by Jill Lepore
Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu, born in Oakland, California, in 1919, had tried to enlist in 1940. A welder at a defense plant, he refused to obey the relocation order, choosing to stay with his girlfriend, an Italian American. He had undergone plastic surgery to disguise his appearance; he pretended to be Mexican and eventually went into hiding. The ACLU took up his case, arguing that Executive Order 9066 was unconstitutional. In 1944, in Korematsu v. United States, the Supreme Court upheld the order in a 6–3 decision, relying on the opinion in Hirabayashi and emphasizing the danger posed to the United States by possible Japanese saboteurs who might aid a Japanese attack on the West Coast. Hoover appointee Justice Owen Roberts, in a strongly worded dissent, made a distinction between the two cases. “This is not a case of keeping people off the streets at night,” he said. “It is the case of convicting a citizen as a punishment for not submitting to imprisonment in a concentration camp . . . solely because of his ancestry, without evidence or inquiry concerning his loyalty.”69
And yet the war cultivated new forms of resistance to the racial order—unprecedented and sustained militant action. In the First World War, W. E. B. Du Bois, at the behest of George Creel, had urged African Americans to set aside the fight against Jim Crow for the duration. Eminent black leaders did not make this same case during the Second World War but instead put pressure on local and state institutions, and especially on the federal government, to dismantle segregation—as did men recruited to serve. “Every time I pick up the paper Some poor African American soldiers are getting shot lynch or hung, and framed up,” a man from the Bronx wrote to Roosevelt. “I will be darned if you get me in your forces.”70
The wartime economic boom that lifted so many Americans out of Depression-era poverty left African Americans out. In factories, their work was segregated and poorly paid. So too in the armed services. In the army, African Americans served in segregated, noncombat units, where they reported to white officers and did menial work; in the navy, they worked as cooks and stewards. They were forbidden from enlisting in the air force or marine corps. “The Negro soldier is separated from the white soldier as completely as possible,” reported Henry Stimson, secretary of war. The Crisis editorialized: “A jim crow army cannot fight for a free world.” James Baldwin worked in a defense plant in New Jersey in 1943, when he was nineteen. “The treatment accorded the Negro during the Second World War marks, for me, a turning point in the Negro’s relation to America,” he later wrote. “A certain hope died, a certain respect for white Americans faded.”71
Scattered sit-ins had started in 1939. A leading legal architect of the movement was Pauli Murray. Murray, born in Baltimore in 1910, had graduated from Hunter College in 1928 and then worked for the National Urban League and for the WPA. One of her white forebears had been a trustee of the University of North Carolina, which rejected her application for admission in 1938 on the basis of her race. At the time, Murray was in search of a doctor to prescribe testosterone; she saw herself as male. Her struggle with her doctors met with no success. To challenge UNC, she approached Thurgood Marshall, a young lawyer leading the NAACP’s campaign against segregation; Marshall discouraged her (Murray had moved to New York, and Marshall thought that a nonresident test case would be weaker than a claim made by a resident). In 1940, Murray was arrested in Virginia for refusing to give up a seat on a bus. Inspired by Henry David Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience, and having recently read a book called War without Violence: A Study of Gandhi’s Method and Its Accomplishments, Murray had decided to try to apply Mahatma Gandhi’s practice of Satyagraha, nonviolent direct action. The idea was to protest injustice without violence by waiting for one’s political opponents to perform injustice, by their own violent suppression of a peaceful protest. Murray’s own inclination was clench-fisted defiance of Jim Crow, but she forced herself to act, instead, with utmost courtesy. Murray next went to Howard University to study law, she said, “with the single-minded intention of destroying Jim Crow.” Instead of fighting for equal facilities, Murray argued for dismantling the forty-five-year-old Plessy altogether by fighting against separate facilities. During her years at Howard, a time when most male students were away fighting the war, Murray planned sit-ins in Washington, DC, drugstores and cafeterias; participants carried signs that read “We Die Together, Why Can’t We Eat Together?”72
In May 1941, A. Philip Randolph, the head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, called for a Negro March on Washington to be held that July. “I suggest that ten thousand Negroes march on Washington, D.C., the capital of the Nation, with the slogan, ‘We loyal Negro American citizens demand our right to work and fight for our country,’” Randolph wrote. By June, more than a hundred thousand protesters were expected to march. Eleanor Roosevelt, hoping to convince Randolph to call off the march, met with him in New York, along with Bayard Rustin, a young civil rights activist who’d been helping to organize the event—and who would later go on to organize the 1963 March on Washington. “Mrs. Roosevelt led off by saying that Mr. Randolph knew of her affection, of her efforts on behalf of Negroes,” Rustin recalled, “and that the President would be greatly embarrassed vis-a-vis our allies if, in the midst of our preparation for defense of freedom, this were to happen.” Eleanor Roosevelt arranged for Randolph to meet with the president at the White House. The president, too, tried to dissuade him.
