Chapter 5: Rejection and Protest: An Historical Sketch
INTRODUCTION
The events of the summer of 1967 are in large part the culmination of 300 years of racial prejudice. Most Americans know little of the origins of the racial schism separating our white and Negro citizens. Few appreciate how central the problem of the Negro has been to our social policy. Fewer still understand that today's problems can be solved only if white Americans comprehend the rigid social, economic, and educational barriers that have prevented Negroes from participating in the mainstream of American life. Only a handful realize that Negro accommodation to the patterns of prejudice in American culture has been but one side of the coin -- for as slaves and as free men, Negroes have protested against oppression and have persistently sought equality in American society.
What follows is neither a history of the Negro in the United States nor a full account of Negro protest movements. Rather, it is a brief narrative of a few historical events that illustrate the facts of rejection and the forms of protest.
We call on history not to justify, but to help explain, for black and white Americans, a state of mind.
THE COLONIAL PERIOD
Twenty years after Columbus reached the New World, African Negroes, transported by Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese traders, were arriving in the Caribbean Islands. Almost all came as slaves. By 1600, there were more than half a million slaves in the Western Hemisphere.
In Colonial America the first Negroes landed at Jamestown in August 1619. Within 40 years Negroes had become a group apart, separated from the rest of the population by custom and law. Treated as servants for life, forbidden to intermarry with whites, deprived of their African traditions, and dispersed among Southern plantations, American Negroes lost tribal, regional, and family ties.
Through massive importation, their numbers increased rapidly. By 1776, some 500,000 Negroes were held in slavery and indentured servitude in the United States. Nearly one of every six persons in the country was a slave.
Americans disapproved a preliminary draft of the Declaration of Independence that indicted the King of England for waging "cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither." Instead, they approved a document that proclaimed "all men are created equal."
The statement was an ideal, a promise. But it excluded the Negroes who were held in bondage, as well as the few who were free men.
The conditions in which Negroes lived had already led to protest. Throughout the 18th century, the danger of Negro revolts obsessed many white Americans. Slave plots of con- siderable scope were uncovered in New York in 1712 and 1741, and they resulted in bloodshed -- whites and Negroes were slain.
Racial violence was present almost from the beginning of the American experience.
THE REVOLUTION
Negroes were at first barred from serving in the Revolutionary Army, recruiting officers having been ordered in July 1775 to enlist no "stroller, Negro, or vagabond." Yet Negroes were already actively involved in the struggle for independence. Crispus Attucks, a Boston Negro, was perhaps the first American to die for freedom, and Negroes had already fought in the battles at Lexington and Concord. They were among the soldiers at Bunker Hill.
Fearing that Negroes would enlist in the British Army, which welcomed them, and facing a manpower shortage, the Continental Army accepted free Negroes. Slaves joined the British, and according to an estimate by Thomas Jefferson, more than 30,000 Virginia slaves ran away in 1778 alone, presumably to enlist. The states were enrolling both free and slave Negroes, and finally Congress authorized military service for slaves, who were to be emancipated in return for their service. By the end of the war, about 5,000 Negroes had been in the ranks of the Continental Army. Those who had been slaves became free.
But the liberty and equality implicit in American independence had meaning rather than application to them.
THE CONSTITUTION AND THE LAWS
Massachusetts abolished slavery in 1783, and Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York soon provided for gradual liberation. But relatively few Negroes lived in these states. The bulk of the Negro population was in the South, where white Americans had fortunes invested in slaves. Although the Congress banned slavery in the Northwest Territory, delegates at the Constitutional Convention compromised with the institution -- a slave counted as three-fifths of a person for determining the number of representatives from a state to Congress; Congress was prohibited from restricting the slave trade until after 1808, and the free states were required to return fugitive slaves to their Southern owners.
Growing numbers of slaves in the South became permanently fastened in bondage, and slavery spread into the new Southern regions. When more slaves were needed for the cotton and sugar plantations in the Southwest, they were ordered from the "Negro-raising" states of the Old South or, despite Congressional prohibition of the slave trade, imported from Africa.
