John Hope, W. E. B. DuBois, Monroe Trotter, and several others wanted to speak out more vigorously against racial discrimination, segregation, and lynching. To do this, they created the Niagara Movement to challenge the political domination of Washington's Tuskegee machine. Because he was the recognized advisor to politicians and philanthropists, this was a difficult task. Hope's criticism resulted in the diminution of financial support to Atlanta University where Hope was president.
W. E. B. DuBois, who was a professor at Atlanta University at that time, charged that:
"Mr. Washington distinctly asks that black people give up, at least for the present, three things,--First, political power; second, insistence on civil rights; Third, higher education of Negro youth,--and concentrate their energies on industrial education, the accumulation of wealth, and the conciliation of the South.... As a result of this tender of the palm-branch, what has been the return? In these years there have occurred: 1. The disenfranchisement of the Negro. 2. The legal creation of a distinct status of civil inferiority for the Negro. 3. The steady withdrawal of aid from institutions for the higher training of the Negro. These movements are not, to be sure, direct results of Mr. Washington's teachings; but his propaganda has, without a shadow of a doubt, helped their speedier accomplishment. The question then comes: Is it possible, and probable, that nine millions of men can make effective progress in economic lines if they are deprived of political rights, made a servile caste, and allowed only the most meager chance for developing their exceptional men? If history and reason give any distinct answer to these questions, it is an emphatic No."
He believed that beginning at the bottom with a humble trade was the best way to stay at the bottom, respect should be worth more than material advancement. He believed that Washington's policy had replaced manliness with a shallow materialism. Monroe Trotter edited the Boston Guardian which was one of the most militant papers published in the Afro-American community. Trotter used it as a platform from which to attack Washington's leadership. On one occasion when Washington was speaking in Boston, Trotter was among those arrested for creating a disturbance during the lecture. When the Niagara Movement was dissolved in 1909 and most of its leaders joined with liberal whites in founding the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Trotter refused to follow them. Besides distrusting the conciliatory policies of Washington, he could not put his trust in an integrated movement.
In the years immediately preceding his death in 1915, Washington hinted at a growing disillusionment with the way in which his compromise had worked. In 1912 he wrote an article for Century magazine entitled "Is the Negro Having a Fair Chance?" In it he criticized the fact that more money was appropriated for the education of whites than of blacks. He also criticized the convict lease system which had developed in the South. His dissatisfaction with segregation became clear when he pointed out that although Jim Crow facilities might be separate they were never equal. Another article which he had written was published after his death in the New Republic. In it he described the terrible effects of segregation. He said that it meant inferior sidewalks, inferior street-lighting, inferior sewage facilities, and inferior police protection. Such lacks made for difficult neighborhoods in which to raise families in decency.
If Washington's program was a sellout, as many believed, it is becoming increasingly clear that he did not intend his compromise as an end in itself. He believed that it could be the means to a much broader future. When he spoke before the Congressional comittee early in 1895, he expressed his opposition to disenfranchisement on a racial basis. His apparent acceptance of it at Atlanta was only a tactical maneuver. In an article which he wrote in 1898, he said that he believed that the time would come when his people would be given all of their rights in the South. He said that they would receive the privileges due to any citizen on the basis of ability, character, and material possessions. He was, in effect, approving disenfranchisement of the poor and ignorant in both races. When Negroes did receive what was due them as citizens, he said, it would come from Southern whites as the result of the natural evolution of mutual trust and acceptance. Artificial external pressure, he insisted, would not help.
The Atlanta Compromise was to be the means to an end and not an end in itself. If the ex-slave would start at the bottom, develop manners and friendliness, Washington believed that he could make his labor indispensable to white society. Acceptance of segregation was, at that time, a necessary part of good behavior. If the whites, in turn, opened the doors of economic opportunity to the ex-slave instead of importing more European immigrants, Washington said that the nation would have an English-speaking non-striking labor force. Gradually, individual Afro-Americans would gain trust, acceptance, and respect. The class line based on color would be replaced by one based on intelligence and morality.
Washington seemed to be unaware that a race which began at the bottom could stay at the bottom. In an age of rapid urbanization and industrialization a strategy which emphasized craft and agriculture was drastically out of step with the economic realities. Moreover the nation did not accept its part of the compromise. The flood of immigration continued unabated for another two decades. When Afro-Americans were given opportunities in industry, it became clear that there were black jobs and white jobs. The former were always poorly paid.
There were two bases for Washington's belief that the Negro should start at the bottom and work his way up. The nineteenth-century economic creed had taught that hard work unlocked the door which led from rags to riches. This teaching was also reinforced by Washington's own experience. Born in slavery and poverty, he rose from obscurity to fame and influence through honesty and industry. However, Washington seemed unaware that the most which his policy could ever achieve was a token acceptance which would leave the Negro masses behind.
In contrast to Washington's policy of conciliation and compromise, W. E. B. DuBois believed that it was necessary to act like men in order to be accepted as men, Speaking the truth as he saw it, loudly, clearly, and fearlessly, was to him the minimum criterion for manliness. This led to a contrasting style of leadership. Where Washington had been polite and ingratiating, DuBois was self-assertive and, frequently, aggressive. Where Washington had tried to win the trust of white bigots, DuBois insisted on confronting them with the truth as he saw it. Where Washington had counseled peace, DuBois clamored for action.
The contrasting leadership styles of Washington and DuBois were rooted in their differing life experiences. DuBois was born in February, 1868, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. His grandfather had procured his own freedom through participating in the American Revolution. DuBois received his elementary and secondary education in an integrated setting which prevented his becoming conscious of the color bar. However, receiving an integrated college education was not so simple. Instead he headed South to Fisk University to further his education, There, the daily insults of discrimination and segregation came to him as a shock. He had not been trained to accept them, and these daily harassments filled him with anger and hostility. He returned north to pursue his graduate education at Harvard University, and he also spent some time at the University of Berlin exploring the new field of sociology.
DuBois's first-class education as well as his own scholarly bent led him to put considerable faith in reason and learning as the tools with which to rebuild the world. He came to believe that bigotry and discrimination were rooted in ignorance and that scholarship could destroy them by exposing them to the light of truth. He strove to demonstrate that the Afro-American was not innately inferior and that his inferior status sprang from his unequal and unfair treatment in America.
While at Harvard, he wrote "The Suppression of the African Slave Trade" which was of such high quality that it became the first volume in an important historical series published by Harvard. Soon afterwards, while teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, he conducted extensive sociological research which resulted in "The Philadelphia Negro". This pioneering sociological work was valuable for the understanding of the Negro in Philadelphia and throughout the North, At that time sociology was a new field, and there was not a single institution of higher learning in the United States or the world which had adopted it as the tool for studying the problems of minority groups. Atlanta University invited DuBois to come there and teach and to conduct sociological studies. There he began a research department which was devoted to studying the problems of the Afro-American community and which resulted in the production of a dozen works.
Besides his interest in scholarly research, DuBois developed a theory of racial leadership. For a people to advance, he believed, they needed leaders. If they failed to develop such people of their own, they would be guided by others. DuBois was doubtful whether his people should entrust themselves to white leaders. He agreed with Washington that the masses would have to make their living with their hands, and he also believed that it was important for them to develop skills which would help them. While wanting to assist the masses, however, he argued that the important priority, at the beginning, must be given to training a leadership elite which he called "the talented tenth." "The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races." This influential aristocracy would include scholars who would unearth the facts about the race and its problems. It would provide leaders who would examine those facts, make key decisions, and lead the race forward. This elite would also include professionals and businessmen who would set an example of good citizenship for the whole community.
Moreover, the achievements of "the talented tenth" would provide living evidence that the racial stereotypes held by white bigots were untrue. This would lead gradually to the acceptance of "the talented tenth" within the majority community, and they would provide the wedge which would break open the walls of prejudice and discrimination forever.
His work at Atlanta University was only one of the ways by which he strove to build "the talented tenth." In 1905 DuBois and several others had founded the Niagara Movement to provide a common platform from which to speak. They also intended it to become the framework within which they could exchange their ideas. In it "the talented tenth" tried to oppose the policies of conciliation and submission which were being propounded by Booker T. Washington. However, in 1906 Atlanta was rocked by a race riot which shook DuBois's faith in reason and scholarship as a panacea. In the very city in which he lived and where his influence should have been strongest, white bigotry exploded, and mobs roamed the streets for days beating Afro-American citizens and burning their homes. DuBois began to wonder whether scholarly discovery of the truth was enough.
Following another race riot in Springfield, Illinois, in 1908 and the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, DuBois left his post at Atlanta to become the director of publicity and research for the N.A.A.C.P. While continuing his interest in scholarly research, his new job involved him in the aggressive exposure and condemnation of discrimination. He became editor of "Crisis" which he developed into a journal of protest. Instead of a scholar dispassionately unearthing and publishing his findings, DuBois's new position made him a passionate journalist and engaged him in a righteous crusade.
However, some blacks questioned the wisdom of entrusting their future to a biracial organization like the N.A.A.C.P. When it was formed, Monroe Trotter refused to join it, claiming that its white membership would blunt its efficiency and militancy. The fact that for many years DuBois was the only black on its executive board led many to wonder whether it had genuine biracial participation in its decision making.
Later, Ralph J. Bunche, professor of political science, U. N. diplomat, and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, attacked the N.A.A.C.P. on the same grounds. He argued that its dependence on white middle-class leaders, to provide financial backing, the sympathy of a large segment of the public, and on favorable court decisions prevented it from achieving significant results. He claimed that whenever a controversial crisis arose, it would be prohibited from taking a truly militant position. Even if its white leadership was capable of making such a radical decision, it was always forced to consider the effect of an action on its white, middle-class, liberal financial backers.
Bunche also criticized the N.A.A.C.P. for relying on the courts and the Constitution for support. He claimed that the Constitution was a brief, general document which always required interpretation to relate it to specific, contemporary issues. This interpretation, he maintained, was always shared by public opinion. While the courts' understanding of the Constitution might not always conform precisely to the majority opinion, the influential, vocal, and dominant segment of the public inevitably influenced the courts' thinking on important subjects. While in individual cases it might even contradict this force, in the long run the Constitution could never be more than what the vocal majority wanted it to be. Bunche believed that the N.A.A.C.P. thinking was always sensitive to the feelings of the white middle class, and therefore could never afford to alienate that group. At the same time, he believed that racism was so ingrained in the white mentality that it would have to receive a series of hard jolts if significant changes were to occur.
In the final analysis, he said, the N.A.A.C.P. would have to bargain and conciliate. Like Booker T. Washington, he felt that it could not afford to be as militant as was necessary. At about the same time DuBois, himself, became disillusioned with the gradual conciliatory approach of the N.A.A.C.P. While he still wanted to work for a integrated society, he had lost faith in the effectiveness of a biracial organization to achieve significant change. In an article which he wrote in Crisis before resigning from the N.A.A.C.P., he suggested that black separatism or black unity could provide a more solid front with which to attack discrimination and segregation than cooperation with white society. His goal, he insisted, was still to make ten million of his people free. He wanted to help them break the bondage of economic oppression, to shake off the chains of ignorance, to gain their full political rights, and to become exempt from the insults of discrimination and segregation.
This kind of freedom, he maintained, was not inconsistent with self-organization for self-advancement. He wanted to see the Afro-American community develop control over its own churches, schools, social clubs, and businesses. This was not, DuBois insisted, a surrender to segregation. He believed that a community which controlled its own basic institutions was in a better position to make its own decisions and work for its own advancement. This solidarity and cooperation was necessary to achieve significant change resulting in an integrated society. Indirectly, he admitted that this was a shift away from his concept of "the talented tenth." The assumption that an educated and cultured elite would be accepted within white society had proved to be erroneous. To the contrary, he noted, whites often feared educated blacks as much or more than uneducated ones. "The talented tenth" had not even gained token acceptance. Therefore DuBois shifted to a concept of a group solidarity instead of an elite leadership. This concept of group cooperation must not be confused with that of Washington. DuBois's type of solidarity was to be the platform from which to assert one's manhood even if it meant personal deprivation:
"Surely then, in this period of frustration and disappointment, we must turn from negation to affirmation, from the ever-lasting 'No' to the ever-lasting 'Yes.' Instead of sitting, sapped of all initiative and independence; instead of drowning our originality in imitation of mediocre white folks; instead of being afraid of ourselves and cultivating the art of skulking to escape the Color Line; we have got to renounce a program that always involves humiliating self-stultifying scrambling to crawl somewhere where we are not wanted; where we crouch panting like a whipped dog. We have got to stop this and learn that on such a program they cannot build manhood.
Both Walter White and James Weldon Johnson took on the task of countering DuBois's position. Johnson argued that DuBois ended where Washington began. He noted that the conflict between integration into a biracial society and withdrawal into black separatism had existed throughout American history. There had always been a minority who wanted to build a separate community, but he said that what was favored by the majority was to gain entrance into American society. Yet the daily insults which were felt even by the most avid integrationists led them to curse white society and, at times, to consider retreat into isolationism. According to his point of view, Johnson pointed out, isolationism had to be based on economics and although one could talk about black capitalism and could even develop some prospering businesses, the economic realities favored mass production and economic interdependence. Separate black institutions were always contingent institutions which were subservient to the country as a whole. Therefore they could never really be free or independent. The separate society would always be subject to external control by the larger economic and political institutions on which it relied. Johnson also noted that integrationists like himself had been charged with failing to see the intensity of the institutional racism which existed all about them. He denied this and claimed that racism and discrimination were patently obvious. To the contrary, he suggested that the real danger was in overemphasizing their importance and becoming paranoid.
After the Second World War, DuBois Joined the N.A.A.C.P. staff for another short period. However, his disillusionment with society had deepened, and he was ready to consider even more radical solutions than before. He had become increasingly convinced that racism was a world problem and not merely an American problem. The series of Pan-African Congresses which he had helped to organize forced him to see a connection between American racism and European imperialism in Africa. At the same time, communism was representing itself as the foe of both racism and imperialism, and for many of the oppressed peoples throughout the world the communist claim had become attractive. To the N.A.A.C.P. it seemed that DuBois's new "pink" ideas and associations were not good for its image, and it asked him to resign. The government charged DuBois with failing to register the "Peace Information Center", where he was employed, as an agent for a foreign principal. Although acquitted, the harassment deepened his cynicism and hostility. Finally, he became a communist, and he moved to Ghana in 1960. He died there in 1963. As a young scholar, DuBois had begun by believing that reason and research would dispel ignorance and prejudice. Obviously, prejudice was not so easily eradicated by reason alone. "The talented tenth," which was to lead the Afro-American community into the mainstream of American life, had not been successful. White bigots were especially antagonized by educated blacks. When DuBois had advocated black solidarity, it had failed to take root because the intellectuals had become alienated from the masses. The black bourgeoisie had been hindered by their color from assimilating into white society, and their newly acquired education, values, and middle-class style of life prevented them from returning to their people. Finally, DuBois's work with the N.A.A.C.P., while it achieved some significant results, failed to bring about the kind of structural social change he desired. Despairing of bring about racial advancement in America, DuBois decided to work for it in Africa.
Marcus Garvey's personality differed markedly from that of both Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois. Washington's image was one of humility and courageousness bordering, many believed, on obsequiousness. DuBois projected the picture of a self-confident, hostile, and reserved individual. In contrast, Garvey was easy-going and flamboyant. The personalities of both Washington and DuBois minimized the fact that they were black. On one hand, Washington appeared to be a man who knew his place and who did not intrude as an individual or a Negro into any situation. On the other hand, DuBois had shaken off the habits of both the "house nigger" and the "field nigger" in order to adopt the characteristics of a cold intellectual which was more in keeping with the Anglo-Saxon character. Garvey, however, flaunted his blackness wherever he went. Black pride and black identity were the cornerstones of his philosophy, and they vibrated through everything he said and did. He was not ashamed of the personality characteristics of the lower classes, and he readily identified with them. It was the black middle class, which had adopted the life style of the mainstream of white society, that earned his scorn.
Marcus Garvey was born in St. Anne's Bay, Jamaica, in August, 1887. His parents were of unmixed African descent. His ancestors had belonged to the Maroons, a group of slaves who had escaped and established their own community in the Jamaican hills. They fought so well and had been so thoroughly organized that the British found it necessary to grant them their independence in 1739. Garvey was very proud of this heritage and of his unmixed ancestry. Jamaican society was structured hierarchically along color lines. The whites were at the top, mulattoes in the middle, and blacks at the bottom. The mulattoes enjoyed displaying and projecting their superiority over the blacks. In turn, Garvey was scornful of the mulattoes, and he distrusted all people with light skin throughout his life.
As a young man, Garvey began making his living as a printer's helper in a large Kingston printing firm and worked his way up to foreman. His leadership ability became evident when, during a walkout, the workers chose him to lead the strike. He had been the only foreman to join the workers, and the company later black-listed him for it. The union failed to come to his aid, and thereafter he distrusted labor organizations as a source of help for his people.
He then traveled extensively around Central and South America, staying briefly in several large cities and supporting himself by his trade. Wherever he went, he found blacks being persecuted and mistreated. In 1912 he crossed the Atlantic and spent some time in London. There he met large numbers of Africans and became interested in their plight as well. While he was there, he was influenced by a Negro Egyptian author named Duse Mohammed Ali. His ideas further intensified Garvey's interest in Africa. At the same time, Garvey read Booker T. Washington's "Up From Slavery" and was impressed with his philosophy of self-help and moral uplift.
By this time, Garvey had become aware that black people were persecuted all around the world in the West Indies, in Central America, in South America, in the United States, and even in Africa, their homeland. When he returned to Jamaica, he determined to establish an organization to work for the improvement of the conditions of black people the world over. The result was the founding, in 1914, of the "Universal Negro Improvement and Conservation Association and African Communities League". In 1916, Garvey came to the United States to solicit the support of Afro-Americans. He had hoped to get the backing of Booker T. Washington with whom he had already corresponded, but, unfortunately, Washington died the previous year.
In the United States Garvey found the Afro-American community ready to support his program of encouraging aggressive racial pride. The hopes which had accompanied the end of slavery, half a century earlier, had turned to ashes. Then, thousands moved from the rural South to the urban North to escape the growth of segregation and to find economic advancement. In the "promised land," they were continually confronted by socially sanctioned segregation, constant racial insults, and relentless job discrimination.
In 1919 white race hatred exploded in race riots all across the country. In that year, there were also some seventy lynchings, mostly black, and some of them were soldiers who had Just returned from defending their country. Urban whites resented the influx of rural blacks from the South who were pouring into their cities, and they tried to confine the newcomers to dilapidated, older neighborhoods. To do this, they were quite willing to resort to violence, and, between 1917 and 1921 Chicago was struck with a rash of house bombings as whites tried to hold the line. During these years, there was one racially motivated bombing every twenty days.
 Chapters of the Universal Negro Improvement Association sprang up all across the country. Although there has been considerable debate about the number of members in the U.N.I.A., it was clearly the largest mass organization in Afro-American history. Its membership has been estimated between two and four million. In any case, its sympathizers and well-wishers were ubiquitous. The "respectable" N.A.A.C.P. never reached such grass-roots support, and even with its white liberal financing, its capital was much smaller than that which Garvey was able to tap from the lower-class blacks alone.
Garvey advocated a philosophy of race redemption. He said that blacks needed a nation of their own where they could demonstrate their abilities and develop their talents. He believed that every people should have its own country.  Race redemption did not mean that all blacks must return to Africa. However, when there was a prosperous, independent African nation, blacks throughout the world would be treated with respect. He noted that Englishmen and Frenchmen were not lynched, but that blacks, in contrast, were treated like lepers. Garvey did plan to encourage those blacks who had particularly useful skills or who desired to return to Africa to do so, in order to become the back-bone of this new prosperous black nation.
Garvey was harshly critical of the leadership in the Afro-American community. With the exception of Booker T. Washington, they had all advocated social equality, intermarriage, and fraternization. Garvey said that these only led to increased racial friction, He argued that racial purity for both whites and blacks was superior to racial integration, Blacks should also be proud of their race and their ancestry. Africa was not a dark and degenerate continent; instead it was a place of which to be proud.
To demonstrate this, Garvey adopted African clothes and hair style long before they became popular. The black bourgeoisie was shocked and ashamed by his blatant display. Whites were totally incapable of understanding why anyone would try to glorify blackness and the African heritage. To them, he seemed merely a clown. However, to the black masses who had no hope of achieving middle-class respectability, his pride in blackness came as a release. Instead of a life buried in shame, he offered them pride and dignity. Instead of being considered "nobodies," he gave them a sense of identity. In place of weakness, he offered solidarity and strength. These ideas spread through the ghettoes of large American urban centers like a fever. In 1920 the Universal Negro Improvement Association held its annual convention at Madison Square Garden in New York City. There were 25,000 delegates in attendance. Garvey told them that he planned to organize the four hundred million blacks of the world into one powerful unit and to plant the banner of freedom in Africa. In response, the convention elected him as the Provisional President of Africa.
Garvey's black separatism led, naturally enough, to black capitalism. Businesses connected with the U.N.I.A. sprang up all across the country. They were usually small enterprises: grocery stores, laundries, and restaurants. Larger businesses included a printing house and a steamship line. The New York World, which was begun in 1918, was the only black daily in existence at that time. After its demise, Garvey began The Black Man, which was published monthly. Although most of these businesses only served to sink Negro roots deeper in American society, the purpose of the Black Star Steamship Line was, eventually, to provide a means of transportation for those who desired to return to Africa. The black middle class felt that Garvey was hurting its image. White politicians were nervous about the existence of such a large and potentially powerful organization, especially when it was led by a man like Garvey whom they could not understand. When the steamship line ran into financial trouble, many were convinced that Garvey had been defrauding the ignorant masses.
After a power struggle within the U.N.I.A., Eason, who had led the fight, was murdered in New Orleans. Two Garveyites were accused of the crime, and opposition to the movement grew even stronger. Finally, with the urging of middle-class Negroes, the government brought Garvey to trial for using the mails to defraud. He insisted on being his own lawyer, and he took great pleasure in harassing the witnesses and haranguing the jury. When he realized that this was undermining his own case, he began taking advice from a white lawyer. Nevertheless, he was fined $1,000 and given a sentence of up to five years in prison. In 1925, he was sent to the Atlanta Penitentiary. At that point, many of his opponents had second thoughts about his case and asked the government to reopen it. President Coolidge commuted the sentence, but as soon as he was released Garvey was again arrested and was deported as an undesirable alien.
As the movement had been largely dependent on Garvey's magnetic personality, the organization began to dissolve as soon as he left the country. Garvey tried to establish a worldwide movement with its base in Jamaica, but a power fight for control with the New York leadership developed. The outbreak of the Second World War further diminished the influence of his organization. Garvey died in London in June, 1940.
Both James Weldon Johnson and W. E. B. DuBois claimed that emigration of blacks from America to Africa was merely a form of escapism. (Ironically DuBois's disillusionment drove him to Africa some thirty years later. ) Johnson argued that a small independent African nation would have to be dependent on Europe and America for capital. Therefore Garvey's program could not achieve the kind of freedom and equality which it claimed. Johnson maintained that it would still be subject to oppression from white imperialism. As such, the nation would only be an underdeveloped area dependent on external financing and continually subjected to economic exploitation. In foreign affairs it would always be small and weak, and it would have to depend on some stronger ally for its defense. It would only become a pawn for the great powers, all of which were white Europeans or Americans. Johnson claimed that a separate African nation would not provide the kind of power base which Garvey promised.
Although Garvey had, overnight, created the largest mass organization in Afro-American history, it crumbled almost as quickly as it had been built. The movement had been overly dependent on his personality. However, Garvey cannot be dismissed so easily.  Lacking a structure within which to operate, it was not very obvious to the external observer. Nevertheless, his ideas have clearly provided the spawning ground from which more recent organizations have developed.
The leadership style of A. Philip Randolph differed from that of Washington, DuBois, and Garvey. His interest in providing jobs and skills for the working class was akin to that of Washington. His aggressive outspoken manner was more like that of DuBois. While lacking the flamboyant style of Garvey, he was able to work among the ranks of the working class and gain their acceptance. He, too, has demonstrated considerable ability in mass organization. Like DuBois, he wanted to use black solidarity as a wedge with which to break through discrimination into a biracial society and not as an end in itself.
Asa Philip Randolph was born in Crescent City, Florida, in 1889. He was raised in a strict religious home. His father was a local minister but he also had to hold down another full-time job in order to support his family. Early in the century, Randolph moved north and attended City College in New York. During the First World War, Randolph, with Chandler Owen, edited The Messenger and made it into an outspoken vehicle for their own opinions. In its pages, they espoused a radical, American brand of democratic socialism. They supported the International Workers of the World, which many viewed as being alien and communistic, and they questioned the advisability of Negroes supporting the war effort. They were charged with undermining the national defense, and they spent some time in Jail. Both advocated a working-class solidarity of blacks and whites which would resist exploitation by capitalism.  While the white and black dogs were fighting over the bone, they pointed out, the yellow capitalist dog ran off with it. The Messenger encouraged blacks to join unions, and it tried hard to persuade the unions to eliminate discrimination. The view they propagated was that unions could not afford to be based on the color line; instead they should be based on a class line.
Randolph and Owen attacked Samuel Gompers and the A. F. of L. for failing to be truly biracial. Randolph criticized DuBois and the N.A.A.C.P. for their lack of concern with the real day-to-day problems of the masses. He charged that the N.A.A.C.P. was led by people who were neither blacks nor workers, and that they were incapable, therefore, of articulating the needs of the masses. He argued that an organization for the welfare of the Irish would never be led by Jews. Therefore, he suggested that an organization for the welfare of Blacks should not be led by whites. He was especially critical of the gradualist, peaceful policy which DuBois appeared to support during the early years of the N.A.A.C.P. He questioned DuBois's professed stand against violence and revolution.
Randolph said: "Doubtless DuBois is the only alleged leader of an oppressed group of people in the world today who condemns revolution." To Randolph, violence and revolution were not anti-American, but were justified by the Declaration of Independence.
During the twenties, Randolph tried several schemes to increase black and white cooperation in unions. Along with Chandler Owen, he founded the National Association for the Promotion of Unionism among Negroes. The most successful of Randolph's efforts came in 1925 when he established the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. The Brotherhood appeared to demonstrate the futility of his basic thesis. Randolph, who believed in biracial unionism, had established, in the Brotherhood, an organization which, by the nature of the occupation, was to be an exclusively black union. He found himself being pushed relentlessly away from biracial unionism into supporting racial organizations for racial advancements.
In 1936, he played a key role in forming the National Negro Congress. It was a broad alliance of all kinds of groups to advance the welfare of the race. Although it did not receive the backing of the N.A.A.C.P., the Urban League, an even more conservative organization, became a cornerstone in the Congress. The Urban League has always been primarily interested in securing employment for the Negro working class. During the thirties, the communists adopted a united-front policy, and they tried to infiltrate the N.N.C. Some of the left-wing unions which did support the N.N.C., were largely white.
Randolph's talent for mass mobilization was demonstrated most clearly in his efforts to organize two gigantic marches on Washington in order to dramatize Afro-American needs and to pressure the government into action. As American industry began to gear up for war production at the beginning of the Second World War, it needed to find new sources of labor. The Afro-American community was eager to support the war effort, particularly because it meant fighting Hitler's racism. But they were also eager to find jobs. However, defense industries in America continued to display their own brand of racial discrimination. Many of them said quite openly that, while they were willing to hire blacks, they would only give them menial positions regardless of their skill and training. It became clear that racism had to be fought at home and abroad.
Many tried to get the government to take action, but it seemed more concerned with protecting its political image and with avoiding alienating the party's financial backers. In January, 1941, Randolph suggested a mass march on Washington to demand government action against discrimination both in government services and in defense industry. The idea took root, and a mass march was being organized for July. On June 25, 1941, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 which forbade further discrimination either in government services or defense industries, on the grounds of race, creed, or nationality. While some discrimination still continued, the order and the Fair Employment Practices Commission, which resulted from it, played an important role in opening large numbers of new jobs to the Afro-American community. The planned march, which will be discussed more fully in a later chapter, was then called off. Although the march was canceled, Randolph hoped to keep the March on Washington Movement alive. He wanted to create a permanent mobilized community. This, too, failed to materialize, but, if it had not been for the war, his efforts might have been more successful. In September, 1942, Randolph called a meeting of the March on Washington Movement before which he outlined his program. He told the conference that slavery had not ended because it was evil, but because it was violently overthrown, Similarly, he said that if they wanted to obtain their rights, they would have to be willing to fight, go to jail, and die for them. Rights would not be granted; they must be taken if need be. His plan was to organize a permanent mass movement on a nationwide basis and to conduct protests, marches, and boycotts. This was an adaptation of some of Gandhi's techniques to the Afro-American problem.
The March on Washington Movement was to be an all-Negro movement. Yet, Randolph did not intend it to be anti-white. He pointed to the fact that every organization must have its own purposes, that Catholic groups concentrated on their interests in the same way as labor groups strove to gain their objectives. Any oppressed people must assume the major responsibility for furthering their goals. They might accept help and cooperation from outside, but they must, in the final analysis, rely on self-organization and self-help. One of the by-products of this, Randolph believed, would be the development of self-reliance within the Afro-American community and the destruction of the slave mentality. Although individual blacks within the community could join other organizations, and while the movement itself might cooperate with other organizations, the March on Washington Movement itself was to be exclusively for blacks. It was a racial movement for racial advancement.
Randolph went on to envision an organization with a challenging action program. Millions of supporters would be divided into a network of small block units. Each would be headed by a block captain. This would facilitate instant, mass mobilization. At a moment's notice, a chain of command could be activated, and millions of marchers would be in the streets. Randolph also envisioned repeated, gigantic marches aimed at Washington and state capitals. He could also see smaller, regular marches on the city halls and other establishments in dozens of cities across the country. To him it was desirable for blacks to picket the White House, if need be, until the nation came to see that blacks were willing to sacrifice everything to be counted as men. Randolph also wanted to encourage the mobilization of registration and voting.
Besides being reminiscent of the Gandhi nonviolent campaign in India, Randolph's March on Washington Movement, although it never materialized, foreshadowed the civil rights movement of the late fifties and sixties. This later civil rights movement, however, was directed by several separate organizations which, at times, were involved in power fights with one another. It lacked the central organization and national, instant mobilization which Randolph had in mind. It also included a substantial number of white supporters and leaders which Randolph had excluded from his program. He had predicted that this kind of white participation would back down in times of crisis and thereby emasculate the movement. This is precisely what the Black Power advocates of the late sixties claimed had happened to the civil rights movement, and they gave the same reasons for its collapse.
In 1947, Randolph cooperated with Grant Reynolds in organizing the League for Non-Violent Civil Disobedience Against Military Segregation; its aim was to encourage draft resisters objecting to serving in a segregated army. Randolph was also one of a delegation which told President Truman that America could not afford to fight colored people in Asia with the army as it then existed. Truman, then, took the first real steps in ending military segregation. In 1963, Randolph and Bayard Rustin did organize a massive march on Washington. Most of the publicity, however, went to Martin Luther King, Jr., its main speaker. This march contributed significantly to the passage of civil rights legislation. However, most of Randolph's efforts continued to be in the realm of union organization. In 1957, he was made a vice president in the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and a member of its executive council. Two years later, he was censured for charging organized labor with racism.
Although Randolph was not able to achieve his dream of mass mobilization, he did display considerable organizational ability. In part, his ideas have been put into effect by subsequent groups, and his philosophy was similar to that which became popular in the 1960s. The whole civil rights movement bore a marked resemblance to his philosophy, and undoubtedly it drew considerable motivation from it. The idea of an all-black mass organization, with a vast network of local action groups participating in it, is still alive. He had envisioned a grass-roots black power movement a quarter of a century before it became popular. Although dozens of such groups have sprung up across the country, they still lack the kind of mass mobilization and national coordination which he had planned. His was to have been a militant, all-black movement without its becoming anti-white. It was to teach self-reliance to the Afro-American community. Local control and power were to be used to achieve freedom and civil rights within a genuinely biracial society.
During the nineteenth century, the American racial dilemma had appeared to be a regional problem. The Northern states had abolished slavery early in the century, and the abolitionists self-righteously condemned Southern slaveholders while remaining unaware of their own racism. However, the twentieth century showed that racism was really a national issue. Thousands of Afro-Americans moved from the rural South into the urban North, creating a more even distribution of that population throughout the country. At the same time, there was a fresh wave of voluntary immigration into America by peoples with an African heritage. Most of these newcomers also moved into Northern cities. As thousands of blacks spread into the North and West, the inhabitants there developed sympathies with Southern racists. Actually, this population shift only unearthed attitudes which had been there all the time. This gigantic migration of peoples was symptomatic of the change in the heart of the black community. It signaled a new dynamism and a new aggressiveness.
The voluntary black immigration which occurred during the twentieth century was a new and unusual phenomenon. Almost all blacks who had previously come to America had been brought in chains. Those who came voluntarily during this century came in spite of their knowledge that racism would confront them. Their awareness of American racism, however, was an abstraction and was only partially understood by them. Nevertheless, they saw America as the land of prosperity and opportunity at a time when, for many of them, social and economic conditions in their homeland did not seem promising. While only a few came from Africa itself, except as students staying for a limited period, there was a swelling flow from the West Indies and the entire Caribbean area.
At the beginning of the 1920s, the United States imposed a new quota system on new immigrants and this drastically slowed the influx of people from South and East Europe. In spite of the racist and ethnic overtones of this legislation, it failed to build significant barriers to movement by blacks within the western hemisphere. During the 1920s large numbers of blacks came to the United States from other parts of the Americas. By 1930 eighty-six percent of the foreign-born Negroes living in the United States were born in some other country in this hemisphere. By far the largest number of these, seventy-three percent, came from the West Indies and most of them were from the British West Indies.
By 1940, there were some eighty-four thousand foreign-born Negroes living in the country. As large as this total might appear, still less than one percent of the twelve million Negroes were recorded in the 1940 census. Most of these new immigrants went to live in large cities in the Northeast, with by far the majority being concentrated in New York City itself. At the point when the influx was at its highest, in 1930, seventeen percent of the Negroes in New York City were foreign born.
An unusually high percentage of these newcomers had held white-collar occupations--mostly young professionals with little hope of advancement in the static economy of the Islands. Although they were aware of the American racial situation, they were still unprepared to cope with it. Most of them were accustomed to being part of the majority in their homeland. They had experienced discrimination before, but it had not been as uncompromising as what they found on arrival in America. Society, as they knew it, was divided into whites, mulattoes, and blacks instead of into black and white. Many mulattoes were not psychologically ready for the experience of being lumped in with the Blacks. Moreover, the racism they knew had been modified by an economic class system which left some of the poor whites with less status than that of professional blacks. Coming to America, for them, meant a loss of status although it might also mean an increase in affluence.
James Weldon Johnson described the West Indian immigrants as being almost totally different from the Southern rural Negroes who had moved into New York City. He said that the West Indians displayed a high intelligence, many having an English common-school education, and he noted that there was almost no illiteracy among them. He also said that they were sober-minded and had a genius for business enterprise. It has been estimated that one-third of the city's Negro professionals, physicians, dentists, and lawyers, were foreign born.
The West Indians had an ethos which stressed saving, education, and hard work. The same self-confidence and initiative which enabled substantial numbers of them to move into professional employment made others into political radicals. Unaccustomed to the intensity of racial hostility and harassment which they found in America, they reacted with anger. They had not been trained since birth in attitudes of submission and nonresistance. This was the phenomenon which created Marcus Garvey and the United Negro Improvement Association. The West Indian community had been gradually merging with the larger Afro-American society. It never established a separate place of residence, and the second generation became mixed with the larger Afro-American community. After the Second World War, there was a fresh wave of emigration from the West Indies to America, but the 1952 Immigration Act drastically reduced the West Indian quota, thereby 'deflecting this stream of emigrants to Britain.
In contrast, the Spanish-speaking immigrants from the Caribbean did establish separate communities. After the United States acquired Puerto Rico, a sizeable number of Puerto Ricans moved to the mainland. This flow began as a trickle at the beginning of the century, and it has grown rapidly since. Most of the Puerto Ricans settled in urban centers in the Northeast, and they established a large, Spanish-speaking community in New York City. The migration of Cubans into America, while not as large, has been important in both Miami and New York. The largest number of Cubans came during the 1950s and 1960s.
In 1910, the Puerto Rican community in New York City numbered only five hundred, but by 1920 it had grown to seven thousand. In 1940, the number of New York residents who had been born in Puerto Rico reached seventy thousand, and in 1950, it jumped to one hundred eighty seven thousand. The 1960 census showed that the Puerto Rican community of New York City, including those born in Puerto Rico as well as those born in America of Puerto Rican parentage, had reached 613,000.
The Spaniards in Latin America had intermarried with both the Indians and Africans to a far higher degree than had the Anglo-Saxons in North America. For this reason, it is much more difficult to identify the racial background of individual Puerto Ricans. Certainly, there was a significant African influence on the entire population of the island. In 1860, it was estimated that almost 50 percent of the island's residents were Negro. In 1900, the percentage had dropped to 40 percent, and, by 1950, it had dropped to 20 percent. The change in these statistics was due to assimilation through intermarriage. Those who migrated to the continent did not include many with dominant negroid characteristics. The 1960 New York City census listed only 4 percent of its Puerto Ricans as being Negro. Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan, in their study of this community, believed that the Puerto Rican racial attitudes may alter the racial views of the entire city and thereby have some effect on the nation. Puerto Ricans are not as race conscious as are most Americans. Most of them are not clearly either black or white. Intermarriage between color groups is common. The Puerto Rican community in New York City is more conscious of being a separate, Spanish-speaking community than it is of being either a black or white one.
The other major Caribbean element in the American Spanish-speaking community comes from Cuba. In 1960, the Cuban community in the United States, including those born in Cuba as well as those born in America of Cuban parentage, totaled 124,416. Only 6.5 percent of this community is nonwhite, while 25 percent of the population in Cuba is nonwhite. The Cuban community in the United States has almost 46 percent of its number living in the Northeast, and it has another 43 percent living in Florida. Almost the entire community is divided between the cities of Miami and New York.
This immigration of foreign-born blacks into the cities of the North and West was concurrent with a sizeable movement of American blacks from the rural South into these same cities. Actually, this internal migration was not new. As soon as the Northern states had begun to abolish slavery, runaways from the slave states in the South began to trickle into the North. As the underground Railway developed, this trickle swelled into a sizeable flow.
Immediately after the Civil War, the flow reversed directions for a short time. Many who had run away during the war returned home to be with friends and family. Thousands of others, born in the North, hurried south to help educate and rehabilitate their brothers. However, this flow was short-lived. As the South moved from slavery into segregation, hope slid into disillusionment and cynicism. In 1878-79 there was a wave of migration from the south into the West. "Pap" Singleton, an ex-slave from Tennessee, had come to the conclusion that the ex-slaveholder and the ex-slave could not live together in harmony, and he believed that the best solution was to develop a separate society. As a result, he formed the Tennessee Real Estate and Homestead Association, but there was not enough land available in Tennessee for the program. Finally, he decided that Kansas was the ideal location in which to build a separate Negro society. Various transportation companies saw this scheme as a way for them to make money, and they encouraged this westward migration. Although the original migrants to Kansas were welcomed, opposition grew as their numbers increased. Before his death in 1892, Singleton became disillusioned with the possibilities of developing a separate society anywhere in the United States, and he came to favor a return to Africa. He believed that this was the only place where his people could escape racial discrimination. Nevertheless, Singleton took pride in his work, and he claimed, probably with some exaggeration, to have been responsible for transporting some 82,000 Afro-Americans from the South into Kansas.
Another ex-slave, Henry Adams, called a New Orleans Colored Convention in 1879 to examine the condition of the ex-slave throughout the South. A comittee was formed for this purpose. It found the situation discouraging and recommended migration into other regions. Another convention held in Nashville reached similar conclusions, and it requested funds from Congress to assist in the process. Funds were not forthcoming. When Congress did investigate this vast migration, Southerners assured the comittee that their Negroes were really very happy, and they claimed that "the migration was a myth."
In spite of this earlier migration, the 1900 census showed that 89.7 percent of the Afro-American community still resided in the South. One-third of the Southern population was nonwhite. The real exodus still lay ahead.
The migrants were moved both by forces within the South which pushed them out and by those within the North which pulled them in. On one hand, continuing violence and segregation drove many to leave their homes. When the boll weevil spread across the Southern states like a plague, it wiped out many poor farmers, and it drove them to seek other means of livelihood elsewhere. On the other hand, the war had interrupted the flow of immigrants from Europe into the Northern industrial centers, and at the same time it created the need for even more unskilled labor in the factories. After the war, the restrictive immigration laws which were passed kept the flow of European immigration low, and Northern industry continued to draw labor from the Southern rural pockets of poverty.
Between 1910 and 1920, some 330,000 Afro-Americans moved from the South into the North and West. By 1940, the number of those who had left the South since 1910 had soared to 1,750,000. Between 1940 and 1950, there were another 1,597,000, and between 1950 and 1960, there were 1,457,000 more who left the South. The percentage of the Afro-American community living still in the South had dropped from 89.7 percent in 1900 to 59 percent and for the first time, more than half of them lived outside of the Deep South.
Another indication of the northward migration which had occured was that a Northern state, New York, had acquired an Afro-American community which was larger than that of any of the Southern states. Much of this migration was also a move from the country to the city. In the South, 58 percent of the Afro-Americans lived in cities. In the West, there are 93 percent who live in the cities, and in the North, there are 96 percent. In the first half of the twentieth century, the Afro-American community had been transformed from a rural and regional group into a national one.
Alain Locke edited a volume of critical essays and literature entitled The New Negro. In it, Locke heralded a spiritual awakening within the Afro-American community. It was manifested by a creative outburst of art, music and literature as well as by a new mood of self-confidence and self-consciousness within that community. The center of this explosion was located in Harlem. Famous personalities such as Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, James Weldon Johnson, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong either moved to Harlem or visited it frequently in order to participate in the vigorous cultural exchange which took place there. The artists of the "Negro Renaissance", as important as they might be themselves, were merely symbolic of the new life which was electrifying the Afro-American community. This new life was also evident in the large urban centers of the North and particularly in Harlem.
Locke pointed out the significance of the great northward migration when he said that the Negro "in the very process of being transplanted," was also being "transformed." This migration was usually explained either in economic terms--jobs pulling Negroes northward--or in social terms--discrimination pushing them out. In both cases, the Afro-American was represented as the passive victim of external socioeconomic forces. Locke insisted that, to the contrary, it was more accurate to understand this migration as a result of a decision made by the Negro himself. For the first time in history, thousands upon thousands of individual Afro-Americans had made a basic choice concerning their own existence. They refused to remain victims of an impersonal and oppressive system, and, as the result, they deliberately pulled up their roots, left their friends and neighbors and moved north to what they hoped would be "the promised land."
From this decision emerged the new Negro. If he was less polite and more aggressive than before, he was also more self-reliant and less dependent on pity and charity. This change, however, did not occur suddenly. The passive, well-behaved Negro, content to stay in his place, had largely been a myth. In part, he, had been the product of a guilt-ridden white stereotype which found this myth comforting. The Negro himself had also contributed to this fiction by his custom of social mimicry, his habit of appearing to fill the role which whites expected of him. By the end of slavery, however, a spirit of individuality had been growing within the Negro consciousness. The opportunity for industrial employment in the North which had resulted from war and from the slowdown in European immigration along with the increase of racism and segregation in the South combined to open the way for the development of the growing spirit of determination.
The new Negro was doing more than asserting his own individuality; the entire Afro-American community was developing a new sense of solidarity. The racist attitudes of mainstream America, both North and South, made it almost impossible for a Negro to conceive of himself purely in individualistic terms. Any Negro who thought of himself as an exceptional or unique individual was brought sharply back to reality by this racism which relentlessly and mercilessly depicted him as nothing more than a "nigger."
In spite of the individualism which was preached as a basic part of the American creed, the Afro-American community was forced to develop a strong sense of group cooperation. In the face of growing racism and segregation, the idealism of the new Negro was still based on the American ideal of democracy, and his goal was still to share fully, some day, in American life and institutions. The Afro-American's heightened sense of racial consciousness was not an end in itself. This racial self-consciousness gave him strength to withstand the daily injustices which confronted him, and it provided him with faith in himself and hope in the future. Locke believed that the new Negro was taking the racism which had been forced upon him by white society and was turning it to positive uses, transforming obstacles to his progress into "dams of social energy and power."
The factor which prevented this new, energetic Afro-American from becoming alienated from America was that its goals were identical with the expressed ideals of the country. The racial discrimination and injustice from which Afro-Americans suffered, though deeply entrenched in national institutions, were themselves a contradiction to the American democratic philosophy. The Afro-American, besides having justice on his side, was comforted knowing that his goals were sanctioned and hallowed by the nation's ideals. As Locke put it, "We cannot be undone without America's undoing".
Thousands of Negro migrants poured north into Chicago. The factories in Detroit attracted thousands more, and Harlem became the center of "the promised land." James Johnson described the Harlem of the 1920s as the "culture capitol of the Negro world." Its magnetism attracted Negroes from all across America, from the West Indies and even some from Africa itself. Harlem contained more Negroes per square mile than any other place on earth. It drew a bewildering and energizing diversity of peoples. Students, peasants, artists, businessmen, professional men, poets, musicians, and workers; all came to Harlem. It combined both the exploiters and the outcasts. Langston Hughes, in describing his first entrance into Harlem from the 135th Street subway exit, said that he felt vitality and hope throbbing in the air. In Black Manhattan, James Weldon Johnson said that Harlem was not a slum or a fringe. Rather, he insisted that it was one of the "most beautiful and healthful sections of the city."
According to Johnson, the stranger traveling through Harlem would be totally surprised by its appearance. Crossing 125th Street on his way up Seventh Avenue, Johnson said, the visitor would not expect to find himself in the midst of an Afro-American community. The character of the houses did not change. For the next twenty-five blocks the streets, stores, and buildings looked no different from those he had already passed. With the exception of their color, the appearance of the people on the streets was the same too. Moreover, Johnson insisted that Harlem was an integral part of metropolitan New York and was not just a quarter within the city in the sense that was true of the communities inhabited by recent European immigrants. Its citizens were not aliens. They spoke American; they thought American.
Harlem Negroes, claimed Johnson, were woven into the fabric of the metropolitan economy. Unlike the Negroes in other Northern cities, they did not work in "gang labor"; rather, they had individual employment here and there scattered throughout the city. He believed that this integration into the society as a whole made a difference in the kind of race relations which existed there, and he said that it explained why New York had not had a major race riot in the "bloody summer" of 1919. He contended that Harlem was a laboratory for the race problem. Many had argued that when Negroes moved north, the race problem would follow them. Johnson pointed out that 175,000 Negroes had recently moved into Harlem without any substantial racial friction and with no unusual increase in the crime rate. Unfortunately, Johnson's views were not to be fulfilled. Before long, crime rates rose in Harlem, and race riots occurred there as well as in other parts of New York City.
Johnson was aware that there had been considerable racial tension at earlier dates as Negroes first moved into Harlem. The community had been, in turn, Dutch, Irish, Jewish, and Italian. Originally Negroes, living in New York, worked for wealthy Whites and lived in the shadows of the large mansions surrounding Washington Square. Several of the streets in Greenwich Village had been almost entirely inhabited by Negroes. About 1890, the community shifted its focus northward into the 20's and low 30's just west of Sixth Avenue. At the turn of the century, it moved again into the vicinity of 53rd Street. By this time, the city's Afro-American community was developing a small middle class of its own, and it contained its own fashionable clubs and night life. Visiting Negro entertainers from across the country usually performed at and resided in the Marshall Hotel. The "Memphis Students", probably the first professional jazz band to tour the country, played at the Marshall. Shortly after 1900, Negroes began to move to Harlem.
Harlem had been overbuilt with large apartments which the owners were unable to fill. The Lenox Avenue subway had not yet been built, and there was inadequate transportation into the area. As a result, most tenants preferred to live elsewhere. Philip A. Payton, a Negro real estate agent, told several of the owners, located on the east side of the district, that he could guarantee to provide them with regular tenants if they were willing to accept Negroes. Some of the landlords on East 134th Street accepted his offer, and he filled their buildings with Negro tenants.
At first, whites did not notice. However, when Negroes spread west of Lenox Avenue, white resistance stiffened. The local residents formed a corporation to purchase the buildings inhabited by Negroes and to evict them. In turn, the Negroes responded by forming the Afro-American Realty Company, and they too bought out apartment buildings, evicted the white tenants, and rented the apartments to Negroes. White residents then put pressure on lending institutions not to provide mortgages to prospective Negro buyers. When one was able to buy a piece of property, regardless of how prosperous or orderly he might appear, local whites viewed it as an invasion, panicked, and moved out in droves. This left the banks, still unwilling to sell to Negroes, holding a large number of deserted properties. Eventually, they were compelled to sell these properties at deflated prices. During and immediately after the First World War, Negroes poured into Harlem, obtained high-paying jobs, and purchased their own real estate. Johnson believed that Harlem Negroes owned at least sixty million dollars worth of property, and this, he believed, would prevent the neighborhood from "degenerating into a slum."
However, the great migration from the rural South had only just begun. As thousands upon thousands more poured into Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, Newark, Boston, Harlem, and other Northern centers, housing became increasingly scarce. Harlem, like the other Negro communities of the North, became more and more crowded. At the same time, jobs became harder to obtain. Poor "country cousins" streamed into "the promised land" to share in the "milk and honey," but, unfortunately, there was not enough to go around. As the Negro population of Harlem grew, white resistance and discrimination also increased. Although Johnson had been impressed with the wealth contained in Harlem, it was infinitesimal compared to the great sums of money held by whites downtown.
Langston Hughes, who had also been impressed by the vitality of Harlem, came to realize that Negro Harlem was, in fact, dependent on downtown financing. As Harlem grew, downtown financiers became increasingly aware that money could be made there. In the 1930s, in contrast to Johnson's optimistic vision, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. and others pointed out that almost all the stores on 125th Street, the major shopping district, were owned by whites and that they employed whites almost exclusively. Harlem soon became a center for both crime and exploitation.
However, in the 1920s Harlem throbbed with vitality and hope. Besides attracting Afro-Americans from every walk of life, it became the focal point for young intellectuals whose creativity resulted in the Negro Renaissance.
In 1922, James Welden Johnson edited a volume of American Negro poetry, and in the same year Claude McKay, who had come to Harlem from Jamaica, published his first significant volume of poetry, "Harlem Shadows". These twin events, however, were only the beginning of a vast outpouring of cultural activity, and Harlem became, as Johnson called it, the "culture capital" for this movement. Artists poured into Harlem from across the country. Night clubs rocked with music and dance. Publishers were besieged by poets and novelists, and, surprising to the young writers, publishers were eager to see Negro authors. Besides the new creative urge, thousands of Negroes and whites were hungry to consume the fruits of this new renaissance. This artistic renaissance did not come out of a vacuum. Negroes had been publishing poetry for over a century and a half, since the time of Phillis Wheatley and Jupiter Hammon. Paul Laurence Dunbar was the first Negro poet to gain nationwide recognition, at the beginning of the twentieth century. While, on one hand, he captured and depicted the spirit of the Negro folk, on the other hand, he did it in such a way as to perpetuate black stereotypes and white prejudices. Actually, this aided his popularity, and he later came to regret it.
Negroes had also been dancing and creating music in America for over three gundred years. Vaudeville and minstrelsy were their first commercial products. Ironically, the first professional entertainers to perform in minstrel shows were whites who were imitating plantation slave productions. In the beginning, whites performed in blackface, and, only later, did Negroes themselves perform commercially. The spirituals were a religious manifestation of the Afro-American heritage. They appear to have been on the verge of disappearing when the "Fisk University Singers", late in the nineteenth century, took steps to preserve them. A choral group from Fisk was touring the country in order to raise money for the school. They received only polite appreciation. When, on one occasion, they decided to offer one of their spirituals as an encore, the audience was enthusiastic. Since then, spirituals have become a standard part of American religious and concert music.
In short, even before the Negro Renaissance of the 1920s the Afro-American community had made a basic contribution to American culture, providing America with a peasant folk tradition of the greatest importance. The social mobility in the American scene had permitted each wave of European immigrants to move up the social ladder before it had time to develop into an American peasant class. However, this mobility was not extended to the Afro-American. Therefore, it was from the Afro-American peasant class that an indigenous American folk culture was to emerge. When minstrelsy and jazz spread around the world, they were seen as American productions. They were, at the same time, Afro-American creations.
The Afro-American folk culture must be seen as the product of the African's experience in America rather than as an importation into America of foreign, African elements. Although the content of the Afro-American folk culture grew out of the American scene, its style and flavor did have African roots. It was based on the artistic sense which the slave brought with him--a highly developed sense of rhythm which was passed from generation to generation, and an understanding of art which conceived of it as an integral part of the whole of life rather than as a beautiful object set apart from mundane experience. Song and dance, for example, were involved in the African's daily experience of work, play, love, and worship. In sculpture, painting and pottery, the African used his art to decorate the objects of his daily life rather than to make art objects for their own sake. The African could not have imagined going to an art gallery or to a musical concert. Art was produced by artisans rather than by artists. This meant that slave artisans in America could continue to produce decorative work, and slave laborers in the field could continue to sing. Art and life could still be combined, though in a restricted manner.
However, while the African brought his feeling for art with him, the content of his art was actually changed as the result of his American slave experience. The dominant African arts were sculpture, metal-working, and weaving. In America, the Afro-American created song, dance, music, and, later, poetry. The skills displayed in African art were technical, rigid, control disciplined. They were characteristically sober, restrained and heavily conventionalized.
In contrast, the Afro-American cultural spirit became emotional, exuberant, and sentimental. This is to say the Afro-American characteristics which have been generally thought of as being African and primitive--his naivety, his exuberance and his spontaneity--are, in reality, his response to his American experience and not a part of his African heritage. They are to be understood as the African's emotional reaction to his American ordeal of slavery. Out of this environmental along with its suffering and deprivation, has evolved an Afro-American culture.
LeRoi Jones, the contemporary poet, playwright, and jazz critic, points out in "Blues People" that the earliest Negro contributions to formal art did not reflect this genuine Afro-American culture. It was only with the emergence of the "New Negro" and the Negro Renaissance that this folk culture entered the mainstream of the art world. Previously, those Negroes who had gained enough education to participate in literary creation generally strove to join the American middle class, and tried to disavow all connections with their lower class background. In doing this, they were only following the same route as that pursued by other ethnic minorities in America. They were ashamed of slavery as well as of everything African.
The folk culture, nevertheless, flourished within the music produced by the Afro-American community. The spirituals and work songs were the product of the slave. After Emancipation, work songs were replaced by the blues. Work songs had been adapted to the mass labor techniques of slavery, whereas the blues, which is a solo form, was the creation of a lone individual working as a sharecropper on his own tenant farm. It continued to express the earthy folk culture, and it, too, was woven into daily life. It expressed the daily tribulations, weariness, fears, and loves of the Afro-American after Emancipation. At the beginning of the twentieth century, blues along with ragtime, became popular, although not always respectable. They could be heard most often in saloons and brothels--nevertheless, they were beginning to move out of the Afro-American subculture and into the white society. W. C. Handy, while by no means the father of the blues, became its best-known commercial creator. He is still remembered for the "Memphis Blues" and the "St. Louis Blues."
In New Orleans, the folk tradition and formal music came together for the first time. There, the Latin tradition had permitted the Creoles to participate in education and culture. They had developed a rich musical tradition, and many of them had received training in French conservatories. However, they preferred the sophisticated European music to the more earthy sounds of their blacker brothers. With the growth of Jim Crow legislation, the Creoles lost their special position in society, and they found themselves forcibly grouped with the blacks, whom they had previously shunned. Out of this fusion of technical musicianship and folk creativity emerged a new, vigorous music which became known as jazz.
Jelly Roll Morton was one musician who had begun by studying classical guitar but preferred the music of the street. He became a famous jazz pianist and singer. Over the years, he played his way from night spots in New Orleans to those in St. Louis, Chicago, Los Angeles, and scores of smaller cities. The musical quality of jazz, instead of adopting the pure tones of classical music, was boisterous and rasping. Instruments were made to imitate the human voice, and they deliberately used a "dirty" sound. Both the trumpet playing and singing of Louis Armstrong illustrate this jazz sound particularly well. When Armstrong appeared in Chicago with King Oliver as the band's second trumpeter, he was immediately recognized as a jazz trumpet virtuoso, and his playing sent an electric shock through the jazz world.
The most famous jazz musician and composer to appear in New York City during and after the Negro Renaissance was Duke Ellington. His well-known theme song "Take the A Train" made reference to the subway line which went to Harlem. By the time jazz had reached Harlem the Negro Renaissance was in full swing. This renaissance, unlike previous art produced by Negroes, consciously built on the Afro-American folk tradition.
Langston Hughes, the most prolific writer of the renaissance, wrote a kind of manifesto for the movement. He said that he was proud to be a black artist. Further, he said that he was not writing to win the approval of white audiences. At the same time he claimed that he and the other young Negro artists were not attempting to gain the approval of black audiences. They were writing to express their inner souls, and they were not ashamed that those souls were black. If what they wrote pleased either whites or blacks, Hughes said, they were happy. It did not matter to them if it did not.
In "Minstrel Man", Hughes expressed the inner emotions of the stereotyped, well-behaved Negro which white America thought it knew so well:
Because my mouth
Is wide with laughter
And my throat
Is deep with song,
You did not think
I suffer after
I've held my pain
So long.

In still more defiant tones, McKay expresses the aggressive response which many Negroes made during the race riots of 1919:
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain...
Nevertheless, Langston Hughes made it clear that his bitter hostility was aimed at injustice and inhumanity and not at American ideals when he wrote:
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be
An ever-living seed,
Its dream
Lies deep in the heart of me.
Besides articulating the Negro's emotional reaction to prejudice and discrimination, the Negro Renaissance depicted other aspects of the Afro-American culture. The flavor of its religious life was captured best by James Weldon Johnson in his volume "God's Trombones: Negro Sermons in Verse", which he published in 1927. Instead of resorting to the standard technique of using stereotyped dialect to capture the flavor, Johnson used powerful, poetic imagery to express its essence. In "The Creation" Johnson depicted a Negro minister preaching on the opening verses of Genesis:
And God stepped out on space,
And he looked around and said:
I'm lonely--
I'll make me a world.
And far as the eye of God could see
Darkness covered everything,
Blacker than a hundred midnights
Down in a cypress swamp.
Then God smiled,
And the light broke,
And the darkness rolled up on one side,
And the light stood shining on the other,
And God said: That's good!
The Negro Renaissance, besides losing its shame over its folk culture, developed a fresh interest in its African heritage. One of the many expressions of this was made by Countee Cullen:
What is Africa to me:
Copper sun or scarlet sea,
Jungle star or jungle track,
Strong bronzed men, or regal black
Women from whose loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden sang?
The Renaissance also included an outcropping of Negro novelists. There had been Negro novelists before, and the best known of them were Charles W. Chestnut and, to some extent, Paul Laurence Dunbar. Chestnut's novels included "The Conjure Woman" and "The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line", whereas Dunbar, who wrote mainly poetry, was best known for his novel "The Sport of the Gods". Chestnut's writing, though moving away from the plantation romanticism which had glorified slavery, developed a more realistic flavor, and it emphasized intergroup relations based on the color line rather than developing the interior lives of its characters. Negro fiction came into its own in 1923 with Jean Toomer's publication "Cane", and, in 1924, with Jessie Redman Fauset's "There is Confusion". These works dealt with Negroes as people and not merely as objects to be manipulated for racial propaganda. Langston Hughes, in 1930, published "Not Without Laughter", a novel to gain wide renown.
To catalog all the authors of the Negro Renaissance would become tedious. However, all the poets and novelists listed within these pages are generally accepted as having gained a place among America's significant writers. They were more than products of an Afro-American subculture; their work became part of the mainstream of American literature. These authors, along with other Negro artists, gained the respect of American art and literary critics. With them, the Afro-American folk culture made its way into the formal art of the nation.
The Negro Renaissance of the 1920s, however, was more than a literary movement. There was, as had been noted earlier, a vast outpouring of musical creativity. Besides the jazz composers and performers, many made their mark in classical concert music. The best known composer from the Afro-American community was William Grant Still. Many operatic and concert singers have been Negroes, and they include such well-known names as Paul Robeson, Marian Anderson, Leontyne Price, and William Warfield.
The most famous of the Afro-American painters was Henry O. Tanner, who had made his reputation before the Negro Renaissance. Tanner's paintings had been widely acclaimed at the Paris Exposition in 1900, the Pan-American Exposition in 1901, and the St. Louis Exposition in 1904. Tanner avoided Negro subjects and concentrated on biblical themes. In the field of sculpture, Meta Warrick Fuller was the first Negro to gain attention. Augusta Savage became well-known for her head of Dr. DuBois, and Richmond Barthe gained recognition for the bust of Booker T. Washington.
In retrospect, the Renaissance of the twenties can be seen as the beginning of a continuing, self-conscious cultural movement within the Afro-American community. During the 1930s, however, the outpouring diminished. The Depression affected the entire American scene, businessmen, workmen, and artists, and its impact on the Negro Renaissance was particularly severe. One of the New Deal measures which alleviated the situation considerably was the Federal Writers Project. Sterling Brown, literary critic and Howard University professor, headed the Negro section. Two of the better known authors who were helped by the Project were Arna Bontemps and Richard Wright.
Wright's novel "Native Son" was widely acclaimed. In it, he depicted the inner anger and hatred felt by many young Negro men as dominating characteristics of the hero's personality; eventually, his life was destroyed. The first Negro to win a Pulitzer Prize was Gwendolyn Brooks, who won it for her poetry. Later, Ralph Ellison was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his novel "Invisible Man".
Since the Second World War, innumerable Negroes have made significant contributions to American culture through the mass media: radio, television, and movies. Large numbers have also joined the ranks of professional athletes in every field from tennis to football. Nevertheless, complaints persist that prejudice continues in these areas. While they are often included as performers, rarely do Negroes achieve significant decision-making authority in their field. In the 1968 Olympics, several black athletes, especially Carlos and Smith, claimed that instead of being accepted on an equal basis, they were being exploited.
The decade of the 1960s has been marked by a militant spirit throughout the Afro-American community; this spirit was reminiscent of the new Negro of the 1920s although it appears to be more cynical and disillusioned. LeRoi Jones and James Baldwin are only the best known of dozens of contemporary black writers. Their bitterness, undoubtedly, springs partly from the dashed hopes of the new Negro. Unfortunately, at the very time that the Afro-American community was stepping forward with new confidence, the nation was tottering on the brink of economic disaster. The year 1929 brought a harsh end to the optimism of the 1920s.
Although Langston Hughes had been confident that the American dream could be made to include his people, thousands upon thousands of other Afro-Americans, especially among the lower classes, were extremely dubious. In 1916, Marcus Garvey came to Harlem, and before long his Universal Negro Improvement Association had opened chapters in urban centers all across the nation. As mentioned previously, Garvey did not believe that blacks could be taken into American society. Hundreds of thousands, who apparently agreed with him, followed his banner. Whatever was the actual number of members of the U.N.I.A., the movement gained more grass-roots support than had any other organization in Afro-American history. While the nation was willing to tolerate the Afro-American folk spirit, the people, themselves, did not believe that they would be accepted.
Although Garvey's movement was by far the largest black nationalist organization in America, it was not the only one. In Chicago, Grover Cleveland Redding was preaching a Back-to-Africa philosophy of his own. He organized the Abyssinian Movement and urged Negroes living on the south side of Chicago to return to Ethiopia. On Sunday, June 20, 1920, Redding led a parade through the Chicago streets. He sat astride a white horse and wore what he claimed was the costume of an Abyssinian prince. At the corner, of East 25th Street and Prairie Avenue he stopped the procession, poured a flammable liquid on an American flag, and burned it. A Negro policeman, who attempted to break up the demonstration, was shot by one of Redding's followers. In the course of the melee, a white storekeeper and a white soldier were killed. Redding and another Negro were later executed for their part in the affair.
In 1925 Noble Drew Ali came to Chicago and established the Moorish American Science Temple. Actually, he had previously attempted to organize other temples in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. He claimed that American Negroes were of Moorish descent and, instead of being really black, were olive-hued. His movement had a banner which carried a Moorish star and crescent on a field of red. He also claimed that American Negroes, being Moors, had an Islamic heritage rather than a Christian one, and he endeavored to spread his particular version of that faith throughout the Afro-American community. By 1927 Ali had established branches in Pittsburgh, Detroit, Philadelphia, Kansas City, Lansing, and elsewhere. He wrote his own version of the Koran which combined passages from the Moslem Koran, the Christian Bible, and some of the writings of Marcus Garvey.
Ali gave his followers a new sense of identity. Most of them wore a fez which set them apart from the typical urban black. Many were also bearded, and each one carried a membership card. Having a different religion from that of the typical ghetto black contributed further to their special sense of identity. Ali's teaching also made them feel that they had a special and unique heritage of which they could be proud. His emphasis on separatism instead of on integration struck a harmonious note with their disillusionment. Instead of leaving them in despair, it permitted them to face white America boldly.
In 1929 a power struggle broke out between Noble Drew Ali and Claude Green, one of his organizers. When Green was found murdered, the Chicago police charged Ali with the crime. While Ali was out on bond, he too died under mysterious circumstances. While some claimed that he had been beaten by the police, others said that he had been "mugged" by Green's followers. Before he was released on bail Ali wrote a letter from prison to his followers encouraging them to have faith in him and in their future. His letter bore distinctly messianic overtones. After assuring them that he had redeemed them, he concluded by extending to them his peace and by commanding them to love one another. His movement splintered after his death into innumerable competing factions.
In Detroit, sometime before 1930, a dark-skinned man appeared selling silk and raincoats. He said that he was W. D. Fard and that he had come from the Holy City of Mecca in order to save the American Negro. People generally described him as being unusually light-skinned for a Negro with perhaps an Oriental cast. Fard also taught that the American Negro was Islamic in origin and that he should return to his ancestral faith. Sometime in 1933 or 1934 he disappeared as mysteriously as he had come. While many believed that Fard and his movement must have been connected with Noble Drew Ali and the Moorish American Science Temple, the Black Muslims have always denied it.
Fard founded, in Detroit, Muslim Temple Number One, and he acquired a handful of devout followers. He insisted that the Muslims should refrain from eating pork, should pray facing the East, and should practice a daily washing ritual.  It is the practice among Muslims to drop their Christian name and, until their true names will be revealed to them, to substitute the letter X for their last name symbolizing the unknown.  The days of the White Devil, he said, were numbered.
The Muslim's life was rigidly disciplined. There were temple services almost every evening. Individual behavior and dress were carefully dictated. Besides forbidding the eating of pork, devout Muslims were not allowed to drink alcohol or smoke tobacco. Relationships between men and women were extremely puritanical. Each temple had special groups to prepare young men and women for manhood and womanhood. The Fruit of Islam was the young men's group, and it was a semi-military defense corps aimed at developing a sense of manhood and the ability for self-defense. The common belief that the Fruit of Islam was preparing for racial aggression has never been substantiated. The Muslim Girls' Training Classes taught cooking, sewing, housekeeping, and etiquette.
After Fard's disappearance, the leadership passed on to Elijah Muhammed, formerly Elijah Poole, whom Fard had been grooming as his successor. Elijah Muhammed moved to Chicago and began Temple Number Two and established his headquarters there. The "Black Muslims", as well as other small, semi-religious, separatist groups, continued to exist unnoticed by the general public. When Malcolm Little, better known as Malcolm X, was converted to the "Nation of Islam", he gave the movement the organizational skill and the eloquence which it previously lacked. This brought it into national prominence.
Black Nationalism and the Negro Renaissance shared a strong sense of racial consciousness and racial pride. However, while the writers who expressed the spirit of the new Negro still believed in their future in America, the black nationalists enunciated a mood of alienation and despair. The Depression, which eroded the hopes of many Americans, hit the Negro unusually hard. It served to increase the level of bitterness in the Afro-American community as a whole.
THE new Negro of the 1920s who had struck out for "the Promised Land" found, in the 1930s, that his old enemies of hunger, cold, and prejudice were lurking outside the door of his newly chosen home. Hope slid into despair and cynicism. The dynamic, self-confident Harlem which Johnson had described in 1925 as the Culture Capital of the Negro World became choked with disillusionment and frustration, and, in 1935, it was the scene of looting, burning, and violence.
While the Depression which swept America in 1929 was a national disaster, it did not hit all segments of society equally, In America, poverty and starvation are also discriminatory. To quote the old adage again, "The Negro is the last to be hired and the first to be fired." The Depression also proved that Harlem, like other Afro-American communities, was not as economically self-sufficient as Johnson had imagined. Although such communities had many Negro-owned businesses thriving on a Negro trade, these businesses were still dependent on the economy at large. Therefore, they were not at all free from the racial discrimination in the nation. Their clientele was largely employed in white-owned businesses. Many Negroes were laid off, and Negro-owned businesses immediately felt the pinch.
Although Negro businesses had grown significantly during the 1920s, most were small establishments and, in the age of mass production and mass marketing, always had to struggle hard in order to compete. In 1929, the Colored Merchants Association was established in New York City, and it attempted to buy goods for independent stores on a cooperative wholesale basis. This aided them in competing with chain stores. The Association also urged blacks to patronize stores owned by Afro-Americans. Nevertheless, the Association only survived for two years. The Afro-American community felt the Depression sooner and harder than did the rest of the country.
