Black Political Action Before the Second World War
Blacks seeking to change the system of caste could employ patience, accommodation, and self-help, as advocated by the influential Booker T. Washington; or they could protest through political action; or they could opt for some form of black separatism. Protesters had to do their share of accommodating. Accommodators occasionally protested. Both groups shared a belief in the promise of America’s civic culture; they saw its caste system as remediable. The American system differed from the traditional caste systems of India or Nepal in that it was at odds with the dominant religion of society—Christianity’s biblical prophetic emphasis on justice—and with the basic tenets of the American civil religion.
When the brilliant poet and essayist Langston Hughes wrote in 1926, “I, too, sing America,” and ten years later, “America will be an ever-living seed, Its dream lies deep in the heart of me,”91 he repeated the faith in America expressed by all of the major black protest leaders from Frederick Douglass on. When Douglass protested in 1853 that “this Fourth of July is yours, not mine,” he was not rejecting the promise of the Declaration of Independence or the political institutions created by the Constitution, for, speaking in Scotland six years earlier, he had said, “I love the Declaration of Independence.”92 Black abolitionist organizations, conventions, and other protest movements existed wherever large groups of blacks lived in the North. With the spread of the black codes in the South and the imposition of Jim Crow ideas everywhere, African-American leaders who formed the Niagara Movement declared, “We will not be satisfied to take one jot or tittle less than our full manhood rights. We claim for ourselves every single right that belongs to a free born American, political, civil and social; and until we get these rights we will never cease to protest and assail the ears of America.”93
In 1910, the leaders of the Movement helped to form the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, whose platform proclaimed integration as the central goal of blacks. “We do not believe in the color line against either white or black,” asserted the NAACP, calling America a “failure” if it continued to exclude blacks from political, economic or social equality.94 The principal intellectual inspiration of the NAACP was W. E. B. Du Bois. There have been few scholars in American history who have been as original, prolific, and influential. Born of African, French, and Dutch ancestry in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868, he eventually joined the Communist party in 1961 and became a Ghanaian citizen a year later, a disillusioned man whose earlier dreams of an integrated society had been shattered. But long before that he had asked whites: “Your country? How come it’s yours? Before the Pilgrims landed, we were here … would America have been America without her Negro people?”95
Other African-Americans repudiated American society altogether. They could not say to whites, as Indians had said, “Go back to the land from whence you came,” but they could call for their own return to Africa or for the creation of a national home for black Americans elsewhere. Some blacks, and many whites too, fantasied a kind of racial territorial pluralism in which blacks would be given a state or a nation within the U.S. The high point of the black nationalist movement came at the end of the First World War, when Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican-born immigrant to Harlem, began to organize blacks into The Universal Negro Improvement Association, with the goal of building institutions under the control of blacks.96 It was the biggest and most successful of all of the black separatist movements, but it was based on a false premise: that most African-Americans did not share the goal of an integrated society.
Garvey inspired a sense of pride and a confidence that black Americans could take control of their own destiny, but separatism was not the goal of most blacks. One said the trouble with Garvey was that “he assumed we were not first and last of all Americans.” Another reported, “this was my country, and I would rather fight for what I have here than go back to Africa.”97 Garvey, who had never actually called for most American blacks to return to Africa, was convicted of using the mails fraudulently. The movement withered, but Garvey’s ideal of self-direction and self-esteem would surface again in the call for black pride in the 1960s.
The ability of blacks to effect change through politics was sharply limited, of course, by caste, particularly in the South. As a consequence, a form of black leadership emerged that Myrdal and his colleagues described as “accommodating.”98 A former slave, Booker T. Washington, one of the few “accommodating” leaders to achieve a national forum and reputation, promised whites that blacks would be patient; he asked whites for support and money to build the educational and economic skills necessary for genuine integration of blacks into American society. He asked blacks also to be patient, promised that with the cooperation of whites the worst of their miseries and burdens would be relieved and they and their children would be trained to take advantage of the opportunities freedom would one day offer. Blacks who followed Washington’s strategy negotiated with whites for benefits and jobs in the political system; they promised to deliver compliance with that system, and, in the North, they promised votes, as well. Their achievements were ultimately limited by their utter dependence on the power and indulgence of whites.
Booker T. Washington was unhesitating in his insistence that blacks should and would achieve the goal of full equality. Before the Second World War, the accommodation model was followed by most black leaders in the North. “Negro protest,” wrote Myrdal, “is shut in by caste.”99 Even in the northern cities, blacks, a small minority unable to make a critical difference in citywide elections or state politics, tended to be dependent on white leaders for favors and spoils. Black northern politicians had some bargaining power in pushing white city governments to act. Still, northern urban political machines in a number of cities were run by sleazy officials who aided in corrupting aspiring black politicians. In Chicago, for example, the northern city with the highest proportion of African-Americans, Oscar DePriest, elected alderman in 1915 and in 1928 elected as the first northern Negro congressman, was, according to Harold F. Gosnell’s landmark study of Chicago politics, tightly tied to the black underworld.100
Gosnell’s intricate analysis of the workings of the Chicago government revealed that for blacks city government was only to a slight extent an instrument of economic mobility. Less than one percent of Chicago firemen and only 2.7 percent of policemen were black in 1932 in a city already 7 percent black. Two and a half percent of public school teachers in Chicago were black by 1934, up from one-half of one percent in 1910; only minuscule progress in that regard had been made in more than a generation. Although blacks in 1932 held 6.4 percent of all the classified civil service positions in Chicago, they worked disproportionately as janitors and as unskilled laborers in other jobs in the city government, just as they did in the private sector.101 Blacks in Chicago may have been better off economically and politically than blacks in the South, Gosnell concluded, but they were still subject to official and semiofficial coercion. Negro politicians had been unable or unwilling to prevent police brutality, to secure decent housing, or even to hinder black police officers from adapting to “the exploitative patterns of behavior found in the department.”102
Because of their impotence at the local level, African-Americans in the 1920s had little influence on national politics. Historian John Hope Franklin has written of instances of the increased black influence in politics in those decades, as when blacks strongly opposed confirmation of John J. Parker to the U.S. Supreme Court and possibly influenced his rejection by the Senate in 1930. Blacks also organized to influence the outcome of senatorial campaigns in Ohio and California in what Franklin called “political regeneration.”103
Republican presidents Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover for their part had done little to encourage the participation of blacks in the political process broadly except on demeaning terms; only slightly more was done nationally under the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt did appoint more than a dozen African-Americans to subcabinet and somewhat lesser positions in Washington. Most benefits blacks received from the New Deal came from programs designed to help the poor. A number of the few black delegates to the Republican conventions in the 1920s and 1930s were hired sycophants or members of corrupt city machines. Democrats had elected no black delegates at all to their national convention in 1928, where