South Carolina Loyalty Oaths: A Correction

Front page headline from February 8, 1958 issue of The State.

In an earlier post, I said that loyalty oaths weren't used against South Carolina college and universities in the 1950s.  In revisiting the conflict between state officials and Benedict College, I found that this isn't quite correct.

After being publicly accused by the Governor of harboring communists at his college, Benedict College President J. A. Bacoats wrote a lengthy response that was published in the newspaper.  He said that newly hired faculty were asked, "Are you a member of the Communist Party or a member of any organization listed by the Attorney General as an organization that is subversive and has its purpose the overthrow of the government by violence?"  In response to the Governor's concerns, Bacoats said, he would start to require faculty to answer the question with a signed, written statement.

Allen University had similar paperwork.  Starting in September 1956, faculty were required to fill out a signed "Data sheet" that included a section that requested information about loyalty to the United States.

This paperwork may have been used to dismiss faulty.  Shortly before the conflict with Allen started, Marion Davis' husband Horace left Benedict College, according to the Governor because "his communist connections were revealed."  It is possible that Horace Davis left when he refused to sign a loyalty statement: earlier he'd refused to testify before HUAC and a later interview with his son indicated that he'd indeed been a member.

Timmerman attacks, Spring 1958

Benedict College
Photo from Richland Library

(This continues earlier posts about Spring 1957 and Fall 1957.)

At the start of the 1958 year, despite requests from state officials and actions by President Veal, Hoffman, Rideout, and Wiggins remained faculty at the HBCU Allen University and Andre Toth remained a student.  The State Board of Education had withheld approval teacher training at Allen University.  If the board persisted through the end of the academic year, many Allen graduates would be unable to secure teaching jobs, ruining the university.  However, in the short term, the conflict stood at an impasse.

President Veal's last chance for avoiding further government intervention by dismissing faculty occurred at a January 10, 1958 meeting of the Board of Trustees.  It did not go well for him: he was booed after saying Governor Timmerman was "a very fine man." While he had reportedly entered the meeting planning to demand dismissal, he ended up stating that he would not recommend the dismissal of the three professors at the time.

Photo of chaotic January 10 meeting of the Board of Trustees of Allen Univeristy
Photo from the Columbia Record newspaper, January 10, 1958.

On the left is Benedict College President J. A. Bacoats
Photo from Richland Library

Five days later, on January 15, 1958, Timmerman deliver his annual address in which he condemned Allen University for having been infiltrated by "undesired and highly trained communist workers".  This is the address I mentioned in the first post in this series.  Timmerman's address was the first time a public officially brought charges against Allen University.

In a second address at the end of the month, on January 29, 1958, he expanded his accusations by alleging that Benedict College, an HBCU that neighbors Allen, was also harboring subversives.  He accused 3 Benedict faculty members of being communist workers and said that Benedict College President J. A. Bacoats had been involved with communist organizations.  Bacoats, he said, had sponsored an event organized by a magazine which "propagated the Communist Party line under the guise of being a religious journal."

Governor Timmerman speaking to law enforcement
From A Capital Blog

Timmerman's speeches inflamed people.  The day of his January 15 speech, 11 Allen University students went to the all-white University of South Carolina and tried to register for classes.  Four Benedict College students tried to do the same on January 24.  Each student were told by a university official that they could not be examined for admission.

Unidentified Allen University students attempting to enroll at the University of South Carolina
Photo from Richland Library

White U of SC students responded to the attempts to desegregate their university with angry counter-protest.  On campus, they greeted the Allen students with the chant, "Two, four, six, right; we don't want to integrate."  Later, after the Allen students left, a 9 foot tall cross was burned in front of the student union, and an African American was hung in effigy.  Around the effigy's neck was a sign warning African Americans: "They tried but don't you."

Despite the inflamed atmosphere, spring semester proceeding along the lines of fall semester.  President Veal, and now President Bacoats, spent the term responding to the Governor's speeches, pressuring the professors to resign, arguing with Board of Trustee members over dismissal procedure, and responding to investigations by the AAUP.

At end of the semester, the whole controversy reached an abrupt conclusion: the Boards of Trustees dismissed all six faculty members.  None of the faculty received any reason for their dismissal, or even formal notice that they were being dismissed, and they all left the schools at the end of the academic year.

Andre Toth with other international students and Allen student leaders
Photo from Richland Library

Despite the provocation that his enrollment represented, there was no public discussion of Andre Toth after he successfully enrolled at Allen.  However, when the 1958-1959 academic year started, he was no longer enrolled as a student.

In a later interview, Toth said that he wanted to return to Allen but school officials told him that it was too costly for him to remain a student and denied him access to dorm housing.  He spent the year working as an elevator operator and bus boy in New York City and then transferred to Wilberforce University, an HBCU in Ohio.  His departure brought the HBCUs conflict with state officials to an end.


