Booker T. Washington & W.E.B. Du Bois
whites. Significantly, a few years later, it was
Washington whom President Theodore Roosevelt
invited to the White House to discuss racial issues.
Not everyone interested in black civil rights agreed
with Washington’s approach, however. By the time
his death in 1915, his views faced significant
challenge from recently formed NAACP and its
articulate spokesman, W.E.B Dubois. Born in 1868 in
Massachusetts, Dubois graduated from Fisk
University in 1888, then went on to become the first
black recipient of a Harvard Ph.D (1895). Making his
name first as a scholar, he wrote books on the African
slave trade and other aspects of black history,
including The Souls of Black Folk (1903), then
helped launch the Niagara Movement (1905). His
evaluation of American race relations can be seen in
the name given to the NAACP’s newsletter: “The
Crisis.” By the 1930s, the
NAACP’s legalistic
approach no longer seemed
adequate to Dubois. At a
time in life when many
become more conservative,
he became more radical. In
1961 he moved to Africa
and renounced his American
citizenship. He died on
August 27, 1963 – the day
before Martian Luther
King’s “I have a Dream”
speech at the March on
Washington.
In the half century after the end of Reconstruction in
1877. Booker T. Washington and W.E.B Dubois
came to prominence in what came to be called the
Civil Rights Movement. Their differing backgrounds
hint at the reasons
for their differences
over how African
Americans should
deal with poverty
and racism.
Washington gave a
title to his own
story when he
called his
autobiography Up
From Slavery
(1901). Born a
slave in Virginia in
1856, in 1872 he
entered Hampton
Institute (a product of Recon-struction idealism that
gave vocational training to young African
Americans). Washington graduated in 1875 but
returned in 1879 to help run the program there. In
1881, at the age of 25, he was asked to head the
newly established Tuskegee Institute in Alabama,
where he made his reputation as a spokesperson for
the African American community. Washington’s
national reputation was made with his famous
“Atlanta Compromise” address of 1895. “In all things
that are purely social we can be as separate as the
fingers,” he said, “yet one as the hand in all things
essential to mutual progress.” Washington’s
accommodating stance appealed to both blacks and
Document A
School Enrollm ent By Race
Percentage of 5 - 19 Year Olds in School
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
1860
1870
1880
White People
1890
1900
1910
1920
Black People
Percentage of People Over the
Age of 9 Unable to Read
Document B
Illiteracy By Race
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
1890
1900
Black People
1910
Foreign Born Whites
Native Born Whites
Document C
Lynchings By Race
180
140
120
100
80
60
40
20
White People
Black People
19
14
19
10
19
07
19
04
19
00
18
95
18
92
18
87
0
18
82
Number of People Lynched
160
Document D
Source: Booker T. Washington, “Atlanta Compromise Address” (September 11, 1895)
“To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the
prosperity of the South, were I permitted I would repeat what I say to my own race, “Cast down your bucket where
you are.” Cast it down among the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you
have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your firesides. Cast down your bucket among
these people who have, without strikes and labor wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, built your railroads
and cites, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth, and helped make possible this magnificent
representation of the progress of the South. Casting down your bucket among my people, helping and encouraging
them as you are doing on these grounds, and to education of head, hand, and heart, you will find that they will buy
your surplus land, make blossom the waste places in your fields, and run your factories. While doing this, you can
be sure in the future, as in the past, that you and your families will be surrounded by the most patient, faithful, lawbiding, and unresentful people that the world has seen. As we have proved our loyalty to you in the past, in nursing
your children, watching by the sickbed of your mothers and fathers, and often following them with teardimmed eyes
to their graves, so in the future, in our humble way, we shall stand by you with a devotion that no foreigner can
approach, ready to lay down our lives, if need be, in defense of yours, the interests of both races one. In all things
that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual
progress….
“The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremist folly, and
that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the results of severe and constant
struggle rather than of artificial forcing. No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in
any degree ostracized. It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important
that we be prepared for the exercises of these privileges. The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is
worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera house.”
Document E
Source: W.E.B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
“Is it possible and probable that nine millions of men can make effective progress in economic lines if they are
deprived of political rights, made a servile caste, and allowed only the most meager chance for developing their
exceptional men? If history and reason give any distinct answer to these questions it is an emphatic NO……
“Such men, [the thinking classes of American Negroes] feel in conscience bound to ask of this nation three things:
1.
