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Not Even Past

Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World By Jessica Marie Johnson (2020)

By Tiana Wilson

Many recent studies on chattel slavery in the Atlantic World have decentered the voices of the colonizers in an effort to creatively reimagine the inner lives of Black people, both enslaved and “free.” However, narrating the complex ways race, gender, and sexuality played out in a colonial setting beyond violence has proven difficult due to the brutal, inhumane conditions of enslavement. At the same time, the drastic imbalance of power raises questions about consent within sexual and intimate relationships. While most scholars of slavery have tended to shy away from such a contentious and messy topic, historian Jessica Marie Johnson presents a compelling analysis of how African women and women of African descent used intimacy and kinship to construct and live out freedom in the eighteenth century.

She demonstrates how the legal status of free, manumission from bondage, or escape from slavery did not protect Black women from “colonial masculinities and imperial desires for black flesh” that rendered African women as “lecherous, wicked, and monstrous” (14). Slaveowners, traders, and colonial officials attempted to exploit Black women’s bodies (enslaved or legally free) for labor. In return, Johnson argues, Black women defined freedom on their own terms through the intimate and kinship ties they formed.

Focusing on Black women in New Orleans, Wicked Flesh takes readers from the coast of Senegal to French Saint-Domingue and from Spanish Cuba to the US Gulf Coast areas in order to tell the varying experiences of Black women across the Atlantic world. Johnson draws on archival material written in multiple languages dispersed across three continents and uses a method that historian Marisa Fuentes describes as “reading along the bias grain” to offer an ethical historical analysis of her texts. Although the majority of sources Johnson utilizes were produced by colonial officials and slaveholding men, this methodology allows Johnson to carefully and innovatively piece together archival fragments, providing readers insight into the everyday intimate lives of Black women during this era. Intimacy, as Johnson explores, encompassed the “corporeal, carnal, quotidian encounters of flesh and fluid” and was the very thing that tied Black women to white and Black men. It was through these connections that women of African descent simultaneously endured violence and resisted colonial agendas. Wicked Flesh seriously consider the ways Black women fostered hospitable and pleasurable spaces on both sides of the Atlantic.

Johnson begins her narrative in West Africa between the geographical region of the Senegal River (north) and the Gambia River (south), also known as Senegambia. Senegal’s Atlantic coast saw Portuguese-Dutch-French-Wolof trade alliances and their struggle for power, but by 1659, the French drove out the Dutch from the northern area and founded the comptoir (administrative outpost of Saint-Louis. It is in this locale, comptoir, that Johnson introduces readers to free African women like Seignora Catti, Anne Gusban, and Marie Baude, who all actively engaged in networks with European and African men.

Throughout chapters one and two, Johnson demonstrates the different ways free African women cultivated freedom in efforts to seek safety and security. This included participating in grand gestures of hospitality for French officials or marring European men, but rejecting their Catholic practices. These practices impacted three groups, free African women who has intimate ties with European and African men, captifs du case (enslaved people who belonged to comptoir residents), and Africans forced onboard of slaved ships set to travel to the Americas. Chapter three examines the latter, including Black women’s and girl’s horrific experiences on the long middle passage and how this forced migration produced a “predatory network of exchanges” that attempted to “dismantle their womanhood, girlhood, and humanity” (123).

Chapters four and five shifts to the Gulf Coast region and encourages readers to reconceptualize the price of manumission for people of African descent that extended beyond the material world. Through the lives of figures like Suzanne, the wife of a New Orleans “negro executioner,” Johnson further illustrates just how bound Black women’s freedom was to their intimate relations and kinship ties with men in power who were acting on behalf of the French colonial regime. When Suzanne’s husband, Louis Congo, initially entered in a contractual obligation with slaveowners or Company officials, he requested freedom for Suzanne too. However, French colonists rejected his demand and instead, only allowed Suzanne to live with her husband, if Louis agreed to grant the Company full use of his wife when the Company needed her. While one scholar may read this account as an example of a Black woman gaining her freedom through her husband’s occupation, Johnson critically assess Suzanne’s lack of control over her own body and movement.

Diving deeper into the intricate ways women of African descent navigated French colonial power in New Orleans, Johnson’s fifth chapter follows girls like Charlotte, the daughter of a French colonial officer, who demanded manumission for herself. It is in this section that Johnson introduces the concept of “black femme freedom” that “points to the deeply feminine, feminized, and femme practices of freedom engaged in by women and girls of African descent” (260). Scholars of Black and other women of color feminists use the term “femme” to describe a queer sexual identity that is gendered in performances of femininity. Johnson finds this term productive in the context of eighteenth-century New Orleans, because strands of resistive femininity and intimacy between women was present during this time. Black femme freedom details a type of liberation that went beyond masculine and imperial desires. It describes the importance of reading Black women’s intimate decisions to privilege themselves and each other in a world that violently privileged the position of slaveowners and husbands. An example of this Black femme freedom lies within Black women’s efforts to create spaces for pleasure, spirit, and celebration against French and later Spanish censorship of their behaviors. This included hosting night markets and wearing headwraps. The last chapter explores the shift in colonial powers and how free women of African descent used this change to claim kinship ties through registration of their wills and testaments.

Wicked Flesh is a well-researched, beautifully written text that is an essential read for anyone interested in the intersections between Slavery, Gender, and Sexuality. Following in the tradition of historians like Stephanie Camp, Jennifer Morgan, and Marisa Fuentes, Johnson’s work is a superb addition to these groups of scholars who are shifting the field of Atlantic History to critically engage with definitions of freedom for enslaved and legally free women of African descent during the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Graduate students including myself can (and likely will) use Johnson’s work as a model for problematizing white colonial sources, while ethically utilizing contemporary theoretical frameworks to imagine and retell the lives of those silenced by institutional archives.

Image credits

Banner image – Ndeté-Yalla, lingeer of Waalo, Gallica, bnf.fr – Réserve DT 549.2 B 67 M Atlas – planche n °5 – Notice n° : FRBNF38495418 – (Illustrations de Esquisses sénégalaises) Image from Wikimedia Commons

TIANA WILSON is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin.

The Sword and The Shield – A Conversation with Peniel E. Joseph (Part II)

With Peniel Joseph 

In this conversation, Dr. Peniel Joseph discusses his new book, The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. This dual biography of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King upends longstanding preconceptions to transform our understanding of the twentieth century’s most iconic African American leaders. This is part II of the conversation. Part I can be seen here. The Not Even Past Conversations Series was born out of the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic.  It takes the form of an interview held informally (usually at home) over Zoom with leading scholars and teachers at the University of Texas at Austin and beyond. The following is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation between Adam Clulow and Peniel Joseph.

AC: You talk about the suffocating mythology that sometimes surrounds Dr King and Malcolm X. One of the parts of your book that’s so striking is your discussion of the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.   Can you talk about this moment and that speech?

AC: Is that the case immediately? The speech has a huge impact and it’s very widely publicized and reported but I get the sense that very quickly people are focusing in on those parts that we all know and the rest of the speech is elided.  Is that the case, that this understanding comes into being very quickly? Or is there a moment when the speech as a whole is considered?

PJ: I think the speech gets a Janus-faced treatment. The Black press treats it in a very holistic way. The white press is going to focus on ‘I Have a Dream’. John F. Kennedy says ‘I Have a Dream’ as soon as he meets King. It’s important to remember that the Black press, the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier the New York Amsterdam News, Los Angeles Herald Dispatch, this is how most of the 16, 17, 18 million Black people got their news. You know, Black people were rarely written about in say The New York Times. King is an exception.  Most of the time Black people were written about in major newspapers was for having committed some kind of crime. So the Black press really gets what he’s trying to say. And even the march on Washington, the Black press gives it its full title. It’s the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. So that economic aspect is really there for the Black press.  But I would say that the mythologizing starts, yes, early and often when we think about the mainstream.

AC: So you talk about this kind of “children’s bedtime story” version of Civil Right that is sometimes told. And it’s often told as a singularly American story. What really struck me in the book is the global dimensions of this story. You talk about Dr King and Malcolm X bestriding the global age of decolonization.  They meet with Ben Bellah, the first President of Algeria and both travel across the world. Malcolm X travels repeatedly and is welcomed, you say, as America’s Black Prime Minister. So is Dr King. Can you say more about these figures as global icons in a much wider process of decolonization?

PJ: Yes, definitely. They’re both hugely impacted by this global age of decolonization. There’s been great work on Black internationalism done by Penny Von Eschen and Brenda Gayle Plummer and Thomas Borstelmann, Mary Dudziak, and Gerald Horne, whose whole career has focused on Black Internationalism with dozens of books. When we think about Malcolm and Martin, both of them are global figures. They converge at the intersection of anticolonialism and human rights, both of them.

