Lee Hays - Teenage Years

Teenage Years

The period immediately following his father's death was so so painful that Lee Hays could not bring himself to talk much about it, even to Doris Willens, the writer he selected to be his biographer. His brothers, both recently married, sent him to Emory Junior College in Georgia from which he graduated in 1930 at sixteen (but already over six feet tall and looking much older than his years). He traveled alone to enroll at Hendrix-Henderson College (now Henderson State University) in Arkansas, the Methodist school that his father and siblings had attended, but the expense of their mother's institutionalization and the effects of the Wall Street Crash of 1929 meant that college tuition money was not available for Lee. Instead he moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where his oldest brother, Reuben, who worked in banking, was now located. Reuben found Lee a job as a page in a public library. There the rebellious Hays embarked on an extensive program of self-education, in the process becoming radicalized:

Every book that was considered unfit for children to read was marked with a black rubber stamp. So I'd go through the stacks and look for these black stamps. Always the very best books. they weren't locked-up books, just books that would not normally issued to children—D. H. Lawrence, a number of European novels. Reading those books was like doors opening. Don't forget that the fundamentalist South was a closed, fixed society. The world was made in six days; everything was foreordained and fixed in the universe. . . . This was the time of the Great Depression . . . the whole country was in the grip of a terrible sickness, which troubled me as it did everyone else. And I didn't understand it until I started reading Upton Sinclair and the little mag. . . Somewhere along in there I became some kind of Socialist, just what kind, I have never figured out.

In 1932, Hays moved out of his brother's house into a room at the Cleveland YMCA, where he stayed for two years. Hearing about the activities of the radical white Presbyterian minister Claude C. Williams, a Christian Marxist, who had become converted to the cause of racial equality and was trying to organize a coal miners' union in Paris, Arkansas. Hays decided to return to Arkansas and join Williams in his work. He enrolled at the College of the Ozarks, a Presbyterian school that allows students to work in lieu of tuition, intending to study for the ministry and devote his life to the poor and dispossessed. There he met a fellow student, Zilphia Johnson (later Zilphia Horton), another acolyte of Williams, who was to become almost as important in Hays' life as Williams himself. An accomplished musician and singer, Zilphia had broken with her father, who was the owner of the Arkansas coal mine that Williams was trying to organize, and had become a union organizer herself. Hays moved in with Williams and his family: "I got to be his chief helper for quite a while", he later wrote. From 1934 to 1940, writes Doris Willens, "Williams was the dominant figure Hays' life—a surrogate father—a man of the cloth but with a radical difference". The following year, Williams was dismissed by the elders of his Paris, Arkansas, church for being too radical (i.e., for fraternizing with blacks) and was subsequently jailed, beaten, and almost killed when he tried to organize an interracial hunger march of tenant farmers in Fort Smith, Arkansas, near the Oklahoma border. His life was only saved because his activities attracted newspaper publicity and the attention of northerners. One of these was Willard Uphaus, a professor of divinity at Yale University, who had recently been appointed executive secretary of the National Religion and Labor Foundation, and who became Williams' admirer and supporter. After his release from jail, Williams moved his family away from Fort Smith to Little Rock to get them out of harm,s way. Hays dropped out of school in order to follow them, living on odd jobs for a time. He then went to visit Zilphia, who had married Myles Horton, a founder and the director of the Highlander Folk School, an adult education and labor organizing school in Monteagle, Tennessee.

At Highlander, Zilphia Horton directed music, theater, and dance workshops. During miner's union meeting in Tennessee, she recruited Hays as a song leader: "When Zilphia got up and said, 'Brother Lee Hays will now lead us in singing', I damn near dropped through the floor. There was no backing out; I had to take the plunge and I've been doing it ever since." Later, he wrote that "Claude and Zilphia did more to change and shape my life than any people I can recall."

In her drama classes at Highlander Zilphia borrowed the techniques of the New Theater League in New York, which encouraged participants to create plays out of their own experience, which would then be staged at labor conferences. It was a revelation for Hays to see how the arts could serve to empower people for social action. He decided to go to New York and study playwrighting himself.

Armed with a letter of introduction from Claude Williams and Willard Uphaus, Hays became a resident at a student program at New York City's progressive Judson Memorial Church. There, he and a friend, Alan Hacker, a photojournalist, raised funds to make a documentary film about the plight of Southern sharecroppers and about efforts at Highlander and elsewhere to organize the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU), one of the first racially integrated labor unions in the United States. In preparation, Hays and Hacker took classes with photographer Paul Strand, among others. They shot the film in Mississippi at an experimental Quaker-run cooperative inter-racial cotton farm. Even so they were harassed by local planters and their scripts and notebooks were stolen and had to be recreated from memory. The film, America's Disinherited, which due to limited funds was quite brief, premiered at the Judson Church in May 1937 and was shown in schools and other venues (a copy is now in the film archives of the Museum of Modern Art). It demonstrates the use of singing in building a movement: "The turning point in the film is when an image of clenched black and white hands is followed by one of biracial strikers marching and singing 'Black and white together / We shall not be moved'". Shortly after it was completed, Alan Hacker died of an illness he had contracted during the filming.

During this period Hays also wrote a play about the STFU, Gumbo (a word used by the sharecroppers for their soil), which was produced at Highlander.