For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And I'd like to welcome my next guest on the show.
It's my friend, Dr. David Badoe.
He's a professor of history at the University of Alabama, and he runs the blog at the history news network Liberty and Power.
Welcome to the show, David.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
And by the way, I really enjoyed your interview last week with Jeff Hummel, who is also a member of Liberty and Power.
I'm glad you two finally got together.
Well, thanks.
Yeah, I've been meaning to interview him forever, but I just...
I'm really bad these days about reading history.
There's so much current stuff.
But I finally got to the book, and it's an excellent book, by the way, if anybody is not familiar.
It's Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men, A Revisionist History of the Civil War.
That's not the actual title at the end there, but something like that.
Well, he's working on a new project, which I think is an expanded, much, much revised version of that book.
It's going to look a lot at the economics, the political economics of slavery, especially.
And I just hope he gets it done, because I think it could have a big impact, potentially.
Yeah.
Well, it's definitely... the old version is definitely great stuff, and I highly recommend it.
So now let's talk about this.
All right.
Quite an achievement here.
You know, I guess I know you well enough I can say I'm proud of you, David.
This is great, man.
Well, thank you.
It's Black Maverick, T.R.
M. Howard's Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power, co-authored with your wife, Linda Royster Beto, right?
That's right.
And now, well, I introduced you.
Introduce her for us.
Who's she?
She's chair of the social science department at Stillman College, and she teaches pretty much everything there, including history and African-American experience and all kinds of stuff.
So she works at a university where they expect a lot of their faculty.
At the University of Alabama, you just sort of show up and teach your classes, and that's pretty much good enough for them.
All right.
Well, don't get yourself in trouble now.
All right.
So who is T.R.
M. Howard?
Nobody's ever heard of him, I don't think.
Well, I sure haven't, but what do I know?
Well, Dr. Howard was, you know, an enabler, I guess you could say.
He was kind of a mentor to the civil rights movement.
Medgar Evers, we would have never probably heard of Medgar Evers if it hadn't been for T.R.
M. Howard.
We probably never heard of Fannie Lou Hamer, and quite possibly we would have never heard of Rosa Parks.
He's the guy that was behind, to a great extent, some of these key civil rights figures, but he was also a very successful businessman.
He was one of the wealthiest blacks in Mississippi.
He was a self-made man.
He had these gigantic rallies in the early 50s in absolutely the worst place in the country for blacks, which was the Mississippi Delta.
I'd say pretty much the worst place.
And he was a fearless guy, and he was a success at whatever he did.
Let's start with the Rosa Parks thing there, because that's probably a good hook for people.
Everybody knows she was kind of the spark behind the Montgomery bus boycott protest and refused to get up out of her seat for a white man.
What does that have to do with Howard?
Well, Dr. Howard was heavily involved in the Emmett Till case.
Emmett Till was a young black boy, really, who was 13, 14, who was visiting from Chicago and Mississippi and was brutally murdered.
It became a national case.
Two white men were charged, even though they were acquitted and they later confessed, so people were outraged by it.
Dr. Howard was heavily involved in that case, and I could talk about that, but after the acquittal, he went around the country giving speeches, usually to audiences of several thousand, about the Emmett Till case.
It really galvanized a lot of blacks in a way that they hadn't been galvanized before.
Some people say it really gave a jump start to the civil rights movement.
One of the speeches he gave was on November 27th in Montgomery, Alabama.
It wasn't a particularly well-publicized speech, but he maybe got a couple thousand people.
His host was Martin Luther King, who at that time was an unknown minister, relatively unknown outside of Montgomery, and in the audience was Rosa Parks, and his talk focused on Emmett Till.
She later said that she was at the talk, and she also later said that when she refused to give up her seat on the bus, she was thinking of Emmett Till.
The talk was only three days before she refused to give up her seat.
Now, that's not proof that he inspired her, but it's certainly interesting.
I think you can find even more of a direct link between him and Evers and Fannie Lou Hamer, but still, he's there three days before the Montgomery bus boycott, and she was thinking of Emmett Till when she refused to give up her seat.
That's a pretty close connection, a strong correlation, if not direct causation, as the scientists would say.
It's Anti-War Radio.
We're talking with David Beto about the book Black Maverick, T.R.
M. Howard's fight for civil rights and economic power.
Now, this guy's got a really interesting life story.
He was born when, I forget, very early on in the century, right?
Well, 1908.
Oh, 1908.
The same year that a lot of other well-known black leaders were born, interestingly enough, like Thurgood Marshall.
1908, Murray, Kentucky.
Originally from Kentucky, and then he started out as a Seventh-day Adventist, and so I guess for people who don't know too much about the Adventists, maybe you can describe a little bit of that, and then perhaps if you could maybe explain what implications that has politically, whether, like in nowadays terms, we would consider Adventists to be conservatives by default, I think, right?
Is that the case here?
Yeah, yeah.
How does that play exactly when we're talking about the 1920s or whatever?
Yeah, maybe in some ways more conservative than they used to be.
The Adventists come out of this whole movement called the Millerites in the early 19th century who were predicting the end of the world, like they predicted it in 1844, and people got up on their rooftops expecting to be brought to heaven.
They were wrong, and they changed the prediction, and after proving wrong, most people fell away, but some people stayed behind, and they stopped predicting the end of the world, but basically out of that you got the growth of Seventh-day Adventists, which was led by this woman named, her last name was White.
It's been a while since I've looked at this stuff.
Anyway, they were mostly White, but they did make some effort to convert Blacks, so there were Blacks within the church, they were part of the same church, and the Adventists were against smoking, they were against drinking, they were a little bit like Mormons in that sense, and politically they tended to be kind of like, politics is corrupt, and let's stay away from politics, which was sort of their attitude, and really is their attitude now to some extent.
So he comes out of this tradition.
They've got a tremendous work ethic.
One thing you see about Adventists is they seem to be pretty prosperous.
Well, and they weren't just teetotallers, they were strongly for prohibition from other people drinking too, right?
Yeah, they were also creationists.
A lot of the early creationists were Adventists, a lot of the best known ones.
I mean, like, the world is 6,000 years old, kind of creationists.
Well, and this is where Howard got his start, was in the prohibition thing, right?
In giving speeches for prohibition.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And that's how he got to start sort of being a political leader type.
Well, and he was a doctor, and it's a very kind of convoluted story about all of his medical practice, he moved all over the country, and when he moved to California he was still a student, right?
He went to, at the time, called the College of Medical Evangelists, his medical school, now Loma Linda University, which is pretty highly respected, but it's an Adventist, white Adventist medical school, and he was the only black student, I think, in his class.
There had been a few others, but he was the only one.
And he also wrote for the black newspaper in Los Angeles, which was the main black newspaper there called the California Eagle.
And he wrote a regular column for them.
And he was involved in various political campaigns and was doing all kinds of stuff during those years when he was a medical student.
And now when he, well, I guess maybe I went too fast through some of that stuff, because it was before he started running around with Upton Sinclair and all the political people in California, he was, I guess, had been designated to kind of inherit this black hospital from the woman who had founded it.
But that was back in Kentucky?
I'm screwed up at this point.
The hospital was, well, there was this woman who set up this hospital.
She was white, but she had this car accident and she barely survived, and so she basically said, I'm going to endow this hospital for blacks, you know, for black Adventists.
And it was in Nashville.
It was called Riverside.
And Howard was basically groomed to be the chief surgeon there to run it.
And he ended up, he did go there for a little while.
Now, oh, then Nashville, then that was after he was in California.
Yeah, that was after he was in California.
I'm sorry, I was confused.
So then let's go back to California, because here he's hanging out with Upton Sinclair, the red.
Well, yeah, and before that he'd been hanging out with a guy named Shuler, who was a, Bob Shuler, who was a Senate candidate of the Prohibition Party, who was, interestingly enough, involved in an early case involving the FCC.
He was forced off the air because of political pressure on what was called at that time the Federal Radio Commission.
Basically, it was a free speech case, really.
And so he was a very successful candidate.
He almost won the election, or at least he did very well, and Howard was involved in that.
So Howard was a little bit of a kind of, I don't know, both these guys took an interest in him, and he supported them.
He wasn't a very ideological person.
His instincts, I think, were pretty libertarian in a lot of ways.
But he's not a guy that I think thought of the world in terms of ideology.
So yeah, he's supporting some pretty varied people, including Sinclair, who was a socialist.
Well, what did he have in common with Upton Sinclair?
That's a very good question.
I'm not sure how much he had in common with him, other than Sinclair took an interest in him.
I mean, you might think that, well, Sinclair was a socialist, so he was probably for civil rights or something.
But it doesn't sound like that in the book.
No, Sinclair had been, at least if you look at The Jungle.