By 1932, the government believed that 38 percent of the Afro-American community was incapable of self-support and in need of government relief. At the same time, it considered that only 17 percent of the white community fell into this category. In October of 1933, between 25 percent and 40 percent of the blacks in many of the large cities, to which they had moved to find a brighter future, were on relief. This percentage was three or four times higher than that of the whites in the same cities. As affluent whites felt the economic pinch, one of the first items to be trimmed from their shrinking budgets was the maid or the gardener. In 1935 the number of unemployed Negro domestics was at least one and a half million. In that same year, the government estimated that 65 percent of the Negro employables in Atlanta were on public assistance while, in Norfolk, 80 percent of the Afro-American community was on relief.
As Negro unemployment statistics skyrocketed in the early thirties, The-Jobs-for-Negroes Movement strove to alleviate the crisis. It was begun by the Urban League in St. Louis. A boycott was organized against white-owned chain stores which catered to Negroes, but refused to employ them. The movement spread throughout the Midwest and had some success in "persuading" white-owned stores in the heart of the ghettoes to hire Negro employees. When the idea reached Harlem, it resulted in the establishment of the Greater New York Coordinating Comittee. One of its founders and organizers was the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and the Comittee received considerable support from his church, the Abyssinian Baptist Church.
It was Powell's claim that the Comittee was shunned by most "respectable" Negroes but that its supporters included an unusually wide variety of radicals. The group referred to its members as antebellum Negroes by which, Powell said, they meant before Civil War II. Some of them, he claimed, favored repatriation to Africa; others were for black capitalism; still another group, including Powell himself, wanted the Negro to achieve full dignity within the American system. In spite of the variety of their objectives, all of them believed that the Afro-American must first achieve economic security before any of these specific goals could be attained.
It was on this primary tactical necessity that they were able to coordinate their activities. They picketed white-owned stores on 125th Street. They carried signs advocating, "Don't buy where you can't work," and Powell maintained that they were able almost to stop trade totally at any target they chose to picket. He claimed to be able to call a meeting with only forty-eight hours notice and have 10,000 persons in attendance. The 125th Street stores soon negotiated and began employing Negro employees. Next, the Comittee hit the city's utility companies. They urged Negroes not to use electricity on specified days. They harassed the telephone company by urging Negroes to demand that the operator place their calls instead of their dialing the number and utilizing the automatic exchanges. Both companies changed their employment patterns in response. The Comittee also boycotted the bus company until it began employing Negroes as drivers as well as on other levels of the company's staff.
By 1935 Harlem had become a pressure cooker which was heated to the boiling point by economic and racial frustrations. When a young Negro stole a knife from a 125th Street store, it became the incident which triggered a social explosion. Although he had escaped from the pursuing officer a rumor spread around the community that he had been beaten to death. A mob soon gathered and began to protest everything from the discrimination practices of merchants to slum landlords and police tactics. Window-breaking, looting, and burning soon followed. Before peace was restored, three Negroes had been killed, some two hundred stores smashed, and it was estimated that approximately $2,000,000 worth of damage had been done.  The commission concluded that the causes of the riot were rooted in resentment against racial discrimination and poverty. The "promised land" of the large northern cities had not lived up to expectations.
The Depression, however, brought its own kind of hope. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had been elected in 1932, promised the country a "New Deal." It was to be a new deal for the workers, the unemployed and, it seemed, for the Negro too. In response, black voters switched to the Democratic party in droves. While Franklin D. Roosevelt was not the first president to appoint Negroes to government positions, his appointments were different in two major respects. First, there were more of them. Second, instead of being political payoffs, the appointees were selected for their expert knowledge, and their intellectual skills became part of the government's decision-making processes.
This group, which became informally known as the "Black Cabinet," included such prominent Afro-American leaders as Robert L. Vann of The Pittsburgh Courier, William H. Hastie of the Harvard Law School, Eugene Kinckle Jones of the Urban League, Mrs. Mary McLeod Bethune of the National Council of Negro Women, Robert C. Weaver, and Ralph Bunche, who later became the first Negro to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The number of Afro-Americans hired by the Federal Government mushroomed rapidly.
Between 1933 and 1946 the number rose from 50,000 to almost 200,000. Most, however, were employed in the lower, unskilled and semi-skilled, brackets. It was also during this period that the civil service terminated its policy of requiring applicants to state their race and to include photographs. Individual personnel officers, nevertheless, could and did continue to discriminate.
In spite of the attempt of the Roosevelt Administration to elevate the status of the Afro-American, the New Deal itself became enmeshed in racial discrimination in three ways: through discriminatory practice within government bureaus, through exclusion carried on by unions, and also as an indirect by-product of the success of the New Deal programs. In a government bureaucracy, power and authority are distributed throughout the administrative hierarchy. Officials at varying levels were still influenced by their personal prejudices, and they continued to use their positions in a discriminatory manner. Regardless of the intentions at the top, prejudice continued to exist in varying degrees throughout the lower levels of the structure.
In 1935 the Wagner Act protected the rights of labor unions, but because most unions practiced racial discrimination, it served indirectly to undercut the status of the Negro worker for a short time. Actually, with the heightened competition for jobs, unions tended to intensify their discrimination. The American Federation of Labor largely consisted of trade or skilled workers. Its member unions regularly practiced racial exclusion and kept blacks out of the trades. To the contrary, the United Mine Workers Union which had been organized on an industry-wide basis rather than a craft basis had encouraged the participation of Negroes within the union since at least 1890. In 1935, several union leaders, led by John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers, decided that the union movement must break away from its craft orientation and begin to organize the new mass production industries on an industry-wide basis.
While the A. F. of L. dragged its feet, the dissidents withdrew and formed the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Immediately they began to organize the steel workers, the meat packers and the automobile workers. These were all industries which employed significant numbers of Afro-Americans, and the CIO followed an aggressive, nondiscriminatory policy. In the beginning, black workers were suspicious, but they soon joined the new unions in large numbers. In the long run, both black and white labor benefited from the Wagner Act.
Finally, the New Deal failed to extend its program to include either agricultural or domestic workers. These were areas in which Afro-Americans were employed in unusually high proportions, and this meant that a large portion of the Afro-American community was not covered by this legislation. For example, both the Social Security and the Minimum Wage laws excluded both agricultural and domestic workers. Nevertheless, it was estimated that in 1939 some one million Negroes owed their livelihood to the Works Progress Administration. If it had not been for the W.P.A., the National Youth Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and other similar organizations, Afro-Americans would have suffered even more during the Depression.
Some relief was brought to farmers through the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. However, white landlords usually kept the checks which had been intended for the sharecroppers. This resulted in the formation of The Southern Tenant Farmers' Union, an interracial organization. Despite the landlords' attempts to use racism to destroy it, the Union showed that white and black farmers could cooperate on the basis of their common economic plight. This alliance of poor whites and poor blacks was reminiscent of the earlier Populist Movement.
Although the New Deal did much to help the Negro, it tended to further undercut his self-confidence and independence. Alain Locke has argued that the significant fact about the northward migration by blacks had been that the Afro-Americans had made a decision for themselves. The fact of having made a decision and of taking action on it, Locke maintains, was the event which created the aggressive self-confident New Negro. In helping him to survive the Depression, the New Deal turned him again into a passive recipient. The large number of Afro-Americans who were receiving government aid in one way or another were aware of their dependency. Afro-American communities, which had been regarded as "The Promised Land," slid into poverty and dejection.
As ominous war clouds began to gather over Europe in the late 1930s, most Americans were preoccupied with domestic problems resulting from the Depression. Those who took notice of the ascendancy of Mussolini and Hitler were apt to be impressed with their successes in combatting the effects of the Depression in Italy and Germany. The Afro-American community, however, was more concerned with the imperialistic and racist elements in the teachings of Fascism and National Socialism. Usually, American Negroes were prevented from looking beyond their own problems by the immediacy of racial prejudice which they faced daily, but this time they were among the first to warn of impending danger.
Racist thought in Germany did not begin with the rise of Adolf Hitler. European anti-Semitism can be traced back into the past for centuries. Although it originally had its roots in a religious feeling, racism became secularized and, by the middle of the nineteenth century, took on political overtones and tried to assume a scientific foundation.
Aggressive nationalism began to bloom at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and went on to spread across Europe. The political unification of Germany, instead of being the glorious culmination of this nationalistic drama, only signaled the end of one act and the beginning of another. Even the German defeat in the First World War did not persuade ardent nationalists to be content with the victories they had already achieved. Instead, they probed the heart of the nation to find an explanation for their defeat. These nationalists contended that the defeat had been due to pollution of racial purity by the presence of a large, alien element--the Jews. If it had not been for this impurity, it was argued, Germany would certainly have been victorious, and it would have demonstrated its global superiority. Aggressive nationalism became virulent racism.
Adolf Hitler exploited this need for a political scapegoat and turned it into a national, anti-Semitic campaign. The racial stereotypes and accompanying feelings were already widespread. Nineteenth century popular German literature was full of such trite symbols. The Jew was always portrayed as a villainous merchant, shifty-eyed, large-nosed, unscrupulous, and wealthy. In contrast, the German was invariably portrayed as a solid, blond-haired peasant, hard-working, loyal, and exploited.
The drama in such literature sprang from the tension between the wealthy Jewish merchants and the hard-working but poor German peasants. Here could be found the same kind of exploitation which Hitler used to explain the German defeat in the war. These popular stereotypes were then joined to the teachings of Houston Stewart Chamberlain which had built on elements from biology, anthropology, sociology, and phrenology. In his book Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, Chamberlain had developed them into a philosophy of world history which centered on the concepts of racial conflict. Human progress and racial purity were equated. He predicted an eventual struggle to the death between the Jewish and the Teutonic races. The Germans, he believed, would emerge victorious. Through the survival of the fittest and the destruction of the weak, mankind would reach a higher stage of evolution. Although Nazi racist thought was concerned almost exclusively with the conflict between the Germans and the Jews, it was clear that the Negro race was, if anything, consigned to an even lower level of importance than the Jews. In the survival of the fittest, Negroes were also destined for extermination in the name of human progress.
Afro-American suspicions about the nature of Mussolini's imperialism proved to be justified when Italy invaded Ethiopia. Mussolini's dream of reviving Roman glory included rebuilding a powerful empire. However, underdeveloped countries which were not already dominated by European nations and which could easily be colonized, were few in number. When Italy invaded Ethiopia, Afro-Americans saw it as another white nation subjugating another black nation. At the very time when Africans and Afro-Americans were looking forward to the liberation of Africa from European domination, Italy was extending imperialism even further and conquering the last remaining independent supposedly black nation in Africa. Afro-Americans were outraged. They looked to the League of Nations hoping that it would take decisive action against the Italian aggression. Their hopes were in vain.
The war that began in 1939 came to be expressed in terms which were even more ideological than had been true of the First World War. The Allies depicted themselves as being the champions of freedom and humanity while they portrayed their enemies as tyrants and barbarians. Afro-Americans were painfully aware of some of the imperfections in this simple dichotomy. While aghast at the racist teachings propagated by Germany, they could not forget the racism which confronted them daily within the United States.
They were also aware of the imperialism which was practiced by both the British and the French who dominated and exploited Africa almost at will. Nevertheless, Hitler's form of brazen racism did give a note of validity to this ideological formulation. Afro-Americans viewed the war both with more enthusiasm and with more pessimism than they had felt at the outbreak of the First World War.  On the other hand, they did not believe that any display of patriotism on their part would significantly diminish racism at home. During the First World War they had thought that a demonstration of patriotism would help to knock down the walls of antagonism. Instead, they found that manliness on the part of Afro-Americans, even in the name of patriotism, was a threat to those whites who believed that Negroes should be kept in their place. Afro-Americans were prepared not to be disillusioned in that way again. For them, the war would still be a double struggle-fighting racism at home as well as abroad.
The Second World War began to affect Americans long before the country was actually drawn into the fighting. Although the American nation stood on the sidelines for the first two years, America became a major source of money, supplies, and encouragement for Britain and France. Providing materiel for the Allies gave new life to the sagging American economy. There were still some five million unemployed in the nation, and something more seemed to be needed. Unfortunately for the Afro-American, most of the new jobs were not open to them. Aside from the fact that he was the first to be fired and the last to be hired, many of the new defense industries made it clear that they would hire no Negroes at all or, at most, would restrict their employment to janitorial positions regardless of the training or education of the applicant.
Hostility was expressed quite openly by some leaders in the West Coast aircraft industry. As better jobs became available, they were quickly filled by white workers eager to improve their economic status. This left some of the more undesirable jobs to go begging, and, as the result, the war boom benefits began to trickle down to the Afro-American community. Afro-Americans, however, were not content with the crumbs from the industrial table. Complaints began to flood into Washington. Several government officials made pronouncements condemning discrimination in defense industries, but they were not heard. It became clear that nothing would change without strong government action, and it was also evident that this would not occur unless the entire Afro-American community could exert united, political pressure.
Early in 1941, A. Philip Randolph put forth the idea of a gigantic March on Washington, and he expressed the belief that a hundred thousand Afro-Americans could be organized to participate in such an undertaking. The immediate response from most of the leaders of both black and white America was one of skepticism. Most of them felt that there was too much apathy in the Afro-American community for such a grandiose scheme to be taken seriously. Nevertheless, interest on the grass-roots level gradually grew and Randolph's idea was transformed into a project involving scores of organizers all across the country, all of whom were working diligently to enlist potential marchers. In the meantime, Randolph began to formulate the complex plans for organizing the actual march. By late spring, skepticism had turned to worry. Many government leaders and finally President Roosevelt himself tried to talk Randolph into canceling the march. They suggested that such an aggressive protest would do more to hurt the Afro-American than help him.
Randolph remained unyielding. Others tried to suggest that the protest would be bad for the American image and therefore was unpatriotic. When they suggested that it would create a bad impression in Rome and Berlin, Afro-Americans retorted that white racism had already created such an image. Finally, Roosevelt contacted Randolph and offered to issue an executive order barring discrimination in defense industries and promised to put "teeth" in the order, provided Randolph call off the march. When Randolph became convinced that Roosevelt's intentions were sincere, he complied.
Roosevelt fulfilled his promise by issuing Executive Order 8802, which condemned discrimination on the grounds of race, color, or creed. Then, he established the Fair Employment Practices Commission and assigned to it the responsibility for enforcing the order. Many Afro-Americans felt that Executive Order 8802 was the most important government document concerning the Negro to be issued since the Emancipation Proclamation. Their immediate joy was somewhat dampened when they found that discrimination still continued in some quarters. Nevertheless, the F.E.P.C. did condemn discrimination when it found it, and, as the result, many new jobs began to open up for Negroes.
Once America was drawn into the fighting, Afro-Americans hurried to the enlistment centers to volunteer their services in the war against Hitler's philosophy. However, it soon became clear that America intended to fight racism with a segregated army. The fact that Negroes were confined to the more menial positions in the armed forces was what irritated Afro-Americans the most. The Negro army units were obviously going to be led by white officers. The Marine Corps was still not accepting any Negroes in its ranks at all. Complaints again began to pour into Washington.
Afro-Americans generally admitted that the Selective Service Act per se was not discriminatory and that it was applied impartially in most places. One of the reasons for this impartiality, undoubtedly, was the fact that both local and national Selective Service Boards included Afro-American representation. In the course of the war, about one million Afro-Americans saw service on behalf of their country. Their ratio within the armed forces was almost the same as that within the nation. This had been the stated goal of the Department of War.
Gradually, the armed forces modified their discriminatory policies in response to the flood of complaints. The Air Force began to train Negro pilots although they still received segregated training and served in segregated squadrons. The Marine Corps accepted Negro recruits for the first time in its history. They, too, served in segregated units. The Navy, which had restricted Negroes to menial positions, gradually began to accept them in almost all noncommissioned positions. Eventually, it even began to commission some Negro officers. The Army, too, introduced an extensive program to prepare Negro officers. It trained most of them in integrated facilities, but they continued to lead segregated units. As the war grew to a close, the Army announced that it intended to experiment with integration. However, when the experiment took place, the integration proved not to be quite what had been expected. Instead of putting individuals from both races together in the same unit, the Army took segregated black and white platoons and merged them into an integrated fighting force although the platoons themselves remained segregated.
This integrated unit did fight well in the field and made a significant contribution to the defeat of Germany in 1945. Negro units, as well as individual Negro soldiers, made outstanding contributions to the war effort both in Europe and in the Pacific, and they received numerous commendations and citations. Skeptics noted, however, that not a single Negro soldier had received the Congressional Medal of Honor in either the First or Second World Wars, and they suggested that the nation's highest award was being reserved for whites.
Although most of the hostilities were focused on the enemy, racial tensions still ran very high within America. Southern whites were displeased with the self-confidence and manliness brought out in Negroes by military experience, and they were unhappy with the dignity which a military uniform conferred upon them.
At the same time, Negro soldiers in the South were angry over the harassment and segregation with which they were confronted. In particular, they were irritated by the fact that German prisoners of war were permitted to eat with white American soldiers in the same dining car on a railroad train traveling through the South, while Negro soldiers could not. Racial riots occurred at Fort Bragg, Camp Robinson, Camp Davis, Camp Lee, Fort Dix, and a notorious one at an American base in Australia. The policy of the War Department was to gloss over these events. Casualties which resulted from riots at bases in the United States were officially listed as accidental deaths. Those which resulted from riots overseas were officially reported as being killed in action.  For this they were charged with mutiny.
There was also one serious civilian race riot during the war; it occurred on June 20, 1943, in Detroit. A fist fight between a white man and a Negro sparked the resentment which had been mounting in that city. Thousands of Afro-Americans had been moving again from the South into the North to fill vacant jobs in war industry, and this was resented by local white residents. Before the Detroit riot ended, twenty-five Negroes and nine whites had been killed. President Roosevelt had to send in federal troops to quell the disturbance. Another factor which irritated Afro-Americans was that the Red Cross blood banks separated Negro and white blood. This was particularly humiliating in that it had been a Negro doctor, Charles Drew, who had done the basic research that made the banks possible.
In spite of this, Afro-Americans were eager to demonstrate their patriotism and to support the war effort. Besides the hundreds of thousands who were involved directly in the military, millions more supported the war effort in countless other ways. Besides growing their own vegetables, saving tin cans and newspapers, they were avid contributors to the War Bond issues. Others volunteered to serve as block wardens in case of enemy air raids. Negro newspapers had their own journalists at the front, and the Afro-American community eagerly kept up with the war news. They took special pride in stories of heroism about Negro soldiers.
Thus, as the war came to a close and Afro-Americans looked forward to the postwar years with both apprehension and determination, they feared that, with the foreign antagonism eradicated, racist feeling at home might increase. At the same time, they were possessed by a new drive to make American democracy into a reality. The ideological character of the war had reminded them of America's expressed ideals of brotherhood and equality. Their participation in the war convinced them that they were worthy of full citizenship. Many had broken the bonds of tradition which had held them in fear and apathy. Some had left their communities to fight in the Army, and some had moved into large urban centers to work in defense industries. Although the war against racism abroad had ended, they were intent to see that the struggle for racial freedom and equality at home would continue.
The San Francisco Conference which founded the United Nations organization was looked upon by peoples around the world as the sunrise of a new day of peace and brotherhood. While hope ran high in most quarters, some of these same peoples were suspicious about its lofty ideological character. Humanitarian ideologies had made their appearance before, but there had always been a gap between theory and practice. Colored peoples and other minorities around the world observed the San Francisco Conference with hope mixed with caution. They wanted to see whether it was mere ideological rhetoric which would salve the consciences of the exploiters and dull the senses of the exploited, or whether, perhaps, its aims might spring from genuine conviction and become established in a framework which would be fully implemented.
The U.N. was to be more sweeping in its goals and programs than the League had been, and it was hoped that it would have more power to carry out its decisions. Its very initials signified that the peoples of the world were to be one people bound together in brotherhood, freedom, and equality. This should have meant the end of imperialistic exploitation as well as the end of minority persecution. The Afro-American community wondered if the U.N. would apply these principles to them. Many skeptics suggested that the U. S. initiative in founding the U.N. was only part of a plan to create a world image which would help America in her new role as a world leader.
Several Afro-Americans were accredited as official observers at the San Francisco Conference. Their number included Mrs. Mary McLeod Bethune, Dr. Mordecai W. Johnson of Howard University, W. E. B. DuBois and Walter White, both of the N.A.A.C.P. Ralph Bunche was an official member of the American staff. There were also a large number of Negro journalists, and the conference was widely covered in the Negro press. Once the U.N. was organized and in operation, several other Afro-Americans worked for it in a number of ways. While some held diplomatic posts, others used their specific scientific and scholarly skills to help various branches of the U.N. They were particularly interested in the departments concerned with the treatment of colonial nations and with the various scientific organizations involved in helping underdeveloped countries.
The United Nations Charter defended universal human rights more clearly than any previous political document in world history. The Charter proclaimed human rights and freedom for all without respect to "race, sex, language or religion." Minority groups were particularly interested in the work of UNESCO which, among other things, studied the nature of prejudice and racism and tried to develop programs to eradicate these evils. The U.N. also formed a Human Rights Commission, and Afro-Americans expected that whatever action the U.N. took to support human rights throughout the world would also have an impact on their situation.
The first test came in 1946 when India charged South Africa with practicing racial discrimination against Indian nationals and their descendants who were living within South Africa. Minority groups throughout the world eagerly waited to see what, if anything, the U.N. would do. When a resolution was passed by a two-thirds majority, charging South Africa with the violation of human rights, and requiring it to report back on what steps had been taken to alter the situation, religious and national minorities were overjoyed. However, the enthusiasm of Afro-Americans was dampened by the fact that both the United States and Britain had voted against the resolution. While posing as the leaders of democracy and humanitarianism, they seemed more concerned with protecting their sovereign rights as nations against similar future charges which might impinge on their sovereignty, than they were with protecting the human rights of oppressed peoples.
The attitude which the U. S. Government took towards human rights sheds considerable light on the internal conflict concerning race within America itself. The U. S. led the fight at the U.N. for the approval of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet the American government has been reluctant to support the inclusion of specific economic and social rights in a draft treaty. The U.N. had endeavored to write a draft treaty which its member nations would sign and which would be binding on them. If the U. S. Senate had ratified such a document, its terms presumably would then be binding on the entire nation. At that time, senators from the Southern states were still staunchly defending legal segregation and disfranchisement of Afro-Americans. The government found itself supporting human rights ideologically while backing down on them in practice.
As the Cold War deepened, the U. S. became increasingly sensitive about its world image. While fighting for world leadership, Russia and America each claimed that its way of life was based on the principles of brotherhood and humanitarianism. Each, in turn, tried to prove to the rest of the world that its ideology was genuinely humane and democratic, while its opponent's ideology was, in reality, oppressive and dehumanizing. The communist bloc attacked the West for being purveyors of imperialism and racism. This forced the American government to face up to the discriminatory policies within the nation and, especially, to reexamine the legal discrimination existing within the Southern states. It was particularly embarrassing to the American ambassador to the United Nations to have to be berated by the Russian delegate concerning some unpleasant racial events which had happened somewhere in the South. The Federal Government had always followed a policy of "hands off," at least since the days of Hayes and the end of Reconstruction. Party politicians always opposed taking a strong federal stand against an established state policy within the South for fear of what would happen to that party within the South. Party unity had almost always been put above civil rights or justice.