Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (56 page)

A NINETY-YEAR-OLD DU BOIS
was hopeful, too, in another way. “Today, the United States is fighting world progress, progress which must be towards socialism and against colonialism,” he said, speaking to seven hundred students and faculty at Howard University in April 1958. Later in the year, having gotten his passport back, Du Bois toured Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and Communist China, where he happily met Chairman Mao Tse-tung. When Mao started musing about the “diseased psychology” of African Americans, showing that he was attuned to the latest racist social science, Du Bois interjected. Blacks were not diseased psychologically; they lacked incomes, Du Bois explained, inciting a debate and a fusillade of questions from Mao. When Du Bois expressed some of his failures as an activist, Mao interjected. Activists only failed when they stopped struggling. “This, I gather,” Mao said, “you have never done.”
⁶

Martin Luther King Jr. had not stopped struggling, either. But Du Bois had soured on King, deciding in late 1959 that he was not the American Gandhi after all. “Gandhi submitted [to nonviolence], but he also followed a positive [economic] program to offset his negative refusal to use violence,” Du Bois said. At the time, Black critics were soundly blitzing King’s philosophy of nonviolence, but some were also taking the civil rights movement figurehead to task on some of his lingering racist ideas. In 1957, King received a letter for his “Advice for the Living” column in
Ebony
magazine. “Why did God make Jesus white, when the majority of peoples in the world are non-white?” Jesus “would have been no more significant if His skin had been black,” King responded. “He is no less significant because his skin was white.” The nation’s most famous Black preacher and activist prayed to a White Jesus? A “disturbed” reader ripped off a letter to
Ebony
. “I believe, as you do, that skin color shouldn’t be important, but I don’t believe Jesus was white,” the reader stated. “What is the basis for your assumption that he was?” With only a basis in racist ideas, King did not respond.
⁷

Du Bois and King had not let up on the pedal of struggle, and neither had college students. Four freshman at North Carolina A&T trotted into a Woolworths in Greensboro on February 1, 1960. They sat down at its restricted counter and remained until the store closed.
Within days, hundreds of students from area colleges and high schools were “sitting in.” News reports of these nonviolent sit-ins flashed on screens nationally, setting off a sit-in wave to desegregate southern businesses. “Students at last to the rescue,” rejoiced Du Bois, urging them on. By April, students were staging sit-ins in seventy-eight southern and border communities, and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had been established.
⁸

If civil rights activists hoped that the attention they received would sway presidential candidates, they were disappointed. The Democratic nominee for president, a dashing Massachusetts senator, said as little about civil rights as possible, both on the campaign trail and in the first-ever televised presidential debates. John F. Kennedy excited activists by supporting the Democrats’ civil rights plank, but disappointed them by naming a suspected opponent of civil rights, Texas senator Lyndon B. Johnson, as his running mate.

Kennedy and his GOP opponent, Richard Nixon, both tried not to take sides. The civil rights and massive resistance movements were stirring debates in many forums, including the scholarly and artistic communities, which in turned further stirred the civil rights and the resistance movements. An airline reservation agent in New York, who wrote fiction in her spare time, touched a chord among activists and sympathizers of the civil rights movement with a brilliantly crafted novel. Harper Lee did not expect the story of a young girl coming to terms with race relations in the South to become an instant and perennial best seller, or to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961.
To Kill a Mockingbird
—about a White lawyer successfully defending a Black man wrongly accused of raping a White woman—became the
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
of the civil rights movement, rousing millions of readers for the racial struggle through the amazing power of racist ideas. The novel’s most famous homily, hailed for its antiracism, in fact signified the novel’s underlying racism. “‘Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy,” a neighbor tells the lawyer’s strong-willed daughter, Scout. “That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” The mockingbird is a metaphor for African Americans. Though the novel was set in the 1930s, the teeming Black activism of that era was absent
from
To Kill a Mockingbird
. African Americans come across as spectators, waiting and hoping and singing for a White savior, and thankful for the moral heroism of lawyer Atticus Finch. There had been no more popular racist relic of the enslavement period than the notion that Black people must rely on Whites to bring them their freedom.
⁹

