A Different Day Read online

  As the threat of war in Europe loomed in the late 1930s, the Roosevelt administration worked to support the western democracies and prepare the United States for possible intervention. By this time many people, including former pacifists, were convinced that taking up arms was the only way to prevent the further expansion of Nazi Germany. But others remained unconvinced that events taking place in a far-off continent could have any relevance to themselves. Given their experiences in the aftermath of World War I, African Americans were understandably ambivalent. In 1936 a tenant farmer in St. Landry Parish expressed a common view among black people when he stated: “The only thing that made me sorry was when the world was in war before. They picked us up and registered us and sent us to war to fight for our country. Now the country is quieted down and steady and the government doing with us just like a man would do with an old poor dog. If they was going to fight again we would sit right here.”2

  Although many black Louisianans eventually supported the war effort, many also continued to voice suspicion and mistrust. In May 1940 a group of black newspaper editors and business leaders in New Orleans warned President Roosevelt that the “un-American practices against the Negroes of this state” were having a detrimental effect on black people's willingness to participate in defense preparations. Some African Americans had “shown evidences of revolt against anything sponsored by the officials of this state for the promotion of the Defense Program,” they said, and were “advocating non-cooperation and rebuke to the fullest extent.”3 The federal government's own regional analyst in Louisiana, Edgar Schuler, also reported widespread dissatisfaction among the state's black residents. As he put it, “The dumbest plantation Negro can't see why he should fight to save Germans from Hitler when he has a Hitler right over him on his plantation.”4

  Accounts such as these caused much consternation at the Office of War Information (OWI) and other federal agencies responsible for monitoring and directing public opinion about the conflict. Throughout the war government officials kept a close watch on African Americans, assigning bureaucratic armies to tasks such as scanning black newspapers and magazines, visiting the headquarters of civil rights groups, gathering and analyzing information from around the country, and conducting special investigations to assess the state of “Negro morale.” The Chicago Defender did not exaggerate when it reported that administrators in Washington could hardly wait until Thursday of each week to “grab a ‘Negro paper’ and find out how the wind blows.”5 In June 1942 FBI director J. Edgar Hoover commissioned a special survey on racial conditions in the United States to assess the threat of subversive activity among the nation's black citizens.6 The reports that resulted from these efforts often concluded the obvious: to gain African Americans’ wholehearted support for the war, it was necessary to eliminate discrimination—at least in the armed forces, civilian defense training, and industrial employment, if not in all aspects of American life.7

  African Americans did not wait patiently for state and national political leaders to grant them these things. As during World War I, hundreds of thousands of black people left the South to seek better jobs and living conditions elsewhere.8 Louisiana's net gain in black population between 1940 and 1950 makes it difficult to tell exactly how many black Louisianans left the state during this period, but census data for individual parishes provide some indication of the extent of black migration from the various regions. All but four of the cotton plantation parishes reported decreases in their black populations ranging from 4 to 31 percent. Seven of the thirteen sugar parishes also lost some of their black residents, with the parishes located near Baton Rouge losing the most. At the same time, parishes with cities of ten thousand people or more gained in black population at an average rate of 26 percent, suggesting that many African Americans left the countryside to seek new jobs in urban areas. (See Table 6.1.) A notice that appeared in the Madison Journal in May 1943 is also revealing. Out of thirty-five local black men who were called to military service that month, only six still resided in Madison Parish. Nineteen of the missing men had moved to either California or Nevada, one had gone to Chicago, and the remaining nine were living in cities in Louisiana or in other southern states.9

  The armed forces provided black Louisianans with another avenue of escape from the plantations. Reservations about sacrificing their lives for an imperfect democracy aside, joining the military offered opportunities for training and employment that few black people could have gained otherwise. In 1940 pressure from national civil rights groups persuaded Congress to include prohibitions on discrimination in the Selective Training and Service Act, raising hopes that African Americans might be treated equally in the selection and training of military personnel. In April the following year, the Madison Journal reported that many black men in the parish had eagerly signed up for service. “Several colored citizens here remarked during the week that if another trainload of negro soldiers passed through Tallulah, there would not be a young negro left,” the article stated. So far the local draft board had managed to fill all of its black quotas with volunteers and had a waiting list of fifty men.10

  With the creation of the Women's Auxiliary Army Corp (WAAC) in May 1942, the possibility of military service was also opened to black women. Recruitment officers for the WAAC and its successor, the Women's Army Corp (WAC), toured Louisiana in 1943 and 1944, encouraging women to join up through appeals to their pocketbooks as much as their patriotism. The WAC offered women a fifty-dollar-per-month salary plus free housing, meals, uniforms, and medical care, along with the chance to train in a variety of careers. Courses to prepare them for jobs as clerks, stenographers, bookkeepers, typists, airplane mechanics, radio operators, and chauffeurs were among those on a list that one officer stated “would fill a college catalogue.”11 African Americans who served in the military often achieved levels of education, skills, and economic security that were unheard of among rural black people, in addition to being exposed to new people, ideas, and social settings outside their home state.12

  For black people who remained in Louisiana, defense preparations created new employment opportunities. Early in 1941 construction work began on several military training camps and airports in northern and southeastern Louisiana. In April, state employment analysts reported that landowners in the region were having difficulty finding tenants and day laborers, since many farmworkers had abandoned the plantations for the higher wages they could earn on construction projects. Only a handful of these people returned to their former employers when the building boom ended. J. H. Crutcher informed WPA officials in Washington that “because of the great difference between the rate paid farm labor, from $.75 to $1.50 a day, and that of $3.20 paid at the camps, many are putting off accepting employment or seeking reinstatement on W.P.A. because of their hope that further work, such as the cantonments, will develop.” Over the next few years new shipbuilding and ordnance plants located in Baton Rouge, Shreveport, Lake Charles, and Erath continued to act as magnets for farmworkers from the surrounding parishes, exacerbating the problems of planters but greatly increasing the economic prospects of the African Americans employed in them.13

  Black people who continued to work on the plantations also benefited from

  Table 6.1 African American Migration in Louisiana during World War II

  Number of African Americans in Parish

  Parish 1940 1950 Percentage Change

  Cotton Parishes

  Avoyelles 10,556 9,907 –6

  Bossier 16,654 13,883 –17

  Catahoula 5,345 4,145 –22

  Claiborne 17,083 12,952 –24

  Concordia 9,767 8,519 –13

  De Soto 20,114 13,812 –31

  East Carroll 12,784 9,936 –22

  East Feliciana 11,649 11,137 –4

  Franklin 12,628 10,770 –15

  Madison 12,775 11,545 –10

  Morehouse 16,129 15,418 –4

  Natchitoches 19,946 17,048 –15

  Red River 7,987 6,056 –24
>
  Richland 13,057 10,926 –16

  St. Landry 33,815 35,009 +4

  Tensas 11,194 8,563 –24

  Webster 14,246 13,018 –9

  West Carroll 4,248 3,117 –27

  West Feliciana 8,954 7,239 –19

  Sugar Parishes

  Ascension 7,948 7,916 –(-)a

  Assumption 7,530 7,226 –4

  Iberville 14,171 13,049 –8

  Lafourche 5,635 5,243 –7

  Plaquemines 5,410 5,462 +1

  Pointe Coupee 13,556 11,725 –14

  St. Charles 3,909 4,349 +11

  St. James 8,228 7,706 –6

  St. John the Baptist 6,876 7,411 +8

  St. Martin 9,651 9,734 +1

  St. Mary 14,242 13,644 –4

  Terrebonne 8,823 8,814 +(-)

