The country welcomed them home with 25 major race riots, the most serious in Chicago. White mobs lynched veterans in uniform. Black Americans fought back.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded in , and the Urban League publicized abuses and worked for redress.
Protesters march against school segregation. Wikimedia Commons. Though they drew support from both races, these groups barely stemmed the tide. The s and 30s produced new Jim Crow laws. By , a Swede visiting the South pronounced segregation so complete that whites did not see blacks except when being served by them. Jim Crow shocked United Nations delegates who reported home about the practice. In , President Harry Truman took decisive action to promote racial equality. He urged Congress to abolish the poll tax, enforce fair voting and hiring practices, and end Jim Crow transportation between states.
Then, as commander in chief, Truman ordered the complete integration of the armed forces. He did not wipe out racism, but, trained to obey commands, officers complied as best they could.
In Korea, during the s, integrated U. Back at home, when the new Eisenhower administration downplayed civil rights, federal courts took the lead. Both times, federal courts upheld segregation. Both times, the parents appealed. This time, the district appealed. The Supreme Court agreed to consider these three cases in combination with one other. In Topeka, Kansas, where schools for blacks and whites were equally good, Oliver Brown wanted his 8-year-old daughter, Linda, to attend a school close to home.
State law, however, prevented the white school from accepting Linda because she was black. On May 17, , at the stroke of noon, the nine Supreme Court Justices announced their unanimous decision in the four cases, now grouped as Brown v. Board of Education. They held that racial segregation of children in public schools, even in schools of equal quality, hurt minority children. To some, the judgment seemed the fruitful end of a long struggle. Actually, the struggle had just begun.
Packard, Jerrald M. New York: St. Chafe, William H. The South, slaveholding and evil. Board of Education ruling. But Jim Crow did not originate in the South.
The Salem Gazette, Oct. Separation — the word universally used in the 19th century — had no place in the South before the Civil War. Slavery required close contact, coercion and intimacy in order to survive and dominate. It was the free but conflicted North that gave birth to separation, in different places and different forms, at the dawn of the railroad age in the late s.
They had already created separate pews in churches, and separate galleries in theaters. Among the eight passenger railways operating in the state of Massachusetts in , only three chose the custom of separate cars. But two of those lines served towns north and south of Boston that had emerged as antislavery strongholds. With pairs of white and black abolitionists from the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society aboard those trains, confrontations were guaranteed.
But go they must. His name was Frederick Douglass. In his memoirs, Douglass described holding so tightly to his bolted seat during one trip that it took six men to oust him. Nor was Douglass the only one resisting. On the line going south to New Bedford a few weeks earlier, a train crew had ejected black abolitionist David Ruggles for refusing to move from the whites-only car.
The slightly built Ruggles, on his way to early blindness from cataracts, filed assault charges against the men who had manhandled him, leaving him with bruises and torn clothing.
By seeking to bring the railway to account through the legal system, this free man of color had done something extraordinary, something no one in slavery could do. He wanted more than an apology. He wanted the discrimination to end. The local judge ruled against him, blaming Ruggles for disobeying the conductor and declaring that the railway corporation was entitled to make and enforce whatever rules it deemed necessary to keep good order. The rights of individuals vs. But the custom did not die, nor did resistance and legal challenges.
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