9

Burying fim Crow

BLACK RACIAL IDENTITY MOBILIZATION, AND REFORM IN THE UNITED STATES

As in South Africa, black identity and protest against racial domination in the United States built upon earlier solidarity, culture, and shared experience. African-Americans were long constrained by repression and regional division, if not the ethnic divisions evident in South Africa. Over the long run, however, central state abandonment of Reconstruction, which allowed for heightened racial domination imposed locally, also provoked greater efforts at forging black unity as the basis for protest. Economic changes made possible by stability then further reinforced African-American solidarity and potential power. Black identity was affirmed, not received, in a contested process. Such identity consolidation had to and did precede actions by such a self-conscious group in response to resources and opportunities, the more conventional focus of study. And opportunities for mobilization were both taken and made, forcing responses from white authorities. Even before black protest reached its high point with the civil rights movement, the dynamic between state policy and black activism was evident.

Toward Racial Solidarity

Well before Jim Crow, blacks were conscious of their common distinctive experience and culture. They had earlier formed separate Methodist churches. But before abolition, the prominent identity among African-Americans was as slaves, and the pressing issue was freedom. Bondsmen engaged in various forms of resistance, and on occasion revolted. Most slaves or freedmen saw no option for or attraction to inclusion in American society. Emergent racial identity was evident in such acts as Denmark Vesey’s leadership of an 1822 slave revolt (although he himself was a free man) and the attack of Nat Turner’s rebels against every white person they encountered.¹ By the 1830s a small number of early black nationalists had emerged, advocating a separate territory, self-determination, or return to Africa. In 1835 and 1847, national black conventions were held, and after 1850 Northern blacks were impelled to protest the Fugitive Slave Law, which threatened their protection from reenslavement.² Informed by such efforts, “Afro-Americans invented themselves, not as a race, but as a nation,” describing themselves as a “poor nation of colour.”³ But distinctions among blacks by color, place of origin, or culture remained. Many then linked themselves with the United States, even going so far as to fight for the Union in the Civil War.

During Reconstruction, free African-Americans did engage in an inclusive American polity for which they had fought, and they later resisted the foreclosure of such participation. Having gained the franchise in the South, they voted and gained office. When Reconstruction was abandoned, blacks joined with whites in the populist movement. And when the Democratic Party began to undermine populism through disenfranchisement, blacks protested their loss of rights.⁴ But as a minority subject to pervasive discrimination, they were unable to block party political moves to unify the white South. Subjected to poll taxes, property requirements for voting, and violence, black voting declined precipitously in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, falling for instance in Georgia presidential elections from 55 percent in 1876 to 5 percent in 1904.⁵ The nation-state and “solid South” were consolidated by allowing or enforcing Jim Crow; blacks were excluded.

The enforcement and then abandonment of black rights directly affected black views. During the Civil War and Reconstruction, with expectations of reform at their peak, separatist black nationalism was abandoned in favor of supporting the Union. But the end of Reconstruction showed America to be unwilling to continue enforcing the inclusion of blacks and many blacks responded in kind, advocating a return to Africa or living separately. For instance, leading black nationalist Martin Delany advocated migration to Africa until the Civil War, joined the Union army in the hope of winning civil rights, and then again advocated migration in response to the disappointing end of Reconstruction.⁶ African churches, established in large numbers after Reconstruction, supported both a return to Africa and self-isolation in the United States. Such separatism, writes William Julius Wilson, “represented a retreat from, rather than an attack against the social order.”⁷ With racial discrimination so pervasive, blacks saw little chance of incorporation, retreating to enforced disillusionment.

Even as radical and significant a figure as Frederick Douglass appears in retrospect to have been somewhat uncertain of how to identify and mobilize blacks after abolition. Douglass advocated “assimilation through self-assertion,” and condemned the hypocrisy of America’s celebrations of freedom amid continued black disenfranchisement.⁸ But Douglass also rejected the notion of racial pride, separatist nationalism, and calls for a return to Africa, advocating instead self-reliance and extension of the franchise.⁹ He wanted blacks to seek inclusion, though he knew that such demands were unlikely to be met. Having acknowledged the unifying effect of slavery,¹⁰ Douglass seemed less certain of what held blacks together after abolition, and the best means to seek redress for their new grievances. Unsure of the basis for continued mobilization, Douglass saw his power dwindle after Reconstruction, though he lived until 1895.¹¹ In his wake, the next generation of black national leaders would continue to wrestle with how to consolidate black identity, mobilization, and advancement.

The leadership mantle was taken up by Booker T. Washington, who stressed the assimilationist aspect of Douglass’s message rather than any popular assertion of black identity. Washington pursued a dual agenda of local black self-reliance in the South while garnering federal patronage and white financial support from Northern liberals still eager to help. To the extent his strategy was consistent with racial separatism, Washington’s Africanism remained covert and conservative, at least by most measures.¹² Seeing no opportunity for their political inclusion in the South where most blacks remained, Washington focused on separate economic advancement as a practical necessity, largely ignoring the link between such advancement and political rights.¹³ While Washington may have provided an example for racial pride, he did nothing to channel that pride into mass mobilization. Commentators and later activists would rebuke him – perhaps unfairly – for capitulation to racial domination.¹⁴ Committed to building his own institutional base at the Tuskeegee Institute for black education, Washington abandoned political assertiveness and demands for equal citizenship. He accepted segregation and remained silent on the 1890 Force Bill, which, had it passed, would have required black enfranchisement.¹⁵ In return, he expected continued financial support, black economic advance, and reduced repression.

Washington’s near-contemporary and eventual successor on the national stage, W. E. B. Du Bois, argued that whites had failed to fulfill their part of Booker T. Washington’s bargain. Rather than allowing blacks to advance on their own, Jim Crow segregation and disenfranchisement had caused further black impoverishment.¹⁶ Du Bois concluded that blacks would have to agitate for the preservation and expansion of their rights and for integration, rather than accept isolation. He assumed that “the talented tenth” of a Northern-concentrated black elite he represented would lead this effort, expecting they would forgo the temptations of accommodation. Yet even Du Bois would compromise at times, for instance in accepting separate training for black officers in the First World War as preferable to no training at all. When his own support of Woodrow Wilson and black participation in the war effort were left unrewarded, Du Bois began to rethink his position.¹⁷

Du Bois had long been conflicted over the “double self” he described as dividing the loyalties of blacks between America and their race.¹⁸ Concluding that America had abandoned blacks, Du Bois shifted to a greater emphasis on race pride, self-segregation, and avoidance of self-denigrating protest.¹⁹ In this sense, his radicalism echoed Washington’s conservatism. But in the Northern tradition, he also became a staunch advocate of black nationalism, using the terms race and nation interchangeably as identities based on common blood and shared experience.²⁰ Du Bois condemned any mixing of blood that would dilute the black race and create division. He feared that fellow mulattoes would see themselves as intermediaries or even white, rather than join the black cause. Racial identity had not yet consolidated to the point where such concerns over absorption would diminish.²¹ Blacks remained trapped in the “double self” of a distinct minority within, yet spurned by white America.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which Du Bois helped to found, reflected his elitism. The organization evolved from Du Bois’s Niagara movement, which never had more than four hundred members, and remained relatively focused on the small black middle class, though the association’s newspaper did achieve a circulation of 100,000.²² Du Bois initially supported the interracial nature of Niagara and the NAACP board, both of which enjoyed considerable white financial support. But he would later resign from the NAACP, criticizing it for a lack of commitment to Pan Africanism; in 1944 he rejoined. Having joined the Communist Party, he had become increasingly disillusioned with the NAACP’s continued and largely unsuccessful efforts to encourage integration with white America, though he later saw no viable alternative to the association.²³

The NAACP itself had no ambivalence about its aims, consistently focusing on appeals to whites and to the federal authorities for decency and redress. According to one longtime official, “the government was always the key. .. . The NAACP program is to obtain all rights to which we are entitled . . . [pushing for] changes in the courts without protests.”²⁴ The association remained focused on blacks’ gaining rights as Americans rather than asserting racial identity or engaging in protest. It pressed for the end of debt peonage and against repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment. Though the organization would later claim credit for the 1960s civil rights mobilization in the South, where the NAACP did have major branches, it long remained stodgily distant from such mass protests.²⁵ The NAACP gradually declined in influence until its use of the courts began to bear fruit in the 1950s.²⁶ A similar fate would befall the Urban League, focused not on court battles or on mass protest, but on easing the transition and encouraging the economic advance of blacks migrating North. As mass protest later emerged, those organizations not involved in such protest were eclipsed.

