PART III
Race and the Politics of New Deal Reform
The late 1930s and the early 1940s witnessed the emergence of new organizations that were dedicated to expanding economic and political democracy in the South and were prepared to challenge Jim Crow laws. In 1937 a group of black students established the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC) in Richmond, Virginia, dedicated to organizing black industrial workers in the South. During the next decade, SNYC grew into a regional organization based in Birmingham; in addition to supporting the work of organized labor, SNYC activists sponsored voter education and registration efforts and leadership training, often through community-based cultural activities.
In 1938 Roosevelt issued the Report on the Economic Conditions of the South, which identified the region as "the Nation's number one economic problem." In response to that report several thousand black and white Southerners met in Birmingham, Alabama, in November 1938 and established the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW). At the founding of the SCHW, Birmingham police commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor enforced segregated seating in the group's meeting hall. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt responded by placing her chair on top of the hastily established line separating the two races. With the endorsement of the Roosevelt administration and the strong support of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the SCHW launched a decade-long effort to expand political participation in the South.
Just weeks after Eleanor Roosevelt's dramatic gesture in Birmingham, the Supreme Court ruled that Lloyd L. Gaines be admitted to the University of Missouri Law School, giving the NAACP its first major victory in the campaign for equal education. Pauli Murray, whose application to the University of North Carolina had been rejected solely on the grounds of race, observed that Gaines was the "first major breach in the solid wall of segregated education since Plessey." It was, she wrote, "the beginning of the end."
World War II
By the late 1930s the crusading spirit of the New Deal had been obscured by mobilization for war and the increasing power of conservatives in Washington. Still, the war experience broadened the possibilities for civil rights struggles. On the eve of America's entry into the war, Osceola McKaine, a South Carolina NAACP organizer, observed: "We are living in the midst of perhaps the greatest revolution within human experience. Nothing, no nation, will be as it was when the peace comes ... There is no such thing as the status quo."
The demographic, economic, and political changes unleashed by the war had far-reaching consequences for African Americans. As scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. has written, World War II "did more to recement black American culture, which migration had fragmented, than did any single event or experience." For the nearly 1 million African Americans serving in the armed forces, the army became "a great cauldron, mixing the New Negro culture, which had developed since the migration of the twenties and thirties, and the Old Negro culture, the remnants of traditional rural black culture in the South." The massive movement of black Southerners to centers of defense production in the North marked one of the largest internal migrations in American history.
Black civil rights activism accelerated under the banner of the Double V campaign, a movement first promoted by the Pittsburgh Courier. Double V advocates combined the fight against fascism abroad with the struggle for racial equality and full democracy at home. When the president failed to respond to black demands for equal inclusion in the war effort, labor leader A. Philip Randolph promised to lead 10,000 black Americans in a march on Washington to compel federal action. At the eleventh hour Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, which prohibited discrimination in defense industries and federal agencies and created the president's Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to implement the law. It was the first federal agency since Reconstruction devoted to dealing with racial discrimination.
The NAACP and the Southern Movement
During the war years, NAACP membership soared to nearly 400,000 nationally, and the rate of growth in the South surpassed that in all other regions. Having reported 18,000 members in the late 1930s, the NAACP claimed 156,000 members in the South by the war's end. Ella Baker, Southern field secretary for the NAACP, reported that the growth in membership brought a "new surge of identity" among black communities around the South. Through the organization of local branches and state conferences of the NAACP, Southern blacks created an infrastructure for sustained political struggle.
In the spring of 1944, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Smith v. Allwright that the all-white Democratic primary was unconstitutional. This **** was the culmination of the NAACP's 20-year-long legal battle against the South's most effective legal means of barring blacks from political participation. "Once the Supreme Court opened the door in 1944," civil rights activist Palmer Weber recalled, "the NAACP charged into the whole registration and voting area very hard."
From 1944 to 1948 the NAACP, along with SNYC, the SCHW, and the CIO Political Action Committee (CIO-PAC), joined with other local and state groups to promote voter registration. When South Carolina Democrats continued to bar blacks from the party, black newspaperman John McCray and NAACP activist Osceola McKaine organized the South Carolina Progressive Democratic Party (PDP). The PDP sent a delegation to the 1944 Democratic National Convention in an unsuccessful effort to challenge old-guard Democrats for failing to open the state party to blacks. That fall the PDP ran its own slate of candidates. Black veterans, like Medgar Evers and Charles Evers in Mississippi, often took leading roles in voter registration efforts. In Birmingham black veterans marched in uniforms to the Jefferson County Court House to register to vote.
