Chapter 19: American Dilemmas

The implications of _____ led to two different conclusions about race, one toward assimilation and the other toward distinctiveness.

cultural explanations

The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) boldly took on as one of its early projects the effort to _____.

debunk the concept of race

The strike by the black workers of the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company proved so successful that _____.

eight thousand black workers joined the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America

The higher education committee's report, published in 1947, called for _____.

eliminating inequalities in educational opportunities

In the context of the southern white opposition to the Brown decision, early in 1956, the governors of Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi called on the southern states to declare that the _____

federal government had no power to prohibit segregation

Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959), which won the New York Critics Circle Award, was a moving story about the _____.

housing problems of an African American family

In the novel If He Hollers, Let Him Go, Chester Himes vividly demonstrated the _____. Multiple choice question.

impact of the war on black migrants to industrial communities

_____ led the Union of Automotive Workers to adopt aggressive efforts to unionize black workers.

A massive strike at Ford in April 1941

Which of the following is true regarding the black internationalism that was active in the 1940s through 1960s?

African American leaders increasingly witnessed a change in their self-image as defenders of the black world.

Black intellectuals such as E. Franklin Frazier and civil rights leaders who shared his perspective saw the focus on an _____ as a distraction from the struggle for inclusion in American social, political, and economic life at a time when racial barriers had begun to fall in electoral politics, the New Deal, organized labor, the American Left, the armed forces, and even the federal judiciary

African past and its cultural legacy

Melville Herskovits's groundbreaking book The Myth of the Negro Past (1941), also funded by the Carnegie Corporation, posited the presence of _____ in the New World.

African survivals

_____ was the author of the novel Jubilee, winner of a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship, which was published in 1966.

Alice Walker

The contradiction of the "Negro Problem" was developed at length in Gunnar Myrdal's 1,400-page opus _____ (1944).

An American Dilemma

In 1948 the NAACP published the _____ as a ninety-four-page booklet that offended the Truman administration and other government leaders and embarrassed them by its unflattering statements.

Appeal

In July 1948, eleven national leaders of the Communist Party, including New York City Councilman _____, were arrested under the Smith Act.

Ben Davis

The first person to make public the idea of bringing a black player into the major leagues in baseball was the black Harvard Law School graduate _____.

Benjamin J. Davis

The individual most responsible for developing the strategy for an all-out legal attack for black civil rights in the 1930s and 1940s was _____.

Charles Hamilton Houston

Within the U.S. black community, the _____ was the organization that kept the American public apprised of anticolonial activities in Africa.

Council on African Affairs

Identify the ways in which southern leaders fought school desegregation after the Brown decision. (Check all that apply.)

Criminalizing anyone who attended or taught mixed classes Encouraging voluntary segregation

Identify the plays that dealt with two of America's most pressing social problems in the 1940s and 1950s: the return of African American soldiers to southern communities and the housing of blacks in northern cities. (Check all that apply.)

Deep Are the Roots On Whitman Avenue

Identify a true statement about the document called the Appeal published by the NAACP in 1948.

Eleanor Roosevelt, a UN delegate, declined Du Bois's request that she bring the document before the UN General Assembly.

Identify a true statement about the document called the Appeal published by the NAACP in 1948. Multiple choice question.

Eleanor Roosevelt, a UN delegate, declined Du Bois's request that she bring the document before the UN General Assembly.

For generations of black Americans, _____ held biblical and black nationalist meanings.

Ethiopia

True or false: In each of the cases that constituted the Brown case, only white lawyers worked closely with people from the New York national office.

False

True or false: In the 1940s and 1950s African American literary artists became less varied in their subject matter.

False

Amid the national anticommunist uproar of the late 1940s and early 1950s, _____ was ousted from the National Maritime Union and consequently from his high-ranking office within the national Congress of Industrial Organizations leadership.

Ferdinand Smith

President Truman publicly committed himself to integrating the armed services and in 1948 appointed a committee to study the problem. The committee published a report, _____, that outlined how integration was to be achieved.

Freedom to Serve

When the votes were counted on Election Day 1948, _____ was the surprise winner, confounding pollsters and pundits.

Harry S. Truman

Identify a true statement about Melville Herskovits's study on African Americans in the New World.

He argued for a base line of West African culture, with black religious life serving as a prime exemplar of African survivals.

Which of the following is true of Carter G. Woodson in the context of his views on the education of blacks?

He criticized highly educated blacks for what he believed to be training that was devoid of racial pride.

Which of the following are true about Charles Hamilton Houston? (Check all that apply.)

He is credited with developing the long-range legal strategy that eventually overturned the "separate but equal" doctrine. He told his students and colleagues that the black lawyer had a duty to be an advocate and instrument for racial equality.

Which of the following is true of Carter G. Woodson?

He rejected educational ideas and practices that treated whiteness as the norm.

