African Americans Confront Lynching: Strategies of Resistance from the Civil War to the Civil Rights ERA by Christopher Waldrep

Author:Christopher Waldrep
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

CHAPTER FIVE

Facing Dynamite

In the twentieth century, violent white racists turned to terrifying new technologies, substituting dynamite for the rope, allowing lynching to take new forms toward familiar goals. Both the purveyors of violence and their victims lost confidence in the government’s ability to solve their problems and protect their rights. In a sense, such doubts about the state may have been inevitable. White and black Americans had competing expectations for government: many whites wanted it to protect their property, their racial privileges, and the racial purity of their neighborhoods, while African Americans grasped the founding documents as tools to establish equal rights. Through the twentieth century, these contradictory notions of the state, one conservative and one dynamic, repeatedly clashed, each side invoking the law to accomplish its goals. And both sides lost confidence in government at about the same time.

Bombing became a social and cultural force in the twentieth century. Both world wars involved extensive bombing, but organized crime and social protest by the Left made the dynamite bomb a fact of life in American cities well before the first soldier fell on a European battlefield. The prevalence of dynamite in the culture led lynchers to its use as well. Demographic change also promoted new forms of lynching. Nineteenth-century lynching had been primarily a rural phenomenon, but in the twentieth century, large numbers of blacks migrated into cities. As blacks urbanized, so did the violence against them, both in the North and the South. Bombings in Northern cities became common as blacks moved into previously white neighborhoods. None of these cultural changes fundamentally altered the nature of white violence or its basic intent to terrorize its victims.

The black population in Southern cities like Birmingham and Miami increased dramatically during and after World War II, and it was a population prepared to buy property. Two federal agencies, the Federal Housing Administration and the Veterans Administration, both financed mortgages that increased the demand for black homes. The cities used racial covenants as a legal defense against black expansion into white neighborhoods. Racial covenants were legal agreements white homeowners signed, pledging not to sell their property to blacks, keeping neighborhoods all white. State governments enforced these contracts.

When local government tried to use its power to protect white neighborhoods, it ran into an expanding black population it could not contain, further demonstrating the limits of governmental power in achieving whites’ goals. In Birmingham, Alabama, whites zoned blacks into flood-prone neighborhoods, often near heavy industry. The black population expanded from 108,938 in 1940 to 130,025 in 1950. Yet, the city zoned no new land for blacks to occupy. The burgeoning African American population had to press outward. The most contentious space lay along the frontier between Smithfield, a black neighborhood, and Graymont, a heavily populated white area.

Local government efforts on behalf of whites ran afoul of Roosevelt-appointed judge Clarence Mullins, of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama, who was increasingly determined to enforce constitutional principle against narrow prejudice. Little in Mullins’s past distinguished him from any other white Alabama lawyer or jurist.

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