A Prison Library: Literature and Black Identity

The recent news that the FBI asked for information from the internet archive is further evidence that books are both important ways of transmitting ideas and important signifiers of which ideas readers find important.

It is not just law enforcement that is interested in reading habits, however. We are hearing a great deal about the project of “the history of the Book” these days. It aims to understand the role of books as vehicles of change: how do books contribute to changes in society, how do they help to create and sustain identity.

Sometimes historians look at books, to measure a culture. What does Invisible Man say about the culture of the United States on the eve of Brown? What do Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery and W.E.B. DuBois’ Souls of Black Folk say about Jim Crow?

At other times, historians draw inferences about people from their libraries. This post talks about a list of about 120 books on the "black experience" that Judge Don Young ordered to be placed into the Marion, Ohio prison library back in 1972, Taylor v. Perini, 413 F.Supp. 189, 215-19 (D.C. Ohio 1976). What interests me about the list is its potential for mapping the sources of identity in the late 1960s and early 1970s. What, then, are the books that the judge ordered added? More below the fold.

The Harlem renaissance and its leaders are well-represented: W.E.B. DuBois’ Souls of Black Folk; Richard Wright’s Native Son and Uncle Tom’s Children; James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928) along with some other Renaissance-era literature, like Rudolph Fisher’s Conjure Man Dies: A Mystery Tale of Harlem (1932) and Walls of Jericho (1928)). Situated between the renaissance and the 1960s is Invisible Man.

There is the early 1960s literature that captured the possibilities of the Civil Rights movement: Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land; Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969); King’s Where Do We Go From Here, The Trumpet of Conscience, Stride Toward Freedom (1958), and Why We Can’t Wait; Alan Westin’s Freedom Now! The Civil-Rights Struggle in America (1964); and Howard Zinn’s SNCC: The New Abolitionists (1968). I might also put John Killen’s And then We Heard Thunder (1964), James Baldwin’s Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968); John Alfred Williams’ The Man Who Cried I Am (1967) in that category–they are situated in a place between the optimism of the Civil Rights era and the later separatism. They ask, with King, what now?

Then there’s the literature that represents the transition to black power, as well as disillusionment with the Civil Rights movement or western society more generally, such as Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (1961) and White Skin, Black Mask (1952); Tom Hayden, Rebellion in Newark; Benjamin Muse, American Negro Revolution: From Non-Violence to Black Power, 1963-1967 (1968); Chuck Stone, Black Political Power in America (1970); Harold Cruce, Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967); Louise Meriwether’s My Daddy was a Numbers Runner (1969)). Along those lines, is literature that provides a popular, sociological critique of 1960s society, like Charles Silverman, Crisis in Black and White (1963). And there’s the literature that continued in the late 1960s and early 1970s to seek an answer in more traditional or different places, like Kenneth Clark’s Dark Ghetto (1967).

As you would expect, there are many on black power: Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice; Autobiography of Malcom X; Amiri Baraka, Home: Social Essays (1966); H. Rap Brown, Die N–r Die! A Political Autobiography; Lester Julius’ Look Out Whitey, Black Power’s Gon Get Your Mama; Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton. Maybe I’d put Angela Davis, If They Come in the Morning (1971) into this category. And I guess Cecil Brown, Lives and Loves of Mr. Jive-Ass N–r, too. Prison literature, like George L. Jackson’s Blood in My Eye, is surprisingly rare in this collection.

There are a lot of histories: DuBois’ Black Reconstruction; John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom and Reconstruction, Emancipation Proclamation, and Reconstruction; Franklin Frazier’s Negro Family in the United States (1968); Edward Cronon, Black Moses: Marcus Garvey (1960); David Levering Lewis’ King: A Critical Biography; Benjamin Quarrels’ Black Abolitionists, Mr. Lincoln and the Negroes; and The Negro in the Civil War; Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution (1956); C. Vann Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955); Arthur I. Waskow, From Race Riot to Sit-In (1966); Herbert Aptheker’s Negro Slave Revolts (1943). Along with the histories are other scholarly work that describe and analyze black culture, such as E.U. Essien-Udom’s Black Nationalism (1970); C. Eric Lincoln’s Black Muslims in America (1961); Henry A. Ploski’s Afro USA (1971); Marshall Stearns, The Story of Jazz (1970); Chuck Stone, Black Political Power in America; and Joseph R. Washington, Black Religion (1964); and other work that collects culture, such as Miles Mark Fisher, Negro Slave Song (1953); Arna Wendell Bontemps, American Negro Poetry (1963).

DuBois’ Black Reconstruction reminds us that there are books on Reconstruction by and for white people and books on Reconstruction by and for black people. Talk about segregation of memory! Jim Crow separated people intellectually, as well as physically and socially.

Of course the classification scheme that I’ve imposed above says a lot about how I view the world of the 1960s and early 1970s, from the vantage of the early twenty-first century. I’m continuing to think about how to classify the books. And as the classifications grow, I find that I want to put books into several categories. It’ll be interesting to see what readers think about the classifications.

There’s a lot more to say about this; prison officials responded that they already had a lot of literature on the black experience in America in their collection. Might be worth comparing the two lists. For example, Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery appears on the prison’s list. But nothing like it is to be found on the court’s list of books to be added. One other quick observation: it’s surprising what isn’t in that list. For instance, I would have expected more James Baldwin.

The special master, Vincent Nathan (who used to teach at the University of Toledo Law School), was kind enough to correspond with me about how the list of books was assembled. He remembers that it came from a group of law librarians. The list may, thus, say more about the intellectual interests of librarians than about the needs or attitudes of the plaintiff class. But even then I think it's informative of what people thought ought to be included on a list of the "black experience." Much left to talk about here.

(This post is a repeat of one over at blackprof a couple of years ago.)

