American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  But where to? How far? In what way? The Montgomery boycott did not trigger a wave of protest actions throughout the South. In that same year of 1955, when Rosa Parks would not budge, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old Chicago black visiting relatives in Mississippi, was dragged from their home for having “whistled” at a white woman. He was beaten, his testicles cut off, and his body dumped into the Tallahatchie River with a cotton-gin fan chained around his neck. North and South, people recoiled with horror, but the atrocity had little more impact; the confessed killers were of course acquitted. In 1957 Eisenhower’s dispatch of paratroopers to Little Rock produced sensational headlines, but it was followed by resolutions in state legislatures pitting state sovereignty against federal court decisions, and by school absenteeism and occasional rioting—and precious little school integration in most southern states.

  Black leaders were neither daunted nor dumbfounded by the frustration of the civil rights movement. But now northern observers were at last seeing more clearly what blacks were up against—a system of discrimination and segregation entrenched in an array of mutually reinforcing ideological, social, political, and legal barriers.

  There still was, of course—there always had been—the “Other South”: the South of racial tolerance and Christian brotherhood. Noted newspapermen embodied this heritage: Harry S. Ashmore of the Arkansas Gazette, Hodding Carter of the Delta Democrat-Times in Mississippi, Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Constitution, Buford Boone of the Tuscaloosa News. Harry Golden, publisher of the Carolina Israelite, won chuckles even from his enemies when he described himself as a member of three minorities—“I’m a Jew, a Yankee, and a radical”—and when he proposed the Golden Vertical Negro Plan, which would integrate the races in the schools by providing desks without seats, in the same way that blacks and whites shopped standing up side by side in city drugstores and supermarkets. But these were lonely voices. The notion of black inferiority was built into the minds of most of even the better-educated Southerners. Writing on the Other South of the nineteenth century, Carl Degler noted that with the coming of the twentieth “the great period of Southern dissent on a widespread and organized basis came to an end.” When Buford Boone attacked white violence in a talk to whites in western Alabama in 1957, from the audience came shouts of “Kill him!” and “Hang him!”

  The white dogma of Negro inferiority took form in the southern mind as a mishmash of stereotypes and shibboleths: “Mongrelization”—white men must protect the purity of blue-eyed, golden-haired southern girls— Negro blood had destroyed Rome—the “curse of Ham” in Genesis defined the black race—blacks were superior only in sports and entertainment— the “good colored” were quiet and law-abiding—Negroes preferred their own segregated schools. Some of these shibboleths combined with anti-Semitism; thus activist Negroes were mere pawns of the Jews. And as the fear of communism swept the country during the 1950s, southern demagogues linked civil rights leaders to Moscow.

  White children in the South picked up these stereotypes in their homes or churches or in play with other kids. Some of their most insidious notions were reinforced by grammar and high school texts. These abounded with tales of the happy relationships between masters and slaves, of slaves who after Emancipation remained with their masters because they knew who their friends were. Slavery, the children read, was the earliest form of Social Security. The Klan was a law-enforcement agency. There were the inevitable portraits of blacks as happy dancers and singers, with their “bright rows of white teeth,” of the lazy black, the carefree childlike black. But in these schoolbooks recent-day blacks and their history remained misty and shrouded. Typically there was no mention of Brown, of black leaders, or of the civil rights struggle.

  An array of southern organizations reflected and relayed these ideas. The most active and conspicuous, with a large membership of “respectable” whites, were the Citizens’ Councils that erupted across the South in the wake of Brown. First membership cardholder and Confederacy-wide head of the Association of Citizens’ Councils of America was Robert “Tut” Patterson, a onetime football player for Ole Miss. Patterson drafted a long-range platform for the Councils’ official newspaper, advocating the “recognition of racial differences as fact,” the migration of blacks and whites seeking integration to states sanctioning it, laws ensuring the “future racial integrity” of black and white communities, “strict enforcement of state voter qualification laws,” separate public schools for the black and white races. Other groups ranged from prestigious organizations for the protection of states’ rights and grass-roots independence to disreputable “white brotherhoods” and the like, and the abominable Klan.

