Philleo Nash Oral History Interview, February 21, 1967

Notice
This is a transcript of a tape-recorded interview conducted for the Harry S. Truman Library. A draft of this transcript was edited by the interviewee but only minor emendations were made; therefore, the reader should remember that this is essentially a transcript of the spoken, rather than the written word.

Numbers appearing in square brackets (ex. [45]) within the transcript indicate the pagination in the original, hardcopy version of the oral history interview.

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This oral history transcript may be read, quoted from, cited, and reproduced for purposes of research. It may not be published in full except by permission of the Harry S. Truman Library.

Opened October, 1973
Harry S. Truman Library
Independence, Missouri

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HESS: As we have just discussed and if any of the things we put down now we find to be repetitious, we can take care of that when the job of editing comes up.

Looking at our list that we made out when we started our project, I believe that we are down to the subject of the Civil Rights Committee. Our eleventh and last interview was on the FEPC, Fair Employment Practices Commission. So, starting off on the subject of the Civil Rights Committee, can you tell me something perhaps about the background to that -- of the decision to establish such a committee?

NASH: Well, Jerry, it is so long since we had a discussion that I think I will have to go all the way back to the beginning and if it turns out that we are repetitious, we will just have to cope with it some other way.

The idea of having a committee on civil rights goes back to the race tension of the early World War II period. There were mounting numbers of incidents that culminated in the riot of 1943 in August in Detroit; there were very close calls in Washington, D.C. and a number of

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other places and some actual outbreaks which increased in frequency.

In the prewar period, or maybe the very early part of the war, there had been tension that broke out into street fighting around the Sojourner Truth housing project in Detroit. There were also rumors that had a lot of circulation -- hostile anti-Negro rumors; there was the story of the "Disappointment Club." As domestic help became scarce and war jobs became frequent in many of the border cities, it was rumored that -- this was when the girl you hired from the employment agency didn't show -- that it wasn't because she had something better to do or a better job, but that she had teamed up with others to "disappoint" the white housekeeper -- the mistress. So, this is a rather primitive era as we look back on it 25 years after, but that kind of thing was going on.

Walter White, then the executive secretary of the NAACP, and others, suggested early in the game to the President, largely through Secretary [Harold L.] Ickes and Attorney General [Francis] Biddle, that a national commission should be created to devise ways and means of dealing with the situation. This was an old

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established technique in race relations at that time; it would have been a good idea, it was nearly done several times.

In a sense, the FEPC was balanced off against this commission. The President was reluctant to have two, and FEPC was being accused at that time of, correctly, I think, of not being strong enough, and what was the point of having two weak committees or commissions to deal with different aspects of the same problem. It is generally believed that, nevertheless, a commission would have been created on the basis of a recommendation from Attorney General Biddle; but at the last moment, by means that I don't understand -- have never known, and by a method of thinking that I don't understand -- an additional proposal was put into the memo; and that is that Negro immigration to Detroit be halted. Now, since this goes to a constitutional right of freedom of movement nobody could have given much extended thought to it and it must have been just thrown in at the last moment, but it was such a shocker as a proposal that it had the effect of negating the whole of the rest of the memo and from there on

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the idea of a committee was dead. Not only that, but the existence of the memo, which was supposed to be confidential between the Attorney General and the President of the United States, somehow found its way into an obscure Upper New York State newspaper, obviously via a deliberate leak somewhere and I don't suppose anyone will ever know where. And, I have been told that the reason why this leak was made was because of this highly controversial, and really most unconstitutional proposal.

There is no amount of race tension or race rioting or fear of violence that would cause responsible Negro leaders to suggest that they accept quiescently a curb on constitutional liberty, and I think it was felt that the quickest way to kill the proposal was just to leak it, and at that time in the Government there were very few, very few secrets, especially in controversial nonmilitary fields, like that of race relations.

I, myself, have had calls from obscure persons working in the Government Printing Office -- messengers. Bear in mind, at this time there were very few high level opportunities for Negroes in the Federal service and, therefore, you had a large number of well-educated,

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highly trained, extremely capable, Negro men and a few Negro women serving in subordinate positions, even in servile positions, as messengers, and so on, who had no individual personal reason to feel any great sense of responsibility about their jobs, and if materials passed through their hands which they thought was detrimental to Negro interests, they had no hesitation whatsoever of turning it over to someone they thought would know what to do with it, and sometimes these were people I knew and was working with.

