EPILOGUE

The “Place for Which Our Fathers Sighed”

When James Weldon Johnson, principal of the segregated Stanton grammar school in Florida, wrote the poem “Lift Every Voice and Sing” to introduce Booker T. Washington during his visit there in 1900, he eloquently linked the past with the present, our present. Quickly transformed into song by his brother John Rosemond Johnson and adopted by the NAACP in 1919 as the Negro National Anthem, the poem calls out to the black community, “Let us march on till victory is won.” But right in the middle of this poem-turned-song, Weldon Johnson acknowledged the recent past events in his own time, and in ours, and condemns America, as he says we are “treading” this pathway to victory “through the blood of the slaughtered.” He also asks that America become the place that its creators envisioned, a “place for which our fathers sighed,” a place where blacks were truly free, and free from the threat of extermination and mass violence. This elusive yet ever-powerful claim to justice and human rights in America has long sustained African American civil rights activism—even into the twenty-first century. Indeed, the last stanza of these powerful lyrics was used in 2009 to introduce the first African American president, Barack Hussein Obama. Yet racial oppression and fears of a race war and black extermination continue to figure prominently in the minds and lives of black leaders and the black community, which is why this history still matters.

Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey, an advocate of Black Nationalism and organizer of the African Universal Negro Improvement Association, was concerned in 1923 that some whites believed that the race question could be settled by “wholesale butchery, by lynching, by economic starvation, by a return to slavery, and legalized oppression. . . . [I]t is this danger that drives me mad.” After the First World War, African American soldiers came back in 1918 with a renewed sense of hope, that since they had served bravely for their country, they would gain the rights to full citizenship. Jim Crow would no longer hold sway over American politics. But this turned out not to be the case, and many whites in the North and South set about reaffirming white supremacy through violence. To Garvey, this meant that blacks across the diaspora needed to come together to develop complete autonomy instead of integration, because “on every side we hear the cry of white supremacy—in America, Canada, Australia, Europe, and even South America. . . . What must the Negro do in the face of such a universal attitude but to align all his forces in the direction of protecting himself from the threatened disaster of race domination and ultimate extermination?”¹ For Garvey, the solution was to return to Africa.

Garvey was right in his assessment that the black community faced a dangerous climate of racial hostility that was rife throughout the twentieth century. In We Charge Genocide, the Civil Rights Congress (CRC) indicted the American government with genocide in 1951 as defined by Article II of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted in 1948. According to Article II, “Killing members of a group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part” were acts of genocide. Article III states that nations would be punished if they were found to have “conspired to commit genocide” or even for an unsuccessful “attempt to commit genocide.” Signed by William L. Patterson, Paul Robeson, Mary Church Terrell, and ninety-one others, the 237-page document claimed, with substantive proof, that in America “comes this record of mass slayings on the basis of race” and that “what is obvious . . . is the careless disregard for Negro life, liberty, and person that is the distinctive trait of genocide.”²

Racial violence increased significantly in the late 1940s after the Second World War due to the black community’s Double V campaign to win the war “over our enemies from without” and “our enemies within” America. African Americans demanded full citizenship rights in exchange for fighting in the war effort, because “surely,” twenty-six-year-old James G. Thompson argued, “those who perpetrate these ugly prejudices here are seeking to destroy our democratic form of government just as surely as the Axis forces.” Blacks were no longer willing to remain silent about “these evil forces which threaten us.”³

The forces that Thompson spoke about and the reason CRC members were protesting were outlined explicitly in the document they submitted to the United Nations General Assembly:

We are compelled to speak by the unending slaughter of Negroes. The fact of our ethnic origin, of which we are proud—our ancestors were building the world’s first civilizations 3,000 years before our oppressors emerged from barbarism in the forests of western Europe—is daily made the signal for segregation and murder. . . . Once the classic method of lynching was the rope. Now it is the policeman’s bullet. . . . We submit that the evidence suggests that the killing of Negroes has become police policy in the United States. . . . But the majority of Negro murders are never recorded, never known except to the perpetrators and the bereaved survivors of the victim. Negro men and women leave their homes and are never seen alive again. Sometimes weeks later their bodies, or bodies thought to be theirs and often horribly mutilated, are found in the woods or washed up on the shore of a river or lake. . . . These unrecorded deaths are the rule rather than the exception.⁴

Thus condemning the United States’ history of racial violence, the CRC members submitted their petition to the UN to “demand that the government of the United States stop and prevent the crime of genocide . . . to assure the safety of the Negro People of the United States.”⁵ Although the UN did not formally answer the petition, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was forced (probably under international pressure) to discuss the meaning of genocide and to determine whether genocide had ever occurred “within the United States.” Certainly, recent studies confirm their analysis, that what African Americans experienced at the hands of white supremacists in America, “the phenomenon of wasting somebody else’s life on a mass scale,” was well within the bounds of what Raphael Lemkin, the originator of the concept in 1944, intended.⁶ But Congress determined that lynching and white-on-black violence were not acts of genocide; therefore, “genocide, as defined in this convention, has never occurred in the United States.”⁷ Congress rejected the CRC’S call to action, because the “outcome of complex processes,” official and unofficial, constructed by individuals and the nation who do “not object” and, under certain circumstances, sanction by inaction the intentional killing of a select group of people aligns with the history of slavery, and America still refused to acknowledge that past.⁸ Nevertheless, the CRC’S outspoken demands for social justice on an international stage continued to be part of how black Americans framed their activism.

Civil rights leaders in the 1950s and 1960s had varying philosophical perspectives about how to combat white violence in the pursuit of their civil rights and what should be done about it. For Martin Luther King Jr., nonviolence was the only way to combat oppression in 1956, because in his view, black violence would foster “retaliatory violence,” and “the dangers of this method . . . will lead to terrible bloodshed.” King’s maternal grandfather, Rev. A. D. Williams, managed to survive the Atlanta massacre of 1906, and this no doubt influenced King’s opinions about how to fight “the forces of injustice.”⁹ But we also know that the humanistic ideals of nonviolence as a strategy for fighting for social justice in America and formulated in large part due to fears of exterminatory violence preceded King and Mahatma Gandhi by more than a century.

NAACP president and community leader Robert F. Williams in Monroe, North Carolina, however, believed that times had changed in 1962 such that both strategies, of violence and nonviolence, needed to be employed against the racial terrorism that plagued blacks across the country. Although Williams affirmed that “the tactics of non-violence will continue and should continue . . . we shouldn’t take the attitude that one method alone is the way to liberation.” He was concerned that it was the black community’s practice of nonresistance that encouraged white internecine violence and notions of white supremacy. The civil rights leaders who espoused nonviolence were “pacifists” who were mostly concerned that “we do not ‘provoke’ or enrage them [whites].” Williams argued that these strategies were based upon old assumptions that he and other black men felt in the 1960s were no longer relevant: “They constantly tell us that if we resort to violent self-defense we will be exterminated. They are not stopping violence—they are only stopping defensive violence against white racists out of fear of extermination.” This fear of extermination and the philosophy of nonviolence were harmful, because it was “precisely this unchallenged violence that allows a racist social system to perpetuate itself.” Moreover, Williams believed that “this fear of extermination is a myth,” because with the world watching and the politics of the Cold War in play, the “United States Government . . . could not succeed in exterminating 20,000,000 people. . . . People everywhere in the world would be ready to support our struggle.” Nevertheless, he too called on the United Nations to begin “an immediate international investigation into the denial of human rights in Monroe,” North Carolina.¹⁰

For civil rights leader Malcolm X, however, a race war was inevitable because of the new generation of blacks who came of age after 1945, and he did not envision that black extermination was out of the realm of possibility. In a speech given at the University of California in 1963, Malcolm stated that because young black people were going to defend themselves against white violence, “America is faced with her worst crisis since the Civil War. The worst crisis since the Revolutionary War. For America now faces a race war. The entire country is on the verge of erupting into racial violence and bloodshed simply because 20 million ex-slaves here in America are demanding freedom, justice and equality.” At the time, Malcolm was still a member of the Black Muslim community, and in line with the philosophy of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, he argued that white Americans would “fight a race war to keep from having to share this country on an equal basis with anyone else but himself. Especially on an equal basis with his 20 million former slaves.” African Americans should separate themselves entirely from America either in Africa or in their own country.¹¹

By 1964 Malcolm no longer believed in a black state, but he did believe that the struggles of African people across the diaspora, particularly in Africa, should be united under one front. His religious and ideological framework shifted such that he was working to create a world “in which people can live like human beings on the basis of equality.” In alignment with this vision, Malcolm spearheaded and became chairman of a new secular organization, the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU). When the Organization of African Unity (OAU), a group of thirty-four African heads of state, held its meeting in Cairo in July 1964, Malcolm was able to disseminate the OAAU’S eighty-page document, which outlined the organization’s concerns. Similar to the 1951 document, We Charge Genocide, this new document argued that “the American government is either unable or unwilling to protect the lives and property of your 22 million African American brothers and sisters. We stand defenseless. . . . We have lived for over 300 years . . . in constant fear of losing life and limb. . . . [I]magine the physical and psychological suffering.”¹² Malcolm wanted the OAU to endorse the OAAU’S efforts to encourage the United Nations to act because he believed what was needed was to push for international intervention, to push the struggle of black people in America beyond civil rights to one of human rights.¹³

