Mary Southard
Mary Carr Boggs Southard (born December 8, 1914 in Spartanburg, South Carolina; died July 9, 1995 in Victoria, British Columbia) was a Communist activist, newspaper correspondent, and book shop owner in Birmingham. She served on the board of the League of Young Southerners and as regional director of the Young Communist League.
Mary was the daughter of Ralph Ervin Boggs and Frances Lavinia Watkins, and the half sister of Henrietta Boggs. She attended Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia, and then went on to Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There she was introduced to Ordway Southard by his sister, Anna. They couple married in 1936.
Southard took over Jane Speed's Book Store on 5th Avenue North in 1940 and continued to operate it as the Modern Book Shop. In the 1940 U.S. Census she listed her occupation as "proprietor" and her husband's as "shipping clerk". The shop was raided by Ollie Osborne's "un-American detail" of the Birmingham Police Department in May of that year. She and two customers were detained and she was held for several hours before being released without charges.
By 1941 she had moved the shop to the Clark Building at 404½ 20th Street North. The store closed by 1942. In August 1942 Mary Southard chaired a Communist Party caucus in Birmingham at which Ordway was nominated to run for Governor of Alabama. She herself accepted the nomination to run as the party's candidate for the Alabama State Senate seat held by Democrat James A. Simpson. She got 19 votes to Simpson's 8,639.
In 1944 Southard was editor of The Birmingham Post' regular section on parent-teacher association activities. In June of that year she enlisted in the Women's Army Corps, claiming an occupational skill in the manufacture of radios and phonographs.
The Southard's daughter, Barbara, was born in 1945. Mary continued to work as a correspondent for The Daily Worker, covering labor actions, police brutality and other matters. In 1947 Birmingham Post reporter Charles Pou worked to determine who was behind an advertisement placed for the "Alabama Communist Party" in the Post and on WSGN-AM. At that time Mary and her daughter resided with a housemaid in the Fleetwood Apartments at 2716 10th Avenue South while Ordway was living in Alaska. A former neighbor described the couple as "good neighbors–minded their own business, that is–but mighty peculiar folks." The unidentified neighbor went on to say that the couple were vague about their occupations. "She painted pictures and he was supposed to do some sort of writing."
In 1950 the Southards purchased a farm in Vermont that has been jointly owned by Owen Lattimore and Vilhjalmur Stefansson, academics who had been accused by Senator Joseph McCarthy of supporting Sovietism. The property was offered for sale in order for Lattimore to pay his defense attorneys The sale to "known Communists" provoked even more suspicion. The resulting controversy became known as "The Lattimore Affair". The Southards were victims of violent intimidation in 1952. Shortly afterward they relocated to Hawaii and immersed themselves in Asian philosophy. Ordway modified his name to "O" and Mary adopted the name "Malia". O became a prolific composer of haikus.
References
- Pou, Charles (May 7, 1947) "'Peculiar Folks,' Neighbors Term Communist Sponsors." The Birmingham Post, p. 1
- Kelley, Robin D. G. (1990) Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press ISBN 9780807842881
- Winston, Rick (2018) Red Scare in the Green Mountains: Vermont in the McCarthy Era 1946–1960. Rootstock Publishing ISBN 9781578690077