“You know, Mr. Randolph, that if you bring a hundred thousand blacks into Washington, there’s absolutely no place for them to eat,” he said. “Furthermore, there’s no place for them to sleep, and even more serious there’s no place in Washington where they can use toilet facilities.”
“That is not my fault nor my problem,” Randolph replied. “But you can issue an Executive Order before we get here opening up the toilets, opening up the restaurants, and making it possible for us to sleep in hotels.”73
In the end, FDR signed Executive Order 8802, prohibiting racial discrimination in defense industries, and Randolph agreed to call off the march. Protests continued. Two black army sergeants in Norfolk, Virginia, refused to give up their seats on a bus; they were beaten and thrown in jail. A black U.S. Army nurse did the same in Montgomery, Alabama; the police who beat her broke her nose.74 Martin Dies of the House Un-American Activities Committee blamed communists, charging that “throughout the South today subversive elements are attempting to convince the Negro that he should be placed on social equality with white people, that now is the time for him to assert his rights.”75 In 1942, FBI head J. Edgar Hoover, keen “to determine why particular Negroes or groups of Negroes or Negro organizations have evidenced sentiments for other ‘dark races’ (mainly Japanese) or by what forces they were influenced to adopt in certain instances un-American ideologies,” conducted a nationwide investigation, including surveillance of hundreds of black lawyers, organizers, artists, and writers. It would result in a classified 730-page report called the Survey of Racial Conditions in the United States, code-named RACON. Far from proposing remedies in the form of civil rights, RACON warned of dangerous political subversives, by which Hoover and the Bureau meant African Americans working to dismantle Jim Crow. Hoover did not believe that the African American struggle for civil rights had come out of black communities; instead, he blamed the Communist Party, and he blamed the Axis. “It is believed the Axis Powers have endeavored to create racial agitation among American negroes which would cause disunity and would serve as a powerful weapon for adverse propaganda,” the director wrote, in a memo to FBI field agents. “It is believed that the agitation has been incited among the American negroes by telling them that the present war is a ‘race war’ and that they should not fight against the Japanese, who are also of the colored race.”76
By no means was the struggle against segregation confined to the South. In Detroit, white people barricaded the streets when the first black families moved in to a public housing project, the Sojourner Truth Homes, in February 1942. “WE WANT WHITE TENANTS IN OUR WHITE COMMUNITY,” read one
billboard. Tensions grew over the next year; in June of 1943 more than six thousand federal troops marched into Detroit to suppress the unrest. In New York that August, rumors that a white policeman had killed a black soldier led to riots that lasted two days, involved more than three thousand people, led to six hundred arrests, and left six people dead. “Don’t you see, Mr. President,” A. Philip Randolph wrote to Roosevelt, “this is not a repetition of anything that has happened before in the history of Negro-white relations?”77 Roosevelt offered very little by way of reply.
Pauli Murray offered, that summer, a poem.
