JOHN WHITE

BLACK
LEADERSHIP
IN AMERICA
from Booker T Washington
to Jesse Jackson

SECOND EDITION

STUDIES IN
MODERN
HISTORY
BLACK LEADERSHIP IN AMERICA
STUDIES IN MODERN HISTORY
General editors: John Morrill and David Cannadine

This series, intended primarily for students, will tackle significant

historical issues in concise volumes which are both stimulating
and scholarly. The authors combine a broad approach, explaining
the current state of our knowledge in the area, with their own
research and judgements; and the topics chosen range widely in
subject, period and place.

Titles already published

FRANCE IN THE AGE OF HENRY IV Mark Greengrass

VICTORIAN RADICALISM Paul Adelman

WHITE SOCIETY IN THE ANTEBELLUM SOUTH Bruce Collins

BLACK LEADERSHIP IN AMERICA: FROM BOOKER T.

WASHINGTON TO JESSE JACKSON (2ndEdn) John White
THE TUDOR PARLIAMENTS Michael A. R. Graves

LIBERTY AND ORDER IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE

J.H. Shennan

POPULAR RADICALISM D.G. Wright

'PAX BRITANNICA'? BRITISH FOREIGN POLICY 1789-1914

Muriel E. Chamberlain

IRELAND SINCE 1800 K. Theodore Hoppen

IMPERIAL MERIDIAN: THE BRITISH EMPIRE AND THE

WORLD 1780-1830 C A. Bayly
A SYSTEM OF AMBITION? BRITISH FOREIGN POLICY
1660-1793 Jeremy Black

BRITANNIA OVERRULED: BRITISH POLICY AND WORLD

POWER IN THE 20TH CENTURY David Reynolds

POOR CITIZENS: THE STATE AND THE POOR IN TWENTIETH-

CENTURY BRITAIN David Vincent
Black Leadership in
America:
From Booker T.
Washington to Jesse
Jackson
Second Edition

John White

Longman
London and New York
r

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First published1985
Second edition 1990
Fourth impression 1992

BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA

White, John 1939-
Black leadership in America from Booker T. Washington to Jesse Jackson. -
:

2nd. ed. - (Studies in modern history (Longman Firm))

1. United States. Black Communities. Leadership, history

I. Title
305.896073

ISBN 0-582-06372-8
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA
White, John, 1939-
Black leadership in America : from Booker T. Washington to Jesse Jackson/
John White. - 2nd ed.
p.cm. - (Studies in modern history)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-582-06372-8 (U.S.)
1. Afro- American leadership - History. 2. Afro- American - Politics and
government. 3. Afro-Americans - Biography. 4. Black nationalism - United
States -History. 5. United States - Race relations. I. Title. II. Series Studies
:

inmodern history
(Longman (Firm))
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L
Contents

Preface to Second Edition vii

Acknowledgements x

1 Introduction: Black Leaders and Limited Options 1

Perspectives: Black protest and accommodation,

1800-1877 3
From Booker T. Washington to Jesse L. Jackson 12

2 Booker T. Washington: Black Enigma 17

Perspectives: Separate but unequal: Southern
race relations, 1865-1895 18
Booker T. Washington: Early life 22
Tuskegee 26
The Atlanta Compromise Address 29
Up From Slavery 33
Black leader 35
Washington and his black critics 38
Assessment 42

3 W. E. B. Du Bois: Talented Propagandist 47

Perspectives: Northern blacks organize for protest,
1890-1910 47
W. E. B. Du Bois: Curriculum vitae 51
Crisis editor 55
Pan-Africanism 63
'A leader without followers', 1934-1963 65
Assessment 70
Contents

Marcus Garvey: Jamaican Messiah 75

Perspectives: The northern black ghetto, 1900-1920 75
Marcus Garvey: Black Jamaican 78
Garvey in America 83
Garveyism 91
Garvey and his black critics 94
Du Bois and Garvey 97
Assessment 101

Martin Luther King, Jr: Apostle for Non-Violence 109

Perspectives: A new deal for blacks? Civil rights
and Negro protest, 1932-1954 109
Martin Luther King, Jr: The making of a leader 118
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference 122
MLK and JFK 125
Albany and Birmingham 126
St Augustine, Freedom Summer and Selma 130
Chicago, Black Power and Vietnam 133
The Poor People's Campaign and the Memphis Strike 137
Assessment 139

Malcolm X: Sinner and Convert 145

Perspectives: Black nationalism after Garvey, the
separatist impulse, 1930-1950 145
Malcolm Little and Malcolm X 150
Malcolm X: Muslim 155
The Autobiography of Malcolm X 159
Malcolm X and his black critics 163
Assessment 166

Jesse Jackson: Populist Preacher 173

Perspectives: From Black Power to political power,
1966-1984 173
Black Power: 'Old Wine New Bottles'?
in 175
Jesse Jackson: From A & T to PUSH 180
Presidential contender 185

Conclusion 191
Bibliographical Essay 195
Index 219

VI
Preface to Second Edition

Since the appearance of the first edition of this book {Black

Leadership in America, 1895-1968) in 1985, there has been a con-
tinuing academic and popular interest in the historical (and contem-
porary) experiences of black Americans. The notable black leaders
- Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Mal-
colm X, Martin Luther King, Jr, and Jesse Jackson - of the twentieth
century continue to receive scholarly attention in books and articles,
as well as in the media. In particular, the period of the civil rights
struggle in the United States, often dated from the Montgomery,
Alabama bus boycott of 1955-56 and the emergence of Martin
Luther King, Jr, and international figure, has been
as a national
subjected to intense examination and assessment. The American
PBS award-winning series 'Eyes of the Prize' did much to alert
the viewers to the episodes, personalities and achievements of the
civil rights coalition, as well as the general outlines of the black
experience since Emancipation. This book intends to incorporate
some of the more recent scholarship, while retaining an emphasis
on the historical context in which successive black leaders functioned.
It also attempts to rectify some of the shortcomings of the first

edition. The roles of women in black protest movements (and the

responses of a male-dominated black leadership class to their
involvement) is discussed with particular reference to the post-
World War II era. For example, Mrs Jo Ann Robinson, the asser-
tive and active head of the Women's Political Council in Montgomery,
Alabama, was instrumental in calling for a boycott of the city's
buses unless conditions for the black passengers were significantly
improved, nearly eighteen months before the historic arrest of Mrs
Rosa Parks on 1 December 1955. Again, within the civil rights

vn
 Preface

coalition, Fannie Lou Hamer emerged as a grass-roots spokesperson

for Mississippi's poor black citizens; in Selma, Alabama, Mrs
Amelia P. Boynton played a crucial role in bringing SNCC field
workers into the state; Ella Baker was a major force in both the
SCLC and SNCC (and one of King's most trenchant critics);
Septima Clark, a school teacher in Charleston, South Carolina,
lost her job for refusing to resign her membership of the NAACP,
and subsequently worked for the Highlander Folk School, setting
up 'Citizenship Schools' across the South, preparing black adults
to read and to vote. Anne Moody, a young black girl who grew up
in Mississippi, became a civil rights activist and was increasingly
critical of the strategies of the established black leadership.
Indeed, it has now become fashionable to assert that too much
attention has been given to black leaders in the United States, at
the expense of the rank-and-file who, it is claimed, were frequently
in advance of those who professed to lead them. And, it has also
been argued, the local concerns of black communities in America
were often not those of the nationally-known protest organizations
- the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People
(NAACP), the National Urban League (NUL), Marcus Garvey's
Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), or the various
elements which comprised the civil rights coalition: the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Congress of Racial
Equality (CORE), the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC) and the several black nationalist/separatist organizations
of the 1960s and 1970s. The present study pays some attention to
these contentions, but, again, is more concerned to illustrate the
themes of continuity and change, conflict and competition, race
and class, theory and ideology as exemplified by the six major
leaders selected, and the movements they inspired. In sum, I have
tried to give greater attention to the goals of successive black
protest movements as perceived by their 'leaders', participants and
critics, as well as the interactions between the racial philosophies
of the leaders themselves.
On his recent tour of the southern states of America, the
Trinidadian novelist and travel writer V. Naipaul was informed
S.
by an Atlanta journalist that only black Americans had 'leaders',
designated as such by the media (and, he might have added, by
historians). Naipaul was initially impressed by the observation,
since it recalled the attitude of the explorers who traditionally ask
of the 'natives' they discover: 'Take me to your leader'. On
reflection, however, he:

L
vin
 Preface

began to wonder whether - since black politics in the United States

were still racial and redemptive and simple - black people in the
United States couldn't after all be said to have leaders, people they
simply followed. And I wondered if it was possible in these
circumstances for black people to stand apart from their leaders, any
more than it was possible for people of the Caribbean or Africa to
stand apart from the racial or tribal chiefs whom they had created. 1

No black leader in America has been 'simply followed'. Rather,

they have articulated the feelings and the demands of their consti-
tuents.When they have been notably in advance of or at variance
with their 'people', they have become isolated, 'leaders without
followers' or have faced criticisms from contending or aspiring
'leaders'.
Like its predecessor, this book reflects my belief that an examina-
tion of those preeminent Negro leaders who have commanded
national (and international) attention in the twentieth century will
reveal one constant factor: reasoned black reactions to prevalent
and frequently unremitting white racism. Primarily a work of
synthesis and explication it will, I hope, encourage readers to
consult the specialized articles and books which are cited in the
Bibliographical Essay. This edition draws on the more recent
writings of American and British scholars; it is also informed by
the constructive suggestions of students, colleagues and critics in
Europe and the United States.

John White
Department of American Studies
University of Hull
October, 1989

REFERENCES

1. V. S. Naipaul, A Turn in the South (New York, 1989), p. 31

IX

m.*/&
Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce

copyright material:

Authors' Agents (Joan Daves) for extract from speech 'I have a
Dream' by Martin Luther King Jr. (c) 1963 by Martin Luther King
Jr. 1968 Estate of Martin Luther King Jr; Bobbs Merrill Co Inc

for an extract from pxxxvii Black Protest Thought in the 20th

Century (1971), by Meier, Rudwick & Broderick; Random Century
Group/Paul R. Reynolds Inc for extracts from Malcolm X:
Autobiography 1968-80 by Alex Haley.
CHAPTER ONE
Introduction: Black Leaders
and Limited Options

American Negro history is basically a history of the conflict between

integrationist and nationalist forces in politics, economics, and
culture, no matter what leaders are involved and what slogans are
used. 1

In the struggle for racial equality, civil and political rights,

economic
and educational advancements, black Americans, both during and
after slavery, responded to the proposals and rhetoric of the leaders
drawn from their own ranks. Yet one of the anomalies of Afro-
American history is that blacks, as an ethnic group, have had only
limited opportunities to select their own leaders. Ironically, it was
during slavery that black leaders in the South - like Denmark
Vesey, Gabriel Prosser and Nat Turner - planned conspiracies or
led revolts aimed at some form of 'freedom', which (for obvious
reasons) were not dependent on white sponsorship or support. But
Frederick Douglass, an ex-slave and the most famous black
abolitionist, was initially thrust into the public gaze by his Northern
white supporters. Booker T. Washington, also a former slave, owed
his elevation as much to such influential white patrons as his
teacher, Samuel Chapman Armstrong, President Theodore Roosevelt,
and the industrialist-turned philanthropist, Andrew Carnegie, as to
his own remarkable abilities. Similarly, W. E. B. Du Bois, the
towering black American intellect of the twentieth-century, became
a key figure in the National Association for the Advancement of
Coloured People only with the approval and financial support of
upper-class white reformers of the Progressive era. Of the male
black leaders under consideration, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther
King, Jr, and Jesse Jackson owed their rise to the reception accorded

1
Black Leadership in America

to them by blacks. Yet they were also perceived (if not sanctioned)
by whites as leaders of their respective movements. Malcolm X, it
can be argued, gained his reputation as much from the distorted
publicity he received from the white-controlled media as from the
endorsement of his black constituents. Whatever their ideological
(or physiological) complexion, then, black American leaders have
historically depended on white as well as on Negro recognition of
their claims to speak for their race. Like their supporters, black
leaders have had to contend with a caste system based on racial
discrimination and proscription. For long periods, they were also
effectively denied the franchise, entry into the major political
parties or access to the centres of power. By definition, black
leaders occupied tenuous and vulnerable positions in their own
and surrounding white community. They were, initially at least,
self-styled exemplars of their race.
Writing in 1944, the Swedish sociologist, Gunnar Myrdal,
suggested persuasively that the extreme positions of Negro leadership
behaviour on behalf of blacks as a subordinate (and segregated)
caste were those of accommodation and protest. In the Southern
states, where the caste system was most rigid and strictly enforced,
whites sought alliances and tacit agreements with those
'accommodating' black leaders who could help them to perpetuate
the values and practices of white supremacy. For their part, Southern
black leaders needed to establish and maintain contact with influential
whites which, in turn, provided them with influence and prestige
within the black community. As Myrdal observed: 'The Negro
leader in this setting serves a "function" to both castes and his
influence in both groups is cumulative - prestige in the Negro
community being an effect as well as a cause of prestige among
whites.' 2 Similarly, in the Northern states, government agencies,
political parties and philanthropic organizations made 'contact'
with the Negro community through the white-appointed (or approved)
black 'leaders'. Much of the competitiveness, rivalry and
'opportunism' of Negro leadership in America has derived from
this need to satisfy (or not exceed) the demands of white supporters,
while remaining responsive to the desires of black constituents.
The black novelist and playwright James Baldwin, writing about
Martin Luther King, Jr, observed tartly that:

...the problem of Negro leadership... has always been extremely

delicate, dangerous and complex. The term itself becomes remarkably
difficult to define, the moment one realizes that the real role of the
Negro leader, in the eyes of the American Republic, was not to make
 Introduction

the Negro a first-class citizen but to keep him content as a second-

class one. 3

Again, the agitation and goals of black 'radicals' have often

served to legitimate the claims of more 'moderate' Negro leaders
in the eyes of white Americans. Thus personal as well as ideological
rivalrieshave had positive (as well as dysfunctional) effects in the
struggle for racial equality and black freedom. (But as Myrdal
noted: 'Since power and prestige are scarce commodities in the
Negro community, the struggle for leadership often becomes
ruthless.') 4
'Black leadership' has not been confined or limited to a few
individuals - however exceptional or charismatic. In the twentieth
century, the rise of national organizations like the NAACP, NUL,
SCLC, COREand SNCC, as well as the powerful influence of the
black church and the activities of grass-roots movements at the
state and local levels, have constituted a collective form of civil
rights protest. The initiatives, concerns and demands of black men
and women at particular junctures and in specific places have not
always been those recognized by the established black leadership
class. In some instances, these 'leaders' have, in effect, been led
by their followers. Yet whatever their awareness of grass-roots
demands and problems, black leaders have all necessarily operated
within the constraints of what has been termed 'a politics of limited
options'. Historically, these options often reflected significant
differences between the limits of permissible activity in the states
north and south of the Mason-Dixon line.

PERSPECTIVES: BLACK PROTEST AND

ACCOMMODATION, 1800-1877

The varied responses of black Americans to their subordinate and

inferior position in American society date from the establishment
of racial slavery in the colonial period. In the years following the
American Revolution - which both strengthened the institution of
slavery and heightened black aspirations for freedom and equality
- these responses persisted and multiplied. Black slaves and 'free

people of colour' (in the North and South) resisted or made some
kind of accommodation to enslavement and non-citizenship, supported
oreschewed proposals for black repatriation or colonization overseas,
adapted to or challenged emerging patterns of racial segregation,
Black Leadership in America

embraced or rejected notions of their African cultural heritage,

favoured or discounted alliances with whites and, from the 1830s,
in the Negro Convention and abolitionist movements, attacked all
forms of racial proscription. By the mid- 1820s the Northern and
Southern states of the American Union were clearly distinguishable
in their attitudes towards slavery, but not in their attitudes toward
and treatment of blacks. Indeed, Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting
America in the 1830s, believed that:

Race prejudice seems stronger in those states that have abolished

slavery than in those where it still exists, and nowhere is it more
intolerant than in those states where slavery was never known. 5

Recent studies have confirmed the accuracy of Tocqueville's

impressions. Anti-black sentiment and legislation in the states of
the North-East and the territories of the West marked the period
from the early 1800s down to the Civil War. Nearly every Northern
state barred blacks from voting, serving in the militia, or receiving
more than a rudimentary education. Racial segregation was evident
in all forms of transportation and in hotels, restaurants, prisons,
hospitals and cemeteries. Minstrel shows - the most popular form
of entertainment in nineteenth century America - conveyed
romanticized images of plantation slavery and crude caricatures of
the alleged stupidity, fecklessness and gullibility of Northern free
blacks. Ironically, free blacks in the Northnow became frozen on
the bottom rungs of the economic ladder as they faced increasing
competition from white immigrants. But in one respect at least,
Northern blacks possessed - and utilized - an advantage not shared
by their Southern counterparts. The expansion of the North's white
population (through immigration and natural increase) provided
whites with a sense of security unknown to white Southerners.
Northern blacks were, therefore, allowed to retain certain basic
liberties - the right to petition for the redress of grievances, to
publish their own
journals and newspapers, and to engage in
political protest and activities. In 1827, a group of black New
Yorkers founded Freedom's Journal, the first black newspaper,
edited by John Russwurm and Samuel Cornish. Their paper attacked
the thinly-veiled racism of the American Colonization Society,
established in 1816, and asserted that its real aim was the
strengthening of slavery by the removal of the free black population
from the United States. Similarly, Richard Allen, a Philadelphia-
born slave who had purchased his freedom in 1777, the year of
his conversion to Methodism, experienced and rejected the church's
 Introduction

discriminatory treatment of its black members. Allen concluded

(in the face of white hostility) that only a separate church, served
by black clergy, could meet the spiritual and temporal needs of
free blacks.He began to organize and implement a black version
of Wesleyanism, became the first black bishop of the African
Methodist Episcopal Church, and organized the initial meeting of
the National Negro convention movement in 1830. Unable to
condone slave violence, Allen provided the organizational structure
for black abolitionism, and inspired free blacks in other parts of
the North to establish their own churches.
Important in their own right, Allen's career and achievements
also provided a notable nineteenth century precedent for black
clerical leadership and influence within the Negro community. In
1829, David Walker, Boston agent for Freedom's Journal, issued
his Appeal - in essence, a nineteenth century Black Power manifesto,
urging Southern slaves to strike for their freedom, as it excoriated
the tortures inflicted on blacks 'by the enlightened Christians of
America'. In 1843, Henry Highland Garnet, a former slave, informed
delegates to the National Convention of Colored Citizens at Buffalo,
New York, that slaves would be fully justified in using violence to
gain their freedom. Echoing Walker, Garnet, in his 'Address to the
Slaves of the United States of America' exhorted them to 'Strike
You cannot be more oppressed than
for your lives and liberties.
you have been - you cannot suffer greater cruelties than you have
already. Rather die free men than live to be slaves. Remember
that you are FOUR MILLIONS. Let your motto be resistance!
resistance! RESISTANCE!'
Such aggressive and uncompromising sentiments effectively
separated black from white abolitionists, most of whom, following
the lead of William Lloyd Garrison, declared themselves pacifists,
and saw their call foremancipation as an appeal to reason and
conscience, as an exercise in moral suasion. Although blacks came
to form separate (and more militant) abolitionist organizations,
their earlier alliances with white reformers set precedents for
interracial cooperation in the cause of civil rights, which were to
be revived in the twentieth century by the NAACP, National Urban
League and the Congress of Racial Equality.
After 1830, Northern blacks increasingly denounced segregated
schools as unequal and inferior, and demanded educational
integration. The Negro Convention Movement - confined to the
Northern states until after the Civil War - operated sporadically
from 1830 to 1860. Early conventions, attended by Negro ministers,
Black Leadership in America

lawyers, businessmen and physicians, lodged protests against

slavery and the indignities faced by free blacks. Negro delegates
with the support of white reformers supported the creation of
manual labour schools for both blacks and whites. Just as the
white-dominated abolitionist movement became split between its
moral suasionist and political activist wings, so too, the Negro
Convention Movement became more militant, and endorsed
independent black protest against disfranchisement and segregation.
The Convention Movement failed to secure mass support for any
one strategy - cooperation with whites, independent political action,
emigrationism - or to achieve black political or social equality.
But it did provide forums, at the state and national levels, for a
developing black leadership class.
The outstanding black leader of the nineteenth century was
undoubtedly Frederick Douglass (1817-95). Born in Maryland,
Douglass was for several years a house slave in Baltimore, where
he learned to read and write. In 1838, when he could no longer
tolerate his condition, Douglass escaped from slavery, married
Anne Murray, a free black, and settled in New Bedford,
Massachusetts. After seeing a copy of Garrison's abolitionist
journal, The Liberator, Douglass became a lecturer for the
Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, and an avowed Garrisonian.
An eloquent and impassioned orator, Douglass quickly became the
leading spokesman for abolitionism. When doubts were expressed
that he had ever been a slave, Douglass published his Narrative
of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), a graphic and convincing
description of his slave experiences, and a landmark in abolitionist
(and black American) literature. Fearful for his safety after
publication of the Narrative, Douglass's friends sent him on a
two-year visit to Britain, where he impressed audiences with his
high intelligence and withering condemnations of slavery. After
his British supporters purchased his freedom, Douglass returned to
America, and moved to Rochester, New York, where he published
his own weekly newspaper, The North Star. As a journalist, essayist
and public speaker, Douglass inveighed against the twin evils of
racial slavery and racial discrimination. A supporter of the Liberty
and Republican parties, Douglass was prominent in the Negro
Convention Movement of the 1840s and 1850s. Personal rivalries
and ideological differences led to his split with the Garrisonians
in 1851. Douglass rejected the Garrisonian slogan of 'No Union
With Slaveholders' as an abandonment of the slaves to the not-so-
tender mercies of their owners. He also disagreed with Garrison's
 Introduction

view that the federal Constitution was a pro-slavery document,

and resented Garrison's intemperate attacks on the Northern churches,
citing the existence of abolitionist sympathisers in some
denominations. Douglass also disliked the patronizing attitudes of
many white abolitionists, and believed that to be successful,
abolitionists must endorse political activism. Douglass welcomed
John Brown's abortive attempt to incite a slave insurrection at
Harper's Ferry in Virginia in 1859 (although he had been unaware
of Brown's intentions), and applauded Lincoln's issuance of the
Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. During the war Douglass
pressed for the acceptance of blacks into the Union armed forces,
believing that a Northern victory would secure both the permanent
abolition of slavery and citizenship rights for the freedman. In
addition to the support for the Union cause, Douglass was active
in espousing a variety of reforms - women's rights, temperance,
and world peace - and opposed capital punishment, lynching and
the convict lease system. He was also a notable advocate of 'industrial
education' for blacks, and stressed the virtues of self-help, capital
accumulation and strict morality. Espousing racial pride and constant
protest against all forms of discrimination, endorsing non-violent
passive resistance, and looking toward the full integration of blacks
into American society, Douglass, in several respects, antedated and
anticipated Booker T. Washington's stress on vocational education
and self-help, the concerns of twentieth century black nationalists
and Martin Luther King's philosophy of non-violent direct action.
During Reconstruction, Douglass stood behind Republican attempts
to enforce civil rights in the defeated South, and pushed for
enactment of the 1875 Civil Rights Act, and the ratification of the
Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, with their guarantees of
citizenship and voting rights for blacks. As a loyal Republican,
Douglass supported the corrupt administration of President Grant,
and the compromise of 1877, despite its abandonment of Southern
blacks to local white rule.
As reward for faithful services to the Republican party, Douglass
a
was appointed a United States Marshal, Recorder of Deeds for the
District of Columbia, and Ambassador to Haiti. With the worsening
of race relations in the post-Reconstruction South, Douglass protested
vigorously against disfranchisement, lynching and the spread of
segregation, but also advised Southern blacks to make the best of
their situation, and to adjust to the reality of white supremacy.
Anticipating Booker T. Washington, who delivered his 'Atlanta
Compromise' address in 1895 (the year of Douglass's death), he
Black Leadership in America

advocated the founding of an Industrial College for blacks, and

informed Harriet Beecher Stowe, the celebrated author of Uncle
Tom's Cabin:

We need mechanics as well as ministers. We need workers in iron,

clay and leather. We have orators, authors and other professional men,
but these reach only certain classes, and get respect for our race in
certain select circles. We must not only be able to black boots but to
make them. 6

In 1873, Douglass moved to Washington, D.C., where he settled

on a fifteen acre estate, awealthy and respected 'elder statesman'
of the first phase of the black protest movement. Following the
death of his first wife, his marriage to Helen Pitts, a white woman
from a prominent Rochester family, brought a storm of protest, to
which Douglass reportedly replied: 'My first wife was the colour
of my mother, and the second, the colour of my father.' A European
tour in 1886-87, added to his already prodigious international
reputation.
Other nineteenth century black spokesmen, however, viewed
racial equality as a dream impossible of realization, and advocated
the wholesale emigration of Negroes to Africa, Central or South
America as the only solution to implacable white racism. During
the 1850s Martin R. Delany became the leading black spokesman
for black emigrationism. In his best-known work, The Condition,
Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the
United States (1852), he declared of American Negroes: 'We are a
nation within a nation: as the Poles in Russia, the Hungarians in
Austria, the Welsh, Irish and Scotch in the British dominions.'
Opposed to black 'repatriation' to Liberia, as proposed by the
American Colonization Society, Delany advocated the establishment
of an independent black state in East Africa to which black Americans
could emigrate. (He later declared his preference for the West
Indies, Central and South America as offering better prospects).
But with the outbreak of the Civil War, Delany abandoned
emigrationism in favour of working for racial equality in America,
and was active in the Freedmen's Bureau, the one federal agency
created to protect the rights of blacks freed by the Emancipation
Proclamation and Confederate defeat.
In the antebellum period, few blacks responded to calls for mass
emigration, since they lacked sufficient funds and, more significantly,
regarded themselves as more American than African. But in
articulating concepts of black separatism, voluntary repatriation

8
 Introduction

and identification with Africa, mid-nineteenth-century spokesmen

made their conviction very apparent that racial equality within
America was a chimera.
Within the slave states of the South, black resistance to servitude
tookmany forms, ranging from secret conspiracy and open rebellion,
malingering, running away, feigned illness and sabotage to the
more metaphysical forms of 'resistance' offered by a distinctive
Afro-American religion with its selective reading of the scriptures
and the culture of the slave quarters - folktales, jokes, rituals,
family and kinship bonds - which provided some protection against
the power and authority of the master class. 'Leadership' within
the slave community was provided by preachers, conjurers, musicians,
parents and grandparents. Yet despite attempts by some historians
to celebrate (if not romanticize) the autonomy of the 'slave
community' antebellum South, slaves, by definition, had
in the
severely limited options and room for manoeuvre, and signally
(but understandably) failed to develop traditions of protest or
revolutionary leadership. In at least three dramatic instances,
however, black leaders in the slave South demonstrated their resolve
and capacity to plan uprisings against a system designed for their
permanent subjugation.
In 1800, Gabriel Prosser, a slave in Henrico Country, Virginia,
organized a conspiracy among his fellow slaves, aimed at
overthrowing slavery and setting up a black state. A small guerilla
force of about 200 men was to enter Richmond, capture arms,
overcome the white population, and take the governor hostage.
Prosser, a skilled blacksmith who was probably literate, was familiar
with the scriptures, and with the ideals inspired by the French
Revolution. His plan involved the systematic allocation of tasks
to various individuals, the calculation of the number of slaves
likely to support the coup, and clandestine meetings to formulate
strategy and tactics. The conspiracy was betrayed to the Virginia
authorities by two of Prosser's slave followers, the incipient slave
revolt was crushed, and Prosser, together with thirty of his followers,
was executed. But, despite its failure, Prosser's conspiracy helped
to rivet the fear of slave revolt (and 'black power') on the mind
of the white South.
The other significant slave conspiracy was that inspired and
organized by Denmark Vesey, in and around Charleston, South
Carolina, in 1822. Vesey, a former slave who had managed to
purchase his freedom, was a profoundly religious man, and a
leading member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Inspired
Black Leadership in America

by Old Testament accounts of Jewish enslavement and persecution,

Vesey saw himself as a black Moses, destined to lead his people
out of bondage. He also hoped to secure external aid from the
West Indies and Africa to maintain an independent black state.
Again this conspiracy was also betrayed, over 130 of the alleged
participants were arrested, and thirty-five, including Vesey, were
hanged. Although Vesey does not appear to have had afiy clear
idea as to the form and structure of the state he wished to establish
after the overthrow of slavery, his conspiracy, like that of Prosser,
demonstrated that slaves and former slaves possessed the capacity
for militant leadership, and the ability to attract followers.
Nat Turner, a Virginia slave, was to lead the most bloody
nineteenth century slave revolt in Southampton County, Virginia,
in 1831 (a year which also marked the appearance of Garrison's
Liberator). The son of an African-born slave mother, Turner was
moved to violence by the events and mystical experiences of his
youth. Like Vesey, Turner drew upon an apocalyptic version of
Christian doctrine, together with revelations and prophetic dreams
and visions to inspire (and later, to justify) his actions. Notwith-
standing the fact that he had been kindly treated by his master,
Joseph Travis, Turner and his slave followers murdered the Travis
family and about fifty other whites before the state militia put
down the insurrection. After eluding capture for several weeks,
Turner was tried and hanged in November 1831. His revolt terrified
the South, prompted the Virginia legislature to discuss the possibility
of ending slavery (the motion was defeated) and provided later
generations of black militants with an authentic hero and slave
leader.
In contrast, the free black caste (itself an anomaly in a racially-
based slave system) in the South, although never providing overall
leadership for slave rebellion, nevertheless succeeded in gaining a
strong sense of collective worth and individual identity through
the founding of religious, fraternal and educational institutions.
Largely the creation of the era of the American Revolution (when
both the British and the colonists offered blacks their freedom as
a reward for military service), and of self-purchase and manumission
by their owners, Southern free blacks (who exhibited class, colour
and denominational divisions), faced increasing repression and
discrimination in the decades before the Civil War. Manumission
became progressively more difficult from the Upper to the Lower
South, and free blacks also faced the danger of being kidnapped
and sold as slaves. Generally more skilled, better-educated and

10
 Introduction

lighter-skinned than the mass of slaves, free blacks faced economic

competition from both slaves and whites. Although free blacks
and slaves had much in common - ancestry, family ties, work
experiences and church membership - there were also conflicting
pressures which effectively weakened any strong sense of racial
unity and precluded a slave/free black alliance for the overthrow
of white hegemony. However degraded or uncertain their position,
free blacks in the Southwere aware that their prospects for survival,
as well as for any economic advancement, depended on their ability
to distinguish themselves, in the eyes of whites, from the mass of
slaves. (Wealthyand light-skinned free Negroes shunned the African
churches, benevolent and fraternal organizations favoured by darker
and poorer free blacks, and formed their own exclusive clubs and
organizations). As Ira Berlin has observed, the free blacks of the
slave South deferred to whites on all occasions, and in doing so
'satisfied the paternalistic pretensions of upper-class whites' while
implicitly renouncing 'their objections to the Southern caste system'. 7
To a remarkable degree, these strategies continued into the post-
Civil War period. Southern black leaders continued to favour the
cautious and conciliatory racial policies which they had practised
and perfected during slavery, and displayed 'conservative' rather
than 'radical' tendencies. Militant proposals (within the context of
their time) for effecting racial change came out of the Northern
states with their traditions of free speech and political agitation;
more cautious, conciliatory and diplomatic proposals for racial
improvement continued to impress Southern blacks, aware of the
dangers posed by virulent white racism, and the continued existence,
after 1865, of various forms of involuntary servitude and coerced
labour. Black leaders in the former Confederate states, both during
and after Reconstruction, were drawn disproportionately from the
ranks of antebellum free people of colour, or were former slaves
who had occupied relatively privileged positions. Collectively,
they were moderates, aware of the necessity for compromise and/or
dissimulationif they were to gain the white patronage necessary

toadvance both themselves and their communities.

The successful black leader, Myrdal believed, became 'a
consummate manipulator', cajoling the white man into doing what
the black leader desired. Inevitably, the Negro leader came to
derive satisfaction in his manipulative skills in 'flattering, beguiling,
and outwitting the white man'. But there was also the real danger
that the Southern race leader, living on his wits (and at some
personal danger) might become simply a self-seeker, 'having

11
Black Leadership in America

constantly to compromise with his pride and dignity'. Northern

race leaders, in contrast, as beneficiaries of a long tradition of
sanctioned protest, were both able and expected to produce displays
of 'actual opposition' to white racism, and with less danger of
retaliationfrom offended whites. But whether they functioned in a
more or less relaxed racial environment, black leaders, Myrdal
noted, had historically been engaged in a similar 'keen and destructive
personal rivalry'. He was quick to add, however, that 'national
Negro leadership is no more corrupt no more ridden with personal
envy and rivalry than any other national leaderships.' 8

FROM BOOKER T. WASHINGTON TO JESSE L.

JACKSON
In the twentieth century, six black spokesmen have gained recognition
as outstanding advocates and ideologues of strategies and goals of
racial advancement. After the death of Frederick Douglass in 1895,
Booker T. Washington (1856-1915), as even his most vociferous
critics conceded, was the nationally acknowledged leader of black
Americans. The most powerful and influential black man of his
day, Washington, despite the efforts of numerous biographers,
remains a complex, and ambiguous figure. Born a slave, Washington
embraced the Protestant ethic of work, godliness and personal
hygiene, and urged the building of black character and business
enterprise. Well-versed in the racial mores and etiquette of the
South, Washington was able to turn white paternalism and patronage
to his own advantage, if not to that of his race. As the principal
and founder of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, a vocational school
for blacks, Washington demonstrated his gifts as an administrator,
educator and leader. He also made Tuskegee into a power base -
'the Tuskegee machine' - and extended its influence into the towns
and cities of the United States. Any assessment of the black
experience after slavery must reckon with this enigmatic and
controversial educator, activist and interracial diplomat.
During thelast twelve years of his life, Washington encountered
in William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963), his most
articulate and distinguished black critic. A New Englander by
birth, Du Bois gained a Harvard PhD, and became the self-appointed
spokesman for the 'Talented Tenth' - the intellectual black elite

12
 Introduction

which, he believed, would provide the vanguard leadership for the

race as a whole. Dedicated to the acquisition of civil and political
rights for blacks, and initially espousing racial integration, Du
Bois joined with Northern black militants like William Monroe
Trotter and with liberal whites, to challenge Washington's influence
and power. A poet, novelist, sociologist, historian and a founding
member of the NAACP (and editor of its publication, The Crisis),
Du Bois castigated Washington as the witting or unwitting supporter
of white supremacy and permanent black inferiority. Battle lines
were drawn, and by the early years of the twentieth century, the
black protest movement appeared to be polarized between its
'accommodationist/conservative' and 'radical/activist' wings.
While neither Washington nor Du Bois ever commanded a mass
following among black Americans, the Jamaican-born Marcus
Garvey (1880-1940) achieved that distinction in the course of his
short but spectacular American career. A declared disciple of
Booker T. Washington, Garvey became the leading black nationalist
in the United States in the period during and immediately after
the First World War. Pledged to the unrealistic goal of the liberation
of Africa from white colonial rule, the inculcation of racial pride
in black Americans, and the separation of races in America, Garvey 's
racial philosophy, his successes and blunders, attracted the ridicule
and scorn of Du Bois to an extent that made his earlier differences
with Washington appear comparatively innocuous. Garvey returned
Du Bois' enmity (and that of other established black leaders) with
interest. Where Washington had spoken primarily for a poverty-
stricken black peasantry, only recently 'up from slavery', and Du
Bois for a growing Northern black urban bourgeoisie, Garvey
capitalized on the depressed condition of the growing urban black
population, confined within the physical and psychological constraints
of the ghetto. Although Garvey 's American career was short-lived,
it reflected the rise and significance of Harlem, the black ghetto in

New York city, as the most important concentration of Afro-

Americans in the United States. Garvey's influence persisted into
the 1960s and 1970s, with the re-emergence of a militant black
nationalism expressed in the emotive slogan 'Black Power', with
its connotations of racial assertiveness, separatism, and pride in

the alleged African cultural and spiritual heritage of Afro- Americans.

Although the black socialist A. Philip Randolph's March on
Washington Movement (MOWM) during World War II, signalled
the shift of black strategy toward direct action protest for political,
economic and civil rights, it was not until the appearance of the

13
Black Leadership in America

young Negro clergyman, Martin Luther King, Jr (1929-68), during

the momentous Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott of 1955-56,
that another black American spokesman commanded national -
and international - attention. The exponent and practitioner of
'non-violent' direct action and confrontation in the cause of racial
integration (and, later, of political and economic rights), Martin
Luther King (like Booker T. Washington, a Southerner by birth
and allegiance) became the personification and symbol of the civil
rights movement which had as its ultimate goal the realization of
racial democracy in America. Towards the end of his life, King
expanded his vision to project a coalition of the underprivileged,
black and white, in America. He also became increasingly critical
of the American capitalist system, and of US involvement in
Vietnam. Ironically, King delivered his famous 'I Have a Dream'
oration, the climax of the 1963 civil rights March on Washington,
as Du Bois died in self-imposed exile in Ghana.
Malcolm X (1925-65), born Malcolm Little, was (like Martin
Luther King) a preacher and activist and, for a significant period,
the leading spokesman for the separatist Nation of Islam (the Black
Muslims). Following his break with the Nation, on doctrinal and
personal grounds, Malcolm X became the best-known, and certainly
the most notorious, ideologue for black militancy and racial
separatism. He was also an admirer of Marcus Garvey and a
declared disciple of Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of
Islam in its classic black separatist phase. Where Martin Luther
King espoused a gospel of non-violent protest and the redemptive
value of love and suffering, Malcolm X appeared to condone, if
not actively promote, racial warfare. The 'Black Power' slogan
and the subsequent rise of such extremist groups as the Black
Panther Party were offshoots of Malcolm's black nationalism. Like
Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X struck a responsive chord among the
black underclass of the nation's ghettos; like Martin Luther King,
he was to die a violent death, with his attitudes undergoing significant
change.
Immediately following the deaths of King and Malcolm X, no
black leader approached their stature or influence, as perceived
either by whites or blacks. In 1980, the magazine Black Enterprise
reported after a poll of 5,000 readers that 'over the last ten years,
the absence of clear-cut leadership has been the single most
noticeable handicap of the black struggle for equality'. The death
in 1981 of Roy Wilkins, who had served as executive director of
the NAACP for twenty-two years, and the resignation of Vernon

14
 Introduction

Jordan, president of the National Urban League for the previous

ten years, came at a time of increasing demoralization and frustration
within an already fragmented civil rights movement. After its
successful campaigns to outlaw segregation in public accommodations
and transportation, and the gaining of legal guarantees of civil and
voting rights, the civil rights coalition (even before the assassination
of Martin Luther King), became increasingly concerned with
economic issues. By 1980 the average black family income was
$15,806, as against $24,939 for whites; unemployment rates for
blacks were three times as great as those for whites. And
accompanying the economic and educational advances made by a
small number of blacks, there was, by the 1980s, a marked decline
in the lifestyles and the prospects of millions of Negro Americans.
Again, the election of Ronald Reagan to the White House in 1980,
signalled the onset of a conservative reaction against the 'affirmative
action' programmes instituted by Lyndon Johnson. (In an analysis
of the 1980 election returns, one poll revealed that many whites
had voted Republican for the first time because - among other
reasons - they believed that the Democrats had been too concerned
with issues of race relations, poverty and civil rights.) But in
1984 black Americans, for the first time, were able to vote for a
serious black contender for the Democratic party's presidential
nomination. Its candidate, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, born in
1941, had been a member of the SCLC and was the declared
disciple of Martin Luther King, Jr. Jackson failed to gain the
party's nomination, but in 1984 and again in 1988, he gained
enormous popular (black and white) support for his projected
'Rainbow Coalition' of the underprivileged and as even his critics
concede, is now the outstanding black leader in America.
The following chapters attempt to summarize and to evaluate
the contributions of Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois,
Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson
to the black protest movement in America, as perceived by them-
selves, their contemporaries and subsequent commentators. By
placing their racial philosophies and leadership strategies in historical
context, it is hoped to illustrate the themes of change and continuity
in black leadership agendas and demands from the late nineteenth
century to the present. Essentially, continuity will be seen to lie in

persistent black protest against the inequities of a caste system in

a democratic society pledged to the principles enshrined in the
Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Change will be
evident in the varying connotations of such concepts as 'integration',

15
Black Leadership in America

'separatism', 'accommodation', 'conservatism', 'radicalism', and

American experience.
'equality' at significant junctures in the black
compass, both
In short, the intention is to provide, within short
individual and interrelated biographies of major Afro-American
leaders - and the reponses of those whom they professed to lead.

REFERENCES

1. Cruse, H., The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: From its Origins to
the Present (New York, 1967), p. 564.
2. Myrdal, G., An American Dilemma (New York, 1964), pp. 722-3.
3. James Baldwin, 'The dangerous road before Martin Luther King', in

C. E. Lincoln (ed.), Martin Luther King Jr: A Profile (New York,

1970), pp. 106-7.
4. Myrdal, G., An American Dilemma, op. cit., p. 775.

5. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer &

Max Lerner (New York, 1966), Vol. I, p.426.
6. Douglass, Frederick, letter to Harriet Beecher Stowe, 8 March, 1863, in

Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (London, 1884), p. 251.

7. Berlin, I., Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum
South (New York, 1974), p.340.
8. Myrdal, G., An American Dilemma, op. cit., pp.773, 778-9.

16
CHAPTER TWO
Booker T. Washington
Black Enigma

Booker T. Washington was not an easy person to know. He never

expressed himself frankly or clearly until he knew exactly to whom
he was talking and just what their wishes and desires were.
[W. E. B. DU BOIS] i

I wanna tell yuh young people ef yuh take de mind and de heart
uv Booker Washington, a real race leader, yuh will nevah think
yo'self above nobody else. ...Booker Washington wuz a great man
come down frum Heaven wid a great cane in his han en laid hold
de ol' dragon.... Dat dragon. ..wuz prejudice. ...One reason I luv
Booker Washington wuz dat he wuz no 'spector uv pussons. He
loved evahbody. Do' Booker Washington wuz a mulatto he wuz
not color struck. He wuz sich a great man.
[HENRY BAKERP

They gived that man piles of money to run this school business
here in the state of Alabama. But I wouldn't boost Booker Washington
today up to everything that was industrious and right. ...He didn't
feel for and respect his race of people to go rock bottom with 'em.
He leaned too much to the white people that controlled the money.. .he
had a political pull any way he turned and he was pullin' for
Booker Washington. [NATE SHAWP

17
Black Leadership in America

PERSPECTIVES: SEPARATE BUT UNEQUAL:

SOUTHERN RACE RELATIONS, 1865-1895
In 1865 the Confederate States of America finally lost their bid
for independence. The South was defeated on the battlefields, but
fought a successful campaign in the post-war period against 'Yankee'
occupation and the imposition of direct rule from Washington,
DC. Although slavery had been destroyed by the war, the white
South was determined that its pattern of race relations would not
undergo fundamental change. The withdrawal of the last remaining
troops from the South in 1877 marked the formal end of
Reconstruction - the attempt by Northern Republicans to impose
measures of civil andpolitical equality for freedmen in the former
Confederate states. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth 'Civil
War' amendments to the Constitution, reforms embodied in the
new Southern state constitutions, provision of education for blacks,
and attempts to suppress such white supremacist organizations as
the Ku Klux Klan, had been the notable achievements of
Reconstruction. More significantly, Southern blacks voted in state
and local elections, held political offices, moved into urban areas
and attempted to exercise their economic rights in a free labour
system. In short, they exercised a wide range of choices that had
been effectively closed under slavery. But by the terms of the
Compromise of 1877, the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes gained
the presidency over the rival claims of his Democratic opponent,
Samuel J. Tilden, and, as part of the bargain, Northern Republicans
abandoned the freedmen to the Democratic 'Redeemer' Southern
state governments. Unable to resurrect the slave system in name,
Southern whites soon devised legal and extra-legal measures which
deprived blacks of the franchise, the right to hold public office, or
to engage in political activities. The 'Black Codes', adopted during
president Andrew Johnson's direction of the Reconstruction process,
were designed to keep Negroes as a landless and closely controlled
labour force. Although they were voided by Congressional
Reconstruction, the Black Codes were to reappear in the form of
various labour laws enacted by Southern state legislatures in the
1870s and 1880s. Vagrancy laws, enticement acts, contract
enforcement statutes, and the criminal surety system, were all
designed to replace slavery by forms of involuntary servitude for
blacks. Staple crop production was resumed on Southern farms
and plantations under the sharecropping system, whereby planters
and merchants kept black tenant farmers in a state of peonage,
 Booker T. Washington: Black Enigma

unable to clear themselves of debt, and required by law to work

owner-employers. In the urban labour market,
indefinitely for their
freedmen and women found employment in tobacco factories and
flour mills and in the extractive industries, but throughout the
South, cotton mills were reserved for whites only.
Socially, Southern race relations, both during and after
Reconstruction, were marked by the increasing separation of the
races - in public accommodations, hospitals, prisons, schools and
places of entertainment. Historians have disagreed as to when
segregation first appeared in the post-war South - whether it was
before, during or at some period after Reconstruction - but
point to full-blown operation in both law and custom in towns
its

and cities throughout the South by the 1890s, with a rigidly

separated caste system as the substitute for slavery. Yet, whenever
itoccurred, segregation (the enforced separation of the races),
marked a decisive change from the South's earlier and almost total
exclusion of blacks from medical, welfare, educational and other
facilities. 4

Thus, one of the achievements of Radical or Congressional

Reconstruction was to secure segregated facilities for blacks where,
previously, they had faced exclusion. Moreover, the Republican
state governments in the South, while effecting some progressive
reforms, never pushed for racial integration as either a desirable
or even a possible goal. With the piecemeal ending of Reconstruction,
the 'Redeemer'governments simply continued and extended segrega-
The best that blacks could hope for were separate
tionist practices.
accommodations and facilities equal to those provided for whites.
Where idealistic Northern Republicans may have hoped that
accommodations and services for the two races might be identical,
the Redeemer Democrats had no such expectations or intentions.
Again, black resistance in the South to increasing racial discrimina-
tion may have prompted the final step in the resort of the South to
de facto segregation.
One response to the restoration of white supremacy in the South
was a renewed call for black emigration. Henry McNeal Turner, a
black preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, had
been expelled from the Georgia state legislature, following the
return of the Democrats to power. Turner roundly denounced both
Republicans and Democrats for their betrayal of the freedman and,
from 1870, began to advocate the emigration to Africa of a select

group of blacks with the skills and resources to build a new state.

In 1891 Turner visited West Africa for the first time, sent back

19
Black Leadership in America

enthusiastic reports, and returned to America determined to launch

an intensive campaign to promote black emigration. A fiery black
nationalist, Turner condemned the failings of American society,
and tried to get the federal government to pay reparations to blacks
for their years in slavery - anticipating the later nationalist-
separatism of the Garvey movement and the Nation of Islam.
From 1894, with the aid of white entrepreneurs, who had organized
the International Migration Society in Alabama, Turner began to
recruit emigrants and sell passages on the Afro- American Steamship
Company, founded, with his support, for transportation to Liberia.
In March, 1895, twenty-two blacks from various Southern states,
recruited by black representatives of the IMS, sailed for Africa.
The following year, 325 blacks left for Liberia. During his third
visit to West Africa, Turner reported that the settlers were making
steady progress. In fact, IMS officials had not provided them with
promised food and help, and many of the emigrants died from
malaria, while those who survived asked to return to America.
Turner's emigrationist campaign appealed only to a small and
desperate segment of the Southern black population. But Turner
continued to advocate the 'limited option' of black emigration for
the remainder of his life (he died in the same year as Booker T.
Washington), and can be considered as the immediate ideological
forerunner of Marcus Garvey.
During and after Reconstruction, most Southern blacks rejected
emigrationism, and placed their hopes in the securing of better
schools and welfare facilities, rather than in gaining racial integration.
Aware of their precarious position in a society pledged to the
restoration and maintenance of white supremacy, those black
delegates who attended the first freedmen's conventions held in
the South immediately after the Civil War, were careful not to
offend white sensibilities by demanding political or social rights
and privileges. Instead, they stressed their Southern identity and
the common interests of whites and blacks. And, disavowing the
need for government action and initiative to protect the interests
of Negro agricultural workers, blacks in the convention movement,
like most black newspapers of the time, espoused the gospel of
self-help, group advancement and laissez-faire.
For a time, it appeared that the Populist movement or People's
Party - the climax of the agrarian discontent of the 1880s and
1890s - with its critique of both Republicans and Democrats as
the creatures of Northern business interests, might produce a bi-
racial alliance of Southern black and white farmers in a united

20
 Booker T. Washington: Black Enigma

Tom Watson of Georgia,

protest. In the South, Populist leaders like
appealed for black support, arguing that economic distress did not
recognize the colour line. In 1892 the Arkansas Populist platform
included a resolution submitted by a black delegate, that it was
'the object of the People's Party to elevate the downtrodden, irres-
pective of race or colour'. Across the South, Populist platforms
denounced lynchings and supported the restoration of political
rights for blacks. But these expressions of concern for the Negro
were essentially rhetorical devices, rooted in expediency rather
than in idealism. When Southern planters and merchants used their
influence to ensure that black tenants voted the Democratic ticket,
Southern Populists, alarmed at the prospect of white competition
for the black vote, reversed earlier ostensibly pro-black pronounce-
ments, and joined with their political rivals in espousing black
disfranchisement and racial separation. By the 1890s, then, Southern
whites of all political persuasions and socio-economic groupings
began to unite under the banner of white supremacy. The 'Solid
South' was not simply the South of Democratic dominance, it was
also, and increasingly, a section in which blacks were systematically
reduced to positions of dependency, poverty and severely restricted
aspirations in a bifurcated social order. Growing up in Mississippi
in the first decade of the century, the novelist, Richard Wright, the
son of a black sharecropper, quickly learned that:

Among the topics that Southern white men did not like to discuss with
Negroes were the following: American white women; the Ku Klux
Klan....Jack Johnson; the entire northern part of the United States; the
Civil War; Abraham Lincoln; U. S. Grant; General Sherman;
Catholics; the Pope; Jews; the Republican party; slavery; social
equality; Communism; Socialism; the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments
to the Constitution; or any topic calling for positive knowledge of
manly self-assertion on the part of the Negro. The most accepted
topics were sex and religion. 5

In the North, the radical impulse which had initiated Congressional

Reconstruction, began to wane with the deaths or retirement from

office of the old Radical Republican leadership. The election of
President Grant in 1868, and the subsequent rise of factionalism
within the Republican party, with Liberal Republicans favouring
an end to military rule in the South and sectional reconciliation,
all pointed to the imminent abandonment of the freedman in the

cause of sectional harmony. By the early 1870s, Northern business

interests were demanding an end to Reconstruction because it was
discouraging investment and commercial enterprise in the South.

21
Black Leadership in America

The United States Supreme Court, in a series of decisions, aided

the segregation impulse in rulings which declared that the provisions
of the Fourteenth Amendment did not affect segregation by state
law if the facilities offered were 'separate but equal'. Mississippi
in 1890, and South Carolina in 1895, were the first former Confederate
states to amend their constitutions effectively to disfranchise nearly
all blacks. Mississippi's racist governor, James K. Vardaman,
declared openly: 'There is no use to equivocate.... Mississippi's
constitutional convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose
than to eliminate the nigger from politics.' Between 1896 and
1915, all Southern states enacted legislation that permitted the
Democratic party to declare only whites eligible for voting in
primary elections. During the 1880s and 1890s, there were on
average one hundred and fifty lynchings of blacks a year - an
appalling index of racial tensions in the South. As Neil R. McMillen
observes, during these decades, 'mob executions of blacks were so
common that they excited interest only in the black community'. 6
Not surprisingly, Southern blacks, although they retained their
traditional loyalty to the Republican party, exercised little actual
power or influence in the solidly Democratic South. Yet black
protest was not entirely extinguished. From 1904 to 1908 Southern
Negroes organized a series of unsuccessful boycotts of segregated
street cars in such cities as Atlanta, Houston, New Orleans and
Mobile. More significantly, increasing numbers of blacks 'voted
with their feet' by leaving the section for a new life in the
industrialized states of the North - even before the mass exodus
of the World War I era. Given the helplessness in black Southerners
in the face of white hostility and violence, there is a certain
intended irony in C. Vann Woodward's observation that: 'It was
an ex-slave who eventually framed the modus vivendi of race
relations in the New South.' 7

BOOKER T. WASHINGTON: EARLY LIFE

Booker Taliaferro Washington was born a slave in 1856, on James
Burroughs' 207-acre farm in Franklin County, Virginia. The son
of a house slave and an unknown white father, Washington later
recalled:

I was born in a typical log cabin, about fourteen by sixteen feet

square. In this cabin I lived with my mother, a brother and sister till

22
 Booker T. Washington: Black Enigma

after the Civil War, when we were all declared free. Of my ancestry, I
knew nothing. 8

Washington spent nine yearsin slavery - the last four during

the Civil War. By own
account, he was poorly clothed,
his
inadequately fed and denied any opportunities for education, apart
from tantalizing glimpses into the schoolroom attended by his
young white 'mistress'. His plantation duties involved taking water
to slaves working in the fields, carrying corn for grinding to the
local mill, and operating a set of fans at the Burroughs' dinner
table. Reflecting on this period of his life, Washington castigated
slavery for having caused physical labour to be regarded 'as a
badge of degradation, of inferiority' by both whites and blacks.
As for the 'greatest injury' that slavery inflicted on blacks,
Washington later declared that it was:

...to deprive them of that executive power, that sense of self-

dependence which are the glory and the distinction of the Anglo-Saxon
race. For 250 years we were taught to depend on some one else for
food, clothing, shelter and every move in life. 9

In 1865, Washington went with his family to join his stepfather,

Washington Ferguson, who had fled to Maiden, West Virginia,
during the war. In Maiden, the reunited family lived in a shanty
town, and Washington worked for a time in the salt mines and
later as a coal miner - experiences which may partly explain his
adult addiction to the rituals of personal hygiene. 'An intense
longing to read' was among Washington's earliest memories, and
he began to acquire the rudiments of literacy from a copy of Noah
Webster's spelling book, a traditional text in American primary
schools. He also began to attend a local school started by Negro
parents, after completing a 5.00 a.m. to 9.00 a.m. shift at the salt
works, with a further two hours shift after the end of afternoon
classes. (In his later career, Washington was a strong advocate of
the night school.) At some point during his Maiden years, Washington
heard about the existence of a school for freedmen - the Hampton
Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia - where blacks could
receive academic training while working for their room and board.
He recalled:

I resolved at once go to that school, although I had no idea where

to
it was, or how many miles away, or how I was going to reach it. ...I
was on fire constantly with one ambition, and that was to go to
Hampton. 10

23
Black Leadership in America

Hampton Institute had been founded in 1868 by Samuel Chapman

Armstrong, the son of Hawaiian missionaries, and a former brigadier
general in the Union army. The views of European educators
stressing the value of industrial schools had been given a receptive
hearing in America before the Civil War, and Frederick Douglass,
as has been seen, was a notable black advocate of the idea. Armstrong
was impressed with education for the freedman as the best means
of smoothing the transition from slavery to freedom. (During
Reconstruction, the Freedmen's Bureau had also supported the
cause of industrial/agricultural education, in an attempt to improve
the condition of Southern blacks.) Armstrong believed also that
such a programme, in addition to elevating 'dependent' and
'backward' races, might also provide a strategic ground of
compromise between Southern whites, Northern whites and blacks.
He was convinced that the freedmen should remain in the South,
among their 'best friends' - the Southern whites - engaged primarily
in agriculture and programmes of individual and collective self-
help. (Bishop Henry M. Turner, on a visit to Hampton in 1878,
accused it of inculcating black inferiority.) Armstrong's pedagogic
ideas, grounded in the belief that education as a moral and
conservative force, appealed to Southern planters and Northern
capitalists, united in their wish to have a tractable and trained
labour force in the post-war South.
Washington's desire to attend Hampton was intensified during
his eighteen-month service as a houseboy in the home of General
Lewis Ruffner, owner of the Maiden salt works and a coal mine.
His stay with the Ruffner family marked the beginning of
Washington's life-long association with (and affection for) upper-
class whites. It was from Mrs Viola Ruffner (a New Englander)
that he also began to imbibe Puritan notions of thrift, cleanliness
and hard work which were to form the basis of his social thought.
Mrs Ruffner also encouraged Washington's persistent efforts to
acquire an education, and allowed him to attend school for an hour
a day during the winter.
In 1872, Washington, aged sixteen, set out from Maiden to cover
the five hundred miles to Hampton - a journey that was to test his
mental, physical and financial resources. At the first night's stage-
coach stop, Washington, the only black passenger, was excluded
from 'a common, unpainted house called a hotel', and refused a
meal. When his meagre funds ran out in Northern Virginia,
Washington walked and begged rides until he reached Richmond,
about eighty miles from Hampton, tired, hungry and completely

24
 Booker T. Washington: Black Enigma

out of money. Working at odd jobs in Richmond, he finally

accumulated sufficient funds to undertake the last stage of his
journey; he reached Hampton with fifty cents to spare. The head
teacher at Hampton, Miss Mary F. Mackie (like Mrs Ruffner, a
New Englander), was visibly unimpressed by the tramp-like figure
who presented himself for admission. After some deliberation, she
ordered him to sweep out the recitation room, a chore which
Washington correctly surmised was his entrance examination.
Thanks to Mrs Ruffner 's training and his own unflagging enthusiasm,
Washington passed the test. After a thorough inspection of the
room, Mrs Mackie informed him: 'I guess you will do to enter
this institution.'
Washington's three years in Hampton were to be the shaping
experience of his life. He later said (and without irony) that
Hampton had given him a better education than he could have
gained at Harvard or Yale. Working as a janitor for his room and
board, and with his clothing and tuition provided by Northern
benefactors, Washington gained the rudiments of a liberal education,
acquired trade skills, and was fully indoctrinated in the Hampton
Christian work-and-cleanliness ethic. He also displayed promise as
a student debater and orator. In General Armstrong, Washington
found a surrogate father, guide and mentor. He was to model his
attitudes, precepts and racial philosophy after Armstrong's example.
From 1875 to 1878 he spent a year at Wayland Seminary, a small
Baptist theological school in Washington, DC, but disliked both
the atmosphere of the capital and the absence of moral and practical
training in the Wayland curriculum. In particular, he was critical
of the frivolities and pretensions of the city's black population,
and the insensitivity of Wayland's black graduates to the needs of
the rural black peasantry. After a brief period studying law,
Washington gratefully accepted Armstrong's invitation to return of
Hampton as a teacher in 1879, where he administered the first
night school class for preparatory students unable to afford part-
time study during the day. Washington nicknamed them 'The Plucky
Class' and under his driving force, the experiment was a success,
confirming his belief that poverty was no excuse for ignorance.

