A Renegade History of the United States Page 38

  THE WHITE FREEDOM MOVEMENT

  Despite the efforts by the civil rights movement to reform it, the black working class brought at least a degree of liberation to whites who rejected the obligations of citizenship and were attracted not to the suffering and deprivation of African Americans but to the joys of their culture. A common theme in the writings of the most famous imitators of African Americans in the postwar period, the Beats, is the attempt to overcome their alienation as white middle-class youth through participation in black culture. In “Howl,” Allen Ginsberg’s “best minds” crashed through bourgeois barriers and into the Negro ghetto to revel in sex, drugs, and emotional catharsis. Jack Kerouac made this desire to be black and free explicit in On the Road. When the novel’s hero arrives in Denver, he heads to the black neighborhood. “I walked … in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night.” Like many white “race traitors,” the Beats often reduced black culture to its most sensual aspects, but in doing so, they found a vehicle through which to escape the confines of whiteness and citizenship.

  The Beats were only a very small part of what became a mass movement of white youth toward African American culture. In the 1950s, the revenue produced by black music grew from less than 5 percent of the total market to nearly 75 percent, and by the early 1960s, untold numbers of white Americans owned, listened to, and danced to rhythm and blues records. As was understood by white anti-integrationists who declared that “jungle rhythms” turned “white boys and girls” to “the level of the animal,” the appeal of the sensual and emotional liberation represented by R & B threatened to subvert the social basis of their culture. This threat was manifested most powerfully by the masses of young white women who flocked to R & B concerts, where they were allowed to shed their sexual inhibitions and break racial taboos on the dance floor. Chuck Berry was candid about the meaning of black music for many white women. In songs such as “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” and “Sweet Little Sixteen,” Berry proclaimed that white sexual taboos were being violated, not by the black predations of the racist imagination, but by the desires of white women. Berry’s boasts were essentially verified by the campaign conducted against him by law enforcement agencies in the late 1950s. He was arrested twice for violation of the Mann Act, which prohibited the transportation of minors across state lines for immoral purposes. One of the cases was dropped after the alleged victim, a white woman, declared not only that her relationship with Berry was entirely consensual but that she had initiated it. In the second case, Berry was found guilty and sentenced to three years in a federal penitentiary. And in 1959, the singer was arrested after a show in Meridian, Mississippi, when a white teenaged fan grabbed him by the neck and kissed him.

  White men as well found black music enormously liberating, and were often militant in defending their access to it. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a black deejay named Shelley Stewart cultivated a large white following in the Birmingham area with his R & B shows on the local black radio station and by spinning records at a weekly whites-only sock hop. During one of the sock hops, eighty members of the local Ku Klux Klan surrounded the building and threatened to do bodily harm to Stewart for his alleged attempts to “dance with white girls.” At that point, a large group of the young male dancers, estimated to be several hundred strong, attacked the Klan, allowing Stewart to escape.

  By the late 1950s, the popularity of R & B among white youth had become so great that it paved the way for the integration of several Southern universities. At Tennessee’s Vanderbilt in 1958, editors of the student newspaper extended their love for R & B into a sustained critique of segregation in higher education. In a series of editorials, they compared white opposition to black music with violent repression of civil rights demonstrators, and called for the immediate integration of their campus. At the University of Alabama in 1962, while the administration was refusing to admit the first black applicants in the school’s history, the Cotillion Club conducted a poll among the all-white student body to determine which entertainers should be invited to perform on campus. Though no African Americans were listed among the performers on the poll, Ray Charles won by what the campus newspaper called “an overwhelming majority with a write-in vote.” The soul singer was duly invited by the president of the Cotillion Club, but the university administration refused to allow him to perform on campus. Charles won the poll again in 1964, and was again barred by the administration. The following year, the chairman of the Southern Student Organizing Committee, a white civil rights group, reported a surprising degree of pro-integration sentiment at the university. And in 1966, facing a student revolt, the administration welcomed none other than James Brown to campus.

  The musicians who made rock-and-roll the chief rival of country music on the popular music charts during the 1960s and early 1970s were deeply influenced by black working-class culture. As has been well documented, many white rock performers found their calling in black juke joints and nightclubs or by listening to R & B on the radio, and the music they created challenged all the tenets of American citizenship. These refugees from citizenship and whiteness sought what Dan Emmett and other early blackface minstrels so desperately wanted. Rather than accept their place in American civilization, what W. E. B. DuBois called “so pale and hard and thin a thing,” these whites envied what DuBois called the slaves’ “sensuous receptivity to the beauty of the world.”

