THREE 

WORLD WAR II

ANOTHER WAR—WORLD WAR II—reshaped American society and reordered American thinking toward racism. For Blacks, the war against fascism was a personal struggle. When Italy invaded Ethiopia, a Black nation had been attacked, and Black America reacted with outrage. Hitler’s notion of a master race was an old and frightening story to American Blacks; in him they saw the worst demagogues of the South now threatening to take over the entire world.

If the war caused many Americans to raise questions about whether and how well democracy was applied at home, the Cold War that resulted from it fostered a strident American nationalism that shut down debate and eliminated dissent in the postwar period. It created a new world physically and politically divided between Soviet and American spheres. It also marked the end of European expansion that had begun in the fifteenth century with the slave trade.

Like the First World War, the economic engine of the Second created jobs for many and another great migration—again Blacks left the South for the North and West. Between 1940 and 1945, the Black population of Los Angeles doubled; the Black population of other cities increased as well. Between 1940 and 1965, the Black population of New York grew from 6 percent of the total to 16 percent; Chicago’s from 8 to 27 percent; Detroit’s from 4 to 18 percent; and Washington, DC’s from 28 to 63 percent.

Above all else, the war and postwar conversion rejuvenated American capitalism. Disposable family income rose. It was $1,055 in 1940; by 1956, that was the income of the average teenager. Corporate profits, the gross national product, the number of civilian jobs, Americans’ personal expenditures—all expanded after the war.

The war quickened the integration of the South into the nation’s economic and political life. Defense dollars stimulated Southern industrial development. The federal government spent $4 billion on Southern military facilities during World War II, building and expanding bases and shipyards—more than one-third of the total spent nationally.

An explosion of job opportunities swallowed up surplus labor that had been mired in agriculture, and job opportunities outside the region pulled Southerners away. In the 1930s, one of every seven Southerners left the region; in the 1940s, one of every five left. More than 1.5 million Blacks left the South in the 1940s. Those who stayed behind became an urban population—by 1950 in Georgia, for example, Blacks were more urbanized than whites. Cities offered Blacks higher living standards, even for the poor. Public housing was superior to sharecroppers’ shacks. And cities offered the safety of numbers, and those numbers meant that institutions—like churches, schools, businesses—were more available than in the countryside.

Those Blacks who left created a civil rights constituency in Northern, Midwestern, and Western states, electing Democrats who countered their Southern colleagues’ objections to any civil rights advance. Those who stayed behind were active too—Black voter registration efforts flourished, much of it prompted by returning veterans. Mississippi’s Progressive Voters League grew to five thousand members in the most repressive state in the union. In Atlanta, the United Negro Veterans marched by the hundred to demand Black policemen. In Savannah, 12,000 new Black voters registered in seventeen days, and the number of new Black voters in Georgia rose from 20,000 in 1945 to 136,000 by the end of 1946.

By 1950, there were half as many Black sharecroppers as there had been in 1930. By 1960, two-thirds of those had left the farm. The demise of sharecropping meant the death of direct control of Blacks by landlords, the weakening of the most powerful rural white supremacist authority since slavery.

In the 1940s, the percentage of Blacks acquiring a high school education shot upward, a reflection of increased Black prosperity and the white South’s increased funding for Black schools to lower pressure for school integration. The number of Blacks in college increased 150 percent in the 1940s; this growth in educational access and achievement meant a corresponding growth in confidence and the courage to demand equal rights.

The war also helped to throw a spotlight on the nation’s acquiescence to racial segregation. The gulf between promise and practice further fueled Black militancy. Even before the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and American entry into the war, war preparation and production had begun. Black leaders were anxious to ensure their constituents would not be left behind in the promised prosperity.

IN EARLY 1941, A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, threatened a mass march on Washington to protest discrimination in defense industry hiring. Black unemployment had reached 25 percent. The contrast between employment segregation at home and America’s claims to be a freedom-loving, democratic alternative to fascist Germany abroad only heightened the frustration Blacks felt on the eve of the war.

Randolph represented a radical, socialist critique of the struggle for equal rights. Born in Florida in 1889, Randolph came of political age in Harlem just before and during the First World War. His conversion to socialism informed his view that the racial struggle was a class struggle too, one that should be waged with the Black working class in the foreground. Neither the NAACP nor the National Urban League drew its leadership from the working class. Randolph became a caustic critic of civil rights organizations that did not share his view and an even more pointed critic of white supremacists.

