The Civil Rights Movement Revised Edition

Origins of the Movement 17

Buy Black Campaign:

The Depression-era

strategy for blacks to

keep their money within

the black community.

Don’t Buy Where You

Can’t Work: Urban pro-

tests during the Great

Depression against busi-

nesses that did not hire

black workers.

Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr.

(1908–72): Harlem cler-

gyman and congressman

who pushed for black

jobs and antipoverty

programs.

Roosevelt, helped blacks in important ways. FDR developed relief programs
for all Americans, relied on a black cabinet of advisers, and invited opera
singer Marian Anderson to sing on federal property when she could not
appear in a private concert hall. Under his leadership, the government hired
many blacks for construction jobs, built the first subsidized housing, and
taught black farmers how to read and how to diversify their crops. But his
New Deal programs discriminated against blacks, and he did not lift a finger
to outlaw lynching, the poll tax, or segregated neighborhoods. Although
some blacks initially concluded that the ‘new deal’ was really a ‘raw deal,’
most deserted Hoover’s ‘do-nothing’ Republican party – the party of emanci-
pation – and moved permanently to the Democrats.
In this hour of desperation, other blacks, including singer Paul Robeson,
turned to the Socialist and Communist parties and the Southern Tenant
Farmers’ Union. These radical groups repudiated racial prejudice and helped
black laborers, farmers, renters, and prisoners, including the hapless Scottsboro
boys, wrongly convicted of raping white women. Blacks of all political per-
suasions celebrated when heavyweight boxer Joe Louis used his fists to lay
low his white opponents, an implicit victory over segregation itself.
Because the president would not address civil rights directly, blacks used
their considerable economic clout to force changes. Virginia Union Univer-
sity economics professor Gordon Hancock proposed a ‘buy black’ strategy in
which blacks would spend ‘black dollars’ at black-owned businesses in order
to recirculate that same dollar several times within the black community.
Merchants, clerics, and teachers cooperated in this ‘double-duty dollar’ cam-
paign. The flip side of this strategy was to boycott white stores in black dis-
tricts that refused to hire black employees or else employed them only in
menial positions. The Chicago Whip, a militant newspaper, promoted a ‘Don’t
Buy Where You Can’t Work’ campaign against retail stores in the Windy
City. The powerful ‘Jobs for Negroes’ idea spread quickly to thirty-five cities.
In Harlem, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., the charismatic minister of the
Abyssinian Baptist Church, picketed and boycotted the hospital, department
stores, utility companies, colleges, theaters, and mass transit so that black
workers would be hired as something more than janitors, porters, and ele-
vator operators. Some white businesses relented, especially the bus company,
which established the nation’s first affirmative actionhiring plan for blacks.
After the outbreak of World War II, the forces of industrialization and
urbanization created conditions from which the civil rights movement cli-
maxed. A. Philip Randolph, America’s top black union leader, pleaded with
Washington officials to desegregate the military and to hire blacks in defense
plants. When his plea went unanswered, Randolph threatened an embar-
rassing march on the nation’s capital. FDR was furious at this war of nerves,
but in exchange for canceling the march, he issued Executive Order 8802,

Affirmative Action:

Government and private

programs designed to

overcome the legacy of

discrimination against

minorities, especially in

education and employ-

ment.