It seemed as if there were only two kinds of people in the world—They and We—White and Colored. The world revolved on color and variations in color. It pervaded the air I breathed. I learned it in hundreds of ways. I picked it up from grown folks around me. I heard it in the house, on the playground, in the streets, everywhere. The tide of color beat upon me ceaselessly, relentlessly.

• Political Disfranchisement
• Biography: The House that Dr. Pope Built
• Deepening the Social Divide
• Issue: Segregation
• Surviving in a Segregated State
• The Economic Picture
• World War II and the Push for Equality
• Event: Journey of Reconciliation
• Related Links
• Assignment 2

The Fifteenth Amendment and the state constitution of 1868 guaranteed voting rights to all male citizens. Therefore white supremacist Democrats could not declare an outright ban on voting by minorities. Instead, they secured passage of the “Suffrage Amendment” to the state constitution in 1900. It included a “grandfather clause” stating that men whose lineal ancestors had the vote before January 1, 1867, could vote without passing a literacy test. The clause in effect allowed illiterate white men to vote but denied suffrage to the majority of men of color, most of whose ancestors could not vote before 1867.

By 1901 nearly all minority North Carolinians were disfranchised and eliminated from political officeholding. White-dominated local election boards used poll taxes and literacy or other “tests” to prevent blacks and American Indians from registering to vote. One Indian testified that a registrar required him to recite the entire United States Constitution. By 1940 fewer than 5 percent of African Americans in the South were registered to vote.
 

