Fear Itself (28 page)

For the first time in many decades, the Supreme Court began to rule in favor of more equal rights. In 1938, it found that Missouri had deprived a black citizen of constitutionally mandated equal protection by excluding him from law school, even though the state was willing to fund his legal education elsewhere. In 1941, it held that Arkansas likewise had violated the Constitution by denying an African-American access to a white Pullman railcar when it had not provided a comparable facility for blacks. Most important, the Court tackled the question of whether party primaries fell within the purview of federal constitutionalism, an issue that was especially important in the one-party South, where party primaries in effect constituted the only democratic elections. In 1935, in
Grovey v. Townsend,
a Texas case, the Court had ruled that the white primary, excluding blacks from electoral participation, did not fall within the purview of the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection, or the Fifteenth Amendment’s insurance of the franchise, because it was a private activity by the Democratic Party that proceeded without regulation or authorization by the state. In 1944, the Court ruled differently in
Smith v. Allwright.
It outlawed such primaries on the grounds that state law made such party elections an inherent part of the electoral process.
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The decision had an immediate effect on black political participation. Within three years, the proportion of southern blacks registered to vote more than doubled, reaching some 12 percent.
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In the South, as well as outside it, African-Americans were mobilized by an active black press and civil rights organizations, including a rapidly growing NAACP, to support a “Double V” campaign for democracy at home as well as overseas. Within the region, white dissent also grew. Tentative and often limited to criticism of the most outrageous features of the racial order, southern liberals advocated a heretical platform for racial reform that linked educational improvement, better access to doctors and hospitals, support for the modernization of state government that would administer programs without regard to race, assaults on egregious inequality and the lack of economic opportunity, and campaigns against restrictions on voting—all of which they linked to the wartime struggle against Fascism.
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The war also witnessed the first focused effort by the federal government to restrict racial discrimination. Concerned with the potential for mass disorder if A. Philip Randolph, the president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a black union, were to mount his projected march on Washington to rally against segregation in the armed forces and call for an end to hiring bias in defense industries, President Roosevelt issued his Executive Order 8802 on June 25, 1941. Establishing a five-person Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC) to “receive and investigate complaints of discrimination” and “take appropriate steps to redress valid grievances,” the order banned “discriminatory employment practices because of race, color, creed, or national origin in government service, defense industries, and by trade unions.”
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From the perspective of the white South, this nightmare of conjunction of union power, labor market issues, and race relations was mitigated by the persistence of racial segregation in the military and by the limited capacity of a body that operated with little money, without real teeth, and without the sanction of a congressional statute. Yet in conjuring the prospect of a labor-based civil rights movement, and its potential for an assault on the economic foundations of Jim Crow, the FEPC crystallized growing southern fears.
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Writing in 1949, Richard Hofstadter compared the 1940s to the pre–Civil War crisis, when “a cleavage between North and South became acute during a time of general social ferment in the North, and also of widespread criticism of the slave system.” He went on say, “In the recent past, great social changes have again been telescoped within a relatively brief period. Simultaneously, the Negro has gained friends and allies outside the South, numerous enough to give him powerful leverage in changing his racial position. Again the South has reacted militantly.”
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From the perspective of blacks and the minority of whites who found the South’s racial order to be embarrassing, excessive, offensive, or simply wrong, World War II was “a liberating war.”
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But for the South’s large white majority, the war, as Odum wrote in 1943, was a “story of the crisis of the South.” He counted the ways. These, he observed, included “a general pressure movement to force the hand of the South to eliminate segregation,” the rise of black militancy among the group’s leaders, and a growing hatred of racial segregation on the part the black masses. In all, Odum argued, the war had increased the “unmeasurable and unbridgeable distance between the white South and the reasonable expectation of the Negro.” As a result, the South had come face-to-face with “a supreme test” whose outcome was not clear. Chronicling “the rising tide of tension,” he presciently projected that “the outcome of this crisis of race” would have a direct bearing on national politics in postwar America, especially “the problem of labor groups,” and the role of government in economic life. “In each of these, both in philosophy and in action,” he predicted, “race would be heavily involved,” and the South “might be a balance of power.”
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Odum wrote as a concerned moderate, hoping that a way could be found to navigate this uncertain future. Others responded with violence and with strategies of resistance. “An epidemic of random murder and mayhem was sweeping like a fever through the region, fueled by white fears that black veterans might become a revolutionary force, and that blacks in general would no longer stay in their place.” For the first time in many years, the Ku Klux Klan rallied at Stone Mountain, Georgia, burning a cross that could be seen sixty miles away, a signal that southern mores would be enforced by any means necessary. The South experienced six lynchings within three months of the August 15, 1945, end of the war with Japan, followed by seven more in 1946. At least five black veterans were killed by the Birmingham, Alabama, police force, led by Eugene “Bull” Connor, whose brutal treatment of civil rights demonstrators would galvanize the nation two decades later.
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The leading southern theorist of resistance, the Alabama lawyer Charles Wallace Collins, sought to counter what he perceived as black control over the national Democratic Party in tandem with organized labor that “strongly advocates and fights for the whole Negro program of equality.” Southern anxiety, he wrote, appropriately had reached fever pitch because a new situation had arisen “within the Democratic Party.” He went on to say, “The northern wing insists that the Party should strive to give equality to the Negro, including the ballot and the abolition of segregation in the South.” This he declared to be “a burning issue for which no compromise solution is possible.” The southern political dilemma, he added, was unprecedented. “And for the first time in the history of the country, the South finds itself without political allies north of the Mason-Dixon Line.”
