Anti-racism encompasses a range of ideas and political actions which are meant to counter racial prejudice, systemic racism, and the oppression of specific racial groups.
Anti-racism is usually structured around conscious efforts and
deliberate actions which are intended to create equal opportunities for
all people on both an individual and a systemic level. As a philosophy,
it can be engaged in by the acknowledgment of personal privileges,
confronting acts as well as systems of racial discrimination and/or
working to change personal racial biases. Major contemporary anti-racism efforts include the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and workplace anti-racism.
History
European origins
European racism was spread to the Americas by the Europeans, but establishment views were questioned when they were applied to indigenous peoples. After the discovery of the New World, many of the members of the clergy who were sent to the New World who were educated in the new humane values of the Renaissance,
still new in Europe and not ratified by the Vatican, began to criticize
Spain's as well as their own Church's treatment and views of indigenous
peoples and slaves.
In December 1511, Antonio de Montesinos, a Dominican friar, was the first European to rebuke openly the Spanish authorities and administrators of Hispaniola for their "cruelty and tyranny" in dealing with the American natives and those forced to labor as slaves. King Ferdinand enacted the Laws of Burgos and Valladolid in response. However enforcement was lax, and the New Laws of 1542 have to be made to take a stronger line. Because some people like Fray Bartolomé de las Casas questioned not only the Crown but the Papacy at the Valladolid Controversy whether the Indians were truly men who deserved baptism, Pope Paul III in the papal bull Veritas Ipsa or Sublimis Deus
(1537) confirmed that the Indians and other races are fully rational
human beings who have rights to freedom and private property, even if
they are heathen. Afterward, their Christian conversion effort gained momentum along
social rights, while leaving the same status recognition unanswered for
Africans of Black Race, and legal social racism prevailed towards the
Indians or Asians. However, by then the last schism of the Reformation
had taken place in Europe in those few decades along political lines,
and the different views on the value of human lives of different races
were not corrected in the lands of Northern Europe, which would join the
Colonial race
at the end of the century and over the next, as the Portuguese and
Spanish Empires waned. It would take another century, with the influence
of the French Empire at its height, and its consequent Enlightenment
developed at the highest circles of its Court, to return these
previously inconclusive issues to the forefront of the political
discourse championed by many intellectual men since Rousseau.
These issues gradually permeated to the lower social levels, where they
were a reality lived by men and women of different races from the
European racial majority.
In 1688, with the "Germantown Petition Against Slavery",
German immigrants created the first American document of its kind that
made a plea for equal human rights for everyone. After being set aside
and forgotten, it was rediscovered by the US abolitionist movement in 1844, misplaced around the 1940s, and once more rediscovered in March 2005. Prior to the American Revolution, a small group of Quakers, including John Woolman and Anthony Benezet, persuaded their fellow members of the Religious Society of Friends to free their slaves, divest from the slave trade,
and create unified Quaker policies against slavery. This afforded their
tiny religious denomination some moral authority to help begin the abolitionist movement
on both sides of the Atlantic. Woolman died of smallpox in England in
1775, shortly after crossing the Atlantic to bring his anti-slavery
message to the Quakers of the British Isles.
During and after the American Revolution,
Quaker ministrations and preachings against slavery began to spread
beyond their denomination. In 1783, 300 Quakers, chiefly from the London
area, presented the British Parliament with their signatures on the
first petition against the slave trade. In 1785, Englishman Thomas Clarkson, enrolled at Cambridge, and in the course of writing an essay in Latin (Anne liceat invitos in servitutem dare (Is it lawful to enslave the unconsenting?), read the works of Benezet, and began a lifelong effort to outlaw the slave trade in England. In 1787, sympathizers formed the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade,
a small nondenominational group that could lobby more successfully by
incorporating Anglicans, who, unlike the Quakers, could lawfully sit in
Parliament. The twelve founding members included nine Quakers and three
pioneering Anglicans: Granville Sharp, Thomas Clarkson, and William Wilberforce – all evangelical Christians.
Abolitionist movement
Later successes in opposing racism were won by the abolitionist movement in England and in the United States. Though many Abolitionists did not regard blacks or mulattos as equal to whites, they did, in general, believe in freedom and often even equality of treatment for all people. A few, like John Brown,
went further. Brown was willing to die on behalf of, as he said,
"millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked,
cruel, and unjust enactments ..." Many black Abolitionists, such as Frederick Douglass, explicitly argued for the humanity of blacks and mulattoes, and the equality of all people.
In 1911 the First Universal Races Congress
met in London, at which distinguished speakers from many countries for
four days discussed race problems and ways to improve interracial
relations.
Scientific anti-racism
Friedrich Tiedemann
was one of the first people to scientifically contest racism. In 1836,
using craniometric and brain measurements (taken by him from Europeans
and black people from different parts of the world), he refuted the
belief of many contemporary naturalists and anatomists that black people
have smaller brains and are thus intellectually inferior to white
people, saying it was scientifically unfounded and based merely on the
prejudiced opinions of travelers and explorers. The evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin
wrote in 1871 that ‘[i]t may be doubted whether any character can be
named which is distinctive of a race and is constant’ and that
‘[a]lthough the existing races of man differ in many respects, as in
colour, hair, shape of skull, proportions of the body, &c., yet if
their whole structure be taken into consideration they are found to
resemble each other closely in a multitude of points.’
German ethnographer Adolf Bastian
promoted the idea known as "psychic unity of mankind", the belief in a
universal mental framework present in all humans regardless of race. Rudolf Virchow, an early biological anthropologist criticized Ernst Haeckel's classification of humanity into "higher and lower races". The two authors influenced American anthropologist Franz Boas
who promoted the idea that differences in behavior between human
populations are purely cultural rather than determined by biological
differences. Later anthropologists like Marcel Mauss, Bronisław Malinowski, Pierre Clastres, and Claude Lévi-Strauss continued to focus on culture and reject racial models of differences in human behavior.
After the end of seclusion in the 1850s, Japan signed unequal treaties, the so-called Ansei Treaties,
but soon came to demand equal status with the Western powers.
Correcting that inequality became the most urgent international issue of
the Meiji government. In that context, the Japanese delegation to the
1919 Paris Peace Conference proposed the clause in the Covenant of the League of Nations. The first draft was presented to the League of Nations Commission by Makino Nobuaki on 13 February as an amendment to Article 21:
The
equality of nations being a basic principle of the League of Nations,
the High Contracting Parties agree to accord, as soon as possible, to
all alien nationals of States Members of the League equal and just
treatment in every respect, making no distinction, either in law or in
fact, on account of their race or nationality.
