Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (54 page)

Segregationists and assimilationists still found ways to adapt dual-evolution theory to suit their ideas about Black people. Segregationists could argue that African populations contained the lowest frequencies of “good” genes. Assimilationists could argue that European populations had created the most complex and sophisticated societies, and were the most culturally evolved populations. Dobzhansky and Montagu ended up dethroning the eugenicists in science but enthroning new racist ideas, as reflected in the globally reported United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Statements on Race in 1950 and 1951.
¹¹

UNESCO officials had assembled in 1950 an international dream team of scholars in Paris to draw up the final rebuttal to Nazism and eugenicists worldwide. Virtually all of the scholars, including Montagu, Dobzhansky, E. Franklin Frazier, and Gunnar Myrdal, had expressed assimilationist ideas—proof that even as the scientific establishment recognized segregationist ideas as racist, they still ensured that assimilationism endured and dominated the racial discourse. While claiming that no human populations had any biological evolutionary achievements, these assimilationists spoke of the “cultural achievements” of certain human populations in the 1950 UNESCO Race Statement. And then, in 1951, geneticists and physical anthropologists figured, in their revised statement: “It is possible, though not proved, that some types of innate capacity for intellectual and emotional responses are commoner in one human group than in another.” Segregationist scholars set out to prove these innate racial differences in intelligence.
¹²

Even before the UNESCO statements appeared on front pages from New York City to Paris, President Harry S. Truman had taken the initiative to improve race relations in the United States. Racial
reform was a vital, though relatively unremembered facet of the “Truman Doctrine” that he presented to Congress on March 12, 1947. He branded the United States the leader of the free world and the Soviet Union the leader of the unfree world. “The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms,” Truman proclaimed. Branding itself the leader of the free world opened the United States up to criticism about its myriad unfree racial policies (not to mention its unfree class, gender, and sexual policies). The harsh treatment of non-White foreigners, the string of nasty postwar lynchings of returning soldiers, the anti-lynching activism of the internationally renowned artist Paul Robeson, NAACP charges of human rights violations before the United Nations—suddenly these unfree racial policies and actions became a liability. Protecting the freedom brand of the United States became more important for northern politicians than sectional unity and securing segregationists’ votes. In addition, exploiting foreign resources became more important for northern tycoons than exploiting southern resources. Cold War considerations and burgeoning activism suddenly forced civil rights onto the national agenda. But, of course, a recounting of these economic and political considerations was not the race relations story—or the history—that the Truman administration wanted consumed. Race relations, as Gunnar Myrdal wrote, were moral problems in need of morally based, persuasive solutions.
¹³

In October 1947, Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights issued its 178-page report,
To Secure These Rights
. The commission praised Myrdal’s
An American Dilemma
, condemned the “moral dry rot” at the heart of America, and recommended civil rights legislation. “Our domestic civil rights shortcomings are a serious obstacle” in US foreign policy, the commission stated, using the now acting secretary of state Dean Acheson as a source. But Gallop pollsters found that only 6 percent of White Americans thought these rights should be secured immediately—only 6 percent, apparently, was antiracist in 1947.
¹⁴

On February 2, 1948, Truman urged Congress to implement the recommendations of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, regardless of the lack of support among White Americans. “[The]
position of the United States in the world today” made civil rights “especially urgent,” Truman stressed. The backlash was significant. One Texas representative kicked off his winning US Senate campaign by rallying 10,000 supporters in Austin to view Truman’s civil rights proposals as “a farce and a sham—an effort to set up a police state in the guise of liberty.” Lyndon Baines Johnson did not, however, join the “Dixiecrats” who bolted from the Democratic Party on account of Truman’s civil rights agenda. The Dixiecrats ran South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond for president on a segregationist platform that read eerily like South Africa’s apartheid Nationalist Party, which rose to power in 1948.
¹⁵

