Racial Violence, American Diplomacy and the Rise of the Civil Rights Movement

The United States’ entry into World War II bore out Ames’s fears of another racial backlash, but the diplomatic implications of that violence proved more compelling than during the First World War.

Even before Pearl Harbor, civil rights activists warned federal officials that the Axis powers would exploit American racial violence to embarrass the United States and undermine the Allied war effort. At a 1940 hearing on a new anti-lynching bill, the NAACP’s Walter White quoted a Nazi newspaper that characterised American treatment of blacks as less humane than German treatment of Jews. The diplomatic stakes of racial violence probably weighed on the Roosevelt administration’s halting prewar actions, from prewar establishment of a civil rights unit within the Justice Department to a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) inquiry into the 1940 killing of a Tennessee NAACP official. When a Missouri mob lynched and burned black murder suspect Cleo Wright in early 1942, just weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the head of the Justice Department’s new Civil Rights Section echoed the NAACP’s earlier warning that wartime lynchings were ‘a matter of international importance and a subject of Axis propaganda’. While Wright’s brutal murder, which harkened back to the spectacle lynchings of earlier decades, and subsequent wartime lynchings prompted federal investigations, none resulted in a successful prosecution.^{^[151]}

A little more than two decades removed from Red Summer, wartime mobilisation and migration demonstrated how rapid economic and demographic change could aggravate racial conflict. Across the South, anxious whites spread fantastic rumours of black rebellion, many of which revolved around emboldened black soldiers accosting white women and arguing with white men. As in World War I, uniformed black servicemen proved especially susceptible to racial attacks.

In Mobile, Alabama, a shipbuilding centre bursting with wartime migrants, the 1942 killing of a black soldier by a white bus driver nearly sparked an NAACP-sponsored bus boycott. The following year, a wave of racial clashes swept through the nation's industrial hubs. A three-day riot in Detroit left thirty-four dead and more than 400 injured. The same month, white locals and off-duty servicemen in Los Angeles attacked dozens of Mexican, Filipino and black youths clad in baggy zoot suits. Like the antiblack violence that marked most wartime riots, the Zoot Suit Riots dramatised the potent mix of racial resentments and mass migration that fuelled broader attacks on racial and ethnic minorities. The forced relocation and internment of Japanese Americans underscored how state-sanctioned discrimination legitimised a broader campaign of harassment and exploitation that predated and outlasted the war emergency.

Ultimately, the postwar stand-off with the Soviet Union motivated federal officials more than the struggle against the Axis. A postwar wave of racist brutality, which included a police attack that blinded black veteran Isaac Woodard in South Carolina, an execution-style quadruple lynching in Georgia, and a string of attacks on black voters during primaries in Georgia and Mississippi, prompted the formation of the National Emergency Committee against Mob Violence. Compelled by reports of gruesome racial attacks, Harry S. Truman appointed a presidential committee in late 1946 to study domestic racial problems and offer recommendations. The following summer, he became the first US president to address the annual conference of the NAACP. The report of the President's Committee on Civil Rights, released in late 1947, emphasised postwar racial violence and warned that the Soviet Union would ‘shamelessly' exploit domestic racial strife in the global struggle for hearts and minds. Based on the recommendations of his civil rights committee, Truman unveiled a ten-point civil rights programme that included federal penalties for lynching and compensation for Japanese Americans interned during World War II.

While Truman's proposals extended beyond the most brutal excesses of white supremacy, antilynching historian Robert Zangrando rightly concludes that ‘the recurrent phenomenon of racist violence' prompted his unprecedented actions.^{^[152]}

The diplomatic exigencies of the Cold War, as well as demographic and political trends decades in the making, help to explain why the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till became the most famous incident of racial violence in modern American history. The brutal Mississippi killing, allegedly in retaliation for Till's advances on a young white cashier, reflected the long shadow of the black rapist myth and the white southerner's fierce resistance to racial change. Till's abduction and brutalisation by the white relatives of his accuser also confirmed anti-lynching advocates' predictions that racial killings would persist in more secretive forms. Occurring just months after local whites organised the segregationist Citizens' Councils in response to the Supreme Court's Brown decision, the seemingly apolitical murder foreshadowed assassinations of local black activists across Mississippi. Till's open-casket funeral in his home city of Chicago, a political, cultural and media hub of black America, dramatised a longstanding tradition of bearing witness and harnessing publicity to call the nation to action. Mamie Till-Bradley ‘wanted the world to see' her son's bloated and brutalised corpse, and no other image did as much to underscore the moral and geopolitical stakes of the American civil rights struggle.^{^[153]}

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Source: Edwards Louise, Penn Nigel, Winter Jay (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 4: 1800 to the Present. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 676 p.. 2020

Racial Violence, American Diplomacy and the Rise of the Civil Rights Movement

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