TWO
ORIGINS OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
THE NAACP WAS founded at a low, low point in the lives of American Blacks. Blacks entered the twentieth century stripped of the promises of democracy, left by the law to the tender mercies of their white neighbors. The Supreme Court had capitulated to the racist fury that swept the South, reneging on the promises of a color-blind Constitution made in the heat of the Civil War and Reconstruction with the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. Following the end of Reconstruction, a wave of terror had descended on the South, where nine of every ten Blacks lived, three-fourths in rural areas. The national government abandoned Blacks to state control; most were reduced to peonage, a condition of near slavery. As historian Harvard Sitkoff observed, “The Southern way had become the American way.”1
By 1900, the eugenics movement—the pseudoscience of racial differences—was in full flower. It claimed nature—not nurture—accounted for and required the superiority of white over Black. While white misbehavior was attributed to poverty, family disorganization, and poor education, Black failings were due to inherent racial inferiority. The eugenics movement described a vertical racial hierarchy, with whites on top and Blacks at bottom, and most white Americans believed that the superior whites should rule over the baser races, including the inferior Blacks. The most progressive whites believed in gradualism, and they emphasized that Blacks should prepare themselves for citizenship through education, religion, and economic uplift, while decrying strategies of agitation, force, or political activity.
Du Bois writes that whites received a “psychological wage” from living in a society where members of their racial group occupied the leading positions. When the group you belong to receives social esteem, prestige, and material benefits, these arrangements seem so familiar as to be virtually natural. Any changes in this relationship or challenges to it are so disquieting that the challenges must be vigorously repulsed and the challengers marginalized. Even if economic benefits will result from altering the status quo, the accompanying loss of privilege and prestige is too high a cost to pay.
Even as white supremacy was being codified, Blacks, particularly in the urban South, responded by building a culture of resistance and accommodation and an institutional infrastructure, best exemplified by the growth of a small number of Black businesses—morticians, barbers, bankers, insurance companies, and others—almost all catering to a Black clientele.
In the early twentieth century, the NAACP and other Black reformers operated in a culture that assumed Black people to be incapable of pursuing or articulating any common interests independent of whites. As the United States prepared to enter the First World War, there was not one Black policeman in the South, not one Black judge anywhere in the country, and the parade of barbarity continued. In 1911, the townspeople of Livermore, Kentucky, bought tickets to participate in a lynching at a local theater; orchestra seat holders were allowed to fire as many bullets as they chose into the hanging Black body; those in the gallery’s cheaper seats could only fire one shot. A crowd of ten thousand watched the stabbing, mutilation, and burning alive of a disabled Black youth in Waco, Texas, in the public square; his remains were sold as souvenirs, the teeth for five dollars each.2
No political party—Progressive, Democratic, Prohibition, Republican, Socialist, or Socialist-Labor—wooed the Black vote in 1912, and not one word about civil rights appeared in any party platform. By the middle ‘20s, membership in the Ku Klux Klan rose to eight million—they controlled the state governments of Indiana and Colorado. In 1924, a new magazine, Time, put the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan on its cover.3
The period between the First and Second World Wars saw an awakening of Black protest. The chief agency of this awakening was the NAACP, but other forces played a role as well. One, of course, was the First World War itself, which helped the slow stream of Black migration from South to North and West grow into a flood, pushed out because Southern life was hard and pulled out because Northern opportunity beckoned. Between 1910 and 1920, three hundred thousand left; over the next ten years, 1.3 million; in the 1930s, 1.5 million left; and in the 1940s, 2.5 million.
Almost four hundred thousand Blacks had served overseas, many as stevedores and laborers. In France, the US military asked the French not to “spoil” Black troops by treating them as equals. Black troops enjoyed freedoms in Europe not permitted on American soil but returned home in 1919 to find their reward was a summer of bloody race riots. The war they fought reflected intra-European arguments over Africa, and the war brought home to many the realization that the majority of the world was colored, not white. For some white Americans, including many in the military, this was a war fought not to make the world safe for democracy but for white supremacy.
For many Blacks, the war held great promise for added equality at home. Du Bois understood the war and the effect it would have on returning Black servicemen. He wrote in the May 1919 issue of the NAACP magazine The Crisis: “Make way for Democracy! We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why.”
