assignment was to write a story about how the French spend their summers
in French summer resorts. So we decided that we'd see. I went to the
American Express and asked what was the best place to go to see, at that
time, resorts, summer resorts. So he told me the name of some beach
—Deauville— Greek
Civilization. He had been a professor of Greek Civilization at
Oxford. So I said "Well, Alfred, why don't we have a Greek ceremony. Be
married in a Greek ceremony." He said well, that wouldn't be possible
because that took two weeks. They started one week and then finished the
next week. I skipped, in this process, the fact that in the morning we
thought maybe we could get some extraterritorial help so to speak and
had gone to see the Canadian consul in Geneva. He turned out to be a
friend of Mairi's father and he said "Are you Colonel Frazer's
daughter?" She said yes. He said "Well, I think you should get married
in Toronto. Toronto is a very beautiful place to get married in. I was
married there." We said thank you very much and left him and went to see
the American consul. When we got to the American consulate they said,
"Oh, he's not here." "Where can we find him?" "He's probably swimming
out in the lake." So we went out there and swam out to this raft and
there, sure enough, was this fellow. I started talking to him about it
and said we wanted to get married. He said he couldn't do it, that he
didn't have authority, which wasn't right. He did have authority. Could
have done
That's the book that you wrote.
Yeah. Then later on . . . the substance of my lecture I wrote in an
article for the New Republic and they published it
with a big whole front page given to it. So when I got back WW Norton,
the publisher, asked me to put it into a book. I did. After the lecture,
we gave a reception at the hotel had a sky room up at the top. I
remember this young man who had worked for them, worked for the
Zimmerns. Later on became a professor of psychology at Harvard. He was
the one told me we couldn't get married because of the bans. When he
heard me introducingConstitution and she was the
women's editor of the Toronto Daily Star, some
enterprising reporter picked up the fact that we were married, see, and
wired our respective papers. Wired the Toronto Daily
Star and the Atlanta Constitution. So there were
stories, very confusing, about the marriage saying that . . . I had
wired my family saying that we were married in Geneva. So when the paper
got the wire from New York they ran a story that we'd had this double
wedding, civil and religious ceremony, you know. How they could have
done that I don't know.
How did your parents handle all this, these cables and . . . ?
They didn't mind. My mother said "Well, how could you be so sure?"
What kind of impression did your trip to Russia make on you?
That I didn't want to live there. My impression of Russia was that they were really struggling and trying to do something. But they were so far behind us that they had nothing really to teach us except in the spirit of working.
Political ideology of the times didn't effect you? Leninism.
No. In fact, some of the people that I knew there were called Trotskyists
and one of them later on disappeared. The husband of Freda Utley. And
she wrote a book called The Dreams we Lost in which
she said I was one of the few people who came to Russia who was not
taken in by the prevailing euphoria.
Had you read Marx's and Lenin's works in London at the School of Economics?
I don't think I read them in London, but I read them in Russia. I studied a lot in the Marxist Leninist Institute in Moscow. I said I studied . . . I read there.
What were your criticisms of what was happening in Russia?
A complete lack of freedom. Complete lack of bread, or almost a complete lack of it. 1932 or '33. Very hard times.
Were you aware of how hard the times were in the States?
No. I missed out on the depression completely. I mean by that I was fortunate in keeping afloat during the depression, thanks to the Rosenwald Fund.
When you came home you still were able to keep out of the
When I came back to New York in 1933 Embree and Will Alexander met me and told me that when the New Deal had been set up they made a presentation to Roosevelt saying that there should be some special provision made to be sure that the Negroes got their fair share of the New Deal. Roosevelt agreed but said that it should be handled by Harold Ickes. So they went to see Harold Ickes and he said suggest me a name, give me a list of names of people that you think can handle the job. So they gave him a list of names, out of which he chose me. Ickes chose me.
On the recommendation of Will Alexander?
From the list that Will Alexander and Embree gave him. I don't know who the other names were, if that's what you mean.
So you went to work within the Department of Interior.
Yes.
Let me ask you first to go back a little bit. What was the thesis of your article and your speech on the new internationalism?
That the withdrawal of such a large part of the world economy as the
Russians represented made the old theories of capitalist economy out of
date and no longer workable. At the same time, the socialist theory that
could have a new system wasn't going to work because of the fact that
the United States and the rest of the world didn't go into it. And that
. . . what I said was that there would be more and more exchange between
governments and less and less between individuals. So there would be
more intergovernmental activity in economics. And that's what I wrote up
in a book called the New Internationalism.
Wasn't there some protest on the part of the blacks about the appointment of a white man?
Not at first. When I took the job . . . . When I went in to
Were there any other black secretaries in the Washington bureaucracy at that time?
At the time I gave the job to Lucia Pitts she was the first black
secretary in government. Gene Talmadge, who was then the governor of
Georgia, went on the radio twice a day and denounced me for doing
such
That's amazing, because the other government dining rooms stayed segregated, didn't they. The department of Interior cafeterias were the only, still were the only integrated cafeterias in Washington.
Well, later on even, during the Second World War, when they built the new big Interior building, some women employees came to Ickes and protested the fact that Negroes were eating in the dining room. So he went down next day, himself, and ate in the general dining room. When he got through he stood up on his chair, knocked on the table and said "I've got an announcement to make. Yesterday several employees came to me and complained about the fact that Negroes were eating in the dining room and I want everybody to understand that it is absolutely okay and it should be done and if anybody comes to me with any complaints on the subject any more that person will be fired." So that was the end of that.
So in 1933 and 1934 you ate with Luca Pitts . . . you ate with your secretary in the dining hall.
Yeah.
What were your duties as adviser of the economic status of the Negro? That was your title?
Yeah. Adviser on the Economic Status of the Negroes. Another example of the kind of thing that went on. You see, when I went in there Ickes said "It's understood with the President that even though you're working in my office you're to be operating throughout the government, anywhere."
I found that the CCC was set up, you know, to give employment relief to
people. They had Negro camps and white camps, but in the Negro camps
they would not employ any Negro skilled, intellectual labor or any . . .
. And the army people there were all white, even in the Negro camps. So
I went to the head of the CCC to complain about this and he said "Well,
there's nothing we can do about that. The reason we can't do anything
about it is that the army is in charge of assigning people to the camps
and they are assigning white officers. They don't want the white
officers to be eating with Negroes." I said "Well, I
Did that have a ripple effect throughout the CCC? Were there more and more black officers . . . .?
Well, I can't generalize as to how prevalent it was, but that's something you could find out. I mean somebody that did research on it could find out. But it did have some ripple effect, but how much I don't know.
Were you involved at all in the public housing aspects of the Department of Interior?
Very much involved in it. At that time, in 1933 and '34, my involvement was to see that Negroes got their share of the jobs. And when they started a public housing venture or any other public works, say in Atlanta, that ten percent of the Negroes—or whatever the percentage of the population was—got jobs.Finally we got an order to that effect through the Public Works Administration. That employment should be on the basis of the population. And if the skilled workers of the town were available, they had to be . . . jobs had to be given to Negroes in proportion. But later on I became the director of defense housing. That was an entirely different story.
Did you try at all to challenge segregation in the public housing projects that you built?
Well, as a matter of fact I didn't because that had to be done through the local housing authorities. For instance, any housing that was built in Atlanta was done through the Atlanta housing authority. They made the policies. Policies were not made in Washington.
Did Ickes try at all to pressure them, the local housing authorities . . . ?
No, I didn't.
Did that issue even come up?
No.
It was just assumed that housing projects would be segregated.
I think now thatwe were just so eager to get houses built that we weren't thinking about the problem of segregation. But I don't remember the issue ever being made. Anyway, after two years I said to Ickes that I thought that Robert Weaver was capable of handling the job. And if he would make him the advisor, I would resign. Ickes said that he would make him advisor, but he didn't want me to resign. He would like me to stay on as his special counsel in his office to give him advice on general things. Which consisted largely of writing his speeches and working on a book for him and so forth. So that takes us to 1934.
You stayed on as his special adviser?
Yeah. That's '34. So I think that's enough for today.
[End of November 16 interview.]
[November 19, 1974 interview begins]
During the panel discussion you mentioned an incident which almost got
you fired from the Interracial Commission. I wondered if you would tell
me that incident again and any other similar incidents which might give
us some idea about what the members of the Interracial Commission, the
white members in particular, were trying to do. What their
Yes, well, this man, Marion Jackson
But he wasn't typical of the board?
