The Golden Thirteen by Dan Goldberg

Author:Dan Goldberg [Goldberg, Dan C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2020-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

John Sengstacke, who owned the largest chain of black newspapers in the country and had met with Attorney General Francis Biddle the year before to discuss wartime cooperation between the black press and the administration, implored the president to undertake sweeping action commensurate with the crisis at hand. Calling on the memory of Lincoln, he asked the president for a proclamation declaring that the federal government believed all men to be equal.39

But Roosevelt was not Lincoln, and he never used the bully pulpit of the White House to advocate for full racial equality. The president responded impersonally, if cordially, to these pleas, saying that he appreciated hearing the concerns.40

Inside the White House, the thought of devoting a Fireside Chat to the subject of race riots was deemed “unwise” by the president’s counselors. At most, Attorney General Biddle argued, the president “might consider discussing it the next time you talk about the overall domestic situation as one of the problems to be considered.”41

Roosevelt thought even that too much, and when he gave a Fireside Chat on July 28, one month after the Detroit riots, he devoted not one word to race. The twenty-nine-minute speech focused instead on the fall of Mussolini.

Historians Philip A. Klinkner and Rogers M. Smith have argued that Roosevelt’s famous political antennae failed to pick up the changes taking place in the spring and summer of 1943. Before the war, it was almost universally accepted by white Americans that they were a superior race. Even among the most progressive class, only a few believed much could or should be done about inequality in the near term. In 1942, when the Double V campaign swept the nation, a National Opinion Research Center Poll found that 62 percent of whites interviewed thought blacks were “pretty well satisfied with things in this country,” while 24 percent thought they were dissatisfied. But by 1943 attitudes were shifting, and a year later, 25 percent of white Americans thought black people were satisfied with their status and 54 percent thought they were dissatisfied.42

“True, white southerners were becoming more restive, but it seems clear that in the context of the war, nationally public attitudes on race had shifted enough that [Roosevelt] could have been more outspoken for reform,” the historians argued.43

In August, another large riot began—this time in New York City—when Margie Polite, a thirty-five-year-old black woman, was arrested by Patrolman James Collins for disorderly conduct outside the Braddock Hotel on 126th Street in Harlem. Robert Bandy, a black soldier on leave, intervened. He and Collins scuffled, and at some point Bandy allegedly took hold of Collins’s nightstick and struck him with it. Bandy tried to run, and Collins shot him in the left shoulder.

The incident was like a spark to kindling on a hot, sweaty night in the city, the kind where the air is thick and humid, and tempers rise to meet the mercury.

Men and women sitting on their fire escapes seeking relief from the stifling heat climbed down the ladders and formed a mob.

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