This is one of those, you know, this book that they force on all sorts of, you know, every high school in the country, it seems like.
I don't know if you ever read it, but The Jungle just has to be in the book.
Yes, the story about how we'd all be poisoned to death by the people who sell us meat if it wasn't for the heroic American empire saving us.
Yeah, but it's got this racist stuff in there about, you know, these black workers being brought up from the South and, you know, barely removed from slavery.
And it's got all these sort of racial stereotypes, and it's sort of part of this whole thing that they're being brought in as strike breakers and that kind of thing.
So he's kind of a racist, or at least he had been.
But, you know, Sinclair was sort of a civil libertarian in some ways.
He was a friend of Mencken, even though they didn't like each other.
I mean, even though they disagreed with each other, they were good friends.
So he's the kind of guy, you know, a leftist that I guess you could deal with, you could talk with, you know, maybe who would appear on antiwar.com if you were around or appear in your radio show.
You know, kind of a reasonable guy.
Why would Howard be attracted to him?
Well, part of what Sinclair was promoting was this idea of kind of cooperatives and that kind of thing.
He wanted to use the state to do it.
But I don't think Howard's attraction to him was basically an ideological thing.
I think Sinclair took an interest in him and, you know, he did have an ego and he got involved in the campaign.
You know, he was a young guy getting involved in a political campaign, getting caught up in it.
And now, so what was it that caused Howard to move to Nashville then?
He was brought in to run this hospital for blacks.
Okay, I'm sorry.
I thought that he had already knew these people for a while before they hired him to do that.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, they were grooming him for it.
Oh, I see.
But after he got his residency and all of that.
Oh, because the connection was through the Adventist church, right?
Exactly.
Right.
That's right.
It was Mary Drouillard who was like 80, she was like almost 90 or something and she was grooming him, this white Adventist.
He was a charmer and she was charmed by him, like a lot of people were.
And then how exactly did that fall apart?
Well, you know, the Adventists had very strict views about certain things, right?
They were against sugary foods.
So Howard was the kind of guy that he'd have his patients, he'd have them drink ginger ale.
He'd give them ginger ale and ice cream when they were recovering.
Of course, they were all upset about that.
They were very puritanical.
He was also a very independent guy.
He had his own ideas about how to run a hospital and they were interfering.
So at a certain point, he just sort of said, I don't need this.
And took a job to be chief surgeon at this hospital in Mississippi for blacks in the Mississippi Delta, which was run by a fraternal society called the Knights and Daughters of Tabor.
And it was one of the largest hospitals for blacks and it was an example of cooperative mutual aid, providing hospital care for people.
And now this guy, Howard, I guess tell us a little bit more about his personality.
Because certainly by the time he's in the Mississippi Delta, he's, you know, got a fur coat and a Cadillac and he's the head of all kinds of different business ventures and he's a surgeon and all these things.
I mean, this is a guy who apparently, you know, gets up and going at 530 in the morning or something.
Yeah, yeah, he had a really good work ethic.
What was his personality like?
The big Cadillac is meaningful to me.
He would really like to spend time with them.
He told great stories, but it didn't come across like he was this egotistical guy, right?
I guess he was a little bit like a Bill Clinton in some sense.
He felt important if you were around him.
And he would deal with janitors, you know, he'd go up and strike a conversation with them and they would feel like, you know, he thought they were important.
And he did.
And he could move between the black elite and ordinary black people.
He could talk with anybody.
He was supremely self-confident, right?
He could go into a racist senator's office and charm him, right?
Well, that's a big part of this, in fact, is that he's got to work with these senators from Mississippi to try to get them to do what he wants.
It's the Veterans Hospital thing, right?
Yeah.
Well, there was a senator, a notorious senator, Theodore Bilbo.
And Bilbo was a notorious racist, probably the most notorious racist in the Congress at that time.
And he was just a crude figure, and a lot of it, I think, was just to get reelected.
And Howard was trying to get money for this Veterans— they were going to build a black Veterans Hospital, right?
So he said, they're going to build it, so we should get it in this all-black town of Mound Bayou.
And he would appeal to civil rights figures who said, well, you should support Mound Bayou because, you know, you build it somewhere else in Mississippi, and the veterans are going to be harassed.
There are curfews, right?
You know, no black person on the streets after a certain time, that kind of thing.
He said, this is an all-black town, black mayor, and they're going to be treated fairly, right?
And at the same time, he goes, and he goes to Senator Bilbo's office, and he says, I want your support to get this Veterans Hospital put there.
You don't want racial trouble, do you?
Well, then put it in an all-black town.
And so he's appealing to both sides.
And Bilbo was so taken by this guy that he wrote him a letter, said, I'll try to help you out.
Can I persuade you to hang out your shingle in Monrovia?
And, of course, that was a joke for Bilbo, kind of a compliment, because Bilbo sponsored a bill to repatriate all blacks back to Africa.
Oh, jeez.
Even though none of them were from there.
How did they not care about this guy, right?
They were all Americans.
Or that he does it without kissing his ass too much, you know?
Well, and, you know, this brings up a pretty important theme, I think, in the history of the civil rights movement, something that we've talked about before, I guess, particularly in regards to George Shiler, about black leaders, civil rights leaders, caught in the position where they feel like if they push too hard, there's going to be a backlash that's going to be worse, and that it's wrong to ask for too much.
So instead of saying, separate is inherently unequal, and we demand an end to this Jim Crow immediately, people are left in the position for pushing for the best Jim Crow they can get.
And then, in fact, I guess Shiler had argued even that the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 65 would lead to worse racism and worse problems and whatever, when in fact it kind of seems like it didn't.
It kind of seems like that was at least right during the time, I don't know if the rights acts actually get the credit, but it was right during the time at least, and some would say that the laws themselves get the credit for finally making it not cool to be a bigot among the white population of this country, and that it didn't lead to worse backlash.
It was a major improvement.
And I guess this guy, Howard, was really caught in this dilemma the whole time.
Here he is in Mississippi, which might as well have been Nazi Germany probably to the average black guy at the time, and he's trying to do the best he can.
I think you do describe him as kind of being outflanked sort of by the NAACP, who are saying this is wrong to appeal to this racist senator and say let's get the best segregation we can get so we can have this black hospital here and whatever, that actually that's more harm than good or something like that.
Can you elaborate on all this?
I think the NAACP beginning in the 40s was we totally reject separate but equal.
It's got to be integration.
In fact, the NAACP was not initially sympathetic to the Montgomery bus boycott because the initial demand of Martin Luther King was not integrating the buses.
It was just blacks and whites will come on the bus, and they'll fill up from the black side and the white side, and nobody's going to have to give up their seat.
That's what was demanding initially, and they didn't really like that.
Howard had the same thing.
He said you want to get integrated schools in Mississippi in 1951?
You're crazy.
It's not going to happen.
It's suicidal.
So he was saying they want separate.
Okay, we'll force them into getting separate.
We'll put pressure on them.
But then the Brown decision is only three years away, right?
Yeah.
The Brown decision, again, for everybody who went to a government school and didn't get taught this, is the one where the Supreme Court said no, separate is inherently unequal, and the Jim Crow laws are hereby null and void, so to speak.
Yeah, and Howard ended up sort of going along with that, right?
I mean I think he sort of took the view as well by 54 that, look, okay, we gave them their chance to do equal, and they don't seem to want to do it, right?
Some of them did, but, you know, basically they weren't going to spend an equal amount of money on the black schools.
And Howard even pointed out and said, you know, they really can't.
Mississippi is a poor state.
You know, you get true separate but equal, you're going to bankrupt the state, right?
They can't afford it.
I mean that's one thing that you don't look at.
Well, I mean maintaining two separate school systems, spending the same amount of money, forget it.
And so for various reasons he shifted over into the direction of saying, all right, you know, first of all, these people aren't serious.
Second of all, you know, I guess we've got to push for integration.
But even then he pointed out, he says, look, most schools are going to be heavily white or heavily black because there's going to be residential segregation, right?
And he was trying to sort of reassure all the whites.
He said, what are you worried about?
You know, you're going to probably still be going to an all-white school for the most part.
That's the thing that gets me, too, because I do spend so much time just reading about current events and whatever.
To really get into a biography like this and all the history that the person, the subject of the biography is living through, you get such a different flavor for stuff, you know?
And I guess, you know, I already knew this, but it just kind of brought a new point of view, a new kind of point to the idea, as you show in the book here, that the first year in history that no one was lynched in the South was in 1952, which is actually only, I still consider myself a young guy with a few white whiskers on my chin, notwithstanding.
And that's only, you know, 25 years before I was born or so, was the first time that nobody was hung to death from a tree in the South.
History makes me mad.
