Return to "Normalcy": Organized Racial Violence in the Post-World War II South (From Violence in America, Volume 2: Protest, Rebellion, Reform, P 231-254, 1989, Ted Robert Gurr, ed. -- See NCJ-119368)

• NCJ Number: 119376
• Author(s): G W O'Brien
• Date Published: 1989
• Length: 24 pages
• Sale Source: Sage Publications, Inc
• Publication Type: Historical Overview
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America
• Note: *This document is currently unavailable from NCJRS.

Annotation

This analysis of organized racial violence in the Post-World War II era suggests the pendulum rested between polar opposites and that the war produced both very positive and very negative effects.

Abstract

During the course of World War II, black and white southerners developed different expectations about the nature of postwar society. Most blacks hoped for improved economic circumstances, voting rights, and an end to the discrimination and mistreatment of segregation. Many whites longed for a return to "normal" race relations in which they held political power, determined working conditions and wages, and generally "kept blacks in their place." As a number of blacks improved their economic situations during the war, they were in a stronger postwar position to fight white assaults. Civic and improvement associations flourished in the forties, and the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) expanded dramatically. The affluent and assertive blacks, however, were the most likely targets of the accelerated terror that gripped the postwar South, and middle-class blacks in particular had to be cautious. Some black leaders, worried about the hostility that the NAACP provoked in the white South, discouraged membership. Segregation repressions eroded in the forties but did not reach fruition until the late sixties. 52 notes.