Violence Against African Americans

By: Herbert Shapiro

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century

Violence Against African Americans

Following Frederick Douglass's death in 1895, Booker T. Washington became a dominant figure in African American leadership. Hopes for short-term implementation of citizenship rights receded and racial violence intensified. In this context Washington's accommodationist perspective, encouraged by the South's white elite and the nation's corporate institutions, took hold. Washington would defer demand for political rights in exchange for an emphasis on black economic advancement. As symbolized by the Tuskegee Institute, which he led as principal, education for blacks would concentrate on agricultural and mechanical skills. At the 1895 Cotton States Exhibition in Atlanta, Washington set forth his view that “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” Washington asserted that black economic achievement would elicit respect from the whites of the South and eventually facilitate access to political rights. But events did not bear out his expectation as racists repeatedly exhibited resentment at blacks who succeeded in moving up from the bottom rungs of society's economic ladder.

Lynching had become more frequent in the decades after 1880, becoming a regular feature of southern society. In some years several such atrocities, in various locations, were a weekly occurrence. Such violence was by no means the work only of small groups of whites operating in isolated communities. The history of lynching includes numerous incidents in which violence was carefully planned, with the murder or murders staged before crowds of whites, advertised so that the largest possible crowd would assemble and with arrangements made for the distribution of souvenirs. In several instances excursion trains brought onlookers to the scene. In 1899 thousands of whites gathered to witness the lynching of a farmer, Sam Hose; some four thousand of the crowd were brought to the scene by trains from Atlanta.

The phenomenon of lynching was supported by the complicity of public officials. In the course of American history the record does not show any white person executed on charges of lynch murder against blacks, although capital punishment was a well-established component of the nation's penal system. Officers of the law facilitated the seizure of prisoners from jails, and judicial officers were on occasion to be found among the mob. After lynchings, police and grand jury inquiries uniformly reported that the murders were done “at the hands of persons unknown.” Well into the twentieth century no American president advocated making lynching a federal offense. Congress failed to enact an antilynching law. Passage of such legislation was blocked by filibusters on the part of southern Democrats in the Senate.

The lynching frenzy crested between the early 1880s and 1901. During that period more than one hundred people were lynched each year, blacks being the great majority. Almost two thousand murders of African Americans occurred in this interval. Tuskegee Institute records indicate that in the years 1882–1944 there were 3,417 blacks and 1,291 whites lynched. Most of those killed were men, but women were also among the victims. The increase in lynching was set in the context of a growing demonization of black people, an outgrowth of a sharpening of class antagonisms that for a time threatened to create a black-white alliance for political and economic justice. The venting of white popular fury in assaulting blacks was part of a strategy geared to prevent such an alliance.

The movement of the South during the 1890s into a prolonged era of segregation and racial disfranchisement was coupled with an intensification of violence. Racist, violence-justifying tracts, such as Thomas Dixon's The Leopard's Spots and The Clansman, reached millions of readers, North and South. In 1896 the Supreme Court gave Jim Crow a contrived constitutional foundation, holding in Plessy v. Ferguson that segregation did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment, provided that public facilities were “separate and equal.” In 1898 mob violence destroyed North Carolina's fusion Republican-Populist government. This violence was centered in the port city of Wilmington where blacks had some access to positions of civic authority and operated small businesses. By no means did blacks dominate statewide and local politics, but racists demagogically claimed that any black participation in public affairs amounted to domination. A letter to the editor of a Wilmington paper asserted, “North Carolina is a white man's state and white men will rule it, and they will crush the party of negro domination beneath a majority so overwhelming that no other party will ever again dare to attempt to establish negro rule here.” Democratic campaigners demanded that whites, who owned most of the property, control the government.

The state election, held in an atmosphere of intimidation, gave victory to the Democrats, but white supremacists in Wilmington moved to eliminate the last vestiges of black participation in politics. On 10 November a mob invaded the city's black neighborhood and burned the building housing the Record, Wilmington's black newspaper. Blacks were attacked at random on the streets and at least twenty-five people were killed. The Democrat Alfred M. Waddell did all he could to make good his threat: “We will not live under these intolerable conditions. No society can stand it. We intend to change it, if we have to choke the current of Cape Fear River with negro carcasses.” Black officeholders were forced to resign, and several thousand people fled the city. The Republican McKinley administration took no action to intervene against this overthrow of lawful government. Following this violence the new state government drafted voting requirements that effectively disfranchised blacks.

During the early years of the twentieth century the race question in the United States unfolded within a context of a burgeoning imperialism that reinforced notions of the inherent superiority of whites. Violence against blacks was more clearly revealed to be a matter of national importance. Lynching continued and there was also the brutal treatment of prisoners in southern work camps, such institutions as Parchman state prison farm in Mississippi, which evolved into a large-scale business enterprise. Peonage, the institution of debt slavery, flourished, and those trapped in this system were repeatedly abused without recourse to law. The chain gang became a regular feature of the social order in the South.

There were many episodes of racial violence in American cities. In 1900 the streets of New York City became the setting for mob terror against blacks, with police joining the mob. For several days in August, white toughs, joined by police, assaulted blacks on Manhattan's West Side. An attorney retained by black community leaders said of the police, “They ran with the crowds in pursuit of their prey; they took defenseless men who ran to them for protection and threw them to the rioters, and in many cases they beat and clubbed men and women more brutally than the mob did.”

In 1906 there occurred the notorious “Atlanta Massacre” in which white mobs, whipped up by a propaganda orgy against supposed outrages aimed at white women, murderously assaulted blacks. One Atlanta newspaper ran an editorial urging castration of all black rapists, and a letter writer recommended sterilization of black baby girls. The historian John Dittmer describes such material as advocacy of genocide. A feature of the Atlanta violence was that blacks defended themselves against the mob. Reliance on protection from paternalistic whites was not sufficient. Many blacks armed themselves to protect their lives and property. One such instance was the response of the father of Walter White, who later became the NAACP's executive secretary. The elder White had been warned that the mob intended to march upon Houston Street, where the White family lived, and White was ready to shoot the first white who put foot on his lawn. There was no attack, but Walter White recalled this episode as awakening in him a new racial consciousness.

