• Features
  • Books
  • Teaching
  • Digital & Film
  • Blog
  • IHS
  • Texas
  • Spotlight
  • About

The past is never dead. It's not even past

Not Even Past

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:

  • The Sword and The Shield – A Conversation with Peniel E. Joseph (Part I)
  • Stokely Carmichael: A Life
  • Muhammad Ali helped make Black power into a global brand
  • 15 Minute History Episode 90: Stokely Carmichael: A Life
  • Watch: “The Confederate Statues at UT”

Consider reading as well:

  • Violence Against Black People in America: A ClioVis Timeline
  • Rising From the Ashes: The Oklahoma Eagle and its Long Road to Preservation
  • Black Resistance and Resilience: Collected Works From Not Even Past

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

  • Stokely Carmichael: A Life
  • Muhammad Ali helped make black power into a global brand
  • 15 Minute History Episode 90: Stokely Carmichael: A Life
  • Watch: “The Confederate Statues at UT”
  • The Sword and The Shield – A Conversation with Peniel E. Joseph (Part II)

Consider also reading:

  • Violence Against Black People in America: A ClioVis Timeline
  • Rising From the Ashes: The Oklahoma Eagle and its Long Road to Preservation
  • Black Resistance and Resilience: Collected Works From Not Even Past

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.


You Might Also Like:

  • Digital Teaching: A Mid-Semester Timeline
  • Digital Teaching: Mapping Networks Across Avant-Garde Magazines
  • Rising From the Ashes: The Oklahoma Eagle and its Long Road to Preservation

The King of Adobe: Reies López Tijerina, Lost Prophet of the Chicano Movement by Lorena Oropeza (2019)

By Micaela Valadez

One of the most challenging projects for historians of the twentieth century is producing biographical accounts of the heroes and heroines of the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Historical biographies have been attacked because they muddy our positive view of popular leaders in movements that remain salient in the twenty-first century. Some historians, however, write narratives that are powerful and controversial simply because the historical subject was nowhere near perfect, even crossing boundaries that we consider violent and abusive. This is the case for one of the most influential figures in the history of the Chicano Movement, Reies López Tijerina. Evangelical preacher and prophet turned leader of the Alianza Federal de Mercedes (Federal Land Grant Alliance], Tijerina’s life is chock-full of both violent and inspiring actions and decisions. Lorena Oropeza’s new book, The King of Adobe: Reies López Tijerina, Lost Prophet of the Chicano Movement, skillfully exposes the contradictions of a significant historical character as historians of the Chicano Movement seem to lose sight of his monumental importance in the fight for land rights in the U.S. Southwest.

The King of Adobe: Reies López Tijerina, Lost Prophet of the Chicano Movement by Lorena Oropeza

Taking readers from Tijerina’s early childhood in Texas to the last years of his life, Oropeza creates a fascinating biographical account of a man with controversial and radical ideas. She considers Tijerina’s evangelical approach to religion and preaching, misogynistic view of gender, sexuality, and the family, and anti-imperialist view of the U.S. government. Oropeza comes to terms with the messiness of his past and even questions his mental health and sanity, brilliantly exposing some of Tijerina’s most unpopular characteristics and actions while balancing the importance of his work in the Chicano Movement.

Photograph of Reies Tijerina around the time of the “Courthouse Raid” incident in Tierra Amarilla, NM, in June of 1967 via University of New Mexico Digital Collections

Some of the most compelling parts of this book lie in the oral histories gathered by the people that knew Tijerina intimately, including his first wife and his daughters. Understanding their tumultuous and sometimes violent relationship with Tijerina helps the reader understand how hard it was for Chicano Movement activists, especially women, to work in a context his family describes as patriarchal. Oropeza brilliantly compares Tijerina’s past as a prophet to his role as the leader of Alianza. His motivations as a prophet in the 1950s propelled him and his religious followers to build their own underground dwellings in New Mexico in hopes that they might be free from the secular world that he blamed for the oppression of his people. Only a few years later, his new followers in Alianza were determined to liberate land taken from Mexicans by the U.S. after 1848 and live free from the U.S. settler state. His connection to land and his resistance to oppression were hard lines that ran throughout his various leadership roles.

