Jim Crow's Counterculture

by R. A. Lawson

  A poor black woman of the era who found herself deserted or rejected by a male lover was not merely experiencing private troubles; she was also caught up in a complex web of historical circumstances . . . [An] emancipated black man was compelled to find work, and even if he found a job near the neighborhood where he and his partner had settled, he nevertheless might be seduced by new possibilities of travel. In search of work—and also in search of the perpetually elusive guarantees of security and happiness—men jumped freight trains and wandered from town to town, from state to state, from region to region. There were imperative economic reasons for undertaking journeys away from home, yet even when jobs were not to be found and available employment was backbreaking and poorly compensated, the very process of traveling must have generated a feeling of exhilaration and freedom in individuals whose ancestors had been chained for centuries to geographical sites dictated by slave masters.88

  As they moved north, they held onto many of their southern traditions, and the blues idiom worked as well in the northern cities as it had in the rural South. As blues had been a tableau for the expression of Jim Crow frustrations, so too was it a message board for the celebration (and disappointment) of escaping the Jim Crow South. During the 1910s and 1920s, the blues became a countercultural vehicle for the otherwise taboo subjects of southern black liberty and equality. The instrumental changes—that is the “jazzing” of blues music in Chicago-style and jump blues—demonstrated that African Americans were not only moving in a cardinal direction but in a cultural direction as well—toward the mainstream. In interesting ways, the musical culture of the Jim Crow South’s laboring class was developing into new forms that had broad appeal. As musicians such as Broonzy adopted jazz ensembles, upbeat lyrical themes, and urban sensibilities, black music was increasingly becoming American music.

  Moses Platt, Sugarland, Texas, 1934. Mississippian Bukka White claimed that the blues “started right behind one of them mules.”

  (Alan Lomax, photographer. Library of Congress)

  Lightnin’ Washington, Darrington State Farm, Texas, 1934. Black labor was a source for black music. Workers at a state prison farm keep time while they chop wood.

  (Alan Lomax, photographer. Library of Congress)

  Leadbelly, Angola State Penitentiary, Louisiana, 1934. Huddie Ledbetter (Leadbelly), in the foreground, honed his skills while incarcerated at prison farms in Texas and Louisiana. (Alan Lomax, photographer. Library of Congress)

  Beer Hall, Mound Bayou, Mississippi, 1939. Jook joints like this Mississippi beer hall were important meeting places for black laborers to relax, and black musicians to ply their trade. (Lee Russell, photographer. Library of Congress)

  Tractor Driver, Aldridge Plantation, Mississippi, 1937. As a young field hand, B. B. King knew that driving a tractor like this one was a great way to impress women; he later found that playing blues guitar was an even more effective means of attracting the opposite sex. (Dorothea Lange, photographer. Library of Congress)

  Jitterbugging on Saturday Night, 1939. Blues was one of many genres of fun-timing music typically heard in jook joints like this one outside Clarskdale, Mississippi. (Marion Post Wolcott, photographer. Library of Congress)

  Mississippi Migrants, 1938. Black farming families had been moving around the rural South since Emancipation. In the early twentieth century, migrating black southerners increasingly set their sights on the urban North. (Dorothea Lange, photographer. Library of Congress)

  Southside Chicago, 1941. In the urban North, black southerners found themselves crowded together in tenement housing, creating a ready market and audience for blues musicians. (Lee Russell, photographer. Library of Congress)

  Chicago Bar Scene, 1941. In the crowded nightclubs of Chicago, musicians eventually found it necessary to electrically amplify their guitars to be heard over the barroom din. (Lee Russell, photographer. Library of Congress)

  Huddie Ledbetter and Martha Ledbetter, Wilton, Connecticut, 1935. As a result of meeting the Lomaxes, Leadbelly was able to leave behind the southern state work farms and start a new, more prosperous life as a musician in New York City. (Photographer unknown. Library of Congress)

  Black WPA Workers, 1941. Early New Deal programs were discriminatory in their hiring practices. Later, the Works Progress Administration hired black workers in numbers higher than their proportion in the general U.S. population. (Barbara Wright, photographer. Library of Congress)

  Negro Soldiers, England, 1942. During World War II, African Americans could express their patriotism in many ways that had been shunned by whites during and after World War I. (John Vachon, photographer. Library of Congress)

  Break

  Jim Crow’s War for Democracy

  The Blues People and World War I

  I’d rather be pimpin’ fer one-eyed Kate . . . Than tote a gun in this man’s war.

