First Friday; Remaking Dixie

Tonight the first Friday features excerpts from a program sponsored by University Press of Mississippi and the book Friends six presenters address the continuing impact of World War 2 on the American South. The speakers were professors Neil McMillan knoll Polk Harvard sip coffee and Marjorie Sproule Wheeler additional viewpoints were offered by World War Two veterans James Jones of Laurel and former Mississippi governor William Winter introductory remarks were made by Professor Robert McIlvaine. Our first speaker this morning is Marjorie Sproule Wheeler who's a professor of history at University of Southern Mississippi. She got a Ph.D. at the University of Virginia and she's a specialist in southern women's history. She's written a book called New Women of the new South. Leaders of the women's suffrage movement in the southern states. She is principal a concentrated her research on the period of women's suffrage. But she is interested in women's

history and the region certainly throughout the 20th century. She's a member of the editorial board of the Journal of southern history and is the immediate past president of the Southern Association for women's history. What she's going to be discussing with us this morning is the impact of World War 2 on women's work. Self-image and expectations and the social attitudes concerning women's abilities and the role of Miss and role in Mississippi in the south. As personal plans that were long postponed could now be real was the year nine hundred forty six. So more marriages occur than any other year. And in 1947 not surprisingly we saw the beginning of the baby boom in the putsch. I am a part as Americans fell into a virtual orgy of domesticity. After two decades of deprivation the popular press presented feminism as a pathological thing and celebrated the ideal woman as a suburban housewife devoted to her children doing volunteer work only the devoted

supporter of her husband. As the song that was sung in countless beauty pageants across America in the 50s which you may remember I enjoyed being a girl. It was from the Flower Drum Song said. I'm strictly a female female and my future I hope will be in the home of a brave and free male whom enjoys being a guy having a girl like me. I quote Remember that song. OK I heard it in pageant after pageant for many years. Lot of this Seeds of Change the basis of what seeds planted by World War 2 were going to remake life in America. What is especially significant is the fact that many of these women workers who laughed or expelled from their war jobs rejoined the labor force at a later date in 1940 thirty six point four percent of women employed were wives. In 1950 However fifty two point one percent of women employed were wives and 25 percent of

the female labor force had children under 18. Why. Why was this happening in an era that was glorifying the stay at home wife. The war produced a boom in white collar occupations including elementary school teachers not surprisingly somebody had to teach all those new babies. Also there was there were increases and other white collar jobs that were acceptable for women in all classes jobs such as sales clerks and secretaries in the booming businesses of corporate America. Married women whose children were in school became a greatly needed element in the workforce replacing the typical female worker of the pre-war period which was the young single woman. And and this is it is to be expected as the average marriage age. You know as women flooded or in some cases were herded into segregated women's jobs there were still considerable discrimination against women in will paying professional employment and the proportion of women entering the professions in the 1950s

actually declined and med schools and some other professional schools continued to have quotas that limited the numbers of women at something like 5 percent. Women were discriminated against in government work and confined to a lower level. Non management positions and banks and businesses for the most part and female workers received lower wages than men and 950 woman's median wage was 53 percent. That mans. So the 1950s the US. It was an era of enormous contradictions with an official idiology that encouraged a mysticism and an economy that encouraged women to work albeit in subordinate daddy and lower paying jobs during the war. Woman's sphere had been greatly expanded the traditional attitudes towards woman's nature remained largely unchallenged but still the war had had an enormous impact and changes were underway. Meanwhile the feminist movement much maligned in the period and seemingly dormant was still quite alive.

