Help tell Davenport’s civil rights story
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By Art Pitz | Sunday, May 18, 2008 |
The Davenport Civil Rights Commission asked me to take on the task of capturing and telling the civil rights history of Davenport. This is a compelling story and well worth exploring. I’d like to point to several factors that helped make a civil rights movement in Davenport possible, and successful.
First and perhaps one of the most important things to notice is that Iowa had been one of the leading “radical” states during Reconstruction after the Civil War and maintained this status for some time. At a time while segregation became law of the land thanks to the Supreme Court’s infamous 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, Iowa didn’t accept this.
For example, in 1868 (86 years before Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court), the Iowa Supreme Court struck down segregated schools. Soon after that, black males received the right to vote and, at least in theory, run for office. These decisions were followed up by the Iowa Civil Rights Act of 1884 which forbade discrimination in private businesses open to the public. This act received a crucial amendment in 1923 which waived the necessity of a grand jury in prosecuting violations of this act. This greatly streamlined the process.
That amendment came about in an interesting way. The Des Moines NAACP quietly and secretly supported a candidate for the legislature from Des Moines for the purpose of pushing through this amendment. The legislator was able to steer it through without any controversy.
While the 1884 act with its 1923 amendment was rarely enforced before WWII, it played a crucial role when some in Iowa began to contest the de facto segregation that existed at that time. This last point is well worth our attention. While Iowa had no legal segregation, it existed in large measure by custom.
Those customs were finally challenged as a result of WWII. Some 1.2 million blacks served in uniform during WWII and many came back unwilling to accept the practices of Jim Crow—including in Iowa.
Fighting against the extreme racism practiced by Hitler’s Third Reich forced many Americans to finally question their own racist practices. The U.S. proclaimed in its founding document that “all men are created equal,” but rarely practiced it. Now, if you really believed in racism then Hitler showed where it logically led. As we will see, this motivation came to play a key role in a Davenport court case that we should now turn to.
Picture that WWII is coming to an end and you’re coming home from an event related to that. You and your spouse want to stop and have some ice cream along the way home. Imagine that you are denied service.
Can you guess why? Charles and Ann Toney were pretty sure this denial was due to the color of their skin. So, they contacted the district attorney’s office to see whether they would take on the case. They were not exactly welcomed with open arms. Thus, they contacted first their local NAACP, but its principle lawyer was still in uniform. Des Moines’ NAACP agreed to take on the case, based on the 1884 Civil Rights Act as amended in 1923. The district attorney’s office agreed finally to work with them to prosecute the case.
The first trial wound up with a hung jury (all white) mainly because the defendant wasn’t pressed on the witness stand about her view that she denied service because she didn’t like “their attitude.” In the second trial, the defendant was pressed and spoke out in anger that she had denied them service because they were black. In the attorney’s closing remarks to the jury, he urged them to declare the defendant guilty in large part because WWII had showed the evil of racism. The jury took less than a half-hour to declare the defendant guilty.
There, the modern civil rights history of Davenport begins.
Read and comment on Dr. Art Pitz’ Historian on the Move blog at qctimes.com/blogs.
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