--_ (.1 'At,It 1., :l BIo.L OnJnol, BIo.L FnnnJom l'vr cot ANo l'u rHE LtcHT or FREeoott, Lono, GotNG To LET tr sHtNE, LEt tr sHtNe, LET tr sHtNE, -Trad ler tr sHtNr! itional spi ritual lne -moyling inJuly of 1944, a civilian bus driver ar Forr Hood, Texas, ordered a black army lieutenant to "get to the back of the bus where the colored people belong." The lieutenant refused, arguing that the military had recently ordered its buses desegregated. Mps came and took him into custody. Four weeks later, the black officer wenr on trial for insubordination. If convicted by the court martial, he faced a dishonorable discharge-which would have crippled his job opportunities for the resr of his life. The lieutenant's name was Jackie Robinson. Three years later, Robinson would don the uniform of the Brooklyn Dodgers to become the first African- American man in the twentieth century to play major league baseball. Robinson's bold defiance of raciar cusrom, his appeal to federal aurhorit1 and his acquittal by that military courr in 1944 all indicated that significant changes were in spin. world war II was a watershed in AfricanAmerican history, raising the hopes of people who, with their children, would build the massive black freedom movement of the 1960s. The urgent need for soldiers to fight abroad and for wage-earners to forge an "arsenal of democracy" at home convinced a flood of African Americans to leave the south. Mechanized cotton pickers shrunk the need for agrarian labor just as rhe lure of good jobs in war indusrries sapped the will Io ,try in the fields. Metropolises from Los Angeles ro New york fiued up with darkskinned residents-and, after the war, the flow persisted. Between 1940 and 1960, 4-5 million black men and women migrated out of Dixie; African Americans were fast becoming an urban people. This second great migration (the first occurred during and just after world war I) helped pry open some long-padlocked doors."Before the war, all but a few blacks were excluded from u.i"r, to good .,white', lobs and the 24 America Divided Jachie Robinson being tagged out at home during a World Series game against the New York Yanhees. Source: National Baseball of Fame, Cooperstown, NY best educational institutions. After the war, increasing numbers of blacks finished high school and gained entrance to historically white colleges; the num- ber of African Americans in the skilled trades and in professions like medicine and education shot up. Before the war, the black freedom movement was a small and fragile entity, repressed by southern authorities and shunned by many African Americans fearful of reprisals if they took part. In 1941, labor leader A. Phillip Randolph vowed to bring masses of demonstrators to Washington, D.C., unless the government opened up jobs in defense plants to black workers. His threat persuaded President Franklin Roosevelt to establish a Committee on Fair Employment Practices (FEPC) and to bar discrimination by unions and companies under government contract. During the war, the NAACP, the oldest national civil rights organization, increased its membership by a thousand percent. Many a black veteran returned from overseas with a new determination to fight the tyranny under which he'd been raised. "I paid my dues over there and I'm not going to take this anymore over here," stated a former black officer.l Centuries of bondage and decades of rigid segregation (called'Jim Crow," after a bygone minstrel character) had taught African Americans hard lessons -rBlach Ordeal, Blach Freeilom 25 about the barriers they faced. A maxim of Frederick Douglass, the nineteenth_ century abolitionist who had freed himself from ,h;t:;;ed self_evident: "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never'did u.ra i, never wilr.,, The demand in the post-world war II era was for ,,freedom.,, But what did that mean? Their history as a narion within a nation reft most brack people a deep sense of arienarion from the society of their birth andL with both inrense rong_ full and eqLr:rl citizenship. The black activisr rra irr,"rr"ctual w. E. B. wrote, in 1903, that the black American ,.ever feers his rwo_ness_an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two ,".".or.ir.Jstrivings. :g-fo: DuBois Two ffi ilr*Jl?':i:;l:ro*ubodv,whosJdogged',.""g,r,-uio,i.keeps-itrrom The thousands of men and women who joined the freedom movement in the two decades after 1945 continued to rive in perpetuar rension between the dual ideals. They demanded^equality under ttre tai-to be.ludged as individuals and not as members of a minorit y race.yet, at the same time, their strength resred o" ,1"::, relationships, and institutions thrt ,p.u.rg f.o_ their own tight-knit African-Am..i.ui .o**uniry-one in which iiliterate laborers and a smalr core of blrck p.oi"ssionals were bondei (.,o, always happily) by race. The resurt *ur ,rrr.u-Llack individual-whether cook or physician-wourd rise from the .o--r.,i,y or not at a[. The cause of civir rights was thus always, by necessity u, *rr.h as design, also a demand for black power. The legal effort that culminated in the most famous court ruling of the twentieth century illustrated the dual longings that DuBois described. In 1950 Thurgood Marshalr and his mlented ,"u..ior"Naac, ir*y.* l".ided to chal_ lenge the principre of segregatea r.hootr.'sut they *"." ,o,-r.,ing fiom an absrracr belief that btact
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