Civil Rights in conflict: The "Birmingham plan" and the Freedom Train, 1947

ON CHRISTMAS EVE, 1947, headlines in the Birmingham Post announced: "Freedom Train Cancellation Due: Plan for Two Lines Called 'Unacceptable': City Refuses to Make Exception." On Christmas Day the New York Times declared: "Freedom Train to Skirt 2 Cities. . . Birmingham Is Ruled Out."1 The news followed several months of tense negotiations over the fate of a traveling display of national American treasures. These negotiations revealed significant divisions in the agendas of African American spokespersons at the national and local levels, as well as the defiant racial attitudes of Birmingham's white leadership, eight years before the onset of the classic phase of the Civil Rights movement in 1955. Although the Freedom Train crisis did not strike a blow against the legality of segregation in Alabama, the Birmingham chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) did score a moral victory during the height of its membership and influence by denying the segregated city an opportunity to host a cultural event of patriotic significance.2

Eight months earlier, in May 1947, over sixty organizations including the American Federation of Labor, the American Veterans of World War II, the National Urban League, and the NAACP sent representatives to a White House conference "For the purpose of Organizing the American Heritage Program and Inaugurating the Freedom Train." A reflection of the tensions associated with the emerging cold war and the Truman administration's developing concern with labor unrest and internal security, the American Heritage Foundation (AHF) program was designed to "persuade all Americans that only by active personal participation in the affairs of our nation can we safeguard our freedoms . . . and continue to demonstrate to the world and ourselves, that the way of free men is best." Pledged to "raise the level of active citizenship in our country," the AHF expressed alarm that in the postwar world "the menace of totalitarianism of the right has been succeeded by the threat of totalitarianism of the left." Within the United States itself, "demagogues and bigots" were engaged in "their disruptive game of setting one group of Americans against another." With the support of Attorney General Tom Clark, Thomas D'Arcy Brophy, president of the AHF, explained that its program was "essentially educational." It was "a citizens' movement-non-partisan and non-controversial-. . . [an] affirmative effort, opposed only to that which is antagonistic to the dignity and freedom of the individual."3

As part of its effort to stimulate American patriotism and "loyalty," Richard Condon of the AHF announced in August 1947 that "the longest train tour in American history" would begin on September 17, 1947, the 160th anniversary of the signing of the Constitution. Scheduled to visit 315 cities in all forty-eight states, the streamlined seven-car train, "a traveling shrine," would carry and exhibit "the nation's most priceless historic documents," including George Washington's copy of the Constitution, Thomas Jefferson's Bill of Religious Freedom, Francis Scott Key's manuscript of "The Star Spangled Banner," the Emancipation Proclamation, and the German treaty of unconditional surrender that ended World War II in Europe.4

The Freedom Train's precious cargo was protected by a state-of-the-art air conditioning system, making "extensive use of a new type of lucite plastic" and a detail of twenty-four U.S. Marines "chosen on the basis of [their] general appearance, intelligence, physical size and outstanding service records." These elaborate security measures, together with the "all-steel construction" of the train itself, were designed to guarantee protection "in the highly unlikely event of an accident." Such an event was "unlikely" because the Freedom Train "would be accorded the same high priority measures as given to a train carrying the president of the United States. "5

The Freedom Train's nationwide tour, the AHF asserted, was intended "to inspire a sense of awareness among Americans to the principles that gave the United States its freedom and independence" and "to stimulate a more active participation in national, state, and local government and community life to protect these liberties." Cities and towns visited by the Freedom Train were urged to organize a "Community Rededication Week" with special events including recitations of the "Freedom Pledge" and "The Nine Promises of a Good Citizen."6

Promoters of the Freedom Train also enlisted the talent of composer Irving Berlin. The opening of his song "Freedom Train"-recorded by Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sistersincluded the lines:7 Here comes the Freedom Train,

You better hurry down,

Just like Paul Revere

It's comin' into your home town.

