Having raised the spectre of communism and its threat to the Palmetto State, Timmerman then suggested a means of coping with the problem, one not very original, to be sure. He recommended establishment of a “permanent legislative committee to investigate communist activities in our state.” In addition, the Governor urged that “consideration be given to the establishment of more realistic requirements for admission to teach in state-supported institutions.” Applicants should be screened more closely before they were employed. Concluding on the following note Timmerman declared: “When academic freedom supersedes loyalty to one’s country, to one’s state and to our trust in God, it becomes an instrumentality of treason and profanes the faith of our nation.”[384]
Senator Gressette of the state’s committee to preserve educational segregation lauded the Governor’s recommendation for a new minor league Un-American Activities Committee. So did other members of the legislature. But the three Allen professors in a statement to the radio and press services blasted the Governor. “The fact of the matter is—and Governor Timmerman knows it well—the real need here in South Carolina is the achievement of American democracy for all the state’s citizens rather than a committee to investigate so-called communistic activities.” The three professors, all church members, also struck back at the Chief Executive’s atheist innuendo. “It comes with ill grace,” they asserted, “for the Governor to question the religious faith of others when he himself so openly repudiates the fundamental teaching of Him who died that all men might dwell together as brothers.” Nor did they think that Timmerman could pose as the shield and defender of the Constitution. “It ill becomes a Governor who spends so much of his time repudiating the Constitution of our country and endeavoring to undermine the highest court of the land to pass upon the patriotism of other Americans. If belief in racial segregation is to be made the definition of loyalty, the vast majority of Americans become disloyal in the eyes of Governor Timmerman.”[385]
On the same day that the Governor was reaffirming his determination to maintain segregation in South Carolina, eleven Allen students appeared on the campus of the University of South Carolina seeking application blanks to permit them to take the University’s entrance examinations. They were turned away by the director of the University’s examination and counseling service who explained that his hands were tied by state law. “According to the orders under which we operate,” he told the students, “I cannot examine you and there is no purpose in supplying you with applications.” Six days later a group of four students from Benedict College, another Negro institution in Columbia, also applied for examination application blanks and were similarly rebuffed.[386]
No effort was made to molest the Negroes when they were on the University of South Carolina campus, though one USC student is said to have leaned out a window and shouted, “Here come the niggers.” During the evening, however, a cross was burned on the University’s athletic field and an effigy of a Negro was hung up on the campus. Telephone calls were received at Allen threatening the University with bombings unless the Negro students desisted in their efforts to enter the University of South Carolina.[387]
Governor Timmerman’s ill-tempered and ill-conceived pressure on Allen opened the door for the very type of law suit that officials of white state-supported universities have been dreading since 1954. The Allen applicants, four of them ministers, indicated that they would resort to “legal steps” to gain admission. “We plan to see this thing through,” said one of their spokesmen. “We all feel that Negroes have been ostracized by being kept out of the University and our cups are just about to run over.”[388]
Only the future can tell, of course, what Governor Timmerman triggered off in his effort to rid Rideout, Wiggins and Hoffman from the Allen faculty. The question of admission of Negroes to white state-supported universities had to be faced sooner or later, but officials of the latter would have preferred to face it later. But to explain Timmerman’s attitude toward the three professors is something else again. The “communist” issue was convenient, if a bit dated, but those who have closely followed the segregation question in South Carolina since the Supreme Court decision of 1954 are inclined to believe that the reason is less ideological than local.
Since the purge of the state Negro college at Orangeburg—the institution is on probation with accreditation agencies because it does not have a sufficient number of holders of the Ph.D. degree on its faculty—Allen has been the chief center for Negro militancy in South Carolina. The three professors who have been the target of official attack have been prominent amongst those on the campus who have urged the University’s students to assert their rights, including the right to sit where they please on city buses. In all of the newspaper accounts of the Allen affair, these facts have not been mentioned, but it is suggested here that they have been governing. Also in the new administration of President Veal and in the person of Bishop Bonner, state authorities were quick to detect a lack of militancy present in their predecessors. It would appear that they have sought to exploit this “softness” and to repeat their disgraceful performance at Orangeburg. But the Allen trustees were made of sterner stuff than the Governor and the State Board of Education had supposed.
The Governor’s frustration was compounded by temporary failure to bring about the dismissal of three white faculty members from Benedict College, a Negro Baptist institution located directly across the street from Allen. In a special message to the General Assembly on January 29, Timmerman cited from the files of the House Un-American Activities Committee the records of three Benedict professors. He also told the legislators that Dr. J. A. Bacoats, president of Benedict and highly respected by both whites and Negroes throughout the state, had delivered a speech in 1941 at a “Protestantism Answers Hate” dinner-forum allegedly sponsored by a “communist-front publication.”[389]
Bacoats and two of the three professors cited, Dr. Lewis Smith and Dr. J. Spencer Kennard, answered the Governor in statements to the press. The former declared: “I have never been a communist nor held membership in the Communist Party. And as I see it from where I now stand, I shall never be a member of the Communist Party.” Smith, a professor of English, said he had no intention of resigning and that he was being attacked “by the same forces that would keep the Negro people from achieving full equality.” Kennard, a Baptist minister and a member of the Benedict history department, asserted that the Governor had “set out deliberately to smear the character of a man who devoted his entire life to serving the Master.”[390]
The governor’s attack on Benedict was successful only in uniting the Negro community in defense of the College (far more so than had been true of the Allen affair) and in alarming white conservatives. The Inter-Denominational Ministerial Alliance of Columbia (Negro), criticizing the Governor’s proposal for a state Un-American Activities committee, held that such a group would be a “fascist gestapo” and threaten Negro academic freedom. It also questioned the very legality of such a committee in the light of recent Supreme Court decisions. Likewise, John H. McCray, chairman of the South Carolina Progressive Democrats, said: “Negro leadership in South Carolina has maintained an eternal and vigorous alert against influence of communism among its people....” And from R. Beverley Herbert, a conservative white attorney of Columbia, came the warning against assuming that men were communists because of past association with left-wing organizations. But the crowning blow came when Benedict’s board of trustees, which includes several white men, among them Dr. Paul Wheeler, a well known clergyman; Dr. R. Archie Ellis, pastor of the Columbia First Baptist Church and B. M. Edwards, a prominent South Carolina banker, issued a public statement completely exonerating President Bacoats and the three faculty members.[391]