| Backgrounds from top: A crowd in Birmingham, Ala., watches as F.B.I. experts look for clues to a bombing of a church in 1963; black students are bused back to Roxbury from South Boston under a police guard during court-ordered busing in 1974; an antiwar demonstrator at the U. of California at Berkeley throws a tear-gas canister at police in 1970. Insets from top: Police officers arrest the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.; a woman bars the way to a lunch counter in Memphis in 1961; Ku Klux Klan members march in 1925 in front of a burning cross in Virginia; W.E.B. Du Bois; the Rev. Robert Marsh (family photograph); Sam Bowers is taken to jail in Jackson in 1968 after his arrest on arson charges relating to the 1966 firebomb death of Vernon Dahmer; protesters flee from police officers and police dogs during a prayer march in Birmingham in 1963; Eugene (Bull) Connor at the Democratic convention in 1964; Rosa Parks arrives at court in 1956 with others on trial for violation of an antiboycott law. (Photographs from Corbis-Bettmann except where indicated)
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Anyone who scans publisher’s catalogs or bookstore shelves knows that the literature on
ALSO SEE: Books Discussed in This Essay |
the civil-rights movement is enormous and growing. Public commemoration, too, continues apace. And yet, despite this powerful body of writing and the documentaries, museums, monuments, and heritage tours built upon it, I sense that the movement is losing its purchase on the present, receding ever further into a grainy, washed-out past.
The ghostliness results in part from a popular narrative that confines the civil-rights revolution to the South and to a brief moment in time. First comes Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which somehow leads to the Montgomery bus boycott. The sit-ins of 1961 seem to spring out of nowhere. In 1963, Eugene (Bull) Connor unleashes attack dogs and fire hoses on the children of Birmingham. Over the next two years, an extraordinary surge of black protest creates a national consensus that puts civil rights at the top of the national agenda, resulting in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. At that point, the scene shifts abruptly to urban riots and the Vietnam War and on to a long conservative interregnum whose links to the civil-rights revolution are unclear.
Bracketed by events that clearly mark its beginning and end, the movement has become not only remote but all too digestible. It is the rare public figure these days who will admit to opposing its all-American goals, defined as ending the South’s anomalous system of legal segregation and granting all citizens the right to vote. Even conservatives now cloak themselves in Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy. Ignoring his identification with anticolonial movements and his critique of capitalism, they make him an avatar for colorblindness -- handy for dismantling affirmative action, gutting government programs, and discrediting efforts to level the social and economic playing field. At the same time, a politics of diversity and multiculturalism paints the civil-rights movement in antiquated tones of black and white.
What we need is a narrative
Books Discussed in This Essay Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution, by Diane McWhorter (Simon & Schuster, 2001) Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement, by Constance Curry et al., (University of Georgia Press, 2000) Divided Minds: Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement, by Carol Polsgrove (Norton, 2001) God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights, by Charles Marsh (Princeton University Press, 1997) The Last Days: A Son’s Story of Sin and Segregation at the Dawn of the New South, by Charles Marsh (Basic Books, 2001) |
of the long civil-rights movement as a project that began in the 1930’s and whose end is not yet in sight. The struggle of black Americans against what can best be called “racial capitalism” in the South -- a system that combined de jure segregation with hyperexploitation of black and white labor -- was central to that project. But this is an American -- not just an African-American or Southern -- story, and one with which we have yet to come fully to grips. Like South Africa in the wake of apartheid, we would do well to make “truth and reconciliation” our civil religion. That would require a hard look at how white Americans, North and South, have colluded in maintaining white privilege, as well as at how white consciousness has been, and can be, transformed.
A spate of recent books by white authors grappling with the white response to the movement suggests the varied forms such a hard look might take. These works include an intimate memoir of a Mississippi boyhood, a critique of white intellectuals, a panoramic study of the civil-rights struggle in Birmingham, and a collection of essays by white women who joined the movement. Each stretches the boundaries of the civil-rights revolution backward or forward in time. And each drives home the importance of confronting our common history -- as well as the heartbreaking difficulty of doing so, given all that divides us still.
I encountered these books in the context of a local upwelling of memory last spring. The experience of moving back and forth between the history I was reading and the history I was witnessing made the necessity and difficulty of that confrontation crystal clear. I had decided to center my oral-history seminar on the desegregation of the Chapel Hill, N.C., public schools, and to link my course with one taught by a colleague in performance studies. Students would interview a range of the participants, create performance projects based on the stories they heard, and meet at the end of the semester with the people they had interviewed, so that all could share what they had learned.
My colleague, Della Pollock, and I wanted to focus on school desegregation because the pioneers who made the hard journey from one world to another and then took up the challenge of creating new, interracial institutions have not become the heroes of civil-rights legend. Yet they had made history, simply by getting up every day and going to school. Moreover, they did so in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, after the television cameras had shifted away from the South and the civil-rights movement had supposedly ended. Our students were the third generation in this saga -- not the activists who had fought for integration, not the crossover students and teachers, but the children of those pioneers -- the first to grow up with no memory of either legal segregation or the integrationist dream. By bringing the two generations together, we hoped to open a path between the past and the present and explore the meaning and fate of the dream.
That, at least, was the plan. But before the semester began, we realized that an impassioned effort at historical reclamation was already in progress: an oral-history project and multimedia exhibit celebrating the history of Chapel Hill’s Lincoln High School, which, like other such cherished and hard-won black institutions across the South, had been summarily shut down in the late 1960’s when black and white schools merged. People in the African-American community were wary of our efforts. They were documenting their own history. Why should they open their doors to what turned out to be a mostly white group of university students? What was to prevent our project from becoming yet another exercise in premature closure, a study of the past that would end by putting interviews on a shelf rather than probing what the sociologist Orlando Patterson calls “the ordeal of integration” (in the 1998 The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America’s “Racial” Crisis), which continues to this day?
That wariness was balanced by two equally strong impulses, on which we found common ground. First, a tenacious commitment to educate the young. And second, a burning desire to break a silence that left unquestioned the belief that black schools were categorically inferior and that hid the pain of integration behind an official progress tale.
By the time the semester was over, we and the people we interviewed were pronouncing the project a “fantastic failure.” A failure because it underscored the impossibility of erasing the boundaries sedimented by slavery, segregation, and the ordeal of integration -- even as we blundered across them, glimpsing what life would be like if they weren’t there. Fantastic in its ability to model the equal exchange and truth-telling that integration demands and to drive home the fact that we are all protagonists in an unfinished revolution.
For me, the resonances between our project and recent writings are captured by the metaphor of “clearburning,” around which Charles Marsh’s first book, God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights (1997), revolves. Clearburning is a farming term for the practice of burning the land in late winter, when it is cleared for plowing, Marsh explained. It allows the farmer to “see the ground for what it is ... to prepare for a new planting and harvest.” By looking with all the honesty and empathy he could muster about both the civil-rights movement and the resistance to it, Marsh tried to clear ground on which black and white Americans could reckon with the past and on which the seeds of justice and reconciliation could be -- as they must be -- planted over and over again.
More recently, in The Last Days: A Son’s Story of Sin and Segregation at the Dawn of the New South, Marsh lets the fire burn right up to his own front door. His father, the Rev. Robert (Bob) Marsh, was a riveting preacher, and in 1967, he got what he saw as the chance of a lifetime. He was called to the posh First Baptist Church of Laurel, Miss., a town that prided itself on its museums, libraries, and country clubs. Two miles from First Baptist stood the Sambo Amusement Company, from which Sam Bowers, the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, orchestrated a statewide reign of terror. We know from the outset what loomed on the horizon: a collision between the sinister forces that Bowers represented and Marsh’s evangelical decency. The collision came not with the satisfying finality of a morality play, but with the compromises, coincidences, and small redeeming acts by which ordinary white Southerners found their way out of massive resistance and into the mainstream of America’s continuing, unresolved racial dilemmas.
When Charles Marsh was a student at Harvard University, he made up a story about a cross burning in his family’s front yard and a father who held off hooligans with a baseball bat. In fact, the Rev. Marsh’s moment of truth came when he presented a Man of the Year award to an upstanding citizen (“one of us”) who turned out to be a hit man for the Klan. Mortified, Bob Marsh saw that he, too, had blood on his hands. He despaired. He broke down. Dreading exile, afraid for his job, and loath to lose his friends, he tried to steer his congregation toward a more tolerant religion, but could not bring himself either to leave or to preach about the complicity of good white people in the violence and crushing poverty he deplored.
In 1970, in “the evanescence of the year came justice, gasping for air but still standing,” Charles Marsh writes. Sam Bowers went to jail, and young Marsh, along with thousands of other schoolchildren across the South, started school under a court-ordered desegregation plan. Elsewhere, well-to-do whites fled to private academies. But Marsh’s parents and their friends “decided to do some overcoming of their own, prodded along by trunkloads of legislation, mandates and courtroom brawls, and the threat of a vanished economy.” They set their children loose on what decades of indoctrination had assured them would be a “mongrelization turnpike,” a Communist-inspired scheme to weaken America through race-mixing in the public schools.
Marsh ends The Last Days on a grace note of compassion for his father (faced with similar choices, he wonders, would he have done better?) and pride in his own small rendezvous with history: “My classmates and I were not simply or only the beneficiaries of the civil-rights movement. We could have resisted in any number of large and small ways, the ways teenagers do. We didn’t have to take the baton, but we took it. We didn’t have to stick it out for the long haul, but we did. We never sat down at the Kress coffee counter in defiance of public accommodations laws. ... But we showered together in locker rooms, tackled each other on playing fields, and slept on each other’s shoulders during night rides home on the team bus. ... We didn’t need, and didn’t have, television to document the moment. ... We needed only each other, boys on the outskirts of manhood, linked together by time and good luck.”
Marsh’s memoir of the 1960’s finds an explosive parallel in another new book, Diane McWhorter’s Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution. McWhorter, too, is a white Southerner, who, as she puts it, grew up “on the wrong side of the revolution,” but there were as many nuances on the wrong side as on the right. Young Charles Marsh may have been preoccupied and inchoate, but he had adults around him who could not escape the moral challenge of times. McWhorter, now a journalist in Manhattan, was the clueless daughter of a wealthy ne’er-do-well, living in a suburb where the families of the men who ruled Birmingham eschewed evangelical seriousness and played tennis and did lunch as if the civil-rights movement were happening on the other side of the moon.
Where Marsh is rueful and reflective, McWhorter is relentless. By linking his father to the Klan, Marsh reminds us of what happens when good people turn a blind eye to evil. McWhorter -- rebellious insider and sleuth -- finds deliberate, cynical manipulation. She starts out anxiously looking for it in her own family. Did her eccentric father, slumming with the lower classes, not only consort with the Klan but take part in murder? Her answer is a relieved “probably not.” But to ferret out her family’s story, she has to tell the whole story. And she comes up with plenty of evidence about the Klan’s puppeteers: Birmingham’s corporate barons pulled the strings and reaped the benefits, and the entanglement among the industrialists, the law enforcers, and the vigilantes ran all the way from the city to the state to the national office of the F.B.I.
McWhorter’s tenacious research yields a vivid history of Birmingham’s pivotal civil-rights campaign. But her most important contribution is to follow the money and let it push the boundaries of her story back in time. In her focus on the bottom line, she pursues a theme superbly developed by the journalist Russ Rymer, whose American Beach: A Saga of Race, Wealth, and Memory (1998) shows how whites benefited from slavery and segregation -- and from the destruction of black institutions after desegregation. She also joins a growing group of historians -- including John Egerton, Michael K. Honey, Robert R. Korstad, Nelson Lichtenstein, Harvard Sitkoff, and Patricia Sullivan -- who argue that the civil-rights movement started not in 1954, but in the late 1930’s and 1940’s, when the South emerged as the crucial battleground for conservatives determined to resist the efforts of New Deal liberals, radicals, and the C.I.O. to push the country in a social-democratic direction.
McWhorter begins with Northern capital, led by U.S. Steel, which built Birmingham after the Civil War by exploiting a limitless supply of cheap black and white rural labor. The Klan emerged during the 1920’s, and its anti-Catholicism proved useful to industrialists who, McWhorter says, figured that if Protestant, American-born workers took out their frustrations on immigrant Catholics, “there was no danger of union solidarity even among whites, let alone across color lines.” In the midst of the Great Depression, the coal and steel barons installed Bull Connor in office, and together they beat back labor unions, sabotaged the New Deal, and turned Birmingham into what can only be called a fascist regime. Among the vigilantes who did their bidding were two of the Klansmen who, in 1963, killed four children in the infamous bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. That explosion, which played on national television as stereotypical redneck violence, was “the endgame in the city fathers’ long and profitable tradition of maintaining their industrial supremacy through vigilantism,” McWhorter writes.
Neither Marsh nor McWhorter grapples directly with the world we live in now. But the past they recount refuses to be contained. In Carry Me Home, it bursts through like a fist. Just as the book appeared, one of its protagonists was convicted of the church bombing, and Alabama’s former attorney general published an op-ed piece in The New York Times accusing the F.B.I. of concealing evidence and aiding the Klan for years after the crime. Marsh’s memoir also points forward, implicitly asking what happened to children in the smalltown South after the spotlight -- and history books -- moved on.
If Marsh -- and the people my students interviewed -- are any indication, the thoughtful and lucky ones among those draftees were marked by the movement, either at the time or in retrospect. And as they reckon with their experience, we can expect more passionate and perceptive fiction, autobiography, journalism, and history.
Both Marsh and McWhorter are exemplars of the hunger to understand and explain themselves and their region that has driven white Southerners to produce both a literature of apology and some of the most potent white writing on the nation’s racial dilemmas. That hunger is critical, because the forces of historical amnesia are hard at work. Efforts at commemoration notwithstanding, in Chapel Hill, Laurel, and Birmingham the landscapes of segregation and the sites of protest are disappearing beneath restaurants, shopping malls, and subdivisions, invisible to newcomers although still vivid to those who lived through the tumultuous times.
Birmingham is emblematic. The town fathers eventually decided that de jure segregation was bad for business; medicine supplanted steel; and black people began to win political office. To the best of our knowledge, the men in suits quit running vigilantes. White suburbanites still live on the other side of the mountain, but they are hard to distinguish from their counterparts everywhere. We need eyes sharpened by unsparing histories to see the new forms of consent and manipulation beneath the surface, and to understand how so much undeniable progress can coexist with so much raging poverty and persistent de facto segregation (a dangerously innocent term for the results of national urban policies, as scholars like Gary Orfield, in his essay on “Race and the Liberal Agenda,” and Thomas J. Sugrue, in The Origins of the Urban Crisis, have persuasively shown).
Carol Polsgrove’s Divided Minds: Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement sharpens our eyes further by chronicling the failure of the country’s most prominent writers and thinkers to confront the central issue of their time. Polsgrove, a professor of journalism at Indiana University at Bloomington, opens with the Brown decision and tells a story of might-have-beens. In 1954, it seemed to many that a new era had begun. That, she believes, was a moment when the moral leadership of intellectuals, together with decisive federal intervention, might have changed the course of history. Yet Brown “barely brushed the thoughts of a surprising number” of the nation’s most prominent white writers and thinkers, she says. Pushed by the long, arduous efforts of black parents and the N.A.A.C.P., the Supreme Court had “opened the door to change.” In the years that followed, intellectuals milled about, “debating among themselves how fast America ought to go through it.”
They dithered because of a venerable wall of not-knowing that protected whites from confronting the realities of black life and the meaning of the color divide, the same wall that allowed small-town preachers like Bob Marsh to throw themselves into the Lord’s work while Mississippi burned. But, most important, intellectuals were also constrained by the cold war, Polsgrove contends. The propaganda battle against the Soviet Union offered both the most effective strategy for opposing and containing racial change and the most persuasive argument for promoting it. North and South, outspoken civil-rights advocates were discredited as “Communists,” out to stir up conflict and weaken the country from within. Proponents of civil rights, both out of conviction and in defense, relied on cold-war rhetoric as well. How, the argument went, could America compete with the Soviet Union for the allegiance of the third world while disenfranchising and segregating its own citizens? In this heated atmosphere, intellectuals retreated from the radicalism of the 1930’s and 40’s, framed segregation as an anomalous deviation from American values, and, rather than press for immediate and decisive enforcement of the Supreme Court decision, came down on the side of a hands-off, go-slow approach.
Unlike historians of the movement -- Taylor Branch, Clayborne Carson, John Dittmer, Adam Fairclough, Charles M. Payne, Chana Kai Lee, and others -- who have focused especially on black activists and local people, magazine and book editors at the time were preoccupied not with what black Southerners were doing and demanding but with how the white South would respond. Or, rather, with how carefully selected spokesmen -- white, moderate males one and all -- thought their fellow citizens would respond. Pre-eminent among those was William Faulkner, who favored the Supreme Court decision but feared a revolt of the rednecks if white Southerners were forced to comply. White writers, like Lillian Smith and Sarah-Patton Boyle, who believed that Faulkner was painting the South as worse than it was, and black intellectuals, like Kenneth Clark, who pleaded for strong national leadership, found their views ignored or distorted.
Polsgrove argues that the national conversation on race was especially impoverished by the stifling of the black radicals of the 1930’s and 40’s (men like Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, and Langston Hughes), as well as by the reluctance of white publications to open their pages to black writers of any political persuasion. The New York intellectuals, who are now routinely held up as paragons of fearless criticism, had little of significance to say -- unless one counts Norman Mailer’s 1957 The White Negro, which sensationalized blacks’ alleged sexual superiority, or Hannah Arendt’s uninformed argument, in 1959, against forced desegregation of the schools.
Into this vacuum stepped the architects of massive resistance, who wove racism and anti-Communism together into a red scare that peaked in the South after McCarthyism had supposedly subsided. By 1963, when James Baldwin published The Fire Next Time, a ringing indictment of white America that opened the media to black intellectuals and stretched the limits of what could be said, it was too late for the peaceful process of desegregation that many Americans -- North and South, black and white -- had expected in the aftermath of Brown.
Moreover, I would argue, the cold-war chill helped to shape the civil-rights movement by determining what messages would resonate and how the movement’s aims would come to be understood. Virtually from the beginning, and with ever-increasing intensity, activists demanded not only the basic rights of citizenship but also economic justice, a goal that could be met only by attacking poverty and de facto segregation throughout the nation, not just the antiquated racial system of the South. That critique of capitalism and of national urban policy, however, found little purchase because of the fatal narrowing of discourse, and also because the destruction of the interracial labor movement of the 1930’s and 40’s and the retreat from the social-democratic thrust of the New Deal had deprived it of an institutional base.
If I have any quarrel with Polsgrove, it is that she ends her fair-minded and astutely argued book with a too-familiar, overgeneralized jab at the professoriate. American intellectuals, she says, have retreated to the university and “abandoned their responsibility for society even more completely than they had in the 1950’s and 1960’s.” But her story is not about wholesale abandonment, nor is it primarily about intellectuals’ ambivalence -- their “divided minds.” It is, at its most convincing, about how and why some voices get heard and others don’t. Different constraints are in force today, but they still amplify some voices and drown out others.
