OR LIBERATION NOW
“There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.”
HELEN KELLER, 1902
Even when traditional American history moves from pure myth toward a semblance of reality, admitting, for example, the injustice of slavery as a legal institution or the long denial of women’s voting rights, the supposed “correction” of such injustices becomes the ingredient for constructing a new myth. So black and white schoolchildren today continue to receive the instruction that President Abraham Lincoln did away with the injustice of slavery with the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, September 22, 1862, and that women were given their equal rights with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in time for women to vote in the 1920 national elections.
Dictionary definitions make “emancipation” synonymous with “liberation,” and that equation is the heart of the myth. Neither “freedom” nor “liberation” resulted from the emancipatory acts of Congress regarding black folks and women, though slave testimony indicates liberated expectations swept plantations in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation. “We was free. Just like that, we was free,” remembers one slave quoted in B. A. Botkin’s Lay My Burden Down. “We knowed freedom was on us, but we didn’t know what was to come with it.” Louisa Bowes Rose remembers, “Daddy was down to the creek. He jumped right in the water up to his neck. He was so happy he just kept on scoopin’ up handfulls of water and dumpin’ it on his head and yellin’, ‘I’se free! I’se free! I’se free!’” And Fannie Berry recalls, “Niggers shoutin’ and clappin’ hands and singin’! Chillun runnin’ all over the place beatin’ time and yellin’! Everybody happy. Sho’ did some celebratin’ . . .”
But when the truth of “emancipation” became clear, former slave testimony and reaction took a different turn. Another slave, Patsy Michener, uses an analogy reminiscent of the Indian myth recited in Chapter 2: “Two snakes full of poison. One lying with his head pointing north, the other with its head pointing south. Their names was slavery and freedom. The snake called slavery lay with his head pointed south and the snake called freedom lay with his head pointed north. Both bit the nigger and they was both bad.”
Former slave Rhody Holsell questioned the strategy of emancipation:
I believe it would have been better to have moved all the colored people way out west to themselves. Abraham Lincoln wanted to do this. It would have been better on both races and they would not have mixed up. But the white people did not want the “shade” taken out of the country. Many of the bosses after the freedom couldn’t stand it and went in the house and got a gun and blew out his brains. If Lincoln had lived, he would have separated us like they did the Indians. We would not have been slaughtered, burned, hanged, and killed if we had been put to ourselves and had our own laws. Many a person is now in torment because of this mixup. God give us a better principle and we could have had thousands of whites slaughtered, but we didn’t after the freedom.
More bitter is the reaction of Thomas Hall, whose testimony was gathered by the Federal Writers’ Project in 1938:
Lincoln got the praise for freeing us, but did he do it? He give us freedom without giving us any chance to live to ourselves and we still had to depend on the southern white man for work, food and clothing, and he held us out of necessity and want in a state of servitude but little better than slavery. Lincoln done but little for the Negro race and from a living standpoint, nothing. White folks are not going to do nothing for Negroes except keep them down. Harriet Beecher Stowe, the writer of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, did that for her own good. She had her own interests at heart and I don’t like her, Lincoln, or none of that crowd. The Yankees helped free us, so they say, but they let us be put back in slavery again.
When I think of slavery it makes me mad. I do not believe in giving you my story, ’cause with all the promises that have been made, the Negro is still in a bad way in the United States, no matter in what part he lives. It’s all the same. Now you may be all right; there’re a few white men who are, but the pressure is such from your white friends that you will be compelled to talk against us and give us the cold shoulder when you are around them, even if your heart is right towards us.
You are going around to get a story of slavery conditions and the persecutions of Negroes before the Civil War and the economic conditions concerning them since that war. You should have known before this late day all about that. Are you going to help us? No! You are only helping yourself. You say that my story may be put into a book, that you are from the Federal Writers’ Project. Well, the Negro will not get anything out of it, no matter where you are from. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I didn’t like her book and I hate her. No matter where you are from I don’t want you to write my story, ’cause the white folks have been and are now and always will be against the Negro.
