Harry Ashmore Interview

 [INAUDIBLE CONVERSATION]

JAMIE STONEY: You ready to go, Sir?

GEORGE STONEY: Uh-huh.

HARRY ASHMORE: But it must have been a year or two.

GEORGE STONEY: Yeah.

JAMIE STONEY: Gentlemen, are we ready?

GEORGE STONEY: All right.

ASHMORE: And he makes, he makes a distinction that Odom later dealt with a great deal, that there was a middle class between the lower class when the –

GEORGE STONEY: I'm sorry. You said Olmstead made the --

ASHMORE: Yeah, he made the distinction that you had this little fringe of these allegedly, professedly aristocratic planters. And then you had, of course, a bunch of poor farmers, really illiterate redneck types. But there was a substantial middle class in there, many of whom were – had a few slaves perhaps, and who were running the same kind of farms that were being run in the Middle West, some of them in areas that were not particularly suitable. They weren't getting into cotton. They were raising hogs and meat and so forth for market. And that, that most people's stereotype of the South has always been 00:01:00that just the rednecks and the aristocrats, and nobody in between. But in fact, it was a middle class society. Certainly, the urban place was middle class. I can't imagine I could have grown up in a more middle class community than the one I did.

GEORGE STONEY: And you were talking about the difficulty in finding a place for the, for the study.

ASHMORE: Oh, the study finally resulted. We got the thing out, and the day before the Brown decision came down, The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill bought out the book. I had thought that, that what I would, my obligation would be to edit these reports finally for publication. Well, it turned out the time element was such that these, these scholars were never going to meet that kind of deadline. That was a horrendous deadline. So, I had to finally write the book. I based it on – I put together what – I took out of what they were, they were, and the book was then published under my name. And 00:02:00that's when the old politician in Arkansas said, asked me what I was doing, and I said, "Well, I'm about to publish a book." He said, "What's it called?" And I said, "It's going to be called The Negro and the Schools." He said to me, "Son, you sound to me like you've got yourself in the position of a man running for sonofabitch without opposition." And I think I was elected by acclamation for a while there. I used to go back to Arkansas. You know, the standard line I like to use – I like to go back to Arkansas after I've been away about 20 years, and by that time, I'd gotten "cleaned up." You know, all this was behind us, and it was ancient history. And I'd be somewhere, and a blue-haired lady would come up to me at a cocktail party and say, "Oh, Mr. Ashmore, I've heard so much about you." And I'd always say, "How would you like to hear the other side." So.

GEORGE STONEY: Okay, Jaime, let's –

[break in video]

GEORGE STONEY: Harry.

ASHMORE: Yeah.

GEORGE STONEY: I've just discovered that you and I are about the same age, 00:03:00except that you are 28 days younger.

ASHMORE: That's, that's right. I'm just a young sprout. You know Georgia Stoney?

BILL GORDON: Oh, yes, very good. Bill Gordon.

GEORGE STONEY: Bill. Bill Gordon.

ASHMORE: He's of the Atlanta World family.

GEORGE STONEY: Oh, I remember that.

GORDON: You remember that.

GEORGE STONEY: I lived in Atlanta from 1946 to 1948.

GORDON: Oh, until 1948. I see.

GEORGE STONEY: And I remember the Atlanta World at that time.

GORDON: Oh, yes, I see. Well, I came in 1949 actually as the Managing Editor of the newspaper and stayed there through 1958 actually before I went overseas to, on an international journalism fellowship. New York Herald Tribune, the Ogden Reid Fellowship. Gave me an opportunity to travel extensively in Africa.

GEORGE STONEY: That's good.

ASHMORE: Uh-huh. Then you got into foreign service, didn't you?

GORDON: Then I joined the foreign service, but that was just before I joined the foreign service after I came back off that trip. I'd seen about 25 African countries, including South Africa of all places. Wonderful experience.

ASHMORE: Well, I'll bet it was.

