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Program Four
Terror and Triumph (1940-1954)
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| "The big thing on Saturday mornings was the Ritz Theater ... they had movies with cowboys. We went upstairs, the white kids went downstairs."--Eyewitness Narrative with Willie Wallace |
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When World War II begins, almost a million African-American men and women join a Jim Crow army. For many, this event becomes the transforming experience in their lives. They return to American determined to achieve the rights at home that they had fought for in Europe. In Mississippi, black veterans like Medgar and Charles Evers challenge Theodore Bilbo in his re-election campaign for Senate. In Georgia, as a response to the United States Supreme Court's declaring the white primary illegal, John Wesley Dobbs, head of the black Masons, organizes a massive voter registration with the help of many veterans. The black vote in Atlanta provides the margin of victory for a Congressional candidate over her conservative opponent.
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Whites respond to black agency with violence. In Walton County Georgia, a mob of whites murders two black men and two pregnant black women. The alleged leader of the mob claims that one of the men, a returned veteran, was killed because after his return from the army, "he thought he was as good as any white man." President Harry Truman, outraged at the killing of the four people in Walton county, as well as the hundreds of attacks on black veterans elsewhere, initiates a federal civil rights campaign and integrates the army. This marks the first time since Reconstruction that the federal government becomes involved in civil rights. Some southern states respond by withdrawing from the Democratic Party to form the States' Rights Party, often called the Dixiecrats.
The national mood is changing and the South feels the heat. Blacks are becoming a major political force in the North and politicians respond to their demands. Barriers fall in sports and movies. The NAACP legal team, led by Thurgood Marshall, feels the time has come to challenge the legal foundations of segregation. They are seeking local communities willing to challenge Jim Crow laws in education in local and state courts so that the cases could be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. One such community willing to risk that challenge is in Farmville, Virginia. Led by 16-year-old Barbara Johns, the students at the all-black Robert R. Moton High School, strike for a better school. When the NAACP offers to use the strike as an opportunity to challenge segregation in education itself, the students and parents agree. In 1954, the Farmville challenge became one of the five cases reviewed by the United States Supreme Court when it rules that segregation in education is unconstitutional. The bastion of segregation, seemingly impregnable for almost 70 years, is now irreparably breached. Through its opening will soon pour the armies of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.
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