Publications
Books
Charles H. Ford and Jeffrey L. Littlejohn, eds., Queer Virginia: New Stories in the Old Dominion. Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 2025.
A new, definitive queer history of the commonwealth. Queer Virginia is a long-needed record of the courageous and creative ways that LGBTQ+ people across the state have persevered and fought for their rights. The history recovered here is remarkable and illuminating, including the life of Hannah Nokes, a Black transgender woman who overcame severe discrimination in Loudoun County during the 1930s; the story of the Hershee Bar, a historic lesbian bar in Norfolk and longtime community focal point; efforts to gather oral histories and produce a queer digital archive in the old capital of the Confederacy, and much more. Full of poignant and telling glimpses of LGBTQ+ life through the decades, this volume reveals generations of widespread prejudice and oppressive laws and the inspiring resilience that queer Virginians brought to their struggle for equality and inclusion.
Reginald Ellis, Jeffrey L. Littlejohn, and Peter Levy, eds., Black Citizens and American Democracy: Fighting for the Soul of a Nation. Gainesville: Univ of Florida Press, 2025.
In 2020, Black Americans continued a centuries-long pursuit of racial equality and justice in the streets and at the polls. Arguing that this year was not a deviation from the historic Civil Rights Movement, the contributors to this collection examine the important work of Black men and women during the previous decades to shape, expand, and preserve a multiracial American democracy.
The authors of these chapters show that Black Americans have long pushed local and national leaders to ensure that all citizens reap the full benefits of the Constitution. They discuss Black women’s roles in advancing national voting rights; how Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) developed “race leaders”; discriminatory news coverage and actions against it; antipoverty efforts; and the racial and gender dynamics of activist organizations.
These studies show how Black activism from the mid-twentieth century to the present has led to positive changes for all Americans, holding the nation to its democratic ideals and promises. Black Citizens and American Democracy compels recognition of many unsung people who have risked their lives and livelihoods for the good of the country.
Jeffrey L. Littlejohn, Reginald K. Ellis, and Peter B. Levy, eds. The Seedtime, the Work and the Harvest: New Perspectives on the Black Freedom Struggle in America. University of Florida Press, 2018. Full Text
This volume's contributors expand the chronology and geography of the black freedom struggle beyond the traditional emphasis on the Jim Crow South and the years between 1954 and 1968. Beginning as far back as the nineteenth century, and analyzing case studies from southern, northern, and border states, the essays in The Seedtime, the Work, and the Harvest incorporate communities and topics not usually linked to the African American civil rights movement. The collection opens with a biographical sketch of Thomas DeSaille Tucker, an educational pioneer who served as the first president of Florida State Normal and Industrial School for Colored Students. It then highlights the work of black women, including Bostonian publisher Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, who defied local governments during the Progressive Era by disseminating medical information and providing access to medical professionals. Next, the collection explores the life and work of Norfolk civil rights attorney James F. Gay, who helped to democratize the political establishment in Virginia’s largest city but became a victim of his own success. The collection then moves to York, Pennsylvania, to examine a 1969 riot that went mostly unnoticed until the town's mayor was charged--more than thirty years later--with the riot-related murder of Lillie Belle Allen. Also featured is an essay examining the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's "Food for Freedom" campaign that aimed to complement voter registration work in Mississippi by providing everyday sustenance to African Americans. Addressing more recent issues, this volume considers the politics of public memory in Baltimore, Maryland, a city divided by racial "riots" in 1968 and in 2015. It then examines the Black Lives Matter movement that gained international attention for its response to Michael Brown's death at the hands of police in Ferguson, Missouri, as well as the Sandra Bland Movement inspired by the arrest of Bland and her subsequent death in the Waller County jail in rural Texas. These chapters connect the activism of today—shaped in so many ways by social media, student activism, and grassroots organization—to a deeply historical, wide-ranging fight for equality.
Jeffrey L. Littlejohn and Charles H. Ford, eds. “The Enemy Within Never Did Without”: German and Japanese Prisoners of War at Camp Huntsville, Texas, 1942-1945. Texas Review Press, 2015. Full Text
Camp Huntsville was one of the earliest and largest Prisoner of War camps constructed in the United States during World War II. Located roughly eight miles east of Huntsville, Texas, in rural Walker County, the camp was built in 1942 and opened for prisoners the following year. The camp served as a model site for POW installations across the country and set a high standard for the treatment of prisoners.Between 1943 and 1945, the camp housed roughly 4,700 German POWs and experienced tense relations between incarcerated Nazi and anti-Nazi factions. Then, during the last months of the war, the American military selected Camp Huntsville as the home of its top-secret re-education program for Japanese POWs. The irony of teaching Japanese prisoners about democracy and voting rights was not lost on African Americans in East Texas who faced disenfranchisement and racial segregation. Nevertheless, the camp did inspire some Japanese prisoners to support democratization of their home country when they returned to Japan after the war. Meanwhile, in this country, the US government sold Camp Huntsville to Sam Houston State Teachers College in 1946, and the site served as the school’s Country Campus through the mid-1950s.
Jeffrey L. Littlejohn and Charles H. Ford. Elusive Equality: Desegregation and Resegregation in Norfolk's Public Schools. University of Virginia Press, 2012. Full Text
In Elusive Equality, Jeffrey L. Littlejohn and Charles H. Ford place Norfolk, Virginia, at the center of the South's school desegregation debates, tracing the crucial role that Norfolk’s African Americans played in efforts to equalize and integrate the city’s schools. The authors relate how local activists participated in the historic teacher-pay-parity cases of the 1930s and 1940s, how they fought against the school closures and "Massive Resistance" of the 1950s, and how they challenged continuing patterns of discrimination by insisting on crosstown busing in the 1970s and 1980s. Despite the advances made by local activists, however, Littlejohn and Ford argue that the vaunted "urban advantage" supposedly now enjoyed by Norfolk’s public schools is not easy to reconcile with the city’s continuing gaps and disparities in relation to race and class.
In analyzing the history of struggles over school integration in Norfolk, the authors scrutinize the stories told by participants, including premature declarations of victory that laud particular achievements while ignoring the larger context in which they take place. Their research confirms that Norfolk was a harbinger of national trends in educational policy and civil rights.
Drawing on recently released archival materials, oral interviews, and the rich newspaper coverage in the Journal and Guide, Virginian-Pilot, and Ledger-Dispatch, Littlejohn and Ford present a comprehensive, multidimensional, and unsentimental analysis of the century-long effort to gain educational equality. A historical study with contemporary implications, their book offers a balanced view based on a thorough, sober look at where Norfolk’s school district has been and where it is going.
Peer-Reviewed Articles
Jeffrey L. Littlejohn, “’The Town Lived Much Among Its Memories’: John W. Thomason Jr. and the Lost Cause in Huntsville, Texas,” East Texas Historical Journal, Vol. 61, No. 2 (2023): 42-53. Full Text.
In the midst of the Great Depression, as William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, and Zora Neale Hurston examined Southern life in new and profound ways, John W. Thomason Jr., a noted author, artist, and marine corps commander from Huntsville, Texas, wrote a conventional homage to his beloved hometown. The piece, published in Southern Methodist University’s Southwest Review in 1934, dripped with the kind of sentimentalism that only the scion of a rich and powerful family can muster. In wistful prose, Thomason related the story of his own ancestors, who had migrated from Alabama to Walker County, Texas, in the 1850s, with their enslaved laborers. These settlers “were not adventurers,” Thomason insisted, “they were scholarly men, of established fortunes and professions, looking for … land now that the slave economy was exhausting the old states.” They came to Huntsville because the “region took prestige from General Sam Houston,” and “a reflected glory from Colonel [Henderson] Yoakum, the historian [of Texas].”
According to Thomason, “Huntsville became a place of prominence: notable for culture, for manners, and for morals.” Local citizens sent their children to Austin College and to Andrew Female College, while the town grew on “low wooded hills” with “wide shady streets.” The houses featured beautiful verandas and the “mockingbirds sang in the pear trees through all the moonlight nights.” At the courthouse, “talented jurists” tried important cases, and politicians debated the topics of the day. “The young gentlemen [in Huntsville] rode blood-horses in tournaments, and the young ladies were famous in the wide land for beauty and deportment.” Meanwhile, “planters maintained themselves in the lavish fashion of the Old South, and the cotton accumulated in the wagon yard [near] the square.”
