Rethinking the Black Freedom Movement

Yohuru Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781135980689
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia nordamericana

The African American struggle for civil rights in the twentieth century is one of the most important stories in American history. With all the information available, however, it is easy for even the most enthusiastic reader to be overwhelmed. In Rethinking the Black Freedom Movement, Yohuru Williams has synthesized the complex history of this period into a clear and compelling narrative. Considering both the Civil Rights and Black Power movements as distinct but overlapping elements of the Black Freedom struggle, Williams looks at the impact of the struggle for Black civil rights on housing, transportation, education, labor, voting rights, culture, and more, and places the activism of the 1950s and 60s within the context of a much longer tradition reaching from Reconstruction to the present day.

Exploring the different strands within the movement, key figures and leaders, and its ongoing legacy, Rethinking the Black Freedom Movement is the perfect introduction for anyone seeking to understand the struggle for Black civil rights in America.

1
“A Continuing Evolving Process”

The Predecessors and Origins of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements

Justice is never given; it is exacted and the struggle must be continuous for freedom is never a final fact, but a continuing evolving process to higher and higher levels of human, social, economic, political, and religious relationship.

A. Philip Randolph¹

The Civil Rights and Black Power Movements occupy a unique place in recent American history. They have become the backdrop for a continuing conversation about race and democracy that seeks to contextualize the nation’s continuing struggle to reconcile elements of racial inequality with its seeming triumph over legal apartheid during the 1960s. The U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of key sections of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, designed to protect Black voting rights, in the summer of 2013 raised serious concerns among many former movement activists about the stability and legacy of the changes they fought to win. Making an appeal to Congress in the aftermath of the Court’s 5–4 decision in Shelby County v. Holder to reestablish those sections that were stricken, Georgia Congressman and longtime Civil Rights activist, John Lewis observed, “People must never forget that the scars and stains of racism are still deeply embedded in every corner, every fiber of American society, even when it comes to our politics.” Referencing his great-grandfather whom he noted “had been a slave” and “became a registered voter,” during Reconstruction, Lewis tied the Civil Rights victories of his era, to the much longer history of the struggle to end slavery and maintain protections for African American Civil Rights to this day. His observations illustrate one of the new directions in thinking about the Civil Rights Movement as both a unique occurrence and one chapter or phase of a much longer Black Freedom Movement.²

Over the past decade, scholars have debated about how to capture the essence of this rethinking of the movement’s temporal and spatial boundaries. Traditionally, scholars have treated the movement primarily as a southern phenomenon fixing its dates in the period between 1954 and 1968—roughly from the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education to the assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King in Memphis. There are, of course, significant limitations that Congressman Lewis’ comments illustrate, in conceptualizing the movement this way. Scholarship that is more recent has sought to expand this definition of the movement beyond its present boundaries—placing it in the much larger context of what historian Clayborne Carson calls the Modern Black Freedom Struggle that was both national and global. Although the movement arose in response to a unique set of circumstances that coalesced in the period after World War II, it was also part of this much longer freedom struggle. As sociologist Aldon Morris proposed, “Organized protest against white domination has always been one of the cornerstones of the black experience.”³ While respecting yet expanding the chronological boundaries of these events, highlighting the issues, personalities, strategies, and tactics employed by those dedicated to winning full equality for African Americans can be instructive.

Even in specialized studies of the movement, scholars quickly conceded that while the postwar period witnessed a flowering of resistance to American apartheid, the roots of that resistance went much deeper. As historian Robert Korstad observed, in his book Civil Rights Unionism, “the key events in this history of working-class insurgency took place between 1942 and 1950 … But the institutions and processes that influenced mobilization have a much longer history.”⁴ This is not to suggest that there has been one continuous movement but rather to highlight the continuities and similarities around those issues and ideas that defined early freedom struggles with the distinct issues and ideas that Civil Rights and Black Power activists later organized and mobilized around. In general, freedom struggles between the end of Reconstruction and the advent of the modern Civil Rights Movement united around certain key issues unique to the African American experience. These include the fight against residential segregation and segregated education coupled with the demand for fair employment, unfettered access to places of public accommodation and equitable treatment within the criminal justice system, which even in the present day remains a persistent obstacles to full equality. Students of the period will find not only a variation in the issues themselves but also among the responses of various individuals and organizations committed to addressing them. Thus, while lynching and the problem of mass incarceration remain distinct issues, they fall under the broad heading of Jim Crow Justice, the roots of which are traceable to the decades after the American Civil War.

Making such connections is certainly not new. Movement leaders often drew such comparisons to emphasize the struggle’s longue durée. In 1962, for instance, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King joined a distinguished group of guests at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City to celebrate the induction of Jackie Robinson, the first African American to play major league baseball in the 20th century, into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Robinson, King observed in his brief remarks, referring to an incident in 1944 when the baseball legend refused to give up his seat on a Texas bus, “was a freedom rider before the freedom rides.” King’s comments were reminiscent of a speech he delivered years earlier on the eve of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. King reminded the audience at the packed Holt Street Baptist Church that the “situation” of segregated transportation that occasioned their gathering was “not at all new.” “The problem,” he explained, “has existed over endless years.” “For many years now,” he explained, “Negroes in Montgomery and so many other areas have been inflicted with the paralysis of crippling fear on buses in our community.” “On so many occasions,” he continued:

Negroes have been intimidated and humiliated and oppressed because of the sheer fact that they were Negroes I don’t have time this evening to go into the history of these numerous cases. Many of them now are lost in the thick fog of oblivion but at least one stands before us now with glaring dimensions.⁵

The “one” case King spoke of, of course, was the arrest of 42-year-old seamstress Rosa Parks. Despite the enduring perception of Parks’ courageous act of defiance as an act of impulse, because she was “tired of giving,” in fact the longtime Civil Rights activist was connected with several local and national protest organizations operating in the Montgomery area including the NAACP that had been committed to fighting for racial equality. Her act of rebelliousness soon became a successful local then national movement.⁶ At the core of the protest was the demand by African Americans in Montgomery for treatment as first-class citizens—a demand that helped to galvanize a national movement.

Joe Azbell, the white city editor of the Montgomery Advertiser, who reported on the meeting the following day, captured this sentiment while highlighting the two remarks in King’s speech that he observed “drew the most applause.” “We will not retreat one inch in our fight to secure and hold our American citizenship,” King boldly challenges his fellow protesters. Second was the statement: “And the history book will write of us as a race of people who in Montgomery County, State of Alabama, Country of the United States, stood up for and fought for their rights as American citizens, as citizens of democracy.”⁷

During the high point of the movement, the quest for first class citizenship united in protest a disparate and diverse coalition of activists, scholars, unionists, veterans, and persons from across the political spectrum. While they shared similar goals, their methods and manner for achieving them were far from uniform. Dr. King’s comments illustrate the complexities of the movement in this regard. In speaking of the long series of injustices, he focused the attention of his audience on the larger denial of justice and equality that bound people of African descent together in pursuit of a common goal. It was not always one unified movement with distinctive leaders and organizations; that would come later. Its origins are important nonetheless because they laid a foundation for the later movement that eventually converged in the more familiar battles of the 1950s and 1960s, including Montgomery, Little Rock, Birmingham, and Selma.

What was evident in these early struggles was an inchoate Civil Rights Movement still in gestation in the riverbed of a Long Black Freedom Struggle. That riverbed not only incubated a struggle for Civil Rights but also an emergent Black Power Movement—a parallel movement seeking to establish a distinct Black cultural identity as well as independent Black institutions and ties with people of African descent across the globe. While often separatist in tone, Black Power advocates also tested the parameters and limits of citizenship and democracy as their demands for self-defense, and self-determination pushed the very boundaries of the constitutional guarantees of free speech and association.

This construction of citizenship, of course, was impossible without the Civil War. Between 1861 and 1865, conflict tore the nation asunder as the Union and Confederate armies battled over competing economic, social, and political systems rooted in slavery. Before the war, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott (1858) declared that people of “African ancestry” were “not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution,” and could “therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.” By the conclusion of the war, there was genuine optimism that the Union would not only abolish slavery but also extend citizenship to the Freedmen. In the decade after the war, three new Constitutional Amendments, abolishing slavery (13th Amendment), granting citizenship (14th Amendment), and outlawing discrimination based on race in voting (15th Amendment) buttressed by additional legislation seeking to establish Civil Rights seemed to argue for a bright future.