A classic response to the Atlanta events was W. E. B. Du Bois's A Litany of Atlanta. In this plea for divine intervention, Du Bois wrote: “A city lay in travail, God our Lord, and from her loins, sprang twin Murder and Black Hate. Red was the midnight; clang, crack and cry of death and fury filled the air and trembled underneath the stars when church spires pointed silently to Thee. And all this was to sate the greed of greedy men who hide behind the veil of vengeance. Bend us Thine Ear, O Lord!”

A Turning Point: Creation of the NAACP.

A turning point in the history of the period was the violence that erupted in Springfield, Illinois, the city of Abraham Lincoln, in 1908. In mid-August an inflammatory report circulated that a white woman had been assaulted by a black man in her home. A mob marched on the city's jail, but unable to seize their intended victim the mob lynched two other persons. The homes of many black families were set afire. Later it was revealed that the alleged assailant had been wrongly identified. In the wake of these events the journalist William English Walling wrote, “Either the spirit of the abolitionists, of Lincoln and Lovejoy must be revived and we must come to treat the Negro on a plane of absolute political and social equality, or Vardaman and Tillman [the racist senators James K. Vardaman of Mississippi and Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina] will soon have transferred the race war to the North.” Walling's account of the Springfield violence, published in The Independent, led to the convening of the 1909 conference in New York City that resulted in the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Along with Walling, among the prominent progressives who issued the call for this meeting were Mary White Ovington, Oswald Garrison Villard, Jane Addams, Lincoln Steffens, Lillian Wald, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Ida Wells-Barnett. On the second day of the conference Ida Wells-Barnett declared, “No other nation, civilized or savage, burns its criminals. Only under the Stars and Stripes is the human holocaust possible.”

The new organization represented an extension of the Niagara Movement, a grouping of black activists led by Du Bois that broke publicly with Booker T. Washington's accommodationism. In Niagara's founding charter Du Bois wrote, “We will not be satisfied to take one jot or tittle less than our full manhood rights. We claim for ourselves every single right that belongs to a free American, political, civil and social; and until we get these rights we will never cease to protest and assail the ears of America.”

Although such activists as the socialist A. Phillip Randolph opposed American entrance into World War I, much of the African American leadership supported the war. Thousands of blacks served in the nation's segregated military forces. But racial violence continued during the war and greatly intensified on the heels of the Allied victory. In early July 1917 white mobs in East St. Louis, Illinois, set homes in the city's black district afire and beat people to death on the streets. Thirty-nine blacks were killed. A congressional investigation revealed that some police and Illinois National Guardsmen joined the mob. The NAACP authenticated the lynching of sixty-three blacks during the war year 1918. On 26 July 1918 President Wilson stated that lynching was “the disgraceful evil” but took no steps to initiate federal action. A wartime lynching that was marked by barbarism almost beyond belief was that of Haynes and Mary Turner in Valdosta, Georgia, on 16 May 1918. Haynes Turner was lynched to compensate for the mob's failure to find the black man believed to have killed a white planter. Turner's pregnant wife Mary declared her husband innocent and vowed to seek justice. For taking this stand she was arrested and then given up to a mob. Before a large crowd she was stripped, hung upside down by the ankles, and roasted to death. In the midst of this torture, a white man opened her belly with a knife, and her infant fell to the ground and was stomped to death. As usual, no action was taken against the killers. As Philip Dray writes, these killings “introduced a new low in the level of degradation associated with lynching.”

Racial violence flamed across the nation in the “Red Summer” of 1919. A product of the ghetto conditions arising in a number of American cities, with whites seeking to drive blacks from positions in the workforce opened by the wartime labor shortage and to confine the many thousands of migrants who came north within segregated housing tracts, racist violence exploded in such cities as Washington, D.C., Chicago, Knoxville, Charleston, and Omaha. The sharpest clash occurred in Chicago, where 23 blacks and 15 whites died, over 500 were injured, and about 1,000 were left homeless. Rioters were especially active in the stockyards area, where scores of workers, women and men, were set upon and some killed. A feature of this confrontation was that blacks resisted attack. A black war veteran explained that a new awakening had come “that must inevitably continue for all time.” The police were of little value in coping with the violence, and indeed they exhibited sympathy for the rioters. In the wake of the violence a commission was established to study the causes of the riot, and extensive documentation was accumulated, but the city's civic and business leadership did little to deal with these causes. Those who two decades later read Richard Wright's Native Son could see that the city was still in the grip of racism.

This period also embraced the violence directed against the black farmers of Arkansas who attempted to organize a union. Propertied whites raided a union meeting at a black church, and before the confrontation was over Phillips County had been turned into a racial battleground. The official figures were that five whites and twenty-five blacks were killed, but an NAACP investigator reported that as many as one hundred blacks had been killed. Hundreds of blacks were arrested and confined in a stockade, and twelve black defendants were sentenced to death. In 1923 the Supreme Court ruled that these convictions resulted from a process in which fair trial was denied.

Lynching. A crowd watches the lynching of an African American, perhaps Jesse Washington, at Waco, Texas, 1916 or 1917. [See the photograph at Waco Lynching.]

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Records, Library of Congress

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The 1920s.

Racial violence was still a component of the black experience in the 1920s. In Chicago in 1920 the homes of a number of blacks were bombed. In that same year a black man, Henry Lowry, was lynched in Arkansas before a large mob, first tortured and then burned at the stake. During 1921 racial violence erupted in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The historian Scott Ellsworth writes of this event, “In terms of density of population and ratio of casualties to population, it has probably not been equaled by any riot in the United States in this century.” A mob of thousands invaded the black community known as “Little Africa.” Walter White estimated that approximately fifty whites died and between 150 and 200 blacks. White saw the roots of the violence in resentments felt by poor whites, but the assault had considerable support from the city's power structure. The mob brought death and destruction to Tulsa's blacks, but extensive resistance was mounted against the racists. John Hope Franklin, who grew up in Tulsa, wrote, “The self-confidence of Tulsa's Negroes soared, their businesses prospered, their institutions flourished, and they simply had no fear of whites.” In recent years the Tulsa events have reemerged as a contemporary issue, linked to the question of reparations for the lives and property the mob destroyed. It is clear that the city's public authorities bore responsibility for what happened, and so the point has been made that compensating Tulsa's African Americans for the monstrous wrongs inflicted upon them would be an act of justice.

