White Rage

by Carol Anderson

  Abbot’s newspaper warned its readers not to be duped by entreaties from so-called black leaders like Moton that Dixie was African Americans’ natural home. The Defender would have none of it: “You see they are not lifting their laws to help you, are they? Have they stopped their Jim Crow cars? … Will they give you a square deal in court yet? When a girl is sent to prison, she becomes the mistress of the guards and others in authority … something they don’t do to a white woman. And your leaders will tell you the South is the best place for you. Turn a deaf ear to the scoundrel, and let him stay.”47

  The Chicago Defender’s threat to the old regime was clear. Nor did it flinch in the face of the outrage that greeted its message. The Defender discussed not only the Klan but also the governors, legislators, government officials, and business leaders who benefited from a system of oppression that robbed African Americans blind. At least as notably, the Defender’s pages published one ad after the next about job opportunities in the North with wages that were unheard of to Southerners. The newspaper prominently displayed information as well about the Chicago Urban League, which made itself available to help smooth the transition from the rural South to the urban North. And in its pages were ever-present pictures of schools, homes, and lush public spaces that held out the promise of all that was possible.

  Freedom of the press and First Amendment rights are hallowed constitutional ground in the United States, and the Defender had not violated any libel law: The lynchings happened; the theft of wages was real; the rape of black women was no secret. The Defender had done nothing but report the truth.48 But for that crime, Southern elites felt it had to be silenced.

  The police chief in Meridian, Mississippi, “ordered the newspaper confiscated from dealers.”49 Other locales soon followed suit. Montgomery passed an ordinance that “any person, firm or corporation who published, printed or wrote or delivered or distributed or posted … any advertisement, letter, newspaper, pamphlet, handbill or other writing for the purpose of enticing, persuading or influencing any laborer … to leave the city of Montgomery for the purpose of being employed as a laborer” would be sentenced to up to six months’ hard labor and fined one hundred dollars.50 A judge in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, issued an injunction banning the distribution of the Chicago Defender anywhere in the county.51

  However, these maneuvers succeeded only in forcing the paper underground. Like a resistance movement in a totalitarian society, a network of black railroad porters, ministers, and teachers, even under the stress of surveillance, worked to circumvent the ban using the postal system and smuggling the paper in bulk goods.52 Indeed, the attempt to keep the Defender out of the hands of African Americans only increased the paper’s credibility and importance.53

  While the ban on the Chicago Defender cut right to the core of American democracy, Southern states’ assault on the First Amendment extended far beyond that newspaper. As the law in Montgomery made clear, the very idea of freedom of movement, and the concept that labor could go wherever it could get the best package, had to be stopped. Thus, in Georgia two men who carried a poem railing against the sharecropping system, lynching, and unequal pay were arrested, convicted, and sentenced to thirty days in jail for carrying incendiary literature.54 While in Franklin, Mississippi, an African American preacher who sold the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) magazine Crisis was hit with a four-hundred-dollar fine and sentenced to five months on the county farm.55

  Regardless of Southern officials’ efforts, wave after wave of black people continued to leave. Nothing seemed to stop the flow. The officials, therefore, decided to go after the railroad system. The logic was simple: If the ideas that led to the exodus couldn’t be stopped, then certainly the physical means by which hundreds of thousands had already left the region could be. A variety of tactics was employed. One was to physically prevent the trains from moving. A waylaid train could wreak havoc with schedules even under optimal conditions, but conditions weren’t optimal. With World War I raging, the shipment of personnel and matériel was crucial to supporting the Allies. Nevertheless, white Southern leaders prioritized their need to stop the advancement of African Americans above all other considerations, including victory over the nation that had sunk the Lusitania and killed nearly twelve hundred passengers and crew members. It was most egregious in Mississippi, where, in Greenville, Greenwood, and Brookhaven, trains were stopped and sometimes sidetracked for days.56 The federal government finally stepped in when the police chief in Meridian, Mississippi, held up a train on a technicality. The U.S. marshal arrested the city’s highest-ranking lawman on the spot.57 Recognizing that there was more than one way to disrupt the flow, Jackson, Mississippi’s officials threatened to rig pending court decisions if the railroads did not stop handing out passes for African Americans to go north.58

