The Negro Revolt
The Negro Revolt - Three Articles The Absence of Justice By Louis E. Lomax Birmingham This is war, another battle in what I have called "The Negro Revolt."' Yet what this troubled town...
...Even so, the Negroes did not disturb the peace, upset order, or break the law...
...Some Negroes have already escaped from the enclave of prejudice by dint of extraordinary talent— in sports, in the theater, in the concert hall...
...Yet such is the obtuseness of human nature that even sympathetic whites must be reminded, as we recently have been by the gifted Negro novelist James Baldwin, of the historical reasons for the depth and breadth and virulence of Negro resentments...
...The voter registration cards show such things as: Name: John Jones...
...He may overcome this somewhat, but never fully so: To be black in this land is to be an outcast in the house of one's fathers, a leper in the land of the white and the cancerous...
...Attorney General Robert Kennedy was probably too optimistic in his recent analogy between the history of the Irish and the Negroes in America...
...The Negroes affront us by diverging from the dominant type all too obviously...
...But the forces of tradition and custom, which uphold special privileges for a dominant race, are still powerful enough to preserve the enclaves of injustice for a century or more to come...
...Under Martin Luther King's leadership, the Negroes conducted mass demonstrations against all forms of segregation...
...And these college students, especially in their sit-in protests against segregated eating places but also in the general agitation for justice, are performing the same service for their race which the articulate craftsmen performed for the less articulate peasants in the late middle ages and in the revolutions which established free governments...
...Another result of an open society is that, despite the educational handicaps from which the present drive for educational integration may ultimately rescue them, an ever greater number of Negroes are getting a university education either in Negro or integrated colleges...
...Will there at no time be observance of the laws of man and nation...
...But, happily, democratic society redressed these conditions, making the Marxist apocalypse of doom and utopia otiose throughout the whole of Western Europe...
...But on the night the accord was reached, a group of recalcitrant whites, opposed to opening the closed enclave, bombed the house of a Negro leader and the motel where the committee had met...
...The problem with the President, as it has been with others before him, is that the fear of enforcing the Constitution to the hilt is greater than the fear of suffering a Little Rock, a University of Mississippi or a Birmingham...
...If Gaston's cooperation and help and money has come to the aid of the desegregation efforts, a new phase in Negro staying power may be at hand, for millions of dollars are available...
...the discipline the Muslims offer has no appeal...
...Do, Lord, do...
...Few people, including the President and the Attorney General, realize that the American Negro is now making his maximum effort for freedom and justice...
...People cry out to the Executive Branch of the Government because Congress cannot make that quick decision and because, ruled practically by the South, to the shame of the voters of this land, Congress has lacked any vital and sustained interest in civil rights...
...Yes Jesus...
...Nonviolence turns on the notion that such a moral battle of attrition will bring us the victory...
...Occupation: Maid...
...Curiously—or perhaps not so curiously—these Negroes were not part of the group which had won accommodation from the whites...
...It was the sight of the children being mauled and tossed about, however, that brought to the attack those "sheep" outside King's fold...
...Is there no room for inventiveness at least...
...that is, guarantee them a black paradise in the nation...
...Let them get their scars early and, if plans work out, they will heal...
...The failure of the Government to act, or its acting belatedly (thus giving license to the lawless), points us in the direction of Hitler's Germany...
...It was his motel that was bombed...
...The Negroes will naturally be impatient, and their impatience will hasten the process of justice and embarrass the "moderates...
...These are not people for the Black Muslims, as everyone seems to think...
...Integration would lose it the wealth that was traditionally its own...
...They spoke from the depths of the enclave of hopelessness...
...Goddammit, you boys and girls move on...
...Please Lord, Please Lord...
...This is because the men assigned to these cases are themselves Southerners...
...An open society will in time encroach upon the boundaries of the enclave...
...He has warned again and again that it is the white man who holds all the weapons, the courts, the power...
...And lock the jaws of them vicious dogs...
...It is something like that here...
...King does not have in his fold...
...Negroes, of course, would suffer most, being most deprived of the tools of the law and the weapons with which to defend themselves: It would be rocks, bottles and cans, largely against dogs, carbines and automatic shotguns...
...Since there is no "increasing misery" among Negroes in this country, however, there is no increasing revolutionary ardor, only constant pressure...
...This failure has had, and will continue to have, its just desserts, mostly at the expense of the Negro who is not as concerned with America's prestige abroad as he is in his own individual, long overdue constitutional rights...
...They belong only to themselves...
...They were a group of hopeless men for whom the promise of Negro job opportunities seemed worthless, because they would be unemployed in any case...
