Year 1946

Sen. Joseph McCarthy would shape the era.

__________ 

“Probably the only people who have the historical sense of inevitable victory are the Americans.”  

Denis Brogan

__________

 

WEEKLY movie attendance in the United States hits 90 million. Within a few years TV will cut deep into theater business. 

Frank Sinatra is hugely popular with teens. On one occasion, fans grabbed at his bow tie for a souvenir and nearly choked him. One older woman wanted her bra autographed. A reporter spoke of “hordes of pimply, shrieking slaves,” listening to him sing.

 

*

Caucasian-only golfing.

William Powell, a returning veteran finds his race means golf courses in the U.S. will often ban him from playing. He begins work on Clearview Golf Club. Two years later he opens a nine-hole course, the first and only designed, built, owned and operated by an African American. In 2013 Powell was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame. Powell took over a rundown dairy farm near Canton, Marcia Pledger explained in a story for the Plain Dealer.  

“He often worked 16-hour days, seven days a week, holding a fulltime job at Timken at night, while seeding, fertilizing and clearing land by hand during the day.” His daughter told Pledger, “He built the course because he loved the game of golf, and when he returned from serving our country in World War II, he wasn’t allowed to play on golf courses in Ohio. My father despised exclusion.” 

The PGA did not remove its “Caucasian-only clause” till 1961. Those who knew Powell remember him saying, “The only color that matters is the color of the greens.”

 

Keep in mind: even the army was segregated when Powell served. He was in the Army Air Force and stationed in England during the war. He began caddying at age 9, according to a NYT story (1-1-2010) on his death. Powell was a security guard for Timken (I think Timken Ball Bearing). He told the Times in 2009, “It’s distasteful when you get turned down. You have a little pride. You say the hell with them. You say I’m not going to badger. I’m not going to beg them. So I said I’ll just build a golf course.” With help from his brother and two black physicians he bought a 78-acre farm. There were incidents of vandalism and ethnic slurs scrawled on building walls. But Powell opened his course to all who wished to play. By 1978 he had expanded to 130 acres and eighteen holes. 

Larry Powell, his son, told the Times, “He was just obsessed. He put all his efforts mentally, emotionally and physically into accomplishing his goal.” 

Powell was born in Greenville, Alabama, but moved to Ohio with his family as a boy. He played golf and football in high school and attended Wilberforce University, and played on the golf team. He was first hired as a janitor at Timken, before the war, but became the first black security guard a few months later. On return from WWII he worked the night shift. In 1967, Renee, his daughter became only the second black woman to play on the L.P.G.A. tour. She first learned how to play at Clearview, using miniature clubs designed by her dad. 

He was particularly thrilled in 1997 when two white women from Atlanta drove north just to play his course, shook his hand, and thanked him for his work.

 

* 

April 1: 

John L. Lewis, refusing a White House compromise, led his 400,000 soft-coal miners out, and the nation’s economy slowed, faltered, wobbled to a dead stop. Within a month, freight loadings dropped seventy-five per cent and steel plants were beginning to bank their fires….After forty days of the crippling coal strike, a truce was arranged only to be followed by the threat of a still more paralyzing walk out.…a total railroad stoppage… (1-22) 

 

*

May 23: A nationwide rail strike commences: 

Within forty-eight hours air and bus terminals were pandemonium, runs were started on gas stations and food stores, unemployment in fringe industries was mounting, and news stories were pouring in of fortunes in lettuce left rotting away at Salinas, in citrus fruit at Redlands, in vegetables on the Rio Grande. From federal officials came the bluntest possible warning that hundreds of thousands in Europe would starve if shipments of grain and meat were delayed as much as two weeks. (1-23) 

Truman: 

…felt compelled to ask for the power which would permit him, as commander in chief, “to draft into the Armed Forces of the United States all workers who are on strike against their government.”

 

As the president spoke his final emphatic word, [an aide] handed him the slip of paper. Truman read this note out loud: “Mister president, agreement signed, strike settled.” A great roar of applause, from Republicans and Democrats alike, swept across Congress.

