Remaking the Rural South by Ferguson Robert Hunt

Author:Ferguson, Robert Hunt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2017-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

The Concrete Needs of the Thousands among Us

Returning from a conference in Raleigh, North Carolina, in March 1943, Sam Franklin felt energized by the like-minded conferees and stirring speakers. The conference was convened by his old friend, Howard Kester, and sponsored by the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen, an interdenominational and interracial group of liberal laity and clergy from the South who worked toward ameliorating the region’s many social problems. Kester titled the conference “Christianity, Democracy, and the Healing of the South.” It was just the kind of work that the residents at Delta and Providence had attempted for the past seven years. At Kester’s invitation, Franklin had been a featured speaker at the conference. Returning to Providence, Franklin thought about how to implement healing in his own small community.1

The trip to Providence was long. Franklin traveled by bus from Raleigh to Meridian, Mississippi, where he then took a train to Jackson. In Mississippi’s capital, he boarded another bus and rode sixty miles north to the small crossroads town of Tchula, Mississippi. From downtown Tchula, he hitchhiked the remaining seven miles out to the farm. The lengthy journey gave Franklin time to reflect on Kester’s conference, but it also provided him ample opportunity to observe the racial customs of public transportation in the South and overhear southerners’ conversations about race relations. At the conference, Franklin had taken part in discussions with like-minded activists, many of whom were southerners, who viewed Jim Crow as an impediment to “healing the South.” As he returned to Providence Farm, he saw and heard white southerners of a different mind, who were determined to maintain Jim Crow at great cost. “As I traveled in Mississippi, I not only saw new evidence of almost sadistic inhumanity in the needless humiliations imposed on Negroes in bus travel,” Franklin lamented, “but also heard one middle class white woman telling another that she had been warned to go armed at all times as the Negroes were soon going to ‘rise.’”2

What Sam Franklin witnessed in his travels was a South in transition and on the verge of crisis. World War II had made race relations more elastic, forcing many Americans to confront the realities that fighting fascism overseas would be an empty gesture to black veterans who returned home to Jim Crow. Meanwhile, African Americans increasingly drew on local organizing networks to agitate for equal rights. Yet for others, the late 1930s and early 1940s increased fears of black advancement in all areas of American society. The continued calls for racial integration, both socially and economically, among returning veterans and the black press led to defiant entrenchment on the part of many white southerners. Even moderate liberals warned of moving too fast too soon in the direction of racial equality. Sociologist Howard W. Odum’s 1943 book Race and Rumors of Race cautioned how white supremacists would resort to violence to maintain Jim Crow. The South was not yet ready, he concluded, for sweeping changes in race relations.3

Additionally, the steady emigration

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