Running for Freedom

Civil Rights and Black Politics in America since 1941

Steven F. Lawson

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118836569
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts

Running for Freedom, Fourth Edition, updates historian Steven Lawson's classic volume detailing the history of African-American civil rights and black politics from the beginning of World War II to the present day.

Offers comprehensive coverage of the African-American struggle for civil rights in the U.S. from 1941 to 2014

Integrates events relating to America's civil rights story at both the local and national levels

Features new material on Obama's first term in office and the first year of his second term

Includes addition of such timely issues as the Trayvon Martin case, the March on Washington 5oth anniversary, state voter suppression efforts, and Supreme Court ruling on Voting Rights Act

1
World War II and the Origins of the Freedom Struggle

For African Americans, the ultimate aim of politics, either protest or electoral, has been liberation. Seeking emancipation from the bondage of white supremacy, disfranchised southern blacks challenged the political system for admission, even as they hoped to transform it by their participation. Civil rights proponents have long believed that blacks could not be free without obtaining the right to vote. At the turn of the century, W. E. B. Du Bois set the standard for rejecting racial solutions that excluded the exercise of the franchise. Attacking Booker T. Washington for his strategy of postponing black participation at the ballot box, Du Bois insisted that the right to vote was intimately connected to first-class citizenship. Without it blacks would never command respect, protect themselves, and feel pride in their own race. To Du Bois, a scholar of the freedom struggle after the Civil War, Reconstruction provided vivid evidence that black elected officials could transform the lives of their constituents. From this experience they derived the historical lesson, summarized by Eric Foner, that “it was in politics that blacks articulated a new vision of the American state, calling upon government, both national and local, to take upon itself new and unprecedented responsibilities for protecting the civil rights of individual citizens.”

The long history to obtain the right to vote suggests that reenfranchisement was considered the decisive first step toward political equality. Civil rights proponents expected participation at the polls to yield the kinds of basic benefits that groups exercising the franchise customarily enjoyed. Yet, for black Americans, much more was at stake. With their systematic exclusion from the electoral process, the simple acquisition of the vote constituted an essential element of liberation from enforced racial subordination. The political scientist Charles V. Hamilton, who studied the voting rights struggle both as a participant and as a scholar, found this passion for the ballot very understandable. “White America had spent so much effort denying the vote to blacks,” he observed, “that there was good reason to believe that they must be protecting some tool of vast importance. Perhaps it was reasonable to put so much emphasis on the one fundamental process that clearly distinguished first-class from second-class citizens.”

Victory at Home and Abroad

Going off to war in the months after Pearl Harbor, black GIs might very well have pondered the connection between politics and freedom. They had many reasons to wonder about the principles of the democratic creed and their promise of first-class citizenship for all. Like their white counterparts they remembered December 7, 1941, when Dorie Miller, a black sailor, performed heroic deeds that would win him the Navy Cross; but they also carried with them the memory of Sikeston, Missouri, where on January 25, 1942, a black prisoner named Cleo Wright was taken out of the local jail and cruelly burned and lynched by a white mob. Unlike Japan and its Axis partners, which were eventually defeated on the battlefield and forced to accept unconditional surrender, the killers of Cleo Wright were never brought to justice. Helping to combat fascism abroad, black fighting men and the families they left behind also demanded unconditional surrender from the forces of racism at home. Blacks failed to persuade the American government to wage total war in their behalf, but they did lay the groundwork for continuing the battle in the decades to come.

This determination to stand up for their rights, strengthened by World War II, grew out of both disillusionment and optimism. In response to Woodrow Wilson’s pledge during World War I to make the world safe for democracy, blacks had followed the advice of Du Bois to “close ranks [and] while this war lasts, forget our special grievances.” Rather than freedom, the end of the war produced bloody race riots and a continuation of Jim Crow practices. At the same time, African Americans refused to plunge into despair and experienced instead a heightening of racial consciousness. The Harlem Renaissance and the black nationalist movement spearheaded by Marcus Garvey explored the roots of black identity and helped forge renewed racial solidarity. A. Philip Randolph organized workers into the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and not only fought for economic benefits from employers but also challenged racial discrimination within the trade union movement. In addition, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an interracial organization founded in 1909, kept alive the battle for equal rights by lobbying Congress to enact an antilynching bill and petitioning the Supreme Court to outlaw disfranchisement measures such as the white primary.

Figure 1 Dorie Miller receiving the Navy Cross from Admiral Chester Nimitz. Miller was later killed in action.

