For a moment, in 1944, it had seemed that the situation might change. In a suit brought by a black Texan, Lonnie E. Smith, against election judge S. E. Allwright, who had denied him the right to vote in the Texas Democratic Party’s white primary, a Supreme Court made strikingly more liberal by Roosevelt appointments ruled that “the right to vote in such a primary … is a right secured by the Constitution.” That ruling, coupled with the return of black veterans, led to a dramatic upsurge in Negro registration in the South. By 1948, some 750,000 Negroes, about 15 percent of the estimated five million Negroes of voting age in the South, had made it onto the election rolls; in that year, there were several unexpected victories by liberal state legislators over the conservative opponents who previously would easily have won in Democratic primaries. But black determination spawned white defiance: the wave of repression and violence that included the gouging out of Isaac Woodward’s eyes, the riddling of the two young black couples in Georgia with so many bullets that they were unrecognizable, and countless incidents of physical or economic intimidation to discourage black Americans from trying to register, and to discourage those who had registered from actually going to the polls. The number of new Negro registrations, as John Egerton wrote, “was the warning siren…that caused white supremacists to purge voter lists, raise court challenges, adopt new laws and constitutional amendments—do anything, in short, to prevent the large African-American minority from regaining the power of the franchise.” And, as Egerton notes, these tactics worked; their “success…would be borne out by one overriding fact: in spite of the increase in minority registration, fewer than half a million black Southerners—not even one of every ten of voting age—actually managed to cast ballots” in the 1948 elections. And after 1948, the situation grew worse. Southern legislatures began shoring up the South’s defenses—passing laws that gave registrars new, and arbitrary, powers. The years after 1948 saw the proliferation of “literacy” tests—in which applicants for registration were required to demonstrate their “understanding” or “interpretation” of passages of state laws (or, ironically, of the United States Constitution) or to answer trick questions put to them by registrars whose decisions were purely subjective—and, according to the new laws, were not subject to appeal, so that even college graduates could be arbitrarily disqualified if their skins were dark. These years saw the proliferation of the “voucher” system in a hundred counties like Bullock.
Obviously, new, stronger, federal voting legislation was needed, and no fewer than thirteen separate voting bills were brought to the floor in the two houses of Congress between 1946 and 1954, but every one was blocked. So when in 1955 courageous Negroes attempted to invoke the law to obtain the right to vote supposedly guaranteed them as citizens of the great Republic, they found, as Aaron Sellers and his friends had found, that there was no law to help them.
As a result, the surge in Negro voter registration in the South that had followed the Allwright decision slowed to a trickle. The figure was 750,000 in 1948; it would not reach a million until 1952. By that year, the number of blacks of voting age in the South had risen to just under six million, so only one out of every six eligible southern Negroes—about 16 percent—was registered in that year, in contrast to 60 percent of southern whites. And the million figure was misleading. So effective was the intimidation, economic and physical, practiced by whites to keep registered Negroes from going to the polls that in 1952, the estimated number of black votes actually cast in the eleven southern states was not a million but, at most, 600,000. Only one out of every ten Negroes eligible to vote in those states actually voted. More than three quarters of a century after the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment that had been intended to make America’s black citizens truly part of America’s political system, they were still not part of it; they were still that system’s outcasts—democracy’s outcasts.
THE HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of black Americans who marched off to the Second World War had gone into battle in defense of America’s shining principles, so many of which—all of which, in the last analysis—rested on the declarations that “all men are created equal” and that all men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” and that it is to “secure these rights” that “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” And then these veterans came home, many with medals, many with wounds, to be reminded not of America’s promises, but of America’s practices.
