Black Civil Rights in America

Kevern Verney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415238885
• eBook ISBN: 9781134555130
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

This book is the authoritative introduction to the history of black civil rights in the USA. It provides a clear and useful guide to the political, social and cultural history of black Americans and their pursuit of equal rights and recognition from 1865 through to the present day.

From the civil war of the 1860s to the race riots of the 1990s, Black Civil Rights details the history of the modern civil rights movement in American history. This book introduces the reader to:

* leading civil rights activists
* black political movements within the USA
* crucial legal and political developments
* the portrayal of black Americans in the media.

This a book no American history or cultural studies student will want to do without.

CHAPTER ONE

New directions

Urbanization and the Great Migration, 1915–30

American society experienced great change in the years 1880 to 1920. Rapid industrialization, mainly in the northern states, led to major urban growth. The population of New York City rose from 1.2 million in 1880 to 5.6 million by 1920. During this period the population of Chicago, a gateway to the West and a centre of the meatpacking industry, increased from just over half a million to 2.7 million. In the same years, Detroit, which became a key location for automobile production, saw a rise in population from 16,360 to just under 1 million, and the population of Pittsburgh, home of the steel industry, grew from 235,071 to 588,343.

Expansion was partly sustained by internal migration from farming communities in the West. In the last decades of the nineteenth century small farmers experienced economic hardship, the result of falling prices, high interest rates and heavy transport costs. Financial difficulties combined with the lure of city life led to a population decline in many rural areas.

The most important source of urban growth was overseas immigration, particularly from southern and eastern European countries like Russia, Poland, Greece and Italy. Between 1880 and 1921 over 23.5 million immigrants arrived in the United States. The influx peaked in the early years of the twentieth century, with 8.8 million immigrants arriving between 1901 and 1910, and over 1.2 million in 1914 alone.

Before the First World War blacks were comparatively unaffected by economic change. At the turn of the century at least 90 per cent of African Americans still lived in the South. Some southern cities, such as Richmond in Virginia, Atlanta in Georgia and Birmingham in Alabama, experienced significant growth between 1880 and 1920, but the region as a whole remained mostly rural. Cotton production, sustained by the sharecropping system, continued to be the mainstay of the southern economy. Moreover, blacks seeking to escape debt peonage in the South by migration to the North encountered formidable problems. Leaving meant separation from family, friends and home surroundings. In the North, racial prejudice made it difficult for blacks to compete for jobs against European immigrants. African Americans were frequently excluded from trade union membership. Accommodation was expensive and hard to find. For these reasons most blacks preferred to put up with the life they already knew rather than seek opportunities elsewhere.

The situation changed dramatically with the outbreak of the First World War. From 1915 European immigration to the United States fell sharply, initially as a result of wartime conditions and later because of legal restrictions induced by postwar xenophobia. At the same time industrial growth continued and even increased because of new wartime production. Northern employers countered the loss of immigrant labour by actively recruiting African Americans instead. Between 1915 and 1925 this led to the ‘Great Migration’ as 1.25 million blacks left the South to take up employment in the North. Most migrants settled in a small number of leading urban centres. From 1910 to 1930 the black population of Chicago rose from 44,103 to 233,903, and that of New York from 91,709 to 327,706. Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh also saw a large increase in their African American communities. Explanations for the migration have traditionally centred on ‘push-pull’ analysis; the negative or ‘push’ features of the South encouraged blacks to leave the region, and the positive or ‘pull’ features of the North made it attractive to migrants.

Blacks were repelled from the South for a variety of reasons. Economic deprivation of black sharecroppers was made worse by strictly enforced social subordination to whites in most aspects of day-to-day life. Minor breaches of racial etiquette resulted in blacks losing their employment, home or worse. Between 1900 and 1909 at least 754 African Americans were lynched in the United States, with 92 per cent of lynchings taking place in the South. On average at least 60 blacks a year were lynched in the southern states between 1900 and 1914. Some victims stood accused of rape or other serious crimes, but others were killed for minor offences that breached social conventions rather than legal norms. The publicly tolerated murder of blacks by white vigilante mobs, lynchings were frequently horrific public spectacles in which the hapless victims were subjected to torture and barbarity of medieval dimensions. This included castration, disembowelling and being burnt alive. The number of lynchings actually dropped at the start of the twentieth century, after a peak of over 100 a year between 1880 and 1900. However, this modest improvement was sufficient to persuade only the most optimistic of blacks, such as Booker T. Washington, that race relations were starting to get better. In particular, younger generations of southern blacks, with no direct experience of slavery, were less willing than their parents and grandparents to tolerate conditions in the South.

