Penguin History of the United States of America

by Hugh Brogan

  Meanwhile, for the Southern blacks, transformation had already begun. Their standard of living and their incomes had been so low that relief payments under FERA and WPA meant that they were actually better off – much better off. The point did not go unnoticed. ‘Ever since federal relief came in you can’t hire a nigger to do anything for you. High wages is ruinin’ ‘em,’ said a North Carolina landlord. ‘I wouldn’t plough nobody’s mule from sunrise to sunset for 50 cents per day when I could get $1.30 for pretending to work on a DITCH,’ said a white Georgian farmer. Intense pressure was brought to undo this shocking state of affairs, leading at one moment (in 1937) to the revival of’something like the slave patrol’1 which drove blacks to work in the cotton fields. Federal policy accepted the idea that relief payments ought to be lower per capita in the South than elsewhere, just as wages were; but neither this nor any other concession to conservatives could make much difference. The poor of the South, black and white, discovered that higher wages for less work were now available to them, thanks to Uncle Sam; and they were soon ready to think that these good things ought to be available to them on principle. The relief programme reinforced the sturdy patriotism of the Southern poor white. A North Carolina tenant farmer said that whenever he heard the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ he got a lump in his throat: ‘There ain’t no other nation in the world that would have sense enough to think of WPA and all the other As.’ The Southern poor black began to look about him, as his Northern kin had already learned to do.

  The experience of segregated service in the profoundly racist army of the First World War, of lynching on the home front and of riots in the war’s aftermath gave Northern blacks a deep awareness of their oppressed status and an equally deep determination to improve it. Sometimes this determination had bizarre results. One such was the Universal Negro Improvement Association of Marcus Garvey (1887–1940). Garvey was a Jamaican who found his way to the United States in 1916 and in the post-war years gained a huge following by his insistence on the greatness and glory of being black (an attitude that was to return in greatly increased strength in the 1960s, when it was expressed in the slogan ‘Black is Beautiful!’). He denounced white Americans as hopelessly corrupt and racist, and urged a return to Africa; meanwhile he urged his followers to build up autonomous black social, economic and military institutions, of which the most celebrated was the Black Star Steamship Line. Unfortunately it caused his downfall: it was commercially unsound, and in 1925 Garvey was sent to prison for using the mails to defraud – he had raised money for his Black Star by post. When he was let out two years later Coolidge deported him as an undesirable alien. Garveyism rapidly faded, to the relief of many black leaders, who found its competition all too effective; but it had enunciated many themes that were to re-emerge forty years later. By an irony of history W. E. B. Du Bois, Garvey’s chief opponent, was eventually to adopt one of Garvey’s principles: when Ghana became the first of Britain’s African colonies to regain its independence Du Bois renounced his American citizenship and went to end his days there.

  On the whole there was more promise in the activities of the more sedate black organizations, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which had been founded in 1909, by Du Bois and others, in the wake of a dreadful race riot at Springfield, Illinois, in the previous year. The NAACP, which was the most important and effective of black pressure groups, was a partnership of blacks and whites, like the old abolitionist movement of which it was self-consciously the heir; and it concentrated on securing African-American advancement through the courts. It made some few gains between the wars, notably by securing the destruction of the ‘grandfather clause’, which was outlawed by the US Supreme Court in the case of Lane v. Wilson (1939) and by scoring a first defeat of the white primary in Nixon v. Herndon (1927); but these victories were more than offset by the loss of Grovey v. Townsend (1935), in which the Court unanimously acknowledged the legality of a revised, but equally effective, form of the white primary. This was a heavy blow to the NAACP which had invested a great deal of time and money in the case; furthermore, the Association had difficulty in answering the charge, made in 1940 by Ralph Bunche (a black intellectual, later a leading diplomatist), that it was of very little use to the bulk of poor blacks, who had more pressing concerns than their inability to vote: ‘The escape that the Negro mass seeks is one from economic deprivation, from destitution and imminent starvation. To these people, appealing for livelihood, the NAACP answers: give them educational facilities, let them sit next to whites in street-cars, restaurants, and theaters. They cry for bread and are offered political cake.’

  Yet there were some signs that important changes were at hand. In 1925 A. Philip Randolph (1889–1978) organized the first successful black labour union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids, that after years of struggle succeeded in winning both recognition and wage increases from the Pullman Company. The Republican allegiance of black voters (where there were any – that is, in the North) began to crack in the 1928 election, when Herbert Hoover, very injudiciously, courted the racist vote in the South. In the same year Oscar De Priest of Illinois became the first black man since Reconstruction to be elected to Congress.

  All the same, the twenties were a miserable period for blacks north as well as south of the Mason-Dixon line, and the coming of the Depression made matters worse. The accelerated impoverishment of the mass of black workers meant that the black lower middle class of small businessmen – shopkeepers, undertakers and the like – who sold them services could no longer find customers, and they too began to succumb to economic disaster. And at first it did not seem that the New Deal could be of much assistance. Roosevelt could not place black rights high on his agenda, if anywhere at all. The NAACP pressed him, as it had pressed so many Presidents before, to support an anti-lynching bill. He told its head, Walter White, ‘I did not choose the tools with which I work… Southerners, by reason of the seniority rule in Congress, are chairmen or occupy strategic places on most of the… committees. If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now, they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I just can’t take that risk.’ But though they accepted this reasoning, black leaders did not let it discourage them. They took comfort from the fact that FDR had a ‘black cabinet’, an unofficial body of African-Americans whose advice he sought on matters to do with their race, from the knowledge that Eleanor Roosevelt was on their side, and from the President’s words to Mary McLeod Bethune, a member of the black cabinet: ‘People like you and me are fighting… for the day when a man will be regarded as a man regardless of his race. That day will come, but we must pass through perilous times before we realize it.’ They discounted the fact that the TVA accepted Jim Crow restrictions, and that the Federal Housing Authority positively encouraged residential segregation.2 To them the all-important thing was that the President’s policies had saved them from despair and starvation, and they went over to the Democratic party en bloc: for instance, in 1934 a black Democrat, Arthur W. Mitchell, replaced the black Republican, De Priest, as Congressman from the first district of Illinois. At the same time, Republicans did not let the growing black vote go without a struggle, which partly explains the rapidly increasing number of blacks in the state legislatures during the thirties. Black judges began to appear here and there in the North. The Roosevelt administration appointed large numbers of African-Americans to executive posts (though not to any very important ones), while its expenditures went not only on relief for individuals but on building hospitals and college buildings for blacks as well. The emergence of the CIO at last opened a way into unionism for large numbers of black industrial workers, who had previously been blocked by the AFL, more because craft unions disliked unskilled workers than because their members disliked blacks. In 1937 the Supreme Court declared that it was legal to picket firms which refused to employ African-Americans.

  Then the Second World War transformed the position a
nd prospects of black Americans, just as the First World War had transformed the prospects of the South.

  The new conflict, to be sure, also carried on the work of the first. Once more, army camps sprouted everywhere in the South. So did military airfields. Some $4,500,000,000 was spent on war plants in the section, raising its industrial capacity by 40 per cent or so; among the longterm effects were the creation of a pool of skilled workers, another of local capital and yet another of trained managers. Once more the South demonstrated its attractions as a field of investment, and financiers and industrialists took note. There was a renewed rush from the land, a renewed burst of urban growth (bringing many acute problems with it); yet times had never been so good on the farms. The new cities and factories could absorb all that the land could produce. With the return of good times came an acceleration of the reviving conservatism of the farmers: they supported the conservative lobby, the Farm Bureau, ever more enthusiastically, and actively encouraged the dismantling of the Farm Security Administration, which had tried to help tenant farmers and sharecroppers. Not that this was too tragic a development: the tenants and sharecroppers were already streaming to the city and the better life (paid for by wartime jobs) that it promised.

