Raymond A. Eve, Ph. D.
quotes needed here
INTRODUCTION
Certain Twentieth Century social movements which occurred in the U. S. are quite commonly presented in textbooks published during recent decades. Much attention seems to have been given to social movements that were primarily concerned with matters of economics and material well-being. For example, much attention has been paid to the early days of the labor movement in the United States as it manifested itself during the first half of this century. Also, considerable consideration has been bestowed upon the oft accompanying pro-socialist movements of the first half of the century.
Perhaps the conspicuousness of these movements was largely due to the impact of the rapid industrialization which so transformed the American scene during the late 18th and early 19th Centuries. In but one example, support for the Communist Party peaked during the 1930s (probably in response to a loss of faith in capitalism by many as a result of the great Depression). However, support for such movements that challenged the very foundations of U. S. values was never widespread during the first half of this century. For example, such a statement can be made about the early days of the civil rights movement in the U. S.
The civil rights movement began largely as a movement to modify -- not the core values -- but the norms of U. S. society in order to permit fuller economic and political participation by minority members in the already existing larger society. The focus of the movement in its early days was largely upon material factors such as attempting to improve access to jobs, schooling, and medical care.
During the 1960s, however, the U. S. witnessed the emergence of the so-called New Left. The New Left was a loose alliance of groups with various political agendas. It contained some groups such as young, largely urban, increasingly militant blacks, but it also included the anti-war campus-based student movement. Many of the social movement tactics initially adopted by New Left activists were imitations of the nonviolent tactics advocated by Martin Luther King, Jr..
King had developed these tactics during the early "freedom rides" into the South in support of blacks living there. The so-called Freedom Riders were blacks and some whites sympathetic to their cause who came largely from outside of the southern U. S. states. The Freedom Riders rode buses into Southern cities to carry out demonstrations on behalf of the blacks living in the South who appeared to be especially ill-treated in the eyes of the Freedom Riders. Their tactics of non-violence had been largely adopted by Martin Luther King, Jr. as a result of his study of their development and use years earlier in India. Mahatma Ghandi is widely seen as the father of such tactics. Ghandi had employed such methods very effectively in this successful attempted to dislodge British colonialism from India during the 1940s. (We will return to the study of Ghandi in India near the end of this book when we discuss revolutions). Since the New Left was an aggregation of some black militant movements with the campus anti-war movement, we will initially look at each of these for the sake of simplicity. Later, we will discuss the sometimes cordial and sometime hostile relationships between these two different elements of the larger entity.
Many people seem to believe that the civil rights movement in America started with the racial confrontations seen in the streets of America during the late 1950s and the 1960s. In reality, the roots of the struggle had begun to grow almost as early as Afro-Americans began arriving in the United States. The first permanent black settlers to arrive in the U. S. were brought there by the Spanish explorer Lucas Vasques de Ayllon in 1526. In that same year, these early immigrants rose up against their white oppressors, killed a number of them, and fled to the Indians (Skonick, 1969, p. 128). Some would argue this was only a precursor of generations of similar conflict to come.
It seems quite common for many people who first became familiar with the black movement due to its manifestations in the 1960s to depict the black movement as moving from the use of peaceful tactics to one of increased use of militant protest and even violence. However, as far back as 1829 a black man named David Walker wrote An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World which refereed to whites as the "natural enemies" of the black man, and urged blacks to "kill or be killed."
Probably the first occasion that most Americans are aware in which violence was employed by blacks as a result of their frustrations is the Harpers Ferry raid that took place in West Virginia in 1859. There the American abolitionist John Brown hoped to establish a base in the mountains to which slaves and free blacks could flee. Brown, born in Connecticut and raised in Ohio, had previously imagined that emancipation could be brought about by massive slave insurrections. He and his five sons had been involved in the "Free-soil militia in Lawrence, Kansas. However, it 1855 pro-slavery forces had sacked the Free-Soil town of Lawrence. Nonetheless, Brown was subsequently able to convince certain Northern abolitionists to finance his new plan to build a safe-haven in Harpers Ferry. However, shortly after Brown and twenty-one followers seized the town in 1859, a young officer (later to be President) named Robert E. Lee and a contingent of federal troops arrived and wiped out Brown's forces. Brown himself was hung -- a fact that was to make him a martyr not only among blacks and Northern whites, but even among many white Southerners. It was but two years later that the Civil War was to break out.
While the John Brown story is widely known in America, what is less well remembered is that there were many episodes of racial conflict in the mid-to-late 1800s, and that most of these actually took place in the Northern states. In the face of competition for jobs and opposition to blacks migrating into Northern urban areas from the South both during and after the Civil War, riots erupted in Cincinnati, Providence (Massachusetts), Pittsburgh, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York City. In one of the more spectacular incidents of the day, the so-called New York Draft Riots of 1863, white youths attacked blacks and left over 1,000 dead in their wake.
However, while such violence against blacks was first seen largely in the North, in the later part of the Nineteenth Century, the South's dynamics during the Reconstruction period were to create their own share of riots by whites against blacks. Riots in the South during this period occurred in New Orleans, Memphis, and Wilmington, N. C.. In each location between 30 and 50 people were left dead almost all of them black.
Many people seem to equate racial disorders with violence or confrontations begun by Afro-Americans against whites. Apparently such an outlook derives from limited experience with the question based on the media content seen since the late 1950s. In reality, during the late 1800s and early 1900s, it was far more common for white crowds to engage in hostile outbursts against blacks and their communities. It has, for example, been estimated that ??? blacks were illegally lynched between ??? and ???. Additionally, it was quite common during that period of history for whites to travel en mass to the black communities and engage in wholesale violence against the residents of those communities. At times, these attacks could probably be compared to "pogroms." (Pogrom is a Russian word that was often applied to mob attacks in Russian directed against Jews and their property that took place at approximately the same time period in history as the riots we have just been discussing. More than 60000 Jews were killed in Russian pogroms).
In reaction to such levels of hostility, Afro-Americans responded in several ways as the century continued to unfold. One reaction was that riots became more bilateral in nature. "Communal riots" became common. Communal riots are characterized in part by the fact that they are set off by conflict between individuals in public places. Blacks, unlike previous years, fought back in many cases (although they still seldom left black neighborhoods, and they were still disproportionately wounded). The police typically sided with the whites, a circumstance which often required the calling in of federal or state troops. Major riots of this type occurred in New York City in 1900, Springfield, Illinois in 1908, East St. Louis in 1917, Philadelphia in 1917, and in Chicago and 25 other cities in 1919. In the East St. Louis riot, fifty people had been killed at one stroke.
Marcus Garvey and the Nation of Islam
It was against this violent background, that around the 1920s Garveyism arose. The term refers to a philosophy of action developed by Marcus Mosiah Garvey. Garvey was born in Jamaica in 1887, but eventually immigrated to New York. In 1916 he started an organization in New York which he called The Universal Negro Improvement Association. The UNIA's goal was the unification of all black people by establishing an African country with an all-black government. Garvey wore an impressive uniform and was said to be a dynamic speaker.
As a result, by 1921 he claimed he had one million followers. Garvey also started a newspaper carrying the title of Negro World in which he advocated pride for black people, economic independence from whites, and a return to Africa. In fact, he even managed to establish a steamship line (called the Black Star Line) that he intended for this latter purpose. The Black Star Line was also envisioned as providing a commercial link for all the black people of the world.
Garvey was also successful in establishing a chain of restaurants, grocery stores, and hotels. Unfortunately, Garvey's enterprises suffered from both white antagonisms and mismanagement, and to compound his financial troubles in 1923 he was arrested for stock fraud. After serving several years in jail, he was pardoned by President Calvin Coolidge and in 1927 he was deported to Jamaica (where he died in 1940).
It is a little known fact that in some ways Garvey had been anticipated many years earlier. In the first decade of the 1800s, a black sea captain named Paul Cuffe had transported several dozen people to Africa with much the same aim that Garvey was later to advocate. However, only with Garveyism did the concept attract a widespread following.
W. E. B. DuBois
Another prominent black leader of the time was W. E. B. DuBois, who had been born in Massachusetts in 1868. Du DuBois was one of the first great scholars among Afro-Americans in the United States. He attended Fisk University and then Harvard (where he received his Ph. D. degree in 1895 -- the first American black to achieve this academic pinnacle). In his academic career he wrote over one hundred scholarly articles and more than 20 books. Many of these works represented the world with the first sociological examinations of the black experience in the new world. In one such book, The Soul of Black Folk, DuBois advocated the concept on an educated black elite that would lead blacks out of their subordinate position.
DuBois is also well-remembered as the founder of the Niagara Movement. The Niagara Movement was the forerunner of the National Association of Colored People (or NAACP -- the best known black social movement organization of the Twentieth Century).
In 1905, Du Bois convened a number of powerful members of the black community at Niagara, New York. These leaders had been drawn together there in large part by a shared conviction that the legal system was not working for Afro-Americans in the United States (and much attention was given to the widespread illegal lynchings of the time). We might wish to note that this meeting was illustrative of the general principle that collective behavior and social movements occur when normal channels for grievances are closed. When the courtroom, the ballot box, and the legislatures are found to be ineffective means for the redress of difficulties and grievances, little is left but expressive action to make one's point. In but one example of this principle, the situation progressed steadily towards the 1909 founding of the NAACP. Du Bois became of the editor of the NAACP's own newspaper for Afro-Americans, a paper called The Crisis. Internal disagreements, however, drove him from the NAACP in 1934 for a ten-year period. He eventually returned to the fold in 1944, however in the meantime DuBois had developed an avowed and open admiration for socialism and the Soviet Union. Such views eventually again led in 1948 to his being forced to resign from the NAACP as anti communist sentiment grew stronger among the American public. Eventually when DuBois reached his nineties, he at last joined the Communist Party, renounced his U. S. citizenship, and moved to Ghana (a nation in West Africa).
During the long life of W. E. B. Du Bois, a very different current emerged in the history of blacks in America. In certain ways the new trend continued the black nationalist emphasis of Garveyism. This trend is still very much with us today. To illustrate the nature of this phenomenon, we must turn our attention to the appearance of another black leader, Elijah Mumammad.
In 1897, a child named Elijah Poole was born in Georgia to a Baptist minister and his wife. Elijah was to grow up to be, in this own words, the "Messenger of Allah." Allah is the name given to God in Islam. Around 600 AD a follower of Islam named Mohammed had been born, and this child was later widely said by his contemporaries and their descendants to be a prophet or messenger from God. Elijah Poole hoped to take such a role in modern times. Specifically, it was his great desire to bring the religion of Islam to Afro-Americans living in the New World during the Twentieth Century just as his namesake had done in the mid-East so many generations earlier. Eljah Poole's of view of himself and his hoped for place in history was primarily the result of having become a follower in about 1930 of W. D. Fard. Fard had himself taken the name of Master Farad Muhammad and sometimes also wished to be referred to as The Prophet. Many of his followers also believed Fard to be Allah. Fard himself had been greatly influenced by an earlier black leader named Dre Ali. Ali had, in 1913, founded a Moorish Science Temple of America in Newark, New Jersey. The word "Moorish," of course, shows the roots of the church's theology to be derived from African Islamic religion. Ali believed that the religion of Islam presented the only viable tool to create unity and progress for blacks in America. However, Ali died in 1929 and the movement was taken over by Fard. Fard, however, mysteriously disappeared in 1933. Afterwards, his following split into two groups, and Elijah Poole (now calling himself Elijah Muhammad) became the leader of the faction of the earlier church that made its home in Chicago. Elijah took his place as the Head of the Temple. Ilijah recognized that Islam had always been more receptive to the important role that blacks had played in world history, and had more readily accepted them into mainstream life in both the ancient and modern cultures of the Mediterranean and the mid-East. Elijah Mohammed felt that an adoption of the Islamic religion by his contemporaries might have important beneficial results for New World blacks. In this belief he was not unique. Most religious leaders have long been aware that is known as the "conversion experience." Under certain circumstances, individuals may experience one manifestation of religion as involving a "conversion." Conversion is said to have occurred when there is a simultaneous transformation of one's self-identity and one's basic meaning system. In contemporary Western society we have many examples of this in the form of born-again Christians who report having had a sudden and dramatic change of identity as a result of recommitting themselves to the Christian religion. A notable precedent for this type of process can be pointed to in the case of a contemporary of Jesus named Saul. Saul was initially a major persecutor of Christians during the time of Christ. However, Saul had a paranormal vision of Christ on the road to Damascus. The result was that Saul experienced a conversion to Christianity after which he became known as Paul and is still known today as one of Christ's most devote Apostles. For Saul, both his own identity and his interpretation of the world were totally transformed by his conversion experience. In the same way, it is fairly common for people -- especially according to some empirical studies -- those suffering a crisis of life circumstances or a crisis in their own view of themselves to have such an experience. The effect is, of course, to give one a sense of decency and purpose in life, and to make it seem that one was put here to do important work. To some blacks in the New World, just emerging from the devastating effects of slavery on their self-images and cultural identity, Islam seemed to offer a chance to regain lost dignity and purpose for black people.
