The New Southern University: Academic Freedom and Liberalism at UNC

4. "A New Negro Is About to Come on the Scene": Leadership vs. Caution in the Struggle for Racial Equality

87 4 “A New Negro Is About to Come on the Scene” Leadership vs. Caution in the Struggle for Racial Equality On a crisp autumn afternoon in 1935, Paul Green, a famous UNC playwright and a dedicated liberal on race issues, decided to join a couple of faculty friends and take in the Duke-Auburn football game up the road in Durham. Green was well known for writing sympathetic African American characters into his plays and for presenting the grittier, uglier side of southern race relations. In 1930, for example, he staged an early version of his play Potter’s Field, based on the hardships of life in Chapel Hill’s black community, to help raise funds for the local African American school, the Orange County Training Center.1 For this and other efforts to improve race relations in the region, he earned the admiration of southern liberals of the 1920s and 1930s. His diary, however, reveals that not everyone appreciated his views on race: “On way to car after game a funny incident happened. A drunk Carolina student leaned from his car, quoted a bit of Negro Tommy’s speech at me and said, ‘Go f— yourself.’ Who he was I do not know.”2 As Paul Green’s experience at the football game reveals, being a white southern liberal—especially one considered an “expert” on southern race relations—could be a trying experience. During the 1920s, UNC faculty, students, and administrators had used the university’s academic freedom to relate to African Americans 88 The New Southern University in new ways. Through the CIC, UNC had established new contacts with black leaders and gained more perspective on the black experience. Some UNC faculty and students had embraced the work of black authors as writers to be read and appreciated for their vision, their technique , and their talent. Prominent African American leaders such as James Weldon Johnson, George Washington Carver, and Robert Moton had visited the campus and interacted with UNC students. UNC leaders entered the 1930s expecting more of the same. Academic freedom enabled Paul Green, Frank Graham, and the school’s famous team of sociologists to deconstruct the mythic narrative of segregation’s virtues. Green wrote about “feeling the need of concerted effort towards racial justice, abolition of present chain-gang system, better pay for teachers, etc., etc.”3 Guy Johnson and his graduate students continued to take a hard, candid look at conditions affecting the local black community. For instance, the research he and others conducted on black poverty provided a “scientific” explanation for the evidence of the devastating effects of a Jim Crow political economy. Student Mayne Allbright applauded the selection of Frank Graham as president, saying it was a sign of good things to come for southern race relations. “On the Negro question,” Allbright said of Graham’s leadership, “a constructive attitude of scholarly research and gradual race improvement.”4 Allbright perfectly summed up UNC’s ambitions at the time; but the 1930s proved to be far different from a mere extension of the 1920s. There was no doubting the mountain of obstacles to be overcome as white southern liberals surveyed southern race relations at the beginning of the 1930s.5 They saw even deeper black poverty caused by the Great Depression, the appalling Scottsboro Boys case in Alabama, and new evidence suggesting lynching was on the rise again. Throughout the South, the criminal justice system continued to put to death African Americans convicted on the flimsiest of evidence and by no jury of their peers, a situation that Paul Green described as “the southern indoor sport—execution of more Negroes.”6 In North Carolina, violence stalked the efforts of the black professional class as they attempted to do their jobs, such as the two Durham lawyers who faced “about ten shots” and “rocks hurled” outside the Henderson courthouse as they attempted to defend two African American men charged with assaulting a white woman.7 It is with good reason that historian Augustus Burns says the 1930s for black southerners were “years of trial, with little hope.”8 Out of this despair, a spirit of militancy arose. African Americans Leadership vs. Caution in the Struggle for Racial Equality 89 pushed even harder for a “forced entrance of the future” on their terms.9 New, assertive voices emerged from within the black community, speaking on a range of issues including antilynching legislation, the...