25
Black Leadership in America

TUSKEGEE
In May 1881 General Armstrong received a letter from the state
commissioners of a Negro normal school in Tuskegee in the black-
belt county of Macon, Alabama, asking him to recommend its first
principal. Their assumption was that Armstrong would recommend
a white teacher for the post. The 'school' in question consisted
only of a dilapidated shack and an old church - both on loan -
without teachers or pupils. But the founding of the school owed
its origin to the persistence of the black vote in the Deep South in

the period immediately after the end of Reconstruction. In the

autumn elections of 1880 Colonel Wilbur F. Foster, a Confederate
veteran, and a former slaveholder, was a Democratic candidate for
the Alabama state senate. Foster approached a black tinsmith,
Lewis Adams, a former slave and the leading black citizen of
Tuskegee. Foster promised that if Adams would deliver the black
vote in the election (Macon County's population was 75 per cent
Negro), he could expect to be rewarded. Adams, formerly a
Republican but now shrewdly decided on a course of political
self-interest for the black community, secured Foster's promise to
sponsor and aid passage of a bill for a Negro normal school in
Tuskegee. The Democrats won an overwhelming victory in 1880,
and Foster fulfilled his part of the bargain: the Alabama legislature
approved the project, named a Board of Commissioners, and appro-
priated $2,000 for teachers' salaries. As R. J. Norrell observes,
Alabama's white conservatives, having regained political control,
no longer felt fearful of blacks and: 'benevolent paternalism toward
blacks made whites feel good about themselves'. 11
Armstrong recommended Washington for the Tuskegee position,
and characterized him as 'a very competent capable mulatto, clear-
headed, modest sensible, polite and a thorough teacher and a
,

superior man'. 12 The Tuskegee Commissioners accepted the

nomination, Washington (aware of the local situation), went to
Tuskegee determined to put into practice the lessons he had learned
(and taught) at Hampton. From the outset, Washington demonstrated
his talents as an interracial diplomat.
Cultivating influential whites in the Tuskegee area, including
one of the Commissioners, George W. Campbell, a former slaveholder,
merchant and banker and Charles W. Thompson, the local Democratic
leader - when President McKinley visited Tuskegee in 1898,
Washington arranged for him to stay at Thompson's home and also
helped his brother to secure the Tuskegee postmastership -

26
 Booker T. Washington: Black Enigma

Washington persuaded and cajoled the white community into

supporting the new school. He also travelled through Macon County,
advertising the school to blacks, and soliciting whatever financial
or other help they could offer. On the symbolically chosen 4th of
July 1881 Washington formally opened the school, with an intake
of thirty students and one teacher - himself. Within a year, he had
moved the school to a new site, an abandoned slave plantation
which he purchased for $500, half of which was borrowed from
General James Marshall, treasurer of Hampton, with a promise to
repay the other half within twelve months: both debts were repaid
within five months.
With the help of his first assistant, Olivia Davidson, who was
to become his first wife, and the labours of the Tuskegee students,
the school grew in size and scope. The student body erected
buildings and built furniture and, in the process, learned skilled
trades. After several failures, Tuskegee produced its own bricks;
cabinet and mattress making shops were opened in 1887, and two
years later, blacksmith operations, wagon-making and wheel-
wrights' work were added to the school 'catalogue'. In particular
Washington concentrated the school's efforts on devising and
teaching modern agricultural techniques, training skilled artisans
and preparing female students to be good housekeepers. New
appointments to the Tuskegee staff included George Washington
Carver, like Washington a former slave, who had become an
agricultural chemist, and was to be a pioneer ecologist. The regime
at Tuskegee, modelled on that of Hampton, was even stricter and
more Spartan. As principal, Washington ruled as a not-so-benevolent
despot, alert to any infraction of the school rules by either staff or
students. Although Tuskegee was a nonsectarian school - and
Washington always displayed a low regard for the moral and
educational standards of black ministers - religious training, in
the form of daily attendance at chapel and weekly Sunday evening
talks by the principal himself, ensured that Tuskegee graduates
would equate education with Christian precepts. Washington also
steadily increased the influence of Tuskegee into the surrounding
community, with extension courses and, after 1892, annual
conferences for farmers which emphasized not only innovative
agricultural techniques, but also the personal and moral qualities
necessary for success. Even before he emerged as a national black
leader, Washington, in speeches and letters to the Northern and
Southern press, constantly stressed that great benefits would come
to the South - and to the entire nation - if the Tuskegee experiment

27
Black Leadership in America

proved successful. Certainly, Southern white conservatives could

only be reassured by Washington's pronouncements on race relations.
He informed a meeting of the National Educational Association in
Madison, in 1884, that:

Any movement for the elevation of the Southern Negro in order to be

successful, must have to a certain extent the cooperation of the
Southern whites. They control the government and own the property -
whatever benefits the black man benefits the white man. ...In spite of
all talk of exodus, the Negro's home is permanently in the South: for

coming to the bread-and-meat side of the question, the white man

needs the Negro, and the Negro needs the white man. 13

Again, he could inform the editor of the Tuskegee Macon Mail

in the same year that: proportion as we
'The race will grow in
learn to help ourselves in matters of education'. In an address to
the Alabama State Teachers' Association in 1882, Washington
made an artful plea for the industrial education of blacks - one
calculated to reassure and impress his white audience:

Two hundred years of forced labour taught the coloured man that there
was no dignity inlabour but rather a disgrace. The child of the ex-
slave, naturally influenced by his parents' example, grows up believing
that he sees what he thinks is the curse of work. To remove this idea
is one of the great missions of the industrial school. The school

teacher must be taught that it will not disgrace him to work with his
hands when he cannot get a school. 14

As Washington's fame grew, he was frequently absent from

Tuskegee, often on fund-raising drives in the Northern states,
where he impressed such millionaire industrial-philanthropists as
John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, George Eastman and Henry
C. Rogers with his own
business-oriented and essentially conservative
social philosophy. Washington (who also had unstinted admiration
for the success symbolized by the possession of great wealth)
directed the financial support of Northern philanthropists not only
to Tuskegee - which, by 1915, had an endowment of $1,945,000 -
but to other black schools and colleges in the South.
Washington, was then, the outstanding black educator of his
day, and Tuskegee remains his great (but now sadly decaying)
monument. It also became his power base and the headquarters for
the 'Tuskegee Machine' (Washington's intricate network of
organizations, spies and informers, which derived its power from
his control of large sections of the black press, fraternal, business,
and religious bodies, and his disbursement of political patronage
and philanthropic funds). An influential figure in the post-

28
 Booker T. Washington: Black Enigma

Reconstruction South, Washington, after delivering a speech in

1895, was catapulted into national prominence

THE ATLANTA COMPROMISE ADDRESS

In 1895, Washington was invited to speak at the Cotton States and
International Exposition held in Atlanta, Georgia. Replying to the
invitation, Washington assured his white sponsors: 'It will be my
aim make my remarks of service to the Exposition - especially
to
to thecoloured department - and to both races in the South', in a
speech designed to 'cement the friendship of the races and bring
about hearty cooperation between them'. Although there was nothing
new in the address that Washington delivered on 18 September
1895, in Atlanta, the timing and circumstances of his speech ensured
that it would reach (and impress) a national audience. Washington's

purpose was to announce a pragmatic compromise that would

resolve the antagonisms between Southern whites, Northern whites,
and the Negro. In a period of worsening race relations, Washington
at Atlanta (as he had before) urged blacks to remain in the South,
work at 'the common occupations of life', and accept the fact of
white supremacy. He deprecated blacks' performances as voters
and legislators during Reconstruction, reminded them that they
were to live (and prosper) by manual labour, and (to whites) stressed
the loyalty and fidelity of Southern Negroes - 'the most patient,
faithful, law-abiding and unresentful people in the world. He'

also stressed that blacks had absolutely no interest in securing

social equality, and in an arresting metaphor declared: 'In all things
that are purely social we can be as separate as the five fingers, yet
one as the hand in all things essential to human progress.' Reduced
to their most obvious terms, his proposals to the South were for
economic cooperation and social separation (or segregation). But
Washington went even further, and assured whites that they had
nothing to fear - and everything to gain from trusting blacks.

As we have proved our loyalty to you in the past, in nursing your

children, watching by the sick bed of your mothers and fathers, and
often following them with tear-dimmed eyes to their graves, so in the
future, in our humble way, we shall stand by you with a devotion that
no foreigner can approach, ready to lay down our lives, if need be, in
defence of yours.

29
Black Leadership in America

Turning to blacks in the audience, Washington informed and

admonished them that:

Our greatest danger is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom
we may overlook the fact that we shall prosper in proportion as we
learn to dignify and glorify common labour. No race can prosper till it

learns that there is as much

dignity in tilling a field as in writing a
poem. No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the
world is long in any degree ostracized. It is important and right that
all the privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important
thatwe be prepared for the exercise of these vast privileges. The
opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely
more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera house.

In conclusion,Washington assured white Southerners that in

their efforts to resolve the raceproblem 'which God had laid at
the doors of the South', they would 'have at all times the patient,
sympathetic help of my race.' 15 In effect, Washington's most
famous speech was a reiteration and adaptation of the optimistic
late nineteenth-century ideology of the 'New South', as espoused
by Southern publicists anxious to assure Northern business interests
and politicians (and themselves) that the trauma of Confederate
defeat was over, that the section was ready and able to transform
itself into an agriculturally diversified and increasingly industrialized
society. Prerequisites for this transformation were Northern capital,
and the attraction of skilled white labour - possibly from Europe.
But New South spokesmen like Henry W. Grady were resolved
that in racial matters, the South would continue to practise self-
determination. Grady was a convinced advocate of racial segregation,
and contended that the two races had an instinctive desire for
separation. Social equality (which blacks did not enjoy anywhere
in the United States), was out of the question. To New South
ideologues, the concept involved (and offered) more than industrial
progress, it would also underwrite the new social order, with blacks
as an integral part of the labour force. As Henry Watterson, a New
South enthusiast for industrialization and urbanization, declared:
'Under the old system we paid our debts and walloped our niggers.
Under the new system we pay our niggers and wallop our debts.' 16
Washington would have rejected Watterson's terminology, but
he implicitly endorsed his sentiments and those of Grady.
Significantly, Washington also contributed to the New South
contention that the grosser forms of racial injustice were rapidly
disappearing. Five years before the Atlanta Address, Washington
had informed a Northern audience that although 'the practice of

30
 Booker T. Washington: Black Enigma

lynching coloured people one of the curses of the South. ..usually

is

resorted to when there is a charge of rape',

it was being criticized

by the Southern press 'and we are sure that a healthy change in

public sentiment is being wrought'. 17
Washington's 'Atlanta Compromise' address caused a sensation
at the time and has been variously interpreted by commentators
ever since. Not surprisingly, the Southern press heartily endorsed
the sentiments it believed Washington had expressed. The Atlanta
Constitution termed the speech 'the most remarkable address
delivered by a coloured man in America', and called Washington
a 'sensible and progressive Negro educator'. A South Carolina
newspaper acclaimed him as 'one of the great men of the South',
and added that 'his skin may be coloured, but his head is sound
and his heart is in the right place'. Northern opinion (with only a
few dissenting black voices) was equally enthusiastic. A Chicago
newspaper, in an editorial widely reprinted in the South, declared
that Washington's remarks at Atlanta and his personal example as
an educator:

has done more for the improvement for the negro in the South than
has been accomplished by all the political agitators. The possession of
a vote does not always ensure respect, but the possession of a good
character, a good home, and a little money reserve always ensure
respect. If every Southern state had such an institution as that at
Tuskegee, Alabama, presided over by such a man as Professor
Washington, the race question will settle itself in ten years. 18

The correspondent of the New York World asserted that nothing

since Henry W. Grady's address to the New England Society of
New York had demonstrated so graphically 'the spirit of the New
South'. On all counts - his own rise to eminence from slavery, his
deprecation of political activity by blacks and stress on economic
advancement, his distrust of labour unions and 'foreigners', and
his generally conservative position on social issues - Washington
stood revealed as the black defender of the New South creed.
Most estimates of Washington's Atlanta Address have viewed it

as an abject surrender of black civil and political rights to the

forces of white racism. It is, however, also possible to view it as
a masterly exercise in dissimulation or, rather, in racial diplomacy.
Writing from Wilberforce University, the young black scholar,
W. E. B. Du Bois, congratulated Washington on his 'phenomenal
success at Atlanta - it was a word fitly spoken'. A close reading
of the text of the Atlanta Address, reveals that it included ultimate
goals which white Southerners could not support. There were

31
Black Leadership in America

and nuances in Washington's address. Reading

futuristic implications
between the August Meier perceptively remarks, Washington,
lines, as
although he asserted that blacks must begin at the bottom:

surely... believed that eventually they would arrive at the top. ..his
Negro supporters emphasized the future implication of his remarks...
the dominant whites were impressed by his conciliatory phraseology,
confused his means for his ends, and were satisfied with the immediate
programme he enunciated. 19

Whatever the nuances, the Atlanta Address made Washington

an acclaimed black leader. James Weldon Johnson, national organizer
and executive secretary for the NAACP, reflecting on Washington's
rise to fame, attributed it to his 'epochal' Atlanta speech, as a
direct consequence of which:

he had at a stroke gained the sanction and support of both the South
and the North - the South, in general, construing the speech to imply
the Negro's abdication of his claim to full and equal citizenship rights,
and his acceptance of the status of a contented and industrious
peasantry; the North feeling that the opportunity had arisen to rid its
conscience of a disturbing question and shift it over to the South. The
great body of Negroes, discouraged, bewildered, and leaderless, hailed
Mr Washington as a Moses. This was indeed a remarkable feat - his
holding of the South in one hand, the North in the other, and at the
same time carrying a major portion of his race along with him. 20

For his part, Washington regarded himself as the successor to,

ifnot the strict disciple of Frederick Douglass. In The Story of
My Life and Work (1910), intended primarily for a black readership,
Washington asserted:
Mr Douglass had the same idea concerning the importance and value
of industrial education that I have tried to emphasize. He also held the
same ideas I do in regard to the emigration of the Negro to Africa,
and was opposed to the diffusion and dissemination of the Negro
throughout the North and Northwest, believing as I do that the
Southern section of the country where the Negro now resides is the
best place for him. 21

But Washington also believed that the issues which Douglass

had agitated were not relevant to the 'New South'. In his biography
of Douglass, Washington noted that his career fell 'almost wholly
within the period of revolution and liberation'. But:

that period is now closed. We are at present in the period of

construction and readjustment. Many of the animosities engendered by

the conflicts and controversies of half a century ago still survive. ...But
changes are rapidly coming about that will remove, or at least greatly
modify, these lingering animosities. 22

32
 Booker T. Washington: Black Enigma

It is unlikely that Douglass would have endorsed these

Washingtonian sentiments and comparisons. In the last year of his
life, asked by a student what advice he would give to the younger

black generation, Douglass reportedly replied: 'Agitate! Agitate!

Agitate!' When
the same student posed the identical question to
Booker Washington in 1899, he received the answer: 'Work!
T.
Work! Work! Be patient and win by superior service.' 23

UP FROM SLAVERY

From 1895 until his death in 1915, Washington's determination,

power and influence made him a force to be reckoned with. He
continued to act as the seemingly omnipotent and autocratic principal
of Tuskegee, but also embarked on extensive fund-raising and
lecturing tours. His message, with few exceptions,
was a restatement
of the Atlanta Address: blacks should eschew politics, cultivate
habits of thrift, economy, sobriety and honesty, and concentrate on
the acquisition of Christian character, property and industrial skills.
Urged by his admirers to write an (inspirational) account of his
remarkable career, Washington collaborated with a ghostwriter to
produce The Story of My Life and Work (1900). Poorly produced,
and replete with grammatical and typographical errors, the book
sold about 15,000 copies within a year of publication, but received
luke-warm reviews in the press. His second autobiography, Up
From Slavery (1901), which first appeared in serial form, was a
more fully-planned and executed project. Max Bennett Thrasher, a
white journalist, a teacher, and a regular visitor to Tuskegee (and
employed by Washington as the school's public relations man),
acted as ghostwriter for the book. Up From Slavery presented
Washington as a black Horatio Alger, who had succeeded because
of his internalization and application of the Puritan work ethic,
instilled in him by successive white mentors. An immediate
publishing success, the book appealed to a foreign readership as
well, and was quickly translated into more foreign languages than
any other American book of its time. Several of Tuskegee 's most
generous benefactors became converts to Washington's philosophy
Andrew Carnegie,
of race relations after reading his autobiography.
who had meet Washington, felt that Up From
earlier refused to
Slavery exemplified his own brand of Social Darwinism, and
donated a library building to Tuskegee as well as $600,000 in

33
Black Leadership in America

United States Steel bonds (from which Washington personally

gained an income). White readers of the autobiography welcomed
not only its retailing of familiar maxims of self-help and perseverence
in the face of adversity, but also its sanguine portrayal of black
life (both during and after slavery). In effect, Up From Slavery
complemented the Atlanta Compromise address (which was also
included in the text).It presented the 'authorized' view of race

relations inSouth during the period of Congressional

the
Reconstruction that had been such an affront to Southern whites.
Black involvement in this phase of Reconstruction was also sternly
deprecated by Washington:

In many cases it seemed to me that the ignorance of my race was

being used as a tool with which to help white men into office, and that
there was an element in the North which wanted to punish the
Southern white men by forcing the Negro into positions over the heads
of Southern whites. ...Besides, the general political agitation drew the
attention of our people away from the more fundamental matters of
perfecting themselves in the industries at their doors and at securing
properties. I saw coloured men who were members of the state
legislatures, and country officers, who, in some cases, could not read
or write, and whose morals were as weak as their education. ...Many of
the Southern whites have the feeling that, if the Negro is permitted to
exercise his political rights now to any degree, the mistakes of the
Reconstruction period will repeat themselves. I do not think that this
will be true, because the Negro. ..is fast learning the lesson that he
cannot afford to act in a manner that will alienate his Southern white
neighbors from him. 24

Most obviously, however, Up From Slavery was an extended

song of praise - a series of 'advertisements for myself - to Booker
T. Washington. As one literary critic has aptly remarked, the book
'reads like a saint's life written by a saint'. And:

Like Dickens' virtuous co-narratress in Bleak House, Washington is

forced into the artless ruse of quoting everyone's praises of him so as
not to be praising himself directly all the time. He does no wrong, has
no enemies, suffers hardships willingly, is universally beloved, and is,
for it all (as he confesses) quite humble. 25

Washington's former teacher at Hampton, Mrs Mary F. Mackie,

was inordinately proud of her pupil, and declared (without noting
the irony) that the book 'sets off more graphically than any article
I have read, the transition from slavery to freedom. It reads like a

romance.' 26

34
 Booker T. Washington: Black Enigma

BLACK LEADER
In the last twenty years of his life,
Washington had a dual career
as educatorand race leader. During the administrations of Theodore
Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, Washington dispensed the
limited federal patronage for blacks, strengthened the intricate
network of the 'Tuskegee Machine' and, with the help of his
devoted secretary, Emmett J. Scott, monitored the activities of his
Negro 1900, putting one of his favourite precepts into
critics. In
practice, Washington founded the National Negro Business League
to promote black entrepreneurship and advertise the economic
success some blacks had achieved. The League not only reflected
Washington's belief that black advancement lay in economic progress,
but also provided him with a cadre of loyal supporters in the major
cities of the North. In the South, Washington, hypersensitively
aware of the precarious position of blacks, ingratiated himself
with successive governors of Alabama, promoted health measures
for Negroes, and promoted such economic ventures as black owned-
and-operated cotton mills and land purchase schemes.
By 1901, Washington was at the height of his fame, and received
the presidential seal of approval when Theodore Roosevelt invited
him to dinner at the White House. The episode angered Southern
whites, who felt he had breached the unwritten rules of racial
etiquette. One 'prominent Southerner' wrote to a Chicago newspaper
that:

Every Southern man of intelligence honors Booker T. Washington, but

no Southern gentleman would sit at table with him under any
consideration whatever. We are willing to pay him homage for his
good works, but we cannot admit him to social equality, because that
involves a principle which is vital to the preservation of the Southern
white race from the evils of intermarriage with blacks.

The American historian, James Ford Rhodes, reported the reaction

of one white man from Tuskegee to Washington's White House
dinner: 'Now when I meet the man who has done all this, I can't
call him Booker like any ordinary nigger, but by thunder, I
I call
27 But, as even
can't call a nigger mister, so I just say professor!'

his black critics reluctantly conceded, the White House episode

had greatly enhanced Washington's national reputation. Henry M.
Turner informed him that: 'You are about to be the great
representative and hero of the Negro race, notwithstanding you
have been very conservative'. 28
Yet, although he had the ear of presidents and philanthropists,

35
Black Leadership in America

Washington was unable to halt, let alone improve, the deteriorating

racial situation of the Progressive era. In 1896, the Supreme Court's
decision in Plessy versus Ferguson, appeared to give judicial
sanction to the 'separate but equal' doctrine, apparently already
endorsed by Washington at Atlanta. Again, while he helped to
deliver the black vote to the Republicans in state and national
elections, Washington seemed powerless when Theodore Roosevelt,
in a blatantly racist act, summarily dismissed three companies of
black troops in Brownsville, Texas, after they had forcibly resisted
a white mob. Similarly, Taft's policy of removing Southern black
officeholders indicated the very real limits of Washington's political
influence.
On numerous occasions, Washington himself was made painfully
aware of the virulence of white racism. When a white chambermaid
in an Indianapolis hotel was reported to have refused to make up
Washington's bed and to have lost her job in consequence, a Texas
newspaper solicited funds 'For a Self-Respecting Girl'. Washington
also discovered that segregation, imposed by whites on blacks,
had produced accommodations that were certainly separate but
decidedly unequal. He once confessed that: 'The mere thought of
a trip on a railroad brings to me a feeling of intense dread and I
never enter a railroad coach unless compelled to do so.' 29 But
Washington also worked to end the more blatant forms of racial
discrimination. He secretly sponsored legal suits against the ex-
clusion of blacks from jury service, the various ingenious devices
employed to deny black suffrage, and the persistence of coerced
labour in the South. In his last years - possibly because of his
failures to prevent presidents Roosevelt, Taft and Woodrow Wilson
from giving executive approval to racial segregation - Washington
became more outspoken against Jim Crow. He criticized condi-
tions in the cars and waiting rooms of Southern railroads, the
persistence of lynching, a Congressional proposal to exclude African
immigrants, and the blatant racism of D. W. Griffith's epic motion
picture Birth of a Nation, with its romantic portrayal of the Ku

Klux Klan. But Washington's strongest protest against discri-

mination did not appear until after his death, in a posthumously
published article, 'My View of the Segregation Laws'. Racial
segregation, Washington asserted, was 'ill-advised' in that it was
both unjust and productive of further injustices. It was also
'unnecessary', and resented by 'every thoughtful Negro'. Again,
segregation was 'inconsistent' since 'the negro is separated from
his white neighbor, but the white businessmen are not prevented

36
 Booker T. Washington: Black Enigma

from doing business in Negro neighborhoods'. Finally, segregation

was harmful to both its victims and its sponsors - 'Wherever a
form of segregation exists, it will be found that it has been
administered in such a way as to embitter the Negro and harms
more or less the moral fibre of the white man'. That blacks did
not openly express their detestation of the system was no proof
that they did not resent it. 30

Washington travelled extensively at home and abroad, and had

a world-wide following. Tuskegee was regularly visited by Africans.
West Indians, Asians, European missionaries and white colonialists.
On his three trips to Europe, Washington had tea with Queen
Victoria, and met the Danish royal family. He stayed with - and
impressed - H. G. Wells, who compared Washington favourably
with W. E. B. Du Bois, a man who 'conceals his passionate
resentment too thinly', whereas Washington 'looks before and after
and keeps his council with the scope and range of a statesman. ..his
is mind that can grasp the situation and destinies of a people'. 31
a
On 1910 visit to Denmark, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy
his
and England, Washington concluded that despite handicaps, the
American Negro was better off than 'the man farthest down' in
Europe, in that he enjoyed a better standard of living, educational,
economic and political opportunities. When Washington told a
meeting of the London Anti-Slavery Society in 1910 that American
race relations were improving, he drew an angry retort from John
E. Milholland of the NAACP, who was also in England. W. E. B.
Du Bois, informed of the incident, published an 'Appeal to Europe'
which appeared in the British and American press. Du Bois accused
Washington of relating only selected items to European audiences
because of his dependence on white support, and stressed instead
widespread discrimination, lynching, and the failure of the courts
to protect blacks as the less sanguine side of the contemporary
American racial scene.
Despite his foreign travels, Washington did not alter his funda-
mental outlook which was essentially that of a provincial Southerner.
He never visited Africa, Asia or the West Indies, and before he
sailed to Europe in 1910, resolved not to enter a single art gallery,
museum or palace. little awareness of or
Washington also had
interest in the African heritage of African-Americans. He was,
however, quite prepared to advise the European colonial powers in

Africa to the extent of supplying Tuskegee staff or graduates to

promote programmes of industrial education (within the existing

political order) among African peoples in Togo, Nigeria, the Belgian

37
Black Leadership in America

Congo, South Africa and Liberia. He also urged that Africans be

taught English in order to give them a lingua franca, and promote
their Western acculturation. Although he endorsed German
colonialism in Africa, toward the end of his life, Washington
criticized white imperialist oppression in the Congo and South
Africa - not because of any Pan-Africanist sentiments, but rather
to highlight the impracticality of black emigration to Africa as a
solution to the American race problem. (In a letter of 1893,
protesting against Henry M. Turner's promotion of African
emigration, Washington asserted: 'This talk of any appreciable
number of our people going to Africa is the merest nonsense... It
does no good, but... does a great deal of harm among the ignorant
of our people, especially in the far South.') 32
In 1915, on a speaking engagement in New York, Washington
collapsed from nervous exhaustion, arteriosclerosis and kidney
was withdrawn after protests
failure (an initial diagnosis of syphilis
from Washington's personal physician). Informed that he had only
a short time to live, he asked to be taken back to Tuskegee: 'I
was born in the South, I have lived and laboured in the South,
and I expect to be buried in the South'. 33 He died at Tuskegee on
14 November, 1915. Washington's statue on the Tuskegee campus
expresses his life in the form of a parable. He is depicted lifting
'the veil of ignorance' from the kneeling figure of a young black
man, holding on his knees an open book and agricultural and
industrial tools. Washington's critics, in his lifetime and after,
suggested another reading of the tableau: rather than lifting,
Washington was lowering a 'veil of ignorance' over the eyes of
his people.

WASHINGTON AND HIS BLACK CRITICS

Opposition to Washington's ideas and to his white-sanctioned
position as race leader, came from a relatively small group of
mainly Northern blacks - journalists, lawyers, clergymen and
educators. Initially united only by their dislike of various elements
of Washington's programme, his contemporary black critics accused
him of a range of offences, miscalculations and misdemeanours.
He was faulted for deprecating political action on the part of blacks
while at the same time functioning as a 'boss', condemned for
attempting to impose a partisan and regional strategy for racial

38
 Booker T. Washington: Black Enigma

advancement on the country as a whole, castigated for his control

of the Negro press and his friendships with white editors, with the
resultant suppression of criticism. Washington's policies of industrial
education were pronounced anachronistic, and his portrayals of
harmonious race relations as travesties of the truth. In a letter
published in an Atlanta journal, only three months after the Atlanta
Address, a black correspondent expressed alarm at Washington's
overnight elevation to the position of race leader, and rejected as
unseemly any comparisons between Washington and Frederick
Douglass:

Every race must make its own heroes... If another race selects our
heroes, puts them upon pedestals, and tells us to bow down to them
and serve them, woe be unto us. It is supreme folly to speak of Mr
Washington as the Moses of the race. If we are where Mr
Washington's Atlanta speech placed us, what need have we of a
Moses? Who brought us from Egypt, through the wilderness to these
happy conditions? Let us pray that the race will never have a leader,
but leaders. Who is the leader of the white race in America? It has no
leader, but leaders. So with us. 34

The Cleveland Gazette reported a black Atlanta journal as

stating:

Prof. B. T. or Bad Taste Wash, has made a speech. ...The white press
style Prof. Bad Taste the new Negro, but if there is anything in him

except the most servile type of the old Negro, we fail to find it in any
of his last acts. ...let the race labor and pray that no more new Negroes
such as Prof. Bad Taste will bob up. 35

As black migration North continued, and with the growth

to the
of a professional black on Washington became sharper
elite, attacks

and more concerted. Julius F. Taylor, Negro editor of the Chicago

Broad Ax was an ardent Democrat, and resented Washington's
involvement in Republican patronage politics. Taylor typified
Washington as 'the Great Beggar of Tuskegee' and 'the greatest
white man's nigger in the world', and warned in 1899:

The time is not far distant when Booker T. Washington will be

repudiated as the leader of our race, for he believes that only mealy-
mouthed Negroes like himself should be involved in politics. 36

William Monroe Trotter, the fiery editor of the Boston Guardian,

was an early and bitter critic of Washington. WheaAndrew Carnegie
donated $600,000 to Tuskegee, Trotter expressed trTe^hopeThal~
Washington would no longer need to engage in fund-raising tours,
and asserted:

39
 Black Leadership in America

This man, whatever good he may do, has injured and is injuring the
race more than he can aid it by his school. Let us hope that Booker
Washington will remain mouth-closed at Tuskegee. If he will do this,
all his former sins will be forgiven.

Taking issue with Washington's reported statement that the

premium
revised constitutions of the Southern states had placed 'a
on intelligence, ownership of property, thrift and character', Trotter
accused him of self-deception and asked rhetorically:

What man is a worse enemy to the race than a leader who looks with

equanimity on the disfranchisement of his race in a country where

other races have universal suffrage, by constitutions that make one
rule for his race and another for the dominant race?

Trotter deplored Washington's rise to fame, and charged him

with being the 'Benedict Arnold' of the black race. He appealed
for a 'black Patrick Henry' who would save his people from the
dangers into which Washington had led them, one who would
inspire them rather with the words 'Give Me Liberty or Give Me
Death'.3v
But the most searching, reasoned and influential critique of
Washington's precepts and policies was produced J331 W. E. B. Du
Bois (see Chapter 3), in his seminal essay 'Of Mr Booker T.
hington and Others', a chapter of The Souls of Black Folk

5f (1903). Although he began by conceding that: 'Easily the most

striking thing in the history of the American Negro since 1876 is
the ascendency of Mr Booker T. Washington' Du Bois charged
that Washington's leadership had resulted in (if it had not directly
encouraged) black disfranchisement, the creation of an inferior
civil status for blacks, and the withdrawal of funds from institutions
of higher training for Negroes. Washington, he suggested, faced a
'triple paradox' in that:

1. He is striving to make Negroes artisans, businessmen and property

owners; but it is utterly impossible under modern competitive

methods, for workingmen and property owners to defend their
rights and exist without the right of suffrage.

2. He on thrift and self-respect, but at the same time counsels a

insists
submission to civic inferiority such as is bound to sap the
silent
manhood of any race in the long-run.
3. He advocates common school and industrial training, and
deprecates institutions of higher learning; but neither the Negro
common schools, nor Tuskegee itself, could remain open one day
were it not for teachers trained in Negro colleges, or trained by
their graduates.

40
 Booker T. Washington: Black Enigma

Although he paid tribute to Washington's achievements in placating

the white South, and in shrewdly appealing to the spirit of
commercialism in the North.Jju Bois p ronoun ced Washing ton's^
vj_sion_narr ow, crassand j2£^mistic^ Washington, he concluded,
represented Negro thought the^^kP attitude of adju stmgiit_anj^
'in
submissionjjgjames Weldon Johnson recalled that Du Bois' critique
provided a rallying point for blacks opposed to Washington 'and
made them articulate, thereby creating a split of the race into two
contending camps'.^ The Niagara Movement of 1905, and its
successor, the NAACP (see Chapter 3) were to institutionalize
opposition to Washington. Washington's responses to his black
critics consisted of a few half-hearted (and abortive) attempts at
reconciliation and cooperation, together with unremitting efforts to
influence, infiltrate or sabotage their organizations. In 1904 he
persuaded the Du Bois-led faction to attend a secret meeting to
iron out their differences. This New York conference (held in
Carnegie Hall) was marked by mutual suspicions, and failure to
achieve a truce or agreement between the Washington and Du Bois
forces. With the support of such benefactors as Andrew Carnegie,
Washington controlled the proceedings, outmanoeuvered his
opponents, and secured the election of loyal followers to a Committee
of Twelve for the Advancement of the Negro Race, a purely advisory
body which, during its brief existence, reported directly back
Tuskegee.
Wajihiiigion keen4y-j^s_ejnted ajrvy challenges. -to his leadershi
As Du Bois was essentially a power
later confirmed, their conflict
struggle, couched in terms of differences in educational and political
ideology. With some real justification, Washington argued that his
Northern-based black critics had no real appreciation of racial
conditions in the South. In a revealing letter, written in 1911,
Washington summarized what he regarded as the outstanding
differences between himself and Du Bois.

I believe that the Negro race is making progress. ..that it is better for
""the race to emphasize its opportunities than to lay over-much stress on
its disadvantages. He believes the Negro race is making little progress.
we should cultivate an ever manly, stj^iglitfonvard LgtyC/tC,
I believe that
man ner an d frie ndly relations between white people and black people.
^^
DuTSois pursues this policy of stirring up strife between white and
black people... he fails to realize that it is a work of construction that
is before us now and not a work of destruction.
40

For his part, Du Bois, during his long life, continually revised
his estimates of Washington, presenting him in a more sympathetic

41
Black Leadership in America

light, and stressing the significant differences in their background

and education. But it was his essay 'Of Mr Booker T. Washington'
that propelled Du Bois into the position of a rival black leader.

ASSESSMENT
In the circumstances of his time and place, Washington evolved a
programme and strategy designed to secure the acquiescence of
Southern and Northern whites in the educational and economic
elevation of a rural black peasantry (recently 'up from slavery'),
and an aspiring urban black bourgeoisie. Aware that slavery had
brought physical labour into disrepute, Washington - in tune with
his age - preached a gospel of hard-work, self-help and self-
reliance. His advocacy of industrial education reflected this belief,
as it also reconciled Southern whites to the idea of any form of
education for blacks. Tuskegee Institute, the Tuskegee Machine,
and the carefully-crafted phrase of the 'Atlanta Compromise' and
other addresses, made Washington's position as the most visible
black leader of his day virtually impregnable. Above all, Washington
was a master tactician, interracial diplomat and archetypal 'trickster'.
In many respects, he bears an unfortunate (but intentional)
resemblance to Dr A. Herbert Bledsoe, the black college principal
in Ralph Ellison's novel, Invisible Man. Describing his methods
and rise to power in the South to the ingenuous narrator, Bledsoe
could well have been retailing Washington's personal success
formula:

Negroes don't control this school or much of anything else. True they
support it, but I control it. I's big and black and I say 'Yes, sun', as
loudly as any burrhead, when its convenient. ...The only ones I even
pretend to please are big white folk, and even those I control more
than they control me. I tell them; that's my life, telling white folks
how to think about the things I know about. ...It's a nasty deal and I
don't like it myself. But I didn't make it and I know that I can't
change it. I had to be strong and purposeful to get where I am. I had
to wait and lick around. I had to act the nigger. I don't even insist that
it was worth it, but now I'm here and I mean to stay - after you win

the game you take the prize and keep it and protect it; there's nothing
else to do. 41

Despite repeated invitations to move North, Washington realized

that his work lay in the South, although the growing criticism
from Northern black critics forced him, in later years, to sharpen

42
 Booker T. Washington: Black Enigma

his portrayals of persisting racial inequalities. In a period of

worsening race relations, Washington continued to build up the
resources and reputation of Tuskegee, and secured philanthropic
funding for other Southern black schools and colleges. Unable to
prevent the erosion of black voting rights, escalating racial violence
and economic exploitation, Washington attempted (both publicly
and privately) to hold the line. As Myrdal noted, Washington, his
critics to the contrary,was never a totally 'accommodating' race
leader, and looked to complete equality as the 'ultimate goal' of
black leadership. Dependent on the support of Northern sympathizers
and Southern white paternalists, Washington balanced on a precarious
tight-rope. Myrdal concluded that:

For his time, and for the region where he worked and where the nine-
tenths of all Negroes lived, his policy of abstaining from talks of
rights and of 'casting down your buckets where you are' was entirely
realistic. 42

Washington's faults were glaring - his astigmatism on the

intensity and prevalence of white racial prejudice, his unquestioning
acceptance of the normative values of white America, his unabashed
materialism and philistinism, his tendency to blame blacks for
their condition, his paranoid jealousy of other black spokespersons.
Yet he also promoted public health measures for blacks and supported
black enterprises - notably, the National Negro Business League,
which anticipated later forms of economic black nationalism.
Moreover, the National Urban League (see Chapter 4), grew out
of organizations that subscribed to Washington's advice to Southern
rural blacks. In its emphasis on training, the NUL echoed and
amplified one of Washington's favourite themes, while his obsession
with the tooth-brush foreshadowed the League's efforts to instruct
black migrants in the rudimentary practices of urban life.

Most importantly, during the years of Washington's ascendancy

(which coincided with increasing hardships, proscriptions and
dangers for Negroes), militant black protest and agitation in the
South was not simply unrealistic, but might have proved a warrant
for genocide. The last black leader to emerge from slavery,
Washington lived dangerously, forced in Langston Hughes' phrase
to spend most of his life with his head 'in the lion's mouth'. Not
only was Washington attacked by black 'radicals', he also failed
to mollify Southern black extremists. Addressing the Peace Jubilee
in Chicago, celebrating the end of the Spanish-American War,
Washington (unguardedly) declared that racial hatred, especially in

43
Black Leadership in America

the South, was a 'cancer' that would one day destroy the nation.
Southern whites were displeased - but Washington's assertion that
the victims of lynching in the South 'are invariably vagrants, men
without property and standing', more than made amends for such
slips of the tongue. Thomas Dixon, Jr, author of The Clansman:
An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905), alleged that
Washington, precisely because of his skill in disguising his real
aims, was quietly preparing the way for the amalgamation of the
races, or (and equally dangerous), the building of a separate Negro
nation. Even Washington's endorsement of industrial training for
blacks was subversive, since 'if there is one thing a Southern white
cannot endure it is an educated negro'. By the same token,
Washington's efforts to make the Negro into a potential competitor
in the market-place with the white man could only end in bloodshed. 43
Booker T. Washington, one of his biographers contends, has not
been accorded a fair evaluation 'partly because his methods were
too compromising and unheroic to win him a place in the black
pantheon, but also because he was too complex and enigmatic for
historians to know what to make of him'. 44
Yet, as J. R. Pole suggests, Washington's role-playing (which
certainly exacted a price in nervous tension and exhaustion),
although devious, was not unique:

In many ways he emerges as a type remarkable for its familiarity

among the operators of American interest groups - that familiarity
being disguised by skin pigmentation. He worked assiduously within
the system, to whose economic and political conventions he faithfully
subscribed; he took conservative views of larger social causes while
showing great tactical skill in maintaining his own personal power
base. 45

Throughout the South, in the era of Jim Crow, local black

leaders, in the main, followed policies of racial conservatism,
stressing economic opportunity over social equality, and espousing
a Washingtonian gospel of black progress through thrift, material
accumulation and industrial training. And, as N. R. McMillen
states of black leaders in Mississippi in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, they (and their counterparts elsewhere)
'conceded nothing to whites that had not already been taken by
force'. 46Although there is no scholarly consensus on Booker T.
Washington's achievement (or limitations) as a black leader, he
certainly should not be blamed for the failure of black Americans
to secure racial equality, however defined, in his own lifetime or
afterwards. He has been blamed for too much anyway.

44
 Booker T. Washington: Black Enigma

As Martin Luther King judiciously observed, Washington should

not be dismissed simply as 'an Uncle Tom who compromised for
the sake of keeping the peace'. His sincerely-held belief was that
'if the South was not pushed too far ... it would voluntarily rally

to the Negro's cause'. But his faith was misplaced and reviled.

Washington's error was that he underestimated the structures of evil;

as a consequence, his philosophy of pressureless persuasion only
served as a springboard for racist Southerners to dive into deeper and
more ruthless oppression of the Negro. 47

REFERENCES

1. Du Bois, W. E. B., Dusk of Dawn, (New York, 1940), pp.78-9.

2. Baker, Henry, born 1854, Alabama, interviewed, 1938, in John W.
Blassingame (ed.), Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches,

and Autobiographies (Louisiana State UP, 1977), p. 675.

Interviews,
3. Rosengarten, T., All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw (New
York, 1974), pp.568-9.
4. Rabinowitz, H. N., Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865-1890
(Oxford UP, New York, 1978).
5. Wright, Richard, Black Boy (London, 1947), pp. 253-4.
6. McMillen, N. R., Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of
Jim Crow (University of Illinois Press, 1989), p.228.

7. Woodward, C. Vann, Origins of the New South (Louisiana State UP,

1951), p.356.
8. Harlan, L. R. et al. (eds), The Booker T. Washington Papers: Vol I

(University of Illinois Press, 1972), p. 215. (cited hereafter as Papers).

9. Papers, Vol. IV (1975), p.92.
10. Papers, Vol. I (1972), p.236.

11. Norrell, R. J., Reaping the Whirlwind: The Civil Rights Movement in

Tuskegec (New York, 1985), p. 14.

12. Harlan, L. R., Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader,

1 865-1901 (Oxford U.P., New York, 1972), p. 110.

13. Papers, Vol. II (1972), p.256,p.258.

14. Ibid., p.194.

15. The entire Atlanta Address is reproduced in Up From Slavery (various

editions) and in Papers, Vol. I.

16. Gaston, P. M., The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking
(Louisiana State U.P., 1970), p.147.
17. Papers, Vol. Ill (1971), p.29.

18. Logan, R. W., The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes

45
Black Leadership in America

to Woodrow Wilson (London, 1965), p.285.

19. Meier, A., Negro Thought in America, 1880-1915 (University of
Michigan Press, 1963), p. 101.

20. Johnson, J. W., Black Manhattan (New York, 1930), pp. 13 1-2.
21. Papers, Vol. I (1972), p.56.

22. Washington, Booker T., Frederick Douglass (London, 1906), pp. 3-4.
23. Foner, P. S. (ed.), The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass (New
York, 1950), Vol. IV, pp.149-50.
24. Papers, Vol. I (1972), pp.258-9.
25. Littlejohn, D., Black on White: A Critical Survey of Writing by
American Negroes, (New York, 1966), p. 30.

26. Harlan, Making of a Black Leader, op. cit., p. 248.

27. Thornbrough, E. L., Washington As Seen By His White

'Booker T.

Contemporaries', Journal of Negro History, 53 (1968), p. 172.

28. Harlan, L. R., Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee,
1901-1915 (Oxford U. P., New York, 1983), p.5.
29. Papers, Vol. II (1972), p.271.
30. Washington, Booker T., New Republic, 4 December 1915.
31. Harlan, Wizard of Tuskegee, op. cit., p. 284.

32. Papers, Vol. Ill (1974), p.377.

33. Harlan, Wizard of Tuskegee, op. cit., p. 424.

34. Foner, P. S., 'Is Booker T. Washington's Idea Correct?', Journal of

Negro History, 55 (1970), p.344.
35. Harlan, Making of a Black Leader, op. cit., p. 226.

36. Nielson, D. G., Black Ethos: Northern Urban Negro Life & Thought,
1890-1930 (London, 1977), pp. 199-200.
37. Meier, A., E. Rudwick & F. L. Broderick (eds), Black Protest Thought
in the Twentieth Century (2nd edn, New York, 1971), pp.32-35.
38. Du Bois, W. E. B., The Souls of Black Folk (New York, 1968 edn.),

pp.48-9.
39. Johnson, Black Manhattan, op. cit., p. 134.
40. Papers, Vol. X, (1981), pp.608-9.
41. Ellison, Ralph, Invisible Man (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1952), p. 11 9.

42. Myrdal, An American Dilemma (New York, 1944), p.741.

43. Thornbrough, 'Booker T. Washington As Seen By His White
Contemporaries', op. cit., p. 180.
44. Harlan, Making of a Black Leader, op. cit., p.vii.
45. Pole, R., 'Of Mr Booker T. Washington and Others,' in Paths to
J.

the American Past (Oxford U.P., 1979), pp. 184-5.

46. McMillen, Dark Journey, op. cit., p. 300
47. King, M. L., Where Do We Go From Here?: Chaos or Community?
(New York, 1967), p. 129.

46
 CHAPTER THREE
W.E.B.DuBois:
Talented Propagandist

My first clear memory of Dr Du Bois was my pride in his recognized

scholarship and his authority in many fields of work and writing. We
Negro students joined the NAACP which Dr Du Bois helped to
organize and build; we read religiously Crisis of which he was editor
for so many years, and in which he wrote clearly, constructively and
militantly on thecomplex problems of the American scene, on the
Negro question, on Africa, on world affairs. [PAUL ROBESON] 1

read Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk in my home and his novel
I first

The Quest of the Silver Fleece. He writes, my father would say, but he
doesn't lead anybody. 2

PERSPECTIVES: NORTHERN BLACKS ORGANIZE FOR

PROTEST, 1890-1910

The late nineteenth century saw several attempts at the formation of

Negro movements to protest against racial discrimination and
Washingtonian accommodationism. In 1890, delegates met in
Chicago at the call of T. Thomas Fortune, editor of the New York Age,
and the most able black journalist of his day. Three years earlier,
1897 Fortune had appealed to blacks to organize a National Afro-American
League which would agitate for the removal of six principal
grievances: the suppression of voting rights in the South, which had
the effect of denying blacks political participation in the states where
they were most numerous; the prevalence of mob rule and lynching in
the South; the inequitable distribution of funds between black and

47
Black Leadership in America

white schools; the degrading prison system in the South; discrimina-

tion and segregation on Southern railroads, and the denial of
accommodations to blacks in public places. Writing from Tuskegee,
Booker T. Washington supported these proposals, and the Chicago
convention adopted a constitution along the lines recommended by
Fortune - the desired goals to be secured by appeals to public opinion,
and non-violent demonstrations. By 1893, however, Fortune
litigation
announced that the League was defunct because of lack of funds and
inadequate support. In 1898, at a meeting in Rochester, New York, the
League was revived as the National Afro-American Council, with a
statement of objectives similar to those of the original League
platform. Conceived as a comprehensive civil rights organization, the
Council during its ten year existence was largely ineffectual, and rent
by factionalism. Washington did not hold any office in the Council,
but through his friendship with Fortune became a dominant influence
in its activities. Inevitably, black responses to the Council reflected, to
a large extent, approval for or opposition to Washington's policies.
When W. E. B. Du young professor at Atlanta University, was
Bois, a
made Negro business scheme promoted by the Council,
director of a
Washington sensed a challenge to his leadership and formed the
National Negro Business League - with the help of a list of black
businessmen provided for him by Du Bois.
While the Afro-American Council continued to be dominated by
Washingtonians, a group of twenty-nine black 'radicals', responding
to an appeal by Du Bois, met on the Canadian side of the Niagara
Falls, in July 1905, to form an organization opposed to Washington
and the influence of the Tuskegee Machine. The Niagara Movement,
which resulted from this meeting, placed responsibility for the racial
problem squarely on whites. Its demands included: freedom of speech
and criticism - an oblique reference to the Tuskegee Machine;
manhood suffrage for all black Americans; the eradication of caste
distinctions based on colour; universal common school education (to
include federal aid and the chance of higher education for all blacks);
equal employment opportunities and constant agitation as the strategy
to secure Negro rights.
In many respects, the Niagara Movement reflected the aspirations
of the college-educated black elite and its determination to effect
profound changes in American race relations through direct action.
The white journalist, Ray Stannard Baker, surveying American race
relations in the early twentieth century, noted of the Niagara
Movement: 'The party led by Dr Du Bois is a party of protest which
endeavours to prevent Negro separation and discrimination against

48
 W.E.B. Du Bois: Talented Propagandist

Negroes by political agitation and political influence. '3 Predictably,

Booker T. Washington was opposed to the Niagara Movement from its
inception, and his obstructionist tactics and ubiquitous influence
undermined the organization, which was never able to gain white
support. It was also unable to gain an appreciable following among the
masses of blacks, and went down to short-term defeat as a protest
movement. But the Niagara Movement was further evidence of the
growing dissatisfaction of Northern blacks with Washington's
Southern-style leadership and claim to be regarded as spokesman of
the race. Ray Stannard Baker characterized Washington as 'an
opportunist and optimist who 'teaches that if the Negro wins by real
worth a strong economic position in this country, other rights and
privileges will come to him naturally'. And, Baker added, 'many
highly educated Negroes, especially in the North, dislike and oppose
him [Washington]'. 4 To Myrdal, writing in the 1940s, the Niagara
Movement signified:

the organized attempt to raise the Negro protest against the great
first

reaction after the Reconstruction. Its main importance was that it brought

to open conflict and wide public debate two types of Negro strategy - one
stressing accommodation and the other raising the Negro protest. Booker
T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois became national symbols for these
two main streams of Negro thought. 5

By 1903, the Niagara Movement had ceased to be an effective

organization, but had laid the foundation for the National Association
for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), a bi-racial
coalition of black radicals and white liberals, pledged to advance
black civil and political rights - and a more serious challenge to
Washington's hegemony.
In the summer of 1908, a race riot in Springfield, Illinois, home of
Abraham Lincoln, resulted in the deaths of eight Negroes, fifty injured
people, and a mass exodus of blacks from the city. William E. Walling,
a white Kentuckian, socialist and social worker, reporting the incident
in an article entitled 'The Race War in the North', issued an appeal for
a revival of the spirit of the abolitionist crusade, and urged the
formation of a national organization of whites and blacks to work for
social justice. Among those responding to Walling's appeal were Mary
White Ovington, a wealthy Northerner from an abolitionist
background, who had just completed the study of blacks in New York
City, and Henry Moskowitz, a Jewish social worker. At their
suggestion, Oswald Garrison Villard, grandson of William Lloyd
Garrison, and editor of the New York Post, issued a 'call' on the
centennial of Lincoln's birth, for a national conference to debate 'the

49
Black Leadership in America

renewal of the struggle for civil and political liberty'. Those

responding to the call included such leading white Progressive
reformers as Jane Addams, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and the
'muckraking' journalists Ray Stannard Baker and Lincoln Steffens.
Black respondents included Du Bois, the militant educationalist Ida
Wells Barnett (who had earlier been active in the formation of the first
national organization for Negro women), and Bishop Alexander
Walters, who had served in the National Afro-American League and
its successor, the Afro-American Council. The conference was held in

the spring of 1909, as the National Negro Committee Conference.

Booker T. Washington declined an invitation to attend on the grounds
that he did not wish to jeopardize his work in the South, and was
interested only in 'progressive, constructive' work for the race, and
not in 'agitation and criticism'. In his address to the Conference, Du
Bois emphasized the interrelatedness of politics and economics, but
avoided attacking (or naming) Washington directly. Resolutions were
adopted condemning the repression of blacks, appealing to the federal
government to compel the Southern states to honour the 14th and 15th
amendments, and demanding that black children receive a propor-
tional share of educational appropriations. Although the Conference
organizers were anxious not to alienate Booker T. Washington, black
delegates rejected a proposal inviting him to join the steering
committee, and forced through a resolution which clearly indicated
opposition to his policies:

We fully agree with the prevailing opinion that the transformation of the
unskilled coloured labourers in industry and agriculture into skilled wor-
kers of vital importance to the race and to the nation, but we demand
is

for the Negroes as for all others a free and complete education, whether
by city, state, or nation, a grammar school and industrial training for all,
and technical, professional and academic education for the most gifted. 6

Although Villard attempted to prevent the Committee from taking

an anti-Washingtonian stance, Washington^ stated that he would have
no association with the body unless guarantees were given that neither
Du Bois nor William Monroe Trotter would formulate its policies. In
1910 the National Negro Committee changed its name to the National
Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, with the white
lawyer and Progressive reformer Moorfield Storey, as president. The
announced aim of the new organization was 'to make 11,000,000
Americans physically free from peonage, mentally free from
ignorance, politically free from disfranchisement, and socially free
from insult'.
From its inception, the NAACP put its emphasis on effecting

50
 W.E.B. Du Bois: Talented Propagandist

change by lobbying for corrective legislation, educating public

opinion, and securing favourable court decisions. Its first judicial
victory came in 1915, when it secured a Supreme Court ruling that
Oklahoma's 'grandfather clause', designed to withhold the ballot from
blacks, was unconstitutional. By 1914, there were thirteen blacks on<\
the Association's Board of Directors, most of whom had earlier
belonged to the Niagara Movement, and the NAACP had 6,000
members in fifty branches, and a circulation of over 31,000 for its
magazine Crisis. Washington declared his opposition to the NAACP,
and expressed concern that white delegates to the 1910 meeting had
gulled blacks into believing that they could achieve progress 'by
merely making demands, passing resolutions and cursing somebody'. 7
When Du Bois accepted an invitation to take up the post of Director of
Publications and research for the NAACP, any hope of a
rapprochement between the organization and the Tuskegee Machine
was lost. Already perceived as Washington's most formidable black
critic, Du Bois, as editor of Crisis, consolidated his reputation as the
most gifted propagandist of the black protest impulse.

W. E. B. DU BOIS: CURRICULUM VITAE

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Great Barrington,
Massachusetts in 1868, the year of president Andrew Johnson's
impeachment; he died in Ghana in 1963, in self-imposed exile, at the
time of the civil rights March on Washington. A poet, novelist,
historian, sociologist and essayist, Du Bois occupies a towering
position in Afro-American letters. An outstanding scholar and teacher,
Du Bois also became a political activist, founding member of the
NAACP and editor of its journal Crisis - in all of these roles, he was
consistently the champion of racial justice. At various points of his
long career, Du Bois was the declared opponent of Booker T.
Washington and Marcus Garvey - yet had more in common with them
than he cared to admit. Du Bois was also a socialist and Communist,
an integrationist and advocate of a form of voluntary segregation, a
black nationalist and a pioneering Pan-Africanist. A supporter of
black American participation in World War I, he became a pacifist and
a Soviet/Chinese sympathizer during the Cold War of the 1950s. An
elitist who singularly lacked the common touch and championed the

cause of the 'Talented Tenth', Du Bois was aloof, arrogant and

visionary. During the 1930s he was to alienate the black bourgeoisie

51
Black Leadership in America

and intelligentsia who had earlier supported his integrationist

'radicalism'. Despite claims by some admirers to the contrary, Du
Bois' intellectual biography is marked by ambivalence, inconsistency
and change. An ardent admirer of Western cultural values and
achievements, he was also the impassioned spokesman for racial pride
and consciousness as the prerequisites for black advancement. Du
Bois expressed his fundamental ambivalence concerning racial and
national identity in his essay 'Of Our Spiritual Strivings' in The Souls
of Black Folk.
One ever feels his two-ness - an American, a Negro; two souls, two
\ thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideas in one dark body,
whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The
history of the American Negro is the history of this Strife - this longing
to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better
and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the old selves to be
lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to
teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his soul in a flood of
white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message to
teach the world. 8 <^aji_ *? /*f5 -4<?v G^wx>Ui7 -v^
To no black American is this statement more applicable than to Du
Bois himself.
Of French Huguenot, Dutch and Negro ancestry, Du Bois described
his racial background as consisting of 'a flood of Negro blood, a strain
of French, a bit of Dutch, but thank God! no 'Anglo-Saxon". 9
Although his father deserted his family soon after Du Bois was born,
his childhood in Great Barrington, a town of about 5,000 with only a
few Negroes, was apparently a happy one. It was only when he and his
classmates decided to exchange visiting cards, and one girl refused to
accept his, that Du Bois, already conscious of his darker complexion,
felt a 'vast veil' had shut him off from his white companions.

An exceptional high school student, Du Bois, at the age of fifteen,

contributed literary, political and social essays to the New York Globe
and the New York Freeman. In these early pieces, he urged blacks to
join the local temperance movement, to form a literary society, and to
take a greater interest in politics. In 1885, he won a scholarship to
attend Fisk University, a black college in Tennessee, where he first
encountered extreme racism and, simultaneously, began to cultivate
his identity as an Afro-American.
No one but a Negro going into the South without previous experience of
colour caste can have any conception of its barbarism. ..I was thrilled to
be for the first time among so many people of my own colour or rather of
such extraordinary colours, which I had only glimpsed before, but who it
seemed were bound to me by new and exciting eternal ties.. ..Into this
world I leapt with enthusiasm: henceforward I was a Negro. 10

52
 W. E. B. Du Bois: Talented Propagandist

At Fisk, Du Bois also encountered rural poverty and ignorance at

firsthand, when for two summers he taught in black schools in
Tennessee. The experience confirmed his growing belief in the power
of education and reason to resolve racial conflict and secure black
advancement. Simultaneously, it also increased his awareness of the
enormous intellectual gulf between himself and the generality of the
black people.
Graduating from Fisk in 1888, Du Bois entered Harvard, where he
was greatly influenced by the philosophers William James, Josiah
Royce and George Santayana, gained a BA degree in 1890, and an MS
in the following year. As a graduate student in history at Harvard, Du
Bois left for Europe in 1892, on a scholarship from the Slater Fund, to
study abroad. He enrolled at the University of Berlin for courses in
history,economics and sociology, where he studied under the
economist Gustav Schmoller and the historian Heinrich von
Treitschke, having already decided to take a PhD in social science. A
declared admirer of Bismarck, who had created the German state
through the force of his will and personality, Du Bois' later Pan-
Africanism was undoubtedly influenced by his exposure to the rise of
German national consciousness. His stay in Germany also acquainted
him with socialist theory and practice.
On his return to America in 1894, Du Bois had also arrived at his

basic intellectual and ideological convictions. The Negro race, Du

Bois believed, could only advance through its own self-help and the
assistance by whites of good will. Black leadership must be provided
by the race's intellectuals - the 'Talented Tenth' - who would inspire
their own people while seeking aid and stimulation from whites. At
Harvard, he claimed to have 'conceived the idea of applying
philosophy to an historical interpretation of race relations', and saw
the discipline of sociology 'as the science of human action'. 11 In his

PhD dissertation The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the

United States of America, 1638-1870, Du Bois argued that moral
cowardice encouraged by greed, had seen the continuation of the trade
after it had been prohibited by law; its suppression had resulted
from a
mixture of humanitarian, economic and political pressures. His
original and provocative thesis was published in 1896 as the first
volume in the Harvard Historical Series, and Du Bois seemed destined
for an academic career.
From 1894-96 he was a professor of Latin and Greek at
Wilberforce University, a black college in Ohio - having rejected an
offer from Booker T. Washington to teach mathematics at Tuskegee.
(In the first autobiography, Du Bois notes wryly: 'It would be

53
Black Leadership in America

interesting to speculate just what would have happened if I had

accepted the ...offer Tuskegee instead of that at Wilberforce.' 12
at
Repelled by the religious fervour which frequently erupted at
Wilberforce in the form of spiritual revivals, Du Bois gratefully
accepted an invitation from the University of Pennsylvania to carry
out a study of the black population of Philadelphia. The Philadelphia
Negro (1899), was a sociological work which criticized the city's
blacks for their immorality, criminality, neglect of education, failure
to organize for social betterment, and the inattention of the Negro
middle class to its White Philadelphians were
potential for leadership.
judged guilty of racist attitudes, and were urged to cooperate with
'better' Negroes by recognizing class and status distinctions within
the black community. Widely regarded as a model study of an urban
black community, The Philadelphia Negro established Du Bois'
academic reputation. Research for the book also broadened his racial
outlook, and he later confessed: 'I became painfully that merely being
born in a group, does not necessarily make one possessed of complete
knowledge concerning it. I had learned far more from Philadelphia
Negroes than I taught them concerning the Negro problem.' 13
From 1897 to 1910, Du Bois was Professor of Sociology and
History at Atlanta University, where he directed the preparation and
publication of a series of studies which documented the existence of
segregation in every area of American life - in labour unions, prisons,
business and industry. But significantly, in view of his contro-
versial proposal for 'voluntary segregation' in the 1930s, the Atlanta
Studies also acknowledged segregation as a unifying force in black
life. In this period also, Du Bois refined and amplified his con- ception
of blackness and the meaning of the Afro-American experience. 'The
Conservation of Races', an address delivered to the newly-formed
American Negro Academy in 1897, and published as a pamphlet, was
Du Bois' most detailed statement on the nature of racial prejudice and
discrimination, and included a call for the black community to
maintain a separate racial identity. Discounting the existence of
meaningful physical differences between the races, Du Bois claimed
that there were 'spiritual and physical differences' between them.
Where the English had bestowed on the world ideas of constitutional
liberty and commercial freedom, and the Germans, discoveries in
science and philosophy, black people still had to reveal their gifts and

qualities. These gifts, celebrated by Du Bois in The Souls of Black

Folk, were those of 'pathos and humour', folk tales and artistic and
musical abilities. He advised the American Negro Academy to seek
'to comprise something of the best thought, the most unselfish

54
 W.E.B.Du Bois: Talented Propagandist

striving and the highest ideals'. 14

During the early 1900s Du Bois, although deeply engaged in
scholarship, was increasingly convinced that the worsening racial
situation required more direct confrontation. The publication of The
Souls of Black Folk, with its critique of Washington, his own activities
as an organizer of the Niagara Movement and author of its Manifesto
in 1905, and his response which saw the founding of the
to the call
NAACP, completed Du Bois' transition from academician to
propagandist. Opposed to Washington's accommodationism, Negro
allegiance to the Republican party, and the complete assimilation of
blacks into the white American way of life, Du Bois, as editor of
Crisis, offered his alternative visions of the present condition and
future prospects of Afro-Americans.

