The history of civil rights in the United States is complex and twisted between the best and worst impulses in its people. Today's post illustrates the twisted history in 1947 that resonates 6 decades later in 2017. If this is a (fair & balanced) illustration of the permanent "American Dilemma," so be it.
[x New Yorker]
Remembering The Freedom Train
By Edward (Ted) L. Widmer
TagCrowd cloud of the following piece of writing
Seventy years ago, in the fall of 1947, Americans had much to be thankful for. Two years after the overwhelming victory of the Allies in the Second World War, US citizens owned seventy-two per cent of the world’s automobiles, sixty-one per cent of its telephones, and ninety-two per cent of its bathtubs. No nation in history had ever seen this level of economic and cultural dominance. In his Thanksgiving proclamation, President Harry Truman called on his fellow-citizens to share their bounty with “needy people of other nations,” and they did, through the Marshall Plan and other acts of generosity.
But even at the apogee of the American century there were doubts about the future. Twelve million GIs came home from the war, only to encounter housing shortages and labor strikes. Few were more disillusioned than African-American veterans. In 1946, there were at least six lynchings in the South; poll taxes blocked voting in many localities, and there were plenty of other reminders that human rights were a work in progress in the country that had done so much to define them. During the war, Franklin Roosevelt’s vision of four towering freedoms had inspired billions around the world. His successor, Truman, seemed beset by a multitude of foreign and domestic crises.
It was at this precarious moment, in 1946, that William Coblenz, a junior official at the Department of Justice, had an idea for an uplifting display of American values. During his lunch break, Coblenz liked to walk across the street to the National Archives, to inspect the exhibit of recently captured Nazi artifacts. Coblenz felt that Americans lacked a coherent understanding of their own, history; soon, he was pressing forward with the idea of a mobile display of America’s greatest documents. Officials from the National Archives were intrigued, and the heads of Paramount Pictures, US Steel, Du Pont, General Electric, and Standard Oil lined up in support. A bipartisan American Heritage Foundation convened to direct these energies, raise funding, and sell the concept of a moving museum to the public. The documents would be carried across America by a special railroad, guarded by Marines: the Freedom Train.
At first blush, these exhibit planners were not natural revolutionaries. They chose the word “Freedom” because “Democracy” struck several as too volatile. The foundation’s most prominent Democrat, John W. Davis, had run for President, in 1924, on a segregationist platform. Without a very clear plan, the organizers hoped that the publicity stunt—seven train cars pulled by a two-thousand-horsepower locomotive with the number 1776 on the side—would result in a national “rededication,” purging “cynicism” and “confusion.”
Tensions became apparent as soon as the documents for display were selected. Archivists sifted through papers from a broad cross-section of historical categories, but certain topic areas—women’s suffrage, collective bargaining, and desegregation—were rejected by the foundation as sensitive. Privately, archivists began to refer to the Freedom Train as “Hell on Wheels.” The final selection of a hundred and twenty-one documents ranged from the Magna Carta to the flag that flew over the USS Missouri on the day the Japanese surrendered, only two years earlier. In between, there was a heavy emphasis on the Founding Fathers, including Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence, and Washington’s handwritten notes on the Constitution. Robert E. Lee was included, in a letter accepting his university presidency, which serenely occupied a panel with his adversary, Abraham Lincoln, who had three documents in all, including the Gettysburg Address and the Emancipation Proclamation.
By the fall of 1947, Americans were awash in Freedom Train-themed comic books, school kits, and other materials heralding the approach of the exhibit. The American Heritage Foundation unveiled a new slogan, “Freedom is Everybody’s Job,” and Irving Berlin wrote a catchy song, which débuted in a carefully coördinated media blitz, just before departure. All the radio networks covered the train when it left Philadelphia, on September 17, 1947—the hundred and sixtieth anniversary of the signing of the US Constitution. Its first stop, Atlantic City, might have struck some as an odd place to encounter the sober language of Gettysburg, or George Washington’s account of starving troops, but American history offered a big tent, open to sinners and saints. At least that was the idea.
Although visitors of all races and ethnicities attended the exhibit together upon its launch, the Chicago Defender, a prominent African-American newspaper, was the first to note that none of the train’s personnel were black, adding that the Freedom Train was “somewhat of a contradiction” in a nation that segregated many of its transportation corridors. On the week of the train’s departure, Langston Hughes published a new poem, “Freedom Train,” in The New Republic, in which the poet hinted at future trouble:
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?
