Living for the City: Robert Clifton Weaver's Liberalism (Page 2)

The Great Depression was especially devastating for black Americans. By 1932 black unemployment in American cities was more than 50 percent; in the Southern countryside, black cotton farmers found themselves unable to earn any profit at all. Because it offered some relief, the New Deal won the support of black city dwellers, especially during Roosevelt's second term; by 1939 the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was giving financial support to a million black families, and the program employed thousands of black teachers, composers, artists and writers (a quarter of a million African-Americans learned to read and write in the WPA Education Program). Both the WPA and the PWA banned discrimination in their programs.

Yet in part because Roosevelt and his liberal allies in Congress always relied on the support of Dixiecrats, they could never make racial justice a central plank of the New Deal. Southern states often disregarded federal antidiscrimination directives, and Roosevelt didn't risk making reprisals. His first cabinet was largely hostile to civil rights. Agricultural and domestic work--the occupations that employed most black workers--were excluded from Social Security. The actions of the US Housing Authority, which built more than 130,000 housing units and was a precursor to the later postwar federal housing programs, were sabotaged by Jim Crow. Many of these new apartments went to African-Americans who otherwise would have been living in desperate conditions, and civil rights spokesmen praised the program for charging black tenants lower average monthly rents than whites. But in the South, the new federal public housing buildings were always segregated--and they often were in the North, as well. A housing project in Williamsburg provided more than 1,600 apartments for white Brooklynites; one in Harlem gave fewer than half that number to black families. When Weaver, in 1940, gave a speech before the National Negro Congress defending the opportunities the program had offered for integrated housing (some fifty projects housed both black and white families), conservatives seized on his remarks and managed to get the program's funding cut altogether.

Because of the Roosevelt administration's timid commitment to racial justice, Weaver--as a loyal New Dealer--often found himself the target of fierce criticism from the African-American left. The black advisers who worked for the executive branch, wrote Howard University historian Rayford Logan, were merely "the type of Negro that the white people wanted--one who knew what to say and what not to say; one who gladly accepted what the white officials gave Negroes and never made any further inquiry or complaint." This view seemed to be vindicated in 1941 when labor leader A. Philip Randolph threatened to organize a march of 100,000 blacks on Washington to protest discrimination in defense jobs and the Army. Weaver had a new government job at the National Defense Advisory Committee, where he was supposed to help integrate African-Americans into the industrial defense program, but he found himself defending companies like Curtiss-Wright, an aircraft manufacturer, against charges of discrimination. Weaver had been able to negotiate a deal whereby Curtiss-Wright would train 1,200 black workers at its plant in Buffalo, New York, but activists argued that this was insufficient, given that the company's Paterson, New Jersey, factory had only sixteen black workers on a payroll of 16,000. Weaver worried that the protests and demonstrations would stir up "reports of extreme racial chauvinism on the part of Negroes, of super-sensitiveness which complicates their problem of industrial employment and of a discrimination mindedness which influences their participation in the armed forces"--this, at a time when the Army kept its blood supply segregated so that white soldiers would not receive transfusions of blood drawn from African-Americans. Ultimately, Randolph, in return for calling off the protest, was able to secure what Weaver could not--a guarantee of colorblind hiring practices in defense programs and the creation of a Fair Employment Practices Commission to investigate charges of racism. The armed forces remained segregated until after the war.

Weaver left Washington during World War II and--along with his wife and their adopted son (Pritchett says the child was most likely born to an unmarried relative)--moved first to Chicago and then to New York City, holding various positions in and out of academia. It was during this period that he wrote his second and most influential book: The Negro Ghetto (1948), a counterpoint to Gunner Myrdal's An American Dilemma. (His first book, Negro Labor: A National Problem, was a well-received treatment of employment discrimination.) Instead of focusing on the South, The Negro Ghetto treated residential segregation in the urban North--and it was one of the first academic works to do so, long before the notion of the "inner city" became as well worn as an old penny. Instead of looking at racism primarily as a "moral issue," as Pritchett puts it, Weaver sought to explain "the economic motivations and institutions" that drove patterns of segregation in Northern cities. He explained how brokers, by creating severe housing shortages in black neighborhoods and by stimulating anxieties about integration, were able to wrest high profits from frightened white families selling their homes. The economic dynamics of white flight needed to be challenged if residential segregation was to be overcome.

Powerful and detailed, The Negro Ghetto provided an argument in favor of using public housing to create integrated neighborhoods and dismantle the myths of prejudice. Weaver criticized the creation of segregated projects, arguing that they would only exacerbate the problems of the ghetto and that it was "a matter of grave concern to Negroes and liberals when the rise in institutionalized residential segregation was accelerated by housing planned, financed and sometimes owned and managed by the Federal government." The book also indicted the irrationality of racial covenants (which stipulated that homes had to be sold only to white buyers). In 1948, shortly before the publication of The Negro Ghetto, the Supreme Court overturned racial covenants. Although the Court's decision did not cite Weaver's research directly, his work was widely thought to have affected the outcome; perhaps in part because of its influence in the case, The Negro Ghetto garnered glowing reviews. Carey McWilliams described it as the "finest study of its kind that has appeared to date," and the New York Times pronounced the book "a comprehensive, authentic survey of an acute social problem."

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