University of Florida Ch 17 Black Revolts of 1950s and 1960s Analysis Week’s Discussion Board Below the template for analyzing social movements. I have ad

University of Florida Ch 17 Black Revolts of 1950s and 1960s Analysis Week’s Discussion Board

Below the template for analyzing social movements. I have adapted it from the SPITCEROW model of conflict analysis developed by Chris Mitchell.

So, for this week’s discussion board you will read chapter 17 of Howard Zinn. “OR DOES IT EXPLODE?”.

Read Chapter 17 of Howard Zinn.

a. Using the SPICEROW conflict analysis model from last week, analyze the black revolt of the 1950s and the 1960s.

b. Next compare and contrast the black revolt of the 1950s and the 1960s with what you observe happening around the United States this week – to the best of your ability, given that there is a lot we do not yet know about what is happening.

c. Langston Hughes asked, “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up, or does it explode?” Are this week’s events the answer to this question?

Answering the questions posed in the social movement analysis template. I expect your answers to be between 500 and 1000 words.

Social Movement Analysis Template (SPICEROW conflict analysis model)

What was the Context (the historical, cultural, social, political, economic situation)?

What were Sources (root causes or systemic causes or structural causes leading to the movement)?

What were the Issues (what were the specific or particular issues that the parties were taking positions on and talking about that triggered the movement)?

Who were the parties and stakeholders? Who were the supporters and the opponents? Was there a coalition of different parties and stakeholders? If so, who were they?

What strategies and tactics did the movement employ? Did they employ different ones at different times?

What were the dynamics within the movement and between the movement and the broader society? Did the dynamics of these relationships change over time? Did the opinions of the broader society change over time?

What were the outcomes of the movement? Who were the winners? What did they win? Who were the losers? What did they lose? Is the movement still in existence today? If so, how is it different today? 17
“OR DOES IT
Copyright 2013. Routledge.
All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.
EXPLODE?”
The black revolt of the 1950s and 1960s-North and South-came as a
surprise. But perhaps it should not have. The memory of oppressed people is one thing that cannot be taken away, and for such people, with such
memories, revolt is always an inch below the surface. For blacks in the
United States, there was the memory of slavery, and after that of segregation, lynching, humiliation. And it was not just a memory but a living
presence-part of the daily lives of blacks in generation after generation.
In the 1930s, Langston Hughes wrote a poem, “Lenox Avenue
Mural”;
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a soreAnd then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar overlike a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
In a· society of complex controls, both crude and refined, secret
thoughts can often be found in the arts, and so it was in black society.
Perhaps the blues, however pathetic, concealed anger; and the jazz, how-
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A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
ever joyful, portended rebellion. And then the poetry, the thoughts no
longer so secret. In the 1920s, Claude McKay, one of the figures of what
came to be called the “Harlem Renaissance,” wrote a poem that Henry
Cabot Lodge put in the Congressional Record as an example of dangerous
currents among young blacks:
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot….
Like men we’ll face the murderous cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
Countee Cullen’s poem “Incident” evoked memories-all different, all
the same-out of every black American’s childhood:
Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.
Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, “Nigger.”
I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That’s all that I remember.
At the time of the Scottsboro Boys incident, Cullen wrote a bitter
poem noting that white poets had used their pens to protest in other
cases of injustice, but now that blacks were involved, most were silent.
His last stanza was:
Surely, I said,
Now will the poets sing.
But they have raised no cry.
I wonder why.
Even outward subservience-Uncle Tom behavior in real situations,
the comic or fawning Negro on the stage, the self-ridicule, the
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caution-concealed resentment, anger, energy. The black poet Paul
Laurence Dunbar, in the era of the black minstrel, around the turn of
the century, wrote “We Wear the Mask”:
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,… We sing, but oh, the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask.
Two black performers of that time played the minstrel and satirized it
at the same time. When Bert Williams and George Walker billed themselves as “Two Real Coons,” they were, Nathan Huggins says, “intending
to give style and comic dignity to a fiction that white men had created…. ”
By the 1930s the mask was off for many black poets. Langston
Hughes wrote “I, Too.”
I, too, sing America
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes….
Gwendolyn Bennett wrote:
I want to see lithe Negro girls,
Etched dark against the sky
While sunset lingers ….
I want to hear the chanting
Around a heathen fire
Of a strange black race ….
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I want to feel the surging
Of my sad people’s soul
Hidden by a minstrel-smile.
There was Margaret Walker’s prose-poem “For My People”:
… Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a bloody peace be
written in the sky. Let a second generation full of courage issue forth, let a
people loving freedom come to growth, let a beauty full of healing and a
strength of final clenching be the pulsing in our spirits and our blood. Let
the martial songs be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now
rise and take control!
By the 1940s there was Richard Wright, a gifted novelist, a black
man. His autobiography of 1937, Black Boy, gave endless insights: for
instance, how blacks were set against one another, when he told how he
was prodded to fight another black boy for the amusement of white
men. Black Boy expressed unashamedly every humiliation and then:
The white South said that it knew “niggers,” and I was what the white South
called a “nigger.” Well, the white South had never known me-never known
what I thought, what I felt. The white South said that I had a “place” in life.
Well, I had never felt my “place”; or, rather, my deepest instincts had always
made me reject the “place” to which the white South had assigned me. It
had never occurred to me that I was in any wayan inferior being. And no
word that I had ever heard fall from the lips of southern white men had ever
made me really doubt the worth of my own humanity.
It was all there in the poetry, the prose, the music, sometimes
masked, sometimes unmistakably clear-the signs of a people unbeaten,
waiting, hot, coiled.
In Black Boy, Wright told about the training of black children in
America to keep them silent. But also:
How do Negroes feel about the way they have to live? How do they discuss
it when alone among themselves? I think this question can be answered in a
single sentence. A friend of mine who ran an elevator once told me:
“Lawd, man! Ef it wuzn’t fer them polices ‘n’ them 01′ lynch mobs, there
wouldn’t be nothin’ but uproar down here!”
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Richard Wright, for a time, joined the Communist party (he tells of
this period of his life, and his disillusionment with the party, in The God
That Failed). The Communist party was known to pay special attention
to the problem of race equality. When the Scottsboro case unfolded in
the 1930s in Alabama, it was the Communist party that had become
associated with the defense of these young black men imprisoned, in the
early years of the Depression, by southern injustice.
The party was accused by liberals and the NAACP of exploiting the
issue for its own purposes, and there was a half-truth in it, but black people
were realistic about the difficulty of having white allies who were pure in
motive. The other half of the truth was that black Communists in the South
had earned the admiration of blacks by their organizing work against enormous obstacles. There was Hosea Hudson, the black organizer of the
unemployed in Birmingham, for instance. And in Georgia, in 1932, a nineteen-year-old black youth named Angelo Herndon, whose father died of
miner’s pneumonia, who had worked in mines as a boy in Kentucky, joined
an Unemployment Council in Birmingham organized by the Communist
party, and then joined the party. He wrote later:
All my life I’d been sweated and stepped-on and Jim-Crowed. I lay on my
belly in the mines for a few dollars a week, and saw my pay stolen and
slashed, and my buddies killed. I lived in the worst section of town, and rode
behind the “Colored” signs on streetcars, as though there was something
disgusting about me. I heard myself called “nigger” and “darky” and I had to
say “Yes, sir” to every white man, whether he had my respect or not.
I had always detested it, but I had never known that anything could be
done about it. And here, all of a sudden, I had found organizations in which
Negroes and whites sat together, and worked together, and knew no difference of race 01 color….
Herndon became a Communist party organizer in Atlanta. He and
his fellow Communists organized block committees of Unemployment
Councils in 1932 which got rent relief for needy people. They organized
a demonstration to which a thousand people came, six hundred of them
white, and the next day the city voted $6,000 in relief to the jobless. But
soon after that Herndon was arrested, held incommunicado, and
charged with violating a Georgia statute against insurrection. He
recalled his trial:
The state of Georgia displayed the literature that had been taken from my
room, and read passages of it to the jury. They questioned me in great detail.
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Did I believe that the bosses and government ought to pay insurance to
unemployed workers? That Negroes should have complete equality with
white people? Did I believe in the demand for the self-determination of the
Black Belt-that the Negro people should be allowed to rule the Black Belt
territory, kicking out the white landlords and government officials? Did I
feel that the working-class could run the mills and mines and government?
That it wasn’t necessary to have bosses at all?
I told them I believed all of that-and more ….
Herndon was convicted and spent five years in prison until in 1937
the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional the Georgia statute under
which he was found guilty. It was men like him who represented to the
Establishment a dangerous militancy among blacks, made more dangerous when linked with the Communist party.
There were others who made that same connection, magnifying the
danger: Benjamin Davis, the black lawyer who defended Herndon at his
trial; nationally renowned men like singer and actor Paul Robeson, and
writer and scholar W E. B. Du Bois, who did not hide their support and
sympathy for the Communist party. The Negro was not as antiCommunist as the white population. He could not afford to be, his
friends were so few-so that Herndon, Davis, Robeson, Du Bois, however their political views might be maligned by the country as a whole,
found admiration for their fighting spirit in the black community.
The black militant mood, flashing here and there in the thirties, was
reduced to a subsurface simmering during World War II, when the
nation on the one hand denounced racism, and on the other hand maintained segregation in the armed forces and kept blacks in low-paying
jobs. When the war ended, a new element entered the racial balance in
the United States-the enormous, unprecedented upsurge of black and
yellow people in Africa and Asia.
President Harry Truman had to reckon with this, especially as the
cold war rivalry with the Soviet Union began, and the dark-skinned
revolt of former colonies all over the world threatened to take Marxist
form. Action on the race question was needed, not just to calm a black
population at home emboldened by war promises, frustrated by the
basic sameness of their condition. It was needed to present to the world
a United States that could counter the continuous Communist thrust at
the most flagrant failure of American society-the race question. What
Du Bois had said long ago, unnoticed, now loomed large in 1945: “The
problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line.”
President Harry Truman, in late 1946, appointed a Committee on
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Civil Rights, which recommended that the civil rights section of the
Department of Justice be expanded, that there be a permanent
Commission on Civil Rights, that Congress pass laws against lynching
and to stop voting discrimination, and suggested new laws to end racial
discrimination in jobs.
Truman’s Committee was blunt about its motivation in making these
recommendations. Yes, it said, there was “moral reason”: a matter of
conscience. But there was also an “economic reason”-discrimination
was costly to the country, wasteful of its talent. And, perhaps most
important, there was an international reason:
Our position in the post-war world is so vital to the future that our smallest
actions have far-reaching effects …. We cannot escape the fact that our civil
rights record has been an issue in world politics. The world’s press and radio
are full of it…. Those with competing philosophies have stressed-and are
shamelessly distorting-our shortcomings . . .. They have tried to prove our
democracy an empty fraud, and our nation a consistent oppressor of underprivileged people. This may seem ludicrous to Americans, but it is
sufficiently important to worry our friends. The United States is not so
strong, the final triumph of the democratic ideal is not so inevitable that we
can ignore what the world thinks of us or our record.
The United States was out in the world now in a way it had never
been. The stakes were large-world supremacy. And, as Truman’s
Committee said: “… our smallest actions have far-reaching effects.”
And so the United States went ahead to take small actions, hoping
they would have large effects. Congress did not move to enact the legislation asked for by the Committee on Civil Rights. But Truman-four
months before the presidential election of 1948, and challenged from
the left in that election by Progressive party candidate Henry Wallaceissued an executive order asking that the armed forces, segregated in
World War II, institute policies of racial equality “as rapidly as possible.”
The order may have been prompted not only by the election but by the
need to maintain black morale in the armed forces, as the possibility of
war grew. It took over a decade to complete the desegregation in the
military.
Truman could have issued executive orders in other areas, but did
not. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, plus the set of laws
passed in the late 1860s and early 1870s, gave the President enough
authority to wipe out racial discrimination. The Constitution demanded
that the President execute the laws, but no President had used th~t
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power. Neither did Truman. For instance, he asked Congress for legislation “prohibiting discrimination in interstate transportation facilities”;
but specific legislation in 1887 already barred discrimination in interstate transportation and had never been enforced by executive action.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court was taking steps-ninety years after
the Constitution had been amended to establish racial equality-to
move toward that end. During the war it ruled that the “white primary”
used to exclude blacks from voting in the Democratic party primarieswhich in the South were really the elections-was unconstitutional.
In 1954, the Court finally struck down the “separate but equal” doctrine that it had defended since the 1890s. The NAACP brought a series
of cases before the Court to challenge segregation in the public schools,
and now in Brown v. Board of Education the Court said the separation of
schoolchildren “generates a feeling of inferiority … that may affect their
hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” In the field of
public education, it said, “the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no
place.” The Court did not insist on immediate change: a year later it said
that segregated facilities should be integrated “with all deliberate speed.”
By 1965, ten years after the “all deliberate speed” guideline, more than
75 percent of the school districts in the South remained segregated.
Still, it was a dramatic decision-and the message went around the
world in 1954 that the American government had outlawed segregation.
In the United States too, for those not thinking about the customary gap
between word and fact, it was an exhilarating sign of change.
What to others seemed rapid progress to blacks was apparently not
enough. In the early 1960s black people rose in rebellion all over the
South. And in the late 1960s they were engaging in wild insurrection in
a hundred northern cities. It was all a surprise to those without that deep
memory of slavery, that everyday presence of humiliation, registered in
the poetry, the music, the occasional outbursts of anger, the more frequent sullen silences. Part of that memory was of words uttered, laws
passed, decisions made, which turned out to be meaningless.
For such a people, with such a memory, and such daily recapitulation
of history, revolt was always minutes away, in a timing mechanism which
no one had set, but which might go off with some unpredictable set of
events. Those events came, at the end of 1955, in the capital city of
Alabama-Montgomery.
Three months after her arrest, Mrs. Rosa Parks, a forty-three-yearold seamstress, explained why she refused to obey the Montgomery law
providing for segregation on city buses, why she decided to sit down in
the “white” section of the bus:
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Well, in the first place, I had been working all day on the job. I was quite tired
after spending a full day working. I handle and work on clothing that white
people wear. That didn’t come in my mind but this is what I wanted to know:
when and how would we ever determine our rights as human beings? … It
just happened that the driver made a demand and I just didn’t feel like obeying
his demand. He called a policeman and I was arrested and placed in jail. …
Montgomery blacks called a mass meeting. A powerful force in the
community was E. D. Nixon, a veteran trade unionist and experienced
organizer. There was a vote to boycott all city buses. Car pools were organized to take Negroes to work; most people walked. The city retaliated by
indicting one hundred leaders of the boycott, and sent many to jail. White
segregationists turned to violence. Bombs exploded in four Negro
churches. A shotgun blast was fired through the front door of the home of
Dr. Martin Luther King,Jr., the twenty-seven-year-old Altanta-born minister who was one of the leaders of the boycott. King’s home was bombed . .
But the black people of Montgomery persisted, and in November 1956,
the Supreme Court outlawed segregation on local bus lines.
Montgomery was the beginning. It forecast the style and mood of
the vast protest movement that would sweep the South in the next ten
years: emotional church meetings, Christian hymns adapted to current
battles, references to lost American ideals, the commitment to nonviolence, the willingness to struggle and sacrifice. A New York Times
reporter described a mass meeting in Montgomery during the boycott:
One after the other, indicted Negro leaders took the rostrum in a crowded
Baptist church tonight to urge their followers to shun the city’s buses and
“walk with God.”
More than two thousand Negroes filled the church from basement to
balcony and overflowed into the street. They chanted and sang; they
shouted and prayed; they collapsed in the aisles and they sweltered in an
eighty-five degree heat. They pledged themselves again and again to “passive resistance.” …
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