Biography: The House Dr. Pope Built by David La Vere Doctor, father, freeman, and political activist—Dr. Manassa Thomas Pope quietly built a home and legacy that have endured. The small, two-story, brown-brick row house on South Wilmington Street in Raleigh doesn’t seem distinctive. It stands off by itself, surrounded by Raleigh Convention and Conference Center parking lots, dwarfed by downtown skyscrapers. Back in 1901, however, when Dr. Manassa Thomas Pope built his house and this part of Raleigh was home to a thriving community of young professionals and their families, the house was considered quite special. And Dr. Pope was a very exceptional North Carolinian. In another time, Pope would’ve been one of our state’s true movers and shakers, with entire history books devoted to him. But Pope was an African-American living in the Jim Crow era when blacks were relegated to second-class citizenship. Still, his was an amazing life. Pope was born in Northampton County in 1858. Although slavery was the practice of the day, Pope was born a free man—the child of free parents who owned large tracts of land in Northampton and Bertie counties. In 1874, at the age of 16, Pope went to Raleigh to attend Shaw University, then one of the few colleges specifically for African-Americans. Upon graduation, he began studying at Shaw’s Leonard School of Medicine. He finished medical school in 1886 and became one of the first doctors officially licensed to practice medicine in North Carolina. Pope married Lydia Walden in 1887 and eventually settled in Charlotte, where he practiced medicine, founded an insurance and drug company, and got involved in politics. Dr. Pope, ca. 1900. Courtesy of the Pope House Museum Foundation. When the Spanish-American War began in 1898, Pope enlisted in the all-black Third North Carolina Volunteers. Although the regiment never saw action, Pope served as a first lieutenant and assistant surgeon. Mustering out of the service in 1899, he and Lydia moved to Raleigh. The couple settled in the Third Ward in the southeast part of the city. At one time, the area had been home to the governor’s mansion but had never blossomed into a big residential area. That changed in 1870, when Reverend Henry Tupper relocated Shaw University, Pope’s alma mater, to the neighborhood. Before long, the Third Ward was attracting a large number of black professionals and prosperous laborers. In 1901, Pope built his brown-brick residence on South Wilmington Street. Well respected and with an office on East Hargett Street, Pope quickly prospered. And, as a well-educated, professional African-American, he continued his political activities. Every vote counts The years between 1865 and 1900 were relatively good times for North Carolina African-Americans. Although prejudice existed, legal segregation did not. Blacks and whites lived side-by-side, rode the same trolleys, worked the same jobs, and constantly rubbed elbows in the course of the day. Black men voted, and North Carolina gained a reputation as a state where hardworking African-Americans could do well. The Democrats, as long as they controlled the state government, saw no reason to change things. However, the party’s defeat in 1896 by a coalition of African-American Republicans and white Populists enraged party leaders. Determined to recapture control of the state government and prevent any further white-black political alliance, the Democrats began a White Supremacy campaign to curtail black voting. The campaign worked all too well, and North Carolina Democrats returned to power in the 1898 elections. Using the concept of “separate but equal,” the North Carolina legislature began instituting “Jim Crow Laws” that separated blacks from whites. Now there were schools for black and schools for whites, separate trolleys, separate drinking fountains, and separate bathrooms. In public areas, blacks were relegated to the worst places. The result was separate but definitely not equal.  The legislature also amended the state constitution so that all North Carolina voters had to pass a literacy test to the satisfaction of a state polling official. Thousands of African-Americans lost their voting rights this way. To ensure that illiterate whites weren’t denied their vote, the amendment instituted a grandfather clause, which stipulated that if a person’s father or grandfather could have voted prior to 1867, when the 15th Amendment giving African-Americans the right to vote was passed, then they didn’t have to take the literacy test. Pope’s parents had been free prior to 1867, and so after the new Jim Crow laws took effect, he went down to the local polling official in 1902, showed his father’s freedom papers, and received his voter registration card. Amazingly, he was one of only seven African-American voters in Raleigh and one of 31 in all of Wake County. Pope's 1902 voter registration card. Courtesy of the Pope House Museum Foundation. Making a difference A few years later, Pope was dealing with changes in his personal and professional lives. In 1906, his wife Lydia died of tuberculosis, and the next year he married Delia Haywood Phillips. The couple had two daughters: Evelyn, born in 1908, and Ruth, in 1910. The Popes stressed education, and their daughters certainly took it to heart. In the 1930s, Evelyn and Ruth received undergraduate degrees from Shaw University and then went on to earn Master of Arts degrees from Columbia University in New York: Evelyn in Library Science and Ruth in Home Economics. Professionally, Pope thrived. He was a sought-after physician, seeing patients at his office as well as in a specially built examination room in his house. The house prospered along with his practice and was filled with modern furniture, decorated with stylish wallpaper and draperies, and housed a rather extensive library for which the city taxed Pope for every year. In fact, the house was very technologically advanced, complete with combination gas-electric lighting, running water, coal-burning stoves, a call-bell system for summoning a maid, and a full indoor bathroom at a time when few in Raleigh could boast one. The Popes also had a telephone, one of the early ones in Raleigh. Later, he built a garage for his automobile. It’s in politics, however, that this quiet, reserved man should be remembered. When the White Supremacy hammer came down about 1900, many African-Americans moved to northern cities. But Pope remained here to fight for the rights of his people. Polling officials’ blood must have boiled when he showed up every election day to cast his ballot. His own life—his university education, his medical degree and practice, his patriotic service to the country during the Spanish-American War—all gave lie to the Jim Crow laws and demonstrated that an African-American was the equal of anybody. The height of Pope’s political activity came in 1919, when he ran for mayor of Raleigh. He headed a slate of three African-American candidates, which included Calvin Lightner and J. Cheek. Of the 2,550 ballots cast in that election, Pope received 126. As Calvin Lightner explained, “We knew we wouldn’t win, . . . but we did it to wake our people up politically.” It wouldn’t be until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s that North Carolina’s Jim Crow restrictions were stricken from the books. Ironically, in 1973, Calvin Lightner’s son, Clarence Lightner, became Raleigh’s first, and so far only, African-American mayor. Unfortunately, Pope wouldn’t live to see it. He died in 1934 at the age of 76. His widow Delia died in 1955. By then, the daughters had their own careers. Evelyn served as a librarian at North Carolina Central University’s law school, while Ruth was a home economics teacher in the Chapel Hill public schools. Neither sister married, and when they retired in the 1970s, they both returned to the South Wilmington Street house. With no heirs, the sisters continued the family legacy of making a difference by creating the Evelyn B. and Ruth P. Pope Charitable Foundation. Besides donating to a number of institutions, including Shaw and North Carolina Central universities, the foundation also created and funded the Pope House Museum Foundation, which has plans to turn Pope’s house into a museum. Framework for history After Dr. Pope’s daughters passed away—Evelyn died in 1995 and Ruth in 2000—family friend and caretaker Edna Rich Ballentine and Kenneth Zogry, executive director of the Pope House Museum, began going through the boxes that the sisters had stored away. Virtually all of Dr. Pope’s papers were found, including his father’s freedom papers and his own voter registration card. These have been donated to the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Also found were Pope’s Spanish-American War doctor’s bag and various medical implements. They discovered Edison-era light bulbs, as well as early 20th-century dishes, toys, books, photos, and clothes. It’s a fascinating collection showing how a middle-class North Carolina African-American family lived during the Jim Crow years. The house was put on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999, and while the museum is not yet open to the public, Zogry’s plan is impressive. “We want to restore the house to how it was in 1919 when Dr. Pope ran for [Raleigh] mayor,” he explains. That means knocking off the front porch and renovating the interior. The museum also hopes to build an educational center next door, which will explain the little-known North Carolina African-American experience in the century between the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement. Still, there are obstacles. The house sits on prime downtown real estate, and the charitable foundation wants to sell the house for about half a million dollars. The Raleigh City Council and Historic Districts Commission have urged the house be retained, and the museum is the logical buyer. Since the museum receives no federal or state money, it is appealing to private sources to raise $3.5 million to purchase and restore the house and build the education center. If North Carolinians love underdogs, then we’ve got to Dr. Pope and his house. He should be remembered and his house preserved. He’s a North Carolinian we can be proud of. David La Vere is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. From Our State: Down Home in North Carolina (August 2003). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.  For more on Pope and his family, visit the Pope House Museum Foundation's Web site.

