Jim Crow, Civil Defense, and the Hydrogen Bomb: Race, Evacuation Planning, and the Geopolitics of Fear in 1950s Savannah, Georgia Jonathan Leib, Thomas Chapman Southeastern Geographer, Volume 51, Number 4, Winter 2011, pp. 578-595 (Article) Published by The University of North Carolina Press DOI: For additional information about this article Access provided by Wyoming, Univ of (30 Nov 2018 12:22 GMT) https://doi.org/10.1353/sgo.2011.0034 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/464686
Transcript
Jim Crow, Civil Defense, and the Hydrogen Bomb: Race, Evacuation Planning, and the Geopolitics of Fear in 1950s Savannah, Georgia
Jonathan Leib, Thomas Chapman
Southeastern Geographer, Volume 51, Number 4, Winter 2011, pp. 578-595(Article)
Published by The University of North Carolina PressDOI:
For additional information about this article
Access provided by Wyoming, Univ of (30 Nov 2018 12:22 GMT)
Jim Crow, Civil Defense, and the Hydrogen BombRace, Evacuation Planning, and the Geopolitics
of Fear in 1950s Savannah, Georgia
JONATHAN LEIBOld Dominion University
THOMAS CHAPMANOld Dominion University
In 1950, in the beginning phases of the Cold War,
the U.S. Congress passed the Federal Civil Defense
Act with the goal of protecting civilian popula-
tions in case of nuclear conflict. By the mid-1950s
civil defense officials were busy developing de-
tailed mass evacuation plans for American cities
seen as targets of potential Soviet hydrogen bomb
attacks. The 1950s was also the height of Jim
Crow racial segregation in the American South.
Using these important historical contingencies as
a political, social, and cultural backdrop, we ex-
plore the geographical implications of Cold War
civil defense planning efforts in a 1950s Southern
segregated city, Savannah, Georgia, through the
dual lenses of race and the geopolitics of fear. We
do this by scrutinizing Savannah’s 1955 Hydro-
gen Bomb Evacuation Plan, particularly as it per-
tained to the evacuation of the city’s school-
children. Overall, the plan detailing local civil
defense planners’ strategy for evacuating Savan-
nah residents makes no specific mention of racial
segregation. But upon closer examination, the
plan suggests that the maintenance of Jim Crow
racial segregation, as well as larger Cold War geo-
political fears playing out at the local level, were
key concerns in carrying out evacuation strategies
in Savannah.
En 1950, en las faces iniciales de la Guerra Fría, el
Congreso de los EE.UU. pasó la Ley Federal de De-
fensa Civil con la meta de proteger la población
civil en caso de un conflicto nuclear. Para medi-
ados de los 1950s, los oficiales de defensa civil
estaban ocupados desarrollando planes detalla-
dos de evacuación masiva para las ciudades esta-
dounidenses que eran vistas como potenciales
blancos de ataques con bombas de hidrogeno sovi-
éticas. Los 1950s fueron también el clímax de la
segregación racial de Jim Crow en el sur de los
EE.UU. Utilizando estas importantes contingen-
cias históricas como contexto político, social, y cul-
tural, exponemos las implicaciones geográficas de
los esfuerzos en planificación para la defensa civil
de la Guerra Fría en la ciudad sureña segregada de
los 1950s, Savannah, Georgia, a través de las vi-
siones duales de raza y las geopolíticas del miedo.
Hacemos esto al examinar el Plan de Evacuación
de Bombas de Hidrogeno de 1955 de Savannah,
particularmente en lo que se refería a la evacua-
ción de los niños en las escuelas de la ciudad. En
general, el plan que detalla la estrategia de los
planificadores locales de defensa civil para evac-
uar los residentes de Savannah no hace mención
específica a la segregación racial. Sin embargo, al
examinarlo detenidamente, el plan sugiere que la
Jim Crow, Civil Defense, and the Hydrogen Bomb 579
preservación de la segregación racial de Jim Crow,
como también la preservación de los mayores
miedos geopolíticos de la Guerra Fría actuando a
nivel local, eran preocupaciones claves en la ejecu-
ción de las estrategias de evacuación en Savannah.
key words: Race, Evacuation planning, Cold
War, Geopolitics of Fear, American South
introduction
The 1950s are viewed by many as anostalgic time, a decade that tended to‘‘focus on the good things while overlook-ing the bad . . . a happy, simple, placidtime’’ (Oakley 1990, ix–x). However, thedecade was not necessarily ‘happy, simple,[and] placid’ for those Americans worriedabout growing international tensions orfor those African Americans living in theAmerican South. The 1950s was the era ofthe emerging Cold War, where increaseddiplomatic tensions and the acceleratingnuclear arms race between the UnitedStates and the Soviet Union left mostAmericans uncertain about their futuresurvival. As a result, there was much con-cern at all levels of government as to howto protect Americans should World War IIIbreak out. In 1950, Congress passed theFederal Civil Defense Act with the goal ofprotecting civilian populations in case ofnuclear conflict, and by the mid-1950scivil defense officials were busy develop-ing detailed mass evacuation plans forAmerican cities seen as targets of potentialSoviet hydrogen bomb attacks (Winkler1984; Zeigler 1985). In addition, the1950s was anything but ‘happy, simple,[and] placid’ for millions of African Ameri-cans living in the American South, as thisdecade marked the height of Jim Crow ra-
cial segregation within the region (Wood-ward 1974; Kennedy 1990 [1959]; Dwyerand Alderman 2008).
Utilizing these twin historical contin-gencies as a political, social, and culturalbackdrop, we explore the geographicalimplications of Cold War civil defenseplanning efforts in a 1950s Southern seg-regated city, Savannah, Georgia, by scru-tinizing that city’s 1955 Hydrogen BombEvacuation Plan, particularly as it per-tained to the evacuation of Savannah’sschoolchildren. Overall, the plan detailinglocal civil defense planners’ strategy forevacuating Savannah residents in case of ahydrogen bomb attack makes no specificmention of maintaining racial segrega-tion. But a closer examination suggeststhat maintaining many of the aspects ofJim Crow segregation was of paramountimportance in carrying out the evacuationplan, particularly the spatial implicationsof evacuating Savannah’s schoolchildrento the countryside. Notwithstanding theabsurdity of enforcing Jim Crow in theface of all out nuclear war and evacuation,we examine contemporary statewide andlocal accounts of Cold War evacuationplanning efforts to reveal clues about howthe dual roles of race and the geopolitics offear played out at the local level in thissegregated Southern city.
In this article, we seek to contribute tothe recent reinvigoration of SouthernStudies both inside and outside the disci-pline of geography. Geographers have longbeen interested in and conducted researchon the region, whether as evidenced overthe past fifty years in the pages of theSoutheastern Geographer or recent sum-maries of the insights about the AmericanSouth collected by geographers and others
580 leib and chapman
(e.g., Wilson and Pillsbury 2006). How-ever, recent work on the American Southhas taken on a decidedly more ‘criticalturn’ applying concepts and theories fromcritical human geography to the study ofthe region. Recent examples of how the‘critical turn’ is being applied to the studyof the American South include geogra-phers’ recent work on how and where thepolitics of memory and heritage are beingleveraged to both reinforce and challengethe region’s long-standing racial relations(e.g., Webster and Leib 2001, Leib 2002,Hoelscher 2003, Dwyer and Alderman2008), and how marginalized populationsare challenging the region’s status quo and(re)making the South’s spaces and places(e.g., Chapman et al. 2007, Webster et al.2010, Cravey and Valdivia 2011, Winders2011). In this article, we contribute to thisreinvigoration of Southern Studies bybringing together recent work in criticalgeopolitics with critical race studies toshow how Cold War fears were used to re-inforce the South’s Jim Crow segregationsystem.
race, the cold war, and the
geopolitics of fear in the
american south
Joanne Sharp (1996, p 557) argues thata critical reading of geopolitics ‘‘demands ageographical praxis—a refusal to accept theabstract logic of geopolitics but instead em-body it in historically and culturally specificinterests.’’ Certainly Cold War attitudes atthe national level, as well as Jim Crow seg-regation strategies in the American South,were rooted in such interests, many ofwhich tended to overlap at multiple geo-graphical scales. Indeed, these narrativesare similar to today’s ‘terrorist’ fears, in
that public discourse is entrenched in a cul-ture of fear and otherness that invoke vari-ous aspects of territory, security, and other-ness (Pain and Smith 2008; Koskela 2009).Nationally, Cold War insecurities and fearsabout a ‘Soviet attack’ were based uponxenophobic reactions to discursive con-structions of global external threats of ‘theother’ invading the territory. Alongsidethese fears, angst among the white popula-tion towards African Americans during JimCrow also played out as a racialized fear of‘the other’ that ‘threatened’ the ‘security’ ofthe territory, albeit the ‘threat’ was internaland regionalized. Both historical narra-tives underlie a longstanding and diversify-ing interest by geographers in examiningmulti-scalar socio-spatial phenomena thatare intimately connected to identity, place-making, and political questions aboutpower and the role of the state (Marston2004; Pain and Smith 2008). Hence thepsycho-social manifestations of anxiety, in-security, and uncertainty that were somuch a part of the Cold War era were alsodeeply implicated with racial segregationin the American South, becoming powerfultools of the cultural politics of control thatsaturated every aspect of southern life(Hopkins and Smith 2008).
These so-called ‘fears’ also manifestedthemselves through ‘moral panics,’ par-ticularly the white Southern outrage in re-sponse to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954decision in Brown v. Board of Education,which declared segregated schools uncon-stitutional (Bartley 1990; Grant 1993;Leib 1995). Indeed, opposition to theBrown decision and a desire to maintainthe Jim Crow system was expressed bymany in the white southern public. Reedand Black (1993) note that in 1956, twoyears after the Brown decision, only 14
Jim Crow, Civil Defense, and the Hydrogen Bomb 581
percent of white southerners approved ofintegrating schools. As well, Rindfuss, St.John and Reed (1978) attribute a sharpdecline in white birthrates in the Southtwelve to eighteen months after the Browndecision to white Southerners’ fear ofbringing new children into an uncertainfuture in a post-Jim Crow South. Of courseracial segregation is not simply a physicalseparation of the races, but is also a socio-spatial manifestation of power. Delaney(1998, p 95) reminds us that ‘‘segregationwas socially constructed in order to rein-force relations of racial domination andsubordination.’’
Given this challenge to white southernhegemony, white politicians in Georgianot only ‘‘responded predictably’’ to theBrown ruling (Bartley 1990, p 207), butled the way in resisting Brown (Grant1993). Indeed, public statements by prom-inent Georgia politicians in the mid-1950smade it clear that schools would not beintegrated no matter what the SupremeCourt had decided. For example, in 1955,Herman Talmadge, a member of Georgia’sleading political family, who had just com-pleted two terms as governor and wasabout to embark on a long career in theU.S. Senate, codified his views on segrega-tion in general and the Brown decision inparticular in his book, You and Segrega-tion. In his book, Talmadge (1955, p viii)argued that eliminating segregation would‘‘destroy the Bill of Rights and our Ameri-can way of life.’’ The religious rhetoric sur-rounding the Cold War (with Soviets de-picted as ‘godless Communists’) was alsovery much part of Talmadge’s rationaleabout maintaining Jim Crow. Segregationwas, according to Talmadge, ‘divinely in-spired’. Indeed, Talmadge linked the CivilRights Movement with the Cold War by
suggesting that desegregation efforts werea sign of Soviet ideological success vis-a-visthe United States (see Dudziak 2000). Asquoted in a 1956 issue of Life (Wallace1956, p 119), one of the most popularmagazines of the era:
‘‘God advocates segregation,’’ Gover-nor Talmadge maintains. ‘‘There arefive different races and God createdthem all different. He did not intendthem to be mixed or He would nothave separated or segregated them.Certainly history shows that nationscomposed of a mongrel race lose theirstrength and become weak, lazy andindifferent. They become easy prey tooutside nations. And isn’t that just ex-actly what the Communists want tohappen in the United States?’’
The city of Savannah, the then secondlargest city in Georgia after Atlanta, had itsown complicated history of race relations(Grant 1993, Tuck 2001, Fraser 2003, Al-derman 2010). Compared to other parts ofthe state, Savannah ‘‘had a history ofslightly more enlightened racial attitudesthan the rest of Georgia’’ (Mayer and Abra-mson 1995, p 35–36; see Tuck 2001). Sa-vannah was home to the state’s ‘‘strongestfree Negro community before the CivilWar,’’ and during the post-bellum periodhad a ‘‘large, educated, and respectableblack middle class’’ (Grant 1993, p 416).The local chapter of the NAACP was alsovery active, organizing a concerted post-World War II voter registration effort thatgreatly increased the size of Savannah’sblack electorate (Bolster 1972). In 1947,Savannah hired its first black police of-ficers, becoming the first city in the ‘DeepSouth’ to integrate its police force (Mayerand Abramson 1995), and by the 1950s
582 leib and chapman
Savannah’s black community had success-fully pressured the city to provide swim-ming pools, recreation centers, and newschools for African Americans (Grant1993). Having said this, however, the citywas hardly a beacon for civil rights. AsW.W. Law, a prominent Savannah civilrights activist, noted about the state of racerelations in Savannah at that time:
The white and the black [in Savannah]were two separate worlds . . . Blackshad no participation in the city halland very little participation in publiclife—they were only allowed in as mes-sengers, custodians . . . When a blackhad to go into the white world, heknew how to conduct himself—he’dhave to be careful when going into abank or a store not even to brush upagainst a white person (quoted inMayer and Abramson 1995, p 36).
Hence race relations in the city, though abit more ‘civilized’ than in many otherplaces in the ‘Deep South,’ were still firmlyembedded in Jim Crow.
These twin themes of Cold War fearsand challenges to white hegemony mergefrom the beginning of federal efforts tocreate a national civil defense strategy. Ofparticular note is a 1950 report issued bythe National Security Resources Board(the immediate predecessor to the FederalCivil Defense Administration) on the so-ciological problems of civil defense from thefield of morale. The report concluded that‘‘social disorganization’’ would occur fol-lowing an atomic bomb attack on the U.S..The report emphasized that an attack onmulti-ethnic cities would result in violencebetween members of different ethnicgroups or religions, resulting in race riotsin the event of an atomic bomb attack. As
the report noted, ‘‘It is awesome to reflecton what would happen in one of thesecities if colored people and white peoplewere forced into close association in shel-ters, in homes, and even in evacuation re-ception centers’’ (quoted in Oakes 1994, p38–39).
This begs the question of whether theFederal Government was actually inter-ested in protecting African Americans, inthe North as well as the South, in the caseof a nuclear attack. As Grossman (2000)has found, there was deep suspicion withinblack communities over whether the Fed-eral Civil Defense Administration wasreally interested in protecting black Ameri-cans, especially after President Truman ap-pointed a staunchly pro-Jim Crow South-ern ex-Governor, Florida’s Millard Cald-well, as the first head of the Federal Civil De-fense Administration in 1950. The NAACPattempted to block Caldwell’s confirma-tion, an effort that was ultimately unsuc-cessful. Once appointed, the NAACP con-sidered calling for African Americans toboycott civil defense activities to protestCaldwell’s leadership and their belief thatthe Federal Government would be more in-terested in protecting white communities,in the North and the South, rather thanblack communities in case of attack.
‘‘escape from the h-bomb’’:
evacuating segregated
savannah in case of attack
Against this backdrop, Georgia politi-cians in the 1950s took civil defense plan-ning very seriously. In 1951, the state legis-lature passed an act setting up a state civildefense agency, and in 1955 a comprehen-sive plan was designed and adopted inorder to coordinate civil defense activities
Jim Crow, Civil Defense, and the Hydrogen Bomb 583
across the state in case of attack (Hearn1956). Following the federal government’saspiration for a mass evacuation of largecities as the primary method for protectingcitizens in case of hydrogen bomb attack,the statewide plan emphasized mass evac-uation of the population from probable tar-get areas, set up evacuation quotas forcommunities, and prescribed traffic routesand emergency measures that ‘‘were to beused in the event of any bombing’’ (Diehl1954). Since evacuation measures werebuilt upon the assumption that urban pop-ulations would be likely targets of nuclearattack, dispersing urban populations to thecountryside was deemed the most effectivemeans of civil defense. Accordingly, fivecities in Georgia were designated as poten-tial targets: Atlanta, Augusta, Columbus,Macon, and Savannah. The state was thendivided into evacuation regions surround-ing these urban sites (Figure 1). Georgiaofficials then left it up to these five cities tocreate their own specific evacuation plan.
Local officials in Savannah also tookcivil defense seriously, becoming one of thefirst U.S. cities to put a detailed evacuationplan in place (Savannah Morning News1955c,e; Hearn 1956). An evacuationmanual titled Escape from the H-Bomb waspublished and mailed to all Savannah andChatham County residents (Figure 2).1
The plan divided Savannah and ChathamCounty into four evacuation zones, whereresidents in each zone were instructed todrive their cars to a designated ‘‘escape-way,’’ which were main thoroughfares thatwould eventually lead them out of the city(Figure 3). Civil defense officials wouldthen receive motorists at ‘‘reception cen-ters’’ scattered throughout the country-side. According to the manual, the goalwas ‘‘to get away [from Savannah] as fast
as possible and as far as away as twentymiles’’ (Chatham-Savannah Defense Coun-cil 1955).
While the plan urged Savannians toevacuate using their automobiles, this leftthe question of how to evacuate Savannah’sschoolchildren in the case of an attack dur-ing a school day. The answer was to incorpo-rate within the plan a detailed descriptionof how students from each of Savannah’sschools would be evacuated, and to whichcommunity in the evacuation area schoolchildren would be sent (Chatham-Savan-nah Defense Council 1955, Hearn 1956).Most schools would evacuate children enmasse by either marching them or bussingthem to a predetermined railroad site, andthen whisking them away to their evacua-tion destination. The use of railroad cars forevacuation purposes was considered quiteinnovative, and Savannah’s civil defenseagency made arrangements with major rail-roads in the Savannah area to have railroadcars ready as needed for evacuation pur-poses (Savannah Morning News 1955b,d;1956a,b). In 1955 and 1956, practice evac-uations were even carried out in the Chat-ham County schools (Savannah MorningNews 1955b, 1956b; Georgia Alert 1955).2
Since Savannah was similar to mostother southern cities in that the SupremeCourt’s 1954 ruling in Brown was promptlyignored, and both public and privateschools were still segregated, how did thehydrogen bomb evacuation plan addressthis fact? Although the Savannah schoolevacuation plan did not specifically men-tion racial segregation, it does appear thatplanning officials took the institutionalbarriers of Jim Crow into considerationwhen creating the spatiality of the evacua-tion plan. The plan called for the evacua-tion of 32,240 Savannah-Chatham County
Figure 1. Civil Defense Regions of Georgia. Source: General Order Number Thirteen, Revised
(Operational Plan No. 1). Atlanta, GA: State of Georgia, Department of Defense, Civil Defense
Division (Issued 1 January 1955, Revised 1 January 1956).
Figure 2. Escape from the H-BOMB.
Title cover of the evacuation instruction manual for Savannah and Chatham County (1955).
586 leib and chapman
Figure 3: Evacuation Routes for Savannah-Chatham County.
Source: Chatham-Savannah Defense Council 1955.
schoolchildren to one of 42 outlying com-munities throughout southeastern Georgia(one additional community lay across theSavannah River in South Carolina). Thevast majority of these evacuation destina-tions were to be racially segregated, withoutlying communities receiving only whitestudents or African American students. Be-tween 82.3 percent and 86.4 percent ofstudents were to be sent to communitiesthat received either only white students oronly African American students.3 Thenumbers of schoolchildren sent to eachcommunity ranged from 38 white studentsto be sent to Ridgeland, South Carolina, to2,219 black students to be sent to McIn-tosh, Georgia, and 3,124 white students tobe sent to Statesboro, Georgia. Of the 43‘receiving’ sites, 39 were to receive eitheronly white students or only black students,while only 4 sites were to receive school-
children of both races.4 Thirty-one of thethirty-nine segregated sites were desig-nated for white schoolchildren, while eightwere designated for black schoolchildren(Figure 4).
The socio-spatial pattern of the planwas not solely an artifact of residential seg-regation (that is, blacks living in close prox-imity to one railroad line, while whites livedin close proximity to another). Though bothblack and white schoolchildren were to beevacuated together along the major railroadlines, the tenets of Jim Crow would havemade it unlikely that students would havemixed on the trains once they were aboard.Indeed, the evacuation plan detailed thenumber of railroad cars necessary to evacu-ate each segregated school, suggesting thatracially sorted schoolchildren were to be as-signed to specific railroad cars by school(Hearn 1956, p 101–109).
Figure 4. Map of evacuation plan by railroad for Savannah-Chatham County schoolchildren.
Source: Chatham-Savannah Defense Council 1955, Hearn 1956. Cartography by authors.
588 leib and chapman
Table 1. Population of communities receiving either only white or only black students.
Total populationgreater than 1,000
Total population lessthan 1,000
Communities receiving only whiteschoolchildren
18 10
Communities receiving only blackschoolchildren
1 6
Calculated from Chatham-Savannah Defense Council 1955, Hearn 1956, and Bureau of the Census1961a, 1961b.
While Platt et al. (1986) convincinglydemonstrate that it would have been im-possible to successfully evacuate tens orhundreds of thousands of urban residentsand house them in rural host communitiesin case of a nuclear attack, the scalar differ-ences between the communities that weresupposed to receive either only white stu-dents or only black students suggests thatwhite students may have benefitted frombeing sent to larger communities, based onthe assumption that larger communitieshave more capacity and emergency infra-structure in place in order to provide theservices needed to meet the needs of dislo-cated populations. It is interesting that ap-proximately two-thirds of those commu-nities receiving only white students hadpopulations of more than 1,000, while onlyone community receiving only black chil-dren had a population larger than 1,000(Table 1). While there were issues involv-ing accurate population counts with theU.S. Census in small rural communities,the numbers do suggest that many morewhite schoolchildren were to be sent tolarger communities than were black school-children. For example, Dublin, Georgia,with a total population of nearly 14,000,was to receive 2,781 white schoolchildren,while the town of McIntosh, Georgia, witha population of less than 1,000, was to re-
ceive 2,219 black schoolchildren. In theJim Crow South, a safe assumption can bemade that racial segregation influencedthe provision of services in the host com-munities. Comparisons between numbersof schoolchildren evacuated to receivingsites with total population by race in hostcommunities suggest that white school-children might have been more easily shel-tered than black schoolchildren. For exam-ple, fifteen of twenty-four communitiesreceiving only white schoolchildren hadlarger white populations than the numberof students they were receiving, while onlyone of five communities receiving onlyblack students had a larger black popula-tion than the number of black studentsthey were to receive.5 These geographicaldisparities suggest that communities re-ceiving only white students were better sit-uated to handle schoolchildren evacueesthan communities receiving only black stu-dents.
jim crow and civil defense
While the socio-spatial pattern resultingfrom the school evacuation plan suggests animplied but systematic maintenance of JimCrow segregation, the strategy may havealso been a conscious decision on the part ofevacuation planners, particularly in light
Jim Crow, Civil Defense, and the Hydrogen Bomb 589
of the recently decided Brown decision.Though the printed record does not expres-sly mention racial segregation, other socialelements suggest that racial segregationmay have been on the minds of many south-ern whites.6 Racist intent of activities bywhite officials in the 1950s South was often-times not a matter of public record. But theimplications were there, partly because theJim Crow system was a hegemonic socialinstitution where the motives of those seek-ing to perpetuate segregation did not haveto be explicitly stated for them to be under-stood (Leib 1995; George and Webster1997). Thus an empirical inquiry into themeaning behind ‘official’ communicationsfrom evacuation planning officials is appro-priate. This is especially fitting in this case,since a small item in the Savannah MorningNews (1955a) noted that C.B. Bryant, a localteacher, was named to Savannah’s civil de-fense council as a committee representativein charge of evacuation planning for all‘‘Negro public schools,’’7 suggesting thatevacuation planners were assigned to cre-ate school evacuation plans of students insegregated schools based on the race of thestudents.
To delve into this possibility further, weexamined contemporary accounts of civildefense planning in Georgia in general byscrutinizing eight years of content (1951–1958) in Georgia Alert, the state’s Civil De-fense Division’s monthly newsletter/mag-azine, and Savannah in particular by ex-amining reports on evacuation planningefforts printed in Savannah’s main morn-ing newspaper, the Savannah MorningNews.
