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From Frederick Douglass to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for more than a century, the dominant political perspective within the Black Freedom Movement was “integrationism.” This political approach emphasized the deep commitment and sacrifices African Americans had made to enrich and expand America’s democracy.
African Americans had, afterall, fought in all of America’s wars, and had made enormous social and economic contributions to the nation’s welfare. Blacks believed in the Constitution and the inherent fairness of democratic institutions. Therefore, according to this argument, it only was reasonable to accept blacks as being full civil partners in the construction of the American nation. All structural barriers which impeded the free and fair access by African Americans to economic development, political decision-making and individual advancement should be eliminated.
The logical path forward to achieve these objectives was through political action, broadly defined: the use of lawsuits to challenge segregation laws in schools, public accommodations and residential codes; the fight to remove all restrictions on black electoral political participation; the establishment of pragmatic coalitions with sympathetic white political organizations and powerful interest groups to shift racial policies and practices toward blacks’ interests. Embedded in this strategic approach to racial advancement was the unquestioned belief that the American state could indeed be lifted from its historical foundations of structural racism. The winning of incremental legal and political victories, over time, would lead to qualitative changes in the American government. In other words, the U.S. government could be deracialized through militant political activity and reforms.
These key assumptions would form the basis for the practical politics of the black middle class for several generations. They are all found, for example, in the 1905 program of the Niagara Movement, a group of liberal black intellectuals and professionals led by W.E.B Du Bois. The Niagara Movement’s agenda called on Congress to enforce the Constitution, and demanded “upright judges in courts, juries selected without discrimination on account of color and the same measure of punishment and the same efforts at reformation for blacks as for white offenders.”
On the issue of electoral political participation, the Niagara Movement urged Negroes to “protest emphatically and continually against the curtailment of their political rights. We believe in manhood suffrage; we believe that no man is so good, intelligent or wealthy as to be entrusted wholly with the welfare of his neighbors.” And on the issue of Jim Crow, there could be no compromise: “Any discrimination based simply on race or color is barbarous, we care not how hallowed it be by custom, expediency or prejudice … discriminations based simply and solely on physical peculiarities, place of birth, color of skin, are relics of that unreasoning human savagery of which the world is and ought to be thoroughly ashamed.”
The same strategic approach for achieving black freedom through the implementation of meaningful reforms within America’s democratic institutions can be heard in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous “I Have A Dream” speech delivered before an audience of 250,000 civil rights protestors at the August 28, 1963 March on Washington, D.C. King’s speech presented the struggle for racial desegregation as the fulfillment of America’s democratic creed: “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. The note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Martin’s greatest political aspiration, his “dream,” was not race-based; it was “a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.” It was the belief that through legal and political reforms “we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.”
In the 1950s and 1960s in the Deep South, the struggle for integration took the form of nonviolent civil disobedience against restrictions of Jim Crow. Although its most prominent spokespersons such as King were middle class, the vast majority of local leaders and grassroots activists were predominantly working class and poor people, and many were women. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 finally outlawed racial segregation in public accommodations throughout the nation, and the Voting Rights Act the following year permitted millions of Southern blacks to vote for the first time in their lives.
Organized efforts to dismantle structural racism outside of the South, however, proved to be more difficult than civil rights activists anticipated. Northern white liberals didn’t object to Negroes gaining the right to vote or eating in restaurants, so long as they did not move next door. The backlash began in “the bastion of California liberalism,” Berkeley, in early 1963 when a referendum on a local ordinance banning racial discrimination in all real estate sales and rentals, was defeated with 83 percent voter turnout. The next year, California voters statewide approved Proposition 14, which proposed to amend the state constitution to guarantee a homeowner’s right to sell only to whom he or she wished to sell, by a two-to-one margin.
That same year, Detroit voters approved a “Home Owners’ Rights Ordinance” that was designed to maintain that city’s pattern of residential segregation. When Martin moved the focus of the desegregation struggle from the Deep South to Chicago, emphasizing employment opportunities and fair housing for Negroes, he encountered fierce resistance from white ethnics. Thousands of white men, women and children hurled rocks, bottles and even knives at unarmed nonviolent demonstrators. Martin was so shaken that he later admitted, “I have never seen such hostility and hatred anywhere in my life, even in Selma.”
Today, residential segregation is more extensive than it was when Martin was assassinated. The economic inequality between the rich and poor has accelerated. Instead of Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court, we have that pathetic panderer to white conservatism, Clarence Thomas on the high court. We’ve elected over 12,000 black elected officials since 1968, yet our political system is moving further to the right. The politics of liberal reform and integration has reached an effective dead end, and it requires a serious and critical rethinking within the black community of where do we go from here. Dr. Manning Marable is Professor of History and Political Science, and the Director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University in New York.