...The manager is a Uberai and doesn't mind...
...Little wonder, then, that the frenetic efforts of the Kennedy Administration to restore peace, law, and order, fell flat with Negroes all over America...
...The city said they needed a permit to demonstrate...
...These is, to be sure, a bitter irony in this form of injustice...
...Education: College degree...
...Age: 33...
...Kennedy, then, cannot be measured by the past...
...Revolutionary ardor is never, as Marx thought, pure resentment...
...John and Mary Jones have children—John Jr., 13, and Susan, 11, named after her maternal grandmother...
...Perhaps another Robert Williams, who was framed and hounded into Cuba, will get them guns, teach them to build and man foxholes...
...Both the open society and the enclave of hopeless injustice will continue to have their contradictory effects...
...The White House, without laying the blame for the riot on anyone (a mistake, as the President should have discovered at Mississippi), took steps to federalize the Alabama National Guard, while the Alabama Governor howled, "It's mine...
...Thus, democratic communities are subject to an evolutionary process of adjustment, and not revolutions of the dispossessed...
...There was some progress made...
...And late into the night you can stand with John and Mary Jones in front of the county jail and hear the children sing: If in our hearts, We do not stray, We will overcome Some day...
...These were the consequences of an open society allowing competition and accommodation of conflicting interests...
...They were doing well in school...
...Why not use them...
...The use of little children, the purest of our troops, in Birmingham, among the meanest of places, was the tip-off that a major and pivotal civil rights battle was underway...
...We have had the preview...
...He might have had better luck had he not been dealing with politicians and savages...
...they will let Mary try on a garment but she cannot, of course, use the dressing room with white women...
...Lord, Lord, Lord...
...And today, a century later, most of the riots in the South are due to efforts to give Negroes the vote...
...And so Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall, head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, came to town, took up headquarters in a segregated motel and proceeded to mediate the dispute...
...These are the obvious consequences of the openness of our society...
...The Rev...
...Yet the Kennedy Administration has not made one single move on behalf of civil rights as quickly as it did before it was given a slender mandate...
...A. G. Gaston, who sat with King and helped draw up the agreement, is just such a man...
...Had the Government acted with "all deliberate speed" after 1954, a wedge might have already been in existence not only in Alabama, but throughout the nation...
...The FBI, moreover, has distinguished itself by seldom finding and arresting those who bomb Negroes' homes or Jewish synagogues, or who shoot visiting French newsmen in the back...
...It is now using up valuable time hearing or refusing to hear or review cases which have already been set in precedent...
...Age: 35...
...In the process, justice was trampled...
...But the inability (due to the complex difficulties in each of us making a living) of the masses of people to be directly and actively concerned, puts us well along the road...
...And our celebrated reason is too errant to digest the difference...
...In a very real sense, this played into our hands...
...After pointing out that an Irish Catholic was elected President less than a century after the anti-Irish riots of the "know nothing" movement, he predicted that a Negro could be elected President in another half century...
...he insists on it because violence is ever present and, like a gusher, must always be capped with a reminder...
...In the face of the Government's refusal to act—after declaring that Washington could not intervene in Birmingham, Kennedy had to eat his words only a few days later— men such as King and the white moderates coaxed or threatened or boycotted to the discussion table may be the next to the last players on the gridiron...
...Who else to act with speed, then, but the Executive Branch...
...Here they are "emancipated," in the sense that they can vote, while being newly enslaved, in the sense that they must live in ghettos such as Harlem...
...This is Birmingham...
...It should have been the other way around...
...Martin Luther King may be the only man in America able to see this specter clearly...
...Various Civil Rights Commissions have proposed that special police be engaged to handle civil rights enforcement...
...They shop in stores where they cannot sit down and have a hot dog, or use the bathroom...
...The Negroes, however, were left out of all, or at any rate most, of the beneficent consequences of this fluid evolutionary process...
...So they marched, two by two, singing and praying, confident that the Constitution of the United States would save them from the hell of an Alabama jail...
...Indeed, Birmingham police spent much of their time restraining State Troopers—rednecks from the bush—who wanted to wade in and club Negroes whether they were involved in the demonstrations or not...
...He was dropped as president of the local NAACP because of this and was later charged with kidnapping a white couple whom, in fact, he had protected...
...Then, still from the jail, there rises a young squeaky voice in prayer, and his fellow holy inmates urge him on: "O Lord have mercy...
...Nor should we have too much difficulty in accounting for the strange phenomenon of a Negro revolution taking place in an open society, rather than in a traditional one...
...Earlier, the same sort of men murdered a pure-hearted mail carrier who was carrying a message about the necessity for integration to the Governor of Alabama...
...And many who had angrily and indignantly wired the White House, screaming at the Brothers to "Do Something...
...The enclave of hopeless injustice in our generally open society obviously has its core in the "deep South"—in Mississippi and Alabama and, in varying degrees, other states of the old Confederacy...
...Revolution in an Open Society By Reinhold Niebuhr The Negro revolution, which is daily gathering force and undoubtedly will gather more force before it reaches its objectives and finally spends itself in fulfillment, is an interesting historical phenomenon...
...Like other recommendations, this all-important one has been tabled indefinitely...
...they get paid every Friday afternoon...
...the city police were at odds with the state police even as fullscale rioting broke out...
...What is significant is that Negroes with high talent are breaking out of the enclave in increasing numbers, thus revealing the virtue of an open society, enlarging its openness, and refuting the libel about the "innate inferiority" of their race...
...President Kennedy has done more for civil rights than any President in history...
...The wartime riots of Detroit and New York would pale beside it...
...It will be recalled that the Attorney General urged the Freedom Riders to call a halt to their journeys down South while his brother, the President, was on an overseas trip...
...The violence would be of so awful a nature that leaders and politicians would then make sure that such a force could not build and explode again, and perhaps its purpose might then be considered well meant...
...If he would have his own profile be one of courage, the President must, and soon, meet the demands of the future, not grapple with the needs of the past...
...The rioting was kicked off by Negroes terribly unwilling, as King suggested, to let their blood flow instead of their white brother's...
...And so the vigil outside the jail is over...
...Help our fellow students who will demonstrate tomorrow...
...Strangely enough, the only true proponents of a neat "class struggle" between the races are the Black Muslims, who believe Allah will perform the service which Marx expected from the "historical dialectic...
...Education: Three years college...
...Despite the promises of a nation "conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal," they lived in slavery in the self-conscious and selfrighteous young nation "brought forth" on a new continent...
...To our dismay, the Kennedy Administration continues to climb the back side of the civil rights mountain...
...Peace, law, and order to the Negro mean little more than enforcement of the status quo...
...If she doesn't like it, or it doesn't fit, she can bring it back...
...But in all candor, few, if any, of us really believed Eugene "Bull" Connor would respond in terms of the soul and the spirit...
...Now, like about a fourth of the school children in Birmingham, John Jr...
...If the Attorney General needs evidence of just how maimed Negroes in Birmingham already are, let him examine the mass of material gathered by Thelton Henderson, a Justice Department field man who has been gathering evidence for a voter registration suit in Birmingham for the past several weeks...
...Dry up the fire hoses, Lord...
...An open society prevents revolutions by allowing all economic, racial and cultural groups freedom to state their claims and defend their interests...
...The Administration's overriding concern was with the restoration of order, the maintainence of peace...
...The last players in this continuing game of charades very likely will be the people Dr...
...The current Negro revolution can be understood only if it is realized that the Negroes comprise a disinherited enclave in a free society...
...Now, in Birmingham, the younger Kennedy questions the morality of the Negro effort, and underscores the risk of using children in the front lines...
...For then, and only then, will we have overcome...
...We shall live for a long time with this pressure and with the contradictory consequences of a revolution in an open society...
...After the Civil War, even the free states did not hasten to enfranchise Negroes under the Fourteenth Amendment...
...Education, religion, economics, health, employment opportunities, unemployment, defense, the Armed Forces—none of these escapes the whiplash and sting of discrimination...
...And the use of children will spread, for now is nonviolence's most perilous hour...
...For the Birmingham policemen are the best of the lot...
...people whom he, Ralph Abernathy and Fred Shuttlesworth denied were theirs...
...The immediate hurts of the Negro might be momentarily alleviated through a fearsome show of righteous vengeance...
...Then his underlings rushed to the fallen women and pinned them to the ground, the knees of the police on their breasts...
...his opponents have not always heeded the Homerian adage: Do thou resist that man with all thy might Who, unprovoked, provokes thee to a fight...
...These are the people the South most fears...
...The white policeman, his night stick at the ready, says move on...
...Stand by us as we suffer for the right...
...We know of the revolutions in 17th century England, 18th century France and 20th century Russia...
...Their skin is black...
...Sullen, deprived, outside the community of religion and economic influences, they are prepared to meet violence with violence...
...But the analogy is not exact...
...They bear the same unsatisfied longings of the ages, the same accumulated resentments against unredressed injustices, which the peasants of the ossified traditional communities bore in past centuries and which, according to Marx, the "proletariat" bore...
...Occupation: Bell hop...
...When a white man—particularly a white policeman—says "move on," black folks move on or get beaten and then jailed for disorderly conduct...
...Despite the assurances of the Fourteenth Amendment, Negroes remained both rightless and powerless in the sense that they were voteless...
...Justice, at the expense of martial law and Federal occupation, should have been imposed on this tormented town...
...our committment is to the presence of justice...
...Yes, Yes, Yes...
...But in a truly democratic society there is always some hope that genuine interests will gradually be recognized, and that in a spirit of mutual accommodation failure to grant them will be justified by their clearly interfering with other legitimate interests...
...These, as we have seen, disavowed the uncertain truce signed in Birmingham by King and moderate whites...
...So she must go out into the alley behind the store and slip into the garment while nobody is looking...
...But, it should be remembered, we are dealing with outraged human beings, not with angels of virtue...
...Williams is the ex-Marine who had his people throw up breastworks in Monroe County, North Carolina, and fought white attackers with rifles...
...The John Fitzgerald Kennedy of 1963 would have been a great President in 1950...
...We aim, of course, at the conscience of men, at the souls of our adversaries...
...the aggrieved, rather than the criminals, were advised to slow down, be moderate, not make waves...
...Another Robert Williams to lead them and Birmingham would be as bloody a battlefield as Bunker Hill...
...certain that one day they would be able to sit down and have a hot dog, use the bathroom and try on a dress before they buy it...
...Yet even in those revolutions the peasants and the rising craftsmen arose as a revolutionary force only when internal strains and external exertions weakened the old order and gave them an opportunity to do so...
...No, we are not at the point where millions of Negroes will be herded into physical concentration camps and eliminated...
...Presidents since Harry Truman have convened Civil Rights Commissions whose reports, many of them coming from Southern white members, have been dutifully filed away without being acted upon...
...They sought to demonstrate peacefully against what they felt was injustice...
...We should know about this double motive of revolutions as we watch the Negro revolution in its ups and downs, and begin to wonder why, as it meets with comparative success, it is developing more and more force...
...this is Alabama in tranquility...
...Won't the Kennedys stop persuading (which has meant, in the case of Governor Ross Barnett of Mississippi, saving a politician's face, a face which cost two lives) and get the jump on the action...
...That, however, was over a decade ago...
...Name: Mary Jones...
...How many more times will we have to witness this stupid, disgusting charade...
...The men who threw the bombs, put dogs on children, and manhandled defenseless Negro women, should have been told to slow down, not move too fast, be moderate...
...True, some of them may be demagogic Congressmen with unsavorary records of racism in reverse...
...The truce came because of the children...
...Raised on a heritage of violence without the soothing ministrations of the church, they are willing to dispense violence themselves...
...They might get nigger smell on them clothes," one merchant said...
...This is Birmingham in peace...
...Despite the fact that the slavery issue caused the Civil War, the victory of the North did more to "save the union," acknowledged by Lincoln to be his "primary purpose," than to emancipate the Negroes...
...It has been as moderate about desegregation as the white business groups...
...Indeed, some of the effects of the present integration controversy stem from the contradictory influences of an open society containing a closed enclave...
...they are the people fabled in Southern story as "bad niggers...
...The scene was transmitted to all the world, and men of all cultures and languages discovered anew the savagery of the land we black Americans call home...
...Of course, Western culture required a whole century to come to terms with the realities of modern industry...
...But, just as it did at the University of Mississippi, the whole damned package blew up in everyone's face...
...The return of peace was hailed and the Kennedy Brothers were revealed as "The Hidden Persuaders...
...It's mine...
...Whites, along with Negroes who retain hope of getting justice, will rejoice that this is not South Africa and that the only conceivable conclusion of the struggle is not a blood bath of violent revolution...
...If historical phenomena were as neat and orderly as our categories of history, revolutions would occur only in moribund traditional societies where there is no free and mutual adjustment of interests and where the most defrauded segment of the community cannot move to attain its rights without shattering the whole rigid structure of a hierarchial community...
...The motive power of their revolutionary actions was resentment against age-old grievances and injustices, borne "patiently" until deliverance seemed near...
...Yes, Lord...
...These facts are almost too obvious to be recorded...
...It is a revolution within the framework of a democratic society...
...he must stand muster before the now and the tomorrow...
...The President called in the troops from the sidelines to the usual ante-bellum yowls of indignation and pronouncements of state's rights...
...Still, these enclaves of injustice are in a community that is otherwise "open...
...If you cared about your children they wouldn't be here...