Civil rights activists waging sit-ins were hardly waiting on White saviors. Then again, many of these students were expecting their noble campaigns of nonviolent resistance to touch the moral conscience of White Americans, who in turn would save southern Blacks from segregationist policies. That strategy sapped W. E. B. Du Bois’s pleasure with the civil rights movement. And activists desegregating southern businesses that low-income Blacks could hardly afford did not seem like racial progress to Du Bois, who refused to measure racial progress by the gains of Black elites. Du Bois had been waiting for a political-economic program to arise. He had been waiting for something like scholar Michael Harrington’s shocking anti-poverty best seller in 1962,
The Other America
. “A wall of prejudice is erected to keep the Negroes out of advancement,” Harrington wrote. “The more education a Negro has, the more economic discrimination he faces.” Harrington used statistics to show that uplift suasion did not work. Moreover, he pointed out that “the laws against color can be removed, but that will leave the poverty that is the historic and institutionalized consequence of color.” By the time Harrington tossed a war on poverty onto the Democrats’ agenda, Du Bois had left the country.
¹⁰

On February 15, 1961, a few days short of his ninety-third birthday, Du Bois received a note from President Kwame Nkrumah informing him that the Ghana Academy of Learning would financially support his long-desired
Encyclopedia Africana
. By the year’s end, Du Bois had arrived in Ghana. But within a few months, he suffered a prostrate infection. Nkrumah later came to Du Bois’s home for his ninety-fourth birthday dinner in 1962. When Nkrumah rose to depart, Du Bois reached for the president’s hand and warmly thanked him for making a way for him to end his years on African soil. Du Bois turned somber. “I failed you—my strength gave out before I could carry out our plans
for the encyclopedia. Forgive an old man,” said Du Bois. Nkrumah refused. Du Bois insisted. Du Bois’s smile broke the somber silence, and Nkrumah departed in tears.
¹¹

IT WAS LEADERS
of decolonized nations like Kwame Nkrumah, who were friendly to the Soviet Union and critical of American capitalism and racism, that US diplomats were trying to attract (if not undermine). But the viciously violent southern response to civil rights protests was embarrassing the United States around the non-White world. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy tried to shift the movement’s energy from the humiliating direct-action protests to voter registration. He also established the Peace Corps, reportedly to “show skeptical observers from the new nations that Americans were not monsters.” Northern universities were trying to show that they were not monsters, either, by gradually opening their doors to Black students. Down south, the Kennedy administration sent in troops to desegregate the University of Mississippi, receiving applause from the international community that was not lost on JFK.
¹²

MOST AMERICANS DID
not consider assimilationists to be racists. They did not consider northern segregation and racial disparities to be indicative of racist policies, and the avalanche of antiracist protests for jobs, housing, education, and justice from Boston to Los Angeles in 1963 hardly changed their views on the matter. The eyes of the nation, the world, and American history remained on the supposedly really racist region, the South. On January 14, 1963, George Wallace was inaugurated as the forty-fifth governor of Alabama. He had opposed the Klan as a politician and judge until he had lost to the Klan-endorsed candidate in the 1958 gubernatorial election. “Well boys,” Wallace said to supporters after the defeat, “no other son-of-a-bitch will ever outnigger me again.” Wallace joined the secret fraternity of ambitious politicians who adopted the popular racist rhetoric that they probably did not believe in private.
¹³

The
New York Times, Time, Newsweek
, the major television stations, and a host of other media outlets came to cover what reporters expected to be a nastily polarizing speech. George Wallace did not disappoint, showing off his new public ideology. “It is very appropriate that from this cradle of the Confederacy, this very heart of the great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generations of forebears before us time and again down through history,” he said. He was sounding one of the two timeworn American freedom drums: not the one calling for freedom from oppression, but the one demanding freedom to oppress. “In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth,” he intoned, “ . . . I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
¹⁴