“Tierra O Muerte” Poster, 1967 (via Smithsonian)

This book also highlights an essential moment in the United States when the discourse of non-violent resistance and protest prevailed over violent militancy. Two years before the Alcatraz Occupation by Red Power activists and five years before the armed opposition at the Second Battle of Wounded Knee, Tijerina’s occupation and raid in 1967 of a courthouse in New Mexico lead to the first instance of armed militancy towards federal and state authorities during the 1960s. However, it also ended up placing him among the most venerable leaders of the Chicano Movement. The Alianza’s militant action garnered national attention for the land-grant cause in the Southwest that Tijerina and the activists in his ranks championed for so long. The 1967 raid also led to his participation in the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign and to conversations with leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. However, his national popularity never stopped Tijerina from continuously using the Bible to justify his place in the broader social movements of the time, nor did he ever truly stop believing that he was divinely blessed, a savior to his people.

Headquarters of the Alianza Federal de Mercedes (The Federal Alliance of Land Grants) via University of New Mexico Digital Collections 

The King of Adobe shows how to responsibly tell the history of people that historians have ignored or never fully explored. In the case of Tijerina, Oropeza challenges his designation as one of the “Four Horseman of the Chicano Movement,” and his eventual erasure in the history of the Chicano Movement. Oropeza brings Tijerina back to prominence. She takes no shortcuts confronting the ironies in his life. She commends his bravery in a moment when national leaders of social movements were murdered for their ideas while revealing his sexist tendencies and the hardships people around him suffered. Much like Matt Garcia’s pathbreaking book, From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez, Oropeza’s book challenges historians who help create simplistic narratives of historical figures for fear of being challenged by academia. Oropeza recognizes that the Alianza’s militant action around New Mexican land-grant disputes and the history of U.S. conquest inspired scholars during that period to investigate U.S. land acquisition further, leading activist scholars and others to critique U.S. imperialism and the creation of the U.S. border. She argues that these early scholarly investigations contributed to the emerging fields of Chicano/a history, the history of the American West, and the history of U.S. settler colonialism. Anyone with interests in the Chicano Movement, the movement for land rights in the Southwest, twentieth-century social movements, Mexican American religion, and oral history should read this book.


You might also like:
Remembering the Tex-Son Strike: Legacies of Latina-led Labor Activism in San Antonio, Texas
City in a Garden: Environmental Transformations and Racial Justice in Twentieth-Century Austin, Texas by Andrew M. Busch (2017)
The Austin Women Activists Oral History Project

King: Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop by Harvard Sitkoff (2009)

by Tiana Wilson

As we approach the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. on the 50th anniversary of his death, April 4, 1968, it is crucial to appreciate King entirely. Beyond his push for nonviolent direct action and racial integration, we should recognize his expansive human rights activism, anti-war advocacy, and ground-breaking thinking.

Harvard Sitkoff’s biography of King shows him as a heroic but flawed leader and emphasizes his radicalism rather than his pacifism. Sitkoff does not shy away from King’s shortcomings. He brings attention to King’s adultery and highlights the criticism he faced from others within the movement. His portrait of King shows him to be a man who made mistakes, feared death, belittled women, gambled, partied, and often compromised. However, it was also clear that King was intelligent, strategic, pious, courageous, radical, well spoken, passionate, and loving at heart. Sitkoff argues that King’s view of the civil rights movement shifted. At the beginning of the movement, the goal was to end Jim Crow and obtain voting rights. However, after King’s experience in the urban north, he knew that the civil rights movement needed to expand to include economic and job security as well as housing reform. By the end of King’s life he was a firm advocate of anti-colonialism and opponent of war and he took a global perspective: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. after meeting with President Johnson to discuss civil rights, at the White House, 1963. Source: Warren K. Leffler, Library of Congress

