Up from Segregation

...the world was not startled...

...Under the emergency relief measures of the Thirties and under the farm subsidies that followed, Negroes came far closer to receiving their just share of government benefits than ever before...

...the Supreme Court decision of 1883 which found unconstitutional the civil rights laws of 1875...

...ington retained leadership until his death in 1915, but during his lifetime there were sharp attacks which indicated that another road held more promise for the advance of the Negro race...

...No catastrophe occurred in the South...

...Dabney is equating the desire to satisfy a personal appetite with the desire to keep the whites a legally exclusive group, shutting out the blacks—and this in a democracy...

...I don't think the temper of the country or of the world will permit it...

...For certain historical reasons, the South always puts its worst foot forward, but there are grounds for believing that out of this crisis a far better South will appear, better not only for its Negro citizens but for all of us...

...The Republican Party had captured control of the country, the agrarian party was soundly licked by the industrialists, the idealists were thoroughly disheartened by the fiasco of Reconstruction...

...The forces of the modern world, which soon erupted in World War I, were destined to lift the Negro with them...

...These decisions of the Court are related, both as cause and effect, to the increasing political power of the Negro in America, and it has been under the leadership of the NAACP that the Negro has found it possible to register and make his political weight felt...

...Therefore, they will use the bloc power the whites have insisted upon giving them and will demand their rights, not only in New York, but also in South Carolina...

...World War I, fought in part over the possession of colonies, backfired like many another war and set in motion forces that would ultimately destroy colonialism and with it the depressed condition of the col-lored people of the United States...

...Wages advanced to $1.25 and $1.50 a day, and industry competed with farming for labor...

...The will of the white South has been expressed in the segregation and disfranchisement acts, enacted from, roughly, 1890 to 1905...

...But what about today...

...By 1956 it was seriously argued before the Presidential election that the Negro vote might control that election...

...The last world event to record in this account of the objective forces that have, indirectly, pushed the Negro upward is the Korean War...

...There it has fought for equal rights for Negroes, building upon the unfulfilled "equal" promise of the Ptessy v. Ferguson "separate but equal" decision, keeping the attention of the Supreme Court focussed upon the definition of equality, until, finally, on May 17, 1954, the Court admitted that separation in public education is itself inequality...

...But Washington's promise failed to materialize...

...But even the efforts of the Negro to help himself seemed of little avail...

...In 1927 it won a decision the gist of which was that a state cannot officially prevent Negroes from voting in primary elections...

...Negroes have not fought alone for their rights...

...These hidden forces were the repressed estate of the Negro—-legally a citizen of the United States, actually a sort of peon—and the economic and political forces of the modern world at work even in the South...

...Charles Francis Adams, speaking at Richmond in 1908, feared that the Negro was not assimilable to American among the whites, that the last threads of racial sentiment were being broken as Negroes moved to the cities, and that the gap between the races was widening...

...This is a matter of self-preservation...

...According to the Negro Year Book, the number of Negroes lynched in the United States jumped from 36 in 1917 to 76 in 1919, dropped to 51 in 1922, and to 29 in 1923...

...I knew nothing of it, either then or for a long time afterwards...

...We put more than 400,000 Negroes in the Army, most of them in labor battalions, only making more glaring the contrast between our words and our deeds...

...One of the most important of them was the NAACP...

...Feeling sure of the general direction of the wind, I would not try to say just how, or how fast, desegregation will take place...

...The government screened more than two million Negroes for military service and put more than one million into active military duty...

...DuBois was also one of the founders, and through most of his life one of the leaders, of an organization far more important than the Niagara Movement: the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which, like The Progressive, was born in 1909...

...Another economic force was the industrial growth of the South during the early 1900's, a growth which was manifested especially in the extension of railroads, the building of lumber mills, and the opening of mines...

...He pointed out that Washington's plan, publicized in the Atlanta speech of 1895, was now, ten years later, not working...

...This movement was strengthened by the farm depression that over-shadowed the South in the Twenties...

...They are already violated in New York...

...As seen by historian Ray Stan-nard Baker, "The object of the movement is to protect against disfranchisement and Jim Crow laws and to demand equal rights of education, equal civil rights, equal economic opportunities, and justice in the courts...

...Nor did I know anything of the explosive forces held in leash around me...

...The Negro stepped in to fill this vacuum, and some half-million Negroes went North to unskilled jobs...

...Such an interracial group was necessary to allay the bitterness that was exploding in the race riots of the immediate postwar years...

...Thomas Waring, of the Charleston News and Courier, has suggested that as the country got tired of the race issue in 1877 and left the Negroes to the desires, wicked and otherwise, of the Southern white men's hearts, so again the country will grow tired, and segregation will remain by default...

...The Spanish-American War, our first admitted colonial adventure, received the hearty support of the white South, and resulted in the United States' conquering and becoming responsible for eight million dark-skinned Filipinos...

...In 1915, shortly before his death, Washington himself made the sad admission: "We are trying to instil into the Negro mind that if education does not make the Negro humble, simple, and of service to the community, it will not be encouraged [by the whites...

...Did it make any difference to the world...

...Comparing the situation of the American Negro today with that of 50 years ago, one finds the present stormy...

...the industrial situation, the keystone of the policy, has become more ominous and uncertain, while the feeling between the races is constantly growing more acute and threatening...

...The year 1915 may be considered a key year in the legal advance of the Negro...

...The Negro would have to settle alone his quarrel with the white South...

...It was as a protection against this autocracy of race that the Niagara Movement was organized...

...I do not mean that American Negroes are not patriotic...

...The white South, deep down, has never been satisfied with its treatment of the Negro...

...Governor Almond of Virginia said recently, "We may have to take it between the eyes...

...In general the condition of the Negro has been alleviated by forces that never intended it...

...If it did, I don't remember any echoes of it...

...In the Smith v. Allwright case of 1944, the Supreme Court went a step farther and found the primary to be an integral part of the state government...

...Perhaps the most pessimistic outlook was expressed by an English traveler, W. P. Livingstone, who said: "If nothing is done to alleviate existing conditions...

...Even if the North does grow tired, will the five million Negroes living there, most of them cooped up in racial ghettos in cities like Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, and Detroit, let it forget...

...DuBois, the second great Negro leader of the early Twentieth Century...

...What forces were there to keep the nation interested in the South in 1877...

...and it is generally admitted that this vote holds a whip hand in at least three Northern states...

...For years the NAACP fought residential segregation not only in the South but in the nation...

...The war arrested immigration to the United States, at the same time the factories were flooded with orders, facing industry with an acute labor shortage...

...No deceptive calm, no sultry summer air hangs over the 1950's as it hung over the decade that opened this century...

...Taking the ballot from the Negro they declare to be only a step to economic slavery . . . [and] that the disfranchisement laws in the South are being followed by all manner of other discriminations...

...And all the cries of all the Southern politicians will not still their demands...

...Not, perhaps, because there were no grounds for them but because Negroes had generally agreed to go along with Booker T. Washington's policy, and whites would generally keep silent, in accord with the good old Southern principle that if you don't talk about an evil it will go away...

...But such gloomy predictions were not, I think, common...

...It shunted them back and forth across all continents and seas, showed them the world—and showed them to the world—with all its unsegregated customs—and kept them segregated still...

...They are bound to the Negroes of the South by ties of blood, association, friendship, and interest...

...Whites did not object, apparently on the assumption that economics was not politics, nor was an economic ballot a key to the bedroom...

...Though the depression weighed heavily upon individual Negroes, it helped their cause generally...

...As a result of our failure to treat the Negro soldier as a first-class citizen, the years following World War II saw increased racial tension over the entire country, wild rumors flourished, there were many instances of individual violence, and severe race riots occurred...

...Even those who realized a half century ago that we in the South were sitting on top of a volcano failed to appreciate what a powerful volcano it was...

...Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish sociologist who wrote the monumental study of the Negro, An American Dilemma, was fearful that the Negro might lose his place in agriculture, because of mechanization, before he had gained a firm foothold in industry...

...The first of these was economic, and among the economic factors was the rising price of cotton...

...I am convinced that there is far more sense in the South than usually appears...

...and as these things came into the world together, they will go out together...

...At the same moment, in Martinique, a thousand miles to the south, Mont Pelee was in eruption and 40,000 people were being smothered and roasted to death...

...While it is true that these federal monies had to pass through local hands, and doubtless in many cases were steered toward white recipients, nevertheless the Negro received something like his share, and he knew that it came from the Great White Father in Washington...

...The white South needed labor, but it wanted to keep the Negro as the mudsill of society, competing for no job the white wanted...

...There had been a serious race riot in Springfield, Illinois, in 1908, and in a call for the formation of a national liberal organization, William E. Walling, a white Kentuckian, wrote in The Independent on September 3, 1908: "Either the spirit of the abolitionists . . . must be revived and we must come to treat the Negro on a plane of absolute political and social equality, or [the race war will soon be transferred to the North...

...The first concerted effort came in 1919, with the organization, covering most of the South, of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation...

...The chief spirit of the movement was W.E.B...

...In both of these economic events the Negro farmer, and the South as a whole, shared...

...But in addition to this economic effect, World War I, like all wars, strained old social relations, and, because of its particular nature raised again in the Negro mind those political ideals he had been forced for some 20 years to forget...

...They know that the fate of the Negro in the United States is indivisible, that if their rights are violated in South Carolina, they will be violated in New York...

...a catastrophe will ensue which will startle the world...

...But even before this, in 1915 and in the political and legal area, it got a decision outlawing the so-called grandfather clauses which in many Southern states exempted from some voting qualifications the descendants of anyone who had voted prior to 1867, thus imposing a double standard which in effect prevented Negroes from voting...

...This was the first legal victory won by the youthful NAACP...

...It certainly smoothed over some critical situations and through its influence the white churchwomen of the South threw their weight against lynching to such effect that this quaint form of "justice" has practically disappeared from the American scene...

...civil privileges have been restricted...

...Du Bois urged the Negro never to forget, or let the world forget, that his constitutional rights were being denied him...

...this dissatisfaction has appeared in attempts to work with Negroes in common efforts, usually ameliorative, occasionally radical...

...Virginius Dabney thinks our Southern storm will blow over, like Prohibition, and the landscape will be as before: the integration action of the Court will be changed and segregation will be legal again, as the Constitution was amended and liquor was made legal again...

...educational opportunities, in some states at least, have been curtailed...

...But in any case, the war did come, and some of the changes in race relationships are due directly to that event...

...From at least as far back as 1883, the Supreme Court had been the bastion of property, the status quo, and the white man...

...At the same time, the coming of the boll weevil brought improvements in farming...

...There is something in the formal analogy, but, in my opinion, the realities are too far apart...

...Personal ties that had bound whites and Negroes together were thus weakened, and Negroes were thrown into closer relations with one another and with national Negro movements...

...This spirit was to move Southern whites in the next few years toward the goal of residential segregation, and it was in this area that the NAACP fought its first battles...

...Any American who is not a fool knows that the simplest way to do this is to establish satisfactory relations with our own colored citizens...

...What was the effect of these world forces upon the American Negro...

...These were the years of the revival of the Ku Klux Klan and the upsurge in lynching...

...In effect Washington urged the Negroes to accept the status quo and promised them that as they became worthy of respect from the whites they would receive it...

...they are patriotic past all reasonable hope...

...Was something done to alleviate the condition of the Negro...

...Since that time integration has been extended to cover practically all areas of military training...

...It is true we didn't sing about democracy this time—the singing wars were done—but we made it plain we were defending democracy on a world-wide scale, and we boasted that we were democracy's arsenal...

...From a low of five cents a pound in 1898, it rose to more than 14 cents in 1910...

...But this fear of the Thirties was to be proved groundless by the upheaval of the Forties...

...WashJAMES McBRIDE DABBS, a South Carolina plantation owner and elder of the Presbyterian Church, is the president of the Southern Regional Council and the author of a new book, "The Southern Heritage," which is being hailed as one of the most penetrating books ever written about the race problem...

...But not its last...

...it is time to stop and back up...

...In addition to this, Negroes learned to vote, along with whites, in the farm elections held occasionally to guide the farm program—the first real voting by the Negro in this century...

...How could they still them...

...Though of course it has gained enemies, especially as the struggle has grown harder for the segregationists, it commands the respect of all people in the South who are concerned for the good of the region and who are also really aware of what is going on...

...Now, in the 1915 decision, it seemed to say: we have gone far enough in heaping handicaps upon the Negro...

...Once again the federal government assumed its historic role as protector of the individual Negro citizen...

...A white Southerner, Thomas P. Bailey, in 1910 made a similar judgment upon disfranchisement: "Its more radical spokesmen have proceeded by easy stages from an indis-criminating attack upon the Negro's ballot to a like attack upon his schools, his labor, his life . . . Its spirit is that of an all-absorbing autocracy of race...

...Thus the extremism of the white Southerner helped create a national organization which in the long run would overcome it...

...Even today most white Southerners refuse to acknowledge the lava and ashes that smother them...

...Booker T. Washington, the great Negro leader of the era, in his famous Atlanta address of 1895 captured the enthusiastic support of the white South with his graphic formula for race relations: "In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to material progress...

...The great depression of the Thirties brought everyone into competition with everyone else...

...One of the first cases it won was in 1917, in Louisville...

...How much the Commission did to ameliorate the condition of the Negro no one knows...

...Writing in 1909 of Washington's tactful handling of race relations, Kelly Miller said: "We are in the midst of an era of good feeling, and must have peace at any price...

...The growing number of Negroes in congested areas in Northern cities was one of the developments that recalled the race problem to the mind of the nation, from which it had been generally absent since the end of the military occupation of the South in 1877...

...Some students of the problem thought that the increasing Negro protest of recent years, though stimulated by World War II, would have occurred, though more slowly, without it...

...and everybody was happy to quaff the nepenthe of the new racist doctrine and, joyously or regretfully, leave to the South the White Man's Burden...

...The first intentional step to ease his plight was taken by Negroes themselves in the so-called Niagara Movement of 1905...

...Negroes were the first fired and the last hired, not only in the South but also in the industrial areas of the North, to which some two million had now gone...

...The general condition of the Negro, then, when The Progressive was born in 1909, was dismal...

...It was this simulated peace that seemed to me real as I sipped my coffee on the slopes of the volcano...

...as Negroes became better artisans, they found white artisans closing ranks against them, and indeed found industry closing against craftsmanship itself...

...The lack of a positive will on the part of the nation had been expressed in the withdrawal of federal troops from the South in 1877...

...Ironically, before it began to lift the Negro, the modern world drove him farther down...

...We are concerned today with establishing satisfactory relations with the uncommitted hundreds of millions of colored people in the world...

...Anyone who thinks they are not going out, and soon, should take a good look at the rising colored nations of Asia and Africa...

...By 1951 the Council was ready to take a stand in favor of desegregation...

...Another economic force was the growth of cities, in the South as well as in the North, and the congregating there of Negroes whose lives had been spent entirely on the farm...

...If Virginia takes it there, the rest of the hard-core South may hestitate before inviting such a blow...

...The significance of the economic factor in this rise of anti-Negro activity is suggested by the formation during the same period of an organization in Georgia called the Black Shirts, whose basic philosophy was that no Negro was entitled to any job any white man wanted...

...Negroes are not in any complete sense first-class citizens there...

...It was DuBois who, from Atlanta University, first challenged Booker T. Washington...

...In the ten years from 1914 to 1924, more than a million Negroes migrated from the South to the North...

...C. Vann Woodward, in his Origins of the New South, says that during this decade Southern visitors and natives alike were pessimistic about the future...

...We made 1,300 Negroes into officers, but we segregated them in the making and later on active duty...

...Several movements, whose aim was the improvement of the Negro's situation, can now be woven into the basic economic and political pattern already sketched...

...The NAACP has achieved its most dramatic success in the field of education...

...the rest of the country had something else to do...

...and that means, at the very least, wiping out those laws and customs which reflect upon and discriminate against them...

...The same rush took place again in 1922, when there was a renewed industrial spurt in the North accompanied by depressed agricultural conditions in the South...

...As Thomas P. Bailey had pointed out in 1910, disfranchisement was no end in itself, but represented rather "an all-absorbing autocracy of race...

...Whatever we really fought for, we said we fought for democracy...

...Summing up such criticism, Professor Kelly Miller, of Howard University, said in 1910: "Under [Washington's] regnancy it is claimed that the last vestige of political power [of the Negro] has been swept away...

...The forces that lay beneath the surface then, some of them so vague as to be imperceptible, now move strongly across the land, and the winds are blowing in Arkansas, in Virginia, and—soon—farther South...

...Industrialization improved the Negro's economic condition, but, by bringing him into closer and more frequent competition with whites, heightened the psychological tension between the races...

...Some of the extremists among white Southerners have called the past four years the New Reconstruction, perhaps with the hidden hope that as the whites won in the original Reconstruction, so they will win now...

...It had been emphasized by two severe race riots, one in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, the other in Atlanta, in 1906...

...These are the demands, repeated on our shores, of the fifteen hundred million colored people of the world...

...One-third of the Negroes in this country live outside the South...

...I mean only that the colonial style treatment of the Negro in the United States is, historically, the colonial treatment of the colored races of the world...

...To some degree, yes...

...to a large degree, no...

...But it was at Sarajevo, on June 28, 1914, that the greatest and most complex of these impersonal forces was released...

...I think Waring, like Dabney, is mistaken...

...We came out of the war to enter into several years of serious race riots, in part brought on directly by the Negroes' experience in the war, and in part stemming indirectly from the circumstance of wartime industry which brought Negroes into association with whites in new and competitive situations...

...For the Negro especially, the kaleidoscopic 18 years since 1940 has been a revolutionary period, in its overall changes suggestive of the revolution of Reconstruction...

...Because they could do little else they accepted this advice, though not without sharp criticism...

...For the first time, Army segregation went by the board, and whites and Negroes fought and died together...

...We glorified our democratic effort, brought the Negroes into it, but then contradictorily segregated them in that very effort...

...as the Negro moved into competition with the white he was challenged as a Negro at every step and if possible stopped...

...The Negro had been repressed—the South said he had been put back in his place— both by the will of the white South and by the lack of a positive will on the part of the nation as a whole...

...The NAACP for 50 years now and with growing success has been leading the Negro's fight for his constitutional rights...

...and the Plessy v. Ferguson and Williams v. Mississippi decisions of the Supreme Court in 1896 which sanctioned both segregation and disfranchisement...

...How could die nation stand up for the Negro in the South while it was bringing to heel, with the substantial help of the South, a colored race in the Far East...

...What true patriot, then, of Maine, or Montana, or Wisconsin— to name states where there are few Negroes—can afford, if he loves his country and his life, to forget the South and let it go its way...

...In 1944 the place of the Commission was taken by the Southern Regional Council, whose aim is "to attain, through research and action, the ideals and practice of equal opportunity for all peoples in the South...

...In every decade individual white Southerners have spoken out for the Negro and for a more democratic social order...

...I sipped my coffee on the slopes of a volcano...

...that, on the contrary, the Negro was being still further depressed...

...it concluded that the state must see to it that Negroes are permitted to vote in a primary...