Many of those coming home to the North rode through white neighborhoods in which they couldn’t live, to housing projects, bleak and bare, that were a constant reminder of their status in society, the projects that James Baldwin said they hated “almost as much as they hated the policeman.” And when they went looking for jobs, they learned anew that, war or not, there were so very many jobs for which they could not apply. And for those coming home to the eleven states of the South, in which, in 1946, two-thirds of black Americans still lived, there were additional reminders. If they came home by bus, there were the seats in front in which they couldn’t sit. When the bus pulled into a terminal or a diner parking lot for a rest stop, there were the water fountains at which they couldn’t drink, and the bathrooms they couldn’t use: the fountains and bathrooms labeled “Whites,” as opposed to “Colored”—the label whites had given them. If they wanted something to eat and went to the diner, there was the window out back at which they would be handed their sandwich, for only men whose skins were white were served inside. When they reached their hometowns, some of them, their awareness sharpened by their travels and experiences in the war, saw with a new understanding the paved streets and sidewalks in the white neighborhoods and the unpaved streets, unbordered by sidewalks, in the black neighborhoods. They saw, alongside these streets, the ditches running filthy with a stream of raw sewage because there was no sewage system in their part of town. If they took their girlfriend, or their wife, to a movie, for their first date after their long-awaited return, they had to climb, as they had had to climb before they left for war, to the balcony because the orchestra below was reserved for whites, and the screen itself was often a reminder—for so few of the faces of the stars upon the screen were black, and the demeanor of black actors in the movies made the couples in the balcony cringe. If they wanted to take their girls or their wives for a hamburger and a soda, or for dinner, there were so many places to which they couldn’t take them. Their little brothers and sisters, who hugged them so tightly when they saw them again, were taller now than they remembered them, but the returning veterans still had to watch them trudge to school, trudge miles sometimes in the heat and the dust, because the school board wouldn’t pay to transport them, while the buses carrying the white children sped past them. They had to watch them trudge home in the evening—tired girls and boys. And the men returning home knew what the schools were like, for they had attended the same schools, and they found that the schools hadn’t changed. The ramshackle shanties that were Negro schools had raw, unfinished walls through which the wind whistled in winter as it did through the planks of the outhouse you used instead of a bathroom. Raw pine plank tables served as “desks,” desks so rough it was hard to write on them because school boards wouldn’t pay even for the sandpapering of desks in Negro schools. And the veterans could see new white schools—so shiny, so clean. Did any of the veterans ask their brothers or sisters, Do you still say the oath to the flag in the mornings?—the oath that pledged allegiance to the country that brought liberty and justice to all.
If they wanted the opportunity, supposedly given them by the G.I. Bill, to go to college, black veterans often found that there were too many of them—that with the doors of white colleges closed to them, there was no place left for them at black colleges. The big southern state universities taught whites—they wouldn’t teach them. And for every one of them who went beyond college, who earned the graduate degree that made him a lawyer or a doctor, there were many who wanted to go beyond college but
who couldn’t, because in southern graduate schools there were almost no places at all for them. If they wanted to vote, to exercise the most basic right of citizens, they found that nothing had changed there either; there were still the literacy tests that were a humiliation even if the white registrar condescended to pass you. Did they think, some of them at least, about America’s promises to its people—and about the faithlessness with which America was keeping its promises to those of its people whose skins were black? Did others try not to think about that—because they couldn’t bear to?
These hundreds of thousands of black veterans had fought to make the world safe for democracy, not Jim Crow, and upon their return, they determined, many of them, to do something about what they found, to secure in their own country the freedoms for which they had fought overseas.
Among these Negro veterans, there was, in addition, anew sense of possibility, a sense that, as Egerton puts it, “things would be different—they had to be.” Many joined an organization dedicated to making things different: the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; by the end of 1946, the NAACP had more than a thousand branches, with a membership totaling nearly half a million. In the courts, in the years after the war, the effort to challenge school segregation in the South was steadily widening, and victories were coming faster and faster—many of them won by a black lawyer, Thurgood Marshall, whose triumphs were beginning to turn him into a legend—and with each victory the feeling grew stronger that the argument should not be merely that separate facilities be equal, but that facilities should not be separate: that the lawyers should push the courts to declare illegal the very separation of the races itself. The momentum for faster change was sweeping before it those Negroes who had argued for moderation. “A lot of the black communities around the country had the bit between their teeth by then,” said one of the leading black civil rights attorneys, William Hastie. “It would have been futile to try damming the tide of human emotion that had been let loose.”