(Photo courtesy US National Archives)

The Great Depression provided unexpected opportunities for black advancement. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal extended economic relief to the one-third of the nation that was ill housed, ill clothed, and ill fed, which included blacks as well as poor whites. Blacks profited from these programs because of their poverty, not because of their race; in fact, many New Deal agencies, especially in the South, were administered to preserve prevailing racial practices that maintained blacks in a subordinate position. For example, programs for federal housing construction contained provisions guaranteeing segregation in the North as well as the South. Despite the perpetuation of racial discrimination and the unwillingness of President Roosevelt to fight for special civil rights measures, African Americans welcomed federal assistance. “Any time people are out of work, in poverty, have lost their savings,” Du Bois remarked, “any kind of a ‘deal’ that helps them is going to be favored.”

Blacks showed their appreciation by abandoning their traditional allegiance to the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln and hopping aboard the Roosevelt bandwagon. This realignment was facilitated by the appointment of blacks to federal posts, a sufficient number to convene an informal “black kitchen cabinet” in Washington. Whites sensitive to racial concerns headed several New Deal agencies and worked to see that relief was distributed more fairly. Furthermore, Roosevelt’s selections to the Supreme Court after 1937 paved the way for a constitutional revolution that augured well for NAACP attorneys preparing a legal assault upon racial discrimination. Most of all, the President’s wife, Eleanor, nurtured the growing attachment African Americans felt toward the Roosevelt administration. Mrs. Roosevelt’s commitment to civil rights was far greater than her husband’s, and she served as an ally in the White House to see that complaints of black leaders received a hearing in the Oval Office. This combination of racial gestures and economic rewards led the majority of the black electorate to vote for Roosevelt beginning in 1936.

On the eve of World War II, blacks stood poised to consolidate their gains and press ahead for full equality. Their political agenda included an end to job discrimination, which helped keep black unemployment at a high 11 percent in 1940; legislation to empower the federal government to prosecute lynchers and to abolish the poll tax on voting imposed by eight southern states; the destruction of the lily-white Democratic primary; and the abandonment of the principle of “separate but equal” that actually produced segregated and unequal treatment in the armed forces, public education, and public accommodations. As the prospect of war increased, black aspirations collided with the reality of pervasive discrimination in a country where mobilization for war came first.

National defense took priority over racial equality in the armed services. As the nation inched closer to the side of the Allies and prepared to join them in war, the army maintained its customary policy of segregation, the navy recruited blacks only as messmates, and the marines and Army Air Corps generally excluded them. When pressed by black leaders for integration of the military in the fall of 1940, President Roosevelt refused to alter practices that had “been proved satisfactory over a long period of years.” Instead, he directed the utilization of “the services of negroes … on a fair and equitable basis.” To do otherwise, he and his advisers believed, would risk upsetting white soldiers and would lower their morale, thereby jeopardizing the war effort.

The attempt to make the system of racial separation operate more equally failed to solve the problem. Black GIs assigned to military bases in the South encountered segregation both on and off the bases. Conforming to the law and customs of the surrounding communities, the military enforced segregation in recreation clubs, theaters, and post exchanges. In one camp, a sign on a chapel announced religious services for “Catholics Jews, Protestants, Negroes.” When they received passes to travel into town, black soldiers rode on segregated buses and used Jim Crow facilities. With the population of many towns swollen with servicemen, an intolerable strain was placed on public transportation and accommodations. Crowded transit systems often led to pushing and shoving between black and white passengers, frequently ending in violence. In July 1942, a black army private in Beaumont, Texas, refused to vacate his seat in a section of a bus reserved for whites. After his arrest, he was shot by white patrolmen while in their custody. Racial incidents such as this were becoming increasingly commonplace throughout the South that year, culminating in a riot in Alexandria, Louisiana, in which 28 blacks were wounded and nearly 3,000 arrested.

Among the black soldiers encountering wartime discrimination was Jackie Robinson. Having attended the University of California at Los Angeles before entering the service, Robinson excelled in basketball, track, baseball, and football, a sport in which he was named as a college All-American. However, these accomplishments did not guarantee him an easy time in the army. When military officials attempted to keep him out of Officers’ Candidate School at Fort Riley, Kansas, he successfully complained and gained admission to the program. Despite his athletic prowess, Robinson was barred because of his race from playing on the baseball team at the army training camp. In protest, he refused to join the football team, which was open to blacks. In 1944, Lieutenant Robinson again challenged unfair racial treatment. While stationed at Ford Hood, Texas, he steadfastly refused to follow a bus driver’s order that he sit in the back of the vehicle with the other black passengers. Subjected to a military court martial for his defiance of local segregationist customs, the former All-American athlete was found innocent.

