The Politics Of The New Negro

...Hence the need for weekly meetings and the largely local, grass-roots nature of the movement...

...Having already come far, and being by no means inexperienced, these young men are realistic and sometimes cynical in their judgments of people...

...Its goal is one of assimilation into American society and it would be blindness not 241 to recognize this...

...They appear to be modeled on the Montgomery Improvement Association and Birmingham's Christian Movement for Human Rights, both of which originated in the bus boycotts of 1955-56...

...Except where it is outlawed, the NAACP has a fairly large dues-paying membership in the South...

...I don't mean, however, to suggest the all-sufficient nature of the oratory: if its emotional force is sometimes frightening, its intellectual content is often minor...

...They turn out to have stayed on campus for a meeting of their own, or for a basketball game...

...They will be reinforced in that desire by their very numbers, by daily relationships in which leaders are discovered and proposals made, and by all the things they learn to do...

...The effort to give some focus to a secular ideology by basing it on the writings of Gandhi and Thoreau seems to me largely artificial...

...The parents of the students who sat on the other side of the room were (largely) nurses, coal miners, teachers, post office employees, railroad porters...

...And these, in largest part, are the "new Negroes" who made the sit-downs possible...

...More than this, they do not know these leaders or the NAACP lawyers...

...These new organizations are centered in the churches (usually the Baptist churches) and are led by the preachers...

...It is this kind of daily degradation which makes all other kinds of segregation possible...

...Now, to this limited kind of politics, students have no access, nor to the court battles as they are waged by the NAACP...

...Indeed, it is likely that more lower class Negro children go to college in the South than in the North...

...This is, in fact, its greatest strength, not only because of the deep religious commitment of the Negro masses and the position of the church as a community center, but also because of the extremely high degree of lay participation—for example, in "testifying"—in the Negro Baptist church...

...The Negro businessman had been astonished, and only moderately gratified, by the sit-downs, the picketing, and the demonstrations which had taken place in a city he boasted of knowing so well and among a people he supposedly led...

...And when the bloc of votes or the sum of capital becomes larger, requests will become demands and tough-minded men will drive a harder bargain...

...Oratory is thus the key form of communication within the movement...

...There is no reason to deplore the fact that a certain tension exists between these two, between Christian pacifims and the civil rights ideology...

...More than this, they are willing to push the idea of non-violence very near to that of pacifism and to discuss international as well as interracial tension...

...Nor has there been any sustained and serious effort by the national office to develop local leaders...

...King and Abernathy, who led the bus boycott, have been especially unrelenting: "Freedom...

...Tension of this sort has often been historically fruitful...

...For many of the ministers, however, religion plays a much more creative role...

...It is a politics of accommodation, but also of shrewd bargaining...

...Some go into the permanent army, hoping to become officers and to live abroad...

...Inevitably, this process brought the students into close contact with the best of the preachers, who are the real leaders of the Negro masses...

...SINCE THE ADULT movement is lower class, it is also religious...

...the approach of the older leaders to either one is likely to be more fearful and devious—and with reason...

...But the large body of the middle class has held aloof, in part because it feels threatened economically, in part because both the militancy and the religiosity of the mass movement is alien to its style...

...Of course, there are other motives involved even in this heroism—motives which may well be secular and personal...

...Out of such organizations, perhaps, will come parents willing to force their children's way into the white schools and eligible voters trained in the perversities of Southern law and determined to register...

...Their own parents are hardly ever actively involved in politics...

...Sternly, though perhaps with a touch of embarrassment, he offered them "guidance" and warned them of "irresponsible leadership...

...At the same time, the Negro business leaders and part-time politicians cautiously support the work of the NAACP and even push the cause of integration wherever—as in the case of the public library in Atlanta—it does not involve large numbers of people or bring any sort of social upheaval...

...It should be said, however, that such men have done a great deal, and that in many and possibly most parts of the South even such a politics is impossible...

...The Negro may be God's appeal to this age...

...The membership of these grass-roots organizations is definitely lower class...

