Double Victory (8 page)

For five days in June 1943 delegates from across the country gathered for a convention in Chicago called We Are Americans, Too. A. Philip Randolph had asked E. Pauline Myers and Ethel Payne to organize the event. At the convention delegates voiced their support of the Non-Violent, Good Will, Direct Action campaign. They agreed to use the technique to fight discrimination in employment, transportation, and any situation where discrimination was obvious. They also agreed to set up educational institutes around the country to train people in how to use the technique. Part of the training would include teaching people how to organize and participate in pickets and parades in nonviolent ways. The institutes would teach people how to remain quiet when they were being insulted. And, most important, the nonviolent training showed people how to endure
physical assaults without striking back. During the final day of the convention, after two hours of debate, a controversial decision was reached. The delegates voted to bar whites from participation in the March on Washington Movement.

Many speakers gave talks during the five days. Some were women. Senora B. Lawson from Richmond, Virginia, said she supported the work of the March on Washington Movement because “it remembers the forgotten men, the men of the street, and gives them a chance to work and exercise their talents.” Cordelia Green Johnson, president of the Beauty Culturists League in New Jersey, said, “We're not asking to sit at the banquet table of white people, but we are asking to sit at a banquet table and eat of the Bill of Rights. It is not necessary to have freedom in heaven, we won't need it there. We want freedom here and now when we can enjoy it.” Layle Lane said black people had tools to use in the fight for equality. She said they had tools in “numbers.” She meant there were millions of black people living in the United States who, she said, had “purchasing power” of billions of dollars annually. She also reminded the delegates that black people—especially in the northern states where blacks could vote without restrictions—needed to use their voting power to elect candidates who were in support of equality. And E. Pauline Myers reminded the delegates that “colored citizens have the right to disobey unjust laws.”

Some black women began to experiment with the idea of taking actions that were nonviolent but bold and challenging. They began to invite attacks and meet them with stubborn resistance.

Stubbornly Resistant

Pauli Murray had applied for graduate school at the University of North Carolina in 1938. She was refused. The letter she
received was very clear: “Members of your race are not admitted to the university.”

Pauli tried the old method of fighting discrimination. She wrote letters—one to President Roosevelt. A copy of that letter went to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. The president didn't answer, but the First Lady responded to Pauli's letter. It led to a lasting friendship between the two women, but it didn't get Pauli into the University of North Carolina.

Being multiracial—black, white, and Cherokee Indian—Pauli Murray knew all about racial discrimination. But “colored” was the only part that a bus driver in Virginia saw on Easter night 1940. And that, along with Pauli's stubborn resistance to segregation practices, was enough to get her arrested.

Pauli and a friend were on their way that night to visit Pauli's family in Durham, North Carolina. They were traveling by bus from New York. The two young women were sitting toward the back of the bus but close to the center. Other black passengers were sitting behind them. The white passengers were seated in front of the women. When more white passengers arrived, the driver told Pauli and her friend to move farther back. But Pauli could see more black passengers coming onto the bus. She knew they would fill up the empty spaces in the back. So she said there was no reason to move from her seat.

The driver left and returned with the police, who arrested Pauli and her friend for creating a disturbance and violating the segregation laws of Virginia. Before the two women left the bus, Pauli gave another passenger her mother's name and telephone number. By that evening Pauli was visited in her jail cell by lawyers from the NAACP.

The lawyers were very impressed that Pauli and her friend had taken great care to write in detail everything that had happened to them on the bus. Pauli and her friend got out of jail.
The NAACP lawyers made plans to file a lawsuit. Before they could do that, the charges of violating the segregation laws were dropped. But the disturbance charge remained.

This was a turning point in Pauli Murray's life. It was one event that led her to law school in 1941 and led her to become a pioneer in the fight for civil rights.

Sit-ins

On a warm July day in 1944, Hattie Duvall, a middle-aged woman from St. Louis, Missouri, walked back and forth in front of a department store carrying a sign that read:
I INVESTED FIVE SONS IN THE SERVICE.
Hattie wasn't simply boasting about her sons. She was protesting the discrimination she would face if she went into the store and sat at the lunch counter. She knew no one would serve her. In fact, they might ask her to leave the store.

This was especially hurtful for Hattie. She had indeed “invested five sons” in the war effort. Her sons had been part of the D-day invasion in France—the largest amphibious invasion of all time. She thought her contribution to the war effort gave her the right to eat where she wanted.

A year before Hattie protested outside the St. Louis department store, a group of black citizens in Washington, DC, carried signs as they protested in front of a restaurant there. It was the spring of 1943, and the protestors were students at Howard University—a predominantly black university. They were trying the direct-action approach in an attempt to bring civil rights to black citizens in the nation's capital city.

The students carried signs too:

OUR BOYS, OUR BONDS, OUR BROTHERS ARE FIGHTING FOR
YOU.
WHY CAN'T WE EAT HERE?

WE DIE TOGETHER—WHY CAN'T WE EAT TOGETHER?

They felt that since their friends and family members were fighting and dying in a war for democracy they should have the right to eat where they wanted.

The Howard students were led by a female law student—Pauli Murray. The students were studying civil liberty laws in their classes at the university and knew they were not doing anything illegal. For about a week before the protest the students rallied other students to support the planned protest at a nearby restaurant that had a whites-only policy.

