Four Hundred Souls

by Four Hundred Souls (retail) (epub)

  between its shores. We fought back, coiling and unleashing a fury

  threaded in our stolen names. Incensed by our ease upon our own

  streets, our stolen names gracing storefronts, our control over

  our own lives, they torched the landscape flat in Tulsa, ignored

  the screams of its rightful citizens and curious children, they set us

  to flame. Wherever we were, whenever we dared upright, wherever

  we breathed out loud, they were—damning the boys in Scottsboro,

  disregarding the vile savage rampaging through men in Tuskegee.

  But, dammit, we phoenix, we. We renaissance and odes inked

  in tumult. We Billie warbling a fruit gone strange. And we still be

  Marian sanctifying that stage, singing her America while America

  said There ain’t a damned thing here that sounds like that.

  1939–1944

  THE BLACK SOLDIER

  Chad Williams

  Isaac Woodard wanted to be a soldier. One of nine children in a family of sharecroppers, he grew up in rural South Carolina, hoping, like so many other African Americans in the Jim Crow South, for a better life.

  His opportunity came. At the age of twenty-three, on October 14, 1942, he traveled to Fort Jackson and enlisted in the U.S. Army. He would become one of approximately 1.2 million Black men and women who served in World War II.

  On the eve of American entry into the war, the place of Black soldiers in the nation’s military was dire. In the summer of 1940, when Congress began debating a peacetime draft, fewer than five thousand Black soldiers were in the entire U.S. Army. Black World War I veterans Rayford Logan and Charles Hamilton Houston, still scarred by their experiences, testified that Jim Crow in the military had to end. The September 1940 Selective Service Act, the first peacetime draft in American history, prohibited racial discrimination in the administration of the draft, but it did not outlaw segregation.

  The NAACP and civil rights activists pressured President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the War Department to reform the military and address racism affecting Black workers. The government responded by appointing Judge William Hastie as a special adviser to Secretary of War Henry Stimson and by promoting Colonel Benjamin O. Davis, Sr., to brigadier general, making him the first Black flag officer in the history of the U.S. military. Despite these concessions, the armed forces remained segregated and the defense industries systematically excluded African Americans. In January 1941, longtime labor organizer A. Philip Randolph proposed a mass march on Washington, threatening to have some one hundred thousand African Americans descend on the nation’s capital. On June 25, just days before the march, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, banning discrimination in the defense industries and creating the Fair Employment Practices Commission.

  The United States entered World War II following the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor. During the surprise bombardment, a Black naval messman, Dorie Miller, manned an antiaircraft gun and shot down at least two Japanese planes. Miller became a powerful symbol of African American patriotic loyalty and commitment to the war effort. But Black people, as represented by the “double V” slogan, were committed not just to victory against fascism abroad but to victory against racism at home as well.

  They faced an arduous battle. Approximately 2.5 million African Americans registered for the draft, a process rife with discrimination. Of the more than 1 million men inducted into the military through the draft, 75 percent served in the army. When they arrived at training camps, especially those located in the South, Black draftees endured humiliation and abuse. The army rigidly enforced racial segregation, often treating German POWs with more respect than Black servicemen. When Black soldiers went off base, they posed both a real and symbolic threat to Jim Crow and frequently clashed with local whites.

  As in World War I, the military consigned the majority of Black troops to labor and service units. Racist ideas that Black men lacked the cognitive ability to be effective combatants and officers continued to pervade the thinking of War Department officials. This belief, however, did not stop the military from putting Black servicemen in harm’s way, both abroad and on the home front. In the summer of 1944, Black dockworkers stationed at Port Chicago, California, refused to work following two munition explosions that resulted in 320 deaths, 202 of whom were African American. The navy court-martialed fifty men on charges of mutiny and sentenced them to eight to fifteen years of hard labor.

  During the war, the military deployed approximately half a million African American soldiers overseas. Although service units, like the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion and the 490th Port Battalion, were present from D-Day on, the army initially had no intention of using Black soldiers as combatants on the European front. Pressure from civil rights organizations and the Black press eventually forced the army to send the reactivated 92nd “Buffaloes” Division to Italy in the summer of 1944. As in World War I, the division’s racist officers lacked faith in the men under their command and derided their allegedly poor performance in combat. The all-Black 93rd Division arrived in the Pacific Theater in early 1944. It finally saw action during the New Guinea campaign. Most Black troops in the Pacific, however, toiled in support capacities. Isaac Woodard, who served as a longshoreman in the 429th Port Battalion, arrived on New Guinea in October 1944, loading and unloading ships.

  In spite of discrimination, Black servicemen did make significant contributions and took advantage of limited opportunities. During the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, the army found itself in desperate need of replacement troops. In January 1945, over the objections of his senior officers, Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower called for a limited number of Black volunteers to fight alongside white soldiers. The 761st Tank Battalion distinguished itself on the European front and was in combat until the final days of the war. The navy grudgingly opened its ranks to Black volunteers. Although the majority of the sixty-five thousand Black seamen continued to serve as messmen, the navy did commission the first Black officers in its history, and one ship, the Mason, had an all-Black crew. The Marine Corps proved most willing to accept Black servicemen in its forces. While the approximately twenty thousand Black Marines trained at a segregated facility in Montford Point, North Carolina, and never saw combat, they paved the way for future enlistees.