Malcolm X, 1963 by Gordon Parks -Exhibition label: “Gordon Parks photographed Malcolm X on a New York City sidewalk as he sold a special issue of Muhammad Speaks, the official newspaper of the Black separatist group Nation of Islam.”(National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution)

Malcolm, I would argue, is even more interested in the global stage because in a lot of ways he’s able to get more global support than he is domestically. I think King is interested in the global stage but as his domestic reputation swells, he really utilizes global support to impact the domestic struggle. Whereas Malcolm is really trying to utilize the world stage to push for anti-racism and the defeat of white supremacy in, for example, the United Nations, and also to have coalitions in the Organization of African Unity that will censor the United States for its mistreatment of African-Americans. In a very specific, granular way they both in the 1950s take trips overseas. So King goes to Ghana in 1957 and is able to witness Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah. When we think about Nkrumah he is such an important figure. He’s really the post-war avatar of Pan Africanism as a nation state building project on the continent of Africa. He makes mistakes. But symbolically, he is this unbelievably important figure. Malcolm X meets him in Harlem. Martin meets him in Ghana.  Malcolm later meets him in Ghana. 

So King gets to Africa first. In 1957. King spends a month in India in 1959. The India trip is crucial. King’s India trip and seeing all that poverty and the caste system in India makes King understand that he has been put on Earth not just to defeat racism and white supremacy, but actually to defeat poverty globally.  These are massive ambitions that most humans will never have, He really believes it.  That’s what’s so extraordinary and exciting about studying these figures. Malcolm visits the Middle East in 1959, spends five weeks there, visits Saudi Arabia, visits Khartoum, Egypt, all these different places. He meets up with Anwar El Sadat, the vice president of Egypt, the future president, Egypt.

Malcolm starts making critical alliances with Middle Eastern and African diplomats in the 1950s. Malcolm had such good alliances, that one of the little known facts I talk about in the book, is that Malcolm X has an office at the United Nations. He’s got it through the connections with African and Middle Eastern diplomats. So Malcolm goes in and out of the UN all the time with a briefcase. And he’s an extraordinary figure in this sense. 

So as the 60s progressed, you see Dr. King with Ben Bella.  King becomes this figure for anticolonial activists who especially are interested in human rights, but especially interested in also pressuring the United States to recognize their activism as something that’s good and virtuous, even as the United States has this ultimate contradiction of not just Jim Crow segregation, but really utilizing state violence against Black people.

In 1964, Malcolm goes overseas for about 25 weeks. He goes to the Hajj pilgrimage in Mecca. He goes to Nigeria. He goes to Tanzania. He goes to Ghana. Malcolm is in Ethiopia. He’s in Cairo. He’s in London. And Birmingham. And Smethwick. And Oxford. He’s in Paris. So what Malcolm is trying to do is, one, he really becomes a statesman who is giving the global audience, the world audience, a firsthand account of his experiences as a Black man and as a Black person in America.

He’s telling Africans about the depth and breadth of racism and white supremacy. He’s repudiating the State Department’s notion that things are getting better. Malcolm is actually even harsher globally than King is.  By 1964 when King travels overseas, he travels to Scandinavia to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. So in a way, King is always giving, until he’s coming out against the Vietnam War, etc, he’s giving a more optimistic vision. 

Malcolm finds some optimism in the fact that anticolonialism has worked and he wants help.  Malcolm meet with Fidel Castro in Harlem September of 1960, and he’s telling Fidel that your struggle is our struggle and our struggle is your struggle. Malcolm is telling that to Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere in Tanzania. What’s so interesting about Malcolm is that so many African revolutionaries respect Malcolm.  He is willing to speak truth to power.  So the global component is really important for both of them. I would say that Malcolm really tries to cultivate that global component even more than King. And I think it’s out of necessity. 

But it’s also because Malcolm is this revolutionary Pan Africanist and also a global Islamic figure.  You know, I make an argument that he’s always Muslim, both within the Nation of Islam and then when he becomes an Orthodox Muslim. So just because he’s in a different sect doesn’t mean that he doesn’t believe he’s a Muslim.  

They are secular, but these are two faith leaders. They bring this real morality to what they’re doing. And it’s not a cheap morality that we have in our society today about who’s sleeping with whom. It’s the morality of: does human life matter?  Should we protect children? Should we protect communities? Should we not torture people? At any time? Any place? Should we be, and this is where King’s very important here, a society that is nonviolent but we are not morally equivocating about that nonviolence. 

“No Apartheid – Wall of Justice Revival” by Mario Torero. (UC Santa Barbara, Library, Department of Special Research Collections)

King believes in nonviolence.  Whether it’s white sheriffs who are attacking Black people or it is people in Vietnam who are considered the enemy. The United States is dropping napalm. And again, these are crimes. These are crimes against humanity that the United States is committing. No matter what we do, we can never take back these acts. Right. And so King is saying that, right. And that’s when King, I argue, April 4th, 1967 becomes a revolutionary because there’s no turning back after that. There’s no handshakes with President Johnson and President Johnson doesn’t come to his funeral.

AC: Malcolm X and Dr King exist in a global moment of decolonization.  Do you see a parallel between that moment and what’s happening now with Black Lives Matter? Because one thing that’s been so striking is the way these protests have gone global in a way that could not have been predicted two years ago.  Do you see parallels between the years you discuss in the book and the global Dimensions of Black Lives Matter which have has swept across the world in unprecedented and unpredictable ways and galvanized people in many different countries?

PJ: Absolutely. I think there’s parallels and I think we’re at another crossroads. I think the parallels are, again, also between the global north and the global south, because as we’ve seen, the underdevelopment of the global south and really the exploitation of the global south has continued with a different kind of colonization. And that colonization is a kind of economic colonization. Right. Because of these unfair distributions of wealth created by globalization. Globalization, that in and of itself is not a bad thing, just like gentrification.  But we have made sure that the distributions or the supply chains of power and privilege versus the supply chains of misery and greed are distributed along racial and economic lines, ethnicity lines, different lines based on identity and geography.

So in a way, even as indigenous groups got rights of political self-determination – probably our biggest global example after King and Malcolm’s time is going to be Nelson Mandela in South Africa. Yes, the ANC absolutely got political power in South Africa, but without connected economic justice and equality. The segregation, the economic impoverishment has actually increased even though now we have Black billionaires and African billionaires in South Africa, too. So the whole world is absolutely in the throes of a rebellion against this inequality that is organized around anti-black racism, but it’s organized around intersectional injustice based on your race, class, gender, sexuality, how you identify.

So we’re seeing this. And I think that King and Malcolm actually anticipated this crisis, and that’s why they were interested in thinking of human and civil rights as a Human Rights movement, this bigger movement that was going to guarantee redistribution of wealth and guarantee citizenship for, yes, Black people, but for all people.

AC: We’re going to return to Dr King in a second but you can say more about how Malcolm X changes and evolves?  He’s often presented in a very limited way that does not encompass the complexity of the individual, but also just how much he changed across this period.  Although you cover their whole lives, the book really focuses on a relatively compressed space of time and he travels a remarkable road in this period. 

AC: So let’s talk about the last two chapters of the book, the Radical King and the Revolutionary King. And so we talked about the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. Let’s talk about the Riverside speech, in 1967.  This is an extraordinary speech that is very different from popular understandings of Dr. King.  It’s stunning in its repudiation of US involvement in Vietnam.  You write in the last years of his life that Dr King was transformed “into a revolutionary dissident vilified in quarters that once feted him.” Do you think he anticipated the strength of this backlash?

PJ: I would say he didn’t anticipate how big the backlash would be because I think that he thought what would protect him was the mainstream accolades that he had gotten before. So he was a Nobel Prize winner, was somebody who had been a leader of a social movement, who was on par with Presidents of the United States. And people knew that King was a serious, sober person politically. He wasn’t prone to making wild eyed statements. And when you read the speech, the speech is very sober. I mean, it’s very critical. But it’s not even his most critical speech against the war. That’s going to start really at the end of that month, because he’s going to do a speech on April 4th, April 15th. He’s at the spring mobilization, which is the largest anti-war demonstration up until that time. 400,000.  Two years later is going to be marching with over a million. That’s in Central Park with Benjamin Spock. Harry Belafonte. 

But then April 30th is when he does the speech at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Stokely Carmichael is in the front row. He says he’s not going to study war no more. It’s a much more stinging indictment. And Stokely leads the standing ovation for that speech. So the Riverside speech, I mean, I think one of the things he talks about when he says America is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world is very, very important, because I think that speech is very similar to what Malcolm X is saying when he says the chickens have come home to roost.

And one of the things that King starts to channel, I argue in the book after Malcolm’s assassination, is really Malcolm’s framing of structural racism and white supremacy and imperialism and racial violence and this idea that the United States being a deployer of that kind of violence is always going to have some kind of karmic payback.  For Malcolm, he was talking about the Kennedy assassination, for King the reason why he breaks with Lyndon Johnson. He’s saying, look: we’re immorally killing all these people in Vietnam, and the Great Society is failing now. In a television interview in 1966, he says, your money goes where your heart goes. And the president’s heart and the country’s heart is in Vietnam. And he was right. I mean, all that money, we know retrospectively, we should have poured that into urban cities and poured that into rural areas and anti-poverty and employment and guaranteed basic income. We could have given everybody health care and income and not murdered all those people. So, again, what’s interesting about King is he takes that weight on for himself. So he feels the weight of the US’s morally reprehensible actions in a way, I think that elected leaders should because that would prevent you from doing it. So King feels that enormous psychic weight. 

