The African Americans

by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

  In the end, the separation of the races demanded by Jim Crow would help to create the means of its destruction: the black civic and religious organizations created by segregation would play a critical role in bringing down the whole rotten edifice. But that day of reckoning was still to come. In the 1930s, “separate but equal” was still the rule, in fact if not in law, and black folks needed some help finding their way through the segregated maze, literally and figuratively.

  In 1936, the postal employee and civic leader Victor Hugo Green (1892–1964?) began publishing a travel guide listing hotels, restaurants, and other establishments willing to do business with African Americans. In places where no hotels accepted black guests, Green’s guidebook listed “tourist homes,” private individuals who would accommodate black visitors. In the years to come, The Negro Motorist Green Book would expand in popularity, covering an ever-larger geographical area and offering African American travelers safe routes through their segregated country. “There will be a day some time in the near future,” reads a portion of the introduction, “when this guide will not have to be published. That is when we as a race will have equal rights and privileges in the United States.”40

  The Green Book would be published until 1964.

  THE DEPRESSION HIT AT THE VERY FABRIC OF THE BLACK COMMUNITY, AT ALL OF ITS LEVELS. WITHOUT PATRONAGE, THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE FLOUNDERED. The lyrical modernism of Jean Toomer and Langston Hughes would give way in the ’30s to the harsh social realism of Richard Wright’s (1908–1960) novels of naturalism, culminating in his masterpiece, Native Son (1940). With the community in economic crisis, left-wing political movements such as the American Communist Party became more attractive to black intellectuals and many black workers. But the most important political shift in the 1930s was the dramatic shift of political allegiances of black voters, who had voted consistently for the Republicans, “the party of Lincoln,” since receiving the franchise just after the Civil War and until Franklin Roosevelt’s second election in 1936, when they embraced Roosevelt’s policies of economic amelioration as well as his overtures to the black community through his wife, Eleanor, and his body of informal black advisers. This Negro “kitchen cabinet,” as it was called, was headed by the great activist and educator Mary McLeod Bethune (1875–1955). The African American community remains strongly Democratic to this day, as we shall see in Chapter 9.

  But it was only the onset of World War II that ended the Great Depression and the attendant extraordinary economic deprivation that afflicted the African American community. The war would bring change in ways that no one could have predicted. Liberal anti-discrimination executive orders from the president would open up economic opportunities in the private sector, and the necessity of black participation in the war effort would eventually lead to the steady but inevitable dismantling of segregation within the armed services (although this would not happen fully until after the war). And, as in every war since the American Revolution, black men would argue that their heroic and selfless service for their country warranted equal treatment at home.

  World War II would turn out to be a crucial period of transition in American race relations. This time, returning veterans would demand their rights. Civil rights leaders would turn to the courts to end the legacy of the Jim Crow laws, the de jure segregation from the 1890s. And both leaders and ordinary African Americans would, in ways that would have surprised even themselves before the war, engage in forms of direct action and protest that over the next two decades would ultimately strike out legal segregation in every aspect of American life.

  Mary McLeod Bethune at her desk at Bethune-Cookman College, by Gordon Parks, January 1943, Daytona Beach, Florida. Photograph. Library of Congress. Among the images on her office walls are those of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom Bethune served in the National Youth Administration, and Madam C. J. Walker.

  _____________________________

  1 C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

  2 Paula Giddings, Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching (New York: Amistad Press/Harper Collins, 2008), 183.

  3 Giddings, Ida: A Sword Among Lions, 189.

  4 Giddings, Ida: A Sword Among Lions, 203.

  5 Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, ed. Alfreda M. Duster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 62–63.

  6 Wells, Crusade for Justice, 345–46.

  7 “The Western Migration,” In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience, http://www.inmotionaame.org/print.cfm;jsessionid=f8302383641353079584716?migration=6&bhcp=1.

  8 Charles S. Johnson, “The New Frontage on American Life,” The New Negro, ed. Alain Locke (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 291.

