In the arts, one area where African-American accomplishments and recognition by whites could not be wholly constrained, black achievements over a twenty-year period from about 1915 to 1935 were impressive. Probably never before had any one ethnic group in the U.S. created in such a short period of time in one city the literary, musical, and artistic record of the “Harlem Renaissance” in New York.105 But the Depression blotted out the glittering eminence of that black renaissance, and for all of the brilliance and protest in the poetry of such men as Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes, caste pluralism in the form of racial segregation remained substantially intact right up to and through the war.
No national report proclaiming caste pluralism to be a failure appeared to match the Merriam Report of 1929 denouncing the policy of forced assimilation of Indians until Myrdal’s An American Dilemma, published in 1944. Nor was any legislation passed to improve the status of blacks comparable to the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which recognized Indian tribal rights. As devastating as life for reservation Indians had become—infant mortality, disease, alcoholism, and other forms of morbidity were higher for Indians than for any other group, including blacks—official brutality no longer was condoned toward Indians as it was in the South against African-Americans. Lynchings of blacks in the South frequently went unpunished even into the 1930s, although not as many occurred as in past years (the worst year was 1892, when 154 blacks were lynched). And, only occasionally, as in the famous Scottsboro, Alabama, case of 1931, did northern intervention prevent the execution of blacks who had been wrongly accused of capital crimes. Typically, blacks held were brutalized in segregated, crowded jails.106
By 1941 and the war, caste pluralism still locked out the vast majority of blacks from the civic culture. In 1940, only one out of twenty black males was employed in a white-collar occupation, compared to one out of three white males. Six of ten employed black women worked as maids; one of ten white women did so. In Chicago, where blacks were 8 percent of the labor force, they were 22 percent of the unemployed. Government employment practices, local and national, were based to a large extent on caste. The five southern states in which African-Americans were more than a third of the population employed not a single African-American policeman. Blacks could not enlist in the Marines or in the Air Force; the Navy accepted them only in menial jobs. The Army was segregated, and no black officer was permitted to outrank any white man in the same unit. Every state in the South, where three-quarters of the African-Americans in the nation lived, as well as a number of states in the North, outlawed intermarriage.107 Caste pluralism was enforced by law, by hiring practices, and by public discourse and social etiquette. Southern whites still called adult African-Americans by their first names or “boy” or “girl.”
That was the situation in January 1941 when A. Philip Randolph, the head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, proposed a march on Washington, D.C., to demand that the U.S. government (which had passed a law drafting black as well as white men into the armed services) ban discrimination in defense industries. President Roosevelt tried to have the march called off, but Randolph persisted. Just as marchers were preparing to board trains for the capital, on June 25, 1941, the president issued Executive Order 8802, banning discrimination in defense industries or in government “because of race, creed, color or national origin.” The civil rights revolution had begun. Probably no one—perhaps not even A. Philip Randolph himself—could have predicted the dismantling of the formal structure of caste that would take place in the 1960s and 1970s.
Chapter Six
“I GO SAD AND HEAVY HEARTED”
Sojourner Pluralism for Asians and Mexicans
MEXICAN workers in the United States in the 1920s sang a corrido, a Mexican ballad, “An Emigrant’s Farewell,” telling of the anguish of a young man about to leave for the United States to work. “I bear you in my heart,” he sang about Mexico, his family, and the beloved Virgin of Guadalupe, lamenting, “I go sad and heavy hearted, / To suffer and endure / …”1 It was an immigrant’s lament not limited to Mexicans. Millions of male sojourners, and later females, too, came from Asia, Europe, Canada, the Caribbean Islands, and the Azores to the U.S. on a lonely journey in search of work. But of all the sojourner immigrants, two large groups—Asians and Mexicans—had in common an extended history of systematic labor exploitation enforced with the cooperation of national and state governments, the local police, and the system of justice.
The U.S. conquest of more than half of Mexico was preceded by the revolt of Euro-Americans in Texas in 1837, leading to its annexation in 1845. Some of the Americans had been invited to settle in Texas. Many more came as illegal aliens, and, by 1830, Americans outnumbered Mexicans in Texas by two to one. The American cry for manifest destiny, driven largely by racism, anti-Catholic bigotry, land hunger, and the desire to expand slavery into new territories, led to the invasion of Mexico and the conquest of a vast land area with a relatively small number of indigenous people.
The treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), which brought the war between the two nations to a formal close, forced Mexico to cede what eventually became California, New Mexico, Nevada, and parts of Colorado, Arizona, and Utah. Those Mexicans who chose to remain for one year in what was now U.S. territory were granted American citizenship. As interpreted by Mexico, protocols to the treaty signed by U.S. emissaries guaranteed to the Mexicans land and water rights and religious and cultural integrity. The American government took the position that since the protocols were not part of the treaty itself, they were not binding. But the U.S. established a system for adjudicating land claims, and a majority of initial claims were approved. Despite that system, Mexicans in the conquered territory lost a substantial amount of property to Euro-Americans through extralegal means within two decades. Bad feelings between the two groups, generated by arguments about land, cultural tensions, and racism, led to recurring conflicts, especially on the border, where the resistance of Mexicans to what was seen as American colonization was extensive.2 The Americans blamed banditos. The Mexicans complained of “gringo justice.”
The treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo became the basis for subsequent land claims by Mexican-Americans in south Texas, New Mexico, and southern California and for assertions that Mexican-Americans were a colonized people, as Indians were. But nearly all Indians in the U.S. today are descendants of tribes who made treaties with the U.S. government, and all but a small minority of Mexican-Americans descend from immigrants who arrived long after the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed.
The vast majority of Mexicans who came to work in the U.S. thought of themselves as Mexican sojourners in a foreign country. What was distinctive about their experience and that of most Asian immigrants was the extent to which they were confined in systems of pluralism intended to coerce their labor.
Cooperation between local police and employers in controlling workers was common in industrial America, as in the coal fields of Appalachia, where native-born Americans were exploited by the coal companies with the help of the police throughout much of this century. But only in the case of the Asians and Mexicans were there national policies to keep such groups of immigrant workers in their place. Other sojourners, such as Italians, Greeks, Turks, Poles, West Indians, French Canadians, and Cape Verdeans who went back and forth to their homelands, were not subject to widely enforced systems of sojourner pluralism that made Asian and Mexican workers particularly vulnerable to employer abuse.
Sojourner pluralism was far less rigidly restrictive than the caste pluralism that restricted black Americans, and in every decade a number of Asian and Mexican immigrants broke through the boundaries intended to keep them in unskilled and servile jobs. The U.S. was a land of opportunity as well as exploitation for sojourners. Chinese immigrants of the turn of the century spoke of California as “the golden mountain,” even as Jewish immigrants called America “the golden land.” Eighty years later, one of the most popular ballads on Spanish-language radio in Texas told of a poor young Mexican woman who waded