CRISIS EDITOR

The first issue of Crisis appeared in November 1910, with a

was selling 16,000 copies
circulation of 1,000 copies; within a year, it

monthly. As editor of the magazine from 1910 to 1934, Du Bois

acknowledged that during this period:

The span of my life. ..is chiefly the story of The Crisis under my
editorship. ...I determined from the beginning to make my work with the
Association not that of executive secretary but editor of its official
organ.... With thisorgan of propaganda and defence we were able to
organize one of the most effective assaults of liberalism upon reaction
that the modern world has seen....If...77ie Crisis had not been in a sense a
personal organ and expression of myself, it could not possibly have
attained its popularity and effectiveness. 15

Certainly, some of Du Bois' finest (and most polemical) prose

appeared in his monthly editorials. Determined from the outset that
the journal would reflect his own ideas (even when they ran counter to
those of the NAACP leadership), Du Bois aimed his editorial shafts at
the literate, middle class black public. He regularly criticized the
South for its inhuman treatment of blacks, as evidenced by
segregation, white primaries, the convict lease system and lynching.
Early issues also featured editorials and articles on 'Coloured High
Schools', 'The Coloured College Athlete', and 'Women's Clubs', and
repeated assertions that blacks possessed a superior spiritual sense
and beauty that made them a chosen people. Du Bois called for
resistance to attempts being made outside the South to institute

55
Black Leadership in America

segregated schools, attacked the black churches for their racial

conservatism, and defended the rights of women - in particular, their
right to vote. Anticipating later theorists, Du Bois stressed the links
between Afro-American and women's political liberation:

Every argument for Negro suffrage is an argument for women's suffrage;

every argument for women's suffrage is an argument for Negro suffrage;
both are great movements in democracy.

He was, however, also concerned about the racism in the contempo-

rary white women's movement, and predicted that 'the women's vote,
particularly in the South, will be cast almost unanimously, at first, for
every reactionary Negro-hating piece of legislation'. Aware of the
double oppression - racial and sexual - suffered by black American
women, Du Bois stated in Darkwater: Voices From Within The Veil
(1920) that although he could forgive the South for slavery and its
attempt to destroy the American Union, he could not forgive 'its
wanton and continued and persistent insulting of the black
womanhood it sought and seeks to prostitute to its lust'. 16

The third issue of Crisis carried Du Bois' avowal: 'I am resolved to

be. ..law-abiding, but refuse to cringe in body and soul, to resent
deliberate insult, and to assert my just rights in the face of wanton
aggression' and he recommended black self-defence against white
vigilante mobs.
literary devices, Du Bois
Employing an array of techniques and
wrote and used savage invective and sardonic
in a clear, direct style,
humour to depict racial indignities and atrocities. In 1911, he
dramatically described a lynching in Pennsylvania:

Ah, the splendour of that Sunday night dance. The flames curled and beat
against the moonlight sky. The church bells chimed. The scorched and
crooked thing, self-wounded and chained to his cot, crawled to the edge
of the ash with a stifled groan, but the brave and sturdy farmers pricked
him back with the bloody pitchforks until the deed was done. Let the
eagle scream! Civilization is again safe! 17

In 1914, Du Bois published a letter of an anonymous witness to the

lynching of Samuel Petty, accused of having killed a Deputy Sheriff in
Leland, Mississippi:

The man who had killed the officer submitted to arrest by the mob,
which. ..numbered about 400. Placing a rope around his neck he was led to
the centre of the town and in the presence of women and children they
proceeded to hold a conference as to the kind of death that should be
meted out to him. Some yelled to hang him; some to burn him alive. It
was decided in a few minutes. Willing hands brought a large dry-goods
box, placed it in the centre of the street; in it was straw on which was

56
 W.E.B. Du Bois: Talented Propagandist

poured a tub of oil; then the man was lifted with a rope around his neck
and placed in this box head down, and then another tub of oil was poured
over him. A man from the crowd deliberately lit a match and set fire to
the living man. ...the poor creature managed to lift himself out of the box,
a mass of flames, and. ..attempted to run. The crowd allowed him to run to
the length of the rope. ...until he reached a distance of about twenty feet;
then a yell went up. ..to shoot. In an instant there were several hundred
shots and the creature fell in his tracks. ...Not a voice was heard in the
defence of the man. ...I looked into the faces of men whom I knew to be
officers to the town lending a willing hand in the burning of this man. 18

In 1919, after an intensive investigation, the NAACP published

Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889-1918, which
estimated that 3,224 black men and women had been lynched during
only 19 per cent of these cases had rape or other forms
this period. In
of sexual assault been alleged - despite the South's repeated
contention that lynching was 'necessary' as a means of protecting its

white women from black ravishment. During the First World War, The
Crisis publicized the rising incidence of lynch law, most dramatically
in a 1916 account (published as an eight-page supplement) of the
seizure and lynching of Jesse Washington, a mentally retarded
adolescent, sentenced to death for the murder of a white woman in
Waco, Texas. 'The Waco Horror', a report of the episode, complete
with photographic evidence, was used as the opening move in an
NAACP campaign for an Anti-Lynching Fund. Distributed to 42,000
Crisis subscribers, 52 Negro weeklies and 700 white newspapers, it
was also sent to all members of Congress and to a list of 500
'moneyed men' in New York, who were asked to subscribe to the
appeal. The 'Waco Horror' included the information that:

Washington. ..was dragged through the streets, stabbed, mutilated and

finally burned to death in the presence of a crowd of 10,000. After the
death what was left of his body was dragged through the streets and parts
of it sold as souvenirs. His teeth brought $5 a piece and the chain that
bound him 25 cents a link. He was lowered into the fire several times by
means of the chain around his neck. 19

In Dusk of Dawn, Du Bois attributed the increase in lynching

during this period partly to the influence of the motion picture 'The
Birth of a Nation', which, he asserted:

fed to the youth of the nation and to the unthinking masses. ..a story which
twisted the emancipation and enfranchisement of the slave in a great
effort toward universal democracy, into an orgy of theft and degradation
and rape of white women. 20

Du Bois' editorship was marked by almost constant friction

between himself and the NAACP board. At issue was usually

57
Black Leadership in America

disagreement over the relationship between the journal and the

Association. Without consulting the board, Du Bois attacked large
sections of the black press, asserting that they did not publish the true
facts about the racial situation, or consistently support the cause of
civil rights. Irritatedblack editors responded sharply to such attacks
and in 1914, at its annual convention, the NAACP passed a resolution
praising the Negro press and, indirectly, rebuking Du Bois. In
response, Du Bois charged that some of his white critics within the
Association were racists, and argued that the 'Negro problem' could
not be separated from other humanitarian and social concerns of the
day. In these, as in other views, his editorial statements often diverged
from agreed NAACP policy.
On Booker T. in 1915, Du Bois paid him a
Washington's death
critical tribute in Washington was, he conceded, 'the
The Crisis.
greatest Negro leader since Frederick Douglass, and the most
distinguished man, white or black, who has come out of the South
since the Civil War'. He had correctly directed the attention of blacks
to economic development, and stressed the desirability of 'technical
education', and the securing of property. Although he had induced
white Southerners to 'at least think of the Negro as a possible man',
Du Bois concluded that Washington must also bear 'a heavy
responsibility for the consummation of Negro disfranchisement, the
decline of the Negro college and school, and the firmer establishment
of colour caste in this land'. 21
In 1916 Du Bois, with other leading blacks, attended a meeting
called by Joel Springran, a white member of the NAACP, at his home
in Amenia, New York. The 'Amenia Conference', in a series of
conciliatory resolutions, attempted to bridge the differences between
the Washingtonians and their opponents. All forms of education were
declared desirable for blacks; political rights were to be secured
through the cooperation of all black leaders, and 'antiquated subjects
of controversy.. .and factional alignments' were to be eliminated. Nine
years later, Du Bois, recalling the Amenia Conference, professed that:

Itnot only marked the end of the old things and the old thoughts. ..and
ways of attacking the race problem. ..in addition to this it was the
beginning of new things. 22

Yet it was Du Bois himself who soon violated the Amenia principle
of cooperative and concerted black protest. As Crisis editor, he
continued to attack the principle of industrial education, advised
blacks to leave the South and castigated Southern black leaders for
their timidity. The most controversial editorial ever published in The
Crisis was Du Bois' 'Close Ranks' plea of July 1918 which declared:

58
 W. E. B. Du Bois: Talented Propagandist

Let us, while this war lasts, forget our special grievances and close ranks
shoulder to shoulder with our fellow citizens and the allied nations who
are fighting for democracy. We make no ordinary sacrifice, but we make it
gladly with our eyes lifted to the hills. 23

Although he viewed World War I as the consequence of imperial

rivalry between the European powers in Africa, Du Bois supported
American intervention on the side of the Allies. He believed that
participation by American blacks would lead to a lessening of racism
(in the event of an Allied victory), and that the war would promote the

independence of former German colonies. Both assumptions proved

wrong, but, as he remembered in Dusk of Dawn:

I was , in principle, opposed to the war. Everyone is. I pointed out in the
Atlantic Monthly in 1915 how was the cause of
the partition of Africa
conflict. Through my knowledge of Germany, I wished to see her
militarism defeated and for that reason when America entered the War I
believed we would in reality fight for democracy including the coloured
folk and not merely for war investments. 24

(Du Bois had earlier supported president Woodrow Wilson who

was to take America into the war, under the mistaken impression that
he would support Negro rights.) Black radicals denounced the
sentiments expressed in 'Close Ranks', and argued that agitation for
civil rights should not be suspended, despite the emergency created by
American involvement in the war.

A. Philip Randolph, the leading black socialist (and later leader of

the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters) asserted that 'Close Ranks'
was as shameful as Washington's Atlanta Compromise, and castigated
Du Bois as a sycophant. When Du
Bois was offered a commission in
the Intelligence branch of the United States Army, his black critics
accused him of having been bribed to support the policies of the
Wilson administration. In the event, the army withdrew the offer, but
Du Bois' behaviour in the affair, which included the demand that he

should receive $1,000 a year from the NAACP to supplement his army
pay, called into question his judgement and commitment to black

protest. If, as maintained, Du Bois had been an

his critics
accommodationist in time of war, his optimism about black advances
was short-lived. He was angered by continued racial discrimination by
the American Federation of Labour (AFL), and appalled at the race
riots in the 'Red Summer' of 1919 that greeted returning black
veterans. Again, the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan after 1915, and
its rapid growth in American cities exacerbated an already volatile
racial situation. Du Bois' response to these events was his editorial
'Returning Soldiers' of May 1919, which advised blacks to 'return

59
Black Leadership in America

fighting' in the struggle at home against racism. America, victorious

over German imperialism, was still a 'shameful land':

It lynches. And barbarism of a degree of contemptible

lynching is

nastiness unparalleled in human

history. Yet for fifty years we have
lynched two Negroes a week. It disfranchises its own citizens. ...It insults
us.... we are cowards and jackasses if now that the war is over we do not

marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to conquer a sterner, longer,
more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land. We
return. We return from fighting. We return fighting. Make way for
Democracy! 25

'Returning Soldiers' prompted the United States Department of

Justice to investigate The Crisis and other black journals. It published
a condemnatory report, 'Radicalism and Sedition Among Negroes As
Reflected in Their Publications', but did not prosecute.
Between 1918 and 1928 Du Bois, (who had earlier made three trips
to Europe), visited France, England, Belgium, Switzerland, Portugal,
Germany, Russia and Africa. These journeys, he later wrote, 'gave me
a depth of knowledge and a breadth of view which was of incalculable
value for realizing and judging modern conditions and, above all, the
problem of race in America and the world'. 26 While America's racial
conflicts continued to engage most of his attention, Du Bois came to
believe that they must be set in the context of the universal problem of
the 'colour line'. During the 1920s he directed a Crisis campaign
against black colleges and universities which did not have
representative numbers of Negroes on their faculties or in adminis-
trative positions. In 1924 he suggested that the NAACP, the AFL and
the railroad brotherhoods should organize an interracial commission,
with the objective of creating integrated labour unions. But the
NAACP leadership, primarily concerned with issues of political and
civil rights, did not consider the promotion of unionism among blacks
as a cause it could officially support. Du Bois himself was soon to
abandon his earlier tolerant attitude toward organized labour in the
face of increasing discrimination within the labour movement, and his
growing conviction that blacks could not expect white support or good
will.
Although he agreed with other militants that economic considera-
tions were of fundamental importance to the black masses, Du Bois,
during the 1930s and 1940s, no longer considered a black/white
alliance of the disadvantaged to be a possibility, given the intensity of
American racism. Accordingly he proposed the formation of black
economic cooperative enterprises based on socialist principles and the
notions of self-help and cultural nationalism. His assumption was that

60
 W. E.B. Du Bois: Talented Propagandist

as consumers, blacks could (and would) provide a foundation for this

form of collective economic enterprise. In the financially ailing Crisis,
he proposed that blacks should develop this separate economy, and to
the consternation of the NAACP (and many black radicals), advocated
racial 'self-segregation' as the road to ultimate black political and
economic power. While he welcomed the expansion of government
activities under Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, Du Bois did not
expect the administration's policies to effect any sea-change in black-
white relations. And although he conceded that blacks had
undoubtedly gained from New Deal welfare and public works
programmes, Du Bois did not want them to remain dependent on a
supposedly benevolent president. Rather, they should accept the
persistence of racial prejudice, including the reality of enforced
segregation, and develop their own institutions. In presenting the case
for black economic separatism, Du Bois attempted to reassure Crisis
readers that his ideas did not conflict with NAACP objectives and
policies. The Association's traditional opposition to segregation, he
argued, had been in fact opposition to discrimination, and the two
were not necessarily synonymous. Since the NAACP had long
supported such 'segregated' institutions as churches, schools and
newspapers, a self-segregated black economy was simply another step
in the formation of institutions which would bolster black pride and
morale. In essence, Du Bois urged blacks (and the NAACP) to face the
fact of enforced segregation and turn it to advantage. Members of the
'Talented Tenth' should become planners of producer and consumer
cooperatives which would form 'a Negro nation within a nation'.
Blacks should patr onize Negro-owned stores and use th£jeryices of
the^black^rofessional clai^^^^^^ ^fe^t^ -

With the use of their political power, their power as consumers, and their
brain power, added to that of personal appeal which proximity and
neighbourhood always give to human beings, Negroes can develop in the
United States as an economic nation within a nation, able to work through
inner cooperation, to fund its own institutions, to educate its genius, and
same time. ..to keep in helpful touch with the mass of the nation.
at the
This has happened more often than most people realize, in the case of
groups not so obviously separated from the mass of people as are the
American Negroes. It must happen in our case, or there is no hope for the
Negro in America. 27

Walter White (who had succeeded James Weldon Johnson as

executive secretary of the NAACP), claimed that Du Bois' editorial on
'voluntary segregation' had been used by agencies in Washington,
DC, to freeze relief projects for blacks, and reasserted the

61
Black Leadership in America

Association's position was that 'to accept the status of separateness

means inferior accommodations... and spiritual atrophy for the group
segregated'. 28 When the NAACP passed a resolution condemning
'enforced segregation', Du Bois launched a campaign to reorganize
the Association along more 'progressive' lines.
But, in advocating black economic self-sufficiency, and in
appearing to condone - if not actively encourage - racial segregation,
Du Bois was running against the tide of dominant black thought. To
his critics, 'a Negro nation within a nation' smacked of Booker T.
Washington's accommodationism and petty capitalism. Francis
Grimke, a black minister who had participated in the founding of the
NAACP, asserted that Du Bois' apparent acceptance of Jim Crow
signalled the end of his role as a race leader. A Chicago black news-
paper mourned the passing of a 'race champion' and over a picture of
Booker T. Washington placed the caption 'Was He Right After All?';
above Du Bois' picture it asked 'Is He A Quitter?'
Du Bois denied that his proposals bore any resemblance to
Washington's National Negro Business League, which sought to
develop a black economy on the basis of free competition and private
profit, since his own recommendations called for the organization of
an economy based on producers' and consumers' cooperatives. When
the NAACP resolved no official could criticize the Association in
that
Crisis without prior approval, Du Bois ignored the ruling, and
continued to regard the journal as his own personal medium. Black
newspaper editors now expressed concern over the rift in the NAACP,
and sided with the Association against Du Bois. Walter White charged
Du Bois with having compromised with Jim Crow and undermined the
Association's integrationist ideals. On 26 June 1934, Du Bois resigned
from the NAACP and returned to Atlanta University. Accepting his
resignation, and noting that it could 'not subscribe to some of his
criticism of the Association and its officials', the NAACP leadership
paid him a generous (and deserved) tribute. Through The Crisis, he
had:

created what never existed before, a Negro intelligentsia, and many who
have never read a word of his writings are his spiritual disciples and
descendants. We shall be the poorer for his loss, in intellectual stimulus,
and in searching analysis of the vital problems of the American Negro; no
one in the Association can fill his place with the same intellectual grasp. 29

If Du Bois' call for a separate black community failed to win either

majority support, his Pan-African enthusiasms also failed to
elite or
communicate themselves to the NAACP and most readers of The
Crisis.

62
 W.E.B. Du Bois: Talented Propagandist

PAN-AFRICANISM

As a young child, Du Bois heard his grandmother singing a 'heathen

melody' to her children, and, like Alex Haley, sixty years later,
instinctively felt that the strange-sounding words spoke to his African
'roots'.

Do ba-na co-ba, ge-ne me, ge-ne me!

Ben d'nu-li, nu-li, nu-li, bend' le

These lines were handed down orally in the Du Bois family, and
'we sing it to our children, knowing as little as our fathers what its
words may mean, but knowing well the meaning of its music. This
was African music. ...the voice of exile.' 30 After his rejection by the
white children in Great Barrington, and his experiences at Fisk, Du
Bois discovered his 'African racial feeling' and felt himself to be both
African by 'race' and 'an integral member of the group of dark
Americans who are called Negroes'. 31
Concern with Africa, the ancestry and culture of African-
Americans, and the deliverance of the African continent from the
European colonizing powers, became central themes of Du Bois'
thoughts and writings. Yet whether as a scholar, propagandist, or the
organizer of four Pan- African Congresses between 1919 and 1927 (a
fifth was held in Manchester, England, in 1945), Du Bois' conception

of Africa was that of a romantic racialist. It ignored cultural

differences and conflicts between Africans themselves, and gave
American blacks an inspirational role which they (and most Africans)
found faintly ridiculous. Reporting on his first experiences of Africa
in 1923, when he attended the inauguration of the president of Liberia,
Du Bois apprised Crisis readers:

The spell of Africa is upon me. The ancient witchery of her medicine is
burning my drowsy, dreary blood. This is not a country, it is a world, a
universe of itself and for itself, a thing Different, Menacing, Alluring. It
is a great black bosom where the spirit longs to die. Things move - black

shiny bodies, bodies of sleek and unearthly poise and beauty. 32

Idyllic pictures of African village and tribal life, with 'well-bred

and courteous children, playing happily and never sniffing or whining'
(anticipating the depiction of West African tribal life in the TV serial
'Roots'), were intended awaken in black Americans pride in Africa
to
and, by implication, pride in themselves. Although he was to ridicule
Marcus Garvey's glorification of blackness, Du Bois was himself a
racial chauvinist, holding for all of his life a near-obsession with
colour.

63
Black Leadership in America

His active interest in Africa began in 1900, when he attended the

first Pan- African Congress held in London, and attended by delegates
from Ethiopia, the Gold Coast, Sierra Leone, Liberia, the Caribbean
and the United States. As chairman of the Committee of the Address
to the Nations of the World, Du Bois issued a call to action:

Let the Nations of the World respect the integrity and independence of the
free Negro states of Abyssinia (properly Ethiopia), Liberia, Haiti, etc.
and let the inhabitants of these states, the independent tribes of Africa,
the Negroes (people of African descent) of the West Indies and America,
and the black subjects of all Nations take courage, strive ceaselessly, and
fight bravely, that they may prove to the world their incontestable right to
be counted among the great brotherhood of mankind. 33

The Second Pan-African Congress, organized by Du Bois, and held

in Paris in 1919, was attended by 59 delegates from 15 countries.
They resolved that Germany's African colonies should be turned over
to an international organization, and that a code of laws be drawn up
for the protection of Africans. At the Third Pan-African Congress,
held in London, Brussels and Paris in 1921, a committee headed by
Du Bois was sent to petition the League of Nations on behalf of the
African colonies. The Fourth Pan-African Congress, which met in
Paris and Lisbon in 1923, issued a set of eight demands seeking
equality for black people throughout the world. At the Fifth Congress,
held in New York in 1927, the major resolutions adopted by the
delegates, in addition to demanding 'the development of Africa for the
Africans and not merely for the profit of the Europeans' asked for
independence for India, China and Egypt. Du Bois either organized or
played a leading role in each of these Congresses yet, as he was to
admit, black Americans (not to mention the European powers) were
not inspired by his Pan-Africanist visions.One of Du Bois'
biographers suggests that in many respects, the Pan-African
Congresses echoed the Niagara Movement:
a handful of self-appointed spokesmen challenged a staggering problem
by passing resolutions. ...periodic conferences to recodify the platform,
refresh personal contacts, and exchange enthusiasm and information, and
the manifestos designed to rally coloured support and to convert white
opinion. In the end, the Congresses accomplished, if anything, less than
Niagara. 34

Such a judgementnot entirely fair. Just as the Niagara Movement

is

was a forerunner of
organized black protest in twentieth-century
America, the Pan-African Congresses pointed to the later course of
political independence in Africa and the Third World. African
nationalists like Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta were to

64
 W.E.B. Du Bois: Talented Propagandist

acknowledge Du Bois as a founding father of Pan-Africanism. In the

United States, such ideologically divergent leaders as Martin Luther
King and Malcolm X were also to pay tribute to Du Bois' African
dream. And for all his romanticization of Africa, Du Bois never
advocated the 'return' of African-Americans to their ancestral
homeland, but rather equated Pan-Africanism with Zionism, while his
celebrations of African primitivism and the sensuousness of its arts,
was in tune with the dominant mood of much of the writing and
concerns of the Harlem Renaissance. At the height of the Garvey
Movement in America, Du Bois cautioned:

Africa belongs to the Africans. They have not the slightest intention of
giving it up to foreigners, white or black. ...They resent the attitude that
other folk of any colour are coming in to take and rule their land. Liberia
is not going to allow American Negroes to assume control and direct her

government. Liberia, in her mind, is for Liberians. 35

Du Bois himself blamed the failure of Pan-Africanism in the short

term on the opposition of the colonial powers, the patronizing and
selfish attitudes of whites to Africa, and the indifference of black
Americans to the plight of their African contemporaries. Ironically,
Marcus Garvey's flamboyant and fantastic notion of uniting all the
Negroes of the world into one great organization was to eclipse Du
Bois' Pan-Africanism, just as it also underlined his inability to reach a
mass audience.

'A LEADER WITHOUT FOLLOWERS', 1934-1963

The most and gifted of all Afro-American scholars and

prolific
intellectuals, Du
Bois was never a successful leader or organizer.
After his resignation from NAACP in 1934, at the age of sixty-six, he
became, more than ever, isolated and increasingly bitter - in F. L.
Broderick's phrase, 'a leader without followers'. His romantic faith in
Africa, contempt for capitalist values and attraction to world
socialism, left Du Bois remote from the everyday concerns of the
majority of black Americans. From the time of his return to Atlanta
University until his death in Ghana in 1963, Du Bois remained
estranged from the Talented Tenth because of their opposition to
socialism and voluntary segregation, and their support for integration
and increased opportunity within the capitalist system. His rejection
of interracial cooperation, insistence that racial prejudice was on the

65
Black Leadership in America

increase, and separatist proposals were also out of step with the liberal
reformism of the New Deal.
Shortly after his return to Atlanta, Du Bois published two major
works. Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward A History
Of The Part Which Black Folk Played In The Attempt To Reconstruct
Democracy In America, 1 860-1 880 (1935) offered a Marxist-derived
interpretation of the role played by blacks in securing Confederate
defeat. Southern slaves, Du Bois argued, had engaged in a 'general
strike'when they fled from the plantations to join the invading Union
armies. More realistically, Black Reconstruction stressed the problems
faced by and the achievements of blacks during the Reconstruction
era,and anticipated 1960s 'revisionism' of the subject. Dusk of Dawn,
which appeared in 1940, was subtitled 'An Autobiography of a Race
Concept' and presented Du Bois' account - and defence - of his dual
careers as an African-American and Pan-African propagandist. 'My
life,' he declared:

had its significance and its only deep significance because it was part of a
Problem; but that Problem was. ..the central problem of the world's
democracies and so the Problem of the future world. ..of which the
concept of race is today one of the most unyielding and threatening. 36

The central theme of Dusk of Dawn is the author's search for

meaning and harmony in a troubled and racially-divided world. He
reiterated his belief in voluntary self-segregation as the only means of
ensuring black progress in America, expressed a favourable view of
the Marxist interpretation of history because of its stress on the
economic foundations of culture (although Du Bois denied that he was
a Communist), and reviewed the famous controversy with Booker T.
Washington - with Du Bois' presentation of himself as the injured
party:

Iwas in my imagination a scientist, and neither a leader nor an agitator; I

had nothing but the greatest admiration for Mr Washington and Tuskegee,
and I had applied at both Tuskegee and Hampton for work.

There had, Du Bois conceded, been significant differences between

himself and Washington. Where Washington had placed his faith in
industrial education and 'common labour', T believed in the higher
education of a Talented Tenth who through their knowledge of modern
culture could guide the American Negro into a higher civilization'.
These theories, Du Bois maintained, were not necessarily opposed,
and indeed could have been complementary. But the striking feature of
Washington's leadership was 'that whatever he. ..believed in or wanted
must be subordinated to common public opinion and that opinion

66
 W. E. B. Du Bois: Talented Propagandist

deferred to and cajoled until it allowed a deviation toward better

ways'. But the roots of the controversy lay in the 'discrepancies and
paradoxes' of Washington's influence and leadership:

It did not seem fair... that on the one hand Mr Washington should decry
political activities among Negroes, and on Negro
the other dictate
political objectivesfrom Tuskegee. At a time when Negro civil rights
called for organized and aggressive defence, he broke down that defence
by advising acquiescence or at least no open agitation.

Above all, Du Bois remembered, the power of the Tuskegee

Machine - which reached out to governors, congressmen, philanthro-
pists and presidents - had had to be resisted.

Contrary to most opinion, the controversy as it developed was not

entirely against Mr Washington's ideas, but became the insistence upon
the right of other Negroes to have and express their ideas. I was greatly
disturbed at this time, not because I was in absolute opposition to the
things that Mr Washington was advocating, but because I was strongly in
favour of more open agitation against wrongs and above all I resented the
practical buying up of the Negro press and choking off even mild and
reasonable opposition to Mr Washington in both the Negro press and the
white. 37

(Surprisingly, in view of their deep enmity, Du Bois devoted only a

few lines of Dusk of Dawn to his later disagreements with Marcus
Garvey.)
At the end of his life, living in Ghana, Du Bois was to admit a
greater respect for (if not approval of) Washington's leadership.
Connor Cruise O'Brien reported the following response when, at the
dinner table, 'someone mentioned Washington in a context that
implied he had been a stooge for the bosses':

Du Bois strongly demurred. He said he had in his youth spoken

slightingly ofWashington and had been memorably reprimanded by his
aunts, who told him that it ill became one who had been born free to
speak disrespectfully of a man whose back bore the marks of the lash. He
went on to say that in the circumstances of the South in Washington's
time, he could not have done anything effective in any other way. He
-
-
Du Bois with his Northern and relatively privileged background - had
been able to take a different stance and had been obliged to enter into
public controversy with Washington. He did not want that controversy to
obscure the merits what Washington had achieved. He spoke with evident
deep feeling, and all of us who heard him were impressed. 38

Du Bois' other scholarly publications (after a brief return to the

NAACP in 1945), included Colour and Democracy: Colonies and
Peace (1945), in which he attempted to link the future of Africa with
that of the rest of the world, align African nationalism with socialist
thought, and condemned the United Nations for its tacit approval of

67
Black Leadership in America

colonialism. (Du Bois served as an associate consultant to the

American delegation at the founding session of the United Nations in
San Francisco.) By this time, Du Bois (who had been more critical of
theEuropean colonial powers than of Hitler but came to regard World
War II as another opportunity for the self-determination of oppressed
people), was firmly identified with international peace movements
against the 'Cold War', with socialism and the representation of
African colonial peoples in the United Nations. His expressed
sympathies for the Soviet Union, condemnation of the Korean conflict
as a capitalist war, an (abortive) attempt tobecome the American
Labour party's representative for New York in the US Senate in 1950
(when he received less than four per cent of the vote), and his
chairmanship of the Peace Information Centre which circulated the
1951 'Stockholm Peace Appeal', a Soviet-inspired nuclear disarma-
ment proposal, were all indications of Du Bois' radical stances and
activities. When he refused to comply with a US Department of
Justice order to register as the agent of a 'foreign principal', Du Bois
was indicted by was acquitted. Excoriated in
a federal grand jury, but
the United States at the height of the McCarthy communist witch-
hunting era (when he was prominent in the defence of the Rosenbergs,
accused of spying for the Soviet Union), Du Bois was feted in the
Communist world on visits to China and Russia. In 1953, he was
awarded the communist-sponsored World Peace Prize and, ten years
later, the Lenin Prize. On his ninety-first birthday in Peking, Du Bois
informed a large and responsive audience that 'in my own country for
nearly a century I have been nothing but a "nigger"'. 39
Although he welcomed the Supreme Court's 1954 school
desegregation decision, applauded the action of 'black workers' in the

Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, and student involvement in the

lunch-counter 'sit-ins' of the 1960s, Du Bois remained aloof from the
black/white civil rights coalition. He characterized Martin Luther
King, Jr as an American 'Gandhi', but also maintained that Southern
racistswould not be moved simply by logical arguments and moral
suasion, and argued that proponents of desegregation should consider
the next stage of their campaigns. (In an article published in 1957, Du
Bois also reflected that 'it is possible any day' that non-violent leaders
like King might be killed.) 40 In 1946, Du Bois, sensing the heightened
aspirations of the post-war generation of black Americans, had
informed an audience in Columbia, South Carolina:

The future of the American Negro is in the South. ...This is the firing line
not simply for the emancipation of the American Negro but for the
emancipation of the African Negro and the Negroes of the West Indies;

68
 W.E.B. Du Bois: Talented Propagandist

for the emancipation of the coloured races; and for the emancipation of
the white slaves ofmodern capitalistic monopoly. 41

Reviewing Samuel R. Spencer's biography Booker T. Washington

and the Negro's Place in American Life (1955), Du Bois strongly
dissented from Spencer's view that Washington anticipated the civil
rights movement of the 1950s, but in his own day 'did what was
possible, given the time and place in which he lived, and did it to the
utmost'. Noting that Spencer, a white Southerner, was bound to reach
a favourable verdict on Washington, Du Bois repeated his contention
that if theNegro, contrary to Washington's advice and example, had
not struggled to retain voting and civil rights and 'for the education of
his gifted children, for a place among modern men, their situation
today would have been disastrous'. Southern whites had dishonoured
the terms of the compromise offered by Washington at Atlanta, yet he
had been 'treated with extraordinary respect by his fellow Negroes,
even when they believed he was bartering their rights for a mess of
pottage'. Here, Du Bois was not simply restating his differences with
Washington but was also, by implication, linking the militant protest
of the NAACP in the early years and his own editorship of The Crisis
in particular, with the post-World War II civil rights coalition. 42 (On
an even more personal note, Du Bois could hardly approve of a book
in which he was accused of having had 'delusions of grandeur' when
he dared to challenge the Tuskegee Machine, or of the description of
himself as 'imperious, egocentric, aloof.)
In 1961, Du Bois applied for membership of the American
Communist Party, havingcome to the conclusion that:

Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction. No

universal selfishness can bring social good to all. Communism - the effort
to give all men what they need and to ask of each the best they can
contribute - this is the only way of human life. 43

Before the announcement of his application was made public, Du

Bois, at the urging of President Nkrumah, went to Ghana (where in
1960 he had begun work on preparation of an Encyclopedia Africana,
a project he had already attempted in 1909 and in 1934), and became a
Ghanaian citizen in the last months of his life. If he had lived three
more years, Du Bois would have seen Nkrumah ousted by a military
coup, and a new regime which suppressed socialism, the doctrine of
Pan-Africanism, and aborted the scheme for the Encyclopedia
Africana. Despite his self-exile and disappointments, Du Bois, as one
of his last letters revealed, also preserved an optimistic view of his life
and labours:

69
Black Leadership in America

I have loved my work. I have loved people and my play, but always I have

been uplifted by the thought that what I have done will live long and
justify my life; that what I have done ill or never finished can now be
handed on to others for endless days to be finished, perhaps better than I
could have done. 44

ASSESSMENT
Du Bois, through all his ideological shifts and turns, attempted to
resolve what he regarded (and personally experienced) as being the
fundamental dilemma of the Afro-American - 'one ever feels his two-
ness'. Unlike Booker T. Washington, Du Bois always felt himself
apart from the mass of Negroes and, for significant periods of his life
was definitely out of step with orthodox black responses to such issues
as socialism, Marxism, and Pan-Africanism. An inferior (and
disinterested) administrator, Du Bois, as editor of Crisis, was the
outstanding agitator and propagandist of the protest movement which
arose partly as a reaction against Washington's power and policies.
Essentially a man of letters, Du Bois, more than any other black
leader, influenced the Negro intelligentsia (the Talented Tenth), and
contributed to the formation of that black consciousness which had its

flowering in the Harlem Renaissance. Du Bois himself admired but

was rejected by white society, and out of this rejection came his
reasoned but impassioned hatred of racial discrimination and injustice.
From the formation of the Niagara Movement until his resignation
from the NAACP in 1934, Du Bois (who would have preferred a life

of historical and sociological research serving the cause of black

advancement) was the singularly gifted spokesman for black
economic and political rights. With Washington's death in 1915, the
continuing black exodus from the South, and the rising expectations of
an educated black middle class, Du Bois achieved leadership of the
Talented Tenth. Simultaneously, he also waged a bitter internal
campaign against what he regarded as the elitism, conservatism and
narrowness of the organization which had elected him as its major
propagandist. The NAACP rejected Du Bois' call for voluntary
segregation (which he had first articulated in the 1890s), and did not
share his collectivist or Pan-African enthusiasms. Yet, on the eve of
his departure from the NAACP, Du Bois was firmly opposed to any
deprivation of any political, civil or social rights, and to enforced
segregation. As one of his biographers suggests, Du Bois made The
Crisis 'a record of Negro achievement' and:

70
 W.E.B. Du Bois: Talented Propagandist

In this context, even Du Bois' aloofness became an asset; it removed him

in Negro eyes from everyday life and, by givinghim a transcendent
quality, it raised the goal of aspiration. 45

Throughout his long and eventful life, Du Bois was inspired by a

vision of reasoned, ordered and dynamic social change. This vision
was perhaps best expressed in the 'Postlude' to his second autobio-
graphy, subtitled 'A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last
Decade of Its First Century', (1968):

This is a beautiful world. This is a wonderful America, which the

founding fathers dreamed until their sons drowned it in the blood of
slavery and devoured it in greed. Our children must rebuild it. Let then
the Dreams of the Dead rebuke the Blind who think that what is will be
forever and teach them that what is worth living for must live again. 46

Du Bois' vision was flawed - his call to 'Close Ranks' during

World War I, although implicitly recognizing that blacks were
pressing for equality, too readily assumed that they would be prepared
to suspend their agitation. His plan for segregated cooperatives of
consumers and producers was unrealistic. He viewed Africa through a
haze of romanticism, yet also inspired African nationalists. His
politics alternated between a radical optimism and a gloomy
conservatism, and, at the end of his life embraced the tenets of
totalitarian regimes. But through all his ideological searchings, Du
Bois was the keeper of America's moral conscience on the question of
race and racial inequality. Martin Luther King, Jr, in the last major
address before his assassination, delivered a fitting tribute to Du Bois,
marking the centennial of his birth:

Dr. Du Bois was a tireless explorer and a gifted discoverer of social

truths. His singular greatness lay in his quest for the truth about his own
people.. ..Whatever else he was, with his multitude of careers and
professional titles, he was first and always a black man. ...Some people
would like to ignore the fact that he was a communist in his later
years. ...It is time to cease muting the fact that Dr. Du Bois was a genius
and chose to be a communist. Our irrational obsessive anticommunism
has led us into too many quagmires to be retained as if it were a mode of
scientific thinking. ...Dr. Du Bois's greatest virtue was his committed
empathy with all the oppressed and his divine dissatisfaction with all
forms of injustice. 47

71
Black Leadership in America

REFERENCES

1. Robeson, Paul, 'The Legacy of W. E. B. Du Bois', in P. S. Foner (ed.),

Paul Robeson Speaks: Writings, Speeches and Interviews, 1918-1974

(New York, 1978), pp.474-5.
2. Isaacs, H. R., The New World of Negro Americans (London, 1963), p. 195.

3. Baker, R. S., Following the Colour Line: American Negro Citizenship in

the Progressive Era (New York, 1964), p. 224.

4. Ibid.,p.222.
5. Myrdal, An American Dilemma op. cit., p. 743.

6. Rudwick, E. M., W. E. B. Du Bois: Propagandist of the Negro Protest

(New York, 1969), p.216.
7. Ibid.,p.l31
8. Du Bois, W. E. B., The Souls of Black Folk (New York, 1968 edn.), p. 17.
9. Du Bois, W. E. B., Darkwater: Voices From Within The Veil (New York,
1969 edn.), p.9.

10. Du Bois, W. E. B., The Autobiography ofW. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy

on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century (New York,
1968), pp.107-8, 133.
11. Ibid., pp.168, 148.
12. Du Bois, W. E. B., Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward An Autobiography of
a Race Concept (New York, 1940), p.49.
13. Marable, M., W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat (Boston, 1986),
p.27.
14. Du Bois, W. E. B., 'The Conservation of Races', American Negro
Academy, Occasional Papers 2 (Washington, D.C., 1897), p. 13.

15. Du Bois, Autobiography, op. cit., pp.258, 260-1.

16. Marable, op. cit., pp. 85-6.
17. Crisis II (September, 1911).
18. Crisis VIII (May, 1914).
19. Hughes, Langston, Fight For Freedom: The Story of the NAACP (New
York, 1962), p.34.
20. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, op. cit., p. 240.

21. Crisis XI (1915-16), p.82.

22. Rudwick, op. cit., p. 186.
23. Crisis XVI (1918), p.lll.
24. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, op. cit., pp. 252-3.
25. Crisis XVIII (May, 1919), pp.13-14.
26. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, op. cit., p. 267.

27. Lester, J. (ed.), The Seventh Son: The Thought and Writings ofW. E. B.

72
 W. E. B. Du Bois: Talented Propagandist

DuBois, Vol. II (New York, 1971), p.405.

28. Marable, op. cit., p. 140.
29. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, op. cit., pp.3 14-15.
30. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, op. cit., p. 1 84.
31. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, op. cit., pp.1 14-15.
32. Crisis XXVII (April, 1924), pp.273-4.

33. Clarke, J. H. et al., Black Titan: W. E. B. Du Bois, An Anthology by the

Editors of Freedomways (Boston, 1970), pp. 19 1-2.
34. Broderick, F. L., W. E. B. Du Bois: Negro Leader in a Time of Crisis
(Stanford, California, 1959), p. 130.
35. Crisis (July, 1924), p.106.
36. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, pp. 2-3.
37. Ibid., pp.69-77.
38. Genovese, E. D., In Red and Black: Marxian Explorations in Southern
and Afro-American History (Vintage Books, New York, 1971), p. 154.

39. Rudwick, Propagandist of the Negro Protest op. cit., p. 293.

40. Marable, op. cit., pp.200-201.
41. Stuckey, S., Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of
Black America (Oxford University Press, New York, 1987), p. 301.

42. Science & Society, 20 (1959), pp.183-5.

43. Marable, op. cit., p. 212.

44. Brewer, W. H., 'Some Memories of Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois', Journal of

Negro History, 53 (1968), p.348.

45. Broderick, op. cit., pp. 230-31.
46. Du Bois, Autobiography, op. cit., pp.422-3.
47. Foner, P. S. (ed.), W. E. B. Du Bois Speaks: Speeches and Addresses
1890-1919 (New York, 1970), pp.13-19.

73
CHAPTER FOUR

Marcus Garvey: Jamaican

Messiah

As a kid heard about Marcus Garvey. We used to sing a song

I

ridiculing him. 'Marcus Garvey is a big monkey man. Marcus Garvey

will catch you if he can. All you black folks get in line. Buy your
tickets on the Black Star Line.' 1

Since the death of Booker Washington there was no one with a

T.
positive and practical uplift for the masses - North or
programme
South. Said a coloured woman after she had joined the organization:
'Garvey is giving my people backbones where they had wish-bones.' 2

PERSPECTIVES: THE NORTHERN BLACK GHETTO,

1900-1920

Even before the end of the Civil War, Southern blacks began to move
from rural areas to the cities of the South, and, increasingly, to those
of the North. A series of economic crises and natural disasters (the
ravages of the boll weevil and catastrophic floods in Mississippi and
Alabama), the gradual mechanization of Southern agriculture, the
adoption of disfranchisement techniques, racial violence and the
spread of Jim Crow legislation and practices, combined to drive
blacks from the land to urban centres. In 1879, thousands of black
tenant farmers, victims of a vicious credit system that kept them in
unending poverty, and of returning Democratic 'Redeemer'
governments which stripped them of the civil and political rights
gained during Reconstruction, left the states of Tennessee, Texas,
Mississippi and Louisiana, and headed for Kansas. These black

75
Black Leadership in America

'Exodusters' were the advance wave of the 'Great Migration' of

Southern blacks, attracted by the prospect of greater opportunities in
the cities of the North-East, Middle West, and the Pacific coast.
Between 1890 and 1910 the black population of Chicago increased
from 1.3 to 2.00 per cent; in Philadelphia, from 3.8 to 5.5 per cent; in
Pittsburgh, from 3.3 to 4.8 per cent, and in Los Angeles, the Negro
population was 2.5 per cent of the total population in 1890. In New
York City, between 1890 and 1920, the black population increased
from less than 70,000 to over 152,000, the majority Southern-born,
but with a significant influx from the West Indies. In this same period,
one area of New York City - Harlem - was transformed from an all-
white, upper-class and fashionable section into a black residential
section.
Although there were important differences in the urban experiences
of Negroes, reflecting the nature of race relations, the origins and
composition of the black population, economic opportunities and the
structure of the black leadership class, there was also a marked
similarity in the forceswhich together produced all-black residential
areas in the major cities. In all cases, the black ghetto was both the

product of white racism, which generally confined blacks to the less-

desirable areas of settlement, and of black entrepreneurship,
adaptability and community spirit. (Even in the mid-nineteenth
century, blacks were more segregated than were white immigrant
groups in Northern cities.) In Harlem, this entrepreneurial spirit was
evident in the formation in 1904 of the Afro-American Realty
Company, which originated in a partnership of ten blacks, organized
by Philip A. Payton, a friend and admirer of Booker T. Washington,
who saw possibilities of exploiting the section's depressed property
market. The Afro-American Realty Company specialized in acquiring
five-year leases on property owned by whites, and then renting it to
blacks. Charles W. Anderson, the leading New York Republican, and
Thomas T. Fortune, editor of the New York Age, supported Payton 's
enterprises. All were proteges of Washington, and members of his
National Negro Business League. Ironically, Washington, despite his
anti-urban bias, can be considered a founding father of one black
ghetto which, by the 1920s had become, in the words of James Weldon
Johnson 'the intellectual and artistic capital of the Negro world'. 3
The black churches were the largest property-owners in Harlem,
investing heavily in real estate and building new places of worship. St
Mark's Methodist Episcopal Church purchased an apartment house on
Lenox Avenue, between 140th and 141st streets, while St Philip's
Protestant Episcopal Church (attended by more affluent members of

76
 Marcus Garvey: Jamaican Messiah

the Negro community), was reported to own or control twenty six-

storey buildings on West 135th Street in 1911. By 1918, it was
estimated that blacks owned $20 million in Harlem properties. Other
black institutions - fraternal orders, social service agencies (including
the local offices of the NAACP and the National Urban League),
foreign and missionary societies and two weekly newspapers - the
New York News and the Amsterdam News - also established
themselves in Harlem, contributing to its fame and growing
population. In 1914, blacks inhabited 1,100 different houses within a
twenty-three block area of Harlem, and in the same year, an Urban
League survey estimated the section's black population at approxi-
mately 200,000, of whom 55,000 had been born in the West Indies. By
this date, Harlem, initially an elegant, tree-lined area, was becoming a
gigantic slum as housing and welfare facilities deteriorated under the
sheer weight of numbers.
The National Urban League was one organization which attempted
to secure better accommodations for blacks. Founded in 1911, the
League grew out of two earlier organizations, the National League for
the Protection of Coloured Women, and the Committee for Improving
the Industrial Conditions of Negroes in New York. Concerned to offer
for recently-arrived rural blacks the kinds of welfare and employment
services already available to native and foreign-born whites through
settlement houses, charities and immigrant-aid societies, the National
Urban League was a bi-raciai coalition of progressive whites and
professional blacks. Considerably to the right of the NAACP, the NUL
reflected Washingtonian policies of moral and economic progress,
vocational training, and the de-emphasis of civil and political rights. It

attempted to secure employment and homes for migrants, and offered

advice on the etiquette and sanitary standards of city life. The League
also conducted surveys among urban blacks, issued reports and
(unsuccessfully) lobbied the American Federation of Labour to outlaw
'lily-white' union practices. Echoing Booker T. Washington, the
League urged blacks to make free use of the toothbrush, the comb,
soap and water. In 1911, the NUL and the NAACP agreed to adhere to
their respective goals and strategies of racial advancement, but neither
organization was able to avoid the charges of black militants like A.
Philip Randolph that they were basically middle-class and white-
dominated agencies, heavily dependent on philanthropic support, and
pledged to the perpetuation of the capitalist system.
American involvement in World War I encouraged further black
migration from the South, as northern industries supplied the needs of
the allies and, with European immigration closed off, called for skilled

77
Black Leadership in America

and unskilled labour. After the United States Supreme Court, in a

decision in 1917, declared municipal segregation ordinances
unconstitutional, 'white improvement associations' utilized restricted
covenants - agreements among property holders not to sell housing in
specified areas to Negroes. As urban conditions worsened, earlier
black migrants blamed newcomers for the increasing discrimination
with which all Northern blacks had to contend.

InHarlem, tensions between American blacks and West Indian

immigrants resulted from fears of economic competition, and jealousy
of the business acumen and social mores of the growing West Indian
community. Afro-Americans asserted that West Indians were too
clannish, overly-ambitious - always prepared to work for lower wages
than native-born blacks - and arrogant. West Indians were charged
with disregarding the norms of American racial customs, while also
standing aloof from black protest organizations. In particular, Afro-
Americans were disturbed by the reluctance of West Indian
immigrants to become naturalized citizens, failure to assimilate with
the black host community and their formation of exclusive fraternal
and benevolent associations.
These tensions, together with the generally worsening racial
situation after 1918, produced an intensified racial awareness and
militancy among black Americans. W. E. B. Du Bois and A. Philip
Randolph advocated black resistance to white mobs, and the united
action of white and black workers against predatory capitalists. In
literature, the arts and music, the Harlem Renaissance signified the
advent of the 'New Negro' - assertive, racially proud and in search of
a positive Afro-American identity. Into this climate, soon to be
overladen by the effects of the Great Depression, a West Indian
agitator and visionary injected a compelling appeal to urban blacks
who were, for all practical purposes, already living in a social
environment which resembled that of an all-black and separatist
'nation'. Moreover, as his fellow West Indian, the poet and novelist
Claude McKay observed, Marcus Garvey came to the United States
'as a humble disciple of the late Booker T. Washington, founder of
Tuskegee Institute'. 4

MARCUS GARVEY: BLACK JAMAICAN

Marcus Mosiah Garvey was born in St Ann's Bay, Jamaica, the
youngest of eleven children. His parents were of unmixed Negro stock

78
 Marcus Garvey: Jamaican Messiah
and descended from Maroons - African slaves who had successfully
defied the Jamaican slave regime and formed virtually independent
black communities in the island's mountains from 1664 to 1765.
Because of this Maroon heritage, Garvey was fiercely proud of his
blackness, and came to display an almost pathological distrust of
light-skinned Negroes. In a 'chapter of autobiography' published in
1925, Garvey recalled:

My parents were black Negroes. My father was a man of brilliant intellect

and dashing courage. He once had a fortune; he died poor. My mother
was a sober and conscientious Christian; too soft and good for the time in
which she lived. 5

Garvey 's father, a skilledstone-mason, was also literate, possessed

a private library, and acted as a local lawyer. After a few years of
elementary education, Garvey, already apprenticed to a printer, left
school at the age of fourteen. As a child, Garvey (like Du Bois)
maintained friendly relations with the white children in his
neighbourhood. He played with the children of a Wesleyan minister
whose church his family attended, and was especially attached to one
of the minister's daughters. But when she was fourteen, her parents
separated her from Garvey, and the shock was traumatic.

They sent her and another sister to Edinburgh, Scotland, and told her that
she was never to write or try to get in touch with me, for I was a 'nigger'.
It was then that I found that there was some difference in humanity, and

that there races, each having its own separate and distinct
were different
social After my first lesson in race distinction, I never thought of
life.

playing with white girls anymore. 6

Moving where he hoped to continue his education,

to Kingston,
Garvey was forced work in a printing shop owned by his godfather.
to
By the age of twenty, he became the youngest foreman printer in
Kingston, at a time when British and Canadian immigrants were
generally taking such jobs. When the printer's union went on strike for
higher wages, Garvey was elected leader. The strike failed when the
printer imported new machinery and immigrant labour, and the
treasurer absconded with the union's funds. Garvey was fired and
blacklisted. He became sceptical of the value of the labour movement
and of socialism, and went to work for the government printing
office. Increasingly conscious of the related issues of race and politics
- 'I started to take an interest in the politics of my country, and then I
saw the injustice done to my race because it was black' - Garvey also
began to oppose British colonial rule in Jamaica. 7
In 1910 Garvey published his first newspaper, Garvey 's Watchman,
a weekly with a circulation of about 3,000 copies. The venture was

79
Black Leadership in America

short-lived, and Garvey went to Costa Rica, where he worked as a

timekeeper on a United Fruit Company banana plantation. He
observed the exploitation of West Indian immigrant workers, and
founded his second paper, La Nation, in which he attacked the British
consul for his indifference to the situation. Garvey then moved on to
Panama and was appalled by the depressed condition of Jamaican
labourers on the Panama Canal, and produced another newspaper, La
Prensa. Moving on through Ecuador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Colombia
and Venezuela, he discovered essentially similar conditions, and in
each case attempted to organize black labour forces. Then, according
to his second wife, Garvey, already ill with fever and

sick at heart over appeals from his people to help on their behalf.. .decided
to return to Jamaica in 1911, and try with the Government there, as well
as to awaken Jamaicans at home, to the true conditions on the Spanish
mainland. 8

Unable to interest the authorities in the terrible conditions faced by

Jamaican workers abroad, Garvey travelled through Europe, and
settled for a time in London, where he met and worked with the
Egyptian nationalist Duse Mohammad Ali, an admirer of Booker T.
Washington, and publisher of the African Times and Orient Review.
From Ali, Garvey learned of the subjugation of blacks throughout
Africa, and increased his knowledge of African history and cultures.
In London, Garvey also first read Washington's Up From Slavery, and
later remembered: 'I read of conditions in America. ..and then my
doom - if I may so call it - of being a race leader dawned upon me.' 9
In 1914, Garvey returned to Jamaica with the plan of forming an
international black organization which would set up an independent
state. On 1 August 1914, he established the Universal Negro
Improvement and Conservation Association and African Communities
League (the UNIA). As defined by Garvey, the UNIA's grandiose
objectives were:

To establish a Universal Confraternity among the race; to promote the

spirit of pride and love; to reclaim the fallen; to administer to and to
assist the needy; to assist in civilizing the backward tribes of Africa; to
assist in the development of independent Negro Nations and
communities; to establish a central nation for the race, where they will be
given the opportunity to develop themselves; to establish Commissaries
and Agencies in the principal countries and cities of the world for the
representation of all Negroes; to promote a conscientious spiritual
worship among the native tribes of Africa; to establish Universities,
Colleges and Academies and Schools for racial education and culture of
the people; to improve the general condition of Negroes everywhere. 10

80
 Marcus Garvey: Jamaican Messiah

The motto of the new organization was 'One God! One Aim! One
Destiny! - similar to the phrase, 'One God, one law, one element', in
'

Tennyson's poem (admired by Garvey) In Memoriam. Garvey later

said of the UNIA motto that: 'Like the great Church of Rome, Negroes
the world over MUST PRACTICE ONE FAITH, that of Confidence in
themselves, with One God! One Aim! One Destiny!' 11
In a pamphlet
published in Jamaica in 1914, Garvey, styling himself as 'President'
of the new movement, addressed the issue of 'The Negro Race and Its
Problems', and argued that:

Representative and educated Negroes have made the mistake of drawing

and keeping themselves away from the race, thinking it is degrading and
ignominious to identify themselves with the masses of people who are
still ignorant and backward; but we are crying out for true and

conscientious leadership.

Echoing Booker T. Washington, Garvey declared that although the

Negro was 'handicapped by circumstances. ..no one is keeping him
back. He
keeping himself back, and because of this, the other races
is
12 Washington's influence and example
refuse to notice or raise him'.
was also evident in Garvey's plan to establish educational and
Jamaican blacks (although West Indian students
industrial colleges for
and Tuskegee had earlier asked a visiting Jamaican delegation
staff at
to set up a school similar to Tuskegee in the British West Indies).
Planning to visit America in 1915, on a fund-raising tour, Garvey
(who had been invited by Washington to visit Tuskegee), informed
him in a letter that: 'I need not reacquaint you of the horrible
conditions prevailing among our people in the West Indies as you are
so well informed of happenings all over Negrodom'. 13 Garvey also
enclosed a copy of the UNIA manifesto, which included among its
objectives, the establishment of industrial schools. Washington, in
reply,wished Garvey every success, yet failed to appreciate the heroic
aims of the UNIA, and simply informed his Jamaican admirer:

This is the age of 'getting together', and everywhere we look we see

evidence of that constructive accomplishment which are [sic] the result of
friendly cooperation and mutual helpfulness. Such, I am sure, is the
object of your Association, and I am only sorry that I cannot afford the
14
time just now to give more careful study to your plans so outlined.

At this stage, Garvey viewed himself as a Washingtonian, but never

met his mentor, who died before Garvey reached America in 1916. At
a UNIA Memorial Meeting for Washington, held in Jamaica, Garvey
was reported as having said:

81
Black Leadership in America

We can only acclaim him as the greatest hero sprung from the stock of
scattered Ethiopia. Washington has raised the dignity and manhood of his
race to midway, and it is now left to those with fine ideals who have felt
his influence to lead the race on to the highest height in the adopted
civilization of the age. He was the man for America. Without the presence
of such a man the dominant race would have long ago obliterated the
existence of the American Negro as a living force even as the Indians
were outdone. ...Every true Negro mourns the loss of Dr. Booker T.
Washington, scholar, orator, educator, race leader and philanthropist. 15

Throughout his life, Garvey expressed admiration - although often

qualified - for Washington. After his second visit to Tuskegee in 1923,
Garvey wrote that 'language fails to express my high appreciation for
the service Dr. Washington has rendered to us as a people', he was 'an
originator and builder who, out of nothing, constructed the greatest
educational and industrial institution of the race in modern times'. 16
Garvey also expressed his enthusiasm for Washington's emphasis on
self-help, race pride, and his hostility to social equality. But in a later
appraisal of Washington's leadership, Garvey voiced a reservation:

The world held up the great Sage of Tuskegee. ..as the only leader for the
race. They looked forward to him and his teachings as the leadership for
all times, not calculating that the industrially educated Negro would

himself evolve a new ideal.

Reiterating one of Du Bois' criticisms of Washington, Garvey

asserted that:

If Washington had lived he would have had to change his programme. No

leader can successfully lead this race of ours without giving an
interpretation of theawakened spirit of the New Negro, who does not
seek industrial opportunity alone, but a political voice. 17

At the height of his power in the United States, Garvey could argue
that whereas Washington had looked for concessions from whites, the
true race leader must be more aggressive and demanding. Revising an
earlier estimate, Garvey concluded that:

Booker T. Washington was not a leader of the Negro race. We did not
look to Tuskegee. The world has recognized him as a leader. We are going
to make demands. 18

When Washington's successor at Tuskegee, R. R. Moton, failed to

provide the kind of leadership which Garvey believed a changed
situation demanded, he was denounced as the captive of 'white
philanthropists' and therefore unfit to speak for the Negro race.
In Jamaica, the UNIA failed to attract the mulatto group of
islanders, while the use of the term 'Negro' in its title was resented by

82
 Marcus Garvey: Jamaican Messiah

many native Jamicans who preferred the term 'coloured'. One

Jamaican critic wrote of Garvey's new 'Society with the long name
and its big aims'. ™ After a year, the movement had only about one
hundred members. Reflecting bitterly on this period, Garvey declared:
I knew there was so much colour prejudice in Jamaica until I
really never
work of the UNIA. I had just returned from a successful trip to
started the
Europe, which was an exceptional achievement for a black man. The
daily press wrote me up with big headlines and told of my movement. But
nobody wanted to be a Negro. Men and women as black as I or even more
so, had believed themselves white under the West Indian order of

,
society... yet everyone beneath his breath was calling the black man a
nigger. I had to decide whether to please my friends and be one of the

'black-whites' of Jamaica, and be reasonably prosperous, or come out

openly, and defend and help and improve and protect the integrity of
black millions and suffer. I decided to do the latter, hence my offence
against the 'coloured-black-white' society in the colonies and
America. ..in the opinion of the 'coloured' element, leadership should
have been in the hands of a yellow or a very light man. There is more
bitterness among us Negroes because of the caste of colour than there is
between any other peoples, not excluding the peoples of India. 20

GARVEY IN AMERICA
Marcus Garvey arrived in New York on 23 March 1916, on a fund-
raising lecture tour for an industrial school to be built in Jamaica, and
intended to stay for five months. He visited Tuskegee 'and paid my
respects to the dead hero, Booker T. Washington', toured thirty-eight
states and, at theend of the year, returned to New York city and set up
base Harlem. Scornful of existing Afro-American leadership, with
in
its dependence on white support and neglect of the masses, Garvey

decided to set up a division of the UNIA in America, and turned to the

West Indian element in Harlem for assistance. Initially, Garvey
planned to return to Jamaica after setting up an American branch of
the UNIA, but faced with the opposition of Harlem's established black
leadership, he resigned as president of the Jamaican chapter, decided
to remain in Harlem, and began a campaign to recruit members.
Within three weeks, Garvey claimed have recruited 2,000 members
to
in Harlem; by 1921 he estimated that the UNIA had six million mem-
bers throughout the world. Neither contemporary observers nor later
historians of the Garvey movement have agreed on its due-paying
membership. In 1923 Du Bois stated that the UNIA had fewer than
20,000 members; by that date, Garvey could have reasonably claimed

83
Black Leadership in America

that within the United States the UNIA had twenty times the
membership and support of allNegro organizations
the other
combined.
In 1919 Garvey began publication of a weekly newspaper, The
Negro World, the official organ of the UNIA. As its masthead
proclaimed, it was 'A Newspaper Devoted Solely to the Interests of
the Negro Race'. With a weekly circulation of about 200,000, The
Negro World was Garvey's greatest propaganda device, and his most
successful publishing venture. It appeared in English, French and
Spanish editions, and lasted until 1933. Every issue carried a front-
page polemic by Garvey, and articles on black history and culture,
racial news, and UNIA activities. The programme of the UNIA was
stated in an eight-point platform in one issue of The Negro World:

1 To champion Negro nationhood by redemption of Africa.

2. To make the Negro race conscious.
3. To breathe ideals of manhood and womanhood into every Negro.
4. To advocate self-determination.
5. To make the Negro world-conscious.
6. To print all the news that will be interesting and instructive to the
Negro.
7. To instill racial self-help.
8. To inspire Racial love and self-respect. 21

(To underline the last point, The Negro World refused to print
advertising copy for skin-whitening and hair-straightening compounds
- much of the black press in America.)
staple revenue sources for
Garvey's ideological statements in The Negro World spread the
UNIA gospel not only throughout the United States, but also in Latin
America, the Caribbean and Africa - much to the consternation of the
colonial powers. The late C. L. R. James described a conversation
with the Kenyan nationalist Jomo Kenyattawhich he was
in 1921, in
informed that illiterate Kenyans 'would gather around a reader of
Garvey's newspaper and listen to an article two or three times'. They
would then run into surrounding areas 'carefully to repeat the whole,
which they had memorized, to Africans, hungry for some doctrine
which lifted them from the servile consciousness in which Africans
lived'. 22
With his repeated calls for international black solidarity,
denunciations of lynchings, and support for the Irish, Indian, and
Egyptian independence movements, Garvey, initially seen as a
charlatan, was quickly perceived as a threat to the established
international order. His activities were carefully monitored by the
British andAmerican intelligence agencies, whose agents accused
Garvey of fomenting racial strife. In America, the young J. Edgar

84
 Marcus Garvey: Jamaican Messiah
Hoover, then assistant to the attorney general (and who was later to
mount a dirty tricks campaign against Martin Luther King), showed a
marked interest in deporting Garvey as an undesirable alien.
Addressing audiences in New York City, Detroit, Chicago, Pittsburgh,
Cleveland Baltimore and Toronto, Garvey's message was essentially
the same.