Stikoff’s book is organized around the key events that shaped King’s leadership. The most compelling argument Stikoff makes is that King was an activist first and then a preacher. He argues that King resisted becoming a pastor and only decided to go into ministry because he knew that it was the best strategic method to get his political agenda across. However, I do think that King was deeply spiritual and used religion to strengthen himself as he became the symbol of the movement and a target of its opponents. King also knew that the south was deeply religious and biblical references would appeal to his supporters. On the other hand, using the black church as the center point for the movement worked in the south but was unsuccessful in the north. De facto segregation complicated urban issues in Chicago and New York, where nonviolent direct action was not as effective as it had been in the south. Shadowing King’s life as the leader of the civil rights movement was was the infamous harassment of the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI’s strict surveillance of King was made prevalent throughout the book, which shows how the system that was supposed to protect King was actually out to destroy him.

Reexamining the legacy and life of Martin Luther King gives us insight into the ways that social movements can be used to make radical changes in the United States and the ways those changes can make their leaders into targets.

You may also like:

1863 in 1963 by Laurie Green
Stokely Carmichael: A Life by Peniel Joseph
Matt Tribbe reviews Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice

IHS Roundtable – Loving v. Virginia After 50 Years

Movie poster for the movie Loving

On March 23, 2017, the Institute for Historical Studies sponsored a roundtable on the landmark Supreme Court decision that struck down laws banning inter-racial marriage. Director of HIS, Seth Garfield, introduced the three panelists, who included Jacqueline Jones, Chair of the UT Austin History Department and well known to readers of Not Even Past, Kevin Noble Maillard, Professor of Law at Syracuse University and co-editor of Loving v. Virginia in a Post-Racial World: Rethinking Race, Sex, and Marriage, and Jeff Nichols, the director and screen writer of Loving, the 2016 feature film devoted to telling the story of Richard and Mildred Loving and their road to the Surpeme Court.

You can listen to an audio of the roundtable here. A transcript appears below.

Transcription by Rebecca Johnston, Henry Wiencek, and Maria Hammack.


GARFIELD:
On behalf of the Institute for Historical Studies it is my pleasure to welcome you this afternoon to our panel commemorating the fiftieth anniversary the Loving v. Virginia decision. This landmark decision struck down laws banning interracial marriage as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th amendment. At the time so-called anti-miscegenation laws were on the books in 16 southern states including Texas. Many years ago sociologist C. Wright Mills observed that “No social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of history, and of their intersections within a society has completed its intellectual journey.”  The story of Mildred and Richard Loving and the watershed case that bears their name in many ways epitomizes such intersections. A story of love, on one hand, so tender, so private, and so ordinary, and on the other hand to persecuted, so public, and so extraordinary, as the couples’ marriage became engulfed by and deepened the broader political struggles for Civil Rights and racial equality in the South.  So today, fifty years after the Loving decision, we’re pleased to have an interdisciplinary panel composed of an historian, a legal scholar, and a filmmaker, to examine the historical origins of said anti-miscegenation laws in the United States, the battles to overturn them and the paths and challenges to greater colorblindness and marriage equality in the U.S.

Black and white image of Richard and Mildred Loving
Richard and Mildred Loving (via Wikimedia Commons).

GARFIELD: Our first panelist is Dr. Jacqueline Jones, Chair of the History Department and Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History and Ideas/Mastin Gentry White Professor of Southern History at UT Austin. Professor Jones is the author of ten books, including A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama’s America, published in 2013, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She’s also the author of Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present, which was also a finalist for the Pulitzer, and won the Bancroft Prize. Her current project is a full-length biography of Lucy Parsons, orator and labor agitator, who was born to an enslaved woman in Virginia in 1851. Professor Jones has won numerous grants and awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Jacqueline Jones.

Headshot of Professor Jacqueline Jones

JONES: Thanks for the introduction, Seth. It’s really a pleasure to be here today, especially with my fellow panelists, Professor Maillard and Mr. Nichols, both of whom have done so much to advance our understanding of and appreciation for the Loving v. the State of Virginia decision: Professor Maillard through his wide-ranging book, Loving v. Virginia in a Post-Racial World, and Mr. Nichols, through the beautiful, compelling movie, Loving.

My first awareness of laws against intermarriage stems from my days as a high school student in Delaware, when I learned that my French teacher, my junior year, was not allowed to live with his wife in the state of Delaware. They lived in Pennsylvania just across the line instead. So among those sixteen southern states that banned interracial marriage through the 1960s was the State of Delaware. I grew up in a rigidly segregated little town of 500 people. There were four churches in this little town – two black, two white, three Methodist, one Presbyterian. This was a small town between Newark and Bloomington, Delaware. And if I’d learned anything from that experience, it was how presumably well-meaning white people could accommodate themselves to – acquiesce in – forms of discrimination such as anti-miscegenation laws, so-called. My parents and my extended family saw this as customary, as a matter of tradition, something that really did not affect them or other churchgoers at this time. So a reminder, here, as we look back to 1967 and wonder how people could so persecute a couple for their relationship, we have to remember how many people were indifferent, and some of course were actively outraged.

Black and white image of a white sign that says in black letters "We want white tenants in our white community" from 1942
White tenants seeking to prevent blacks from moving into the Sojourner Truth housing project in Detroit, 1942 (via Wikimedia Commons).

By way of introduction, I would just like to restate what Seth already mentioned in his introduction – the obvious central paradox that informs our understanding of the institution of marriage, that it is built on the most private, intimate of human relationships, and yet it is not only highly public, but also highly politicized. Specifically in the South, but not only in the South, the states’ regulation of interracial marriage has been a means to further and preserve white supremacy.

I’d like to very briefly discuss four themes today. First of all, I want to distinguish between interracial sex and interracial marriage. They are related, but they’re not the same thing. Secondly, I want to remind us to remain alert to the hypocrisy and dissembling. We’ll hear much about white men who objected to race mixing and miscegenation, but that is only partially true. Let’s see what they do and not just what they say. Certainly, there were distinct limits to their outrage. Third, the subject of interracial marriage has a history. We can compare, for instance, the Antebellum period in American history to the period after the Civil War and see how attitudes towards relationships, especially marriages between white men and black women, changed over time. And finally, I want to suggest that interracial marriage is a complicated question, revealing of definitions of family, race, power, and citizenship.

Those of you who know me and know my work know that I object to the word “race” for its imprecision, but mainly because it doesn’t really exist. It’s a fiction. Racial ideologies of course are very powerful, and have had a pernicious influence on this country. But that’s very different from the idea of race, which presupposes a hierarchy of racial groups and the notion itself of course seeks to categorize people into certain groups. I’ll be using the term race, though, even though I don’t think it really exists, except as an ideology, a political strategy. And the strategy here is among people who seem to construct hierarchies of power based on lineage and gender, and skin, color, and class.

So, here, at the beginning of my first point, which is distinguishing between interracial sex and interracial marriage, let’s go back to the 17th-century Chesapeake, Maryland and Virginia, those colonies, and reflect on the reality of colonial settlements, which had too much land and too few workers. We see, early in the century, masters of indentured servants, white and black, impregnating their women servants in order to extent those servants’ indentures. That is, in order to extend their time of service. It was illegal for a young woman who was a servant to become pregnant. She could be forced to serve more than the customary seven years if she did become pregnant. So what happened was officials in the Chesapeake began to pass laws saying that if an indentured servant became pregnant, her time would be given or sold to another master. That was to discourage masters from impregnating their servants and making them spend longer on their indentures.

Black and white photograph of slaves working on a plantation, circa 1862–1863
Slaves working on a plantation, circa 1862–1863 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Also during this period we find a very distinct development, and that is the colonies decide that legal status should flow from the mother’s status, and not from the father’s status. That was primarily because slave owners, again, were impregnating enslaved women. As a result, regardless of the father’s status, regardless of the physical appearance of the children, the children were, of course, legally enslaved. And I think this fact shows the “why?” of race. People often talk about race-based slavery. But in fact, children with one white parent or one black parent were of neither race. It’s very difficult to speak in racial terms of children whose parents are mixed. But in any case, we do find, throughout the Antebellum South, by the late Antebellum period, clear evidence that many children of slave owners have become enslaved, because they are the offspring of white men physically and sexually abusing enslaved women.

The term miscegenation was actually coined during the American Civil War, and the aim here of laws against miscegenation was to uphold the authority of well-to-do white men who sought to control land, labor, and inheritances to the detriment of white women. And also the detriment of black and Native American men and women. Before the Civil War, black-white marriages were not encouraged, certainly, but they were in many cases tolerated, because they didn’t threaten the racial hierarchies embedded in the institution of slavery. But beginning in the 1860s and then through the 1960s, the American legal code enshrined the idea that interracial marriage was unnatural. In other words, once slavery was destroyed, local and state officials felt they had to carefully monitor not just interracial marriage, but also interracial sex, mainly between black men and white women. We see in the 1890s, when the Populist Party is beginning to make a strong pitch for the common interests among black and white sharecroppers and tenants, we see during this period the demonization of black men, the image of the black man as rapist, the white woman as victim. This, as Ida B. Wells-Barnett and other anti-lynching activists pointed out, was a total fiction. And yet, it was an image that was meant to drive a wedge between landless black and white tillers of the soil who otherwise would’ve understood that they had much in common.

Color-coded map of the United States that showed which states had laws against inter-racial marriage until Loving v. Virginia in 1967
States in red on this map still had laws against inter-racial marriage until Loving v. Virginia in 1967 (via Wikimedia Commons).

I want just for a moment, though, to detour to a marriage that I know a little bit about, and that is between a formerly enslaved woman and a white man. I just finished a biography of Lucy Parsons, who was born to an enslaved woman in Virginia in 1851 and forcibly removed with the rest of her master’s plantation to Texas in 1863, in the middle of the Civil War. After freedom, she and her family moved to Waco, where she met a young white man named Albert Parsons. Albert Parsons later became famous for his role in the Haymarket affair. He was hanged in 1887. In any case, Lucy and Albert Parsons were able to marry in Texas in 1872. And it’s interesting because there was a very small window of opportunity for them to do so. After the war, Southern whites were interpreting marriage laws to mean that black people could marry among themselves for the first time legally, but that they could not marry white people. In 1872, and for a few months in 1873, the Republican Party held sway in the State of Texas. Albert Parsons, who was a Republican operative, took advantage of that window of opportunity. He and Lucy got married; I think probably the mayor of Waco presided over their marriage. But by the next year, the Democrats had regained control of the state again, and the couple had to move to Chicago, where they lived the rest of their lives. She lived until 1942. They lived in a German immigrant community in Chicago, which seemed to accept them for who they were.

Bans on interracial marriage obviously have had implications for family relations. White kin have been determined to withhold from Indian, Native American, African American, and Asian would-be wives’ land, inheritance, and other resources from their marriage with white men. And this was, of course, as Professor Maillard has pointed out in his book, not just a black-white issue, but an issue related to a whole host of other groups defined as non-white. The point here is that a white man’s marriage to a black [woman], of course, implicitly implied a redistribution of land and resources if he died before she did. And that, of course, was something that white supremacists could not abide. Extralegal interracial families were common throughout the South after the Civil War. I would think that, had Richard Loving been wealthy, and had he not married Mildred Jeter, Caroline County officials would have left the couple alone. So we see a couple of issues there – the arrogance of white men of means in exploiting black women, and we also see the idea that marriage here really changes the dynamic, because it does involve control over land and inheritances.

So, the theme of hypocrisy. In the film, the county sheriff – I think it’s the sheriff, i’m not sure – says that that robins and sparrows were made separate by god, and that they should never be joined together. The judge, the local judge in the case, Bazile, rails against race mixing as if there is a real principle here at stake. We know, though, slave owners who raped enslaved women – that was a logical component of the slave system. By doing so and producing children, these white men enhanced their labor forces. Yes, they did enslave their own children. In the process, they also demeaned and humiliated black men, and they held the enslaved community in subjection. Mary Boykin Chesnut, the well-to-do wife of a South Carolina politician, said famously: “White women on the plantation seemed to know where the white children on other plantations came from, but the ones on their own plantation, they think dropped from the sky.”

