Toward Freedom Land: The Long Struggle for Racial Equality in America

The Preconditions for Racial Change

11 The Preconditions for Racial Change Part of a much longer essay that dealt with the sources of the black freedom movement, its evolving ideologies, and the political responses, this excerpt sketching the preconditions for racial change was frequently reprinted and often rebuked. It was written in the early 1970s, when most textbooks commonly ascribed the civil rights movement to the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” or to the actions of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Instead, I sought to locate the origins and causes of the black freedom struggle in the 1930s and 1940s and to emphasize socioeconomic factors rather than jurists and presidents . Although my looking back to the years before Brown eventually helped prod the profession to take a “long” view of the history of the struggle for racial equality and to employ the concept of a “long” civil rights movement, to some, my focus on structural developments appeared to be a denial of black agency. Nothing I’ve written has given me more trouble. I was assailed by not a few historians for minimizing the importance of individual and collective protest, for reducing African Americans to silent victims, even for erasing blacks from the story. That was hardly my intention. Indeed, the longest section of the original essay dealt with African American activism in the 1960s. Questions remain, moreover, as to the relative importance of, and relationship between, external factors and protest activities. To feed the debate, and perhaps spur some historians to do more contextualizing and less editorializing , what follows is the excerpt most commonly reprinted from “Race Relations: Progress and Prospects,” in Paths to the Present, ed. James T. Patterson (Minneapolis: Burgess Publishing Co., 1975), 183– 227. Reprinted by permission. 12 Toward Freedom Land Of the interrelated causes of progress in race relations since the start of the Great Depression, none was more important than the changes in the American economy. No facet of the race problem was untouched by the elephantine growth of the gross national product, which rose from $206 billion in 1940 to $500 billion in 1960, and then in the 1960s increased by an additional 60 percent. By 1970, the economy topped the trillion-dollar mark. This spectacular rate of economic growth produced some 25 million new jobs in the quarter of a century after World War II and raised real wage earnings by at least 50 percent. It made possible the increasing income of blacks, their entry into industries and labor unions previously closed to them, and gains for blacks in occupational status; and it created a shortage of workers that necessitated a slackening of restrictive promotion policies and the introduction of scores of government and private industry special job training programs for Afro-Americans. It also meant that the economic progress of blacks did not have to come at the expense of whites, thus undermining the most powerful source of white resistance to the advancement of blacks. The effect of economic changes on race relations was particularly marked in the South. The rapid industrialization of the South since 1940 ended the dominance of the cotton culture. With its demise went the need for a vast underclass of unskilled, subjugated laborers . Power shifted from rural areas to the cities, and from traditionoriented landed families to the new officers and professional workers in absentee-owned corporations. The latter had neither the historical allegiances nor the nonrational attachment to racial mores to risk economic growth for the sake of tradition. The old system of race relations had no place in the new economic order. Time and again in the 1950s and 1960s, the industrial and business elite took the lead in accommodating the South to the changes sought by the civil rights movement. The existence of an “affluent society” boosted the fortunes of the civil rights movement itself in countless ways. Most obviously, it enabled millions of dollars in contributions from wealthy liberals and philanthropic organizations to pour into the coffers of the NAACP, Urban League, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and countless other civil rights groups. Without those funds it is dif- ficult to comprehend how the movement could have accomplished The Preconditions for Racial Change 13 those tasks so essential to its success: legislative lobbying and court litigation; nationwide speaking tours and the daily mailings of press releases all over the...