Background
The historical background
The Rainbow Beach story is set against a background of historical events that brought about fundamental change in civil liberties in America in the 1950s and 1960s. Jack, a reporter for the Chicago Defender, is sent from the familiarity of his urban surroundings to cover the Clarkesdale elections. From a relatively sophisticated and tolerant Chicago society, Jack’s visit to Clarkesdale, Mississippi, is an eye-opener, and his values and humanity are tested to the full.
Prejudice, violence and hardship were the norm in Clarkesdale, as they were in most of the southern states. Slavery for farm workers, long since abolished, had been replaced by sharecropping, and for millions of African Americans this too was fast becoming an impossible existence. In the 1950s, a mass migration of millions of black workers left for Chicago — the Chicago Defender, flying the flag for civil liberties, was in part responsible for this exodus.
By the 1960s, Chicago — with inadequate housing, transport and employment to cope with its sudden population increase — had become a tinderbox. White people, resentful of this ‘invasion’, turned their anger from politicians to their new neighbours, and violence escalated out of control. A struggle to gain a voice and a civilised existence began in earnest for the new black residents of the city. Leading the crusade towards what eventually became the Civil Rights Movement were Dr Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.
The Chicago Defender
The Defender was founded on 5 May 1905 by Robert S. Abbott, and by the beginning of the Great War in 1914 was the United States’ largest and most influential black weekly newspaper. Distributed often illegally by Pullman porters across the country, the Defender campaigned for black people to migrate from the South to the North, and was highly successful — tripling the black population in Chicago and other major cities in the North and Northwest.
Abbott’s nephew, John H. Sengstacke, took over the paper in 1948. During Sengstacke’s early tenure, he influenced President Harry S. Truman to integrate the armed services, and in 1948 Truman issued an order to end segregation in the military. Sengstacke also played a key role in the election of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, and is credited with integrating many of Chicago’s major city government departments, including the police and fire departments and the Board of Education. He is also responsible for the appointment of James B. Parsons to the federal bench — the first Black federal judge appointed since Reconstruction. For more than two decades until his death, Sengstacke was named one of the nation’s most influential Black leaders by Black Enterprise magazine.
The Great Migration
Between 1940 and 1970, over five million African Americans moved north across the Mason–Dixon line, leaving behind their southern homes for the promise of increased prosperity. Despite its major social and political significance, this mass migration went largely undocumented for years, and it is only relatively recently that scholars have begun to examine the phenomenon closely.
Below is an example of the impact migration had on Northern cities during the first half of the twentieth century — when the story of Rainbow Beach begins — showing the increase in Black residents in four major cities.
| City | 1900 | 1910 | 1940 |
|---|---|---|---|
| New York | 60,666 | 91,709 | 458,444 |
| Washington | 86,702 | 94,446 | 187,266 |
| Chicago | 30,150 | 44,103 | 277,731 |
| Detroit | 4,111 | 5,741 | 149,119 |
By 1950, only 40% of the Black population lived on farms, and the number of acres operated had declined by 37%, to 25.7 million acres. Moreover, in 1950 the United States Census Bureau reported that for the “non-white” population — 95% of which was Black — only 18.4% were employed as farm workers, with 38% as “blue collar workers” (mainly industrial) and 34% as “service workers”. This transformation of the social form of the Black community — from a predominantly agricultural labouring class in the rural South to an integral sector of the industrial proletariat concentrated in the urban North — is one of the most significant social transformations in the history of the United States.
The Civil Rights Movement
The American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s refers to the reform movements in the United States aimed at abolishing racial discrimination against African Americans. Significant dates during this period include:
- 17 May 1954The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that racial segregation in schools should no longer be allowed.
- 1 Dec 1955On a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks, a 43-year-old Black seamstress, refused to give up her seat to a white passenger. Her arrest triggered a year-long boycott of the bus service by Montgomery’s Black residents, ending in the desegregation of the buses.
- 21 Feb 1961Malcolm X, a Black nationalist leader, is shot and killed.
- May 1963Civil rights protesters in Birmingham, Alabama, had fire hoses and dogs set on them. The action was broadcast on international news and generated widespread sympathy for the movement.
- 28 Aug 1963Almost 200,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington to hear Dr Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
- 11 Aug 1965Race riots erupt in Los Angeles.
- 4 Apr 1968Dr Martin Luther King is shot and killed.