A Renegade History of the United States

by Thaddeus Russell

  Leaders are needed all over this South, in every community, all over this nation: intelligent, courageous, dedicated leadership. Not leaders in love with money, but in love with justice; not leaders in love with publicity, but in love with humanity.

  The greatest threat posed by Grace and his followers was to the cause of integration. They were, according to King, too black:

  [If] we’re going to get ready for integration, we can’t spend all of our time trying to learn how to whoop and holler… . And we’ve got to have ministers who can stand up and preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. Not a Negro gospel; not a gospel merely to get people to shout and kick over benches, but a gospel that will make people think and live right and face the challenges of the Christian religion.

  The subjects of Grace’s kingdom were unfazed. His supporters filled the courtroom to overflowing, and, eight months after the trial, tens of thousands attended his annual parade through downtown Charlotte. Yet by the time Grace died in 1960, the kingdoms of Sweet Daddy Grace and Prophet Jones had been conquered by a new generation of leaders.

  The civil rights leaders faced other competitors for the loyalty of African Americans, most famously black nationalists. But while the nationalists rejected integrationism and nonviolence, they shared with the civil rights leaders a contempt for the decadence of Jones and Grace as well as the ethic of sacrifice. Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam insisted on strict discipline, hard work, and the renunciation of drugs, tobacco, liquor, gluttony, laziness, emotional display, and promiscuity. They promised a new black nation “where we can reform ourselves, lift up our moral standards, and try to be godly.” Whereas “the black man” in his current condition was “not fit for self,” the “new black man” would relinquish his desires for “the good life” in service of the nation. According to Malcolm X, Islam taught black people “to reform ourselves of the vices and evils of this society, drunkenness, dope addiction, how to work and provide a living for our family, take care of our children and our wives.” With a similar mission, the Black Panther Party, founded in 1966, organized itself into a semimilitary organization in which duty to the “community” took precedence over what they called “decadent and bourgeois” desires for wealth and pleasure. Black cultural nationalists such as Amiri Baraka, Ron Karenga, and Nikki Giovanni routinely denounced attachment to “materialistic fetishes” as “the white boys’ snake medicine” and as the product of a “slave mentality.” The Last Poets, an avant-garde musical group that grew out of the Black Arts Movement, condemned “niggers” whose alligator shoes, Cadillacs, and preoccupation with sex made them “scared of revolution.”

  SLEEPING ON THE FLOOR

  Significantly, among the most ardent ascetics in the “black freedom movements” were whites. Applications for the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project in 1964 reveal that many of the white college students were attracted to the poverty and suffering of black Southerners. In explaining his motivations for participating in Freedom Summer, one volunteer wrote, “This is not a struggle to be engaged in by the mere liberal, for the liberal can’t be counted on to make the sacrifices required… . I have rejected my ‘birthrights’ and voluntarily identified with the suppressed classes.” Another declared, “I am against much of what my family stands for. I realize that four families could live comfortably on what my father makes—[that is,] comfortably Mississippi Negro style.” In one application, a graduate student wrote that he would end his career as an academic to join the movement. “I can simply no longer justify the pursuit of a PhD. When the folks in [Mississippi] have to struggle to comprehend the most elementary of materials on history and society and man’s larger life, I feel ashamed to be greedily going after ‘higher learning.’ And when I reflect on the terrors and deprivations in daily lives here, I cannot return to the relative comforts and security of student life.” Some of the volunteers could not contain their rage at those who chose to live in material comfort. In response to advice from white leaders of the National Council of Churches that the volunteers should project a respectable, middle-class image, one wrote:

  We crap on the clean, antiseptic, decent middle-class image. It is that decency we want to change, to overcome. So crap on your middle class, on your decency, mister Church man. Get out of your god-damned new rented car. Get out of your pressed, proper clothes. Come join us who are sleeping on the floor… . Come with us and walk, not ride, the dusty streets of Gulfport.

