Activism Choices

Activism Choices

While one can describe black social thought as ranging along a continuum of ideologies from complete biological amalgamation and cultural assimilation with members of the dominant society at one extreme, to complete withdrawal from American society and the creation of independent black states at the other, most African Americans have been characterized by what we may call an "ethnic dualism."  Thus between the two extremes there have been a great variety of ideologies recognizing blacks as American citizens, yet emphasizing their distinctiveness as an ethnic group.  Some of these intermediate categories have included:  advocacy of attaining constitutional rights through self-help and racial solidarity; and an insistence upon racial equality combined with preference for separate clubs and churches, and the espousal of all-black communities within the U.S.  This ambivalence, or ethnic dualism, has been produced by the contradiction between the values of American democracy and the fact of race discrimination.

W. E. B. Du Bois described it best:  "One ever feels his two-ness,-an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. . . .  He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the door of opportunity closed roughly in his face." (from The Souls of Black Folk, chap. 1)

Here we will examine some of the diverse options that arose in the 1960s African American protest movement

Legalistic Appoach -- NAACP

• The NAACP endorsed a direct, frontal attack on the system of racial segregation and discrimination through lobbying for civil rights legislation and, more important, fighting in the courts for the enforcement of the Reconstruction amendments.  Their focus was on disfranchisement and segregation.
• By mid-century the Supreme Court had outlawed discriminatory voting procedures, legal devices promoting residential segregation, and segregation in interstate transportation, in publicly owned recreational facilities, and in public institutions of higher education.  The culmination was the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board, which declared segregation in public elementary and high schools unconstitutional.
• In spite of state laws and Supreme Court decisions something was clearly wrong:  the white primary was outlawed in 1944, but most blacks in the South still couldn’t vote; Supreme Court decisions desegregating transportation facilities were still largely ignored; discrimination in employment and housing abounded, even in northern states with civil rights laws; beginning in 1954 the black unemployment rate moved steadily upward; the massive resistance to the Court’s Brown decision typified southern intransigence.
• A number of factors created a "revolution of expectations":  blacks were buoyed by the rise of new African nations with decolonization; communist Russia's successful attempts to embarrass the U.S. on the world stage by pointing to its racist violations of its democratic pretensions; Martin Luther King and the Montgomery bus boycott demonstrated that direct action could work.
• Most ironically, the NAACP’s very successes in the legislatures and the courts, more than any other single factor, led to this revolution of expectations and the resultant dissatisfaction with the limitations of the NAACP’s program.

Nonviolent Direct Action

• While nonviolent direct action had some philosophical and religious roots in America, the strategies and philosophies adopted by African Americans in the 1950s and 1960s were most directly inspired by Gandhi.
• Blacks had already seen how nonviolent direct action could work:  the threatened March on Washington in 1941 coerced President Roosevelt to act against job discrimination in the rapidly expanding war industries.
• CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality), especially as led by James Farmer, learned from A. Phillip Randolph the effectiveness of direct action as applied to the American scene.
• In the early years, CORE focused mostly on desegregating places of public accommodation and recreation in the northern states.
• In 1947 it sponsored a precursor to the 1961 Freedom Ride, known as the Journey of Reconciliation.  Interracial teams tested the compliance with the Supreme Court's 1946 Morgan v. Virginia decision, which held that state laws requiring segregation on interstate transportation were an undue burden on interstate commerce.  The Journey demonstrated that there was little compliance with the decision, but it resulted in little publicity or movement.
• Direct action techniques as used by SCLC and CORE ended the NAACP’s hegemony in the civil rights movement, hastened incalculably the whole process of social change in race relations, all but destroyed the barriers standing against the recognition of black constitutional rights, and ultimately turned the black protest organizations toward a deep concern with the economic and social problems of the masses.
• Eventually the movement would go from an emphasis on protecting African Americans' constitutional rights toward a focus on securing economic policies that would ensure the welfare of the culturally deprived in a technologically changing society; from appealing to white Americans’ sense of fair play (moral suasion) to demands based upon power in the black ghetto.
• The activity of black students around the nation forced the major civil rights groups, particularly SCLC and NAACP, to overcome their cautiousness and fight to keep up.

Albany

• In the previous lecture we considered why Americans are not as familiar with the "Kissing Case" in North Carolina as they are with the Emmett Till case in Mississippi.  Now we will do the same thing with protest efforts, highlighting the movement in Albany, Georgia, as opposed to the more famous one in Birmingham, Alabama.
• Albany came to the forefront of the civil rights movement in 1961.  Albany State College was an African-American college in Georgia.  In November 1961, SNCC mobilized students to protest about the segregation and disenfranchisement experienced there.  This protest did not receive support from local NAACP and other civil rights leaders as they saw SNCC as troublemakers.
• Albany’s bus center was targeted.  The law forbade segregation in interstate travel services; however, segregation still existed and this is what forced the students to protest.  Hundreds were arrested. Albany’s city authorities refused to desegregate the bus station despite pressure from the Attorney General, Robert Kennedy.
• Someone in the Albany civil rights movement invited Martin Luther King to join the protest.  This angered SNCC activists who wanted the protest to remain led by locals.
• King led one protest march and got arrested.  The city authorities played a cat-and-mouse game.  They decided nobody would be arrested and jailed; students were arrested and released.  In this way there were no "martyrs" to the cause and the nation's media were less likely to be attracted to what was going on -- the opposite of what happened in Birmingham in 1963.  They also promised the creation of a biracial committee to look at Albany’s problems, thus appearing magnanimous.  King left the Albany movement discouraged and returned to Atlanta.
• The authorities reneged on their agreement and the movement had lost momentum.  Protests became less and less well supported.
• Albany is typically recognized as a major defeat of the civil rights movement.  However:
  • the bus station was desegregated
  • a few more blacks registered their right to vote
  BUT
  • city parks were closed
  • city swimming pools were shut down
  • the city library was integrated but the seats were removed
  • schools remained segregated - despite 1954 Brown v Topeka.
• No violence was used by the authorities in Albany, so African Americans were seen as the cause of trouble rather than the authorities.  The lack of violence meant that the federal government had no reason to intervene; social disorder was not threatened as it had been in Little Rock.
• Another clear problem was the failure of SNCC/SCLC/NAACP to cooperate.
• King recognized that an area that had little SCLC support would not welcome SCLC help; also that the authorities within the South could not be trusted and that a political approach would be less effective than a financial one -- boycotts which would affect the financial well being of the white community.
• The lessons learned in Albany would contribute to the strategies employed successfully in Birmingham.

Sit-ins and the Origins of SNCC (Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee)

• Four students at North Carolina A&T -- Joseph McNeil, Izell Blair, Franklin McCain, and David Richmond -- went to a Woolworth's in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina, on a Monday afternoon, February 1, 1960.  They purchased a few items and then sat down at the lunch counter.  They were asked to leave by the waitress, but they politely explained that as they had purchased items in the store, they should be allowed to sit down.
• A black woman behind the counter berated them.  “You are stupid, ignorant.  You’re dumb. That’s why we can’t get anywhere today.  You know you’re supposed to eat at the other end.”
• The manager ordered his employees to ignore the students.  The students had expected to be arrested and they were surprised by the inaction.  They stayed for an hour.  The store closed and they went back to campus.
• Buoyed by their action, they recruited more students to go back with them the next day.  The same thing happened for the next three days, with increased numbers of students attending the sit-in and increasing media attention.  A&T refused to limit the actions of their students.  A few white students from Greensboro College joined the protestors on Wednesday to show their support.  More young whites stood outside and yelled at the students gathered inside.
• By the end of the week, the manager, having had his business disrupted and after receiving a bomb threat, closed the store.
• The Mayor of Greensboro asked citizens to forgo “individual rights and business interests” while an honorable resolution could be reached.  The black students gave him two weeks.
• Others did not wait.  There were sit ins in Raleigh, Durham, Elizabeth City, Charlotte, Fayetteville, Hampton.  In all, there were sit-ins in thirty counties in seven states, mostly led by students.  These were uncoordinated responses; while perhaps inspired by the actions of their fellow students, there was no overarching organization or leadership.
• Angela Davis, Andrew Young, and others say that they continually get asked the question, “How did you get started?  How did you organize?”  Their answer is always that it started without a grand plan.  They just felt they had to do something and along the way they met fellow travelers.
• SCLC had to play catch-up.  Ella Baker, an NAACP field organizer, had to convince the male leadership that the students, and young people in general, were the vanguard.  SCLC leaders showed their doubt, and perhaps contempt, by making Baker the conduit to the students.  Had it been important to them, Joanne Grant writes, they would have placed a male at the head.  Baker has been called the “midwife” for SNCC.

Increasing Radicalism

• Young civil rights activists came together in SNCC to form a community within a social struggle.  SMCC workers sought to create a rationale for activism by eclectically adopting ideas from the Gandhian independence movement and from the American traditions of pacifism and Christian idealism as formulated by CORE and SCLC.
• SNCC was less willing to impose its ideas on local black leaders or to restrain southern black militancy.
• Viewed as the shock troops of the civil rights movement, SNCC established projects in areas such as rural Mississippi considered too dangerous by other organizations; Bob Moses was a key figure in the Mississippi effort.
• Overall, SNCC's main strategy was to go into mostly rural areas and inform and aid people in getting the vote.  They also fought for general desegregation.  They emphasized building local, indigenous leadership.
• As the thrust of SNCC’s activities shifted from desegregation to political rights, its philosophical commitment to nonviolent direct action gave way to a secular, humanistic radicalism influenced by Marx, Malcolm X, Camus, and most of all by the SNCC organizers’ own experiences in southern black communities.
• After the defeat of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to unseat the regular all-white delegation to the Democratic National Convention in August, 1964, SNCC had by this time become an increasingly radical training ground for activists who would participate in the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, the Vietnam War protests, the Chicano Movement, and the Women’s struggle.  They also fostered connections with the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).
• They began to question their own nonviolent strategy.  They wondered whether nonviolence could achieve the fundamental social changes they now viewed as necessary.
• Staff members debated whether southern black people could achieve lasting improvement in their lives while continuing to rely on appeals for white liberal support and federal intervention, and whether SNCC could continue to expand the black struggle while remaining tied to the rhetoric of interracialism and nonviolent direct action.
• They also questioned whether their remaining goals could best be achieved through continued confrontation with existing institutions or through the building of alternative institutions controlled by the poor and powerless.
• The third phase of SNCC’s development involved the members efforts' to resolve their differences by addressing the need for black power and black consciousness, by separating themselves from white people, and by building black controlled institutions.  By 1966, when Stokely Carmichael (who originated the phrase "Black Power") was elected chairman of SNCC, SNCC espoused its separatist talk, but was unable to unify black support.

Nationalist Ideologies

• Black nationalism was far more deeply rooted in the African-American community than practice of nonviolence.  Prominent advocates have been Henry McNeal Turner, Marcus Garvey, and Malcolm X.
• Generally, nationalist ideologies have been weakest in periods when the status of blacks seems to be improving, when there appeared to be hope for the achievement of equality in American society.  Nationalist ideologies have been strongest in periods of deteriorating conditions, or when, as in the latter part of the 1960s, black expectations far outran actual gains, with consequent frustration and disillusionment.
• The gap between ideal and practice in American society has meant that blacks not only wanted to be part of society but that they also found it desirable (and necessary) to develop their own group life within it.
• By 1964, SNCC and CORE, both of whom had been prominent practitioners of nonviolence, grew disdainful of American society and its middle-class way of life, and cynical about liberals and the leaders of organized labor.
• SCLC and NAACP believed that blacks, as a dispossessed minority, could not hope to achieve their goals purely through their own actions.  They based their strategy on a coalition of blacks with white liberals, organized labor, and white clergy such as had developed during the plans for the March on Washington.  They thought the coalition, acting as a political force, would compel the federal government to eliminate poverty in American for whites and blacks alike.
• By the most widely accepted estimates, 21% of the American people lived below the officially established poverty line in 1959.  By 1969, only 12% remained below that line.  Improvements helped blacks and whites in about the same proportion:  56% of the black population had lived in poverty in 1959, while only 32% did so ten years later -- a 42% reduction;  18% of all whites had been poor in 1959, but only 10% were poor a decade later -- a 44% reduction.  This marked a combination of a very healthy economy as well as Pres. Johnson's Great Society initiatives.
• Vietnam further divided the groups, with SNCC and CORE becoming more radical and anti-American.