  9 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “The Truth Behind ‘40 Acres and a Mule,’” 100 Amazing Facts about the Negro, The Root, January 7, 2013, http://www.theroot.com/views/truth-behind-40-acres-and-mule?page=0,0.

  10 Adena Spingarn, “When ‘Uncle Tom’ Became an Insult,” The Root, May 17, 2010, http://www.theroot.com/views/when-uncle-tom-became-insult?page=0,0.

  11 Spingarn, “When ‘Uncle Tom’ Became an Insult.”

  12 David Pilgrim, “The Garbage Man: Why I Collect Racist Objects,” Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, February 2005, www.ferris.edu/htmls/news/jimcrow/collect/.

  13 W. Fitzhugh Brundage, “Beyoncé, Bert Williams, and the History of Blackface in America,” UNC Press Blog, March 2, 2011, http://uncpressblog.com/2011/03/02/w-fitzhugh-brundage-beyonce-bert-williams/.

  * Karen Dalton, “Currier & Ives Darktown Comic: Ridicule and Race,” unpublished manuscript, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute, 1996.

  14 Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery (1901; repr., New York: Tribeca Books, 2012), 106.

  15 Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 14.

  16 A’Lelia Bundles, “Walker, Madam C. J.”AANB Online, African American Studies Center, Oxford University Press, http://www.oxfordaasc.com.

  17 A’Lelia Bundles, On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker (New York: Scribner, 2001), 122.

  18 Bundles, On Her Own Ground, 122.

  19 Bundles, On Her Own Ground, 268–69.

  20 Bundles, On Her Own Ground, 220.

  21 Bundles, On Her Own Ground, 208.

  22 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “W. E. B. Du Bois’ Talented Tenth in Pictures,” The Root, December 2, 2010, http://www.theroot.com/views/web-du-bois-talented-tenth-pictures.

  23 Henry Lyman Morehouse, “The Talented Tenth,” The American Missionary 50, no. 6 (June 1896; Project Gutenberg, November 21, 2006), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19890/19890-h/19890-h.html.

  24 Stephen Tuck, We Ain’t What We Ought to Be: The Black Freedom Struggle from Emancipation to Obama (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 131.

  25 Tuck, We Ain’t What We Ought to Be, 132.

  26 W. E. B. Du Bois, “Intermarriage” editorial, The Crisis 5, no. 4 (February 1913), 180.

  27 W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Prize Fighter” editorial, The Crisis 8, no. 4 (August 1914), 181.

  28 Theresa Runstedtler, Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner: Boxing in the Shadow of the Global Color Line (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 227.

  29 Jervis Anderson, A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 101.

  30 W. E. B. Du Bois, “Close Ranks” editorial, in W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995), 697.

  31 Neil A. Hamilton, “Garvey, Marcus,” American Social Leaders and Activists, American Biographies (New York: Facts on File, 2002), 159.

  32 “The Western Migration,” In Motion.

  33 Darlene Hine Clark, personal communication to Sabin Streeter, February 6, 2012.

  34 Jane M. Gaines, Fire and Desire: Mixed-Race Movies in t
he Silent Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 121.

  35 Gaines, Fire and Desire, 148.

  36 Langston Hughes, The Big Sea: An Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1993), 223.

  37 Victoria Earle Matthews, “The Value of Race Literature,” in The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892–1938, eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Gene Andrew Jarrett (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 288.

  38 Matthews, “The Value of Race Literature,” 289.

  39 Christopher Gray, “Streetscapes/Blumstein’s Department Store; How a Black Boycott Opened the Employment Door,” New York Times, November 20, 1994, http://www.nytimes.com/1994/11/20/realestate/streetscapes-blumstein-s-department-store-black-boycott-opened-employment-door.html.

  40 Victor Hugo Green, The Negro Motorist Green Book: An International Travel Guide (New York: Victor H. Green & Co., Publishers, 1949). Downloaded as a PDF at www.miroundtable.org.