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Fearing that the filibuster would not be a sufficient guardian, Collins identified two options that could utilize the political capacity of the South: an independent southern political party that “would hold the balance of power in the Congress as do the southern Democrats now,” or a new two-party alignment, in which the South would vote increasingly in tandem with conservative Republicans in “a logical though unorganized alliance.”
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The fretful concerns of the South’s leaders peaked when a broad-based movement with congressional support mounted an effort to create a permanent FEPC. The World War II FEPC, which was closed when its funding was cut off at war’s end, had, in fact, made a significant difference to black employment prospects in war industries, but largely in the North.
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In the South, it had failed to break out of the confines of segregated employment patterns because the institution on which it relied, the U.S. Employment Service (USES), continued operating as it had traditionally. It maintained segregated offices, routinely placed blacks only in menial and heavy labor, and failed to direct blacks to skilled blue-collar or white-collar jobs. In key war-industry factories, welders and other skilled black laborers were offered only unskilled work as porters or busboys. The FEPC did investigate southern defense industries, received numerous complaints about bias in the USES, and publicized findings of job discrimination discovered in hearings held in May 1942. Yet a combination of little money, determined opposition from southern officials, and the don’t-rock-the-boat attitude of the Wartime Manpower Commission, under whose authority the FEPC was located, made it impossible for the committee to make significant headway in the South.
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As the war ended, white southern anxiety continued to grow as the region witnessed the return of hundreds of thousands of black veterans who were impatient for change. As they prepared to reenter the workforce, fair-employment legislation covering all employers of six or more persons reached the floor of the Senate in January 1946. This bill promised an aggressive federal effort to secure racial equality that would be significantly more far-reaching than the wartime FEPC, which had included only the federal government and companies engaged in contracting with it.
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The proposal for a permanent FEPC would have prohibited discrimination based upon race, creed, color, national origin, or ancestry not only by the federal or state governments but also by private employers, with no exemptions for agricultural labor, and by unions. Richard Russell was quick to recognize the radical character of the bill, rightly noting that “there is no more comparison between the powers which were sought to be vested in the FEPC created by Executive order and the agency which is sought to be created by the pending legislation than there is between a rat and an elephant, the existing committee being the rat, and the body proposed to be set up being the elephant which would trample down the last private rights of business in the country.”
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Far more threatening to segregation than antilynching initiatives, this legislation, a bill, in Russell’s words, that “would create class and racial consciousness,” evoked a range of negative arguments by southern senators that combined reasoned objections to federal power in the private economy with exaggerated, even panic-stricken and hysterical prose. The bill, which crystallized the main sources of southern anxiety at the junction of race and class, Russell insisted, would “nationalize all employment in industry, business, agriculture, and all other lines of work,” taking “away from the employer the fundamental right to say whom he shall hire, whom he shall promote, whom he shall discharge.” Alabama’s Lister Hill likewise raised the specter in this “first step toward the nationalization of American business and American enterprise” of “a little bureaucrat, clothed with all the power and majesty of the Federal Government, [who] would come out of Washington and would walk into a man’s castle—his business—and there would assume to tell him and to dictate to him whom he could employ and whom he could not employ.” Byrd of Virginia described such bureaucrats as “snoopers and busybodies, smellers and agitators, alleged do gooders.”
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This combination of authority and intervention was, it was argued, a harbinger of totalitarianism. Many speakers from the South deployed innuendos and resorted to scapegoating. For Walter George of Georgia, the FEPC bill represented the “philosophy of totalitarian government, pure and simple, in its most extreme form and expression. . . . The latest example is Nazi Germany.” For John Bankhead of Alabama, the bill’s supporters were “the Bolshevik crowd, the Communist crowd.” For Wilbert O’Daniel of Texas, “the philosophy of this FECP bill is purely communistic, and I should not be surprised to learn that it originally came from Moscow.”
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These were relatively measured comments. James Eastland of Mississippi cast his argument that “the bill would rape Magna Carta itself” in anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish terms. He blamed the “school of thought [that] has grown up in this country which expresses the ideals of these people of southern and eastern Europe. For 50 years that school of thought has grown as immigrants have come to this country, and from it there has been a concerted attempt to destroy our Anglo-Saxon system of jurisprudence, of justice, and of liberty, a school of thought which reaches the high point in this bill, which is part of a campaign to destroy the America which we have loved, and which thousands of men have laid down their lives to create and preserve.”

Not to be outdone, Olin Johnston, South Carolina’s former governor and now a first-term senator, railed against this assault on the natural order of things. Racial separation, he explained, “is due to an inborn instinct . . . that cannot be changed by legislation.” The flagrant Mississippi racist Bilbo likewise described how “segregation is perfectly natural in nature. It is natural in the animal world. We do not see horses out in the meadow land lining up with the cows. . . . That general law also applies to the human race.” Underscoring his greatest fear, he regretted “that there are many white people in this country who have no regard for the integrity of their white blood, who are encouraging and aiding and abetting the attempt, the fight, the campaign, the movement which is on to bring about the mongrelization of their own white blood. I say that FEPC is one of the instruments they want to use to bring about that social equality which leads to miscegenation, mongrelization, intermixing.”
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Much of the inflated rhetoric was directed at unions, especially the CIO, whose members were said to be outside agitators, both corrupt and Communist, “would be uplifters,” as South Carolina’s Burnet Maybank put it, “people from other sections of the country who do not know or understand the colored man, would use their efforts to stir up strife and prejudice among our people, which in the end would result only in unemployment, and not fair employment.” A colloquy between Senators Eastland and Maybank likened the CIO to Reconstruction-era carpetbaggers, and noted, as Maybank put the point, that “the leaders of the CIO mainly are against the things for which the southern people stand.”
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