  The most significant examples of racial progress in the military occurred in the Air Corps. Bending to pressure, on January 9, 1941, the War Department agreed to the creation of the 99th Pursuit Squadron with headquarters located in Tuskegee, Alabama. Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., was part of the first graduating class of cadets and subsequently took command of the squadron. The War Department’s refusal to send them into battle was the last straw for Judge William Hastie, who resigned in protest in January 1943. Manpower needs and pressure from First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt ultimately put them in action, first in North Africa and then in Italy. In February 1944, the 99th was joined by the 100th, 301st, and 302nd squadrons, becoming the 332nd Fighter Group. By the end of the war, 992 men became pilots, with 450 serving overseas. Used primarily as bomber escorts, the fighters of the 332nd flew 1,578 missions with over fifteen thousand individual sorties and won numerous commendations.

  Black women, too, took advantage of opportunities created by the war. Along with entering the industrial workforce by the thousands, they served in the military, enduring both racism and sexism throughout their experiences. They made up approximately 4 percent of the fifteen thousand enlistees in the Women’s Army Corps (WACs); Charity Adams Earley became the first African American female WAC officer. The navy’s Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Services (WAVES), established by Congress in 1942, was originally all white. But at President Roosevelt’s insistence, the WAVES began accepting African American volunteers in 1944, and seventy-two Black women ultimately underwent training.

  Af
ter the war came to an end on September 2, 1945, African Americans immediately began to wonder if their service and sacrifice had been in vain. The military did not award Medals of Honor to any Black soldiers and largely ignored their contributions to the war effort. As they returned to their homes across the country and especially in the South, their expectations for freedom and increased rights were met with fierce resistance. In the spring and summer of 1946, white supremacists killed several Black veterans and attacked countless others.

  On February 12, 1946, Isaac Woodard was almost home. He had distinguished himself during the war, rising to become a sergeant and earning several medals. He returned to the United States on January 15 and received his official discharge on February 12 at Camp Gordon, Georgia. There he got on a Greyhound bus along with other newly minted veterans and headed for Winnsboro, South Carolina, to be reunited with his wife, Rosa.

  During the ride, when Woodard asked the white bus driver to use the restroom, they got into a heated argument. When the bus stopped in Batesburg, South Carolina, the driver called for local police to remove Woodard. Two white officers arrived, forcibly took Woodard off the bus, and viciously beat him with their batons before dragging his unconscious body to jail. When Woodard awoke the next morning, his face battered and covered in dried blood, he could not see. Both his eyes had been destroyed, leaving the twenty-seven-year-old veteran permanently blind.

  News of Woodard’s blinding shocked Black America. It offered a brutal reminder that while the foreign war might have ended, the domestic war for civil rights raged on. The NAACP, led by Executive Secretary Walter White, used the incident to pressure President Harry Truman to act. In December 1946, Truman established the President’s Committee on Civil Rights. And on July 26, 1948, in response to its recommendations and to continued agitation from A. Philip Randolph, Truman issued Executive Order 9981. The order abolished segregation in the armed forces. Black veterans such as Medgar Evers, Amzie Moore, and Robert Williams, inspired by their war service, became key leaders in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s. World War II transformed African Americans and ultimately changed the course of American history.

  1944–1949

  THE BLACK LEFT

  Russell Rickford

  Though African Americans joined in the jubilant celebrations of peace when the Second World War came to an end in 1945, many among them remained skeptical about the U.S. war effort, seeing it as nothing more than a white man’s fight.

  The more radical thrust of African American demands—which included meaningful global peace, decolonization, and thoroughgoing human rights in their own country—sought not merely greater inclusion of “minorities” in the capitalist apparatus but a basic reorganization of political and economic arrangements. It was the Black left that embodied this expansive agenda. From activist-intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1946 An Appeal to the World (a report on U.S. racial oppression submitted to the fledgling United Nations), to socialist crusader Claudia Jones’s 1949 essay, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!,” the Black American manifestos of the day imagined liberation as the wholesale redistribution of power and wealth.

  But society was moving in a different direction. The early postwar years produced great waves of political and social reaction, delivering a stunning rebuke to just conceptions of peacetime reconversion. The intensification of national hostilities with the Soviet Union reinforced efforts to crush bold prescriptions for reform within the United States. Black activists of all political inclinations were among the targets of the retrograde forces that combined to stymie progressive change. The organs of hyperpatriotism—from the congressional body known as the House Un-American Activities Committee to local segregationist, antilabor, and anti-Communist groups—harbored special enmity for leftists, whom they attempted to discredit by labeling them “subversives.”