The Temple of Islam, therefore, began to develop a substantial following. Elijah Muhammad, or example, was successful in creating Nation of Islam schools in many cities, in operating a number of restaurants, a publishing company, stores, and farms. By the 1960s, the Nation of Islam had grown to more than 100,000 members. Historically, it has emphasized black pride, the importance of cohesive families, economic self-sufficiency, and moral behavior. Not unlike many so-called "Apocalyptic Separatist" religious groups, Black Muslims believe that the American government is both unjust and corrupt in the eyes of Allah. Consequently, the followers are not supposed to participate in the government of the U. S., nor to bear arms on the government's behalf. They are, however, expected in their personal lives to abstain from the use of alcohol or tobacco, dancing, going to the cinema, and to avoid gambling and sports. All moral authority was said to lie in the decisions of the successors of Elijah Muhammad, Since he died in 1975, the concept has been extended to the belief that all moral authority is vested in his line of successors.
It has been said of the Nation of Islam that it exchanged the goal of separatism for one of political and social independence and self-sufficiency by the black community within the United States. Perhaps, it best known advocate in recent years has been Malcolm X.
Malcolm X was born bearing the name of Malcolm Little In Omaha, Nebraska, in 1925. He belonged to a large family having seven brothers and sisters. Eventually, he was to become a pioneer in promoting the doctrine of self-defense for blacks when faced with racial aggression.
Shortly after Malcolm's birth, the family moved to Lansing, Michigan. Unfortunately, however, his father died there in 1931 when Malcolm was but six years old. Even more tragic was the fact that his father was allegedly murdered by whites for advocating ideas popularized by Marcus Garvey. His father's death clearly had a great impact on the rest of Malcolm's life as well as upon his mother who suffered a nervous breakdown shortly after the killing. The family was, as a result, split up by welfare workers.
In spite of having to spend a number of years in a foster home after these cataclysmic events, the young man showed excellent academic capabilities and even eventually becoming President of his high school class. He even aspired to become a lawyer some day. One of his teachers, however, is said to have told him that such a thing was impossible for a black man, and that he should become a carpenter instead. Demoralized, Malcolm dropped out of school and went to live with a relative in Boston. Not surprisingly, after all these events, Malcolm was to hold the opinion for the rest of his life that whites had destroyed his family.
When he was sixteen Malcolm moved to New York City's black Harlem section. There he began to make his living as a hustler and a confidence game man. He sold drugs, became an addict himself, and provided prostitutes for white males. He eventually moved back to Boston where he organized a burglary ring. However, in 1946 this criminal lifestyle lead to disaster when he was caught, convicted, and sent to prison. It was in prison that Malcolm became acquainted with the Nation of Islam. Eventually, he joined the organization, and when he was released he continued his involvement with the black Muslims. He moved in with his brother who was living in Detroit at the time. There, he changed his name to Malcolm X as a way of rejecting his "slave name" and replacing it with the "X." This transformation of his name was intended by Malcolm to symbolize his lost "true African family name."
It was at this point in his life that Malcolm became involved with Elijah Muhammad. He helped the latter person to organize many new black Muslim groups within the U. S.. In 1954, Malcolm returned to Harlem as minister of its Muslim temple. A few years later, he began the publication of a newspaper, entitled Muhammad Speaks.
The Nation of Islam had attained national prominence by the 1960s. By that time, Malcolm X had become the best known advocate of the black Muslim movement, but he also now faced a significant proportion of the movement who accused him of working too much for his own glory. The Church itself officially silenced him as a result of his remark after John F. Kennedy's assassination in 1963 when he has stated that the killing of Kennedy was just a case of "the chickens coming home to roost." As a result, in 1964 Malcolm X broke away from the Nation of Islam and started his own group with the name of the Organization of Afro-American Unity (the OAAU). Shortly thereafter, he made a pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia to more deeply understand the roots of Islam. In Saudi Arabia he believed that he saw much greater racial harmony than in the U. S., and he came thereafter to believe that whites and blacks in the U. S. were both victims of a racist society. It was his personal dream and vision that Islam could someday overcome racism in the United States. He also changed his name again while in Saudi Arabia to el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz.
Some years later, he began to travel widely on the continent of Africa. As a consequence, he began to advocate Pan-Africanism. Indeed, he believed that blacks all over the world should unite to defeat racism throughout the world.
Near the end of 1964, Malcolm began to receive death threats, and his home was actually bombed during this period of time. These were just precursors of worse to come. While speaking at a OAAU rally in Harlem in February of 1965, Malcolm was shot and killed.
By now the modern civil rights movement was well underway, due in no small part to the visibility of Malcolm X and the Black Muslims.
The sentiments of Americans seem to have had periods during which they become more positive towards blacks. One example of this occurred under Roosevelt's New Deal but the most truly dramatic change of view towards the positive came with the Second World War. The effects of wars to secure democracy have had an interesting effect on race relations in the U. S. since at least the Second World War (not withstanding, of course, the Civil War). For one thing, there is the old Marxist dictum to consider that tells us that "external threat creates internal cohesion." Men under fire by a common enemy quickly forget even major differences between themselves, even racial differences. During the Second World War at least some black soldiers therefore found themselves treated within the armed services with a higher degree of equality and mutual respect than had been their lot in civilian life. It was also not lost on a large number of soldiers, black and white alike, that World War Two was being been fought by the Allies at least in large part because of opposition to the extreme racism of Hitler's regime. Many U. S. black soldiers felt that if they had been asked to risk their lives to secure the rights of all citizens regardless of race or creed in Germany and elsewhere, should not the same result be made at least as eagerly sought in the United States? The demand for equal rights and treatment for minorities "at home" was greatly nurtured by these historical factors.
By now the migration of blacks to urban centers was nearly complete, and this concentration increased the probability of effective political organization. The civil rights movement began to surge forward during the late 1940s and the 1950s in the U. S.. The NAACP at last began to have some modest success in the nation's courts. For example, restrictions on the use of public facilities and transportation based on race began to yield to effective challenges in the courts. One of the more memorable courtroom successes came in the landmark Shelly v. Kramer. That case struck down restrictive covenants in relation to housing access.
Another major victory for Afro-Americans came in 1954 with the resolution of the law case of Brown v. Board of Education. In 1896 the Supreme Court had ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that racial segregation was acceptable as long as equal facilities were available to all. While the decision at the time was intended to apply strictly in terms of treatment on railroads, the doctrine was applied widely thereafter in other areas of public facilities. It was not until the late 1940s that the Supreme Court actually began to insist upon equality of treatment in such matters for blacks. In 1954 the famous Brown vs. the Board of Education went to trial. The Supreme Court heard the case of Linda Brown, a black woman, who had been denied admission to an elementary school in Topeka, Kansas, because of her race. Brought together under the case were companion cases from South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware. Under the direction of Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Court unanimously concluded that separate education facilities are inherently unequal and that such segregation of facilities was in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Nonetheless, in spite of Linda Brown's victory, more than a decade would pass before significant school integration would take place throughout the nation.
Many of the early tactics used by the civil rights activists of the early 1960s had been borrowed pretty much wholesale in their conception and style from Mahatma Ghandi's earlier resistance of the occupation of India by the British. For example, in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960 a number of black college students from Greensboro Agricultural and Technical College began sitting at the luncheon counter in Woolworth's Department Store knowing that such racial intermingling was forbidden. They were inevitably asked to leave, but the students refused to do so and the store management had them arrested. While rather harsh treatment, these arrests were just as the students had planned and hoped for because they believed the publicity surrounding their arrests would inspire moral outrage among other blacks and, hopefully, some whites. Two months after these initial arrests, the leaders of the sit-in organized an SMO they called the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). SNCC would become one of the best-known SMOs of the black movement.
In the spring of 1961, a number of "freedom rides" were organized outside the South by blacks and their supporters and then sent into in Alabama and Mississippi. Freedom rides involved the deliberate defying of segregation laws on interstate buses. Blacks would board buses in an integrated pattern in states where this was the normal state of things, and then ride into the Southern states that prohibited interracial seating, as well as interracial mingling in the bus terminals and restaurant facilities. Quite a few white sympathizers went along on these Freedom Rides. The freedom riders would, in effect, force the police to arrest them by merely refusing to change seats or use segregated bus facilities in the prescribed manner. Again the intent was to gain publicity for the cause of racial equality. Ghandi had realized many years before that if one can force authorities to use excessive force in the face of what appears to be quite reasonable behavior by ordinary citizens, the use of such force tends to erode the legitimacy of the authorities. Instead of the law-breakers being seen as "criminals" or "deviants," they are seen as victims of irrational repression. In a sense, the tactic intends to present the public with a highly symbolic morality play and appeal to the social audience's sense of fair play. If the tactic works, the movement gains both constituents (active members) and adherents (passive, but supportive friends of the movement).
A major organizer of such rides was CORE (Congress for Racial Equality). CORE was an SMO that had been founded years before in Chicago in 1942, and was dedicated to using nonviolent principles to prevent discrimination against blacks. James Farmer became the leader of the organization in the 1950s and under his leadership CORE had expanded rapidly.
In April of 1964, several black organizations, including the NAACP, SNCC, and CORE, help to organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Elections in Mississippi appeared to have been rigged against blacks by the gerrymandering of voting district boundaries and by other questionable means. The response of the black community was to create their own delegation to the 1964 Presidential Democratic Convention in Chicago. They felt that they were sending the delegates who should justly have gone to Chicago in the first place. Unfortunately, the Democratic Convention refused to seat the Mississippi Freedom Party delegation. This created a turning point in attempts by the black movement to use conventional, nonviolent means for social change. Until now, many blacks had felt that white liberals could be relied upon to help them utilize various conventional means such as the press and the ballot box to redress black grievances. Now, however, it appeared to many blacks that legitimate channels for the resolution of their grievances were closed to them. In the face of this fact, frustration began to boil over into more militant, and even violent, means.
In 1964 the first major case took place in the U. S. of what may be termed "insurrection riots" and the location was Harlem. Unlike the earlier "communal race riots," the new form of rioting (sometimes termed the "commodity-insurrection-type") involved assaults on property. Because of white flight to the suburbs, this new type of riot involved fewer clashes between black and white civilians. Instead of interracial strive between average citizens, most of the conflict took place between the residents of black ghettos and police. These new riots were most often sparked by real or imagined incidents of police brutality. The focus of insurrection riots was primarily one that consisted of looting and destruction directed against white-owned businesses. The 1964 riot under consideration here was set off by the killing of an unarmed black teenager by white police officers. The result was a rampage by thousands of Harlem residents.
