The Color of Money Read online

  Another strand of collective action was aimed not at rejecting the white business establishments, but demanding that if they were going to make money in the ghetto, they should at least share the wealth with the black community by hiring black employees. Black communities began using organized boycotts. The Harlem Labor

  Union, made up of former Garveyites, picketed white stores that refused to hire blacks in the 1932 “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work" movement. Soon black leaders across the country began talking about leveraging the purchasing power of the black dollar to fight discrimination.123 Adam Clayton Powell emerged as the most vocal leader of the boycott movement, and several years later he formed the Greater New York Coordinating Committee for Employment, which aimed at securing jobs through nonviolent protest.124

  In 1935, several white merchants challenged a black boycott of their Baltimore businesses in the Maryland Court of Appeals.125 The court ruled in favor of the black boycotters, stating that so long as viol ence, intimidation, and threats were not used, blacks had “an unquestionable right" to present their cause “in a peaceable way."126 The judge even seemed to be encouraging black groups to boycott in order to “persuade white employers to engage colored employees," and to protest discrimination “by organization, public meetings, propaganda and by personal solicitation." However, the court seemed to put the onus on the black community to achieve their demands, stating, “whether they succeed or fail will depend on the cooperation of their people." The unstated subtext was that it was the responsibility of the black population to work to end racism. The ruling set the stage for the civil rights movement’s early strategy of leveraging black market power and using organized boycotts against Jim Crow buses in Montgomery, Alabama.

  As another harbinger of what was to come, movements demanding more black control of the ghetto came to be embraced by whites who championed a segregated economy—for the benefit of blacks, of course. An illustrative example was an editorial written by a white supporter of the black community who urged Harlem to follow Chicago’s lead and establish segregated black banks and businesses. The cleverly named article, “If Negro Quarters for Negroes— Negro Dollars for Negroes, Too" was published in the New York Daily Mirror in 1935 and urged Harlem’s black population to do as blacks in Chicago had done and work toward a “conscious and a kind of prideful segregation—a segregation which was WON, not imposed." Indeed, the author believed that Chicago’s black belt was “an achievement rather than imposition," which had given blacks the power to control their own dollars.127

  The writer said that Harlem was being “bled white” and urged the black community to drive out the white exploiters and fight for a black economy. “It is for the ‘Black dollar’ that Harlem fights now, because it has to.” In other words, the “fight” was to maintain a segregated Harlem for Harlem was being overtaken by “white exploiters” after blacks had first claimed the land. “Block by block, store by store, house by house, white profit seekers here infiltrated back into the district which became black by common consent in the decade after the war.” The story being told was that blacks had chosen segregation and now these infiltrators were ruining the mutually beneficial arrangement. Once the white “infiltrators” were eradicated, Harlem could win back its total segregation.

  Not only had Harlem not wanted its segregation, there was also an anti-Semitic subtext to the tale because the “infiltrators” of the black ghetto were understood to be Jewish shop owners. The tension between Jewish shop owners and black residents had led to some incidents of violence even as black leaders rejected the scapegoating of Jewish merchants. Abram Harris and Adam Clayton Powell pushed back against anti-Semitism when these claims arose among black protestors. They warned that anti-Semitism was the same as the racism they were fighting and cautioned blacks not to “do Hitler’s work here at home.128

  Indeed, the end of the war heralded a monumental shift in race relations. Despite integration of the U.S. armed forces in 1948, a segregated home front, continued racial hostility, and limited economic opportunity greeted black war veterans upon their return. Just as black Union soldiers had returned to the South after the Civil War to demand equality, so too did black veterans of World War II agitate for better treatment from the country they had risked their lives for. James Baldwin recounted that the “treatment accorded the Negro during the Second World War [marked] a turning point in the Negro’s relation to America. . . . A certain hope died.”129 Hitler’s outrageous acts of racial cleansing disgusted Americans and highlighted the racial hypocrisy at home. How was it that the good guys abroad maintained their own brand of racial violence at home?

  During the 1948 Democratic National Convention, Senator Hubert Humphrey forcefully denounced Congress’s intransigence on civil rights. “There’s no room for double standards in American politics," he said. “Our demands for democratic practices in other lands will be no more effective than the guarantee of those practices in our own country." He demurred, “to those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are 172 years late. To those who say that [civil rights] is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this: The time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights."130

  Congress began to see more antilynching laws, though ultimately none made it past the southern bloc. However, the federal government finally recognized and formally ended the cruel practice of convict leasing in southern prisons after the war. As explained by Douglas Blackmon, “It was a strange irony that after seventy-four years of hollow emancipation, the final delivery of African Americans from overt slavery and from the quiet complicity of the federal government in their servitude was precipitated only in response to the horrors perpetrated by an enemy country against its own despised minorities."131 In 1946, Truman created the Commission on Higher Education, with the aim of repealing segregation. He also created a Committee on Civil Rights, which called for the “elimination of segregation, based on race, color, creed, or national origin, from American life." Truman eventually lost the votes of four southern states because he enacted laws outlawing poll taxes, lynching, segregation in interstate transportation, and discrimination in federal employment and the armed services.132 Though these gains were modest, there was forward momentum.

