59“not a single black-owned business”: “What Happened at Columbia,” Crisis, April 1946,
60“militant” blacks “were moving on every front”: Louisville Courier-Journal editorial, quoted in Jason Morgan Ward, Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 55.
60“The doors of the white man’s party”: Smith, quoted in Ward, Defending White Democracy, 20.
62“Are we fighting this war”: Quoted in ibid., 40.
62“seeking to use the war emergency”: Broughton, quoted in Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 35.
62“There will be no social equality”: Eastland, quoted in Ward, Defending White Democracy, 81.
63for the American way of life: It is worth noting here that some southern white veterans were changed positively by their war experience. In Columbia one of Billy Fleming’s brothers, John Calhoun Fleming Jr., moved among the whites mobbed in the square encouraging them to go home. In fact, none of the elder Fleming’s sons was on the square, not even Billy. O’Brien, The Color of Law, 131-132.
63“The white people of the South”: Columbia Daily Herald editorial, quoted in Chris Lamb, Blackout: The Untold Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Spring Training (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 11.
63“Negroes even in small communities”: Quoted in Herbert Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 363.
63“Before, Columbia was a hellhole”: Blair, quoted in Carl T. Rowan, South of Freedom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), 43.
64“There won’t be no more trouble”: Harlan, quoted in ibid., 48.
64a strong and sustained translation of war experience: I do not mean to minimize the importance either of Reconstruction or of such late-nineteenth-century black leaders as Timothy “T.” Thomas Fortune, Monroe Trotter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary Church Terrell, and others. They were, as historian Shawn Leigh Alexander so appropriately titled his book about them and their work before the NAACP existed, an Army of Lions. They are, unfortunately, dimly remembered today, although many were significant well into the twentieth century. Indeed, freedom, as the old movement song goes, has always been “a constant struggle” and phrases—such as “civil rights era”—that suggest the freedom struggle was confined to the 1950s and ’60s are inadequate descriptors that misstate black history. But I use “sustained” here to emphasize that a continuum of civil rights or black freedom rights struggle and change stretched from World War I to World War II. It eclipsed the political impact of Reconstruction and directly shaped the decades of the 1950s and ’60s.
66“Negroes are organizing all over the state”: Quoted in Cameron McWhirter, Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2012), 165.
66“No colored maid in the kitchen”: Rebecca Sharpless, Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 85.
66The FBI actually began a formal investigation: Bryant Simon, “Fearing Eleanor: Racial Anxieties and Wartime Rumors in the American South, 1940–1945,” in Labor in the Modern South, ed. Glenn T. Eskew (Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 84.
67“The increasing number of negroes”: Secret Information Concerning Black American Troops, quoted in Crisis, in a section called “Documents of the War,” May 16–17, 1919.
67“was never another country”: Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 17.
68“The forces of hell in this country”: W. E. B. Du Bois, “An Open Letter to Woodrow Wilson” Crisis, March 1913, in W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 445–447.
68“the nadir”: The term “nadir” was originally used by historian Rayford W. Logan in The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (New York: Da Capo Press 1997), 52–53.
68“Race is greater than law”: John Sharp Williams, quoted in Lee E. Williams and Lee E. Williams II, Anatomy of Four Race Riots: Racial Conflict in Knoxville, Elaine (Arkansas), Tulsa, and Chicago, 1919–1921 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), appendix A, 103.
69“We turned out the lights early”: Walter White, A Man Called White (New York: Viking, 1948), 10–11.
70“If a white mob”: Du Bois, quoted in Raymond Wolters, Du Bois and His Rivals (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 75.
71fewest lynchings of anyplace in the state: According to historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage: “When attempted lynchings receive careful scholarly scrutiny, it is likely that the portrait of southern blacks as sullen, powerless victims of mob violence will need serious revision. After most lynchings blacks well understood that vigorous protest would be suppressed brutally by whites. But prior to threatened lynchings aroused blacks were often inventive and vocal opponents of mob violence.” Brundage, “The Darien ‘Insurrection’ of 1899: Black Protest During the Nadir of Race Relations,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 74, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 234–253.
72“No organization like ours”: Du Bois letter to Spingarn, quoted in McWhirter, Red Summer, 27.
73They, too, were new Negroes: The song “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” known as the “Negro national anthem,” was written as a poem by James Weldon Johnson and put to music by his brother, Rosamond, first sung in 1900 by schoolchildren welcoming Booker T. Washington to the Stanton School in Jacksonville, Florida, is a primary example of shifting black attitudes as the twentieth century began. Any verse can be picked out as a vivid illustration. The second of three verses reads:
Stony the road we trod, bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat, have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed
73“making the South safe for Negroes”: In Christopher S. Parker, Fighting for Democracy: Black Veterans and the Struggle Against White Supremacy in the Postwar South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 33.
