CHAPTER 1 African Origins
Langston Hughes, the most prolific writer of the renaissance, wrote a kind of manifesto for the movement. He said that he was proud to be a black artist. Further, he said that he was not writing to win the approval of white audiences. At the same time he claimed that he and the other young Negro artists were not attempting to gain the approval of black audiences. They were writing to express their inner souls, and they were not ashamed that those souls were black. If what they wrote pleased either whites or blacks, Hughes said, they were happy. It did not matter to them if it did not.
In "Minstrel Man", Hughes expressed the inner emotions of the stereotyped, well-behaved Negro which white America thought it knew so well:
Because my mouth
Is wide with laughter
And my throat
Is deep with song,
You did not think
I suffer after
I've held my pain
So long.
Because my mouth
Is wide with laughter
You do not hear
My inner cry:
Because my feet
Are gay with dancing,
You do not know
I die.
Claude McKay expresses an inner anger rather than a secret pain felt by a contained and somewhat more sophisticated Negro responding to segregation:
Your door is shut against my tightened face,
And I am sharp as steel with discontent;
But I possess the courage and the grace
To bear my anger proudly and unbent.
In still more defiant tones, McKay expresses the aggressive response which many Negroes made during the race riots of 1919:
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain...
Nevertheless, Langston Hughes made it clear that his bitter hostility was aimed at injustice and inhumanity and not at American ideals when he wrote:
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be
An ever-living seed,
Its dream
Lies deep in the heart of me.
Besides articulating the Negro's emotional reaction to prejudice and discrimination, the Negro Renaissance depicted other aspects of the Afro-American culture. The flavor of its religious life was captured best by James Weldon Johnson in his volume "God's Trombones: Negro Sermons in Verse", which he published in 1927. Instead of resorting to the standard technique of using stereotyped dialect to capture the flavor, Johnson used powerful, poetic imagery to express its essence. In "The Creation" Johnson depicted a Negro minister preaching on the opening verses of Genesis:
And God stepped out on space,
And he looked around and said:
I'm lonely--
I'll make me a world.
And far as the eye of God could see
Darkness covered everything,
Blacker than a hundred midnights
Down in a cypress swamp.
Then God smiled,
And the light broke,
And the darkness rolled up on one side,
And the light stood shining on the other,
And God said: That's good!
The Negro Renaissance, besides losing its shame over its folk culture, developed a fresh interest in its African heritage. One of the many expressions of this was made by Countee Cullen:
What is Africa to me:
Copper sun or scarlet sea,
Jungle star or jungle track,
Strong bronzed men, or regal black
Women from whose loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden sang?
The Renaissance also included an outcropping of Negro novelists. There had been Negro novelists before, and the best known of them were Charles W. Chestnut and, to some extent, Paul Laurence Dunbar. Chestnut's novels included "The Conjure Woman" and "The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line", whereas Dunbar, who wrote mainly poetry, was best known for his novel "The Sport of the Gods". Chestnut's writing, though moving away from the plantation romanticism which had glorified slavery, developed a more realistic flavor, and it emphasized intergroup relations based on the color line rather than developing the interior lives of its characters. Negro fiction came into its own in 1923 with Jean Toomer's publication "Cane", and, in 1924, with Jessie Redman Fauset's "There is Confusion". These works dealt with Negroes as people and not merely as objects to be manipulated for racial propaganda. Langston Hughes, in 1930, published "Not Without Laughter", a novel to gain wide renown.
To catalog all the authors of the Negro Renaissance would become tedious. However, all the poets and novelists listed within these pages are generally accepted as having gained a place among America's significant writers. They were more than products of an Afro-American subculture; their work became part of the mainstream of American literature. These authors, along with other Negro artists, gained the respect of American art and literary critics. With them, the Afro-American folk culture made its way into the formal art of the nation.
The Negro Renaissance of the 1920s, however, was more than a literary movement. There was, as had been noted earlier, a vast outpouring of musical creativity. Besides the jazz composers and performers, many made their mark in classical concert music. The best known composer from the Afro-American community was William Grant Still. Many operatic and concert singers have been Negroes, and they include such well-known names as Paul Robeson, Marian Anderson, Leontyne Price, and William Warfield.
The most famous of the Afro-American painters was Henry O. Tanner, who had made his reputation before the Negro Renaissance. Tanner's paintings had been widely acclaimed at the Paris Exposition in 1900, the Pan-American Exposition in 1901, and the St. Louis Exposition in 1904. Tanner avoided Negro subjects and concentrated on biblical themes. In the field of sculpture, Meta Warrick Fuller was the first Negro to gain attention. Augusta Savage became well-known for her head of Dr. DuBois, and Richmond Barthe gained recognition for the bust of Booker T. Washington.
In retrospect, the Renaissance of the twenties can be seen as the beginning of a continuing, self-conscious cultural movement within the Afro-American community. During the 1930s, however, the outpouring diminished. The Depression affected the entire American scene, businessmen, workmen, and artists, and its impact on the Negro Renaissance was particularly severe. One of the New Deal measures which alleviated the situation considerably was the Federal Writers Project. Sterling Brown, literary critic and Howard University professor, headed the Negro section. Two of the better known authors who were helped by the Project were Arna Bontemps and Richard Wright.
Wright's novel "Native Son" was widely acclaimed. In it, he depicted the inner anger and hatred felt by many young Negro men as dominating characteristics of the hero's personality; eventually, his life was destroyed. The first Negro to win a Pulitzer Prize was Gwendolyn Brooks, who won it for her poetry. Later, Ralph Ellison was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his novel "Invisible Man".
Since the Second World War, innumerable Negroes have made significant contributions to American culture through the mass media: radio, television, and movies. Large numbers have also joined the ranks of professional athletes in every field from tennis to football. Nevertheless, complaints persist that prejudice continues in these areas. While they are often included as performers, rarely do Negroes achieve significant decision-making authority in their field. In the 1968 Olympics, several black athletes, especially Carlos and Smith, claimed that instead of being accepted on an equal basis, they were being exploited.
The decade of the 1960s has been marked by a militant spirit throughout the Afro-American community; this spirit was reminiscent of the new Negro of the 1920s although it appears to be more cynical and disillusioned. LeRoi Jones and James Baldwin are only the best known of dozens of contemporary black writers. Their bitterness, undoubtedly, springs partly from the dashed hopes of the new Negro. Unfortunately, at the very time that the Afro-American community was stepping forward with new confidence, the nation was tottering on the brink of economic disaster. The year 1929 brought a harsh end to the optimism of the 1920s.
Black Nationalism
Although Langston Hughes had been confident that the American dream could be made to include his people, thousands upon thousands of other Afro-Americans, especially among the lower classes, were extremely dubious. In 1916, Marcus Garvey came to Harlem, and before long his Universal Negro Improvement Association had opened chapters in urban centers all across the nation. As mentioned previously, Garvey did not believe that blacks could be taken into American society. Hundreds of thousands, who apparently agreed with him, followed his banner. Whatever was the actual number of members of the U.N.I.A., the movement gained more grass-roots support than had any other organization in Afro-American history. While the nation was willing to tolerate the Afro-American folk spirit, the people, themselves, did not believe that they would be accepted.
Although Garvey's movement was by far the largest black nationalist organization in America, it was not the only one. In Chicago, Grover Cleveland Redding was preaching a Back-to-Africa philosophy of his own. He organized the Abyssinian Movement and urged Negroes living on the south side of Chicago to return to Ethiopia. On Sunday, June 20, 1920, Redding led a parade through the Chicago streets. He sat astride a white horse and wore what he claimed was the costume of an Abyssinian prince. At the corner, of East 25th Street and Prairie Avenue he stopped the procession, poured a flammable liquid on an American flag, and burned it. A Negro policeman, who attempted to break up the demonstration, was shot by one of Redding's followers. In the course of the melee, a white storekeeper and a white soldier were killed. Redding and another Negro were later executed for their part in the affair.
In 1925 Noble Drew Ali came to Chicago and established the Moorish American Science Temple. Actually, he had previously attempted to organize other temples in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. He claimed that American Negroes were of Moorish descent and, instead of being really black, were olive-hued. His movement had a banner which carried a Moorish star and crescent on a field of red. He also claimed that American Negroes, being Moors, had an Islamic heritage rather than a Christian one, and he endeavored to spread his particular version of that faith throughout the Afro-American community. By 1927 Ali had established branches in Pittsburgh, Detroit, Philadelphia, Kansas City, Lansing, and elsewhere. He wrote his own version of the Koran which combined passages from the Moslem Koran, the Christian Bible, and some of the writings of Marcus Garvey.
Ali gave his followers a new sense of identity. Most of them wore a fez which set them apart from the typical urban black. Many were also bearded, and each one carried a membership card. Having a different religion from that of the typical ghetto black contributed further to their special sense of identity. Ali's teaching also made them feel that they had a special and unique heritage of which they could be proud. His emphasis on separatism instead of on integration struck a harmonious note with their disillusionment. Instead of leaving them in despair, it permitted them to face white America boldly.
In 1929 a power struggle broke out between Noble Drew Ali and Claude Green, one of his organizers. When Green was found murdered, the Chicago police charged Ali with the crime. While Ali was out on bond, he too died under mysterious circumstances. While some claimed that he had been beaten by the police, others said that he had been "mugged" by Green's followers. Before he was released on bail Ali wrote a letter from prison to his followers encouraging them to have faith in him and in their future. His letter bore distinctly messianic overtones. After assuring them that he had redeemed them, he concluded by extending to them his peace and by commanding them to love one another. His movement splintered after his death into innumerable competing factions.
In Detroit, sometime before 1930, a dark-skinned man appeared selling silk and raincoats. He said that he was W. D. Fard and that he had come from the Holy City of Mecca in order to save the American Negro. People generally described him as being unusually light-skinned for a Negro with perhaps an Oriental cast. Fard also taught that the American Negro was Islamic in origin and that he should return to his ancestral faith. Sometime in 1933 or 1934 he disappeared as mysteriously as he had come. While many believed that Fard and his movement must have been connected with Noble Drew Ali and the Moorish American Science Temple, the Black Muslims have always denied it.
Fard founded, in Detroit, Muslim Temple Number One, and he acquired a handful of devout followers. He insisted that the Muslims should refrain from eating pork, should pray facing the East, and should practice a daily washing ritual. Muslim members were reminded that their last names had been imposed upon them by the white man whom Fard equated with the Devil. It is the practice among Muslims to drop their Christian name and, until their true names will be revealed to them, to substitute the letter X for their last name symbolizing the unknown. Fard insisted that the first man had been a black man and that whites were a corruption of humanity. The days of the White Devil, he said, were numbered. Blacks should deliberately withdraw from white society in order not to be caught in its final destruction.
The Muslim's life was rigidly disciplined. There were temple services almost every evening. Individual behavior and dress were carefully dictated. Besides forbidding the eating of pork, devout Muslims were not allowed to drink alcohol or smoke tobacco. Relationships between men and women were extremely puritanical. Each temple had special groups to prepare young men and women for manhood and womanhood. The Fruit of Islam was the young men's group, and it was a semi-military defense corps aimed at developing a sense of manhood and the ability for self-defense. The common belief that the Fruit of Islam was preparing for racial aggression has never been substantiated. The Muslim Girls' Training Classes taught cooking, sewing, housekeeping, and etiquette.
After Fard's disappearance, the leadership passed on to Elijah Muhammed, formerly Elijah Poole, whom Fard had been grooming as his successor. Elijah Muhammed moved to Chicago and began Temple Number Two and established his headquarters there. The "Black Muslims", as well as other small, semi-religious, separatist groups, continued to exist unnoticed by the general public. When Malcolm Little, better known as Malcolm X, was converted to the "Nation of Islam", he gave the movement the organizational skill and the eloquence which it previously lacked. This brought it into national prominence.
Black Nationalism and the Negro Renaissance shared a strong sense of racial consciousness and racial pride. However, while the writers who expressed the spirit of the new Negro still believed in their future in America, the black nationalists enunciated a mood of alienation and despair. The Depression, which eroded the hopes of many Americans, hit the Negro unusually hard. It served to increase the level of bitterness in the Afro-American community as a whole.
CHAPTER 10
Fighting Racism at Home and Abroad
Hard Times Again
THE new Negro of the 1920s who had struck out for "the Promised Land" found, in the 1930s, that his old enemies of hunger, cold, and prejudice were lurking outside the door of his newly chosen home. Hope slid into despair and cynicism. The dynamic, self-confident Harlem which Johnson had described in 1925 as the Culture Capital of the Negro World became choked with disillusionment and frustration, and, in 1935, it was the scene of looting, burning, and violence.