  As the world wars shifted to the Cold War, communist regimes abroad began to highlight stories of U.S. racism in their propaganda. Black soldiers being lynched in their military uniforms, Klan violence, rampant black poverty, and the everyday injustices of Jim Crow segregation were being advertised by enemies of the state. A 1952 brief written by the Democratic attorney general exhorted the federal government to enact antidiscrimination laws as a matter of foreign policy. “It is in the context of the present world struggle between freedom and tyranny that the problem of racial discrimination must be viewed. . . . Racial discrimination furnishes grist for the Communist propaganda mills, and it raises doubt even among friendly nations as to the intensity of our devotion to the democratic faith. . . . Other peoples cannot understand how such a practice [of school segregation] can exist in a country which professes to be a staunch supporter of freedom, justice, and democracy."133 After the Supreme Court in Brown u Board of Education ruled against segregation in schools, Voice of America broadcast the praiseworthy decision to the world in thirty-five different languages.

  To defeat communism, America needed to tell the world a story of American racial progress. It was decided to focus on telling the story of the black elite. As part of a public relations blitz on race, the U.S. Information Service (USIS) released a promotional pamphlet called The Negro in American Life in 1950. The story the pamphlet portrayed was one of redemption: America had made a tragic mistake by sanctioning slavery, but since then, American democracy had been a long march toward racial progress.

  In reali ty, the injustice was ongoing. From the New Deal and through the Cold War era, unparall
eled U.S. prosperity bypassed blacks through purposeful exclusion. The grand-scale economic and political injustices operating in this era were created and sustained by an invisible Jim Crow credit market. The pushback had already begun and the economic frustration of the impoverished black community in the segregated ghettos would erupt soon enough. However, in communicating progress on race to the communist nations, the State Department chose to measure racial progress through the success of the black middle class. “Some Negroes are large land-holders; some are wealthy businessmen. . . . Negroes work in banks, public utilities, insurance companies, and retail stories. They are physicists, chemists, psychologists, doctors, metallurgists." Although the report conceded that “much remains to be done," this measurement of racial progress became ubiquitous.134

  In need of more inspirational stories of black rights to broadcast, the State Department called on the Division of Negro Affairs in 1951. Voice of America wanted to broadcast biographical information of successful black entrepreneurs across the world to be used as an ideological weapon—the story of black capitalists was a strong counterpoint to communist charges that American capitalism relied on racial exploitation. As the State Department noted in a letter to Archie A. Alexander, a successful black contractor, they wanted to share his story in order to “improve its prestige with the darker races of people in the Asiatic countries."135

  Besides compiling reports, this was the most notable action the Division of Negro Affairs had accomplished thus far, and it would not survive much longer. In 1953, President Eisenhower terminated the office in order to cut waste, though it is likely racial discrimination also played a part in the decision—Roy Wilkins famously quipped that if Eisenhower “had fought World War II the way he fought for civil rights, we would all be speaking German now.”136 However, the idea of using black business as a political tool did take root in President Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Nixon. Nixon would build his own division of black capitalism in the Commerce Department, but with a much wider scope. He too would use black entrepreneurship as a weapon in a war, but not a foreign one.

  Civil Rights Dreams, Economic Nightmares

  There was a brief window between 1963 and 1965 when it seemed inevitable that the arc of the moral universe would actually bend toward justice quickly and without detour. At the centennial commemoration of the Emancipation Proclamation in September 1962, President Kennedy stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and acknowledged that blacks were “not yet freed from bonds of injustice." He promised to “complete the work begun by Abraham Lincoln," to “eradicate the vestiges of discrimination and segregation." A year later at that same memorial, Dr. Martin Luther King led the March on Washington and asked the country to honor its founding principles of equality. When the King coalition’s disciplined nonviolence was met with the South’s unruly backlash against federal law, cameras captured the clash and made the case for the petitioners. “We will soon wear you down by our capacity to suffer," said Dr. King.

  For a brief moment, King’s powerful message of peace and optimism united the complex and varied voices of the black community. The American public embraced the message that it was time to turn the page from racism toward progress. For the first time since Reconstruction, there was harmony among all three branches of government—this time, the Supreme Court, the executive branch, and Congress all pushed toward racial equality. The Court, the same institution that had sanctioned Jim Crow segregation in the South during the first Reconstruction, began to tear it down in case after case with masterful assistance from the NAACP’s Thurgood Marshall.1

  President Kennedy urged Congress to pass a sweeping civil rights bill in 1963, “not merely for reasons of economic efficiency, world diplomacy and domestic tranquility—but above all because it is right." Kennedy also envisioned broader reforms aimed at addressing the conditions of poverty. “There is little value in a Negro’s obtaining the right to be admitted to hotels and restaurants if he has

  no cash in his pocket and no job.” He remained committed to the bill until his life was cut short in November 1963.

  It took a “master of the senate” to finally break the South’s stranglehold on Congress and pass the Civil Rights Act.2 President Lyndon Johnson knew how to breach the southern legislative gamesmanship that had successfully blocked every attempt at civil rights legislation since the New Deal because he had practiced the hold-up game himself. First as junior Texas senator and then during his six years as majority leader, he practically controlled the southern bloc, and by extension the entire Senate. But now he pushed vigorously for reform; after all, he quipped, “what the hell’s presidency for?” Upon his sudden inauguration, Johnson met with the leaders of the civil rights coalition: King of the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC), Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, Whitney Young of the National Urban League, James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.3 Young told reporters after the meeting that “a magnolia accent doesn’t always mean bigotry.”4 When Andrew Johnson had taken office after President Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, he halted Reconstruction reforms and set the black community back for generations. With this second accidental President Johnson, things went very differently. Lyndon Johnson made the civil rights cause his own. Together, LBJ and MLK were at the helm of the most monumental forward movement in race relations in American history. Their partnership was neither natural nor comfortable, but the timing was right and a large part of the public was with them— at least for a little while.

  Johnson pushed Kennedy’s original civil rights bill in Congress and made clear that he wanted “nothing less than the full assimilation of more than twenty million Negroes into American life.” The Civil Rights Act was passed in July of 1964, banning racial discrimination in employment and in all public accommodations.5 Jim Crow was dead. In August of 1965, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, which guaranteed blacks the vote. These acts were not empty gestures. Both laws were immediately enforced by the administration and the Supreme Court. Blacks achieved more rights in a few short years than they had in the previous two hundred.

  While the reforms of 1965 were in fact the beginning of historic changes that continue today, they were also the high water mark of the civil rights movement. Soon there would be backlash, divisions, and retrenchment. Even President Johnson wavered. Johnson has been described as “the last president to offer committed leadership that challenged racial injustice," but even he stepped back from the civil rights struggle as the United States became mired in Vietnam. Civil rights historian Taylor Branch explains that it was Kennedy’s assassination that fully launched the civil rights era— and it would be Martin Luther King’s assassination five years later that would bring it to a halt.6

  Yet even before the civil rights momentum ground to a halt with the war in Vietnam and King’s coalition broken, the movement’s scope had been too limited to address the full problem of racial inequality. The assumption of too many Americans was that once discrimination was purged from the law, the effects of discrimination would disappear. American racism was mistakenly seen as an issue of bigoted white-hooded Klansmen, but that was just the ugliest symptom of a broader problem, the visible tumor of a cancer that went far deeper. Blacks living in the urban North were not being told to sit at the back of the bus because most did not have access to public buses in the first place. The financial isolation of the urban black population was a result of years of racism, but there were no ready villains, no Bull Connor or whites-only water fountains. “The segregated practices in the South are kind of public butchery," noted Saul Alinsky. “It’s visible. There’s bleeding all over the place. Up here [in the North] we use a stiletto, it’s internal bleeding, it’s not visible, but it’s just as deadly."7 The violence of northern segregation had been sown years before and was continually bearing another sort of strange fruit—economic exploitation. Black northerners applauded the gains of the civil rights movement, but
they demanded change for their communities. Intractable poverty and inequality were just as oppressive as the South’s brute hostility, but a far more complex problem to address. And as a stunned North would soon find out, the unrest was far closer to home than Selma, Alabama.

  Yet when the black movement shifted to address the problem of black poverty, it became constrained by its own rhetorical demands. The movement’s song, most masterfully harmonized by King, Marshall, Kennedy, and Johnson, was legal equality. The tune had a familiar ring because its force came from America’s founding documents—“all men are created equal" and “equal protection under the law." Though Dr. King’s message was much broader than is commonly portrayed, what captivated and chastened many was how closely his message hewed to these common American ideals. King recited the Constitution’s promise and summoned the nation to bring its deeds in line with its democratic aspirations. “The home that all too many Americans left was solidly structured idealistically. Its pillars were soundly grounded in the insights of our Judeo-Christian heritage: . . . all men are created equal. . . . What a marvelous foundation for any home!" King was calling Americans home. And home was the classic liberal notion of equality. According to liberal principles, individuals must be free to pursue their own aims using their own talents. No group trait, like race or ancestry, should be used to exclude someone from free participation in markets and society. A country built on liberalism could not tolerate discrimination because it punished a person based on a group attribute instead of the content of their character. The civil rights movement was founded on aligning America’s liberal democratic ideal with its hypocritical racial hierarchy—on reconciling the “American Dilemma." The 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 aimed to fix the bug in the system by erasing the dissonance between word and deed.