The American Kaleidoscope. Lawrence H. Fuchs
they found African-Americans often excluded from mainstream institutions. Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd reported that in Muncie, Indiana, in 1925, although no Jews were members of the Rotary Club, Jewish merchants mingled freely with other businessmen in the smaller civic clubs. But blacks were excluded not only from all civic clubs but also from the larger movie houses, the YMCA, and the YWCA. Black children were restricted to their own corner of the park for play.70 Returning in the mid-1930s, the Lynds found that “business-class Middle-town tolerates the Negro population complacently as a convenient instrument for getting certain types of dirty work done for low wages.” Blacks were not permitted to become machinists, and an official in a large automobile plant told the Lynds that they had no Negroes at all because it would be degrading for white men to do the same kind of work as blacks.71
The doubling and tripling of black populations in northern cities in the 1920s resulted in an intensification of public school segregation. There had been few blacks in the schools of Chicago and Pittsburgh at the turn of the century; by 1930, the great majority of black pupils and teachers learned and worked in overwhelmingly black schools in Chicago and Pittsburgh, and also in Milwaukee, New York, Cleveland, Detroit, and certain other cities.72 Segregation in the schools was an index of increased residential segregation. In some cities, Cleveland among them, blacks had earlier been less segregated residentially than immigrant-ethnic groups—in 1910, Italians had been more segregated than African-Americans. Ten years later blacks had become the most segregated group.73
At the onset of the Depression, almost nine out of ten blacks still lived in the South, where the informal rules and etiquette of caste were tight and where “the white southerner might readily be branded a race traitor if he shook a Negro’s hand or called a colored person ‘Mr.’ or ‘Mrs.’”74 The term “caste” was used extensively by sociologists and other scholars who studied the South in the 1930s. Research sponsored by the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, which later became the Southern Regional Council, concentrated on the impact of the New Deal on southern agriculture and on the life of southern blacks. When the North Carolinian Arthur Raper, then research and field secretary of the Commission, made a systematic study of Greene and Macon counties in Georgia in the early 1930s, he learned that all of the instruments of caste pluralism—social indignity, physical brutality, educational deprivation, and political exclusion—combined to keep the vast majority of blacks confined to the most menial kinds of work. Some blacks in the North were being drawn into a new national industrial economy, but in the South only one out of every ten who farmed owned any land, “and scarcely half of these have enough to make a living on.” Of the 90 percent who owned no land, half were sharecroppers without work animals, plows, or farm equipment of their own, and a fourth were farm wage hands.75
Education and politics, which had provided hope to so many immigrants and their children, gave very little to African-Americans. Education in the Black Belt counties of the South resembled that of Georgia’s Greene County, where blacks of high school age outnumbered whites; only one black school provided even ninth-grade work, compared to three four-year and four two-year high schools for whites.76 As for the Fifteenth Amendment, Raper wrote in 1936, “It is the expressed belief of nearly all the white people in these counties that the Negro should not be allowed to vote, especially in local elections, and if necessary, force should be used to keep them from the polls.”77 As a result, practically no blacks voted in county and state elections, and only a few in national elections.
John Dollard, a Yale psychologist, conducted a highly personal, ethnographic research study in a small town in Mississippi just large enough to qualify as an urban area (more than 2,500 people). In his 1937 book, Caste and Class in a Southern Town, Dollard described “Niggertown,” a community of ramshackle housing and only two paved streets for 1,500 people.78 Before the Depression, blacks there had owned some businesses, and more land; there had even been a black-run bank. By the time Dollard arrived, all of these acquisitions were gone. Dollard used the word “caste” to describe the condition of blacks, who were subjugated and excluded by whites from institutions of education, religion, and politics.79
Caste was enforced by the rules of social relations. Of all the whites in town, only Jewish merchants, themselves a tiny minority, appeared to give blacks a modicum of courtesy.80 Dollard saw education as the only opening; if white teachers were permitted to encourage learning among blacks, he believed that the system of caste might eventually be undermined.81 But, as Raper had reported one year earlier in Georgia, segregated schools for blacks were inferior, and education was ineffective as a means of breaking the rules of caste since it was also a reflection of it.82
Two years after Dollard’s book, another study of the Deep South was published, anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker’s After Freedom,83 It described life in a Mississippi town disguised by the name “Cottonville.” Elliott M. Rudwick, in his preface to the later, 1967, edition, called Cottonville “a caste-like social system.” Like Dollard, Powdermaker found some class distinctions among the Negroes, but only three owned automobiles, one of them an illiterate ex-bootlegger.84 No matter what the status of black ministers or teachers within the black community, they were still just “boy” to whites who met them on the street in Cottonville. Powdermaker told of one fairly prosperous, dignified man in his late fifties, a highly respected member of the church, who was stopped by a young white woman who was having trouble with her car. Although she knew his name very well, she called him “boy,” repeating it sharply as she ordered him about “in rendering her this unpaid service.”85
What Powdermaker, Dollard, and Raper described was a social system based overwhelmingly on racial lines. They acknowledged certain deviations from the rules. Some white men had black mistresses; some African-Americans owned land; a few white teachers tried to instill ambition and hope in their black students. But these exceptions were too rare in the South to constitute a fundamental challenge to the pervasive system of caste.
Of all the studies by social scientists of the condition of blacks in the U.S. in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the most influential by far was the Carnegie study conducted by economist Gunnar Myrdal and his large staff of researchers. He, too, used the word “caste” to characterize the position of blacks, in the South particularly. The principal significance of black migration north and west, Myrdal wrote, was separation from “the full blown caste system of the South.” He and his associates found effects of caste in the North as well.86 He insisted that it was a mistake to talk about both ethnics and blacks as minority groups because such a term failed “to make a distinction between the temporary social disabilities of recent light-skinned immigrants and the permanent disabilities of Negroes and other colored people.”87 The American definition of Negro as anyone who had the slightest amount of black blood made the caste line “absolutely rigid.”88 Blacks were subject to certain disabilities solely because they were Negroes, no matter the actual color of their skin or how well educated they were.
The point of caste was absolutely clear, Myrdal believed. It was to keep blacks in servile jobs. Middle- and upper-class occupations were almost all closed to Negroes. Young Negro women had practically no chance of getting employment as stenographers or secretaries, as sales clerks in department stores, or as telephone operators outside of businesses run by Negroes for Negroes. Even as late as the mid-1930s, blacks in such jobs were only two-thirds of one percent of all female workers. To surmount discrimination, some of the lightest-colored Negroes in the North “passed” into white life from nine to five in order to earn a living, while maintaining their social and family life among blacks.89 But most blacks could not pretend to be white, and with rare exceptions they were locked into jobs intended for their caste.
A minority of blacks—mostly teachers and ministers but also undertakers and beauticians—were professionals who served blacks. By 1910, blacks in the professions and blacks with business and white-collar jobs equaled only 7 percent of the total black labor force, compared to 6 percent twenty years earlier.90 Many of those who were professionals despised segregation; nevertheless, they had a vested interest in caste, which gave them control over certain markets. In the Depression, even the slight gains by blacks in the workplace and schools were sharply