by John Egerton
William H. Hastie and Charles R. Drew fought and lost the battle to reverse government policy requiring blood segregation in the early 1940s. Scientific knowledge and simple justice were on their side (not to mention the biblical declaration that “God has made of one blood all nations”), but it would be another decade before social behavior advanced that far.
Hastie and Drew had been boyhood friends in Washington, classmates at the all-black and highly regarded Dunbar High School, and 1925 graduates of Amherst College (where another of their classmates was Benjamin J. Davis, Jr., of Georgia, later to gain notoriety as the attorney for Communist organizer Angelo Herndon and then as a member of the American Communist Party himself). After Amherst, Hastie (and Davis) studied at Harvard Law School and Drew went to medical school in Canada. Then, while Hastie was making a name for himself in the New Deal (as an assistant solicitor and member of the Black Cabinet, and as FDR’s first black appointee to the federal judiciary in 1937), Drew was breaking new ground at Howard University Medical School in Washington and at New York’s Presbyterian Medical Center with his research on classifying, preserving, and storing blood for later transfusion.
Hastie resigned from his judicial appointment in the Virgin Islands in 1939 in order to become dean of Howard’s law school; a year later, with war threatening, he took a leave of absence to accept appointment as civilian aide to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. Drew also went on leave that year when the government of Great Britain asked him to set up and direct its wartime blood bank and plasma projects. In February 1941, after helping both Britain and the United States establish blood programs in support of military operations, the thirty-seven-year-old Dr. Drew was named medical director of the American Red Cross blood bank program.
William Hastie and Charles Drew found themselves directly in the line of fire in late 1941 when the surgeons-general of the U.S. Army and Navy, with the approval of Secretary Stimson, informed the Red Cross that they would accept blood only from white donors for military use. Scientific studies had proved conclusively that no racial differences existed in the chemical makeup of blood, but the military, under heavy political pressure, yielded to the prevailing social bias. The Red Cross and even the conservative American Medical Association publicly criticized the new policy, although they opted in the end to cooperate “for the sake of the war effort.” In January 1942, the War Department modified its stand by agreeing to accept blood from black donors, but rigid segregation of the supply was to be maintained. The Red Cross not only concurred in that decision but declared through its chairman, Norman H. Davis, that the quasi-public agency had no interest in trying to settle racial-social controversies. Later, agency officials suggested that those who persisted in criticizing the policy were unpatriotically attempting to cripple the blood donor service and thus harm the war effort itself.
Angered but not silenced, Charles Drew resigned from the Red Cross and returned to the medical school at Howard early in 1942, declaring publicly that the racial segregation of blood was contrary to scientific fact—and an insult to patriotic black Americans. William Hastie stayed on at the War Department for another year and kept up the fight to change the policy. Finally, in January 1943, he too resigned with a parting shot at Stimson and the military establishment; the secretary quickly accepted Hastie’s letter of parting, relieved to see him go.
Resuming the law school deanship at Howard, Hastie continued to speak out against segregation in the military and elsewhere. In 1946, President Harry S. Truman appointed him governor of the Virgin Islands, and in 1949, after campaigning vigorously for Truman, Hastie was named by the President to a seat on the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals, where he would serve until his death in 1976.
Charles Drew’s years of public service were to be far fewer in number. He remained on the faculty at Howard through the 1940s, staying out of the limelight but keeping close ties with his old friend Bill Hastie. Then, in the early morning hours of April 1, 1950, as Drew and three of his colleagues were on an all-night driving trip from Washington across the segregated South, en route to a meeting at Tuskegee Institute, the physician fell asleep at the wheel near Burlington, North Carolina, and died when his car left the road and crashed. Though he received prompt medical attention, his injuries were such that his life couldn’t be saved.
