Historical Image of the Day

Member of the New Negro Alliance protesting white-owned firms in black neighborhoods not hiring black employees, Washington DC, 1930s

Historical Image of the Day

Our new series will cover racial violence in the North. It's always worth reminding people that racial violence is not just a southern problem.

Anti-busing protest, Boston, 1976

Historical Image of the Day

Mildred and Richard Loving, the interracial couple who fought against Virginia's anti-interracial marriage laws, leading to the landmark Supreme Court case from 1967, Loving v. Virginia, which overthrew miscegenation laws.

Shorter Rand Paul: "The Civil Rights Act of 1964 Destroyed Our Freedom!"

Seems pretty clear that Rand Paul will fit right in with his potential future GOP colleagues in the Senate:

INTERVIEWER: Would you have voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964?

PAUL: I like the Civil Rights Act in the sense that it ended discrimination in all public domains, and I’m all in favor of that.

INTERVIEWER: But?

PAUL: You had to ask me the “but.” I don’t like the idea of telling private business owners—I abhor racism. I think it’s a bad business decision to exclude anybody from your restaurant—but, at the same time, I do believe in private ownership. But I absolutely think there should be no discrimination in anything that gets any public funding, and that’s most of what I think the Civil Rights Act was about in my mind.

INTERVIEWER: But under your philosophy, it would be okay for Dr. King not to be served at the counter at Woolworths?

PAUL: I would not go to that Woolworths, and I would stand up in my community and say that it is abhorrent, um, but, the hard part—and this is the hard part about believing in freedom—is, if you believe in the First Amendment, for example—you have too, for example, most good defenders of the First Amendment will believe in abhorrent groups standing up and saying awful things. . . . It’s the same way with other behaviors. In a free society, we will tolerate boorish people, who have abhorrent behavior.

Sadly, using this against Paul in Kentucky would probably backfire. I wonder if a majority of Kentucky whites would vote for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 if it came up for a vote.

Bad Days in American History: February 21, 1965

On February 21, 1965, Nation of Islam assassins shot and killed Malcolm X before a rally in New York City.

Malcolm's death was precipitated by his break with Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammad over Muhammad's sexual peccadillos, corruption, and weird version of Islam. Of course, Malcolm's story is well-known to anyone who's read his autobiography--and really, if you haven't, I don't know what to say except to go buy it and read it right away. Born in 1925 in Omaha, Malcolm's family had to flee the Ku Klux Klan because of his father's civil rights activism. A follower of Marcus Garvey, Earl Little led his family to Lansing where whites probably murdered him in 1931. After falling through the very wide cracks of 1940s America, Malcolm ended up in prison, where the ambitious young man found direction through conversion to the Nation of Islam. He became the group's most passionate and dynamic speaker after his release from prison in 1952.

The Nation of Islam preached African-American self-reliance, separation from whites, and armed resistance if necessary. Malcolm mocked the civil rights movement's integrationist goals. The media loved this and played up his differences from Martin Luther King, which probably helped King gain respectability among moderate whites.

Malcolm left the Nation of Islam in 1963, a decision that cost him his life. The NOI had no tolerance for apostates. Malcolm was hardly the only member they assassinated, a major activity for the organization well into the 1970s. Among the NOI leaders deeply involved in these assassinations was Louis Farrakhan, who later became the group's leader.

Before his assassination, Malcolm visited Mecca and began to understand both that the NOI had a distorted view of Islam and that there were white Muslims who had a similar worldview to his own. Now, modern-day moderates take this as proof that Malcolm was softening. He's become something of a mainstream hero over the past 20 years. Like King, that's come with a dilution of his message. My reading of Malcolm's political evolution is that he was becoming a more class-based warrior rather than strictly race-based. But there's no room in this mythological history for such an analysis. Instead, Malcolm supposedly was moving closer to King's position, culminating in their single, but friendly, meeting. In fact, both  King and Malcolm evolved with the times, both coming to a class-based analysis that might have differed on tactics, but I believe they two men increasingly understood the problems of their people through similar analysis.

