Rumblings of Change in the Pre-Civil Rights Era (1941-1953)

            Although many considered World War I to be the conflict that would end all wars,[1] the world once more found itself embroiled in turmoil in 1939. The United States remained neutral until Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The day after this catastrophe, the United States officially declared war, and remained engaged in World War II until its termination in 1945.

Several factors during this era helped to make the twin issues of race and multiethnicty topics of great concern. First, countless African American soldiers who risked their lives for the United States returned to a nation that still treated them like second-class citizens despite their sacrifices. Jim Crow laws continued to dominate the landscape, and this factor created a great dissatisfaction amongst African Americans.[2] Many responded to this shunning by devoting themselves to the fight for equal civil rights.[3]

Second, the Great Migration that began in 1916[4] continued throughout the 1940s. To a large extent World War II helped to sustain this movement.[5] As many as a million African Americans forsook the South as a result of the abuse they received at the hands of indignant Southerners.[6] By 1950, 2.5 million African Americans who had been born in the South resided in the North and in the West.[7] Prior to 1916, 90 percent of African Americans lived in the South,[8] but by 1970, only 53 percent remained there.[9] Simply put, this “black migration was one of the largest and most rapid mass internal movements of people in history.”[10] The phenomenon not only brought more Northern Anglos into contact with African Americans, but also threw a brighter spotlight onto American’s race problems.[11]

Third, to speak to the issue of racial inequality, and in appreciation for the admirable manner in which African American soldiers performed throughout World War II, President Harry Truman ordered the desegregation of the military in 1948. The president declared, “there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin.”[12] The outcry toward this act was immediate and vociferous as some detractors warned that the measure would lead to widespread comingling. A New York times article accused President Truman’s civil rights interests of “threat[ening] to make Southerners into a mongrel, inferior race by forced intermingling with Negroes.”[13] What was unclear concerning these types of accusations was how Truman intended to make Anglos produce multiethnic offspring with African Americans.

In this era, like previous periods of American history, Anglos were concerned that African American men would comingle with Anglo women and produce mongrel people.[14] If, however, they had stopped to consider the state of “race” in the 1940s and early 1950s with an objective eye, they would have realized that admixture already was widespread and had not caused the nation to implode. In fact, comingling in parts of the United States was so prolific that some jokingly said about a certain city in Louisiana, “You can take a bowl of rice and feed all the people of pure-white blood in the city.”[15]

In the midst of substantial opposition against so-called mongrelization, in 1942 anthropologist Ashley Montagu (1905-1999) published the first edition of his work, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race. In this book, he questioned the standard scientific understanding of race:

The abolitionists argued that those who were enslaved were as good human beings as those who had enslaved them. To this, by way of reply, the champions of slavery could only attempt to show that the slaves were most certainly not as good as their masters. And in this highly charged emotional atmosphere there began the recitation of the catalogue of differences which were alleged to prove the inferiority of the slave to his master.[16]

He also explained “that all human beings are so much mixed with regard to origin that between different groups of individuals intergradation and ‘overlapping’ of physical characters is the rule.”[17] In other words, the notion of a “pure” strain of humanity was spurious from a biological perspective, and the implication of his work was that mix-raced people were not the bugbears that detractors made them out to be. Even though Montagu’s work did not change the national perception regarding race, the book does indicate that cracks in American’s long-established approach to the topic of ethnicity were forming, helping to pave the way for the Civil Rights Era a decade later.

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[1] Author H. G. Wells helped to popularize this phrase by publishing a series of newspaper journals in book form that made use of this statement as its title. See H. G. Wells, The War That Will End War (London: Frank & Cecil Palmer, Red Lion Court, 1914).

[2] Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), 145.

[3] Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name, 381.

[4] Carole Marks, “Black Works and the Great Migration North,” Phylon 46.2 (1985): 148.

[5] Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns, 187.

[6] Joe William Trotter Jr., “The Great Migration,” OAH Magazine of History 17.1 (October 2002): 31.

[7] Stewart E. Tolnay, “The African American ‘Great Migration’ and Beyond,” Annual Review of Sociology 29 (2003): 210.

[8] Katherine J. Curtis White, Kyle Crowder, Stewart E. Tolnay, and Robert M. Adelman, “Race, Gender, and Marriage: Destination Selection During the Great Migration,” Demography 42.2 (May 2005): 215.

[9] “The Second Great Migration,” The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, http://www.inmotionaame.org/print.cfm;jsessionid=f830444661458729315793?migration=9&bhcp=1 (accessed November 3, 2017).

[10] Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How it Changed America (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 6.

[11] Renee C. Romano, Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 147.

[12] For a digital copy of this order, see “Executive Order 9981,” Harry S. Truman Presidential Library & Museum, https://www.trumanlibrary.org/9981.htm (accessed November 3, 2017).

[13] Kaplan, “The Miscegenation Issue in the Election of 1864,” 275.

[14] Howard Washington Odum, Race and Rumors of Race: The American South in the Early Forties, with a new introduction by Bryant Simon (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 58.

[15] Brattain, “Miscegenation and Competing Definitions,” 622.

[16] M. F. Ashley Montagu, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, with a foreword by Aldous Huxley, 2^nd rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946), 10-11.

[17] Ibid., 3.