  West Baton Rouge 6,859 6,240 –9

  Rice/Grain Parishes

  Acadia 8,319 8,994 +8

  Allen 4,421 4,373 –1

  Beauregard 2,593 3,023 +17

  Cameron 670 583 –13

  Jefferson Davis 6,015 5,683 –6

  Vermilion 5,043 4,698 –7

  Subsistence/Truck Parishes

  Bienville 11,491 9,407 –18

  Caldwell 3,496 2,936 –16

  Evangeline 6,999 7,553 +8

  Grant 3,979 3,454 –13

  Jackson 5,612 4,592 –18

  La Salle 1,337 1,376 +3

  Lincoln 11,239 10,362 –8

  Livingston 2,639 2,951 +12

  Sabine 4,760 4,291 –10

  St. Bernard 1,405 1,614 +15

  St. Helena 5,048 4,785 –5

  St. Tammany 7,303 7,922 +8

  Tangipahoa 15,042 16,589 +10

  Union 7,259 6,623 –9

  Vernon 2,420 2,216 –8

  Winn 4,278 4,415 +3

  Parishes with Cities of 10,000 People or More

  Caddo 63,793 66,361 +4

  Calcasieu 14,952 20,563 +38

  East Baton Rouge 33,634 52,262 +55

  Iberia 13,447 12,965 –4

  Jefferson 8,475 16,138 +90

  Lafayette 14,098 15,727 +12

  Orleans 149,034 181,775 +22

  Ouachita 21,020 24,647 +17

  Rapides 26,899 29,967 +11

  Washington 10,814 12,064 +12

  Total for Louisiana 849,303 882,428 +4

  SOURCE: Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Population, Volume 2: Characteristics of the Population, Part 3: Kansas–Michigan (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1943), 362–65, 421, 435, and A Report of the Seventeenth Decennial Census of the United States, Census of Population: 1950, Volume 2: Characteristics of the Population, Part 18: Louisiana (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1952), 49–50, 78–81.

  a(-) indicates less than 0.5 percent.

  the war. Competition for labor forced planters to raise wage rates and offer tenants more appealing work contracts. Anticipating as much, Congress extended the Sugar Act for three years past its initial expiration date of December 1941 and gave growers a 33.5 percent increase in subsidies to enable them to match the wage scales offered by other employers. Consequently, minimum wages for adult male sugarcane cutters rose from $1.50 per day in 1941 to $1.85 in 1942. The following year, many growers found it necessary for the first time to pay more than the minimum rate determined by the Department of Agriculture, increasing average wages during the harvest season by approximately 46 percent. Observers recorded similar increases for day laborers in the cotton parishes.14 A study conducted in 1943 noted that because of the demand for personnel in industry and the armed forces, “Even the farm laborer and migratory worker are being comparatively well paid for the first time in their lives.” In 1945 Louisiana reported a farm wage bill of $30,102,470, an increase of 107 percent over the $14,546,990 paid to agricultural workers in 1940.15

  The need to raise agricultural production to levels sufficient for feeding

  African American company of the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps in training at Fort Des Moines, Iowa, May 1943. Service in the armed forces and their auxiliaries did not insulate black military personnel from discrimination or persecution during World War II, but it did offer a measure of economic security as well as training opportunities that most African Americans had not previously had access to. RG 111-SC-238651, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

  European allies as well as Americans once again resulted in the expansion of the Agricultural Extension Service. Funds allocated by the War Food Administration enabled the states to hire more African American agents to work with black farmers, and a nationwide “Food for Freedom” campaign exhorted all rural families to grow their own food so that more would be available for domestic and foreign consumers.16 Louisiana administrators announced plans to contact every farmer in the state, promising to provide all the assistance that was available from the various farm agencies to those who agreed to cooperate with the program. Pointe Coupee Parish extension agent A. B. Curet declared, “This is the finest opportunity we have ever had to achieve a balanced agriculture, increase our income, improve our standard of living, make our farms better farms and at the same time aid national defense.” After visiting Louisiana and several other states in 1942, two

  Black laborers awaiting transport to a construction project in Camp Livingston, Louisiana, December 1940. Defense preparations created new jobs and lured thousands of rural people away from the plantations even before the United States officially entered World War II. LC-USF34-56690-D, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

  officials from the Department of Agriculture reported that landlords who had formerly prevented workers from growing their own food were now “encouraging and occasionally requiring their tenants to grow a variety of foodstuffs.”17 Landowners risked being labeled unpatriotic if they refused to allow tenants and sharecroppers to cultivate “victory gardens.” Wartime exigencies therefore forced planters to concede on issues that had long concerned black people in their struggle for economic independence.