No, he wasn't typical.
Was there any difference between the staff of the Interracial Commission
and the board as far as how far they were willing to go in
I was never conscious of any conflict.
I have been doing research on Jesse Daniel Ames and the campaign against lynching and I came across some remarks of hers somewhere about you, saying that you were awfully hot-headed and aggressive young man. Does that surprise you?
Doesn't surprise me at all. She came in some time after I was there. She came from Texas and joined the staff. I thought of her as being a very aggressive woman.
In what way?
In wanting things her way. She came in with the idea of sort of changing things around, seemed to me, as I remember it, to her way of doing things. And they weren't always mine. I think we had some mild disagreements but I don't think they were anything deep or ideological.
What kind of things did you disagree about?
I don't remember. But they weren't anything important, I don't believe.
Do you know what the source of tension was between her and Will Alexander?
I was not conscious of any tension except she was the kind of person that wanted to take over everything. She probably wanted to tell him how to run the organization and he resisted a little bit. That would be my guess.
Yesterday when we stopped we were at 1934.
Came 1934, I said to Secretary Ickes that I thought Robert Weaver could
handle the job and would he accept him as adviser if I resigned. He said
he would but he wanted me to stay on as his special counsel to help
Was it while you were special counsel that you organized the interdepartmental committee on Negro affairs?
Well, I'm not sure whether I did that before or after I became his special assistant. What I did was to go around to speak to every one of the secretaries and ask them if they wouldn't have somebody on their staff do the same kind of work I was supposed to be doing. Some of them did have. For instance, in Commerce . . . Eugene Kinkle Jones was there in Commerce. I think his secretary was named Roper. I'm not sure of this now. Henry Wallace wouldn't have anybody. He didn't think he needed it.
Well he was under a lot of pressure at that very time about the Agricultural Adjustment Act.
He did need it, but he didn't think he did. I talked to Harry Hopkins.
Harry Hopkins thought he knew better, you know. He later on got married
He stayed for just about six months, I think.
He came in and left
What was the purpose of the committee?
To relieve me of the responsibility of trying to work through other
secretaries. I had a very good relationship with Ickes
You held hearings in the South, didn't you, about the effects the NRA and the Agricultural Adjustment Act were having on blacks?
No I didn't.
Oh. It was pretty much an internal operation. You weren't going out and trying to find out . . .
No. You're talking about this committee? No, the inter-departmental committee was just a way of comparing notes, making suggestions to each other what we could do. So we may have suggested that somebody else hold these hearings, but I didn't have anything to do with them.
What kind of information did you have about what kind of effect the New Deal agencies were having on blacks?
Well, the letters that I would get complaining about discrimination. I got one letter from Mississippi from some tenant farmer down there. He wrote to "Your Race Majesty" and he wanted to know if I couldn't do something about helping the situation down there.
Did you feel like you got any results for your efforts?
Well, I think we got some results from that regulation about employment.
They had to employ on public works jobs a proportionate amount of Negro
skilled and unskilled. I think there were some results in
What was your perception of the internal conflicts that were going on within the administration? Did you feel frustrated? Were there a lot of pressures on Ickes, for example, that were keeping him from being able to go as far as he might have gone? Or at that time did you feel pretty self confident about what you were doing, pretty hopeful?
I don't remember feeling frustrated or self confident. A lot of articles in the Negro press and so forth about the need of having a Negro in my job and I was very sympathetic to that. And as soon as I felt that Ickes would do it, I moved in that direction. There was a meeting in Washington where I announced it. John W. Davis was this firebrand. He was having some meeting and I think the meeting was designed to protest my being in the job. I was on the program. When it came time for my speech, I announced that I was resigning and that Robert Weaver was taking over. That had a somewhat deflating effect on Mr John Davis. Emotionally deflating. He weighed about 300 pounds.
What did you think of Henry Wallace at that time?
At that time I thought Henry Wallace was difficult and evasive. I thought that he could have been more forthright about the problems facing him than he was.
It's always amazed me that he emerged as the Progressive Party candidate in '48 and by then was seen as being so radical.
Which he really wasn't.
Of course C. B. Baldwin was close to him and kept working on him. Milo
Perkins was gone; he didn't have anything to do with the
He was rather strange. Fanatic.
A veterinary can probably tell, but I can't.
He was fanatic in what way.
Maybe religiously, I'm not sure. He always struck me as being rather fanatical.
I didn't get into that at all. Had all this guru stuff going on. But I didn't know anything about that. I had nothing to do with his religious or his emotional feelings. He would go to a party and just go to sleep, you know. After dinner, sit around like this and just go to sleep.
Who were the most cooperative people in the administration? Besides Ickes.
Let's see. I didn't get very much cooperation from anybody outside of Ickes. Ickes was very cooperative. But that wasn't cooperation, he backed me up. And he always did do that. He was very good about backing me up.
He always did?
Yeah.
What was your role on getting the report on economic conditions in the South published?
That came some time later. It was around 1938. We're still in '34. At the
end of '34, Edwin Embree, the president of the Julius Rosenwald Fund,
took the position that they were perfectly willing
Were these cities that wanted municipally owned power systems?
Yeah, municipal power systems. In many cases it necessitated buying up
the private power company. Buying them out and turning the whole system
into municipal. That involved doing a great deal of work in the
Did you deal directly with Wendell Wilkie at all?
Dealt directly with all of them.
With Wendell Wilkie?
Oh, no. I didn't have anything to do with him.
What about TVA? Did that come within your jurisdiction at all?
Hugo Black, who was a justice of the Supreme Court, said that what we were doing was the real thing. Because if it hadn't been for these cities being able to buy TVA power, TVA would not have been able to succeed. But we furnished TVA with the customers and made it possible for them to go ahead and do it.
Was it after that or before that that Ralph Bunche was your general counsel.
I don't remember that. No, you're wrong. He was in the State Department.
You were mostly involved in litigation, then. In processing the loan applications . . . .
Yeah. It was a question of litigation and getting the organization to
pass on these applications. I'll give you an example.
How did he try to pursuade you not to give Augusta the loan?
The argument was that the people of Augusta had a perfectly good electrical service now and they didn't need a municipal one. So I took the position that that was up for them to decide, not for me to decide or for him. If they said they wanted a municipal plant, then they were the ones to make the decision. And they had decided that they did want one.
Did you have other run ins with the Georgia Power Company later on in your career? Were there any permanent repercussions from your tenure in the power division? It seems like you were making some kind of powerful enemy.
I don't think we had any other applications from Georgia. But he was a part of the big holding company, Commonwealth and Southern, and they had a good many of them under . . . . Wilkie was the overall president. Chattanooga, Knoxville, Nashville, Memphis in Tennessee and in Alabama there was Besemer and another one. But in Georgia I don't believe there was anything but Augusta.
How long were you in that division?
About three or four years, until Roosevelt made the decision that Dr New Deal was dead and Dr Win the War was the one that we had to obey.
This was about 1937 and the funds for the Public Works Administration
sort of gave out. It was about that time that I made a speech before . .
. . There was a group of liberal southerners that met together in
Washington for dinner at Hall's Restaurant. And we'd meet down there
about once a month. And one time I was talking down there and I told it
to Jerome Frank. And he said what we really need is a pamphlet that sets
out, for people to understand, exactly what this is all about. I agreed.
Then I got a call one day from the president, Roosevelt, to come over
to
Did you ordinarily have personal audiences with Franklin Roosevelt or was that unusual for him to call you over?
No, that was unusual, I'd sayunique, that he should call me over.
Why did he do that?
He wanted help on the Georgia situation. So he said he had about made up
his mind that Lawrence Camp was the best man to defeat George and he
didn't have any organization and he needed an organization. And the
governor at that time—who I can't remember—was a good man. Rivers. He
said Gov Rivers was a good governor and he had agreed that he would
support Lawrence Camp. So I told him what I thought. I said that I
thought Rivers was a pretty good governor but that I didn't think that
Roosevelt could count on him. When the going got rough, he would switch.
Roosevelt said well, anyway, as far as he knew he was the best governor
that Georgia had had in a long time and he was going to work with him.
So I said "Well, I think, Mr President, that the most important thing
that I can do is to get out a pamphlet that will tell the people of the
South what you are trying to do in the New Deal. They're not getting the
message through the newspapers or through the politicians, who by and
large are hostile. So if we could get out a pamphlet that would tell
them the story, I think that might be very helpful." He said "Well, it
may be. But one thing I want to precaution you about. Don't talk about
remedies. Just
Who actually wrote it?
