Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  On 16 September she was the featured guest speaker at a banquet to honor the leaders of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and its International Ladies Auxiliary in New York’s Mecca Temple. To prepare, she read the union’s vision statement and decided to focus on one section: “We believe in American democracy. We know it is not perfect, but we have the right and the job here to make it so.”

  Among the luminaries at the dinner were Brotherhood president A. Philip Randolph, Walter White, New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia, and NYA head Aubrey Williams. Mary McLeod Bethune introduced ER, saying, “No problem has been too great or too small for her thoughtful, sympathetic consideration. No life has been too lofty or too low for her tender touch. . . . To know her is to love her.”

  ER thanked Dr. Bethune, who “served as an inspiration” to people of all races—as a teacher, a woman of service, “a leader among leaders.” Then she turned to the subject of American democracy: “You know, better than any other people, that it is not perfect, but we all have that . . . great obligation to improve the democracy of the United States. Only in doing that can we possibly make this nation really safe.”

  She specifically emphasized the enormous contributions that blacks had made to “the great arts,” emphasizing “how much America and all its citizens owe to the culture and gifts and skills that have come to this country . . . from every one of the minority groups that are the citizens of the United States.”

  James Weldon Johnson, she said, had once told her, “‘You are making a mistake, the people of your race. . . . You don’t recognize how much more my race has to contribute in many artistic ways, and you don’t try to develop them.’” She and Johnson had “spent a very delightful evening” together, and “I never had a more charming escort.” His words reverberated in all her efforts to be aware of and try “to further any opportunities” for the advancement of art, literature, music, “and many, many things which perhaps, before, many of us had not thought of. I think you should feel very proud, just as many other people who have come from other lands should feel very proud of the contribution they have made to the culture and life of the country.”

  Perhaps never before had the contributions of black Americans been so poignantly recognized by a first lady. But this was no time to rest, she said, “and you know how many difficulties there are that you have to overcome.” Her hope for the future lay in active young people, “and because I know a good many of the young people of your race, I know how great are their difficulties, and I appreciate their leadership.”

  ER specifically praised Harriet Ida Pickens, daughter of William Pickens, the longtime field secretary of the NAACP who had worked closely with Joe Lash when he was still in the AYC and had made a rousing speech at the contentious February 1940 AYC meeting in Washington. “I have the greatest respect for [Harriet’s] ability and her tact, devotion and courage,” ER said, “in doing the things which she thinks are right.” A Smith College honors graduate who majored in classics and chemistry, Pickens was the first African-American awarded Smith’s S-pin for all-around excellence in academics and sports. A dedicated youth leader, she condemned the ever-growing power of segregationists and decried Mississippi’s proposal to provide free textbooks to grades one to eight, with all references “to citizenship and voting rights” deleted in books for “Negro pupils.”

  ER considered Pickens’s AYC speech a mandate for action and closed her address to the Brotherhood with a call for deliberate, courageous, sustained action.

  [You have shown] great courage in the way you have carried on your Organization. But I want you to feel something which I feel very strongly now, that in the past few years, we have come in many ways far along the road to better understanding . . . [and also] to a greater appreciation of the dignity of human individuals, regardless of their race, or their creed, or their color. And a great many of us no longer think in little sections about people; we think of people as individuals and as contributors to a common cause. . . .

  I would like to pledge to you my faith and my cooperation to make this a better country . . . for all of us to live in and to make you pledge in return, that as we move forward, we may feel that our country is safer because it is a better country to live in for everyone.

  With those words, the entire audience of eight hundred stood to cheer: It was better for everyone when it was better for everyone.

  Walter White then took his turn and angrily denounced racial discrimination in defense industries and the military:

  It is particularly fortunate that you chose to hold your Convention at this crucial period in the world’s history, when the white world and what we have called “civilization” is reeling under the impact of totalitarian Stukas and Messerchmitts. . . . An upper-crust blithely and smugly gorged itself on the fat of the land and, because it had the ships and guns and economic power to get away with it, believed that God or Gobineau, or both, intended non-white races to exist only to create wealth for the so-called white nations of the earth.

  But even in the face of [Europe’s tragedies], the majority of white Americans have not yet awakened to the precariousness of the situation here in its similarity to European countries which have fallen victim to the dictators. England would be safe today, instead of on the verge of [conquest], did she have the loyal support of Ireland, India, Africa, and the West Indies. She does not have that support, because for generations, she has exploited these people and denied them all but the most meager share of the wealth which they produced.

  Here in our own country we continue practices against minorities—racial and religious—which are so vicious [they endanger] loyalty to the United States. While Congress appropriated millions of dollars for material defense, industrial plants and military arsenals deny employment to Negroes. Yet black workers will be taxed the same as their white counterparts to pay for the bill. How, then, could loyal support among the black citizenry be counted on?

  Recently, I ran across a case in a New England industrial city where the leader of the local Nazi Bund was given employment in a plant making airplanes. . . . That same plant curtly told a young Negro, whose grades averaged 98.4 percent in a topnotch technical school, that there were no jobs . . . “for niggers.” What happens when such a young man witnesses such a disgrace, a Nazi leader given a job while he washes automobiles in a garage . . . [and] his hard-earned training goes to waste?

