Origins of the Movement 21number of black voters increased to one million, a fourfold increase in a
decade.
Other developments discredited racism in the eyes of many whites. The
Nazi holocaust of innocents made the very idea of racism despicable.
Scientists and social scientists demonstrated that educational achievement
was directly related to one’s environment, not to cranial capacity or genetic
predisposition. Spurred by a growing revulsion against racism, progressive
organizations, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans for
Democratic Action, American Jewish Congress, and National Catholic
Welfare Conference, formed coalitions with civil rights groups to fight dis-
crimination. In World War II, early Japanese victories against the British and
French empires shattered the assumption of white superiority. After the war,
the United States and Soviet Union competed for the allegiance of darker-
skinned peoples in the Third World, making civil rights in America a neces-
sity. The invention of television transformed domestic racial confrontations
into a vivid morality play that was beamed into middle-class homes north of
Dixie. In Dixie itself, the white elite divided as city businessmen came to real-
ize that racism hurt their bottom line. Northern businesses that moved South
to take advantage of low taxes and cheap labor reached the same conclusion
- racism was bad for business. The affluent postwar society spawned a reac-
tion that pulled many idealistic young people to a cause larger than them-
selves. All of these factors produced a change in leadership on the federal
level, essential to dismantling the monstrous edifice of Jim Crow.
Americans for Democratic
Action: The leading lib-
eral lobbying organiza-
tion during the Cold War.