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You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders as you please. You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus is it not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.
In advancing a vision of southern prerogatives based on a particular view of the Constitution and of federalism rather than on a direct endorsement of racism, Johnson nonetheless disdained anti-discrimination efforts as a form of slavelike compulsion.
not because he was “against the Negro race” but because “this is not the way to accomplish what so many want to do for the Negro.”
“the Negro—as a minority group involved in this discussion of civil rights—has more to lose by the adoption of any resolution outlawing free debate in the Senate than he stands to gain by the enactment of the civil rights bills as they are now written.”15
The federal government, though seemingly race-neutral, functioned as a commanding instrument of white privilege.
The Democratic Party that fashioned and superintended the New Deal and Fair Deal combined two different political systems: one that was incorporating new groups and voters, who had arrived from overseas or had migrated from the South; the other still an authoritarian one-party system, still beholden to racial separation.
Southern seniority was exaggerated by not having to compete in a two-party system. Members from the region thus secured a disproportionate number of committee chairmanships, giving them special gatekeeping powers. Further, the filibuster in the Senate served to advance southern power.
Rising to oppose a 1940 anti-lynching bill, Congressman John Rankin of Mississippi cautioned northern Democrats to Remember that southern Democrats now have the balance of power in both Houses of Congress. By your conduct you may make it impossible for us to support many of you for important committee assignments, and other positions to which you aspire. . . . You Democrats who are pushing this vicious measure are destroying your usefulness here. . . . The Republicans would be delighted to see you cut President Roosevelt’s throat politically, and are therefore voting with you on this vicious
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They used three mechanisms. First, whenever the nature of the legislation permitted, they sought to leave out as many African Americans as they could.
Second, they successfully insisted that the administration of these and other laws, including assistance to the poor and support for veterans, be placed in the hands of local officials who were deeply hostile to black aspirations.
Third, they prevented Congress from attaching any sort of anti-discrimination provisions to a wide array of social welfare programs such as community health services, school lunches, and hospital construction grants, indeed all the programs that distributed monies to their region.
The holdings of black farmers, furthermore, were much smaller than white holdings—63 acres in 1935, compared to 145 on average for whites—and their acreage was worth 20 percent less. Thus the average value of a black farm that year was $1,864 compared to $5,239 for whites.15
working in the main on white farms as terribly compensated workers of one kind or another. They were in the greater part tenants or sharecroppers.
“The most abject of America’s rural people . . . were the African Americans who farmed in the South; they lived in the poorest region of the United States and were the poorest people living there,” writes the historian James McGovern.
The second, even more important mechanism was the discretionary power available to state and local officials, virtually all white, to maintain this differentiated system of payments.
Their goal was to maximize the flow of federal funds while maintaining local responsibility to ensure the continuing viability of the southern racial order.
“Under the FERA the Negro was shown the same place assigned to him at the close of the Civil War, which had for seventy years . . . sealed his illiteracy and poverty.”
The New Deal did indeed stem some of the tides of adversity, but at the cost of accommodation with racial oppression.
Unfortunately, the great majority of blacks still were left out. Most African Americans, we have seen, were farmworkers or domestics, and people in these categories did not qualify.
These southerners who dominated committee considerations broadly supported Social Security as a source of badly needed help for their poverty-stricken region, but they even more emphatically did not want the federal government to threaten the South’s “way of life.”
We should note that ADC overall was less generous than the FERA programs it had replaced, which, despite all their shortcomings, had injected more monies into poor black communities.
Where they worked in industrial and commercial pursuits that were covered, they often were left out because they lacked a history of regular, stable employment. With the defeat of national standards, even when they gained a way in, the benefits tended to be comparatively meager.
We may rest assured, therefore, that when we turn over to a federal bureau or board the power to fix wages, it will prescribe the same wage for the Negro that it prescribes for the white man. Now, such a plan might work in some sections of the United States but those of us who know the true situation know that it just will not work in the South. You cannot put the Negro and the white man on the same basis and get away with it.
Yet other southern legislators condemned the FLSA as racial legislation aimed at the South, claiming it was comparable to anti-lynching legislation.
A broader climate of nativism dominated. Public discourse took an ugly turn. “Think of submitting questions involving the very life of the United States to a tribunal on which a nigger from Liberia, a nigger from Honduras, a nigger from India . . . each have votes equal to that of the great United States,” Senator James Reed of Missouri remarked about the League. Such talk went unrebuked.
The black campaign for military integration failed dismally. Writing for The New Republic in 1944, Lucille Miller accurately summarized the wartime situation:
The Air Corps has discriminated against Negroes in the most complicated and costly way, building a segregated air base for Negroes when there was room in established training centers over the country.