Women such as Mississippi's Lucy Somerville ho were to pay artists to do the toss article makes clear been a champion of women's ambitions during wartime Washington continued to fight for women's rights and full opportunities through groups such as the baby w and the egg w keeping alive a feminist claim or show us a nurturing seeds of them in this change that were planted during World War Two. Such leadership combined with the frustrations of women in an era with a split personality would soon lead to a new era for women in America. Thank you. Read the middle of the war July the 4th 1943 foreigner wrote to his stepson Malcolm Franklin. There is a squadron of Negro pilots he wrote. They finally got Congress to allow them to learn how to risk their lives in the air. They are in Africa now under their own negro Lieutenant Colonel did well in LBL area on the same day a mob of white men and white policeman

killed twenty negroes in Detroit. Suppose you and me and a few others of us lived in the Congo freed Seventy seven years ago by ukase. Of course we can't live in the same apartment hut with the black folks nor always ride in the same car nor eat in the same restaurant but we are free because the great black father says. Then the Congo is engaged in war with the Cameroon. At last we persuade the great black bothered to let us fight to UN jam say our flyers. You've just spent the day trying to live long enough to learn how to do your part in saving the Congo. Then you come back down and told the 20 of your people have just been killed by a mixed mob of civilians and cops a little what would you think. A change will come out of this war if it doesn't if the politicians and the people who run this country are not forced to make good the shibboleth they glibly talk about freedom liberty human rights the new young man who lived through it will have wasted your precious time and those who don't live through it will have died in vain.

Four years later in January nine hundred forty seven The city fathers of Oxford proposed a monument to the Fayette County soldiers who died during World War Two and were well on their way to making it a whites only monument until James silver a Mrs. Duke and William Faulkner protested. Mullins The editor of The Oxford eagle at the time wrote later that Faulkner came into his office one day and insisted that black soldiers also be included. Of course you'll put negro names on there he said. When they're dead it's the only time they are not niggers. He wrote the inscription himself to be placed on the monument. They held not theirs but all man's liberty. This far from home to this last sacrifice they did indeed list the names of the negroes dead. All seven of them at the bottom of the plaque under the heading of the Negro race. Boehner's letter in this minor episode in Oxford History represent in microcosm the tensions between the forces of change that war to set loose in the south. The local skirmishes between

those who saw change as inevitable and those who tried to halted voting are always a seismograph of social change very early understood how cataclysmic was to be the effect on the south and on America of World War Two. He reacted profoundly to it while it was in progress and at its end hit the ground running fully prepared as a citizen to insist that his fellow white southerners adapt to inevitability even if not to more power morality. And he was willing to instruct them in how to do so. In this alas he stands quite alone among the canonical major Southern writers and critics the ones I mean that we now identify with the so-called Southern Renascence say for foreigner for two is almost completely a wall from Southern fiction as I've written elsewhere. The war against Hitlerism intensified the civil rights consciousness of the New Deal years it raised the expectations of African-Americans considerably and it had a significant

impact on American racial opinions especially in heightening perceptions of the discrepancy between the Democratic ideals of the United States and its undemocratic racial practices. But this does not alter the fact that compared to the depression decade and far more to the decades that followed. Blacks in World War Two faced greater resistance to change in a mill you less hospitable to disruptive protests and with reduced internal wherewithal and external support. The constraints imposed by a nation at war. The twin dealing resources for sustained confrontation and the genuinely patriotic response of most African Americans to the dangers their nation faced. All these things inhibited militant protest activity the end WCP which

had faced challenges throughout the 1930s for more radical contentious African-American groups urging direct action against Jim Crow. For all practical purposes the NWC people in 1945 had become the Civil Rights Movement and the sole major organization. Militant protest never entirely abated during the war but it never assume dominance in either black strategy or action especially in the south. The traditional tactics of African-American protest groups have not suddenly become unacceptable nor had new more disruptive ones suddenly come into widespread use. Why. In part because of the nearly million young black man who might've been expect expected to be in the forefront of more militant forays against racist practices had been uprooted from their communities to serve in

an armed forces which cramped organized protests and in part because another million African-Americans had migrated out of the South and in part because the optimism of African Americans for postwar progress and optimism induced by the sudden prosperity of those who left you will employ our domestic worker for a job in a defense plant. By that din of Democratic propaganda during the war all these things I think mitigated against a radical turn in practices and certainly in part because wartime America proved an infertile ground for the seeds of protest planted in the 1930s. The needs of war came first for virtually every proponent of civil rights and every white ally of the