             

So the railroad strike was over and the and the Congressmen cheered, but an unprecedented paralysis had been prevented only by the threat of an unprecedented curtailment of liberties. (1/24-25)

 

*

“No. I’m going to stay at my station,” 

June 6: A fire in a Chicago hotel kills 61. Reports in The New York Times, at the time, said 58 died: 

Fifty-eight men and women, mostly Middle Westerners, perished from flames and smoke early today when fire swept the twenty-two story LaSalle Hotel, which was built in the heart of the city's business district in 1909 as the "largest, safest and most modern hotel west of New York City."

 

The LaSalle was reputedly one of the safest hotels in the city. When it opened in 1909, it was described as “the most comfortable, modern and safest hotel west of New York City.” The fire began in a bar and spread quickly, exposing many safety issues. The fire fed on the highly varnished woodwork in the lobby and then spread up the two stairways. More than 200 people were also injured. 

The Chicago Tribune adds, 

As the inferno grew, Bradfield, the night manager, came across the hotel’s operator at the switchboard, alerting guests. He urged her to get out. “No. I’m going to stay at my station,” replied Julia C. Berry. There she died, having saved hundreds of lives, officials later said.

 

With the staircases unusable, firefighters saved guests by raising ladders to the windows of lower-floor windows. Those on upper floors had to be brought down via fire escapes, which luckily were in working order.

 

Tribune war correspondent Joseph Hearst and his wife had just returned from China and were in a room on the 19th floor. “Someone in the hall yelled for everyone to get out,” he said. “We wrapped wet towels around our faces, felt our way down the corridor to the fire escape and descended safely.”

 

A number of newly discharged servicemen staying at the hotel joined the rescue effort.

 

Seaman 1st Class Joseph O’Keefe, aided by three civilians, dragged 27 guests from fifth-floor rooms after discovering the hotel’s fire hose was useless. “It just went drip, drip,” he said. His buddy, Seaman 1st Class Robert Might, helped people down a fire escape before being overcome by smoke and taken to Henrotin Hospital. Two more sailors, Bernard Traska and Robert Higdon, dragged hose lines into the hotel and helped raise ladders.

 

Fawn, a seeing-eye dog, guided her owner down a fire escape. “I can’t see and I can’t smell, but I tasted the smoke and nudged Fawn,” said Anita Blair of El Paso, Texas. “We followed the crowd around a corner, and then a man helped me and my dog over the windowsill and onto a fire escape landing.”

 

The Anti-Cruelty Society gave Fawn and Blair an award: “For exceptional kindness done by a human being to an animal, and the other way around,” the Tribune reported. The Chicago Telephone Traffic Union established a college fund for John Joseph Berry, the 16-year-old son of the operator who died while alerting others.

 

Merritt Penticoff and his wife spent an agonizing 45 minutes in their 18th-floor room before a knock on the door suggested it was safe to leave. “‘We got dressed after that pounding,’ Mrs. Penticoff said,” as the Tribune reported, without using the woman’s full name. “‘Then my husband laughed for the first time — I had automatically put on lip rouge, despite my haste, acting absolutely subconsciously.’”

 

*

“As long as red blood runs in white men’s veins.” 

July 25: A lynch mob (Moore’s Ford Bridge Lynching) stops a car being driven by Loy Harrison, a white Georgia farmer. His passengers are two black couples, who work as sharecroppers on his land. Harrison has just bailed one of the men, Roger Malcolm, out of jail after he was accused of stabbing a white man in an argument, eleven days earlier. Roger, his wife Dorothy, George W. Dorsey and Mae Murray Dorsey are tied to trees and riddled with bullets. 

Mr. Dorsey had committed no crime – but had served five years in the Pacific with the U.S. Army. His mistake was to make it clear he was proud of his service. He had been home from war less than a year.

Dorothy Malcolm happens to be his sister. 

Eugene Talmadge is running for governor of Georgia at the time. Not long before the murders he had come to Walton County to warn that if blacks were allowed to vote they would overturn segregation in the schools and hotels and dash the Jim Crow system to pieces. 

Negroes, he stated “should stay home and not attempt to vote.” 

