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Chapter Five

“THIS FOURTH OF JULY IS YOURS”

African-Americans and Caste Pluralism

SPEAKING on July 4,1853, Frederick Douglass complained: “I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary … this Fourth of July is yours, not mine.”¹ By 1853, most free African-Americans were excluded from meaningful participation in the civic culture and from skilled or middle-class occupations.

Slavery based on race began soon after the first settlers came, when whites treated their black and their white indentured servants in a radically different manner. Of three runaway servants caught in Virginia in 1640, two, who were white, were sentenced to an extension of four years in their period of servitude, but the third, who was black, was sentenced to servitude for life. In 1662, Virginia declared that the status of offspring of a white man and a Negro woman would follow that of the mother. Two years later, Maryland prohibited intermarriage between the races; in 1690, South Carolina declared slaves to be real estate.² By 1700, when blacks were transported in large numbers, slavery was well established.

The expansion of slavery and the tightening of controls on slaves in the South was fueled at first by profits in rice, indigo, and tobacco, and then especially in cotton. In the South in the seventeenth and much of the eighteenth century, slavery was supported also by the interests of New England merchants and shipbuilders, who profited from the slave trade. Slavery became entrenched in the North as well, if on a more modest scale. In 1704, the governor of Connecticut reported that all children born of Negro bondswomen were born in servitude; thirteen years later, African-Americans were barred from holding land in Connecticut. In New York, trade with blacks was prohibited by 1702; in New York City, slaves were forbidden to be on the streets after sundown and were not allowed to appear as witnesses at the trial of a free person.

The Early Agreement to Exclude Blacks from Participation in the Republic

By 1775, nine-tenths of the half million Negroes in the colonies lived in the South. Indentured servants and redemptionists could become members of the polity once they discharged their contracts, but slaves had no contract. Locked into a caste relationship, they were compelled to work at the most brutal, lowly, and unrewarding of jobs. The sons and daughters of indentured servants could go off to the West and claim land. Slaves could go nowhere without their masters’ authority.

Even the most illustrious of the founding fathers—John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison—all but Franklin later Presidents of the United States—saw no way to overturn the slave system when the Constitution was written in 1787. Washington, Jefferson, and Madison agreed on slavery with those other Virginians who spoke so eloquently of liberty and freedom, George Mason and Patrick Henry. The difficulties would be too great should we be deprived of slaves, said Mason, while denouncing slavery as immoral and warning of its terrible consequences. “I deplore slavery,” said Henry, but “prudence forbids its abolition.”³ Adams of Massachusetts not only deplored slavery but refused to own slaves even “when the best men in my vicinity thought it not inconsistent with their character” and even “when they were very cheap.”⁴ Franklin, who came from multiethnic Pennsylvania, grew up in a household in Boston that had no Negro slaves or servants. Even before the Revolution, he expressed the hope that the slave trade could be ended.⁵ But not until after the Revolution, especially in the last few years of his life, when he was president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, did he take a strong stand on the issue. In his last public act, Franklin wrote a memorial to the first Congress of the United States to promote the abolition of slavery, but the Congress, after a debate that lasted nearly a month, put it aside.

Washington’s views were more commonly held. Slavery is immoral; slaves have the right to be free; we have come to depend on them as a source of labor that we cannot do without; therefore, we cannot abolish slavery. He wrote and said repeatedly that he hated slavery and wished it could be abolished gradually, but he was certain that to set the slaves free at once would produce “inconvenience and mischief.”⁶ He often said that he wished never to buy another slave, yet he found that circumstances required such purchases.⁷ At the Constitutional Convention, where he presided, he appears to have remained aloof from the debate on slavery (Georgia and South Carolina insisted that nothing be done to touch it and that slaves be counted for purposes of representation). As president, he told a Quaker visitor that he thought it best for him not to comment publicly on the question of slavery since the issue of its abolition might come before him for an official decision.⁸ His own slaves constituted so much a portion of his estate that he thought he could not afford to free them, and at the time of his death he owned 317 slaves.⁹

The new Constitution recognized slavery by specifying that every slave should count as three-fifths of a person for purposes of apportioning representatives, by stipulating that the Congress could not prohibit the slave trade until 1808, and by insisting that no slave held under the laws of one state escaping into another could be discharged from slavery. But the authors of the Constitution themselves recoiled from the word “slave.” They wrote of “three-fifths of all other persons” and of “the migration or importation of such persons as any of the states now existing shall think proper to admit” and that “no person held to service or labor in one state,…” So odious was the term “slavery” that the term “service or labor” is repeated three times in order to avoid it.

Madison and Jefferson both agreed with Washington on slavery’s moral evils, Madison writing in Federalist Paper No. 42 that the hope of ending the slave trade in twenty years “ought to be considered as a great point gained in favor of humanity.”¹⁰ Madison lamented, “happy would it be for the unfortunate African, if an equal prospect lay before them of being redeemed from the oppression of their European brethren.”¹¹ But in what sense were they “brethren”? He voted in the first Congress for a naturalization law that admitted only whites to citizenship, and neither he nor Jefferson released all of their slaves to freedom.

As president, Madison tried his best to enforce the ending of the slave trade in 1808. In his later years, he tended to favor the idea of colonization, with the agreement of slave owners, of course: he believed the western territories would be better for colonization than Africa, and he accepted the presidency of the Colonization Society. To end slavery would be to erase a “blot from our Republican character,”¹² he said, but, as late as 1833, he wrote to Henry Clay that slavery had become inextricably woven into the economy of that republic, and that he did not think Northerners would meddle in the institution because, as merchants, ship owners, and manufacturers, they had an interest in preserving the union with the slaveholding states.

Although Jefferson understood as keenly as Madison and Washington the moral degradation of slavery, he wrote more than they did on the character and the qualities of blacks, to their disadvantage. He loved liberty, anguished about slavery, but believed blacks intellectually, spiritually, and physically inferior to whites.¹³ After the Revolution, he hoped for a total emancipation and the abolition of the slave trade; yet, like Washington and Madison, he doubted that the two races could ever live peaceably side by side. The answer to the problem, he thought, was in the colonization of blacks in Africa or in some other far place.¹⁴ Jefferson made his opposition to slavery public in a message to Congress on December 2, 1808, when he spoke of the impending end of the slave trade as preventing “those violations of human rights which have been so long continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa.”¹⁵ He worked hard to see the passage of a strong act to implement the proscription put into the Constitution.