The white man of the world has been accustomed to deal with the Uncle
Tom cringing negro. Up to 1919 he knew no other negro than the negro
represented through Booker Washington. Today he will find a new negro
is on the stage. Every American negro and every West
Indian negro must
understand that there is but one fatherland for the negro, and that is
Africa. And as the Germans fought and struggled for the fatherland of
Germany; as the Irish man is fighting for the fatherhood of Ireland, so
must the new negro of the world fight for the fatherland of Africa.

(Anticipating the rhetoric of Malcolm X and the Black Power

advocates of the 1960s, Garvey informed a UNIA meeting at Carnegie
Hall in 1919: 'The first dying that is to be done by the black man in
done to make himself free'.) 23
the future will be
In July 1919 Garvey purchased a large auditorium in Harlem -
'Liberty Hall' - for UNIA meetings, and Liberty Halls were also
opened by other UNIA branches. (By 1926 there were sixteen
divisions and chapters of the UNIA in California.) Amy-Jacques
Garvey described the multiple functions of these halls, designed to
serve 'the needs of the people':

Sunday morning worship, afternoon Sunday schools, Public meetings at

nights, concerts and dances were held. Notice boards were put up where
one could look for a room, a job or a lost article. In localities where there
were many people out of work during the winter, Black Cross Nurses
would organize soup kitchens and give them a warm meal daily.. ..In the
freezing winter days stoves had to be kept going to accommodate the cold
and homeless until they 'got on their feet again'. 24

The Negro Factories Corporation was established in 1919, and,

according to The Negro World, was designed 'to build and operate
factories in the big industrial centres of the United States, Central
America, the West Indies and Africa to manufacture every marketable
commodity'. 25 The corporation developed a chain of grocery stores, a
restaurant, tailoring establishment, a hotel, printing presses, a (black)
doll factory and a steam laundry in Harlem. (Garvey's advertising
skillswere revealed in the promise of the Negro Factories Corporation
Laundry Service: 'We Return Everything But The Dirt'.) By 1920, the
UNIA and its allied enterprises - putting into practice the Washington-
derived precept of economic self-help - employed 300 people.

85
Black Leadership in America

Garvey's most spectacular undertaking was the organization of an

all-Negro steamship company that would link the coloured people of
the world in commercial and industrial intercourse. The Black Star
Steamship Line, incorporated in Delaware on 26 June 1919, was
capitalized at $500,000, with 100,000 shares of stock at $5.00 a share.
The Black Star Line also stemmed from Booker T. Washington's
axiom that blacks must seek to become independent of white capital,
and stock circulars for the projected company appealed directly to
racial pride.

The Black Star Line Corporation presents to every Black Man, Woman,
and Child the opportunity to climb the great ladder of industrial and
commercial progress. If you have ten dollars, one hundred dollars, or one
or five thousand dollars to invest for profit, then take out shares in the
Black Star Line, Inc. The Black Star Line will turn over profits and
dividends to stockholders, and operate to their interest even whilst they
will be asleep. 26

Sale of BSL stock was limited to Negroes, with a maximum of 200

shares per person. In February 1920, the BSL was recapitalized at
$10,000,000.
Garvey never intended that the line would be the agency for the
mass transportation of Negroes back to Africa; rather it was conceived
as a commercial operation, a source of justifiable racial pride, and a
demonstration of black entrepreneurial (and nautical) skills. Amy-
Jacques Garvey recalled that:

The main purpose of the formation and promotion of the Black Star Line
was to acquire ships to trade between the units of the Race - in Africa,
the U.S.A., the West Indies, and Central America, thereby building up an
independent economy of business, industry, and commerce, and to
transport our people on business and pleasure, without being given
inferior accommodation or refusal of any sort of accommodation. 27

Unfortunately, the BSL's operations and administration were

marked by financial failure, as well as by elements of farce and
ineptitude.
In August 1920, Garvey and the Harlem branch of UNI A staged the
First International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World.
Delegates representing twenty-five countries attended the proceedings
in New York - although a Bureau of Investigation agent reported that
many of the 'so-called foreign delegates' had, in fact, been 'living in
the United States for years'. Consequently 'the majority of his
followers and especially the general public are under the impression
had just arrived here especially for Garvey's
that all these delegates
convention'. 28 Roi Ottley, a black journalist and social worker,

86
 Marcus Garvey: Jamaican Messiah

remembered that as a child he had witnessed the 1920 Convention.

During the whole month of August 1920, delegates from all the states, the
West Indies, South America and Africa assembled in Liberty Hall, in a
demonstration that proved to be a series of rousing 'bravos' and
'hallelujahs' to the black leader. People were fascinated by all the bustle,
and animation in the streets. There were loud speeches, stock-selling
from the curbstones, and indeed fisticuffs as men clashed. 'Is Garvey
greater than Jesus Christ?' people asked. 'Give he a chance' shot back his
devout West Indies followers in their quaint English dialect. 'He's a
young mon yet!' 29

The 1920 Convention was certainly a splendid and glamorous

Parades through Harlem of the various elements of the UNIA -
affair.

the African Legion in blue and red uniforms, the Black Cross Nurses,
dressed in dazzling white, the Black Flying Eagles, and the Universal
African Motor Corps - attracted and delighted the Negro community.
Garvey also took the opportunity to advertise the UNIA at the expense
One of the slogans carried in the convention parade read:
of his rivals.
'NAACP: Nothing Accomplished After Considerable Pretence/UNIA:
United Nothing Can Impede Your Aspirations'. 30 The UNIA flag, red
for Negro blood, green for Negro hopes and black for Negro skin, was
prominently displayed, and the Convention speeches stressed the
themes of African nationalism and the meaning of Garvey's
movement. To the Reverend James David Brooks, UNIA secretary-
general at the 1920 convention, Garveyism was:

the spirit to help God work out the destiny of the black race. The spirit of
Garveyism is which belongs to you.
the spirit to contend for that
Garveyism is the spirit of self-reliance. Garveyism is the freedom for

Africa. You have got to get the spirit of Garvey and let it touch your heart
31
until it becomes part of your life. ..until at night you dream Garveyism.

(Two years Brooks unsuccessfully sued Garvey for an unpaid

later
loan of $1,000 and $7,000 in unpaid wages.) Garvey was elected
Provisional President of the African Republic, and informed the
delegates:

We are here to celebrate the greatest event in the history of the Negro
people for the last 500 years. We are in sympathy with the great Irish
people who have been overrun for the last 700 years by the tyrants of
Great Britain; we are in sympathy with the people of India. ..who are also
dominated by Great Britain. We are in sympathy with the Chinese, with
32
the Egyptians but one and all we are in sympathy with ourselves.

Charles S. Opportunity, the magazine of the

Johnson, writing in

National Urban League, detected the possible inspiration for Garvey's

exalted title:

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Black Leadership in America

first International Convention of the UNIA, De Valera

Just prior to the
was elected Provisional President of Ireland. Garvey then became
Provisional President of Africa. 33

The UNIA Convention also created a nobility - Knights of the Nile,

and honours - the Distinguished Service Order of Ethiopia. Delegates
drafted a 'Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the
World', which included the demand that 'Negro' be spelled with a
capital N, condemnations of European imperialism in Africa and
lynchings in the United States.
But the UNIA rested on Garvey 's charisma and energies rather than
on He undertook a series
his administrative or organizational abilities.
of energetic promotional tours - including visits to Cuba, Jamaica,
Costa Rica, Panama and British Honduras - to sell Black Star Line
stock and memberships in the UNIA. But a series of misfortunes,
miscalculations and tactical blunders hastened his eventual American
downfall. In 1921 President Warren G. Harding, speaking in Alabama,
asserted his belief in the Washingtonian ideal of the separation of the
races. Garvey endorsed the speech, and was roundly condemned by
other black leaders.The following year Garvey went to Georgia for a
meeting with Edward Young Clarke, 'Imperial Kleagle' of the racist
and terroristic Ku Klux Klan, in an attempt to elicit Klan support for
the UNIA's African programme. From their opposing perspectives,
Clarke and Garvey shared a common belief in racial purity and racial
separation. As Garvey later announced: 'Whilst the Ku Klux Klan
desires to make America absolutely a white man's country, the UNIA
wants to make Africa absolutely a black man's country'. 34 Garvey's
black critics were astounded and outraged by the episode. William
Pickens of the NAACP, who had earlier shown interest in the UNIA,
broke with Garvey over the Klan meeting, and informed him bitterly:

I gather you are the Ku Klux Klan, or at least conceding

now endorsing
the justice of its aim and repress coloured Americans and
to crush
incidently other racial and religious groups in the United States. You
compare the aim of the Ku Klux in America with your aims in Africa -
and if that be true, no civilized man can endorse either one of you. ...What
is the earthly commonsense of bargaining what we have in the United

States for what the Klan, and nothing like the Klan, can give us in Africa?
If it is ever to be possible for you to negotiate a worse transaction than
the Black Star Line, this must be IT.. ..I would rather be a plain black
American fighting in the ranks AGAINST the Klan and all its brood than
to be the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux or the allied Imperial Blizzard
oftheUNIA. 3 5

An editorial by Chandler Owen in The Messenger, the black

socialist paper, was headlined: 'Marcus Garvey! The Black Imperial

88
 Marcus Garvey: Jamaican Messiah

Wizard Becomes Messenger Boy Of The White Ku Klux Kleagle', and

concluded:

The issue is joined, and we shall spare no pains to inform the American,
West Indian, African, South American and Canal Zone Negroes of the
emptiness of all this Garvey flapdoodle, bombast and lying about
impossible and conscienceless schemes calculated not to redeem Africa
but to enslave Africa and the Negro everywhere. ..the Messenger is firing
the opening gun in a campaign to drive Garvey and Garveyism from the
American soil.

Robert W. Bagnall, an organizer for the NAACP, was reported in

the New York Times as having told a 'Marcus Garvey Must Go' rally
that:

Garvey tells you to accept the Ku Klux Klan at its face value. He tells you
not to oppose the Klan which has lynched and robbed you again and
again. That's Garvey a leader who shows himself a cowardly, whining
adventurer, an individual of doubtful honesty and a demagogic
charlatan. 36

In turn, Garvey stigmatized his black critics as proponents of

'racial equality' as distinct from his own philosophy of 'racial purity'.
His continuing support for white segregationists, and his contacts with
Theodore G. Bilbo, the Mississippi senator actively opposed to racial
intermixing, who also espoused the repatriation of black Americans to
West Africa, indicated that in his quest and zeal for black separatism,
Garvey disregarded the sensibilities of most American Negroes.
After 1920 also, Garvey was repeatedly in financial and legal
difficulties. The Black Star Line was economically unsound, and its
operations were less than seaworthy. For example, the BSL's first ship,
a small freighter, the 'S. S. Yarmouth', cost $165,000, and was in
constant operational and legal trouble. Other ships purchased by the
line, theaptly-named 'Shadyside', an old Hudson River excursion
boat,and the steam yacht 'Kanawha', never realized a fraction of their
purchase prices. The 'Yarmouth' ( later named 'S. S. Frederick
Douglass'), sailed for Cuba with a cargo of whiskey, narrowly escaped
sinking, and arrived at its destination with a good part of the cargo
having been disposed of by the crew.The Pan Union Company, the
importers of the whiskey, were awarded $6,000 by a court for their
losses. In less than five months' active service, the 'Shadyside' cost
the BSL $1 1,000 in operating losses.
At the 1922 convention of the UNIA, Garvey repudiated
his critics within themovement, and removed them from office
after a series of acrimonious show trials. At the same time,
he began to modify his demands for the expulsion of the European

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Black Leadership in America

powers from Africa, disavowed his connection with radicalism, but

continued to denounce his enemies (real and imagined) within the
NAACP. Women were featured more prominently at the 1922
convention, after female delegates challenged male dominance of the
proceedings and the UNIA as a male-run organization but featured
mainly in fashion shows and pageants as 'Modistes and Milliners' and
'Manikins'. Bessie Coleman, the first black American to obtain a
pilot's licence, was presented to the delegates (she was killed four
years later after falling from her plane at a flying display at
Jacksonville, Florida). A motion was debated that the women in UNIA
should be given greater prominence in the organization.

We, the women of UNIA and ACL know that no race can rise higher than
its women. We need women in the important places of the organization to

help refine and mould public sentiment, realizing the colossal programme
of this great organization and. ..we are determined to reclaim our own
land, Africa. 37

In 1922 Garvey and three of his associates were arrested and

charged with using the United States Mails to defraud - on the basis of
information (unwittingly) supplied to the Bureau of Investigation by
Cyril V. Briggs, leader of the African Blood Brotherhood, a radical
group, which advocated human rights, an end to colonialism and a
federation of Negro organizations'. Garvey had attacked Briggs,
'all

who was of light complexion, as a 'white man' trying to pass as black.

Briggs was also an ardent supporter of the Russian Revolution,
leading Garvey to condemn him as a 'dangerous Bolshevik'. 38
At his trial the prosecution declared that Garvey had promoted the
sale of BSL stock, although he knew that the company was in serious
financial trouble. Garvey conducted his own defence in a melo-
dramatic fashion, and blamed his colleagues, white competitors, the
NAACP and other enemies for the Line's collapse. He was fined
$1,000, and sentenced to five years in prison. Released on bond, he
returned to UNIA activity, and in particular attempted to obtain
permission from the Liberian government to establish a UNIA base in
The Liberians, also engaged in financial transactions
that country.
with the Firestone Rubber Company, informed the American
government that they were 'irrevocably opposed, both in principle and
fact to the incendiary policy of the Universal Negro Improvement
Association headed by Marcus Garvey'. 39 In addition, Garvey faced
the opposition of theEuropean imperialist powers (and of Du Bois and
J. Edgar Hoover) to his Liberian scheme. In 1925 Garvey's appeal
against his mails fraud conviction was rejected by the United States
Circuit Court of Appeals, and he was sent to the Atlanta penitentiary.

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 Marcus Garvey: Jamaican Messiah

After two years President Calvin Coolidge (who had gained Garvey's
declaration of support in the 1924 elections) commuted his sentence,
and as an alien convicted of a felony, he was deported to Jamaica.
From 1927 1940 Garvey worked to rebuild the UNIA, and
to
branches were opened in Paris and London - where he set up an office
in West Kensington. In 1929 the Sixth International Convention of
Negro Peoples of the World met in Jamaica, but Garvey disputed with
the American delegates, whom he accused of financial malpractices.
He demand that the headquarters of the
also refused to accept their
organization remain in New
York, and with the defection of his
remaining American followers, Garvey's influence in the United
States declined even further - although offshoots of the UNIA were to
reappear from time to time in the 1930s and 1940s. Garvey himself
remained active. He denounced Italy's attack on Ethiopia in 1935,
castigated the Harlem religious leader Father Divine for permitting his
followers to refer to him as God, and continued to envision a world-
wide organization of black people dedicated to African liberation. But
none of his causes aroused the mass support which he had commanded
in America. Garvey died in London in 1940 (after reading premature
reports of his death in the press), impoverished and without ever
having set foot in Africa.

GARVEYISM

The ideology of Marcus Garvey and the UNIA combined the various
elements of black nationalism - religious, cultural, economic and
territorial - into a distinctive philosophy. Basic to this world view was
the emotive power of blackness. Garvey was essentially a racial
Zionist who offered an eschatology of colour, in which black was
good and white was evil. Garveyism advocated black economic self-
determination and African redemption. It preached the revitalization
of coloured people throughout the world and the power of the black
race. Garvey was also well aware of the importance of religion in
black culture and consciousness. The religious component of
Garveyism was the African Orthodox Church, established in 1921,
with the West Indian George Alexander McGuire as the UNIA's
chaplain general. Garvey believed that as God was made in the image
of man, black people ought to visualize and worship a black God and a
black Christ. As he expressed it:

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Black Leadership in America

Since the white people have seen their own God through white spectacles,
we have now started out to see our God through our own spectacles. We
Negroes believe in the God of Ethiopia, the everlasting God. ..but we shall
worship Him through the spectacles of Ethiopia. 40

To many of its followers, the UNIA was a surrogate or civil

religion, with Garvey a 'Black Moses', blacks the Chosen People, and
Africa the Promised Land. At the same time, the rituals, symbols and
beliefs of the UNIA's civil religion were sufficiently generalized to
permit members to continue to participate in their particular religious
denominations. Benjamin E. Mays, the Negro theologian and teacher
(and intellectual mentor of Martin Luther King, Jr) observed that
Garvey used the idea of a black God 'to arouse the Negro to a sense of
deep appreciation for his race. ..to stimulate [him] to work to improve
his social and economic conditions'. 41 Culturally, Garveyism extolled
and intensified the race consciousness which had already existed
among black Americans, only too painfully aware of their ethnic
identity in a racist society. It was Garvey's considerable achievement
to give this awareness a more positive (and international) focus. As a
statement of economic nationalism, Garveyism (deriving many of its
principal tenets from Booker T. Washington) espoused black
economic independence and self-sufficiency, but avoided endorsing
either capitalism or socialism. The Black Star Line and the Negro
Factories Corporation were, in fact, more cooperative than corporate
forms of business enterprise. The UNIA's proposed Liberian colony
would have comprised family units together with larger cooperative
farms administered by the Association.
The most important element in Garveyism, however, was its
emphasis on a return to Africa (whether in a physical or a spiritual
sense), the expulsion of European powers from the African continent,
and belief that once a strong and independent 'African nation' was
established, Negroes would gain automatically in power and prestige.
Although Garvey did not realistically expect all black Americans to
'return' to Africa, he viewed the UNIA as representing the vanguard
in the struggle for African liberation. As he informed an audience in
Madison Square Garden in 1924:

The thoughtful and industrious of our race want to go back to Africa,

because we realize it will be our only hope of permanent existence. We do
not want all the Negroes in Africa. Some are no good here, and naturally
will be no good there. The no-good Negro will naturally die in fifty years.
The Negro who is wrangling about and fighting for social equality will
naturally pass away in fifty years, and yield his place to the progressive
Negro who wants a society and country of his own. 42

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 Marcus Garvey: Jamaican Messiah

Failing the peaceful resettlement of a black elite in colonized

Africa, Garvey advocated the use of force, and the UNIA included
such paramilitary units as the African Legion, The Black Eagle Flying
Corps and the Universal African Motor Corps. Garvey informed
delegates to the 1920 Convention (and the European colonialist
powers in Africa):
We are striking homeward toward Africa to make her the big black
republic. .and we say to the white man who dominates Africa that it is to
his interest to clear out now, because we are coming, not as in the time of
Father Abraham, 2,000,000 strong but we are coming 400,000,000 strong
and we mean to retake every square inch of the 12,000,000 square miles
of African territory belonging to us by right Divine. 43

At the Second International Convention in 1921 Garvey delivered

an address at Liberty Hall which concluded with the ringing
declaration:

It falls to our shackles that bind Mother Africa. Can you

lot to tear off the
do it? You did Revolutionary War. You did it in the Civil War.
it in the
You did it at the Battles of the Marne and Verdun. You can do it marching
up the battle heights of Africa. Let the world know that 400,000,000
Negroes are prepared to live or die as free men. Climb ye the heights of
liberty and cease not in well doing until you have planted the banner of
the Red, the Black and the Green on the hilltops of Africa. 44

The liberation of Africa from European colonial rule, and the

repatriation there of the 'best' Afro-Americans (mulattos, by
definition, were excluded), appear as constant - although not always
clearly expressed - themes in Garvey's writings and speeches. But the
mass appeal asserted by Garveyism transcended the impracticality and
fantasy of its 'Back-to- Africa' ideology. For most Garveyites, the idea
of an African homeland was more appealing than any actual desire (or
ability) to leave the United States. Richard Wright, recalling his
encounters with Garveyites in Chicago in the 1920s, felt that they

had embraced a totally racialistic outlook which endowed them with a

dignity I have never seen before in Negroes. Those Garveyites I knew
could never understand why I liked them but would never follow them,
and I pitied them too much to tell them that they would never achieve
their goal, that Africa was owned by the imperial powers of Europe, that
their lives were alien to the mores of the natives of Africa, that they were
people of the West. ...It was when the Garveyites spoke fervently of
building their own country, of someday living within the boundaries of a
culture of their own making, that I sensed the passionate hunger of their
lives. 45

Alain Locke, editor of and contributor to The New Negro, an

anthology of the work of artists and writers of the Harlem

93
Black Leadership in America

Renaissance, published in 1925, observed in his essay 'The New

Negro' that:
When the racial leaders twenty years ago spoke of developing race pride
and stimulating race consciousness, and of the desirability of race
solidarity, they could not in accurate degree have anticipated the abrupt
feeling that has surged up and now pervades the awakened centres.. ..With
the American Negro, his new internationalism is primarily an effort to
recapture contact with the scattered peoples of African derivation.

He viewed Garveyism as constituting perhaps 'a transient' but

certainly a 'spectacular phenomenon' animated by 'the sense of a
mission of rehabilitating the race world esteem from the loss of
in
prestige for which the fate and conditions of slavery have so largely
been responsible'. 46

GARVEY AND HIS BLACK CRITICS

Even more than Booker T. Washington, Garvey aroused critical
responses from his black American contemporaries, but all were
agreed on (as they deplored) his mass appeal. From the time of his
arrival in Harlem until his deportation, Garvey faced the often bitter
opposition of established and aspiring black leaders of differing
ideological persuasions. To the middle-class, integrationist members
of the NAACP and the Urban League, as well as to black socialists
and radicals, Garvey was viewed as a visionary, a charlatan, a
demagogue and a madman. He was accused of advocating racial
segregation and of pandering to the prejudice of Southern whites, of
injecting a divisive consciousness of colour among Afro-Americans
and of duping his gullible followers.
Despite his expressed admiration for Booker T. Washington,
members of the National Urban League, with its vested interest in
economic opportunity for blacks within the American capitalist
system (and its support for racial integration) were less than
enthusiastic about Garvey's aims. Charles S. Johnson, writing for the
NUL's journal Opportunity in 1923, characterized Garvey as a
'dynamic, blundering, temerarious visionary' and a trickster. Not only
were his ideas unrealistic, his 'financial exploits were ridiculously
unsound, his plans for the redemption of Africa absurdly visionary,
and the grand result, the fleecing of hundreds of thousands of poor and
ignorant Negroes'. By the standards of the NUL, Garveyism was 'a
gigantic swindle', providing a 'dream-world escape for the "illiterati"

94
 Marcus Garvey: Jamaican Messiah

from the eternal curse of their racial status in this country'. All that
Garvey offered the urban poor was 'an opiate for their hopeless
helplessness - a fantastic world beyond the grasp of logic and reason
in which they might slake cravings never in this social order to be
realised'. 47 Urban Leaguers (like most of Garvey's black opponents)
saw him as an outsider, undereducated and bombastic. Board members
of the NUL were also light-skinned, and this fact alone ensured
animosity between the League and the UNIA. On all counts, then,
Garvey and the NUL were antithetical. But Leaguers were not
insensible to Garvey's mass appeal, based on the twin pillars of racial
pride and the right of self-determination. Charles S. Johnson conceded
that Garvey's personal characteristics, deplored by his critics, were
precisely those which made him a charismatic figure.

His extravagant self-esteem could be taken for dignity, his hard-

headedness as self-reliance, his ignorance of law as transcendency, his
blunders as persecution, his stupidity as silent deliberation, his
churlishness and irascibility as the eccentricity of genius. 48

On wing of the black protest movement, Garvey was to earn

the left
the enmity of the socialists A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen,
joint editors of the Messenger. Randolph, the most notable black
labour organizer of the 1920s, had helped to form the Brotherhood of
Sleeping Car Porters in 1925. In later years he claimed to have given
Garvey his first opportunity of addressing a Harlem street audience.
(W. A. Domingo, who was the first editor of the Negro World ,

reported that Garvey's first public speech in New York was greeted
with catcalls and jeers, while the speaker himself, visibly nervous, fell
off the platform.) For a time, Randolph and Garvey, despite profound
differences in their racial and political attitudes, enjoyed cordial
relations. In 1919 Randolph addressed a UNIA meeting which
considered sending a Negro delegate to the Paris Peace Conference.
Earlier, Garvey had attended a conference organized by Randolph that
led to the formation of the short-lived International League of Darker
Peoples, which aimed to secure African liberation by an interracial
alliance of radical, liberal, and labour movements.
As the UNIA grew, however, relations between Randolph and
Garvey became increasingly strained. Garvey's glorification of black
capitalism ran counter to the Randolph-Owen belief in democratic
socialism, and other aspects of Garveyism earned their disapproval. In
a series of articles in the Messenger, they attacked Garvey's African
schemes as being based on simplistic reasoning, since the oppression
of the masses, worldwide, was colour-blind. Garvey was also accused

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Black Leadership in America

of stirring white prejudice against blacks and of fostering tensions

between West Indians and Afro-Americans. In fact, the Messenger's
critiques of Garvey had a pronounced anti-West Indian tone. Robert
W. Bagnall, writing in the magazine in 1923, depicted Garvey as:
A Jamaican Negro of unmixed stock, squat, fat and sleek, with protruding
jaws and heavy jowls, small bright pig-like eyes and bull-dog-like face.
Boastful, egotistical, tyrannical, intolerant, cunning, shifty smooth and
suave, avaricious. ..gifted at self-advertisement, without shame in self-
laudation, promising ever, but never fulfilling. ..a lover of pomp and
tawdry finery and garish display,a bully with his own folk but servile in
the presence of the Klan, a sheer opportunist. If he is not insane, he is a
demagogic charlatan, but the probability is that the man is insane.
Certainly the movement is insane, whether Garvey is or not. 49

Following Garvey's overtures to the Ku Klux Klan, Chandler and

Randolph served notice that they were going to campaign for his
expulsion from America. The Messenger now adopted the slogan
'Garvey Must Go'. The Friends of Negro Freedom, a civil rights
propaganda organization, founded by Randolph and Owen in May
1920, and which included several NAACP officials, also promoted
anti-Garvey meetings. Randolph wrote sarcastically in the Messenger:
'I think we are justified in asking the question, that if Mr Garvey is

seriously interested in establishing a Negro nation, why doesn't he

begin with Jamaica, West Indies?' 50 (A Messenger editorial typified
Garvey as 'A Supreme Jamaican Jackass').
In 1923 eight leaders of the 'Garvey Must Go' campaign, with
Chandler Owen as secretary, wrote to the US Attorney General, urging
the government to speed up its prosecution case against Garvey for
mail fraud. (Garvey charged the committee with offences against race
solidarity.) The signatories included Harry H. Pace of the NUL,
William Pickens, field secretary of the NAACP, and Chandler Owen.
A. Philip Randolph, despite his major role in the campaign, did not
sign the letter. During Garvey's imprisonment, the Messenger advo-
cated the total destruction of the UNI A, and commended Du Bois'
critique (see p. 99- 100) of Garvey: 'Lunatic or Traitor', published in
1924. Randolph and Owen, like other commentators, rejected Gar-
vey's intense black nationalism, and certainly resented his achieve-
ment in leading a movement composed almost entirely of the black
working class. Above all, they resented his challenge to the Talented
(Afro-American) Tenth's monopoly of race leadership. (Garvey
himself observed with some accuracy that 'my success as an organizer
was more than rival Negro leaders could tolerate'.) 51 Nowhere was
this jealousy and resentment more apparent than in the responses of
W.E.B. Du Bois to the rise (and fall) of Garvey in America.

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 Marcus Garvey: Jamaican Messiah

DU BOIS AND GARVEY

In his first autobiography,Du Bois recalled that he had first heard of
Garvey 1915, on a visit to Jamaica, where he had been warmly-
in
received 'by coloured people and white. ...Garvey and his associates,
The United [sic] Improvement and Conservation Association, joined

in thewelcome'. 52 Du Bois reported Garvey 's arrival in America in

the Crisis, noting that he was on a visit to raise funds for the
establishment of an industrial school for blacks in Jamaica. Four years
later, DuBois conceded that Garvey had 'with singular success
capitalized and made vocal the great and long suffering grievances
and spirit of protest among the West Indian peasantry', and
commended his eloquence as an orator. And, Du Bois noted, 'he has
become to thousands of people a sort of religion'. 53 But Du Bois'
subsequent references to Garvey, open or veiled, became increasingly
bitter and occasionally shrill. In a cryptic Crisis editorial in 1922, Du
Bois was obviously referring to Garvey when he predicted that 'We
must expect the Demagogue among Negroes more and more. He will
come to lead, inflame, lie and steal. He will gather large followings
and then disappear.' 54 Garvey did not let such oblique references pass
unchallenged, and regularly blamed Du Bois and the NAACP for most
of his problems, including the thwarting of his Liberian plans, the
collapse of the Black Star Line, and his trial and imprisonment. Du
Bois, in turn, was angered because Garvey 's African schemes were
competing - and often confused - with his own Pan-African
philosophy and activities.
From 1920 onwards Du Bois began to aim Crisis editorials directly
at Garvey and the UNIA. Among other misdemeanours, Garvey was

charged with having attempted to introduce the black/mulatto schism

in America where, Du Bois claimed unconvincingly, 'it has never had
any substantial footing and where today it is absolutely repudiated by
every thinking Negro'. In accentuating this division, Garvey had
'aroused more bitter colour enmity inside the race than has ever before
Two weeks before the UNIA's 1920 Convention, Garvey
existed'. 55
Du Bois, inviting him to stand for election as 'the accredited
wrote to
spokesman for the Negro people'. Du Bois icily refused the
provocative invitation, and sent several requests to Garvey for
information on UNIA membership, finances and activities, for a
'critical estimate' to be published in the Crisis. At the convention, Du
Bois was reported as having said to an interviewer:

Ido not believe that Marcus Garvey is sincere. I think he is a demagogue,

and that his movement will collapse in a short time. ...His followers are

97
Black Leadership in America

the lowest type of negroes, mostly from the Indies. It cannot be

considered an American movement. ...Most of his following are in
Jamaica and other islands of the West and East Indies. They are allied
with the Bolsheviks and the Sinn Feiners in their world revolution. 56

Garvey, in retaliation, castigated Du Bois as 'the associate of an

alien race', and accused him of being 'more of a white man than a
Negro [and] only a professional Negro at that'. Warming to this
theme, Garvey ridiculed Du Bois' 'aristocratic pretensions' and his
professed Negro, French and Dutch ancestry.

Ihave but the ancient glories of Ethiopia to imitate. Anyone you hear
always talking about the kind of blood he has in him other than the blood
you can see, is dissatisfied with something and I feel sure that many of
the Negroes of the United States know that if there is a man who is most
dissatisfied with himself, it is Dr. Du Bois. 57

With relations between the two men worsening rapidly, Du Bois

denied that he was envious of Garvey 's success, rather was he fearful
of his failure.

He can have all the money and power he can efficiently and honestly use.
If in addition he wants to prance down Broadway in a green shirt - let
him - but do not let him foolishly overwhelm with bankruptcy and
disaster one of the most interesting spiritual movements in the modern
Negro world. 58

Du Bois intensified his campaign against Garvey and again

attempted (unsuccessfully) to secure details of BSL finances. In a long
article published in Century magazine in 1923 Du Bois linked Booker
T. Washington with Garvey, and deplored the influence of both the
master and his declared disciple.

The present generation of Negroes has survived two grave temptations,

the greater one fathered by Booker T. Washington, which said, 'Let
politics alone, keep your place, work hard, and do not complain', and
which meant perpetual caste status for the coloured folk by their own
cooperation and consent, and the consequent inevitable debauchery of the
white world; and the lesser, fathered by Marcus Garvey, which said,
'Give up, Surrender! The struggle is useless; back to Africa and fight the
white world'.

In the same article, Du Bois also described having seen Garvey at a

UNIA meeting:

A little fat black man, ugly but with intelligent eyes and a big head...

seated on a plank platform beside a 'throne', dressed in a military

uniform of the gayest mid-Victorian type. 59

Garvey 's response was immediate and savage. The Negro World
carried the banner headline: 'W. E. B. Du Bois As A Hater Of Dark

98
 Marcus Garvey: Jamaican Messiah

People', subtitled 'Calls His Own Race "Black and Ugly", Judging
From The White Man's Standard Of Beauty'. On the sensitive issue of
physical and personal appearance, Garvey claimed that to Du Bois,
anything black was repellent, and that was why 'in 1917 he had but
[NAACP] office, when one could
the lightest of coloured people in his
hardly whether it was a white show or a coloured vaudeville he
tell

was running at 5th Avenue'. Du Bois, Garvey alleged, actually

believed blacks to be ugly, sought out the company of whites, danced
and even slept with them. Comparing their respective backgrounds to
his own advantage in terms of self-reliance and achievements, Garvey
conceded that Du Bois was highly educated, but if that education 'fits
him for no better service than being a lackey for white people, then it
were better that Negroes were not educated'. Du Bois, Garvey
claimed, was the avowed enemy and known saboteur of the UNIA -
an all-black organization grounded in the common people. But for the
support of such white patrons as Mary White Ovington and Oswald
Garrison Villard, the fastidious and mannered Du Bois 'would be
eating his pork chops from the counter of the cheapest restaurant in
Harlem like so many other Negro graduates of Harvard and Fisk'.
Garvey concluded his indictment by pointing up the fundamental
ideological differences which separated him from Du Bois and the
NAACP:
Du Bois cares not for an Empire of Negroes but contents himself with
being a secondary part of white civilization. We of the UNIA feel that the
greatest service that the Negro can render to the world and himself.. .is to
make his independent contribution to civilization. It is only a question of
time before coloured men and women everywhere will harken to the
voice in the wilderness, even though Du Bois impugns the idea of Negro
liberation. 60

(Garvey chose to ignore Du Bois' charge that he was a Jamaican

agitator uninterested in the struggle of Afro-Americans for civil
rights.)
Following Garvey's trial and conviction, Du Bois published his
most bitter attack on Garvey in a Crisis editorial headed 'A Lunatic or
A Traitor'. It revealed that to Du Bois, the basic principles in conflict
were those of racial integration as opposed to separation, and the
antagonisms fostered by Garvey's
interracial racial chauvinism. The
'half-concealed' planks in the UNIA platform were seen as meaning:
That no person of African descent can ever hope to become an American
citizen.
That forcible separation of the races and the banishment ol Negroes to
Africa is the only solution to the race problem. That race war is sure to
follow any attempt to realize the programme of the NAACP.

99
Black Leadership in America

Garvey, Du Bois insisted, far from attacking white prejudice, was

attacking fellow Negroes, for whom he only had contempt. He refused
Garvey was now the victim of white prejudice since 'no
to accept that
Negro America ever had a fairer and more patient trial'. Garvey had
in
'convicted himself by his own admissions and monkey-shines in
court'.

American Negroes have endured this wretch too long and with fine
restraintand every effort at cooperation and understanding. But the end
has come. Every man who apologises for and defends Marcus Garvey
from this day forth writes himself down as unworthy of the countenance
of decent Americans. As for Garvey himself, this open ally of the Ku
Klux Klan should be locked up or sent home.

In a dramatic climax to his piece, Du Bois claimed that he had been

advised not to publish it 'lest I be assassinated', and concluded with a
heroic flourish: 'I have been exposing white traitors for a quarter of a
century. If the day has come when I cannot tell the truth about black
traitors it is high time that I died.' 61
At the end of the 1924 UNIA Convention, a resolution was passed
which declared:
In view of the fact that W. Du
Bois has continually attempted to
E. B.
obstruct the progress of the UNIA and detriment of the Negro
to the loss
race and that he has. ..gone out of his way to try to defeat the cause of
Africa's redemption, that he be proclaimed as ostracized from the Negro
race as far as the UNIA is concerned, and from henceforward be regarded
as an enemy of the black people of the world. 62

From his prison cell in Atlanta, Garvey continued to lambast Du

Bois and the NAACP as deadly adversaries. After Garvey's release
and deportation, Du Bois - with his bete noir removed from the
American scene - denied that the NAACP had opposed the UNIA, and
claimed that the Crisis had published only five articles on Garvey
(ignoring those which had attacked him only indirectly). In later years,
Du Bois was more magnanimous toward Garvey, and in The World
And Africa (1947) characterized Garveyism as 'a poorly conceived but
intensely earnest determination to unite the Negroes of the world,
especially in commercial enterprise'. The strength of the UNIA 'lay in
its backing by the masses of West Indians' and by substantial numbers

of Afro-Americans. Its weakness and shortcomings 'lay in...

demagogic leadership, poor finance, intemperate propaganda, and the
natural apprehension aroused among the colonial powers'. 63 In his
it

second autobiography, Du Bois was concerned to disclaim any

'enmity or jealousy' in his feud with Garvey, and cited that part of his
Crisis editorial (published after Garvey's deportation) which stated

100
 Marcus Garvey: Jamaican Messiah

that Garvey had and worthy dream. We wish him well. He is

'a great
free; he has a following; he still has a chance to carry on his work in

his own home and among his own people and to accomplish some of
his ideas. We will be the first to applaud any success he might have.' 64
The message was clear; with Garvey 's spectacular American career at
an end, Du Bois could consign him thankfully to the West Indies, and
oblivion.
For his part, Garvey refused to come to even partial peace terms
with his most influential black American protagonist. In the 1930s,
when Du Bois began to espouse the idea of a nonprofit, cooperative
racial economy, Garvey roundly accused him of stealing the UNIA's
clothes and preaching latter-day Garveyism. The Negro World carried
the headline: 'Dr. Du Bois agrees with UNIA leader - Takes
Programme Over Finally - But Does Not Openly Confess It'. In a
short essay, published in 1934, Garvey repeated his contention that Du
Bois was 'exceptional' only in his admiration for and imitation of
white culture.

To us he was never a leader.. .just a vain opportunist who held on to the

glory and honour showered on him because he was one of the first
experiments of Negro higher education. He was never a born leader. He is

too selfish to be anything but Du Bois. 65

Writing from England in the following year, Garvey delivered a

final verdict on Du Bois, a man
with 'no racial self-respect, no
independent ideas, nothing of self-reliance', and was prepared to
compose (thirty years before it was required) Du Bois' obituary
notice:

When Du Bois dies he will be remembered as the man who sabotaged the
Liberian colonization scheme of the Negro, the man who opposed the
American Negro launching steamships on the seas, the man who did
everything to handicap the industrial, educational system of Tuskegee,
the man who never had a good word to say for any other Negro leaders,
but who tried to down every one of them. 66

ASSESSMENT

Where Du Bois and the NAACP failed to reach a mass black

constituency, Marcus Garvey, through the UNIA, succeeded in
building a popular movement and following for his programme of
racial upliftand the 'redemption' of Africa. Garvey's greatest
achievement was to arouse in poor and lower-class blacks, unaffected

101
Black Leadership in America

by or unaware of the Harlem Renaissance and the 'New Negro', a

fierce pride in their colour and racial identity. Like all leaders, Garvey
was a visionary. That his vision of the expulsion of the European
colonial powers from Africa was, in the period between the two World
Wars, impossible of realization, never appears to have occurred to
him. In effect, he wanted to make Zionists of black Americans and of
coloured people throughout the world. Garveyism struck a responsive
chord among the Afro-American underclass of the 1920s partly
because it exalted all things black and inverted white standards, while
retaining, in large measure, the practices of the surrounding white
society. For every white institution and belief, Garveyism offered a
black counterpart: The Black Star Line, Black Cross Nurses, The
Negro World, The Black Legion and The Black Flying Corps, a black
God and a black Christ. Both a religious and circular impulse,
Garveyism linked its constituent elements in the concept of blackness.
(Marcus Garvey, rather than the Black Power theorists of the 1960s,
deserves credit for the slogan 'Black is Beautiful'.) Again, the
programme of the UNIA, with its stress on economic nationalism and
African liberation, permitted (and encouraged) Afro-Americans to
identify with 'primitive' Africans from a position of technological and
material superiority. But the bulk of Garvey's followers, in common
with most Afro-Americans during the 1920s, were never seriously
attracted by the prospect of going 'Back-To-Africa'. The nation-wide
interest the UNIA and its flamboyant leader aroused reflected the
disillusionment of blacks for whom the promised land of the
American city had turned into the harsh reality of the squalid ghetto.
And, with the anti-Negro climate of the post World War I era,
Garvey's rhetoric, together with UNIA pomp and ceremony, attracted
a following. But, as in the nineteenth century, few black Americans
were prepared to leave the United States and undertake the uncertain
and thankless task of 'redeeming' Africa. Garvey's larger significance
as a leader lies in the fact that he articulated the grievances of those
blacks for whom the civil rights goals of desegregation and political
rights were largely meaningless. Again, he made the established Afro-
American leadership class (and its white allies) painfully aware of
their distance from the rank-and-file of the urban underclass. After
Garvey's deportation, and particularly during the Depression and New
Deal, the established black protest organizations tried more
strenuously than before to close the gap between the elitist concerns of
the Talented Tenth and the day-to-day problems of the majority of
American Negroes.
The less attractive face of Garveyism was its authoritarianism,
paramilitarism, and racial chauvinism. Garvey himself has been
102
 Marcus Garvey: Jamaican Messiah

portrayed as a charismatic leader and a shameless demagogue, a

revolutionary and a reactionary, the father of the heightened black
consciousness of the 1960s, and the purveyor of a falsified and
incomplete version of the African past and the Afro-American
experience. From his published Papers, he sometimes emerges as an
artful dodger, hypersensitive to real or imagined criticism, and
constantly (but not always convincingly) protesting his financial
honesty. There is no doubt that Garvey, more than any previous leader,
stimulated racial pride and confidence among black Americans. As the
black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier observed perceptively in the
1920s, part of Garvey's success as the leader of a mass movement was
due to the regalia, pomp and circumstances which the UNIA offered to
its adherents.

A uniformed member of a Negro lodge paled in significance beside a

soldier of the Army of Africa. A Negro might be a porter during the day,
taking his orders from white men, but he was an officer in the black army
when it assembled at night at Liberty Hall. 67

To the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Sr, pastor of Harlem's

Abyssinian Baptist Church, Garvey's arrival in 1916:

was more significant to the Negro than the World War, the Southern
exodus and the fluctuation of property values. ...During the reign of
Garvey there were two places in America - the federation of 48 states,
and Harlem, and two million Negroes thought that Harlem was both of
them. ...it is recording the truth to say that [Garvey] is the only man that
68
ever made Negroes who are not black ashamed of their colour.

Claude McKay, applauded Garvey's propagandistic skills, and the

sheer audacity of the Black Star Line, which 'had an electrifying
effect upon all the Negro peoples of the world'. Unfortunately,
Garvey's revolutionary fervour had not been accompanied by a true
revolutionary's consciousness. His ignorance of Africa was profound,
taking no account of its tribal, geographic, linguistic and geographical
divisions. His schemes of black capitalism had foundered with the
collapse of the Black Star Line. But, McKay conceded, Garvey's 'five
years of stupendous vaudeville' had made him 'the biggest
popularizer of the Negro problem, especially among Negroes, since

Uncle Tom's Cabin'. 69 James Weldon Johnson found little to praise in

Garvey or the movement he led. A 'supreme egotist' who had

surrounded himself with 'cringing sychophants' and 'cunning
knaves', Garvey, in advocating the repatriation of black Americans,
was simply plagiarizing ideas retailed by the American Colonization
Society a century earlier, and rejected by the majority of Afro-
103
Black Leadership in America

Americans then and in the 1920s:

The central idea of Garvey's scheme was absolute abdication and the
recognition as facts of the assertions that this is a white man's country in
which the Negro has no right, no future, no chance. To that idea the
overwhelming majority of thoughtful Negroes will not subscribe. 70

Garvey's feuds with his American detractors drained the energies

of all the participants, inhibited the development of both the unified
black community he claimed to want, and polarized the black protest
movement during a period of 'white backlash'. Garvey's movement
(and its adherents) aroused only scorn and derision from the emerging
black middle class. An affluent black physician in Chicago informed
E. Franklin Frazier that the letters UNIA really stood for 'Ugliest
Negroes in America'. 71 Verdicts on Garvey's leadership inevitably
reflect attitudes toward the subsequent trends in American race
relations. CertainlyMarcus Garvey relished conflict and competition,
and this was both a source of his appeal, and a factor in his defeat. As
Myrdal observed, this Jamaican 'outsider':
denounced practically the whole Negro leadership. They were bent upon
cultural assimilation; they were all looking for support and they were
making a compromise between accommodation and protest. Within a
short time he succeeded in making enemies of practically all Negro
intellectuals. Against him were mobilized most leaders in the Negro
schools, the Negro organizations and the Negro press. He heartily
responded by naming them opportunists, liars, thieves, traitors and
bastards. 72

On a visit to Jamaica in 1965, a notable black American placed a

wreath on Garvey's memorial, and informed his audience:
Marcus Garvey was the first man of colour in the history of the United
States to lead and develop a mass movement. He was the first man on a
mass scale and level to give millions of Negroes a sense of dignity and
destiny, and make the Negro feel he is somebody. You gave Marcus
Garvey to the United States of America, and gave to millions of
Negroes... a sense of personhood, a sense of manhood, and a sense of
somebodiness. 73

The speaker on that occasion was Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.

REFERENCES

1. Isaacs, H. R., The New World of Negro Americans (London, 1964), p. 19.
2. Jacques-Garvey, A., Garvey and Garveyism (Kingston, Jamaica, 1963),
p.27.

104
 . .

Marcus Garvey: Jamaican Messiah

3. Johnson, J. W., Black Manhattan, op. cit., p. 147.

4. McKay, C, Harlem: Negro Metropolis (New York, 1940), p. 143.
5. Jacques-Garvey, A. (ed.), Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey
(New York, 1969), p. 124.
6. Ibid., p.125.

7. Hill, R. A. (ed.), The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement

Association Papers, Vol. I, 1826-August 1919 (University of California
Press, 1983), p. 5. (Cited hereafter as Papers.)
8. Jacques-Garvey, Garvey and Garveyism, op. cit., p. 8.

9. Jacques-Garvey, Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, op. cit.,

p.126.
10. Jacques-Garvey, Garvey and Garveyism, op. cit., p. 1 1

11. Papers, Vol 7,(1983), p.54.

12. Ibid., pp.55, 61.

13. Ibid.,p.ll6.
14. Harlan, L. R., Booker T. Washington: Wizard ofTuskegee, op. cit., p.281.
15. Papers, Vol. 7,(1983), p. 166.

16. Martin, T., Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of
Marcus Garvey and the UNIA (Westport, Connecticut, 1976), pp.28 1-3.
17. Jacques-Garvey, Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, op. cit.,

p.56.
18. Vincent, T., Black Power and the Garvey Movement (San Francisco,
California, 1972), p. 26.
19. Papers, Vol. I, (1983), p.146.
20. Jacques-Garvey, Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, op. cit.,

pp.127-8.
21 Jacques-Garvey, Garvey and Garveyism, op. cit., p. 3 1

22. James, C. L. R., Black Jacobins (London, 1980), p.396.

23. Papers, Vol. I, (1983), pp.503, 505.
24. Jacques-Garvey, Garvey and Garveyism, op. cit., p.91.

25. Cronon, E. D., Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the
Universal Negro Improvement Association (University of Wisconsin
Press, 1962), p.60.
26. Ibid.,p.52.
27. Jacques-Garvey, Garvey and Garveyism, op. cit., p. 86.

28. Papers, Vol. 77 (1983), p. 566.

29. Ottley, R.,New World A-Coming (New York, 1969), p.75.
30. Papers, Vol. 77(1983), p.647.
31. Ibid.,pp.442-43.
32. Ibid.,p.482.
33. Opportunity, I (August, 1923), p.21.
34. Papers, Vol. IV (1985), p.709.

105
Black Leadership in America

35. Ibid., pp.748-9.

36. Ibid., pp.758, 933.
37. Ibid.,p.l037.
38. Moore, R. B., 'Critics and Opponents of Marcus Garvey' in Clarke, J. H.
(ed.), Marcus Garvey and the Vision of Africa (New York, 1974), p. 224.
39. Cronon, Black Moses, op. cit., p. 129.
40. Jacques-Garvey, Philosophy and Opinions Of Marcus Garvey, op. cit.,

p.44.
41. Mays, B. E., The Negro's God as Reflected in His Literature (New York,
1938), pp. 184-5.
42. Jacques-Garvey, Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, op. cit.,

p.\22.
43. Johnson, Black Manhattan, op. cit., p. 97.

44. Jacques-Garvey, Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, op. cit.,

p.97.
45. Wright, R., American Hunger (New York, 1977), pp. 28-9.
46. Locke, A. (ed.), The New Negro (New York, 1980), pp.7-15.

47. Weiss, N. J., The National Urban League 1910-1940 (New York, OUP,
1974), pp. 148-9.
48. Opportunity, I (August, 1923), p. 232.

49. Messenger (March, 1923), p. 368.

50. Kornweibel, No Crystal Stair: Black Life and the Messenger, 1917-1928
(Westport, Connecticut, 1975), p. 148.

51. Papers, Vol. I, (1983), p.ll.

52. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, op. cit., p. 277.

53. Lester, J., (ed.), The Seventh Son, op. cit., II, pp. 175-6.
54. Rampersad, A., The Art and Imagination ofW. E. B. Du Bois (London,
1976), p.149.
55. Lester, The Seventh Son, op. cit., p. 183.
56. Papers, Vol. //(1983), p.620.
57. Rudwick, E. M., W. E. B. Du Bois, op. cit., p. 219.

58. Lester, The Seventh Son, op. cit., p. 183.

59. Martin, Race First, op. cit., pp. 297-9.
60. Jacques-Garvey, Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, op. cit.,

pp.3 10-20.
61 Lester, The Seventh Son, op. cit., pp. 1 84-6.
62. Martin, Race First, op. cit., pp. 306-7.
63. Du Bois, W. E. B., The World and Africa (New York, 1947), p.236.
64. Bu Bois, The Autobiography ofW. E. B. Du Bois, op. cit., pp.273-4.
65. Essien-Udom, E. U. and A. Jacques-Garvey (eds), More Philosophy and
Opinions of Marcus Garvey (London, 1977), p. 124.

106
 Marcus Garvey: Jamaican Messiah

66. Martin, Race First, op. cit., p.311.

67. Frazier, E. R, 'Garvey as a Mass Leader', Nation (18 August 1926),
pp. 147-8.
68. (New York, 1938), pp.70-71.
Powell, A. C. Snr, Against the Tide
69. McKay, C, 'Garvey as a Negro Moses' in W. Cooper (ed.), The Passion
of Claude McKay (New York, 1973), pp.65-9.
70. Johnson, Black Manhattan, op. cit., pp. 256-7.
71. Frazier, E. F., Black Bourgeoisie: The Rise of a New Middle Class
(Toronto, 1965), p. 250.
72. Myrdal, An American Dilemma, op. cit., p. 746.

73. Barrett, L. E., Soul Force: African Heritage in Afro- American Religion
(New York, 1974), p. 151.

107
 '

CHAPTER FIVE \^~

Martin Luther King, Jr:
Apostle for Non-Violence
*
r
1
(,(
r ^^
Is*-
T
?JH (2^5 f>~
Redemptive suffering had always been the part of Martin's argument
which I found difficult to accept. I had seen distress fester souls and bend
peoples' bodies out of shape, but I had yet to see anyone redeemed from
pain, by pain. [MAYA ANGELOU]

In 1960, my mother bought a television set... one day, there appeared the
Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. What a funny name, I thought. At the
face of
moment I first saw him, he was being handcuffed and shoved into a police
truck.He had dared to claim his rights as a native son, and had been
He displayed no fear, but seemed calm, serene, unaware of his
arrested.
own extraordinary courage. ...At the moment I saw his resistance I knew I
would never be able to live in this country without resisting everything
that sought to disinherit me. ...He Was The One, The Hero, The One
Fearless Person for whom we had waited
[ALICE WALKERP

PERSPECTIVES: A NEW DEAL FOR BLACKS? CIVIL

RIGHTS AND NEGRO PROTEST, 1932-1954

For most black Americans, the collapse of the economy after 1929
simply aggravated an already desperate situation. Black unemployment
figures were vastly out of proportion to their percentage of the population.
In 1933, an Urban League report indicated that over 17 per cent of the
entire Negro population was on relief (as contrasted with less than 10 per
cent of the total white population). Conditions were equally bad in the
North and the South, but in the Southern states, private charity

109
 Black Leadership in America

organizations often refused to aid blacks. In the Southern farm belts, black
tenant farmers and share croppers went increasingly into debt. Those
organizations traditionally concerned with black welfare - the NAACP
and the National Urban League^- were unable to cope with the emergency
crisisproduced by-tmr^epression. Beginning in the South Side of
Chicago, 'Jobs-for Negroes' campaigns - utilizing boycotts against
producers and retailers of goods and services who did not pursue fair
policies with respect to the employment of blacks - soon spread across
the country, but encountered difficulties as white merchants obtained
Negro organizations from r
V"£:
court injunctions
*—
establishments.
"prohibiting -
— picketing their
~ ~
The National Urban League, primarily concerned with
-
J

economic matters, offered its services to the Republican president, /

Herbert Hoover, successfully petitioned for the inclusion of a Negro on/
the President's Emergency Committee for Unemployment, and sought a
fair share of jobs and relief measures for blacks. But with whites now
willing to take even the m ost menial positions, the NUL's emphas s

I shifted from expanding opportunities to retaining those low-level jot s

\ NUL became more reliant than eve r
blacks already held. Increasingly, the
1 on the white philanthropic foundations, but could do little to improve
J either the employment status or the prospects of blacks during thei
1 Depressjoji^ — ^
' During the late 1920s and early 1930s, the American Communist
Party publicized injustices against blacks and attacked the black
bourgeoisie, and Negro protest organizations, but failed to attract a mass
following. The National Negro Congress, with A. Philip Randolph as its
first president, was formed in 1936. A Communist-inspired movement,

critical of the conservatism of th e NAACP a nd the NUL it was to founder

,

after the Soviet-Nazi non-aggression pact of 1939, when Randolph and

other, black leaders withdrew their support. *

Tt was the election~of the DeTnoerat-Eranklin D. Roosevelt in 1932,

with his promise of a 'New Deal', that raised black hopes and marked a
turning pjpint in American race relations. (SeTe^erTthe Depression had not
immediately"shaken the traditional Republican loyalties of Negroes. In the
1932 presidential election, blacks in Detroit, Cleveland, Philadelphia and
other major cities voted for Herbert Hoover.) By 1934, the Negro vote
began switching to the Democrats and in 1936, according to one estimate,
84.7 per cent of blacks favoured Roosevelt's rp.-fflprtinn^Althnnph jvjp.w

UDeal reform policies and govemmentaLagencies were not free of raciaj _

discrimination (and no major piece of civil rights legislatio n was adopted
during Rooseve lt's four terms ot office ), blacks shared in New Deal relief

4 measures, and the administration eventually appointed black advisers in

the major departments. Mary McLeod Bethune was made directoroLthe

110
 ^
Martin Luther King Jr: Apostle for Non-Violence
,

Division of Negro Affairs of the National Youth Administration William , 1 \

H. Hastie served in various capacities, including that of civilian aide to /

the Secretary of War in the early years of World War II, and Robert C. /
Weaver was adviser to the Department of the Interior. If these/
appointments were largely symbolic, they were also the highest positionsj
held by blacks in the federal government since the administratio n of
William Howard Taft. But Roosevelt, although the most attractive
president to black Americans since Abraham Lincoln, was a consummate
politician, keenly aware that he must not offend Southern sensibilities on
race issues beca use of his de pendence on Southern Democratic votes in *$£—
Congress forjhr passage, of New Dealiegislalion.f Yet precisely because
blacks did benefit from New Deal measures, particularly in the areas of
housing, education, health and labour, the established black protest
organizations attempted to bring increased pressure on the government to
mak e New Deal pjjHtiejsjmdjjrogra to black

s
needs^_
In 1933, following an ^N
^—
AAG^ initiative, various race advancement
organizations established the Joint Committee on National Recovery to
The emergence of
fight discriminatory practices in federal reliefagencies.

the Congress of Industrial Organizations (fCIO) saw an attempt by the

American Federation of Labour, underlRe leadership of John Lewis of the
United Mine Workers, to org anize black skilled and uns killed worker:
into industrial union s. Th e NAACP, in response, reversed its critical
stance toward organized labour, and worked to build an<ajli aflce with the

JCIU There was also~lTsIgnificant increase

. in the size of the black
electorate in the North during the Roosevelt era, and the mobilization of
organizations in the South to promote black voter registration. Again,
Roosevelt's appointments to the Supreme Court of justices generally
sympathetic to civil rights resulted in the gradual ending of such
discriminatory practices as segregation in interstate transportation and
inequalities in the pay of black and white school teacher s. Eleanor
Roosevelt a lso promoted civil rights causes. In 1938 at the opening
session of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare in Birmingham,
Alabama, Mrs Roosevelt defied a local segregation ordinance by taking a
seat on the 'coloured' side of the auditorium. The following year, when
the ultra-conservative Dau^tejs^oXihe^American Revolution refused to^
let the black contralt^rpanarTAndersoru perform at Constitutional HatfY
in Washington, DC, MrTkoosevelt resigned_from the PAR, and arranged

for Miss Andersonlo give her c oncer t fromthe step s of the Lincoln
Memorial. In the election of 1940Mack voters overwhelmingly supported
Roosevelt for a third term.
However, the New Deal, although it raised black hopes, failed to

111
Black Leadership in America

satisfy them. A 1937 conference, sponsored by the National Youth

Administration and organized by Mary McLeod Bethune, concluded that
the majority of blacks still faced the problems of unemployment and lack
of economic security, inadequate recreational and educational facilities,

poor health and housing, and the continuing fear of mob violence. Two
years later, another conference concluded that certain measures were
imperative if there was to be any meaningful improvement in the status of
blacks. These included federal legislation to outlaw lynching, the
unrestricted use of the vote, the elimination of discrimination in the
federal civil service, the expansion of low-rent housing, the extension of
social security coverage to domestic and agricultural workers, additional
black appointments to federal policy-making bodies and the expansion of
federally-funded work-relief programmes. In 1940 the NAACP, in a
commended Roosevelt for having
Crisis editorial, included blacks in New
Deal programmes, but condemned his failure to support a federal anti-
lynching bill, and the persistence of racial discrimination in civilian life

and in the United States armed forces.

On the eve of American involvement in World War II, black protest
organizations were united in demanding full and equal participation in the
military, and an end to discriminatory practices in the defence industries -
which offered new employment opportunities for the blacks. Some
came to adopt a more conciliatory tone,
sections of the black press
arguing (after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor) that the national crisis
demanded that civil rights agitation should be suspended (or at least

muted) for the duration of the war. More radical black leaders disagreed.
Th£31? rch on Washin gton Movement (MOWM) w as the most Striking
demonstration of more aggressive trends in black protest thought and
action. In fact, the idea of exerting mass pressure on the government to

end discrimination in the defence industries did not originate with A.

