African americans in the american west

About half of the black population left the Portland-Vancouver area after the war, and those that remained faced widespread discrimination by employers and unions. The United States Employment Service (USES) did not force employers to hire black workers, because employers threatened to find workers elsewhere. USES officials concluded that it was "unwise and the wrong approach to attempt to force employers to hired colored workers against their will" after thirty firms stopped using USES during the war when they were pressured to hire black workers. Members of the Portland chapter of the Urban League, which had been established during the war, thought that USES workers themselves lacked "racial tolerance" and were not doing enough to change the policies of local industries. Portland, according to Urban League members, was the most bigoted city on the West Coast.

Black women, of course, faced double discrimination. Only two Portland area manufacturing establishments registered with the USES would employ black women: a garment factory and a bag factory that operated two segregated buildings, one for white workers and the other for black workers. The Urban League tried to improve employment prospects for black workers by pressuring unions and employers to end discriminatory practices and by reluctantly acting as an employment agency for black workers. Black women seeking the help of the USES or the Urban League were often urged to take work in domestic service, which "most of them are reluctant to do...because they object to the wage scales and the working conditions." According to the USES, many of the black women looking for work were married and unable to live at their place of employment, a requirement for many domestic jobs.

Margaret Kay Anderson, field secretary for the Women's Bureau reported that "many of the colored women who worked during the war are out of the labor market because they had no intention of working when the war was over." She did not explain how the USES knew that these women had been planning to retire from the work force and were not discouraged by the limited opportunities for black women workers...

Despite efforts to find alternatives, two of the three black women worked as domestics in the postwar period. Audrey Moore, who was the sole support of her child, reported having difficulty finding jobs--a difficulty compounded by being female and black, and by not having a high-school education. Housecleaning, poultry work, and seasonal cannery work were all she could find. Marie Merchant cleaned Pullman cars for a while and then did domestic work for private families. Beatrice Marshall...who had been trained as a machinist but was a victim of racial discrimination in the shipyards, worked at the bag factory until it closed in 1946, when she got a job as a page in the public library...
Source: Amy Kesselman, Fleeting Opportunities; Women Shipyard Workers in Portland and Vancouver During World War II and Reconversion, (Albany, NY 1990), pp. 114-115, 118.

LAS VEGAS: THE "MISSISSIPPI OF THE WEST"
Las Vegas, the 20th Century gambling Mecca of the nation, was a quintessential boom town. Founded in 1904, by 1960, its population reached 64,405. If Las Vegas appeared different to Americans because it was the "city that never sleeps," it was all too familiar to black Americans as a locality that practiced racial discrimination. Indeed race relations by the time of a World War II influx of African Americans had deteriorated to a point where local residents, many of whom were from the South, dubbed the city, the "Mississippi of the West." In the account below historian John Findlay describes both the rise of racial segregation and discrimination, and its eventual decline in the nation's leading resort city.
Since World War II, southern Nevada had a significant black population. In 1960 the minority accounted for 15% of the people inside the Las Vegas city limits. Virtually all blacks lived in an impoverished section of town known as Westside. For them, there was little chance to escape to outlying subdivisions. During the 1940s and 1950s the segregation of blacks and their relatively low standard of living served as a counterpoint to the glitter and prosperity of the gambling capital.

Contemporary observers tended to explain local racism as an import from the Deep South. Relations between blacks and whites in southern Nevada, however, actually followed the same cycle of accommodation and conflict that characterized earlier frontiers in the United States. Minorities had traditionally encountered less hostility on relatively new and open frontiers, but as each new West became more crowded, tensions between ethnic and racial groups increased. Whites were more likely to invoke prejudices as frontier societies grew more complex and competitive.... All across the American West, blacks, Indians, Latinos, Asians, and other minority peoples had been relegated consistently to less rewarding jobs and less desirable lands once whites began to crowd into frontier regions. Blacks suffered something of the same fate in Las Vegas during the mid-twentieth century.

Blacks coexisted relatively easily with whites in southern Nevada from the founding of the railroad town in 1905 until whites began to throng to the boom town of the 1940s. A quite small percentage of the population before World War II, blacks resided not in a sharply defined district of their own but rather in close proximity to whites in downtown Las Vegas during the 1920s and 1930s. The relative harmony broke down briefly in the early 1930s when blacks began to compete for jobs on Boulder Dam, but after completion of the project relations returned to normal until the tremendous influx of both whites and blacks during the Second World War. Blacks generally lost the ensuing competition for the best jobs and more comfortable housing. Whites, faced with more blacks than ever before, increasingly practiced policies of discrimination and segregation that cemented the plainly subordinate status of the minority. When blacks and whites kept arriving in southern Nevada after the war, amid fears of economic slump and housing shortages, whites continued to restrict their minority to the less rewarding jobs and the most run-down residential district. By 1950 Las Vegas had become a tightly segregated city.... Blacks remained concentrated in an area that was so impoverished that in 1965 it became one of the very first targets of VISTA, the Great Society's domestic Peace Corps program.

At the same time that they confined the minority to Westside residences, whites closed off the resort city to blacks by erecting rigid racial barriers that earned the city comparison to the Deep South. Downtown and Strip establishments generally did not admit black patrons until the late 1950s and early 1960s, so black Las Vegans had to gamble at their own clubs in Westside. Black entertainers like Nat King Cole and Sammy Davis, Jr., when they were permitted to stay in Strip hotels at which they were performing, were sometimes discouraged from mingling with whites or having black friends accompany them on the grounds. Segregation was extended to other public places as well, including theaters, restaurants, swimming pools, and schools.

The prospects for black Las Vegans began to brighten during the late 1950s and early 1960s at the same time that conditions improved around the country. The quality of life in Westside started to change in 1955 as banks began to lend money to black homeowners and government agencies invested additional funds for rebuilding the run-down district. The coincidental opening of the first interracial hotel, the short-lived Moulin Rouge, indicated a growing interest in black tourists as well. Even greater strides were made, however, once Las Vegans realized that their racial policies tarnished the image of the city in the eyes of a county that was increasingly responsive to demands for civil rights. Exclusionary policies no longer seemed appropriate for a city hoping to be regarded as cosmopolitan. Las Vegans, who had previously been largely unmoved by protests organized by civil rights activists, were much more sensitive to the possible repercussions of a demonstration scheduled for March 1960, by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Major hotels and casinos averted the protest, and the certain bad publicity, by agreeing to desegregate facilities quickly. Conditions for blacks did not improve overnight in Las Vegas, as evidenced by riots that rocked Westside in 1969, but positive changes had been started. Racial barriers would not be permitted to stand in the way of the continuing boom in southern Nevada.

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The chamber had plush carpet and carved, heavily padded pews for spectators. The Court’s sergeant-at-arms sat in a high chair facing the audience. Behind him was the judge’s bar, beautifully carved and long enough to accommodate nine large, overstuffed leather chairs, one for each of the nine justices. Behind the chairs was a heavy velvet curtain. The bailiff announced the imminent appearance of the justices, and everyone stood. The judges then stepped through the nine slits in the curtain.

I was thrilled. I recognized a few of them from photos that I had seen. The real thrill came from my sense that this August body was assembled that morning because of me--to recognize and affirm my rights of citizenship...

As had been true at the state supreme court, the judges were free to interrupt counsel for either side at any point. This time, however, it was the state’s counsel that was being interrupted. Marshall carefully presented his argument with scarcely an interruption. I believed that only one decision was plausible: my immediate admission to the University of Oklahoma. That seemed the only way Oklahoma could comply with the United States Constitution.

Attorneys Hansen and Merrill had a much harder and slower go of it. The state attorneys reiterated their position concerning out-of-state tuition and my failure to give the board of regents notice of my desire to study law within the state. They also spoke of the Oklahoma law prohibiting whites and blacks from attending classes together. Various justices cut in on the arguments with rather pointed questions that seemed to indicate they were leaning in my direction. At least as important as the questions’ wording was their tone, a tone that ran all the way from incredulity to frustration with Oklahoma’s position.

Justice William O. Douglas cut in on Merrill’s and Hansen’s point about the lack of prior notification to observe that I had attempted to enroll on January 14, 1946, and filed suit almost two years ago. Douglas opined that would appear to be clear notice. He said that at the rate the state was moving I would be an old lady before I would be able to practice law. Justice Robert Jackson wanted to know why, after two years, Oklahoma had made no effort to do anything about the problem. Justice Hugo Black also specifically wanted to know whether the regents had taken any action to satisfy my effort. Hansen had no direct response, saying only that the regents had no money to set up any other law school, adding that they believed I would refuse to accept a segregated law school.

Justice Felix Frankfurter systematically explored various alternatives and asked whether the state would admit me for the term beginning in a few days if the Court mandated it to do so. Hansen answered yes, if necessary, although he added that doing so would violate the laws of Oklahoma. Frankfurter then asked if a separate course of study could be arranged within the existing law school. Hansen answered that it could. Could I be admitted temporarily pending the establishment of a separate law school? Hansen said that the Oklahoma Board of Regents for Higher Education had authority to do any or all of those things.

Justice Robert Jackson interrupted to ask if counsel really believed that a school with a single student could afford an acceptable legal education. Merrill answered yes. Justice Jackson disagreed. He said such foolishness was neither reasonable nor equitable.

Dean Merrill noted that Oklahoma was one of many states with a public policy of segregation. He reminded the Court that for decades rulings had upheld that arrangement. Now, he told the Court, plaintiff is unwilling to recognize that settled policy. He was right on that.

Justice Jackson asked why I should be required to abide by a given policy more than any other person. Should I, he asked, be required to waive my constitutional rights for the benefit of the state’s public policy?

They were good questions--great questions, it seemed to me. They were exactly the questions that every other court and public official had ignored. This time, this Court asked them.

Only four days after the hearing, the Court issued a terse one-page, unsigned unanimous order. With OU’s second semester’s enrollment to begin in exactly one week, the judgment was that I was “entitled to secure legal education afforded by a state institution.” The Court ordered that Oklahoma “provide it for her in conformity with the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and provide it as soon as it does for applicants of any other group.”...

It was under such surreal and humiliating conditions that George W. McLaurin became the First African American to attend the University of Oklahoma. By the end of the year about twenty others had also enrolled. All of them were completely segregated within the university. They had designated sitting areas in the classrooms and the library. They entered the cafeteria by a side door and sat at folding tables set up in a corner away from other diners, surrounded by a heavy iron chain, and manned by an armed guard.

McLaurin, a senior citizen when he entered, left the university at the end of his second semester because of unsatisfactory grades. His age and the humiliation he suffered probably affected his performance...
Source: Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher, A Matter of Black and White; The Autobiography of Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher, (Norman, 1996), pp. 144-145.