Thanks in part to the support of Black voters, President Truman defeated both Thurmond and the runaway favorite, Republican Thomas E. Dewey, in the election that year. In voting for him, Black voters and civil rights activists were especially pleased with Truman’s use of executive power in 1948 to desegregate the armed forces and the federal workforce. Civil rights activists had other reasons to be hopeful that year. Jackie Robinson desegregated Major League Baseball, and around the same time, the National Football League and the National Basketball Association were also desegregated. For decades thereafter, Black baseball, football, and basketball professionals were routinely steered into positions that took advantage of their so-called natural animal-like speed and strength (apparently, nonathletic Black folk were not really Black).
¹⁶

Civil rights activists were also pleased when Truman’s Justice Department filed a brief for
Shelley v. Kramer
. The case was decided on May 3, 1948, with the Supreme Court holding that the courts could not enforce all those Whites-only real estate covenants proliferating in northern cities to keep out migrants and stop housing desegregation. “The United States has been embarrassed in the conduct of foreign relations by acts of discrimination taking place in this country,” the Justice Department’s brief stated. It was the first time the US government had intervened in a case to vindicate Black civil rights. It would not be the last. Truman’s Justice Department filed similar briefs for other successful desegregation cases in higher education during
the 1940s and early 1950s, ever reminding the justices of the foreign implications of discrimination.
¹⁷

The
Shelley v. Kraemer
decision was hardly popular. In 1942, 84 percent of White Americans told pollsters they desired separate Black sections in their towns. They apparently had little problem with the overcrowded conditions in those Black neighborhoods. But the 1948 decision did galvanize the open housing movement—and open the floodgates of White opposition to desegregation—in cities all over the postwar United States. The open housing movement featured a motley collection of folks. There were upwardly mobile Blacks and antiracist housing activists struggling for better housing options. There were racist Blacks who hated living in neighborhoods with inferior Black folks and dreamed of living next to superior White folks. And there were assimilationists who believed that integrated neighborhoods could facilitate uplift suasion, improve race relations, and solve the nation’s racial problems. White real estate agents and speculators exploited everyone’s racist ideas through blockbusting—the practice of convincing White owners to sell their homes at a reduced price, out of the fear that property values were on the verge of a steep drop due to Blacks moving in, only to resell at above-market value to Black buyers eager for better housing stock. Real estate agents and speculators easily scared White owners about the consequences of Blacks moving in, warning of “an immediate rise in crime and violence . . . of vice, of prostitution, of gambling and dope,” as Detroit’s most famous anti-open-housing activist put it. White neighborhoods became interracial and ended up almost all Black, and the changing demographics from White to Black quickly led to worsening conceptions of the same neighborhood. (By the end of the twentieth century, the opposite was occurring as Whites “gentrified” Black urban neighborhoods. Black neighborhoods became interracial and eventually ended up almost all White, with the changing demographics from Black to White quickly leading to improved conceptions of the same neighborhood. Apparently, the sight of White people marked a good neighborhood, whereas the sight of Black people in the same place marked a bad one, thus demonstrating the power of racist ideas.)
¹⁸

When racist ideas and policies did not keep Blacks out, urban Whites sometimes turned to violence in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. However, most urban Whites preferred “flight over fight.” Real estate agents, speculators, and developers benefited, selling fleeing Whites new suburban homes. America experienced an unprecedented postwar boom in residential and new highway construction as White families moved to the suburbs and had to commute farther to their jobs. To buy new homes, Americans used wartime savings and the benefits of the GI Bill, passed in 1944. It was the most wide-ranging set of welfare benefits ever offered by the federal government in a single bill. More than 200,000 war veterans used the bill’s benefits to buy a farm or start a business; 5 million purchased new homes; and almost 10 million went to college. Between 1944 and 1971, federal spending for former soldiers in this “model welfare system” totaled over $95 billion. As with the New Deal welfare programs, however, Black veterans faced discrimination that reduced or denied them the benefits. Combined with the New Deal and suburban housing construction (in developments that found legal ways to keep Blacks out), the GI Bill gave birth to the White middle class and widened the economic gap between the races, a growing disparity racists blamed on poor Black fiscal habits.
¹⁹