A desire to leave was reinforced by worsening economic conditions as cotton crops were decimated by a new insect pest, the boll weevil. First arriving in Texas from Mexico in 1892, the weevil gradually moved eastwards, reaching Georgia and the Carolinas by the early 1920s. In any given year up to 50 per cent of cotton crops could be destroyed by the pest, and weevil damage from 1892 to 1918 was estimated to cost $250 million, a loss of some 4.5 million bales of cotton. Sharecroppers, who even in good times were the most marginal of cotton producers, were usually the first to suffer.

At the same time as the boll weevil ruined livelihoods in the South, a wartime boom in industrial output created unprecedented job opportunities for blacks in the North. During the First World War northern factory workers could earn from $2.25 to $3.25 per day, compared to only 75 cents a day for farm labourers in the South. This economic pull was reinforced by better social conditions. Migrants often wrote letters home praising high wages and more liberal race relations in the North. Initial migrant groups thus encouraged further waves of migration and provided reception areas for later newcomers.

Although racism was ever present in the North, and intensified as a result of black migration, conditions were still notably better than in the South. Blacks in the North were able to enjoy voting rights and could hope to provide a better education and future for their children. Black newspapers, most notably the influential Chicago Defender, run by Tuskegee graduate Robert Abbott, highlighted opportunities in the North. The Defender was widely circulated in the South and even banned by some southern states.

The experience of black migrants once in the North has been the subject of much debate. Better wage levels were offset by higher living costs and expensive, overcrowded accommodation. In terms of health and social welfare, migrants often exchanged one set of problems for another. Deficiency diseases and racial brutality in the South were replaced by tuberculosis, juvenile delinquency and high ghetto crime rates in the North. Despite this, few migrants chose to return to the South.

It used to be accepted by historians that migrants experienced a limited, but clear, improvement in their quality of life. More recent accounts by scholars such as Carole Marks have been less positive. Northern industrial employers, able to take advantage of cheap non-unionized labour, were the real short-term beneficiaries of the Great Migration rather than black migrants themselves.

Black migrants also tended to fare badly in comparison to European immigrants. The latest newcomers to city life, African Americans lagged behind other ethnic groups in political and labour organization. Most black workers remained non-unionized until the 1930s. African Americans were less successful than other ethnic groups in gaining patronage and a share of the spoils system operated by urban political party machines. Moreover, although other minority communities like the Irish, Italians, Jews and Slavs suffered from bigotry, the problem was worse for African Americans. The children of immigrants could, by changing their names and adopting American-style dress and customs, hope to escape prejudice. Permanent differences in physical appearance meant that racism was a burden inherited by successive generations of African Americans.

The fact that black migrants were already American citizens and the fact that they were fluent in English gave them only limited advantage over immigrants. Socially, the rural South, although a part of the United States, was in many respects as far removed from the likes of New York and Chicago as peasant communities in Europe. Language difficulties reinforced group solidarity in immigrant neighbourhoods, encouraging the development of ethnic businesses and social institutions. African American migrants, by comparison, were less successful in developing autonomous community organizations, in part because they did not experience the same linguistic barriers.

The Great Migration had a profound impact on African American life. The ghettos of the North became home to a talented young generation of black artists and intellectuals in a cultural flowering known as the Harlem Renaissance. Black writers such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay and Jean Toomer achieved literary fame. Although often sharply critical of US race relations, their works acquired cult status among fashionable white middle-class readers.

In popular music, Blues and Ragtime fused with brass band and dance music to produce the new phenomenon of Jazz. Black musicians and singers such as Duke Ellington, Adelaide Hall and Cab Calloway became national celebrities. The Cotton Club in Harlem, featuring all-black cabaret shows, became a centre of New York nightlife. Black musicals such as Shuffle Along (1922), Chocolate Dandies (1923) and Blackbirds (1926–8) played to packed houses on Broadway. Another African American revue, Runnin’ Wild (1923), introduced the Charleston as the new dance craze of the decade. The following year Paul Robeson played the leading role in Eugene O'Neill's All God's Chillun Got Wings. The production not only launched Robeson's international career, but was the first time that a black man played the principal role opposite a white actress in a Broadway performance. Some artists, like Robeson, believed that the richness and diversity of black cultural achievement would help to break down barriers of racial prejudice and bigotry.

Ironically, the social impact of the Great Migration had the opposite effect. Most large cities of the North had small African American communities before the First World War. These ‘old settlers’ were relatively few and, if subject to racial discrimination, did not generally suffer from institutionalized segregation – the culturally or legally enforced separation of the races. The influx of the ‘new settlers’ after 1915 greatly increased the visibility of African American communities. Racial tensions increased and formal segregation spread to many northern cities for the first time. ‘Old settlers’ often blamed the newcomers for worsening conditions and perceived them as backward and unsophisticated. Black residential areas, such as Harlem in New York and the South Side in Chicago, became overcrowded, forcing up rents and creating a shortage of living accommodation. Often large families were forced to live in squalid single-room ‘kitchenette’ apartments with only the most basic facilities. When black ghettos began to expand into neighbouring white residential areas, racial violence frequently resulted. Tensions increased at the end of the First World War in 1918 as both black and white soldiers returned home and were placed in competition for employment. During the ‘Red Summer’ of 1919 there were over 25 race riots in cities across the United States. The worst disorder was in Chicago during July, when 15 whites and 23 blacks were killed, 520 people injured and over 1,000 African American families made homeless as black houses were burnt by white mobs.

The end of the war saw not only a worsening of race relations but a reawakening of conservative values in America. In a reaction to the horrors of the war in Europe the United States retreated into isolationism, declining to join the newly created international peacekeeping organization, the League of Nations, in 1919–20. Nativist fears of foreign influences, especially political and labour radicalism, culminated in the 1924 National Origins Act. This limited total immigration to the United States to only 165,000 persons in any year, and that mostly from the perceived Nordic and Anglo-Saxon countries of northern and western Europe. Southern and western states in the United States experienced a revival of religious fundamentalism. In a vain attempt to regain lost innocence the whole nation was pledged to abstinence from alcohol by the introduction of Prohibition with the passage of the eighteenth amendment to the US Constitution in 1919.

Although immigration controls helped to ensure continued job opportunities for black migrants, the ‘New Era’ of conservatism generally made life more difficult for African Americans. A striking example of this was the re-emergence of the Ku Klux Klan. First formed in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866, the original Klan expanded to some 500,000 members and terrorized blacks and Republican voters throughout the South in the late 1860s and early 1870s. Ultimately suppressed by the federal authorities, the organization was effectively defunct by 1872.

In 1915 a new Klan was formed in Atlanta, Georgia, by a defrocked Methodist minister, William Joseph Simmons. The revival was prompted by the murder of a local white girl, Mary Phagan, and because of the glamorous portrayal of the Klan in the film Birth of a Nation. Over the next ten years Klan membership rapidly expanded, reaching 100,000 in 1921 and 4 million by 1924. Full-time Klan agents known as Kleagles used aggressive marketing techniques to recruit new members, not just in the South but throughout the nation. The Klan succeeded by appealing to a combination of commonly held fears and prejudices – racism, xenophobia, anti-semitism, anti- Catholicism and anti-communism. In cities like Chicago the Klan recruited strongly in ‘zones of emergence’ – white residential areas adjoining black or immigrant ghettos. After 1925 Klan membership sharply declined, falling to just 45,000 by 1930. This was largely because of changing public perceptions of the Klan following shocking revelations about corruption and criminality in the organization. However, the racial conservatism that supported the initial rise of the Klan remained.

Under these conditions liberal whites and African Americans found it difficult to achieve any improvements in race relations. In 1911 the National Urban League (NUL) was founded out of two earlier organizations, the National League for the Protection of Colored Women and the Committee for Improving the Industrial Conditions of Negroes in New York. The most conservative of the major civil rights organizations in the twentieth century, the Urban League was initially dominated by wealthy and middle-class white philanthropists. It was created to provide practical help and advice to urban black communities rather than to campaign actively for social and political reform.

The NAACP was, by comparison, more radical in its outlook. Its main efforts were concentrated on a legalistic strategy of challenging segregation and discrimination in the courts. This approach led to only limited gains before the 1930s. A rare breakthrough came in 1917 when, in Buchanan v. Warley, the US Supreme Court held that city ordinances enforcing residential segregation were unconstitutional. Victory was even then less than complete. The ruling of the judges derived less from concerns over racial fairness than the belief that such laws violated the property rights of homeowners.

From 1909 to 1934 the NAACP journal Crisis was edited by W. E. B. DuBois, and in 1920 another African American, James Weldon Johnson, was appointed as NAACP Executive Secretary. The organization began to develop grassroots black support with 274 branches or chapters and over 90,000 members by the early 1920s. Despite these advances the NAACP did not achieve a truly mass membership until the 1940s. It continued to be perceived as an elitist and largely white-run organization until the late 1920s.

One of the few positive developments to result from the Red Summer of race riots was the founding in 1919 of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC) in Atlanta, Georgia. The Commission was set up by southern white liberals with the support of a few African American spokespersons to campaign for interracial dialogue and understanding. Between 1919 and 1943 it sponsored academic studies on southern race relations and supported black education with the aid of grants from the Julius Rosenwald Fund, a charitable offshoot of the business giant Sears Roebuck.

The death of Booker T. Washington in November 1915 marked a turning point in terms of African American leadership. Robert Russa Moton, Washington's successor as Principal of Tuskegee, was an able educator but with no aspiration to be a national race leader. Washington's leading black critics, such as W. E. B. DuBois and William Monroe Trotter, lacked charisma and genuine mass appeal. The leadership vacuum left by Washington was filled not by any established African American spokesperson but by Marcus Garvey, a newcomer to the United States from the West Indies.

Born in 1887, Garvey spent the first 23 years of his life in Jamaica. Between 1910 and 1914 he travelled widely in Central and South America and Europe, settling in London. Inspired by Booker T. Washington's autobiography, Up From Slavery (1901), he returned to Jamaica in 1914 and established the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). The UNIA was initially intended to promote industrial education as practised by Washington at Tuskegee. Short of money, Garvey landed in New York in 1916 to embark on a fund-raising tour of the United States. A forceful and energetic speaker, he soon began to gain recognition and respect in African American society. In 1917 he formed a branch of the UNIA in Harlem, New York and within a year recruited some 1,000 members. During 1918 he established a weekly newspaper, The Negro World, which achieved a wide circulation first in the United States and later in the Caribbean, South America and Africa.

In 1919 Garvey began a series of UNIA economic initiatives. The Negro Factories Corporation (NFC) was set up to promote black-run businesses and founded a chain of retail outlets. Between 1919 and 1921 a more ambitious project, the Black Star Line (BSL), sought to launch an international black steamship company, buying three ships, the SS Yarmouth, the SS Kanawha and the Shadyside. The money for these purchases was raised by the sale of $750,000 of share certificates to thousands of small black investors. Garvey hoped that the BSL, which was started as a business venture, would help fulfil his wider vision of uniting black peoples worldwide in international commerce.

By this time he had moved away from Booker T. Washington's integrationist philosophy. Garvey was now a black nationalist who rejected the view that blacks could ever be fully assimilated as equals into US society. Instead African Americans should develop their own institutions and minimize contacts with whites. Ultimately, Garvey hoped to achieve an end to European colonialism in Africa and the Caribbean and to create an independent black African state. In August 1920 delegates from over 25 countries attended the UNIA First International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World held in Harlem. The Convention elected Garvey as Provisional President of the anticipated new African...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Black Civil Rights in America
• Introductions to History
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: emancipation and accommodation
• 1 New directions: urbanization and the Great Migration, 1915-30
• 2 Seeds of change: the Great Depression and the Second World War, 1930-45
• 3 Montgomery spring: postwar change and the emergence of the civil rights movement, 1945-65
• 4 An African American summer: Black Power, 1965-76
• 5 Winter in America: 1977 to the millennium
• Conclusion back to the future
• Appendix: Supreme Court cases cited in the text
• Select bibliography
• Index