The “madness of the Civil War” destroyed this idyllic world, Thomason argued, and the war’s aftermath brought African American freedom and “the vulturine politicians of Reconstruction.” It was not long, however, before white Democrats returned to power and redeemed the South. They voted out Black legislators and re-established as much of the old order as they could. But Huntsville and the surrounding countryside had been changed for good. In this new era, Thomason recalled, “The town lived much among its memories: the veterans of the Confederacy held … county offices as stoutly against old age as they had held Richmond against Grant, knowing the end to be inevitable, but with no bowing of the head….On Memorial Days, the town was Confederate. The Battle Flag hung in the windows and from the porches, and the cemetery flowered in the blue and red of … Confederate markers.”
Texas historians will no-doubt recognize the many elements of Lost Cause ideology present in John Thomason’s romantic take on Huntsville’s history. The benevolent plantation owner, the devoted Southern Belle, the dutiful Black slave, the heroic Confederate soldier, and, in particular Huntsville fashion, the principled prison official -- these are the figures who continue to populate the collective memory that most white Huntsvillians share. This “memory” is an artificial construct, however, which originated in the nostalgic recollections of the white elite. It was then popularized and spread through a variety of means, including newspapers stories and classroom lectures, Hollywood films and television shows, and, perhaps most importantly, through “institutions of power,” like museums and libraries, where young and old alike continue to be educated about the past. The interlocking elements of this collective memory fit together like a puzzle, forming a larger picture that appears more plausible than its distinct parts. As a result, the sentimental reminiscences of the elite are accepted as fact and become a powerful tool to justify and explain away the inequities of the past and present. For, as Gregg Cantrell and Elizabeth Hayes Turner have argued, “Collective memories, as wielded by powerful groups, have had a tendency to shape and define that which is acceptable, that which should be remembered, that which should be forgotten, and who may be allowed entrée into positions of economic or political ascendancy.”
John Thomason’s account of Huntsville’s history demands closer inspection for what it reveals about the plantations, prisons, and Lost Cause ideology that continues to populate the collective memory of most whites in the community. Such an analysis is important for a variety of reasons. First, Thomason’s essay on Huntsville was reprinted as an authoritative account of the city’s past by its own Heritage Committee in Huntsville and Walker County Texas: A Bicentennial History (1976). Second, John Thomason remains a crucial historical figure in city lore. He served in World War I, wrote 11 books, including Fix Bayonets, Jeb Stuart, and Gone to Texas, and published over 60 articles during his lifetime. Third, in Huntsville, the Thomason Building, a four-story academic structure located next to Austin Hall on the main quadrangle at Sam Houston State University (SHSU), is named for him. And, fourth, as anyone who has done research at SHSU knows, the special collections room at Newton Gresham Library is also named for Thomason and features a permanent exhibit of his drawings and manuscripts. Put simply, Thomason is a revered figure in Huntsville and at Sam Houston State University, and his work requires close examination for what it says about the city and its past.
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Jeffrey L. Littlejohn and Charles H. Ford, “Race and Recreation in East Texas: A History of Huntsville’s Municipal Swimming Pool and Emancipation Park,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Vol. 127, No.2 (October 2023): 144-171. Full Text.
After six years of planning and construction, the residents of Huntsville, Texas, celebrated the opening of their new municipal swimming pool on May 18, 1939. At 7:30 that evening, local officials sponsored a grand party to commemorate the occasion. The Huntsville High School Band presented a thirty-minute concert, and mayor Robert C. Stiernberg welcomed families to the new facility. Then, the city’s swimming pool committee offered a brief recitation of its efforts before a group of young men from Sam Houston State Teachers College put on a stunt show. The scouts followed next with their own pool exercises for boys and girls. Finally, the night’s main attraction took place: a “mammoth bathing revue . . . sponsored by all the civic and service clubs in Huntsville.” As was common at the time, a “bevy of the best-looking girls” in town were requested to strut their stuff in bathing suits to “compete for the honor of being named ‘Miss Huntsville.’” Wanda Grogan, a freshman at Sam Houston Normal Institute, defeated thirteen other entrants in the contest, winning the title “Miss Huntsville” and the right to represent the city at the Tomato Festival in Jacksonville, Texas, that June.
Huntsville’s new pool proved to be incredibly popular. Open daily from 7:00 to 9:00 a.m. and 3:00 to 10:00 p.m., it offered affordable entertainment in a relaxing environment. Adult tickets cost just twenty-five cents, while children under twelve years of age were admitted for ten cents. In addition, local adults who intended on swimming regularly could buy a season ticket for $7.50. College students paid only $5.00, and high school students paid just $3.75. Within the first week alone, the Huntsville Item reported, “nearly 2,000 [people] . . . paid admission fees.” Helen Bowden, the city council’s appointed property manager, said that “attendance ha[d] increased each day,” and that “many of the swimmers ha[d] come from other cities in the area.”
This last statement proved remarkably revealing. Although White residents from Trinity, New Waverly, Willis, and other nearby towns could travel to Huntsville and swim in the city’s new pool, local African Americans, who made up 25 percent of Huntsville’s population, were barred from enjoying the new facility. Racial protocols established by White Texans required that men and women of different races be separated in public spaces such as pools, movie theaters, train cars, and restaurants. Although the state of Texas had no specific law requiring segregation of swimming pools, White officials applied a 1915 statute to the new form of recreation. As historian Bruce Glasrud has shown, “a state law prescribing that black and white coal miners must be provided with separate bathing and locker facilities eventually was interpreted to include swimming pools and rest rooms for all the population.” Indeed, Glasrud noted, “No black Texans could use a white swimming pool or restroom during the first half of the twentieth century.”
This article examines the intersection of race and recreation in Huntsville and the broader East Texas region during the twentieth century. According to scholar David G. McComb, “[c]overage of . . . recreational history in Texas . . . is spotty.” In fact, McComb shows that “[o]nly an incomplete, unorganized, and unrecognized collection of writings about recreation history . . . exists for Texas.” To address this important gap in the literature, we have drawn on national studies of recreation, like Victoria Wolcott’s Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters: The Struggle over Segregated Recreation in America, as well as in-depth archival, newspaper, and legal research, to present this particularly Texan story of a segregated municipal pool and the way it differs from the northern narrative that appears in Jeff Wiltse’s book, Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America. In particular, we find that racial practices at municipal pools in Texas were much more exclusionary than those in the North during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Although White Texans did not establish laws explicitly requiring the segregation of pools, they excluded Black and Hispanic people from Whites-only pools through custom, harassment, and violence. In response, African Americans in Huntsville and the broader East Texas region pursued an equalization strategy that differed from the legal tactics employed by northern Blacks described by Wiltse. Rather than filing lawsuits to integrate municipal pools in the 1940s and 1950s as northern Blacks did, African Americans in East Texas advocated and often established recreational places of their own. In Huntsville, for example, local African Americans developed Emancipation Park, a historically-Black facility that provided some respite from the discriminatory world of Jim Crow. Meanwhile, in neighboring towns like Nacogdoches, Blacks established a private lake club and benefited from the largess of the region’s leading White employer, Arthur Temple, who funded a swimming pool for African Americans in the city’s Orton Hill neighborhood.
As historian Sarah Caroline Thuesen reminds us, however, even the “remarkable achievements of equalization activism . . . should not obscure the inherent limitations of any fight for equality in a deeply segregated society.” Indeed, those limitations became increasingly obvious as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) sued northern and western cities to desegregate their pools, while Huntsville’s African Americans were left to simply petition and pressure the town’s White leaders to construct a pool at Emancipation Park. That never happened, though, even after the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed. Rather, in Huntsville and nearby towns like Marshall, Texas, White leaders closed or sold their pools in the 1950s and 1960s rather than desegregate them. This extreme example of resistance to integration undermined the concept of the municipal pool and encouraged middle- and upper-class Texans to abandon public facilities for their own private pools. Put another way, White resistance to racial integration played a key role in the retreat from municipal pools and other recreational facilities that served the public in East Texas.
Jeffrey L. Littlejohn and Charles H. Ford, "'In the Best American Tradition of Freedom, We Defy You': The Radical Partnership of Joseph Jordan, Edward Dawley, and Leonard Holt," Journal of African American History, Vol. 106, No. 3 (Summer 2021): 496-520. Full Text.
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The history of the civil right movement has long centered on victories won in the Deep South between 1954 and 1965. As inspiring as this “classical” narrative may be, it overemphasizes the effectiveness of organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and downplays more radical, local efforts that often took place in the border states. This article offers a counter-narrative to the traditional story. It explores the efforts of three Virginia attorneys, Joseph Jordan, Edward Dawley, and Leonard Holt, who combined direct action tactics, impromptu street theater, and brilliant courtroom arguments into a strategy of movement lawyering that soon spread throughout the nation. While Jordan, Dawley and Holt were not immediately successful and their law firm was put out of business by state harassment, their efforts and strategies helped to end the Jim Crow regime in both Virginia and the wider United States.
