The century opened with America the world’s industrial giant — and with people organizing to make the giant answer to them. Reporters and reformers dragged the ugly parts into the light: poisoned food, children in the mills, bought politicians. Laws followed — food inspection, limits on child labor, the breakup of some monopolies. In 1911, a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York killed 146 garment workers, most of them young immigrant women, because the bosses had locked the doors. Out of that horror came fire codes, factory laws, and stronger unions. Reform, in this country, has usually been paid for in advance.
In 1920, after more than seventy years of organizing that began at Seneca Falls, women won the vote — the Nineteenth Amendment. In those same years, Black Southerners began the Great Migration: over the decades, six million people moved north and west, trading the terror of Jim Crow for crowded cities, industrial jobs, and a different, quieter racism. They built new capitals of Black life, Harlem first among them, and their music — blues, jazz, gospel — became America’s music.
In October 1929 the stock market crashed, and the Great Depression followed. By 1933 one worker in four had no job. President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal changed what government was for: Social Security for the old, insurance for bank deposits, a minimum wage, jobs programs, and — crucially — the legal right of workers to form unions. Union membership soared, and for the first time the government took responsibility for ordinary people’s economic security. The argument over how much responsibility has never stopped.
Then the Second World War. The United States and its allies destroyed fascism abroad while practicing segregation at home, and everyone could see the contradiction. Black soldiers fought under a slogan, Double Victory: over fascism abroad, over racism at home. Women built the bombers. And in one of the war’s ugliest acts here at home, the government imprisoned about 120,000 Japanese Americans — most of them citizens — in camps, for their ancestry alone.
After the war, the long struggle came to its peak. In 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court finally said segregated schools violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection — the promise of 1868, taken up at last. Then the people moved: Montgomery walked instead of riding segregated buses for 381 days; students sat down at whites-only lunch counters; children marched in Birmingham into dogs and fire hoses, and the country watched on television. In August 1963, a quarter of a million people marched on Washington. Congress answered: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed segregation, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 finally enforced the Fifteenth Amendment across the South.
It cost lives all the way, and in April 1968 it cost the movement its greatest voice, when Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in Memphis — where he had gone to stand with striking sanitation workers. The gap between the promise and the practice had been forced narrower than it had ever been. It had not closed.