THE GREAT EMANCIPATOR
In his excellent updated account of black resistance, Look Out Whitey! Black Power’s Goin’ Get Your Mama, Julius Lester explodes the myth of the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, in a single paragraph:
Blacks have no reason to feel grateful to Abraham Lincoln. Rather, they should be angry at him. After all, he came into office in 1861. How come it took him two whole years to free the slaves? His pen was sitting on his desk the whole time. All he had to do was get up one morning and say, “Doggonnit! I think I’m gon’ free the slaves today. It just ain’t right for folks to own other folks.” It was that simple. Mr. Lincoln, however, like Mr. Kennedy (take your pick) and Mr. Eastland, moved politically, not morally. He said that if he could keep the Union together by maintaining slavery, he’d do it. If he had to free the slaves to keep the Union together, he’d do that, too. But he was in office to preserve the Union, not free the slaves. (Nowadays they say preserve law and order, not see that blacks get a little justice.)
Though Lester’s observation captures the reality quite well, we should take a closer look at the opinions and actions of the Great Emancipator. First of all, the Emancipation Proclamation itself. It didn’t free black folks per se, nor did it make any claim to having done so. The Emancipation Proclamation, put into effect January 1, 1863, applied only to the slaves in those states that had seceded from the Union—which left some 800,000 unaffected:
Now, therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, by virtue of the power in me vested as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States in time of actual armed rebellion against the authority and government of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion, do, on this 1st day of January, A.D. 1863, and in accordance with my purpose so to do, publicly proclaimed for the full period of one hundred days from the first day above mentioned, order and designate as the States and parts of States wherein the people thereof, respectively, are this day in rebellion against the United States the following, to wit:
Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana (except the parishes of St. Bernard, Plaquemines, Jefferson, St. John, St. Charles, St. James, Ascension, Assumption, Terrebonne, Lafourche, St. Mary, St. Martin, and Orleans, including the city of New Orleans), Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia (except the forty-eight counties designated as West Virginia, and also the counties of Berkeley, Accomac, Northhamption, Elizabeth City, York, Princess Anne, and Norfolk, including the cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth), and which excepted parts are for the present left precisely as if this proclamation were not issued.
The Great Emancipator urged the newly released black folks to be nonviolent and leave the killing to white folks:
And by virtue of the power and for the purpose aforesaid, I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States and parts of States are, and henceforward shall be, free; and that the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.
And I hereby enjoin upon the people so declared to be free to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defense; and I recommend to them that, in all cases when allowed, they labor faithfully for reasonable wages.
To credit Abraham Lincoln with being the Great Emancipator, or the supreme abolitionist of his time, is pure myth. Many factors led to the Emancipation Proclamation, not the least of which was the factor that determines so many of America’s decisions—military necessity. Abraham Lincoln never favored unconditional abolition, was always sensitive to the interests of the South, did not hate slaveholders—though he was absolutely opposed to slavery spreading into the territories—and was at best a “reluctant” emancipator reacting to the Northern abolitionist pressures because of the sensitivities of the office he held.
Regarding the difference between Northern abolitionists and Southern slaveholders, Lincoln suggested that if New England had proved to be the best place to raise cotton, slavery would have existed there. Or if Northerners had lived instead in the South, they too would have gone along with slavery.
Lincoln made his own position concerning the institution of slavery quite clear in his reply to abolitionist Horace Greeley, who had written an open letter to the President entitled “The Prayer of Twenty Millions,” published in the New York Tribune, August 19, 1862. Greeley suggested:
Had you, sir, in your Inaugural Address, unmistakably given notice that, in case the Rebellion already commenced were persisted in, and your efforts to preserve the Union and enforce the laws should be resisted by armed force, you would recognize no loyal person as rightfully held in Slavery by a traitor, we believe the Rebellion would therein have received a staggering if not fatal blow.
Then Greeley reminded his President of some Civil War facts:
The Rebels are everywhere using the late anti-negro riots in the North, as they have long used your officers’ treatment of negroes in the South, to convince the slaves that they have nothing to hope from a Union success—that we mean in that case to sell them into a bitterer bondage to defray the cost of the war. Let them impress this as a truth on the great mass of their ignorant and credulous bondmen, and the Union will never be restored—never. We cannot conquer Ten Millions of People united in solid phalanx against us, powerfully aided by Northern sympathizers and European allies. We must have scouts, guides, spies, cooks, teamsters, diggers and choppers from the blacks of the South, whether we allow them to fight for us or not, or we shall be baffled and repelled.
Lincoln replied in a letter to the newspaper on August 22, 1862:
I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored, the nearer the Union will be the Union as it was. If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them.
My paramount object is to save the Union, and not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save this Union, and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.
I shall do less whenever I shall believe I am doing hurt to the cause, and I shall do more whenever I believe more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors, and I shall adopt new views as fast as they shall appear to be true views. I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty, and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.
Greeley was asking President Lincoln to make a blanket application of the Confiscation Bill (July 17, 1862), a bill “to suppress insurrection, to punish treason and rebellion, to seize and confiscate the property of rebels,” of which slaves were a part. On July 22, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton issues the executive order of the President:
That military commanders within the States of Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas, in an orderly manner, seize and use any property, real or personal, which may be necessary or convenient for their several commands, for supplies or for other purposes, and that while property may be destroyed for proper military objects, none shall be destroyed in wantonness or violence.
That military and naval commanders shall employ as laborers, within and from said States, so many persons of African descent as can be advantageously used for Military or naval purposes, giving them reasonable wages for their labor.
That as to both property and persons of African descent, accounts shall be kept sufficiently accurate and in detail to show quantities and amounts, and from who both such property and such persons have come, as a basis upon which compensation can be made in proper cases, and the several Departments of this Government shall attend to and perform their appropriate parts towards the execution of these orders.
Blacks began to meet the Union troops in large numbers, effecting what was a general work strike. Without black labor in the fields, it would be extremely difficult to feed Confederate troops. The Committee of the American Freedman’s Union Commission described the phenomenon: “Imagine, if you will a slave population . . . coming garbed in rags or in silks, with feet shod or bleeding, individually or in families and larger groups,—an army of slaves and fugitives. . . . The arrival among us of these hordes was like the oncoming of cities.”
“It was,” said W. E. B. Du Bois, “a general strike that involved directly in the end perhaps a half a million people.” Early Union practice during the Civil War was not to interfere with slaveholders and their property. Union officers returned runaway slaves to their masters. On the Fourth of July 1861, Colonel Pryor of Ohio delivered a speech to the people of Virginia saying,
I desire to assure you that the relation of master and servant as recognized in your state shall be respected. Your authority over that species of property shall not in the least be interfered with. To this end, I assure you that those under my command have pre-emptory orders to take up and hold any Negroes found running about the camp without passes from their masters.
But the black work stoppage changed all that and made the Union armies emancipators even before their Commander-in-Chief was ready to draft and release his Proclamation. Thus Du Bois explained:
The North started out with the idea of fighting the war without touching slavery. They faced the fact, after severe fighting, that Negroes seemed a valuable asset as laborers, and they therefore declared them “contraband of war” (property belonging to the enemy and valuable to the invader). It was but a step from that to attract and induce black labor to help the Northern armies. Slaves were urged and invited into Northern armies; they became military laborers and spies; not simply military laborers, but laborers on the plantations, where the crops went to help the Federal army or were sold North. Thus where Northern armies appeared, Negro laborers came, and the North found itself actually freeing slaves before it had the slightest intention of doing so, indeed when it had every intention not to.
The Emancipation Proclamation, then, was a wartime measure, issued in the midst of a difficult war. Antidraft riots (which featured the lynching of black folks) by white folks in the Northern cities necessitated the enlistment of black fighting men. War Department records show that there were 178,595 blacks regularly enlisted in the Union army, 36 percent of the free black population, taking part in over four hundred military engagements during the Civil War. Add to that the large numbers of blacks in direct support of the Union army and the figure soars to a million. There is no doubt that the large number of blacks with access to arms was a determining factor in the Union’s successful termination of the rebellion.
Europe was posing a problem with possible interference. Some sentiment in England favored recognizing the South as an independent nation, and warships were being prepared for Confederate use. An antislavery declaration was needed to swing British public opinion strongly in favor of the Union and to ward off British interference. And abolitionist pressure was demanding a clear antislavery issue as a rallying point against the South. Only as a wartime measure did the Emancipation Proclamation make sense anyway. No President can declare the Constitution null and void, and Abraham Lincoln knew that. However, in an existing state of war the President can declare emergency measures, even if they are unconstitutional. Such measures cannot remain in effect longer than the state of war. Permanent abolition of slavery, of course, required constitutional amendment.
