Timmerman attacks: the Allen University professors

Photo of Edwin Hoffman
From West Virginia State University yearbook

This blogpost is preceded by 

1. "Timmerman attacks, Spring 1957"
2. "Timmerman attacks, Fall 1957"
3. "Timmerman attacks, Spring 1958"
4. "Timmerman attacks: Allen University and Benedict College"
5. "Timmerman attacks: the Benedict professors"
6. "Timmerman attacks: the Allen University professors"

In my last post, I described the Benedict faculty attacked by Governor Timmerman.  What about the faculty at Allen University?  Before describing them, I should say that it is a little artificial to separate  the faculty at the two schools.  Allen is across the street from Benedict, and at the time, the schools exchanged faculty and students.

Edwin D. Hoffman
Hoffman was a 40-year old Professor of History who'd been at Allen University since 1954.  He was born in Long Island, New York and studied at City College of New York and Columbia University, He had taught at Long Island University for seven years prior to coming to Allen.

It's unclear why he left Long Island for Columbia, SC.  A natural guess is that he'd been dismissed from LIU, but Timmerman didn't say this in his speech (and he highlighted the dismissals of the other professors).  He may have just left for personal or professional reasons.  (Update:  Hoffman wasn't dismissed from LIU.  He wanted to teach at a HBCU.  More here.)

Hoffman's highest degree was a Ed.D. (rather than a Ph.D.), but he seems to have studied African American history.  He published academic articles on the topic while at Allen.  He also seems to have been an excellent teacher.  Kay Patterson, a former state senator, speaks glowingly of being taught by him and Rideout in an interview.

After being dismissed from Allen University, Hoffman taught at Pembroke State College (a college which before the Brown decision had been for American Indians) for a few years before going to West Virginia State College (a public HBCU).

Hoffman worked in West Virginia until he retired in 1988.  He spent his retirement in California, teaching part time at Cal State Hayward.  He died in 2008.

Photo of John G. Rideout
From Thunder Bay University Yearbook

John G. Rideout
John. G Rideout was born in Vermont in 1915 and received a BA from Colby College, was a Rhodes Scholar at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford, and received a Ph.D. in English from Brown University in 1945.  His dissertation was on the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelly.

He taught at several colleges before receiving his Ph.D. and then started teaching at the University of New Hampshire in 1946.   In New Hampshire, he became involved with left-wing politics, chairing the New Hampshire Progressive Party and running as their 1948 candidate for U.S. Senate.  These political activities attracted the attention of school and state officials, and he was forced to resign.  His resignation was reported in the New York Times in an article on challenges to academic freedom.

After leaving New Hampshire, he was able to find a position at Idaho State College in 1949, although his experience in New Hampshire was repeated, and he was forced to reign in 1953.  He ended up in Allen University after that, reportedly telling an associate that he was "going down there until things cool off".

After being dismissed from Allen, Rideout spent the next 6 years teaching at Huston-Tillotson University (a private HBCU in Austin, Texas) and then moved to Lakehead University (in Canada). He spent the rest of his career there, serving as Chair of the English Department for 16 years (1964 to 1980).  The university has honored him with a named award, the Rideout Memorial Bursary.  Rideout died in 1991.

While at Allen, Rideout was married to Miriam Rideout, and his children George and Margaret Bard were probably living at home.  As with many of the other professors, I can't find information about the other members of the Rideout family.

Forrest O. Wiggins
Photo from the University of Minnesota

Forrest Oran Wiggins
Forrest O. Wiggins was born in Indiana in 1907.  he received his B.A. from Butler University and then received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin in 1931, writing a dissertation on "The moral consequences of individualism".

After graduating, Wiggins taught at a series of HBCUs: Morehouse College, Howard University, Johnson C. Smith University, North Carolina College for Negroes (now NC Central University), and Louisville Municipal College.

He was hired by the University of Minnesota in 1946.  This was a significant event as he was the first African American professor hired at UM and one of only a handful of African Americans working a flagship state university.  He seems to have become involved with left-wing politics while at Minnesota.  Governor Timmerman, for example, says that he became an active member in the Socialist Workers Party in 1946, and he served as Vice Chairman of the Minnesota Progressive Party.  Wiggins was dismissed from Minnesota in 1952.

His dismissal was a major controversy.  The official reason for his dismissal was his poor scholarly record, although he had the support of both students and members of the Philosophy Department.  Professors in the Philosophy Department issued a 5-page report challenging the allegation's against Wiggins.  Wiggins contended that he was being dismissed because of his politics.  His job at Allen University was his first position after leaving Minnesota.

