Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (55 page)

In fact, there was scarcely a community in the early 1950s where prejudice was not fueling cruelly unjust White campaigns against open housing, desegregated education, equal job opportunities, and civil rights.
The Negro in American Life
displayed pictures of a desegregated classroom and community that few Americans would have recognized, while admitting “much remains to be done.” The pamphlet asked, given how bad things were, is it not amazing how far we’ve come? With every civil rights victory and failure, this line of reasoning
became the standard
past-future
declaration of assimilationists: we have come a long way, and we have a ways to go. They purposefully sidestepped the
present
reality of racism.
²³

The Negro in American Life
attempted to win the hearts and minds—and markets and resources—of the decolonizing non-White world. Nothing would be better for our interests in Asia than “racial harmony in America,” said the US ambassador to India, Chester Bowles, at Yale in 1952. However, after the illustrious World War II general Dwight D. Eisenhower entered the White House in 1953, he discontinued the Truman Doctrine on civil rights. Racial discrimination was not a societal problem, but a failure of individual feelings, Eisenhower lectured. The solution lay not in force, but in “persuasion, honestly pressed,” and “conscience, justly aroused,” Eisenhower added. This pipe dream allowed the shrewd Eisenhower to conciliate northern readers of
An American Dilemma
and southern readers of
Take Your Choice
.
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Before Truman left office, his Justice Department had submitted a brief for yet another desegregation case before the US Supreme Court, a combined case of five NAACP lawsuits against desegregated schools in Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, and Washington, DC. “It is in the context of the present world struggle between freedom and tyranny that the problem of race discrimination must be viewed,” the brief stated in support of desegregation. The Court heard oral arguments in
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka
for a second time on December 8, 1953. At a White House dinner, Eisenhower invited his newly appointed chief justice, Earl Warren, and grabbed a seat next to the eminent lawyer defending the segregationists, John Davis, someone the president repeatedly praised as “a great man.” On a stroll to the coffee table, Eisenhower told Warren he could understand why southerners wanted to make sure “their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big black buck.”
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On May 17, 1954, Chief Justice Warren, in his opinion of the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision, somehow agreed with the lower court’s finding that southern schools had “been equalized, or are being equalized.” Thus, for the Supreme Court,
Brown v. Board of Education
was about the psychological impact of separate schools on Black children.
Warren found the answer in the social science literature, the recent explosion of studies trying to figure out why Black people had not assimilated and why the racial disparities still persisted. With the slavery-deforming-Black-people theory no longer sustainable in the early 1950s, assimilationists conjured up the segregation-deforming-Black-people theory. They cited the famous doll tests of psychologists Kenneth Clark and Mamie Clark, as well as popular books on the subject, such as
The Mark of Oppression
(1951) by two psychoanalysts. Discrimination and the separation of the races, the assimilationists argued, had been having a horrible effect on Black personalities and self-esteem.
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In his
Brown
opinion, Chief Justice Warren footnoted the famous doll tests as evidence of the negative impact of segregation on Black people. He felt sure enough to write, “To separate [colored children] from others of similar age and qualification solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” In short, “segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children.” It tended to retard their “education and mental development” and deprived “them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racial[ly] integrated school system,” Warren surmised. “We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”
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Warren essentially offered a racist opinion in this landmark case: separate
Black
educational facilities were inherently unequal and inferior because Black students were not being exposed to White students. Warren’s assimilationist problem led to an assimilationist solution over the next decade to desegregate American schools: the forced busing of children from Black schools to inherently superior White schools. Rarely were White children bused to Black schools. By the 1970s, segregationist White parents from Boston to Los Angeles were opposing forced busing, spitting on reformers all types of racist vitriol, while antiracist Black parents were demanding two-way busing or the reallocation of resources from the over-resourced White schools to the under-resourced Black schools. These antiracist plans were opposed
by both assimilationists and segregationists, who seemed to assume, like the Court, that majority-Black schools could never be equal to majority-White schools.

Not many Americans immediately recognized the assimilationist reasoning behind the
Brown
decision. But Zora Neale Hurston did. She was then sixty-four and living in Florida, and she was as sharp as ever despite her recent literary descent. “If there are not adequate Negro schools in Florida, and there is some residual, some inherent and unchangeable quality in white schools, impossible to duplicate anywhere else, then I am the first to insist that Negro children of Florida be allowed to share this boon,” wrote Hurston in the
Orlando Sentinel
. “But if there are adequate Negro schools and prepared instructors and instructions, then there is nothing different except the presence of white people. For this reason, I regard the ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court as insulting rather than honoring my race.” Calling out civil rights leaders, she framed it a contradiction in terms to scream race pride and equality while at the same time spurning “Negro teachers and self-association.” Hurston’s widely reprinted letter was praised by segregationists and antiracists, but sparked only ire from assimilationists.
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Despite its basis in racist reasoning, for many—and of course many did not actually read Warren’s opinion—the effect of the landmark decision overturning
Plessy v. Ferguson
honored Black people. “I have seen the impossible happen,” wrote W. E. B. Du Bois. USIA propagandists were as elated as Black folk. Within an hour of the announcement, the Voice of America broadcast the news to Eastern Europe. Press releases were drawn up in multiple languages. The decision “falls appropriately within the Eisenhower Administration’s many-frontal attack on global communism,” the Republican National Committee had to state on May 21, 1954, since Eisenhower refused to endorse
Brown
.

In the Jim Crow South, Mississippi senator James Eastland vowed—rallying the troops—that the South “will not abide by or obey this legislative decision by a political court.” And the segregationist resistance came so fast and so strong that when it came time for the Supreme Court to implement the
Brown
decision in 1955, for the first
time in US history, the Court ended up vindicating a constitutional right and then “deferr[ing] its exercise for a more convenient time,” sending Du Bois and other activists into a rage. Still, southern segregationists closed ranks and organized “massive resistance” through violence and racist ideas. Apparently, they cared more about defending their separate-but-equal brand before America than defending the American-freedom brand before the world.
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CHAPTER 29

Massive Resistance

THE MOST NOTORIOUS
victim of what was to be called “massive resistance” to desegregation was fourteen-year-old Emmett Till on August 28, 1955. For hissing at a Mississippi White woman, hooligans beat Till so ruthlessly that his face was unrecognizable during his open casket funeral in his native Chicago. The gruesome pictures were shown around the enraged Black world. On March 12, 1956, nineteen US senators and seventy-seven House representatives signed a southern manifesto opposing the
Brown v. Board of Education
decision for planting “hatred and suspicion where there has been heretofore friendship and understanding.” The Klan fielded new members, and elite segregationists founded White citizens councils. Southern schools ensured that their textbooks gave students “bedtime” stories, as historian C. Vann Woodward called them, that read like
Gone with the Wind
.

But the civil rights movement kept coming. W. E. B. Du Bois was stunned watching the unfolding Montgomery Bus Boycott during the 1956 election year. It was not the boycott’s initial mobilizer, Alabama State College professor Jo Ann Robinson, nor the boycott’s drivers, those walking Black female domestics, who surprised him. Any serious history student of Black activism knew that Black women were regularly driving forces. Du Bois was stunned by the twenty-seven-year-old figurehead of the boycott. A Baptist preacher as a radical activist? Du Bois had never thought his eighty-eight-year-old eyes would see a preacher like Martin Luther King Jr. Du Bois sent a message of encouragement, and King sent a grateful reply. King had read Du Bois’s
books, and he later characterized him as “an intellectual giant” who saw through the “poisonous fog of lies that depicted [Black people] as inferior.” Du Bois also sent a proclamation to the Indian journal
Gandhi Marg
. King—in his strident commitment to nonviolent civil disobedience—could be the American Mahatma Gandhi.
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King’s other favorite scholar penned the most controversial Black book of 1957, possibly of the entire decade. The gender racism of E. Franklin Frazier in
Black Bourgeoisie
, depicting White women as more beautiful and sophisticated than Black women, Black wives as domineering, and Black husbands as “impotent physically and socially,” was as manifest as his historical racism. “Slavery was a cruel and barbaric system that annihilated the negro as a person,” Frazier said. This theory resembled the racist thesis of historian Stanley Elkins in his smash hit
Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life
(1959). And yet Frazier had overcome his cultural racism. The popular social science literature about the psychological effects of discrimination that molded the
Brown
decision had remolded Frazier’s old ideas of assimilation as psychological progress, and he now believed in assimilation as regression. No group of Black people held more firmly to assimilationist ideas, Frazier argued, than the Black bourgeoisie, who tried to “slough off everything . . . reminiscent of its Negro origin.”
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Frazier sounded like the ministers of Elijah Muhammad’s quickly growing Chicago-based Nation of Islam (NOI) in the late 1950s. “They won’t let you be White and you don’t want to be Black,” the son of Garveyites, former convict, and the NOI’s new Harlem minister liked to say. “You don’t want to be African and you can’t be an American. . . . You in bad shape!” CBS’s Mike Wallace brought Malcolm X and the NOI to the attention of millions in the 1959 sensational five-part television series entitled
The Hate That Hate Produced: A Study of the Rise of Black Racism and Black Supremacy
. Elijah Muhammad and his ministers opposed assimilationists; instead, they preached racial separation (not Black supremacy), arguing that Whites were an inferior race of devils. Ironically, Black and White assimilationists, clothed in racism and hate for everything Black, condemned the Nation of Islam for donning racism and hate for everything White.
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In
Black Bourgeoisie
, Frazier delivered the most withering attack on the Black middle class in the history of American letters, commercializing a new class racism: the Black bourgeoisie as inferior to the White bourgeoisie, as more socially irresponsible, as bigger conspicuous consumers, as more politically corrupt, as more exploitative, and as sillier in their “politics of respectability,” to use historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s recent term. Despite, or rather because of, Frazier’s overreach into class racism,
Black Bourgeoisie
had a significant effect on the civil rights movement, galvanizing Martin Luther King’s generation of middle-class youngsters to break away from what Frazier termed their apathetic “world of make-believe.”
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And this powerful force of youthful courage, growing more powerful by the day, was needed to resist the segregationist massive resistance that seemed to grow more massive with each passing day. Segregationists had stripped the Civil Rights Act of 1957 of its enforcement powers, making it practically a dead letter when it passed on August 29, 1957. On September 4, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus deployed the National Guard to block the Little Rock Nine from desegregating Central High School, defying a federal court order. With the globally circulating sights and sounds of government troops defending howling segregationist mobs, Little Rock harmed the American freedom brand.

“Our enemies are gloating over this incident,” Eisenhower wailed in a nationally televised speech, “and using it everywhere to misrepresent our whole nation.” Eisenhower and his aides agonized for two weeks, seeking solutions that could keep both his political image in the South and the American image abroad intact, to no avail. On September 24, in a decision he later regarded as “the most repugnant act in all his eight years in the White House,” Eisenhower sent in federal troops to protect the Little Rock students as they entered the school. Some civil rights activists recognized the incredible power Cold War calculations had given them to embarrass America into desegregation. Still others believed and hoped that Gunnar Myrdal’s dictum was coming true: that the civil rights movement was persuading away racist ideas.
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