  This, White declared, was going on all over America, north and south, where unions and industrialists denied African-Americans access to employment. Most bitter to report was the ongoing terror of violence and lynching. “The mob still rides, aided and encouraged by a minority of the U.S. Senate, which has filibustered to death every attempt to secure federal legislation against lynching.” And while both political parties ignored the subject, NAACP efforts to register voters were being met with violence.

  A reputable Negro citizen . . . Elbert Williams lies in a Tennessee grave, killed by a mob at Brownsville in June. . . . A minister of the Gospel and several other reputable Negro citizens . . . have been driven out of the town and told they will be lynched if they return. What was their crime? They asked local officials for information as to what they should do to qualify to vote in the presidential election. . . . Though the names of thirteen members of the mob were supplied to the authorities a grand jury returned the usual verdict—Williams died at the hands of parties unknown. The Federal Department of Justice—apparently afraid of the [local political] machine—has been “investigating” . . . for nearly three months.

  After dinner, ER and Bethune asked Walter White for the details of Elbert Williams’s lynching. He was thirty-three, a founder of Brownsville’s NAACP branch, which at that time had only fifty-four members—“a tiny fraction” of the county’s nineteen thousand blacks. Although blacks outnumbered whites three to one, blacks had not voted in Haywood County since 1884. On 6 May, Williams and several other branch members had
tried to register to vote. Then on the night of 20 June, while he and his wife were listening to the Joe Louis–Arturo Godoy boxing match on the radio, a city policeman arrived at their door. He demanded Williams go outside for a “discussion” and forced him into a waiting car. Three days later Williams’s body was found in the Hatchie River. Elbert Williams was the first known NAACP official to be killed in the struggle for civil rights.

  The previous week Elisha Davis, who had also tried to register to vote, had been tortured by a mob of sixty men who “forced him to reveal names of NAACP members, and promised to kill him if he remained in Brownsville,” according to historian Patricia Sullivan. Davis escaped to Jackson and warned about the “reign of terror” in the county. NAACP branch president Reverend Buster Walker had also been forced from his home.

  On 10 August 1940 the Pittsburgh Courier editorialized: “If Elbert Williams is not avenged, if Elisha Davis, Rev. Buster Walker, and other refugees dare not return home, just because they sought to exercise their right to vote, then democracy . . . is a grim and empty fiction.” Walter White and NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall urged the Justice Department to conduct a federal investigation and appealed for an end to the silence of the white press and of FDR. The president’s failure even to express sympathy to Williams’s wife and family was noted.

  White and Marshall went to Tennessee to investigate and were momentarily heartened to learn that U.S. attorneys and the Justice Department had obtained the names of police officer Tip Hunter and a mob of a dozen terrorists. The NAACP collected funds to reunite Davis with his wife and seven children, and they moved to Michigan. But the investigation languished in the hands of the FBI, and the Justice Department made no move to prosecute.*

  ER did not understand FDR’s continued silence in the face of such tragedy, as well as Wendell Willkie’s growing popularity. Staunch labor leaders like John L. Lewis and many black leaders, including boxing champion Joe Louis, were active for Willkie. Black newspapers criticized the president for being “as mum as the Sphinx” on all aspects of “the Negro question,” and their coverage was increasingly pro-Willkie. The Baltimore Afro-American even wondered if there were more Nazis south of Baltimore than west of Berlin.

  ER returned to her Eleventh Street apartment and wrote an urgent letter, based on all she had learned from Walter White. The time for silence was over, she told her husband. It was time for a conference. Most immediately “there is a growing feeling . . . [that blacks must] be allowed to participate in any training that is going on in the aviation, army, navy. . . . This is going to be very bad politically besides being intrinsically wrong and I think you should ask that a meeting be held.”

  The next day White wrote to thank ER: “Your speech is going to do a lot of good.” He sent her articles about military segregation, which now absorbed “the Negro press.”

  As you of course know, Negroes object to being the one group* so segregated not only on the basis of the principle involved but because such separation makes easier discrimination by hostile or prejudiced superiors. I wonder if the time isn’t ripe for the experiment to be tried in a state like New York, for example, where Americans could serve their country in a regiment, or division, on the basis of physical condition, loyalty and ability rather than on race, or creed, or color.

  All that summer, as the Burke-Wadsworth bill was debated, the NAACP campaigned against racial discrimination in the bill. Senator Robert Wagner introduced an amendment guaranteeing Americans the right to volunteer for military service regardless of creed or color. And Hamilton Fish—who had led a black infantry division during World War I and was, according to historian Gail Buckley, “an ally of the NAACP”—introduced an amendment to outlaw discrimination in military selection and training.

  But the bill as passed in September stated that inductees would be limited to those individuals who were “acceptable” to the military and who met the needs of “adequate” military accommodations. Walter White and A. Philip Randolph protested this language, and asked to meet with FDR. Since 11 August ER had also urged FDR and Secretary Knox to meet with White and a delegation of race leaders to ensure Negro participation in the armed forces.