  These groups were part and parcel of a political system that built ideas, interests, institutions, and leaders into a fortress of racism and inequality. A tragic paradox lay across the South. Ordinarily southern state governments were politically so unrepresentative, and organizationally so slack, that progressive action to meet human needs—even if only white needs— was weak and faltering. Governors’ powers were limited; legislatures were dominated by reactionary rural cliques; the one-party system of Democrats inflated the politics of personality and demagoguery and thwarted a rationally competitive politics of intelligent policy choices.

  By the end of the 1940s the most astute analyst of southern politics, the Texan v. O. Key, Jr., could conclude that politics was the South’s greatest problem. “The South’s heritage from crises of the past,” Key wrote, “its problems of adjustment of racial relations on a scale unparalleled in any western nation, its poverty associated with an agrarian economy which in places is almost feudal in character, the long habituation of many of its people to nonparticipation in political life”—all these put the South’s political system under an enormous burden. Those who loved the South, he concluded, “are left with the cold, hard fact that the South as a whole has developed no system or practice of political organization and leadership” able to carry that burden.

  Once Brown and other events challenged southern racism, however, southern leaders sprang into united action to obstruct progress and protect while privilege, drowsy legislatures churned out legislation, governors rushed to the school doors, registrars redoubled their vigilance against black invasion of the polls. White Citizens’ Councils, “employing the powerful weapons of economic reprisal, political pressure, psychological and emotional terror, and social ostracism,” coordinated the efforts of hitherto slack state officials. Within four years of Brown, state legislatures passed 196 segregation laws—measures for placement or assignment of pupils, grants for private education, repeal of compulsory school attendance, even provisions for the possible abolition of public schools. The country, said Harry Ashmore, had not seen such a mass of restrictive legislation since the days of the Know-Nothings.

  Such was the suddenly restocked and rearmed fortress that civil rights leaders confronted in the late 1950s. Their weapons seemed puny, measured by ordinary criteria of political warfare. Southern blacks typically could not vote, could not run for office, lacked extra cash for politics, often could not even protest. But they had their own secret weapon of enormous potential power—their sense of outrage welling up from years of oppression, their moral fervor rising out of their belief in America’s promise of liberty and equality for all. And they had their political and moral arm— their churches.

  Through every twist and turn of the southern civil rights movement during the late 1950s and 1960s, the black church—Baptist churches mainly, but also Methodist—would be its driving force and institutional base, at once spiritual, moral, cultural, political, organizational. Nat Turner was only one of the Baptist preachers who had led slave revolts, and black churches North and South played vital roles in the abolitionist movement. After Reconstruction, however, the combative spirit of many southern churches leaked away as they accommodated to Jim Crow; many black ministers gained influence and prestige as brokers between white elites and black folk. Still, as E. Franklin Frazier wr
ote, with the “elimination of Negroes from the political life of the American community,” the Negro church became the only arena in which blacks could “assert themselves” and in which the “thirst for power could be satisfied.”

  The old marks of the resistance to slavery were still evident as the black church grew stronger: charismatic leaders insulated from white society; a large, tightly organized congregation; a communications network; an independent financial base; relatively safe meeting places for planning tactics and generating commitment; and most critically, the “common church culture,” grounded in a rich heritage of empowering prayers and spirituals that could be directly channeled to political goals. Ever since slavery the male preacher had been the accepted community leader, closely attuned to the needs and aspirations of his black followers. Oratorical mesmerists like King had ready opportunity to reshape the cultural content of black religion into a weapon of protest by reinterpreting biblical stories or portraying Moses and Jesus as revolutionaries. The dynamic relationship between the charismatic clergy and the common church culture fashioned a mighty engine of grass-roots social power.

