The Jim Crow Laws and Racism in United States History (6 page)

Those who came north expecting a paradise, however, found themselves disappointed. They suffered in the workplace. Blacks were often the last hired and the first fired. They were given the most menial and low-paying tasks. Most labor unions, which courted European immigrants, closed their doors to black workers.

Blacks found that segregation was not confined to the South. “It was understood that there were certain restaurants downtown where you couldn’t eat,” said Chicago journalist Vernon Jarrett. “Clubs . . . had black entertainers, but the management told them to discourage their friends from watching them perform.”
⁹

Many blacks preferred to live apart from white people. Many, if not most whites, also wanted such segregation.

Recent arrivals from the South often got little sympathy from established black residents. Many of these longtime settlers were prosperous. They resented the coarse language, rough manners, and unrefined hygiene of the migrants. Some feared that the new neighbors would reflect badly on them with the white community.

Unofficial but very real boundaries separated the races. By law, Chicago beaches were integrated. In truth, there were “black” beaches and “white” ones. When some black swimmers accidentally drifted near a white beach in the summer of 1919, Chicago erupted in a massive race riot, which lasted more than two months. By the time the rioting stopped, at least fifteen whites and twenty-three blacks were dead. More than five hundred others were injured. It was a vivid reminder of the tensions the Great Migration was causing between whites and blacks as they competed for jobs, housing, and even recreation.

Even if the black migrants did not find paradise in the North, most could expect a better life than the one they left in the South. They could send their children to integrated schools. They received cash wages, which they could spend as they liked. If their employers displeased them, they could leave their jobs. They had opportunities beyond their wildest hopes. “I never even contemplated going into a public library in the South,” claimed Vernon Jarrett.
¹⁰

Most of all, the North offered the feeling that life could be better. Author Richard Wright explained, “The North symbolized to me all I had not felt and seen, it had no relation whatever to what actually existed. Yet by imagining a place where everything was possible, I kept hope alive in me.”
¹¹

Chapter 7

THE KEY TO INDEPENDENCE

African Americans knew that education was important. An educated person could make his or her own decisions. An educated farmer could total his accounts at the end of the planting season without relying on the white foremen. Education was the key to independence, and an independent black population was the last thing Southern whites wanted.

Education

Black education was virtually nonexistent in the South before the Civil War. Most African Americans were slaves. White masters felt slaves needed to know only how to do their jobs. Blacks learned survival skills: how to act humble, how to hide their real feelings when insulted, how to soothe the egos of white people.

Access to free public education was unknown until after the war. At that time, the Freedmen’s Bureau opened schools for blacks. More than four thousand such public schools appeared. Even after the bureau disbanded in 1872, many schools survived.

Blacks got their education wherever they could. Any available building might serve as a black school. Most schools lacked supplies such as books, pencils, blackboards, and maps. Schools were frequently overcrowded. Black teachers earned a fraction of what their white colleagues received. States often used funds aimed for black education in white schools. Thus, blacks were being taxed to educate whites.

Black children had shorter school years than white kids. Blacks usually did not start classes until the end of the cotton harvesting season. This could be any time from November to January. Classes ended in early spring, at the start of the planting season.

“The Right and Power of a State”

Educational inequalities existed, but not everyone was willing to accept them without a struggle. In most cases, courts sided with the white-controlled government, even when injustice was obvious.

One such case involved schools in Richmond, Virginia. The city had separate schools for white male, white female, and black students. When the black grammar school became overcrowded, school officials closed the black high school and moved the black elementary students there. All white schools remained open.

Black plaintiffs claimed that the white high schools should be closed as well. The case went to the Supreme Court. Its justices ruled that the states, not the federal government, should control education. The black plaintiffs lost the case.

A 1908 case involved a small college in eastern Kentucky. Berea College was a private Christian school that did not receive state funds. Nevertheless, the Kentucky government ruled that it had broken state laws by admitting both black and white students. Kentucky law said a college could admit both black and white students—if their classes were at least twenty-five miles from each other.

The college protested. The college claimed that, by denying students the ability to study together, the government was denying their freedom of religion. The Supreme Court did not agree. Because the college was incorporated in Kentucky, it had to obey Kentucky laws.

African Americans were not the only victims of educational discrimination. A Chinese-American girl named Martha Lin attempted to enter an all-white school in Mississippi. Her father was not fighting segregation; he just wanted the best possible education for his daughter. This case, too, failed in the United States Supreme Court. Chief Justice William Howard Taft wrote, “The right and power of a state to regulate the method of providing for the education of its youth at public expense is clear.”
¹

Progress in destroying Jim Crow education ranged from slow to nonexistent. Even African-American educator W.E.B. Du Bois suggested that blacks were better off improving black schools than trying to desegregate all-white ones.

Social Engineers

Charles Houston, along with two hundred thousand other African Americans, volunteered for military service in World War I. College-educated Houston soon became an officer. His rank, however, did not mean he got respect from his white fellow soldiers. Poor treatment from whites made him determined to fight for racial justice.

In 1929, Houston was named dean of the Howard University Law School. He took the lightly regarded law school and soon made it respectable. Houston once claimed, “a lawyer is either a social engineer or a parasite to society.”
²
He gathered some of the finest young black legal minds in the country, including a Baltimore native named Thurgood Marshall.