African-American struggle. In November 1993 I began interviewing some of the 85 I was and black Mississippians who served in uniform during World War Two conducted on the 50th anniversary of the allied victory over the Axis powers. These conversations did not neglect what might naturally be defined as military history. But they focused more fully on the social meaning of the war and most particularly on the ultimate American wartime irony. The conscription of African-Americans to fight abroad for the very liberties they were denied at home. My interview went by interviewing survivors in a standing population of World War 2 veterans. I hope to document both how ordinary black men and women from one Southern state remembered their service in the last Jim Crow war and how that service may have influenced their understanding of the black place in what white Mississippians once called a white man's country

transformed by wartime experience. African-Americans of the World War Two generation soldier and sit in civilian often could not immediately act on their emerging convictions yet they entered the post war period more determined than ever to become full partners in the American democratic experiment. Not a few of them even many who lived in the darker reaches of the lower south announced for all to hear that United States must now live up to its own ideals. Most veterans in this sample believe that though the war may not have changed their hometowns it nevertheless changed them. It gave them new perspectives and new aspirations they could not otherwise have. They could not always act upon immediately but that influenced a subsequent course of their lives. Oh it changed a great deal of things. Wilson Ashford said of his two years in the Army it changed the individual. Shouting to be heard over the din of the small automotive garage he had operated since returning to

Starkville in 1905 this seventy year old octavo Hall County and double ACP leader told me that the black soldier learn from wartime experience that he was able to compete. Quote. That's where change came in. That was the first step in change where you could feel that you could do it. You were always taught that you can't do it whites. They always told the negative side nothing positive from that standpoint it gave you an opportunity to see things in a different light. Perhaps the most affecting of the many stories told to me about white resentment and abuse of black men and women in military dress came from Henry Murphy of Hattiesburg a Purple Heart winner who served in two wars he recalled that when he returned to Hattiesburg in 1986 his father a local minister met him at a nearby Camp Shelby with a change of civilian clothes quote. He told me not to wear my uniform home because the police was beating up black eyes and

searching them. If they had found a white picture in his pocket they'd kill him unquote. Although Murphy had no pictures he did as his father wished. His was no hero's welcome. As the older man drove the family Chevrolet to Hattiesburg the returning soldier slipped out of his olive drabs and put on overalls and a jumper. The uniform of a field hand patriotic service at home and abroad provided new perspectives on ancient wrongs and ultimate lack possibilities. The war helped shape an emerging racial consciousness. It underscored the moral contradictions of a nation that professed human rights and practiced something else it fostered the development of a larger societal framework within which successful struggle for human rights could be waged. They were never an independent variable in the equation of sweeping social change. World War 2 never the last accelerated political economic legal and intellectual tendencies already in motion. It's set in train a combination of forces

international national and regional that ultimately undermined the legal foundations of segregation discrimination and disfranchisement. And it was precisely this convergence of warm developments personal and impersonal. This combination of human agents pushing for social justice and of societal forces conducive to racial change that brought a second reconstruction to the American South. As these interviewees understood only too well the courage and conviction they attributed to in substantial part to their service experience were in themselves not enough. What they perhaps understood less fully was how the war their war contributed to the emergent structural changes in the nation's political and economic life and its laws and social values and its public policy that ultimately open the way for fundamental racial progress in this favoring context like courage and conviction could help transform a

system that it once sent these Mississippians to fight abroad. What they didn't have at home. Thank you very much. The first of these is James Jones who served with the seven hundred sixty first tank battalion which was the first African American armored combat battalion to go into the European theater during World War 2. This Italian was nicknamed the Black Panthers and spent a hundred and eighty consecutive days in combat including key roles in the Siegfried line in the battle of the Bulge. Mr Jones is a resident of Ora where he served on the city council. He will talk with us about the situation of segregation and discrimination during training in America as well as in combat in Europe and the impact that this had on him and on others in the war zone.

