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From Jim Crow to Jane Crow, or How Anne Scott and Pauli Murray Found Each Other
- University Press of Mississippi
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142 From Jim Crow to Jane Crow, or How Anne Scott and Pauli Murray Found Each Other —glenda elizabeth gilmore Guion Johnson was home alone on an early spring afternoon in 1939 when the ringing telephone pierced the silence. It was a school day, and she was president of the PTA at Chapel Hill High School. Her husband, Guy Johnson , was up in New York talking to a visitor from Sweden, Gunnar Myrdal, whom the Ford Foundation had hired to study race relations in the United States. Guy might have learned more about race relations if he had stayed at home that day. A male graduate student from the University of North Carolina was on the line, and his words tumbled out in a rush. A white mob had headed out to lynch a “Negro farmer who lived on the edge of town.” The farmer was accused of raping a white Chapel Hill High student during the school lunch period a couple of hours earlier. Graduate students from the sociology department were heading out to confront the lynch mob. Would Guion Johnson gather some townspeople to come and back them up? Johnson asked who had been raped, and when she heard the student’s name, she stopped the torrent of words. “That can’t possibly be true,” she exclaimed, “I saw and talked with this girl during the noon recess.” Johnson had seen the girl at the Rose’s 5-10-25 Cent Store, “whispering and giggling with one of the salesgirls.” Johnson reprimanded her: “What are you two giggling about? And why are you off the schoolgrounds? It’s against the rules, you know.” “I’m going right on back to school now,” the girl promised. Johnson described the girl as belonging to “one of the few poor-white families” in Chapel Hill. The girl was fatherless and lived near the black farmer whom she had accused of raping her. In Johnson’s capacity as PTA president, she managed a small emergency medical fund for poor students. Months earlier, the girl had needed a tonsillectomy; Johnson had taken her to the hospital to have the procedure, and paid for it. How Anne Scott and Pauli Murray Found Each Other 143 Fearful that a mob of graduate students might prove unequal to a lynch mob, Johnson hung up and called the chair of the sociology department , the famed race-relations expert Howard Odum. She told him that his students needed him and that she had proof that the girl was lying. He responded, “I can’t join these boys. I would not like to face my white farmer friends and confront them when they think they are doing what is right.” He advised her to “leave the matter alone because he was sure the police would handle” it. Muttering to herself that she “knew the police better than he did,” Johnson then called the mayor, who took the farmer from the tiny jail in Carrboro to safety in the Durham jail. Despite Johnson’s eyewitness testimony that the young white woman was elsewhere at the time of the alleged rape, the black farmer stayed in jail for months. There are thousands of southern stories like this one, but in this case, we know why the white woman cried rape. Johnson was already aware of the girl’s “general reputation.” Here is how she conveyed it to the mayor that day: “She has been slipping out of classes and going next door to the basement of the Baptist Church to meet her boy friend. . . . She is pregnant and . . . she has concocted this tale to get a legal abortion.”1 Such an embarrassment of riches, the plethora of connections between race, class, and gender that radiate from this story, ready to ensnare the historian. Let’s start at the end: “She is pregnant and . . . she has concocted this tale to get a legal abortion.” That explanation is astonishing to us, yet it seemed perfectly logical to Guion Johnson. In the pre-Roe South, at least in the ninety square miles that Johnson and I shared in the 1950s and 1960s, pregnant girls went to the drugstore for quinine tablets, threw themselves down the stairs, or wondered if they knew anyone who knew anyone in New York City. Wealthy girls might find their private doctors helpful. I remember choosing a gynecologist in Charlotte in 1969 because, it was rumored, he would help “if you got in trouble.” But what’s a poor white...