73“would rather fight to make Georgia safe for democracy”: In ibid., 34.
74“a nigger jumping over the yard”: Sparks, quoted in Judith N. McArthur and Harold L. Smith, Texas Through Women’s Eyes: The Twentieth-Century Experience (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 58.
74to wait at a nearby call box: Ibid.
75was on its way to attack them: C. Calvin Smith, “The Houston Riot Revisited,” Houston Review 13 (1991): 91–92; see also Robert V. Haynes, “The Houston Mutiny and Riot of 1917,” 418–439.
76“It was not a cold-blooded slaughter of innocents”: Martha Gruening, “Houston, an N.A.A.C.P. Investigation,” Crisis, November 1917, 18.
76“The negroes, dressed in their regular uniforms”: “13 Negro Soldiers Hanged for Rioting,” New York Times, December 12, 1917.
76“Thirteen young strong men”: Du Bois, quoted in Patricia Sullivan, Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: New Press, 2009), 71.
77“were fighting for France”: Colson, quoted in Chad Louis Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976), 306.
77“There is not a black soldier but who is glad he went”: Du Bois, “An Essay Toward a History of the Black Man in the Great War,” 732–733.
78the writer and political activist Hubert Harrison: The brilliant Hubert Harrison may be the most ignored of the early-twentieth-century black intellectuals. His newspaper, the Voice, was the first to emerge as part of the New Negro movement. The Liberty League’s program “emphasized internationalism, political independence, and cl
ass and race consciousness.” Jeffrey B. Perry, Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883–1918 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 5.
78“If white men are to kill unoffending Negroes”: “Race Radicalism,” in A Hubert Harrison Reader, ed. Jeffry B. Perry (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 95.
78“Negroes can stop lynching in the South”: “How to Stop Lynching. By the Editors of the Messenger,” in African American Political Thought, ed. Marcus D. Pohlmann, 6 vols. (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2003), 1: 212–217.
78“Each black soldier”: William Colson, “The Immediate Function of the Black Veteran,” Messenger, December 1919, 19–20.
79“an organization of soldiers, for soldiers, by soldiers”: Chad Louis Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 273.
80“I made up my mind”: Houston, quoted in Gerald Astor, The Right to Fight: A History of African Americans in the Military (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2001), 112.
80“poisoned with political and social equality stuff”: Robert L. Fleegler, “Theodore G. Bilbo and the Decline of Public Racism, 1938–1947,” Journal of Mississippi History, Spring 2006: 13.
81“The Nazi philosophy crystallizes”: White, quoted in Gilmore, Defying Dixie, 346.
81“The fight against Hitlerism”: Quoted in Leon F. Litwack, How Free Is Free? The Long Death of Jim Crow (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 56.
81“So far as the colored peoples of the earth are concerned”: George Schuyler, Pittsburg Courier, September 9, 1939.
81“This is no fight merely to wear a uniform”: Crisis editorial, December 1940, quoted in Stephen Tuck, We Ain’t What We Ought to Be: The Black Freedom Struggle from Emancipation to Obama (repr. ed.; Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2011), 218.
82“We were in war”: Excerpt from transcript of The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords, produced/directed by Stanley Nelson, 1988, www.pbs.org/blackpress/film/.
82“We, all of us”: Randolph, quoted in Gilmore, Defying Dixie, 361.
Chapter Three: “Fighting for What We Didn’t Have”
83The title quotation is from Neil R. McMillen, Remaking Dixie: The Impact of World War II on the American South (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), 107.
83“Like almost half the whites in Mississippi”: Charles Evers and Andrew Szanton, Have No Fear: A Black Man’s Fight for Respect in America (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1997), 60.
83“Medgar and I had always wanted to vote”: Ibid., 59.
84“We ignored all the nigger baiting”: Ibid., 30.
84“You see these two little niggers”: Ibid., 31.
84“The best way to keep a nigger from the polls”: Myrlie Evers-Williams, For Us the Living, with William Peters (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 26.
85“rednecks … holding shotguns, rifles, and pistols”: Evers and Szanton, Have No Fear, 61.
85“I meant to die fighting for Negro rights”: Ibid., 63.
85“We’ll get them next time”: Ibid., 67.
85the whites stopped following them: John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 1–2.
86“Fighting World War II woke up a lot of us”: Evers and Szanton, Have No Fear, 55.
86“For a long time I had the idea”: Amzie Moore, interview by Prudence Arndt for Blackside, 1979, Eyes on the Prize, PBS documentary series, Henry Hampton Collection, Washington University Film and Media Archive, Washington University Digital Gateway Texts, St. Louis, Missouri.
87“I’d been hungry in my life”: Moore, quoted in Howell Raines, My Soul Is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South Remembered (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977), 233–234.
88“Amzie was the only one I met on that trip”: Bob Moses, interview with author, April 25, 2013.