A billboard in Detroit in 1942 called for the continuation of segregated housing. What’d you get, black boy
When they knocked you down in the gutter,
And they kicked your teeth out,
And they broke your skull with clubs
. . .
What’d the Top Man say, Black Boy?
“Mr. Roosevelt regrets. . . .”78
After graduating first in her class at Howard, Murray was rejected from a graduate program at Harvard Law School, which did not admit women. She went instead to the University of California, where she wrote a dissertation on “The Right to Equal Opportunity in Employment.” Beyond leading the effort to adapt the teachings of Gandhi to the civil rights movement, Murray would pioneer an interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment that insisted that it could be used to fight not only Jim Crow, discrimination by race, but also “Jane Crow,” discrimination by sex.79
FDR, confronted with a sustained and organized wartime campaign of sit-ins, protests, rallies, and boycotts, pledged to remedy one of the most galling forms of discrimination: black soldiers living in Jim Crow states generally could not vote. “Surely the signers of the Constitution did not intend a document which, even in wartime, would be construed to take away the franchise of any of those who are fighting to preserve the Constitution itself,” the president said during a fireside chat in January 1944. But when proposed legislation guaranteeing soldiers the right to vote went to Congress, southern Democrats balked. Much amended, the measure that became law left enforcement to the states. As the Pittsburgh Courier, a black newspaper, explained, the new law “answers the demand for a soldier vote law while guaranteeing that the Negro vote be ‘taken care of’ by election in precincts, counties, and other state units, and therefore is satisfactory to all except Negroes.”80
The American debate about the incompatibility of democracy and racism reached a new audience in 1944 with the publication of An American Dilemma, by a Swedish sociologist named Gunnar Myrdal, who’d been commissioned by the Carnegie Corporation to study race. The American dilemma, according to Myrdal, was the tension between, on the one hand, the American creed of human rights and personal liberty and, on the other, racial injustice. “The three great wars of this country have been fought for the ideals of liberty and equality, to which the nation was pledged,” Myrdal wrote. “Now America is again in a life-and-death struggle for liberty and equality, and the American Negro is again watching for signs of what war and victory will mean in terms of opportunity and rights for him in his native land. To the white American, too, the Negro problem has taken on a significance greater than it has ever had since the Civil War.”81
As a national consensus emerged about the need for Americans to find common cause and put their ethnic differences behind them, Hollywood filmmakers developed a convention later known as the “ethnic platoon,” about a motley group of American soldiers who form a band of brothers. Eric Johnston, who had been an adviser to FDR, became head of the Motion Picture Association of America. “We’ll have no more Grapes of Wrath,” he announced. “We’ll have no more films that deal with the seamy side of American life. We’ll have no more films that treat the banker as a villain.” A government pamphlet titled “A Manual for the Motion Picture Industry” explained that wartime films ought to be sure to include all manner of ethnic Americans as “the people,” and that part of the fight in this war must be against “any form of racial discrimination or religious intolerance.” Lifeboat, based on a story by John Steinbeck, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and released in 1944, is the epitome of the genre. The military and civilian survivors of an attack by a German U-boat find themselves on a single lifeboat, with the U-boat captain. Only by conquering their own differences can they rescue themselves from his machinations. The rich socialite falls in love with the working-class Irishman; the black steward saves everyone.82
Whatever the influence of Gunnar Myrdal or Hollywood filmmakers on the wartime struggle for civil rights, that struggle was led by black Americans, intellectuals, reporters, artists, and activists. “To win a cheap military victory over the Axis and then continue the exploitation of subject peoples within the British Empire and the subordination of Negroes in the United States is to set the stage for the next world war—probably a war of color,” the African American sociologist Horace Cayton wrote in The Nation in 1943. “Somehow, through some mechanism, there must be achieved in America and in the world a moral order which will include the American Negro and all other oppressed peoples. The present war must be considered as one phase of a larger struggle to achieve this new moral order.”83 Building that new order would be the work of the postwar world.
