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Article Excerpt
Lyndon B. Johnson's presidency is one marked by no shortage of controversial topics, but his civil rights policies are not usually among them. Even most of his critics applaud his leadership in this area, particularly with regard to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. (1) Similar consensus, however, does not exist for the question of the origins of his commitment to this cause. Many historical interpretations find LBJ to have been largely indifferent to the plight of African Americans until the latter part of his political career. "In climbing up the political ladder," wrote Stephen Lawson, "Johnson grew from a Dixie obstructionist to a civil rights advocate" (Lawson 1982, 159). Contemporaries agreed. Civil rights reform, explained journalist Hugh Sidey, "began as a power play and to change his own image, and to move out and show that he was the leader and he could do this. Then I think it became a real deeply held conviction as he saw what it was all about." (2) Johnson, in other words, only became a true believer in the cause of African Americans once he entered the White House. On the surface, such an account seems logical. LBJ was a Southerner with a reputation as a master political operator, a background that exposed him to very few African Americans, and a career as a Texas congressman that never saw him publicly leading the charge for civil rights. Yet a closer look at his early political career, particularly his stint as state director for the National Youth Administration (NYA) in Texas, suggests a deeper commitment to civil rights than this simple narrative of personal and political evolution would indicate.
There is surprisingly little historiography about Johnson's tenure with the NYA. There is only one published monograph that specifically addresses this topic, Carol Weisenberger's Dollars and Dreams (1994), which devotes just one section of one chapter to LBJ's policies toward African Americans. Most general biographies pay Johnson's NYA years little attention. (3) Even narrowly focused studies of his early civil rights positions concentrate on his congressional record. (4) The literature that does exist has two major shortcomings. First, much of it assumes that LBJ had no serious concern with civil rights at this early date beyond its potential impact on his political career. Weisenberger offers the most overt statement of this position, concluding that racially equitable policies in the Texas NYA stemmed not from Johnson but from his liberal superiors in Washington. In her view, LBJ's main concern was balancing his desire to cultivate his more liberal superiors with maintaining his popular standing in Texas. "His political ambitions," Weisenberger concluded, "would be a factor in how Texas carried out Washington's directives for benefiting black youths" (1994, 134). Anthony Badger's study of the New Deal also found the source of liberal NYA policies to be Washington, explaining that national officials "politely but firmly prodded reluctant state administrators, like Lyndon Johnson of Texas, to increase the number of blacks enrolled in the [NYA] programme" (1989, 208). Robert Caro attributed LBJ's interest in this position to a desire to make progress toward his "far-off goal" of a seat in Congress (1982, 363-64), and Julie Pycior's study of his policies toward Mexican Americans noted that he "considered the NYA not an engine of social reform but rather a jobs program to help the needy and a vehicle to further his career" (1997, 34). Yet Johnson's racial policies were actually a significant challenge to state mores at a time when few African Americans voted; hence, this stance seems just as likely to have damaged his political career than to have advanced it. LBJ, of course, recognized that pleasing his superiors in Washington might help his political career in the future, at least if he could escape a backlash from white Southerners. Still, his commitment to racial justice for its own sake should not be dismissed. In fact, as the evidence will show, LBJ was a committed liberal on civil rights three decades before he became president.
There are a few works, most notably Robert Dallek's Lone Star Rising and Christie Bourgeois's "Stepping over Lines: Lyndon Johnson, Black Texans, and the National Youth Administration," that have argued otherwise, finding a laudable record on civil rights in Johnson's NYA tenure, one rooted in a genuine commitment to equality. (5) Yet these works are hindered by a second shortcoming: a failure to compare LBJ's NYA policies with those of other Southern states at the time. This omission means that these accounts fail to provide the contextualization necessary for a full understanding of this critical period in Johnson's development. Bourgeois notes, for example, that African Americans made up 14.7% of the Texas population in the 1930 census but received only 9.8% of the state NYA school aid funding in 1936; this low percentage seems less damning when one compares it with Arkansas, where the African American community made up 25.8% of the population but obtained only 12.8% of the money from the same source (Bourgeois 1987, 165; Daniel and Miller 1938, 362). This is not to suggest that the Texas NYA fared better than all of its Southern counterparts. Alabama's African American community represented 35.7% of the state population, according to the same census, but it received 35.8% of the school aid program jobs in the middle part of the decade (Daniel and Miller 1938, 362). Other states also exceeded the Texas standard. Nevertheless, without such a base of comparison, these studies have offered an incomplete look at the initial civil rights policies of the future president. By examining the NYA records of the Southern states in the mid- to late 1930s, this article aspires to reject the more politically driven portrayals of Weisenberger and Caro and to place the more positive ones in a broader analytical context and, in doing so, to offer a fuller understanding of the subsequent civil rights policies of President Lyndon Johnson.
African Americans and the NYA
American youths, like so many others, suffered badly during the Great Depression. In 1934, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins estimated that 3.3 million people between the ages of 18 and 30 had neither work nor school in their lives (Lash 1971). (6) President Franklin D. Roosevelt was reluctant to create a youth program, fearful that such an action might be seen as an attempt to militarize America's young in ways similar to those followed by fascist leaders in Europe and that it might encourage other societal groups to demand agencies as well. And other programs, particularly the Civilian Conservation Corps, were charged with assisting this age group. New Deal liberals such as Harry Hopkins, Aubrey Williams, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, however, consistently pushed for a more comprehensive program, and on June 26, 1935, FDR finally complied, signing Executive Order no. 7086, which created the NYA. "I have determined that we shall do something for the nation's unemployed youth because we can ill afford to lose the skill and energy of these young men and women," the president declared. "They must have their chance in school, their turn as apprentices and their opportunity for jobs--a chance to work and earn for themselves" (Texas Outlook, October 1935, 43).
The NYA received $50 million, a national advisory committee, and the leadership of Aubrey Williams, a liberal from a poor Alabama family who was committed to genuine and far-reaching reform. Under Williams, the agency's focus quickly evolved from offering short-term relief to providing training and education that would be more beneficial to America's youths over the long term. Four overarching objectives emerged: providing funds for the creation of part-time employment opportunities that would allow students to remain in school; providing funds for the creation of part-time employment opportunities for poor youths not in school; encouraging job-training, vocational counseling, and placement service programs; and developing recreational and leisure time activities. Within a year, the NYA had reached almost 600,000 Americans between the ages of 16 and 25, and by 1939, it had spent over $184 million providing assistance to more than 5 million people (Rauch 1975, 169; Self 1974, 13-15).
One of the central issues surrounding the implementation of this and other New Deal programs was whether their opportunities would be extended to African Americans, who were among those most in need. (7) In 1932, African American unemployment approached 50%, and many of those who maintained their jobs saw serious declines in hours and wages. African American youths, who made up 12.8% of the national youth population, represented 15.3 % of the youth relief recipients by the middle of the decade, although a closer look at this statistic reveals that even this number dramatically understates the problem. In urban areas, 29% of African Americans, compared with 14% of whites, were on relief. The only reason that the national average for African Americans was so much lower than the urban average is that, in rural areas, where the percentage of white youths on relief remained at roughly 14%, the percentage of African Americans dropped to 8%, a disparity that reflected not greater economic opportunities in rural areas but the fact that Southern welfare officials so often discriminated against them in dispensing aid. (8) Nor did they have equal educational opportunities. In 1930, average expenditure per pupil in the South was $44.31 for whites, but only $12.57 for African Americans. (9) It is no surprise, then, that in 1930, more than 800,000 African Americans in the South between the ages of 7 and 20 were not enrolled in school, and more than 1.5 million were illiterate. (10)
Despite these problems, the New Deal was no champion of racial equality, especially in its earliest years. Roosevelt was concerned that specific measures to aid African Americans would endanger his larger reform program, and he thus succumbed to political realities. "I've got to get legislation passed by Congress to save America," he told the national secretary of the NAACP. "If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now, they [Southern politicians] will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I just can't take that risk" (Lash 1971, 673). However, later New Deal programs were more color-blind, and none of them reached out to African Americans more than the NYA.
The NYA's commitment to civil rights started at the top. Eleanor Roosevelt had championed African American rights from almost the moment of her husband's election, and the NYA was one of the programs about which she felt most strongly. Aubrey Williams, whose social worker background offered him personal exposure to Southern racism and its impact on relief agencies, was equally dedicated. In 1934, Williams, then a leading official at the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, ordered state officials to make sure that "educational relief to Negroes be at least at the level of their percentage of the population in each state" (Lash 1971, 670). Now, he applied the same commitment to the NYA. He consulted with numerous African American leaders in designing the program, and the NYA's National Advisory Committee had two African American representatives on it from the beginning." State directors were also routinely asked to provide specific information regarding the civil rights progress their programs were making. In December 1935, Williams appointed Juanita Saddler, the former dean of women at Fisk University, to be his administrative assistant for Negro activities. In mid-1936, her duties were transferred to the NYA's newly created Division of Negro Affairs, which was directed by Mary McLeod Bethune until 1943. Bethune's duties were clearly defined: "to promote the full integration and participation of negroes in the program of the National Youth Administration." (12)
It is simplistic, though, to attribute Washington's interest in fostering a racially balanced program simply to the idealism of Williams and Eleanor Roosevelt. Political factors obviously existed as well, although the small percentage of African Americans voting in the South and FDR's sizeable electoral majority likely minimized this factor. More important--although often overlooked--was the impact of European developments. The rise of fascism encouraged the American government to act to reinforce the loyalty of those citizens deemed most susceptible to anti-American propaganda, both to avoid a similar rise in the United States and to better prepare the nation for a potential conflict. Thus. in March 1937, the Texas Outlook praised the NYA, noting that, when it was created, approximately 5 million Americans between the age of 16 and 25 were without work. "Five million young men and women--many of them here in Texas--idle, energetic, filled with the urge of life and living are going to do something. If there is not work or school for them, they will do something else. Vagrancy, pauperism, crime, revolt--these are the inevitable answers to such a condition" (Texas Outlook, March 1937, 16). Because African Americans were clearly at the top of the list of those who might be susceptible to such sentiments, the government sought to reinforce their loyalty to the system. The NYA offered a useful vehicle for doing so. A letter from Bethune to FDR in the late 1930s offered a number of recommendations for policy toward African Americans, noting that it was necessary to act "to help check an increasing array of false propaganda which is emanating from certain sources." (13) R. O'Hara Lanier, the assistant director of the NYA's Division of Negro Affairs, implored a conference of guidance counselors to redouble their efforts to obtain jobs for African Americans, reminding them, "You, as guidance and social workers, on the frontiers of occupational and social adjustment, and I, as a negro on the periphery of American culture and economics, face communism, fascism, and the perils of making democracy work... We cannot have a free society without having freedom for all people." (14) And an Aubrey Williams speech to an NAACP meeting in 1940 was particularly blunt:
In these days of "fifth columnists," espionage agents, and governments corroded by the "nibbling" of unprincipled traitors, this nation of ours may be justly proud of the knowledge that there are 13,000,000 citizens who have proved, through years of turmoil and strife, their loyalty to their country.... The nation's defense is not alone a matter of planes and tanks and machine guns, but the morale and spirit of its people. The bulwark of that morale and spirit is a deep belief in the things they would defend, therefore, the driving power of our national defense will correspond to the extent to which all the people share in the benefits of the democracy and believe in its ideals and principles ... To the extent to which all groups share in decent working conditions for labor, improved farm economy, low rent housing and health services, adequate education and work opportunity for youth, protection of life, liberty, and property--to that extent will they be inclined to defend their system from attack both from within and from without.... The challenge from the dictators must shake us loose from idle talk of freedom into action and deeds to extend that liberty to all Americans. (15)
Nor did African American leaders fail to recognize the potential political advantages that could come from the growing threat overseas. When Senate conservatives filibustered an anti-lynching bill, Arthur Spingarn, the president of the NAACP, responded, "If the elemental rights of life, liberty, and the pursuits of happiness are withheld from ten percent of our population and if our orderly judicial processes continue to be flouted by lynching mobs it will soon become obvious to a world hostile to democracy that democracy is not functioning in its strongest and greatest exemplar and the cause of freedom may be lost forever." (16) Regardless of the motives in Washington, however, much of the specific details regarding the program's implementation would be left to the state branches. The national office...
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