But I found that I wanted to dig a little deeper than just
an occasional forum or debate or discussion and my activities.
One thing, we set up a little branch of the Society of American Soviet
Friendship and began to have discussions in the home on what was happening in the Soviet Union. And,
by this time I was working with a Congregational
Education Society and I decided to go to the workers school and take some classes on political science and
Marxism. The workers' school at that time was down on 12th Street
between Broadway and University Place.
And, I remember there was a teacher called Pop Mendel, who
we went to - was my teacher.
And he was a real teacher, very interesting man.
Then there was a teachers summer training school.
We went up to a farm for a whole six weeks,
and Pop Mendel was the head of that school.
To Mr. Herring, my boss, this to him was an amusing
eccentricity, I guess you might call it, of mine.
But I remember meeting - first reading Lenin's
State and Revolution and,
was it, Engels' Origin of the Family.
And these began...were eye openers to me because even though I had gone,
graduated in economics from the University of California,
I had never heard about Karl Marx until I came to New York, and
William Patterson had introduced me to the subject of Marxism.
There also grew up in Harlem a whole series of home study groups
among intellectual friends of mine.
And there was really a ferment of activity.
I remember George Schuyler, who had started
with The Messenger, way back in the early days of
The Messenger when it had a socialist approach
as a radical, by this time had become a ranked reactionary.
If you look back over the pages of the
Amsterdam News, you would see how he used to castigate
those of us whom he considered in the intellectual circles as being pinkles and so on.
So it was that I began to find that,
not fully, but began to understand much more the character of the society in which we lived and
that the kinds of activities that I had been part of or simply
the reason why they were as they were was because
they were part of the established order of things.
That the best of all worlds was a capitalist world, and
what we were doing, the (inaudible) of things that we were doing,
were the kind of activities that had very stringent limitations.
And that if you wanted to to play the game and be a part of it, you couldn't-
there were certain things that...certain areas you didn't go beyond. I'll give you a small example.
In editing this paper, there's a period when the Ford workers were beginning to
organize and there was a, what we called, massacre if you remember.
When they were workers were shot down in Detroit, Michigan.
I wrote a story on this for the...our little newsletter and
my headline was the Ford massacre.
Mr. Herring told me, "Well, Louise, we can't say it that way.
We have to say the Ford tragedy."
One time we had a seminar up in New England on labor relations.
It was in the period before... this was all before the organization of the CIO
when the mass industries and industrial unionism
had not come upon the scene.
There were attempts from the left like the trade union
I think it's called T.U.U.L. Trade Union Unity League
and the activities of
communist or - and radical labor leaders like William C Foster.
And I entered their strike activities because like one of them goes back to 1919 before my time, but
we had the seminar and who were the participants in this seminar
up in New England?
They were people who were part of the establishment who were the
owners or executives in
factories and mills and industries. And
I remember how futile I felt
was what were we doing,we were, you know,
worse than Don Quixote
gesturing at world windmills, and I remember
when after two days such seminar and the rationalization of what of these
Upper-class
White
Members of the establishment of the society
Rationalizing their their approach to labor which was was primarily just the philanthropic approach and then labor
Itself did not have the right to organize
Independently and so forth. And on the way back,
driving down from Boston or wherever we had held the seminar, I was just filled with disgust and
Well, I guess foaming at the mouth, you might say and
Dr. Herring would say, "Ah, Louise, you know
Forget it forget it. You know it's just, that's just what we do. We
We can't really get down to the heart and the
basis of these things because where does our money come from?"
So that even here,
though I was primarily in a white organization,
and the
people to whom I was talking were white,
it was the same approach to labor as it had been to the black question,
for example, and on race relations, I found, I was
under Mr. Herring, that I could go just so far.
It's alright to talk about
we had this seminar on the South and
which
outraged some of the people in the race relations field. We took a group of
middle and upper-class
white and blacks through the South in a Pullman car.
Sleeping together, I mean sleeping in the same car, eating together.
And when we got to towns, like in the South, where the discrimination was,
we'd all go out the Black...and sit going...if we had to get out of off of our car
we'd go into it a
the black entrance to the railroad station.
We stopped...where we stopped was at black colleges such as Talladega and Tuskegee and
Hampton and
Wherever we stopped
Some stations, we'd go into, we would have to pull our shades down
Because if our car was stationed in the station whites would curse.
They canceled our trip to Birmingham. We were not- we were not permitted to go to Birmingham.
And there was talk that our car was going to be dynamited on the road.
Now...But what...it was a myth. Upper middle class
Mary McLeod Bethune was with us, Brett Brownlee of the American Missionary Association,
Leading society women from Park Avenue. I don't think there was a worker in the group.
And all we did was go to these colleges and have talks. I remember in Atlanta
At Morehouse and Florence Reid was the white head that time, at that time, of Spelman,
the girls college in
Atlanta. And we had these talks on race relations, but there was always...they stopped. Where would you go?
You know,
The most radical question you could talk about would be intermarriage or social equality.
But we didn't - talking about job equality or
educational opportunities, it was a limited field. I mean we just went to the point where a liberal would go.
So that, I think, was what turned me into
going to the workers' school and trying to get down to a more fundamental understanding of what all this was about
Which I could not get either from the
white philanthropist who had been my patrons or the white
liberals and religious leaders who became my friends.
There was a limit to which you didn't go beyond.
