The Modern Mind

by Peter Watson

  The issues raised by Harrington and Jacobs were both referred to by President Johnson. There is no question, however, that the main urgency that propelled him to his Great Society speech, apart from the ‘deep background’ of the Cold War, was race, especially the situation of American blacks. By 1966 a whole decade had elapsed since the landmark decision of the Supreme Court in 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional, repudiating the doctrine of ‘separate but equal.’ As Johnson realised, in the intervening years the basic statistics of black life were dispiriting. In 1963 there were more blacks in America in de facto segregated schools than there had been in 1952. There were more black unemployed than in 1954. More significant still, the median income of blacks had slipped from 57 percent that of whites in 1954 to 54 percent. Against this background, Milton Friedman’s arguments about the long-term beneficial effects of capitalism on race relations looked thin, and in 1963, as Johnson recognised, action was needed to avert trouble.

  Among the blacks themselves there was, as might be expected, a range of opinions as to the way forward. Some were in more of a hurry than others; some felt violence was necessary; others felt nonviolence ultimately had more impact. In March 1963 there had been riots in Birmingham, Alabama, when an economic boycott of downtown businesses had turned ugly following a decision by the commissioner for public safety, Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor, to have the police surround a church and prevent people from leaving. Among those arrested in the wake of these events (on Good Friday) was Martin Luther King, a thirty-four-year-old preacher from Adanta who had made a name for himself by rousing, rhetorical speeches advocating nonviolence. While he was in solitary confinement, King had been denounced by a group of white clerics. His response was ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail,’ nineteen pages scribbled and scrawled on envelopes, lavatory rolls, and the margins of newspaper articles, smuggled out of the jail by his supporters. It set out in vivid and eloquent detail why the people of Birmingham (i.e., the whites) had ‘left the Negro community with no alternative’ but to take the course of civil disobedience and ‘nonviolent tension’ in pursuit of their aims.30 ‘Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States…. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in the nation…. We had no alternative to prepare for our direct action…. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving at jet-like speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter.’31

  After his release from the Birmingham jail, King achieved the peak of his fame, and he was chosen as the main speaker for an historic march on Washington that summer, designed deliberately by a variety of black leaders to become a turning point in the civil rights campaign. The march was to be massive, so massive that although it was to be peaceful, it would nonetheless convey an implicit threat that if America didn’t change, didn’t do something – and soon – about desegregation, then … The threat was left deliberately vague. About a quarter of a million people descended on Washington on 28 August 1963, between a quarter and a third of them white. The marchers were relatively good-natured, and kept in line by a team of black New York policemen who had volunteered as marshals. The entertainment was second to none: Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary, and Mahalia Jackson, with a number of other celebrities showing up to lend support: Marlon Brando, Harry Belafonte, Josephine Baker, James Baldwin, Lena Home, Sammy Davis Junior. But what everyone remembered about that day was the speech by King. In recent speeches he had used a phrase he had found to be effective – I have a dream’ – and on this occasion he lavished extra special care on his delivery.32 Just as some men’s face is their fortune, in King’s case it was his voice. A very distinctive baritone, its dominant characteristic was a slight quiver. Combined with a rhetorical strength, this quiver made King’s voice both strong and yet vulnerable, exactly matching the developing mood and political situation of ordinary American blacks. But it also had a universal appeal that whites could identify with too. For many, King’s speech that day would prove to be the most memorable part of the civil rights campaign, or at least the part they chose to remember. ‘Five score years ago,’ he began, announcing his near-biblical tone, ‘a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand, signed the Emanicipation Proclamation.’ With his first sentence he had hit his theme and rooted it in American history. ‘But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free…. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights.’ And then he opened out, saying that he had a dream that one day his four little children would be judged ‘not by their colour but by their character.’33 Even today, the recording of King’s speech has the power to move.

  King lived through and helped bring about turbulent times (Vietnam was a second factor). Between November 1955, when Rosa Parks, a black American, was arrested for sitting at the front of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama (blacks had traditionally only been allowed in the back of the bus), and 1973, when Los Angeles elected its first black mayor, an enormous social, political, and legislative revolution took place. That revolution was most visible in the United States, but it extended to other countries, in Europe, Africa, and the Far East, as this list, by no means exhaustive, indicates:

  1958: Disturbances in Little Rock, Arkansas, when the state governor tries to prevent the admission of black pupils to a school.

  1960: The Civil Rights Act is passed, empowering blacks to sue if denied their voting rights.

  1961: The Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) organises ‘freedom rides’ to enforce bus desegregation.

  1962: The Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity forms, chaired by Vice President Johnson. James Meredith, a black student, gains admission to the University of Mississippi, Oxford, under federal guard. The British Commonwealth Immigrants Act limits the rights of admission to Britain of certain Commonwealth immigrants.

  1963: The March on Washington. Equal-pay law for men and women in the United States is enacted.

