Domination, Church and the NAACP
By the 1950’s Southern Whites had established a comprehensive system of domination
over blacks. This system of domination protected the privileges of white society and
generated tremendous human suffering for blacks. In the cities and rural areas of the
South, blacks were controlled economically, politically, and personally. Those three
dimensions were combined in what can be called a “tripartite system of domination”.
Economic oppression emerged in the fact that blacks
were heavily concentrated in the lowest paying and
dirtiest jobs the cities had to offer. In a typical
Southern city during the 1950s at least 75% of black
men in the labour force were employed in unskilled
jobs. They were the janitors, porters, cooks, machine
operators, and common labourers. By contrast, only
about 25% of white men were employed in these menial occupations. In the typical
Southern city approximately 50% of black women in the labour force were domestics,
while slightly less that 1 percent of white women were employed as domestics. Another
20% of black women were lowly paid service workers, while less than 10% of white
women were so employed. In 1950 social inequality in the work place meant that nonwhite
families earned nationally only 54 percent of the median income of white families.
The negative impact of racial inequality in the workplace was more then financial. In
factories and other places of employment, workers with authority over other workers
enjoyed greater freedom, status, and deference. Being at the bottom of the work
hierarchy, blacks were controlled in the work place by whites. Positions vested with
authority – managerial and supervisory – were almost always filled by whites.
Whites had the jobs that required white shirts and neckties. Whites decided who would
be promoted, fired, and made to work the hardest. While black men in greasy work
clothes laboured in these conditions, their mothers, wives, and sisters cleaned the
houses of white women and prepared their meals. Blacks entered into these exploitative
economic relationships because the alternative was starvation or at least unemployment,
which was usually much higher that average in the black community.
Southern urban black communities of this period were oppressed politically because
blacks were systematically excluded from the political process. As a general rule there
were no black officials in city and state governments, because such measures as the poll
tax, all-white primaries, the “grandfather” clause, intimidation, and violence
disenfranchised blacks as a group. Law and order were usually maintained in the black
community by white police forces. It was common for law officials to use terror and
brutality against blacks. Due process of law was virtually nonexistent because the courts
were controlled by white judges and juries, which routinely decided in favour of whites.
The white power structure made the decisions about how the public resources of the
cities were to be divided. Blacks received far less than whites, because in practice
blacks had few citizenship rights and were not members of the polity.
Compounding the economic and political oppression was the system of segregation that
denied blacks personal freedoms routinely enjoyed by whites. Segregation was an
arrangement that set blacks off from the rest of humanity and labeled then as an
inferior race. Blacks were forced to use different toilets, drinking fountains, waiting
rooms, parks, schools, and the like. These separate facilities forever reminded blacks of
their low status by their wretched condition, which contrasted sharply with the wellkept facilities reserved for whites only. The “coloured” and “white only” signs that
dotted the buildings and public places of a typical Southern city expressed the reality
of a social system committed to the subjugation of blacks and the denial of their human
dignity and self-respect.
Segregation meant more than separation. To a considerable extent it determined
behaviour between the races. Blacks had to address whites in a tone that conveyed
respect and use formal titles. Sexual relationships between black men and white women
were viewed as the ultimate infraction against the system of segregation. Black males
were therefore advised to stare downward when passing a white woman so that she
would have no excuse to accuse him of rape and have his life snatched away. Indeed
segregation was a personal form of oppression that severely restricted the physical
movement, behavioural choices, and experiences of the individual.
The tripartite system of racial domination – economic, political, and personal oppression
– was backed by legislation and the iron fist of Southern governments. In the short run
all members of the white group had a stake in racial domination, because they derived
privileges from it. Poor and middle-class whites benefited because the segregated
labour force prevented blacks from competing with them for better paying jobs. The
Southern white ruling class benefited because blacks supplied them with cheap labour
and a weapon against the labour movement, the threat to use unemployed blacks as
strikebreakers in labour disputes. Finally, most Southern whites benefited
psychologically from the system’s implicit assurance that no matter how poor or
uneducated, they were always better than the niggers.
Meager incomes and the laws of segregation restricted city blacks to slum
neighbourhoods. In the black part of town housing was substandard, usually dilapidated,
and extremely overcrowded. The black children of the Southern ghetto received fewer
years of formal schooling than white children, and what they did receive was usually of
poorer quality. On the black side of town life expectancy was lower because of poor
sanitary conditions and too little income to pay for essential medical services. Adverse
social conditions also gave rise to a “black-against-black” crime problem, which
flourished, in part, because its elimination was not a high priority of the usually all-white
police forces.
Ironically, urban segregation in the South had some positive consequences. It facilitated
the development of black institutions and the building of close-knit communities when
blacks, irrespective of education and income, were forced to live in close proximity and
frequent the same social institutions. Maids and janitors came into close contact with
clergy, schoolteachers, lawyers, and doctors. In the typical Southern city, the black
professional stratum constituted only about 3 percent of the black community. Skin
colour alone, not class background or gender, locked blacks inside their segregated
communities. Thus segregation itself ensured that the diverse skills and talents of
individuals at all income and educational levels were concentrated within the black
community. Cooperation between the various black strata was an important collective
resource for survival.
Segregation provided the constraining yet nurturing environment out of which a complex
urban black society developed. The influx of migrants from rural areas intensified the
process of institution-building. The heavy concentration of blacks in small areas in the
cities engendered efficient communication networks. In cities, white domination was not
as direct as on the plantations, because urbanization tended to foster impersonal,
formal relationships between the races. Within these compact segregated communities
blacks began to sense their collective predicament as well as their collective strength.
Growth in the black colleges and in the black church was especially pronounced. It was
the church more than any other institution that provided an escape from the harsh
realities associated with domination. Inside its wall blacks were temporarily free to
forget oppression while singing, listening, praying, and shouting. The church also provided
an institutional setting where oppression could be openly discussed and resources could
be developed to organize collective resistance. By the 1950s the tripartite system of
domination was firmly entrenched in Southern cities, but in those cities were born the
social forces that would challenge the very foundations of Jim Crow.