With its headquarters in Harlem, New York, the OAAU was composed of various civil rights leaders and organizationally affiliated people of working- and middle-class backgrounds who understood that the mood within black communities in the South, and in the North, was more confrontational and more desperate. Only the day before the OAU met in Cairo, the Harlem community erupted in six nights of outrage and black aggression because of the shooting and murder of fifteen-year-old James Powell by police officer Thomas Gilligan right in front of his friends and other witnesses with impunity.¹⁴ Indeed, what was at stake was that African American people no longer accepted gradualism: “We no longer endorse patience and turning the other cheek. We assert the right of self-defense by whatever means necessary. . . . [I]f we must die anyway, we will die fighting back and we will not die alone. . . . We are well aware that our future efforts to defend ourselves . . . by meeting violence with violence . . . could create the type of racial conflict in America that could easily escalate into a violent, world-wide, bloody race war.” Malcolm asked that in “the interests of world peace and security, we . . . recommend an immediate investigation into our problem by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.”¹⁵

Malcolm’s assassination on February 19, 1965, meant the end of the OAAU and his dream of Pan-African solidarity that would galvanize the world into action in demanding human rights for African Americans in the United States. But the ideas expressed by Robert F. Williams and Malcolm X, along with historian John Hendrik Clarke—self-determination and self-realization through education, economic security and political engagement, the right to self-defense, and the development of a Pan-African consciousness to facilitate a new world order that would “assur[e] full human rights” for all people—influenced the black power movement in the ensuing years.¹⁶

From the very beginning, conservative civil rights leaders were concerned that the more aggressive agendas of the black power movement would derail what had been accomplished through the courts and encourage white backlash. But King’s politics of nonviolence also appear to have been shaped by genuine fears of a race war and black extermination. In his telephone conversation with President Lyndon Johnson, King expressed concerns about the Watts “Riot” in 1965. He told Johnson that because of the potential of “retaliation from the white people” and because “people [white] had bought up guns . . . if something isn’t done to give a new sense of hope to the people in that area,” he feared that “a full-scale race war can develop.” Johnson agreed with King about the gravity of the problem, but he equated violence during the Watts Riot with southern racial violence by stating that “a man’s got no more right to destroy property with a Molotov cocktail in Los Angeles than the Ku Klux Klan has to go out and destroy a life.”¹⁷ Despite Johnson’s diminished capacity for understanding the importance of human life, for King the potential for internecine violence loomed ominously over the black community. According to civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, the overt racism of Police Chief Parker, who called “the Negro rioters . . . monkeys,” and Parker’s “insistence on dealing with the outbreak in Watts as though it were the random work of a criminal element threatened to lead the black community, as Martin Luther King remarked” privately, “into potential holocaust.” Rustin also noted that (as was true for Nat Turner’s insurrection, John Brown’s insurrection attempt, and the Wilmington and Atlanta massacres) the number of black deaths and injuries was not accounted for in the McCone Report on the Watts Riot and that the report was replete with “white stereotypes and shibboleths about . . . the Negro penchant for violence.”¹⁸

Indeed, much of the controversy over the black power movement was centered upon the idea of a race war leading to mass violence. Roy Wilkins, executive director of the NAACP, claimed that the words black power denoted “black racism,” which would lead to “black death.” King stated that he did not have a problem with black pride and the idea of self-defense, but his concern was that he saw “a pattern of violence emerging” and that “the cry ‘black power’ . . . falls on the ears as racism in the reverse.”¹⁹ Wilkins’s and King’s fear was that white Americans would construe black power to mean “black mastery,” an age-old refrain used to stoke white violence against the black community dating back to the days of enslavement. They feared retaliatory violence in a war between the races that would extend beyond the urban cities in the West and North. They feared the white backlash that would inevitably come from white resistance to what whites would call “Negro rule.”

For Stokely Carmichael, however, who popularized the term “Black Power” while still a member and eventually the head of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), black power had nothing to do with violence: “Why do white people in this country associate Black Power with violence, and the [answer] is because of their own inability to deal with blackness.”²⁰ As far as Carmichael and other black power movement members were concerned, it was not their problem that white Americans were fearful of black people asserting their rights to full employment, education, decent housing, protection from police brutality, fair and impartial treatment from the criminal justice system, and the right to self-defense.²¹ The affirmation that justice and equality belonged to all of America’s citizens and should not have to be legislated through law was obvious to most black Americans. And their collective willingness to push back against those who believed that blacks had to wait for racist whites to give those rights to them became evident in the intensity with which the federal government attempted to shut the movement and its leaders down. Nevertheless, Carmichael affirmed, despite concerns that black power would start a race war in America: “We are not going to wait for white people to sanction Black Power. . . . [W]e are tired of trying to prove things to white people. We are tired of trying to explain to white people that we’re not gonna to hurt them. We are concerned with getting the things we want, the things we have to have to be able to function. . . . The question is, will white people overcome their racism and allow for that to happen in this country?”²²

The National Committee of Negro Churchmen offered similar sentiments over the “controversy about black power” in 1966. For these church leaders, from various denominations across the country, the discourse surrounding the term was “not anything new but the same old problem of power and race which has faced our beloved country since 1619.” In their view, the problem with black power lay in the historical fact that it had always been acceptable for whites in America to use power to achieve their goals “in getting what they want,” while black people were relegated to achieving their goals of social justice only through moral suasion or through appealing to America’s “conscience.” These black church leaders were clear that while they “deplore the overt violence of riots . . . their basic causes lie in the silent and covert violence” that surrounded the black community, violence that “pin[s] the backs of the masses of Negroes against the steaming ghetto walls—without jobs in a booming economy; with dilapidated and segregated education systems in the full view of unenforced laws against it; in short: the failure of American leaders to use American power to create equal opportunity in life as well as in law— this is the real problem and not the anguished cry for ‘black power.’” Indeed, they argued that black power did not endanger what had already been achieved, for in reality the gains toward “authentic democracy” had been minimal since the 1950s, and those who benefited were mainly middle-class blacks.²³

Although the clergy members noted that they were glad that none of the civil rights leaders advocating black power were seeking “domination,” the black community had to “be reconciled with the white majority.” Their reasoning was not based on the fact that blacks were a minority population surrounded and outnumbered by whites: “We see and feel that power every day in the destructions heaped upon our families and upon the nation’s cities. . . . [W]e are men, not children, and we are growing out of our fear of that power, which can hardly hurt us any more in the future than it does in the present or has in the past.” No, their reasoning for supporting black power, or “group power,” as they renamed it, was because it would lead to that place for which their fathers sighed, one of reconciliation “wielded to make visible our common humanity.”²⁴

Despite the envisioned positive outcome of the black power movement, black fiction writers had a decidedly different outlook on what would happen if members of the black community applied the black power ethos, indeed, the American ethos of freedom from oppression, self-defense, and self-preservation in large urban cities in the late 1960s and 1970s. In The Spook Who Sat by the Door: A Novel by Sam Greenlee published in 1969, the main character, ironically named Freeman, desegregates the CIA, learns its tactics, and then pretends to be a community activist in the inner city of Chicago. Instead of dismantling gang organizations, Freeman works with the most powerful gang, the Cobras, and trains them to fight against the injustices that plagued the black community. The fictional character Freeman states: “They were not convinced, those thickheaded cops, that niggers would tolerate no more head whippings. The cops felt sure that the answer to the riots and the increasing lack of respect for the uniform was more blood, more stitches, more battered kidneys. . . . And don’t ever think . . . he won’t do anything to keep the scene the way it’s always been. . . . He could go all the way: barbed wire, concentration camps, gas ovens; a ‘final solution’ of the Negro problem.”²⁵ For Greenlee’s character Freeman, black extermination was a real possibility.

In his novel Plan B, Chester Himes imagines what a race war would look like as a result of blacks fighting back against the white supremacy system, and he imagines it from the perspectives of both blacks and whites in America. At the onset of the race war, it was “whites’ guilt and fear that eventually saved blacks from extermination. The whites had the means, but they did not have the will. Their guilt would not allow them to exterminate the black race.” Instead, the solution in Himes’s imagination became that “whites demanded that many large, modern prisons be erected all over the United States, and that all blacks be locked up in them, except for the few needed to look after their food and sanitation.” But as blacks continued to fight back, “there was an immediate outcry demanding the use of armed forces to exterminate the black race.” As things begin to disintegrate into chaos in Chicago, the main character Tomsson Black reflects: “He had intended to issue an ultimatum to the white race: grant us equality or kill us as a race. . . . In the end, it would all depend on the white man’s image of himself. Could the white man reconcile the destruction of the black race with his own image as a just, civilized, and compassionate human? Was he capable of slaughtering twenty million blacks and then continue to live with himself and enjoy his own society? It had been done before. It was a calculated risk to assume that it could never happen again.”²⁶

