Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (4 page)

By 1944 the protests of blacks—for Randolph and other leaders military desegregation was a top priority—had a modest effect on the armed services. The navy slowly moved toward integrated units. The army, at a loss for manpower during the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, pressed blacks into combat, with positive results. But segregation persisted in the army, and racial tensions became intense. "My God! My God!" army chief of staff General George Marshall exclaimed, "I don't know what to do about this race question in the Army." He added, "I tell you frankly, it is the worst thing we have to deal with. . . . We are getting a situation on our hands that may explode right in our faces."
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Though Marshall did nothing about the situation, he correctly assessed the more militant mood. A black Alabama corporal explained in 1945, "I spent four years in the Army to free a bunch of Dutchmen and Frenchmen, and I'm hanged if I'm going to let the Alabama version of the Germans kick me around when I get home. No sirreee-bob! I went into the Army a nigger; I'm comin' out a
man
."
³⁴

Expectations such as these unavoidably sharpened racial conflict in the postwar South, where more than two-thirds of American Negroes still lived—mass migrations notwithstanding—in the late 1940s. There, little had changed since the late nineteenth century. Most southern blacks—at least 70 percent—lived in poverty in 1945.
³⁵
Virtually everything remained segregated: schools, churches, parks, beaches, buses, trains, waiting rooms, restaurants, hotels, rest rooms, drinking fountains, and other public accommodations. All but a few white southerners believed theirs was the superior race, with a natural right to supremacy.
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Mississippi senator James Eastland, later to become an influential national spokesman for white racism, expressed this view without embarrassment in a wartime speech against the FEPC: "What the people of this country must realize is that the white race is a superior race, and the Negro race is an inferior race."
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Myrdal conceded that whites in the South "do not see the handwriting on the wall. They do not study the impending changes; they live again in the pathetic illusion that the matter is settled. They do not care to have any constructive policies to meet the trends."
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Racist feelings promoted institutional discrimination and a virtual totality of white power. Deep South states in the early 1940s admitted almost no black lawyers, judges, or policemen. Notwithstanding the Supreme Court decision against white primaries, Negroes in the lower South faced a range of ruses and outrages—poll taxes, impossibly designed "literacy" tests, violent intimidation—that deprived them of any voice in politics. The emblem of the Democratic party in Alabama (Republicans did not matter) was a lusty gamecock under a scroll that read
WHITE SUPREMACY
.
³⁹

Resting very close to the surface of these white concerns, especially in the South, were complicated feelings about sex between the races. There was irony here, of course, for white men continued, as they had throughout American history, to demand sexual favors from economically and legally defenseless black women. Miscegenation was the great open secret of sexual life in the South.
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But state laws criminalized interracial sex as well as racially mixed marriages. (Until 1956 Hollywood's Motion Picture Code forbade interracial marriage to be shown; no black man embraced a white woman on screen until 1957.)
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And woe to black men in the South who seemed too friendly with white women. By 1945 whites less often retaliated against such behavior by lynching—there were nineteen reported lynchings of Negroes between 1940 and 1944, compared to seventy-seven between 1930 and 1934 and forty-two between 1935 and 1939—but all black American men knew that white violence was an ever-present possibility following any kind of "uppity" behavior, no matter how exaggerated by whites, especially if it was thought to threaten the supposed purity of southern white womanhood. Southern blacks who escaped violence, only to be brought to trial for such alleged offenses, faced all-white judges and juries and had virtually no possibility of justice.