Inside the Freedom Train,

You'll find a precious frieght,

Those words of liberty

The documents that made us great.8

The national office of the NAACP initially announced its qualified support for the Freedom Train project. Speaking at an AHF luncheon in Washington, D.C., on May 22, 1947, NAACP executive secretary Walter White condemned the acquittals on the previous day of twenty-eight "self-confessed lynchers in a courtroom in Greenville, South Carolina," and said the country had less to fear from "foreign ideologies" than from "native totalitarianism." White cautioned fellow delegates that "merely causing our young, middle-aged and old people to look at and touch the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence is not enough. We have got to demonstrate to ourselves and to the world that democracy is the best way of life, but we have got to live it as well as talk about it."9

White's optimism was appropriately guarded; subsequent decisions by the AHF and conflicts with hosting cities frustrated the NAACP's hopes that the Freedom Train would serve as a catalyst in the improvement of civil rights for African Americans. In August 1947 the NAACP requested that the AHF include President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Executive Order 8802 (June 25, 1941)-the document that created the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) and barred racial discrimination in the defense industries, the armed forces, and departments of the federal governmentin the train's exhibits because "no document in recent years has so aroused the interest and enthusiasm for the democratic process among minorities." But the AHF Documents Approval Committee had already rejected a National Archives proposal to include the executive order and other documents related to women's suffrage and labor relations, and a reversal of the decision was not forthcoming. The NAACP communication also noted that it had "been assured informally that there would be no segregation on account of race in the viewing of the documents on the Freedom Train" and urged the AHF to make public a decision reached the month before that "no segregation of any individuals or groups of any kind on the basis of race or religion be allowed at any exhibition of the Freedom Train held anywhere."11

But the white leadership of southern cities had different ideas about how the exhibit should be viewed, and news of plans for segregated showings prompted increased NAACP action on several fronts. Informed by Walter Winchell's syndicated column that "the South's major cities are setting aside a day for whites, another for Negroes, when the Freedom Train arrives," White asked the AHF what action it would take in such circumstances and expressed hope that these visits would be canceled, with appropriate publicity, as this would be "the only effective way of implementing the resolution passed by the board on July 9th."12

African American poet and NAACP supporter Langston Hughes illuminated the paradox of a segregated celebration of freedom in one of his most savagely satirical poems, "Freedom Train":

The Birmingham station's marked COLORED and WHITE.

The white folks go left, the colored go right

They even got a segregated lane.

Is that the way to get aboard the Freedom Train?13

Alabama-born composer and music publisher W. C. Handy, concerned that in some parts of the South, "unless local conditions are changed, Negro Americans must view the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation under undemocratic conditions," turned Hughes's poem into a spiritual-"Checkin' on the Freedom Train."14

Gloster B. Current, the NAACP's director of branches, duly advised its thirty-two southern chapters "to insist on no segregation and discrimination of visitors to the Freedom Train" when it arrived in their respective cities. NAACP state conferences in Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, and Alabama were advised "to work for a program insuring that there will be no jim crowing the Freedom Train as it passes through the South."15

The national office also informed local branches that in many locations the Freedom Train would be put on a siding near the local station. If it was parked close to houses occupied by African Americans, NAACP officers were to urge these residents "to present their best appearance" and (somewhat contradictorily) to "refrain from standing out of doors or in other ways being conspicuous." These suggestions had been prompted by Current's viewing of the Freedom Train near "one of our branches," where it had been "stationed in front of ramshackled shacks occupied by Negroes":

The residents, although it was Sunday, stood about on the outside unkempt, dirty and obviously making a show of themselves. The children were ill-dressed and fought with each other. As ten thousand white and Negro spectators waited in line to see the Freedom Train all of them got a glimpse of this sordid life of our people. While the homelife of these residents probably was no fault of their own, it gives a stereotyped impression to those white people who already believe the Negroes inferior. This we want to avoid.

Current accordingly advised branches on appropriate courses of action. They should make sure that with the imminent arrival of the Freedom Train, local black residents be "forewarned and properly advised on their behavior, dress and actions." Officials might issue a leaflet declaring that "The NAACP Welcomes the Freedom Train" but also stating that "freedom" meant the "elimination of segregation and discrimination, complete equality and other points in our program." 16

The NAACP's concerns were well founded. Memphis authorities announced that when it arrived in January 1948, the traveling exhibition would be viewed on a segregated basis with whites and blacks each having half a day to view the exhibit. As Michael Honey has observed, by the 1940s Memphis political boss Edward H. Crump had veered sharply away from his earlier paternalistic attitudes on race to embrace "the type of venomous political rhetoric employed by Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo." Crump now claimed, with the support of Mayor James Pleasants, that the AHF's stipulation of integrated viewing of the Freedom Train's documents would cause whites and blacks to jostle each other and lead to race riots.17 In response the AHF took Memphis off the Train's itinerary.l8 After the Memphis episode, Mayor William B. Hartsfield of Atlanta and Mayor Hugh P. Wasson of Chattanooga stated that admission to the Freedom Train in their cities would not be segregated. But the Georgia cities of Savannah and Brunswick successfully adopted the stratagem of having the two races form separate lines before being admitted to the train in alternating groups. As the train's director, W. H. S. O'Brien, reported with unintended irony: "They went in in separate blocks of twenty-five and came out mixed up."19

