Double V Campaign (1 ene 1942 año – 31 dic 1945 año)

Descripción:

Since racial injustice had been part of American life for hundreds of years, why did the civil rights movement arise when it did? The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1909, had begun challenging racial segregation in a series of court cases in the 1930s. Other organizations, such as Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association in the 1920s, had attracted significant popular support generations before (see “Marcus Garvey and the UNIA” in Chapter 21). These forerunners were important, but several factors came together in the middle of the twentieth century to create a much larger movement.

One such factor, or root, was the ideological justification for World War II. In the war against fascism, the Allies sought to discredit racist Nazi ideology. This commitment to fighting fascist ideology abroad drove many Americans to question and criticize their homegrown system of racism. “The Jewish people and the Negro people both know the meaning of Nordic supremacy,” wrote the African American poet Langston Hughes in 1945, as he spurred the country to take up the cause of black equality. The Cold War placed added pressure on U.S. officials. To inspire other nations in the global standoff with the Soviet Union, “we must correct the remaining imperfections in our practice of democracy,” President Harry S. Truman proclaimed in a “Special Message to Congress on Civil Rights” in 1948.

The emergence of a substantial black middle class, another key factor, lent more momentum to the push for equality. The historically small black middle class saw robust growth after World War II. Its ranks produced most of the civil rights leaders: ministers, teachers, trade unionists, attorneys, and other professionals. Churches, for centuries a sanctuary for black Americans, proved especially crucial. Middle-class growth was linked in crucial ways to urbanization, as cities provided jobs and education while nurturing important institutions (such as churches, labor unions, and political organizations, among others) that would aid in the struggle. In the 1960s, a sizable increase in African American college students brought new ideas and energy to the movement (Table 26.1). With access to education and media, this rising black middle class had a more powerful voice than any previous black population. Less dependent on white patronage and less vulnerable to white retaliation, middle-class African Americans were in a position to lead a movement for change.

TABLE 26.1

African American College Enrollment
Year Number of African Americans Enrolled (rounded to nearest thousand)
1940 60,000
1950 110,000
1960 185,000
1970 430,000
1980 1.4 million
1990 3.6 million
External forces assisted the movement too. While rank-and-file white laborers did not universally back civil rights, the leaders of the United Auto Workers, the United Steelworkers, the Communications Workers of America, and other progressive trade unions became reliable allies at the national level. The new medium of television played a crucial role as well. When television networks covered early desegregation struggles — at Little Rock High School in 1957, for instance — many Americans across the country witnessed the violence of white supremacy for the first time.

Together, these elements — the moral motives for fighting World War II, the growth of the black middle class, support from labor unions, the immediacy of television coverage — help explain why the civil rights movement emerged when it did. But no single factor was decisive on its own. None ensured an easy path. The fight for civil rights was a vast and protracted social movement, one that faced down ferocious resistance over three decades.



An ordinary cafeteria worker from Kansas was the spark behind another key wartime civil rights initiative. In a 1942 letter to the Pittsburgh Courier, James G. Thompson urged that “colored Americans adopt the double VV for a double victory” — victory over fascism abroad and victory over racism at home. Edgar Rouzeau, editor of the paper’s New York office, agreed: “Black America must fight two wars and win in both.” Instantly dubbed the Double V Campaign, Thompson’s notion spread like wildfire through black communities across the country, with the backing of Rouzeau and the Courier, one of the nation’s leading black newspapers. African Americans would demonstrate their loyalty and citizenship by fighting the Axis powers but simultaneously demand the defeat of racism at home.

During World War II, hundreds of thousands of black migrants left the South, bound for large cities in the North and West. There they found jobs such as the welding work done by these African American women at the Landers, Frary, and Clark plant in New Britain, Connecticut. Fighting employment discrimination during the war represented one of the earliest phases in the long struggle against racial segregation in the United States.

The Double V met considerable resistance. In war industries, factories periodically shut down in Chicago, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and other cities because of “hate strikes”: the refusal of white workers to labor alongside black counterparts. Detroit proved especially tense. Life magazine reported in 1942 that “Detroit is Dynamite…. It can either blow up Hitler or blow up America.” A year later, the tension finally ignited. On a hot summer day, whites from the city’s ethnic European neighborhoods taunted and beat African Americans in a local park. Three days of rioting ensued in which thirty-four people were killed, twenty-five of them black, and federal troops were called in to restore order. The other half of the Double V — fighting abroad — also faced vigorous resistance from segregationists. Despite the fact that all-black units, such as the 761st “Black Panther” Tank Battalion and the famous Tuskegee Airmen were widely praised by military commanders, Mississippi’s Senator Eastland ridiculed black troops at war’s end. “The Negro soldier was an utter and dismal failure in combat,” he said, a lie uttered from the floor of the U.S. Senate.

Despite such incidents, and to some degree because of them, a wave of activism spread. In New York City, employment discrimination on the city’s transit lines prompted one of the first bus boycotts in the nation’s history, led in 1941 by Harlem minister Adam Clayton Powell Jr. In Chicago, James Farmer and other members of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a nonviolent peace organization, founded the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1942, specifically to fight for racial equality. FOR and CORE embraced the philosophy of nonviolent direct action espoused by Mahatma Gandhi of India. Another FOR member in New York and proponent of direct action, Bayard Rustin, led one of the earliest challenges to southern segregation, the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation — a two-week multiracial bus ride through the South, where buses and bus stations were strictly segregated, that met violent resistance from whites. Meanwhile, after the war, hundreds of thousands of African American veterans used the GI Bill to go to college, trade school, or graduate school, which better positioned them to push against segregation. At the war’s end, Powell affirmed that “the black man … is ready to throw himself into the struggle to make the dream of America become flesh and blood, bread and butter.”

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