Philip Randolph's call for a march on Washington, D.C. in early 1941.
Agitation for mass pressure of some kind had grown since the failure of
black leaders to gain any major concessions from Roosevelt in 1940, with
protest meetings around the country sponsored by the NAACP and the
Committee for the Participation of Negroes in National Defence. But in
January 1941, Randolph suggested that 10,000 Negroes march on the
nation's capital with the slogan: 'We loyal Americans demand the right to
work and fight for our country'.
The MOWM - which was conceived as an all-black action on the part
and on behalf of the black masses - anticipated the forms of black protest
of the 1950s and 1960s. In the event, the March on Washington did not
take place. Roosevelt is sued Exe ^'^yf rwvW 880? in Tune 1941, which
tipulated that there should be no more discrimination in the defence
 Martin Luther King, Jr: Apostle for Non-Violence

industries 'because of race, creed, or national origin'. Yet the original

MOWM agenda had also included the demand for an executive order
forbidding the awarding of government contracts to firms practicing racial
discrimination in their hiring practices, and a sim ilar order endi ng
segregation and discrimination in the armed forces and in all departments
of the federal government, as well as a request for legislation forbidding
the benefits of the National Labour Relations Act to unions denying
Negro membership. In 1943 A. Philip Randolph began to plan a strategy
of civil disobedience (based on the Gandhian example in India), to attack
segregation and discrimination in the Northern states.
Gandhi's philosophy and techniques were also reflected in the
,

formation of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1942. Founded

by James Farmer, a black Louisianan, and members of the Fellowship of
Reconciliation (FOR), a Quaker pacifist social action organization, CORE
was chiefly responsible for pioneering the use of nojvyjoient protest as a
civil rights strategy. CORE en gaged in its firsj^it-irfjn 1943, when

Farmer and an interracial group of members employed the tactic against a

Chicago restaurant which had refused to serve blacks. In 1947 CORE
sponsored a 'Journey of Reconciliation' - a forerunner of the 1961
'Freedom Rides' - through the Upper South to test compliance with the
Supreme Court decision, a year earlier, in Morgan v. Virginia, banning
segregation in interstate transportation. CORE was to remain active in the

direct-action protests of the 1950s and 1960s, concentrating its efforts on

voter-registration drives in the Southern states. (In 1964 two CORE staff

members, James Chaney and Michael Schwern er, together with Andrew
Goodman, were abducted and murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi - an
episode recently portrayed in the movie 'Mississippi Burning'.)
World War II had created a climate in which blacks (and some whites)
perceived possibilities for decisive changes in race relations. Black
membership of labour unions and employment in white-collar and semi-
skilled jobs increased, while returning black veterans, after 1945, spurred
the increasing demands for civil rights. The heightened expectations of .

blacks, the growing importance of the Negro vote^jmdj^ojitin^^

migration out of the South combined to produc^^^^Tmproy^mentMn %£^i
several areas. In the South itself the number of blacks registered to vote ^^7} t

increased from 2 to 12 per cent in the years 1940-47. Roosevelt's

successor, Harry Truman, who appointed the President's Committee on
Civil Rights in 1946, was the president to address the NAACP, and
first

urged a variety of civil rights measures on a Congress controlled by

Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans. In response to the
wartime complaints of black troops who had faced discriminatory and
segregationist practices, Truman issued Executive Order 9981 in 1948,

113
Black Leadership in America

which called for 'equality of opportunity for all persons in the armed
forces, without regard to race, colour, or national origin'. Although
sections of the military were slow to implement the policy, by the time of
the Korean War there was a substantial measure of racial integration in the
armed forces.
In the presidential election of 1948 Truman's espousal of civil rights
reforms provoked conservative Southern Democrats to bolt the party and
form the 'Dixiecrat' party, which carried four Southern states for its
candidate, Strom Thurmond. With the aid of a majority of black votes in
the electorally crucial states of the North, Truman beat his Republican
opponent, Thomas Dewey, but continued to face a Congress that was
recalcitrant on racial matters. In fact, Truman's actual commitment to civil
rights issues was very thin. In the 1948 presidential election he had tried
to appease Southern Democrats on civil rights issues. During the Korean
War, when he had the opportunity to create a wartime Fair Employment
Practices Committee, Truman refused to do so. Again, more could have
been done, through the use of Justice Department attorneys, to prosecute
same period, the
violators of civil rights in the South. But, during the
Supreme Court of the United States was beginning to hand down
decisions which were sympathetic to black aspirations.
In 1938 the Court had made an initial move against the doctrine of
'separate but equal' when it ruled that in failing to provide a law school
for blacks, Missouri was in violation of the 14th Amendment, and in a
1950 ruling, the Court ordered the state of Texas to admit blacks to the
university law school. NAACP attorneys, together with sympathetic black
and white historians (including John Hope Franklin and C. Vann
Woodward) and eminent sociologists, pushed the Court repeatedly on the
'separate but equal' principle. In 1954 Earl Warren - appointed as a
Supreme Court justice by the racially conservative president Eisenhower
- handed down the historic 'Brown' decision which held that separate
educational facilities were 'inherently unequal' and, in the following year,
ordered schools desegregation to proceed with '^Indeliberate speed',
provoking massive jmp!. wejl^Fgarrized oppositioiTiTrffie^gouth. The
Court's xu\'\n%^n^Jfr&wn versus Board of Education' marked the
triumphant COT^Jfl^ioriof the NAACP 's long campaign against segregated
schools, and/6verturned~the "riessy versus Ferguson' decision 6T1896.
The Brown decision was""immediately recognized - by IFs supporters and
opponents - as a landmark step in American race relations, since it
appeared to remove constitutional sanctions for the whole system of racial
segregation and Jim Crow laws.
Eisenhower himself was largely indifferent (and frequently hostile) to
black civil rights. In 1956 he campaigned throughout the South in an

114
 Martin Luther King, Jr: Apostle for Non-Violence

attempt to win segregationist votes. Ironically, he was compelled to use

executive authority to implement the 1954 decision when Governor
Orville Faubus of Arkansas, in jeptembejTl957^ carried defiance of the
ruling to the point of using state militia lohaTftoken integration at Little
Rock High School. Faubus removed on court order, but when
the troops
hysterical white mobs forced the removal of nine black children,
Eisenhower ordered in federal troops to enforce the law. (Little Rock
schools were closed in 1958-59, and blacks did not actually attend Little
j*ock High School unti l August 1959). Other Southern state governors
employed less violent (but more effective) methods to circumvent the
Brown decision - for example, providing state money to enable any white
student 'threatened' with integration to attend a private school, or to allow
any school district to close its schools if desegregation was against local
community wishes.
In the face of executive disinterest and Southern white intransigence,
Southern blacks became increasingly active. As a younger generation of
black activists began to challenge racial discrimination and segregation in
the South, they faced not only the opposition of a majority of whites, but
also that of black 'conservatives' - the older-established leadership class
which had practiced the politics of conciliation, caution and restraint in
power structure.
their dealings with the white
In Montgomery, Alabama, 'the cradle of the Confederacy', Jo Ann
Gibson Robinson, an instructor in English at Alabama State College and
an active member of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, was president of the
Women's Political Council (WPC), a local black women's organization
founded in 1946 by one of her colleagues, Mrs Mary Fair Burks, when the
local League of Women Voters had refused to integrate. In 1953 the WPC
met with the City Commission to lodge complaints about the treatment of
black passengers on the city's buses, a principal source of friction being
the bus company's loosely defined seating policy which varied from route
to route and driver to driver. Blacks were frequently required to shift their

seats when peremptorily commanded to do so by white drivers. They

were also compelled to get on at the front door of buses to pay their fare,

and then get off and then reboard at the back door, instead of simply being
allowed to walk down the aisle. Drivers sometimes moved off before
black passengers had time to reboard. In 1954 Claudette Colvin, a 15
year-old black girl had refused to vacate her seat when ordered to do so by
a driver and had been placed on probation. In May of that year Mrs
Robinson, on behalf of the WPC, had written to Montgomery mayor W.
A. 'Tacky' Gayle, insisting upon better conditions for black passengers on
the city's buses, and threatened a boycott if significant improvements
were not forthcoming.

115
 Black Leadership in America

On 1 December 1955, six days after th e Interstate Co mmerce-

C omm ssion ban ned segregaJJ^^rrratfTBhk^s and in all facilities
i

p-"gggP-(1 ^TT~iTrtFTS'tate traveJZMrs Rosa L. Parksja 43-year old black

^seamstress in a downtown Montgoln^Ty--strjrerrefused a bus driver's
orders to vacate her seat to a white man. A high school graduate and a
former secretary_of the local c hapter of the NAA C^Mrs Parks had been
ejected from Montgomery buses on several occasions for refusing to obey
the Alabama segregation ordinance. This ordinance required blacks to
give up their seats for whites, if ordered to do so by (white) bus drivers,
acting under the provisions of a 1945 Alabama state statute which
required the Alabama Public Service Commission to enforce racially-
segregated seating by all bus companies under its jurisdiction. (Mrs Parks
had also attended a workshop at the Highlander Folk School, founded by
Myles Horton, a teacher and community activist, during the Great
Depression. At Highlander, black and white labour and civil rights
workers were trained in protest techniques, and, in 1955, Highlander
instituted a programme
which black adults learned the rudiments of
in

literacy - thereby qualifying them to vote.) On this occasion, however,

she was arrested, charged with breaking a city segregation law, and fined
$14.00. Fo llowing Mrs Parks' arrest, Jo Ann G ibson Robinson drafted,
mimeograp hed arulwith the help of he r students, distributed a leaflet
^vtyfcalling fo^S^67cott^FtheJiuscompan^TSs^Mrs Robinson later recalled:

n 'We had planned llit^^OleslJ^i^fbefore Mrs Parks was arrested. There

had been so many trrrrrgPmat happened, that black women had been
embarrassed over, and they were ready to explode.' The leaflet rea d in
part:

Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown in jail because she
refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person to sit down.... If
we do not do something to stop these arrests, they will continue. The next time
it may be you, or your daughter, or mother.. ..We are, therefore, asking every

Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial. Don't ride
the buses to work, to town, to school or to anywhere on Monday.... Please stay
off all buses on Monday.

Mrs Robinson, recalling the episode, also remembered that before

writing the leaflet, she had written some notes 'on the back of an
envelope':

The Women's Political Council will not wait for Mrs Parks' consent to call for

a boycott of the city buses. On Friday, December 2, 1955, the women of

Montgomery will call for a boycott to take place on Monday, December 5. 3

Edgar D. Nixon, president of the local chapter of the International

Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and a dominant figure in the
Montgomery NAACP, remembered calling on Mrs Parks after her arrest

116
 Martin Luther King, Jr: Apostle for Non-Violence

and telling her: 'We can break this situation on the bus with your case'.
After talking to her husband and mother, Mrs Parks replied: 'You know,
Mr Nixon, if you say so, I'll go along with it'. 4 Following the initiative of
Mrs Robinson and the WPC, and under the direction of E. D. Nixon, a
group of black ministers formed the Montgomery Impro ve ment
f Associat ion (MIA) to direct and coordinate what became a 382-day
boycott of the City Lines bus company, owned by the Chicago-baseo^
National City Lines. Nixon and Robinson shrewdly recognized that blacks
could be more effectively organized for a mass protest through the
indigenous black church, which bridged social classes and political
factions - than through a secular movement. Again, the facilities of the
black churches - in providing meeting-places and fund-raising machinery
- were particularly important in a community which did not have a black-
owned radio station or newspaper. The majority of bus passengers were
blacks, and the company stood to lose $3,000 a day in revenues, the city
of Montgomery part of its $20,000 a year in taxes on the bus line, and
Montgomery department stores could anticipate over one million dollars
in lost sales, if the proposed boycott proved effective.
The original demands of the MIA, however, were
quite modest, and
had been accepted by other Southern municipalities: two years earlier,
blacks in Baton Rouge, Louisiana had boycotted the city's buses and
forced an agreement that passengers would be given 'first come, first

served' segregated seating. The MIA asked for greater courtesy from bus
drivers; the hiring of black drivers on predominantly black routes, the
seating of blacks from the back toward the front of buses and whites from
the front to the back, without a section always to be kept clear for each
race. Essentially, then, the initial thrust of the Montgomery bus boycott
was for modification of segregationist practices. Montgomery whites,
however, were not prepared to compromise on racial segregation, and the
MIA, through a law suit,demand the elimination of segregation
came to
on the city's buses. By charging Mrs Parks with violating the segregated
transportation statute, the Montgomery authorities inadvertently made
possible an appeal to a federal court and, ultimately, to the Supreme
Court, challenging the constitutionality of segregation in interstate
transportation.
Martin Luther King, Jr, a twenty-six year old Negro minister, who had

arrived in Montgomery from Atlanta only a year before, was unanimously

elected to preside over the MIA. E. D. Nixon agreed to serve as treasurer,
but refused to run for the presidency of the new organization because
he would be away from Montgomery for long periods on railroad
business. By all accounts, including his own, King was surprised to gain
leadership of the MIA. During his first year in Montgomery, he had

117
Black Leadership in America

concentrated his energies on his pastorate of the Dexter Avenue Baptist

Church, serving a black middle-class congregation (which included
facultymembers of Alabama State College), and on completing his
doctoral dissertation. King later recalled that his election as MIA
president 'caught me unawares. It happened so quickly I did not even
have time to think it through. It is probable that if I had, I would have
declined the nomination.' 5 In fact, a month before his nomination, King
had refused the presidency of the city chapter of the NAACP, had not
engaged in any organized civil rights protest, and had not met Mrs Parks.
But on several counts, King was an ideal choice for the MIA presidency.
As newcomer, he was not involved in the factionalism of local
a relative
black politics, and had not been compromised by his dealings with the
white community. His selection also reflected hostility within the MIA to
the Reverend L. Roy Bennett, a Methodist minister, and president of the
Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance. In addition, as E. D. Nixon
recognized, King possessed the personal and educational qualities
necessary in a leader who would have to conduct negotiations at a high
level. In other respects, however, Martin Luther King, was an unknown
Jr

quantity. The Montgomery bus boycott was to make him into a figure of
national (and international) stature. In his first (hastily-prepared) speech
as leader of the MIA, King issued a ringing call to action, coupled with a
plea for an orderly protest:

We are here this evening to say to those who have mistreated us for so long
that we are tired - tired of being segregated and humiliated; tired of being
kicked about by the brutal feet of oppression.... For many years we have shown
amazing patience. We have sometimes given our white brothers the feeling that
we like the way we were being treated. But we come here tonight to be saved
from that patience that makes us patient with anything less than freedom and
justice. ..if you will protest courageously and yet with dignity and Christian
love, when the history books are written in future generations the historians
willpause and say: 'There lived a great people - a black people - who injected
new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.' This is our challenge
and our overwhelming responsibility. 6

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR: THE MAKING OF A

LEADER
The son of a sharecropper who had attended Morehouse College and
entered the Baptist ministry, Martin Luther King, Jr was born in Atlanta,
Georgia. His maternal grandfather, the Reverend Alfred Daniel Williams,
had founded the Ebenezer Baptist Church, and Martin Luther King, Sr, a

118
 Martin Luther King, Jr: Apostle for Non-Violence

forceful preacher, member of the NAACP, and an active Republican, was

a strong personality. Martin Luther King, Jr, grew up in a close-knit,
middle-class and deeply religious family, and seemed himself destined for
the ministry. At the age of fifteen he entered Morehouse College in
Atlanta,where he was influenced by its president, Benjamin E. Mays, a
leading black theologian and church historian. Mays' attacks on racial
injustice, and his beliefs in Christian social responsibility and political
engagement greatly impressed King (who had considered law or
medicine), and he elected to continue the family tradition and become a
Baptist minister. At Morehouse, King read Henry David Thoreau's classic
es say Civil Disobedience, an d accepted its central assertion that the
individual should refuse to cooperate with an evil system, and is entitled
to disobey unjust laws.
In 1948 King graduated from Morehouse with a degree in sociology,
and enrolled at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, to

study for the ministry. At Crozer, he was introduced to the writings of the
Social Gospel theologian Walter Rauschenbusch, and endorsed his
contention that the church should concern itself with social conditions, as
well as with the salvation of souls. In his first book, an account of the
Montgomery bus boycott, King asserted:

Ithas been my conviction ever since reading Rauschenbusch, that any religion
which professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned
about the social and economic conditions that scar that soul, is a spiritually
moribund religion.

At Crozer, King also became interested in the teachings of Mohandas

K. Gandhi, after he heard a lecture in Philadelphia, delivered by Mordecai
W. Johnson, president of Howard University, who had recently returned
from a trip to India. Already a declared pacifist, King added Gandhi's
philosophy of non-violent resistance to injustice to his intellectual system,
and later came to celebrate the redemptive power of love and suffering as
forces for social change. King was to write that:

Gandhi was probably the first person in history to lift the love ethic of Jesus
above mere interaction between individuals to a powerful and effective force
on a large scale. It was in this Gandhian emphasis on love and nonviolence that
I discovered the method of social reform for which I had been seeking. I came

to feel that this was the only morally and practically sound method open to
oppressed people in their struggle for freedom. My study of Gandhi convinced
me that true pacifism is not nonresistance to evil, but nonviolent resistance to
evil.

As a student, King was introduced to the writings of the American

Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr's concept of 'collective evil' (but
did not accept Niebuhr's break with pacifism), and rejected Marxism as

119
Black Leadership in America

atheistic and materialistic - although he endorsed its social concerns, and

believed that 'Communism grew as a protest against the hardships of the
underprivileged'. 7 After a distinguished career at Crozer,
King entered the
doctoral programme Boston University in 1951. Here he met and
at

married Coretta Scott, from Alabama, then a student at the New England
Conservatory of Music. Before completing his PhD thesis on the opposing
theological views of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman, King was
offered and accepted a pastorship at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in
Montgomery. In addition to his intellectual abilities and credentials, King
brought to his first appointment a love for the South, a supportive wife,
and a social philosophy based on a belief in Christian activism. As leader
of the MIA, he quickly came to display considerable powers as an orator
and public performer - qualities which were to distinguish his subsequent
career as the prophet and practitioner of non-violent resistance to denials
of civil and human rights.

As pr^sH^ntrtf fre MIA which included twenty black ministers in its

membershifjTT^ipg, (who was aware that their initial demands did not
meet the NAACP's minimum standard for racial integration) united and
inspired the boycott movement. When Montgomery blacks followed the
call not to ride on the city's buses, the MIA created and maintained a car
pool, which gave more affluent Negroes an opportunity to participate in
the protest by giving lifts to the walkers. After Montgomery whites put
pressure on insurance companies to cancel the policies of these motorists
offering their services to the MIA, the organization turned to Lloyd's of
London for coverage. When an attempt to divide the black community
into its traditional factions failed, the mayor and city fathers resorted to
other tactics. King was arrested for an alleged speeding offence (and
jailed for the first time in his life), and in Jan uary 195 6 his house wa s,
bombed. On 21 February, a Montgomery Grand Jury indicted 115 blacks
Tor allegedly breaking a 1921 anti-labour law which held that it was
illegal to injure a legitimate business enterprise without 'just cause or
legal excuse'. Faced by such provocations, King continued to preach a
message of non-violent resistance, and the boycott began to attract
national support and financial donations from various sources including
the NAACP, the United Auto Workers and overseas.
During t his period . King also developed a close working relationship
wjthc^ alpfiAbejTTajJi^Negro pastor of the First Baptist Church, and an
activist preacher. Following the attack on his home, King was visited by
Bayard Rustin, and Glenn E. Smiley, members of the Fellowship of
Reconciliation, admirers of Gandhi and followers of the American
pacifist, A. J. Muste. But, according to his own account, it was a white

woman, Miss Juliette Morgan, in a letter to the Montgomery Advertizer,

120
 ,

Martin Luther King, Jr: Apostle for Non-violence

who first alerted King to the parallels between the bus boycott and
Gandhi's strat egy in Indiaj
_
The Negroes of Montgomery seem to have taken a lesson from Gandhi - and
our own Thoreau, who influenced Gandhi. Their task is greater than Gandhi's,
however, for they have greater prejudice to overcome. One feels that history is
being made in Montgomery these days. It is hard to imagine a soul so dead, a
heart so hard, a vision so blinded and provincial as not to be moved with
admiration at the quiet dignity, discipline and dedication with which the
Negroes have conducted their boycott. I

King remembered that Miss Morgan 'sensitive and frail, did not long
survive the rejection and condemnation of the white community', but that
before her death in 1957:

...the name of Mahatma Gandhi was well-known in Montgomery. Non-violent

resistance had emerged movement, while love stood as
as the technique of the
'The regulating ideal. Christ furnished the jpJriLand motivation, while Gandhi
furnished the method. This philosophy was disseminated mainly through the
regular mass meetings which were held in the various Negro churches of the
city. 8

Despite a Supreme Court ruling against segregation on interstate buses

in South Carolina, the Montgomery city government obtained a local
court injunction ordering it to continue the practice. On 4 June 1956 a

Federal District Court ruled that the city ordinance violated the United
States Constitution, but the city appealed, and the boycott continued.
However, as King and his associates were awaiting a court decision
regarding the continuing operation of the car pool, news came of the
Un ited States' Supreme Court decision declaring Alabama's state and
local laws upholding segregation on the buses to b e, unconstitutional. King
and the MIA now worked to prepare the black community for the arrival

of the desegregation order, and urged blacks to behave courteously when

they went back on the buses. They were instructed to 'read, study and
memorize' a list of 'Integrated Bus Suggestions' which included the
following:

^KPray for guidance and commit yourself to complete non-violence as you enter
the bus. quiet but friendly; proud but not arrogant; joyous, but not
Be
boisterous. If cursed, do not curse back. If pushed, do not push back. If struck,
do not strike back, but evidence love and goodwill at all times. 9

Montgomery's buses were desegregated, but there was retaliatory

violence against blacks, and Negro churches in the city were firebombed.
But for King, the boycott provided a demonstration and vindication of the
efficiency of non-violent direct action. While the boycott was still in

progress, he declared:

121
Black Leadership in America

We now know that the Southern Negro has become of age, politically and
morally. Montgomery has demonstrated that we will not run from the struggle,
and will support the battle for equality. TTns_is_a,pxotest - a nonrvinl&ugrotest^
against injustice. We are depending on moral and spiritual forces. ..this is a
movement of passive resistance, and the great instrument is the instrument of
love... no matter what sacrifices we have to make, we will not let anybody drag
us down so low as to hate them. 10

Rufus A. Lewis, former football coach at Alabama State College, a

successful businessman, and chairman of the Citizens' Steering
Committee formed in 1953 to press for better treatment of Montgomery's
blacks, believed that King's 'greatest contribution' to the boycott_lwas
interpreting the situation to the mass of the people. tjjg'rniiJH speak hpttjp
than any man I've ever heard in expressing to the pe6pTe-thetr-T5fooTem
and making them see clearly what the situation was and inspiring them to

work at it.' 11 Yet there is also evidence to suggest that the mass of
Montgomery blacks, although supporting the boycott, were confused by
or indifferent to the Gandhian gloss which King (with the advice of
Rustin and Smiley) attempted to put on the movement. In retrospect, it is

clear that the Montgomery boycott was a seminal event, yet it did not
touch off a national Negro revolt. Refusing to ride the buses, although a
form ofdirect action, was also an essentially conservative protest - the
withdrawal of patronage, an act of omission rather than one of
commission. It involved participants in considerable hardship and
inconvenience, but little actual physical danger. Again, the boycott had
been initiated by the Women's Political Council and Mrs Robinson, and
not by the black ministers of Montgomery. In effect, they were presented
with a fait accompli, and as Mrs Robinson wryly observes after her
circular was made public:

It was then that the ministers decided that it was time for them, the leaders, to
catch up with the masses. ...Had they not done so, they might have alienated
themselves from their congregations. 12

THE SOUTHERN CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP

CONFERENCE
In lgM King and other black clergymen, with the advice of Bayard
T^ustin and Stanley Levison, a white New York attorney, formed the
SoiitheniJ^ hrjstian Leadership Conference (SCLQX-to spread and
coordinate the strategy of non-violent civil rights protest across the South.
Its statement of purpose declared that:

122
 Martin Luther King, Jr: Apostle f^r Non-Violence

SCLC believes that the American dilemma irrpace relations can best and most
quickly be resolved through th e actions of thousands of p eople, committed to
thepHlnsnphy nf nonvinlancp who will phyQJrally i'Wrfy th^msHv^S in a
just and moral struggle. SCLC is firmly opposed to segregation in any
form. ..and pledges work unrelentingly to rid evervy_estige of its
itself to scars
from our nation through nonviolent means. Our ultimate ^oal is genuine
intergroup and interpersonal living - integration. 13

An unstructured and unorthodox organization, SCLC did not offer

individual memberships - wishing to avoid direct competition with the
NAACP. (Many of SCLC's founders were members of the NAACR)
Bapt ist minis tej^-were/heavily represented in SCLC affiliates, and
provided the leadership/of the organization, but were atypical of a group
which, drawing itss^ges and support from the black community, was
traditionally ^OfTservative^p ossessing a vested interest in the racial status
c[uo. For the remainder of his life, King was to be identified with the
SCLC, while the organization itself deliberately capitalized on King's
growing fame and prestige.
Bayard Rustin and Stanley Levison also urged King to remain non-
partisan, since there was little fundamental difference between the
Republicans and Democrats on civil rights issues. SCLC, they believed, in
stressing non-violence and Christian principles, would appeal to a wide
liberal constituency. In May 1957 King (as part of SCLC strategy to
present him as a national figure) attended a 'Prayer Pilgrimage' to
Washington, D.C., in the company of Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of
the NAACP, and A. Philip Randolph. The event attractedlittle media

attention, but King received the greatest ovation after an address in which
he demanded that blacks now be^glyen the ballot /to enforce their
x> "^~e- ^J^U'A
constitutional rights.
/'Vl U*- ^
/<

The SCLC's original aim of spreading the Montgomery example by

supporting similar boycotts in other cities had met with little success, and
in Montgomery the MIA did little to challenge directly other forms of
segregation. Believing that Southern whites were less opposed to black
voting rights than desegregation, the SCLC, during its first three years,
engaged an (unsuccessful) effort to double the number of black voters
in

in the South. Ella Baker, the SCLC's temporary executive director (and

the only woman on its board), initiated this 'Crusade for Citizenship', but
with inadequate financial resources and lack of effective organization at

the local levels, was achieved. Baker (whoheiie^eiithat mass protest

little

m ovements should be organize d from <ge_jrjjS2r£otsJeYel) became

increasingly critical of King's leadership abilities, and regarded him as
pompous and condescending toward women. Certainly before 1960 SCLC
was inadequately staffed and, without a clearly-defined purpose,

123
 Black Leadership in America

undecided as to whether to instigate its own protests or simply to assist in

local actions.
In 1959 after surviving a stabbing by a deranged black woman as he
was signing copies of Stride Toward Freedom in a New York bookstore,
King (who had earlier visited Ghana, Nigeria and several European
capitals, including London) ma de a spiritual pilgrimage t^Indi a^an^went

to Gandhi's shrine. The Indian visit was a significant event in King's

intellectual and political growth. In particular, he was impressed by prime
minister Nehru's explanation that under the Indian constitution, caste
discrimination was punishable by imprisonment, and concluded that India
had made greater progress against the iniquitous caste system than had the
United States against racial discrimination.He returned to America with
the renewed conviction that non-violent resistance 'is the most potent
weapon available to the oppressed people in their struggle for freedom'. 14
In November 1959 King resigned as Pastor of Dexter Avenue Church,
and moved to Atlama to concentrate his energies on the SCLC. Its
strategy for the^eTection year 1960 was to continue with the voter
registration drive, together with direct-action protests against segregation.
With many of Atlanta's established black leaders hostile to civil rights
agitation (and with his father resident in the city as well), King
diplomatically agreed that the SCLC would not undertake any protests
there.

It was tJ^e^uMnS movement, pioneered at Greensboro, North Carolina 1

In February 1960, when four black students from the North Carolina
Agricultural and Technical College sat down at a Woolworth's lunch
counter and demanded service, that had already inaugurated a new - and
more aggressive - phase of the civil rights struggle. Various forms of non-
violent direct action protests, utilizing the Greensboro strategy, quickly
followed - 'wadf-ins' at municipal swimming pools and segregated
beaches, 's tand ins' at theatres refusing to sell tickets to blacks, and 'j3njyz_

ins' at segregated churches. Many of the student activists had been

inspired by the Montgomery boycott and had read King's account, Stride
Toward Freedom. In turn, King was aware that a new element had been
injected into the black protest movement, and was concerned to retain the
influence of the SCLC in the face of growing competition (and rivalry)
among civil rights organizations.

A When Ella Baker arranged(a meeting of student leaders 3at Shaw

University in Raleigh, North Carolina in April 1960, out of which
emerged the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee XSNCQr-King
attempted to mould the movement in the image of the SCLC, which
initially accepted (and adopted) his non-violent philosophy. King advised

the student leaders to collect voluntee rs willing to go to jail ra ther than

pay fines for alleged infractions of the law, to adhere to the doctrine of
 . —
Martin Luther King, Jr: Apostle for Non-Violence

non-violence, and, by Hrrej? f artion p rnt e g ts, to compel the federal

government to intervene in the civil rights struggle. it was soon
Although
tomove beyond what it came to regard as King's cautious, conciliatory
and unrealistic approach, SNCC, at its inception, embraced SCLC
principles:

We affirm the philosophical or religious ideal of ja6n-violen c^as the

foundation of our purpose, the presupposition of our faithfand the manner of
our action. Non-violence as it grows from the Judaic-Christian tradition seeks a
social order of justice permeated by love.. ..Love is the central motif of non-
violence. It matches the capacity of evil to inflict suffering with an even more
enduring capacity to absorb evil, all the while persisting in love. 15

Yet Ella Baker, aware of the growing dissatisfaction among the student
generation with the established civil rights leadership, urged SNCC to
maintain a separate identity. Diane Nash, a student at Fisk University in
Nashville, and a leader in the student sit-in movement, recalled that Ella
Baker 'was very important in giving direction to the student movement...
in terms of seeing how important it was that the students should set the

goals and directions and maintain control of the student movement'. After
the founding of SNCC, E lla Baker noted that the conference had made it

very apparent 'that the current and other demonstrations are

sit-in
concerned with something bigger than a hamburger. The Negro and white
students, North and South, are seeking to rid America of the scourge of
racial segregation and discrimination - not only at lunch counters but in
every aspect of life.' 16 \ ^J) / <ov r*si Qk^JtCvq -"^ ?" 03^-

MLK AND JFK

Whereas King had been unhappy with the record of the Eisenhower
administration on civil rights - apart from the president's reluctant stand
during the Little Rock crisis - he entertained greater hopes for the
Democratic challenger in the 1960 election, John F. Kennedy. When King
was given a four mo nth prison sentence for an alleged dri ving offence in

^Georgia, he w aj_releasedJo 11nwin g Senat or Kennedy's in tervention, At

Although King himself did not officially come out for Kennedy, 'Daddy'
King, in gratitude, reversed his traditional Republican loyaltie s^ and
declared that he would be urging blacks to vote for the etnocrati c^ g
candidate, despite his Catholic^taithTCertainly black support was crucial

inKennedy's narrow victory over Richard Nixon in 1960; a post-election

Gallup poll indicated that Kennedy had received 68 per cent of the black
vote. \^s
But despite his declared commitment to civil rights, Kennedy did not
125
 Black Leadership in America

keep his campaign promise to prohibit housing discrimination in

federally-funded housing projects by executive order, and awarded three
'strict constructionists' to federal judgeships in the South. A month before
Kennedy's inauguration civil rights activists gained a victory in the Su-
preme Court when it ruled that bus terminals servingjnterj
must be integrated. I n 1961 CORE sponsore-(H^ries_xiL Treedom Rides
into the South to test compliance with the decision. When the Freedom
Riders were met by white violence in Alabama and Mississippi, the
Kennedy administration was forced to intervene to protect the riders, but,
concerned not to alienate Southern Democrats, began to stress voter
registration projects as a less provocative form of civil rights activity.

King did not participate directly in the Freedom Rides, but quickly
realized that the intensive press coverage of Southern attacks on the
Freedom Riders should be utilized by SCLC and its allies, and he became
involved in several forms of direct-action protest, w ith varying degrees of
success and failure. SCLC, under Wyatt Walker, a Baptist minister, who
replaced Ella Baker as executive director, determined to capitalize on
King's image, and regain leadership of the civil rights coalition.

ALBANY AND BIRMINGHAM

From December 1961 to the summer of 1962, King and the SCLC led a
mass direct-action campaign in Albany, Georgia, demanding not only
(f\ integrated_fari]iiies, buG^mployment for blacks in the city 's police force

and ot her municipal job s. The Albany campaign failed because of divided
°
<h>
1 "D £j^
ner&i es anc loyalties between the SCLC, SNCC and local blacks. James
*

y\ Gorman of SNCC, suspicious of 'charismatic' leadership, did not want

^{ff®* King in Albany, believing that blacks should rely on grass-roots
organization. Although King was arrested and jailed, along with his
supporters, police chief Laurie Pritchett did not employ violence against
the demonstrators, thus denying them media exposure, and possible
federal intervention. Again, attorneys for the city were able to secure a

federal injunction that halted demonstrations for ten days, effectively

sapping their momentum. Although King and Abernathy were given jail

sentences (when they refused to pay $78 fines) for marching without
permits, they were quickly released after Chief Pritchett arranged for
payment of their fines. The city closed its parks rather than integrate them,
and the town's library was 'integrated' only after all its chairs had been
removed. As King later conceded, SCLC had gone into Albany
inadequately briefed on the local situation.

126
 Martin Luther King, Jr: Apostle for Non-Violence

But the lessons of Albany were well-learned, and SCLC's next

campaign (already planned) was carefully executed. Within SCLC itself,
new staff members, with direct experience of voter registration campaigns
and Freedom Rides, made the organization more efficient and effective.
New SCLC members included James Lawson, C. T. Vivian, James Bevel,
r
Hosea Williams an$j^rla rew Young. King himself had also come to
realize that, in Bayard Rustin s words, 'protest becomes an effective tactic
to the degree that it elicits brutality and oppression from the power
structure', and privately conceded that the success of the_looJi£yiQlent
resistance depended on the existence (or fostering) o fYcreative tension -
attacks by whites on demonstrators, coverage by the media, consequent
national outrage and subsequent federal intervention. All of these
ingredients were to be present in the Birmingham, Alabama campaign of
1962-3.
The South 's major industrial city, Birmingham was also a stronghold
of racial oppression, fully-fledged segregation and an administration
pledged to resist even minimal change.JEjieene 'Bull' Connor,
Birmingham's police commissioner, e xerciseatotaPpowei^and had earlier
closed the city's parks^oJilacks^ift-^r4er to avoid integration. From 1957
to 1963 there were^s^enteen ^uns olve^ bjomb ings of Negro churches and
the homes of locaTcT?tn-igrits leaders. Inspired by the Montgomery
boycott, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, pastor of Baptist Bethel
Church, had formed the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights
(later an affiliate of the SCLC). With the support of local black college
students, Shuttlesworth had led a b oycott of Birmingham stores, in an
effort to desegregate lunch counters and open up jobs for Negroes.
Shuttlesworth invited King and the SCLC to come to Birmingham to
focus and direct a campaign against the business community. King
accepted, and decided to concentrate on three demands: the integration of
lunch counters,fitting and restrooms and drinking fountains in department

stores; theupgrading and hiring of blacks Jn business and industry, and

the creation of a bi-racial committee to work out a time-table for
desegregation in other areas of municipal life. Boycotts an d sit-in s of
down-town stores were to be combined with disruptive street
demonstrations, and Wyatt Walker collected the names and addresses of
300 Birmingham residents prepared to go to jail. A. G. Gaston, a local
black millionaire entrepreneur, provided the campaign with rent-free head
quarters at his hotel, while outside support was organized by the black
actor Harry Belafonte.
Demonstrations were twice postponed - once to allow for (abortive)
negotiations with business leaders, and, a second time, to await the
(disputed) outcome of a mayoralty election between commissioner 'Bull'

127
Black Leadership in America

Connor, and a racial moderate, Albert Boutwell. When Connor obtained a

court order enjoining all demonstrations pending a court decision, King
(prepared to defy an injunction of a state rather than a federal court),
marched on city hall, wearing the denim overalls that had become the
field uniform of the SCLC. King was arrested and held for two days
without being allowed to contact his wife or SCLC lawyers but, following
the^inlexvention^o f President Kenn edv_and his brother, Robert, the
attorney generaf (neither of whom sympathized with the SCLC
campaign), was allowed to communicate with Coretta and his attorneys.
When King's activities in Birmingham were criticized by eight white
clergymen in the city, who described him as a*r extremist and outside
agitator, and urged blacks to end their demonstratibllsTTns response was to
produce a classic statement on civil rights and non-violence. InJJLettef-
=
tf
frorn Birmingham Jair King asserted that he had been invited trjtne
. city
"
y the AlaDama unnstian Movement for Human Rights, and claimed that

noone^^ujd^^ajxjj^s^ observed that direct action

must always precede negotiation, and reiterated his belief in resistance to
unjust laws. King expressed disappointment that his fellow (black and
white) clergymen confused non-violence with extremism, and warned that
black disaffection had already produced the Black Muslim sect 'made up
of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated
Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incurable
"devil"'. In contrast, King presented himself as a responsible moderate, as
having 'tried to stand between these two forces saying that we need not
follow the "do-nothingism" of the complacent or the hatred and despair of
the black nationalist'. 17
Released on bail after eight daysin prison, King left Birmingham, and,

in his absence, James Bevel put hundreds of black schoolchildren into

direct confrontation with the white authorities. Bull Connor met the
marchers with fire hoses, police dogs and clubs, and 2,500 were arrested
and jailed. No serious injuries were inflicted on the marchers, but
television and press coverage of the episode shocked the nation, with Bull
Connor as the villain of the piece. The federal government was forced to
act, and with the arrival of Burke Marshall, head of the Civil Rights

Division of the Justice Department, negotiations were opened between the

SCLC and the city government. The agreement finally reached fell short
of the original SCLC demands. Stores agreed to desegregate their
facilities, but only within ninety days, and accepted the 'gradual' hiring of
black employees. It was the white business community, anxious to restore
some measure of harmony (and prosperity) which pushed for the
racial
limited settlement. Again, the Birmingham agreement left untouched the
issue of school desegregation, and some black leaders (including Fred

128
 Martin Luther King, Jr: Apostle for Non-Violence

Shuttlesworth) accused King of accepting only token gains, when total

victory could have been achieved by further protests. (Yet
was probable, it

as King believed, that continuing demonstrations would have been

counter-productive.)
Whatever its limitations, the Birmingham campaign provoked the
Kennedy administration into introducing civil rights legislation. In a
television address, Kennedy acknowledged as much when he stated that:
'the events inBirmingham and elsewhere have so increased the cries for
equality that no
city or state or legislative body can prudently choose to
ignore them'. Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson, was finally to secure
congressional cooperation resulting in the landmark Civil Rights Act of
1964, which not only included Kennedy's proposals but also gave the
executive powers to withdraw federal funds from state and local
governments practising discrimination. The Birmingham protest also
atoned for the miscalculations of SCLC's Albany campaign, and
propelled King into leadership of the civil rights coalition. A Newsweek
opinion poll of blacks indicated that 95 per cent regarded King as their
most successful spokesman.
In the March on WashingtofroT^ugust 1963Jwhen a quarter of a
million people ( about 20 per cent o £^hgm-^higrconverged on the capital

in an effort to obtain passage of the Civil Rights bill, King delivered his 'I

have a dream' oration - one of the great speeches of the twentieth century
- from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Some of the impact of the
speech (the 'dream '
imagery of which King had already used in a speech
in Detroit two months earlier) derived essentially from its context rather
than from its contents. But the cadences of King's oratory, and the
repetition of his central theme (not unlike that of a skilled jazz
improviser), had a cathartic effect on his audience:

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former
slaves and the sons of former slave holders will be able to sit down together at

the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of \

Mississippi, a desert state sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression,
will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. ...I have a dream that I
one day the state of Alabama, whose governor's lips are presently dripping f

with the words of interposition and nullification, will be transformed into a

situation where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands witlfi
18
little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers.

But not all of the marchers^^sembJeUardTe^i^ Memorial shared

King's integrationist visiog^hiLLewis of SNCC hajd to be persuaded to

modifyjiis speech because SCLC leaders considered i t too criticaLpf the

Kennedy administra/ion. The young black civil rights activist Anne
Moody remembered:

129
Black Leadership in America

I sat on the grass and listened to the speakers, to discover we had 'dreamers'
instead of leaders leading us. Martin Luther King went on and on talking about
his dream. I sat there thinking that in Canton [Mississippi] we never had time
to sleep, much less dream. 19

In 1964 King appeared on the cover ot Time magazine^ in which he

was credited with 'an indescribable [ca pacity fo r_empathy that is the
touchstone of 'of leadership'. In the same year, King was awarded the
Nobel Peace Prize. Significantly, in his acceptance speech, he linked the
civil rights movement with
the larger cause of world peace and human
King was already under investigation by the FBI which,
rights. Ironically,

under J. Edgar Hoover's directive had begun to keep the SCLC under
close surveillance because of alleged Communist infiltration of the
organization (and also because of King's alleged philandering). < Robert
Kennedy, ^c onvinced that King's close associate and advisor, Stanley
Levisonf was an active member of the American Communist Party, had
authorized FBI wiretaps on King.

ST AUGUSTINE, FREEDOM SUMMER AND SELMA

In 1964 the SCLC, anxious to mdu^ej&emiedy^ s successor, Lyndon
Johnson, t o secure passage of^tKeCivTl'Rights 6ilTT^indertook a protest
campaign in St Augustine, FlormaTWyatt Walk eH5eTieved that the SCLC
could exploit the city's dependence on tourism (and its expectation of
federal funding for its 400th anniversary celebrations) by launching an
attack against the discrimination faced by St Augustine's blacks, who
constituted abo(jT25^)er cent of the city's po pulation_oMli}QQ. As in
Birmingham, SCLC strategy was to apply economic pressure on the
business community that would compel the city, faced with federal
intervention, to negotiate concessions. But Lyndon Johnson, aware that
the civil rights would be a major issue in the forthcoming election, and
afraid that the conservative Republican, Barry Goldwater, would appeal to
Democrats in the Deep South, was reluctant to act. SCLC protestors in St
Augustine were attacked by whites, including^Gansme^and Florida
governor Farris Bryant defied a federal court injunction protecting the
right of peaceful protest in St Augustine by reinstating a ban on night
marches, and refused to use the National Guard to protect demonstrators.
Although the St Augustine campaign ended in stalemate, with some of the
city's hotels, motels, restaurants (anticipating passage of the pending Civil
Rights Bill) agreeing to desegregate their facilities, but with no agreement
reached on other issues, SCLC believed that it had induced Johnson to

130
 Martin Luther King, Jr: Apostle for Non-Violence

secure the passage by Congress of the historic 1964 Civil Rights Act, and
thus vindicated direct action protest.
During the summer of 1964 King and the SCLC went to Mississippi to
assist SNCC and CORE in a 'Freedom Project' - a voter registration drive
resulting from a mock election organized by Robert Moses of the SCLC,
who was also director of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO),
a coalition of SNCC, CORE, the SCLC and the NAACR It led to the
founding of a new political party, the Mississippi Freedom Democrats
(MFDP) in the spring of 1964, that was to challenge the all-white
Mississipp i delegatio n^: the Democratic National Convention.

r Fannie Lo^Hajne-r/bprn in 1917, the last of 20 children of a bl ack -\

jha£e£ rop"pln^a mil yjn MontgomeryjCountv, Mississippi, was a major \
forcejn the -MFp P. Pecanse she was literate Mrs HameThacTbeen
\

promoted to the post of timekeeper on the W. D. Marlon plantation near

Ruleville, Mississippi, having previously worked there as a field hand. In ^
1962 shg^cfst her joVafter attempting to re gistervas a voter, and became^&AL
civil rig/its activist in th e SNCC, orga nizing voter registration projects ana f
attempting to obtain welfare benefits for poor black families. On one
occasion she was arrested and severely beaten for attempting to use the
'rest room' in a Mississippi bus station. At t he Democratic N ational
Conventj oruJVIrs Hamer told the credentials "committee how she (anciJl^X
other blacks) had been brutally treated when they attempted to vote in
-
Mississippi. Despite her dramatic (and nationally televised) testimony
during which she declared 'Is this America? The land of the free and the
home of the brave? Where we have to sleep with our telephones off the
hook, because our lives be threatened daily? '-Lyndon Johnson refused to
allow the 'Freedom Democrats' voting rights in the convention. Instead it

was proposed that at future conventions, no delegations would be allowed

from states discriminating against black voters, and that two Freedom
Democrats - Aaron Henry, president of the Mississippi NAACP, and
Edward King, the white chaplain of Tougaloo College - be allowed to sit
in the convention as delegates-at-large with full voting rights. King, along
with feoy Wilkins of the NAACP, James Farmer ojLCQRE-and Bayard
Rustin, was in favour in accepting tne propo^j^jbej^aog^hat blacks
bu£sH£C^angered by
could not afford to^Henaie^he-DcrnScratic party,
the treajjBeirr^f jrieMDFP, drew incr easingly away from the
conseWtfsifr~"oTKing and theS CLC.^Mte7TTel^p eiii a n t e_£rttfe
'

Democratic Convention, Mrs HameTattempted (unsuccessfully) to run for

the United States House of Representatives as the MpDP candidate from

Mississippi's Second Congressional District. In 1962she was the plaintiff
/
in a legal action which resulted in the overturning of local election results
in two Mississippi counties because blacks ha<i not been allowed to vote.

gu^ <^jo~^ 5
^y^
 Black Leadership in America

In great demand as a public speaker and an (accomplished) performer of

civil rights songs, Mrs Hamer later served on the Democratic National
Committee and the board of directors of the Fannie Lou Hamer Day Care
Centre, founded in Ruleville in 1970 by the National Council of Negro
WomemJEhe^recipient of many honorary degrees and awards, Mrs Hamer
die^m 1977^ the historic black township of Mound Bayou, Mississippi
year after the mayor of Ruleville announced the observance of a
annie Lou Hamer Day. Shortly after her death, the Mississippi state

t
legislature unanimously passed a resolution praising her services to the
state. In her autobiography To Praise Our Bridges, Fannie Lou Hamer
recalled:

•# I married in 1944 and stayed on the plantation

the courthouse in Indianola to register to vote. That
when I went down to
happened because I went
to a mass meeting one night. Until then I'd never heard of no mass meeting
until 1962,

a nd I didn 't know that a Npgrn rnnlH rpgktpr and vntp Bob Moses, Reggie
Johnson, Jim Bevel, and James Forman were some of the SNCC workers who
ran that meeting. When they asked for those to raise their hands who'd go
down to the courthouse the next day, I raised mine. ..The only thing they could
do to me was to kill me and it seemed been trying to do that a little
like they'd
bit at a time ever since I could remember.. I've worked on voter regi stration
.

here [in Mississippi] ever since I went

mass meeting. ..I went to
to that first
Africa in 1 964 and I learned that I p^hampd of
sure didn't have anything to be
from bein g black. Bei ng from the South we never was taught much about our
African heritage. The way everybody talked to us, everybody in Africa was
savages and really stupid people. But I've seen more savage white folks here in
America than I've seen in Africa. /l w as treated much better in Africa than I
was treated in America^?

Since its 'Crusade for Citizenship' in 1960 black suffrage had been a^
major goal of King and the SCLC. Although the Ajg4 '""' TTTag^A^
n
'

had dealt a heavy blow to segregation, it had not guaranteed the

constitutional right to vote. In 1965 SCLC decided to join with SNCC and
CORE in a voter-registration drive in Selma, Alabama, to dramatize the
need for additional legislation, by again provoking crisis and
It was Mrs Amelia Platts
confrontation with the white authorities.
Boynton, a civil rights activist in Selma, instrumental in bringing SNCC
workers into town, who persuaded King and theJiCLC to make Selma the
target for their voting rights project. j^gClie[g>vorkers (who had been
active in Selma since 1963) wer&^^r^^jgr^JBotrt coop c4^ting3athJCing^
andJh^£La^ <

^^__^^T-1^
/

<
^Although King's presence would bring valuable publicity to the
campaign, the SNCC disliked his excessive religiosity, tendency to
compromise at critical junctures, and SCLC's penchant for provoking
crisis and then leaving the scene for other engagements. When King,
leading a march from Selma to Montgomery, refused to break through a

132
 Martin Luther King, Jr: Apostle for Non-Violence

police barricade, led the marchers in prayer, and then turned back to
Selma (with many of his followers singing 'Ain't Gonna Let Nobody
Turn Me 'Round') SNCC workers were openly contemptuous. (King had,
in fact, decided 'againjrtjij^cjrfr^^ the Alabama police after
discussions with the Attorney General, but had not informed SNCC of his
resolve.) But again, King's presence had dramatized an already violent
situation. Dallas County sheriff James G. Clark, like Bull Connor in
Birminghamjiad been_provoked into violence against the demonstrators,
notably ^fPBloody Sunday at the Edmund Pettus bridge on the road out
'

of Selma, w here marchers were tear-gassed and beaten by mounted

police. C. T. Vivian of the SCLC had been publicly assaulted by Clark,
and the murder of the white Unitarian minister James J. ggeb, b y Selma
whites, produced a highly-charged atmosphere which moved Lyndon
Johnson to call Congress into special session to enact new voting rights
legislation. ^^=^^
On 17 March 1965, cour t ^pprov
a federal ^
the Selma-to-
Montgome ry march, Johnson mobilized Alabama state militia to protect
the procession (which was also accompanied by Justice Department
officials), and on 25 March King spoke to 25,000 people from the capitol

steps in Montgomery, bringing the black protest movement back full

circle to the scene of the bus boycott ten years earlier. The Selma
campaign also marked the culmination of the civil rights movement mihe
South and, in retrospegfr was KingXfinest hour^On 6 August rtvndon
Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, a^flirect consequence of the Selma
campaign.

$M4
4^^
CHICAGO, BLACK POWER AND VIETNAM,

The furban racial riots of the 1960s (eu p hefftistically term ed 'civil
disord ers ' ^ Al ertedKing to the problems of poverty and social path ology ,

and the need for reaching the black underclass of the nation 'g^merj:ity>
ghettos. Concurrently, he was also beginning to express concern over trie
cause and implications of the escalating American presence in Vietnam.
These two issues - poverty and A^nerican imperialism - which King also
believed were intimately related, werelo aominatehis thought and actions
for the remaining three years of his life. Together, they offer convincing
evidence to support the contention that King hecajrjejncreasinglv radical-
(and less reformist) in his last years. /flthoughKing's position on Vietnam
allied him with the younger elements of the civil rights coalition - SNCC
and CORE - it alienated him from the established black leadership and

133
 Black Leadership in America

earned him the enmity of Lyndon Johnson (as well as the renewed
attentions of the FBI).
lespite the disapproval of Bayard Rustin, King decided to
move to Chicago to lead a non-violent demonstration against segregated
slum housing, de facto segregated schools, black unemployment and job
discrimination. (In 1956 Edwin C. Berry of the Chicago Urban League
had called his city the most segregated one in the United States.) James
Bevel, the strategy organizer for SCLC in Chicago, asserted that the black
unemployment rate was twice that of the whites, detailed the extent of
black family breakdowns, and charged the Democratic party machine
with allowing merchants to make minimal investments in black areas of
the city, inflating prices and syphoning off profits to the affluent white
suburbs. In going to Chicago, King was aware that he was taking on its

formidable mayor, Richard J. Daley, a consummate politician and power

broker in the national Democratic party. As the Reverend Arthur Brazier,
leader of the South Side Woodlawn Association observed:

King decided to come to Chicago because he thought Chicago was unique in

that there was one man, one source of power, who you had to deal with. He
knew this wasn't the case in New York or any other city. He thought if Daley
could be persuaded on the lightness of open housing and integrated schools
that things would be done. 21

ut although Daley treated King outwardly with respect, the

considerable resources of the city government were used to frustrate the
campaign. When King, in a move to highlight the housing crisis, moved
into a rat-infested apartment, Daley sent in building inspectors with slum
violation notices. When SCLC marched through Chicago's blue collar
suburbs, they encountered bitter and violent opposition from working-
class whites, and King himself was assaulted, but Daley argued that

a SCLC had encouraged rioting.

As events in Chicago were to prove, SCLC strategies did not transpose

easily from the rural South to the urban North. Despite Jesse Jackson's
attempts in 'Operation Breadbasket', consumer boycotts organized with
the help of black ministers against white employers practicing hiring
discrimination, SCLC discovered that urban preachers lacked the prestige
\ /they enjoyed in the South, while the black church was also less efficient
\j as an organizing institution for protest movements. Again ill-prepared and
inadequately briefed, SCLC workers did not even possess appropriate
clothing for the severe Chicago winter. Moreover, the gathering protest
war was diverting funds and energies away from the
against the Vietnam
movement. Although SCLC claimed some success in working
civil rights

with Chicago street gangs - members of which acted as King's

134
 Martin Luther King, Jr: Apostle for Non-Violence

bodyguards - they rejected the philosophy of non-violent protest. In

Chicago, King who was increasingly attracted to democratic socialism of
the kind he had witnessed in Sweden, was demanding drastic
redistributions of wealth and political power, in favour of the poor and
dispossessed. But The Chicago Freedom Movement succeeded only in
persuading Daley to concede*mopen_ housing agreement with the city's
banking and real estate interests which achieved little in practice. When
Daley was re-elected to a fourth term of office in 1967, he disavowed the
open housing policy. SCLC's first campaign outside the South had

achieved little, while calling King's philosophy and strategies into

question.
The growing rift between SCLC and/ST^C^epene^Sitfkig the
one-man 'March AgainstFe>ar> m 1966.
^ojilinuation o f James Meredith 's
Meredith haoHfecome-'HTC 111 sTbiac t r stt idiilt lu uuuH"a1ci^l^veTslt3roT~
Mississippi in 1962, but only after a confrontation between President
Kennedy and the state's segregationist governor, Ross Barnett, the
deployment of 600 United States marshals and 15,000 federalized
National Guardsmen, and riots which resulted in the loss of two lives and
the injury of 375 people. When Meredith was shot and wounded by a
white sniper in Mississippi, King joined with Stokely Ca^michajl of
SNCC and Floyd McKissiSk of CORE to>cojiiplele__Mereditri's march.
Carmichaefs use of3fe=-emofive slogan/clack Power^ (see Chapter 7)
became a source of tension, when King, opposed to the phrase because of
its connotations of racial separatism and apparent acceptance of violence,
threatened to withdraw from the march unless its leaders made a
commitment to non-violence . King was to recall:

I pleaded with the groupjoabandoajhe Black Pow er ?)og an Tf was my

contention that a leader has to De~concerned about the problems of semantics.
Each word, I said, has a denotative meanin g - its explicit and recognized sense
- and a connotative meaning - its ^sjigge^trvejense^ While the concept of Black
Power might be denotatively sound, the slogan 'Black Power' carried the
wrong connotations. I mentioned the implications of violence that the press
had already attached to the phrase. 2 ^'
While agreement was reached between King, Carmichael and
McKissick rfopto use the competing slo^anjjpX31acJ^£owexI^and
^Freedom Now' for the rem ainder of t he march, th e dispute was indicative
of the approaching ofThe along lgciapte well as
4i
i^^^^ic^pii^d^cl^splines^
split

Since 1965 King (although not a

civil rights coalition

strict pacifist) had questioned the

morality of the war in South-East Asia but, aware of Lyndon Johnson's
support for civil rights, did not join the anti-war lobby until early in 1967,
when he appeared in demonstrations with Dr Benjamin Spock. Coretta

135
 Black Leadership in America

&*fE 1
ijXgr-zn aroint pacifist/ and a member of Women Strike for Peace,
supported her husband's new stance. Increasingly convinced that the war
was deflecting the administration's attention from civil rights, and aware
that his opposition to it would damage the SCLC financially, King, after
reading an article on 'The Children of Vietnam' in Ramparts magazine,
which featured a photograph of a Vietnamese woman holding a dead baby
killed by the American military, decided to join the peace movement.
In an address delivered at Riverside Church in New York City in April

1967, King expressed sympathy for the Vietcong and for the revolut ionary
movements in the Third World. The lollowlng month, King, in a talk to
SCLC starters, "praiseoLHo Chi Minn as the dedicated leader of a popular
movement against a corrupt dictatorship. As he continued to protest
against the war, King arouseckliosjIkL^r ess commen t: Newsweek
magazine accused him of displaying simplistic political judgement' and
of being 'in over his head' in issues about which he was singularly ill- a

informed. Life magazine published an editorial on 'Dr King's Disservice I

to His Cause', in which it asserted that by linking the civil rights /

movement with the opposition to the American position in Vietnam, he/

had come 'close to betraying the cause for which he has worked so long'./
It concluded:

Nv Dr King has claimed that the budgetary demands of the war in Vietnam are the
key hindrance to progress in civil rights. Not so. If the drive for equal rights
)

^"TaTters now, in the difficult time when life must be given to laws already on the
books, Dr King and his tactics must share the blame. 23

y
Carl Rowan, a black journalist who had met King during the
p '^Montgomery boycott, published an article in Reader s Digest, in which he
i argued that King's involvement in a conflict between the United States
and Communists would rais e fu rther suspicions concerning his loyal tje_s
X^anH^TTJgf^jiH^rigpr impending r\v\\ rights, Ifgidatinn King's response tO
^ such attacks, was to argue that there ^a^an interrelationship between
^£acl&m and jx>verty and American impenajhmjind.militarism .^=sl^J
conviction that deepened after the racial riojsjriNewark and Detroit^ King
now asserted that it would be m orally him to denounce
in cojT|iste nt for

the violence against blacks iirthe ghettos, and to condone/American

violence in Vietnam. Again, as winner of the Nobel^eace^nze, he felt an
obligation to oppose war, particularly one which violated the right of self-
determination by the Vietnamese. The FBI kept Lyndon Johnson informed
of King's anti-war activities, and intensified itfs surveillance of the SCLC.

136
L-^
 Martin Luther King, Jr: Apostle for Non-Violence

THE POOR PEOPLE'S CAMPAIGN AND THE MEMPHIS

STRIKE

In_a n_effort t^ bridge the divisions M thin the civil rights ranks (the
NAACP and the Urban League were vehemently opposed to involvement
in the anti-war movement) King, by the end of 1967, had conceived an
interracial alliance that would both reassert the principle of non-violence
and unite a coalition of the poor alon g 6asg>rather than r^ngl line^
Stanley Levison, with memories of the 1942 'Bonus March' on
Washington, D.C., suggested that a small 'army' of demonstrators should
erect a shanty town or tent city on government property in the capital.
Within the SCLC, Jesse Jackson and James Bevel opposed the idea,
believing that priority should be given to ending American involvement in
Vietnam. King, desperate to reignite the spirit of protest which had
brought success to the South, and aware of his precarious position as a
spokesman for non-violence, explained the rationale behind the Poor
Campaign in an article published
People's after his assassination.

The time has come to return to mass non-violent protest.... Our Washington
demonstration will resemble Birmingham and Selma in duration. Just as we
dealt with the social problem of segregation through massive demonstrations,
and. ..with the political problem - the denial of the right to vote - through
massive demonstrations, we are now trying to deal with economic problems -
the right to live, to have a job and income - through massive protest. It will be
a Selma-like movement on economic issues. ..no structural changes have taken
place as a result of the riots. We^plan to build a shantytown in Washington,
patterned after the bonus marches of the thirties, to dramatize how many
people have to live in slums. 24

The planned march (wjuch took place afte£ his death) also revealed

KjrxgI^_c_o_nviction thaf^meripanja-iriety needed a fu ndamental

and econornicpowe r. (The immediate purpose of
isdistributioiTof wealth
the projected march was to pressure Congress into enacting King s
!

proposed Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged - a massive federally-

funded anti-poverty programme.) He informed an interviewer:

America is deeply racist and its flawecL both economically and

de mocracy is

socially... the black revolution is than a struggle for the rights of

muchowre
Negroes. It is forcing America to faQ^aJJ-lts interrelated flaws - racism,
'

poverty, militarism, and imperialism. It is exposing evils that are deejply rooteo^
whole structure of our society. 25 ^^^\^^fi - jLcMsufic*(
in the
£^03
In February 1968 Negro sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee,
went on strike to win union recognition, improved wages and working
conditions. King, who saw the Memphis strike as the beginning of the
projected Poor People's Campaign, accepted an invitation from James

137
 Black Leadership in America

Lawson, an old friend and Methodist minister, to lead a protest march in

Memphis. The demonstration ended iiC^isorder^w hen police shot a black
youth during a pitched battle with protestors. King conceded that he had
gone Memphis jn^dequatej^briefed, and left abruptly. Sections of the
to
press, taking their cuesfrom FBI informants, predicted that the violence
in Memphis would be repeated on a larger scale during the <WajyiinglQru
march. The Memphis Commercial Appeal commented tartly: 'Dr King's
pose as a leader of a non-violent movement has been shattered. He now
has the entire nation doubting his word when he insists that his April
project [the Poor People's Campaign] can be peaceful.' 26 King was deeply
disturbed by events in Memphis, and media comment on his own
culpability. But Lyndon Johnson's surprise announcement that he would
>v not seekj^le^onjnJj^S^ appeared to offer hope that the anti-war and
J
anti-poverty movements might achieve a unified front under a new
Democratic president. (In the event, the conservative Republican, Richard
Nixon, won the election.)
King returned Memphis in a more optimistic mood to lead a new
to
march. On
King addressed a small but enthusiastic audience at
3 April
Mason Temple, and referred to the increasing number of threats on his
life. In a startling peroration he declared that:

...it really doesn't matter with me

now, because I've been to t^mountaintop,
and I would like to live a long lifeTlongevity has
don't mind. Like anybody, I

its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God 's will.