The Freedom Train was scheduled to stop in the Magic City on December 29, 1947. Anticipating its arrival, Public Service Commission president Cooper Green, assistant commissioners Eugene "Bull" Connor and James E. Morgan, and Francis S. Falkenburg, local chairman of the Freedom Train Planning Committee, were adamant that (as in Savannah and Brunswick) admission to the exhibit would only be allowed with separate lines for whites and blacks. More specifically, what became known as the "Birmingham Plan" required that the two races be admitted in alternate groups of twenty to twenty-five. Although whites and blacks would be on the train at the same time, they would never actually mix because a black group would not be admitted to the exhibit until the preceding white group had exited the first car and entered the second. This was the subtle twist and distorted ingenuity of the Birmingham Plan.20

In reply to a query from the AHF, the Birmingham commissioners disingenuously claimed that there would be no segregated viewing of the Freedom Train exhibition but, pleading concern for public safety in "a crowd of possibly 20,000 people," promised that "separate white and colored lines [would] be merged continuously, fairly, and with equal opportunity for all." They also correctly claimed that their proposal was supported by the city's "leading colored citizens"-notably, Dr. Ernest W. Taggart, a dentist and president of the Birmingham NAACP, and I. J. Israel, "publisher of The Southern Press[, a] local colored publication."21

When the AHF-with the prompting of Walter Whiterejected this explanation, Commissioners Connor and Morgan adopted a stronger stance:

Our segregation law is for the protection of the white and black races in the city, and for the prevention of disorders.... It is not a mantle to be set aside at the instance [sic] of this or that visitor to the city. If those in charge of the Freedom Train should see fit to bring it to Birmingham, they will be welcomed cordially, but cannot expect that either they or visitors to the Freedom Train will be exempt from our laws.22 2 In 1941 the national office of the NAACP had awarded the Birmingham branch its prestigious Thalheimer award for its "splendid work regarding industrial disputes; for its organized action in reducing police brutality; for its registering voters; and [for] its increase in members from 603 in 1938 to 1,032 in 1940." In 1946 membership reached a peak of 8,500, and throughout the 1940s it ranked as one of the organization's largest branches in the South.23 During and immediately after World War II, Emory O. Jackson-first president of the Alabama State Conference of NAACP branches, executive secretary of the Birmingham NAACP, and managing editor of the African American newspaper the Birmingham World-"became the conscience and chief motivator of the branch."24 The Birmingham World urged blacks to register for the draft and to register to vote, and it was Jackson who made public the agreement reached between Taggart and the city commissioners and subsequently committed the Birmingham NAACP to the policy announced by the New York office.25

At its annual business meeting in early December 1947, the Birmingham chapter condemned "the present jimcrow plans formulated by the public rulers of the City of Birmingham for viewing the Freedom Train [on] Monday, Dec. 29, 1947," because of their "shocking and intolerable violation of the non-discrimination and non-segregation declarations adopted by the American Heritage Foundation" and dramatized by the exclusion of Memphis from the train's southern itinerary. The Birmingham Plan was an affront to "what the NAACP in Birmingham stands for and fights for.... [I]f the people of Birmingham are not ready for the Freedom Train to roll into the city in the spirit in which the project was planned, then the NAACP is patient enough to wait until the people get ready." The chapter urged the national office of the NAACP "to correct the defects of the `Birmingham Plan' or let some other city that will abide by the no-segregation rules have the date given to Birmingham."26

At a meeting with the city commissioners and a group of African American leaders including Emory Jackson, the Reverend J. L. Ware, pastor of Trinity Baptist Church, presented the case against the Birmingham Plan. But as the Birmingham News-Age-Herald reported, "Commissioner Connor . . took up the burden of the argument and announced that as long as he is police commissioner he would never sanction the plan asked for by the Negroes." After quoting from the city's segregation ordinance, Connor "invited the speaker to go on talking, said he would listen till doomsday, but would not change his mind under any circumstances." The same report misleadingly claimed that the situation appeared to have been resolved by the AHF's "willingness to accept the Birmingham plan as something other than segregation" and predicted that the Freedom Train would stop in the city.27