GEORGE STONEY: Well, Harry, could you tell us a little bit about this gathering that's tonight?

ASHMORE: Well, John Popham, of course, is kind of a legendary figure in the South. He was the first New York Times Southern correspondent. He came down here in 1947. Well, I guess before that, I guess he came down about 1946, right at the end of the war. I remember the first time I ever saw him, I was still in Charlotte. I was the Editor of The Charlotte News. He came by to see me. He was just starting his rounds. And Pop didn't settle in Atlanta because he stayed in Chattanooga because the Times owned The Chattanooga Times.

GEORGE STONEY: That was the paper, yeah.

ASHMORE: The other way around. The Chattanooga Times owned The New York Times

GEORGE STONEY: Oh, The New York Times? Gotcha.

ASHMORE: The family had started there. The office is in [Salzberg?] and all that. So Pop worked out of Chattanooga, but he roamed the South. And he was here during the buildup, pre-Brown, that is. And then, of course, through the whole – much of whole early days of the Civil Rights troubles. And then he was replaced by Claude Sitton, who will be here. And Claude was really a remarkable reporter. He was at first a one-man band. Pop then went to Chattanooga and became the Managing Editor of the Times property there. But when Pop was roaming the South, he spent a lot of time with the academics. He got to know a lot of the people in the universities, to give the sociological background for all this. Plus knowing all of the rednecks and politicians and governors and God-knows-what-all, the Black leaders, Martin Luther King. And he got to know just a wide variety of people. So some years back, John Griffin, whose house 00:06:00we're at here, John was a professor at Emory when I first met him, and he worked on this Ashmore Project, as they called it, this Negros and the Schools book. He was with the group that operated here. And John later went down to Florida State and lived in Tallahassee. And after, while all this got going, he got intrigued with getting some people down to reminisce about the, about these early days of the movement. And so, I think one of the first meetings was down there. He had a little house down in the country. And Ralph McGill was there, and Popham, and Bill Baggs, who's a dear friend of mine who was the Editor of The Miami News. And I've forgotten who else. Well, anyway, John has been ever since assembling this group.

GEORGE STONEY: Oh, so it's Griffin who's behind it all.

ASHMORE: Oh well, Griffin is sort of, he's the den mother. The mother of us all. So about once a year, we get together. And later, this got mixed up with 00:07:00what is now called the Popham Seminar. And that's an annual meeting which involves the journalists that lived through this and editors and people who were reporters and also some of these academics that Pop knew. So, it's sort of a joint meeting, and they meet here in Atlanta. Well, they met various places, but now it always turns out to be Atlanta. And they meet on a Saturday, like today, and have a dinner and sort of a lot of drinking [inaudible] and lying. You know, it's like an old soldiers' reunion. Everybody's heard all the stories 15 times, and the academics have been there. And then there'll be a session tomorrow morning [inaudible] about noon. So they do it out at the airport. People can fly in for the weekend. So, it's become a kind of an institution; everybody's getting awfully long in the tooth. [Inaudible due to traffic 00:08:00noises]. One of the best writers in the South. He lived in Nashville. And Roy Reed is here. Roy was a, worked with Popham on The New York Times back during the troubles. And he's now a journalism professor at The University of Arkansas. He worked with me on the Gazette, and I hired him when he first started out. [Inaudible] he's here. And who else? Claude Sitton, who was Pop's successor as the Principal Correspondent later went to New York as the National Affairs Editor up there of The New York Times. And then came back South as he wanted to do as the Editor of [inaudible] a couple years ago when he retired. And he's now teaching part-time at Emory and living in Atlanta. And he'll be here.

GEORGE STONEY: Good, uh-hum.

ASHMORE: I think there's some other people. Tom [inaudible] who's the former 00:09:00Editor of the Constitution. You know him. And I think he'll be there. And a variety of people might come. I think we've got about 50 people [inaudible]. And I came over here Thursday because it takes me all day to get here.

GEORGE STONEY: I know.