Jeffrey L. Littlejohn and Charles H. Ford, “Historian and Activist: Joseph Lynn Clark and the Texas Commission on Interracial Cooperation,” East Texas Historical Journal vol. 57, no. 2 (2019): 79-125. Full Text.
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Winner of the C.K. Chamberlain Award (2020) from the East Texas Historical Association for the best article appearing in the East Texas Historical Journal.
As a native Texan and state historian, Joseph Lynn Clark (1881-1969) knew more about the racial tensions that plagued the Lone Star State than just about anyone in the white community. After a decade of teaching at Sam Houston State Normal College in Huntsville, Texas, Clark helped found the Texas Commission on Interracial Cooperation (TCIC) in 1920. The group aimed to foster dialog between white and black Texas. As a result, Clark participated in anti-lynching efforts, public health campaigns, and educational programs to build trust between whites and blacks and to help ameliorate the worst problems that African American faced in Texas. Yet, it would be wrong to suggest that he advocated anything resembling true equality between the races. On the contrary, like the majority of Southern liberals of his generation, Clark channeled his religious and democratic ideals into a paternalistic form of managed race relations that was intended to soften the rough edges of Jim Crow without fundamentally challenging the system. From Clark's point of view, white supremacy and segregation were simply unquestioned, natural facts of life, which defined the place of whites and blacks in Southern society. At the same time, however, he and many of the other Christian, civically-minded whites associated with the TCIC believed that segregation required an intermediary group that could serve as both a link between the races and a force to “perfect” Jim Crow. Clark and his allies hoped that their actions as members of such a group could help bridge the gap between the realities of the Jim Crow system and the rhetoric that was used to justify it. Only then, they believed, could whites and blacks “live in friendliness and mutual respect,” leaving the controversial issue of segregation to be settled through “the wisdom and justice of oncoming generations.”
Jeffrey L. Littlejohn with Charles H. Ford, Jami Horne, and Briana Weaver, “The Cabiness Family Lynching: Race, War, and Memory in Walker County, Texas,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, vol. 122, no. 1 (July 2018): 1-30. Full Text.
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Winner of the H. Bailey Carroll Award (2019) from the Texas State Historical Association for the Best Article in the Southwestern Historical Quarterly.
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Winner of the Special Award for Research and Writing on Texas in World War I (2018) from the Texas State Historical Association.
“I don't know for sure that this is true,” Thomas Anders, a native of Walker County, Texas, reported in his manuscript, Memoirs of a Country Boy, “but I heard that there were two colored brothers who supposedly roughed up one of the members of the Draft Board ... during World War I.” The black youngsters intended to teach the local draft officer a lesson, but, before they could, “a bunch of [white] men ... went out to where the brothers lived, and ... shot ’em.” It was a brutal killing, Anders recalled. The white mob “forced ’em into the[ir] house” and “burned the[ir] whole family—men, women, and children.” The murder of the Cabiness family proved so traumatic, in fact, that, even years after the event, “old colored men” on the Huntsville square continued to talk about the ill-fated brothers and their lingering ghosts.
Anders’s recounting of the Cabiness family lynching near Huntsville, Texas, covers the event like a shroud, revealing the broad outline of the story, but concealing its true horror. A white mob in Walker County did, indeed, target and kill George Cabiness, his mother Sarah, and four of his siblings between May 30 and June 1, 1918. Although the Walker County sheriff, Tom E. King, the Huntsville city marshal, C. B. Birmingham, and the Dodge, Texas, justice of the peace, Sam Roark, were all identified as members of the mob, these law enforcement officers did nothing to prevent the burning of the Cabiness home or the murder of its inhabitants. Not only does Anders’s narrative miss this important fact, laying blame for the event on the Cabiness boys themselves, but it, like contemporary news stories and more recent reference articles, fails to place the lynching in historical context or to explain who the victims and perpetrators of the crime actually were. So, even now, one hundred years after the events of 1918, the facts and figures involved in the Cabiness lynching remain a mystery.
This article seeks to move beyond the vague memories and deliberate silences that have surrounded the Cabiness lynching by providing the first in-depth study of the crime based on archival research. The authors of this article have examined hundreds of pages of census records, court reports, property deeds, and newspaper stories while also consulting a half-a-dozen local authorities on Walker County history. The result is a story that stretches from the antebellum days in Walker County, through the Civil War and Reconstruction, and on to World War I and the” Red Summer” of 1919. It is a story about black slavery and white supremacy, about the search for freedom and the limits of democracy, and, most of all, it is a story about African American agency and white violence in the New South at the turn of the twentieth century.
Ervin Malakaj, Jeffrey L. Littlejohn, Kimberly Bell, Patrick J. Lewis, and Julia D. May, “Teaching an Honors Seminar on #BlackLivesMatter in East Texas,” Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council, vol. 18, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2017): 3-15. Full Text.
In spring 2017, Ervin Malakaj (Assistant Professor of German) and Jeffrey L. Littlejohn (Professor of History) led a Difficult Dialogues seminar on #BlackLivesMatter for Sam Houston State University (SHSU) Honors College. The seminar considered the complex historical, economic, and cultural forces that produced the movement along with the various responses to it. By mid-semester, however, the course had become a target for fake news blogs and websites. Critics of the #BlackLivesMatter movement attempted to portray the course as a propagandistic endeavor intended to force a left-wing ideology upon unwilling students who had reluctantly enrolled in the course in order to receive scholarship money from taxpayer funds. Media responses mischaracterized the institutional parameters governing the course as well as the course aims. Consequently, Malakaj (as the instructor of record), the SHSU Honors College, and university administrators were all contacted by various interest groups angered by the news. Donors threatened to withdraw donations to the university. Students who had been accepted for admission and had declared that they would matriculate the following fall threatened to withdraw their initial intent to attend the university. At the same time, however, the course instructors and the university received a great deal of support. We provide here an outline of the institutional parameters within which the course was offered, the pedagogical aims and content of the course, and an examination of the public and university response to the fake news story. Our goal is to offer a case study that will benefit honors colleges considering similar course programs as well as those having dealt with or anticipating negative public responses to sensitive programming.
Jeffrey L. Littlejohn and Charles H. Ford, “Booker T. Washington High School: History, Identity, and Educational Equity in Norfolk, Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography vol. 124, no. 2 (2016): 134-162. Full Text.
In the early 1990s, historian Earl Lewis showed the centrality of Norfolk’s Booker T. Washington High School for working class African Americans in Hampton Roads, Virginia, between the 1920s and 1950s, but there is no similar study that carries the Booker T. story into the civil rights era. In fact, there are few in-depth community studies in general that present the multifaceted role that African Americans played as they confronted official attempts to equalize and integrate their schools. This essay draws inspiration from those pioneering works that do exist, including David Cecelski’s Along Freedom Road, Vanessa Walker’s Their Highest Potential, and Jack Dougherty’s More Than One Struggle. Drawing on these and other fine works, we incorporate African American sources alongside familiar documents from the white establishment to show that black educational history cannot be reduced to a simple struggle for integration. Rather, the Booker T. Washington story illustrates the complex and at times contradictory efforts that African Americans pursued as they struggled to reconcile their community history and personal identities with the larger integrationist objectives being pursued by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
​Jeffrey L. Littlejohn and Charles H. Ford, “African American Activism: New and Broadening Scholarship on the Civil Rights Movement,” Southern Studies vol. 23, no. 1 (2016): 27-28. (Introduction to a three-article volume of Southern Studies that we edited). Full Text.
The civil rights movement for racial equality in the United States has proven to be to be longer and more complicated than both contemporary memory and popular culture recall. The iconic timeline of the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 to the March from Selma in 1965, engrained in our memory with the Eyes on the Prize series, has been recently expanded and enriched by scholarly efforts. Historians like Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Patricia Sullivan, Glenda Gilmore, Danielle McGuire, Peniel Joseph, and Waldo Martin Jr. have extended both the chronological and thematic limits of the movement. Collectively, their work shows that African American activists pushed for equal rights in a variety of ways beyond the courtroom and the ballot box.
