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War challenges racism
Shouldn’t Congressional Black Caucus speak for Black America?
By BUD JOHNSON
African-American News&Issues

“Many African Americans were understandably ambivalent about World War II. Black Americans who had committed themselves wholeheartedly to the “war for democracy” returned from World War I to find the Klan marching in Washington and segregation undiminished. Now the government asked them to risk their lives in a war against Nazi racism abroad, while in many parts of their own country, American law forced them into separate and distinctly unequal facilities. Even the armed forces, within which African-Americans were supposed to strike their blows for democracy, maintained strict segregation, with African-Americans generally relegated to service and support jobs.

“Why should they fight to secure foreigners’ rights that they could not enjoy at home? Despite these misgivings about the righteousness of the cause, more than 700,000 African- Americans served in the military. The challenge for African-American leaders was to remind White Americans that a struggle for racial justice abroad must inevitably lead to a closer look at injustice at home. The documents here demonstrate some of the efforts made by both White and Black leaders to build support for the war in the African-American community, as well as the intense frustrations that persistent segregation at home and in the military produced. Outside the military, nearly two million African Americans found jobs in wartime industries. But there too, segregation persisted.

“Roosevelt needed the votes and the labor of African Americans, and so when A. Philip Randolph threatened a march on Washington, Roosevelt had to take notice. A lifelong socialist and labor organizer, Asa Philip Randolph served officially as the president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a strong, almost entirely African-American, union. Benjamin McClaurin, in an interview with William Ingersoll in 1960 for the Columbia Oral History Project, recalls how Randolph, touring the South during the war, decided “something has to be done to get Negroes to participate in a program.” Randolph’s plan, a mass march on Washington by at least 50,000 Black Americans, would specifically protest segregation in wartime industries.
“Fearful of such a march, Roosevelt agreed to meet with Randolph and McClaurin in the White House in June 1941. After meeting with the Black leader, President Roosevelt enacted Executive Order 8022 in June 1941. This landmark order established the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), which was charged with investigating claims of racial discrimination in government jobs and wartime industries.

“Though it was suspended in 1946, the FEPC helped pave the way for later government interventions on behalf of civil rights. It also helped convince African Americans that there might be some hope for improvement through an activist government, especially after Randolph used similar tactics to pressure Harry Truman.

“Grudgingly, Truman finally revoked segregation in the armed forces in 1948. In both the political and the cultural arena, during World War II, African Americans challenged the legal and customary limits on their participation as equal members of American society. As World War II exposed the hypocrisy of American racism more sharply, it allowed African Americans to build a foundation for attacking segregation and racial inequality in the postwar era.”
The foregoing text is an excerpt gleaned from the Center for History and New Media’s treatise, Mobilizing African-Americans For War, for the edification of made-in-American-Africans who demonized Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee for organizing 50 “peace-minded Democrats” to oppose Bush’s war resolution.

“She’s wrong for playing politics when we’re at war. We must stand together,” lamented several callers to Person-to-Person on KCOH radio (1430 AM), after Lee said she would be willing to go to Iraq and stand in front of the tanks to convince Bush to find a more humane way to remove Saddam. After Lee’s bold statement, on Lisa Berry-Dockery’s Saturday morning show, a caller, apparently assuming she was speaking metaphorically, playfully ragged, “I hope you don’t do that Mrs. Lee, because they sure would blow you away and we need you here.” Without any hint of humor, the 18th Congressional District representative affirmed, “No, I’m speaking from my heart.”

Sheila has always been a truly committed public servant, thus, it greatly disturbed African American News& Issues to hear history illiterate Black folks condemn her for the nerve and verve to speak for the majority of her constituency. Rep. Jim Marshall, a Democrat from Georgia used an obscure House rule to cancel the caucus meeting. An angry John Lewis, D-Georgia, said, “In all good conscience, I cannot and will not vote for a resolution that supports and endorses a failed policy that led to war.” After a 392-11 House and 99-0 Senate vote, John Conyers, D- Mich., who voted against the resolution said, “I trust the people to see though this attempt to coerce endorsement of his preventive war doctrine.”
Political grandstanding aside, Berry-Dockery rebutted, “I’ve known Sheila for a long time and I never seen her more serious about anything.” Rep. Gene Green, D-Houston rationalized, “There are members who feel, once hostilities started, we ought not talk about opposition. We don’t want to make the troops feel like there’s any dissension about the job they’re expected to do.” Since Green can’t speak from a historically Black perspective, he’s obviously speaking strictly for his district. Sheila, however, was speaking for a majority of her constituency that views the war from a historically Black perspective. Furthermore, as Texas’ widest circulated newspaper with a Black perspective and the uncompromising voice of Black America, we have her back.

Ergo, AAN&I will go on record to say that any CBC member who didn’t have her back shouldn’t masquerade as Black America’s representatives. In essence, any Black politician who doesn’t realize the best time to negotiate is when we have bargaining power, don’t understand the game well enough to play politics and certainly can’t speak for Black America. More succinctly, history records the best time to challenge institutionalized racism is when there’s a war going on. That’s the only time America’s greedy power brokers heed us, because they need us. Especially our children, to fight, bleed and die for a nation that has persistently denied us an equal right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.