AHR Forum
Rethinking Race and Class in African-American
Struggles for Equality, 1885-1941
KEVIN GAINES
A MAJOR CONTRIBUTION OF THESE ESSAYS on African Americans' struggles for civil
rights in Chicago is their sophisticated treatment of class in an African-American
context. Ironically, it is the uniqueness of Chicago's turbulent history of labor strife
and racial contlict that, to my mind, poses larger issues of the relationship between
race and class within African-American leadership and movements. Known as
"Sweet home" and, more caustically, "Up South" to generations of black migrants,
and thus emblematic in its unfulfilled promise, Chicago offered African Americans
opportunities for social advancement amidst ample proof of pervasive racism. The
essays by Elizabeth Dale and Beth Tompkins Bates reinforce this image of Chicago
as more paradox than paradise for African Americans. Even as they portray that
city as an ideal setting for the exploration of the northern phase of civil rights
struggles, their essays offer insights on race and class that transcend region as they
apply to the study of the history and origins of civil rights.
While the essays in this forum, and my remarks on them, focus on AfricanAmerican history, I read them as not only transcending their particular location but
also gesturing even more broadly toward other fields of inquiry. In their concern
with elite oppositional strategies against overwhelming institutional and cultural
forces of racism, they are also relevant for scholars of colonialism and ethnic
studies. For scholars of the subaltern, the essays raise vital issues: the significance
of elites; the need to address the complexity of race, gender, class, and sexuality
within systems of domination and oppositional strategies alike; and how one
understands resistance in its subtler, even compromised, aspects, when it must
confront pervasive regimes of power backed by violence.1 The application of
analytical contributions from related or analogous fields is not to be confused with
a facile approach to comparative history. Rather, its utility retlects the extent to
which the elites and peoples produced by slave societies, colonial systems, and
I am indebted to Penny Von Eschen and the editors of the AHR for their comments and suggestions,
and to the National Humanities Center, whose generosity enabled the completion of this essay.
1 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (New
York, 1995); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and
Jewish Immigrants in the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 1995); Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian
American Cultural Politics (Durham, N.C., 1996). See McClintock for a trenchant discussion of the
debates among scholars of empire and colonialism around the question of how race, gender, and
resistance are theorized.
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racial state formations were forged in that crucible of modernity represented by the
expansionist projects of the West. 2
From this standpoint, conventional approaches to African-American elites' legal
struggles over civil rights and citizenship during the late nineteenth century can be
greatly enhanced by discussions of the social marginality of racialized colonial and
immigrant elites. And in turn, recent work in African-American history that
foregrounds gender and sexuality, as well as political economy, in accounts of the
reinvention of American systems of racial domination, yields its own insights for
scholars of colonialism and ethnic studies. One cannot really understand the genesis
of those systems of domination, or the multifaceted and nuanced character of
resistance, without first coming to terms with the complicated processes by which
race, gender, sexuality, and class constitute and construct each other. While these
essays achieve varying degrees of success in pursuing this interpretive agenda, they
have much to teach us in their welcome challenges to conventional thinking about
race, class, and black leadership.
1970s, works of twentieth-century African-American history that invariably address the origins of the civil rights and black freedom movements have fallen
into roughly two approaches. The first, the study of clites, ranges from contributionist accounts of black intellectuals and professionals, to pioneering biographies
of major figures in black letters and leadership, to institutional histories of black
middle-class reformers and their organizations. 3 More recently, these attempts to
situate the black intelligentsia within a broader American history have been
enriched by the influence of women's history and black feminist studies. 4 The
second approach focuses on issues of working-class resistance, mass mobilization,
and labor politics as crucial for an understanding of African-American activism and
SINCE THE
2 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass., 1993);
Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s
(New York, 1986); for treatments of the pitfalls of comparative approaches to the study of systems of
racial domination, see Frederick Cooper, "Race, Ideology, and the Perils of Comparative History,"
AHR 101 (October 1996): 1122-38; and Stuart Hall, "The After·Life of Frantz Fanon: Why Fanon?
Why Now? Why Black Skin, White Masks?" in The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual
Representation, Alan Read, ed. (Seattle, Wash., 1996), 12-37.
3 A representative sample of this large body of work includes August Meier, Negro Thought in
America, 1880-1915 (1963; rpt. edn., Ann Arbor, Mich., 1971); Willard B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of
Color: The Black Elite, 1880-1920 (Bloomington, Ind., 1990); Louis Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The
Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901-1915 (New York, 1983); Alfred A. Moss, Jr., The American Negro Academy:
Voice of the Talented Tenth (Baton Rouge, La., 1981); John Hope Franklin, George Washington
Williams: A Biography (Chicago, 1985); Theodore Kornweibel, No Crystal Stair: Black Life and the
Messenger, 1917-1928 (Westport, Conn., 1975); David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue
(New York, 1982); Wilson J. Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850-1925 (1978; rpt. edn.,
New York, 1989).
4 Gerda Lerner, ed., Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (New York, 1972);
Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York, 1981); Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood:
The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York, 1987); Paula Giddings, When and
Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York, 1984); Jacqueline
Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present
(New York, 1985); Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the
Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, Mass., 1989); Darlene Clark Hine, Black Women in
White: Racial Conflict and Cooperation in the Nursing Profession, 1890-1950 (Bloomington, Ind., 1989);
Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol (New York, 1996).
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modern social movements. These community-oriented studies of collective organizing or labor politics range from assessments of post-Reconstruction era black
leadership and its relation to the group aspirations of blacks for land ownership,
literacy, and equal rights to examinations of the origins of, as well as the constraints
imposed upon, modern civil rights struggles. s
That these two approaches reveal the problem of class in the study of AfricanAmerican struggles for racial and social justice seems only natural where the
question of the character and significance of black leadership and movements has
been, and remains, an urgent concern.O It is striking, nonetheless, that despite the
profusion of studies of black elites, we know more (though still not enough) about
black working-class consciousness and its political impact and implications than
about black middle-class ideology and consciousness. Inasmuch as so many studies
of black elites have been works of intellectual history, they have often left the social
foundations of African-American privileged status uninterrogated. And, ironically,
while ostensibly foregrounding class, earlier interpretations of black elites often
adopted a presentist and reductive racial framework of integration ism versus
nationalism that often failed to elucidate not only the complicated operations of
race and class in social and power relationships but their gendered dimension, as
well.
The essays by Dale and Bates on black politics in Chicago address this need for
more sophisticated approaches to the study of black elites and social movements,
and the relationship between the two. Dale's essay reconstructs a civil rights suit
challenging segregation in a Chicago theater in the 1880s. Bates offers a new
assessment of popular challenges to old-guard NAACP leadership during the 1930s,
highlighting the conflicts between the Chicago branch's involvement in labor
organizing and direct-action protests and the national office's emphasis on opposing segregation in the courts and through lobbying and moral suasion. In their
respective analyses of black middle-class ideology and the role of elites, both essays
encourage an understanding of race and class more intricate than that allowed
solely within "top-down" or "bottom-up" approachesJ
In "'Social Equality Does Not Exist among Themselves, nor among Us': Baylies
5 Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (1976; rpt. edn., New
York, 1992); Gerald David Jaynes, Branches without Roots: Genesis of the Black Working Class in the
American South, 1862-1882 (New York, 19~6); William H. Harris, The Harder We Run: Black Workers
since the Civil War (New York, 1982); Thomas C. Holt, Black over White: Negro Political Leadership in
South Carolina during Reconstruction (Urbana, Ill., 1977); Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe:
Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1990); Peter Raehleff, Black
Labor in Richmond, 1865-1890 (19~4; Urbana, Ill., 1989). On labor politics and the modern civil rights
movement, see Michael K. Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers
(Urbana, 1993); Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein, "Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor,
Radicals and the Early Civil Rights Movement," fournal of American History 75 (1988): 786-811.
" Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York, 1984); Clayborne Carson, "African
American Leadership and Mass Mobilization," Black Scholar 24 (Fall 1994): 2-7.
7 Of course, there are exemplary contributions whose analytic frameworks combine elite and
popular approaches, articulating elites to broader social movements and developments. See, for
example, Willard B. Gatewood, Jr., Black Americans and the White Man's Burden, 1898-1903 (Urbana,
Ill., 1975); Robert Hill, ed., The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers
(Berkeley, Calif., 1983- ); Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical
Tradition (London, 1983); David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919
(New York, 1993).
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vs. Curry and Civil Rights in Chicago, 1888," Elizabeth Dale gives an imaginatively
researched account of the suit brought by Josephine Curry, a middle-class
African-American woman, against Josiah Baylies, a white theater manager, for
excluding Curry and her party from the theater in violation of the Illinois Civil
Rights Act of 1885. Reading Curry's arguments for her civil rights closely against
the background of race relations in Chicago, Dale foregrounds the class considerations that complicate what a more conventional approach might treat as simply a
racial narrative about civil rights and equal treatment. The more refined and
nuanced kind of storytelling Dale practices here lends great force to her critique of
examples of legal and African-American history that effectively enshrine and
perpetuate the reification of legal formalism, namely, its separation of law from
society. Dale's essay, following recent trends in legal history and critical race
theory,S understands the law itself as a terrain of social struggle. Within Baylies vs.
Cuny, this struggle was inevitably shaped by ideologies and narratives intertwining
race and class, through which its parties articulated competing visions of equality.
Dale's close reading of "the divergent narratives of civil rights" that were argued
within the case allows us to account for a contradictory moment during which Curry
could prevail in her suit against Baylies' theater even as "ideas of equality and
integration began to separate," culminating in Plessy vs. Ferguson and the establishment of "separate but equal" as rationalization of de jure segregation.
The background for Curry's lawsuit was the ambiguous state of race relations in
Chicago, marked by the unpredictability of de facto segregation typical in the urban
North throughout the nineteenth century. In Chicago, blacks enjoyed a measure of
integration in jobs, housing, public accommodations, and reform institutions, but
insult and exclusion were constant realities. Black middle-class spokespersons'
arguments for civil rights were shaped by these quotidian experiences of discrimination in supposedly accessible public accommodations. Dale cites an editorial in
an African-American newspaper in Chicago that insisted that blacks were uninterested in "social equality" with whites, arguing instead for the saliency of class
distinctions over white supremacy's assertion and practice of racial caste subordination. Following from this conviction that class should trump race, the staunchly
middle-class Currys, Dale argues, based their claim for integration on an economic
view of equality predicated on their ability to pay for first-class accommodations,
thus entitling them to facilities equal to those enjoyed by whites of comparable
middle-class standing.
Dale's contextual reading of this particular articulation of equality shows that
arguments for civil rights were hardly straightforward in an era in which deeply
raciaJized notions of class and urban public space framed the issues. She demonstrates that civil rights struggles are seldom just about race but invariably involve
class identities and conflicts as well. Dale persuasively shows the limits of Curry's
oppositional strategy, noting the similarity of her economic claim for integration,
based on her membership in "the better class" of African Americans, with the
" See, for example, Mary Frances Berry, Black Resistance, White Law: A History of Constitutional
Racism in America (1971; rpt. edn., New York, 1994); William E. Forbath, Hendrik Hartog, and Martha
Minow, "Introduction: Legal Histories from Below," Wisconsin Law Review (1985): 759-66; Patricia J.
Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).
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opposing defense of segregation made by Baylies. For his part, the theater owner
claimed the right to exclude the Currys and other African Americans, testifying that
their presence in his theater might prove violently disruptive, causing him economic
injury.
Respectability was a crucial component of the economic terms by which Curry
and Baylies asserted their diametrically opposed conceptions of rights. Where the
Currys invoked their middle-class status as the symbolic ticket to the theater, along
with their paid admission, Baylies, whose establishment abutted the notoriously
disreputable Levee district, drew on popular sentiment pathologizing integrated
public space to support his contention that segregating blacks was necessary for the
survival of his business. Since she formulated her claim to equal access in the
unegalitarian language of bourgeois respectability, nothing in Curry's logic prevented Baylies and his lawyer from arguing that Baylies' own property interests
outweighed African Americans' entitlement to equal treatment in the public
sphere. Dale performs an exemplary service in showing how supposedly universal
values and ideals such as equality can be contested and, in the process, rendered
insidiously ambiguous, according to the distinct social positions of the opposing
parties.
Through her discussion of the arguments made by Curry's attorney, Edward
Morris, Dale also shows how profoundly different arguments can be made on behalf
of the same objective, namely, the plaintiff's claim for equal treatment. Morris, a
black civil rights activist and, later, an outspoken opponent of Booker T. Washington's compromises with segregation, based his argument on a vision of equality
rooted in an idea of inalienable rights, rather than the notion of property, or
bourgeois status-based rights, implied in Curry's testimony and in the defendant's
segregationist argument. Moreover, Dale contrasts Morris's activist view of civil
rights law as upholding principles of integration and equal rights and ameliorating
anti-black antagonism with the judge's philosophy, which, though he ruled in favor
of Curry, stopped well short of interpreting the Civil Rights Act as a manifesto of
racial equality.
From her thick description of Baylies vs. Curry, with its careful rehearsing of the
arguments, social circumstances, and lived experiences of its participants, Dale
emphasizes the contingency of the legal process, its actors negotiating the choices
available to them. At first glance, as Dale contends, the circumstances of the case
render suspect the tendency to subsume legal history within a dispiriting narrative
of worsening race relations. Certainly, the relative fluidity of race relations in
Chicago at the time, the case's complicated and varied visions of equality, and
ultimately, Curry's eventual victory all militate against our intuitive notion of a
deeply entrenched Jim Crow order.
Yet I find myself not quite convinced by Dale's assertion of contingency. For, in
highlighting the contradictory implications of Curry's economic claim for civil rights
and the contending visions of equality articulated within her case, Dale has also
demonstrated a slippery slope by which the logic and language of civil rights law is
eroded within a changing political and ideological climate and is found to contain
the very seeds of its negation. In fact, Dale provides evidence for the contention
that African Americans, even in their legal challenges to segregation, unintention-
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ally acquiesced to an inexorably worsening anti-black climate. Rather than demonstrating that civil rights challenges were more contested, or open to contingency,
than we might think, Dale documents one instance of a widespread but ultimately
highly ineffective and counterproductive black middle-class strategy of claiming
entitlement to citizenship rights by stressing class stratification."
Such nuanced readings of a particular case study as Dale's, however valuable, tell
us less than we need to know about socio-historical change as the background for
such cases and for the origins of segregation. Evidently, the judges who upheld
Curry's suit under the Illinois Civil Rights Act found her class-based assertion of
respectability, as well as her economic conception of equality, more compelling
than Baylies' socially marginal claims of economic harm. But Curry's suit did not
establish anything remotely resembling a precedent on which subsequent black
plaintiffs could rely. The courts would eventually reject such status-based claims by
middle-class African Americans, expressing more sympathy with the property
interests and status aspirations of whites in increasingly attenuated interpretations
of civil rights law, consigning the citizenship rights of blacks to dead-letter status.
By 1911, a New York City jury could acquit one Harry Ulrich, a working-class white
man, of having committed a vicious and bloody assault against Booker T.
Washington, undeniably the most powerful and influential black leader of his
time. 1o On what basis? What changes, not only in Chicago but within national race
relations as well, in the interval between Baylies vs. Curry and Plessy and its
aftermath, might further illuminate the onset of de jure segregation?
In order to engage such questions, historians and legal scholars must continue to
embrace the unwieldy task of historicizing race, making sense out of the irrational,
pseudo-scientific, and even pathological justifications for segregation and the
violence that enforced it. 11 Compared to the suffocating repression of the postReconstruction South, Chicago afforded African Americans and black elites a
modicum of freedom in mobility, expression, and possibilities for political action, a
range of possibilities yielding ~ignificant changes by the 1930s. Nevertheless, it
remains useful to regard Chicago in the late nineteenth century as a national entity
as much as a regional one, its distinctiveness compromised by the influence of
southern ideologies of race. And, given the convergence of local conditions with
national discussions of race, we also need a clearer sense of the interaction between
formal law-making and the informal processes represented by the explosive political
controversies around race. Legal historians of segregation must be alert, as well, to
the extent to which ideologies of race are embedded within political economy and
class relationships and, furthermore, to the centrality of narratives about sexuality
within the ideological underpinnings of de jure segregation and disfranchisement. 12
q For an extended discussion of this phenomenon, see Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black
Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996).
10 Ulrich testified that he assaulted Washington in New York's Tenderloin district, believing him to
be an anonymous intruder engaged in suspicious behavior. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Wizard
of Tuskegee, 379-404.
I I Two noteworthy recent examples are Thomas C. Holt, "Marking: Race, Race-Making, and the
Writing of History," AHR 100 (February 1995): 1-20; and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, "AfricanAmerican Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race," Signs 17 (Winter 1992): 251-74.
12 Nell Irvin Painter, "'Social Equality,' Miscegenation, Labor, and Power," in The Evolution of
Southern Culture, Numan V. Bartley, ed. (Athens, Ga., 1988), 58-67; Peggy Pascoe, "Miscegenation
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Evidence of the reproduction in the North-and at the national level-of racial
theories and customs seemingly peculiar to the South can be seen in the attention
of the African-American press in Chicago to the controversy over "social equality."
Such appropriations of dominant ideas about race by black elites can tell us much,
not only concerning the political significance of black middle-class ideology but also
about the process by which irrational cultural narratives of white supremacy are
reinscribed and presented anew in the more authoritative codes of law. If Dale is
correct in her suggestion that middle-class African Americans' economic arguments
for civil rights were crafted partly in response to hostile white accusations that
blacks were making intolerable demands for "social equality," a term fraught with
moral panic directed against the miscegenation of black men and white women,
then sexual racism might well explain a great deal in the undermining of civil rights
laws. From this standpoint, one imagines a scenario within which Josephine Curry's
middle-class claim of entitlement to access to integrated public venues might elicit
more sympathy in the courts than, say, that asserted by even an unimpeachably
bourgeois gentleman of color. Given that the respectability and prosperity of black
men in the flesh was as likely to provoke white suspicion and antagonism as the
ideological specter of Negro criminality, one wonders whether the Currys had
anticipated this fear of black men as potential economic and sexual competitors by
choosing to have Josephine, rather than her husband John, represent the aggrieved
party in court.J3
WHERE DALE USEFULLY CONFRONTS intra-racial class divisions and mines the
contradictions inherent in the Currys' claim of bourgeois respectability to affirm
their civil rights, Beth Bates surveys an altogether different period in the 1930s
when class identities and solidarities among African Americans were much more
fluid and complementary. In "A New Crowd Challenges the Agenda of the Old
Guard in the NAACP, 1933-1941," Bates documents the conflict in strategy and
tactics between middle-class black leadership and those favoring mass-based
mobilization efforts. Engaging the vast literature on the NAACP and its relationship to the Left, Bates describes a moment during which the association's struggle
for racial equality in the courts met sharp challenges from a "new crowd" of activists
who were convinced that mass mobilization and protest politics were more
appropriate responses to inequalities in jobs and housing. By 1941, Bates argues,
the strategies of grass-roots activism, labor organizing, and direct action pursued by
new-crowd leaders around the Chicago branch had won over a pragmatic Walter
White, erstwhile "old-guard" African-American leader and executive secretary of
Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of 'Race' in Twentieth Century America," Journal of American
History 83 (June 1996): 44-69; Martha Hodes, "The Sexualization of Reconstruction Politics: White
Women and Black Men in the South after the Civil War," Journal of the History of Sexuality 3 (1993):
402-17.
13 For an instructive assessment of the role of gender politics in the legal challenges to segregated
railroad facilities waged by middle-class African Americans in the decade preceding Plessy, see
Kenneth W. Mack, "Complicating the Career of Jim Crow: Railroad Segregation and Citizenship in
Late Nineteenth-Century Tennessee," paper presented at the 1996 Annual Meeting of the American
Studies Association, Kansas City, Missouri.
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the NAACP, who threw his support and that of his organization behind the United
Auto Workers' strike at a Ford plant near Detroit.
Challenging assumptions of intra-racial class conflict that erroneously presume
the black bourgeoisie to be essentially indistinguishable from its Anglo-American
counterpart, Bates describes the contingency of class identity, seen in the social
ambidexterity of important members of the new crowd of leaders who were equally
at home in bourgeois institutions and labor unions. The crisis of the Depression and
the new spaces for interracial labor organizing created by the New Deal go far in
explaining the collective consciousness and group solidarity espoused by such
educated African Americans as Thelma McWorter (Wheaton). Hired by the
Chicago YWCA African-American branch as industrial secretary in charge of
teaching and training female workers, Wheaton held a position that heralded a
profound shift in intra-racial class politics dating from the 1930s. This shift made it
possible for a traditionally middle-class, philanthropic institution such as the
YWCA to provide a base for lahor organizing and a culture of working-class
opposition.
In this connection, it is well worth noting that class identities and relationships
throughout the era of segregation were dcfined and dctermined by racial caste
subordination. This is a crucial point that often escapes those students of black life
and politics who, perhaps overly respectful of the avowed middle-class status of
their subjects, are all too willing to gloss over the fundamental marginality and
precarious status of even the most privileged blacks. That African-American
landowners and political leaders were prime targets for white violence since
Reconstruction, and well into the modern civil rights era, has been well documented. 14 Middle-class respectability proved equally useless in protecting many AfricanAmerican women from rape and other physical violence. IS In addition, there was
the pervasive and longstanding phenomenon of well-educated African Americans
forced by racial exclusion, or economic contraction, into working-class occupations. 16 Under such conditions, one readily imagines how work like the organizing
performed by new crowd leaders such as Wheaton and those others mentioned by
Bates might offer a security and even prestige rare among the circumscribed black
occupational options during the Depression.
For Bates, the mass-protest tactics of local networks were instrumental in
reshaping the NAACP's stance toward unions and thus in the forging of cross-class
alliances between middle-class institutions and workers. More than this, these local
campaigns, as she writes, "contributed to reconfiguring the range and direction of
national protest politics." In this regard, Bates's treatment of the 1930s builds on
scholarship stressing the alliance between labor and civil rights organizations during
the 1940s.17 By documenting the origins of the progressive politics of the World
14 Eric Faner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, ]863-1877 (New York, 1988); Foner,
Freedom '.I' Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders during Reconstnlction (New York, 1993).
15 Darlene Clark Hine, "Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West: Preliminary
Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance," in Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women's
History, Ellen Carol DuBois and Vicki L. Ruiz, eds. (New York, 1990),292-97.
In Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 15-16.
17 Penny Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957 (Ithaca,
N.Y., 1997); Korstad and Lichtenstein, "Opportunities Lost and Found"; Honey, Southern Labor;
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War II era, Bates provides a much-needed supplement to narratives of civil rights
written from the top down, confined to mainstream organizations and messianic
leadership. III
Bates's analysis of the origins of shifts in national politics in militant, local
collective organizing initiatives is strengthened by her discussion of the NAACP's
vulnerability, its very survival threatened by the Depression. Hampered by its
"old-guard" style of black leadership characterized by paternalism and a preoccupation with respectability, the association seemed unwilling to capitalize on the
increase in political potential and assertiveness represented by Chicago's growing
black community, as shown in Bates's astute discussion of White's fund-raising
strategy during the early 1930s of targeting liberal whites. While the NAACP slept,
so to speak, the working-class initiatives of the Chicago division of the Brotherhood
of Sleeping Car Porters, the Communist Party, the National Negro Congress, and
the Congress of Industrial Organizations paralleled the confrontational protest
tactics of Chicago branch members. Although White and the national office initially
sought to impose its discipline on the branch, forcing it to call off a boycott of Sears,
criticism of the association mounted from several quarters, appealing for a positive
program of direct action. If White could afford to dismiss withering internal
criticism from such radicals as W. E. B. Du Bois and Abram Harris, and purge these
messengers, he had to take seriously the misgivings of middle-class branch leaders
like Chicago's Daisy Lampkin, whose criticism was backed by the considerable
influence of the National Association of Colored Women, which lent its support to
anti-discrimination protests against Sears.
Bates's main achievement is her richly detailed rendering of new-crowd activist
networks resulting from the productive cooperation between the National Negro
Congress and the CIO, under whose umbrella flourished an astonishing range of
black community institutions and activists. The value of her insightful account of
the fluidity of class identities and relationships within Chicago's vibrant black
politics of the 1930s cannot be overemphasized, for this phenomenon is essential to
the comprehension of the origins and aspirations of black social movements
throughout the civil rights era. Black Chicago's old guard was swept along by the
momentum established by the NNC organizers, trade unionists, radical intellectuals, churches, fraternal orders, and reform institutions. Moreover, these campaigns
were grounded in the black community while they simultaneously nurtured new
subcultures of interracial labor radicalism. Unlike the black elites of previous
generations, who, against the ubiquitous pressures of racism, constantly asserted
their moral and cultural distance from the majority of African Americans, the black
elite that Bates describes exchanged, through its civic-minded impulses, the older
paternalism of racial uplift for a new receptivity to working-class politics.
Amid the failure of White's efforts to rally executive and legislative backing for
Manning Marable. Race, Reform and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945-1982
(Jackson, Miss., 1984).
18 David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference, 1955-1968 (New York, 1986); Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years,
1954-1963 (New York, 1988); Juan Williams, Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965
(New York, 1987).
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387
his anti-lynching campaign, orchestrated from the national office as a bid to shore
up white liberal support, the executive secretary was hearing similar complaints
from several branches of the NAACP's marginalization and virtual irrelevance to
the concerns and needs of African-American workers. Indeed, contrary to the view
that the leftist agenda of the National Negro Congress exerted a divisive, and
potentially destructive, influence on civil rights politics, Bates suggests that the
NNC's militancy may well have enabled the expansion of membership of the
NAACP's largest branches in Chicago, Detroit, and Baltimore. Eventually, White
and Roy Wilkins grew weary of hearing the NAACP called to account within the
rising denunciations of conservative old-guard leadership. With the establishment
of the Legal Defense and Education Fund, the association was freed to pursue a
dual strategy in its fight against segregation, lending its support to the labor-civil
rights coalition that culminated in both A. Philip Randolph's 1941 March on
Washington protest movement and White's own intervention in the UAW-CIO
strike against Ford.
Despite their divergent emphases, Dale and Bates have written essays that
complement each other. Where Dale is describing the construction of the master's
house, as it were, of de jure segregation, from the foundation of racial ideologies
and customs, Bates elucidates the groundswell of grass-roots politics and the
emerging cross-class coalition between labor and civil rights groups that mobilized
to dismantle legal structures of racial and social inequality. Their respective
analyses of the role of black elites are enhanced by their juxtaposition in this forum.
The contrast between Josephine Curry's circumscribed, bourgeois, and effectively
exclusionary notion of equality and Edward Morris's comprehensive vision of
equality predicated on a universalist idea of inalienable human rights is mirrored in
the contrasting styles and assumptions of staid, old-guard black leadership and the
labor solidarities and mass-mobilization tactics encouraged by the more democratic
new-crowd leaders. Both essays affirm the inescapably ambiguous status of black
elites and leadership in a society structured in racial dominance, witnessed in the
historical tension between accommodationist elite visions of racial uplift and more
egalitarian, social visions of uplift and emancipation.
Kevin Gaines is an associate professor of history and African-American studies
at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his doctorate from the
American Civilization department at Brown University. Gaines is the author of
Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics and Culture during the Twentieth
Century (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996). He is writing a book on African-American
expatriates in Ghana, from 1954 to 1966, which will examine the early civil
rights era from an international perspective.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
APRIL
1997