But the years of my twenties were enkindling and tumultuous. The world was well into that series of social revolutions which started, we are told, with the First World War and is not yet ended, and the American Negro people were a kind of revolutionary catalytic agent in their own country. It was their historic role, to be sure, but it had been suspended while Negroes played a supernumerary part in the European conflict. Americans in general seemed not to realize what had happened in Europe. They did not think of it as change. It was merely an eruption which they had helped put down and were intent on sealing off with the cement of isolationism. But after the war American Negroes reenlivened the spirit of revolt, and the country was alarmed by the truculent persistence with which they fought for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, for instance, and by the vigor of their opposition to the confirmation of Judge John Parker to the United States Supreme Court, and by the inroads of Communism among them, and by their implacable solidarity in the Scottsboro case.
How emotional the times were! What comings-together, what incitement! Out of college just three years at the time of the Scottsboro case in 1931, I remember the almost weekly meetings. Especially do I remember one at which Alice Dunbar Nelson spoke. The widow of Paul Dunbar, a Negro poet nationally famous at the turn of the century, Mrs. Nelson had been one of my teachers in high school and an old family friend. She was beautiful—tall, with ivory skin and a head of glinting red-gold hair—and she was also of great and irresistible charm. One thought of her as being saturated in a serene culture, even in divinity. I doubt that she had ever been much concerned with the common run of Negroes, and that night as she spoke to a large audience of all classes of a united people, she was like a goddess come to earth—but a goddess. In the end, with tears glistening in her eyes, she stretched out her gloved hands and cried, “Thank God for the Scottsboro case! It has brought us together.”
It was a thing to arouse even one constitutionally insensible to mass excitement, and I was not insensible—not in those days. I had found that out the year before, my second in the deep South. A student of mine was murdered, apparently in cold blood, by a white man or men. It happened in the late afternoon, in a section of Atlanta some distance from the college, and I knew nothing of it for several hours. But that night a colleague of about my own age rushed into my dormitory room without the usual courtesy of knocking.
“Come on,” he said, gesturing vehemently, “we got to go.”
I resented his bursting in on me. We did not particularly care for each other anyway. “You might have knocked,” I said.
“For Christ’s sake, this is no time for the amenities!” he said. “We got to go.”
“Go where? I’m not going anywhere.”
“To the meeting.”
“What meeting?”
“My God, man, don’t you know that Dennis Hubert’s been lynched?” His eyes blazed like fires in a draft. He was greatly agitated.