The New Southern University: Academic Freedom and Liberalism at UNC

Epilogue: “Th e University Must Go on Being a University”: Frank Graham and the World War II Era

149 Epilogue “The University Must Go on Being a University” Frank Graham and the World War II Era The entrance of the United States into World War II in December 1941 presented Frank Graham and UNC with a dizzying array of new challenges . Graham had already begun in 1940 to anticipate the changes that war mobilization would bring to UNC. He was in the forefront of local preparedness efforts, pledging the university’s assistance to and cooperation with the federal government. At Franklin Roosevelt’s request, Graham threw himself into wartime service; he spent weeks in Washington , DC, serving on the War Labor Board. At the same time, Graham hoped the university would still adhere to its central mission, as he explained in a letter to UNC parents and students. “The University must go on being a University,” Graham said, “ever alert to the needs of its people.” War challenged UNC to “meet the double responsibility of carrying out the regular functions and freedom of a historic and progressive state University, and of cooperating to the limit of our capacity with our country in a total war against the axis powers to save the freedom and all things for which America and our University stand.” The war was bound to alter life at the University and, as Graham noted, bring “many new things to the peaceful, freedom-loving village of Chapel Hill.” These new things included “Naval R.O.T.C., the student flight-training program , the Carolina Volunteer Training Corps, courses in military science , the ‘speed-up’ of college years from four to three, admission by 150 The New Southern University examination, military and naval research projects, and civilian morale organizations.”1 Not everything changed at UNC during the war or throughout the 1940s, however. Controversies involving race relations, labor/leftist activity , and academic freedom continued to stir deep emotions at the university and throughout the South. Even though he was gone from campus much of the time, Frank Graham remained at the center of these controversies. While a more complete study of academic freedom and liberalism at UNC during the 1940s will have to wait for further research , a focus on Frank Graham will give a quick view of the challenges presented by the new context of world war and the early Cold War. The war gave Graham the weapon of patriotism to sharpen his attacks on the South’s racists and to resist the nearly pathological fear of organized labor and leftist politics. In his wartime speeches, Graham placed his support of unions and more racial justice at the core of U.S. efforts in the war, and his reputation as one of the South’s most renowned liberals grew. But Graham’s heart never left the university; he routinely cited academic freedom and the importance of the university to a democratic society as central to the American war effort. World War II gave African Americans new momentum in their long struggle for civil rights. As many historians have noted by now, the war— and, more specifically, the murderously racist policies of the Nazi state— gave African Americans and white liberals new ammunition in their struggle against segregation.2 In Raleigh, for example, an African American judge and longtime NAACP leader, Hubert T. Delany, said in 1944 that “white Christians are nothing but plain, ordinary, psalm-singing hypocrites.” Delany charged that white southerners paid “lip service and nothing more to Christianity. . . . The White Christians drape themselves with the Cross of Christ at every opportunity but they present the perfect example of hatred. They teach the poor whites and the poor blacks to hate one another; they uphold, tolerate, and condone segregation , disfranchisement, and every other institution that prevents Christianity from being a reality. . . . We have to face the truth in this country. Hitler has no monopoly on fascism. We started it right here; we taught fascism to Hitler; we have been practicing it for years.”3 Life in Chapel Hill remained fraught with hardship and uncertainty for the local black community. John K. Chapman points out that “as late as 1944 parts of the black community of Chapel Hill had no electricity .” But Chapman also relates the story of Edna Lyde, who moved to Epilogue 151 Chapel Hill from South Carolina in 1944. Her first job was as a housekeeper at the Carolina Inn. After her supervisor, a white man named Moses, yelled at her...