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At the end of the nineteenth century, the newly elected, white Democratic legislature had begun to enact a series of “Jim Crow,” or segregation, laws. The first one separated whites from other races on railway cars. After the turn of the twentieth century, North Carolina passed legislation mandating racial segregation in neighborhoods, streetcars, and other public places. In actual practice, segregation went beyond even the requirements of the law. It remained a social institution in North Carolina for decades.

The United States Supreme Court legalized state Jim Crow laws in the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson. In 1892 Louisiana native Homer Plessy was arrested for sitting in a train car designated for whites only. Plessy was seven-eighths white and one-eighth black, but the railroad did not permit him to occupy the car. The Supreme Court ruled that separating the races did not necessarily violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, so long as each race received equal treatment.

The ruling set in place a sixty-year-long system of legalized racial segregation. In practice the Jim Crow laws separated the races but did not ensure equal treatment. John Marshall Harlan, the only justice to dissent from the ruling, foreshadowed the trouble to come.

The destinies of the two races in this country are indissolubly linked together, and the interests of both require that the common government of all shall not permit the seeds of race hate to be planted under the sanction of law. What can more certainly arouse race hate, what will more certainly create and perpetuate a feeling of distrust between these races than state enactments, which, in fact, proceed on the ground that coloured citizens are so inferior and degraded that they cannot be allowed to sit in public coaches occupied by white citizens?

The term Jim Crow came from the name of a minstrel show character. The popular minstrel shows of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries featured white actors pretending to be black and darkening their faces with burnt cork. The entertainers performed musical and comedy acts that stereotyped African Americans as grinning, dancing fools or ignorant, childlike creatures. Jim Crow became a racial epithet and eventually referred to discriminatory laws and social customs.

Minstrel show at the Philadelphus School, Robeson County, ca. 1900

The Jim Crow era produced a large number of stereotypical and racist images of blacks. These derogatory depictions degraded people of color and perpetuated the myth that they were inferior to whites. Grotesque characterizations of African Americans appeared in nearly every available medium and especially in advertisements for consumer products ranging from tobacco to laundry detergent to greeting cards. Popular imagery portrayed American Indians, too, as extreme stereotypes. They appeared in pulp fiction and Hollywood films as stoic “noble savages” and bloodthirsty enemies.

The Ku Klux Klan Reemerges
Federal authorities had suppressed the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction. A new Klan arose in 1915 and fueled racial hatred. This second Klan, much larger than the first one, operated throughout the nation. In addition to African Americans, it targeted Roman Catholics, Jews, foreigners, and communists with its terrorist tactics. The Klan would become active once again during the Civil Rights movement that began in the 1950s.

The popular 1915 motion picture The Birth of a Nation glorified the Ku Klux Klan and southern resistance to racial equality. It caused outrage among African Americans nationwide. The film was based on The Clansman, a 1905 novel by Thomas Dixon Jr. A minister, jurist, politician, and writer from Shelby, Dixon saw the early 1900s as a time that threatened American society with race mixing and the evils of socialism.

The Fight against Lynching
Lynching became rampant throughout the South after the end of Reconstruction. Lynching was a type of vigilantism in which lawless white mobs dragged blacks accused of crimes, particularly rape or attempted rape of white women, from the custody of legal authorities. The mobs tortured and then publicly executed their victims, usually by hanging. They left the bodies on display as warnings to other African Americans. Lynch mobs sometimes targeted whites as well.

Some white North Carolina leaders condemned lynching. For example, in 1906 Governor Robert Brodnax Glenn mobilized the National Guard in response to the lynching of five black men in Salisbury. Although conviction was unusual in such cases, one of the perpetrators received a sentence of fifteen years’ hard labor. Later, Governors Thomas Walter Bickett and Cameron Morrison also took firm stands against lynching.