  1964: The Civil Rights Act in the United States forbids discrimination in work, restaurants, unions, and public accommodation. The Economic Opportunity and Food Stamps Acts are passed, and the U.S. Survey of Educational Opportunity carried out.

  1965: Great Society initiatives includes Head Start programs to support education for the poor and minorities; Medicaid and Medicare to provide medicine for the poor and elderly; urban development schemes; and other welfare benefits. Women are accepted as judges.

  1966: NOW, the National Organization for Women, is founded, along with the Black Panthers, a black paramilitary outfit that calls for ‘Black Power.’ Under the U.S. Child Nutrition Act, federal funds provide food for poor children. British Supplementary Benefit assists the sick, disabled, unemployed, and widows. Inner cities are rebuilt.

  1967: Thurgood Marshall becomes the first black man appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Race riots in seventy American cities accelerate ‘white flight’ to the suburbs. Colorado is the first U.S. state to allow abortion. Homosexuality is legalised in Britain. In the United States, a report of the Commission on Civil Rights concludes that racial integration needs to be accelerated to reverse the underachievement of African-American children. Educational Priority Areas are created in Britain to combat inequality. Abortion becomes lawful in the U.K.

  1968: The Urban Institute is founded. The Kerner Report on the previous year’s race riots warns that the United States is becoming ‘two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal.’ President Johnson announces ‘affirmative action,’ under which all government contractors must give ‘preferential treatment’ to African Americans and other minorities. Racial discrimination in the sale and renting of houses is outlawed. Shirley Chisholm is elected the first black congresswoman. The Immigration and Nationality Act replaces quota system with skill require
ments. Hispanic workers protest against their treatment in the United States. The Race Relations Act in the U.K. makes racial discrimination illegal.

  1969: Supreme Court nominees are withdrawn on grounds of their ‘racism and incompetence.’ Black Panthers are killed in a police raid in Chicago. Land begins to be returned to Native Americans. The United States ends censorship.

  1970: Civil rights for women; in federal contracts companies must employ a quota of women. The Equal Pay Act is passed in the U.K. Divorce is made legal in Italy. The first desegregated classes are held in the United States.

  1971: Bussing introduced to ensure a ‘racial balance’ in some U.S. schools. Switzerland accepts female suffrage. Slum primary schools in the U.K. are cleared. Medicare is implemented in Canada. The first women are ordained as priests (by the Anglican bishop of Hong Kong).

  1972: Andrew Young becomes the first African American elected from the South to Congress since Reconstruction. Indians march on Washington, D.C. First woman governor of the New York Stock Exchange.

  1973: In the United States abortion is made legal. The first black mayor of Los Angeles is elected.34

  The change didn’t end there, of course (the following year saw the first Hispanic and women governors of U.S. states, and the first female bishops). But the years of turbulence were over (which was also related to the ending of the war in Vietnam, and the economic downturn following the oil crisis in 1973 – see chapter 33 below). Not that all the change was in one direction, toward greater freedom for minority groups, women, and homosexuals. An alternative list reads as follows:

  1964: Bantu Laws amendment, designed to limit the settlement of Africans to peripheral areas, is introduced in South Africa.

  1966: Apartheid is extended to South West Africa (Namibia).

  1967: Resettlement villages are accelerated in South Africa.

  1968: Humanae Vitae, papal encyclical, prohibits use of artificial contraceptives by Roman Catholics.

  1969: The Stonewall police raid on a homosexual club in New York results in several days of violence after the club is set on fire while police are inside. Anti-egalitarian ‘Black papers’ are published in Britain. Arthur Jensen, in the Harvard Educational Review, argues that African Americans score consistently less well on IQ tests than do whites.

  1970: In South Africa all black Africans are consigned to one or other of the ‘Bantu homelands.’ Several books about race are banned in South Africa.

  1971: South African Bantu areas are brought under control of central government.

  1972: South Africa abolishes coloured representatives on municipal councils.

  Throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, the growing illiberalism of South African society and the violence associated with the advance of the blacks in America, were increasingly seen as part of the same malaise – the same dilemma, as Myrdal had called it – circumstances that combined to produce some sharp thinking about race. Though these authors might match King in rhetoric, they rarely matched him in Christian feeling.

