J. Michael Martinez - A Long Dark Night: Race in America from Jim Crow to World War II

J. Michael Martinez works in Monroe, Georgia, as a government affairs representative and corporate counsel with a manufacturing company. He also teaches political science as a part-time faculty member at Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, Georgia. Martinez is the author or coauthor of nine previous books, including Carpetbaggers, Cavalry, and the Ku Klux Klan: Exposing the Invisible Empire during Reconstruction (2007) and Coming for to Carry Me Home: Race in America from Abolitionism to Jim Crow (2012), both available from Rowman & Littlefield. Visit him on the Internet at www.jmichaelmartinez.com.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Martinez, J. Michael (James Michael), author.

Title: A long dark night : race in America from Jim Crow to World War II / J. Michael Martinez.

Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015035504| ISBN 9781442259942 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781442259966 (electronic)

Subjects: LCSH: United StatesRace relationsHistory. | Southern StatesRace relationsHistory. | African AmericansHistory1877-1964. | RacismUnited StatesHistory. | RacismSouthern StatesHistory.

Classification: LCC E185.61 .M364 2016 | DDC 305.800973dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015035504

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

This book is for my beautiful granddaughter, Emma Kay Lynne Woodson, in hopes that she will live in a nation where she is judged not by the color of her skin, but by the content of her character

I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed; the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!

Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of
Frederick Douglass, an American Slave

The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.

Isaiah 9:2

Hes gone on high to prepare a place

Trouble done bore me down

For to prepare a place for me and you

Trouble done bore me down....

Ive seen some strangers quite unknown

Im a child of misery

Im sometimes up and sometimes down

Im sometimes level with the ground

Trouble Done Bore Me Down, Negro Spiritual

1.1 A Thomas Nast cartoon of Jefferson Davis as Shakespeares Iago

2.1 The iconic black leader Frederick Douglass

2.2 An early illustration of the Jim Crow character

2.3 Associate Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan

3.1 Three Klansmen garbed in Ku Klux Klan regalia

3.2 A scene from the Tulsa race riot of 1921

3.3 Two lynching victims, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, 1930

4.1 Perennial presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan

5.1 Georgia politician Tom Watson

5.2 Atlanta newspaperman Henry Grady

5.3 South Carolina politician Pitchfork Ben Tillman

5.4 South Carolina politician Coleman Blease

5.5 South Carolina Senator Cotton Ed Smith

6.1 Booker T. Washington, a proponent of accommodationist race relations

6.2 W. E. B. Du Bois, a critic of Washingtons accommodationist views

7.1 A famous Jacob Lawrence image of the Great Migration

8.1 A scene from the Currier and Ives series Darktown Comics

8.2 The Gold Dust Twins, Goldie and Dustie, circa 1890

8.3 A 1916 magazine supplement advertising Cream of Wheat and featuring Rastus

8.4 A 1921 image by N. C. Wyeth showing Aunt Jemima

8.5 A scene from the film The Birth of a Nation showing the Ku Klux Klan with the evil Negro Gus

8.6 Ku Klux Klan founder William Joseph Doc Simmons in 1921

8.7 Ku Klux Klan imperial wizard Hiram Wesley Evans

9.1 Langston Hughes, a leading voice of the Harlem Renaissance, in 1943

9.2 Jamaican entrepreneur and political activist Marcus Garvey

10.1 President Warren G. Harding

10.2 U.S. senators Tom Connally of Texas; Walter F. George of Georgia; Richard B. Russell of Georgia; and Claude Pepper of Florida shown on January 27, 1938

10.3 The Tuskegee Airmen receiving a briefing in March 1945

E.1 A black student, George W. McLaurin, attends a segregated class at the University of Oklahoma in 1948

E.2 President Harry S. Truman after addressing the closing session of the 38th annual conference of the NAACP at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., on June 29, 1947

Barack Obamas election as the forty-fourth president of the United States was heralded by some pundits as marking a new era in American history, a postracial epoch when individuals would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character, as Martin Luther King Jr. once dreamed. Obama himself contributed to the rhetoric of a new, more inclusive age when he delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in Boston, Massachusetts, on July 27, 2004. During a seventeen-minute address that established his reputation as a rising star in the political world, the previously little-known, mixed-race Illinois state legislator exclaimed, There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian Americatheres the United States of America.

Obamas comment would have been hopelessly naive throughout most of American history, but the United States at the dawn of the twenty-first century had changed tremendously in a relatively short time. Four decades before Obama arrived so dramatically on the American political scene, Congress passed and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, followed a year later by the Voting Rights Act. With these historic laws aimed at reversing the disenfranchisement of people of colorand thanks also to the efforts of black and white civil rights activists and a slew of US Supreme Court opinions, as well as ratification of the Twenty-Fourth Amendment abolishing the poll taxthe Jim Crow regime finally collapsed and died. Black and white citizens willingness to modify their attitudes about race lagged behind enactment of the two landmark federal statutes and the other remarkable developments in law and policy, but eventually, as new generations replaced their parents and grandparents, change occurred in all avenues of American life.

Unencumbered by the shackles of legal segregation, blacks became visible to white Americans and excelled in all fields of human endeavor. Jackie Robinson integrated American baseball when he moved from the Negro Leagues to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Althea Gibson broke the color line in international tennis during the 1950s. Movie star Sidney Poitier earned an Academy Award as best actor for his work in the 1963 film