Young Leaders Change
CORE & NAACP
Julie Varner Wright, with the NAACP, admires the “Jim Crow Must Go” tie of Thomas Walter Gaither, with the Congress of Racial Equality. Photo by Cecil J. Williams. Courtesy of Cecil J. Williams
Thomas Walter Gaither
At first, Thomas Walter Gaither saw nonviolence as compliance, as the behavior he had witnessed among black elders of his childhood and had disavowed. That’s what he told Rev. Glenn E. Smiley, a white Methodist preacher and pacifist, who spoke at Claflin University in Orangeburg, South Carolina. Smiley belonged to both the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a Chicago-founded interracial group that had held sit-ins since the 1950s, and the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), an international peace organization founded in 1914. In Montgomery, Alabama, Smiley tutored the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in nonviolent resistance during the 1955-56 bus boycott.
Gaither told Smiley, after hearing him promote nonviolence, “That’s precisely why we are in the predicament we are in.” However, Gaither also read Life of Mahatma Gandhi by Louis Fischer and The Gandhi Reader by Homer A. Jack, a CORE co-founder. The leader of India’s successful nonviolent resistance of Great Britain’s rule, Mohandas Gandhi practiced satyagraha, or holding onto truth, sometimes translated as “soul power.” Gandhi distinguished satyagraha from passive resistance, which he understood as “a weapon of the weak” that could be characterized by hatred and eventually devolve into violence. Satyagraha included civil disobedience and the overlapping refusal to submit to injustice.
Inspired by the February 1, 1960 sit-ins held in Greensboro, North Carolina, Gaither and others began plans for sit-ins in Orangeburg. Groups of thirty to forty students each from Claflin and next-door South Carolina State College met several times to study CORE Rules for Action and Cracking the Color Line, a 34-page booklet describing CORE’s successful desegregation of restaurants, theaters, and swimming pools in the 1940s and 1950s. They also studied King’s Stride Toward Freedom, his 1958 memoir of the Montgomery bus boycott.
On February 25, Gaither and other youths led Orangeburg’s first organized sit-in.
“Gaither decided that nonviolence offered ‘a high moral plane that the opposition couldn’t begin to understand.’ He recognized something even segregationists commented upon, as jeering whites assaulted stoic sit-in participants: ‘You became a threat to the system when you sat down to order a Coke or hamburger. When a nice, well-dressed polite person shows up for a hamburger, and you won’t serve them, it says something about you, not
about the person wanting to be recognized as a human being.’”
“During the first Orangeburg sit-in, March 25: ‘In what had already become a standard rebuttal, the Kress manager began removing the padded counter seats from their pedestals, one by one. Each student remaining seated until the manager approached, then relinquished his or her seat. Afterward the Kress employees strung a rope barrier, intending to allow in only whites. The Associated Press reported, ‘About 25 Negroes took seats briefly Thursday at the Kress store in Orangeburg but departed quietly when prepared signs were displayed.’ Two Negroes placed $1 bills on the counter, and a third dropped 15 cents in change. One said, ‘Thanks for the service we didn’t get.’”
Julie Varner Wright
The Ku Klux Klan burned crosses in the cornfield next to the Varner family’s Summerville home. The house’s floor-to-ceiling windows exposed the family to the participants in KKK meetings, and Mildred Collins Varner would push Julie and her siblings behind the sofa to hide them from the hooded men and shield them from rocks or bricks or gunfire that might hit the house their father had built.
As a child, Julie saw contradictions everywhere. Her father, John Varner, owned a grocery store, and she bristled when he responded with a humble “yes, sir” and “no, sir” to white men. Her father’s twin, James Varner, cut white men’s hair, and those customers prohibited any other black men in the barber shop. “I couldn’t understand the duality,” she said. In the local drugstore, she tried more than once to take a counter seat and order a fountain soda, only to be told to move along. As a teen she was kicked out for demanding service.
She pondered the hate she witnessed and experienced daily and concluded that emotion betrayed a lack of understanding. She decided that she was needed, that God had given her special talents she could use to work against segregation.
The KKK’s local presence inspired in her a need for action not resignation. “And if anything started me thinking about fighting for freedom it was…those incidences where we had to really run for cover,” she told Rebecca Dominguez-Karimi during a 2008 oral history interview.