  THE FRUITS OF VIOLENCE

  Martin Luther King is rightly thought of as the American apostle of nonviolence, but he participated in one of the great attempted murders of the twentieth century. The victim of the attempted murder was the Bad Nigger.

  During World War II, the Bad Nigger gained the attention of whites as the zoot-suiter, who infected much of American youth with a renegade spirit. The riots in LA and Harlem, the zoot suit culture, and rebellious youth in general were widely seen as threats to national security. The Bad Nigger bore the primary responsibility for this. And so a plot to kill him was hatched.

  After the riots, Earl Warren, the governor of California, ordered a study of the social conditions that created the zoot-suiters. In Harlem, a young black psychologist named Kenneth Clarke interviewed black zoots who had participated in the riot and published an article in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology which attempted to explain the antisocial behavior that had caused the riots. During this time, a Swedish social scientist named Gunnar Myrdal was traveling through the ghettoes of American cities conducting field research for a study that would solve the American race problem once and for all. The study, which was titled An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, was published in 1944, the year after the riots. It was a national bestseller, and it remains one of the most revered works of American social science. Its pages contained the first plan since Reconstruction to destroy the Bad Nigger.

  An American Dilemma argued that black “pathologies” were the product of slavery and segregation. To Myrdal, the most debilitating of these pathologies were an antiwork ethic, hostility toward whites, sexual deviancy, and what he called the “instability of the Negro family.” An American Dilemma directed African Americans to seek inclusion within the nation and “become assimilated into American culture,” but warned that they would not be accepted until they embraced the norms from which they had diverged and acquired “the traits held in esteem by the dominant white Americans.”

  Though Myrdal counseled African Americans to assimilate, his sternest admonitions were directed at whites, in particular those in government and business who were undermining the nation’s strength by allowing segregation to continue. Sounding very much like the abolitionists who argued that slavery created sloth, Myrdal maintained that integration and assimilation were required for the efficient working of America:

  Not only occasional acts of violence, but most laziness, carelessness, unreliability, petty
stealing and lying are undoubtedly to be explained as concealed aggression… . The truth is that Negroes generally do not feel they have unqualified moral obligations to white people… . The voluntary withdrawal which has intensified the isolation between the two castes is also an expression of Negro protest under cover.

  Anxiety about the inefficiency of segregation plagued the leading racial liberals of the postwar era. The Truman administration’s push to integrate the armed forces followed the report issued in 1947 by the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, which argued that so long as blacks were segregated, they would be poor soldiers and workers.

  Perhaps the most expensive results [of segregation] are the least tangible ones. No nation can afford to have its component groups hostile toward one another without feeling the stress. People who live in a state of tension and suspicion cannot use their energy constructively. The frustrations of their restricted existence are translated into aggression against the dominant group… . It is not at all surprising that a people relegated to second-class citizenship should behave as second-class citizens. This is true, in varying degrees, of all of our minorities. What we have lost in money, production, invention, citizenship, and leadership as the price for damaged, thwarted personalities—these are beyond estimate. The United States can no longer afford this heavy drain upon its human wealth, its national competence.

  No one was more important in popularizing the language of racial liberalism than Eleanor Roosevelt. She had been the most aggressive proponent of civil rights in her husband’s administration, and was the most prominent member of the boards of the NAACP and the Congress on Racial Equality after the war. In hundreds of articles and speeches, she insisted that the United States would not live up to its democratic promise until it gave full citizenship to African Americans. But she, like other racial liberals, understood that citizenship was not just a package of benefits. In 1943 Roosevelt contributed to a series of columns written by whites in the Negro Digest called “If I Were a Negro.” She acknowledged that African Americans had reason to be angry, but reminded them that citizenship required work and sacrifice.

  If I were a Negro today, … I would know that I had to work hard and to go on accomplishing the best that was possible under present conditions. Even though I was held back by generations of economic inequality, I would be proud of those of my race who are gradually fighting to the top in whatever occupation they are engaged in.

  I would not do too much demanding. I would take every chance that came my way to prove my quality and my ability and if recognition was slow, I would continue to prove myself, knowing that in the end good performance has to be acknowledged …

  I would try to sustain my own faith in myself by counting over my friends and among them there would undoubtedly be some white people.

  Traditionally, the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education has been interpreted as a gift to African Americans, but in fact, the court’s principal justification for its decision was that educational integration would benefit employers and the state. The court made explicit that non-normative black behavior was at odds with the integration of African Americans into the body politic. In ruling segregation in education unconstitutional, the court explained that by depriving blacks of full citizenship, the United States was also depriving itself of the opportunity to create a new class of disciplined and productive workers and soldiers. The unanimous decision by the justices argued that the schools should be integrated in order to take advantage of this opportunity:

  Today, education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments. Compulsory school attendance laws and the great expenditures for education both demonstrate our recognition of the importance of education to our democratic society. It is required in the performance of our most basic public responsibilities, even service in the armed forces. It is the very foundation of good citizenship. Today it is a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his environment.

