Penguin History of the United States of America (117 page)

Then the Second World War transformed the position and prospects of black Americans, just as the First World War had transformed the prospects of the South.

The new conflict, to be sure, also carried on the work of the first. Once more, army camps sprouted everywhere in the South. So did military airfields. Some $4,500,000,000 was spent on war plants in the section, raising its industrial capacity by 40 per cent or so; among the longterm effects were the creation of a pool of skilled workers, another of local capital and yet another of trained managers. Once more the South demonstrated its attractions as a field of investment, and financiers and industrialists took note. There was a renewed rush from the land, a renewed burst of urban growth (bringing many acute problems with it); yet times had never been so good on the farms. The new cities and factories could absorb all that the land could produce. With the return of good times came an acceleration of the reviving conservatism of the farmers: they supported the conservative lobby, the Farm Bureau, ever more enthusiastically, and actively encouraged the dismantling of the Farm Security Administration, which had tried to
help tenant farmers and sharecroppers. Not that this was too tragic a development: the tenants and sharecroppers were already streaming to the city and the better life (paid for by wartime jobs) that it promised.

What Torified the whites radicalized the blacks, and they made substantial gains in both military and civilian life, though not without anguish. In the services they quickly discovered that they were being treated as second-class citizens, and were equally quick to resent it. Northern blacks, called up in large numbers, found themselves at training-camps in the rural South where these second- or third-generation city-dwellers, these soldiers of freedom (many had joined up with great enthusiasm to fight Hitler) found themselves treated as they never had been in their lives before – treated as their Southern kin were. The contempt, the brutality, the injustice of white supremacy made themselves felt every day. What was particularly hard to bear was the sight of Nazi prisoners of war enjoying facilities, such as railway restaurants and dining-cars, which black American soldiers were forbidden to enter. Nor did these Northerners appreciate segregated quarters within the camps, or segregated everything in nearby towns. Inevitably there was trouble: fights, riots and one full-scale mutiny. The high command came badly out of the story.
³
Not only was segregation in the army preserved, but black units were denied equal opportunity to shine in war: all too often they were given poor training, poor equipment, and were sent to the least promising parts of the battlefield. In spite of this many individual blacks and many black units performed heroically and more than vindicated their claim to equal rights as American soldiers. But the only leading American general who seemed to understand and accept the idea was George Patton, a hot-headed, brilliant commander who welcomed the 761st ‘Black Panther’ Tank Battalion to his army in Normandy in 1944 in a speech that endured among many veterans’ treasured memories:

Men, you are the first Negro tankers ever to fight in the American army. I would never have asked for you if you were not good. I have nothing but the best in my army. I don’t care what color you are as long as you go up there and kill those Kraut sons-of-bitches. Everyone has their eyes on you and are expecting great things from you. Most of all, your race is looking forward to your success. Don’t let them down, and, damn you, don’t let me down!

If you want me you can always find me in the lead tank.

But even an officer corps dominated by men of Southern background and attitudes eventually had to accept that it had a wolf by the ears; in the mere interests of military efficiency concessions had to be made. Officer cadet schools were desegregated in 1940; blacks were admitted to the Marine Corps for the first time and, on an equal footing, to the navy; in the army
they were used in a combat role in all theatres (whereas in the First World War they had been confined to a support role, though not in the Civil War); finally, during the crisis of the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, when the Germans counter-attacked for the last time and for a few days carried all before them, black reinforcements were thrown in wherever they could be of most use and a measure of
de facto
desegregation at the fighting level occurred. It was followed up in January 1945 by the creation of the first formally integrated unit in the history of the army. The implications were plain, and in 1948 President Truman opened all jobs in the armed services to African-Americans and abolished the racial quota, according to which no more blacks would be accepted into uniform than there were, proportionately, in the total population. Finally, during the Korean War, the needs of the battlefield once more took a hand, and under the pressure of events the complete integration of the US army was at last achieved.