The laws of bondage became even more institutionalized. Masters retained absolute authority over their Negroes, who were unable to leave their masters' properties without written permission. Any white person, even those who owned no slaves -- and they outnumbered slaveholders six to one -- could challenge a truant slave and turn him over to a public official. Slaves could own no property, could enter into no contract, not even a contract of marriage, and had no right to assemble in public unless a white person was present. They had no standing in the courts. Without legal means of defense, slaves were susceptible to the premise that any white person could threaten their lives or take them with impunity.
DISCRIMINATION AS DOCTRINE
The situation was hardly better for free Negroes. A few achieved material success, several owned slaves themselves, but the vast majority knew only poverty and suffered the indignity of rejection by white society. Forbidden to settle in some areas, segregated in others, they were targets of prejudice and discrimination. In the South, they were denied freedom of movement, severely restricted in their choice of occupation, and forbidden to associate with whites or with slaves. They lived in constant danger of being enslaved -- whites could challenge their freedom and an infraction of the law could put them into bondage. In both North and South, they were regularly victims of mobs. In 1829, for example, white residents invaded Cincinnati's "Little Africa," killed Negroes, burned their property, and ultimately drove half the colored population from the city.
Some Americans, Washington and Jefferson among them, advocated the gradual emancipation of slaves, and in the 19th century, a movement to abolish slavery grew in importance and strength. A few white abolitionist leaders wanted full equality for Negroes, but others sought only to eliminate the institution itself. And some anti-slavery societies, fearing that Negro members would unnecessarily offend those who were unsympathetic with abolitionist principles, denied entrance to Negro abolitionists.
Most Americans were, in fact, against abolishing slavery. They refused to rent their halls for anti-slavery meetings. They harassed abolitionist leaders who sought to educate white and Negro children together. They attacked those involved in the movement. Mobs sometimes killed abolitionists and destroyed their property.
A large body of literature came into existence to prove that the Negro was imperfectly developed in mind and body, that he belonged to a lower order of man, that slavery was right on ethnic, economic, and social grounds -- and quoted the Scriptures in support.
Spreading rapidly during the first part of the 19th century, the institution enslaved less than one million Negroes in 1800, but almost four million in 1860. Although some few white Americans had freed their slaves, most increased their holdings, for the invention of the cotton gin had made the cotton industry profitable. In mid-century, slavery in the South was a systematic and aggressive way of treating a whole race of people.
The despair of Negroes was evident. Malingering and sabotage tormented every slaveholder. The problem of runaway slaves was endemic. Some slaves -- Gabriel Prosser in 1800, Denmark Vesey in 1822, Nat Turner in 1831, and others -- turned to violence, and the sporadic uprisings that flared demonstrated a deep protest against a demeaning way of life.
Negroes who had material resources expressed their distress in other ways. Paul Cuffee, Negro philanthropist and owner of a fleet of ships, transported in 1816 a group of Negroes to a new home in Sierra Leone. Forty years later Martin R. Delany, Negro editor and physician urged Negroes to settle elsewhere. When Frederick Douglass, the distinguished Negro abolitionist, addressed the citizens of Rochester on Independence Day, 1852, he told them:
The Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.... Fellow citizens, above your national tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions, whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are today rendered more intolerable by the jubilant shouts that reach them....
THE PATH TOWARD CIVIL WAR
The 1850's brought Negroes increasing despair, as the problem of slavery was debated by the nation's leaders. The Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 settled no basic issues. And the Dred Scott case in 1857 confirmed Negroes in their understanding that they were not "citizens" and thus not entitled to the Constitutional safeguards enjoyed by other Americans.
But the abolitionist movement was growing. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" appeared in 1852 and sold more than 300,000 copies that year. Soon presented on the stage throughout the North, it dramatized the cruelty of slave masters and overseers and condemned a culture based on human degradation and exploitation. John Brown's raids, then the election of Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency on an anti-slavery platform gave hope that the end of slavery was near.
But by the time Lincoln took office, seven Southern states had seceded from the Union, and four more soon joined them. Even the abolitionist movement had disappointed perceptive Negroes who saw that white leaders were less than altogether sincere. A few were genuinely interested in the Negro, but most were paternalistic and prejudiced. Whites were motivated at best by pity, at worst by economic self-interest.
Equality of treatment and acceptance by the society at large were myths, and Negro protest during the first half of the 19th century took the form of rhetoric, spoken and written, which combined denunciation of undemocratic oppression together with pleas to the conscience of white Americans for the redress of grievances and the recognition of their constitutional rights.
A few Negroes joined white Americans who believed that only Negro emigration to Africa would solve racial problems. But most Negroes equated that program with banishment and felt themselves "entitled to participate in the blessings" of America. The National Negro Convention Movement, formed in 1830, held conferences to publicize on a national scale the evils of slavery and the indignities heaped on free Negroes.
The American Moral Reform Society, founded by Negroes in 1834, rejected racial separatism and advocated uplifting "the whole human race, without distinction as to . . • complexion." Other Negro reformers pressed for stronger racial consciousness and solidarity as the means to overcome racial barriers. Many took direct action to help slaves escape through the Underground Railroad. A few resisted discrimination by political action, even though most Negroes were barred from voting. Some few called for, but made no effort to organize, slave rebellions and mass violence.
Frustration, disillusionment, anger, and fantasy marked the Negro protest against the place in American society assigned to them. "I was free," Harriet Tubman said, "but there was no one to welcome me in the land of freedom. I was a stranger m a strange land."
The Civil War and Emancipation renewed Negro faith in the vision of a racially egalitarian and integrated American society. But Americans, after having been roused by wartime crisis, would again fail to destroy what abolitionists had described as the "sins of caste."
CIVIL WAR AND "EMANCIPATION"
Negroes volunteered for military service during the Civil War, the struggle, as they saw it, between the slave states and the free states. They were rejected.
Not until a shortage of troops plagued the Union Army late in 1862, were segregated units of "United States Colored Troops" formed. Not until 1864 did these men receive the same pay as white soldiers. A total of 186,000 Negroes served.
The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 freed few slaves at first, but had immediate significance as a symbol. Negroes could hope again for equality.
But there were, at the same time, bitter signs of racial unrest. Violent rioting occurred in Cincinnati in 1862, when Negro and Irish hands competed for work on the riverboats. Lesser riots took place in Newark, New Jersey, and in Buffalo and Troy, New York, the result of combined hostility to the war and fear that Negroes would take white jobs.
The most violent of the troubles took place in New York City Draft Riots in July 1863, when white workers, mainly Irish-born, embarked on a three-day rampage.
Desperately poor and lacking real roots in the community, they had the most to lose from the draft. Further, they were bitterly afraid that even cheaper Negro labor would flood the North if slavery ceased to exist.
All the frustrations and prejudices the Irish had suffered were brought to a boiling point.... At pitiful wages, they had slaved on the railroads and canals, had been herded into the most menial jobs as carters and stevedores.... Their crumbling frame tenements ... were the worst slums in the city.
Their first target was the office of the provost-marshal in charge of conscription, and 700 people quickly ransacked the building and set it on fire. The crowd refused to permit firemen into the area, and the whole block was gutted. Then the mob spilled into the Negro area, where many were slain and thousands forced to flee town. The police were helpless until federal troops arrived on the third day and restored control.
Union victory in the Civil War promised the Negroes freedom but hardly equality or immunity from white aggression. Scarcely was the war ended when racial violence erupted in New Orleans. Negroes proceeding to an assembly hall to discuss the franchise were charged by police and special troops, who routed the Negroes with guns, bricks, and stones, killed some at once, pursued and killed others who were trying to escape.
Federal troops restored order. But 34 Negroes and four whites were reported dead and over 200 people were injured. General Sheridan later said:
At least nine-tenths of the casualties were perpetrated by the police and citizens by stabbing and smashing in the heads of many who had already been wounded or killed by policemen... it was not just a riot but 'an absolute massacre by the police ...' a murder which the mayor and police ... perpetrated without the shadow of necessity.
RECONSTRUCTION
Reconstruction was a time of hope, the period when the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were adopted, giving Negroes the vote and the promise of equality.
But campaigns of violence and intimidation accompanied these optimistic expressions of a new age, as the Ku Klux Klan and other secret organizations sought to suppress the emergence into society of the new Negro citizens. Major riots occurred in Memphis, Tennessee, where 46 Negroes were reported killed and 75 wounded, and in the Louisiana centers of Colfax and Coushatta, where more than 100 Negro and white Republicans were massacred.