...This is especially true because there is a certain tendency in the local organizations to drift into a role as innocuous as their titles, that is, to become in fact civic and improvement associations...

...The sons of the men who sat on one side of the room went to college (most of them) in the North...

...This is possibly overstated, for there are many very religious students and some at least who make quite specific connections between their religion and their politics...

...The counters and the streets were outside the political arena in which the older leaders operated...

...At any rate, it is the inevitable result of the coming together of the students and the Negro masses...

...And this obviously suits the needs and purposes of the established local leadership, which finds its yearly contribution to Legal Defense perfectly compatible with a hands off policy on school integration...

...In the same way religious feeling 242 acts to mobilize energy and to discipline it, making non-violence easier...

...Businessmen, schoolteachers, lawyers, live and work almost entirely in the Negro world...

...The crucial fact is that the students, potentially middle class as they may be, do not identify themselves with the closely-knit bourgeois elite of the Southern Negro world—and especially not with its politics...

...By common, I mean that level on which segregation is most frequently experienced by most people, on which it becomes a bodily habit, like walking to the back of a bus, and shapes a mental reflex: people who walk to the back of the bus must be inferior...

...The two Alabama groups have been holding weekly meetings ever since, for which anywhere from 500-1,000 people regularly turn out...

...He was undoubtedly right, but meanwhile things are kept moving, and people educated, through an exhausting succession of meetings...

...Individual businessmen, lawyers and teachers are of course involved, and are often leaders...

...it is worth going to jail for...

...That means inevitably that they will become interested in politics...

...The student leaders themselves were the products of a vast expansion in Southern Negro college enrollment since the late forties—an expansion in which the schools obviously reached far beyond the limited middle class...

...Equipped to win legal decisions, the Association seems unready— there are exceptions of course—to sponsor local action...

...To experiment freely with the two is indeed novel in Negro life...

...They ride the buses and search for a cheap place to eat downtown...

...Its extent is determined, almost literally, by the size of the local churches and the range of the human voice...

...they look forward to an order not based on secular equality but on religious fraternity...

...Today the choice is no longer between violence and non-violence...

...And they have inherited a considerable resentment toward the established middle class and its pretensions, a function of the distance the middle class has always insisted upon placing between itself and the mass of Negroes...

...His report, which follows, seems to us of the greatest political interest.—EDITORS "The first act has come off very well, but who is going to write the second...

...On the other hand, the actual practice of non-violent direct action obviously gives rise to feelings which are not merely strategic...

...The preachers and the theology students are the intellectuals of the Negro movement and its most frequent spokesmen...

...Of course, non-violence is as much a practical necessity as it is a theory...

...The students are willing to take risks in the name of both prosperity and virtue...

...This too is a test for the young Negro, an occasion for heroism, but it is also, simply, an education...

...They find no leaders forthrightly committed to a direct, local struggle against segregation...

...Surely a written literature—and a literature of controversy—is needed, to discuss immediate purposes and methods and to elaborate a long-range ideology...

...But the people who work in the dozens of menial capacities—more numerous in the South than in the North—are drawn daily to the white business districts and the white suburbs...

...There they participate in workshops studying political techniques, or listen to speeches and join in community singing...

...It is between non-violence and non-existence...

...And the meetings are also religious rallies—or rather, political revivals— where the intellectual content of the speeches is wrapped in biblical imagery and presented in a language of overwhelming emotional force...

...Driven to be political, eager to be active, the students find no way open into the existing but narrow political world...

...it is worth losing a job for...

...The new mass character of the movement strengthens the hand of its Christian theorists...

...The program of the typical meeting is based on a church service—the form familiar even when the content is radically changed...

...They know what to expect from their fellow Negroes and what from the white man...

...The article won such favorable attention that we decided to send Mr...

...That is not yet within the range of the backdoor dealing...

...Often considerable numbers of adults will work directly with the students in picketing and in mass demonstrations...

...They have sought to connect the strategy of non-violence with Christian pacifism and love, and to train the students in both...