In its tenth year, the NAACP had almost one hundred thousand members. For the next two decades the NAACP’s work was threefold: it attacked individual instances of racial injustice, it attacked the South-wide denial of the right to vote, and it continued prosecuting a series of court cases against legalized Jim Crow.4
The most prominent counter to the interracialism of the NAACP was the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), led by the nationalist Marcus Garvey, born in Jamaica in 1887, who had immigrated to the United States in 1916. By the ‘20s, Garvey had built the largest and broadest mass movement of Blacks America had ever seen. By the mid-’20s the UNIA had more than seven hundred branches in thirty-eight states, in every corner of the country, and more than two hundred branches outside the USA. His plans, spelled out in 1925, were very different from those of the NAACP.
Garvey argued for a return of some American Blacks to Africa, the liberation of Africa from European colonialism, the creation of Black businesses, and rigid separation of the races here. Blacks deserved political and economic equality, he argued, but whites would never permit it. The center of Garvey’s message was absolute rejection of white denigration of Africa and African Americans. Africa had agriculture and advanced culture—written languages, advanced medicine, and mathematics—when Europeans were still naked barbarians, he proclaimed. But modern Africa had been spoiled by Europeans, and Africans in America had been robbed of the legacy their African forebears had created for them.5
BY 1921, GARVEY’S UNIA may have had ten times as many members as the NAACP. At its height in 1923, the UNIA boasted six million members, the largest Black mass movement in American history. In 1923, Garvey was convicted of mail fraud, sentenced to five years in federal prison, and then pardoned by President Coolidge and deported in 1927. He had risen to great influence, attracting hundreds of thousands of followers, before the government brought him down. He had aroused the anger and enmity of other Blacks; Du Bois called him “the most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America and in the world . . . either a lunatic or a traitor.”6 The Messenger, published by labor leader A. Philip Randolph, referred to Garvey as “the supreme Negro Jamaican Jackass” and an “unquestioned fool and ignoramus.”7 But thousands upon thousands loved and followed him; they did so because he tapped into the strong stream of nationalism, race preservation, cultural revitalization, group identity, and self-defense that has been ever-present in Black America since slavery.
Garveyism represented psychological liberation from mental slavery imposed by white supremacy. “The world has made being black a crime,” Garvey said. “I intend to make it a virtue.”8 He linked black aspiration for cultural and economic independence from white domination with the American striving for success, and, if the effect was not much change in the physical circumstances of Garvey’s followers, he radically altered their mental state and political outlook and kept alive that ever-present strain of Black Nationalism that continues in America today.
THE TEN YEARS following World War I saw improvements in the economic lives of Blacks, but a quick decline followed. When the stock market crashed in October 1929, many Blacks were already in the middle of a depression. “Even in starvation there was discrimination,” a historian wrote.9 Relief distribution was governed by racial preferences, and Blacks were totally excluded from some welfare programs.
Building Black political power, for many Blacks, offered a way out. Dissatisfaction among Blacks with the Republican Party began in 1928 when the party tried to replace its Black supporters and rebuild an all-white organization in the South, destroying the influence of prominent Black party leaders. One result was an increased Black vote in the 1928 presidential election for Alfred E. Smith, the Democratic candidate. Smith lost to Republican Herbert Hoover, in part because the Republicans were willing to exploit anti-Catholic sentiments in the South and were willing to shoulder their loyal Black supporters aside to attract white Democrats. Republicans learned that prejudice was politically profitable; Blacks learned that blind loyalty to any party was foolish.
By the time Herbert Hoover ran for reelection in 1932—against the little-known Democratic governor of New York, Franklin Roosevelt—a few Blacks were willing to abandon Abraham Lincoln’s party. One-half of all urban Black Southerners were out of work. Most Blacks voted for Hoover, who lost, but, within a year, Roosevelt’s personality and his politics began to win the allegiance of more Blacks, as well as many other Americans, as he began an all-out attack on the Depression. In his four terms from 1933 to 1945, he never supported a single piece of civil rights legislation and scarcely spoke a single word against discrimination. Racial discrimination persisted in federal programs. Blacks, however, did benefit from various New Deal measures, and Black federal employees increased from fifty thousand in 1933 to nearly two hundred thousand by 1946.