On another occasion, he stated firmly, “Non-segregation in our schools will never work as long as red blood runs in white men’s veins.” 

Even the most harmless examples of “race-mixing” bothered Eugene Talmadge. He once expressed great displeasure after seeing a singing quartet, The Mariners, two white men and two black men, on Arthur Godfrey’s television show. Even worse, he insisted, were the dance numbers, during which, “Negro men frequently are seen mixed up in the dancing ensembles with scantily-clad white females.” Talmadge suggested that the South should boycott such shows. 

The New York Times (writing about old testimony being unsealed in 2018), notes that 25 F.B.I. agents were sent south to investigate the Moore’s Ford Bridge murders. They worked for four months, subpoenaed 106 individuals, interviewed 2,790 people, and came away with nothing. Even J. Edgar Hoover was stunned. “The arrogance of the…white population was unbelievable and the fear of the Negroes was almost unbelievable,” he said later.

Jim Crow was the law of the land.

 

* 

The article in the Times catches my interest; and I go looking for details. The Equal Justice Initiative describes the Moore’s Ford Bridge lynching, adding several interesting details. Dorothy Malcolm is seven months pregnant on the night the car is stopped at the bridge. 

Her husband had been arrested for allegedly stabbing a white farmer, Barnette Hester during a fight. 

The mob tied the two men to a large oak tree. Mrs. Malcolm recognized several members of the mob and called on them to spare her husband. This led to her death and the death of Mrs. Dorsey. Now they “knew too much.” The four victims were shot at least 60 times at close range, including several shotgun blasts. President Harry Truman ordered a federal investigation. A reward of $12,500 was offered for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the murderers. But the white community remained silent on what had taken place and the black community was too cowed to talk. 

Many years later, when the FBI reopened its investigation, those who might know something still refused to talk. 

In response to charges that he was withholding information, Walton County Superior Court Judge Marvin Sorrells, whose father worked for Walton County law enforcement in 1946, vowed that “until the last person of my daddy’s generation dies, no one will talk.”

 

* 

The tooth was never recovered.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) fills in other details, including the ages of the victims: Roger, 24, Dorothy, 20, George, 28 and Mae, 24. According to the SPLC trouble started when, 

Tempers flared and Roger Malcolm stabbed Hester in the back with what witnesses described as an ice pick, delivering an injury that would plague him for the rest of his life.

 

“I know that Hester eventually died because he never got over the stab wound,” a cousin told investigators in 2001.

 

Hester family members grabbed and held Roger Malcolm while Walton County Sheriff’s deputies Lewis Howard and C.J. “Doc” Sorrells, the future sheriff, came to make an arrest.

 

The SPLC notes that bond, which was originally set at $600, was dropped to $500. This lower figure meant Malcolm could be bailed out of jail. Harrison, the white farmer, offered to front the money and said he’d take Malcolm and his wife back to his place after he was released. The Dorseys came along in part because they wanted to do some shopping in Monroe, the county seat (about 20 miles east of Atlanta). Loy Harrison was offering them a  ride. 

Harrison chose not to take the direct route home, however, but went by way of the Moore’s Ford Bridge. There a mob of 20-25 men stopped the car. Harrison would later testify that a “tall, dignified looking man of about 65, wearing a broad-brimmed hat” led the mob which surrounded the vehicle. 

“The leader looked like a regular businessman,” said Harrison, an early suspect in the killings who maintained his innocence for years.

 

First, the mob pulled Roger Malcolm from the car and said, “We want that nigger,” Harrison said.

 

Next, a member of the mob pointed to another of the passengers and said “We want you, too, Charlie’,” Harrison recalled.

 

Harrison, realizing they had identified the wrong Dorsey, replied “That’s not Charlie. That’s George.”

 

An armed man with a gun prodded Harrison and warned: “Keep your damned mouth shut. This ain’t your party.”

 

The two men were being marched off to some nearby woods when one of the women started calling out mob members by name. The leader of the mob, according to Harrison, turned and said “Git them women. Bring ‘em over here. They know too much.”

 

The two men were tied at the hands and ropes were put around the women’s necks. They were then shot with what investigators determined to be at least two different shotguns and multiple handguns enough times to make the bodies difficult to identify. Police later pulled bullets from multiple tree trunks.

