Fighting Racism in World War II

 

A week by week account of the struggle against racism and discrimination in the United States from 1939-1945, from the pages of The Militant newspaper

Published by Pathfinder Press, 1980

A review by Steve Halpern

When many people think about the Second World War, they think of a heroic struggle to free the world from the horrendous effects of fascism. Well, C.L.R. James didn’t agree with that idea. James was the author of a definitive history of the Haitian Revolution titled: The Black Jacobins. In 1939, James quoted from democratic and republican office holders who argued that World War II was a war for “democracy”, as well as the “preservation of human liberties.”

James went on to report on the reality of what this so-called “democracy” was all about:

“Such is the ‘democracy’ of the South that in many towns the Negros wouldn’t be able to sit in the same room with whites to hear why they should die for ‘democracy.’ There are thousands of hotels in the South where if a Negro dared to show his nose at the front entrance, three janitors would fall on him and throw him out into the gutter, after which the police would beat him up and take him to jail. In many cities, if he went near the polling booth he would risk being beaten up and perhaps shot. He must come out of the rear entrance of a bus in southern cities, or any white cop nearby might riddle him with bullets.”

So, this was the atmosphere where a tenacious struggle took place striving to give Black people the democratic rights, the government falsely claimed that they already had. These were struggles against murders by racist mobs, and open discrimination within the military, as well as discrimination in the military related production factories. The government’s response to the resistance to discrimination was to set up committees that, for the most part, did nothing to resolve these persistent violations of the rights of African Americans.

Malcolm X argued in his speech The Ballot or the Bullet: “Why, if birth made you an American, you wouldn’t need any legislation, you wouldn’t need any Amendments to the Constitution, you wouldn’t be faced with civil rights filibustering in Washington D.C. right now.”

George Breitman edited those words for Malcolm in the book Malcolm X Speaks. In the book Fighting Racism in World War II, Breitman used the pen name Albert Parker and Philip Blake. 

One of the articles in this book reported on anti-lynching bills that were introduced to Congress from the year 1919-1940. The government never adopted any of those bills into law. 

As we know, murder in the United States is supposed to be against the law. A memorial outside the city of Montgomery, Alabama commemorated 4,400 lynchings in this country. These were all acts of cold-blooded murder, where the government made no attempt to prosecute the murderers. This is one of the examples that supports the argument made by Malcolm X. 

While there were thousands of illegal lynchings, there were also many lynchings that pretended to be in line with the so-called laws. One of those lynchings was of Odell Waller. Waller was a sharecropper in Virginia who had been cheated out of the money for his crops. When he protested this theft, the person who cheated him out of his money attacked Waller. Waller then defended himself, and his attacker died in the struggle.

Phillip Murry, President of the Congress of Industrial Unions (CIO), and William Green, President of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) both opposed the execution of Waller. President Franklyn Roosevelt received thousands of letters also opposing the execution. However, Roosevelt didn’t even advocate for a committee to investigate what happened.

Before his execution Odell Waller wrote these words:

“In my case I worked from sunup until sundown trying to make a living for my family and it ended in death for me.

“You take big people and the President, Governors, judge, their children don’t never have to suffer. They has plenty money. Born in a mention [mansion] nothing ever to worry about. I am glad some people are that lucky.

“The penitentiary all over the United States are full of people ho [who] was pore [poor], tried to work and have something, couldn’t so that maid [made] them steel [steal] and rob.”

George Breitman (Albert Parker) had this to say about the true motivations of why the state of Virginia executed Waller:

“They wanted his blood because the Waller case exposed in all its rottenness the ‘American way of life’ in the South—the system of Jim Crowism, of economic super-exploitation on the land, of political oppression and discrimination through the poll tax.”

Along with all the lynchings in this country during those years, there was the systematic discrimination inside and outside of the military. Many expressed their outrage of these conditions by participating in the March on Washington Movement. While President Roosevelt was demanding “Four Freedoms” in Europe, Black people organized to get those same freedoms here.

The central organizer of this movement was A. Phillip Randolph, who was the President of the Sleeping Car Porters Union. While Randolph initially supported the idea of this March on Washington, he ultimately backed off of following through. The reason Randolph gave for calling off this march was Roosevelt’s claim that he would set up a committee to look into the question of discrimination. That committee did little, if anything, to deal with systematic discrimination.

In Art Preis’ book Labor’s Giant Step, he gave considerable evidence of how union officials in the CIO and AFL compromised the interests of labor during World War II. They supported President Roosevelt’s position that workers needed have wages insufficient to feed their families to support the war. We might keep in mind that corporations in this country made super-profits because of their defense contracts with the government. 

However, the formation of the Congress of Industrial Unions was a real advance in spite of its many limitations. The CIO made a real attempt to organize all workers, including workers who were Black. Because of this approach millions joined the CIO, and the United Auto Workers Union became the national representative of autoworkers.

Corporations had a particularly cruel way of combatting the CIO in Philadelphia in 1944. The transit workers of that city voted to remove their former union officials and vote for a slate of CIO candidates. The candidates who opposed the CIO slate had the following slogan: “A vote for the CIO is a vote for n—s on the job.”

After losing the election, James McMenamin and Frank Carney went on a campaign to call a wildcat strike unauthorized by the union. They demanded that the company refuse to hire Black workers for the higher paid positions. McMenamin acknowledged that he was receiving money from the executives of Philadelphia Transportation Company. Several workers refused to honor this unauthorized strike, but the company would not allow them to work.   

After this strike, Maxwell Windhan, a Black union member became the vice-president of the Philadelphia Transport Workers Union because of an election with 2,200 cast votes. Four other Black union members became members of the union executive board.

The Philadelphia news media, to this day, has reported that this was a strike of white workers against Black workers. There has been no attempt by the mainstream news media to report the facts that place the story in context. 

When we see how labor union officials as well as the leadership of the Communist Party compromised the interests of Black and white workers, we might begin to understand why there was little opposition to President Roosevelt’s internment of about 110,000 Japanese in this country.

Dr. Edgar B. Keemer, a Black doctor wrote an article for The Militant newspaper about the Japanese internment camps. Keemer used the pen name Charles Jackson. He was indicted as a draft dodger because he opposed discrimination in the navy. The case against him was dropped after he was defended by the ACLU and the Socialist Workers Party.

Dr. Keemer also served fourteen months in prison because he supported the right of women to decide if and when they became mothers. The formal charge against him was that he performed abortions. Today abortions are legal, but the right for women to have control over their bodies has come under tenacious attack.

This is what Dr. Keemer (Charles Jackson) had to say about the internment of the Japanese:

“Soon after the shooting stage of the war with Japan began, these citizens (of Japanese heritage), in flagrant violation of their civil rights, were yanked from their farms and homes and were herded into virtual concentration camps, known officially by the polite name of relocation centers. This illegal repression was carried out by the law-enforcement agencies after a campaign by the capitalist press to whip up racial prejudice under the guise of national patriotism. 

“The real motivators, however, were a big business outfit called the Associated Farmers, along with other reactionary interests which stand to profit—war or no war—by the elimination of competitors and by the persecution of a minority within the working class.”

Dr. Keemer concluded this article with the following words:

“The Japanese-American workers are not only our comrades in the world class struggle for socialist liberation, but they are also our brothers through oppression in this capitalist ‘democracy.’

“Let us not fail to rally to their side and fight back against the attacks of the common enemy.”

Currently, I’m reading Elizabeth Hinton’s book America on Fire and hope to write a review of that book as well. Hinton documented the rebellions in hundreds of cities and towns in this country protesting the systematic police brutality and discrimination against the Black community in the 1960s and 1970s.

We might think about the fact that during the Second World War and in the war against Vietnam, the United States government also carried out wars against the Black community in this country. When we think about that reality, we might also consider the fact that there has been significant resistance to reporting on the unvarnished history of Black people in this country. Recently, the actor Tom Hanks had a column in the New York Times protesting the fact that he never learned about the 1921 Tulsa massacre of the Black community when he was in school.

James Loewen reported on some of these facts in his book Lies My Teacher Told Me. So, when we look at the books Fighting Racism in WWII and America on Fire, we aren’t just looking at African American history. We are also looking at the true history of the United States and the world.

Today young people are demonstrating in the streets because they want to put an end to the long history of racial injustice that has been tolerated by the government since its inception. The determination of those young people is a continuation of the struggle against discrimination that has also been a part of the entire history of this country. As we can see, that struggle is continuing.