Wallace became the face of American racism, when he should have been rendered only as the face of segregation. Harper Lee should have reigned as the face of assimilation in the literary world, while sociologists Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan should have reigned as the faces of assimilation in the scholarly world. In 1963, they published their best-selling book,
Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City
. Pulitzer Prize–winning Harvard historian Oscar Handlin, in his
New York Times
review of the book, hailed its treatment of Negroes as an “excellent” and “much-needed corrective to many loose generalizations.” This assessment typified the wild affirmations the book received from northern academics.
¹⁵

Native New Yorkers trained in postwar assimilationist social science, Glazer and Moynihan met one another while working in the Kennedy administration on poverty issues.
Beyond the Melting Pot
propagated a ladder of ethnic racism—that is, a hierarchy of ethnic groups within the racial hierarchy—situating the hard-working and intelligent Jews over the Irish, Italians, and Puerto Ricans, and West Indian migrants over the “Southern Negro” because of West Indians’ emphasis on “saving, hard work, investment, [and] education.” Glazer penned the chapter on the Negro, saying that “the period of protest” must be succeeded by “a period of self-examination and self-help.” He claimed that “prejudice, low income, [and] poor education only explain so
much” about “the problems that afflict so many Negroes.” As an assimilationist, Glazer, citing Frazier, attributed the problems to both discrimination and Black inferiority, particularly the “weak” Black family, the “most serious heritage” of slavery. From historical racism, Glazer turned to the class racism of Frazier’s
Black Bourgeoisie
. Unlike the other middle classes, “the Negro middle class contributes very little . . . to the solution of Negro social problems,” he wrote. And from historical racism and class racism, he turned to cultural racism and political racism to explain why problems persisted in the Black community. “The Negro,” he said, “is only an American, and nothing else. He has no values and culture to guard and protect.” He criticized the Negro for insisting “that the white world deal with his problems because, he is so much the product of America.” In Glazer’s vivid imagination, the Negro insisted that “they are not
his
problems, but everyone’s.” And this, he said, was “the key to much in the Negro world,” that Blacks were not taking enough responsibility for their own problems.
¹⁶

Ironically, the actual “key to much in the Negro world” may have been the very opposite of Glazer’s formulation—the Negro may have been taking too
much
responsibility for the Negro’s problems, and therefore not doing enough to force the “white world” to end the discriminatory sources of the problems. Elite Blacks, raised on the strategy of uplift suasion and its racist conviction that every Negro represented the race—and therefore that the behavior of every single Black person was partially (or totally) responsible for racist ideas—had long policed each other. They had also policed the masses and the media portrayals of Blacks in their efforts to ensure that every single Black person presented herself or himself admirably before White Americans. They operated on the assumption that every single action before White America either confirmed or defied stereotypes, either helped or harmed the Negro race.

Beyond the Melting Pot
saluted the leadership of the National Urban League, the NAACP, and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) for their lobbying and legal activism. Glazer and Moynihan neither saluted nor mentioned the many local groups that were fiercely confronting segregationists in the streets in 1963. Nor did they mention
the youngsters of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in Mississippi, Malcolm X in Harlem, or Martin Luther King Jr.

On April 3, 1963, King helped kick off a spate of demonstrations in Birmingham, bringing on the wrath of the city’s ruggedly segregationist police chief, “Bull” Conner. Nine days later, on Good Friday, eight White anti-segregationist Alabama clergymen signed a public statement requesting that these “unwise and untimely” street demonstrations cease and be “pressed in the courts.” Martin Luther King Jr., jailed that same day, read the statement from his cell. Incited, he started doing something he rarely did. He responded to critics in his “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” published far and wide that summer. King attacked not only those Alabama preachers, but also the applauding audience of
Beyond the Melting Pot
. He confessed that he had “almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom” was not the segregationist, “but the white moderate . . . who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom.” King explained that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
¹⁷