So she had long given thought to racism by the time she enrolled at Claflin University in 1957. While she had married at 17 and born a daughter in eleventh grade, Julie Varner Wright finished high school and attended college because her parents cared for her daughter and her church helped her pay tuition and expenses. She also worked for a social sciences professor during her Claflin tenure and led the NAACP youth council, but her focus stayed on academics.
A straight-A student, Wright caught the interest of the University of South Carolina (USC) in 1958, when the local newspaper celebrated her academic success, publishing a photo of the light-skinned young woman. USC assumed she was a white student connected to white professors at Claflin and invited her to apply for admission. That interest ended when Wright showed up for an interview with the Rev. Isaiah DeQuincey Newman, an officer with the state NAACP. She tried to enroll again in 1960 and was again refused, according to A History of the University of South Carolina, 1940-2000.
“The NAACP wanted me to fight it, and my mother and father didn’t want it,” said Wright. She declined to sue because her parents insisted the cost to her family would be too high. “When you make that kind of decision, you impact yourself and your whole family.” The rejection and the decision not to fight the racial discrimination hurt. “This cemented my desire to fight for freedom,” she said.
Wright completed college in three years. Her father’s schooling had ended in fifth grade, her mother’s after one year of college, and she wanted them proud of their firstborn. Her first organized protest experience, picketing downtown Orangeburg drugstores, occurred when the white professor who employed her encouraged not only Wright but his entire class to protest segregation. On March 15, 1960, Wright found herself in Columbia’s Central Correctional Institute when mass arrests during the thousand-strong Orangeburg march resulted in protesters being bused to the state prison. She and others were released the following day without charges being filed.
Wright believed that some black leaders didn’t directly or effectively address segregation and thus she couldn’t leave her own future “to just anybody.” That motivated her to seek the part she needed to play. She chose recruiting other young people to the NAACP. Its youth and college councils began in 1935-1936, under the direction of Walter White, NAACP executive secretary until 1955, and Juanita E. White, the first youth secretary.
Wright objected to CORE encouraging direct action without the funds to get students out of jail. She believed the NAACP’s commitment to using court cases to end segregation could be hampered by the costly legal defense of sit-in participants from other organizations. So she not only took a job with the NAACP but sometimes opposed CORE’s tactics.
Upon her graduation in May 1960, Wright worked in South Carolina and then, beginning in January 1961, throughout the South as a youth field secretary. She was supervised by Ruby Hurley, who served as national youth secretary from 1943 to 1952 then as director of the Southeast regional branch of the NAACP. The two were among very few women in NAACP leadership positions.
The Crisis, official Publication of the NAACP, announced Wright’s hiring in its March 16, 1961 issue.
Wright’s work demanded courage — repeatedly.
In 1961, Wright walked alone into a jail in Santee, South Carolina, assigned to investigate the suspicious death of a black man active in voter registration. Jailers showed Wright the prisoner’s naked body. Supposedly, he had strangled himself by a belt attached to a bunk rail. “But he was too tall,” said Wright. During the ordeal, she thought, “Julie, where did you get that self-confidence that if you asked a police officer to see a body, he would let you?” She kept working because “Everybody ought to have a right to live.”
In Mississippi, Wright often accompanied Medgar Evers, that state’s NAACP field secretary since 1954, on assignments. They would ride many miles down dark country roads without car lights, intending to reduce the risk of being recognized and attacked. On one call to the courthouse in Jackson, Mississippi, law enforcement officers set dogs on Evers and Wright when the two approached the marble steps. The two turned and ran for their car. Evers pushed Wright into the car first. The dogs raked his back as he lunged inside.
On June 12, 1963, Evers was murdered, shot in the back as he walked from his car to his house. Twice, all-white juries deadlocked over the guilt or innocence of Byron De La Beckwith, a member of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens Council (WCC) charged with Evers’ assassination. In 1994, new evidence led to a third trial and Beckwith’s conviction.
The year Evers died, Wright left her NAACP post, and in 1964, began graduate school at Atlanta University in Atlanta, Georgia. Upon graduation she worked as a reference librarian, then in posts directing library systems. In 1993, as Julie V. Hunter, she was appointed director of the Auburn Avenue Research Library on Black History and Culture in Atlanta, Georgia. In 2002, she was appointed the first executive director of the African American Research Library and Cultural Center in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.