This series continues with:

1. "Timmerman attacks: Allen University and Benedict College"
2. "Timmerman attacks: the Benedict professors"
3. "Timmerman attacks: the Allen University professors"
4. "Timmerman Attacks: Hoffman Update"

Timmerman attacks, Fall 1957

Andre Toth enrolling at Allen University
Photo from Richland Library

(This continues an earlier posts about Spring 1957.)

At the start of September 1957, Allen University President Veal, under pressure from state officials, had spent the summer trying to dismiss Professors Hoffman, Rideout, and Wiggins without success.  State officials wanted these professor gone because they were involved in left-wing politics.

The conflict escalated in September because Allen University enrolled its first white student, Andre Toth.  Toth was a Hungarian refugee who had fought against the Soviets in the 1956 Hungarian revolution and then fled the country when it became clear that the revolution would be put down.  He was brought to the US by a refugee program.  The younger refugees were placed as students at universities, and Toth had been offered a place at Allen.  

Toth was almost certainly interested in challenging racial segregation.  In the 1950s, communist education on the United States emphasized the country's race problems, and Toth had been taught about segregation in the South during high school.  

Toth's enrollment at a private HBCU was not as big a challenge to segregation as the enrollment of an African American at a public whites-only school would have been.  At this time, Talladega College in Alabama, Fisk University in Tennessee, and Xavier University in Louisiana all had admitted whites.

For South Carolina state officials, even this was too much.  On September 9, shortly before classes started, the State Board of Education, headed by Governor Timmerman, adopted a resolution which read:

The approval of Allen University for teacher training is withheld until such time as the Board may determine that it is in the public interest to grant approval, and the State Department of Education is directed to withhold certification of its graduates until approval is granted.

The board gave no explanation for its actions, although the newspapers immediately speculated that it was an attempt to force President Veal to dismiss faculty and expell Toth.

Withholding board certification would have devastated Allen University over the long-term.  A large number of Allen students were studying to be public school teachers.  Without state certification, many Allen graduates would be unemployable, current students would transfer to other schools, and few high school students would apply for admissions.  

The Chappelle Administration building at Allen
Photo from Richland Library 

Over the course of Fall semester, the gears of academic administration turned slowly in response to the crisis. President Veal spent the semester pressuring the professors to resign, arguing with Board of Trustee members over whether the professors could be dismissed, and responding to investigations by the AAUP.  After all this, the semester ended as it began: Toth remained a student and Hoffman, Rideout, and Wiggins all remained faculty.

This situation would change almost as soon as 1958 began.  I will explain what happened in the next post.

This series continues with:

1. "Timmerman attacks, Spring 1958"
2. "Timmerman attacks: Allen University and Benedict College"
3. "Timmerman attacks: the Benedict professors"
4. "Timmerman attacks: the Allen University professors"
5. "Timmerman Attacks: Hoffman Update"

Timmerman attacks, Spring 1957

Allen University President Frank R. Veal
From Joseph Simeon Flipper Library

As I mentioned in an older post, loyalty oaths were not used extensively at South Carolina universities in the 1950s.  However, universities did experience Red Scare attacks by the state government.  Some of the most serious attacks were against the private HBCUs Benedict College and Allen University.  I will describe what happened in a series of posts.

At the end of the 1956-1957 school year (on June 15, 1957), Allen University President Veal asked three faculty members, Edwin D. Hoffman, John G. Rideout, and Forrest O. Wiggins, to resign from their positions for the best of "both the University and yourself."  If they did not resign, he further stated, then he'd recommend their dismissals.

President Veal gave no justification for his request, but he was reacting to pressure from the state government.  Over the course of spring semester, he has been in communication with state officials who wanted the three faculty members dismissed.  One report has Veal receiving a phone call from "the people downtown."

Postcard of Allen University in 1949
From Richland Library

As would become increasingly clear over the course of the academic year, Hoffman, Rideout, and Wiggins were being targeted because of their involvement in left-wing politics.  Rideout and Wiggins, and possibly also Hoffman, had moved to Allen University after being dismissed from other universities because of their political engagement.  (Update: Hoffman did not move to Allen after being dismissed from his previous job.  He wanted to teach at an HBCU.  More details here)

It's unclear to me what the professors had done to provoke the state government.  They never received formal dismissal charges from the university.  Governor Timmerman later publicly accused them of organizing "typical CP [Communist Party]" activities, but he justified this by citing political activities outside of South Carolina.  For example, the Governor pointed to Rideout's leadership of the New Hampshire Progressive Party in 1946 as evidence that he was a "trained communist worker."

