The War and Civil Rights

Nazi theories of racial superiority heightened awareness of racism within the United States, particularly the unequal treatment of African Americans and the unjust internment of Japanese Americans.

Main Idea

The War and Civil Rights

• how African Americans fought racism during World War II

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• the effect of the March on Washington Movement.

• why internment violated the civil liberties of Japanese Americans.

• During the war African American demands for equal treatment grew louder. Many whites as well as African Americans realized the uncomfortable similarities between racial tensions in the United States and Hitler’s belief in a superior race.

• Actions by Nazis and research by scholars discredited the idea of racial superiority of any group.

Civil Rights Movement Grows

• African Americans responded to this heightened awareness of racism in the United States with a new militancy. As they moved from the South, where they could not vote, to the North and West, they began to flex their political muscle.

Civil Rights Movement Grows (cont.)

Civil Rights Gains• The war led civil rights groups to

develop new forms of protest against racial injustice. The NAACP urged African Americans to “persuade, embarrass, compel, and shame our government and our nation” to end discrimination. Other leaders, such as A. Philip Randolph, called for direct action.

Civil Rights Gains (cont.)

• Randolph–appalled by discrimination in the armed services and exclusion of African Americans in well-paying wartime industries–called for a massive all-African American march on Washington.

• Randolph and FDR finally reached a compromise. FDR persuaded Randolph to call off the march and drop his demand for an integrated army in return for an executive order creating a Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to ban racial discrimination in war industries.

Civil Rights Gains (cont.)

• Randolph continued to use his March on Washington Movement (MOWM) to focus attention on discrimination by organizing mass rallies, boycotts of segregated facilities, and acts of civil disobedience.

Civil Rights Gains (cont.)

• Encouraged by Randolph’s success, other African American civil rights leaders organized the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which organized mass protests and acts of civil disobedience such as sit-ins.

• Meanwhile, membership in the NAACP continued to grow. The organization stepped up its plan to challenge discrimination in the courts, overturning state practices that kept African Americans from voting in Democratic primaries in the case of Smith v. Allwright.

Civil Rights Gains (cont.)

Civil Rights Gains (cont.)

The FEPC Fights Discrimination (cont.)

• The FEPC faced major obstacles. It could only act on formal complaints, which many people were afraid to file. Moreover, the FEPC had no power to enforce its decisions. It could cancel war contracts, but that meant cuts in military production and possible walkouts by workers.

The FEPC Fights Discrimination

• The FEPC also faced prejudice, especially from Southern Democrats in Congress who claimed the agency fostered racial tensions. In reality, FEPC leaders moved cautiously. They did not consider segregation, as opposed to discrimination, as a cause for action and in fact approved the creation of separate facilities for African American and white workers.

The FEPC Fights Discrimination (cont.)

• One of the few groups to suffer restrictions of its civil liberties during World War II was the more than 120,000 Japanese Americans who were relocated to internment camps.

• Responding to the outburst of anti-Japanese sentiment following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 authorizing the removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast.

Internment of Japanese Americans

Internment of Japanese Americans (cont.)

• Japanese Americans suffered great economic hardship when they were forced to sell possessions, farms, houses, and places of business at a huge loss.

• Despite the harsh, dehumanizing conditions at internment camps such as Topaz, Utah, and Heart Mountain, Wyoming, the evacuees preserved their dignity by publishing newspapers; starting schools, bands, Scout troops, and softball leagues; building tennis courts; landscaping flower and vegetable gardens; and giving lessons on the arts.

Internment of Japanese Americans (cont.)

• Two Supreme Court rulings upheld wartime policies toward Japanese Americans: (1) in Hirabayashi v. United States the Court upheld a curfew aimed only at Japanese Americans and (2) in Korematsu v. United States it upheld the order providing for internment.

Internment of Japanese Americans (cont.)

• In 1988 President Reagan signed Public Law 100-383, which apologized for wartime policies and offered limited restitution to individuals of Japanese ancestry who were interned during the war.

Hirabayashi v. United States

• Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, President FDR issued executive orders permitting the military to exclude certain persons from "military areas.“ The defendant, Hirabayashi, was convicted of violating a curfew, and his appeal of this conviction reached the Supreme Court.

• Hirabayashi v. United States was a case in which the United States Supreme Court held that the application of curfews against members of a minority group were constitutional when the nation was at war with the country from which that group originated.

Korematsu v. United States

• Korematsu v. United States was a landmark United States Supreme Court case concerning the constitutionality of Executive Order 9066, which ordered Japanese Americans into internment camps during World War II. In a 6-3 decision, the Court sided with the government, ruling that the exclusion order was constitutional. The opinion held that the need to protect against espionage outweighed Korematsu's individual rights, and the rights of Americans of Japanese descent.