  The white volunteers devoted considerable energy to teaching black Mississippians the value of the ascetic life, thus suggesting that the people they actually encountered on the streets of Gulfport and elsewhere in the state did not share their calling. Many of the white volunteers helped establish “freedom schools” for poor black children and served as teachers. Staughton Lynd, a white radical who was then a professor at Spelman College, oversaw the freedom schools and developed their curriculum. A central purpose of the schools, as stated in the basic curriculum written by Lynd, was to inculcate values in black children that were antithetical to white middle-class life. One lesson was intended “To find out what the whites’ so-called ‘better life’ is really like, and what it costs them.” Another was “To help the students see clearly the conditions of the Negro in the North, and see that migration to the North is not a basic solution.”

  An entire unit of the Freedom School curriculum was devoted to explaining the differences between what were called “Material Things,” which were associated with whites, and “Soul Things,” which were associated with blacks. The purpose of this lesson was “To develop insights about the inadequacies of pure materialism.” Among the “ideas to be developed” with the students were that “The possessions of men do not make them free” and that “Negroes will not be freed by: (a) taking what the whites have; (b) a movement directed at materialistic ends only.” A list of questions designed to lead to these ideas included the following:

  Suppose you had a million dollars. You could buy a boat, a big car, a house, clothes, food, and many good things. But could you buy a friend? Could you buy a spring morning? Could you buy health? And how could we be happy without friends, health, and spring?

  This is a freedom movement: Suppose this movement could get a good house and job for all Negroes. Suppose Negroes had everything that the middle class of America has … everything the rest of the country has … would it be enough? Why are there heart attacks and diseases and so much awful unhappiness in the middle class … which seems to be so free? Why the Bomb?

  An exchange between a white Freedom Summer organizer and his black constituents indicates that they did not share the same aspirations. When black teenagers in Greenwood, Mississippi, demanded that violent tactics be used to gain access to a whites-only movie theater, Bob Zellner, the son of a white Methodist minister and a lead organizer of Freedom Summer, was brought in to change their minds. At a community forum, Zellner argued that rather than focus on the movie theater, the teenagers should focus on “more important” matters. “We feel that our concentration has to be on voter registration now,” he told them. “Integrating all the movies in the South won’t achieve anything basic.” A sixteen-year-old girl then responded. “You say that we have to wait until we get the vote,” she said. “But you know, by the time that happens, the younger people are going to be too old to enjoy the bowling alley and the swimming pool.” When the white volunteers arrived in Mississippi, they and the people they sought to emulate were often headed in opposite directions.

  TOO BAD FOR INTEGRATION

  While it is undeniably true that the civil rights and black nationalist organizations inspired great numbers of African Americans with visions of black uplift, movement leaders did not succeed in creating a mass commitment to the responsibilities and sacrifices necessary for revolution or for citizenship. The aversion to communal obligation was far greater among the black working class than among whites. As W. E. B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and more recent scholars such as Robin D. G. Kelley, Davi
d Roediger, Saidiya Hartman, and Roderick Ferguson have suggested, the relatively liberated character of black American culture might very well have been the result of the fact that for most if not all of their history, African Americans have been to some degree excluded from citizenship and therefore far less likely to internalize its repression. It is certainly arguable that having created a culture of freedom out of slavery, segregation, and compulsory labor, when citizenship appeared attainable in the post–World War II period, the black working class demonstrated an unwillingness to relinquish the pleasures of that culture in exchange for their rights. As scholars have moved away from studies of black leaders and toward an examination of African American working-class culture, evidence of this resistance has mounted.

  Draft evasion as well as insubordination against commanding officers in the military remained far greater among African Americans than among whites from the two world wars through the Korean and Vietnam wars. During World War I, the only black combat division in the American Expeditionary Force frequently ran away during battles, resulting in the removal of the entire division from the front. There is also substantial anecdotal evidence that during both world wars, large numbers of black men feigned illness or insanity to evade the draft. We have seen that during World War II, black men were more likely than whites to evade the draft. Similarly, historian Gerald Gill has found that draft law delinquency during the Korean War was extraordinarily high in black urban neighborhoods. In the early months of the war, it was estimated that 30 percent of eligible men in Harlem were delinquent in registering. At the national level, approximately 20 percent of those arrested for violating the Selective Service Act from 1951 through 1953 were African American. Black resistance to patriotic obligation peaked during the Vietnam War, when African Americans made up fully one-half of the eligible men who failed to register for the draft.

  It is unlikely that this resistance to military service was motivated chiefly by pacifism. Indeed, evidence produced by several scholars has corroborated Timothy Tyson’s claim that nonviolent integrationism, rather than combative and autonomous opposition to racism, “is the anomaly” in African American history, even during the civil rights era. This research has revealed mass uprisings against racist violence in Decatur, Mississippi, Monroe, North Carolina, and Columbia, Tennessee, as well as countless examples of individual acts of violent self-defense throughout the South. In northern cities, violent responses to poverty and police brutality were, of course, commonplace, and in the major uprisings in Watts (1965), Detroit (1967), and Newark (1967), they were coupled with militant demonstrations of material desires in the form of looting.

  Robin D. G. Kelley, Tera Hunter, and other historians have found a long tradition of resistance to labor discipline among black working men and women. According to Kelley, this most often involved “evasive, day-to-day strategies: from footdragging to sabotage, theft at the workplace to absenteeism, cursing and graffiti.” Kelley criticizes scholars who, in attempting to counter racist stereotypes, “are often too quick to invert them, remaking the black proletariat into the hardest-working, thriftiest, most efficient labor force around.” Rather, he says, “if we regard most work as alienating, especially work performed in a context of racist and sexist oppression, then we should expect black working people to minimize labor with as little economic loss as possible.”

  African Americans escaped the obligations demanded of “good” citizens in other, often clandestine ways.

  Though many commentators have argued that the tax revolt of the 1970s was largely driven by resentful whites, African Americans were waging something of a tax revolt of their own, less visible and perhaps less consciously “political” than the white rebellion, but far broader. Studies of Internal Revenue Service records have shown that noncompliance to tax laws was significantly greater among African Americans in the 1960s and 1970s than among whites. Furthermore, these studies do not take into account the vast, untaxed underground economy, which economists have estimated produced between 8 percent and 14 percent of the total national income in the 1970s, and whose participants were disproportionately black. A study conducted by the Department of Labor in 1971 estimated that one of every five adult inhabitants of Harlem lived entirely on income derived from illegal enterprises.

  Perhaps most tellingly, the black popular culture that arose in the 1950s and 1960s—a phenomenon ignored by nearly all historians of the civil rights movement—showed a distinct lack of interest in King’s project.

  Despite civil rights leaders’ admonishments to African Americans to forego personal gratification for a higher purpose, the most popular black urban folk tales during the period continued the oral tradition of venerating “bad niggers” who rejected the “jive-ass jobs” assigned to them, defeated white opponents in athletic, sexual, and mental contests, and accumulated luxuries surpassing those of “Vanderbilt, Goldberg, and Henry Ford.” Some of the most popular “party records” of the 1960s and 1970s were recordings of Rudy Ray Moore’s stand-up comedy acts, in which he often recited X-rated versions of classic “bad nigger” tales such as “Dolemite,” “Shine,” “Pimpin’ Sam,” and “The Signifying Monkey.” Similarly, Redd Foxx and Richard Pryor gained mass audiences with routines that unabashedly endorsed the sensuality of black culture. These performers established a dominant genre in African American comedy that proudly asserted black culture’s embrace of pleasure and freedom over the repressive morality of whiteness. Moreover, these expressions of the superiority of African American “badness” were not exclusively masculine. No black comedian of the postwar period was more popular than Moms Mabley, whose orations on sex and soul food brought hundreds of thousands of black patrons to theaters across the country.