White America simply did not respond to black appeals for redress, which would have disrupted white unity encouraged by racial domination. Jim Crow expanded in the South, provoking many blacks to migrate North in search of opportunity, a process later crucial in undermining racial domination. While Northern blacks were not isolated in separate townships, as in South Africa, they were increasingly segregated in poor urban ghettoes.

With the NAACP remaining relatively elitist and focused on judicial redress, the major mass movement among blacks before the middle of the twentieth century was that led by Marcus Garvey. Advocating racial purity and nationalism, Garvey combined an urban and less accommodationist version of Booker T. Washington’s focus on economic advance with the inspirational message of a return to Africa. Among the new potential mass constituency of urban poor blacks migrating North, he found a receptive audience increasingly convinced that whites were not open to persuasion for redress, leaving blacks to fend for themselves. As Garvey concluded, “upon ourselves depends our own destiny.”²⁷ This view was reinforced by America’s spurning of black veterans after the First World War and by a series of riots in 1917–19, in which white workers objected to the rising use of black labor. These experiences and trends converged to boost the following of Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, which by 1923 had close to a million members. Meanwhile, an increasing sense of black self-empowerment also emerged out of the Harlem Renaissance and later the unionization of black Pullman railroad porters.

Though Garvey was imprisoned for tax violations and his movement collapsed, its legacy was to demonstrate that blacks could be mobilized on a mass level. By 1941, railroad porter unionist A. Philip Randolph would call for a blacks-only march on Washington, the mere threat of which was sufficient to force President Roosevelt to create the Committee on Fair Employment Practices, aimed at ending job discrimination in war industries. Blacks were still often excluded from social programs throughout the New Deal and endured continued disenfranchisement.

The sixty or more years after Reconstruction marked a period of early black attempts at ideological refinement and mobilization, but did not produce long standing mass protest for inclusion. According to Du Bois, the majority of blacks still in the South remained mired in hypocritical compromise.²⁸ With segregation entrenched, impoverished Southern blacks also were intimidated by mob violence. Northern blacks did engage in small-scale riots and even in the Garveyite mass movement. But Garveyite abandonment of an American-based identity remained largely a form of escape rather than a direct challenge. Blacks were spurned by white America, but still did not collectively assert themselves as a race demanding inclusion in the American nation.

The continued distinction between regional trends in itself demonstrates a lack of consolidated nationwide racial identity despite the efforts of leading intellectuals. The North–South divide, which had ripped apart the nation, had also divided blacks, whose experiences varied according to region. That division reflected the post-Reconstruction reassertion of states’ rights, with localized race policies providing no nationally unifying target for protest. No nationwide race policy was imposed, and little nation-wide racial identity or protest emerged. Federal toleration of local policies did not have the unifying effect of the South African central state’s acts of commission. As a result, for all the intellectual activity of the black elite, Garvey, the black porters’ union, and the threatened 1941 march, the period from 1877 to 1955 remained one of relative quiescence and division among black masses. Even mobilization during the 1920s was Northern and focused on separatism and a return to Africa, rather than inclusion and redress, and the planned 1941 march was abandoned through compromise. Meanwhile, the racial order was further consolidated in response to party pressure.

That this period did not produce nationwide mass mobilization for inclusion is not to suggest that nothing of significance occurred. For all of their disagreements, the efforts of Douglass, Washington, Du Bois, Garvey, and others provided a rich legacy of ideological identity formation. This legacy gradually helped to inspire further nationwide racial consciousness, as did rising industrialization, migration to the North, and urbanization. But structural conditions still did not provide the opportunity for the ideological spark to light the tinder of mass mobilization.

Throughout this period regional reconciliation and nation-state consolidation among whites proceeded. The tension between North and South abated, the economy grew, and centralized authority could be and was expanded as the disruption posed by regional conflict faded. By mid-twentieth century the central state had solidified sufficiently to have won two world wars and sustained the interventions of the New Deal. By the 1950s, the federal government had accumulated enough power to intervene again, this time in the defining bastion of regional autonomy, race relations. And African-Americans, conscious of this development, would press for just such an intervention. With the consolidation of a centralized instrument of social intervention, demands would rise for the use of this instrument to fulfill the aspirations of the previous generations.

Rising Black Protest Forces State Reforms

By mid-century, African-Americans were becoming more united, particularly in the South, where blacks were further solidified by long-entrenched social, religious, and economic ties, and by the inspiring efforts of leadership. Black density had fed white fears of political and economic competition, headed off by Democratic Party and local authority efforts at disenfranchisement and legal segregation, which in turn created further racial unity. As whites were unified in the “solid South” by racial domination, blacks increasingly consolidated as a self-conscious group ready to act for themselves. Black communities pressured local authorities, while national organizations pressed for intervention by federal authority consolidated in the New Deal and world wars. This combined pressure would force federal action against Jim Crow, first through the judiciary and then the executive branch. Such intervention capped the trend of growing central power over state and local government, but it was the growing protest that forced central power to bear. Consolidation of power and pressure for the application of that power converged, in an ongoing dynamic.

Racial domination diminished regional intrawhite conflict and bolstered nation-state consolidation, which in turn provided the necessary conditions for tremendous economic growth. Not only did such growth increase the power of the state, but it also enlarged the urbanized and educated black middle class, a trend later encouraged by state policies. Black family income was 41.1 percent of whites’ in 1940, but 61.2 percent by 1970. The number of blacks with white-collar jobs grew with the explosion of government employment and support services.²⁹ It is not surprising that such economic advance should have fed rising expectations, but it is also conceivable that rising class distinctions within the black community could have divided more than unified, as it had in the past.³⁰ Distinctions by class and color remained salient. But the emerging black middle class gradually took a leading role in asserting unified racial identity, with greater militancy evident at higher levels of job status and education.³¹

Du Bois’s expectations for activist leadership from the talented tenth proved prescient, though such engagement emerged only once the black elite actually grew closer to that proportion. When the civil rights movement developed in the 1950s and 1960s, it was led primarily by the black middle class, much as earlier attempts at mobilization had been led by an elite.³² Relative economic security and growing size provided the emergent class with the confidence and resources to pursue such political mobilization, but it does not explain why the class did so.

Racial domination and discrimination forced the black middle class to identify itself racially across class, and to see its fate tied to that larger identity. As Congressman Charles Rangel of New York puts it, “segregation and racism caused the black middle class to stay with blacks,” and quantitative studies confirm that blacks remained uniquely isolated together, regardless of income.³³ Prominent legal segregation in the South and discrimination in the North defined all blacks and forced them together, forging collective identity in the most practical manner. “As long as segregation was the law, it didn’t make any difference if you had gone to Harvard Law.. .. No matter how rich you were, you had to live in a certain section.”³⁴ Whereas whites were divided socially and politically by class and ethnicity, blacks had no alternative but to increasingly focus on race, the official category that bound them together and down. Middle-class blacks were acutely aware that their opportunities were limited by their race, making them all the more conscious of their collective responsibility and peer pressure. Even better-off blacks could not escape the logic that “black people have not suffered as individuals but as members of a group; therefore, their liberation lies in group action.”³⁵ The resources gained from economic advance would be applied to collective action.