2.
3.
The right to vote
Civic equality
The education of youth according to ability
“They do not except that the free right to vote, to enjoy civil rights, and the be educated, will come in moment; they
do not except to see the bias and prejudices of years disappear at the blast of a trumpet; but they are absolutely
certain that the way for a people to gain their reasonable rights is not by voluntarily throwing them away and
insisting that they do not want them; that the way for a people to gain respect is not by continually, in season and out
of season, that voting is necessary to modern manhood, that color discrimination is barbarism, and that black boys
need education as well as white boys.”
Document F
Source: W.E.B Du Bois, “The Niagara Movement, “ Voice of the Negro II (September 1905)
“There has been a determined effort in this country to stop the free expression of opinion among black men; money
has been and is being distributed in considerable sums to influence the attitude of certain Negro papers; the
principles of democratic government are losing ground, and caste distinctions are growing in all directions. Human
brotherhood is spoken of today with a smile and a sneer; effort is being made to curtail the educational opportunities
of the colored children; and while much is said about moneymaking, not enough is said about efficient, selfsacrificing toil of head and hand. Are not all these things worth striving for? The Niagara Movement proposes to
gain these ends. . . If we expect to gain our rights by nerveless acquiescence in wrong, then we expect to do what no
other nation ever did. What must we do then? We must complain. Yes, plain, blunt complain, ceaseless agitation,
unfailing exposure of dishonesty and wrong—This is the ancient, unerring way to liberty, and we must follow it.”
Document G
Source: T. Thomas Fortune, a Black activist and newspaper editor, writing in the nationally circulated Black
periodical, Christian Recorder (May 15, 1890)
“I have spent a week at Tuskegee, forty miles from Montgomery, investigation and studying the great work being
done here, in the Tuskegee Normal (Teacher Training) and Industrial Institute, of which Mr. Booker T. Washington
is the originator and projector…
“Here we have under control a thousand acres of land; here we have 400 colored sons, drinking in knowledge from
the faithful ministrations of twenty-eight colored teachers, male and female. A more interesting spectacle can no
where else be seen and studied…Splendid farm equipments, stock-raising, fruit culture, laundry work, practical
housekeeping in all its braches, blacksmithing, wheelwrighting, carpentering, printing and building, shoe and
harness making, masonry are all taught in their practical forms, while a splendid Normal school system is
maintained to prepare school teachers for the great work before the…
“No time is wasted on dead languages or superfluous studies of any kind. What is practical, what will best fit these
young people for the work of life, that is taught, and that is aimed at. Norm is moral and religious culture
neglected…It is impossible to estimate the value of such a man as Booker T. Washington.”
Document H
Source: Ida Wells Barnett, a Black civil rights activist, feminist, and newspaper editor, “Booker T. Washington and
his Critics” (1904)
“Industrial education for the Negro is Booker T. Washington’s hobby….
“That one of the most noted of their own race should join with the enemies to their highest progress in condemning
the education they had received, has been to…(college educated Negroes) a bitter pill…
“No human agency can tell how many black diamonds lie buried in the black belt of the South, and the opportunities
for discovering them become rarer every day as the schools for thorough training become more cramped and no
more are being established.
“Does this mean that the Negro objects to industrial education? By no means. It simply means that he knows by sad
experience that industrial education will not stand him in place of political, civil and intellectual liberty, and he
objects to being deprived of fundamental rights of American citizenship to the end that one school for industrial
training shall flourish. To him it seems like selling a race’s birthright for a mess of pottage.”
Document I
Source: Carter Woodson, a Black historian and educator, The Mis-education of the Negro (1933)
“Neither this inadequately supported (industrial education) school systems nor the struggling higher institutions of
classical order established about the same time…connected the Negroes very closely with life as it was. These
institutions were concerned rather with life as they hoped to make it. When the Negro found himself deprived of
influence in politics, therefore, and at the same time unprepared to participate in the higher functions in the
industrial development which this country began to undergo, it soon became evident to him that he was losing
ground in the basic things of life. He was spending his time studying about the things which had been or might be,
but he was learning little to help him to do better the tasks at hand.”
Ain’t gonna ride them buses no more, Ain’t gonna
ride no more. Why don’t all the white folk know that I
ain’t gonna ride no more. – Sung by Montgomery
boycotters 1955-1956
Martin Luther King, Jr.