...Governor George Wallace and Mayor Albert Boutwell screamed at each other and Wallace fired off wires to Washington...
...He did precisely what was expected: He unleashed dogs on children and felled women with fire hoses...
...The Irish merely affronted us by having a different religion and a different place of origin than the "true" Americans...
...The constitutional privileges of all are in danger because the Government refuses to meet the needs of a minority...
...He fled northward to Canada and from there went to Cuba...
...Negro businesses within the segregated community, insurance particularly, have created black millionaires...
...It should be clearly stated that Negroes have resorted to nonviolence not because we are all that moral, but because the other cheek is the only practical weapon in our arsenal...
...But even now only the most talented women are able to establish "equal rights" with men in politics and business...
...One further significant revelation came with the furor in Birmingham: The Negro business community of the South may now be inclined to get off the fence...
...But the nature of the times demands that more be done for civil rights than at any other period in history...
...But King's time may be running out...
...King has had startling good fortune...
...The first signs of this were in his use of the children in the Birmingham marches...
...But there is one liberal store in town...
...The order was broken, the peace disturbed, by those who would deny Negroes even the right to protest...
...Only because he does not realize the seriousness of our revolt, the Attorney General fails to understand that every American Negro is maimed at birth...
...Neither Life Enough Nor Time By John A. Williams For the American Negro the hurt of Birmingham, of the South, of the nation, is so deep, so twisting, so all-encompassing that the only relief from it may be, as authorities close to the scene have warned time and again, raw, quivering violence...
...That was in the case involving Dr...
...John and Mary Jones cannot try on the suits and dresses they are thinking of buying...
...No single question that effects this nation is without roots imbedded deeply in the problem so recently blown up in Birmingham...
...We are not concerned with the absence of trouble...
...If, under Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy the CRC'S recommendations have been put into action, few people know about it...
...We are not there yet...
...A maimed child," he has said, "is something we can hardly afford...
...and the hopes generated by cracks in the old order...
...Negroes with votes will use their power in favor of Negroes without votes...
...the rioting on the University of Mississippi campus would look like child's play...
...The mills of both God and democracy grind exceedingly slowly...
...The Muslims stress defense if attacked...
...They have been saying in South Africa that the time is "five minutes to 12...
...King's jailing in Atlanta...
...To give the illusion of doing something...
...We know how it goes by now...
...Repeatedly these reports have cited the failure of local police to preserve law and order, pointing out that the likes of law officials like Bull Connor and Albert Lingo of Alabama and Willis McCall of Florida are as much a barrier to desegregation as the schools' refusal to admit Negroes...
...And if there are funds for marches and bail fees, there are also funds for weapons...
...The Supreme Court has had its say, but has been defied at nearly every turn, even by Federal Court judges...
...A joint interracial committee finally resolved the "tension" by promising desegregation of the large downtown department store facilities, promotion of Negroes to sales positions, and the formation of a permanent commission on race relations...
...the Negroes applied for the permit and were denied...
...One man summed it all up this way: "They'd better enforce that mother---------Constitution or the God damn thing won't be worth a s--t to nobody...
...But it also encompasses the entire nation, particularly the Northern urban centers to which the Southern Negroes fled...
...It is a combination of resentment and hope...
...A group of Birmingham Negroes, enraged by the bombing, went beserk, rioted and ruthlessly laid waste to several homes and businesses...
...For the Negro it is a holy war, and we are of the holy war nonwhite men all over the world are now waging...
...They would do it with startling relish...
...These "sheep" have demonstrated their willingness to attack even without weapons...
...While Nixon dawdled, the Kennedys dialed and won for themselves the Negro vote that determined the election...
...But justice was not done...
...That is why revolutionary movements become more revolutionary in the process of their success...
...They meet the man—the white man—every morning...
...John and Mary Jones, and there are hundreds like them, are in the tradition of Birmingham...
...Birmingham illustrates the situation most poignantly...
...To be sure, the Negroes got a crumb...
...We will have the tension of the integration struggle with us as long as we live in the precarious peace of the nuclear dilemma...
...He does not continually advocate nonviolence merely as a platform...
...The kids went in their small trusting ways, believing in King and his God, to endure the problems that we as adults, with life enough and time, have been unwilling to solve in the 100 years since Emancipation...
...in Birmingham, were relieved to discover Jack and Bobby had been on the job all along...
...Yet what this troubled town needs is not the absence of trouble but the presence of justice...
...The claims may not always be granted, or the interests acknowledged...
...The weak agreement was beaten out, regardless, "behind the scenes...
...and Susan are in jail...
Vol. 46 • May 1963 • No. 11