Enforced racial domination inescapably imposed race as the overriding category of identity and mobilization for blacks, while segregation itself helped to create a black middle class whose businesses benefited from a captive black market.³⁶ Middle-class blacks then began to focus their concern and action on the continued constraints of racial domination from which their money provided little escape.³⁷ This was particularly true for small black business people, preachers, and undertakers, for whom segregation had provided some protection from white sanctions. These entrepreneurs and professionals serving blacks were more interested in avoiding group ostracism they might face if they ignored their fellows than they feared whites who already segregated them. By comparison, teachers and others employed by public authorities remained susceptible to economic pressures from whites, and tended to avoid confrontation.³⁸

Given imposed racial unity, the rise of the black middle class reinforced the indigenous black organizations that would provide the foundation for protests, initially in the South. Economic advance brought together larger numbers of relatively well-off blacks within churches, universities, and local NAACP branches, which would become the locus and initiators of mobilization. Churches in particular would shift from conservative bulwarks of the status quo to sites of movement organization.³⁹ This shift not only reflected greater economic security, but the greater autonomy enjoyed by the black middle class and their organizations. According to Andrew Young, “with the second or third generation out of poverty, they were secure enough [to provide] leadership . . . independent of the white power structure.”⁴⁰

That the emergence of mass mobilization would occur first in the South is not surprising. That region was where black social networks were entrenched and where formal segregation provided for autonomous organizational centers, unified blacks most strongly, and offered a clear target for protest. The South was “where blacks were, Jim Crow country, the heart of the enemy,” recalls George Houser. “There were plenty of issues in the North, but the thing that attracted most attention was the petty apartheid in the South.”⁴¹ Thus, while the absence of nationwide Jim Crow still impeded nationwide racial unity and protest, its regional imposition would reinforce unity and protest in the South, developed through social networks and cultural ties. Localized state policy provoked initially localized response.

If Jim Crow reinforced the potential for Southern mobilization, the image of a more liberal North and the increased central authority in Washington provided another crucial ingredient for the protests to come. Southern black protest would not only be the result of the push of unifying local oppression and black solidarity, but the pull of protection and vindication that might be called upon from the North. Southern blacks recalled that the North, at least for a time, had imposed abolition and Reconstruction on the South. Indeed, the New Deal signaled that the federal government and the Democratic Party in particular favored social intervention that might yet be directed toward blacks.⁴²

The Allies’ antiracist rhetoric in the Second World War further encouraged blacks, as it had in South Africa. African-Americans were inspired to a greater hopefulness and national loyalty that largely eclipsed the separatist nationalism that had emerged during the decades of post-Reconstruction abandonment. Veterans in particular returned from war expecting their national service and loyalty to be rewarded. “Black men had been in the . .. fight against Hitler’s racial theories,” says James Farmer. “Fighting against racism over yonder [made them] more sensitized about racism at home. They observed racism here as quite alive and it hit them harder than ever before because they knew their buddies had died.”⁴³ It was not uncommon for black veterans to encounter segregation upon their return home with a new sense of shock. Percy Sutton recalls, “I was thrown off a train in my captain’s uniform. It was a castration I remembered for a long time. I fought a war to stop that.”⁴⁴ Black veterans responded with occasional small protests.⁴⁵

Rising expectations of change helped to move Du Bois’s dilemma of the double self to greater resolution. Blacks recognized their racial distinction – even the middle class could not escape. But they had also served their country. If America would reward such service and fulfill its promise of equal rights, then blacks could be loyal both to race and country. The trick was to force such fulfillment, and only the North was likely to help, if not out of generosity toward blacks then to resolve the North’s own ambivalence between allowing for regional autonomy and encouraging national consolidation. Many blacks assumed that if only the North were forcibly reminded of the conditions in the South, they would move to correct it, for the South was part of the same country.⁴⁶ Blacks expected the circle to turn. If the South had forced the North to withdraw and allow for Jim Crow, the North might now be ready to revisit the issue and fulfill its earlier promise.

In 1954, Washington sent the clearest signal since Reconstruction that it was again ready to impose reforms on the South. Where party politicians had prevaricated, nine white justices of the U.S. Supreme Court spoke as one, finding in Brown v. Board of Education for the plaintiff that the Constitution demanded the end of segregation in the crucial area of public education. Constitutional vagueness was replaced by constitutional imperative, in effect nullifying the deal of 1877. Federal authority would no longer fully appease the South in allowing for Jim Crow.

Brown v. Board of Education did not mark the first time the Court had moved against segregation, but it was the strongest such decision to date. Nor was the Brown order for school desegregation quickly or uniformly implemented. Indeed, the decision provoked considerable moves and countermoves, including the formation of the first local anti-integration White Citizens’ Council two weeks later, the segregationist Congressional Southern Manifesto the next year, and local black efforts to force implementation.⁴⁷ But such contestation only reaffirmed that the battle had been joined. Washington had effectively promised a second Reconstruction, again provoking Southern white resistance that had defeated the first attempt a century earlier. But Brown would help spark a movement that this time would counter white Southern resistance to reform and reconfigure America’s racial order, thereby reordering American politics as well.

The Brown decision signaled federal receptivity to extending civil rights, inviting mobilization. In 1955, blacks in Montgomery, Alabama, were well prepared to take up the invitation, for local authorities had already proved somewhat open to reform, and the local bus company was vulnerable to the economic pressure of a boycott by its urban black constituency.⁴⁸ A strong base of church organizations proved crucial in uniting black elites, not bus riders themselves, to support poorer members of their congregations, particularly a cohort of courageous women who were.⁴⁹ Indeed, the Church was crucial as then the only institution “we controlled.”⁵⁰ It also provided legitimacy during the McCarthy era, for it was difficult to accuse the Church of Communism.⁵¹ Further cover was provided by the Brown decision itself, as suggested by the more modest demands and result of a 1953 bus boycott in Baton Rouge before that decision. In his first boycott speech in Montgomery, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., made explicit reference to this effect of the Brown decision: “if we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong.”⁵²

The Montgomery bus boycott was not the spontaneous event of later myth. Nor was it, as Andrew Young argues, “the bus driver [who] started the movement,” for segregated seating had been long practiced.⁵³ When Rosa Parks decided not to give up her seat for a white, she knew what she was doing, having been trained in civil disobedience at the Highlander School and having long served as an NAACP official.⁵⁴ Still, the boycott began with modest aims. “At the outset, it was just for more equal treatment,” James Farmer says. “They demanded more courteous treatment, hiring more black drivers, seating by first come first served, but not for desegregation.”⁵⁵ The widespread observance of the boycott encouraged its participants to push their leaders to demand more, and after more than a year the buses were desegregated. Popular protest against daily indignity, encouraged by Brown, had advanced the impetus for integration beyond courts and classrooms.

Montgomery provided not only a signal victory, but also a new leader. At the first boycott meeting, as James Farmer remembers it, local civic leader E. D. Nixon charged, “you preachers are all cowards.” Martin Luther King replied, “Nobody calls me a coward,” to which Nixon responded, “I nominate Dr. King as president.”⁵⁶ King was perfect for the role. Scion of a leading family, he had recently arrived at the pulpit, independent of both white patronage and prior intrablack competition. His Gandhi-inspired faith in nonviolence resonated:

His was a heady gospel. Though you hit us, we will love you and we will wear you down with our capacity to suffer. These were beautifully crazy words that moved them, especially whites. He was plucking the tenets of faith in which we all believe – the Judeo-Christian and American faith.⁵⁷

King was a true believer in the promise of the religiously inspired American dream, who eloquently could and did demand that it be fulfilled for blacks with full citizenship. He used the promise of federal intervention to demand not that the social order be overthrown but that it live up to its ideals of incorporation.⁵⁸ He understood the federal dynamic and played on it, inviting local Southern repression that would provoke federal action and Northern white liberal support.⁵⁹ King remained convinced that gaining concessions from the federal government was possible and essential for the movement’s success in overcoming Southern black fear. When this dynamic required him to engage in sit-ins or other forms of direct action himself, he often did so reluctantly. He encouraged black protest and demanded action from a receptive federal government that, by acting, could thereby avoid an explosion.