  It was in Peekskill, New York, however, that the savagery of racist reaction surfaced most dramatically in 1949. The occasion was a Paul Robeson concert. A star of stage and screen, the fifty-one-year-old Robeson was one of the world’s foremost entertainers. He was also a stalwart activist who fought tirelessly for the causes of decolonization, labor, and human rights. Robeson was an antifascist and an internationalist who lent his prodigious talents to trade union struggles across the globe. He had battled lynching and segregation while promoting Black militancy and cultural pride. He was an ally of the Communist Party; an outspoken admirer of the Soviet Union (which he cherished for its anticolonial and antiracist policies); and an opponent of the Cold War who called for peaceful coexistence of the superpowers.

  In short, Robeson was everything the far right despised. When he was named headliner of a civil rights benefit concert set to take place in Peekskill in late August 1949, some of his most committed foes resolved to block the performance.

  Earlier that spring, news outlets had quoted Robeson (somewhat inaccurately) as proclaiming, at the Paris Peace Conference, that African Americans would refuse to participate in a war against the Soviet Union. The gist of the statement Robeson had actually made was that Black America’s true fight lay at home, in the land of Jim Crow.

  This overwhelmingly defined the African American worldview after the smoke cleared from World War II. Black people had nurtured their own visions of the war, recasting a struggle against fascism as a crusade against white supremacy. Now they were determined to translate that ideal into a quest for full democracy at home.

  On the one hand, that meant preserving the gains—including increased access to industrial jobs and unions—that mass Black mobilization and the exigencies of wartime production had enabled. On the other hand, African Americans believed that the cataclysm of global war heralded a new racial order that they could help construct. Having helped defeat Adolf Hitler and his ideology of racial hierarchy, Black people increasingly resented Jim Crow and other domestic regimes of second-class citizenship. Indignation became migration as thousands (and eventually millions) of Black Southerners journeyed to northern, western, and eastern cities, expanding an African American exodus that had accelerated during the war, laying the groundwork for the burgeoning and restive Black communities of the postwar years.

  War had weakened the colonial empires of Europe; everywhere, it seemed, subject peoples were pressing for self-rule. Black Americans watched this upsurge with a sense of expectation, seeing India’s 1947 independence and the nascent freedom campaigns of other “colored” populations as closely aligned with their own efforts to restructure U.S. society.

  There were signs that some African American aspirations might be realized. In 1944 and 1948, respectively, the Supreme Court struck down the whites-only primary election system and ruled that racially restrictive housing covenants could not be enforced. By 1948, President Truman had been pressured into desegregating the military and the federal bureaucracy. He had already impaneled a Committee on Civil Rights whose 1947 report, To Secure These Rights, offered a stark assessment of structural racism nationwide. In 1947 as well, Jackie Robinson broke the color line in major league baseball, and the Congress of Racial Equality, a civil rights outfit, organized the Journey of Reconciliation, a campaign to test compliance with a new law banning segregation on interstate buses.

  But any departure from the tenets of militarism and Negro acquiescence enraged ultranationalists and bigots. In 1946 a South Carolina policeman beat veteran Isaac Woodard so badly it ruptured his eyes and left him blind. In 1947 Georgia sharecropper Rosa Lee Ingram was sentenced to death, along with her two sons, after all three family members repelled the vicious assault of a white man. And in the same year, the Trenton Six were wrongfully convicted of murder by an all-white jury in New Jersey.

  And then there was Robeson. Amid the outcry about his alleged Paris declaration, several of his concerts were canceled. In the Westchester County town of Peekskill, as the date of his performance approached, some residents felt justi
fied in engineering a campaign of aggression against the singer. The American Legion and the Chamber of Commerce denounced the upcoming recital as “un-American” and called for it to be vigorously contested. “The time for tolerant silence that signifies approval is running out,” an area newspaper asserted.

  These provocations had the desired effect. When the day of the concert arrived, such a menacing swarm of anti-Robeson demonstrators appeared at the outdoor performance site that the event was called off. That evening roving bands of self-styled patriots attacked concertgoers trapped on the show ground. A cross was burned. Anti-Black and anti-Semitic epithets were hurled. “Lynch Robeson!” the mob chanted. As Robeson supporters attempted to exit the grounds, they were brutally stoned or beaten, and many of their vehicles were overturned. Police stood by amid the mayhem, sneering at victims or hoisting their billy clubs and joining in the ambush.

  Robeson was defiant. Buoyed by a massive rally in Manhattan’s Harlem neighborhood, where well-wishers marched in his defense, the singer vowed to return to the Peekskill area. The concert was rescheduled for the following weekend. This time Robeson was able to perform, his rich baritone echoing in the hills. To ensure his safety and that of the concertgoers, a large contingent of Black and white trade unionists formed a perimeter around the grounds. There they stood, shoulder to shoulder, throughout the concert. But when it ended and attendees began to leave, throngs of right-wing protesters, including supporters of veterans groups, again unleashed a torrent of violence. Assailants bludgeoned audience members or fanned out along a roadside to shower departing cars with rocks, shattering windshields and bloodying the asphalt.

  Observers around the world viewed the Peekskill riots as a portent. As the Cold War deepened, the United States was lurching to the right, and the most regressive social elements felt emboldened. Seeing Peekskill as a call to arms, jingoists nationwide soon adopted a chilling new slogan: “Wake up, America! Peekskill did!”