Laboured Protest

Black Civil Rights in New York City and Detroit During the New Deal and Second World War

Oliver Ayers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429673191
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Historians have long realized the US civil rights movement pre-dated Martin Luther King Jr., but they disagree on where, when and why it started. Laboured Protest offers new answers in a study of black political protest during the New Deal and Second World War. It finds a diverse movement where activists from the left operated alongside, and often in competition with, others who signed up to liberal or nationalist political platforms. Protestors in this period often struggled to challenge the different types of discrimination facing black workers, but their energetic campaigning was part of a more complex, and ultimately more interesting, movement than previously thought.

1
The New Deal, the Rise of Organized Labour and National Civil Rights Organizations During the 1930s

The national stories of the New Deal, organized labour and civil rights activism during the 1930s provide a perfect starting point to the history of the era of ‘laboured protest’. Although these top-down topics were among the first to receive attention from scholars, a fresh look—with the net cast wide and achievements assessed in detail—introduces the contested landscape of Depression-era politics and the hurdles protestors faced.¹ The boundaries between ‘national’ and ‘local’ leaders, moreover, were neither hard nor fast; spokesmen and -women speaking on behalf of national organizations were also members of local communities and used these experiences to inform decision making.

Economic concerns, centred on employment in particular, moved to the top of the protest agenda. The political currents of 1930s civil rights activism did not, however, all pull in the direction of the left. Collaborative responses were undermined by a menu of personal, political and generational tensions. The National Negro Congress (NNC) offered a glimpse of the power of coordinated action but was institutionally weak at the national level, while key nominal supporter organizations like the Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) operated largely independently from one another. The experiences of national level leaders provide an invaluable first taste of the book’s larger argument: many realized that a certain type of activism—a distinctive recipe for success—was more urgent than ever. Broad-based alliances were needed as never before, but enduring political differences meant coordinated activism at a national level was only sporadic and faltering.

The Great Depression and the ‘New Deal for Blacks’

The scale of the task facing civil rights organizations caught in the teeth of the Great Depression was daunting. Statistics charting the impact of the recession made grim reading. During the Depression, Black Americans in Chicago constituted 4% of the population but 16% of the unemployed. In Pittsburgh, the split was 8% to 40%. Even after four years of the New Deal in 1937, the national unemployment rate stood at 23.2% for black Americans against 15.7% for whites.² These figures and numerous others that could be placed alongside them reflected racial disparities woven deeply into the historical fabric of the USA’s economic and social systems. If we consider, as one noted scholar put it, that the ‘falling economic tide of the Depression lowered all boats’, black Americans sailed into 1929 on the connected historical currents of Jim Crow segregation, the tortuous failures of Reconstruction and the institution of slavery itself. The result was the severest regression of African Americans’ economic status across the whole twentieth century.³

Behind the statistics lay thousands of individual stories of hardship. Experiences varied by region. In the South, where the majority of black citizens continued to reside despite the Great Migration northward after the First World War, predominately rural communities struggled to cope with the near collapse of agricultural production. Practices such as share-cropping meant black Americans’ foothold on the economic ladder in states still dependent on the production of crops like cotton was already weak; the Depression turned life for many into a day-to-day struggle for survival.

In the cities of the North, meanwhile, the frantic fight for jobs revealed the national scope of the racial problem. Occupations once designated ‘Negro jobs’ in domestic service and unskilled work became a precious commodity coveted by many. The situation was worsened by the exclusionary practices of many employers and unions. On the eve of the Depression, black workers represented only 2% of the country’s union members, and about half of these were clustered in the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP). The rise of far right groups like the Black Shirts, with their slogan ‘No Jobs for Niggers Until Every White Man Has a Job’, was an incendiary example of the bigger problem: the Great Depression pushed black Americans even further to the margins of economic life.⁴

The limitations of the New Deal’s response, at a national economic level and regarding the specific problems facing black citizens, seem straightforward to document. A full-scale economic recovery proved elusive. Despite the panoply of New Deal initiatives, the performance of the US economy was an enduring frustration for the Roosevelt administration. Unemployment as a percentage of the national workforce remained in double digits throughout the 1930s, peaking at 25% in 1933, falling to 14% in 1937 before going back up 15% in 1940 on the eve of the US entry into the war. Gross National Product only rose above the 1929 level in 1941. It was US involvement in the Second World War, more than the New Deal, that finally returned the nation to sustained economic growth.⁵

The New Deal had a transformative impact, nevertheless, on US politics, economics, society and culture. The wave of governmental activism symbolized in the creation of the famous ‘alphabet agencies’ had dramatic implications for black Americans and protest groups seeking to intercede on their behalf, although some effects stemmed directly from the actions of the Executive Branch. Roosevelt’s position on questions of race varied according to the changing political weather. He had actively courted the dominant Southern wing of the Democratic Party in order to secure the presidential nomination in 1932, which reduced drastically any chance of tackling flagrant problems like lynching. Roosevelt defended his lack of action on the grounds that relief and recovery had to take precedence, arguing the congressional support of Southern Democrats could not be jeopardized by controversial measures on race. As Roosevelt put it when responding to NAACP Secretary Walter White to explain the delays in passing an anti-lynching bill: ‘I did not choose the tools with which I must work’. The bill died in the Senate in February 1938, with Roosevelt refusing to offer his full support. Many black Americans viewed Roosevelt’s defence as a mealy-mouthed excuse that typified the administration’s indifferent attitude to their grievances. The ‘Southern cage’ that set limits on New Deal legislation in all manner of areas was particularly blatant on the question of anti-lynching.⁶