And he's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. Andl've
seen the Promised Land. So I'm happy tonight. I'm not worried about
anything. ^r^iojTearing any man. 'Mine eyes have seen the glory of the
coming of the Lord?^*^^^

The next day, Martin Luther King, Jr, was shot and killed by a white
sniper as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. James Earl Ray, a
small-time criminal was convicted^and sentenced to a 99-year prison
p sentence) for King's murder, but tnere is strong evidence to suggest FBI
I 1 and Central Intelligence Age ncy im plication in his assajssjnMiojiJKing's
v 5 death touched offa. wave of violence across America, in which more than

twenty people d^tr-N^wrf^eek magazine, in a memorial issue,

commented:

King's martyrdom on a motel balcony did far more than rob Negroes of their
most compelling spokesman, and whites of their most effective bridge to black
America. His murder, for too many blacks, could only be read asjajuiigement
upon his n on-violent philosophy - and a license for retalia tory vmlence. ^

Floyd McKissick, in the same issue, announced simply: 'Dr Martin

Luther King was the last prince of non-violence. Non-violenceis_ajkad

138
 .

Martin Luther King, Jr: Apostle for Non-Violence

philosophy and it was not black people that killed it.' 28 Ironically, King's
murder may have helped the Memphis strikers. Following his death, 300
ministers (black and white) marched to city hall to demand recognition of
the union, and Memphis businessmen also began to press for a settlement
of the dispute. Again, the passage of the 19 68 Civil Rights Act, which
inrnrporatpH^fairJinij^ing proposals absent from the 1966 Act, may have
been facilitated by King's murder and the congressional sympathy i

evoked.

From the time of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, until the Memphis
sanitation workers' strike thirteen years later, Martin Luther King, Jr, was
the outstanding advocate of non-violence as both a method of protest and
as a way of life. To his admirers (black and white) King wasCthjT
outstanding blacky leader _o_Lth e twentieth century, whose unique
contributions to the civil rights cause derived from his intense religious
faith, expressed in the idioms and symbols of Southern black Christianity.
King 's personal bravery, a nd engagement with the forces of Southern
racism resembled (as they were intended) a medieval passion play in
which th e forces of good confronted t hose of evi l. To his critics, King was
the exponent of an unrealistic, if not pathological doctrine which enjoined
its adherents to lojieUl^eiJLiipr^i^siJrs and to abdicjte^the_jighlj)i-s£lf-
^efejjc^JCing, his critics also charged, had not initiated the black protests
of the 1950s and the 1960s (which began as locaLc ampaigns), had failed
to gain mass support for either his reformist or radical ideas, and among 1

his personal failings was p ompo us, s exist, and ov erbearin g to /

subordinates. The divergenfvTews of King's admirers and detractors/

deserve consideration and amplification.
^
^jr^
During and after the Montgomery boycott, King served as a sateriys>of
increasing symbolic and charismatic significance, able to direct attention
on and support for protests by pthers^t^^KiiigJ^a^ilit^ to bring
started
these tneLnews media (andjfl
crises to the attention or UtoJlifr-fedeTal

government) which made him a pivotalft

rial figure. Again, his expressed

devotion to non-violence and religious terminology (as well as his

openne^sjocomr^ojrfise) made King appear 'moderate', 'respectable' and
'reasonable' in the eyes of many Americans.
Until the emergence of the Black Power slogan, King, through
his prestige and for ce^of personal ity, was able to hold together an
obviously fragmenting civil rights coalition. In this respect, he served as

139
 dership in America 7^-

the vital centre of the movement, standin^etwjta^he CV.nnKervaH<jrr of

the NAACP and Urban League, and t^mdicahOT^Of SNCC and CORE.
But King also recognized that 'non-violertee^-provoked violence, and the
SCLC came to expect (and deliberately precipitate) assaults on black
demonstrators in order to gain public sympathy for civil rights legislation.

In this respect, also, King deserves credit for having inspired (through his
o ratory and personal example) Southern blacks - and their white
"supporters - to gain a sense of individual and collective worth through
political action. Jx is often not fully appreciated that to engage in civil
rights activities in the Southern states was to actively rjskjlf ath or injury
As the acquittal by an (all- white) Mississippi ju ry in 1955 of two local
white men accused of murderingfemmett Till. A
Chicago teenager, who
had allegedly made 'familiar' remarks to a white woman indicated, any
infraction of the rigid standards of Southern racial etiquette could lead to
violent death for black 'offenders', and the absolution of th eir murderer s -
should they even be brought to trial. Again, a spCIcJiar d Kinp fras
observed, in their willingness to go to prison for their beliefs, the student
activists who were initially inspired by the Mjemtgomery boycott
'undermined the traditional negative connotations of jail and turned it

from a place of shame to one of political honour ^&-^

It was also Martin Luther King's achievement to invest civil rights
v protest with universal signific ance, his declared purpose being 'to redeem
the soul of America' by(appeafeto its moral c onscience a nd national

tW<t ( values. By 1966, however, and despite tangible victories over segregation
and discrimination, King felt <snmp^mpatf&y fnr^RlacK Power and Marxist
American society, and ha^moved perceptibly to the left in his
critiques of
social attitudes and awareness. The Vietnam War, urban violence, and the

\JaLA ' reanzat i° n that with-le^al victories achieved, protest movements needed
nj^jP^w embrace ^^nonvU^ rights, all c ontributed to King's latter-day
y^-^>- radicali sm. (That King even privately expressed admiration for
<^gpaffdinavian-type democratic socialism is difficult for even his most
ardent American admirers - black and white - to concede).
Recent disclosures of King's chequered private life and s exual appetite
should no way affect judgements of his stature as a race leader, but it
in

re mains unexplained(whv ^e and his SCLC colleagues (and other

j

etemerffsTn the civil rigKtsrnovement), aware of FBI surveillanceand

'dirty tricks', did little, if anything to curb or conceal their more igfrmaje^

activities. David Garrow suggests that King's se xual procl ivities and
practices w ere simply 'standard ministerial practice in a context where
intimate pastor-parishioner relationships had long been winked at' \^~
(Garrow quotes King as having said to a worried acquaintance: 'I'm away
rom home twenty-five to twenty-seven days a month. Fucking 's a form .
 Martin Luther King, Jr: Apostle for Non-Violence

of anxiety reduction'.) 30 But King's weaknesses as a leader need to be

acknowledged. ^-L s*~~^\
Primarily a mmeglst, negotiator and ^Qh arisma tic^^peak^ King was
Lj&dJin anv s ense/aTTorganization man.B ut the SCLC/with which he was
identified after the conclusion of the Montgomery boycott, also came to
be identified solely with King himself. Ralph Abernathy, its vice-
president, called SCLC simply 'a faith operation'. 31 (Yet many Southern
black clergymen did not share the SCLC's Social Gospel orientation.
Wyatt Walker estimatedthat probably 90 per cent of black ministers in
Birmingham remained aloof from the campaign there.) Poorly organized,
SCLC was frequently inefficient and always m ale dominated. Septima"
Clark, active in the Highlander Folk School, was~also a member of the
SCLC's executive staff. Like Ella Baker, she discovered that King (and
his male associates) 'didn't think too much of the way women could
contribute' to the movement. Frequently patronized by King, Mrs Clark,
in retrospect, remembered that: [jy^dLz (j£^6Zst^L^tS3?^^ —
...in those days I Dr King, other than asking him not to lead all
didn't criticize
the marches. I adored him. I supported him in every way I could because I
greatly respected hi s courage his seryice to others, a nd his non-violence The
, .

way I think about hinf now comes from my experience in the women's
movement. But in those days. ..in the black church men were always in charge.
It was just the way things were. 32

^SCLCjva^aj^flexib^Cjj^ and hecause_onts_ ministerial ba st

able to mobilize effectively Southern blacks. Andrew You ng (who joined
SCLC in 1961, became its principal negotiator and played a decisive role
in the negotiations thatended the Birmingham campaign) observed that
although King was in nominal charge of SCLC, it was more like 'a jazz
combo', in which eac h staff member had 'a chance to s_oio\ 33 With King's
death, SCLC losfan accomplished orchest^^/^rrang er, and was to
engage in a leadership struggle between his appointed successorvRalph
Abernathy and Jesse Jackson, until Jackson's resignation in 1971 (see
ChapteT7)rlf, as is now generally acknowledged, King's fame was
created by the civil rights movement (rather than vice versa) it is also true
that throii^hj}isjeadersjr^
sta tes achiev ed itsjrjx^t4i gnifican t_yJctories. Judged only by his
contribution to" the phase of black protest, his influence in
classic'
shaming Congress into enacting the Civil Rights, Voting Rights and
Housing Acts, King will be remembered as the greatest blac^risionarv^
leader of the twentieth century. That the majority of Americans, black and
white, were unableOa endorse K ing's later critiques of capitalist society, / /^)
suggests that he was also, end of his life, a leader m advance of 9^
at the

most of his followers. Yet King never abandoned his fundamental belief
v

141
Black Leadership in America

in the aspirations of African- Americans forCurtejgation into the American

way of life. In a eulogy to King, delivered at his funeral service at Atlanta
on 9 April 1968, Benjamin E. Mays, President Emeritus of Morehouse
College, declared that::

No reasonable person would deny that the activities and persona lity of Martin
Luther King, Jr., contributed largely to the success of the student sit-in
movements in abolishing segregation in downtown establishments; and that .his
activities contributed mightily to thepassage of the Civil Rights legislation of
1964 and 1965.... He had faith in lns_country. He died striving to desegregate
and integrate America.... nonviolence to King was total commitment not only in
solving the problems of the race in the United States but in solving the
problems of the world. 34 (

Ironically, the nn^grjlionis^ movement of the 1950s and 1960s, of

'which King was the symbolic leader, also gave rise to a revived sense of
mjTTnriali*m/ with demands for racial separatism (a nd (violem-
itancfi: against the forces of white oppression. As King himself became
painfully aware, no one voiced these views more articulately than the son
of another black minister - Malcolm X.
-7 **
REFERENCES
Angelou, M., The Heart of a Woman (London, 1986), p.93.
Walker, A., In Search of Our Mother's Gardens: Womanist Prose (New York,
1984), pp. 143-4.
Garrow, D. J., Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern

Christian Leadership Conference (New York, 1986), p. 16; Garrow, D. L.

(ed.), The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The

Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson (University of Tennessee Press, 1987),

pp.45-6.
Raines, H., My Soul Is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South
Remembered (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1983), p.43.
King, M. L., Jr, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (London,
1958), p.54.
Williams, J., Eges on the Prize: America 's^CiwJJtighls^Ymrs 1954-196&
(Penguin BooksTN egfork, 1988}Zp56^^
King, Stride Toward Freedom, op. cit., pp.91-3.
Ibid., p.79.

9. Ibid.,p.l58.
10. Meier, A., E. Rudwick and F. L. Broderick (eds), Black Protest Thought in

the Twentieth Century (2nd edn, New York, 1971), pp.293-300.

142
 — . .

Martin Luther King, Jr: Apostle for Non-Violence

11. Fairclough, A., To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian
Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr. (University of Georgia
Press, London, 1987), p.27.
12. Garrow, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It, op.
cit., pp.53^.
13. Meier, et al., Black Protest Thought in the Twentieth Century, op. cit.,

pp.303-6.
14. Lewis, D. L., King: A Critical Biography (London, 1970), p. 105.

15. Meier, et al., Black Protest Thought in the Twentieth Century, op. cit.,

pp.307-8.
16. Williams, Eyes on the Prize, op. cit., p. 137.

/l7? King, M. L. Jr., 'Letter From B irmingham Jair, in Why We CantJVaitJ£$&&L

t
'^Yo^/m^jTW^^^'-
18. Meir, et al., Black Protest Thought in the Twentieth Century, op. cit.,

pp.49-50.
19. Moody, A., Coming of Age in Mississippi (New York, 1968), p. 307.
20. Hamer, Fannie Lou, To Praise Ou r Bridges:_ An Autobiography (1967),
quoted in Juan Williams, Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years
1954-1965 (Penguin Books, New York, 1988), pp.245-247. Mrs Hamer also

recounts her civil rights activities in Howell Raines, My Soul Is Rested:

Movement Days In The Deep South Remembered (Penguin Books, New
York, 1983), pp.249-255.
21. Royko, M., Boss: Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago (London, 1972),
p.141.
22. King, M. L., Jr, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (New
York, 1967), p.30.
23. Ansboro, J. J., Martin Luther King, Jr,: The Making Of A Mind (New York,
1983),p.256.
24. Meier, et al., Black Protest Thought in the Twentieth Century, op. cit.,

pp.586-93.
25. Garrow, D. J., The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr., from 'Solo' to Memphis
(London, 1981), p.214.
26. Fairclough, To Redeem The Soul Of America, op. cit., p.377.

27. Ibid.,pp.380-1.
28. Newsweek, 15 April 1958.
'
V29. King, R. H., Citizenship and Self-Respect: The Experieji(X.,olJ^jticjJnJhe_ )
J
J^___JCivil Rights Movement', Journal of American Studies, 22 (1988), p. 12.
|

30. Garrow, Bearing the Cross, op. cit., p.375.

3 1 Fairclough, To Redeem The Soul Of America, op. cit., p. 1
32. Clark, S., Ready From Within: Septima Clark and the Civil Rights Movement,
ed. with an introduction by Cynthia Stokes Brown (Navarro, California,

1986), pp.78-9.

143
Black Leadership in America

33. Colaiaco, J. A., Martin Luther King, Jr.: Apostle of Militant Nonviolence
(New York, 1988), p.53.
34. Mays, B. E., 'Eulogy of Dr Martin Luther Xing, Jr.', in The Morehouse
College Bulletin, 36 (summer, 1968), pp.8-12.

144
CHAPTER SIX

Malc&hxi X:^ Sinner and

Convert

If Malcolm X were not a Negro, his autobiography would be little,

more than a journal of abnormal psychology, the story of a burglar,
dope pusher, addict and jailbird - with a family history of insanity
- who acquires messianic delusions and sets forth to preach an
upside down religion of 'brotherly' hatred.
[The Saturday Evening Post

It does not promote the cause of responsible leadership to deny

the importance of Malcolm X to the particular segment of people
whose political and/or ideological leader he was, or sought to
be. ...Malcolm X made an impact on the minds of the black masses
irrespective of his criminal past or his strong pro-black ideology.
[C. ERIC LINCOLN?

-5

PERSPECTIVES: BLACK NATIONALISM AFTER GARVEY,

\fHE SEPARATIST IMPULSE, 1930-1950

Marcus Garvey's deportation in 1927, and the onset of the Great

Depression effectively ended black American support for the
separatist Universal Negro Improvement Association. Negro
organizations and leaders, concerned with ensuring the sheer
survival of blacks, stressed interracial cooperation, and the political
and economic advancement of blacks within the United States.
From the advent of the New Deal in 1932, to the climax of the
civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, integration remained the
dominant black ideology. The goals of integration and equal rights

145
Black Leadership in America

coincided with the aspirations of a growing black middle class.

During the period of World War II, NAACP branches increased
from 335 in 1940 to 1,073 in 1946, and its total membership rose
from 50,000 to 450,000. The publication in 1944 of Gunnar Myrdal's
monumental An American Dilemma, with its optimism, deprecation
of separatist movements, and acceptance of racial integration as
the proper goal of protest activity, also helped to set the ideological
tone accepted by most civil rights activists and theoreticians. Not
until themid-1960s, with the emergence of the Black Power slogan,
growing disillusionment on the part of many younger blacks with
the 'tokenism' of civil rights legislation, and their rejection of
non-violence as a strategy and a philosophy, did black nationalist
theories and organizations enjoy the currency (and publicity) which
had attended Garvey and the UNIA. But even in the 1930s and
1940s, not all black leaders subscribed to the integraperrrst^ethic.
W.
his
E. B^_Du_Bois, a s hasbeen seen, clashed with therNA ACP^&ver
advocacy of a separate blacjc^economy. v .
^
The American Communist Party, founded in 1919, made some
converts among black intellectuals with its Stalinist-derived call
for ^self-determina U^fl^for-A^ran-Ame ncans. including a proposal
to create an all-black '49thJ£tate' out of the heart of the Southern
"black belt'. But the Communist appeal mass of blacks was
to the
'minimal and by 1935, operating on the (mistaken) assumption that
the proletarian revolution was at hand, American Communists
reversed their nationalistic stance in favour of a policy of equal
rights for blacks in the United States.
But the mass unemployment of the Depression saw the flowering
of various mystic, black nationalist sectarian cults in the black
urban ghettos. Noble Drew Ali's Moorish-American Science Temple,
founded in Newark, New Jersey, in 1913, gained in strength with
the influx of a largenumber of former Garveyites in the late 1920s.
Drew Americans would find salvation only when
insisted that black
they realized that they were Moorish Americans or Asiatics, whose
true African homeland was Morocco.
More significant wa s/HFatfier bivine ^ PpP r<a Mirrinn Mnv ^mpnt
established on Long Island in 1919, which instituted a collectivist
economy among its followers (who also included ex-Garveyites),
and functioned as much as a social as a religious black nationalist
movement. From 1931-36, Father Divine's Peace Mission grew
from a handful to over a million followers or 'angels'. Wages and
benefits acquired by converts (who were required to surrender any
insurance policies and to withdraw from fraternal organizations)

146
 Malcolm X: Sinner and Convert

were used to purchase missions and houses ('Heavens'), which

were turned into sexually segregated living quarters. Members
were employed in Father Divine's laundries, restaurants and
communal farms in New York and New Jersey. During their heyday,
the Peace Missions provided wholesome meals at minimal prices
to the unemployed. Father Divine (born George Baker) became the
most successful black evangelist of the 1930s and 1940s, and was
the most arresting black nationalist since Marcus Garvey. Through
the collective efforts of his followers, Divine (who was opposed
to trade unions and social welfare legislation) was able to provide
food, accommodation and employment for large numbers of blacks
untouched by New Deal programmes. But Father Divine ha H littl^
interest in the civil rights protests of the period. Although he took
part in street demonstrations against department stores in Harlem
which practiced discrimination, Divine had little impact as a reform
leader. He died in 1965 in his mansion on a 75 acre estate outside
Philadelphia. His obituary in the New York Times related that:

Father Divine's height was 5 feet 2 inches, and his customary dress
was a carefully tailored $500 silk suit. He was bald and paunchy.. ..His
rhetoric was replete with malapropisms, and many of his sentences
were virtually unintelligible. However, to the thousands who looked
upon him and heard him speak, Father Divine was God Almighty, who
had arrived full grown on earth. ..to divulge a creed of peace,
communal living, celibacy, honesty, and racial equality.. ..In practice,
Father Divine fostered a mass cooperative primitive communism,
based on the Last Supper. 3

Emigrationist and repatriation ideas were confined during the

1930s to such organizations as the Ethiopian Pacific Movement,
established in Chicago in 1932, by Mittie Gordon, a former president
of the city's division of the UNIA. In 1939, 300 members of the
movement set out for Washington, D. C., to lobby the federal
government in support of Senator Theodore Bilbo's proposal to
allocate federal funds to blacks who wished to emigrate to Africa.
Most never arrived in the capital, as their transportation began
breaking down even before they had left the Chicago city limits.
(In 1941 Miss Gordon was charged with inciting blacks to avoid
conscription.)
In 1930 the most influential black nationalist/separatist religion,
the Nation of Islam (the Black Muslims) was founded by Wallace
D. Fard in Detroit, Michigan. Presenting himself as a Muslim
prophet, Fard preached a message of black redemption within
Islam. Whites were castigated as 'devils' and mankind itself was

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Black Leadership in America

said to havebegun with the black race which had brought civilization
to the world.The white race - a degenerate mutation of the original
inhabitants of the earth - the 'Asiatic Black Man' - had been
given 6,000 years of domination by God to test the capacity and
strength of the Black Nation. But the day of judgement was at
hand, when the 'Caucasians' and their religion, white Christianity,
would be destroyed. Fard attracted a following, founded the Temple
of Islam and a University of Islam (actually a combined elementary
and secondary school), and taught young Muslim women the
rudiments of domestic science. The fruit of Islam - a paramilitary
organization - drilled its male members in the use of firearms.
In 1933, following Fard's disappearance, leadership of the Nation
(which had gained about 33,000 adherents) passed ttTgjijafi Pooled
the son of Georgia tenant farmers and former slaves, and a Garveyite^
Poole changed his name to Elijah Muhammad, and declared that
he was 'Allah's Prophet'. During the 1930s and 1940s, the Nation
of Islam grew slowly, drawing support mainly from the black
lower class. Muhammad organized Temples in Chicago, Milwaukee,
and Washington, DC, and amplified the precepts of the faith.
According to Elijah Muhammad, the black race originally inhabited
the moon, and at one time the moon and the earth were one planet.
But following an explosion - produced by a mad black scientist
called Yakub - the two were separated. 'Original Man' - the first
people to inhabit the earth - were black, members of the tribe of
Shabazz.
Under Elijah Muhammad, the Black Muslims advocated racial
separatism, self-determination and the setting up of an independent
black republic within the borders of the United States - or a 'return'
to Africa. Black Muslims published their own history books which
stressed the glories of the African past. They rejected the term
'Negro' as derogatory and favoured the term 'Afro-American',
and discarded black surnames as marks of the slave past, substituting
the suffix 'X'. Converts were enjoined to follow a strict code of
personal conduct which included a prohibition on the eating of
pork, extra-marital sexual relations, and the use of tobacco, alcohol
or narcotics. Muslims were not allowed to engage in any kind of
political activity or to serve in the armed forces.
In 1942 Muhammad and sixty-two of his followers were convicted
of draft evasion and jailed for three years. It was in prison that
Muhammad realized that the existing civil rights organizations had
made no attempt to reach or recruit criminals, delinquents or the
black underclass; in the post-war era, the Nation of Islam concentrated

148
 Malcolm X: Sinner and Convert

on just these elements, and with often remarkable results. Drug

addicts were rehabilitated and prostitutes 'reformed' after they
joined the Nation. Discipline within the organization was strict;
indolence and laziness were sternly reproved, and habits of thrift,
personal cleanliness and economic self-help were extolled as
positive virtues. Until the government granted them a separate
state, Muslims elected to avoid any social, religious or political
contacts with whites. During the Depression and New Deal, they
refused to accept relief checks, Social Security numbers, or any
form of federally-sponsored employment.
In addition to being allowed to set up an independent state,
Muslim demands, as formulated by Muhammad, included the
following:

We want the government of the United States to exempt our people

from ALL taxation as long as we are deprived of equal justice under
the laws of the land.
We believe that intermarriage or race mixing should be prohibited.
We believe that the offer of integration is hypocritical and is made by
those who are trying to deceive black peoples into believing that their
400-year-old enemies of freedom, justice and equality are, all of a
sudden, their 'friends'. We believe that such deception is intended to
prevent black people from realizing that the time in history has arrived
for the separation from the whites of this nation.
We believe that Allah (God) appeared in the Person of Master W. Fard
Muhammad, July, 1930; the long-awaited 'Messiah' of the Christians
and the 'Mahdi' of the Muslims. 4

In sevgx al respects, the B lack^ Muslims represente d a latter-d ay j)(

vfersion ofGarveyism. The separatism of the Nation of Islam was
motivated by similar forces to those which had prompted Garveyites
to discover their individual and group identity in racial separation.
The g roup econo rny practiced by the Muslims - dry cleaners,
grocery stores, restaurants, dairy farms and bakeries - duplicated
those of the UNIA
(and of FaJherDivine). Again, in its commitment
to racial uplift and (feo^mptioy, the Nation of Islam retained
fundamental tenets of Garveyism, which had itself drawn selectively
on Booker T. Washington's economic nationalism. But where
Washington, in the racial climate of the early 1900s, was a
'conservative' s eparatis t, Elijah Muhammad, in the predominantly

integrationistatmosphere of black thought during and after World

War II, preached a more milita nt, assertiv e,.sej3ajmli_sm, based on
his version of the Muslim HithTThe Nation of Islam, although it
attracted increasing attention, might have remained a relatively
obscure sect during the integrationist phase of the black protest

149
Black Leadership in America

movement, had it not attracted the attentiop^-oljts most {intghjjP

convert, later to become its most famous aroosU

ALCOLM LITTLE AND MALCOLM X

Malcolm Little was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1925 (the fourth
of eight children), the son of a West Indian mother and a black
American Baptist preacher, who was a follower of Marcus Garvey.
In his Autobiography, Malcolm remembered:

My father the Reverend Earl Little, was. ..a dedicated organizer for
Marcus Garvey's UNIA. With the help of such disciples as my father,
Garvey, from his headquarters in Harlem, was raising the banner of
black-race purity and exhorting the Negro masses to return to their
ancestral African homeland - a cause which made Garvey the most
controversial man on earth. 5

When Malcolm was very young his family, following warnings

,

by the Ku Klux Klan that the Reverend Little's UNIA activities

were unsettling local blacks, moved to Lansing, Michigan. Malcolm
accompanied his father on UNIA missions around Lansing. At
meetings held in private houses, Malcolm remembered seeing 'big
shiny photographs of Marcus Garvey', which his father always
carried, being passed around.

The pictures showed that what seemed to me millions of Negroes

thronged in parade behind Garvey riding in a fine car, a big black man
dressed in a dazzling uniform with gold braid on it. ..wearing a
thrilling hat with tall plumes. I remember hearing that he had black
followers not only in the United States but all around the world,
and. ..the meetings always closed with my father saying, several times,
and the people chanting after him, 'Up, you mighty race, you can
accomplish what you will!' 6

When Malcolm was six, his father was beaten and thrown to
death under a tramcar by members of a local white supremacist
group - the Black Legion - who had earlier burned the Little
family home. An intelligent and promising high school student,
Malcolm hoped to become a lawyer, an ambition that was summarily
dismissed by his teacher as being unrealistic for a Negro (she
suggested that he become a carpenter). The episode, together with
his father's death, his mother's commitment to a mental hospital
and the subsequent fragmentation of the family, increased Malcolm's
early sense of alienation from an unremittingly hostile white

150
 Malcolm X: Sinner and Convert

society. In 1941 he left school and went to live with his older
half-sister in Roxbury, Massachusetts, the black ghetto of Boston.
Employed as a shoeshine boy at the Roseland Ballroom (where he
met such famous jazzmen as Lionel Hampton and Johnny Hodges),
and as a dining-car porter on the Boston-New York route, Malcolm
became a petty criminal, with the nickname 'Detroit Red' and
operated for a time in Harlem during much of World War II.
Returning to Boston in 1945, he was soon arrested for burglary
and sentenced to seven years in prison, a severe penalty probably
reflecting the fact that one of his accomplices was his white
mistress. He was not yet twenty-one years old.
During his first year in prison, in Charleston, Malcolm continued
to behave as a delinquent, baiting the guards, sni ffing n utmeg and
other substances, and, by his own account, r aging against God and
'
the Bible to such an extent that he was called Satan^ by the other
inmates. But he met and came to respect a fellow prisoner, Bimbi,
who was studious and articulate. With his encouragement, Malcolm
began correspondence classes in English and Latin, copied out an
entire dictionary, and read so voraciously in his cell after lights
out that he permanently impaired his vision. In 1948, after his
transfer to Concord prison, Malcolm received a letter from his
brother, Philbert, stating that he had discovered the 'natural religion
for the black man', and had j oined the Nation of Islam./ It also
instructed him, 'don't eat any more pork, and don't smoke any
more cigarettes. I'll show you how to get out of prison'. 7 Malcolm's
natural curiosity was aroused. Further letters from his family,
including his brothers Reginald and Philbert, and his sister, Hilda,
all of whom were Black Muslims, and correspondence with Elijah

Muhammad himself, together with his own reading, introduced

Malcolm to the Black Muslim faith. He embraced the new creed
with all the enthusiasm of the convert. In addition to jMack M uslim
literature, he also read Du
Bois' The^ouls of Black Folk, H. G.
VfeftS*~Vutline of HistolY^diWiH^UTSLnVs Story of Civilization.
Released from prison vfTT^^jrMMcdlm went directly to Detroit
to meet Elijah MuhamnWr^vas made a formal member of the
Nation, and took the surname X. He advanced rapidly within the
Muslim hierarchy to become assistant minister to Temple No. 1 in
Detroit. He also became the movement's most effective preacher
and proselytizer. In 1954 he was given the ministry of Temple No.
7 at Lennox Avenue and 116th Street in Harlem, and quickly built
a following in New York. As a trusted minister and disciple of
Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm preached orthodox black Muslim

151
 Black Leadership in America

doctrine. At the Harlem rally 1960, he declared:

The Western World with drunkenness, dope, addiction, lying,

is filled

stealing, gambling, adultery, fornication, prostitution and hosts of other

evils. The God of Peace and Righteousness is about to set up His
Kingdom... here on this earth. Mr Muhammad is trying to clean up our
morals and qualify us to enter into this new Righteous Nation of
God. ..stop carrying guns and knives. ..drinking whiskey, taking dope,
reefers and even cigarettes. No more gambling! Elevate the black
woman. ...Your thirst for integrating makes the white man think you
want only to marry his daughter. We [Muslims] who follow Mr
Muhammad don't think God ever intended for Black men to marry
white women.. ..WE MUST HAVE SOME LAND OF OUR OWN. How
else can 20 million black people who now constitute a nation within
our own right, a NATION WITHIN A NATION, expect to survive... in
a land where we are the last ones hired and the first ones fired. ...WE
MUST HAVE SOME LAND. We will then set up our own farms,
factories, business and schools. ..to become self-sustaining,
economically and otherwise. 8

Yet despite Malcolm's dedication and considerable oratical

skills, the Black Muslim appeal was limited, and members had
few rights. Muslim theology was bizarre (and bogus), while the
call for 'separation', however appealing emotionally, was vague,
and to the black majority, unrealistic. Malcolm began to attract
increasing attention and support from lower-class ghetto blacks,
less from his exegesis of Black Muslim tenets than for his blistering
condemnations of white racism and critiques of the civil rights
movement's stress on non-violence and integration. Some of his
most stinging comments were reserved for Martin Luther King's
\jioctrine of redemptive black suffering. D rawing an analogy with
Mslay&ry, Malcolm asserted that t he two glas ses of slaves were the
'House Negro', loyal to the master, an d the 'Fiehdjjegro', who
hated both the master a nd serv it ude. Their modern counterparts
were the 'Uncle Toms' - accommodating, peaceable and self-
serving, and the 'New Negro' who had a pride in his colour and
culture, and who demanded racial separation. Martin Luther King
belonged firmly in the first category, an 'Uncle Tom' whose
primary concern is in defending the white man, and if he can elevate
the black man's condition at the same time, then the black man will be
elevated. But if it takes the condemnation of a white man in order to
elevate the black man, you'll find that Martin Luther King will get out
of the struggle. Martin Luther King isn't preaching love - he's
preaching love the white man. 9

Asked by the noted black psychologist Kenneth B. Clark if his

strictures against Negroes 'talking abo ut "love ev er ybody" [whe nl

152
 Malcolm X: Smnezand Convert

ylh£jL_donl L have an y Iq vg^ hatsoev gr fortheirj)wn kind was an

y
!

oblique reference to King, Malcolm replied tartly:

You don't have to criticize Reverend Martin Luther King. His actions ns
criticize him. Anx^gxo_w_hp teaches other Negroes to turn the other
cheek is d is arm ing t hat Negro. ..of his God-given right. ..his moral "1
right. ..hTs natural right to defend himself. Everything in nature can
defend itself except the American Negro. And men like King - their
job is to go among Negroes and teach Negroes 'Don't fight back'. He
doesn't tell them, 'Don't fight each other'. 'Don't fight the white man
is what he is saving. ...W hite people follow Kin g... .White people

subsidize King. White 'people sup port King. ..th e masses ot black
"people don't support King~~j wrlo isJ the pest weap on^that t he white
marrr wno^wants to brutalize Negroes, has ever gotten in this country,
because he is setting up a situation where, when the white man wants
to attack Negroes, they can't defend themselves, because King has put
this foolish philosophy out - you're not supposed to fight, or.. .to
defend yourself. 10

M alcolm ga ve a similar assessment of King to the black journalist

,ouis Lomax, adding on this occasion that:

The goal of Dr Martin Luther King is to give Negroes a chance to sit

in a segregated restaurant beside the same whitenjan who has
brutalized them for years... to get Negroes tO/frJrgrve/the people who
have brutalized them for 500 years. ..but the masses of black people
today don't go for what Martin Luther King is putting down. 11

When King was honoured at a ceremony in Harlem after his

receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize, Malcolm commented sarcastically:

Lile_^QLJJie. peace prize, we got the problem. I don't want the white
man giving me medals. If I'm following a general and he's leading me
into battle, and the enemy tends to give him rewards, or awards, I get
suspicious of him. Especially if he gets a peace award before the war
is over. 12

That Malcolm was prepared to act directly against white provoca-

tion was dramaticallxijjustrated in 1957, when hea led a group of
followers, an q surrounded a Harlem police station^ following the
beating of a Black Muslim by the police. Malcolm demanded the
victim's release and hospitalization, and $70,000 claim forfiled a
damages against the New York City police department. The widely
publicized action caught the attention of the media and of blacks
throughout the country, and membership of the Nation increased
rapidly. According to one estimate, by 1959 the annual income of
the Nation was $3,000,000; by 1961 the eight Temples founded by
Malcolm in the Eastern states had completed payment of nearly
$39,000 to the Nation's headquarters in Chicago. (Malcolm's own

153
 Black Leadership in America

New York Temple No. 7 contributed over $23,000.)

A frequent guest on TV and ra dio_jli03LS^J^alc_oJjn. ^by Q 964
> t _

w^^aTsoTthe second most requested speaker on college camptrses

- the first being the ultra conservative Republican (and presidential
contender), Barry Goldwater. In his numerous public addresses
and in the Nation's newspaper (which he founded), Muhammad
Speaks, Malcolm, gaining in confidence and awareness, pointed
out the major issues confronting blacks: inadequate housing and
high rents, inferior welfare and educational facilities, and political
^-^-powerlessness. He was also increasingly uneasy with the conservatism
\ of Elijah Muhammad, and in particular, his refusal to allow Black
v^\ Muslims to participate in civil rights protests. Recalling this period,
\J
\ Malcolm reflected:

J-" ITT harboured any personal disappointment. ..it was that privately I was
convinced that our Nation of Islam could be an even greater force in
the American black man's overall struggle - if we engaged in more
action.... I felt privately that we could have amended or relaxed our
general non-engagement policy. I felt that, wherever black people
committed themselves, in the Little Rocks and Birminghams...
militantly disciplined Muslims should be there. ...It could be heard
increasingly in the Negro communities: 'Those Muslims talk tough,
but they never do anything, unless somebody bothers Muslims.' 13

It is also clear, in retrospect, that the insularity and exclusiveness

of the Muslims, as well as their theological mysticism, no longer
satisfied the intellectually mature Malcolm. The occasion of the
break with the Nation was provided by the assassination of John
F. Kennedy in November 1963. Disregarding Muhammad's directive

that Muslim spokesmen should refuse to comment on the event,

Malcolm, when asked for his thoughts (at the end of an address
prepared a week before Kennedy's murder in Dallas, and entitled
'God's Judgement of White America'), remarked that it was simply
a matter of 'chickens coming home to roost'. In his Autobiography,
Malcolm remembered:
I said that the hate in white men had not stopped with the killing of

defenseless black people, but that hate, allowed to spread unchecked,

finally had struck down his country's Chief of State I said it was the
same thing as had happened with Medgar Evers, with Patrice
Lumumba, with Madame Nhu's husband. 14

Malcolm's impromptu comments were widely reported, and

Elijah Muhammad^£iis4>ended him from t he Nati on_ior_a J3£Uday
perfoM, during which he was forBTtoerTto speak as a Muslim
minister. Malcolm correctly suspected that his suspension (he was
not to be reinstated) was an attempt to curb his influence within

154
 Malcolm X: Sinner and Convert

the movement, as it also reflected the growing divergence between

his ideas and those of Muhammad. (Malcolm's well-founded
suspicion that Muhammad had not adhered to the Nation's strict
code of sexual conduct had also weakened his respect for the man
and his movement.)

MALCOLM X: MUSLIM
In March 1964, Malcolm resigned from the Nation and announced
that he was going to organize a new mosque in New York City -
to be known as the Muslim Mosque, Inc. - which would provide
both a spiritual and an activist base for Muslims and non-Muslims
and adopt a black nationalist, direct-action approach to the racial
problem. Although he publicly still endorsed Muhammad's policies

of racial separatism and an ultimate return to Africa, Malcolm

was aware that the theology and political inactivism of the Nation
did not appeal to the Black youth of the ghettos. His splinter group
would, therefore:

...beorganized in such a manner as to provide for the active

participation ofall Negroes in our political, economic, and social

programmes. ...Our accent must be upon youth. ...We are completely

disenchanted with the old, adult, established politicians.

Malcolm also reiterated his contention that blacks should (and

would) retaliate in self-defence when provoked:

Concerning non-violence: it is criminal to teach a man not to defend

himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks. It is legal. ..to

own a shotgun or rifle. When our people are being bitten by dogs,
they are within their rights to kill those dogs. We should be
peaceful... but the time has come for the American Negro to fight back
in self-defence whenever and wherever he is being unjustly and
unlawfully attacked. 15

From its inception, the was weak, poorly

Muslim Mosque, Inc.,
organized, and without sufficient funding. The wing of the
radical
civil rights coalition - SNCC and CORE - rejected Malcolm's
overtures to form a working alliance. Despite his breach with the
Black Muslims, Malcolm was initially regarded by younger black
militants as a lone agitator and self-publicist, and a potential (if
not actual) rival for leadership of the urban black proletariat. For
his part, Elijah Muhammad never forgave Malcolm's apostasy, and

155
Black Leadership in America

the Nation's newspaper published weekly diatribes, comparing him

with such notable traitors as Judas, Brutus and Benedict Arnold.
The established black leaders, already embarrassed and angered by
Malcolm's attacks, were in no mood to form alliances with him.
In fact, Malcolm was now in an ambivalent position: a confirmed
Black Muslim and an aspiring civil rights leader, a religious and
secular black nationalist. Moreover, he was now beginning to
review the plight of black Americans in a world-wide context and
perspective.
In 1964 Malcolm made a tour of thg_Mid41g^ East and African
states, where he w sjggH^rece e d by heads of stateTpoliticians
i

and students. The^unrinjy^oh^^

31ecca, jwiiere his exposure to the true Islamic faith broke his
remaining ties with the bowdlerized version preached by Elijah
Muhammad. Malcolm was particularly impressed by the fraternal
relations between pilgrims of all colours and nationalities at Mecca,
and the interest expressed in the American racial situation by Arab
and African leaders. He returned to the United States as a Sunni
Muslim: El-Hajj-Malik El-Shabazz - although he continued to be
known as Malcolm X - convinced that if they must remain in
America physically, Afro-Americans should 'return' to Africa
culturally and metaphysically within the framework of Pan-
Africanism. On his return from Africa, Malcolm informed a reporter:

Every time you see another nation on the African continent become
independent, you know that Marcus Garvey is alive. All the freedom
movement that is taking place right here in America today was
initiatedby the philosophy and teachings of Garvey. The entire Black
Nationalist philosophy here in America is fed upon the seeds that were
planted by Marcus Garvey. 16

In 1964 Malcolm announced the formation of the

June
Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) which with distinct
overtones of Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association,
declared itself:

Dedicated to the unification of all people of African descent in this

hemisphere and to the utilization of that unity to bring into being the
organizational structure that will project the black people's
contribution to the world.

Among its objectives, the OAAU asserted the 'Afro-American's

rig hLof self-defence' against all oppressors, complete independence
for all black people, ' make every
ayj3tejjj£j^£t£ajior^^
unregistered voter in the Afro-American community an independent
voter', 'the establishment of a rnli-nral rpntre in HaHpmL^rn offer
3 - ^ — I—
I

156
 —

Malcolm X: Sinner and Convert

courses and workshops in the arts and in Afro-American history,

and Afro-American principals for bla ck schools. It also called for
the formulation of a peti tion to be presented to the ITnite.fi Nations
Human Rights C"ir ^ ^t
"
nn r rallin g fr>r the prosecution of the
> 1

United States government, on the grounds that the deteriorating

condition of Afro-Americans constituted a threat to world peace. 17
As Peter Goldman observes, the OAAU prospectus 'read like a
Black Power manifesto two years ahead of its time'. 18 —^ |

An organization of never more than 900 members, the OAAU,

despite its impressive title, was^jnjir^-4he^jji^UtttUarj^l_^

of Malcolm 's ^nanging ano^Je~velopiii^> views on the racial situation

at home and abroad, rather than an activist movement. OAAU
rallies were not membership meetings but public relations and
educational events during which Malcolm explained his thinking
and strategies on a variety of issues. He criticized blacks for
supporting Lyndon Johnson's candidacy in 1964, and castigated
the black bourgeoisie for its commitment to private enterprise. He
urged supporters to organize 'rifle clubs' to defend the Afro-
American community against white vigilante violence and police
brutality. But Malcolm's most attractive theme for black audiences
was his exposition of the history of racial discrimination in America,
generally with references to 'the legacy of slavery'. Like Booker ,

T. Washington and Marcus Garvey, Malcolm ma de freq uent allusions

to the^debilitating effecTs~oTensTavement on the black psyche.
hJU^
However, alter hi s^ break with the Nation of Islam ^^lMcaLmLjdid
noTpreach the .vme deliverance of blacks from racial oppression
but r blacks to^errvTrtnem'sTTves^t^ollowing his second
J
vTsTFTo AtricarT capitals in~lyb4, during which he attended the
meeting of the Organization of African Unity in^Cairp, and urged
it to support his moves to indict the American government before

the United Nations, Malcolm began to appeal to non-racist whites

for their support in the civil rights struggle. He declared:

We wil l work wi] with tfny groups no matter what their

'crJpur isTaslong aj snumelyTrfferested in taking the'Type of
st eps necessary to bring an end to the injus ti ces that bl ack people in

^Xhis cou ntxy_are afflicted by. No matter what their colour is, no matter

what their political, economic or social philosophy is, as long as their

aims and objectives are in the direction of destroying the vulturous
system that has been sucking the blood of the black people in this
country, they're all right with me. 19

In his last speeches, Malcolm also made passing references to

socialism. At an OAAU meeting in Harlem in December 1964, he

157
Black Leadership in America

observed that:

Almost every one oLtUo Luunlfiub iLmt^jas gotten independence has

devised some 10fltTo\socialistic system/^nd this is no accident.... You
can't operate a capitanstk^vstem unless vou are vulturistic; you have
to have someone's blood to suck to be a capitalist. You s how me a
capitalist, and I'll show you a bloodsucker. 20

But despite such assertions, Malcolm never moved beyond a

vague critique of capitalism, and Q£X£ r_endorsed Marx ism. As one
confidant remarked: 'he had no use for Marxism. He considered
Marxism as another political ideology invented by white men for
white men, to shift the seat of power from one group of white
men to another group of white men. He thought it had no relevance
to the black man.' 21 Essentially an inspired agitator, public moralist
and revivalist (he once called himself a 'black Billy Graham'),
Malcolm (unlike Martin Luther King) addressed a dispossessed
and almost entirely black constituency, and never envisioned a
coalition of the underprivileged across racial lines. He informed
one interviewer:
The history of America is that working class whites have been just as
much against not only working Negroes, but Negroes, because all
all

Negroes are working class within the caste system. The richest Negro
is treated like a working class Negro. There never has been any good

relationship between the working class Negro and working class

whites. ..there can be no worker solidarity until there is first some
black solidarity. ...I think one of the mistakes Negroes make is this
worker solidarity thing. There's no such thing - it didn't even work in
Russia. 22

From his conversion to the Nation o f Islam to the end of his

life,Malcolm remained a black nationalist committed to the
spiritual and material elevation of Afro -Americans thr ough the
affirmation ot nis own taith in the redemption of the individual.
Like Booker T. Washington, Malcolm produced an authorized and
inspirational account of his own life, completed shortly after his
assassination by three members of the Nation of Islam in Harlem,
on 21 February 1965. Published after his death, it became a cardinal
text for the emerging Black Power movement. Malcolm's posthumous
Autobiography presented his search for identity fa s well as his
claim to leadership) to an audientre that had been largely indifferent
or actively opposed to him during his comparatively short public
career. It is possible to regard it as his greatest achievement.

158
 Malcolm X: Sinner and Convert

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X

Like Up From Slavery, Malcolm's Autobiography (dictated in

instalments to the then struggling black writer, Alex Haley) is a
black success story, but one profoundly different in content and
tone. It contains graphic descriptions of Malcolm's youth in Omaha,
Nebraska, and Lansing, Michigan, his subsequent criminal activities,
prison experiences, conversion to the Nation of Islam, changing
relationships with Elijah Muhammad, and the discovery of 'true'
Islam on his journey to Mecca. In many respects, it belongs to the
genre of spiritual conversion autobiography, and is, in effect, a
black Pilgrim's Progress, in which Malcolm describes the episodes
of his life in the form of parables; an incident is described, and
then the appropriate moral dawn. Thus, in a notable passage,
Malcolm describes how, as a ghetto youth, he allowed his friend
Shorty to 'straighten' his hair at home, with a near-lethal mixture
of lye, eggs and other ingredients. In every respect, the experience
was hair-raising:
The congolene just felt warm when Shorty started combing it in. But
then my head caught fire. I gritted my teeth and tried to pull the sides
of the kitchen table together. The comb felt as if it was raking my
skin off. My eyes watered, my nose was running. I couldn't stand it
any longer; I bolted to the washbasin. I was cursing Shorty with every
name I could think of when he got the spray going and started soap-
lathering my head.

When the painful operation was completed, Malcolm looked in

the mirror and the sight 'blotted out the hurting. ..on top of my
head was this thick, smooth sheen of shiny red hair - real red -
as straight as any white man's'. In retrospect, to the intellectually
mature Malcolm, the episode was revealing and cautionary:

This was my really big step toward self-degradation: when

endured I

all that pain, literally burning my cook my

flesh with lye, in order to
natural hair until it was limp, to have it look like a white man's hair. I

had joined the multitude of Negro men and women in America who
are [so] brainwashed into believing that black people are 'inferior' -
and white people 'superior' - that they will even mutilate their God-
created bodies to try to look 'pretty'. 23

Throughout his book, Malcolm shrewdly adjusts his language to

paralleland evoke the particular stages of his life. Recounting his
career as a street-wise hustler, running narcotics, working the
'numbers' racket, and providing black prostitutes for white customers,
Malcolm (also showing his sense of humour) says:

159
Black Leadership in America

Shorty would take me to the groovy, frantic scenes in different chick's

and cat's pads, where with the lights and the juke down mellow,
everybody blew gage and juiced back and jumped. I met chicks who
were as fine as May wine, and cats who were hip to all happenings.

And then adds laconically:

That paragraph is a bit deliberate of course; its just to display a bit

more of the slang that was used by everyone I respected as 'hip' in
those days. 24

As in his public speeches and addresses, so too in the

Autobiography, Malcolm could employ parody and satire. In a
devastating passage, he both conveys and mocks the world of un-
reality inhabited by the aspiring black bourgeoisie of the Roxbury
section of Boston, who imitated white middle-class life-styles.

I'd guess that eight out of ten of the Hill Negroes of Roxbury, despite
the impressive-sounding job titles they affected, actually worked as
menials and servants. 'He's in banking', or 'He's in securities'. It
sounded as if they were discussing a Rockefeller or a Mellon - and
not some grey-headed, dignity-posturing bank janitor or bond-house
messenger. 'I'm with an old family', was the euphemism used to
dignify the professions of white folks' cooks and maids who talked so
affectedly among their own kind in Roxbury that you couldn't even
understand them. I don't know how many forty or fifty-year old errand
boys went down the Hill dressed like ambassadors in black suits, to
down-town jobs in 'government', 'in financing', or 'in law'. It has
never ceased to amaze me how so many Negroes, now and then, could
stand the indignity of that kind of self-delusion. 25

But, he was also prepared to admit, as a teenager, Malcolm had

himself slavishly conformed to sartorial trends and fashions, as in
the hilarious account of his purchase of a 'zoot' suit:

I was measured, and the young salesman picked off a rack a suit that
was just wild; sky-blue pants thirty inches in the knees and angle-
narrowed down to twelve inches at the bottom, and a long coat that
pinched my waist and flared out below my knees. As a gift, the
salesman said, the store would give me a narrow belt with my initial
'L' on it. Then he said I ought to buy a hat, and I did - blue, with a
feather in the four-inch brim. Then the store gave me another present:
a long, thick, gold-plated chain that swung down lower than my coat
hem.

Again a moral is drawn: 'I was', Malcolm recalls ironically,

'sold forever on credit'. 26 Following his (false) conversion to the
Nation of Islam, Malcolm's dictated life-story adopts a more formal,
sober and suitably dignified form.

160
 Malcolm X: Sinner and Convert

Never in prison have I studied and absorbed so intensely as I did now

under Mr Muhammad's guidance. ...I went to bed every night ever
more awed. If not Allah, who else could have put such wisdom into
the little humble lamb of a man from the Georgia fourth grade and
saw mills and cotton patches. The 'lamb of a man' analogy I drew for
myself from the prophecy in the Book of Revelations of a symbolic
lamb with a two-edged sword in its mouth. Mr Muhammad's two-
edged sword was his teachings, which cut back and forth to free the
black man's mind from the white man. My adoration of Mr.
Muhammad grew, in the sense of the Latin root and word adorare. 11

After his break with the Nation, Malcolm, converted to the true
Islamic faith during his visit to Mecca, reflects on his earlier
ingenuousness in having followed his acknowledged mentor without
question.

I guess it would be impossible for anyone ever to realize fully how

complete was my belief in Elijah Muhammad. I believed in him not
only as a leader in the ordinary human sense, but I also believed in
him as a divine leader. I believed he had no human weaknesses or
faults.... There on a Holy World how very dangerous
hilltop, I realized
it is for people to hold any human being
such esteem, especially to
in
consider anyone some sort of a 'divinely guided' or 'protected'
person. 28

In recounting the story of his life - whether as schoolboy, petty

criminal, autodidact, Muslim minister or putative black leader -
Malcolm (like Booker
Washington) presents himself as eminently
T.
successful. He relates his receptions in Saudi Arabia with ostensible
modesty and a certain disingenuousness, in a letter written at the
time:

Never have I been so highly honoured. ...Who would believe the

blessings that have been heaped upon an American Negro? A few
nights ago, a man who would be called in America a 'white' man, a
United Nations diplomat, an ambassador, a companion of kings, gave
me his hotel suite, his bed. ...His Holiness Sheikh Muhammad Harkon
himself okayed my visit to Mecca. ..he told me he hoped I would be a
successful preacher of Islam in America. A car, a driver, and a guide
have been placed at my disposal. Never would I have thought of
dreaming that I would ever be a recipient of such honours - honours
that in America would be bestowed upon a King - not a Negro. 29

Embracing his new faith with enthusiasm and obvious sincerity,

Malcolm, in the chapter of his Autobiography entitled 'El-Hajj
Malik El-Shabazz', reveals that he also retained and displayed the
self-confidence and boosterism of the American entrepreneur abroad:

161
Black Leadership in America

Behind my nods and smiles. ..I was doing some American-type

thinking and reflection. I saw that Islam's conversions around the

world could double and triple if the colourfulness and the true
spiritualness of the Hajj pilgrimage were properly advertized and
communicated to the outside world. ...The Arabs said 'insha Allah'
('God willing') - then they waited for converts. Even by this means,
Islam was on the march, but I knew that with improved public
relations the number of new converts turning to Allah could be turned
to millions. 30

As the late I. F. Stone, a journalist sympathetic to Malcolm,

wryly observed, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz 'had become a Hajj but
remained in some ways a Babbit, the salesman archetype of American
society. A creed was something to sell. Allah, the Merciful, needed
better merchandising.' 31 In a real sense, in his Autobiography,
Malcolm was 'merchandizing' himself, attempting to assure and
reassure his readers that as a consequence of the experiences
described, he was no longer a threat to society, but rather a figure
of integrity and stature. He was, however, prepared to admit to
Alex Haley that certain incidents had been exaggerated in the
telling to increase their dramatic impact. For example, as a young
gang leader, concerned to establish his credentials, he had not
actually played Russian roulette with a pistol, but had palmed the
bullet. When Haley offered to amend the passage, Malcolm replied
that it should stand since he did not want to be regarded as a
bluffer. Throughout the book, Malcolm presents himself as a man
constantly in motion and the process of change, who only came to
rest - physically and metaphysically - at the Holy City of Mecca.
His sense of spiritual kinship with fellow pilgrims is conveyed in
the following passage:

...the Muslim world's customs no longer seem strange to me. My

hands readily plucked up food from a common dish shared with
brother Muslims; I was drinking without hesitation from the same
glass as others; I was washing from the same little pitcher of water;
and sleeping with eight or ten others on a mat in the open. I remember
one night. ..I lay awake among sleeping Muslim brothers and I learned
that pilgrims from every land - every colour, and class, and rank;
officials and beggars alike - all snored in the same language. 32

Malcolm's autobiography does not end with his spiritual and

political illumination atMecca, but rather in passages expressing
anxiety and uncertainty. Like Martin Luther King, Malcolm was
aware that he might, at any moment, be killed by either his black
or white enemies. He predicted with grim accuracy that 'I do not
expect to live long enough to read this book in its finished form',

162
 Malcolm X: Sinner and Convert

and wondered only who 'would meet a fatal catastrophe first -

"non-violent" Dr King, or so-called "violent" me'. 33 In the event,
Malcolm was murdered three years before his great rival. Although
King had deplored Malcolm's apparent preoccupation with violence
and advocacy of racial separatism, he deplored Malcolm's untimely
death. When a young white student informed him that his grandmother
had just read The Autobiography of Malcolm X and thought 'it was
a marvelous book of love', King reportedly replied:

It was tragic that Malcolm was killed, he was really coming around,

moving away from racism. He had such a sweet spirit... right before he
was killed he came down to Selma and said some pretty passionate
things against me, and that surprised me because after all it was my
own territory down there. But afterwards he took my wife aside, and
said he thought he could help me more by attacking me than praising
me. He thought it would make it easier for me in the long run. 34

During his lifetime, however, Malcolm elicited less generous

responses from leaders of the civil rights coalition.

MALCOLM X AND HIS BLACK CRITICS

As an impassioned agitator, moralist and cynic, Malcolm found
the integrationism, gradualism and non-violence espoused by the
established civil rights leadership to be misguided and not a little

ridiculous. In 1963, in a 'Message to the Grassroots', Malcolm

informed his audience that the contemporary civil rights movement
did not qualify as a social revolution. The American, French,
Russian and Chinese revolutions had been marked by violence and
bloodshed and had effected radical change. With heavy irony and
emphasis, he suggested that the:

only kind of revolution that is nonviolent is the Negro revolution. The

only revolution based on loving your enemy is the Negro revolution.
The only revolution in which the goal is a desegregated lunch counter,
a desegregated theatre, a desegregated park, and a desegregated toilet.
You can sit down next to white folks - on the toilet.

At a Harlem rally late in 1964, Malcolm declared T don't believe

we're going to overcome [by] singing. If you're going to get
yourself a .45 and start singing "We Shall Overcome", I'm with
you.' 35 Asked about his view of the activities of Martin Luther
King and the SCLC in Birmingham, Alabama, Malcolm replied
harshly: 'Martin Luther King is a chump not a champ. Any man

163
Black Leadership in America

who puts his women and children on the front lines is a chump,
not a champ.' 36 Nationally-recognized black leaders, Malcolm
maintained, had betrayed their constituents. He informed a Detroit
conference in 1963 that:

When Martin Luther King failed to desegregate Albany, Georgia, the

civil rights struggle in America reached its lowpoint. King became
bankrupt almost, as a leader. The Southern Christian Leadership
Conference was in financial trouble; and it was in trouble, period, with
the people when they failed to desegregate Albany, Georgia. Other
Negro civil rights leaders of so-called national stature became fallen
idols. ..began to lose their prestige and influence [but] local leaders
began to stir up the masses. ..at the grass roots level. This was never
done by these Negroes of national stature.... They control you, they
contain you, they have kept you on the plantation. 37

Asked in an interview in March 1964 about his attitude toward

'Christian-Gandhian groups', Malcolm retorted:

Christian? Gandhian? I don't go for anything that's nonviolent and

turn-the-other-cheekish....I've never heard of a nonviolent revolution
or a revolution that was brought about by turning the other cheek, and
so I believe that it isa crime for anyone to teach a person who is

being brutalized to continue to accept the brutality without doing

something to defend himself. If this is what the Christian-Gandhian
philosophy teaches, then it is criminal - a criminal philosophy. 38

Again, Malcolm's insistence on separatism and identification

with Africa, was at odds with the integrationism and 'Americanism'

of the civil rights movement. In a conversation with the Southern

white writer, Robert Penn Warren, Malcolm derided the possibility
of 'the political and economic system of this country' producing
'freedom, justice. ..equality and human dignity for twenty-two
million Afro- Americans' and declared that:

I believe that a psychological, cultural, and philosophical migration

back to Africa will solve our problems. Not a physical migration, but
a cultural, psychological [and] philosophical migration back to Africa
- which means restoring our common bond - will give us the spiritual
strength and the incentive to strengthen our political and social
position right here in America. ..And at the same time this will give
incentive to many
of our people to also visit and even migrate
physically back to Africa, and those who stay here can help those who
go back and those who go back can help those who stay here, in the
same way as the Jews who go to Israel. 39

Such statements by Malcolm, whether as a Black Muslim or

independent minister, earned him the condemnation of most black
leaders and spokesmen. The substance of much of their criticism

164
 Malcolm X: Sinner and Convert

echoed that of earlier Afro-American indictments of Marcus Garvey.

Malcolm, it was generally conceded, had touched the sensitivities
of urban blacks by exhorting them to reassert racial pride and to
resist white oppression and denigration. Martin Luther King
reportedly once remarked to a friend: 'I just saw Malcolm X on
television. I can't deny it. When he starts talking about all that's
been done to us, I get a twinge of hate, of identification with
him'. 40 But King also deplored Malcolm's apparent obsession with
violence and asserted that:

...violence is not going to solve our problem. ..in his litany of

articulating the despair of the Negro without offering any positive,
creative alternative, I feel that Malcolm has done himself and our
people a great disservice. Fiery, demagogic oratory in the black
ghettos, urging Negroes to arm themselves and prepare to engage in
violence, as he has done, can reap nothing but grief. 41

In the last months of his life, Malcolm was also seen by his
black critics (and with some justification) as confused and uncertain.
Bayard Rustin informed Robert Penn Warren in October 1964 that
Malcolm (then returning from the Near East) was only a marginal
figure.

He has very little in the way of an organization - practically nothing.

They're a few frustrated youngsters and a few confused writers. ..but
even before he left here, these Sunday meetings which he was always
having got smaller and smaller, because he doesn't have any real
answers to the immediate problems which Negroes want an answer to.

Whitney M. Young of the National Urban League believed that

despite frequent appearances in headlines and on television:

...there aren't ten Negroes who would follow Malcolm X to a separate

state. The only appeal he has is to give a Negro who's been beaten

down all day a chance to get a vicarious pleasure out of hearing

someone cuss out the white people.

James Farmer, of the Congress of Racial Equality, felt that

'Malcolm has done nothing but verbalize - his militancy is a matter
of posture, there has been no action'. 42 To Roy Wilkins of the
NAACP, Malcolm's greatest limitation was that 'the only way you
could judge things was whether you did the thing that was manly,
no matter if it was suicidal or not. A prosecutor like Malcolm has
to be able to put himself in the shoes of people who did the best
they could under the circumstances', and this, Wilkins believed,
Malcolm was congenitally unprepared or unwilling to do. 43 Only
after his death and canonization as the patron saint of Black Power

165
Black Leadership in America

by the younger elements in the black protest movement were

established black leaders prepared to offer more favourable estimates
of Malcolm X.

ASSESSMENT

As a black Mu&Hm minister and independent spokesman after his

break with Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X was consistently dedicated
to the spiritual regeneration of Afro-Americans. He employed the
rhetoric- pfracial separatism to affirm the resolve of blacks to exist
on tl feVf^own terms w ithin (but culturally and mentally apart from)
the surrounding white society. An accomplished , polished and
Malcolm portrayed and analysed the plight
artful public speaker,
and dilemma of black Americans with remarkable vividness and
clarity. His speeches were filled with visual images, metaphors,
slogans and allusions to black history, music and folk lore, all of
which struck an immediate chord with his audiences. In the following
exchange with Rf&fia/fj^enn Warren, Malcolm responds to a question
about 'nonselective reprisal' against whites with a parable:

Well, I'll tell you, if I go home and my child has blood running down
her leg and someone tells me a snake bit her, I'm going out and kill
snakes, and when I find a snake I'm not going to look and see if he
has blood on his jaws.
WARREN: You mean you'd kill any snake you could find?
MALCOLM X: I grew up in the country, on a farm. And whenever a
snake was bothering the chickens, we'd kill the snakes. We never
knew which was the snake did it.