It was erroneously reported then—and the misinformation has often been repeated since—that Charles Drew, the pioneer of plasma research, died from loss of blood after an all-white hospital refused to admit him. Racial segregation of emergency medical facilities was indeed responsible for the deaths of numerous black accident victims in those years, but not for Drew’s. Still, his untimely and bloody death was attributable in part to the fact that segregated public accommodations forced black travelers like him to drive long distances without rest. Whether or not a blood transfusion would have saved him, the cruel fact remains that he died from an unnecessary loss of blood.
Just eight months after Drew’s death, the government rescinded its policy on blood segregation. On December 1, 1950, at the direction of President Truman’s new secretary of defense, General George C. Marshall—who was also the national chairman of the American Red Cross—officials of both the government department and the volunteer agency agreed unanimously that the time had finally come to do what Charles R. Drew and William H. Has tie had urged upon them a decade earlier. Accordingly, racial distinctions were completely removed from the donor program, and the blood of all Americans at last had only one meaningful color: red.
It might seem peculiar that the outcast black American minority would be clamoring insistently for an active role in World War II before the country had even entered the conflict, but that’s exactly what happened. Patriotic fervor no doubt had less to do with it than the infuriating insult—and the economic disadvantage—of being systematically locked out of defense jobs and military combat roles. Whatever their motivations, blacks in general (much the same as Southern whites) accounted for more volunteers and fewer conscientious objectors than the general run of American males, even though segregation and discrimination in all branches of service persisted throughout the war.
In the civilian workforce, blatant racial bias prevailed both in the federal government and in industries with defense contracts, and it mattered little where the jobs were located or what skills they required. Some agencies and departments in Washington were less discriminatory than others, but their extensions around the country strongly favored whites. The aircraft industry was as segregated in Seattle and St. Louis as it was in Atlanta, and the construction industry, even as it begged for workers, turned away 75,000 skilled black craftsmen. Half of all defense industries excluded blacks as a matter of stated policy. The white press seemed inclined to ignore the problem, but it wouldn’t go away. Finally, late in 1940, an effort by African-Americans to protest these conditions began to take shape.
It coalesced around the leadership of A. Philip Randolph, the Florida-born, New York City–toughened boss of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. In September, he and Walter White of the NAACP and T. Arnold Hill of the National Urban League were granted an audience with President Roosevelt to discuss the racial-exclusion issue; FDR, affable as always, listened intently but gave them only vague promises that he would look into their complaints. They waited five months for some sign of movement, but none came. In February 1941, Randolph said to one of his union aides, “I think we ought to get ten thousand Negroes and march down Pennsylvania Avenue asking for jobs in defense plants and integration of the armed forces.” In the coming weeks, the March on Washington Movement—MOWM—was born.
MOWM turned out to be more effective as a symbolic and temporary threat to the racial status quo than as an ongoing civil rights organization, but Philip Randolph himself had more enduring qualities. With what seemed like perfect timing, he had ridden the late-thirties wave of labor union growth stimulated by the New Deal, and his eventual success with the porters’ union assured him of a
power base and a degree of visibility that would not diminish for another thirty years.
Randolph was a complex man—a pragmatic Socialist with no patience for Communist ideology, an aggressive activist and radical who was at heart a pacifist, an organizer whose strategies embraced both racial independence and integration. He was a controversial figure, too, having served until 1940 as president of the National Negro Congress, an organization that attracted support from the Communist Party and criticism from such widely separated sources as the House Un-American Activities Committee and the NAACP.
If there was one quality above all that made the streetwise Randolph stand out among the small cadre of agency executives, government aides, intellectuals, ministers, writers, educators, and others who made up the nation’s black elite, it was this: He came across forcefully as a wise and confident man of the common people, a straight talker, a social activist who never bent to the weight of someone else’s agenda or ideology. A passion for racial justice seemed to burn within him like a pure blue flame, a pilot light that never flickered. Neither the Communists nor anybody white nor even his black contemporaries on the left or right could claim to have him in their pocket. A half-century of survival had left him with a thick skin, a mature sense of mission, and a determination to stay the course.