The Harlem riot was a harbinger of things to come. Riots followed in the Watts area of Los Angeles in 1965 and Chicago in 1966. In 1967, there were no fewer than one hundred and sixty racial confrontations in over 120 cities scattered around the country. Altogether over forty people were killed, nearly 60,000 federal troops had been mobilized and more than forty million dollars in property damaged had taken place. Such outbreaks tended, of course, to symbolize the loss of faith by blacks in the capacity to effect change through peaceful use of conventional institutions such as the ballot box, the courts, or the media. The evidence of the loss of faith by blacks in the use of conventional channels for the redress of grievances was soon to be even more dramatically confirmed. In 1968, their greatest hope, Martin Luther King, Jr. would be struck down in Tennessee by an assassin's bullet .
In 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, a black woman named Rosa Parks, who then worked as an assistant tailor -- and was the wife of a civil-rights activist -- refused to give up her seat on a public bus when asked to do so for a white man. In doing so she sparked the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955. Rosa Parks was arrested as a result of her actions on the bus. Many people even today seem to feel that this was an entirely spontaneous act on the part of Mrs. Parks, but the evidence suggests otherwise. Parks worked not only as a tailor's assistant but also as a secretary for the local chapter of the NAACP. Rosa Parks had the previous summer attended workshops on civil disobedience at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee. She also had worked closely with the all-black Montgomery Improvement Association, the President of which was a young, recently arrived black minister named Martin Luther King, Jr..
Generally, the Montgomery affair is pointed to as the first boycott in the U. S. by blacks of public transportation. In fact, this was not the first black boycott of public transportation -- not even the first one held in Montgomery, the former capital of the Confederacy. There had been a boycott of the city's streetcar system in the years 1900-1906. However, while the earlier boycott had lasted for two and one-half years, it was ultimately to fail and pass almost unnoticed into history.
However, after Ms. Parks' arrest, a new series of meetings was held in the black community, and eventually Martin Luther King, Jr. was chosen as the figurehead that would confront the white power structure in Montgomery.
King had been born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1929. He was the son of the Reverend Michael (later to be Martin) and Alberta King. He received a Bachelor's degree in Sociology from Morehouse College, and divinity degree from Crozer Theological Seminary. He later received a doctorate of Philosophy in 1955 from Boston University. During 1954 he had accepted his first pastor ship at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery.
The boycott King was elected to head was to last a year, and this time it would end with success. In fact, the success would bring King rapidly to national attention.
Later in this book we will examine the life of Mahatma Gandhi in India where Ghandi successfully developed the tactics of nonviolent civil disobedience that were to drive the British overlords out of India during the 1940s. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a great admirer and student of Ghandi's tactics, and would eventually become the best known practitioner of these within the U. S..
In 1960, King accepted copastorship (with his father) of a large Baptist church in Atlanta, Georgia. He also began to travel widely organizing blacker voter registration campaigns.
His most spectacularly successful event employing the tactics of nonviolent protest would be the massive 1963 "Poor People's March" to Washington, D. C. As a part of this march, over two hundred and fifty thousand persons gathered along the path between the U. S. Capitol building and the White House to demonstrate support for racial reforms. It was, by far, the most impressive display ever seen in America of political clout by blacks. But the sense of optimism the rally generated as its immediate effect was short-lived. In September of 1963, four black girls were killed while attending church in Birmingham, Alabama by a bomb thrown by whites through a church window.
The two events together, however, seemed to deeply effect the conscience of much of the nation. One evidence of this was that in 1964 the U. S. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. The Act forbade discrimination in voting, public accommodations, and employment. It even empowered the U. S. Attorney General to deny funds to local agencies that practiced discrimination. At long last it seemed that things might be looking up for blacks in America! However, in 1965 came a brutal reminder that the struggle was by no means over. In Selma, Alabama, civil rights demonstrators were attacked by city police who used clubs, tear gas, and whips to subdue the crowd. One result of their actions was that Martin Luther King, Jr. and John Lewis of SNCC lead a march (not unlike one Ghandi had led in India many years before) of over 40,000 supporters from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery. It appears that the visibility and emotional impact of this event was at least partially responsible for another act of Congress in the form of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In that document, Congress outlawed all discriminatory qualifying tests for voter registration, and it also provided that in the future voter registration would be by federal registrars only.
King now went on a tour of Northern urban cities. During this experience, he began to more closely associate the economics forces with those of racial oppression. As a result, he began to call for an entire reconstruction of American society with much greater monetary redistribution, much of which he felt should be accomplished through antipoverty programs. Eventually, he even came to feel there were connections between the Vietnam conflict and the persistence of poverty in the U. S.. This was to lead him to argue that the antipoverty programs needed in the U. S. "had been shot down on the killing fields in Vietnam."
While making plans for another march on Washington in 1968, King traveled to Memphis, Tennessee, in support of striking sanitation workers. There, he was killed by a bullet fired by James Earl Ray just after King had delivered his famous "I Have a Dream " speech. (In part of that speech he appeared to foresee his own imminent death when he told the large crowd that had come to hear him that ". . . I have been to the top of the mountain, I have seen the other side, and there is a promised land waiting there . . . [although] I may not get there with you."
The immediate result of King's death was widespread rioting. Major riots erupted in Memphis, Cleveland, Washington, D. C., Baltimore, and Chicago. More than 75,000 troops were required to quench the flames of outrage.
In the study of revolutions, there has long existed a concept known as Davie's "J-curve." While a detailed discussion is precluded here by limited space, the concept predicts that civil violence will typically be at its worst not when things are darkest for the oppressed, but when things have finally been getting better but are then followed by a sudden down-turn in the fortunes of the aggrieved. Why this should be the case becomes clear upon reflection. When classes or other strata of people have been long oppressed, they are typically found to have eventually given up hope and resigned themselves to their fate. However, when things have indeed begun to get better, people's hopes and aspirations begin to rise -- slowly at first, but then with a burst of enthusiasm based upon a belief that after the long night the dawn must surely be now close at hand. Unfortunately, this pattern tends to cause hopes and aspirations to rise more quickly than the snail's pace at which institutional reform can generally be accomplished. Therefore, a sudden downturn in the fortunes of the oppressed is perceived by them as being far more painful than it would have been before hopes had ever been raised. Often anger swells up so quickly, and to such a degree, that rioting or even outright revolutionary activity (intended to "throw the rascals out") becomes one result. It is probably the case that King's death would not have been so keenly felt had not Afro-Americans seen substantial progress towards equal treatment in the years just prior to his death. But King had become a new Messiah whom his followers believed would lead them to the "Promised Land" (his own words in Memphis), and his death represented insupportable disappointment. The immediate effect was rioting in the streets, but the overall movement itself changed too. The "black liberation" movement was about to largely displace the "civil rights movement."
It is a truism, as we have already seen, that collective behavior tends to intensify when people feel that legitimate, institutional outlets to solve their grievances appear unavailable or ineffective in responding to their needs. Under such conditions, militancy is a likely outcome. The only exception is that if it appears that there is absolutely no hope, collective behavior can take the form of a shared sense of hopelessness and resignation to whatever fate may bring. This condition, however, is seldom seen and only occurs in times of direst conditions. Realizing that they cannot win by an all-out confrontation due to inadequacy of resources, choice of tactics, or both, a movement has a couple of options. It may decide, as most of the civil rights activists had done up to this point in the overall story, to rely on nonviolent resistance. As we noted above, much of the core of tactics used in nonviolent resistance was worked out by Mahatma Gandhi in resisting British colonialism in India. As explained by Ghandi, at the heart of the philosophy of nonviolence as a tactic is a need to "Make injustice visible, and be prepared to die like a soldier if necessary to do so." The goal, therefore, in Ghandian nonviolence is to stage manage public events and perceptions so that the powerful appear to be morally abusing the power endowed upon them by their followers. If one can make the aggressor seem, in truth or fiction, to appear to be immoral or to appear to be grossly overreacting to the circumstances, then the legitimacy of the powerful is diminished. This, of course, was what the freedom rides and voter registration campaigns had partially accomplished. When the police attacked or arrested people for merely trying to use public transport on a equal footing, for asking for food at a lunch room counter, or tried to intimidate black voters, many people (including many whites) felt incensed at what they saw on television and in the paper.
However, there is a second mode of tactics that can also adopted instead of nonviolence. These tactics involve using increased levels of militant action, but action that must be somewhat covert in the face of the great power of the dominators. It was to this second type of activity that the black liberation movement was to increasingly turn. It its extreme form, the second choice may manifest itself as terrorism. Ironically, terrorism arises often at the same point in history as nonviolent resistance, and for the same reason -- both tactics avoid a head-on confrontation that would almost certainly fail in the face of the other side's resources. Fortunately, only seldom did things reach so extreme a state in the black liberation movement, but that chance was certainly there -- and may still be to some extent.
Black militancy's rise was most obviously outside of the South, particularly in the Northeastern U. S. -- and to some degree on the West coast. Younger, more urban blacks, began to feel that the leaders of the civil rights movement were merely a collection of "Uncle Toms." By this derogatory label, they wished to imply that the older, more Southern, more middle-class, more often ministerial, civil rights leaders they had been watching for some years were too inclined to identify with the aggressor. They felt these leaders of the NAACP, SCLC, and similar organizations had too much faith in the motives of whites and were too ready to compromise and accommodate with whites. Perhaps some of this was the result of expectations set off my minor improvements in the black condition that meant that such expectations would now grow faster than the rate at which objective political and economic conditions could possibly improve. Whatever the reason, the new young black leaders were not willing to wait with the same patience previously shown by the leaders of the civil rights movement. In but one example, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee embarked on a much more radical campaign in 1966, partly as a result of their election of Stokely Charmichael to leader of SNCC. Charmichael would be followed in 1967 by H. Rap Brown. Both leaders of SNCC rejected accomodationism and integrationims with the white community in favor of "black power." Black power in contrast to the civil rights movement emphasized racial equality, but not integration. Black power as a dogma assumed that instead of hoping that whites would come to the assistance of the black community, the black community had everything it needed on its own to rise out of oppression. Further it was argued that cooperation within integrated SMOs had been coopted by whites. As a consequence, black power asserted that as long as SMOs were integrated, many blacks would still be assigned the subordinate positions within these organizations. This, in turn, was seen as an extension of black people having "introjected dominant cultural values." In simpler words, the culture had so long told blacks that they were second class citizens or were inferior in other ways, that many black people had developed a negative self-image. The leaders of the black liberation movement felt that it was therefore necessary therefore that black people quit "begging" for equal treatment, quit waiting for "Whitey" to do something for the black man or woman. Instead, black power argued that blacks should generate from within their own community the sense of pride, dignity, and purpose that would allow black people an effective and self-determined future.
Because of these ideological emphases, black liberation, black power, and "Black is Beautiful" became nearly synonymous phrases. Instead of trying to dress like whites, and instead of using cosmetic products intended to make one appear more like whites, it was argued that the black man or woman should renew the pride they had known in Africa. Thus did the African form of dress, African music, African art, and blackness itself come to be seen as desirable cultural elements. The followers of black liberation felt that the problem here-to-fore was as much created by a negative psychological sense of blackness among Afro-Americans as it was a matter of overt oppression by whites. Why else, it was asked had blacks not demanded their rights, stood up and taken them if necessary, even used force and violence if need be, to have obtained their proper place in U. S. society?
Many of the black liberation leaders began to equate the black struggle within the U. S. to struggles by the peoples of many Third World[1] countries against capitalism as represented by the U. S. "Military-Industrial Complex." Why, they asked, should blacks be forcibly drafted into the army before anyone else because they were too poor to get college draft deferments? Why, it was asked, should they be told to fight and die to "make the world safe for democracy," only to return home to find themselves as powerless and exploited as before. Colonialism by the U. S. overseas was seen as based on a routinization of violence, both physical and psychological against native people's of other countries. The result was that some began to argue that retaliatory violence was not only necessary, but justifiable against the common oppressor (i.e., the U. S. Military-Industrial Complex). For example, it was argued by Franz Fanon that colonialism was itself "violence in its natural state, and will only yield when confronted with greater violence." Fanon went on to say that ". . . at the level of [oppressed] individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex, and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores self-respect." (Fanon, 19??, pp. ??). These were inflammatory words not previously heard from the mouths of the leaders of the black movement. Who was this angry man saying such dramatic and dangerous things?
Fanon was born in the Caribbean island of Martinique in 1925 and educated in France, but eventually joined the Algerian nationalist movement. As we have begun to see, his anti colonial writings had a strong impact on the thinking of the U. S. black liberationists.
In the eyes of Fanon and others who agreed with him, black liberation could essentially be defined by the elements of self-defense, rejection of nonviolence, an emphasis on black cultural and political autonomy and the rejection of white values, and control from within their own communities for blacks.
The proceeding failure of moderate black SMOs to stem the flow of violence against blacks by both white civilians and police led some of the newer organizations' members to arm themselves with guns. However, "the idea of black men defending themselves with force has always inspired horror in whites." (Skolnick, 19??, p. 150). The intensity of the conflict between young black militants and the police reached a white-hot pitch as a result. And in the mind of the police, the problem came to be symbolized by the very existence of a new SMO that emerged from the black movement, specifically the Black Panthers.
The Black Panther Party was a militant SMO started in 1966 in Oakland, California, by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. The two leaders called on blacks to arm themselves. Widely misunderstood both then and now was their emphasis on the importance of not striking first, but being prepared to defended oneself with guns and other weapons from white attacks. However, most of the country only viewed the act of some black men arming themselves as a precursor to a black revolution. Thus were the Panthers viewed with shock, alarm, and hostility by white America. The Panthers for their part began to espouse a rhetoric that equated the presence of police in the black communities with that of an occupying army in less developed nations.
The Panthers were not quite always the nightmare from Hell that the police expected them to be. For example, the Panthers provided free breakfasts for the poor in several cities and they even opened schools and medical clinics to serve ghetto residents. Nonetheless, and not surprisingly, tensions with the police continued. Huey Newton, for example, was found guilty in 1967 of killing an Oakland, California policeman. However, the decision was overturned in an appeal's court. Newton was again charged with murder in a street fight in 1974, and this time he fled to Cuba.
The organization spread to other cities but everywhere the reaction was the same. The police felt that surely the Panthers were the forefront of a revolution that must be stopped at all costs. For example, in 1969, during a police on a Panther residence in Chicago, the police killed Panther leader Fred Hampton as he lay in his bed.
Maybe the police shouldn't have worried so much. Internal schisms and bickering among Panther leaders eventually led to the decline of the influence of the Panthers during the 1970s.
It has been widely noted that the black movement became much less evident during the 1970s and 80s. There may well be several reasons for this.
First, black liberation in its more spectacular forms seems to represent a possible case of an "expressive" social movement. Expressive social movements are ones in which participants are involved primarily for the emotional satisfaction that results from seeing themselves as morally and righteously correct. It is felt that sooner or later they will thoroughly trounce the rascals that they perceive as the source of their problem. However, movement adherents have frequently found that after attempting such a satisfying frontal confrontation intended to satisfy their emotional needs, their power was insufficient to prevail. Under such conditions, the movement may find that it must forego some emotional satisfaction in exchange for the adoption of more subtle tactics which are less likely to provoke an overwhelming hostile response from a dangerous enemy. According to Turner and Killian (1987, p. 301), expressive tendencies in a social movement mean a preference for coercion rather than for the tactics of bargaining, facilitation, or persuasion [these latter tactics being more typical of a strategic movement] . . . ".
The very emotionality of expressive tactics makes them a difficult choice to sustain over long periods of time. By the 1970s, the "older" SMOs that had tended to emphasize strategic tactics that emphasized for reasoned, long term strategies had begun a new ascendancy over the militant SMOs of the black liberation movement. The NAACP , for example, had continued it quite and steady work all the while lost to the hot eye of the mass media, and now their work continued with the same quite dedication that had characterized it for more than half a century. Indeed, it can be argued that some of the steam went out of the black liberation movement precisely because of an increased democratization of society. Many of the goals of the early 1960s had been met. The ballot box and the courtroom had finally been proving responsive to many grievances, thus diminishing the need for extra-instituional tactics. The democratization of society was especially noticeable in the social sphere, less so in the economic one. Socially, by the end of the 1970s, Afro-Americans had made huge strides into the mainstream of American life. Black and white children seldom attended separate schools. Theaters, restaurants and other public facilities were now shared, popular music had racially integrated followings, and Affirmative Action even appeared to be bringing economic equality to many minority members. In spite of widespread belief in Affirmative Action by liberals and great hostility by conservatives, it can be argued that both have a somewhat erroneous view of its real effects. It is possible to argue, for example, that in many ways Affirmative Action has been one of the major means of a Marxist "rationalization" of the system. Marx used this term to describe attempts by the powerful to make a social system the powerful support and benefit from look more reasonable, "rational" and helpful to the less powerful than it really is. A Marxist might argue, for example, that while Affirmative Action opened up some desirable jobs to a relatively small proportion of Afro-Americans and other minorities, it has actually done little or nothing to modify the institutional root causes of a stratified society. It does almost nothing, for example, to equalize the quality of schools, to insure good medical care for the poor, to provide high quality employment within in poor areas. Perhaps it has actually presented the appearance of change without really incurring any substantial rearrangement of societal institutions and resources. Nonetheless, for a number of years it led to the perception by Afro-Americans that their collective economic circumstances were getting better, and to the extent that perceptions were thus altered, the steam that would drive the locomotive of collective behavior was considerably lessened.
Progress was, however, sufficient enough in other areas of life, such as the political arena, that the almost unimaginable happened. In 1988, a black man stood at least a chance of being nominated for President of the United States by one of the two major political parties. Jesse Louis Jackson, the potential nominee, was born in 1941 in Greenville, South Carolina. Jackson is a Baptist minister, and was active in the Southern black protest movement with Martin Luther King, Jr. during the early 1960s. He eventually founded PUSH (People United to Save Humanity) and later called for a movement composed of a "Rainbow Coalition" of peoples of many colors. In 1988, he was to run for nomination for President of the U. S. during the national Democratic convention. Jackson won 30 percent of the delegates at the convention, a better showing than his first try in 1984. However, he declined to run in the 1992 election, instead throwing his support behind Bill Clinton.
The black movement has recently shown signs of movement back towards its former militancy. When, in 1992, black motorist Rodney King was severely beaten by Los Angeles police officers, the city erupted in mass violence and looting. Perhaps not coincidentally, thereafter in 1993 Los Angeles elected a conservative white Republican businessman as its new mayor. To date the L. A. riot remains a relatively isolated incident and cannot be described as a true revitalization of a militant black movement. It should be noted, however, that in dollars adjusted for inflation, the area of Los Angeles that exploded was actually more poverty stricken than it was when the 1965 riot occurred. In 1965 the city was primarily a biracial city composed of but two racial groups, blacks and whites. Today, the city has many other large minority populations. Still little known apparently even today, is the fact that more Hispanics were arrested in L. A. during the 1992 riot than were members of any other ethnic category. Also different from the L. A. riot of the 1960s is the fact that much of the violence was directed by one minority group against another minority group. Whereas relative deprivation of Afro-Americans in the past was largely measured by blacks comparing themselves to whites or well-to-do blacks[2], now we find that frequently feelings of relative deprivation involve one minority group comparing itself with one or more other minority groups. One result is a good deal of hostility between minority groups. This situation presents even well-meaning members of the majority with a problem. If measures are taken to improve the lot of one minority in a city like L. A., for example, without taking the same action for the other minority groups, tension is actually heightened due to increased relative deprivation. Such a circumstance does not bode well for an organized, integrated "Rainbow Coalition" movement of the poor and disadvantaged in America. Instead of hostility against the dominant class, minorities are inclined more so than in the 1960s to see each other as villains or competitors. In some ways, the situation is not unlike the one that existed just after the civil war. At that time in history, Northern political interests often found themselves outvoted in the South by large numbers of rural Southerners. There is substantial evidence that to a degree some Northern interests set out to heighten tensions and hostilities between rural Southern blacks and whites. The reason should be obvious -- such a situation would split the vote of rural Southerners thereby make it relatively easier to create a house divided that could no longer stand against the carpetbaggers interests.
Another way in which the current situation differs from the 1960s can be noticed. In the past there was a relatively strong coalition between the Jewish minority in the U. S. and blacks Americans. The former supplied considerable economic and political resources to the Afro-American cause. Now, however, in William Raspberry's (a black editorialist) words speaking of today's black youth, "The generation for whom the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s is summed up as a philosophical struggle between a wimpish Martin Luther King, Jr. and a macho Malcolm X has no memory of the coalition [between Jews and blacks]." (Raspberry, 1994). In contrast to the former alliance, recent black leader Louis Farrakhan has been making a career of attacking U. S. Jews by accusing them of being a major source of black problems.
The current leader of the NAACP, Ben Chavis has embraced Farrakhan as an ally in an attempt to strengthen the NAACP during a time when it is under fire for not being more visible. Raspberry quotes an anonymous "wise friend" as saying "The folks the NAACP has been relating to have moved on, and there are two ways to deal with that fact. You can broaden and build on your present base, or you can walk away from it to fashion something entirely new. The second way is very risky."
We shall shortly see that in many ways the black movement in the U. S. faded almost seamlessly into the student movement of the 1960s. However, to see how this came about we need to examine the long-term origins of student movements themselves.
While it is often felt by the general public that the student movement in the U. S. started during the 1960s, in truth the boisterous episodes of the youthful movement seen in the 60s were only the most recent manifestation of a tradition whose roots go back many, many more years. Bennett Berger (1967) has pointed out that many of the themes commonly seen by the public and media as "invented" by the youth movement in the 1960s already existed among American literary expatriates in Europe as long ago as the 1920s. Indeed, Berger goes on to tell us that according to Malcolm Cowley's book Exile's Return, even some elements described by Berger regarding the youth movement of the 1920s (especially some of the lifestyle themes of the expatriates), had themselves originated more than one hundred years ago in the form of European "Bohemian culture." According to Cowley, among the features of the earlier Bohemian artist culture was the idea of "salvation by the child" -- that each of us when born has unlimited potential that is slowly crushed by a standardized society and a mechanical style of education. Secondly, Bohemian culture placed great value on the centrality of self-expression and self-fulfillment or what we would today call "doing your own thing." Thirdly, there was an attraction to paganism. Paganism is characterized, at least according to Cowley, as overwhelmingly erotic with an emphasis on female flesh and fertility, males symbols of virility (such as beards and boots), and the concept that sexual intercourse is one way of setting one's self "free." Fourthly, there existed the idea of living for and in the present and a rejection of deferred gratification as virtuous (instead the catch phrase is "We want it NOW!"). Fifthly, Puritanical value systems and repressive legislation are viewed as the number one enemy of all the really desirable things in life. Sixthly, bohemianism emphasized equality of the sexes. Finally, yet another focus was a romantic love of the exotic, especially far away places (in Berger's words, "They do it better in . . .'(You name it)')."
