A Social Revolution? (1 of 6)

This is the first of an intended six posts about the social revolution created in part by the U.S. Supreme Court in its Brown vs. Board of Education decision. The next post will review Brown I and the third, Brown II. The fourth post in this series will discuss events from Brown II to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The fifth post will cover the civil rights acts of 1964 and 1968 The last post in this series will examine the Supreme Court’s Griswold decision. This post briefly covers a selection of related facts and events from 1945 to 1953 to characterize the context facing the Court in 1954

A selected chronology

In 1945 seven African Americans were lynched. In this same year, New York state established the first state commission against discrimination. New Jersey and Massachusetts followed soon after and by 1965 25 states had similar commissions. However, Congress refused to vote funds for the Fair Employment Practices Commission, effectively killing the commission.

President Truman issued in 1946 an executive order creating the Presidential Committee on Civil Rights. The committee produced a report that among other items recommended that Federal laws against lynching be enacted. In July of this year, 100,000 African Americans voted in Democratic primaries in Georgia. Within three days of the primaries, five African Americans were lynched, one of them a veteran of WWII who was the only Africa American to vote in Taylor County. He was taken from his home and shot by four whites. A sign posted on an African American church in the county read: “The first nigger to vote will never vote again.” Altogether six African Americans were lynched in 1946.

In this year an amendment to the state constitution in Alabama required a literacy test as a way of restricting African American voting. A Federal District Court in 1949 found this provision unconstitutional. In Morgan v. Virginia the Supreme Court struck down a Virginia law requiring racial segregation on commercial interstate buses as contrary to the Constitution’s commerce clause.

Race riots occurred in Athens, Alabama and Columbia, Tennessee. In Athens, the riot started with a fistfight between two whites and an African American. A white mob of up to 2,000 injured between 50 and 100 African Americans. Sixteen persons were indicted in connection with the riot. In Columbia, a fight between a white and an African American mother and her son started the violence. A group of whites joined in the fight, with the mother and her son being put in jail. A lynch mob then raided the African American portion of the town, firing into homes. Some African Americans returned the fire. Two people were killed and 16 wounded. Two days later two more African Americans were killed.

Between 1947 and 1962, 12 blacks were lynched. One lynching in 1947 occurred in South Carolina where an African American being held in connection with a murder was lynched. An all-white jury exonerated the 28 white men who had confessed to participating in the lynching.

In twelve Southern states, only 12% of African Americans of voting age were qualified to vote. This figure was less than 3% in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi. The percentage was highest in Tennessee, 26%.

In 1948 President Truman ordered the Justice Department to handle anti-discrimination suits brought by private individuals.

In the 1947-48 school year, the ratio of the average value of the property, buildings, and equipment for white children was nearly four times higher than the average for African American children in Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana. The Supreme Court decided that restrictive covenants in real estate were unenforceable in Federal courts although they were not held illegal. The California Supreme Court held that the state’s anti-miscegenation laws violated the 14th Amendment.

Also in this year, the Supreme Court ruled that the Oklahoma Law School had to provide equal protection for African Americans. Because the state had not provided a law school for African Americans an African American girl applying to school could not wait until an African American law school was built and was therefore entitled to immediate admission. The Court, however, did not actually require admission. The University of Delaware announced that African Americans would be admitted to graduate courses not offered at Delaware State College for Negroes. The University of Arkansas voluntarily admitted African Americans to its professional schools.

In Vidalia, Georgia an African American man was warned not to vote and when he did, he was lynched by a group of hooded men. Also in Georgia, the NAACP president was beaten by whites for escorting blacks to the polls. In Brown v. Basking, the Federal District Court invalidated an effort by the South Carolina Democratic Party to bar African Americans by requiring party members to take an oath supporting segregation and opposing fair employment practices.

In 1949 Federal law prohibited racial discrimination in the Federal Civil Service. New Jersey gave jurisdiction over public transportation to the agency charged with ending discrimination in employment. In subsequent years, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, and Rhode Island took similar action. Connecticut extended the jurisdiction of its Civil Rights Commission to cover public housing, the first state to do so.

A conference of lawyers associated with the NAACP decided in 1950 to mount a full-scale attack on educational segregation. They began research and initiated several legal attacks on education segregation. In Sweatt v. Painter, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the admission of an African American to the previously all-white University of Texas Law School on the grounds that the separate law school for African Americans could not be made equal to the white law school. In another court case, the University of Virginia Law School was ordered to admit its first African American. The U.S. District Court ordered the Louisiana State University Law School to admit an African American. The U.S. Supreme Court in McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents ruled that the University of Oklahoma could not segregate an African American student in the classroom, library, or cafeteria because such segregation violated the 14th Amendment. A state court decision opened the University of Missouri to African Americans.

The U.S. Supreme Court ended dining-car segregation on railroads by requiring them to permit African Americans to occupy any empty seat instead of being confined to a special section.

In 1951 the University of North Carolina admitted its first African American student. Oregon forbade discrimination on account of race, color, religion, or national origin in any school chartered or licensed under any state statute. A Washington, DC Municipal Court of Appeals ruled segregation in restaurants illegal. In Florida, the NAACP executive for that state and his wife were killed by a bomb placed under their home; both had been active in voter registration.

President Truman established a committee to fight discrimination against African Americans in companies doing business with the Federal Government.

A court ordered in 1952 the University of Tennessee to admit African Americans to its graduate, professional, and special schools; the first African American was admitted in this year. The NAACP was able to gain admission of African Americans to the Nursing School at Louisiana State University but failed in its effort to desegregate the University of Florida Graduate Schools. The NAACP succeeded in desegregating the public schools of southern Illinois. NAACP lawyers brought five school desegregation cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. These five cases comprised the Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954.

Legal action by the NAACP opened certain public housing projects to African Americans in Detroit, San Francisco, Long Branch, N.J., Sacramento, and Richmond, California. The NAACP desegregated the Philco Corp. and prevailed upon the United Auto Workers to incorporate an antidiscrimination clause in its contract with Pressed Metals, Inc. The NAACP defended African American workers on the B&O Railroad when the union of railway clerks sought to force African Americans to join a Jim Crow local. The result of this court case was that African Americans were denied membership in the white local but did not have to join the Negro local.

As a result of NAACP legal action in Federal District Court, a swimming pool in Kansas City was desegregated. In Louisville, Kentucky a municipal golf course was desegregated, but the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review a case in which African Americans were denied admission on certain days of the week to a Miami municipal golf course.

Tuskegee Institute reported that for the first time in the 71 years that records had been kept there were no lynchings in this year. In 12 Southern states, the percentage of African Americans of voting age registered to vote was 28%. When an NAACP delegation met with President Eisenhower, he indicated he would oppose Federal aid to segregated schools but would not dictate to Southerners how to run their schools.

President Eisenhower’s administration in 1953 ended segregation in schools on military bases and civilian employees in the Navy shore establishments. The administration also ended segregation in VA hospitals.

The Supreme Court called for re-argument in the five school segregation cases first heard by the Court in 1952. An NAACP task force of 100 lawyers, social scientists, and other experts was formed to research for Court’s rehearing. Through the efforts of the NAACP, an African American was admitted as an undergraduate to Louisiana State University.

Skilled jobs were opened to African Americans by the Fisher Body Division and the Diesel Division of General Motors. In Chicago and Cleveland blacks attempting to more into white neighborhoods caused a flare in violence.

In May 1954 the Supreme Court ruled by a 9-0 vote that school segregation was unconstitutional since “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” [See next post for details on this case and its immediate aftermath.] The White Citizens Councils became the most influential organization created to fight desegregation and civil rights, although many other groups sprang up in the South to fight against desegregation. The first WCC was formed in Mississippi in July and within weeks many WCCs were formed throughout the South and even in some border states. By the end of the year, the WCC in Mississippi claimed a membership of 80,000.

Mississippi Senator John Eastland and Mississippi congressman John Bell Williams introduced proposed Constitutional amendments to set aside the Supreme Court’s decision; the amendments died in committee. Various fair employment practices bills were introduced in Congress, but none were enacted.

The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare reaffirmed its policy of giving Federal funds to segregated hospitals.

Comment

This scatter-shot of events pulled from Peter Bergman’s book* tries to provide a gloss on the dangers and the Jim Crow constraints on African Americans. Murders and beatings of African Americans by whites almost seemed commonplace. Many, if not most, of these lynchings and beatings related to attempts by African Americans to register to vote or in responses to their voting. While the courts were active in this period, their activity was on a limited case-by-case basis, with progress being painstakingly slow. Some northern and West coast states made more comprehensive progress toward fighting discrimination.

Because of the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling, separate but equal was the progressive password of the times. Note that the court-ordered educational integration almost entirely involved professional schools. Many states provided undergraduate education for African Americans through separate facilities but had no, or very sketchy, facilities for African Americans. The courts found in relatively easy to determine that such facilities, if they existed at all, were not separate but equal.
Perhaps the most effective desegregation efforts related to interstate transportation. However, in Morgan v. Virginia the Supreme Court missed an opportunity to apply a separate but not equal frame for transportation desegregation.

Overall, the NAACP and its legal resources made it possible to gain some important desegregation victories during this period. At the same time, these efforts always occurred in an atmosphere of life-endangering threats. It took courage to be either a plaintiff or a plaintiff’s legal representative.

Congressional intervention was nearly invisible. Outside of the federal judiciary, only some interventions by President Truman gave a presence to Federal elective support for desegregation.

To readers under 50 years of age, the above may seem like ancient history. To those over 60, however, it probably seems like these events were not many years ago. For example, I moved to Florida from Pittsburgh in 1969. Eighteen years before moving there an NAACP executive and his wife were blown up. And 17 years before I moved there, no African Americans were in Florida graduate schools.

As I read through this list of events and the great more that are to come in the late ’50s and early ’60s I wonder if our current time is seeing a reprise of this kind of hateful divisiveness. Even current data on hate crimes are estimates at best and have been kept only recently, so there is no way to compare today to the ’50s. I also wonder what the ’50s may have been like if access to assault rifles and bomb-making materials of today were available back then.

*Bergman, Peter. (1969) The Chronological History of the Negro in America. New York, NY: Harper and Row Publishers..