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4 Night Train, Freedom Train: Black Youth and Racial Politics in the Early Cold War
- The University of North Carolina Press
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112 7 7 7 7 7 7 “Returning to Memphis from a small town in northern Alabama recently,IfoundmyselfhummingandreflectingonRoyAcuff’sclassicinvitation :‘TakethatnighttraintoMemphis/TakethatnighttraintoMemphis / I’ll be waiting at the station,’” wrote LeMoyne College student Charles E. Lincoln for the LeMoyne Democrat, a campus newspaper, in February 1946. He contrasted Acuff’s country music lyrics about a much-anticipated romantic rendezvous to his own sentiments aboard a segregated Memphisbound train. “Irresistibly,” he wrote, “I was being rushed through the night back to the world cotton market, back to Beale Street, back to the terrors of the Memphis police brutality, the far-reaching, all seeing Cerberus of the Crump machine and the unpleasant daily contact with the little Crumplets .” Torn about his own choice to return to the city, Lincoln—better known as C. Eric Lincoln, who would become a leading scholar of religion and African American culture in subsequent years—noted that as a World War II veteran, he could have attended a northern university on the GI Bill. Despite his misgivings, he viewed LeMoyne as an intellectual “oasis,” where “[f]or a few hours each day one can feel that he is man among men, that life holds a future, and education a promise.”1 Two years after Lincoln’s poem appeared in a LeMoyne paper, another train ride placed the city at the heart of local and national controversy over the meaning of freedom in postwar America. Scheduled to visit Memphis in January 1948, the much-heralded Freedom Train, sponsored by the American Heritage Foundation (ahf), altered its itinerary to avoid Memphis after Mayor James Pleasants Jr. declared that he refused to concede to the foundation’s desegregation policy for visitors to the train. Originally proposed by the U.S. Justice Department at the commencement of the Cold War, the Freedom Train surpassed any previous project in the na7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 Night Train, Freedom Train Black Youth and Racial Politics in the Early Cold War 4 Racial Politics in the Cold War 113 tion’s history to promote allegiance to American democracy. The exhibit, installed on a high-speed modern streamliner, showcased original historical documents hailed as milestones of American democracy, usually held at the National Archives and other institutions. Freighted with this precious cargo, the train visited all forty-eight states, traveling over 37,000 miles to 322 cities and towns between September 1947 and January 1949.2 Greeted at each stop by thousands of enthusiasts, it kicked off community “rededication” celebrations at which local citizens pledged their commitment to American democracy. Paradoxically, the ahf’s goal to unify American citizens behind a presumably shared history based on democracy ignited conflict over the postwar meaning of freedom, especially in the South. The train’s journey from town to town and state to state united Americans but at the same time divided them by becoming a lightning rod for local tensions about race. Even the historical documents became part of the struggle, as various groups disputed their representativeness of American democracy and their original and contemporary meanings. For example, hundreds of individuals from around the country sent letters to Memphis newspapers and the mayor to articulate their own opinions about the Crump machine’s refusal to adhere to the ahf’s desegregation policy, imbuing the local dispute with national significance. Memphis residents also weighed in, suggesting that the train’s bypassing Memphis had prompted many citizens to view themselves, the city, and the idea of freedom in new light. At LeMoyne College, the Freedom Train conflict spurred returning veterans and newly entering students to forge identities as members of a new generation of activists who would fight for freedom for African Americans. Even as the Crump machine defiantly espoused a view of freedom as the absence of Yankee tyranny, students pursued their own understandings of this ideal. In the immediate aftermath of the war, a majority of LeMoyne students joined the college chapter of the naacp. As the Freedom Train controversy erupted in fall 1967, college naacp members published the premier issue of their newsletter, The Beacon, in which they declared that it was their role to “lead the way in the fight for freedom.”3 They contrasted themselves as students to the “man on the street” who lacked educational opportunities. They also distinguished themselves from older black leaders , including those at the helm of the Memphis naacp. The following January , two Greyhound buses filled with LeMoyne College students...