  Who would direct this power? This question was largely settled in 1957, when the Southern Christian Leadership Conference took form, in Aldon Morris’s words, “to unite community leaders by bringing them directly into leadership positions while simultaneously organizing the black masses.” Indeed, the mass base of the church was “built into” the SCLC structure. The SCLC nurtured extraordinary second-cadre leaders, both in its Atlanta headquarters and in the affiliates—Fred Shuttlesworth, Hosea Williams, James Revel, Andrew Young, Ralph Abernathy. The focus of authority and the center of attention was young King, who showed a “rare talent for attracting and using the skills and ideas of brilliant aides and administrators”—he was compared to FDR on this score—and provided a degree of tough organizational power.

  SCLC moved into the political vacuum after the Montgomery boycott, but as it solidified itself organizationally and financially, it floundered in charting a strategy for the budding movement. It mounted a southern-wide voter registration campaign but with little success. The momentum of the freedom movement slowed to a crawl.

  Angry and frustrated, black activists passionately debated new tactics and strategies. With SCLC divided over ways and means, other black organizations challenged the movement leadership. In 1942 James Farmer and others had founded the Congress of Racial Equality, which had pioneered the use of nonviolent direct action to integrate Chicago restaurants. Five years later CORE had joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation in a freedom ride through the upper South. But by 1960 CORE too was frustrated and uncertain. Then a handful of college students and a lone black woman took leadership.

  Late Monday afternoon on February 1, 1960, four well-dressed young men, first-year students at the mainly black North Carolina A & T College in Greensboro, bought some school supplies at Woolworth’s, then sat down and ordered coffee and doughnuts. “I’m sorry,” the waitress said, “we don’t serve you here.” “Why not?” the students asked. The waitress called the manager, who tried to reason with them, while a cop paced back and forth swinging his club but uncertain what to do. The students held their seats until the store, now crowded with onlookers, closed for the day. The move had been carefully planned as a team effort. Though they were much influenced by Gandhi, a protester said later, what had precipitated the action was the “courage each of us instilled within each other.” Growing numbers of students joined them at the lunch counter every day that week; soon virtually all of the area’s college students, as well as students from Greensboro’s black high school and hundreds of others, were sitting in, picketing, or boycotting segregated eating places.

  By wire service and student grapevine, news of the sudden protest flashed across North Carolina and the rest of the nation. It was “like a fever.” The next week students staged lunch-counter sit-ins in Winston-Salem, Durham, and other communities. By February’s end protests had erupted in over thirty cities in seven states and by April had swept through the entire South. Again and again young men and women stayed resolute and nonviolent when ketchup and other food were flung at them, lighted cigarettes were jabbed into them, white toughs set on them with little police interference. As the actions grew larger and better organized and moved deeper into the South, white violence increased along with black arrests. Would this movement peter out? Black leaders again debated strategy.

  One woman had her own answer. When black activist Ella Baker first heard about the sit-ins she called her contacts at southern colleges. “What are you all going to do?” she asked in her deep resonant voice. “It is time to move.” Then in her mid-fifties, Baker had acquired a grass-roots wisdom in her three decades of organizing. She remembered hearing, as a young child in a small North Carolina town, her ninety-year-old grandmother tell stories about slave revolts. The grandmother, flogged for refusing to marry the man chosen by the owner, had instead married a rebellious slave preacher. Valedictorian of her class at Raleigh’s Shaw University, Baker moved to Harlem just before the depression. During the 1930s she traveled the country setting up black consumer co-ops, then began a long association with the NAACP, organizing chapters through the South. She had an extraordinary ability to give people, especially young people, a deeper understanding of social change.

  But Ella Baker was a woman, and even though she had become executive director of SCLC, she had never felt accepted by King and his lieutenants. They did not take seriously her bold ideas for improving SCLC and its voting rights campaign. Growing more and more critical of its centralized, charismatic leadership, she resigned in the summer of 1960.