ASHMORE: From California, it's a long haul. So I couldn't get here until Thursday night, and I wanted to spend yesterday with Tom and see some other people, and Popham came over yesterday afternoon, and [inaudible] showed up [inaudible], and he came in?

GORDON: Last night.

ASHMORE: Last night.

GEORGE STONEY: Well, one of the things that this project I'm working on now about the textile organization, it's reminded me of my own class attitudes.

ASHMORE: That's right.

GEORGE STONEY: Which I was almost completely unaware of until I got involved with this. I grew up in Winston-Salem.

ASHMORE: Right.

GEORGE STONEY: Which was mainly tobacco town but also had its cotton mills. And I didn't realize until I got into this how my own middle class attitudes about the linthead was. It's surprising when I go into a mill village, I'm still surprised at how, how literate those people are. I mean, it's shocking to see how those old prejudices limit one's anticipations.

ASHMORE: There's no question about it. Even the ones that are old enough to go back to the previous generation, most of them were illiterate. But they were frequently great storytellers. You know, that was a rural art, Blacks and whites, too. You talk to anybody back there really in the country, and they can tell you, and they illustrate this. It's wonderfully eloquent stuff. You find that it doesn't really have a lot to do with reading and writing. It's an art; it's an aural. It's what John Egerton called "porch talk." People 00:11:00sat down before there was any television. People sat out in the hot weather on the porch, and they told stories back and forth, lies, or people about their relatives, all these crazy people that lived down the road. So you get this, and I think this is, you know, this is one of the issues now, we got on all this PC business, which seems to me to be far out of hand. But they, um, there is a common Southern culture that I think embraces Blacks as well as whites. Now, you've got all the division, you've got all the– but they had, they shared history. And history is a great, a hell of a big part of this. And that nothing like this happened anywhere else in the country. The Blacks and whites have no common history, and they got a hell of a lot of hostility, much more so than you get here. Not that it isn't still here. And what you're saying is latent class attitudes, I'm sure. Even those of us who've work to try to get rid of 00:12:00it, we still have it to some degree. I mean, you just automatic – you don't – and, of course, I think once you become conscious of it, you overcome it, but I'm not sure it isn't, it isn't somehow deeply ingrained.

GEORGE STONEY: I find I always have to recognize that it might be there.

ASHMORE: Right.

GEORGE STONEY: Just as – the same thing with race.

ASHMORE: That's right. I think it is. And I think it works on both sides. Uh, if you have a long enough association, there will be situations where both sides overcome it. But a couple strangers meeting, Black and white, there's bound to be – I mean, they don't know how you're gonna react. And you don't know exactly how they're gonna react. And they start overdoing it, which is offensive. And so that's a natural problem. I believe –

GEORGE STONEY: I once remember being in a public meeting where there was some debate over a film I had made with some Black people in it.

ASHMORE: Yeah.

GEORGE STONEY: And somebody from the audience says, "Oh, but George, you're 00:13:00not prejudiced." And I said, "Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I'm, I'm working at it."

ASHMORE: That's right.

GEORGE STONEY: "But don't trust me because it's, it's there." And I think the same thing probably with the lintheads.