The tide was not rising only among blacks. Widespread though racism remained among white Americans, the war had made more of them aware of—and uneasy about—their country’s broken promises. And their understanding had been given an intellectual underpinning: Gunnar Myrdal’s monumental An American Dilemma, published near the end of the war, which documented the pervasiveness of white racism in America and disproved the clichés about the innate inferiority of Negroes on which that racism was based, and which made readers grasp the terrible gulf between America’s behavior and the ideals on which America had been founded; and whose scathing import—that America had blamed the black man for what it had done to him—was working its way, gradually but steadily, into America’s consciousness. And in 1947 their understanding had been personified in a popular hero, a hero with dark black skin, gleaming white teeth, and a flaming will; even if you were white, when you saw the bat held high and then whipping through the ball, when you saw the speed on the base paths, and when you saw the dignity with which Jack Roosevelt Robinson held himself in the face of the curses and the scorn and the runners coming into second base with their spikes high, you had to think at least a little about America’s shattered promises. The Brooklyn Dodgers were in the National League, but three months later, rooting for the Washington Senators of the American League became less of an unalloyed joy for Richard Russell; if he wanted to watch the Senators play the Cleveland Indians, he had to watch a black man on the same field as whites: Larry Doby had joined Jackie in the big leagues. In 1950, Jackie Robinson would be on the cover of Life magazine—the first black on Life’s cover in all its seven hundred issues. Race was becoming, faster and faster, an open topic of discussion in America; there was, in Egerton’s words, “a spreading sense of outrage that discrimination based solely on skin color was locking people out of jobs, housing….” During the years since V-J Day, support for civil rights, for the end of Jim Crow, had been rising all across the North, the demand quickening. A tide of opinion for equality and social justice had been rising—rising slowly, but rising. And the tide had been swelled by a hard pragmatic consideration: Negroes in the North had much less difficulty in voting than those in the South, and, led by the newly militant, better-educated, black veterans, more of them were doing so, particularly in the big northern states whose electoral votes were crucial in political calculations.
During the first seven years of the postwar era, moreover, there had been a President in the White House who had been determined to harness that tide, a President who not only reiterated the requests of his predecessor, twice passed by the House but twice rejected by the Senate, for the creation of a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission and for the abolition of the poll tax, but who had also proposed, in 1946 and 1947 and 1948, what Franklin Roosevelt had not—after commissioning the study that would be called, in a phrase out of the Declaration of Independence, “To Secure These Rights,” this President whose “very stomach turned over” at the beating of Negro veterans, asked Congress to secure those rights by making lynching a federal crime, banning discrimination in schools, hotels, restaurants, and theaters, and passing legislation protecting the Negroes’ right to vote.
But the tide had risen before, and had been blocked before, by the Senate, and now, as it rose again, the Senate blocked it again: with the defeat, in 1946 and again in 1947 and 1948, of the anti-lynching legislation and the anti-poll tax legislation and the anti-discrimination legislation, the tide broke helplessly against the dam that had stood athwart it for so long. And in the 1949 civil rights battle in which Lyndon Johnson had delivered his “We of the South” maiden speech which Richard Russell had called “one of the ablest I have ever heard,” the dam had been made even stronger and higher than before by Russell’s strengthening of the rules against cloture. And after that southern victory, when in 1950 and in 1951 and 1952, civil rights legislation had been proposed in the Senate, it had seldom even reached the floor.
DURING THE YEARS SINCE 1952, despite the presence in the White House of a new President whose lack of enthusiasm for civil rights made the Executive Branch almost as high a barrier to the cause as the legislative, the rising tide had for a time apparently found another channel through which it could flow toward justice. All during the early 1950s, four separate school desegregation cases, which had been lumped together under the title Brown v. Board of Education, had been rising, slowly but steadily, through the federal court system toward the highest court. That court was scheduled to begin hearing arguments on the Brown case on December 7, 1953, and that morning, when the trolleys pulled up on Constitution Avenue and congressional employees stepped off and walked toward their offices in the Capitol, they noticed, through the winter-bare trees, in front of the smaller white marble temple of the Supreme Court Building to their left, a long line of men and women waiting for admittance to the Court’s session that day. Most of them wore hats against the thirty-degree cold, and almost all of the faces under the hats were black. Some of those men and women had been in line all night. “I have a feeling that the Supreme Court is going to end segregation,” one of them explained to a reporter.
For three days that December, the Supreme Court heard arguments on Brown, and five months later, on May 17, 1954, the Court ruled that separation of races in schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s pledge of equal protection of the law, “that in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate but equal facilities are inherently unequal…. To separate them [Negro children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority…that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” The Court’s Chief Justice understood as Lyndon Johnson understood the importance of unanimity, and Earl Warren had obtained it—even from Justice Stanley F. Reed of border-state Kentucky. Reed, who had been the last holdout, was looking down from the bench at Thurgood Marshall, who had led the fight in Brown, when Warren utte
red the words, “So say we all.” Reed “was looking me right straight in the face, because he wanted to see my reaction when I realized he hadn’t dissented,” the great black attorney would recall. The two men exchanged nods, barely perceptible. But there were tears on the Justice’s face. All across the United States black men and women knelt to give thanks to God.
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 110