1938 The United States

The United States

Awards

*John H. Johnson, the founder of Ebony  (1945) and Jet (1951) became the first African American to be named one of the country's "Ten Outstanding Young Men" by the United States Junior Chamber of Commerce.  This was the first of many awards won by Johnson for his success in publishing.

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George Washington Carver

Carver had been frugal in his life, and in his seventies established a legacy by creating a museum on his work and the George Washington Carver Foundation at Tuskegee in 1938 to continue agricultural research. He donated nearly $60,000 in his savings to create the foundation.

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Marcus Garvey

In 1938, Marcus Garvey gave evidence before the West India Royal Commission on conditions in London. Also, in 1938, he set up the School of African Philosophy in Toronto to train UNIA leaders. He also continued to work on the magazine The Black Man.

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*Attracted by the ideas of black separatists such as Marcus Garvey, United States Senator from Mississippi, Theodore Bilbo, proposed an amendment to the federal work-relief bill on June 6, 1938, which would have deported 12 million African Americans to Liberia at federal expense to relieve unemployment. He wrote a book advocating the idea. Garvey praised him in return, saying that Bilbo had "done wonderfully well for the Negro." But Thomas W. Harvey, a senior Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League leader in the US, distanced himself from Bilbo because of his racist speeches.

While imprisoned Garvey had corresponded with segregationist Earnest Sevier Cox who was lobbying for legislation to "repatriate" African Americans to Africa. Garvey's philosophy of Black racial self-reliance, could be combined with Cox's White Nationalism - at least in sharing the common goal of an African Homeland. Cox dedicated his short pamphlet "Let My People Go" to Garvey, and Garvey in return advertised Cox's book White America in UNIA publications.

In 1937, a group of Garvey's rivals called the Peace Movement of Ethiopia openly collaborated with the United States Senator from Mississippi, Theodore Bilbo, and Earnest Sevier Cox in the promotion of a repatriation scheme introduced in the United States Senate as the Greater Liberia Act. In the Senate, Bilbo was a supporter of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.  Bilbo, an outspoken supporter of segregation and white supremacy and, attracted by the ideas of black separatists like Garvey, proposed an amendment to the federal work-relief bill on June 6, 1938, proposing to deport 12 million African Americans to Liberia at federal expense to relieve unemployment. He took the time to write a book entitled Take Your Choice, Separation or Mongrelization, advocating the idea. Garvey praised him in return, saying that Bilbo had "done wonderfully well for the Negro". 

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The Labor Movement

*In Harlem, the Greater New York Coordinating Committee for Employment, chaired by Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., compelled employers to hire staffs that were at least one-third African American and to provide equal advancement (promotion) opportunities for African Americans and European Americans.

*Ferdinand C. Smith (1894-1961), a founder of the National Maritime Union, became its first African American vice-president.

When the vice-president was abolished in 1939, he became the first African American national secretary.  In 1943, he became the first African American member of the National Congress of Industrial Organizations Executive Board.  He was influential in recruiting the mixed crew for Hugh Mulzac, who set sail as the first African American captain of a merchant ship on October 20, 1942.   A native of Jamaica, and an alleged subversive because of his Communist ties, in 1948, Smith was arrested and deported as an undesirable alien.

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The Law

*The United States Supreme Court decided New Negro Alliance v. Sanitary Grocery Co. (March 28)

New Negro Alliance v. Sanitary Grocery Co., 303 U.S. 552 (1938), was a landmark United States Supreme Court decision in the jurisprudence of the United States, safeguarding a right to boycott in the struggle by African Americans against discriminatory hiring practices. The court concluded that according to the United States Congress "peaceful and orderly dissemination of information by those defined as persons interested in a labor dispute concerning 'terms and conditions of employment' in an industry or a plant or a place of business should be lawful; that, short of fraud, violence, or conduct otherwise unlawful, those having a direct or indirect interest in such terms and conditions of employment should be at liberty to advertise and disseminate facts and information with respect to terms and conditions of employment, and peacefully to persuade others to concur in their views respecting an employer's practices."

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*The United States Supreme Court decided the case of Hale v. Kentucky (April 11).

Hale v. Kentucky, 303 U.S. 613 (1938), was a United States Supreme Court case relating to racial discrimination in the selection of juries for criminal trials.  The case overturned the conviction of an African American man accused of murder because the lower court of Kentucky had systematically excluded African Americans from serving on the jury in the case. NAACP counsel, including Charles Hamilton Houston, Leon A. Ransom and Thurgood Marshall, represented Hale.

Joe Hale, an African American, had been convicted in McCracken County, Kentucky. No African Americans were selected as jury members within the previous 50 years although nearly 7,000 were eligible for jury service.

The court unanimously ruled that the plaintiff's civil rights had been violated.

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*In the case of Missouri ex rel Gaines, supported by the NAACP, the United States Supreme Court declared that states must provide equal, even if separate, educational facilities for African Americans within their boundaries (December 12).  The plaintiff, Lloyd Gaines, mysteriously disappeared following the Court's decision.

Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, 305 U.S. 337 (1938), is a United States Supreme Court decision holding that states that provided a school to white students had to provide in-state education to blacks as well. States could satisfy this requirement by allowing blacks and whites to attend the same school or creating a second school for blacks.

The Registrar at the Law School of the University of Missouri, Cy Woodson Canada, refused admission to Lloyd Gaines because Gaines was an African-American.  At the time, there was no law school specifically for African-Americans within the state. Gaines cited that this refusal violated his Fourteenth Amendment right. The state of Missouri had offered to pay for Gaines’ tuition at an adjacent state’s law school, which he turned down.

The key question posed by the case was "In light of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, does Missouri violate this clause when it affords whites the ability to attend law school in state while not affording the same right to blacks and instead forcing them to attend adjacent states for their law education?"

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes held that when the state provides legal training, it must provide it to every qualified person to satisfy equal protection. It cannot send them to other states, nor can it condition that training for one group of people (such as blacks) on levels of demand from that group. Key to the court’s conclusion was that there was no provision for legal education of blacks in Missouri, which is where Missouri law guaranteeing equal protection applies. To the court, sending Gaines to another state would have been irrelevant. Justice James C. McReynolds' dissent emphasized a body of case law with sweeping statements about state control of education before suggesting the possibility that—despite the majority opinion—Missouri could not still deny Gaines admission.

The Gaines decision does not quite strike down separate but equal education as upheld in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Instead, it provides that if there is only a single school, students of all races are eligible for admission, thereby striking down segregation by exclusion where the government provides just one school. Though this case did not go as far as Brown v. Board of Education (1954) would, it was a step in that direction.

This decision is very significant because it marks the beginning of the Supreme Court's reconsideration of the "separate but equal" standard made by the Plessy decision in 1896. This case was brought to suit by the NAACP on behalf of Lloyd Gaines, and aimed to test the constitutionality of segregation. In this case the Supreme Court did not overturn Plessy v. Ferguson or violate the "separate but equal" precedents, but began to concede the difficulty, and near impossibility, of a state maintaining segregated black and white institutions which could never be truly equal. Therefore, it can be said that this case helped forge the legal framework for the United States Supreme Court's landmark 1954 decision, Brown v. Board of Education, which banned segregation in public schools.

Despite the initial victory claimed by the NAACP, after the Supreme Court had ruled in Gaines' favor and ordered the Missouri Supreme Court to reconsider this case, Gaines was nowhere to be found. When the University of Missouri soon after moved to dismiss the case, the NAACP did not oppose the motion.

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Literature

*Richard Wright's novel Uncle Tom's Children was published.

*Two books by Sterling A. Brown were published.  The Negro in American Fiction was a study of African Americans and African American themes in American literature.  Negro Poetry and Drama surveyed the African American contributions in these areas.

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The Movies

*In this year, the Goldberg movie company produced two films for African Americans:  Siren of the Tropics, starring Josephine Baker, and Mystery in Swing, starring Monte Hawley, Marguerite Whittin and Bob Webb.  The latter movie became one of their most successful films commercially.

*The musical comedy film Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm starring Shirley Temple, Randolph Scott and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson was released (March 18).

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Music

*Ella Fitzgerald and Chick Webb topped the American popular music charts with a swinging jazz version of the children's nursery rhyme "A-Tisket, A-Tasket" (August 20).

Ella Fitzgerald was the first African American woman to win a Grammy.  Fitzgerald was born on April 25, 1918, in Newport News, Virginia, and moved to Yonkers, New York.  She began her career at age fifteen at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, and was later hired by Chick Webb's band.  Fitzgerald developed her famous skat singing while on a tour with Dizzy Gillespie.  Known as the "first lady of jazz", she was one of the most celebrated singers of the twentieth century.

*"Sister" Rosetta Tharpe (1921-1973) became the first African American to take gospel music into a secular setting when she sang on a Cab Calloway show in the Cotton Club.  

When Tharpe signed with Decca, she became the first gospel singer to record for a major company.  Born in Cotton Plant, Arkansas, and raised in the Holiness Church, Tharpe began touring as a professional when she was six.  She took the lead in bringing gospel music to the mainstream.  Tharpe was the first to tour extensively in Europe, and in 1943 she was the first to sing gospel at the Apollo Theater in New York City.

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The NAACP

*The NAACP appointed Thurgood Marshall special counsel for its legal cases.

Thurgood Marshall was appointed by the NAACP as special counsel in charge of all its cases.  He remained with the NAACP until 1961 when he became a federal judge in the Circuit Court of Appeals. 

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The New Deal

*African American participation in the administration of the WPA had been slight.  In September 1938, only 91 African Americans were employed at the Washington headquarters.

*The Fair Labor Standard Act, by setting minimum wages, caused increased competition for jobs and thus encouraged discrimination against African Americans.

*In Birmingham, Alabama, African Americans and European Americans were segregated in the state relief offices.

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