The Changing Status of the Negro

...When the editors of Collier's import Alan Paton from South Africa to comment upon the scope and significance of this trend, one can safely assume that the revolution has "arrived...

...he will ultimately be absorbed into industry, both North and South...

...It is essential to note in this regard that no significant measures against caste were undertaken by the Federal government prior to Roosevelt's wartime FEPC (1941) . On the contrary, parts of the New Deal's social program were distinctly anti-Negro in effect, if not intention...

...Disfranchisement followed inevitably as a means of preventing legal redress for renewed economic exploitation...

...In broad terms, then, a new emancipation has occurred: for the first time in American history, the fortunes of the American Negro are no longer largely dependent upon the fortunes of the cotton crop...

...127 in Negro farm labor, but an increase in the average size of farms, in order to make the investment in farm machinery profitable...

...It is curious because it is occurring under official auspices—under the sponsorship of a gov ernment not noted, at least in recent years, for bold and imaginative social innovation...

...The former has to do with vast changes in the economic life of the South...

...As of 1940, some 75 per cent of all American Negroes still lived in the South, and of these, 63 per cent still lived on Southern farms, rather than in Southern cities...

...Both are a part of America's preparation for war...

...During the Reconstruction Period which followed, the freedman attempted, under the protection of the Federal government, to consolidate his new status against the inevitable reaction which was to come...

...But the rate of growth for the South during the war years (1940-1945) was considerably greater (84% as against 49% for the non-South...

...The work of Franz Neumann is known to American readers primarily through his massive study of Naziism, Behemoth, a book that in a decade or so has achieved the status of a major contribution to modern political thought...

...The old plantation economy was revived, based now on share-cropping and tenant-farming, peonage and convict-lease...

...In pre-Hitler Germany he had been Ia lawyer working with the trade unions and the Social Democratic Party...

...More over, by pegging prices through crop-restriction, the American govern ment unwittingly caused a further loss to American cotton in foreign markets...

...Ideally in such a society there should be no organized economic, religious, or cultural life outside of the duly constituted agencies of government: hence the bureaucratic nature of the present revolution, with the armed forces acting as the vanguard of social progress...

...The Genesis of Caste Even before slavery was abolished, a new fabric of race relations was being woven to replace it...

...In a period when American capitalism thinks not in terms of expansion, but of survival, Jim Crow is discarded because it has no survival-value...

...In inter-state travel, two important court decisions (Morgan v. • See Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma, p. 414, for the story of negotiations between Randolph and Roosevelt...

...Official liberalism maintains, in a mood of self-congratulation, that the democratic conscience of America has at last become aroused...

...In the years between 1876 and 1900, the foundations of the Ameri can caste system were laid...

...Equality before the law is a hollow triumph unless it is followed by widespread social intercourse across the color-line...

...In 1929, cotton represented 40 per cent of the total acreage under cultivation in the South...

...for Negroes, it often involves unlearning strong feelings of hostility and distrust...

...As the South industrializes, the farm population will continue to decline, and eventually the Negro sharecropper will become a factoryhand...

...With due respect for cultural inertia, and for secondary psychological factors, the roots of the caste system are still to be found in the quasi-feudal plantation system which has traditionally dominated 126 Southern agriculture...

...Income from Southern agriculture was 65 per cent greater than from manufacturing in 1929, but only 10 per cent greater in 1948...

...The Negro and the Southern Economy The breakdown of caste in America has more to do with Southern economics than with Northern ideology...

...Why did the Negro suddenly discover friends in high places...

...In 1937, it actually published a model restrictive-covenant, which was only dropped in 1949 under pressure from the NAACP...

...The value hierarchy is reorganized, and white supremacy becomes a luxury...

...The Breakdown of Caste The first important blow to be struck against caste by the Federal government was FDR's Executive Order of June 25, 1941...

...These laws, moreover, were promptly ratified by the Supreme Court, in a series of "separate but equal" deci sions...

