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| Veal and a dean were featured in a 1961 advertisement for evaporated milk Ebony magazine |
As Allen University president, Frank R. Veal played a crucial role in the South Carolina governor's attacks on HBCUs during the late 1950s. He comes off badly in the public record. A protest flyer named Veal as one of the "Judases, Uncle Tom's, and tools of Timmerman" who was carrying the state to deeper ruin. The AAUP report on the incident used more restrained language but likewise condemned him. It determined that he had grossly violated established rules for academic due process, and his actions were "either complete administrative confusion or hypocritical lip service used as a device to conceal administrative misdeeds." Here we take a closer look at Veal's record.
Most surprising is that, prior to moving to South Carolina, Veal enjoyed close interactions with prominent members of the Communist Party. It appears that the South Carolina press and government officials never learned of this despite the amount of attention they paid to events at Allen.
Veal was born in 1907 to a middle-class family in Milledgeville, Georgia. Veal's father worked as a machinist and a laundryman and was able to purchase his own home. After graduating from high school, Veal left Georgia for South Carolina to attend Allen University. This began a life-long connection with the university and the AME church. He graduated with an A.B. degree in 1932 and then remained at the university for a year to teach history. He then pursued religious studies for most of the 1930s. He earned a B.D. from the divinity school at the University of Chicago and possibly an S.T.N. degree from Boston University. (The BU degree is mentioned in one newspaper article, but I could not find it in university records.) In the mid-1930s, he worked as an assistant football coach at Howard University while also taking classes. He earned a B.D. degree from Howard in 1937.
In 1940, Veal moved to Ohio to work as a minister for the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He would serve as a religious minister for most of the 1940s. He was first stationed in the city of Newark, but the next year he moved to Brown Chapel in Cincinnati. Within the church community, he is remembered for raising funds to expand the chapel's physical infrastructure.
Veal became active in politics while in Ohio. His political work started with civil rights activity. He was a leader in the local chapter of the NAACP. This brought him into regular contact with left-wing political activists in the city. In the late 1940s, leftists, both in the city and nation-wide, were organizing around the third-party presidential candidate Henry A. Wallace. Wallace had served as Roosevelt's Vice President but had split with mainstream Democrats over foreign policy and communism. Wallace advocated for adopting socialist democratic policies and peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union. Many of Wallace's supporters were part of the socialist democratic organization the Progressive Citizens of America. In 1948, Wallace ran as a third-party presidential candidate, and the PCA formed the backbone of his political party, the United States Progressive Party.
An important part of the Progressive Party's platform was racial equality, so Veal's work in the NAACP naturally drew him into the Progressive's orbit. He served on a November 13, 1947 committee that welcomed Wallace when he came to Ohio to campaign. He also appeared at a January 21, 1948 Progressive Citizens rally held in Columbus.
Veal's involvement with the Progressive Party attracted negative attention from internal security forces. The Progressive Party heavily drew membership from communists and was even believed by some conservatives to be under communist control. As a result, many people involved with the Progressives came under FBI investigation. Veal himself came to the FBI's attention after an informant reported that he was a communist.
The accusation of communist membership was not absurd. Cincinnati was in fact home to a significant number of members of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). In Ohio, almost 3,000 people joined the Party. As a major industrial center, Cincinnati was a center for many of the regional CP's activities.
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| Dorothy Pilder High school yearbook photo from Ancestry |
Although both the Progressive Party and the Communist Party reached out to African Americans, African American membership was small. Many of local Party members were white union members. For example, the communist labor organizer Talmadge Raley was born to poor farmers in Kentucky and had moved to Cincinnati to work at a porcelain factory. By the 1940s, he was working as an union organizer and then as a local union representative for the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America.
Talmadege was unusual in that much of the CP's membership was made up of white immigrants, especially Jewish immigrants from Eastern Euope. Typical was Dorothy Pilder (later Dorothy Renfrow). Dorothy was born in Cincinnati, but her parents were Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Russia who ran a delicatessen. Others were from a working-class background. The Party member Victor Keller (or Kellar) was a Ukrainian immigrant who worked as a machine operator in a clothing factory.
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| Louis B. Renfrow Harvard yearbook photo via Ancestry |
While Veal's involvement with the Progressive Party brought him into regular contact with members of the CPUSA, his direct engagement with the CP was not very significant. The only information the FBI was able to collect was a report that Veal had been put on a local CPUSA committee charged with handling religious matters. After a year, the Cincinnati FBI office decided to close Veal's file. The file ends with the remark that he was "never considered sufficiently important to be designated as the subject of a Security Card Index."
The Cincinnati office had reviewed its records on Veal because he had moved to South Carolina in August 1948. Veal left Ohio to assume leadership of "Mother Emanuel," the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. This was an honor. The church is one of the oldest and largest African American churches in the south.
Veal's largely dropped out of progressive politics after moving to South Carolina. Continued involvement with the Progressive Party was unworkable. In November, Wallace was soundly defeated in the presidential election, receiving even fewer votes that States' Rights candidate Strom Thurmond, and support for the Progressives collapsed throughout the nation. The Progressive Party never enjoyed strong support in South Carolina, and interest in communism was essentially non-existent.
After he moved, Veal fell within the jurisdiction of the Savannah office of the FBI. That office reviewed the files collected by the Cincinnati office and solicited information from law enforcement officers as well as informants. Their investigation failed to produce any indication that Veal was engaged in subversive activities. One FBI agent (Carlton M. Dillard) requested permission to interview Veal with the goal of developing him as a source of information about communists. Permission was denied, and the FBI again lost interest in him.
Veal moved from Charleston to Columbia in 1952 to serve as pastor for the Emmanuel AME Church. That year, he was one of three African Americans to run for the U.S. House of Representatives. All three lost the election by a significant margin, but their campaigns were significant as the candidates were the first African Americans in South Carolina to run for major political offices in over a generation.
After he had served as a pastor in Columbia for a year, Veal left the church to work in higher education. He was elected president of Paul Quinn College in Waco, Texas. The college is closely affiliated with the AME church, so his election was natural one. Veal served without attracting any controversy for three years and then returned to Columbia after being elected president of Allen University. He replaced Samuel R. Higgins who stepped down after being elected an AME bishop.
What are we to make of this? In a report, an FBI agent dismissed Veal's activities in South Carolina with the remark that they were "self-centered to promote his own welfare." An informant the agent contacted (Albert B. Brooks) went further. He said that Veal was "over-ambitious" and trying to get elected as Allen University president with the "ultimate aim" of becoming an AME bishop.
The broad contours of the FBI agent's report appear correct. As early as 1948, the press reported that Veal was trying to replace Samuel R. Higgins as Allen University president. A charitable interpretation of his record is that he was an ambitious religious leader who wanted to advance the cause of African Americans but also recognized the constrains imposed political reality. In Ohio, with its more liberal political culture, Veal built relations with progressives, but in the conservative strong-hold of South Carolina, he recognized that he needed to respect the state's staunchly segregationist culture.
Whatever plans Veal had to use the Allen University presidency to advance his standing within the AME church were ruined by the negative publicity surrounding the governor's attacks. He remained as Allen University president until 1962, but he never received his desired bishopric. Instead, he returned to Ohio to serve as pastor of the Bethel AME Church in the town of Lockland (a suburb of Cincinnati). He remained there until his death in 1969.
Sources
1) "Three Negro Candidates in South Carolina." Jackson advocate. [Jackson, Miss.], August 2, 1952, p. 1.
2) "Move to Oust Dr. Samuel Higgins as Allen U. Head" The Ohio daily-express [Dayton, Ohio]., June 14, 1948, p. 2
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