And he feels that about poverty. He feels that about violence. And so he becomes this very clarifying figure. But he starts to use nonviolence as a political sword in the way that Malcolm X had talked about. And King starts speaking truth to power, saying Congress, the halls of Congress are running wild with racism. In 1967 before the American Psychological Association, he’s saying the roots of urban rebellions are white supremacy, and white racism is producing chaos. And the media says that there would be peace if Black people stopped rebelling. And King says it’s the white people who are producing the chaos.

This is King. One of the most interesting symmetries between Malcolm and Martin is the fact that Malcolm X, who I argue is Black America’s prosecuting attorney, was always charging white America with a series of crime. We have the videotape of King talking to poor Black people in Marks, Mississippi. There’s a point where Andy Young says King is in tears listening. This is terrible. Marks, Mississippi.  King says the way you are living right here in America, it’s a crime. That’s what King says.  

Martin Luther King, Jr (1967) by Benedict J. Fernandez. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Eastman Kodak Professional Photography Division, the Engl Trust, and Benedict J. Fernandez

So we go from Malcolm saying this is a crime. He’s that revolutionary. King’s our good guy. Right? So he’s the bad guy. And King is saying this is a crime. And King is talking about white people getting access to land through the Homestead Act. And Black people not getting their reparations, their 40 acres and a mule. And yet people are telling Black people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. And so he says, we’re coming to Washington to get that check. Right. So this is extraordinary what happens in terms of the symmetry between both of these individuals. Both while they’re living but then certainly during the last three years of King’s life.

AC: So a final question.  Before becoming a university professor, I taught high school history. And the question I have is, how should we teach about these two figures in a way that does more justice to their lives

PJ: I think we should teach about them together. So this is really a dual biography. Whenever you tell students about one, you tell them about the other. It’s pretty simple to do because they live parallel lives. Malcolm’s born in 1925. King in 1929. Malcolm’s killed in 1965. King in 1968. So there’s not a lot of mental shuffling you have to do.  And so I think you show students the way in which they interpret race and democracy differently based on the life experiences that they have. So you look at King: Morehouse College, had his father in his life. Malcolm: father was killed, trauma, foster home. While he’s in college, Malcolm is in prison.  While King is in seminary, Malcolm’s in prison and they both come out and they’re activists, both men of faith. They become faith leaders. But then you look at how, how and why both of them imbibe this revolutionary moment in different ways. And then why do they start to converge? How and why they converge. 

AC: Thank you for sharing your thoughts on two remarkable lives and a remarkable book.  

Part I in this series is available here.

PENIEL JOSEPH holds a joint professorship appointment at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and the History Department in the College of Liberal Arts at The University of Texas at Austin. He is also the founding director of the LBJ School’s Center for the Study of Race and Democracy. His career focus has been on “Black Power Studies,” which encompasses interdisciplinary fields such as Africana studies, law and society, women’s and ethnic studies, and political science. His newest book, The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., was published in March 2020 and is available now.

More from Dr. Joseph on Not Even Past:

Consider reading as well:

Featured Image Credit: MalcolmX and MLK, Jr., mural, E. W. alley view, N. of Manchester Ave. towards Cimarron, Los Angeles, California, 2010. (Vergara, Camilo J. Vergara Photograph Collection. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

The Sword and The Shield – A Conversation with Peniel E. Joseph (Part I)

With Peniel Joseph 

This is Part I of a conversation with Dr. Peniel Joseph. In this conversation, Dr Joseph discusses his new book, The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. This dual biography of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King upends longstanding preconceptions to transform our understanding of the twentieth century’s most iconic African American leaders. The Not Even Past Conversations Series was born out of the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic.  It takes the form of an interview held informally (usually at home) over Zoom with leading scholars and teachers at the University of Texas at Austin and beyond. The following is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation between Adam Clulow and Peniel Joseph.

AC: Thank you so much for joining me today.  You start the book with a meeting that takes place on March 26, 1964, between Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  Remarkably, and as you write, this is the only time they actually met.  Can you tell us about this meeting and how it came about? And the bigger question that runs through the whole book is how should we characterize their relationship? You use a few different terms. You talk about them as political partners, kindred spirits, and alter egos.  How should we understand this meeting and their relationship more generally?

AC: And do you think at that moment in March 1964, they’re aware of this partnership? They’re clearly thinking about each other. They’re reading each other’s writing. They’re listening to each other’s speeches now. They’re intertwined in all sorts of fascinating and productive ways but at this moment of meeting, is there an awareness of this partnership or do you think that lies ahead?

PJ: I think there’s an awareness. I think King is very careful until Malcolm X’s assassination. King utilizes Malcolm for leverage in the political mainstream. Malcolm X represents for white Americans, including elected officials the alternative to King. So if you think King is too militant, King is too radical. Then you’ve got Malcolm X to deal with, someone who is the boldest critic of white supremacy of his generation.  And so I think that Malcolm and King realize what the other is doing for them.

But because King is so mainstream, Malcolm is the person who’s more willing to be seen with King.  And that makes sense, right? Because when you think about King, it’s almost like when you think about a corporation that’s too big to fail.  Now Malcolm, as we see by 1963, becomes this international figure as well. Starting in 1959 but especially in 1963-64, he’s traveling overseas. He spends 25 weeks in Africa, the Middle East. The famous Oxford Union debate. So he’s really becoming more of a global figure.

But the person who is a global leader, who’s really been given the imprimatur of the world, of mainstream politics, is the Nobel Prize winner.  For these reasons, King is less interested in a formal partnership with Malcolm X.  And Malcolm would be more interested because King has more to lose. But by the time Malcolm is assassinated and as we see with Watts in a lot of ways what’s going to happen to King, is that he loses his alter ego. Yes. Stokely Carmichael and King. But King loses that Malcolm X figure. And King is going to be forced to become further radicalized. And I argue really, in the later chapters, for the radical King, the revolutionary King.

Martin Luther King and Malcolm X waiting for a press conference by Marion Trikosko. 1964. (via Library of Congress)

You talk about these two intertwined but different notions of radical black citizenship and radical black dignity that stand at the center of the book. Can you explain in more detail what you mean?

In this book, you argue for a more expansive understanding of these two remarkable figures. In particular, you talk about rescuing them from the suffocating mythology that surrounds them. I was so struck by was this phrase, how conventional images do no justice to these complex and changing figures. Does this apply equally to both of them or is the mythology more restrictive for Malcolm X or Dr King?

You know, I think it restricts both of them. So for Malcolm, this idea of being this black warrior really takes away from who he is. We’re not allowed to see the vulnerability, the sense of humor, the fear at times that he has, the shortcomings. Ossie Davis, the late Ossie Davis, an extraordinary actor and activist, has this great eulogy for Malcolm X, saying he was our living Black manhood, our shining Black prince. And there’s positives there, positives to have Malcolm as this kind of role model. But there’s negatives as well when he becomes somebody that’s impenetrable. Any figure, every leader has faults and flaws, man or woman, because they are human beings like the rest of us. So, Malcolm, when we take him out of that mythology, one, we see what a truly extraordinary figure he was. Because, and I say this in the book, Malcolm experiences racial trauma at a very early age. His father is murdered. His mother is institutionalized. His father is murdered by Black Legion white supremacists. He has this wayward youth that he admits in his autobiography, committing crimes, working odd jobs. He’s arrested for crimes he did commit and given a rather harsh sentence and spends 76 months in jail. And then he really becomes this person who is this intellectual, who is this political leader, this deep thinker, and then this great organizer. And so I think when you label Malcolm as just a warrior, you lose something.  I think it hurts Black men because of this idea that Black men don’t have the full range of emotions. You know, it hurts you there.

Malcolm X, half-length portrait, facing right / World-Telegram & Sun photo by Ed Ford. 1964. (via Library of Congress)

Two. You’re unable to see what a truly, extraordinarily supple mind and diplomat Malcolm is, because he transforms from a prosecuting attorney into a statesman by 64.  What’s so interesting is in Europe and the Middle East and Africa – even though Malcolm speaks at Harvard, at Yale –  they see that intellect and embrace him more eagerly than Americans. Right. That’s why he’s at Oxford Union. And they see this brilliant man.  Even when people disagree.  Because the thing about brilliance and ideas, as you know, is that, of course, we’re not going to all agree on everything. The extraordinary nature of ideas is that we can disagree, hopefully civilly. Right? Well, we learn from each other in those disagreements. Right. And so Malcolm speaks at Middle Eastern universities, African universities, European universities. And they’re interested in him not only because he’s a political activist, but because of his brilliant mind. So he suffers in the standard mythology.