In reality, however, the new Amendments proved insufficient against the rising tide of white supremacy. In a series of rulings between 1873 and 1883, a hostile U.S. Supreme Court chose to interpret the scope and meaning of the Amendments narrowly, effectively nullifying the efforts of the Republican Congress to establish African Americans’ claim to full citizenship. Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, in the meantime utilized his veto power to attempt to check other legislation aimed at establishing equal rights for people of color. Throughout the former states of the Confederacy, state and local politicians adopted laws and policies designed to return African Americans back to the same position they occupied under slavery. Simultaneously, white terrorist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan used violence and intimidation to undermine Black Civil Rights and disfranchise Black voters. Northern and border states were not immune from the violence or the segregationist impulse. Delaware attempted to bar Blacks’ testimony against whites in court while the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court upheld the legality of segregated railroads.

The result, especially in the South, was a quasi-freedom that relegated African Americans to second-class citizenship. Southern author and ex-confederate soldier George Washington Cable best captured the essence of the dilemma that African Americans faced in an extended essay published in The Century Magazine in 1885. While advocating for full citizenship for African Americans, Cable grimly acknowledged that to be

a free man is his still distant goal … Twice he has been a freedman. In the days of compulsory reconstruction, he was freed in the presence of his master by that master’s victorious foe. In these days of voluntary reconstruction he is virtually freed by the consent of his master, but the master retaining the exclusive right to define the bounds of his freedom.⁸

Cable condemned the incipient lines of segregation he saw emerging in many southern states in the wake of the failed efforts at Congressional Reconstruction. Emboldened Democratic southern legislatures, eager to put the war and “the Negro question” behind them, moved swiftly to reestablish white supremacy. They found an ally in the U.S. Supreme Court, which over the period from 1873 to 1896, systematically dismantled many of the protections put in place by the “Radical Republican” Congress to protect African American Civil Rights. Beginning with the Slaughterhouse cases of 1873, the High Court narrowly interpreted the scope of the Amendments while deferring to state police powers in matters of “health, safety, and morals,” that became the cornerstone of segregationist laws.

African Americans were far from passive in responding to assaults on their freedom. Tens of thousands left the Jim Crow South, for instance, in search of greener pastures in Kansas, Oklahoma, and other points west, a precursor to the Great Migration that took place in successive waves between 1900 and 1970. Others were more vocal in their resistance. In the years and decades after the war, a number of African American newspaper editors, civic leaders, and ministers spoke out against efforts to restrict Black citizenship. AME Bishop and Civil War veteran Henry McNeal Turner, for instance, sharply criticized the U.S. Supreme Court for its ruling in the Civil Rights cases of 1883, which struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Designed to ensure equal access to places of public accommodation for people of color, the court declared the law unconstitutional and held acts of private discrimination beyond the reach of the federal government. Referring to the “Dred Scott” decision as “only a mole-hill in comparison with this obstructing Rocky Mountain to the freedom of citizenship,” Turner could hardly contain his indignation. The “gambler, cut-throat, thief, despoiler of happy homes, and the cowardly assassin,” he protested, “need only to have white faces in order to be accommodated with more celerity and respect than are our lawyers, doctors, teachers and humble preachers.”⁹

Turner’s words foreshadowed state-sanctioned segregation. A little over a decade after its ruling in the Civil Rights cases the High Court issued its decision in Plessy v. Ferguson holding that Louisiana’s 1890 Separate Car Act, requiring African Americans and whites to sit in separate cars, did not violate the citizenship or equal protection clauses of the 14th Amendment. The court ruled further that such segregation placed no “badge of inferiority” on African Americans in violation of the 13th Amendment and, thus, was not illegal. The ruling effectively eliminated barriers to segregation. While segregationists celebrated the decision, it was a clear departure from broader trends toward integration. In the roughly two decades between the end of the war and the court’s ruling in Plessy, for example, the historian C. Vann Woodward noted significant fluidity in race relations.¹⁰ African Americans, in spite of racial prejudice, were able to start families, carve out successful businesses, and take advantage of educational opportunities. Institutions of higher learning like Howard University and the Tuskegee Institute served as the gateway for a small but influential minority to acquire the experience and training necessary to move into the professions; some African Americans were able to enroll at white institutions.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy, however, arrested this progress. Empowered by the court’s decree, Democratic controlled legislatures in southern states quickly erected legal barriers to equality for African Americans under the doctrine of separate but equal.

Even before the ...