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  Though federal authorities had thus far failed to prevent violence against African Americans, there were indications that they were becoming more willing to intervene in this area. Since 1939 the Civil Liberties Unit within the Department of Justice had been working on developing ways of using the Constitution and other federal laws to better protect the civil rights of individuals. Through careful study of the legislation, prosecution of court cases, and development of legal precedents, its staff worked to strengthen the government's ability to bring southern lynch mobs and other offenders to justice. These efforts received further impetus when Roosevelt appointed Francis Biddle to the attorney general's office in August 1941. Biddle had expressed a commitment to upholding Americans’ civil liberties, and the appointment received strong support from black leaders. In February 1942 the attorney general took the unprecedented action of ordering a federal investigation into the murder of a black man by a crowd of white people in Missouri. Three years later the Justice Department's civil rights section brought charges against law enforcement officers in Georgia who had administered a fatal beating to a black prisoner in their custody. Neither action resulted in convictions, but they revealed a change in attitude on the part of officials in Washington that seemed an encouraging sign.64

  By far the most significant development of the war years was the Supreme Court's decision to outlaw the system of white-only primary elections in the South. In states where the Democratic Party was assured victory in any contest with Republicans, the only time voters had the opportunity to participate meaningfully in the political process was during the primary elections for Democratic candidates. Party officials argued that theirs was a private organization entitled to restrict its membership to white people. The Court's opinion in Smith v. Allwright (1944) rejected that view, stating that political parties were public entities and could not discriminate against African Americans. The decision removed a major obstacle to black voting in the South and encouraged mass voter registration efforts by the NAACP and other civil rights groups after the war.65

  National political developments continued to favor African Americans through the end of the decade. The emerging Cold War with the Soviet Union and the need to seem credible as leaders of the “free” world meant that national elites remained susceptible to pressure from black Americans to ensure justice and equality within the United States. On taking office after Roosevelt's death in April 1945, President Harry Truman worked to maintain black people's support for his administration by taking several actions on civil rights. In the first year of his administration he advocated establishing a permanent FEPC, ordered the Justice Department to investigate the murders of several black people by white supremacists in Georgia, and appointed a committee to study the problem of racism. In October 1947 the President's Committee on Civil Rights presented its report, To Secure These Rights, urging the government to take sweeping measures to eliminate racial discrimination. Truman spoke on the issue of civil rights before Congress in January 1948, endorsing many of the committee's recommendations for action. He later issued executive orders to establish a Fair Employment Board within the Civil Service Commission and to desegregate the armed forces.66

  Truman's actions precipitated an open split within the Democratic Party between its northern liberal and southern reactionary wings. After a bitter struggle at the party's 1948 national convention over the adoption of a civil rights plank and the nomination of Truman as presidential candidate, dissenting southern “Dixiecrats” organized the States’ Rights Party to contest the coming elections. Their actions failed to prevent the reelection of the president, and Truman carried all the southern states except Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Alabama. An NAACP newsletter stated optimistically that the election results proved that most white Americans supported civil rights and were prepared to see black people treated fairly at last.67

  Whether or not this assessment was accurate, in the late 1940s African Americans were better placed than ever before to engage in organized, sustained attacks on white supremacy. The ideological implications of the war, increased economic opportunity and prosperity, and the federal government's gradual shift toward accepting its responsibility to ensure justice for all Americans suggested that the post–World War II era would bring important developments in the freedom struggle. Both white and black analysts pointed to the gains African Americans had made and predicted far-reaching consequences. Quite simply, as one writer stated, the nation's black citizens were “not content to return to serfdom in the South, or to second-class social and economic status in the industrial North.”68 White Louisianans who viewed these developments with trepidation were right to be afraid. In the next two decades, many of their worst fears were realized.

  7 The Social Order Have Changed:

  The Emergence of the Civil Rights Movement, 1945–1960

  Nora Windon, the registrar of voters in Rapides Parish, must have been alarmed by the letter she received from the leaders of the Alexandria branch of the NAACP in August 1946. The petitioners pointed out that the recent Supreme Court decision in Smith v. Allwright allowed for federal charges to be brought against officials who interfered with the right of any person to register to vote and enclosed statements from several people accusing her of violating the law. “You do not seem to realize that the social order have changed,” they stated. “Over ten thousand Negro men and women died in World War II for ‘World Democracy,’ when you are denying [it] at home. . . . This local branch of over five hundred members are requesting you to eliminate these practices when the books open again next month, when large number will appear to register.”1

  Encouraged by the federal government's tentative support for civil rights and empowered by their improved economic status, black activists in Louisiana launched their strongest assault yet on white supremacy in the post-war years. Local NAACP branches, fraternal orders, teachers’ associations, voters’ leagues, and labor unions worked together to demand an end to discrimination in education, voting, and employment. White opponents countered these efforts with state repression, economic reprisals, intimidation, and accusations that civil rights activity was communist-inspired. These attacks hindered but did not halt black people's march toward equality. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, sympathetic media coverage helped to elevate African Americans’ battles against injustice to national prominence, transforming local struggles into a nationwide movement that had the support of thousands of white as well as black people.