 

Harrison told investigators a gunman took him to the bridge and held him there as he heard gunshots go off nearby. Once the shooting stopped, Harrison said, the leader of the mob stared him down and asked “Have you recognized anyone here?”

 

After Harrison said he didn’t, a member of the group recommended killing him anyway.

 

“Let’s shoot him, too, then there will be no evidence,” the mob member said.

 

Harrison walked away from the scene after the leader of the group stepped in and stopped any more killing, Harrison said.

 

The governor of Georgia at the time, Ellis Arnell, had previously favored a state civil rights act. Arnell expected justice to be done, since, he said, “15 to 20 of the mob members are known by name.” 

This was not to be the case. Talmadge, who had once said “nothing can be gained by giving equal rights” to black people, and usually referred to them with the “n-word,” then considered in many circles to be acceptable, won the 1946 election (but died before he could be inaugurated).  

As noted, a veil of silence quickly fell over the Monroe/Walton County community. Those “who spoke to the federal grand jury paid a steep price.” Two white men beat up Lamar Howard, 19, a black employee of the local ice house, after they heard he had talked with authorities about what he knew. One of the attackers later admitted he had pounded Howard. An all-white jury refused to convict. 

Another problem investigators faced was poor security at the site of the lynching. Souvenir hunters trampled the spot, making gathering evidence even more challenging. The SPLC explains: 

Donald Garrett, a Navy veteran [and white] just home to Loganville, Georgia, from World War II, was one of those souvenir collectors.

 

Garrett told the Georgia Bureau of Investigation in 2005 that he went to Moore’s Ford Bridge the day after the killings, eventually leaving with a human tooth pulled from a pool of blood at the site.

 

Garrett gave the tooth to the daughter of a local politician who, Garrett recalled, wore it as a charm on a bracelet around her wrist.

 

The tooth was never recovered.

 

* 

Investigations came up empty in 1946; but as times changed, there were talks of reopening the case periodically. In 1992 Clinton Adams, a white man, told the F.B.I. that when he was ten he witnessed the killings. He said he remained silent for fear of his life. His story could not be corroborated. 

It was long assumed that the KKK had a hand in the murders. In 2008 authorities received a tip. A former Klan leader, George Hinton, had possibly hidden evidence on his farm not far from Monroe. Agents from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation followed up on the tip. They were told that Hinton had been the “gunsmith” for the local Klan in the 1930s and 40s. A search warrant was obtained. Investigators combed his property. Among other items, they found a Klan roster from the period of the lynching. E. L. Almand, who owned the funeral home were the four bodies were sent, was listed as “Exalted Cyclops” for 1939. 

Again, many whites had to know the truth at the time; and many blacks had to have suspicions, too. 

When asked about the investigation in 1992, black World War II veteran Sidney Clark said many who lived in Walton County knew better than to speak with authorities then.

 

“Everybody was keeping their mouths shut,” Clark told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “The Jim Crow laws were in effect then, and they worked good.”

 

* 

Loy Harrison was a suspect from the start.

The story interested me, and I continued to check for more details. The Chattanooga Times Free Press added to the sad saga, in an article in March 2018. Loy Harrison was a suspect from the start: 

An FBI report noted Harrison was a former Ku Klux Klansman and well-known bootlegger. The initial investigation lasted roughly six months and yielded dozens of possible suspects, some simply because they were Hester's relatives, friends or neighbors, or because they had no alibis. Ultimately, there were no indictments.

 

In 2010, Terry Powis, associate professor of anthropology at Kennesaw State University, led a group of students in in an archaeological dig at the Moore’s Ford Bridge site. Vivian James, a Kennesaw State University anthropology student, told the paper the work had uncovered dozens of bullets, .22, .38 and .44 caliber, and casings, and yielded a preliminary ballistics analysis. 

The Marietta Daily Journal quoted one of the diggers: 

“As an African-American, I realize that 64-years ago it is quite possible that I could have been one of these victims,” said senior Sedrie Hart, 25. “I cannot imagine how the families must have felt, and are still feeling. If my work helps bring some closure to these families, that is payment enough.”