Nevertheless, reconstruction reached a legislative climax in 1875 with passage of the first Civil Rights law. Negroes now had the right to equal accommodations, facilities, and advantages of public transportation, inns, theaters, and places of public amusement, but the law had no effective enforcement provisions and was, in fact, poorly enforced. Although bills to provide federal aid to education for Negroes were prepared, none passed, and educational opportunities remained meager.
But Negroes were elected to every Southern legislature, 20 served in the U.S. House of Representatives, two represented Mississippi in the U.S. Senate, and a prominent Negro politician was Governor of Louisiana for 40 days.
Opposition to Negroes in state and local government was always open and bitter. In the press and on the platform they were described as ignorant and depraved. Critics made no distinction between Negroes who had graduated from Dartmouth and those who had graduated from the cotton fields. Every available means Was employed to drive Negroes from public life. Negroes who voted or held office were refused jobs or punished by the Ku Klux Klan. One group in Mississippi boasted of having killed 116 Negroes and of having thrown their bodies into the Tallahatchie River. In a single South Carolina county, six men were murdered and more than 300 whipped during the first six months of 1870.
The federal government seemed helpless. Having withdrawn the occupation troops as soon as the Southern states organized governments, the President was reluctant to send them back. In 1870 and 1871, after the 15th Amendment was ratified, Congress enacted several laws to protect the right of citizens to vote. They were seldom enforced, and the Supreme Court struck down most of the important provisions in 1875 and 1876.
THE END OF RECONSTRUCTION
As Southern white governments returned to power, beginning with Virginia in 1869 and ending with Louisiana in 1877, the program of relegating the Negro to a subordinate place in American life was accelerated. Disenfranchisement was the first step. Negroes who defied the Klan and tried to vote faced an array of deceptions and obstacles -- polling places were changed at the last minute without notice to Negroes, severe time limitations were imposed on marking complicated ballots, votes cast incorrectly in a maze of ballot boxes were nullified. The suffrage provisions of state constitutions were rewritten to disenfranchise Negroes who could not read, understand, or interpret the Constitution. Some state constitutions permitted those who failed the tests to vote if their ancestors had been eligible to vote on January 1, 1860, when no Negro could vote anywhere in the South.
In 1896, Negroes registered in Louisiana totalled 130,344. In 1900, after the state rewrote the suffrage provisions of its constitution, Negroes on the registration books numbered only 5,320. Essentially the same thing happened in the other states of the former Confederacy.
SEGREGATION BY LAW
When the Supreme Court, in 1883, declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional, Southern states began to enact laws to segregate the races. In 1896, the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson approved "separate but equal" facilities; it was then that segregation became an established fact, by law and by custom. Negroes and whites were separated on public carriers and in all places of public accommodation, including hospitals and churches. In courthouses, whites and Negroes took oaths on separate Bibles. In most communities, whites were separated from Negroes in cemeteries.
Segregation invariably meant discrimination. On trains all Negroes, including those holding first-class tickets, were allotted a few seats in the baggage car. Negroes in public buildings had to use freight elevators and toilet facilities reserved for janitors. Schools for Negro children were at best a weak imitation of those for whites, as states spent 10 times more to educate white youngsters than Negroes. Discrimination in wages became the rule, whether between Negro and white teachers of similar training and experience or between common laborers on the same job.
Some Northern states enacted civil rights laws in the 1880's, but Negroes in fact were treated little differently in the North than in the South. As Negroes moved north in substantial numbers toward the end of the century, they discovered that equality of treatment was only a dream in Massachusetts, New York, or Illinois. They were crowded by local ordinances into one section of the city where housing and public services were generally sub-standard. Overt discrimination in employment was a general practice. Employment opportunities apart from menial tasks were few. Most labor unions excluded Negroes from membership -- or granted membership in separate and powerless Jim Crow locals. Yet when Negroes secured employment during strikes, labor leaders castigated them for not understanding the principles of trade unionism. And when Negroes sought to move into the mainstream of community life by seeking membership in the organizations around them -- educational, cultural, and religious -- they were invariably rebuffed.
That northern whites would resort to violence was made clear in anti-Negro riots in New York, 1900; Springfield, Ohio, 1904; Greensburg, Indiana, 1906; Springfield, Illinois, 1908.
The latter was a three-day riot, initiated by a white woman's claim of violation by a Negro, inflamed by newspapers, intensified by crowds of whites gathered around the jail demanding that the Negro, arrested and imprisoned, be lynched. When the sheriff transferred the accused and another Negro to a jail in a nearby town, rioters headed for the Negro section and attacked homes and businesses owned by or catering to Negroes. White owners who showed handkerchiefs in their windows averted harm to their stores. One Negro was summarily lynched, others were dragged from houses and streetcars and beaten. By the time National Guardsmen could reach the scene, six persons were dead -- four whites and two Negroes; property damage was extensive. Many Negroes left Springfield, hoping to find better conditions elsewhere, especially in Chicago.
By the 20th century, the Negro was at the bottom of American society. Disfranchised, Negroes throughout the country were excluded by employers and labor unions from white collar jobs and skilled trades. Jim Crow laws and farm tenancy characterized Negro existence in the South. About 100 lynchings occurred every year in the 1880's and 1890's; there were 161 lynchings in 1892. As increasing numbers of Negroes migrated to Northern cities, race riots became commonplace. Northern whites, even many former abolitionists, began to accept the white South's views on race relations.
BOOKER T. WASHINGTON
Between his famous Atlanta Exposition Address in 1895 and his death in 1915, Booker T. Washington, principal of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama and the most prominent Negro in America. secretly spent thousands of dollars fighting disfranchisement and segregation laws; publicly he advocated a policy of accommodation, conciliation, and gradualism. Largely blaming Negroes themselves for their condition, Washington believed that by helping themselves, by creating and supporting their own businesses, by proving their usefulness to society through the acquisition of education, wealth, and morality, Negroes would earn the respect of the white man and thus eventually gain their constitutional rights.
Self-help and self-respect appeared a practical and sure, if gradual, way of ultimately achieving racial equality. Washington's doctrines also gained support because they appealed to race pride -- if Negroes believed in themselves, stood together, and supported each other, they would be able to shape their destinies.
THE NIAGARA MOVEMENT
In the early years of the century, a small group of Negroes, led by W.E.B. Du Bois, formed the Niagara Movement to oppose Washington's program, which they claimed had failed. Washington had put economic progress before politics, had accepted the separate-but-equal theory, and opposed agitation and protest. Du Bois and his followers stressed political activity as the basis of the Negro's future, insisted on the inequity of Jim Crow laws, and advocated agitation and protest.
In sharp language, the Niagara group placed responsibility for the race problem squarely on the whites. The aims of the movement were voting rights and "the abolition of an caste distinctions based simply on race and color."
Although Booker T. Washington tried to crush his critics, Du Bois and the Negro "radicals," as they were called, enlisted the support of a small group of influential white liberals and socialists. Together, in 1909-1910, they formed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
THE NAACP
The NAACP hammered at the walls of prejudice by organizing Negroes and well-disposed whites, by aiming propaganda at the whole nation, by taking legal action in courts and legislatures. Almost at the outset of its career, the NAACP prevailed upon the Supreme Court to declare unconstitutional two discriminatory statutes. In 1915, the Court overruled the Oklahoma "grandfather clause," a provision in several Southern state constitutions that excluded from the vote those whose ancestors were ineligible to vote in 1860. Two years later, the Supreme Court outlawed municipal residential segregation ordinances. These NAACP victories were the first legal steps in a long fight against disfranchisement and segregation.
THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
During the first quarter of the 20th century, the federal government enacted no new legislation to ensure equal rights or opportunities for Negroes and made little attempt to enforce existing laws despite flagrant violations of Negro civil rights.
In 1913, members of Congress from the South introduced bills to federalize the Southern segregation policy. They wished to ban interracial marriages in the District of Columbia, segregate white and Negro federal employees, and introduce Jim Crow laws in the public carriers of the District. The bills did not pass, but segregation practices were extended in federal offices, shops, restrooms, and lunchrooms. The nation's capital became as segregated as any in the former Confederate states.