Henry Lee Moon, a journalist and a Southern field organizer for the CIO-PAC, reported: "Negro groups, sometimes in collaboration with labor and progressive groups, sometimes alone, are setting up schools to instruct new voters in the intricacies of registration, marking the ballot, and manipulating the voting machine." By the late 1940s the total number of registered black voters in the South approached 1 million; it had been estimated at 200,000 in 1940. The increases were most striking in South Carolina, where the number of black voters climbed from 3500 to 50,000, and in Georgia, where the number rose from 20,000 to 118,000.
Southern whites met growing black political participation with **** and fraud. There were countless individual acts of **** against blacks who voted, as well as public campaigns on the parts of candidates like Eugene Talmadge in Georgia and Theodore Bilbo in Mississippi, inviting whites to do what was necessary to keep blacks from the polls. In several cases black veterans were gunned down after voting. Publicly staged acts of **** against blacks increased during the 1946 primary season and included the execution-style murders of two black couples in Walton County, Georgia. There is evidence that Talmadge stole his gubernatorial win in 1946 and that the Justice Department had enough information to indict him. But the department chose not to pursue the matter.
Postwar America: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue
Wartime experience and the growing power of the Northern black vote elevated the importance of civil rights in national politics. At the war's end, decolonization movements in Africa and Asia and the beginnings of the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union heightened the rhetoric of freedom, democracy, and self-determination. In 1947, W. E. B. Du Bois sought unsuccessfully to enlist the United Nations in an international investigation of racial discrimination in the United States.
President Harry S. Truman responded to the call for civil rights reform by commissioning a review of racial discrimination, which resulted in a report that called for sweeping federal action against Jim Crow. Truman was reluctant to act in the face of strong Southern opposition. But a close 1948 presidential race in which victory in key Northern states hinged on the black vote compelled him to endorse a strong civil rights plank at the Democratic National Convention. Southerners left the convention in protest and ran their own candidate for president in 1948 on the States Rights Party ticket. Shortly after the convention, Truman issued an executive order desegregating the armed forces.
The confident Democratic initiatives of the 1930s and 1940s, however, were overwhelmed by two postwar political factors: (1) the cold war and the Truman administration's domestic loyalty-security program, which limited civil liberties; and (2) the acceleration of white Southern repression of any challenge to the Jim Crow system. Groups like SNYC and the SCHW became targets of government investigations. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) sought out suspected communists and fellow travelers, while a revived Ku Klux **** terrorized blacks attempting to vote in the South and Southern civic leaders presided over fraudulent elections. Indeed, Charles Houston wondered why the loudly proclaimed crusade to "lead the world to democracy" did not extend to the Southern United States. Why were free and fair elections in Eastern Europe of greater import to the U.S. government than open elections in Alabama and Mississippi?
Part IV
The Civil Rights Struggle in the 1950s
During the 1950s the struggle against Jim Crow in the South remained distant from national issues and concerns. After 1948 the Democratic Party placated its rebellious Southern wing while its civil rights agenda floundered. Meanwhile, whites responded to the steady migration of Southern blacks to Northern cities by extending patterns of racial segregation and black exclusion in housing, employment, and education.
The foundation of the Civil Rights Movement remained anchored in the cumulative gains of the NAACP legal campaign and its extensive network of branches. Southern NAACP leaders, however, faced an emboldened defense of the racial status quo. In 1951 the Christmas Day assassination of Harry T. Moore, a leading NAACP organizer in Florida, and his wife inaugurated a decade of white **** and state-sponsored repression that heightened in the aftermath of the Brown decision.
Brown v. Board of Education
On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that the doctrine of separate but equal as applied to public education was unconstitutional. Brown marked the culmination of the NAACP's long legal battle; the Court had effectively reversed its 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, the cornerstone of the segregation system. By implication, state-mandated racial segregation in all areas of public life violated the Constitution.
