Struggles Before Brown by Jean Van Delinder

Author:Jean Van Delinder [Delinder, Jean Van]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317251316
Google: kQnvCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-11-17T05:04:35+00:00

Rising Expectations and Social Unrest

The 1940s brought dramatic changes to American society, particularly in how it reconfigured the color line. Advocates of more egalitarian race relations became bolder in pointing out the contradiction between maintaining a system of segregation at home, while at the same time assuming the role as leader of the “free world.” This rising militancy, especially among African Americans, has been attributed to their participation in the armed forces during World War II—a war for freedom and democracy (Patterson 2001). When blacks returned home, many decided to fight the war on a second front by directly challenging the inequalities of Jim Crow, or segregation.

America’s new world dominance after World War II encouraged those in segregated settings to develop their own “revolution of rising expectation” toward the cultural value of equality suggested within integrated settings. Though the mass mobilization era of the civil rights movement would not fully mature for another ten years, this embryonic period of civil rights activism provides a useful way to study the impact of culture on social structure in terms of activism.

It is within this revolutionary context that we can understand the unusual importance of the Border Campaign for generating civil rights activism. We can draw a parallel here between Crane Brinton’s analysis of the Puritan, American, French, and Russian revolutions and the early appearance of the civil rights movement within border states more than in the Deep South. Brinton wrote: “First, these were all societies on the whole on the upgrade economically before the revolution came, and the revolutionary movements seem to originate in the discontents of not unprosperous people who feel restraint, cramp, annoyance, rather than downright crushing oppression” (1952, 318; see also Tocqueville 1955, 177; Davies 1962b, 5, 17; Sztompka, 1993, 309–318). We can generalize Brinton’s argument so as to include not only economic oppression but also racial oppression. It was in the border states rather than the Deep South that we find “restraint, cramp, annoyance, rather than downright crushing oppression.”

Direct action perspectives emphasize formal organizations and leadership as being crucial to the development of mass mobilizations such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 (Killian 1984; Killian and Smith 1960; Morris 1984; McAdam 1982; Oberschall 1989). The type of civil rights activism encountered in Topeka, Kansas, prior to the Brown case involved intermediate stages, aimed at transitional goals. The social changes eventually wrought out of this activism were neither immediate nor resulting from a specific action or cause. Participants in Topeka did not necessarily take the shortest route to their desired objective. They also undertook numerous actions that on first scrutiny appear to be unrelated. This is due to the fact that the some of these actions were peaceful negotiations requesting inclusion of African Americans in all public facilities: movie theaters, swimming pools, and schools.

As at the turn of the century, the black middle class led the vanguard in challenging segregation. But the tactics would shift from eradicating illegal segregation—in a sense sustaining the legality of segregation—to directly challenging it.

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