EAST ST. LOUIS, 1917
Elsewhere there was violence. In East St. Louis, Illinois, a riot in July 1917 claimed the lives of 39 Negroes and nine whites, as a result of fear by white working men that Negro advances in economic, political and social status were threatening their own security and status.
When the labor force of an aluminum plant went on strike, the company hued Negro workers. A labor union delegation called on the mayor and asked that further migration of Negroes to East St. Louis be stopped. As the men were leaving City Hall, they heard that a Negro had accidentally shot a white man during a holdup. In a few minutes rumor had replaced fact: the shooting was intentional -- a white woman had been insulted -- two white girls were shot. By this time 3,000 people had congregated and were crying for vengeance. Mobs roamed the streets, beating Negroes. Policemen did little more than take the injured to hospitals and disarm Negroes.
The National Guard restored order. When the governor withdrew the troops, tensions were still high, and scattered episodes broke the peace. The press continued to emphasize the incidence of Negro crimes, white pickets and Negro workers at the aluminum company skirmished and, on July 1, some whites drove through the main Negro neighborhood firing into homes. Negro residents armed themselves. When a police car drove down the street Negroes riddled it with gunshot.
The next day a Negro was shot on the main street and a new riot was underway. The authority on the event records that the area became a "bloody half mile" for three or four hours; streetcars were stopped, and Negroes, without regard to age or sex, were pulled off and stoned, clubbed and kicked, and mob leaders calmly shot and killed Negroes who were lying in blood in the street. As the victims were placed in an ambulance, the crowds cheered and applauded.
Other rioters set fire to Negro homes, and by midnight the Negro section was in flames and Negroes were fleeing the city. There were 48 dead, hundreds injured, and more than 300 buildings destroyed.
WORLD WAR I
When the United States entered World War I in 1917, the country again faced the question whether American citizens should have the right to serve, on an equal basis, in defense of their country. More than two million Negroes registered under the Selective Service Act, and some 360,000 were called into service.
The Navy rejected Negroes except as menials. The Marine Corps rejected them altogether. The Army formed them into separate units commanded, for the most part, by white officers. Only after enormous pressure did the Army permit Negro candidates to train as officers in a segregated camp. Mistreated at home and overseas, Negro combat units performed exceptionally well under French commanders, who refused to heed American warnings that Negroes were inferior people.
Mobbed for attempting to use facilities open to white soldiers, Negro soldiers returning home suffered indignities. Of the 70 Negroes lynched during the first year after the war, a substantial number were soldiers. Some were lynched in uniform.
POSTWAR VIOLENCE
Reorganized in 1915, the Ku Klux Klan was flourishing again by 1919. Its program "for uniting native-born white Christians for concerted action in the preservation of American institutions and the supremacy of the white race," was implemented by flogging, branding with acid, tarring and feathering, hanging and burning. It destroyed the elemental rights of many Negroes, and of some whites.
Violence took the form of lynchings and riots, and major riots by whites against Negroes took place in 1917 in Chester, Pennsylvania, and Philadelphia; in 1919 in Washington, D.C., Omaha, Charleston, Longview, Texas, Chicago, and Knoxville; in 1921 in Tulsa.
The Chicago riot of 1919 flared from the increase in Negro population, which had more than doubled in 10 years. Jobs were plentiful, but housing was not. Black neighborhoods expanded into white sections of the city, and trouble developed. Between July 1917 and March 1921, 58 Negro houses were bombed, and recreational areas were sites of racial conflict.
The riot itself started on Sunday, July 27, with stone throwing and sporadic fighting at adjoining white and Negro beaches. A Negro boy swimming off the Negro beach drifted into water reserved for whites and drowned. Young Negroes claimed he had been struck by stones and demanded the arrest of a white man. Instead, police arrested a Negro. When Negroes attacked policemen, a riot was in the making. News spread to the city, white and Negro groups clashed in the streets, two persons died, and 50 were wounded. On Monday, Negroes coming home from work were attacked; later, when whites drove cars through Negro neighborhoods and fired weapons, Negroes retaliated. Twenty more were killed and hundreds wounded. On Tuesday, a handful more were dead, 129 injured. On Wednesday, losses in life and property declined further. Rain began to fall; the mayor finally called in the state militia. After nearly a week of violence, the city quieted down.