The very long civil rights movement

Ken Zogry already had a fine career established in public history by 1998: he had completed two books, both of which would end up winning awards, The Best the Country Affords: Vermont Furniture, 1765-1850 (The Bennington Museum: 1995), and The University’s Living Room: A History of the Carolina Inn (UNC: 1999). Then, something happened that changed his life. He was asked to take a look at an endangered house in downtown Raleigh, a house built in 1901 by Dr. Manassa Thomas Pope. Dr. Pope, a graduate of the medical school at Shaw University, was the first licensed African American doctor in North Carolina. His daughters lived in the house until into the 1990s.

In 1998, Zogry prepared a National Register nomination for the house, which by then was surrounded by parking lots. He ended up involved in a 10-year struggle to save the house and to turn it into the first house museum of an African American family in North Carolina. It's not yet open to the public, but there are great plans, and Zogry is the executive director of the Pope House Museum Foundation.

About 1,800 of the documents Zogry found in the house at the outset are now in the Southern Historical Collection at UNC. What especially piqued his interest was a 1906 voter registration card issued to Dr. Pope. "Everything I had learned said this should not exist," he said as he began his talk on Saturday morning at a conference on New Perspectives in African American History and Culture. The discovery launched him on an investigation into a fascinating and little-known story about black male political resistance to white supremacy in the first two decades of the twentieth century--in Raleigh. The result is his UNC dissertation, which he has just recently defended.

What Zogry has discovered is that Dr. Pope's action in registering to vote was part of a concerted voter registration effort that went on around 1906; then it stopped, to pick up again in 1916. Many questions remain unanswered, including why the 10-year hiatus, but it is clear that there was a strong movement among African Americans to participate in politics even as Jim Crow laws were tightening and the conservative Democrats were shoring up their power after retaking the government in 1898.

In 1919, Dr. Pope actually ran for mayor of Raleigh. He was joined on the ballot by African American candidates for commissioner of safety and commissioner of public works. With no hope of a chance, these men were making a statement: "the strongest possible public action that black leaders could take against disenfranchisement," according to Zogry.

The election was lost, but all was not lost. A student named Ella Baker was attending Shaw in 1918. According to Zogry, the election of 1919 was "a formative experience" for her. After graduation she moved to Harlem and began her life's work--which included becoming "a guiding force" behind both the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In fact, said Zogry, it was no accident that SNCC was formed at Shaw: Baker could have taken it to any major black school, but Shaw provided "a strong connection to history."

Commenting on Zogry's paper, Fitz Brundgage called Dr. Pope's mayoral election campaign significant because of its threat to the "appearance of hegemony." It was significant "because it underscores the persistence of a commitment to black political action that extends far back," back before the 1950s, back before the 1930s (which is sometimes what we think of as the outer edge of the civil rights movement), back to within the very height of the Jim Crow period. And Brundage would even take it farther back. Rather than read Dr. Pope's story as a predecessor to what was to come later in the twentieth century, he "would read it backward and talk about a continuous black struggle for equality, with varying tactics, but a continuity of struggle," one that has never let up: These various episodes of civil rights activities should not be seen as separate events that just happened, but rather as a long steady march, by actors conscious of their own history from one generation to the next.

A local apology

With the recent republication of John Ehle's 1965 book The Free Men, a moving chronicle of the civil rights protests that stood "liberal" Chapel Hill on its end in 1963-64, an important, yet little known, chapter in Chapel Hill's history has come to light again. This time last year, UNC's Wilson Library manuscripts division did its own part to acknowledge these events by mounting a fine documentary exhibit and hosting a series of panel discussions. I had the privilege of introducing and moderating a discussion that included Quinton Baker, Karen Parker, and Braxton Foushee, all of whom were students who participated in the demonstrations.



It was very clear to me why Tim West, who heads the manuscripts division, asked me to moderate this session. At the heart of the protest was the refusal of my predecessors on the Chapel Hill Town Council to pass a local public accommodations ordinance. Here's some of what I said at that panel back in January 2007:

I’ve been here almost 20 years. Yet it wasn’t until the NAACP presented us with a request to rename Airport Road for Martin Luther King Jr., three years ago, that I began to get any sense of what had happened here in the early 1960s. We had to learn all over again, from folks like Dan Pollitt who is here, and Joe Straley who is no longer here, that King spoke here in 1960, in the wake of the Greensboro sit-ins. In the end, we celebrated the name change on May 8, 2005, the 45th anniversary of King’s visit. But getting to that point was not an easy road.When it was the will of the Council in 2004, after three public hearings on the topic, not to vote to change the name of the road but instead to set up a citizen committee to talk about it, that’s when I learned that for some with better memories, it was déjà vu all over again. This is precisely what the Board of Aldermen (as they were then called) did in January 1964, rather than pass a local public accommodations ordinance. That was the second time they had said no to the ordinance, while Franklin Street roiled with demonstrations. Elected leaders did not lead.

The successes of the 1960-61 protests by Lincoln High students and graduates, including Braxton, at Colonial Drug and other places including the bus station and the two segregated movie houses set the stage for the demonstrations of 1963 and 1964. In this period, according to Dan Pollitt, who as a law professor was very much involved, Chapel Hill “joined the ever-increasing number of southern communities to experience an effort at racial integration by tactics variously called ‘creative disorder,’ ‘scofflaw Christianity,’ and ‘insurrection and rebellion.'”

Particularly over the long months of December 1963, January, February, March, and April 1964, university administrators “shut their eyes to the problem with a position of neutrality,” and the board of aldermen, as I’ve mentioned, ducked responsibility, while the demonstrators kept the pressure up. With the exception of the Daily Tar Heel, the local press tried its best to ignore what was right in front of them, except when they condemned it, which they did in their editorials often and with great stridency. The Chapel Hill Weekly, under Orville Campbell’s leadership, started out with some sympathy to the demonstrators but quickly joined forces with the opposing business interest. So did The News of Orange County, edited by Roland Giduz, who was also on the Chapel Hill Board of Aldermen; and so did the radio station, owned by the mayor, Sandy McClamroch. Then as now, people wondered how an episode like this could have happened in the “southern part of Heaven.”

Roland Giduz, to his immense credit, has apologized. "We should have led the way," wrote the Old Codger Blogger last month.

Today, the official Martin Luther King Jr. Day, set me to thinking again about the purpose of this observance. It seems to me that it is to further the elimination of racial discrimination and bring about natural racial integration.

I harken back to the 1960s in Chapel Hill when the local Board of Aldermen debated enactment of a public accommodations ordinance. That local law would have prohibited racial discrimination in local business service. After many months of deliberation the ordinance failed. The proposal brought on a lengthy trial of conscience throughout the community. As a member of the Town Board I sided with the majority that did not support this ordinance on legal grounds.

Those legal grounds were the fact that municipal governments had no authority to pass laws except those specifically authorized for them. It all became a moot question on July 4, 1964 when the national civil rights law took effect.

Although I believe such authority might yet be illegal, I would support enactment of this local law as I look back on it today. I’d do so on practical grounds, as much as for the fact that I heartily supported then and now the elimination of racial discrimination.The population of Chapel Hill back then would have generally accepted that first public accommodations law to be enacted by a town.

I believe we (the Town Board) erred in not passing that ordinance despite its questionable legality. We (the Board majority) didn’t see the forest for the trees. That is to say, we focused on trying to persuade individual businesses to drop their racial barriers, when the bigger picture was to eliminate all discrimination.

Forty-five years later, does a change of heart matter? I think it does. The very fact of a public apology for an institutional wrong shows that the terms of the debate have shifted. In a new book on the subject, The Politics of Official Apologies, Melissa Nobles argues that, at the highest levels, apologies "help change the terms and meanings of national membership." (Thanks to Al Brophy at Legal History Blog for the tip.)

Thank you, Roland.

The women behind Rosa Parks

Today's Hutchins Lecture sponsored by the Center for the Study of the American South, by Danielle McGuire, a fellow this year at the Center, was a fascinating study of the decade-long movement of African American women in Montgomery, Alabama who made the 1955 boycott happen. At the heart of their anger was much more than not being able to sit where they pleased on a bus: it was sexual abuse.

It was near midnight on September 3, 1944, when the Rock Hill Holiness church, in Abbeville, Alabama ended its evening service. After a night of singing and praying, Recy Taylor and her friend started towards home. Strolling along the Abbeville-Headland Highway toward town, Recy Taylor, a twenty-four-year-old African-American mother and sharecropper, noticed the same green sedan, packed full of gawking young white men, drive by at least three times. When the car rolled to a stop just a few feet behind the black women, seven men with knives and guns got out of the car and walked toward them. Herbert Lovett pointed a gun at Taylor’s head and ordered her into the car. Lovett’s friends piled in and they sped away into the night. Ten minutes later, the car rattled down a tractor path and stopped on a vacant patch of land. Standing beneath a grove of pecan trees, Lovett demanded Taylor get out of the car, remove her clothes, or, he threatened, “I will kill you and leave you down here in the woods.” Lovett held Taylor at gunpoint while each of the white men took turns “ravishing” her. After the gang rape, Lovett blindfolded Taylor, pushed her into the car, and dropped her off in the middle of town.
When the Montgomery branch of the Alabama NAACP heard about the brutal assault a few days later, they sent an investigator. Her name was Rosa Parks.

A Montgomery minister named Martin Luther King Jr. rose to a leadership position soon after Rosa Parks' arrest on December 1, 1955, but as McGuire persuasively reminds us, the movement belonged to the women.

Thus I have to question one sentence in the Chapel Hill narrative of the 1947 "freedom riders" story: "[Bayard] Rustin's writings directly inspired Ms. Rosa Parks, in 1955, and the Freedom Riders of 1960-61, to challenge Jim Crow segregation on buses and other souther institutions."

When the case over the Montgomery boycott came to trial in a federal courtroom, the women plaintiffs were asked pointedly whether it was Dr. King who put them up to it. Said sixteen-year-old Claudette Colvin, "No, sir. We haven't changed our ideas. It has been in me ever since I was born."

(See Frank Sikora, The Judge: The Life & Opinions of Alabama's Frank M. Johnson, Jr. (1992).)

1947 "Freedom Ride" remembered

Everyone knows about the 1961 "freedom rides," but not everybody knows that they had a precedent in 1947. In 1946, the Supreme Court held that interstate Jim Crow laws on buses and trains were unconstitutional. A group of activists led by Bayard Rustin and the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE, and the Fellowship of Reconciliation, took to the road to test the opinion. When they got to Chapel Hill, they were met with violence--a sorry bit of history for our "city on the hill."

The legendary Rev. Charlie Jones took the victims to his home (pursued by cabs filled with men who got out and threw rocks at his house) and then helped them make safe passage to Greensboro.

Three men--Bayard Rustin, James Felmut, and Igal Roodenko--served time for their offenses against the state by working on a chain gang. (The high profile of this travesty at least led to a legislative investigation of North Carolina's chain gangs and ultimately their abolition.)

At last night's Council meeting, the Chapel Hill-Carrboro branch of the NAACP, together with the Community Church (the church Rev. Jones helped to found after he was expelled from the Presbyterian Church over these issues), sought a resolution from us in support of their campaign to get a North Carolina historical marker erected to commemorate this event. We passed the resolution with dispatch--and we look forward to their success in Raleigh.

Marking civil rights history in Durham

Congratulations to the folks in Durham who succeeded the second time around in getting a state historical marker for the site of a civil rights sit-in in 1957.

"I think it's significant because it does illustrate the civil rights movement before Greensboro," said committee member Jeff Broadwater, a history professor at Barton College in Wilson. "Sometimes we think the civil rights movement started with Greensboro."

Durham activists have long argued that the Durham event, coming 2 1/2 years before the Greensboro sit-in, laid much of the groundwork for future civil rights protests.

1957, fifty years later

Although the 1960s bore the brunt of the civil rights movement, with bombings in Birmingham, violent protests in Selma, and on and on, the 1950s were not all sock hops and saddle loafers. Fifty years later, scholars are convening at Binghamton University to discuss "Black Liberation and the Spirit of '57." The major papers are online.

David Garrow's treatment of Little Rock exposes President Eisenhower's utter lack of commitment to the cause of civil rights. I recommend it.

But if you can only find the time for one of these essays, I highly recommend Robert Darden's “Sam Cooke, ‘You Send Me,’ and the American Highway." Darden deftly links the infiltration of black music into white popular culture to a dramatic rise in black mobility thanks to a combination of the new interstate highways (authorized by Eisenhower from his sickbed in 1956) and the public accommodations provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

When Cooke created his own record label following the success of "You Send Me," one of his first projects was with the Pilgrim Travelers. But long before that day, their first hit back in 1948 had been "Standing on the Highway," which included the mournful line,

She left me standing out on the highway
Left me wondering
Which way to go.

The promise of the Federal Aid Highway Act, which ultimately would be fulfilled in a way that not Eisenhower . . . and not even Sam Cooke could imagine, would provide the answer to the Travelers' question. Which way to go? It was another small stap on the road towards an America someday that lives up to the considerable promise of its own origins, where all men and women are free.

[Peter] Guralnik calls his biography of Cooke, Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke, and the title is taken from the Langston Hughes poem of the same name:

Good morning, daddy!
Ain't you heard
The boogie-woogie rumble
Of a dream deferred. --Langston Hughes, "Dream Boogie"

In this, at least, the intersection of the on-going struggle for civil rights for all people and a relatively obscure piece of federal legislation, worked together to see that the dream would not be forever deferred.

It took me a little while to realize that I know Bob Darden. He was a master's student in journalism at the University of North Texas when I was an undergraduate journalism minor. We often worked the rim together. I believe Doug Starr was usually in the slot.

(Via Cliopatria.)

The long civil rights movement

For several years, UNC history professor Jacquelyn Dowd Hall has been arguing that the received version of what constituted the "civil rights movement" is impoverished:

The civil rights movement circulates through American memory in forms and through channels that are at once powerful, dangerous, and hotly contested. Civil rights memorials jostle with the South's ubiquitous monuments to its Confederate past. Exemplary scholarship and documentaries abound, and participants have produced wave after wave of autobiographical accounts, at least two hundred to date. Images of the movement appear and reappear each year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and during Black History Month. Yet remembrance is always a form of forgetting, and the dominant narrative of the civil rights movement—distilled from history and memory, twisted by ideology and political contestation, and embedded in heritage tours, museums, public rituals, textbooks, and various artifacts of mass culture—distorts and suppresses as much as it reveals.

Centering on what Bayard Rustin in 1965 called the "classical" phase of the struggle, the dominant narrative chronicles a short civil rights movement that begins with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, proceeds through public protests, and culminates with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Then comes the decline. After a season of moral clarity, the country is beset by the Vietnam War, urban riots, and reaction against the excesses of the late 1960s and the 1970s, understood variously as student rebellion, black militancy, feminism, busing, affirmative action, or an overweening welfare state. A so-called white backlash sets the stage for the conservative interregnum that, for good or ill, depending on one's ideological persuasion, marks the beginning of another story, the story that surrounds us now.

Martin Luther King Jr. is this narrative's defining figure—frozen in 1963, proclaiming "I have a dream" during the march on the Mall. Endlessly reproduced and selectively quoted, his speeches retain their majesty yet lose their political bite. We hear little of the King who believed that "the racial issue that we confront in America is not a sectional but a national problem" and who attacked segregation in the urban North. Erased altogether is the King who opposed the Vietnam War and linked racism at home to militarism and imperialism abroad. Gone is King the democratic socialist who advocated unionization, planned the Poor People's Campaign, and was assassinated in 1968 while supporting a sanitation workers' strike.

By confining the civil rights struggle to the South, to bowdlerized heroes, to a single halcyon decade, and to limited, noneconomic objectives, the master narrative simultaneously elevates and diminishes the movement. It ensures the status of the classical phase as a triumphal moment in a larger American progress narrative, yet it undermines its gravitas. It prevents one of the most remarkable mass movements in American history from speaking effectively to the challenges of our time.

It's nice to see that Hall's project has found serious traction. Harvard's Charles Warren Center is sponsoring a workshop on "Race-Making and Law-Making in 'the Long Civil Rights Movement.'"

A local footnote: At Monday night's town council meeting, we approved plans for a granite paver to be placed in front of the Old Post Office on Franklin Street to mark the space with the name Peace and Justice Plaza. Three long-time social activists, Joe and Lucy Straley and Charlotte Adams, will be honored by having their names carved on the paver. There is plenty of room for other names in the future. These three people were exceptional in their devotion to social justice, in the sheer number of hours they spent in active protest.

But of course, they were not the only ones. One notable moment of social protest was the period of 1963-64 when, despite the determined activism of Chapel Hill college and high school students in particular, the town council not once but twice refused to pass a local public accommodations ordinance. During Holy Week 1964, protesters positioned themselves in front of the Post Office and stayed there day and night for a week, fasting.


The three in the center--Quinton Baker, Karen Parker, and Braxton Foushee--reflect upon their experiences as students and protesters in Chapel Hill in 1963-64. On the right is UNC student Erika Stallings. It was a privilege to moderate this panel, to hear the panelists' brave stories.

In today's story about Peace and Justice Plaza in the Daily Tar Heel, Laura Bickford, a current-day protester, complains that "It's unfair for this one moment 40 years ago to be memorialized when there are a lot of other struggles that are going on." But that is precisely not the point. This is not a marker that commemorates the past only. By giving this space the name of "Peace and Justice Plaza" and by honoring three notable activists with the explicit acknowledgment that others may be honored in the future, the town is acknowledging its part in the long and unfinished civil rights movement. We are saying that protest is a welcome and healthy part of civic discourse--even when (as in the 1963-64 episode) it turns out that the town is on the wrong side of history.

Conservatives and the rhetoric of equality

Guest post by Jonathan Riehl, J.D., Ph.D., a former reporter for Congressional Quarterly, and, I'm proud to say, a recent student of mine. His UNC dissertation, "The Federalist Society: How Conservatives Are Changing the Meaning of Constitutional Law," is under review for publication.

I’ve recently developed the feeling that I was in limited company, at least among the more liberal-minded, in not being shocked in the least by the Supreme Court’s recent decision in the school desegregation case. I’ve spent the past four years studying legal conservatism—the Federalist Society in particular—from a rhetorical as well as a legal perspective. Thus my focus was as much on the ways conservatives have formulated and articulated their arguments as it has been on the underlying substantive legal (and social) questions. Rhetoric in this sense is not “mere”; it shapes the public discourse and can be politically determinative. Nowhere is this observation more clear than in the area of race. Conservatives have not only captured a 5-4 court. They have captured the discourse, and with it the public meaning of “equality.”

It is absolutely vital to understand that for fifty years “movement conservatives” have seen a wide array of social and political issues, including race and Affirmative Action, as part of a much broader struggle between two Enlightenment ideals: Liberté and Egalité. For William F. Buckley Jr. and the Cold War conservatives the contrast was apposite to the struggle against what they perceived to be an equality-obsessed Communist Menace. The socialist/communist trope was vital to the glue that held the early conservative coalition together. Social conservatives resented Godless Communism. Economic conservatives resented impositions on “liberty” by government regulation—a project carried on by self-described “classical liberals” such as Chicago law professor Richard Epstein of Takings fame.

To understand how American conservatives have talked about equality in the context of civil rights we need to understand the meaning of equality in the conservative mind. Hence we must go all the way back to Edmund Burke and his reaction to the revolution in France. “Equality is the product of art, not of nature,” is how conservative intellectual historian Russell Kirk interpreted Burke’s key insight. “If social leveling is carried so far as to obliterate order and class,” he wrote in The Conservative Mind (1953), “art will have been employed to deface God’s design.” Particularly in its socialist guise, state-enforced egalitarianism is “the death of progress,” stifling innovation, competition, and creativity. It is destructive of civilization, of the heritage and traditions which hold society together. As the Southern rhetorical critic Richard Weaver wrote, “Where equality obtains, no one knows where he belongs.” In a recent law review article on American Exceptionalism, Federalist Society co-founder professor Steven Calabresi, of Northwestern Law, writes that the “golden door” of Ellis Island is home to a statue of liberty, “and not a statue of ‘equality’ or ‘fraternity.’ That is,” he writes, “after all, what this country stands for.”

Conservatives moved to reshape the legal discourse of equality during the Nixon presidency. In particular, Supreme Court nominee William Rehnquist, who made clear he accepted Brown, was thereby largely inoculated against racially tinged accusations deriving from a notorious memorandum he wrote while clerking for Justice Robert Jackson. Support for Brown—with its vague, though inspirational language and ambiguous holding—became a trump-card defense and an opportunity for conservatives to redefine its meaning. And in doing so they managed a return, of sorts, to the bad old days of Plessy v. Ferguson.

In Washington v. Davis (1976) the Nixon Court essentially read the first Justice Harlan’s dissent and its ideal of “colorblindness” into the common law, creating what liberal Yale Law School professor Reva Siegel has described as a tense relationship between the core principles of anticlassification and antisubordination. “Talking about the wrongs of classification was not merely a cooler way of justifying Brown, it was simultaneously an effective way of limiting Brown,” she concludes. As a frustrated Justice William Brennan wrote in his dissent in University of California Regents v. Bakke (1978), “[C]laims that law must be ‘color-blind’ or that the datum of race is no longer relevant to public policy must be seen as aspiration rather than as description of reality.”

Conservatives continued to shape the debate over “equality” and racial issues throughout the 1970s. As George W. Bush’s former speechwriter David Frum wrote in a fascinating social history of that crucial decade, “Busing to achieve racial balance was reduced to busing, a ‘revolution imposed from above.’” In his comprehensive study of the Reagan administration’s civil rights policies, history professor Raymond Wolters, of the University of Delaware, astutely observes that Reagan “knew that the yellow school bus had become a symbol of intrusive social engineering and sensed that, for many people, the buses might have been emblazoned with words like liberal or Democrat.” By the end of the ’70s, statistics do show that white public opinion had turned decisively against “busing.” Busing and Affirmative Action were rearticulated as “quotas” and the game was up. Conservatives captured the language; the eventual outcome of this sea change was realized last week. There was nothing surprising about it.

As American University law professor Jamin Raskin has written, “conservatives gathered excitedly around the mantra of ‘colorblindness,’ a magical turn of phrase that justified not only the dismantling of affirmative action programs . . . but judicial disengagement from the project of active school desegregation.” Another magical turn of phrase comes, of course, from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. King’s vision of an America where people are not “judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” has been smoothly absorbed into the conservative rhetoric of colorblindness.

“Well, Dr. King, we’re not going to make it with your children, maybe your grandchildren maybe your great-grandchildren,” commentator and former education secretary William Bennett said at a 1993 Heritage Foundation panel discussion on “The Conservative Virtues of Dr. Martin Luther King.” “We are further away from being colorblind today than we were when Dr. King [gave his speech], because race-norming, counting by race, reverse discrimination, racial identification, talking about oneself and one identity in terms of race is much more popular and much more a part of the intellectual and political mainstream than it ever was,” Bennett said.

Brennan’s Bakke dissent was echoed last week by Justice Breyer. Segregation, Breyer wrote, “perpetuated a caste system rooted in the institutions of slavery and 80 years of legalized subordination.” The “promise” of Brown, Breyer wrote, was to undo that system. The problem is that not everyone understands the “promise” in the same way—the rhetorical work by conservatives has made it so: They articulated Brown into their existing narrative of the struggle between individual liberty and forced socialized norms. Racist segregation was an example of the latter, and as such Brown was right to attack it. But social re-organization through Affirmative Action and busing schemes were of a wholly different cast. Thus Roberts wrote:

Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on color of their skin. The school districts in these cases have not carried the heavy burden of demonstrating that we should allow this once again—even for very different reasons.

Motive is thus written out of the law—a crucial legacy of the conservative legal movement’s increased influence.

The broad philosophical question of equality remains the linchpin. In this way I agree with Maryland law professor Deborah Hellman, guest-blogging at Balkinization: “The more sensible reading of Justice Roberts’ claim is as a moral claim: the way to stop wrongful discrimination on the basis of race is to stop drawing distinctions on the basis of race. As such, this claim rests on the dubious proposition that any instance of drawing distinctions on the basis of race is wrongful.”

But—aha! “Dubious” or not, this claim is central to conservatives’ political and legal project. Liberals, including Breyer, have not yet risen to the challenge of vigorously answering conservatives’ moral claims—claims made legally viable, in this case, by Brown’s vagueness and convoluted progeny up to and including the Michigan cases decided by O’Connor’s vote a few years ago. Rather than chastising Roberts and Alito for “not following precedent” (which garners a collective yawn from most of the non-lawyer public), liberals must take up the challenge of reclaiming Brown and the popular understanding of equality.

In a way, we have seen a return to Plessy—not in some cheap racist sense, but in terms of the colorblind standard of Harlan’s dissent and the “self-inflicted psychology” rationale nested deep in the majority opinion. In 1896 the Court held that any harms produced by segregation were the result of a willful self-perception, a “construction” that “the colored race chooses.” This is the second half of the modern conservative view, holding that the civil rights era is over; the first being the foundational conflict between liberty and equality. The perpetuation of civil rights litigation and political contestation is at best misguided, at worst a fraud. “Memories of aggressive discrimination and oppression do not fade so quickly,” writes Robert Bork. “But in another way, the intensely unsatisfactory state of race relations is a mystery. The opportunities for blacks to advance in the United States have never been greater.”

And what is to blame for this mysterious disquiet, this continued agitation? Liberalism, of course, and its faith in the possibility of absolute equality. Charles Murray, co-author of the much-maligned Bell Curve, put it this way in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute in 1994: “That people are unequal is not in doubt, now as ever before . . . but we have been deeply indoctrinated throughout the twentieth century that they shouldn’t be.” Ultimately, ideology is to blame, and equality is just one more ideological formation. “The perversions of the egalitarian ideal.” Murray reminds his audience, “began with the French Revolution.”

Movement conservatives have taken the long view, both intellectually and legally. It’s high time liberals came to grips with this fact and developed rhetorical, political, and legal strategies to match. Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP team did precisely this in the lead-up to Brown, in conjunction with Dr. King and the leaders of the broader civil rights social movement. They've had no modern successors.

Free Men back in print

John Ehle's The Free Men, the story of the civil rights movement in Chapel Hill in 1963-64, is back in print after more than 40 years. As I said a few months ago when I chaired a panel on this period for the Southern Historical Collection in UNC's Wilson Library, this book ought to be required reading in Chapel Hill. And perhaps that says too little. It's important local history, but it also tells in microcosm the much larger story of the sacrifice and commitment that black (and a few white) Americans demonstrated in order to gain the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Thanks to former Council member Joe Herzenberg for coming to our meeting last night and calling it to our attention.

"Pressing the Holdouts" in 1960s Chapel Hill

What an honor and a pleasure to moderate last night's panel discussion by three who participated in the civil rights demonstrations in Chapel Hill in 1963-64 and one student eager to learn from them. The DTH story is just a glimpse at how rich the discussion was.

Next week in the series: the speaker ban law.

UNC protest exhibit opens today

"I Raised My Hand to Volunteer: Students Protest in 1960s Chapel Hill" opens today in Wilson Library. Sponsored by the library's manuscripts department, it features diaries, letters, personal papers, photographs, and other documentation of a tumultuous period. The exhibit will formally open this evening at 5:15, with, at 6:00, a keynote presentation by Peter Filene. Programming will continue for the next three Tuesday evenings with panel discussions on the topics of the sit-ins of 1963-64; the speaker ban controversy; and the food workers' strike of 1969.

I'm going to be moderating the talk next week on the sit-ins.

Details.

Upcoming exhibit on student protest in Chapel Hill

UNC's Southern Historical Collection and University Archives are sponsoring an upcoming exhibit called "I Raised My Hand to Volunteer: Student Protests in 1960s Chapel Hill." The exhibit, which will be in the Manuscripts Department of Wilson Library, opens Tuesday, January 23, with a talk by history professor Peter Filene. On three subsequent Tuesday evenings, panel discussions are planned: on the desegregation sit-ins of 1963-64, the speaker ban controversy, and the foodworkers' strike of 1969.

When Tim West asked me to moderate the first of these panels, the one on the sit-ins, it was very clear to me why he should think of a Town Council member. In the tumultuous period before the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which banned discrimination in public accommodations, the demonstrators had the audacity to ask the Chapel Hill Board of Aldermen to pass a local public accommodations ordinance. At a crucial public meeting that followed much back-and-forth among members of the Board, alderman Adelaide Walters gave a passionate explanation of her intention to vote in favor of the ordinance:

The underlying idea of a Public Accommodations Law is so simple that it was expressed in one sentence by the President of the United States, Lyndon Johnson, in his State of the Union message on January 9 [1964]: "all members of the public should be given equal access to facilities open to the public." This statement seems reasonable to most people in Chapel Hill, since this is a university town where freedom flavors the spirit of a great university.

It is likewise not surprising that Chapel Hillians are concerned that our Negro citizens often suffer personal embarrassment and shame from treatment in some public places here.

We are aware that some 90 percent of our merchants subscribe to the principle of public accommodation. Indeed, the Merchants Association itself has gone on record in favor of open business for all citizens.

Why, then, is a Public Accommodations Law necessary? Why was the commandment "Thou shall not kill" ever put into law? It seems regrettable that we need legislation to enforce a plain truth. But because the bigotry of a few is poisoning the peace and harmony of community relationships, we are impelled to take action.

The Human Relations Committee set up by the Board of Aldermen and appointed by the Mayor, the Ministerial Association, as well as many individuals, have urged us to pass a Public Accommodations ordinance.

Some say that such an ordinance is an invasion of private property rights. Others point out that such rights have always been subject to the laws of the land--laws of ownership, sale, inheritance, zoning, sanitation, eminent domain.

For these reasons and many more, it is my hope that the Board of Aldermen will pass a Public Accommodations ordinance and thus in part restore the damaged public image of what I believe is an enlightened community.

The ordinance was not even voted upon. Rather, alderman Roland Giduz made a substitute motion to set up a group of community leaders "to serve as a mediation committee to resolve racial differences that currently beset this town and to which complaints of racial discrimination could be brought." That motion carried 6-2, with Hubert Robinson (Chapel Hill's first black alderman) joining Walters in opposing it. Mayor Sandy McClamroch, who had no vote under the system in place (except as a tie-breaker), went out of his way to express his opposition to the passing of an ordinance.*

The town's leaders, in other words, did not lead.

This exhibit will provide a welcome opportunity to revisit that period. It'll be my honor to moderate a panel that includes three people who were among the student activists--Quinton Baker, Karen Parker, Braxton Foushee--and a current UNC student political leader, Erika Stallings.

*All of this information comes from John Ehle's invaluable 1965 book The Free Men, a book that ought to be required reading in Chapel Hill public schools. It is out of print.

Mixed message in Mississippi

In Philadelphia, Mississippi, a little over a year after the conviction of Edgar Ray Killen for manslaughter in the cases of the murders of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodwin, Neshoba County celebrates the return of a restored Confederate monument to the courthouse lawn.

Eyes and ears on the prize

"Eyes on the Prize," the first two episodes of which aired on PBS last night, seems more and more remarkable as time goes on--if only for the inevitable reason that its principals keep dying, making the stories they told all the more valuable. Take just the first episode, which included the Montgomery bus boycott: Georgia Gilmore died in 1990; Constance Baker Motley died a year ago. And so on.

The web site that goes along with the series add considerable value: listen to the freedom songs yourself.

"Mighty Times" then and now

I was sorry I couldn't join Paul last night for the Carrboro screening of "Mighty Times: The Children's March," an Oscar-winning documentary "that tells the story of a group of young people in Birmingham, Alabama, who braved fire hoses and police dogs in 1963 in a fight against segregation in their town." Tim Tyson, Reg Hildebrand, and Chuck Stone led the after-discussion.

Tim's book about some mighty times up in Oxford, N.C., has sold 50,000 copies. That's great. It'll be more by the time UNC gets through with it. This is a book about confronting the past straight on. Toward the end of it, Tim lays it out:

We cannot address the place we find ourselves because we will not acknowledge the road that brought us here. Our failure to confront the historical truth about how African Americans finally won their freedom presents a major obstacle to genuine racial reconciliation. In some instances, white people rose to the call of conscience, though only a handful followed their convictions into the streets. More often, what grabbed white America’s attention was the chaos in those streets. . . . The civil rights movement knocked down the formal and legal barriers to equal citizenship, but failed to give most African Americans real power in this society.

The reception in Oxford is, naturally enough, mixed.

"I know some people in town are angry about the book," said author Tim Tyson, who spent part of his growing-up time in Oxford and was 10 years old in 1970. He noted that a friend told him the book divided white Oxford into two camps, "the people who were angry about the book and the people who had read the book."

It's a book well worth reading in our own not so mighty time.

Like it is

Tim Tyson strikes again. In a follow-up to his earlier interview with Melinda Penkava on The State of Things about Blood Done Sign My Name, he was on again yesterday. He has more to say about civil rights history--in memory and reality.

Nonviolence was an important moral witness, but what sitting at the lunch counter has in common with burning a warehouse is that both of them are a form of coercion that says you're not going to make any money until you deal with us. Until you make us full citizens, we will not have business as usual. And that is a form of politics and coercion. And it's not just about calling upon the conscience of the person who owns the lunch counter, who wants to eat at it, but it is a matter of compelling them to negotiate with you. Martin Luther King said a riot is the language of the unheard. If you won't hear the sit-in, then things will start catching on fire. And that's always been true, and it's true all over the world, and I think we tell ourselves a kind of happy story about that because we'd like to pretend that we were better than we were.

. . .

It's just politics as it happens on planet Earth. . . . I am not an advocate of violence, OK? But nonetheless, politics is not about a moral appeal. Politics is about power. And the civil rights movement was a political movement.
Tyson is giving a lecture tomorrow at 5 p.m. at the National Humanities Center. It's called "Miss Amy's Witness: Why the History of the Civil Rights Movement is (Mostly) Wrong."

Veterans Day thought: "Vietnam"

"Vietnam," says the inscription on on the grave of Henry Marrow, the young black man who was brutally murdered in Oxford, N.C., in 1970. That is all. Marrow did not fight in Vietnam. He did not die for protesting Vietnam. But this is what the young black men who reacted to his murder with force and violence chose as his epitaph. "They felt embattled," observed Juan Williams in his sensitive radio piece on Tim Tyson's Blood Done Sign My Name, "and thought that 'Vietnam' was the one word that told the whole story."

The men who rose up in anger after Marrow's killing may have felt that the streets of Oxford were their Vietnam, but their message went beyond that. These were men who had fought in Vietnam. In swamps and jungles thousands of miles from home, they risked death to defend American democracy. Like the black veterans of two world wars before them, they might well have wondered what they got from it all in return. To inscribe "Vietnam" on the grave of a black victim of racial hatred in rural North Carolina in 1970 is to draw a profound connection.

United States of the South

Today I decided to get away from it all by going to the library and working on an essay I've spent too long trying to finish. It's on a novel by Elizabeth Spencer and how it handles a historical event of 1886, a mass murder of black men in a Mississippi courthouse. Actually I was not getting away from it all at all. The story behind the story is the suppression of the black man's vote in the years after the price for that vote had been paid in blood. Outrage is a powerful motivator. Maybe I will finish that essay after all.

I wasn't expecting to come across this, a passage from W.J. Cash's The Mind of the South, published, after a long gestation, in 1941:

Proud, brave, honorable by its lights, courteous, personally generous, loyal, swift to act, often too swift, but signally effective, sometimes terrible in its action--such was the South at its best. And such at its best it remains today, despite the great falling away in some of its virtues. Violence, intolerance, aversion and suspicion toward new ideas, an incapacity for analysis, an inclination to act from feeling rather than from thought, an exaggerated individualism and a too narrow concept of social responsibility, attachment to fictions and false values, above all too great attachment to racial values and a tendency to justify cruelty and injustice in the name of those values, sentimentality and a lack of realism--these have been its characteristic vices in the past. And, despite changes for the better, they remain its characteristic vices today.

Cash killed himself, hung himself with his own necktie, in that same year, 1941. C. Vann Woodward was more optimistic about the future of the perpetually "New South," observes Jacob Levenson in the Columbia Journalism Review; he believed that somehow the legacy of Jim Crow could be overcome in a period of new economic growth, while a strong positive regional identity remained.

In the fullness of time, the South triumphed on the national political scene: "Governors like Jimmy Carter, William Winter, and Dale Bumpers encouraged biracial coalitions that cast an aura of reconciliation across the region." But the predicted demise of Jim Crow took a curious route. The shift from a historical allegiance to the Democrats, the party of white supremacy, to the Republicans, the party of Lincoln, took off when Goldwater denounced the Civil Rights Act. Lyndon Johnson, who succeeded in the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, said that he knew he was giving the South to the Republicans "for a long time to come." Then, as Levenson reminds, Nixon aligned himself with Strom Thurmond.

But it was Reagan . . . who tightened the Republican hold on the region. Reagan’s success in the South can be viewed as an affirmation of both Cash’s and Woodward’s view of the region. Reagan skillfully employed a version of the cultural code that Cash had identified forty years earlier to overwhelmingly win the white southern vote. His first major campaign stop after gaining the 1980 nomination was near Philadelphia, Mississippi, the community in which the civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney were murdered. There he pledged to the almost all-white audience at the Neshoba County Fair—an obligatory stop on the Mississippi political circuit—that he believed in states’ rights. In another speech he denounced the welfare queen in designer jeans. At the same time, though, his message to southerners went beyond coded racial signals and incorporated a range of southern themes, some that had endured through two centuries, and others that spoke to Woodward’s transformed South. He solidified his connection to the evangelical right by speaking openly about his Christian faith, and at the same time offered tax cuts to appeal to the newly emergent middle-class, white, suburban southerner. In 1980 Reagan took every southern state except Georgia, and in 1984 he swept the region. The elder Bush did the same. And, of course, after Bill Clinton won some southern states in ’92 and ’96, George W. Bush swept the South in 2000, and is considered a good bet to do so again this year.

And the rest is our living history.

Imagine . . .

Yesterday when my book club discussed Blood Done Sign My Name, a powerful history of a racial murder up the road in Oxford, N.C., in 1970, beautifully told by historian-witness Tim Tyson, we were privileged to have the author himself with us. A professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, he's in residence this year at the National Humanities Center. In fact, he's staying in a home just down the street from us.

Even today, stories like this one touch a nerve in cities and towns all across the South. Though few of them will find a chronicler as skilled and compassionate as Tyson, hundreds of such stories are waiting to be told.

On July 4, 2004, the Lexington Herald-Leader issued an apology for failing to cover the civil rights movement in what we would now call real time. Not an oversight or accidental misjudgment at all, it was a deliberately "cautious approach"--so successful that a member of my book club, now a historian in her own right, didn't know what was going on under her nose while she was in college right there in Lexington.

So here's a thought experiment: what if, forty to fifty years ago, twenty-first century computer technology had been available?

"The revolution will not be televised." . . . but what if it had been blogged?