King and his movement sought to speak to all of America, and the mass media now made this possible. As one activist noted later, the civil rights movement was “the first social movement on television. .. . After a while we saw how to use TV [so that] people saw the reality.”⁶⁰ Former Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall attests to the impact of the media: “Television and communications technology educated the rest of the country to what was an intolerable situation. This is an important part of what makes the political system run.”⁶¹ As an early example, the 1955 lynching of young Emmett Till was unlike any previous lynching in the national publicity it received. According to activist Bob Mants in Alabama’s Lowndes County, “I remember seeing the pictures of [Till’s] battered body... . [It] put spark to the fire.”⁶² The media thus further consolidated black unity and national attention, while simultaneously inspiring white liberal support and encouraging federal intervention.

In a nation more self-consciously unified by the media, America’s “can do” sensibility informed a popular response that such injustice had to be and could be redressed anywhere. “When fire hoses were brought down to a church, that was put on TV. Middle-class whites were incensed – they can’t do that in a church.”⁶³ But this tactic also brought its own problem of escalation, or “what to do for an encore,” as James Farmer explains. “The second protest always had to exceed the first to get more attention, otherwise the press will yawn and if so, the nation yawns.”⁶⁴

In the aftermath of Montgomery, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), founded in 1957 as a church-based coalition, struggled to find an encore to the bus boycott, amid ongoing local efforts. Black college students then took the initiative through the use of peaceful sit-ins, beginning in Greensboro in 1960.⁶⁵ Later that year, they formed the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), with SCLC support and the prominent advice of activist Ella Baker. Women remained an important movement constituency.

Though most of the students were close to middle-class status, they identified themselves racially (as would those in South Africa’s Black Consciousness movement), because of the direct experience of legal segregation. Indeed, these students sought to distance themselves from middle-class concerns, postponing their own studies, receiving little funding or reimbursement, by which they feared they would be corrupted, and purposefully adopting an anti-organization and nonhierarchical structure.⁶⁶ To further identify themselves with the general black public they later moved the SNCC national office to Mississippi, and began to focus on rural community organizing, spreading the doctrine of black solidarity and protest.⁶⁷ According to activist Bob Mants:

By 1964–65, we left the urban centers and had gone to the field where racism was more overt. Lots of idealism was left at the lunch counters. In the bayou and the Black Belt, it was a different ball game – hardball. Where there was more violence, there was more movement. Violence organized people, gave people more solidarity. It became a tidal wave.⁶⁸

Even in such relatively low-profile local activities, SNCC still followed King’s basic strategy of provoking federal intervention against localized repression.⁶⁹ Reflecting in 1966 on the early 1960s, SNCC activists acknowledged that “it was assumed that if the country was informed, there would follow certain reforms,” reflecting an ongoing “confidence in the government.”⁷⁰

Inspired by the students, SCLC returned to direct action, repeatedly seeking to provoke local repression, invoke federal intervention, and negotiate redress. When officials in Albany, Georgia, failed to respond to protests with repression, publicity wavered and the federal government failed to intervene. The lesson learned was to pick a protest cite where the authorities would respond violently, preferably in front of cameras. Birmingham, Alabama, with its vociferously segregationist and states’-rights Sheriff Bull Connor, was perfect for furnishing an opportunity for the movement to dramatize itself before the national media.⁷¹ Connor responded with dogs and hoses, provoking national dismay and federal intervention. Where Albany had been a failure, Birmingham was “the pinnacle,” says James Farmer. “If the object was to change the mind of a nation and a president, then it was a great success. The public came to our side.”⁷²

Of course, the dynamics of mobilization success were not always so straightforward. Segregationists also learned the lesson of Birmingham. King himself acknowledged that after that episode there would be “fewer overt acts to aid us; naive targets . . . will be harder to find.”⁷³ Some potential targets were also purposefully avoided; for instance, “the black power structure” of Atlanta, “closely aligned with whites and not wanting a confrontation,” was able to “call the leadership together to get King not to mess with Atlanta.”⁷⁴ According to activist Hosea Williams, “if there was a town King wanted to start a movement in, it was Atlanta, but every time he started to, the white folks would get Daddy King and the folks Martin respected to stop him.”⁷⁵ SCLC’s link to the black middle class thus served as a brake as well as a resource.

The other main organization of the movement was the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), founded in 1942 under white leadership and later led by James Farmer. Early CORE protests failed to take off, for “there was nothing to back us up.” But after 1960, CORE also learned to target its actions to provoke federal intervention.⁷⁶ In addition to sit-ins and marches, CORE engineered the Freedom Rides, which used integrated buses to provoke unrest throughout the South. In one instance, mobs beating Freedom Riders were watched with approval by the Alabama attorney general, provoking the federal attorney general, Robert Kennedy, to intervene, a dramatic example of the dynamic of states’-rights repression prompting federal intervention.⁷⁷ Wary of the explosive nature of this dynamic, federal authorities sought to divert CORE and the other leading organizations from protest into more manageable voter education and registration drives, but the protests continued alongside the voting projects.⁷⁸

By 1963, civil rights protests had emerged as the most pressing issue on the political agenda, with protests challenging white national unity and provoking an official response. On 11 June 1963, despite Southern resistance, President Kennedy abandoned his earlier reluctance to embrace the issue, arguing in a nationally broadcast speech that “one hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. . .. Now the time has come for this nation to fulfill its promise.”⁷⁹ As if in rebuke to such imposition from Washington, that same night the NAACP’s Medgar Evers was killed in Mississippi.

Two months after Kennedy’s June speech, the large-scale March on Washington culminating at the Lincoln Memorial riveted the nation. Martin Luther King’s soaring “I have a dream” speech pressed for the dismantling of Jim Crow. But the march also signaled a rise in black expectations. SNCC’s John Lewis used the occasion to goad Kennedy by asking “which side is the federal government on?” – explicitly invoking the issue of the division of power in which race had long been enmeshed.⁸⁰ Lewis was pressured against being even more confrontational in a last-minute meeting held in the Lincoln Memorial itself. The statue of the Great Emancipator silently watched over this debate and the ensuing speeches in a moment filled with historical poignancy. This transitional moment was further symbolized by the death of W. E. B. Du Bois, news of which came the very morning of the march. The architect of a civil rights movement that only emerged at the end of his lifetime passed on just as the movement came to fruition.

Under continued pressure, President Lyndon Johnson advocated further reforms, including the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act. In 1965 he declared that “nothing is of greater significance to the welfare and vitality of this nation than the movement to secure equal rights for Negro Americans.”⁸¹ The architect of the Great Society understood that federal authority had to be exerted over the defining issue embedded in states’ rights, that of race, if the nation-state and his centralized social policy were to be consolidated and further disruption avoided. When a controversial march in Selma, Alabama, was attacked by local police, Congress was provoked to pass the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which led to massive black voter registration.⁸² Not coincidentally then, the high-water mark of centralized state authority and power came together with the peak of protest demanding federal civil rights intervention in 1964 and 1965. Jim Crow was finally legally dead.

A century after the Civil War, the issues that had torn apart the Union finally seemed to be reaching a resolution. The South still resisted federal imposition of civil rights – for instance with a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan – but such sectionalism and mob action no longer threatened to destroy the Union. The South had been appeased with Jim Crow and increasingly reintegrated into the nation-state. Racial domination had served the purpose of regional reconciliation. By the mid-twentieth century, that central authority was strong enough to turn its power back to race relations, the issue on which its very growth had been forged by earlier avoidance of intervention. Racial domination had allowed Washington to gain enough power to challenge that very racial order and thereby finally consolidate central control.