  8

  RISE! A PEOPLE EMERGENT 1940–1968

  AFTER TURNING MUCH OF ITS AUTO INDUSTRY OVER TO THE WAR EFFORT, DETROIT BECAME A CENTER FOR THE DEFENSE INDUSTRY DURING WORLD WAR II, DRAWING MORE THAN 100,000 AFRICAN AMERICANS FROM THE RURAL SOUTH IN SEARCH OF JOBS. Ultimately, this wave of “defense migration” would surpass even the Great Migration in scope. From 1933 to 1943, the number of blacks in Detroit doubled, from 100,000 to 200,000—but the Motor City was hardly welcoming. Newly arriving African Americans were excluded from all but one of the city’s public housing projects.

  Many were forced to live in homes without indoor plumbing, with rents two to three times higher than those paid by families in white districts. Factory discrimination inflamed an already tense racial situation caused by the housing shortage. White defense workers, angered by the recent factory integration policy and promotion of black workers, engaged in hate strikes across the city. By the end of 1942, executives at the Ford Motor Company exacerbated racial tensions throughout the Detroit area when the company reversed its traditionally progressive hiring policies and virtually ceased bringing on African American males.

  On June 20, 1943, tensions between black and white defense industry workers over housing and jobs exploded into a devastating race riot that spread across the city. More than 200 individuals were swept up in what became known as the Belle Isle Riots, named for the bridge that stretches across the Detroit River. As was so often the case, unfounded rumors of murder and rape were at the heart of this tragedy.

  The false rumor that white sailors had thrown a black woman and her baby into the Detroit River ignited a full-scale riot. By 11:30 p.m. that Sunday, 5,000 people were fighting in the middle of East Jefferson, at the Belle Isle bridge entrance. Police restored order around 2 a.m.

  But around midnight, an employee of Wilson’s Forest Club had jumped on the stage to spread the rumor about the alleged drownings.

  The club was packed with about 700 black people, many of whom poured into the streets and began attacking whites. Around the same time, another false rumor spread to a white neighborhood near the Roxy Theatre on Woodward at Temple that a black man had raped a white woman on Belle Isle.

  Whites leaving the theater gathered on Woodward, which separated the white neighborhood from Paradise Valley. They dragged blacks from automobiles and streetcars. At one point, the crowd on Woodward was estimated at 10,000. As daylight approached, the fighting continued.1

  By the time the two-day riot ended, 34 people were dead, including 25 African Americans, most of whom were killed by Detroit police. The rest of the tally was just as dire. Nearly 700 people were wounded, three-quarters of whom were black. More than 1,800 people had been arrested, more than 85 percent of them African American. Detroit suffered an estimated $2 million in property damage. “Hitler won a battle in Detroit today,” wrote the Chicago Sun, with good reason: U.S. troops about to ship out to fight the Nazis in North Africa were ordered to stay in Detroit instead, to keep Americans from killing Americans.2

  The Detroit riot was not an isolated event. Incredibly, it was one of more than 240 racial clashes in the United States in 1943 alone. It came at a time of heightened racial tensions across the country, caused in part by simmering black anger at white American hypocrisy: While the United States waged what the country officially portrayed as a righteous war in Europe against Hitler’s hateful racial ideology, virulent racism ran rampant and unchecked at home. President Franklin Roosevelt had called for a world founded on “four essential human freedoms”—freedom of speech and worship, and freedom from fear and want. Yet those basic freedoms remained far out of the reach of many African Americans, whose lives were constrained by the fear of racist violence and the reality of crippling poverty and segregation.

  Detroit riot, Detroit, Michigan, June 20–22, 1943. Bettmann, Corbis UK Ltd.

  In response, the black press mounted a campaign they called “Double V,” which stood for victory over fascism abroad and racism at home. The black elite, among them leaders of the NAACP, lobbied hard for the end of segregation in the military, along with increased combat participation for black soldiers (including active service for the Tuskegee Airmen), seeing each as an essential and important step toward demonstrating the merits of wider civil rights throughout American society following the war. This was the same case that Frederick Douglass had made about black military combat during the Civil War. Douglass’s argument proved to be in vain; would history repeat itself following World War II?

  Wartime Conference for Total Peace (Double V Campaign), by Elton C. Fax for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1944. Poster. Library of Congress.

  As the war raged, segregation and discrimination persisted, even on the battlefield. While FDR issued Executive Order 8802, which desegregated defense industries that contributed to the war effort, the U.S. military itself would remain segregated through the entire course of the war. Nearly 1 million of the 16 million Americans who served in the armed forces during World War II were African American, yet most black soldiers remained confined to the lowest military ranks, relegated to dangerous and undesirable jobs as bomb loaders or service positions known as quartermasters.

  The Marine Corps was the last branch of the contemporary military to refuse enlistment by black men (although, according to Marine records, 13 blacks served in the Marines during the American Revolution), but by the Second World War, an executive order issued by the president left them with no choice but to abandon their policy.3 As in the other branches, the internal command was sharply divided, and the officer corps remained entirely white. A black command structure rose alongside its white counterpart, but it was always subordinate to and under the dominion of white officers. A black officer, for instance, never crossed paths with a white enlisted man, thus removing the possibility that a white man would have to acknowledge the superior status of a black man, even in the military. This is how bizarrely racial segregation manifested itself in America at that time. Black Marine recruits received training in a completely separate facility, Montford Point, which was located in Onslow County, North Carolina, a coastal outpost where soldiers were subject to vicious racial discrimination both off base and on, and whether they were in uniform or not made no difference in how they were treated.

  In many ways the world was changing, and with it, so was the military. But extreme prejudice persisted. In a crowning indignity born out of a toxic combination of bureaucracy, scientific ignorance, and racial hatred, the United States Army even insisted that the blood of its soldiers be kept segregated. The African American physician and surgeon Dr. Charles Drew (1904–1950) did not mince words when it came to sharing his opinion of the Army’s decision. Calling it “a stupid error” in a 1944 letter to Jacob Billikopf, the director of the Labor Standards Association, Drew wrote: “It was a bad mistake for three reasons: (1) No official department of the Federal Government should willfully humiliate its citizens; (2) There is no scientific basis for the order; (3) They need the bloo
d.”4

  Howard P. Perry, first black Marine, by Roger Smith at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, March 1943. Photograph. Library of Congress.

  Drew was in a position to know. In 1938, with impeccable timing, he pioneered blood-preservation techniques just as the war created an unprecedented worldwide demand for blood transfusions. Through his research at Columbia University, he discovered a method for storing and preserving plasma that would allow it to be shipped overseas and reconstituted for blood transfusions. At the time, Great Britain was desperate for blood for its wounded. As the leading authority in the field, Drew was put in charge of the “Blood for Britain” campaign launched in 1940 by the American Red Cross, the Blood Transfusion Association, and the National Research Council to provide vital plasma to troops fighting Nazi Germany. Nonetheless, the Army continued to keep the blood of African Americans separate from that of whites. Dr. Drew was appalled. A former student quoted him as saying: “‘There’s only one blood. There is no black blood, no white blood. There is blood.’”5

  Nine years later, on April 1, 1950, Drew and three other doctors from Howard University were driving to a medical conference in segregated Alamance County, North Carolina. When it was Drew’s turn to drive, he fell asleep behind the wheel and crashed the car. The men were taken to Alamance General Hospital, which generally served whites only but did make it a practice to treat blacks in its emergency room. When one of the white doctors on Drew’s case recognized his accomplished patient, he ordered that “emergency measures” be taken to save him. But those measures were for naught, and Drew died from brain injury, internal bleeding in the lungs, and multiple injuries.6 The rumor spread that Drew bled to death after he was denied treatment in a whites-only hospital. The supposed circumstances of his death became the stuff of urban legend—but the legend is simply not true. Although Dr. Drew himself was not turned away, the story was derived from the all-too-real experiences of African Americans struggling to survive in a segregated society.