Part Three
The Black/African American
In Part Two, we saw the gains made in education, which led to the rise of Black intellectuals. However, Black civil rights were eroded with the passing of various Supreme Court decisions, which denied them equal treatment under the law, paving the way for the Jim Crow segregation laws beginning in 1887 and, in 1898, the indirect exclusion of Blacks from voting.
Social tensions continued, and in 1906, the Atlanta riots broke out, followed by the 1908 Illinois riots. This led to the birth of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), which pledged to work to abolish segregation, equal voting rights, education opportunities, and the enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. W.E.B Du Bois’s Niagara Movement joined forces with the NAACP, and he became the editor of their magazine, Crisis. To add to the struggle, Booker T. Washington and his alliances founded the National Urban League in 1911, which focused on persuading employers to engage Black workers and break down the discriminatory attitudes of the unions.
In 1906, O.W. Gurley, a wealthy African-American from Arkansas, moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, and purchased over 40 acres of land. Around the same time, Blacks were mass migrating from Mississippi, Georgia, and Texas. The city had grown from 18,182 in 1910 to approximately 100,000 residents by 1920 and had the highest number of African Americans in the state. The Black Wall Street, as it was called, had African-American attorneys, real estate agents, entrepreneurs, doctors, and other black-owned businesses such as barbershops, grocery stores, funeral home services, and churches.
It has been suggested that the average income of Black families in Tulsa at the time was higher than the minimum wage in 2017, with Black entrepreneurs reinvesting back into the community. The socioeconomic progress of African Americans on Black Wall Street threatened the power structure of White-dominated American capitalism. As a result, in June 1921, a White mob attacked, bombed, and looted Black-owned businesses and homes and misplaced and massacred hundreds of Black people. The police were complicit in the riots that followed. They recruited armed and deputised Whites to multiply the police force overnight.
The police disregarded due process and arrested and detained Black people; meanwhile, no Whites were arrested, there were no prosecutions, insurance claims were rejected, and no survivors nor their families ever received the reparations suggested by the Tulsa Race Riot Commission. Incidentally, private industry and the state stood to benefit economically from the destruction of Black Wall Street because shortly after the massacres, the mayor ordered the redesigning of Greenwood District for industrial purposes. Attempts were made to bring down land prices, and as a result, Blacks were offered property that was below market value. The elite Whites used poor Whites as pawns to obtain more land, wealth, and prosperity, and judging by the legal impunity granted to Whites by law enforcement, the state endorsed and supported the Tulsa riot for self-serving, capitalistic gains.
The Great Depression of the 1930s disproportionately affected African Americans. They suffered from an unemployment rate of two to three times that of Whites, which intensified their economic plight and sparked significant political developments. In the 1932 presidential race, African Americans overwhelmingly supported the successful Democratic candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt, and some Black leaders became his advisers. Even though the industrial boom towards the end of the 1930s ended the Depression, African Americans still got the short end of the stick, and some 1.5 million of them migrated to the industrial North in the 1940s. The migrations sparked the1940s riots because of the shortages of affordable housing, discrimination in employment, and police brutality.
In 1941, 2.5 million Blacks registered for the draft in an army that was segregated, and along with the double V campaign (victory over our enemies from without and the ones within), this was an inspiration for modern-day civil rights movements. After World War II, the civil rights movement’s efforts continued, with the NAACP taking on the restrictive covenants in housing, segregation in interstate transportation, and discrimination in public recreational facilities. In 1954, the U.S. issued one of its most significant rulings in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (Kansas), where the court overturned the separate but equal ruling of the Plessy v. Ferguson case and outlawed segregation in the U.S. public school system.
This was followed by the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott and the Supreme Court ruling in 1956 that segregation on public transport was unconstitutional. In a similar attempt, in 1963, Blacks in Britain organized the Bristol bus boycott as a response to widespread racial discrimination in housing and employment. In this case, the Bristol Omnibus Company, owned by the British government, had refused to recruit Black or Asian bus crew. By 1960, Black unemployment in the U.S. was still twice the national average, with nearly a third of the population living below the poverty line compared to 13% of Whites. Even though Black purchasing power had increased, the economic gap between Whites and Blacks had hardly narrowed.
This inspired civil rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King and his non-violent soldiers of freedom, who often faced and paid the price for demanding that America live up to the Declaration of Independence, liberty, equality, and freedom for all regardless of station, creed, or color. In addition, activists such as Malcolm X and his antiracist philosophy challenged assimilationist ideas that centered on White people, their bodies, cultures, and philosophies. In Malcolm X’s advocation for Black is beautiful, we can see the Black Lives Matter Movement today, and in being politically conscious then, we see the young of all races demanding justice today. These de-assimilation ideas have, over the past six decades, ushered in multi-culturalism, African American culture, and Africa.
The ’60s also saw the rise of the Black Panthers, whose main objective was to protect Blacks from police brutality, the kind that we still see today in the murder of young unarmed Blacks by those sworn to protect them. In the U.S., the police have murdered Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Eric Harris, Renisha McBride, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Jordan Davis, George Floyd and many others. Similarly, in Britain, Blacks who have died at the hands of law enforcement officers include Christopher Alder, Sean Rigg, Kingsley Burrell, Daren Cumberbatch, Simon Francis, and the list goes on.
In addition, the Black Panthers called for Blacks to be exempt from the draft because they were dis-proportionately drafted to fight for Southeast Asian liberties that they did not possess in America. Blacks made up 18% of the American army at the time when they only made up 11% of the population. These injustices, inequalities, and discrimination against Blacks led to discontent and riots, with significant outbreaks in Los Angeles in 1965, Chicago, New Jersey, and Detroit in 1967, and then the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King in 1968, which ushered in a new era of civil rights activism.
In the final part of this four-part blog, we will discuss Black America in the 21st century.