  —”Soldier Man Blues,”

  transcribed by John Jacob Niles, 1918

  The Jim Crow Army

  Historians increasingly interpret the Great War as a watershed event in the wider cultural history of the United States. Bolshevism (or at least the threat of it), mass advertising, suffrage, racism, progressive politics, and a host of other important cultural elements shaped American life through the war years.1 The seeming dissonance between Woodrow Wilson the race-conscious southerner and Woodrow Wilson the champion of democracy helped make uncertain the war’s effects on American blacks at a time when the blues were forming as a new expression of their individual and collective consciousness. Constantly seeking progress toward racial uplift, the nation’s black leaders during World War I urged black Americans to support the war effort. Du Bois and others encouraged “closing the ranks” and practicing conspicuous patriotism, trying to combat the depiction of depraved colored soldiers in D. W. Griffith’s recent film, The Birth of a Nation (1915), as well as memories of the 1906 Brownsville Raid, in which white Texans and black U.S. soldiers exchanged fire, leaving 167 soldiers dishonorably discharged.2 In the minds of “close the ranks” advocates, the black serviceman would raise his self-esteem through martial training and donning the American uniform; the white community would rethink their racial mores after seeing African Americans faithfully dedicated to American patriotism and civic ideology. These leaders’ approach mirrored the efforts of black Americans during earlier military conflicts, such as the Union Army’s famous 54th Massachusetts Infantry. Military historian Robert Mullen summarized this long-standing view: “Black Americans have viewed their military record as proof of loyalty and as a claim to the benefits of full citizenship . . . The Black American, therefore, sought to participate in America’s wars in the hope that sacrifices on the battlefield would bring the reward of increased rights for all Black people in civilian life.”3

  In hoping to effect a change in black self-concept while simultaneously redrawing the black image in the white mind, race progressives’ approach to the Great War also resembled their thinking regarding the Great Migration. Black Americans could expect better opportunities in industrial cities, even if those opportunities carried with them unforeseen consequences and challenges. By leaving, southern blacks sent their white neighbors a message that they could find opportunities elsewhere and were not as dependent on whites as racial dogmas would have them believe. Whereas it is clear that the southern black “masses” undertook migration in large numbers, often for the reasons advocated by Du Bois and Abbott, less discernable is the reception of such leaders’ messages regarding the war. While there is little evidence in blues lyrics from which to surmise what the black laborers of the South thought about Du Bois’s and Abbott’s entreaties, the musicians did reflect the uncertainty felt by a young generation that had known nothing other than Jim Crow and had much to gain if their service did win closer protection from Uncle Sam. In reconstructing the experience of black southerners throughout the war years, we can test whether the war for democracy represented a watershed event or, in the words of Mississippi historian Nei
l McMillen, was a “turning point that turned only slightly.”4

  Despite the hope projected by black leaders at the beginning of World War I, black southerners in the war years faced challenges from all levels of mainstream white society. First, the executive branch of federal government seemed poised to desert, rather than support, African Americans. The Wilson administration followed an exclusionary policy toward African Americans in the federal government and presided over de facto racial policies that made Washington, D.C., the most segregated city outside the Deep South.5 Wilson’s southern and Democratic position on race influenced his prosecution of the War for Democracy as well. Wilson’s administration, in fielding an armed force that was often exclusionary and, at best, segregated, seemed to understand the traditional argument that U.S. citizenship carried with it the obligation of military service. If a group’s opportunity to fulfill this obligation was removed, policy makers could supply the rationale for denying that group equal rights to citizenship.6 Administration officials knew that arming southern blacks would be a hard sell, given southern white politicians’ “natural repugnance” to black soldiers.7 In effecting a Jim Crow-style presidency, Wilson “persuaded the white South that America could fight ideological wars for democracy and ethnic self-determination abroad without threatening the system of segregation at home.”8

  The number of African Americans participating, or seeking to participate, in the Great War nearly equaled those who moved in the Great Migration. Over two million black men registered for service in 1917 and 1918, and almost 370,000 men were actually inducted, a figure approaching the estimated number (500,000) the South lost in black out-migration during the 1910s. At least 700,000 black Americans volunteered for service,9 thus isolating militants such as Boston editor William Monroe Trotter, who openly defied Du Bois and Uncle Sam alike by rejecting the war to “make the world safe for democracy” and instead advocating a war to “make the South safe for Negroes.”10 While contemporaries noted some degree of nonparticipation on the part of African Americans, there was no clear connection between black desertion and black protest of the war.11

