By Cindy Patton

By Cindy Patton”The Gateway to the South” On July 29, 1958, a sub-committee of the much-criticized House Committee on Un-American Activities opened a three-day investigation into communism in the American South. Concerned not to offend the marginally progressive city of Atlanta, the presiding chairman Edwin E. Willis of Louisiana (who had assumed the duties for this hearing in place of Francis E. Walter of Pennsylvania, Chair of the HUAC as a whole), told reporters that”We are here to trace the web of Communist penetration in the industrialized areas of the South. We picked Atlanta for our hearings because it is centrally located and the gateway to the South . .

. . we’re not investigating Atlanta as such.” (“Probe” 1)Indeed, while Atlanta’s mayor William B. Hartsfield – who, during the heyday of the civil rights movement, busily promoted the idea of Atlanta as the “city that is too busy to hate” – had welcomed the subcommittee, which he learned, earlier in July, was headed his way.

He told his regional newspaper that “I think there’s very little communist activity in this section.” Likewise, Georgia’s state attorney general Eugene Cook offered full cooperation from both his department and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, although he, too, said there were few communists in the state.

(Moore, 1958, 8) As the hearings unfolded, it became clearer that several of those who appeared, notably Carl Braden, who had appeared before the Committee in North Carolina, and Frank Wilkerson, who had appeared before the Committee in Los Angles, were strategically testifying in Atlanta order to create the basis for legal challenges to the constitutionality of the committee and its hearings. Although the Committee only had standing to collect information about the structure of the supposed communist groups, these post-WWII through early 1960s era hearings netted tens of thousands of pages of testimony. In these documents were list upon list of individuals who attended a meeting, received mail, ofr otherwise even the most remote form of contact with groups imaged by the Committee to be part of a vast networks of communist and communist-sympathetic organizations. Once a group was declared “subversive,” attending a meeting or receiving mail from it placed an individual on the “subversives” list, a practice know as “citation.”The evidentiary rules for HUAC were in practice nearly non-existent. Athough their legal power was limited to issuing supoeanas, their managed to strike terror across America by threating to jail individuals for contempt if they refused to testify. Their loose attention to what would normally be constitutionally protected procedural rules for prosecution created a frustrating gap between the information they obtained and the actions of the FBI, state bureaus of investigation, and other government policing agencies.

The overreach of the Committee in relationship to its legal power also complicated the act of testifying: many people invoked the Fifth Amendment – that against being forced to incriminate oneself – even though the legal status of testimony before HUAC was equivocal, that is, since it was not a courtroom, it was not clear whether the Fifth Amendment applied. There was, therefore, considerable confusion about the relationship between the House’s “citations” and criminal or legal action that might be investigated and prosecuted by police at the local, state, or national level. Thus, while “citations” were unproven suggestions of un-American activity, the high level of paranoia about spies meant that at the time, those who ran afoul of the Committee were popularly understood as traitors. To make matters worse, HUAC members regularly read lists of names into the publicly-accessible Congressional Record, making it easy for anyone to find out who HUAC believed was a subversive.The general outlines of story of HUAC is well known by most Americans, and indeed, by the time of the Atlanta hearings, the worst of the Committee’s inquisitorial activity was more or less completed. Northern and West Coast officials considered the Committee and its most famous head – Joe McCarthy – to be aberations who had finally be relegated to the pile of paranoic ideas. Indeed today, the idea of the “McCarthy era” is part of the lexicon, and the use of this allegation has reemerged on both sides of the aisle during the Trump presidency .

But it is important to give specificity to this attribution, especially since the current context and that of the Atlanta HUAC hearings, is one in which the voting rights of African Americans are at stake. Whatever the average American knows about the “anti-communist” over-reach of HUAC, few beyond historians of the period realize that what began as an anti-semitic purge of “Jews” from Hollywood and the media, ended in an effort to thwart racial integration in the South, and more specifically, to prevent Black people from voting. In this essay, I consider the contemporaneous impressions of HUAC in Atlanta and compare this with the book-to-film production of William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust. The race relations in the “southland” of the 1950s were deeply unreconcilled, still emotionally tied to defeat of the Confederacy less than a century earlier, and still dominated by the extra-judicial power – indeed, terrorism – of white racist individuals, organizations (Ku Klux Klan), and by state and local government practices that enforced racial segregation. I use the Faulkner-based film to reconstruct an epistemology of what white and Black Southerners could know about the racist system in which they lived.