 

How might the victims have felt, we must ask today (and their families later) and did guilt ever trouble the perpetrators as they aged?

 

* 

The opening of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, earlier this year sparked renewed interest in the subject of lynching. According to an April 2018 article in the Cincinnati Enquirer a total of 4,400 African Americans were lynched in this country between the years 1877 and 1950; and that may have been an undercount. The memorial listed 15 known victims in Ohio and 168 in Kentucky, with two being killed in Butler County, the only Ohio county with more than one. Reporters for the Enquirer believed they might have unearthed stories of other victims missed previously by researchers. In 1895, for example, a black man named Noah Anderson was snatched from authorities by a white mob in New Richmond and hanged “on the highest poplar tree in Clermont County.”

 

 

* 

“We return from fighting. We return fighting.” 

Today, when Americans argue about whether or not NFL players should kneel during the National Anthem, a little history might help us all form more nuanced opinions. In fact, throughout American history many whites who wanted to ensure Negroes remained “in their place” feared African Americans who went off to war. 

Too often, racists complained, these men (for in those days no women were allowed to fight) returned home expecting to be treated fairly in the country for which they had just risked their lives. 

Peter C. Baker, writing in The New Yorker, explains: 

When the First World War broke out, black thinkers and writers debated the merits of signing up to fight for a country that functionally denied them full citizenship. Three hundred and eighty thousand black men heeded W. E. B. Du Bois’s call to enlist in the segregated Army, many of them hoping that doing so would increase the standing of blacks on the home front. But for much of white America, front-line military service by blacks undercut the claims of racial superiority around which their lives – and their economies – were structured.

 

In a speech on the Senate floor in 1917, Mississippi Senator James K. Vardaman warned that the return of black veterans to the South would “inevitably lead to disaster.” Once you “impress the negro with the fact that he is defending the flag” and “inflate his untutored soul with military airs,” Vardaman cautioned, it was a short step to the conclusion that “his political rights must be respected.”

 

When black soldiers did return – and did act differently – many whites were appalled. Baker continues: 

Whites speculated that, while stationed in Europe, black soldiers had enjoyed wartime liaisons with white French women, increasing their lust – which, in the white imagination, was already dangerously high – for sex with white American women. Many black veterans were denied the benefits and disability pay they’d been promised. In the first summer after the war…anti-black riots erupted in more than twenty American cities, including Houston, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. “This is the right time to show them what will and what will not be permitted, and thus save them much trouble in the future,” one Louisiana newspaper opined, in an editorial titled “Nip It In the Bud.” 

 

At the time, Du Bois, one of the founders of the NCAAP,  could write in an editorial about black veterans arriving back home, “We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting.”

 *

“The real battle has just begun in America.”

The same kind of problems arose in the wake of World War II. George Dorsey, lynched at Moore’s Ford Bridge, was not the only black veteran to run into the same kind of racism he had been fighting abroad. 

Bryan Stevenson, Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, writing in the Milwaukee Independent,  picks up the story in detail. Throught American history, 

Military service sparked dreams of racial equality for generations of African Americans. But most black veterans were not welcomed home and honored for their service. Instead, during the lynching era, many black veterans were targeted for mistreatment, violence, and murder because of their race and status as veterans. Indeed, black veterans risked violence simply by wearing their uniforms on American soil.

 

In the years between the two World Wars, the number of blacks serving in the U.S. military declined dramatically. Jim Crow treatment, both in the North and in the South did not exactly spark young men to go and fight for “their” country – when that country treated them less than equally.

A feeling of patriotism, however, swept over all Americans after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and U.S. entry into World War II. But service to the flag often made African Americans who served targets of a different kind once they returned home: 

…In 1941, fewer than 4000 African Americans were serving in the armed forces, and only 12 were officers. By 1945, more than 1.2 million black men were in uniform. Even as the United States proclaimed itself the world’s greatest democracy, it was fighting the racism of Hitler’s Germany with an army that remained racially segregated through the end of the war. Black troops initially were barred from frontline combat and assigned to service duties, cleaning white officers’ rooms and latrines as orderlies and janitors. But as casualties mounted, the army sent African American troops into combat out of necessity.