I recall a pamphlet that was about to be printed for the guidance of Armed Forces in the Pacific, especially in the New Guinea area, and it was sort of a manual on "pigeon," but of course it took such "pigeon" terms as "boy" and didn't say whether this was or was not a respectful thing to do. A preprinted copy of one of these was put into my hands by one of these people who said, "Can't you put a stop to this kind of thing?" As it happened, I didn't even know it was going on, but I did. I didn't leak it because I'm not in the leaking business, but I was in the information business and I went over to the . . .

HESS: And you did put a stop to it.

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NASH: Oh, yes -- went over to the Pentagon and I said, "This is very offensive and if anybody had reviewed this that knew anything about it they wouldn't have permitted this to be done; you at least have to make some explanation." And so, it was picked up and corrected. So, this is just by way of explanation that while I was really shocked at the idea of a Cabinet level communication being leaked, it was only an extreme example of something that was very common at that time.

HESS: It was kind of hard to keep things quiet at that time.

NASH: In this area it was impossible. This is a town of very few secret., especially not in a controversial subject matter area like race relations.

Well, now for better or for worse, that memo was killed and the high level race relations commission was never formed. There were, however, very, very many meetings about it. And, it seemed to me that it would be a good idea to create such a commission, and I figured that if it were not going to be done during the war, that it would be essential to have such a commission after the war. I was going at this time

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on the basis of the analogy with World War I when the most severe tension, and the largest number of riots, were in the year immediately after the close of hostilities, in other words, 1919 was the year with the largest number of riots and the most people involved in them; and, we instituted at that time a study of all the riots of World War I in order to learn as much as we could about them and see whether there was a pattern as to time, place, issues, what was done, what could have been done better, and so on.

HESS: What did you find out about that?

NASH: Well, in the first place, they were all in the summer, and this gave rise to our feeling that summer was the time you had to worry about the most, which was later borne out by the experience in post-World War II. Also, we noted that in World War I, or immediately after, the locus of the rise was pretty much the border communities of the South, and they were, I felt, although our information wasn't very good on this, wasn't good enough -- I had a feeling that it was, to some degree, connected with the return of World War I servicemen; that is, Negro servicemen who had perhaps had a little better treatment than they had had before and were not about to return to a second-class position.

Now, I didn't assert this very strongly because

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I didn't really know enough about what was happening to Negro servicemen in World War I to be very dogmatic. On paper it was a pretty sorry record with segregated companies zoned to the interior and so on. On the other hand, the lot of the rural Negro, or the urban Negro to the extent that there was such in 1918, was not very good either. So, we were dealing with a speculative area. The only reason that I mention this, since I have to be rather indefinite about it, at such length, is that in probing these 1919 riots we were able for almost every case to locate an issue. Now, that is quite important in developing a theory of operation about how to stop them or prevent them or cure them

HESS: To find a cause.

NASH: . . . because the popular theory, the sociological theory about race riots, or at least when we did this work, is that they had no cause, and, therefore, they were both unpredictable and couldn't be remedied except in a very general sense -- if there is no specific cause, there is no specific remedy. In other words, if you have to wait for the whole caste and class system that involves race to be cleansed before you attempt to do

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anything about race riots then you are indeed very helpless and all you can do is stamp them out, or wait for the hurricane to go away, so to speak, and I found this to be rather unacceptable. Not only that, the study of the riots of the World War I period indicated that it is not even true because there were very few instances where there wasn't a pretty clear-cut example of denial of access to a facility. This was the big problem. Now, it might be a hospital, it might be a recreation area, park, a beach; it wasn't much about jobs; and it might be in a community where, as I say, the returning servicemen just had forgotten a little bit of how to be humble, and accommodate to the white folks, and so on, and somebody else coming back was going to see that the old order was restored, and none of this, and the next thing you know, we have street fights.

HESS: In 1946, the year after the war, there were several riots in the United States, too, weren't there?

NASH: Yes.

HESS: Two I have down here are Columbia, Tennessee in February of '46 where a Negro woman and her son got into a fight with a white radio repairman and were pushed through

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a window and that started a fight, and then a little later on in the year in December of ‘46 in Redwoo