Emory Jackson promptly queried whether the AHF had, in fact, changed its announced position on nonsegregated admission to the Freedom Train and noted caustically that "Birmingham Commissioner Eugene Connor says that the Birmingham Plan is 'segregation' and he should know."Jackson was concerned that the AHF might accept the Birmingham Plan and "wink at segregation before one gets on the train and just insist that segregation be done away with on the train." In fact, he argued, there would be no "mixing" of racial lines under the proposed arrangement, and once people were on the train, "movement will be so fast that these groups will stay in compact racial units." He warned that "the Negro people intend to boycott the train."28

In a statement submitted to the city commission, the NAACP branch listed its principal objections to the Birmingham Plan. It was contrary to local practice because in Birmingham all citizens stood in a single line at banks, post offices, and supermarkets and did not form separate lines for the viewing of circuses and parades. Moreover, the Freedom Train was engaged in "interstate commerce, which makes jimcrow inapplicable." Because the train was either federal property or under federal custody, "enforcement of segregation laws" might invite litigation on the part of the plaintiffs.29

Other African American organizations also roundly condemned the Birmingham Plan for the Freedom Train. Bishop Benjamin G. Shaw of the First Episcopal District of the African Methodist Zion Church informed Walter White: "I am opposed to second-class citizenship for any people, white or black, as symbolized in the separate lines for white and black citizens as presented in the Freedom Train plan for this city."30 The Birmingham Metropolitan Council of the National Council of Negro Women announced that it had welcomed the cancellation of the Freedom Train's visit to Memphis and had "rejoiced in the knowledge that it would stop in Birmingham assuming . . . that the officials of the City had conceded to the non-segregation, non-discrimination declaration adopted by the sponsors of the train." But the council and its affiliates now commended the NAACP's resolutions opposing the Birmingham Plan.31

Louis Burnham, executive secretary of the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC) headquartered in Birmingham, informed AHF national director Edward Shugrue that the SNYC endorsed the local NAACP protests over segregated admission to the Freedom Train and called the Birmingham Plan a "stupid and gratuitous insult to the citizens of this community who have for years formed indiscriminate lines in . . . banks, stores, pay windows, post offices and other public places." The SNYC also reported a widespread belief that the AHF's regional representative was urging other southern cities "to accept similar discriminatory arrangements."32

When these and other protests failed either to move the city commission or to elicit a positive response from the AHF, the Birmingham NAACP, through its secretary, Emory O. Jackson, asked members to boycott the impending visit of the Freedom Train. A directive urged: "Stay away from Freedom Train, because the City Fathers insist on separate lines for Negro and white people." Those already possessing tickets were advised "not to use them nor offer them to any other Negro for use. Nobody on God's earth can compel you to see the Freedom Train." Ministers were also to urge their congregations "to avoid going to the Freedom Train exhibit on Monday, December 29."33

In response to the threat of a black boycott in Birmingham, the continued intransigence of city commissioners, and Walter White's protests, the AHF canceled the Freedom Train's visit to Birmingham.34 (Officials in Jasper, Alabama, who had promised no racial segregation if the Freedom Train stopped there, were disappointed when they were not given Birmingham's place on its itinerary.) A jubilant Walter White immediately cabled the AHF: "Decision to withdraw Freedom Train from Birmingham and thus put [the] Bill of Rights above local segregation laws conceived in fear and nurtured in prejudice is the greatest Christmas gift to the cause of democracy which can be given."35

Emory Jackson offered his own summary of the episode. The city's white newspapers had "agreed to a conspiracy of silence" following the formulation of the Birmingham Plan, which had been exposed and publicized by the Birmingham World. Dr. Taggart, according to Jackson, had inexplicably given his verbal approval of segregated admission to the Freedom Train. Jackson dismissed I. J. Israel as "a hustler who provides police tips and is an informer for the white supremacy group."36

Ernest Taggart, understandably chastened by the entire episode, tried to justify his having approved the visit of the Freedom Train to Birmingham "with separate lines leading up to the train [but] with stipulated understanding that there would be free and unmolested comingling and movement of blacks and whites on the train." He had favored this device "as a compromise between a white protesting group and a Negro protesting group, which made it obvious that the Freedom Train had to bypass Birmingham because people here couldn't decide how they would see it." But Taggart insisted that he had been "speaking for myself and not for any of my several organizational connections." Implacably opposed to any forms of discrimination and segregation, he had nevertheless offered the compromise "in the hope that the good done by the appearance of the Freedom Train here would outweigh any harm imagined."37

In his own reflections on "The Freedom Train versus Segregation in the South," Walter White noted that the Birmingham city commissioners had expended an inordinate "amount of time, thought, telegraph tolls and newsprint" in their "childish insistence" on segregated admission to the Freedom Train. Following its canceled appearance, and "blinded by sectionalism and prejudice," these officials had insisted "that a local segregation ordinance should take precedence over the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights" and had falsely claimed that the AHF had agreed to their proposals. In the event, by refusing to accept the Birmingham Plan, the AHF had highlighted the issue of "bigotry versus democracy" and reminded fair-minded Americans of the indignities and inanities of racial segregation.