The three articles that we edited for this special edition of Southern Studies complement this growing body of historical work. Accordingly, the first article by Norfolk State University Professor of History Cassandra Newby-Alexander uncovers fascinating and previously unknown links between the legendary ex-slave Harriett Tubman and the extraordinary social worker and engineer Vivian Carter Mason. Mason's local reputation in Norfolk, Virginia, as a civic and educational leader is well-known, but this article places that reputation within her larger national and international ambitions. The second article by Florida A&M University Assistant Professor of History Reginald Ellis traces the evolution of North Carolina College for Negroes President James Shepard's pragmatic moves to effect approximate equality within the dual system of the Jim Crow South. Shepard’s battles with the NAACP have been covered elsewhere and in detail, but this article argues that the college president changed his tone to match those of his more militant critics by the end of his life. Finally, the third article by Sam Houston State University Adjunct Professor of History Carolyn Carroll documents the late and ongoing process of desegregation at Sam Houston State University, which began only after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Carroll’s story reveals that student integration came to the East Texas school before the end of the 1990s, but that the faculty and staff remain nearly lily-white in the new century.
Carolyn Carroll and Jeffrey L. Littlejohn, “The Dismissal of Rupert C. Koeninger: Cold War Hysteria, Academic Freedom, and the Creation of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board,” East Texas Historical Journal vol. 53, no. 2 (2015): 115-140. Full Text.
On May 6, 1961, after more than a decade of devoted service at Sam Houston State Teachers College (SHSTC), Dr. Rupert C. Koeninger received word that he would soon be dismissed from his position as chair of the school’s sociology department. Surprised by the news, the fifty-four-year-old professor naturally questioned the president of the Huntsville, Texas campus, Harmon Lowman, about his pending dismissal. Lowman could offer little in the way of clarification, however. The president had not initiated proceedings against Koeninger, nor had he received any complaints from students, faculty, or staff members about the sociologist or his work. In fact, as Lowman hesitantly revealed, he had been pressured by the Texas State Teachers College Board of Regents to decline Koeninger’s contract because of allegations made against him by right-wing politicians and activists who opposed his stance on civil liberties and civil rights.
Although elements of the Koeninger story have been told before, no one has ever been able to uncover the real players behind the events until today. Using archival evidence that has only recently become available, this article pushes beyond the contemporary accounts of Koeninger’s dismissal by journalist Ronnie Dugger, historian C. Vann Woodward, and faculty-activist William J. Kilgore. In order to enhance and correct the existing narrative, this essay links the behind-the-scenes machinations of four key individuals who were responsible for Koeninger’s dismissal: James A. Franklin, Jr., the business manager of a little-known Bible College in Tehuacana, Texas; John V. Dowdy, Sr., the powerful Congressman from the Seventh Texas Congressional District; William H. “Bill” Kellogg, the chair of the John Birch Society in Walker County; and finally C. Smith Ramsey, the chairman of the Board of Regents of the Texas State University System. Archival evidence shows that these radical right-wing ideologues ran roughshod over Koeninger’s academic and personal liberty in a vicious act meant to silence his support for civil liberties and civil rights. In the process, however, these radical forces overplayed their hand and prompted state and national organizations, including the Texas Association of College Teachers (TACT) and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), to defend Koeninger and his academic freedom.
​Jeffrey L. Littlejohn and Charles H. Ford, “Moving ‘Mere Pawns on the Chessboard’: Walter E. Hoffman Jr., School Desegregation, and Busing in Norfolk, Virginia,” Southern Studies vol. 22, no. 11 (2015): 47-72. Full Text.
U.S. District Court Judge Walter E. Hoffman’s distinguished reputation for “selfless dedication to law and duty” may be traced back to its origins in the 1950s, when he took an uncompromising stand against the forces of state-sponsored Massive Resistance to school desegregation. As local members of the political establishment in Norfolk, Virginia, are still fond of recounting, Hoffman’s rulings in Beckett v. School Board of Norfolk and James v. Almond required that Virginia’s largest city desegregate six of its secondary schools in February 1959. Despite opposition from political figures and public commentators, Hoffman’s orders proved decisive and helped usher in a new era of desegregated schools not just in Virginia but throughout the South.
While we do not deny the greatness of Judge Hoffman as a jurist, this essay presents a more nuanced and humanized portrait of him than the Olympian judge who braved social ostracism in the 1950s to uphold the rule of law. The existing story, which spotlights the heroic Hoffman “standing before the shouting mob” of the 1950s, ignores his deep-seated opposition to real integration that came only with cross-town busing at the dawn of the 1970s. In fact, Hoffman’s opposition to busing and true integration of public schools has been forgotten in the municipal hagiography that has grown up around him. Using accounts from local newspapers, the city’s school board records, and documents from the Walter E. Hoffman Papers at Washington and Lee University, this essay traces the arc of Judge Hoffman’s career, from his stand against Massive Resistance in the 1950s to his role as a passive resister a decade later. In the end, our research shows how even one of the most courageous Southern judges of the 1950s -- who stood up for racial desegregation in a time of crisis -- could, by the 1970s, serve as a disenchanted force of delay working to temper the social experimentation of the era.
Jeffrey L. Littlejohn and Charles H. Ford, “Arthur D. Morse, School Desegregation, and the Making of CBS News, 1955-1964,” American Journalism vol. 31, no. 2 (2014): 1-20. Full Text.
​On April 2, 1964, one month after assuming the presidency of CBS News, Fred W. Friendly announced the appointment of his long-time associate and friend, Arthur Morse, as the Executive Producer of CBS Reports. This was not an unexpected choice. The two men had worked together for more than a decade, and Morse had distinguished himself as a reporter-director with Friendly on both See It Now and its successor CBS Reports. Most significantly, Morse had produced a series of prize-winning television documentaries on public schools and racial discrimination. These programs included “Ballots of Bear Creek,” “Clinton and the Law,” “The Lost Class of ’59,” “Who Speaks for the South,” and “The Other Face of Dixie.” Despite his contributions to this impressive body of work, which won two Sylvania Awards, a Peabody Award, two School Bell Awards, an Ohio State University first prize for television, and a commendation from the National Conference of Christians and Jews, Morse’s role in reporting and producing these documentary programs has been ignored by previous historians of television and the civil rights movement. This omission is particularly startling, given the fact that fewer than 20 of the programs produced during the era that media historian Michael Curtin has called the “Golden Age of Television Documentary” focused on civil rights at all.
As this article shows, Morse’s commitments to racial desegregation and educational quality were deep-seated and stemmed from his long career as a freelance writer and activist in the decade before the advent of television news. His untold story complicates and deepens the existing narrative provided by media historians like Aniko Bodroghkozy, Michael Curtin, and Steven Classen, who argue that television news privileged white moderates over deviant segregationists and black activists in an attempt to form a narrative of “sectional reconciliation” and national unity. This historiography assumes that CBS icons Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly produced an event-driven, episodic accounting of the most dramatic flashpoints in the desegregation struggle in an attempt to explain the white South to a national audience. We find, in contrast, that it was the seemingly obscure Arthur D. Morse, rather than the more familiar figures of Murrow and Friendly, who provided the primary voice and authorship behind CBS’s prize-winning pieces on desegregation. From very early on, Morse had demonstrated an exceptionally strong interest in achieving racial equality beyond mere compliance with the law, and this advocacy came through in certain key points of his various programs and earlier print pieces. He developed a narrative template that would see its most advanced stage in the two programs he wrote on public school desegregation in Norfolk, Virginia -- outsiders manipulating local people, white moderates saving the day, and most problematically for his superiors at CBS, black agency and voices presented, albeit in a limited way. Finally, Morse’s work on desegregation was linked to his broader interests in educational issues in general and to wider discourses involving public anxieties over the effectiveness of local schools and teachers. These forgotten details offer the much more nuanced and interesting story behind the story that can only be recaptured through archival research on television and the heyday of the civil rights movement.
Charles H. Ford and Jeffrey L. Littlejohn, “Reconstructing the Old Dominion: Lewis F. Powell, Stuart T. Saunders, and the Virginia Industrialization Group, 1958-1965,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography vol. 121, no. 2 (2013): 146-172. Full Text.
Winner of the William M.E. Rachal Award (2013) from the Virginia Historical Society for the Best Article in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography.
On the eve of his appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court in August 1971, Richmond attorney Lewis F. Powell, Jr., issued a call to American businessmen, beckoning them to stand up and fight against “extremists on the left” who held free enterprise and markets in contempt. This memo to fellow Virginian Eugene B. Sydnor, Jr., of the National Chamber of Commerce urged business leaders to challenge their critics in Hollywood, academe, and on national television networks by establishing a coalition of think tanks, speaker bureaus, and textbook review committees that would make modern conservatism both intellectually respectable and broadly popularly. Only much later did conservative pundits, looking back at their success, attribute the memo with any lasting influence. However significant or inconsequential in launching modern conservatism, the memo came out of a much earlier battle in Powell’s career than that with liberal pundits and professors in the Nixon era. Ironically, it emerged from earlier divisions within Virginia’s white elite on how best to deal with Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Massive Resistance, and the grave economic consequences that both posed for the Old Dominion during the 1950s and ’60s.