ASHMORE: I think it is. I concluded a long time ago, and I've written a lot about this, that you – First of all, the distinction between desegregation and integration was critically important. Integration is a, is a personal acceptance at a level that doesn't have a whole lot to do with the law. It has a whole lot to do with living together. But your desegregation was to get rid of barriers, knock them down. And we've been able to do that. And I always figured it's going to take another generation of experience of people living together, working together particularly on a co-equal basis, for this to begin to overcome, on both sides. I think this is – you can't, you can't speed 00:14:00this up. And there's a lot of nonsense being written about this now. [Hackrow?] just got a book out about how he suddenly discovered he had some race prejudice. I don't know where the hell he's been all these years. You know, it was a very shocked book, you know. It talks about "we've got to face this," he says. Well, hell. I think one of the most revealing experiences and, goodness, Truman's monument – the desegregation of the military, which was the first real institutional desegregation. And these people had to fight and live together. And they were in an artificial situation to begin with. In the first place, there were no women around in those days, and so you couldn't get into all that complication. And it turned out, I went up and served two weeks active duty at Camp Chaffee during the Korean War when it just started. And these redneck kids were coming in from Mississippi and Alabama and New Orleans, 00:15:00Louisiana, along with these Blacks who were coming in, and they had hit, they came right in the reception center. This was a basic [inaudible]. And all of a sudden they were dumped into a situation they had never been in their lives. The guy next to him in the shower was Black. And the guy eating next to him was Black. And the Black was in the same [inaudible]; there was a redneck next to him in the shower. And then the military by that time had integrated to the point where most of the Sergeants were Black. And here were these redneck kids who were not only taking orders from a Black but were getting their ass eaten up by a Black. Well, I walked around. Nobody knew what to do with me, but I was up there and looked at this at close range and then talked to a lot of these [inaudible] white officers who had accepted it, and some of them were just as racist as they've ever then. But they all agreed that if you're gonna have them, this is the only way to do it.

GEORGE STONEY: If you're gonna have them.

ASHMORE: That's right. If you gotta have them. And so, it worked, and it's worked since. And you see the final flowering of it in, you know, we've got a Black Commanding General. A helluva fellow, Colin Powell. And he, I always said Colin Powell is the living symbol of why you need Affirmative Action. He couldn't have been there without Affirmative Action. Furthermore, he had to demonstrate courage, and capacity, organizing ability, all these things that the Black stereotypes supposed not to have. He had to demonstrate them in spades because he had, he had to overcome all of this prejudice that was there. And he made it. And I think that says a lot about what this experience is gonna do if we can, if we don't turn it back. Which is, for God's sake, is what mostly Bush is trying to do.

GEORGE STONEY: Now I'm running into this kind of contradiction. For a part of this project I travel with a friend from Atlanta who's Black, and we would go into these cotton mill villages. And I found them inviting him into eat and all of this in a way that I had never expected. But, as soon as I started talking about unions, some of these same people would, "You're a very nice man, but I've got a granddaughter in that mill, and it will be held against her."

ASHMORE: Uh-huh.

GEORGE STONEY: So that I find that this kind of economic fear seems to be quite as strong, or stronger than the racial fear. Do you think we'll ever get over that?

ASHMORE: I don't know, and I was surprised that you mentioned this. I hadn't really thought about that. Is there that much actual – is this a perceived threat, or is it a real threat? I mean, is there that kind of retribution? Can they still do that?

GEORGE STONEY: Yes.

ASHMORE: Can they just fire somebody out-of-hand because they are leaning toward the union?

GEORGE STONEY: That's what happened for example in Kannapolis this summer.

ASHMORE: Well.

GEORGE STONEY: We followed that campaign, and you'll find it in the videotape that I sent you. And there was selective – right after the campaign, there was selective firing.

ASHMORE: Well, I am –

GEORGE STONEY: This is a tactic which, I'm afraid, is just accepted.

ASHMORE: Well, I think – don't you think that's retrograde? Don't you think there was a period there where people could assume the union had enough strength to protect them?

GEORGE STONEY: Uh-huh.

ASHMORE: And I think now the unions are getting weaker because the damn government is against them now. The government's doing everything – the Republicans are doing everything, they can to weaken the unions. And the unions again are being, their strength is being sapped by the fact that their own success is doing it. They bring all these, these former blue collar workers are all now middle class and conservative and at a union. Which it's true. This 00:19:00comes into it. And again, I hadn't realized that, um – I was surprised that you talk about the fact that this history of Gastonia and this period has been virtually –

GEORGE STONEY: Just want to get you out of the sun

ASHMORE: Have been virtually eliminated from people's consciousness. I realized that was a fact, but I thought that was just a part of our collective absence of memory. Which I think the media contributes to, particularly television, where everything just happened today. I mean, yesterday doesn't exist. But you seem to think it's a, it's really a conscious thing that these people are frightened, they don't want to talk about it.

