THE POSTWAR YEARS-AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY

As African American veterans returned home, white opposition to wartime gains intensified. In 1917 a white mob invaded the black community in East Saint Louis, Illinois, and killed hundreds of African Americans. During the same year, the U.S. Army summarily court-martialed a group of black soldiers and hanged 13 without the benefit of an appeal after a black battalion rioted in reaction to white harassment in Houston, Texas. After the war, many black soldiers in uniform were attacked or killed by whites attempting to enforce racial domination. During the 'Red Summer' of 1919, antiblack riots occurred in scores of cities including Longview, Texas; Washington, D.C.; and Chicago, Illinois. These attacks continued into the 1920s and made African Americans even more determined to militantly defend their rights.

College-educated blacks were still few in number, but they generally provided articulate political and cultural leadership. Black leaders were united in believing that blacks’ wartime sacrifices entitled them to first-class citizenship. Younger African Americans exemplified a militant “New Negro” who demanded respect and full equality from America and refused to take no for an answer.

The most popular militant black leader during this period was a Jamaican immigrant named Marcus Garvey who established the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), an international organization, in 1914. The UNIA had two to four million members at its height. Garvey was an outspoken critic of racial injustice, who appealed to black pride and identified with black working classes and the poor. His public appearances in New York's Madison Square Garden and elsewhere attracted tens of thousands of people.

Garvey was also highly critical of what he considered elitist middle class black leadership. He was particularly opposed to the integrated NAACP and to W.E.B. Du Bois, the editor of its Crisis magazine. In return, black civil rights leaders sharply criticized Garvey. His popularity and militancy also led to his surveillance by the U.S. government. In 1922 Garvey was arrested for mail fraud in connection with a steamship line he had established to pursue trade with Africa. His subsequent conviction and imprisonment, and his deportation in 1927, sent the UNIA into rapid decline.

A

The Harlem Renaissance

Marcus Garvey’s career was part of the growth in racial pride and awareness that characterized the 1920s. During this period Harlem, a neighborhood in New York City, became the North's largest and the world's best-known African American community. It was the home of the Harlem Renaissance, a black cultural community of intellectuals, poets, novelists, actors, musicians, and painters. This community included Alain Locke, a Harvard graduate and Rhodes scholar, who was one of several black academics who promoted African American and African culture. Other important figures were Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay. Their work was publicized by white patrons and black newspaper and magazine editors and found a wide audience in the United States and Europe. Although Harlem was the most widely known center of U.S. black culture, the cultural renaissance flourished in other cities with substantial black populations such as Chicago, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.

The growth of black communities in the North also led to greater black political influence. Black politicians were elected to many state and local offices in the North. In 1928 Chicago's Oscar DePriest became the first African American from outside the South to serve in Congress. Political organizations represented the interests of both the emerging black middle class and those of less affluent blacks, an example of the racial pride and unity with which African Americans met white racism.

B

The Great Depression

The African American cultural renaissance lost momentum in the 1930s as people focused on the Great Depression, a worldwide economic downturn that began in 1929. Even before the depression, unemployment and poverty among blacks were high, but the economic downturn devastated black communities. The economy was bad for everyone—17 percent of whites could not support themselves by 1934. Yet, 38 percent of African Americans were unable to support themselves by that year because large numbers of blacks were often fired to make room for unemployed white workers. African Americans lost their jobs at a much higher rate than whites and remained out of work longer. In some black communities 80 percent of the people were on relief, receiving surplus food, clothing, and other aid from the government, and black unemployment ranged as high as 60 percent.

These statistics translated into a falling standard of living for African Americans that was more drastic than for their fellow white citizens. The median annual black family income in Harlem dropped by nearly half between 1929 and 1932, and wage levels were lower for blacks than for whites. Businesses took advantage of the situation. One Philadelphia laundry, for example, advertised for black female workers at $9 to $10 weekly and for white female workers at $12. At the same time, Harlem landlords could charge rents of $12 to $30 a month, higher than comparable housing elsewhere, because Harlem was one of the few places where blacks could live.

But since the depression hit both blacks and whites, it made interracial action and reform more feasible. Unemployed veterans of World War I, both black and white, organized the Bonus Expeditionary Force to protest economic conditions. About 20,000 veterans took part in the Bonus March on Washington in the spring and summer of 1932, demanding early payment of their veteran's benefits. In the South, black and white tenant farmers and sharecroppers worked together to demand fair treatment and a greater share of farm profits. A few blacks were drawn to the Communist Party when it recruited their support and ran a black candidate, James Ford, for vice-president in 1932, 1936, and 1940.

The labor movement was another area where blacks and whites worked together. All-black organizations, such as the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, led by A. Philip Randolph, worked with the industrial unions that joined the interracial Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) to forge a new, more militant labor movement. Labor unions played an important role in forming the National Negro Congress, headed by Randolph, which was organized to promote black economic interests.