Of course, describing federally enforced reforms of Jim Crow as simply the culmination of a dynamic between states and the center ignores the popular pressures that catalyzed this outcome. Politicians had long been accustomed to appeasing sectional animosity by allowing for Jim Crow. While this policy allowed for the gradual incorporation of the South, it also had gradually further solidified prior racial identity and new forms of opposition, at least in the South where Jim Crow was strongest. Politicians’ frame of reference was shaken by popular pressure posing a new threat to stability, if not to the state’s coercive power. According to longtime activist Willie Ricks, speaking with some exaggeration, “institutions opened up and passed rules of fairness [only] when [the movement] became a physical threat to the United States government.”⁸³ Even as sympathetic a president as Lyndon Johnson had to be pressed to use federal power to fulfill the promise of reform. According to Andrew Young, “LBJ told us he could not give us voting rights in 1964, so we created a crisis.”⁸⁴ That crisis of mass mobilization forced Johnson to give what he had thought he could not. Southern resistance was overcome; racial domination unifying whites had been met with rising black protest, forcing the end of legal Jim Crow. The circle closed.

National Black Protest and White Backlash

The demise of Jim Crow did not end inequality nor foreclose black protest, which then shifted North, where blacks inspired by the traditions of Du Bois and Garvey had been increasing their numbers as they migrated from the South. Pervasive discrimination and urban segregation concentrated and united blacks, whose cross-class mobilization was further inspired by Southern activism. As the central state consolidated its authority and the national media spread images of discrimination, nationwide black identity and protest emerged more forcefully. Protest in the North now exploded, taking a different form than in the South, reflecting continued regional differences of experience, institutions, and culture. Northern blacks also lived in a society in which race was entrenched, and in a state where racial domination had been regionally enforced, but without legal Jim Crow comparable to the South. Northern blacks had no official racial order enforcing their unity. In a sense, they found themselves in a situation similar to Afro-Brazilians, in an official racial democracy of strong, informal discrimination. As a result, Northern black activism tended to focus on separatist identity building to challenge liberal images of inclusion. In a vicious cycle, riots then discouraged white support for reform, provoking greater black militance. Whereas the federal government had earlier acted against the violence of Southern segregationists, it now shifted to act against black violence.

The federal embrace of civil rights had the unintended effect of reinforcing an emerging spread of the movement to the North. When President Johnson declared to Congress in 1965 that there was “no Negro problem . . . only an American problem,” he implicitly nationalized the movement.⁸⁵ Activists had already begun to shift their focus accordingly, for once “segregation had fallen, now you see the system as not just about Southern segregation, but also more national.”⁸⁶ Indeed, democratic inclusion with the end of Jim Crow did not bring an end to discrimination and black economic deprivation nationally. This further convinced many that racism was a national attitude reflected also in Northern black urban poverty, which the civil rights movement had not yet begun to address.⁸⁷

That race was an issue outside of the South was not news to Northern blacks. But the explosion of the civil rights movement in the South both raised expectations of change in the North and inspired Northern black mobilization. In the words of activists: “People in the North saw us being beaten up,”⁸⁸ and as “heroic activity was seen on TV [involving] people who look like them being brutalized, . . . in the North they also wanted to struggle.”⁸⁹

Between 1940 and 1970, five million blacks had migrated North in search of opportunities, a prominent example of black agency predating mass protest.⁹⁰ This migration, made possible by the preservation of a united polity allowing for racial domination, also diminished the sectional focus of race issues, creating a more nationwide racial identity. Northern blacks retained links with their Southern roots, which added to the diffusion: “We went South every summer. We felt connected. . .. People were coming up from the South and telling stories. . . . [Those] Southern experiences enraged us” (Barbara Omalade).⁹¹ Northern blacks responded by saying “let’s check out this civil rights stuff and began attending CORE and SNCC meetings and listening” (James Farmer).⁹²

The then-established civil rights organizations were primed to take up the challenge in the North. SNCC’s 1964 Freedom Summer project had brought South a thousand volunteers, who returned North with a newly radicalized vision reinforced by the murder of three volunteers, two whites and a black. That radicalization was reinforced by the experience of the activists’ Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s (MFDP) failed attempt to be recognized at the Democratic Party convention of 1964. “Disappointed and betrayed” by their abandonment by Johnson and the Democratic Party, SNCC concluded that their previous success at gaining federal support had been “played out.”⁹³ Rising Southern Congressional resistance to civil rights reaffirmed this conclusion.⁹⁴ Activists still hoped that protests in the North would force federal support as they had in the South, but they understood, in Marvin Rich’s words, that “the struggle in the North would be more complex. The cities were too big for community organizing.”⁹⁵ The hypocrisy of Northern liberalism – the absence of legal Jim Crow amid pervasive informal discrimination – also made it “difficult to unite the forces and consolidate the attack upon so elusive a target... . [We were] unable to zero in on a clearly defined enemy.... In the North, the enemy was diffuse, scattered, and often concealed” (James Farmer).⁹⁶

Martin Luther King’s 1966 Chicago campaign was the most notable attempt by the Southern-based civil rights organizations to shift their operations North. In the absence of explicit formal segregation as a target of mobilization, King focused on economic opportunity.⁹⁷ The difference of concerns from the South was marked. As one Northern activist, Livingston Wingate, noted, “the black cat in [the North] wasn’t worried about no damn bus – he’d been riding the bus for fifty years. What he didn’t have was the fare.”⁹⁸ But poverty and exploitation had no single cause that could be easily dramatized in a way comparable to the legal inequities of Jim Crow. Informal residential segregation in Chicago limited blacks, but was not legally codified.⁹⁹ And local authorities under Mayor Richard J. Daley were then unlikely to be provoked into serving as advertisements for mobilization comparable to Bull Connor.¹⁰⁰ Veteran activists warned King not to try a Chicago campaign, and when that campaign faltered for lack of a clear focus or victory, King’s allies advised, “For God’s sake, Martin, this is getting you nowhere! Settle for something” (Willie Ricks).¹⁰¹ But there was no one thing to settle for, and no external intervention forthcoming.

In the absence of Jim Crow or illegal activity by local officials, the federal government initially saw little or no role in Northern race issues. Disputes over class and poverty were not embedded in the balance of federal power as was the South’s official racial segregation. Activists complained that federal officials told them that the government was very limited in what it could do.¹⁰² The Supreme Court had mandated an end to legal segregation, which the executive could enforce. But there was no comparable mandate for equal economic outcomes, both more difficult to ensure and inconsistent with liberal images of meritocracy. This difference left the movement unable to engage the same dynamic of federal intervention upon which its Southern success had depended.

By 1965, Johnson had apparently concluded that the movement had achieved its aims. Further pressure seemed to Johnson ungrateful and likely to feed a countershift among whites to the right.¹⁰³ Even within the movement itself, A. Philip Randolph concluded that “the civil rights revolution has been caught up in a crisis of victory,” and activist James Bevel even declared that “there is no more civil rights movement. President Johnson signed it out of existence when he signed the voting-rights bill.”¹⁰⁴ Other activists did not see it that way and still held expectations of greater victories, amid declining white and federal support that might have provided such victories.¹⁰⁵

Having declared victory over Jim Crow and consolidated its power, the federal government lost interest in civil rights. The Democratic Party, having already lost Southern white support, saw no advantage in now antagonizing Northern whites. Instead, Johnson shifted his focus from civil rights to the Great Society, which many whites opposed as a veiled attempt to further help blacks. Later Johnson even lost interest in his poverty programs, shifting his focus to the Vietnam War. Covert surveillance by the FBI – long noted for its opposition to the civil rights movement – fed Johnson’s growing resentment and distrust of the movement.¹⁰⁶

Stokely Carmichael, among others, argued that the increasing fervor of the movement was unfairly blamed for the backlash of federal withdrawal, but it did contribute.¹⁰⁷ The movement’s disillusionment and pique exacerbated Washington’s withdrawal. Activists spurned Johnson’s 1965 conference on civil rights, criticized his appointment of Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court, and even launched personal attacks on the wedding of the president’s daughter.¹⁰⁸ By 1966, many in the movement had lost all hope of federal support, concluding with SNCC staff conferees that whereas “we asked the federal government to hand us solutions . . . [now] we see the government willing to perpetuate white supremacy.”¹⁰⁹ Jim Crow was dead, but racism and socioeconomic discrimination beneficial to whites remained significantly unchanged by public intervention.

Much as the first Reconstruction had been reversed by Redemption, the second Reconstruction led to a second Redemption amid demands for an end to civil rights reforms. By 1964, Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater was attacking federal intervention and civil rights to boost his campaign. In the South, George Wallace and other white politicians sought to benefit from white resentment at federal intervention, using attacks on Washington and on black protest, despite the rise in black voting.¹¹⁰ Northerners joined Southerners in this backlash, in part reflecting dismay over the movement’s unwillingness to accept victory and its incursions into the North, where most whites believed there was no problem. According to Percy Sutton, “we began to step on the toes of some of our friends who had been with us. It was frightening to whites when we began challenging where we lived” in the North.¹¹¹ Or as Hosea Williams explains in retrospect, “most of our support had come from the North. If we went there, I knew they would defect.”¹¹²

White backlash, the federal government’s inability or unwillingness to redress Northern discrimination, and rising black Northern mobilization all contributed to a volatile mix. Riots exploded in New York in 1964, eighteen days after Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, as if to signal that such legislative redress was insufficient to meet Northern expectations and needs. Shortly after the Selma march in 1965, the Watts area of Los Angeles rioted, leaving thirty-six dead. In 1967, Newark, Detroit, and thirty-eight other cities erupted in violent riots, leaving eighty-four dead. Within three days of King’s assassination in 1968, 125 cities and towns burned.¹¹³ Between 1964 and 1969 there were more than four hundred “disorders"; the contagion spread from larger cities to smaller and diminished only after potential centers of unrest had already burned and police had increased patrols and curfews.¹¹⁴

The direct causes of the riots are difficult to specify. Certainly, experiences of discrimination, police brutality, unemployment, inadequate housing, and the like contributed to their potential. But such conditions were all too common in Northern ghettoes, and the actual participants in riots were generally not the most economically underprivileged members of the community.¹¹⁵

The context of the civil rights movement may have been more directly relevant. Roger Wilkins argues that “the riots emerged out of seeing [what was happening in] the South. Spirits were stirred, [while] nothing was happening with them” in the North.¹¹⁶ Northern blacks “saw changes in the South, they saw the president signing the Civil Rights Act with all the Negro leaders in attendance, but they saw no changes in their own lives.”¹¹⁷ Such disillusion reflected both federal inaction in the North and a rising nationalization of black identity and aspirations following migration north and spreading images of activism. These circumstances did not provoke riots in the South, where the recent end of Jim Crow was widely celebrated by blacks. And in the North, recent migrants seeing greater opportunity than in the South were themselves less prone to riot. But more established Northern blacks were angered by the lack of opportunity compared to whites and retained ties to the South that may have inspired a desire to somehow associate themselves with the mobilization in the South.¹¹⁸ Bob Mants argues that there was a direct relationship: “Every time there was a major demonstration in the South, there was a sporadic reaction in the North. In the North, they saw their kinfolk in the South getting beaten. There were Southern roots to the urban riots. It was the violence in the marches they saw that united people in a common belief.”¹¹⁹ Given the time lag between Southern marches and most Northern riots, such a direct causation seems overdrawn, but the riots did reflect national developments as much as local conditions. Southern protest had inspired Northern activism, which ultimately expressed itself in riots.

Though blacks in the North were less subject to Jim Crow, they had clearly come to identify themselves racially, across regions, with the civil rights movement. They lacked an organized movement themselves, in the absence of an explicit legal target and federal response which had strengthened organizations in the South.¹²⁰ The absence of direct federal intervention in the North against a diffuse target of poverty raised resentment among a black populace that now expected such intervention and did not appreciate its limits. According to Martin Luther King, “our summers of riots have been caused by our winters of delay.”¹²¹ But what King hopefully saw as delay reflected what others saw as a more fundamental unwillingness and inability to intervene. And in the absence of such intervention, riots were an assertion of black identity and anger, with surveys suggesting that the majority of Northern blacks felt greater racial pride as a consequence of the riots¹²² The riots indicated and reinforced that racial identity and mobilization had become national in scope.

In their own way, the riots were akin to the Southern movement as an appeal for federal intervention, though they elicited a different response. Washington had intervened against the violence inflicted by Southern Jim Crow officials, in keeping with the fundamental imperative to restore peace. But mass violence in the North provoked intervention against blacks there and their challenge to social peace. Furthermore, the riots undermined the majority’s perception of the movement’s legitimacy. Whereas most blacks viewed the riots as spontaneous protests against real grievances, most whites viewed them as conspiratorial or criminal acts.¹²³ And federal officials now expressed concern that earlier reforms and social programs had raised unreasonable expectations. They were eager not to appear to reward the rioters with further such programs, though some increased social spending from Washington was targeted at optimistically designated “model cities.”¹²⁴ But by then the Great Society, which had raised expectations of change, was already losing funds to the Vietnam War effort.

The most direct outcome of white backlash against rising black militancy was to help elect a Republican president. With white resentment strong, Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” of appeasement and a commitment to restore “law and order” helped him to capture the White House in 1968. Voted in by Southern whites abandoning the Democrats and by Northern conservatives, Nixon did not owe anything to the black community.¹²⁵ His later cuts in civil rights implementation programs, including his own “Philadelphia Plan,” underlined this lack of electoral debt.¹²⁶ Expenditures were shifted from social programs to law enforcement.¹²⁷ Furthermore, Nixon’s policy of “benign neglect” toward blacks and his encouragement of black capitalism as an alternative to protest encouraged a newly resurgent black nationalism.¹²⁸ Having previously appealed to America, they now questioned America. By the mid- to late 1960s, many activists had concluded that white America was again more concerned with domestic peace than racial justice. They saw what was described as a backlash as actually representing a racist status quo. Frustrated by the federal government’s reluctance to interfere in the North, they increasingly blamed “the system” for continued inequality and injustice, concluding that “the federal government ain’t nothing but a white man.”¹²⁹ And so they turned to the tradition of separatism, using their exit from the mainstream as a shock tactic designed to gain attention and to force further redress from a system that had spurned them.¹³⁰

The rise of black nationalism not only reflected a shift of the dynamic between the movement and federal government, but also a regional realignment within the movement itself. Northern blacks had become further engaged in the movement and had outpaced the South in protests by the latter half of the 1960s.¹³¹ They were less concerned with ending formal segregation than with achieving greater economic opportunity, which was being blocked by informal discrimination. Federal legislation had made little impact on their lives. Localized boycotts and sit-ins were unlikely to result in major structural change. And so Northern blacks instead turned from King’s approach to assertions of separatism to gain political and economic power. Such Black Power had its roots in Southern experiences. According to Bob Mants, Lowndes County, Alabama, “taught us Black Power,” for it was there that SNCC activists listened to rural blacks’ suspicions of whites and launched the Black Panther Party. In Mississippi the Black Power slogan was first used on a march in 1966, but it soon came to be seen as a Northern development, signaling both some regional convergence and the rise of Northern activism.¹³²

Class realignment coincided with regional shift. The Southern civil rights movement had fundamentally involved the black middle class and had benefited them most directly, for instance with the provision of government jobs. But this relatively better-off group in the North was pushed to reaffirm its solidarity with the larger group of black poor who had not so benefited.¹³³ Activists described Black Power as “a call to the black middle class to come home . . . so that all blacks, haves and have nots, can have more.”¹³⁴ Black Power was both ennobling and empowering in providing a link to the black middle class, unifying Northern blacks on the basis of racial identity and their common experience of discrimination.