We can mourn Malcolm's death for so many reasons. Very few civil rights leaders had the combination of vision, charisma, respect, and discipline to see the movement into a post-segregationist future. King certainly did, though he struggled mightily in the years after 1965. Malcolm probably did too. Ralph Abernathy, Stokely Carmichael, Andrew Young, Julian Bond, and others most certainly did not have this combination of virtues, yet they became the faces of the movement after Malcolm and King's deaths. Had Malcolm lived, it's likely he could have provided real leadership for the black nationalist movement that arose during and after 1965; perhaps he could have reigned in the movement's excesses while channeling its passions to substantive policy goals. He certainly would have led the anti-Vietnam movement--I can only imagine the powerful voice he would have provided.

Or maybe J. Edgar Hoover would have killed Malcolm during the COINTELPRO era anyway.

I'm most sad about Malcolm's death when I think of the paucity of African-American leadership during the 1980s and 90s. The fact that a charlatan like Farrakhan became a nationally respected leader through the Million Man March suggests how huge the vacuum had become. Of course, much of the problem during those years was how to keep fighting through massive white backlash. And one can certainly argue that millions of African-Americans worked very hard in those decades to slowly break down barriers that eventually led to Barack Obama's election to the presidency. Maybe they were the collective great civil rights leaders of the period. But white abandonment of the city during the 60s and 70s, the crack epidemic, persistent poverty, and institutionalized racism speaks to how badly African-Americans needed leaders during these decades to lead the unfinished civil rights revolution.

Who knows what Malcolm could have provided African-Americans and the poor during the 1970s and 80s. But almost certainly more than Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson, or other veterans of the civil rights generation who couldn't seem to find their way during that long dark time.

Historical Image of the Day

United Construction Workers Association rally, early 1970s. The UCWA was dedicated to fighting hiring practices in Seattle's segregationist construction unions.

Parliamentary Procedures Do Not Explain The Southern Strategy

Richard Reeves' odd explanation of how the South went Republican really doesn't make much sense. Rather than talk about race, he claims the roots of this shift go back to Kennedy forcing a change in the size of the House Rules Committee, which placed more of his allies on it and embarrassed leading Southern Democrats.

This explanation just doesn't hold water. As a commenter on the post named Bill said:

This is bad history. Absent the Voting Rights Act and the other civil rights legislation, it would have taken much more than a rules fight to get the South to defect to the Republican Party. Race, race and race is at the heart of Southern politics. The 2008 election is a measure of how absolutely poorly Bush had performed in office and a growing small band of younger southerners for whom race is not the lynchpin of politics who joined with an omnipresent band of liberal whites of all ages that was helped by record African-American turnout.

Yes. This actually reminds me of arguments claiming the Civil War was not about slavery. Sure, you can point to other areas of tension, but without slavery, none of those other reasons were sufficient for Americans to start killing each other. Similarly, Kennedy undermining the power of conservatives in Congress allowed for civil rights legislation to pass, but it was that legislation specifically, along with Richard Nixon taking advantage of white southern discontent to push his own ambitions, that created the all-Republican South. This legislative battle is an interesting story, but Reeves puts way too much explanatory power on its shoulders.

Historical Image of the Day

Robert Singleton, Freedom Rider

The Decline and Fall of the SCLC

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference declined into irrelevancy soon after the death of Martin Luther King. Ralph Abernathy proved unable to steer the SCLC ship into a relevant future, in no small part because the civil rights movement found itself rudderless without King and without a clear agenda. The movement never regained its power in this country. Major players such as Jesse Jackson and John Lewis are still around and active, but as a whole, the mainline African-American civil rights movement has followed organized labor into political irrelevancy.

This decline is certainly not helped by the SCLC's embrace of Michael Vick. I'm not sure what they see in defending Vick. It's true that many African-Americans see the treatment of their sports heroes like Vick and Barry Bonds as part of a broader racial war against them. We can't ignore those sentiments because they are grounded in truth. But they are also somewhat wrong-headed. No one is going after Vick because he is black. They are going after him because he fights dogs.

There are a million issues for the SCLC, NAACP, and other civil rights organizations to work on. African-Americans still receive a raw deal in this country. Police brutality, poverty, drug use, unequal education, housing that is desegregated in name only, etc., etc., are deeply important issues. To subsume these issues in order to defend a millionaire athlete who enjoys blood sports seems wrong-headed at best.

Via Good Nonsense.