  In addition to strangling interstate commerce and being willing to hijack the legal system to blackmail the railroads into submission, authorities went after African Americans directly. In Albany, Georgia, the police ripped up the tickets of black passengers who were on the platform waiting to board.59 Jacksonville mayor J.E.T. Bowden was upset that there were so many black men near the labor recruiting station and trying to board trains that he had the police chief arrest them for vagrancy and told the nearly five hundred men that they would not be allowed to leave the city for better jobs.60 Memphis police inspector Earl Barnard seized twenty-six northbound African Americans, charged them with vagrancy, and then routed them to a plantation in Arkansas in what can only be called “peonage.”61 In Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the ticket agent, under the advice and counsel of the town’s citizens, simply refused to sell any tickets to African Americans.62 When blacks tried to circumvent the dragnet by walking many miles to use another station, they were manhandled by police at the railroad stations and then charged with vagrancy.63 In Americus, Georgia, blacks trying to go north faced a dense network of local police and county sheriffs who were armed with state-issued arrest warrants. Herded into the jails, even though none of the officials knew for sure whether it was legal to detain someone simply because they wanted to go north, African Americans weren’t released until the trains had left the city.64

  The Macon Telegraph grimaced at such far-flung efforts at coercion: “We are not slaveholders … We do not own the Negroes; we cannot compel them to stay here.”65 Indeed, all the heavy-handed tactics boomeranged. Blacks weren’t intimidated; instead, they were more determined than ever to leave.66 In desperation, the mayor of New Orleans wired the president of the Illinois Central Railroad, asking his company to “stop carrying negroes to the North.” In a reply that was a primer on basic federal law and economics, the railroad executive explained that neither his company nor any other one, given the interstate commerce clause, could refuse to sell tickets or provide transport to paying customers. Moreover, he pointed out, given the relatively high wages that blacks were now getting in the North, the South needed to brace itself; the exodus would surely continue.67

  Rather than brace themselves, the same Southern leaders who had always been such staunch and proud adherents of states’ rights now lobbied the federal government for help. They recognized that the nation’s mobilization for World War I could provide the perfect patriotic cover—despite their own string of transgressions—to stanch the flood of blacks out of the South. In 1918, the Selective Service Division of the federal government issued a “work or fight” order that required every able-bodied person to be either inducted into the armed services or employed in the key industries the nation needed to wage total war.68 Instead, the white South took full advantage of the fog of war to keep African Americans from migrating north. Conjuring up a new version of the infamous vagrancy laws that had fueled the convict-lease labor system after the Civil War, Southern officials used so-called Councils of Defense to corral black bodies for planters, mill operators, and other employers.69

  The justification of this new form of bondage—as a defense of God a
nd country—was a fig leaf to cover the Southern states’ true, self-serving motives. Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis F. Post admitted that he had “found that the work-or-fight order was being used for peonage purposes and that employers were conscripting labor for private use rather than for the service to the war effort.” Equally revealing was his concession that the majority of workers were black. The NAACP added that it was no accident that the widespread abuse of the work-or-fight order lined up “exactly … with that portion of the territory of the U.S. in which the institution of chattel slavery formerly existed.”70 The chief of the United States Employment Services, a man from Meridian, Mississippi, in fact, vowed “that the first thing he was going to do was to see that Niggers were stopped from going North.”71

  The reason Southern officials rose up to try to stop the Great Migration of a people for whom they clearly had such contempt goes far beyond the easy default response of “labor.” Black flight threatened much more than the economic foundation of a feudal society; African Americans’ determination to achieve their full potential endangered the legalistic, biological, and philosophical tenets of a racially oppressive system. Black prosperity and success—indeed, black intelligence—were unimaginable and, thus, justified the disparate funding in education that had led to abysmal schools and made the brutality of the criminal justice system necessary. It propped up skewed, racially based pay scales. The whole culture of the white South was erected on the presumption of black inability. And the Great Migration directly challenged that foundation. Black success was the white South’s bogeyman.72 And the fear that this engendered erupted in ticketed passengers being dragged off trains, interstate commerce getting blocked, the wartime needs of the nation going ignored, and labor becoming criminalized for taking its skills to an employer willing to pay.

