The historic quest for equality of opportunity
The historic quest for equality of opportunity
When we were more guilty yet more innocent
In today’s commentary, my intention is to make clear the evolving conceptualization of the African-American movement from 1917 to 1972, providing a foundation for my reflections in my next commentary on the period from 1972 to the present. In writing today’s commentary, I have consulted my 1994 book, The African-American Movement: From Pan-Africanism to the Rainbow Coalition.
The historic struggle for equality of opportunity
The primary intellectual tendency of the African-American movement from 1930 to 1968 was the attainment of equality of opportunity in America.
Black Americans first became a political force in the USA in the 1930s, when the black migration to industrial states, which began during World War I, enabled black voters to affect the outcome of presidential elections in key states in the electoral college voting system for presidential elections. In the 1930s, the black press (working at that time in separate black-owned newspapers in major cities) claimed that the sentiments of black voters had been an influential factor in blocking the approval of a Supreme Court nominee in 1930, in the election of several senators in 1932, and in the presidential elections of 1936.
In 1941, A. Philip Randolph, the head of the all-black Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, organized a March on Washington to demand an executive order abolishing discrimination in the armed forces, government agencies, and national defense jobs. A settlement was negotiated, in which President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued (on June 25, 1941) an Executive Order banning discrimination in defense industries and government employment in exchange for the cancellation of the march. Subsequently, the March on Washington Movement organized indoor rallies in 1942 in large arenas in big cities, calling for the implementation of the executive order. Randolph became a celebrated public figure, calling for an end to discrimination in the government, armed forces, defense industries, and in public accommodations.
In 1946, Randolph organized rallies demanding the conversion of the wartime Fair Employment Practice Committee into a permanent agency. In 1947, Randolph formed the League for Nonviolent Civil Disobedience Against Military Segregation. He declared that if an executive order ending segregation in the armed forces were not issued, he would lead an organized civil disobedience movement against the draft, calling upon both black and white youth to refuse to register for the military draft.
After failed attempts to get other African-American leaders to denounce Randolph, President Harry Truman issued two Executive Orders on July 28, 1948, creating commissions for the elimination of racial discrimination in federal employment and the armed forces. As a result of the executive orders, Truman secured the black vote in the seven key industrial states, enabling him to win three—Ohio, California, and Illinois—by small margins, providing him with the margin of victory in the Electoral College vote in the 1948 presidential elections.
In a parallel track in the struggle for racial equality, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, directed by future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, had arrived to a breakthrough in its challenge through litigation of state-sponsored segregation in education in the South. In the period 1930 to 1945, the Legal Defense Fund had been attaining favorable court rulings with respect to unequal physical facilities in particular school districts, but the strategy was ineffective in forcing an abandonment of segregation in favor of a more economically efficient single school system. In 1945, the Legal Defense Fund adopted a new strategy. In the pivotal case of Sweat v. Painter, NAACP lawyers, using the testimony of social scientists, argued that, with respect to graduate education, equality cannot be measured by physical facilities alone.
In 1951, NAACP lawyers brought together five cases in South Carolina, Kansas, Virginia, Delaware, and Washington, D.C., challenging racial segregation in elementary and secondary schools. On May 17, 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the Court ruled that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” and that segregation in schools violates the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The executive branch of the federal government, recognizing the importance of the protection of black civil and political rights as the world-system was transitioning from colonialism to neocolonialism, supported the NAACP petition. In a declaration that is stunning in its understatement and apparent naïveté, Secretary of State Dean Acheson asserted to the Court: “The continuation of racial discrimination in the United States remains a source of constant embarrassment to this government in the day-to-day conduct of its foreign relations; and it jeopardizes the effective maintenance of our moral leadership of the free and democratic nations of the world.”
Black churches, black colleges, and black protest organizations had become increasingly strong in numbers and in resources after 1930, as a result of the industrialization of the South and the urbanization of Southern blacks, which had been stimulated by New Deal policies designed to promote the economic development of the South. Acting on this foundation, in the period 1955 to 1965 college-educated black ministers and leaders forged a non-violent mass movement, by blacks of all social classes, in opposition to the structures of Jim Crow in the South. Highlights of the Southern civil rights stage of the African-American movement included: the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56, which lifted Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to national prominence; the formation of local movement centers across the South from 1956 to 1958, which organized local protest actions; the establishment of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957; the student sit-ins of 1960, which led to the establishment of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); the Freedom Rides of 1961, which provoked the intervention of the Kennedy administration; the Birmingham Campaign of 1963, which exposed police brutality in the South of that era, and which prompted President John F. Kennedy to appear on national television to defend the movement’s goals and to announce that he would submit to Congress a bill based on “the proposition that race has no place in American life or law.”
The struggle for the right of blacks to vote in the South paralleled the mass movement for civil rights, and it exposed the ugly and barbaric side of white resistance. In 1961, a coalition of major civil rights organizations, led by SNCC and funded by the federal government, was established for the purpose of organizing voter registration projects in the South. Most SNCC staff workers were black, and a minority was white; they were from both the North and the South. In Mississippi, staff workers encountered repeated instances of violence, intimidation, and harassment. In 1963 in Mississippi, there were twenty-six violent attacks on SNCC staff and on black residents by whites. The climate of fear generated by violence, combined with the tactics of voter registration officials, resulted in slow progress in black voter registration. As a result, SNCC in 1964 established a parallel registration process, in order to demonstrate the desire to vote among the disenfranchised. In addition, the 1964 “Freedom Summer” project included the recruitment of white student volunteers and the formation of freedom schools, which were characterized by alternative content and pedagogical methods.
During the Freedom Summer project, three civil rights workers were killed, provoking a national consternation. James Chaney was an African American from Mississippi who was on the staff of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality). Michael Schwerner was a white staff member of CORE who been working in Mississippi for six months. Andrew Goodman was a white student at Queens College who was among the Freedom Summer volunteers. The bodies of the three young men were found on August 4 near Philadelphia, Mississippi, culminating a thorough federal government search and investigation of the disappearance of the three, who had been missing since June 21.
Neither the federal government nor Mississippi state authorities took any action to directly protect the civil rights workers or to induce local authorities to check harassment and violence directed against them. Local authorities often participated in the intimidation. SNCC reported during Freedom Summer dozens of incidents in which civil rights workers were beaten, shot, or threatened by whites; twenty-five bombings of homes and churches in the black community; and three hundred arrests of civil rights workers, usually on misdemeanor charges.
In 1964, SNCC formed a separate political organization, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), which was open to all Mississippi residents, regardless of race. Its more than 80,000 registered members elected 800 delegates to the MFDP state convention, which elected 68 delegates, including four whites, to attend the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. The MFDP delegation presented itself to the credentials committee of the Democratic National Convention, challenging the legitimacy of the all-white delegation selected by the regular Mississippi Democratic Party, on the grounds of its systematic exclusion of blacks from participation. Senator Hubert Humphrey proposed a compromise, in which two MFDP delegates would be seated as at-large delegates; the remaining 66 delegates would be permitted attendance as non-voting guests; and the Convention would establish new rules that would bar from the 1968 convention any state delegations that discriminated against blacks. Martin Luther King, CORE’s James Farmer, and MFDP delegation chair Aaron Henry favored the Humphrey compromise. But the MFDP delegates were overwhelmingly opposed to the compromise, so the MFDP refused to accept it.
The voter registration campaign in the South of the early 1960s made gains in black voter registration. From 1962 to 1964, black voter registration across the South increased from 29 to 43%. But progress was slower than had been hoped, and Alabama (with 23% black voter registration) and Mississippi (7%) were especially notorious. Movement leaders concluded that federal legislation on voting rights was needed. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference chose Selma, Alabama, as the place for a confrontation designed to compel the federal government to act. In 1961, Selma had approximately 15,000 blacks of voting age, and 156 registered black voters.
Regular non-violent marches and rallies were held in Selma in January and February 1965. Many were arrested for violating a city ordinance that prohibited parades. When King was arrested on these grounds, national attention focused on Selma, and President Johnson issued a statement declaring that the source of the problem in Selma was the violation of the voting rights of blacks, and that the federal government intended to protect the right of all citizens to vote.
On March 7, some 600 marchers set out for a fifty-four-mile march from Selma to Montgomery, the state capitol. As the marchers crossed the bridge leading out of Selma, they were attacked by state troopers and a county posse. There was extensive national news coverage, giving rise to an escalation nationwide of white support for the protection of black voting rights. Hundreds of whites converged on Selma to support the African-American struggle, including a James J. Reeb, a Boston Unitarian minister, and Viola Gregg Liuzzo, a Michigan homemaker and mother of five, who were killed during their direct involvement in the Selma protest. Thousands demonstrated in numerous cities across the nation, including 20,000 in Boston and 15,000 in Washington.
In a press conference on March 13, President Johnson expressed support for the sincere effort of black citizens to attain the right to vote, and he deplored the brutality with which they were treated. He spoke of the need to “strengthen the determination of each of us to bring full and equal and exact justice to all of our people. This is not just the policy of your government or your President. It is in the heart and the purpose and the meaning of America itself.” On March 15, the President appeared on national television before a joint session of Congress to call for support for the administration’s proposed voting rights bill. He explained that the voting procedures in Alabama were designed for the purpose of unconstitutionally denying to blacks the right to vote and that the proposed bill would eliminate such barriers. The address was interrupted forty times by applause. There was positive reaction to the President’s address from all sectors of white society.
In Selma, SCLC planned another attempt at a Selma-to-Montgomery march. SCLC had had obtained a federal court injunction against the state of Alabama, prohibiting state authorities from interfering with the march, and President Johnson federalized 1800 Alabama national guardsmen to protect the marchers. On March 21, 3200 marchers, including hundreds of whites who had converged on Selma, began the five-day, fifty-four-mile trek. By previous agreement, they reduced their numbers to 300 marchers at the county line, where the highway was reduced to two lanes.
When they reached the outskirts of Montgomery five days later, where the highway widens to four lanes, the Freedom Marchers were joined by others. As they proceeded through the streets of Montgomery toward the state capital, their numbers swelled to 25,000, with the three major national television networks providing live coverage of the event. Unlike the political situation of the Montgomery Bus Boycott ten years earlier, King arrived to the speaker’s podium at the steps of the state capitol of Montgomery with the support of the federal government and with the support of religious, labor, and news organizations of white society. King declared: “We are on the move now, and like an idea whose time has come, not even the marching of might armies can halt us.”
It was the historic moment of the definitive triumph of the African-American struggle for equality of opportunity, without regard for race.
President Johnson formally submitted the voting rights legislation to Congress on March 25. The bill moved rapidly through the various committees in the House and Senate, and it was signed into law in a televised ceremony on August 6, 1965. The law suspended literacy tests and other voting qualification tests in any state or county in which less than fifty percent of the voting age population had voted in 1964, empowering the attorney general to appoint federal registrars to supervise voter registration in such states and counties. As a result, voting registration in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia as well as many counties in North Carolina came under federal jurisdiction. The law had a significant effect on voter registration. In Mississippi, the percentage of blacks registered to vote rose from 7% in 1964 to 58% in 1968; in Alabama, from 23% in 1964 to 57% in 1968; for the South as a whole, from 43% in 1964 to 62% in 1968. The percentages of black voters in the South in 1968 was comparable to the voting percentages among whites.
The American struggle for equality of opportunity regardless of race from 1930 to 1968 culminated in important measures that constituted the foundation for important changes in American customs with respect to race. The February 24, 2023 report by the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, “The Weaponization of Race Hurts America,” names four legal and constitutional steps that marked the end of systemic racism: the 24th amendment, which outlawed the poll tax as a requirement in federal elections, ratified by the states in 1964; the Civil Rights Act of 1964; the Voting Rights Act (1965); the Supreme Court decision that struck down interracial marriage bans in sixteen states (1967); and the Fair Housing Act (1968).
It was a beautiful and triumphant story, that we should never forget, forged in an epoch in which the nation was both more guilty yet more innocent in its racial and imperialist sins and in its hopes for a better future. It was a struggle led and supported overwhelmingly by African-Americas. It was a struggle of dignity, courage, sacrifice, heroism, and hope. It was a struggle that insisted on the right of African Americans to define their role as citizens of the United States of America, and that insisted on their full equality of opportunity as the only just terms of their inclusion, without any restrictions on the basis of race.
Modern racism had emerged to legitimate conquest and forced labor that had been integral to the capitalist world-economy and colonial European-centered world-system. But the world-system was in transition to neocolonialism, which possesses a democratic façade. The time of racism had passed, and for this reason, the white establishment and white society endorsed its abolition.
Racism could not be eliminated by laws alone. But following the reforms of 1964 to 1968, it was against the laws and the norms of the established order, such that it would no longer be systemic. Racism would now be deviant behavior.
Pan Africanism and anti-colonial nationalism
A secondary tendency of the American-American movement from 1917 to 1972 was Pan Africanism and anti-colonial nationalism.
As the NAACP increasingly came under the control of its rapidly growing black membership in the urban North, it turned to a Pan-African orientation. In 1917, it adopted a resolution declaring that World War I was caused by the rivalry among the world powers to selfishly use the labor of the despised darker races. Accordingly, lasting world peace can be attained only when the people of color in Africa, Asia, the West Indies, and the United States attain self-government. In 1919, the NAACP established “Africa in the World Democracy” as the theme of its annual conference, in which the central theme of the speakers was the return of Africa to the Africans. In 1919, the NAACP sent the editor of its magazine, the outstanding black public intellectual W.E.B. DuBois, to Paris to organize the Pan-African Congress, which had fifty-seven delegates from fifteen countries of the West Indies and Africa.
As the Pan-African movement lost its capacity to influence world events during the decade of the 1920s, the African-American movement in the USA turned during the 1930s toward the struggle for equality of opportunity in the United States, as reviewed above.
The Pan-African tendency of the African-American movement experienced a resurgence in the period 1966 to 1972, taking the form of the advocacy of black power and black control of the institutions of the black community. In reaction to the equivocation of white allies in the struggle for voting rights, especially evident the voting rights campaign in Mississippi from 1962 to 1964 and in the 1964 Democratic National Convention, noted above, there emerged among black activists the concept of the need for blacks to attain political power, in order to avoid situations of dependency on unreliable allies. By 1965, black power and the need for black funding and control of black organizations became the central motif of an emerging black consciousness, which included an identification with the Third World and its anti-colonial struggles. The clear and powerful formulations of Malcolm X were influential in this ideological evolution.
The nationalist tendency focused not on racism but on conquest and colonialism as the central characteristic of the modern world, beginning with the Spanish conquest of the American continents in the sixteenth century. It considered racist attitudes and racist speech to be secondary characteristics that emerged from the colonial foundation. It recognized that modern racism emerged as a legitimating discourse for colonialism, which was driven by a desire for gold and wealth, a desire incapable of defending itself in its own terms.
In placing primacy on the structures of colonial domination, black nationalist thought laid bare the survival of colonial dimensions in the aftermath of independence. The territorial boundaries and the political structures of the independent states, for example, were those that had been imposed by the colonizer, and issues often were debated by the colonized in the language of the colonizer. The economies of the newly independent states possessed structures imposed by the colonizer, promoting underdevelopment and creating what Kwame Nkrumah named neocolonialism, in which the ex-colonial powers had the newly independent states in an “economic stranglehold,” such that the situation of independence was described by Oginga Odinga as “Not Yet Uhuru (Freedom).” One had to return to African traditions to attain liberation, as formulated in theory and practice by Nyerere in Tanzania. Or one had to experience total rejection through violence against the colonial military forces, for violence functioned as a “cleansing force” of psychological liberation, necessary for the attainment of full political-economic independence and personal self-respect, as formulated by Frantz Fanon, the most widely cited thinker of the period 1966 to 1972.
African-American anti-colonial nationalism of the period 1966 to 1972 thus framed the modern problem of European colonial domination of Africa and the Americas as a modern expression of the age-old tendency to build civilizations on a foundation of conquest, with the notable characteristic that, this time, the conquered would find the power to resist. Although it was less clear a half century ago than it is today, Odinga’s insight, learned from the tribal elders, was on the mark: the final triumph of the colonized would be attained by taking the ways of the colonizer and turning them against the system that he had forged through conquest.
Conclusion
The triumph of the African-American movement for the attainment of equality of opportunity without regard for race meant that the African-American struggle for full democratic citizenship had to be reframed. Dr. King expressed the essence of the problem when he said, “What good is it to have the right to sit at a lunch counter and order a hamburger, if you can’t afford the hamburger?” This was a question that implied a change in the terms of struggle, because as everyone knew, some blacks could indeed pay for the hamburger, and some whites could not. So it would have to become a struggle against the denial of fundamental human needs based on incapacity to pay.
As noted above, I will continue with reflections on this next necessary stage of the movement in my next commentary.
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