It was just after D-Day I arrived in Europe at a camp outside of Paris. It was in the fall of the year. It's raining. As streets in front I've put up tents with six feet of mud and I'm telling you almost slept in the mud. But while I was there a couple of weeks I think it was there but a semi was called and there was a black officer there at this assembly and we were told that he was there to take with him like a serviceman's who they felt they could take training and could be used in a tank battalion and I should say I had took ministration wake in the post office post a unit never seen a tank. I was taken as one of those replacements to 760 First thank you time and I took my

training five miles behind the line. I was given on the job training a couple of weeks. We were taught how to drive a tank. The reason for that the 760 first tank battalion was extrapolation and 940 to the air. I would say the outcome of considerable pressure being placed on the president by Mrs. Roosevelt who was also pressured by Miss film to say that blanks in order to ever get the just treatment in America should contribute to the war. Not that blacks have not contributed to the war effort in previous years. If you look back at history from the time of the American Revolution when the first man that was killed in the effort of the American Revolution was a black man and the expansion of the West you had the buffalo

buffalo soldiers one out of every five soldier that was participating in the expansion of the American to go through to the west was a blight the black buffalo soldiers. They protected the colonies. Those are the roads the railroads the telegraph lines all of that was done. By Buffalo Bill soldiers they also dissipative the Spanish-American War. They were to have their own Roosevelt did outstanding service in the war. Spain and Cuba and Mexico. Every war that you go through they say admirably and War One. One of the most outstanding regiments in World War One was a 360 united effort to defeat Infantry Regiment. They won more medals then any other outfit

and the American expression force and friends they were the only outfit that the French awarded the cuckoo to gear your own outfit that was awarded that medal by the French government. They were the first outfit and the only one that exceeded the 760 face and time of continuous combat phase. They spent one hundred ninety one consecutive days on the front lines. Yet and still they were not a phone at the treatment that was awarded and they were not even mentioned in the history books. They thought as Neal said earlier our governor William Winter needs no introduction. I will give him a very brief one but don't you sometimes talk or no he is a former governor of Mississippi. Why he is here to talk to us today over is not because he was governor but because he is a veteran of war too and was an

officer in the army and dealing with a contingent that was composed of sensibly of African American troops and he will tell us about how that experience affected him. My son interestingly enough unpredictably. West are the only black infantry training regiment in the army at that time. A subsequent one was established as a casualty and Europe mounted this was in the summer of 1944. I was assigned to a training regimen consisting of all 0 black trainees all black noncommissioned officers and also white commissioned officers. The brand new second lieutenant I came in to command a platoon of black soldiers. My platoon sergeant

was a formal professional prizefighter from Harlem. He assured me the first day that I had need not worry about any disciplinary problems that might arise that of the media. Second Lieutenant I could look to him to take care of those problems and he did. But a few weeks after that I became a part of a noble experiment a daring experiment. The office a cadre of the first specialist training regiment the 1st Infantry Training Regiment for McClellan Alabama was going to be de segregated and replacement officers would be black officers. And this cost a good deal of concern among some of my officer comrades there. They had

thought that once they achieve the rank of officer of Second Lieutenant that they would be the spared the indignity of having to associate with black office. But there began this this stream of black officers into the regiment. We were sharing the same mess facilities the same training facilities in the same the same sleeping quarters working together. But when it came to the social aspects of military life there was built a separate officers club for the black officers who would come with their wives or their girlfriends. And so it was at that level that the lines of segregation were maintained. Obviously there was total segregation of the post.

We worked together all day long and then in the evenings all weekends we want out in the segregated world of Aniston Alabama. That was not exactly a place that welcomed the desegregation of the races. It was here of course in this setting. Then I came to the conviction that segregation in this country was not going to last very much longer. And so I would say to young people in Mississippi they need to listen folks like Mr. Jones understand what he went through. Understood indignant as if he bore sacrifices he may we may now be able to enjoy a better state of society where although we haven't not achieved the level that hopefully we can achieve in terms of

relations between the races still enables everyone now to have a better shot at leading a good life. Thank you very much.