After Makino's speech, Lord Cecil
stated that the Japanese proposal was a very controversial one and he
suggested that perhaps the matter was so controversial that it should
not be discussed at all. Greek Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos
also suggested that a clause banning religious discrimination should
also be removed since that was also a very controversial matter. That
led to objections from a Portuguese
diplomat, who stated that his country had never signed a treaty before
that did not mention God, which caused Cecil to remark perhaps this
time, they would all just have to a take a chance of avoiding the wrath
of the Almighty by not mentioning Him.
Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes
clarified his opposition and announced at a meeting that "ninety-five
out of one hundred Australians rejected the very idea of equality.
Hughes had entered politics as a trade unionist and, like most others in
the working class, was very strongly opposed to Asian immigration to
Australia. (The exclusion of Asian immigration was a popular cause with
unions in Canada, the US, Australia, and New Zealand in the early 20th
century.)
The Chinese delegation, which was otherwise at daggers drawn with the Japanese over the question of the former German colony of Qingdao and the rest of the German concessions in Shandong Province,
also said that it would support the clause. However, one Chinese
diplomat said at the time that the Shandong question was far more
important to his government than the clause.
British Prime Minister David Lloyd George found himself in an awkward situation since Britain had signed an alliance with Japan in 1902, but he also wanted to hold the British Empire's delegation together.
Although the proposal received a majority (11 out of 16) of votes, the proposal was still problematic for the segregationist US President Woodrow Wilson, who needed the votes of segregationist Southern Democrats to succeed in getting the votes needed for the US Senate to ratify the treaty. Strong opposition from the British Empire delegations gave him a pretext to reject the proposal. Hughes and Joseph Cook vigorously opposed it as it undermined the White Australia policy.
Mass mobilization around the Black Lives Matter
movement have sparked a renewed interest in antiracism in the U.S. Mass
movement organizing has also been accompanied by academic efforts to
foreground research regarding antiracism in politics, criminal justice reform, inclusion in higher education, and workplace antiracism.
Intervention strategies
Anti-racism has taken various forms such as consciousness-raising
activities aimed at educating people about the ways they may perpetuate
racism, enhancing cross-cultural understanding between racial groups,
countering "everyday" racism in institutional settings, and combating
extremist right-wing neo-Nazi and neo-Fascist groups.
Proponents of anti-racism claim that microaggressions can lead to many negative consequences in a work environment, learning environment, and to their overall sense of self-worth. Antiracism work aims to combat microaggressions and help to break systemic racism by focusing on actions against discrimination and oppression.
Standing up against discrimination can be an overwhelming task for
people of color who have been previously targeted. Antiracists claim
that microinterventions can be a tool used to act against racial
discrimination.
Microintervention strategies aim to provide the tools needed to
confront and educate racial oppressors. Specific tactics include:
revealing the hidden biases or agendas behind acts of discrimination,
interrupting and challenging oppressive language, educating offenders,
and connecting with other allies and community members to act against
discrimination.
The theory is that these microinterventions allow the oppressor to see
the impact of their words, and provide a space for an educational
dialogue about how their actions can oppress people marginalized groups.
Microaggressions can be conscious acts where the perpetrator is aware of the offense they are causing, or hidden and metacommunicated
without the perpetrator's awareness. Regardless of whether
microaggressions are conscious or unconscious behaviors, the first
antiracist intervention is to name the ways it is harmful for a person
of color. Calling out an act of discrimination can be empowering because
it provides language for people of color to bring awareness to their
lived experiences and justifies internal feelings of discrimination.
Antiracist strategies also include confronting the racial
microaggression by outwardly challenging and disagreeing against the
microaggression that harms a person of color. Microinterventions such as
a verbal expression of "I don't want to hear that talk" and physical
movements of disapproval are ways to confront microaggressions.
Microinterventions are not used to attack others about their biases, but
instead they are used to allow the space for an educational dialogue.
Educating a perpetrator on their biases can open up a discussion about
how the intention of a comment or action can have a damaging impact. For
example, phrases such as "I know you meant that joke to be funny, but
that stereotype really hurt me" can educate a person on the difference
between what was intended and how it is harmful to a person of color.
Antiracist microintervention strategies give the tools for people of
color, white allies, and bystanders to combat against microaggressions
and acts of discrimination.
It is important that white racial justice activists are mindful in not causing activism burnout for activists of color. According to Gorski and Erakat (2019),
of the 22 racial justice activists in the sample, 82% of the
participants identified behaviors and attitudes of the white racial
justice activists as a major source of the burnout that they feel. The
same study also found that 72.2% of the participants said that the cause
of their burnout was attributed to the white activists having unevolved
or racist views.
44.4% of the activists also said that their burnout was due to white
activists invalidating their perspectives as activists of color.
50% of the participants said that their burnout was caused by white
activists not willing to "step up" to achieve the goals of the movement. 44.4% of participants said that their burnout was due to white fragility.
50% of the participants said that their burnout was caused by white
activists taking credit for the work of activists of color or exploiting
them in other ways.
Egalitarianism has been a catalyst for feminist, anti-war, and anti-imperialist movements. Henry David Thoreau's opposition to the Mexican–American War, for example, was based in part on his fear that the U.S. was using the war as an excuse to expand slavery into new territories. Thoreau's response was chronicled in his famous essay "Civil Disobedience", which in turn helped ignite Mahatma Gandhi's successful campaign against the British in India. Gandhi's example in turn inspired the American civil rights movement. As James Loewen writes in Lies My Teacher Told Me: "Throughout the world, from Africa to Northern Ireland, movements of oppressed people continue to use tactics and words borrowed from our abolitionist and civil rights movements."
Criticism
Some of these uses have been controversial. Critics in the United Kingdom, such as Peter Hain, stated that in Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe had used anti-racist rhetoric to promote land distribution, whereby privately held land was taken from white farmers and distributed to black Africans (see: Land reform in Zimbabwe). Roman Catholic bishops stated that Mugabe framed the land distribution as a way to liberate Zimbabwe from colonialism, but that "the white settlers who once exploited what was Rhodesia have been supplanted by a black elite that is just as abusive."
The civil rights movement (1896–1954) was a long, primarily nonviolent action to bring full civil rights and equality under the law to all Americans. The era has had a lasting impact on American society – in its tactics, the increased social and legal acceptance of civil rights, and in its exposure of the prevalence and cost of racism.
Following the civil war, the United States expanded the legal rights of African Americans. Congress passed, and enough states ratified, an amendment ending slavery in 1865 — the 13th amendment to the US constitution. This amendment only outlawed slavery; it provided neither citizenship nor equal rights. In 1868, the 14th amendment was ratified by the states, granting African Americans citizenship, whereby all persons born in the US were extended equal protection under the laws of the constitution. The 15th amendment (ratified in 1870) stated that race could not be used as a condition to deprive men of the ability to vote. During Reconstruction (1865–1877), northern troops occupied the South. Together with the Freedmen's Bureau,
they tried to administer and enforce the new constitutional amendments.