By March 1941, Randolph had gone public with his plans, and had upped the threatened size of his army of marchers tenfold, to 100,000. Almost all of the nation’s black newspapers endorsed the march, and Walter White, with whom Randolph maintained a good professional and personal association in spite of their strategic and ideological differences, was openly supportive of the MOWM initiative. Even when Randolph announced that the protest march would be an all-black affair under the complete control of MOWM, the canny White refrained from criticism. He was in a position to know that FDR was feeling the pressure, and that the administration was looking for ways to make some concessions to its black critics.
Eleanor Roosevelt, clearly conveying her husband’s wishes, had made a personal appeal to White to dissuade Randolph, but the NAACP chief replied, in all honesty, that he had no control over his friend. Next, White was invited to a high-level meeting of about thirty New Dealers (Mrs. Roosevelt, Aubrey Williams, Will Alexander, Robert Weaver, Sidney Hillman, and others) to discuss the matter further, and it was there that the idea of an executive order banning discrimination in defense industries was discussed and informally endorsed. White quickly recognized that such an order was obtainable, and he subsequently advised Randolph not to settle for less.
The target date for the march on Washington was July 1. Randolph’s forces and the administration were both under intense pressure to yield, but June arrived without any public sign of a compromise. Randolph and White were summoned to the White House again, and the President made a personal promise of fairer treatment for black workers, but Randolph politely held out for a tangible show of improvement. Next, Aubrey Williams and Eleanor Roosevelt met with the two black leaders in the office of New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who had offered to mediate—but again there was no breakthrough. On June 18, one last effort to avert the protest march brought A. Philip Randolph and Franklin D. Roosevelt face-to-face again at the White House, with more than a dozen of the President’s top advisers in the room, including Williams.
Roosevelt made it plain that he was not willing, with war imminent, to shake up the armed forces by issuing an order to end segregation, but he showed a willingness to consider some modifications in job discrimination practices if they could be guaranteed not to impede war production. Clearly he wanted to go about it by persuasion, not by executive order. By all accounts, Roosevelt liked and respected Randolph, but he was determined to give him nothing concrete. Looking him directly in the eye, he said, “Philip, what do you think?”
Aubrey Williams remembered Randolph’s response as a singular display of quiet courage and determination. In a firm voice, the labor leader told the President that he and his associates had come “to ask you to say to the white workers and to management that we are American citizens and should be treated as equals. We ask no special privileges; all we ask is that we be given equal opportunity with all other Americans for employment in those industries that are doing work for the government. We ask that you make it a requirement of any holder of a government contract that he hire his workers without regard to race, creed, or color.” Roosevelt, visibly moved, instructed Williams and two others to draft such a statement.
The next morning they brought in the document for the President’s consideration. It barred discrimination by either management or labor in all industries holding defense contracts (the federal bureaucracy itself was later added to the list of those required to pledge fairness), and it called for the appointment of a Fair Employment Practices Committee to handle complaints. No reference was made to segregation in the armed forces.
For almost a week the document lay on Roosevelt’s desk. Randolph waited in silence. The march was still on, and tens of thousands of black citizens from all over the country were preparing to descend on the capital. Finally, on June 25, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802. A short time later, Randolph announced that the march on Washington was canceled.
MOWM and its jubilant supporters proclaimed victory, but that view of the outcome was far from unanimous, even among blacks. Roy Wilkins and Charles H. Houston, two men closely associated with the NAACP, criticized Randolph for excluding whites from MOWM; W. E. B. Du Bois was conspicuously quiet, giving no public sign that he supported the organization or its leaders. Some critics saw Randolph as another Marcus Garvey; others objected to his professed commitment to a strategy of nonviolent civil disobedience. (Not among them was James Farmer, a Texas-born, Mississippi-raised Methodist preacher’s son who, in 1942, when he was twenty-two years old, started the Congress of Racial Equality in Chicago with Bayard Rustin and others, inspired in part by the strategic and philosophical ideas of A. Philip Randolph.)
