The Making of African America (27 page)

In 1940, American mobilization for war provided new leverage for civil rights advocates. They demanded, among other things, a desegregation of the armed forces and equal access to employment in the expanding defense industries. When it became evident that those opportunities would not be forthcoming, protests began. Under the leadership of A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, militants threatened a massive march of black people on Washington, shaking the Roosevelt administration. Although Randolph's March on Washington Movement eventually withdrew its demand for desegregation of the military, in June 1941 a reluctant President Roosevelt issued an executive order providing “full and equitable participation of all workers in defense industries” and establishing the Fair Employment Practices Commission to root out discrimination. The success of the March on Washington Movement fueled political activism, confirming the notion that only mass action could end the policy of exclusion and separation. Activists launched the Double V campaign; the membership of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People grew by a thousand percent; and new, even more militant organizations, like the Committee of Racial Equality, began to protest segregation in restaurants, theaters, and other public places.
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While the larger structure of white supremacy hardly budged, the tremors were felt, not least in the workplace. Employers—pressured by the massive expansion of industrial production—opened their doors to black women as well as men. Aided by their incorporation into the new industrial labor unions, black men and women enlarged their toehold in industrial America. Between December 1941 and August 1942, the number of black men employed in manufacturing jumped from 500,000 to 1.2 million. Over the course of the decade, the share of black men working as “operatives”—the census designation for factory workers—doubled, making up over one-fifth of the black workforce. Representative of changes in other industrial cities, the proportion of black workers employed in Detroit's auto industry increased from 4 to 15 percent between 1942 and the war's end. Black men—particularly those who had put down roots in the North—at last began to climb the ladder of industrial employment, moving from unskilled to skilled labor, from a place on the line into the ranks of stewards and foremen. The number of black women operatives also increased, so that nearly one-fifth of employed black women worked in factories.
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Still, advances in industrial employment were fitful and frustratingly slow. The Fair Employment Practices Commission sometimes successfully pressured obdurate corporate employers, particularly those dependent upon wartime contracts. But just as often the commission's directives were ignored, and racially exclusive policies remained in place. The commission had even less success with smaller, proprietary firms that feared that the introduction of black workers would stir discord. Although usually just a pretext for maintaining a lily white labor force, the threat was real enough. Some of the largest and most powerful labor unions—especially in the building trades—continued to exclude black workers from membership, and the members themselves were more than willing to protect white privilege with force, as a rash of “hate strikes” confirmed. Long after major corporate employers and labor unions formally committed themselves to equal opportunity in the workplace, the familiar pattern of black workers being assigned to dangerous, dirty work remained much in evidence.

By the 1940s, a full generation after the beginning of the third passage, the place of black men and women in the most dynamic sector of the American economy remained precarious. Unemployment among black men and women was at least twice as high for black as for white workers, and discrimination—indeed outright exclusion—was common. Entry into white-collar work was near impossible. The first arrivals could do little to bend the prejudices of Northern employers—no matter what their credentials. Prior to World War II, few black men and women—6 percent compared to 37 percent of whites—could be found behind an office desk or a department store counter earning wages as salespersons, bookkeepers, accountants, or clerks. Exploring American race relations in the 1940s, Gunnar Myrdal and his associates concluded, “the North is almost as strict as the South in excluding Negroes from middle class jobs....”
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Again the war made a difference. The shortage of workers allowed black men and women to secure employment in jobs previously reserved for whites. Many—some of them the children of Southern immigrants—gained their positions as civil servants in expanding federal, state, and municipal bureaucracies, as teachers, postal workers, middle managers, and clerks of all sorts. Others secured employment in the private sector. While rank discrimination remained, the advances were real, particularly in the defense industry.
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An expanding cadre of black men and women exchanged their blue collars for white and enjoyed greater stability of employment, a chance for regular salary increases, access to health care, and pensions at retirement, all the while escaping from the exhausting labor of the assembly line. Their presence began to change African American life.
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As the wages of black workers increased—growing to many times what they would have been in the rural South—other opportunities arose. With money in their pockets, black men and women became eager consumers. Black entrepreneurs moved quickly to address their needs, opening beauty salons, barber shops, grocery stores, restaurants, dance halls, theaters, and—ultimately—funeral parlors to serve the greatly enlarged Northern black population. Some grew beyond these petty enterprises and began working in banking, insurance, publishing, and manufacturing. They fielded sports teams, manufactured cosmetics, produced records, and shot movies. Promoting the notion that benefits would accrue to all black people from the expansion of “race businesses,” they urged black customers to “buy black.” For their part, white storekeepers, eager to maintain the patronage of black customers, became susceptible to the pressure of “don't shop where you can't work” campaigns.
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Wartime prosperity not only enlarged black communities but also made them more diverse. Like the plantation or cropper villages of earlier times, the inner city's social geography housed a well-defined society that reflected the changes set in motion by the third great migration. Old Settlers faded—although hardly disappeared—pushed aside by a new, Southern-born elite, as some of the new arrivals, seizing the main chance, gained prominence as entrepreneurs, professionals, politicians, and preachers—sometimes all four at once.

At the forefront, occupying positions of community leadership and pressing the case for equality, was a solid class of working people: factory operatives along with schoolteachers, civil service employees, and petty proprietors, as well as laborers and domestics. They distinguished themselves not so much by the size of their bank accounts, but by their dress, deportment, and associational memberships that together made a visible claim to respectability. That claim was sometimes reinforced by residence, as members of the black middle class—much like their white counterparts—separated themselves from the poor, as they nurtured their claim to middle-class decency.