The focus on encouraging racial identity was at the core of the Black Power movement. The most notable symbolic move was the expression of positive racial identity, which did not require white support. Seeking a form of less tangible but real psychological power, the Black Power movement focused on black self-identification.¹³⁵ In part, this assertion of identity was cultural, for instance in the wearing of dashikis and Afro hairstyles. Black nationalists claimed a tie to Africa, then itself proclaiming independence.¹³⁶ Beyond cultural separatism, some advocates of Black Power stressed the need for self-determination, or for separate black capitalism, ironically in the tradition of Booker T. Washington.¹³⁷ Alternatively, Black Power was described as consistent with American pluralism, following the logic that “before a group can enter the open society, it must first close ranks. . . . What we have needed most has been the opportunity for the whole group.”¹³⁸

Though Black Power remained vaguely defined, focusing on varying mixes of culture, politics, and economics, it was unified by a focus on asserting a positive racial identity, with strategy adjusted accordingly. Symbolizing this focus was the replacement of the old term “Negro” with “black,” embracing unity based on physical traits and shared experience. Integration as a demand or tactic was rejected as a middle-class preoccupation unlikely to meet the needs of the majority of blacks and destructive of black pride and independence.¹³⁹ Consistent with this reasoning, and similar to South Africa’s Black Consciousness movement, whites were increasingly excluded from the movement, in part to “convey the revolutionary idea . .. that black people are able to do things themselves.”¹⁴⁰ As the movement shifted from demands of concrete redress through appeals to allies to a focus on black identity, whites were no longer needed or wanted. And the shift away from integration was consistent with a diminished strategic commitment to nonviolence, which had so appealed to whites. Many blacks had become frustrated at seeing peaceful protests violently repressed, and had become more willing to countenance or use counterviolence.¹⁴¹ And as the Black Power movement was eager to embrace the urban riots as expressions of racial identity, for some “Black Power became the cry for burning down the cities.”¹⁴² In the tradition of Algerian revolutionary writer Franz Fanon, violence was seen as a positive expression of identity.

For all of its ideological and strategic distinctiveness, there remains some dispute as to how widespread or significant the Black Power movement was. According to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “there was no transition to Black Power, other than among a few elites and in the media.”¹⁴³ Kwame Ture (aka Stokely Carmichael) counters that whites “always pretend that the nationalist tendency doesn’t exist,” and former activist Marvin Rich warns against “denigrating Black Power [proponents] for being few.”¹⁴⁴ Polls suggest that in 1966 black nationalist leaders such as Carmichael enjoyed a 19 percent popularity rating among blacks. In 1970, 42.2 percent of blacks viewed Black Power favorably, compared to only 10.7 percent of whites.¹⁴⁵ Before his death, King himself acknowledged the need to increase racial pride and acknowledged the rising influence of Black Power while at the same time criticizing it.¹⁴⁶

Perhaps the best indicator of the significance of Black Power was its rising influence within existing movement organizations, and the rise of new leaders and groups associated with its ideology. As early as 1965, SNCC’s John Lewis argued for a black-controlled movement.¹⁴⁷ The next year, Stokely Carmichael became chair of SNCC, arguing for a shift from nonviolent fieldwork to more assertive black identity as a means to positive racial identification. Carmichael sought to awaken “the black community to an awareness of blackness, that is black consciousness,” and to unify the black bourgeoisie and youth.¹⁴⁸ White participants were seen as an impediment to this assertion of black identity, and so their SNCC membership was first limited in 1964, and then prohibited in 1967.¹⁴⁹ A similar development occurred within CORE, which by 1964 had begun to focus more on ideology than a concrete program, and insisted on having a black chair. Eventually CORE adopted enough Black Power rhetoric to lead most whites to drift away without being formally expelled.¹⁵⁰

The shift to Black Power was also demonstrated by the emergence of new organizations, most notably the Black Panthers.¹⁵¹ Founded in 1966 in the 85 percent black Lowndes County, Alabama, and then spreading to the north and California, the Panthers rejected “the degrading begging which has gone hand in hand with the civil rights movement when it has been subordinated to white liberalism.”¹⁵² At the same time it effectively discouraged white membership, while still receiving liberal white donations. And while Panthers dismissed nonviolence, even openly carrying guns, this show of force was more psychological assertion and media attention grabber than a viable option of armed resistance.¹⁵³ Even their organized provision of community service was designed primarily as a propaganda tool to win trust and prove their competency, again similar to the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa.¹⁵⁴ In 1968, the Panthers had 5,000 members, but by the following year it was largely in disarray, the result of internal divisions, ideological disputes and power struggles encouraged by law enforcement officials’ surreptitious efforts to sow discord and direct police assaults.¹⁵⁵

The Panthers, like many other black nationalists, were inspired by the words and life of Malcolm X, whose original base was the rising Nation of Islam separatist religious movement.¹⁵⁶ Informed by the Black Muslim ideology, Malcolm was an early proponent of ending black self-hate through a positive assertion of an inclusive black racial identity and self-determination. His and the Nation of Islam’s stance was an American version of Fanon and a precursor of South Africa’s Black Consciousness movement. This philosophy offered a prototype of Black Power, advocating a return to Africa more as a philosophical assertion than as a practical proposal. And Malcolm purposefully used separatist militancy to attract media attention to spread his message.¹⁵⁷ Spreading that message of identity was his aim, not the immediate results pursued by the civil rights leadership. Still, Malcolm’s militancy may have strengthened the bargaining position of more moderate leaders in a radical flanking effect.¹⁵⁸ But whereas King had appealed to and believed in the American dream, Malcolm saw America as a nightmare from which he sought to awaken both blacks and whites.¹⁵⁹ Though this basic difference remained, by the end of his life Malcolm began to shift toward a more programmatic focus and an alliance with King and civil rights organizations such as SNCC, after being expelled by the Nation of Islam for violating orders.¹⁶⁰ But the prospect for convergence was lost with the assassinations that followed. Malcolm was killed by Black Muslims in 1965, before the white backlash and the height of the movement that evoked his memory.

Though the movements symbolized by King and Malcolm X remained distinct, together they demonstrated the emergence of nationwide black unity and protest. The Southern-based civil rights movement succeeded at pressing for federal intervention and for the end of Jim Crow. Bolstered by migration, the more Northern-based Black Power movement focused on consolidating black identity and gaining socioeconomic redress. As the nation-state had been consolidated, so had black identity and protest. Regional distinctions remained, but a two-front movement applied strong pressure on the federal government to overturn racial domination and then to encourage greater economic equality.

The Movement Fractures

Even in the wake of historic success, black unity and protest eventually faltered. The target of legal Jim Crow had fallen and federal intervention for ending poverty had peaked, then begun to diminish. But Washington’s efforts to meet black demands and to contain their challenges to nation-state stability had profound if unforeseen consequences. Though discrimination and segregation continued, antipoverty and related programs further advanced the black middle class, exacerbating the class rift among blacks. Growing electoral participation incorporated black voters, but also diluted their impact within the larger electorate. More militant blacks sought to reinforce black unity with calls for separatism and claims of cultural distinction, which moderates belittled as counterproductive for integration. Issues of race continued to tear at the national fabric, but with less ideological coherence or organizational force. The nation-state had become more inclusive, at least officially, dissipating and co-opting black protest.

