Friedan’s classmate was far from alone in having an existential crisis in the suburban nation. As suburban living spread across the landscape, it faced a fusillade of criticism, largely on cultural and aesthetic grounds. (Environmental and racial issues received less attention.) Lewis Mumford and other cultural critics excoriated the suburbs for perceived sterility and uniformity. Suburban residents, as well as the communities they lived in, came under attack for conformity, blandness, and lack of taste. Novelist John Keats’s The Crack in the Picture Window (1956) presented suburbia as a dystopia of predatory real estate practices and pervasive discontent, while Sloan Wilson, whose The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955) was made into a popular movie starring Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones, portrayed a spiritual crisis in the commuting class. (Critiques of suburban living more sympathetic to residents, put forth by Friedan and Herbert Gans, pointed out the isolated lives of many housewives, trapped during the day by housework, children, and a lack of transportation.)
While critics of suburbia pointed out many obvious flaws with the emerging dominant mode of American life, their tone often reflected class snobbery more than anything else, contempt for working people with different values and tastes than cosmopolitan intellectuals, and a lack of imagination and information about the actualities of daily life in the suburbs. Rarely did they point out the benefits the suburbs brought, including affordable dwellings and a measure of personal privacy, something the rich always had but that the urban working class and even middle class often could not find. The much-publicized criticism of the suburbs was at one with a general distrust of mass culture and mass politics that characterized liberal thinking during the 1950s. Only very occasionally did critics of suburban life examine the way core liberal policies, especially the New Deal approach to housing, had created the world they so disliked.
CHAPTER 6
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“We the Union Army”
During the three decades after World War II, a civil rights movement radically expanded American democracy. The changes it brought to the lives of Americans and the structures of governance constituted the most important political development of the entire postwar era. A prolonged campaign for racial equality, fought largely but not exclusively by African Americans, propelled the movement. But it entailed more than the struggle for black advancement, as it transformed fundamental ideas about the rights of individuals in the society, their social roles, the relationship between government and the citizenry, and the means of achieving political and social change.
The civil rights movement sometimes was called the “Second Reconstruction.” The term pointed to the way that it could be seen as the last act of the Civil War, a fight for formal, legal racial equality as promised in the constitutional amendments and laws passed in the aftermath of the War Between the States. Like the first Reconstruction, the civil rights movement at times took on a quasi-revolutionary character, especially in the South, where it set off deep, sometimes violent social conflict.
The postwar civil rights movement unfolded with both continuities and breaks with the past. It was not a steady movement forward. Though it did not reach its high tide until the mid-1960s, much happened before then. Immediately after World War II, civil rights efforts swelled across the country from bases in established black institutions and liberal and labor groups that had grown during the New Deal and the war. In the South, the movement soon came to a halt in the face of a white countermobilization. By the mid-1950s, however, demographic and legal changes created the basis for the emergence of a new southern-based mass movement. After some gains, it too was checked by forces defending the existing racial order. But as the 1950s ended and the 1960s began, a larger, more militant phase of the civil rights movement took off, which ultimately brought about not only an extension and redefinition of democracy but also a reconstitution of almost every aspect of American society.
The Impact of World War II and the Cold War
Wars facilitated moments of advance for African Americans, as the need for social mobilization and the rhetoric of democracy created favorable conditions for knocking down discriminatory barriers in the labor market, the law, and the military. Rosa Parks, who later became world-famous for setting off the Montgomery bus boycott, first rode on an integrated vehicle during World War II, when she took a job at an Army Air Force base in Montgomery, Alabama. A federal order desegregating public spaces and transportation on military bases meant that Parks could begin her trip home from work on a trolley sitting with whites, before transferring to a segregated city bus. During the war, Parks became one of a small number of registered black voters in Montgomery, having joined a voter registration drive pushed forward by E. D. Nixon, a Pullman car porter who headed the local branches of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and the NAACP.
As hundreds of thousands of African Americans left the rural South during the war for better jobs and lives elsewhere, they escaped the semifeudal system of social control and outright terror that white southerners enforced in the countryside. With greater latitude for action, they built institutions that provided bases for their struggle for rights. Black trade union membership swelled in the North and some urbanized parts of the South. The NAACP’s membership grew, and new civil rights groups, like the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), were founded.
