The African Americans

by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

  Although in later years he became a broken man who never regained his career or his stature as an artist, at that time his conviction in his beliefs—and in the wrongdoings of his own country—made Robeson, the defender of human rights, a powerful symbol of courage and defiance, and a race man. “To achieve the right of full citizenship which is our just demand,” Robeson wrote, “we must ever speak and act like free men. When we criticize the treatment of Negroes in America and tell our fellow citizens at home and the people abroad what is wrong with our country, each of us can say with Frederick Douglass: ‘In doing this, I shall feel myself discharging the duty of a true patriot; for he is a lover of his country who rebukes and does not excuse its sins.’”16

  The government’s draconian response to Robeson’s determination to fight against racism showed that, in taking the case against American anti-black racism to the international community, the actor and activist had struck a nerve. The United States government was not eager to see the nation’s racial problems paraded before the world, compromising its image as a beacon of freedom and providing ammunition to its enemies, precisely as competition with the Soviet Union for allies among emerging Third World nations of color was growing keener. As the Cold War heated up through the ’50s, civil rights leaders would remember that lesson. The threat of damage to the United States’ inter-national reputation would provide them with a powerful lever as they pressed a reluctant federal government to protect black people and defend civil rights at home.

  THE YEARS THAT FOLLOWED WORLD WAR II SAW IMPORTANT SOCIAL AND CULTURAL CHANGES FOR AFRICAN AMERICANS, as black athletes and entertainers overcame long-standing barriers and entered the mainstream. When Jackie Robinson (1919–1972) donned the uniform of the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, he was only the most visible of a whole generation of popular figures who offered new role models and positive images of black people. Much of black America celebrated the glamorous wedding of Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and singer Hazel Scott (1920–1981), thanks to splendid press coverage. Lena Horne (1917–2010), a favorite pinup of black soldiers during the war, became an even greater postwar heartthrob and Hollywood star. The celebrity of these new black icons and many, many more, as well as the successes of the growing civil rights movement and the NAACP’s legal strategy, was promoted and sustained by the black press, with a particular push from a young publisher in Chicago.

  John H. Johnson (1918–2005), the grandson of slaves, was just 27 years old when he first published Ebony magazine at the end of the war in 1945. Aimed at the emerging black middle class, the glossy magazine pledged in its debut issue “to mirror the happier side of Negro life—the positive, everyday achievements from Harlem to Hollywood.”17

  While Johnson’s celebration of black achievement in a magazine was fresh, the black press had obviously existed long before Ebony came along. African Americans had been disseminating ideas through their own newspapers and magazines ever since the Freedom’s Journal newspaper began publishing in 1827 to commemorate the abolition of slavery in the state of New York. But Johnson had identified, through a dazzling combination of intuition and business acumen, a desperate need in the black community for aspirational images of itself. The mainstream press printed little if any positive coverage of African Americans, and the southern press subscribed to a nefarious “unwritten policy that prohibited the picture of a black person from appearing in any news publication unless it was in connection to a crime.”18

  Johnson’s motivation in publishing Ebony was high-minded and commercial at the same time. In his memoir, Succeeding Against the Odds, he wrote that his goal for the magazine was to serve as “a medium to refuel the people, and to recharge their batteries … a medium to make Blacks believe in themselves, in their skin color, in their noses, in their lips, so they could hang on and fight for another day … a medium—bright, sparkling, readable—that would let Black Americans know that they were part of a great heritage.”19 But in launching this novel publication, he claimed with some amusement that he “wasn’t trying to make history. I was trying to make money.”20

  For the first 20 years of its existence, Ebony covered fashion and celebrities, always with an eye on black success stories, whether they were found in the world of entertainment or sports or in the general population. One of its most widely read features was “Speaking of People,” which many readers thought of as “Another Negro First!” The column documented strides that black people were making in integrating business and government positions, and the stories about these people inspired a generation of younger black students to aspire as well. In the ’50s, in keeping with the changing times, Ebony began to publish articles of a more political nature, and always celebrated the work and achievements of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Ebony’s sister publication, the weekly newsmagazine Jet, also documented developments in the movement, most famously featuring the mutilated corpse of Emmett Till (a teenager who was lynched for ostensibly whistling at a white woman) on the cover of its September 15, 1955, edition. Ebony became the biggest-selling black magazine in America and remained that way for decades.

  IN THE POSTWAR YEARS, IT WASN’T JUST WHAT BLACK PEOPLE WERE READING THAT WAS NEW; IT WAS WHAT THEY WERE LISTENING TO AS WELL. And in 1949, that was WDIA. With “one of the white salesmen [at the station saying] that WDIA stands for ‘We Done Integrated Already,’” according to the DJ Ford Nelson, WDIA was far ahead of its time, or maybe more accurately a hopeful sign of things to come.21 Prior to WDIA, black-format radio stations simply did not exist. In 1948, two white station owners, Bert Ferguson and John R. Pepper, made what turned out to be a very shrewd business decision: They put a DJ named Nat D. on the air “and billed him as the Mid-South’s first Negro disc jockey.”22 Was the owners’ motive to aid integration, to speed along a process that some believed was inevitable but that many hoped would never happen? Not necessarily, Nat D. Williams (1907–1983) wrote in a column from November 23, 1948, not long after WDIA decided on its format. “‘They are businessmen,’ he said. ‘They don’t necessarily love Negroes. They make that clear. But they do love progress and they are willing to pay the price to make progress. One of the most neglected markets in the Mid-South is the Negro market. And that’s true because so many white businessmen take the Negro for granted.’”23