  Still, African Americans continued to leave. As the Chicago Defender crowed in 1922, MORE THOUSANDS KISS THE SOUTH A LAST GOOD-BY: MISSISSIPPI DELTA IS BEING STRIPPED OF LABORERS, EVERY TRAIN BRINGS GUESTS NORTH.73 Yet, the land above the Mason-Dixon Line was, as Du Bois remarked, no paradise, and certainly no haven from oppression.74 African Americans who went to the North simply stepped into a new articulation of the seething, corrosive hatred underlying so much of the nation’s social compact. Beginning in 1917 and going into the 1920s, so-called race riots, which were essentially lynchings on a grander scale, erupted in East St. Louis, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and numerous other cities.75 Though labeled “riots,” these outbursts were more like rampages, where whites went hunting for African Americans to pummel, burn, and torture. Killing was just an added bonus. In some instances, as in Chicago, blacks fought back. But in all instances, they were outnumbered. In Chicago alone, twenty-three African Americans were killed, and one thousand black families were left homeless.76 During the Red Summer of 1919 there were, in fact, seventy-eight lynchings, including a man burned at the stake in Omaha, Nebraska.77

  More than just white fears of black competition for jobs ignited rampant violence against African Americans. Anxieties about housing played a big role. Chicago, for example, had hemmed the black population into tight, confined areas with finite housing possibilities. In 1917, the Chicago Urban League found that real estate agents had so constricted the supply of homes for African Americans that on one day alone, only fifty houses were available for 664 black applicants. Given the basic economics of supply (limited) and demand (great), rents skyrocketed up to 50 percent higher for this decaying housing stock.78 For decades afterward, when it appeared that African Americans were moving into white neighborhoods, race riots became an all-too-familiar drumbeat to drive blacks back to overcrowded, dilapidated slums.79 In one case, a young Jewish couple, Aaron and Louise Bindman, was suspected of hosting an African American boarder. “Some of the mob was actually up on our porch, pushing on the door,” the wife recalled. “We were terrified. We put empty bottles on the floor to slow them down if they actually got inside. We had already barricaded the doors, and I remember breaking the table legs off our kitchen table to defend ourselves. We started boiling water to throw on anybody coming in. We were pretty defenseless.” Her husband then explained, “We didn’t expect help from the police, who were obviously assisting the hoodlums.” With five thousand to ten thousand whites coming to run them and the phantom African American boarder out of the Chicago neighborhood of Englewood, the couple was defenseless.80

  While spared a full-blown riot during the first wave of the Great Migration (1915–40), Detroit simmered in unmasked hatred against the tens of thousands of blacks who now called that city home. Previously, there had been an uneasy truce between the white community and the relatively small number of African Americans in Detroit. But during the exodus, in just eighteen months, the African American population in the Motor City quadrupled, as the automobile industry provided job opportunities and possibilities for advancement almost unimaginable to those who had dealt with Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.81 Employees at Ford, with an industry-setting pay scale of five dollars an hour, could make in a single day what it took a prosperous sharecropper some two months or more to earn.82 And so they kept coming. By the mid-1920s, there were ten times as many blacks in Detroit as there had been in 1915.83 And then the tenuous truce shattered.