One event that caught the nation's attention in 1923 was the clash in Detroit between a black family, that of Dr. Ossian Sweet and his wife Gladys, who had taken ownership of a home in a previously all-white district, and racists who would drive them out. The mob—permitted by the police to assemble outside the Sweets’ home—threw rocks and bricks. People inside the home fired upon the mob, killing one man. The police, who had done nothing to disperse the mob, now arrested Dr. and Mrs. Sweet and nine others, charging them with murder. The NAACP took charge of the legal defense, widely publicized the case in the African American press, and arranged for Clarence Darrow to serve as chief defense counsel. The famed attorney demolished the testimony of prosecution witnesses and in his summation to the jury eloquently brought to life the black experience with racial violence, capturing the effect of a frenzied white mob upon people of color. In this case, in a Detroit in which the Klan had become a powerful influence, the jury would not convict those who fought in defense of their lives and homes. In 1926, however, the Supreme Court upheld the legality of racially restrictive housing covenants.

The 1920s marked a period in which lynching persisted, but in the face of increased public exposure of lynch mobbism and in the face of Congress having come near to passing antilynching legislation, there was increasing recourse to the tactic of legal lynching. In numerous instances, blacks were afforded the appearance of due process, but hasty trials and procedures reeking of race prejudice resulted in guilty verdicts and death sentences.

The Depression and New Fears of Racism.

The Great Depression decade of the 1930s brought new features to the racial struggle. Interwoven in these years were racist fears that, in the economic disaster, poor whites and blacks might join hands in a united struggle; racists brutally tried to prevent such unity, and to counter the increased influence of antiracism in American intellectual life. There was also the evidence, visible most sharply in the rise of Hitlerism in Germany and Italian aggression against Ethiopia, of the linkage between fascism and racism. The political left, notably that section of it affiliated with the Communist Party, gained wider support among African Americans. A nationwide and indeed international movement against the “legal” lynching that again and again made a mockery of southern “justice” took form in the Scottsboro Case, the 1931 convictions and death sentences inflicted on eight black youths in Alabama on charges that they raped two young white women. This movement succeeded in preventing the carrying out of the executions, despite the anger of southern racists in response to demands for staying the hands of Alabama's executioners. It took, however, until 1950 before the last of the Scottsboro prisoners was released from prison.

In Chicago during August 1931 city police killed three blacks who sought to put an evicted woman's furniture back in her apartment. The subsequent funeral procession became a massive interracial demonstration for justice, but although housing evictions for nonpayment of rent were temporarily suspended, no action was taken to punish the officers who killed the three blacks. In the South, black sharecroppers and tenant farmers organized to protest the terrible poverty and brutality imposed by the region's landlords. At Camp Hall and Reeltown, Alabama sharecroppers enlisted in a Sharecroppers Union, only to be jailed and killed by police. In Missouri during 1939 landlords in the Bootheel section evicted hundreds of sharecroppers from the lands they worked. The evicted farmers, organized by the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, protested by setting up camp along two Missouri highways, but police forcibly removed them, and although all this took place under Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, the federal government took no action.

New York City's Harlem community in 1935 saw an explosion of rebellion against the multifaceted oppression suffered by tens of thousands of blacks. This episode helped expose the innumerable acts of violence and discrimination of which city authorities and property owners were guilty. Following this confrontation a mayor's commission was constituted and a report made public in July 1936. The delay indicated the continuing hesitancy to call general public attention to the woeful conditions existing in New York's black communities. The report presented numerous proposals for easing the racial situation and left no doubt that police brutality was a major element in generating violence. The report stated that Harlemites were aware that disregard of their rights “is due not only to the fact that they are Negroes but also to the fact that they are poor and propertyless and therefore defenseless.” Harlem in 1935 was a harbinger of the racial crisis of the 1960s. As was generally true nationally, protest in the 1930s led to some improvements, but the basic conditions of Jim Crow America remained unchanged.

The most hopeful feature of the decade was a large measure of cooperation between white and African American workers, symbolized in the emergence of the new CIO unions, which organized on an interracial basis. A new development was the formation in 1936 of the National Negro Congress (NNC), a coming together of a broad range of religious, trade union, and fraternal organizations in a united front against reaction at home and fascism on the world scene. The NNC stressed its support of labor unionism and indeed played an active role in bringing collective bargaining to the mass-production industries. Congress president A. Phillip Randolph told the delegates to the 1936 meeting, “Our contemporary history is a witness to the stark fact that black America is a victim of both class and race prejudice and oppression. Because Negroes are black they are hated, maligned and spat upon; lynched, mobbed, and murdered. Because Negroes are workers, they are browbeaten, bullied, intimidated, robed, exploited, jailed and shot down.” He noted the importance of the struggle to end the debt-slavery peonage system, making clear the connection between economic issues and civil rights. The NAACP did not become an affiliate of the congress, but several of the NAACP's leaders, including Roy Wilkins, attended the founding meeting. Wilkins acknowledged that the congress “expressed the willingness of the masses of the people to sacrifice and fight.”

In the 1930s there was a shift in the position taken by W. E. B. Du Bois. While remaining committed to the goal of eliminating segregation, he urged that in the context of the terribly urgent crisis of the decade, blacks needed to turn to independent economic and political organization and to set aside short-term expectation that white America was ready to end Jim Crowism. NAACP secretary Walter White pushed through the NAACP board a resolution that declared that “both principle and practice necessitate unyielding opposition to any and every form of enforced segregation.” Du Bois continued to express his views in the pages of Crisis, and when the NAACP board insisted that no association officer diverge from the organization's policies in the magazine's pages, Du Bois resigned his positions as Crisis editor and NAACP board member. He accepted an invitation from Atlanta University's president John Hope to rejoin that institution's faculty.

The year 1935 saw the appearance of Du Bois's landmark historical work, Black Reconstruction. The book was a powerful rejoinder to the prevalent racist school of Reconstruction historiography, affirming the democratic nature of Reconstruction and stressing the enormous contributions African Americans made to it. Du Bois's scholarship of this period reflected the influence of Marxian thought, and indeed he set forth the generalization that Reconstruction expressed the liberating nature of a dictatorship of the proletariat. At Atlanta University he led a seminar on Marxism. In the 1930s the book did not reach a wide reading audience, but in subsequent years it played a vital role in reshaping the historical perception of Reconstruction.