  The Brown decision contained one footnote: a reference to Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma. The argument in Brown that segregation made blacks pathological was authored by Kenneth Clarke. And the man who wrote the decision was Chief Justice Earl Warren. The Bad Nigger haunts every word of the decision to integrate America’s schools.

  For the first time in American history, black leaders were offered real integration by the federal government. They seized this opportunity to replace the Bad Nigger with the Black Citizen.

  In Montgomery, Alabama, local civil rights leaders spent much of the year after the Brown decision looking for a person to serve as a catalyst and symbol for a bus boycott they had decided to launch. The leaders agreed that the symbol would be female, because they believed a black woman would receive more sympathy than a black man. Early in 1955, a candidate did emerge, but she did not meet the requirements of respectability. In March, a fifteen-year-old girl named Claudette Colvin was forcibly ejected from a bus after disobeying the city’s segregation ordinance, and the leaders considered launching a boycott to protest her act of defiance, until it was revealed that Colvin was pregnant and unmarried. Unlike Colvin, Rosa Parks was able and willing to project an image of feminine domesticity and respectability. Because she was married, restrained, and an active member of a church, Parks was well suited for her role as the founding mother of the civil rights movement. During the bus boycott, local civil rights leaders described her to the press as “mild-mannered and soft-spoken,” a “lady … [who] was too sweet to even say damn in anger,” and “a typical American housewife.” One white supporter of the boycott said that she “looks like the symbol of Mother’s Day.”

  Of course, the Bad Nigger lived on, in cities all over America. And what our textbooks don’t tell us is that in the 1960s the Bad Nigger accomplished something quite remarkable. Without assimilating or integrating, he opened the doors of the segregated South.

  Historians agree that the events of 1963 in Birmingham were pivotal in the history of American race relations. The Civil Rights Act was signed into law the following year, making segregation of public accommodations illegal. Historians also largely agree that the nonviolent demonstrations in May 1963, which allegedly provoked the use of fire hoses and dogs by Bull Connor and his notoriously brutal police department, shamed the local white power structure into forcing desegregation of the Birmingham commercial district.

  As the story goes, nationally televised images of well-dressed children marching into jail, and of protesters being blasted with hoses and attacked by German shepherds, at a time when the United States was engaged in a competition with Communism for the hearts and minds of dark-skinned people in the Third World, made segregation a contradiction that had to be eliminated. And indeed, shortly after the airing of the police attacks, representatives of the Birmingham city government and chamber of commerce signed an agreement to open all parts of the downtown shopping area, including previously segregated jobs, to blacks. It was also during this time that Martin Luther King, who called for the “children’s crusade,” penned his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail, which quickly entered the canon of American letters and established nonviolent protest in American culture as not only morally correct but also the most effective means of social change.

  But nonviolence was not just a strategy. In his letter, King pointed to its deeper political implication. The nonviolent civil rights movement sought not just desegregation, not just access to space and to the privileges of whites, but integration, which for King and the leaders of the civil rights movement meant the complete merger of the races. It was this goal that made nonviolence a necessary strategy, for as King understood, violent resistance to whites made it impossible for blacks to be welcomed by them. It also damaged what he called the “inescapable network of mutuality” that tied all people “in a single garment of destiny.”

  But what is missing from the na
rratives of the desegregation of Birmingham is the majority of black people in the city, namely those who did not participate in the movement. Their story is not one of nonviolence and integration but of violence and the defense of autonomy.

  The records of the Birmingham Police Department contain hundreds of reports filed by police officers in the four years prior to the civil rights campaign that provide detailed descriptions of white encounters with African Americans. These reports indicate with stunning vividness that the all-white, notoriously racist, and brutal Birmingham police force and the city’s equally famous segregationist civilian population did not go unchallenged, and that the violence in the streets went in both directions. The reports tell of hundreds of ordinary black people punching, kicking, biting, and even stabbing and shooting whites who encroached, even in the slightest ways, on their freedom.

  Another striking aspect of the police reports is how many women participated in these street wars, and how fiercely they did so. On the night of April 29, 1962, two police officers arrived at the house of John Carter to deliver a citation for a parking violation. The report that documented the subsequent events tells of one ordinary black woman’s sense of entitlement and willingness to defend it with means that fell well outside the norms of bourgeois respectability: