Before the 1950s

Hello, I am Charles Payne.

I am the Henry Rutgers distinguished professor

of African and African-American Studies

at Rutgers University, Newark, where I also

direct the Cornwall center for Metropolitan studies.

Much of my research has to do with the American Civil rights

movement, including the short course we're doing today,

which is entitled, "Early Steps in the Civil Rights

Movement, 1945 to 1980."

Welcome to the first mini lecture in our course

on steps in the early civil rights movement.

I have become increasingly convinced in recent years

that discussions like this should actually

start with the Reconstruction period,

that we need to understand how Black activism evolves

over almost an entire century, before we

get to the 1950s and the 1960s.

Most scholars would place the end of Reconstruction

somewhere around 1877.

One of the consequences of the collapse of Reconstruction

was that the Black population in the South

was largely disenfranchised.

It was prevented from voting, prevented

from taking part in political life for almost three

generations.

Being politically powerless, in turn,

made Black people vulnerable to a wide range

of exploitation and violence.

At the turn of the 20th century, only about 3%

of the Blacks in the South were registered to vote.

And that figure would remain pretty constant, pretty close

to 3%, until 1940.

But in 1947, it goes up to 12%.

In 1950, it is all the way up to 20% of the Blacks in the South

are registered to vote.

Now, some things are going to happen in the early 50s,

and that number's going to get pushed down again.

But it's pretty clear that the real break with the past

happens in the 1940s.

It happens in the context of World War II.

And while it's a story that has many factors,

there are three, I think, that I want

to stress as contributing to the re-emergence of Southern Blacks

into political life.

World War II was a watershed moment, of course,

in a great many ways.

One and a half million African-Americans

fought in the American military.

And they came back with considerable frustration

at the fact that they had been fighting

a war against Nazi racism, within a strictly segregated,

and often very racist military.

So they came back with heightened sense of entitlement

about having access to some of the democracy

that they had been fighting for.

And so much of the leadership in Black communities,

much of the leadership around civil rights activism,

is going to come from among these veterans.

Footnote.

White veterans also came back to the South with an attitude.

Some of them began attacking some of the political machines

which had controlled the South for generations

in places like Memphis, and actually made

those places more democratic.

That's a part of the same story.

One factor is the Black Veterans coming back to the South.

A second factor was the end of the all White primary

in the South.

One of the most effective ways to disenfranchise Blacks

had been to say, well, political parties

and the Democratic Party is not a public institution.

It's a private group.

It's a private association.

Therefore, we can restrict our membership.

Therefore, when we have a primary--

and in the South, for the first half of the 20th century,

only the Democratic Party counted.

So if you won that primary, you were almost

certain to win the election.

So that since we're a private organization,

our primaries can be all White. And

we can determine who is in and out of our primaries.

Well, in 1944, after a long series of NAACP court suits,

the Supreme Court decided that the game was up, that the White

primary was illegal.

Primaries were a public activity,

and no one could be excluded from it on the basis of color.

So that decision, Smith versus Allwright,

sends a signal to the South that the law, the country,

in some sense, has legitimated the right of Blacks

in the South to vote.

So that becomes a very important factor.

The third factor is that in the 1940s,

and continuing into the early 1950s,

racial terrorism was on the decline.

Almost certainly, this has to do with the fact

that Southern agriculture was mechanizing, like agriculture

across the rest of the country.

And that large Black workforce, which

made Southern agriculture go, was no longer

needed to the same degree.

Once you had machines that could pick cotton,

you didn't need human hands picking cotton.

And when you didn't need human hands picking cotton,

you didn't need violence to control that population.

So, across the 1940s, even beginning

at the end of the 1930s, we see significant reduction

in the number of lynchings.

Tuskegee Institute, which probably kept the best records

on lynching, in 1952, for the first time in 70 years,

they could not find a single lynching in the South.

Had you gone back 20 years, they were finding 30 to 40 lynchings

a year.

Had you gone back 40 years, maybe 60 to 70

lynchings per year.

In the early 1950s, for the first time,

they had years when there were no lynchings.

Now, of course, there's always another side to these stories,

right?

As lynchings went down, bombings went up.

The deaths of Black prisoners, while they

were under the control of law enforcement probably went up.

But even that could be interpreted

as a kind of progress, right?

The fact that the most dangerous defenders of White supremacy

were hiding behind bombs in the night,

rather than rallying crowds, rallying lynch mobs

in the open, meant that killers saw a need

to be more cautious than they had been in the past.

I mean, it was a measure of progress.

A grim measure, but it was still some signal

that there was a shift going on in the balance of power.

Of course, there was also activism going on in the North.

