THE MOST NOTORIOUS victim of what was to be called “massive resistance” to desegregation was fourteen-year-old Emmett Till on August 28, 1955. For hissing at a Mississippi White woman, hooligans beat Till so ruthlessly that his face was unrecognizable during his open casket funeral in his native Chicago. The gruesome pictures were shown around the enraged Black world. On March 12, 1956, nineteen US senators and seventy-seven House representatives signed a southern manifesto opposing the Brown v. Board of Education decision for planting “hatred and suspicion where there has been heretofore friendship and understanding.” The Klan fielded new members, and elite segregationists founded White citizens councils. Southern schools ensured that their textbooks gave students “bedtime” stories, as historian C. Vann Woodward called them, that read like Gone with the Wind.
But the civil rights movement kept coming. W. E. B. Du Bois was stunned watching the unfolding Montgomery Bus Boycott during the 1956 election year. It was not the boycott’s initial mobilizer, Alabama State College professor Jo Ann Robinson, nor the boycott’s drivers, those walking Black female domestics, who surprised him. Any serious history student of Black activism knew that Black women were regularly driving forces. Du Bois was stunned by the twenty-seven-year-old figurehead of the boycott. A Baptist preacher as a radical activist? Du Bois had never thought his eighty-eight-year-old eyes would see a preacher like Martin Luther King Jr. Du Bois sent a message of encouragement, and King sent a grateful reply. King had read Du Bois’s books, and he later characterized him as “an intellectual giant” who saw through the “poisonous fog of lies that depicted [Black people] as inferior.” Du Bois also sent a proclamation to the Indian journal Gandhi Marg. King—in his strident commitment to nonviolent civil disobedience—could be the American Mahatma Gandhi.1
King’s other favorite scholar penned the most controversial Black book of 1957, possibly of the entire decade. The gender racism of E. Franklin Frazier in Black Bourgeoisie, depicting White women as more beautiful and sophisticated than Black women, Black wives as domineering, and Black husbands as “impotent physically and socially,” was as manifest as his historical racism. “Slavery was a cruel and barbaric system that annihilated the negro as a person,” Frazier said. This theory resembled the racist thesis of historian Stanley Elkins in his smash hit Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959). And yet Frazier had overcome his cultural racism. The popular social science literature about the psychological effects of discrimination that molded the Brown decision had remolded Frazier’s old ideas of assimilation as psychological progress, and he now believed in assimilation as regression. No group of Black people held more firmly to assimilationist ideas, Frazier argued, than the Black bourgeoisie, who tried to “slough off everything . . . reminiscent of its Negro origin.”2
Frazier sounded like the ministers of Elijah Muhammad’s quickly growing Chicago-based Nation of Islam (NOI) in the late 1950s. “They won’t let you be White and you don’t want to be Black,” the son of Garveyites, former convict, and the NOI’s new Harlem minister liked to say. “You don’t want to be African and you can’t be an American. . . . You in bad shape!” CBS’s Mike Wallace brought Malcolm X and the NOI to the attention of millions in the 1959 sensational five-part television series entitled The Hate That Hate Produced: A Study of the Rise of Black Racism and Black Supremacy. Elijah Muhammad and his ministers opposed assimilationists; instead, they preached racial separation (not Black supremacy), arguing that Whites were an inferior race of devils. Ironically, Black and White assimilationists, clothed in racism and hate for everything Black, condemned the Nation of Islam for donning racism and hate for everything White.3
In Black Bourgeoisie, Frazier delivered the most withering attack on the Black middle class in the history of American letters, commercializing a new class racism: the Black bourgeoisie as inferior to the White bourgeoisie, as more socially irresponsible, as bigger conspicuous consumers, as more politically corrupt, as more exploitative, and as sillier in their “politics of respectability,” to use historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s recent term. Despite, or rather because of, Frazier’s overreach into class racism, Black Bourgeoisie had a significant effect on the civil rights movement, galvanizing Martin Luther King’s generation of middle-class youngsters to break away from what Frazier termed their apathetic “world of make-believe.”4
And this powerful force of youthful courage, growing more powerful by the day, was needed to resist the segregationist massive resistance that seemed to grow more massive with each passing day. Segregationists had stripped the Civil Rights Act of 1957 of its enforcement powers, making it practically a dead letter when it passed on August 29, 1957. On September 4, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus deployed the National Guard to block the Little Rock Nine from desegregating Central High School, defying a federal court order. With the globally circulating sights and sounds of government troops defending howling segregationist mobs, Little Rock harmed the American freedom brand.
“Our enemies are gloating over this incident,” Eisenhower wailed in a nationally televised speech, “and using it everywhere to misrepresent our whole nation.” Eisenhower and his aides agonized for two weeks, seeking solutions that could keep both his political image in the South and the American image abroad intact, to no avail. On September 24, in a decision he later regarded as “the most repugnant act in all his eight years in the White House,” Eisenhower sent in federal troops to protect the Little Rock students as they entered the school. Some civil rights activists recognized the incredible power Cold War calculations had given them to embarrass America into desegregation. Still others believed and hoped that Gunnar Myrdal’s dictum was coming true: that the civil rights movement was persuading away racist ideas.5
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
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.18
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.19