Knowledge, Power, and Black Politics

Collected Essays

Mack H. Jones

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781438449081, 9781438449074
• eBook ISBN: 9781438449098
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Few scholars have influenced the development of the study of black politics as much as Mack H. Jones. Through his writings one can trace the emergence, evolution, and maturation of the scientific study of the field. Knowledge, Power, and Black Politics brings together difficult-to-find and out-of-print essays by this important figure. In the first part of this volume Jones demonstrates how American social science creates a misleading caricature of African American life, one that can only lead to misguided public policies. He offers an alternative frame of reference, the dominant-subordinate group model, and argues that it offers greater descriptive insights and prescriptive utility for those interested in understanding politics internal to the African American community. The framework established in the first section is used to examine a broad range of topics such as the history of black politics from the period of enslavement to the modern era and the dynamics of the civil rights movement, as well as a range of contentious public policy issues, including public welfare, affirmative action, the black underclass, racism and multiculturalism, the black conservative movement, deracialization, presidential politics, and US foreign policy toward developing countries.

SECTION II

BLACK POLITICS

Theory and Practice

5

Black Politics

From Civil Rights to Benign Neglect*

The late Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, is given credit for the phrase “seek ye first the political kingdom and other things shall be added unto you.” Much of the history of black people in the United States suggests that Nkrumah’s dictum undergirded their struggle for equal status. Beginning with the efforts of blacks during the slavery era and continuing to the present, black people have placed inordinate faith in politics as the vehicle for liberation. To be sure, there have been those who assigned primacy to other means such as education, economics, or religion, as the optimum structure through which liberation might be achieved, but politics has invariably been accepted, consensually, as the most auspicious arena for promoting desired social changes. Consequently, much of the black struggle has been directed toward achieving full participation of the U.S. political process, with the implied assumption that such action would bring about equal status.

The level of black participation, which has never approached anything approximating full participation, has been characterized by peaks and troughs as blacks have achieved new levels of participation only to be followed by greater white resistance and concomitant decline in participation. The contemporary epoch should be understood as one segment in this undulating progression. This chapter focuses primarily on political developments, both electoral and nonelectoral of the 1960s and early 1970s. Specifically it will deal with the various black political groupings, their philosophies, tactics, goals, and political gains achieved, and with white resistance to their efforts.

Before dealing with the contemporary epoch, present developments should be placed in proper perspective by briefly citing salient historical developments in the black struggle for political equality and by establishing a frame of reference for analyzing and interpreting black political activity in the United States.

The history of black political activity may be divided into five fairly distinct periods: (1) pre–Civil War, 1619–1865; (2) post–Civil War and Reconstruction, 1865–1876; (3) post-Reconstruction and reimposition of white supremacy, 1876–1944; (4) struggle for equal status under the constitution, 1944–1954; and (5) struggle for full socioeconomic and political participation, the contemporary epoch, 1954 to the present.

During the first period, 1619–1865, most blacks were slaves and had no political rights. At one time or another every colony recognized slavery and sharply defined the legal status of slaves and free blacks.¹ The latter, who numbered 59,557 in 1790; 313,466 in 1830; and 475,209 in 1860, although technically free, were only slightly better off than slaves.² Consequently, black political activity during this period was concerned mainly with securing legal rights, particularly the franchise, for freedmen, whose conditions were desperate. Some states limited their mobility and required that all freedmen carry passes, while others placed severe proscriptions on occupations in which they might engage.

The position of the federal government was hardly more benevolent than that of the states. According to one prominent historian,

Reflecting the popular concept of the United States as a white man’s country, early Congressional legislation excluded Negroes from certain federal rights and privileges and sanctioned a number of territorial and state restrictions. In 1790, Congress limited naturalization to white aliens; in 1792, it organized militia and restricted enrollment to able-bodied white male citizens; in 1810, it excluded Negroes from carrying the United States mail. … On the basis of such legislation, it would appear that Congress had resolved to treat Negroes neither as citizens nor as aliens.³

Blacks achieved no major national victories during this period. The most significant development was the Dred Scott decision of 1857, which declared that blacks were not included under the Constitution and, consequently, could not lay claim to any of the rights and privileges provided U.S. citizens.

The most striking political gains ever for black Americans occurred during the second period, 1865–1877. The Thirteenth Amendment (1865) outlawed slavery, while the Fourteenth, passed three years later, repealed Dred Scott by bestowing citizenship on blacks and guaranteeing to them equal protection of the laws. The Fifteenth Amendment (1870) expressly guaranteed the right to vote.

