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Hello and welcome to African Elements. In this episode, Unity In Diversity? In part one
of this series, we will explore the political and social climate up to 1920s that is going to
shape the boundaries of African Americans’ ideological responses to the failure of
Reconstruction. In what political and social climate is it possible to agitate for Civil
Rights? Under what circumstances would it make more sense to push for Black
Nationalism and racial separatism? How will the philosophical differences in
African Americans' approaches to the problems of the early 20th century bear
out as a country heads into yet another armed conflict during World War I?
All that, coming up next.
As we have already seen in Episode 9, African Americans in the post-Civil War era were
confronted with a number of problems and they responded in various ways. Some
responded by escaping the South to the Western frontier, others responded with
agitation and protest, and still others responded with a more accommodationist approach.
In this episode, we will explore in more depth the philosophical ideologies
behind each of these approaches as well as their limitations. Specifically, the
ideological responses and approach to the problems that black folks are confronting in
this era will be framed in terms of Civil Rights, and Black Nationalism.
As we have seen WEB Du Bois and Booker T. Washington had fundamental
views of the world that were in deep opposition to one another. On the one hand, Du
Bois believed in social equality for African-Americans as citizens of the United
States. He believed in the 14th amendment and that African Americans ought to
focus their efforts on making real the promise of equal treatment under the law. In
short, he believed that African Americans should stress their status as full and equal
citizens in the United States -- or the notion of Civil Rights.
To that end, he and 28 other delegates met at Niagara Falls in 1905 to formulate a
strategy for pursuing the notion of civil rights. The movement included both
blacks and whites. Their strategy was one of public protest and agitation.
Keep confronting the power structure with its hypocrisy and make it as difficult as
possible for businesses usual to function as long as a system of political and social
white supremacy was in place. They staged marches, petitioned lawmakers, and
wrote editorials in newspapers constantly reminding the white power
structure of the injustice of the racial subjugation of African American citizens.
They demanded full political rights, equal treatment in public places, and an end to
discrimination and segregation in the US military.
Booker T. Washington, of course, opposed the Niagara movement. He manipulated
the power structure to undermine it in every way possible.
First, he sent spies to keep him informed as to the movement’s participants and
strategies. Then he paid the newspapers to be rate the movement and to ostracize
anyone who took part in it. Ultimately, he working behind-the-scenes to ensure that
anyone who supported the movement would not obtain any federal appointment or
job, or if they already had one to have them removed.
Ultimately, Washington was successful and the Niagara movement disintegrated
before it got off the ground. Du Bois continued his efforts though, when he and others
founded the National Organization for the Enhancement of Colored
People, or NAACP in 1909. Its mission: to ensure that African Americans be
"physically free from peonage, mentally free from ignorance, politically free
from disfranchisement, and socially free from insult."
Although the NAACP had no direct connection with the Niagara movement, it was
founded by many of the same key players. Washington was largely successful in
marginalizing the group and shepherding away potential benefactors and financiers
both black and white. But a 1908 race riot in Springfield, Illinois made it finally possible
to rally support for a national movement among some influential white Progressives.
Among many others, a white Kentucky-born socialist William E. Walling was keenly
distressed by the *** of eight African Americans and the wounding of dozens more
in a northern city -- the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln.
He called for a national organization of "fair-minded whites and intelligent blacks
"to speak out boldly against racial violence and injustice." Their new tactics included a
reliance on judicial and legislative measures to provide legal protections for
African American citizenship. It's a tactic the organization continually used -- first in its
lawsuit, Guinn v. The United States in 1915, which attacked the grandfather
clause intended to keep former slaves away from the voting booths -- later in a
number of strategically formulated lawsuits culminating in the famous
Brown versus Board of Education decision in 1954 that overturned a "separate
but equal" clause established in the Plessy v. Ferguson case of 1896.
In fact, it became the primary weapon of the NAACP. So much so that it established a
separate branch of the organization, the NAACP legal Defense and education fund
in 1940 with its own legal staff.
Another avenue of NAACP activities was its national publication, The Crisis. WEB
Du Bois served as the Director of Publicity and research for The Crisis from
its inaugural edition in 1910 until he ultimately left the organization in 1934 for
reasons that will be discussed in Part 2 of this lecture. The Crisis served as
a platform for the intellectual defense of the NAACP's mission.
It posted articles touting the merits of the integrationist approach as well as the
accomplishments of people of color in the United States. It's central underlying premise
was that the United States was made stronger when people of color are given full
and equal opportunities to allow their gifts and talents to flourish.
The publication also challenged other ideological approaches such as those of
Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, and the Communist Party which will
be discussed later in Part 2. It challenged Booker T. Washington's assertion that
agitation was making life harder for blacks in the South and that public protest only
provoked a violent response on the part of white supremacists.
Sometimes the war of words got ugly. WEB Du Bois refered to Marcus Garvey as
"a little, fat black man, ugly but with intelligent eyes and big head."
Upon the death of Booker T. Washington, Du Bois eulogized him in the crisis,
acknowledging his significance as an African-American leader, but also
reasserting his view that ultimately Washington's agenda had not moved black
America forward. Certainly the NAACP can be credited with many
successes in the civil rights struggle, but it's important to be real about the meaning of
those successes. Some of its most significant accomplishments of the 20th
century include a successful legal challenges against voter disenfranchisement such as
the grandfather clause and the all-white primary, which made the right to vote
essentially meaningless because black candidates were not allowed to run in
primary elections. Certainly its best-known accomplishment is the 1954
Brown versus Board of Education Supreme Court, overturned legally sanctioned
segregation. But those successes have to be measured against ubiquitous
fact that the political institutions the NAACP worked with were enmeshed
in white supremacy. In other words, once the grandfather clause was considered
unconstitutional the political establishment bent on maintaining white supremacy
simply came up with other measures to exclude or nullify the African American vote
such as the white primary. The result appears like a never ending series of
hurdles wherein after jumping one hurdle another series of hurdles are set up to replace
it in what seems to be an endless conveyor belt.
The same can be said about school integration. Recently, in 2004 America celebrated
the 50th anniversary of the Brown versus Board of Education decision, but 50
years after segregation was declared unconstitutional, The Harvard Civil Rights Project
observed that school integration was at the same level in 2004 as it was in
1969. According to their report, one in eight southern African-American students
attend a school that is 99 percent black. About a third attend schools that are at
least 90 percent minority including more than half of African-Americans attending
schools in the Northeast. The report concluded, “We are celebrating a victory over
segregation at a time when schools across the nation are becoming increasingly
segregated.”
Herein lies the central weakness of the integrationist approach -- that
is, there is no guarantee that the goal will ever be obtainable.
It is on this logic that Booker T. Washington rested his ideology which would later
become the core of Black Nationalism that rather than bother with jumping over
hurdles to integrate into American society blacks ought to focus their efforts on
creating their own society.
In contrast to WEB Du Bois, Booker T. Washington's reality was dominated by
white supremacy enforced by law and social terrorism. He believed the route to African
American prosperity could not be achieved by pushing equality with whites, but
rather seeking to build one's own communities with the infrastructure and institutions
to become self-sufficient and self sustaining, thus making the need for social integration
a moot point.
The ideology which would later become the core of Black Nationalism has six
central and overlapping characteristics.
The first, cultural nationalism emphasizes that black people have a culture, style of life,
and approach the problems of existence that is distinct from white Americans in particular
and Westerners in general.
As such, black nationalists tend to place a heavy emphasis on African-centered
education, religion, and culture.
Closely linked to cultural nationalism is religious nationalism. One can see
elements of religious nationalism in African-American churches which
tend to be styled upon traditional West African modes of worship.
For example, the relationship between the pulpit and the congregation is very different
in an African-American church than you would find in most other churches in that the
congregation is much more an active part sermon.
Spontaneous shouts of affirmation and call and response between the pulpit
and the congregation are direct offshoot of a West African expression of
spirituality. There are also non-Christian varieties of religious nationalism such as
the Nation of Islam which will be discussed later, as well as various Afro-Caribbean
hybrids of Christianity and Roman Catholicism such as Vodou in Haiti or Santeria in
Cuba.
Another aspect of Black Nationalism is a notion of economic nationalism which
includes both capitalist and socialist forms. The capitalist form would probably be most
familiar to Booker T. Washington stressing the economic development of
one's own community. Economic nationalists often stressed that African
Americans should patronize only black owned businesses and spend their dollars in
their own communities. A socialist approach towards economic nationalism also
includes building up the economic resources of one's own community but also
includes the notion that the community has a responsibility to look out for
the individual needs of each community member.
That sentiment is often expressed in the West African proverb "it takes a
village to raise a child." The socialist black nationalist economic approach to will be
seen later in organizations such as the Black Panther party which saw it as the
responsibility of the black community to provide for each others basic needs.
For example, the Black Panther Party included a free breakfast for children
program, free health clinics in the community, and its own sort of community policing
program to provide protection for the community in the face of police brutality.
Political expressions of Black Nationalism stress political solidarity within the black
community and can be approached by reform of the political process or a
revolutionary approach which advocates the overthrow existing political and
economic institutions. After his break with the Nation of Islam, will see in the political
platform of Malcolm X., for example a heavy emphasis on political solidarity with
African Americans throughout the Western Hemisphere as well as the continent of Africa
and persons of African descent throughout the globe.
He pursued an agenda of putting forward a united front and tackling issues such as
apartheid in South Africa and segregation in the United States as smaller
subcomponents of the same larger issue.
Emigrationism is a component of Black Nationalism that also
expresses itself in two forms. It emphasizes that persons of African descent are better off
with their own sense of nationhood as an autonomous sovereign entity.
The Back-to-Africa movement stresses a physical return back to the continent of
Africa. Probably the most notable proponents of the back to Africa movement was
Marcus Garvey, but many others African Americans have shared this view since
the post-revolutionary period in the early 1800s. But other black nationalists have
rejected a physical return to the African continent in favor of carving out a separate
autonomous territory within the United States for African Americans.
The "Plan of San Diego," discussed in your book, Black and Brown: African Americans
in the Mexican Revolution, is one manifestation of this principle.
Later, Malcolm X. would point out that persons of African descent had provided the
economic underpinnings of the wealth of the United States through 250+ years of
slave labor, and thus should be entitled to their own autonomous state within the
boundaries of the United States.
Look for these various expressions of black nationalism throughout the
course of the Black liberation wtruggle in the Universal *** Improvement
Association, the Nation of Islam, the Black Panther party, and the political
ideology of people like Stokely Carmichael a.k.a. Kwame Toure.
It's easy to see the built-in conflict between the approach of WEB Du Bois
and the NAACP and the Black Nationalist approach of Booker T. Washington -- the
former basing its fundamental approach based on integration and the latter
approaching problems based on separatism.
This is the same fundamental difference in worldview that's going to frame the ideological
divide between Martin Luther King and Malcolm X (although I believe that's been largely
overplayed), and even more so between Martin Luther King and Stokely Carmichael
a.k.a. Kwame Toure. This is another one of those patterns that will see over and over
again throughout the Black liberation struggle. Just as we see with Du Bois and
Washington, the feud between the various ideologies later on is going to
get ugly. They will often be quite ruthless in the way they undermine one another.
As we will see, the NAACP cooperated with the FBI in the prosecution of Marcus
Garvey that led to his exile from the United States
Thurgood Marshall, also would later cooperate with the FBI in undermining the
Nation of Islam. Alex Haley, the author of roots was actually hired by the FBI
when he was working as a journalist to develop negative articles on the Nation of
Islam. In the early 1900s we've seen how Washington manipulated the power
structure to marginalize his political rivals, and it's pretty safe to say that there was no
love lost between WEB Du Bois and Booker T. Washington.
Because the NAACP was integrationists group bent on integrating into the white
power structure and the organization has always had large numbers of liberal
whites as members, Booker T. Washington attacked Du Bois as a puppet for white
people. The irony here, of course, is that Booker T. Washington also sought the
support of the white elite and, quite frankly, white supremacists in forwarding
his own agenda. Herein lies the central weakness of black nationalism as an approach
to problems. The central paradox here is that separatism from the white
political and economic power structure, and the building of an economic and political
power structure within the black community begs the obvious question -- how does
one build a political and economic power base when very goal is to separate itself
from political and economic systems of power?
It's a dilemma that Washington recognized early on as he sought economic
backing from elite white benefactors.
Despite efforts to separate from whites in the interest of self-sufficiency, the old adage
that it takes money to make money ultimately makes the black nationalist agenda
nearly impossible to attain without some measure of support from the very
institutions that they're seeking to separate from.
One of the ways that the various African American leaders’ differences will be
expressed is in their support for political leaders. The Republican Party which, early
on championed political and social equality for blacks -- even if only for their own
political gain – had lost interest in African Americans as a political agenda since
the compromise of 1877. They sat idly by as southern redemption and white
supremacy returned African Americans to slave like conditions that existed prior
to the Civil War. African Americans, however, were faced with few political
alternatives. In 1914, WEB Du Bois took an unusually bold step in declaring his
support for the Democrat, Woodrow Wilson.
To this day, I'm honestly not quite sure what he was thinking. Before becoming
president, Woodrow Wilson was the president of Princeton University -- the
only Ivy League University at the time that refused to admit blacks.
Du Bois the first African-American to receive his PhD from Harvard University. Du
Bois attended Harvard University after having applied to and been rejected
from Princeton University. Additionally, as President Woodrow Wilson oversaw
the segregation of Washington DC, and he provided what passed for
academic research for the film, Birth of a Nation -- a film that vilified reconstruction
efforts, glorified southern redemption and especially glorified the role of the Ku
Klux *** in returning and restoring the social order that it existed in the white
imagination prior to the Civil War. It was an endorsement that WEB Du Bois would be
ridiculed for, and one that he himself would later regret.
As it became clear that the United States was going to be drawn in to the global
conflict known at the time as the Great War, and later World War I, Woodrow
Wilson declared it, "a war to make the world safe for democracy," and once again,
a very familiar pattern is going to reemerge. To African Americans, this was an
opportunity to become part of the struggle that, if victorious, would bring about an end to
tyranny and democratic rights for all world citizens.
It was a prize that many African Americans could not help but fight for.
The WEB Du Bois urged African Americans to close ranks, and support the war
effort as a path to finally earning respect of the country and gaining full
citizenship. Of course we have of course, we've seen this movie before. On the
other hand, maybe THIS time things will turn out differently.
Well, as you probably guessed things didn't turn out quite the way WEB Du Bois
had hoped. While many African Americans supported the armed forces, the military
reciprocated that support with rigid segregation and racism. While there were ten
thousand black regulars in the Army and five thousand in the Navy, the Marine Corps did
not allow black enlistments at all. As was the case with the Buffalo soldiers who fought
the Indian Wars under the most difficult circumstances under the harshest
conditions, African Americans in the military during World War I were minimally trained
and with the most meager of equipment and supplies. It was assumed that African
Americans lacked the intelligence and discipline to be good soldiers. Their
inadequate military training oftentimes made this a self-fulfilling prophecy.
At Camp Hill Virginia, African American soldiers experienced conditions
inferior to those of their white counterparts. They lived in tents with no floors and no
blankets, and even black officers did not get the respect of white enlistees.
The military did not plan to use African American troops in combat.
Instead, they were to occupy only the most menial roles: loading and unloading ships
as kitchen workers and driving on supply lines.
Although African American servicemen often failed to get respect from their own
countrymen, their experiences abroad instilled them with a sense of
empowerment, and they were often treated with a great deal of courtesy and respect
by the European allies. In October of 1918, though, the all-black 368th infantry was
sent to the line of battle at the Argonne Forest.
Although their mission to hold the line failed, unit was commended for its bravery.
The US Secretary of War praised another all-black unit, the 369th Infantry, as the best
all-round regiment in France. The 369th later won the French Croix de Guerre,
France's highest military honor, for helping capture a railroad junction in the fall of
1918. Throughout World War I, the 369th never lost a foot of ground and never had a
man captured.
The respect they had earned abroad gave the African American servicemen high
hopes that they would return to America that would embrace them as heroes.
As we see, however, the America they returned to was fraught with racial tension.
The great migration of African Americans North to fill a much-needed labor supply
stirred racial animosity, particularly among poor whites with whom they were
now in direct competition for jobs.
Any hopes that African Americans had for returning to a more democratic
America were dashed during the "red summer" of 1919.
Within a year of the war, more than seventy Blacks were lynched including 10
Black soldiers of whom several were still in uniform.
Bloody riots had arisen in all parts of the country including; Longview, Texas, Chicago,
Illinois, Knoxville, Tennessee, Omaha, Nebraska, Elaine, Arkansas, and Detroit,
Michigan. The Ku Klux *** had re-emerged and was held accountable for floggings,
brandings with acid, episodes of tarring and feathering, hangings, and burnings. Add
to that the NAACP report in 1922 that tallied up 3436 lynchings between the years
of 1889 and 1922.
This reality pushed many African Americans to seek alternative ideologies.
The mantle of Booker T. Washington's ideology of Black Nationalism would be
taken up by Marcus Garvey in the 1920s, but as we discussed Black Nationalism
has its drawbacks and limitations.
The NAACP in its ideology of integration would also be a popular ideology in the
1920s, but the red summer of 1919 clearly showed that the goal of integration may very
well be unattainable. Perhaps with the influx of poor white Eastern Europeans would
bring alternative ways of framing old problems.
The new group of ethnic Europeans had fled harsh conditions and economic
exploitations not unlike those faced by African Americans.
Perhaps joining forces, they could create a class-based solidarity that would cut
across racial and ethnic lines. As we will see in part 2, interethnic cooperation
between poor whites and blacks did have the potential to pose a real threat to the
elite white power structure. But as we will also observe, class-based unity had
drawbacks of its own.
That’s all for this episode. You can see everything you’ve seen here as well as
the entire archive of episodes at my website www.africanelements.org.
You can also join the discussion on our Facebook Group African Elements.
I'm Darius Spearman. Thank you for watching.