But White also observed that not all southern towns and cities had followed Birmingham's baleful example. Jasper, Alabama, had "reacted magnificently" to the episode, and Mayor John L. Goodwyn of Montgomery had conceded that because both races stood in one line to "pay taxes, buy groceries and make bank deposits," there had been no reason to abandon this practice with regard to the Freedom Train. The Tupelo (Miss.) Daily Journal had ridiculed the insistence of Boss Crump on segregated admission to the Freedom Train in an editorial titled "Say 'Memphis' and Hold Your Nose." White proposed amending it to suggest "that both nostrils be held when one says Memphis and Birmingham." But, he concluded optimistically, the controversy surrounding the Freedom Train in the South-and particularly in Birmingham-had "made decent Southerners aware of how ridiculous the South is being made to appear. They are becoming vocal against the small-minded officials who misrepresent them."38

Birmingham's white residents were understandably disappointed at the cancellation of the Freedom Train's stopover in their city but reached differing verdicts on the final outcome of the episode, as indicated by a random sampling of opinion: "I have never thought very much of the Commissioners anyway. No one anticipated any trouble over a single line except them"; "The Heritage Foundation is asking too much of the South when they specify non-segregation"; and "Birmingham shouldn't have a law providing for segregation. Separation of the races will take care of itself naturally. If people could see those documents, they would be more inclined to believe this."39

Commissioner Green, a principal architect of the Birmingham Plan, received a mixed mailbag from his constituents following cancellation of the Freedom Train's visit. One correspondent thanked him for "refusing to allow the Freedom Train to be brought into Birmingham and used as a wedge to force us to do away with our segregation laws, even temporarily," and another commended Green for "having intestinal fortitude enough to keep the meddling yankee reformers from breaking the segregation laws in Birmingham with the intolerance train." But one Birmingham resident expressed disappointment over both the nonappearance of the train and the behavior of the city commission and concluded: "Our city stands shamed and belittled by all other southern cities and towns which accepted this opportunity. I believe that you have misjudged the people of Birmingham. They are better Americans than you think." These views were echoed by another correspondent, who felt that the commissioners were guilty of "violating the spirit of Christmas and of our Constitution" and of "saying to the nation and the rest of the world that we, the citizens of Birmingham, Alabama, have not evolved as far along the democratic scale as the citizens of Mobile, Montgomery and other cities. "40

Reporting from Birmingham, the African American correspondent of the Pittsburgh Courier offered this gloss on the whole affair:

Run up the Confederate flag! Dixie's Freedom Train derailers have struck again! This time they blasted the historic train and its priceless cargo, symbolic of America itself, completely off the tracks before it got here for its scheduled Dec. 29 visit! The reason: Freedom Train wouldn't bow to jim crow! Threats of death whispered over telephones. . . chicanery and conniving by city officials . . . some "uncle tom-ing" by Negro "leaders". . . hurried long distance telephone conferences between Birmingham and New York . . . featured [in] a bitter battle waged by determined Negro citizens who fought to the end against racial segregation .. and won!41

On December 29,1948, Walter White presented an NAACP Award of Merit to Shugrue "for enforcing a national policy of non-segregation at all exhibits of the Freedom Train throughout its nationwide tour."42 That the Freedom Train did not stop in Birmingham in 1947 was a victory for the uncompromising stand of the national office of the NAACP and White's determination to expose and publicize a particularly offensive case of southern segregation. By the same token the incident also demonstrated the resolve of Birmingham's authorities to resist any and every perceived threat to the racial status quo. Not least, it revealed generational and ideological divisions within the city's African American community exemplified by the conservatism of Ernest W. Taggart and the militancy of Emory O. Jackson.

But the Birmingham branch of the NAACP did not maintain the momentum generated by the Freedom Train imbroglio. Between 1948 and 1949 it lost over 4,000 members, and Jackson lamented that its leadership had become "dispirited" as well as depleted. He blamed this deterioration on the heightened tensions resulting from the Truman administration's civil rights proposals and increases in racial violence that included a spate of bombings and increased Ku Klux Klan activity in the Birmingham area. As Dorothy Autrey concludes, the Birmingham chapter of the NAACP "entered the 1950s a pale reflection of the organization it had been only a few years before."43

In 1956 the NAACP was effectively outlawed in the state of Alabama.44 More serious-and effective-challenges to racial segregation and discrimination in the Magic City would await the formation in 1956 of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) under the leadership of the Reverend Fred L. Shuttlesworth and the 1963 Birmingham campaign of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), when "Bull" Connor would again pose as the champion of racial segregation. In hindsight the failure of the Freedom Train to stop at Birmingham in 1947 can be seen as a symbolically significant nonevent. Lacking the political power to compel integrated viewing of the Freedom Train, the Birmingham NAACP nevertheless protested long enough and loudly enough in the ear of a sympathetic AHF to disrupt the itinerary of a national campaign of patriotic boosterism. Segregation may have been firmly entrenched in Birmingham, but the city's blacks would not give the white establishment the satisfaction of displaying under segregated conditions the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Emancipation Proclamation-documents that would have a particular resonance for the continuing civil rights struggle in the Alabama of the 1950s and 1960s. Ironically, the city where a bus boycott eight years later would launch the South into the most significant years of the Civil Rights movement experienced a peaceful, integrated visit by the Freedom Train. An editorial in the Montgomery Examiner chastised the defiant stance of the Birmingham City Council and, in language that belied the racial tensions simmering in Montgomery, praised the capital city for its open-minded acceptance:

The fact that this city avoided all the senseless hair-splitting that barred the Freedom Train from Birmingham and Memphis is just another indication of the mature wisdom and level-headedness that exists here. How utterly ridiculous that Associate Commissioner "Bull" Conner [sic] of Birmingham, should have been permitted to wave the flag of racial intolerance in the "Magic City" and send the train on its way-no stop for the symbol of American freedom in Alabama's biggest city! . . . It is interesting that Birmingham, with a big Yankee-originated population, should demonstrate less racial tolerance and good will than Montgomery, the home of the Confederacy.45

1 Birmingham Post, December 24, 1947; New York ?imes, December 25, 1947. 2 On the background and ideology of the American Heritage Foundation and the Freedom Train see James Gregory Bradsher, "Taking America's Heritage to the People: The Freedom Train Story," Prologue 17 (Winter 1985): 229-45; and Stuart J. Little, "The Freedom Train: Citizenship and Postwar Political Culture, 1946-1949," American Studies 34 (Spring 1993): 35-67. On the Freedom Train controversy in Birmingham see Dorothy Autrey, "The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Alabama, 1913-1952" (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame,1985), 255; and Glenn T. Eskew, But for Birmingham:

The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997), 73. For a readily accessible documentary source on the Freedom Train see American Heritage Foundation-Freedom Train folder, Papers of the NAACP XI, Part 15: Segregation and Discrimination: (Complaints and Responses, 1940-1955, Series B: Administrative liles (Bethesda, Md., 1993), microtilm, reels 6-7 (hereafter AHFFT). Created by Justice Department initiative specifically to oversee a traveling exhibit that evolved into the Freedom Train, the AHF continued sponsoring citizenship programs on a smaller scale at least into the 1950s. See Bradsher, "America's Heritage," 242; Little, "Freedom Train," 63 n. 14. 3 Undated American Heritage Foundation press releases, AHFFT. In a special issue devoted to the Freedom Train, the editors of the socialist magazine New Masses pointed out that among the items conspicuously absent from the exhibit were "the documents setting

forth the Taft-Hartley Act, the President's 'loyalty' order, and the various bills and programs that proscribe and invalidate everything else on the Freedom Train-documents that would deprive the preponderance of our citizenry, labor, the Negroes, Jews, political minorities, of every civil right, of constitutional guarantees and protections." The chairman of the Board of Trustees of the AHF was Wall Street banker Winthrop Aldrich, and despite the presence of vice chairmen William Green of the American Federation of Labor and Philip Murray of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, "the key backers of the Freedom Train campaign have nothing in common with the basic citizens of our country-those who create the goods and wealth of our powerful nation." "Stay on the Track!" New Masses, September 30, 1947, p. 2.

4 AHF press release, August 25, 1947, AHFFT. 5 Ibid.

6 AHF press release, August 31, 1947, AHFFT. Promise 6 declared: "In thought, expression and action; at home, at school and in all my contacts, I will avoid any group prejudice based on class, race or religion." Ibid.