The Georgia Alert was an official stategovernment organ of public communica-tion for Georgia residents, reporting oncivil defense activities throughout the
state, as well as providing suggestions andtips on civil defense planning and training.In the hundreds of pages that were dis-seminated to the public over the years, wefound no mention of civil defense activi-ties among the state’s African Americancitizens (though Georgia Alert did, how-ever, contain a patronizing and conde-scending article about the civil defenseefforts of Seminole Indians in Florida[Georgia Alert 1953], along with numer-ous jokes, some printed at the expense ofwomen, that were used as filler material).There are two possible explanations forthis omission. The first is that the maga-zine’s authors did not feel compelled todifferentiate between whites and AfricanAmericans in their stories on state and lo-cal civil defense events and activities. Thesecond possibility is that African Ameri-cans were invisible to the magazine’s au-thors.
To explore this issue further, we ana-lyzed the 209 photographs printed inGeorgia Alert from 1951 to 1958. Whilerecognizing the inherent irony in seekingvisual evidence of socially constructed ra-cial categories, our analysis found no pho-tos of African Americans. Furthermore,two of these photos suggest that the lackof African Americans in the pages of Geor-gia Alert may not have been a mere coinci-dence. The first photo (Figure 5) depictsthe all white staff of the Georgia Civil De-fense Division in 1951 proudly displayingthe racially divisive Confederate battleflag (see Leib and Webster 2007). A sec-ond photo from 1952 shows members ofthe Civil Defense agency’s Religious Ad-visory Committee (Figure 6). The purposeof the six member committee was to trans-mit information to other religious leadersand congregations throughout the state in
Figure 5. Georgia’s Civil Defense Staff in 1951.
Source: Georgia Alert, November 1951:p.6.
Figure 6. Civil Defense Agency’s Religious Advisory Committee.
Source: Georgia Alert, February 1952:p.5.
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case of nuclear attack. Given the impor-tance of religion in southern life in general(Manis 2002; Silk and Walsh 2008) andGeorgia in particular (Webster 1997,2000; Chapman et al. 2007), it was imper-ative that civil defense officials had the fullcooperation of church leaders in order toimpress upon the general public the im-portance of civil defense planning. But de-spite the strength, number and culturalimportance of black churches during JimCrow in the South, the committee had noAfrican American representation (thoughone Rabbi served on the committee de-spite the state’s small Jewish community)8
In addition to examining contemporaryaccounts of civil defense planning at thestatewide level, we also reviewed contem-porary newspaper accounts within Savan-nah itself. The Savannah Morning News,the city’s main morning newspaper, pro-vided extensive coverage of the 1955 and1956 practice drills of the evacuation planin Savannah’s schools (1955b, 1956a,1956b). Of the eleven schools mentionedin the stories in the Savannah MorningNews about the practice drills, only threewere African American, two of which werelabeled as having ‘‘problems’’ with theirevacuation drills that ‘‘marred’’ the other-wise outstanding evacuation drills in otherschools. One such ‘‘problem’’ school wasSavannah State College, a historicallyblack college that at the time was the city’sonly four-year college. The SavannahMorning News (1956b) account of the Sa-vannah State College practice drill empha-sized the speed in which students wereevacuated from their buildings. Accordingto the newspaper report, students and fac-ulty at Savannah State organized theirevacuation ‘‘motorcade’’ as requested, but‘‘protocol’’ resulted in a considerable time
lag. While three black schools were dis-cussed in the Savannah Morning News’ sto-ries about evacuation drills, black studentswere not depicted in any of the photos thataccompanied these stories. All six photosaccompanying these articles did, however,depict white students being evacuated(Savannah Morning News 1955b, 1956b).
conclusion
Facing the total destruction of Savan-nah and the surrounding region, it is bothabsurd and unremarkable that evacuationplanners would be concerned enough tocreate an evacuation plan that sought topreserve Jim Crow racial segregation. It isabsurd because a hydrogen bomb droppedon the city would likely result in a massivenumber of deaths that would not discrimi-nate based upon one’s race. However, thetenets of the plan are also unremarkable inthat it did not appear to have escaped thelong fingers of the Jim Crow system of in-stitutional segregation. In our readings ofpublic documents and newspaper ac-counts, the overriding questions about thespatiality of the evacuation plan revolvedaround the discovery of issues related toracial segregation or inclusion. Given thesensitive nature of race relations duringthe time, it would be difficult to establishdirect cause and effect between public pol-icy and Jim Crow segregation. Indeed,those in the white hegemonic power struc-ture that were behind planning effortswould have been foolish to incorporatesuch explicit discrimination. But what isnotable here is that what is omitted often-times reveals more about social power thanwhat is ‘officially’ included. In this case, it isthe African American population in placeslike Savannah that appear to have come up
Jim Crow, Civil Defense, and the Hydrogen Bomb 592
short in terms of evacuation planning. Ofcourse this is not much of a surprise, con-sidering the cultural and political climateof the American South during the period.The mid to late 1950s was a time of mas-sive resistance among whites, in part be-cause of the then-recent Brown decisionstriking down segregation in the region’sschools. Attempts to ignore Jim Crow as ananachronistic artifact that might hinderthe evacuation process would have beenunthinkable to most whites at the time.