A number of groups, among them the biracial Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, called for an end to the violence. But attempts at anti-lynching legislation in the 1920s and 1930s failed. Because capital crimes fell under the jurisdiction of state rather than federal authorities, many opponents of lynching considered such legislation a state responsibility, and Congress never passed anti-lynching laws.

Genesis of the NAACP
In an effort to combat lynching, disfranchisement, and Jim Crow laws, a group of activists formed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in New York City in 1909. Its monthly magazine, The Crisis, edited by the African American historian and intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois, exposed and denounced racial discrimination. The Crisis also attacked Thomas Dixon Jr., whose racist novels romanticized white supremacy.

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Despite the rigors of segregation, the first half of the twentieth century and especially the period between World Wars I and II saw great creativity among African American writers, musicians, and other artists. Author Richard Wright gave voice to the black experience in Native Son and other works such as Uncle Tom’s Children, and Langston Hughes published What the Negro Wants. Composer and bandleader Duke Ellington produced the Deep South Suite and Jump for Joy, a satirical funeral for Jim Crow.

In North Carolina, white dramatist Paul Green supported equality for African Americans. His play In Abraham’s Bosom told a tragic story about a black educator and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1927. At the 1943 meeting of the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association, J. Saunders Redding became the first African American to receive the Mayflower Cup for the best book by a North Carolinian with No Day of Triumph, a documentary about black life in the South. Raleigh attorney Willis Smith condemned the Mayflower Cup selection committee for “trying to prove they were liberal” by giving the prize “for such a piece of trash as the Negro wrote.” Smith later used inflammatory racial rhetoric to defeat incumbent Frank Porter Graham in the 1950 Democratic primary for Graham’s United States Senate seat.

North Carolina Schools—Separate and Unequal
White public schools in North Carolina received more funds than black and Indian schools did. In 1933 only 7 percent of black students attended high school in the state, and their teachers’ salaries were 25 to 30 percent lower than the salaries of white teachers. Nathan C. Newbold, the white director of the state’s Division of Negro Education, noted “that it is natural and logical for intelligent Negroes to exhibit a feeling of unrest . . . over conditions which to them seem to mean there is no hope of equality of education for them.” He worked to improve instruction in the public schools. Despite the economic hardships of the Great Depression, advocates for minority education managed to make some significant strides between the two World Wars.

In 1902 the nineteen-year-old black educator Charlotte Hawkins Brown founded Palmer Memorial Institute, a private school at Sedalia in rural Guilford County. In 1900 North Carolina had more than two thousand privately operated schools for African Americans, but most teachers had only elementary school education and could instruct their students only up to that level. Palmer was different because Brown was offering college preparatory instruction in a junior and senior high school setting. The school operated until 1971; today the campus is a state historic site.

Building Strong Communities
In the face of segregation and racism, African Americans found solace and strength in their own tight-knit communities. Churches and other local organizations acted as centers of political and social activity. Black communities became strongholds of hope, ambition, and self-help. Subject in most places to the same Jim Crow rules as black North Carolinians, Indians existed largely on the fringes of the dominant white society. Many preferred to stay near their home communities rather than to enter the larger social system, which often failed to acknowledge them. Both communities relied on formal and informal organizations for support.

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Industrialists saw the South’s impoverished and racially divided population as a bottomless pool of cheap labor and built mills and factories in rural areas to take advantage of it. Jobs in these industries offered alternatives to agriculture, but most of North Carolina’s blacks, Indians, and poor whites still lived as tenant farmers and sharecroppers.

Tenant farming and sharecropping controlled the lives of numerous American Indians and African Americans, as well as whites, in North Carolina during the early twentieth century. Under these arrangements, a farmer cultivated a landowner’s property, harvested the crop, and then surrendered a percentage of the harvest as rent. Tenants and sharecroppers often had to pay part of their remaining funds to store owners for food and supplies obtained on credit during the year. The system kept farmers from realizing financial gains, and it allowed landholders and merchants to maintain a stranglehold on farming families. After each harvest, a farmer had to decide whether to stay in the same place or move on to work for another landowner. Many families moved every few years, trying to get the best deals they could from landowners.

Out-Migration
In response to the demands of the two World Wars, industry grew at a phenomenal rate in the United States. This growth drew people from the countryside to look for work. Throughout the South during and after World War I, thousands of African Americans joined the “Great Migration” to find jobs in northern industrial centers. They fled also to escape white supremacy, lynching, and Jim Crow laws. Cities in the North offered opportunities for a new life. About 57,000 blacks left North Carolina between 1910 and 1930. During the Great Depression, 7.6 percent of the state’s African Americans migrated. By 1950 less than 26 percent of North Carolina’s population was black.

American Indians joined the flight to urban areas both inside and outside the state. Greensboro, Fayetteville, and Charlotte became favored destinations in North Carolina. Beyond state borders, cities such as Baltimore, Detroit, Richmond, and Atlanta drew young Indians. Many of the emigrants stayed briefly before returning. Others stayed for years or decades but maintained ties with their home communities.

Despite the federal government’s tolerance of segregation and failure to halt lynching, many black and Indian North Carolinians enlisted in the army during World War I, and the African Americans served in segregated units. But some people saw a bitter irony in fighting to bring democracy to Europe when it was denied to persons of color at home. Three thousand African Americans assembled in Raleigh in 1919 and passed a resolution stating that they would not be satisfied to fight and perhaps die in a war for democracy and then come home to racism. They denounced lynching and called for a boycott of segregated businesses. They also urged parents and teachers to foster racial pride in African American children.

C.C. Spaulding, founder of the N.C. Mutual Life Insurance Co.

After World War I, in which African Americans from North Carolina served overseas, an influential, urban black middle class arose in the state. It included well-educated, prosperous, and self-reliant citizens proud of their race. They formed part of the national “New Negro” movement, the so-called Talented Tenth who stood in contrast to the more provincial and generally less educated blacks of the rural South. Durham’s sizable population of African American businessmen, educators, and other professionals epitomized this new class. The city’s black commercial district, known as Black Wall Street, included the Mechanics and Farmers Bank and stores, restaurants, and other services. The North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company of Durham was the nation’s biggest black-owned business by mid-century. In 1925 Durham boasted the largest chapter of the National Negro Business League. Booker T. Washington called the city “the capital of the black middle class.” Charlotte, Greensboro, Raleigh, Winston-Salem, and other cities also had their black middle classes.

Hard Times
In 1929 poverty, hunger, and despair befell the state when the stock market crashed and the world sank into the Great Depression. Burdened by racism and segregation, minorities endured the most suffering. They barely managed to survive as tenant farmers, sharecroppers, domestic workers, loggers, and day laborers, and many lost their livelihoods entirely. Of the 10,000 displaced farm tenants in eastern North Carolina in 1934, 60 percent were black. The percentage of African Americans among workers in the state’s tobacco factories shrank from 76 to 55 between 1930 and 1940. Similar difficulties confronted Indians. Some Occaneechi-Saponi in Alamance County did find work in the furniture industry because they lived near a manufacturing plant in Mebane, and some Cherokee worked in logging in western North Carolina and engaged in subsistence farming.

African Americans drifted away from supporting the Republican Party, which had in effect abandoned them after 1900. They looked with hope to the Democratic Party of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and its New Deal social programs. A few farm projects did help rural North Carolinians, but the federal “alphabet agencies” failed to aid the state’s blacks and Indians on a large scale. Some Cherokee found federal employment building Tennessee Valley Authority dams in the Mountains.

During the Great Depression, two programs targeted the Lumbee Indian community in Robeson County. Pembroke Farms, a resettlement project, aimed to help struggling farmers acquire property. It enabled local families to escape the sharecropping system by buying farms using forty-year mortgages. The Red Banks Mutual Association, part of the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration, started as a 1,600-acre collective farm that pooled money to raise crops and pay for land. The project officially disbanded in the 1960s, and the land was sold to the farmers. A parcel of it now forms part of the North Carolina Indian Cultural Center.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt visits the Eastern Band of Cherokee Reservation in North Carolina in 1937. (Bill Clinton was the next sitting US President to visit an Indian reservation in the 1990s.)

Halifax County benefited from one of the New Deal’s 113 rural resettlement “experiments.” The Roanoke Resettlement Farm at Tillery was established to help black residents. It was one of only eight such African American projects in the nation.

Challenge to Industry
African Americans’ dissatisfaction with the racial status quo showed in their efforts to establish labor unions. Tobacco workers held a meeting in Durham’s black community of Hayti in 1934 that led to the formation of two local chapters of the Tobacco Workers International. In 1943 black tobacco workers in Winston-Salem went on strike. Not only did African American labor challenge a major southern industry, but the black community in Winston-Salem also used the situation to involve its members in voter registration and ongoing political activity.

The 1943 Reynolds Strike began on June 17, when Theodosia Simpson was working on a stemming machine in sweltering heat at the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company in Winston-Salem. She overhead a foreman threaten to fire a fellow employee, a widow with five children to support, for being sick. Afterward, Simpson and other employees refused to work. By the next afternoon, three factories had shut down. Black workers organized rallies and meetings with Reynolds executives. They demanded union recognition, the right to collective bargaining, higher wages, and improved working conditions. According to historian Robert Korstad, the strike was “probably the first large mobilization of African Americans in North Carolina since the late nineteenth century” and “a key moment in the emergence of the Civil Rights movement” that took off in the 1950s.