And then King suffers in ways at times on a bigger scale, because King is still a larger, more global figure. When you think about the holiday, when you think about the annual celebrations, when you think about it, King is virtually the only Black American figure accorded this monument in Washington. I mean, you know, we haven’t done that for other Black figures. You know, Harriet Tubman. Sojourner Truth. There’s people that we could pick.  Ida B. Wells just won a Pulitzer Prize posthumously from Columbia University for her journalism against lynching in the late 19th, early 20th century. So we have these truly extraordinary figures.  But King is the exceptional one.  The two most well-known Black figures in American history are King and now Barack Obama.  And when we think of King’s suffocating mythology, we don’t want to talk about how much of a revolutionary Dr. King was. We don’t want to say that Dr. King was interested in social democracy, that Dr. King had a criticism against capitalism, that Dr. King remained nonviolent, but the reason Dr. King was assassinated is because Dr. King was using nonviolence to coerce the country into doing things it doesn’t want to do, namely Black citizenship and dignity.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., half-length portrait, facing front] / World Telegram & Sun photo by Dick DeMarsico. 1964. (Via Library of Congress)

And so King is this anti imperialist, anti-war revolutionary and King becomes a fire breather. What’s so extraordinary is how you can be that radical. And he’s not cursing. He’s not threatening violence. And he’s trying to use the moral force of the witness. Right. John Lewis does the same thing. Congressman John Lewis, when you’re saying you’re going to reveal to the world the opponent you’re up against is using immoral tactics just through your witness.  And if the police commit acts of violence, we’re going to roll ourselves up into a ball and let the world watch and the world will decide. Is this the land of the free and the home of the brave? That’s who Martin Luther King Jr becomes.

And the interesting thing about Malcolm and Martin is Malcolm had criticized the march on Washington as the Farce on Washington because he said they didn’t paralyze the city.  By 67, 68, as early as 65, Dr. King says that’s the next step. We’re going to use nonviolence to paralyze cities in his essay Beyond Los Angeles. So the two start to have a meeting of the minds. Even though Malcolm is no longer alive by February 21st, 1965. So it’s truly extraordinary.

Part 2 of this conversation with Dr. Peniel Joseph is available here. The banner image comes from Malcolm X and MLK, Jr., mural, E. W. alley view, N. of Manchester Ave. towards Cimarron, Los Angeles, California, 2010. https://www.loc.gov/item/2015647507/

PENIEL JOSEPH holds a joint professorship appointment at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and the History Department in the College of Liberal Arts at The University of Texas at Austin. He is also the founding director of the LBJ School’s Center for the Study of Race and Democracy. His career focus has been on “Black Power Studies,” which encompasses interdisciplinary fields such as Africana studies, law and society, women’s and ethnic studies, and political science. His newest book, The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., was published in March 2020 and is available now.

More from Dr. Joseph on Not Even Past

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Violence Against Black People in America: A ClioVis Timeline

By Haley Price, William Jones, and Alina Scott

The brutal killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis this summer marked a key event in the history of violence against Black Americans. But it was just one of many acts of violence that have been committed in American history. In order to put Floyd’s killing into a larger historical context, our Digital History intern, Haley Price, created four ClioVis timelines to help herself and others learn more about such violence. Alina Scott, a graduate student in the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin and Dr. William Jones, a recent Ph.D. from Rice University, also worked on the timelines, adding relevant scholarship to many of the events to assist readers who want to learn more. Below, Haley, Alina, and Will introduce the timeline by telling us how the timelines were compiled, what they learned in making them, and how they think the timelines can serve as a resource for others. While the timelines are not comprehensive, they provide viewers with a sense of the historical forces at play across time and illustrate how the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020 fits into a larger pattern of historical violence.

As readers will see, there are four timelines. We originally started making one timeline. But, as the number of events grew, we decided to break the larger timeline into three separate timelines. You now see an “Overview” timeline that includes 153 events. We then divided the overview timeline into three thematic timelines: “Slavery in America,” “Jim Crow to Civil Rights,” and “Police and Civilian Brutality.”

Introduction
By Haley Price

The purpose of these timelines is to visualize the history of Black Americans and to connect the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests to their historical context. Even as a History and Humanities major, this part of US history was still very new to me. I had learned about “Jim Crow Laws,” “The Great Migration, and “The March on Washington” in my entry-level U.S. history classes, but they were often tacked onto the ends of units, a footnote in a whitewashed version of our past. Black history is not given its rightful space in the American history curriculum. It is no wonder many Americans feel unprepared to fully understand the June 2020 protests.

Making this timeline was a way for me to educate myself, but much more importantly, I hope it will be a helpful resource for others to do the same. If you take one look at this timeline and feel overwhelmed, I encourage you to push past that feeling. Pick one event that you recognize and start there. See what caused that event and then look at its impact. Take things slowly, learn a little bit at a time, and then share with a loved one who wants to learn, too.

What I Did:
As I added events and eras to the timeline, I filled in their dates and wrote descriptions, added images, connections to other events, and more. I predominantly used information from websites like history.com, blackpast.org, and recent news articles. These sites fall into the category of popular history, so they are accessible to all kinds of learners. I was encouraged to find so much information through simple web searches because that means that viewers who want to go beyond the timeline will be able to do the same.

To Use ClioVis timelines:

  • Click on points, connections, and eras to read about specific events and people.
  • View in presentation mode to navigate the timelines chronologically.
  • Zoom in and out of periods to see how historical events are connected to each other.
  • Drag your mouse left and right to navigate the timeline manually.

View “Overview: Context for the 2020 BLM Protests” in full screen here .

I. Slavery in America

View “I. Slavery in America” in full screen here. 

What I Did:
By Dr. William Jones

I edited the timeline for content, grammar, and punctuation, focusing on the years before 1860. I also added academic sources that both substantiate the descriptions of the events and point viewers to additional reading. In choosing representative scholarship, I attempted to stick to academic sources that are comprehensive narratives published recently or considered classics. I found that describing the events themselves and finding sources for them was less difficult than deciding what should be included on the timeline. I always felt an internal tug between comprehensiveness, legibility, and simplicity.

A wide geographic perspective is often crucial for understanding the colonial era because all the European colonies in North America were part of larger empires, which included colonies in the Caribbean and South America. Yet I was also afraid of adding too many events to the timeline and making it illegible. For some events, I decided to include geographically broad connections in the descriptions rather than enter them onto the timeline. For instance, the authors of the South Carolina Slave Code of 1691 based that code on Jamaica’s code of 1684, which itself was based on Barbados’s code from 1661; this information (and sources to substantiate it) is only available on the timeline in the description of the South Carolina code. In other instances, I did not mention how historical developments outside the United States influenced a specific event on the timeline, but viewers who consult the readings will find that information. For instance, the nineteenth-century Atlantic slave trade in the Spanish Empire, sugar production in Cuba, and Great Britain’s attempts to police the slave trade on the west African coast are all background elements of the Amistad case, but none of that appears on the timeline. Finally, I felt like I needed to include some events (the Haitian Revolution, in particular) that occurred beyond the geographic boundaries of the United States because they influenced a great deal of the history of slavery and race.

II. Jim Crow to Civil Rights

View “II. Jim Crow to Civil Rights” in full screen here. 

What I Did: 
By Alina Scott

“My role in the project was to edit the period after 1860 for content and source material to ensure that Black voices and scholarship were included in the dialogue. The Black radical tradition and the movement for Black lives have a rich legacy of cultural, political, and historical contributions so incorporating novels, critiques, and histories by Black authors was not difficult. I also wanted to incorporate sources that are accessible to an audience outside academia by including e-books, podcasts, and documentaries available online.

As noted above, we divided the “Overview” timeline into three sections for the sake of user readability, though the timelines are best read together. A key goal of the project is to show the continuity of antiblackness from the highest levels of government to state leaders and local organizations. The project also shows the continuous resistance and resilience of Black people to systemic oppression.”

III. Police and Civilian Brutality

View “III. Police and Civilian Brutality” in full screen here. 

“While revising, I was struck by the way the timeline highlights protest, legislation, and presidential power as key themes. While it includes a large number of important individuals, organizations, and events, the timelines is incomplete. Overall, the timelines do a tremendous job highlighting key dates in Civil Rights activism and legislation even if it was not possible to include all historical actors and events. They make an excellent tool for teaching and learning about the political genealogy of the historic moment we are currently in. The movement for Black Lives is bigger than politics and legislation and we encourage others to make their own timelines. For instance, how might this timeline overlap with another on Black life, joy, and healing practices? Or a timeline centering Black Women and their role as intellectuals, in community building, religious life, and organizing? Or a timeline on Black Internationalism, international BLM movements, or coalition-building in the African Diaspora? There is potential, with a tool like ClioVis, to digitally show the many ways Black people have advocated for our lives and liberated ourselves in a way that is historically accurate, representative, and educational.

We hope you find thatthe timelines a useful building block for teaching and learning history.”

If you would like to know more about using these and other timelines or use ClioVis in your classroom, contact admin@cliovis.org.
Visit ClioVis.org for more information on how to create an account, view tutorials, and other sample projects.

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Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution by Ada Ferrer (2014)

by Isabelle Headrick 

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Cuba was profoundly shaped by its proximity to and multi-layered relationship with Haiti, or Saint-Domingue as it was called before the 1803 Haitian Revolution. In the decades leading up to Saint-Domingue’s 1791 slave revolt, Cuban planters looked with envy on the booming sugar economy of their neighbor to the southeast and sought to emulate its success. After the revolution in Haiti, Cuba was able to take advantage of the implosion of Saint-Domingue’s sugar industry.  Sugar production machinery and human expertise vanished from Saint-Domingue and reappeared in Cuba. Within twenty years of the first Haitian slave revolt, Cuba had surged ahead to become the largest sugar producer in the Caribbean. Necessary to that, of course, was human capital in the form of enslaved Africans or Afro-Caribbeans, some of whom may have been captives from Haiti. Between 1791 and 1821, slaves were imported into Cuba at a rate four times greater than in the previous thirty-year period. As a result, Cuban elites were forced to confront the growing probability, and then actual occurrence, of slave revolts.

Freedom’s Mirror (2014)

Ferrer shapes her narrative around the “mirror,” or reversal, of historical processes: the collapse of one colony’s sugar economy and the rapid growth of another’s; the liberation gained by slaves on one island and the expansion of slavery and entrenchment of enslavement structures on the other; revolution and independence in one place and colonialist counterrevolution in the other; fears of re-enslavement on the part of former slaves and fears of revolt on the part of the elites. She argues that for Cuba, the Haitian Revolution in 1791 served as a temporal “hinge” between the “first and second slaveries.” The second slavery distinguished itself from the first in its larger scale and in its existence alongside a growing “specter” of abolitionist political movements and the reality of enslaved people successfully claiming and obtaining their own freedom.

Nineteenth-Century Photograph of Enslaved People Drying Bagasse in Cuba via University of Miami Digital Collections

The first half of Freedom’s Mirror takes the reader up to Haitian independence and victory over Napoleon’s forces in 1804. These chapters trace the evolution of Cuba’s “sugar revolution,” Cuban attempts to deter the import of negros franceses – Saint-Domingue slaves who might foment rebellion — and a short-lived alliance between the Spanish army based in the city of Santo Domingo (including soldiers from Cuba) and the Haitian rebels. The second half of the book showcases the conflicts resulting from the rise of coffee plantations in lands occupied by communities of runaway slaves, the 1808 turmoil in Cuba caused by Napoleon’s installation of his brother on the Spanish throne, featuring discussions of independence and slavery abolition, and the 1812 Aponte Rebellion.

Map of Haiti via Digital Public Library of America

Freedom’s Mirror, however, is not just a story about the causal relationship between the Haitian Revolution and Cuba’s transformation, and Ferrer does not confine her investigation to economic or political factors. What interests Ferrer are the “quotidian links – material and symbolic – between the radical antislavery movement that emerged in Saint-Domingue at the same time that slavery was expanding in colonial Cuba” (11). In particular, she tracks the circulation of knowledge, rumor, conversation, religious symbolism, anxieties and hopes that mapped onto infrastructures of commerce, slave-trading, government activity, and military action.

Toussaint L’Ouverture via New York Public Library

In 1801, for example, Toussaint Louverture’s forces occupied Santo Domingo and issued public proclamations. These were carried by ship crews and disseminated in Cuba, as were first-hand accounts of Spanish refugees from that occupation who had fled to Cuba. This, according to Ferrer, is the mechanism by which Cubans came to know of the events of the rebellion and the “spectacular ascent” of Toussaint Louverture (153). Eleven years later, images of the coronation of the Haitian King Christophe appeared in the prison holding suspects from Aponte’s revolutionary movement in Cuba. In the tradition of Lynn Hunt’s treatment of the “invention” of human rights, Ferrer uses her sources—city council minutes, port registers, trading licenses, letters, confessions of revolutionaries on the eve of their executions, and printed images of Haitian leaders—to document that this circulation of information and rumor transformed the interior experiences and decision-making of historical actors and ordinary people in both Cuba and Haiti.

Freedom’s Mirror situates Cuba in a regional history, primarily the interactions between Cuba and Haiti. Ferrer is fundamentally attuned to the circulation of knowledge, symbolism, and ideas. In bringing those into the light, she shows us that economic, political, and military realities never cease to shape, and be shaped by, subjective perceptions and individual actions.


You might also like:

Cuba’s Revolutionary World
Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit, by Kristen Block (2012)
Che Guevara’s Last Interview
Black is Beautiful – And Profitable
Making History: Takkara Brunson


Other Articles by Isabelle Headrick:
Madeleine’s Children: Family, Freedom, Secrets and Lies in France’s Indian Ocean Colonies, by Sue Peabody (2017)
Building a Jewish School in Iran

Digital Archive – Rising From the Ashes: The Oklahoma Eagle and its Long Road to Preservation

Digital Archive - Rising From the Ashes: The Oklahoma Eagle and its Long Road to Preservation

by Jaden Janak

On May 31, 1921, Greenwood, a district in Tulsa, Oklahoma crafted by Black business people and professionals, burned to the ground. After a young white girl accused Dick Rowland, a Black elevator attendant, of sexual assault, mobs of white vigilantes attacked this Black community and its citizens for what the white rioters perceived as an injustice against their women. Conservative estimates claim that by the melee’s conclusion some 1,000 homes were destroyed, dozens (if not hundreds) of lives were lost, and a remarkable number of businesses gone. One of the businesses razed in the chaos of the Tulsa Race Massacre was the Tulsa Star—the city’s first Black newspaper, established in Tulsa just seven years earlier. In 1936, E.L. Goodwin, a local Black businessman, bought the rights to the Tulsa Star, renaming it The Oklahoma Eagle.

The Tulsa Star, November 9, 1918 (via Newspaper.com)

Intertwined with the story of the The Oklahoma Eagle is my own story. My family moved to Oklahoma when I was an infant, so that my father could attend law school at the University of Tulsa. After graduating in 1999, my father’s first job was as a law clerk at Goodwin & Goodwin, Attorneys at Law. I grew up listening to the stories of Jim Goodwin, the son of E.L. Goodwin, and playing with his beloved Westie aptly named Justice. In the same building where E.L. Goodwin and his staff worked to publish, The Oklahoma Eagle, — at the time the only Black newspaper in the city of Tulsa — my father and Jim Goodwin toiled away at civil rights cases for indigent clients. These efforts to publish the paper were not without struggle. Four years before my father began working at Goodwin & Goodwin, it looked like the Goodwins were going to lose control of The Eagle.

 

A framed article discussing the Eagle’s financial struggles that hangs on the wall at The Oklahoma Eagle.(via author)

With determination and the support of local benefactors, The Oklahoma Eagle survived these financial struggles. In remembrance of the hard times and the faith that carried them through, the Goodwins constructed a hanging altar of sorts known as the “Wall of Faith,” which sits outside where my father’s office once was.

“The Wall of Faith” located at The Oklahoma Eagle offices (via author)

Many years later and after my father went into private practice, I returned to The Oklahoma Eagle in 2016, this time as a staff writer and legal intern with my father’s former partner, Jim Goodwin. Mr. Goodwin assigned me to cover local and national criminal justice matters because of my background in community organizing and newspaper writing with Saint Louis University’s student newspaper, The University News.  That summer I wrote about topics ranging from the police murder of Ollie Brooks to the Orlando Massacre. However, these articles are not available online. As I discovered during my time at The Eagle, the paper lacked the infrastructure to enable digitization of the paper’s archive and current issues. To begin solving this problem, I worked with then-editor Ray Pearcey to create social media and a proper website for the paper. Still, I worried about the paper’s growing archive and how to preserve it. The Tulsa City-County Library had already microfilmed some of the older copies of The Eagle in the 1980s, but the vast majority of the paper’s near 100-year old archive remained either missing or in grave condition. After some quick research, I realized digitization is an expensive endeavor and certainly not one I could accomplish as a rising junior in college. So, I left The Eagle at the end of that summer and returned to school.

Fast forward another few years to the summer of 2019 and I am a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin. Mr. Goodwin approached me earlier this year and requested I return to The Eagle one last time to complete his dream of digitizing the paper. I had no previous experience with physical archives, much less with digitizing archives, but I have always enjoyed a challenge. When I arrived at The Eagle offices, I was not sure what to expect as I had never before seen the physical volumes of the paper’s archive. The room where the archives rest do not contain the conditions archives typically do such as climate-control, archival boxes, and an ordering system. Rather, the archive room has clear water damage and the papers lay unboxed with the thin protection of trash bags covering those that are not simply left open to the elements. Mr. Goodwin and his family have fought vigorously to keep the paper alive and in the meantime, some upkeep has fallen by the wayside. After seeing the condition of the archive, I knew we needed to act fast and protect this important resource of Black Oklahoma history.