WARREN: To read your parable, then, you would advocate

nonselective reprisals?
MALCOLM X: I'm just telling you about the snakes. 44

In Malcolm's imagery, society was a jungle, infested with snakes,

foxes, wolves and vultures, yet black 'leaders' themselves, were
often no more than 'parrots', repeating 'what the [white] man
says.' 45
The most remarkable feature of Malcolm's remarkable life was
From the parochial and si mplistic
his capacity for intellectual growth.
outloo
~ • k
'
of his Black M uslim phase, he came to embrace amor^,
! ^— i — .

s^rjjimicated and informed spiritual and political world-view by

the time of his death. But he. nev er aba ndoned his role as an
evangelist for a form of^ftlack natlonalT^^vv^Hch owed* much to

166
 Malcolm X: Sinner and Convert

Marcus Garvey's example. As a Black Muslim minister, Malcolm

energized and greatly increased the membership and vitality of
what had been a relatively obscure and largely elderly sect. By
1963 he had become increasingly impatient with the political
disengagement forced on the Nation of Islam by Elijah Muhammad.
Simultaneously, he pointed out the weaknesses in the objectives
and achievements of a civil rights coalition which, after some
successes in the South, had come to regard racial integration a
panacea. Agarfu. as. an independent minister. Malcolm voiced the
feelings of ayfyounger black generatio'AVither hostile or indifferent
to Marti n Luther King's philoso ph y orf npn- violenre anH the pojw^r
it redemptive_suffe_ring. And, before King's myn moye t6 the left,
[alcolm highlightedthe_socio-economic condition (and needs) of
blacks, and the Suure qi the
fj civil rig hts movement to effect
meaningful changeTrTtne lives of the ghett^proletariat. Malcolm
~*
espoused (and personified) black leadership from thej gtass roots "~\
of local organ^zjitions^Jree from the domination orthe middle
classesTBayard Rustin, in conversation with Peter Goldman, conceded
that Malcolm had bri>jight_jj_Jdnd of psychic satisfaction and
compensation to/^JJe%is^sse^se3?-^C :,

King had to iftTjasur^eTby his victories. But what King did, what the
be
NAACP did, what Roy Wilkins did, all that was for the benefit of the
SjOjnJierji Negro. There were no obtainable, immediate results for the
Northern ghettoized black, whose housing is getting worse; who is
_ f
uliabie^to fiha ~work; whose schools are deteriorating ....He. ..must find
victory somewhere, and he finds victory within. He ne eded Malcolm, j^
who brought him an internal victory, precisely because the external
victory is beyond his reach. What can bring satisfaction is the feeling
that he is black, he is a man, he is internally free. King had to win
victories in the real world. Malcolm's were the kind you can create
yourself. 46

The sociologist C^,£ric Lincoln expressed a similar view of.

Malcolm's.'appeal and achi evement: n

I He was always c hallenging^ the white man, always dehunkmg the white '

/ man. I don't think Tie_wa"s~ever under any illusion that a powerless

/ black minority could mount a physical challenge to a powerful white
majority and survive. But they'could mount a ps ychological rh allpngeS-*
and if they were persistent, they might at least produce some erosion
in the attitudes and the strategies by which the white man has always
protected himself and his interests. His challenge was to prove that
_you are as great as yousa^^oji_-ai^~a^noral as^y^u_s^y_you_are_.as
kind as youTay you areTTasloving as yousay you are. ..as altruistic a
47
yotr sayyou are... as superior as you say you are.

167
Black Leadership in America

Like Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X has been claimed as a

revolutionary and a reactionary, a black nationalist and a black
racis t, a prophet and a demagogue. Like Garvey also, Malcolm
had more followers than those who belonged to the Organization
of Afro-American Unity. Where Garvey spoke to the despairing
mood of the 1920s, Malcolm was receptive to the hopelessness of
the ^ ndur rng black^gh etto s_pf the 1960s, which he sought to
transform into centres of black consciousness, enterprise and
spiritual liberation. Two differing estimates of Malcolm, both
delivered after his assassination, illustrate his essentially
psychological appeal as perceived by admirers and critics. Asked
why he 'eulogized' Malcolm X,(OssieDavl s, the black actor,
v

director and playwright, replied: >

We used to think that protocol and common sense required that

Negroes stand back and let the white man speak up for us, defend us,
and lead us from behind the scenes in our fight. This was the essence
of Negro politics. But Malcolm said to hell with that! Get up off your
knees and fight your own battles. ...That's the way to make the white
man respect you. Malcolm. ..was refreshing excitement. ...He could
make you angry as hell, but he could also make you proud. It was
impossible to remain defensive and apologetic about being a Negro in
his presence. ...I never doubted that Malcolm X, even when he was
wrong, was always the rarest thing in the world among us Negroes: jl
true man. 48
><

James Baldwin, writing seven years after Malcolm's death,

observed correctly that Malcolm had never been a 'racist':

His intelligence was more complex than that.... What made him
unfamiliar and dangerous was not his hatred for white people but his
love for blacks, his apprehension of the horror of the black condition,
and the reasons for it, and his determination so to work on their hearts
and minds that they would be enabled to see their condition and
change it for themselves. 49

Although he rejected Malcolm's racial separatism and advocacy

of retaliatory violence, MarthiLuthej^Kiji^his widow believed,
occupied some common gr ound with him.

shared with Malcolm the fierce desire that the black American
reclaim his racial pride, his joy in himself and his race - in a
physical, a cultural, and a spiritual rebirth.^ke shared with the
'
nationalists the sure knowledge that black is beautif ul' and that, in so
many respects, the quality of the black people's scale of values was
far superior to that of the white culture which attempted to enslave
us.... Martin too believed that white Christianity had failed t o act in

accordance with its teachings. Martin also believed iHSwrinvi olent

168
 Malcolm X: Sinner and Convert

Black Power He believed that we must have our share of the

.

economy, of education, of jobs of free choice. 50 ^

With the violent deaths of Martin Luther King, Jr, and of Malcolm
X, the urban riots of the 1960s, and the fragmentation of the civil
rights coalition on the rocks of Black Power and the polarization
caused by the Vietnam War, American society appeared to be in
turmoil. Legislation designed to improve the citizenship status of
blacks - notably, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting
Rights Act of 1965 - served also to heighten their expectations.
Yet in 1966 the unemployment rate for blacks was 7.8 per cent, or
twice the national average, with 40 per cent of black families
earning less than $3,000 a year. Again, ten years after the Supreme
Court's historic decision on school desegregation, the United States
Commissioner of Education could report that the majority of Jfe
American children still attended racially segregated school^-Mast-^jp
disturbingly, perhaps, the nation 'sj)lack ghettos, despite the efforts ^£>
of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, remained as appalling
reminders of the persistence (if not the intensification) of white
racism impervious to the appeals of either integrationists or black
nationalists. The disillusioned mood of u rban blanks was most
frighteningly revealed in the wave ofj civil disorders' which
engulfed the country's major cities in the 1960s: Harlem (1964),
Watts, Los Angeles (1965), Newark, New Jersey; Detroit, Michigan,
and Cleveland, Ohio Q967_- 68)^uffered major racial disturbances
which resulted in over 200 deaths (mostly of blacks), with at least
10,000 injured and 60,000 arrested, and the widespread destruction
of property. Opinion polls indicated that while most blacks agreed
that rioters and looters were guilty of criminal acts, many also
regarded rioting as a justifiable form of political protest against
police brutality, unremitting white racism, and the dreadful condition
within the black ghettos As President Lyndon Johnson's National
.

A dvtsory Commissio n on Civil Disorders reported:

hat white Americans have never fully understood - but what the
r

fegro can never forget - is that white society is deeply implicated in

the ghetto. White institutions created it, white jji£liununns_maintain it,

(and white society cond ones it. ... Our nati ojLis_JiiQ-ving towafd-fwo
societies, one black, one white,- se parate_and unequal. 51

]j<c£££f£t/

(3
Black Leadership in America

REFERENCES

1. The Saturday Evening Post, 12 September 1964, quoted in The

Autobiography of MalcolmX (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1980 edn.),
p.44.
2. Lincoln, C. E., 'The Meaning of Malcolm X', in J. H. Clarke (ed.),
Malcolm X: The Man and His Times (Toronto, 1969), p. 10.
3. Whitman, A., 'Father Divine', in The Obituary Book (New York,
1971), pp.64-5.
4. Muhammad, E., 'The Muslim Programme', in J. H. Bracey, A. Meier
and E. Rudwick, Black Nationalism in America (New York, 1970),
pp.404-7.
5. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, op. cit., p. 79.

6. Ibid., p.85.

7. Ibid., pp.248-9.
8. Bracey et al., Black Nationalism in America, op. cit., pp.4 10-20.
9. Goldman, The Death and Life of Malcolm X (London, 1974) p. 75.
P.,

10. Clark, K. B., The Negro Protest: James Baldwin, Malcolm X and
Martin Luther King Talk With Kenneth B. Clark (Boston, 1963),
pp.26-7.
1 1 Lomax, L. E., When the World is Given: A Report on Elijah Muhammad
and the Black Muslim World (New York, 1964), p. 174.
12. Goldman, P., 'Malcolm X: Witness for the Prosecution', in J. H.
Franklin and A. Meier (eds), Black Leaders of the Twentieth Century
(University of Illinois Press, 1982), p. 3 17.

13. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, op. cit., p. 397.

14. Ibid., p.411.

15. Breitman, G., Malcolm X Speaks (New York, 1965), pp. 18-22.
16. Weisbord, R. G., Ebony Kinship: Africa, Africans and the Afro-
Americans (Westport, Connecticut, 1973), p. 82.

17. Malcolm X, 'Statement of the Basic Aims and Objectives of the

Organization of Afro-American Unity', in Bracey et al., Black
Nationalism in America, pp.42 1-7.
18. Goldman, The Death and Life of Malcolm X, op. cit., p. 190.
19. Breitman, G., The Last Year of Malcolm X (New York, 1967), p.46.
20. Blair, T. L., Retreat to the Ghetto: The End of a Dream (London,
1977), p.46.
21. Goldman, The Death and Life of Malcolm X, op. cit., p. 234.

22. Breitman, The Last Year of Malcolm X, op. cit., p.46.

23. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, op. cit., pp. 137-8.
24. Ibid., p.140.

25. Ibid., p.123.

170
 Malcolm X: Sinner and Convert

26. Ibid., p.135.

27. Ibid., pp.310-11.

28. Ibid., pp.482-3.
29. Ibid., pp.455-6.
30. Ibid., p.469.

31. Stone, I. F., In a Time of Torment (New York, 1967), p. 117.

32. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, op. cit., pp. 457-8.

33. Ibid., pp.496, 500.
34. Halberstam, D., 'When "Civil Rights" and "Peace" Join Forces', in

C. E. Lincoln (ed.), Martin Luther King Jr.: A Profile (London, 1972),

pp. 66-7.
35. Goldman, 'Malcolm X: Witness for the Prosecution', op. cit., p. 3 19.

36. Lomax, When the World is Given, op. cit., p. 74.

37. Epps, A. (ed.), The Speeches of Malcolm X at Harvard (New York,

1969), p.70.
38. Breitman, G. (ed.), By Any Means Necessary: Speeches, Interviews
and a Letter by Malcolm X (New York, 1970), pp. 8-9.
39. Warren, R. P., Who Speaks for the Negro? (New York, 1965), p. 259.

40. Ibid., p.266.

41. Oates, S. B., Let the Trumpet Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King,
Jr. (London, 1982), p.253.
42. Warren, Who Speaks for the Negro? op. cit., pp.161, 197, 244.
43. Goldman, The Death and Life of Malcolm X, op. cit., p. 385.

44. Warren, Who Speaks for the Negro? op. cit., p. 261.

45. Epps, The Speeches of Malcolm X at Harvard, op. cit., p. 49.

46. Goldman, 'Malcolm X: Witness for the Prosecution', op. cit., p.311.
47. Ibid., p.312.

48. Davis, O., 'Why I Eulogized Malcolm X', in J. H. Clarke, Malcolm

X: The Man and His Times, op. cit., pp. 128-31.
49. Baldwin, J., No Name in the Street (London, 1972), pp. 66-7.
50. King, C. S., My Life With Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York, 1970),
pp.256-7.
51. Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New
York, 1968), p.l.

171
CHAPTER SEVEN
Jesse Jackson: Populist
Preacher

I've always developed a tension - a tension in my own mind about

the place I'm assigned I deserve to be. That's why I resist the
press calling me a black leader. I'm a moral l e ader who just happens
to be black. [JESSE JACKSON] i

We can move from the slave ship to the championship! From the
guttermost to the uppermost! From the outhouse to the courthouse!
From White house!
the state house to the
[JESSE JACKSON: Los Angeles Rally, August 1982]

Jackson's rise to prominence 1984 was fueled by a number of

rn
factors; central among them were
his impressive knack for self-
promotion and the dispirited and uncertain conditions prevailing
within the Afro-American population. [ADOLPH L. REED, JR] 2

PERSPECTIVES: FROM BLACK POWER TO POLITICAL

POWER, 1966-1984

By 1966 what Milton Viorst has called the 'reformist phase' of

the black protest movement had achieved its notable victories. 3
The Civjl Rights Actof 1964, SLndJ^Votm^^htsJ^ct of 1965 ,

abolishedlheformal practices ot segregation and eliminated 'literacy'

and other tests which had been used to prevent blacks from registering
as qualified voters. Yet there were, as has been seen, divisions
within the civil rights coalition which came increasingly into the
open. The older established organizations and their leaders resented

173
Black Leadership in America

younger elements, such as CORE and SNCC,

the publicity given to
while there were also tensions and jealousies between the older
leaders themselves. Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, for example,
resented Martin Luther King's preeminence as the primary symbol
and spokesman of the civil rights struggle.
At the height of the SCLC's Birmingham campaign, Attorney
General Robert Kennedy reminded the president that in responding
to the crisis, the administration should keep in mind the fact that
'Roy Wilkins hates Martin Luther King'. 4 Young activists in the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee also believed that
King's style of leadership discouraged grass roots organization,
came to question (and then reject) integration as the proper goal
of militant black protest, and began to define its purpose as the
creation of autonomous political and economic institutions. By the
mid-1960s, SNCC had disavowed non-violence and had also rejected
alliances with white liberals. CORE advocated working within the
Democratic party, but sanctioned the use of violence in self-defence,
and called for black economic boycotts as well as all-black businesses
and financial institutions based on and located within the ghettos.
In 1968 whites were excluded from active membership of CORE.
These 'radical' critics of the civil rights movement criticized it as
a subterfuge for the maintenance of white supremacy, rejected the
assumptions of integration, and stressed instead the virtues of
black life-styles and black consciousness.
At the other end of the black ideological spectrum, the Nation
of Islam continued to denigrate Malcolm X as an apostate. In a
two-page editorial in Muhammad Speaks, published six years after
his assassination, it warned that:

Some people want to build a backward nation by goading unstable

youths to violence. ...Such people are attempting to use Malcolm to
mislead his sincere admirers. His good qualities - the long hard study
put in under the guidance of Mr Muhammad - are ignored. ..what
youths are really being told is that by being a degenerate, hustler, and
quick-to-kill, they are being 'revolutionary' like the 'real Malcolm',
the pre-Muslim Malcolm. Other young blacks are being told that
Malcolm discovered some great, abstract. ..'humanistic' 'Truth' in the
last eleven months of his life. This nameless, mythical abstraction they
would have impressionable Blacks substitute for a programme of real
social progress... for dignity bestowed on hard work. ..which are
consistently advanced by Messenger Muhammad year in year out. 5

The Nation's expressed concern over the growing cult of Malcolm

X was not misplaced. In many respects, he was the inspiration for
and posthumous examplar of a revitalized nationalism that began

174
 Jesse Jackson: Populist Preacher

as a slogan and gradually acquired a supporting rationale - the

ideology of Black Power.

OLD WINE IN NEW BOTT]

During the continuation of James Meredith's 'March Against Fear

in the summer of 1966, Stokely Carmichael of the SN CC^jnfc

a crowd at Greenwood, Mississippi:

The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin us is to
take over.... We been say in' 'freedom '
for six years and we ain't got
nothin'. What we gonna start sayin' now is. ...BLACK POWER 6
Precisely what the new slogan meant was unclear. Julius Lester,
a former field secretary of SNCC, offered a simplistic interpretation
of the concept in his half-humorous but sharply bitter account:
Look Out Whitey! Black Power's Gon' Get Your Mama, published
in 1968. Black Power, Lester asserted, meant that 'Bl ack People
would control their own li ves, des tinies and comm unities', a nd he
ridiculed the 1963 March on Washington as:

...a great inspiration to those who think that something is being \

accomplished by having black bodies next to white ones. ..nothing bu \/

a giant therapy session that allowed Dr. King to orate about his
y^n^
dreams of a nigger eating at the same table with some Georgia
cracker, while most black folks just dreamed of eating. 7
/
As a black nationalist ideology, Black Power came to acquire a
variety of connotations. It was most obviously a reaction against
persistent white racism and paternalism, which viewed integration
as either 'tokenism' or 'assimilationism'. Stokely Carmichael and
Charles V. Hamilton, in their elucidation^of Black Power asserted
'
that: The %oal of black people must/no t b e to assimilate into
middle-cla ss America, for t hat cl ass, as a^y-rfole, Tswitho ut a viable
consci ence as regar^sJlu manity'. 8 They also rejected the notion of
an equal working partnership with whites in the black protest
movement, and dismissed the efforts of 'man y yo ung, m^daMe-
^laj3_^_wjijj^~^j]i^ like some sort oTrepsi-Cola
generation, have wanted to "come alive" through the black community'
and black groupsVJMB lack Power also represented a disillusionment^rr
with the(^pdujiH^rrj^ an d legislative achievements of the civi\l^j^?
rights c oalition - a reco^nTfioh"that its apparent victories had not V^dt/ty
produced any discernible changes in the lives of most Afro-

175
 Black Leadership in America

Americans. Most obviously, Black Power was an assertion (or

rat^^^^a j^assertionW^fracial prid e^ a rejecti o n of white _standarcj s
o f physj cfll-and cosmetic beauty, Evident in the slogan 'Black is
Beautif ul\anj 1&£—^ogue of 'natural' Afro -America n hair styles
( or wigs ), adc ;rs as James Brown and Nina

Simone. the 1960s the sound of black jazz grew harsher evident ,

n the work of Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane.

There was also a renewed interest in the African background and
heritage ( real or imagined) of black Americans, together with
demands for Black Studies programmes in colleges and universities,
black inductors and separate facilities for black students.
i

s^^ (^ In poHiic*r^llack Power was sy nonymous wj th independen t

In^p^litic^r^
)lack~action and exercise of power in the urban ghetm^ pjthpi^
through the creation of a Mark po it c a p a rty nr control n f th e
. l i l

a l machinery within the ghettos, without white involvement ..

conomically^Dlack Power called for the creation of independent,

self- sufficient black business enterprises through the encouragement
of black entrepreneurs and the formation of black cooperatives. In
the area of education, Black Power theoreticians demanded local
community control of public schools in predominantly black
neighbourhoods. Essentially, Black Power stressed self-help, racial
unity a nd voluntary se gregation Owing a great deal to Malcolm
.

X 's black nationalist statements, Black Power as Lyndon Johnson's

Commission on Civil Disorders concluded, was in some respects
also 'Old Wine in New Bottles':

/ %^yY^^ Black Power advocates feel that they are the most militant group in
gX^ the Negro protest movement. Yet they have retreated from a direct
confrontation with American society on the issue of integration and,
by preaching separatism unconsciously function as a n acc om modati on
,

to white racism Much of their economic programme, as well as their

interest in Negro history, self-help, racial solidarity and separation, is
reminiscent of Booker^ T Washington The rhetoric is different, but the
.^programmes are remarkably similar. 10

From its Power wa^n evsr a coherentjdeologjy.

inception, Black
^nd fajj^d to formrd^tedemanrh^^ supported by_-a^oiajoritv^
of its proponents. (It also contained disturbing elements of anti-
SemiTismTwrnch many American commentators chose to ignore.)
Moreover, as Manning Marable has observed, Black Power was
quickly appropriated by conservative interests, black and white.
TheJBl ack Pnwer_conference h HfMjTj^hjj^delphia in June 1968
_
was co-sponso red b^kClairolJa white co rpor ation, whos e, president
endorsed the concept as meaning black 'ownership of apartments,

176
 Jesse Jackson: Populist Preacher

ownership of homes, ownership of businesses, as well as equitable

treatment for all people'. Again, the Republican Richard Nixon,
running for the presidency in 1968, defined (and defused) Black
Power as another form of 'fre e enterprise':

What most of the militants are asking is not separation but to be

included in - not as supplicants, but as owners, as entrepreneurs - to
have a share of the wealth and a piece of the action. And this is
precisely what the Federal central target of the new approach ought to
be. It ought to be oriented toward more black ownership, for from this
can flow the rest - black pride, black jobs, black opportunity and yes,
black power. 11

In these formulations, Black Power had been transmuted simply

into Black Capitalism. Theodore Draper has suggested plausibly
that:

Both the strengths and weaknesses of the Black Power slogan may be
traced to its ambiguity.. ..It sprang from a nationalist urge without

getting into any of the nationalist dilemmas. It avoided trouble by the

simple expedient of leaving undefined what kind of 'power' it had in
mind. Black capitalists as well as black separatist revolutionaries could
adopt it for very different purposes. 12

The Black Panther party, founded in Oakland, California by

two black college students, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in
1966, was perhaps the most extreme example of Black Power in
action. Its original 'Ten Point Programme' stated the following
demands:
1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our
black community.
2. We want full employment for our people.
3. We want an end to robbery by the white man of our black
community.
4. We want decent homes, for shelter of human beings.
5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of
this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us
our true history and our role in the present day society.
6. We want all black men to be exempt from military service.
7. We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of black
people.
8. We want freedom for all black men held in federal state, county,
and city prisons and jails.
9. We want all black people when brought to a trial to be tried in
court by a jury of their peer group or people from their black
communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.
10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and
peace. 13

177
Black Leadership in America

With its firearms, black berets, and menacing Black Panther

emblem, the new party (which organized armed patrols to protect
the black community of East Oakland against police attacks) spread
rapidly across the country, and appeared to be a direct threat to
'law and order'. In fact, the Panthers were initially reformist rather
than revolutionary. In 1967 they initiated a free breakfast programme
for black children, and offered medical advice to ghetto residents.
By the end of the decade the Panthers had become a Marxist-
Leninist party, advocating the revolutionary overthrow of capitalist
America. But as a consequence of police and FBI infiltration and
harassment, the party's leaders, by the early 1970s, were dead,
imprisoned, or, as in the case of Eldridge Cleaver, the Panther's
'Minister of Information', in exile abroad.
e fundamentalist Nation of Islam also underwent significant
Changes thel970s. After theTeath of~Blijah Muhammad in
in
Muhammad, assumed leadership of the
1975, his son, Wallace D.
sect, and began to modify (or to 'Malcolmize') its tenets. Re-
-
named the World Community of Al-IsiamTn~Tfie West, it embraced
the orthodox teachings of Islam, and began to direct its efforts

^
toward the establishment of a collectivist capitalism, and whites
were invited to join the movement which had earlier castigated
them as 'devils'. Even before Elijah Muhammad's death, the Nation
had begun to assume a Third World (as opposed to a traditional
black nationalist) stance. It supported such disparate movements
as Pan-Islam, Pan-Africanism, Puerto Rican nationalism and
international socialism. The notion of a 'homeland' for Afro-
Americans was considerably played down in favour of a more
conventional form of Pan-Islamism. In 1976 Wallace Muhammad
received $16 million from the United Arab Emirates, to build a
new mosque and educational institution, and also obtained a contract
to package food and supplies for the United States Army. However,
not all black Muslims accepted these innovations. In 1981 Minister
Louis Farrakhan announced his intention to return the Nation to
the precepts and practices of Elijah Muhammad, hastening the
fragmentation and decline of the black nationalist sect.
A year before his assassination, Malcolm X remarked that the
legal victories achieved by the civil rights movement in the 1960s
were making black Americans more politically conscious and
assertive. During the 1970s and 1980s, many blacks appeared to
believe that political activity and political power were the most
effective means to realize further racial advancement. Accordingly,
the strategies employed by black leaders turned increasingly away

178
 Jesse Jackson: Populist Preacher

from demonstrations, confrontations and boycotts towards greater

use of the ballot gained by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In 1966
there were 6 black members in the United States Congress and 97
Negroes serving in state legislatures; by 1973, there were 16 blacks
in Congress, and over 200 in 37 state legislatures. In 1979, blacks
held 4,607 elected offices - 66 per cent of which were in the South
- and there were 191 black mayors and 313 state legislators. The
Democratic party responded to this upsurge in political activity by
significantly increasing the number of black delegates to the party's
1972 National Convention, where black Congresswoman Shirley
Chisholm campaigned (unsuccessfully) for the Democratic
presidential nomination. In the 1976 presidential election, over 90
per cent of black voters supported the Democrat's nominee, Jimmy
Carter. As president, Carter appointed some blacks to high office
- most notably, Andrew Young, as US Ambassador to the United
Nations, Patricia Harris as Cabinet secretary of housing and urban
development, and John Reinhardt to the International
Communications Agency. Willie Dennis, the black speaker of the
California legislature, observed in 1981 that 'black leadership'
had become more diffuse:
Now the politicians who are black are providing one aspect of black
leadership, the religious community another, and the professional
organization another. This adds up to even greater international change
than could ever have been brought about by a Martin Luther King
rally or a Roy Wilkins boycott. 14

Yet even by the early 1980s, elected black officials constituted

less than 1 per cent of all elected officials nationally, and one
forecast estimated that at this rate of change, blacks would only
hold 3 per cent of all elective offices by the year 2000. Again,
blacks had gained 'power' in large urban centres precisely when
the continued migration of impoverished ethnic groups to metro-
politan areas, and the ongoing exodus of affluent whites to the
suburbs and (increasingly) to the 'sunbelt' states made the inner
than they had been in the past. A
cities politically less significant
1974 study found that in 23 out of 26 cities with black mayors,
16 ranked in the top third of all American cities based on their
rates of poverty. Despite the growth of the black middle class - as
measured by education, income and occupation - black unemploy-
ment rates were at least double those of whites, life expectancy
for blacks was shorter than that for whites, black infant mortality
rates were greater, and many poor black families (nearly 70 per
cent of the total) were headed by women.

179
Black Leadership in America

Carter's successor, the Republican Ronald Reagan, had little

sympathy for minority groups or civil rights. In its first six months
in office, the Reagan administration only filed five law suits relating
to racial discrimination with the Civil Rights Division at the Justice
Department (as compared with twenty-four suits under Richard
Nixon and seventeen under Carter during their first six months'
tenure). Reagan insisted that enforcement of civil rights should be
left to the individual states, curtailed laws against housing
discrimination, and reduced the numbers of those eligible for such
social welfare programmes as unemployment compensation,
Medicaid, food stamps and Aid to Families with Dependent Children.
Only after intense pressure from the Congressional Black Caucus,
other members of Congress and civil rights sympathizers, did
Reagan agree to sign the bill which commemorated Martin Luther
King's birthday (15 January) as a national holiday. At a White
House ceremony on 2 November 1983, Reagan (in the presence of
the King family) declared that: 'traces of bigotry still mar America.
So each year on Martin Luther King day, let us not only recall Dr.
King, but rededicate ourselves to the commandments he believed
in and sought to live everyday'. 15 If Reagan (unconvincingly) on
this occasion, appeared to endorse King's precepts and practices,
an aspiring black leader had already laid claims to being his true
successor.

JESSE JACKSON: FROM A & T TO PUSH

Jesse Louis Jackson was born in Greensville, South Carolina in

1941, the illegitimate son of an Alabama sharecropper. A promising
student and a natural athlete, Jackson later typified the Jim Crow
system he was exposed to in the South Carolina of his youth as
one of 'Humiliation':
...go to the back of the bus even though you pay the same fare.
Humiliation: no public parks or libraries you can use even though you
pay taxes. Humiliation: upstairs in movies. Back doors in hotels and
cafes. ...Humiliation: all-white police with no police warrants who were
so absolute in their power until they were called 'the law'.
Humiliation: a dual school system. Black teachers and white teachers
working the same hours, only the Black teachers taught more students
and taught double shifts and received less pay.. ..We used books
exactly three years after white students used them. We used desks
exactly four years after whites used them. There were no Black school

180
 Jesse Jackson: Populist Preacher

boardmembers....We were rewarded for docility and punished for

expressing manhood. Men were called boys. Women called girls. We
called white children 'Master' and 'Missy'. 16

Jackson won an athletic scholarship to the University of Illinois

in 1959, but because of his colour was not allowed to play as a
football quarterback and resented his exclusion from social events.
He transferred to the all-black North Carolina Agricultural and
Technical State University, where he became involved in the
Greenboro student sit-in movement directed against segregated
lunch counters. A. Knighton Stanley, a young black minister serving
the A & T campus, and William Thomas, a CORE student activist,
recognized that Jackson, flamboyant, dynamic, a football star and
president of the Student Council, would be a valuable addition to
the protests. Stanley later recalled:

We needed Jesse as a football player the girls loved. ...We woke him
up one day and told him to protest with us and he has been protesting
ever since 17

Recruited to act as a marshal for downtown marches, Jackson

soon became identified as a sit-in leader. On one occasion, he led
seven hundred demonstrators to the City Hall in Greensboro, and
in a reference to the SCLC's Birmingham, Alabama campaign,
declared that, in a similar fashion, local blacks would 'take over
the city of Greensboro'. When Jackson was arrested and put in
jail, leaflets were printed with the headline 'Your great leader has

been arrested'. 18
After graduation, Jackson enrolled at the Chicago Theological
Seminary, and, in 1963, joined the SCLC, and earned a reputation
for his organizing abilities in rallying the city's black clergy behind
Martin Luther King. In 1963 Jackson joined the SCLC campaign
in Selma, and in 1966 helped to unite the SCLC and the Chicago
Coordinating Council of Community Organizations into the Chicago
Freedom Movement, which pressed for open housing and school
integration. Appointed by King to head the SCLC's Operation
Breadbasket, Jackson led protests for non-discriminatory hiring
practices by Chicago businesses. Within twelve months, Jackson
had helped to obtain 2,200 jobs for blacks in white-owned Chicago
firms. Despite (or because of) his rapid ascendancy within the
SCLC, Jackson was regarded by many of his colleagues as an
upstart and a self-promoter. King himself shared some of these
reservations about Jackson, and also questioned his failure to
appreciate the need for a wholesale restructuring of the American

181
Black Leadership in America

economy. Andrew Young remembered that King, despite being

impressed with Jackson's performance in Chicago and Cleveland
with Operation Breadbasket:

was quite rough on Jesse because he (King) said that.. .Breadbasket

would not solve the problem... that jobs would finally have to be
provided by the public sector rather than the private sector, and that
Breadbasket was essentially a private sector programme. 19

On another occasion, King remarked in exasperation:

Jesse Jackson's so independent, I either want him in SCLC or

out. ..he's a part of SCLC or he's not a part of SCLC.

William A. Rutherford, a black Chicago businessman who joined

theSCLC in 1967, believed that King's displeasure with Jackson
was more than a disagreement over ideology and recalled:

He didn't trust Jesse, he didn't even like Jesse. ...If you ask me if there
was any suspicion about Jesse's motives and even devotion to the
movement, I would say categorically yes, there was - considerable.
And we talked about it.

(Another SCLC executive remembered that King used to say

'Jesse, you have no love'.) 20
Jackson was with King in Memphis when he was assassinated
in April 1968, and aroused further bitterness (and disbelief) within
SCLC by appearing on national television in Chicago, the same
night, claiming to have King's blood on his shirt and to have been
the last person to speak with him.
When SCLC, after King's death, decided to stage the Poor
People's Campaign, Jackson appeared as the 'mayor' of 'Resurrection
City'- the tent and plywood encampment set up near the Washington
Monument. (Resurrection City was poorly organized and quickly
became a liability to the SCLC, which was presented with a bill
of $71,000 by the National Parks Service for damage caused, while
blacks in the capital virtually ignored the protest.) Within SCLC
itself, was an opposition to Ralph Abernathy's assumption of
there
leadership, and Jackson (already receiving national publicity for
his Operation Breadbasket project) resigned from the organization
in 1971. The occasion of the break came when Abernathy suspended
Jackson for sixty days after he had staged a fair called 'Black
Expo' under a separate organization, rather than under the aegis
of SCLC, but the causes went back further. In April 1970 Jackson
had appeared on the cover of Time magazine in an issue devoted
to 'Black America 1970'. Characterized by Time as 'one leader

182
 Jesse Jackson: Populist Preacher

among many', Jackson was, nevertheless, given an extensive

profile:

Tall and sensuously attractive, Jackson is the kind of leader who

suggests both a dignity of bearing in his brooding dedication to his

cause and a sense of brotherly warmth in his casual Levi's, boots and
open sports shirts. He possesses what he himself matter-of-factly
accepts as charisma, and he inspires devotion among a wide range of
followers.... At 28, he effectively bridges the widening gulf between
the young activists and the old-style moralistic preachers. His strength
is his use of evangelistic fervor to achieve pragmatic ends. ...He feels

that many blacks have common economic grievances with poor

whites.... Jackson expounds his opinions forcefully in public. He does
not arouse a crowd as readily as King did, but he employs cadence,
sweeping hand gestures, a penetrating gaze and abrupt changes in
volume to command attention. He deliberately mangles grammar and
throws in mild profanity to develop rapport with audiences. He is
hopelessly addicted to preacherly metaphors. ...He has a host of adoring
admirers as well as caustic critics. But he is still too young to assume
a black leadership role on a national scale. 21

During the decade of the 1970s Jackson engaged in a carefully-

planned campaign of self-advertisement, addressed over 500 civic
and professional groups, including the National Conference of
Mayors and the United Negro College Fund, and became a columnist
with the Los Angeles Times syndicate. After his break with the
SCLC in 1971, Jackson (who had been ordained as a Baptist
minister in 1968) founded Operation PUSH (People United to Save
Humanity) - later changed to People United to Serve Humanity -
with its headquarters in Chicago. The organization grew rapidly to
consist of seventy chapters with over 80,000 members. As the
head of PUSH, Jackson threatened boycotts of selected companies
if they did not offer parity for blacks. With distinct echoes of

Booker T. Washington's ideas concerning the promotion of black

capitalism, Jackson stated in 1974 that 'When we organized Operation
PUSH, our stated objective was to help effect and direct a
transformation of the Human Rights Movement from emphasis on
Civil Rights to one on Civil Economics'. 22
In August 1981 the Coca-Cola Company signed an agreement
with PUSH to spend $14 million with minority vendors (a goal it
soon surpassed by more than 22 per cent), and pledged to increase
its management staffing from 5 to 12.5 per cent. Similar agreements

were concluded with Burger King, Anheuser-Busch, the Southland

Corporation and Kentucky Fried Chicken. In 1982 PUSH persuaded
the Seven Up Corporation to sign a $61 million agreement to invest
capital in black enterprises. PUSH also purchased shares in General

183

/
Black Leadership in America

Motors, Ford, Chrysler and American Motors. (The Reagan adminis-

tration, responding to Jackson's attacks on its policies on Central
America and South Africa, launched an investigation on Operation
PUSH'S finances, and claimed that it had 'misused' over $1.7
million in government contracts.) Project PUSH EXCEL, initiated
in 1975, was designed to promote parent/teacher cooperation and
to motivate black students. Initially successful in gaining donations
from private foundations, the federal government and even the
Arab League, PUSH EXCEL was to encounter criticism in 1984
for failure to make acceptable financial reports as required by
its

stateand federal laws.

At the twentieth anniversary of the March on Washington,
Jackson alerted blacks to their as yet unrealized political power
with reference to the outcome of the 1980 presidential election.

Reagan won Alabama by 17,500 votes, but there were 272,000

unregistered blacks. He won Arkansas by 5,000 votes, with 85,000
unregistered blacks. He won Kentucky by 17,800 votes, with 62,000
unregistered blacks. ..the numbers show that Reagan won through a
perverse coalition of the rich and the registered. But this is a new day.
Hands that picked cotton in 1884 will pick the president in 1984. 23

He repeated the same message across the country, and

it became

clear that Jackson himselfwould be a contender for the Democratic

party's presidential nomination in 1984. Despite the criticisms of
some black leaders like Benjamin Hooks of the NAACP, and John
Jacob of the NUL, and Coretta Scott King herself that a black
candidacy would split the Democratic vote, and produce a white
backlash at the polls, Jackson declared:
Part of our problem now is that some of our leaders do not seize
opportunities. I was trained by Martin to be an opportunist. 24

In lectures and speeches throughout the country, Jackson reiterated

his basic contention:

Blacks have their backs against the wall and are increasingly
distressed by the erosion of past gains and the rapidly deteriorating
conditions within the Black and poor communities. As black leaders
have attempted to remedy these problems through the Democratic
party.. .too oftenhave they been ignored or treated with disrespect.... A
black candidacy could use an 18-million eligible Black-voter base to
put together a 'coalition of the rejected', including appealing to six
million Hispanics, women, more than 500,000 Native Americans,
twenty to forty million poor whites, and an appeal to the moral
decency and enlightened economic self-interest of millions of rejected
white moderates, liberals and others.... A black candidacy would alter
the essentially negative and defensive option of the 'lesser of

184
 Jesse Jackson: Populist Preacher

two. ..evils', to the positive and offensive alternative of a 'live' option.

An increase in voter-registration and political participation would have
a profound impact upon the status quo of the Democratic party....
Never again should blacks live and operate below their political
privilege and rights. 25

PRESIDENTIAL CONTENDER

Eliciting and responding to his audiences' shouts of 'Run, Jesse,

Run', Jackson, from the summer of 1983, began to campaign for
the Democratic nomination. One of his announced goals was to
increase voter registration among members of the 'Rainbow Coalition'
which he hoped would invigorate the Democratic party. Jackson's
appeal to minority groups was considerable. In the New York state
primary election, he won 34 per cent of the Puerto Rican vote,
and was the only candidate for the Democratic nomination to
address the National Congress of American Indians. (One Indian
journalist wrote that Jackson was 'a national minority leader who
has captured the imagination of people of colour, other than
blacks'.) 26 Among white voters, Jackson, in 1984, found support
among left-wing activists, liberals, the unemployed, and blue collar
workers. Blacks also responded to Jackson's campaign, which
according to one estimate, was endorsed by over 90 per cent of
the black clergy within two months of his announced candidacy.
As Adam Fairclough observes, black support for Jackson in the
1984 presidential primaries 'represented a logical response to the
political circumstances' in which they found themselves. 'The
Jackson vote was a considered protest against the conservatism of
the other Democratic contenders and the failure of white Democrats
to reciprocate black support on an equal base.' 27
In the area of foreign policy Jackson called for a reduction of
the American and Soviet armoury, the removal of Cruise missiles
from Europe, normalized diplomatic relations with Cuba, and an
end to United States intervention in Central America. In a daring
and dramatic move, Jackson went to Syria in December 1983 to
ask President Hafez al-Hassad for the release of a young black
navigator, Lt Robert Goodman, whose reconnaissance plane had
been shot down, killing the pilot and with Goodman taken as a
prisoner. After some discussion, President Hassad released Goodman
to Jackson's custody, and the two men were given heroes' welcomes
by President Reagan at the White House. Critics, however, argued

185
Black Leadership in America

that Jackson was interfering in the conduct of American foreign

policy. (In 1979 Jackson had alienated many Jewish Americans
when he met with Yasir Arafat, head of the Palestine Liberation
Organization, on a visit to the Middle East.)
More serious criticism resulted from Jackson's off-the-record
reference to a reporter from the Washington Post to New York
City as 'Hymie Town'. Although Jackson insisted that no anti-
Semitic slur was intended, the remark, together with his refusal to
reject the support of Black Muslim Minister Louis Farrakhan after
he had called Judaism 'a gutter religion', offended many American
Jews and white liberals, already disturbed by the connections of
PUSH with Arab groups. At the Democratic National Convention
in San Francisco in July 1984 Jackson had gained approximately
300 delegates, but the Democratic front runner, Walter Mondale,
had 200 black delegates, and Jackson's bargaining power was
severely circumscribed. In the event, Mondale and Geraldine
Ferraro gained the party's presidential and vice-presidential
nominations, with Jackson becoming an unenthusiastic supporter
of the Democratic ticket which went down to a crushing defeat
with the re-election of Ronald Reagan. But Jackson's candidacy in
1984 undoubtedly contributed to a large black voter turnout. An
estimated 3.05 million blacks voted in the Democratic primaries,
and over ten million - 89 per cent of whom supported Mondale -
participated in the November elections. In 1988 Jackson again
attempted to gain the Democratic nomination, and emerged as the
most 'radical' of all candidates. June Jordan, the distinguished
black political commentator (and a Jackson supporter) observes
that not only did he support such controversial causes as gay and
women's rights but was also:

the first presidential candidate in 1988 repeatedly to plead the plight

of 650,000 American farmers who had lost their farms within the eight
years of Reagan's reign. ..the first to identify drugs as the number one
menace to domestic security.. .the first and only contender.. .to demand
that South Africa be designated a terrorist state and treated
accordingly.. .the first and only candidate to call for self-determination
and statehood for Palestine. ..the first and only candidate, Republican
or Democratic, to propose an international minimum wage. 28

Despite impressive performances in the presidential primaries

(in Michigan in March 1988 he received 55 per cent of the votes
and then proceeded to win in Wisconsin - a state with less than a
4 per cent black population), Jackson lacked the support of the
Democratic National Party, and failed to carry New York State

186
 Jesse Jackson: Populist Preacher

(although he gained nearly all of New York City's black votes and
an estimated 60 per cent of its Hispanic vote). Michael Dukakis
gained the Democratic nomination but lost the November election
to George Bush, Reagan's former vice-president.
To his admirers, Jackson, in 1988, had again demonstrated his
ability to appeal to a 'Rainbow Coalition' of the American electorate
- he gained three times as many white votes in the 1988 primaries
than he had in 1984 - and remains the Democrats' most progressive,
if not radical, figure, almost certain to continue as a serious

contender for the party's presidential nomination in 1992. To his

detractors, Jackson, in 1988, as earlier, projected confusing and
contradictory images: a self-declared successor of Martin Luther
King and a political opportunist, a colour-blind Populist and a
confirmed anti-Semite, a preacher and a demagogue, an idealist
and a 'hustler', a champion of the poor, and an ardent black
capitalist. It is obviously too premature to offer an 'assessment' of
Jesse Jackson's claim to be considered as a 'black leader' (a
typification which he rejects anyway) of comparable stature to
Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Martin
Luther King or Malcolm X. But, as Gary Wills observes, Jackson
was:

the only nationally active and visible black leader in the late 1970s
and 1980s, the one a whole new generation of blacks watched as they
grew into adulthood. ...Many of the charges made against Jackson -
that he is going outside his role as a civil rights leader, that he
encourages a cult of personality, that he is risking prior gains by
taking on new issues - were made against Dr. King in his day. 29

And, Wills might have added, these and similar charges were
also made against Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus
Garvey and Malcolm X in theirs. Certainly the responses which
Jackson (like Martin Luther King), has consistently evoked from
his audiences - black and white - brings to mind John Dollard's
personal observation, made in 1937, that:

No more exhilarating form of leadership of human beings exists than

that possible between the Negro preacher and his congregation. 30

Whether Jackson's continued political preaching to a national

'congregation' will result in his becoming the first 'black leader'
to occupy rather than simply visit the White House, remains to be
seen. That he was in South Africa in 1990 to greet - and be
photographed with - the released African National Congress leader

187
Black Leadership in America

Nelson Mandela suggests Jackson's continuing ability to be in the

right place at the right time.

REFERENCES

1. Jackson, J., quoted in the Washington Post, 14 March 1976.

2. Reed, A. The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon: The Crisis of Purpose
L., Jr,

in Afro- American Politics (Yale University Press, 1986), p. 106.

3. Viorst, M., Fire in the Streets: America in the 1960's (New York,
1979), p.345.
4. Garrow, D. J., in C. W. Eagles (ed.), The Civil Rights Movement in
America (University Press of Mississippi, 1986), p. 62.
5. Lincoln, C. E., The Black Muslims in America (Rev. edn, Boston,
1973), p.212.
6. Viorst, Fire in the Streets, op. cit., p. 374.

7. Lester, J., Look Out Whitey! Black Power's Gon' Get Your Mama!
(New York, 1968), pp.100, 104.
8. Carmichael, S. and C. V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of
Liberation in America (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1969), p. 54.

9. Ibid., p.95.

10. Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New

York, 1968), p.235.
11. Marable, M., Race, Reform and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction
in Black America, 1945-1982 (London, 1984), pp. 108-9.
12. Draper, T., The Rediscovery of Black Nationalism (New York, 1970),
p.125.
13. Bracey, J. H., A. Meier and E. Rudwick, Black Nationalism in America
(New York, 1970), pp.53 1-2.
14. Time, 21 September 1981.
15. Franklin, J. Jr, From Slavery to Freedom: A
H. and A. A. Moss,
History of Negro Americans (New York, 1988), p.477.
16. Marable, M., Black American Politics: From the Washington Marches
to Jesse Jackson (London, 1985), p. 258.

17. Chafe, W. H., Civilities and Civil Rights: Greenboro, North Carolina
and the Black Struggle for Freedom (Oxford University Press, New
York, 1980), p. 125.

18. Ibid., pp.142-3.

19. Fairclough, A., To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian
Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr, (London, 1987),
pp.353-4.

188
 Jesse Jackson: Populist Preacher

20. Garrow, D. J., Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York, 1986), pp. 585-6.
21. Time, 6 April 1970, pp.11-13.
22. Marable, M., Black American Politics, op. cit., p. 262.

23. Franklin, J. H., and A. A. Moss, From Slavery to Freedom, op. cit.,

p.478.
24. Time, 22 August, 1983, p.36.
25. Marable, M., Black American Politics, op. cit., p. 257.

26. Ibid., p.275.

27. Fairclough, A., 'What Makes Jesse Run?', Journal of American

Studies, 22 (1988), p.84.
28. Jordan, J., 'Next Time the Rainbow', New Statesman and Society, 6
January 1989, pp. 32-3.
29. Wills, G., 'New Votuhs', New York Review of Books, 18 August 1988,
p.4.

30. Dollard, J., Caste and Class in the Southern Town (3rd edn, Anchor
Books, New York, 1957), p.243.

189
Conclusion

From colonial times to the present, black leaders in America have

developed and utilized their distinctive personal qualities in attempts
to improve (or eliminate) the inferior caste status of African-
Americans. Their shared concern has been to improve the condition of
blacks through economic, educational, political, and psychological
progress. Whatever their differences on such issues as segregation and
integration, 'accommodation' or protest, alliances with or rejection of
whites, all have displayed and sought to build on a sense of racial
pride and identity among their followers.
Lines of ideological continuity also link the leaders discussed:
Booker T. Washington, the towering Southern black figure of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was a professed admirer of
Frederick Douglass's ideas on 'industrial education' for Negroes. W.
E. B. Du Bois, on several occasions, conceded that given the circum-
stances of his time and place, Washington had articulated and
implemented a realistic (if incomplete) programme of racial advance-
ment. Moreover, before the publication of The Souls of Black Folk, Du
Bois and Washington shared some basic convictions. Both endorsed
the white middle-class virtues of thrift, sobriety, education and capital
accumulation, placed economic advancement before political rights,
and were willing based upon education
to accept suffrage restrictions
or property qualifications. Marcus Garvey acknowledged Washington
as the inspiration for his own racial and economic philosophy, as he
also castigated Du Bois' integrationism and concern with the
'Talented Tenth'. Ironically, Du Bois came to agree with both
Washington and Garvey on the necessity for a 'black economy', and
also shared with Garvey a conviction that Afro-Americans needed to
understand and acknowledge their African antecedents and culture.

191
Black Leadership in America

Martin Luther King, Jr, recognized the achievements, even as he

deplored the limitations of Washington, Du Bois and Garvey, and
displayed at least a grudging respect for his contemporary rival,
Malcolm X, who, in turn, expressed admiration for Garvey 's racial
vision. Jesse Jackson, currently the most visible black leader in
America, has consistently presented himself as the spiritual disciple of
Martin Luther King.
In assessing the achievements and contributions of black American
leaders to their respective causes, a historical perspective reveals the
shifting connotations of such key concepts as 'integration',
'segregation', 'separatism' and 'civil rights'. It also suggests that the
adjectives 'radical' and 'conservative' when applied to black leaders
and the policies they espoused, reflect particular conditions and
'limited options'. To his contemporary critics, Booker T.
Washington's (public) deprecation of political action and support for
the social separation of the races, smacked of supine surrender to
white supremacy. It may well have been a shrewd and calculated
recognition of the fearful penalties which would have attended any
displays of Southern black militancy in the era of Jim Crow. From the
end of Reconstruction to World War II, Southern black leadership was
forced to operate within the 'separate but [un]equal' confines of a
system predicated on and pledged to the maintenance of white
supremacy. Whatever influence Southern black leaders possessed was
exercised through white intermediaries, who were prepared only to
make limited concessions within the framework of segregation. In the
post-war period, however, a younger generation of Southern black
men and women began to demand changes which ran directly counter
to prevailing customs and mores. As Myrdal observed, next to racial
intermarriage, the South's 'rank order of discriminations'
encompassed:

...dancing, bathing, eating, drinking together and social intercourse

generally.. .segregationsand discriminations in the use of public facilities
such as schools, churches and means of conveyance. ..discriminations in
law courts, by the police, and other public servants. Finally came the
discriminations in securing land, credit, relief and other social welfare
1
facilities.

From the 1950s onwards, and starting at the grass roots with local
protests, black Southerners began to challenge this traditional list of
racial proscriptions. The civil rights movement, which brought into
prominence Martin Luther King, Jr, also owed its dynamic to the
continued efforts of thousands of activists, black and white, male and
female. It also came to provide training, membership and leadership

192
 Conclusion

for the protest and reform movements which followed: the anti-war
movement, the student movement, and the campaigns for minority
rights. Paradoxically, the civil rights movement, like earlier black
protests, drew much of its strength from the sense of racial identity
which segregation had (inadvertently) fostered. The NAACP, which
institutionalized black opposition to Washington and the Tuskegee
Machine, was at its inception a 'radical' organization, pledged to
securing both black political participation and racial integration.
Given the tradition of black protest which existed in the Northern
states, such a response was feasible and timely. But the increasing
shift of black Americans from the rural South to the industrialized
urban centres of the North, also gave rise to conditions which fostered
intense black separatist feelings, which, in turn, were capitalized upon
by such leaders as Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X.
With the advent of the Nation of Islam, and the rise of the Black
Power slogan in the 1960s, racial separatism was viewed as a 'radical'
response to appalling socio-economic conditions, and a younger
generation of black 'militants' rejected the integrationism of the
NAACP, NUL and SCLC as 'assimilationism'. Instead, they advocated
a form of cultural pluralism - 'a Negro nation within a nation' -
without sufficient awareness of its and precedents.
historic antecedents
At the end of their respective careers, W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther
King, Jr, and Malcolm X, had moved beyond an exclusive concern
with civil rights to formulate 'radical' critiques of capitalist society,
colonialism, and militarism. Most recently, Jesse Jackson has
attempted to project his social democratic concept of a 'Rainbow
Coalition' of the disadvantaged and unrepresented into American
politics.
The fundamental aspiration of the Afro-American, to which all

black leaders have responded, was best expressed by W. E. B. Du Bois

in The Souls of Black Folk:
He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and ata -*-£*r
American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without \ /* <--
having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face. ..to be a co-
worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to
husband and use his best power and his latent genius. ...Merely a concret
underlying principles of the great republic is the Negro
test for the
Problem, and the spiritual striving of the freedmen's sons is the travail of
souls whose burden is almost beyond the measure of their strength, but
who bear it in the name of an historic race, in the name of this the land of
their father's fathers, and in the name of human opportunity. 2

Writing in 1967, Alice Walker observed of the civil rights

movement in America:

193
Black Leadership in America

Itgave some of us bread, some of us shelter, some of us knowledge and

pride, all of us comfort. It gave us our children, our husbands, our

brothers, our fathers, as men reborn and with a purpose for living. It
broke the pattern of black servitude.... It gave us history and men far
greater than Presidents. ...It gave us heroes, selfless men of courage and
strength, for our little boys and girls to follow. It gave us hope for
tomorrow. 3

REFERENCES

1. Myrdal, G., An American Dilemma (New York, 1944), p. 61.

2. Du Bois, W. E. B., 'Of Our Spiritual Strivings', in The Souls of Black

Folk (New York, 1961), pp. 17-22.
3. Walker, A., In Search of Our Mother's Gardens: Womanist Prose (New
York, 1984), pp. 128-9.

194
Bibliographical Essay

ABBREVIATIONS FOR JOURNALS CITED:

AAS Afro-American Studies

AHR American Historical Review
AJS American Journal of Sociology
AL American Literature
AQ American Quarterly
CWH Civil War History
HWJ History Workshop Journal
JAH Journal of American History
JAS Journal of American Studies
JHI Journal of the History of Ideas
JNH Journal of Negro History
JSH Journal of Southern History
MassR Massachusetts Review
PSQ Political Science Quarterly
SAQ South Atlantic Quarterly

INTRODUCTORY AND GENERAL STUDIES

The following texts contain useful and pertinent information on

Afro-American history: Rayford W. Logan, The Betrayal of the
Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (London,
1965); John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss, Jr, From Slavery
to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans (6th edn, New York,

195
Black Leadership in America

1988); August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, Along the Colour Line
(Urbana, Illinois, 1976); Robert H. Brisbane, The Black Vanguard:
Origins of the Negro Social Revolution 1900-1960 (Valley Forge,
Pennsylvania, 1970); Mary Ellison, The Black Experience: American
Blacks Since 1865 (London, 1974); Mary F. Berry and John
Blassingame, Long Memory: The Black Experience in America
(New York, 1982). John Hope Franklin and August Meier (eds),
Black Leaders of the Twentieth Century (University of Illinois
Press, 1982), has valuable essays on Booker T. Washington, Du
Bois, Garvey, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, and also contains
profiles of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, A. Philip Randolph, Mary McLeod
Bethun, Mable K. Staupers, and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr, among
others. See also: Howard N. Rabinowitz (ed.), Southern Black
Leaders of the Reconstruction Era (University of Illinois Press,
1982), which contains an excellent section on collective biography.
There are many editions of documentary materials, two of the best
are: August Meier, Elliott Rudwick and Francis L. Broderick (eds),
Black Protest Thought in the Twentieth Century (2nd edn, New
York, 1971), and John H. Bracey, August Meier and Elliott Rudwick
(eds), Black Nationalism in America (New York, 1970). See also
the revealing conversations in Kenneth B. Clark, The Negro Protest:
James Baldwin, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Talk With
Kenneth B. Clark (Boston, 1963). For the influence of Africa on
the emergence of black nationalism in America, and the attractiveness
(or otherwise) of Du Bois and Garvey to black Americans, see
Harold R. Isaacs, The New World of Negro Americans (London,
1964).
The classic work on the black experience up to the New Deal
remains the late Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma (New
York, 1944 and 1964), the most influential study of American race
relations ever published. It contains some penetrating insights into
the problems faced by black leaders. See also David W. Southern's
assessment, Gunnar Myrdal and Black-White Relations: The Use
and Abuse of An American Dilemma (Louisiana State University
Press, 1987). His argument is partly summarized in 'An American
Dilemma Revisited: Myrdalism and White Southern Liberals',
SAQ, 75 (1976), pp. 182-97. See also Ralph Ellison's 1944 critique
of An American Dilemma in his stimulating collection of essays
on black life, music and art: Shadow and Act (New York, 1972).
The following articles treat black leadership in chronological
order: Frederick Cooper, 'Elevating the Race: The Social Thought
of Black Leaders, 1827-50', AQ, 24 (1972), pp. 604-25; Guy B

196
 Bibliographical Essay

Johnson, 'Negro Racial Movements and Leadership in the United

State', AJS, 43 (1937-38), pp. 55-71; Wilson Record, 'Negro
Intellectuals and Negro Movements in Historical Perspective', AQ,
8 (1956), pp. 3-20; Leslie H. Fishel, Jr, 'Repercussions of
Reconstruction: The Northern Negro, 1870-1883', CWH, 14 (1968),
pp. 325-45. Three excellent studies of black leadership are: Daniel
C.Thompson, The Negro Leadership Class (Englewood Cliffs, New
which traces the social origins of black leaders in
Jersey, 1963),
New Orleans from 1940 to 1960; M. Elaine Burgess, Negro
Leadership in a Southern City (University of North Carolina Press,
1960), which also focuses on New Orleans, and Raymond Gavins,
The Perils and Prospects of Black Leadership: Gordon Blaine
Hancock, 1874-1970 (Duke University Press, 1970), which describes
the career of the Virginia-based educator, clergyman, journalist
and theorist, who synthesized the contending philosophies of his
two great contemporaries, Washington and Du Bois. For summaries
of black protest within the wider perspective of minority group
activities, see Alec Barbrook and Christine Bolt, Power and Protest
in American Life (Oxford, 1980), and John Higham (ed.), Ethnic
Leadership in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). In
the autobiographical Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth
(London, 1947), the novelist Richard Wright (1908-1960) provides
a moving and often harrowing account of his early life in Mississippi
and Tennessee. The posthumously published American Hunger
(New York, 1977), is an equally revealing record of Wright's
experiences in Chicago during the 1930s.
John Dollard's famous study, Caste and Class in a Southern
Town (3rd edn, New York, 1957), originally appeared in 1937. It
is a pioneering appraisal by a social psychologist of the relations

between blacks and whites in a Southern community - Indianola,

Mississippi, and has been described as 'a sociological Gulliver's
Travels'. See also, Allison Davis and John Dollard, Children of
Bondage: The Personality Development of Negro Youth in the
Urban South (New York, 1940 and 1964), a series of Negro life
histories which complements Caste and Class in a Southern Town
and the work of Allison Davis, Burleigh B. Gardner and Mary R.
Gardner, Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste
and Class (University of Chicago Press, 1941 and 1965). Two
recent books which treat black life in Mississippi are: Douglas L.
Conner with John F. Marszalek, A Black Physicians Story: Bringing
Hope To Mississippi (University Press of Mississippi, 1985), a
moving account of a black doctor who took on the self-imposed

197
Black Leadership in America

task of 'providing leadership for black people within the context

of a segregated society', and Neil R. McMillen's graphic study,
Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow
(University of Illinois Press, 1989), an examination of black-white
most repressive Southern state ('the land
relations in perhaps the
of the tree and the home
of the grave') between 1890 and 1930.
The responses of Southern white businessmen to the civil rights
movement in the 1950s and 1960s are treated in a valuable collection
of essays edited by Elizabeth Jacoway and David R. Colburn,
Southern Businessmen and Desegregation (Louisiana State University
Press, 1982). As the editors state, collectively these essays 'suggest
that the response of the southern [white] leadership to the
desegregation challenge was an accommodation to what was
perceived as inevitable change. ..although they did not modify their
racial attitudes, they did allow racial considerations to slip from
the dominant position in their hierarchy of values.' See also A. J.
Badger's review essay, 'Segregation and the Southern Business
Elite', JAS, 18 (1984), pp. 105-9. The noted black writer Alice
Walker was born in rural Georgia; In Search of Our Mother's
Gardens: Womanist Prose (New York, 1984), contains her reflections
on 'The Black Writer and the Southern Experience,' and trenchant
essays about the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King, Coretta
King, and the tenth anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington.
Black protest movements and leaders from the late nineteenth
century to recent years are treated in: E. L. Thornbrough, 'The
National Afro-American League, 1887-1908', JSH, 27 (1961),
pp. 494-5 12; A. Meier and E. M. Rudwick, 'The Boycott Movement
Against Jim Crow Street Cars in the South, 1900-1916', JAH, 55
(1969), pp. 756-76; E. M. Rudwick, 'The Niagara Movement',
JNH, 42 (1957), pp. 177-200; Langston Hughes, Fight For Freedom:
The Story of the NAACP (New York, 1962); Charles F. Kellog,
NAACP: A History of the National Association for the Advancement
of Coloured People, Vol. I, 1909-1920 (Baltimore, Maryland,
1967); B. Joyce Ross, /. E. Spingarn and the Rise of the NAACP,
1911-1939 (New York, 1972), and Mark V. Tushnet, The NAACP's
Legal Strategy Against Segregated Education, 1925-1950 (University
of North Carolina Press, 1987). The National Urban League's first
three decades are given comprehensive and judicious treatment in
Nancy J. Weiss, The National Urban League: 1910-1940 (Oxford
University Press,New York, 1974). A more closely focused study
isprovided by Arvarh E. Strickland, History of the Chicago Urban
League (University of Illinois Press, 1966), which covers the period

198
 Bibliographical Essay

1915-1964, and concludes that because of the city's indifference

black population, 'the agency has never been able to reach
to its
its full potential.'
On black Americans during the progressive era, see: D. W.
Grantham, 'The Progressive Movement and the Negro', SAQ, 54
(1955), pp. 461-77; Gilbert Osofsky, 'Progressivism and the Negro',
AQ, 16 (1964), pp. 153-68; Thomas G. Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt
and the Idea of Race (Louisiana State University Press, 1980);
Nancy J. Weiss, 'The New Negro and the New Freedom: Fighting
Wilsonian Segregation', PSQ, 84 (1968), pp. 61-79; Katherine L.
Wolgemuth, 'Woodrow Wilson's Appointment Policy and the Negro',
JSH, 24 (1958), pp.450-71; Henry Blumenthal, 'Woodrow Wilson
and the Race Question', JNH, 48 (1963), pp. 1-21. Ray Stannard
Baker's graphic 'eye-witness' account of American race relations
(first published in 1908), is Following the Colour Line: American

Negro Citizenship in the Progressive Era (New York, 1964), a

prime (and primary) source of information.
Black attitudes to World War I are discussed in Theodore
Kornweibel, Jr, 'Apathy and Dissent: Black America's Negative
Responses to World War I', SAQ, 80 (1981), pp. 322-38. Raymond
Wolters, The New Negro on Campus: Black College Rebellions of
the 1920s (Princeton University Press, 1975), is a detailed study
of expressions of discontent against paternalism (black and whites)
at such black colleges as Fisk, Howard, Tuskegee, Hampton and
Wilberforce.
Black responses to the Depression and New
Deal are included
in the section of Du A. Harrel, 'Negro
Bois (below), but see also, J.

