Remembering Town Hall’s historic Jim Crow debate 75 years later
75 years ago tonight a historic radio debate about the future of America's oppressive system of apartheid was broadcast live across the country. Millions of whites and blacks listened.
Town Hall’s 1,500 seats were full.
Its stage was cluttered with a dozen people, tall stands of baking-hot lights, thick electrical cables and TV cameras the size of refrigerators.
Across the country hundreds of thousands of black Americans and their top civil rights leaders were among the millions listening on the radio. A few thousand people in New York and Philadelphia were watching on their primitive TV sets.
A lot of black history had already been made by Marian Anderson, Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday at the New York City venue, which was famed for both its acoustics and its politically progressive management.
But what was about to happen at exactly 8:30 on the night of Nov. 9, 1948 had nothing to do with music.
For the next hour the popular ABC public affairs show “America’s Town Hall of the Air” was going to smash an enduring network radio taboo by discussing the United States’ most shameful political, social and economic invention -- Jim Crow.
Four prominent Americans — three white men and one black man — were about to hold the first major debate in the national media about the future of the 60-year-old system of legal racial segregation that existed in various forms in 17 states.
What they would say about the immorality and unconstitutionality of American-made apartheid was going to be broadcast live on more than 200 radio stations and two infant TV stations in New York and Philadelphia.
The loyal defenders of Old Jim Crow on stage were the famed Mississippi Delta journalist Hodding Carter Jr. and his fellow segregationist, Arkansas newspaper editor Harry Ashmore.
Opposing them were two famous sworn enemies of Jim Crow.
Walter F. White was the dynamic national boss of the NAACP. An early civil rights superstar, he was a light-skinned, blue-eyed black man who had the ear of U.S. presidents and had been on Time magazine’s cover ten years earlier.
White’s debate partner was veteran Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter Ray Sprigle, 61.
In August Sprigle had written a 21-part, nationally syndicated series detailing the inequality and discrimination he had witnessed while pretending to be a black man for a month in the Jim Crow South
His often bitter descriptions of the oppression, fear and humiliation ten million black Americans faced every day in the segregated South had shocked clueless white readers in the North and thrust the question of Jim Crow’s future into the national consciousness overnight.
The 1938 Pulitzer Prize winner’s first-person account – essentially a 21-part op-ed piece -- was titled “In the Land of Jim Crow.” It was syndicated to 13 dailies, including the New York Herald Tribune and the Seattle Times – all white, all in the North.
Sprigle’s entire series was also proudly and prominently carried to black Americans for seven weeks by a single newspaper -- the weekly Pittsburgh Courier. The country’s largest and arguably most influential black paper with 300,000 readers from Harlem to L.A., it also delivered its national edition to blacks in the Deep South — where it was often seized by local sheriffs.
Sprigle made no pretense of objectivity or balance. He addressed most of the racial issues that still trouble us today, albeit in far less severe ways.
He wrote about recent lynchings, the widespread and often violent suppression of black voting rights, the ludicrous inequality of black education, the constant dread all black men had of inciting white violence and the failure of Atlanta’s all-white criminal “justice” system to protect black neighborhoods from criminals.
Along the way he repeatedly shamed the South for “the wanton murders” and unjustified shootings of unarmed black men by white police and civilians that usually went unpunished, thanks to a justice system everyone knew was permanently tilted against blacks.
Not surprisingly, Sprigle’s sarcastic tone and his constant mocking of “the master race” for its stupidity and racism enraged the white South’s standing army of professional defenders. Their top propagandist, Sprigle’s nemesis in print, was the brilliant and prolific Hodding Carter Jr.
When the first installments of “In the Land of Jim Crow” appeared in August of 1948, Carter quickly cranked out his own six-part syndicated series defending the South’s racist segregation laws and feudal way of life. He blasted Sprigle’s admittedly slanted journalism as unfair and exaggerated and repeatedly smeared him as just another trespassing liberal Yankee troublemaker.
But millions of black Americans and civil rights leaders like Walter White disagreed.
They had been thrilled to see Sprigle’s takedown of Jim Crow published in important Northern white newspapers, covered favorably by Time and Newsweek and plugged twice by Eleanor Roosevelt in her national newspaper column “My Day.”
