The economic dislocations of the Great Depression and the contradictions of fighting for freedom abroad during World War II while enforcing discrimination and segregation at home exacerbated racial and ethnic conflict throughout America. Lynchings of Aerican Americans surged in the rural South in the early 1930s, and during the war rioting occurred in major cities, accompanied by other acts of communal discord. Despite this, the era offered hope for improved race relations as black activists and white liberals joined forces with renewed vigor to fight racial discrimination and protect civil rights.
The era began on a discouraging note as lynching increased sharply during the depths of the depression. Organizations such as the National Association eor the Advancement oe Colored People (NAACP), the National Urban League, and the Commission on Interracial Cooperation (which had been founded in 1919 “to quench, if possible, the fires of racial antagonism” in the South) had helped reduce the practice. But in 1930, lynchings shot up from 10 to 21 per year, fell to six in 1932 and then jumped to 28 the next year. According to the Tuskegee Institute’s lynching statistics, 20 lynchings took place in 1934, after which the annual number fell into the single digits.
The horrific 1934 lynching of Claude Neal in the Florida panhandle so shocked the nation that sentiment built against such actions. Claude Neal was arrested for the rape and murder of his 19-year-old white neighbor. In fact, she hadn’t been raped and Neal’s guilt in the murder was uncertain. The sheriff removed him to Alabama for safety. But a mob tracked him down, extracted him from the jail, and took him in a car caravan back to Florida, where he was castrated, made to eat his genitalia, and ultimately riddled with bullets. His body was dragged to the home of the victim, where a mob that included children stabbed, kicked, and cut pieces from the body for souvenirs. With the corpse hanging in the local courthouse square—its torso covered for modesty’s sake—a race riot ensued that drove many blacks from their homes and jobs. Regional papers had advertised the impending lynching, radio stations broadcast its location, and the lynchers released a statement inviting all white people to the affair. Between
3,000 and 7,000 attended.
After researching lynching several years later, Gun-NAR Myrdal reported in his seminal 1944 work on race relations, An American Dilemma, that he encountered few people in the middle and upper classes in the South who approved of it. Yet few of them said they would try to stop a lynching or punish the perpetrators. In fact, prominent people often participated. At the national level, efforts of the NAACP and their supporters to persuade Congress to pass antilynching legislation failed in the 1930s. A major reason for this failure was that President Franklin D. Roosevelt refused to throw his political weight behind the effort. He feared that such a stance would alienate the many powerful southern Democrats whose support he needed for passage of New Deal legislation.
The “legal lynching” of the Scottsboro Boys in 1931 grew directly out of this sort of poisoned atmosphere. The trial of the nine young black men falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama made a mockery of jus-tice—although, because of Supreme Court rulings, all nine eventually regained their freedom.
In the Scottsboro case and other situations, Communists tried during the depression to win support from working-class blacks in order to displace the NAACP, whose legal gradualism and middle-class bias also alienated those pressing more militant agendas. The Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) gained control of the defense of the Scottsboro Boys and sought to use it to attract black support. The CPUSA’s International Legal Defense obtained the pro bono services of Samuel S. Leibowitz, at the time perhaps the country’s best criminal attorney. Communists were instrumental in freeing Birmingham coal miner Angelo Herndon, who had been jailed for inciting insurrection. His crime was trying to convince other blacks to join the Communist Party.
Despite such episodes, however, and the continuing Jim Crow system of segregation and disfranchisement in the South, African Americans overwhelmingly embraced the American system, rejected radical ideologies, and stayed well away from communists and communism. The National Negro Congress, for example, formed in 1936 by aggressive young black intellectuals, fell apart when leaders like Ralph Bunche and A. Philip Randolph resigned in protest at Communist threats to take over its agenda.