Changes, and Lack of Change, during World War II.

The racial question took on broader dimensions in the 1940s. At the beginning of the decade there was the joint participation by thousands of black and white workers in a successful struggle by the United Auto Workers to unionize the Ford Motor Company. The national and international context was drastically reshaped by the outbreak of World War II. Preparation for war and the mammoth mobilization of resources required after Pearl Harbor altered the American racial scene. In the course of the war many thousands of black workers found employment in the burgeoning war industries, and other thousands served in the armed forces, despite the military's continuing Jim Crowism. The first months of the American war effort were characterized by exclusion of black workers from the war industry labor market, with the exception of some menial employment. In surveys undertaken by federal agencies, African Americans voiced their consciousness of the divergence between avowed war aims and the racism deeply entrenched in American society. This racism was to be seen in the armed forces themselves, as well as in the civilian sector.

African Americans insisted that a war fought in the name of democracy required altering the racist status quo at home. A major victory was won in 1941 by the March on Washington movement led by A. Phillip Randolph. The movement rallied mass support for a demonstration in the nation's capital that would voice key demands for racial equality. This was in the midst of the Roosevelt administration's mobilization against Axis aggression. It did indeed appear likely that if the march was held, many thousands would participate. In May 1941 a manifesto was issued that began, “Call to Negro America: To March on Washington for Jobs and Equal Participation in National Defense.” Blacks were called upon to fight for jobs in national defense, to struggle for racial integration in the armed forces, and to demonstrate for the abolition of Jim Crowism in all government departments and defense employment. Mass power, it was said, could cause President Roosevelt to issue an executive order giving force to these demands. The call declared, “An ‘all out’ thundering march on Washington, ending in a monster and huge demonstration at Lincoln's Monument, will shake up white America.” Blacks were also summoned to march to city halls and councils, to urge Roosevelt to issue the order. The march and demonstrations were to be “orderly and lawful, but aggressive and militant, for justice, equality and freedom.” Among the call's signers were Randolph, Walter White of the NAACP, Lester Granger of the Urban League, and the historian Rayford Logan. In late June 1941 Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 establishing the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) charged with establishing fair employment in defense-related industries. The march on Washington was thereupon canceled.

The establishment of the FEPC was an important victory, but racial tensions remained high. Harlem's Amsterdam News editorialized, “Where there was once tolerance and acceptance of a position believed to be gradually changing for the better, now the Negro is showing a ‘democratic upsurge of rebellion,’ bordering on open hostility.” The journalist Roi Ottley reported race riots at several army camps, stabbings at Fort Huachuca, killings at Fort Bragg, and a Camp Upton edict “not to shake a nigger's hand.” And, to be sure, the armed forces remained segregated.

Several racial conflicts exploded in American cities during the summer of 1943. Violent confrontation broke out in New York's Harlem in early August. A city policeman shot a soldier, Robert Bandy, at the Hotel Braddock. The incident started rumors that the soldier had been killed, and the outbreak quickly began. Numerous white stores were attacked, while black-owned businesses, especially if they displayed racial identification, were left alone. Pawnshops and groceries headed the roster of establishments ransacked. The New York Post commented that “this whole incident was a naive, peasant-like act of revenge.” Discriminatory housing and employment practices, police brutality, and letters from black servicemen recounting episodes of blatant racism in the military were key factors that set the context for violence. A Brooklyn Urban League official called attention to “the obvious connection between a Negro soldier being shot in Harlem and the numerous reports of unjust attacks on Negro soldiers in the South. Could it be this unbearable correlation which made the flame of anger so hot among Harlem's citizens to start them on the road to blind madness and retribution. It's possible.” Prominent city leaders, including Mayor La Guardia, Walter White of the NAACP, and Ferdinand Smith of the National Maritime Union, toured Harlem, and La Guardia did acknowledge that the community had legitimate grievances. The federal government, however, was largely inactive in the crisis, and the city administration failed to make a commitment to democratizing the city's hiring, housing, and educational practices. Before some measure of order was restored, six people were killed, 550 were arrested, and some 1,450 stores were damaged or destroyed. The author Richard Wright commented, “I don't think it's a race riot—although it has possibilities of turning into one. I had the feeling it was a spontaneous outburst of anger, stemming mainly from the economic pinch. The shooting of the soldier was indeed the spark that set it off.” In terms of remedies, Wright gave first place to alleviating the plight of blacks in the armed forces. The actor Sidney Poitier, a recent arrival to the United States, gave a newspaper his impressions: “In a restaurant downtown where I was working, I heard that there was trouble in Harlem. After work I took a train uptown, came up out of the subway, and there was chaos everywhere—cops, guns, and people running and looting, with shots going off everywhere and debris and broken glass all over the street. Many stores had been set on fire, and the commercial district on 125th Street looked as if it had been bombed.”

The Harlem violence did not come without ample warning. A month earlier in Detroit, the largest wartime racial confrontation shook the arsenal of democracy. Virulent racist organizations, including a revived Ku Klux Klan, a Nazi-inclined National Workers League, and the followers of the homegrown fascist Gerald L. K. Smith, infested the city, setting the framework for bloodshed. The spreading of rumors set off the violence. A fistfight allegedly occurred between a white man and a black man on Belle Isle bridge, which began a rumor that a black baby had been thrown from the bridge, countered by rumors that a black man had killed a white girl. The journalist Thomas Sanction reported that Detroit's mayor had already given the white version of the day's events. Supposedly, blacks began the rioting, wrecked white property, and attacked whites in the black community. But Sanction gave a different version of events:

"Every one of the sixteen victims shot down by Detroit's predominantly southern police force the first day of the rioting were Negroes. The news photographs of the flaming, exploding automobiles show the destruction of Negro property, not white. There are pictures of Negroes lying dead and wounded on the streets; begging for mercy; running like animals before white mobs armed with pipes and beer bottles. Almost without exception, the pictures of those arrested show only Negroes, men and women, lined up like cattle, hands above their heads."

