Not all veterans, of course, took as radical a posture as Colson or McKaine. Dartmouth College graduate Lester B. Granger began working with the Urban League after his military service and eventually became its president. The Urban League, originally founded in New York as the Committee on Urban Conditions Among Negroes, concentrated on breaking down barriers to employment and over the years developed close relationships with potential employers. Charles Hamilton Houston, another World War I veteran, decided to become an attorney; as dean of the Howard University law school and NAACP special counsel, he would become the godfather of the 1954 Supreme Court Brown decision by initiating the NAACP plan to attack the validity of “separate but equal.” Houston later remembered, “I made up my mind … that if luck was with me and I got through this war, I would study law and use my time fighting for men who could not strike back.” Yet wherever these veterans fell on the political spectrum, whites considered them all tainted by their overseas military service.
Black veterans were thought to be largely responsible for the black agitation that white Americans saw in evidence all around them, from the black nationalism of Marcus Garvey to the expanding NAACP. Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo surely echoed the attitude of many white supremacists toward the black soldiers of World War I and World War II when he declared that they had been “poisoned with political and social equality stuff.”
Although most black veterans of the world wars would not become civil rights leaders, they generally returned home unwilling to surrender their humanity and dignity by submitting to the old codes of behavior demanded by white supremacy. Many found ways to personally resist its strictures, even with force when necessary. Their military experience was a crucial factor in their willingness to use force: for men who had been shooting at Nazis or at Japanese and Italian fascists, to shoot back at attacking Klansmen simply was not a very difficult choice to make, especially because, despite having fought for democracy overseas, they did not encounter much of it when they returned home.
The nation’s blacks were becoming increasingly impatient for the rights that had long been denied them. In the years between the two world wars, black people were demanding desegregation and equal rights much more insistently than before the wars. They became even more intent on gaining full citizenship, with all of the rights that accompanied it. This was an affirmative demand, distinct from the protests about the racist practices and barbaric horrors (like lynching) that had dominated black concerns earlier in the century. Blacks no longer felt they had to prove their worthiness. Rather, they were convinced that democracy was a human right and that participation in making the decisions that affected their lives was not a privilege to be earned but a right guaranteed to them—along with all U.S. citizens—under the Constitution.
The experience of facing off against Germany in World War II helped solidify many black Americans’ commitment to accelerating their struggle for democracy at home. Germany’s claim to be the fatherland of an Aryan “master race” made it white supremacist in a way that it had not seemed to be in World War I. To fight Adolf Hitler’s Nazism, therefore, was to strike a blow against the ideology of white supremacy in the United States as well, if only because it intensified discussion about democracy and citizenship. As Walter White expressed this change in tone, “The Nazi philosophy crystallizes all and every anti-colored, anti-Jewish, anti-liberal and anti-freedom principle.” A January 1942 editorial in Crisis magazine even more explicitly connected the war abroad and the war at home: “The fight against Hitlerism begins in Washington, D.C., the capital of our nation, where black Americans have a status only slightly above Jews in Berlin.”
Even so, some influential black intellectuals’ experiences in World War I, as well as their stance against colonialism, led them to lean toward isolationism when war once again broke out in Europe. “So far as the colored peoples of the earth are concerned,” wrote columnist George Schuyler “it is a tossup between the ‘democracies’ and the dictatorships… . What is there to choose between the rule of the British in Africa and the rule of the Germans in Austria?” This attitude, which reflected both emotional and political ties to anticolonial struggle, continued well into the 1960s and encouraged the young people of SNCC and CORE to take a great interest in Africa’s independence movements and the continent’s armed liberation struggles.
Dissident voices notwithstanding, the civil rights establishment saw that World War II—as a war against fascism—presented a significant political opportunity. Linking the fight against fascism overseas with the fight for full citizenship and democracy at home could both continue and accelerate the reframing of the civil rights struggle that had begun with World War I. Anticipating the entrance of the United States into the war, Crisis magazine editorialized in its December 1940 issue, “This is no fight merely to wear a uniform. This is a struggle for status, a struggle to take democracy off of parchment and give it life.” There was broad agreement within the civil rights community that the war should be fought on two fronts, and on February 7, 1942, the Pittsburg Courier launched a “Double V” campaign, which called for victory over fascism abroad and victory over racism at home. As pioneering black journalist Edna Chappell McKenzie recalled years later: “We were in war and in war you don’t have friendly relationship[s]. You’re out to kill each other. And so that’s the way it was with The Courier… . We were trying to kill Jim Crow and racism… . Now what [the government] didn’t seem to understand, that we had every valid reason to fight for full citizenship at home if we expected to give our lives overseas.”
Not all black Americans signed onto the Double V campaign, however. After America’s entry into the war, the black leadership establishment outside the South slowly—and somewhat contradictorily—began to deemphasize protest and direct-action challenges to the federal government. Indeed, a year after it was launched, the Double V campaign had almost entirely disappeared from the pages of the Pittsburg Courier and many other black newspapers. Instead, these newspapers—and most civil rights organizations—signed on to the war effort, explaining that America’s fight was their fight and easing the pressure on Washington for the duration of the war. Despite his initial success in pressuring President Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 8802 banning discrimination in defense industries, Randolph’s March on Washington Movement and plans for protest and civil disobedience in cities across the country fizzled out, receiving no encouragement from nationally prominent black leaders. Randolph himself backed the war effort, taking a different stance than he had during World War I. “We, all of us, black and white, Jew and Gentile, Protestant and Catholic, are at war… . What shall the Negro do?” he asked. “There is only one answer. He must fight.”
Racial discrimination persisted in the ranks of the military and at all levels of U.S. society during World War II, despite what appeared to be the more liberal presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. But in the final analysis, whether or not World War II marks a precise watershed moment in the evolution of black struggle in the United States, it certainly gave it an enormous boost. Even a casual observer of the southern Freedom Movement cannot fail to notice the prominence of the war’s black veterans in that effort. Clearly something had changed in the perspective and behavior of many of the returning veterans. And it is clear, too, that this change took place independently of mainstream black organizations. Rather, it occurred at the grass roots, where—not coincidentally—the staunchest resistance against white power could soon be found, as well.
3
“Fighting for What We Didn’t Have”
It is impossible to create a dual personality which will be on the one hand a fighting man toward a foreign enemy, and on the other hand a craven who will accept treatment as less than a man at home.
—Judge William H. Hastie to U.S. War Department, 1941
Armed white men surrounded Medgar and Charles Evers when they appeared at the Newton County courthouse in the logging town of Decatur, Mississippi. It was 1946, not
long after the two brothers had been discharged from the U.S. Army, and they were planning to register to vote.
The Everses knew many of the gun-toting white men around them; as boys they had even played with some of them. The frightened circuit clerk knew the Evers brothers, too. As Charles Evers years later recalled of him and other white Mississippians like him, “Like almost half the whites in Mississippi … [they] didn’t want murder and bloodshed, but they didn’t dare embrace us and get branded ‘nigger lovers.’”
Despite the risk of ostracism, the clerk brought the two returned veterans inside and sat them down in a back room, where he tried to persuade them to abandon their attempt. When they refused, he finally permitted them to register. “Medgar and I had always wanted to vote,” wrote Charles Evers in his autobiography. “As soldiers we’d worked like dogs, risked our lives fighting for freedom, democracy, and all the principles this country was founded on. But we couldn’t vote. The law said we could, but the whites of Mississippi made sure we couldn’t.”
That the Evers brothers had succeeded in registering to vote in a rural Mississippi community like Decatur was unusual, but registering was only half the battle. They wanted to actually cast ballots on Election Day. The stridently racist Theodore Bilbo was seeking a third term in the U.S. Senate, and Charles and Medgar intended to help defeat him.
Some fourteen years earlier—in 1932, when Medgar was nine and Charles was eleven—the brothers were sitting on the steps of the same courthouse amid a white crowd gathered for a Bilbo campaign speech. For the two boys, it was entertainment in a small town that had very little. “We ignored all the nigger baiting,” Charles remembered later. “Northerners can’t appreciate a southern rascal. I always could.” Because Medgar and Charles were so young, they were not likely to encounter the kind of violent reaction that would almost certainly have met any black man daring to sit on the courthouse steps to listen to Bilbo’s rants. But Bilbo noticed them, and, pointing at them, he emphasized the necessity of maintaining white supremacy. “You see these two little niggers setting down here?—these two nigger boys right there will be asking for everything that is ours by right… . If you don’t keep them in their place, then someday they’ll be in Washington trying to represent you.”
The day before the 1946 primary, the unintentionally prescient Bilbo was back in Decatur, and in a familiar racist harangue in the town square he appealed to his white listeners to target black registered voters, even though they were very few in number: “The best way to keep a nigger from the polls on election day is to visit him the night before,” Bilbo said to a receptive crowd that understood exactly what he meant.
No one in Newton County was likely to be foolish enough to show up at the Evers’s home attempting to frighten and intimidate anyone. The boys’ father, James, was sometimes called “Crazy Jim” Evers. Undaunted by white-supremacist authority, he would not hesitate to shoot any attacker regardless of race. But elsewhere in town—particularly around the locus of white power that was the courthouse—the Evers family had to be much more careful, although on more than one occasion James Evers had refused to step aside to let whites walking toward him pass.
The effects of Bilbo’s encouragement were plain to see when Medgar, Charles, and four of their friends—all of them World War II veterans—went to the courthouse to vote on July 2. They found awaiting them a crowd of “rednecks … holding shotguns, rifles, and pistols,” recalled Charles Evers. But the white men standing guard at the courthouse may not have realized that at least one of the six men before them had come prepared for a fight.
Charles Evers would later claim that he was carrying a pistol and a switchblade knife. The county sheriff was on the scene watching as the two groups eyed each other, but he said nothing and did nothing, so Charles told Medgar he intended to try to enter the Courthouse and vote. “I meant to die fighting for Negro rights,” he later wrote. “The ‘Klukkers’ [Ku Klux Klansmen] were cowards. They liked defending white rights but they didn’t want to die doing it.”
Medgar, who was always less hot-tempered than his older brother, decided that it was not worth the risk and that they should leave. “We’ll get them next time,” he told his brother. Charles let Medgar lead him away. “I’d stopped guarding my life,” he recalled, “but Medgar guarded it for me.” Still, Charles’s weapon would come in handy. Some of the whites who had been at the courthouse followed the group home and continued to threaten them. “We pulled our guns… . They turned heel and ran,” Charles wrote.
Medgar told a slightly different story and the two stories help show the differences between the two brothers. According to Medgar, the six had walked to the courthouse and did actually enter it, but armed white men surged around them, so they split up and returned home. They regrouped and drove back to the courthouse with guns hidden in the car. They left the weapons in the car and attempted to walk into the polling place but were once again blocked by a white mob. “We decided not to pursue it,” said Medgar later without elaborating. The group of veterans left the courthouse. They were followed by some of the whites, who waved guns from their cars. But when the Evers group showed their own weapons, the whites stopped following them.
Like many black men returning home after World War II, the Evers brothers and their friends had resolved not to be intimidated or pushed around and not to submit to the old, familiar restrictions and oppressions ordained by white supremacy. And though Charles and Medgar did not use their guns or their military training on primary day in 1946, many veterans were willing to do so when they felt it necessary and practical. “Fighting World War II woke up a lot of us,” says Charles Evers. “We had to ask ourselves … Why were we second class citizens?”
Men like the Evers brothers would prove vitally important to the Freedom Movement in the 1960s. And while black–white shootouts were by no means common in the postwar South, the threat that they might occur increased markedly with the return of black veterans. Indeed, it became apparent almost immediately at the end of the war that the region was on the cusp of change largely because, more than any other group within the black community, veterans were the least accepting of white supremacy. They were dangerous. White power recognized that they were dangerous. And this is where the modern civil rights movement truly begins.
Mississippi native Amzie Moore exemplifies the link between World War II veterans and the modern movement. More than any single person, Moore would be responsible for SNCC’s presence in Mississippi and its movement into grassroots organizing for voting rights. He was drafted in 1942, and despite the discrimination and segregation he encountered at every posting, his army service changed him. As he entered a new world far removed from the Mississippi he had grown up in, his experiences began opening his mind, and he found himself thinking in ways he never had before. “For a long time I had the idea that a man with white skin was superior because it appeared to me that he had everything,” he recalled. “And I figured if God would justify the white man having everything, that God had put him in a position to be the best.” His military service and the travel it entailed radically changed this outlook. “You can leave Calcutta, you can leave Egypt; you can go down the Red Sea through the Suez Canal; you can hit the Indian Ocean, you can go up the Gulf of Said [Port Said, Egypt]… . You going to find black people all the way over,” Moore observed. “You go for miles and miles and that’s what you’re going to see.” Amzie Moore’s wartime travels led him to conclude that European civilization had been lifted from barbarism largely by the achievements of much earlier and superior civilizations, such as that of Egypt. He was stunned: “All civilization was black… . And I was so surprised. And since then, I have not had [an inferiority] complex.” Before being discharged, Moore joined the NAACP.
Back home in Cleveland, Mississippi, after the war, Moore saw that conditions for black people had not improved. The city’s white residents had even organized a home guard to protect white women from the black veterans supposedly lusting fo
r them, and there was an upsurge in murderous antiblack terrorism. Despite his newly expanded black consciousness, however, Moore did not organize protest or resistance. Instead, he planned to get rich. He got a job at the post office where he had worked before the war, built a brick house, and—with a loan from Standard Life Insurance Company—opened a service station with a small café attached. His wife operated a beauty salon on the premises.
Then one day Moore visited a black family living on a cotton plantation not far from his home. He found fourteen “half-naked children” without beds, and the family was burning cotton stalks in an old metal barrel to keep warm. They had, Moore recalled, “no food.” Moore too had grown up on a Mississippi plantation. “I’d been hungry in my life… . And I could tell how a hungry child felt, because I knew how I felt. Just looking at that I think really changed my whole outlook on life. I kinda figured it was a sin to think in terms of trying to get rich in view of what I’d seen.”
After that visit, Moore redoubled his commitment to the NAACP. In 1955 he was elected president of the organization’s Cleveland branch. His selection surprised him; he had not even been present at the meeting when the vote was held. Later, he became vice president of the State Conference of NAACP branches. He was, in 1960, the first black Mississippian adult civil rights leader to embrace SNCC, a student-led organization founded that year with the assistance of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s SCLC.
This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed Page 11