Since Jim Crow was about institution-alizing power relationships that man-ifested themselves spatially, there is noreason to think that it would not have ap-plied to ‘on the ground’ evacuation plan-ning, especially at a time when the hege-monic order was being openly questionedby the courts and southern white politi-cians were fighting back. The system of ra-cial segregation was the hegemonic orderof the day, so it was more than likely thatthe systemic social and physical barriers ofthe plan were taken for granted in theminds of evacuation planners in Savan-nah. For Savannah’s schoolchildren atleast, the socio-spatial strategy of the evac-uation plan appears to have ensured thatthe ‘‘close association’’ between blacks andwhites warned about in the 1950 NationalSecurity Resources Board report wouldnot be allowed to occur in case of a hydro-gen bomb attack.
notes
1. The evacuation manual for Savannah and
Chatham County was first published and dis-
tributed to the public in 1955. The copy of the
manual in our possession (Escape from the
H-Bomb) is undated, except for the map show-
ing evacuation routes from Savannah, which is
dated 1955. Data on the school evacuation plan
for Savannah and Chatham County have been
taken from the copy of the Savannah plan re-
produced in the statewide evacuation manual
issued on January 1, 1956 (Hearn 1956, 93–
110). This data was then cross-checked with
Chatham-Savannah Defense Council (1955).
The lead author would like to thank Terri Har-
per who first brought the existence of the Sa-
vannah hydrogen bomb evacuation manual to
his attention.
2. Reporting on a May 1956 practice drill, the
Savannah Morning News (1956b) noted that
‘‘Savannah reportedly is the only city in the
country to have a rail evacuation system planned
for schoolchildren, and several state and federal
civil defense officials were on hand to witness
the plan in action.’’
3. A range of percentages are given because
the evacuation manual is not clear about the
exact numbers of African American school-
children that were to be evacuated to the com-
munity of Oliver, Georgia.
4. One possible explanation for the towns of
Jesup and Sylvania receiving both black and
white students may come from the fact that they
were the largest communities to be used for stu-
dent evacuations on their respective railroad
lines (calculated from Chatham-Savannah De-
fense Council 1955, Hearn 1956, Bureau of the
Census 1961a). Given their relatively large
sizes, students may have been shuttled from
their trains to evacuation centers within both
white and black communities in these towns.
This would be significant, since between 65 per-
cent and 91 percent of students destined for the
four communities receiving both white and
black school children were being sent to either
Jesup or Sylvania.
5. School evacuation data was compared
with race and population data for communities
from the 1960 Census. Unfortunately, exact
population counts by race were reported for
only some communities with populations less
593 leib and chapman
than 1,000. Hence not every small community
could be analyzed in terms of population by
race.
6. No mention of race (other than identifying
which schools are ‘‘colored’’) appears in either the
Savannah evacuation manual (Chatham-
Savannah Defense Council 1955) or in the state-
wide evacuation plan (Hearn 1956).
7. It is interesting that the Savannah Morning
News index for 1955 felt compelled to list the race
of Mr. Bryant. The entry in the index for this arti-
cle reads: ‘‘Civil defense aides named: The Rev F J
Donahue and C B Bryant (Negro)’’ (p 181). One
can only speculate as to why the person compiling
the index felt so compelled.
8. The inclusion of a Rabbi on the board is
noteworthy, given that Jewish communities in
Georgia and throughout the South were the vic-
tims of discrimination and violence in the 1950s
from elements within the region’s white Christian
communities (see Sheskin 2000, Greene 1996).
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