Various ones of us wrote it. For instance, Cliff Durr, who was a very fine lawyer at that time with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, later on with the Communications Commission, was largely responsible for the section on credit. Tex Goldsmith did a good deal of work. Arthur Goldsmith, who had been with the WPA and then was my assistant in the power division. Alger Hiss came in for a few meetings but I don't think he did any writing.
Did you write part of it?
Yes, sure. I had to sort of bind it all together. It was my idea to keep each section four pages so that they could be treated separately. And later on that the pamphlet could have been broken down into a number of four page pamphlets itself, each one on a different subject.
Were you responsible for the interpretation of the report of the South as an economic colony of the North? Was that a kind of view of what the problems of the South were that you all shared?
Well, it wasn't a new thing. It was the prevailing attitude
What do you think of that analysis of what the situation . . . ?
Well, I think it was. I think it's only now that it's breaking away from
that. I just came back from Alabama and I was told over there that that
pamphlet is still circulating over there. It went into a circulation of
over a million, you know. We got together a group of very distinguished
southerners to be a sort of sponsoring committee. And we had a meeting
in Washington on July 3—on the basis that there would be very little
news on July 4—and I had mimeographed copies of the report that we wrote
up to submit to this group for their changes and so forth. Frank Graham
was the head of it. We asked Howard Odum first, but he was still for
Hoover at that point. Howard Odum was very slow in coming around. When
we went out to lunch all these men left their copies on their desks.
Apparently somebody came in, some reporter, and swiped one of them. So
the next day it appeared in full in the New York
Times. You know, if we'd asked the New York Times
to print it in full, we couldn't have got it. But as a leak, it got in
there. Later on other papers in the South printed it in full. So that
greatly increased the circulation and the fame of the pamphlet and
Roosevelt mentioned it when he made his speech in Georgia for Lawrence
Camp. Incidentally, the power company opposed Camp strongly and also
told Gov Rivers, who was running for re-election, that if he supported
Camp they would defeat him. So despite all of his promises to Roosevelt,
he didn't deliver the support and the organization that he had promised
to help with did nothing. He switched. He scrammed.
How did you know that the power company put pressure on him?
How did I know it at that time? Well, I don't know. I've forgotten how I knew it.
So one of the results of the report was the creation . . . or at least it fed in to the other events that were coming together to bring into being the Southern Conference on Human Welfare.
Well, in a way yes. It aroused a lot of attention and so forth while I
was working in Atlanta.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
What were you doing in Atlanta?
Lowell Mellett was the head of the National Emergency Council. That was
an organization set up by the president to get direct word from the
field as to what was going on so that he would not be dependent on the
usual political avenues. In each state the National Emergency Council
had executives. I was the Georgia director of the Georgia council. And I
was responsible to Lowell Mellett. About the time we were working on the
report, and just as we were finishing, actually, Lowell Mellett asked me
if I wouldn't come down and take the job in Atlanta that had been held,
up to that time, by a staunch supporter of Senator George, who was
apparently not giving them the kind of information in Washington that
they felt they needed. I agreed to take it. One of the things I did was
to go around the state with an assistant I had named Francis Shirling
and hold meetings in which we discussed various sections of this report
with groups of citizens all over the state. I suppose
So you went to the Birmingham conference that formed the Southern Conference on Human Welfare?
Yeah.
But you were there to help purge George.
You were active in the campaign, then.
No, I was absolutely not active politically.
Well, you had a radio program against . . .
Well, as a bureaucrat, civil servant, I couldn't take any political part in the campaign and didn't. But what I did was to go on the radio every morning and report what the New Deal was doing in Georgia and ended up every one of these with "Georgia Marches on with Roosevelt." But I never did take any position on Camp.
I wanted to ask you a little bit about the controversies that went on within the Southern Conference about whether communist party members should be involved in that whole thing.
That's a big subject, but I suppose there's no question to the fact that
there were some communists in the Southern Conference. But it was always
my position, and it was the position more or less that prevailed, that
it would be more harmful to start up some kind of exclusion than would
be to leave the communists in there and fight it out with them. We had
to fight all the time, but we knew who they were and what the communist
issues were. For instance, one case that was very public, was in the
third conference in Nashville, Tennessee. It was on winning the war. The
South's part in winning the war. And the communists, at that time, were
very eager to get the United States as a sort of second front. Because
the Russians needed the help, in their campaign, of diverting the
Germans away from them. So the Russian position was that the United
States
In 1939 . . . I came across some correspondence between yourself and Frank Graham about whether communists should be barred from membership. At that time you were considering that as a possibility, I think, at least.
Well, it was a constant issue in the conference. Great pressure on us
from the outside to bar them from membership and bar officers like the
American Civil Liberties Union, I think, did and I think the American
Jewish Congress and other organizations. Passed resolutions that no
communists should hold office. But this meant holding hersey hunts,
hearings, and deciding who was a communist and who wasn't. So although I
would personally have been against any communist getting a
How would you characterize Frank Graham's role in that controversy?
Christian, Frank was a benevolent influence and I think he was taken in. For instance, Alton lawrence was one of his proteges from the University of North Carolina and became very active in the Southern Conference and for a long while was—I think—one of the leaders of the youth group of it. Had Frank's blessing because he had assured Frank over in North Carolina that he wasn't a communist. And Frank had believed him and went ahead and supported him. So I think Frank was probably pretty bitter about the fact that Alton lawrence turned out to be a communist. I'm not sure that he ever knew it, but I suppose he did.
You think he was too benevolent, too tolerant? Or do you think that style of his was helpful and important in the Conference.
Very helpful. I think Frank was a very fine man. Much more courageous than Howard Odum. Howard Odum would retreat into research whereas Frank Graham would meet the problem and try to do something about it.
How would you compare Graham with other southern liberals that were involved in the conference? How would you compare him with yourself, for example?
I would say he was a much better man that I was.
Better in what way?
More tolerant. Wiser. But now take
You said that you would have been opposed to having . . . . Do you see the role that the communist party or communist party members played in the conference as being altogether a negative one?
Negative? No. For instance, the communist party has had a positive role in the South with respect to the Negro problem. They, from the beginning, have fought for Negro rights and fought, generally speaking, more consistently than any other group. One of my quarrels with the communist party is that they have a tendency to try to wreck any organization that they can't control. As far as the Southern Conference on Human Welfare was concerned, they couldn't control it but we were going along and doing the kind of things that they wanted done.
But they didn't try to wreck the organization, do you think?
In 1946 we had a conference in New Orleans and we had had the principle, since the first one in Birmingham in 1938, that we would never have a segregated meeting. The absence of segregation was almost a sacred principle in the Southern Conference. We had the municipal auditorium reserved in New Orleans for the conference. A few days before the conference the city notified us that we would have to segregate the meeting, that we couldn't have an unsegregated meeting there. Well, I said then we wouldn't have the meeting there, have it somewhere else. We took Carpenters' Hall. Had the meeting there. Well, the southern secretary of the communist party was very unhappy about this and came to me and tried to persuade me that we should give in on this and let the meeting be segregated, rather than give it up. Rather than give up the auditorium.
Why did he do that?
Opportunism. Not thinking clearly. Because I think it would have defeated
our purposes a great deal and I absolutely refused
It seemed to me from looking at the papers that you had as much difficulty dealing with the socialist party people as you did with the communist party people.
Well, the socialists were difficult. Now, for instance, Roger Baldwin was
working very close with the socialists. He and Frank McCallister and
I've forgotten who the other socialists were. But you're right. You see
at that time there was a big fight on in New York between the communists
and the socialists. And we were reflecting that, or we were in the back
waters of that fight. Roger Baldwin came to see me in Washington. I was
the treasurer of the Southern Conference. He came to see me one day and
said he was on the Marshall Foundation and he thought he could get
$1,000 for us. He wanted to be sure that James Dombrowski would be kept
as the secretary, administrator. So I told him well there wasn't any
doubt about that because there was no opposition to Jim Dombrowski and
it would be all right. So we got the $1,000. Then he came down to the
Nashville conference and there the fight between the communists and the
socialists was very prominent in various issues. I've forgotten which
ones. But Roger was sitting there and he felt that Jim Dombrowski was at
that time siding with the communists. Apparently he'd counted on him
siding with the socialists. So he then insisted that we fire Jim
Dombrowski
[End of November 19 interview.]
[Beginning of November 20 interview.]