Massive Resistance was a scary prospect for elite white Virginians. No one they knew actually wanted the implementation of Brown, but just like the Great Depression and World War II, they perceived that the “trial” over public school desegregation would soon pass with them firmly in charge. Of course, Virginia’s elite knew that to retain their power the white masses and government officials associated with the state’s leading political boss, U.S. senator Harry F. Byrd, must not be allowed to overdo their outrage at school desegregation. Although Byrd had once supported the elite’s subtle and refined management of white supremacy—even signing a celebrated anti-lynching bill as governor in 1928—the older he became the more he bristled at outside criticism of Virginia and its system of race relations. Now, a generation after his triumphant moderation in the 1920s, Byrd and his friends in Congress had decided that they had had enough. When news of the Brown decision finally came out, Byrd and one hundred of his Congressional colleagues issued the Southern Manifesto in 1956, calling for “massive resistance” to the Supreme Court’s embrace of public school desegregation. Despite the tenuous constitutional and legal grounding of the manifesto, Massive Resistance proved to be no laughing matter. It meant closed public schools in several key Virginia cities; it meant official and extra-legal surveillance and harassment of civil rights attorneys by the state; it meant state tuition grants to parents who enrolled their children in segregated private academies; and it meant giving air time to racist and roguish elements of the American right. In short, its excesses were poisonous for businessmen and women in the Old Dominion who wanted to show that Virginia was a great place for creative people of whatever background to live and raise a family.
Before Virginia became for lovers, it first had to mute or marginalize its most rabid home-grown haters, according to both old and new money in the state. This article assesses the efforts of two elite white Virginians—Richmond attorney and school board chair Lewis J. Powell, Jr., and Norfolk and Western Railway president Stuart T. Saunders—who worked through the Virginia Industrialization Group to tame the most virulent strains of white racism in Virginia between 1958 and 1965. Although scholars have looked at the group’s initial attempts to persuade Gov. J. Lindsay Almond, Jr., to halt the school closing crisis in 1958, no one has yet analyzed its long-term effectiveness after Massive Resistance was declared dead in February 1959. This article fills in that historiographical gap, suggesting that the group’s success in pushing a moderate, if not egalitarian agenda, ultimately led to its demise by 1965. More significantly, however, the group’s effectiveness in organizing public-private partnerships and extending the influence of business on the operation of government became the template for a national movement in the upcoming decades. In short, solving the “Moderates’ Dilemma” of the 1950s opened the door for a free-market, pro-business renaissance by the early 1970s and helped launch what became modern conservatism.
Book Chapters
Jeffrey L. Littlejohn and Charles H. Ford, “From Sodomy Laws to Same-Sex Marriage: Discrimination and LGBTQ Activism in Virginia,” in Queer Virginia: New Stories in the Old Dominion. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2025.
In February 2014, U.S. District Court Judge Arenda Wright Allen issued a landmark decision in the Virginia same-sex marriage case Bostic v. Rainey. Finding for the petitioners, Timothy Bostic and Tony London, a gay couple seeking to marry in Norfolk, Judge Wright Allen declared that all of Virginia’s statutes and constitutional provisions outlawing same-sex marriage were void because they violated the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment equal protection clause. In July 2014, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Wright Allen’s decision, while restyling the case Bostic v. Shaefer. The U.S. Supreme Court followed suit three months later, denying certiorari in the case and effectively overturning all Virginia laws banning same-sex marriage. The high court’s ruling also ended stays on same-sex marriage cases in Indiana, Oklahoma, Utah, and Wisconsin, while making it likely that same-sex marriage would expand into Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, West Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina as well. In fact, the Bostic decision set the stage for the U.S. Supreme Court’s later ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage throughout the United States in June 2015.
This chapter first examines the entrenched opposition to same-sex relationships in Virginia and then shows how members of the LGBTQ community fought and ultimately overcame such opposition. Beginning with evidence from the colonial, revolutionary, and antebellum periods, it argues that Virginia’s prohibitions against same-sex relationships evolved over time, becoming more restrictive as each decade passed. By the twentieth century, Virginians had enacted laws to prohibit sodomy, to sterilize the “unfit,” and to prevent the spread of “obscene” materials. These laws, backed by Christian moralizing and pseudo-scientific theories, served to stigmatize people increasingly known as “homosexuals,” much as segregation and disenfranchisement had served to isolate and suppress the state’s Black community. In fact, Virginians proved particularly aggressive in the targeting of gay, lesbian, and queer members of their communities, although the historiography on such matters remains almost non-existent. While scholars like Peter Wallenstein, J. Douglas Smith, Pippa Holloway, and Lisa Lindquist Dorr have published excellent studies on race, sexuality, politics, and law in Virginia, only one similar book by Gregory Samantha Rosenthal currently examines the discrimination against and activism by members of the LGBTQ community.
Although gay, lesbian, and queer Virginians became more open about their lifestyles during the last quarter of the twentieth century, same-sex relationships remained legally and culturally taboo in Virginia. The AIDS epidemic, rise of political conservatism, and expansion of Christian evangelicalism made matters worse. Yet, there were glimmers of hope during the 1970s. For example, ministers in the Unitarian, United Churches of Christ (UCC), and Metropolitan Community Churches (MCC) began performing same-sex marriage ceremonies. These religious efforts to solemnize same-sex marriages by granting them spiritual recognition did not, as of yet, carry any legal sanction. But, as LGBTQ activists challenged state laws and customs, the U.S. Supreme Court came to their aid. In 2003, the justices issued their historic decision in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), overturning state sodomy laws and making it possible for same-sex couples to pursue legal sanction for their marriages. In response, the majority of Virginia’s voters decided in 2006 to outlaw same-sex marriage by constitutional amendment. This move, in turn, sparked a revitalized campaign to legalize same-sex marriage through the courts and the court of public opinion.
At the close of this overview, we pay special attention to the arguments in support of same-sex marriage, the entrenched opposition to such marriages, and the ways in which cultural, political, and legal changes created a new environment supportive of same-sex marriage during the second decade of the twenty-first century. In particular, this chapter argues that LGBTQ activists adopted a form of “respectability politics” to push their cause forward. Early same-sex marriage efforts that had originated from the grassroots or from advocacy organizations were often limited by the marginal positions their clients, attorneys, and leaders held in the broader community. In the face of continuing opposition and oppression, advocates for same-sex marriage turned to the “politics of respectability,” focusing on upper-middle class, well-educated, white couples who would legitimize and “sell” the idea of same-sex marriage to Virginians.
Charles H. Ford and Jeffrey L. Littlejohn, “Queer Liberation and the Obscenity Debate in Hampton Roads,” in Queer Virginia: New Stories in the Old Dominion. Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 2025.
National histories of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) rights movement generally open with a set of well-known events that occurred between 1945 and 1970. There is good reason for this approach. At the end of World War II, most gay Americans lived a closeted lifestyle governed by fear and paranoia. As scholar Gregory Briker has argued, “a nationwide consensus held homosexuality to be perverse and even dangerous, and gays and lesbians faced harassment by public authorities and private citizens alike.” In the years after the war, however, LGBTQ activists and everyday citizens launched multiple challenges to the pervasive discrimination that they faced. Harry Hay, for example, co-founded the first gay men’s national organization, the Mattachine Society, in 1950, and five years later lesbian leaders created their own group, the Daughters of Bilitis. At the same time, activists in California founded the community’s first national magazine, ONE, which aimed to “push the [gay rights] message outward, not only to gays and lesbians … but to heterosexuals throughout the country.” These advances in the 1950s gained further momentum during the next decade, as teenagers and young adults participated in a sexual revolution that challenged older, Victorian norms of behavior, and federal courts legalized the use of birth control by women. The Stonewall Uprising in New York City in June 1969 capped off this period of struggle, as an array of queer folks protested police raids on the Stonewall Inn, launching the modern Queer Rights Movement.
Despite these advances in the years following World War II, state officials and police departments around the country continued to use sodomy laws to outlaw same-sex relationships and condemn people who participated in them. In addition, governments at every level equated homosexuality with obscene, illegal behavior. In 1953, for example, President Dwight Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450 on security requirements for government employment. The document classified homosexuality as “sexual perversion” and cited such conduct as grounds for dismissal from the federal workforce. In fact, historian David K. Johnson has shown how the federal government investigated and purged hundreds of gay employees during the 1940s and 1950s in what he calls the Lavender Scare.
