Part 2 of Dr. Washburn's Media & Society Lecture, Feb. 8, 2001

(After viewing a clip of Soldiers Without Swords, the PBS documentary on the black press.)

OK. I wanted you to see that, because it gives you some of the flavor, and I think it's much better than me just constantly standing up here and talking. In 1984 a man named Studs Terkel wrote a very famous book, which he receive a Pulitzer Prize for. The name of the book was, The Good War.

The title of this book came from the fact that the book was a bunch of oral histories that he had done. One of the women in this book talked about how World War II was the good war because the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and it galvanized the country and everybody was behind this war. Well, as I think you can see in that film, that's not necessarily the case. On Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and almost immediately blacks go down and try to sign up for the armed services.

They go to the Marine recruiting stations. The Marines tell them, "We don't want you. We've never had a black in the Marines."

They go to the Coast Guard, and the Coast Guard says, "We don't want you. We've never had a black in the Coast Guard."

They go to the Army Air Corps -- what we know call the Air Force -- and the Air Corps says the same thing, "We've never had black pilots. We aren't interested in you."

They go to the Navy and get a little different response.

The Navy says, "Sure we'll take you. We've had blacks a long time, who have been mess boys. They've worked in the kitchens. If you come into the Navy, that's all you can do. You can work in the kitchens or else we don't want you."

They go to the Army, and the Army is 10 percent black, because that is the percent of blacks in the country. They had gone to this in the late 1930s.

They [the Army] decided it would be exactly the same proportion as blacks in the country -- 10 percent. So blacks go down to sign up for the Army, and blacks are told by the army, "We'll take you, but remember we'll only take one of you for each nine non-blacks we get. So we'll take whites, we'll take Asians, we'll take Chicanos, but we'll only take one black for each other nine people who are non-black."

Well, blacks were obviously upset about that.

It mentioned the Red Cross in there [the film]. Blacks go down and try to give blood to the Red Cross as soon as the bombs dropped at Pearl Harbor.

The Red Cross says, "No, we're not interested. You're a black person." Over the next month, blacks complain about this. They tried out the scientific data which shows that type A from a black person is the same as type A from a white person. After a month the Red Cross relents and says, "OK. We'll take blood from blacks, but we'll only give it to black people."

Women go to the Army, want to sign up to be nurses, and the Army says, "OK. We'll take some black women.They take hundreds of white women, they take 54 black women and not only that, but they tell the black women, "You can only treat black people."

That's the way it was at the time. There were many other things. You got on a bus or a street car at that time, there was a black line across, two thirds of the way back on the car, which ran across the top of this car that was about an inch wide, and it meant that if you were black, you had to be behind this line before this bus or trolley car would move. If you didn't they just threw you off and proceeded without you.

There were black drinking fountains, white drinking fountains, black bathrooms, white bathrooms, many blacks could not go to public universities, and many blacks did not get the same pay as whites even though they had the same education and the same experience.

Well, with all of these inequalities, it was very natural that the black press would leap into the fray, so to speak, and start complaining about what was going on with blacks, with the very heart of the republic in danger.

Maybe the republic would go under because at this particular time the government did not know whether it could win in World War II.

The black press started complaining bitterly and then you have this Double V campaign show up. It was up here, and I'll just repeat a little bit of this. You had James Thompson. He was a 26-year-old cafeteria worker at the Cessna Aircraft corporation in Wichita Kan., and he writes a letter to the Pittsburgh Courier, the largest black newspaper in the country. It was a weekly and at 190,000 circulation. In World War II it would grow to 350,000. It was almost double during the war. He wrote this letter. The Pittsburgh Courier ran this letter on Jan. 31, 1942. And I'll just read part of it here:

"Being an American of dark complexion, these questions flash through my mind. Should I sacrifice my life to live half-American? Would it be demanding too much to demand full citizenship rights in exchange for the sacrifice of my life? Will colored Americans suffer still the indignities that have been heaped upon them in the past?"

And then he suggests this Double V Campaign. The Double V Campaign basically was, "Let's have victory over these totalitarian forces overseas -- meaning the Germans, and the Japanese, and the Italians -- and let's have victories over the same types of forces in this country."

And that was a direct shot at the South. For instance, you had poll taxes in the South. Poll taxes were simply designed to keep blacks from voting. If they couldn't afford to pay it, they couldn't vote. You had lynchings in this country. You think lynchings went out with the Cowboy and Indian era? No way! In 1942, 13 blacks got lynched in this country. The most vicious one in Sikeston, Mo., where a black man was accused of raping a white woman. He was in the jail. A mob descended on the jail, grabbed him out of the jail. Beat him, tied him with a chain behind a car, dragged him through the streets. They hanged him and then they put gasoline on his body and burned it.

That's the kind of things that were going on at this particular time. So, James Thompson suggests that we ought to have a Double V Campaign to get rid of some of these injustices. And he concluded his letter, "Surely, those who perpetuate these ugly prejudices here, are seeking to destroy our democratic form of government just as surely as the Axis forces."