Yesterday when we stopped talking we were discussing the relationship between the socialists and the communists and the liberals and the labor people in the Southern Conference on Human Welfare. I wanted to go back to that just a little bit more. In the fall of 1939 you suggested, according to some letters of yours in the Southern Conference papers, that it might be a good idea to have people who came to the meetings of the Southern Conference register and indicate when they registered whether they were members of the communist party or not. Do you remember anything about that in 1939?
I don't remember, but if I did I would now regard it as a mistake.
Why is that?
Because anybody who was a communist wouldn't register as a communist. It seems to me now much more sensible to judge people on the way they acted, not on the badge that they wore or how they would sign in.
Is that a view that you came to have maybe more strongly in the '40s and '50s, after the McCarthy era started than you had had in the earlier time?
Maybe.
But you don't really remember your thoughts on the subject when the conference first began.
No. I never was myself terrible anti-communist, but I never
Do you remember John Thompson? Why did you oppose his selection as chairman of the Southern Conference?
I don't remember.
What did you think about him?
I thought he was a nice but rather weak fellow and I think he made a bad mistake after he became president to send out that letter with Howard Lee about the American peace mobilization.
Did you have real disagreements with John Thompson and Howard Lee?
No, not that I remember. I liked him personally but I just thought he was kind of a weak fellow to succeed Frank Graham.
Weak in what sense?
Weak in the sense of having a strong program, standing up and fighting for it. Frank Graham always was very articulate about what he was working for. But John Thompson, though an eloquent speaker, never did seem to me to have anything very forceful to say.
In 1942 you were elected chairman of the Southern Conference. What made you decide to take on that job?
Well, they first tried to get Homer Rainey
The conference appeared strong right after that Nashville convention, didn't it? There was a lot of different groups represented at the Nashville conference in 1942. Is that how you remember that conference?
I thought it was very strong. It was also very factional. That was when the fights between the communists and socialists were at their peak.
We talked yesterday a little bit about Roger Baldwin. In fact I don't think we quite finished that story. Roger Baldwin came to the Nashville conference and thought that Jim Dombrowski was taking the side of the communists instead of the socialists and wanted him fired.
I don't know why Roger came at all. But he came down to Washington and
looked me up. We had lunch together. And he said he could get $1,000 for
us from this
How do you explain the fact that people like Roger Baldwin and Frank
McCallister were launching this strong attack on the Southern Conference
for being supposedly controlled by communists . . . at that time, when
the communists, even the alleged communists, were no longer in
positions
It was because we didn't take the stand of excluding them, which is what they were trying to force us to do. They wanted us to exclude communists. It was a national sort of a trend among organizations. And they were trying to push us into that position. And we weren't about to do it. There never was any real support for it in the organization.
Who were the people in the organization that kept that from happening?
As I say, I don't know that it was ever really proposed. But I would never have gone for it. Frank Graham, I suppose . . . he was out at that point, so he didn't . . . . But Virginia Durr certainly would not have gone for it. The active members of the executive committee were not for any kind of exclusion. Because as we thought then, and I feel strongly now, it would have been a very divisive thing to do and we were weak enough as it was. To start dividing our forces would have destroyed our organization, as many other organizations were destroyed, the same way.
The anti-communist socialists believed that the organization would be destroyed unless you excluded communists.
Well, that's what their contention was but it didn't happen that way.
Have you read Thomas Krueger's book on the Southern Conference, Promises To Keep? What do you think about it?
Yeah. I wrote him and told him that I thought he was a little bit hipped
on the communist issue, too much so. And he wrote back and said he
thought so too. He agreed that he had been too much worried about the
communists when he wrote the book. I sent that letter to Atlanta
Did you think the book was accurate except for that?
Well I don't remember any points in it that I thought were false. It was just that general attitude of fearing that the communists had more power than they did have.
In that book he describes you as being self-confident, aggressive and a little ruthless. What do you think about that? Do you remember that? Some people thought that, he said.
What do I think about it? Do I think I am self-confident? Aggressive? A little ruthless? Yes. Or was.
Was that necessary to keep the organization alive and well in 1942?
Yeah. I think so. I think you can't be too namby-pamby and keep a big organization together.
When you took on the leadership in 1942 did you have ambitions of building it into a stronger organization that—
Sure.
Where did you think it would go?
We were hoping that it would become a popular, mass membership sort of. We thought in terms of state committees. And then we organized various state committees. One committee for Georgia here, under Margaret Fisher. A committee for North Carolina under Mary Price. And various state committees which we hoped would be politically effective. And that came to bear in 1948, when they were politically ineffective. But if they had been properly organized, if we had really got going, we might have had a different situation in 1948 when we came out for Wallace.
I'm trying to understand what your political views were at this time.
Krueger describes you as a deeply traditional American
That's right. It means that I believe in the Bill of Rights and am devoted to it for everybody. As far as I'm concerned that's what it means. I don't know what he meant by it. But my attitude is that the Bill of Rights is there as the basis of American democracy and it's for everybody. Communists and socialists, black and white, everybody. And as soon as you start drawing lines and saying everybody but . . . you know. Everybody except. Then the whole thing is destroyed.
When you wrote the report on economic conditions in the South you said that Roosevelt wanted you to write about the problems but not about the solutions. Not to suggest solutions. But when you became chairman of the Southern Conference, you were trying to pose solutions. What were those solutions? What did you think would be the answer to the South's problems?
Various ones. I can't go down the whole list now. But for the people to
get together. Do away with discriminatory freight rates, for instance.
Do away with segregation. And so forth. And that's what we had in mind
when we had the meeting in Birmingham. Was to . . . a general approach.
But what happened was that we had reserved the municipal auditorium for
the meeting and people were coming in from all over the South, black and
white. And we had no idea of discriminating or segregating and they were
all going to be sitting there together. But at the last minute the mayor
or the council told us we had to segregate. We objected and we were
faced with the alternative of either calling off the meeting or bowing
to the will of the city. Mrs Roosevelt, when she came in, she put her
chair right in the aisle, so that she was neither on one side nor the
other. That's what . . . my idea of what it should be. So we
You didn't come out publicly strongly for integration, though—
That wasn't the idea. We didn't want to make that the chief issue. They made it the chief issue. That's the thing. The opposition made segregation the chief issue. What we were interested in was the whole economic picture, and we would have liked to have dealt with that. And the same thing happened later on in the Southern Regional Council. You see, when Odum started the Southern Regional Council, he came in with a big plan for the whole region, economically speaking. But right away it got caught up in the race question. Just doesn't seem to be possible to do anything in the South until you face the race question.
Were blacks within the Southern Conference pushing the conference also to deal . . . focus more on the race question and not on economic problems?
I don't know that there was any distinction. The whole business of black power and all hadn't come up at that time. And there was no division as far as I knew.
How do you account for the strength that the Southern Conference gained during the war years?
Why do you say that it was stronger?
Well, I get that sense from Krueger's book, I suppose. It grew in numbers, in membership.
Got more CIO support. The budget increased a lot.
That was one of the big things. That we got the support of labor for a
while there. And then the whole communist issue
Who do you think got to Phil Murray?
Catholic church. His father confessor told him if he wanted to get to heaven he better straighten out the CIO first. That's what I think. You asked me what I think. But I don't have any evidence to prove it. I didn't have any tape recording of the confession booth.
I want to talk about that whole thing with Van Bittner, but to go back a little bit to the earlier days. When you took the chairmanship of the Southern Conference and began to put so much time into it, did you think about moving back to the South and living in the South?
Yes.
Why did you not do that?
Because I continued to work in Washington. My job was there. But I did buy land in Georgia. When I was down here in '38 working with the National Emergency Council I took a crash course in law and did even take the bar examinations. I failed them.
What were you planning to do? Why did you take a crash course in law?
If I had come back, as a lawyer, I probably would have gone into politics
in some way. If I could afford it. Could have afforded it.
You stayed in Washington. Were you then working in defense housing? What was your job . . .
I went back in 1939. The defense housing was set up and I was asked to move from the power division to take over the job of organizing the division of defense housing. That became a really emergency kind of a job that absorbed a great deal of my attention and didn't leave me any left over time to think about politics.
And that's what you were doing while you were chairman of the Southern Conference. How did you have time to do both of those things at the same time?
Well, because I didn't have to devote a great deal of time to it, I suppose. I don't remember any conflicts on the subject. The only activity that I remember in those days is going down to Raleigh for that conference down there. Then when I went to Europe . . . . See, I went to Europe in '42 or '43, I'm not sure which. I guess it was '41. I went to Europe with the Navy department. Skipping here. I lost out with the defense housing.