...Many of the sermons on selfsacrifice preached in Negro churches are aimed at them...

...This is partially because the Negro masses do little reading...

...There is another aspect of campus life which the businessmen in the meeting room might have found easier to understand...

...The Negro has found this discipline in the idea of non-violence...

...Fraternities and sororities, junior-senior proms, May Queens— these are the campus equivalents of the coming-out parties, the Elks' meetings and all the other paraphernalia of a separate but equal middle class (and upper middle class) life—all of it assiduously reported in ,Ebony and similar magazines, and all of it nervously self-conscious and very serious...

...243...

...its vitality can be felt in the naturalistic imagery which the preachers always prefer to the mechanical metaphor or the political cliche...

...I would rather be a poor free man than a rich slave...

...The vision of the preachers is different...

...He experiences segregation as a form of career closure, cutting many forms of work and moneymaking (and of creativity) out of the realm of possibility...

...Even more, it is because the Negroes control no media of mass communication (the tiny Southern Negro press has not supported the sitdowns) other than the church meeting...

...But the fact is that the students reached the church's meeting room and the pastor's study (less often the church proper) at about the same time as they reached the lunch counters, and for the same reasons...

...But segregation is also, and at its most common level, a system of incidental insult...

...Incidental insult is the daily experience of the Negro masses, much less so of the middle classes...

...it is significant that the Student Co-ordinating Committee recently adopted a statement of purpose which is in line with King's theology...

...For the South is home, and given any sense at all of power or possibility, they will stay home and make it livable...

...They believe that the methods of the current struggle will determine the nature of the future society...

...And a few still dream of Paris...

...is worth suffering for...

...Walzer on a second and longer journey, during which he would visit a considerable number of Southern communities, talk with Negro leaders, ministers and students...

...Similar organizations—the Petersburg (Virginia) Improvement Association, the Raleigh (North Carolina) Citizens Association, etc.— 239 have now sprung up throughout the South...

...But they are extraordinarily idealistic about goods, both moral and material...

...The lead which the students gave resulted in the appearance of new forms of political organization among adults...

...To arrive at the last of these is especially difficult, for if the law requires only individual skillfulness the march requires mass discipline...

...In the past, college administrators have approved and even sponsored the participation of students in such activities—as if 236 they were training them for a game of middle class charades...

...They find no pattern of sustained, methodical political activity into which they can enter...

...There the Negro leadership is likely to consist of white appointees: these men run the Negro colleges, one minister told me, as if they were state concessions...

...The absence of bureaucratic jargon (co-ordinate committees, implement decisions, etc...

...All these are summed up intellectually in what might be called a civil rights ideology, the basis of which in any individual student is more likely to be the Declaration of Independence than the Bible...

...Student and parental ambitions alike push the young beyond imitation and careerism, and further than the businessmen, the "responsible" leaders, would have them go...

...And they are rivals too of middle class Protestantism...

...BUT THE PRECISE CONNECTION between the religious and the political movement is more difficult to assess...

...This is a tremendously important shift in Negro religious thought, for the religion of generations of Negro adults has been otherworldly and resigned or otherworldly and ecstatic, but never practical and activist...

...This makes them leaders, indeed, without any rank and file following, men who speak for the Negro community, but who rarely speak to it, men who simply assume that some massive vote of confidence has been awarded them...

...And indeed the social gospel suggests something quite different from Christian redemption: "You can't save a man's soul," a preacher in Petersburg said, "until you save his body...

...Apparently frightened by the possibility of school integration (they worry, probably with reason, that it will not be accompanied by the integration of teaching staffs), the teachers have not played an active role in the various local movements...

...Each week a collection is taken...

...Their advice, however, was coldly rejected by the student leaders...

...But what the sudden appearance of large numbers of ready young men means, first of all, is that many more will decide to stay South...

...The "notables" were willing enough to write a script for the second act, but I felt they would have liked also to change the cast...

...There is such a; paucity of organization in the Negro community that irresolute leaders can often be persuaded to fill gaps other than the political— to help raise money for the local "Y," to work on traffic control, etc...