The passage of the famous act of 1807 probably could not have occurred without Jefferson’s energetic leadership. But by that time, 400,000 slaves had been transported to North America. They, along with their descendants, might be kept as slaves for as long as they lived. Even with the virtual end of the transatlantic traffic, the institution had become firmly entrenched in the South with the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 and the insatiable demand for cotton of Britain’s textile industry. By 1820, cotton was grown extensively in Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina. White settlers pushed Indians out of their ancestral territories, and as production soared in the black belt—the rich, dark-soiled heartland of the expanding cotton kingdom—many small farmers became large landholders and slaveholders.

The ideology of Jeffersonian republicanism created problems for the institution of slavery. Pitted against the ideal of God-given human rights was the rationalization that slaves were not morally fit for freedom. The new nation could not make up its mind about the extension of slavery. Its policies veered in fits and starts away from sanctioning it to disapprobation and back to approval again. The Northwest Ordinance had prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territories in 1787; the Missouri Compromise in 1820 admitted Missouri as a slave state but prohibited slavery north of 36 degrees and 30 minutes forever; the compromise of 1850 admitted California as a free state but allowed Utah and New Mexico to enter the Union with slavery if their constitutions so determined; the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 undermined the Missouri Compromise by permitting the people of the territories of Kansas and Nebraska to decide for themselves whether they would come into the Union as slave or free states.

If economic greed caused slavery to spread, the theory of racial inferiority justified it. As the slave population grew in the South, whites enforced slavery with increasing rigor. Slave codes often forbade slaves to own anything in their own right or dispose in any way of the product of their industry; no slave was to be admitted as a witness in either criminal or civil matters, for or against a white person; in many jurisdictions it was not a crime to kill a slave; husbands and wives, parents and children were often separated at the auction block; floggings were common.¹⁶

Even at the height of the power of the slave system, blacks were not a caste in the sense of the Untouchables of India or the Eta of Japan, who worked only at certain stigmatized jobs as their fathers and ancestors had for generations. Some blacks were free, even in the South, and worked at jobs that required education and a high degree of skill. Even among the slaves, some were entrusted with important responsibilities within the households of white planters. Far from being untouchable, thousands served as the nurses and confidantes of white children, and tens of thousands more were mistresses to white owners. Unlike low castes elsewhere, they knew the possibilities of freedom. They also knew a religion that, in the Old Testament, called not for acceptance of but resistance to injustice.

There were many ways to resist: doing a poor job; feigning illness; self-mutilation; killing overseers and masters in the woods or poisoning them; self-starvation; running away; and even slave revolts in the face of impossible odds. Whenever a major revolt took place, the noose of slavery was tightened. The names of Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner, the three most famous leaders of slave revolts, seized white Southerners with fear. Prosser, a slave, led the first of these nineteenth-century revolts in 1800, when a thousand slaves met six miles outside Richmond, armed with clubs, swords, and other crude weapons, to march on the city. Vesey, a free man who worked as a carpenter in Charleston, plotted his revolt for years, but although perhaps as many as nine thousand slaves were involved, it was easily beaten down before it started in July 1822. Nat Turner selected the Fourth of July as his day of revolution, but illness postponed the action until August 21. Within twenty-four hours sixty whites were killed, after which the blacks were overtaken and captured by state and federal troops.¹⁷

Following each rebellion, there was a flurry of action by whites to intimidate slaves, free blacks, and white sympathizers. In 1845, a Kentucky man was sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment for having brought to freedom three runaway slaves. In 1850, the Fugitive Slave Law laid heavy fines and imprisonment on anyone who harbored or concealed a fugitive slave. But the most significant sanction for slavery came in the Supreme Court’s decision in 1857 in Dred Scott v. Sanford.

In that year, when a quarter of a million immigrants arrived in the United States and when Carl Schurz, not yet a citizen, was almost elected lieutenant governor of Wisconsin, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that since blacks were not citizens they did not have the right to sue in court and a citizen-master could take his slave property wherever he liked, even to states that did not recognize slavery, without giving up total control. Dred Scott, a Missouri slave who had been taken by his master to live in free Illinois, could not sue for his freedom after returning to Missouri because he had never been released from slavery by his master. Frederick Douglass saw in the Supreme Court’s harsh decision the possibility that it would become “one necessary link in the chain of events preparatory to the complete overthrow of the slave system.”¹⁸ The Civil War was only four years away.

The ambiguities of the caste system were most apparent with respect to free blacks, even before the Civil War. At the end of the Revolution, when free African-Americans constituted less than 4 percent of the black population in the South, the laws against them were relatively mild. But as Southerners became more fearful of slave revolts, one southern state after another disenfranchised free blacks, barred them from military service, and prohibited them from testifying against white persons. They were subject to search without a warrant and to trial without jury for all but capital crimes; they were not permitted to assemble and were forbidden to carry arms; they were kept from professions and many trades by high license fees and physical intimidation; some states required them to register and carry freedom papers; and, of course, they could not marry out of their caste. They lived in constant danger of being kidnapped or being forced back into slavery by the courts. As historian John Hope Franklin has written, “one slip or ignorance of the law would send them back into the ranks of slaves.”¹⁹

That the vast majority of them were essentially outside of the civic culture was clear from laws regulating their freedom of movement. By 1835, most southern and many northern states had restricted or prohibited free immigration by blacks; the right of assembly had been taken away from almost all free Negroes in the South. Blacks generally could own land (except in Georgia up until 1818), but in 1826 Congress denied them preemption rights on public lands.²⁰ Even in the North, some states did not allow free African-Americans to testify in cases involving white persons, and their children either attended segregated schools or were not permitted into public schools.

