Segregation in the United States

III

Black Opposition to Segregation before World War II

Violence and the power of state governments made resistance to segregation difficult. Nevertheless, blacks fought segregation at the ballot box, in the courtrooms, and through organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which was founded in 1909. After the Supreme Court decision in The Civil Rights Cases in 1883, blacks throughout the nation held public meetings to discuss and protest the decision. For example, the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass gave a major speech to a large protest meeting at Lincoln Hall in Washington, D.C. In addition to protest meetings, blacks organized the Brotherhood of Liberty to plan legal and political action against segregation. The brotherhood commissioned the publication, in 1889, of the first important legal analysis of segregation, in Justice and Jurisprudence: An Inquiry Concerning the Constitutional Limitations of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, a volume of more than 500 pages.

Another example of early black opposition to segregation led to the important case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). In 1891 a group of people of mixed African and European ancestry, who called themselves “persons of color,” in New Orleans banded together to fight segregation on trains in Louisiana. They formed the Citizens’ Committee to Test the Constitutionality of the Separate Car Law. They raised $3000 for the costs of a test case. Albion Tourgee, a former judge, nationally prominent writer, and one of the nation’s leading white advocates of black rights, agreed to take the case without fee. In June 1892 Homer A. Plessy purchased a first class ticket on the East Louisiana Railroad and sat in a car reserved for white customers. A conductor immediately challenged Plessy’s right to sit in the “white” car. When Plessy refused to move, he was arrested and arraigned before Judge John H. Ferguson. Plessy then sued to prevent Ferguson from conducting any further proceedings against him. Eventually his challenge reached the United States Supreme Court, which—much to the anger of blacks—upheld segregation.

In 1905 a number of black activists, led by W. E. B. Du Bois, the first black to receive a doctoral degree from Harvard University, met in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada to plan strategies to fight for racial equality. By 1909 the Niagara Movement, as the group called itself, led to the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a racially integrated organization dedicated to fighting segregation and inequality. In addition to Du Bois, the prominent founders included a number of white activists such as philanthropists Joel and Arthur Spingarn, Jane Addams, educational reformer John Dewey, and Oswald Garrison Villard, the grandson of abolitionist William Loyd Garrison. Among the important black leaders joining Du Bois was Ida B. Wells, a prominent opponent of lynching.

Almost immediately, the NAACP began to challenge segregation in the courts. Before World War II started in 1939, there were a few significant victories in the Supreme Court. In Guinn v. United States (1915), the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the “grandfather clause” in the Oklahoma constitution. That clause allowed illiterate people to vote if they could prove their grandfathers had been voters. As a result, illiterate whites could vote but not illiterate blacks, whose grandfathers had mostly been slaves. The NAACP also challenged segregation in other areas. In Buchanan v. Warley (1917), the court declared unconstitutional a Louisville, Kentucky, law that required that blacks and whites live in certain sections of the city. Similarly in Moore v. Dempsey (1923), the Supreme Court overturned convictions where blacks had been systematically excluded from juries. In Gaines v. Canada (1938), the Supreme Court also ruled that Missouri had to open its state supported law school to blacks, unless it was prepared to build a separate law school for them.

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These rulings were important preludes to the successful assault on segregation in the 1950s and 1960s. However, in the 1920s and 1930s they did not lead to increased voting by blacks, regular black participation as jurors, integrated neighborhoods, or increased opportunities for blacks in higher education.

IV

The Emergence of the Civil Rights Movement

During and after World War II, challenges to segregation became more common and more successful. Three major factors accounted for this: the great migration; the changing nature of American politics; and the social and cultural changes connected to the war itself.

A

The Great Migration

The great migration was the movement of a large number of blacks from the Southern states to the Northern and Western ones for a range of reasons including better jobs, better schools, and a less racist environment. It began during World War I, continued during the 1930s, and expanded dramatically in the 1940s and 1950s. The migration changed the nature of black population in two ways. First, it resulted in a massive movement out of the South and into the North. In 1920 there were 8,055,000 blacks living in the 11 states that had made up the Confederacy. By 1950 that number had only increased to 9,052,000. By contrast, the number of blacks in 11 Northern states grew 400 percent, from 1,086,000 in 1920 to 4,258,000 in 1950.

The second change in the black population was that blacks in both the North and South became increasingly urbanized throughout the 20th century. In 1890, 85 percent of all Southern blacks lived in rural areas; by 1920 that figure had dropped to 75 percent. In 1940, at the start of World War II, only 64 percent of Southern blacks were rural. The war accelerated this movement to urban areas. In 1950, 52 percent were rural, but by 1960 a majority of southern blacks, 58 percent, lived in urban areas. Northern blacks were always more urban, but the percentages nevertheless changed dramatically during this period as well. In 1890, 62 percent of all Northern blacks lived in urban areas; by 1960, 95 percent were urban. The urbanization accelerated during World War II, as blacks moved North to work in war-related industries. Between 1940 and 1990 Chicago’s black population grew from 282,000 to 1,197,000; New York went from 477,000 to 1,784,000; Detroit from 151,000 to 759,000; and Los Angeles from 98,000 to 505,000. The movement to the cities concentrated blacks in specific neighborhoods, often giving them enough voting power to elect local public officials. Blacks in the North did not face legal barriers to voting, and thus actively participated in the political process. Not surprisingly, white Northern politicians with large black constituencies began to oppose segregation and to support civil rights.