  While the Great Migration had led to nearly exponential growth in the number of African Americans who called Detroit home, the area where they were supposed to live, Black Bottom, had never expanded. Realtors, insurance agents, banks, and landlords had devised a witches’ brew of schemes and machinations, such as redlining and restrictive covenants, to cordon off wide swaths of Detroit’s housing stock from African Americans and carve a color line through the city.84 And so, the small stretch of land called Black Bottom became engorged with ten times the number of people it once held.85 Less than half the homes in this ghetto-in-the-making had indoor plumbing, although in the urban north a bathroom was the norm. More than 15 percent of families were forced to live in one-room apartments. Nearly one third of all black families were crammed into four-room homes.86 But despite the clearly debilitating and disastrous effects of this brutal reality, Michigan’s Supreme Court, relying on the precedents of Cruikshank, the Civil Rights Cases, and Plessy, upheld racially restrictive housing policies as constitutional in Parmalee v. Morris (1922).87

  Tired of the cramped living conditions and exasperated with paying exorbitant rents for ramshackle housing that the landlords refused to repair, black professionals sought to move away from Black Bottom. That aspiration, however, was fraught with danger. While a few managed to find homes in white neighborhoods, others faced the wrath of mobs and homeowners’ associations. In the summer of 1925, for example, Dr. Alexander Turner, Dunbar Hospital’s co-founder and head of surgery, tried to move into the home he had purchased in an all-white part of town, Tireman. Within five hours of his unpacking his first box, bricks and rocks rained down as a mob a thousand strong moved in to drive him out. With Detroit police officers watching, “he was compelled to sign a deed and relinquish ownership of the property” at gunpoint. The police then escorted Turner and his family back to the black side of town.88

  Dr. Ossian Sweet, who was also on staff at Dunbar Hospital, like Turner, dared breach the color line in Detroit. It was unclear to him why Black Bottom had to be his only option. He had a medical degree from Howard University; he was married to a beautiful, sophisticated woman; and he was a loving father to a baby girl. Sweet, with his carefully trimmed hair, tailored suits, and tortoiseshell glasses, wanted a home befitting a man who had emerged from the abject poverty of the Deep South to become a physician with a thriving practice in Detroit. He was the embodiment of the American dream.89

  On September 8, 1925, Sweet began to move into his new home on the corner of Garland Avenue and Charlevoix. It was a nice bungalow—perhaps the finest house in the neighborhood, though it was no upscale community but rather a marginal white neighborhood in Detroit.90 Residents were not college-educated; there wasn’t a doctor, a
lawyer, or an accountant among them. They were pipe fitters, factory foremen, blue-collar workers.91

  The next day a mob, spurred by a number of meetings of the homeowners’ association, began to form outside his house. Sweet, well aware of what had already happened to his colleague Dr. Turner, was prepared and had asked his brother and some friends to help him protect his property. He had firsthand knowledge of what a mob could do. When Sweet was a young boy in Florida, an African American teenager who lived around the corner from him was accused of rape, tied to a tree, and burned alive.92 Sweet had also been in Washington, D.C., during the Red Summer 1919, when police allowed whites to rampage for days slaughtering black people. The tide turned only after returning African American veterans had seen enough, polished their rifles, and began shooting.93 The next year, Sweet’s relatives in Ocoee, Florida, lived in the part of town that whites incinerated “in the single bloodiest day in American political history.” Whites went hunting for a black man who had dared approach the ballot box in the 1920 presidential election, and, in the process, killed scores of African Americans and ethnically cleansed the town until it became all-white for nearly sixty years.94 As a result of his experience, Ossian Sweet had packed, among all the moving boxes and satchels, a small arsenal of guns and four hundred pounds of ammunition.95

  Sweet made sure to alert the police that trouble was brewing. Several officers arrived on the scene, but they hung back from the house, even as the crowd continued to grow. Then, as the sun set and two of Sweet’s friends arrived in a taxi, rocks suddenly began to pummel the home on Garland Avenue. Sweet heard angry shouts of “Here’s niggers! Get them! Get them!” As his friends rushed into the house, the mob was like a tsunami. Sweet saw “a human sea. Stones kept coming faster.” Windows in the home shattered.96