FDR Shuts Down the Black Press

MerryPrankster

What if the Roosevelet Administration had shut down the black press during WWII?

According to a PBS (or was it GPTV?) video my Journalism class has been watching (it's entitled "Soldiers without Swords"), the black press dedicated itself to "double V" (victory over the Axis and victory over racism in the US) during WWII. However, they also publicized racial violence in the military (leading the military to ban it from its bases) and demanded change. J. Edgar Hoover and some others believed that this harmed the war effort (some believed that it might agitate blacks enough that they'd commit acts of sabotage), and Hoover himself tried to pressure Biddle, the Attorney General at the time, to charge several black editors with treason.

The editor of the Chicago Defender at the time used Eleanor Roosevelt to arrange a meeting with Biddle, where a sort of arrangement was worked out. Biddle with not indict anyone, but the black papers would not escalate their campaign.

WI this meeting had not taken place and the editors of several important black papers were charged with treason? I assume that their presses would be seized by the government operating under "state of emergency" laws as well. Would attempts to try them fizzle, as did FDR's indictment of several America Firsters and Bund types as "domestic fascists"? Or would they face jail time or even the death penalty?
 

Farnham

Matt Quinn said:
What if the Roosevelet Administration had shut down the black press during WWII?

According to a PBS (or was it GPTV?) video my Journalism class has been watching (it's entitled "Soldiers without Swords"), the black press dedicated itself to "double V" (victory over the Axis and victory over racism in the US) during WWII. However, they also publicized racial violence in the military (leading the military to ban it from its bases) and demanded change. J. Edgar Hoover and some others believed that this harmed the war effort (some believed that it might agitate blacks enough that they'd commit acts of sabotage), and Hoover himself tried to pressure Biddle, the Attorney General at the time, to charge several black editors with treason.

The editor of the Chicago Defender at the time used Eleanor Roosevelt to arrange a meeting with Biddle, where a sort of arrangement was worked out. Biddle with not indict anyone, but the black papers would not escalate their campaign.

WI this meeting had not taken place and the editors of several important black papers were charged with treason? I assume that their presses would be seized by the government operating under "state of emergency" laws as well. Would attempts to try them fizzle, as did FDR's indictment of several America Firsters and Bund types as "domestic fascists"? Or would they face jail time or even the death penalty?
Click to expand...

I think if those who wanted to prosecute got their way, the black editors would have been jailed but released relatively shortly after the war. It would have created more ill will in the black community certainly, perhaps with the civil rights movement beginning immediately after the war. (Unlike OTL, where it didn't get going until perhaps the mid-'50s)
 

Melvin Loh

Would the shutting down of the black press have caused far more racial unrest among black servicemen from 1942 onwards both in the US and overseas, as they felt that the white establishment were again shafting them and not letting their legitimate grievances be heard ? And how about Eleanor and her pro-civil rights influence ?
 

MerryPrankster

What surprised me in the "Soldiers Without Swords" video is that there were black Americans who made the "why should I fight for the country that doesn't respect my rights?" argument that was later made in Vietnam.

Before, I was under the impression that the vast majority of American blacks (or at least their leaders) at the time believed that their service in WWII would "earn" them their rights. There certainly weren't incidents like the defection of black soldiers to Filipino guerrillas in the Filipino Uprising during the World Wars--the Germans dropped lynching propaganda on black regiments in WWI, with little effect. The person who made the argument was (I think) a black journalist from the period (journalists were very influential in the black community), not some deranged Panther type.
 

MerryPrankster

On second thought, the title of the thread might need work. Shutting down the black press was largely J. Edgar Hoover's idea; FDR went along with it b/c, in the words of one of the people in "Soldiers without Swords," he was "guillible." Remember, this is a man who thought the USSR would be a good ally in the post-war struggle against European colonialism.
 

Prunesquallor

Roosevelt was about as "guillible" as a cobra. I'm always fascinated by the ambivalence of so many views about Roosevelt, how people can believe simultaneously that he was a master of Machiavellian ploys but that he was taken in on all these occasions.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top
Top