New Deal policies that worsened the positions of Blacks were not overtly racist but undoubtedly had racist effects. Most telling was the exclusion of farm laborers and domestic workers from coverage under the Social Security Act and the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Since most Southern Blacks and relatively few Southern whites were concentrated in these lowly paid occupations, Black exclusion meant most Blacks were left out of the new welfare state and denied the same chance to escape poverty available to many poor whites. It is undeniable that, in comparison with whites, Blacks became relatively worse off. New Deal programs helped fuel the modern wealth gap between Blacks and whites.10 Nonetheless, the material circumstances of Blacks improved, and, on average, Blacks were better off in 1950 than they had been in 1930.
Eleanor Roosevelt played an important role in shaping both white and Black perceptions of her husband’s administrations; she was on intimate terms with noted Black educator Mary McLeod Bethune. Mrs. Roosevelt visited Black schools and federal projects targeted to Blacks, and represented an egalitarianism never seen in the White House before. By 1936, a majority of Blacks were Democrats, and Roosevelt—in contrast to his twentieth-century predecessors in the White House—was viewed fondly by most Blacks.
Franklin Roosevelt’s 1932 election and subsequent terms increased the power of the Presidency. The Depression also changed the nature and role of government. The Depression of the 1930s was—and is—the greatest crisis Americans confronted in the twentieth century. America was fighting for its life and future. There had never been a time when the government was so engaged in the lives of its citizens. Americans began to re-think and question the role of government in insuring economic stability and in helping individuals protect themselves from larger economic and social forces they could not confront alone. The Depression and New Deal changed forever the nature of the American workplace—unemployment insurance and Social Security created a safety net for millions of Americans.
BY 1935, AMERICA had begun to leave behind the unregulated capitalism that had created so much misery. Even the arts were changed by the Depression—writers, photographers, composers, artists, and painters hired by the Works Progress Administration and the Farm Security Administration began to celebrate the lives and struggles of ordinary women and men. Art was for everyone, they believed—not just for an elite.
The Depression, the New Deal measures taken to end it, the relative racial liberalism of many in the Roosevelt Administrations, and the assertiveness of Black Americans helped raise Black expectations, overcome powerlessness, and diminish white hostility. Supreme Court decisions had begun to reverse the anti-Black counterrevolution of the late 1800s; cases involving Black exclusion from juries, the right to picket against employment discrimination, disenfranchisement, racially restrictive housing covenants, unequal pay for Black teachers made Blacks “less freedmen and more free men.”11
In 1932, Southern politicians had been loudest in demanding government action to beat back the Depression and had supported Franklin Roosevelt enthusiastically. New Deal programs poured money into the South, most of it intended to help the poor and most of it controlled by and benefiting landowners and their business associates. Big planters in the Black Belt, the region that was the backbone of the segregationist South, saw their fortunes secured.
But within a few years, the New Deal began to upset some time-honored Southern economic and political relationships and to challenge others. Work relief programs and the legalization of labor unions threatened to upset the supply of cheap labor and destroy the culture of agricultural dependency. Workers flocked to labor unions—to the United Mine Workers and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers in 1933 and in 1934. In 1935, industrial unions organized the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and in its militancy and social and political outlook it differed widely from the racially restrictive and politically conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL).
The promise of federal interest—if not federal protection—spurred racial militancy and inspired efforts to secure the right to vote. NAACP membership swelled. Black youth joined the left-wing American Youth Congress, the American Student Union, and the Southern Negro Congress. In Georgia and South Carolina, Blacks attempted to vote in white primaries (the primaries were run like private clubs in which only whites could participate).
In 1936, with the economy on the upswing and a popular program of jobs, credit, and relief, Roosevelt easily won reelection, creating a new majority: big-city political machines, the Southern and border states (powered by labor militancy), and Black votes. Yet, at the same time, white resistance to integration was certified by a Roper poll in 1939. Only one in eight Americans believed Blacks should live wherever they wanted to live; seven in ten said Blacks were less intelligent than whites, and in 1944, half believed in affirmative action for whites, agreeing that whites should have the first chance at any kind of job. Half said they wouldn’t like it if they were in a hospital with a “Negro nurse”; six of ten told the Gallup poll in 1948 they would object to mixing the races in the military.