Moreover, while I think Polsgrove is right about the missed opportunities of the 1950’s and 60’s, she puts too little emphasis on the machinations of the industrialists whom McWhorter skewers, and on the actions of politicians at both national and regional levels. We need more research on the roots and mechanisms of white resistance, but what we do have shows clearly that in the absence of federal enforcement, conservative Southern politicians, backed by wealthy elites, quickly narrowed the room in which liberals could maneuver. In that context, it is not hard to understand why intellectuals feared that, if civil-rights advocates pushed too hard, the Bull Connors and Sam Bowerses of the South -- and the beady-eyed sociopaths they enabled -- would do just what they did do: stoke bigotry and rain down violence on stranded local people.
With Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement, a collection of first-person essays by white women who were on the right side of the revolution, we are on more familiar ground. For these memoirists, the movement offered not a quagmire of ambivalence but what one of them, Sue Thrasher, calls “a dazzling moment of clarity.” In fact, the action in this book seems almost to take place on a different planet from the one Polsgrove describes. These women came of age politically in the 1960’s, and they did not look to Polsgrove’s intellectuals for guidance, nor were they diverted by the cold war. They found their way through deeper channels. Influenced by Christian existentialism or secular Judaism, they responded to the movement with a shock of recognition: It seemed to be an extension of values they had learned at home.
Which is not to say that these are stories only of faith and passionate conviction. Divided Minds versus Deep in Our Hearts: The very titles split mind from body, intellectual life from activism, and, of course, men from women (there are female thinkers in Polsgrove’s book, but most of her protagonists are men). But such oppositions are misleading. In the course of putting their bodies on the line -- an act of embodiment that had radical meanings and consequences, especially when so many of those bodies belonged to women and children -- the young women in this book helped to generate ideas potent enough to change the world.
Take one example. Casey Hayden, a Texan schooled in the Y.W.C.A. who joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee staff early on, remembers typing out a now-famous manifesto of a renewed feminist movement with a group of women gathered around a mimeograph machine in the dead of night. The year was 1964, and SNCC was on the verge of turning from interracialism to black power. “Our writing is simple, patchy, and erratic,” Hayden reflects. “But its goal is noble: to discern the effects of a system -- stereotyping, labeling, and discrimination, wasted talent, separation. ... There was no feminist critique on the left in our generation. We were first. It is a good critique, in many ways, and brave, a fine example of how the tools developed in analyzing racism were translated, inside SNCC itself, into an analysis of gender. We had pierced the racist bubble and were seeing clearly. All things were open to question.”
In this book, each woman’s behind-the-scenes account of life in the movement is absorbing and a welcome gift, but I found myself as interested in where the narrators came from as in what they did. Most of them stress -- too modestly -- the blind good luck of being in the right place at the right time, and most speak of parents, teachers, and friends who wouldn’t have been caught dead on a picket line but who, once shocked out of “not knowing,” understood that civil rights were a matter of simple justice, that segregation was wrong. What if the politics of massive resistance had not frightened such ordinary people into silence? What if counterpressure from the federal government and the opinion makers had created a climate in which it did not take so much courage to speak out? What if young people like the women in this book and, especially, the black Southerners who inspired them, had not had to make the sacrifices they made?
All of these books contribute to clearburning. They help us to see our past for what it is, and thus to clear the ground for a reckoning still to come. At the same time, as Barbara Ransby, a scholar in African-American studies, comments in her introduction to Deep in Our Hearts, they demonstrate that “politics are determined in our heads and our hearts, not our genes and our lineage.” And they humble us with the question: How do we mobilize memory, anticipate the future, and speak now against the day?
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall is a professor of history and director of the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author, with others, of Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (University of North Carolina Press, 1987, reissued with a new introduction in 2000).
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