Dombrowski, James Anderson

DOMBROWSKI, JAMES ANDERSON (1897–1983). For thirty-seven years, between 1929 and 1966, James Anderson Dombrowski sought to build United Front coalitions in the South, first among the region’s few progressive religious leaders, then during industrial union drives, and finally, during the civil rights movement. A Christian Socialist, he was reviled by the South’s elected politicians as “Public Enemy Number One.” He was equally anathema to much of the political Left, scorned by Communist Party members as a liberal while feared by many liberals as a Communist.

Dombrowski was born in Tampa, Florida, the only son of first-generation English and Polish immigrants. His mother died when he was five, and his father, who owned a jewelry store, died ten years later. The Methodist Church dominated young Dombrowski’s early years, first in Tampa, and later, after World War I, when he enrolled at Emory University. Through Dr. Harry F. Ward at Union Theological Seminary in New York, and the social turbulence of the 1920s, Dombrowski became an organizer. He was arrested in Elizabethton, Tennessee, in 1929 during strikes at three rayon mills. He joined the Highlander Folk School in 1933, teaching miners and mill and farm workers leadership and organizing skills until 1942, when he became director of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW).

Determined that SCHW would challenge the exploitation of labor, blacks, and women, either through organizing, political education, or electoral politics, Dombrowski was soon under fire. In 1948 he was hauled before a Nashville, Tennessee, grand jury investigating subversion. The same year he was arrested for violating the Birmingham, Alabama, Jim Crow law while speaking at the all-black Southern Negro Youth Congress. A year later, he was ousted from the SCHW in a bitter membership fight, mostly over his United Front views.

Without pause, he founded the interracial Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF) to confront racism. As with SCHW, SCEF’s influence extended beyond its membership or resources. In 1954 Dombrowski refused to give the U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee SCEF’s membership list. In 1963, having arranged a conference on civil rights attended by black and white lawyers in New Orleans, he was arrested for subversion by Louisiana officials, who seized all SCEF’s records, handing them over to U.S. senator James Eastland. On grounds that his first amendment guarantees had been violated, Dombrowski took his argument to the U.S. Supreme Court, which found in his favor in 1965 in Dombrowski v. Pfister, concluding that the arrest had “a chilling effect” on freedom of speech. A year later, Dombrowski, hobbled by arthritis, left SCEF, devoting his remaining years to less direct civil rights activities, mostly in New Orleans, and to oils and watercolors that evidenced his strongly held social views.

Adams, Frank. “Dombrowski: Portrait of an American Heretic.” Southern Exposure 10 (July–August 1982).

Adams, Frank T. James A Dombrowski, An American Heretic, 1897-1983. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992.

James A. Dombrowski Papers,1918-1983. Wisconsin Historical Society. https://search.library.wisc.edu/catalog/999465343102121.