The United States Armed Forces, to fight for World Democracy, is within itself undemocratic.
We stand up and eat each meal which they call a meal. . . . The truth, Sir, are we nothing but slaves.
The word Negro is never used here, all they call us are nigger do this, nigger do that. Even the officers here are calling us nigger.
As an individual, the negro is docile, tractable, lighthearted, care free, and good natured. If unjustly treated, he is likely to become surly and stubborn, though this is usually a temporary phase. He is careless, shiftless, irresponsible, and secretive. He resents censure and is best handled with praise and by ridicule. He is unmoral, untruthful, and his sense of right doing is relatively inferior. . . . On the other hand, the negro is cheerful, loyal, and usually uncomplaining if reasonably well fed. He has a musical nature and a marked sense of rhythm. His art is primitive. He is
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Embarrassingly, the Selective Service fell on blood percentages, using racial guidelines not unlike the country’s European enemy, Nazi Germany. Ordinarily, the rule it used was “that 25 percent Negro blood made a person a Negro.”
Admiral Chester Nimitz explained that enlisted whites would not stand for the possibility of command by black officers at sea. Secretary Knox clarified the Navy’s position, insisting that “we must be realists. If we put Negroes in the navy it would be like putting them in hell. The relationships on shipboard are such that white and colored just cannot be mixed.”
Will there be a separate school for tire maintenance? the Civilian Aide’s Office asked. Can Negro enlisted men be trained as guard patrolmen at Miami Beach? First Air Force wanted to know. May they be sent to the corps area horseshoeing school? Four Corps Area was asked. Are Negroes eligible for the General Mechanics Course at Motor Transport Schools the Replacement and School Command and the Antiaircraft Command inquired. Can Negroes be given observation aviation training?
Even though many blacks gained advancement from their participation in the Second World War, the larger, overall effect created increasing racial disparity.
“The GI Bill changed where and how Americans lived. Suburbs sprang up like mushrooms around every sizable city. . . . As surely as the Homestead Act of 1862 filled the prairies of the Far West, the GI Bill created and filled the suburbs.”
DESPITE THESE GAINS, Mettler’s conclusion that the GI Bill “represented the most egalitarian and generous program black Americans had experienced, far more inclusive than New Deal social programs,” is not so much wrong as misleading.
By amplifying the bill’s achievements for returning black soldiers without sufficiently underscoring the high and often impassable barriers placed in their path, such an appraisal can be deceptive.
Of the nine thousand students at the University of Pennsylvania in 1946 (which, along with Columbia University, had the least restrictive policies in the Ivy League), only forty-six were black.
President Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights found in 1948: It is clear there is much discrimination, based on prejudice, in admission of students to private colleges, vocational schools, and graduate schools. . . . Application blanks of many American colleges and universities include questions pertaining to the candidate’s racial origin, religious preference, parents’ birthplace, etc. In many of our northern educational institutions enrollment of Jewish students seems never to exceed certain fixed points and there is never more than a token enrollment of Negroes.
Tennessee law declared: “It shall be unlawful for any school, academy, college, or other place of learning to allow white and colored persons to attend the same school, academy, college or other place of learning.”
Though separate, black colleges hardly were equal. “Not a single one of these institutions offers work that is even substantially equal to that offered in the corresponding state institutions for whites,”
and the study concluded that “the State of Virginia does not intend to provide equal opportunities for higher education of Negroes in the near future; if at all.”
The gap in educational attainment between blacks and whites widened rather than closed.87 Of veterans born between 1923 and 1928, 28 per cent of whites but only 12 percent of blacks enrolled in college-level programs.
These impediments were not confined to the South. In New York and the northern New Jersey suburbs, fewer than 100 of the 67,000 mortgages insured by the GI Bill supported home purchases by non-whites.
IMAGINE TWO COUNTRIES, one the richest in the world, the other amongst its most destitute. Then suppose that a global program of foreign aid transferred well over $100 billion, but to the rich nation, not the poor. This is exactly what happened in the United States as a result of the cumulative impact of the most important domestic policies of the 1930s and 1940s.
As this book has demonstrated, affirmative action during the Democratic administrations of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman had been exclusively white.
Nixon enforced the Philadelphia Plan first drafted by Johnson’s Department of Labor in 1967, which required that minority workers in the notoriously discriminatory construction trades be hired in rough proportion to their per centage in the local labor force.
It now fell to employers to demonstrate that they were not discriminating against African Americans as a group.
If affirmative action did not exist, the United States would be a vastly more segregated country.