All of these factors were being batted back and forth in Lincoln’s mind as he decided whether or not to become the “Great Emancipator.” A delegation representing a public meeting of “Christians of all denominations,” held in Chicago, Sunday, September 7, 1862, met with President Lincoln on September 11, urging national emancipation. Lincoln asked the delegation:
What good would a proclamation of emancipation from me do, especially as we are now situated? I do not wish to issue a document that the whole world will see must be inoperative, like the Pope’s bull against the comet! Would my word free the slaves when I can not even enforce the Constitution in the rebel states? Is there a single court, or magistrate, or individual that would be influenced by it there? And what reason is there to think it would have any greater effect upon the slaves than the late law of Congress, which I approved, and which offers protection and freedom to the slaves of rebel masters who come within our lines? . . . And suppose they could be induced by a proclamation of freedom from me to throw themselves upon us, what should we do with them? How could we feed and care for such a multitude? General Butler wrote me, a few days since, that he was issuing more rations to the slaves who have rushed to him, than to all the white troops under his command. They eat, and that is all; though it is true General Butler is feeding the whites also, by the thousand; for it nearly amounts to a famine there. . . . Understand, I raise no objection against it, on legal or constitutional grounds; for as commander-in-chief of the army and navy, in time of war, I suppose I have a right to take any measure which may best subdue the enemy. Nor do I urge objections of a moral nature, in view of possible consequences of insurrection and massacre at the South. I view the matter as a practical war measure, to be decided upon according to the advantages or disadvantages it may offer to the suppression of the rebellion.
The delegation reminded President Lincoln “that when the proclamation should become widely known [as the law of Congress has not been] it would withdraw the slaves from the rebels, leaving them without laborers, and giving us both laborers and soldiers.” They further insisted that General Butler’s difficulties were the inevitable result of “half way measures.”
Abraham Lincoln summed up the meeting in these words:
I admit that slavery is the root of the rebellion, or at least its sine qua non. The ambition of politicians may have instigated them to act, but they would have been impotent without slavery as their instrument. I will also concede that emancipation would help us in Europe and convince them that we are incited by something more than ambition. I grant further that it would help somewhat at the North, though not so much, I fear, as you and those you represent imagine. Still, some additional strength would be added in that way to the war. And then unquestionably it would weaken the rebels by drawing off their laborers which is of great importance; but I am not so sure we could do much with the blacks. If we were to arm them, I fear that in a few weeks the arms would be in the hands of the rebels; and indeed thus far we have not had arms enough to equip our white troops. I will mention another thing, though I meet only your scorn and contempt. There are fifty thousand bayonets in the Union armies from the Border Slave States. It would be a serious matter, if, in consequence of such a proclamation as you desire, they should go over to the rebels. I do not think they all would—not so many indeed as a year ago, or as six months ago—not so many to-day as yesterday. Every day increases their Union feeling. They are also getting their pride enlisted, and want to beat the rebels. Let me say one thing more: I think you should admit that we already have an important principle to rally and unite the people in the fact that constitutional government is at stake. This is a fundamental idea, going down about as deep as anything.
Eleven days later Abraham Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation, which was issued the first of the following year. He proved to be a man of his word. Lincoln did exactly what he told Horace Greeley he might do—free some slaves and leave others untouched. And of course in reality he didn’t free any slaves at all. Those slaves who were in the Union, over whom he had immediate authority, Lincoln did not free, as his abovementioned “Border State” concerns prevailed. Those slaves he did declare to be free were the property of the rebel states over whom Lincoln did not have immediate authority. The North had to defeat the South in battle before such authority would be restored. But then the war would be over, and an emergency measure would not be in effect; thus, the whole issue became a matter of constitutional amendment.