Changes in political thinking and the law complemented demographic and economic shifts in the push for greater rights. The New Deal forwent a direct attack on voting bars in the South, but it did promote the idea of democratic rights by using racially nondiscriminatory election procedures in a variety of contexts other than the selection of officeholders, such as for determining whether workers would be represented by a union. When Congress failed to make the wartime Fair Employment Practices Committee permanent, a growing number of states and cities, starting with New York State in 1945, passed laws making it illegal to discriminate in employment or union membership on the basis of race, religion, or national origin. While these laws lacked effective enforcement procedures, they represented important public statements against discriminatory practices and exerted some degree of pressure on employers and unions to change their ways. For its part, the Supreme Court, dominated by Roosevelt and Truman appointees, issued a series of decisions during the 1940s that outlawed or limited racially discriminatory practices, including its rulings on whites-only primary elections and housing covenants; a decision requiring unions with exclusive representation rights to equally protect all workers covered by their contracts regardless of race; and a ban on discrimination against black passengers in interstate transportation.
In the South, the drive to improve black life focused on voting. As the war ended, African Americans and their white allies broke with the timidity of the Roosevelt administration to directly attack the political basis of white supremacy. Local voter leagues, the NAACP, heavily black or left-wing unions, and black colleges sponsored voter registration drives, often led by returning veterans. By 1952, a million southern African Americans were registered to vote, 20 percent of those eligible, quadrupling the number registered in 1944. Though in the rural Deep South black voters remained very scarce, in some parts of the region they became a significant political force, undermining or checking segregationist thrusts. In Atlanta, blacks made up about a quarter of the voters by 1949 and had begun to force a change in the city’s politics, leading, among other things, to the hiring of the first African American policeman. In North Carolina, African Americans were elected to local government positions for the first time since Reconstruction in Winston-Salem (1947), Fayetteville (1949), Greensboro (1951), and Durham (1953).
Steps to democratize the voting system did not only affect African Americans, nor did they occur only in the South. The New Deal, the democratic rhetoric of the war, and the postwar international discussion of human rights broadened notions of democracy. In 1945, Georgia eliminated its poll tax, which greatly increased the white franchis
e, while several other states eliminated the tax specifically for veterans. Three years later, the last states to bar Indians from voting or serving on juries, New Mexico and Arizona, ended their prohibitions. In 1952, when the territory of Puerto Rico was reorganized as a commonwealth, it eliminated a literacy requirement for voting by women. Meanwhile, court rulings against laws banning naturalized citizens born in designated countries from voting allowed more Asian Americans to vote. By the early 1950s, something close to universal adult suffrage was becoming the norm, with the very large exception of African Americans in the South (and the lesser exception of felons and ex-felons).
In the North, where African Americans did not face voting bars, other issues, particularly the fight against job discrimination and for the desegregation of housing and public facilities, took the fore as civil rights, African American, labor, left-wing, and liberal groups pressed for racial equality and desegregation using tactics ranging from lawsuits to pressure on elected officials to public demonstrations of various kinds. In Newark, New Jersey, African Americans mounted protests against segregated swimming pools, restaurants, theaters, and bars. When in 1947 the state adopted a new constitution, it barred racial segregation in schools and in the state militia. In New York, ongoing campaigns against segregation led to legislation extending the state ban on discrimination to housing and public accommodations.
As notions of biological racial superiority became less acceptable in the light of changed scientific thinking and the wartime fight against racialist regimes, many northern and national organizations began at least token desegregation. New York University hired its first full-time black faculty member in 1946. Three years later, the American Association of University Women, the American Nurses Association, and the House of Delegates of the American Medical Association all admitted African Americans for the first time.
No change in race relations received more attention than the desegregation of major league baseball in 1947 with the promotion of Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers, after a prolonged campaign to integrate the sport by the black press and communist-led groups. The National Football League began allowing black players in 1946; the National Basketball Association in 1950. Participant sports also began desegregating, often only after considerable struggle. UAW members at the Ford River Rouge plant, many of whom were African American, began a campaign to desegregate local bowling alleys in 1941, throwing up huge picket lines when owners resisted. In 1944, their national union launched a drive to desegregate the American Bowling Congress, attracting various allies including the Catholic Youth Organization and the NAACP. After six years, a failed attempt to start a rival group, and several lawsuits, the country’s leading bowling organization finally ended its policy of restricting its leagues and tournaments to members of “the white male sex.”