Both northern and southern states began to disenfranchise free blacks at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and probably more than 90 percent were not permitted to vote during the several decades prior to the Civil War.²¹ Even in liberal Pennsylvania, where the law permitted blacks to vote until 1838, when the franchise was restricted to white males, blacks did not vote out of fear, according to an informant of Alexis de Tocqueville. When the French visitor was surprised in 1832 to find no blacks voting in a state founded by Quakers and celebrated for its toleration, he asked the Pennsylvanian whether it was fair that blacks should not vote, since they paid taxes. The answer came that of course blacks had the right to vote but they voluntarily abstained. Tocqueville, exclaiming on their extraordinary modesty, was told that they were “afraid of being maltreated” and that “the magistrates are unable to protect them in the exercise of their legal rights.”²²

African-Americans generally were denied the benefits of federal land policy. An opinion from the attorney general’s office was necessary to qualify free Negroes for the benefit of the Pre-Emption Act of 1841, and in the 1850s they were frequently excluded from homesteading legislation. From 1810 until 1862, federal law excluded Negroes from the postal service. But nothing so clearly symbolized the caste status of all blacks—free or slave—as the Dred Scott decision. Up to that decision, African-Americans were considered citizens in many northern states, even though they were excluded from suffrage and holding office, in the same way that women and children were considered citizens. They had rights to property, liberty of person, freedom of speech, and access to the courts. After Dred Scott, it was uncertain whether free blacks who had not been citizens at the time of the creation of the Union enjoyed any rights guaranteed by the Constitution. The case was complicated because Scott had not only lived in Illinois with his owner but had also been sold to an abolitionist family in New York. Since the Missouri Supreme Court had declared Scott to be a slave, the justices could have decided that Scott had no status as a citizen or an alien. Instead, Chief Justice Taney and five other justices ruled that because Scott was a black man he could not be a citizen of the U.S. within the meaning of the Constitution because no state could on its own “introduce a new member into the political community created by the Constitution of the United States.”²³

It was a convoluted decision intended to tighten the boundaries of caste. Taney made up a theory that all Negroes were meant to be excluded from the political community by the Constitution through its clauses respecting the slave trade and the extradition of fugitives, even though those provisions applied only to slaves. Taney somehow saw confirmation of his theory in the explicit restriction barring naturalization to all but white aliens in statutes passed from 1790 on. The decision, in effect, held that those who created the Union in 1789 formed a closed community that restricted membership to their descendants and to aliens (only whites) brought in by the process of naturalization.²⁴ Taney was wrong in history and in law, but it would take a civil war to affirm citizenship for blacks and the principles of membership in the political community by right of birth.

As Richard Wade has shown, regulations in southern cities controlling the movement and behavior of Negroes tended to be the same for free and bonded blacks.²⁵ In Baltimore in 1850, 90 free Negroes joined 126 whites in petitioning for a school to prepare free blacks for “those humble stations in the community to which they are confined by the necessities of their situation.”²⁶ The system chose white labor—including Irish and German immigrants—over blacks for higher-status jobs. Once free, Ira Berlin has shown, blacks in the South were confined to the bottom of the social order, “despised by whites, burdened with increasingly oppressive racial proscriptions, and subjected to verbal and physical abuse.”²⁷

The number of free blacks grew in the decades before the Civil War. By 1830, there were 319,000 in the U.S., thirty years later 488,000, 44 percent in the South, 46 percent in the North, the remainder in the south central states and the West.²⁸ In the face of almost every form of discrimination, including segregated schools, free African-Americans worked in a diversity of occupations, to that extent modifying the fundamental objective of caste. John Hope Franklin has written that “almost every community had its free Negro carpenters, barbers, cabinetmakers, and brick masons; many had shopkeepers, salesmen, and clerks, even where it was in violation of the law.”²⁹ Some free blacks owned extensive property, including slaves in a few cases, and many developed fraternal and charitable organizations in the tradition of ethnic voluntary pluralism, particularly in the North, where they also established and joined abolitionist societies. A tiny number went to predominantly white colleges. Some became writers, poets, and physicians. But while caste pluralism was not airtight, it worked largely as it was intended until passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 abolished slavery.

The Changing Nature of Caste After Emancipation

Encouraged by emancipation and the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment, African-Americans formed state associations of the National Equal Rights League; they lobbied to end policies of racial segregation and discrimination in many states; and, in some places, they won. In Iowa, the Negro Exclusion Law was repealed; in Ohio, the legislature provided that impoverished colored persons could be eligible for relief; in Illinois, the ban on the testimony of blacks in state courts was ended. Impressive reforms were achieved in the upper midwestern states in 1864 and 1865. Nevertheless, the situation in Indiana probably was more typical of the North’s determination to exclude blacks from basic rights. In September of 1865, the governor of Indiana pointed without shame to the fact that blacks were not only excluded from voting but from testifying in courts of justice; they even were kept from public schools and from acquiring title to land.

In 1864, even after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, Congress continued its traditional policy of disenfranchising blacks in the territories and the District of Columbia; in 1865, it voted to perpetuate racial segregation in the Union army and in the public school system of the Capital; even in the midwestern states of Iowa, Minnesota, and Michigan, where blacks were few and where sentiment for equality was as strong as anywhere in the country, the state legislatures permitted cities and towns to establish segregated school systems.³⁰

Because the Thirteenth Amendment said little about the position of blacks as members of society other than that they were free, a Reconstructionist Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which specified that they would have fundamental rights as citizens of every state and territory in the U.S. They could enforce contracts, sue, give evidence, deal in property, and have the benefit of laws to protect their persons and property the same as white citizens. When doubt was raised about the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, Congress met to consider a Fourteenth Amendment. The amendment later would become (along with the First Amendment) the fundamental charter of human rights in American society—the crux and the fulcrum of the redefined and expanded civic culture of the 1970s and 1980s. Opposition, even in the North, was strong. Senator Thomas Hendricks of Indiana argued that white men “had a right to exclude the colored man if they saw fit … this is a white man’s government, made by the white man for the white man.”³¹ In the House of Representatives, Andrew Rogers of New Jersey echoed that view: “Sir, I want it distinctly understood that the American people believe that this government was made for white men and white women.”³²

Passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, and its ratification by the states, and of subsequent civil rights legislation by Congress was made possible by the political dominance of radical Republicans and the occupation of reconstructed southern states by Union troops.