After being dismissed from Allen, he taught at Savannah State College for a few years before joining Hoffman at West Virginia State University, where he taught until he retired.  He died in Florida in 1982.


This series continues with "Timmerman Attacks: Hoffman Update."

Timmerman attacks: the Benedict professors

This blogpost is preceded by 

1. "Timmerman attacks, Spring 1957"
2. "Timmerman attacks, Fall 1957"
3. "Timmerman attacks, Spring 1958"
4. "Timmerman attacks: Allen University and Benedict College"

Who were the Benedict faculty accused of being communists?  The faculty members were Joseph Spencer Kennard Jr. (a religious scholar),  Lewis Smith (the Chairman of the Division of Humanities), and Marion Davis (an instructor in English).

Lewis Smith
Because his name is such a common one, its challenging to find information about Lewis Smith. He received an AB and a MA degree from Harvard University. He then was an English graduate student at the University of Iowa. He wrote the dissertation "Changing Conceptions of God in Colonial New England." He received his PhD in spring 1953.

Smith had started working at Benedict in 1956, so he'd been employed for a little over a year when the Governor Timmerman started attacking him. 

In his speech, Governor Timmerman made the following allegations against Smith:

1. 1955 – Discharged dishonorably by U. S. Navy as Security Risk.
2. 1956 – Told CP [Communist Party] leader he had been CP member.
3. 1949-1951 – Refused to tell investigating committee whether or not had been, or is, CP member (Fifth Amendment).

(Timmerman went on to say of Smith, "It is believed that this subject is still a punk but given time may develop".)

Entrance to West China University in the 1920s
Photo from Wikipedia

Joseph Spencer Kennard, Jr. 
By contrast, there is a significant amount of information about J. Spencer Kennard, and he seems like a fascinating character.  He was born in 1890 in Ossining, New York to Isabella Daubey and J. Spender Kennard Sr, an internationally known lawyer and author.  Kennard had received an excellent education with a A.B. from Harvard University, a S.T.B. from the Princeton Theological School, a Ph.D. from Yale, and a Th.D. from the University of Strasbourg.  He was an active scholar in the 1940s and 1950s, publishing about 5-10 journal articles and a book.

Kennard seems to have been deeply religious and spent much of his life as a Baptist missionary.  He lived in Japan from 1920 to 1936 as a Baptist missionary.  This was a very eventful period as Japan was experiencing a rise in extreme nationalism and beginning to embark on a series of expansionists wars.  Kennard's time in Japan came to an end in October 1936 when he was barred from reentering the country after a trip back to the US.  Japanese officials justified their decision using language that anticipated Red Scare attacks in the US:

Maintaining Communist thoughts since prior to coming to Japan, Dr. Kennard has been connected with the Fellowship of Religion [the author meant "Reconciliation"] organization advocating anti-war principles and has propagated anti-war ideas. 

This was major news: it was reported in the New York Times.

After being banned from Japan, Kennard did missionary work in China and taught at the West China Union University.  He was in China from 1937 to 1944, a period that roughly coincided with China's war with Japan and overlapped with the Chinese Civil War.  Kennard was openly critical of the Chinese National Party and opposed providing them with US aid.  He went so far as to submit an opposition statement to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

His statement was titled "The year of the rat" and described Chinese Nationalist leaders as rats that have "gnawed at the pillars of society until today one of the world's greatest civilizations is threatened with collapse."  Because the Chinese Nationalist party was fighting the Communist Party of China, opposing them was a controversial position that would have brought accusations of being a communist.

Kennard returned to the US in 1944 after the Mission Board denied his request to continue working in China.  He then seems to have bounced around a bit, teaching at SUNY New Paltz (then State Teachers College), for example, and ended up at Benedict in 1952.

I should add that Kennard was married, and his wife May F. Kennard was also teaching at Benedict during this period.  She evidently had advanced training in English studies (the AAUP report describes her as the only Benedict teacher with advanced training that remained after the dismissals), but I haven't found any other information about her.  (Reading documents from the 1950s reminds me how much American society has changed when it comes to gender issues: the women are largely invisible in the accounts).

I haven't been able to find much information about what Kennard did after he was dismissed.  He was 68 years old at the time, so he may have just retired.  It seems that he moved back to the Northeast and remained involved in politics.  In 1965, for example, the New York Times published a letter from him criticizing US involvement in the Vietnam war.  He passed on in 1980 and is buried in Pennsylvania.