The 1943 strike led to a brief period of unionization at Reynolds Tobacco Company. A local chapter formed there in 1944, and the union won a three-year contract. But union activity in Winston-Salem reached beyond the tobacco factories. Members registered many black voters for the first time in the city’s history.

The union did not last long at Reynolds. With the help of the newspaper the Winston-Salem Journal, white conservatives and business owners linked it with communism and anarchy. When the union contract expired in 1947, the company spent more than two months stonewalling a new contract, and another strike began. Then Kenneth Williams, an African American alderman elected by the newly registered voters, publicly denounced the union. Discredited and harried by federal investigators, it lost power and was deactivated in 1951. The workers of the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company have not been represented by a labor union since.

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Thousands of black North Carolinians served with distinction in the armed forces during World War II. Inspired by their wartime experiences, a large new class of veterans began to push for the improvement of schools and access to public facilities. The war also gave African Americans at home opportunities to demand equal treatment, and the black labor movement grew. Pressed by the working class for better living standards, civil rights, and equal opportunities, African American professionals began to act aggressively to secure political rights and social equality.

The USO was organized in 1941 to provide social, recreational, spiritual, and welfare facilities to members of the armed services. This World War II–era poster lists separate facilities in Raleigh for whites and blacks, typical of USO operations in the segregated South.

Despite their disappointment with the New Deal, black North Carolinians continued to support Democratic president Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt appointed a number of African Americans to important positions in his administration. He denounced lynching and became the first president since Abraham Lincoln to demonstrate a serious concern for the welfare of African Americans.

World War II had lifted the state’s economy out of eighty years of stagnation. Black North Carolinians had reached a point from which they would never consent to retreat. At the close of the war, North Carolina stood once again at the open window of social change.

Nearly one-third of whites and more than two-thirds of African Americans in the armed forces during World War II came from the South. Black soldiers served with valor, but segregation within the armed forces was part of their everyday lives: the segregation of units, of jobs, and even of the blood supply. Minority residents on the home front continued to chafe at the injustice of segregation, wondering again why African Americans and Indians could fight and die for their country without having the basic rights of first-class citizenship.

North Carolina Indians continued to draw distinctions between themselves and African Americans. At the outbreak of the Second World War, five men from the Waccamaw-Siouan community in Bladen and Columbus Counties went to a local recruiter to enlist in the military. The recruiter had listed them on the paperwork as “colored.” The men told him that they were American Indians and that the papers should give “Indian” as their race. The recruiter insisted that the men enlist as “colored.” Maintaining their right to enlist as Indians, they ultimately refused to serve at all during the war.

Others, however, like Thomas Oxendine, did serve successfully. Oxendine, a Lumbee from Pembroke, Robeson County, became the first American Indian commissioned as a naval aviator. After completing flight training at the Naval Air Station in Jacksonville, Florida, Oxendine was assigned as a scout observation pilot aboard the USS Mobile. On July 26, 1944, he landed his seaplane in the midst of Japanese gunfire, in adverse weather, to rescue a downed fellow airman. For this he received the Distinguished Flying Cross. During his navy career, he test-piloted carrier-type aircraft and was combat flight instructor for the supersonic F8U Crusader. He also served in Korea and Vietnam and was director of plans for the navy’s Office of Information in the Pentagon. After retiring in 1970, he became chief of public information at the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Growth of the NAACP
Black North Carolinians joined the NAACP in ever-increasing numbers before and during the Second World War. Led by idealistic lawyers, the NAACP fought in the federal courts for racial justice. Before the war it spearheaded the effort to keep conservative North Carolina jurist John J. Parker off the United States Supreme Court.

Membership in the NAACP soared in the war years, and the number of branches in the state more than doubled. By the war’s end, Winston-Salem had the largest NAACP chapter, with 1,991 members. The North Carolina Conference of NAACP Branches formed in Charlotte in 1943, largely as a result of efforts by Ella Baker, Kelly Alexander, and T. V. Mangum. The ongoing conference created a powerful united effort for reform.
 

