 CHAPTER II. PATTERNS OF DISORDER. THE AFTERMATH OF DISORDER. We will all do our best for a peaceful future together. Next time we'll really get the so-and-sos. It won't happen again. Nothing much changed here, one way or the other. We have sought to determine whether any of these expressions accurately characterizes events in the immediate aftermath of the twenty surveyed disorders. We are conducting continuing studies of the post-disorder climate in a number of cities, but we have tried to make a preliminary judgment at this point. To do so, we considered CHANGES IN NEGRO AND WHITE ORGANIZATIONS. OFFICIAL AND CIVIC RESPONSES TO THE SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CONDITIONS AND GREVANCES UNDERLIING THE DISORDERS. POLICE EFFORTS TO INCREASE CAPACITY TO CONTROL FUTURE OUTBREAKS. EFFORTS TO REPAIR PHYSICAL DAMAGE. We conclude that THE MOST COMMON REACTION WAS CHARACTERIZED BY THE LAST OF THE QUOTED EXPRESSIONS. NOTHING MUCH CHANGED. The status quo of daily life before the disorder was quickly restored. Despite some notable public and private efforts, particularly regarding employment opportunities, little basic change took place in the conditions underlying the disorder. In some cities disorder recurred within the same summer. In several cities the principal official response was to train and equip the police and auxiliary law enforcement agencies with more sophisticated weapons. In several cities Negro communities sought to develop greater unity to negotiate with the larger community and to initiate self-help efforts in the ghetto. In several cities there has been increased distrust between blacks and whites, less interracial communication and growth of white segregationist or black separatist groups. Often several of these developments occurred simultaneously within a city. Detroit provides a notable example of the complexity of post-disorder events. Shortly after the riot, many efforts to ameliorate the grievances of ghetto residents and to improve interracial communication were announced and begun by public and private organizations. The success of these efforts and their reception by the Negro community were mixed. More recently militant separatist organizations of both races appear to be growing in influence. Some of the most significant of the post-riot developments were official and other community actions. The new Detroit committee, NDC, organized under the co-sponsorship of the mayor of Detroit and the governor of Michigan, originally had a membership ranging from top industrialist to leading black militant spokesman. NDC was envisioned as the central planning body for Detroit's rejuvenation, however it had an early setback last fall when the state legislature rejected its proposals for a statewide fair housing ordinance and for more state aid for Detroit schools. In January 1968, NDC's broad interracial base was seriously weakened when black militant members resigned in a dispute over the conditions set for a proposed NDC-supported grant of $100,000 to a black militant organization. To deal with the employment problem, the Ford Motor Company and other major employers in Detroit promised several thousand additional jobs to Detroit's hardcore unemployed. At least 55,000 persons were hired by some 17 firms. Ford, for example, established two employment offices in the ghetto. Reports vary on the results of these programs. Steps taken to improve education after the riot include the appointment of Negroes to seven out of 18 supervisory positions in the Detroit school system. Before the summer of 1967, none of these positions was held by a Negro. Michigan Bell Telephone Company announced that it would adopt one of Detroit's public high schools and initiate special programs in it. Detroit School Board failed to obtain increased aid from the state legislature and announced plans to bring a novel suit against the state to force hire per capita aid to ghetto schools. There are signs of increased hostility toward Negroes in the white community. One white extremist organization reportedly proposes that whites armed themselves for the Holocaust it prophesies. A movement to recall the mayor has gained strength since the riot, and its leader is also pressed to have the fair housing ordinance passed by the Detroit Common Council put to a referendum. The police and other law enforcement agencies in Detroit are making extensive plans to cope with any future disorder. The mayor has proposed to the Common Council the purchase of some $2 million worth of police riot equipment, including tanks, armored personnel carriers, and stoner rifles, a weapon which fires a particularly destructive type of bullet. Negro Community Action A broadly based Negro organization, the Citywide Citizens Action Committee, CCAC, was formed after the riot by a leading local militant, and originally included both militant and moderate members. It stresses self-determination for the black community. For example, it is developing plans for Negro-owned cooperatives, and reportedly has demanded Negro participation in planning new construction in the ghetto. CCAC has lost some of its moderate members because it has taken increasingly militant positions and a rival more moderate Negro organization the Detroit Council of Organizations has been formed. Post Riot Incidents and Prospects for the Future There appears to be a growing division between the black and white communities as well as within the black community itself. Some pawn shops and gun stores have been robbed of firearms, and gun sales reportedly have tripled since the riot. In late 1967, a rent strike took place. Some fire bombings were reported, and a new junior high school was seriously damaged by its predominantly Negro student body. Many Negroes interviewed rejected the theory that the 1967 riot immunized Detroit against further disorders. Some believed that a new disturbance may well be highly organized, and therefore much more serious. Changes in Negro and White Organizations In half the city's surveyed, new organizations concerned with race relations were established or old ones revitalized. No clear trend is apparent. In a few cities the only apparent changes have been the increased influence of Negro militant separatist or white segregationist groups. In a few cities the organizations identified intended to follow more moderate and integrationist policies. A youthful Negro who emerged as a leader during the riot in Plainfield started a new organization which, though militant, is cooperating with and influencing the established more moderate Negro leadership in the city. And in a few cities organizations of white segregationists, Negro militants, and moderate integrationists all emerged following the disturbances. In Newark, as in Detroit, both black and white extremist organizations have been active, as well as a prominent integrationist post-riot organization, the Committee of Concern. The committee was formed immediately after the riot, and includes leading white businessmen, educators, and Negro leaders. At the same time, leading black militants reportedly gained support among Negro moderates, and a white extremist group achieved prominence but not success in attempting to persuade the city council to authorize the purchase of police dogs. Official and civic response. Actions to ameliorate Negro grievances in the twenty city surveyed were limited and sporadic. With few exceptions, these actions cannot be said to have had contributed significantly to reducing the level of tension. Police-community relations. In eight of the city surveyed, municipal administrations took some action to strengthen police-community relations. In Atlanta, immediately after the riot, residents of the disturbance area requested that all regular police patrols be withdrawn because of hostility caused during the riot when a resident was killed allegedly by policemen. The request was granted, and for a time, the only officers in the area were police-community relations personnel. In Cincinnati, however, a proposal to increase the size of the police-community relations unit and to station the new officers in precinct stations has received little support. Employment. Public and private organizations, often including business and industry, made efforts to improve employment opportunities in nine of the cities. In Tucson, a joint effort by public agencies and private industry produced 125 private and 75 city jobs. Since most of the city jobs ended with the summer, several companies sought to provide permanent employment for some of those who had been hired by the city. Housing. In nine cities surveyed, municipal administrations increased their housing programs. In Cambridge, the Community Relations Commission supported the application of a local church to obtain federal funds for low and moderate income housing. The commission also tried to interest local and national builders in constructing additional low-cost housing. The Dayton City Government initiated a program of concentrated housing code enforcement in the ghetto. The housing authority also adopted a policy of dispersing public housing sites and at the request of Negroes declared a moratorium on any new public housing in the predominantly Negro West Dayton area. But in Newark, municipal and state authorities continued to pursue a medical center project designed to occupy up to 150 acres in the almost all Negroes central ward. The project bitterly opposed by Negroes before the riot would have required massive relocation of Negroes and was a source of great tension in the Negro community. However, with the persistent efforts of federal officials, HUD and HEW, an accommodation appears to have been reached on the issue recently, with reduction of the site to approximately 58 acres. Private organizations attempted to improve the quality of ghetto housing in at least three of the cities surveyed. A Catholic charity in New Jersey announced a plan to build or rehabilitate 100 homes in each of five cities, including three of the cities surveyed, Elizabeth, Jersey City and Newark and to sell the homes to low income residents. The plan received substantial business backing. Education. In five of the city surveyed, local governments had taken positive steps to alleviate grievances related to education. In Rockford, residents approved a bond referendum to increase teacher salaries, build schools and meet other educational needs. A portion of this money will be used with matching state and federal funds to construct a vocational and technical center for secondary schools in the Rockford area. In two cities, private companies made substantial contributions to local school systems. The Standard Oil Company of New Jersey donated to the Elizabeth School Board of Building valued at $500,000 for an administrative center and additional classrooms. In four of the cities surveyed, grievances concerning education increased. In Cincinnati, recent elections resulted in the seeding of two new board of education members who belonged to a taxpayers group which had twice in 1966 successfully opposed a school bond referendum. Also, racial incidents in the Cincinnati schools increased dramatically in number and severity during the school year. Recreation. In four cities, programs have been initiated to increase recreational facilities in ghetto communities. A month and a half after the New Brunswick disturbance, local businessmen donated five portable swimming pools to the city. A boat which the city will use as a recreation center was also donated and towed to the city by private companies. Negro representation. The elections of Negro mayors in Cleveland, which experienced the Hugh Ryan in 1966 and Gary, have been widely interpreted as significant gains in Negro representation and participation in municipal political structures. In five of the six surveyed cities which have had municipal elections since the 1967 disturbances, however, there has been no change in Negro representation in City Hall or in the municipal governing body. In New Haven, the one city where there was change, the result was decreased Negro representation on the Board of Aldermen, from five out of thirty-five to three out of thirty. Changes toward greater Negro representation occurred in three other cities in which Negroes were selected as president of the City Council and as members of a local civil service commission, a housing authority, and a Board of Adjustment. Grievance machinery. There was a positive change in governmental grievance channels or procedures in two cities, but in one case an effort to continue use of counter rioters as a communications channel was abandoned. Federal programs. There were at least ten examples in eight cities of federal programs being improved or new federal programs being instituted. In two cities disputes have arisen in connection with federally assisted programs. Municipal services. Four cities have tried to improve municipal services and disturbance areas. In Dayton the city began a program of additional garbage collection and alley cleaning in the disturbance area. In Atlanta, on the day after the disturbance ended, the city began replacing street lights, repaving streets, and collecting garbage frequently in the disturbance area. However the improved services were reportedly discontinued after a month and a half. Other programs. In one city a consumer education program was begun. In none of the twenty cities surveyed were steps taken to improve welfare programs. In two of the surveyed cities, plans were developed to establish new business in disturbance areas. Capacity to control future disorders. Five of the surveyed cities plan to improve police control capability in the event of disorder. Four cities developed plans for using counter rioters, but in one case the plans were later abandoned. In Detroit plans were made to improve the administration of justice in the event of future disorders by identifying usable attention facilities and assigning experienced clerks to process arrestees. Repair of physical damage. Significant numbers of businesses in the riot areas have reopened in several cities where damage was substantial. In Detroit none of the businesses totally destroyed in the riot has been rebuilt, but many which suffered only minor damage have reopened. In Newark 83% of the damaged businesses have reopened according to official estimates. In Detroit the only city surveyed which suffered substantial damage to residences there has been no significant residential rebuilding. In two cities Negro organizations insisted on an active role in decisions about rehabilitation of the disturbance area. End of section 21. Section 22 of the Kernert Commission Report. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Eric Evans Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. Kernert Commission Report. Chapter 3. Organized Activity. The president directed the commission to investigate to what extent if any there has been planning or organization in any of the riots. The president further directed the Federal Bureau of Investigation to provide investigative information and assistance to the commission and authorized the commission to request from any other executive department or agency any information and assistance which the commission deemed necessary to carry out its functions. The commission obtained documents numbering in the thousands from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of State, the Department of Defense, the Department of the Treasury, the Internal Revenue Service, the Post Office Department, the Legislative Reference Service of the Library of Congress, and the Central Intelligence Agency. The commission established a special investigating staff supplementing the commission's field teams and related staff that made the general examination of the riots in 23 cities. The special investigating staff examined the data supplied by the field teams, by the several federal agencies, and by congressional investigating units, and maintained continuous liaison with these organizations throughout its investigation. In addition to examining and evaluating intelligence and information from federal sources, the special investigating staff gathered information from local and state law enforcement agencies and officials. It also conducted its own field investigations in 15 cities, with special emphasis on five that had experienced major disorders in 1967, Cincinnati, Newark, Detroit, Milwaukee, and New Haven. Special staff investigators employed by the commission interviewed over 400 persons, including police officials, black militants, and ghetto residents. The commission studied the role of foreign and domestic organizations and individuals dedicated to the incitement or encouragement of violence. It considered the organizational affiliations of those who called for violence, their contacts, sources of financial support, travel schedules, and so far as possible, their effect on audiences. The commission considered the incidents that had triggered the disorders and the patterns of damage during disorders, particularly in Newark and Detroit. The commission analyzed the extent of sniper activity and the use of firebombs. The commission collected and investigated hundreds of rumors relating to possible organized activity. These included reports on arms caches, sniper gangs, guerrilla training camps, selection of targets for destruction, movement of armed individuals from one riot area to another, and pre-riot planning. On the basis of all the information collected, the commission concludes that the urban disorders of the summer of 1967 were not caused by nor were they the consequence of any organized plan or conspiracy. Specifically, the commission has found no evidence that all or any of the disorders or the incidents that led to them were planned or directed by any organization or group international, national, or local. Militant organizations, local and national, and individual agitators who repeatedly forecast and called for violence were active in the spring and summer of 1967. We believe that they deliberately sought to encourage violence and that they did have an effect in creating an atmosphere that contributed to the outbreak of disorder. We recognize that the continuation of disorders and the polarization of the races would provide fertile ground for organized exploitation in the future. Since the disorders, intensive investigations have been conducted not only by this commission, but also by local police departments, grand juries, city and state committees, federal departments and agencies, and congressional committees. None this far has identified any organized groups as having initiated riots during the summer of 1967. The commission appointed by Governor Richard J. Hughes to examine the disorders in New Jersey was unable to find evidence supporting a conclusion that there was a conspiracy or plan to organize the Newark or Plainfield riots. Investigations are continuing at all levels of government including committees of Congress. These investigations relate not only to the disorders of 1967, but also to the actions of groups and individuals, particularly in schools and colleges, during this last fall and winter. The commission has cooperated in these investigations. They should continue. End of section 22. Section 23 of the current commission report. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Eric Evans, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. Kerner Commission Report. Chapter 4. The Basic Causes. We have seen what happened. Why did it happen? In addressing this question, we shift our focus from the local to the national scene, from the particular events of the summer of 1967 to the factors within the society at large that created a mood for violence among so many urban Negroes. The record before this commission reveals that the causes of recent racial disorders are embedded in a massive tangle of issues and circumstances, social, economic, political, and psychological, which arise out of the historical pattern of Negro-white relations in America. These factors are both complex and interacting. They vary significantly in their effect from city to city and from year to year, and the consequences of one disorder, generating new grievances and new demands, become the causes of the next. It is this which creates the thicket of tension, conflicting evidence, and extreme opinions cited by the President. Despite these complexities, certain fundamental matters are clear. Of these, the most fundamental is the racial attitude and behavior of white Americans toward black Americans. Race prejudice has shaped our history decisively in the past. It now threatens to do so again. White racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II. At the base of this mixture are three of the most bitter fruits of white racial attitudes. Purvasive Discrimination and Segregation The first is surely the continuing exclusion of great numbers of Negroes from the benefits of economic progress through discrimination in employment and education, and their enforced confinement in segregated housing and schools. The corrosive and degrading effects of this condition and the attitudes that underlie it are the source of the deepest bitterness and lie at the center of the problem of racial disorder. Black Migration and White Exodus The second is the massive and growing concentration of impoverished Negroes in our major cities, resulting from Negro migration from the rural South, rapid population growth, and the continuing movement of the white middle class to the suburbs. The consequence is a greatly increased burden on the already depleted resources of cities, creating a growing crisis of deteriorating facilities and services and unmet human needs. Black Ghettoes Third, in the teaming racial ghettos, segregation and poverty have intersected to destroy opportunity and hope and to enforce failure. The ghettos too often mean men and women without jobs, families without men, and schools where children are processed instead of educated, until they return to the streets, to crime, to narcotics, to dependency on welfare, and to bitterness and resentment against society in general and white society in particular. These three forces have converged on the inner city in recent years and on the people who inhabit it. At the same time, most whites and many Negroes outside the ghetto have prospered to a degree unparalleled in the history of civilization. Through television, the universal appliance in the ghetto, and the other media of mass communications, this affluence has been endlessly flaunted before the eyes of the Negro poor and the jobless ghetto youth. As Americans, most Negro citizens carry within themselves two basic aspirations of our society. They seek to share in both the material resources of our system and its intangible benefits, dignity, respect, and acceptance. Outside the ghetto, many have succeeded in achieving a decent standard of life and in developing the inner resources which give life meaning and direction. Within the ghetto, however, it is rare that either aspiration is achieved. Yet these facts alone, fundamental as they are, cannot be said to have caused the disorders. Other and more immediate factors help explain why these events happened now. Recently, three powerful ingredients have begun to catalyze the mixture. Frustrated hopes The expectations aroused by the great judicial and legislative victories of the civil rights movement have led to frustration, hostility, and cynicism in the face of the persistent gap between promise and fulfillment. The dramatic struggle for equal rights in the South has sensitized Northern Negroes to the economic inequalities reflected in the deprivations of ghetto life. Legitimation of violence A climate that tends toward the approval and encouragement of violence as a form of protest has been created by white terrorism directed against nonviolent protests, including instances of abuse and even murder of some civil rights workers in the South, by the open defiance of law and federal authority by state and local officials resisting desegregation, and by some protest groups engaging in civil disobedience who turn their backs on nonviolence, go beyond the constitutionally protected rights of petition and free assembly, and resort to violence to attempt to compel alteration of laws and policies with which they disagree. This condition has been reinforced by a general erosion of respect for authority in American society and the reduced effectiveness of social standards and community restraints on violence and crime. This in turn has largely resulted from rapid urbanization and the dramatic reduction in the average age of the total population. Powerlessness Finally, many Negroes have come to believe that they are being exploited politically and economically by the white power structure. Negroes, like people in poverty everywhere, in fact lack the channels of communication, influence, and appeal that traditionally have been available to ethnic minorities within the city and which enabled them, unburdened by color, to scale the walls of the white ghettos in an earlier era. The frustrations of powerlessness have led some to the conviction that there is no effective alternative to violence as a means of expression and redress as a way of moving the system. More generally, the result is alienation and hostility toward the institutions of law and government and the white society which controls them. This is reflected in the reach toward racial consciousness and solidarity reflected in the slogan Black Power. These facts have combined to inspire a new mood among Negroes, particularly among the young. Self-esteem and enhanced racial pride are replacing apathy and submission to the system. Moreover, Negro youth who make up over half of the ghetto population share the growing sense of alienation felt by many white youth in our country. Thus, their role in recent civil disorders reflects not only a shared sense of deprivation and victimization by white society, but also the rising incidents of disruptive conduct by a segment of American youth throughout the society. Incitement and Encouragement of Violence These conditions have created a volatile mixture of attitudes and beliefs which needs only a spark to ignite mass violence. Stride and appeals to violence, first heard from white racists, were echoed and reinforced last summer in the inflammatory rhetoric of Black racists and militants. Throughout the year, extremists crisscrossed the country preaching a doctrine of violence. Their rhetoric was widely reported in the mass media. It was echoed by local militants and organizations. It became the ugly background noise of the violent summer. We cannot measure with any precision the influence of these organizations and individuals in the ghetto, but we think it clear that the intolerable and unconscionable encouragement of violence, heightened tensions, created a mood of acceptance and an expectation of violence and thus contributed to the eruption of the disorders last summer. The Police It is the convergence of all these factors that make the role of the police so difficult and so significant. Almost invariably, the incident that ignites disorder arises from police action. Harlem, Watts, Newark, and Detroit, all the major outbursts of recent years, were precipitated by arrests of Negroes by white police for minor offenses. But the police are not merely the spark. In discharge of their obligation to maintain order and ensure public safety in the disruptive conditions of ghetto life, they are inevitably involved in sharper and more frequent conflicts with ghetto residents than with the residents of other areas. Thus, to many Negroes, police have come to symbolize white power, white racism, and white repression. And the fact is that many police do reflect and express these white attitudes. The atmosphere of hostility and cynicism is reinforced by a widespread perception among Negroes of the existence of police brutality and corruption and of a double standard of justice and protection, one for Negroes and one for whites. To this point, we have attempted only to identify the prime components of the explosive mixture. In the chapter that follows, we seek to analyze them in the perspective of history. Their meaning, however, is already clear. In the summer of 1967, we have seen in our cities a chain reaction of racial violence. If we are heedless, none of us shall escape the consequences. End of Section 23. Section 24 of the Kerner Commission Report. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Report of the National Advisory Committee on Civil Disorders. Kerner Commission Report. Chapter 5. Rejection and Protest and Historical Sketch. Part 1. Introduction. The events of the summer of 1967 are in large part the culmination of 300 years of racial prejudice. Most Americans know little of the origins of the racial schism separating our white and Negro citizens. Few appreciate how central the problem of the Negro has been to our social policy. Fewer still understand that today's problems can be solved only if white Americans comprehend the rigid social, economic, and educational barriers that have prevented Negroes from participating in the mainstream of American life. Only a handful realize that Negro accommodation to the patterns of prejudice in American culture has been but one side of the coin. For as slaves and as free men Negroes have protested against oppression and have persistently sought equality in American society. What follows is neither a history of the Negro in the United States nor an account of Negro protest movements. Rather it is a brief narrative of a few historical events that illustrate the facts of rejection and the forms of protest. We call on history not to justify but to help explain for black and white Americans a state of mind. The Colonial Period. Twenty years after Columbus reached the New World, African Negroes transported by Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese traders were arriving in the Caribbean islands. Almost all came as slaves. By 1600 there were more than half a million slaves in the Western Hemisphere. In Colonial America the first Negroes landed at Jamestown in August 1619. Within forty years Negroes had become a group apart, separated from the rest of the population by custom and law. Treated as servants for life, forbidden to intermarry with whites, deprived of their African traditions, and dispersed among southern plantations, American Negroes lost tribal, regional, and family ties. Through massive importation their numbers increased rapidly. By 1776 some 500,000 Negroes were held in slavery and indentured servitude in the United States. Nearly one of every six persons in the country was a slave. Americans disapproved a preliminary draft of the Declaration of Independence that indicted the King of England for waging cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. Instead they approved a document that proclaimed all men are created equal. The statement was an ideal, a promise, but it excluded the Negroes who were held in bondage as well as the few who were free men. The conditions in which Negroes lived had already led to protest. Racial violence was present almost from the beginning of the American experience. Throughout the eighteenth century the danger of Negro revolts obsessed many white Americans. Slave plots of considerable scope were uncovered in New York in 1712 and 1714, and they resulted in bloodshed. Whites and Negroes were slain. Negroes were at first barred from serving in the Revolutionary Army, recruiting officers having been ordered in July 1775 to enlist no Stroller, Negro, or Vagabond. Yet Negroes were already actively involved in the struggle for independence. Crispus Atux, a Boston Negro, was perhaps the first American to die for freedom, and Negroes had already fought in the battles at Lexington and Concord. They were among the soldiers at Bunker Hill. Fearing that Negroes would enlist in the British Army, which welcomed them, and facing a manpower shortage, the Continental Army accepted free Negroes. Many slaves did join the British, and according to an estimate by Thomas Jefferson, more than thirty thousand Virginia slaves ran away in 1778 alone, presumably to enlist. The states enrolled both free and slave Negroes, and finally Congress authorized military service for slaves who were to be emancipated in return for their service. By the end of the war about five thousand Negroes had been in the ranks of the Continental Army. Those who had been slaves became free. The Constitution and the Laws Massachusets abolished slavery in 1783, and Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York soon provided for gradual liberation. But relatively few Negroes lived in these states. The bulk of the Negro population was in the South, where white Americans had fortunes invested in slaves. Although the Congress banned slavery in the Northwest Territory, delegates at the Constitutional Convention compromised. A slave was counted as three-fifths of a person for determining the number of representatives from a state to Congress. Congress was prohibited from restricting the slave trade until after 1808, and the free states were required to return fugitive slaves to their southern owners. Growing numbers of slaves in the South became permanently fastened in bondage, and slavery spread into new southern regions. When more slaves were needed for the cotton and sugar plantations in the Southwest they were ordered from the Negro-raising states of the Old South, or, despite congressional prohibition of the slave trade imported from Africa. The laws of bondage became even more institutionalized. Masters retained absolute authority over their Negroes who were unable to leave their master's properties without written permission. Any white person, even those who owned no slaves, and they outnumbered slaveholders six to one, could challenge a truant slave and turn him over to a public official. Slaves could own no property, could enter into no contract, not even a contract of marriage, and had no right to assemble in public unless a white person was present. They had no standing in the courts. Discrimination as a doctrine. The situation was hardly better for free Negroes. A few achieved material success. Some even owned slaves themselves. But the vast majority knew only poverty. Forbidden to settle in some areas, segregated in others, they were targets of prejudice and discrimination. In the South they were denied freedom of movement, severely restricted in their choice of occupation, and forbidden to associate with whites or with slaves. They lived in constant danger of being enslaved, whites could challenge their freedom, and an infraction of the law could put them into bondage. In both North and South they were regularly victims of mobs. In 1829, for example, white residents invaded Cincinnati's little Africa, killed Negroes, burned their property, and ultimately drove half the Negro population from the city. Some Americans, Washington and Jefferson among them, advocated the gradual emancipation of slaves, and in the nineteenth century a movement to abolish slavery grew in importance and strength. A few white abolitionist leaders wanted full equality for Negroes, but others sought only to eliminate the institution itself, and some anti-slavery societies, fearing that Negro members would unnecessarily offend those who were unsympathetic with abolitionist principles, denied entrance to Negroes. Most Americans were, in fact, against abolishing slavery. They refused to rent their halls for anti-slavery meetings. They harassed abolitionist leaders who sought to educate white and Negro children together. They attacked those involved in the movement. Mobs sometimes killed abolitionists and destroyed their property. A large body of literature came into existence to prove that the Negro was imperfectly developed in mind and body, that he belonged to a lower order of man, that slavery was right on ethnic, economic, and social grounds, quoting the scriptures in support. Spreading rapidly during the first part of the nineteenth century, slavery held less than one million Negroes in 1800, but almost four million by 1860. Although some few white Americans had freed their slaves, most increased their holdings, for the invention of the cotton gin had made cotton the heart of the southern economy. By mid-century slavery in the south had become a systematic and aggressive way of treating a whole race of people. The despair of the Negroes was evident. Malingering and sabotage tormented every slave-holder. The problem of runaway slaves was endemic. Some slaves, Gabriel Prosser in 1800, Denmark Vasey in 1822, Nat Turner in 1831, and others turned to violence, and the sporadic uprisings that flared demonstrated a deep protest against a demeaning way of life. Negroes who had material resources expressed their distress in other ways. In 1816 Paul Cuffy, Negro philanthropist and owner of a fleet of ships, transported a group of Negroes to a new home in Sierra Leone. Forty years later Martin R. Delaney, Negro editor and physician, also urged Negroes to settle elsewhere. Equality of treatment and acceptance by the society at large were myths, and Negro protests during the first half of the nineteenth century took the form of rhetoric, spoken and written, which combined denunciation of undemocratic oppression together with pleas to the conscience of white Americans for the redress of grievances and the recognition of their constitutional rights. A few Negroes joined white Americans who believed that only Negro emigration to Africa would solve racial problems, but most Negroes equated that program with banishment and felt themselves entitled to participate in the blessings of America. The National Negro Convention Movement, formed in 1830, held conferences to publicize on a national scale the evils of slavery and the indignities heaped on free Negroes. The American Moral Reform Society, founded by Negroes in 1834, rejected racial separatism and advocated uplifting the whole human race without distinction as to complexion. Other Negro reformers pressed for stronger racial consciousness and solidarity as the means to overcome racial barriers. Many took direct action to help slaves escape through the underground railroad. A few resisted discrimination by political action, even though most Negroes were barred from voting. Frustration, disillusionment, anger, and fantasy marked the Negro's protest against the place in American society assigned to them. I was free, Harriet Tubman said, but there was no one to welcome me in the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land. When Frederick Douglass, the distinguished Negro abolitionist, addressed the citizens of Rochester on Independence Day, 1852, he told them, The Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Fellow citizens, above your national tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions, whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are today rendered more intolerable by the jubilant shouts that reach them. The Path Toward Civil War The 1850s brought Negroes increasing despair as the problem of slavery was debated by the nation's leaders. The Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 settled no basic issues, and the Dred Scott case in 1857 confirmed Negroes in their understanding that they were not citizens and thus not entitled to the constitutional safeguards enjoyed by other Americans. But the abolitionist movement was growing. Uncle Tom's cabin appeared in 1852 and sold more than 300,000 copies that year. Soon presented on the stage throughout the north, it dramatized the cruelty of slave masters and overseers, and condemned a culture based on human degradation and exploitation. The election of Abraham Lincoln on an anti-slavery platform gave hope that the end of slavery was near. But by the time Lincoln took office, seven southern states had seceded from the Union, and four more soon joined them. The Civil War and Emancipation renewed Negro faith in the vision of a racially egalitarian and integrated American society. But Americans, having been aroused by a wartime crisis, would again fail to destroy what abolitionists had described as the sins of caste. Civil War and quote Emancipation, unquote. Negroes volunteered for military service during the Civil War, the struggle as they saw it between the slave states and the free states. They were rejected. Not until a shortage of troops plagued the Union army late in 1862 were segregated units of United States colored troops formed. Not until 1864 did these men receive the same pay as white soldiers, a total of 186,000 Negroes served. The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 freed few slaves at first, but had immense significance as a symbol Negroes could hope again for equality. But there were at the same time bitter signs of racial unrest. Violent rioting occurred in Cincinnati in 1862 when Negro and Irish hands competed for work on the river-boats. Lesser riots took place in Newark and in Buffalo and Troy, New York, the result of combined hostility to the war and fear that Negroes would take white jobs. The most violent of the troubles took place in the New York City draft riots in July 1863 when white workers, mainly Irish-born, embarked on a three-day rampage. Desperately poor and lacking real roots in the community, they had the most to lose from the draft. Further, they were bitterly afraid that even cheaper Negro labor would flood the north if slavery ceased to exist. All the frustrations and prejudices the Irish had suffered were brought to a boiling point. At pitiful wages they had slaved on the railroads and canals, had been herded into the most menial jobs as carters and stevedores, their crumbling frame tenements were the worst slums in the city, their first target was the office of the Provost Marshall in charge of conscription, and seven hundred people quickly ransacked the building and set it on fire. The crowd refused to permit firemen into the area, and the whole block was gutted. Then the mob spilled into the Negro area, where many Negroes were slain and thousands forced to flee town. The police were helpless until federal troops arrived on the third day and restored control. Union victory in the Civil War promised the Negroes freedom but not equality or immunity from white aggression. Scarcely was the war ended when racial violence erupted in New Orleans. Negroes proceeding to an assembly hall to discuss the franchise were charged by police and special troops who routed the Negroes with guns, bricks, and stones, killed some at once, and pursued and killed others who were trying to escape. Federal troops restored order but thirty-four Negroes and four whites were reported dead and over two hundred people were injured. General Sheridan later said, at least nine-tenths of the casualties were perpetrated by the police and citizens by stabbing and smashing in the heads of many who had already been wounded or killed by policemen. It was not just a riot but an absolute massacre by the police, a murder which the mayor and police perpetrated without the shadow of necessity. Reconstruction. Reconstruction was a time of hope, the period when the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments were adopted, giving Negroes the vote and the promise of equality. But campaigns of violence and intimidation accompanied these optimistic expressions of a new age. The Ku Klux Klan and other secret organizations sought to suppress the emergence into society of the new Negro citizens. Major riots occurred in Memphis, Tennessee, where forty-six Negroes were reported killed and seventy-five wounded, and in the Louisiana centers of Colfax and Cushatta, where more than one hundred Negro and white Republicans were massacred. Nevertheless, in eighteen-seventy-five Congress enacted the first significant civil rights law. It gave Negroes the right to equal accommodations, facilities, and advantages of public transportation, inns, theaters, and places of public amusement. But the law had no effective enforcement provisions, and was, in fact, poorly enforced. Although bills to provide federal aid to education for Negroes were prepared, none passed, and educational opportunities remained meager. But Negroes were elected to every southern legislature, twenty served in the U.S. House of Representatives, two represented Mississippi in the U.S. Senate, and a prominent Negro politician was Governor of Louisiana for forty days. Opposition to Negroes in state and local government was always open and bitter. In the press and on the platform they were described as ignorant and depraved. Critics made no distinction between Negroes who had graduated from Dartmouth and those who had graduated from the cotton fields. Every available means was employed to drive Negroes from public life. Negroes who voted or held office were refused jobs, or punished by the Ku Klux Klan. One group in Mississippi boasted of having killed 116 Negroes and of having thrown their bodies into the Tallahatchie River. In a single South Carolina county, six men were murdered and more than three hundred whipped during the first six months of 1870. The federal government seemed helpless. Having withdrawn the occupation troops as soon as the southern states organized governments, the president was reluctant to send them back. In 1870 and 1871, after the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, Congress enacted several laws to protect the right of citizens to vote. They were seldom enforced, and the Supreme Court struck down the most important provisions in 1875 and 1876. As southern white governments returned to power, beginning with Virginia in 1869 and ending with Louisiana in 1877, the process of relegating the Negro to a subordinate place in American life was accelerated. Disenfranchisement was the first step. Negroes who defied the Klan and tried to vote faced an array of deceptions and obstacles. Polling places were changed at the last minute without notice to Negroes. Severe time limitations were imposed on marking complicated ballots. Votes cast incorrectly in a maze of ballot boxes were nullified. The suffrage provisions of state constitutions were rewritten to disenfranchise Negroes who could not read, understand or interpret the Constitution. Some state constitutions permitted those who failed these tests to vote if their ancestors had been eligible to vote on January 1st, 1860, a date when no Negro could vote anywhere in the south. In 1896 there were 130,344 Negroes registered in Louisiana. In 1900, after the state rewrote the suffrage provisions of its Constitution, only 5,320 remained on the registration books. Essentially the same thing happened in the other states of the former Confederacy. End of Section 24. Recording by Maria Casper. Section 25 of the Kerner Commission report. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. Kerner Commission report. Chapter 5. Rejection and Protest. An Historical Sketch. Part 2. Segregation by Law. When the Supreme Court in 1883 declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional, southern states began to enact laws to segregate the races. In 1896 the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson approved separate but equal facilities. It was then that segregation became an established fact by law as well as by custom. Negroes and whites were separated on public carriers and in all places of public accommodation including hospitals and churches. In courthouses whites and Negroes took oaths on separate Bibles. In most communities whites were separated from Negroes in cemeteries. Segregation invariably meant discrimination. On trains all Negroes including those holding first class tickets were allotted seats in the baggage car. Negroes in public buildings had to use freight elevators and toilet facilities reserved for janitors. Schools for Negro children were at best a weak imitation of those for whites as states spent ten times more to educate white youngsters than Negroes. Discrimination in wages became the rule whether between Negro and white teachers of similar training and experience or between common laborers on the same job. Some northern states enacted civil rights laws in the 1880s but Negroes in fact were treated little differently in the north than in the south. As Negroes moved north in substantial numbers toward the end of the century they discovered that equality of treatment did not exist in Massachusetts, New York or Illinois. They were crowded by local ordinances into sections of the city where housing and public services were generally substandard. Overt discrimination in employment was a general practice and job opportunities apart from menial tasks were few. Most labor unions excluded Negroes from membership or granted membership in separate and powerless Jim Crow locals. Yet when Negroes secured employment during strikes, labor leaders castigated them for undermining the principles of trade unionism, and when Negroes sought to move into the mainstream of community life by seeking membership in the organizations around them, educational, cultural, and religious, they were invariably rebuffed. By the 20th century the Negro was at the bottom of American society. Disenfranchised Negroes throughout the country were excluded by employers and labor unions from white-collar jobs and skilled trades. Jim Crow laws and farm tenancy characterized Negro existence in the south. About one hundred lynchings occurred every year in the 1880s and 1890s. There were 161 lynchings in 1892. As increasing numbers of Negroes migrated to northern cities, race riots became commonplace. Northern whites, even many former abolitionists, began to accept the white south's views on race relations. That northern whites would resort to violence was made clear in anti-Negro riots in New York City, 1900, Springfield, Ohio, 1904, Greensburg, Indiana, 1906, and Springfield, Illinois, 1908. The Springfield, Illinois riot lasted three days. It was initiated by a white woman's charge of rape by a Negro, inflamed by newspapers, and intensified by crowds of whites gathered around the jail, demanding that the Negro, arrested and imprisoned, be lynched. When the sheriff transferred the accused and another Negro to a jail in a nearby town, rioters headed for the Negro section and attacked homes and businesses, owned by or catering to Negroes. White owners who showed handkerchiefs in their windows averted harm to their stores. One Negro was summarily lynched, others were dragged from houses and streetcars and beaten. By the time National Guardsmen could reach the scene, six persons were dead, four whites and two Negroes, property damage was extensive, many Negroes left Springfield, hoping to find better conditions elsewhere, especially in Chicago. Protest in the early 1900s Between his famous Atlanta Exposition address in 1895 and his death in 1915, Booker T. Washington, principal of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama, and the most prominent Negro in America, privately spent thousands of dollars fighting disenfranchisement and segregation laws. Publicly, he advocated a policy of accommodation, conciliation and gradualism. Washington believed that by helping themselves, by creating and supporting their own businesses, by proving their usefulness to society through the acquisition of education, wealth and morality, Negroes would earn the respect of the white man and thus eventually gain their constitutional rights. Self-help and self-respect appeared a practical and sure, if gradual, way of ultimately achieving racial equality. Washington's doctrines also gained support because they appealed to race pride. If Negroes believed in themselves, stood together and supported each other, they would be able to shape their destinies. In the early years of the century, a small group of Negroes led by W. E. B. Dubois formed the Niagara Movement to oppose Washington's program. Washington had put economic progress before politics, had accepted the separate but equal theory and opposed agitation and protest. Dubois and his followers stressed political activity as the basis of the Negro's future, insisting on the inequity of Jim Crow laws and advocating agitation and protest. In sharp language, the Niagara Group placed responsibility for the race problem squarely on the whites. The aims of the movement were voting rights and the abolition of all caste distinctions based simply on race and color. Although Booker T. Washington tried to crush his critics, Dubois and the Negro radicals, as they were called, enlisted the support of a small group of influential white liberals and socialists. Together in 1909, 1910, they formed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The NAACP hammered at the walls of prejudice by organizing Negroes and well-disposed whites, by aiming propaganda at the whole nation, by taking legal action in courts and legislatures. Almost at the outset of its career, the NAACP prevailed upon the Supreme Court to declare unconstitutional two discriminatory statutes. In 1915, the court struck down the Oklahoma Grandfather Clause, a provision in several southern state constitutions, that, together with voting tests, had the effect of excluding from the vote those whose ancestors were ineligible to vote in 1860. Two years later, the Supreme Court outlawed residential segregation ordinances. These NAACP victories were the first legal steps in a long fight against disenfranchisement and segregation. During the first quarter of the twentieth century, the federal government enacted no new legislation to ensure equal rights or opportunities for Negroes, and made little attempt to enforce existing laws, despite flagrant violations of Negro civil rights. In 1913, members of Congress from the south introduced bills to federalize the southern segregation policy. They wished to ban interracial marriages in the District of Columbia, segregate white and Negro federal employees, and introduce Jim Crow laws in the public carriers of the District. The bills did not pass, but segregation practices were extended in federal offices, shops, restrooms, and lunchrooms. The nation's capital became as segregated as any in the former Confederate states. East St. Louis, 1917. Elsewhere there was violence. In July 1917, in East St. Louis, a riot claimed the lives of thirty-nine Negroes and nine whites. It was the result of fear by white working men that Negro advances in economic, political, and social status were threatening their own security and status. When the labor force of an aluminum plant went on strike, the company hired Negro workers. A labor union delegation called on the mayor and asked that further migration of Negroes to East St. Louis be stopped. As the men were leaving City Hall, they heard that a Negro had accidentally shot a white man during a holdup. In a few minutes, rumor had replaced fact. The shooting was intentional, a white woman had been insulted, two white girls were shot. By this time three thousand people had congregated and were crying for vengeance. Mobs roamed the street, beating Negroes. Policemen did little more than take the injured to hospitals and disarm Negroes. The National Guard restored order. When the governor withdrew the troops, tensions were still high, and scattered episodes broke the peace. The press continued to emphasize Negro crimes. White pickets and Negro workers at the aluminum company skirmished. And on July 1st some whites drove through the main Negro neighborhood firing into homes. Negro residents armed themselves. When a police car drove down the street Negroes riddled it with gunshot. The next day a Negro was shot on the main street, and a new riot was underway. The area became a bloody half mile for three or four hours. Streetcars were stopped, and Negroes without regard to age or sex were pulled off and stoned, clubbed and kicked. Mob leaders calmly shot and killed Negroes who were lying in blood in the street. As the victims were placed in an ambulance the crowds cheered and applauded. Other rioters set fire to Negro homes, and by midnight the Negro section was in flames and Negroes were fleeing the city. There were forty-eight dead, hundreds injured, and more than three hundred buildings destroyed. World War I and Postwar Violence When the United States entered World War I in 1917 the country again faced the question whether American citizens should have the right to serve on an equal basis in defense of their country. More than two million Negroes registered under the Selective Service Act, and some three hundred sixty thousand were called into service. The Navy rejected Negroes except as menials. The Marine Corps rejected them all together. The Army formed them into separate units, commanded for the most part by white officers. Only after great pressure did the Army permit Negro candidates to train as officers in a segregated camp. Mistreated at home and overseas Negro combat units performed exceptionally well under French commanders who refused to heed American warnings that Negroes were inferior people. Negro soldiers returning home were mobbed for attempting to use facilities open to white soldiers. Of the seventeen Negroes lynched during the first year after the war a substantial number were soldiers, some were lynched in uniform. Reorganized in 1915 the Ku Klux Klan was flourishing again by 1919. Its program for uniting native-born white Christians for concerted action in the preservation of American institutions and the supremacy of the white race was implemented by flogging, branding with acid, tarring and feathering, hanging and burning. It destroyed the elemental rights of many Negroes and of some whites. Violence took the form of lynchings and riots, and major riots by whites against Negroes took place in 1917 in Chester, Pennsylvania and Philadelphia, in 1919 in Washington, D.C., Omaha, Charleston, Longview, Texas, Chicago and Knoxville, and in 1921 in Tulsa. The Chicago riot of 1919 flared from the increase in Negro population, which had more than doubled in ten years. Jobs were plentiful, but housing was not. Black neighborhoods expanded into white sections of the city, and trouble developed. Between July 1917 and March 1921 fifty-eight Negro houses were bombed, and recreational areas were sites of racial conflict. The riot itself started on Sunday, July 27th, with stone-throwing and sporadic fighting at adjoining white and Negro beaches. A Negro boy swimming off the Negro beach drifted into water reserved for whites and drowned. Young Negroes claimed that he had been struck by stones and demanded the arrest of a white man. Instead, police arrested a Negro. Negroes attacked policemen and news spread to the city. White and Negro groups clashed in the streets. Two persons died and fifty were wounded. On Monday Negroes coming home from work were attacked. Later, when whites drove cars through Negro neighborhoods and fired weapons, the Negroes retaliated. Twenty more were killed and hundreds wounded. On Tuesday a handful more were dead, one hundred twenty-nine injured. Rain began to fall, the mayor finally called in the state militia, the city quieted down after nearly a week of violence, the 1920s and the new militancy. In the period between the two world wars the NAACP dominated the strategy of racial advancement. The NAACP drew its strength from large numbers of southern Negroes who had migrated to northern cities and from a small but growing Negro group of professionals and businessmen. It projected the image of the new Negro, race-proud and self-reliant, believing in racial cooperation and self-help and determined to fight for his constitutional rights. This was reflected in the work of writers and artists known as the Harlem Renaissance, who drew upon the Negro's own cultural tradition and experience. W. E. B. Du Bois, editor of the Crisis, the NAACP publication, symbolized the new mood and exerted great influence. The NAACP did extraordinary service, giving legal defense to victims of race riots and unjust judicial proceedings. It obtained the release of the soldiers who had received life sentences on charges of rioting against intolerable conditions at Houston in 1917. It successfully defended Negro sharecroppers in Elaine, Arkansas, who in 1919 had banded together to gain fairer treatment. They had become the objects of a massive armed hunt by whites to put them in their place and who were charged with insurrection when they resisted. It secured the acquittal with the help of Clarence Darrow, of Dr. Ossian Sweet and his family. The Sweets, who had moved into a white neighborhood in Detroit, shot at a mob attacking their home and killed a man. The Sweets were eventually judged to have committed the act in self-defense. Less successful were attempts to prevent school segregation in northern cities. Jerry Mandarin of school boundaries and other devices by boards of education were fought with written petitions, verbal protests to school officials, legal suits, and in several cities school boycotts. All proved of no avail. The thrust of the NAACP was primarily political and legal, but the National Urban League founded in 1911 by philanthropists and social workers sought an economic solution to the Negro's problems. Sympathetic with Booker T. Washington's point of view, believing in conciliation, gradualism, and moral suasion, the Urban League searched out industrial opportunities for Negro migrants to the cities, using arguments that appealed to the white businessman's sense of economic self-interest and also to his conscience. Another important figure who espoused an economic program to ameliorate the Negro's condition was A. Philip Randolph, an editor of The Messenger. He regarded the NAACP as a middle-class organization unconcerned about pressing economic problems, taking a Marxist position on the causes of prejudice and discrimination. Randolph called for a new and radical Negro unafraid to demand his rights as a member of the working class. He advocated physical resistance to white mobs, but he believed that only united action of black and white workers against capitalists would achieve social justice. Although Randolph addressed himself to the urban working masses, few of them ever read The Messenger. The one man who reached the masses of frustrated and disillusioned migrants in the northern ghettos was Marcus Garvey. Garvey, founder in 1914 of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, UNIA, aimed to liberate both Africans and American Negroes from their oppressors. His utopian method was the wholesale migration of American Negroes to Africa. Contending that whites would always be racist, he stressed racial pride and history, denounced integration, and insisted that the black man develop a distinct racial type of civilization of his own and work out his salvation in his motherland. On a more practical level he urged support of Negro businesses, and through the UNIA organized a chain of groceries, restaurants, laundries, a hotel, printing plant, and steamship line. When several prominent Negroes called the attention of the federal government to irregularities in the management of the steamship line, Garvey was jailed and then deported for having used the males to defraud. But Garvey dramatized as no one before the bitterness and alienation of the Negro slum dwellers who, having come north with great expectations, found only overcrowded and deteriorated housing, mass unemployment, and race riots. The Depression. Negro labor, relatively unorganized and the target of discrimination and hostility, was hardly prepared for the Depression of the 1930s. To a disproportionate extent Negroes lost their jobs in cities and worked for starvation wages in rural areas. Although organizations like the National Urban League tried to improve employment opportunities, sixty-five percent of Negro employables were in need of public assistance by 1935. Public assistance was given on a discriminatory basis, especially in the South. For a time, Dallas and Houston gave no relief at all to Negro or Mexican families. In general, Negroes had more difficulty than whites in obtaining assistance, and the relief benefits were smaller. Some religious and charitable organizations excluded Negroes from their soup kitchens. The New Deal. The New Deal marked a turning point in American race relations. Negroes found much in the New Deal to complain about. Discrimination existed in many agencies. Federal housing programs expanded urban ghettos. Money from the Agricultural Adjustment Administration went in the South chiefly to white land owners, while crop restrictions forced many Negro sharecroppers off the land. Nevertheless Negroes shared in relief, jobs and public housing, and Negro leaders who felt the open sympathy of many highly-placed New Dealers held more prominent political positions than at any time since President Taft's administration. The creation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, CIO, with its avowed philosophy of non-discrimination, made the notion of an alliance of black and white workers something more than a visionary's dream. The Depression, the New Deal, and the CIO reoriented Negro protest to concern with economic problems. Negroes conducted Don't Buy Where You Can't Work campaigns in a number of cities, boycotted and picketed commercial establishments owned by whites, and sought equality in American society through an alliance with white labor. The NAACP came under attack from some Negroes. Du Bois resigned as editor of the Crisis in 1934, in part because he believed in the value of collective racial economic endeavor and saw little point in protesting disenfranchisement and segregation without more actively pursuing economic goals. Younger critics also disagreed with the NAACP's gradualism on economic issues. Undeterred, the NAACP broadened the scope of its legal work, fought a vigorous though unsuccessful campaign to abolish the poll tax, and finally won its attack on the white primaries in 1944 through the Supreme Court. But the heart of its litigation was its long-range campaign against segregation, and the most obvious inequities in the southern school systems, the lack of professional and graduate schools, and the low salaries received by Negro teachers. Not until about 1950 would the NAACP make a direct assault against school segregation on the legal ground that separate facilities were inherently unequal. End of Section 25, recording by Maria Kasper. Section 26 of the Kerner Commission Report. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Kerner Commission Report. Chapter 5. Rejection and Protest, An Historical Sketch, Part 3. World War II During World War II, Negroes learned again that fighting for their country brought them no nearer to full citizenship. Rejected when they tried to enlist, they were accepted into the army according to the proportion of the Negro population to that of the country as a whole, but only in separate units and those mostly non-combat. The United States thus fought racism in Europe with a segregated fighting force. The Red Cross, with the government's approval, separated Negro and white blood in banks established for wounded servicemen, even though the blood banks were largely the work of a Negro physician, Charles Drew. Not until 1949 would the armed forces begin to adopt a firm policy against segregation. Negroes seeking employment in defense industries were embittered by policies like that of a West Coast aviation factory, which declared openly that the Negro will be considered only as janitors and in other similar capacities, regardless of their training as aircraft workers we will not employ them. Two new movements marked Negro protest, the March on Washington and the Congress of Racial Equality, Core. In 1941, consciously drawing on the power of the Negro vote and concerned with the economic problems of the urban slum-dweller, A. Philip Randolph threatened a mass Negro convergence on Washington unless President Roosevelt secured employment for Negroes in the defense industries. The President's Executive Order 8802, establishing a Federal Fair Employment Practices Commission, forestalled the demonstration. Even without enforcement powers, the FEPC set a precedent for treating fair employment practice as a civil right. Core was founded in 1942-43, when certain leaders of the fellowship of reconciliation, a pacifist organization, became interested in the use of nonviolent direct action to fight racial discrimination. Core combined Gandhi's techniques with the sit-in, derived from the sit-down strikes of the 1930s. Until about 1959, Core's main activity was attacking discrimination in places of public accommodation in the cities of the northern and border states, and as late as 1961, two-thirds of its membership and most of its national officers were white. Meanwhile, wartime racial disorders had broken out sporadically, in Mobile, Los Angeles, Beaumont, Texas, and elsewhere. The riot in Detroit in 1943 was the most destructive. The Negro population in the city had risen sharply, and more than 50,000 recent arrivals put immense pressures on the housing market. Neighborhood turnover at the edge of the ghetto bred bitterness and sometimes violence, and recreational areas became centers of racial abrasion. The Federal regulations requiring employment standards in defense industries also angered whites, and several unauthorized walk-outs had occurred in automobile plants after Negro workers were upgraded. Activities in the city of several leading spokesmen for white supremacy, Gerald L. K. Smith, Frank J. Norris, and Father Charles Coughlin, inflamed many white southerners who had migrated to Detroit during the war. On Sunday, June 20th, rioting broke out on Belle Isle, a recreational spot used by both races but predominantly by Negroes. Fistfights escalated into a major conflict. The first wave of looting and bloodshed began in the Negro ghetto, Paradise Valley, and later spread to other sections of the city. Whites began attacking Negroes as they emerged from the city's all-night movie theaters in the downtown area. White forays into Negro residential areas by car were met by gunfire. By the time Federal troops arrived to halt the racial conflict, twenty-five Negroes and nine whites were dead, property damage exceeded two million dollars, and a legacy of fear and hate descended on the city. Again in 1943, a riot erupted in Harlem, New York, following the attempt of a white policeman to arrest a Negro woman who was defended by a Negro soldier. Negro rioters assaulted white passers-by, overturned parked automobiles, tossed bricks and bottles at policemen. The major emphasis was on destroying property, looting and burning stores. Six persons died, over five hundred were injured and more than one hundred were jailed. The postwar period. White opinion in some quarters of America had begun to shift to a more sympathetic regard for Negroes during the New Deal, and the war had accelerated that movement. Thoughtful whites had been painfully aware of the contradiction in opposing Nazi racial philosophy with racially segregated military units. In the postwar years American racial attitudes became more liberal, as new non-white nations emerged in Asia and Africa and took increasing responsibilities in international councils. Against this background the growing size of the Northern Negro vote made civil rights a major issue in national elections, and ultimately in 1957 led to the establishment of the Federal Civil Rights Commission, which had the power to investigate discriminatory conditions throughout the country and to recommend corrective measures to the President. Northern and Western states outlawed discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations, while the NAACP in successive court victories won judgments against racially restrictive covenants in housing, segregation in interstate transportation, and discrimination in publicly owned recreational facilities. The NAACP helped register voters, and in 1954 Brown v. Board of Education became the triumphant climax of the NAACP's campaign against educational segregation in the public schools of the South. Core, which had been conducting demonstrations in the border states, its major focus on public accommodations, began experimenting with direct action techniques to open employment opportunities. In 1947, in conjunction with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Core conducted a journey of reconciliation, what would later be called a freedom ride, in the states of the Upper South, to test compliance with the Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation on interstate buses. The resistance met by the riders in some areas and the sentencing of two of them to thirty days on a North Carolina road gang dramatized the gap between American democratic theory and practice. The Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott of 1955-56 captured the imagination of the nation and of the Negro community in particular, and led to the growing use of direct action techniques. It catapulted into national prominence the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., who, like the founders of Core, held to a Gandhian belief in the principles of pacifism. Even before a court decision obtained by NAACP attorneys in November 1956 desegregated the Montgomery buses, a similar movement had started in Tallahassee, Florida. Afterward another one developed in Birmingham, Alabama. In 1957 the Tuskegee Negroes undertook a three-year boycott of local merchants. After the state legislature, gerrymandered nearly all of the Negro voters outside of the town's boundaries. In response to a lawsuit filed by the NAACP, the Supreme Court ruled the Tuskegee gerrymander illegal. These events were widely heralded. The new Negro had now emerged in the South, militant, no longer fearful of white hoodlums or mobs, and ready to use his collective strength to achieve his ends. In this mood King established the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957 to coordinate direct action activities in Southern cities. Nonviolent direct action attained popularity not only because of the effectiveness of King's leadership, but because the older techniques of legal and legislative action had had limited success. Impressive as the advances in the fifteen years after World War II were, in spite of state laws and Supreme Court decisions, something was still clearly wrong. Negroes remained disenfranchised in most of the South. Though in the twelve years following the outlawing of the White Primary in 1944, the number of Negroes registered in Southern states had risen from about 250,000 to nearly a million and a quarter. Supreme Court decisions desegregating transportation facilities were still being largely ignored in the South. Discrimination in employment and housing continued, not only in the South but also in Northern states with model civil rights laws. The Negro unemployment rate steadily moved upward after 1954. The South reacted to the Supreme Court's decision on school desegregation by attempting to outlaw the NAACP, intimidating civil rights leaders, calling for massive resistance to the court's decision, curtailing Negro voter registration, and forming White Citizens Councils. Revolution of Rising Expectations At the same time Negro attitudes were changing. In what has been described as a revolution in expectations, Negroes were gaining a new sense of self-respect and a new self-image as a result of the civil rights movement and their own advancement. King and others were demonstrating that nonviolent direct action could succeed in the South. New laws and court decisions and the increasing support of White public opinion gave American Negroes a new confidence in the future. Negroes no longer felt that they had to accept the humiliations of second-class citizenship. Ironically, it was the very successes in the legislatures and the courts that, more perhaps than any other single factor, led to intensified Negro expectations and resulting dissatisfaction with the limitations of legal and legislative programs. Increasing Negro impatience accounted for the rising tempo of nonviolent direct action in the late 1950s, culminating in the student sit-ins of 1960 and the inauguration of what is popularly known as the Civil Rights Revolution or the Negro Revolt. Many believe that the Montgomery boycott ushered in this Negro Revolt, and there is no doubt that in its importance, by projecting the image of King and his techniques, it had great importance. But the decisive break with traditional techniques came with the college student sit-ins that swept the South in the winter and spring of 1960. In dozens of communities in the Upper South, the Atlantic Coastal States and Texas, student demonstrations secured the desegregation of lunch counters in drug and variety stores, arrests were numbered in the thousands, and brutality was evident in scores of communities. In the Deep South the campaign ended in failure, even in instances where hundreds had been arrested, as in Montgomery, Orangeburg, South Carolina, and Baton Rouge. But the youth had captured the imagination of the Negro community and to a remarkable extent of the whole nation. Student Involvement The Negro protest movement would never be the same again. The Southern college students shook the power structure of the Negro community, made direct action temporarily preeminent as a civil rights tactic, speeded up the process of social change in race relations, and ultimately turned the Negro protest organizations toward a deep concern with the economic and social problems of the masses. Involved in this was a gradual shift in both tactics and goals, from legal to direct action, from middle and upper class to mass action, from attempts to guarantee the Negro's constitutional rights to efforts to secure economic policies giving him equality of opportunity, from appeals to the sense of fair play of white Americans, to demands based upon power in the Black ghetto. The successes of the student movement threatened existing Negro leadership and precipitated a spirited rivalry among civil rights organizations. The NAACP and SCLC associated themselves with the student movement, the organizing meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, at Raleigh, North Carolina in April 1960, was called by Martin Luther King, but within a year the youth considered King too cautious and broke with him. The NAACP now decided to make direct action a major part of its strategy, and organized and reactivated college and youth chapters in the southern and border states. CORE, still unknown to the general public, installed James Farmer as national director in January 1961, and that spring joined the front rank of civil rights organizations with the famous Freedom Ride to Alabama and Mississippi that dramatized the persistence of segregated public transportation. A bus burning resulted in Alabama, hundreds of demonstrators spent a month or more in Mississippi prisons. Finally, a new order from the Interstate Commerce Commission desegregating all interstate transportation facilities received partial compliance. Organizational Differences Disagreement over strategy and tactics inevitably became intertwined with personal and organizational rivalries. Each civil rights group felt the need for proper credit in order to obtain the prestige and financial contributions necessary to maintain and expand its own programs. The local and national, individual and organizational clashes stimulated competition and activity that further accelerated the pace of social change. Yet there were differences in style. CORE was the most interracial, SCLC appeared to be the most deliberate. SNCC staff workers lived on subsistence allowances and seemed to regard going to jail as a way of life. The NAACP continued the most varied programs, retaining a strong emphasis on court litigation, maintaining a highly effective lobby at the nation's capital, and engaging in direct action campaigns. The National Urban League, under the leadership of Whitney M. Young, Jr., appointed Executive Director in 1961, became more outspoken and talked more firmly to businessmen who had previously been treated with utmost tact and caution. The role of whites in the protest movement gradually changed. Instead of occupying positions of leadership, they found themselves relegated to the role of followers. Whites were likely to be suspect in the activist organizations. Negroes had come to feel less dependent on whites, more confident of their own power, and they demanded that their leaders be black. The NAACP had long since acquired Negro leadership, but continued to welcome white liberal support. SCLC and SNCC were from the start Negro-led and Negro-dominated. CORE became predominantly Negro as it expanded in 1962 and 1963. Today all executives are Negro, and a constitutional amendment adopted in 1965 officially limited white leadership in the chapters. A major factor in tensifying the civil rights movement was widespread Negro unemployment and poverty. An important force in awakening Negro protest was the meteoric rise to national prominence of the black Muslims established around 1930. The organization reached the peak of its influence when more progress toward equal rights was being made than ever before in American history, while at the same time the poorest groups in the urban ghettos were stagnating. The black Muslims preached a vision of the doom of the white devils and the coming dominance of the black man, promised a utopian paradise of a separate territory within the United States for a Negro state, and offered a practical program of building Negro business through hard work, thrift, and racial unity. To those willing to submit to the rigid discipline of the movement, the black Muslims' organization gave a sense of purpose and dignity.