Many Black leaders were elected to local and state offices, and many
others organized community groups, especially to support education.
Reconstruction ended following the Compromise of 1877 between northern and southern White elites. In exchange for deciding the contentious presidential election in favor of Rutherford B. Hayes, supported by northern states, over his opponent, Samuel J. Tilden,
the compromise called for the withdrawal of northern troops from the
South. This followed violence and fraud in southern elections from 1868
to 1876, which had reduced Black voter turnout and enabled southern White Democrats to regain power in state legislatures
across the South. The compromise and withdrawal of federal troops meant
that such Democrats had more freedom to impose and enforce discriminatory practices. Many African Americans responded to the withdrawal of federal troops by leaving the South in the Kansas Exodus of 1879.
The Radical Republicans,
who spearheaded Reconstruction, had attempted to eliminate both
governmental and private discrimination by legislation. Such effort was
largely ended by the Supreme Court's decision in the civil rights cases, in which the court held that the 14th Amendment did not give Congress power to outlaw racial discrimination by private individuals or businesses.
The Supreme Court's decision in Plessy v Ferguson (1896) upheld state-mandated discrimination in public transportation under the "separate but equal" doctrine. As Justice Harlan, the only member of the Court to dissent from the decision, predicted:
If a state can prescribe, as a rule of civil conduct,
that whites and blacks shall not travel as passengers in the same
railroad coach, why may it not so regulate the use of the streets of its
cities and towns as to compel white citizens to keep on one side of a
street, and black citizens to keep on the other? Why may it not, upon
like grounds, punish whites and blacks who ride together in street cars
or in open vehicles on a public road or street?
The Plessy decision did not address an earlier Supreme Court case, Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886), involving discrimination against Chinese immigrants, that held that a law that is race-neutral on its face, but is administered in a prejudicial manner, is an infringement of the Equal Protection Clause in the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution.
While in the 20th century, the Supreme Court began to overturn state statutes that disenfranchised African Americans, as in Guinn v. United States (1915), with Plessy, it upheld segregation that Southern states enforced in nearly every other sphere of public and private life.
The Court soon extended Plessy to uphold segregated schools. In Berea College v. Kentucky, the Court upheld a Kentucky statute that barred Berea College,
a private institution, from teaching both black and white students in
an integrated setting. Many states, particularly in the South, took Plessy and Berea as blanket approval for restrictive laws, generally known as Jim Crow laws, that created second-class status for African Americans.
In many cities and towns, African Americans were not allowed to share a taxi
with whites or enter a building through the same entrance. They had to
drink from separate water fountains, use separate restrooms, attend
separate schools, be buried in separate cemeteries and swear on separate
Bibles.
They were excluded from restaurants and public libraries. Many parks
barred them with signs that read "Negroes and dogs not allowed." One
municipal zoo listed separate visiting hours.
The etiquette of racial segregation was harsher, particularly in
the South. African Americans were expected to step aside to let a white
person pass, and black men dared not look any white woman in the eye.
Black men and women were addressed as "Tom" or "Jane," but rarely as "Mr." or "Miss" or "Mrs.,"
titles then widely in use for adults. Whites referred to black men of
any age as "boy" and a black woman as "girl;" both often were called by
labels such as "nigger" or "colored."
Jackie Robinson's Major League Baseball debut, 1947
Jackie Robinson
was a sports pioneer of the civil rights movement, best known for
becoming the first African American to play professional sports in the
major leagues.
Robinson debuted with the Brooklyn Dodgers of Major League Baseball on April 15, 1947. His first major league game came one year before the US Army was integrated, seven years before Brown v. Board of Education, eight years before Rosa Parks, and before Martin Luther King Jr. was leading the movement.
Following the Civil War, black leaders made substantial progress in establishing representation in the Republican Party.
Among the most prominent was Norris Wright Cuney, the Republican Party chairman in the late 19th century Texas. These gains led to substantial discomfort among many white voters, who generally supported the Democrats. During the 1888 Texas Republican Convention, Cuney coined the term lily-white movement
to describe efforts by white conservatives to oust black people from
positions of party leadership and incite riots to divide the party.
Increasingly organized efforts by this movement gradually eliminated
black leaders from the party. The writer Michael Fauntroy contends that
the effort was coordinated with Democrats as part of a larger movement
toward disenfranchisement
of black people in the South at the end of the 19th and beginning of
the 20th century by increasing restrictions in voter registration rules.
Following biracial victories by a Populist-Republican
slates in several states, by the late 19th century the Democratic Party
had regained control of most state legislatures in the South. From 1890
to 1908, they accomplished disenfranchisement of blacks and, in some
states, many poor whites. Despite repeated legal challenges and some
successes by the NAACP, the Democrats continued to devise new ways to limit black electoral participation, such as white primaries, through the 1960s.
Nationally, the Republican Party tried to respond to black interests. Theodore Roosevelt, president 1901–1909, had a mixed record on race relations. He relied extensively on the backstage advice of Booker T. Washington
regarding patronage appointments across the South. He publicly invited
Washington to dinner at the White House, thereby challenging racist
attitudes. On the other hand, he began the system of segregating federal
employees; and he cracked down on black soldiers who refused to testify
against each other in the Brownsville Affair of 1906. In order to defeat his successor William Howard Taft
for the Republican nomination in 1912, Roosevelt pursued a Lily-white
policy in the South. This new progressive party of 1912 was supportive
of black rights in the North, but excluded all black members in the
South.
Republicans in Congress repeatedly proposed federal legislation to prohibit lynching, which was always defeated by the Southern block. In 1920 Republicans made opposition to lynching
part of their platform at the Republican National Convention.
Lynchings, primarily of black men in the South, had increased in the
decades around the turn of the 20th century. Leonidas C. Dyer, a white Republican Representative from St. Louis, Missouri,
worked with the NAACP to introduce an anti-lynching bill into the
House, where he gained strong passage in 1922. His effort was defeated
by the Southern Democratic block in the Senate, which filibustered the bill that year, and in 1923 and 1924.