The U.S. Supreme Court generally failed to address the widespread and varied forms of discrimination that members of the LGBTQ community faced. Although the court did rule in One Inc. v. Olsen (1958) that homosexuality was not, by definition, obscene, the Court’s other rulings on obscenity during the period -- Roth v. U.S. (1957), Memoirs v. Massachusetts (1966), Miller v. California (1973), Paris Adult Theatre I v. Slaton (1973) -- allowed localities wide discretion in determining if same-sex magazines, movies, and other forms of expression were obscene. Put another way, federal wavering on homosexuality and obscenity led local officials, particularly in the South, to maintain more comprehensive definitions of obscenity than the U.S. Supreme Court likely intended. The community standards test, which originated in Roth, allowed municipalities to define homosexuality as a deviant, illegal sexual act. By the 1970s, however, the initial Roth community standards test had become too complex and contradictory. Even Justice William Brennan, the author of the original test, abandoned any attempt at defining obscenity in Miller because it was impossible to do so. Despite the profound social and cultural changes that had occurred between Roth and Miller, the Court left the decisions regarding obscenity up to local officials based on the vague rubric of prurient interests or lacking cultural value.
This chapter examines three controversies over homosexuality and obscenity that divided erupted in Tidewater Virginia during the era of Gay Liberation. It opens with a brief discussion of the police raids that took place at local bars in the 1970s, highlighting, in particular, the Alcohol Beverage Control (ABC)’s harassment of law-abiding gay customers at the Cue Club, the Pantry, and other gay bars. Next, we turn to queer publications that emerged in the 1970s, including Norfolk’s Unitarian-Universalist Gay Caucus newsletter, which eventually became Our Own Community Press. It offered a voice and community-building nexus for gays and lesbians in the area. Conservative Christians and opponents of homosexuality in Hampton Roads viewed Our Own Press and other gay newspapers as instruments of deviant behavior, however, and demanded that they be removed from public libraries. As this debate raged, the showing of Frank Ripploh’s controversial 1981 film Taxi Zum Klo kicked off another fight. The film, a dark comedy about a Berlin school teacher who lived different public and private lives, proved too sexually explicit for many audiences. In 1982, authorities seized the film after it was shown at the Naro Expanded Cinema in Norfolk’s Ghent neighborhood, but the movie soon achieved a cult status among queer audiences who considered its treatment of gay culture and sexuality groundbreaking.
By examining these three flashpoints, this chapter highlights the uneven and ambiguous nature of perceived progress in the 1970s and 1980s. While LGBTQ activists challenged harassment at local bars and libraries, the U.S. Supreme Court’s failure to clearly articulate gay rights left many people in the community open to even more persecution. On the other hand, we suggest that official bullying -- from ABC raids to library restrictions -- represented increasingly desperate attempts to forestall gay liberation, limit First Amendment rights, and manage heteronormative hegemony. In fact, the last of the three controversies occurred at a well-known art-house cinema that made its name showing provocative and award-winning fare that was not generally featured in the region’s commercial, mainstream theaters. One would think that this would have been a safe-space for free expression, but that was not the case in 1982, when municipal authorities seized the rented reels of the allegedly offensive film and refused to return it to its rightful owners.
Jeffrey L. Littlejohn and Charles H. Ford, “The Seamstress and the Counselor: Evelyn T. Butts, Joseph Jordan Jr., and Butts v. Harrison (1966),” in Reginald Ellis, Jeffrey L. Littlejohn, and Peter Levy, eds., Black Citizens and American Democracy: Fighting for the Soul of a Nation. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2025.
The expansion of voting rights in Virginia is popularly associated with the ratification of the Twenty Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1964 and the passage of the federal Voting Rights Act in 1965. Yet, discriminatory obstacles to voting in state and local elections lingered on in Virginia even after these crucial changes to federal election law were made. In fact, it took the confidence and tenacity of two local activists in Norfolk, Virginia -- attorney Joseph Jordan Jr. and seamstress Evelyn Butts -- to challenge the state’s discriminatory voting restrictions and secure democratic rights for all. Accordingly, this chapter traces the development of the unlikely professional partnership between this attorney and this housewife, their landmark litigation, and their efforts to shape public opinion to support their side. Indeed, Jordan and Butts’ most important contribution to civil rights history may have been their efforts to build independent Black leadership to challenge White political domination in the Old Dominion. Framed in the tradition of John Dittmer’s landmark study, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (1995), this chapter privileges grass-roots activism over the national narrative and organizations. In other words, the anniversary of the expansion of voting rights should be more complicated and extended than merely honoring President Lyndon B. Johnson's response to demonstrations in Selma, Alabama. In Virginia, it must include everyday people who challenged the status quo to introduce a new era of American democracy.
Jeffrey L. Littlejohn, "Homicide in Modern Texas," in Brandon Jett and Kenneth W. Howell, eds., Steeped in a Culture of Violence: Murder, Racial Injustice, and Other Violent Crimes in Texas, 1965-2020 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2023), 27-52. Full Text.
On Friday, July 2, 1982, Barbara L. Smith and her son, Steven Mark Reynolds, hurriedly prepared to leave their home at 7827 Idlewood Lane in Dallas, Texas. The 39-year-old mother had been in an ongoing domestic dispute with her second husband, Kenneth Eugene Smith, and she hoped that separating from him might prevent any additional conflict. As Barbara and her son packed their bags, however, Ken returned home and interrupted them. An argument quickly ensued, and Barbara sent her 15-year-old son out of the house. The teenager later told investigators that “his parents were in the bedroom arguing when he heard a gunshot.” Dallas police quickly arrived on the scene, and Barbara was pronounced dead at 12:15 am. Homicide detectives found that Ken had drawn a firearm on his wife, shot her in the neck, and then turned the gun on himself. Although his wound proved serious, it was not fatal.
Ken Smith faced swift prosecution for the alleged murder of his wife. On July 10, eight days after the incident, his case was assigned to Criminal District Court Five in Dallas County. At the advice of his attorneys, Smith pled not guilty to the charges against him. Investigators continued to gather evidence, and prosecutors took the case to trial on December 10, 1982. After hearing from family members, psychiatric doctors, and police investigators, the jury found Smith guilty of murder and sentenced him to 120 days in jail and 10 years of probation. Shortly after this decision, Smith posted a $2,500 bond, and his attorneys appealed his case. In April 1985, Smith received a new sentence that limited his punishment to 10 years of probation, and in October 1994 he was released from any further responsibility in Barbara Smith’s death.
I was eight years old when my aunt Barbara was murdered, but my parents shielded me from the gruesome details of her death. Even if they had chosen to share the story with me, Barbara’s murder would have made little sense. Popular culture and my own fears led me to believe that homicide was a crime most often committed by the type of evil characters who were portrayed on television shows and in Hollywood movies. I certainly did not understand that the majority of murders in the United States were committed by adults who knew their victims, either as family members, neighbors, or acquaintances. Nor did I understand that aunt Barbara was killed during one of the most violent periods in recent history. In 1982, Texas ranked second among the most homicidal states in America, with a murder rate that had skyrocketed from 7.5 victims per 100,000 people in 1965 to 16.1 victims per 100,000 people in 1982. Although this dramatic rise in the murder rate held little interest for me in the 1980s, today I understand that it contributed to the passage of draconian legal reforms, the militarization of urban police forces, the federal war on drugs, and the current state of mass incarceration. Why did the homicide rate in the Lone Star State rise so precipitously between 1965 and 1982? And, why, after that period, did it begin a slow but steady decline to the current rate of 5.3 victims per 100,000 people? This chapter argues that a complex and evolving culture of violence in Texas contributed to a surge in murders during key periods of racial and class conflict in the Lone Star State. Those murders, in turn, declined due to a variety of factors, including the growth and efficiency of law enforcement, changes in popular culture, and the availability of new treatments for depression and psychiatric disorders.
Carolyn Carroll and Jeffrey L. Littlejohn, “The Construction of Huntsville State Park: Race and Recovery in Twentieth Century East Texas,” in Milton Jordan and George Cooper, eds., Conflict and Cooperation: Reflections on the New Deal in Texas (Nacogdoches: Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2019). Full Text.
Huntsville State Park has long been considered one of the great success stories from the New Deal era. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) began construction on the park during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s. At the time, government officials and local boosters promised that the park would provide visitors with a welcome respite from the economic conditions of the Great Depression. Design plans called for scenic spots for bird watching, a large man-made lake for fishing, and a beautiful stone lodge for relaxation and refreshments. The park’s initial construction phase came to an end, however, in November 1940, when a violent storm destroyed the park’s spillway and lake. Despite local calls to repair the park, World War II and the Cold War delayed construction at the site for more than a decade. Finally, in March 1956, the park opened to the public with a new dam, spillway, and lake built by the Trinity Construction Company. Today, the park boasts a 2,100-acre wooded recreational area with 21 miles of hiking trails. Visitors can also enjoy fishing in Lake Raven, camping in one of the park’s 160 campsites, and learning about the regional environment through ranger programs at Raven Lodge. Despite the bucolic setting at Huntsville State Park, the site has a complicated racial story that exposes some of the most painful ironies and contradictions in Texas history. Few campers today know that one of the park’s initial construction crews, CCC Company 1823 Veteran Colored (VC), was an all-black unit of veterans from the Spanish American and First World wars. Although the men in this unit cut the hiking trails, reforested the landscape, and built the original spillway for the park, they were barred from visiting it and other state parks in Texas due to racial segregation. As attorneys for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) fought against the obvious discrimination that African Americans endured in Texas, state park officials and local leaders in Huntsville and other cities around the state debated the best way to resolve the matter. In the short run, massive resistance against desegregation won the day. In fact, Texas governor Allan Shivers co-opted Huntsville State Park, making it a rhetorical weapon in his campaign to stave off racial desegregation during the 1950s. By injecting “a state's right theme” into his dedication address at the park on May 18, 1956, Shivers called on white Texans to resist federal attempts to force the state to desegregate parks, schools, and other publicly-funded institutions. Shivers’ tactics worked in the short-run, setting the stage for at least one racially-charged confrontation at Huntsville State Park in the 1960s. But Shivers and the segregationists lost in the end. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 required that public parks, like the one in Huntsville, be open to all people without regard to race or color.
Jeffrey L. Littlejohn and Charles H. Ford, “Southern Discomfort: The Rise and Fall of Civil Rights Attorney James F. Gay, 1942-2008,” in The Seedtime, the Work, and the Harvest: New Perspectives on the Black Freedom Struggle in America. University of Florida Press, 2018. Full Text
James F. Gay was one of the most important figures of the civil rights era in Norfolk, Virginia, but he has been forgotten in both academic and political circles. Gay, along with his older brother Milton, organized the sit-ins that brought down Jim Crow in Tidewater, and he went on to become one of the first African Americans to graduate from the University of Virginia Law School. As a local entrepreneur and leader of the Norfolk branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), he was seen as a possible mayoral candidate in the 1970s. His fame finally peaked in the following decade, as he won a significant case before the U.S. Supreme Court that transformed Norfolk’s local electoral practices to allow for greater diversity and inclusion in city government. Gay quickly fell from grace, however, and his fall was especially sharp and traumatic. In 2007, a year before Gay’s death, columnist Earl Swift of the Virginian Pilot, the area’s principal newspaper, laid blame for Gay’s decent into obscurity on the attorney’s string of ethical lapses that had led to his disbarment in late 1993. Yet for all of his narrative prowess, Swift failed to place the rise and fall of James Gay within its proper and wider historical context. While we do not deny the self-destructive arrogance that underlay some of Gay’s professional misconduct, we also appreciate the venom of Norfolk’s establishment toward an outsider who successfully turned everything upside down. In fact, Gay’s story is not simply a local tale about a civil rights activist falling from favor. Rather, it illustrates the high hurdles that leaders of the black freedom struggle faced as they attempted to convert the political and cultural accomplishments of the 1960s into a new governmental reality in the 1980s. Along the way, Gay made many personal mistakes, but his every misstep received attention from a white oligarchy that forgave segregationists of the old order, like Judges Hal Bonney and James G. Martin IV, and ignored the malfeasance of African American politicians and city councilmen Paul Riddick and Anthony Burfoot. James Gay’s sins were never forgiven, though, largely because he had effectively challenged the civic status quo, whereas many of the other transgressors simply became part of the establishment.
Charles H. Ford and Jeffrey L. Littlejohn, “The Crisis Responds to Public School Desegregation,” in Protest and Propaganda: W. E. B. Du Bois, The Crisis and American History, edited by Amy Kirschke and Phillip Luke Sinitiere. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2014, 226-240. Full Text.
Throughout the 1950s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) used its monthly magazine, The Crisis, to survey and analyze the implications of public school desegregation. Building on the print activism and visual protest for civil and human rights deployed by its inaugural editor W. E. B. Du Bois, who spent the 1950s under an anti-Communist microscope, The Crisis captured relatively obscure developments, probing the logistical problems and cultural effects of school desegregation that other media outlets either ignored or celebrated. It correctly interpreted Massive Resistance as a national problem -- rather than simply a southern phenomenon -- underscoring the deleterious and, often, subtler discriminatory practices in the North and West. It confidently and predictably foresaw the ultimate end of Jim Crow schools, but it had no illusions about the difficulties and dangers associated with that long and strange death. This chapter analyzes how The Crisis covered the Brown v. Board of Education decisions and their effects on parents, students, teachers, politicians, and pundits, spotlighting the important role that the magazine had in increasing awareness and mobilizing support for public school integration.
​Jeffrey L. Littlejohn and Charles H. Ford, “Truman and Civil Rights,” in A Companion to Harry S. Truman, edited by Daniel S. Margolies. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2012. Full Text.
On April 5, 1968, less than twenty-four hours after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the Harry Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, hosted the first national conference devoted exclusively to the Truman Administration and civil rights. The coincidental timing of the conference made the occasion doubly poignant, since many of the participating scholars felt a deep affinity for Dr. King and his work on behalf of civil rights. Despite the somber spirit that pervaded the first hours of the meeting, however, discussion leader and historian Donald R. McCoy pressed on with the agenda as planned. Throughout the day, sixteen invited scholars took part in three discussion sessions, which were each devoted to a series of pre-arranged questions. Among the questions discussed were: 1) what contributed to the Truman administration’s interest in civil rights; 2) what more could the administration have done to further civil rights; and 3) what significant accomplishments did the administration achieve for its period and for subsequent times? In answering each of these questions, the participants suggested that President Truman and his administration had taken bold steps to secure important advances on the civil rights front. As the distinguished historian John Hope Franklin told the group at a public address that afternoon, “The crucial turning point in viewing the problems of race … in the United States occurred when the executive branch of the federal government began actively to assume a major role. This occurred during the administration of Harry S. Truman.” Indeed, Franklin went on to argue that Truman had “move[d] the country” on the civil rights issue in a way that no previous President had done before. Truman created the President’s Commission on Civil Rights; he issued executive orders desegregating the military and federal bureaucracy; and he placed the civil rights of American citizens above the narrow regional interests of the Southern white establishment. “If the nation had listened more carefully to the President’s entreaties for human equality, and if it had assumed the grave responsibilities that it faced in those critical years,” Franklin concluded, then the horrors and recriminations of 1968 might have been avoided altogether.
In the years immediately following the Truman conference, scholars codified an orthodox interpretation of the President’s work on civil rights that was drawn mainly from positive contemporary assessments from the 1940s. The historical monograph to appear in 1969 was Richard M. Dalfiume published Desegregation of the U.S. Armed Forces: Fighting on Two Fronts, 1939-1953. Then, two years later, Donald McCoy and Richard Ruetten’s book, Quest and Response: Minority Rights and the Truman Administration came out. These studies presented what some scholars have called the “liberal” interpretation of the Truman administration, which reflected the egalitarian hopes of contemporary progressives who viewed Truman’s work as a stage in the unfolding march toward equality and social justice. Revisionist scholars soon challenged these generous claims about the President and his administration. In 1970, William Berman published The Politics of Civil Rights in the Truman Administration, and Barton J. Bernstein released “The Ambiguous Legacy: The Truman Administration and Civil Rights.” The following year, Harvard Sitkoff published his essay, “Harry Truman and the Election of 1948: The Coming of Age of Civil Rights in American Politics.” These works portrayed Truman as a “reluctant champion” of civil rights, who took up the African American cause (and then tailored its boundaries) for calculated political reasons that had little to do with civil rights. According to this school of thought, Truman’s life-long racism prevented him from seeing African Americans or other ethnic minorities as true equals, and thus his own personal limitations shaped what was essentially an “ambiguous legacy” on civil rights. Recent scholar have further refined this view moving in one of two directions. First, biographers, like David McCullough and Alonzo Hamby, have combed the archives and conducted hundreds of interviews to present a more nuanced and in-depth study of Truman the individual. These studies are important because they reveal a great deal about the President’s personal views on race, the power of the federal government, and the role that civil rights should play in the Democratic agenda. At the same time, a second group of scholars, including Mary Dudziak and Thomas Borstelmann, has moved in the opposite direction. These diplomatic and global historians argue that Truman’s civil rights activities must be understood not primarily on the personal or even national stage, but that his actions were in large part the result of new diplomatic realities created by the Cold War with the Soviet Union.