While the Depression which swept America in 1929 was a national disaster, it did not hit all segments of society equally, In America, poverty and starvation are also discriminatory. To quote the old adage again, "The Negro is the last to be hired and the first to be fired." The Depression also proved that Harlem, like other Afro-American communities, was not as economically self-sufficient as Johnson had imagined. Although such communities had many Negro-owned businesses thriving on a Negro trade, these businesses were still dependent on the economy at large. Therefore, they were not at all free from the racial discrimination in the nation. Their clientele was largely employed in white-owned businesses. Many Negroes were laid off, and Negro-owned businesses immediately felt the pinch.
Although Negro businesses had grown significantly during the 1920s, most were small establishments and, in the age of mass production and mass marketing, always had to struggle hard in order to compete. In 1929, the Colored Merchants Association was established in New York City, and it attempted to buy goods for independent stores on a cooperative wholesale basis. This aided them in competing with chain stores. The Association also urged blacks to patronize stores owned by Afro-Americans. Nevertheless, the Association only survived for two years. The Afro-American community felt the Depression sooner and harder than did the rest of the country.
By 1932, the government believed that 38 percent of the Afro-American community was incapable of self-support and in need of government relief. At the same time, it considered that only 17 percent of the white community fell into this category. In October of 1933, between 25 percent and 40 percent of the blacks in many of the large cities, to which they had moved to find a brighter future, were on relief. This percentage was three or four times higher than that of the whites in the same cities. As affluent whites felt the economic pinch, one of the first items to be trimmed from their shrinking budgets was the maid or the gardener. In 1935 the number of unemployed Negro domestics was at least one and a half million. In that same year, the government estimated that 65 percent of the Negro employables in Atlanta were on public assistance while, in Norfolk, 80 percent of the Afro-American community was on relief.
As Negro unemployment statistics skyrocketed in the early thirties, The-Jobs-for-Negroes Movement strove to alleviate the crisis. It was begun by the Urban League in St. Louis. A boycott was organized against white-owned chain stores which catered to Negroes, but refused to employ them. The movement spread throughout the Midwest and had some success in "persuading" white-owned stores in the heart of the ghettoes to hire Negro employees. When the idea reached Harlem, it resulted in the establishment of the Greater New York Coordinating Comittee. One of its founders and organizers was the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and the Comittee received considerable support from his church, the Abyssinian Baptist Church.
It was Powell's claim that the Comittee was shunned by most "respectable" Negroes but that its supporters included an unusually wide variety of radicals. The group referred to its members as antebellum Negroes by which, Powell said, they meant before Civil War II. Some of them, he claimed, favored repatriation to Africa; others were for black capitalism; still another group, including Powell himself, wanted the Negro to achieve full dignity within the American system. In spite of the variety of their objectives, all of them believed that the Afro-American must first achieve economic security before any of these specific goals could be attained.
It was on this primary tactical necessity that they were able to coordinate their activities. They picketed white-owned stores on 125th Street. They carried signs advocating, "Don't buy where you can't work," and Powell maintained that they were able almost to stop trade totally at any target they chose to picket. He claimed to be able to call a meeting with only forty-eight hours notice and have 10,000 persons in attendance. The 125th Street stores soon negotiated and began employing Negro employees. Next, the Comittee hit the city's utility companies. They urged Negroes not to use electricity on specified days. They harassed the telephone company by urging Negroes to demand that the operator place their calls instead of their dialing the number and utilizing the automatic exchanges. Both companies changed their employment patterns in response. The Comittee also boycotted the bus company until it began employing Negroes as drivers as well as on other levels of the company's staff.
By 1935 Harlem had become a pressure cooker which was heated to the boiling point by economic and racial frustrations. When a young Negro stole a knife from a 125th Street store, it became the incident which triggered a social explosion. Although he had escaped from the pursuing officer a rumor spread around the community that he had been beaten to death. A mob soon gathered and began to protest everything from the discrimination practices of merchants to slum landlords and police tactics. Window-breaking, looting, and burning soon followed. Before peace was restored, three Negroes had been killed, some two hundred stores smashed, and it was estimated that approximately $2,000,000 worth of damage had been done. Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia appointed a study commission which was headed by the noted black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier. The commission concluded that the causes of the riot were rooted in resentment against racial discrimination and poverty. The "promised land" of the large northern cities had not lived up to expectations.
The Depression, however, brought its own kind of hope. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had been elected in 1932, promised the country a "New Deal." It was to be a new deal for the workers, the unemployed and, it seemed, for the Negro too. In response, black voters switched to the Democratic party in droves. While Franklin D. Roosevelt was not the first president to appoint Negroes to government positions, his appointments were different in two major respects. First, there were more of them. Second, instead of being political payoffs, the appointees were selected for their expert knowledge, and their intellectual skills became part of the government's decision-making processes.
This group, which became informally known as the "Black Cabinet," included such prominent Afro-American leaders as Robert L. Vann of The Pittsburgh Courier, William H. Hastie of the Harvard Law School, Eugene Kinckle Jones of the Urban League, Mrs. Mary McLeod Bethune of the National Council of Negro Women, Robert C. Weaver, and Ralph Bunche, who later became the first Negro to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The number of Afro-Americans hired by the Federal Government mushroomed rapidly.
Between 1933 and 1946 the number rose from 50,000 to almost 200,000. Most, however, were employed in the lower, unskilled and semi-skilled, brackets. It was also during this period that the civil service terminated its policy of requiring applicants to state their race and to include photographs. Individual personnel officers, nevertheless, could and did continue to discriminate.
In spite of the attempt of the Roosevelt Administration to elevate the status of the Afro-American, the New Deal itself became enmeshed in racial discrimination in three ways: through discriminatory practice within government bureaus, through exclusion carried on by unions, and also as an indirect by-product of the success of the New Deal programs. In a government bureaucracy, power and authority are distributed throughout the administrative hierarchy. Officials at varying levels were still influenced by their personal prejudices, and they continued to use their positions in a discriminatory manner. Regardless of the intentions at the top, prejudice continued to exist in varying degrees throughout the lower levels of the structure.
In 1935 the Wagner Act protected the rights of labor unions, but because most unions practiced racial discrimination, it served indirectly to undercut the status of the Negro worker for a short time. Actually, with the heightened competition for jobs, unions tended to intensify their discrimination. The American Federation of Labor largely consisted of trade or skilled workers. Its member unions regularly practiced racial exclusion and kept blacks out of the trades. To the contrary, the United Mine Workers Union which had been organized on an industry-wide basis rather than a craft basis had encouraged the participation of Negroes within the union since at least 1890. In 1935, several union leaders, led by John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers, decided that the union movement must break away from its craft orientation and begin to organize the new mass production industries on an industry-wide basis.
While the A. F. of L. dragged its feet, the dissidents withdrew and formed the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Immediately they began to organize the steel workers, the meat packers and the automobile workers. These were all industries which employed significant numbers of Afro-Americans, and the CIO followed an aggressive, nondiscriminatory policy. In the beginning, black workers were suspicious, but they soon joined the new unions in large numbers. In the long run, both black and white labor benefited from the Wagner Act.
Finally, the New Deal failed to extend its program to include either agricultural or domestic workers. These were areas in which Afro-Americans were employed in unusually high proportions, and this meant that a large portion of the Afro-American community was not covered by this legislation. For example, both the Social Security and the Minimum Wage laws excluded both agricultural and domestic workers. Nevertheless, it was estimated that in 1939 some one million Negroes owed their livelihood to the Works Progress Administration. If it had not been for the W.P.A., the National Youth Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and other similar organizations, Afro-Americans would have suffered even more during the Depression.
Some relief was brought to farmers through the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. However, white landlords usually kept the checks which had been intended for the sharecroppers. This resulted in the formation of The Southern Tenant Farmers' Union, an interracial organization. Despite the landlords' attempts to use racism to destroy it, the Union showed that white and black farmers could cooperate on the basis of their common economic plight. This alliance of poor whites and poor blacks was reminiscent of the earlier Populist Movement.
Although the New Deal did much to help the Negro, it tended to further undercut his self-confidence and independence. Alain Locke has argued that the significant fact about the northward migration by blacks had been that the Afro-Americans had made a decision for themselves. The fact of having made a decision and of taking action on it, Locke maintains, was the event which created the aggressive self-confident New Negro. In helping him to survive the Depression, the New Deal turned him again into a passive recipient. The large number of Afro-Americans who were receiving government aid in one way or another were aware of their dependency. Afro-American communities, which had been regarded as "The Promised Land," slid into poverty and dejection.
The Second World War
As ominous war clouds began to gather over Europe in the late 1930s, most Americans were preoccupied with domestic problems resulting from the Depression. Those who took notice of the ascendancy of Mussolini and Hitler were apt to be impressed with their successes in combatting the effects of the Depression in Italy and Germany. The Afro-American community, however, was more concerned with the imperialistic and racist elements in the teachings of Fascism and National Socialism. Usually, American Negroes were prevented from looking beyond their own problems by the immediacy of racial prejudice which they faced daily, but this time they were among the first to warn of impending danger.
Racist thought in Germany did not begin with the rise of Adolf Hitler. European anti-Semitism can be traced back into the past for centuries. Although it originally had its roots in a religious feeling, racism became secularized and, by the middle of the nineteenth century, took on political overtones and tried to assume a scientific foundation.
Aggressive nationalism began to bloom at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and went on to spread across Europe. The political unification of Germany, instead of being the glorious culmination of this nationalistic drama, only signaled the end of one act and the beginning of another. Even the German defeat in the First World War did not persuade ardent nationalists to be content with the victories they had already achieved. Instead, they probed the heart of the nation to find an explanation for their defeat. These nationalists contended that the defeat had been due to pollution of racial purity by the presence of a large, alien element--the Jews. If it had not been for this impurity, it was argued, Germany would certainly have been victorious, and it would have demonstrated its global superiority. Aggressive nationalism became virulent racism.
Adolf Hitler exploited this need for a political scapegoat and turned it into a national, anti-Semitic campaign. The racial stereotypes and accompanying feelings were already widespread. Nineteenth century popular German literature was full of such trite symbols. The Jew was always portrayed as a villainous merchant, shifty-eyed, large-nosed, unscrupulous, and wealthy. In contrast, the German was invariably portrayed as a solid, blond-haired peasant, hard-working, loyal, and exploited.
The drama in such literature sprang from the tension between the wealthy Jewish merchants and the hard-working but poor German peasants. Here could be found the same kind of exploitation which Hitler used to explain the German defeat in the war. These popular stereotypes were then joined to the teachings of Houston Stewart Chamberlain which had built on elements from biology, anthropology, sociology, and phrenology. In his book Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, Chamberlain had developed them into a philosophy of world history which centered on the concepts of racial conflict. Human progress and racial purity were equated. He predicted an eventual struggle to the death between the Jewish and the Teutonic races. The Germans, he believed, would emerge victorious. Through the survival of the fittest and the destruction of the weak, mankind would reach a higher stage of evolution. Although Nazi racist thought was concerned almost exclusively with the conflict between the Germans and the Jews, it was clear that the Negro race was, if anything, consigned to an even lower level of importance than the Jews. In the survival of the fittest, Negroes were also destined for extermination in the name of human progress.
Afro-American suspicions about the nature of Mussolini's imperialism proved to be justified when Italy invaded Ethiopia. Mussolini's dream of reviving Roman glory included rebuilding a powerful empire. However, underdeveloped countries which were not already dominated by European nations and which could easily be colonized, were few in number. When Italy invaded Ethiopia, Afro-Americans saw it as another white nation subjugating another black nation. At the very time when Africans and Afro-Americans were looking forward to the liberation of Africa from European domination, Italy was extending imperialism even further and conquering the last remaining independent supposedly black nation in Africa. Afro-Americans were outraged. They looked to the League of Nations hoping that it would take decisive action against the Italian aggression. Their hopes were in vain.
The war that began in 1939 came to be expressed in terms which were even more ideological than had been true of the First World War. The Allies depicted themselves as being the champions of freedom and humanity while they portrayed their enemies as tyrants and barbarians. Afro-Americans were painfully aware of some of the imperfections in this simple dichotomy. While aghast at the racist teachings propagated by Germany, they could not forget the racism which confronted them daily within the United States.
They were also aware of the imperialism which was practiced by both the British and the French who dominated and exploited Africa almost at will. Nevertheless, Hitler's form of brazen racism did give a note of validity to this ideological formulation. Afro-Americans viewed the war both with more enthusiasm and with more pessimism than they had felt at the outbreak of the First World War. On the one hand, they could eagerly support a war to defeat Hitler's racist doctrines. On the other hand, they did not believe that any display of patriotism on their part would significantly diminish racism at home. During the First World War they had thought that a demonstration of patriotism would help to knock down the walls of antagonism. Instead, they found that manliness on the part of Afro-Americans, even in the name of patriotism, was a threat to those whites who believed that Negroes should be kept in their place. Afro-Americans were prepared not to be disillusioned in that way again. For them, the war would still be a double struggle-fighting racism at home as well as abroad.
