LibGuides: Martha Berry and the Berry Schools: Don West and the 1933 Student Work Strike

Don West and the 1933 Berry Student Work Strike

A native of north Georgia, Don West achieved success as one of the foremost southern regional poets of the 20th century. He was at different times a labor organizer, political radical, preacher, progressive educator, and outspoken spokesperson for human equality in the generation before the civil rights movement. Although he is best known for his literary works, West was also an effective proponent of the Social Gospel, embraced by some of the South’s most dedicated religious reformers.[*] West enrolled in 1923 at the Martha Berry School for Boys, leaving without a diploma in his senior year. West often said he was expelled from Berry, sometimes because of his anger at a screening on campus of the racist film Birth of a Nation, sometimes in protest of the firing for "fraternizing" of school chaplain Rev. Melville Gurley. After the publication of his poem collection Crab Grass, West returned to speak at Berry and was lauded in the March 1932 Berry Alumni Quarterly as embodying "some of Berry's noblest ideals." In 1933 West answered the call of his cousin Willis Sutton, arranging for Clyde Johnson from the National Student League to provide support for Berry students organizing in response to labor conditions. West's letter to the New Republic initiated a firestorm of responses from Martha Berry and her supporters, and resulted in an investigative report by the magazine's emissary Hamilton Basso.

[*] Lorence, James. "Don West." New Georgia Encyclopedia, last modified May 8, 2017. https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/arts-culture/don-west-1906-1992/

New Georgia Encyclopedia
Against the Grain: Southern radicals and prophets, 1929-1959 by Anthony P. Dunbar
Call Number: Main Book Collection - 2nd Floor HN79.A133 R33
Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1981, p.53-54.
"[Clyde] Johnson and [Willis] Sutton went to a supposed rendezvous with the dissident students on the following night, but they were surprised by an armed body of school officials and hustled off to jail."
Don West’s Undergraduate Days at Lincoln Memorial University: The Record Vs. The Myth by Elizabeth Lamont
Appalachian Heritage, v.36, n.4 (2008), p.40-47.
At Georgia’s Berry School, where he attended high school prior to his arrival at LMU, West recalled “resent[ing] certain things,” and being “a rebel.” There’s no question that was true, but his accounts of the trouble vary and exaggerate the result. Sometimes he claimed to have been expelled because he led a campus protest over the showing of the Klan-friendly Birth of a Nation; other times, he said that the firing of Berry’s chaplain inspired the protest that led to his expulsion. Either way, a search through Berry’s archives reveals that West was never expelled. Enraged over what he considered the unfair firing of the chaplain, he simply chose to go home. (Berry’s principal, G. Leland Green, even agreed to write him a letter of recommendation when the boy wrote from home informing Green of his decision.)
Education and the evolution of the South: A history of the Berry Schools, 1902-1970 by Carol Guthrie
Call Number: Archives Berry Collection LD405 .B22 .G764
PhD, University of Tennessee Knoxville, 1994.
The history of the Berry Schools parallels important social and educational changes in the South throughout the twentieth century. In its first forty years, the school embraced a philosophy similar to that of the Southern Education Movement, whose leaders advocated practical mechanical and agricultural train in g as a means to uplift the South. Also, the school strove to inculcate its rural students with the paternalistic, planter-class values of its founder, Martha Berry. The school did this by developing a work program which trained students in practical matters such as farming, animal husbandry, construction, and carpentry. The student work program also enabled Berry, a boarding school, to keep its operating expenses at a minimum. With the onset of the Depression and the designation of the South as the "number one" problem facing America, leaders at the Berry Schools found themselves struggling against a tide of change. Radical leftists, such as Don West, charged Berry exploited its students for their labor. Berry students began to balk at the restrictive social life policies. With Martha Berry’ s death in 1942, school officials found themselves facing enormous pressures both within and outside Berry.
A Hard Journey: the life of Don West by James J. Lorence
Call Number: Main Book Collection - 2nd Floor PS3545.E8279 Z75 2007
Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 2007, p.7-10, 24, 41-43.
Chapter 1, Shaping a Value System (p.7-10) includes an account of West's time as a student at the Martha Berry School for Boys, including his leadership of opposition to a screening of Birth of a Nation, his growing dissatisfaction with Berry as working to strip Appalachian children of their culture, and his protest over the firing of Chaplain Melville Gurley. Chapter 3, The Turning Point (p.24) includes a brief discussion of West's 1924 return to campus and a lecture to the agriculture school. Chapter 4, Radicalization: Baptism by Fire (p.41-43) analyzes the student strike and its aftermath, including reaction from Myles Horton and the Highlander Folk School.
A History of the Berry Schools on the Mountain Campus by Jennifer Dickey
Call Number: LD405.B22 D52 2013
Charleston, SC: History Press, 2013, p.57-61.
Discussing Don West and the student strike and its aftermath, Dickey writes "For a brief period of time, Martha Berry must have feared that her dream had become a nightmare."
Organize or Starve!: Communists, Labor, and Antiradical Violence by Robin D. G. Kelley
Call Number: Ebook and Memorial Library Main Book Collection - 2nd Floor HX91 .A2 K45 1990
In Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990, p.57–77.
Clyde Johnson's role in labor organizing in Rome, Georgia, including the Berry student strike.

Primary Sources

Sweatshops in the Schools by Don West
New Republic (October 4, 1933) v.76, n.983, p.216.
Don West's letter reporting on a "significant" student strike at Berry.
The Week
New Republic (October 25, 1933) v.76, p.986, p.292.
Having received over 200 letters repudiating Don West's letter, the magazine commits to sending an "independent and reliable investigator" to Berry.
About the Berry Schools: An Open Letter to Miss Martha Berry by Hamilton Basso
New Republic (April 3, 1934) v.78, n.1009, p.206-208.
As promised, the New Republic sent reporter Hamilton Basso spend several days at Berry as a follow up to Don West's letter.
Berry schools students foil attempts to foment strike. by Edwin Holman
Atlanta Constitution (October 8, 1933) p.10A.
Robert C. Alston, chairman of Berry's board of trustees, adamantly denied that a strike took place and branded Don West and other organizers "radicals."
The Berry School seeks to indoctrinate poor whites with white supremacy
Oral History Interview with Don West, January 22, 1975. Interview E-0016. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Tensions over organizing efforts at the Berry School
Oral History Interview with Don West, January 22, 1975. Interview E-0016. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.