Slave Breeding by Gregory D. Smithers

Author:Gregory D. Smithers
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780813059150
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Published: 2012-05-03T04:00:00+00:00

Sex, Slavery, and the Civil Rights Movement

At the end of World War II, the Social Science Institute at Fisk University declared that “one of the most important race relations jobs of the next ten years will be the full integration of minority group veterans into a post-war world.”7 During the next two decades, the members of African American institutions of higher learning, black churches, and grassroots political organizations took up the cause of “full integration” for World War II veterans and all African Americans. Mary McLeod Bethune exemplified the drive for “full integration” when she called on civil rights activists to come together and keep their “rendezvous with LIFE.” This “rendezvous,” Bethune believed, would result in African Americans “enjoy[ing] the rich fruits of democracy.”8 For the vast majority of black America’s civic, religious, and intellectual leaders, the fight for legal equality was a way to attack the historical legacy of slavery and to challenge the nation to live up to its founding ideals.

Black churches throughout the South played a critical organizational role in addressing the historical legacy of slavery. While black intellectuals analyzed the historical and sociological significance of slavery, black churches provided a focal point for community organizing and political activism. According to E. Franklin Frazier, the “black church” had been an organizational hub in successfully destroying slavery, and it played a similarly prominent role once black America mobilized en masse to fight for racial justice after World War II.9 For the people drawn to black churches, the memory of slavery punctuated the rhetoric of their leaders and inspired the activism of the civil rights movement. Charlayne Hunter Gault, for example, recalled: “We could see that past—the slavery, the segregation, the deprivation and denial—for what it was; a system designed to keep us in our place and convince us, somehow, that it was our fault, as well as our destiny.”10 It was time for the nation to confront its history and fulfill its promise of legal equality for all Americans.

The imagery popularly associated with the civil rights movement during the 1950s and 1960s is of charismatic leaders, black men and church ministers, leading teenagers, college students, and working-class people in protest against racial segregation. Leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. helped to situate the civil rights movement in historical context and deserve their place in the pantheon of influential Americans. King understood that to change America’s discriminatory laws and racist institutional practices, historical, Christian, and sociological narratives must inspire grassroots campaigns and high-profile state and national political battles.

These efforts took shape during the 1930s and 1940s, as black women activists attacked the sexual foundations of segregation—that is, interracial rape and lynching—and African American civic and labor organizations launched assaults on economic and educational discrimination. During World War II, for example, African American leaders A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and A. J. Muste threatened to protest racial discrimination in war industries by marching on Washington in 1941. Most famously during this period, the Pittsburgh Courier began a campaign promoting the “Double V” campaign, the fight to end fascism abroad and destroy racial segregation at home.

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