  In film portrayals of African Americans, by the early 1970s, the sexless and self-sacrificing characters played by Sidney Poitier during the civil rights era had been replaced by hypersexual superheroes who had achieved spectacular wealth by means other than “working for the Man.” The so-called blaxploitation genre was created not by Hollywood but by the independent black producers, writers, and directors of two films, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, which was released in 1971, and Superfly, released in 1972. The hero of Sweet Sweetback is brought up in a brothel and becomes a pimp to pursue a life of fine clothes, fancy cars, and unlimited sex. After witnessing two white policemen savagely beating a young black man, Sweetback kills the cops and escapes across the Mexican border. Ebony called the film “trivial” and “tasteless,” but the black working class voted with its feet. When the film opened at the Grand Circus Theater in Detroit, it broke the record for opening-night box office receipts. Sweet Sweetback, which was made for $150,000, went on to gross more than $15 million. It was then the most successful independent film ever released. Superfly was even more popular among black audiences, grossing more than $18 million, and it too was attacked by the civil rights leadership. The film portrayed a Harlem cocaine dealer who escapes the drug business and the ghetto by ripping off a white syndicate boss and overpowering corrupt cops. The hero rejects both his position of power and the work ethic, preferring a life of pleasure and freedom.

  In popular music, the lyrics of African American songs in the era of civil rights and black power represented nearly all the desires the movements’ leaders struggled to repress. Materialist aspirations were heralded by such enormously popular songs as “Money Honey,” “The Payback,” and Barrett Strong’s “Money (That’s What I Want).” Another staple of rhythm and blues lyrics was the rejection of compulsory labor. Fats Domino, Sam Cooke, and Smokey Robinson sang of hating “Blue Monday” and having “Got a Job,” but also of loving the liberation brought by the weekend. And, as if in response to King’s plea for hard work and frugality, in “Rip It Up” Little Richard wailed, “Well, it’s Saturday night and I just got paid / Fool about my money, don’t try to save / My heart says Go! Go! Have a time / ’Cause it’s Saturday night and I feel fine.” Of course, R & B was also well stocked with
paeans to sexual revelry, from the Clovers’ “Good Lovin’” in the 1950s to James Brown’s “Sex Machine” in the 1960s and Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” in the 1970s.

  These sentiments were triumphant in the rise of disco, the most popular music of the 1970s. Having originated in black and Italian, gay working-class nightclubs, by the middle of the decade, disco dominated the airwaves, the Billboard music charts, and the dance floors. More generally, it was also at the center of the most sexually open era in American history. Disco culture celebrated the body, rejected work, and represented the antithesis of family values. Perhaps most striking, as many observers of the phenomenon noted, disco clubs were the most racially integrated public spaces in the United States. In one of the great ironies in the history of American race relations, a queer and entirely renegade creation produced more integration through desire than the civil rights movement ever achieved through moralism and legislation.

  Not surprisingly, some of disco’s harshest critics came from the heirs of Martin Luther King. Virtually quoting King’s condemnation of rock-and-roll in the 1950s, Jesse Jackson attacked disco as “sex-rock” and as “garbage and pollution which is corrupting the minds and morals of our youth.” Jackson threatened a boycott against stores that sold disco records, and his Operation PUSH held a series of conferences on the evils of the music. Disco did fade from the scene, but it gave birth to a cultural form that proved even more vexing to the remnants of the civil rights leadership. Since its arrival in the late 1970s, hip-hop has moved ever farther from King’s vision. Today, the two dominant genres in the music and its visual accompaniments are the violently anti-integrationist “gangsta style,” and “bling,” a carnival of conspicuous consumption and sensual gratification.

  Significantly, the achievements and failures of the civil rights movement correspond with the desires and antipathies expressed in contemporary African American culture. Despite the insistence by Ella Baker and other movement leaders that the objectives of the sit-in movement were, as Baker said, “bigger than a hamburger” and “not limited to a drive for personal freedom,” testimonies by sit-in participants indicate that many African Americans in the South welcomed the desegregation of public space as their entry into the consumer culture. After the lunch counter at the largest department store in Atlanta was desegregated, sit-in organizers were dismayed that the first black people to eat there honored the occasion by dressing in their finest clothes, including fur coats.