A "Southern City" No More: White Supremacists, Civil Rights Activists, and D.C. Segregation, 1944–56

From World War II through the aftermath of the Brown decision, segregation in the nation's capital emerged as a prime target for civil rights activists.  According to A. Philip Randolph, Washington remained the "capital of Dixie, of 20th century Copperheaded Confederacy."  The elevation of the race-baiting Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo to chairmanship of the Senate Committee on the District of Columbia in 1944 heightened black concerns that the South was tightening its grip on the city.  Yet while Randolph and his allies worried that a "Jim Crow-ized" Washington would spread southern racial practices nationwide, southern white supremacists lamented the breakdown of segregation in their capital.  "Washington," Bilbo warned his constituents, "while sometimes called a southern city, is on the borderline."  As white southerners anticipated a civil rights revolution, Washington served as their bellwether.  During the late 1940s and early 1950s, southern politicians warned their constituents about civil rights campaigns in the city that, if unchecked, would spread southward.  Rather than celebrate their capital's "southern"-ness, segregationists increasingly associated Washington with their racial stereotypes of the urban North.  Portraying the nation's capital as a place of relentless agitation, animosity, and criminality, segregationists argued that Washington had succumbed to the racial ills that only Jim Crow could cure.  After school desegregation began in the District, segregation's foes and defenders again invoked Washington's strategic and symbolic power.  Southern segregationists, still in control of the congressional D.C. committees, launched a 1956 hearing aimed at exposing how desegregation had "ruined" the nation's capital.  In this conflict, as in earlier skirmishes over segregation, southern conservatives and civil rights advocates revealed competing visions of race and place.  Rather than a battle to determine the capital's regional loyalties, civil rights showdowns in Washington reverberated in ongoing struggles—North, South, and West—over racial discrimination.