  To appeal to the large and growing black population in Memphis, this meant providing something they had never heard before on the air: a steady stream of black music; black voices, not just singing, but delivering news and advertising; black programming. In short, “WDIA was a celebration of firsts: the first radio station in the country with a format designed exclusively for a black audience; the first station south of the Mason-Dixon line to air a publicly recognized black disc jockey; … the first Memphis station to gross a million dollars a year; the first in the country to present an open forum to discuss black problems; and, most important, the first to win the hearts and minds of the black community in Memphis and in the Mid-South with its extraordinary public service. For most blacks living within broadcast range, WDIA was ‘their’ station.”24

  With station owners everywhere hoping to capitalize on the success of WDIA, black-oriented radio stations began to crop up in almost every major urban center in the United States. And unlike concert venues or nightclubs, radio waves couldn’t be segregated; any listener of any race could tune in to whatever station they wanted in the privacy of their own home. According to the Birmingham DJ Shelley Stewart, “Music really started breaking down the barriers long before politics in America began to deal with it.”25

  And the effect was noticed by self-declared white racists. George Lincoln Rockwell—self-appointed head of the American Nazi Party—told Alex Haley (1921–1992) in a Playboy interview in April 1966:

  Our white kids are being perverted, like Pavlov’s dogs, by conditioned-reflex training. For instance, every time a white kid is getting a piece of ass, the car radio is blaring nigger bebop. Under such powerful stimuli, it
’s not long before a kid begins unconsciously to connect these savage sounds with intense pleasure and thus transfers his natural pleasurable reactions in sex to an unnatural love of the chaotic and animalistic nigger music, which destroys a love of order and real beauty among our kids. This is how you niggers corrupt our white kids—without even laying a dirty hand on them. Not that you wouldn’t like to.26

  It was a contest that Rockwell had lost, even by the time he was interviewed by Haley. Simply put, integration was first heard by the postwar generation on the radio.

  Yet in some ways WDIA was essentially apolitical, at least in terms of what it broadcast. None of the managers were black, and, in fact, only one-third of the on-air personalities were African American (one of whom was the future blues legend B. B. King).27 These announcers, though, heeded the policy typical of white-run black stations of the period: they avoided controversy by staying away from music or talk that might be considered radical or inflammatory in any way, unlike John Johnson’s editorial policies for Jet and Ebony. Nat D. Williams put it bluntly: “[WDIA] had to appeal to black audiences and at the same time not offend white audiences.”28 But from the start, the very fact of WDIA’s existence was an act of subtle subversiveness. And as time went on, WDIA began to take a more open stance on politics, producing programming that called attention to issues of desegregation and the struggle for civil rights. “Many people in Memphis thought these programs were helping race relations. African Americans in particular felt that WDIA had ‘increased the white community’s understanding of Negro problems, because so many white people listen too.’”29

  WLAC was another such station. Broadcast from Tennessee across the South, by the 1950s, the station featured R & B programs at night, along with advertising aimed at black listeners, from hair pomade and blackstrap laxatives to baby chicks. The DJs exposed listeners to black music that they could get by mail order through Randy’s Record Shop in Gallatin, Tennessee. Although the black audience knew that the DJs at WLAC were actually middle-aged white men who spoke in simulated African American dialect, they listened anyway, all across the country. The announcers’ skin color was irrelevant and, on the radio, invisible; these DJs played the records that their audience wanted to hear, helping to give artists like Sam Cooke, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, and Little Richard ever-wider exposure. These radio stations made integration and equality for blacks seem closer at hand than it actually was. But they integrated the musical tastes—and eventually the attitudes— of young white Americans in ways that the resistance to the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision sought to restrict and contain. In other words, radio became one aspect of the emerging civil rights movement, although this was an inadvertent outcome of a commercial impulse. After all, the owners of these radio stations were primarily motivated to make money.

  WDIA and especially WLAC also served to achieve another function: their music united the tastes of African American listeners in the North and the South, creating a common canon of music that these young people consumed. In this way, radio performed a cultural function within the race similar to the draft in World War II, which brought the children of migrants in the Great Migration into close proximity with the children of the older, settled northern black communities in large quartermaster camps of the segregated armed forces such as the Army’s Camp Lee, in Petersburg, Virginia. In other words, the military’s segregation policies during World War II served to “integrate” the black community fragmented by the Great Migration.

  In 1954, music took a backseat to the headlines for the moment as radio listeners, both black and white, heard remarkable news from a press conference on the steps of the United States Supreme Court. In a landmark decision, the court ruled that segregated public schools violated the Constitution, holding that “in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate is inherently unequal.” When he heard the news, an astonished W. E. B. Du Bois reportedly said, “I have seen the impossible happen.”30 And indeed he had, except that this decision was the culmination of a long, well-planned, seemingly snail-like pace of assault through the legal system.