However, the Court issued a separate **** one year later concerning the enforcement of this momentous decision. Sympathetic to warnings of Southern white defiance, the Court allowed for a policy of gradual implementation that would, the opinion explained, be responsive to local conditions and problems. While calling for compliance "with all deliberate speed," the Court reflected the ambivalence of the justices, executive and congressional leadership, and the vast majority of Americans about dismantling racial segregation in the South. For most white Southerners, Brown II was a license to resist. During the next ten years, less than 1 percent of black children in the South attended "white" schools.
Brown was a major turning point in the struggle for civil rights, and it marked the beginning of the most celebrated chapter of the Civil Rights Movement. The decade that followed saw a heightening interplay between Southern blacks striving to realize the promise of Brown in the face of "massive resistance" by Southern whites and the equivocal response of the federal government, unfolding on an increasingly national and international stage.
Emmett Till, Montgomery, and the Emergence of Martin Luther King Jr.
In August 1955, just three months after the court ruled in Brown II, 14-year-old Emmett Till was murdered in Money, Mississippi, for allegedly whistling at a white woman. Mamie Bradley, Till's mother, brought her son's body home to Chicago and insisted on an open casket so that all could see "what they did to my boy." Jet magazine's photograph of Till's badly mutilated body offered gruesome evidence of the **** that reigned in Mississippi, and it informed the consciousness of a new generation of young black people. The widely publicized trial and acquittal of Till's murderers confirmed what most already knew about the Southern system of racial injustice.
That December, Rosa Parks, a local NAACP leader in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to surrender her seat on a city bus to a white man. This action, and the mobilizing work of the Women's Political Council, sparked a boycott of Montgomery buses that lasted for 381 days. Local black leaders elected Martin Luther King Jr., the new 26-year-old minister of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, as head of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), the organization that led the boycott and sued to end segregation on the buses. Hundreds of African Americans, mostly women, walked several miles to and from work each day; as one woman commented, "My feet is tired, but my soul is rested." This dignified protest contrasted with the city's efforts to intimidate the MIA leadership through indictments, injunction, and the bombing of King's house, and it attracted the attention of the national and international media.
By the time the Supreme Court struck down segregation on the buses in December 1956, King had become a seasoned leader and eloquent spokesman of the emerging nonviolent movement. Early in 1957, King joined with other activist ministers and civil rights leaders like Bayard Rustin and Ella Baker to establish the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC); King was elected its president, and Baker became the first executive director. The SCLC served as an umbrella organization, linking church-based affiliates throughout the South in the nonviolent struggle for racial justice and to "redeem the soul of America."
The NAACP, Little Rock, and School Desegregation
The fight for school integration had few supporters outside the black community. The NAACP aided parents who petitioned school boards to admit their children to the all-white schools, in compliance with the Brown decision, but the organization became the target of an extensive effort across the South to shut it down. In 1956 Alabama passed a state law effectively barring the NAACP from operating in that state; South Carolina barred NAACP members from state employment. Five other states enacted laws requiring the NAACP to register and to provide lists of members and contributors. While such state action was often unconstitutional, the burden was on local NAACP branches to spend scarce resources in fighting to overturn these laws. In the meantime, the White Citizens Council (WCC), founded in Sunflower County, Mississippi, in 1956, organized local businessmen and civic leaders throughout the South. WCC chapters used economic reprisals and manipulation of the law in an effort to intimidate and undermine civil rights activists and supporters.
Southern obstructionists met their first major setback in Little Rock, Arkansas. In 1957 a group of local parents, working with NAACP leader Daisy Bates, succeeded in winning a court order mandating the admission of black students to Central High School. Governor Orval Faubus employed the National Guard to block the admission of the nine men and women selected to attend Central High. The governor's bold defiance of the federal courts compelled President Eisenhower, who was no supporter of school integration, to send in army troops and federalize the Arkansas National Guard in order to ensure peaceful compliance with the court order. After the school year ended, the governor closed the public schools to avoid further integration.
From 1957 to 1959 public schools in Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, closed rather than obey desegregation orders. In New Orleans, when public schools admitted four young black girls to the first grade, whites in the city rioted.
this is what i've been trying to tell you boogies, man.
the republicans have had our backs this whole dayum time...
it was a republican president that set your black **** free, and it was a republican congress that gave you your civil rights....
black folk didn't start voting democrat until jesse jackson begun getting paid millions to tell black that the republicans where a bunch of racist for not giving out free handouts...
JESSE IS GETTING PAID MILLIONS TO DO WHAT HE DOES! :idea:
