"Subversive" is a favorite expression of the F.B.I., the Presidency, the Attorney General, and Congress. J. Edgar Hoover, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, not to mention Congress and the mad dog it considers its watchdog - the House Un-American Activities Committee - are certainly armed with immense, with world-shaking powers, which they, in their search, harassment, and persecution of what they conceive to be subversive, use individually and collectively.
Yet all these kings' horses and all these kings' men can't seem to uncover the most openly read and popular hate sheet calling itself "Rebel Underground," circulated on the University of Mississippi campus, which highly touts such seditious issues as: (1) calling for the execution of President Kennedy; (2) referring to United States Marshals executing a Supreme Court Decision for desegregating schools as "murderous paranoids"; (3) hinting, in no uncertain terms however, that Sidna Brower, the courageous editor of the student paper which dared criticize the mobs that reign over that campus, is a "foul wench"; (4) making life an unbearable ordeal not only for the Negro James H. Meredith, but. for any whites whose attitudes are a shade less racist than their own moronic stew of bigotry; and (5) frothing at the mouth against "the anti-Christ Supreme Court." This isn't "just kids' stuff." This is the voice of those who were responsible for two actual murders, one of a foreign correspondent accredited, not to a battlefield in the Congo, but to the United States to report on "the American way of life." This is the voice of the Governor, not only of Mississippi, but of Alabama; and the voice of their counterparts in the Southern bloc in Congress, as well.
To these voices of hate has now been added the savage growl of vicious police dogs unleashed against Negroes seeking to register to vote in Mississippi and Alabama. The Simon Legrees with their hounds still serve their slave-masters!
In January 1963, a new Governor came to the helm in a state that vies with the magnolia jungle as the staunchest outpost of racism on this side of diamond apartheid, shouting his sedition for all the world to hear. Not only, says this paragon of "law and order "in the state of Alabama, is he, Governor Wallace, for "Segregation today, tomorrow and forever," but he will organize to spread this doctrine to the North. He judges by the manner in which the KKK, after World I, spread North. He forgets that this ambition of his is out of tune with these times-and beyond his capacities. This is so not because of the established powers at Washington, D.C., but because the self-activity of the Negroes has made it so. Indeed all this white Southern howling at the winds is due to the unbridgeable gulf between the post-World War I era and the post-World War II age when the Negro, far from running defensively away from lynching, has taken the offensive for his full rights on all fronts, and most of all in the South.
In contrast to the initiative of the Southern Negro, the whole world is witness to the shilly-shallying, dilly-dallying of the Kennedy Administration. At a time when the world crisis and challenge from totalitarian Russia demands the very essence of total democracy, and his own "will" would like to express itself with a New England rather than a Southern drawl, the peculiar American capitalism that has been both raised up, and thrown back by the unfinished state of its revolution, compels him to bridle his "will." Capitalism, not capitalism in general, but 'American capitalism as it expanded after the Civil War, sharpened the basic contradictions of the historic environment in which it functioned. This capitalism was tied to the cotton plantations.
For global power's sake the Administration presently tries to explain away the tortoise pace on the civil rights front on the ground that, when the chips are down, the white South becomes at once transformed into "pure patriots." Samuel Johnson has long ago noted that patriotism has ever been the last refuge of scoundrels. Nowhere and at no time was this truer than in the benighted South of today.
Even so conservative a writer as the Swedish scholar, Gunnar Myrdal, had to write that World War II, which increased the militancy of the Negro, had only one effect on the Southern white liberals-they refused to continue the little cooperation they had started with the Negro intellectuals against discrimination unless the latter accepted, nay, avowed, social segregation. So myopic of view is that region that the following passed for the words of a liberal! It is Mark Ethridge, ex-chairman of the FEPC, writing in The Virginia Quarterly of July, 1942; "There is no power in the world-not even the mechanized armies of the earth, the Allied and the Axis-which can now force the Southern white people to abandonment of social segregation. It's a cruel disillusionment, bearing germs of strife and perhaps tragedy, for any of their (Negroes) leaders to tell them that they can expect it, or that they can exact it, as the price of their participation in the war." Mr. Myrdal had to conclude on the following note:
". . . The region is exceptional in Western non-fascist civilization since the Enlightenment in that it lacks every trace of radical thought. In the South all progressive thinking going further than mild liberalism has been practically non-existent for a century."1
It should be obvious that the South's patriotism lasts only so long as the Negroes don't insist that the white South give up its slave master mentality.
The blindness to all this on the part of the Administration is self-induced even as its impotence is self-imposed. There is no need whatever for the Federal power-truly an awesome world might-to shy away at the challenge of a single state, especially when that state is so dependent on military contracts from the Federal Government for the major part of what economic power it has. The Ford management-trained Secretary of Defense can tell the President the exact extent of Federal aid. But Mr. Kennedy already knows that-and the politics behind it. This is what he sets.
It took a great deal of digging by his Harvard trained historian to come up with the obscure, inconsequential Lucius Q. C. Lamar as a "liberal" Southern hero of the past which the present needs to emulate.2 It would have been a great deal easier to find the quotation from Wendell Phillips that told the simple truth: "Cotton fibre was a rod of empire such as Caesar never wielded. It fattened into obedience pulpit and rostrum, court, market-place and college and lashed New York and Chicago to its chair of State." It still does.