The Second World War began to affect Americans long before the country was actually drawn into the fighting. Although the American nation stood on the sidelines for the first two years, America became a major source of money, supplies, and encouragement for Britain and France. Providing materiel for the Allies gave new life to the sagging American economy. There were still some five million unemployed in the nation, and something more seemed to be needed. Unfortunately for the Afro-American, most of the new jobs were not open to them. Aside from the fact that he was the first to be fired and the last to be hired, many of the new defense industries made it clear that they would hire no Negroes at all or, at most, would restrict their employment to janitorial positions regardless of the training or education of the applicant.
Hostility was expressed quite openly by some leaders in the West Coast aircraft industry. As better jobs became available, they were quickly filled by white workers eager to improve their economic status. This left some of the more undesirable jobs to go begging, and, as the result, the war boom benefits began to trickle down to the Afro-American community. Afro-Americans, however, were not content with the crumbs from the industrial table. Complaints began to flood into Washington. Several government officials made pronouncements condemning discrimination in defense industries, but they were not heard. It became clear that nothing would change without strong government action, and it was also evident that this would not occur unless the entire Afro-American community could exert united, political pressure.
Early in 1941, A. Philip Randolph put forth the idea of a gigantic March on Washington, and he expressed the belief that a hundred thousand Afro-Americans could be organized to participate in such an undertaking. The immediate response from most of the leaders of both black and white America was one of skepticism. Most of them felt that there was too much apathy in the Afro-American community for such a grandiose scheme to be taken seriously. Nevertheless, interest on the grass-roots level gradually grew and Randolph's idea was transformed into a project involving scores of organizers all across the country, all of whom were working diligently to enlist potential marchers. In the meantime, Randolph began to formulate the complex plans for organizing the actual march. By late spring, skepticism had turned to worry. Many government leaders and finally President Roosevelt himself tried to talk Randolph into canceling the march. They suggested that such an aggressive protest would do more to hurt the Afro-American than help him.
Randolph remained unyielding. Others tried to suggest that the protest would be bad for the American image and therefore was unpatriotic. When they suggested that it would create a bad impression in Rome and Berlin, Afro-Americans retorted that white racism had already created such an image. Finally, Roosevelt contacted Randolph and offered to issue an executive order barring discrimination in defense industries and promised to put "teeth" in the order, provided Randolph call off the march. When Randolph became convinced that Roosevelt's intentions were sincere, he complied.
Roosevelt fulfilled his promise by issuing Executive Order 8802, which condemned discrimination on the grounds of race, color, or creed. Then, he established the Fair Employment Practices Commission and assigned to it the responsibility for enforcing the order. Many Afro-Americans felt that Executive Order 8802 was the most important government document concerning the Negro to be issued since the Emancipation Proclamation. Their immediate joy was somewhat dampened when they found that discrimination still continued in some quarters. Nevertheless, the F.E.P.C. did condemn discrimination when it found it, and, as the result, many new jobs began to open up for Negroes.
Once America was drawn into the fighting, Afro-Americans hurried to the enlistment centers to volunteer their services in the war against Hitler's philosophy. However, it soon became clear that America intended to fight racism with a segregated army. The fact that Negroes were confined to the more menial positions in the armed forces was what irritated Afro-Americans the most. The Negro army units were obviously going to be led by white officers. The Marine Corps was still not accepting any Negroes in its ranks at all. Complaints again began to pour into Washington.
Afro-Americans generally admitted that the Selective Service Act per se was not discriminatory and that it was applied impartially in most places. One of the reasons for this impartiality, undoubtedly, was the fact that both local and national Selective Service Boards included Afro-American representation. In the course of the war, about one million Afro-Americans saw service on behalf of their country. Their ratio within the armed forces was almost the same as that within the nation. This had been the stated goal of the Department of War.
Gradually, the armed forces modified their discriminatory policies in response to the flood of complaints. The Air Force began to train Negro pilots although they still received segregated training and served in segregated squadrons. The Marine Corps accepted Negro recruits for the first time in its history. They, too, served in segregated units. The Navy, which had restricted Negroes to menial positions, gradually began to accept them in almost all noncommissioned positions. Eventually, it even began to commission some Negro officers. The Army, too, introduced an extensive program to prepare Negro officers. It trained most of them in integrated facilities, but they continued to lead segregated units. As the war grew to a close, the Army announced that it intended to experiment with integration. However, when the experiment took place, the integration proved not to be quite what had been expected. Instead of putting individuals from both races together in the same unit, the Army took segregated black and white platoons and merged them into an integrated fighting force although the platoons themselves remained segregated.
This integrated unit did fight well in the field and made a significant contribution to the defeat of Germany in 1945. Negro units, as well as individual Negro soldiers, made outstanding contributions to the war effort both in Europe and in the Pacific, and they received numerous commendations and citations. Skeptics noted, however, that not a single Negro soldier had received the Congressional Medal of Honor in either the First or Second World Wars, and they suggested that the nation's highest award was being reserved for whites.
Although most of the hostilities were focused on the enemy, racial tensions still ran very high within America. Southern whites were displeased with the self-confidence and manliness brought out in Negroes by military experience, and they were unhappy with the dignity which a military uniform conferred upon them.
At the same time, Negro soldiers in the South were angry over the harassment and segregation with which they were confronted. In particular, they were irritated by the fact that German prisoners of war were permitted to eat with white American soldiers in the same dining car on a railroad train traveling through the South, while Negro soldiers could not. Racial riots occurred at Fort Bragg, Camp Robinson, Camp Davis, Camp Lee, Fort Dix, and a notorious one at an American base in Australia. The policy of the War Department was to gloss over these events. Casualties which resulted from riots at bases in the United States were officially listed as accidental deaths. Those which resulted from riots overseas were officially reported as being killed in action. On several occasions, Negro soldiers refused to do work which they believed had been assigned to them purely because of their race. For this they were charged with mutiny.
There was also one serious civilian race riot during the war; it occurred on June 20, 1943, in Detroit. A fist fight between a white man and a Negro sparked the resentment which had been mounting in that city. Thousands of Afro-Americans had been moving again from the South into the North to fill vacant jobs in war industry, and this was resented by local white residents. Before the Detroit riot ended, twenty-five Negroes and nine whites had been killed. President Roosevelt had to send in federal troops to quell the disturbance. Another factor which irritated Afro-Americans was that the Red Cross blood banks separated Negro and white blood. This was particularly humiliating in that it had been a Negro doctor, Charles Drew, who had done the basic research that made the banks possible.
In spite of this, Afro-Americans were eager to demonstrate their patriotism and to support the war effort. Besides the hundreds of thousands who were involved directly in the military, millions more supported the war effort in countless other ways. Besides growing their own vegetables, saving tin cans and newspapers, they were avid contributors to the War Bond issues. Others volunteered to serve as block wardens in case of enemy air raids. Negro newspapers had their own journalists at the front, and the Afro-American community eagerly kept up with the war news. They took special pride in stories of heroism about Negro soldiers. When Hitler and his racist philosophy went down in defeat, they felt that they had achieved a personal victory and that at the same time they had made a contribution to America and the world.
Thus, as the war came to a close and Afro-Americans looked forward to the postwar years with both apprehension and determination, they feared that, with the foreign antagonism eradicated, racist feeling at home might increase. At the same time, they were possessed by a new drive to make American democracy into a reality. The ideological character of the war had reminded them of America's expressed ideals of brotherhood and equality. Their participation in the war convinced them that they were worthy of full citizenship. Many had broken the bonds of tradition which had held them in fear and apathy. Some had left their communities to fight in the Army, and some had moved into large urban centers to work in defense industries. Although the war against racism abroad had ended, they were intent to see that the struggle for racial freedom and equality at home would continue.
The U.S. and the U.N.
The San Francisco Conference which founded the United Nations organization was looked upon by peoples around the world as the sunrise of a new day of peace and brotherhood. While hope ran high in most quarters, some of these same peoples were suspicious about its lofty ideological character. Humanitarian ideologies had made their appearance before, but there had always been a gap between theory and practice. Colored peoples and other minorities around the world observed the San Francisco Conference with hope mixed with caution. They wanted to see whether it was mere ideological rhetoric which would salve the consciences of the exploiters and dull the senses of the exploited, or whether, perhaps, its aims might spring from genuine conviction and become established in a framework which would be fully implemented.
The U.N. was to be more sweeping in its goals and programs than the League had been, and it was hoped that it would have more power to carry out its decisions. Its very initials signified that the peoples of the world were to be one people bound together in brotherhood, freedom, and equality. This should have meant the end of imperialistic exploitation as well as the end of minority persecution. The Afro-American community wondered if the U.N. would apply these principles to them. Many skeptics suggested that the U. S. initiative in founding the U.N. was only part of a plan to create a world image which would help America in her new role as a world leader.
Several Afro-Americans were accredited as official observers at the San Francisco Conference. Their number included Mrs. Mary McLeod Bethune, Dr. Mordecai W. Johnson of Howard University, W. E. B. DuBois and Walter White, both of the N.A.A.C.P. Ralph Bunche was an official member of the American staff. There were also a large number of Negro journalists, and the conference was widely covered in the Negro press. Once the U.N. was organized and in operation, several other Afro-Americans worked for it in a number of ways. While some held diplomatic posts, others used their specific scientific and scholarly skills to help various branches of the U.N. They were particularly interested in the departments concerned with the treatment of colonial nations and with the various scientific organizations involved in helping underdeveloped countries.
The United Nations Charter defended universal human rights more clearly than any previous political document in world history. The Charter proclaimed human rights and freedom for all without respect to "race, sex, language or religion." Minority groups were particularly interested in the work of UNESCO which, among other things, studied the nature of prejudice and racism and tried to develop programs to eradicate these evils. The U.N. also formed a Human Rights Commission, and Afro-Americans expected that whatever action the U.N. took to support human rights throughout the world would also have an impact on their situation.
The first test came in 1946 when India charged South Africa with practicing racial discrimination against Indian nationals and their descendants who were living within South Africa. Minority groups throughout the world eagerly waited to see what, if anything, the U.N. would do. When a resolution was passed by a two-thirds majority, charging South Africa with the violation of human rights, and requiring it to report back on what steps had been taken to alter the situation, religious and national minorities were overjoyed. However, the enthusiasm of Afro-Americans was dampened by the fact that both the United States and Britain had voted against the resolution. While posing as the leaders of democracy and humanitarianism, they seemed more concerned with protecting their sovereign rights as nations against similar future charges which might impinge on their sovereignty, than they were with protecting the human rights of oppressed peoples.
The attitude which the U. S. Government took towards human rights sheds considerable light on the internal conflict concerning race within America itself. The U. S. led the fight at the U.N. for the approval of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet the American government has been reluctant to support the inclusion of specific economic and social rights in a draft treaty. The U.N. had endeavored to write a draft treaty which its member nations would sign and which would be binding on them. If the U. S. Senate had ratified such a document, its terms presumably would then be binding on the entire nation. At that time, senators from the Southern states were still staunchly defending legal segregation and disfranchisement of Afro-Americans. The government found itself supporting human rights ideologically while backing down on them in practice.
As the Cold War deepened, the U. S. became increasingly sensitive about its world image. While fighting for world leadership, Russia and America each claimed that its way of life was based on the principles of brotherhood and humanitarianism. Each, in turn, tried to prove to the rest of the world that its ideology was genuinely humane and democratic, while its opponent's ideology was, in reality, oppressive and dehumanizing. The communist bloc attacked the West for being purveyors of imperialism and racism. This forced the American government to face up to the discriminatory policies within the nation and, especially, to reexamine the legal discrimination existing within the Southern states. It was particularly embarrassing to the American ambassador to the United Nations to have to be berated by the Russian delegate concerning some unpleasant racial events which had happened somewhere in the South. The Federal Government had always followed a policy of "hands off," at least since the days of Hayes and the end of Reconstruction. Party politicians always opposed taking a strong federal stand against an established state policy within the South for fear of what would happen to that party within the South. Party unity had almost always been put above civil rights or justice.
However, these same party politicians could not ignore world opinion. Even from a narrow political point of view, a party could not permit the nation's world image to become tarnished, lest the electorate become dissatisfied. World leadership brought with it the need to be concerned with world opinion. Racism was no longer a local or state question. In fact, as W. E. B. DuBois had predicted, it had become the leading question of the twentieth century. At the end of the Second World War, Walter White, then executive director of the N.A.A.C.P., toured Europe and drew conclusions concerning the effect of the war and the course of the future. In his book Rising Wind, White demonstrated a relationship between the oppressed peoples of the world, racism, and imperialism. Though a relative moderate, White warned of a future worldwide racial conflict.
As the war was drawing to an end in the Pacific theater, the Japanese cautioned Asiatics about American racial oppression. What they called attention to was that the British dominated colored peoples in Africa and Asia and that the Americans persecuted their racial minority at home. White believed that this propaganda was taking root in the hearts of many Asiatics. He also believed that most of Asia would slide into the Russian camp, thereby preparing the way for a third world conflict. He contended that Britain and America had a choice between ending their policies of racial superiority and preparing for the next war.
In 1948 A. Philip Randolph began to advocate civil disobedience on the part of Afro-Americans, rather than ever again allowing themselves to be part of a segregated army. He recommended that they refuse to serve in future wars, and the idea received widespread attention. In a Senate comittee inquiry, Senator Wayne Morse from Oregon suggested to him that such civil disobedience in wartime could well be viewed as treason and not merely as civil disobedience. Clearly, Randolph's suggestion had hit a sensitive nerve. A nation which had been skeptical about permitting Afro-Americans in its armed forces was now becoming extremely uneasy at the thought that Afro-Americans might not want to serve. In the same year President Truman appointed a commission to study race relations in the military. Its report, Freedom to Serve, recommended that the Armed Forces open up all jobs regardless of race, color, or creed. As a result, the military began to move slowly in the direction of integration. However, when the communists invaded South Korea, the issue quickly came to a head. Unless integration was achieved, America would have to fight communists and colored Asiatics with a segregated army and would have to do it in the name of the United Nations.
In 1950 General Matthew Ridgway began to accelerate integration in the forces under his command. He did this partly as a matter of philosophy and partly from necessity. The Army needed the fullest and most efficient use of the few troops available in order to stem the flow of a much larger communist force into South Korea. This integration proceeded very well, and when he was put in charge of all forces in the Far East, he asked the Defense Department for permission to integrate all of the forces in the area. Within three months, the extent of integration in the Armed Forces jumped from nine percent to thirty percent. While Afro-Americans were pleased, they were also convinced that it had been done more from the pressure of world opinion than from a genuine humanitarian conscience.
During this period, the Federal Government took a more active role in several other ways in regard to improving race relations. How much of this action sprang from internal motivation and how much resulted from the pressure of world opinion is a matter of conjecture. In any case, the Truman Administration deliberately created an atmosphere favorable to changing race relations within America. In 1946 Truman appointed a comittee on civil rights which, after intensive study, published its report, To Secure These Rights.
The report set forth that the Federal Government had the duty to act in order to safeguard civil rights when local or state governments either could not or did not take such action. The comittee recommended enlarging the size and powers of the civil rights section of the Justice Department and also recommended that the F.B.I. increase its civil rights activity. The threat of federal intervention in state racial policies led to a revolt by several Southern Senators within the Democratic Party. In 1948 they formed the Dixiecrat Party and refused to support many of the policies and candidates of the Democratic Party. Truman also appointed a comittee to study higher education in America, and its report recommended an end to discrimination in colleges and universities. In 1948 Truman issued an executive order aimed at achieving fair employment within government service. He also continued the practice of attacking discrimination within industries working under government contracts. In 1948 the Supreme Court declared that restrictive covenants in housing were unconstitutional. Many state and local governments across the country also took action against discrimination in the fields of housing and employment.
Thus the principles underlying the United Nations and the Declaration of Human Rights had the effect of stirring democratic and humanitarian ideals in many parts of white America. Sensitivity to world opinion had made all branches of the Federal Government more willing to act on racial matters. Although most Americans would have insisted that these activities sprang from a genuine concern for racial justice, Afro-Americans were convinced that it had been the pressure of world opinion which had turned these humanitarian convictions into action.
CHAPTER 11
Civil Rights and Civil Disobedience
Schools and Courts
THE democratic idealism which had been fostered by the Second World War and the Cold War made many American citizens increasingly uncomfortable about the legal support given to racism in the Southern states. A wide variety of organizations--labor unions, religious and fraternal societies as well as groups specifically concerned with attacking racism--became increasingly active in trying to put democratic ideals into practice. America's competition with communism in gaining world leadership, made many Americans feel that it was necessary to prove, once and for all, the superiority of the American way of life. However, there was a growing concerted effort to destroy legal segregation because it was a serious blemish on this democratic image.
Believing strongly in the democratic process as these groups did, this attack was mounted within the framework of the legal system. The N.A.A.C.P. came to be the cutting edge of the campaign. In particular, the Legal Defense Fund of the N.A.A.C.P. and the small group of intelligent, dedicated Negro lawyers whom it financed, spearheaded the attack. It was clear that the legal system itself supported the position of Southern racists. Most Afro-Americans in the South could not vote, and Southern senators were in a position to sabotage any attempt to change the system through the legislative process. They were chosen through a white electorate, and Afro-Americans in the South could do little about that. Even if a favorable majority in Congress stemming from the North and West could be established, the one-party system in the South meant that Southern Senators were continually reelected and, therefore, had Congressional seniority. Consequently, they controlled most of the comittees and were thereby in virtual control of the legislative process itself.
Although the courts had usually interpreted the Constitution so as to support segregation, much of that document's language supported democratic and equalitarian principles. If the courts could be persuaded to understand the Constitution differently, legal segregation might well be found to be unconstitutional. The judicial system to some degree reacts to popular pressure and events, and it too was influenced by the need to justify American democracy to the rest of the world.
The N.A.A.C.P. had already mounted a broad, concerted attack against legal segregation before the Second World War. When Walter White defeated W. E. B. DuBois in a struggle for leadership, he confirmed the Association's emphasis on striving for an integrated society. The number of white and middle-class black supporters of the N.A.A.C.P. grew, and its treasury prospered. The Association chose to concentrate its efforts on a gradual, relentless attack against segregation through the courts. Believing that education was an all-important factor in society, it decided that school desegregation should become the major target.
Thurgood Marshall was the master strategist in the school desegregation campaign. He decided that the attack should be a slow, indirect one. Most Southern school systems, although they had developed two separate institutions, had not established separate graduate and professional facilities for Negroes. Marshall decided to attack the school question on the graduate, professional, and law-school level. First, Southerners did not seem as frightened about racial mixing on the graduate school level, and second, the cost of developing separate graduate and professional schools for a handful of Negro students, it was reasoned, would be prohibitive.
In 1938, in Gaines v. Canada, the Supreme Court declared that Missouri's failure to admit a Negro, Lloyd Gaines, to the state law school, when the state did not have a comparable "separate but equal" institution for Negroes, constituted a violation of the "equal-protection" clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Missouri wanted to solve the problem by paying the student's tuition in an integrated Northern law school, but the Court refused to accept that as a solution. It argued that the state had already created a privilege for whites which it was denying to Negroes. This, in itself, was a Constitutional violation.
A decade passed without any further action. In 1948, the Supreme Court attacked Oklahoma for its failure to permit a Negro to enroll in its state law school. The Oklahoma Board of Regents, then, decided to admit Negroes to any course of study not provided for by the state college for Negroes. This was a considerable step forward.
In 1950, in Sweatt v. Painter, the Supreme Court condemned an attempt by the state of Texas to establish a special law school overnight in which it could enroll a Negro applicant. The Court said that this fly-by-night institution was not equal, and it insisted that an equal institution must include equal faculty, equal library, and equal prestige. It argued that part of an equal degree was the prestige conferred on the graduate by the status of that institution. To be equal, the Court reasoned, the separate school must carry an equal degree of professional status. It also decided, in McLaurin v. Oklahama Regents, that it was unconstitutional for a university to segregate a Negro student within its premises. Oklahoma had roped off part of its university's classrooms, library, and dining room as a means of accommodating a graduate student in the School of Education. The Court argued that this handicapped a student in his pursuit of learning and that part of a graduate education included the ability to engage in open discussion with other students.
These decisions, in essence, meant that the South was compelled to integrate graduate and professional schools. In themselves, they did not constitute an attack on segregated education. They merely represented an attempt by the courts to guarantee that separate education was, in fact, equal education. Southern states, recognizing the trend of events, began crash programs to build and upgrade their Negro school systems. At this point, the N.A.A.C.P. was not certain whether to push on for total desegregation or whether temporarily to settle for quality education. However, the stubbornness of some Southern school boards in refusing to upgrade Negro schools forced the N.A.A.C.P. lawyers into their decision to make an outright attack on legal segregation.
In 1950 N.A.A.C.P. lawyers initiated a series of suits around the country attacking the quality of education in primary and secondary schools. Three of these suits--Topeka, Kansas, Clarendon County, South Carolina, and Prince Edward County, Virginia--became involved in the 1954 Supreme Court desegregation decision. The N.A.A.C.P. charged that these schools, besides being inferior, were a violation of the "equal-protection" clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. All of the suits, as had been expected, were defeated in the local courts. However, they were appealed.
Though the Supreme Court had allowed the decision made in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 to stand, the Court was moving closer to a reexamination of the "separate but equal" clause. That decision had argued that separate facilities, if they were equal, did not violate a citizen's right to equal protection under the law. It had become the cornerstone on which a whole dual society had been built. The Court had made no attempt, however, to guarantee that these separate institutions would be equal, and clearly they were not. At mid-century, the Court began by challenging this dual system at points of blatant and obvious inequity. By 1950 in Sweatt v. Painter, the Court was attacking subtle inequalities such as that of institutional prestige. The next step was for the Court to ask whether in fact separate institutions could ever be equal. In other words, the question was whether segregation, in itself, constituted inequality and was an infringement on a citizen's rights.
On May 17, 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education of the City of Topeka, the Supreme Court declared that school segregation was unconstitutional and that the "separate but equal" doctrine, which the Court itself had maintained for half a century, was also unconstitutional. Although the decision referred directly only to school segregation, in striking down the "separate but equal" doctrine, the Supreme Court implied that all legal segregation was unconstitutional. It contended that to separate children from other children of similar age and qualifications purely on the grounds of race generated feelings of inferiority in those children. It argued that the segregation of white and colored children in schools had a detrimental effect on the colored children. Further, the Court insisted that the damaging impact of segregation was greater when it had the sanction of law. It pointed out that segregation was usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the colored child. This resulted in a crippling psychological effect on his ability to learn by undermining his self-confidence and motivation. Therefore, segregation with the sanction of law deprived the child of equal education, and the Court concluded that it was a violation of the "equal-protection" clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Southern whites were outraged, and they dubbed May 17 as "Black Monday." Ninety Southern Congressmen issued the "Southern Manifesto" condemning the Court decision as a usurpation of state powers. They said that the Court, instead of interpreting the law, was trying to legislate. Southern states resurrected the old doctrine of interposition which they had used against the Federal Government preceding the Civil War. Several state legislatures passed resolutions stating that the Federal Government did not have the power to prohibit segregation. Other Southerners resorted to a whole battery of tactics. The Ku Klux Klan was revived along with a host of new groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of White People. The White Citizens' councils spearheaded the resistance movement. Various forms of violence and intimidation became common. Bombings, beatings, and murders increased sharply all across the South. Outspoken proponents of desegregation were harassed in other ways as well. They lost their jobs, their banks called in their mortgages, and creditors of all kinds came to collect their debts.
In 1955 the Supreme Court declared that its desegregation decision should be carried out "with all deliberate speed." Southern school districts, however, became experts in tactics of avoiding or delaying compliance. It began to appear that each school board would have to be compelled to admit each individual Negro student. Even then, some officials said that they would never comply. They persisted in arguing that the Court had overstepped its constitutional functions. Again, the constitutional question of federal vs. state authority had come to a head just as it had a century earlier.
In 1957, the governor of Arkansas openly opposed a court decision ordering the integration of the Central High School in Little Rock. When federal marshals were sent to carry out the order, Little Rock citizens were in no mood to stand idly by and watch. Both the citizens and the local officials were united in opposing federal authority. Everyone watched to see what President Eisenhower would do in the face of this challenge. On the one hand, Eisenhower and the Republicans had condemned the increasing centralization of power in the federal government. On the other hand, Eisenhower had been a general who had been accustomed to having his subordinates carry out his orders. Eisenhower, the general, moved with decisiveness and sent troops into Little Rock to enforce the law. Although Eisenhower himself had said that men's hearts could not be changed by legislation, he diligently fulfilled his functions as the head of the Executive Branch of the government. Surprisingly enough, it was also under his administration that Congress passed the first Civil Rights Act since 1875. Although the bill was rather weak, it was an admission that the Federal government had an obligation to guarantee civil rights to individual citizens and to act on their behalf when state and local governments did not. This was a reversal of the traditional "hands off" position.
It cannot be stated with certainty that these events were merely calculated responses to the changing world situation, but the Cold War and the emergence of an independent Africa were nevertheless realities which could not be overlooked. Ghana had gained its status as an independent nation. It had also sought and gained admission to the United Nations in 1957, and in that same year, opened an embassy in Washington. African diplomats, traveling through the United States, were outraged whenever they were confronted by humiliations which were the consequence of segregation. Communist leaders, at the same time, took great pleasure in pointing out to these Africans the mistreatments of Afro-Americans within the United States. Although many Southern whites continued to insist that their freedom to maintain a separate society apart from that of the blacks was an essential part of democracy as they understood it, most Americans found legal segregation to be embarrassing in the face of America's claim to the democratic leadership of the world. Afro-Americans exploited the situation in order to involve the Federal Government in their desegregation campaign.
The Civil Rights Movement
On December 1, 1955, an obscure black woman, Mrs. Rosa Parks, was riding home on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. As the bus gradually filled up with passengers, a white man demanded that she give him her seat and that she stand near the rear of the bus. Mrs. Parks, who did not have the reputation of being a troublemaker or a revolutionary, said that she was tired and that her feet were tired. The white man protested to the bus driver. When the driver also demanded that she move, she refused. Then, the driver summoned a policeman, and Mrs. Parks was arrested.
None of this was unusual. Daily, all across the South, black women surrendered their seats to demanding whites. Although most of them did it without complaint, the arrest of an obstructionist was entirely within the framework of local laws and in itself was not a noteworthy event. However, the arrest of Mrs. Parks touched off a chain reaction within Montgomery's Afro-American community. If she had been a troublemaker, the community might have thought that she had only received what she deserved. On the contrary, its citizens viewed her as an innocent, hardworking woman who had been mistreated. Her humiliation became their own.
Spontaneous protest meetings occurred all across Montgomery, and the idea of retaliating against the entire system by conducting a bus boycott took hold. Almost immediately, the call for a black boycott of Montgomery buses spread throughout the community, and car pools were quickly organized to help people in getting to and from their employment. Whites refused to believe that the black community could either organize or sustain such a campaign. Nevertheless, Montgomery buses were running half empty and all white.
The man chosen to lead the Montgomery bus boycott was a young Baptist minister named Martin Luther King, Jr. He and ninety others were indicted under the provisions of an anti-union law which made it illegal to conspire to obstruct the operation of a business. King and several others were found guilty, but they appealed their case. As the boycott dragged on month after month, Montgomery gained national prominence through the mass media, and King quickly gained a national reputation. When the bus company was finally compelled to capitulate and to drop its policy of segregated seating, King had become a national hero. Mass resistance, including some forms of civil disobedience, became popular as the best way to achieve racial change.
King had already given considerable thought to the question of how best to achieve social change, and, more important, to do it within the framework of moral law. His experiences with direct action techniques in Montgomery helped him to confirm and to further elaborate his thinking. His philosophy had been influenced by the writings of Henry Thoreau and Mahatma Gandhi with the result that he developed an ideology of nonviolent resistance. Like Gandhi, King wanted to make clear that nonviolence was not the same as nonresistance. Both maintained that if it should come to a choice between submission and violence, violence was to be preferred. Both stressed that nonviolent resistance was not to be an excuse for cowardice. To the contrary, nonviolent resistance was the way of the strong. It meant the willingness to accept suffering but not the intention to inflict it.
King believed in nonviolent resistance both as a tactic and as a philosophy--both as means and end:
"... the nonviolent approach does something to the hearts and souls of those comitted to it. It gives them new self-respect. It calls up resources of strength and courage that they did not know they had. Finally, it so stirs the conscience of the opponent that reconciliation becomes a reality."
On the philosophical level, King said that nonviolent resistance was the key to building a new world. Throughout history, man had met violence with violence and hate with hate. He believed that only nonviolence and love could break this eternal cycle of revenge and retaliation. It was his hope that the Negro, through utilizing the philosophy of nonviolent resistance, could help to bring about the birth of a new day. To King, nonviolent resistance implied that the resister must love his enemy: "When we allow the spark of revenge in our souls to flame up in hate toward our enemies, Jesus teaches, 'Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.'"
To him, love, in the most basic and Christian sense, did not require that the resister had to feel a surge of spontaneous sentiment, but it did mean that he had made a deep and sincere commitment to the other person's best interest. From this point of view, helping to free a racist from the shackles of his own prejudice was construed to be in his best interest and, therefore, a loving act. The Biblical injunction "Love your neighbor as yourself" meant being as concerned for his well-being as for your own. King believed that, if injustice could be attacked and overcome through a policy of nonviolent resistance, it would then lead to the creation of the "beloved community." This philosophy would become the means of reconciliation and, to put it in religious terms, would be redemptive.
King made it clear that nonviolent resistance was concerned with morality and justice and not merely with obtaining specific goals. When laws, themselves, were unjust, nonviolent resistance could engage in civil disobedience as a means of challenging those laws. Civil disobedience was not to be understood merely as law-breaking. Instead, King said that it was based in a belief in law and also in a belief in the necessity to obey the law. However, when a particular law was grossly unjust, that unjust law itself endangered society's respect for law in general. If the unjust law could not be changed through normal legal channels, deliberate breaking of that specific law might be justified. Because the person engaging in civil disobedience did believe in the value of law, he would break the unjust law openly, and he would willingly accept the consequences for breaking it. He would participate in law-breaking and accept its penalty as a means of drawing the attention of the community to the immorality of that specific law.
Largely inspired by the successful Montgomery bus boycott, mass protests and other direct action techniques began to spread rapidly throughout the South and even into the North. King was concerned that those using the technique should fully understand its meaning and value. Otherwise, he feared that it might be used carelessly and thereby distort its moral and redemptive quality. Therefore, King and a number of his supporters formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference as an organization to spread these ideas and to provide help to any community which became involved in massive, nonviolent resistance protests.
On February 1, 1960, four Negro students from the Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro, North Carolina, entered a Woolworth's variety store and purchased several items. Then, they sat down at its lunch counter, which served whites only. When they were refused service, they took out their textbooks and began to do their homework. This protest immediately made local news. The next day, they were joined by a large number of fellow students.
In a matter of weeks, student sit-ins were occurring at segregated lunch counters all across the South. College and high school students by the thousands joined the Civil Rights Movement. These students felt the need to form their own organization to mobilize and facilitate the spontaneous demonstrations which were springing up everywhere. This resulted in the formation of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Comittee. The S.C.L.C. and S.N.C.C. came to be the leading organizations in the Southern states. C.O.R.E.--Congress of Racial Equality--carried on the militant side of the struggle in Northern urban centers, and it involved many Northern liberals in crusades to help the movement in the South.
The N.A.A.C.P. tended to be uncomfortable with the new direct action techniques and preferred more traditional lobbying and legal tactics. It did get involved on a massive scale in giving legal aid to the thousands of demonstrators who were arrested for various legal infractions such as marching without a parade permit, disturbing the peace, and for trespassing. To some extent, the N.A.A.C.P. resented the fact that it had to carry the financial burden for the legal actions resulting from these mass protests, while the other organizations received all the publicity and most of the financial aid inspired by that publicity.
By the time the 1960 Presidential election approached, both political parties had become aware that the racial issue could not be ignored. In several Northern states, Afro-Americans held the balance of power in close elections. Also, by that year, over a million Afro-Americans had become eligible to vote in the Southern states. John F. Kennedy, the Democratic candidate, easily out-maneuvered his Republican opponent, Richard M. Nixon, in the search for Afro-American votes. Kennedy had projected an image of aggressive idealism which captured the imagination of white liberals and of Afro-Americans.
The move which guaranteed the support of most Afro-Americans for Kennedy came in October, a mere three weeks before the election. Martin Luther King, Jr., and several other Negroes had been arrested in Atlanta, Georgia, for staging a sit-in at a department store restaurant. While the others were released, King was sentenced to four months at hard labor. Kennedy immediately telephoned his sympathy to Mrs. King. Meanwhile, his brother and campaign manager, Robert Kennedy, telephoned the judge who had sentenced him and pleaded for his release. The next day, King was freed. The news was carefully and systematically spread throughout the entire Afro-American community. When Kennedy defeated Nixon in November, Afro-Americans believed that their vote had been the deciding factor in the close victory.
Two months after Kennedy took office, C.O.R.E., under the leadership of James Farmer, began an intensive campaign, involving "freedom rides." Scores ind scores of whites and blacks were recruited from Northern cities and sent throughout the South to test the state of desegregation of travel facilities as well as of waiting rooms and restaurants. As the campaign reached a climax, Attorney General Robert Kennedy became annoyed with its intensity. Apparently, he had hoped that the direct actionists would wait for the new Administration to take the lead in Civil Rights. Instead, they chose to try to make the new Administration live up to the image which it had projected. Kennedy requested a cooling-off period, but the freedom riders would not listen. But when the freedom riders were attacked in Montgomery, Alabama, without receiving adequate local police protection, Kennedy sent six hundred federal marshals to escort them on the rest of their pilgrimage.
The year 1963 was a target date for the Civil Rights Movement. It was the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Movement adopted the motto, "free in '63." In the spring, the S.C.L.C. spearheaded a massive campaign in Birmingham for desegregation and fair employment. Marches occurred almost daily. The marchers maintained their nonviolent tactics in the face of many arrests and much intimidation. In May, when the police resorted to the use of dogs and high-pressure water hoses, the nation and the world were shocked, Sympathy demonstrations occurred in dozens of cities all across the country, and expressions of indignation resounded from all around the world. In June, the head of Mississippi's N.A.A.C.P., Medgar Evers, was shot in the back outside his home and killed. Scores of sympathy demonstrations again reverberated throughout the country. Violence in the South was on the increase.
Although President Kennedy had intended to use his executive authority as his main weapon in securing civil rights, the mounting pressure on both sides of the conflict forced him to take more drastic action, and he submitted a Civil Rights Bill to Congress. Opponents of the Bill were particularly perturbed by the section which sought to guarantee the end of discrimination in all kinds of public accommodations--stores, restaurants, hotels, motels, etc. They claimed that this was an invasion of the owners' property rights. It soon became clear that the Bill would be entangled in a gigantic Congressional debate for months. Civil Rights supporters looked for new techniques which would bring added pressure on Congress. Again, the idea of a March on Washington was proposed, and this time it was carried through. The demonstration on August 28, 1963, was larger than any previous one in the history of the capital. At least a quarter of a million blacks and whites, from all over America, representing a wide spectrum of religious, labor, and civil rights organizations, flooded into Washington.
The occasion was peaceful and orderly. The marchers exuded an aura of interracial love and brotherhood. The emotional impact on the participants was almost that of a religious pilgrimage. President Kennedy, instead of trying to block the march as demanded by many Congressional leaders, aided it by providing security forces, and he also met Personally with a delegation of its leaders. The high point of the demonstration was Martin Luther King's famous speech:
"Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.
"Now, I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'
"I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
"I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the people's injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and Justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
"This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with--with this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope."
In November, Congressional debate on the Civil Rights Bill was still continuing, but the President had now made the passage of the Civil Rights Bill one of the most urgent goals of his Administration. But on the 22nd of November, John F. Kennedy was gunned down in the Presidential limousine in Dallas, Texas. The nation and the world were struck dumb with disbelief. Even those who had disliked his politics were horrified at the assassination of a President in a democratic state. His supporters felt that they had lost a friend as well as a leader. In fact many regarded Kennedy as a savior.
The sense of shock caused despair and gloom. The fact that his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, was a Southerner led most civil rights supporters to feel that there would be a reversal of federal policies on the racial question. However, Johnson immediately tried to reassure the nation that his intention was to carry on with the unfinished business of the Kennedy era. By the time the Bill passed in the spring of 1964, civil rights supporters felt that Johnson was as dependable an ally as Kennedy had been. Instead of the vehement opposition to the public accommodations provision of the Bill which had been expected, compliance was fairly wide-spread and came with relatively little opposition.
It soon became clear, however, that the passage of the Civil Rights Act was not the victory which would end the racial conflict. In fact, violence on both sides escalated. A Washington, D. C., Negro educator, Lemuel Penn, was gunned down by snipers as he drove through Georgia on his way home from a training session for reserve officers. Two Klansmen were charged, but they were acquitted. In Philadelphia, Mississippi, three civil rights workers--two white and one black--disappeared. The youths were later found brutally murdered. In spite of national protests, local justice was not forthcoming.
At the same time, forewarnings of anger and violence had begun to rumble in many Afro-American communities across the land. In spite of the legislative victories, most ghetto Negroes found that their daily lives had not changed. In fact, the economic gap between blacks and whites had tended to increase as whites received the benefits of prosperity in larger portions than did the blacks. Also, many ghetto residents, whose lives were surrounded with crime and violence, were further angered when they watched the evening news showing their Southern brothers kicked and clubbed by sheriffs. These ghetto residents had not been schooled in the tactics of nonviolent resistance. In the summer of 1964, race riots occurred in Harlem and Rochester, N.Y., as well as in several cities in New Jersey.
In the spring of 1965, Selma, Alabama, was the scene of a concentrated voter registration drive. The campaign was once again spearheaded by Martin Luther King and the S.C.L.C. During the demonstrations, a Black civil rights worker and a Northern Unitarian clergyman were both killed. Finally, a gigantic march was planned between Selma and the state capitol at Montgomery. State officials sought to prohibit the march. The U. S. District Judge at Montgomery, however, ordered officials to permit the march and to provide protection for the marchers. President Johnson federalized the Alabama National Guard and used it to guarantee the maintenance of law and order. When the procession reached the state capitol building, the demonstrators were addressed by two Afro-American Nobel Peace Prize winners. Ralph Bunche, who had received the award for mediating the Middle Eastern crisis, lamented the fact that he had to address an audience while standing under a Confederate flag. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who had just received the award himself for his work in nonviolent resistance, told the marchers to take heart because they were on the road to victory:
"We are on the move now. The burning of our churches will not deter us. We are on the move now. The bombing of our homes will not dissuade us. We are on the move now. The beating and killing of our clergymen and young people will not divert us. We are on the move now. The arrest and release of known murderers will not discourage us, We are on the move now.
"Like an idea whose time has come, not even the marching of mighty armies can halt us. We are moving to the land of freedom.
"Let us therefore continue our triumph and march to the realization of the American dream. Let us march on segregated housing, until every ghetto of social and economic depression dissolves and Negroes and whites live side by side in decent, safe and sanitary housing.
"Let us march on segregated schools until every vestige of a segregated and inferior education becomes a thing of the past and Negroes and whites study side by side in the socially healing context of the classroom.
"Let us march on poverty, until no American parent has to skip a meal so that their children may march on poverty, until no starved man walks the streets of our cities and towns in search of jobs that do not exist.
"Let us march on ballot boxes, march on ballot boxes until race baiters disappear from the political arena. Let us march on ballot boxes until the Wallaces of our nation tremble away in silence.
"Let us march on ballot boxes, until we send to our city councils, state legislatures, and the United States Congress men who will not fear to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with their God. Let us march on ballot boxes until all over Alabama God's children will be able to walk the earth in decency and honor.
"For all of us today the battle is in our hands. The road ahead is not altogether a smooth one. There are no broad highways to lead us easily and inevitably to quick solutions. We must keep going."
Later that evening, a white woman from Detroit was shot and killed on the highway between Montgomery and Selma as she was ferrying marchers back home.
President Johnson sent a new voting rights bill to Congress which gave sweeping powers to the Attorney General's office allowing it to send federal registrars into localities to register voters when local officials were either unable or unwilling to do so. In the course of a television appearance in which Johnson announced this legislation and in which he expressed his own indignation at the events in Selma and Montgomery, he acknowledged the impact of demonstrations in pushing both the country and the Congress into taking positive action to remedy injustices. He implied that, while he did not always approve of the methods used, the demonstrators had done a positive service for justice and for the country. He promised to see the fight through to the end, and he said that it was the obligation of all good men to see that the battle was fought in the courts and through the legislative process rather than forcing it into the streets. He ended his speech by quoting the lead line from the popular civil rights hymn, "We Shall Overcome."
By 1965, the Federal Government had enacted legislation guaranteeing almost all the citizenship rights of America to Negroes and had also provided mechanisms with which to enforce this legislation. Nevertheless, the passage of a bill in Washington did not immediately secure the same right in Selma, Montgomery, or in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Each right, so it seemed, had to be fought for and won over and over again in almost each locality. Although discrimination continued and even seemed to intensify at times, it no longer carried with it the force of law. The Civil Rights Movement had, no matter what its critics said of it, accomplished one sweeping victory--the destruction of legal segregation in the United States.
CHAPTER 12
The Black Revolt
Civil Disorders
The smoldering tensions and frustrations which lay just below the surface in the Afro-American community exploded into a racial holocaust on August 11, 1965, in Watts--a black ghetto just outside of Los Angeles. When the smoke finally subsided several days later, more than thirty people were dead, hundreds had been injured, and almost four thousand had been arrested. Property damage ran into the millions.
The nation was shocked. The mass communications media tended to exaggerate the amount of damage done and also conjured up visions, in the mind of white America, of organized black gangs deliberately and systematically attacking white people. Many felt that it had been the worst racial outbreak in American history. In fact, it was not. The 1943 riot in Detroit and the 1919 riot in Chicago had both been more violent. The 1917 race riots in East St. Louis, Illinois, had outdone the Watts outburst in terms of the amount of personal injury. The violence in most previous riots had been inflicted by whites against blacks, and perhaps this was why white America did not remember them very clearly. The violence in Watts, though not directed against white persons as many believed, was still accomplished by blacks and aimed against white-owned property. White Americans were confused because they felt they had given "them" so much. Whites could not understand why blacks were not thankful instead of being angry.
In spite of the rumors that the riot was the result of conspiratorial planning, the activities of the rioters and of the law enforcement units displayed a crazy, unreal quality as the riot unfolded. It began with a rather routine arrest for drunken driving. Marquette Frye, a young black, was stopped by a white motorcycle officer and asked to take a standard sobriety test. In the course of arresting Frye, along with his brother and mother who were both objecting to the police action, the officers resorted to more force than many of the bystanders thought was necessary. The spectators became transformed into a hostile mob. As the police cars departed, youths began to pelt the vehicles with rocks and bottles. They continued to harass other traffic passing through the area. For a time, the police stayed outside the area, hoping that it would cool down. Then, believing that it was time to restore order, a line of police charged down the street clearing the mob. The police clubbed and beat anyone who did not get out of the way. The guilty usually ran the fastest, and the innocent and the physically disabled received most of the punishment. Instead of clearing the mob, the police charge only served to further anger the bystanders.
The rage of the black ghetto had been accumulating against all the symbols of oppression. The police, of course, were the most obvious and visible manifestation of this power, and in a riot they were one of the most convenient targets for the rioters. Newsmen and firemen also became victims of rock and bottle throwing. White-owned stores throughout the ghettoes formed another target for this anger. Before long, rioters were breaking into stores and carrying off everything from beer to television sets and clothing. Breaking and looting was shortly followed by burning. The center of the action was soon nicknamed "Charcoal Alley."
After a couple of days when the riot continued to grow, Los Angeles officials began to consider calling in the National Guard. Police Chief Parker did not know that it was necessary for him to contact the Governor's office and ask the Governor to call out the Guard. Unfortunately, Governor Brown was in Greece. The Lieutenant Governor was afraid to make such an important decision on his own initiative. Finally, Los Angeles officials phoned Governor Brown in Athens, and he gave his authority for calling out the Guard.
By the time the Guard arrived, all of Watts was covered with billowing clouds of smoke. The looting and burning were no longer confined to roving gangs of youths. Angry adults, who had previously only urged them on, had become intoxicated by the mood of destruction. People of all ages, many of whom had had no previous police record, began to join. The pressure chamber had blown its valve and was now letting off steam. Watts abandoned itself to an emotional orgy.
The National Guard had not been adequately trained to handle civil disorders. It also came with a point of view which was unsuited to a civilian outburst. They had been trained to work against an enemy, and had a tendency to interpret every action in this way and to view all the residents of Watts as enemies. When two drunks in a car refused to stop at a Guard roadblock and ran into a line of soldiers, the Guard interpreted it as a deliberate and malicious suicide attack. The Guard was convinced that they were being personally threatened, and the officers issued live ammunition to all the men.
By the end of the riot, the Guard had fired thousands of rounds of ammunition. The press portrayed Watts as an armed camp with scores of black snipers systematically trying to pick off the police and the Guard. In retrospect, both the police and the Guard came to believe that most of the snipers had really been the police and the Guardsmen unknowingly shooting at each other. When all of the evidence was examined in the calm light of day, very little of it pointed to the existence of snipers. Gradually, the Guard gained confidence in itself and in the situation. The more that it acted in calm and deliberation, the more quickly peace was restored to the area. Finally, eleven days after the Frye arrest the last members of the Guard withdrew, and the next day the police returned to normal duty.
In the light of the victories of the Civil Rights Movement, whites were bewildered by the anger which exploded from the black ghetto. They thought of their concessions to blacks as gifts from a generous heart. Blacks, to the contrary, viewed these concessions as the tardy surrender of rights which should have been theirs all along. Moreover, the effects of the civil rights victories had been largely limited to the Deep South and almost entirely to changes in legal status. The day-to-day realities of education, housing, employment, and social degradation had hardly been touched. Finally, life in an urban ghetto, though lacking the humiliation of legal segregation, had brought another harsh reality into Afro-American life. Survival for the individual as well as for the family came under fresh stress in urban slum situations. This had also been true for immigrant groups from Europe. Urban slum conditions created tremendous economic, social, and psychological strains. Ghetto life added a new dimension of social disorganization to an already oppressed community. The anonymity of life in large urban centers tended to remove many of the social constraints to individual behavior. Crime and delinquency increased. Actually, America had been deluded by the Civil Rights Movement into thinking that genuine changes were taking place for most Afro-Americans. Watts became a living proclamation that this was not true.
Early in 1967, violence began to reverberate throughout the ghettoes all across the nation. The earliest disturbances occurred at three Southern universities. Then, violence exploded in Tampa, Florida, in June. The following day, June 12, Cincinnati, Ohio, experienced a racial outburst. On June 17, violence began in Atlanta, Georgia.
The worst riots of that long hot summer occurred in Newark, New Jersey, and in Detroit, Michigan, during the month of July. Racial hostilities in Newark had been boiling for several months. In spite of the black majority in Newark, a predominantly white political machine still ran City Hall. Blacks were only given token recognition. The event which actually triggered the riot was, again, a relatively meaningless arrest. Bystanders assumed, probably mistakenly, that the black taxi driver who was being arrested, was also being beaten by the arresting officer. Bit by bit, again in a crazy pattern, the fires of frustration flared throughout the city. At almost the same time, ghetto violence began to rock several other northern New Jersey communities: Elizabeth, Englewood, Plainfield, and New Brunswick.
Looting and burning began to occur in Newark on a wide-scale basis. Before long, the Guard was called in, and the shooting increased. The chief of staff of the New Jersey National Guard testified that there had been too much shooting at the snipers. His opinion was that the Guard considered the situation as a military action. Newark's director of police offered the opinion that the Guard may have been shooting at the police with the police shooting back at the Guard. "I really don't believe," he said, "there was as much sniping as we thought."
By the time the shooting had ended, twenty-three people had been killed. Of these, one was a white detective, one was a white fireman, and twenty-one were Negroes. Of the twenty-one Negroes killed, six were women, two were children, and one was an elderly man seventy-three years old. The Kerner Report also stated, as did the New Jersey report on the riot, that there had been considerable evidence that the police and the Guard had been deliberately shooting into stores containing "soul brother" signs. Instead of merely quelling a riot or attacking rioters, some of them were apparently exploiting the situation to vent their own racial hatreds.
The violence in Detroit exploded on July 22. Again, it unfolded in an irrational, nightmarish fashion. The police had been making some rather routine raids on five illegal after-hours drinking spots. At the last target, they were overwhelmed to find eighty-two "in-mates." They needed over an hour in which to arrest and remove all of them. This created considerable local disturbance and attracted an ever-growing crowd of onlookers.
In Detroit, the black community had been upset for some time by what it believed had been a selective enforcement of certain laws aimed at them. Apparently, many of the observers believed that these raids were intended to harass the black community. Small-scale looting and violence began. After sputtering and flaring for a few hours, the riot began to grow and spread rapidly. By that night, the National Guard was activated.
By Monday morning, the Mayor and the Governor had asked for federal help. The Governor had the impression that, in order to secure it, he would have to declare a state of insurrection. He was further led to believe that such an action would mean that insurance companies would not pay for any damage. For this reason, he refused to act. All day, burning and looting continued and grew. Shooting became increasingly widespread, and the number of deaths began to soar rapidly. Finally, before midnight on Monday, President Johnson sent in federal troops on his own initiative.
When the federal troops arrived, they found the city full of fear. The Army believed that its first task was one of maintaining its own order and discipline. Second, it strove to establish a rapport between the troops and the citizens as a basis on which to build an atmosphere of calm, trust, and order. The soldiers provided coffee and sandwiches to the beleaguered residents, and an atmosphere of trust gradually developed.
It became clear that the mutual fear between the police and the citizens had only intensified the catastrophe. Lessons which had been learned two years earlier in Watts by the police and the Guard had not been applied in Detroit. Law enforcement officials again overreacted and used high-powered military weapons in a crowded civilian situation. This overreaction presented as much danger to innocent, law-abiding citizens as did the violence of the rioters. There had also been a tendency to treat the residents, en masse, as enemies and thereby to weld them into a hostile community. The federal troops demonstrated that a calm, deliberate, and open display of force was much more effective in restoring order than shooting at any frightening or suspicious target.
By the time order was restored to Detroit, forty-three people had been killed. Thirty-three were black, and ten were white. One Guardsman and one fireman were among the casualties. Some of the other white victims had been killed while they were engaged in looting. Damages were originally estimated at five hundred million dollars, but later estimates reduced the damage drastically.
Again, as in Newark, there was evidence of police brutality during the riot. The police were charged with brutality and murder in an incident which occurred at the Algiers Motel. After hearing that there had been a sniper in the building, the police riddled it with bullets. Then, they entered and searched it. In the course of questioning its inhabitants, three youths were shot and killed.
In turn, the police and the Guard accused the rioters of widespread sniping. Twenty-seven rioters were charged with sniping, but twenty-two of these charges were dropped at the preliminary hearings for lack of evidence. Later, one pleaded guilty to possessing an unregistered gun, and he received a suspended sentence.
President Johnson appointed a commission, headed by Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois to investigate the causes of the riots. In particular, he wished to ascertain whether any subversive or conspiratorial elements were involved. Although many did not like the report, particularly because of the blame it laid on the white community, it clearly proved that there had been no subversive or conspiratorial elements in these riots. The report warned that America was splitting into two nations: one black and one white. It believed that racism and hatred were growing deeper and that communication between the two communities was breaking down. The Commission made several recommendations for change in government, business, and society at large. These changes, however, would be very expensive. Government at all levels largely ignored the report. Liberals applauded it. Blacks felt that it was merely another report; they wanted action. Conservatives claimed that it was a prejudiced and unfair study.
In April of 1968, another rash of riots swept through the Afro-American community. This time there was a clear and obvious cause. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was visiting Memphis in support of a garbage workers' strike, was leaning over his motel's second-floor balcony railing talking to a colleague below when suddenly he was struck by a sniper's bullet and killed. Shock and outrage swept across the nation. Many Afro-Americans felt that they had been robbed of a friend as well as of their only hope for a better future.
Robert Kennedy took to the campaign trail for the 1968 Presidential election in order to bring justice to the poor, both black and white, and in order to reunite America behind a new sense of purpose and idealism. In June, after a rally in Los Angeles, he too was shot and killed. The nation was filled with horror and disbelief. Robert Kennedy had gained the trust of Afro-Americans more than almost any other white man of his generation. Violence seemed to reign supreme, and idealists, both black and white, were paralyzed by a feeling of futility.
Black Power
Even before the assassination of Martin Luther King, the Civil Rights Movement was disintegrating. Many believed that it was being killed by the riots. In fact, the Civil Rights Movement had already come under sharp attack both from within and from without. The urban riots of the sixties, instead of being the cause of its demise, were symptoms of the disease in the urban, Afro-American communities--a disease for which the Civil Rights Movement had not been able to effect a cure. In retrospect, it appears that there had always been voices from within the Afro-American community which had maintained that the Civil Rights Movement was not the panacea that many believed it to be. To the contrary, militant blacks maintained that the Civil Rights Movement itself was one of the primary causes of the urban riots. Stokeley Carmichael pointed out:
"Each time the people ... saw Martin Luther King get slapped, they became angry; when they saw four little black girls bombed to death, they were angrier; and when nothing happened, they were steaming. We had nothing to offer that they could see, except to go out and be beaten again. We helped to build their frustration."
As early as 1957, Robert F. Williams, then the N.A.A.C.P. leader in Monroe, North Carolina, concluded that nonviolence could not be looked upon as a cure-all for all the problems of the Afro-American community. In his opinion the right for an Afro-American to sit in the front of the bus in Montgomery was not so spectacular a victory:
"The Montgomery bus boycott was a victory--but it was limited. It did not raise the Negro standard of living; it did not mean better education for Negro children, it did not mean economic advances."
Williams compared the Montgomery boycott to an incident in Monroe:
"It's just like our own experience in Monroe when we integrated the library. I just called the chairman of the board in my county. I told him that I represented the NAACP, that we wanted to integrate the library, and that our own library had burned down. And he said, 'Well, I don't see any reason why you can't use the same library that our people use. It won't make any difference. And after all, I don't read anyway.'"
Williams claimed that a racist social system existed because the violence at the heart of that system went unchallenged. Violence was an integral part of the racial system, and it had not been introduced into the system by Afro-Americans.
"It is precisely this unchallenged violence that allows a racist social system to perpetuate itself. When people say that they are opposed to Negroes 'resorting to violence' what they really mean is that they are opposed to Negroes defending themselves and challenging the exclusive monopoly of violence practiced by white racists. We have shown in Monroe that with violence working both ways constituted law will be more inclined to keep the peace."
Williams urged Monroe Negroes to carry guns and other weapons and to defend themselves when attacked. He defended his position by invoking the teachings of Henry Thoreau who had also been used as an authority by the pacifists. Although Thoreau usually supported pacifism, according to Williams, Thoreau also believed that there were occasions which justified violence. Thoreau, who had defended John Brown's attack on Harpers Ferry, had made the statement that guns, for once, had been used for a righteous cause and were being held in righteous hands. In integrating his theory in regard to self-defense with the teachings of Thoreau, Williams was obviously attacking the philosophy of nonviolent resistance taught by Martin Luther King who also drew on Thoreau.
Even during the peak of the Civil Rights Movement, in the background there was a constant, irritating opposition. While the movement grew, the Black Muslims also grew. Not only did they challenge the tactics of nonviolent resistance, they disagreed totally with its goals. While Elijah Muhammed constantly opposed aggression, he did preach the need for self-defense. To him it was not necessary for a man to turn the other cheek when he was hit. He also ridiculed the Civil Rights goal of integration. Instead of losing themselves in white America, Muslims believed in finding their own identity and in maintaining a separate society. They claimed that blacks should not be ashamed of either their color or their heritage. They taught that the black man had had a history of which to be proud. The sense of self-acceptance and pride which they taught came as good news to ghetto residents who realized that they could never be assimilated into white, middle-class America.
With the conversion of Malcolm Little, better known as Malcolm X, the Muslims gained a dynamic speaker who did much to popularize and spread their teaching. Although the peculiar doctrines and puritanical practices of the Muslims prevented many from joining the movement, the number of its sympathizers grew rapidly. Malcolm X was able to appeal to ghetto residents in a way that Martin Luther King could not.
King, obviously, had had all the advantages of a middle-class home. Malcolm, however, had started at the bottom, and ghetto residents could readily identify with him. King had gone to college and had even earned a doctorate. Malcolm gained his reputation "hustling" on the streets of Boston and New York and also from teaching himself while serving a sentence in prison.
In 1964 Malcolm X was forced to break with Elijah Muhammed. Apparently, Elijah Muhammed had become threatened by Malcolm's charismatic appeal, and he feared he might lose his leadership in the movement. After a pilgrimage to Mecca as well as visits to several newly independent African nations, Malcolm returned to America ready to start a movement of his own. Although he believed more strongly than ever in Islam, he came to feel that several of the teachings of the Black Muslims were erroneous. One reason was that in Mecca he had worshipped with people from all races. As a result, he no longer felt that the white man, per se, was the "devil":
"In the past, yes, I have made sweeping indictments of all white people. I never will be guilty of that again--as I know now that some white people are truly sincere, that some truly are capable of being brotherly toward a black man. The true Islam has shown me that a blanket indictment of all white people is as wrong as when whites make blanket indictments against blacks."
Malcolm intended to continue teaching Islam in America, and he insisted that a religious faith was a help to any political movement. Nevertheless, he also intended to form a secular organization which could appeal to a wide variety of persons, and form the center of a new black militancy. Before any of these activities could get under way he was killed. Malcolm X was gunned down by four blacks, probably associated with the Black Muslims, while addressing a meeting in New York City early in 1965.
To Malcolm X the Civil Rights Movement was in need of a new interpretation. The degree of segregation existing in schools and in the rest of society, he contended, had actually increased in the decade since the Supreme Court decision in 1954. It seemed to him to be particularly true in the case of the de facto segregation practiced in the North. The spirit of the Civil Rights Movement, he pointed out, had been one of asking and pleading for rights which should have belonged to Afro-Americans by birth:
"I said that the American black man needed to recognize that he had a strong, airtight case to take the United States before the United Nations on a formal accusation of 'denial of human rights'--and that if Angola and South Africa were precedent cases, then there would be no easy way that the U.S. could escape being censured, right on its own home ground."
Malcolm was also critical of the Civil Rights Movement, contending that its interracial makeup and its emphasis on integration undercut the real goals of the black masses. "Not long ago," he said, "the black man in America was fed a dose of another form of the weakening, lulling and deluding effects of so-called 'integration.' It was that 'Farce on Washington,' I call it." Malcolm held that the famous March on Washington in 1963 had begun as a very angry, grass-roots movement among poor black people. He said that whites took it over and turned a genuine protest into a sentimental, interracial picnic.
Finally, Malcolm made it clear that he, too, was willing to resort to violence although he did not favor initiating it. He held that, when the rights of blacks were violated, they should be willing to die in the struggle to secure them:
"If white America doesn't think the Afro-American, especially the upcoming generation, is capable of adopting the guerrilla tactics now being used by oppressed people elsewhere on this earth, she is making a drastic mistake. She is underestimating the force that can do her the most harm.
"A real honest effort to remove the just grievances of the 22 million Afro-Americans must be made immediately or in a short time it will be too late."
The slogan "Black Power" exploded from a public address system in Greenwood, Mississippi, in the summer of 1966, and as it reverberated across America Stokeley Carmichael's motto spontaneously took on the dimensions of a movement. James Meredith, who had become famous for initiating federally backed integration of the University of Mississippi, was making a one-man freedom march across the South. He sought to demonstrate that blacks could walk through the South without fear. When he was shot, civil rights leaders from across the land felt compelled to continue his demonstration.
Martin Luther King representing S.C.L.C., Floyd McKissick from C.O.R.E., Stokeley Carmichael of S.N.C.C. and several others discussed the meaning and direction of the movement as they marched along the road by day and as they sat together in motels at night. Their discussion became a heated debate about both the tactics and the goals of their struggle. McKissick and Carmichael questioned the worth of nonviolence as a tactic and the value of integration as a goal. When the marchers reached Greenwood, Mississippi, a S.N.C.C. stronghold, Carmichael seized the microphone, and instead of using the traditional civil rights slogan of "Freedom Now" he began chanting "Black Power!"
Many whites assumed that the phrase meant black violence, and they assumed further that black violence meant black aggression. They conjured up pictures of bloody retaliation. Others saw it as a rejection of white allies, and they insisted that the freedom struggle could not be won without white help. To Carmichael, the Civil Rights Movement as it existed was "pleading and begging." It also had been wrong, he said, in assuming it was possible to build a working coalition between a group which was strong and economically secure--middle-class white liberals--and one which was insecure--poor blacks. In his opinion, "there is in fact no group at present with whom to form a coalition in which blacks will not be absorbed and betrayed." Two such differing groups had different sets of self-interest in spite of their similar sentiments. Carmichael contended that a genuine coalition had to be built between groups with similar self interests. Further, he argued that each group must have its own independent base of power from which to negotiate the terms of a working alliance. Black power, he said, was an attempt to build the strength on which future coalitions could be established.
Carmichael also attacked the concept of integration. If blacks wanted good housing or good education, integration meant leaving a black neighborhood and finding these things in white institutions. "This reinforces, among both black and white," he argued, "the idea that 'white' is automatically better and 'black' is by definition inferior. This is why integration is a subterfuge for the maintenance or white supremacy." If blacks could gain control of their own neighborhoods, each community, black and white, could define its own goals and be responsible for achieving its own standards. When both societies had built the kind of communities they wanted, meaningful integration between equal, though different, communities could occur, Carmichael contended. Integration, instead of being a one-way street, would be reciprocal.
