An African American and Latinx History of the United States
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Racial capitalism produced cohorts of politicians and political institutions whose primary function was to keep wages low, to quash dissent, and to severely curtail the freedoms of African American and immigrant workers. Politicians who built their careers at the expense of Black and Brown labor became the leading political figures of the postwar period in Mississippi, Florida, and California. These guardians of inequality opposed every effort to reform the nation’s labor and civil rights laws. Simultaneously, they and their acolytes were the proponents of the Cold War’s military industrial complex, which drained the resources of the nation in a devastating new round of military interventions from Latin America to Southeast Asia. The republic that had spent much of its energy suppressing Black and Brown labor in the first one hundred twenty-five years of its existence carried forward the grim legacy of disenfranchisement into the twentieth century.
Regardless of these many setbacks, however, African American and Latinx workers continued striving to create a political and economic system that valued human rights and individual dignity above property rights and the power of employers’ organizations. The organizers who built the social movements of the Great Depression would soon link up with a new generation of activists in the 1960s to generate a revived struggle for dignity and justice on all fronts. First, however, as World War II wound down, a remarkable international conference in Mexico brought new hope to the American working class.
CHAPTER 7
EMANCIPATORY INTERNATIONALISM VS. THE AMERICAN CENTURY, 1945 TO 1960s
The writer Carl Hansberry traveled to Mexico in the winter of 1945 for the Pittsburgh Courier to cover the Inter-American Conference on Problems of War and Peace, convened at Chapultepec, a historic suburb of Mexico City. Delegates from twenty independent nations of North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean met to forge “further cooperative measures for the prosecution of the war to complete victory.”1 The Chapultepec Conference, as it would come to be known, was tasked with creating a plan furthering “the maintenance of peace and collective security” in the hemisphere after the end of World War II. Participants were also charged with discussing the “consideration of methods to develop such cooperation for the improvement of economic and social conditions of the peoples of the Americas, with a view to raising their standard of living.”2 The Mexican muralist Diego Rivera sketched scenes from the conference’s daily proceedings with a plan to create a series of murals on the subject of fostering hemispheric unity.3
The United States delegation steered the assembly to focus on security and trade matters.4 However, nations such as Nicaragua, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic understood from decades of hard experience what the United States meant by “security.” As if to confirm their suspicions, Senator Tom Connally of Texas, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, claimed that the assembly was creating a new Monroe Doctrine, backed by all the Americas instead of just the United States. Connally asserted that this new Monroe Doctrine would be “based on the president’s war powers to order U.S. armed forced anywhere they may be needed to promote the United Nations war effort.”5
Haiti dropped a bombshell on US plans to dominate the conference. The Haitian delegates submitted a resolution that said the security of the hemisphere hinged on the equality of nations as well as the equality of people in those nations. This resolution stunned the delegates, and it was not covered in any mainstream media outlet in the United States. Carl Hansberry excitedly shared the exact language of the Haitian resolution in full with his Pittsburgh Courier readers. It read:
Whereas the practice of racial discrimination is not only contrary to the positive reports and conclusions of scientists, but is also in formal contradiction of the Christian doctrine on which our civilization is based;
Whereas the Nazi doctrines that submerged humanity into the most terrible catastrophe of all time came for the most part from the Nazis’ pernicious and pretended notions of the inequality of races;
Whereas world peace cannot be established except on the valid idea that all men, regardless of their race, nationality or religion, be accepted with full equality;
Therefore, the Conference on Problems of War and Peace resolves to recommend to the governments of the American Republics the complete abolition of all political regulations or actions which make possible discriminations against people, based upon race, religion or nationality.6
Haiti had once again struck a blow for liberty. Delegates built on Haiti’s bold intervention to craft a more democratic vision of postwar possibilities. Ezequiel Padilla, Mexico’s secretary of foreign affairs—who had been elected president of the Chapultepec Conference by acclamation—demanded an end to “race hatred” in the Americas. The Cleveland Call and Post reported that Mexico “presented the resolution suggesting the abolition by the American States of ‘sex discrimination that may still exist’ and proposed that each government allocate funds annually for ‘the financing of the Inter-American Committee of Women in the same manner as it is being done for the other institutions of the Pan American Union.’”7 African American newspapers reported that the United States was working behind the scenes to put a damper on discussions of global inequality. For example, the Amsterdam News wrote,
It is significant that very little if anything has appeared in the newspapers of the United States in connection with the Haitian resolution against discrimination. What is more, The Amsterdam News, in an attempt to get an official view of the resolution and to find out what has been done with it, telegraphed Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., Nelson Rockefeller, Assistant Secretary of State, in charge of Latin-American affairs, and the redoubtable Tom Connally, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but up to press time, no replies had been received.8
Even though the conference’s final declarations on human rights were not as strongly worded as the original Haitian offering (the final wording was “the equality of rights and opportunities for all men, regardless of race or religion”), the prominent African American writer Albert L. Hinton thought that “the Act of Chapultepec drawn up at the recent Inter-American Conference of Foreign Ministers held in Mexico City, is an historic document judged by any standards. But because it contains among other things, a declaration against racial discrimination and persecution of minority groups, it is destined to go down in history as one of the greatest international peace documents of all time.”9 To Hinton, the Act of Chapultepec signaled the death knell of Jim Crow: “The state of South Carolina could do much worse than study the Act of Chapultepec in the light of the Palmetto State’s action a year ago in abolishing all of its primary laws with the avowed purpose of preventing Negro South Carolinians from voting.”10 Hinton argued that the act essentially outlawed recent efforts to bolster segregated education in Alabama, writing,
And finally, Uncle Sam, who played such a major role in drafting the Act of Chapultepec, might scrutinize the Act more closely and then ask himself why it is that in this supposed land of plenty and opportunity there are still four-million farm families ill-housed, 850,000 rural homes with no toilet facilities, many rural counties with only one physician for each 10,000 of its population, and 1,400 of America’s 3070 counties, most of them rural, with no full-time health department. . . . The Act of Chapultepec document “which may conceivably become the great charter of equality and human freedom” for the black and brown peoples of the Western hemisphere, is international in character, but in a very real sense, powerfully implemented by the declaration against racial discrimination, it might very well serve as a charter or code of conduct for a certain section of the U.S.A.11
The Act of Chapultepec now carried with it the force of law in the United States.12 Harold Preece, a Texan, a socialist, and a frequent contributor to African American newspapers, was jubilant. “I’m not going overboard when I agree with leading diplomats in Mexico City interpreting the Chapultepec declaration for inter-American cooperation and defense as ‘the greatest joint document of democra
tic principles and hemispheric unity ever signed by the American nation.’”13 Preece stated that Chapultepec “means that Negroid nations like Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Brazil, stand on the same plane with predominantly white nations like the United States and Chile.” Most important, Preece asserted, was that the Act of Chapultepec slammed the legal brakes on US military intervention in Latin America and threatened the power of government by American banks to control the people of the Global South:
It’s also a freeze bath for people like Mr. Henry Luce, publisher of Time Magazine, who spout eyewash about “the American Century” and who see the United States using the big stick to build a big empire of blood and cash. For the big stick “rared up” and hit us in the face when we used it by sending marines to suppress the Negro peoples of Haiti and Santo Domingo and to chase the Negro-Indian Nicaraguan guerrillas who helped head off the American Century under the leadership of that Indian patriot of the Americas, General Sandino.
This time, the big stick is going to be wielded by the peoples of the Americas against all those who would disturb the peace and prosperity of the Americas.14
PUTTING CHAPULTEPEC TO WORK
African American, Latinx, and Jewish organizations seized on the domestic and foreign policy potential of the Act of Chapultepec. After a courageous group of Mexican American parents organized in Orange County, California, to challenge the inferior schooling their children were receiving, the American Jewish Congress filed a brief on behalf of the parents in the Supreme Court case, Méndez v. Westminster.15 Counsel for the plaintiffs included Pauli Murray and Thurgood Marshall. The parents’ attorneys argued that the Act of Chapultepec and the United Nations Charter—promulgated in 1945—required signatory nations to outlaw “not only discrimination but also its potential causes. This is certainly broad enough to cover segregation.”16 Katharine F. Lenroot, head of the Children’s Bureau of the Department of Labor, concurred, and shared her analysis of the treaty with the National Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers, which was held in Washington, DC, also in 1945. Lenroot argued that “the Chapultepec Conference . . . reaffirmed the principle [of] equality of rights and opportunities for all men, regardless of race or religion, a principle recognized by all American states.”17
Senator Dennis Chavez of New Mexico, the first Mexican American elected to the US Senate, used the Act of Chapultepec to advocate for the creation of a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission to protect the civil rights of workers and to end discrimination on the job. The original Fair Employment Practices Commission was the fruit of the march on Washington threatened by Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids in 1941. Now the FEPC was endangered especially by Southern Democrats, who looked to re-entrench Jim Crow labor relations at the end of the war. Working in tandem with the New York civil rights organizer Anna Arnold Hedgeman, Chavez argued that a permanent FEPC would demonstrate to the nations of the hemisphere that the United States was serious about democracy: “Our Latin neighbors have had every reason to question the motives of our Government, and the Chapultepec agreement goes a long way toward the cherished goal of honest inter-American relations.”18 With Hedgeman as secretary of the National Council for a Permanent FEPC, Chavez worked with some of the nation’s best community organizers, including the Arkansas NAACP leaders Daisy Bates and her husband, L. C. Bates. However, the National Council also faced powerful opposition in Washington from what the Black press called the “Bilbo-Eastman filibusters,” referring to Mississippi’s senatorial guardians of Jim Crow, Theodore G. Bilbo and James Oliver Eastland.19
A legal team headed by Charles Hamilton Houston brought the Act of Chapultepec to the United States Supreme Court in 1948 during oral arguments in the Shelley v. Kraemer restrictive racial covenant cases. Earlier, in his capacity as vice president of the American Council of Race Relations, Houston had cited the Act of Chapultepec and the 1945 United Nations Charter as “international agreements [that] obligate our government to work to eliminate all racial discrimination.”20 At the Shelley v. Kraemer hearings, one of Houston’s co-counsels, Herman Willer, argued that “the nation’s treaties, the United Nations Charter and the Act of Chapultepec, have established a public policy of equal treatment for all and have made the covenants void.”21
One pathway to the origins of the modern civil rights movement, as well as to the Chicano/a movement, runs straight through Chapultepec, Mexico. The impetus that Haitian delegates gave to civil rights and labor struggles in the United States at the Chapultepec Conference was immediately seized upon by African American and Mexican American organizers. These activists could exploit the democratic openings created at the Inter-American Conference on Problems of War and Peace because they recognized the centuries-old currents of freedom that flowed from nations such as Haiti and Mexico. While John Adams and generations of elite leaders in the United States had depicted the Haitian and Mexican people as backward, visionaries such as Dennis Chavez, Harold Preece, and Carl Hansberry were the inheritors of the traditions of emancipatory internationalism that had led them to look to the Global South for lessons on liberation.
Soon, however, these openings began narrowing. Even though restrictive covenants and segregated schools for Mexican American schoolchildren were abolished in law (if not in actual practice), Chavez’s multiracial FEPC crusade failed, destroyed by Sunbelt employers’ advocates in Congress.22 In 1946, soon after writing a piece critical of the Ku Klux Klan, Harold Preece was driven out of the South by white terrorists.23 And, after years of fighting racial discrimination in Chicago, Carl Hansberry’s experiences at Chapultepec convinced him that his family’s future was in Mexico, but he died in 1946, before he could move his family there. His daughter, the celebrated playwright Lorraine Hansberry, stated: “American racism helped kill him.” It is possible to glimpse a vision of her father’s dreams in her 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun.24
The United States rejected Haiti’s vision of the equality of nations and privileged its own definition of “national security,” ultimately ensuring that chaos, violence, and genocide would become the fate of millions.25 Militarism and political manipulation in the service of Washington-directed capitalism were the preferred tools of US foreign policy in Latin America in the twentieth century.26
In 1954, the New York Times warned hysterically that “Communists might ultimately take over Guatemala and use it as a base to infiltrate other Latin nations and the vital Panama Canal zone.”27 In the same year, the United States engineered a bloody coup against President Jacobo Árbenz, even as it flooded the region with arms shipments to US-friendly regimes in Honduras and Nicaragua.28 In reality, the historian Greg Grandin writes, Guatemala’s leaders “were trying to implement a New-Deal-style economic program to modernize and humanize Guatemala’s brutal plantation economy.”29 Árbenz’s only crime, writes Grandin, was “to expropriate, with full compensation, uncultivated United Fruit Company land and legalize the Communist Party—both unacceptable acts from Washington’s early-1950s vantage point.”30 African Americans responded to the newest wave of US invasions in Latin America in much the same way that they had reacted to imperialism between the 1820s and 1920s.31 In a letter to the Pittsburgh Courier that criticized the US-sponsored coup in Guatemala, Mack Nance of Nogales, Arizona, stated,
For an individual or group of individuals to imply that we, the people of the USA[,] do not seek to dominate or to extend our authority over others, is to ignore the very history of the country in which we reside, resulting in prevarication, evasiveness, or intentional falsehoods. From the very birth of our country, we have sought to extend our authority over others. For example, we need only point to our great Western states, snatched from the Indians; the Mexican War; Puerto Rico, the Hawaiian Islands, Guam, the Philippines, Nicaragua, and Guatemala.32
Ralph Matthews, a Cleveland Call and Post columnist, launched a devastatingly sarcastic attack on US crimes in Guatemala.
This new government, headed by a very
wicked man by the name of Jacob Arbenz, set out to confiscate the land not being cultivated by the Boston people, and divided it up among the peons who had never owned a foot of earth in all their lives or the lives of their fathers before them. He compounded this rascality by offering to pay the Boston people not what the land was actually worth, but the value the owners themselves had place[d] upon it when paying taxes to the Guatemalan government. This was no way to treat the stockholders. By encouraging the formation of labor unions, [Arbenz] satanically and with malice aforethought, forced the bleeding company to pay excessive wages which increased things to the point where workers who formerly earned the tidy sum of around $185 a year were now carrying home as much as a thousand dollars per annum.33
Matthews observed that the United States government could not tolerate the specter of “workers who had never earned more than 85 cents a day . . . now carrying home as much as a buck and a half. This was communist infiltration pure and simple and threatened the peace of the Americas and the world. Anyone with a grain of sense could see that this evil state of affairs could not be tolerated in the Western hemisphere.”34
African Americans would continue to express their dissent against coups and military interventions from Guatemala to Vietnam as well as the US-sponsored “dirty wars” in Central America in the 1980s. During her keynote address at the 1986 Black Women Writers in the Diaspora Conference, Black feminist Audre Lorde asked audience members to understand: “Sisterhood and Survival demands that I ask myself as an African American, what does it mean to be a citizen of the most powerful country on earth? And we are that. What does it mean to be a citizen of a country that stands upon the wrong side of every liberation struggle on this earth? Let that sink in for a moment.”35