Though cotton is king no longer, the politics based on racism reigns supreme in the South and fills the Halls of Congress with the abnormal might that comes from despotic social relations, quasi-totalitarian politics that would topple easily enough if the Negro got his freedom. But thereby would also be exposed the truth of American democracy: that the racism which is the basis of the political rule of the South is acceptable to the North, and has been so not only since it withdrew the Federal troops from the South at the end of Reconstruction in 1877, but ever since the ambivalent Declaration of Independence was adopted in 1776.
American Civilization is identified in the consciousness of the world with three phases in the development of its history.
The first is the Declaration of Independence and the freedom of the thirteen American colonies from British Imperial rule.
The second is the Civil War.
The third is technology and world power which are presently being challenged by the country that broke America's nuclear monopoly-Russia. So persistent, intense, continuous, and ever-present has been the self-activity of the Negro, before and after the Civil War, before and after World War I, before, during and after World War II, that it has become the gauge by which American Civilization is judged. Thus, Little Rock reverberated around the world with the speed of Sputnik I, with which it shared world headlines in 1957, and which gave the lie to American claims of superiority.
The Civil War remains the still unfinished revolution 100 years after, as the United States is losing the global struggle for the minds of men.
President Kennedy asked that this entire year, 1963, the centenary of the Emancipation Proclamation, be devoted to its celebration. Cliches strutted out for ceremonial occasions cannot, however, hide today's truth. Because the role of the Negro remains the touchstone of American Civilization-and his struggle for equal rights today belies their existence-paeans of praise for the Emancipation Proclamation can neither whitewash the present sorry state of democracy in the United States, nor rewrite the history of the past. Abraham Lincoln would not have issued the Proclamation had the Southern secessionists not been winning the battles and the Negro not been pounding down the doors of the Northern Armies demanding the right to fight.
By 1960, the year when no less than 16 new African nations gained their independence, the activities of the American Negroes had developed from the Montgomery, Alabama, Bus Boycott in 1956, the year of the Hungarian Revolution, to the Sit-ins, Wade-Ins, Dwell-Ins, North and South. In 1961 they reached a climax with the Freedom Rides to Mississippi. This self-activity has not only further impressed itself upon the world's consciousness, but also reached back into white America's consciousness. The result has been that even astronaut Walter Schirra's 1962 spectacular six-orbital flight became subordinate to the courage of James Meredith's entry into the University of Mississippi.
In a word, the new human dimension attained through an oppressed people's genius in the struggle for freedom, nationally and internationally, rather than either scientific achievement, or an individual hero, became the measure of Man in action and thought.
The vanguard role of an oppressed people has also put white labor in mass production to the test. And it has put a question mark over the continuous technological revolutions, brought to a climax with Automation and nuclear power. For, without an underlying philosophy, neither the machine revolutions nor the splitting of the atom can produce anything but fear-fear of unemployment in the one case and fear of war in the other.
As was evident by the Negro's attitude in World War II, nothing can stop him from being the bitterest enemy of the existing society. In the midst of the war, the Negro broke out in a series of demonstrations in Chicago, Detroit, New York as well as at army camps. Along with the miners' general strike that same year, these were the first instances in United States history when both labor, white and Negro, and the Negro as the discriminated-against minority, refused to call a halt either to the, class struggle or the struggle for equal rights. Both forces challenged their own State as well as Communist propagandists who had declared the imperialist war to have become one of "national liberation" which demanded subordination to it of all other struggles.3
Fully to understand today's activities-and that is the only meaningful way to celebrate the centenary of the Emancipation Proclamation - we must turn to the roots in the past. This is not merely to put history aright. To know where one has been is one way of knowing where one is going. To be able to anticipate tomorrow one has to understand today. One example of the dual movement-the pull of the future on the present and its link to the past-is the relationship of the American Negro to the African Revolutions. Because it is easy enough to see that the United States Supreme Court which, in 1954, gave its decision on desegregation in schools is not the Court which, 100 years before, proclaimed the infamous Dred Scott decision, there are those who degrade today's self-activity of the Negro. Instead, they credit Administration policy with changing the status of the American Negro.
They point to the Cold War and the need for America, in its contest with Russia, to win "the African mind." There is no doubt that the Cold War influenced the decision of the Supreme Court. Neither is there any doubt that the African Revolutions were a boon to the Negro American struggles. But this is no one-way road. It never has been. For decades, if not for centuries, the self-activity of the American Negro preceded and inspired the African Revolutions, its leaders as well as its ranks, its thoughts as well as its actions. The relationship is to and from Africa. It is a two-way road. This too we shall see more clearly as we return to the past. Because both the present and the future have their roots in a philosophy of liberation which gives action its direction, it becomes imperative that we discover the historic link between philosophy and action.
Despite the mountains of books on the Civil War, there is yet to be a definite one on that subject. None is in prospect in capitalist America. Indeed it is an impossibility so long as the activity of the Negro in shaping American Civilization remains a blank in the minds of the academic historians. The bourgeois historian is blind not only to the role of the Negro but to that of the white Abolitionists. Mainly unrecorded by all standard historians, and hermetically sealed off from their power of comprehension, lie three decades of Abolitionist struggle of whites and Negroes that preceded the Civil War and made that irrepressible conflict inevitable. Yet these are the decades when the crucible out of which the first great independent expression of American genius was forged.
The historians who dominate American scholarship have only passing references to the Abolitionist movement. Clearly no unbridgeable gulf separates this type of history writing from Russia's infamous rewriting of its revolutionary history. Only Negro historians such as W. E. B. Du Bois, G. Carter Woodson, and J. A. Rogers have done the painstaking research to set the record of American history straight by revealing the Negroes' great role in its making. With few exceptions, however, their work is ignored by the dominant white acadamecians. Literary historians, like Vernon L. Parrington in his Main Currents in American Thought, did, it is true, recognize that the soil which produced a Ralph Waldo Emerson produced also a William Lloyd Garrison.
Essayists like John Jay Chapman go a great deal further than Professor Parrington. He sides with the Abolitionists against the great literary writers comprising the Transcendentalists. "The Transcendentalists," writes John Jay Chapman, "were sure of only one thing-that society as constituted was all wrong. The slavery question had shaken man's faith in the durability of the Republic. It was therefore adjudged a highly dangerous subject . . . Mum was the word . . . from Maine to Georgia."
To this he contrasts William Lloyd Garrison's ringing proclamation: "I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject (slavery) I do not wish to think, speak or write with moderation. I am in earnest - I will not equivocate - I will not capitulate - I will not retreat a single inch-AND I WILL BE HEARD!"
In the 1921 preface to his biography of Garrison, Chapman boldly claims "that the history of the United States between 1800 and 1860 will some day be rewritten with this man as its central figure." This certainly separates Chapman decisively from the established historians who "analyze" Abolitionism as if it comprised a small group of fanatics removed from the mainstream of American Civilization. Chapman certainly believed the Abolitionists to be the true molders of history. Such writing, however, remains a history of great men instead of great masses of "common men."
The Abolitionists, however, saw themselves differently. The great New Englander, Wendell Phillips, was fully aware of the fact that not only Negro leaders like Frederick Douglass or Harriet Tubman, but white Abolitionists like himself and even the founder of the LIBERATOR, William Lloyd Garrison, were "so tall" because they stood on the shoulders of the actual mass movement of slaves following the North Star to freedom. Without the constant contact of the New England Abolitionists with the Negro mass, slave and free, they would have been nothing-and no one admitted it more freely than these leaders themselves. The Abolitionists felt that strongly because they found what great literary figures like Emerson, Thorean, Hawthorne, Melville and Whitman did not find-the human force for the reconstruction of society.
This is what armed them 100 years ago, with a more accurate measure of "the Great Emanicipator" than most of today's writers, though the latter write with hindsight. This is what gave the Abolitionists the foresight to see that the Civil War may be won on the battlefield but lost in the more fundamental problem of reconstructing the life of the country. This is what led Karl Marx to say that a speech by Wendell Phillips was of "greater importance than a battle bulletin." This is what led the great Abolitionist, Phillips, after chattel slavery was ended, to come to the labor movement, vowing himself "willing to accept the final results of a principle so radical, such as the overthrow of the whole profit-making system, the extinction of all monopolies, the abolition of privileged classes . . . and best and grandest of all, the final obliteration of that foul stigma upon 'our so-called Christian civilization, the poverty of the masses . . ."
The spontaneous affinity of ideas, the independent working out of the problems of the age as manifested in one's own country, and the common Humanist goal made inevitable the crossing of the paths of Karl Marx and the Abolitionists.
Deep indeed are the American roots of Marxism. Since Marxism is not only in books but in the daily lives of people, one must, to grasp its American roots, do more than inhabit an ivory tower. Far, however, from heeding Wendell Phillips' admonition that "Never again be ours the fastidious scholarship that shrinks from rude contact with the masses," American intellectuals have so adamantly sought escape from reality that they have become more conservative than the politicians. To use another expression of the great Phillips, "There is a class among us so conservative, that they are afraid the roof will come down if you sweep the cobwebs."
This characterizes our age most accurately. It applies just as appropriately to the end of the nineteenth century when the country turned from Populism to rampant racism because capitalism found it "simply liked the smell of empire."4 By then Phillips and Marx were long since dead. Fortunately, however, Marxism, being a theory of liberation, its Humanism springs ever anew in today's activities.5
1 An American Dilemma, by Gunnar Myrdal, p. 469.
2 "Who is Lucius Q. C. Lamar?", News & Letters, Oct. 1962.
3 The Negro and the Communist Party, by Wilson Record. University of N. Carolina, 1951, is a useful book on all the changes in the Communist Party line for the period of 1941-45. Many of the quotations here are obtained from that book.
4 American Diplomacy, 1900-1950, by George F. Kennan.
5 For the Humanism of Marxism in its American setting see Marxism and Freedom by Raya Dunayevskaya.