Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (56 page)

Talented black people who sought to break into new fields continued to face formidable obstacles. In Hollywood there seemed to be a little more room for black actors, but mainly in self-sacrificing roles. In
Edge of the City
(1957) and
The Defiant Ones
(1958) Sidney Poitier humbled himself for white friends. These roles, he said later, were "other-cheek-turners."
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In professional sports, team owners moved slowly. The New York Yankees baseball team waited until 1955 before making Elston Howard, a gifted athlete, its first black player. The Boston Red Sox, the last major league baseball team to sign a black player, delayed taking that step until 1959, at which time only 15 percent of the 400 roster players in the major leagues were African-American. Most of them were top performers: one had to be excellent to make it.

Other sports in the 1950s remained mostly white at the highest levels. Althea Gibson broke the color bar on the tennis circuit in 1949, winning both Wimbledon and the United States championship in 1957, but few others followed her in the 1950s or early 1960s. Arthur Ashe, the first black male on the circuit, did not start top-level play until 1963. The Professional Golfers Association did not have a black player on the tour until 1961. No black golfer was invited to the Masters tournament in Georgia until 1974, when Lee Elder appeared. In part because country clubs were mostly closed to African-Americans, both tennis and golf continued to develop few black stars.
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Although the National Basketball Association featured a few black players when it began in 1950, notably Nat "Sweetwater" Clifton, the teams had unwritten quotas permitting only four blacks (including two starters) on their rosters throughout much of the 1950s. Talented black basketball players were thought to be appropriate for the Harlem Globetrotters, where they were expected to wear big, toothy smiles and to act like clowns. It was virtually axiomatic that blacks should not coach major teams either at the college or professional level. While Bill Russell overcame this obstacle by becoming player-coach of the Boston Celtics basketball team in 1966, it was not until 1975 that major league baseball had a black manager (Frank Robinson) and not until 1989 that the National Football League did (Art Shell).
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As earlier, no aspect of racism in America cut so deeply as housing discrimination. During the 1950s, what one scholar has called a "second ghetto" arose in large northern cities such as Chicago. In the Windy City white politicians conspired with downtown businessmen and developers to prevent the central city business district from becoming "ringed" by black migrants, who were arriving from the South in record numbers. Exploiting federal funds for urban renewal, they declared downtown black neighborhoods to be "slums," tore them down, and put up commercial buildings or housing for whites in their place. African-Americans were displaced into dilapidated neighborhoods, increasingly in all-black public housing projects. Most of the 21,000 family units of public housing erected in Chicago during the 1950s were built in already black regions of the city, thereby greatly increasing the density of blacks in these areas.
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Black people who sought to escape the projects confronted, as in the past, unyielding and sometimes violent opposition from white property-owners elsewhere in the cities. And those who yearned for a life in the suburbs mostly dreamt in vain. When a black family sought to move into Levittown, Pennsylvania, in 1957, it was greeted with rock-throwing. Levitt dared sell a house to blacks (in New Jersey) only in 1960. More than any other thing, governmentally sanctioned housing discrimination revealed the power of white racist feeling against black people in the United States.

Discrimination in housing solidified an already widespread de facto segegration in northern schools. Whether this had totally bad results continued to be debated many years later, for some experts argued that all-black schools (with black faculties) offered reinforcement for African-American children that often did not exist in desegregated schools. Still, it was everywhere obvious that discriminatory housing patterns prevented black children from attending much-better-financed white schools. In short, African-American children were denied the basic right of equal opportunity. Many northern black schools, indeed, continued to be badly maintained institutions where faculty despaired of establishing elementary discipline and where little if any serious academic learning took place. High percentages of the black children in these schools came from poverty-stricken or broken homes that had no books or magazines—or even pens or pencils. These children often arrived in school without having had breakfast. The readers they studied from were usually hand-me-downs from white schools. The "Dick and Jane" stories in the books featured pink-cheeked, well-dressed children doing pleasurable things in single-family homes set in the suburbs. A host of contemporary studies suggested that the farther along black children got in these schools, the farther they fell behind white children of the same age.
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Underlying these and other humiliations were white attitudes that persistently downgraded African-American culture and history. While most white intellectuals had jettisoned the baggage of scientific racism, they were loath to acknowledge that blacks had developed positive traditions of their own, save perhaps in music and dance. Asserting that slavery had eradicated African-American consciousness, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan concluded as late as 1963, "The Negro is only an American, and nothing else. He has no values and culture to guard and protect."
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It followed, other whites believed, that whites could ignore what blacks did and thought. This is what Ralph Ellison lamented in labeling his novel
Invisible Man
(1952) and what James Baldwin later meant by entitling a collection of his essays
Nobody Knows My Name
(1961). To be ignored was as bad as to be oppressed—maybe worse.

O
BDURATE THOUGH THESE OBSTACLES
remained, they weakened a bit in the 1950s. Some of these changes, such as the disrepute of scientific racism as a result of the Holocaust, dated to the war years. The democratic ideals extolled during the war had further challenged racist practices. The rise of the Cold War obliged Truman and others to consider civil rights at home: American claims to lead the "Free World" otherwise rang hollowly.
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Four other forces intensified the potential for interracial progress in the 1950s: ongoing social and demographic change; rising pressure from the NAACP and other advocates of desegregation; demands from brave and determined black people at the grass-roots level; and the United States Supreme Court. These combined to ignite the modern civil rights movement, which inspired unprecedented egalitarian passion in the nation. No other movement in postwar American history did as much to arouse rights-consciousness in general—among women, the poor, and other disadvantaged groups—and to transform the society and culture of the United States.

The social and demographic changes abounded: job opportunities and military service during World War II, which had pulled millions of blacks—many of them young and impatient—out of isolated and poverty-stricken enclaves in the rural South; subsequent migrations of millions more, not only to northern industrial areas but also to growing southern cities; the ascendance in these places of better-educated young people, of a black middle class, and of resourceful leaders; greater black engagement in politics, especially in northern cities; the seductive affluence of the postwar era, which excited aspirations for a better life; and the spread of mass communications, especially television, which facilitated collective mobilization and alerted black people to the dynamic possibilities of the culture at large. African-Americans, including many who were better off in the postwar era than ever before, grew more keenly aware, of their relative deprivation. Thanks to all these social and demographic changes, rights-consciousness, already rising in the 1940s, expanded for millions of American black people in the 1950s. Like whites, they were rapidly developing grander expectations.
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Responding to these aspirations, civil rights advocates in the NAACP, which had grown greatly during World War II, redoubled their efforts against racial segregation. Chief among them by the late 1940s was Thurgood Marshall, a tall, determined lawyer who led the fight against the "separate but equal" doctrine established by the Supreme Court in the 1890s. Marshall was the son of a father who was a Pullman porter and waiter at an exclusive white club in Maryland and of a mother who had graduated from Teachers College of Columbia University. After graduating from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, an all-black college with an all-white faculty, Marshall had been denied admission, on racial grounds, to the University of Maryland.
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He never forgot this insult. He then went to Howard University Law School, a center under the leadership of Charles Houston in the training of black civil rights lawyers.
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By 1938, when he was only thirty, Marshall had become chief counsel for the NAACP. Marshall had a common touch and an apparently fearless determination to travel anywhere, even in dangerous areas of the South, that inspired local people to stand up against injustice.

In the 1930s and 1940s Marshall and fellow attorneys focused on ending "separate but equal" in graduate education. This was a logical strategy at the time, for most southern states could hardly pretend that they provided equality at that level, and black universities lacked the resources to fill in the gaps. No black institution then offered work-leading to the Ph.D., and only two (Howard and Meharry in Nashville) provided medical education. Blacks could study dentistry, law, pharmacy, and library science in only one or two southern institutions, and they could pursue graduate work in engineering or architecture nowhere in the South.
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Struggling for reform in graduate education forced Marshall and his associates to litigate patiently through the various levels of the American court system. In June 1950 they had notable success with the Supreme Court; on the same day the Court rendered two important decisions. One ordered the state of Texas, which had set up a separate and inferior all-black "law school" (it had three classrooms and three faculty members), to admit a black plaintiff to its all-white school. The other decision barred the state of Oklahoma from continuing to segregate facilities within its graduate school of education. Until then the school had forced the plaintiff, a sixty-eight-year-old black educator, to use separate cafeterias and library facilities and to sit alone in sections of classrooms marked R
ESERVED FOR
C
OLOREDS
.
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Marshall and others with the NAACP's Legal Defense and Education Fund next took on the challenge of fighting against segregated public schools, which were then attended by some 40 percent of American children in twenty-one states, ten of them outside the Confederacy.
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States and school districts that discriminated tried to claim that the separate facilities used by blacks were equal. But their case was absurd, especially in the Deep South. South Carolina in 1945 spent three times as much per pupil on its white schools as it did on black ones and 100 times as much on transportation of white students. The value of white school property was six times that of black. Mississippi schools were even more unequal; in 1945 its white schools received four and a half times as much funding per pupil as did the black ones. Almost everywhere that segregation existed, black school years were shorter, teachers were paid less, and textbooks were dated discards from the white schools.
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In challenging such a vast and institutionalized core of American racism, Marshall and his allies depended greatly on grass-roots help from black people and their institutions, especially local NAACP branches. Pullman porters, who represented an elite in many black communities, often supplied local leadership. Jim Crow, ironically enough, had helped to sustain all-black institutions and communities that provided solidarity vital to protest. Many of those who assisted the NAACP were unknown outside their communities and remained largely unsung participants in the movement even in their own time. In backing Marshall and the NAACP they risked vehement white retaliation that ranged from loss of work to fear for their lives. When Levi Pearson, a black farmer in Summerton, South Carolina, dared to help the NAACP challenge school segregation, white bankers cut off his credit so that he could not buy fertilizer. White neighbors refused to lend him their harvesting machine as they had in the past, and his crops rotted in the fields. Shots were fired at his house. Pearson was luckier than some: the Reverend Joseph DeLaine, the black minister who persuaded him to bring suit, had his house burned down. DeLaine and most other blacks involved with Pearson in the case were forced out of the county.
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Pearson and many other black people, however, had exhausted their patience, and they stood up to be counted as plaintiffs in suits that Marshall brought against segegration in the schools. Five of these suits, including Pearson's, reached the Supreme Court by 1953, challenging school policies in Virginia, Delaware, the District of Columbia, South Carolina, and Kansas. The best-known plaintiff was the Reverend Oliver Brown, a welder in Topeka, Kansas, whose eight-year-old daughter Linda had to go to a Negro school twenty-one blocks away when there was a white school only seven blocks from her house. His suit, joined by twelve other parents, was filed in 1951 as
Brown
v.
the Board of Education of Topeka.
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