(American Odyssey, 1989)
After the
Montgomery boycott, Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr.,
had emerged as the
unchallenged leader of the
African American protest
movement. Short in
stature and gentle in
manner, King was at that
time only 27 years old.
What had propelled him
into this demanding role
in history?
The son of a
Baptist minister, King and
his father were named after Martin Luther, the
founder of the Protestant branch of Christianity. The
younger King grew up in a comfortable, middle-class
home in Atlanta. He attended Morehouse College
there, and when he was 18 years old, decided on a
career in the ministry. He already showed a gift for
the eloquent, emotion-arousing art of popular
speaking in southern churches. After a trail sermon in
his father’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, he was
ordained a Baptist minister.
King then went north for more schooling, to
Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, and
then to Boston University for a Ph.D. in religion. By
the time he first arrived in Montgomery in September
1954 as pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church,
he had also met and married Coretta Scott.
Southern Christian Leadership Conference
(SCLC) Following the success of the Montgomery
bus boycott, King faced the question of how to
extend the lessons learned there to other cities and
other civil rights arenas. In January 1957 King called
a meeting in Atlanta of 60 southern ministers to
discuss nonviolent
integration.
The beginning of
the conference was
marred by the news that
the home and church of
King’s friend and fellow
minister Ralph Abernathy
had been bombed. After a
hurried trip back to
Montgomery to survey the
damage, King returned to
Atlanta to assume the
presidency of the new
organization, the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).
Nonviolence
From the beginning of the
Montgomery boycott, King encouraged his followers
to use nonviolent resistance. This meant that those
who carried out the demonstrations should not fight
with authorities, even if provoked to do so.
The SCLC and the Fellowship of
Reconciliation (FOR), the
latter an interracial
organization founded in 1914,
conducted workshops in
nonviolent methods for civil
rights activists. Those
attending learned how to sit
quietly while others jeered at
them, called them names, even
spat on them. Workshop
participants also learned how
to guard themselves against
blows and how to protect each
other by forming a circle of
bodies around someone who
was under attack.
King’s use of nonviolent tactics has often
been compared to those used by Mohandas Gandhi in
India’s struggle for independence from Great Britain.
In both cases, the final victory depended on using
moral arguments to change the minds of the
oppressors. King linked nonviolence to the Christian
theme of “love one’s enemy” However, he was
certainly familiar with Gandhi’s teachings, and in
1959 traveled to India to talk with some of Gandhi’s
followers.
The Gandhian strategy of nonviolence
involved four steps: investigation, negotiation,
publicity, and demonstration. Applied to civil rights
actions, this meant that the activist ought first to look
into a situation and gather the facts. Next, the activist
should attempt to negotiate with the person
responsible for the segregation. Failing that, others
should be made aware of the situation and what the
activists intended to do. Only then should the action,
such as a march or a demonstration, he carried out.
Soon after the victory in Montgomery,
nonviolent methods began to be applied in a
startlingly fresh way. Students
in universities and colleges all
over the country were tired of
waiting for change. They
vowed to integrate the nation’s
segregated lunch counters,
hotels, and entertainment
facilities by a simple new
strategy of nonviolent
resistance—sitting.
A Season of Sit-ins
The first sit-in was
not elaborately planned. The
group of four freshmen from
North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College
had never attended a workshop on nonviolence. But
late one night they began to talk about what they
could do to fight segregation. Earlier in the day
Joseph McNeil, one of the four, had tried to get
something to eat at the local bus station, but had been
turned down. He was hurt and resentful.
“We should just sit at the counter and refuse
to go until they serve us,” one suggested.
“You really mean it,” his friend said.
“Sure I mean it” the first replied.
The next day, February 1 1960, the four
walked into a local store. Nervous, they first tested
the waters to see if their business was welcome. One
brought a tube of toothpaste, another some school
supplies. Then the four sat down at the whites-only
lunch counter and asked for
coffee and doughnuts.
“ I’m sorry but we
don’t serve colored here,” the
waitress said.
“I peg your pardon,”
Franklin Mc Cain said. “You
just served me at a counter two
feet away. Why is it that you
serve me at one counter and
not at another?”
The four continued to
sit at the counter until it
closed, about half an hour later. The next day they
cam back, accompanied by 27 other students. The
third day, 63 students sat down at the lunch counter.
They were not served, so they just sat. On the fourth
day the students were joined by three white students
from the Women’s College of the University of
North Carolina. By Friday, the fifth day, the
demonstrators had grown to about 300. They sat in
shifts. If some students had to leave to attend class,
their place at the lunch counter was taken by other
students who stood waiting behind them.
On Saturday evening 1,600 students
attended a victory rally, exhilarated by the
announcement that the company was ready to
negotiate. They soon discovered that the celebration
was premature, for the company was willing to make
only token changes in its segregation policy.
Two months later students resumed their
lunch counter sit-ins. Adopting a new hard line, the
city arrested 45 students and charged them with
trespassing. This in turn so enraged the students and
their supporters that they launched a massive boycott
of stores with segregated lunch counters. As sales
dropped by a third, the merchants reluctantly gave in.
Six months after the four freshmen first sat down and
asked for coffee, they were finally served.
The Sit-ins Spread Meanwhile, the spontaneous
grass roots movement in Greensboro started a
reaction that spread like a brush fire throughout the
Border States and the upper south. By April 1960,
college and high school students in 78 communities
had staged sit-ins, and 2,000 protestors had been
arrested. A year later, those numbers had nearly
doubled. By September 1961, 70,000 black students
and white students were sitting-in for social change.
The targets of many sit-ins were southern
stores of national chains. However, in some northern
cities students picketed stores of the same chains,
carrying signs that read “We walk so they may sit.”
As more lunch counters integrated under the
pressure of sit-ins, variations of the technique
emerged. Students held “Kneel ins” to integrate
churches, “read ins” in libraries, “wade ins” at
beaches, and “sleep ins” in motel lobbies.
A Student Movement The driving center of the civil
rights movement had
spread from the legal
committees
of
the
NAACP and African
American churches to
college campuses. The
students were impatient.
As schoolchildren in 1954
when the Supreme Court
ruled on the Brown
decision,
they
had
expected
immediate
results. But progress had
been slow. In 1957 African Americans had shared in
the excitement of Ghana’s independence from Great
Britain. During 1960 alone, 11 African countries
threw off the shackles of colonialism. “All of Africa
will be free before we can get lousy cup of coffee,”
writer James Baldwin complained.
The nonviolence of the students provoked
increasingly hostile reactions form those who
opposed them. In Nashville, after four students had
successfully desegregated a bus terminal, they were
badly beaten. In other cities, white teenagers poked
students in the ribs, ground cigarettes out on their
backs, or threw ketchup on them as they ate.
The Creation of SNCC Ella J. Baker, executive
secretary of King’s SCLC, was impressed with the
students’ commitment and courage, but she was
concerned about their lack of coordination and
leadership. She invited 100 student leaders of the sitins to a conference at Shaw University in Raleigh,
North Carolina, over Easter weekend in April 1960.
To her surprise, some 300 students showed up,
mostly
from
southern
African
American
communities, but a few also from northern colleges.
Out of that meeting came a new civil rights
organization, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC, pronounced snick).
King addressed the students that weekend.
He stressed the moral power of nonviolence, saying,
“The tactics of nonviolence without the spirit of
nonviolence may become a new kind of violence.”
One of the slogans students
most warmly applauded at the
conference was: “Jail not bail.” The
decision to refuse bail and to remain in
jail came about for practical as well as
philosophical reasons. Supporters of the
sit-ins throughout the country had been
contributing bail money so that students
who were arrested could be quickly
released on bail. As the number of
arrests grew, the bail money became
heavy drain on the treasures of civil
rights organizations. Philosophically,
opting for jail placed the burden of
supporting the arrested protesters onto
the police and local officials. Also,
through press coverage, jail service kept
the eyes of the nation focused on the
protesters and their conflict with the
authorities.
In adopting “jail not bail” as a
tool, SNCC followed a tradition of civil disobedience
in U.S. history. Henry David Thoreau, for example,
spent a night in jail in 1846 for refusing to pay his
poll tax as a protest against slavery and the Mexican
War. Thoreau wrote an essay, “Civil Disobedience”:
How does it become a man to behave toward
this American government today? I answer;
that he cannot without disgrace be
associated with it. I cannot for an instant
recognize that political organization as my
government which is the slave’s government
also.
