Left-wing candidate met Southern inhospitality

The News & Observer's Rob Christensen covers the Old North State's modern political era from post-Reconstruction to the 21st century in his new book, The Paradox of Tar Heel Politics. Here is the last of three days of excerpts.

The reception accorded former Vice President Henry Wallace when he visited North Carolina in August 1948 was just short of a shooting match.

Wallace had been President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's agriculture secretary, secretary of commerce and vice president, before he was dumped from the ticket in 1944 by FDR and replaced with Harry Truman. Four years later, Wallace was the presidential candidate of the Progressive Party, a left-wing party that included communists and pushed for racial integration, world peace, and other causes.

The state chapter of the Progressive Party nominated North Carolina's first racially integrated ticket of the 20th century, nominating blacks for the U.S Senate and for attorney general.

Wallace's three-day trip to North Carolina was part of a Southern tour that was an open challenge to the system of segregation. Calling for the end of Jim Crow, Wallace said he would speak only to racially integrated audiences. Wallace made the front pages of North Carolina newspapers when he said he would stay at the home of a black supporter in Durham rather than in a hotel.

Probably never before or since had a presidential candidate received such a hostile reception in North Carolina. His first stop was the state Progressive Party convention held in a Durham armory. Wallace could hardly be heard above the heckling from outsiders. Fights broke out and one student acting as a Wallace bodyguard was stabbed eight times. A National Guard sergeant was so unnerved that he unsheathed his 45-caliber pistol.

The next day in the textile town of Burlington, Wallace was not allowed to speak at all. Accompanied by folk singer Pete Seeger and a small group of supporters, Wallace was pummeled by a barrage of eggs, tomatoes, ice cream cones, peach stones and green peppers. At one point, Wallace waved his finger at the audience and said: "Remember that you are in the United States."

"Get your communists and your Negroes out of this town," one person shouted. Giving up, Wallace said, "Good-bye folks." The crowd of 500 broke past police and began pounding on the car windows and blocking the path. It was only after a motorcycle patrolman brandished his pistol, that the crowd made way.

Heckled, splattered in five N.C. cities

In Greensboro, Winston-Salem, High Point, Hickory, and Charlotte, Wallace was heckled, shouted down, and splattered with rotten eggs and spoiled fruit. He showed personal courage, standing up to angry crowds, even as his gray hair became stained with egg yolk. When he called for federal aid for Southern hospitals, he was jeered as a communist. "Any one who wants to call that a Bolshevik plot is welcome to do so," Wallace shot back. "I say it is a Christian thought."

When he called for allowing all people to vote in Hickory, Wallace was again met with a barrage of eggs and tomatoes. "Use all your eggs, use all your fruit to feed your children," Wallace shouted. Before leaving, Wallace paraphrased the Bible. "As Jesus Christ told his disciples, when you enter a town that will not hear you willingly, then shake the dust of this town from your feet and go elsewhere."

The violence in North Carolina made the front pages of newspapers across the country. In Washington, Truman called the treatment of his former vice president "a highly un-American business." Gov. Cherry promised beefed-up protection and declared that "a man ought to have the right to talk." By the time Wallace made his last stop in Asheville, there was a cordon of 30 city policemen and 10 Highway Patrolmen. For the first time, Wallace was able to hold a peaceful rally and be heard. As the train pulled out of Asheville, the traveling reporters from New York and Washington sung their own version of the Tin Pan Alley tune, emending the famous line: "Nothing could be finer than to get out of Carolina in the morning."