Some young black men, often led by veterans, dared to challenge these patterns of racial discrimination in the South in the immediate postwar years. Rustin and others in the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a pacifist group dedicated to racial justice, embarked on highly dangerous "freedom rides" in the Upper South in 1947 to test the Supreme Court's decision against segregation in interstate travel. Other blacks came home, still in uniform, and tried to register to vote. Medgar Evers sought to cast his ballot in Mississippi, even though local whites said they would shoot him if he tried. In parts of the Upper South these efforts paid modest dividends. In most places, however, whites countered with threats or with violence. Rustin was arrested, jailed, and sent to work in a chain gang. Evers and four others were driven away by whites wielding pistols. Whites in 1946 killed three blacks—and two of their wives—who sought to vote in Georgia. Eugene Talmadge won his race for governor in Georgia at that time by bragging that "no Negro will vote in Georgia for the next four years."
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As later events were to demonstrate, this kind of crackdown on Negro protest in the South by no means dampened the determination of blacks to struggle against institutionalized discrimination. On the contrary, many continued to resist: clamoring to register, fighting discrimination in employment, seeking to join unions, challenging segregation. Moreover, southern blacks continued in these postwar years to build up their own institutions—schools, churches, community organizations—that served as bases for black self-pride and solidarity. All-black schools, for instance, had already succeeded in cutting illiteracy among Negroes, from 70 percent in 1880 to 31 percent in 1910 to around 11 percent in 1945.
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But these efforts did not begin to temper the intransigence of most southern whites during and after World War II. Refusing to bend, the whites drove black protests below the surface in the South: in 1950, as in 1940, white supremacy seemed secure in Dixie.

Black protest in the North was by contrast much more open in the late 1940s. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), founded in 1942, led "sit-ins" at Chicago restaurants as early as 1943. Activists were especially militant at the local level, primarily in areas where large numbers of blacks congregated during the mass migrations of the era. Between 1945 and 1951, eleven states and twenty-eight cities enacted laws establishing Fair Employment Practices Commissions, and eighteen states approved legislation calling for the end of racial discrimination in public accommodations.
⁴⁴
The NAACP, CORE, and Urban League succeeded in 1947 in forcing the
Chicago Tribune
to cease its practice of negative "race labeling" in stories about black activities, including crime. At the same time, Chicago adopted an ordinance outlawing the publication of "hate" literature.
⁴⁵
A year later the Supreme Court, in a decision hailed by civil rights leaders, ruled that "restrictive covenants," private pacts used by whites to keep blacks (or other "undesirables") out of residential neighborhoods, were not legally enforceable in the courts.
⁴⁶

The battle against restrictive covenants revealed a key fact about post-World War II racial conflicts in the North: many such fights centered on the efforts of blacks, crowding into northern cities in record numbers, to find decent housing. Negroes faced not only the covenants but also the systematic adoption by lending institutions of "red-lining," a practice that blocked off large areas of the cities from blacks seeking home mortgages. Blacks also confronted the racist policies of developers, many of whom refused to sell to blacks, and of city officials, who tightened zoning restrictions so as to limit the building of low-cost housing. Those few builders who sought to construct such housing ordinarily demanded public subsidies—construction, they said, would otherwise not pay—only to be rebuffed by local officials.

The federal government played a key role in these conflicts over housing. Some federal officials, notably Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, who exercised control over the housing division of the Public Works Administration until 1946, tried to promote relatively liberal policies concerning race relations. But even Ickes, confronting widespread hostility against the movement of blacks to white neighborhoods, dared not support the building of public housing projects open to blacks in white areas. Instead, he followed a so-called neighborhood composition rule, which approved public housing for Negroes only in areas that were already predominantly black.
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When such projects were constructed, they led to further crowding in these areas. Meanwhile, the Federal Housing Adminstration, which distributed billions of dollars in low-cost mortgage loans in the late 1940s, thereby underwriting much of the suburban expansion of the era, openly screened out applicants according to its assessment of people who were "risks." These were mainly blacks, Jews, or other "unharmonious racial or nationality groups." In so doing it enshrined residential segregation as a public policy of the United States government.