Event: Journey of Reconciliation by Beth Crist On June the third the high court said, When you ride interstate Jim Crow is dead. Get on the bus, sit anyplace, ‘Cause Irene Morgan won her case. You don’t have to ride Jim Crow. — “You Don’t Have to Ride Jim Crow!” A group of sixteen men, eight black and eight white, sang this song on a two-week bus trip through Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky in April 1947. Irene Morgan, the woman mentioned in the song, is unfamiliar to most, as are the details of her trailblazing civil disobedience and her Supreme Court victory. In 1944, eleven years before Rosa Parks refused to relinquish her bus seat, Irene Morgan defied a bus driver and, subsequently, two police officers who demanded she cede her seat to a white couple. She was arrested and fined ten dollars. Thurgood Marshall, then a young lawyer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), appealed her case to the United States Supreme Court. Morgan’s victory resulted in the landmark 1946 decision striking down segregation in interstate transportation. In 1947 the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Fellowship of Reconciliation, two groups striving to further civil rights, sponsored a bus trip to determine if bus companies were upholding the year-old Morgan decision. The groups also wanted to educate the public on the new law, scheduling more than thirty speaking engagements before church, NAACP, and college audiences, and to discover how bus drivers, passengers, and police reacted to nonviolent protestors who challenged Jim Crow laws during interstate travel. Waiting rooms at bus stations were also segregated, as seen in this photo taken in Durham in 1940. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. George Houser and Bayard Rustin, members of the Fellowship of Reconciliation from New York, instructed their fellow passengers on proper behavior during the bus trip: If you are a Negro, sit in a front seat. If you are white, sit in a rear seat. If the driver asks you to move, tell him calmly and courteously: “As an interstate passenger I have a right to sit anywhere in this bus. This is the law as laid down by the United States Supreme Court.” If the driver summons the police and repeats his order in their presence, tell him exactly what you said when he first asked you to move. If the police asks [sic] you to “come along,” without putting you under arrest, tell them you will not go until you are put under arrest. If the police put you under arrest, go with them peacefully. At the police station, phone the nearest headquarters of the NAACP, or one of your lawyers. They will assist you. With those instructions, the group, including three men from North Carolina—Eugene Stanley, a teacher at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro, and Ernest Bromley and Louis Adams, Methodist ministers—set out on its fifteen-city trip, which became known as the Journey of Reconciliation. Beginning in Washington, D.C., and traveling south, the group encountered no incidents until it reached Petersburg, Virginia. There, an African American member of the group was arrested courteously when he refused to move to the back of the bus. A police court found him guilty of disorderly conduct. Released on bond, he was later tried and convicted, and fined ten dollars. Two other African American members were taken off the bus in Durham but were quickly released without being charged. The sixteen bus riders met their first major challenge in Chapel Hill on April 13. Upon boarding the bus, a black rider and a white rider chose front seats. The driver ordered them to move; when they refused, the driver summoned the police. The two men were arrested, and one was forced harshly out of the bus. When other passengers expressed support for the group, two more members—a black man and a white man—took the seats vacated by the arrested men. They, too, were arrested. All four men were charged with disorderly conduct and released on bond. Tensions mounted near the scene, with some onlookers threatening the arrested men and others defending them. A local white minister drove the four men to his home for their safety, only to be followed by a group of white men threatening violence. Although no violence occurred, the group of sixteen riders left Chapel Hill in a private car that night. The four arrested men were tried on charges of violating the state’s Jim Crow law, the court arguing that, because they were planning stopovers in three cities within the state, they were not interstate passengers. One of the white men received sixty days on a road gang; the second white man and one of the black men received thirty days on a road gang; the second black man received a fine of twenty-five dollars. The group changed buses in Statesville, whereupon the bus driver asked an African American member to move to the back of the bus. When the group explained the Supreme Court decision, the bus driver took no further action, even when passengers complained. The next incident occurred in Asheville. When police arrested a black member of the group for sitting in the front of the bus, the white member sitting next to him asked to be arrested. The police refused, so he moved to a rear seat and was then arrested. After being found guilty of violating a state law requiring separation of white and black passengers, both men were released on bond. Minor incidents occurred in Tennessee and Kentucky, but no group members were arrested. The group continued its ride, turning northeast to return to Washington, D.C. An African American member was arrested in Amherst, Virginia, charged with disorderly conduct, and released on bond. The bus driver apologized for contacting the police. The group encountered their last incident in Culpepper, Virginia, when an African American member was arrested and released on bond. The Journey of Reconciliation received publicity and raised awareness of racism. The cause received additional exposure in 1948 when Houser and Rustin received from the Council against Intolerance in America the Thomas Jefferson Award for the Advancement of Democracy for their courageous efforts. CORE modeled the better-known Freedom Rides of 1961 after the historic bus trip. Civil rights advocates who participated in the Freedom Rides encountered harsh violence but met with eventual, hard-won success in ending segregated seating in interstate vehicles and terminals. Because of the bravery and conviction of the sixteen riders, the Journey of Reconciliation represents an integral chapter in the Civil Rights movement in the United States. Classroom discussion ideas: Ask your students these questions: What emotions might the riders have felt while riding the buses? Why did they go on this potentially dangerous trip? Have older students research how the nonviolent Journey of Reconciliation influenced the tactics used in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.

