 |
| Newspaper announcement of the hiring of Horace B. Davis and two other professors The Sou'wester newspaper; September 14, 1929 |
Horace B. Davis and his family arrived in Memphis, Tennessee in fall 1929. They moved because Horace had been hired to teach at Southwestern University (now Rhodes College). The job was just a paycheck for him. The scholarship that had funded him for the last three years had run out, and his political activities had made university administrators hesitant to employ him.
Horace's arrival on campus did not attract any special attention. The school newspaper announced his hire in an article discussing all the new additions to the faculty, but it just offered a brief summary of his educational history. Horace's most notable appearance in the student newspaper was in a satirical issue published shortly before April 1st (a traditional day for practical jokes). Among students, Horace evidently had developed a reputation both for his interest in international politics and his appearance. The article humorously reported that Horace had recently been absent from his class, and one rumor held that he had gone to a London disarmament conference, but in fact, he had been having his suit cleaned and pressed. That task, the paper reported, was so taxing that he had to spent an entire day resting in bed.
Even though Tennessee is a border state, and Memphis was a regional commercial center, Horace found the city to be a deeply southern place. Much of the economy revolved around cotton which was grown on large farms by sharecroppers. Unfavorable leases trapped sharecroppers in debt, leaving them stuck in rural poverty. Black sharecroppers had it especially bad as the state's legal system provided them with little protection from unscrupulous landlords. In one discussion with a landlord about farming, Horace was told candidly about the way things worked. The landlord explained that most sharecroppers maintained their own financial records and checked them against the records maintained by their landlord. When asked what sharecroppers did when two accounts did not agree, he said, "they lose."
 |
| Horace's home at 1650 Monroe Avenue, Memphis, TN From Redfin |
The lack of legal protection left Blacks exposed to violence. While Horace was living in the city, a Black streetcar passenger was shot to death by the conductor. The conductor was upset because he'd been questioned about whether he had correctly computed change for a fare payment. Although he committed the act in front of witnesses, the conductor was never charged with murder. Instead, he was sentenced to a month in jail for carrying a firearm without a permit.
The violence of Memphis even struck close to Horace's home. He employed a young Black woman, Lillie Mae Harris, to do domestic work. One night after work, while waiting at a bus-stop, Lillie was forced into a car by two young white men. They proceeded to take her to an isolated area and then raped her. Even though she had taken note of the men's license plate number, she did not file a police report as her family discouraged her, arguing that there was no hope of seeing the rapists punished.
Lillie's mother worked as kitchen staff at Southwestern University, and she and Horace developed good social relations with each other. Through their interactions, Horace learned much about the complexities of Jim Crow social etiquette. One time Lillie and her mother invited Horace and his family to visit their uncle who lived in the country and worked as a sharecropper. Always eager to learn about the lives of workers, Horace happily accepted the invitation.
Lillie's uncle was a gracious host. He welcomed Horace to his home and spoke freely about life in rural Tennessee. However, he also respected the social rules of Jim Crow. He served Horace and his family a meal at the dinner table, but he and his family declined to join them and instead ate in the kitchen.
One of the uncle's neighbors was a white sharecropper. He and the uncle enjoyed relations that were friendly but strangely shaped by segregation. Horace wanted to meet the white sharecropper to learn more about working conditions in the area. The uncle introduced the two. Horace was invited into the sharecropper's home, and the two candidly discussed farm life. During the whole visit, the uncle waited outside. Although the uncle and the farmer were on good terms and even hunted together, the uncle seemed to feel that it would have been improper to join a conversation between white men.
Surprisingly, Horace had largely positive things to say about teaching at Southwestern University. At the time, the university was a small school of about five hundred students and was associated with the Presbyterian church. The student body was all-white and largely drawn from the region around Memphis. The typical incoming freshman had received a limited education from the state's primitive high school system. The university offered a somewhat old-fashioned curriculum (the most popular course was a language course on Ancient Greek), but academic standards were high. After four years at the university, most students graduated with an academic education that compared well with that offered by universities in the north.
Horace experienced first-hand how the university molded students. He was assigned to teach a freshman class that had an open-ended curriculum and was designed to help students adjust to college work. Wanting to promote critical thinking, Horace selected a textbook titled Introduction to Critical Thinking that included both a chapter on Darwin's theory of evolution and a chapter on higher criticism of the Bible. The university president objected to the use of such textbook in a freshman class at a church-affiliated school in Bible Belt, so Horace instead taught anthropology with an emphasis on the work of Franz Boas, especially his ideas about cultural relativism and his opposition to scientific racism.