Although public protest led to a reduction in lynchings, heinous acts continued sporadically. In the 1942 lynching of 25-year-old Cleo Wright in Sikeston, Missouri, the county prosecutor and local police were present at the jail when a mob seized Wright and dragged him behind a car to the black section of the community, poured gasoline over him, and set him afire. Local whites responded to the horrible affair by advocating more segregation—for the “protection” of African Americans.
Also alarming during this 15-year period was the spread of rioting. White mob actions were similar to those in industrial centers during and after World War I. In the early 1930s, Arkansas whites burned homes and crops and fired upon black sharecroppers active in the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. Elsewhere, black farmers who were thought to have fallen under radical labor influences were harassed and attacked. Anti-Semitism led to violence in depression-racked New York City when gangs of young Irish Americans and German Americans roamed the streets of Washington Heights, Flatbush, and the South Bronx robbing and harassing Jews, occasionally vandalizing their stores.
Indicative of a rising anger and determination in black America, insurrectionary rioting also emerged in which African Americans resorted to mass violence to express outrage over continued subordination. A riot erupted in Harlem in 1935 after police scolded (and released) a black youth caught shoplifting candy. Rumors spread that they had killed the boy. Fueled by simmering bitterness, blacks dismissed police denials and retaliated against symbols of their subordination. One white was killed, and 200 white-owned stores were trashed.
In 1941, black soldiers rioted in North Carolina when they were not allowed on a bus with white soldiers. One black and one white were killed. Many of these men came from the North and had no experience in the ways in which Jim Crow governed day-to-day race relations in the South. A similar incident took place in El Paso, Texas, in 1943. In Camp Stewart, Georgia, rumors of a black man raping a white woman led ultimately to a riot by black troops that took two battalions to suppress.
Fisk University reported 242 separate incidents of racial violence in 1943. Race riots broke out in several major cities, often setting African Americans against ethnic whites. Tulsa, Chicago, East St. Louis (Illinois), Philadelphia, Buffalo, and Beaumont (Texas) all experienced racial disturbances. In Mobile, Alabama, whites rioted because 12 black men had been promoted into skilled jobs in the shipyards, the preserve of whites. The mob drove away every black worker it could find.
The most violent riots of 1943 occurred in Harlem and Detroit, where whites resented black economic incursions, and blacks resented continuing discrimination. The Detroit riot began over racial taunting at the Belle Isle public park and lasted for three days. In typical fashion, whites invaded black neighborhoods and blacks fought back. Thirty-four people, including 25 African Americans, were killed before the police, supported by the military, were able to quell the disturbance.
In Harlem a few weeks later another riot broke out, triggered by a confrontation involving a white policeman, as had been the case in 1935. This time, a uniformed black soldier was shot in a hotel lobby by a patrolman. Rumors that the serviceman died led to a riot in which six people were slain and 150 stores were looted. The two Harlem riots set the pattern for the ghetto insurrections of the “long hot summers” of the 1960s, in which the urban African-American poor resorted to violent protest over their powerlessness.
The Port Chicago, California, incident of July 1944— the worst war-related disaster in the territorial United States—exemplified the depths of racial disharmony. While poorly trained African-American sailors were loading ammunition onto Liberty Ships, a huge explosion obliterated two ships, killing 320 men, 202 of whom were black. Fifty black sailors were court-martialed for refusing to return to this duty, claiming that only African Americans were assigned such dangerous work. This affair contributed to the decision of the U. S. Navy to begin integrating before the war ended.
One apparently forgotten minority, Native Americans, did manage to post some minor gains during this period. Their plight had worsened since passage of the 1887 Dawes Severalty Act, which divided Indian land into small plots to promote assimilation and sedentary agriculture but also made it easier for whites to gain control of the land; and they were further beset by the corrupt Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) in Washington, D. C. However, in 1933 John Collier was appointed BIA head by President Roosevelt, and he used his extensive experience in urban reform to upgrade existing programs. Beyond making it harder for outsiders to expropriate Indian land, he founds thousands of jobs for Native Americans through the Civilian Conservation Corps and also acquired money from the
Public Works Administration to construct hundreds of schools. Collier also achieved the Indian Reorganization Act, which ended land allotment and sought to restore self-government. This move was not popular among many tribes, but the BIA had finally accorded Native American tribes recognition and government attention that had been sadly lacking.
Los Angeles’ infamous “Zoot-Suit Riot” broke out in June 1943 when a white mob comprising soldiers, sailors, and civilians descended upon Mexican barrios invading theaters, streetcars, and even homes. The riot received its name from the fancy, high-waisted suits that many young male Mexican Americans were wearing. With police acquiescence, mobs attacked these individuals, stripped them of their clothes, and beat them, often quite severely. After the Hearst newspapers wrote prejudicial stories about zoot-SUITERS, the Los Angeles City Council made wearing the garb a misdemeanor. Hispanics also suffered continued discrimination at the hands of local Anglo administrators throughout the Southwest, who believed that Mexicans were, at best, a temporary source of imported labor and unworthy of any kind of assistance. This indifference plus the Mexican Repatriation Program resulted in a “reverse mass migration” south of the border whereby an estimated half-million Mexicans returned home during the 1930s.
During World War II, nativist and racial hostility led to the relocation of Japanese Americans and the incarceration of more than 110,000 first - and second-generation Japanese Americans in internment camps. These unfortunate families often lost their homes, businesses, and investments in the government’s haste to protect national security—and to respond to political pressure. In the camp at Manzanar in the California desert, which opened in June 1942 surrounded by barbed wire with guard towers, searchlights, and machine gun emplacements, two inmates died and eight were injured in a riot against the War Relocation Authority’s use of informants within the camp.
The war galvanized black determination to enter the American mainstream, and led to more attention to minorities and to civil rights. Leading black newspapers popularized the “Double V” campaign—victory at home over Jim Crow as well as victory abroad over the Axis. The NAACP grew from 50,000 to 450,000 members during the war, and black protest increased. The March on Washington Movement organized by A. Philip Randolph in 1941 led President Franklin D. Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 8802 banning racial discrimination in government and in industries with government defense contracts and establishing the Fair Employment Practices Committee.
At the same time, an increasing number of concerned whites became convinced that the problems of racial prejudice, tension, and conflict heightened by the Great Depression and highlighted by the war effort had to be addressed. As early as 1938, the Southern Conference for Human Rights sought to improve conditions for the underprivileged. This organization spoke out boldly against lynching, Jim Crow voting laws, and other forms of racial discrimination. More important, in response to the violence of 1943, the Commission on Interracial Cooperation was reformed into the Southern Regional Council to bring to African Americans “the equal opportunity that every other citizen of the United States has.”
Outside the South, too, new initiatives were undertaken. In Chicago that same year the American Council on Race Relations was formed to advise communities on racial problems. Local and state interracial commissions were created to look into the causes of racial tensions and to address prejudice and discrimination. In California, the governor implemented an effort to investigate and improve the situation of Mexican Americans following the zoot-suit riots. Such initiatives sought to build upon the foundation of government protection of minority rights and helped lay groundwork for the restoration of civil rights in the postwar era. Gunnar Myrdal’s influential An American Dilemma, Supreme Court decisions eroding the legal foundations of Jim Crow in education and voting, and the growing prominence of civil rights in the agenda of liberalism also contributed to the momentum of such efforts. In this respect World War II proved a catalyst for gradual changes in attitudes toward race, whereby the traditional status quo was no longer perceived as either legal or even desirable in many quarters. Moreover, the participation of blacks and other minorities in that conflict and their significant contribution to the ultimate victory lent greater credence to their demand for a greater share of the American dream in the postwar period.
Further reading: Kevin J. McMahon, Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race: How the Presidency Paved the Road to Brown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Mary Poole, The Segregated Origins of Social Security: African Americans and the Welfare State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Herbert Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988).
—Howard Smead
World History