7 AHF press release, August 28, 1947, AHFFT. Berlin intended his composition as "a jingle rather than a heavy patriotic song of freedom." An AHF official commented that "characteristically, composing `The Freedom Train' took ven little of Berlin's time." Ibid. x Lyric excerpts of `"The Freedom Train" by Irving Berlin rJ Copyright 1947 bv Irving Berlin. (C) Copyright Renewed by Irving Berlin. (O Copyright Assigned to Joe DiMaggio, Anne Phipps Sidamon-Eristoff and Theodore R. Jackson as Trustees of God Bless America Fund. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission.

9 "Proceedings at the American Heritage Foundation Luncheon, Washington, D.CA., Statler Hotel, May 22, 1947," 24-25, AHFFT. For its part, the AHF expressed a desire to have the support of the NAACP and promised to supply it "with ul:ato-date information on progress made in the plans for the Freedom Train." John L.. Fitzgerald, director of promotions, AHF, to Walter White, June 27, 1947, AHFFT.

II) "Asks Freedom Train Carry FEPC Executive Order 8802," NAA(CPI press item, August 15, 1947, AHFFT. Lester Granger of the National Urban League had also urged the AHF to

announce its policy of nonsegregated admission to the Freedom Train. Rov Wilkins, assistant secretary of the NAACP, expressed his concern that if the AHF made such a public announcement, the credit might go to the Urban League and not to the NAACP. Roy Wilkins to Walter White, August 15, 1947, ibid.; Little, "Freedom Train," 48-49; Bradsher, "America's Heritage," 234.

II News from . the American Heritage l` Foundation, September 25, 1947, AHFFT. Winthrop W. Aldrich was quoted as saying, "It is our firm determination that the American Heritage program shall be an instrumentality of strengthening the freedoms and liberties of all Americans regardless of race or color." New York Times, September 29, 1947; little, "Freedom Train," 56.

12 Walter White to Winthrop Aldrich, telegram, October 15, 1947, AHFFT. 13 From Collected Poems by Langston Hughes. Copyright 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. knopf, Inc. Widely reprinted, Hughes's poem was written at the request of his friend John P. Davis, editor of Our World magazine. It first appeared in the New rem Republic, September 1947, 27. Arnold Rampersad, The l,Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 2, 1941-1967, I Dream a World (New York, 1988), 13fi.

14 W C. Handy to the NAACP, New York City, October 3, 1947, AHFFT. Paul Robeson was to record another version of "Freedom Train" for the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW). Bob Bialek of the SCHW offered the NAACP copies of the record at sixt-five cents for orders of twenty-five or more and asserted: "This poem . . . played an important role in barring Jim Crow policies on the Train's southern run." Letter to Rov Wilkins, December 9, 1947, AHFFT.

15 NAACP press release, October 24, 1947, AHFFT. In December Current wrote to the AHF, asserting that the NAACP "has been cooperating with the Freedom Train by contacting its branches on the route and advising them to cooperate with the local committees. Further, we have been interested in preventing segregation and this far, the activity of the foundation has been commendable." He also asked the AHF to supply the NAACP with the Freedom Train's fill itinerary "in order that we can continue to contact our branches in this regard." Gloster B. Current to John Murphy, December 17, 1947, AHFFT.

ts Memorandum by Gloster B. Current, November 25, 1947, AI IFFT. 17 Little, "Freedom Train," 58; Michael K. Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (Urbana, Ill., 1993), 345-46.

te New York Times, December 25, 1947; Crump's biographer observes: "The American Heritage Foundation, sponsor of the Freedom Train, took Memphis off the train's scheduled

stop for January, 1948, because city officials insisted that riders be segregated. Crump called the situation as he saw it: 'A custom of 150 years can't be sidetracked in a day or year and made workable. . . Memphis would like to have the Freedom Train. The whites and colored would like to see it,' but it was regrettable that `there are many whites and colored who hate one another viciously, and there is no patent medicine overnight cure for it."' William D. Miller, Mr. Crump ofMemphis (Baton Rouge, 1964), 312-13. See also Bradsher, "America's Heritage," 234-35.

19 New York limes, December 25, 1947. The same report observed that in Savannah and Brunswick the separate lines had been formed on railroad property, and had been controlled-without incident-bv white and black police officers.