Carmichael believed the existing political structure must be changed in order to overcome racism:
"'Political modernization' includes many things, but we mean by it three major concepts: (1) questioning old values and institutions of the society; (2) searching for new and different forms of political structure to solve political and economic problems; and (3) broadening the base of political participation to include more people in the decision-making process."
Black power meant two things: the end of shame and humiliation, and black community control. Blacks should be proud of being black, and they should be proud of their African past. Instead of using skin lighteners and hair straighteners, black power advocates began adopting a style of dress with an African flavor. To Carmichael there was still one other aspect to the black power philosophy. It should accentuate human values and human dignity. The prevailing system, besides being racist, put a primary emphasis on property rather than on humanity. Carmichael wanted the black-controlled community to act for the benefit of all blacks and not merely for the advantage of a handful of exploiting black capitalists.
What he advocated was the development of black cooperatives, not the building of black capitalism. He referred to this new political system as "political modernization." Its key was community, cooperative control of all the important things in people's lives. In addition to building a more participatory kind of democratic government, and developing cooperative enterprises, it meant that people renting houses or apartments must have rights and protection. He encouraged consumers and apartment dwellers to develop organizations which could fight for their special interests. He also wanted the community to gain local control of its police force.
The black power ideology spread across the nation rapidly, providing the movement with fresh impetus and a philosophical framework. Many had lost faith in the effectiveness of marches, demonstrations, appeals to white consciences and other direct action techniques. Black Americans were also growing weary and frustrated over the amount of violence which was being heaped upon nonviolent resisters. In Bogalusa, Louisiana, blacks were intimidated daily by the local Ku Klux Klan. Law enforcement officials never provided help either in terms of protection or in prosecuting wrongdoers. In fact, the law enforcement officials themselves were increasingly suspected of belonging to the Klan. Bogalusa blacks came to feel that arming themselves for self-defense was their only solution. In 1966 a number of them armed themselves, and founded the Deacons for Defense and Justice. Also in 1966, young blacks in Oakland, California, became extremely angry at what they believed to be police harassment. This resulted in their forming the Black Panther Party.
Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, both of whom had been raised under ghetto conditions, felt that there was a need for an organization which could communicate with poor blacks instead of merely appealing to the black bourgeoisie. The symbol of the black panther had been used by an independent, black political party which S.N.C.C. had helped to found in Lowndes County, Alabama.
The black panther had special appeal as a symbol because, though it rarely or never attacked another animal, it would defend itself ferociously whenever it was challenged. In Oakland, the Black Panthers began by keeping the police under surveillance as a means of limiting their alleged brutality. Panther members carried registered guns and displayed them openly as the law permitted. Whenever the police stopped to question someone, the following Panther car also stopped. Then, the Panthers would stand nearby displaying their weapons, and someone who had some legal training, would inform the individual being questioned by the police what his legal rights were. The police were extremely angry at this harassment and looked for ways to retaliate. The best-known Panther recruit was Eldridge Cleaver who, like Malcolm X, had educated himself while in prison. Cleaver wrote several articles for Ramparts magazine, and became well known for his book Soul on Ice. His vivid writing helped the Panthers in spreading their ideas widely. Gradually, chapters of the Black Panther party were established in ghettoes all across America.
Besides demanding legal rights for blacks, the Black Panthers developed a ten-point program demanding decent jobs and decent housing. Also, arguing that most black prisoners had been convicted in courts by people conspicuous for their racial prejudice, they advocated that all black inmates of American jails should immediately be released and granted amnesty. Because blacks were not properly represented in the country and were not treated fairly as citizens, the Panthers contended that they should be exempted from all military service. Blacks fighting in the Vietnam war, they pointed out, were represented in numbers above their national proportion and were being used to fight a racist war against colored people in Asia. Carmichael had previously made this same point and had popularized the motto, "Hell No! We Won't Go!"
Although the Black Panthers believed in black power, they were willing to cooperate with some extremist whites, and they wanted the entire political system restructured to remove power from the rich and put it in the hands of the masses of citizens. They expressed this teaching with the slogans, "All power to the people" and "Black power to the black people." Eldridge Cleaver had also concluded that some young whites could be trusted to support the black cause. He had been impressed with the commitment of some of the white college students, especially those connected with Students for a Democratic Society. He recognized that there were some modern John Browns who could be depended on to help the cause. In the 1968 election, the Panthers joined with militant white groups which were seeking both racial justice and an end to the war in Vietnam and formed the Peace and Freedom Party. Although he was not old enough to meet the constitutional requirements, Eldridge Cleaver was nominated as the party's presidential candidate. In spite of the fact that the Peace and Freedom Party received only a handful of votes, it was a means of communicating its message to the American people.
In spite of President Nixon's appeal to the American people to "lower their voices" of protest so that they might better be heard, many believed that he only wanted quiet in order not to be disturbed. With Nixon's election, black and white radicals felt that the white and conservative backlash had taken over the "Establishment" and that official repression was bound to follow. Vice President Agnew's anti-liberal attacks were taken by many as an expression of Nixon's feelings which he preferred not to express himself.
The Black Panthers and the police became involved in a number of confrontations or "shoot-outs" which the former believed to be the result of a nationally organized, official repression. The police, at the same time, accused the Panthers of deliberately trying to kill "pigs," the Panthers' name for the police, and the Panthers accused the police of deliberately creating situations which would allow them to kill the Panther leadership. Before long, most of the Panther leaders were either under arrest, had been killed, or had fled into exile to avoid being arrested.
As civil disorders diminished in the ghettoes, college campuses were increasingly rocked by student riots. In part, it was because students asked for changes in the university structure. Black students demanded that courses in black studies be initiated and that colleges aggressively recruit new black students even if their grades were below admission standards. Some urban schools, like Columbia University, were accused by black and white students of diminishing the housing of ghetto residents to make the university's expansion possible. Other campus riots were aimed against the war in Vietnam. In May of 1970, when President Nixon sent American troops into Cambodia supposedly in the process of de-escalating the war in Vietnam, protests spread all across the country, and several campuses exploded with riots.
At Kent State University in Ohio, the National Guard shot and killed four white student protesters. At Jackson State in Mississippi, the police killed two black students. Campus riots escalated, and dozens of colleges and universities were compelled to close their doors for the remainder of the academic year. While some Americans felt that these killings were a result of government repression of the freedom of speech, others believed that more action of this kind was necessary to curb what they viewed as extremist protest. Blacks again noticed that it had been the death of four white students which brought forth the widespread indignation. They believed that killings of blacks by police and Guardsmen were usually taken for granted or ignored. Even liberals, they believed, were only really stirred by repressive measures aimed against whites.
When the Nixon Administration still refused to change its policies in response to these violent confrontations, radicals turned increasingly to the use of terrorist violence. Bombings had been on the increase for a couple of years, and during the summer of 1970, they became even more frequent. But the walls of the Establishment still did not come tumbling down. Members of the Panthers, S.N.C.C., and the Weathermen--the left-wing of the Students for a Democratic Society--were generally thought to be responsible for much of this terrorism. Instead of rallying fresh supporters to the cause of the radical left, their terrorism only served to alienate other moderates and radicals. Although the violence of this left fringe increased, their numbers appeared to decrease, and because of this the terrorist fringe began to reevaluate its tactics and the whole situation.
In February of 1971, when the Army of South Vietnam crossed into Laos with heavy American air support, campuses across the country remained quiet. At the same time, when Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers was brought to trial for allegedly participating in the murder of an ex-Panther, only a handful of spectators attended the opening of his trial. A year before when another Panther had gone on trial for his alleged involvement in the same crime, New Haven, Connecticut, experienced a series of demonstrations which culminated in a mass protest meeting of some fifteen thousand people.
By early 1971, terrorism, violent confrontation, and peaceful protests had withered considerably. Pessimism, cynicism, and despair were widespread, and many advocates of change had become paralyzed by futility, but neither black nor white protesters had surrendered to the status quo. Both groups were rethinking their attitudes. Instead of using massive campaigns with mass media coverage, the Movement had switched its emphasis to the routine, day-by-day organization of support. In 1966 the Black Power Movement had contained more rhetoric than power. In 1971 it was still alive, but blacks were working in practical ways, limiting themselves to workable objectives. The Afro-American community was quietly building community organizations to create the economic and political foundations necessary for the future. Mass protests and radical slogans, even when they received worldwide attention, had not had enough muscle to change power relationships. Afro-Americans, then, turned to the more grueling and inglorious job of trying to put their theories into practice.
Epilogue
What insights can the study of history bring to the understanding and solution of the American racial situation? How can the knowledge of yesterday's events help us to face tomorrow's decisions? The fact is, whether we know it or not, that the past is always with us and clings tightly to us like a cloak. We have the choice of either recognizing it and dealing constructively with it or of ignoring it and remaining in bondage to it.
The heritage of the American slave system is still part of our lives. Racial attitudes of white superiority and black inferiority became an integral part of the American cultural climate, and it is still part of the air we all breathe. All Americans, black and white, inhale and assimilate more racism than we care to admit. Denying that we are still infected by prejudice, however, does not help us to deal creatively with it. The drive to create a black identity which can be worn with pride and the emergence of independent African nations already have made a significant impact in altering American racial stereotypes.
History is one of the disciplines concerned with understanding how social processes operate. On this point, the study of Afro-American history raises a particular question about the means of social change. There have been those who sought to achieve it through appeals to conscience and idealism, others have turned to the use of physical force, and there have also been those who worked for it through mobilizing economic and political power.
The black experience in the United States leaves one either disillusioned or cynical concerning the value of conscience and idealism in erasing American racism. These factors, however, have not been totally irrelevant. The American democratic creed has prevented the nation from building a permanent legal caste system based on color. As a legal structure, Jim Crow lasted less than a century and was limited to the Deep South. Idealism has made it impossible for America to rest comfortably while pursuing its racist policies.
Violence is a tempting technique for the frustrated and angry. In fact, it often has accompanied rapid social change, but it is usually a by-product of shifting power relationships in society rather than the cause of change itself. Trusting in violence is a form of revolutionary romanticism, a seductive shortcut to other more basic kinds of social power. The history of the Black Panthers would seem to be an example of this point. Their appeal to violence attracted angry youths who were eager for quick results. Although the party gained a lot of publicity, and, in some quarters, received a lot of applause, its desire for rapid success kept it from building a solid, mass base. Apparently its leaders believed that violence made this kind of mobilization unnecessary. Its publicity and quick successes were superficial and failed to achieve basic social transformation. On Wednesday, May 19, 1971, Huey Newton, the Black Panther Minister of Defense, declared that the Panthers had been wrong in confronting the police: "All we got was a war and a lot of bloodshed." He said that they had been mistaken in disregarding the church and in thinking that they could change things without the people's changing them:
"We'll be criticized by the revolutionary cultists for trying to effect change by stages, but to do all we want to do, we just have to go through all the stages of development. We cannot jump from A to Z as some thought."
Throughout history almost all social transformations have been the result of shifts in basic power relationships. The attempt to build political and economic power on a nationwide basis within the black community is a relatively new phenomenon. Reconstruction had attempted to do it earlier, but it was destroyed before it could be tested. Almost all other black economic and political involvement has been dependent on sizable white support. This was true both of the policies of Booker T. Washington and of the Civil Rights Movement. In fact, this meant a reliance on white power and on white conscience. The new spirit of black pride and self-reliance along with the new voting rights has already created pockets of black political strength in many Northern cities and in parts of the rural South. It is also being reflected in the Congress with the election of more blacks and with their creation of the Black Caucus, presently consisting of thirteen black congressmen. After submitting a list of their demands to President Nixon, their spokesman, Representative William Clay, D-Mo., said:
"We are going to set the tone for the black liberation struggle in this country.... Black people in this country have no permanent friends, no permanent enemies, only permanent interests.... I think we've reached the point in black America where we've completely given up on the mass demonstrations, sit-ins and boycotts. We've come to the basic conclusion that America has no conscience. Anybody who still appeals to what they think is a conscience is either stupid or frustrated. The only possible avenue for the achievement of equal rights for all in this country is through the exertion of political power. We have actual power, and even greater potential power, more than we've ever had in history."
As Representative Clay maintains, striving for racial change through an appeal to conscience has been found woefully inadequate. The resort to physical force has not been followed very often and, when it has, it has been used sporadically. To succeed, it obviously requires its own kind of mass power base to bring about lasting results. The creation of genuine black political power which was preached in 1966 is only being achieved now. It has already gained significant local results. In the Black Caucus, it promises broader national influence. Trusting to white consciences has been proven naive. Looking to terrorism for quick results has only led to publicity and bloodshed. Building genuine political power, however, is producing results now and promises to create more social transformation in the immediate future.