To the extent that the civil rights movement and Black Power were intended to identify and unify blacks across class lines, government policy responses worked against such unity. Increased social services and education, affirmative action, minority contracting, and government employment all tended to bolster and benefit the black middle class more than the poor, with the former doubling in proportion during the 1960s alone.¹⁶¹ During the 1970s and 1980s, income differences among blacks grew considerably, with the rising black middle class eager to retain their jobs and income, particularly as they had not accumulated a cushion of assets.¹⁶² While such co-optation may not have been purposefully intended by government planners, mobility for some, gained by unified protest, cut against racial solidarity. As the better off “moved up and out, they accommodated themselves,” encouraging many whites to believe that discrimination no longer existed.¹⁶³ But remaining inequality and black poverty, no longer legally encoded, was then blamed by many whites on black inferiority, tarring the black middle class as well. Thus, the end of legal segregation and rise of the black middle class somewhat diminished racial unity, but the reality and perception of a linked fate did not disappear.¹⁶⁴

Meanwhile, the black urban poor remained poor and isolated, subject to discrimination and alienated from the mainstream. Close to a third of blacks remained stuck below the poverty line throughout the 1970s and 1980s, suffering from a decline in industrial jobs and rising crime. Black male workers’ average earnings in proportion to whites, which had risen from the 1940s to 1970s, stagnated after 1973.¹⁶⁵ Even in Alabama’s rural Lowndes County, where the Black Panthers originated, most blacks remained in abject poverty.¹⁶⁶ Blacks remained consistently more likely to be unemployed, more likely to fall below official poverty lines, unable to get home mortgages, and stuck in poor neighborhoods.¹⁶⁷ This continued poverty also led some young ghetto residents to condemn more moderate and well-off blacks for having abandoned the less well-off, exacerbating the class division.

Particularly during the 1970s and 1980s, participation in electoral politics was seen by many as the way to avoid a class rift: within the black community and to advance that community as a whole. Enfranchised in the South by the 1965 Voting Rights Act and in the North via migration, more than 50 percent of African-Americans voted during the early 1970s. The number of black elected officials rose to more than three thousand in the same period.¹⁶⁸ Ironically, informal segregation encouraged such participation by effectively creating racial voting blocks able to elect their own representatives.¹⁶⁹ Civil rights activists saw such participation as a logical outcome of their demands for the franchise, and even Black Power advocates embraced the prospect of greater representation as a form of self-determination.¹⁷⁰ Such participation indicated a continued belief in integration, with those blacks feeling more integrated in American society also more likely to vote. In Malcolm’s words, they preferred the “ballot to the bullet.”¹⁷¹ Most black votes continued to flow toward the Democrats, following the New Deal transition of that party to the leading adherent of federal social intervention from which blacks hoped to and did benefit.¹⁷²

Over time, many blacks became disillusioned with electoral participation. Much as legislative reform had led to disenchantment for lack of concrete change, many later concluded, in activist Hosea Williams’s words, that “all these black politicians haven’t meant a damn thing.”¹⁷³ As a minority, blacks could not outvote whites, who were increasingly voting for conservative Dixiecrats and Republicans. The exception remained those black-majority urban districts where political power was consolidated, but such victories still did not translate into improved living conditions.¹⁷⁴ Resulting black voter apathy was overcome temporarily by the enthusiasm for Jesse Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 presidential races, but disillusionment quickly returned thereafter, and black voter participation fell precipitously.¹⁷⁵

Rising black disillusionment with electoral politics was reinforced during the 1980s and thereafter by the continued backlash of white sentiment and government policy. The limited impact of earlier reforms reinforced white racists’ arguments about the futility of official redress, ignoring the impact of past and ongoing discrimination. During the Reagan and Bush administrations, black federal employment and budgets for civil rights implementation were reduced while the black poor lost further ground.¹⁷⁶ This trajectory ultimately led to a shift back to further states’ rights after the 1994 Republican Congressional victory. As the federal balance of power was again reconfigured toward less central power, blacks suffered under a second Redemption. Much as they had after the first Reconstruction, many blacks felt abandoned by Washington. Past reforms were rescinded amid the end of progress, with earlier commitments to change ignored and expectations dashed.¹⁷⁷

Backpedaling of policy, omission of further gains, and discrimination provoked a black separatist response similar to that of the late 1960s, but with less coherence. Some blacks expressed their disillusionment with the prospect for a better life in the North by returning to the South. Others rioted, most notably in 1992 in Los Angeles, where black anger over rising poverty and crime was turned against Asians and Latinos. Urban youth joined a resurgence of interest in the thought and imagery of Malcolm X, thereby hoping to reassert black identity, purity, unity, and conviction. This shift was denigrated by more established blacks as “a feel good thing . . . of barking at the moon” (Charles Rangel).¹⁷⁸ But militant rhetoric appealed nonetheless, evident in a popular surge of interest in and assertions of multicultural distinctiveness tied to race. This interest was perhaps most evident in the rising popularity of the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, in the lyrics of Rap music, and in popular theories about antiblack conspiracies that embraced “victimology.”¹⁷⁹ Some blacks even advocated the return of a “one drop of blood rule” to distinguish and unify all blacks, thereby effectively seeking to replace Jim Crow’s unifying definition with a self-imposed equivalent. Former civil rights activists were led to wonder, “Why do they want segregation back?”¹⁸⁰ To preserve group solidarity and some minority power, many blacks reverted to assertions of essentialist difference.

The recent rise of separatist black identity reflects not only black disillusionment with white America, but also a collective black interest in defining and asserting a category no longer imposed by the state. If previously the state had done the work of reinforcing identity via imposed racial domination, such formal rules had now ended. Racial identity had been refined by Jim Crow and related policies; that target was now lost. At the same time, many African-Americans concluded that “anti-discrimination law . . . has largely succeeded in eliminating symbolic manifestations of racial oppression, but has allowed the perpetuation of material subordination of Blacks,” despite class differences.¹⁸¹ Blacks remained linked by informal discrimination and indeed, the black middle class’s greater contact with whites led them to experience this discrimination most directly, producing widespread disillusionment.¹⁸² To challenge continued subordination, “the most valuable political asset of the Black community has been its ability to assert a collective identity.”¹⁸³ Physical distinctions of race that had earlier been categorized to enforce racial domination were now embraced as a basis for black unity and power. But in the absence of “clear simple issues [and] . . . a visible enemy which stirs the emotions and stiffens resistance” (Joseph Lowery), assertions of identity become more difficult.¹⁸⁴ With the implementation of such reforms, not only did many whites conclude that there was nothing else the law could do, but a defining target of black identity formation was lost.¹⁸⁵

Official racial domination’s imposed racial categories had created shared experiences according to which blacks defined themselves, building on prior cultural and social ties. Many of the early intellectual efforts of the black elite during the twentieth century had been aimed at turning the category of racial domination into a basis for a more positive assertion of identity, efforts that were hindered by continued regional or related distinctions and Southern repression.

Only when federal authority was pressed to impose nationwide reforms of the racial order was corresponding national racial identity finally consolidated. The possibility of such reforms also provided the opportunity for further mobilization around racial identity, giving rise to the civil rights movement, creating still further opportunities. Again regional distinctions remained. Washington had allowed the South to impose Jim Crow until the mid-1950s before, pressed by protest, it imposed reforms. As a result, Southern blacks remained optimistic, inspiring a moderate form of mobilization for integration. No such dynamic applied to the North, where there was less formal Jim Crow and less legal and historical basis for federal intervention. Northern blacks received no encouragement regarding intervention, and so turned away from white allies toward more separatist and cultural movements.

As the racial order was officially dismantled, the target of identity formation and mobilization faded. The recent result has been a crisis of uncertainty and some fracturing of racial identity, though efforts at retained solidarity have continued, informed by continued discrimination. White racism and black racial solidarity persisted, in an ongoing dynamic. Black solidarity remains evident in both electoral politics and cultural assertions, but divisions have grown and mass collective protest has diminished.