Houston joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) legal staff in 1934. Five years later, he started the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. The fund’s primary mission was “to render free legal aid to Negroes who suffer legal injustice because of their race or color and cannot afford to employ legal assistance.”
³
At first, the defense fund’s staff consisted of Thurgood Marshall and a clerk. It would soon record an impressive number of victories.

Marshall’s strategy was to start with cases with the best chance of victory in the courts. He would use these wins as precedents to argue in later cases. Marshall looked for cases in the border Southern states. He felt whites in those states were less hardened about segregation than in Deep South states such as Mississippi and Alabama. He went after cases involving unequal pay for teachers. If school districts were forced to pay black teachers as much as whites, the added costs might encourage the districts to end segregation. He wanted cases involving college students, because whites might be less opposed to integration in colleges than in elementary schools.

Marshall scored his first major victory in his native Maryland. Donald Murray, an African American, was denied admission to the University of Maryland’s law school because of his race. In 1936, the Supreme Court ordered the law school to admit Murray. Soon after, Marshall sued a Maryland school district that was paying black teachers less than whites.

Herman Sweatt, a mail carrier, sought admission to the University of Texas law school. The university refused. In 1948, the Supreme Court ruled that black applicants must be admitted to law schools reserved for whites unless equivalent facilities were available to them.

Texas hastily created a separate law school for blacks. But as had happened many times before, separate was not equal. The all-white University of Texas law school was considered one of the best in the nation. Its black counterpart, the Texas Law School for Negroes, hardly measured up. It started with four basement rooms, two professors, and no law library. On June 5, 1950, the Supreme Court decided
Sweatt
v.
Painter
in the plaintiff’s favor. The formerly all-white University of Texas Law School had to admit black students.

The man largely responsible for victories such as Sweatt’s did not live to see Sweatt triumph. Charles Houston died on April 22, 1950. The decision in Sweatt’s favor would not have surprised him. Before he died, Houston predicted “there come times when it is possible to forecast results of a contest, of a battle, of a lawsuit long before the final event has taken place. And so far as the struggle for civil rights is concerned, the struggle is won.”
⁴

Brown
v.
Board of Education

Although Kansas had remained loyal to the Union during the Civil War, segregation existed there, even in the capital of Topeka. Linda Brown was a victim of the segregation. She lived five blocks away from an all-white school. But she had to walk through a railroad yard, catch a school bus, and ride twenty-one blocks to her all-black school. Even though the schools were roughly equal in quality, Brown’s father, Oliver, felt Linda was denied the right to the best possible education.

Topeka officials said the city was authorized to have segregated schools. In truth, the law declared that cities with more than fifteen thousand people could (but did not have to) segregate their schools. If Linda Brown was kept from a nearby school, it was the local school board and not the state that was responsible.

Brown et al.
v.
Board of Education of Topeka, Shawnee Co., Kansas, et al.
began hearings on June 25, 1951. A month later, the school board passed a resolution to end segregation “as soon as possible.”
⁵
The plaintiffs and their NAACP backers refused to accept this promise. They took the case to the United States Supreme Court.

Four other cases also came before the court, two from Delaware and one each from Virginia and South Carolina. The Court decided to lump all these cases together with
Brown
as one lawsuit. Since it had agreed to take the
Brown
case first, the five cases became known as
Brown
v.
Board of Education
. A similar case dealt with segregation in Washington, D.C., schools. Because the District of Columbia was a federally run district and not a state,
Bolling
v.
Sharpe
would be decided separately from the other cases.

Lawyers argued the cases before the Supreme Court in December 1952. There were ten one-hour presentations: five by the plaintiffs in the five state cases, and five by the defending school boards. Then all sides went home, hoping for quick decisions.

Those decisions did not come quickly. Supreme Court members appeared to be divided on the verdict. If they acted immediately, they would have a split decision. Justice Felix Frankfurter suggested rehearing the cases in December 1953. His colleagues agreed.

Fred Vinson, the chief justice, said that he did not wish to reverse the
Plessy
ruling. Southerners Tom Clark and Stanley Reed appeared ready to follow Vinson. So did Justices Harold Burton and Sherman Minton. Frankfurter and Robert Jackson were unpredictable. Only William Douglas and ex–Klan member Hugo Black appeared to favor desegregation.

Chief Justice Vinson died suddenly in the summer of 1953. With his passing, the whole tone of the case changed.

The Warren Court and the
Brown
Decision

After Vinson’s death, President Dwight Eisenhower had to nominate a new Supreme Court chief justice. He chose Earl Warren, who had been a popular California governor.

Warren’s nomination worried several people. As a state official in California during World War II, Warren had favored the forced removal of one hundred thousand Japanese Americans from the state. (During the war, many people were afraid that Japanese Americans were working for Japan, the United States’ enemy. In some places, Japanese Americans were forced to leave the country or were held in internment camps until the war was over.) People wondered whether Warren would ignore people’s rights similarly in Supreme Court cases. One of Warren’s early actions seemed to show that he no longer favored discrimination. When Warren arrived at the Supreme Court in 1953, the Court had separate washrooms for whites and blacks. Warren immediately desegregated the washrooms.