Black and white image of a family of slaves in Georgia, circa 1850
Family of slaves in Georgia, circa 1850 (via Wikimedia Commons).

So after the Civil War, black men’s sexual relations with white women became a piece with agitation for civil rights. Poor women who married black men were deemed immoral and promiscuous. But getting back to this hypocrisy about a time where segregation was certainly the law of a particular region, if not the land, consider the case of Strom Thurmond, who loudly denounced integration. If you’ll recall, Strom Thurmond, born in 1902 in South Carolina, was a U.S. senator for 48 years from that state. He ran on the Dixiecrat ticket in 1948, ran for president. In 1964, he became a Republican because of his opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, outlawing discrimination in housing and in jobs. That year – he had declared, actually, in 1948, when he ran for president: “All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the army cannot force the negro into our homes, into our schools, our churches and our places of recreation and amusement.” Well, note that many black women were already going into white homes every day to work as domestic servants, and as laundresses and as cooks. That was not the purpose of segregation, to keep black women from serving white households. It was to humiliate black people in public and keep them in separate parks or away from parks, in separate parts of the movie theater, and so forth. In 1925, Strom Thurmond raped a domestic servant in his house, 16-year-old domestic Carrie Butler. His daughter Essie Mae Washington and Thurmond’s family kept this secret until his death in 2003. Miscegenation laws were finally taken off the books in South Carolina in 1998 and in Alabama in 2000.

But what I wanted to juxtapose here was Thurmond, with his strident arguments against integration, when every day this vulnerable young woman was coming into his home, the home of his parents, and he certainly had no compunction about sexually abusing her. The Lovings, as people will recall, were sentenced to one year in prison for violating Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924. That year, I think, has a broader context. Obviously, it was a time when the United States was limiting the immigrants who could come into this country to those from European nations. It was a time of scientific racism. And under the Virginia law, members of so-called non-white races could marry each other, but they could not marry white people. So again, the aim here was to uphold white supremacy and not the separation of the races per se.

Photograph of Senator Thurmond on his 100th birthday, shortly before his retirement from the US Senate
Senator Thurmond on his 100th birthday, shortly before his retirement from the US Senate (via Wikimedia Commons).

The relationship between marriage and power – this is clear, I think. And again, we come back to the fact that when Richard Loving did predecease his wife, his assets went to her. They, in other words, went presumably to her extended family within a black community. Their children were called unnatural and bastards, and again, think of the hypocrisy here. The United States has ample evidence that prohibitions against race mixing have not been adhered to at all. What is race – the Loving children, Donald, Sydney, and Peggy, were labeled black. But the mixed heritage here – Mildred Jeter was a descendant of Native Americans as well as of people of African descent – the mixed heritage revealed how foolish these very rigid, strict classifications were. So marriage is an integral component of American citizenship. It confirms not only rights, but also respect on a couple.

In conclusion, I just want to say that beginning in the British North American colonies and stretching into our own time, state-based efforts to control or prohibit interracial marriage and interracial sex, all the while sanctioning the abuse of black and other minority women – that’s a long and sordid history. Indeed, today we see vocal resistance to gay marriage among people who, like their Southern white forebearers before them, invoke god to argue that same-sex relationships, and not just marriage, are sinful. Obviously, we cannot congratulate ourselves that the Loving decision of 1967 settled this question once and for all. Though we can acknowledge that it was a long past due, if not entirely successful effort, to curtail state power in criminalizing intimate relationships in general, and marriage in particular, between consenting adults. Thank you.

GARFIELD: Thank you. Our next speaker is Dr. Kevin Noble Maillard. He is Professor of Law at Syracuse University. Professor Maillard is a co-editor of Loving v. Virginia in a Post-Racial World: Rethinking Race, Sex, and Marriage, published by Cambridge University Press in 2012. Katherine M. Frank, Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, noted that the edited volume “contains some of the most thoughtful, and original essays on race, family, nation and law.” Originally from Oklahoma, he is a member of the Seminole Nation, Mekusukey Band. He received his B.A. in Public Policy from Duke University, his J.D. from Penn Law School, and his Ph.D. in political philosophy from the University of Michigan. Dr. Maillard is a frequent commentator on race in the United States. He’s written for The Atlantic and provides on-air legal commentary to MSNBC, and is a contributing editor to The New York Times. We’re so pleased he could join us today coming in from New York. Please welcome Professor Maillard.

Headshot of Professor Kevin Noble Maillard, Professor of Law at Syracuse University

MAILLARD: Thanks for coming, I’m glad to be in such esteemed company here in Texas. This is really great and the weather of course is just really welcome for me coming from New York where there’s still snow on the ground.

I first became interested in this topic just by being born. My dad is West Indian, his grandparents came over from St. Maarten in the 1800s. My mother is from Seminole Nation of Oklahoma and that’s where I grew up. And so, I also went to high school in Tulsa, OK, where I had these parents with this background and then I went to an all-white high school so I’ve always kind of suffered being the only one of whatever it is in all of my institutions.

So, here’s what I find so interesting about licenses. We have to have a lot of licenses, do a lot of things. We need a license to drive. We need a license to in Texas to hunt, to own a gun. We need a license to do a lot of things. We also need a license traditionally to have sex. That’s what marriage is. When I tell this to my students they kind of look at me like “we don’t have to have a license.” But when the state is recognizing that relationship and according benefits, protections and privileges because of that relationship then the license to have sex becomes something that is worthy of holding and it becomes a property interest where we can exclude other people and we can have expectations on what we desire to get out of the marriage. We have this interest in marriage where we expect things to come from it. So, when we see these wars over what marriage means over who can and cannot get married these are just culture wars with marriage there that’s in the middle. That thing that academics on college campuses would call a liminal space. Normal people might call it a flashpoint. Other people on the street might just call it a really important issue. For marriage itself, it is a legal relationship but it’s not about love that much. Love is a new concept in the issue of marriage.

Black and white photograph of a protest against integration in Little Rock, Arkansas
Protest against integration, Little Rock, AK (Wikimedia Commons).

So, I study legal history and when we think about marriage this is an exchange of property. As Professor Jones was saying, we are transferring property from white men to other people. Would they have looked at the Lovings differently had Richard Loving been a rich guy? If he had a lot of property to give a way? If he had a lot of property to transmit at his death? Think of marriage also as a way of classifying people. Think of when you go to the doctor’s office and every time you go there’s some status that you have to put on. What do they want to know? Your address, your phone number, your next of kin, that kind of information. But they always want to know whether you’re married or not. That’s interesting, right? They want to know if you’re married or not and there are only four choices: single, married, widowed, divorced. Everyone else is just dead to the world. It doesn’t say if you’re dating, if you’re cohabiting, there’s no “it’s complicated” like they would have on Facebook. There are all these rigid statuses because the state can only see the red light or the green light, there’s nothing that’s in between. So, for marriage, it places people into pegs and society we can look at these people and say “are they joined? Are they committed? Are they not committed?”

So, from my own person life, I’ve been studying marriage and interracialism my entire career. I’m not married but I have my partner and we have kids together and then people then always want to know what our status is and I’m always really annoyingly academic and political about it. But then it’s the same thing as being married but I’ve always looked at marriage as a way to disenfranchise black people or differently as a way for the state to back away from people because once people are married the state expects them to take care of themselves. We could look at marriage as a way of privatizing welfare. In my home state of Oklahoma there are marriage promotion campaigns. “Why don’t we have these people all get married?” In one of the debates between Romney and Obama—this was the famous “binders full of women” debate—Romney said, well “why don’t we just have all these people get married” as if David’s Bridal is going to solve all our social pathologies.

We expect the state to rely on marriage as a way of saying: “once these people are married, they’ll take care of each other, they’ll be dual income or we hold that spouse liable for all that other person’s debts, their obligations, their responsibilities to society.” So, marriage itself is this golden circle of protection, of privileges, of expectations that has been used traditionally as relationship to either bring black people in but more so to exclude people of color from the franchise, to exclude people of color from full citizenship by saying “if we have these people who were once enslaved, let’s have them get married because then now all of these poor people can take care of each other, we no longer have any obligation toward these people.”