These historiographical debates had their origins in the fragmentation of American consensus during the 1960s. From the orthodox perspective, Truman’s civil rights policy stemmed directly from the benevolent expansion of federal power during the twentieth century. From the revisionist vantage point, however, Truman’s domestic policies including civil rights were viewed in tandem with his alleged failures in foreign policy. He had helped to mid-wife the domino theory and the containment policy, the same arrogant assumptions of American power and goodness that had led to the quagmire of Vietnam. Incipient detente made his stand against a seemingly monolithic communism a generation before seem incredibly naive. Domestically, his extensions of the New Deal had blossomed into Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, which had only seemed to fuel urban unrest and black militancy. His accommodation of Joseph McCarthy’s red scare and the national security state of J. Edgar Hoover seemed particularly sour in a turbulent era whose professors and students were rebelling against that kind of governmental intrusion. In fact, Truman seemed to embody the small-town provincialism that the radical chic and the professional left regularly ridiculed. Thus the early 1970s was a prime entry point for the revisionists of Truman’s civil rights legacy. No longer would he be portrayed in the same pantheon with the great white fathers, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and John Kennedy. The turbulence of the Vietnam era underscored the unfinished business of civil rights from the Truman years that, to revisionists, may have been left deliberately unfinished by the everyman from Missouri.
The pendulum then swung back again to accentuate the positive features of Truman’s civil rights legacy with the biographies of McCullough and Hamby. This shift resulted from a growing appreciation of the common sense measures pursued by Truman during a time of great crisis. For example, the resumption of the Cold War with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the subsequent election of Ronald Reagan as President in 1980 made Truman as foreign policy hawk seem not so bad. Ironically, his popular and academic reputation seemed to be reborn against a backdrop of a renaissance of the Gilded Age, laissez-faire economics that had been seen in the Truman years as being made obsolete by Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Reagan and his speechwriters did their utmost to connect the Gipper, a Democrat during the 1940s, with Cold Warriors Truman and Kennedy who had stood up to the evil empire. This was in stark contrast to contemporary Democrats from McGovern through Mondale who allegedly were for appeasing the Soviet menace. Along with this reassessment of Truman’s foreign policy, his domestic liberalism was forgotten or conveniently embraced, as nearly all politicians of the 1980s came to agree with the increasingly distant accomplishment of dismantling racial segregation if not the actual attainment of racial equality in economic matters. Indeed, Truman's forthrightness and simple maxims paralleled Ronald Reagan's homespun and corny stories, as 1984's "morning in America" meant a restoration of a post-World War II peace and quiet that had never existed. The petty scandals that had almost driven Truman out of office were never mentioned, as the Gipper's own "Teflon" coating deflected charges that his administration was the most corrupt in history until that point. The obvious abuses of power during both the Truman and Reagan administrations came from an inherently evil Washington, DC and its entrenched elites, and not from the Midwesterners sent there to represent the people's interests. In reference to civil rights, Truman emerged as a competent manager of competing and conflicting interest who became a uniter and not a divider.
Jeffrey L. Littlejohn, ”'Sit Down Children, Sit Down': The Sit-In Movement in Norfolk, Virginia,” in Voices from Within the Veil: African Americans and the Experience of Democracy, edited by William Alexander, Cassandra Newby-Alexander, and Charles Ford, 330-344. Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008.
When school let out on Friday, February 12, 1960, Milton Gay Jr., prayed for guidance. Gay was a nineteen-year-old freshman at Virginia State College in Norfolk, and he was preparing to lead his first sit-in demonstration. “I was anxious and frightened,” he later recalled. “It was just the uncertainty” of the situation. “We didn’t know whether police were going to take out their billy clubs . . . hit us over the head, and drag us off to jail.”
The sit-in movement had begun eleven days earlier -- on February 1 -- when African American college students sat down at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina to protest against segregation. The Woolworth’s staff refused to serve the students, insisting that lunch counters in Greensboro, like those around the South, were reserved for whites-only. When the Greensboro students were asked to move from the counter, however, they refused. In a dramatic act of non-violent resistance, the students -- Ezell Blair Jr., Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond -- kept their seats. Over the coming days, hundreds of students joined the Greensboro protest against segregated seating. Their efforts inspired a wave of sit-in demonstrations that spread across the South in the winter of 1960, forever transforming the Civil Rights Movement.
Inspired by the Greensboro demonstrations, Milton Gay and a host of Norfolk students coordinated a similar protest for their city’s downtown district. This essay chronicles their effort. It is a tale of growing impatience and dissatisfaction, in which young people, furious with the tortured pace of desegregation, bypassed their elders and became the leaders in a campaign to challenge Jim Crow. In the process, Norfolk’s African American young people sat-in at restaurants and spoke at churches; they marched on sidewalks and protested at schools. But, most of all, they led their parents and their pastors into a new stage of the civil rights struggle.
Jeffrey L. Littlejohn, "The Brown Decision in Local Context: Race and Public Education in Norfolk, Virginia." In Brown v. Board of Education: Its Impact on Public Education, 1954-2004, edited by Dara Byrne, 165-175. New York: Word for Word Publishing for the Thurgood Marshall Foundation, 2005.
In 2004, the citizens of Norfolk, Virginia, commemorated the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education. As part of the year’s activities, this article examined three legal cases from Norfolk that helped to frame the Brown decision and place it in historical context.
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The first pivotal showdown began in Norfolk during the era of “separate but equal,” years before the Brown decision in 1939. By that time, sixty-eight years of segregation had created tremendous inequality in the city's white and black schools. In response, Aline Black and Melvin Alston, two African American teachers at Booker T. Washington High School, joined with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and lawyer Thurgood Marshall to file suit against the City of Norfolk so that they might win salaries equal to those of their white counterparts. Although Black lost her case and was unable to secure an appeal, Alston won his -- the first such equalization victory in the state of Virginia. Alston's victory had no immediate impact on segregation itself, but the NAACP's success in cases like his paved the way for a switch in legal strategy that would soon challenge the entire idea of “separate but equal.”
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The second educational showdown began in Norfolk soon after the Brown decision in 1956. Disgusted with the Massive Resistance tactics promoted by Senator Harry F. Byrd, several African American families in Norfolk sued the School Board for its failure to desegregate the public schools. What followed was a hard-fought three-year legal battle, pitting Mayor W. F. Duckworth, local segregationists, and Governor J. Lindsay Almond, Jr. against local African American families and the NAACP. The tides turned many times during the struggle, but in the summer of 1958, District Court Judge Walter Hoffman ordered that Norfolk must begin to integrate its previously all-white schools. In response, Governor Almond shut down the six schools that were to be integrated, displacing almost 10,000 students in the largest district in the state. It took two further judicial decisions -- one by the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals and the other by the Federal District Court in Norfolk -- to re-open the schools in February 1959. The six previously all-white schools were then open to the “Norfolk 17,” and these brave African American students were soon in classes with nearly 10,000 white students. Although Massive Resistance had been defeated, the school closings represented how difficult the road ahead would be for supporters of integration and equality.
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The third educational showdown began in Norfolk during the early 1980s, as the city's leaders considered ending cross-town busing for elementary school children. Court-ordered busing for desegregation had begun in Norfolk in 1971. By 1975, the city had achieved “unitary” status, which meant that the federal courts no longer considered Norfolk a segregated public-school system. Although cross-town busing continued, the next ten years produced a dramatic transformation in the racial composition of Norfolk 's public schools. White children were leaving the district in large numbers, and the system was becoming increasingly African American. As a result, in 1982, the School Board sponsored six public forums to consider a proposal to end the cross-town busing of elementary school children, which many people believed to be a major cause of “white flight” from the district. Parents and community leaders immediately took sides in the debate, which resulted in the School Board's approval of the proposal to end cross-town busing. The fight was not over, however. Within a month, several African American leaders filed suit in Riddick v. School Board of the City of Norfolk. The case was not decided until 1986, when the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals issued the first federal opinion permitting a school district to dismantle its integration plan. Norfolk would no longer bus its elementary school children.
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