Fighting for Full Freedom

After World War I, blacks combat the color line on America’s shores.


By Charles Coe


"We Return Fighting: The Civil Rights Movement in the Jazz Age by Mark Robert Schneider (Northeastern University Press; Boston; 2001; 472 pages; $35)

We return.

We return from fighting.

We return fighting.

Make way for democracy! We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why.

So wrote W. E. B. Du Bois in the May 1919 issue of Crisis, the legendary house organ of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The Great War was over, and black soldiers had so distinguished themselves in combat in the trenches of Europe that three Negro battalions were decorated for bravery by the French military.

Now these heroes were returning to an America where they were denied the freedoms they’d risked their lives to help secure for others.

In We Return Fighting, an exhaustively researched volume that will be published next month, Mark Robert Schneider, adjunct instructor in American history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, offers a tribute to the Jazz Age activists who struggled against tremendous opposition to advance the cause of civil rights.

In some ways, the racial caste system in postwar America seemed worse than ever before. In 1921, three years after the end of World War I, a horrific series of events made it abundantly clear that African Americans needed to “stand their ground and fight.”

In Jasper County, Georgia, a white farmer named John S. Williams murdered eleven black workers he had bailed out of jail and kept as virtual prisoners—beating and ultimately killing them after they rebelled against him.

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, a group of armed blacks repulsed a white mob attempting to lynch a young black man jailed for “assaulting” a white woman. (Apparently, he had stumbled against her after being jostled by the movement of the elevator in which they were riding.)

Within the day, whites had “put [the young man] to the torch, burning churches, lodge buildings, and everything in their path,” killing up to 200 blacks in all and doing more than $1.5 million in property damage.

In Schneider’s view, the central role in the struggle for civil rights during that turbulent period was played by the NAACP, which had been created in 1909 in response to a growing dissatisfaction with the views of Booker T. Washington, president of Tuskegee University.

Washington, the most prominent black political leader of his time, urged African Americans to forgo a demand for civil rights in the short term, arguing that the Negro’s best strategy was to gradually earn the trust and respect of whites by being a good citizen. But as white supremacists gained ground in the early 1900s, Washington’s philosophy began to lose appeal among African Americans.

To an extent unmatched by any other group, the NAACP organized voting drives, staged public demonstrations and conferences, and posed numerous legal challenges to discrimination. As its membership and influence grew, it would fight—with mixed success—for equal access to education and housing, and lay the groundwork for a legal challenge to lynching.

Schneider attempts to dispel two common beliefs about the NAACP. First, that it was essentially an elitist, middle-class organization lacking mass appeal. Schneider points out that “the rank and file who signed the branch charters listed their occupations time and again as laborers, janitors, porters, laundresses, and domestic helpers.” Furthermore, the organization focused its energies on “the defense of sharecroppers, workers, students, soldiers, and, most of all, victims of white violence.”

Schneider also challenges the idea that whites controlled the NAACP, and points out that “the ascension of James Weldon Johnson and Walter White to the secretariat of the association in 1919 marked the first time in American history that African Americans ran a nationally organized civil rights group.” He asserts that, thanks to the efforts of NAACP founder Du Bois and his colleagues, a strong leadership core lent the organization “internal stability and authority within African America.”

Of course, no history of the civil rights movement in the 1920s would be complete without a discussion of Marcus Garvey, whose style and message stood in sharp contrast to that of the NAACP. A flamboyant and charismatic figure, Garvey led the “Back to Africa” movement, which, in calling for the creation of a black-governed state in Africa, sparked the dreams of disenfranchised blacks all across America.

Schneider, who devotes a chapter to the “Emperor of Harlem,” acknowledges that Garvey “masterfully synthesized diverse elements of African-American and diaspora yearnings” and that Garvey’s message of Black Nationalism and economic self-reliance “struck deep chords of longing among millions of people who felt themselves to be a lost tribe among strangers.”

Still, Schneider concludes Garvey’s impact on the civil rights movement was ultimately mostly symbolic. The activist’s intolerance of independent thinkers in his inner circle, his financial mismanagement of his Black Star Line steamship company, and his defense of the Ku Klux Klan (which he described as “pro-white, not anti-black”) contributed to his downfall.

Schneider suggests that a fundamental difference existed between Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association and the NAACP. The former was based on a cult of personality and collapsed in the absence of its founder, whereas the latter focused on building a strong organizational infrastructure that could—and did—survive changes in leadership.

We Return Fighting illuminates a period that has too long stood in shadow and serves as an overdue homage to civil rights activists who risked their lives to awaken the conscience of a nation. This book deserves a place on the shelf of anyone who wants to understand more clearly the complex and troubled history of race relations in America.

The NAACP activists of the 1920s didn’t win every battle they fought. (The defeat of the Dyer bill, the proposed federal antilynching law, was a particularly bitter setback.) But the organization “continued the fight when victory was not on the horizon,” laying the foundation for the victories of later generations. People everywhere who carry on the struggle for human rights are forever in their debt.

Charles Coe is a program officer with the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a published poet, and a former writer and editor in the University Publications office.

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John Adams and the Founding of the Republic; Richard Alan Ryerson, editor; Northeastern University Press; 2001

Arguably, Adams-mania reached fever pitch earlier this year when George W. Bush added David McCullough’s best-selling John Adams to the presidential summer reading list.

If you’re daunted by that 700-plus-page tome, however, this collection of essays serves as a fine window onto the first vice president and second president of the United States.

Written by leading scholars, the essays on the life and times of Adams stand on their own as valuable contributions to our understanding of the Revolutionary leader. Richard Alan Ryerson, editor in chief of the Adams Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society, edited the volume, which is based on papers presented at a 1996 conference.

The recent surge in interest in Adams stems largely from a new appreciation for the critical role he played in America’s political origins. This book delves deeply into the varied accomplishments—and complex character—of the preeminent political theorist and public official. From an account of his pre-Revolutionary career to examinations of his political thought, it thoroughly explores Adams’s profound legacy.

Many topics are covered, including Adams’s aggressive diplomacy in Europe, his frustrating experience as vice president, the complexities of the 1796 election, his views on free speech, and the contributions of his wife and trusted adviser, Abigail.

With an extensive introduction to Adams’s life and career by Ryerson, John Adams and the Founding of the Republic emerges as an essential aid to developing a better grasp of Adams’s importance in American history. It might just spread Adams fever to your corner of the republic.