Opponents of black civil rights used economic reprisals and
frequently violence at the polls in the 1870s and 1880s to discourage
blacks from registering to vote or voting. Paramilitary groups such as
the Red Shirts in Mississippi and the Carolinas, and the White League in
Louisiana, practiced open intimidation on behalf of the Democratic
Party. By the turn of the 20th century, white Democratic-dominated
Southern legislatures disfranchised
nearly all age-eligible African-American voters through a combination
of statute and constitutional provisions. While requirements applied to
all citizens, in practice, they were targeted at blacks and poor whites
(and Mexican Americans
in Texas), and subjectively administered. The feature "Turnout in
Presidential and Midterm Elections" at the following University of Texas
website devoted to politics, shows the drastic drop in voting as these
provisions took effect in Southern states compared to the rest of the
US, and the longevity of the measures.
Mississippi passed a new constitution in 1890 that included provisions for poll taxes, literacy tests
(which depended on the arbitrary decisions of white registrars), and
complicated record keeping to establish residency, which severely
reduced the number of blacks who could register. It was litigated before
the Supreme Court. In 1898, in Williams v. Mississippi,
the Court upheld the state. Other Southern states quickly adopted the
"Mississippi plan", and from 1890 to 1908, ten states adopted new
constitutions with provisions to disfranchise most blacks and many poor
whites. States continued to disfranchise these groups for decades, until
mid-1960s federal legislation provided for oversight and enforcement of
constitutional voting rights.
Blacks were most adversely affected, and in many southern states
black voter turnout dropped to zero. Poor whites were also
disfranchised. In Alabama, for instance, by 1941, 600,000 poor whites
had been disfranchised, as well as 520,000 blacks.
It was not until the 20th century that litigation by African
Americans on such provisions began to meet some success before the
Supreme Court. In 1915 in Guinn v. United States, the Court declared Oklahoma's 'grandfather clause'
to be unconstitutional. Although the decision affected all states that
used the grandfather clause, state legislatures quickly employed new
devices to continue disfranchisement. Each provision or statute had to
be litigated separately. The NAACP, founded in 1909, litigated against many such provisions.
One device which the Democratic Party began to use more widely in Southern states in the early 20th century was the white primary,
which served for decades to disfranchise the few blacks who managed to
get past barriers of voter registration. Barring blacks from voting in
the Democratic Party primaries meant they had no chance to vote in the
only competitive contests, as the Republican Party was then weak in the
South. White primaries were not struck down by the Supreme Court until Smith v. Allwright in 1944.
Criminal law and lynching
Juvenile African-American convicts working in the fields in a chain gang, photo taken c. 1903
In 1880, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Strauder v. West Virginia,
that African Americans could not be excluded from juries. However,
beginning in 1890 with new state constitutions and electoral laws, the
South effectively disfranchised blacks in the South, which routinely
disqualified them for jury duty which was limited to voters. This left
them at the mercy of a white justice system arrayed against them. In
some states, particularly Alabama, the state used the criminal justice system to reestablish a form of peonage,
through the convict-lease system. The state sentenced black males to
years of imprisonment, which they spent working without pay. The state
leased prisoners to private employers, such as Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company, a subsidiary of United States Steel Corporation,
which paid the state for their labor. Because the state made money, the
system created incentives for the jailing of more men, who were
disproportionately black. It also created a system in which treatment of
prisoners received little oversight.
Extrajudicial punishment was more brutal. During the last decade of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, white vigilante mobs lynched
thousands of black males, sometimes with the overt assistance of state
officials, mostly within the South. No whites were charged with crimes
in any of those murders. Whites were so confident of their immunity from
prosecution for lynching that they not only photographed the victims,
but made postcards out of the pictures.
The Ku Klux Klan,
which had largely disappeared after a brief violent career in the early
years of Reconstruction, reappeared in 1915. It grew mostly in
industrializing cities of the South and Midwest that underwent the most
rapid growth from 1910 to 1930. Social instability contributed to racial
tensions that resulted from severe competition for jobs and housing.
People joined KKK groups because they were anxious about their place in
American society, as cities were rapidly changed by a combination of
industrialization, migration of blacks and whites from the rural South,
and waves of increased immigration from mostly rural southern and eastern Europe.
Initially the KKK presented itself as another fraternal
organization devoted to betterment of its members. The KKK's revival was
inspired in part by the movie Birth of a Nation, which glorified the earlier Klan and dramatized
the racist stereotypes concerning blacks of that era. The Klan focused
on political mobilization, which allowed it to gain power in states such
as Indiana, on a platform that combined racism with anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic
and anti-union rhetoric, but also supported lynching. It reached its
peak of membership and influence about 1925, declining rapidly afterward
as opponents mobilized.
Republicans repeatedly introduced bills in the House to make lynching a federal crime, but they were defeated by the Southern block. In 1920 the Republicans made an anti-lynching bill part of their platform and achieved passage in the House by a wide margin. Southern Democrats
in the Senate repeatedly filibustered the bill to prevent a vote, and
defeated it in the 1922, 1923 and 1924 sessions as they held the rest of
the legislative program hostage.
Farmers and blue-collar workers
White
society also kept blacks in a position of economic subservience or
marginality. Most black farmers in the South by the early 20th century
worked as sharecroppers or tenant farmers, and relatively few were landowners.
Employers and labor unions generally restricted African Americans
to the worst paid and least desirable jobs. Because of the lack of
steady, well-paid jobs, relatively undistinguished positions, such as
those with the Pullman Porter
or as hotel doorman, became prestigious positions in black communities
in the North. The expansion of railroads meant that they recruited in
the South for laborers, and tens of thousands of blacks moved North to
work with the Pennsylvania Railroad, for example, during the period of the Great Migration. In 1900 Reverend Matthew Anderson, speaking at the annual Hampton Negro Conference
in Virginia, said that "...the lines along most of the avenues of wage
earning are more rigidly drawn in the North than in the South. There
seems to be an apparent effort throughout the North, especially in the
cities to debar the colored worker from all the avenues of higher
remunerative labor, which makes it more difficult to improve his
economic condition even than in the South."
The nadir of race relations was reached in the early 20th century, in
terms of political and legal rights. Blacks were increasingly
segregated. Cut off from the larger white community, however, black
entrepreneurs succeeded in establishing flourishing businesses that
catered to a black clientele, including professionals. In urban areas,
north and south, the size and income of the black population was
growing, providing openings for a wide range of businesses, from
barbershops to insurance companies.
Undertakers had a special niche in their communities, and often played a
political role, as they were widely known and knew many of their
constituents.
Historian Juliet Walker calls the 1900s-1930s the "Golden age of black business." According to the National Negro Business League,
the number of black-owned businesses doubled rapidly, from 20,000 in
1900 to 40,000 in 1914. There were 450 undertakers in 1900, rising to
1000 in this time period. The number of black-owned drugstores rose from
250 to 695. Local retail merchants—most of them quite small—jumped from
10,000 to 25,000.[24][25] One of the most famous entrepreneurs was Madame C.J. Walker (1867–1919), who built a national franchise business called Madame C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company, based on her development of the first successful hair straightening process.