Which of the following is true of the African American writer Frank Yerby?

He was known widely for novels with white protagonists.

Identify the true statements about Carter G. Woodson. (Check all that apply.)

He worked to educate the public on the contributions of African Americans to the nation through professional scholarship and conferences. He gave blacks a sense of pride in their heritage, including their resistance to racial oppression.

Black Americans were not oblivious of the United Nations General Assembly's acknowledgment, in the autumn of 1946, of India's charges that _____.

Indian nationals and their descendants in South Africa were victims of discrimination

Ralph Ellison, who has been compared by some critics with Richard Wright for his talents as a writer, received even greater acclaim than Wright for his novel _____ (1952).

Invisible Man

Which of the following are true about the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO)? (Check all that apply.)

It adhered to the industrial principle of labor organizing. It articulated the official policy of racial diversity in its affiliate unions.

Identify the true statements about the Labor-Management Relations Act that was passed by Congress in 1947. (Check all that apply.)

It outlawed a variety of labor strikes. It strengthened employers' hands against labor.

Which of the following is true of the Labor-Management Relations Act that was passed by Congress in 1947?

It outlawed the "closed shop" requirement for workers.

Identify a true statement about the United Nations (UN) Charter established in the founding conference of the United Nations held in late April 1945.

Its preamble reaffirmed faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person.

The recruitment of _____ to the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 occurred against the backdrop of the united-front effort of blacks and whites, leftists and moderates, and labor and civil rights organizations in various parts of New York.

Jackie Robinson

The work of _____ captured the social concerns of the 1950s and 1960s—racial consciousness, discrimination, and sexuality—and his later work addressed the ideological cleavages between the black power and civil rights movements.

James Baldwin

_____ gained popular recognition for his film scripts for the black actor and singer Harry Belafonte, and his novel And Then They Heard the Thunder (1963) was regarded by many as his most important novel.

John Oliver Killens

_____ constituted an early, crucial part of the unfolding civil rights movement that would peak in the 1960s.

Labor civil rights

The establishment of _____, which by mid-decade boasted 60,000 members, drew ever-increasing numbers of African Americans into its ranks, with blacks serving as UAW staff, as delegates to UAW conventions.

Local 600

Identify the true statements about the early civil rights struggle in the 1940s. (Check all that apply.)

Many working-class blacks and some whites engaged in the civil rights struggle through labor unions. Labor unions worked with moderate, liberal, and radical civil rights organizations in united-front campaigns.

Richard Wright won greater acclaim for _____, which described the literally murderous frustrations of a young black man living in a Chicago slum and the efforts of a Marxist lawyer in his defense.

Native Son

George W. Henderson George W. Lee Waters Turpin

Ollie Miss (1935) and Jule (1946) Beale Street (1934) and River George (1936) These Low Grounds (1937) and O Canaan (1939)

The CIO's much-heralded _____ unionization drive between 1946 and 1953 did not fare any better in the Cold War South.

Operation Dixie

_____ received the National Book Award in 1952 and the Prix de Rome in 1955.

Ralph Ellison

In the 1940s, the best known of the younger African American writers was _____. Multiple choice question.

Richard Wright

_____ won the Jule and Avery Hopwood Prize for his poems, and his first volume, Heart-Shape in the Dust, was published in 1940.

Robert Hayden

On the basis of India's charges that Indian nationals and their descendants in South Africa were victims of discrimination, two-thirds majority of the United Nations General Assembly in 1946 passed a resolution requiring _____.

South Africa to report at the next meeting the steps that it had taken to rectify the situation

Identify a true statement about the black internationalism in the 1940s through 1960s.

The 1940s through the 1960s were periods of active black internationalism.

In 1946, Frank Yerby's _____ remained on the best-seller list for many months and reportedly approached the million-copy mark.

The Foxes of Harrow

Which of the following were evidence of the changing international order that was described as the "rising wind" by Walter White in 1945? (Check all that apply.)

The Pan African Congress being held in Manchester, England, in 1945 India winning its independence British colonial rule in 1947

Identify the two dilemmas that were highlighted in the South's determination to provide better public schools for African American youths during the battle of the blacks against the "separate but equal" doctrine in the 1950s. (Check all that apply.)

The fight in the courts indicated the Supreme Court's incremental move away from the doctrine of separate but equal. Black schools were so inadequate that it would take years of significant funding to achieve even a semblance of equality.

Before the 1948 presidential elections, _____ were outraged with many of President Truman's liberal Fair Deal policies, and especially with the steps he was taking to advance desegregation.

conservative southern Democrats

Which of the following stirred protest in some parts of the black community during the 1930s? Multiple choice question.

The overthrow of Spain's democratic republic by Generalissimo Francisco Franco

Identify a true statement about the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company case in Winston-Salem.

The racial disparities in pay, work conditions, and treatment served to discourage interracial unity at the anti-union company.

Identify the response of black communities in the United States to Italy's invasion of Ethiopia in 1935.

They rallied in protest demonstrations and organized Ethiopia relief drives.

Identify the response of black leaders in the 1940s and 1950s to Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma.

They welcomed Myrdal's huge study, perceiving his assessment to be an affirmation of a long held awareness in their community.

Identify the response of black Americans to the overthrow of Spain's democratic republic by Generalissimo Francisco Franco and his establishment of a fascist dictatorship during the 1930s.

They were among the international volunteers who went to Spain to support the Spanish Republican forces.

In 1947, the civil rights committee's report, _____, demanded "the elimination of segregation, based on race, color, creed, or national origin, from American life."

To Secure These Rights

True or false: In the context of the battle of the blacks against the "separate but equal" doctrine, in 1951 nine southern states revealed a glaring disparity between per pupil expenditures for blacks and whites.

True

In the postwar world, the _____ functioned as the most important forum of international deliberation and, in the decades to follow, would grow more influential as a voice for independent African nations.

United Nations

Identify the issues that African American literary artists focused on in the 1940s and 1950s. (Check all that apply.)

Urban life Migration Restrictive housing

The Pan African Congress, held in Manchester, England, in 1945, emphasized _____.

a unified black internationalism based on the similar condition of racial economic oppression

In communication with NAACP lawyers, African American communities in the South began to strategize around the problem of graduate level and professional school programs of public (state) universities that refused to _____.

admit their own black residents

The influence of culturalists in the study of the debilitating effects of racism and segregation was evident in the work of those who _____.

advocated educational models that emphasized the pluralistic character of the United States

The Council on African Affairs (CAA) was particularly vigilant in _____.

alerting African Americans to political and trade union activism in South Africa

The McLaurin case and the Sweatt case revealed the beginning of a change in focus of NAACP's legal strategy to _____.

an attack on the very premise behind segregated education

African survivals in the New World dealt with cultural patterns that appeared strongest in areas where _____.

blacks had lived under conditions of greater cultural autonomy

In 1952, after announcing his retirement from office, Harry Truman gave the Howard University commencement address, in which he called for a _____.

civil rights program to end discrimination against minorities

African Americans countered opponents of the June 1946 petition by arguing that one of the United Nations' main purposes was _____.

international cooperation in solving problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character

Civil rights liberals applauded President Harry Truman for the Howard University address but nonetheless admonished him that America could assure its moral credibility only with _____.

laws and policies that would rebut charges of bigotry and discrimination

The McLaurin case drew public attention because George W. McLaurin was _____.

not treated equally

The Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal characterized the "Negro Problem" as _____.

one that was roiling the minds of white Americans

The Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal characterized the "Negro Problem" as _____. Multiple choice question.

one that was roiling the minds of white Americans

Acting on the recommendations of the Freedom to Serve, the Army adopted a new policy in 1949 that _____.

opened all positions to qualified personnel without regard to race or color

The purpose of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was to contribute to _____.

peace and security by promoting collaboration among nations through education, science and culture

For African Americans in the 1930s and 1940s, a romanticized discussion of cultural distinctiveness, including the black-inspired musings of the Harlem (New Negro) Renaissance, came under increasing scrutiny and attack from those who _____. Multiple choice question.

perceived race relations as masking economic conflict

Carter G. Woodson had argued persistently for the _____.

presentation of African American history to teachers explicitly as a corrective to an unhealthy, overly assimilationist education

In 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois characterized the "Negro Problem" as the _____.

psychological dilemma of being American and Negro

In 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois characterized the "Negro Problem" as the _____. Multiple choice question.

psychological dilemma of being American and Negro

Through the United Auto Workers, an affiliate of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), blacks demanded _____.

racial equality in the workplace

Assimilation, it was argued, would occur most rapidly in contexts of _____.

racially integrated, urban settings

Richard Wright, a communist supporter in the 1930s, believed that it was the black author's role to _____.

represent the voice and oppressive conditions of the black working class

Of particular interest to local black communities in the 1930s and 1940s was the legal assault on _____

segregated public higher education

Encouraged by the United Nations (UN) charter and the early actions of UN agencies, the National Negro Congress in June 1946 filed a petition with the UN's Economic and Social Council on behalf of black people in America, seeking United Nations aid in the _____.

struggle to eliminate political, economic, and social discrimination

The Brown case brought four cases before the Supreme Court—one of them from Delaware, whose state supreme court held that _____.

the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment invalidated segregation provisions in the state constitution

For Richard Wright, the pathology imagery in Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma was useful for _____

understanding the dehumanizing effects of racial oppression

Operation Dixie's drive to _____ proved to be an uphill, ultimately unsuccessful battle.

unionize an interracial southern workforce