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The Durham Manifesto
In 1942 the North Carolina College for Negroes, now North Carolina Central University, in Durham hosted the Southern Conference on Race Relations. Afterward a committee issued a document known as the Durham Manifesto. It declared that World War II had produced “increased racial tensions, fears, and aggressions, and an opening up of the basic questions of racial segregation and discrimination, Negro minority rights and democratic freedom.” The manifesto proclaimed that the war should result in a victory of “ideals” as well as “arms.” It demanded complete voting rights for African Americans, equalization of educational opportunities, equal salaries for black teachers, fair employment practices, and the right to unionize for black labor.

The rising sentiment of black activism in the 1940s found spokesmen in people such as Louis E. Austin, editor of Durham’s black newspaper the Carolina Times and president of the Durham NAACP chapter. Austin considered the Durham Manifesto too conservative in its demands. In 1942 he implored President Roosevelt to issue “an edict declaring a new birth of freedom for the thirteen million Negroes in the United States.” African Americans, Austin declared, were shedding their blood in a war for “a democracy that is infested with deception, hypocrisy, deceit, unfairness and subversive measures toward one-tenth of the nation’s citizenship.” As Austin’s rhetoric hinted, a new day was dawning for people in the South.

Charlotte Hawkins Brown Memorial
http://www.ah.dcr.state.nc.us/sections/hs/chb/chb.htm
An extensive biography of Charlotte Hawkins Brown and history of the Palmer Memorial Institute.

Drew Drawing Attention
http://reporter-archive.mcgill.ca/Rep/r2908/drew.html
This 1997 article from McGill University, Drew’s alma mater, discusses the renewed attention paid to Drew.

Journey of Reconciliation
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAjor.htm
A history of the landmark bus trip, including primary documents.

The Pope House Museum Foundation
http://www.thepopehousemuseum.org/index.shtml
The history of the Dr. Manassa Pope family and house and the current efforts to establish the Pope House Museum.

Tar Heel Junior Historian magazine articles (Adobe Acrobat files):

"Assigned Places," (segregation in the 1920s) The Twenties Roar through North Carolia issue (Spring 2004)

"Touching Base with a Tuskegee Airman," Exploring the Air: Pioneers of Aviation issue (Fall 2003)

"A Tarboro Legacy: Dr. Milton Quigless," (African American physician who opened a clinic in 1947) Experiences in Health and Healing issue (Spring 1997)

"What One Young African American Woman Could Do: The Story of Dr. Charlotte Hawkins Brown and the Palmer Memorial Institute," African American Life issue (Fall 1995)

"Middle-Class Durham during the Age of Jim Crow," African American Life issue (Fall 1995)

Complete one of the following assignments:

Option 1 (If you are seeking reading credits for this course, choose this option.)
Primary sources, like the letter, oral history, and voter registration card in this session, can be fascinating items that make history come alive and make reading engaging. Using civil rights-related primary sources found in this workshop and/or elsewhere on the Internet, develop a lesson plan that:

• teaches your students the difference between primary and secondary sources
• demonstrates the personal and real feel of history that reading a diary entry, letter, oral history transcript, document, and/or period newspaper account can invoke
• shows how reading primary sources differs from reading textbooks and other secondary sources

(Read the workshop's session on Primary Sources for more information and related links.)

Submit your completed lesson plan via e-mail to jessica.humphries@ncmail.net.

Option 2
Some civil rights-related images and artifacts are disturbing. Ku Klux Klan masks and robes, for instance, and photographs of lynchings, cross burnings, and violent demonstrations can invoke a wide range of strong feelings. Museums have to decide whether to include such items in exhibits and, if so, how best to interpret them. How do you feel about showing such images in the classroom? Are they good teaching tools that drive home lessons about civil rights, or too graphic or likely to anger or upset some students? If they are shown to students, how should they be explained? How do you determine what images and other materials are age-appropriate? State your case on the workshop's Bulletin Board.

Option 3
World War II offered African Americans in the military new opportunities, although they continued to face segregation and discrimination. Create a lesson plan in which your students learn about the African American military experience in World War II. The lesson can be broad or can focus on one or two aspects, such as a particular African American soldier or division, segregation policies, or new opportunities for blacks.

Submit your completed lesson plan via e-mail to jessica.humphries@ncmail.net.