Home of Kennard's father,  Joseph Spencer Kennard, Sr.
From Book News, Volume 24

Marion Davis
Marion Davis may be familiar to the mathematician readers: she is the mother of Chandler Davis, a math professor at the University of Toronto and also a former target during the Red Scare (the University of Michigan has a lecture series honoring him).

She'd come to Benedict with her husband Horace B. Davis in 1955.  Horace had taken the position at Benedict after being dismissed from a faculty position at the University of Missouri at Kansas because he had been called before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

As with May Kennard, there isn't a lot of information about Marion Davis, except in relation to her husband.  He had left Benedict the year before the Governor's public attacks on Allen University and had gone to Raleigh, North Carolina to work at Shaw University.  She'd stayed at Benedict to continue teaching for a year.

Governor Timmerman's attacks against Davis seems pointlessly cruel to me.  By the time he publicly attacked her in January, she'd already decided to leave Benedict at the end of the semester to join her husband at Raleigh.  Moreover, at this time, she was fighting a battle with cancer.  Cancer claimed her life a few years later, in 1960.

Horace B. Davis
One thing I hadn't realized until revisiting the literature is that there seems to have been a seventh target of Timmerman's attacks: Marion Davis's husband Horace.  In his speech, Timmerman says that he'd left Benedict College after his "communist connections were revealed." I haven't been able to find any details about this, unfortunately.


This series continues with:

1. "Timmerman attacks: the Allen University professors"
2. "Timmerman Attacks: Hoffman Update"

Timmerman attacks: Allen University and Benedict College

This blogpost is preceded by 

1. "Timmerman attacks, Spring 1957"
2. "Timmerman attacks, Fall 1957"
3. "Timmerman attacks, Spring 1958"

W. S. Scarborough, one of the early professors at Allen University
Photo from Blackpast 

One thing that I found surprising about how the Governor's attacks on universities played out is that professors played essentially no role in the conflict.  The conflict played out almost entirely between the state government, the Board of Trustees, and the AAUP.  

While both Allen and Benedict ultimately dismissed the 6 faculty, the specifics of how this was done differed in important ways.  Allen University Board of Trustees was able to effectively resist pressure from Governor Timmerman and  President Veal for a year.  At two meetings, they were able to block attempts to dismiss faculty, and President Veal ultimately succeeded only after unilaterally replacing the Board Chairman with someone more supportive of him.

The Board of Trustees of Benedict College were less effective.  The month after Timmerman publicly accused Benedict of harboring communist workers, the Board of Trustees issued a statement stating that, after making a reasonable inquiry, they found no evidence of their faculty promoting communism.  However, at their next meeting, the Board of Trustees voted not to renew the contracts  of the accused faculty.

Presidents Bacoats and Veal at a political rally
Veal is the second-from-the right, Bacoats the fourth
From Richland Library

A close study of the meeting is revealing. The Benedict board was racially mixed, with about half the members being white and half black.  It seems that all members wanted to get rid of the accused faculty, but when deciding on how to do this, the board split along racial lines.  A majority of African American members advocated for not renewing contracts, while a majority of white members advocated for summary dismissal (the more punitive action).  White board of trustee members also gave voice to Governor Timmerman's concerns in a very direct way: one member was on the telephone with him during the meeting.

By contrast, at least a large majority of Allen University's Board of Trustees was African American.  This seems to have limited influence of the Governor on their decision making and empowered them to resist President Veal.

The difference in the board probably reflects the nature of the HBCUs.  Benedict College was founded by white Christian missionaries and until 1938 it was led by a white college president.  Allen University, on the other hand, was founded by African American ministers affiliated with the African Methodist Episcopal (or AME) church

It is illuminating to compare the governance of Allen and Benedict with that of S. C. State University.  Here is a photo of their Board of Trustees in 1952:

The 1950 Board of Trustees at S. C. State University
Photo from S. C. State University: A Black Land-Grant College in Jim Crow America

Notice anything?

The person in the middle, next to the Confederate flag, is Strom Thurmond.  I am guessing that he supported dismissing faculty who supported desegregation.  Two years earlier Thurmond had declared, "there's not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the [expletive deleted] race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches."  

You can listen to an Wikipedia's recording of Thurmond's speech here.  (✋Warning✋: This is a speech by Strom Thurmond in the 1940s.)

This series continues with:

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