Caste pluralism was abolished on paper under the cover of Union bayonets, mainly by men such as Senators Charles Sumner of Massachusetts and Daniel Cook of New Hampshire, who had little to do with blacks in their daily lives and who were not in a position to enforce the laws they wrote. The most far-reaching amendment to the Constitution ever enacted, the Fourteenth Amendment provided, in Section I, that any person born or naturalized in the U.S. is a citizen of the U.S. and of the state wherein he or she resides. Then, in what became the basis of the civil rights revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, the amendment stipulated that “no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens in the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law; nor to deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Even after passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, citizenship in the Deep South did not mean the end of terror for blacks. Reconstructionist Representative Samuel McKee of Kentucky pointed out in 1869 that in his state the Ku Klux Klan was on the rampage against blacks, committing “assassinations by night and by day,” without a single case on the record of anyone having been arrested or punished for these crimes. “Today I can walk in broad daylight into the cabin of any colored man and rob him of all he possesses in the presence of all his family, and there is no court of Kentucky that will convict me; today I can enter the church where one of the colored ministers preaches to his flock, and in the presence of his own congregation, drag him from the altar and murder him on the spot, and there is no court of Kentucky that can convict me unless a white person saw the deed.”³³

McKee was speaking in favor of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which provided that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” The Fourteenth had decided citizenship, but the question of suffrage remained open, since states had total responsibility for specifying voting qualifications. McKee’s point was that citizenship meant nothing without the right to vote, a position echoed in the other chamber by Reconstructionist Senator Adonijah Welch of Florida, who argued that blacks would never be truly free without political power.³⁴ Other senators argued back that blacks were incompetent to vote; but the Fifteenth Amendment, like the Fourteenth, was passed by a Congress controlled by radical Republicans, including some from the formerly rebellious states occupied by Union troops and now under Reconstruction.

At the time of ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1869, only seven northern states had acted to give African-Americans the vote, and not one state with a large black population outside the South had done so. The former slaves were citizens who were protected in certain fundamental rights; but when the Supreme Court cast doubt on the full sweep of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1873, the Reconstructionist Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875, the most sweeping legislation of its kind until 1964, asserting, among other things, that all citizens “of every race and color” were entitled to equal enjoyment of public accommodations.

The amendments and laws of the post—Civil War Congresses and ratifying legislatures in the states—the acts of the victors in war—were on the books. But what of the real constitution, the feelings, opinions, and behavior of the American people? And what of the willingness of the U.S. Supreme Court to give meaning to those words in such a way as to affect the everyday lives of blacks? In 1870, Congress had passed a bill directed specifically at the Ku Klux Klan, making it an offense for two or more persons to go in disguise with the intent of intimidating any citizen from exercising or enjoying any right or privilege secured by the Constitution or the laws, but, in a decision only one year after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, the Supreme Court said that only the State of Louisiana, and not the United States Congress, could guarantee the rights of its citizens.³⁵ The Court declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional, saying that only state action denying equal protection of the laws was prohibited by Congress in the Fourteenth Amendment. Private citizens who owned theaters or hotels could deny their facilities to blacks if they wished.³⁶ By 1892, the year in which Ellis Island was opened as a gateway for what would become more than ten million immigrants, ten southern states had passed laws separating blacks from whites on trains. In 1895, the Supreme Court, citing an 1849 decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Court allowing segregation in the schools in that state, concluded in the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson case that segregation on railroads as prescribed by a Louisiana statute of 1890 did not deny equal protection of the laws.³⁷

In his dissent, Justice John Harlan set the standard to which the Court would return in 1954, more than half a century later. But his was a lonely voice in asserting that “the law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved.” Harlan acknowledged that the white race was dominant in education, wealth, and power, but that did not justify whites’ denying basic, fundamental rights to blacks since those rights were now clearly guaranteed to all persons in the U.S. Segregation on railroads put “the brand of servitude and degradation upon a large class of our fellow-citizens, our equals before the law.” Then, in the standard which he set for generations to come, Harlan expressed a view probably of only a small minority of the American people. “There is no caste,” he wrote. “Our Constitution is color blind.”³⁸

The real constitution, the deep and wide consensus of the American people on the position of blacks in American life, was far from colorblind. Almost twenty years before Plessy, the American people acquiesced in a deal that elected Republican Rutherford B. Hayes president in 1877 in exchange for removal of federal troops from the South and the end of Reconstruction. Soon, many blacks who attempted to vote were terrorized and states began to enact statutes to institutionalize blacks’ exclusion from the political process. Louisiana passed the first of the famous “grandfather clauses,” under which the right to vote was given to all male citizens whose fathers or grandfathers had been able to vote on January 1, 1867. Schools were segregated, and curfews applying exclusively to blacks were imposed.³⁹

Keeping blacks in a servile state meant the vast majority remained landless and constantly in debt. Those who owned their own farms were maintained in a dependent state through the lien system of farm financing, though it actually burdened many more poor white farmers than blacks. Rational economic behavior might have led the much larger number of poor whites to join forces with blacks against the system,⁴⁰ but most whites “never questioned the sacredness of caste, never stopped wanting the greatest subordination of ‘idle and unreliable’ black labor.” As one labor historian of late-nineteenth-century Georgia put it, “whether planter or poor, whites continued to believe that a proper caste system would assure their own prosperity.”⁴¹

Within twenty years of Plessy, the evidence of racial caste was everywhere in the South. Restaurants, drinking fountains, theaters, circuses, hospital floors, barber shops, juries, public parks, schools, and all manner of public accommodations were racially segregated. Although class divisions among whites were strong, there was nearly universal agreement among whites that blacks should be confined by what one historian of the South has called an “inherited, inflexible system with a literal moral authority.”⁴²

With the end of Reconstruction, the lives of many blacks became more precarious than under slavery. As blacks moved from the South to the North and West, racial animosity increased in both sections. The burning of homes and churches and individual acts of unprovoked violence were commonplace in the North against African-Americans, who were driven out of many cities, and violence against blacks reached new levels of terror in the South with the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the White Camelia.⁴³

Terrorist attacks on freed blacks in the South appeared to succeed with the support or acquiescence of the vast majority of whites. After 1870, terrorist intimidation kept blacks from the polls. Houses were burned, crops destroyed, and blacks were whipped and lynched for voting Republican. Lynching became the ultimate sanction against blacks who were so uppity as to agitate for voting rights. The prevalent view was that blacks of any station, even those who owned property and went to college, should not vote. One Mississippi senator exclaimed, “I am just as opposed to Booker Washington as a voter, with all his Anglo-Saxon reinforcements, as I am to the coconut-headed, chocolate-colored, typical little coon Andy Dotson who blacks my shoes every morning. Neither is fit to perform the supreme function of citizenship.”⁴⁴

Caste followed American blacks into the armed services in the First World War when all units were segregated. Following the lure of freedom and opportunity, one million blacks moved from the South to the North between 1915 and 1925, leaving the caste system of the South for a different kind of caste in the North. As was true whenever large numbers moved to the North in search of jobs, violent racial clashes became common, the worst of them in 1919 in Chicago and East St. Louis, Illinois, where at least forty Negroes were killed.⁴⁵ The violence was massive in cities throughout the country (more than twenty-five race riots in urban centers) in the “Red Summer” of 1919. It was one thing to draft blacks or hire them to fight in a war; it was another to let them work alongside whites in jobs that held some status and paid decent wages.⁴⁶ One of America’s most noted satirists, Finley Peter Dunne, wondered if blacks would not be better off with the Cotton Belt than a belt on the neck from a policeman’s club. Dunne’s barroom philosopher, Mr. Dooley, asked his friend Hennessey, “I used to be all broke up about Uncle Tom, but cud I give him a job tendin’ bar in this here liquor store?”⁴⁷

African-American soldiers who returned from the war could not get jobs, for example, in a white man’s liquor store in Chicago or New York. Yet, there was reason to escape from the South, where some blacks had been lynched in their uniforms in the terrible summer of 1919. Even public-spirited social workers in many cases appear not to have advanced beyond Jefferson’s view about the inherent inferiority of blacks. It was a time when blaming the victim was accepted as an explanation for caste or, at the least, second-class citizenship for African-Americans. C. Vann Woodward wrote that public-spirited professionals “laid great stress on the alarming increase in Negro crime as the race flocked to the cities and packed into crowded, filthy sums. Convinced that the race was rapidly deteriorating in morals and manners, in health and efficiency … they resolved that the Negro was incapable of self government, unworthy of the franchise.”⁴⁸

When Woodrow Wilson, a self-proclaimed reformer and progressive, was elected president, the hopes of African-Americans, who seem to have shifted to the Democratic candidate in the 1912 election, were raised. But Wilson actually strengthened the caste system by reintroducing segregation in several federal departments. At least three of his cabinet members were sympathetic to the arguments of the so-called “National Democratic Fair Play Association,” to the effect that great harm would come to the country if the 24,500 blacks employed by the federal government were permitted to continue to work in integrated settings among their 465,000 white fellow employees.⁴⁹

Wilson staunchly defended the official policy of segregation in personal letters to his old friend Oswald Garrison Villard, the publisher, who was an activist in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He told a Negro delegation that federal segregation was necessary because of friction between blacks and whites. Leading the delegation was William Monroe Trotter, one of the founders of the Niagara Movement (the civil rights organization begun in 1905 on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls that led to the founding of the NAACP) and editor of an African-American paper, the Boston Guardian. He told the president that unless the policy of segregation was changed Wilson would lose Negro support at the polls. Wilson dismissed Trotter’s words as an empty threat, and the federal government continued a policy of segregating blacks in “the less desirable rooms, the inconveniently located lavatories, the poorly lit alcoves.”⁵⁰

Washington, D.C., was essentially a southern city, but segregation increased in northern cities as well. There was, in Stanley Lieberson’s phrase, “a hardening in white attitudes toward black schooling” in the 1920s, as more blacks moved to the North.⁵¹ In Cleveland, for example, the curricula for predominantly black schools and classes shifted away from academic subjects to vocational training. More emphasis was placed on sewing, cooking, manual labor, foundry and sheet and metal work. Central High School, which was serving 61 percent of Cleveland’s black high school students by 1930, provided mathematics instruction to fewer than half of its tenth graders; it dropped classes in Spanish, German, bookkeeping, and stenography, and in its home economics classes emphasized laundry work.⁵² Blacks with high school degrees found themselves relegated to lowest-status jobs. Education provided little reward for blacks as compared to whites, especially after the onset of the Great Depression.⁵³

The Depression: Tightening the Boundaries of Caste

During the great industrial expansion in the North between 1910 and 1930, the black male labor force in the region more than doubled to 480,000.⁵⁴ Many became longshoremen, garage workers, truck drivers, and deliverymen. Others found jobs in the iron, steel, machinery, automobile, and railroad industries. In railroads, they were kept at unskilled work. Even before 1910, they had entered several industries as strikebreakers, working the docks in Baltimore, and in the iron and steel industries in western Pennsylvania.⁵⁵ In Detroit, the Ford Motor Company offered a wide range of blue-collar jobs to black workers beginning in the 1920s; they were later organized by the United Auto Workers of America.⁵⁶ In industries such as utility companies blacks were not hired at all.

Even in the North, blacks were shut out from craft labor unions and often were forced to establish unions of their own.⁵⁷ Exceptions rarely did more than blunt the edge of the color line, even in industrial unions. Although the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workers Union admitted blacks on the basis of equality with whites, many of the other twelve crafts in the packing industry excluded them.⁵⁸ Between 1882 and 1900 there were at least fifty strikes by whites against the hiring of blacks, which, according to labor historian Herbert Hill, kept them from highly paid skilled work in most industries for decades to come.⁵⁹ “The less attractive and lower paid jobs” went “to the black man.”⁶⁰

One union that appeared to open opportunity to blacks in the late 1920s was the Jewish-led International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, but, in Philadelphia, some native-born American white women refused to work alongside blacks. In New York, where Jews were particularly active in the ILGWU and where a disproportionate number of blacks were West Indian immigrants, blacks occasionally were elected shop chairmen and used as organizers.⁶¹ But even in that most liberal of unions, the top leadership was white until the 1970s, and Hill’s statement that in the early decades of the twentieth century “the aim of white labor organizations to restrict black workers to the lowest rungs of the job ladder was increasingly successful” has been amply documented.⁶²

The Depression ravaged most of the economic gains blacks had made in the early 1920s. John Bodnar’s study of a small steel town shows how the position of blacks, which in 1920 had been stronger there than that of Slavs and Italians, was considerably weakened as blacks became more numerous. Although a greater percentage of blacks than Slavs and Italians were semiskilled in 1920, 40 percent of the Slavs and Italians had become semiskilled by 1939, compared to 27 percent of the blacks.⁶³

Unemployment actually was higher in the North than in the South during the Depression, but southern blacks continued to migrate, although at a much lower rate than in the previous ten years. In the North, blacks had more personal freedom, better wages if they could find a job, and a modicum of government relief if they could not. The caste system itself could be challenged openly, at least by intellectuals, teachers, and social workers and some politicians who courted African-American voters. But in the North blacks were segregated in the most deteriorated neighborhoods, where, unaccustomed to northern winters and separated from family and often from their church and professional black leadership, blacks were in some ways worse off than they had been in the South. As early as October 1933, as many as 40 percent of blacks in several large urban centers were on relief, three or four times as many as whites, and by the late 1930s, when sociologists St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton made their intensive study of blacks in Chicago, the situation had become even worse.⁶⁴