In addition to the three Constitutional amendments, Congress passed several statutes designed to protect the rights of blacks. The act of 1866 was and still remains the most far-reaching civil rights law ever passed by Congress. It was meant to ensure for blacks the same rights “as are enjoyed by white citizens.”⁴ The so-called force acts of 1870 and 1871 sought to protect black access to the franchise by making it a crime for individuals or groups, either privately or under the color of law to interfere with the right to vote. Significantly, the first act covered not only direct and immediate interference, but indirect economic pressure as well. The act made it a crime to interfere with voting by “means of bribery, threats, or threats of depriving such persons enfranchised by the Fifteenth Amendment of employment or occupation, or of ejecting such persons from rented house, lands, or other property, or by threats of refusing to renew leases or contracts for labor, or by threats of violence to himself or family.”⁵ The second act sought to eliminate organized terrorist interference by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan by declaring that such interference “shall be deemed a rebellion against the government of the United States.”⁶ The final civil rights statute of this period, the act of 1875, guaranteed blacks access to public accommodations, and the right to serve on petit and grand juries.

Collectively, the Civil War amendments and the several civil rights acts represented unprecedented political gains. By 1875, blacks had been legally or constitutionally accorded all rights and privileges enjoyed by white persons and the federal government was specifically empowered to protect the exercise of them.

The third period, although characterized by intense black protests was one of reversals rather than victories. Many of the rights won during the preceding period were nullified through nonenforcement, while others were specifically reversed. Between 1876 and 1888, the Supreme Court virtually eliminated all federal protection by ruling that the national government had no power to prevent discrimination and interference by private individuals and groups. According to Blaustein and Zangrando, “the Civil Rights Cases of 1883 confirmed the fact that the National government was officially abandoning the Negro to the caprice of state control. The next thirty years indicated the extent to which the Negro, though nominally freed from slavery, could be repressed and reduced to the status of second-class citizenship by the force of law and the force of custom sustained by state control.”⁷

Blacks did not win a significant national victory during this period until 1944 when the Supreme Court in Smith v. Allwright, outlawed the white primary.⁸ Between 1944 and 1954 blacks won several significant victories in the Supreme Court including the seminal Brown decision outlawing state-sanctioned segregation as a denial of equal protection of the laws. It was the logic of the Brown decision that paved the way for the elimination of all forms of discrimination and segregation and laid the foundation for the contemporary struggle for full socioeconomic and political participation.

With this brief historical sketch behind us, it remains for us to establish a frame of reference through which we may analyze black political activity. Such activity, like all other forms of social activity, can be understood only in terms of some conceptual scheme or frame of reference. Traditionally, the melting pot theory of U.S. pluralism has been used most often as a conceptual scheme for interpreting the sociopolitical life of black people in the United States.⁹ This approach assumes that U.S. society can be explained in terms of successive waves of ethnic groups that move in linear progression from politically impotent subjects to full citizens-participants over time. Under this frame of reference, the political history of other ethnics—Irish, Jews, Poles, Italians—is used as a referent or benchmark for interpreting black political life.¹⁰

The essential assumption of the ethnic pluralist model is that society moves predeterminedly toward a state of equilibrium characterized by countervailing forces that ensure that no one group gets too much and that every group gets substantially something. The pluralist frame of reference assumes further that it is only a matter of time before blacks become an equal partner in a new equilibrium.

During the 1960s the pluralist frame of reference came under attack for being inappropriate for understanding the black political experience.¹¹ In earlier work I argued that a frame of reference for black politics should not begin with superficial comparisons of blacks and other ethnic minorities in this country or elsewhere, because such an approach inevitably degenerates into normative reformist speculation around the question of what can be done to elevate blacks to the position (real or imagined) occupied by the group with which they are being compared. This, in turn, leads to the establishment of a linear model of ethnic or out-group politics that forces the black political experience to fit a contrived model that obscures, rather than clarifies, the crucial variables in the black political experience. In developing a frame of reference for black politics, one should rather begin by searching for those factors that are inherent in the black political experience, for these are the things that will facilitate our understanding of the role and position of blacks in the U.S. political system.¹²

Consistent with Blalock,¹³ I went on to argue in the earlier work that the key to understanding black politics in the United States is the realization that those in superordinate positions invariably act in such a manner as to preserve their position of dominance and that, therefore, whites in the United States act toward blacks in such a manner as to maintain white hegemony. Thus, rather than conceptualizing black politics as a process through which black people, propelled by some unseen hand, move inexorably to a position of equal status, it is more appropriate to conceptualize it as a power struggle between two groups, one bent on maintaining its position of dominance and the other struggling for liberation. These groups may be thought of respectively as the dominant and submissive group.

Historically, dominant groups have used several basic political strategies to maintain their position of dominance. These include: (1) assimilation; (2) legal protection of minority rights; (3) pluralism; (4) population transfer; (5) continued subjugation; and (6) extermination. On the other hand, submissive or oppressed groups have attempted to use the first four strategies along with a fifth-reversal of status through revolutionary activity—to alleviate their oppressed condition. At any point in time there will be identifiable forces within the dominant community advocating the use of any one or any combination of the six strategies as the optimum method for maintaining...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Foreword by Robert C. Smith
• Introduction
• Section I. Epistemology and Theory
• Section II. Black Politics: Theory and Practice
• Section III. Race and Public Policy
• Section IV. Commentaries and Reviews
• Index
• BackCover