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RACE RELATIONS

"A Jap's a Jap"

(Lt. Gen. John L. DeWitt, commander of Western Defense, 1941). In the aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor waves of racism and hatred directed at Japanese and Japanese Americans swept the West Coast. On 19 February 1942 President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, ordering Japanese and Japanese Americans living in California, Oregon, and Washington to be relocated to internment camps for the duration of the war. Some of these people were "Issei," Japanese immigrants still tied to Japanese tradition, and a small number were "Kibei," American-born Japanese who studied in Japan, but most were "Nisei," American-born children of Issei parents, citizens of the United States by birthright and assimilated into American culture. The U.S. government made little distinction among these groups, denying many the legal rights that were theirs by virtue of their citizenship. One cost of the internment to the already tight American economy was the loss of two-thirds of the U.S. vegetable crop, previously grown by Japanese American farmers on the West Coast.

Loss of Rights and Property

Within days of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese Americans on the West Coast were fired from civil service jobs, their licenses to practice medicine and law were revoked, their businesses were boycotted, and their insurance policies were canceled. By spring 1942 their constitutional rights to due process were suspended. "The only good Jap is a dead Jap," a congressman from California shouted from the floor of the House of Representatives. Overt racism was mixed with fears that Japanese Americans were threats to military security and public safety. As California's attorney general Earl Warren—a Republican who was considered liberal on most issues—said in 1942, "When we are dealing with the Caucasian race we have methods that will test…loyalty. But when we deal with the Japanese, we are in an entirely different field." Yet security concerns quickly proved unfounded, as J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), acknowledged that Japanese Americans were not signaling Japanese submarines with laundry hanging on their clotheslines or taking photographs of the Golden Gate Bridge to help Japanese troops attacking San Francisco. Yet officials remained convinced that Japanese Americans might resort to mob violence if there were another bombing of Hawaii or a submarine attack on the West Coast. This fear was a primary motive for the roundup and relocation of Japanese and Japanese Americans to what one California congressman called "inland concentration camps." Among the Japanese Americans who protested their internment at congressional hearings in 1942 was Miki Masoka, who asked, "Has the Gestapo come to America? Have we not risen in righteous anger at Hitler's mistreatment of the Jews? Then is it not incongruous that [American] citizens of Japanese descent should be similarly mistreated and persecuted?"

Internment

Japanese Americans were treated like prisoners. Young children who did not know English were tagged and herded with their families onto trucks. Families were housed in horse stalls before being moved to makeshift camps in remote and barren areas of Arizona, Arkansas, inland California, Colorado, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming. Innocent and respectable people lived for years in one-room barracks without privacy, their farms, homes, businesses, and bank accounts confiscated. Mothers and fathers endured the indignity in silent apathy and depression, while their Nisei children often exploded in anger, some refusing to sign a loyalty oath and renouncing their American citizenship. Others volunteered to serve in the U.S. Army and were part of the elite, but segregated, 442nd Division, the most decorated combat division in the army. On 2 January 1945 the order excluding Japanese Americans from the West Coast was terminated, and in 1959 citizenship was restored to those Japanese Americans who had renounced their citizenship in the camps. In 1989 President George Bush signed the Internment Compensation Act awarding twenty thousand dollars to each surviving victim of the relocation order. Further reparations were paid in 1993, when a successful class-action suit brought a ruling that the constitutional rights of the internees had been violated.

Rising Black Expectations

African Americans lost patience with segregation and discrimination during World War II On 15 January 1941 black labor leader A. Philip Randolph, known as the "Gandhi of the Negroes" for his use of passive resistance to protest racial discrimination, called for an orderly demonstration of blacks on 1 July in Washington, D.C., to protest their exclusion from employment in the defense industries. On 25 June, after meeting with Randolph and other black leaders a week earlier, President Roosevelt preempted the demonstration by issuing Executive Order 8802, banning racial discrimination in defense industries and government and establishing a Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to investigate discrimination. The order did help many blacks find work in defense plants, though generally in nonskilled, low-paying jobs. Still, the number of blacks in skilled positions more than doubled, and those in semiskilled positions increased by an even larger percentage. The availability of defense-industry jobs lured blacks from the South to northern and western cities. Away from southern states, where poll taxes and unequally administered literacy tests prevented most African Americans from registering to vote, these blacks not only increased their incomes but also found a greater voice in politics. During the war years blacks overall saw a modest improvement in their standard of living and laid the groundwork for the civil rights movement of the 1950s.

Blacks in the Military

An executive order could not end long-standing prejudice, nor did it change conditions in the armed forces, where African Americans were accepted into the military far less often than whites, served in segregated units, were given inferior assignments, and advanced in the ranks slower than whites. In 1940 there were five black officers in the regular army and none in the navy. During the war opportunities for blacks in the military increased greatly. At the same time, military bases—particularly in the South and the West—were hotbeds of racial tension, fueled by resentment over the inferiority of recreational facilities for blacks to those enjoyed by whites, as well as whites' prejudice toward blacks. Among the first of several riots to arise from such situations was the one that followed the alleged lynching of a black soldier at Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1941. Another, at Camp Stewart, Georgia, in summer 1943 arose when military police clashed with black soldiers protesting segregation of post facilities and racial discrimination in a nearby town.

Race Riots in the Cities

Yet military-post riots paled in comparison to the explosions of black anger in Detroit and New York in summer 1943. One hot June day in Detroit black and white youths became involved in a small fight at a crowded beach. Within an hour and a half about five thousand people were rioting, their anger fueled by rumors. One such report, that a black woman and her baby had been thrown off a bridge, brought white sailors and inner-city blacks rushing to the scene with clubs and chains. The riot raged out of control for three days over large parts of the city until President Roosevelt declared a state of emergency and called in six thousand national guard troops. Twenty-five blacks and nine whites were killed, and more than seven hundred people were injured. The Detroit riot of 1943 remains one of the worst race riots in American history. After it was over Edward Jeffries, the white mayor of Detroit, prompted further racial tension with the warning "We'll know what to do next time."

The Harlem Riot

In August a riot erupted in the Harlem section of New York City after a fight between a black military policeman (in the presence of his mother) and a white policeman. The two scuffled, and after the MP started to run off with the policeman's nightstick, the policeman shot him in the shoulder. The rumor spread through black Harlem that a black soldier had been shot in the back and killed. The ensuing riot left 5 dead, 367 injured, and damages amounting to more than $5 million.

Racism Discredited

Black frustration mounted after the war, as blacks got less than their share of jobs and income in the booming postwar economy. Public acceptance of racism began to change, however. Various academic organizations, responding to Nazi claims of Aryan superiority, spoke out against racism. The American Anthropological Association, for example, argued that there was no scientific proof of psychological or cultural differences based on race. Psychologists made similar arguments, ascribing Nazi claims of the inferiority of non-Aryans to the desire to find scapegoats. Gunnar Myrdal's groundbreaking study An American Dilemma (1944) addressed racism, distinguishing whites' perceptions of blacks' demands from their actual needs and interests.

Governmental Response

Having failed to convince Congress to make President Roosevelt's wartime FEPC a permanent commission, President Harry S Truman established the President's Committee on Civil Rights on 5 December 1946 to advise him on issues related to discrimination. On 2 February 1948, acting on many of their recommendations, President Truman delivered the first ever presidential civil rights address to Congress, proposing legislation to ban poll taxes, a federal antilynching law, and the establishment of a permanent federal Fair Employment Practices Commission. Passage was blocked by powerful Southern Democrats. Change came more quickly in the military. The navy ended segregation in 1946, and on 26 July 1948 President Truman signed Executive Order 9981, banning segregation in all branches of the military. On the same day he also ordered the desegregation of the federal civil service.