  On 21 September, when the president finally agreed to the meeting, ER forwarded White’s correspondence: “This is for your consideration before the meeting with the colored group.” On 27 September FDR met with White, Randolph, T. Arnold Hill (formerly of the Urban League, now assistant to Dr. Bethune at the NYA), and members of his military team—navy secretary Frank Knox and Assistant Secretary of War Robert Patterson. The meeting lasted less than an hour (11:35 to 12:10). White sent ER a full account of the discussion: “The President opened the conference by stating that he had been pleasantly surprised” when War Department officials told him, “without solicitation on his part, that Negroes would be integrated into all branches of the armed service as well as service units.”

  White asked the president “if this applied to officers as well as enlisted men . . . , if this meant that Negroes would be continued to be used only in separate units and . . . if this open door policy applied to the Navy as well as to the Army.”

  Evidently it did apply to officers, and there were plans to call up “600 Negroes who were reserve officers,” and to train additional officers as needed. But the military had apparently never “even thought of non-segregated units in the Army. The President, however, was immediately receptive,” White noted, to his argument that while there might be difficulties in Mississippi or Georgia if white and black soldiers were together in regiments, “there was no reason to anticipate any difficulties . . . in states like New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, where Negroes and whites attend the same schools, play on the same athletic teams, and live in the same neighborhoods without difficulty.” White “emphasized that . . . an army fighting allegedly for democracy should be the last place [to find] undemocratic segregation.”

  FDR promised to investigate paths “to lessen, if not destroy, discrimination.” He thought it possible to “put white and black regiments in the North side by side,” and then, as replacements were needed, “through this continuity of Negro and white regiments . . . the Army could ‘back into’ the formation of units without segregation.”

  Patterson considered it “an experiment worth trying.” But Secretary Knox rejected it—“since [in the navy] men have to live together on ships,” and there could not be “Southern ships and Northern ships.” FDR pointed out that since the navy “was organizing [musical entertainments and] new bands for ships,” these “Negro bands might help solve the problem [to] accustom white sailors to the presence of Negroes on ships.” Knox “promised to look into” this idea.

  There was some discussion of elimination of discrimination in employment at army arsenals, navy yards, and national defense industries. But “the shortness of time” for the meeting prevented any significant exchange. It ended when FDR, Knox, and Patterson agreed to study the detailed memorandum for a “Non-Jim Crow Program” prepared by Hill, Randolph, and White, with the assistance of Charles Houston, Judge William Hastie, and Robert Weaver. FDR gave them reason to believe there would be another meeting to discuss their memorandum and to integrate the Negro into all aspects of national defense.

  But there was no subsequent meeting, nor even a phone call. Rather, on 9 October, FDR issued a press release announcing a new official policy of complete military segregation.

  The policy of the War Department is not to intermingle colored and white enlisted personnel. . . . This policy has been proven satisfactory . . . and to make changes would produce situations destructive to morale and detrimental to the preparation for national defense. [Therefore,] the department does not contemplate assigning colored reserve offices other than those of the Medical Corps and chaplains to existing Negro combat units.

  The black leaders were stunned by the press release, furious that White House press secretary Steve Early
implied that they themselves had approved the policy. On 10 October they sent a telegram to the White House to reject the president’s assertion that the army’s Jim Crow policies had “been proven satisfactory.” They “repudiated and denounced” FDR’s decision to approve “segregation for Negro units” in the armed forces. Rather, the leaders asserted:

  Segregation has been destructive of morale and has permitted prejudiced superiors to exercise their bigotry on defenseless Negro regiments. . . . We are inexpressibly shocked that a President of the United States at a time of national peril should surrender so completely to enemies of Democracy who would destroy national unity by advocating segregation. Official approval by the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of such discrimination and segregation is a stab in the back of Democracy.

  They protested the abhorrent press “trick” that implied they had agreed to the segregationist policy in conference.

  The NAACP initiated a letter-writing campaign throughout its six hundred branches, all youth councils, and college chapters to encourage protests before Election Day. The Crisis published every word of FDR’s duplicitous statement that “it is the policy of the War Department that the services of Negroes will be utilized on a fair and equitable basis.” There was nothing fair or equitable about it.

  Clearly FDR and the War Department, White editorialized, intended “to have as few Negro officers as possible.” Out of 230,000 servicemen in the peacetime military, there were only 5,000 blacks, and of those 5,000, only 5 were senior officers. Three were chaplains. Two were line officers: Colonel Benjamin O. Davis Sr., and his son, Captain Benjamin O. Davis Jr., the first black graduate of West Point since 1889. White’s editorial was bitter: “The whole trend in the army is known to be against having any Negro officers.” The War Department’s “long-range plan” was unacceptable: there were to be “no Negroes sent to West Point; no Negroes accepted in the citizens’ military training camps; very little, if any, training for Negro reserve officers; restricted training for Negroes in the ROTC.” “Immediate Action” was required.