The NAACP counsel Thurgood Marshall was forthright in assessing responsibility for the violence. In his view, there was justification for summoning a grand jury to examine “the nonfeasance and malfeasance of the police as a contributing factor in the Detroit riots.” Marshall called attention to the 1942 incidents at Detroit's Sojourner Truth Housing Project where police sided with a white mob seeking to prevent occupancy by black tenants. His conclusion was that responsibility for the 1943 violence rested with the Detroit police. There was also evidence of the continuing difficulty of moving the Roosevelt administration to take action on behalf of equal rights. The NAACP urged Roosevelt to deliver a fireside speech calling upon Americans to refrain from violence and racial hatred, but this suggestion was ignored. A quite different response from the one the NAACP requested was a proposal Attorney General Francis Biddle made for placing limits on black migration to the cities. The New York and Detroit episodes were not isolated phenomena. According to a Fisk University study, during 1943 some 242 racial battles took place in forty-seven cities. The issue of access to jobs was a substantial component of these clashes. In Mobile white workers attacked blacks when Alabama Dry Dock instituted integrated work on the shipways without informing the union or conducting any educational program. In Cincinnati white workers attacked blacks who had been hired to work on the assembly line at Crosley Manufacturing.

Apart from what took place in the cities there is a long roster of wartime incidents of racial violence in a variety of locations in the United States. These incidents repeatedly called forth protests by blacks. On 25 July 1942 several hundred black New Yorkers marched silently in protest of the execution of Odell Waller, a Virginia sharecropper condemned for supposedly killing his landlord in a dispute over shares. At Sikeston, Missouri, in January 1942, a black man named Cleo Wright was lynched for allegedly having attacked a white woman. Perhaps the sharpest outcry against this murder was a speech, “Sikeston; Hitlerite Crime against America,” delivered by the Communist African American leader William L. Patterson at a St. Louis Washington-Lincoln-Douglas meeting. Patterson called racist violence the domestic counterpart of fascism. He declared, “Death to lynchers, the destroyers of American democracy, is the slogan of victory.”

There is a long list of protests at army camps. During the summer of 1941 forty-three blacks stationed at Camp Custer, Arkansas, abandoned maneuvers after being threatened by a group of armed white men—and it turned out that these men were accompanied by state troopers. At Fort Bragg, North Carolina, a soldier, Ned Thurman, was clubbed by military policemen for objecting to the beating of a fellow black soldier. In wrestling with the whites Thurman seized the gun of one of them and fired a shot, killing one of the MPs. Thurman was in turn killed by the other MP. After this incident several companies of black troops were forced to stand with hands above their heads. At Fort Dix, New Jersey, three soldiers were killed and five wounded in a fifteen-minute battle over the use of a public telephone. At Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania, a white regimental commander posted a notice reading, “Any cases between white and colored males and females, whether voluntary or not, is considered rape and during time of war the penalty is death.” The editor of a Memphis African American newspaper wrote to the Christian Century, “I saw a Negro soldier beaten half to death in the Grand Central Station at Memphis last Tuesday night.” In Florence Murray's Negro Handbook, 1946–1947 there is an extensive listing of wartime racial violence in the armed forces. Recent scholarship has shown that many white liberals and some black leaders confined themselves to platitudes about “good” race relations.

With the coming of victory in the war, African Americans expressed their determination that the postwar racial scene be different from what it had been before. In 1944 W. E. B. Du Bois returned to the NAACP, taking the position of Director of Research. In April 1945 he represented the association at the founding meeting of the United Nations, held at San Francisco, lobbying, as he had done at the 1919 Versailles Conference, for international commitment to human rights and against colonialism. In 1946 Du Bois supervised preparation of an NAACP appeal to the UN regarding the denial of rights to African Americans. He contributed an essay in which he declared “that the disfranchisement of the American Negro makes the functioning of all democracy in the nation difficult; and as democracy fails to function in the leading democracy in the world, it fails in the world.” He also stated that the federal government “had continually cast its influence with imperial aggression throughout the world and withdrawn its sympathy from the colored peoples and from the small nations. It has become through private investment a part of the imperialistic bloc which is controlling the colonies of the world.” Du Bois became increasingly critical of the Truman administration, and in 1948 he was discharged from his NAACP position when he wrote an article expressing his personal support for Henry Wallace's third-party presidential candidacy. The NAACP continued its civil rights program but was unwilling to break with Harry Truman.

A perspective on the postwar future was also articulated by Horace Cayton, coauthor of the classic study of Chicago, Black Metropolis. The war, Cayton wrote, had produced a new spirit of internationalism among African Americans. Blacks had now taken a position of full participation in the war effort so as to enable them to help shape the peace. Detroit's African American newspaper, the Michigan Chronicle, also called for a realization of the broader implications of the war. The struggle against the Axis was a world revolution, and that meant that the war had accelerated hopes for a new America and even a new world. The United States was fortunate in that the job could be done “without resorting to violence and bloodshed.”

The link between wartime America and the future was also expressed in a soldier's letter: “Those of us who are in the armed services are offering our lives and fortunes, not for the America we know today, but for the America we hope will be created after the war.” Another soldier wrote: “A new Negro will return from the war—a bitter Negro if he is disappointed again. He will have been taught to kill, to suffer, to die for something he believes in, and he will live by these rules to gain his personal rights.” Official America, however, was slow in coming to grips with these deep aspirations.

After the War: Martin Luther King Jr.

The postwar years gave much evidence of racist America's zeal for perpetuating racial violence. An episode that epitomized such racial cruelty was the blinding of the African American veteran Isaac Woodard by the Batesburg, South Carolina, police chief Lynwood Shull. Riding a bus through South Carolina's piedmont, Woodard asked the driver to make a rest stop, to which the driver replied, “Hell, no,” drawing the reply, “Dammit, you've got to talk to me like a man.” The driver determined to have Woodard arrested, and at Batesburg, Shull assaulted him. President Truman appeared shocked by this incident when it was recounted to him by a civil rights delegation.