 

No matter the sacrifices of black servicemen, Jim Crow remained the law of the land at home and in the service. Black military policemen stationed in the South could not enter restaurants where their German prisoners of war were allowed to eat. Private Bert Babero wrote that he was required “to observe a sign in the latrine, actually segregating a section of the latrine for Negro soldiers, the other being used by the German prisoners and the white soldiers.” He recalled, “[I]t made me feel here, the tyrant, is actually placed over the liberator.”

 

For many veterans, their first confrontation with the post-war racial caste system occurred on the bus or train that carried them home. On February 8, 1946, honorably discharged Marine Timothy Hood removed the Jim Crow sign from a trolley in Bessemer, Alabama. In response, the white street car conductor, William R. Weeks, unloaded his pistol into Mr. Hood, firing five shots. Mr. Hood staggered off the tram and crawled away, only to be arrested by the chief of police, G.B. Fant of Brighton. Fant put Mr. Hood in the back of a police car and murdered him with a single bullet to the head. Fant later alleged that Mr. Hood had “reached toward his hip pocket as if to draw a gun.” Although there was no evidence that Mr. Hood was armed, the coroner returned a finding of “justifiable homicide,” and Fant was cleared.

 

On February 12, 1946, Isaac Woodard, a black veteran who had served in the Philippines, boarded a Greyhound bus in Georgia, headed home to his wife in North Carolina. When the bus stopped just outside of Augusta, South Carolina, Mr. Woodard asked the driver if there was time to use the restroom, and the driver cursed at him. After a brief argument, Mr. Woodard returned to his seat. At the next stop in Batesburg, the angry driver told Mr. Woodward to exit the bus, where the local chief of police, Linwood Shull, and several other police officers were waiting.

 

The police beat Mr. Woodard with billy clubs and arrested him for disorderly conduct, accusing him of drinking beer in the back of the bus with other soldiers. Upon arrival at the police station, Shull continued to strike Mr. Woodard with a billy club, hitting him in the head so forcefully that he was permanently blinded.

 

The next morning, a local judge fined Mr. Woodard $50 and denied his request for medical attention. By the time of his release days later, Mr. Woodard did not know who or where he was. His family found him in a hospital in Aiken, South Carolina, three weeks later, after reporting him missing. “Negro veterans that fought in this war… don’t realize that the real battle has just begun in America,” Mr. Woodard later said. “They went overseas and did their duty and now they’re home and have to fight another struggle, that I think outweighs the war.”

 

By the mid-20th century, violent racialized attacks on black veterans were slightly more likely to result in investigations and charges against the white perpetrators, but they rarely led to convictions or punishment, even when guilt was undisputed. Under pressure from the NAACP, the federal government eventually charged Chief Shull for the attack on Mr. Woodard, but the prosecution was half-hearted at best. The United States Attorney did not interview any witnesses except the bus driver.

 

At trial, Shull admitted that he had blinded Mr. Woodard, but Shull’s lawyer shouted racial slurs at Mr. Woodard and told the all-white jury, “[I]f you rule against Shull, then let this South Carolina secede again.” After deliberating for 30 minutes, the jury acquitted Shull of any wrongdoing, and the courtroom broke into applause. Remarking on the outcome, Mr. Woodard said, “The Right One hasn’t tried him yet… I’m not mad at anybody… I just feel bad. That’s all. I just feel bad.”

 

Maceo Snipes had served in the army for two and a half years and received an honorable discharge when he returned home to Taylor County, Georgia, to farm his father’s land. On July 17, 1946, Mr. Snipes voted in the Democratic primary for governor. The next day, several white men in a pick-up truck went to Mr. Snipes’s house and a white veteran named Edward Williamson shot him. Mr. Snipes walked for several miles seeking help, but died before he could find any. Williamson, who belonged to a politically powerful family, told a coroner’s inquest that he had gone to collect a debt from Mr. Snipes and Mr. Snipes pulled a knife on him. The inquest ruled the killing was an act of self-defense. Taylor County, Georgia, later honored its World War II veterans with two engraved, segregated plaques listing white and black veterans separately. Though an integrated plaque was added in 2007, the segregated originals remained.