  African Americans’ new prosperity fueled an increase in civil rights activity during the war. At the same time, wartime rhetoric and the government's need to unite people behind mobilization efforts provided black Americans with powerful leverage in the fight against injustice. A special issue of the black New Orleans newspaper Sepia Socialite published in 1942 was filled with references to the dual meaning of the war for African Americans. In one article, Bishop S. L. Green wrote, “the Negro marches on with America, but not blindly. When he defends the United States of America abroad, he does not want to be disenfranchised and unjustly treated at home.” In a foreword to the work, George Schuyler urged black Louisianans to take advantage of the war to demand equality. “Let them resolve that not only will they enjoy democracy and freedom AFTER this great world struggle is over, but that they must have them HERE and NOW,” he wrote. “Let them insist with all the force and eloquence at their command that for them democracy must begin AT HOME, in Louisiana, and that they want it to begin AT ONCE.”18 Staff at the FBI's New Orleans Field Division reported that the state's other black newspapers had adopted a similar tone. According to these agents, African American editors and publishers were conducting “a militant campaign for equal rights as well as those against social, economic and political discrimination” and often exploited the war situation to threaten the withdrawal of black people's support if conditions did not change.19

  Civil rights organizations like the Urban League, the NAACP, and the newly formed March on Washington Movement (MOWM) engaged in similar campaigns. The NAACP increased its presence in Louisiana during the war, with local activists managing to charter more than thirty branches by the end of 1946. The strongest chapters were in urban areas like New Orleans and Baton Rouge, but the organization also reached into Iberville, Concordia, Madison, St. Landry, and other rural parishes.20 In the early 1940s the NAACP worked with the Louisiana Colored Teachers’ Association (LCTA) and local civil rights groups to pressure school boards to equalize white and black teachers’ salaries
. African American leaders used the rhetoric of the nation's war propaganda to argue the case for justice. In April 1943 the Iberville Parish Improvement Committee presented a petition to school board officials that stated, “We approach this problem in the Democratic way—the way for which our sons and other loved ones are sacrificing their lives on foreign battle fields with the hope that this honorable body will deal with the matter in the American spirit of fair play, granting to the Negro teachers their appeal for equal pay for equal work.” Two months later LCTA president J. K. Haynes warned Governor Sam Jones that the state might soon suffer from a shortage of black teachers unless they were treated fairly. “Many of our teachers are leaving the profession going to defense area and other high salaried positions due to inability to make a living wage teaching,” he observed. “We humble urge that you use your influence to the realization of equalization of economic opportunity in the teaching profession in this state which is in keeping with the American ideal of democracy.”21

  Working-class black people made up a large proportion of the NAACP's membership, and they were also vital participants in the March on Washington Movement.22 As government analysts noted, the MOWM's focus on gaining equal job opportunities for black people held enormous appeal to thousands of African Americans. One report explained: “It is in regard to job discrimination that Negroes feel the deepest rancor. They recognize that economic opportunity is the basic remedy for all of the injustices which they suffer. They are distressed by social discrimination, by segregation, by the unfortunate living conditions imposed upon them and by other disadvantages. But interviewing indicates that their prime concern at present is over their economic handicaps.”23 In war industry centers like California's East Bay area, migrants from the rural South strongly supported the NAACP's and the MOWM's organizing efforts. There and in other cities across the nation, former tenants and sharecroppers who joined the industrial working class continued their struggles for economic independence and political influence, pursuing long-standing goals in new contexts with new methods. The threat of mass demonstrations if the government failed to act against racism persuaded President Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 8802 in June 1941, banning discrimination against black workers by unions and employers who held government contracts and creating the President's Committee on Fair Employment Practice (FEPC) to monitor the hiring procedures of companies.24