Tell me what you did as director of defense housing and how you lost your position.
In defense housing we had the job of getting housing built for defense
workers. We could operate directly in those places where there was no
local housing authority. Where there was a local housing authority, that
was done through Strauss, the administrator of the USHA. In Detroit, for
instance . . . it was almost an exception . . . . There was a great
demand for houses for Negroes in the defense plants there. I don't know
why they didn't want to go through the housing authority, then through
the USHA, but they came to us. As I remember it, we got the housing
authority
Who suggested that name?
I don't know. I didn't have anything to do with that. That was all done locally. There was great opposition on the part of the Polish Catholics who lived nearest this site to having Negroes move in there. Although it was an industrial area and nobody lived close to it. But they objected, raised good deal of complaint through their Congressman and so forth. I took the position, well, this is the site that was recommended by the mayor and the local housing authority. And its not up to us in Washington to tell them they don't know what they're doing.
Who were your enemies in the South who brought pressure?
Well the worst one was Cong. Boykin of Mobile, Alabama. He had urged me to appoint his brother as the custodian of one of the housing projects. I had him investigated and the report came back that he was a thoroughly unreliable scapegoat. So I wouldn't appoint him. This made Boykin furious, you see, and he set out to get me, so to speak. So he was very irate. But also Sen.George didn't bear any love for me because of the campaign in 1938 there. He had connections in the Civil Service Commission. Cong. Ramspeck had gone there and he was a close friend of George's. So there were a good many people who felt that I was a dangerous radical. There seems always to have been.
You were also involved in trying to get creative, good architects to build these houses. Was that controversial?
Yeah, that was part of it. We had the idea that since we were doing this
job ourselves, directly, we could get in the very best architects in the
country to see whether they couldn't get up some good ideas. Usually the
local housing authority had to work with politically powerful
architects. One of the best, of course, was Frank Lloyd Wright and I
wrote him and asked him if he wouldn't take on a job. He was reluctant
at first but finally he agreed to do it. Sent him up to Massachusetts
So none of the defense housing was built by Frank Lloyd Wright.
No. So Frank Lloyd Wright never built any defense housing.
How did you feel about being fired?
Well, I felt it was just one of the contingencies of trying to do what
you believe in, you know. You always have to figure that you're not
going to win every battle. My record with the Civil Service Commission
was good. I had civil service status. My grades had always been perfect
from the very first. Excellent, I guess, is what they call it. And this
was right in the middle of the war and the government was constantly
putting out notices that they needed executives to carry on the war and
calling for people to come in. So I felt sure I could get another job.
But very slow in coming about. The personnel director of the Federal
Works Agency where I had been working before called me in one time and
said "Clark, I've just been over to the Civil Service Commission to look
into your situation to find out why they haven't offered you a job. And
I find
You weren't a scientist.
Well, I was a social scientist.
During this time when you were working on defense housing, you were chairman of the Southern Conference, how much time did you devote to the conference? How much time did you spend in the South at meetings and conferences?
I really can't answer that question. Not a whole lot. I answered letters, went to meetings and so forth. But my regular working hours were with the government.
If you had come back to Georgia and gone into politics, what would you have done? Run for Congress?
If I had come back to Georgia in 1939?
If you had passed the bar exam would you have come back to Georgia?
I don't know. It depends on whether I could have made a living. I would
have had to find some possibility of really getting some
What kind of political career were you thinking of?
I didn't get down to those fine points. [Laughter]
I had wondered before why you didn't go into politics.
One reason is money. Have to have a good backlog of money. Or you have to have supporters. And my father had told me, as a boy, that I had to chose whether I wanted to be an honest man or a politician. He'd just seen so many politicians who campaigned on an issue and got support and got elected on one issue and then the issue would change and he couldn't count on their support any more so he changed, too. In other words, this business of being honest was what he meant.
Did you agree with your father later on?
I do now.
In other words your family wouldn't have encouraged you to go into politics or supported you financially.
No, they would discourage me. I don't know what you mean by my family. If you mean my father and my brothers, they would have been against it. My uncle Clark, who was the most successful political member of the family, he would have been violently against it.
That brings up another subject, of how your family viewed your activities, your conflicts with the southern power companies and your being accused of being a communist and your being attacked on the radio as a dangerous radical. How did that effect your Georgia family?
My immediate family—my father and mother and brothers—were always very loyal and unquestioning about it.
Did they agree with you at all?
No. Well, my father and mother were tolerant. I wouldn't say they agreed
with me, but they agreed with me to the extent that it was my business
and they weren't going to interfere. My uncle Clark always said that he
and I were going in two different directions. And then when he died his
son took over the Constitution
Constitution? For libel and
made Ralph McGill retract the column that he had printed. That was about
1943 or 4, I guess. Was it 1947?
Uhhuh, 1947. So you were suing your own uncle's newspaper.
Well, I was suing Ralph McGill, too.
Why was Clark Howard Jr so violently opposed to you?
One thing, I think that it was a confusion, my name and his name and he felt somehow or other involved. That's why, after having us out for dinner that night, when we first came down here he and Margaret had Mairi and me for dinner with Ralph McGill and Ralph McGill's wife. And the next day he stopped using my name as Clark. From then on it was always Dr C. H. Foreman.
Did he confront you personally with his differences or did he just treat the things that you were involved in in his editorials and in his newspapers in a very unfriendly, critical way?
I don't want to generalize about it. The main thing was that column that Ralph McGill wrote in which he said the Southern Conference was communist. And I took the position that when he said leadership that included me and that I had a right to sue. And I got a lawyer in Macon, Georgia, to sue. And they were sufficiently scared to settle it.
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
— attitude toward the Southern Conference and his political stance during that time in the light of his reputation now as a great liberal.
Well, Ralph McGill was over at the first meeting of the Southern Conference, but later on he became convinced that we were influenced by the communists. That's the only way I can account for it. In many ways, Ralph McGill was a very fine man and did good work. But he was all wrong on that score.
Were you surprised at all during the annual dinner the other night when you were being made a life fellow and Ralph McGill's name was also brought up as a great—
I wasn't surprised.
Did you think it was a little contradictory?
Well, Ralph McGill is a local hero in the fight and he was one of the founders of the Southern Regional Council. He came in when the Interracial Commission was being changed to the Southern Regional Council. He came in to give it respectability. He wasone of the people that broadened the scope, so to speak, of the Interracial Commission.
What about the creation of the Southern Regional Council? It's always been hard for me to understand first of all why Will Alexander and Howard Odum didn't seem to have consulted with you at all before they started to set up an organization which seems to have been a competing organization, or one which had purposes that overlapped the purposes of the Southern Conference.
Well, I was on the board of the Interracial Commission at the time that
it happened and we hashed it out. I remember a big black board out there
and Howard Odum was drawing various designs about what was
What would have happened if Alexander had come into the Southern Conference and Howard Odum . . . they'd lent their contacts and respectability with foundations to the Southern Conference? Did you want them to do that, or try to encourage them to do that?
Sure, we wanted them. We gave some kind of citation. Thomas Jefferson Award to Will Alexander in 1940, I think it was, in Chattanooga for his outstanding work in the South. But there was no chance of getting Howard Odum in there. He was scared of his shadow. As I said, up until 1938 he was still a staunch Hooverite. Republican.
Was it upsetting to you when this competing organization was formed?
No. I never felt that. I felt the more organizations that are working on the situation the better. Each one has to do it in his own way. That's all right.
What were the differences between the Southern Regional Council and the Southern Conference in their tactics?
One big difference was that we came out from the very beginning against
segregation in the Southern Conference. We had to because of that
Birmingham situation. The Southern Regional Council, or Interracial
Commission, hedged around for a long long time on that question and
gradually came to it, I think someone said the other night, about 1951.
But I remember one meeting of the executive committee of the Southern
Regional Council when . . . in the '40s . . . when the YWCA came out
against segregation and said there would be no more segregation in any
of their
What about economic issues?
Well, if you mean that . . . support . . . I suppose it was economic. But it was fear. The man who introduced the resolution nullifying mine was a Catholic priest from Savamah. Monsignor . . . something like that. Economics was not in his mind so much as respectability. But as far as the organization was concerned, if they had come out at that time against segregation it would have been much harder for them to raise money.
How do you account for the fact that the Southern Conference wasn't able to survive while the Southern Regional Council survived and prospered?
