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1. N&O, 19 August 1945. 2. NBL to FPG, 12 August 1943, FPG Papers; Ashby, Frank Porter Graham, 154, 174–91. 3. Birmingham News-Age Herald, 20 November 1938; WP, 6 July 1938; NYT, 23 and 24 November 8 † NEW BATTLEGROUNDS Nell Lewis praised God in her 19 August 1945 installment of “Incidentally” as she marked the yielding by Japan five days earlier to the Allies’ terms of surrender . She expressed her deep gratitude to the Lord for the “inestimable blessing of peace which has come at last to the tortured world” and for the “victory of the forces of freedom.” The columnist also continued to advance her frequently invoked thesis that mankind’s transgressions had “brought upon us the unparalleled catastrophe of this war,” and she implored the Supreme Being to “grant that we may never again repeat those sins.”1 During the war Lewis had written to her friend Frank Porter Graham in Washington to learn more about his views regarding various postwar international organizations. Franklin D. Roosevelt had appointed Graham to the National War Labor Board, which the president created to settle industrial disputes that might impede the military effort. The commander in chief’s selection outraged several ultraconservative congressmen, who resented the southern liberal leader’s ties to a myriad of progressive organizations. Regardless of his many professional responsibilities, the University of North Carolina ’s chief executive remained virtually incapable of declining to lend his support to any assemblage advocating social, political, and economic justice in the South.2 Graham’s impeccable liberal credentials and his inspirational delivery of the opening address at the initial convention of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW) in Birmingham in November 1938 had resulted in his election to serve as that organization’s chairman. Born of the response by idealistic southerners to Roosevelt’s declaration several months earlier that the “South presents right now the Nation’s No. 1 economic problem,” the SCHW staged in the red brick Municipal Auditorium and other venues in the industrial city—a bastion of Jim Crowism and the focal point of the Communist Party, USA’s activities in Dixie—a remarkable interracial gathering of more than twelve hundred delegates and many other attendees, including several communists.3 new battlegrounds 217 Before leaving the convention on its second day to attend another meeting , Graham had insisted that he would under no circumstances serve as the permanent chairman of the newly formed organization. Two days later, as arch-segregationist and New Deal antagonist Martin Dies, the Birmingham City Commission, the Alabama Council of Women’s Democratic Clubs, and numerous conservative southern newspapers commenced a concerted attack on the SCHW, Graham learned of his election to the post he had declined. In spite of the opprobrium he knew he would face, he accepted the lightning rod position and expressed his willingness to work in conjunction with others “who appreciate the South and can take it on the chin if necessary for the region and the people they love the most.”4 Graham soon learned that despite the small size of the communist contingency , it contained influential members. In a series of letters that he wrote to these individuals, he attempted to persuade them to disclose any connections they had to the Communist Party. He did not request that they resign from the conference but urged a complete and truthful disclosure of their allegiance to the Party in order to allay rumors and negative publicity and to ensure their aboveboard participation at the SCHW biennial convention, which would assemble in April 1940 in Chattanooga, Tennessee. All of his correspondents denied having communist ties.5 At the Chattanooga convention Graham prevailed in a bitter fight against the conference’s communists and fellow travelers and played a prominent role in authoring and securing the adoption of an amendment that “deplore[d] the rise of dictators anywhere, the oppression of civil liberties, the persecution of minorities, aggression against small and weak nations, the violation of human rights and democratic liberties of the people by all Fascist, Nazi, Communist , and imperialist powers alike which resort to force and aggression instead of the processes of law, freedom, democracy, and international cooperation.” 1938; Linda Reed, Simple Decency & Common Sense: The Southern Conference Movement, 1938–1963 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 15–19; Thomas A. Krueger, And Promises to Keep: The Southern Conference for Human Welfare, 1938–1948 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1967), 20–39; Morton Sosna, In Search of the Silent South: Southern Liberals...

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