The impact of the Second World War on civilian blacks, was just as profound, though possibly less visibly dramatic. Progress was determined by two factors: the growing importance of black votes in Northern elections, especially in the great urban-industrial complexes, and by the manpower needs of the nation at war. As a matter of fact, black political leverage had been growing for some time: for example, in 1930 it was largely African-American pressure that defeated Herbert Hoover’s nomination of an unacceptable candidate to the Supreme Court. Ten years later A. Philip Randolph spectacularly demonstrated the new muscle of his people. After the outbreak of the war in Europe, the United States economy, as we have seen, moved over to the production of war materials and began to boom. Blacks found it exceedingly hard to get employment in the resuscitated factories. A colour bar unquestionably existed, and denunciations by the President, by the US Office of Education and by the National Defense Advisory Committee did little or nothing to improve matters. So in January 1941 Randolph announced that unless the bar was lifted he would lead a march of blacks on Washington on 1 July, a date unpleasantly near the glorious Fourth, and an event calculated to draw the greatest possible attention to the existence of racial oppression in the leading Western democracy: a propaganda gift to Goebbels. Nothing could have been more divisive or more likely to give a harried administration, struggling to control events as America drifted towards war, enormous political trouble. At the same time the blacks of America responded with huge enthusiasm. Leading New Dealers such as Mayor La Guardia and Mrs Roosevelt were sent to dissuade Randolph, but he was inexorable. At length the President gave in. After conferring with the black leader Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, under which every defence contract between the government and industry had to have a clause forbidding racial discrimination in employment, and a committee on fair employment practices was set up to make sure that the clauses were honoured. Randolph called off the march on Washington. But the tactic was not forgotten: Mr Randolph was to live to see it actually used.

Blacks, of course, welcomed 8802; the South did not. One Kentucky journalist tried to make it acceptable to Southern white opinion by arguing that it had nothing to do with racial segregation and by asserting comfortingly that ‘all the armies of the world, both of the United Nations and the Axis, could not force upon the South the abandonment of racial segregation’. Like the proposed march, this assertion afforded a glimpse of the future.

The fair employment order and the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) could not immediately end all prejudicial discrimination by employers; blacks still failed to get all the jobs they were entitled to, or, when employed, to secure earned promotion; but still they made huge advances, as the rapid rise of the black population of such cities as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and Detroit suggested. The NAACP went on with its war in the courts. It brought unceasing pressure to bear in the attempt to equalize educational opportunities for black and white children in the South, and in particular to equalize teachers’ salaries: after winning a crucial case in the Supreme Court,
Gaines
v.
Canada
(1938), in which chief Justice Hughes declared that, to be constitutional, ‘separate but equal’ facilities (as required by
Plessy
v.
Ferguson)
had to be truly equal, the NAACP was able to lobby so effectively that soon after the end of the war black schoolteachers’ salaries in the South had risen to 79 per cent of whites’.
Gaines
thus added appreciably to the cost of maintaining school segregation; it also marked the Supreme Court’s first step away from segregationist doctrine. Even more important was another NAACP-inspired decision,
Smith
v.
Allwright
(1944), in which the Court finally declared the white primary to be unconstitutional in any form. This decision did not of itself mean that Southern blacks would now be able to vote. It was only a first step, like
Gaines
. But first steps have to be taken.