So student movements did not originate in the U. S. entirely in the 1960s. For example, half of the Harvard senior class was expelled in 1823 for participating in disruptive activity, and students were involved in anti-draft campaigns during the Civil War (Altbach and Peterson, 1971). As we shall shortly see, U. S. student activism has shown a cyclical pattern of activity all through the Twentieth Century. However, we shall also see that until the 1960s, most student activism closely reflected the political activities and concerns of the larger, adult society. It was in the 1960s, by contrast, that an entirely new type of student movement was to emerge.
One of the earliest of the Twentieth Century groups of student activists was the Intercollegiate Socialist Society (ISS). The ISS however was not entirely run by students. Instead, it was founded by adults at the turn of the century to promote an interest in socialism among young college men and women. It concerned itself largely with debates over issues such as U. S. rearmament and the desirability of entry into WWI, with the right to free speech on campuses, with immigration policy, with the desirability of establishing a World Court, and with various specific aspects of socialism. Unlike the 1960s movement, it paid little, if any attention to issues of university administration and the connections of the universities to the outside world except that in 1916, the organization voted to oppose the introduction of military training on campuses. In 1919, the ISS changed its name to League for Industrial Democracy.
A second organization existed at about the same time. The Young People's Socialist League had been organized in 1907. While it was a broad-based movement, it showed some presence on the nation's college campuses. By 1913 it claimed over 4000 members in 112 chapters. It aimed primarily at supporting political campaigns on behalf of socialist candidates.
In the 1920s, strong student sentiment in support of the League of Nations (the forerunner of today's United Nations) sparked the formation of the National Student Committee for the Limitation of Armaments. A similar antiwar sentiment was reflected in the decision of many Christian youth organizations of the same period to pass strong antiwar statements.
By the late 1920s, the Student League for Industrial Democracy that we mentioned above had grown to seventy-five student chapters and claimed about 2000 members. Its major activities during the Twenties were campaigns against ROTC on campus and opposition to U. S. intervention in Nicaragua and Mexico. One function apparently served by SLID at this point in history was the training of leaders for the labor, Socialist, and other reform movements.
In 1927, the first convocation of the American Federation of Youth was held. The AFY represented fifty youth organizations and sponsored a platform that was opposed to compulsory military training, imperialist foreign policy, and child labor.
It was not until the 1930s that the United States saw the beginnings of the first truly "mass student movement" in U. S. history. Several hundred thousand students participated in peace strikes at one time or another during the decade. However, the "generation gap" that was to be so much a part of the 1960s youth movement was still largely absent. Most student organizations of the day were affiliated with adult organizations. Even the student antiwar movement of the day was moved more by conservative isolationism than by political liberalism, and it was still confined almost entirely to cosmopolitan areas of the nation (Albach and Peterson, p. 6).
The Great Depression of the late 1920s and early 30s began the radicalization of student organizations. Support among all Americans for socialism reached a peak for the Twentieth Century at about this time. This fact is not very surprising since the Depression seemed to herald a potential collapse of capitalism. Social movements tend to begin as ones which only wish to modify normative ways of doing things, but if such changes are impossible or do not work, movements often begin to reorganize themselves to challenge the core values the norms are based upon. As the Depression deepened, more and more people began to question whether capitalism had within itself the means to recover from the crisis. This doubt is what drove the fortunes of the socialist and communist movements to a peak for the Twentieth Century in the U. S.
The Communist and Socialist Parties that had previously avoided recruitment on campuses reversed their former policy and became active in the universities by the early 30s. Even the Christian student movement was radicalized. The Council of Christian Associations (which united the YWCA and the YMCA) published materials in favor of collective ownership within the U. S. of natural resources and public utilities. Surprising to many people today we find that in 1938 the first National Assembly of Student Christian Groups passed a resolution that declared capitalism (and fascism) to be unacceptable to them and in favor of the goals of Marxian socialism.
The antiwar issue, however, was still the most dramatic of the period. A poll of over 20,000 college students conducted in 1931 found that nearly forty percent of the respondents said they would not participate in any war, and another one-third said they would fight only if the U. S. were actually invaded (Rawick 1957). In another poll conducted by Brown University's student paper involving over 20,000 college student respondents, about half of the students polled at sixty-five campuses said they would bear arms only if the U. S. was invaded.
In overview, the student organizations of the 1930s involved large numbers of students in political activism for the first time in the U. S., but a cohesive and coherent movement did not result. Factional infighting was chronic, and the ties to adult movements left the student movements with little political autonomy. However, it is also true that many of those involved in these movements were to become the parents of the early student organizers of the 1960s student campaigns.
With the 1940s and the advent of World War II, the student movement simply disappeared. The old Marxian dictum that "external threat creates internal cohesion" seems to have been operative. All Americans apparently felt it was necessary to pull together in the face of the Axis campaigns that drew Americans into battle in Europe and the Orient. Even after the war was over attempts to reactivate the student movement were largely unsuccessful. One reason was that a high proportion of students were returning veterans who often started a family during or after the war and were consequently primarily preoccupied with making a living to support their families.
The adult political Left was also in disarray at the time, and could not provide much in the way of guidance or resources for potential constituents of student movements.
The fifties saw the continuation of the quite on campuses. The Korean War had much the same effects that WWII had on the previous generation. Additionally, the fifties were a time of strengthening political repression in America. Senator Joseph McCarthy had launched the "Big Red Scare" -- with its associated "witch-hunt" for Communists.
McCarthy had been one of the first to recognize the potential of the spreading number of television sets in the U. S. for mobilizing political and social movements. The introduction of television made it much easier to mobilize large numbers of people, many of whom might never have actually met, into a social movement or political action organization. McCarthy and his right-hand man (later to be President), Richard M. Nixon, made sure that the hearings conducted by McCarthy's House UnAmerican Activities Committee (or "HUAC" ) were televised. (The so-called "hearings" were more like cross-examinations that lacked any sense of a due process of law).
Initially, McCarthy picked up a very strong level of support from television viewers, many of whom seemed to believe that McCarthy represented a thin line between themselves and an imminent communist takeover of the U. S.. In the long run, however, very few dedicated Communist Party members were actually found to exist. Eventually McCarthy's ideological storm-trooper tactics offended most Americans' sense of fair play. Nonetheless, it seems clear today that the general climate that surrounded McCathy's activities had a chilling effect on any left-wing political activity in the U. S.
While there was little left-wing student activism to be seen during the 50s, a number of conservative student movement organizations did spring up during the 1960s for the first time in many years. In 1960, for example, Young Americans for Freedom came into existence. The YAF was to be one of the few strong opponents of the liberal and leftist student SMOs during the 1960s.
With the onset of the 1960s, the student movement did begin to revive. As we shall see, in many ways events taking place among Afro-Americans were to actually stimulate much of the 1960s revival of student activism. However, the student movement of the 1960s was in some ways unlike any seen before. The new student movement was not so much organized around the political and economic issues that had been central to student activists in previous decades. Nor would it any longer be just a "junior" version of the adult-oriented Old Left. The Old Left had been in fact, mostly composed of adult adherents. It had also been centered primarily around support among workers for the doctrines of socialism and communism. In contrast, the new student movement was simultaneously more autonomous than before and also more inclined to hearken back to the values of Bohemian culture. This latter trend was sufficiently well-developed that by the end of the 60s there was to be a word for this new outlook. People would speak of the "Counterculture," a way of life and a world view that stood in stark contrast to those of the "Military-Industrial Complex." If the Protestant ethic was the mainstay of adult culture and the military, then some student activists reasoned, the opposite might well be desirable. If hard work in the factories was seen as good by the leaders of the Military-Industrial complex, then perhaps dropping out and "doing one's own thing" should be pursued instead. If sobriety was the a goal of adult culture, the use of drugs and alcohol for recreation and self-discovery should be a good alternative. If the "Protestant Ethic" of self-denial, planning for the future, and socking away cash for a rainy day were the values of parents, then perhaps living in the here-and-now, rejecting materialism, and spending freely and immediately (and dividing up the gains with one's friends) might be preferable. It is readily seen then that by the end of the 1960s the counterculture had become markedly distinct from the Old Left.
The black movement and the student movement have both been included together in this chapter because ultimately it becomes hard at times to say whether or not the two were really altogether separate movements during the 1960s! One way in which the similarity can be seen is evident when we examine the origins of what was to become the largest, arguably the most powerful, and the most militant of the large student organizations of the 1960s. The organization in question was called Students for a Democratic Society (better known at the time simply as "SDS").
A major turning point in the organization of the SDS into an effective voice for student activists came in June of 1962 when about sixty members gathered at a wooded camp owned by the American Labor Federation. The location was Port Huron, Michigan, just outside of the city of Detroit. For many years, SDS had been the student wing of an adult SMO, the League for Industrial Democracy. Only, however, about 1960 did it start to take on an identity separate from the parent organization. It celebrated and symbolized its new status by changing its name to differ from that of the "parent" adult organization. In many ways SDS chose to model its new identity after the mostly black Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ( or "SNCC" -- see above). According to one observer, "SDS field secretary Tom Hayden, a journalism student at the University of Michigan and editor of the campus newspaper, worked with SNCC on voter registration in Georgia and Mississippi, was beaten and jailed, and sent back vivid reports to SDS members. . . . Hayden foresaw the emergence of a white student movement parallel to the pioneering black student movement, with which it might coalesce. . . . [He] sensed that what was needed more than theories and programs was a comprehensive moral vision of the possibility of fundamental change in a nation paralyzed by Cold War, both domestic and foreign. (Burns, 1990, pp. 56-57).
The meeting in Michigan had been called to try to reshape SDS. One way in which this was to be done was by writing a "manifesto" for the emerging white student movement. What was written down in the manifesto was to become chapter and verse of the ideology of the 1960s student movement. The name given to the document that emerged from the meeting was the "Port Huron Statement." It offered a scathing critique of American life and institutions.
The Port Huron statement found the U. S. to be guilty of racism, militarism, and generalized citizen apathy. It proposed that these should be replaced by new goals that would include empowerment of the individual and a new sense of shared community. Also emphasized was the emerging youth movement preoccupation with being "self-fulfilled." Much emphasis was therefore placed on seeking self-actualization and "authenticity" and "relevancy." Moreover, the Port Huron statement urged the transformation of private troubles and grievances into political concerns. It went on to say, "We would replace power rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance by power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason and creativity. As a social system we seek the establishment of a democracy of individual participation." (Albert and Albert, 1984, p. 181).
The initial focus of SDS after the generation of the Port Huron statement was an attempt to build an interracial movement of the poor. Employing SNCC-style community organization tactics, SDS attempt to build a grass roots movement with activities centered in the white and black ghettoes of Chicago, Cleveland, Newark, Baltimore, and in other northern cities. Nonetheless, even by fall of 1964 a full-fledged student movement had not yet developed. However, all that was about to change due to the short-sightedness of a few university administrators.
In October on the Berkeley campus of the University of California, two deans and one campus police chief took it upon themselves to approach a table in an outdoor area at the center of the campus. The table displayed Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) literature and a collection jar. When CORE organizer Jack Weinberg refused to take down his table, he was arrested. A large crowd of students gathered around Weinberg and began shouting at the police "Take us all!". One student in the crowd, Mario Savio, was a member of the campus Friends of SNCC. Savio had only recently returned from a racial equality campaign in Mississippi. Savio leaped atop a police car that by now was surrounded by students (but only after removing his shoes!). He gave an impassioned speech for the release of Weinberg. Savio would later lead a sit-in at the administration building after negotiations with the police failed. This incident was the start of a long career for Savio as a leader of the emerging student movement.
Meantime, the police car would remain surrounded and stationary for the next thirty-two hours (with Weinberg inside the whole time), as one student after another from a large crowd climbed to the top of the car to give impromptu speeches.
As pointed out by Burns (1990, p. 61), the apparently spontaneous explosion was in reality as carefully orchestrated ahead of time as had been the apparently spontaneous decision of Rosa Parks to refuse to move to the back of the bus many years before in Montgomery, Alabama. In 1960 a number of Berkeley students had tried to attend hearings conducted by Senator Joseph McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington as it began its Big Red Witch-Hunt. The students had been repeatedly denied admission. Their frustration with what they felt was this flagrant violation of democracy became the impetus for a sit-in on the steps of the building in which the hearings were taking place. The sit-in was, of course, a tactic borrowed from Southern black students. Like many of those earlier students and their supporters the end result was that they were washed down the stairs with a high-pressure fire hose and dozens arrested. Up until this point in history the students had tried to protect the civil rights of others, now they felt that it was their own civil rights that were in jeopardy.
One result of the Weinberg incident was that in the days that followed many normally disparate student organizations joined together into "the Free Speech Movement." The Free speech movement included members of groups stretching across the whole political gamut -- from supporters of conservative Senator Barry Goldwater and campus Young Republicans on the one hand, to socialists and Maoists on the other. The primary glue that bound this unlikely group together was a shared hostility to what they perceived as autocratic authoritarianism. Many felt that the rights of free speech and individual conduct in general were being stifled by the Establishment and by the general mood of conformity of the 50s. In both structure and process, the Free Speech Movement sought to create an true manifestation of participatory democracy. To a large extent they succeeded in the beginning, at least within their own movement. Privileged information and behind the scenes deals within the movement were unimaginable to the constituents and adherents.
The Free Speech Movement, however, soon began to lose a bit of steam, but was once again helped along through the ironical mechanism of a reactionary set of public officials.
The Chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley brought new charges against Savio and others. Over 1000 students promptly took over the main administration building singing "We Shall Overcome" (a standard selection of the earlier black civil rights movement in the South). The Governor of California, Edmund G. Brown, inadvertently further helped the students' cause by sending in hundreds of police who arrested over 800 demonstrators. In response, the Berkeley graduate students organized a strike that shut down the university. Surprisingly to many outsiders, the Berkeley faculty subsequently voted by a wide majority to support the strike. Berkeley faculty of the time apparently felt that the Free Speech Movement was "about more than just freedom of speech. Most participants . . . [feel] alienated in the academic assembly line of this huge, impersonal assembly line." [Berkeley had over 27,000 students at the time]. The faculty had also noticed that the students were "ill-housed. . . and ill-nourished not in the material sense, but in the intellectual and spiritual senses. As the multiversity has climbed to higher-and-higher peaks of research productivity, material riches, and bureaucratic complexity, the students have fallen into deeper-and-deeper abysses of hostility and estrangement." (Wolin and Schaar, 1965, p. 360).
By 1965 what had started out as a minor military matter in which then-President Jack Kennedy had sent a number of military advisors to Vietnam had escalated into a full scale conflict involving U. S. ground soldier. Nearly 200,000 Marine and Army troops found themselves stationed in this far-off and almost unheard of corner of the world. Support for the war was never uniformly positive in the U. S.. One indication of this was the fact that in April of 1965, twenty-five thousand U. S. citizens held a protest march in Washington, D. C. to let then-President Lyndon Johnson know of their opposition to his escalating U. S. involvement in Vietnam. It was the first organized demonstration against the war, and also the largest antiwar demonstration the country had ever witnessed. Perhaps less well remember today than the march itself is the fact that the march was organized by SDS. One result was an instant increase in media exposure for SDS, followed by a sharp increase in those joining the organization.
SDS was, however, not without company from unrelated SMOs who were also gaining both membership and momentum. For example, in Oakland, California, protesters laid their bodies on train tracks in front of troop trains carrying soldiers bound for Vietnam. The "Assembly of Underrepresented People" managed to organize the first national antiwar coalition that spanned a number of SMOs. Collectively, the umbrella organization became known as the National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam (or NCC). NCC was composed of thirty-three separate organizations who had banded together to increase their overall effectiveness. It was able to send thousands of protesters into the streets both across the nation and in other countries.
Somewhat surprisingly, the burst of growth and activity that characterized the antiwar movement during 1965 seemed to become somewhat stagnant during the following year. This apparent inactivity actually masked the fact that much energy was going into organizational activities, especially at the grassroots level. Behind the scenes there was much preparation for the next big round of activity. Meanwhile, the NCC was in deep trouble during 1966 from problems within its own ranks. There was substantial, nearly insurmountable, squabbling going on within NCC between the Communists, the Trotskyists, and the pacifists. The final result was that in November of 1966 the old NCC was replaced from within by the newly formed Spring Mobilization Committee. The aim of this new organization was to hold massive demonstrations of mainstream Americans. "The Mobe" intended to demonstrate the breadth of opposition to the war. To this end, they planned mass demonstrations in New York and San Francisco for early 1967. The new strategy appeared to be working. For example in February of 1967, over twenty-five hundred nicely dressed, middle class women from the Women's' Strike for Peace marched right into the Pentagon itself and demanded to see "the generals who send our sons to Vietnam!" (Burns, 1990, p. 72).
Also early in '67, over a quarter of a million diverse people showed up in New York's Central Park on April 15th to protest the war. (Among the speakers that day were Martin Luther King, Jr. and Stokely Charmichael).
Yet more fuel was poured on the mounting fire of motivation during 1966-67 by General Lewis Hershey, the head of the Selective Service (otherwise known as the "draft board"). At Hershey's order during this period, draft boards across the nation were instructed to begin inducting male college students who had received lower academic marks. Peter Henig and Kathy Wilkerson of SDS managed to unearth a related document that was entitled "Channeling." The document made it clear that the selective service saw it as its duty to use draft deferments and inductions to force young men into defense-related occupations. Inductions were now approaching 40,000 middle-class students per month. These were young people who had here-to-fore been largely insulated from the threat of the war (unlike their poorer brethren in the ghettoes). They were now finding the war threat to be a very personal one.
It has been widely noted that prison riots of a political nature became much more frequent in the 1960s and afterwards. At least part of the explanation for this increase in riots is probably traceable to the fact that the 1960s were the first time that a large number of middle class youth were put in prison. Their crimes for which they were imprisoned were somewhat unusual by previous standards. They were incarcerated primarily engaging in recreational drug use and draft resistance. Before that point in time, prison inmates has typically lacked education, writing skills, and a political understanding of the world. Putting large numbers of well-educated youth in prison had some unusual effects. For example, the new more educated inmates promptly began producing underground newspapers for the other inmates. These newspapers offered a new way for prisoners to look at their situation. The writers often analyzed the plight of inmates in sociological terms, and pointed to sociological biases that may have helped to place them there. Instead on offenders being seen as evil in all cases, there began to emerge the view that many of them were actually victims of processes of social structure that had biased the odds against them long before they were arrested. The better writing and organizational skills of the new inmates certainly contributed to the new outbreaks of prison riots as a much higher proportion of inmates began to question the legitimacy of the prison, and even "the System" that put them there. So too, did making college students new-found vulnerability to the draft have much the same effect on the world outside of the prison. Undoubtedly what had formerly been seen as largely a "poor man's problem" -- the draft and Vietnam -- now became a case study of the old Marxist dictum that external threat creates internal cohesion. The black movement and the student movement found themselves opposing a "common enemy" in the form of the Vietnam War and the draft.
SDS was now growing by leaps and bounds. According to Burns, "the bulk of the newcomers were younger, came from west of the Mississippi, often from the big state universities, and their style was both more militant and more libertarian, reflecting he influence of the blossoming "counterculture" . . . The new breed of activists, dubbed "prairie power," took the reins from the old guard." (Burns, 1990, p. 75).
One result of their growing numbers was that student militants changed from using tactics of nonviolent protest to outright militant resistance. More and more, takeovers of campus administration buildings and violent confrontations with police became commonplace. The focus was placed on rejecting war research and ROTC on campus, resistance to on-campus recruiting by the military, the policies of DOW chemical (the maker of napalm bombs- "fire jelly"), and the practices of the Central Intelligence Agency.
In March of 1967, David Harris (who had recently resigned as Student Body President at Stanford University) and Dennis Sweeney as well as other members of the Peace and Liberation Commune from Palo Alto (California's "silicon valley") joined together with Berkeley activists to create "the Resistance." This new SMO called for a nationwide turn-in of draft cards during the coming October. Harris and Sweeney had worked with SNCC in Mississippi and they had hopes that the Resistance would become a sort of "white SNCC." (Ironically, SNCC itself had recently decided that black people must demonstrate that they are able to help themselves. As a result, they had asked their white members to leave the organization. (In the words of one long-forgotten black militant youth "Being a student is temporary, being black is permanent!").
The California counterculture's influence was much in evidence in the Resistance with much stress being placed on the idea of draft resistance as a act of freeing oneself to become an authentic, self-liberated individual.
Competition from the Resistance did not, however, mean noticeably slow the growth of SDS. The number of SDS chapters was now about 300 and growing. SDS helped to organize a demonstration of a few hundred students at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. They intended to offer nonviolent obstruction of recruiters from DOW chemical corporation. The reaction, however, by the University came in the form of a terrifyingly violent assault by police -- clad in full riot gear -- that bloodied many in the crowd. The crowd reacted by throwing rocks and bricks at the troops. Never had a U. S. campus seen such a level of confrontation.
October had arrived, and 1500 young men did indeed turn in their draft cards as one of the activities in the first National Day of Non cooperation. In October also, about 100,000 people marched in Washington, D. C. in protest of the war. Of these, about 50,000 continued on the Pentagon building intending to continue their activities there. What ensued was a real "happening." A collection of individuals describing themselves as witches, warlocks, holy men, seers, prophets, mystics, saints, sorcerers, shamen, troubadours, minstrels, bards, road men, and madmen held a ceremony intended to "exorcise" the Pentagon of the "evil spirits" who dwelled within. A few protesters made it into the halls of the giant building, but they were quickly beaten and ejected from the building. As night settled, many gathered together just outside and began singing softly. The mood was peaceful and reflective, a fact mirrored by their choice of "Silent Night" as one of their renditions. Some authors have described the general atmosphere as one of religious awe and contemplation. Nonetheless, late in the darkness after the media had departed, a large contingent of U. S. Marshall's and MPs attacked the crowd with clubs and rifle butts. The aggressors appeared for some reason to single out women for much of the harshest violence.
At about the same time, the U. S. military for the first time gave the President Johnson a pessimistic report on the progress of the war, but they also asked for another quarter of a million men to add to the half-million men already stationed in Vietnam. At home, even the so-called "Silent Majority" seemed to be running out of patience with the lack of progress that characterized the war.
Senator Eugene McCarthy, a liberal anti-war Democrat, was beginning to make his bid for the next Democratic Presidential nomination. McCarthy was showing surprising strength -- due in no small part to the so-called "Children's Crusade" of youthful volunteer antiwar activists who worked tirelessly at the grassroots level for his campaign. It was in this climate of change that Robert Kennedy, brother of former President John Kennedy, also threw himself into the race for the nomination.
Meanwhile, Columbia University, located in a deteriorated part of New York's Harlem, had decided to build a controversial gymnasium on its campus that would destroy a considerable amount of low-income housing that would not be replaced. To add insult in injury in the eyes of those opposed to the gymnasium, the facility would not be made available for use by Harlem residents. This situation served as a precipitating event for a demonstration that would eventually see a large number of students seize control of three major campus buildings. Nearly a week of occupation of the buildings would elapse before the university's administration would decide to call in the police. When the police were called in, there were over 700 students arrested and about 150 of them injured.
Events were going from bad to worse for the New Left. Early in 1968, within a two month period, both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy were each felled by assassins' bullets. At the same time, the war had been intensifying and widening as desperate tactics found favor at the White House where anxiety had replaced the earlier sense of optimism that had turned out to be misplaced.