  There is some disagreement among historians concerning the impact of World War II on the freedom struggle. Scholars who see the 1940s as a turning point in African American history and the catalyst for the civil rights movement have recently been taken to task by analysts who point out continuities between the prewar and postwar decades.2 White opposition to the struggle, for example, hardly abated at all, despite the discrediting of racist theories that resulted from the worldwide revulsion at Nazi atrocities. Racial violence in the United States intensified as white supremacists fought to maintain their dominant position in society, and reform efforts that had been gathering strength in the previous decade were stymied by resurgent conservatism during the early years of the Cold War.3 The FEPC and the civil rights measures proposed by the Truman administration fell victim to the usual coalition of southern Democrats and business-oriented Republicans that, according to one congressman, had “been behind every reactionary movement, and . . . opposed to all liberal, forward-looking legislation” presented to lawmakers in previous decades.4

  Cumulatively, however, the war brought changes to the nation and to the lives of its black inhabitants that should not be underestimated. This was especially the case in the rural South, where mechanization eroded the power relationships between white landlords and black tenants, in the process weakening one of the chief means of maintaining white supremacy. Although the ideological impact of the war on both white and black people has probably been too heavily emphasized, its economic effect
on African Americans has not been emphasized enough. An examination of the early civil rights movement in Louisiana suggests that there were strong links between World War II and the emergence of an organized, mass protest movement in the 1950s and 1960s.

  Significantly, in Louisiana and elsewhere, black war veterans played prominent roles in the freedom struggle in the second half of the twentieth century.5 As African American leaders had predicted and white Louisianans had feared, black people's experiences in the armed forces broadened their horizons and made them less willing to accept discrimination. Many recalled military service as a defining moment in their lives. Harrison Brown was stationed overseas during the presidential election of 1944, when black as well as white soldiers received ballot papers allowing them the opportunity to participate. After mailing in his ballot, however, he received a letter from officials in Louisiana telling him that he was not allowed to vote. Disgusted by the hypocrisy of a nation that expected him to risk death to protect it but refused to treat him as a citizen, he returned home “determined to try to do something about it.” A. Z. Young of Bogalusa experienced a similar revelation. After serving three and a half years in the U.S. Army and spending 168 days on the front line, he concluded that he should be entitled to the same rights as white Americans. “This is where the turning point actually came in my life,” he stated, “where I was willing to stand up and to fight not only for myself, but for my people, wherever they be.” Both these men and many others who shared their experiences became key participants in struggles against white supremacy in their communities.6

  The heightened sense of injustice that infected thousands of black people as a result of their participation in World War II was an important factor in the 1940s and 1950s, but this alone could not have sparked the mass movement of the postwar period. African Americans had emerged from World War I feeling much the same way, but attempts to engage in organized protest activity following that war could not be sustained. An important difference between the 1920s and the 1940s was that the political economy of the South was fundamentally altered after World War II. Large numbers of black people had escaped or were displaced from agricultural labor, making them more independent of white people. By 1950 the proportion of black workers engaged in agriculture had dropped to 27 percent, and of those who were still farmers, a higher percentage owned their own land. At least a few observers realized that the demise of farm tenancy was likely to have significant consequences. In 1947 extension agent Norvel Thames of Tensas Parish wrote in his annual report: “As through the rest of the South . . . the agriculture of the parish is in the throes of revolution in its farming type and system. . . . Though the writer has no crystal it appears that this change will be far reaching in both its economical and social phases.”7

  Other white Louisianans also recognized that the dislodgment of thousands of black people from plantations where they had been under tight control had potentially serious implications. Early on, some analysts perceived the need to move the state away from its traditional focus on agriculture toward a more diversified economy so that surplus laborers could be absorbed. Chambers of commerce and civic leaders encouraged industrialization

  Cultivators with mules and drivers (above) and cultivating sugarcane with tractor and driver (below), Schriever, Louisiana, June 1940. These two photographs illustrate the dramatic reduction in labor needs that accompanied the mechanization of agriculture, which had important consequences for rural southern communities and for the black freedom struggle in the second half of the twentieth century. LCUSF34-55260-D and LC-USF34-54273-D, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

  throughout the 1940s and 1950s, emphasizing the advantages of cheap utility rates, low wages, and tax exemptions to persuade investors to build factories and processing plants in their parishes.8 In February 1948 a group of farmers and business owners from eleven plantation parishes formed the Louisiana Delta Council to develop collaboration between the agricultural and business interests of the region. Modeled on a similar organization created ten years earlier by Mississippi Delta planters, the council listed among its objectives “To cooperate with all interested groups in establishing uniform policies relating to labor and its costs” and “To jealously guard and protect our area from discriminatory and unfair legislation and from any predatory encroachment whatever.” Council members aimed to perpetuate racial inequality in the new economy and to fight attempts by the federal government, labor unions, or civil rights groups to interfere with the social order.9