Other major incidents of violence included the lynch murder in Georgia of four black farmworkers, Roger and Dorothy Malcolm and George and May Dorsey; the police assault in 1946 upon the black community of Columbia, Tennessee; the beating of four Freedom Riders engaged in a “Journey of Reconciliation” in 1947 at Chapel Hill, North Carolina; the 1946 police murder in Freeport, New York, of two black veterans, Charles and Alonzo Ferguson; the 1947 mob lynching of construction worker Willie Earle in South Carolina; the mob assault in 1949 at an open-air concert by Paul Robeson at Peekskill, New York; and the 1949 stoning and firing of shotguns at the Clarendon County, South Carolina, church of minister Joseph Albert Delaine, followed in 1951 by the burning of his home and church. Reverend Delaine was a leader in the struggle for school desegregation that resulted in 1954 in the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision. This brief listing can be supplemented by scores of other incidents.

At the beginning of the 1950s two episodes of legal lynching drew national attention. These events were in keeping with the long trend of executing blacks, using the forms of law while denying actual due process. One was the 1951 execution of Willie McGee in Laurel, Mississippi, on charges of raping a white woman, although there was much reason to believe that the relationship was consensual. The electrocution took place in a courtroom with hundreds crowding the outside lawns, cheering. Another such murder, also in 1951, was the execution of seven Virginia black men known as the Martinsville 7. An atrocity that deeply penetrated the national consciousness was the 1955 Mississippi lynching of Emmett Till, fourteen. Till had allegedly “wolf-whistled” at a white woman. He was subsequently seized, beaten, shot, and thrown into the Tallahatchie River with the fan of a cotton gin tied around his neck. Sizable protest demonstrations took place in a number of cities. In Chicago thousands viewed the open casket bearing Till's body.

The mid-1950s brought a turning point in the struggle against racial injustice. On 17 May 1954 Chief Justice Earl Warren read out the Supreme Court's unanimous ruling in the Brown case, and it soon became clear that implementation of desegregation depended on the outcome of the conflict between civil rights advocates and segregationists. Of historic dimensions was the 1955–1956 Montgomery bus boycott, which undermined the pretense that southern blacks found Jim Crow conditions tolerable. The boycott was triggered by the arrest of Mrs. Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her seat on a bus and yield to segregated seating policies. Leadership in preparing for the boycott came from ministers and from the city's Women's Political Union. It was in this confrontation that Martin Luther King Jr. emerged as a charismatic leader of a mass movement that could develop the power to move millions. King's leadership role was facilitated by his roots in the black church, his remarkable eloquence, and his ability to communicate his message to both African Americans and whites. He infused into the movement the values of Christian belief, democratic American tradition, and Gandhian nonviolence. After a boycott lasting some ten months, the Supreme Court on 13 November 1956 held that segregation in Alabama intrastate bus transportation was unconstitutional.

From the onset of his leadership, it was clear that King saw nonviolence as applicable both to American society at home and also to the world crisis of threatened nuclear war. Rejecting what he viewed as the materialism of Marxism, King was also critical of the exploitative nature of capitalism. King's philosophy was not one of passivity but of active struggle for fundamental social change. The biographer Taylor Branch has made the case for viewing King as probably the central figure in post–World War II American history. Given King's extraordinary role, it was inevitable that racists would single him out for attack and seek to smear him as a Communist, and that the fanatic FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, unchecked by the White House, waged a vendetta against King, seeking by every possible means to remove him from the national scene.

King quickly became the target of violence. On 30 January 1956 the King family home in Montgomery was bombed, and there were constant mail and telephone threats. In 1960 Dr. King was arrested in the course of an Atlanta sit-in and sentenced to a jail term of four months for violating probation on a charge of not having a current Georgia driving license. He was hurriedly transferred to the isolated state prison at Reidsville, engendering urgent fears for his safety. It was only the intervention of John and Robert Kennedy that secured his release. Later, in 1965, he was assaulted in Selma by a member of the American Nazi Party.

The movement, of course, was based on far more than King's individual leadership. In 1957 King became head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Beyond SCLC, such organizations as the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) and the newly formed Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) played major roles in the struggle. SNCC grew out of the 1960 student lunch-counter sit-ins in cities throughout the South. The sit-ins involved a new generation of black youth no longer willing to put up with Jim Crowism, and in the face of assaults and threats they succeeded in desegregating numerous eating places. SNCC, drawing white and African American activists from both the South and the North to its ranks, undertook programs of voter registration and desegregation of public facilities in a variety of communities, including those of deeply repressive Mississippi. The names of many SNCC workers—James Forman, Fannie Lou Hamer, Julian Bond, Ruby Doris Smith, and Robert Moses—are writ large in the history of the civil rights revolution.

Robert Moses was a prime articulator of a movement philosophy that differed from that of SCLC. Committed to nonviolence, Moses would base the movement on “participatory democracy,” on a “from the bottom up” concept of leadership. In such a framework SNCC workers were facilitators and links to the outside world, while crucial decision-making authority rested with those being organized. The voice of a plantation worker, such as Mrs. Hamer, mattered as much or more than that of an Ivy League graduate.

The next few years brought expanded demonstrative activities and crucial victories, especially in the Deep South, that broke the back of the Jim Crow system. The 1961 Freedom Rides, the campaign to desegregate interstate bus transportation and terminal facilities, brought victory in a federal ruling outlawing discrimination. As was usually true, this victory did not come without casualties: in Montgomery and Birmingham the riders were set upon by Klansmen and beaten. Upon their arrival in Jackson, the riders were immediately arrested and carried off to of Parchman prison with its vicious conditions. The historian David Oshinsky writes that in the 1960s “Mississippi officials used the Delta prison to house—and break down—those who challenged its racist customs and segregation laws.” A climax of the struggle was the 1963 confrontation at Birmingham, where, in the face of pressure hoses and snarling dogs, thousands of demonstrators, including many schoolchildren, captured the attention of the world. The Birmingham struggle was led by the SCLC after careful calculation that the city symbolized the core of southern racism and that the movement could draw upon a considerable base of local support. That support was led by the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, who had organized the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights after the state outlawed the NAACP. On Christmas Day 1956 Shuttlesworth's parsonage was bombed, but this indomitable leader was not to be intimidated. And it was in Birmingham that King had written his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” while in jail for leading a protest demonstration. King reserved his sharpest criticism for the so-called “moderates” who counseled gradualism. The Birmingham struggle resulted in a compromise settlement that struck down some of the segregationist barriers. The Birmingham struggle also resulted in President Kennedy delivering a televised speech in which he urged enactment of civil rights legislation.

In August 1963 tens of thousands of Americans, black and white, assembled in Washington in a nonviolent “March for Freedom and Jobs.” The crowd listened with rapt attention as Dr. King delivered his magnificent “I Have a Dream” speech, a speech that sealed King's role as the foremost leader of the civil rights movement. The march exceeded expectations, offering hope that civil rights would move through Congress. But less than a month later there was a response from some of the nation's most violent haters. Klansmen set off a bomb at Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four girls: eleven-year-old Denise McNair and fourteen-year-olds Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins. Long years would pass before any of the killers would be brought to justice.

In the summer of 1964 the Civil Rights Act was passed and signed. But a decisive issue of citizenship rights, the voting franchise, remained unresolved. That issue came to the fore with the launching of a voter registration drive in Selma, Alabama. Earlier, in 1963, SNCC had undertaken a registration campaign and had drawn a number of prominent public figures to join the struggle in Selma, but little progress had been made beyond exposing the lawlessness of local police. Now, in the winter of 1964–1965, SCLC decided to center its work in Selma, to make this Alabama city a powerful lever toward forcing the federal government to take action on the right to vote, despite President Johnson's contention that the timing was premature. The Selma struggle came on the heels of the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Dr. King, an honoring of King that drove J. Edgar Hoover to obstruct any celebration of this event. Selma witnessed the confrontation between the forces of civil rights and the brutality of Selma officialdom, symbolized by the quintessential racism of Dallas County sheriff Jim Clark. The confrontation appeared to be stalemated until the “Bloody Sunday” of 7 March when hundreds sought to march to Montgomery, Alabama's capital, to lay their grievances before the state government. Americans everywhere were shocked by the televised scenes of marchers beaten and teargased as they attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. On 15 March Johnson urged enactment of a voting rights bill, and when a federal judge lifted an injunction against further marches, hundreds—led by King and with protection from the military—began the historic march to Montgomery, joining thousands who had come from all parts of the nation. The Selma struggle brought victory in the form of congressional enactment of the Voting Rights Act.

The Selma struggle was accompanied by casualties. The decision to march to Montgomery had followed a state trooper's murder of the woodcutter Jimmie Lee Jackson during a demonstration at nearby Marion. A Unitarian minister, James Reeb, was fatally beaten on 9 March, and the day of the assemblage in Montgomery a Detroit civil rights volunteer, Viola Liuzzo, was shot and killed by Klansmen as she drove along the highway from Montgomery into Selma. Another volunteer drawn to the Selma confrontation, the Episcopal seminarian Jonathan Daniels, was killed at nearby Hayneville, seat of Lowndes County. It was in Lowndes County that the Black Panther Party, an expression of black political self-determination, was formed.

Months before Selma the realization that the racism of the Deep South represented a national crisis that demanded resolution exploded with the 1964 “Mississippi Freedom Summer.” In that state Klansmen and state police had become intertwined, and violence against supporters of civil rights was endemic. Mississippi was indeed the “closed society” vividly portrayed by the historian James Silver. It was in Mississippi in 1962 that the opening of the state university to an African American applicant, James Meredith, required a massing of federal marshals and troops. It was in the state's capital, Jackson, that the NAACP leader Medgar Evers in June 1963 was assassinated by the white supremacist fanatic Byron de la Beckwith. In 1964 several civil rights organizations, most notably SNCC, rallied hundreds of volunteers to come to Mississippi to work for civil rights. Shortly after the project got under way, three of the volunteers, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney, were murdered, an atrocity that exposed police complicity in Klan violence and the federal government's failure to protect civil rights workers even when it was clear their lives were in danger. The Freedom Summer evolved into a challenge of the seating of the segregationist Mississippi delegates at the 1964 Democratic convention, but the Johnson administration blocked this challenge.

Following the climactic struggles of 1964–1965, the civil rights struggle became enmeshed with the economic oppression of African Americans and the Johnson administration's Vietnam War. Johnson had pledged a “war on poverty,” but national resources were drained to support the Vietnam War. In this context a series of urban rebellions in ghettos of the North and West erupted, raging in such cities as Newark, New York City, Rochester, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles. Scores were killed and large areas devastated. King was prescient in his warning that the bombs dropped on Vietnam would explode in violence in America's cities. SNCC stepped forward to take a position against the Vietnam War, and in 1967 Dr. King challenged the morality of the war, setting it in a context of imperialism and racism. Those who thought King would stand aside from the war question had never rightly understood him. In the winter of 1967–1968 he spurred organization of a “Poor People's March” to Washington, but he was never to lead that demonstration. In April 1968 he had come to Memphis to give his support to a strike of the city's sanitation workers. By this time he had been denounced by much of America's media and political establishment. King was assassinated at Memphis on 4 April, an event that caused rebellions in a number of cities. A new, complicated stage in the struggle for human rights was now to unfold. Martin Luther King symbolized a legacy, and it was and is important that this legacy be rightly understood, not only as one of passive nonviolence but also as one of militant struggle for the fundamental reshaping of American society.

Contemporary America.

In the late 1960s the Black Panther Party (BPP), centered in the San Francisco Bay area of California, appeared as a new expression of militancy on the national scene. Adopting its name from the Panther Party of Alabama, the BPP signified commitment to armed self-defense against racial violence, particularly police violence. The organization also identified with revolutionary nationalism throughout the world and condemned what it viewed as the American imperialist adventure in Vietnam. It was at Oakland's Merritt College that Huey Newton and Bobby Seale took the first steps to organize the new movement. Shortly thereafter Eldridge Cleaver, a talented writer who had been imprisoned following sexual assault charges, became editor of the BPP's newspaper, and his book Soul on Ice became a best seller. The Panthers achieved considerable popularity among urban African Americans and radical whites. The Panthers drew considerable attention when a group of members carrying rifles entered the halls of the California legislature in Sacramento. They also gained standing in black communities by organizing breakfast programs for ghetto children.

Government agencies quickly determined that the Panthers constituted a dire threat and that any and all expedient means might be used against them. In keeping with the FBI's COINTELPRO operation, initially undertaken against the Communist Party, various provocations targeting the Panthers were carried out. In Los Angeles the bureau worked successfully to instigate violence between the BPP and the cultural nationalist group Us, led by Ron Karenga. On 4 December 1969 Chicago police, using information supplied by an FBI informer, raided an apartment where Black Panthers lived and sprayed the premises with gunfire, killing the BPP leader Fred Hampton and another Panther, Mark Clark. That same year in New York City the “Panther 21” were arrested on conspiracy charges; the twenty-one defendants were acquitted on all charges in 1971. In 1970 there was the killing of the Panther prisoner George Jackson. He had become one of the most outspoken radicals among the nation's prisoners and introduced fellow inmates to ideas of Marxism and black nationalism. The result was the coming together of a group known as the Soledad Brothers.

Beyond prison, the university professor Angela Davis championed the cause of Jackson and his comrades. When George Jackson's younger brother Jonathan smuggled guns into the Marin County Courthouse during a trial of one of the Soledad Brothers, a shoot-out with police resulted in the deaths of three people, including the judge. Angela Davis was indicted on murder charges for allegedly supplying the guns to Jackson, but following an international defense campaign she was acquitted. The government's actions against the Panthers were a warning of the extreme measures officialdom might embrace in the name of national security. Howard Zinn asked a most pertinent question regarding official repression of the Panthers: “Was the government turning to murder and terror because the concessions—the legislation, the speeches, the intonation of the civil rights hymn ‘We Shall Overcome’ by President Lyndon Johnson—were not working?”

A result of George Jackson's murder was the Attica prison, New York, rebellion of September 1971. African Americans made up 54 percent of Attica's prison population. The news from Soledad brought to the boiling point long-festering inmate grievances. On 9 September prisoners took over four of the prison yards and held forty guards as hostages. Outside observers were invited inside by prisoners, one of them the New York Times columnist Tom Wicker, who reported, “That prison yard was the first place I have ever seen where there was no racism.”

After five days a military attack, approved by Governor Nelson Rockefeller, was launched against the prisoners. Thirty-one prisoners and nine guards were killed, all of them by the national guardsmen, prison guards, and local police who carried out the attack. Later public probes and court suits disclosed much about the appalling conditions that prevailed at Attica and other state prisons, and indictments against Attica rebels were dropped. Conditions within the prison system became a national issue. The United States, however, was at the threshold of a vast increase in the number of people held in prisons.

An issue that has challenged the nation's conscience in recent years is the death penalty, to which most of the nation's states and indeed the federal government itself have continued to adhere. During the presidency of Bill Clinton, the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act was passed. In 1972 in Furman v. Georgia, the Supreme Court overturned all existing death penalty laws on grounds of their arbitrariness. But during the next four years states rewrote their death penalty statutes and in 1976, in Gregg v. Georgia, the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty. Constitutional law scholar David R. Dow has noted that “a disproportionate number of capital murder defendants are black.” Dow adds that “black Americans face forms of racism that whites do not, including poorer medical care, higher disapproval rates on mortgage applications, and so on; and one instance of racism is reflected in the criminal justice system.” A study of homicides in Georgia discloses that murderers of whites were between four and five times as likely to be sentenced to death as murderers of blacks. There is also clear evidence that blacks charged with rape-murder are much more likely to suffer the death penalty than whites so charged. The historical context of the death penalty is a matter raised by such scholars as Stephen B. Bright and David Oshinsky. Bright has flatly stated that “the death penalty is a direct descendant of lynching and other forms of racial violence and racial oppression in America.”

Police brutality against African Americans has a long history, but this problem has escalated in recent years. In December 1979 Arthur McDuffie, a black insurance executive, was beaten to death by police officers in Dade County, Florida. When a jury returned not-guilty verdicts against officers involved, Miami's black and poor communities of Liberty City, Brownsville, Overton, and Coconut Grove resorted to setting buildings afire, looting, and throwing rocks and bottles at police. At least 400 people were injured, several killed, and more than 1, 250 arrested. Los Angeles, in 1992, was the scene of a major rebellion following the acquittal of police officers brought to trial for a savage beating, recorded on camera, of a motorist named Rodney King. The historian Robin Kelley writes that “Los Angeles experienced the most widespread and devastating urban uprising in the history of the United States.” At least fifty-eight people were killed (twenty-six African Americans among them) and thousands were injured.

Although police brutality is clearly a nationwide reality, events in Cincinnati have come to typify a law-enforcement system as yet unable to curb police brutality. In 2001 an unarmed African American youth, Timothy Thomas, was shot and killed by a city police officer. This event aroused outrage in Cincinnati, across the nation, and internationally. Many voices were heard, from ghetto residents to prominent public personalities, demanding that the city confront its pervasive racism. One of the matters called to public attention was the police system of racial profiling in determining which persons were to be arrested. Within a few years several other black Cincinnatians were killed by police, without just cause.

While overt lynching has largely been replaced by judicial execution, lynching's echo is still with us. In 1998 in Jasper, Texas, a black man, James R. Byrd Jr., was chained to a pickup truck and dragged to death. Three white supremacists were arrested and charged with his murder. Going beyond these individuals, however, the Texas NAACP and other organizations called for a national investigation into hate crimes and the terrorist organizations responsible for them.

The evidence noted in this volume and others in the African American History Reference Series suggest the magnitude of contradiction between the avowed national traditions of democracy and the reality of a social order of inequality in which violence plays a fundamental role in keeping that order in place. As demonstrated in the overturning of the systems of formal segregation and racial disfranchisement, this social order is not impervious to change, but the process of change is yet to be completed.

Boy's Murder. Signs protest the fatal police shooting of the thirteen-year-old Devin Brown in South Los Angeles, 2005. Brown led the police on a car chase that ended in his backing into a police car before being shot. Photograph by Damian Dovarganes.

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[See also COINTELPRO; Federal Bureau of Investigation; Laws and Legislation; Lynching and Mob Violence; Orangeburg Massacre; Racial Profiling; Riots and Rebellions; Rodney King Riots; Segregation; and biographical entries on figures mentioned in this article.]

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