From left to right: Ray Pearcey, former editor of The Eagle, pictured with Jim Goodwin and Chad Williams. (via author)

Immediately, I scoured the internet and consulted my colleagues about how to proceed. Eventually, I located an existing partnership between the University of North Texas and The Oklahoma Historical Society (OHS) to digitize old Oklahoma newspapers. I sent an email to the Director of the OHS’s Newspaper Digitization Program, Chad Williams, proposing we form a partnership. Williams responded enthusiastically and said the OHS had been waiting for The Oklahoma Eagle to approach them. I thought my work had been accomplished just two days into my summer-long stay at the Eagle. This was not the case. I had not anticipated the deeply emotional process necessary for Mr. Goodwin to let go of the paper, his father’s enduring legacy and ultimately, his own. For the remainder of the summer, we debated back and forth about everything, from the expense necessary to digitize the paper ourselves to the changing role of newspapers in society. Indeed, newspapers are a dying form—one more likely to lose than to make money. Mr. Goodwin wanted to find a mechanism for him to sell his archive, produce income to sustain the paper, all while maintaining control of it. Disabusing him of this as a way forward proved to be one of the most difficult tasks of my burgeoning career.

Ultimately, Mr. Goodwin agreed to the OHS’s offer to digitize The Oklahoma Eagle for free while allowing us to maintain copyright privileges. During the process of signing this agreement, we discovered that someone from the paper (this person’s identity is still unknown) had been sending a copy of The Eagle to the OHS for forty years. The OHS, unbeknownst to the paper, had been microfilming issues for all that time. This has made the digitization process much easier than expected. In August, Williams along with a team of researchers gathered the remaining physical volumes of the paper and have begun work to digitize them. They will be returning the physical copies in archival boxes, so that the copies might survive longer. According to the agreement, the digitized version of The Oklahoma Eagle’s archive will be made publicly available on The Gateway To Oklahoma History by 2021, the 100-year anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre. As Lead Archivist on the project, I am still working with both The Oklahoma Eagle and the Oklahoma Historical Society to ensure the seamless nature of this partnership.

 

Final agreement between the OHS and The Oklahoma Eagle (via author)

As the Greenwood community prepares for the centennial anniversary of the Race Massacre, the city of Tulsa is finally reckoning with its dark history of displacement and genocide. In 1997, the city of Tulsa first convened a commission to lead an excavation of suspected mass graves containing the bodies of those killed during the Massacre. For political reasons, that search never happened. Now, a second commission has formed and has been tasked with leading the search. This time, however, the Mayor and the Tulsa Police Department have labeled this work a homicide investigation. Working with a team of archaeologists, historians, local activists, and government officials, the Mass Graves Commission hopes to locate the bodies of those deliberately discarded and forgotten. The history of The Oklahoma Eagle and the history of the Race Massacre are part and parcel of one another. Hopefully, as the 100-year anniversary approaches, the work of the Commission and the work of the OHS can meaningfully pay homage to the lives and intellectual history lost to this tragedy. The Oklahoma Eagle stands as a testament to Greenwood’s rich legacy of endurance as the paper quite literally rose from its ashes.

 


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Media and Politics From the Prague Spring Archive
Authorship and Advocacy: The Native American Petitions Dataverse
Remembering the Tex-Son Strike: Legacies of Latina-led Labor Activism in San Antonio, Texas

Digital Resources – “The Reddest of the Blacks”

By Sean Guillory

Lovett Fort-Whiteman was born in Dallas, Texas in 1889 and died in a Stalinist labor camp sometime after 1938. The son of a former slave, a graduate of Tuskegee University, Fort-Whiteman became one of the most important African American Communist activists and organizers of the 1920s and the only known African American to be a victim of the Stalinist Terror. How did the Dallas native, dubbed “The Reddest of The Blacks,” by Time Magazine in 1925, wind up a victim of Stalinist violence in Soviet Russia? Sean Guillory has made this short video to recount his fascinating and moving story. The video was originally posted on Guillory’s excellent podcast and blog page, “Sean’s Russia Blog” and we re-post it here with his permission.

 

Other Articles You May Like:

The Proletarian Dream
Reforming Texas in Early Twentieth-century Texas
Confederados: The Texans of Brazil
The Enemy Within

 

“Stand With Kap”: Athlete Activism at the LBJ Library

“Stand With Kap”: Athlete Activism at the LBJ Library

By Gwendolyn Lockman

The Lyndon B Johnson Presidential Library opened “Get in the Game,” a timely exhibit on the intersection of social justice and sports, on April 21, 2018. In 2014, a new wave of athlete activism began in the United States. That year, NBA teams donned “I Can’t Breathe” shirts during warm ups to protest the police brutality against Eric Garner. In the summer of 2016, the WNBA joined the conversation with the “Change Starts with Us—Justice & Accountability” and #BlackLivesMatter, #Dallas5, #__ demonstrations by the Minnesota Lynx and New York Liberty. The current moment is most defined, of course, by Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protests that began in the 2016 NFL preseason. “Get in the Game” charts a legacy of barrier-breaking and justice-seeking athletes from the late 19th century to the present with an emphasis on the current relationship between athlete activism and American politics.

Colin Kaepernick at the LBJ Library, (all pictures unless otherwise noted are by the author).

The exhibit is remarkably comprehensive, especially for a small-scale and brief installation (the exhibit closes January 13, 2019). Visitors will find a wide selection of sports represented—horse racing, football, baseball, basketball, track and field, boxing, tennis, golf, and fencing—and attention to gender, race, media, player salaries, and social justice. Guests should be keen to linger in the center room of the exhibition, where curatorial care and intentionality is reflected in an exceedingly well communicated examination of Jackie Robinson’s post-baseball activism and the 1968 Olympic Project for Human Rights.

Letter from Jacki Robinson to President Johnson (photos by the author, materials held at the LBJ Library)

While most Americans are familiar with Jackie Robinson as a figure and the brief details of his early career with the Brooklyn Dodgers, few popular versions of his story reflect on the later years of his baseball career and  after he retired. It is not popularly discussed that Robinson was among the crowd at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, nor that he campaigned for Richard Nixon.

Robinson committed much of his time in retirement to activism, working with the NAACP, encouraging other black athletes, and communicating with several politicians. “Get in the Game” features letters and telegrams from Robinson to Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. The letters show Robinson’s concern that Civil Rights remain a presidential priority throughout changes in regimes, as well as his concerns about the morality and risks regarding the Vietnam War.

Robinson implored Eisenhower to do more for African Americans, writing, “I was sitting in the audience at the Summit Meeting of Negro Leaders yesterday when you said we must have patience. On hearing you say this, I felt like standing up and saying, “Oh no! Not again!” I respectfully remind you sir, that we have been the most patient of all people. When you said we must have self-respect, I wondered how we could have self-respect and remain patient considering the treatment accorded us through the years.”

Robinson also engaged Presidents regarding black liberation in Africa and Dr. King’s anti-war stance. He wrote to President Kennedy, “With the new emerging African nations, Negro Americans must assert themselves more, not for what we can get as individuals, but for the good of the Negro masses. I thank you for what you have done so far, but it is not how much has been done but how much more there is to do. I would like to be patient Mr. President, but patience has caused us years in our struggle for human dignity.”

When Dr. King protested the Vietnam war in 1967, Robinson wrote to President Johnson, “I do feel you must make it infinitely clear, that regardless of who demonstrates, that your position will not change toward the rights of all people; that you will continue to press for justice for all Americans and that a strong stand now will have great effect upon young Negro Americans who could resort to violence unless they are reassured.”

Another strength of the exhibition is the number of items on loan or gifted from the Dr. Harry Edwards Archives at the San Jose State University Institute for the Study of Sport, Society and Social Change. Dr. Edwards led the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR), the group that organized the boycott of the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games, and continues to work with athletes, including Colin Kaepernick. The exhibition focuses not only on Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s iconic anthem protest and its 50th anniversary, but also the support, solidarity, and demands of the OPHR.

Mere days before his assassination, Dr. King met with Dr. Edwards and endorsed the athletes’ “courage and determination to make it clear that they will not participate in the 1968 Olympics until something is done about these terrible evils and injustices.” Five members of the Harvard Rowing team, due to compete in the Games, appeared with Dr. Edwards to officially state, “It is their criticisms of society which we here support.” Black students at Harvard Law also stated that they supported the athletes’ “willingness to sacrifice the fruits of your labor for the achievement of the goals of Black Americans.”

Though the International Olympic Committee (IOC) met one of the demands of the OPHR, that South Africa and Rhodesia be uninvited to the games, and the boycott was called off, Lew Alcindor (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) and other basketball players maintained their stance and did not compete at the games.

Even for those athletes who did compete, the spirit of the OPHR continued, breeding both solidarity and backlash. An OPHR button is included in the exhibition, like the ones worn by Smith, Carlos, and the Australian runner Peter Norman who won the silver medal alongside Smith’s gold and Carlos’s bronze. Displayed adjacent to the button is a State Department memo concerned with what to do about the demands from the IOC to remove Smith and Carlos from the Olympic Village, though the athletes ended up leaving on their own, returning to backlash from the press and the public.

The exhibition closes with Kaepernick and notes his connection to the 1968 Olympics. A unique strength of the materials is the inclusion of University of Texas at Austin alumnus Nate Boyer, who worked with Kaepernick to attempt to bridge the divide between his protest and American servicemen and women and their families.

