Confederate "Heritage" Month 2014, April 11: George Jackson

(Posting a day late.) After having posted about Black Power the other day, this article that recently came to my attention seems like a good supplement: Craig Marine, EXIT THE DRAGON/It's been 30 years since George Jackson died in a pool of blood at San Quentin. His death still reverberates in America SFGate/The Chronicle Magazine 08/19/2001. It's a somewhat sensationalist but still informative report on an iconic figure of the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s.

Prison has been and continues to be used in the United States disproportionately against African-Americans. Just as today the absurdly disproportionately high rates of imprisonment of young black men is a significant issue in voting rights, so the civil rights movement in the 1960s brought a new focus to prison issues and their affect on African-Americans.

The Nation of Islam, whose most famous spokesperson was Malcolm X, gave a particular emphasis to prison recruitment, which is how Malcolm became a Muslim and a part of the group. (He left the group after becoming more acquainted with mainstream Islam; the Nation of Islam's explicit racism made it an heretical sect in most Muslims' eyes.)

George Jackson was a young black man who became radicalized in San Quentin prison. California at that time had a sentencing law calling "indeterminate sentencing," which gave judges and prison officials enormous discretion over how long a prisoner could be held. It was originally instituted as a prison reform policy, but turned into a terribly abusive practice in case like Jackson's. As Marine notes, at the time of his death, Jackson "had spent 10 years in prison - seven of them in solitary confinement - for stealing $70.20."

Jackson was killed on August 21, 1971, in an escape attempt from San Quentin prison.

Marine writes:

But most significantly, George Jackson, and the death of George Jackson at the age of 29, affects every citizen to this day because he was, more than any other person, most responsible for the politicization of the incarcerated. Even today, with the obscene percentage of minorities that are jailed in relation to their white counterparts, it remains true that for many, their only real education comes behind bars. And when they re-enter society - yes, America, some of these people actually do get out - they are changed: educated, politically aware and, understandably, very, very angry.

Marine's version of George Jackson's political education/self-education is more-or-less contemptuous, but gives a basic concept:

Jackson soaked it all up, watched and read as the New Left emerged, embracing whatever bastardized version of Marxism, Leninism and/or Maoism was in vogue that week. Unlike those concerned more about fashion than substance, Jackson went to the source material, negotiating through the less-than-scintillating, if illuminating, works of the great political theorists themselves.

Then, George Jackson added his own twist on the Revolution. Just as Lenin had goosed Marx by figuring a vanguard can manipulate the science of communism, and Mao altered the status quo by using peasants as opposed to workers to lead his revolution, Jackson's idea was that it was America's prisoners who would be the vanguard, the driving force, of the revolution.

George Jackson was a member of the Black Panthers, whose perspective had also been shaped by the prison experience of leaders like Eldridge Cleaver.

George Jackson's case also made philosophy professor Angela Davis famous, or infamous, depending on one's perspective. She was tried and acquitted on charges of having assisted a desperate attempt by George's younger brother Jonathan to free George. As Marine recounts:

Those who may make the association between Jackson's name and the revolutionary struggle of the late 1960s and early 1970s often think of him as the man holding onto the end of a shotgun that was taped around the neck of a terrified judge - an image forever frozen in time in one of the most famous news photographs in history. That was James McClain, freed (briefly) by George's 17-year-old brother, Jonathan, who smuggled guns into a Marin County courtroom in an ill-fated attempt to trade hostages for his older brother.

He quotes Davis in his 2001 article on George Jackson's death:

"George Jackson was murdered," said Angela Davis, now 57, and teaching in Santa Cruz, as she expressed a commonly held belief about what may have happened 30 years ago. "But it's the classic story: you can kill the man, but you can't kill the ideas."

Stripped of the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist theories that adorned much of his writing, what Jackson did that was perceived as so incredibly dangerous was teach.

"He broke down the structures of the prison gangs as they were organized at the time and re-built them around politics instead of petty criminal activities such as loan-sharking and extortion," said Davis, a former Communist Party member whose love for Jackson, as expressed in the couples' correspondence, was used unsuccessfully by prosecutors in an attempt to provide motivation for what they said was her part in the Marin County courthouse bloodshed that left four dead. Tried for murder, Davis was acquitted.

"The last thing those in power wanted was an organized underclass, ready to fight for revolution," said Davis. "George tried to teach anyone who would listen, regardless of race, that The Man wanted division, wanted prisoners at each others' throats. He scared people to death, as well he should have."

The History Is A Weapon website provides the text online of George Jackson's 1970 Soledad Brother. The same site has the text of an interview with him, Remembering the Real Dragon- An Interview with George Jackson May 16 and June 29, 1971.

Bob Dylan did a song commemorating him, "George Jackson," which Joan Baez covers in this version:

George Jackson was a charismatic figure whose words and militant resistance resonated with many who felt some of the genuine desperation that someone in his position must have felt. It's easy enough to pick out passages from the linked material from him that sound simplistic and narrow. But then he was working in the toughest kind of environment against what were unquestionable overwhelming odds. One doesn't have to idolize him or approve of the execution of the prison guards described in Craig Marine's article to recognize that the anger, despair and radical rejection of peaceful and legal methods of fighting white racism and the institutions that sustained it did resonate with a non-trivial number of African-Americans circa 1970.

And it resonates in negative sense perhaps even more heavily today with the aging whites who take FOX News to be an actual news source. Take, for instance, this one paragraph from the interview linked above in which Jackson says:

You know, guerrilla war is not simply a matter of tactics and technique. It's not just questions of hit-and-run or terrorism. It's a matter of proving to the established order that it simply can't sustain itself, that there is no possible way for them to win by utilizing the means of force available to them. We have to prove that wars are won by human beings, and not by mechanical devices. We've got to show that in the end they can't resist us. And we will! We're going to do it. There's never going to ever be a moment's peace for anyone associated with the establishment any place where I'm at, or where any of my comrades are at. But we're going to need coordination, we're going to need help. And right now, that help should come in the form of education. It's critical to teach the people out there how important it is to destroy the function of the prison within the society. That, and to show them in concrete terms that the war is on - right now! - and that in that sense we really aren't any different than the Vietnamese, or the Cubans, or the Algerians, or any of the other revolutionary peoples of the world.

This is how a lot of Republicans think of Barack Obama, who is routinely described on websites and broadcasts and e-mail chain letters that are generally regarded by Republicans as sensible (if a bit edgy) as an America-hating Kenyan Communist Nazi Marxist Islamist atheist anticolonialist extremist.

A large portion of the Republican Party base, which means a significant number of American whites generally, are stuck in 1969, their fears haunted by images of guys like George Jackson, an army of ghosts waiting to leap out at them from any black person they encounter. Included the President of the United States.

And who says Americans have no sense of history?

Tags: angela davis, black power,
civil rights movement, confederate heritage month 2014, george jackson, white racism

Obama and white racism in America

The symbolism of Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama, who is preparing to blow up a bunch of Syrians to demonstrates his macho Credibility, celebrating the anti-militarist protester and Nobel Peace Prize winner Martin Luther King, Jr. in his speech yesterday was jarring enough.

He added to the incongruity by saying this:

And then, if we're honest with ourselves, we'll admit that during the course of 50 years, there were times when some of us claiming to push for change lost our way. The anguish of assassinations set off self-defeating riots. Legitimate grievances against police brutality tipped into excuse-making for criminal behavior. Racial politics could cut both ways, as the transformative message of unity and brotherhood was drowned out by the language of recrimination. And what had once been a call for equality of opportunity, the chance for all Americans to work hard and get ahead was too often framed as a mere desire for government support -- as if we had no agency in our own liberation, as if poverty was an excuse for not raising your child, and the bigotry of others was reason to give up on yourself.

I apparently wasn't the only who for whom that passage sounded like Obama throwing something is as a sop to the people who hate his guts and always will. He just can't seem to help himself.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, who's generally an Obama loyalist, writes in On the Death of Dreams Atlantic Online 08/29/2013:

Barack Obama has taken the stage at a moment when it is popular to assert that black people are the agents of their own doom. The response to Trayvon Martin, indeed the response to Barack Obama himself, has been to attack black morality, to highlight black criminality and thus change the conversation from what the American state has done to black people, to what black people have done to themselves. ... Barack Obama believes that these people have a point. [my emphasis]

Coates is actually going beyond seeing it as a sop to white racists. He thinks Obama actually believes in this posture.

Chauncey DeVega in Why? Barack Obama Decides to Publicly Scold Black Americans (Again) During His March on Washington Anniversary Speech WARN 08/29/2013 makes a similar point, "Barack Obama is in his second and final term. He does not need to worry about being reelected."

In other words, he doesn't have any particular reason to be saying stuff like this, and on an occasion like yesterday's, if he doesn't actually believe it. DeVega:

History is his most important audience now.

Will President Obama be remembered as the country’s first Black President? Or alternatively, will Obama be remembered as a President who happened to be black? This is a subtle distinction; it is also very important as we attempt to locate Barack Obama relative to the long Black Freedom Struggle and the Civil Rights Movement.

Barack Obama's speech on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and Dr. King’s "I have a Dream Speech" would seem to suggest that he is more comfortable with the second title. Ultimately, Barack Obama's public scolding of Black Americans is not being done for some short-term political goal, i.e. to win a presidential election by having an obligatory for Democratic candidates "Sister Souljah" moment. Given his habit of publicly calling out black folks' perceived and imagined cultural and moral failings, on some level, Obama must believe such things to be true. [my emphasis]

The long-deceased Nobel Peace Prize winner King, on the other hand, was willing to challenge white racism directly. From his speech that has been idolized and trivialized as the "I Have A Dream Speech," he said:

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This; is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. 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. It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality - 1963 is not an end but a beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual.

Even in a short excerpt like this, the radical - and radical is the right word - difference between Obama's and MLK's perspective is evident. Obama often used the phrase "the fierce urgency of now" in his 2008 campaign for the Presidency. But it didn't seem to have much more content for him than voting for his election.

And think of the people to whom Obama was conceding by throwing in his churlish, scolding paragraph against black people yesterday, the FOX News addicts and the Rush Limbaugh fans. How did they or their equivalents at the time react in 1963 to a line like, "Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual"?

Easy to answer: the same way they react to Obama today, no matter how mildly and "bipartisan" the way he expresses things. But King was willing to get in their face and call them on their nonsense. Obama is more inclined to conciliate them by repeating it.

Also from King's 1963 speech:

There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of onr nation until the bright days of justice emerge.

There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, "When will you be satisfied?" We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression ...

I have a dream that one day in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification ...

By contrast, Obama speaks in the way Chauncey DeVega describes:

... while Obama wants action on the part of black folks to improve themselves, there is no equivalent demand that white people take responsibility for white racism.

The President's March on Washington anniversary speech is a crystallization of the price of admission Barack Obama paid in order to become the country’s first black Chief Executive.

For example, Obama talks in broad and inclusive ways about the racial progress made in America, while continuing to remind the public of the work that remains — all the while not proposing any race specific solutions to these problems.

Obama avoids talking about the particular struggles and concerns of the African-American community because in his own words, he is "the president of all Americans."

And the country’s first black president publicly scolds African-Americans, with the sum effect being to legitimate a narrative and logic that black and brown folks somehow share in the responsibility for how white racism, both structural and inter-personal, has negatively impacted people of color's life chances.

Tags: barack obama, civil rights movement, martin luther king jr., syria, white racism

Segregation 2.0 and income inequality

"While outright race-based segregation in schools was banned, in reality, educational segregation has worsened in recent decades, as Gary Orfield and other scholars have documented." Joseph Stiglitz, How Dr. King Shaped My Work in Economics New York Times 08/27/2013

The end of officially-sponsored school segregation in the South was a milestone in the dismantling of the Segregation 1.0 (Jim Crow) system. Formally racially segregated schools were official institutions promoting, teaching and literally embodying the separation of the races. It was the Brown v. Board of Education decision on segregated public schools that put Segregation 1.0 into its long, final defensive phase. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was more central, because denial of the vote to African-American citizens was the real political core of the segregation system. But the end of school segregation forced whites in the South, and somewhat later in other sections of the country, to confront the changed realities in their lived experience in a new way.

I'm modest about my ability to declare new eras as having begun. But whether Segregation 2.0 is beginning, impending or already a well-established reality, it's here for the United States. The Segregation Five of the Roberts Supreme Court have gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. The Republicans are escalating rapidly on voter suppression measures. Some of the rulings of the Supreme Court in recent years have may have effectively eliminated the practical force of the Brown decision. And, as Stiglitz points out, de facto racial segregation of schools in on the rise.

As he and others have been careful to point out, the famous "I Have A Dream" march whose anniversary we've been celebrating was called the "March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom." Martin Luther King was intensely aware that class injustice was intimately connected with racial discrimination and put that reality at the center of his message.

Stiglitz in his piece talks about how his involvement in the civil rights movement lead him to become an economist and to specialize in problems of distribution:

It was because I hoped that something could be done about these and the other problems I had seen so vividly growing up in Gary, Ind. — poverty, episodic and persistent unemployment, unending discrimination against African-Americans — that I decided to become an economist, veering away from my earlier intention to go into theoretical physics. I soon discovered I had joined a strange tribe. While there were a few scholars (including several of my teachers) who cared deeply about the issues that had led me to the field, most were unconcerned about inequality; the dominant school worshiped at the feet of (a misunderstood) Adam Smith, at the miracle of the efficiency of the market economy. I thought that if this was the best of all possible worlds, I wanted to construct and live in another world.

In that odd world of economics, unemployment (if it existed) was the fault of workers. One Chicago School economist, the Nobel Prize winner Robert E. Lucas Jr., would later write: "Of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most seductive, and in my opinion the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution." Another Nobel laureate of the Chicago School, Gary S. Becker, would attempt to show how in truly competitive labor markets discrimination couldn’t exist. While I and others wrote multiple papers explaining the sophistry in the argument, his was an argument that fell on receptive ears.

Like so many looking back over the past 50 years, I cannot but be struck by the gap between our aspirations then and what we have accomplished.

Rick Perlstein has been quoted several places I've seen for his perceptive comment on the neutralizing of King's image by turning him into a plastic saint: "Frankly, Martin Luther King had to be forgotten before he could be remembered." (See Joan Walsh, The right's outrageous MLK ignorance Salon 08/28/2013)

Fortunately, like with other leaders that played an important role in pushing democracy forward, trying to redefine them into harmless, vaguely inspirational figures is a tricky business. Some people growing up hearing their conservative families and the political leaders they follow talk about King's "content of their character" speech with the present-day conservative spin will actually look one of these days to understand more of what King was about. They will be surprised to see what the plaster saint of conservative mythology who was opposed to any and all laws to prevent racial discrimination actually had to say!

But the world doesn't stand still. And Segregation 2.0 is just as much a plague against democracy as the 1.0 Jim Crow version was.

Joan Walsh has a moment of liberal guilt about comparing Obama as President to King as civil rights leader. But then she goes ahead and does it anyway:

I admit, during this commemorative week, I've come to think it's wrong for white people in particular to deploy King as a weapon against our first black president. It simplifies the context in which both men have had to struggle, against staggering odds. It cheapens them, and us – especially on this day. History will no doubt compare them, but historians will have more information and more wisdom than we have today. Obama is the president, of everyone, charged with advancing liberty and justice as well as keeping us safe. He has disappointed me, profoundly at times, but I will not find him wanting, at least not today.

Still, were he alive, I have no doubt but that King would still be marching. He got a holiday after he was silenced; had he never been silenced, I'm not so sure he'd have gotten a holiday, because he would have kept pushing us, all of us, to live up to our highest ideals.

I actually think the comparison between the two Nobel Peace Prize winners is especially relevant right now. The living one is getting ready to launch an act of undeclared war against Syria, a country that has not attacked the United States. The long-decreased one was a very sharp critic of American militarism in general and its Vietnam War manifestation in particular.

Here's the living Nobel Peace Prize winner on Wednesday, Obama at March Anniversary: Goals of Economic Opportunity Have Fallen Short 08/28/2013:

Here is the other Nobel Peace Prize winner talking about the Vietnam War, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. - April 4, 1967 - Beyond Vietnam: A Time To Break Silence [Full Speech]:

Tags: civil rights movement, martin luther king jr., syria, vietnam war, white racism

MLK in 1965

Martin Luther King Jr. on NBC's Meet the Press in 1965:

This 1965 interview with Martin Luther King, Jr. is a reminder that TV journalism was once journalism. And also a warning not picture the 1960s as some Golden Age of TV journalism. It's pretty obvious that the questions were more focused on the elements of excitement and fashionable Washington Beltway topics than on policy substance. But the Beltway priorities in topics were more sensible than what we see today.

With David Gregory on 2031's version of Meet the Press, they would have given King about half the screen time. And Dancin' Dave would have questioned him about the latest rumor about an affair he might be having, proceeded to ask him to speculate on the effect his movement would have on the next Presidential election horse race, played some "gotcha" clip of him saying something five years before that sounds superficially different from what he's saying now, and closed by asking him to speculate on how gangsta rap might be affecting African-American youth.

The thing that strikes me in particular is that King was able to define what were radical political tactics in the then-existing context in terms that were accessible to the average person. He used inclusive religious language, for instance, talking about the moral order. And he was willing to challenge the apathy and jibe the moral conscience of white citizens in Alabama who did have the right to vote and who were mostly sitting back in approval as George Wallace and the Ku Klux Klan were running wild.

The right to vote was a central concern for him in this interview, though he insisted that other situations like "police brutality" were as degrading and humiliating to black citizens as denial of the right to vote.

He stressed the need to fight poverty with public policy.

James Kilpatrick, a staunch defender of segregation, is one of journalists interviewing King. Also included is Tom Wicker, who despite a liberal reputation certainly seemed to be asking probing questions requiring King to defend his positions.

King describes his Ghandian concept of defying unjust laws, including the willing to accept the legal penalty for violating an unjust law in order to appeal to the conscience of the nation. He refers to the Boston Tea Party as a prime example of civil disobedience - which I would not, involved the deliberate destruction of property. (Without getting into it further here, I agree with Daniel Ellsberg that Edward Snowden was right to leave the country in his case. Snowden was not practicing Ghandian civil disobedience, he was leaking vital information about government wrongdoing.)

It's notable that King also recognizes that the court system can be a key weapon of oppression and illegality. He uses the term "reign of terror" to describe the conditions under George Wallace's gubernatorial administration in Alabama at the time. And he calls Alabama "a society that has refused to protect life and the right to vote."

At around 22:30, he says, Realism impels me to admit, however, that when there is justice and the pursuit of justice, violence disappears. And where there is injustice and frustration, the potentialities for violence are greater."

King was not an advocate of political violence. But he also didn't shrink from discussing the realities of violence, including violence generating by brutal social conditions imposed on entire communities, at that time.

In a helpful article that JSTOR has apparently made generally available, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" in Context: Ceremonial Protest and African
American Jeremiad College English 62:1 (Sept 1999), Elizabeth Vander Lei and Keith Miller discuss King's use of the rhetorical device of the jeremiad in his most famous speech:

In a jeremiad, the speaker adopts the stance of a prophet-outcast, evoking Old and New Testament prophets such as Moses, Elijah, Jeremiah, and John the Baptist. These prophets went into the wilderness to discern God's voice and returned to communicate that message to the rest of the community. In African American jeremiads, the speaker signals this position of alienation through metaphor and scriptural allusion rather than through social isolation.

The rhetorical structure of African American jeremiads is threefold: a consideration of the freedom promises in America's founding documents, a detailed criticism of America's failure to fulfill this promise, and a prophecy that America will achieve its promised greatness and enjoy unparalleled happiness.

King was experienced in using religious language that was inclusive and inspiring, including Biblical references that were presumably somewhat more familiar to the average American in 1963 than today. And he could make moral appeals situated in familiar patriotic and American historical symbolism.

King was a protester. He was trying to make people uncomfortable, to challenge them to see their daily reality in a new way. But this wasn't just some generic personality quirk. He was protesting the institutions of white racism. He wanted to make people uncomfortable about the denial of rights to black Americans. He wanted to challenge people to see that poverty was a problem for all of society, not just for the people directly affected at a given moment.

Vander Lei and Miller also write:

The first structural element of a jeremiad, a consideration of the freedom promises in America's founding documents, relies on standard citations from these documents, the so-called sacred texts of American civil religion: the Bible, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Emancipation Proclamation. Long before the Emancipation Proclamation, African American abolitionists claimed the bright American promise by soaking their discourse in the Bible and by citing the Declaration of Independence (especially the phrase "all men are created equal"), a document which they sometimes conflated with the Constitution. For example, in 1813 African American James Forten cited Thomas Jefferson's affirmation that "all men are created equal" to argue the equality of all races, including "the Peruvian and the Laplander, the white man and the African". Leading white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, in the first issue of The Liberator, contended that this phrase called for the immediate end to slavery. In fact, upon analyzing a large sample of abolitionist rhetoric, Celeste Condit and John Lucaites discovered that one-third of the documents they examined referred directly to the promises contained in the Declaration of Independence.

This is why I use Andrew Jackson at this blog as a symbol of progressive democracy. Not because he right on all his major policies; his Indian policy was bad by the standards of his own time. But because he was an important symbol for the movement of Jacksonian democracy that expanded democracy, strengthened national unity on the basis of a commitment to democracy, and developed new forms of grassroots political organizing that benefited labor, Abolitionists and Native American activists, often going far beyond the measures that Jackson himself championed.

And this is why that I not only want to see history done right, in both its professional and amateur versions, but I also want to make sure that we distinguish the constructive, democratic, progressive aspects of what actually happened in real history from the backward, reactionary and destructive aspects.

Symbolic celebrations and applications of historical imagery are not the same as writing history. But they are a very real and important part of politics and how Americans understand our national identity, however vague a concept that may be. I'm not willing to leave the progressive aspects of American history to be distorted, denied or forgotten by conservatives and reactionaries. The Christian Right does not "own" American history and neither does the Republican Party. (These days I suppose it's redundant to distinguish the Christian Right and the Republicans.)

As we see in the interview above, the real existing Martin Luther King, Jr. was able to speak in moral and patriotic terms that effectively framed his issues and were easily accessible to his American listeners of all races. And, yes, he was willing to make some white people angry and to shame them over segregation and white racism.

Tags: civil rights movement, martin luther king jr., white racism

Obama and Mississippi

The Jackson Clarion-Ledger was a notoriously hardline segregationist newspaper in the 1960s, owned by the Hederman family. Anyone who knows something about the role the Hederman press played in opposing the civil rights movement then shouldn't have any trouble getting their heads around the idea that the mainstream press today could very well be damaging the prospect for a democratic society and a peaceful foreign policy. The Hederman heirs did redeem the family name in recent years: they now publish the New York Review of Books, the archetype of a "liberal intellectual" journal. And the current owners pf tje Clarion-Ledger are a bit different from those days, too. Bob McElvaine explains.

Mississippi's Largest Paper Endorses Obama by Robert S. McElvaine

If Colonel Robert McCormack, the longtime publisher of the arch-Republican Chicago Tribune is spinning in his grave as a result of that paper's endorsement two weeks ago of Democrat Barack Obama, imagine what sort of posthumous somersaults the brothers Thomas and Robert Hederman must be doing after this morning's editorial in the Mississippi paper they controlled for a half century through the middle deacdes of the twentieth century.

No major media organ was more intransigent in its support for segregation and its opposition to the civil rights movement than the Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Mississippi. Typical of the paper's attitudes on racial questions was its headline after the 1963 March on Washington at which Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech:

WASHINGTON IS CLEAN AGAIN WITH NEGRO TRASH REMOVED

In the days when the Hederman brothers owned the paper, it frequently warned of the dangers of the horror of "miscegenation."

This morning the Clarion-Ledger endorsed a mixed race man who identifies himself (as the Hederman brothers would have identified him) as black for president of the United States!

The times, they have a-changed.

[Historian Robert S. McElvaine is Elizabeth Chisholm Professor of Arts & Letters at Millsaps College and the author of The Great Depression: America, 1929-1941 (Random House). His latest book is Grand Theft Jesus: The Hijacking of Religion in America (Crown).]

Tags: barack obama, civil rights movement, mississippi politics, racism, robert mcelvaine

The sixties: liberals, the left and the civil rights movement

Historian Howard Zinn, one of the most influential intellectuals among the New Left in the United States, wrote in Postwar America: 1945-1971 about how the position of the liberals was far more frustrating to civil rights activists and African-Americans than most people today probably realize, or would even find it hard to imagine. There still were actual liberal Republicans in the 1960s, so we're talking about liberals in both parties. But it also didn't mean they thought conservatives in either Party were somehow more supportive of civil rights. They very obviously weren't.

Zinn makes an interesting point about the Brown v. Board of Education decison of 1954 that was a landmark legal blow to the segregation system in the South:

Supreme Court decisions, however, are not self-enforcing. Moreover, the year after the Brown decision, the Court retreated on the question of how soon segregation must end. It said that once school districts had made "a prompt and reasonable start toward full compliance" with the 1954 decision, the lower courts, which it charged with the responsibility of applying the desegregation decision, might "find that additional time is necessary." It urged lower courts to enter "such orders and decrees ... as are necessary and proper to admit to public schools on a racially non-discriminatory basis with all deliberate speed the parties to these cases."

The Court's approach to the enforcement of the Constitution on the issue of segregation was unusual. It could hardly be imagined that the discovery of slavery in, say, a town in Nevada in 1954 would lead it to decide that though the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery the town should be allowed to make a "prompt and reasonable start" toward its gradual elimination. Or that any violation of federal law by, say, a national syndicate for fraud through the mails would lead it to decide that the guilty parties must gradually desist from their activities. As black constitutional lawyer Loren Miller wrote with some bitterness in The Petitioners: "No American lawyer anywhere had ever supposed that the Supreme Court or any other organ of government could suspend the exercise of a peacetime constitutional right for a single day." By 1965, ten years after the "all deliberate speed" guideline of the Court, more than 75 per cent of the school districts in the South were still segregated. (my emphasis)

The civil rights movement in the South found itself constantly having to push even the liberal Kennedy and Johnson administrations to enforce the law protecting peaceful civil rights demonstrators and activists. Here's an example Zinn gives:

In the sit-ins of 1960 and the Freedom Rides of 1961, hundreds of persons were arrested, most of them black students, for asserting their constitutional rights; yet the federal government did not interfere with those arrests. Indeed, in the Freedom Ride of May, 1961, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, instead of using the power of the federal government to protect the riders, asked the riders to desist in a "cooling-off period" - an executive branch version of the Supreme Court's suggestion that blacks' constitutional rights be granted "with all deliberate speed." Kennedy did send marshals into Alabama after riders had been beaten in Anniston and Birmingham. As for those who rode into Mississippi, the attorney general entrusted their safety to state officials in a compromise agreement under which they would be protected from beatings, but would be arrested on arriving at Jackson. That the federal government had the constitutional power to prevent those arrests was admitted by the man who was Kennedy's assistant in charge of civil rights at that time, Burke Marshall. Marshall argued, however, that this power should not be exercised because "the result would have been chaotic and more destructive of the federal system than what happened in Mississippi." He wrote later: "It would be possible to devise authority for the federal courts to enjoin such arrests. There is no constitutional or doctrinal difficulty involved. But the consequences would be to destroy the means by which Mississippi maintained order." (my emphasis in bold)

To African-Americans and civil rights activists, "the means by which Mississippi maintained order" were a major part of what needed to be altered.

Tags: civil rights movement, howard zinn, sixties

What was the "New Left" of the 1960s?

Back cover of Radical America May-June 1968

I've been using the journal Radical America as a contemporaneous source for commenting on some aspects of "the 60s", which in its meaning as a cultural unit really means more like 1960-1973. The fact that Brown University has an online archive of the journal greatly facilitates such research.

The banners in that back-cover graphic by Walter Crane (1845-1915) read, clockwise from bottom left:

No people can be free while dependent for their bread
No wage slavery
No child toilers
Production for use not for profit
Solidarity of labor
The cause of labor is the hope of the world
Socialism mean the most helpful and happy life for all
A commonwealth where wealth is common
Art and enjoyment for all
Hope in work & joy in leisure
Cooperation and emulation not competition
Shorten working day and lengthen life
Socialism is internationalism
Equal opportunity
Freedom

That issue contains an article called "The New Left's Early Years" by James P. O'Brien, which covered the years up until 1965 in the United States. His summary at the end describes the New Left as follows:

Roughly since 1960 there has been a social movement, composed mainly of students, which has threatened the equilibrium of American society. This threat was not, at first, unambiguously radical: it was liberal in the nature of its surface demands (such as racial integration, an end to nuclear testing, and free speech) but radical in its distrust of compromise and in its proclivity for direct action. Over a period of years form and content merged, and the result was something that could legitimately be called a Hew Left. The concept of participatory democracy, as evolved by SDS and SNCC, offered both a mode of operation and a critique of welfare-state liberalism. Moreover, it furnished the basis for a revolt against the university environment in which most New Leftists found themselves. The idea that the "normal channels" are instruments of manipulation, and that people must be motivated to make decisions for themselves, was clearly applicable to the university as well as to other areas of society; this is what made student radicals realize that they no longer had simply to fight other people's battles.

Since 1965, the New Left had undergone a number of changes, both in its conception of society and in its strategic thinking. Draft resistance, underground newspapers, guerilla theatre, and above all black power, are terms that would have evoked few signs of recognition three short years ago. But none of them should be surprising in the light of what the New Left had become by 1965. For they are all variations on a theme: the recognition that American liberalism was not enough, that the good society was one in which people shaped their own institutions to meet their own needs. (my emphasis)

That's a good capsule description of how the New Left distinguished itself from the prevailing form of Establishment liberalism in those days.

Neither that summary nor the article focuses on women's liberation as part of the Movement. That may partially be due to O'Brien's own limitations of understanding. Women certainly played a major role in the organizations he discusses in the article.

But my understanding is that the New Left in the United States didn't start highlighting women's issues as such until the year 1968. Clearly, women's experiences in the civil rights and student movement and other forms of political activism were a major stimulus to the women's movement. And they certainly learned a lot about political activism in those experiences. But - and I hope I'm not stepping into some sensitive classification dispute without being aware of it - I tend to see the women's movement as overlapping the "New Left" of this period rather than being identified with it.

O'Brien's article discusses various key moments in the development of what came to be called the New Left, such as:

• The civil rights movement of the 1950s (the Montgomery bus boycott started in 1955)

• Martin Luther King, Jr.'s rise to prominence in the civil rights movement along with his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)

• The desegregation sit-in movement that began in 1960 and which the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) promoted

• A sit-in demonstration by Berkeley students in 1960 at the San Francisco City Hall against the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) which was holding one of its witch-hunt hearings there. This is a little-remembered event, it seems, though it was featured in the documentary film Berkeley in the Sixties (1990). The police reacted ham-handedly, turning fire hoses on the students. This generated enough publicity that the anti-HUAC protests became more widespread.

• The formation of the Student Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (Student SANE) and the Student Peace Union (SPU) to protest the nuclear arms race, with events like the Berlin crisis culminating in the building of the Berlin Wall in 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and the spectacularly ill-advised fallout shelter program during the Kennedy administration

• The formation of activist campus political parties like SLATE in Berkeley and VOICE at the University of Michigan

• Tom Hayden and Al Haber became leaders of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1961. SDS had until 1960 been called the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), the near-invisible student group of a social-democratic group called the League for Industrial Democracy. SDS split with the latter because SDS under Hayden and Haber wanted a more activist orientation, and SDS started becoming more influential on campuses nationally.

• The Freedom Rides organized by SNCC in the South

• Continuing demonstrations against segregation and for stronger civil rights legislation, including the still-famous March on Washington in 1963, where King gave his "I Have A Dream" speech

• SNCC's formation of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) which organized the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964 to register voters there, in which hundreds of young Northern activists participated

• The ERAP (Economic Research and Action) project sponsored by SDS which sent participants to do local studies of conditions in poor, mostly white urban areas, though Tom Hayden wound up going to the African-American ghetto in Newark (he later wrote a long article made into a book on the 1967 Newark riots)

• The formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and its unsuccessful attempt to be seated as the state's official delegation at the 1964 Democratic convention. O'Brien writes, "More than any other single event, this dramatized the readiness of militants in the civil rights movement to break away from the liberal coalition of the Johnson administration."

• The Berkeley Free Speech Movement of 1964

• Public protests against the Vietnam War as the 1965 escalation and bombing of North Vietnam got under way

• The May 2nd Movement (M-2-M), which was heavily influenced by the sectarian Progressive Labor Party (PLP), which stressed explicitly anti-imperialist themes to the extent of identifying with Vietnamese and Cuban revolutionaries and actively encouraging draft resistance

Articles like these give a perspective that's hard to get in even well-done retrospectives, let alone the ones that are tailored to the press consensus of 2008 about the world and the "culture war". These articles were written by people who identified with the Movement and written for people who were part of or interested in it.

The early issues of Radical America definitely have an "underground press" feel to them, as well. The Brown digital collection consists of PDF files, one for each issue. And because they are images, I haven't figured out a way even with the Adobe software to copy text. But because they are images, you get more of that low-budget production sense.

Tags: 1968, civil rights movement, sds, students for a democratic society, tom hayden, vietnam war

More on "the 60s"

Brave white police in Birmingham in 1963 didn't seem to care whether civil rights demonstrators were nonviolent (this particular photo makes me think again about the threads connecting the segregation mentality and the Cheney-Bush torture program: remember the dogs in the Abu Ghuraib photos?)

Following up on my previous post on the aftermath of the King assassination in 1968, I do think it's worth remembering the kinds of social tensions that came to the fore in the 1960s and early 1970s, never more dramatically than in 1968. There was no shortage of explanations, denunciations and schemes to deal with those tensions the violence that was one result of them. Certainly the violence was something that Republicans and authoritarians (who were by no means so polarized into the Republican Party as they are today) were happy to emphasize. The Nixon-Agnew campaign of 1968 made "law-and-order" a central theme.

Yes, hard as it may be for younger people to imagine, in those days the Republican Party actually claimed to respect the law! Not that Nixon and his Watergate co-conspirators actually did respect it. But they at least pretended to.

The civil rights movement of the 1950s and early 1960s, which even Republicans today pretend to respect, was largely focused on the Southern and especially the Deep South, where legal (de jure) segregation has been enforced since the 1890s. As white Southerners have always been eager to remind people - more often than not to make excuses for Southern racial practices - white racism wasn't limited to the South. What the South did have that was distinct was an elaborately structured, legally enforced system of segregation that even drastically restricted the freedom of whites in many ways. Though generally, only those Southern whites who actually cared about freedom noticed that aspect of things.

Violent racial and social outbreaks didn't just start occurring with the assissination of Martin Luther King, Jr. In his contribution to What's Going On: California and the Vietnam Era (2004), Clayborne Carson describes the formation of a group called the Nonviolent Action Committee (N-VAC) "by three black activists - Woody Coleman, Robert Hall, and Danny Gray - who wanted to break free of the constraints of the predominantly white Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)." He describes the growth of militant rhetoric among both civil-rights movement in 1964-65.

And the rhetoric didn't simply come out of thin air. He describes observing an incident at that time "police searching every black person on an entire block in Watts", then a predominantly black neighborhood. His description of the Watts riot of 1965 is dramatic:

In June 1965 I wrote a profile of Woody Coleman for the Los Angeles Free Press that opened with his bold forecast: "I'm looking for a bloodbath this summer. We're going to get tired of being peaceful and nonviolent without getting anything. We're still getting crumbs; we're going to get a big slice of that cake." I could not have realized then the accuracy ofhis prediction, but I had learned enough about race relations in the city to give it credence. The article included his description of N-VAC as a "mean and nasty organization" that would become the northern equivalent perhaps of SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] or the political counterpart of the Nation of Islam [the Islamic group of which Malcolm X had been a minister] which, he said, lacked "an active program.' The article concluded with another provocative prediction: "We won't get a solution until we put enough pressure, until the politicians realize that there's not going to be any peace until the Negroes get their freedom. The movement will probably come to bloodshed. We've tried enough nonviolence and seen that it doesn't work."

Despite Woody's prescience, I doubt any of us were prepared for the unprecedented black insurgency of August 1965 ... when a mass protest against police abuse engulfed a large section of the city. The Watts "riot" was actually an insurgency that briefly transformed large sections of South Central Los Angeles into liberated zones of the black freedom struggle. I recall standing outside N-VAC's Central Avenue headquarters trying to make sense of the fiery, deadly racial rebellion that made our nonviolent, interracial militancy seem so insignificant and inadquate. I can never forget the sight of Central Avenue buildings in flames as far as I could see (although the N-VAC headquarters was undamaged). The spreading violence attracted more community support than had all of N-VAC's organizing efforts. We did our best to show our sympathy for the rioters, but none of us actually joined int he looting and other popular forms of uncivil disobedience. Instead, we organizaed an ambulance patrol to assist injured people - an activity that resulted in a clash with police that left me and two other N-VAC members with wounds from billy-club blows to our heads. I felt fortunate to have been spared the fate of many other resident who became "justifiable homicides" after similar encounters with police. N-VAC member Jerry Farber wrote about this incident in a widely reprinted Free Press article that expressed both our sense of solidarity with the rebellion and our uncertainty about its consequences. When National Guardsmen arrived, we felt a sense of pride that the Los Angeles police had not been able to overcome the black community's resistance without military assistance.

Did this push forward the movement for better conditions for African-Americans in Los Angeles or other cities where riots occurred? Yes and no. It made the very real problems difficult for even the most conventional-minded politicians and community leaders to ignore. It certainly provoked a "white backlash", as it was called at the time, though many white Americans had been "backlashing" ever since the end of the Civil War.

And while black communities in those situations may have been energized in some ways by events and the often sub-optimum responses to them by the forces of "law-and-order", there had to have been a great deal of demoralization, as well. After all, the Watts riot and well as the Neward riot of 1967 and those that followed the King assassination generally did the most physical damage in black neighborhoods themselves. And it was mostly African-Americans from those neighborhoods found among the dead and injured afterwards.

The David "Bobo" Brookses of today and also in the 1960s like to contrast the nonviolent approach represented by Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement in the South with the violence of riots like those in Watts and the rhetoric and occasional actions of groups like the Black Panther Party. What the Bobos actually want is the kind of "nonviolence" that comes with people not trying to do anything to actually addresses real social injustices, racial or otherwise.

In the real world, in many ways there was a radical difference between the two situations. The South's "de jure" segregation was in blatant conflict with the Constitution, a conflict that the Supreme Court highlighted in a dramatic way with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Ending de jure segregation in the South was by no means easy. And if King's brand of "nonviolence" had meant social and political passivity, de jure segregation would still be largely in place in 2008. And while neither the Kennedy or Johnson administration would have acted as aggressively as they did on civil rights without the pressure of civil rights activists, the federal government had a formal responsibility to enforce the Constitution against segregationist laws that violated it.

And while the Democratic Party in those days was also the "cracker party" (as Malcolm X called it) of George Wallace and Ross Barnett, both the Kennedy and the Johnson administrations were willing to act against segregation. In addition, the Republican Party in the 1960s was more sympathetic to civil rights concerns than is even conceivable today. So the Southern civil rights movement, including King's shrewd appeals to the American democratic traditions and Christian values, had a real chance at bringing practical political pressure to bear that had a meaningful chance of ending de jure segregation. The singular obnoxiousness of many Southern defenders of segregation clearly played a role in that process, as well.

But the problems of race and poverty outside of the legal structures of formal segregation were far more intractable than the nasty but embattled segregation system in the South. That was especially the case in urban areas in both the North and the South. But to understand the role of violent outbreaks like in Watts or the appeal such militant rhetoric as that associated with groups like the Panthers or the Nation of Islam or other "black nationalist" groups played in urban ghettoes of the time, we have to recognize that the problems manifested themselves in different ways than segregated lunch counters and the avenues for practical redress were not as clear as in the fight against de jure segregation.

Tags: civil rights movement, racism, segregation

Moyers on Martin and Lyndon

Bill Moyers discussed Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King, Jr., in his
Bill Moyers essay of 01/18/08 on his weekly Journal show. For all his faults, Johnson really cared about the needs of ordinary people. And acted on it. The video includes Johnson's famous "We shall overcome" moment, a phrase from an old hymn that civil rights activists frequently sang in an arrangement by Pete Seeger.



Moyer's conclusion of the essay:

Of course the movement had come first, watered by the blood of so many, championed bravely now by the preacher turned prophet who would himself soon be martyred. But there is no inevitability to history, someone has to seize and turn it. With these words at the right moment — "we shall overcome" — Lyndon Johnson transcended race and color, and history, too — reminding us that a president matters, and so do we.

Tags: bill moyers, civil rights movement, lyndon johnson, martin luther king jr.