On racial issues, Horace found that many of his students held regressive views. Once he held a classroom poll on whether it was ever justified to burn a man to death. The poll showed the class to be evenly split on the issue, but when he rephrased the question as one about "lynching" rather than "burning," he was shocked to find that twenty-six of the twenty-nine students were in favor. However, the students were tolerant of opposing views on these issues. Although the students soon realized that Horace did not share their political views, they were friendly and remained engaged in their coursework. A biology professor he knew had an even more positive experience. Many of his students were able to reconciled his lectures on evolution with their religious beliefs.
Horace planned to return to New York to complete his dissertation at the end of the academic year. His departure was announced in the student newspaper without any great fanfare: "Scott [another professor], Davis plan to work on Ph.D. degrees," read the headline. Over the course of the next month, circumstances would change rapidly. Horace and his wife Marion would find themselves under the scrutiny of the national press.
By the end of the academic year, Marion had joined the Communist Party USA. Accounts of when she joined are conflicting. In his autobiography, Horace stated that she joined while they were living in Pennsylvania, but Marion wrote that she joined while living in Memphis. The decision to join was a life-changing one: party membership potentially exposed her to negative press and police repression. However, it was one made without any fanfare. Marion and Horace subscribed to the American Communist Party's newspaper, the Daily Worker. The newspaper regularly included a form that readers could send to the Party if they were interested in learning more about communism. Marion decided to fill out the form after witnessing both the worsening national economic condition (the Great Depression had begun) and the regressive political situation in Memphis. In June, shortly before she and Horace planned to leave Memphis, she became a card-carrying Communist when a Communist organizer visiting from out-of-town, Tom Johnson, presented her with her Party membership card.
By this time, Marion had attracted the attention of local law enforcement. Law officers were evidently monitoring her mail as the police commission, Clifford Davis, later testified that she had sent a letter to the communist-organized civil rights organization, the American Negro Labor Congress. In it, she expressed optimism about the prospects for political organizing in the south.
Although they had only been in Memphis for a year, Marion and Horace had been able to connect with the handful of communist sympathizers living in city. Those people included a former Party member by the name of Joseph Norvell. Born Josef Nowosielski in Chernivhove, Russia, he had moved to the United States in 1911 and lived in St. Louis for a number of years before moving to Memphis to work as a grocer. By the time Horace met him, he had left the Party but remained supportive of its cause.
In late May, Horace received letters from two Party members, Robert W. Dunn (an acquaintance from the northeast) and Tom Johnson (a party organizer in Birmingham), asking him to organize a political protest. The communist-affiliated National Textile Workers Union had been trying to organize mill workers in Georgia. At a May 21 political rally, six organizers had been arrested on insurrection charges. Horace was asked to organize protest against their arrest.
Horace and Marion found Memphis to be difficult place for political organizing. Only a handful of people were interested in participating. However, after deliberating on the matter, they decided to go ahead and hold a protest. They were scheduled to leave in a few weeks, and Horace told Marion, "I somehow don't want to go away from this place without taking some kind of stand against the things I've seen."
On Thursday June 5, Marion successfully applied for a permit to hold a public meeting on the next day at Confederate Park, a public park by the Mississippi River. She and Horace then distributed leaflets announcing the meeting and gave notice to the press. That evening, a reporter came to their home to interview them about the upcoming meeting. Marion recalled giving the reporter "a mouthful." They not only spoke about the Atlanta arrests, but they also spoke in favor of social equality for Blacks and about the success of the Soviet Union. The next morning the interview formed the basis of article in which Marion's picture appeared beneath the caption "Communist leader."
After the article came out, events progressed rapidly. Tom Johnson arrived from Birmingham to help with organizing. It soon became clear that they would experience significant pushback. Horace and Marion began receiving angry anonymous phone calls from people who had learned of the upcoming protests from the news. The most significant phone call they received was one from police commissioner Clifford Davis. Around lunchtime, he told them that he had withdrawn the protest permit, and he had two hundred legionnaires (members of a war veterans organization) who were prepared to break up the meeting if they persisted. Horace and Tom Johnson immediately left home to meet with the commissioner and discuss the matter.
 |
| Clifford Davis From "ET" via findagrave |
In meeting with the police commissioner, Horace and Tom were walking into a lion's den. Clifford Davis was an important figure in Memphis's white supremacist power structure. Although it was not widely known at the time, he was not only in charge of the police; he was also a leader of the local Ku Klux Klan. The Memphis Klan was very different from the Klan that Horace had encountered in Pittsburgh. While the Pittsburgh Klan focused on anti-immigration, the Memphis Klan sought to enforce racial segregation and suppress labor organizing through extralegal violence. In doing so, it was acting as the extra-legal arm of the wealthy cotton planters who dominated city politics.