...In any event, the do-nothing policy of the Roosevelt administration was reversed only under the pressure of preparation for global war...

...Like all revolutions, this one involves both a weakening of the ancien regime from within, and an attack upon it from without...

...In a word, the plantation South is being destroyed by the remorseless process of capital accumulation...

...From 1939 to 1947, the number of wage-earners in manufacturing rose from 1,349,000 to 2,023,000, or exactly 50 per cent...

...It is against this back ground that the current climate of "racial tolerance" must be seen...

...The clash between this new frame of reference and the outmoded system of white supremacy appears nowhere more clearly than in the clash between the armed forces and the white South...

...Mechanization portends not only a further decline • In 1945, the value of farm implements and machinery in the South was $406 per farm...

...This loss, together with domestic competition from synthetic fabrics, has brought a subsequent decline to only 20 million acres in 1948...

...It is interesting to note that the American Negro has chosen the term "integration" to designate his desire to become a first-class citizen...

...The title calls reality by its name: it epitomizes the political situation of man in contemporary society...

...It is paradoxical because it is occurring at a time when reaction has the initiative in all other political spheres...

...Year after year, whenever Universal Military Training is introduced in Congress, the Mississippi delegation votes solidly against a proposal which "will make ouah nigras uppity...

...The plantation system is doomed not only by the demise of King Cotton, but by the inevitable mechanization of Southern agriculture...

...The garrison state, like a jealous god, knows no other gods before it—not even so venerable an American deity as a white skin...

...Appropriately enough, the new era in American race relations was ushered in by way of the War Manpower Commission...

...128 they cannot account for the amazing progress of the last fifteen years, nor for the role of the Federal government in these developments...

...Although incipient caste relations existed under slavery, the American caste system did not crystallize until the post-Reconstruction era, when a wave of repression followed the withdrawal of Federal troops from the South...

...America must avoid internal economic crisis at all costs...

...To begin with, cotton is no longer King...

...The textile industry, as might be expected, has declined in importance along with the cotton crop...

...In public utilities construction, which is often a barometer of future industrial development, the South increased its proportion of the US total from 22.3 per cent to 31.3 per cent...

...125 Virginia, 1946...

...In the long run, as Gunnar Myrdal suggests, there is no place for the Negro in Southern agriculture...

...In 1929, in spite of increased competition from Egypt and China, 43 million acres of American cotton were under cultivation...

...Blocked in the legislature, these forces have expressed themselves through the executive and judicial branches of the Federal government...

...During the first year of the AAA, which subsidized landlords for curtailing cotton production (incidentally pushing Negro share croppers off the land),, it was further reduced to 29 million acres...

...124 The result was the post-Reconstruction repression...

...In such a society, the distinctive frame 130 of reference is fighting effectiveness...

...Meanwhile the whole agricultural sector of the Southern economy has been losing ground to the manufacturing sector...

...The new system rested ultimately on the plantation economy of the rural South...

...Simply to summarize the high points of this development will attest to its deep and permanent character...

...in 1948, it accounted for only 22 per cent...

...The NRA codes, or the National Labor Relations Act, would have been appropriate instruments for such a purpose, but nothing of the sort appeared...

...What has been happening in the last few decades to the economic roots of the caste system...

...For some fifteen years, and through three separate administrations, American capitalism has solved its chronic crisis by this means, until sophisticated conservatives have come to adopt a con129 scious perspective of permanent war economy...

...Thus black robe and white each made its unique contribution to the establishment of the American caste system...

...Whatever one's interpretation of this paradox, no one can doubt that a revolutionary transformation is taking place...

...It is to form part of a collection of his essays to be edited by Herbert Marcuse and published by the Free Press in 1955...

...Historical insight often commences with a date...

...perhaps Roosevelt's "statesmanlike" alliance with the Southern Democrats accounts for the oversight...

...The Negro and the Permanent War Economy The forces described above would undoubtedly suffice, in the fullness of time, to destroy caste in America...

...a society in which it can be assumed that one's fate or life-chances in no essential way depend on the color of one's skin is still very far from being a reality in America...

...The impact of his urbanization on the American caste system is already apparent...

...It has been the product not so much of war and cold-war strategy as of an unconscious drive for national unity which is the natural corollary of a permanent war economy...

...As Alan Paton points out in his interview with Governor Byrnes, respect for what was once the Union Army is the Achilles' heel of the white South...

...Forced upon a reluctant President by A. Philip Randolph's "MarchonWashington Movement,"* the order created a Fair Employment Practices Committee within the War Manpower Commission...

...Paton reflects, for example, as he visits the new American Army, "on the amazing scene around me, with its amazing implications—that it was the Army with its tanks and guns and bombs that had struck this particular fetter from men's minds and advanced the cause of the Lord of Peace...

...During the war this long-range trend was greatly accelerated by the heavy investment of the Federal government in shipyards, aircraft factories, and munitions plants—an investment which doubled the Southern industrial plant as of 1939...

...A. Philip Randolph's abortive movement to boycott a Jim-Crow Army (1947-48) was not without its effect...

...If the government is at last doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, let us to that extent rejoice...

...In housing, the Supreme Court (Shelley v. Kramer, 1946) has outlawed the enforcement of restrictive covenants through civil suits, though not as yet the cove nants themselves...

...To appreciate fully what is being un-done, it may be relevant to recall what was done in the first place, during those momentous years when the Negro was emancipated, but not set free...

...For whites this involves not merely good will, but a serious effort to understand Negro life and culture...

...The problem, however, is not merely to acknowledge this historical necessity, but to trace it to its source...

...Caste relations, as distinct from the direct property-bond between master and slave, date from the earliest existence of a free colored population...

...We are witness ing the disintegration of a caste system which for seventy-five years has controlled the pattern of social intercourse between Negro and white...

...The impact of the AAA on the Negro sharecropper has been touched upon...

...Some sense of historical necessity must emerge, if only one contemplates the forces making for racial integration as they flow around the solid rock of Senate filibuster...

...In mili tary life, the integration of the armed forces was effected by President Truman's Executive Order 9981 (1948) . Above all, in education, the separation of the races has been held invalid in a series of decisions starting with Sweatt v. Painter (Texas, 1950) and McLaurin v. Okla homa State Regents (1950) , and culminating in the historic Supreme Court decision of 1954...

...In sum, cotton acreage has declined during the two decades from 1929 to 1948 by approximately 53 per cent...

...At the same time, recognizing the roots of the current situation, we must also recognize its limitations...

...For radicals, interracial activity represents one of the few remaining areas where personal initiative really matters...

...Already the end of the one-party system is foreshadowed by the 1952 elections, in which large sections of the "solid" South (especially heavily industrialized Texas) deserted to the Republicans...

...the employment ratio between agriculture and non-agriculture was 50-50 in 1920, but 35-65 in 1940...

...Where legal methods failed, the Klan and the lynch-mob took over...

...the Federal Housing Administration provides another case in point...

...Anxiety in Politics" is his last completed work, a lecture delivered at the Free University in Berlin in May 1954...

...For whatever the historical forces motivating the breakdown of caste, the human gain will be immense...

...He had always rejected the interpretation of politics in psychological terms: he knew that political decisions...

...In spite of what radicals and socialists have said about the limitations of legal formalism, and in spite of the Negro's continuing experience of caste, the historical trend is unmistakable...

...And as one Southern economist points out, "It is the plantations with their croppers that can most easily be recast into the large-scale mechanized agriculture that offers efficiency in the economic sense...

...Integration in the schools, as any Northerner knows, can be largely nullified by continuing discrimination in housing and employment...

...The "Negro problem" is still very far from being solved...

...The American Negro, North and South, is still far from being in the position where he can say that what happens to him happens because of his personal qualities or his impersonal fate as a member of society: he knows, and he is right to know it, that his "Negro-ness" is in many ways the most crucial element depriving him of the rights and privileges which people 131 of white skins take for granted...

...The Negro emerges as a political force, with full access to the machinery of government for the defense of his rights.-- A higher standard of living and a higher educational level breeds self-confidence and militancy, and eventually factory experience will breed trade-union consciousness...

...This sharp decline has had an enormous impact upon the struc ture both of Southern agriculture and of Southern industry...

...therefore important concessions must be made to a disadvantaged minority group which numbers over fifteen million...

...During these years segregation laws were enacted in all spheres of life, from education and travel to housing and marriage...

...At one stroke it wrecked the plantation economy, severed the master-slave relationship between the races, and threw the former bondsman into the wage-market as a legal equal...

...The removal of discrimination, the removal of segregation would be great historical events, yet it would be premature indeed to suppose that these would, ipso facto, eliminate the inferior condition to which the social customs, if not quite so much the social forms, of America reduce him...

...In short, the edifice of white supremacy is crumbling in every important cultural area...

...When asked how the South could tolerate the presence of Army posts where no segregation was practiced, the Governor replied, "if these were the policies of the Army, there was nothing more to be said...

...132...

...The South has lagged far behind the rest of the nation in the purchase of farm machinery, but during the war, as a result of high incomes and manpower shortage, it began to narrow the gap.* Given the patterns of Southern prejudice, there can be no doubt that the "poorwhites" will operate most of this new machinery, while Negroes are forced off the land...

...As a Negro novelist of the period observed, "Lynching was instituted to crush the manhood of the enfranchised black...

...The Negro question has become a military manpower question—a matter of organizing American resources for war...

...Taken alone, however, • Hoover & Ratchford, Economic Resources and Policies of the South (1951) . •• These basic economic changes are not without political manifestation...

...Under the exigencies of the world power struggle, America moves slowly toward a garrison state...

...A certain amount of historical background, as well as Neumann's scholarly references, have been omitted for reasons of space...

...and Henderson v. VS, 1050) have virtually abolished segregation in seating and dining-car arrangements...

...It was effectively de throned during the 1930s, by a combination of world agricultural trends and the farm policy of the New Deal...

...the latter, with America's role on the world scene, and with the slow emergence in this country of what Harold Lasswell has called a Garrison State...

...therefore some form of permanent military conscription is inevitable...

...f The number of Negro voters in the South increased from 250,000 in 1940 to 1,250,000 in 1952—mostly in the Southern cities...

...Perhaps the New Deal was preoccupied...

...Those who view the democratic conscience of America with some misgivings will prefer to seek a more substantial explanation...

...We gratefully acknowledge their permission to print it here, for the first time in English, in abbreviated form...

...Emancipation caused an economic and social revolution in the Old South...

...Shortly after the war (1945-1949) , eight Northern industrial States adopted similar anti-discrimination laws in the field of employment—laws which often covered public accommodation as well...

...Why, throughout the period of New Deal labor legislation, was no provision made for fair employment practices...

...By 1932, however, as a result of the saturation of the world market, the figure had dropped to 36 million acres...

...By 1900, Mississippi, Louisiana, and the Carolinas had disfranchised the Negro with "Grandfather Clause," poll tax, and terror...

...therefore the American economy will contain a huge armaments sector for the foreseeable future...

...In politics, the white primary has been outlawed (Smith v. Allbright, 1944) , while the poll tax survives in only five Southern States...

...This system, and the cotton crop on which it was based, necessitated a large, disciplined labor force, which in the absence of slavery necessitated caste...

...The all-important matter of interpretation remains: why, in a few short years, have such immense strides been made in the field of civil rights when, for example, the situation in, regard to civil liberties has been steadily deteriorating...

...result from the development of societal institutions and relationship...

...both aim to secure a maximum fighting effectiveness for the nation...

...From 1939 to 1947, its proportion of the total wage-earners in Southern industry declined from 35 per cent to 27 per cent...

...In family law, by a California Supreme Court decision in 1948, a State law forbidding miscegenation was held unconstitutional...

...It was the task of this committee to see that hiring under government contract in the nation's war-plants was conducted without regard to race, creed, or national origin...

...Since cotton farming requires an abundance of cheap, manual labor, a greater diversification in Southern agriculture has resulted in a shrinking demand for farm labor...

...In the current American Gleichschaltung, the impulse with respect to Negroes is toward absorption...

...This is the meaning both of first-class citizenship for Negroes, and of second-class citizenship (or no citizenship at all) for "subversives...

...Alan Paton observes in his Collier's article of October 29 that the FHA, early in its career, regarded itself as a business venture, and held Negro occupancy of its projects to be harmful from a business point of view...

...In the city, because of the collective strength of the Negro ghetto, old-style terror is unthinkable...

...with respect to political dissidents, toward repression...

...And in this reply, as Paton remarks, one sees clearly the final yielding of the South...

...New industrial construction soared from $154 million, or 19.6 per cent of the national total in 1939, to $776 million, or 21.7 per cent in 1948...

...We are living in a period when foreign-policy considerations are decisive in determining the course of domestic events...

...Within this frame of reference, AttorneyGeneral Brownell can on one day submit an amicus curiae to the Supreme Court urging integration of the schools, and on the next, request Congress to increase the penalty for thought-crimes under the Smith Act to twenty years...

...This pattern of caste persisted, without any apparent loss of vigor, down to the period of America's participation in the Second World War...

...Legal and formal victories must be given human content...

...America must staff its fighting forces (both military and civilian, for the distinction has disappeared) with loyal personnel...

...It is no coincidence that the first serious breach in the American caste system appeared during the period of "national defense...

...About this essay Herbert Marcuse writes, "To many of [Neumann's] friends, this was a surprise...

...In the late 1930s, whether wittingly or not, the Roosevelt administration turned from public works to armaments as the central core of its economic program...

...Nonetheless, adds Marcuse, "it was not an escape into psychology...

...For the first time since the Reconstruction era, the Federal government is intervening in American life on behalf of the Negro...

...The Human Dimension Threatened from within by the modernization of the South, and from without by the current Gleichschaltung, the American caste system is disintegrating before our eyes...

...By 1876 the Republican Party grew "tired" of being revolutionary (it has never regretted the decision) and abandoned the Negro to the tender mercies of the white South...

...As caste crumbles, millions of Negroes and whites will experience a sense of liberation from its de-humanizing consequences...

...Neumann, who was killed in an automobile accident in Switzerland last September, had also gained a reputation in the world of anti-Nazi Germans as an editor of Montesquieu, a writer on the relation between law and society, and a student of Political theory...

...Long before Emancipation, nominally free colored citizens were subjected to segregation in housing and travel, discrimination in employment, and exclusion from places of public accommodation...

...It was a period in which the Negro was systematically stripped of his civil rights in order to assure the restoration of white supremacy...

...it was sustained in custom and in law by segregation, an elaborate pattern of caste relations which partly separates the races and partly permits them to mingle, but only under circumstances humiliating to the subordinate caste...

...Without drawing sentimental or chauvinistic conclusions from this turn of events, socialists must acknowledge it as eminently desirable...

...What is the driving force which converts Presidents and Supreme Court Justices, statesmen and politicians, Republican and Democrat alike, to a policy of "racial liberalism...

...America must garrison an empire...

...In this way, impersonal historical forces can be translated into human terms...

...As modern nations prepare for war, precisely what occurs is a Gleichschaltung, or integration, in the course of which minority groups are either absorbed or eliminated...

...they must be supplemented by continuing political pressure and by the ultimate symbol of acceptance: personal association...

...Only bewildered liberals like Alan Paton are incapable of understanding this paradox...

...In the past 15 years, however—roughly since 1940—the ram horn has been sounded, and the walls are tumblin' down...

...in the non-South, $1292 per farm...

...For those who understand the main drift of American politics since the Roosevelt era of "national defense," the contradictory trends in civil rights and civil liberties present no paradox...