Master of the Senate (140 page)

During the many decades that followed, these invalidated laws against segregation were not replaced by other national laws. No civil rights legislation of any type was passed by the federal government after 1875. The national laws were replaced by state laws that allowed segregation—that in fact
required
segregation. As Richard Kluger wrote in his monumental book
Simple Justice
, the Supreme Court had “flashed the green light,” and the eleven southern—and several border—states sped through it, passing legislation that made segregation a matter not merely of custom or tradition, but of law. In 1887, the Florida Legislature passed a statute requiring that white and “colored” passengers be separated on railroad trains, Mississippi adopted a similar law in 1888, Texas in 1889, and in 1890 Louisiana followed suit—with an act whose key phrase was to become widely adopted: “all railway companies carrying passengers in this State, shall provide separate but equal accommodations for the white, and colored, races, by providing two or more passenger coaches for each passenger train, or by dividing the passenger coaches by a partition so as to secure separate accommodations.” Any passenger, white or Negro, not obeying the law was subject to a fine of twenty-five dollars and up to twenty days in jail. By 1895, every southern state had, by similar “separate but equal” laws, formally relegated Negroes to the front coaches that were nearest to the soot-belching engines. As Kluger wrote: “The Jim Crow era had begun.”

It spread rapidly, particularly after the Supreme Court in its remarkable 1896 verdict in
Plessy v. Ferguson
ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment “could not have been intended” to give the Negro equality in social situations but only “before the law”—and that racially separate facilities were therefore legal so long as they were equal, and that social segregation was therefore not
discrimination. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the legislatures of the southern states had written into statute books laws that, in Kluger’s words, “officially designated” the black man as “a lower order of being”—laws that stipulated that not only in railway cars and stations, not only in hotels and restaurants but in courtrooms (where, in addition, restrictions were placed on the status of blacks as plaintiffs, witnesses, and jurors), in cemeteries, and in hospitals, in bathrooms and at water fountains, black people and white people would not mix. It was no longer the option of an individual restaurant or hotel owner whether or not to separate his clients by race; under the law, he
must
separate them. (Interracial dating and marriages were strictly forbidden, of course, and special emphasis was placed on separation in the schools, for what would be the inevitable result of letting white girls mingle all day with black boys but the most dreaded threat of all? Mississippi’s United States Senator Theodore Bilbo spelled it out in 1947 in a self-published book,
Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization:
better to see civilization “blotted out with the atomic bomb,” he wrote, “than to see it slowly destroyed in the maelstrom of miscegenation, interbreeding, intermarriage, and mongrelization.”)

The place of Negro citizens in the southern states’ political picture had undergone a parallel transformation. Reconstruction legislation had sought to make the newly freed slaves a part of southern political life, but the protection of black voters from fraud, trickery, and the outright brutalities of mob intimidation at a thousand polling places throughout the South required an enormous number of troops. In 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes won the presidency with a razor-thin margin provided by the disputed electoral votes of three southern states, and as part of the negotiations under which he received those votes, federal troops were withdrawn from the South, and the vote began to be taken away from the new Negro citizens—so effectively that by 1889, a prominent southern editor would remark that “The Negro as a political force” was no longer a “serious consideration” in the region. In the 1890s, southern states passed laws to keep that
status quo.
They instituted poll taxes—often retroactive, sometimes to age twenty-one, so that the amounts involved might be prohibitive for poor people; by 1901, every southern state had its poll tax. In 1898, Louisiana passed a “grandfather clause” that made registration automatic for any man whose father or grandfathers had been registered before Reconstruction—meaning most southern white men—and that, through prohibitive property and educational requirements, made registration very difficult for any man whose father or grandfathers had not been registered—meaning most southern black men. By 1901, every southern state had its grandfather clause. The “white primary” was another effective means of evading the Fifteenth Amendment’s wording that the right to vote should not be denied because of race or color by any
state.
Democratic Parties in the various states declared that the party’s primary elections were not state functions but rather the mechanisms of a private organization for selecting its nominees, and that the parties were therefore
allowed to exclude Negroes from membership, and hence from the right to vote in the party’s primaries. So dominant was the Democratic Party in the Old Confederacy that Negroes were therefore excluded completely from the only election that mattered. The combination of these techniques was so effective that in the 1940 elections only about 2 percent of Negroes of voting age in the South, where most black Americans lived, cast votes.

For a moment, in 1944, it had seemed that the situation might change. In a suit brought by a black Texan, Lonnie E. Smith, against election judge S. E. Allwright, who had denied him the right to vote in the Texas Democratic Party’s white primary, a Supreme Court made strikingly more liberal by Roosevelt appointments ruled that “the right to vote in such a primary … is a right secured by the Constitution.” That ruling, coupled with the return of black veterans, led to a dramatic upsurge in Negro registration in the South. By 1948, some 750,000 Negroes, about 15 percent of the estimated five million Negroes of voting age in the South, had made it onto the election rolls; in that year, there were several unexpected victories by liberal state legislators over the conservative opponents who previously would easily have won in Democratic primaries. But black determination spawned white defiance: the wave of repression and violence that included the gouging out of Isaac Woodward’s eyes, the riddling of the two young black couples in Georgia with so many bullets that they were unrecognizable, and countless incidents of physical or economic intimidation to discourage black Americans from trying to register, and to discourage those who
had
registered from actually going to the polls. The number of new Negro registrations, as John Egerton wrote, “was the warning siren…that caused white supremacists to purge voter lists, raise court challenges, adopt new laws and constitutional amendments—do anything, in short, to prevent the large African-American minority from regaining the power of the franchise.” And, as Egerton notes, these tactics worked; their “success…would be borne out by one overriding fact: in spite of the increase in minority registration, fewer than half a million black Southerners—not even one of every ten of voting age—actually managed to cast ballots” in the 1948 elections. And after 1948, the situation grew worse. Southern legislatures began shoring up the South’s defenses—passing laws that gave registrars new, and arbitrary, powers. The years after 1948 saw the proliferation of “literacy” tests—in which applicants for registration were required to demonstrate their “understanding” or “interpretation” of passages of state laws (or, ironically, of the United States Constitution) or to answer trick questions put to them by registrars whose decisions were purely subjective—and, according to the new laws, were not subject to appeal, so that even college graduates could be arbitrarily disqualified if their skins were dark. These years saw the proliferation of the “voucher” system in a hundred counties like Bullock.

Obviously, new, stronger, federal voting legislation was needed, and no fewer than thirteen separate voting bills were brought to the floor in the two
houses of Congress between 1946 and 1954, but every one was blocked. So when in 1955 courageous Negroes attempted to invoke the law to obtain the right to vote supposedly guaranteed them as citizens of the great Republic, they found, as Aaron Sellers and his friends had found, that there was no law to help them.

As a result, the surge in Negro voter registration in the South that had followed the
Allwright
decision slowed to a trickle. The figure was 750,000 in 1948; it would not reach a million until 1952. By that year, the number of blacks of voting age in the South had risen to just under six million, so only one out of every six eligible southern Negroes—about 16 percent—was registered in that year, in contrast to 60 percent of southern whites. And the million figure was misleading. So effective was the intimidation, economic and physical, practiced by whites to keep registered Negroes from going to the polls that in 1952, the estimated number of black votes actually cast in the eleven southern states was not a million but, at most, 600,000. Only one out of every ten Negroes eligible to vote in those states actually voted. More than three quarters of a century after the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment that had been intended to make America’s black citizens truly part of America’s political system, they were still not part of it; they were still that system’s outcasts—democracy’s outcasts.

T
HE HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS
of black Americans who marched off to the Second World War had gone into battle in defense of America’s shining principles, so many of which—all of which, in the last analysis—rested on the declarations that “all men are created equal” and that all men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” and that it is to “secure these rights” that “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” And then these veterans came home, many with medals, many with wounds, to be reminded not of America’s promises, but of America’s practices.

Many of those coming home to the North rode through white neighborhoods in which they couldn’t live, to housing projects, bleak and bare, that were a constant reminder of their status in society, the projects that James Baldwin said they hated “almost as much as they hated the policeman.” And when they went looking for jobs, they learned anew that, war or not, there were so very many jobs for which they could not apply. And for those coming home to the eleven states of the South, in which, in 1946, two-thirds of black Americans still lived, there were additional reminders. If they came home by bus, there were the seats in front in which they couldn’t sit. When the bus pulled into a terminal or a diner parking lot for a rest stop, there were the water fountains at which they couldn’t drink, and the bathrooms they couldn’t use: the fountains and bathrooms labeled “Whites,” as opposed to “Colored”—the label whites
had given them. If they wanted something to eat and went to the diner, there was the window out back at which they would be handed their sandwich, for only men whose skins were white were served inside. When they reached their hometowns, some of them, their awareness sharpened by their travels and experiences in the war, saw with a new understanding the paved streets and sidewalks in the white neighborhoods and the unpaved streets, unbordered by sidewalks, in the black neighborhoods. They saw, alongside these streets, the ditches running filthy with a stream of raw sewage because there was no sewage system in their part of town. If they took their girlfriend, or their wife, to a movie, for their first date after their long-awaited return, they had to climb, as they had had to climb before they left for war, to the balcony because the orchestra below was reserved for whites, and the screen itself was often a reminder—for so few of the faces of the stars upon the screen were black, and the demeanor of black actors in the movies made the couples in the balcony cringe. If they wanted to take their girls or their wives for a hamburger and a soda, or for dinner, there were so many places to which they couldn’t take them. Their little brothers and sisters, who hugged them so tightly when they saw them again, were taller now than they remembered them, but the returning veterans still had to watch them trudge to school, trudge miles sometimes in the heat and the dust, because the school board wouldn’t pay to transport them, while the buses carrying the white children sped past them. They had to watch them trudge home in the evening—tired girls and boys. And the men returning home knew what the schools were like, for they had attended the same schools, and they found that the schools hadn’t changed. The ramshackle shanties that were Negro schools had raw, unfinished walls through which the wind whistled in winter as it did through the planks of the outhouse you used instead of a bathroom. Raw pine plank tables served as “desks,” desks so rough it was hard to write on them because school boards wouldn’t pay even for the sandpapering of desks in Negro schools. And the veterans could see new white schools—so shiny, so clean. Did any of the veterans ask their brothers or sisters, Do you still say the oath to the flag in the mornings?—the oath that pledged allegiance to the country that brought liberty and justice to all.

If they wanted the opportunity, supposedly given them by the G.I. Bill, to go to college, black veterans often found that there were too many of them—that with the doors of white colleges closed to them, there was no place left for them at black colleges. The big southern state universities taught whites—they wouldn’t teach them. And for every one of them who went beyond college, who earned the graduate degree that made him a lawyer or a doctor, there were many who wanted to go beyond college but who couldn’t, because in southern graduate schools there were almost no places at all for them. If they wanted to vote, to exercise the most basic right of citizens, they found that nothing had changed there either; there were still the literacy tests that were a humiliation even if the white registrar condescended to pass you. Did they think, some of
them at least, about America’s promises to its people—and about the faithlessness with which America was keeping its promises to those of its people whose skins were black? Did others try not to think about that—because they couldn’t bear to?