Our titles on the Great Depression and New Deal Virginia part two, begin with biographies of two black leaders, “Perils and Prospects” about professor and Baptist pastor Gordon Blaine Hancock, and “Song in a Weary Throat” about professor and Episcopal priest Pauli Murray. The milieu that they worked in for racial advancement is described in “Managing White Supremacy”, a reprised review. “The Segregated Origins of Social Security” describes the contested elements of each title of that important New Deal enactment.
Then the expanded role of the federal government in Virginia land management is highlighted in “Super-motorway” describing the construction of the Blue Ridge Parkway, and the history of federal influence on forestry, agriculture and tourism in Appalachia is discussed in “Managing the Mountains.
On this historical period in Virginia, see also Great Depression and New Deal Virginia part one. for an overall survey of Virginia’s political, economic and social experience in the 1930s. General surveys of Virginia History can be found at Virginia History Surveys. Other Virginia history divided by topics and time periods can be found at the webpage Books and Reviews.
These titles are all used in bibliographies found in surveys of Virginia history of scholarly merit that are currently used in Virginia university history departments. Additional insights are used from articles in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, the Journal of Southern History and the Journal of American History.
Perils and Prospects of Southern Black Leadership
Raymond Gavins wrote The Perils and Prospects of Southern Black Leadership: Gordon Blaine Hancock, 1884–1970 in 1977. It is now available on Kindle and online new in paperback. Gavins incorporates biography, along with intellectual and social history to write about Gordon Blain Hancock and his place in black and southern history. Most of Hancock’s life was spent teaching at the Virginia Union University and pastoring at the Moore Street Baptist Church in Richmond. He studied at Seneca Institute, Colgate University and Harvard.
A race man, Hancock believed in self-help and racial solidarity. At the same time in the segregated 1940s he promoted cooperation with whites to end compulsory racial division. Committed to full citizen rights, along with Luther Porter Jackson and Plummer Bernard Young, he was an author of the Durham Manifesto on race relations. At the same time opposed white leadership in predominantly black institutions, he also had reservations about mixed racial marriage. Like many revolutionaries, he was overtaken by more militant leaders in the 1960s, but he had been one who set in motion the changes in attitudes and expectations leading to a more equitable future.
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Song in A Weary Throat
Pauli Murray wrote Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage in 1987, reprinted as Pauli Murray in 1989. It is now available on Kindle and online in paperback. This is an autobiography of an early activist for equal black and women’s rights, but more history than literature, with vignettes of personal insights into the Roosevelts, Thurgood Marshall, Stephen Vincent Benet and Lloyd K. Garrison.
In the early 1940s Pauli Murray was jailed in Petersburg for refusing to move to the back of the bus and “sat in” in Washington DC diners, long before Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. adopted those non-violent tactics confronting segregation. As a lawyer, she played an important role in the adoption of Title VII, banning sexual discrimination in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In her later years she became one of the first women Episcopalian priests.
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*Richard B. Sherman wrote The Case of Odell Waller and Virginia Justice, 1940-1942 in 1992. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “Odell Waller and Virginia Justice” at Amazon.com for your bookshelf.
Managing White Supremacy
Douglas Smith wrote Managing White Supremacy: Race, Politics, and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia in 2002. It is available on Kindle and online in paperback. Smith examines race relations in Virginia over the first half of the 20th century. In the early decades, there was a façade of good race relations among paternalistic whites and the “better class” of blacks. While Klu Klux Klan violence was anathema, overzealous white supremacists such as John Plecker turned to Anglo-Saxon Clubs to reinforce the color line. The 1924 Racial Integrity Act redefined race with a “one drop rule” and outlawed racial intermarriage.
Smith describes the challenges to the segregation system by both whites and blacks. Despite the protests of the black Virginia press led by the Richmond Planet and the Norfolk Journal and Guide, along with notable whites such as Louis Jaffe of the Norfolk Virginia-Pilot, the 1926 Public Assemblages Act mandated racial segregation in all public places.
By the late 1930s and early 1940s, there was more Virginian black initiative in bring about social change, using court cases to challenge Richmond’s racial segregation ordinances, library segregation in Alexandria, unequal teacher salaries in Norfolk and exclusion from the University of Virginia. Leaders such as Oliver W. Hill and Samuel W. Tucker demanded rights as citizens. Although white Virginians such as Virginius Dabney of the Richmond Times-Dispatch recognized the inequalities that had grown up under “separate but equal”, it took African-American leadership to attain an end a legal regime of second-class citizenship.
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Segregated Origins of Social Security
Mary Poole wrote The Segregated Origins of Social Security: African Americans and the Welfare State in 2006. It is now available on Kindle and online in paperback. While there were substantial differences among administration and scholars regarding the scope of Social Security, the Act was made racially discriminatory by policymakers whose vision was clouded by racial privilege. This was less so for Old Age Assistance and Unemployment Insurance than it was for Old Age Benefits and Aid to Dependent Children.
Several southern senators broke ranks and sought to extend Old Age Assistance to farm workers which would have disproportionately benefited African Americans, but they were unsuccessful. The three major black and interracial organizations could not agree on Social Security Act provisions.
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*John A. Salmond wrote Miss Lucy of the CIO: The Life and Times of Lucy Randolph Mason, 1882-1958 in 1988. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Miss Lucy” at Amazon.com for your bookshelf.
Super-Scenic Motorway
Ann Mitchell Whisnant wrote Super-Scenic Motorway: A Blue Ridge Parkway History in 2006. It is now available on Kindle and online new and used. This is a story of the unique mountainous path from Virginia’s Shenandoah to Georgia’s Great Smoky Mountain National Parks. Whisnant begins with a concise history of the parks movement in the United States, and continues with her narrative of the Blue Ridge Parkway construction.
It is a story of conflicts between federal agencies and regional boosters and local residents, between state and local governments over routes and tourist dollars, between advocates of wilderness and a sculpted landscape. Players include poor mountaineers facing resettlement, the Eastern Band of Cherokees and the elite North Carolina resort of Little Switzerland. Virginia’s Peaks of Otter tourist development was erased after half a century to protect the isolated and remote image of Appalachia.
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*Harley E. Jolley wrote The Blue Ridge Parkway in 1969. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Blue Ridge Parkway” at Amazon.com for your bookshelf.
Managing the Mountains
Sara M. Gregg wrote Managing the Mountains: Land Use Planning, the New Deal, and the Creation of a Federal Landscape in Appalachia in 2010. It is now available on Kindle and online new and used. This book of forest, farming and recreation analysis studies the first three decades of the twentieth century in Appalachia, and the federal government’s role in affairs. It centers on a comparative study between the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and the Green Mountains of Vermont. In Virginia, the state advanced federal and state interest by exercising its eminent domain, while its local mountain farmers were generally left out of political discussions. In Vermont, the local farmers were engaged in town hall meetings and the state served as a check on federal initiatives.
Gregg highlights the contests between comprehensive planning in forest, farming and recreation versus local social, political and economic concerns. The federal government emerged from 1911 to the 1930s as a powerful land-use planner for both public and private lands by buying private property to place in the public domain. The region was transformed from primarily extraction industry related to lumber to an increasingly conservation and recreation minded focus.
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