It was possible to begin to imagine that world in 1943, because the tide of the war had turned. U.S. and Canadian forces pushed back Japanese advances in the Pacific. Hitler’s planned assault on Soviet forces at Kursk ended in a German retreat. Britain bombed Hamburg. Allies invaded Italy. In July 1943, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin—the “Big Three”—met in Tehran, chiefly to plan the campaign against Germany. They also touched on the question of postwar international cooperation. Roosevelt and Stalin twice met together privately. (“Roosevelt believed that he would get along better with Stalin in Churchill’s absence,” the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union later said.) Roosevelt told Stalin about the plan, drafted by Sumner Welles, for a United Nations organization comprising three parts: an assembly, with delegates from all nations; an executive committee, of the Big Four, with six other regional delegates; and a security council of the “four policemen,” who would have power to act with force to prevent aggression and secure the peace. (The idea of a “world’s policeman” dates to the First World War, but in 1943, during a birthday dinner for Winston Churchill, FDR called upon the Allied powers—the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and China—to serve as the world’s “four policemen.”)
The meetings in Tehran, lavish dinners hosted by each leader in turn, were plagued by mistrust and, on Stalin’s part, duplicity. Churchill felt that Roosevelt had betrayed him by meeting with and repeatedly siding with Stalin. “There I sat with the great Russian bear on one side of me, with paws outstretched,” Churchill wrote, “and on the other side sat the great American buffalo.” Stalin reveled in his ability to divide the two men. The Big Three agreed on a plan for attacking Germany. But the statement issued at the end of the Tehran conference made no reference to the United Nations.84
At home, Roosevelt’s rhetoric took a turn toward what would become the UN’s language of human rights. A fight for freedom became a fight for rights. In January 1944, in a message to Congress, Roosevelt announced his plan for a Second Bill of Rights. The first Bill of Rights had guaranteed certain political rights, but “as our nation has grown in size and stature,” Roosevelt explained, “these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.” Declaring certain “economic truths” to be “self-evident,” his list of rights included “the right to a useful and remunerative job,” “the right of every family to a decent home,” “the right to adequate medical care,” and “the right to a good education.”85
Time declared, “Dr. Win-the-War has apparently called into consultation one Dr. Win-New-Rights.” Wartime prosperity strengthened Roosevelt’s hand in expanding the government’s role in securing rights, and civil rights activists had demanded it. At the same time, libe
rals were losing political power, not gaining it, at least as measured by congressional elections. In 1942, Democrats lost 42 seats in the House and 8 in the Senate. They still held a majority of seats in both houses, but a far diminished one. In 1936, there were 242 more Democrats than Republicans in the House; in 1942, that majority had shrunk to 10. In 1938, Democrats held 60 more seats than Republicans in the Senate, a majority that, by 1942, had shrunk to 21. By 1943, Congress had eliminated a great many New Deal relief programs, including the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration, the National Youth Administration, and the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation. Other New Deal agencies were either dismantled or had their heads replaced with conservatives. I. F. Stone said that the New Deal was “beginning to commit hara kiri.” In 1944, Archibald MacLeish gave voice to liberals’ anticipation of a reactionary peace: “Liberals meet in Washington these days, if they can endure to meet at all, to discuss the tragic outlook for all liberal proposals, the collapse of all liberal leadership, and the inevitable defeat of all liberal aims. It is no longer feared, it is assumed, that the country is headed back to normalcy, that Harding is just around the corner.”86
MacLeish was not far wrong. In 1945, Martin Dies reconvened his Un-American Activities Committee to investigate liberals suspected of being communists. Anticipating Joseph McCarthy, Dies warned of “hundreds of left-wingers and radicals who do not believe in our system of free enterprise” and claimed that “not less than two thousand outright Communists and Party-liners” were “still holding jobs in the government in Washington.” The objects of Dies’s ire included Frances Perkins and even Eleanor Roosevelt herself. “The First Lady of the Land,” Dies said, “has been one of the most valuable assets which the Trojan Horse organization of the Communist Party have possessed.”87