Drake and Cayton found that “caste” existed in “watered down form” in Chicago and elsewhere in the North.⁶⁵ By the mid-1930s, white Chicago was organized to keep Negroes in their place. Three such groups were some American Federation of Labor unions in skilled trades, certain railroad brotherhoods, and, most important, an association of neighborhood property owners in alliance with the Chicago Real Estate Board and the Chicago Title and Trust Company.⁶⁶ Blacks in Chicago made gains in voting and political power; yet, the overwhelming majority were still subordinated to menial jobs if employed at all, and they were the first fired and the last hired. Those few African-Americans who did what the authors called “clean work” were almost entirely confined to the black ghetto, and, even before the Depression, more than twenty-five of every hundred Negro men and fifty-six of every hundred Negro women were doing some kind of servant work, or four times their proportionate share.⁶⁷ Those men working at manual labor were confined overwhelmingly to the lowest-paid, dirtiest, and heaviest of jobs.⁶⁸ That was the main point of caste! The black poet Langston Hughes wrote sardonically in 1936, “I am the Negro, servant to you all.”⁶⁹

When other sociologists studied ethnic and racial groups in the North after 1925, they found African-Americans often excluded from mainstream institutions. Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd reported that in Muncie, Indiana, in 1925, although no Jews were members of the Rotary Club, Jewish merchants mingled freely with other businessmen in the smaller civic clubs. But blacks were excluded not only from all civic clubs but also from the larger movie houses, the YMCA, and the YWCA. Black children were restricted to their own corner of the park for play.⁷⁰ Returning in the mid-1930s, the Lynds found that “business-class Middle-town tolerates the Negro population complacently as a convenient instrument for getting certain types of dirty work done for low wages.” Blacks were not permitted to become machinists, and an official in a large automobile plant told the Lynds that they had no Negroes at all because it would be degrading for white men to do the same kind of work as blacks.⁷¹

The doubling and tripling of black populations in northern cities in the 1920s resulted in an intensification of public school segregation. There had been few blacks in the schools of Chicago and Pittsburgh at the turn of the century; by 1930, the great majority of black pupils and teachers learned and worked in overwhelmingly black schools in Chicago and Pittsburgh, and also in Milwaukee, New York, Cleveland, Detroit, and certain other cities.⁷² Segregation in the schools was an index of increased residential segregation. In some cities, Cleveland among them, blacks had earlier been less segregated residentially than immigrant-ethnic groups—in 1910, Italians had been more segregated than African-Americans. Ten years later blacks had become the most segregated group.⁷³

At the onset of the Depression, almost nine out of ten blacks still lived in the South, where the informal rules and etiquette of caste were tight and where “the white southerner might readily be branded a race traitor if he shook a Negro’s hand or called a colored person ‘Mr.’ or ‘Mrs.’”⁷⁴ The term “caste” was used extensively by sociologists and other scholars who studied the South in the 1930s. Research sponsored by the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, which later became the Southern Regional Council, concentrated on the impact of the New Deal on southern agriculture and on the life of southern blacks. When the North Carolinian Arthur Raper, then research and field secretary of the Commission, made a systematic study of Greene and Macon counties in Georgia in the early 1930s, he learned that all of the instruments of caste pluralism—social indignity, physical brutality, educational deprivation, and political exclusion—combined to keep the vast majority of blacks confined to the most menial kinds of work. Some blacks in the North were being drawn into a new national industrial economy, but in the South only one out of every ten who farmed owned any land, “and scarcely half of these have enough to make a living on.” Of the 90 percent who owned no land, half were sharecroppers without work animals, plows, or farm equipment of their own, and a fourth were farm wage hands.⁷⁵

Education and politics, which had provided hope to so many immigrants and their children, gave very little to African-Americans. Education in the Black Belt counties of the South resembled that of Georgia’s Greene County, where blacks of high school age outnumbered whites; only one black school provided even ninth-grade work, compared to three four-year and four two-year high schools for whites.⁷⁶ As for the Fifteenth Amendment, Raper wrote in 1936, “It is the expressed belief of nearly all the white people in these counties that the Negro should not be allowed to vote, especially in local elections, and if necessary, force should be used to keep them from the polls.”⁷⁷ As a result, practically no blacks voted in county and state elections, and only a few in national elections.

John Dollard, a Yale psychologist, conducted a highly personal, ethnographic research study in a small town in Mississippi just large enough to qualify as an urban area (more than 2,500 people). In his 1937 book, Caste and Class in a Southern Town, Dollard described “Niggertown,” a community of ramshackle housing and only two paved streets for 1,500 people.⁷⁸ Before the Depression, blacks there had owned some businesses, and more land; there had even been a black-run bank. By the time Dollard arrived, all of these acquisitions were gone. Dollard used the word “caste” to describe the condition of blacks, who were subjugated and excluded by whites from institutions of education, religion, and politics.⁷⁹

Caste was enforced by the rules of social relations. Of all the whites in town, only Jewish merchants, themselves a tiny minority, appeared to give blacks a modicum of courtesy.⁸⁰ Dollard saw education as the only opening; if white teachers were permitted to encourage learning among blacks, he believed that the system of caste might eventually be undermined.⁸¹ But, as Raper had reported one year earlier in Georgia, segregated schools for blacks were inferior, and education was ineffective as a means of breaking the rules of caste since it was also a reflection of it.⁸²

Two years after Dollard’s book, another study of the Deep South was published, anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker’s After Freedom,⁸³ It described life in a Mississippi town disguised by the name “Cottonville.” Elliott M. Rudwick, in his preface to the later, 1967, edition, called Cottonville “a caste-like social system.” Like Dollard, Powdermaker found some class distinctions among the Negroes, but only three owned automobiles, one of them an illiterate ex-bootlegger.⁸⁴ No matter what the status of black ministers or teachers within the black community, they were still just “boy” to whites who met them on the street in Cottonville. Powdermaker told of one fairly prosperous, dignified man in his late fifties, a highly respected member of the church, who was stopped by a young white woman who was having trouble with her car. Although she knew his name very well, she called him “boy,” repeating it sharply as she ordered him about “in rendering her this unpaid service.”⁸⁵

What Powdermaker, Dollard, and Raper described was a social system based overwhelmingly on racial lines. They acknowledged certain deviations from the rules. Some white men had black mistresses; some African-Americans owned land; a few white teachers tried to instill ambition and hope in their black students. But these exceptions were too rare in the South to constitute a fundamental challenge to the pervasive system of caste.