  African Americans celebrated Brown v. Board as a “Second Emancipation.” The unanimous Supreme Court decision represented the crowning triumph of the NAACP’s patient legal strategy against state-sponsored segregation. It was the culmination of decades of litigating and strategizing by Charles Hamilton Houston, “the man who killed Jim Crow,” and his team of black lawyers, among them Robert Carter and Thurgood Marshall, who would go on to be the first African American justice on the nation’s highest court. The sole tragedy of the timing of the decision was that Houston had died in 1950, four years before the seeds of reform that his legal strategy had planted could bear full fruit.

  Little Rock, Arkansas, riot, September 6, 1957. Photograph. Bettmann, Corbis UK Ltd. Black student Elizabeth Eckford attempts to integrate Little Rock Central High School and is jeered at by angry whites as National Guardsmen look on. This is, perhaps, the iconic image of the school integration movement sparked by the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.

  The Supreme Court’s directive to desegregate “with all deliberate speed” went unheeded in many school systems across the South. In some places, like Piedmont, West Virginia, schools desegregated quickly and without incident the year after Brown. But elsewhere, desegregation would be a long and painful process. In Farmville, Virginia, for example, local authorities elected to keep the public schools closed for five years rather than integrate.

  New Orleans was another segregationist holdout. A full six years after the Brown decision, a brave six-year-old, immortalized in newsreel footage and the Norman Rockwell painting The Problem We All Live With (which today hangs in the White House), became the first black student to integrate her elementary school in New Orleans. Ruby Bridges (b. 1954) became an icon of the innocence of the African American community’s historic demands for full citizenship rights and the implacable, irrational nature of the racist opposition to those demands when she entered the William Frantz Elementary School flanked by federal marshals, dispatched to shield her from the seething mob of white adults hurling hateful epithets at her. International audiences who saw the images of the little black girl surrounded by armed soldiers broadcast on television reacted with outrage.

  It wasn’t just local school boards resisting enforcement of the law, but institutions of higher learning as well. The renowned broadcast journalist and writer Charlayne Hunter-Gault (b. 1942) was one of the first two black students to attend the University of Georgia in 1961, along with Hamilton Holmes (1941–1995). Vernon Jordan (b. 1935), the future president of the National Urban League and adviser to President Bill Clinton, was one of the lawyers who fought her case. He found a crucial bit of evidence about the academic qualifications of white students who had been admitted to the university, which his legal team, under the direction of Constance Baker Motley (1921–2005), used to win their the right to enroll.

  The successful effort to end segregation in public education resulted from the NAACP’s patient strategy of challenging segregationist laws in the courts. In the aftermath of the Brown decision, activists focused more intently on direct action to challenge Jim Crow, notably in Montgomery, Alabama, where segregated transportation remained in force.

  Rosa Parks (1913–2005), a seamstress and secretary for the local NAACP branch, was among a group of local leaders looking for a way to challenge segregation on the city’s buses. While the Morgan v. Virginia decision had desegregated buses traveling from state to state, it did nothing for the many African Americans commuting to work, day in and day out, in cities like Montgomery. The activists had considered several young women who had been harassed by white bus drivers as possible test cases, but none of them were ideal. One woman, Mary Louise Smith, was arrested just a month and a half before Rosa Parks. Shortly after Smith’s arrest, her father was smeared as a drunk; while the 18-year-old maid
insisted it was a vicious rumor, the damage had been done to her reputation. Even earlier that year, in March 1955, a 15-year-old named Claudette Colvin (b. 1939) was dragged kicking and screaming from an Alabama bus when she refused to give up her seat. Colvin was considered, quite unfairly, to be something of a wild card, though—pregnant at 15 and desperately poor—and hence not useful to the struggle as a role model for a people and a political movement still very much in the grip of the so-called politics of respectability.31 Another example of injustice would have to be found to serve as the icon of the movement.

  Rosa Parks fit the bill. A 42-year-old married woman with a proper, conservative appearance, she was, as her biographer Joyce Hanson put it, “beyond reproach to be a test case.” Although perhaps she appeared meek, Parks was an unapologetic activist, a member of the Alabama Voters’ League in addition to the NAACP. Despite her membership in the NAACP, she was not working under orders that day, as has been implied by many. “I spontaneously made that decision without any leadership,” she said ten years after the event, at a tribute dinner. “You can’t be told what to do. You have to be motivated. You have to feel that you will not be pushed around.”32 In later years, Parks said that her decision to refuse that day was also motivated by the horrific lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi, on August 28, 1955, and the acquittal of his two white murderers just under a month later. For the alleged crime of speaking disrespectfully (by their description) to a white woman, Emmett Till had his skull crushed in and an eye gouged out, his mutilated body thrown into the Tallahatchie River by his abductors, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, who boasted of their crime to a journalist after an all-white jury found them not guilty. “I thought about Emmett Till,” Rosa Parks said, “and I could not go back.”33