The National Association for Colored People,

probably at this point the longest lasting, most widely

known national civil rights group,

had its most rapid period of growth in the 1940s,

in the context of World War II.

Going from a membership of about 50,000, just prior to the war,

to a membership of over 400,000 before the end of the war.

It wasn't the only vigorous organization, though.

There was an entire movement led by A. Philip Randolph.

A. Philip Randolph came out of union organizing.

He was the head of the Brotherhood

of Sleeping Car Porters.

And one of the things, obviously,

that as a union person, he is centrally concerned with,

is access to jobs.

And so, the march on Washington movement

was an attempt to get jobs for Black people

in the burgeoning war industries, defense industries.

And the movement consisted of a series of mass meetings

and marches across the country.

Rallies where tens of thousands of people

came, to demand that Blacks have access

to jobs in the defense industry.

They filled Madison Square Garden at one rally.

Franklin Roosevelt eventually felt the pressure,

and eventually signed an executive order,

which opened up those jobs to more and more Black people.

A. Philip Randolph, by the way, was also involved right

at the end of the war, in another campaign that

helped to lead to the desegregation

of the armed forces, immediately after World War II.

20 years after Randolph threatened the march

on Washington, he was presiding over another march

on Washington, the famous march on Washington in 1963.

The march at which Dr. King gave his I Have a Dream speech.

But the seed, the idea for that march

had been planted 20 years earlier,

and Randolph is the connecting link.

At the same time, there's another kind

of battle going on in the North that's important.

And even though it's not often thought

of in these conversations, it should be.

And that was the battle against living in the ghetto, right?

The ghetto, just as much as sharecropping, just as

much as disenfranchisement, is an instrument of subordination.

In the 19th century in urban America, North and South,

perhaps even more so in the South,

Blacks and Whites in urban areas tended

to live in very mixed communities.

There was no tradition of strong racial concentration,

such as we were going to see in the 20th century.

Over the course of the 20th century,

of course, after you get the waves of late 19th century

migration from Europe, you're going to have ethnic enclaves

all over American cities.

But they're different from the enclaves in which Blacks

were forced to live.

The Black ghetto is always more homogeneous,

and it's much longer lived.

If you looked at 1930 Chicago, virtually every ethnic group

you could think of had its neighborhood.

A neighborhood that was identified with it.

But in fact, with one exception, one exception

other than Blacks, the people who

were identified with a neighborhood

were almost never the majority of the people

in that neighborhood.

There were more non Italians in Little Italy in Chicago

than there were Italians.

The Jewish neighborhoods in Chicago

never had a majority of Jews living in them.

The Swedish neighborhood never had a majority of Scandinavians

living in them.

With Blacks, it was different.

With Blacks, 82% of the population

in Black neighborhoods were Black.

That concentration was distinct.

And nationally, decade by decade, Blacks

became more concentrated in urban neighborhoods,

so that between 1930 and 1970, the average level

of Black spatial isolation doubled.

Nor did those numbers go down with time.

They were steady over the course of the century.

And so, there was a movement to push against those boundaries.

Very often, it's just a matter of individuals

moving into neighborhoods, into towns where Blacks had not

moved before.

Very often, they do that with the support of civil rights

groups.

But a great many of it is simply individuals making decisions

on their own.

Although then, when trouble starts, they often

have to call on civil rights groups

for one kind of support or another.

And trouble often did start.

And the most significant form of trouble,

the most concerning of course, was violence.

Homes were bombed.

Mobs gathered on people's lawns.

They threw things into homes.

In the years immediately after the Great Migration,

and immediately after World War I, in Chicago,

there was a racial bombing every 20 days for three years.

That gives you a sense of how intransigent

the White neighborhoods were about having

Blacks move into them.

So that's a different kind of battle going on in the North,

from the battles going on in the South.

But to mention one other Southern battle, the right

to vote intersected with educational issues, right?

From the end of Reconstruction on,

the South systematically provided poor education

to Blacks.

That very often meant only three or four months of schooling

a year.

And while education was underfunded

for everybody in the South, it was particularly

underfunded for Black people.

It's hard to come up with an average

over that period of time.

But a good guess is probably that expenditures

on Black education were about a third

of what was spent on White education.

And again, I'm saying what was spent on White

education was also inadequate by national norms.

And in some places, it wouldn't have been a third.

It might have been--

expenditures on Black education would

have been a seventh of what was being spent on White education.

The natural result of that, large numbers of people

were not literate.

Many states took advantage of the illiteracy

that they had created through their policies,

by saying that in order to register to vote,

people had to interpret a section of the state

constitution, to the satisfaction of the registrar.

And while that disenfranchised a great many Black people,

it also disenfranchised some White people, right?

Which tended to be the case with the patterns of the forms

of suppression at that time.