Henry David Thoreau
Civil Disobedience,
1849
Within a year SNCC
evolved from an activity that
students engaged in between
classes to a full-time
commitment. The most active
students postponed their studies
and dropped out of college to
work for the movement. In the
fall of 1961, SNCC sent 16
“field secretaries” to areas most
resistant to integration. By early
1964 that number had grown to
150.
A field secretary could
count on only about $10 a week
from SNCC, so most roomed
and boarded with local African
Americans who lived constantly
southern African Americans
who lived constantly on the edge of poverty. SNCC
workers and their hosts were also subject to physical
harassment, even danger.
More than federal court decisions and more
than civil disobedience would be required before the
segregation system of 100 years finally broke down.
The active commitment of the nation’s president
would be needed as well. The year that the sit-ins
erupted and SNCC was formed, John F. Kennedy
became the presidential nominee of the Democratic
Party.
The Legacy of Malcolm X
He terrified Whites and turned Negroes into African Americans
“We’re not Americans.
We’re Africans who happen to be in America.
We were kidnapped and brought here against our will from Africa.
We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock-that rock landed on us” –Malcolm X (1964)
In his day, Malcolm X was not widely
regarded as an admirable figure. Except in Harlem,
the man who rose from poverty and prison to the
pulpit was virtually unknown until CBS’s Mike
Wallace, in a 1959 television documentary entitled
“The Hate That Hate Produced” showed him leading
an ominous “rise of black racism.” Six years later
thousands of mourners attended Malcolm’s Harlem
funeral, but outside America’s poorest neighborhoods
few tears were shed. A New York Times editorial
dismissed the murdered minister as “a twisted man”
who turned “true gifts to a evil purpose.” Time
termed him “an unashamed demagogue.” Columnist
Walter Winchell called him “a petty punk.” Nor was
the Negro press, as it was known in those days, any
kinder. The Washington Afro-American described
the black nationalist leader as “a professional racebaiter.” Malcolm X, the Michigan Chronicle
concluded, “reaped the harvest of his own
philosophy.”
Now many years later, the man who called
himself the “angireist Negro in
America” has been the subject of
much historical revision. Spike Lee
has made a movie that ushered in a
new tide of Malcolm X examination.
The epic opens with the video of
Rodney King’s beating and ends a
fast-moving 3 hours and 21 minutes
later in a sea of black faces in
current-day Soweto, South Africa
which serves as a reminder that, for
many, the struggle for civil rights did
not end in the 60s. “Most middleclass black Americans are not
listening to the rumblings from below
says Manning Marable, a historian at
the University of Colorado at
Boulder, who wrote a biography of
Malcolm X “They aren’t listening to
the voices of anguish and alienation.”
The movie has shaped and
reshaped the ways in which millions
of people view a man who was one of
his generation’s plainest speaking but mostmisunderstood personalities. “Malcolm X was a far
more complicated figure than any of us knew in the
60s.” says Robert O’ Meally, an American studies
professor at New York’s Banard College. “If you
look at the whole range of his career, you can see
some pretty good Malcolm’s in the barrel with the
bad ones.”
Lamb and Chicken. During the early 60s
the media presented one bad Malcolm after another.
“If I had said Mary had a little lamb, he once
complained “what probably would have appeared
was Malcolm X Lampoons Mary.” But the press did
not have to exaggerate Malcolm’s rhetoric to make it
frightful. All white people were devils, he declared,
the members of an evil race created thousands of
years ago by a made black scientist. Hell was not
something in the hereafter. Malcolm preached, but
was what blacks endured every day on Earth. All of
this, he warned, would soon be set straight by a
global revolution of dark skinned people-a “lake of
fire,” a “day of slaughter…for this sinful white
world.” When John F. Kennedy was assassinated,
Malcolm talked cheerfully about “the chickens
coming home to roost.” He hailed as “a very
beautiful thing” the crash of an airliner full of white
people-a case in which God got “rid of 120 of them at
one whop.”
Those headline-making utterances came
from “the pre-Mecca Malcolm,
“the messenger who blindly
followed the teachings of
Nation of Islam founder Elijah
Muhammad and thus, in one
historian’s words, “scared the
bejesus out of white people.”
Less noticed was what occurred
in Malcolm’s final year.
