Racism - A Short History - George M Fredrickson.pdf - WNLibrary

THREE Climax and Retreat
Prominent among the liberal interracialists of the interwar
years were Jewish immigrants like Boas who could
identify with the victims of racism because of their own
experiences with European antisemitism. Changing white
attitudes reflected to some extent a growth in black political
power. The shift of African American population from the
South to the North made blacks once again voters. By the
1930s, they were numerous enough to decide close elections
in some major cities and pivotal industrial states, and
the Democrats welcomed them into their urban/ethnic coalitions.
In the South, however, conditions remained virtually
unchanged in the postwar years. The new political
clout of northern blacks and the enhanced power of the
federal government as a result of the New Deal had yet to
be translated into an assault on the Jim Crow system, which
was still sustained by the constitutional doctrine of states’
rights and the southern Democratic Party’s wholehearted
commitment to white supremacy.
In South Africa a substantial migration of blacks from
the countryside to the cities during and after the Great War
was also accompanied by an increase in the extent and
intensity of African protest politics. But rather than an
enhancement of black power and a mellowing of white attitudes,
something like the reverse occurred. “Influx controls”
on migrants, along with confinement to segregated
townships or compounds of those who received permission
to remain in urban-industrial areas, set the basic pattern
for the system of labor coercion that would be fully and
ruthlessly implemented during the apartheid era. The interwar
period was one of increasing repression and denial
of rights, culminating in 1936 when all Africans were re-
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