Paul Robeson was involved in the simmering racial politics that led to the Ku Klux Klan attack on Charlie’s Place in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina in the summer of 1950. Charlie Fitzgerald’s coziness with whites was out of sync with the time and place. Racial tension in South Carolina began escalating after a federal judge opened the state’s Democratic primary to black voters in 1948. It was to the chagrin of many Southern whites that blacks began to assume a few positions of power. The political awakening of the South’s black citizens was at the core of the racially charged 1950 Democratic U.S. Senate campaign in South Carolina. The incumbent senator, Olin D. Johnston, entered the summer campaign bolstered by the successful attempt of Southern senators to block the establishment of a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), a federal agency that would investigate racial discrimination in employment practices. In bombastic Southern oratory, the earthy Johnston — his arms flailing wildly — railed in a speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate that it would be “a blow to Christianity” to require equal treatment of whites and blacks in hiring. “A responsibility has been placed on mankind to keep his race pure,” argued Johnston. “Mongrelization of the races is the greatest destroyer of civilization and Christianity.” In his deep baritone voice, Johnston decried “persistent agitation, designed to cause all colored people to have such a group consciousness as to carry continuously a chip on their shoulders,” and warned his fellow senators “not to mine the road ahead with dynamite that is certain to explode with great destruction when these opposite viewpoints collide.” Back home in South Carolina, anxious to exploit the race issue to the maximum in his campaign for reelection, Johnston stumped the state’s forty-six counties in a series of verbal slugging matches with his opponent, incumbent governor Strom Thurmond. It turned into quite a show. In the towns along the campaign trail, the political rallies leading up to the July 11 Democratic primary were considered top-flight summer entertainment. Boisterous crowds of up to four thousand turned out for the carnival-like stump speeches, demanding that the candidates mix it up with an exchange of barbs and insults. For the first time, newly empowered black voters joined the mostly white crowds. It didn’t matter to either candidate that the rising black constituency would witness the most openly racist political campaign in the state’s modern history. The two candidates worked hard to outdo each other with caustic race-baiting rhetoric. Thurmond accused Johnston of being soft on racial segregation and promised if elected to the Senate that he “will not sit with folded arms and my tongue cleaved to the roof of my mouth” when a federal court makes a civil rights ruling that attacks the southern way of life. “Any man that says I am for mixing of the races is a low-down, contemptible liar,” charged Johnston in a speech at Georgetown. In another appearance at Charleston, the senator—loudly booed by blacks in the crowd — shouted to his hosts, “Make those niggers quit!” Johnston, who darkened his graying hair with black shoe polish, sometimes found moist black streaks running down his forehead in the humid evenings of summer. Thurmond, a health fanatic, became well known for standing on his head on the lawn of the governor’s mansion. At two stops a day in the grueling campaign, the candidates hammered each other on race. Thurmond was accused by Johnston of inviting the governor of the Virgin Islands, a black man, to the South Carolina governor’s mansion. Thurmond was irate. “No Negro will ever be a guest at the governor’s mansion so long as I am governor,” Thurmond shouted to a chorus of boos from blacks at a rally in Columbia. At a rally in Spartanburg, Thurmond chided Johnston for his tenure on the Senate’s District of Columbia Committee. “If he’s got so much influence, why does he let the Negroes swim in the same pools with white people?” Thurmond barked. When they weren’t berating each other on race, the candidates were using paid political ads to polarize South Carolina’s electorate. In a newspaper ad for his candidacy, Thurmond urged President Truman to forget about “minority blocs” of voters and withdraw his program to break down segregation in the armed forces. He warned that Truman’s desegregation plan would “compel Southern white boys to serve, eat, and sleep together with Negro troops and also use the same recreational facilities.” As one looks back on this dark chapter of South Carolina’s history, it is fascinating to note that beginning in 1941, nine years before the senate campaign, Strom Thurmond began providing financial support to a daughter he had fathered with a black woman in 1925. The revelation that Thurmond had a daughter of mixed race came after his death at age 100 in June, 2003. Thurmond’s daughter, Essie Mae Washington-Williams, was born October 12, 1925 to a 16-year-old unmarried mother, Carrie Butler, who cleaned the Thurmond family home in Edgefield, South Carolina. At the time, Thurmond, 22, was living at the home while he worked as a school teacher and high school coach. Thurmond first met his daughter around 1941, after he had been a state senator and circuit judge. From then on, the aspiring politician provided financial support for the woman, who remained a well-kept secret throughout his public career. Knowing Thurmond’s personal history makes his political attack on Paul Robeson, the heroic black singer, actor, and human rights advocate, even more remarkable. Robeson, Thurmond charged, “has been going all over the country demanding that we abolish segregation, and to show his contempt for our way of life in the South, he married his son off to a white girl.” Robeson, one of the era’s most talented, articulate, and politically active public figures, had risked his life to tour small towns throughout the South in 1948 on behalf of the progressive presidential candidate Henry Wallace. Strom Thurmond, as that year’s presidential candidate of the segregationist Dixiecrat party, represented everything Robeson abhorred. In retrospect, Thurmond’s family secret made his attack on Robeson and his son staggering in its sheer hypocrisy. But this cynical Southern politician was not about to lower the racial temperature. Robeson, however, was a black man that Thurmond couldn’t intimidate, and the eloquent intellectual knew how to get under the governor’s skin. Cheerfully singing his way through the deep South, Robeson attacked the Thurmond-led Dixiecrats as “powerful reactionaries who hope to stamp out the militant struggle of the Negro for complete freedom, equality and civil rights [and who] hope to keep all the wealth for themselves.” Framing the “black belt of the South” as the area that would decide whether the Negro people “survive or perish,” Robeson spoke with a level of public candor then unheard of in South Carolina. “For as long as any boy or girl can be denied opportunity in Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and Mississippi — so long as one can be lynched as he or she goes to vote — so long as the precious land does not belong to the people of that area (and with the land, the wealth that flows there from in agriculture and in industry) — so long as they do not have the full opportunity to develop and enrich their cultural heritage and their lives — so long are the whole Negro people not free.” To the South’s white establishment, those were fighting words. Contribute to my Kickstarter campaign to bring the story of Charlie’s Place to the black citizens of South Carolina at the Historic Myrtle Beach Colored School Museum and Education Center. Paul Robeson with Henry Wallace, the presidential candidate https://kickstarter/projects/1448443155/wild-history-ii-overcoming-the-racial-obstacles-to
Posted on: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 05:24:27 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015