The strongest evidence of respectability derived from church membership. The most prestigious black churches had pedigrees that dated back to the early nineteenth century with the emergence of freedom in the North. These long-tailed institutions with established congregations supported all manner of organizations, from schools to boys and girls clubs, debating societies and reading rooms, and even so-called intelligence offices that functioned as employment bureaus. Their prestige attracted some newcomers from the South, but their formal, high-toned services discomforted others. For these men and women, Holiness or Pentecostal congregations, often operating out of storefronts, became the churches of choice. Their ministers, many Southern born, professed a muscular Christianity and dispensed with the staid decorum and intellectualized gospel that the new arrivals found objectionable. Religious choices not only spoke to the gap between Old Settlers and new arrivals but also to the differences within a society of growing complexity, as upwardly mobile black men and women gravitated to churches that claimed greater respectability. If the ghetto represented in interracial terms a separation of the races, it also manifested in intraracial terms a separation of the classes.
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The ghetto was not only a complex institution, but also a changing one. Following World War II, the black inner city underwent its own transformation, as the black population grew in number and density. While blockbusting real estate agents sent skittish white homeowners fleeing to the expanding suburbs, federal policymakers, joined by redlining bankers and mortgage brokers—both determined to maintain racial homogeneity—kept black people penned in decaying urban neighborhoods, denying them access to homeownership in the new suburbs by endorsing race restrictive covenants and rejecting would-be black homeowners applications for mortgage insurance. “If a neighborhood is to retain stability,” declared the official Federal Housing Administration's handbook, “it is necessary that all properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social class.” While federal policymakers removed the racial rules from their FHA handbook in the 1940s, they continued to enforce them for another twenty years, quietly maintaining the principle of “racial compatibility.” Other federal programs, most prominently the GI Bill, which offered returning soldiers financial help to become part of a nation of suburban homeowners, were similarly color-coded. Denying black veterans access to these loans left them and their families locked in the meanest part of American cities. In the decades following the war, the level of urban residential segregation increased until the indexes of dissimilarity—which measured the degree of segregation—reached 90 percent, meaning that almost the entire population would have to move to achieve a random distribution of whites and blacks.
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Other changes reshaped African American life in postwar America. While black people could do little to break the vice grip of residential segregation, their growing political presence and economic prosperity stoked the struggle for equality. White supremacy—weakened by legal assaults—began to waver. In 1948, the Democratic Party included a Civil Rights plank in its platform, and President Harry Truman issued an executive order desegregating the army.
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While the fiercest battles remained to be fought in the South, black Northerners provided much of the political leverage against the old order and reaped some of the benefits as well.

Centuries-old employment practices that had throttled the advancement of black people withered under the glare of national publicity, the enforcement of long-ignored antidiscrimination laws, and the imposition of affirmative action programs. Employers who once openly rejected black applicants hurried to hire at least a token black man or woman to demonstrate their commitment to a newly invigorated egalitarianism, or at least to comply with federal—and sometimes state—law. The rush to meet the new ideal allowed some black women to find a place behind a reception desk, and some men gained access to a clerkship, but tokenism itself soon became exposed as a form of obstructionism. Between 1940 and 1960, the number of black women clerical and sales workers increased from less than 2 percent to almost II percent. Employers, who once denied black workers any sort of visibility lest they too be tainted, suddenly placed black men and women in the most visible positions. Banks, hotels, and department stores advertised the presence of black tellers and clerks. A black receptionist became de rigueur in many corporate offices.

New openings greatly expanded the black middle class. Black stock-men and charwomen emerged from the back rooms and basements and took their places on sales floors or offices as salespersons, bookkeepers, and accountants. A growing number of black teachers, black police officers, black social workers, and black real estate agents swelled the ranks of those who did not have to labor with their hands. Between 1940 and 1960, the proportion of black men and women employed in white-collar jobs doubled.
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During the 1960s, the long-term changes set in motion by the third great migration and by the immediate effects of the Civil Rights movement decisively altered the economic structure of black society. The number of black men and women working at white-collar jobs increased by 80 percent over the course of the decade. The proportion of black men working in professional and managerial positions more than doubled during the 1960s. By the end of the decade, the share of the black population nominally defined as middle class increased from one in eight to one in four. A general prosperity allowed large numbers of black people to escape the confines of menial labor. If the years accompanying World War I had seen black men and women enter the industrial working class for the first time, the 1960s witnessed their arrival in the American middle class. No longer confined to the old positions of clergy, postal or social workers, teachers, or a variety of petty proprietors, middle-class black men and women could increasingly be found working alongside white architects, engineers, physicians, managers, and other professionals. Some struck out on their own to become successful entrepreneurs. The structure of black America began to approach that of white, even if its wealth did not.

The black middle class continued to prosper as never before. The number of black families earning $10,000 or more (in constant dollars) more than doubled the years between 1960 and 1969. The growth rate of the black middle class declined during the next decade, but it nonetheless continued to expand by nearly 60 percent over the previous decade's total. Similar growth occurred in the years that followed, so that the number of black families earning more than $50,000 increased by a factor of two. Although its resources remained shallow and its place precarious, the black middle class—aided in part by affirmative action programs—nonetheless continued to grow steadily in the decades that followed.
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