The modest but significant postwar steps toward broader political and civil rights did not generate a self-sustaining process of social change. The year 1948 proved a high point of national concern about civil rights. Though the Dixiecrat revolt failed to cost the Democrats the presidential election, party leaders, in an effort to reintegrate southern segregationists into the party, thereafter distanced themselves from their brief, bold rhetorical support for equal rights. Republicans, seeing the possibility of building up their party in the South by attracting white urban and suburban voters, also downplayed their support for federal civil rights action. In the 1952 election, both parties adopted weaker civil rights platforms than they had four years earlier, and Adlai Stevenson picked a southern segregationist, John Sparkman, as his running mate.
The domestic anticommunist drive hurt the civil rights movement. In the South, a wave of liberals elected to Congress and to statehouses during the mid- and late 1940s found themselves under fierce attack, red-baited by opponents for their pro-labor and progressive economic views and challenged for failing to sufficiently defend the region’s racial order. Many went down to defeat or retreated on civil rights. The anticommunist crusade decimated civil rights groups with ties to communist-led organizations while weakening some of the unions that most actively fought for racial equality. It also undermined the influence of left-wing black leaders like Paul Robeson and W. E. B. DuBois, who faced investigations, indictments, and the loss of public venues to express their views.
White liberals, especially in the North, generally supported civil rights but, unlike leftists, not as a matter of urgency. Many accepted the outlook of Gunnar Myrdal’s influential report An American Dilemma, which suggested that a widely shared American belief in fairness and equality was on the way toward ultimately overcoming racial prejudice. In the liberal view, the key to ending racial inequality lay in education and modernization of the South. Seeking to speed up the process would only incite a white backlash. Optimistic that the problem of racial discrimination would in effect solve itself through general social advancement, most liberals gave much greater attention to the fight against communism, labor issues, and economic growth. When they did get involved in civil rights campaigns, it often was as an offshoot of their anticommunism, either to draw support away from civil rights groups with communist links or in response to Soviet-bloc propaganda attacking the United States for its racial practices.
Buses, Schools, and the Southern Black Movement
A little-noted event in 1953 previewed a reconfigured southern movement for black rights. In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, as in many southern cities, the second-class status of black bus riders provoked deep anger. Baton Rouge buses were divided into sections for white riders in the front and for black riders in the rear. If seats in the latter area were filled, black riders had to stand even if there were empty seats in the white section. In 1953, under pressure from African Americans, a city ordinance modified bus segregation so that it would be first come, first served, with blacks filling seats starting in the back of the bus, and whites from the front. White bus drivers, the day-today enforcers of segregation, refused to accept the change. To block it, they went on strike, leaving twenty-five thousand daily riders stranded. “The sole issue is racial segregation,” said an officer of their union. Within days, the state attorney general stepped in, ruling the new city ordinance illegal. Victorious, the drivers returned to the buses, but 90 percent of the black riders did not, refusing the travel under the old system. Black churches organized the boycott, under the leadership of T. J. Jemison, a minister and NAACP activist, whose father headed the National Baptist Convention, the largest organization of people of African descent in the world. To transport the boycotters, church leaders set up a network of private cars. To raise money and keep up spirits, they held nightly mass meetings. With black riders accounting for two-thirds of the bus system’s revenue, the boycott soon led to a compromise proposal to reserve the two front bus seats for whites, the backseat for blacks, allowing the rest to be filled first come, first served. After much debate, the boycott leaders accepted the settlement, ending the protest after ten days.
Baton Rouge revealed the outlines of a new mode of church-based, nonviolent mass action. The urbanization of southern blacks underlay this approach to fighting for rights, which used the growing economic importance of urban blacks as a lever on the white power structure. Black churches, swelling in size with urbanization, had organizational and spiritual resources, able and well-respected leaders not dependent on whites for their livelihood, and deep community ties that made them unmatched bases for social and political mobilization once they decided to push for civil rights. But such efforts blossomed only after two events further altered the political climate in the South, a Supreme Court decision and a terrible murder.
Brown v. Board of Education changed everything, and very little. The decision—perhaps the best-known in the history of American jurisprudence—was the culmination of an NAACP campaign, conceived of in the early 1930s, to advance black education by attacking through litigation the vast inequality in schooling offered to whites and blacks. At
first, the civil rights group did not directly challenge the 1896 Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson upholding separate but equal accommodations as constitutional. Instead, it argued that, within the context of segregated school systems, public agencies were failing to provide blacks and whites with equal opportunities, which Plessy implied was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal protection for all citizens. The first NAACP cases demanded equal access to professional and graduate education. After victories in some of those cases, including court orders that blacks be admitted to previously all-white schools when no equivalent segregated facilities existed for them, the NAACP moved on to elementary and secondary education.
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