A notable curatorial decision that mutes the political nature of the exhibit and fails to connect Jackie Robinson, the 1968 games, and Colin Kaepernick, is the omission of Jackie Robinson’s autobiography I Never Had it Made (1972). This is a common missed connection in the anthem protest legacy. Calling upon Frederick Douglass’s 1852 speech, “What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?”, the introduction to Robinson’s book recalls game one of the 1947 World Series, Robinson’s rookie year. He writes, “The band struck up the national anthem. The flag billowed in the wind. it [sic] should have been a glorious moment for me as the stirring words of the national anthem poured from the stands. Perhaps it was, but then again perhaps the anthem could be called the theme song for a drama called The Noble Experiment . . . As I write this twenty years later, I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.”

Though the decision to omit the autobiography is an easily defendable one—the focus on Robinson is his breaking the color barrier and his correspondence with Presidents—it stands out because of the inclusion of other athletes’ autobiographies and provocative statements. Perhaps more accessible due to the museum’s possession of an inscribed copy owned by LBJ, Bill Russell’s book Go Up For Glory (1966) is included, along with details of his delivery of Muhammad Ali’s refusal to serve in the military.

As visitors exit “Get in the Game,” the last item they see is the block quote, “If there is no struggle there is no progress,” from Frederick Douglass. Knowing what we do about Robinson, Smith and Carlos, and Kaepernick, it is also worth considering a quote from Douglass’s “Fourth of July” speech:

“The Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice. I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.”

More like this:

Unsportsmanlike Conduct: College Football and the Politics of Rape
Muhammad Ali Helped Make Black Power into a Global Brand
Remembering Willie ‘El Diablo’ Wells and Baseball’s Negro Leagues

Eddie Anderson, the Black Film Star Created by Radio

by Kathryn Fuller-Seeley

In December 1939 Academy Award nominated, African American actress Hattie McDaniel was barred from attending the premiere of Gone with the Wind in Atlanta, Georgia because of her race Just four months later, a quite different scenario played out in New York City. In April 1940, the first elaborate premiere of a Hollywood studio-produced film was held in Harlem, the cultural capital of black America. Paramount Studios sponsored two simultaneous world premieres of Buck Benny Rides Again, a movie which, in every way but actual billing, co-starred American network radio’s premiere comedy star, Jack Benny, and his radio valet and butler, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson. One gala was held at the studio’s flagship theater, the Paramount, in midtown Manhattan. The other was held at the Loew’s Victoria Theater on 125th Street, in the heart of Harlem. In a most unusual move in an industry that limited roles for African-American performers to tiny, often uncredited parts as servants, Paramount also aggressively promoted the film’s surprise, break-out co-star, African American actor Anderson.

Eddie Anderson and Theresa Harris in Buck Benny Rides Again
Eddie Anderson and Theresa Harris in Buck Benny Rides Again

Paramount’s publicity department released a barrage of publicity in New York and in major African American newspapers across the nation, touting “Hollywood goes to Harlem!” for the separate premiere of Buck Benny Rides Again on the night before, April 23, 1940. The Victoria Theater was a 2,400 seat picture palace adjacent to the Apollo Theater. Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, Jack Benny’s film co-star, was given the “hail the conquering hero” treatment in Harlem—an estimated 150,000 people lined the streets as Anderson and major political, social, and entertainment dignitaries of black America paraded to the theater. Jack Benny, his radio cast members, film director Mark Sandrich and Benny’s radio comic nemesis Fred Allen, all appeared on stage at the Victoria to praise Anderson. After the show, Anderson was honored with receptions at the Savoy Ballroom and the Theresa Hotel. The event was extensively covered in breathless detail by the nation’s black press, and blow-by-blow coverage of the premiere was carried on a local black-oriented radio station.

Anderson’s role in the Buck Benny film as Jack’s valet “Rochester” carried over from radio, in a witty and “hip” display of intermedia storytelling and crossover fame. Anderson’s performance stole the movie, as it gave “Rochester” far more screen time than black actors had found in any Hollywood film that had not been a black cast feature. Buck Benny featured Rochester’s witty retorts to Jack’s (whom Rochester cheekily calls “Boss”) egotistical vanities, croaked out in his distinctive, raspy voice. The film and the role positioned Anderson as one of the most prominent African American performers of the era, despite—and because of—mainstream white racial attitudes of the day. It took star status in a rival medium (as co-star with a white comedian) for a black actor to achieve prominence in American film.

Buck Benny was among the highest grossing movies of the year at the American box office in 1940. Throughout the nation, movie theaters billed the film on marquees as co-starring Benny and “Rochester.” In many theaters, especially African American theaters in the South, but also in white and black neighborhood movie houses elsewhere across the nation, the marquee billing put “Rochester’s” name first above the title. The film’s box office success led to recognition of Anderson and Benny as spokesmen for civil rights and integration. The two were named to the Schomburg Center Honor Roll for Race Relations for their public efforts to foster interracial understanding. This moment before World War II further raised the consciousness of a young generation of African Americans to fight for civil rights, in an interlude before racist white backlash coalesced to further limit black entertainers in American popular media. Anderson’s success caused him to be hailed in black newspapers as being a harbinger of a “new day” in interracial amity and new possibilities for black artistic, social, and economic achievement.

Eddie Anderson’s radio-fueled movie stardom complicates the shameful Hollywood story of racism, racial attitudes, and restrictive limits on representations of African Americans in film and popular entertainment media in the late 1930s and World War II era. A middle-aged dancer, singer, and comic who’d forged a regional career in West Coast vaudeville and mostly un-credited servant roles in Hollywood films, Anderson rocketed to stardom due to his role on Jack Benny’s Jell-O program, one of the top-rated comedy-variety programs on radio in the 1930s. Anderson’s “Rochester” role in his first years on Jack Benny’s radio program (1937-1938) had contained heavy doses of minstrel stereotypes—stealing, dice-playing, superstitions—but from the beginning the denigratory characteristics were counterbalanced by the valet’s quick wit and irreverence for Benny’s authority, accentuated by his inimitable voice and the wonderful timing of his pert retorts and disgruntled, disbelieving “Come now!” This spark of intelligence and individual personality that Benny and his writers gave Anderson to work with, which he so embellished with his performance, made him an immediate sensation on Benny’s show.

Rochester critiqued Benny’s every order and decision, with an informality of interracial interaction unusual in radio or film depictions of the day. His lively bumptiousness raised his character above other, more stereotypical black servants in American popular media. Rochester could appeal to a wide variety of listeners, as historian Melvin Ely notes of “Amos n Andy.” He always remained a loyal servant and had to follow Benny’s orders, so he was palatable to those listeners most resistant to social change. Yet, in a small way, Rochester spoke truth to power, and he was portrayed by an actual African-American actor, so he gained sympathy and affection among many black listeners.

The enormous box office success of Eddie Anderson’s three co-starred films with Jack Benny in 1940-1941 fueled optimistic hopes in the black press that prejudiced racial attitudes could be softening in the white South. Rochester was hopefully opening a wedge to destroy the old myths that racist Southern whites refused to watch black performers, the myths to which racist white film and radio producers so stubbornly clung. The Pittsburgh Courier lauded Anderson as a “goodwill ambassador” bringing a message of respectability and equality to whites in Hollywood and across the nation. The hurtful representations of blacks in the mass media of the past could finally be put aside, The Los Angeles based African American newspaper, The California Eagle, optimistically argued in an editorial that Anderson’s example pointed to new hopes for interracial tolerance and black cultural and social achievement:

Two years ago Americans became conscious of a new thought in Negro comedy. It was really a revolution, for Jack Benny’s impudent butler-valet-chauffeur, “Rochester Van Jones” said all the things which a fifty year tradition of the stage proclaimed that American audiences will not accept from a black man. Time and again, “Rochester” outwitted his employer, and the nation’s radio audiences rocked with mirth. Finally, “Rochester” appeared with “Mistah Benny” in a motion picture – a picture in which he consumed just as much footage as the star. The nation’s movie audiences rocked with mirth. So, it may well be that “Rochester” has given colored entertainers a new day and a new dignity on screen and radio.

Eddie Anderson’s cross-media and cross-racial stardom was very real in the U.S. popular media between 1940 and 1943. Unfortunately, a series of unforeseen events, and the growing racial strife in the nation during the war curtailed Anderson’s film career. MGM attempted to build Anderson into a greater star, featuring him in its all-star black cast dramatic musical production of “Cabin in the Sky” with Lena Horne. But “Cabin in the Sky” was released in summer 1943, just as race riots erupted in Detroit and other manufacturing and military base cities over labor strife. Timid film exhibitors did not play up Anderson’s film or stardom for fear of violence playing out in their theaters. Racist white backlash against blacks gaining footholds of integration and prominence in American public life began spreading across the south. Anderson’s subsequent appearance in “Brewster’s Millions” (Paramount, 1945) caused the film to be banned in Memphis for its portrayal of pleasant interracial interactions. Although he remained the most prominent (and highest paid) black performer on radio and television through the late 1950s, his stardom faded to being only a core component of the Jack Benny ensemble.

From Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, Jack Benny and the Golden Age of Radio Comedy(2017).

More about radio, film, and race in the US

Melvin Ely, The Adventures of Amos n Andy: A Social History of an American Phenomenon. (1991). Ely examines the complexities of how two white entertainers created two comic black radio characters that divided American audiences, who either loved or loathed the most popular show on radio from 1928 until 1950.

Michele Hilmes. Radio Voices: American Broadcasting 1922-1952 (1997). This marvelous cultural history of the rise, flourishing, and demise of radio in American culture broke new ground in discussing the importance of gender and race for radio producers, narratives, and listeners.

Miriam J. Petty, Stealing the Show: African American Performers and Audiences in 1930s Hollywood ( 2016). Petty uncovers the many subtle ways that black film performers layered meaning, dignity, and outstanding talent into the minor roles they were given in American films.

Barbara Savage, Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War and the Politics of Race (North Carolina, 1999). Savage explores the opportunities that wartime needs for African-American participation and support provided for more equitable representation and address in the nation’s most widespread media form.

  Quotations:

“Rochester: A New Day” California Eagle 24 April 1941: 8.

“Harlem’s Reception for Rochester at Film Premiere Tue, will top all previous ones,” New Amsterdam News 20 April 1940: 20.

“New Yorkers all set for Rochester’s Film Premiere,” Chicago Defender 20 April 1940: 20.

Why I Ban the Word “Feminism” from My Classes

by Jacqueline Jones

In each of my graduate seminars, at the beginning of the semester, I caution students not to use certain words I consider problematic; these words can actually hinder our understanding of a complex past.  Commonly used—or rather, overused—in everyday conversation as well as academic discourse, the banned words include “power,” “freedom,” and “race.”  I tell my students that these words are imprecise—they had different meanings depending upon the times and places in which they were used– and that today we tend to invoke them too casually and even thoughtlessly.

Oh yes, and there is another word I ask my students to avoid—“feminism.”  Students often greet this particular injunction with surprise and dismay. Does it mean that their instructor believes that women should stay at home and not venture into the paid labor force?  If so, why is she standing in front of a classroom now?  So I have to be sure to make a case about the pitfalls related to the use of the word.  Even the broadest possible definition is problematic, as we shall see.

Protesters at the 2017 Women’s March (via Wikimedia Commons).

The purpose of the massive march on Washington held on January 21, the day after President Trump’s inauguration, was to protest his election.  It was called the “Women’s March,” and as we all know, sister marches took place all over the country and the world the same day.  A group of women initiated the idea of the protest, and took care of all the logistics; many participants wore pink “pussy hats” to call attention to the President’s demeaning remarks about grabbing women’s genitals captured on the infamous Access Hollywood videotape.  The hand-held signs at the rally covered a whole range of issues, including abortion and reproductive rights, equal pay, sexual harassment, Black Lives Matter, protection for undocumented immigrants, public education, and women’s struggles for fair treatment and equality generally.   Presumably, Trump’s election had prompted an historic level of anger and frustration among women. Many news outlets, participants, and observers suggested that the march represented a remarkable display of re-energized, twenty-first century feminism, with the word itself suggesting a kind of transcendent womanhood bringing together women of various ages, races, classes, and ethnicity.

Protesters at a sister rally in 2017 (via Pixabay).

Well, not exactly.  Although only 6 percent of African American women voted for Trump, 53 percent of white women did.  We can safely assume, then, that many white women not only stayed away from the march, but also objected to it in principle: the pink-pussy-hat contingent did not speak for them.  So we might ask, which groups of women did not march?  Here is a possible, partial list: devout Catholic women who believe that birth control, abortion, and gay marriage are sins against God; former factory workers who were fired from their jobs when their plants were shipped overseas; the wives and daughters and mothers of unemployed coal miners; anti-immigrant activists; women of color who saw the march as dominated by white women; and pro-gun rights supporters. Missing too were probably women who found Mr. Trump’s video sex-talk disgusting but chose not to see this as the defining issue in the 2016 Presidential campaign–just as some liberal women might have disapproved of Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky but did not let that affair diminish their support for him when he was president.  In both these cases, the pro-Trump and pro-Clinton supporters expressed less solidarity with the men’s victims and more support for other elements of the men’s politics.  In other words, these women eschewed any putative “sisterhood” in favor of other political issues.

Suffragists parade down Fifth Avenue, 1917 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Another way of looking at this issue is to challenge the view that feminists had as their greatest priority a woman president.  How many self-identified feminists were eager to see Sarah Palin run for president in 2012?  Again, for many women, their overriding concern is not womanhood per se but a wide range of political beliefs and commitments. As we learned soon after U. S. women got the right to vote in 1919, different groups of women have different politics; in the 1920s, the suffragists were astonished to find that women tended to vote the way their husbands did, according to a matrix of ethnic and class factors.

Delegation of officers of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, 1917 (US National Archives via Flickr).

The example of the Women’s March suggests that, for all the talk today of “intersectionality” (the interconnectedness of certain social signifiers such as class, religion, “race,” and gender) “feminism” promotes a very specific political agenda, one that does not necessarily reflect the priorities and lived experience of a substantial portion of the female population. In essence, the word “feminism” is too vague to have much meaning within a society where women have multiple forms of identity, and gender might or might not be the defining one at any particular time.  Even the broadest possible definition—feminists are people who seek to advance the interests or the equal rights of women—has its limitations.

As an historian, I would suggest several reasons why students should avoid the use of the word “feminism”–unless they encounter the word in a primary text; then they should try to figure out what the user meant by it.

  • The word itself did not appear in common usage until the 1920s. Therefore it would be a mistake to apply it to people before that time, or to people since who themselves have not embraced the label; otherwise we risk imposing a term on historical actors who might or might not have used it to describe themselves.
  • Throughout history, various waves of the so-called “women’s” or “feminist” movement were actually riven by intense conflicts among women. Around the turn of the twentieth century, leading white suffragists went out of their way to denigrate their black counterparts and express contempt for immigrant and working class men and women. The early organizers of the National Organization for Women feared that association with lesbians and militant black women would taint their drive for respectability.  Organizers of the 2017 Women’s march debated whether or not anti-abortion women could or should be included in the protest: could one be a feminist and at the same time oppose reproductive rights for women?

Two Lowell mill workers, ca. 1840 (via Wikimedia Commons).

  • Often in history when we find solidarity among women it is not because these groups of women sought to advocate better working conditions or the right to vote for all women; rather, their reference group consisted of women like themselves. In the 1840s, Lowell textile mill workers walked off the job and went on strike not as “feminists,” but as young white Protestant women from middling households—in other words, as women who had much in common with each other.  Religion, ethnicity, lineage, and “race” have all been significant sources of identity for women; when a particular group of women advocates for itself, it is not necessarily advocating for all other women.
  • Similarly, we are often tempted to label those strong women we find in history as “feminists,” on the assumption that they spoke and acted on behalf of all women. Yet they might have believed they had more in common with their male counterparts than with other groups of women.  Female labor-union organizers probably felt more affinity with their male co-workers than with wealthy women who had no experience with wage work.  In other words, the transcendent sisterhood that feminism presupposes is often a myth, a chimera.
  • The word not only lacks a precise definition, it also carries with it a great deal of baggage. Indeed, some people have a visceral, negative reaction to the sound of it. It is difficult to use a term with such varied and fluid meanings.  And feminism meant something different to women of the 1960s, when they could not open a credit-card account in their own name or aspire to certain “men’s jobs,” when they debated the social division of labor in the paid workplace and in the home, compared to young women today, who at times see feminism through the prism of music lyrics, movies, fashion, and celebrity culture:  Is the talented, fabulously wealthy Taylor Swift a feminist?
  • Finally, a personal note: In the 1960s, I was a college student and caught up in what was then called the “feminist movement” as shaped by Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique and the newly formed National Organization for Women.  My mother disapproved of my emerging priorities in life; she had gotten married right after World War II, and she believed (rightly, as it turned out) that the movement denigrated her choice to stay home full-time with her children.  I was puzzled and distressed that my mother could not appreciate my choices; but now I am also puzzled and distressed that the movement could not appreciate her choices.  Coming of age during the war, she feared that she would never marry and have a family, and when she finally had that opportunity, she was happy—for the most part—to embrace it, despite the considerable financial sacrifice for the household that her choice entailed.

Women’s March 2017 (Backbone Campaign via Flickr).

Perhaps, with very few exceptions—equal pay for equal work?—there are few issues on which all women everywhere can agree.  My own view is that, we can pursue social justice in ways that advance the interests of large numbers of men as well as women, without having to defend the dubious proposition that “feminism” as constructed today speaks to and for all women.  It doesn’t.  For the historian, that fact means that we have to come up with other, more creative ways of discussing forms of women’s activism and personal self-advancement that took place in the past, and, in altered form, continue today.

Also by Jacqueline Jones on Not Even Past:

The Works of Stephen Hahn.
On the Myth of Race in America.
History in a “Post-Truth” Era.

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