While urban Black neighborhoods in postwar America became the national symbol of poverty and crime, the suburban White neighborhoods, containing the suburban White houses, wrapped by white picket fences, lodging happy White families, became the national symbol of prosperity and safety. All of the assimilationist chatter in the media, in science, and in popular culture hardly reined in the segregationist backlash to the open housing movement, but it did do wonders uniting historically oppressed European ethnic groups in White suburbia. Ethnic enclaves in cities transfigured into multiethnic suburbs, the land where the Italians, Jews, Irish, and other non-Nordics finally received the full privileges of Whiteness. “Neither religion nor ethnicity separated us at school or in the neighborhood,” remembered Karen Brodkin, a University of California at Los Angeles anthropologist whose Jewish family moved to Long Island, New York, in 1949.
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NAACP chapters lent their support to the open housing movement. But engaging in activism was like walking a tightrope in postwar America. In 1950, Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy started leading a witch hunt for “Communists,” meaning virtually anyone critical of the dominant ideas of the day, such as capitalism, America’s pro-colonial policy abroad, northern assimilation, and southern segregation. Walter White and his right-hand man Roy Wilkins had to keep the NAACP’s legal activism and uplift suasion carefully within the status quo of anti-communism and assimilation. “The Negro wants change in order that he may be brought in line with the American standard,” Wilkins wrote in
The Crisis
in December 1951. Meanwhile, antiracists and socialists, and certainly antiracist socialists, were being threatened, fired, arrested, and jailed on trumped-up charges. An eighty-two-year-old Du Bois was arrested (and exonerated) in 1951. The US State Department revoked Du Bois’s passport, as it did Paul Robeson’s, and attempted to silence the St. Louis–born Black dancer Josephine Baker in France, all to manage the freedom brand of the United States abroad.
²¹

But the State Department could not stop William Patterson, chairman of the short-lived Civil Rights Congress, from slipping into Geneva in 1951 and personally delivering a petition, entitled
We Charge Genocide
, to the United Nations Committee on Human Rights. Signed by Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Trinidadian journalist Claudia Jones (founder of England’s first Black newspaper), and almost one hundred others, the petition—and documentation of nearly five hundred brutal crimes against African Americans in the late 1940s—blasted the credibility of the self-identified leader of the free world. The true “test of the basic goals of a foreign policy is inherent in the manner in which a government treats its own nationals,” the antiracists boomed from Switzerland to Swaziland.
²²

Scurrying into damage control, the US State Department found some anti-communist, racist, unconditionally patriotic Blacks to go on speaking tours, such as Max Yergan, who became an outspoken defender of apartheid South Africa. In 1950 or 1951, a cadre of brilliant
propagandists in what became known as the United States Information Agency (USIA)—the US foreign public relations agency—drafted and circulated a pamphlet around the world entitled
The Negro in American Life
. The pamphlet acknowledged the past failings of slavery and racism and declared that there had been racial reconciliation and redemption, made possible, of course, by the power of American democracy. These branders of the New America ingeniously focused on the history of racial progress (and not the racist present) and on Black elites (and not the Black masses) as the standards of measurement for American race relations. The question was not whether America had eliminated racial disparities. That was deemed impossible—just as the elimination of slavery was once deemed impossible. The question was whether the Talented Tenth were experiencing less discrimination today than yesterday. “It is against this background that the progress which the Negro has made and the steps still needed for the full solutions of his problems must be measured,” the pamphlet read. Over the past fifty years, there had emerged more Black “large landowners,” successful businessmen, and college students. Activism had not driven this “tremendous pace” of racial progress, but uplift and media suasion,
The Negro in American Life
imagined, evoking the imagination of Gunnar Myrdal. While fifty years ago, “the majority of whites, northern and southern, were unabashed in their estimate of the Negro as an inferior,” the growing “number of educated Negroes, and their journalists and novelists, have made the white community keenly aware of the cruel injustice of prejudice.”
The Negro in American Life
declared to the world that “today, there is scarcely a community where that concept has not been drastically modified.”