  The 367,000 African Americans inducted into the armed services during World War I served in a segregated military. From their first contact with the War Department, southern blacks faced disadvantages based on their race. The Selective Service Act of 1917, the law instituting a national military draft, was not designed to bring national uniformity or centralization but rather respected local power brokers by granting county draft boards significant control of the induction process.12 Southern draft boards clearly found the notion of utilizing black labor for the armed services less than “repugnant.” Boards employed the rationale that black men had fewer domestic responsibilities and fewer legitimate dependants than white registrants and therefore should serve in the place of white males, whose economic value outweighed those of African Americans, replicating the Civil War-era practice by native-born whites of paying a bounty for Irish immigrants to serve in their stead. As a result, the national draft created a disparity between white and black enlistees. Black Americans made up only 9.6 percent of the registrants available for the national draft, but comprised 13 percent of the entire force drafted; in other words, black registrants were inducted 31 percent of the time, compared to a rate of 26 percent for white registrants.13 Most white draft officials recognized the disparity as necessary to leveling the racial balance, as whites were understood to volunteer at a rate far exceeding that for blacks. “You must be aware that the Negro only labors to gain a livelihood,” wrote a group of Georgia planters, “[and] by no stretch of reasoning or imagination can he be induced to exert himself for patriotic motives.” Viewed primarily as a labor resource, black southern men were subjected to “work or fight” provisions that forced them to choose between working on white-owned plantations or joining the armed services.14 Chalmers Archer Sr., a black sharecropper from the Mississippi village of Mt. Olive, explained how he was pressed into service. “I was literally plowing through the south forty when I was sent for by the Lexington military draft office and told to report there at once. I was told that I would be summarily jailed for not answering previous notices to report for induction into the army. The only thing that kept me from being jailed was the report from the postmaster who said no letter had come through the post office for Chalmers, as she knew me personally.” Either poor postal service was to blame for Archer’s failure to report, or there had never been a letter in the first place and he was simply being forcibly exported from one field of labor to another. Restrained from sending word or returning to his family, Archer was inducted “on the spot” and shipped out by train the next day, headed for France.15 Big Bill Broonzy, not yet a professional bluesman before the war, never received formal solicitation either; he was chosen by his boss to fill their plantation’s quota of five men for armed service. The contrast between the president’s talk about a war for democracy and the paternalistic fashion in which Broonzy was conscripted may have stimulated the sensitivity to inequality that Broonzy later displayed in his famous tune “Black, Brown, and White.”16

  Black soldiers found that Jim Crow in the U.S. military did not end with a discriminatory and locally controlled draft. Although some histories of African Americans in World War I highlight the few decorations received and successes achieved by black combat troops, the vast majority of black enlistees had a far more humbling and unceremonious war experience.17 Most were relegated to supply and labor details during the war, and only fifty thousand black soldiers were sent to Europe. Hardly any saw combat duty. Mired in supply and labor positions, most African Americans serving in the war were never allowed to demonstrate patriotism in the form of armed service.18 Of course, the Western Front was horrifically deadly, and men who had been conscripted against their will were likely happy to be far away from the exploding shells. As we shall see in the blues tunes collected in France and recorded afterward, this was not so much the people’s war, but rather Uncle Sam’s, and the wartime experience of blacks on the home front differed little from their domestic lives before or after the war. Whereas his musical career offered him a variety of opportunities, Broonzy’s wartime service was a largely customary experience, as he remained stateside in a labor camp. “I didn’t know when the war was over, they kept us so busy cleaning up—filling up holes in the highways, sawing up trees that had blowed across the road.” Broonzy complained that southern white civilians and army officers harassed the black soldiers. “Anyone who spoke up for his rights,” Broonzy remembered, “generally got punished.”19

  The Houston Riot of August 1917 was the most dramatic manifestation of the inconsistency between domestic race relations and the nation’s foreign policy goals of spreading democracy. Black troops stationed in the Texas city removed segregation signs. According to Colonel G. C. Gross, the reporting army officer on the scene, “these soldiers, sworn to uphold the law, were not willing to comply with laws repugnant to them.” White Houstonians harassed the garrisoned troops, and a police officer allegedly pistol-whipped and shot a uniformed black soldier, sparking a riot that left seventeen people—eleven civilians, four Houston police officers, and two U.S. soldiers—dead. Gross blamed the riot on the racism of local whites and the unjust treatment blacks received at the hands of the Houston Police Department.20 In his letter to President Wilson, however, Secretary of War Newton Baker applauded the execution of thirteen of the soldiers involved in what he called a “mutiny” within the armed forces.21 Secretary Baker’s rhetoric of fear resonated among whites in other southern communities. In the wake of the Houston debacle, white residents of Vicksburg, Mississippi, forced black enlisted men off the streets and threatened to rip their uniforms from their backs. When the commandant at nearby Camp Hayes confronted city officials, he was advised to keep all uniformed black males out of the city altogether.22

  While Broonzy, the Houston servicemen, and other labor-only troops stationed in the United States found life in the army to be J
im Crow as usual—or worse—black soldiers serving in France had the chance to stretch their previous identities. Still, they too faced restrictions. The commanding American officer, Missouri-native General John J. Pershing, offered his French allies directives governing the behavior of African American troops in France. Similar to Jim Crow statutes in their attempt to control social interaction, Pershing’s orders were particularly “southern” in their forbidding “[Negro] enlisted men from addressing or holding conversation with the women inhabitants of the town.”23 Like planters resisting black migration out of the rural South, white officers with stakes in racial segregation hoped to prevent southern blacks from adopting new ideas or identities during their overseas service. A small number of black troops and officers would receive decorations—including the American Distinguished Service Cross and the French Croix de Guerre—for their military service in the war, but far outnumbering these were the black servicemen relieved from duty because white soldiers refused to stand with them. The message many black servicemen took from their experience was that they would be asked to perform only menial labor, like back home, and that the opportunity to prove themselves patriotic citizens would never materialize.24 A song performed by Mr. Mooney Dukes on the Western Front summed up the feeling: