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chapter 8 Opportunities Found and Lost Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement with robert korstad Most historians would agree that the modern civil rights movement did not begin with the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Yet all too often the movement’s history has been written as if events before the mid-1950s constituted a kind of prehistory, important only insofar as they laid the legal and political foundation for the spectacular advances that came later. Those were the “forgotten years of the Negro Revolution,” wrote one historian; they were the “seed time of racial and legal metamorphosis,” according to another. But such a periodization profoundly underestimates the tempo and misjudges the social dynamic of the freedom struggle.1 The civil rights era began, dramatically and decisively, in the early 1940s when the social structure of black America took on an increasingly urban, proletarian character. A predominantly Southern rural and small-town population was soon transformed into one of the most urban of all major ethnic groups. More than two million blacks migrated to Northern and Western industrial areas during the 1940s, while another million moved from farm to city within the South. Northern black voters doubled their numbers between 1940 and 1948, and in the eleven states of the Old South black registration more than quadrupled, reaching over one million by 1952. Likewise, membership in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) soared, growing from 50,000 in 355 branches in 1940 to almost 450,000 in 1,073 branches six years later.2 The half million black workers who joined unions affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) were in the vanguard of efforts to transform race relations. The NAACP and the Urban League had become friendlier toward labor in the Depression era, but their legal and social work orientation had not prepared them to act effectively in the workplaces and working-class neighborhoods where black Americans fought their most decisive struggles of the late 1930s and 1940s. By the early 1940s it was commonplace for sympathetic observers to assert the centrality of mass unionization in the civil rights struggle. A Rosenwald Fund study concluded, not without misgivings, that “the characteristic movements Lichtenstein_ContestofIdeas_TEXT.indd 109 5/24/13 8:04 AM 110 the rights revolution among Negroes are now for the first time becoming proletarian,” while a Crisis reporter found the CIO a “lamp of democracy” throughout the old Confederate states. “The South has not known such a force since the historic Union Leagues in the great days of the Reconstruction era.”3 This movement gained much of its dynamic character from the relationship that arose between unionized blacks and the federal government and proved somewhat similar to the creative tension that linked the church-based civil rights movement and the state almost two decades later. In the 1950s the Brown decision legitimated much of the subsequent social struggle, but it remained essentially a dead letter until given political force by a growing protest movement. In like manner, the rise of industrial unions and the evolution of late–New Deal labor legislation offered working-class blacks an economic and political standard by which they could legitimate their demands and stimulate a popular struggle. The “one man, one vote” policy implemented in thousands of National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) elections, the industrial “citizenship” that union contracts offered once-marginal elements of the working class, and the patriotic egalitarianism of the government’s wartime propaganda—all generated a rights consciousness that gave working-class black militancy a moral justification in some ways as powerful as that evoked by the Baptist spirituality of Martin Luther King Jr. a generation later.4 During the war the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) held little direct authority, but like the Civil Rights Commission of the late 1950s, it served to expose racist conditions and spur on black activism wherever it undertook its well-publicized investigations. And just as a disruptive and independent civil rights movement in the 1960s could pressure the federal government to enforce its own laws and move against local elites, so too did the mobilization of the black working class in the 1940s make civil rights an issue that could not be ignored by union officers, white executives, or government officials.5 This essay explores two examples of the workplace-oriented civil rights militancy that arose in the 1940s—one in the South and one in the North. It analyzes...

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