This dynamic was common during the Red Scare.  A person involved in left-wing politics could be accused of being a communist on the basis of minimal evidence.  Such an accusation might not result in legal charges, but it could be used to justify dismissal from a job or social exclusion by peers.  Moreover, having been accused would make a person a target for future accusations.

Timmerman may have been targeting the professors simply because they provided a convenient way to attack civil rights activists.  A mysterious unsigned letter in the University of South Carolina archives alleges that Timmerman's goals were to tie African American political activities to communism and to advance his political career.

Attacking Allen University and its faculty was a natural way to attack civil rights activism as the university was a center for activism in the 1950s and 1960s.  A recent action that Timmerman took as an offense was the university's decision to admit a student from S. C. State University who had been expelled for his activism against segregation.

Forrest O. Wiggins
From Blackpast.

I do not think that the professors were promoting communism in any substantial way.  Some of the accused may have been members of the Communist Party, but as far as I can tell, nobody charged any of the professors with taking any concrete action to promote communism in South Carolina.  Moreover, 1957 was towards the end of the Red Scare, so by this point, the major communist parties were crippled by years of legal and political persecution.

The professors may have challenging legalized racial discrimination, and this was commonly equated with communism in the 1950s South.  Hoffman and Rideout were both white, and Rideout's family lived in campus housing.  Racially mixed housing was rare, although not illegal, in South Carolina at the time.

White professors living and teaching at a private HBCU was not a major affront to segregationists in the way that an African American attending a whites-only public university would have been.  Such an arragement could be viewed as the type of paternalistic relationship that was permissible under segregation.  I can't find any documentation that Hoffman, Rideout, or Wiggins were taking any specific actions for civil rights, but I suspect they may have been involved in an action that presented a serious challenge to segregations: the desegregation of Allen University.

In the 1956-1957 school year, Allen University admitted as students five white refugees from the Hungarian Revolution.  They had been placed at the university by a refugee aid program.  Evidently the program director evidently hadn't realized Allen was an HBCU, and when he realized this, he offered to make alternative arrangements.  Four students decided to attend other schools before arriving at Allen, but one — Andre Toth — planned to arrive on campus for fall semester.

By the end of the summer, President Veal had repeated his request for the resignations of the three professors, recommended their dismissal to the Board of Trustees, and removed them from all faculty committees, but all three remained faculty.  The conflict seemed to have reached a stalemate, but it would escalate in September when Toth arrived on campus and break the color barrier in South Carolina's higher educational system.

This series continues with:

1. "Timmerman attacks, Fall 1957"
2. "Timmerman attacks, Spring 1958"
3. "Timmerman attacks: Allen University and Benedict College"
4. "Timmerman attacks: the Benedict professors"
5. "Timmerman attacks: the Allen University professors"
6. "Timmerman Attacks: Hoffman Update"
7. "Communism in South Carolina"
8. "What was Forest O. Wiggins up to?"
9. "What's in an FBI record?"

Soviet tank in Budapest during the Hungarian Revolution
From Wikipedia

"I am not a member of any organization that believes in the overthrow of the American Mathematical Society"

Photo from the book Civil rights in South Carolina.

The title of this post is meant to be a play on California's 1950 loyalty oath which state employees, especially university professors, were required to sign.  The loyalty oath was mentioned in Abigail Thompson's editorial which appears in the latest issue of the Notices of American Mathematical Society.  I expect the editorial will generate has generated much discussion among mathematicians.  Thompson criticizes the UC system's current practice of requiring university job applicants to submit diversity statements and compares it to the use of loyalty oaths in the 1950s.  The South Carolina state government used  similar tools to enforce segregation.   I thought it'd be timely to discuss the topic in greater depth.

The term "loyalty oath" as applied to the 1950 California oath is somewhat of a misnomer.  I encourage you to read the full text here.  The oath is a commitment to two different things: loyalty to the federal and state governments ("I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support the Constitution...") and nonmembership in the Communist Party and organizations that advocate for the overthrow of the U.S. government ("... I am not a member of the Communist Party...").  The most controversial part of the oath is the declaration of nonmembership, so it could more properly be called a membership ban.

(In all this condemnation of of loyalty oaths, I was surprised to see that nobody pointed out that California seems to still require them.  See here, here, and here for contemporary discussions.  I think the current oath is here.  Presumably the current oath is less controversial since it doesn't include a membership ban.)

South Carolina implemented a simple membership ban.  In 1956, South Carolina Legislators passed a law barring government employees from holding membership in the NAACP and fining public officials who failed to implement the ban.  The law was designed to target teachers.  At the start of the school year, public school teachers were asked to fill out a questionnaire that asked if they were members of the NAACP or if they believed in integration.  One of the more detailed questionnaires is this one for a school in Orangeburg country:

1956 Teacher Application taken from The Problem of Desegregation in South Carolina

About 20 teachers refused to fill out the form.  They were subsequently fired.

