[L-I] Southern Conference Educational Fund [the realities]

The link posted earlier this morning on ASDnet  -- "SCEF and CPUSA" -- is
simply another instance of substantive misinformation. This is the case with
the post's "label" -- and the historical outline given by the link [from
whomever] is certainly replete with errors and omissions. The problems that
confronted a rapidly waning SCEF in the early 1970s especially had nothing
to do one way or the other with CPUSA -- which can certainly not be blamed
for those!  These difficulties involved other  groups and issues of which I,
frankly, know little.

Eldri and I left the South in the Summer of '67 and went into the Pacific
Northwest and then, for an academic year, to Coe College in Iowa.  From 1969
to 1973, I directed the large-scale grassroots organization of block clubs
and related groups [mostly Black, Puerto Rican, and Chicano] on Chicago's
very bloody South/Southwest Side.  Also active in Native affairs and issues
on the Northside, we organized the long-enduring, all-Indian Native American
Community Organizational Training Center [of which I served for a number of
years as Chair -- and did so for some time after we left Chicago.] Later, we
were in Iowa again, then up-state New York, then the Navajo Nation -- and
then to the Northern Plains -- and now to Idaho.  The organizing trail is
very much a Romany trail.

SCEF, very broadly Left in a completely non-sectarian fashion,  grew out of
the very fine Southern Conference on Human Welfare --  a courageous and
interracial group of Southern liberals and some radicals originating in the
New Deal era. SCEF had its most effective period from the onset of the 1950s
to the retirement of its excellent executive director, Jim Dombrowski, at
the end of 1965.

During that period, its splendid newspaper, The Southern Patriot, was very
capably edited by Alfred Maund and later by the equally capable Anne Braden.
[ Al Maund,  a good friend of mine, is a noted Southern writer and author of
a great novel, The Big Boxcar,  and was also editor of Labor's Daily and
later a key staffer of International Chemical Workers Union.]  The SCEF
board was a fine interracial cross section of sensible Southern activists --
religious and labor and general social justice folk -- and its advisory
committee extended into Arizona.   Aubrey Williams [a major Southern leader
with a highly placed New Deal background]  served as its President for years
and was later succeeded by the Reverend Fred L. Shuttlesworth of Birmingham
[President of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights and National
Secretary of SCLC.]

My own activist links with SCEF began soon after Eldri and I arrived at
Tougaloo in the Summer of '61.  Almost immediately I became Advisor to the
Jackson Youth Council of NAACP and a member of the board of directors of the
Mississippi State Conference of NAACP Branches.  When we launched our
historic Jackson boycott in late 1962, SCEF -- especially through Jim and
Anne Braden and Carl Braden -- gave us a great deal of invaluable
assistance.  The very effective Jackson Boycott Movement became, in due
organizing course, the massive and historic Jackson Movement in which youth
played a major role at all points. I was Chair of its Strategy Committee.

 At the conclusion of the very hard-fought, super-dramatic and extremely
sanguinary Jackson Movement era, Jim Dombrowski offered me the position of
SCEF Field Organizer -- with the understanding that I could do my own thing
pretty much in any way I wished.  I was pleased to accept.  We set my salary
at the precise salary figure drawn  from NAACP by my  very good friend, the
recently murdered Medgar Evers:  $6,500.00 with some expenses and benefits.
At the same time I joined SCEF, my very good friend, Miss Ella J. Baker,
founder and Advisor to SNCC [who had been SCLC's first Executive Director],
accepted Jim's offer of an ongoing position as Consultant.  I was
instrumental, with Jim's enthusiastic concurrence, in securing the New York
law firm of Kunstler, Kunstler and Kinoy [known affectionately as KKK] as
SCEF's counsel. [Bill Kunstler had already represented me in several key
Mississippi cases.]

Much was certainly accomplished by SCEF during the next two years or so.  I
worked in grassroots civil rights and anti-Klan organization in several very
hard-core  Deep Southern areas. Ella played a critical role in liaison work
with SNCC and other projects and gave me much assistance at key points.
Carl Braden did a great deal of valuable, on-going work with Northern
supporters -- and was much involved in Appalachian affairs.  A key
fund-raising role was carried by Howard Melish.  Through The Southern
Patriot, Anne Braden reported Southern civil rights news -- much of which
would otherwise have been obscure -- to a national and international
audience and gave much media-linkage assistance to  a wide variety of
grassroots civil rights projects.

Jim Dombrowski, severely crippled by illness [but he marched in the SCLC
demonstrations at Danville, Virginia], continued to very capably hold down
the SCEF national office on 822 Perdido Street, New Orleans.  [My old
Chicano Mine-Mill companeros were always intrigued by that address since it,
of course, translates into "Nowhere."]  During this period, we were
constantly Red-baited and attacked on many fronts -- including the notorious
Louisiana Un-American Activities Committee/State Police raid on the New
Orleans SCEF office in October 1963, the arrest of Jim and two other SCEF
officials, the seizure of the SCEF records -- and their illegal shipment by
train into Mississippi where they were then taken by Mississippi Senator Jim
Eastland and his U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee.  SCEF sued and,
in 1965, won a total victory at the USSC level:  Dombrowski v. Pfister.

At the end of 1965, Jim retired as SCEF director and Anne and Carl Braden
became co-directors.  At the point Jim retired, Ella and I both left.  She,
of course, continued to work with SNCC and related projects and I continued
my organizing work in the South -- in radical grassroots anti-poverty
activism [much support from Highlander Research and Education Center.]  Ella
and I and Jim kept in very close touch, always, both during this period and
thereafter all the way through.  Jim died at New Orleans in 1983 and Ella
passed away in NYC in 1986. I miss them much indeed.

After our departure, SCEF hired a much larger number of staff people than
had formerly been the case -- essentially on subsistence "Movement wages."
In time, internal difficulties developed.

The major SCEF papers are at State Historical Society of Wisconsin:  Jim's
collected papers, those of the Bradens, and mine.  [My papers are also held
by Mississippi Department of Archives and History.]  An excellent biography
of Jim was done by another good friend of mine and I strongly recommend it:
Frank Adams'  James A. Dombrowski: An American Heretic [Knoxville,
University of Tennessee Press, 1992.]

I have a fair amount of material on SCEF organizationally at our large
website www.hunterbear.org  -- stemming from our part of its extremely
productive period -- and a good deal relating to my own work as SCEF Field
Organizer.  It all starts at this point
http://www.hunterbear.org/creative.htm

Fraternally -

Hunter Gray  [ Hunterbear ]
www.hunterbear.org  ( strawberry socialism )
Protected by Na´shdo´i´ba´i´





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