Well, the Southern Conference went down in '48 on the shoals of Wallace. It went all out in the Wallace campaign and when that was such a fiasco there was nothing for us to do but to fold up.
So you think it was a mistake for the Southern Conference to get so involved in electoral politics in that particular campaign?
Well, in the sense that it was the end of the Southern Conference, maybe.
But on the other hand it was the only thing that we could do at that
time logically. Because that's what we had been building up to. Wallace
came out with our program. Wallace was the first candidate
I want to talk some more about the Progressive party campaign but maybe we should go back a little bit and keep going up chronologically. In 1943 you went to Black Mountain College to teach. How did that come about? How did you decide to do that?
After the Nashville meeting in 1942 some students from Black Mountain College were at that conference in Nashville. They urged me to stop by Black Mountain College on my way back to Washington and see the college and speak there. Which I did. I was offered a job to come and teach at Black Mountain College, which I wasn't prepared to take because I was still planning to go into the Navy. After a year in London, working on the anti-submarine warfare, which was what I was doing, the Navy offered me the job of working, going over, analyzing the various ports of Japan to decide which ports were the ones that should be bombed by the United States. I didn't know at that time there would be the atomic bomb. But in any event, that didn't appeal to me. That wasn't something I wanted to do. So I said I didn't need to work there any longer. I wrote to Black Mountain College and told them that I would be interested now in teaching there. So I was invited to come back down to teach in 1942.
You were one of several young faculty that had come to Black Mountain in recent years. Eric Bentley and Frederick Cohen, I think.
They were both there when I got there.
They were already there and then you came. You all formed kind of a group? A different section of the faculty compared to some of the older faculty members?
Well, there were some members of the faculty who were refuges from
Germany. Al Biers was the chief one and a fellow named Erwin Straus.
They looked upon us as radicals. As we were saying last night, militants
and radicals. Hard to say what's what. We probably did have different
ideas about what was going on. But the main thing at Black Mountain was
that Ted Dreier, who started it, had established it so that he and Al
Biers had permanent tenure. They could never be fired. Everybody else
came on contract. But they also insisted on unanimity. This was
supposedly a Friends [Quaker] concept of consensus. Ted Dreier lay very
heavy emphasis on that. Well, it turned out to be a fraud because he and
Albers could then block anything they didn't want. Because they had
veto, so to speak, if you had to have unanimity. They could block it.
And they could never be fired. Then came this girl, Frances de Graaff,
who had had her contract just renewed. And because she approved of two
of the girls going over to Fisk University for some conference and they
were arrested on their way back for hitchhiking—which they weren't
supposed to do—the older members of the faculty felt that somehow or
other Frances had embarrassed the college and so they voted to fire her.
Even though she had a valid contract for two more years. Eric Bentley
and
Have you read Martin Duberman's account of that? What did you think of it?
I thought it was pretty good.
What was it about Black Mountain that attracted you in the first place? Were you interested in educational innovation or in the communitarian aspects of the place?
Yeah, I was interested in education and in the freedom in which they worked and the fact that the students were allowed to have such initiative. The students were the ones who took the initiative in getting me there in the first place and getting me going. And I thought that was fine.
What was it like to live there?
Well, it was like a summer camp but very informal and a little bit detached from life . . . from the rest of life. A little bit too idyllic in a sense for living.
How did you like the communal aspect of it? The intense personal relationships.
Well, I didn't like eating together in the dining hall. I thought that the privacy of our own home was much more desirable. I don't know of any other communal aspects . . . . We had our own house and we had our own meals there, later. But the communal aspects, I don't know what you mean.
Did the men help take care of the children and cook and things like that? As well as the women.
Did I help . . .
But the Black Mountain environment didn't encourage sharing of the child rearing responsibilities.
No. I don't think so.
When you went there in the first place did you think you could
No, I didn't have any such idea. Once I was there . . . it came up sort of gradually as to why we didn't have Negro students. I was in favor of it and I think that Frances deGraff and Eric Bentley were in favor of it too, the same. But the older ones were frightened. They were frightened that we were going to be persecuted, you see. And they had been through very hard times in Germany and they had reason to be frightened, I suppose. We were going to antagonize the community by doing something . . . .
So you all resigned over Frances de Graaff's firing?
Yeah.
What did you plan to do next?
Well, I was already doing something else. I was in New York working on the third term for Franklin Roosevelt. CIO Political Action Committee. I'd already started working with them. I got leave of absence for the summer to work with the CIO Political Action Committee. So I'd gone up to New York and came back down from New York to attend the meeting that had to do with Frances de Graaff's firing.
Is that the only reason you resigned or were you ready to leave and do something else?
That was the main reason to resign, because I wouldn't have resigned if they hadn't acted unfairly. But the main thing that got under my skin was to find that they had been deceiving us all the time. See, we were supposed to be a democratic organization, all of us in there together on the same basis. And here Ted Dreier and Albers had reserved kind of a major status.
What about the plan that you had to start another college in Washington? What was that all about?
For a while there I thought about the possibility of starting another college, Roosevelt College. We were thinking about, talking about Harper's Ferry as a place, a good place to start a kind of a college that would be the right thing. But I'm awful glad we didn't do it because the money situation, again, would have got us down. Plus McCarthy. He came along soon afterwards.
Did some people have expectations, like Cohen, that the school was going to begin?
No, I don't think so.
What would this college have been like? What would have been a good college?
What would Roosevelt College have been like if we had founded it? I can't answer that kind of question. It depends on who gets there and what they decide.
But what did you want? What was your ideal?
What I would like to have had would have been a good college that would have had the same kind of general approach to students that Black Mountain College had but at the same time be truly democratic and be close enough to Washington so that it would be a part of the life of the country. Not be out in the woods, where Black Mountain College was.
When you were at Black Mountain did you have any contact with the Southern Summer School for Women Workers in Asheville?
No.
You never heard of it?
No, not that I know of.
It was a workers education school outside of Asheville. There doesn't seem to have been any contact between it and Black Mountain. Seems very odd. Did you know Louise McLaren?
Sure, I knew her.
Through the Southern Conference?
Yeah.
She was head of this summer school for women workers.
Organizationally we had no connection.
So you left Black Mountain, went to Washington, thought about starting the school, but what? couldn't raise enough money to do it?
Well it really never got off the ground. It was just an idea. I corresponded with Will Alexander about it, but no offer came through with a million dollars, which was what it would take.
So you became director then of National Citizens PAC, right?
I was in New York working for the CIO Political Action Committee and Sidney Hillman asked me if I wouldn't organize the National Citizens Political Action Committee, which was to be a kind of parallel organization with the CIO Political Action Committee except it would be not labor but people generally, national citizens.
And you did that for several years.
Yeah. Through the election of '44 and then in '45 I became full time president of the Southern Conference on Human Welfare, on salary.
Tell me something about your work with National Citizens PAC. What did you do? How much autonomy did you have?
The main job there was to organize the committee. So I had to find people all over the country who would be members of the national committee and then get them together for meetings and so forth. Try to work with the CIO PAC. Trying to get Roosevelt elected.
You built strong ties with the CIO during that year, with Sidney Hillman.
Yeah. Phill Murray.
And that was helpful in raising money for the Southern Conference.
Right.
Was that one of the reasons that you went to work for them? In order to build institutional ties between the labor movement and the Southern Conference? Is that one of your things you were trying to do?
Sure. We were always trying to broaden the base and get more and more support for the Southern Conference. And to get organized labor would have been one of the biggest things we could have done. And for a while there we thought we had it. But Phil Murray, who got Jim Carey, who was the secretary, to introduce a resolution into the convention of the CIO saying that the Southern Conference for Human Welfare was the natural spearhead for liberal action in the South. It passed the CIO. On the basis of that resolution a lot of the unions gave us money, for a year or two. Til Van Bittner cancelled it all out.
Did you know Van Bittner, did you deal with him before his attack on the Southern Conference?
Well, I knew vaguely but I didnt deal with him, no.
How do you account for his opposition?
Well, I think the socialists got to him. And Phil Murray had weakened by that time.
He did write a letter apologizing—
Constitution. And Van
Bittner was persuaded by Clark that I was a communist, or at least a
dangerous person.
The CIO was being red-baited from the beginning by the AFL. They both announced southern organizing drives in 1946. Was Van Bittner compromising himself in different ways to try to build a southern organizing drive? What was he trying to do? Why would he come to Atlanta at all?
He was . . . Operation Dixie. That's what they called it. He was going to come down here and organize the unorganized. But why Van Bittner would go to the Constitution and talk to Clark Howell—that's a different problem.
Well you thought operation Dixie was a good idea.
Sure. See, we had [gone?] into the CIO situation from the beginning . . . . One of the reasons for starting the Southern Conference on Human Welfare was to help the CIO organize. And we did a big job in Alabama and other places helping the CIO. But by the end of the war they had forgotten about this and they were intent on becoming respectable.
Do you think the CIO in the war years, when they cooperated with the war labor board in no-strike pledges and things like that . . . . On the one hand, they had gained a lot of members during the war years. But by those compromises they did begin to build more credibility.
Maybe.
Were you involved with labor to that degree?
No, I didn't know that . . . to that extent.
It was really a shock to you when labor support started falling away after the war.
I was very shocked by Van Bittner's statement, yeah.
Did you know other labor figures? George Baldanzi, who took over for Van Bittner.
No.
Did you continue to try to support Operation Dixie after Van
We didn't become anti-labor, if that's what you mean. No.
I just mean did you continue to try to support the drives, their campaigns.
Yeah. In the states. The state committees did.
How would you describe the differences between yourself and Jim Dombrowski?
There are a great many differences between Jim Dombrowski and myself. One thing is that Jim is a more deeply religious figure than I am and very devoted christian socialist. And always has been. And I'm neither christian nor socialist.
What are you?
An agnostic. An agnostic who believes firmly in the Bill of Rights.
Were you ever a christian socialist? In your youth?
No. Never was a christian socialist or a communist. [Interruption on tape.]
I wanted to ask you about the controversy over Dombrowski's role in the Southern Conference. The incident in which the board removed him from being administrator for both the Southern Conference and SCEF and then re-instated him and that whole thing. What was that about?
I think the answer on that is . . . . A number of us felt that Jim did
not have the broad political organizing ability that was required in a
mass organization for political purposes. And at the end of the '46
conference in New Orleans it was proposed that we have separate
administrators for the conference and the educational fund. The
educational fund was a tax deductable educational organization. Jim
seemed to be ideally suited for that, but not for the political activity
that needed
Was he there at the meeting in New Orleans?
He was there, but not at the meeting of the committee.
So what happened?
What was Lucy Randolph Macon's objection to Branson Price?
I think the main thing was that she felt that Margaret Fisher was a superhuman person. She felt that Margaret Fisher was the person to do the job and she really felt that Margaret Fisher should have my job.
Why didn't you want Margaret Fisher to have the job?
Well, Margaret and I never got along too well together. She and Lucy Mason had before, had earlier, tried to get Jim Dombrowski removed from his job. [With the idea that Margaret would have taken it over.]
Why didn't you get along with Margaret Fisher?
We just had different kinds of natures. Margaret was very dominating and I guess I'm very dominating.
Branson Price was chairman of the New York committee. If she
No. She was a North Carolina girl and if she had become the administrator of the Southern Conference, she would have functioned out of New Orleans. The New York office would have been run by somebody else to raise the money up there.
Dombrowski had devoted a whole lot of his . . . he had been the major person, I assume, through the years since 1942 who had been on the scene working full time to try to build the Southern Conference. Is that right?
Yeah.
It seems understandable why he would be very irate at being removed from that, his position.
Oh, it's understandable. That doesn't mean it wasn't right.
How did you see his contribution to building the conference in previous years?
Jim worked much better working with people, individually, and sort of building up a slow organization like the Southern Conference Educational Fund than he would have been to get out and organize a big, mass organization.
Was he opposed to the conference moving into political action?
No. Wasn't opposed to it, but he just didn't do much about it.
So how was that whole thing resolved?
Well, it got very complicated. This is one of the reasons that the
organization finally died in '48. [There was] a big fight on in
Dombrowski then moved over to be head of SCEF.
Yeah, he went ahead with that.
Why did he give in and do that?
Why did he? You have to ask him. I don't know. He just accepted it as a logical thing, I suppose. Logical thing to do. It was no disgrace. Two different organizations. And it was a clear division of activities. And he could give his whole time to SCEF and somebody else should have given their whole time to organize politically. And if they had then we would have been in better shape to do something more in '48 when Wallace ran.
You said that the state organizations, if they had been well organized, you might have been able to do better in the '48 campaign. Why weren't the states better organized? What went wrong?
Didn't have organizational ability. Margaret Fisher did a pretty good job here in Georgia. Mary Price did a fair job in North Carolina. I've forgotten the name of the woman in Virginia.
Tell me about your involvement in the campaign. That must have been quite an experience, campaigning for Wallace in the South.
Well, we passed a resolution endorsing Wallace. The executive committee did. And this antagonized a number of our contributors in New York, who had previously given money. Also antagonized Aubrey Williams. So, there was some kind of controversy there—
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 3, SIDE A]
You resigned.
I resigned both jobs.
In order to work full time in the Wallace campaign?
Well, in order to placate the situation. If Aubrey thought he could take it on and do a better job, let him do it.
How were you supporting yourself then?
About that time . . . I had been working on an idea of having a theatre in Washington which would admit Negroes. At that time there was no theatre in Washington where Negroes could go. The National Theatre, which had before been a pretty good theatre, had had to close down because Actors Equity would not appear there as long as it was a segregated audience, as long as Negroes were not admitted into the audience. So they closed down. So Washington not only had no theatre for Negroes, but it had no theatre period. The city of Washington had no theatre whatsoever. The theatre gave as its reason the fact that the chief of police had said it would be dangerous to admit Negroes into the audience. So we hit upon the idea of challenging this whole situation by starting a theatre, movie theatre, which would not be segregated. And the Dupont Theatre was in a building which a friend of mine named Danny Weitzman owned. He asked me if I would manage it. So I managed the theatre, the Dupont theatre and we opened it up . . . had no segregation. And that way we broke down the whole segregation pattern in Washington. From then on, movies and theatres have been unsegregated.
So you were managing the theatre while you were working in the Wallace campaign?
Yep.
What did you do in the Wallace campaign?
Largely make speeches and appeal for money.
Did you travel in the South?
Yeah. I made a tour with Paul Robeson, raising money. He was singing and I was raising money. We went to Winston-Salem, Memphis.
Were there integrated facilities where you traveled? On trains and . . .
Sure. Everywhere we went.
What kind of audiences did you have and how did they react?
Well, it varied. We had different experiences. Maybe I should say . . .
the year before Wallace went on a tour in the South for the Southern
Conference on Human Welfare. That was in '47. He started the tour in
Norfolk, Virginia. We had rented the hall there, or the committee for
Virginia had rented an auditorium in Norfolk, city auditorium, for this
meeting. When I got there the audience was all in and Negroes and whites
were all mixed up together. But the police had then just said that they
had to divide. The Negroes had all to sit on one side and the white
people on the other. I came in the back of the theatre and overheard
this hassle going on between the police and the people who were handling
the concert, handling the meeting. The police just said they had to do
it. They had police established on the wings of the stage, so that
nobody could go there until the audience was segregated. I walked down
the center aisle and noticed that there was a flight of stairs across
the orchestra pit and I walked up those stairs and on to the platform
and called the meeting to order and announced that the police had said
that we couldn't have a meeting unless it was
Tell me something about Henry Wallace. What was Henry Wallace like? What did you think of him as a politician? As a person and a politician.
He was a very nice, genial dreamy kind of a guy. I don't want to try to
get into a characterization of Henry Wallace. I told you the other day
about my ankle
How do you account for the violent reaction against Wallace in that campaign? Extreme opposition. Violence against his campaigners and so on. Were you surprised at how reactionary the response to his campaign was?
I was surprised at it but it doesn't seem to me that it's hard to account
for in terms of the feeling that had been engendered against him as
being a disrupter. Take McGovern, the last campaign. You can see that
very much the same kind of thing was going on there. Wallace was
speaking at a tougher time and taking a harder line. [Interruption.]
Asked me whether I thought it was true that I was self-confident, arrogant and slightly ruthless. And I think yes it was true.