  One of the authors James Baldwin had read when he was in Paris was Frantz Fanon, a black psychiatrist born in the French West Indian island of Martinique in 1925. After training in psychiatry in Paris, Fanon was assigned to a hospital in the North African colony of Algeria during the rising against the French. The experience appalled him; he took the Algerians’ side and wrote a number of books in which, like Baldwin in the southern states of America, he became a spokesman for those suffering oppression. In A Dying Colonialism (1959) and Black Skin, White Masks (1960), originally published in French, Fanon proved himself an articulate critic of the last days of imperialism, and his activities for the FLN (National Liberation Front), including an address to the First Congress of Negro Writers in 1956, drew the attention of the French police.35 Later that year he was forced to leave Algeria for Tunisia, where he continued to be one of the editors of El Moudjahid, an anticolonial magazine. His most poignant book was The Wretched of the Earth (1961), conceived at the time Fanon was diagnosed as suffering from leukaemia, and which consumed his final strength.36 Fanon was a more polemical writer than Baldwin, and a less gifted phrase-maker. But like the American his works are designed to worry whites and convince blacks that the battle – against racism and colonialism – can be won. Where The Wretched of the Earth was different was in Fanon’s use of his experiences as a psychiatrist. Fanon was intent on showing fellow blacks that the alienation they felt as a result of colonialism was a result of colonialism, and not some natural inferiority inherent in the black race. In support of his argument he reported a number of psychiatric reactions he had seen in his clinic and which, he said, were directly related to the guerrilla war of independence then being waged inside the country. In one case an Algerian taxi driver and member of the FLN had developed impotence after his wife had been beaten and raped by a French soldier during interrogation. In another, two young Algerians, aged thirteen and fourteen, had killed their European playmate. As the thirteen-year-old put it, ‘We weren’t a bit cross with him…. One day we decided to kill him, because the Europeans want to kill all the Arabs. We can’t kill big people. But we could kill ones like him, because he was the same age as us.’37 Fanon had many stories of disturbances in young people, and especially among the victims of torture. He pointed out that torture victims could be divided into two – ‘those who know something’ and ‘those who know nothing.’ He said he never saw those who knew something as patients (they never got ill; they had in a sense ‘earned’ their torture), but among those who knew nothing, there were all sorts of symptoms, usually related to the type of torture – indiscriminate, mass attack with truncheons or cigarette burns; electricity; and the so-called ‘truth serum.’ Victims of electric torture, for example, would develop an electricity phobia and become unable to touch an electric switch.38

  Fanon’s aim, like R. D. Laing’s, was to show that mental illness was an extreme but essentially rational response to an intolerable situation, but he was also answering what he saw as oversimple arguments by European scientists and social scientists regarding ‘the African mind’ and African culture. In the mid-1950s, the World Health Organisation had commissioned a survey by a Scottish psychiatrist, Dr J. C. Carothers, on ‘Normal and Pathological Psychology of the African.’ Carothers had worked in Kenya and been medical officer in command of prisons there. His survey had concluded, ‘The African makes very little use of his frontal lobes. All the particularities of African psychiatry can be put down to frontal laziness.’ Carothers actually put forward the idea that the ‘normal’ African is like a ‘lobotomised European.’39 Fanon countered dismissively, arguing that Carothers had missed the point. At that stage, he said, African culture (like black American culture, like Baldwin’s writing) was the struggle to be free; the fight – violence itself – was the shared culture of the Algerians, and took most of their creative energy. Like King, they had become ‘creative extremists.’ Fanon did not live to see peace restored to an autonomous Algeria. He had been too busy completing his book to seek treatment for his leukaemia, and although he was taken to Washington in late 1961, the disease was too far advanced. He died a few weeks after his book was published, aged thirty-six.

  Polemical writing, like Fanon’s, was exactly the sustenance blacks needed in the 1960s, and in America, after James Baldwin changed his stance in a series of novels, Another Country (1962), Blues for Mister Charlie (1964), and Going to Meet the Man (1965), his place was taken by Eldridge Cleaver. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1935, Cleaver liked to describe himself as having been ‘educated in the Negro ghetto of Los Angeles and at the California state prisons of San Quentin, Folsom and Soledad.’ Though ironic, this was also true, as Cleaver had read widely in jail (he had been convicted of marijuana possession) and met several other inmates who nurtured his rebellious instincts. He eventually became minister of information in the Black Panther Party, an African-American paramilitary organisation. His first book, Soul on Ice, released the same year that K
ing was assassinated, was a wide-ranging attack on Baldwin. ‘There is in James Baldwin’s work,’ wrote Cleaver, ‘the most gruelling, agonizing, total hatred of the blacks, particularly of himself, and the most shameful, fanatical, fawning, sycophantic love of the whites that one can find in the writings of any black American writer of note in our time.’40 For Cleaver, as with Fanon, the situation facing African Americans was too urgent to allow the luxury of becoming an artist in any wider sense; the problem was so all-enveloping that to turn one’s back on it, or place it in a wider context, as Baldwin attempted to do from time to time, was for Cleaver an avoidance akin to race crime. Three themes are interlaced in Soul on Ice, which was written in prison. One is the everyday brutality of whites toward blacks, highlighted by prison routine. Two, Cleaver’s thoughts on international race politics, white myths about race, Africa, black history, black food, black music, showing how to build a countervailing and sustaining myth. And three, Cleaver’s progressive thoughts about sex between the races, from the first essay, where he confesses that for him, as a young man, he found white women more attractive than black, to the last essay, a far more lyrical, near-mystical paean of praise to ‘Black Beauty’ – ‘Let me drink from the river of your love at its source.’41 Pointed as his criticisms of Baldwin were at the time, the latter’s works have survived in better shape than Cleaver’s essays.