Part Four: Transformations · The Problem of the Color Lines

IN 1903, THE PERSPICACIOUS public intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in the opening of The Souls of Black Folk: "Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here at the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line."¹ Forty years later, World War II forced America to confront the problem of the twentieth century. Social scientists took the lead in pointing out the problem of the color line. In Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, published in 1942, Ashley Montagu framed the war as a conflict between the "spirit of the Nazi racist" and the "spirit of democracy." Nazism reflected the wrongheaded and dangerous thinking that "the shape of the nose or the color of skin" had something "to do with human values and culture." A year later, in The Races of Mankind, Ruth Benedict denounced racism as unscientific and urged the United States to "clean its own house" and "stand unashamed before the Nazis and condemn, without confusion, their doctrines of a Master Race."² Policymakers and pundits also depicted the war as a defense of democracy and a campaign against racism. "By making this a 'people's' war for freedom," it was argued, "we can help clear up the alien problem, the negro problem, the anti-Semitic problem." Republican leader Wendell Willkie echoed: "Today it is becoming increasingly apparent to thoughtful Americans that we cannot fight the forces of imperialism abroad and maintain a form of imperialism at home . . . . Our very proclamations of what we are fighting for have rendered our own inequities self-evident. When we talk of freedom of opportunity for all nations, the mocking paradoxes in our own society become so clear that they can no longer be ignored." "We are behind the times I admit," Frank

Dixon, a former governor of Alabama, confessed to a friend. "The Huns have wrecked the theories of the master race with which we were so contented so long." The New York Times editorialized in May 1941: "A nation making an all-out effort cannot neglect any element in its population. If it is engaged on the side of democracy it must leave open the doors of opportunity to all, regardless of race."³ During the war, the most eloquent call for American society to confront its own racism appeared in Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. In fighting this "ideological war," he argued, Americans must apply the principle of democracy more explicitly to race. "Fascism and nazism are based on a racial superiority dogma-not unlike the old hackneyed American caste theory-and they came to power by means of racial persecution and oppression." Therefore, Americans must stand before the whole world in support of racial tolerance and equality. "When in this crucial time the international leadership passes to America," Myrdal observed, "the great reason for hope is that this country has a national experience of uniting racial and cultural diversities and a national theory, if not a consistent practice, of freedom and equality for all .... The main trend in [this country's] history is the gradual realization of the American Creed. "⁴ Indeed, during World War II, Hitler's Nazism with its ideology of Aryan racial supremacy forced Americans to look critically at the color lines within their own society. For different racial and ethnic minorities, the contradictions between the reality of prejudice and the principle of equality became American dilemmas.