Booker T. Washington, who ran the National Negro Business League and was president of the Tuskegee Institute,
was the most prominent promoter of black business. He traveled from
city to city to sign up local entrepreneurs into the national league.
Poster from Office of War Information. Domestic Operations Branch. News Bureau, 1943
Charles Clinton Spaulding
(1874–1952), an ally of Washington, was the most prominent black
American business leader of his day. Behind the scenes he was an advisor
to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s, with the goal of promoting a black political leadership class. He founded North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, which became America's largest black-owned business, with assets of over $40 million at his death.
Although black business flourished in urban areas, it was
severely handicapped in the rural South where the great majority of
blacks lived. Blacks were farmers who depended on one cash crop,
typically cotton or tobacco. They chiefly traded with local white
merchants. The primary reason was that the local country stores provided
credit, that is the provided supplies the farm and family needed,
including tools, seeds, food and clothing, on a credit basis until the
bill was paid off at harvest time. Black businessmen had too little
access to credit to enter this business.
Indeed, there were only a small number of wealthy blacks;
overwhelmingly they were real estate speculators in the fast-growing
cities, typified by Robert Church in Memphis.
Division of Negro Affairs in the Department of Commerce
Minority entrepreneurship entered the national agenda in 1927 when Secretary of CommerceHerbert Hoover
set up a Division of Negro Affairs to provide advice, and disseminate
information to both white and black businessmen on how to reach the
black consumer. Entrepreneurship was not on the New Deal agenda of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
However, when he turned to war preparation in 1940, he used this agency
to help black business secure defense contracts. Black businesses had
not been oriented toward manufacturing, and generally were too small to
secure any major contracts. President Eisenhower disbanded the agency in 1953.
Executive orders for non-discriminatory hiring by defense contractors
President Roosevelt issued two executive orders
directing defense contractors to hire, promote and fire without regard
for racial discrimination. In areas such as West Coast shipyards and
other industries, blacks began to gain more of the skilled and
higher-paying jobs and supervisory positions.
As the center of community life, Black churches were integral leaders and organizers in the civil rights movement.
Their history as a focal point for the Black community and as a link
between the Black and White worlds made them natural for this purpose.
This period saw the maturing of independent black churches, whose
leaders were usually also strong community leaders. Blacks had left
white churches and the Southern Baptist Convention to set up their own churches free of white supervision immediately during and after the American Civil War.
With the help of northern associations, they quickly began to set up
state conventions and, by 1895, joined several associations into the
black National Baptist Convention, the first of that denomination among blacks. In addition, independent black denominations, such as the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church and AME Zion Church,
had made hundreds of thousands of converts in the South, founding AME
churches across the region. The churches were centers of community
activity, especially organizing for education.
Continuing to see education as the primary route of advancement and
critical for the race, many talented blacks went into teaching, which
had high respect as a profession. Segregated schools for blacks were
underfunded in the South and ran on shortened schedules in rural areas.
Despite segregation, in Washington, DC by contrast, as Federal
employees, black and white teachers were paid on the same scale.
Outstanding black teachers in the North received advanced degrees and
taught in highly regarded schools, which trained the next generation of
leaders in cities such as Chicago, Washington, and New York, whose black
populations had increased in the 20th century due to the Great Migration.
Education was one of the major achievements of the black community in the 19th century. Blacks in Reconstruction
governments had supported the establishment of public education in
every Southern state. Despite the difficulties, with the enormous
eagerness of freedmen
for education, by 1900 the African-American community had trained and
put to work 30,000 African-American teachers in the South. In addition,
a majority of the black population had achieved literacy. Not all the teachers had a full 4-year college degree
in those years, but the shorter terms of normal schools were part of
the system of teacher training in both the North and the South to serve
the many new communities across the frontier. African-American teachers
got many children and adults started on education.
Northern alliances had helped fund normal schools and colleges to
teach African-American teachers, as well as create other professional
classes. The American Missionary Association, supported largely by the Congregational and Presbyterian
churches, had helped fund and staff numerous private schools and
colleges in the South, who collaborated with black communities to train
generations of teachers and other leaders. Major 20th-century industrialists, such as George Eastman of Rochester, New York, acted as philanthropists and made substantial donations to black educational institutions such as Tuskegee Institute.
In 1862, the U.S. Congress passed the Morrill Act, which established federal funding of a land grant college
in each state, but 17 states refused to admit black students to their
land grant colleges. In response, Congress enacted the second Morrill Act
of 1890, which required states that excluded blacks from their existing
land grant colleges to open separate institutions and to equitably
divide the funds between the schools. The colleges founded in response
to the second Morill Act became today's public historically black colleges and universities
(HBCUs) and, together with the private HBCUs and the unsegregated
colleges in the North and West, provided higher educational
opportunities to African Americans. Federally funded extension
agents from the land grant colleges spread knowledge about scientific
agriculture and home economics to rural communities with agents from the
HBCUs focusing on black farmers and families.
In the 19th century, blacks formed fraternal organizations across
the South and the North, including an increasing number of women's
clubs. They created and supported institutions that increased education,
health and welfare for black communities. After the turn of the 20th
century, black men and women also began to found their own college
fraternities and sororities to create additional networks for lifelong
service and collaboration. For example, Alpha Phi Alpha the first black intercollegiate fraternity was founded at Cornell University in 1906. These were part of the new organizations that strengthened independent community life under segregation.
Tuskegee took the lead in spreading industrial education to Africa, typically in cooperation with church missionary efforts.
Libraries
Development
of library services for blacks, particularly in the South, was slow
moving and lackluster. At the turn of the 20th century there were only a
few available and they were largely housed on private grounds. Western Colored Branch established in 1908, the first public library in the South for African Americans, was the first of its kind to be funded by a Carnegie grant.
Following the formation of the Western Colored Branch, other such
facilities were constructed, particularly in association with black schools.
Following the Brown v. Board of Education decision effort was made to desegregate
public libraries along with other facilities. A primary example of
those who worked to achieve such is The Tougaloo Nine. The Tougaloo
Nine were a group of African-American college students (including Joseph
Jackson Jr., Albert Lassiter, Alfred Cook, Ethel Sawyer, Geraldine
Edwards, Evelyn Pierce, Janice Jackson, James Bradford, and Meredith
Anding Jr.) who courageously sought to end segregation of the Jackson, Mississippi Public Library in 1961.