  With northern workers rapidly unionizing and labor costs increasing, industrialists needed little persuasion to build new plants or relocate existing ones in the South. Between 1947 and 1954 Louisiana gained 632 new manufacturing establishments, increasing industrial employment for the state by 9 percent. The area around Baton Rouge became a center for chemical and petroleum processing plants owned by giant corporations like the Dow Chemical Company, providing employment opportunities for displaced farmworkers from nearby rural parishes. By 1954 East Baton Rouge Parish had 142 industrial enterprises that employed 18,882 people. Another 104 manufacturing plants located in neighboring Ascension, Iberville, Pointe Coupee, and Livingston Parishes provided nearly two thousand more jobs.10

  New industries appeared in other rural areas as well. In 1942 the Illinois-based Princeville Canning Company began contracting with West Feliciana farmers to grow sweet potatoes, and three years later its owners decided to build a cannery in the parish that employed around 150 people during the peak season. These developments benefited black sharecroppers, who reportedly were “astonished to receive from sixty to eighty dollars from an average acre of sweet potatoes” after being accustomed to earning only twenty-five dollars an acre from cotton. In the 1950s the Crown-Zellerbach Corporation constructed a new paper mill in St. Francisville, giving an added boost to the economic life of the parish.11

  Throughout the state, the lumber industry expanded rapidly both during and after World War II, fueled by the demand for new housing and other buildings. In 1954 every Louisiana parish except Cameron, Plaquemines, and West Baton Rouge had at least one enterprise producing lumber or wood products, with the northern parishes of Jackson, Ouachita, Rapides, and Winn each reporting more than forty. Although some of the smaller, family-owned operations remained, the trend after World War II was toward larger companies with their own sawmills and processing facilities. These mills were subject to federal minimum wage laws and other legislation protecting workers, offering employees a better chance of earning a decent living than had existed in the early twentieth century.12

  Economic diversification had some positive effects for African Americans. The incomes of many black people increased in the decades after the war, with new nonagricultural industries contributing to higher living standards for rural families.13 Yet the lower wages that black workers received compared with their white counterparts, lack of opportunities for promotion, and other discriminatory treatment revealed that most white Louisianans were prepared to allow only limited advancement for African Americans. The owners of newly established industries had as much to gain by perpetuating racism as did the older plantation elite, so they generally adapted willingly to traditional southern practices.14 African American farmers who produced sweet potatoes for the Princeville Canning Company had their yields weighed on different scales from the white contractors, and the inaccurate readings taken from the Jim Crow apparatus meant that they consistently earned less from their crops. The company also gave first preference to white farmers in supplying the crates used for transporting potatoes during peak production times. As a result, black growers often missed their contracted delivery dates and were penalized accordingly. Princeville had a contract with the U.S. government to supply canned sweet potatoes to the army, and in 1958 its St. Francisville plant came under federal investigation for failing to pay workers the wages specified in its contract or to meet the required health and safety standards. Substandard and discriminatory conditions als
o prevailed at Crown-Zellerbach's paper-processing plants in Bogalusa and St. Francisville, where white and black workers had separate union locals; used segregated bathrooms, water fountains, and other facilities; and were promoted along separate lines of progression that ensured that African Americans were always confined to the lower-paying jobs. As a result of such practices, many black people failed to share in the increasing prosperity that other Americans enjoyed after World War II. Dilapidated houses, outdoor toilets, open sewers, and malnourished, poorly clothed children remained a feature of the landscape of rural Louisiana well into the second half of the twentieth century.15

  A more encouraging postwar development was the implementation of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944. The “GI Bill of Rights,” as it came to be called, rewarded Americans who had served in the armed forces and their auxiliaries by granting them a wide range of benefits that included a weekly allowance to ease the transition back into civilian life, grants for education and training, preference for civil service jobs, and access to low-interest federal loans to buy houses, farms, or businesses. Government subsidies gave millions of working-class veterans opportunities that most could not have dreamed of before the war. A stipend of fifty dollars a month plus up to five hundred dollars a year to pay for tuition fees and books enabled many people to receive a college education that they would not otherwise have been able to afford. Better jobs and a higher standard of living followed, greatly enlarging the nation's middle class. By 1950 one-third of the population of the United States had benefited in some way from the GI Bill, with nearly eight million veterans taking advantage of the educational benefits alone.16