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Program Three
Don't Shout Too Soon (1918-1940)
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W.E.B. Du Bois
A brilliant African-American intellectual and activist, who opposed Booker T. Washington's accommodationist stance toward segregation. |
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As the federal government under Woodrow Wilson segregates the federal government, a new generation of African Americans is no longer willing to acquiesce to white supremacy. World War I ushers in the era of the "New Negro." Race riots break out in the North and South between 1919 and 1921. The worst episodes are in Chicago, Illinois; Elaine, Arkansas; and Tulsa, Oklahoma, in which some four to five hundred blacks and a lesser number of whites are killed. Lynchings also soar in the post war years. Many blacks protest by leaving the South for better jobs and freedom from oppression.
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The NAACP slowly begins to lead the resistance to segregation. In the Elaine riot case, the NAACP wins a reversal in the United State Supreme Court of the death sentences of twelve black farmers who had been unjustly condemned to death for killing a white man during the riot. In the mid 1920s, W.E.B. Du Bois becomes the lightning rod for a student strike against Fayette McKenzie, the president of his alma mater, Fisk University. McKenzie, reflecting the ideology of the South and the northern philanthropists whose financial support he needs, helps prepare his students to accept the status quo in the South. Du Bois supports a student strike that leads to the resignation of McKenzie. The strike resounds on other campuses where students and teachers win a major battle at Howard University over a patriarchal white president.
During the Great Depression, revolt takes place in the cotton fields as well. Ned Cobb, a tenant farmer in Alabama, is one of thousands of black farmers inspired by the Communist Party's defense of the "Scottsboro Boys"--nine black youths sentenced to death on the false charge of rape. In 1931, Cobb joins the Communist-led Sharecropper's Union in its struggle to win better pay for poor black and white farmers. Wounded in a shootout, Cobb is sent to prison for 13 years.
While farmers struggle for their economic rights in Alabama and Arkansas, Charles Houston, chief attorney for the NAACP, begins to organize a legal battle to secure constitutional rights for blacks in the United States Supreme Court. He is encouraged by the fact that the Roosevelt administration is sympathetic to African Americans. For the first time since Reconstruction, blacks are able to successfully lobby the federal government for jobs, services and support. When Roosevelt appoints liberal Supreme Court judges, Houston begins to challenge the constitutionality of legal Jim Crow in the courts.
While Houston fights his battle on the legal front, Walter White, head of the NAACP, wages war in the court of public opinion. He mobilizes grass roots support among blacks and whites against lynching. In the South, white women form the Association of Southern Women Against Lynching and actively recruit the support of hundreds of southern law enforcement officials. White unsuccessfully tries to get the Congress to pass a federal anti-lynching law but fails to do so in a close battle. His efforts, however, attract interracial support. For the first time, black people find, in the words of Mary Mcleod Bethune, they are "no longer alone." Southern whites begin to join the growing civil rights movement to end injustice in the courts, discrimination in public places and even challenge the segregation itself. As the world plunges towards war, black leaders demand jobs in defense industries and an end to segregation in the army. A. Philip Randolph organizes one of the first major demonstrations of growing black power when he threatens a massive march on Washington unless Roosevelt issues an executive order mandating that companies with federal contracts must offer equal job opportunities to blacks. Roosevelt reluctantly agrees.
By the end of the era, although little visible change had taken place, Paul Robeson declares "change is in the air."
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