Willis Duke Weatherford: Race, Religion, and Reform in the American South by Andrew McNeill Canady (review)

How do we judge the efforts of a single individual to achieve social justice, and whom should we rightly judge them against? This question lies at the heart of Andrew McNeill Canady's judicious assessment of the life and work of Willis Duke Weatherford, a leading figure in the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) in the first half of the twentieth century, whose commitment to alleviating racial and economic injustice was reflected in multiple publications; educational and scholarly collaboration with black scholars in the South; and leadership of key Christian educational institutions with racial understanding as a core mission.

The limits of Weatherford's perspective are obvious enough, to present-day eyes. Raised in mostly white, small-town Texas in the 1870s and 1880s, it is no surprise that Weatherford was not at the cutting edge of the civil rights movement as it burst into the public eye in the 1950s. Shaped first and foremost by his religious faith, tested and re-forged during his college years in the 1890s, Weatherford could be moralistic and high-handed, and he was deeply marked by the paternalism characteristic of white southern Progressives in the early twentieth century. A gradualist throughout his career, Weatherford often gave the impression that he was more concerned with white opinion than with black rights.

Nonetheless, as Kimberley Johnson has recently demonstrated, white southern liberals like Weatherford, committed to pressing for "equal" treatment under Jim Crow, were not completely ineffective. Indeed in some ways their reform efforts stimulated later demands to dismantle the system entirely. Weatherford was at the heart of these early reform efforts: bringing young white members of the YMCA into contact with black scholars from Tuskegee and Fisk; playing an active part in the Southern Sociological Congress and Committee on Interracial Cooperation; and striving for decades to keep summer camps and educational institutions open that would train young minds to the racial tolerance and understanding Weatherford took to be at the heart of white Christian duty. Weatherford went further than most white southern liberals, indeed. Many white liberals faded away once integration became the key demand. Weatherford, by contrast, perhaps as a result of his years teaching at Fisk University, participated in conferences and endorsed statements that, by the 1940s, were clearly moving in an integrationist direction.

Weatherford's gradualism was a constant brake on his embrace of black rights, however, and occasional glimpses suggest other actors believed Weatherford had more scope for action than he was willing to use. Clearly there were financial and personal risks to moving too quickly, as Canady emphasizes. But Weatherford cut his sails preemptively, it seems, and Canady is a little too generous here. His handling of challenges to segregation at Blue Ridge (where Weatherford led various summer programs over the years) frustrated some within the YM/WCA movement. Canady's evidence does not always allow us to assess how sharp the constraints really were, in part because Weatherford did not actively test them. The young Weatherford's white southern progressivism also provided crucial ideological cover for Jim Crow at its moment of emergence, precisely because of the putatively tolerant face it presented, something Canady does not consider.

Nevertheless, one becomes convinced, as Canady seems to hope, that Weatherford became an especially forward-looking advocate of the kind of liberalism possible in the white South under Jim Crow, one genuine in its belief that educating white southerners in Christian duty would compel them to sympathy for the welfare of others (white and black, rural and urban). Naïve, perhaps, but Canady provides ample resources to understand both the inherent limits and guiding ideals of this life lived in service to others, adding to an emerging and more generous re-consideration of white southern liberals of Weatherford's generation.