In a 1970 interview with fellow author John A. Williams, Chester Himes explained that his intent was to show whites in America what a race war would look like. Himes envisioned that a black revolution would be violent because “when you have resorted to these means, this is the last resort. . . . All you do then is you kill as many people as you can, the black people kill as many of the people of the white community as they can kill. That means children, women, grown men.” Although it is black people who are killed in Plan B, Himes wanted white America, who he believed were “going around playing games,” to envision “what would happen if the black people would seriously uprise.” When asked if he believed that America would exterminate its black population in a race war, Himes argued that he did not believe that whites would do it, because it would “destroy America. . . . It’s not a question of whether they could destroy the blacks physically; it’s the fact that they can’t do it morally—and exist in the world.” The problem, as Himes saw it, was that most blacks did not know that whites would not exterminate them and thus did not challenge white supremacist violence. Because of this passive behavior, Himes argued, whites did not take black violence or threats by black power leaders to assert their rights through force seriously.²⁷

Fortunately, there has not been a race war or black extermination as envisioned by Garvey, Malcolm, King, and Himes, but neither has social justice been achieved, nor an end to racial discrimination and race-based violence. There has not been a race war, but millions of people of African descent have died because of the institution of enslavement and the ideas about race and who was eligible for extermination that supported it across the Atlantic World. The formation of activist groups in 2013 like Black Lives Matter in response to the murder of young black men and women like Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Michelle Cusseaux, and Tanisha Anderson effectively galvanized organized protest against this long history of violence that black people continue to contend with. Apocalyptic prophecies about the possibility of a race war and the extermination of black bodies continue to circulate on the Internet. Police brutality, black criminality, and the mass incarceration of large numbers of black and brown people have become popular topics due to Michelle Alexander’s 2010 book, The New Jim Crow, which has helped to dismantle laws that disproportionately and unfairly target black and brown people to serve unreasonable sentences for nonviolent crimes.²⁸ Will we be able to look back in fifty years, in one hundred years, and see that the criminal justice system finally serves the American people in an equitable fashion? And what about black-on-black crimes of violence? This is not how Africans in America have treated each other historically. Will we finally get at the heart of the suffering and psychic dislocation caused by unlivable environments that display a callous disregard for the humanity of those forced to live in urban ghettos and rural poverty?

Moreover, the murder of nine innocent members of the historic Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Carolina on June 17, 2015, should tell us that these ideas, the deep and troubling history that has tied violence and race together in ways that seem inseparable, are indeed alive and well. Twenty-year-old Dylann Roof told authorities that he hoped to start a “race war.” He told a survivor of his night of carnage, a massacre of people young and old, that he was killing black people because “you rape our women and your [sic] taking over our country.”²⁹ Did he know that these were the very ideas used to justify enslavement, the dismantling of Reconstruction in the South, and the de facto legalization of Jim Crow? Did he know that this was the first and largest historically black church in the South, a denomination of the Methodist tradition that was started by former slaves and where Denmark Vesey organized with other black members to revolutionize the country by dismantling slavery in one of the richest slave states in the country? Did he realize that his use of the words “race war” had a historic context that meant the annihilation of blacks or whites well into the civil rights era? Did he realize the trauma he would cause not only for the black community but also for the white community, shining daylight on the troubling yet ever-persistent ideas about the alleged racial incompatibility of black, brown, and white people in America?

This country desperately needs something like a Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a solution to dealing with our history of racial violence, with white supremacy, and with the reconciliation of that history because it has been and remains a curse upon this nation. We need to cleanse ourselves of our ugly past, to begin to heal the deep fractures and trauma that 250 years of slavery and 150 years of racial oppression have done to the fabric of America and its people. And then, collectively, we must envision what a country that was not based on the ideas of white supremacy, or race war, or black or white extermination would look like. The question we must ask ourselves is: Have we truly moved beyond where America began? Have we, as Americans, white and black, internalized the ideas of the disposability of black people in America that have held sway for over three centuries? Can we as a country move beyond the depictions of blackness as symbols of savagery and barbarianism that were and are inscribed upon black and brown bodies throughout the African diaspora, made manifest in the history of racial violence in America and the Atlantic World?