And this is, it's, we're only talking a couple of generations ago that this was the fight.
Is it, you know, are we going to let little black kids learn to read or not?
Well, and of course, you know, these lynchings, we're talking about not just people being hanged from a tree.
We're talking about people being burned at the stake.
I mean, this is how bad these were.
I mean, it's common to burn people at the stake.
You know, that's what they did.
And you had, you know, I'm no great fan of voting, but, you know, you had black majority counties in the Mississippi Delta.
Black majority.
You didn't have a single black voter.
You know, what does that mean?
That means you're not going to get on a jury, for example, right?
So if there's a case you're going to be in, hey, forget it.
It's going to be an all-white jury, right?
They may rule in your favor.
But if it's a crime like murder or something, well, you know, you're not going to have much luck.
Well, and so let me ask you about – well, actually, let me ask you about this instead of what I was about to say.
You know, here we're a couple of white guys talking about the black civil rights movement, and what do we really know about it?
I mean, I guess on one hand I'm thinking, well, lately I haven't heard about any black guys being burned at the stake in the South, but, you know, how much better is it really as a matter of real quality?
In fact, especially as we head into what looks to be guaranteed to be some kind of, you know, 10-year Great Depression here, you know, black unemployment is always much higher than, you know, the rest of the country and California, of course.
You know, I think we can expect that there's going to be a hell of a lot of people who have no ability to be their own breadwinner for years to come now.
I mean, isn't it kind of de facto Jim Crow still in this society, David, is what I'm asking you?
Well, I think it's a mixed bag.
I mean, you've got the war on drugs, which has been incredibly destructive to poor minority communities.
You know, many young black men going through the prison system being turned into criminals by the correctional system, so-called.
And you've got, like you said, the higher unemployment rates.
You've got the breakdown of the family structure, which, you know, I think has been tremendously destructive, and there's a lot of causes on that.
On balance, I think it's much better, but I think you definitely have a lot of negative things.
And I see these, you know, this all-black town in Mississippi where Howard was, you know, they were providing their own institutions, their own hospitals, all of this stuff.
And now when you go there, unfortunately what you see is people looking around for stimulus money.
It's kind of a mixed bag, and there's definitely some negative aspects to it, but we shouldn't romanticize in any way what it was like to be a black man in Mississippi in the early 1950s.
It's like a totalitarian state in some ways is what we're talking about.
Indeed.
Well, you know, I'm interested in, like you say, the change in terms of the stimulus money.
Obviously it is a mixed bag.
I wonder about, just for an example, health care is just one of many examples where the state fills what they claim are needs that must be filled by them, and they end up supplanting things like what you described throughout this book, the kind of associations that Howard was a part of were these fraternal organizations.
This is who paid for, sponsored the hospitals in this country before the government came in.
But something like the Knights of Tabor couldn't possibly exist in this day and age where there's, you know, I don't know, 500 million laws about how health care has got to be.
You've got to be a PPO or a HMO or you've got to force people to buy this kind of insurance or that or who knows what.
Well, this is amazing when you think about it.
Most of the members of this organization were sharecroppers.
We're talking about people that would be under the poverty line easily today.
Most of them were.
And there for like seven-something dollars a year in the 40s, 30 days of hospital care provided, right?
You know, in a good hospital for the period with good doctors.
And they were regulated out of existence.
And not just regulated.
I mean, a lot of other things happened like Medicare and Medicaid and, you know, I mean, it really is an example of governments that are destroying these institutions.
And there were all sorts of black businesses and black entrepreneurs, and Howard was one of them.
And really the guy that helped get the ball rolling was Booker T. Washington with his encouragement of business and self-help.
And really Washington was the guy that ultimately what his strategy worked.
It led to the Civil Rights Movement.
Well, that's right.
The Civil Rights Movement comes out of the black middle class that Washington helped to create.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, and that's the key to actually having rights.
The first and foremost right is the right to your own property, the right to be independent from others.
And he was right.
He said, look, you know, we're not going to get anywhere as long as we don't have property and the rest of it.
Well, they got property.
They went into business, became professionals to a much greater extent.
That gave blacks the clout to be able to start agitating more effectively for civil rights.
The book is T.R.
M. Howard, Black Maverick, T.R.
M. Howard's Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power.
It's by Beto and Beto, David Beto and Linda Royster Beto.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today, David.
Thanks a lot.
You can find a lot more of what David writes at Liberty and Power at the History News Network, HNN.org.