  What Torified the whites radicalized the blacks, and they made substantial gains in both military and civilian life, though not without anguish. In the services they quickly discovered that they were being treated as second-class citizens, and were equally quick to resent it. Northern blacks, called up in large numbers, found themselves at training-camps in the rural South where these second- or third-generation city-dwellers, these soldiers of freedom (many had joined up with great enthusiasm to fight Hitler) found themselves treated as they never had been in their lives before – treated as their Southern kin were. The contempt, the brutality, the injustice of white supremacy made themselves felt every day. What was particularly hard to bear was the sight of Nazi prisoners of war enjoying facilities, such as railway restaurants and dining-cars, which black American soldiers were forbidden to enter. Nor did these Northerners appreciate segregated quarters within the camps, or segregated everything in nearby towns. Inevitably there was trouble: fights, riots and one full-scale mutiny. The high command came badly out of the story.3 Not only was segregation in the army preserved, but black units were denied equal opportunity to shine in war: all too often they were given poor training, poor equipment, and were sent to the least promising parts of the battlefield. In spite of this many individual blacks and many black units performed heroically and more than vindicated their claim to equal rights as American soldiers. But the only leading American general who seemed to understand and accept the idea was George Patton, a hot-headed, brilliant commander who welcomed the 761st ‘Black Panther’ Tank Battalion to his army in Normandy in 1944 in a speech that endured among many veterans’ treasured memories:

  Men, you are the first Negro tankers ever to fight in the American army. I would never have asked for you if you were not good. I have nothing but the best in my army. I don’t care what color you are as long as you go up there and kill those Kraut sons-of-bitches. Everyone has their eyes on you and are expecting great things from you. Most of all, your race is looking forward to your success. Don’t let them down, and, damn you, don’t let me down!

  If you want me you can always find me in the lead tank.

  But even an officer corps dominated by men of Southern background and attitudes eventually had to accept that it had a wolf by the ears; in the mere interests of military efficiency concessions had to be made. Officer cadet schools were desegregated in 1940; blacks were admitted to the Marine Corps for the first time and, on an equal footing, to the navy; in the army they were used in a combat role in all theatres (whereas in the First World War they had been confined to a support role, though not in the Civil War); finally, during the crisis of the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, when the Germans counter-attacked for the last time and for a few days carried all before them, black reinforcements were thrown in wherever they could be of most use and a measure of de facto desegregation at the fighting level occurred. It was followed up in January 1945 by the creation of the first formally integrated unit in the history of the army. The implications were plain, and in 1948 President Truman opened all jobs in the armed services to African-Americans and abolished the racial quota, according to which no more blacks would be accepted into uniform than there were, proportionately, in the total population. Finally, during the Korean War, the needs of the battlefield once more took a hand, and under the pressure of events the complete integration of the US army was at last achieved.

  The impact of the Second World War on civilian blacks, was just as profound, though possibly less visibly dramatic. Progress was determined by two factors: the growing importance of black votes in Northern elections, especially in the great urban-industrial complexes, and by the manpower needs of the nation at war. As a matter of fact, black political leverage had been growing for some time: for example, in 1930 it was largely African-American pressure that defeated Herbert Hoover’s nomination of an unacceptable candidate to the Supreme Court. Ten years later A. Philip Randolph spectacularly demonstrated the new muscle of his people. After the outbreak of the war in Europe, the United States economy, as we have seen, moved over to the production of war materials and began to boom. Blacks found it exceedingly hard to get employment in the resuscitated factories. A colour bar unquestionably existed, and denunciations by the President, by the US Office of Education and by the National Defense Advisory Committee did little or nothing to improve matters. So in January 1941 Randolph announced that unless the bar was lifted he would lead a march of blacks on Washington on 1 July, a date unpleasantly near the glorious Fourth, and an event calculated to draw the greatest possible attention to the existence of racial oppression in the leading Western democracy: a propaganda gift to Goebbels. Nothing could have been more divisive or more likely to give a harried administration, struggling to control events as America drifted towards war, enormous political trouble. At the same time the blacks of America responded with huge enthusiasm. Leading New Dealers such as Mayor La Guardia and Mrs Roosevelt were sent to dissuade Randolph, but he was inexorable. At length the President gave in. After conferring with the black leader Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, under which every defence contract between the government and industry had to have a clause forbidding racial discrimination in employment, and a committee on fair employment practices was set up to make sure that the clauses were honoured. Randolph called off the march on Washington. But the tactic was not forgotten: Mr Randolph was to live to see it actually used.