On the day of the “direct action sit-in”—a Saturday—12 students went to the restaurant. The students entered in groups of three and asked for service. When they were refused, they took seats and pulled out magazines, books, pens, and paper. They sat quietly and studied. Police arrived and remained outside. The students weren't doing anything illegal.

Black students continued to enter the restaurant in groups of three. They asked for service, were refused, and sat quietly reading. Soon most of the seats in the restaurant were taken by black students who were willing to eat and pay for their food—but whom the owner refused to serve. Only a few seats remained for paying white customers.

Pauli Murray led sit-ins at lunch counters in Washington, DC.
The Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University

Finally, the owner closed the business for the day. He said, “I'll lose money, but I'd rather close up than practice democracy this way.”

The students remained outside the restaurant and formed a picket line. When customers tried to enter the restaurant, the students explained the situation. Some white customers expressed support for the students' actions.

“I think it's reasonable. Negroes are fighting to win this war for democracy just like the whites. If it had to come to a vote, it would get my vote!” one white customer said.

Another said, “Well now, isn't that something! I eat here regularly, and I don't care who else eats here. All I want is to eat. I want the place to stay open. After all, we're all human.”

On the following Monday, the students again set up their picket line in front of the restaurant. Within two days, the restaurant owner had given in and changed his policy. No more “whites only” at this restaurant.

A year later the Howard students decided to try to integrate the heart of Washington, DC. They went to a restaurant near the White House. On a Saturday afternoon in 1944, groups of two or three students dressed in their best clothes entered the restaurant. Every ten minutes more black students strolled into the restaurant.

Outside a picket line of black students formed as well. They were well dressed and well behaved. Even when a group of white soldiers taunted the picketers, they refused to react. They remembered the training they'd had. They were quiet and dignified.

Meanwhile, 55 black students had taken seats inside. The manager called the corporate office of the establishment and reported that the restaurant was filling with black customers. The manager was ordered to serve the students.

In Chicago, Bernice Fisher, Rita Baham, Gladys Hoover, Shirley Walowitz, Sylvia Barger, Eleanor Wrights, and Priscilla Jackson, members of a student group at the University of Chicago, had also sworn themselves to the elimination of discrimination by means of nonviolent action.

The women and some of their male classmates formed a group of about 20 students intent on integrating a South Side restaurant in May 1943. The restaurant had always discriminated against black customers. The group—consisting of black and white students—entered the restaurant and seated themselves. Five of the group were black—three men and two women.

The three men went up to the counter. The two black women sat in a booth with some of the white students. The waitress told the three men at the counter that they could be served in the basement—where blacks had been served in the past. They declined. They preferred to sit upstairs at the counter.

The manager tried to get the black women to move to a booth in the back of the restaurant. When they refused to move, the manager called the police. The police arrived but said no one was breaking the law.

With all the tables occupied and the seats at the counter taken by the protestors, the manager and waiters held out. They wouldn't serve any black people. But the protestors weren't going anywhere. They sat and sat. Finally, after two hours, the manager gave in. Everyone was served.

The students were surprised but happy. They had lined up enough students to take turns coming into the restaurant in
groups of 20. But the first group achieved results—so the second and third groups weren't needed.

When Hattie Duvall participated in the movement in St. Louis she joined other black professional women and college students who had learned from the protestors in Washington and Chicago. The St. Louis group also stood up to discrimination with “stubborn and nonviolent resistance” in the form of a series of sit-ins that summer. Sometimes men joined the women. And sometimes white people joined. But it was a core group of black women who planned, organized, and led the effort. Marie Harding Pace, Thelma Grant, Modestine Crute Thornton, and others organized and participated in about a dozen sitins in department store restaurants between May and August 1944 in St. Louis. On May 15, 1944, Pearl Maddox and Birdie Beal Anderson—joined by three college students, Vora Thompson, Shermine Smith, and Ruth Mattie Wheeler—went into a popular department store and asked to be served in the store's restaurant. The manager invited Vora Thompson to a private meeting in his office. He explained to Vora that she couldn't be served because it would “create a disturbance” and “the American pattern would not permit the serving of Negro customers.” Vora told the manager that black men were suffering and dying in a war for democracy. Certainly, blacks should be allowed to eat where they chose in a democratic America. Vora said it was “time to begin training Americans to respect Americans. Our brothers and our sweethearts are suffering and dying all over the world to destroy Fascism, and you and I must get rid of it at home.”

While Vora was in the meeting with the store manager, the other women were enjoying a soda and a sandwich in the restaurant. Their lunch had been purchased by a white man who had been in the protest group. The black women quietly ate
their lunch at the counter and left. Vora's visit with the store manager failed to change the store's policy of discrimination. The manager and waiters continued to make it clear that black diners were not welcome at the lunch counter.

In July, 55 women enjoyed ice cream at a department store restaurant in St. Louis. Forty of the women were black. Fifteen were white women. The white women had purchased the ice cream and given it to the black women. Sometimes the sit-ins by the black women of St. Louis caused a stir. At another sit-in at a drugstore counter, for instance, Shermine Smith had eaten only part of her sandwich when the manager took the sandwich from her hands, grabbed Shermine by the arm, and lifted her from her seat. Shermine remembered what she had been taught. She met the attack with nonviolent resistance. She didn't kick, or scream, or resist the manager. She didn't say anything as he escorted her from the store.