Randolph had waged a decade-long struggle to organize railroad porters into a union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and won certification in 1937. His experience and his victory gave him entree into the national councils of organized labor, where he became a constant prod to the exclusionary practices of most unions. President Woodrow Wilson called Randolph “the most dangerous Negro in America.”¹

Randolph, the NAACP’s Walter White, and an Urban League spokesman visited Roosevelt in September 1940 to complain about defense plant job discrimination. Randolph left the meeting convinced that only mass action would force a presidential response. Randolph warned that one hundred thousand Blacks would march on Washington to bring their “power and pressure to bear on the agencies and representatives of the Federal Government to exact their rights in National Defense employment and the armed forces of the country.”²

The Black response was overwhelming, even from the less militant NAACP and Urban League. With the march set for July 1, 1941, Randolph wrote as a member of the newly formed March on Washington Committee: “Dear Fellow Negro Americans: Be not dismayed in these terrible times. You possess power, great power. Our problem is to harness and hitch it up for action on the broadest, daring, and most gigantic scale!”³

Roosevelt tried to stop the march, enlisting the services of his wife, Eleanor, a popular figure among Blacks nationally, and the aid of New York mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia. They failed, and the president called a White House meeting with Randolph and three others.

The four insisted on a quid quo pro for canceling the march. On June 25, Roosevelt gave it to them. He issued Executive Order 8802, which declared: “There shall be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color or national origin.”⁴

The order did not desegregate the military, as the movement had demanded, but it did establish a Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC), empowered to investigate and recommend but without enforcement powers. Like many of the victories won by Black Americans, the executive order was ineffective, only grudgingly given, and then granted only in response to threatened disruption and international embarrassment. Roosevelt paid little attention to the merit of the arguments that Randolph and others made; what interested him was an expedient way of canceling the march.

The FEPC, which largely died after the war, did represent a dramatic new commitment to Blacks from an American president. The March on Washington movement, kept alive by Randolph, played an important role in laying the groundwork for the civil rights movement that would follow in the 1950s. Not only did it show the effectiveness of threats of disruptive protest; it provided early training for a generation of activists—among them James Farmer and Bayard Rustin—and it built a base of activists standing ready for the nonviolent movement to begin.

As the 1940s began, Black Americans were poised for another leap forward. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal had raised expectations and, in some instances, created new opportunity. It had especially changed American expectations of government’s role in combating poverty and had erased Black loyalty to the Republican Party. Black life chances had improved between 1930 and 1940—literacy among Blacks was up, the number of Black skilled workers was up, life expectancy increased, the percentage of young Blacks attending school had risen.

Black Americans had enjoyed boosts from sports, with Joe Louis’s championships from 1937 to 1949 and Jesse Owens’s four gold medals won over the objections of Adolf Hitler at the 1936 Olympics; and from the arts in 1939, when Mrs. Roosevelt resigned from the Daughters of the American Revolution over their refusal to let Marian Anderson sing at Washington’s Constitution Hall, when Native Son by Richard Wright became a 1940 best seller, and when Paul Robeson, Canada Lee, Katherine Dunham, Duke Ellington, Lena Horne, and others began to enjoy popular success.

They had also gotten a boost from the US Supreme Court in a series of lawsuits sponsored by the NAACP and others, including Gaines v. Canada, a 1938 decision declaring that states had to provide equal facilities for Blacks even if separate facilities existed; Smith v. Allwright in 1944, in which the court struck down Texas’s white primary; Morgan v. Virginia in 1946, where the court banned segregation in interstate travel; and in 1948 in Shelley v. Kraemer, in which the court said racially restrictive housing covenants were unconstitutional. If the NAACP’s legal victories did little to dent white supremacy, they did educate Blacks about their civil rights, mobilized local communities, and strengthened the NAACP’s position as the dominant organization fighting for civil rights. Membership in the NAACP increased greatly by 1945—acknowledgment of the association’s increased militancy and the growing desire by Blacks for an organized vehicle to promote racial progress.

As in World War I, the employment opportunities created by World War II and the desire by Southern Blacks to improve their lives and escape Southern terror changed the demographics of Black America. The government encouraged recruiting Southern Black workers as a wartime emergency measure. Both Southern Black women and men were motivated to move by harsh racial conditions, but women faced another fear: sexual exploitation at the hands of whites.