In New England and New York, people stood in line for hours, whisked through the train at a rate of ten thousand a day. The documents were set back in futuristic glass cases, inside green panels that were angled at zigzags and lit with soft fluorescent bulbs, permitting visitors to glide through from one end to the other, as if moving through time. But, as the days grew shorter, it became clear that the Freedom Train was not moving as quickly as recent events. Having completed its run through the Northeast, the train circled back through Washington, DC, in time for Thanksgiving and the big crowds of Union Station. Then it prepared for a push into the old Confederacy. Its first stop was Charlottesville, Virginia, where the return of Jefferson’s documents was treated as something of a family reunion. Deeper into the South, the project’s contradictions became more difficult to manage. As Langston Hughes had suspected, many Southern officials had no intention of letting white and black Americans walk through the narrow corridors of the train together.
Harry Truman was a proud son of the Confederacy, keenly aware of his own family’s partisanship in the Civil War. But he had grown in the office, and the rising tide of violence against African-Americans had sickened him. On October 29, 1947, his Administration had issued “To Secure These Rights,” a report that cited the same historic documents that the train was carrying, to argue that the United States had defaulted on its promise to African-Americans. The fusillade received a mixed response in the South, where leaders awaited the Freedom Train with mounting dread. A different kind of Freedom Ride had recently taken place, in April, when the Congress of Racial Equality had organized a “Journey of Reconciliation,” by bus, bringing together black and white citizens opposed to Jim Crow. Now, as the Freedom Train approached, each Southern city had to deal with a core question: should visitors be allowed to enter the train together, or segregated into white and black categories?
Many cities alternated groups of black and white visitors without calling attention to the fact. But two cities went out of their way to insist publicly on two different lines forming. In Birmingham, the commissioner of public safety, Theophilus Eugene (Bull) Connor, was already known for his unreconstructed views. Memphis was also a problem, dominated by an old political machine led by E.(dward) H.(ull) "Boss" Crump and a mayor, James Pleasants, who argued that “jostling” in the line was a form of unhealthy contact between the races. A Memphis newspaper summed up the situation with a headline that no satirist could have improved upon: “Memphis Officials Fear Freedom Train Will Inspire Citizens.”
Faced with the prospect of segregated lines to see the Emancipation Proclamation, the American Heritage Foundation announced that the train would bypass Birmingham and Memphis. In Birmingham, the cancellation was received with resignation, but in Memphis the news hit hard. Many Memphians chartered buses of their own to Nashville, where the train was cheerfully welcomed. A reporter dispatched there by the New York Times found a long line of blacks and whites, waiting reverentially together, including one elderly African-American woman who fainted upon her first contact with the Emancipation Proclamation. Excitement had been building, especially as African-Americans read accounts of the train’s progress through other cities, including the reports filed from Montgomery by Rosa Parks.
"Boss" Crump was furious that the train had bypassed his city, and, in 1948, he supported the organization of a new states’-rights party, the Dixiecrats. Harry Truman, meanwhile, campaigned joyfully during his whistle-stop campaign, as if he had found a freedom train of his own. In 1948, his victory was in part due to the ballots of African-Americans, voting in the Democratic column for the first time. On January 20, 1949, the week that Truman was inaugurated, the Freedom Train pulled back into Washington, DC, the final stop on a thirty-seven-thousand-mile journey through all forty-eight states. A “Freedom Scroll,” containing the signatures of three million Americans who had boarded the train, was presented to the President, who had agreed to dispatch the train two years earlier, when there was no guarantee that he would be in Washington to welcome it back.
Perhaps no city had been more changed by the train than Memphis, where it failed to arrive. Boss Crump’s influence withered after the non-event, and, though segregation endured, a new generation of African-Americans found ways to make themselves heard. In 1953, a young Memphis musician, Herman "Junior" Parker, recorded a new song, “Mystery Train,” which described a railroad rumbling ominously through an imaginary landscape, changing everything. The song included lyrics borrowed from one set of white performers, the Carter Family, and it was soon covered by another set—Elvis Presley, Scotty Moore, and Bill Black—in the tiny studio of Sun Records, where "Junior" Parker had recorded his version. In the wake of the Freedom Train, black and white Americans were free to walk down the same corridors, jostling each other. # # #
[Edward (Ted) L. Widmer is a historian, writer, librarian and musician who served as a speechwriter in the Clinton White House (1997-2001). In 2001, he was named the inaugural director of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience and associate professor of history at Washington College (Chestertown, MD). He left that position to become the Director and Librarian of the John Carter Brown Library of Brown University (Providence, RI). In 2012, he served as a senior advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In 2016, Widmer was appointed Director of the John Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. Widmer received an AB (history) and a PhD (history) from Harvard University (Cambridge, MA).]
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