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| Bennett H. Wall |
I have recently learned in my capacity as an interim ATxH board member that the Southern Historical Association has embraced the cause of the new organization and will be carrying a favorable notice of it in the program of its annual meeting to be held this coming fall in Kansas City. There will be members of the Alliance for Texas History participating in that upcoming SHA meeting. This development brings back to me warm memories of my early years of membership in the Southern Historical Association because my professor and mentor Bennett H. Wall was active in it for many decades. He introduced me as his student during the early 1970s to the academic history of the South by encouraging me to join the SHA and attend its annual meetings. Ben later co-authored a book with me once I became an academic historian pursuing my own career. We also came to be staunch friends. I delivered the eulogy on his passing, with an expanded version of it later published in Louisiana History. I am convinced that Ben Wall, were he with us today, would heartily approve of the Alliance for Texas History. I am glad the modern Southern Historical Association which he helped to create over a generation ago is now doing so.
Ben taught history at the University of Kentucky for twenty years before moving to Tulane University where he was my graduate professor, eventually finishing his sixty-year career as a distinguished faculty member at the University of Georgia. Ben joined the Southern Historical Association in 1939, later serving for thirty-four years as its Secretary-Treasurer, a position which functions in effect as the group's executive director which made him the chief arbiter of the association’s administrative affairs during the turbulent years of the Civil Rights movement. He also later became its president.
Ben was a progressive, forward-thinking individual solidly against segregation and all forms of discrimination. There were no second-class citizens in his South. As a historian, he embraced the absolute credo that people from all walks of life, backgrounds, genders, ethnicities, and religions deserved to have their historical stories fully told and accurately included in the mainline fabric of southern history. I admired Ben Wall for the sensitivity and equanimity he employed in his attempts to effect successful change in the historical profession at a time when it was needed badly. He worked hard for these changes in the profession while recognizing there was a significant difference between his personal actions as an individual historian and his actions as a someone holding a leadership position in the Southern Historical Association.
He was successful, I believe, because he carefully avoided involving the SHA itself in external, at-large controversies beyond its stated academic mission. Although Ben and other members of the SHA did become personally active as individual historians in advancing many wider calls for change in southern society, Ben never crossed the line to invoke the name of the SHA in social reform initiatives beyond its organizational existence because he saw it as a professional association first and foremost dedicated to historical research, not wanting to have its scholarly standing potentially jeopardized before the public as an entity engaging in politicized activism during an era of difficult tensions across the South. Nonetheless, inside the organization from the 1950s to the 1980s, he worked consistently to implement needed SHA reforms which guaranteed full equality of all the association’s policies and practices, especially regarding issues of race and gender at a time when these considerations were passionately controversial throughout the South.
As
a white historian Ben openly fought for civil rights sixty and seventy years
ago, when doing so was not only rare in Southern academe, but also could be
dangerous. He worked with the NAACP’s Thurgood Marshall to implement the
successful integration of the University of Kentucky. Historian
Thomas D. Clark has credited Ben as having been pivotal to that process. Within
the SHA, Dr. Wall played a significant role in
welcoming John Hope Franklin as a member of the Southern Historical
Association. Along with C. Vann Woodward and Bell I. Wiley, Ben fashioned a
panel held in Williamsburg, Virginia in which Dr. Franklin became the first
African-American historian to present a paper at the annual SHA meeting.
However, that year Franklin could not stay at the segregated Williamsburg Inn
or attend the evening banquet there. Ben rectified that situation several years
later at a subsequent SHA meeting when he prevailed upon the Peabody Hotel in
Memphis to accept him as a guest. One year Dr. Wall peremptorily
moved the entire SHA annual meeting to a new city on short notice because the
previously arranged hotel venue refused to accommodate the association’s Black
members.
John
Hope Franklin once told me Ben Wall was one of the most remarkably
fearless people he ever knew in the historical profession. That quality showed
through when Ben organized a group of his historian friends, all of them white,
to join Dr. Martin Luther King on the march from Selma to Montgomery. They
marched as individual historians, not as representatives of their respective
universities or the academic organizations to which they belonged. Ben often
told the story that as some of them drove home together after the march, a loud
group of white rowdies waving Confederate flags from the bed of a pickup truck
followed them honking the horn and yelling racial slurs because their car
carried signs which said: “Historians Against Segregation.” Ben was relieved
when the pickup turned around at the Montgomery County line and went back to
town.
In the
1970s, in the face of opposition from some members, Ben insisted female
historians have full and equitable roles in the SHA as officers, committee
members, panel participants, and contributors to the journal. He worked with
Anne Frior Scott and other female historians in founding what eventually became
the Southern Association for Women Historians, initially a subgroup of the
Southern Historical Association of which back then some members of the all-male
SHA board did not approve. Years later, when Anne Scott gave a speech at Austin
College where I taught, she said to me Ben Wall was the first of what she called
the “Old Male Guard of the SHA” to embrace women’s history and he did so with
vigor. Although it never passed into ratification, Ben fervently supported the Equal
Rights Amendment and, for over a decade, he decreed the Southern Historical
Association would not meet in states which had failed to ratify it, making all
of us southern historians of that era by necessity into regular annual guests
at Georgia’s Atlanta Biltmore Hotel.
I
have been attempting to do my part in helping make the Alliance for
Texas History into an organization which can accomplish here in Texas
analogously the same kind of constructive progress for the academic historical community
which Ben Wall made in his time. The obstacles he faced were different than
those with which the current generation of Texas academic historians must contend today. Yet, Bennett H. Wall did his best to guarantee the historical profession in which he participated would adapt appropriately with the times. I hope that through the Alliance for Texas History the same will happen for the present-day academic historians who belong to the new
organization.