One day they simply asked for a philosophy book from the circulation
desk at the "whites only" branch, but they were denied and asked to
leave. They chose to stay despite harassment and were arrested. There
were several similar incidents during the Civil Rights Movement,
including the St. Helena Four who, on March 7, 1964, sought to enter the
St. Helena branch of the Audubon Regional Library in Greensburg, Louisiana. Peaceful protests by students in libraries expanded access during the Civil Rights Movement and beyond. Wayne and Shirley A. Wiegand have written the history of the desegregation of public libraries in the Jim Crow South.
The Niagara Movement and the founding of the NAACP
At the turn of the 20th century, Booker T. Washington
was regarded, particularly by the white community, as the foremost
spokesman for African Americans in the US. Washington, who led the Tuskegee Institute,
preached a message of self-reliance. He urged blacks to concentrate on
improving their economic position rather than demanding social equality
until they had proved that they "deserved" it. Publicly, he accepted the
continuation of Jim Crow and segregation in the short term, but privately helped to fund national court cases that challenged the laws.
W. E. B. Du Bois and others in the black community rejected Washington's apology for segregation. One of his close associates, William Monroe Trotter, was arrested after challenging Washington when he came to deliver a speech in Boston in 1905. Later that year Du Bois and Trotter convened a meeting of black activists on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls.
They issued a manifesto calling for universal manhood suffrage,
elimination of all forms of racial segregation and extension of
education—not limited to the vocational education that Washington emphasized—on a nondiscriminatory basis. The Niagara Movement was actively opposed by Washington, and had effectively collapsed due to internal divisions by 1908.
Segregation in the federal civil service began under President
Theodore Roosevelt, and continued under President Taft. President Wilson
allowed his cabinet to escalate the process, ignoring complaints by the
NAACP.
The NAACP lobbied for commissioning of African Americans as officers in
World War I. It was arranged for Du Bois to receive an Army commission,
but he failed his physical. In 1915 the NAACP organized public
education and protests in cities across the nation against D.W. Griffith's film Birth of a Nation, a film that glamorized the Ku Klux Klan. Boston and a few other cities refused to allow the film to open.
Anti-lynching activities
The NAACP
operated primarily at the local level, providing as forum that brought
black religious, professional and business elites in most large cities. Baltimore was a pioneer in battling for issues that dominated the agendas of the post-World War II civil rights and Black Power movements.
Baltimore activists were protest pioneers during the 1930s and 1940s.
They organized in the city to fight against housing discrimination,
school segregation, prison conditions, and police brutality.
The NAACP devoted much of its energy between the first and second world wars to mobilizing a crusade against the lynching of blacks. It investigated the serious race riots in numerous major industrial cities throughout the United States in what was called the "Red Summer of 1919," catalyzed by postwar economic and social tensions. Though primarily consisting of white-on-black attacks, Red Summer saw blacks begin to fight back, in Chicago and other cities.
The organization sent Walter F. White, who later became its general secretary, to Phillips County, Arkansas in October 1919 to investigate the Elaine massacres.
In that year, it was unusual for being a rural riot: more than 200
black tenant farmers were killed for trying to organize a union. They
were murdered by roving white vigilantes and federal troops after a deputy sheriff's attack on a union meeting of sharecroppers
left one white man dead. The NAACP organized the appeals for twelve men
sentenced to death a month later, based on their testimony having been
obtained by beating and electric shocks. The groundbreaking United
States Supreme Court decision in Moore v. Dempsey, significantly expanded the Federal courts' oversight of the states' criminal justice systems in the years to come.
The NAACP worked for more than a decade seeking federal anti-lynching legislation. Its offices in New York City
regularly displayed a black flag out the window—stating "A Man Was
Lynched Yesterday"—to mark each outrage. Efforts to pass an
anti-lynching law foundered on the power of the Solid South;
Southern Democrats in the Senate controlled power in Congress. For
instance, while Republicans achieved passage in the House of an
anti-lynching law in 1922, Southern Democratic senators filibustered the
bill in the Senate and defeated it in the 1922, 1923 and 1924
legislative sessions. Because positions were awarded by seniority and
the South was a one-party region, its Democratic congressmen controlled
important chairmanships in both houses of Congress. The South defeated
all anti-lynching legislative bills.
The NAACP led the successful fight, in alliance with the American Federation of Labor, to prevent the nomination of John Johnston Parker to the Supreme Court. They opposed him because of his opposition to black suffrage and his anti-labor
rulings. This alliance and lobbying campaign were important for the
NAACP, both in demonstrating their ability to mobilize widespread
opposition to racism and as a first step toward building political alliances with the labor movement.
Elbert Williams of Brownsville, Tennessee, is believed to be the first NAACP member lynched for his civil rights activities, killed on June 20, 1940.
He had been part of an NAACP effort in 1940 to register black voters in
his city for that year's presidential election. Whites targeted other
NAACP members, threatening them, and ran several families out of town
who feared for their safety. In 2015 the Tennessee Historical Commission approved a marker commemorating Elbert Williams in Brownsville.
Desegregation activities
After World War II,
African-American veterans returning to the South were spurred by their
sacrifices and experiences to renew demands for the protection and
exercise of their constitutional rights as citizens in American society. One serviceman reportedly said:
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 sirree-bob! I went into the Army a nigger; I'm comin' out a man.
From 1940 to 1946, the NAACP's membership grew from 50,000 to 450,000.
The NAACP's legal department, headed by Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall, undertook a litigation campaign spanning several decades to bring about the reversal of the "separate but equal" doctrine established in the Supreme Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson
(1896). Instead of appealing to the legislative or executive branches
of government, they focused on challenges through the courts. They knew
that Congress was dominated by Southern segregationists, while the
Presidency could not afford to lose the Southern vote.
The NAACP's first cases did not challenge the principle directly, but
sought instead to establish factually that the state's segregated
facilities in transportation, public education and parks, for instance,
were not equal. These were typically underfunded, with outdated
textbooks and facilities. Such cases helped lay the foundation for the
ultimate reversal of the doctrine in Plessy v. Ferguson.
Marshall believed that the time had come to do away with
"separate but equal". The NAACP issued a directive stating that their
goal was now "obtaining education on a nonsegregated basis and that no
relief other than that will be acceptable." The first case that Marshall
argued on this basis was Briggs v. Elliott, but the NAACP also filed challenges to segregated education in other states. In Topeka, Kansas, the local NAACP branch determined that Oliver Brown
would be a good candidate for filing a lawsuit; he was an assistant
pastor and the father of three girls. The NAACP instructed him to apply
to enroll his daughters at a local white school; after the expected
rejection, Brown v. Board of Education
was filed. Later, this and several other cases made their way to the
Supreme Court, where they were consolidated under the title of Brown.
The decision to name the case after one originating in Kansas was
apparently made "so that the whole question would not smack of being a
purely southern one."