A month before the Emancipation Proclamation became effective, Abraham Lincoln proposed constitutional amendments in his annual message to Congress, December 1, 1862. Lincoln’s plan involved compensation to slaveholders from government funds, and relocation of black people “on the continent or elsewhere,” also with government funds. Lincoln had long been intrigued with the idea of sending black folks back to Africa (or to Africa, since most of them were at least a generation removed from their native soil). Or sending them to any other convenient place, for that matter.
On April 16, 1862, an act abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia was approved by Abraham Lincoln. Said Lincoln: “I have ever desired to see the National Capital freed from the institution in some satisfactory way.” Section XI of the act designated
That the sum of one hundred thousand dollars, out of any money in the treasury not otherwise appropriated, is hereby appropriated, to be expended under the direction of the President of the United States, to aid in the colonization and settlement of such free persons of African descent now residing in said District, including those to be liberated by this act, as may desire to emigrate to the Republics of Hayti or Liberia, or such other country beyond the limits of the United States as the President may determine; Provided, The expenditure for this purpose shall not exceed one hundred dollars for each emigrant.
Thus the law that “emancipated” slaves in Washington, D.C., immediately encouraged them to get out. Life for “free” blacks in Washington was designed to encourage them to want to leave. When Lincoln was assassinated, the Washington City Council ordered that blacks be excluded from the funeral procession. The Assistant Secretary of War interceded on their behalf, so a quota was set on the number of blacks officially allowed to mourn their departed Emancipator. Even that was better than New York City, where city officials refused to permit any black men to walk in the funeral procession for Lincoln there.
Thursday afternoon, July 14, 1862, President Lincoln gave audience at the White House to a “committee of colored men.” The President informed his guests that a sum of money had been placed at his disposal by Congress for the purpose of colonizing people of African descent, “or a portion of them,” in some other country, “making it his duty as it had long been his inclination to favor that cause.”
Why [asked the President] should the people of your race be colonized? Why should they leave this country? . . . You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong, I need not discuss, but this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think your race suffers very greatly, many of them, by living among us, while ours suffers from your presence. In a word, we suffer on each side. If this is admitted, it affords a reason at least why we should be separated.
President Lincoln urged his “colored” delegation to take the initiative in getting out for the good of white and black folks, even though they might not want to go. Lincoln’s suggested colonization site was in Central America. Lincoln urged:
I suppose one of the principal difficulties in the way of colonization is that the free colored man can not see that his comfort would be advanced by it. You may believe you can live in Washington or elsewhere in the United States the remainder of your lives, perhaps more so than you can in any foreign country, and thence you may come to the conclusion that you have nothing to do with the idea of going to a foreign country. This is (I speak in no unkind sense) an extremely selfish view of the case.
There is an unwillingness on the part of our people, harsh as it may be, for you free colored people to remain with us. Now, if you could give a start to white people, you would open a wide door for many to be made free. If we deal with those who are not free at the beginning, and whose intellects are clouded by slavery, we have very poor materials to start with. If intelligent colored men, such as are before me, would move in this matter, much might be accomplished. It is exceedingly important that we have men at the beginning capable of thinking as white men, and not those who have been systematically oppressed.
Lincoln even got in a sly dig blaming black folks for all the trouble in the land:
See our present condition—the country engaged in war; our white men cutting one another’s throats, none knowing how far it will extend, and then consider what we know to be the truth. But for your race among us there could not be war, although many men engaged on either side do not care for you one way or the other. Nevertheless, I repeat without the institution of slavery and the colored race as a basis the war could not have an existence.
The “colored” delegation said they would think about the President’s suggestion and give him an answer “in a short time.” Frederick Douglass, as always, had a nitty-gritty reply on the tip of his tongue:
A horse thief pleading that the existence of the horse is the apology for his theft or a highway man contending that the money in the traveller’s pocket is the sole first cause of his robbery are about as much entitled to respect as is the President’s reasoning at this point. No, Mr. President, it is not the innocent horse that makes the horse thief, nor the traveller’s purse that makes the highway robber, and it is not the presence of the Negro that causes this foul and unnatural war, but the cruel and brutal cupidity of those who wish to possess horses, money and Negroes by means of theft, robbery, and rebellion.
But Abraham Lincoln was very slow to give up on the idea of voluntary black deportation. When the Central America plan failed to materialize, he thought of black colonies in Texas and Florida. Haiti remained a strong possibility in the President’s mind. In fact some four hundred blacks were taken to Haiti, but most of them died in a smallpox epidemic. Some blacks did go to Africa after the war and founded the Republic of Liberia. And in the same month of his assassination, April 1865, Lincoln was again corresponding with his old Union officer friend Benjamin Franklin Butler asking him to work out the logistics of shipping black folks to Haiti or Liberia. Butler wrote in reply: “Mr. President, I have gone carefully over my calculations as to the power of the country to export the Negroes of the South and I assure you that, using all your naval vessels and all the merchant marine fleet to cross the seas with safety, it will be impossible for you to transport to the nearest place . . . half as fast as Negro children will be born here.”
Abraham Lincoln did not live to see the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which abolished slavery officially; though the amendment did not include either compensation to slave owners or the relocation of blacks. Today the name of Abraham Lincoln is revered in America as the Great Emancipator, while the names of black groups and individuals advocating separatism, such as the Black Muslims, are reviled. But the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and Abraham Lincoln, though a century apart in history, are very close politically. Both men reject false notions of emancipation in the interest of true black liberation, and both consider separatism a necessary prerequisite.
That emancipation is no substitute for liberation was witnessed almost immediately after the Civil War. Southern states began enacting “black codes” and “peonage” laws which in effect returned the freed slaves to the control of their former masters. Blacks were forced to work as hired farm hands and domestic servants or to face being arrested on charges of vagrancy. Vagrants were “bound out,” rented as laborers, giving their employers the right to pay their fines in place of serving jail sentences. Blacks could not testify in court against white men and could serve as court witnesses only in cases involving other blacks.
With the former masters now the employers, Frederick Douglass summed up the situation: “The employers retained the power to starve them to death, and wherever this power is held, there is the power of slavery.”
YOU’VE COME A LONG WAY, BABY?
Whenever the word “emancipation” appears in the pages of traditional American history books, the reader should always be suspicious. It is usually used as a cover to discourage any further thought of liberation. No clearer example in American history can be found than the so-called emancipation of women. It simply means women obtained their long overdue right to vote as a result of suffrage agitation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The liberation of women has yet to be accomplished.
Women waged a courageous struggle against the injustice at the polling places of America, just as they have continued to engage in the struggle for justice and human dignity ever since. Today women of all ages swell the ranks of demonstrators against the war in Vietnam, they have become the backbone of the peace movement, and they cannot be accused of being in the struggle out of selfish interests. They do not face the immediate problem of being drafted. Yet they put themselves on the line because the cause is right, and they want to stand alongside men in protesting continued injustice.
Spending as much time as I do on college campuses all over the country, I am continually reminded of the second-class status of women. Almost every campus I visit has different dormitory regulations for women and men. Women have to abide by an 11 P.M. curfew. Men can stay out all night, which means male students can sneak into the library after hours on the night before a big test, if they happen to have a friend working at the library who can let them in. Yet male and female students take the same test together. Women do not get a 30 percent headstart on each test.
Women come to college as students, not as women, and they should obviously be treated on an equal basis with men students. And if parental pressure is responsible for college curfews, if parents do not trust their sons and daughters to be treated equally as students on campus, they should keep them home and watch them themselves.
But discrimination against women on campus is merely a reflection of the discrimination that exists in society. Women work just as hard as men to earn their degrees, it takes them just as long to obtain a doctorate, yet they know in advance they will never make the same salaries as men holding the same degree. Women pay the same food prices as men; the same hospital fees, doctor bills, and rent. Obviously salaries should also be equal.
Marlene Dixon, writing in the December 1969 issue of Ramparts magazine, clearly demonstrates the salary inequity of working women, especially nonwhite working women. She says:
Women, regardless of race, are more disadvantaged than are men, including non-white men. White women earn $2600 less than white men and $1500 less than non-white men. The brunt of the inequality is carried by 2.5 million non-white women, 94 percent of whom are black. They earn $3800 less than white men, $1900 less than non-white men, and $1200 less than white women.
For further documentation of the deprivation and degradation of women, Marlene Dixon cites the decline in educational achievement at the very time when higher educational levels are demanded. She says:
In 1962 . . . while women constituted 53 percent of the graduating high school classes, only 42 percent of the entering college class were women. Only one in three people who received a B.A. or M.A. in that year was a woman, and only one in ten who received a Ph.D. was a woman. These figures represent a decline in educational achievement for women since the 1930’s when women received two out of five of the B.A. and M.A. degrees given, and one out of seven of the Ph.Ds. While there has been a dramatic increase in the number of people, including women, who go to college, women have not kept pace with men in terms of educational achievement. Furthermore, women have lost ground in professional employment. In 1960 only 22 percent of the faculty and other professional staff at colleges and universities were women—down from 28 percent in 1949, 27 percent in 1930, 26 percent in 1920. 1960 does beat 1919 with only 20 percent—“you’ve come a long way baby”—right back to where you started! In other professional categories: 10 percent of all scientists are women, 7 percent of all physicians, 3 percent of all lawyers, and 1 percent of all engineers.
That 3 percent figure in the lawyer category strikes home to me personally, as every time I appear in court and watch my attorney Jean Williams in action, I am once again reminded of the courtroom competence of women.
A recently published government study entitled American Science Manpower 1968: A Report of the National Register of Scientific and Technical Personnel gives ample documentation of salary discrimination in the field of science against women of equal scholastic standing with men. The 1968 figures show that roughly 9 percent of the nation’s registered scientists are women, which seems to be a drop of 1 percent since 1960. The median annual income for the registered women scientists is $10,000. The median annual income for all scientists in $13,200. There is no special breakdown for the median annual income for male scientists, but since women were included in the “all scientists” category, obviously the median salary for men is higher than $13,200.
Government units came the closest to giving women a fair deal in salaries: $10,600 on the average compared with $11,200 for men. Nonprofit agencies such as foundations were farthest out of line with $10,000 versus $14,700. Industry was almost identical in salary sex discrimination to nonprofit agencies. And the report indicated disparities up to 35 percent between salaries paid men and women with Ph.D. degrees.
Society’s discrimination against women, placing them in the category of sex objects rather than individual human beings, begins at a very early age. Little kids are indoctrinated with society’s sickness. An adult will ask a little boy: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” The same adult will turn to a little girl and say “Who’s your boy friend?” It is a sick male-oriented society that will push sex that close to the cradle.
Then from the cradle to the grave society tells women that their role is to be pretty, feminine, and domestic and to stay behind their men. Multibillion-dollar cosmetic and fashion industries encourage the role, insisting that women wear lipstick, rouge, perfume, and other types of cosmetics, and wear pretty clothes. But such superficialities have nothing to do with a woman’s stature as a full human being. I could wear all those things also, and it would not make me a woman.
Sexism and racism are closely allied, and both are the enemies of true human liberation. People are born into this world as human beings first and sexual beings second. The quality of a person’s life determines whether a male will grow into the full stature of manhood or a woman will grow into the full stature of womanhood. Males and females can engage in sexual activities whether or not they ever reach the level of manhood and womanhood.
Sexism and racism are best symbolized by America’s current confusion regarding the American flag, and pseudo-patriotic claims upon that flag indicate an opposition to true human liberation. Many Americans are upset at seeing the American flag treated with disrespect; burning it, tearing it, soiling it, or other forms of desecration. But what is a flag, after all, but a piece of cloth. Personally I have always had more respect for human beings than I have had for a piece of cloth. When all Americans grow to the full stature of manhood and womanhood, and learn to salute each other as human beings, that is the day all flags will be safe.
For such salutary behavior would indicate the dawn of a liberated America. An America in which Muhammad Ali could reign as heavyweight champion of the world regardless of his religious or political beliefs. An America where a man’s religious beliefs are respected regardless of the color of the believer. An America where churches would live the gospel of Jesus Christ rather than merely preach that word, where Felipe Luciano and the Young Lords would not have to assume the burden, facing arrest and persecution, of incarnating the gospel the churches ignore. An America where Cesar Chavez would be recognized as a saint and a statesman rather than tormented as a rabblerouser in the grape fields. In short, an America where patriotism is expanded beyond love of country to embrace a love and devotion to worldwide humanity.