writing assignment

CHAPTER 28

Freedom Brand

LIKE MANY ACTIVISTS, W. E. B. Du Bois reeled from the height of the Nazi Holocaust of Jews and other non-Aryans. After the United States entered World War II in 1942, Du Bois felt energized by Black America’s “Double V Campaign”: victory against racism at home, and victory against fascism abroad. The Double V Campaign kicked the civil rights movement into high gear, especially up North, and the long-awaited comprehensive study of the Negro financed by the Carnegie Foundation kicked it into yet another gear, especially down South.

In 1936, Carnegie Foundation president Frederick P. Keppel had briefly considered some White American scholars when he had decided to heed Cleveland mayor Newton Baker’s recommendation to sponsor a study on the “infant race.” But there was almost no consideration of Zora Neale Hurston or the elder statesmen, W. E. B. Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson. Although White assimilationists and philanthropists were taking over the racial discourse in the academy, they were customarily shutting out Black scholars as being too subjective and biased to study Black people. It was amazing that the same scholars and philanthropists who saw no problem with White scholars studying White people had all these biased complaints when it came to Black scholars studying Black people. But what would racist ideas be without contradictions.1

Carnegie officials drew up a list of only foreign European scholars and White officials stationed in European colonies who they believed could complete the study “in a wholly objective and dispassionate way.” They ended up selecting the Swedish Nobel-laureate economist Gunnar Myrdal, bringing him to the United States in 1938. With $300,000 in Carnegie funds, Myrdal employed a classroom of leading Black and White scholars, including Frazier and Herskovits —seemingly everyone except Hurston, Du Bois, and Woodson.2

In his two-volume, nearly 1,500-page study, published in 1944, Myrdal shined an optimistic light on what he termed, in his title, An American Dilemma.

He identified the racial problem as a “moral problem,” as assimilationists long had since the days of William Lloyd Garrison. White Americans display an “astonishing ignorance about the Negro,” Myrdal wrote. Whites ignorantly viewed Negroes as “criminal,” as having “loose sexual morals,” as “religious,” as having “a gift for dancing and singing,” and as “the happy-go-lucky children of nature.” Myrdal convinced himself—and many of his readers—that ignorance had produced racist ideas, and that racist ideas had produced racist policies, and therefore that “a great majority of white people in America would be prepared to give the Negro a substantially better deal if they knew the facts.” W. E. B. Du Bois probably shook his head when he read this passage. “Americans know the facts,” he may have thought to himself, as he once wrote. Du Bois had been sharing the facts for nearly fifty years, to no avail.3

Du Bois did enjoy most of the two volumes, including the devastating assault on the rationales of segregationists, the encyclopedic analysis of racial discrimination, and the fallacy of southerners’ separate-but-equal brand. “Never before in American history,” Du Bois admitted, had “a scholar so completely covered this field. The work is monumental.” E. Franklin Frazier agreed in his two glowing reviews. He praised Myrdal’s “objectivity” and willingness to describe “the Negro community for what it was—a pathological phenomenon in American life.”4

And yet one of Myrdal’s solutions to White racism was still Black assimilation. “In practically all its divergences, American Negro culture is . . . a distorted development, or a pathological condition, of the general American culture,” Myrdal surmised. “It is to the advantage of American Negroes as individuals and as a group to become assimilated into American culture.” An American Dilemma did for cultural assimilationists what Darwin’s Origin of Species had done for Social Darwinists, what Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin had done for abolitionists, what Samuel Morton’s Crania Americana had done for polygenesists, and what Robert Finley’s Thoughts on Colonization had done for colonizationists. The book inspired a cadre of key politicians, lawyers, judges, preachers, scholars, capitalists, journalists, and activists to power up the next generation of racist ideas and the assimilationist wing of the civil rights movement. To Myrdal, neither segregationist scholars, with their “preconceptions about the Negroes’ inherent inferiority,” nor antiracist scholars, who were “basically an expression of the Negro protest,” could be objective the way he and the new assimilationists could.5

AS WORLD WAR II neared its end in April 1945, W. E. B. Du Bois joined representatives of fifty countries at the United Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco. He pressed, unsuccessfully, for the new UN Charter to become a buffer against the political racism of colonialism. Then, later in the year, Du Bois attended the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester, England, and was fittingly introduced as the “Father of Pan- Africanism.” A sense of determination pervaded the Fifth Congress. In attendance were two hundred men and women, some of whom would go on to lead the African decolonization movements, like Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta. These delegates did not make the politically racist request of past Pan-African congresses of gradual decolonization, as if Africans were not ready to rule Africans. The antiracist “Challenge to the Colonial Powers” demanded immediate independence from European colonial rule.6

The United States emerged from World War II, looked over at the ravaged European and East Asian worlds, and flexed its unmatched capital, industrial force, and military arms as the new global leader. Only the Communist Soviet Union seemed to stand in America’s way. The Cold War between capitalism and communism to win the economic and political allegiances of decolonizing nations, and of their markets and resources, had begun. In March 1946, Dean Acheson warned that the “existence of discrimination against minority groups in this country has an adverse effect on our relations with other countries.” Acheson was a source as reliable as they came. He had headed the State Department’s delegation at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, which rebuilt the international capitalist system. President Harry S. Truman, who took over after Roosevelt died in 1945, listened to Acheson’s warning that globally circulating reports of discrimination, fanned by the flames of Russian media outlets, were harming US foreign policy and causing doors to shut on American businessmen, especially in the decolonizing non-White nations.7

President Truman was prepared to make some reforms, but southern segregationists fought tooth and nail to maintain the racial status quo. Mississippi’s firebrand senator Theodore Bilbo, for one, did not get the memo from Acheson. “I call on every red-blooded white man to use any means to keep the niggers away from the polls,” Bilbo said on a reelection campaign stop in 1946. Bilbo’s call to arms ignited such a firestorm that when he won his election, the newly elected Republican majority blocked him from reentering the Senate in 1947. (His southern peers preaching “states’ rights” to keep Blacks from the polls were allowed to take their seats.) Not to be silenced, Bilbo retired to his

estate in southern Mississippi and self-published Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization to rally the troops against egalitarians. “That the Negro is inferior to the Caucasian has been proved by six thousand years of world-wide experimentation,” Bilbo claimed.8

Take Your Choice hit southern bookstores during a landmark publishing year, 1947. Howard historian John Hope Franklin’s sweeping history of Black folk, From Slavery to Freedom, was a milestone, and pushed hard against the racist version of history promoted by Bilbo and Columbia’s fading Dunning School. From Slavery to Freedom wasn’t wholly antiracist, though. Franklin began with the racist historical conception that slavery had induced Black inferiority. This assertion did at least counteract Jim Crow historians’ claims of enslavement as “a civilizing force.” But both historical pictures were wrong and racist—one started Black people in inferiority before slavery, and the other ended Black people in inferiority after slavery. And Franklin cast Black women and poor people as impotent spectators in the Negro’s “struggle for the realization of freedom.” Prodded by Black feminist historians like Mary Frances Berry, Nell Irvin Painter, Darlene Clark Hine, and Deborah Gray White, John Hope Franklin—and the historically male-centered field of African American history—spent the rest of the century trying to correct these mistakes in subsequent editions and books.9

As Franklin set the new course of Black (male) historiography in 1947 (decades before Black women’s history set a newer course), Columbia evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky and anthropologist Ashley Montagu set the new course of Social Darwinism—away from eugenics. The Ukraine-born Dobzhansky had famously joined evolution and genetics by defining evolution as a “change in the frequency of an allele within a gene pool.” The England-born Montagu had succeeded his mentor, Franz Boas, as America’s most eminent anthropological opponent of segregation when Boas died in 1942. Montagu’s Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race topped the charts that year, with Americans still shuddering from news of the Holocaust. Montagu exposed the dangerous myth of biological racial hierarchy and shared the antiracist concept that “all cultures must be judged in relation to their own history . . . and definitely not by the arbitrary standard of any single culture.” Montagu did not always follow his own advice, however. In his “example of cultural relativity,” he judged that in the past 5,000 years, while European cultures will have advanced, “the kingdoms of Africa have undergone comparatively little change.”10

On June 6, 1947, these two commanding scholars published their groundbreaking article in the all-powerful Science journal. “Race differences,” Dobzhansky and Montagu wrote, “arise chiefly because of the differential action of natural selection on geographically separate populations.” They rejected eugenic ideas of fixed races, fixed racial traits, and a fixed racial hierarchy. Human populations (or races) were evolving, they argued, and changing genetically through two evolutionary processes: one biological, one cultural. It was not nature or nurture distinguishing humans, but nature and nurture. This formulation became known as the dual-evolution theory, or the modern evolutionary consensus. The consensus held as evolutionary biology grew over the course of the century. It was an area of growth that sometimes complemented the growth of molecular biology, particularly after American James Watson and Brits Francis Crick and Rosalind Franklin discovered the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) in 1953.

Segregationists and assimilationists still found ways to adapt dual-evolution theory to suit their ideas about Black people. Segregationists could argue that African populations contained the lowest frequencies of “good” genes. Assimilationists could argue that European populations had created the most complex and sophisticated societies, and were the most culturally evolved populations. Dobzhansky and Montagu ended up dethroning the eugenicists in science but enthroning new racist ideas, as reflected in the globally reported United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Statements on Race in 1950 and 1951.11

UNESCO officials had assembled in 1950 an international dream team of scholars in Paris to draw up the final rebuttal to Nazism and eugenicists worldwide. Virtually all of the scholars, including Montagu, Dobzhansky, E. Franklin Frazier, and Gunnar Myrdal, had expressed assimilationist ideas—proof that even as the scientific establishment recognized segregationist ideas as racist, they still ensured that assimilationism endured and dominated the racial discourse. While claiming that no human populations had any biological evolutionary achievements, these assimilationists spoke of the “cultural achievements” of certain human populations in the 1950 UNESCO Race Statement. And then, in 1951, geneticists and physical anthropologists figured, in their revised statement: “It is possible, though not proved, that some types of innate capacity for intellectual and emotional responses are commoner in one human group than in another.” Segregationist scholars set out to prove these innate racial differences in intelligence.12

Even before the UNESCO statements appeared on front pages from New York City to Paris, President Harry S. Truman had taken the initiative to improve race relations in the United States. Racial reform was a vital, though relatively unremembered facet of the “Truman Doctrine” that he presented to Congress on March 12, 1947. He branded the United States the leader of the free world and the Soviet Union the leader of the unfree world. “The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms,” Truman proclaimed. Branding itself the leader of the free world opened the United States up to criticism about its myriad unfree racial policies (not to mention its unfree class, gender, and sexual policies). The harsh treatment of non-White foreigners, the string of nasty postwar lynchings of returning soldiers, the anti-lynching activism of the internationally renowned artist Paul Robeson, NAACP charges of human rights violations before the United Nations—suddenly these unfree racial policies and actions became a liability. Protecting the freedom brand of the United States became more important for northern politicians than sectional unity and securing segregationists’ votes. In addition, exploiting foreign resources became more important for northern tycoons than exploiting southern resources. Cold War considerations and burgeoning activism suddenly forced civil rights onto the national agenda. But, of course, a recounting of these economic and political considerations was not the race relations story—or the history—that the Truman administration wanted consumed. Race relations, as Gunnar Myrdal wrote, were moral problems in need of morally based, persuasive solutions.13

In October 1947, Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights issued its 178-page report, To Secure These Rights. The commission praised Myrdal’s An American Dilemma, condemned the “moral dry rot” at the heart of America, and recommended civil rights legislation. “Our domestic civil rights shortcomings are a serious obstacle” in US foreign policy, the commission stated, using the now acting secretary of state Dean Acheson as a source. But Gallop pollsters found that only 6 percent of White Americans thought these rights should be secured immediately—only 6 percent, apparently, was antiracist in 1947.14

On February 2, 1948, Truman urged Congress to implement the recommendations of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, regardless of the lack of support among White Americans. “[The] position of the United States in the world today” made civil rights “especially urgent,” Truman stressed. The backlash was significant. One Texas representative kicked off his winning US Senate campaign by rallying 10,000 supporters in Austin to view

Truman’s civil rights proposals as “a farce and a sham—an effort to set up a police state in the guise of liberty.” Lyndon Baines Johnson did not, however, join the “Dixiecrats” who bolted from the Democratic Party on account of Truman’s civil rights agenda. The Dixiecrats ran South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond for president on a segregationist platform that read eerily like South Africa’s apartheid Nationalist Party, which rose to power in 1948.15

Thanks in part to the support of Black voters, President Truman defeated both Thurmond and the runaway favorite, Republican Thomas E. Dewey, in the election that year. In voting for him, Black voters and civil rights activists were especially pleased with Truman’s use of executive power in 1948 to desegregate the armed forces and the federal workforce. Civil rights activists had other reasons to be hopeful that year. Jackie Robinson desegregated Major League Baseball, and around the same time, the National Football League and the National Basketball Association were also desegregated. For decades thereafter, Black baseball, football, and basketball professionals were routinely steered into positions that took advantage of their so-called natural animal-like speed and strength (apparently, nonathletic Black folk were not really Black).16

Civil rights activists were also pleased when Truman’s Justice Department filed a brief for Shelley v. Kramer. The case was decided on May 3, 1948, with the Supreme Court holding that the courts could not enforce all those Whites- only real estate covenants proliferating in northern cities to keep out migrants and stop housing desegregation. “The United States has been embarrassed in the conduct of foreign relations by acts of discrimination taking place in this country,” the Justice Department’s brief stated. It was the first time the US government had intervened in a case to vindicate Black civil rights. It would not be the last. Truman’s Justice Department filed similar briefs for other successful desegregation cases in higher education during the 1940s and early 1950s, ever reminding the justices of the foreign implications of discrimination.17

The Shelley v. Kraemer decision was hardly popular. In 1942, 84 percent of White Americans told pollsters they desired separate Black sections in their towns. They apparently had little problem with the overcrowded conditions in those Black neighborhoods. But the 1948 decision did galvanize the open housing movement—and open the floodgates of White opposition to desegregation—in cities all over the postwar United States. The open housing movement featured a motley collection of folks. There were upwardly mobile Blacks and antiracist housing activists struggling for better housing options. There were racist Blacks who hated living in neighborhoods with inferior Black

folks and dreamed of living next to superior White folks. And there were assimilationists who believed that integrated neighborhoods could facilitate uplift suasion, improve race relations, and solve the nation’s racial problems. White real estate agents and speculators exploited everyone’s racist ideas through blockbusting—the practice of convincing White owners to sell their homes at a reduced price, out of the fear that property values were on the verge of a steep drop due to Blacks moving in, only to resell at above-market value to Black buyers eager for better housing stock. Real estate agents and speculators easily scared White owners about the consequences of Blacks moving in, warning of “an immediate rise in crime and violence . . . of vice, of prostitution, of gambling and dope,” as Detroit’s most famous anti-open-housing activist put it. White neighborhoods became interracial and ended up almost all Black, and the changing demographics from White to Black quickly led to worsening conceptions of the same neighborhood. (By the end of the twentieth century, the opposite was occurring as Whites “gentrified” Black urban neighborhoods. Black neighborhoods became interracial and eventually ended up almost all White, with the changing demographics from Black to White quickly leading to improved conceptions of the same neighborhood. Apparently, the sight of White people marked a good neighborhood, whereas the sight of Black people in the same place marked a bad one, thus demonstrating the power of racist ideas.)18

When racist ideas and policies did not keep Blacks out, urban Whites sometimes turned to violence in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. However, most urban Whites preferred “flight over fight.” Real estate agents, speculators, and developers benefited, selling fleeing Whites new suburban homes. America experienced an unprecedented postwar boom in residential and new highway construction as White families moved to the suburbs and had to commute farther to their jobs. To buy new homes, Americans used wartime savings and the benefits of the GI Bill, passed in 1944. It was the most wide-ranging set of welfare benefits ever offered by the federal government in a single bill. More than 200,000 war veterans used the bill’s benefits to buy a farm or start a business; 5 million purchased new homes; and almost 10 million went to college. Between 1944 and 1971, federal spending for former soldiers in this “model welfare system” totaled over $95 billion. As with the New Deal welfare programs, however, Black veterans faced discrimination that reduced or denied them the benefits. Combined with the New Deal and suburban housing construction (in developments that found legal ways to keep Blacks out), the GI Bill gave birth to the White middle class and widened the economic gap between

the races, a growing disparity racists blamed on poor Black fiscal habits.19 While urban Black neighborhoods in postwar America became the national

symbol of poverty and crime, the suburban White neighborhoods, containing the suburban White houses, wrapped by white picket fences, lodging happy White families, became the national symbol of prosperity and safety. All of the assimilationist chatter in the media, in science, and in popular culture hardly reined in the segregationist backlash to the open housing movement, but it did do wonders uniting historically oppressed European ethnic groups in White suburbia. Ethnic enclaves in cities transfigured into multiethnic suburbs, the land where the Italians, Jews, Irish, and other non-Nordics finally received the full privileges of Whiteness. “Neither religion nor ethnicity separated us at school or in the neighborhood,” remembered Karen Brodkin, a University of California at Los Angeles anthropologist whose Jewish family moved to Long Island, New York, in 1949.20

NAACP chapters lent their support to the open housing movement. But engaging in activism was like walking a tightrope in postwar America. In 1950, Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy started leading a witch hunt for “Communists,” meaning virtually anyone critical of the dominant ideas of the day, such as capitalism, America’s pro-colonial policy abroad, northern assimilation, and southern segregation. Walter White and his right-hand man Roy Wilkins had to keep the NAACP’s legal activism and uplift suasion carefully within the status quo of anti-communism and assimilation. “The Negro wants change in order that he may be brought in line with the American standard,” Wilkins wrote in The Crisis in December 1951. Meanwhile, antiracists and socialists, and certainly antiracist socialists, were being threatened, fired, arrested, and jailed on trumped-up charges. An eighty-two- year-old Du Bois was arrested (and exonerated) in 1951. The US State Department revoked Du Bois’s passport, as it did Paul Robeson’s, and attempted to silence the St. Louis–born Black dancer Josephine Baker in France, all to manage the freedom brand of the United States abroad.21

But the State Department could not stop William Patterson, chairman of the short-lived Civil Rights Congress, from slipping into Geneva in 1951 and personally delivering a petition, entitled We Charge Genocide, to the United Nations Committee on Human Rights. Signed by Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Trinidadian journalist Claudia Jones (founder of England’s first Black newspaper), and almost one hundred others, the petition—and documentation of nearly five hundred brutal crimes against African Americans in the late 1940s—

blasted the credibility of the self-identified leader of the free world. The true “test of the basic goals of a foreign policy is inherent in the manner in which a government treats its own nationals,” the antiracists boomed from Switzerland to Swaziland.22

Scurrying into damage control, the US State Department found some anti- communist, racist, unconditionally patriotic Blacks to go on speaking tours, such as Max Yergan, who became an outspoken defender of apartheid South Africa. In 1950 or 1951, a cadre of brilliant propagandists in what became known as the United States Information Agency (USIA)—the US foreign public relations agency—drafted and circulated a pamphlet around the world entitled The Negro in American Life. The pamphlet acknowledged the past failings of slavery and racism and declared that there had been racial reconciliation and redemption, made possible, of course, by the power of American democracy. These branders of the New America ingeniously focused on the history of racial progress (and not the racist present) and on Black elites (and not the Black masses) as the standards of measurement for American race relations. The question was not whether America had eliminated racial disparities. That was deemed impossible —just as the elimination of slavery was once deemed impossible. The question was whether the Talented Tenth were experiencing less discrimination today than yesterday. “It is against this background that the progress which the Negro has made and the steps still needed for the full solutions of his problems must be measured,” the pamphlet read. Over the past fifty years, there had emerged more Black “large landowners,” successful businessmen, and college students. Activism had not driven this “tremendous pace” of racial progress, but uplift and media suasion, The Negro in American Life imagined, evoking the imagination of Gunnar Myrdal. While fifty years ago, “the majority of whites, northern and southern, were unabashed in their estimate of the Negro as an inferior,” the growing “number of educated Negroes, and their journalists and novelists, have made the white community keenly aware of the cruel injustice of prejudice.” The Negro in American Life declared to the world that “today, there is scarcely a community where that concept has not been drastically modified.”

In fact, there was scarcely a community in the early 1950s where prejudice was not fueling cruelly unjust White campaigns against open housing, desegregated education, equal job opportunities, and civil rights. The Negro in American Life displayed pictures of a desegregated classroom and community that few Americans would have recognized, while admitting “much remains to be done.” The pamphlet asked, given how bad things were, is it not amazing

how far we’ve come? With every civil rights victory and failure, this line of reasoning became the standard past-future declaration of assimilationists: we have come a long way, and we have a ways to go. They purposefully sidestepped the present reality of racism.23

The Negro in American Life attempted to win the hearts and minds—and markets and resources—of the decolonizing non-White world. Nothing would be better for our interests in Asia than “racial harmony in America,” said the US ambassador to India, Chester Bowles, at Yale in 1952. However, after the illustrious World War II general Dwight D. Eisenhower entered the White House in 1953, he discontinued the Truman Doctrine on civil rights. Racial discrimination was not a societal problem, but a failure of individual feelings, Eisenhower lectured. The solution lay not in force, but in “persuasion, honestly pressed,” and “conscience, justly aroused,” Eisenhower added. This pipe dream allowed the shrewd Eisenhower to conciliate northern readers of An American Dilemma and southern readers of Take Your Choice.24

Before Truman left office, his Justice Department had submitted a brief for yet another desegregation case before the US Supreme Court, a combined case of five NAACP lawsuits against desegregated schools in Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, and Washington, DC. “It is in the context of the present world struggle between freedom and tyranny that the problem of race discrimination must be viewed,” the brief stated in support of desegregation. The Court heard oral arguments in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka for a second time on December 8, 1953. At a White House dinner, Eisenhower invited his newly appointed chief justice, Earl Warren, and grabbed a seat next to the eminent lawyer defending the segregationists, John Davis, someone the president repeatedly praised as “a great man.” On a stroll to the coffee table, Eisenhower told Warren he could understand why southerners wanted to make sure “their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big black buck.”25

On May 17, 1954, Chief Justice Warren, in his opinion of the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision, somehow agreed with the lower court’s finding that southern schools had “been equalized, or are being equalized.” Thus, for the Supreme Court, Brown v. Board of Education was about the psychological impact of separate schools on Black children. Warren found the answer in the social science literature, the recent explosion of studies trying to figure out why Black people had not assimilated and why the racial disparities still persisted. With the slavery-deforming-Black-people theory no longer sustainable in the

early 1950s, assimilationists conjured up the segregation-deforming-Black- people theory. They cited the famous doll tests of psychologists Kenneth Clark and Mamie Clark, as well as popular books on the subject, such as The Mark of Oppression (1951) by two psychoanalysts. Discrimination and the separation of the races, the assimilationists argued, had been having a horrible effect on Black personalities and self-esteem.26

In his Brown opinion, Chief Justice Warren footnoted the famous doll tests as evidence of the negative impact of segregation on Black people. He felt sure enough to write, “To separate [colored children] from others of similar age and qualification solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” In short, “segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children.” It tended to retard their “education and mental development” and deprived “them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racial[ly] integrated school system,” Warren surmised. “We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”27

Warren essentially offered a racist opinion in this landmark case: separate Black educational facilities were inherently unequal and inferior because Black students were not being exposed to White students. Warren’s assimilationist problem led to an assimilationist solution over the next decade to desegregate American schools: the forced busing of children from Black schools to inherently superior White schools. Rarely were White children bused to Black schools. By the 1970s, segregationist White parents from Boston to Los Angeles were opposing forced busing, spitting on reformers all types of racist vitriol, while antiracist Black parents were demanding two-way busing or the reallocation of resources from the over-resourced White schools to the under- resourced Black schools. These antiracist plans were opposed by both assimilationists and segregationists, who seemed to assume, like the Court, that majority-Black schools could never be equal to majority-White schools.

Not many Americans immediately recognized the assimilationist reasoning behind the Brown decision. But Zora Neale Hurston did. She was then sixty-four and living in Florida, and she was as sharp as ever despite her recent literary descent. “If there are not adequate Negro schools in Florida, and there is some residual, some inherent and unchangeable quality in white schools, impossible to duplicate anywhere else, then I am the first to insist that Negro children of

Florida be allowed to share this boon,” wrote Hurston in the Orlando Sentinel. “But if there are adequate Negro schools and prepared instructors and instructions, then there is nothing different except the presence of white people. For this reason, I regard the ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court as insulting rather than honoring my race.” Calling out civil rights leaders, she framed it a contradiction in terms to scream race pride and equality while at the same time spurning “Negro teachers and self-association.” Hurston’s widely reprinted letter was praised by segregationists and antiracists, but sparked only ire from assimilationists.28

Despite its basis in racist reasoning, for many—and of course many did not actually read Warren’s opinion—the effect of the landmark decision overturning Plessy v. Ferguson honored Black people. “I have seen the impossible happen,” wrote W. E. B. Du Bois. USIA propagandists were as elated as Black folk. Within an hour of the announcement, the Voice of America broadcast the news to Eastern Europe. Press releases were drawn up in multiple languages. The decision “falls appropriately within the Eisenhower Administration’s many- frontal attack on global communism,” the Republican National Committee had to state on May 21, 1954, since Eisenhower refused to endorse Brown.

In the Jim Crow South, Mississippi senator James Eastland vowed—rallying the troops—that the South “will not abide by or obey this legislative decision by a political court.” And the segregationist resistance came so fast and so strong that when it came time for the Supreme Court to implement the Brown decision in 1955, for the first time in US history, the Court ended up vindicating a constitutional right and then “deferr[ing] its exercise for a more convenient time,” sending Du Bois and other activists into a rage. Still, southern segregationists closed ranks and organized “massive resistance” through violence and racist ideas. Apparently, they cared more about defending their separate-but-equal brand before America than defending the American-freedom brand before the world.29

CHAPTER 29

Massive Resistance

THE MOST NOTORIOUS victim of what was to be called “massive resistance” to desegregation was fourteen-year-old Emmett Till on August 28, 1955. For hissing at a Mississippi White woman, hooligans beat Till so ruthlessly that his face was unrecognizable during his open casket funeral in his native Chicago. The gruesome pictures were shown around the enraged Black world. On March 12, 1956, nineteen US senators and seventy-seven House representatives signed a southern manifesto opposing the Brown v. Board of Education decision for planting “hatred and suspicion where there has been heretofore friendship and understanding.” The Klan fielded new members, and elite segregationists founded White citizens councils. Southern schools ensured that their textbooks gave students “bedtime” stories, as historian C. Vann Woodward called them, that read like Gone with the Wind.

But the civil rights movement kept coming. W. E. B. Du Bois was stunned watching the unfolding Montgomery Bus Boycott during the 1956 election year. It was not the boycott’s initial mobilizer, Alabama State College professor Jo Ann Robinson, nor the boycott’s drivers, those walking Black female domestics, who surprised him. Any serious history student of Black activism knew that Black women were regularly driving forces. Du Bois was stunned by the twenty- seven-year-old figurehead of the boycott. A Baptist preacher as a radical activist? Du Bois had never thought his eighty-eight-year-old eyes would see a preacher like Martin Luther King Jr. Du Bois sent a message of encouragement, and King sent a grateful reply. King had read Du Bois’s books, and he later characterized him as “an intellectual giant” who saw through the “poisonous fog of lies that depicted [Black people] as inferior.” Du Bois also sent a proclamation to the Indian journal Gandhi Marg. King—in his strident commitment to nonviolent civil disobedience—could be the American Mahatma Gandhi.1

King’s other favorite scholar penned the most controversial Black book of 1957, possibly of the entire decade. The gender racism of E. Franklin Frazier in

Black Bourgeoisie, depicting White women as more beautiful and sophisticated than Black women, Black wives as domineering, and Black husbands as “impotent physically and socially,” was as manifest as his historical racism. “Slavery was a cruel and barbaric system that annihilated the negro as a person,” Frazier said. This theory resembled the racist thesis of historian Stanley Elkins in his smash hit Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959). And yet Frazier had overcome his cultural racism. The popular social science literature about the psychological effects of discrimination that molded the Brown decision had remolded Frazier’s old ideas of assimilation as psychological progress, and he now believed in assimilation as regression. No group of Black people held more firmly to assimilationist ideas, Frazier argued, than the Black bourgeoisie, who tried to “slough off everything . . . reminiscent of its Negro origin.”2

Frazier sounded like the ministers of Elijah Muhammad’s quickly growing Chicago-based Nation of Islam (NOI) in the late 1950s. “They won’t let you be White and you don’t want to be Black,” the son of Garveyites, former convict, and the NOI’s new Harlem minister liked to say. “You don’t want to be African and you can’t be an American. . . . You in bad shape!” CBS’s Mike Wallace brought Malcolm X and the NOI to the attention of millions in the 1959 sensational five-part television series entitled The Hate That Hate Produced: A Study of the Rise of Black Racism and Black Supremacy. Elijah Muhammad and his ministers opposed assimilationists; instead, they preached racial separation (not Black supremacy), arguing that Whites were an inferior race of devils. Ironically, Black and White assimilationists, clothed in racism and hate for everything Black, condemned the Nation of Islam for donning racism and hate for everything White.3

In Black Bourgeoisie, Frazier delivered the most withering attack on the Black middle class in the history of American letters, commercializing a new class racism: the Black bourgeoisie as inferior to the White bourgeoisie, as more socially irresponsible, as bigger conspicuous consumers, as more politically corrupt, as more exploitative, and as sillier in their “politics of respectability,” to use historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s recent term. Despite, or rather because of, Frazier’s overreach into class racism, Black Bourgeoisie had a significant effect on the civil rights movement, galvanizing Martin Luther King’s generation of middle-class youngsters to break away from what Frazier termed their apathetic “world of make-believe.”4

And this powerful force of youthful courage, growing more powerful by the

day, was needed to resist the segregationist massive resistance that seemed to grow more massive with each passing day. Segregationists had stripped the Civil Rights Act of 1957 of its enforcement powers, making it practically a dead letter when it passed on August 29, 1957. On September 4, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus deployed the National Guard to block the Little Rock Nine from desegregating Central High School, defying a federal court order. With the globally circulating sights and sounds of government troops defending howling segregationist mobs, Little Rock harmed the American freedom brand.

“Our enemies are gloating over this incident,” Eisenhower wailed in a nationally televised speech, “and using it everywhere to misrepresent our whole nation.” Eisenhower and his aides agonized for two weeks, seeking solutions that could keep both his political image in the South and the American image abroad intact, to no avail. On September 24, in a decision he later regarded as “the most repugnant act in all his eight years in the White House,” Eisenhower sent in federal troops to protect the Little Rock students as they entered the school. Some civil rights activists recognized the incredible power Cold War calculations had given them to embarrass America into desegregation. Still others believed and hoped that Gunnar Myrdal’s dictum was coming true: that the civil rights movement was persuading away racist ideas.5

A NINETY-YEAR-OLD DU BOIS was hopeful, too, in another way. “Today, the United States is fighting world progress, progress which must be towards socialism and against colonialism,” he said, speaking to seven hundred students and faculty at Howard University in April 1958. Later in the year, having gotten his passport back, Du Bois toured Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and Communist China, where he happily met Chairman Mao Tse-tung. When Mao started musing about the “diseased psychology” of African Americans, showing that he was attuned to the latest racist social science, Du Bois interjected. Blacks were not diseased psychologically; they lacked incomes, Du Bois explained, inciting a debate and a fusillade of questions from Mao. When Du Bois expressed some of his failures as an activist, Mao interjected. Activists only failed when they stopped struggling. “This, I gather,” Mao said, “you have never done.”6

Martin Luther King Jr. had not stopped struggling, either. But Du Bois had soured on King, deciding in late 1959 that he was not the American Gandhi after all. “Gandhi submitted [to nonviolence], but he also followed a positive [economic] program to offset his negative refusal to use violence,” Du Bois said.

At the time, Black critics were soundly blitzing King’s philosophy of nonviolence, but some were also taking the civil rights movement figurehead to task on some of his lingering racist ideas. In 1957, King received a letter for his “Advice for the Living” column in Ebony magazine. “Why did God make Jesus white, when the majority of peoples in the world are non-white?” Jesus “would have been no more significant if His skin had been black,” King responded. “He is no less significant because his skin was white.” The nation’s most famous Black preacher and activist prayed to a White Jesus? A “disturbed” reader ripped off a letter to Ebony. “I believe, as you do, that skin color shouldn’t be important, but I don’t believe Jesus was white,” the reader stated. “What is the basis for your assumption that he was?” With only a basis in racist ideas, King did not respond.7

Du Bois and King had not let up on the pedal of struggle, and neither had college students. Four freshman at North Carolina A&T trotted into a Woolworths in Greensboro on February 1, 1960. They sat down at its restricted counter and remained until the store closed. Within days, hundreds of students from area colleges and high schools were “sitting in.” News reports of these nonviolent sit-ins flashed on screens nationally, setting off a sit-in wave to desegregate southern businesses. “Students at last to the rescue,” rejoiced Du Bois, urging them on. By April, students were staging sit-ins in seventy-eight southern and border communities, and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had been established.8

If civil rights activists hoped that the attention they received would sway presidential candidates, they were disappointed. The Democratic nominee for president, a dashing Massachusetts senator, said as little about civil rights as possible, both on the campaign trail and in the first-ever televised presidential debates. John F. Kennedy excited activists by supporting the Democrats’ civil rights plank, but disappointed them by naming a suspected opponent of civil rights, Texas senator Lyndon B. Johnson, as his running mate.

Kennedy and his GOP opponent, Richard Nixon, both tried not to take sides. The civil rights and massive resistance movements were stirring debates in many forums, including the scholarly and artistic communities, which in turned further stirred the civil rights and the resistance movements. An airline reservation agent in New York, who wrote fiction in her spare time, touched a chord among activists and sympathizers of the civil rights movement with a brilliantly crafted novel. Harper Lee did not expect the story of a young girl coming to terms with race relations in the South to become an instant and perennial best seller, or to

win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961. To Kill a Mockingbird—about a White lawyer successfully defending a Black man wrongly accused of raping a White woman—became the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the civil rights movement, rousing millions of readers for the racial struggle through the amazing power of racist ideas. The novel’s most famous homily, hailed for its antiracism, in fact signified the novel’s underlying racism. “‘Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy,” a neighbor tells the lawyer’s strong-willed daughter, Scout. “That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” The mockingbird is a metaphor for African Americans. Though the novel was set in the 1930s, the teeming Black activism of that era was absent from To Kill a Mockingbird. African Americans come across as spectators, waiting and hoping and singing for a White savior, and thankful for the moral heroism of lawyer Atticus Finch. There had been no more popular racist relic of the enslavement period than the notion that Black people must rely on Whites to bring them their freedom.9

Civil rights activists waging sit-ins were hardly waiting on White saviors. Then again, many of these students were expecting their noble campaigns of nonviolent resistance to touch the moral conscience of White Americans, who in turn would save southern Blacks from segregationist policies. That strategy sapped W. E. B. Du Bois’s pleasure with the civil rights movement. And activists desegregating southern businesses that low-income Blacks could hardly afford did not seem like racial progress to Du Bois, who refused to measure racial progress by the gains of Black elites. Du Bois had been waiting for a political-economic program to arise. He had been waiting for something like scholar Michael Harrington’s shocking anti-poverty best seller in 1962, The Other America. “A wall of prejudice is erected to keep the Negroes out of advancement,” Harrington wrote. “The more education a Negro has, the more economic discrimination he faces.” Harrington used statistics to show that uplift suasion did not work. Moreover, he pointed out that “the laws against color can be removed, but that will leave the poverty that is the historic and institutionalized consequence of color.” By the time Harrington tossed a war on poverty onto the Democrats’ agenda, Du Bois had left the country.10

On February 15, 1961, a few days short of his ninety-third birthday, Du Bois received a note from President Kwame Nkrumah informing him that the Ghana Academy of Learning would financially support his long-desired Encyclopedia Africana. By the year’s end, Du Bois had arrived in Ghana. But within a few months, he suffered a prostrate infection. Nkrumah later came to Du Bois’s home for his ninety-fourth birthday dinner in 1962. When Nkrumah rose to

depart, Du Bois reached for the president’s hand and warmly thanked him for making a way for him to end his years on African soil. Du Bois turned somber. “I failed you—my strength gave out before I could carry out our plans for the encyclopedia. Forgive an old man,” said Du Bois. Nkrumah refused. Du Bois insisted. Du Bois’s smile broke the somber silence, and Nkrumah departed in tears.11

IT WAS LEADERS of decolonized nations like Kwame Nkrumah, who were friendly to the Soviet Union and critical of American capitalism and racism, that US diplomats were trying to attract (if not undermine). But the viciously violent southern response to civil rights protests was embarrassing the United States around the non-White world. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy tried to shift the movement’s energy from the humiliating direct-action protests to voter registration. He also established the Peace Corps, reportedly to “show skeptical observers from the new nations that Americans were not monsters.” Northern universities were trying to show that they were not monsters, either, by gradually opening their doors to Black students. Down south, the Kennedy administration sent in troops to desegregate the University of Mississippi, receiving applause from the international community that was not lost on JFK.12

MOST AMERICANS DID not consider assimilationists to be racists. They did not consider northern segregation and racial disparities to be indicative of racist policies, and the avalanche of antiracist protests for jobs, housing, education, and justice from Boston to Los Angeles in 1963 hardly changed their views on the matter. The eyes of the nation, the world, and American history remained on the supposedly really racist region, the South. On January 14, 1963, George Wallace was inaugurated as the forty-fifth governor of Alabama. He had opposed the Klan as a politician and judge until he had lost to the Klan-endorsed candidate in the 1958 gubernatorial election. “Well boys,” Wallace said to supporters after the defeat, “no other son-of-a-bitch will ever outnigger me again.” Wallace joined the secret fraternity of ambitious politicians who adopted the popular racist rhetoric that they probably did not believe in private.13

The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, the major television stations, and a host of other media outlets came to cover what reporters expected to be a nastily

polarizing speech. George Wallace did not disappoint, showing off his new public ideology. “It is very appropriate that from this cradle of the Confederacy, this very heart of the great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generations of forebears before us time and again down through history,” he said. He was sounding one of the two timeworn American freedom drums: not the one calling for freedom from oppression, but the one demanding freedom to oppress. “In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth,” he intoned, “ . . . I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”14

Wallace became the face of American racism, when he should have been rendered only as the face of segregation. Harper Lee should have reigned as the face of assimilation in the literary world, while sociologists Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan should have reigned as the faces of assimilation in the scholarly world. In 1963, they published their best-selling book, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City. Pulitzer Prize–winning Harvard historian Oscar Handlin, in his New York Times review of the book, hailed its treatment of Negroes as an “excellent” and “much-needed corrective to many loose generalizations.” This assessment typified the wild affirmations the book received from northern academics.15

Native New Yorkers trained in postwar assimilationist social science, Glazer and Moynihan met one another while working in the Kennedy administration on poverty issues. Beyond the Melting Pot propagated a ladder of ethnic racism— that is, a hierarchy of ethnic groups within the racial hierarchy—situating the hard-working and intelligent Jews over the Irish, Italians, and Puerto Ricans, and West Indian migrants over the “Southern Negro” because of West Indians’ emphasis on “saving, hard work, investment, [and] education.” Glazer penned the chapter on the Negro, saying that “the period of protest” must be succeeded by “a period of self-examination and self-help.” He claimed that “prejudice, low income, [and] poor education only explain so much” about “the problems that afflict so many Negroes.” As an assimilationist, Glazer, citing Frazier, attributed the problems to both discrimination and Black inferiority, particularly the “weak” Black family, the “most serious heritage” of slavery. From historical racism, Glazer turned to the class racism of Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie. Unlike the other middle classes, “the Negro middle class contributes very little . . . to the solution of Negro social problems,” he wrote. And from historical racism and class racism, he turned to cultural racism and political racism to explain why problems persisted in the Black community. “The Negro,” he said, “is only an

American, and nothing else. He has no values and culture to guard and protect.” He criticized the Negro for insisting “that the white world deal with his problems because, he is so much the product of America.” In Glazer’s vivid imagination, the Negro insisted that “they are not his problems, but everyone’s.” And this, he said, was “the key to much in the Negro world,” that Blacks were not taking enough responsibility for their own problems.16

Ironically, the actual “key to much in the Negro world” may have been the very opposite of Glazer’s formulation—the Negro may have been taking too much responsibility for the Negro’s problems, and therefore not doing enough to force the “white world” to end the discriminatory sources of the problems. Elite Blacks, raised on the strategy of uplift suasion and its racist conviction that every Negro represented the race—and therefore that the behavior of every single Black person was partially (or totally) responsible for racist ideas—had long policed each other. They had also policed the masses and the media portrayals of Blacks in their efforts to ensure that every single Black person presented herself or himself admirably before White Americans. They operated on the assumption that every single action before White America either confirmed or defied stereotypes, either helped or harmed the Negro race.

Beyond the Melting Pot saluted the leadership of the National Urban League, the NAACP, and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) for their lobbying and legal activism. Glazer and Moynihan neither saluted nor mentioned the many local groups that were fiercely confronting segregationists in the streets in 1963. Nor did they mention the youngsters of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in Mississippi, Malcolm X in Harlem, or Martin Luther King Jr.

On April 3, 1963, King helped kick off a spate of demonstrations in Birmingham, bringing on the wrath of the city’s ruggedly segregationist police chief, “Bull” Conner. Nine days later, on Good Friday, eight White anti- segregationist Alabama clergymen signed a public statement requesting that these “unwise and untimely” street demonstrations cease and be “pressed in the courts.” Martin Luther King Jr., jailed that same day, read the statement from his cell. Incited, he started doing something he rarely did. He responded to critics in his “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” published far and wide that summer. King attacked not only those Alabama preachers, but also the applauding audience of Beyond the Melting Pot. He confessed that he had “almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom” was not the segregationist, “but the white moderate . . . who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with

your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom.” King explained that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”17

No one knows whether the sickly W. E. B. Du Bois read King’s jailhouse letter. But just as Du Bois had done in 1903, and later regretted, in his letter King erroneously conflated two opposing groups: the antiracists who hated racial discrimination, and the Black separatists who hated White people (in groups like the Nation of Islam). King later distanced himself from both, speaking to a growing split within the civil rights movement. More and more battle-worn young activists had grown critical of King’s nonviolence and disliked the pains he took to persuade away the racist ideas of Whites. More and more, they were listening to Malcolm X’s sermons about self-defense, about persuading away the assimilationist ideas of Blacks, about mobilizing antiracists to force change. On May 3, 1963, these young people watched on television as Bull Connor’s vicious bloodhounds ripped the children and teenagers of Black Birmingham to pieces; as his fire hoses broke limbs, blew clothes off bodies, and slammed bodies into storefronts; and as his officers clubbed marchers with nightsticks.

The world watched, too, and the United States Information Agency reported back to Washington about the “growing adverse local reactions” around the world to the “damaging pictures of dogs and fire hoses.” Kennedy met with his top advisers to discuss this “matter of national and international concern.” He dispatched an aide, Burke Marshall, to Birmingham to help negotiate the desegregation accord that stopped the protests. Kennedy also sent soldiers to ensure safety for the desegregation of the University of Alabama on May 21, 1963. Governor George Wallace put on a show for his voters, standing in the schoolhouse door, admonishing the “unwelcome, unwanted and force-induced intrusion . . . of the central government.”

State Department officials had to put in overtime when agitated African leaders critical of the United States met in Ethiopia on May 22, 1963, to form the Organization of African Unity. Secretary of State Dean Rusk sent out a circular to American diplomats assuring them that Kennedy was “keenly aware of [the] impact of [the] domestic race problem on [the] US image overseas and on achievement [of] US foreign policy objectives.” Rusk said Kennedy would take “decisive action.”

On June 11, John F. Kennedy addressed the nation—or the world, rather— and summoned Congress to pass civil rights legislation. “Today we are committed to a worldwide struggle to promote and protect the rights of all who

wish to be free,” Kennedy said. “We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it.” The eyes of the nation and the world turned to Washington’s legislators, who kept their eyes on the world. When the new civil rights bill came before the Senate Commerce Committee, Kennedy asked Secretary of State Rusk to lead off the discussion. Racial discrimination had “had a profound impact on the world’s view of the United States and, therefore, on our foreign relations,” testified Rusk. Non-White newly independent peoples were “determined,” he said, “to eradicate every vestige of the notion that the white race is superior or entitled to special privileges because of race.” By August 1963, 78 percent of White Americans believed that racial discrimination had harmed the US reputation abroad. But not many inside (or outside) of the Kennedy administration were willing to admit that the growing groundswell of support in Washington for strong civil rights legislation had more to do with winning the Cold War in Africa and Asia than with helping African Americans. Southern segregationists cited those foreign interests in their opposition. South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond refused “to act on some particular measure, because of the threat of Communist propaganda if we don’t,” as he fired at Rusk.18

Kennedy’s introduction of civil rights legislation did not stop the momentum of the long-awaited March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Though it had been organized by civil rights groups, the Kennedy administration controlled the event, ruling out civil disobedience. Kennedy aides approved the speakers and speeches, a lineup that did not include a single Black woman, or James Baldwin or Malcolm X. On August 28, approximately 250,000 activists and reporters from around the world marched to the area between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. Before Kennedy officials happily read the USIA’s report saying that numerous foreign newspapers contrasted the opportunity to march that had been “granted by a free society” with “the despotic suppression practiced by the USSR,” and before King ended the round of approved speeches with his rousing and indelible antiracist dream of children one day living “in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” and before Mahalia Jackson sang into the blazing throng of approved placards and television cameras, the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins came as the bearer of sad news.

W. E. B. Du Bois had died in his sleep the previous day in Ghana, Wilkins announced. “Regardless of the fact that in his later years Dr. Du Bois chose another path,” Wilkins intoned, “it is incontrovertible that at the dawn of the

twentieth century his was the voice calling you to gather here today in this cause.” The well-trained journalist at the helm of the NAACP reported the truth. Indeed, the younger Du Bois had called for such a gathering, hoping it would persuade and endear millions to the lowly souls of Black folk. And yes, the older Du Bois had chosen another path—the antiracist path less traveled—toward forcing millions to accept the equal souls of Black folk. It was the path of civil disobedience that the young marchers in the SNCC and CORE had desired for the March on Washington, a path a young woman from Birmingham’s Dynamite Hill was already marching upon and would never leave. Roy Wilkins did not dwell on the different paths. Looking out at the lively March on Washington, he solemnly asked for a moment of silence to honor the ninety-five-year movement of a man.19