Leadership in the Election Year 1936', JSH, 34 (1968), pp. 546-65,

and Nancy J. Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black
Politics in the Age of FDR (Princeton University Press, 1983),
which demonstrates conclusively that 'blacks became Democrats
in response to the economic benefits of the New Deal. ..in spite of
the New Deal's lack of a substantive record on race'. Father
Divine's Peace Mission Movement is treated in Sara Harris, Father
Divine: Holy Husband (New York, 1953), and Robert Weisbrot,
Father Divine and the Struggle of Racial Equality (University of
Illinois Press, 1983). Weisbrot argues convincingly that the Peace
Mission Movement 'was easily among the most impressive examples
of cooperative enterprise' during the Depression years, and suggests
that Divine's appeal lay 'in partbecause he seemed the ultimate
role model for many poor, uneducated blacks seeking evidence
that they could improve their lot'. For the ambivalent relations

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between the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) and

black Americans see especially two books by Wilson Record: The
Negro and the Communist Party (University of North Carolina
Press, Chapel Hills, 1951), and Race Relations and Radicalism:
The NAACP and the Communist Party in Conflict (Ithaca, New
York, 1964). Also valuable are William Nolan, Communism Versus
the Negro (University of Chicago Press, 1951); V. D. Bornet,
'Historical Scholarship, Communism and the Negro,' JNH, 37
(1952), pp. 304-24 and Harvey Klehr and William Tompson, 'Self-
Determination in the Black Belt: Origins of a Communist Policy,
Labor History, 30 (Summer, 1989), pp.354-66.
Black responses to World War II have been extensively treated.
See especially, Neil A. Wynn, The Afro-American and the Second
World War (London, 1976); A. Russell Buchanan, Black Americans
in World War II (Oxford, 1977), and Philip McGuire, Taps for a
Jim Crow Army: Letters from Black Soldiers in World War II
(Oxford, 1983). Four distinctive interpretations of Afro-American
protest activities during the war are to be found in: Richard M.
Dalfiume, 'The Forgotten Years of the Negro Revolution', JAH,
LV (1968), pp. 90-106; N. A. Wynn, 'Black Attitudes Towards
Participation in the American War Effort, 1941-1945', AAS, 3
(1972), pp. 13-19; Harvard Sitkoff, 'Racial Militancy and Interracial
Violence in the Second World War', JAH LVIII (1971), pp.661-8;
Lee Finkle, 'The Conservative Aims of Militant Rhetoric: Black
Protest During World War II', JAH, LX (1973), pp. 692-713. See
also: K. T. Anderson, 'Last Hired, First Fired: Black Women
Workers During World War II', JAH, LXIX (1982), pp.82-97, and
C. R. Koppes and G. D. Black, 'Blacks, Loyalty and Motion Picture
Propaganda in World War II', JAH, 73 (1986), pp. 383-406. The
distinguished career of the first black federal judge, adviser to the
War Department and reforming governor of the Virgin Islands is

treated in Gilbert Ware's biography, William Hastie: Grace Under

Pressure (New York, Oxford University Press, 1985).
The civil rights movement after the World War II has been
extensively covered. See especially: Robert Kostad and Nelson
Lichenstein, 'Opportunities Found and Lost: Labour, Radicals and
the Early Civil RightsMovement', JAH, 75 (1988), pp. 786-811;
August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, CORE: A Study in the Civil
Rights Movement, 1952-1968 (New York, 1973); Howard Zinn,
SNCC: The New Abolitionists (Boston, 1965); Clayborne Carson,
In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (London,
1981); William Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro,

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 Bibliographical Essay

North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom (Oxford

University Press, New York, 1980); Harvard Sitkoff, The Struggle
for Black Equality, 1954-1980 (New York, 1981); Benjamin Muse,
The American Negro Revolution: From Civil Rights to Black Power
(Bloomington, Indiana, 1968). Charles W. Eagles (ed.), The Civil
Rights Movement in America (University Press of Mississippi,
1986), contains insightful essays by David L. Lewis, Clayborne
Carson, Nancy J. Weiss and William H. Chafe. The roles of women

and the rank-and-file participants in the civil rights movement

have recently begun to receive (overdue) attention. See particularly:
Sheyann Webb and Rachel West Nelson, Selma, Lord, Selma:
Childhood Memories of the Civil-Rights Days as told to Frank
Sikora (University of Alabama Press, 1980); David J Garrow (ed.),
The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The
Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson (University of Tennessee Press,
1987); Cynthia Stokes Brown (ed.), Ready From Within: Septima
Clark and the Civil Rights Movement (Navarro, California, 1986),
and Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi (New York, 1968).
Close analysis of the competition and strategies of the civil rights
coalition are offered by: Allen J. Matusow, 'From Civil Rights to
Black Power: The Case of SNCC, 1960-1966,' in Barton J. Bernstein
and Allen J. Matusow (eds), Twentieth Century America: Recent
Interpretations (New York, 1969); Herbert H. Haines, Black Radicals
and the Civil Rights Mainstream, 1954-1970 (University of Tennessee
Press, 1988); Jack M. Bloom, Class, Race, and the Civil Rights
Movement (Indiana University Press, 1987), and Richard H. King,
'Citizenship and Self-Respect: Experience of Politics in the Civil
Rights Movement', JAS, 22(1988), pp. 7-24. Sociological treatments
of the civil rights movement are to be found in Doug McAdam,
Political Processand the Development of Black Insurgency,
1930-1970 (University of Chicago Press, 1982), and Aldon D.
Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities
Organize for Change (New York, 1984). Manning Marable provides
a black Marxist analysis in Race, Reform and Rebellion: The
Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945-1982 (London,
1984), and Black American Politics from the Washington Marches
to Jesse Jackson (London, 1985). Stephen J. Whitfield, A Death
in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till (New York and London,
1988), offers a detailed account of the episode, and suggests that
'the viciousness of the murder of Emmett Till spurred efforts to
tempo of civil rights advances for Southern blacks'.
accelerate the
Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years

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Black Leadership in America

1954-63 (London, 1989), is an epic (and highly readable) treatment

of the classic phase of the civil rights movement, and devotes
considerable attention to Martin Luther King and the SCLC. It is
complemented by Juan Williams, Eyes on the Prize: America's
Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965 (Penguin Books, New York, 1988),
the companion volume to the American Public Broadcasting TV
series. Milton Viorst's Fire In the Streets: America in the 1960s
(New York, 1979), offers some penetrating observations on the
rifts that developed in the civil rights movement. The late Robert

Penn Warren's collection of taped interviews with black protest

leaders, Who Speaks for the Negro? (New York, 1965), is still a
useful collection, but should be supplemented by Howard Raines,
My Soul is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South Remembered
(Penguin Books, New York, 1983), an outstanding compilation of
The epochal Brown decision of 1954 is given detailed
oral history.
examination in Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of
Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for
Equality (2 vols, New York, 1975), but see also Robert F. Burk,
The Eisenhower Administration and Black Civil Rights (University
of Tennessee Press, 1984), and Michael S. Mayer's article, 'With
Much Deliberation and Some Speed: Eisenhower and the Brown
Decision', JSH, LII (1986), pp. 43-74. Catherine A. Barnes, Journey
from Jim Crow: Desegregation of Southern Transit (Columbia
University Press, 1983), provides a case study of the desegregation
process in the South, and demonstrates that 'federal action came
in response to black protest and pressure'. The following articles
provide useful information: Harvard Sitkoff, 'Harry Truman and
the Election of 1948: The Coming of Age of Civil Rights in
American JSH, 37 (1971), pp. 597-616; Monroe Billington,
Polities',
'Civil Rights, President Truman and the South', JNH, 58 (1973),
pp. 127-39; William H. Chafe, 'The Civil Rights Revolution,
1945-60: The Gods Bring Threads to Webs Begun', in Robert H.
Bremner and Gary W. Reichard (eds), Reshaping America: Society
and Institutions (Ohio State University Press, 1982), pp. 68-100;
John Hart, 'Kennedy, Congress and Civil Rights', JAS, 13 (1979),
pp. 165-78; Monroe Billington, 'Lyndon B. Johnson and the Blacks:
The Early Years', JNH, 61 (1977), pp. 26-42; John Runcie, 'The
Black Culture Movement and the Black Community', JAS, 10
(1976), pp. 185-214, and John White, 'American Minorities: The
Non-Melting Pot', in Henry S. Commager and Marcus Cunliffe
(eds), The American Destiny: An Illustrated Bicentennial History
of the United States, Vol. 19 The Unquiet Years (New York, 1976),

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 Bibliographical Essay

pp. 50-64.The urban racial disturbances of the 1960s are summarised

and assessed in the Report of the National Advisory Commission
on Civil Disorders (New York, 1968), the body appointed by
President Lyndon Johnson under the chairmanship of Governor
Otto Kerner of Illinois.

BLACK PROTEST AND ACCOMMODATION 1800-1877

There is an enormous literature on slave life, culture, adaptation

and 'resistance'. For a sampling of this work see especially: Eugene
D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New
York, 1974); Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation
Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (University
of North Carolina Press, 1988); John W. Blassingame, The Slave
Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York,
1972), and Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black
Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom
(Oxford University Press, New York, 1977). Eugene D. Genovese,
In Red and Black: Marxian Explorations in Southern and Afro-
American History (New York, 1971), includes provocative and
stimulating analyses of slave resistance, black nationalism and
Black Power.
The standard work on free blacks in the Old South is Ira Berlin,
Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South
(New York, 1974). For the Southern black experience immediately
after the Civil War, see Leon F. Litwack's excellent study, Been In
the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York, 1972).
C. Vann Woodward's celebrated thesis concerning the emergence
of Southern segregation appears in The Strange Career of Jim
Crow (3rd rev. edn, New York, 1974). The 'Woodward Thesis' is
convincingly modified in Howard N. Rabinowitz, Race Relations
in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (Oxford University Press, 1978),
which suggests that urban segregation replaced earlier practices of
the almost total 'exclusion' of blacks from public accommodations
and welfare facilities.
The Northern free blacks before the Civil War are
activities of
surveyed in Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the
Free States, 1790-1860 (University of Chicago Press, 1961); Robert
C. Dick, Black Protest: Issues and Tactics (London, 1974); Floyd
J. Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality: Black Emigration

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Black Leadership in America

and Colonization, 1787-1863 (Urbana, Illinois, 1975); Jane H. and

William H. Pease, They Who Would Be Free: Blacks' Search For
Freedom, 1830-1861 (New York, 1975), and Benjamin Quarles,
Black Abolitionists (New York, 1964). Quarles has also written an
excellent brief biography, Frederick Douglass (Washington, DC,
1984), but see also Waldo E. Martin, Jr, The Mind of Frederick
Douglass (University of North Carolina Press, 1984, and Philip S.
Foner (ed.), Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, 4 vols, New
York, 1950-1955). Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass
(London, 1906), is as informative about the author as his subject.
There have been several notable interpretive studies of American
Negro thought. Particularly recommended are: Benjamin E. Mays,
The Negro's God as Reflected in His Literature (New York, 1938),
August Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880-1915 (University
of Michigan Press, 1963); Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro
Intellectual: From Its Origins To The Present (New York, 1967);
Frank Hercules, American Society and Black Revolution (New
York, 1972); Alfred A. Moss, The American Negro Academy: Voice
of the Talented Tenth (London, 1981); Vincent P. Franklin, Black
Self-Determination: A Cultural History of the Faith of the Fathers
(Westport, Connecticut, 1984); David G. Nielson, Black Ethos:
Northern Urban Negro Life and Thought, 1890-1930 (London,
1977); William Toll, The Resurgence Of Race: Black Social Theory
from Reconstruction to the Pan-African Conferences (University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1979); Adam Lively, 'Continuity and
Radicalism in American Black Nationalist Thought, 1914-1929',
JAS, 18 (1984), pp. 207-35, and two books by William J. Moses:
The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850-1925 (Hamden,
Connecticut, 1978), and Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social
and Literary Manipulations of a Religious Myth (Pennsylvania
State University Press, 1982). Sterling Stuckey's Slave Culture:
Nationalist Theory and Foundations of Black America (Oxford
the
University Press, New
York, 1978), is a densely written and
repetitious collection of essays, but offers some interesting
observations on the black nationalist ideas of David Walker, Henry
Highland Garnet, W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson.

BOOKER T. WASHINGTON
The outstanding authority on Washington's life is Louis R. Harlan.

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 Bibliographical Essay

His two- volume biography, Booker T.Washington: The Making of

a Black Leader, 1865-1901 (Oxford University Press, New York,
1972), and Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee,
1901-1915 (Oxford University Press, New York, 1983), is a meticu-
lously-researched and well-written account of Washington as a
race leader and educator, but tends to judge him by the standards
of present-day white liberalism. Harlan is also one of the editors

of The Booker Washington Papers, 15 volumes plus a Cumulative

T.

Index (University of Illinois Press, 1972-1989). Individually

indexed, with cross-references and informative notes, these volumes
can be mined to extract material on every aspect of Washington's
activities and interests. Volume I contains Washington's major
autobiographical writings, Up From Slavery, The Story of My Life
and Work, and extracts from The Story of the Negro and My Larger
Education, together with shorter pieces. Professor Harlan has also
written several informative articles on Washington: 'Booker T.
Washington and the White Man's Burden', AHR, 71 (1965-66),
pp. 441-67; 'Booker T. Washington in Biographical Perspective',
AHR, 75 (1970), pp. 1581-99; 'The Secret Life of Booker T.
Washington', JSH, 37 (1971), pp. 393-416, and 'Booker T.
Washington and the "Voice of the Negro"', JSH, 45 (1979), pp.45-62.
Older but still recommended biographies of Washington are:
Basil Mathews, Booker T. Washington: Educator and Inter-Racial
Interpreter (London, 1949); Samuel J. Spencer, Booker T. Washington
and the Negro's Place in American Life (Boston, 1955), and Bernard
Weisberger, Booker T. Washington (New York, 1972). Hugh Hawkins
has edited an interesting collection of essays on Washington by
his contemporaries and later commentators: Booker T. Washington
and Emma L. Thornbrough
his Critics (2nd ed, Boston, 1974).
(ed,),Booker T. Washington (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1969),
a volume in the 'Great Lives Observed' series, includes autobio-
graphical extracts from Washington's writings, the views of his
contemporaries and modern evaluations of his leadership and
influence. Washington's White House dinner is mentioned in Seth
M. Scheiner, 'President Theodore Roosevelt and the Negro,
1901-1908', JNH, 47 (1962), pp. 169-82. Judith Stein, '"Of Mr
Booker T. Washington and Others": The Political Economy of
Racism in the United States', Science and Society, 38 (1974-75),
pp. 422-63, surveys race relations and politics in the Southfrom
1877-1910, with particular reference to Washington, Populism and
black disfranchisement. Other recommended articles are: August
Meier, 'Booker T. Washington and the Negro Press', JNH, 38

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Black Leadership in America

(1953), pp. 67-90; Daniel Walden, 'The Contemporary Opposition

to the Political and Educational Ideas of Booker T. Washington',
JNH, 45 (1960), pp.103-15, (see also Philip S. Foner's reprints of
two early expressions of opposition to Washington by blacks: 'Is
Booker T. Washington's Idea Correct?', and 'Washington and
Douglass', JNH, 55, 1970, pp. 343-7); Donald J. Calista, 'Booker
T. Washington: Another Look', JNH, 49 (1964), pp. 240-55; John
P. Flynn, 'Booker T. Washington: Uncle Tom or Wooden Horse?',
JNH, 54 (1969), pp. 262-74; Emma Lou Thornbrough, 'More Light
on Booker T. Washington and the New York Age\ JNH, 43 (1958),
pp. 34-49, and 'Booker T. Washington As Seen By His White
Contemporaries', JNH, 53 (1968), pp. 161-82; and Lawrence J.
Friedman, 'Life in the Lion's Mouth: Another Look at Booker T.
Washington', JNH, 59 (1974), pp. 337-51. J. R. Pole's essay 'Of
Mr Booker T. Washington and Others', in his Paths to the American
Past (Oxford University Press, 1979), offers some refreshing
comments on Washington historiography. Literary textual analyses
of Up From Slavery can be found in Robert B. Steptoe, From
Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (University
of Illinois Press, 1979), pp.32-51, Houston A. Baker, Jr, Long
Black Song: Essays in Black American Literature and Culture
(University Press of Virginia, 1972), pp. 84-95, and David Littlejohn,
Black on White: A Critical Survey of Writing By American Negroes
(New York, 1966).
On one
of Washington's fiercest black critics see Charles W.
Puttkammer and Ruth Worth, 'William Monroe Trotter, 1872-1934',
JNH, 43 (1958), pp. 298-316, and Yvonne Williams, 'William
Monroe Trotter: Race Man, 1872-1934', AAS, 1 (1971), pp.243-51.
Emma L. Thornbrough 's T. Thomas Fortune: Militant Journalist
(London, 1972), includes a careful account of his ambivalent
Garvey as
relationship with Washington, and later association with
editor of the Negro World. Charles F.Kellog's NAACP, already
cited, contains a detailed discussion ofWashington's dealings with
that organization up to his death in 1915. Tuskegee's most famous
black teacher is accorded a succinct and balanced evaluation in
Linda O. McMurray, George Washington Carver: Scientist and
Symbol (Oxford University Press, New York, 1981). It can be read
in connection with A. W. Jones' article, 'The Role Of Tuskegee
Institute in the Education of Black Farmers', JNH, LX (1975),
pp. 252-67. That Washington's empire collapsed with his death is
made clear in Carl S. Mathews' article, 'The Decline of the Tuskegee
Machine, 1915-1925: The Abdication of Political Power', SAQ,

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 Bibliographical Essay

75 (1976), pp.460-69. See also Robert J. Norrell's excellent study,

Reaping the Whirlwind: The Civil Rights Movement In Tuskegee
(New York, 1985), which traces race relations in Tuskegee, Alabama
from the 1870s to the 1960s. Norrell's provocative and persuasive
thesis is that 'Washington's experiment, which promised that blacks
would realize full equality once they had made themselves useful
to society, ultimately succeeded in Tuskegee. Well-educated,
economically secure Institute professors successfully challenged
white conservative control of Tuskegee after Washington's hands-
off policy toward politics was forsaken in the late 1930s.' Booker
T. Washington's 'accommodationism' is placed firmly in its Southern
context in C. Vann Woodward's celebrated Origins of the New
South (Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1951), and
Paul M. Gaston's illuminating essay The New South Creed: A
Study in Southern Mythmaking (Louisiana State University Press,
Baton Rouge, 1970).

W. E. B. DU BOIS
Du Bois has been well-served by biographers. The four best studies
are: Francis L. Broderick, W. E. B. Du Bois: Negro Leader in a
Time of Crisis (Stanford, California, 1959); Elliott Rudwick, W.
E. B. Du Bois: Propagandist of the Negro Protest (New York,
1969); Arnold Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W. E. B.
Du Bois (London, 1976), and Manning Marable, W. E. B. Du Bois:
Black Radical Democrat (Boston, 1986). Rudwick is primarily
concerned with Du Bois' conflicts with his contemporaries, from
his opposition to Washington down to his resignation from the
NAACP in 1934. Broderick covers much of the same ground, but
takes Du Bois' career to 1952, when he had become increasingly
involved in peace and socialist movements. Rampersad's biography
stresses Du Bois' 'essentially poetic vision of human experience',
and examines in detail his major writings, including novels and
poetry. Rampersad concludes that Du Bois 'lived at least a double
life,continually compelled to respond to the challenge of reconciling
opposites'. Marable offers 'a general revisionist interpretation' of
Du Bois's life and thought, and emphasizes his 'profound sense of
morality and black prophetic Christianity'. Less convincingly,
Marable argues that Du Bois was not a 'paradoxical' thinker, but
concludes, more satisfactorily, that his 'greatest virtue was his

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Black Leadership in America

committed empathy with all the oppressed and his divine

dissatisfaction with all forms of injustice'. For shorter but judicious
evaluations see: Jack B. Moore, W. E. B. Du Bois (Boston, 1981),
and Joseph P. DeMarco, The Social Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois
(London, 1983).
Rayford W. Logan has edited an uneven collection of essays
which treat Du Bois' multiple careers as propagandist, historian,
race leader and Pan-Africanist: W. E. B. Du Bois: A Profile (New
York, 1971), which includes extracts from the Rudwick and Broderick
studies. Julius Lester has collected and edited a representative
selection of Du Bois' work: The Seventh Son: The Thought and
Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, 2 vols, (New York, 1971.) See also,
John Henrik Clark et al., Black Titan: W. E. B. Du Bois, An
Anthology by the Editors of Ereedomways (Boston, 1970), and
Herbert Aptheker (ed.), W. E. B. Du Bois, Against Racism:
Unpublished Essays, Papers, Addresses, 1887-1961 (University of
Massachusetts Press, 1985), and Philips S. Foner (ed), W. E. B.
Du Bois Speaks: Speeches and Addresses, 1890-1919 (New York,
1970). The following articles offer good summaries of significant
aspects of Du Bois' life and preoccupations: E. M. Rudwick, 'W.
E. B. Du Bois in the Role of Crisis Editor', JNH, 43 (1958), pp.
214-40; Mary Law Chafee, 'W. E. B. Du Bois' Concept of the
Racial Problem in the United States', JNH, 41 (1956) pp. 241-58;
Ben F. Rodgers, 'W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey and Pan-
Africa', JNH, 40 (1955) pp. 154-65; Wilson J. Moses, 'The Politics
of Ethiopianism: W. E. B. Du Bois and Literary Black Nationalism,'
AL, XLVII (1975), pp. 411-26; Clarence G. Contee, W. E. B. Du
l

Bois, the NAACP and the Pan-African Congress of 1919', JNH,

57 (1972), pp. 13-28, and 'The Emergence of W. E. B. Du Bois
as an African Nationalist', JNH, 54 (1969), pp. 48-60; Jean Fagan
Yellin, 'Du Bois' Crisis and Women's Suffrage', MassR, 14 (1973),
PP. 365-75; C. H. Wesley, 'W. E. B. Du Bois: The Historian',
JNH, 50 (1965), pp. 147-62, and Katherine M. Glazer, 'W. E. B.
Du Bois' Impressions of Woodrow Wilson', JNH, 58 (1973), pp.
452-9.
For Du Bois' responses to the Depression and New Deal, see in
addition to the biographies cited: Raymond Wolters, Negroes and
the Great Depression: The Problem of Economic Recovery (Westport,
Connecticut, 1970); John B. Kirby, Black Americans in the Roosevelt
Era (Knoxville, Tennessee, 1980), and Harvard Sitkoff, A New
Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National
Issue, Vol. 1, The Depression Decade (Oxford University Press,

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 Bibliographical Essay

New York, 1978).

Du Bois' major writings, available in several editions include
Dusk of Dawn (1940), which he described as 'not so much my
autobiography as the autobiography of a concept of race', and The
Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois (1968), edited by Herbert
Aptheker. Du Bois' major historical and sociological works (all of
which are currently in print) include: The Suppression of the
African Slave Trade to the U.S.A., 1638-1870 (1896); The
Philadelphia Negro (1899); The Souls of Black Folk (1903 and
1968); The Negro (1915); Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil
(1920 and 1969); Black Reconstruction in America (1935), Colour
and Democracy (1945), and The World and Africa (1947).

MARCUS GARVEY
Garvey's biographers have reached very differing conclusions
about their subject and the movement he led. Edmund David
Cronon's Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the
Universal Negro Improvement Association (Madison, Wisconsin,
1962), offers a mixed verdict. On the one hand, Cronon found
Garvey to have been an inept leader with such serious deficiencies
that they 'overbalanced the sounder aspects of his programme'.
On the other, Cronon conceded that Garvey was essentially honest,
was harassed by his black and white critics, but yet managed to
make a permanent contribution to the precepts and practice of
black nationalism in America. Theodore G.Vincent's Black Power
and the Garvey Movement (San Francisco, California, 1972), depicts
Garvey as the inspiration of the later leaders of independent African
states, and the UNIA as a heterogeneous body, some of whose
members were concerned with securing racial equality in America.
Vincent argues that Cronon displayed a 'negative attitude' toward
the UNIA, since he 'could not visualise a black nationalism that
was neither reactionary nor demagogic'. Vincent sees Garvey as
the leading ideological forerunner of the black separatist theorists
of the 1960s. In Race First: The Ideological and Organizational
Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the UNIA (Westport, Connecticut,
1976), Tony Martin claims that Garvey was 'the greatest black
figure in the twentieth century'. Martin's over-long study ignores
factionalism within the UNIA, and asserts unconvincingly that

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Black Leadership in America

Garvey was a 'revolutionary' nationalist. But the DuBois-Garvey

feud receives the fullest documentation in Martin's book. Garvey 's
wider American influence and appeal is examined in Emory J.
Tolbert, The UNIA and Black Los Angeles: Ideology and Community
in the Garvey Movement (Los Angeles: UCLA's Centre for Afro-
American Studies 1980). Tolbert demonstrates that a large percentage
of Garveyites in Los Angeles were homeowners and experienced
activists; unlike New York Garveyites, they did not 'engage in
open ideological warfare' that characterized relations between the
UNIA and the NAACP in Harlem. In Garveyism as a Religious
Movement: The Institutionalization of a Black Religion (Metuchen,
New Jersey and London, 1978), Randall K. Burkett examines the
implicitly and explicitly religious language, symbols and rituals of
the UNIA, and concludes convincingly that 'the religious ethos of
the UNIA was pervasive, embracing nearly every facet of its
organizational life'. Judith Stein, The World of Marcus Garvey:
Race and Class in Modern Society (Louisiana State University
Press, 1986), emphasizes the petit bourgeois spirit of Garveyism,
and examines Garvey 's career from the comparative perspective of
community.
the class structure and divisions within the black
Professor Robert A. Hill has undertaken a formidable task - the
assembly of 'acomprehensive survey of all the presently available
historical manuscripts and records pertaining to the life and work
of Marcus Mosiah Garvey, as well as the popular worldwide
organization that he founded and led from its inception in 1914
until his death in 1940'. Six volumes (four have already appeared)
will cover Garvey and the UNIA activities in the United States,
two will plot the impact of Garveyism in Africa, and two final
volumes will deal with the man and his movement in the Caribbean.
On the evidence so far, The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro
Improvement Association Papers (University of California Press,
1979 to 1985, and continuing), promises to be the most significant
undertaking in African- American historiography since the publication
of the Booker T. Washington Papers. Informative footnotes identify
Garvey's disciples and critics and each volume is handsomely
produced. Less satisfactory, however, is the intended general
introduction to Garvey and the UNIA offered in Volume 1. Defining
Garveyism as symbolizing 'the historic encounter between two
highly developed socioeconomic and political traditions: the social
consciousness and drive for self-governance of the Caribbean
peasantry and the racial consciousness and search for justice of
the Afro-American community', with the UNIA, after 1920, as 'a

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 Bibliographical Essay

black government in exile', Hill adopts a clumsy classification of

Garvey's achievements under such headings as 'Garveyism as the
Religion of Success', 'Confraternity and Self Cultures', and 'The
Mirror of Nationalism' in a rambling and poorly-written essay.
(He also fails to mention that Garvey never set foot in Africa.)
But as source materials, the Garvey Papers are indispensable to
the student of the period.
Briefer and generally sound assessments of Garvey's American
years can be found in: Robert G. Weisbord, Ebony Kinship: Africa,
Africans, and the Afro-Americans (Westport, Connecticut, 1973);
Leonard E. Barrett, Soul Force: African Heritage in Afro-American
Religion (New York, 1974); Alphonso Pinkney, Red Black, and
Green: Black Nationalism in the United States (Cambridge University
Press, 1976), and Theodore Draper, The Rediscovery of Black
Nationalism (New York, 1970). The opposition of black American
socialists to Garvey is treated in Theodore Kornweibel, Jr, No
Crystal Stair: Black Life and the Messenger, 1917-1928 (Westport,
Connecticut, 1975). (For a brief account of A. Philip Randolph's
career, seeWilliam H. Harris, 'A. Philip Randolph as a Charismatic
Leader, 1925-1941', JNH, XLIV (1979), pp.301-15). On relations
between black Americans and West Indians in Harlem, see David
J. Hellwig, 'Black Meets Black: Afro-American Reactions to West

Indian Immigrants in the 1920s', SAQ, 77 (1978), pp.206-24. Two

important studies of Harlem are: Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The
Making of a Ghetto, 1880-1930 (New York, 1963), and Nathan I.
Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York, 1971). John Runcie has
written two excellent articles on neglected aspects of Garveyism:
'Marcus Garvey and the Harlem Renaissance', Afro-Americans in
New York Life and History (July, 1986), pp.7-28, and 'Black Music
and the Garvey Movement', Afro-Americans in New York Life and
History (July, 1987), pp. 7-23. See also Jervis Anderson Harlem: ,

The Great Black Way, 1900-1950 (London, 1982), a vivid account

by a black journalist of the culture and politics of the most famous
black ghetto.
Of 'eyewitness' descriptions of Garvey and the UNIA in New
York, the most graphic are by Claude McKay, Harlem: Negro
Metropolis (New York, 1940, 1968); Roi Ottley, 'New World A-
Coming' (New York, 1943, 1969), Adam Clayton Powell, Sr,
Against the Tide: An Autobiography (New York, 1938); James
Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York, 1930, 1968). Richard
Wright, the noted black novelist, describes his meetings with
Garveyites in Chicago during the Depression in American Hunger

211
Black Leadership in America

(New York, 1944, 1977).

Robert H. Brisbane, Jr, provides a concise account of Garvey's
American activities in 'Some New Light on the Garvey Movement',
JNH, 36 (1951), pp. 53-62. Garvey's widow (and second wife),
Amy-Jacques Garvey edited the valuable Philosophy and Opinions
of Marcus Garvey (New York, 1969), the speeches and writings of
Garvey before 1925. See also, her partisan but fascinating account,
Garvey and Garveyism (Kingston, Jamaica, 1963), and E. U. Essien-
Udom and Amy-Jacques Garvey (eds), More Philosophy and
Opinions of Marcus Garvey (London, 1977). John Henrik Clark
(ed.), Marcus Garvey and the Vision of Africa (New York, 1974),
contains Garvey's important 1923 autobiographical piece, 'The
Negro's Greatest Enemy', various speeches, and insightful essays
by Richard B. Moore, Edwin S. Redkey and Marcus Garvey, Jr.

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR

There are now several major studies of King and his role in the
civil rights movement. David L. Lewis, King: A Critical Biography
(London, 1970), charts the major stages of King's career, and has
some pertinent comments on his personality, but is poorly written
and adopts a patronizing tone. Stephen B. Oates, Let The Trumpet
Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr., (London, 1982), covers
much the same ground, but avoids any serious analysis of King's
stature as a black leader, and lapses frequently into purple prose.
David J. Garrow has written three important books: Protest at
Selma: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Voting Rights Act of 1965
(New Haven, 1978), is a close analysis of the SCLC campaign
and its aftermath; The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr: From
'Solo' to Memphis (London, 1981), argues convincingly that King
was a real, rather than an imagined, threat to the established order,
in that he had become, in the last years of his life, a radical figure;
Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference (New York, 1986), offers a
massively detailed narrative account of the man and the movement.
King's private life (and the FBI's interest in his extra-marital
activities), tensions within the SCLC, the campaigns in Albany,
Birmingham, Selma and Chicago all receive close attention. Garrow
is particularly concerned to prove that King was primarily motivated

more by a visionary religious faith than by his reading of Gandhi

212
 Bibliographical Essay

or Walter Rauschenbusch. Adam Fairclough's excellent account,

To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership
Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr., (University of Georgia
Press, London, 1987), stresses SCLC's achievements as an organized
protest movement, and offers balanced assessments of King's
strengths and weaknesses. Fairclough has also written four useful
articles: 'The SCLC and the Second Reconstruction 1957-1963',
SAQ, 80 (Spring, 1981), pp. 177-94; 'Was Martin Luther King a
Marxist?', HWJ, 15 (Spring, 1983), pp. 117-25; 'Martin Luther
King, Jr., and the War in Vietnam', Phylon, XLV (March, 1984),
pp. 19-39, and 'The Preachers and the People: The Origins and
Early Years of the SCLC, 1955-1959', JSH, Lll (August, 1986),
pp. 403-40. James A. Colaiaco, Martin Luther King, Jr.: Apostle
of Militant Nonviolence (New York, 1988), is a short but informative
biography. Colaiaco stresses that King was 'among the first black
American leaders to shift his focus from civil rights to human
rights', and towards the end of his life had begun to formulate 'a
radical critique of American institutions and foreign policy'. Like
other recent commentators, Colaiaco believes that King sympathized
with Black Power and Marxist critiques of American capitalism
and militarism.
King's intellectual and spiritual development receive considered
attention in Hanes Walton, Jr, The Political Philosophy of Martin
Luther King, Jr. (Westport, Connecticut, 1971), and in John G.
Ansbro, Martin Luther King, Jr,: The Making of a Mind (New
York, 1983), which is particularly informative on King's attitudes
to American involvement in Vietnam. See also the following
articles: John E. Rathbun, 'Martin Luther King: The Theology of
Social Action', AQ, 20 (1968), pp. 38-53; Warren E. Steinkraus,
'Martin Luther King's Personalism and Nonviolence', JHI, 34
(1973), pp. 97-111, and Mohan Lai Sharma, 'Martin Luther King:
Modern America's Greatest Theologian of Social Action', JNH, 53
(1968), pp. 257-63.
August Meier's influential essay of 1965,'On the Role of Martin
Luther King', is reprinted in John Bracey, August Meier, and Elliott
Rudwick's anthology, Conflict and Competition: Studies in the
Recent Black Protest Movement (Belmont, California, 1971), David
J. Garrow, Clayborne Carson, James H. Cone, Vincent G. Harding

and Nathan I. Huggins are the contributors to a valuable symposium:

'A Round Table: Martin Luther King, Jr.', JAH, 74 (1987), pp.
436-81. Clayborne Carson has also written perceptively on King's
relationship with young black militants: In Struggle: SNCC and

213
Black Leadership in America

the Black Awakening of the 1960's (cited above). C. Eric Lincoln

edited a good collection of essays, Martin Luther King Jr.: A
Profile (New York, 1970), with contributions from James Baldwin,
Ralph Abernathy and August Meier. The best account and analysis
of the Montgomery boycott is provided by J. Mills Thornton III,
'Challenge and response in the Montgomery Bus Boycott of
1955-1956,' reprinted in Sarah W. Wiggins (ed.), From Civil War
to Civil Rights: Alabama 1860-1960, An Anthology from the Alabama
Review (University of Alabama Press, 1987), pp. 463-5 19. On the
Memphis strike see Davis M. Tucker's essay, 'Rev. James M.
Lawson, Jr., and the Garbage Strike', in his study, Black Pastors
and Leaders: Memphis 1819-1972 (Memphis State University Press,
1975).
For a personal account of King's life and work, see Coretta
Scott King, My Life With Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York,
1970).
King's major writings are: Stride Toward Freedom: The
Montgomery Story (New York, 1958); Why We Can't Wait (New
York, 1964); Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?
(New York, 1967) and the Triumph of Conscience (New York,
1968).

MALCOLM X
Any study of Malcolm X must begin with The Autobiography
of Malcolm X (New York, 1965), now available in several paperback
editions. The British Penguin edition (1980) contains a useful
index. Written in collaboration with Alex Haley (later the author
of the phenomenal best seller and TV series, Roots) it is, on every
count, a remarkable document. Haley's 'foreword' is also essential
for an understanding of the genesis of the book, and for its insights
into Malcolm's personality, style and intellectual development.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X has been subjected to rigorous
scholarly interpretation and exegesis. See especially: Barrett J.
Mandell, 'The Didactic Achievement of Malcolm X's
Autobiography', AAS, 2 (1972), pp. 269-74; Frederick D. Harper,
'A Reconstruction of Malcolm X's Personality', AAS, 3 (1972),
pp. 1-6; Cedric J. Robinson, 'Malcolm Little as Charismatic Leader',
AAS, 4 (1972), pp.81-96; Samuel J. Weiss, 'The Ordeal of Malcolm
X', SAQ, 67 (1968), pp. 53-63; Carol Ohman, 'The Autobiography

214
 Bibliographical Essay

ofMalcolm X: A Revolutionary Use of the Franklin Tradition',

AQ, 22 (1970), pp. 13 1-49, and Eugene Victor Wolfenstein's essay,
'The Autobiography of Malcolm X', in his perceptive but difficult
study, The Victims of Democracy: Malcolm X and the Black
Revolution (University of California Press, 1981), pp. 284-92.
Peter Goldman, a senior editor of Newsweek magazine, examines
Malcolm's later years in The Death and Life of Malcolm X (London,
1974), an overblown but sympathetic biography. See also Goldman's
shorter essay: 'Malcolm X: Witness for the Prosecution', in Franklin
and Meier (eds), Black Leaders of the Twentieth Century (cited
above).
Favourable assessments of Malcolm are to be found in Thomas
The End of a Dream? (London,
L. Blair, Retreat to the Ghetto:
1977), and Alphonso Pinkney, Red, Black, and Green: Black
Nationalism in the United States (cited above). Archie Epps, editor
of the Speeches of Malcolm X at Harvard (New York, 1969), also
provides an informative analytical and descriptive essay, 'The
Paradoxes of Malcolm X'. John Henrik Clark (ed.), Malcolm X:
The Man and His Times (Toronto, 1969), is a collection of black
estimates (all of them eulogistic) of Malcolm, together with a
selection of his speeches and interviews. George Breitman has
also collected statements by Malcolm in By Any Means Necessary:
Speeches, Interviews, and a Letter By Malcolm X (New York,
1970), and Malcolm X Speaks (New York, 1965). In The Last Year
of Malcolm X (New York, 1967) Breitman claims that he was 'one
of the most slandered and misunderstood Americans of our time',
and offers 'what is missing or muted in The Autobiography' as a
corrective to the view that it represents a full record of Malcolm's
politicaldevelopment, arguing (unconvincingly) that he became a
revolutionary socialist. Also valuable for the insights they afford
into Malcolm's views are: Malcolm X: The Last Speeches, edited
by Bruce Perry (Pathfinder Press: New York, 1989), which includes
six previously unpublished addresses and interviews, and Malcolm
X on Afro-American History: Expanded and Illustrated Edition
(Pathfinder Press, New York, 1970 and 1988), with an introduction
by George Breitman, which contains selections from Malcolm's
Autobiography, the text of an address to the Organization of Afro-
American Unity, 24 January, 1965, and short discourses on such
topics as 'The House Negro and the Field Negro' and 'Africa and
Self-Hate'.
On the origins and growth of The Nation of Islam, see: C. Eric
Lincoln, The Black Muslims in America (rev. ed, Boston, 1973),

215
Black Leadership in America

and his article 'The Black Muslims Revisited or the State of the
Black Nation of Islam', AAS, 3 (1972), pp. 175-86; E. U. Essien-
Udom, Black Nationalism: The Rise of the Black Muslims in the
U.S.A. (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1966), and Louis E.
Lomax, When the Word is Given: A Report on Elijah Muhammad
and the Black Muslim World (New York, 1964).
A critical estimate of Malcolm is provided by Tom Kahn and
Bayard Rustin, 'The Ambiguous Legacy of Malcolm X', Dissent,
12 (1965), pp. 188-92. For more favourable verdicts see: Le Roi
Jones, 'The Legacy of Malcolm X and the Coming of the Black
Nation', in his collected pieces Home: Social Essays (New York,
1966), and the late I. F. Stone's thoughtful essay, 'The Pilgrimage
of Malcolm X', from In a Time of Torment (New York, 1967),
pp.1 10-21. Wilson J. Moses in Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms
(cited above), suggests plausibly that Malcolm X might be regarded
as 'a sort of "apostle to the gentiles", because he expended an
appreciable amount of energy during his last years addressing
predominantly white audiences'.
In One Day When I Was Lost (London, 1974) James Baldwin
created an intriguing 'scenario' based on Malcolm's Autobiography,
dictated in part by 'the legal complexities created by Malcolm's
rupture with the Nation of Islam Movement'. It is a sensitive
evocation of the 'much-maligned, groping and very moving character
of a man known as Malcolm X'. Maya Angelou recounts her
meetings with Malcolm in The Heart of a Woman (London, 1986),
and All God's Children Need Travelling Shoes (London, 1987).
See also Eldridge Cleaver's tribute, 'Initial Reactions on the
Assassination of Malcolm X', in Soul on Ice (London, 1969). Two
spirited expositions of Black Power are to be found in Julius Lester,
Look Out Whiteyl Black Power's Gon Get Your Mama! (New York,
1968), and Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black
Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (Penguin Books,
Harmondsworth, 1969).

JESSE JACKSON

There is no satisfactory biography of Jackson, but see: Barbara A.

Reynolds, Jesse Jackson: The Man, The Movement, The Myth
(Chicago, 1975). Adolph L. Reed, Jr, The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon:
The Crisis of Purpose in Afro-American Politics (New Haven and

216
 Bibliographical Essay

London, 1986) is a highly critical evaluation, which criticizes

Jackson for engaging in 'symbolic politics' and unconvincingly
insists that he is not a significant figure in American politics.
Adam Fairclough's Review Essay, 'What Makes Jesse Run?', JAS,
22 (April, 1988), pp. 77-86, and Manning Marable, Black American
Politics: From The Washington Marches to Jesse Jackson (cited
above), offer more positive assessments of Jackson as a black
leader. See also the black political commentator June Jordan's
essay, 'Next Time the Rainbow', an analysis of Jackson's 1988
presidential campaign, in the New Statesman and Society (6 January
1989), pp.31-5.
For an influential statement of the view that 'many important
features of black and white relations in America are not captured
when the issue is defined as majority versus minority and that a
preoccupation with race and racial conflict obscures fundamental
problems that derive from the intersection of race and class', see
William Julius Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks
and Changing American Institutions (2nd edn, University of Chicago
Press, 1980). Wilson's views are partially refuted in Alphonso
Pinkney's The Myth of Black Progress (Cambridge University
Press, 1984), which offers a sober (and sobering) assessment of
the black American condition in the 1980s. His concern is with
the continuing erosion of a 'commitment to racial equality, and a
general shift to the right on matters pertaining to race and poverty'
- symbolized by Reagan's victories in 1980 and 1984.

217
 1

Index

Abernathy, Ralph, 120, 126, 141, 182 Birmingham, Alabama, 127-9

Adams, Lewis, 26 Birth of a Nation, 36, 57
Addams, Jane, 50 Black Codes, 18
Afro-American Realty Company, 76 Black Panther party 177-8
Albany, Georgia, 126-7 Black Power, 13, 135, 175-7
Ali, Duse Mohammed, 80 Black Reconstruction in America, 66
Ali, Noble Drew, 146 Black Star Steamship Line (BSL), 86,
Allen, Richard, 4-5 89,92
Amendments to the Constitution, 7, 18, Booker T. Washington and the Negro's
22,50 Place in American Life, 69
Amenia Conference, 58 Boutwell, Albert, 128
American Colonization Society, 4, 8, 103 Boynton, Amelia Platts, viii, 132
American Communist Party, 69, 110, 146 Brazier, Arthur, 134
American Federation of Labour (AFL), Briggs, Cyril V., 90
59,60,77,111 Broderick, Francis L., 65
American Negro Academy, 54 Brooks, James David, 87
American Revolution, 3, 10 Brown v. Board of Education, 114
Anderson, Charles W., 76 Brown, James, 176
Anderson, Marian, 1 1 Brown, John, 7
Angelou, Maya, 109 Brownsville, Texas, 36
Arafat, Yasir, 180 Bryant, Farris, 130
Armstrong, Samuel Chapman, 1, 24-6 Burks, Mary Fair, 115
Atlanta University, 54, 65 Burroughs, James, 22, 23
Autobiography of Malcolm X, 158-63 Bush, George, 187

Bagnall, Robert W., 89, 96 Campbell, George W., 26

Baker, Ella, viii, 123-5 Carmichael, Stokely, 135, 175
Baker, Ray Stannard, 48, 49 Carnegie, Andrew, 1, 28, 33-4, 41
Baldwin, James, 2-3, 168 Carter, Jimmy, 179
Barnett, Ida Wells, 50 Carver, George Washington, 27
Barnett, Ross, 135 Chaney, James, 113
Belafonte, Harry, 127 Chicago, 134-5
Bennett, L. Roy, 118 Chisholm, Shirley, 179
Berry, Edwin C, 134 Civil Rights Act
Bethune, Mary McLeod, 110, 112 of 1875,7
Bevel, James, 127,128,137 of 1964, 131
Bilbo, Theodore G., 89, 147 of 1968, 139

219
Index

Clark, James G., 133 Farmer, James, 113, 131, 165

Clark, Kenneth B., 152 Farrakhan, Louis, 178, 186
Clark, Septima, viii, 141 Father Divine, 91, 146-7
Clarke, Edward Young, 88 Faubus, Orville, 115
Cleaver, Eldridge, 178 Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), 113
Coleman, Bessie, 90 Ferraro, Geraldine, 186
Colour and Democracy, 67-8 Fisk University, 52, 53
Colvin, Claudette, 115 Forman, James, 126
Committee of Twelve for the Fortune, T Thomas, 47-8, 76
Advancement of the Negro Race, 41 Foster,Wilbur R, 26
Congress of Industrial Organizations Franklin, John Hope, 114
(CIO), 111 Frazier, E. Franklin, 103, 104
Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), 3, Free Blacks, 10-11
5, 113, 174 Freedmen's Bureau, 24
Connor, Eugene 'Bull', 127, 128 Freedmen's conventions, 20
Coolidge, Calvin, 91 Freedom's Journal, 4
Cornish, Samuel, 4
Crisis, 51,55-62, 97, 100-1, 112 Gandhi, Mahatma, 113, 119, 121
Garnet, Henry Highland, 5
Daley, Richard J., 134-5 Garrison, William Lloyd, 5, 49
Darkwater, 56 Garrow, David, 140-1
Davidson, Olivia, 27 Garvey, Amy-Jacques, 86
Daughters of the American Revolution Garvey, Marcus, 1, 13, 15, 51, 63, 65,
(DAR), 111 75,78-104, 191-2
Davis, Ossie, 168 and Africa, 92-4
De Valera, Eamon, 88 and Du Bois, 97-101
Delany, Martin R., 8 and Malcolm X, 150, 156
Dennis, Willie, 179 and Washington, 80, 82-3
Dewey, Thomas E., 114 Gaston, A.G., 127
Dixon, Thomas, Jr., 44 Gayle, W. A. 'Tacky', 115
Dollard, John, 187 Goldman, Peter, 157, 167
Domingo, Wilfred A., 95 Goldwater, Barry, 130, 154
Douglass, Frederick, 1, 6-8, 12, 32-3, Goodman, Andrew, 113
39, 191 Goodman, Robert, 185
Draper, Theodore, 177 Gordon, Mittie, 147
Du Bois, W.E.B., 1, 12-13, 15, 31, 37, Grady, Henry W., 30, 31
40-2,47-73 Grant, Ulysses S., 7, 21
and Garvey, 97-101 Great Migration, 76
and Pan-Africanism, 63-5 Griffith, D. W., 36
and Washington, 40-2, 66-7, 69 Grimke, Francis, 62
and World War I, 58-60
Dukakis, Michael, 187 Haley, Alex, 63, 159, 162
Durant, Will, 151 Hamer, Fannie Lou, viii, 131-2
Dusk of Dawn, 57, 59, 66-7 Hamilton, Charles V., 175
Hampton, Lionel, 151
Eastman, George, 28 Hampton Normal and Agricultural
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 1 14-15 Institute, 23-5
Ellison, Ralph, 42 Harding, Warren G., 86
Emancipation Proclamation (1863), 7 Harlem, 76-7, 83
Encylopedia Africana, 69 Harlem Renaissance, 65, 70, 78
Executive Order Harris, Patricia, 179
8802(1941), 112 Hastie, William H., Ill
9981 (1948), 113-14 Hayes, Rutherford B., 18
Henry, Aaron, 131
Fairclough, Adam, 185 Highlander Folk School, viii, 116, 141
Fard, Wallace D., 147-8 Ho Chi Minn, 136

220
 1 3

Index

Hodges, Johnny, 151 Mackie, Mary F., 25, 34

Hooks, Benjamin, 184 Malcolm X, 14, 15, 150-69
Hoover, Herbert, 110 and Garvey, 150, 156
Hoover, J. Edgar, 84, 90, 130 and King, 153, 163-4, 174
Horton, Myles, 116 Mandela, Nelson, 187-8
Hughes, Langston, 43 Marable, Manning, 176
March on Washington (1963), 129-30
'I Have Dream,' 129-30
a March on Washington Movement
International League of Darker (MOWM), 13, 112-13
Peoples, 95 Marshall, Burke, 128
International Migration Society Marshall, James, 27
(IMS), 20 Mays, Benjamin E., 92, 119, 142
Invisible Man, 42 McGuire, Alexander, 91
McKay, Claude, 78, 103
Jackson, Jessie, vii, 1, 15, 134, 137, 173, McKinley, William, 26
180-7 McKissick, Floyd, 135, 138-9
Jacob, John, 184 McMillen,NeilR.,22,44
James, C.L.R., 84 Meier, August, 32
James, William, 53 Memphis Commercial Appeal, 138
Johnson, Andrew, 18, 51 Meredith, James, 135, 175
Johnson, Charles S., 87-8, 94-5 Milholland, John E., 37
Johnson, James Weldon, 32, 41,61, 76, Mississippi Burning, 1 1
103-4 Mississippi Freedom Democrats
Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 15, 129, (MFDP), 131
130, 133 Mondale, Walter, 186
Johnson, Mordecai W., 1 19 Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott
Jordan, June, 186 (1955-6), 7, 116-18, 120-2
Jordan, Vernon, 14-15 Montgomery Improvement Association
(MIA), 117-18, 120-1
Kennedy, John F., 125-6, 128, 154 Moody, Anne, viii, 129-30
Kennedy, Robert, 128, 174 Morgan, Juliette, 120-1
Kenyatta, Jomo, 64, 84 Morgan v. Virginia, 13 1

King, Coretta Scott, 120, 135-6, Moses, Robert, 131

168-9, 184 Moskowitz, Henry, 49
King, Edward, 131 Moton, Robert R., 82
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1, 14, 15, 68, Muhammad, Elijah, 14, 148-9, 154-5,
109-44 161, 171
and Du Bois, 71 Muhammad, Wallace D., 178
and Garvey, 104 Murray, Anne, 6
and Jackson, 181-2, 191-2 Muste, A.J., 120
and Malcolm X, 165, 180 Myrdal, Gunnar, 2, 3, 11-12, 43, 49, 104,
and Washington, 45 146, 192
King, Martin Luther, Snr., 118-19, 125
King, Richard, 140 Naipaul, V.S., viii-ix
Ku Klux Klan, 18, 36, 59, 88-9 Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Douglass, 6
Lawson, James, 127, 137-8 Nash, Diane, 125
Lester, Julius, 175 Nation of Islam, 147-9, 151, 178
'Letter from Birmingham Jail,' 128 National Afro-American Council, 48
Levison, Stanley, 122-3, 130, 137 National Afro-American League, 47-8
Lewis, John, 1 1 National Association for the
Lewis, Rufus A., 122 Advancement of Coloured People
Lincoln, C. Eric, 145, 167 (NAACP), 1,3,5,41,50-1
Little Rock, Arkansas, 115, 125 National Advisory Commission on Civil
Locke, Alain, 93-4 Disorders, 169, 176
Lomax, Louis, 153 National Negro Business League, 35,

221
Index

43,62 Rhodes, James Ford, 35

National Negro Committee, 50 Robeson, Paul, 47
National Negro Congress, 110 Robinson, Jo Ann Gibson, vii,

National Urban League (NUL), 3, 5, 15, 115-17, 122

43,77, 109, 110 Rockefeller John D., 28
National Youth Administration, 112 Rogers, Henry C, 28
Negro Convention Movement, 4, 5-6 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 1 1
Negro Factories Corporation, 85, 92 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 61, 110, 111
Negro World, 84 Roosevelt, Theodore, 1, 35
New Deal, 61,66, 110-12 Rowan, Carl, 136
'New South', 30 Royce, Josiah, 53
Newton, Huey P., 177 Ruffner, Lewis and Viola, 24
Niagara Movement, 41, 48-9. 64 Russwurm, John, 4
Niebuhr, Reinhold, 119 Rustin, Bayard, 120, 122-3, 127, 131,
Nixon, Edgar D., 116-17 165, 167
Nixon, Richard M., 125, 138, 177 Rutherford, William A., 182
Nkrumah, Kwame, 64, 69
Norrell, Robert J., 26 Santayana, George, 53
North Star, 6 Schmoller, Gustav, 53
Schwerner, Michael, 113
O'Brien, Connor Cruise, 67 Scott, Emmett J., 35
Opportunity, 94 Seale, Bobby, 177
Operation Breadbasket, 134,182 Selma, Alabama, 132-3
Organization of Afro-American Unity Shuttlesworth, Fred, 127, 128-9
(OAAU), 156-8 Simone, Nina, 176
Ottley, Roi, 86-7 Souls of Black Folk, 52, 54, 55, 151, 193
Ovington, Mary White, 49, 99 Southern Christian Leadership
Owen, Chandler, 88-9, 95, 96 Conference (SCLC), 3, 15, 122-5,
126-8, 130-2, 134-5, 140-1
Pace, Harry H., 96 Southern Conference for Human
Pan-African Congresses, 63-4 Welfare, 1 1

Parks, Rosa L.,vii, 116-17 Spencer, Samuel R., 69

Payton, Philip A., 76 Spingarn, Joel, 58
People United to Save Humanity Spock, Benjamin, 135
(PUSH), 183-4 Smiley, Glenn E., 120
Petty, Samuel, 56-7 Stanley, A. Knighton, 181
Pickens, William, 88, 96 St. Augustine, Florida, 130-1
Pitts, Helen, 8 Steffens, Lincoln, 50
Plessy v Ferguson, 36, 114 Stone, I. F, 162
Pole.J. R., 44 Storey. Moorfield, 50
Poor People's Campaign, 137-8, 182 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 8
Populist movement, 20, 21 Stride Toward Freedom, 124
Powell, Adam Clayton, Snr., 103 Student Non- Violent Coordinating
Pritchett, Laurie, 126 Committee (SNCC), 3, 124-5,
Prosser, Gabriel, 1, 9 131-3, 135

Randolph, A. Philip, 13, 59, 77, 78, Taft, William Howard, 35, 36, 1 1

95-6, 110, 112, 113, 123 'Talented Tenth', 51, 53, 61, 66
Rauschenbusch, Walter, 119 Taylor, Julius F, 39
Ray, James Earl, 138 Thirty Years of Lynching in the United
Reagan, Ronald, 15, 180, 185-6 States, 57
Reconstruction, 18, 19, 34 Thompson, Charles W., 26
Redeemer governments, 75 Thoreau, Henry David, 119
Reeb, James J., 133 Thrasher, Max Bennett, 33
Reed, Adolph L., 173 Thurmond, Strom, 114
Reinhardt, John, 179 Tilden, Samuel J., 18

222
 Index

Till, Emmett, 140 Warren, Earl, 114

Tocqueville, Alexis de, 4 Warren, Robert Penn, 164, 165, 166
Treitschke, Heinrich von, 53 Washington Booker T, 1,7, 12, 15, 17-
Trotter,William Monroe, 13, 39-40, 50 46,51,66,78,81, 191-2
Truman, Harry, 113-14 Atlanta Compromise Address, 29-32
Turner, Henry McNeil, 19-20, 24, 35, 38 and Douglass, 32-3
Turner, Nat, 1, 10 and Du Bois, 40-2
Tuskegee Institute, 26-8, 38, 53-4, andGarvey, 80, 81,83
81,82 and King, 104
'Tuskegee Machine', 28, 48, 51, 67 Watson, Tom, 21
Watterson, Henry, 30
Uncle Tom's Cabin, 8 Wayland Seminary, 25
Universal Negro Improvement Weaver, Robert C, 111
Association (UNIA), 80-91 Webster, Noah, 23
Up From Slavery, 33-4, 80 Wells, H.G., 37, 151
White, Walter, 61, 62
Vardaman, James K., 22 Wilberforce University, 53
Vesey, Denmark, 1,9-10 Wilkins, Roy, 14, 123, 131, 165, 174
Vietnam War, 133, 135-6 Williams, Alfred Daniel, 118
Villard, Oswald Garrison, 49, 50, 99 Williams, Hosea, 127
Viorst, Milton, 173 Wilson, Woodrow, 36, 59
Vivian, C.T., 127, 133 Wills, Gary, 187
Voting Rights Act of 1965, 133 Wise, Stephen S., 50
Woodward, C. Vann, 22, 114
Waco, Texas, 57 Wright, Richard, 21,93
Walker, Alice, 109, 193-4
Walker, David, 5 Young, Andrew, 127, 141, 179
Walker, WyattT, 126-7, 130 Young, Whitney M., 165
Walling, William E., 49
Walters, Alexander, 50

223
Studies in Modern History: John Morrill and David Cannadine

Since the first appearance of Black Leadership in America in 1985 there

has been continuing academic and popular interest in the historical
experiences of Black Americans. Now fully revised and updated, the
Second Edition of this popular text explores the Afro-American
experience in the twentieth century with particular reference to six
outstanding race leaders: Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois,
Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and (new to the
revised text) Jesse Jackson. Their philosophies and strategies for
racial advancement are compared, and set against the historical
framework and constraints within which they functioned.
John White examines the 'grass-roots' of black protest movements
in America, and his Second Edition pays particular attention to the
role of black women in the civil rights struggle during the 1950s and
1960s. The major civil rights organizations - the National Association
for the Advancement of Coloured People, the National Urban
League, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, as well as
such black separatist groups as the Universal Negro Improvement
Association and the Nation of Islam (the Black Muslims) - are also
discussed in detail, and an introductory chapter treats black protest
and 'accommodation' during the slavery era.
A work of synthesis and of individual and collective biography, this
revised edition of Black Leadership in America is intended for under-
graduate and college courses in American history, politics, sociology
and race relations, and also for general readers interested in a deeper
understanding of one of the major issues of our century.
John White is Senior Lecturer in American History in the Depart-
ment of American Studies at the University of Hull. He has also
taught at the Universities of Michigan, Rochester, Rutgers, California
State and Alabama.
Some reviews of the First Edition:

". . White offers a more sympathetic perspective on Booker T Washington,

.

Garvey, and Malcolm X than they have generally received from liberal historians
in this country .... This book is well worth reading for its distinctive views on
"
these important
r and controversial Jfigures.
6 ALABAMA REVIEW
"The end-product is an excellent critical examination of these important
figures, combined with a useful general survey of modern black American
"
history.
HISTORY

Cover: Washington Peace March ISBN D-5AE-Qb37E-A

1983, on the 20th anniversary of the
Civil Rights March led by Martin
Luther King. Photograph by Leif
Skoogfors. Reproduced by kind
permission of Camera Press, London.
»
1ST Longman !582"063