Of all the studies by social scientists of the condition of blacks in the U.S. in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the most influential by far was the Carnegie study conducted by economist Gunnar Myrdal and his large staff of researchers. He, too, used the word “caste” to characterize the position of blacks, in the South particularly. The principal significance of black migration north and west, Myrdal wrote, was separation from “the full blown caste system of the South.” He and his associates found effects of caste in the North as well.⁸⁶ He insisted that it was a mistake to talk about both ethnics and blacks as minority groups because such a term failed “to make a distinction between the temporary social disabilities of recent light-skinned immigrants and the permanent disabilities of Negroes and other colored people.”⁸⁷ The American definition of Negro as anyone who had the slightest amount of black blood made the caste line “absolutely rigid.”⁸⁸ Blacks were subject to certain disabilities solely because they were Negroes, no matter the actual color of their skin or how well educated they were.

The point of caste was absolutely clear, Myrdal believed. It was to keep blacks in servile jobs. Middle- and upper-class occupations were almost all closed to Negroes. Young Negro women had practically no chance of getting employment as stenographers or secretaries, as sales clerks in department stores, or as telephone operators outside of businesses run by Negroes for Negroes. Even as late as the mid-1930s, blacks in such jobs were only two-thirds of one percent of all female workers. To surmount discrimination, some of the lightest-colored Negroes in the North “passed” into white life from nine to five in order to earn a living, while maintaining their social and family life among blacks.⁸⁹ But most blacks could not pretend to be white, and with rare exceptions they were locked into jobs intended for their caste.

A minority of blacks—mostly teachers and ministers but also undertakers and beauticians—were professionals who served blacks. By 1910, blacks in the professions and blacks with business and white-collar jobs equaled only 7 percent of the total black labor force, compared to 6 percent twenty years earlier.⁹⁰ Many of those who were professionals despised segregation; nevertheless, they had a vested interest in caste, which gave them control over certain markets. In the Depression, even the slight gains by blacks in the workplace and schools were sharply reversed. Only in the field of politics in the North did blacks gain some slight ground.

Black Political Action Before the Second World War

Blacks seeking to change the system of caste could employ patience, accommodation, and self-help, as advocated by the influential Booker T. Washington; or they could protest through political action; or they could opt for some form of black separatism. Protesters had to do their share of accommodating. Accommodators occasionally protested. Both groups shared a belief in the promise of America’s civic culture; they saw its caste system as remediable. The American system differed from the traditional caste systems of India or Nepal in that it was at odds with the dominant religion of society—Christianity’s biblical prophetic emphasis on justice—and with the basic tenets of the American civil religion.

When the brilliant poet and essayist Langston Hughes wrote in 1926, “I, too, sing America,” and ten years later, “America will be an ever-living seed, Its dream lies deep in the heart of me,”⁹¹ he repeated the faith in America expressed by all of the major black protest leaders from Frederick Douglass on. When Douglass protested in 1853 that “this Fourth of July is yours, not mine,” he was not rejecting the promise of the Declaration of Independence or the political institutions created by the Constitution, for, speaking in Scotland six years earlier, he had said, “I love the Declaration of Independence.”⁹² Black abolitionist organizations, conventions, and other protest movements existed wherever large groups of blacks lived in the North. With the spread of the black codes in the South and the imposition of Jim Crow ideas everywhere, African-American leaders who formed the Niagara Movement declared, “We will not be satisfied to take one jot or tittle less than our full manhood rights. We claim for ourselves every single right that belongs to a free born American, political, civil and social; and until we get these rights we will never cease to protest and assail the ears of America.”⁹³

In 1910, the leaders of the Movement helped to form the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, whose platform proclaimed integration as the central goal of blacks. “We do not believe in the color line against either white or black,” asserted the NAACP, calling America a “failure” if it continued to exclude blacks from political, economic or social equality.⁹⁴ The principal intellectual inspiration of the NAACP was W. E. B. Du Bois. There have been few scholars in American history who have been as original, prolific, and influential. Born of African, French, and Dutch ancestry in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868, he eventually joined the Communist party in 1961 and became a Ghanaian citizen a year later, a disillusioned man whose earlier dreams of an integrated society had been shattered. But long before that he had asked whites: “Your country? How come it’s yours? Before the Pilgrims landed, we were here … would America have been America without her Negro people?”⁹⁵

Other African-Americans repudiated American society altogether. They could not say to whites, as Indians had said, “Go back to the land from whence you came,” but they could call for their own return to Africa or for the creation of a national home for black Americans elsewhere. Some blacks, and many whites too, fantasied a kind of racial territorial pluralism in which blacks would be given a state or a nation within the U.S. The high point of the black nationalist movement came at the end of the First World War, when Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican-born immigrant to Harlem, began to organize blacks into The Universal Negro Improvement Association, with the goal of building institutions under the control of blacks.⁹⁶ It was the biggest and most successful of all of the black separatist movements, but it was based on a false premise: that most African-Americans did not share the goal of an integrated society.

Garvey inspired a sense of pride and a confidence that black Americans could take control of their own destiny, but separatism was not the goal of most blacks. One said the trouble with Garvey was that “he assumed we were not first and last of all Americans.” Another reported, “this was my country, and I would rather fight for what I have here than go back to Africa.”⁹⁷ Garvey, who had never actually called for most American blacks to return to Africa, was convicted of using the mails fraudulently. The movement withered, but Garvey’s ideal of self-direction and self-esteem would surface again in the call for black pride in the 1960s.

The ability of blacks to effect change through politics was sharply limited, of course, by caste, particularly in the South. As a consequence, a form of black leadership emerged that Myrdal and his colleagues described as “accommodating.”⁹⁸ A former slave, Booker T. Washington, one of the few “accommodating” leaders to achieve a national forum and reputation, promised whites that blacks would be patient; he asked whites for support and money to build the educational and economic skills necessary for genuine integration of blacks into American society. He asked blacks also to be patient, promised that with the cooperation of whites the worst of their miseries and burdens would be relieved and they and their children would be trained to take advantage of the opportunities freedom would one day offer. Blacks who followed Washington’s strategy negotiated with whites for benefits and jobs in the political system; they promised to deliver compliance with that system, and, in the North, they promised votes, as well. Their achievements were ultimately limited by their utter dependence on the power and indulgence of whites.

Booker T. Washington was unhesitating in his insistence that blacks should and would achieve the goal of full equality. Before the Second World War, the accommodation model was followed by most black leaders in the North. “Negro protest,” wrote Myrdal, “is shut in by caste.”⁹⁹ Even in the northern cities, blacks, a small minority unable to make a critical difference in citywide elections or state politics, tended to be dependent on white leaders for favors and spoils. Black northern politicians had some bargaining power in pushing white city governments to act. Still, northern urban political machines in a number of cities were run by sleazy officials who aided in corrupting aspiring black politicians. In Chicago, for example, the northern city with the highest proportion of African-Americans, Oscar DePriest, elected alderman in 1915 and in 1928 elected as the first northern Negro congressman, was, according to Harold F. Gosnell’s landmark study of Chicago politics, tightly tied to the black underworld.¹⁰⁰

Gosnell’s intricate analysis of the workings of the Chicago government revealed that for blacks city government was only to a slight extent an instrument of economic mobility. Less than one percent of Chicago firemen and only 2.7 percent of policemen were black in 1932 in a city already 7 percent black. Two and a half percent of public school teachers in Chicago were black by 1934, up from one-half of one percent in 1910; only minuscule progress in that regard had been made in more than a generation. Although blacks in 1932 held 6.4 percent of all the classified civil service positions in Chicago, they worked disproportionately as janitors and as unskilled laborers in other jobs in the city government, just as they did in the private sector.¹⁰¹ Blacks in Chicago may have been better off economically and politically than blacks in the South, Gosnell concluded, but they were still subject to official and semiofficial coercion. Negro politicians had been unable or unwilling to prevent police brutality, to secure decent housing, or even to hinder black police officers from adapting to “the exploitative patterns of behavior found in the department.”¹⁰²

Because of their impotence at the local level, African-Americans in the 1920s had little influence on national politics. Historian John Hope Franklin has written of instances of the increased black influence in politics in those decades, as when blacks strongly opposed confirmation of John J. Parker to the U.S. Supreme Court and possibly influenced his rejection by the Senate in 1930. Blacks also organized to influence the outcome of senatorial campaigns in Ohio and California in what Franklin called “political regeneration.”¹⁰³

Republican presidents Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover for their part had done little to encourage the participation of blacks in the political process broadly except on demeaning terms; only slightly more was done nationally under the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt did appoint more than a dozen African-Americans to subcabinet and somewhat lesser positions in Washington. Most benefits blacks received from the New Deal came from programs designed to help the poor. A number of the few black delegates to the Republican conventions in the 1920s and 1930s were hired sycophants or members of corrupt city machines. Democrats had elected no black delegates at all to their national convention in 1928, where the few black alternates were separated from whites by chicken wire. Nor were there any African-American delegates at the 1932 convention, where Roosevelt was first nominated, though some blacks were elected to the legislatures of ten states in that year’s elections. Virtually nothing was done to attack the structure of racial caste itself until the Second World War.¹⁰⁴

In the arts, one area where African-American accomplishments and recognition by whites could not be wholly constrained, black achievements over a twenty-year period from about 1915 to 1935 were impressive. Probably never before had any one ethnic group in the U.S. created in such a short period of time in one city the literary, musical, and artistic record of the “Harlem Renaissance” in New York.¹⁰⁵ But the Depression blotted out the glittering eminence of that black renaissance, and for all of the brilliance and protest in the poetry of such men as Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes, caste pluralism in the form of racial segregation remained substantially intact right up to and through the war.

No national report proclaiming caste pluralism to be a failure appeared to match the Merriam Report of 1929 denouncing the policy of forced assimilation of Indians until Myrdal’s An American Dilemma, published in 1944. Nor was any legislation passed to improve the status of blacks comparable to the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which recognized Indian tribal rights. As devastating as life for reservation Indians had become—infant mortality, disease, alcoholism, and other forms of morbidity were higher for Indians than for any other group, including blacks—official brutality no longer was condoned toward Indians as it was in the South against African-Americans. Lynchings of blacks in the South frequently went unpunished even into the 1930s, although not as many occurred as in past years (the worst year was 1892, when 154 blacks were lynched). And, only occasionally, as in the famous Scottsboro, Alabama, case of 1931, did northern intervention prevent the execution of blacks who had been wrongly accused of capital crimes. Typically, blacks held were brutalized in segregated, crowded jails.¹⁰⁶

By 1941 and the war, caste pluralism still locked out the vast majority of blacks from the civic culture. In 1940, only one out of twenty black males was employed in a white-collar occupation, compared to one out of three white males. Six of ten employed black women worked as maids; one of ten white women did so. In Chicago, where blacks were 8 percent of the labor force, they were 22 percent of the unemployed. Government employment practices, local and national, were based to a large extent on caste. The five southern states in which African-Americans were more than a third of the population employed not a single African-American policeman. Blacks could not enlist in the Marines or in the Air Force; the Navy accepted them only in menial jobs. The Army was segregated, and no black officer was permitted to outrank any white man in the same unit. Every state in the South, where three-quarters of the African-Americans in the nation lived, as well as a number of states in the North, outlawed intermarriage.¹⁰⁷ Caste pluralism was enforced by law, by hiring practices, and by public discourse and social etiquette. Southern whites still called adult African-Americans by their first names or “boy” or “girl.”

That was the situation in January 1941 when A. Philip Randolph, the head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, proposed a march on Washington, D.C., to demand that the U.S. government (which had passed a law drafting black as well as white men into the armed services) ban discrimination in defense industries. President Roosevelt tried to have the march called off, but Randolph persisted. Just as marchers were preparing to board trains for the capital, on June 25, 1941, the president issued Executive Order 8802, banning discrimination in defense industries or in government “because of race, creed, color or national origin.” The civil rights revolution had begun. Probably no one—perhaps not even A. Philip Randolph himself—could have predicted the dismantling of the formal structure of caste that would take place in the 1960s and 1970s.