Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (57 page)

No one knows whether the sickly W. E. B. Du Bois read King’s jailhouse letter. But just as Du Bois had done in 1903, and later regretted, in his letter King erroneously conflated two opposing groups: the antiracists who hated racial discrimination, and the Black separatists who hated White people (in groups like the Nation of Islam). King later distanced himself from both, speaking to a growing split within the civil rights movement. More and more battle-worn young activists had grown critical of King’s nonviolence and disliked the pains he took to persuade away the racist ideas of Whites. More and more, they were listening to Malcolm X’s sermons about self-defense, about persuading away the assimilationist ideas of Blacks, about mobilizing antiracists to force change. On May 3, 1963, these young people watched on television as Bull Connor’s vicious bloodhounds ripped the children and teenagers of Black Birmingham to pieces; as his fire hoses broke limbs,
blew clothes off bodies, and slammed bodies into storefronts; and as his officers clubbed marchers with nightsticks.

The world watched, too, and the United States Information Agency reported back to Washington about the “growing adverse local reactions” around the world to the “damaging pictures of dogs and fire hoses.” Kennedy met with his top advisers to discuss this “matter of national and international concern.” He dispatched an aide, Burke Marshall, to Birmingham to help negotiate the desegregation accord that stopped the protests. Kennedy also sent soldiers to ensure safety for the desegregation of the University of Alabama on May 21, 1963. Governor George Wallace put on a show for his voters, standing in the schoolhouse door, admonishing the “unwelcome, unwanted and force-induced intrusion . . . of the central government.”

State Department officials had to put in overtime when agitated African leaders critical of the United States met in Ethiopia on May 22, 1963, to form the Organization of African Unity. Secretary of State Dean Rusk sent out a circular to American diplomats assuring them that Kennedy was “keenly aware of [the] impact of [the] domestic race problem on [the] US image overseas and on achievement [of] US foreign policy objectives.” Rusk said Kennedy would take “decisive action.”

On June 11, John F. Kennedy addressed the nation—or the world, rather—and summoned Congress to pass civil rights legislation. “Today we are committed to a worldwide struggle to promote and protect the rights of all who wish to be free,” Kennedy said. “We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it.” The eyes of the nation and the world turned to Washington’s legislators, who kept their eyes on the world. When the new civil rights bill came before the Senate Commerce Committee, Kennedy asked Secretary of State Rusk to lead off the discussion. Racial discrimination had “had a profound impact on the world’s view of the United States and, therefore, on our foreign relations,” testified Rusk. Non-White newly independent peoples were “determined,” he said, “to eradicate every vestige of the notion that the white race is superior or entitled to special privileges because of race.” By August 1963, 78 percent of White Americans believed that
racial discrimination had harmed the US reputation abroad. But not many inside (or outside) of the Kennedy administration were willing to admit that the growing groundswell of support in Washington for strong civil rights legislation had more to do with winning the Cold War in Africa and Asia than with helping African Americans. Southern segregationists cited those foreign interests in their opposition. South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond refused “to act on some particular measure, because of the threat of Communist propaganda if we don’t,” as he fired at Rusk.
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Kennedy’s introduction of civil rights legislation did not stop the momentum of the long-awaited March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Though it had been organized by civil rights groups, the Kennedy administration controlled the event, ruling out civil disobedience. Kennedy aides approved the speakers and speeches, a lineup that did not include a single Black woman, or James Baldwin or Malcolm X. On August 28, approximately 250,000 activists and reporters from around the world marched to the area between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. Before Kennedy officials happily read the USIA’s report saying that numerous foreign newspapers contrasted the opportunity to march that had been “granted by a free society” with “the despotic suppression practiced by the USSR,” and before King ended the round of approved speeches with his rousing and indelible antiracist dream of children one day living “in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” and before Mahalia Jackson sang into the blazing throng of approved placards and television cameras, the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins came as the bearer of sad news.

W. E. B. Du Bois had died in his sleep the previous day in Ghana, Wilkins announced. “Regardless of the fact that in his later years Dr. Du Bois chose another path,” Wilkins intoned, “it is incontrovertible that at the dawn of the twentieth century his was the voice calling you to gather here today in this cause.” The well-trained journalist at the helm of the NAACP reported the truth. Indeed, the younger Du Bois had called for such a gathering, hoping it would persuade and endear millions to the lowly souls of Black folk. And yes, the older
Du Bois had chosen another path—the antiracist path less traveled—toward forcing millions to accept the equal souls of Black folk. It was the path of civil disobedience that the young marchers in the SNCC and CORE had desired for the March
on
Washington, a path a young woman from Birmingham’s Dynamite Hill was already marching upon and would never leave. Roy Wilkins did not dwell on the different paths. Looking out at the lively March on Washington, he solemnly asked for a moment of silence to honor the ninety-five-year movement of a man.
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PART V

Angela Davis

CHAPTER 30

The Act of Civil Rights

SUMMER TOURISTS HAD
already left the gaudy beachside casinos in Biarritz by the time she arrived for her Junior Year in France Program. She had come a long way from her hometown of Birmingham and her Brandeis University campus outside of Boston. On September 16, 1963, Angela Davis walked with classmates in Biarritz and skimmed a
Herald Tribune
. She noticed a headline about four girls dying from a church bombing. It did not hit her at first. Then, suddenly, it registered. She stopped, closing her eyes in disbelief as her puzzled companions looked on. She pointed to the article. “I know them,” she spluttered out. “They’re my friends.” Avoiding her classmates and their perfunctory condolences, Davis kept staring at the familiar names in sadness and rage. Cynthia Wesley. Carole Robertson. Carol Denise McNair. Addie Mae Collins.

The only deceased girl Angela Davis did not know personally was Addie Mae. Angela’s mother, Sallye, had taught Denise in the first grade. The Robertson and Davis families had been close friends as long as she could remember. The Wesleys lived around the block in the hilly Birmingham neighborhood where Angela grew up.
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Angela had been four years old when her parents, Sallye and B. Frank Davis, had desegregated that neighborhood in 1948. White families began moving out as Black families moved in. Some stayed and violently resisted. Because of White resisters’ bombing of Black homes, the neighborhood was often called “Dynamite Hill.”

But the bombings did not deter Angela’s parents, especially her mother. Sallye Davis had been a leader in the Southern Negro Youth
Congress, an antiracist Marxist organization that protested against economic exploitation and racial discrimination in the late 1930s and 1940s, drawing the admiration of W. E. B. Du Bois. On Dynamite Hill, Sallye and her husband nurtured Angela on a steady diet of anticapitalist and antiracist ideas. And so, when Angela started the first grade, she was struck by the inequities at lunchtime: hungry children without enough food had to sit there and watch other children eat. Like her mother, she gave to the hungry children. She grew up detesting the poverty all around her. And she grew up detesting the poverty of the assimilationist ideas all around her, deciding, “very early, that I would never—and I was categorical about this—never harbor or express the desire to be white.”
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She ventured north in the fall of 1959 to attend an integrated high school in Manhattan, where her history teachers nurtured her to socialism. She joined a youth organization, called “Advance,” and picketed a Woolworths in solidarity with the rash of southern sit-ins in the spring of 1960. Davis stayed in the North for college, enrolling as one of the few Black students at Brandeis University in 1961. She wanted to continue her activism, but Brandeis’s White campus activists alienated her. “It seemed as if they were determined to help the ‘poor, wretched Negroes’ become equal to them, and I simply didn’t think they were worth becoming equal to,” she remembered.
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Davis found other outlets. She attended the Eighth World Festival for Youth and Students in Helsinki, Finland, in the summer of 1962. When one of her favorite authors came for a lecture at Brandeis in October 1962, Davis captured a front-row seat. James Baldwin was nearing the publication of his luminous 1963 book for activists critical of the civil rights movement’s integrationist, persuasion, and nonviolent thrusts. He titled the manifesto
The Fire Next Time
, with an epigraph quoting an African American spiritual to put the title in context: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, / No more water, the fire next time!”
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News of the Cuban missile crisis prematurely ended Baldwin’s lecture. But later he gave a powerful speech at a hastily organized antiwar rally on Brandeis’s campus. Davis was there listening intently to Baldwin—and then to Brandeis’s sophisticated Marxist philosopher,
who would become her intellectual mentor and who was fast becoming the intellectual mentor of the rapidly organizing “New Left”: Herbert Marcuse. Davis listened intently again when yet another towering mentor of 1960s youth came to speak at Brandeis. Davis could not relate to Malcolm X’s religious deprecations of Whites. But she “was fascinated,” she later said, “by his description of the way Black people had internalized the racial inferiority thrust upon us by a white supremacist society.”
⁵

By her junior year, Davis had gone to study in France, only to be thrust tragically back to Dynamite Hill by the murder of those four girls. Davis did not view the Birmingham church bombing on September 15, 1963, as an isolated incident carried out by southern White extremists. “It was this spectacular, violent event, the savage dismembering of four little girls, which has burst out of the daily, sometimes even dull, routine of racist oppression,” in Davis’s words. But Davis’s classmates in France—indoctrinated by the mythology of the antiracist North and racist South—refused to accept her persisting analysis of “why the whole ruling stratum in their country, by being guilty of racism, was also guilty of this murder.”
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The nineteen-year-old Angela Davis was hardly alone in the world in her analysis of American race relations. The Birmingham murders signified the massive resistance to the civil rights movement and the naked ugliness of American racism. As the brutality turned negative eyes to the United States in the decolonizing world, the stakes were raised for civil rights legislation to reassure the American freedom brand, forcing Kennedy’s hand. President Kennedy announced his “deep sense of outrage and grief” over the Birmingham bombing. He launched an investigation, which caused his southern approval ratings to dip. Kennedy tried to boost his ratings two weeks later on a trip to Dallas. He never made it back to Washington.
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On November 27, 1963, two days after JFK’s burial, the thirty-sixth president of the United States buried any lingering global fears that civil rights legislation had died with Kennedy. “No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for
which he fought so long,” declared Lyndon Baines Johnson to Congress. Civil rights had hardly topped Kennedy’s agenda, but activists and diplomats felt relieved.
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On March 26, 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X came to watch the debate over the civil rights bill, meeting for the first and only known time at the US Capitol. Malcolm had recently been pushed out of the corrupted Nation of Islam. When he left Washington, he started warning American racists of the “ballot or the bullet.” At a church in Detroit on April 12, 1964, Malcolm offered his plan for the ballot instead of the bullet: going before the United Nations to charge the United States with violating the human rights of African Americans. “Now you tell me how can the plight of everybody on this Earth reach the halls of the United Nations,” Malcolm said, his voice rising, “and you have twenty-two million Afro-Americans whose churches are being bombed, whose little girls are being murdered, whose leaders are being shot down in broad daylight!” And America still had “the audacity or the nerve to stand up and represent himself as the leader of the free world . . . with the blood of your and mine mothers and fathers on his hands—with the blood dripping down his jaws like a bloody-jawed wolf.”
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THE DAY AFTER
the Detroit speech, Malcolm, who was Muslim, boarded a plane and embarked on his obligatory hajj to Mecca. After a lifetime in the theater of American racism that began with the lynching of his father, Malcolm X on this trip saw for the first time “all colors, from blue-eyed blonds to black-skinned Africans,” interacting as equals. The experience changed him. “The true Islam has shown me that a blanket indictment of all white people is as wrong as when whites make blanket indictments against blacks,” he said. From then on, he took on the racist wolves and devils, no matter their skin color. Though American media outlets reported his change, the narrative of Malcolm X as hating White people endured.
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