Minutes of Meeting of National Committee for Defense of Columbia, Tennessee "Riot" Victims

4 April 1946

Present: Co-Chairmen—Mrs. Roosevelt and Dr. Channing Tobias, group from Washington—Clark Foreman, Milton Kemnitz, Sidney Rodnam; Abraham Unger, National Lawyers Guild;¹³ Palmer Weber,¹⁴ CIO-PAC; Mary McLeod Bethune; Arthur B. Spingarn;¹⁵ Justin Feldman, American Veterans Committee;¹⁶ George Marshall, National Federation for Constitutional Liberties;¹⁷ Dr. George Haynes,¹⁸ Federal Council of Churches; Ollie Harrington¹⁹ and Mr. White.

Mr. Foreman pointed out that despite the fact that the "riot" occurred in Tennessee it could have happened anywhere because there is a decided trend to "put the returning Negro veteran in his place" and that Tennessee is only the beginning. Mr. Foreman said that this is such a grave menace to democracy itself that everyone as individuals and organizations must mobilize to meet it.

Mr. Feldman pointed out that not only the question of raising money was important but also some sort of educational program which would be directed to the people of the nation which would indicate what the nature of the incident was and just how they can possibly guard against such violence recurring. Also the question of defending the victims of the attack, punishment of the officers guilty of the crime and whatever legal efforts are possible to get property damage restitution.

There was lengthy discussion concerning the inclusion of the Communist Party in the group working in coordination with the NAACP. Mrs. Roosevelt pointed out that should the Communist Party be part of that group there would be furnished the background for a statement by those who are really guilty and others in the South that the whole defense is a "communist plot". Mrs. Roosevelt expressed the opinion that it would endanger the success of our fight to include the Communist Party. Following further discussion, it was decided to turn to other business and work out this problem at a later date, being pointed out that the really important issue was that there was open action on the part of the authorities to try to prevent democracy in the South.

Mr. Weber stated that all important was

(1) that the NAACP have sufficient funds to carry on legal defense

(2) that there be a national educational drive on the question of race relations

(3) political work in the South and developing the vote of the Negro there

(4) the forming of a policy-steering committee that the people have confidence in and would also have support of all organizations.

Dr. Tobias expressed the opinion that in an emergency situation like the Columbia, Tennessee case people immediately begin to think in terms of organizations. This, he pointed out, can be harmful, as it has been in the past. He said that the rank and file, and particularly colored people, have turned to the NAACP because of its history in the winning of legal battles. He felt that since the NAACP has commanded the confidence of the people of the country, it was only logical that the legal defense be handled by the NAACP.

Mrs. Bethune stated that she was fully in accord with Dr. Tobias' statement.

Dr. Haynes agreed also and pointed out that in defending the victims of the "riot" there must be an example set for the entire world. He felt that the proposed steering committee be not more that 10 persons. He felt that the NAACP should choose such a committee since it had the responsibility of defending the victims. There was further discussion as to the process of setting up such a committee.

Mrs. Roosevelt summarized the suggestions—that the NAACP should appoint a small steering committee chosen from both groups and that that steering committee should formulate policy and make reports to the groups that are willing to take part in the three-fold program and not in any way interfere with the defense of the people but raise money for their defense, promote educational work and try to prevent the recurrence of such violence.

Dr. Haynes suggested that power be given the steering committee to outline the basic guiding basis of inclusion of groups, what they are to do and responsibility the group is to share.

Mr. White was of the opinion that the Association not choose the steering committee but that the co-chairmen select that group.

Mr. Spingarn made a motion that the co-chairmen be authorized to select that steering committee. The motion was seconded by Mrs. Bethune. An amendment was made by Mr. Foreman that the steering committee have power to raise money and to integrate whatever individuals and organizations it sees fit to.

It was suggested that a list of names be submitted to the co-chairmen from which would be selected a steering committee. Mr. Spingarn disagreed on the basis that members might overlook some capable persons. The co-chairmen requested that names be submitted to them and in the event that they thought of additional names such names would be circulated. The steering committee was given power to select its own chairman and that the co-chairmen of the National Committee be officers ex-oficio. There being no further business, the meeting was adjourned.

TMins NAACP, DLC

1. O'Brien, 7-40, quote 16-17; A. Black, Casting, 97-98.

2. "Disorders Halted in Tennessee City," NYT, 27 February 1946, 29; "Tenn. Rioting Ends; Troops Seize Weapons," WP, 27 February 1946, 5; "Sit-Down Staged by 568 Convicts," NYT, 1 March 1946, 2.

3. ER had close ties with four of the organizations attending the NAACP planning meeting—the Southern Conference on Human Welfare, the CIO-PAC, the Chicago Civil Liberties Committee, and the National Federation of Civil Liberties. ER had also worked closely with White on the NAACP's anti-lynching campaign and its defense of the imprisoned sharecropper Odell Waller, and had helped the NAACP secure the financial support critical to its legal efforts (A. Black, Casting, 37-41, 94, 137).

4. Founded in 1938 with both FDR and ER's strong support, the Southern Conference on Human Welfare brought together non-Communist Southern liberals dedicated to addressing the stark economic and racial conditions confronting states south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Led by the CIO-organizer Joseph Gelders, SCHW targeted southern employment practices (specifically the South's violent anti-union sentiments and its reliance on sharecropping and tenant farmers) and its strong support of the poll tax. Its board included ER, University of North Carolina President Frank Pert Graham, Lucy Randolph Mason, Clark Foreman, and Mary McLeod Bethune (Sitkoff, 128-32).

5. A. Black, Casting, 98; O'Brien, 34. For a list of the organizations involved in this committee, see n10 below.

6. Clark H. Foreman (1902–1977), a white, Harvard-educated Georgian who dedicated his career to civil rights action after witnessing a lynching, had impressed ER with his dedication to promoting civil rights prior to his taking action on the Columbia case. In 1942, ER defended Foreman when, as the director of defense housing for the Federal Works Agency, he provoked public criticism by using federal funds to construct the Sojourner Truth housing project in Detroit in an attempt to offer low-income housing to African Americans. Foreman, delighted at the prospect of working with ER once again, wrote her on March 25 to add his "full concurrence" with this letter from Bethune (Werner Bamberger, "Clark H. Foreman, 75," NYT, 16 June 1977, 47; A. Black, Casting, 91; O'Brien, 34; Clark Foreman to ER, 25 March 1946, MMBP, DeWaMMB).

7. For Clark Foreman see n6 above.

8. Z. Alexander Looby (1899–1972), a graduate of Howard University, New York University, and Columbia Law School, was, until 1950, the sole African American attorney in Nashville. In 1951, he became the first African American elected to the Nashville City Council; and he represented Nashville students suing to implement Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka et al. Six years later, white critics of his defense of students engaged in sit-ins bombed his home. The bombing did not dissuade Looby (Untitled Article, WP, 26 March 1972, D10).

9. George Marshall (1904–2000), an economist, lawyer, and political activist, served as chairman of the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties (NFCL), an organization which merged with the International Labor Defense in April 1946 to form the Civil Rights Congress (CRC). Like its predecessors, the CRC fought to end the persecution of African Americans and Communist Party members alike, making the anti-Communist leaders of the NAACP uneasy. The CRC disbanded in 1956, following the House Committee on Un-American Activities' nine-year attack on the CRC. During the investigation, Marshall, who refused to turn over records to the committee, served a three-month prison term for contempt of Congress ("George Marshall," Obituaries, Columbia College Today, May 2001, http://www.college.columbia.edu/cct/may01/may01_obituaries.html, accessed March 1, 2006; "Civil Rights Group Called Red 'Front,'" NYT, 31 August 1947, 2; "Civil Rights Congress Votes for Dissolution," NYT, 10 January 1956, 25; C. Anderson, 60, 168-70).

10. White included the following list of organizations in the body of his letter: Southern Conference for Human Welfare; National Federation for Constitutional Liberties; International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Houston, Texas, and Arlington, Virginia; National Negro Congress; American Veterans Committee; Congress of Industrial Organizations; Independent Citizens Committee; Interracial Fellowship League; African Methodist Episcopal Church, Chicago, Illinois; National Maritime Union; National Council of Negro Women; Metropolitan Community Church, Chicago, Illinois; League of Women Shoppers; National Lawyers Guild; Institute of Applied Religion; Communist Party; Amalgamated Clothing Workers; Chicago Civil Liberties Committee; National Council for Permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee; Methodist Federation for Social Service; Civil Rights Federation; Hudson County CIO Council; United Federal Workers; Cafeteria Workers, CIO; Methodist Church; United Office & Professional Workers of America; Fur and Leather Workers; United Steel Workers of America; International Longshoreman Warehouseman's Union; United People's Action Committee, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; State, County and Municipal Workers of America; Congress for Civil Rights; American Youth for Democracy; Chicago Action Council; Farm Equipment Workers; Veterans-Citizens Committee to Oust Bilbo; American League Post 87, Chicago; International Workers Order; Federation of Colored Women; Delta Sigma Theta; Chicago Council of Negro Organizations; United Automobile Workers; United Packinghouse Workers; American Legion FDR Post; American Committee for Spanish Freedom; American Communications Association; N.C. Federation of Women's Clubs (colored); North Carolina Committee for Human Welfare; Washington Independent Union Council; Alpha Kappa Alpha Non-Partisan Council; Congress of Women's Auxiliaries; Hotel and Club Employees Union; the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America; as well as numerous local organizations, clergymen, professors, and other public-spirited individuals.