All these policies helped to hasten the growth of large, institutional ghettos—cities within the central city—in some of the bigger urban areas of the North after 1945. Few such ghettos had existed before then. These areas became increasingly crowded, especially by contrast to white areas of these cities. In Chicago the number of white people declined slightly, by 0.1 percent between 1940 and 1950, yet the number of dwelling units occupied by whites increased by 9.4 percent. During the same years the number of black people in Chicago, a mecca for southern migrants, increased by 80.5 percent, but they occupied only 72.3 percent more dwelling units than in 1940. The percentage of non-whites in "overcrowded" accommodations (defined as more than 1.5 people per room) grew during that time from 19 percent to 24 percent. The number of dwelling units without private bath facilities increased by 36,248. Black residents complained of huge invasions of rats. Fires in Negro areas of Chicago killed 180 slum dwellers, including sixty-three children, between 1947 and 1953. For the dubious privilege of living in such crowded areas, blacks in Chicago, lacking market options, faced rents ranging between 10 and 25 percent higher than those paid by whites for comparable shelter.
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The Negro writer Ann Petry wrote a novel,
The Street
(1946), that described this sort of living. It focused on West 116th Street in Harlem, a grim place that blighted the experiences of Lutie Johnson, a single, black, working mother, and of Bub, her eight-year-old son. Children, keys strung around their necks, walked home to empty apartments and waited until their parents—too poor to afford a sitter—got home after work. Men with bottles of liquor in brown paper bags loitered about the stoops, waiting to prey on the unwary. "The men stood around and the women worked," Petry wrote.

The men left the women and the women went on working and the kids were left alone. The kids burned lights all night because they were alone in small, dark rooms, and they were afraid. Alone. Always alone. . . . They should have been playing in wide stretches of green park and instead they were in the street. And the street reached out and sucked them up.
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While blacks crowded into ghettos, whites found ample space in the mushrooming suburbs. In Chicago, 77 percent of home-building between 1945 and 1960 took place in suburban areas. As of 1960 only 2.9 percent of people in these suburbs were black, roughly the same percentage as had lived in Chicago suburbs in 1940. "White flight," indeed, was rendering restrictive covenants unnecessary even before the Supreme Court decision in 1948. Many white urban residents, anxious to escape the influx of blacks, sold their houses to blacks and—racial covenant or no—took off for the suburbs. This process led to creation of a few "salt-and-pepper" areas of racial mixing, but neighborhood desegregation rarely lasted for long. In some places realtors engaged in "block-busting," warning whites in adjacent neighborhoods of the coming black "invasion." Fearful whites then sold in droves at market-bottom prices to the realtors, who cut the houses into smaller and smaller units and charged high rents for what soon became dilapidated slum housing. The neighborhood transformation was almost always rapid.

Some working-class whites, of course, could not afford to move. Many of these people lived in closely knit, ethnically homogeneous neighborhoods where ownership of property was both a treasured value and a primary asset.
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They could not—would not—leave. They banded together to preserve the state of their neighborhood, relying less on covenants—a middle-class ploy—than on direct action. The result was what one careful study has called an "era of hidden violence" and of "chronic urban guerilla warfare."
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In Detroit between 1945 and 1965, racially transient neighborhoods witnessed some 120 incidents of violence, featuring rock-throwing, cross-burnings, arson, and other attacks on property.
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In Chicago, which had the largest Negro population of any American city, racially motivated bombing or arson disturbed the peace every twenty days during the late 1940s. Whites also staged large-scale "housing riots" to push blacks away from their neighborhoods. One of these, in Cicero near Chicago, drew a looting and burning mob of between 2,000 and 5,000—to drive one black family out of an apartment. Only the police and 450 National Guardsmen brought an end to the violence. Another Chicago riot, in 1947, aimed to stop blacks from getting space in heretofore white public housing. It attracted 1,500 to 5,000 whites who assaulted blacks, injuring thirty-five. This riot required the intervention of 1,000 policemen, who stopped the trouble after three days of mayhem. In both cases blacks got the message; it was impossible not to.