Chapter 19:

American
Dilemmas

Dr. Ammons, Fall 2021

Thurgood Marshall,
Donald Gaines Murray,
and Charles Houston
Intellectual Crosscurrents
• An American Dilemma.
• Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern
Democracy (1944).
Emphasized destructive effects of the contradiction of American life
on black communities.
Advocated social engineering; ideas helped give shape
to growing civil rights movement.
Cited by Supreme Court in Brown versus Board of Education.
• American Youth Commission findings on personality development of African
American youth.
Few opportunities to lead normal lives.
Intellectual Crosscurrents
• The emphasis on assimilation and culture.
• Scholarly interpretation of black pathology and victimization a departure from
earlier scholarship affirming racial pride.
• Social scientists began to challenge biological premise of race.
Franz Boas.
• Culture emphasized as explanation of group differences.
• Debate between assimilation and distinctiveness.
• Boas and Melville Herskovits argue convergence of “American type”
characteristics in groups over time.
• Herskovits 1920s scholarship advocated assimilationist viewpoint.
Intellectual Crosscurrents
• African survivals.
• At odds with earlier work, by 1940 Herskovits proclaimed
importance of African cultural patterns.
• Research discovered similarity between African and New World
Cultures.
• In The Myth of the Negro Past, argued that African Americans
exhibited identifiable “Africanisms.”
Herskovits believed in social importance of his argument; hoped it
would develop sense of pride.
Intellectual Crosscurrents
• African survivals.
• At odds with earlier work, by 1940 Herskovits proclaimed
importance of African cultural patterns.
• Research discovered similarity between African and New World
Cultures.
• In The Myth of the Negro Past, argued that African Americans
exhibited identifiable “Africanisms.”
Herskovits believed in social importance of his argument; hoped
it would develop sense of pride.
Intellectual Crosscurrents
• Carter G. Woodson rejected educational ideas and practices that
treated whiteness as the norm.
The Negro in Our History; The Miseducation of the Negro.

• Most black scholars not aligned with Herskovits and his

emphasis on culture.
E. Franklin Frazier argued African American people stripped of
social heritage.
Intellectual Crosscurrents
• Abandoning the culturalist perspective.
• In 1940s, many black intellectuals saw cultural distinctiveness as a
distraction.
• Felt emphasis on cultural distinctness posed a dilemma by
suggesting that blacks unable to fit into American society.
Many worried that such scholarship would be used to justify
segregation.
Literary and Dramatic Arts 1
• Black writers disagreed about how the sociology of black life should be told in
an art form.
Richard Wright (Native Son) felt it was author’s role to voice oppressive
conditions of black working class.
James Baldwin (“Everybody’s Protest Novel”) rejected emphasis on
pathological manifestations of racism.

• Fiction and other prose.

• Arna Bontemps – productive writer of different genres, including historical
novels and children’s books.
• George W. Henderson; George W. Lee – novels about black life in Deep South;
Waters Turpin – used materials of Upper South for novels.
Literary and
Dramatic Arts
Literary and
Dramatic Arts
Literary and
Dramatic Arts
Literary and
Dramatic Arts
Black
Internationalism 1
Black
Internationalism
Black
Internationalism
Black Internationalism
• UNESCO’s work.
• African Americans greatly interested in newly-created UNESCO.
• UNESCO’s 1950 Statement on Race sought to eradicate
understanding of race as biologically determined and inherited.
Ashley Montagu took lead role in statement, which pronounce
race a “social myth.”

• Statement overturned; 1952 replacement rejected the concept of

race as “social myth.”
Black Internationalism
• The Trusteeship Council.
• African Americans interested in Council’s work but disappointed at failure to end
colonialism.
• Heartened to see appointment of Ralph Bunche as director of Trusteeship Division.
First African American Nobel Peace Prize winner for mediation of Arab-Israeli
war armistice.

• The South Africa resolution.

• 1946 UN resolution requiring South Africa to rectify discrimination faced by Indians.
• Gave African Americans hope of getting their own petitions for fundamental freedoms heard.
Black Internationalism
• The June 1946 Petition.
• National Negro Congress submitted petition seeking UN aid in the struggle to
eliminate political, economic, and social discrimination.
• Charles Hamilton Houston.

• The Appeal.
• An Appeal to the World – 1947 N A A C P petition authored by W. E. B. Du
Bois.
• Appeal accused United States of violating the human rights of its black citizens.
Black Internationalism
• Embarrassed the Truman administration, especially with charge that
racism a bigger threat than the Soviet Union.
• No hearing at UN.

• The Red Scare.

• African American leftists came under attack as Cold War continued.
Robeson’s passport revoked in 1950; Du Bois denied
passport and later moved to Ghana.
McCarthyism; Smith Act.
Black Internationalism
• Continuing anticolonialism.
• N A A C P leaders protested vigorously against anticolonialism in
Africa and Asia and denounced Italian rule in Libya, Somalia, and
Eritrea.
• 1940s through 1960s remained periods of active black
internationalism
Charles H. Houston
• Houston, a lawyer who worked closely
with the N A A C P on the court cases
that eventually ended segregation, was
the architect of many successful
strategies.
Labor Civil
Rights 1
Black Migration
Labor Civil
Rights
Labor Civil
Rights
Labor Civil Rights
• Picket line in front of Mid-City Realty
Company. South Chicago, Illinois Picket line in
front of the Mid-City Equipment Company in
South Chicago in the 1940s.
Labor Civil Rights
• Ford Auto Workers in Detroit.

• Ford worked closely with black churches in southern recruitment efforts.

• United Auto Workers (UAW) joined with few black ministers not beholden to Ford;
Reverend Charles A. Hill.
• Local 600 by mid-decade had 60,000 members.

• UAW worked closely with the N A A C P.

• Integrating baseball.

• Jackie Robinson recruited by the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947.

• Ben Davis introduced a resolution calling for baseball’s integration

Labor Civil
Rights
Labor Civil
Rights
Labor Civil Rights
• The demise of Left-Labor Civil Rights.
• Prominent New York leftists lost leadership positions in the labor movement.
• N A A C P took anticommunist position.
Civil Rights Congress barred from participating in national
mobilization for passage of civil rights legislation.

Detroit’s labor civil rights.

Reached a highpoint in the mid-1940s.
Challenged the interpretation that anticommunism and racial
conservatism everywhere silenced the voice of workers in the civil
rights movement of the 1950s through 1960s.
Truman and
Civil Rights 1
Truman and Civil Rights
• New Army policy instituted in 1949.
Positions open to qualified personnel without regard to race or
color, and abolished racial quotas.

• “Dixiecrats” – conservative southern Democrats angered by

Truman’s liberal Fair Deal and desegregation policies.
• Truman surprise winner in 1948 election.
Received 2/3 of black vote; decisive in victory.
Truman and Civil Rights
• The Howard University address.
• Truman’s 1952 commencement address calling for civil rights
program backed by federal government.
Fighting for Civil Rights in the
Courts
• Charles Hamilton Houston.
• Responsible for case-by-case legal attack strategy on Jim Crow.
Saw lawyers as “social engineers.”
Believed lawyers had duty to be advocate and instrument for racial
equality.
Thought black lawyers must work within context of black
communities.
• Functioned like field worker mobilizing communities.
• Smith versus Allwright; Shelley versus Kraemer.
Fighting for
Civil Rights in
the Courts
Fighting for Civil Rights in the
Courts
• N A A C P began to shift legal strategy from equalization
arguments to attacks on premise behind segregation itself.
Supreme Court sides with N A A C P in McLaurin case ordering
end to University of Oklahoma’s segregation practices.
Supreme Court in Sweatt opinion finds a separate black law
school would not be equal because of white school’s alumni,
reputation, and “relevant intangibles.”
Fighting for Civil Rights in the
Courts
• The battle against separate but equal.

• Separate and unequal education had immeasurable effects.

Difference in per pupil expenditures; school property.

• South’s black schools so inadequate it would take years of funding to achieve equality;
Supreme Court incrementally moving away from separate but equal.

• 1952 N A A C P took five school segregation cases to Supreme Court; U.S. Attorney General
asked separate but equal doctrine be struck down.

• Scholar activism.

• “The Effects of Segregation and the Consequences of Desegregation: A Social Science

Statement” report in 1953.
Fighting for
Civil Rights in
the Courts
Fighting for Civil Rights in the
Courts
• Southern white opposition.
• Many white southerners expressed virulent and outspoken
opposition to desegregation.
• Southern leaders considered numerous ways to avoid compliance.
Doctrine of interposition.

• N A A C P special object of attack due to its primary role in

desegregation fight.