The NAACP ban targeted public school teachers because African American teachers were an early focus of the civil rights movement in South Carolina.  In the 1940s, for example, the NAACP campaigned for African American public school teachers to receive the same pay as white teachers (teacher pay scales were set by a formula that explicitly took account of a teacher's race).  African American teachers were a natural group to organize because they formed a large professional body that was negatively impacted by segregation laws.

Govorner Timmerman

The fight over civil rights had become especially intense by 1956.  The Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision ruling racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional had presented a major challenge for segregationists.  In part as a response to the Brown decision, George Timmerman was elected governor in 1955 after running on a populist, segregationist platform.  Signing the NAACP ban into law was one of Timmerman's many actions to preserve segregation.

There was a long legal fight over the ban.  The NAACP almost immediately tried to challenge it in federal court, but before the case made its way through the legal system, the state legislature repealed the ban.  Legislators seem to have been concerned about legality and replaced it with a law requiring teachers to declare all organizations they belonged to.

The idea behind the new law was that it would force disclosure of NAACP membership while being easier to defend legally than the ban. (The new law didn't explicitly target a specific organization.) The new law didn't explicitly require that NAACP members be fired, but disclosure of membership would would expose members to serious danger.  For example, Joseph De Laine, a leader behind a South Carolina suit that was incorporated into Brown v. Board of Ed, was fired from his job, had his church burned, and was the target of an attempted drive-by shooting.

I can't find much information about how the NAACP bans were used after 1956.  The 1960 Supreme Court decision Shelton v. Tucker ruled a similar law in Arkansas unconstitutional, so presumably South Carolina's laws would have unenforceable at that point.  No idea what happened between 1957 and 1960.

In contrast to the situation with loyalty oaths in California, the laws targeting the NAACP do not seem have been used on university professors.  They did, however, have an impact on higher education.  In response to the NAACP ban and similar laws passed at this time, university faculty and staff at South Carolina State University, the public HBCU, drew up a resolution in protest.  The protest escalated over the course of the school year.  The governor sent state law enforcement officials to campus and the students responded by going on strike.  The strike ended when the university president threatened to expel the protesters.  Calm returned to campus after that, although about 10 students were suspended, 1 was expelled, and about 5 faculty fired.

Some fallout from the S.C. State protests appears in my article on James Solomon.  I mention in the article that, under pressure from the governor, 6 faculty were fired from the private HBCUs Allen University and Benedict College.  These schools were targeted in part because of the support they provided the S. C. State protesters:  the expelled student enrolled and completed his degree at Allen University.

Rereading Thompson's article after reflecting on this piece of South Carolina history was insightful for me.  In comparing them to loyalty tests, I think Thompson is trying to make the point that mandatory diversity statements are a bad idea regardless of the merit of the intended goal of promoting diversity.   Her view is that a job screening for political views is an inherently bad political tool.  I find it hard to productively contemplate this view in the context of the 1950s bans on membership in the Communist Party and the NAACP because I find the political goals of the bans so odious.

If we reach back further back into South Carolina's history, we can find loyalty tests being used to advance more noble political goals.  In the 19th century, oaths were one of the tools politicians used to limit the political power of Confederate sympathizers during and after the Civil War.  All the mathematicians I know are certainly supportive of this aim.  Were laws barring unreconstructed Confederate from federal jobs bad political tools despite their aims?  I honestly don't know, but this seems like a good question to consider when thinking about the use of political screenings in job hiring.

Loyalty oath signed by a former Confederate surgeon after the Civil War.  
Photo from the IC Blog.

Sources:

1). Civil rights in South Carolina: From peaceful protests to groundbreaking rulings by James L. Felder.

2). Making civil rights law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1936-1961 by Mark V. Tushnet.

3). The problem of desegregation in South Carolina by W. E. Solomon.

4). South Carolina State University: A Black land-grant college in Jim Crow American by William C. Hines.

A Statement of Purpose

This blog was started to record my thoughts about James L. Solomon and the Atlanta University math graduate program in the late 1950s and early 1960s.  My research for my article on Solomon and desegregation generated more interesting ideas than I could fit into an AMS Notices article, so I am putting them here for the time being.

The name of this blog is inspired by Chester Himes' novel "Blind man with a pistol."  Himes writes: "A friend of mine told me this story about a blind man with a pistol shooting at a man who had slapped him on a subway train and killing an innocent bystander peacefully reading his newspaper across the aisle and I thought, damn right, sounds just like today's news."

Like Himes with his novel, I will be trying to make sense of what's going on.  Since I don't have any formal training in methods of historical inquiry, this blog may just be a blind man with a math degree blasting away, but at least I shouldn't cause as many injuries as Himes' character.

Film poster for film adaption of Himes's novel The Heat's On