Eighty-three years ago, my father wrote a column titled “Democracy Losing!” asserting that while Americans were debating whether the world was winning or losing the war against the Nazis, “a casual survey of happenings in the U.S. reveals that democracy is taking a beating on this front.”
In November of 1942, Ebenezer lamented that the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), were still balking at the terms “set forth by, Miss Marian Anderson, and her management that her appearance in a benefit concert sponsored by the DAR be precedent for use of Constitution Hall by persons of color.”
My father loved Marian Anderson, so it is no surprise that three years after her historic 1939 Easter concert at the Lincoln Memorial — an alternative venue arranged with the help of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt after the DAR refused to abandon its whites-only policy — Ebenezer was still outraged.
But that was not the only bee in his bonnet.
“Quite a few incidents of far-reaching importance have taken place since the DAR refused the world’s greatest singer the use of the Hall because of unwillingness to break their long-established custom of racial discrimination.”
My father pointed to three lynchings in Mississippi — two of the victims were children — and that an ‘”investigation’ whitewashed the whole affair.”
He also mentioned that Princeton University had informed the NAACP that it would continue ”’for the present at least,’ its policy of discrimination.”
There also was the pledge by Southerners in Congress to filibuster an anti poll-tax bill. “The poll tax is but a symbol of oppression of the proletariat by the plutocrats.”
“Then we come to New York,” he added. “Here five child welfare agencies prefer to lose the subsidy of City funds than to remove racial barriers. Even in this age of much shedding of blood in attempt to destroy Hitler’s theory of a master race, these agencies find it ‘unwise’ to rear Negro and white children in the same institution.”
Several months after this column, in 1943, the DAR agreed to allow Marian Anderson to perform for a racially integrated audience in their venue.
I have not been able to pinpoint my father’s NAACP/Princeton University reference,. However, according to April Armstrong, author of “Erased Pasts and Altered Legacies: Princeton’s First African American Students,” the first African American to receive an A.B. from Princeton University was John Leroy Howard in 1947. (At least two other Black men had received graduate degrees in 1891 and 1893. Bruce Wright, a future member of the New York Supreme Court, was accepted into Princeton as an undergraduate in the mid-1930s, but his admission was revoked when he showed up on campus and administrators realized he was Black.)
While there has been significant progress since my father wrote this column 83 years ago, “Democracy Losing” is certainly a concept that is currently trending. With President Donald Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts; Republican efforts to put the final nail in the coffin of the Voting Rights Act; the assault on universities, particularly their commitment to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion; and the violent attacks on people perceived to be undocumented immigrants by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents based on their race, has eery echoes of the past.
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