88“Only mass action”: Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 27.
88especially Freedom Rides: The Freedom Rides have been so romanticized as challenges to segregation that their greatest significance remains underappreciated: penetration by the Freedom Movement into the rural bastions of white supremacy of the Deep South. Although the rides changed little with regard to segregation in the little towns and hamlets the buses passed through, and despite the bombing of the Freedom Rider bus in Anniston, Alabama, they proved that organized civil rights struggle could be brought into these areas, which had seemed forbidden for so long. The resulting political tremors reached all the way to Washington, D.C.
89willing to compromise with southern bigots in order to achieve their political goals: The response of the Kennedys to every major protest was to ask activists to agree to a “cooling off” period. In a May 24, 1963, meeting at Robert Kennedy’s New York City apartment arranged by author James Baldwin, CORE activist Jerome Smith and Kennedy got into a heated argument. A number of prominent African Americans were present, including Harry Belafonte, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, psychologist Kenneth Clark, and singer Lena Horne. Afterward, Kennedy said of the group, “They seemed possessed,” and he ordered the FBI to increase surveillance on Baldwin and the other participants. See Arthur M. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times (New York: First Mariner Books, 1978), 333–334; also Evan Thomas, Robert Kennedy: His Life (New York: Simon and Shuster, 2007), 243–245.
90Marcus Garvey’s UNIA: There were fifty-six UNIA chapters in Mississippi during the 1920s; thirty-five of them were in the Delta. See Akinyele Omowale Umoja, We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 18–20.
91honorably discharged four months later: John Vernon, “Jim Crow, Meet Lieutenant Robinson: A 1944 Court-Martial,” Prologue 40, no. 1 (Spring 2008), www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2008/spring/robinson.html.
92rather than in organized political actions: A notable exception took place in Birmingham, Alabama, after the war when members of the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC) worked with veterans for voter rights. On February 1, 1946, one hundred black veterans converged on the Jefferson County courthouse demanding the right to vote. And in Georgia, black veterans founded the Georgia Veterans League, which had about three hundred members in four chapters.
92“The only thing you can say”: Christopher S. Parker, Fighting for Democracy: Black Veterans and the Struggle Against White Supremacy in the Postwar South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 193; Parker, interview with author, November 7, 2012.
92Once, after Myrlie exclaimed, “He’s disappeared again!”: Myrlie Evers, interview with author, July 26, 2012.
93“southern white folks didn’t mess with a few intransigent black people”: Faith S. Holsaert, “Resistance U,” in Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC, ed. Faith S. Holsaert et al. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 189.
94he never bothered her children again: Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 11.
94“You don’t have no black children”: Townsend, quoted in ibid., 12.
95“the quintessential ‘outraged mother’”: Ibid., 10.
95“You better not go around that counter”: Evers and Szanton, Have No Fear, 1–2.
95“Don’t ever let anybody beat you”: Michael Vinson Williams, Medgar Evers: Mississippi Martyr (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2011), 26–27.
95“He didn’t smell like fear”: Evers and Szanton, Have No Fear, 15.
96“That was one of the stories Medgar shared with me”: Myrlie Evers, interview with author, July 26, 2012.
97“a little piece of legal crawlspace”: Bob Moses, interview with author, April 25, 2013.
98“at least a splinter on my shoulder”: McKaine, quoted in John Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation
Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 227.
98Henry thought it was “a fortunate thing”: Aaron Henry, Aaron Henry: The Fire Ever Burning, with Constance Curry (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), 58.
99“Three years in the army”: Ibid., 58–63.
99“sensed undercurrents rising to the surface”: Ibid., 63.
99blacks would never vote in Mississippi: Gail Williams O’Brien, The Color of Law: Race Violence and Justice in the Post World War II South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 92.
99accomplished by bloodshed if necessary: Nan Elizabeth Woodruff, American Congo: The African American Freedom Struggle in the Delta (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 214; note that this book gives the Mississippi newspaper editor’s name as “E. D. Schneider.”
100“Actually I believe they were waiting to see”: Henry, Aaron Henry, 65.
100–101the Soviet Union could point to conditions in the United States: This is a fascinating dilemma of U.S. diplomacy in the early years of the 1960s. Diplomats from newly independent African nations were routinely denied service in restaurants and prevented from using restrooms when driving between their Washington, D.C., embassies and the United Nations in New York. There was discrimination in housing, as well, particularly in the Washington neighborhoods catering to diplomats. President Kennedy established a special protocol section of the State Department to address this embarrassment, but it made no headway until southern struggle forced the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Kennedy himself was fairly dismissive of the travel problems of African diplomats, saying at one point that instead of driving, they should fly to New York as he always did. Charles E. Cobb Jr., On the Road to Freedom: A Guided Tour of the Civil Rights Trail (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2008), 41.
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