  Baker saw that the new student movement would not last without a structure to coordinate local groups. Borrowing funds from SCLC, she organized a southern-wide conference of student activists from over fifty colleges and high schools at Shaw University during Easter weekend. King spoke to two hundred fervent activists, but Baker fought an effort by SCLC to capture the students as its youth wing. Like most of the students, she believed they needed an autonomous organization “with the right to direct their own affairs and even make their own mistakes”; and she hoped they would be more militant in their nonviolence than SCLC. The young activists thoroughly agreed. After setting up a loosely structured Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, with delegates from every southern state, they committed themselves to nonviolence as the “foundation of our purpose, the presupposition of our belief, and the manner of our action.”

  And so SNCC—“Snick,” as people called it—was born. Inspired by Ella Baker, SNCC came to embody a brand of leadership that would clash with the leadership model of SCLC. Students tended to agree with her view that the centrality of one or a few charismatic leaders able to attract big crowds, big media, and big money was dangerous, for the charismatic leader got to the point of believing “that he is the movement.” They liked her idea of “group-centered leadership”—the idea that the movement needed people willing and able to develop leadership among other people and not operate as leaders above the crowd. They believed with her that black people in the South would have to rely on themselves and not on outside leaders. Above all, they agreed that SNCC must, in its organization and methods, prefigure the values of the redemptive society they sought to build, and that since they all shared both a hostility to authority and the risk of death, “we are all leaders.” This seeming anti-leadership ethos was actually an affirmation of an alternative kind of leadership—decentralized, participatory, comradely.

  But still the fortress of racism stood. By the end of 1960 hundreds of eating places had been opened to all, while tens of thousands of lunch counters, schools, terminals, drinking fountains, toilets, buses, lodging places remained barred to blacks. Increasingly, leaders in SCLC if not SNCC evaluated the advantages and dangers of turning to the federal government for help.

  Turning to the white man’s government out of desperation was nothing new for southern blacks. In
the 1860s the government fought a war first for the Union and then, increasingly, to abolish slavery, but war and reconstruction ended with blacks merely in a new form of servitude. The national Republican party, with its Lincoln tradition, and later the New Deal, with its social welfare concerns, handed out various favors to blacks, but it was the coming of a war fought for democracy and freedom and against Nazi racism that brought blacks such tangible benefits as jobs and welfare programs. Later, neither Truman Democrats nor Eisenhower Republicans appeared willing or able to deliver on their parties’ commitments to the men and women “freed” almost a century earlier.

  By the 1960s “turning to the feds” raised in sharpest form the central political and even philosophical question facing blacks: to what extent should they rely on the white majority in the nation as a whole to respond to black needs and aspirations? Should they risk once again being forgotten, sold out, double-crossed? To the contention that Theodore Roosevelt’s Square Deal, FDR’s New Deal, and Truman’s Fair Deal gave economic help or at least a measure of social and psychic support to blacks, came the response that that help was at best incidental to helping needy whites and at worst “mere crumbs.” But the argument remained that action by blacks alone, though vitally necessary, was tragically inadequate, given the power of the southern white fortress. No one made this point with such overwhelming intellectual authority, philosophical imagination, and analytical skill as a Swedish scholar who had so immersed himself in the American racial dilemma as to become a citizen in thought if not in law. His name was Gunnar Myrdal.

  In his 1,000-page study, An American Dilemma, sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation and published in 1942, Myrdal drew a portrait of black-white relationships in America in all their rich and evil complexity and explored the paradoxes that made up the dilemma: the continuing power of the American ideals of liberty and equality even as they existed side by side with gross racism and injustice and structures of inequality; the tragedy as well as the opportunity of the white majority—mostly “good people,” wanting to be “rational and just,” pleading to their consciences that they meant well even when things went wrong. Equally arresting—and even more relevant in 1962, when Myrdal brought out a twentieth anniversary edition—was his argument, powerfully supported by both historical data and sociological theory, that blacks must use all possible weapons in their effort to conquer the fortress of racism, and that these weapons most decidedly should include the moral passion, the credal ideals, the institutional machinery, and the collective leadership available among the American people as a whole. The civil rights movement must, in short, fight not only in the streets and at the lunch counters but in Washington and the state capitols.