An amazing read: The Decline of Public Racism; 1938-1947

Theodore G. Bilbo and the Decline of Public Racism, 1938-1947

“I call on every red-blooded white man to use any means to keep the n*ggers away from the polls. If you don’t understand what that means you are just plain dumb.”

These were the words of United States senator Theodore G. “The Man” Bilbo of Mississippi, as he addressed white supporters during his successful re-election campaign in June 1946. His inflammatory language ignited a firestorm, however, that prevented him from taking his Senate seat in January 1947 and ended the career of one of the nation’s most flamboyant politicians.

“The Man” fell because of the growing intolerance among many whites toward public racism and anti-Semitism. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, white elites outside the South—defined here as leading daily newspapers, weekly magazines, organizations, and political leaders—largely ignored Bilbo’s racist incitements.2 World War II, however, brought about a significant change in elite attitudes. Due to the ideological war against Nazism, America’s emergence as a superpower, and the unifying nature of the conflict, the kind of virulent public racism that was a trademark of Bilbo’s career was no longer tolerated outside of the South. Bilbo’s career, from his return to the governor’s mansion in 1928 through the Senate debate over his seating in 1947, parallels and illustrates the declining tolerance of overt racism and nativism in the United States. Many southern politicians continued to use extreme language similar to Bilbo’s. Major southern figures such as James Eastland, Richard Russell, Strom Thurmond, and George Wallace played the race card and supported Jim Crow with all their energies well into the 1960s...

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Bilbo and the other southern senators were not going to allow the anti-lynching bill to pass without a battle. On January 6, they began one of the longest filibusters in American history. “To defeat this measure, so help me God, I would be willing to speak every day of the year 1938,” declared Bilbo on January 21. He expressed his opposition in racially explicit terms, referring to supporters of the anti-lynching bill as “mulattoes, octoroons, quadroons” and to NAACP head Walter White as an “Ethiopian.” Bilbo added, “When once the flat-nosed Ethiopian, like the camel, gets his proboscis under the tent, he will overthrow the established order of our Saxon civilization.” Finally, in rhetoric similar to that of his 1946 campaign, Bilbo seemed to condone violence:

If you succeed in the passage of this bill, you will open the floodgates of hell in the South. Raping, mobbing, lynching, race riots, and crime will be increased a thousandfold; and upon your garments and the garments of those who are responsible for the passage of the measure will be the blood of the raped and outraged daughters of Dixie, as well as the blood of the perpetrators of these crimes that the red-blooded Anglo-Saxon white Southern men will not tolerate.

Bilbo’s rhetoric was extreme even by the standards of his fellow southerners. Richard Russell of Georgia, who became one of the Senate’s most respected voices on foreign policy, repeatedly suggested that the Communist Party was behind the bill. James Byrnes of South Carolina, later Harry Truman’s secretary of state, characterized the legislation as little more than an attempt by northern Democrats to curry favor with black voters. Bilbo echoed these arguments, but as the previous comment demonstrates, he went much further. No major white publication, however, reported his remarks. The same rhetoric that would bring about his downfall a decade later went largely unnoticed by white Americans in 1938.

In the same speech, Bilbo speculated for the first time about an idea that would become one of the signatures of his career: a program to return blacks to Africa. “It is essential to the perpetuation of our Anglo-Saxon civilization,” he said, “that white supremacy be maintained, and to maintain our civilization there is only one solution, and that is either by segregation within the United States, or by deportation of the entire Negro race to its native heath, Africa.” Despite the fact that Bilbo was calling for the removal of twelve million American citizens, no major news outlet reported Bilbo’s comments. Bilbo reiterated his support for the repatriation proposal on February 2 and February 17. The New York Times reported his proposal without comment in back-page stories. No other major white publication even mentioned it. On May 24, 1938, Bilbo formally proposed legislation to return blacks to Africa...

http://mdah.state.ms.us/pubs/bilbo.pdf