Roosevelt was always attuned to the wider political climate, a feature that made him a slippery customer for protestors. Yet this same quality also meant that, as black voters increased in influence in certain areas, the administration might accede to certain demands. As the 1930s progressed, partly because of the support of influential figures like chief of the Public Works Administration (PWA) Harold Ickes and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, black Americans were given some consideration. The so-called Black Cabinet was one manifestation of this trend, an informal group of advisors who were brought, haltingly and sporadically, into various New Deal administrations. By 1935, there were approximately 45 informal members in various agencies, most of whom were college educated. The appointment of people like William Hastie, who became the first black federal judge in 1937, evidenced an apparent growing openness to African American concerns.⁷ As Harvard Sitkoff observed, the Cabinet’s ‘very existence focused government attention on civil rights’, but it functioned mainly as a reactive ‘brake’ that attempted to temper outright discrimination.⁸

The New Deal also provided some jobs directly to black Americans. Some were put to work by alphabet agencies like the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Public Works Administration (PWA) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA). In 1937, the WPA was employing around 350,000 black Americans; by 1939, 200,000 had spent time with the CCC.⁹ In addition, as the bureaucratic machinery of government grew, black Americans managed—unevenly and with plenty of frustrations—to secure a foothold in public sector employment. The provision of work had stark limitations, but the Democratic Party reaped a substantial political dividend for these efforts: it was jobs and relief, rather than action on civil rights, that played the deciding factor in black Americans’ decision to say ‘farewell to the party of Lincoln’.¹⁰ This created the odd spectre of a Democratic Party that retained a staunchly segregationist platform in the South receiving substantial black votes nationally for the first time.¹¹

There were also less obvious long-term effects of the New Deal that shaped the experiences of activists well into the post-war period. As the New Deal moved to regulate all manner of areas in economic and social life, it put into place systems that, for good and for ill, impacted black prospects in the 1930s and beyond. Housing policy was a case in point. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was set up in 1934 to shore up the parlous state of the housing market, seen as a central cause of the financial crash of 1929. The FHA acquired sweeping new powers, with responsibility for billions of dollars of mortgage funds. It was joined in 1937 by the United States Housing Authority (USHA), which led a wave of public housing construction. Some FHA policies promoted segrega-tory housing practices, while both agencies often reinforced racialized biases in the market that cast a long shadow throughout the century.¹²

Social welfare policies also had discriminatory features with long-term consequences. As Mary Poole has shown, the Social Security Act of 1935 contained a range of measures—from leaving the distribution of welfare to local officials to designating black claimants as an especially dependent category of recipient—whose racially divisive consequences only became clearer over time.¹³

It was no wonder that many consequences of the New Deal were not immediately obvious, for the relationship between state and society was being transformed. The rise of a liberal ‘New Deal Order’ defined American social, economic and political life for decades, with the growth of organized labour and industrial trade unionism in particular, central to the Democrat Party’s newly dominant electoral coalition. By 1945, approximately 30% of the US workforce was organized into unions. Local organizers pushed for unionization ‘from below’, but their efforts also depended on supportive legislation like section 7 (a) of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) in 1933 and its more long-lasting successor, the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935. Systems of collective bargaining shaped employment experiences of white and black workers alike, with union elections carried out under the auspices of the new National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).¹⁴

The expansion of industrial unionism under the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) was at the centre of this story. The CIO began life as a separate committee within the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in November 1935 before going its own way in 1938, and its putative commitment to organization across occupational, ethnic and racial lines became a defining feature of the liberal order that seemed to be ascendant in mid-century American politics. The net result, as Nelson Lichtenstein put it, was to ‘thoroughly [politicize] all relations between the union movement, the business community, and the state’.¹⁵ For black Americans, these larger changes in the political economy had numerous ‘bread-and-butter’ effects: they changed what jobs were available, how they were obtained and under what levels of pay and conditions they were conducted.

The headline statistics on black union membership were dramatic. National numbers rose from an estimated in 56,000 members in 1930 to 600,000 in 1940, before reaching a peak of 1,250,000 in 1944. Over half a million of these were in the CIO, but many were also in locals affiliated to the AFL.¹⁶ The CIO’s commitment to interracial unionism was seemingly demonstrated by the victories of its Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) in cities like Chicago and by the United Auto Workers’ (UAW) organization of Detroit’s motor industry. In the South, meanwhile, the success of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (STFU)—also briefly a member of the CIO—was another example of the world of possibilities for biracial cooperation that seemed to be opening up for black workers.

Yet the sweeping observation that by the end of 1930s, ‘a former major antagonist [organized labour] had become an ally of the civil rights movement’, reveals only a partial truth.¹⁷ Just as in housing and social security, there were differences between the intent and outcomes of policy. Unions retained a range of practices on questions of membership, hiring, promotion through to social events. On this spectrum, some would place the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) among the most succ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The New Deal, the Rise of Organized Labour and National Civil Rights Organizations During the 1930s
• 2 When ‘Poems Became Placards’: Black Protest in 1930s New York City
• 3 Civil Rights Activism in Detroit in the Era of Unionization, 1933–1941
• 4 ‘Getting a Grand Runaround by Management, Government and the Union’: The Shifting Contours of Employment Discrimination in Wartime
• 5 The March on Washington Movement and National Level Protest During the Second World War
• 6 A Tale of Two Committees: Black Protest in Wartime New York City
• 7 Black Protests Against Employment Discrimination in Wartime Detroit
• Conclusion: Civil Rights Activism in the Era of Laboured Protest
• Index