These successes owed much to the transformation of the Supreme Court by appointments made during Roosevelt’s second and third terms, and even while they were being won blacks were still suffering outrageously at the hands of fellow-citizens. NAACP persistence in pursuing these cases was, however, a sign that blacks were even less willing than they had been after the First World War to endure bad treatment, at least in the North (and the black North, as whites were reminded in 1943, ‘has always been the tongue of the black South’). Matters came to a head in Detroit. The great automobile assembly lines had been turned over to the production of tanks, and the whole industry had greatly expanded: by the end of the war it was responsible for 20 per cent of all war production. The wide-open job market had allured many poor blacks as well as whites from the South (50,000 of the one sort, 450,000 of the other). Such an influx, only comparable to what had occurred at the height of the Great Migration and the Industrial Revolution, would in any circumstances have imposed enormous strains on social resources. All over America it proved difficult to house wartime workers, and shanty-towns, ‘new Hoovervilles’, inevitably grew up to accommodate them. Black and white immigrants were alike unused to
city and factory life; the white Southerners brought their traditional hostilities with them and acted upon them; rabblerousers were not lacking. At last, after incessant provocation, the blacks retaliated. On 20 June 1943, after a fist fight between a black man and a white, the races clashed violently all over the city. At length Roosevelt had to declare a state of emergency and send in federal troops to restore order. The trouble ended only after twenty-five blacks and nine whites had been killed, 800 people had been injured, and two million dollars worth of damage had been done to property (most of it belonging to blacks). It was a shocking and depressing affair, but in its way also signified progress: African-Americans had not submitted tamely to oppression, and the violence had dramatically advertised their grievances to the world.

So it can be argued that by the end of the war the blacks had discovered the three weapons with which, in the fifties and sixties, they were to achieve such striking victories: the imaginative use of political and economic pressure; the appeal to the courts and the Constitution; violence. In addition, wartime service and wartime mobility had not only widened black horizons, but made the blacks more conscious of their strength, and of the need for united action. But the immediate post-war period was not one in which these discoveries could be put to use. The majority of the people – the whites – were rejoicing in the return of peace and its opportunities, while in Congress the alliance of reactionaries was rising to the peak of its influence. Social statistics indicated that black folk were continuing to gain ground: black incomes were rising, more workers were skilled or semi-skilled, more were going to university and fewer were earning their living on the land. But such political momentum as the black cause retained was attributable to the actions of the new President. Harry Truman was not untouched by the prejudices of his native state, Missouri, but he was too intelligent and had too lively a sense of decency and justice to let them rule him. Besides, he knew the increasing importance of the black vote to the Democratic party and, above all, to the New Deal, which he was determined to carry to renewed victories. So as well as ordering the desegregation of the armed services he set up a new FEP C, using his executive authority (the wartime FEPC had lapsed after the return of peace, and filibustering Southern Senators made sure that Congress did not revive it on a statutory footing), he forbade the Federal Housing Administration to lend money to racially segregated building projects, and he opened vast numbers of civil service jobs to blacks. He also made various symbolic gestures, calculated to advertise the blacks’ cause and his own attachment to it: he proposed a civil rights Act, and appointed Dr Ralph Bunche to be American ambassador to the United Nations. Best of all, perhaps, by defying the Dixiecrats in 1948 and yet managing to get re-elected he showed that the power of the Solid South was waning at last, in the Democratic party and in the nation at large.

If the black vote was worth winning, it was worth competing for: in and after the 1952 election the Republicans were careful to show themselves
liberal on the race issue, and won some friends thereby. Eisenhower completed the desegregation of the armed services and followed Truman’s policy of making numerous black appointments. But if the African-Americans allowed their progress to wait on the actions of the federal government it would be very slow. So the NAACP stuck to its own line. It tried hard to get the federal courts to declare segregation in schools unconstitutional, and in 1954 it succeeded. In that year the Supreme Court overturned
Plessy
v.
Ferguson
at last. It had been whittling away at that notorious precedent ever since the
Gaines
case; now, under the leadership of the new Chief Justice, Earl Warren of California, a unanimous Court accepted the arguments of the NAACP that ‘separate but equal’ was a contradiction in terms, and in its decision in the case of
Brown
v.
Topeka Board of Education
,
⁴
after citing the Fourteenth Amendment, found for the plaintiff. Next year it followed up this finding with a decree that school desegregation should begin everywhere ‘with all deliberate speed’. In so doing it touched off a revolution.