Historical Image of the Day

NAACP pamphlet, 1944

The New Civil Rights Movement

I wholeheartedly agree with David Bacon's new article in The American Prospect calling for a more radical pro-immigrant movement. Bacon examines recent developments among anti-immigrant racists and argues that a stronger pro-immigrant agenda is needed to fight back.

This is the front in civil rights that we need to organize around. Treating immigrants this way is a slap in the face to every positive aspect of American democracy and history. Uniting not only immigrants, but African-Americans, union members, and people of all races who believe in justice and equality, this could create a powerful progressive coalition that would not only pass pro-immigrant legislation and demilitarize the border, but also build a broader justice movement to transform the country.

Read the whole article.

Historical Image of the Day

Officers of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 1930s

Historical Image of the Day

Women voting, Cheyenne, Wyoming, 1888

Historical Image of the Day

Ella Baker

Lest we forget...

While the figure of Martin Luther King, Jr. has dominated the civil rights narrative, it is worth remembering the man beyond one day in January each year.

It was 39 years ago today that King was murdered. We should remember the man, his legacy, and all the different civil rights activists, with their different viewpoints, opinions, and ideologies, more than we do.

D has more.

Tuesday Forgotten American Blogging: Martin Luther King, Sr.

Martin Luther King, Sr. isn't entirely forgotten of course. He is remembered for his son. But no one thinks much about the father, who is an interesting guy in his own right. More importantly, King Sr. can help us understand an entire generation of African-American preachers who laid a great deal of the groundwork that allowed the civil rights movement to explode in the 1950s.

Born in 1899 in Stockbridge, Georgia, like many people of his time and race, he was born to poor sharecroppers. The failure of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow policies forced millions of African-Americans into these scenarios of systemic poverty, political and economic disfranchisement, and violence of all forms. King became interested in fighting for the rights of his people and saw the ministry as a prime way to affect change, as did many other young black men of his generation.

King could not read until his late teens, but that didn't stop him. At the age of 15, he started preaching in his home area of Georgia and found himself successful. An ambitious man, King learned to read and attended Morehouse College in Atlanta, beginning in 1926. This was not easy for him--he failed many courses and struggled overall. Why? Not because he was stupid; rather like so many people of his generation, King didn't have any educational advantages at all. Whites claimed that blacks were inferior and lazy. But of course the real problem was racism and the denial of opportunities throughout your life. Soon after his graduation, in 1931, he became the minister at Ebenezer Baptist Church on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta. "Sweet Auburn" was the center of African-American life in Atlanta. It was home to shops, large homes, and Atlanta's version of the vibrant African-American communities that developed across the South in response to Jim Crow laws and violence against them.

Interestingly, Martin Luther King was originally named Michael King. He changed it to Martin in 1934 as a way to show his commitment to the church.

King Sr. played a pretty big role in developing the civil rights movement in Georgia, serving as head of the state NAACP and worked to end Jim Crow laws there. Like many black men of his generation, King was a committed Republican for a very long time. Though many blacks began moving toward the Democratic Party during the New Deal, many others, especially in the South, rightfully connected that party with white supremacy and thus chose the Republicans. Of course, most of them couldn't vote so it didn't matter much. King did not switch his affiliation until 1960 when the Kennedy brothers worked to have King freed after an arrest in Georgia that placed his life in tremendous danger. After his conversion, he played an important role in state politics and did a great service to Jimmy Carter in supporting his presidential nomination in 1976. Many liberals in the party thought Carter was too conservative but King pointed out how much Carter did to end segregation in Georgia and swayed enough votes to give him the nomination. During the civil rights movement proper, King Sr. supported his son, though he was fearful of what might (and of course did) happen to him. He wasn't at the forefront of the movement, much like many preachers of his generation who came of age in the bad days before World War II when any perceived dissent against segregation was met with extreme violence. But he was always there for his son, often filling in for him at Ebenezer when King Jr. had work to do in other places.

Martin Luther King, Sr. was not a particularly exceptional man, except for who his oldest son was. He was certainly a leader in the local black Atlanta community, and Georgia in general, and is a man who deserves more attention than he has received. But really, looking at King is really a way to look at thousands of exceptional African-American men who served as preachers across the South during the long Jim Crow era and who put their prestige and often their lives on the line to protect their churchgoers and community from the onslaught of white violence, be it physical, sexual, or economic.