THE 1920's AND THE NEW MILITANCY
In. the period between the two World Wars, the NAACP dominated the strategy of racial advancement. The NAACP drew Its strength from large numbers of Southern Negroes who had migrated to Northern cities; from a small but growing Negro group of professionals and businessmen who served them; from an upsurge of confidence among the "New Negro," race-proud and self-reliant, believing in racial cooperation and self-help and determined to fight for his constitutional rights; from writers and artists known as the "Harlem Renaissance" who used their own cultural tradition and experience as materials for their works. W.E.B. Du Bois, editor of the Crisis, the NAACP publication, symbolized the new mood and exerted great influence.
The NAACP did extraordinary service, giving legal defense to victims of race riots and unjust judicial proceedings. It obtained the release of the soldiers who had received life sentences on charges of rioting against intolerable conditions at Houston in 1917. It successfully defended Negro sharecroppers in Elaine, Arkansas, who in 1919 had banded together to gain fairer treatment, who had become the objects of a massive armed hunt by whites to put them "in their place," and who were charged with insurrection when they resisted. It secured the acquittal, with the help of Clarence Darrow, of Dr. Ossian Sweet and his family who had moved into a white neighborhood in Detroit, shot at a mob attacking their home, killed a man, and were eventually judged to have committed the act in self-defense.
The NAACP tried vainly to promote passage of an anti-lynching bill, but its most important activity was its campaign to secure enforcement of the 14th and 15th Amendments. It conducted sustained litigation against disfranchisement and segregation, and embarked upon a long fight against the white primaries in the Southern states. The NAACP attacked one aspect of discrimination at a time, hacking away at the structure of discrimination. Local branches in Northern and border cities won a number of important victories, but full recognition of the Negroes' constitutional rights was still a future prospect.
Less successful were attempts to prevent school segregation in Northern cities, which followed the migration of large numbers of rural black folk from the South. Gerrymandering of school boundaries and other devices by boards of education were fought with written petitions, verbal protests to school officials, legal suits and, in several cities, school boycotts. AU proved of no avail.
The thrust of the NAACP was primarily political and legal, but the National Urban League, founded in 1911 by philanthropists and social workers, sought an economic solution to the Negroes' problems. Sympathetic with Booker T. Washington's point of view, believing in conciliation, gradualism, and moral suasion, the Urban League searched out industrial opportunities for Negro migrants to the cities, using arguments that appealed to the white businessman's sense of economic self-interest and also to his conscience.
Also espousing an economic program to ameliorate the Negroes' condition was A. Philip Randolph, an editor of the Messenger. He regarded the NAACP as a middle-class organization unconcerned about pressing economic problems. Taking a Marxist position on the causes of prejudice and discrimination, Randolph called for a new and radical Negro unafraid to demand his rights as a member of the working class. He advocated physical resistance to white mobs, but he believed that only united action of black and white workers against capitalists would achieve social justice.
Although Randolph addressed himself to the urban working masses, few of them ever read the Messenger. The one man who reached the masses of frustrated and disillusioned migrants in the Northern ghettos was Marcus Garvey.
SEPARATISM
Garvey, founder in 1914 of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), aimed to liberate both Africans and American Negroes from their oppressors. His utopian method was the wholesale migration of American Negroes to Africa. Contending that whites would always be racist, he stressed racial pride and history, denounced integration, and insisted that the black man develop "a distinct racial type of civilization of his own and ... work out his salvation in his motherland." On a more practical level he urged support of Negro businesses, and through the UNIA organized a chain of groceries, restaurants, laundries, a hotel, printing plant, and steamship line. When several prominent Negroes called the attention of the United States Government to irregularities in the management of the steamship line, Garvey was jailed, then deported for having used the mails to defraud.
But Garvey dramatized, as no one before, the bitterness and alienation of the Negro slum dwellers who, having come North with great expectations, found only overcrowded and deteriorated housing, mass unemployment, and race riots.