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$ 2 ”The Sense of Security No Longer Exists” The Early 1950s A s the 1950s opened, change pressed on the South with growing intensity. The victory of the Communists in China and the beginning of the Korean War brought global challenges to American power into sharp focus. At home, an aggressive anti-Communism arose to counter the perceived threat of subversion from within. In the South itself, deep changes spread through the economy, demographics, and culture.1 New manufacturing industries entered the region, drawing agricultural workers to rapidly growing cities. By 1950 there were thirty cities in the South with 100,000 or more people; ten of those had at least 250,000. The region’s population as a whole had increased by nearly 4 million since 1940.2 In 1950, on the occasion of Vanderbilt’s seventy-fi h anniversary, Harvie Branscomb spoke of this transformation with pride and hope. The South is no longer the [n]ation’s acute economic problem, though we are far yet from a aining the average individual income of the nation as a whole. The progress in this part of the United States within the last two decades has been impressive. The farms are being mechanized ; the one crop system is gone. More and more power dams are being built on our rivers. Industries are springing up. Barge lines now move up the Tennessee and the Cumberland. Vast installations of government are now coming into the region. One only has to drive across the country to see that the physical form of the old South has ceased to be, and that the new South which we have talked about so long is in process of realization.3 Branscomb believed that these ongoing changes presented southern universities with even greater opportunities to lead. The region’s new vitality, he said, meant that southerners Desegregating Private Higher Education in the South  58 will be able to build educational institutions of the first rank. The resources for a great university in this region are now to be found at home. . . . There is almost daily evidence that the thoughtful lea[d]ers of the country believe that sound foundations have been laid here for a great university and that this is the proper location for one. This is the meaning of the recent election of Vanderbilt to the Association of American Universities. It did not mean that our advanced teaching and research had reached its full or proper limit. It did mean a verdict by our peers that the graduate school . . . is sound and worthy, and that we should be called upon to represent and strengthen scholarship and science in this part of the country.4 Change continued also in southern race relations, o en quietly and beneath the surface of daily life. While much seemed the same—schools, parks, and transportation all remained segregated; most southern blacks still worked in menial occupations—within the region’s black communities a new resolve to fight their demeaning treatment emerged. By the summer of 1951 the five cases that would later be consolidated as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka had all been filed. A li le more than a year later lawyers argued these cases in front of the United States Supreme Court.5 The desegregation of the region’s public graduate and professional schools, also instigated by NAACP legal challenges, continued at a steady pace.6 Not every white southerner, of course, embraced these changes with the same sense of optimism as Harvie Branscomb. The scope and pace of the transformations le many angry and disoriented, but even more jarring was the erratic nature of the change. As southern cities were being rapidly trans- figured, smaller towns and rural areas were o en le with many of their traditional ways intact. This clash added to the anger and sense of lost control , as people struggled to understand what was happening and why.7 Something of this state of mind can be seen in a speech that Hollis Edens gave in early 1950 to the Men’s Fellowship Club of the Main Street Methodist Church in Gastonia, North Carolina. The Gastonia Gaze e reported his uneasy remarks. “Time ceased to march 60 years ago, Dr. Edens said figuratively , and ‘now it catapults.’” His remedy for the unse led state of affairs was to turn around, to “double back” and “fill the pockets that were le open in that march of civilization.” Edens insisted that “we need to go...

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