In this climate, the Democratic Convention was held in Chicago with the intention of nominating a Democrat to run for President. The antiwar National Mobilization Committee had planned another activity somewhat like that they held at the Pentagon earlier. They hoped to encourage a large "walkout" of the convention by mainstream delegates. This would demonstrate, they felt, the widespread displeasure with President Johnson's management of the Vietnam War. They found, however, they were going to have to share Chicago with a more militant SMO, the Yippies (short for Youth International Party).
The Yippies were largely former hippies who had decided the Establishment was not about to be willing to leave them alone to "do their own thing" or "get into their own bag, Man." The result was a group of former hippies who had become politicized with a vengeance -- unlike the rest of the hippie community.
The conservative and aging Mayor of Chicago, Richard Daley, steadfastly refused to grant permits for camping in the public parks or for protest marches, declaring instead in an act of blatant political grandstanding that "As long as I'm Mayor, there will be law-and-order in the streets of Chicago." His belligerence, however, played right into the hands of the demonstrators. The new tactic they had decided upon was to try to "bring the war home to the streets of America" (in the words of Yippie founders Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Rene Davis). The students expected the politicians and police to act repressively and they even felt this was a good turn of events. It would demonstrate, they felt, that the same antidemocratic, industrial, militaristic forces that they believed abused the rights of the citizens of the Third World were likely to be employed at home whenever anything threatened "business as usual." So much, they said, for the legitimacy of the rhetoric that the war was being conducted to "Make the world safe for democracy."
Even the protesters, however, could not have imagined the intensity with which the police in Chicago would fulfill their wildest expectations. Night after night the police it turned out would attack protesters and innocent bystanders alike with cries of "Kill, kill, kill!". (An official inquiry by the federal government and the state of Illinois would describe the situation as "a police riot"). The country, repulsed by the images it saw on the TV, and generally uninformed about the underlying issues, responded by electing Republican Richard Nixon (the "law-and-order" candidate) as the result of a massive political backlash resulting from events in Chicago and elsewhere.
Nixon decided to attempt an all-out assault in Vietnam to try to end the war quickly. A massive campaign called "Duck Hook" was designed by Nixon and his advisors. Duck Hook, if carried out, would drastically escalate the war and would include massive bombing directed at Hanoi and other civilian locations. It would also lead to the mining of the harbors of North Vietnamese port cities, and the architects of Duck Hook even planned for the use of tactical nuclear bombing.
In the meantime, however, young people from the McCarthy and Kennedy campaigns had organized the Vietnam Moratorium Committee. This latter organization then activated hundreds of student body presidents to help in plans for a November "Moratorium Day." They got unexpected help from the media and a growing ground swell of antiwar sentiment among the public. By the time of the big day in October, hundreds of thousands of citizens all over America left their schools and jobs to participate in literally thousands of local demonstrations. There were marches, vigils, teach-ins, door-to-door campaigns, and readings of lists of the war dead. The White House was taken aback by all this, and Operation Duck Hook was shelved.
Moratorium days were planned now to occur monthly. And, indeed, in November, three quarters of a million people gathered in Washington to protest the war (as did 100,000 in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park). But President Nixon and his chief advisor, Henry Kissinger, had been busy applying pressure to Congress and the media after they had seen the results of the October Moratorium Day. And they succeeded. The media downplayed the November demonstrations and even went so far as to depict them as lead by fringe radicals.
In April of 1970, Nixon felt safe to widen the war by sending troops into Cambodia without first obtaining the consent of Congress. Reaction was immediate. Over 350 campuses participated in an immediate nationwide strike. The strike hut down some of these institutions of higher education for the rest of the year. It also precipitated the most enduring domestic tragedy of the war.
At Kent State University in Ohio, National Guard soldiers, order to disperse even peaceful assemblies of students, opened fire with life ammunition on a large crowd of students killing four students and wounding nine others. Two of the dead were bystanders who had been hit by accident. The student plan formulated before Chicago had tragically succeed -- the war in Vietnam had indeed come home to the streets of America. When asked what he thought about the killings at Kent State senior statesman John Kenneth Galbarith replied that "A nation that turns the weapons of war on its own youth, is in serious trouble."
While many mainstream members of American society initially said they approved of what the guard had done, the will had gone out of Americans to persist in the quagmire of Vietnam. Vietnam veterans began to take the lead in the protest marches and other activities.
It is a truism in social movements theory that when a movement begins to fail or decline, some elements most dedicated to it often adopt more and more extreme tactics as their cause seems to become more desperate. For example, in 1974 a radical splinter group of SDS, the so-called Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped Patty Hearst, a member of the fabulously wealth publishing family. They subjected her to severe brainwashing techniques focused around anti capitalist dogma. They succeeded in so far as she eventually helped them rob a bank allegedly to support a socialist revolution.
Several other such extremist incidents have taken place since the late 1960s, but their very nature points to the decline of the potency of the student movement.
Norm-oriented movements are movements that do not seek a radical restructuring of society (or a segment of the existing social structure) (Smelser, 1962). The term norms refers to rules for acceptable behavior within a given situation. So "norm-orented movements are ones which feel that the existing overall state of affairs is okay, and that the values underlying the existing norms need not be questioned. Sometimes, however, a movement may come to feel that mere normative change by itself is not enough to meet the goals of the movement. This is especially likely to occur if movement adherents have tried various tactics for meeting their goals by changing the norms, but still have not succeeded in reaching their desired ends. Under such circumstances they may begin to advocate a switch to a value-oriented movement. For example, during the 1930s many social movements at first sought to meet the challenges and deprivations of the Great Depression by changing the rules for how business was conducted, changing banking laws, changing lending policies, etc. However, as the Depression wore on and did not seem to be going away, an increasing number of people began to argue for a value-oriented movement that would question the moral worth of capitalism. They sometimes went on to argue that capitalism should be replaced with socialism (that was perceived by the adherents as more socially fair). This latter postions clearly represents a value-oriented movement instead of only a norm-oriented one.
We have seen in this chapter how the civil rights movement began the black struggle primarily in the form of a norm-oriented movement. Most of the controversy at that time surrounded rules for behavior, such as whether one should have to move to the back of the bus, should have to drink from a seperate water fountain, and so forth. However, it can be seen that the black liberation movement that came a bit later was proceeding in a more value-oriented direction. It argued, not for integration with the existing society, but for a seperate society. It argued that Christianity would never really support the equality of blacks, and therefore should be replaced with the Black Muslim religion, it argued that racial was built into capitalist society, and argued many other value-based positions.
So too did the student movement originate largely as one centered around norms. For example, the right to hear controversial speakers on campus and the right to refuse forced induction into military service. So by the end of the sixties the student movement too had become increasingly value-oriented in outlook. The counterculture has emerged to challenge nearly every element of mainstream culture.
Like the black movement, the student movement came to ask more-and-more serious questions about the role of capitalism both at home and in the Third World. The equality of women was becoming a popular pillar of the students' ideology. Many other value-oriented issues had emerged during the decade that the student movement was active.
So both movements were increasingly moving away during the 1960s from concern with monetary matters and policies strictly within capitalist society and questions about other normative matters, and more-and-more into a posture that raised serious challenges to the value system the U. S. was based on at the time. We will see in subsequent chapters that in many ways this move from norm-oriented to value-oriented social movements was but the beginning of a trend. By the 1990s, citizens of the U. S. would be at each other's throats most intensely, not over economics practices per se or over normative issues, but instead they would face off increasingly over value-issues such as the abortion question, the gay-rights question, the animal rights questions, feminism, "political correctness" and so forth.
Today, as the black movement struggles to revitalize itself in
the U. S., the current situation might best be described as one that
sociological criminologists sometimes refer to as "a Quiet Riot."
No one doubts that crime has "soared" in the U. S. since the
beginning of the 1960s[3], and it is
also clear that statistically the proportion of crimes committed by black
offenders has increased the fastest.
(Remember, however, that even though the black rate of crime is higher than for whites since Afro-Americans only
constitute about twelve percent of Americans the absolute number of offenses committed by whites is still a much
higher actual number).
Crime
is usually thought of as an failure of individuals to manifest moral
behavior. However, sociologists know
that crime also rises when people lose faith in the power and property concepts
advocated by the powerful of a society.
When people feel that the manner in which power and property are
distributed do not leave any hope for their own self-fulfillment, many are
tempted to circumvent the "stacked deck" by any means possible. Thus, if self-improvement and the good life
are not available through institutionalized means, some individuals may chose
to "innovate" by using means outside
of institutionally approved ones. Where
political and economic forces associated with such circumstances can be
effectively mobilized by social movements, what might otherwise be individual
acts of desperation are less likely to occur.
Instead, the disaffected can express their grievances collectively
through riots, or social movement (even revolutionary ones). However, in the absence of such social
movements, and when all legitimate avenues seem closed, crime may become an
attractive way of both expressing one's frustration and sometimes advancing
one's own situation.
It
can be argued that the success of the black movement in the past led primarily to benefits for blacks who
were middle-class, and that it did little to help those trapped in poverty in
the inner cities.
One of the immediate results of the improvements for middle class blacks was that many middle
class blacks abandoned the city and their poorer brethren for the greater
comfort and security of the suburbs.
Combined with the flight of whites to the same areas, the tax base of
the city was eroded until even providing decent schools and adequate housing
conditions for poorer citizens receded beyond the reach of more and more large
cities. The result has been an often
misunderstood and typically unrecognized type of collective behavior that we could
call "collective resignation."
Usually collective behavior appears as the reinforcement of heightened
emotionality and strong impulses towards action. But when the situation appears completely hopeless -- such as
when political and economic effectiveness seem beyond one's reach -- shared
depression and hopelessness can also become a shared, cyclically reinforcing
phenomenon. Lacking a political
framework, a sense of injustice may well become -- not a social movement -- but merely an individualized
emotion. The result is a lot of crime
against a system that the alienated (rightly or wrongly) perceive as repressive
and illegitimate. This pattern is
sometimes described by use of the term "quite riot."
It is probably the case that if the U. S. wishes to bring it's crime
rate down (recent national opinion polls show this to be the number one concern
of citizens), it would have to act "counter intuitively" by actually helping the poor to mobilize their
discontent into social movements. Such
social movements could negotiate collectively
for the benefit of their constituents and adherents. Where such negotiations are fruitful, crime and deviant behavior
can generally be expected to drop in the long run (although, if unsuccessful,
such organization then makes outright revolutionary actively more likely. So there is some risk involved for the
dominant classes).
For example, in one study conducted during the 1960s, cities that
experienced riots during that period were statistically matched to similar
cities that did not have riots. What
was found was that it was not poverty per
se, or poor housing per se, that
seemed to have caused riots. Instead,
riot cities (unlike their matched "sister cities" in the study), were
found to have had city governments that were perceived by the poor as
uninterested in doing anything to alleviate their conditions. Where there were open channels for
grievances there were no riots! So, it
seems clear that the individual hopelessness that leads to today's quiet riots
of crime and deviance in the inner cities probably should be harnessed into
political movements that can provide a less desperate means for the pariahs of
the nation to express their self-interest.
Surprisingly, therefore, it is probably in the best interest of the
political elite to help the poor to mobilize themselves politically. The alternative is that eventually a
charismatic leader, perhaps not unlike one of the black liberationists of the
1960s, might be able to provide an intellectual framework and the rhetoric that
would almost overnight mobilize the discontent of the impoverished. Under such leadership, it is quite possible
that almost overnight such a leader could harness what now appears to be individual
alienation into -- not a riot or a crime -- but a truly revolutionary
movement. In other words, a movement
that would replace the current dominant conceptions of how power and property
should be distributed with other conceptions more to the liking of movement
adherents. When a child is playing
checkers with a friend or sibling and sees that he or she cannot win, the child
will often turn the board over because such an act represents an emotionally
satisfying rejection of the rules of the game.