GEORGE STONEY: Uh-huh.

ASHMORE: And they open up when you come in and give them a chance to, the ones, particularly the one ones.

GEORGE STONEY: The interesting, uh – "How'd you get my name?" "Your family was blacklisted." "No, it wasn't." And then we show them their names from a list we got out of the archives in Washington where there was a protest, and their father or their grandfather was in that. And then it opens 00:20:00up, and they start crying, "Yes, we did have to leave town, and my mother ran a boarding house for the railroad workers for six years, and we finally got back in 1940 when they needed us, and we worked here ever since."

ASHMORE: But they don't want to talk about it.

GEORGE STONEY: That's right. Until we – then it begins to open up when we have their name on a document.

ASHMORE: Uh-huh.

GEORGE STONEY: It's very touching. It's almost like going to somebody denying that they were ever a mem – a slave on a plantation until you find them listed on a bill of sale.

ASHMORE: Well, have you run across – what's the record of the FBI in this? Have you seen much of that?

GEORGE STONEY: We haven't looked into that. That would be an interesting thing.

ASHMORE: Well, I'm just curious. I had just thought of it. I don't know. My memory doesn't suggest they would have any particularly active role, but I 00:21:00expect they goddamn well did. Old J. Edgar Hoover, certainly in the later stages, you know, he must have, he must have had them in there.

GEORGE STONEY: But you must have a very similar kind of parallel between the middle class Blacks –

GORDON: Yes?

GEORGE STONEY: Who were very much supported by the world –

GORDON: Yeah?

GEORGE STONEY: And a group of Blacks who were not, who were, who were, uh, not so established.

GORDON: Yeah. Yeah, there is a conflict there. And people get to feeling that Blacks who've been able to get out of the ghetto, get into the suburbs so to speak, and get into top positions, feel that we've left these people behind. And then that gives them the feeling that sure you have. So, you in just as much danger as a white person. And many cases more so because you have betrayed us. That story hasn't got across again. I guess that also happens among the white. But you speak here of class and feeling that, feeling between whites and 00:22:00so-called classism. And the race problem on the other hand. My feeling is that, um, well, maybe I should back up here a bit. You mentioned also something about the white checking the list and finding that he's not on the slave. But I think that's changing now.

ASHMORE: I think that's so. I think there's raising consciousness knowledge.

GEORGE STONEY: The fascinating thing to me going into these local archives and the local museums. Almost no Southern archive or museum now will avoid having Black history. Many of them are doing a good job of it. There's almost no working class white history. That's coming. And one of the things we're doing with this film is to help fill that gap.

GORDON: Well, the, well, I just did this story a couple years ago about this woman North Carolina. I don't know if you know about this woman or not. 00:23:00Somerset Homecoming.

ASHMORE: Oh, yeah, yeah.

GORDON: You know about that?

ASHMORE: Well, uh-huh.

GORDON: Well, I went down and interviewed her and did a story for the Colonial Williamsburg magazine. And what it brought out there, she was tracing her history back to the time when her people were slaves on that plantation. And each year now she invites former slave owners and former, I mean, members of the former slave owners and descendants of formers slaves to come together. And she's got them to come together. Hundreds of them.

ASHMORE: Big annual event.

GORDON: Big annual event. Every day, I mean, every year on the, I think it's on Labor Day, she invites them, and she's got a great story there.

GEORGE STONEY: I think it's interesting that we went back to a parallel thing.

GORDON: Yeah?

GEORGE STONEY: We went back to East Newnan, Georgia.

ASHMORE: Yeah.

GEORGE STONEY: Where they have an annual get-together of all the people who worked in the East Newnan cotton mill.

ASHMORE: Right.

GORDON: Uh-huh.

