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From Labor Action, Vol. 13 No. 42, 17 October 1949, p. 14.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
No major civil-rights bill passed the 81st Congress.
Eastland of Mississippi – senatorial seniority, Bilbo ideology and all – is ensconced at the head of the civil-rights subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The South sees a recrudescence of the rape charge. The “sovereign” states of Virginia and Florida prepare the legal lynching of the Martinsville seven and the Groveland three-who-are-left. The Klan, if not in the saddle, rides again.
The Dixiecrats are split between those in the Democratic Party and those on its fringe. The Republicans and the Dixiecrats are political bedfellows. The Democrats seemingly are capable of nothing except to insist that their minds are on weightier matters than civil rights. Labor’s leaders, with a still, small voice, whisper in their master’s ear. Civil rights are filibustered off the agenda and President Truman finally admits this in public, as of October 3.
It doesn’t make a pretty picture. But it would be wrong to assume that this picture is the sum total of the history of the civil-rights struggle. Some aspects of these problems need discussing.
Today – and we may date “today” from December 1947, when the report of the president’s committee (To Secure These Rights) saw the light of day – has been called the time “when the American people think, read and talk about civil rights more than they ever have since the Civil War and Reconstruction.” The flood of newsprint, books, commentary and even movies out of Hollywood only testifies to the truth of this. This Niagara demonstrates the vitality of the issue, and it can only grow.
It was not the labor movement that advanced the civil-rights program. Better if it had been! American labor would be a head taller now had it been capable of addressing to the nation this elementary democratic proclamation in its own name. To say this is not water under the bridge, but relevant to understanding the present and future fortunes of this issue. The civil-rights impasse is directly linked to the fact that the labor movement is not yet grown up. Politically speaking, it still thinks it has to ask the president if it can stay out late at night.
The program was advanced, through its representative in’a high governmental place, President Truman, by a section of the bourgeoisie. In advancing it, Truman did not have the United support of his own class, any more than Roosevelt had when he rescued the same class with the New Deal lifeline. In proposing it. Truman exercised one of the traditional functions of the “executive committee of the ruling class.”
In advancing it, bluntly stated reasons were given in the report of the president’s committee: Is national unity desirable from the standpoint of the ruling class in the impending war with Russia? And more particularly, what can that section of the bourgeoisie which “regrets the loss of the Southern market” do except to hold up Truman’s arms while it waits for a mandate from the “people”?
The “international” reason was not stated as boldly as “We look foul in the eyes of the world,” but it was stated thus: “We cannot escape the fact that our civil rights has been an issue in world politics. The USA is not so strong, the final triumph of the democratic ideal is not so inevitable that we can ignore what the world thinks of us or of our record.” This reason with variations continues to be duplicated again and again in speeches and writings.
W.W. Waymack, late of the Atomic Energy Commission, said upon the occasion of accepting the chairmanship of the National Citizens Council on Civil Rights:
“There are pressures within our country – a national awareness of what’s right, along with what’s necessary. There is also a set of external pressures. They have to do with America’s new role in the world situation – the power we have and the responsibility that goes with it. If we’re to succeed we have to put our house in order.”
Mrs. Roosevelt said, speaking in the South without benefit of office: “The most important thing we have to realize in the U.S. today is that we are the spearhead in the fight between democracy and communism.” Barkley today (not Lincoln) put it: “Civilization cannot endure half free and half slave.”
This “international” motivation is more, not less, compulsive two years after it was first formulated, if only because “our record” remains an open book. It is more compulsive if only because, atom bombs are democratic in the same way that bacteria are broadminded.
The “internal” reason was stated in this way: “One of the principal problems facing us-and the rest of the world is achieving maximum production and continuing prosperity. The loss of a huge, potential market for goods is a direct result of the economic discrimination which is practised against many of our minority groups ...” As a result their purchasing power is curtailed and markets are reduced. Reduced markets result in reduced production. While the dream of “continuing prosperity” is a fool’s paradise, the proposal to raise the Southern standard of living to to nearer to the Northern level makes good sense from the point of view of the capitalist economic needs today.
Civil rights is not a humanitarian flight of fancy, or just a vote-catching device. Civil rights is a part of Truman’s economic program. That civil rights are a part of Truman’s economic program is a fundamental reason why the program cannot be scrapped for long by those who injected it into the political scene.