The meeting between Horace, Tom, Clifford and the city officials rapidly fell apart. What had started as a discussion over a park permit escalated into a discussion over social equality between blacks and whites. It ended when Clifford had Horace and Tom arrested on charges that they were going to provoke a riot by speaking out on racial issues at a permit-less meeting. He then sent two police officers to Horace's home to meet with Marion.
The ostensible reason for having police meet Marion was to inform her that her husband had been arrested. However, their actions demonstrated that their goal was to arrest Marion and anyone else they could find. When the police officers arrived at the home, they rang the doorbell and then forced their way in after Marion answered. They began inspecting her bookshelves, and when she asked to see a search warrant, they responded by laughing. Seeking an excuse to arrest her, they asked Marion if she was still planning to hold the protest meeting. She deflected the question several times, and the officers finally became frustrated and simply told her that she was under arrest.
After being booked, Marion was imprisoned by herself in a small room containing only a small bed and a barred window. Over the course of the evening, the police tried to extract more information from her. First, an official asked Marion if she wanted to contact her children, thinking that she had left them with other organizers and would inadvertently disclose their identities. This ruse proved unsuccessful, so she was put in contact with another prisoner who tried to extract information through casual conversation. This too failed, so the prison matron tried getting information from Marion but without success. The next day Marion along with Horace and Tom were released.
Tom was escorted by the police and onto a train leaving town. Horace and Marion were allowed to return to their home. They found it in a terrible condition. The police officers had searched bookcases and filing cabinets for incriminating material and left everything in disarray. To add insult to injury, before leaving, they had left cigar ashes and footprints all over the floor.
Horace and Marion spent the next day and a half packing up their household. On Monday night, they went to the train station to leave Memphis for Minneapolis. When they arrived, they found that their problems with law enforcement had not come to an end. Also waiting for their train was a group of suspicious-looking men who Marion thought had been send to surveil them. Later, after everyone had departed on the train, Marion's suspicious were confirmed by a friendly train porter who discretely called her attention to a badge that one of the men was wearing. To dodge the men, Horace and Marion got out at the Chicago stop and then re-boarded.
The arrests made the news. Many newspapers celebrated the police. The headline of the article published in the Chattanooga Daily Time read "Communist party nipped at Memphis." The Sceola Times went even further by condemning the university that had employed Horace: "It appears that the good people of Memphis made a mistake in contributing to the fund to secure Southwestern for that city. This school should be located in Chicago or some other northern city where the people believe in and practice social equality. There is certainly no demand for such an institution in Memphis or in any other southern city." Horace remained unrepentant. He told one reporter, "I have broken the law twenty times in my economics class at Southwestern this past year. I believe in social equality and have taught this principal [sic] to my students."
 |
| Joe Norvell in 1941 From Naturalization Records via Ancestory.com |
Sources
1. "Cotton will be grown by power tools." The Oklahoma Weekly Leader [Oklahoma City, OK]. May 16 1930. p. 1.
2. "Race equality is taught by communists." The Bee [Danville, Virginia]. June 7, 1930. p. 2.
3. "Professor Jailed over 'Red' meeting." Illustrated Daily News [Los Angles, California] June 7, 1930. p. 7.
4. "Equal rights backer filed in Tennessee." Warren Times Mirror [Warren, Pennsylvania] June 7, 1930. p. 6.
5. "Arrest trio for communist acts." The Bristol Herald Courier [Bristol, TN]. June 7, 1930. p. 1.
6. "Communist plot in Memphis uncovered." The Brownsville Herald [Brownsville, TX]. June 7, 1930. p.
7."Trio charged with attempt to organize communistic group." Johnson City Chronicle [Johnson City, TN]. June 7, 1930. p. 2.
8. "Communist party nipped at Memphis." Chattanooga Daily Time [Chattanooga, TN] June 7, 1930. p. 1.
9. "Jail bars meet of communists." The Knoxville Journal [Knoxville, TN]. June 7, 1930. p. 1.
10. "'Communists' released." The Morning Chronicle [Manhattan, KS] June 8, 1930. p. 3.
11. "Three free as communists." The Brownsville Herald [Brownsville, TX]. June 8, 1930. p. 32.
12. "The drive is ended on communism." The Knoxville Journal [Knoxville, TN]. June 8, 1930. p. 11.
13. "Southwestern teacher defies authorities." The Steele Enterprise [Steele, MO]. June 16, 1930. p. 5.
14. Look up Sceola Times
15. "Sedition charge threat in Tenn. by Legion, cops." The daily worker [Chicago, IL], June 10, 1930, Final City Edition, p. 1.
16. "Investigation of Communist Propaganda: Hearings Before a Special Committee to Investigate Communist Activities in the United States of the House of Representatives Seventy-First Congress Second session, Pursuant to H. Res. 220." Part 6, Vol No. 1.
No comments:
Post a Comment