Racial Struggles in the U.S.

The voices of the leaders and members of the NAACP were not, of course, the only voices raised in challenge to racial policies in the United States in the first half of the century. Other important events are detailed in this section.

Marcus Garvey's “Back to Africa” Movement

Marcus Garvey, a passionate and committed black nationalist, was born in Jamaica. He founded, in 1914, an organization he called the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA); its aim was to promote solidarity among blacks and celebrate without apology the significant achievements of African history and culture.

Garvey was impatient with any notion that racial integration could be successful in the United States, or indeed in any nation where blacks did not constitute a majority of the population. He promoted a “back to Africa” vision that drew both enthusiastic crowds and cynical opponents from within the African-American community, most notably from the DuBois-led NAACP.

Garvey's nationalist movement and exuberant rhetoric won him a major following, and he was probably the most prominent African-American leader in the country in the early 1920s. Many suspected (and Garvey insisted) that dark governmental forces were behind his later imprisonment for mail fraud; the conviction arose from accusations of participation in financial irregularities related to an all-black steamship firm, the Black Star Steamship Line, he had launched.

The company's three ships made travel and trade possible between their United States, Caribbean, Central American, and African stops. The economically independent Black Star Line was a symbol of pride for blacks and seemed to attract more members to the UNIA. Early in 1922 Garvey was convicted of mail fraud and given a maximum sentence of five years at the Atlanta federal penitentiary by Judge Julian Mack, also a NAACP member.

Whatever the truth behind the manipulations that led to his legal troubles, Garvey's movement faltered after he was deported to Jamaica in 1927 upon his release from prison. He never regained the public influence he had earlier enjoyed as a spellbinding public speaker and editor of the influential newspaper Negro World. However, in the United States Garveyism became central to the development of the African-American consciousness and freedom movements of 1960s.

Because of his courage, his pride, his tenacity, his gift for oratory, and his relentless insistence on the autonomy, dignity, and beauty of his people, Marcus Garvey has often been cited as a precursor to the 1960s African-American leader Malcolm X. Interestingly, Malcolm was born in the same year Garvey's movement began its nosedive, 1925.

Pickets During the Depression

Shortly after the stock market crash of 1929, an African-American protest movement against stores that refused to hire African-American staff arose in Chicago. Picket lines quickly spread to other major cities. The protesters' powerful slogan: “Don't Buy Where You Can't Work.”

The operation continued, doggedly, for the duration of the Great Depression. Economic issues were of keen importance to African-American communities in the troubled years following the crash; by 1937, it was estimated that over one quarter of all African-American males were unable to find work.

The pickets were a portent of public protests to come.

The National Negro Congress

In 1936, delegates from over 500 different African-American groups gathered in Chicago and formed the National Negro Congress, an umbrella group that would yield considerable political clout in the years to come. The group selected Asa Phillip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, as its first president.

Having successfully made the transition from “black labor leader” to “black leader,” the energetic Randolph soon proved was not shy about making life difficult for white politicians. He was, in particular, a thorn in the side of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose level of political commitment to the civil rights movement at that time could perhaps be described as “all talk unless absolutely forced to take action.”

Randolph's determination—and, in particular, his obvious willingness to call a 100,000-person July 4 march on Washington that would have embarrassed the Roosevelt White House—led to a concession: an executive order forbidding racial discrimination in government projects and defense industries. The march was called off. A later president, John F. Kennedy, would attempt, without success, to get African-American leaders to call off the 1963 March on Washington; when they refused, he made the best of the situation by insisting that he was in agreement with its aims.

The (Other) Bus Boycott

Long before the 1954 boycott of buses in Montgomery, Alabama, made national headlines, African-Americans in New York City won concessions from a city transit system committed to racist practices. The year was 1941, and the issue was whether New York's bus companies would employ African-American drivers and mechanics. African-Americans stayed off city buses for four weeks, at which point the bus companies agreed to change their hiring practices.

CORE Is Born

In 1942, James Farmer founded the Congress of Racial Equality, better known as CORE. The group was devoted to nonviolent campaigns of “direct action” against racially discriminatory practices in public places, housing, and other settings. Although the group would win national attention in the early 1960s for its courageous Freedom Rides through the segregated south, its early campaigns were in the north. A 1942 sit-in, for instance, took place at the segregated Stoner's Restaurant in Chicago.

Excerpted from The Complete Idiot's Guide to African-American History © 2003 by Melba J. Duncan. All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. Used by arrangement with Alpha Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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