Five months later the United States was at war; the people closed ranks and made a show of unity in adversity, but segregation remained the order of the day. The Fair Employment Practices Committee—two blacks and three whites, chaired by Mark Ethridge of the Louisville Courier-Journal—began to receive and consider the complaints of people who wanted to work in the war effort but were denied that opportunity because of their race.
The results were hardly impressive. Lacking any enforcement power beyond moral persuasion, the FEPC resolved few disputes and did not recommend cancellation of any defense contracts. At a public hearing in Birmingham in June 1942, Ethridge, who was widely regarded as one of the South’s most prominent white liberals, declared that “there is no power in the world—not even in all the mechanized armies of the earth, Allied and Axis—which could now force the Southern white people to the abandonment of the principle of social segregation.” If the remark had been made by an avowed white supremacist like Senator Bilbo or Governor Talmadge, no one would have been surprised; coming as it did from the chairman of a government committee responsible for promoting fairness in employment, Ethridge’s unfortunate comment was a slap in the face to progressives.
Blasted by Southern whites for doing too much and by blacks for doing too little, the FEPC in reality didn’t do much at all. Several of its members, including Ethridge, finally resigned in frustration after three years. The committee was then reorganized, and regional offices were opened in several cities, including Dallas and Atlanta, but the pattern of weak and ineffective performance didn’t change. Some Southern railroads, shipyards, and plants openly defied the committee and the government. Finally, after three more years of impotence, Congress would pull the plug in 1946 and leave the FEPC to expire—out of money, out of friends, out of luck and life.
Every step toward equal opportunity had been a challenge, an ordeal, and the road ahead looked no smoother. But in subtle and irrevocable ways, the coming of war marked the gradual beginning of a change in attitudes, beliefs
, behavior—for black Americans, for Southern whites, for Americans everywhere. The March on Washington Movement was one sign among many that race, once an ignored topic thought to involve only poor people in the South, was about to become a major public issue in the United States. Scores of Southern politicians, steeped as they were in racist habit and ideology, saw and felt this faint shift in the wind and steeled themselves to resist at all costs the social changes that were coming.
2. The Locust Confederacy
In war as in peace, the South was ravaged by the political equivalent of a plague of locusts. Informally bonded by philosophy and temperament—and by the acquired habits of power and privilege—this undemocratic oligarchy of reactionary lawmakers held sway from the city halls and county seats to the state capitols and the halls of Congress. The pattern, established after Reconstruction, had continued virtually unaltered for more than sixty years: A relative handful of economically powerful white people controlled the region by excluding from the political process all except others similar to themselves. With rare exceptions, you had to be white to be in the game at all; in addition, it helped immeasurably if you were a man, and it was also decidedly in your favor to be over forty, wealthy, a property owner, a conspicuously pious Protestant of Anglo-Saxon descent, an outspoken defender of Southern traditions, and a denigrator of Yankees. On top of all that, of course, it went without saying that you had to be a Democrat.
An inventive variety of devices served to limit the franchise. Only since 1920 had the nation’s women had legal standing at the polls—and in the South and elsewhere, many people still considered feminine political activity unbecoming if not disreputable. Every Southern state had instituted a poll tax in the 1890s or early 1900s as a transparent means of taking the vote away from blacks and poor whites. The tax of one or two dollars a year was billed as a revenue raiser, but its only effective purpose was to restrict suffrage; in some states, it was retroactive to age twenty-one, cumulative for up to 24 years, and had to be paid months before election time. By 1937, North Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida had repealed their poll taxes, and Georgia, under reform governor Ellis Arnall, did the same in 1945. South Carolina and Tennessee would follow suit in the early 1950s. The other states—Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia—would cling to the discredited device until it was finally banned by the Twenty-fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1964.