Blacks who listened to the Town Hall debate on radio were especially pleased with the strong performances of Walter White and Sprigle. White received 245 positive personal letters, telegrams and phone calls. And Sprigle no doubt scored many moral points with Americans and constitutionalists of every color with his final statement to Carter:
“I think I can very briefly summarize my end of this discussion, and that is this: that it seems to me to require some effrontery to discuss when and how you are going to apply the Constitution of the United States to a segment of the population. I think that many of your problems of segregation would be solved by the simple recognition of the Negro in the South as a citizen of the United States, subject to the rights granted him and every other citizen by the Constitution.”
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Sprigle’s historic “expose” of the Jim Crow elephant living in the national news room was forgotten long ago, swept away in the 1950s by the multimedia coverage of the growing civil rights movement.
But Sprigle was far ahead of America’s civil rights curve. His series came 13 years before John Howard Griffin’s blockbuster book “Black Like Me,” six years before Brown v. Board of Education and seven years before the shocking murder of Emmett Till.
As for his fellow journalists, there were no immediate follow-up investigations or heavy coverage of Jim Crow by other important white Northern papers or magazines.
The New York Times never published a word about Sprigle’s newspaper series or the radio debate in 1948 — and still hasn’t to this day. And it wasn’t until the mid-1950s that the brewing fight for equality and civil rights in the Jim Crow South became the lead story on the nightly news.
Sprigle was no civil rights crusader, no liberal do-gooder. He was a conservative Republican newsman who wrote that what he saw in the Jim Crow South made him ashamed to be an American – and a white man.
There’s no evidence his pioneering journalism changed civil rights history or influenced any of the people who were shaping or writing about it in 1948.
But 75 years later he deserves to be remembered as the daring old newspaperman who woke the white North from its racial coma for a few months and made a valuable, if immeasurable, contribution to the earliest beginnings of the modern civil rights movement.
My 2017 Lyons Press book ‘30 Days a Black Man’ details Ray Sprigle’s undercover mission into the South and the impact his series had on the country in the summer and fall of 1948. His original 21-part series in the Post-Gazette, plus Hodding Carter’s answering series, is reprinted in ‘In the Land of Jim Crow.’
Extra, extra…..
Me and the NY Times
August, 2023
In the last six years I've tried at least a dozen times to get the NY Times's book section and/or its Race/Related section an excuse to write something about the subject of my eternally timely and tragically under-publicized 2017 book '30 Days a Black Man,' which re-tells the mostly forgotten story of Pittsburgh reporter Ray Sprigle's undercover journalism mission into the Jim Crow South of 1948 disguised as a black man.
The people at the Times' Race/Related newsletter, which says it focuses on "race, identity and culture," will send you a nice, slightly hopeful but not very sincere automatic reply when you send them an email/suggestion/pitch/tip:
Thank you for your note. Please stay in touch and let us know what you think — whether it’s about this newsletter, the way The Times covers race, our Instagram or what you’re reading. We read and think about all of it. We even write back, albeit belatedly! You can reach us at racerelated@nytimes.com.
—Race/Related Team
But since 2018 I have never received any response from a NYT human employee, and to this day the Times of NY, the paper of record, has never written a word about Ray Sprigle's historic trip, the series he wrote that shocked the country or anything about the brave black American who helped Sprigle, the great John Wesley Dobbs of Atlanta.
For the record, this is what I sent Race/Related this morning:
Come on, NYT --
75 years ago this month Ray Sprigle's 21-part nationally syndicated series recounting the month he spent in the Jim Crow South disguised as a black man was shocking the white North, angering the white South and pleasing millions of black Americans and the NAACP's Walter White.
The NY Times, as far as I can tell, never wrote a word about Sprigle's trip in 1948 or the prime time radio debate he held in Nov. 1948 at Town Hall in NYC.
Now's a good time for you to make amends -- to Sprigle, his brave guide John Wesley Dobbs and to your readers.
Thanks
Bill s
I've learned not to hold my breath.
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As I've said before and will mumble again, everyone should read both the Sprigle series and this book. Sprigle was the best investigative journo of his time, but Steigerwald is a better writer.