20 Douglas L. Hunt, "`Birmingham Plan' for Freedom Train," Birmingham Neos-Age-Herald, December 21, 1947. William A. Nunnelley comments that before their election to consecutive fourth terms in 1949, Mayor Green and Commissioners Morgan and Connor "despite

occasional bickering among themselves . . . presented a generally harmonious front to voters." Connor, as he had earlier, "continued to project his image as the protector of Birmingham society, and his outspokenness in the area of race relations enhanced his position with the Birmingham electorate, still comprised primarily of whites." Bull Connor (Tuscaloosa, 1991), 38.

21 Cooper Green to Thomas D'Arcy Brophy, December 17, 1947, AHFFT.

22 Birmingham Post, December 24, 1947. 23 Autrey, "NAACP in Alabama," 202-4. 24 Ibid., 216.

25 For a capsule biography of Jackson see S. S. Seay Sr., I Was There by the Grace of God (Montgomery, 1990), 118-20. Seay asserts that as managing editor of the Birmingham World Jackson "fought discrimination and injustice with great courage and distinction, as he spoke and wrote, informing and stimulating Blacks to action against the extremely oppressive conditions under which they lived." See also Eskew, But for Birmingham, 70-72.

26 Resolution of the Birmingham Branch of the NAACP, December 4, 1947, AHFFT. 27 Hunt, "`Birmingham Plan' for Freedom Train."

28 Emory 0. Jackson to Walter White, December 21, 1947, AHFFT. 29 NAACP Citizens' Committee's Statement Prepared for Presentation to the Birmingham City Commission Tuesday Morning, December 16, 1947, AHFFT. 30 Benjamin Garland Shaw to Walter White, December 19, 1947, AHFFT.

s1 Memorandum to the President, Officers and Members of the Birmingham Metropolitan (Council of the National Council of` thc National CounCil of Negro Women, Dember 17, 1947, .Ff T. 32 Louis E. Burnham to JJ. Edward Sh-Shugrue, December lS, 1947, AHFFT. The Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC) was affiliated with the National Negro ( Congress. Like the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, the SNYC "was considered a tool of the Communist Party by its critics." In fact, its membership was mainly noncommunist, although Louis Burnham was a member of the Communist Party Nell I-vin Painter, ed., ihe Narrative of Hosea Hudson: His life as a Negro Communist in the South (Canbridge, Mass., 1979), 380.

33 Open letter by Emory O.Jackson, December 23, 1947, Freedom Train folder, Cooper Green Papers, Department of Archives and Manuscripts, Birmingham Public Library (hereafter DAM-BPL). The letter also stated: "First come, first see, is the way it should be. When the City Fathers put you in different lines on the basis of race. they take away your freedom... If you get into one of the separate lines, you will be giving the (ity officials your approval of racial discrimination."

34 In a cable to Cooper Green, Thomas D'Arcy Brophy asserted: "We respectfully reaffirm announced policy of American Heritage Foundation that there can be no racial segregation on the Freedom Train. All citizens must have equal opportunity to view historic documents of our American heritage. To do otherwise would violate the spirit of these documents and the Freedom Train." Thomas D'.Mcv Brophy to Green, December 16, 1947, Freedom Train folder, Cooper Green Papers, DAM-BPI.. Sec also Little, "Freedom Train," 58-59.

35 Walter White to Lou Noc,ins, December 24, 1947, AHFFT. 36 Emory O.Jackson to Walter White, December 25,1947, AHFFT; see also Emory O.Jackson, "The Trick Play Did Not Work," Birmingham World, January 10, 1948.

37 E. W. Taggart to Walter White, December 30, 1947, AHFFT. In an oblique reference to Taggart, Glenn Eskew claims that "The Freedom Train incident demonstrated the duplicity of the traditional Negro leadership class." But for Birmingham, 73.

38 Walter White, "Freedom Train versus Segregation in the South," Statement For Release to Subscribing Newspapers, January 1, 1948, AHFFT.

39 Bill Leslie, "Birmingham Folk Disappointed Over Cancellation of Freedom Train Visit," undated clipping from Birmingham Post, AHFFT.

40 Various correspondents to Green, Freedom Train folder, Cooper Green Papers, DAM-BPL.

41 "Freedom Train Derailed Again," undated clipping from Pittsburgh Courier, AHFFT. 42 "Text of Scroll to be presented by Mr. White to the American Heritage Foundation at the Freedom Train, December 26, 1948, 3 pm," AHFFT. 43 Autrey, "NAACP in Alabama," 217-18.

44 Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (New York, 1995), 92-93.

45 Montgomery Examiner, January 1, 1948.

John White is a Reader in American History in the Department of American Studies, University of Hull, United Kingdom. He presented a version of this essay at the Alabama Historical Association in Birmingham on April 18, 1997.

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