11. Memphis mayor and investment banker Edward Hull Crump (1876–1954) ran a political machine that controlled the Democratic Party in Tennessee for over twenty years. As a political boss, Crump opposed the Ku Klux Klan and supported FDR; however, he insisted that organized labor had no place in politics. When progressive groups such as the Congress of Industrial Organizations began to challenge his authority in the late 1930s, Crump denounced them as Communists to discredit their efforts. Crump's power was not restricted to party politics. As long as his machine remained in power, he also controlled the state police and highway patrol, and he hired men who exerted force (both physical and political) in ways less "benevolent" than the Crump machine's "benevolent dictatorship." In 1946, Edward W. Carmack, backed by the CIO, challenged Crump's grip on state politics by running against Sen. Kenneth D. McKellar (D-TN), chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee and Crump's strongest ally. On election day, demonstrations against the Crump machine grew so intense that when veterans protested in Athens, Tennessee, a deputy sheriff died trying to disperse the crowd. McKellar won the primary by a 75,000 vote margin (Harold B. Hinton, "Crump of Tennessee: Portrait of a Boss," NYT, 29 September 1946, 120; "He Liked to Run Things," NYT, 18 October 1954, 24; Virginius Dabney, "The Upper South: McKellar's Rival Plans 80 Tennessee Speeches," NYT, 26 May 1946, E8; DAB).

12. A. Black, Casting, 98. Quote taken from Document 103.

13. Abraham Unger (1899–1975) established himself as an attorney committed to the defense of civil rights and civil liberties by representing the African Americans accused of rape in the Scottsboro case in the 1930s and members of the Communist Party indicted under the Smith Act in the 1940s. Unger represented the National Lawyers Guild, an organization of legal professionals "who seek actively to eliminate racism; who work to maintain and protect our civil rights and liberties in the face of persistent attacks upon them; and who look upon the law as an instrument for the protection of the people rather than for their repression" ("Abraham Unger Is Dead at 76," NYT, 17 July 1975, 32; National Lawyers Guild, "About Us: Mission and History," http://www.nlg.org/about/aboutus.htm, accessed 1 March 2006).

14. Frederick Palmer Weber (1914–1975), a former teacher of philosophy and economics at the University of Virginia where he received his Ph.D., worked as research director of the Political Action Committee of the CIO, a position he had held since 1944 ("F. Palmer Weber, 72, Is Dead," NYT, 24 August 1986, 36).

15. Arthur Barnett Spingarn (1878–1971), an attorney committed to using the courts to fight for civil rights, served concurrently as president of the NAACP (1940–1966) and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund (1940–1957) (DAB; Farnsworth Fowle, "Arthur Spingarn of the NAACP Is Dead," NYT, 2 December 1971, 1).

16. Justin N. Feldman served as director of veterans affairs of the American Veterans Committee, a racially integrated group of veterans formed as an alternative to the conservative American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars. The American Veterans' Committee mission statement—as printed on its official letterhead—read, "To achieve a more democratic and prosperous America and a more stable world" (Egerton, 328; Justin Feldman to ER, 9 January 1947, AERP).

17. See n9 above.

18. George Edmund Haynes (1880–1960), a sociologist who received his Ph.D. from Columbia University (the first African American to earn a doctorate from that institution), studied race relations in the urban setting and actively worked to improve those relations by organizing conferences and clinics, first as the founder and executive secretary of the National Urban League (1910–1917) and then as the executive secretary of the Department of Race Relations of the Federal Council of Churches (1922–1946) (DAB; "George E. Haynes, Sociologist, Dies," NYT, 10 January 1960, 87).

19. Oliver Wendell Harrington (1912–1995), cartoonist and journalist, illustrated "Bootsie," a comic strip that satirized race relations in the United States, for over thirty-five years. Working as a wartime correspondent for the Pittsburgh Courier in Italy, Harrington met Walter White who, after the war ended, hired him to head the NAACP's public relations department. Harrington authored the NAACP's pamphlet describing the events in Columbia, entitled "Terror in Tennessee" (ANBO; Eric Pace, "Oliver Harrington, Cartoonist Who Created 'Bootsie,' Dies at 84," NYT, 7 November 1995, D22; O'Brien, 35). For the controversy surrounding "Terror in Tennessee," see header, Document 118.

Creating a Machinery for Peace

ER promoted the United Nations whenever and wherever she could. On February 19, 1946, Chester D. Owens, director of education at the progressive Elmira (New York) Reformatory, wrote ER to ask if she would contribute a guest column for The Summary, an eight-page weekly publication produced by the Elmira inmates and then circulated among prisoners across the country. ER's article, entitled "Mrs. Roosevelt Speaks," appeared in the March 29 issue.¹