Some in the NAACP thought Marshall was moving too quickly. They feared that the Southern judge, Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson, who would almost certainly oppose overruling Plessy,
could destroy their case. One historian stated: "There was a sense that
if you do this and you lose, you're going to enshrine Plessy for a
generation." A government lawyer involved in the case agreed that it was
"a mistake to push for the overruling of segregation per se so long as
Vinson was chief justice—it was too early."
In December 1952, the Supreme Court heard the case, but could not
come to a decision. Unusually, they pushed the case back by a year, to
allow the lawyers involved to research the intention of the framers who
drafted the "Equal Protection Clause" of the 14th Amendment. In September 1953, Vinson died of a heart attack, for which Justice Felix Frankfurter remarked: "This is the first indication I have ever had that there is a God." Vinson was succeeded as chief justice by Earl Warren, who was known for his moderate views on civil rights.
After the case was reheard in December, Warren set about persuading his colleagues to reach a unanimous decision overruling Plessy.
Five of the other eight judges were firmly on his side. He persuaded
another two by saying that the decision would not touch greatly on the
original question of Plessy's legality, focusing instead on the principle of equality. Justice Stanley Reed
was swayed after Warren suggested that a Southerner's lone dissent on
this issue could be more dangerous and incendiary than the court's
unanimous decision.
In May 1954, Warren announced the Court's decision, which he wrote. It
said that "segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis
of race" was unconstitutional because it deprived "the children of the
minority group of equal educational opportunities" and thus equal
protection under the law.
Numerous Southern leaders and their constituents strongly resisted the ruling; the Governor of Virginia, Thomas B. Stanley,
insisted he would "use every legal means at my command to continue
segregated schools in Virginia," and some school districts closed down
rather than integrate. One survey suggested that 13% of Florida
policemen were willing to enforce the decision in Brown.
Many from the American-Jewish community
tacitly or actively supported the civil rights movement. Several
co-founders of the NAACP, themselves, were Jewish and, in the latter
part of the 20th century, many of its white members and leading
activists came from within the Jewish community.
Jewish philanthropists actively supported the NAACP and various other civil rights groups, as well as schools for African Americans. The Jewish philanthropistJulius Rosenwald
supported the construction of thousands of primary and secondary
schools for black youth in the rural South; the public school system was
segregated and black facilities were historically underfunded. In
partnership with Booker T. Washington and Tuskegee University, Rosenwald created a matching fund which provided seed money for building. Tuskegee Institute
architects created model school plans. Black communities essentially
taxed themselves twice to raise funds for such schools, which required
community matching funds. Often most of the residents in rural areas
were blacks. Public funds were committed for the schools, and blacks
raised additional funds by community events, donating land and labor,
and sometimes by members' getting second mortgages on their homes.
Hoping to encourage collaboration, Rosenwald required the white school
systems to support the schools by approving them. At one time some forty
percent of rural southern blacks were learning at Rosenwald elementary
schools; nearly 5,000 were built in total. Rosenwald also contributed to HBCUs such as Howard, Dillard and Fisk universities.
The 2000 PBS television production From Swastika to Jim Crow discussed Jewish involvement in the civil rights movement. It recounted that Jewish scholars fleeing from or surviving the Holocaust of World War II came to teach at many Southern schools, where they reached out to black students:
Thus, in the 1930s and 1940s when Jewish refugee professors arrived at Southern Black Colleges, there was a history of overt empathy between Blacks and Jews, and the possibility of truly effective collaboration. Professor Ernst Borinski
organized dinners at which Blacks and Whites would have to sit next to
each other—a simple yet revolutionary act. Black students empathized
with the cruelty these scholars had endured in Europe and trusted them
more than other Whites. In fact, often Black students—as well as members
of the Southern White community—saw these refugees as "some kind of
colored folk."
The experience of fighting in World War I
along with exposure to different racial attitudes in Europe influenced
the black veterans by creating a widespread demand for the freedoms and
equality for which they had fought. Those veterans found conditions at
home as bad as ever. Some were assaulted even while wearing their
uniforms in public.
This generation responded with a far more militant spirit than the
generation before, urging blacks to fight back when whites attacked
them. A. Philip Randolph introduced the term the New Negro in 1917, becoming a catchphrase to describe the new spirit of militancy and impatience of the post-war era.
A group known as the African Blood Brotherhood, a socialist group with a large number of Caribbeanémigrés
in its leadership, organized around 1920 to demand the same sort of
self-determination for black Americans that the Wilson administration
was promising to Eastern European peoples at the Versailles conference
in the aftermath of World War I. The leaders of the Brotherhood, many
of whom joined the Communist Party in the years to come, were also
inspired by the anti-imperialist program of the new Soviet Union.
In addition, during the Great Migration, hundreds of thousands of African Americans moved to northern industrial cities starting prior to World War I and through 1940. Another wave of migration during and after World War II led many to West Coast
cities, as well as more in the North. They were both fleeing violence
and segregation and seeking jobs, as manpower shortages in war
industries promised steady work. Continued depressed conditions in the
farm economy of the South in the 1920s made the north look more
appealing. Those expanding northern communities confronted familiar
problems—racism, poverty, police abuse and official hostility—but these
were in a new setting, where the men could vote (and women, too, after
1920), and possibilities for political action were far broader than in
the South.
Marcus Garvey and the UNIA
Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) made great strides in organizing in these new communities in the North, and among the internationalist-minded "New Negro"
movement in the early 1920s. Garvey's program pointed in the opposite
direction from mainstream civil rights organizations such as the NAACP;
instead of striving for integration into white-dominated society,
Garvey's program of Pan Africanism has become known as Garveyism. It encourages economic independence within the system of racial segregation
in the United States, an African Orthodox Church with a black Jesus and
black Virgin Mother that offered an alternative to the white Jesus of the black church, and a campaign that urged African Americans to "return to Africa," if not physically, at least in spirit. Garvey attracted thousands of supporters, both in the United States and in the African diaspora in the Caribbean, and claimed eleven million members for the UNIA, which was broadly popular in Northern black communities.
Garvey's movement was a contradictory mix of defeatism, accommodation and separatism: he married themes of self-reliance that Booker T. Washington could have endorsed and the "gospel of success" so popular in white America in the 1920s with a rejection of colonialism worldwide and rejection of racial inferiority. The movement at first attracted many of the foreign-born radicals also associated with the Socialist and Communist parties, but drove many of them away when Garvey began to suspect them of challenging his control.
The movement collapsed nearly as quickly as it blossomed, as the
federal government convicted Garvey for mail fraud in 1922 in connection
with the movement's financially troubled "Black Star Line". The government commuted Garvey's sentence and deported Garvey to his native Jamaica
in 1927. While the movement floundered without him, it inspired other
self-help and separatist movements that followed, including Father Divine and the Nation of Islam.