After World War I, blacks won numerous local elections throughout the North. In 1928, in part because of the movement of Southern blacks into Chicago, Oscar DePriest became the first black to serve in the U.S. Congress since 1901, and the first ever from the North. In addition to individual black officeholders, blacks outside of the South began to affect the election of whites. In Ohio, Kansas, and California, for example, blacks helped elect and defeat whites who supported or opposed civil rights advances. The power of urban black voters changed the political landscape and accelerated the pace of civil rights.

The great migration introduced millions of blacks to a world in which formal segregation did not exist and basic facilities, like transportation, restaurants, and public bathrooms, were open to all people. However, the North was not without racism. Blacks could not move to certain neighborhoods, were denied access to many jobs, and were informally segregated. In Chicago, for example, some public beaches on Lake Michigan, while legally open to all, were segregated by local custom, which was enforced by mob violence when blacks tried to use them. Certain labor unions, particularly in the skilled building trades, excluded blacks. But, despite de facto segregation and exclusion by individuals, unions, and employers, blacks who moved to the North were able to live without the degrading oppression of day-to-day segregation. They were thus better able to oppose legalized segregation in the South.

B

Changes in American Politics

While the great migration changed how black Americans lived, the Great Depression of the 1930s and the New Deal altered American politics by setting a precedent for government activism. The administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt assumed a new role of intervening in society to ensure jobs, justice, and the prosperity of the American people, who were severely affected by the Depression. Since the Civil War, the Republican Party had dominated American political life. Between 1868 and 1932 only two Democrats, Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson, held the White House. Blacks had loyally voted for the Republicans, the party of Abraham Lincoln, and until the 1920s Republican presidents had always rewarded them with small amounts of patronage. Some Republicans also remained loyal supporters of civil rights for blacks. The Democratic Party, on the other hand, had remained largely dominated by its Southern, segregationist wing. Woodrow Wilson, who had been raised in Virginia, ordered the segregation of all federal facilities in Washington, D.C. shortly after he became president.

Party alignments, and notions of race, changed during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Franklin Roosevelt’s huge victories in 1932 and 1936 shifted some power in the Democratic Party to Northern progressives and liberals who opposed segregation. Roosevelt himself was more progressive on race than any of his predecessors and appointed blacks to high offices, including William Hastie, appointed in 1937 as the first black federal judge.

The president’s wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, made clear her hatred for segregation. In a gesture that symbolized a sharp break with previous administrations, she invited the National Council of Negro Women to have tea at the White House. Her most important attack on segregation came in 1939, when the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) refused to allow the black opera singer Marian Anderson to give a concert at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. Mrs. Roosevelt publicly resigned from the DAR, while the secretary of the interior, Harold L. Ickes, invited Anderson to give an Easter Sunday concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. This symbolic gesture set a new tone in Washington, one which indicated that the national administration no longer supported segregation.

Meanwhile, Roosevelt’s New Deal programs were designed to help the country recover from the Depression. New agricultural policies, public work projects, the building of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), and the rural electrification programs helped blacks as well as whites by providing jobs, electricity, and other conveniences, especially in the rural South. Laws regulating wages and hours as well as protecting the rights of workers to unionize raised the living standards for Americans of all races. During the 1930s Northern blacks increasingly voted for Democratic candidates. The shift began in 1934 when Arthur W. Mitchell became the first black Democrat in the history of Congress.

By the eve of World War II, black voters regularly elected officials in a number of Northern states, as well as in Kentucky and West Virginia. These newly elected officials actively fought against segregation and racism although not always successfully. By this time a majority of the members of Congress favored an anti-lynching bill, but these legislators were never able to overcome Southern filibusters in the Senate.

C

Social and Cultural Changes

A final impetus to the reinvigorated civil rights movement was World War II. The struggle against Nazism forced some Americans to reconsider the legitimacy of racism in the United States. The Holocaust and the murder of six million Jews, merely because of their ethnicity, led some Americans to realize that racism could be a threat to democracy itself. Blacks also served in the military in unprecedented numbers. By the end of the war, many blacks had served with whites in integrated units. Moreover, the Roosevelt Administration prohibited segregation on all military bases, even in the South. Thus, the war experience taught many people that equality was possible. Following the war, black veterans returned with a new sense of purpose. Joining them in the struggle against segregation was a better educated and financially more secure black middle and working class living in the North. Many blacks had earned high wages in war industries, were members of industrial unions, and politically active. While the struggle against segregation would be in the South, Northern support was essential.

Finally, the postwar world forced the national government to face, for the first time, the threat that segregation posed to international relations. After the war, many colonies in Asia and Africa gained their independence from European domination. At the same time, the Cold War struggle with the Communist government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) forced the United States to court the good will of these nations. Segregation undermined the nation’s ability to negotiate with these new nations while giving the USSR ammunition in its propaganda war against the United States. Leaders of the American foreign policy establishment urged an end to segregation at home as a way of fighting Communism abroad.

V

The Civil Rights Movement

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