The Civil Rights Movement and the continuing struggle for the redemption of America.

• Date: 22 March 2003
• Author: Bush, Rod
• Published date: 22 March 2003
• Author: Bush, Rod

WHEN SOME STAFF MEMBERS OF THE SOUTHERN CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP Conference (SCLC), including Jesse Jackson, resisted Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s proposal to go to Memphis to support the striking sanitation workers, Dr. King was incensed. SCLC staff, some concerned with their own more favored projects, argued that this new project would spread them too thin. Dr. King issued a strong rebuke to their narrowing of the horizons of the movement. He argued that that this country was in critical condition and that they all had to work together to "redeem the soul of America" (Frady, 1996: 225). Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was a man with a transcendent vision, but in stating these prescient sentiments, he stood on the shoulders of giants. This is too often forgotten in treatments of the Civil Rights Movement. This article seeks to understand the Civil Rights Movement in the context of its larger role as a force for the democratization of U.S. society, internally and in its international relations.

Although liberals and leftists have tended to disregard J. Edgar Hoover's fear of subversion within the Civil Rights Movement as either a disingenuous cover for his own racism or the paranoid fantasy of an anticommunist psychosis, I would argue that Hoover's fears were well founded within the context of his own premises: that the Civil Rights Movement posed a fundamental threat to the power arrangements of the American social order that he was sworn to defend. I have long felt that the lack of a serious appraisal of J. Edgar Hoover among liberals stemmed from a fear of confronting the contradictions within liberalism itself, partly revealed in its bastard offspring, neoconservatism. American liberalism is particularly torn between its egalitarian principles (vis-a-vis the New Deal and Great Society traditions) and its desire for stability and social order (stemming from the social position of the U.S. as the hegemonic power within the capitalist world-economy and from its propagation of a founding principle of the capitalist world, the myth of pan-European supremacy).

Martin Luther King, Jr., understood well these contradictions. His statement in his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" could apply to liberals and moderates:

I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's greatest stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice, who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.... We will have to repent in this generation not merely the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people (King, 1986: 295-296). Although broad segments of white America speak with pride of their support for the civil rights tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr. (at least up to the 1963 to 1965 period), some had serious reservations. Despite the accolades given today to Dr. King's dream, many liberals shared J. Edgar Hoover's fears about the Civil Rights Movement. They believed it would ratchet up general dissatisfaction with America, leading others to support the demands of the Negro and to seek redress of their own grievances, causing in turn an exponential growth in dissatisfaction with the American social order and the alleged Euro-American cultural foundation of humanity's greatest achievements.

One can sense this ambivalence in the public pronouncement of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a public figure who consistently supported redistributive programs for the disadvantaged. Moynihan decried America's inaction in the face of the increasing crises and consequent alienation of the Negro inner city. His concern that the Nation of Islam and other Black militants might soon follow the model of the Chinese Communists may today seem totally outside the bounds of scholarly discussion. However, it makes sense given Moynihan's support for redistributive programs and opposition to programs that enhanced the social and political power of the poor, because it gave them the wrong message about how one should pursue success in America. Moynihan perfectly reflects the neoconservative dilemma without committing himself to the neoconservative movement.

Studies of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s provide us with rich and powerful analyses of the sources of the struggle, the resources that enabled people to struggle effectively, and the intelligence, creativity, and vision of the women and men who committed their lives to the struggle for justice, equality, and democracy in America. Despite their status as second-class citizens often occupying segregated ghettos away from the American mainstream, the struggles of Black people have been remarkably central to the story of American democracy, and will continue to be central to the task of completing the great American Revolution.

The story of the Civil Rights Movement in its broad outlines is familiar to many readers. The more specific intellectual history presented here focuses on the interaction of the ideas put forward by the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, the evolution of ideas and strategies within the liberal center, and the rise of a counter-revolutionary ideology fashioned in opposition to the radical threat posed by the rise of an increasingly large cadre of revolutionary ideologues and their location within an increasingly insurrectionary inner-city poor, the corollary of the 19th-century dangerous classes.

The Black Freedom Struggle assumed various organizational forms that attempted to articulate the increasingly assertive, militant, and radical sentiments of people within America's inner cities. Some pivotal organizations of the 1960's radical awakening were the Nation of Islam, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), the Black Panther Party, and the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). These organizations constituted much of the core of the Black Power militancy of the mid-1960s, but they ultimately gave way to attempts to transcend the limitations of the Civil Rights, Black Power, and New Left movements.

The histories of these organizations provide us with spectacular stories of heroism, creativity, and vision. Despite the boldness and creativity of the individual and organizational leadership that came to the fore in the 1960s, however, the level of challenge that they mounted could not be normalized. It depended on the continued mobilization of an insurrectionary community. Once the insurrection subsided, the forces of repression moved to eliminate the threat to the social order. The revolutionary militants who came to the fore during this period returned to the drawing boards to determine the way forward.

Rather than seek to deepen their understanding of the complex relationship between the action of the broad masses of the population and the thinking of leaders, intellectuals, and organizations, they overemphasized the role of organization and leadership and their failure to give sufficient leadership to the spontaneous rebellion of the masses. The militants concluded that they had failed as revolutionaries and looked around for a more adequate revolutionary model that would enable them to organize their communities for a protracted struggle for power and social transformation. Most scholars of social movements have dismissed this period as the thrashings of a wounded beast in its final death throes, which descended predictably into a swamp of sectarianism, bickering, and utopian groups far removed from the concerns of their former inner-city bases. In my view, the evolution was far more complex and merits much closer study. These scholars lament the shattering of the 1960's left-liberal consensus, attributing it to the extremism of the militants. I argue that the shattering of that consensus was inevitable and, over the longer run, liberating. The fracturing of the coalition was due not to the extremism of the New Left. Instead, the implosion occurred because of the liberal center's collusion with the Right in the brutal repression of the popular Left (Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, SNCC, and SDS) and its acceptance of the presumption of American power as a force for good in the world.

The strategy of armed self-defense used by some Black Power militants was not a strategy for urban guerilla warfare. Although the notion of urban guerilla warfare had some currency during the earlier cadre development period among the forces associated with the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), it did not by and large survive the mass mobilization period of the later 1960s, when the Black Panther Party and others articulated a notion of the Long March. The concept regained currency among some only after the deadly assault on the movement's leaders, including the murders of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and many leaders of the Black Panther Party. The Black Panther Party and the Nation of Islam advocated a policy of self-defense, which clearly incited the animosity of federal and local law enforcement agencies, whose command of a counterinsurgency state allowed them to plot the murder of popular Black leaders. These law enforcement agencies pursued the suppression of the militants with a reckless glee, combined with cold-blooded ruthlessness.

This dose of reality shattered any illusions about the liberal-democratic nature of the U.S. for those who were members of the opposition. An approach was sought that would preclude the vulnerability that allowed Black Power militants of the late 1960s to be so easily targeted and eliminated. The New Left as a social force emerged in opposition to the alleged collusion and...