Well, the Double V became a quick success, for the black press, and particularly the Pittsburgh Courier. You saw the diagram up here, they had the two V's with the eagle in between them. You had Double V baseball games, Double V flag-raising ceremonies, Double V victory gardens. You had Double V beauty contests. You had women weaving these V's in their hair. You had the song Yankee Doodle Tan, and the Pittsburgh Courier tells its readers, "You want to become a Double V member, send us a nickel, just a nickel. We will send you a card and we will enroll you in the Double V Club, and we will send you a lapel pin. Go around wearing these lapel pins." The summer in 1942, the Pittsburgh Courier signed up 200,000 blacks, all of them had paid a nickel to become members.

Well, as this goes on, the black press continues to complain about injustices. One of the biggest, which you saw up here, were the fact that blacks were being sent to Army camps -- and the Army camps were spread in kind of a half moon shape from the Carolinas down to Arizona, across that part of the country. They were being sent to these Army camps and quickly, black soldiers were having pitched battles -- and I'm talking about shooting at each other -- with white military police.

And they are killing each other off in these camps. And in May of 1942, one of the most famous letters ever published in the black press in this country came from a black soldier in the South. He wrote the Cleveland Call and Post, in Cleveland, Ohio, and the publisher ran this letter without revealing who the soldier was, and the soldier used the words, "Kill a cracker in Germany, or kill one in Georgia, what's the difference."

The government got real excited about those words. Let me tell you, that did not go unnoticed by the government. What's going on at this time, is that the government's noticing what's going on.

The government is very worried. If you look at the documents at the National Archives like I have, and the documents at the Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York, you will notice that the government was not sure that it could win this war, and basically beat Japan, until August of 1942. In August of 1942 the Marines landed on Guadalcanal. The Japanese staged violent counterattacks, suicide attacks, nearly drove the Marines back into the ocean. Finally the Marines gain a foothold in Guadalcanal and at that point, when the Marines gained a foothold and started advancing, up the chain of islands, called the island hopping campaign of World War II, where you get closer and closer to Japan, then you build the giant runways where you have the giant bombers, and you bomb Japan. At that particular point, in August of 1942, finally the government figures out that, yes, we can beat Japan. But before August 1942, there was extreme fear that if the blacks of this country, who made up 10 percent, if they did not support this war, then who knows if we can win with 90 percent of the population. Can we win?

And furthermore, mentioned on the film, not only can you win, but what happens if this 10 percent starts going out, because they are disenchanted, because of the inequality, what if they go out and they blow up power lines and railroad tracks, what happens? Well, that never happened, but there was a great fear by the government that this kind of thing would occur.

Well, in late May 1942 there was a Cabinet meeting, and at this Cabinet meeting was Francis Biddle, who sees the president afterward, and Roosevelt says, "You've got to talk to these black press publishers. These guys are hurting the war effort with all of this criticism, complaining about all of these inequalities."

So Biddle goes back, has a meeting mid-June 1942, with John Sengstacke, the one that appeared on the film here, and you saw basically what happened. Sengstacke walked into the room at the Justice Department. There's a large, large table. Black newspapers are laid down on this table, and all of them are talking about the fact the blacks and whites are killing each other in the Army camps before they can get overseas.

Biddle says, "See these newspapers, these are hurting the war effort. If you don't stop this we will take you to court under the Espionage Act."

The Espionage Act was passed in 1917, after the U.S. got into World War I. The Espionage Act basically says that you cannot do anything that will harm the government in successfully proceeding with the war. One of those things, is that you won't do anything that will cause people to not go and enlist in the armed services.

So Biddle makes his threat. Sengstacke, who was equally tough as Biddle, says, "We've had black newspapers in this country since the 1820s. We've been writing this stuff and complaining about inequalities for more than a hundred years. We're not going to stop now, and if you don't like it just take us to court." A very tough thing to say to the attorney general of the United States.

Well, they calm down over the next 45 minutes. At the end of it Biddle has totally changed his tongue, and he says to Sengstacke, "I'll tell you what, if the black press, does not write anything more critical or worse, if you want to put it like that, then what they are writing now, we will not take any of the black newspapers to court under the Espionage Act in this particular war."

So Sengstacke goes out and tells the other black publishers. They all love this kind of agreement. Suddenly they're safe because they were very, very worried about what could happen with this kind of threat from the Attorney General.

Well, if you look, at that particular thing, you have to ask the reason why. Why did Biddle make this threat, and then why did he back off within less than an hour? What you have to understand is that in the spring of 1942 the U.S. government started looking very heavily at the press of this country and they divided the press into four different parts.

One part was what you might call the white press. It could be anything from the Salt Lake paper to the New York Times, the LA Times. It could be the paper in this town.

They looked at the white-owned press in this country and they quickly realized that we have nothing to worry about this press. They are largely supporting the war effort, and we have nothing to worry about. The one lone exception that they particularly worried about was the Chicago Tribune, one of the country's largest papers. This paper was very much of an anti-administration newspaper.