...The most fervent, the most capable, possibly the most radical of the leaders believe in the larger (religious) meaning of the Negro struggle, but even they will admit the essentially bread-andbutter demands of their followers...

...But active, even functioning grass-roots organization is rare...

...In order to support mass action they have revived the social gospel...

...But short of such a break with the habits of segregation as the students have initiated, such persons will never appear in sufficient numbers to make any real difference in Southern life...

...Then the Negro leaders—their power in the Negro community increased because of their acceptance by the whites, and their power with the whites increased because of the "control" they can presumably exercise over the Negroes—will deal for such favors as they can hope for or imagine: more money for the Negro high school, fair treatment in the petty courts, some new arrangement with the real estate board, the admission of a Negro to the police force, etc...

...The ministers who preach so fervently against materialism and talk so endlessly of the need for Christian education know it very well...

...It was an extraordinary confrontation, this meeting between community and student leaders, an encounter of generations, and also of classes...

...And it brought the students into the churches, which are the only free forums existing in the Negro community...

...The men who engage in it are likely to develop a curiously "white" view of the Negro masses—that is, to view them as requiring just that paternal watchfulness and that cautious respectable representation which they themselves can provide...

...The connection of non-violence to Christian love produces, for them, an ideology as important as that of integration and equality...

...What we need," a minister told me, "is a flood of tracts...

...But the presupposition of all such bargaining is that the basic pattern of segregation will not be altered...

...In a day when sputniks and explorers dash through outer space . . . nobody can win a war...

...I would guess that they are related to the pride and self-affirmation of the young Negroes...

...Embarrassing moments often follow suggestions that students present rise and be applauded...

...An exception to this last statement might be made for the preachers...

...But it remains true that the key factor in the students' activity is the forward thrust of their new self-respect, their desire for equality—and their materialism...

...Sometimes the NAACP is associated with the local movement as its legal wing or its "civil rights committee...

...Many still escape to the North, which has traditionally robbed the Southern Negro community of its discontented and energetic young men...

...If I wanted to hear a "nice little sermon on redemption," Abernathy of Montgomery told me, I would have to go to a white church...

...But the larger number by far of ordinary Negroes were also outside this political arena, not active citizens and not even represented...

...Probably for most people, and especially among the students, religion acts largely to reinforce the civil rights ideology and to add to it a certain pious intensity...

...They are not likely to be satisfied, at any rate, with anything short of personal encounter— something always eschewed by the older leaders...

...It was the end of May, after four months of activity, and he was meeting with the students for the first time...

...I was told often that "when one side has all the guns, then the other side is non-violent...

...A political adaptation of the Southern Baptist sermon fills the gap left by the virtually complete 240 absence of favorable news coverage and of simple and dramatic pamphlets...

...They seem equally ready for a success story and a morality play, and I have no doubt that the civil rights movement is an adventure in which something of both is involved...

...But the Association does not form the nucleus for organization on a local level—I was told that this was chiefly because of its own centralized and inflexible structure...

...Perhaps the stages in the developing consciousness of the Negro can be traced in the succession of methods employed to win entrance into American (white) society: from the humble labor urged by Booker T. Washington to the coming-out party, and then from legal and political pressure to the mass march...

...All these represent real improvements in the conditions of life in a Southern town...

...Such men may provide needed intellectual or moral support, but their ideas are not a creative force in the South today...

...What the students have done, however, is to change the method of this ideology from legalism to mass action, and this has brought other changes in its train...

...The students generally are less religious than their parents, and even when religious they often have a distrust of Baptist preaching, an uneasiness with its emotional appeal and an aversion to the response it evokes...

...At this point they will encounter the politics of their elders, of the business and professional men in the meeting room...

...points to its ad hoc, local organization...

...They discover ways to avoid many, though by no means all, of the encounters in which insult is to be expected...

...There are probably few religions whose forms are so readily adaptable to mass politics...

...A local realtor addressed this question to the assembled "Central Committee" of the student movement in a large Southern city...

...III The students, for the most part, do not attend the weekly meetings in the churches...

...238 II It is obvious that education, voting, housing and employment are the key areas in which segregation as a system of apartheid and organized inequality is most effective...

...The students became their political surrogates and then their political instructors and finally (in some cases) their political colleagues...

...Consequently, perhaps, the ceremonials of that class lose their absorbing interest...

...The students still in jail are symbols of the force of this theology...

...As a result of increased enrollments, there have appeared on the campuses large numbers of aggressive young men, fiercely hungry for success, for material goods and even fame...

...The mass character of the new civil rights movement is best revealed in this oratory, its phrases picked up and chanted by the audience...

...There will also be a "political action committee" (and, for example, in Petersburg, a PAC Newsletter...

...Martin Luther King has even suggested that it is the mission of the Negro to teach non-violence to the world: It may even be possible for the Negro, through adherence to non-violence, so to challenge the nations of the world that they will seriously seek an alternative to war and destruction...

...And for most of the students the course which the demonstrations have taken is a matter of strategy and not ideals...

...I But in the South today even the eager proto-bourgeois, even the cautious careerist (carrying on his back, most likely, a considerable burden of parental hopes) encounters obstacles in his upward progress which are not individually surmountable...

...Its leaders lose their power to command...

...They receive a deference ftom their fellows which they hardly ever need pay to the white man...

...Yet, among the members of King's former church—which is the most fashionable Baptist church in Montgomery—there are to be found few members of the Montgomery Improvement Association...

...Baptist oratory has become especially important...

...it is intimately known, perhaps, to many of the adult members of the Baptist churches, but it is alien to most modern students...

...One feels that the successful businessmen would like to treat the students in a similar fashion...

...It is the language of evangelism, except that at the end of the speeches men and women are asked to come forward—not to be saved—but to make a decision to picket or to sign up for a session in voter registration...

...What is creative, again, is the students' commitment to direct mass action, their disenchantment with legalism...

...Warning and offer were reiterated by other men at the same 235 meeting—banker, insurance broker, lawyer, newspaper owner, head of the Negro YMCA—a gallery of notables who spoke, as they did not hesitate to inform the students, for 80 million dollars worth of capital...

...The limited Negro middle class, itself the product and in many ways the bulwark of a segregated society, no longer provides opportunity, for the increasing number of talented, aggressive young men...

...they aim, as one of the ministers told me, "to integrate the church and the world...

...And it is the latter which are strengthened by the daily presentation, through the mass media, of the American Dream...

...Now the preachers of the movement feel themselves in competition with tent-meeting and store-front revivalism...

...With a rather cruel politeness, the students refused to discuss their future plans...

...This is a politics of back-door dealing, tough-minded, unidealistic, and sometimes successful...

...I have no doubt that it is this added intensity, rather than the merely secular ideas, which makes it possible for young people to go to jail—though the goal of their activity remains civil and not religious: "We are willing to go to jail, be ridiculed, spat upon and even suffer physical violence to obtain First Class Citizenship...

...So the students who marched downtown to the five and dime stores came into touch with the Negro masses, and challenged segregation precisely where it was most irritating to them...

...But wherever there exists a bloc (however small) of Negro votes and a sum (however moderate) of Negro capital, there will appear men, 237 both black and white, to bargain...

...It was revealed when a controversy broke out at a North Carolina college over whether the student newspaper should carry a page of pictures taken at the Spring Formal and showing the Queen and her Court, or whether the pictures should show picket lines and courtroom scenes of another sort...

...they will be the future heroes of the movement...

...The schoolteachers, for example, make up the largest constituent element in the Southern Negro middle class...

...But the students have self-confidence enough for an open and deliberate joyfulness, and even for occasional bravado...

...What is novel and creative is the appearance in Negro religion and the social gospel and of a political ideology based on non-violence and love...

...they are in continual contact with white people, and usually with white peole who are giving orders...

...But such ideas are not common among the students and most of the preachers of the social gospel are content to apply it in a more limited fashion...