The
labor movement, with some exceptions, had historically excluded African
Americans. While the radical labor organizers who led organizing drives
among packinghouse workers in Chicago and Kansas City during World War I and the steel industry in 1919
made determined efforts to appeal to black workers, they were not able
to overcome the widespread distrust of the labor movement among black
workers in the North. With the ultimate defeat of both of those
organizing drives, the black community and the labor movement largely
returned to their traditional mutual mistrust.
Left-wing political activists in the labor movement made some progress in the 1920s and 1930s, however, in bridging that gap. A. Philip Randolph, a long-time member of the Socialist Party of America, took the leadership of the fledgling Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) at its founding in 1925. Randolph and the union faced opposition not only from the Pullman Company,
but from the press and churches within the black community, many of
whom were the beneficiaries of financial support from the company. The
union eventually won over many of its critics in the black community by
wedding its organizing program with the larger goal of black
empowerment. The union won recognition from the Pullman Company in 1935
after a ten-year campaign, and a union contract in 1937.
The BSCP became the only black-led union within the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1935. Randolph chose to remain within the AFL when the Congress of Industrial Organizations
(CIO) split from it. The CIO was much more committed to organizing
African-American workers and made strenuous efforts to persuade the BSCP
to join it, but Randolph believed more could be done to advance black
workers' rights, particularly in the railway industry, by remaining in
the AFL, to which the other railway brotherhoods belonged. Randolph
remained the voice for black workers within the labor movement, raising
demands for elimination of Jim Crow unions within the AFL at every
opportunity. BSCP members such as Edgar Nixon played a significant role in the civil rights struggles of the following decades.
Many of the CIO unions, in particular the Packinghouse Workers, the United Auto Workers and the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers
made advocacy of civil rights part of their organizing strategy and
bargaining priorities: they gained improvements for workers in
meatpacking in Chicago and Omaha, and in the steel and related
industries throughout the Midwest. The Transport Workers Union of America, which had strong ties with the Communist Party at the time, entered into coalitions with Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the NAACP and the National Negro Congress to attack employment discrimination in public transit in New York City in the early 1940s.
The CIO was particularly vocal in calling for elimination of racial discrimination by defense industries during World War II;
they were also forced to combat racism within their own membership,
putting down strikes by white workers who refused to work with black
co-workers. While many of these "hate strikes" were short-lived: a
wildcat strike launched in Philadelphia
in 1944 when the federal government ordered the private transit company
to desegregate its workforce lasted two weeks and was ended only when
the Roosevelt administration sent troops to guard the system and arrested the strike's ringleaders.
Randolph and the BSCP took the battle against employment discrimination even further, threatening a March on Washington in 1942 if the government did not take steps to outlaw racial discrimination by defense contractors.
Randolph limited the March on Washington Movement to black
organizations to maintain black leadership; he endured harsh criticism
from others on the left for his insistence on black workers' rights in
the middle of a war. Randolph only dropped the plan to march after
winning substantial concessions from the Roosevelt administration.
The Scottsboro Boys
In 1931, the NAACP and the Communist Party USA also organized support for the "Scottsboro Boys",
nine black men arrested after a fight with some white men also riding
the rails, then convicted and sentenced to death for allegedly raping
two white women dressed in men's clothes later found on the same train.
The NAACP and the CP fought over the control of those cases and the
strategy to be pursued; the CP and its arm the International Labor Defense (ILD) largely prevailed. The ILD's legal campaign produced two significant Supreme Court decisions (Powell v. Alabama and Norris v. Alabama)
extending the rights of defendants; its political campaign saved all
the defendants from the death sentence and ultimately led to freedom for
most of them.
The Scottsboro defense was only one of the ILD's many cases in
the South; for a period in the early and mid-1930s, the ILD was the most
active defender of blacks' civil rights, and the Communist Party
attracted many members among activist African Americans. Its campaigns
for black defendants' rights did much to focus national attention on the
extreme conditions which black defendants faced in the criminal justice
system throughout the South.
Foreign pressure
Its treatment of African Americans compromised the United States' role as a would-be world leader and champion of democracy. The world challenge from Communism—not to be confused with the actions of the U.S. Communist Party in support of ending discrimination—forced:
...democracies of the West...to divest themselves of
antiquated racial attitudes and practices in order to prevent further
mergers of anti-imperialist revolutions and Communist revolutions.
Incidents in the United States involving Negro discrimination...are
given a much bigger play in the neutralist Asian press than they are in
America itself.
In addition, the victory over Nazis and Fascists in World War II did much to lay the groundwork for the civil rights movement.
Regional Council of Negro Leadership
On December 28, 1951, T. R. M. Howard, an entrepreneur, surgeon, fraternal leader and planter in Mississippi, founded the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL) together with other key blacks in the state. At first the RCNL, which was based in the all-black town of Mound Bayou,
did not directly challenge "separate but equal" policy, but worked to
guarantee the "equal." It often identified inadequate schools as the
primary factor responsible for the black exodus to the North. It called
for equal school terms for both races, as black schools were
historically underfunded. From the beginning, the RCNL also pledged an
"all-out fight for unrestricted voting rights."
The RCNL's most famous member was Medgar Evers. Fresh from graduation at Alcorn State University
in 1952, he moved to Mound Bayou to sell insurance for Howard. Evers
soon became the RCNL's program director and helped to organize a boycott
of service stations that failed to provide restrooms for blacks. As
part of this campaign, the RCNL distributed an estimated 20,000 bumper
stickers with the slogan "Don't Buy Gas Where You Can't Use the Rest
Room." Beginning in 1953, it directly challenged "separate but equal" and demanded integration of schools.
The RCNL's annual meetings in Mound Bayou between 1952 and 1955
attracted crowds of 10,000 or more. They featured speeches by Rep. William L. Dawson of Chicago, Rep. Charles Diggs of Michigan, Alderman Archibald Carey Jr. of Chicago, and NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall. Each of these events, in the words of Myrlie Evers, later Myrlie Evers-Williams,
wife of Medgar, constituted "a huge all-day camp meeting: a combination
of pep rally, old-time revival, and Sunday church picnic." The
conferences also included panels and workshops on voting rights,
business ownership, and other issues. Attendance was a life-transforming
experience for many future civil black leaders who became prominent in
the 1960s, such as Fannie Lou Hamer, Amzie Moore, Aaron Henry, and George W. Lee.
On November 27, 1955, Rosa Parks attended one of these speeches at Dexter Avenue Church in Montgomery. The host for this event was a then relatively unknown Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Parks later said that she was thinking of Till when she refused to give up her seat four days later.
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