The act is one that is an attempt to avoid an inevitable feeling that
one is a loser. So too, we may be
sitting on a powder keg in the form of a political chess game in which an
increasing number of Americans are tempted to "turn the board
over." In other words, they might
look for a new game with new rules they believe to be more favorable to
them. Such actions would not take the form not of individual crime, but
would take the form of political revolution. (In subsequent chapters, we will point out how today's "law-and-order" campaigns, the
current moral rearmament crusades, and similar efforts are at least in part
attempts to prevent the unfolding of such a scenario, but may actually increase the possibility of violent
action). Indeed, if one adopts the
perspective outlined above, one of the great ironies is that the criminal
justice system itself becomes seen as itself a booming capitalist industry).
There are also, however,
forces at work to prevent violent political action. Chief among these is that racial and ethnic tensions now involve
far more than just whites and blacks.
Since the 1960s, many of the nation's cities have seen a great increase
in the diversity of their composition.
Large cities now include not only whites and blacks, but also Asians,
peoples from the Caribbean region, Hispanics, American Indians, and
others. Numerous studies have shown
that in such a situation, any specific minority group tends to compare itself
more closely with other minority
groups than it does to the dominant classes.
To some extent it appears that the poor think it unrealistic to feel
they can really anticipate being as well off as elite members of society, but
they are particularly galled when they see another minority whose situation is
improving faster than their own. This
has led in recent years, as in the riots that followed Rodney King's arrest in
Los Angeles, to greater tensions and violence between minority groups. Until such differences are set aside and
minorities act in consort with one another, their effectiveness in demanding
reforms from the societal elites will be greatly compromised.
Secondly, let us not
forget that much progress has been made compared to the situation of the 1960s
with regard to opening channels for grievances. The ballot box, the court room, and the news media -- while still
perceived as biased by many minority groups members -- have nonetheless also
been the scene of considerable success for minorities in the past couple of
decades. Compared to the 1950s and
before, many civil rights laws have been passed, access to jobs has somewhat
increased, minority newscasters and reporters are now commonplace in the
media. These factors have has certainly
helped to improve the sense of minorities that conventional channels for
grievances are not entirely closed to them.
It can be argued, however, that much more success has been obtained in
the area of increasing social equality than of increasing economic
equality. Perhaps this can be traced in
part to the fact that all the publicity given to Affirmative Action. Many people, both within and outside of
minority communities, viewed Affirmative Action as heralding imminent great
changes in the U. S.. It can be argued
on the other hand, that Affirmative Action has actually prevented such change. It rewarded
a few individuals, but did little or nothing about eliminating poor schooling
in ghettoes and barrios, nothing towards equalizing access to health care,
nothing really substantial in the way of infusing large sums of money into
minority business enterprises. In other
words, it appears that it had little effect on social structure. In fact, it might be suspected that it's
very popularity among elites was due to
the fact that it gave the appearance of doing something about all these issues
without requiring that any dramatic reorganization of society be
undertaken. Certainly, for many years,
it appears that its existence led to the perception
by both whites and minorities that the income gap between minorities and whites
was decreasing, but in fact the gap was actually increasing. However,
according the W. I. Thomas theorem, "things that are perceived as real are
real in their consequences," much collective behavior may have been
diffused by the existence of Affirmative Action. Recent opinion polls, however, suggest that in the past few years
larger segments of the minority communities have become aware that the income
gap has actually been increasing almost continuously since the early
1970s. Therefore, their interest in
renewing extra-institutional activities like collective behavior and social
movements may also be increasing.
Yet another factor to be
considered has been the relative lack of leadership in the black movement in
recent years. There has been an
apparent lack of support from the black community itself for leaders that could
be equated with the charisma and presence of a Martin Luther King, Jr., an H.
Rap Brown, or a Malcolm X. Why this
should be so is an interesting question.
Is it because such leaders do not exist today, or do potential movement
adherents simply not have any enthusiasm for identifying and promoting such
personalities? The answer,
unfortunately is neither clear not easy to come by.
Finally, it should be recognized that the forces of social control have been
far more sophisticated in their methods of dealing with discontented
citizens. Compared to the
under-educated and often openly racially bigoted police and courts of the years
before the 1960s, the situation is very different today. The implementation of criminal justice
sequences in college as a requirement for most police and correctional
officials has produced very different views of the problems. Indeed, many correctional and law
enforcement officials today are themselves minority group members from urban
backgrounds. To a large degree this is
due to conscious decisions taken as a result of events of the 1960s to try to
prevent the same circumstances that applied when most such officials were
white, undereducated, and from rural backgrounds. It became clear that it was not wise to ask such persons to
understand and deal with young, nonwhite, and highly urbanized
populations. Even the tactics employed
today by law enforcement are very different.
After tragic mistakes like the Attica Prison riot in New York state in
1971 (in which 43 people died), and the Kent State killings by the National
Guard in Ohio, professionals were called in to develop emergency
management plans for such situations. In general, such plans have become a
commonplace today. The average
policeman or correctional worker has a much more sophisticated understanding of
how to communicate with the aggrieved and with crowd control tactics. He or she is no longer left to try to
innovate tactics and solutions on the spur of the moment, or to choose only
between using live ammunition or doing nothing. Today, when abuses by the police do occur, there are now citizen advisory councils -- often having
strong minority representations -- to review the decisions and actions taken by
the police.
All of these factors not only
decrease the likelihood of riots, but also of social movements that might arise
out of the same frustrations that might drive riots.
In summary, the economic gap
between most minorities and the white majority is increasing generally, and
this is a potentially powerful motivation to collective behavior but many other
factors seem to make a widespread reoccurrence of the events of the 1960s less
likely than they were at that time.
The student movement, which has
tended to run in cycles of activism for more than one hundred years (with roots
stretching back into Europe), has been conspicuously quite for a longer period
of time since the 1960s than is typical, and shows little sign of reviving
today. There are probably several
reasons for this. Chief among these is
that the 1960s were a period of almost unrivaled economic growth. This meant that many college students lived
on campus and did not have to work for a living. This left much time for the altruistic discussion of issues and
concern for social justice for the less fortunate. By comparison, most college students of today are much more
occupied with earning a living and trying to pay their way through school. This leaves them with less energy for
altruism and self-actualization. It
also means that they will spend much more of their day with people whose political
views are likely to be more conservative their own, and certainly more
conservative than was typical of one's fellow students during the 1960s. Also, since collective behavior in general,
and social movement activity in particular, are enhanced by having like-minded
people in close proximity, it can be readily seen that today's student
population is less likely to live in dorms, more likely to be older, more
likely to be at work, to have families to support, and so forth. All these factors, of course, combine to
make it less likely a critical mass of students will emerge to support a social
movement of any strength.
Another extremely important factor in the absence of a student movement
in comparison to the 1960s is the absence of the military draft system. For many students of the 60s, the question
of the Vietnam war was no mere frivolity.
Instead, it was a life-and-death question for many. While it is somewhat disillusioning to
advance the argument that the antiwar movement declined as soon as personal
risk was removed for students, it is none-the-less quite striking how quickly
the steam went out of the student movement as soon as the draft was eliminated
in the late 1960s.
Students of the 1960s were much more alike than they are today, much
more often in the late adolescent years, and much more likely to come from
well-to-do families. Students of the
sixties had to deal with far less in the way of diversity within their own
ranks. Today, the very people the
students strove so vigorously to support -- the sons and daughters of the
working class and the children of minorities -- make up a larger-and-larger
percentage of college students. Today's
students are both less likely to be concerned with what they often consider the
esoteric abstractions that so drove the counterculture, and more likely to find
themselves in disagreement with other students instead of the
"Military-Industrial Complex."
Indeed, most students of today appear to have an intense desire to
benefit from just the same institutions so despised by the young of the
1960s. Perhaps they are realistically
afraid that the capitalism of today does not provide them with the same
standard of living or even a "safety net" that their fathers enjoyed
as a single-earner head-of-household.
Or perhaps the billions of dollars spend on advertising beginning at a
period of history when they were children has had real effects. Advertising is not only much more pervasive
but of a new type. The new form
experienced by today's college students emphasized self-gratification and
consumption of consumer luxury goods (unlike the emphasis on hard work and
self-denial that was presented to their parents in their own day in the form of
the "Protestant Ethic").
Indeed, much of the new
advertising emphasized the idea that "You are what you own!,"
and that one is personally inadequate without the right athletic shoes, right
auto, right stereo, etc. Given the
unprecedented amount spend on such ads, and the unprecedented amount of
exposure today's youth had to it during their formative years, it would be very
surprising if today's youths were not much more materialistic in their outlook.
However, this set of circumstances produces a final irony. So long as most youth of today felt that
industry was going to make it possible for them to obtain these things, they
had little interest in collective action.
However, the poor job market of the mid-1990s has begun to change their
views. Now even conformity to
Reagan-like norms and values appears to be adequate now to insure one's future
economic well-being. It would appear
from recent opinion polls that students once again are beginning to feel that
mainstream institutions are failing to provide them with an attractive
future. Good jobs are harder to find,
and without these jobs starting families must be delayed, and so on. The result of these factors is that the
alienation of students seems now to be on the increase. It also appears likely the effects of the
Free-Trade agreement may make it increasingly difficulty for U. S. college
students to count the kind of middle class jobs required for material comfort
after college.
If these trends continue, it is likely we will see something of a repeat
of the pattern of the 1960s where students and minorities alike perceive
themselves as occupying economically similar circumstances. Also the "graying of American"
means that students will have a smaller political voice than the
"Boomers" have enjoyed.
Angered by the wealth and political clout of the Boomers, it is
increasingly likely that U. S. college students will once again form cultural
and political coalitions with their disadvantaged brethren. This would bring about a final irony. We have seen above how much, if not most, of
the student movement grew out of the militancy of the black movement of the
1950 and early 60s. Today, the black
movement and minority movements in general seem unlikely to manifest much
militancy on their own due to factors just discussed. However, students now have more reasons than at any time in the
Twentieth Century to perceive themselves as having some similarity of positions
with poorer minorities. Some of them
might well choose to exercise what they have learned in school to promote
social movement organizations and other collective activism to challenge the
Boomer's version of the old military-industrial complex. Or they may choose merely retreatism into
individualistic acts of alienation, such as increased drug and alcohol use,
recreational consumerism, and vicarious
identification with violent sports and entertainment. After all, the very phrase "Generation X," often used
to denote today's college students captures the fact that this generation is
diverse and lacks a common sense of identity like none before it. Such a lack of unity does not make good
fodder for a social movement.
In the introduction of the next chapter, we will discuss how it can be
that while most people see the 1960's cultural rebellion in the U. S. as being
long dead, it is possible to argue that in reality it set off certain cultural
dilemmas and patterns that are only today actually reaching fruition. The outcome of the forces set in motion
during the Sixties, it will be argued, form the basis of increasingly intense
"culture wars" within the U. S..
These culture wars, rooted in the 1960s, are only today becoming
manifest in the mass media and the minds of those who compose the general
public. Perhaps we will see less of
students vs. adults than certain groups of adults competing with other adult
groups over "appropriate" lifestyles and values.
We
will also see in the following chapters how dramatic was the shift in the theme
of social movements between the 1960s and the 1990s from norm-oriented
underpinnings to value-oriented ones.
[3] Although most people are suprised to discover that the rate (incidents per 100,000 citizens -- and therefore adjusted for changes in overall population size) of crime actually declined a good bit during the 1980s in spite of public perceptions that crime as getting worse during that time.