 

In a separate story, the Equal Justice Initiative outlines the experience of Hosea Williams, who later went on to become an important leader in the civil rights movement:

…Williams was threatened by a lynch mob at the age of 14 in Attapulgus, Georgia, for befriending a white girl. Even after this terrifying experience of racial violence, Mr. Williams enlisted to serve in World War II as part of the all-black unit of General George Patton’s Third Army. During a battle in France, an artillery shell hit Mr. Williams’s platoon, killing the other 12 soldiers and wounding Mr. Williams; when the ambulance transporting him to the hospital was hit by another artillery shell, Mr. Williams was again the lone survivor and spent 13 months at a British hospital recovering from his injuries. 

 

After the war, Mr. Williams headed home to Attapulgus with a Purple Heart and the assistance of a cane. While he was wearing his uniform, Mr. Williams was brutally assaulted by a mob of white men at the bus station in Americus, Georgia, after he attempted to drink out of the white-only drinking fountain. The mob left him for dead. People at the bus station called the town’s black undertaker, who found a pulse and brought Mr. Williams to the Veterans Administration hospital. Lying in the hospital for eight weeks due to his new, “peacetime” injuries, Mr. Williams found himself lamenting that he “had fought for the wrong side.”

 

Nearly lynched, nearly killed abroad, and nearly lynched again upon returning home, Hosea Williams survived and continued to fight for human rights. He went on to help organize the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, served as Executive Director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and was jailed more than 125 times for participating in civil rights demonstrations. Mr. Williams relentlessly challenged his country to honor at home the ideals of freedom and equality it fought for abroad.

 

And that is what I discovered one day, in retirement from teaching, about one lynching in America. 

And the history of lynching. 

And the stories of just a few of the 4,400 dead.

 

*

1946 Ford pickup truck.

A hound dog comes with the car.

As the summer of 1946 closed, the food shortages were reaching their climax in meat famine. First came a meteoric rise in prices. 

PRICES SOAR, BUYERS SORE

STEERS JUMP OVER THE MOON

 

Ran the New York Daily News headlines.” (1/26)

But there were ways and ways of getting things. Housewives kept an eye on the front street, alerting each other that a supply truck was on its way to the chain store. Tipping became more and more correct – perhaps a half dollar to the butcher for the back-breaking labor of handing the chops over the counter. The tie-in sale was commonplace; you could get Scotch if you were also ready to load up on wine and rum. Here and there barter came back. A car would get you an apartment; football tickets, good liquor, soap, auto batteries, and sugar were all part of the day’s currency.

 

…The black market was most extensive in the new-car field (an estimated seventy-five per cent), and the techniques took on rococo variety. Customers would drop for or five hundred-dollar bills on the desk and quickly look the other way. You could get a new automobile by trading in your old car for a reasonable price – say ten dollars. In other salesrooms, the customer would look toward a wall a hundred feet away and say: “Bet you five hundred dollars I can hit that wall with my hat.” In Oklahoma City, a dealer sold you the car and, for four hundred dollars more, a hound dog. The dog, decidedly a post war model, would then shuffle back to its master. (1/27)

 

For two decades Arthur H. Vandenberg of Michigan…had been an all-out isolationist….The final turn in his thinking came when he stood in London in 1944 and listened to German robot bombs snarl overhead. “How can there be immunity or isolation,” he mused to a friend, “when man can devise weapons like that.” (1/29)

 

“Vandenberg had taken the immemorial path of effective leadership in a democracy: he led where people were going anyhow.” (1/30) 

In the Japanese trials, men who had led millions only months ago turned all American efforts at seriousness into a grizzly opera bouffe. Ex-Premier Hideki Tojo sat picking his nose and trying to flirt with an American secretary. Ex-propagandist Shumei Okawa would open his shirt and rub his scrawny chest, dart from his chair smack Tojo’s gleaming pate, shout in weirdly clever English: “I hate the U.S.; it is democrazy.”

 

From the German trial came evidence that sounded like an echo of the primitive forests. There was Major General of Police Otto Ohlendorf matter-of-factly telling how his Task Force D killed 90,000 men, women, or children. (Other task forces were said to have killed more, the Major General added, but he suspected they were just boasting.) Or the testimony of Doctor Franz Blaha, a Czech surgeon who had managed to live through Dachau: “It was dangerous to have a soft, fine skin….Soft human skin was prized for leather and bindings.” Or the reports from the trials of women workers at the Belsen and Oswiecim concentration camps: of gentle-voiced Juana Borman, whose wolfhound enjoyed tearing prisoners to pieces; of wispy Anna Hampel, who took a liking to a French internee and, being rebuffed, beat him daily with a hose; of Irma Grese, she of the delicate features and the warm smile, who calmly fixed her hair while the prosecution showed movies of a bulldozer pushing a huge pile of rotted corpses into a pit. And what thoughtful American could fail to ponder the fact many an ordinary German was expressing utter bewilderment that the Allies, having won the war, should conduct rigorously fair trials for enemy prisoners?  (1/32-33)

 

American communist leaders began deserting the party with a jarring set of declarations. The most publicized deserter, Louis Budenz, ex-editor of the Daily Worker, quit with a flat statement that Communist parties anywhere were not political parties at all but conspiracies which gave their loyalty first and last to the Soviet Union.” (1/35)

 

* 

November 4: Joe McCarthy, a World War II veteran, wins a seat in the U.S. Senate from Wisconsin. Eric Goldman gives his background: 

Getting recognized was no new concern of Joseph McCarthy. The Irish settlement in northern Wisconsin where he grew up respected money and looks; the McCarthys were a struggling brood of nine and Joe was the ugly duckling, barrel-chested and short-armed with thick eyebrows and heavy lips. Mother Bridget McCarthy threw a special protective wing around the shy, sulky boy and when the rough teasing came, he sought out her big warm apron. “Don’t you mind,” she would console. “You be somebody. You get ahead.”

 

Joe took heed. He would get back; he would show everybody. The shy sulkiness turned into a no-holds-barred ambition curiously mixed with a gawky, grinning likeability . The boy worked so furiously on the family farm that neighbors joked he must have spent his babyhood wearing overalls instead of diapers. Starting his education late, he talked, wheedled, and shoved his way through Marquette University with so much corner-cutting that Wisconsin educators still gasp at the record.

 

Associates noted the fierce, blinding drive in everything McCarthy did. When he boxed and his awkwardness was getting him cut to pieces, he would keep coming in, slashed and bleeding but flailing away in the hope of striking a knockout blow. When he played poker, he played all-or-nothing. “He had the guts of a burglar,” one friend remembers. “He was brutal. He’d take all the fun out of the game, because he took it so seriously.” When he ran for office in college, he dropped his homework, cut school for weeks at a time, devoted night and day to buying coffees and cokes and making lavish promises. He and his opponent agreed that each would vote for the other until the election was decided. The first ballot was a tie. On the next McCarthy won by two votes.

 

“Joe,” the defeated candidate said, “did you vote for yourself?”

 

McCarthy grinned his big, disarming, tail-between-the-legs grin. “Sure. You wanted me to vote for the best man, didn’t you?”

 

Once out of Marquette, he bashed his way to a Wisconsin Circuit Judgeship and soon converted it into a political stump, knocking off divorces in five minutes or less, racing around to please people by trying as many cases as possible. After Pearl Harbor he entered the Marine Corps, turning the whole Pacific Theater of War into a headquarters of McCarthy for the United States Senator, blithely giving himself the name of “Tail-gunner Joe” although most of the time he was actually serving as an intelligence officer and doing the paperwork for a squadron of pilots. Elected to the Senate in 1946, he thrashed about for ways to secure his political hold. McCarthy served the interests of the Pepsi-Cola company so faithfully he became known to fellow senators as the “Pepsi-Cola kid.” He delighted the real-estate interest in Wisconsin by battling public housing and he pleased some of his large German-American constituency by defending the Nazis on trial for the murders of Malmédy. (1/138-139)