The wave of outmigration built a Black industrial working class in Northern cities. On a much smaller scale, a similar class grew in the South. But, North or South, they worked the most difficult, dangerous, and low-paying jobs. Despite increased opportunity, segregated jobs remained the rule. In 1940, 62 percent of Black men were farmers, farm laborers, or other laborers; only 28 percent of white men had similar jobs. Almost 30 percent of white men had professional, semiprofessional, proprietary, managerial, and clerical and sales jobs; only 5 percent of Black men were so employed. Fifteen percent of white men were skilled craft workers; only 4 percent of Black men were. Among women who worked outside the home, 56 percent of Northern Black women were domestic workers; only 12 percent of Northern white women were maids. Fifty-one percent of white women had professional, managerial, sales, or clerical jobs; only 9 percent of Black women had such work.⁵

And when white women were urged to enter the factory to replace their husbands, absent in the war, Black women were urged to enter the laundry, the cafeteria, or other service jobs white women had left behind. Only 100 of the 96,000 female production workers in Detroit’s plants in late 1942 were Black.

In the military itself, race remained the determinant for employment. In the Marines, Blacks could only serve as stewards. In the Navy, 80 percent of Blacks—and 2 percent of whites—were stewards, cooks, and stewards’ mates. The Army had one white officer for every five white enlisted men; every Black officer served seven Black enlisted men.

But the war mobilized thousands of Black men into a military force and inspired them and others like them to fight for freedom. For most Black Americans, the war had two goals—”a double V”: victory over fascism and Hitler’s master race theories abroad; victory over racism at home. The NAACP’s Walter White wrote in 1945 that “Negro militancy and implacable determination to wipe out segregation grew more proportionately during the years 1940 to 1945 than during any other period of the Negro’s history in America.”⁶

Four thousand Black women served in the Women’s Army Corps, about 10 percent of all WACs. But in the WAC and the Army Nurse Corps, Black women were assigned to segregated units and seldom sent overseas. They were barred from the Women’s Reserve of the Navy until 1944. And segregation at restaurants, movie theaters, and other places of public accommodation served as daily reminders to Blacks they were not considered a part of the public.

THE UNITED STATES found it at least rhetorically difficult to fight a war against racial supremacy in Europe and the Far East while tolerating white supremacy inside the United States. The Japanese made race-based appeals to nonwhites in China, Latin America, and India. The author Pearl S. Buck wrote: “Every lynching, every race riot, gives joy to Japan. . . . ‘Look at America’ Japan is saying to millions of listening ears. ‘Will white Americans give you equality?’“ She argued: “We cannot . . . win this war without convincing our colored allies—who are most of our allies—that we are not fighting for ourselves as continuing superior over colored peoples.”⁷

And in his 1944 classic An American Dilemma, Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal noted that “the German radio often mentions America’s harsh treatment of Negroes in its propaganda broadcasts to European peoples.”⁸ Myrdal’s two-volume study offered a radical reformulation of America’s racial problems. Racism contradicted whites’ own “American creed” of liberty, equality, justice, and fair opportunity for everyone. But Myrdal wrongly postulated that discrimination and racial inequality were the products of irrational prejudice and not integral to the structure and functions of our politics and institutions. Thus, the Myrdal paradigm, adopted by most Americans, treated racial prejudice as a largely psychological phenomenon rather than acknowledging race was a political construct created and employed to pursue power and maintain control. An American Dilemma sold an unusual one hundred thousand copies. In 1954, the Supreme Court cited Myrdal’s study in its Brown v. Board of Education ruling.

World War II did make democracy, for many Americans, more than an abstract concept; it was an ideal for which they were fighting and dying. But even that ideal had contradictions. American soldiers died in segregated trenches in a segregated army; the enemy was often characterized in racist terms—the “yellow Jap” and the “savage Hun.” At home, Japanese Americans became scapegoats for the war and victims of anti-Japanese hysteria. In 1942, 112,000 Japanese Americans were rounded up and herded into camps, their property confiscated.

In March 1942, two thousand miles of the West Coast, by order of President Roosevelt, was designated an evacuation area; 120,000 Japanese people who lived on the West Coast, two-thirds of them American citizens, were forced into ten concentration camps—the only prison camps ever designed for Americans who had committed no crime. Ten thousand Germans and German Americans and ten thousand Italians and Italian Americans were placed in camps for shorter periods; the ten thousand Italian Americans were forced to relocate from California’s coast.⁹

As the pogroms against Jews and the death camps in Europe became common knowledge, racial supremacy understandably lost currency; Hitler gave racism a bad name.

On Tuesday, August 14, 1945, I was sitting in the segregated balcony of a downtown movie theater in Nashville when the movie suddenly stopped, the lights came on, and a man walked in front of the screen to the center of the stage. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said in a deep Southern accent. “The war is over!”