Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work (1930s)
Former prizefighter Bill Tate led a boycott of white merchants in Chicago in 1929 who refused to hire blacks, spearheading a strategy in the 1930s called “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work.” It grew out of the “Double Duty Dollar” doctrine that African American ministers preached from the pulpit; churches promoted the strategy in mass meetings and through the newsletters. The primary aim was to help black businesses financially and to advance the race economically and socially. It spread to cities in other states, including Atlanta, St. Louis, Baltimore, Cleveland, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. There were branches in Richmond, Boston, and Pittsburgh, as well as in smaller cities, such as Evanston, Illinois, and Alliance, Ohio. Don’t Buy was sustained from the 1930s to World War II.
The effort became variously known as the “Jobs for Negroes” movement, “Don’t Spend Where You Can’t Work” movement, and other titles. Organized mass meetings, trade pact agreements, boycotts, and block-by-block picketing advanced the purpose of the Don’t Buy strategy. One of the larger movements took place in Harlem around 1930, when leaders sought clerical jobs for blacks in white-owned stores. After Sufi Abdul Hamid tried to follow his successful movement in Chicago in which blacks were placed in 200 jobs in two months, he moved his efforts to Harlem. Hamid and his Negro Industrial Alliance became so disruptive in their efforts that they helped to cause the Harlem Riots of 1935. White merchants in Harlem and in Maryland were unsuccessful in their legal maneuvers to end the pickets and boycotts. The Harlem network involved churches, fraternal groups, women groups, and social and political organizations.
Nearly a decade would pass before Harlem’s black activists succeeded in their campaign to find jobs on a widespread basis. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. became a major player in Harlem’s efforts. He organized a Citywide Coordinating Committee to find jobs for blacks. The diverse background of local black merchants caused some disparity, and many felt that, if the strategy worked, they would lose black customers to white businesses. Women agitators worked through organizations such as the Harlem Housewives League and urged women to patronize only those black grocery stores that belonged to the Colored Merchants’ Association. The women also targeted the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company (known as A&P). In time, the work of the women and Powell led to black employment in the New York Edison Electric Company, the New York Bus Company, the 1939 World’s Fair, and elsewhere. Nationally, however, the plan led to no more than 2,000 jobs for blacks, but it tested the black community’s economic strength. The effects of the strategy were seen during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, when African Americans deployed an economic boycott against white merchants who practiced racial discrimination in their businesses. The economic boycotts were short-lived, as most of the merchants readily changed their racial practices.
Jessie Carney Smith
Durham, North Carolina, Sit-ins (1960)
Although the Greensboro, North Carolina, Sit-in captured national attention in February 1960, it was preceded by the action of seven young African American Durhamites, who three years earlier entered the Royal Ice Cream parlor, sat in the whites-only section, and requested service. Because the Royal Ice Cream parlor was located in the African American community and those seeking service were required to enter by the back door and stand, it was selected as the protest site. Led by the Reverend Douglas E. Moore, the protesters included Mary Clyburn, Claud Glenn, Jesse Gray, Vivian Jones, Melvin Willis, and Virginia Williams. They entered the parlor on June 23, 1957, and were subsequently arrested and fined $25 each. It was their hope that their actions would test Durham’s segregation laws. However, no redress came from the judicial branch, including the U.S. Supreme Court. Sit-ins in North Carolina had occurred as early as 1943, and, like the Durham sit-in of 1957, received little or no publicity. While the protesters’ action did not result in a change of Jim Crow policy, it did signal the growing restlessness with America’s system of racial segregation. The Reverend Moore, a classmate of Martin Luther King Jr. and pastor of the Asbury Temple Methodist Church, and Floyd McKissick, who headed the NAACP Youth Council, trained students to conduct sit-in protests. The 1957 Durham sit-in and its attendant court cases barely stoked the embers. However, in February of 1960, Durham and other cities across the South became hotbeds for sit-in protests. It was in Durham that King made his 1960 “Fill Up the Jails” speech endorsing the sit-ins as a method of direct non-violent confrontation against the South’s racial segregation laws.
Linda T. Wynn
East St. Louis, Illinois, Race Riot (1917)
This tragedy was considered one of the worst racial outbreaks in American history. The town of East St. Louis, Illinois, separated from St. Louis, Missouri, by the Mississippi River, experienced considerable racial tensions as blacks were drawn to the area to seek industrial employment. White union workers wanted restrictions placed on the number of blacks living in the town, as well as on working in local factories. Unsubstantiated rumors persisted that black men had harassed white women, further angering whites. After a white store owner was accidentally shot by a black man during a robbery, a white mob of more than 3,000 formed on May 28, 1917, and began destroying African American homes, businesses, and churches. Police and National Guard units called to the scene did nothing to stop the rioting, but rather searched black homes for concealed weapons. The violence reignited after July 1, when a “drive-by” shooting in a black neighborhood led to a response by blacks the next day that resulted in the accidental deaths of two undercover white police officers. Whites made a public show of the unmarked police car filled with bullet holes, and another mob sought revenge on the black community. Over 100 African Americans were gunned down by whites during the riot, including children, and more homes were burned.
Fletcher F. Moon
Economic Boycotts and Withdrawals (1950s–2000)
Economic boycotts and withdrawals as a strategy used by blacks during their mid-twentieth century struggle to secure civil rights and liberties was not a modern-day approach. During the nineteenth century, African Americans used boycott methods to demonstrate against America’s unjust treatment. Having staged several streetcar “ride-ins,” abolitionist/feminist Sojourner Truth won a lawsuit against a streetcar driver who had forced her off his streetcar. Later, toward the century’s end, journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett seized upon the segregated transportation system with a public act of resistance by refusing to leave the white ladies’ coach. At the dawn of the twentieth century, African Americans again employed the stratagems of economic boycotts and protests. From 1900 to 1906, African Americans in more than 25 southern cities organized boycotts of segregated streetcars. A half-century later, African Americans in Montgomery, Alabama, again instituted the boycott and economic withdrawals against the public transportation system. After decades of struggle, an open crusade by the people began in the 1950s against calcified racial intolerance and discrimination, a struggle that became a protracted fight.
Whites made a public show of the unmarked police car filled with bullet holes.
The NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) all employed an assortment of boycott and economic withdrawals to combat economic, social, and institutional injustices and inequities. Two years before the Montgomery movement captured America’s attention and propelled the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. into the modern Civil Rights Movement, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the Reverend T. J. Jemison initiated one of the first bus boycotts by American blacks in the country’s South. Although short-lived, the Baton Rouge bus boycott served as a paradigm for similar protests throughout the South, including the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott.