The Civil Rights Movement is One of the Most Fertile Fields of Scholarship

The civil rights movement [or post-WWII phase of the Af-Am freedom struggle] is one of the most fertile fields of scholarship. Every year, more books and articles get published on the subject than even the most diligent and unemployed specialist can keep up with.1 The relationship of the movement to the present keeps changing in more disruptive and demanding ways than with most fields of history, even recent history.2 Court cases create a market for interpretations of the past, as do the gestures of professional activists, candidates, and advertisers. Hardly a year goes by without a major film treatment.3 Yet at the heart of all this abundance is an absence. There is a lot of historical writing, but precious little historiography in the sense of distinct interpretive choices, staked out by experts. There are no camps to define where scholars stand and help readers make sense of the friction between contending authorities.4 The main tendencies of interpretation are handed down from prof to student, it would appear, more out of habit than conscious choice among carefully cultivated alternatives. There have been intelligent efforts at revisionism.5 But these have not caught on. There is no debate. Or none about the basic premises and outlines of the story that trickles down from the ivory tower to the textbook-publishers and PBS. We’ve had Kuhnian normal science w/o a significant wrinkle for 3 decades. The field is ripe for debate. I’ll gnaw only the most obvious bone of potential contention, the questionable but unquestioned assumption of continuity. With scarcely an exception, scholars in the field have long asserted a strong continuity between the struggle of the 60s and the “backlash” of later years.6 To question this might yield fruitful innovations of analysis and interpretation. I offer 4 modest starting points (5 if time). 2 I. Perhaps most fundamental: the two major goals of the post-WWII movement, electoral power and desegregation, came into surprising conflict. Until l970 or so, both goals were part of the same strategy. But as re-enfranchisement paid off with large numbers of Black Elected Officials, especially in big cities, the logic of the two quests diverged: BEOs, seeking to hold and increase their power, opposed suburban annexation, which they saw—often rightly—as a conservative and/or racist strategy to dilute black voting power. But desegregators—of schools and neighborhoods—saw “white flight”directly undo their accomplishments and doom future integration experiments to failure (since tax dollars went with the flight, and college-educated black parents fled too). They favored annexation to halt the flight or to put escapees within busing range. II. The liberal-conservative divide that defined movement politics, and the related Dem-GOP divide, crisscrossed and blurred so much as to become unrecognizable. By the late l960s, outright racist opposition to civil rights virtually disappeared from political rhetoric: black voting power became formidable in precisely those places once dominated by racist politicians. Opposition to the now trans-regional civil rights movement quickly became bipartisan (it had been led and dominated by Dems till the mid-l960s). As it did, it became transideological. In scattered instances, right-wingers peddled J.E. Hoover’s line of King’s communist associations. But that smelled too much of esoteric paranoia for the smart money in the opposition. Pragmatic opponents of the movement pitched a big tent on the ground of revulsion with civil disobedience, which they said bred disrespect for the law and encouraged violence, either wittingly or irresponsibly.7 (This had a significant kernel of honesty in it: King and others openly avowed that they sought to bring the inherent tensions and violence of a racist order “to the surface.”) 3 Many fair-weather supporters of the movement—liberals—turned against it for law and order. George Wallace campaigned on that slogan—which he had denounced years earlier as “a communist term” (L&A was a term that civil rights supporters rallied around, remember, in the days of Massive Resistance.) Perhaps some racists took the slogan as a coded promise for some vestigial face-saving concession to “white” folk.8 But many northern Democrats—New Dealers, trade unionists, etc.--as well as Nixon and Agnew, campaigned for law and order.9 Wallace picked up a lot of Bobby Kennedy supporters (as did Nixon). A majority of Wallace voters in key states named Humphrey (the candidate of unions and welfare-statists), not Nixon, as their second choice. The last season of riots (’68) shows how ideologically open law & order was. In major cities—all but three by my count—mayors and police chiefs,10 notably the Republican Lindsay (he did not switch to Dem till l97l) essentially heeded the Kerner Commission’s warning against shows of excessive police force11 (and other recommendations). The rioting in April l968 was surprisingly minor—everywhere but Chicago, Baltimore, and Kansas City (where mostly Democratic and one Republican official rejected Kerner with varying degrees of bombast, and in doing so appeared to prove it right), and Washington DC (where black liberal mayor Walter Washington, aided by singer James Brown and others, was unable to contain the outbursts largely initiated by the former Chairman of SNCC, Stokely Carmichael).12 Even Richard J. Daley’s own police chief objected to—and contravened--the Mayor’s order to shoot to kill.13 Liberal-conservative lines became even more unsustainable when Nixon—who had a more liberal record on civil rights than Adlai Stevenson or Jack Kennedy in the l950s, and much black support--began surfing the waves of partisan realignment. He 4 chose Spiro Agnew (who took credit for the crackdown in Baltimore)14 to anchor his campaign in fear of urban unrest, and later Clarence Kelley (who was responsible for police provocations in KC) as his FBI Chief.15 Scholars see in this a continuation of southern massive resistance to black rights, a bid for the old resisters’ votes. More plausible evidence of Nixon’s racial manipulation—more decisive for those who accuse Nixon of carrying old segregationist water--is his turn against busing, which had first been ordered by his own appointee, Warren Burger (writing for a unanimous court in l97l). Whatever Nixon’s motives, a racial campaign must also be judged by its results. To turn against busing did not do the political trick that Nixon—let alone subsequent Republicans--needed it to do. Busing died out—but not from white backlash alone.16 One reason it died is that black parents often came out in huge, vocal numbers against it. Nationwide polls showed a majority of black voters for busing, but as w/ white voters, support appears to drop sharply when their own children are involved. Part of black opposition was fear of other people’s racism—a complex thing that needs to be explored if we are ever to get a grip on how racial institutions and divisions persist: in my research on segregationism, I found white southerners insisting, as early as the l940s, “I have nothing against black people, but you know, there are a lot of backward rednecks whose prejudices will explode in violence, which will only hurt the Negro.” There’s much in subsequent events to vindicate such fears. But it is also clear that racism got a long extension on its lease from people who, if we take them at their word, feared not black people but white racists.17 (We have no way of knowing their sincerity. Scholarly discipline would dictate neutrality. If that won’t do the trick, the parallel to black opposition to busing should.) 5 Part of black opposition was cultural nationalism, which had a long history. Most white people thought it was in remission or decline after Brown, but it came back with a vengeance by l968. Part of it was simply pragmatic skepticism about investing in long-term gambles like desegregation; their limited capital could purchase more certain gains for their children by improving their present schools immediately.18 Scholars talk about wedge issues, but don’t follow through. Effective wedges split ideological clumps and allow new, different clumps to form. Nixon’s political masterstroke was affirmative action. Initiated by LBJ and strongly supported by M.L. King, the policy was soon abandoned by LBJ because it clearly violated the l964 civil rights act.19 Nixon had great reasons to revive it. He could force Democrats to support his initiatives—indeed adroitly induce them to start taking credit for them--or face reduced black turnout in close districts. Thus he drove a wedge between the Democrats and the increasingly hard-pressed white “ethnic” voters. Those voters felt betrayed by Democrats and by “limousine liberals” who, they believed, supported social polices and evaded their burdens—as they had done by sending their own kids to suburban and private schools. The GOP had other reasons to create affirmative action: party leaders were desperate to reduce riots and other urban crime. This was a cheap way to do that—and to blame the injustice on Democrats (or more often, unelected judges). People are surprised to learn that Wm F Buckley, for his own reasons, initially endorsed “reverse discrimination.” Soon the military brass and corporate boardrooms supported affirmative action (see briefs in MI cases), which pays off in recruitment and marketing.20 (While we’re on the military, it may not exactly be evidence of discontinuity, but it certainly is a surprise, that the biggest, if not the only significant, engine of successful post-l960s integration 6 was this institution that King and other civil rights veterans denounced in l968.) All that aside, it is hard to imagine so much emphasis on affirmative action at the time Nixon launched it without its having the added benefit of splitting the Great Society coalition. When Nixon’s conservative southern appointee Lewis Powell rescued affirmative action in its first major challenge in l978, he circumvented the legal ban on it with an entirely novel justification—a state interest in “diversity.” This was in many ways inconsistent with the original justification of LBJ and MLK. Diversity’s selling point was, it made education a richer, more realistic experience for white people. Practical aid to people who were actually crippled by generations of race-specific deprivation was off the table. After some delay and confusion, black papers and black opinion generally rallied to the Bakke doctrine—a southern conservative judge’s repackaging of Richard Nixon’s policy. The NAACP was in some sense rescued by it: that organization, battered by competition from more fashionable groups in the l960s, legal troubles, debt, declining membership, and a long-deferred succession struggle, revived. III: Organizational Style, Constituencies, and Programs. That may be the most surprising discontinuity: the lumbering old dinosaur of bureaucratic incrementalism is the civil rights group left standing in the ‘80s. The NAACP’s postwar competitors, CORE, SCLC, SNCC, Panthers, NWRO all swiftly died or shrunk to mere formalities by the early 70s.21 [NUL survives too, even less influenced by the ‘50s-60s mass movement than the NAA.] There is a major theme in news coverage of the NAACP in the l970s and early l980s that historians have left unexamined, but also speaks to the question of continuity: its increased financial dependence on corporate donors rather than its members. Everyone in lst Reconstruction history notes the corporate hijack of the most 7 powerful tool of black liberation, the l4th Am dpc. No one in 2nd Recon hist as far as I know even asks the question. The NAA also makes a much more definitive break w/ the labor movement in the l970s, I believe, than it ever did before. The NAA pulled a new coalition from the jaws of “diversity”--quite distinct from the one ML King & Geo Wiley envisioned. Unlike King’s poor minorities, always hard to mobilize, the new coalition was eager, upwardly mobile, and even affluent people who could claim some legal connection to such a minority, plus the majority group, women. (Black beneficiaries in education were already within inches of admission to target schools—precisely those who least needed aid, increasingly the offspring of collegetrained parents. The picture in the labor market is more complicated.22) Meanwhile, a number of deeply committed liberals, including black people with unimpeachable left credentials like Bayard Rustin and William Julius Wilson, complained that affirmative action was at best a diversion & waste of scarce political capital.23 Affirmative action supporters dishonestly wrote off these and other deviations from the party line as “neo-conservative.” Scholars have since generally followed that invidious usage, defining affirmative action as liberal and opposition as conservative, full stop. The broader economic program of the civil rights movement--guaranteed income, full employment, increased school funding--was lost. The focus of organized struggle for racial reform in the l980s was defense and expansion of affirmative action policies that left the worst victims of racism (the poor)—who were practically the sole focus of SCLC in l968—largely unaffected. [The Black Caucus unsuccessfully pushed some of the old agenda. We might discuss that in the Q&A, along w/ racial redistricting.] 8 The NAA promoted the soon widespread perception that attacks on affirmative action were attacks on black people. The kernel of honesty here was that affirmative action was the only gesture that the Democratic party was consistently willing--or able-to make in return for black votes.24 The NAA’s tactic was shrewd: one of the lessons of the l970s was that the only way to unify empowered black people was to attack them. The NAACP—aided by periodic Democratic efforts to boost black turnout—isolated and exaggerated the GOP’s racist imagery, especially Reagan’s Neshoba County line about state rights—a complex, unexamined problem I can say more about in the Q & A. The biggest example scholars posit after Neshoba County was the Willie Horton ad in l988. Whether that ad had the racial effect of scaring white voters away from Dukakis is unclear. What is clear is something that historians almost never acknowledge: the partisan provenance of the ad. People who ought to know better are often surprised to learn that the first person to use the Willie Horton ad was not Roger Ailes or Lee Atwater but Al Gore.25 How can race-baiting be an exclusively GOP game? IV: Positive Mass mobilization: The key feature of the l950s-early l960s, a mass movement in the streets, was not sustained. The important distinction between the movement and the rioting (which scholars see as its continuation—an assumption that’s hard to make w/o racism) is not that the latter is violent but that it is disorganized and fleeting. To the extent that masses mobilized in the 70s, they did so around leaders, especially Jesse Jackson. Historians have devoted more ink to divorcing charismatic leadership (and nationally prominent organizations) from the mass upsurge of the 50s-60s than to any other interpretive point. A major faction in SNCC had tried to eradicate the historic association of social movements with charismatic leaders; historians have drunk that 9 faction’s kool aid. Aldon Morris (following Weber) showed that charismatic leaders can flourish in symbiosis with, rather than at the expense of, mass movements.26 But the question soon became—when so many black leaders were responsible to constituents in elections—whether anybody could square the circle of institutionalizing such leadership. Black leaders—elected and non--were far more devoted to institutionalizing black power than mobilizing masses in the l970s. That’s among the starkest contrasts to the 50s-60s. The CBC and National Bl Political Conventions (l972 and l974) were only two of the crusades for the new grail of institutionalizing the momentum of the mass movement of the l960s. Actor Ossie Davis used his own charisma to try to wean supporters from dependence on leaders when he told the crowd assembled for the founding of the CBC, “It’s not the rap, it’s the map; it’s not the man, it’s the plan.” But Jesse Jackson, acclaimed as King’s heir by the media but also (after a while) by polling data and the crowds he alone could draw at rally after rally, stole the show of the two NBPCs, and soon stole other shows. (His message was, in effect, it is not the plan, and I am the man.) More than any figure, Jackson galvanized masses in the l970s and l980s. And more than Nixon or Reagan, he made a hash of ideological continuity: Within weeks of the l973 Roe decision, Jackson announced that abortion was murder—and soon added that liberals’ effort to insure Medicaid funding of abortions a strategy to destroy black political power. Jackson repeatedly called himself “conservative” later in the decade and hinted to Republicans that he would bring millions of black Democrats over to them if they played ball. He endorsed Bob Dole in his l980 Senate race. Not to be outdone, Eldridge Cleaver returned to the US as a conservative born-again Christian in l976, who went on tour w/his new friend Chuck Colson, Nixon’s former lawyer and hatchet-man. 10 CORE’s Roy Innis made headlines supporting the causes of Idi Amin, Jonas Savimbi, Trent Lott, and subway vigilante Bernhard Goetz. Ralph Abernathy, Hosea Williams, and Charles Evers—heir to the other civil rights martyr of the l960s—all endorsed Reagan in l980. (Abernathy, interestingly, was one of the few civil rights leaders who had broken with the NAACP to oppose Powell’s nomination.) While old veterans of the anti-civil rights movement (Faubus, Wallace, John Satterfield, Rev. Criswell, John Stennis, etc.27) in various ways made their peace with civil rights—often campaigning for and winning black votes—black veterans of the movement had changed, too. We need to acknowledge their irreducible, indomitable variety too. V: Ideological continuity is also a matter of manufactured memory—a preoccupation that has lately begun to soak into civil rights history, but again without diluting the assumption of continuity. You find more historians bitterly citing right-wing appropriation of a deradicalized King than you find actual conservatives appropriating him. Wm Bradford Reynolds did—with transparent dishonesty--invoke King’s ghost to support his “color blind” attack on affirmative action. (It’s not a simple lie, since by then the constitutional justification, the coalition of beneficiaries, and the cultural appeal of affirmative action are radically different from the affirmative action that King supported. Reynolds lied. But his critics have not retaliated with complete honesty, as they pretend that affirmative action is the same as it was in King’s day.) At any rate, conservatives never relied on their “color-blind” King as much as scholars like to pretend: they had far more crowd-pleasing arguments against affirmative action than that. (The anti-abortion movement was the real “conservative” appropriation of King, joined by some of King’s family as well as Jackson, for a time. Again more on this if anyone’s interested in Q&A.) 11 More significant is the public memory of King’s most prominent black enemies, who go almost completely unexamined in the literature. The Nation of Islam underwent a radical change in l975—and began to rehabilitate King. Till then, the NOI called King a race traitor & Uncle Tom. Louis Farrakhan soon broke with the NOI, which obligingly changed its name (to World Community of al-Islam in the West) in time for Farrakhan to start a new “Nation of Islam”—which resuscitated Elijah Muhammad’s racism and loopy romantic faith in gunplay.28 By all accounts, Farrakhan took only a small fraction of the original NOI with him. (W.D. Muhammad’s increasingly orthodox Islam has been far more popular among black Americans who identify as Muslims: they understood W.D. as a disciple of a true hero, Malcolm X—the only rival that Elijah had denounced more bitterly than King.) Though the most prominent black Muslim celebrities—Kareem Abdul-Jabar and Muhammad Ali—publicly denounced Farrakhan, he still appeared in the media as “the black Muslim leader,” as though he were the only one. Even when Farrakhan was supposedly under scrutiny for his association with Jesse Jackson, the press conveyed the impression that he represented most black Muslims. As far as I know, no scholar of civil rights in the l970s has challenged that picture. Farrakhan made things more complicated when he, too, twenty years after the main group of Muslims, began to rehabilitate King: he claimed King as a brother and fellow “martyr to truth” in his Million Man March in l995, self-consciously modeled on King’s MOW. The Black Panthers had likewise denounced King as a sissy and a coward when he was alive. But their members began to claim King’s mantle—in life as in death, King was far more popular among the black masses than any “militant” had been. Panthers needed his cachet. In l990, Panthers attempted a revival in Milwaukee by marching to 12 lengthen Martin Luther King drive all the way across town. They built a shrine to King in their office--on King Drive--flanked by shrines to Huey Newton and Malcolm X, both of whom spent much of their lives denouncing King. (Malcolm calmed down a bit and made steps towards King near the end of his own life. That’s another historical development that most scholars misrepresent, which we can address in Q&A.) In light of all this, a striking discontinuity of scholarly method raises a final question about the pervasive assumption of continuity. The literature on civil rights in the l950s and early l960s has been driven above all by a focus on “grassroots” activism: on the black people who organized and took to the streets. But the literature on what became of that struggle in the politics of the l970s-l980s focuses almost entirely on white people.29 I wonder whether the whole assumption of continuity might evaporate as soon as we start seeing that black Americans—in electoral politics, street activism, or both— who were never united behind the famous strategies of the l950s-60s to begin with, did not simply remain as they were. They adapted, reconsidered, regrouped: like any other people, they had and have a history, and their history involves as much change as continuity. If the post-l960s GOP gains its dynamism and spectacular growth from racial reactionaries, we need to look at what they were reacting against before we can say we understand them. If time remains: Why is there no debate? 30 I am very tentative about this, based on offhand comments made by scholars I have asked. Usually the fear seems to be that if a scholar goes down this road, he is apologizing for racism, underestimating its persistence, failing to be part of the solution, denying that black people struggle on today, &c &c. Let me be clear: my view is that racism is to this day a lot more pervasive than most people of any ideology or party admit. I believe we live in a racist society, and that in many ways, for poor black people, the effects of racism have gotten worse since the l960s, not better. Racism played a key role in the politics of the l970s and l980s, in my view. 13 Where I differ with most of my colleagues, it seems to me, is that I think that most historians (who, like me, place themselves on the left) underestimate racism by restricting it first to southerners and lower-class Archie-bunker types; second, to “conservatives”; third to post-l960s Republicans, especially those who fled the southern Democratic party and/or the cities at the time; and finally to white people. It seems to me, you are as likely to find a racist on the opposite side of those four divisions: again to assume any correlations is to assume we can gauge people’s motives a lot better than I think we can. A supporter of racial redistricting and affirmative action, for example, is as likely to be a racist as an opponent—there are racist reasons for doing both. We cannot read minds and motives most of the time, especially not with statistical lumps like these. There’s no reason—other than our own prejudices, our own allegiances—to believe that the racism has aligned the way we wish, with all the racism on the side of our enemies. That’s what seems to me to be at stake in all the assertions of continuity: we have to keep up the fight against the enemy, scholars believe, and it simplifies matters if the enemy is the same enemy as it was in the good old days, when racism was so simple and clear you didn’t have to be a scholar to discern its presence. In that light, the linchpin on which all the assumptions of continuity swing may be the one big underlying assumption of discontinuity, which seems even more pervasive: that racism was simple back then. Historians can distill few general truths from their years of training and research, but I bet we’d agree on this one: things were never simple. My work on white supremacist strategy and propaganda and black religious mobilization against them has certainly taught me that although racism has changed, it has not become more sophisticated or subtle--any more than people have become smarter and more capable of complex thought. Racism was always bristling with subtleties and contradictions, with seemingly infinite variations and overtones. Racists made alliances of convenience and principle that made them as interesting—if not as likable—as any other conglomeration of human beings who left a historical record behind. To return to seemingly disengaged and even formulaic discussion of things like continuity and discontinuity—the sort of thing historians in less glamorous fields still have time for—would shake up the (occasionally self-righteous) complacency that has settled over the field. I think historians can do that sort of thing better, qua historians, than we do the sort of sublimated activism that often appears to drive us. I hasten to add I am something of a sublimated activist myself, and have no ideological quarrel with the goals passionately sought by my distinctly egalitarian and anti-racist colleagues. The problem is, I became a historian largely because I think activists and armchair activists alike are susceptible to comforting illusions. The illusion that the movement is still in progress— that it has not suffered a severe decline from internal as well as external causes; that all of the flaws and all of the evil are on the other side; that anything that’s bad must also be racist, etc.—makes for ineffectual activism. I don’t claim to have all the truth—but I do claim that disagreeing more openly and vigorously about these things would make better—more interesting as well as more accurate—history. And that will be our only chance to give activists something they may need and do not already have enough of.