This paper had been very critical of the Roosevelt administration, and so in June of 1942 the Tribune, Chicago Tribune, ran a story in which you could read between the lines and you could realize that one of the reasons, and one of the main reasons that the U.S. fleet mangled the Japanese Fleet in the battle of Midway, which was an important turning point in the war, was because the Americans had broken the Japanese naval code, and they could pinpoint what ships were going to be there, where they were going to be on certain days and so forth. So, as a result of that, the U.S. government got very upset, and for the first and only time in the war it went after a mainstream newspaper under the Espionage Act.

Went to a grand jury in August of 1942 in Chicago and as a result of that, the grand jury asked the Justice Department lawyers, it said, "What did this paper do, that is a violation of the Espionage Act that gave away war signals? And the Justice Department lawyers said, "We can't tell you that. They just gave away war secrets, you've got to believe us." And the grand jury threw it out. And the next day in the paper, the Tribune, which was very spunky, ran a picture on its front page a drawing of the Tribune Tower building in downtown Chicago. If you've ever seen this building, it goes very up, very much, up like this with a point on it. They drew a picture of this building, they drew a flag on the top. The building's in black and white, the flag's in red, white, and blue, and it's very obvious what the Tribune was doing and just to put it mildly, was giving the administration the finger. Like, we got away with this if you like it or not.

Well, that was one kind of press, the white press. Another kind of press was the Japanese and German press in this country. We're talking about papers written in Japanese and German, or we're talking about papers for Japanese and German audiences written in English. They look at the German press they quickly decide that, "Nah, we don't have anything to worry about that press." They look at the Japanese press, they're very worried about the Japanese press because of the readership of these newspapers. You have a postmaster near San Francisco, who writes ecstatically to the Post Office Department, "We've got this Japanese newspaper here, it's in Japanese, and before they publish each time, I'm requiring them to go out and give me a translation of what's in this thing, before they can publish it." The Post Office writes back, "God, that's great!" So, they do this for three weeks, the paper goes under. It absolutely was too much for this paper to give a translation and wait to publish this thing until the Post Office Department said it was OK. Now, what you have there, is what's called prior censorship. Did anybody care in the country? No. You know this is a Japanese newspaper, Down With The Thing. So it went down. And Japanese paper after Japanese paper went under in this particular war. There were Japanese papers in interment camps, but once you got outside the interment camps there were not many of these Japanese newspapers.

Well, another kind of press in this country was the fascist-type press. Fascist-type press, with one exception, was very small, located all over the country -- Los Angeles, Wichita, Chattanooga , Noblesville, Indiana. What distinguished these presses was the fact that they were put out by people who did not feel the U.S. should be in the Second World War. And the thing they said over and over again, "This is a war being fought to make Jewish bankers and Jewish businessmen rich. And the U.S. should not be in this war for that cause."

Well, the bombs drop at Pearl Harbor. One of these people put out these newspapers. One in North Carolina, wrote one month after Pearl Harbor, "The U.S. deserved the bombing of Pearl Harbor." The U.S. just swooped in, that was the end of that newspaper. Did anybody care? No. And they go in and they look at a bunch of these other papers, and put so much pressure on them, and people are so afraid to be seen with these papers, that most of them die.

The main one that they have a problem with is one called Social Justice, and this is a magazine put out by a very famous Catholic priest, Father Charles Coughlin, in Royal Oak, Mich. This is promoting the same kind of fascist views and the administration is afraid to deal with this publication because it's put out by a prominent Catholic, and the feeling in the administration, "Do we go against the Catholics, can we win the next election?" I mean that's what's going on. So what they do, they go to the postmaster general. The postmaster general is a Catholic. He goes to the bishop of Detroit, and the bishop of Detroit shuts the priest down. I mean that's the way you got things done.

Well, the fourth kind of press was the black press. The black press in many ways, in terms of the government, was the most important press in World War II. Not because it had the largest circulation, or the most readers, but because the black press was more radical than the white press, less radical than the fascist press, and the government could not decide, "Can we win against this press in court?"

And this decision is made before Biddle meets with Sengstacke in the summer of 1942. So the question was, "Can we win?" And they look at what the black press is writing. It's writing about lynchings, and it's writing about people not getting into the armed services, and all this stuff. And the Justice Department lawyers say, "You can complain about these things, it isn't like you're making up problems. These are things that exist. They're complaining about real things. Therefore they have the right to protest about these things. Whether anybody likes it or not."

As a result of drawing that kind of conclusion the Justice Department decides not to try the black press under the Espionage Act in World War II. The other part of it, was that the Justice Department, like a lot of lawyers, was very much into winning. It talked about how many cases can we win, and it did not want to lose to the press, in court in World War II. And they talked about that. They said, "Look what happens when we go to court against the press. Immediately the New York Times and others screamed 'First Amendment violation,' and they just harp on this and they harp on this. And we go all the way to trial and we go through the trial, and if we lose, the Justice Department, then the New York Times and the others will scream,'"We told you, you were trying to violate the Constitution. This is a first amendment right, and you can't do this to us.'"

So, the Justice Department and Francis Biddle decide not to try the black press under the Espionage Act in World War II.

Click here to read Part III of Dr. Washburn's remarks.

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