  Blacks, of course, welcomed 8802; the South did not. One Kentucky journalist tried to make it acceptable to Southern white opinion by arguing that it had nothing to do with racial segregation and by asserting comfortingly that ‘all the armies of the world, both of the United Nations and the Axis, could not force upon the South the abandonment of racial segregation’. Like the proposed march, this assertion afforded a glimpse of the future.

  The fair employment order and the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) could not immediately end all prejudicial discrimination by employers; blacks still failed to get all the jobs they were entitled to, or, when employed, to secure earned promotion; but still they made huge advances, as the rapid rise of the black population of such cities as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and Detroit suggested. The NAACP went on with its war in the courts. It brought unceasing pressure to bear in the attempt to equalize educational opportunities for black and white children in the South, and in particular to equalize teachers’ salaries: after winning a crucial case in the Supreme Court, Gaines v. Canada (1938), in which chief Justice Hughes declared that, to be constitutional, ‘separate but equal’ facilities (as required by Plessy v. Ferguson) had to be truly equal, the NAACP was able to lobby so effectively that soon after the end of the war black schoolteachers’ salaries in the South had risen to 79 per cent of whites’. Ga
ines thus added appreciably to the cost of maintaining school segregation; it also marked the Supreme Court’s first step away from segregationist doctrine. Even more important was another NAACP-inspired decision, Smith v. Allwright (1944), in which the Court finally declared the white primary to be unconstitutional in any form. This decision did not of itself mean that Southern blacks would now be able to vote. It was only a first step, like Gaines. But first steps have to be taken.

  These successes owed much to the transformation of the Supreme Court by appointments made during Roosevelt’s second and third terms, and even while they were being won blacks were still suffering outrageously at the hands of fellow-citizens. NAACP persistence in pursuing these cases was, however, a sign that blacks were even less willing than they had been after the First World War to endure bad treatment, at least in the North (and the black North, as whites were reminded in 1943, ‘has always been the tongue of the black South’). Matters came to a head in Detroit. The great automobile assembly lines had been turned over to the production of tanks, and the whole industry had greatly expanded: by the end of the war it was responsible for 20 per cent of all war production. The wide-open job market had allured many poor blacks as well as whites from the South (50,000 of the one sort, 450,000 of the other). Such an influx, only comparable to what had occurred at the height of the Great Migration and the Industrial Revolution, would in any circumstances have imposed enormous strains on social resources. All over America it proved difficult to house wartime workers, and shanty-towns, ‘new Hoovervilles’, inevitably grew up to accommodate them. Black and white immigrants were alike unused to city and factory life; the white Southerners brought their traditional hostilities with them and acted upon them; rabblerousers were not lacking. At last, after incessant provocation, the blacks retaliated. On 20 June 1943, after a fist fight between a black man and a white, the races clashed violently all over the city. At length Roosevelt had to declare a state of emergency and send in federal troops to restore order. The trouble ended only after twenty-five blacks and nine whites had been killed, 800 people had been injured, and two million dollars worth of damage had been done to property (most of it belonging to blacks). It was a shocking and depressing affair, but in its way also signified progress: African-Americans had not submitted tamely to oppression, and the violence had dramatically advertised their grievances to the world.