“Along the Color Line” is distributed free of charge to over 350 publications throughout the U.S. and internationally. Dr. Marable’s Column is also Available on the Internet at www.manningmarable.net.
African Americans had, afterall, fought in all of America’s wars, and had made enormous social and economic contributions to the nation’s welfare. Blacks believed in the Constitution and the inherent fairness of democratic institutions. Therefore, according to this argument, it only was reasonable to accept blacks as being full civil partners in the construction of the American nation. All structural barriers which impeded the free and fair access by African Americans to economic development, political decision-making and individual advancement should be eliminated.
The logical path forward to achieve these objectives was through political action, broadly defined: the use of lawsuits to challenge segregation laws in schools, public accommodations and residential codes; the fight to remove all restrictions on black electoral political participation; the establishment of pragmatic coalitions with sympathetic white political organizations and powerful interest groups to shift racial policies and practices toward blacks’ interests. Embedded in this strategic approach to racial advancement was the unquestioned belief that the American state could indeed be lifted from its historical foundations of structural racism. The winning of incremental legal and political victories, over time, would lead to qualitative changes in the American government. In other words, the U.S. government could be deracialized through militant political activity and reforms.
These key assumptions would form the basis for the practical politics of the black middle class for several generations. They are all found, for example, in the 1905 program of the Niagara Movement, a group of liberal black intellectuals and professionals led by W.E.B Du Bois. The Niagara Movement’s agenda called on Congress to enforce the Constitution, and demanded “upright judges in courts, juries selected without discrimination on account of color and the same measure of punishment and the same efforts at reformation for blacks as for white offenders.”
On the issue of electoral political participation, the Niagara Movement urged Negroes to “protest emphatically and continually against the curtailment of their political rights. We believe in manhood suffrage; we believe that no man is so good, intelligent or wealthy as to be entrusted wholly with the welfare of his neighbors.” And on the issue of Jim Crow, there could be no compromise: “Any discrimination based simply on race or color is barbarous, we care not how hallowed it be by custom, expediency or prejudice … discriminations based simply and solely on physical peculiarities, place of birth, color of skin, are relics of that unreasoning human savagery of which the world is and ought to be thoroughly ashamed.”
The same strategic approach for achieving black freedom through the implementation of meaningful reforms within America’s democratic institutions can be heard in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous “I Have A Dream” speech delivered before an audience of 250,000 civil rights protestors at the August 28, 1963 March on Washington, D.C. King’s speech presented the struggle for racial desegregation as the fulfillment of America’s democratic creed: “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. The note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Martin’s greatest political aspiration, his “dream,” was not race-based; it was “a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.” It was the belief that through legal and political reforms “we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.”
In the 1950s and 1960s in the Deep South, the struggle for integration took the form of nonviolent civil disobedience against restrictions of Jim Crow. Although its most prominent spokespersons such as King were middle class, the vast majority of local leaders and grassroots activists were predominantly working class and poor people, and many were women. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 finally outlawed racial segregation in public accommodations throughout the nation, and the Voting Rights Act the following year permitted millions of Southern blacks to vote for the first time in their lives.
Organized efforts to dismantle structural racism outside of the South, however, proved to be more difficult than civil rights activists anticipated. Northern white liberals didn’t object to Negroes gaining the right to vote or eating in restaurants, so long as they did not move next door. The backlash began in “the bastion of California liberalism,” Berkeley, in early 1963 when a referendum on a local ordinance banning racial discrimination in all real estate sales and rentals, was defeated with 83 percent voter turnout. The next year, California voters statewide approved Proposition 14, which proposed to amend the state constitution to guarantee a homeowner’s right to sell only to whom he or she wished to sell, by a two-to-one margin.
That same year, Detroit voters approved a “Home Owners’ Rights Ordinance” that was designed to maintain that city’s pattern of residential segregation. When Martin moved the focus of the desegregation struggle from the Deep South to Chicago, emphasizing employment opportunities and fair housing for Negroes, he encountered fierce resistance from white ethnics. Thousands of white men, women and children hurled rocks, bottles and even knives at unarmed nonviolent demonstrators. Martin was so shaken that he later admitted, “I have never seen such hostility and hatred anywhere in my life, even in Selma.”
Today, residential segregation is more extensive than it was when Martin was assassinated. The economic inequality between the rich and poor has accelerated. Instead of Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court, we have that pathetic panderer to white conservatism, Clarence Thomas on the high court. We’ve elected over 12,000 black elected officials since 1968, yet our political system is moving further to the right. The politics of liberal reform and integration has reached an effective dead end, and it requires a serious and critical rethinking within the black community of where do we go from here. Dr. Manning Marable is Professor of History and Political Science, and the Director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University in New York.
“Along the Color Line” is distributed free of charge to over 350 publications throughout the U.S. and internationally. Dr. Marable’s Column is also Available on the Internet at www.manningmarable.net.