I think you depicted yourself, though, without making allowance for the
fact that you were very kind. You weren't entirely ruthless,
unnecessarily. I think that you felt that ruthlessness was often
necessary. Then there was a thing you didn't tell about the Sojourner
Truth project. When the money, the Pittsburgh Courier had a streamer across the top of their
paper saying, "Foreman Loses Head For Us. What Are We Going To Do About
It?" Well, that was because they tried to sign over the Sojourner Truth
project to be a white project and Clark wouldn't allow that over his
signature. I think that was a pretty important story. Because the Negro
leaders then went to the White House to protest Clark's firing and his
resignation. And it was then that Mrs Roosevelt and Frances Perkins held
the
Mairi's right about that. What they wanted to do . . . The project had been designed for Negroes, but under pressure the change had been made that they would give it to whites, white people instead of Negroes. Then the Negroes objected. But by that time the white people had been already moved in. So they had to move the white people out and that's when they had the big, bloody riots. Sojourner Truth race riots. Really, it was a question of not being able to make up their minds. Switching back and forth which caused the trouble. Not being ruthless, see.
There was another thing that you neglected to say. You did draw some of the big architects in in defense housing. It wasn't only Frank Lloyd Wright. Frank Lloyd Wright said that he only did the project because Clark convinced him that he should do it. And he liked Clark and he felt he could work for Clark. But he had no use for the government as a whole. But Bill Wurster built Vellajo and that was one that was in California. And didn't Hugh Hutchins, didn't he do a project? Hugh Stubbins.
In Massachusetts. Gropius and Breuer did.
So you did influence . . . somehow or another there was influence on good architecture that went into the low cost housing there that I thought would be interesting and should be brought out. There was another thing that the Civil Service Commission had against you and that was that Clark insisted on his Negro maid sitting at the table with us.
No, that wasn't the Civil Service.
Was that just a gossipy thing that went around? You lost a job on account of it though.
Well, Will Alexander told me one time that he had tried to persuade the
man who succeeded
That wasn't such an important thing, but the other was. At the time in between the job after you resigned . . . when was it that you were full time working on the Southern Conference? You were away for three weeks at a time when we lived at the 21st Street house in Washington. You would be in the South traveling for long periods of time. That was just before the Dupont Theatre, wasn't it?
I guess it was.
There was a time when you were really working very much
That's what you say.
You did bring Negroes in to Black Mountain College.
One.
Well, didn't you have a debating team or some team come from Fisk and then that was why Annie and the other girl went over there?
We gotone girl in for the summer conference.
But you were always trying to bring Negroes in at that time, I thought.
The question that Jackie asked was did I go down there with that intention and I did not. It was only when I got down there and faced the situation that I saw that it wasn't living up to what it should be that I felt we ought to do something about it.
Did you remember that we had lived in New York for a whole year after we left Black Mountain? We came directly to New York, not to Washington. We lived in Park Avenue and took the Cohens into the house with us. That was straight from Black Mountain.
What were you doing during that year?
Working for the [CIO] PAC.
That was 1943-4. A cute thing in connection with the story with Robeson.
When Paul and Lawrence Brown were discussing with Clark what he was
going to do if they did . . . they thought that he was going to have
trouble. Lawrence said "Well, Clark, what are you going to do if they
come and challenge your right to sit here with us?" And
Mairi, could I ask you a question? When you married Clark you were
woman's editor of the Toronto Daily Star. I know this
would be a long story, to get into your life and activities, too, but
fairly briefly can you tell me something about how you . . . did you go
on with your career in any way . . . .
Oh, the Star used to ask me to write stories, but I
think I only wrote one or two things back. I became so involved in
Washington life. I thought that . . . I was too involved. I went to art
school the first year. I wanted to study painting. And there was a
perfectly wonderful opportunity at the Phillips Art Gallery Art School.
So I went and studied painting. And then I started to have a family.
After all, I was over 30. I had to get busy having a family. And the
life in Washington was very busy. Roped you in. I went in to working,
oh, for the national symphony and on the public school committee and
various other things.
Did you start one of the first integrated public schools in Washington?
I was always given credit for being . . . but I really didn't have the
idea for that school. I think that my friend Agnes Engnes Inglis said
that I had made her do it or something ridiculous, which wasn't so. I
remember having a conversation with her and saying that there should be
a school started and that it should start right down in the lowest
grades so that there wouldn't be as much feeling about it. The children
would integrate more happily. And then we went to New York to live for a
year. When I came back Ag said "Well, you
But she was in charge of a radio women's program.
Also, I took over the children's art center from the WPA project. I insisted on running that only on a desegregated basis. And it worked very, very well.
You had a radio show?
Well, I did a couple of programs for women for WQQW. That was a little later.
[In that day?] that was quite a job.
Well, I know.
A show every day?
Well, I had an interview program for ten minutes and five minutes of news
at the end of it. But I became a little bit too radical for the station
I think. I was approached by both the unions to belong and I was very
eager to be a member of the union. The management got wind of it and so
they promoted me to be the personnel manager.
You were raising a family while Clark was doing all these different things, fairly unconventional things. What kind of effect was his career and his reform activities having on the children?
Well, that's a very good question, because our children had Negro
friends, right from the time that they were old enough to have any
friends. And several incidents took place with our children where they
stood up, against the authorities. One was in the public playground in
Washington. I took these children—Sheila and Joanie and Geno, who was
Hugh then—and two or three little Negro friends from our neighborhood
Did any of them go on to become politically active in their own right?
Oh, they're all very politically oriented.
Joanie, the younger one . . . . When we went to New York she went to a public school in New York. She and Eskimo were the only non-Jewish children in the class. One day the teacher said—
About Rene paying his money? Well, there was a little French boy and the
teacher was collecting the money for whatever the community
organization, the school . . . they have some little fee that they pay
for class expenses. The teacher went around the class and put down who
had paid and she came to the little French boy, Rene, and she said "Why
haven't you paid your quarter?" Or "your 15 cents." And he said "My
father didn't have it to give me." "Well, Rene, then you just can't be a
member of this—" Oh, Joanie's hand shot up and she said "That's not
fair." She stood up and said "We'll all contribute for Rene." And the
teacher said "Well, that's not the same, that's not the same. I think
that Rene should get the money. He just didn't convince his father of
theimportance of this." Well, really, they were very poor people and
they didn't have the money. So the next day, I think
You were radical. My son was eight years old at the time that MacArthur came back from Wake Island or where ever it was that Truman fired him. Each member of the class had to say one letter of . . . they were going to spell MacArthur's name out in front of the class. And each child had to say something for each letter. So when it got to T, my son said "T is for Truman, whose advice he would not heed." Well, Joanie wouldn't go . . . the whole school in her class was given the opportunity to go over to 5th Ave and watch the parade if they wanted to, but she wouldn't go.
The other thing was, once I was called up at the John Quincy Adams
school—which later the principal became one of my very dearest friends
and she came to the Wallace meetings and asked me to get tickets for her
but not to tell anybody. Florence Cornell. She called me up to the
school one day because when Geno, Hugh, was in the first grade they had
all been asked to write an essay. He wrote an essay that had no bearing
on the little books that they'd been reading and she said that she was
disturbed by this because she thought that he was getting embued in
politics and that we were teaching him about politics and things of that
kind too early. I said I'd come up and see. She said "I want you to come
up and talk to the teacher." Miss Michaelson and Mrs Cornell and I met
and some of the other children's essays were
That was another thing that the children had to suffer. Oh well, it went
on and on. They were always being called communists. Mrs Cornell called
them in at that time of the Wallace campaign. Mrs Cornell called the
children in and said to them—because they wore Wallace buttons to school
and the other children would jerk them off them and take them away from
them and then they would turn up the next day with a new Wallace button.
So Mrs Cornell called them into the office and she said "You children
are having a hard time, aren't you?" They said, well, yes, they were.
And she said "Because you're for Henry Wallace." And they said yes. And
she said "Well, I want you to know that Mrs Cornell is for Wallace and
I'm having a hard time, too. But I think it will be worth it." And you
know, you just can't imagine any public school teacher going out on a
limb like that. The principal. She took me to a board of education
meeting about desegregating the schools in Washington because she
thought I might speak out. Because the John Quincy Adams School was
losing white
I understand . . . after the mess she made with her children, she wasn't . . .
The children really . . . it was something for them to weep about. I don't think it hurt them. I think that's all. I better stop.
What happened was, it was a meeting in 1928 in Washington. And John Hope was there. He and Will Alexander and I had been talking about the need for this. Getting these all together and how it could be done. And all the difficulties were raised. So I finally came through with the idea, well, if John Hope was made the head of the Atlanta University, which was just a part of it, and then the others could be brought together around him. So he accepted that. He thought it was a brilliant idea. Just seemed to me commonplace.
Do you feel like talking a little bit about the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee so we will have a little bit on your whole career?
I don't feel like it now.
END OF INTERVIEW