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Winning the War for Democracy
The March on Washington Movement, 1941â?"1946
By David Lucander UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09655-6
CHAPTER 1
What Happens When Negroes Don't March?
The thing that did it was the March on Washington. That scared these people like no other thing. Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, H. Rap Brown, all wrapped together, never had the power, the real power, and threat that that first March had.
—Richard Parrish, MOWM member, interview, May 1, 1975
A. Philip Randolph claimed that he originally thought of sponsoring a march on Washington while traveling through the Deep South on an organizing and speaking tour for the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. According to Milton Webster, one of Randolph's companions on that trip, the ambitious plan for a massive demonstration in the capital on July 1, 1941, was first articulated in Savannah, Georgia. Another BSCP member and close associate of Randolph, Benjamin McLaurin, remembers that it initially "scared some of them to death ... including myself," and he was surprised that in less than a month "it had caught fire.... [E]verybody was talking March on Washington." The Deep South was an unlikely place for the birth of an organization relying on militant rhetoric, dramatic protest, and controversially seizing public space through demonstrations. MOWM's support in that region, however limited, is attributable to the BSCP, an African American labor union headed by Randolph that had local chapters in dozens of railroad towns throughout Dixie. Some of his audiences thought the idea so audacious as to be preposterous. T. D. McNeal swayed them. The St. Louis-based BSCP organizer stayed in each city after Randolph moved on. His job was to "work up negroes to come to Washington for this demonstration." The Arkansas native and former porter knew how to present the unconventional threat in a way that made Randolph's plan seem not only realistic, but also like something that could reap tangible results.
Randolph built MOWM to have a national presence by structuring the organization's National Executive Committee in a way that geographically represented the entire United States. This committee had three members at large, as well as three members each from the North Atlantic Region, South Atlantic Region, Southern Region, Midwestern Region, and Pacific Region. Layle Lane, Senora Lawson, David Grant, Charles Wesley Burton, Bennie Smith, C. L. Dellums, Lawrence Ervin, and Leyton Weston were among the committee's eighteen representatives, and they were also some of MOWM's most committed grassroots activists. The most energetic MOWM chapters were in urban centers of the North and Midwest. During the 1940s, the population of these regions swelled with an influx of 1.6 million African American migrants who left the countryside and the South. Nationwide, that decade saw the percentage of African Americans living in cities rise from less than 50 percent to almost 60 percent. By 1944 the number of African Americans on voting rolls in northern states swelled to 2.5 million, creating an electoral bloc that potentially held the balance of power in seventeen states. These relocated black southerners found greater freedom in cities, and many of them chose to agitate for a fair share of jobs in a defense industry that offered "nice work ... if you can get it." That kind ofwork, of course, was difficult for racial minorities to obtain, and MOWM arose in roughly two dozen cities to address this unfairness. The presence of MOWM branches in Tampa, Birmingham, Denver, and Los Angeles attests to the national character of mid-twentieth-century racism and indicates that the organization appealed to at least a small number of people in various regions of the United States.
MOWM flourished best in cities where industrial production was already high before the war and in places that African American communities had well-established social and political networks. Specifically, New York, Chicago, and St. Louis were the sites of MOWM's busiest local chapters. MOWM caught on quickly in Harlem, then home to a young James Baldwin. "Racial tensions," remarked the eminent writer, "were exacerbated during the early years of the war, partly because the labor market brought together thousands of ill-prepared people." African American longshoremen responsible for handling explosives bristled at being refused service at restaurants along the docks. Family members of soldiers were concerned that their relatives stationed in the South would be "beaten up or killed by some of those white folk down there," and they wondered why their sons and husbands were "fighting big Hitler over yonder even with all the little Hitlers over here." A 1942 study by the Office of Facts and Figures interviewed more than one thousand black New Yorkers. The findings showed that nearly two-thirds of respondents believed that they did not have a fair chance to get defense work. As Shirley Graham dramatized in her 1945 short story "Tar," those who did get defense jobs often wound up disillusioned, dirty, and in dead-end positions without a chance of promotion.
In this environment, Milton Webster rejoiced that "young ladies on street corners and public spots" distributed fifteen thousand MOWM buttons throughout the New York metro area, and African Americans were proudly "wearing them up and down the streets." One of New York's more enthusiastic MOWM members, T. T. Patterson, reported that his organization "is making steady progress [and] is spreading quite definitely." "This is the Movement," Patterson wrote Randolph, "that will mean more to the Negro of this country, and, for that matter, of any other country, than any movement of this century." Fervor for MOWM was not as high in the South. There was, of course, a branch in the BSCP hotbed of Jacksonville, Florida, and a young porter named E. D. Nixon organized a MOWM chapter in Montgomery, Alabama. In Norfolk, Virginia, MOWM leader Senora Lawson helped formulate its nonviolent goodwill direct-action campaign in 1943. Southerners made contributions to MOWM, but cities in this region weren't the sites of significant protests under the organization's auspices. MOWM's uneven geo graphic dispersion is partially attributable to the well-known prevalence of racial violence and atmosphere of intimidation that seemed to be synonymous with the Deep South. BSCP organizer Benjamin McLaurin's wife, Margaret, privately and confidentially wrote Randolph, asking him to keep her husband out of the region. "Please do not send Mac into any part of Alabama now," she wrote in the early 1940s. "The tension is just too great and his life is not worth a nickel."
"The Negro masses awakened in 1941," Randolph reflected at his eightieth birthday gala, and the prospect of a war against totalitarian regimes created an environment conducive to activism opposing Jim Crow. MOWM was Randolph's "brainchild," but it was grassroots activists who energized the organization and used it to tackle issues in their hometowns. Randolph's speeches struck a chord because they emphasized cooperative self-reliance and racial solidarity, while MOWM's message of civic engagement and political organizing gave substance to a program of confrontational protest. Randolph was certainly not the first to espouse these ideas, but his conclusion that "the future of the Negro depends entirely upon his own action, and the individual cannot act alone" resonated with audiences convinced that this was a "clarion call" for striking down racism. "African Americans made two important discoveries in World War II," writes historian Robert A. Hill, "namely, that the system of white supremacy was not impregnable and that mass militancy, such as the March on Washington Movement ... could effectively challenge the system and produce results." The general mood of black America during the years of MOWM's zenith was, according to another historian, marked by a "sense of hope and pessimism ... that dominated a good deal of daily conversation." The Black Worker, a monthly magazine edited by Randolph, credited MOWM with successfully channeling this "wave of bitter resentment, disillusionment and desperation" into constructive protest politics.
Just as the Chicago Defender was synonymous with the Great Migration, the Pittsburgh Courier was a leading voice in the fight for civil rights and racial equality during World War II. Launched in 1942, the Courier's wildly popular Double V campaign linked the fight against international fascism with the need to topple racism on America's home front. As originally expressed in its pages by James Thompson, "The first V for victory over our enemies from without, the second V for victory over our enemies from within." Under newspaperman Percival Prattis's leadership, the campaign took off, and subsequent issues featured the "VV" symbol more prominently. The Courier office was inundated with "hundreds of telegrams and letters of congratulations," as well as requests for Double V buttons and bumper stickers. In a few short weeks, the slogan became "the true battle cry of colored America," and Double V rhetoric percolated into the writings in most of the 150 African American newspapers reaching more than 2 million subscribers throughout the nation. In short, the Double V campaign was both a critique of American race relations and an outpouring of black patriotism. To exemplify this, the Chicago Defender took on the Atlantic Charter's Four Freedoms in a cartoon attacking racial injustice within the United States. "The Four Freedoms: Dixie Style" featured a poll tax collection box, a ball and chain labeled "peonage," and a lynch noose-images that were clearly incongruent with platitudes such as "freedom from fear" and "freedom from want."
African American newspapers already had a reputation as "a fighting press," and they rose to the occasion in World War II by exploiting the obvious contradiction of a racially segregated nation waging war against fascism. Journalist Roi Ottley noted that the Double V campaign had the support of "nearly every newspaper and pulpit," and the themes of defeating racism and fascism popped up in a handful of blues songs. Even before the term Double V was coined, a 1940 cover of the NAACP's journal, the Crisis, presented a visually powerful example of the impulse that the phrase represented. It featured a photograph of two warplanes flying over an airfield with the caption "WARPLANES—Negro Americans may not build them, repair them, or fly them, but they must help pay for them." The image spoke to the fact that the entire aircraft industry employed only about 240 African Americans in a workforce of approximately 107,000. Thrilled with this kind of coverage and eager for news of the war, circulation of African American newspapers rose nationwide by an estimated 40 percent, and government polls found that 72 percent of African Americans throughout the country read black newspapers. The support of African American newspapers for Randolph's efforts was varied and uneven, but the Chicago Defender encapsulated the period's ethos best with the phrase "These are Marching days, America."
African Americans saw the Second World War as an external force that could help make reform movements be fruitful, and the looming international crisis coincided with their increasingly aggressive rhetoric deployed against Jim Crow. Future MOWM member Pauli Murray wrote President Roosevelt in 1938, "We are as much political refugees from the South as any of the Jews in Germany." The NAACP dubbed racial inequality and segregation "the acid test of democracy." Caroline Singer of the National Association of Colored Women neatly connected Nazism and racism with her statement that "anti-Negroism is based upon the concept of a master race ... that is irreconcilable with democracy." Drawing a similar connection between white supremacy and Nazism, the St. Louis Argus remarked, "Isn't the world today paying and paying dearly for the sins of the so-called superior race, whom we call the Nazis? ... In times such as these when there is so much being said about Democracy, we naturally feel racial discrimination more keenly." During an "inter-faith, inter-denominational, inter-racial prayer service" at Chicago's Soldier Field, MOWM asked, "Shall we have democracy for all of the people or some of the people?" Randolph later answered, "Justice is not qualified. Freedom is not limited. Citizenship cannot exist in degrees. It must be full and complete. All or none." To Walter White, World War II was an international contest of race relations, "a war to save the world from the military aggression and racial bigotry of Germany and Japan." More confrontationally, the Black Worker thundered, "Let us tear the mask of hypocrisy from America's Democracy!" Randolph described the moment of war as a time when "Negroes are fighting on two fronts. This is as it should be. They are fighting for democracy in Europe. They are fighting for democracy in America. They are trying to stop Hitler over there, and they are determined to stop Hitlerism over here." "To save democracy at home," argued Randolph at People's Church in Chicago, "we must make democracy work at home for the total population." Randolph characterized the early 1940s as "an hour when the sinister shadows of war are lengthening and becoming more threatening," and his threat to march on Washington inspired African Americans to fight their own localized battles that contributed to a broader national struggle. This struggle, as seen in the pages of African American newspapers and in countless speeches, was one that linked fascism in Germany with racism in the United States. Hitler and Jim Crow were citizens of different countries, but both needed to be eradicated.
The confrontation with Nazism spawned new liberal sensibilities that elevated race relations and civil rights as issues of national import, making the 1940s seem ripe for change. In his 1945 book, A Rising Wind, Walter White noted, "White nations and peoples had vigorously proclaimed to the world that this war is being fought for freedom, and colored people were taking them at face value." Like many of her generation, Louise Elizabeth Grant thought that "older forms of social control have been lost almost entirely ... and society is in a state of flux, if not revolution. The common man and the underprivileged are struggling for economic, political, and social emancipation." Global instability, thought Grant, incited an upsurge in "class conflict, minority problems, nationalistic movements ... and other expressions of social unrest." In this milieu, Randolph's "plan caught on like fire" among a people who were certain that the war presented a crisis for the system of segregation and inequality bitterly referred to as Jim Crow. Randolph believed the Second World War had the capacity to finish "an uncompleted liberal bourgeoisie democratic revolution—commonly known as the Civil War" The struggle against slavery left "the slave power broken, but the slave masters were not eliminated," and Randolph construed this latest conflict as the climactic battle over a global color line. Unlike in World War I, when leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois advised African Americans to mute their protests against racism and to "close our ranks" until after the war, Randolph demanded that America rectify racism immediately. Instead of waiting to "return fighting," African Americans in World War II were poised to never stop agitating. "When the battle is won," wrote Kelly Miller, "the black patriot does not expect to be robbed of the fruition of his victory as he was in the First World War."
"The Negro was only on the sidelines of American industrial life. He seemed to be losing ground daily," noted Robert C. Weaver of the Office of Production Management. Weaver attributed the pitifully low morale among African Americans to their lingering exclusion from desirable defense-industry jobs, reporting that "disillusionment of Negroes in New York and elsewhere" was on the rise at precisely the moment when national unity was needed to carry out the war. Surveying the African American workforce, Weaver found that in April 1940, white unemployment was at 17.7 percent, whereas 22 percent of African Americans were in the same predicament. Six months later, a bustling defense industry caused white unemployment to drop to 13 percent, but the percentage of unemployed African Americans changed by only a fraction of a percent. In ten New York war plants employing a total of 29,215 workers, only 142 were African American. Statistics from the United States Employment Service were equally discouraging. In October 1940, the total of nonwhite job placements in twenty different defense plants was a paltry 5.4 percent. Six months later, by April 1941, this figure actually decreased to just 2.5 percent. It looked as if African Americans were going to be among the last hired, if they were hired at all.
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Excerpted from Winning the War for Democracy by David Lucander. Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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