African American History

XIX

World War II

In the late 1930s and the early 1940s, the attention of African Americans focused on events in Europe—rise of dictators, Germany's invasion of Eastern Europe, and Italy's invasion of Ethiopia. Blacks protested Italy's invasion of Ethiopia and raised funds for Ethiopian relief. Black newspapers ran stories about the invasion, and the Pittsburgh Courier sent its own correspondent to North Africa to cover the story.

African Americans were also quick to recognize the danger of Nazism and its theories of Aryan superiority. To many, it resembled the segregationist rhetoric of the American South. At the Berlin Olympics of 1936, black track star Jesse Owens carried the pride of nonwhites as he symbolically confronted Hitler’s theories. In races against Germans and other Europeans, Owens won four gold medals.

By the end of 1940, France had fallen to Hitler’s forces, and Germany, Italy, and Japan had formed an alliance. Within a year, Japan had moved into China and Southeast Asia. The United States imposed trade sanctions on Japan, but these failed to restrain Japan’s expansion. On Sunday morning December 7, 1941, Japan attacked American forces stationed at Pearl Harbor and other U.S. military facilities on Oahu in the Hawaiian Islands. A black mess attendant aboard the USS West Virginia, Dorie Miller, was among those later cited for distinction during the battle. In the heat of battle, he pulled his wounded captain to safety. Although he had never fired a machine gun before, Miller shot down as many as four attacking planes, for which he later received the Navy Cross for heroism.

When the war began in Europe in 1937, there were only about 5,000 black enlisted men and fewer than a dozen black officers in the regular army. Before the war ended in 1945, more than a million black men and about 4,000 black women had served in the armed forces. Nearly half served abroad, most in Europe and North Africa, but thousands also served in the Pacific. African Americans served in all branches of the military during the war.

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In 1941 the 99th Pursuit Squadron, the first black combat unit in the Army Air Corps, was established in Tuskegee, Alabama. More than 600 black pilots trained for this highly decorated unit. They completed more than 500 missions in the first year of America’s involvement in the war. Over 80 were decorated with the Distinguished Flying Cross for combat over France, Germany, North Africa, and Eastern Europe.

Yet even as blacks participated in the war abroad, black military troops suffered all too familiar discrimination at home. In 1941, 100 African American officers were arrested for protesting the whites-only policy of the officer’s club at Freeman Field in Indiana. In 1943 William Hastie, aide to the U.S. Secretary of War, resigned his office to protest racial discrimination in the armed forces.

By 1940 American factories were hiring new workers for war production, finally relieving the depression’s stubborn unemployment. But blacks benefited less than white workers from rising employment and increased wages. Discrimination in employment and wage policies continued to create disadvantages for black workers.

Early in 1941, A. Philip Randolph met with Roosevelt administration officials to demand equal employment for blacks in industries working under federal government defense contracts. He threatened to lead 100,000 African Americans in a march on Washington, D.C., to protest job discrimination. Negotiations were heated, but finally Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 forbidding discrimination based on race, creed, color, or national origin in the employment of workers for defense industries with federal contracts. The order also established a Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to oversee the implementation of the order. Roosevelt’s actions immediately opened thousands of steady well-paying jobs to black workers and encouraged a new surge of migration from the South to Northern cities.

The need for labor opened factory work to women and drew large numbers from the domestic jobs many had taken during the worst days of the depression. Working in war industries, black women found that the pay was better and the work was generally less physically demanding than domestic work. Also many black women who had lost domestic jobs to white women during the 1930s now returned to take those jobs as whites left them. African American men and women fully engaged in the war effort were determined to pursue a “Double V Campaign,” victory over fascism abroad and victory over racism at home. Consequently, the pace of civil rights protest quickened during the mid-1940s.

XX

Postwar Civil Rights Activities

The struggle against Hitler’s theories of racial supremacy spurred some whites in the United States to accept racial equality. This acceptance was strengthened by the writings of numerous scholars, including the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, author of An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944). Other scholarly and literary publications increased whites’ understanding of the black experience, notably the novel Native Son (1940) by Richard Wright; Black Metropolis (1945), an important sociological study by St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton; and From Slavery to Freedom (1947) by historian John Hope Franklin.

Drawing on increasingly liberal racial attitudes, the interracial Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), formed in 1942, conducted nonviolent sit-ins and demonstrations in Chicago, New York, and other Northern cities throughout the 1940s. These sit-ins challenged racial segregation and had some success at integrating public accommodations such as restaurants. Supreme Court rulings in the 1940s struck down many methods of segregation. In 1944 the court outlawed Southern Democrats’ white primaries, striking down their argument that the party was a private club and primary elections were open to club members only. In 1946 it ruled that segregation in interstate bus travel was unconstitutional, and in 1947 it disallowed racial discrimination in the federal civil service.

The late 1940s also saw the color barrier fall in many areas of society that had been all white. One of the most dramatic instances occurred in 1947, when Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers, becoming the first black to play major league baseball in the 20th century. In 1949 Wesley A. Brown became the first African American to graduate from the U.S. Naval Academy.

Following the war, the GI Bill, funded by the government, gave new educational opportunities to veterans and promised greater economic prosperity. Blacks were determined to be included. Thousands of black veterans enrolled in technical training or colleges and universities, financed by government benefits. These black veterans paved the way for ongoing increases in African American college enrollments. The number of African American college students increased from 124,000 in 1947 to 233,000 in 1961.

African Americans continued to migrate from the rural South to the urban North to improve their economic status. From 1948 to 1961, the proportion of blacks with low incomes (earning below $3,000 a year) declined from 78 percent to 47 percent; at the same time the proportion earning over $10,000 a year increased from under 1 percent to 17 percent. Although black income improved, it remained far below that of whites. Black median income in 1961 was still lower than white median income had been in 1948.