Obviously, there had to be some response to that.

One of the most creative people leading the response

was a woman named Septima Clark, who started teaching

in South Carolina and the low country,

not long after the first World War.

On her first job, Septima Clark was paid $35 a week.

White teachers in a school almost

across the street from her were making $85 a week.

Partly for that reason, she became a leader,

and the fight led, in her state by the NAACP,

to equalize expenditures in Black and White schools,

in a number of parts of that campaign.

But she eventually became an important leader

in the state NAACP because of her work.

I think she was vice president of the state chapter.

And at some point, the state of South Carolina

decided the NAACP was a subversive organization,

an anti-American organization.

And was therefore illegal.

And illegal to be a member of it.

A great many- no doubt the vast majority- of Black teachers

dissociated themselves from the NAACP.

Septima Clark refused to resign.

And because she refused to resign from her teaching job--

because she refused to resign from the NAACP,

she was fired from her teaching job in 1956.

There's an interesting pattern, in which White people see

someone becoming an activist leader,

and they fire that person.

They take some steps against that person.

And it turns out to free up the person

to become a more serious activist.

This is one of those cases.

So they fire her from her school teaching job,

and her next job is to become the director of programs

at a place called the Highlander Center.

Highlander probably started in the early 1930s.

You can think of it as a center for training activists.

Whatever you wanted to learn about social change

in the South in those days, whether you were Black, White,

Native American, you could go to Highlander.

And they would try to teach you whatever

it was you needed to learn.

She was fired from her school teaching job in Charleston,

becomes the director of programs at the Highlander Center,

at a time when Highlander is trying

to become a force in improving the literacy

of African-Americans, so that they can register to vote.

And she designs the program, trains recruits and trains

the teachers.

She designs a program for working with people,

first to teach them how to read, then

to teach them how to interpret the Constitution.

So picture, if you will, in the first days, buses that

pick up people in the early morning in South Carolina,

to take them to the fields where they're going to be working.

And on the bus, there's a teacher

striding up and down the rows, helping

people learn their alphabet, helping them learn phonics,

helping them learn the words, helping them

talk about the Constitution.

And they would do that in the morning

before they went to the fields.

They would do it in the afternoon

when they returned from the fields.

They eventually bought a store.

And in the front of the store, they had a store.

And in the back of the store, they

had a voter registration school, and a literacy school.

And the store was used to hide what they were actually doing.

With the help of Ella Baker, about whom we'll

be talking in one of the subsequent many lectures,

that program, the citizenship schools,

was transferred to Dr. King's organization, the Southern

Christian Leadership Conference.

And with that support, it was able to grow

into a South-wide program for supporting voter registration,

for improving literacy, and for developing community activists.

The school trained over 10,000 teachers.

They had as many as 200 schools operating simultaneously

in people's kitchens, in beauty parlors,

and under trees in the summertime.

Graduates were expected to go into other leadership

role in the movement, beyond merely teaching

in the citizenship schools.

The evaluation form asked them, has the graduates

been successful in getting others to vote?

Attended community meetings, engaged in demonstrations,

rendered more help to his or her neighbors,

worked for any unselfish cause.

So my point again, which is the whole point

for this part of the mini lecture,

is that work which starts just after World War I becomes

important in providing the human infrastructure

for local struggles that are going

to take place in the 1960s.

There are a lot of things I haven't talked about.

I haven't talked about the growing interest in the 1940s,

among Black and White activists in this country,

in Mahatma Gandhi.

And his attack on colonialism in India.

And people beginning to wonder if any part of that

could be adapted to America.

I haven't talked about one of the most courageous forms

of activism in the South in this early period, which

are the vigorous attempts to organize sharecroppers

in places like Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

They were eventually stopped by violence,

but the fact that they were able to get people

to try to organize for better working conditions,

better economic return on their labor,

the fact that people were willing to try

is significant by itself.

I haven't talked about the sustained

anti-lynching campaigns, that probably lasted from the 1930s

into the 1960s.

They were not successful, but they

changed the strategic context for Southern White leaders.

They had to begin thinking about whether or not

the things they were doing were going

to encourage the anti-lynching legislation that they

so desperately wanted to stop.

And I haven't talked, other than a brief reference,

about the vigorous campaigns against discrimination

and segregation in the military.

But a great many people were politicized

by what they experienced in the process of serving

in the military over the course.

So, my point then, my summary, is that you can at least, a 30,

perhaps a 40 year period prior to the middle of the 1950s,

you can see a kind of gathering of forces

at both the macro and the micro level.

Activist networks were forming, people

were experimenting with tactics, gathering resources.

And all those things are going to come together at some point

to make the modern movement possible.