As a soldier, Robinson did not act alone in challenging racial discrimination in the armed forces. On the eve of America’s entry into the war, civil rights groups such as the NAACP and National Urban League, along with the Negro press and black college officials, campaigned to break down the barriers that kept the Army Air Corps from accepting black pilots. The War Department believed blacks incapable of flying aircraft. One report claimed that the “colored race does not have the technical nor the flying background for the creation of a bombardment-type unit.” Nevertheless, persistent pressure and the negative publicity tarnishing the nation’s democratic war aims led the War Department in 1941 to agree to train African-American pilots. The black fighter squadron remained segregated from white pilots, prompting criticism from the NAACP and the black press, which favored the cessation of racial criteria in the military. The Pittsburgh Courier blasted the Jim Crow policy as “a citadel to the theory that there can be segregation without discrimination.” Yet, by the end of the war, the exploits of the Tuskegee Airmen had made African Americans swell with pride. Stationed at Tuskegee army airfield in Alabama, on the grounds of an abandoned graveyard, black pilots eventually took to the skies over Europe and proved their skills in fighting the Nazis.

However, both overseas and at home, the Tuskegee Airmen battled racial discrimination. They fought against the military command’s thinking that they could not make talented fighter pilots in combat, and they challenged segregated facilities on military posts in the United States. At the Tuskegee training center, the airmen conducted a successful sit-in protest to desegregate accommodations on the base. In response, Colonel Noel F. Parish discarded segregated signs, invited popular entertainers to lift the troop’s morale, and desegregated the mess hall. At other military posts black pilots were segregated in the mess halls and movie theaters, while German prisoners of war who were quartered at the camps took seats in the “whites only” areas of these accommodations, an outrage black soldiers protested. Indeed, enemy prisoners of war could attend shows, movies, and dances, sponsored by the United Service Organizations (USO) and local chambers of commerce, which were barred to black soldiers. The situation was much the same once the soldiers left the military posts. In one highly charged incident, black airmen taking leave from Walterboro army airfield in South Carolina stopped to eat in a racially restricted café in nearby Fairfax, and were denied service. Brimming with anger, they told the white owner to “go to hell,” brandished their service revolvers, and left the restaurant shouting the mock-salute, “Heil Hitler!” Slightly more successful, in November 1944, Walterboro airmen, spending a leave in Washington, DC, integrated the District of Columbia’s airport cafeteria after having been first turned away. They may have received service out of deference to their military uniforms, because the airport resumed segregation in its accommodations once the war ended.

Protests also surfaced at Selfridge Field just outside of Detroit. On January 1, 1944, black officers teamed in groups of three at intervals throughout the day attempted to integrate the racially restricted officer’s club. Although one group gained admission, the soldiers were soon ordered to leave by the base commander. The protest resumed the next day, but the club remained barred to blacks. One of the leaders of the challenge was Lieutenant Milton Henry from Philadelphia, who had had previous confrontations with segregation. In the spring of 1942, Henry had a run-in with a Montgomery, Alabama bus driver when he refused his order to sit in the rear of the vehicle. Henry demanded his nickel fare back and punched the driver in the mouth. The driver pulled out a gun, and the two began a struggle that spilled out onto the street. Henry managed to escape, but was sent to the military stockade for a brief period. A year later, he was stationed at Selfridge and helped plan the organized protests. The persistent Henry lodged a complaint with the War Department, which resulted in an investigation of racial discrimination at the airfield, under the direction of General Benjamin O. Davis, the military’s highest ranking African-American officer. The report confirmed the protesters’ charges, and the War Department ordered a reprimand for Selfridge’s commander. However, Henry faced reprisals. In 1944, air force officials prosecuted him for insubordination in an incident unrelated to the officer’s club demonstration. He was found guilty and discharged from the army on August 10.

An even more serious brouhaha occurred in April 1945, when Colonel Robert Selway ordered that the officers’ club at Freeman Field in Seymour, Indiana, remain segregated. The policy sparked a challenge from members of the 477th Bombardment Group who were stationed there. Previously, black soldiers had staged a protest when Selway insisted on separating the races in the base’s movie theater. Black airmen and their white sympathizers initiated “Operation Checkboard,” and when the lights went down the soldiers switched seats so that they were sitting next to each other under cover of darkness. On April 5, 1945, several groups of black officers defied Selway’s Jim Crow regulations and proceeded to enter the “whites-only” Club Number Two. In turn, the colonel had them arrested and proceeded to court-martial over one hundred African- American officers. The beleaguered airmen wired Secretary of War Henry Stimson that the continuation of segregation “can hardly be reconciled with the world wide struggle for freedom for which we are asked and are willing to lay down our lives.” By this point in the war, the army high brass, under pressure from the NAACP and the black press, had grown less tolerant of overt racial discrimination, especially within its officers’ corps, and set nearly all the accused airmen free. Nevertheless, General Frank O. Hunter, the commander of the First Air Force and a Georgia native who supported Jim Crow, convinced the War Department to approve the court martials of three of the protesters, Lieutenant Robert Terry, Lieutenant Shirley Clinton, and Lieutenant Marsden Thompson. The military panels acquitted Clinton and Marsden, but found Terry guilty; however, he received a light fine. At the same time, the army punished Colonel Selway and relieved him of the command of Freeman Field.

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