GEORGE STONEY: And we were there to interview them about what happened in the '30s. We showed some of our material. We showed the footage of the, newsreel footage of the [inaudible]. We were able to present to one of the families letters which their father wrote to Roosevelt at the time and wrote to Talmadge at the time. All seemed to be well. They started talking about things that were happening, happened in '34. And then, until one gentleman got up, and he said, "We want to make sure that this is not a conspiracy for unions. And suddenly you just felt a tightening all over that [inaudible]. And people were uncomfortable about talking just like that."

GORDON: Well, I don't know if you saw the story or not. But about three weeks ago, a group of Blacks had a reunion.

GEORGE STONEY: I'm just – I'm sorry, I'm just moving you out of the sun a bit more.

GORDON: Down in Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson. And they were there they said because they wanted to trace their history back to our home. So they call it homecoming. This was on the news and the press and everything. But there is a feeling now among Blacks, in particular, that they don't mind tracing their history back to this particular point, their roots back. And in North Carolina, for example, this was told me by a white, a young white fella, he said there's a group that belongs to a fireman's union or something, and they all get together once a year for a big party, and the – Blacks and whites. And they are all calling each other "cousin this" and "cousin that."

ASHMORE: Well, I, I, well, I think I quote an epitaph of [inaudible]. When I first started working on the paper, the Ashmores in Greenville County have been there since the first trees were cut down, and they were kin to everybody. I met all kinds of Ashmores, except I never met a rich one, unfortunately. They were big in politics, and my cousin John Ashmore was a County Supervisor; my cousin 00:26:00Bob Ashmore was the, was the prosecuting attorney, and cousin Morris Ashmore was a Tax Collector, so we had it pretty well. And I was covering the courthouse. And we had it pretty well locked up. Well, I asked old John Ashmore, who was the patriarch of the family, who was the County Supervisor sitting in his office one day, and I said, "God damn, John." I just said, "We got all kind of kinfolk. Who are we kin to in this county?" He said, "Son, the way I look at it, we're kin to everybody in this county, Black or white, one way or another." I always thought that was a real definitive statement about an old story –

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GEORGE STONEY: All right, all right, John, come on here.

ASHMORE: I don't think he's got any sound on.

ASHMORE: John!

JOHN: Great to see you.

ASHMORE: John.

JOHN: How do you do?

ASHMORE: I'm doing all right. And you?

GEORGE STONEY: My cousin.

GORDON: Oh, your cousin! Oh, I'm glad to see you, too.

JOHN: What, Harry's just telling that story about being kin to everybody?

ASHMORE: We got into that. We were talking about the kinfolks.

GEORGE STONEY: We just talking about the heritage that we, when we were doing a reunion of the millworkers in East Newnan, Georgia. For 26 years they've been getting together. And so we were showing some of this material and talking about the '34 strike, and all seemed to be well until one gentleman got up and said, "How do we know this isn't part of a conspiracy for the unions?" And suddenly there was a pall over them – you just felt the tightening over everybody. And it was a very uncomfortable time there until somebody said, "Well, all of that's behind us. We want to forget it all. We are just one family." And it was all love. And so –

JOHN: Actually, the feeling is still there.

GEORGE STONEY: If you can cover up something in the back and grass it over, then it's all right.

ASHMORE: George has got me going back over a lot of stuff I haven't thought of 00:28:00in a very long time. About the class attitudes.

GEORGE STONEY: And speaking of your relatives, there is an Ashmore who in the Charlotte papers was identified as somebody who was heading a vigilante group during the strike.

ASHMORE: Wouldn't be surprised. We had all kinds.

GEORGE STONEY: I will send you that. I will send you a Xerox.

ASHMORE: Great. I don't think we had any leaders of the NAACP, but I'm sure we had some on the other side.

GORDON: Like DuBois, our founder.

JAMIE STONEY: I'm about our here Dad? Do you want me to reload?

GEORGE STONEY: No, we're fine.