Memphis, the Peabody, and the SHA: a fifty-year commemoration.

Introduction

ONE OF THE LANDMARK EVENTS IN THE HISTORY OF THE SOUTHERN Historical Association took place fifty years ago this month in Memphis. At the annual meeting at the Peabody Hotel in November 1955, the program for the Phi Alpha Theta dinner consisted of three prominent speakers--none of them historians per se--in a discussion billed as "The Segregation Decisions," a title that of course refers to the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, handed down in May 1954, and the Court's follow-up ruling on implementation, announced in May 1955. In addition to the obvious topicality of the session, the panel attracted considerable attention for two other reasons: William Faulkner was one of the panelists, and the Peabody Hotel initially sought to ban African American members of the SHA from attending the dinner session.

For the Association's meeting in Memphis in 2004, President Wayne Flynt and the program committee arranged an opening-night session that recalled the controversial panel, and the SHA was able to stage it in the very room--then called the Continental Ball Room--of the Peabody Hotel in which the 1955 session had taken place. The Association is very grateful to the management of the Peabody Hotel both for their full cooperation in allowing us to return to their elegant ballroom to discuss a rather dark moment in the hotel's own history and for their fine treatment of John Hope Franklin. (Note what he says at the end of his comments.) The session was followed by a celebration--slightly premature--of his ninetieth birthday, with a cake contributed by the Peabody Hotel.

Anne Firor Scott, who presided over the 2004 session, labeled the panel "three historic artifacts and a scholar to make sense of us." Fred A. Bailey is the scholar, and the lecture he delivered, growing out of his current work on southern historians and the history they made, is reproduced here in revised and somewhat expanded form. The "historic artifacts"--all distinguished scholars and former SHA presidents--then recounted their own memories of not only that occasion but also other SHA meetings at which racial issues were confronted in a variety of ways. Their comments are reproduced here essentially unrevised--just as they delivered them last year. (For anyone who would like to see the session in its entirety, a videotape is still available from the SHA office for $10.)

Of the three, only Thomas D. Clark was at the meeting in 1955. He had served as the "toastmaster" of the dinner, and he vividly recalled for us, at age 101 and without a note in hand, just what it was like to be in that room on that occasion. (Sadly, Dr. Clark died this past summer, just two weeks shy of his 102nd birthday. See an obituary by Thomas H. Appleton Jr. in this issue.) John Hope Franklin chose not to attend the meeting that year, and, in explaining why he did not, he told the audience much about the challenges of being an African American member of the SHA during that era. Anne Scott was not at the 1955 Memphis meeting either and focused instead on another memorable meeting, at Asheville in 1963, and the presidential address delivered there by James W. Silver.

The SHA leadership recognized the significance and topicality of this session in 1955, and President Bell I. Wiley and Secretary-Treasurer Bennett H. Wall arranged to have the talks by William Faulkner, Benjamin E. Mays, and Cecil Sims published in pamphlet form early the next year under the title The Segregation Decisions. We have reproduced the content of that pamphlet in its entirety on the SHA website, for anyone interested in further pursuit of the observations and memories that follow here.

Anne Scott concluded her introductory remarks at last year's session by noting the irony of historians, who know a great deal about the past, often knowing very little about their own history as historians. Given the richness of much of the SHA's history and the remarkable memories of those who lived it, we feel that last year's special session is worthy of wider dissemination and preservation in printed form, and we are very pleased to be able to present it all here in the pages of the Journal.

MR. INSCOE is the secretary-treasurer of the Southern Historical Association and a professor of history at the University of Georgia.