Whites reacted violently to the wartime movement of blacks to urban areas in the North and the West. By the late 1940s, as the black percentage of city populations increased, more and more whites moved to the new suburbs that often restricted black residence. Conflicts between black workers and white workers over housing and jobs developed in some cities. In Detroit in 1943, for example, 25 blacks and 9 whites died in a race riot before federal troops restored order.

XXI

The Cold War

The growing black population in Northern cities provided decisive support for liberal Democratic candidates who in turn backed civil rights reforms. Race became an important issue in postwar politics. In 1947 the NAACP presented a petition to the United Nations (UN). It documented the history of racism in America and was discussed for two days by the UN Human Rights Commission. President Harry S. Truman created a Presidential Commission on Civil Rights. In response to pressure by black leaders, President Truman issued executive orders designed to eventually desegregate the armed forces and prevent discrimination in federal employment.

Southern Democrats were angered by Truman’s actions and by Northern Democrats’ adoption of a strong civil rights plank in the 1948 Democratic Party platform. They split from the Democratic Party and formed the States’ Rights Party, whose members were known as Dixiecrats. African American influence on national politics was clear in 1948 when Truman was elected president after receiving only a minority of white votes.

The Cold War, which began during the Truman administration, also became a factor in postwar race relations. During the Cold War, the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) engaged in an intense economic and political struggle for the allegiance of people around the world. As part of the Cold War, the United States began a campaign against Communism, the economic system of the USSR, both at home and abroad. The anti-Communist campaign had a mixed impact on black America.

In the world arena, the United States presented itself as the champion of freedom and democracy against the totalitarianism of Soviet Communism. The United States was embarrassed by its denial of rights to African Americans. Supporting black rights and appointing African Americans to prominent governmental positions bolstered America’s claims.

At home, however, the campaign against Communism resulted in efforts to identify and prosecute Communists. From 1951 to 1954, Senator Joseph McCarthy and his Senate subcommittee investigated allegations of Communist activities. McCarthy charged many accomplished Americans with disloyalty, including black singer Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois. Such activities made it harder for people to express political dissent and to support progressive organizations for labor and black rights.

XXII

The Brown Decision

During the 1940s and 1950s, NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall directed a carefully constructed legal campaign against Southern segregation laws. These laws separated blacks and whites in such areas of public life as schools, restaurants, drinking fountains, bus stations, and public transportation. The NAACP focused on segregation in education, and won a number of court victories, culminating in the Supreme Court's ruling in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. This ruling declared that separate facilities were inherently unequal and therefore unconstitutional, thus reversing the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling.

However, President Dwight D. Eisenhower did not support a strong federal role in enforcing desegregation, an attitude that encouraged Southern resistance. State troopers were used in Texas to prevent integration; people who supported integration risked losing their jobs; and segregationists set off bombs in Tennessee and Alabama. In a “Southern Manifesto,” 101 congressmen vowed to resist integration.

Meanwhile, after three years of negotiation, the black community and the school board in Little Rock, Arkansas, devised a plan to enroll nine black students at Central High School. When the plan was implemented in the fall of 1957, Governor Orval Faubus used the National Guard to block the black students from entering the school. The public outcry forced Eisenhower to act. He put the National Guard under federal direction and sent federal troops to enforce the Brown decision and protect the students from white mobs. Nevertheless, the following year, Faubus closed all of Little Rock’s high schools rather than integrate them. Ten years after the Brown decision, less than two percent of Southern black children attended integrated schools.

Whites in many areas of the South organized private white schools rather than accept integration. In 1959 officials in Prince Edward County, Virginia, moved white students and state education funds to hastily organized white private schools. For four years, until privately funded black schools could be organized, black students in the county had no schools. Finally in 1963 the county complied with court rulings and reopened the public schools. During the early 1960s, it was necessary to maintain federal troops and marshals on the University of Mississippi campus to ensure the right of a black student to attend classes.

XXIII

The Struggle for Equal Rights

The Brown decision energized other action in the Southern civil rights movement. One critical effort began in Montgomery, Alabama, in December 1955, when a black activist named Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white man and move to the back of a city bus. Parks’s actions were backed by the local NAACP, which organized a boycott of the city’s buses. It asked a 26-year-old minister named Martin Luther King, Jr. to be the spokesperson for the boycott organization. The black community faced threats and violence but continued the boycott for more than a year until the Supreme Court demanded the integration of Alabama buses. In 1957 a group of ministers led by King formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to continue organizing nonviolent actions against Southern segregation.

Inspired by the bravery of students integrating Central High School in Little Rock, in February 1960 four black college students in Greensboro, North Carolina took seats at the “whites-only” lunch counter in Woolworth’s department store and waited to be served. They were refused service, but their sit-in continued. A few days later the number of students “sitting-in” had grown to 150. Whites harassed and violently attacked the students, and the events were covered by newspapers and television. This coverage brought the demonstrators national attention, and protests spread quickly. During that year, 75,000 students—both black and white—staged sit-ins in 75 localities. Over 5,600 protesters were arrested, 2,000 of them for picketing outside Northern stores that had segregated Southern branches.

In April 1960 Ella Baker, the executive director of SCLC, convened a meeting of student leaders to try to coordinate these local spontaneous demonstrations and establish a relationship with the students. The students formed a separate organization called the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), with its own leadership. SNCC adopted the commitment to nonviolence at the urging of King and other civil rights activists and worked with other civil rights organizations.

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