But scrap it they did in this 81st Congress. The bourgeois press has shown some comprehension of the situation in its comments on the situation – comprehension at least of the meaning and the weight of bureaucracy on a big scale in, a big country. Government by the two-party system, legislation by administration, administration expanded to the point of qualitative change, a jealous and a sectional Congress, all these have operated to the hilt in the 81st Congress.
The bald fact is that the 1948 elections did not return a Congress committed to the civil rights program. Congress is well aware that if Truman succeeded in the last election only with a mandate from the people, there is a distinction between his position and theirs. Within the Democratic Party it is asked and answered: Does the party program (and it is civil rights and Taft-Hartley repeal they mean) apply to the party as a whole? Administration Democrats denied the mandate on T-H by conceding in advance an unwritten injunction power for the president. The Dixiecrats can ask this question even with a certain justice, for if their party is in power by the people’s vote, they themselves are not. Considerations of this type are enhanced in this Congress which emerged out of an election which resulted in no clear majority for labor’s program.
An equally fundamental factor in the present status of the civil rights legislation is that these proposals are only a part of the Democratic program. This is what is behind the excuses about weightier matters, and this is the base of the bipartisan “must” legislation.
Not only are civil rights only a part of the Truman program. On civil rights the issue is not yet joined. If this is obvious for the South, it is equally true at the national level. Had labor had its own party it could have hastened the joining of the issue. But labor’s endorsement of the civil-rights program at the national level is akin to its fight for Taft-Hartley repeal. It follows, and projects into the future, the “reward your friends and punish your enemies” policy, while in practice going along with Democratic strategy.
The situation in 1949 – and to all indications in 1950 – is. analogous in a way to the situation at the time of the Civil War. It is basically the same in place – the South – but with differences in time and in degree. Slavery in its day checkmated the expansion of the economy. Today the depressed land of Jim Crow can only hinder the economy. In circumstances when the growing industrial capitalist class was checkmated, emancipation was not the program of the young Republican Party, and it became its program only in the third year of the war, a war which in its first two years gave every evidence of going the wrong way. Emancipation came when it was recognized – late but still recognized – that it was necessary to the winning of the war.
The situation today differs from this. A more rapid expansion is not yet of vital urgency. It is rather projected – in Truman’s phrase: “The national economy must continue to expand.” Added to this is the fact that the nation is not now engaged, or about to engage, in the Third World War. It is in the stage of cold preparation. These conditions, as well as the political dependence of labor, place the joining of the issue in the future.
The indications are that the coming Congressional elections in 1950 and the presidential election of 1952 will again be fought on this issue. 1950 will be the sounding board, and it is far from ruled out that with labor following its present course, which coincides with the Democratic Party strategy, some gains can be made.
It is POSSIBLE that the 1950 Congress will pass a national FEPC bill, the legislation which civil rights groups have agreed to give priority, or an anti-poll-tax bill. The latter has the advantage that it would swell the vote in the South and thereby forecast the return of the two-party system to the South.
These measures or other legislation are possibilities. The criticism of the policy of labor’s leaders is not that this could not happen under the policy outlined, but is to be made precisely on the ground that they see no further than this. They believe that they know what political pressure means, but demonstrate that they do not have the ability or the desire to grasp the meaning of independent pressure. And pressure upon them from their own ranks is not crystallized and will not be crystallized in 1950. This means that what happens in the civil rights field will happen at Truman’s speed.
There are two places to look for advances in the civil rights field. The first of these places is within the labor movement. To see this clearly involves a recognition of such events as the Rubber Workers’ adoption at their last convention of an EEPC of their own, labor’s support for the state FEPCs which have been enacted in the last period, and an analysis of the political activity of the trade unions in the South, where the “non-partisan” policy is less at variance with the requirements of the political scene for the same reasons that the Negro in the South establishes his right to vote within the Democratic Party, or in local election on a non-party basis.
The second place, contrary to popular opinion, is in the South. Suffice it now to say that it is a Dixie which is in transition. Vardaman, an earlier Bilbo, was not speaking for the 20th century when he laid down his arrogant edict: “As it is in Mississippi, so will it be in all the states ultimately.” The movement proceeds in the other direction.
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