Black Liberation and Socialism by Ahmed Shawki

Author:Ahmed Shawki [Shawki, Ahmed]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: ebook, epub, General, Social Science, United States, Political Science, Ethnic Studies, Politics and Government, Political Ideologies, Communism; Post-Communism & Socialism, Civil Rights, Philosophy, African American Studies, Socialism, Sociology, Black Studies / Politics, African Americans
ISBN: 9781931859264
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2006-05-15T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter eight

The Roots of the Civil Rights Movement

The roots of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s lie in the transformed conditions and experience of Blacks during the Second World War. Large numbers of jobs previously closed to Black workers were suddenly available. Black migration to the North reached an unprecedented scale. Until the eve of the First World War, 90 percent of Blacks lived in the South. As late as 1940, 77 percent of all Blacks resided in the former slave states—compared to 27 percent of whites.1 By 1950, the figure had declined to 68 percent, a trend that would continue into the 1960s.2 In 1910, 57 percent of all Black male workers and 52 percent of all Black female workers were farmers. Eight percent of men and 42 percent of women were employed as domestics or personal servants. Only one sixth of the Black population worked in manufacturing or industry. By 1940, 28 percent of Black workers were service workers, and farm employment had dropped to 32 percent. By 1960, 38 percent of Blacks were industrial workers, 32 percent service workers, and only 8 percent of all Blacks employed worked on farms.3 The urbanization of the Black population transformed its character—and as we will explore in this chapter, heightened the confidence of Blacks in both the North and the South to challenge racism. By 1946, Black employment in manufacturing had increased 135 percent over its 1940 proportion, and under the auspices of the CIO, Black workers joined industrial unions by the tens of thousands. One hundred thousand Black workers joined the aircraft industry organized by the United Auto Workers (UAW), 5,000 Blacks joined the National Maritime Union, and in one Baltimore local of the Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers of America, Black employment went from 5 percent of the workforce in 1941 to 20 percent by 1943, and even elected a Black shop steward.4

The role played by Blacks during the war proved to be decisive. Thousands of Blacks were drafted into the army. More than three million Black men registered for the service, of whom 500,000 were stationed abroad.5 Having fought for “democracy” abroad, Blacks returning from the war believed they ought to have some rights at home—and they intended to fight for those rights.

It was against this backdrop that several legal challenges to segregation, largely initiated by the NAACP, were to prove successful. The most famous of these was the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, which ordered the desegregation of public schools and struck down the “separate but equal” doctrine that was at the core of segregation in the South. Many civil rights historians assert that Brown v Board of Education of Topeka and similar court decisions raised the confidence and combativeness of Blacks. While this is undoubtedly the case, the focus on the 1954 Supreme Court ruling tends to overlook how several factors retarded the emergence of the civil rights movement for almost a decade.

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