Breaking with Muhammad,
Malcolm traveled to Mecca and
discovered Muslims “of all
colors, from blue-eyed blonds
to black-skinned Africans.” He
returned to America preaching
brotherhood and a hostility to
bias in any form. “In the past, I
have permitted myself to be
used to make sweeping
indictments of all white
people.” He said “I no longer
subscribe to sweeping
indictments of one race.”
James Farmer, the civil-rights leader who
headed the Congress of Racial Equality in the 60s,
remembers a revealing conversation shortly after
Malcolm’s return from Mecca. Malcolm vowed to
devote the rest of his life, Farmer says, to repairing
the damage done by narrow mindedness. “Anyone
who will work along with us is my brother,”
Malcolm told the CORE leader, “and that goes for
your three guys, too”- a reference to James Chaney,
Micheal Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, three
CORE workers who had been murdered in
Mississippi. “Malcolm knew that Schwerner and
Goodman were white and Jewish.” Farmer recalls,
“For a black nationalist and a Muslim to say that
those two white Jews were his brothers was a real
confession and real change. I asked him why he had
not expressed that view in his rallies in Harlem. He
said, “If a leader makes a sudden right-angle turn, he
turns alone.”
When Malcolm began preaching in the 50s,
black Americans were represented on radio and
television mainly by servants like Jack Benny’s
Rochester and bumbling connivers like Amos and
Andy’s Kingfish. The only African hero most black
moviegoers saw was a white Tarzan. “You know
yourself that we have been a people who hated our
African characteristics.” Malcolm told a Detroit
audience. “We hated our heads, we hated the color of
our skin, hated the blood of Africa that was in our
veins…Our color became to us a chain.” What
Malcolm started-“a cultural revolution to
unbrainwash an entire people.” He called it-bears
fruit today in music, dress, art and literature, all
brimming with self-respect and pride in an African
heritage. It was Malcolm’s influence, many scholars
say, that turned “Negroes” into “black people.” He
fathered the black-power movement that started
within a year of his death. Long before the movement
faded in the 70s, its disciples were hailing “St.
Malcolm.”
Many young Americans caught up in
Malcolmania are familiar with the high lights of his
life. They devour Pathfinder Press’s collections of his
speeches and are largely
responsible for the 300
percent jump that’s occurred
since 1989 in sales of “The
Autobiography of Malcolm
X.” as told to Alex Haley.
But many other Malcolm
fans know little about him.
Until a year ago, some black
students were asking their
history professor, “Who is
this Malcolm the Tenth?”
Whites often know even less
about the civil-rights era.
Alan Stone, president of
Michigan’s Alma College,
says his students “are surprised to learn that separate
drinking fountains existed barely 25 years ago. They
seem to think these things happened at the turn of the
century.”
“By any means …” Much of what young
people think they know about Malcolm comes from
rap music. The rap group Public Enemy, in its “Shut
Em Down” video, shouts, “Screw George
Washington, “then knocks the first president off the
dollar bill and replaces him with Malcolm X. In
Prince Akeem and Chuck D’s “time to come correct.”
Malcolm is shown speaking and then lying dead in
his coffin while the words “by any means necessary”
flash across the screen. Those four words – now
Malcolmania’s No.1 slogan – are also the title of a
Boogie Down Production album, the cover of which
has lead rapper KRS – One peering out a window
with a semi-automatic rifle, just as Malcolm did in an
Ebony magazine photo in 1964.
Malcolm’s oldest daughter, Arrallah
Shabazz says too many youths believe that “by any
means necessary” means using a gun. Shabazz who at
the age of 6 saw her father shot to death, favors
another interpretation.”Any means” she says, can
include reading books and studying hard. Malcolm
himself always used the term ambiguously in telling
how to achieve justice and equity, and he let friends
and foes alike interpret as they wished. But his
message about self-improvement was plain. “With
out education,” he warned, “you are not going
anywhere in this world.” Spike Lee says he made his
movie in hopes of ending a distribution trend in
inner-city schools: Blacks who make good grades, he
notes, are assailed by peers as acting white.
The color line. It was not easy to be black
and contented in the 1960s. The supreme court had
outlawed school segregation, but nearly every
Southern classroom remained either all-white or allblack until late in the decade. Hotels, eating places,
theaters, libraries, buses, ball parks, zoos – all were
segregated. The typical Southern service station
provided three restrooms: “Ladies,” “Gentlemen” and
“Colored.” In some countries, blacks who tried to
vote risked losing their jobs or their lives. Outside the
South, local laws banned discrimination and
politicians spoke of brotherhood. But millions of
blacks lived in crumbling,
rat-infested housing with no
hope of moving to the white
suburbs, and their children
attended schools as
segregated as any in the Old
Confederate. Police
floggings were
commonplace in the North
and south alike.
Martian Luther
King Jr. and Malcolm X
looked at what black people
were up against and reached
totally different conclusions
on what should be done.
King, focusing initially on the South, believed a
campaign of nonviolent protests would end
segregation, changing white people’s hearts as well
as their laws. “We are simply seeking to bring into
full realization the American dream – a dream yet
unfulfilled,” the Baptist minister explained. By
contrast, Malcolm X found nothing in America worth
saving. “I see America through the eyes of the
victim” he said. “I don’t see any American dream. I
see a nightmare.” The pre-mecca Malcolm said King
was a “Chump” and an “Uncle Tom” for pursuing
integration. The real answer, Malcolm said was the
voluntary but permanent separation of the races, with
whites in one place and blacks in another. The
government, he said, shold “give us part of this
country.” He grinned that someplace sunny, like
Florida of California, would be fine.
Malcolm mocked the civil-rights
movement’s approach, which King patterned after
Mahatma Gandhi’s successful campaign against
British colonialism in India. “this is a beg-o-lution.
You Toms are askingthe white man for a cup of
coffee at a lunch counter.” Holding hands with white
people and singing “We shall Over come” he said, is
laughable. “You don’t do that in a revolution. You
don’t do any singing, you’re too busy swinging.”
King dismissed Malcolm’s words as “fiery,
demagogic oratory” that “can reap nothing but grief”
Nonviolence, King told one audience, disarms the
oppressor. “It weakens his morale” and “exposes his
defense.” And he just doesn’t know what to do. Now
I can assure you that if we rose up in violence in the
South, our opponents would really know what to do,
because they know how to operate on this
level…..They control all the forces of violence.” And
whites would have an excuse to do nothing about
oppression.
Ballots and bullets. Black people in those
days clearly preferred King’s course. In a 1964 New
York Times poll, 3 of every 4 New York City blacks
named King as “doing the best work for Negroes.”
Only 6 percent chose Malcolm, who, plainly irked,
said to Alex Haley: “Brother, do you realize that
some history’s greatest leaders never were
recognized until they were safely in the ground?” In
that year – his final year – Malcolm quit attacking the
civil rights movement and offered to help it instead.
Once apolitical, he now urged blacks to vote. He
traveled to Alabama and spoke in support of King,
who was in jail for leading a protest. Malcolm
continued to say scary things, calling for black
people’s rifle clubs and threatening to have the
United Nations convict the United States of genocide.
But he insisted that his fire-eating rhetoric was
making King’s job significantly easier. “When the
Black Muslim movement came along talking that
kind of talk that they talked, the white man said,
“thank God for the NAACP,” Malcolm explained. “A
lot of people who wouldn’t act right out of love
began to act right out of fear.”
After Malcolm died, King began moving
toward Malcolm’s pessimism. With the civil-rights
movement’s Southern goals in place, King turned to
the cities of the North. He soon discovered that many
of the Northern whites who supported his campaign
against racism in the distant South saw nothing
wrong with what was happening in the nearby
ghettos. Blacks rioted in the Watts section of Los
Angles, shouting “Burn, Baby, Burn” and “Long live
Malcolm X,” The war in Vietnam, which both King
and Malcolm bitterly opposed, was escalating. King
quit talking about his dream. “I saw that dream turn
into a nightmare,” he said.
Forward, backward. Malcolm and King
today would see both a dream and a nightmare. In the
almost two generations since their deaths, black
America has both progressed and regressed. The
black middle class has quadrupled, and the top 20
percent of all black households now averages
$61,000 in income. But much of the swelling middle
class has fled the inner cities, leaving behind a poor
but bloated underclass. “Whatever the measure –
median income, health care, life expectancy –
problems in the central cities have gotten worse,”
says the University of Colorado’s Marable, “and a
majority of African-Americans continue to be locked
out of the promise of the American dream.”
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)
•
Background of the Case
An 1890 Louisiana law commanded railroads to “provide equal but separate accommodations for the white and
colored races.” Violation of this law carried a fine of $20 or 25 days in jail. Railway personnel were responsible for
assigning seats according to race.
Plessy, who was one-eighth black, attempted to sit in the white section of a train going from New Orleans
to Covington, Louisiana. When a conductor ordered Plessy to give up his seat, he refused. He was then arrested and
ordered imprisoned by Ferguson, a local judge. On appeal, the Louisiana Supreme Court found that the statute under
which Plessy had been arrested was valid.
•
Constitutional Issue
Plessy appealed to the United States Supreme Court on the grounds that Louisiana’s statute violated the
Thirteenth Amendment, which forbids slavery, and the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits the states from
denying “to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
•
The Court’s Decision
Justice Henry Brown wrote for a seven-member majority, with Justice John Harlan dissenting (one Justice was
absent).
The issue related to the Thirteenth Amendment was quickly brushed aside. The court held that “a legal
distinction between the white and colored races…has no tendency to destroy the legal equality of the two races.”
However, concerned with the Fourteenth Amendment, Brown concluded that it aimed strictly “to enforce the
absolute equality of the two races before the law,” but that it “could not have been intended to abolish distinctions
based on color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political, equality…” Laws requiring segregation “do not
necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other...,” he stated. Brown called this “the underlying fallacy”
of Plessy’s case and postulated that a black-controlled legislature might someday enact similar laws, which would
also be valid under the Fourteenth Amendment.
The Court ruled, then, that the matter ultimately depends on whether Louisiana’s statute was “reasonable.” The
majority opinion explained that segregation laws “have been generally, if not universally, recognized as within the
competency of the state legislatures in the exercise of their police power.” In such matter, a legislature is free to take
into account “established usages, customs, and traditions of the people,” as well as “the preservation of public peace
and good order.”
Finally, Brown rejected the notion that “social prejudices may be overcome by legislation.” He maintained, “If
the civil and political rights of both races be equal, one cannot be inferior to the other civilly or politically. If one
race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them on the same plane.”
•
A Dissenting Opinion
Justice Harlan’s dissent first criticized the majority opinion for ignoring the true intent of Louisiana’s statute,
which was “under the guise of giving equal accommodation for whites and blacks, to compel the latter to keep to
themselves while traveling in railroad passenger coaches.” Harlan’s “fundamental objection” to the statute was that
it “interferes with the personal freedom of citizens.” No government should be able to infringe the right of one race
to choose to travel with another.
Harlan saw segregation on racial lines as “a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and
equality before the law established by the Constitution…The thin disguise of ‘equal’ accommodations for
passengers in railroad coaches will not mislead anyone, nor atone fore the wrong this day done.”
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954)
•
Background of the Case
Brown represents a collection of cases, all decided together. The cases had one common feature: Black children
had been denied admission to segregated white public schools.
These cases reached the U.S. Supreme Court by way of appeals through lower courts, all of which had ruled in
accordance with the decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). The Plessy case determined that separate but equal
facilities did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection of the laws.”
An earlier case, Sweatt v. Painter (1950) had held that blacks must be admitted to the previously segregated
University of Texas Law School because no separate but equal facility existed in the state. In Brown, however, there
were findings “that the Negro and white schools involved have been equalized or were being equalized…”
•
Constitutional Issue
The Brown case was an explicit reappraisal of the question in Plessy v. Ferguson. Did separate but equal public
facilities violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment?
•
The Court’s Decision
The Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote the Court’s unanimous decision.
Justice Warren began by noting that attempts to determine the precise intent of the Fourteenth Amendment’s
original sponsors have proved inconclusive. Even more difficult was any effort to discover its relation to the issue of
public schools, as so few were in existence when the Amendment took effect.
Warren explained that the Court’s method of examination, then, was to “look to the effect of segregation itself
on public education” in order to determine “if segregation in public schools deprives these plaintiffs of the equal
protection of the laws.”
Warren quoted a Kansas state court ruling, which held that “segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has
a tendency to retard the educational and mental development of Negro children and to deprive them of some of the
benefits they would receive in a racially integrated school system.” Likewise, the U.S. Supreme Court concluded
that segregation of black school children “generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that
may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone…Any language in Plessy v. Ferguson
contrary to this finding is rejected.”
On this basis the Court concluded “that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has
no place. Separate education facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore we hold that the plaintiffs…are, by reason
of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth
Amendment.