What about these people of different races that might want to marry? Now there will be a transfer of wealth, an intermingling of financial and property interests between these groups and there will no longer be any rigid boundaries between the different races and we will not be able to tell where one stops and the other starts. So, marriage is a function of the police power. It locates people within a society, it determines their status; it tells the state whether we can recognize these people as actually being joined to one another or not.

A marble plaque at 42 Rutland Gate in London, UK for Sir Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics
Marble plaque at 42 Rutland Gate, London (via Wikimedia Commons).

Here’s where it ends up being a legal issue about prohibitions and exclusions for marriage: Eugenics. Eugenics would be the science of human breeding. This was very popular in the early 20th-century. Eugenics— “we have the right people marry each other.” Without this policing of these people marrying each other, then our society might devolve. If we have careful examination of the appropriate people to marry, then our society will be stronger. What is this sounding like? At the forefront of this scholarship of Eugenics was a man by the name of Francis Galton who was English and was a half cousin of Charles Darwin and he coined the term Eugenics in 1883 as “the science of improvement of the human germplasm through better breeding.” Eugenicists vociferously argued that the white race as a superior group remained strong only when pure. They would have studies; there would be doctors that would back up these studies—not really good doctors; there were scholars that would write about this; there were state actors who would support this. What does this sound like? Fake science! It’s like history repeats itself over and over.

“A people that fails to preserve the purity of its racial blood, thereby destroys the unity of the soul of the nation and all its manifestations.” Who said that? Adolf Hitler. Adolf Hitler was part of the conversation of Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act. The architects of that Integrity Act were three men by the name of Walter Plecker, Earnest Sevier Cox and John Powell. They led a campaign of racial politics in the state which classified miscegenation as “a breach in the dyke” to be stopped. They insisted on the legitimacy of Eugenics, which they defined as the science of improving stock, whether human or animal. The trio presented a racial apocalypse attributed to imprudent choices of sexual partners. Eugenics minded propaganda published by the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics warned young men and women considering marriage—the greatest and most important of human relations—and also lawmakers who were responsible for the future of the state and welfare of the race.

A photograph of a historical marker in North Carolina for the state's Eugenics Board
Historical Marker in North Carolina (via Wikimedia Commons).

By presenting this future of the white race as dependent on individual, personal choice— “when you walk out on the street today, you’re making associations with different people, you might marry that person, you might have a child with that person”—the personal literally is political. These Virginians attempted to ignite a race panic that would soon be ingrained in law.

“The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life.” this is written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Supreme Court Justice, in the Harvard Law Review in 1897. This statement conceptualizes law as a system of beliefs, a reflection of what our society holds most valuable—what it holds to be proper, how we should associate, who we should be close to. These are the components of the Racial Integrity Act—what our society deems to be most important. First, the act required all citizens within the state born after June 14, 1912 to register their racial composition with the Bureau of Vital Statistics, with Walter Plecker as director.

Secondly, the race registration certificates determined a valid marriage, thus preventing any non-whites from illegally marrying whites. Thirdly, the act defined a white person as one whose blood is entirely white, having no known demonstrable or ascertainable mixture of blood of another race, which they had to amend because some of the people that were white in the state of Virginia that thought of themselves as white that were part of the state legislature would suddenly not be counted as white anymore, this would have affected about 16 members of the legislature. So, they put a little bit of an exception in there to make room for people who would proudly call themselves descendants of Pocahontas. So, people who in Virginia would like to say “I’m from the first families of Virginia, the oldest families of Virginia” most of those people could trace their ancestry back to a non-white Disney princess known as Pocahontas—they wouldn’t be able to do that anymore. These people who wanted to claim that minuscule ancestry were no longer be declared white even if it was 1/156th part Native. These people would no longer be part of the white franchise in the state of Virginia.

We end up with Loving v. Virginia, where the Lovings are challenging this Racial Integrity Act of 1924 that was the intellectual commerce of Nazi Germany. What is a white person? the state invokes equal protection. they’re saying that everyone is being treated equally by this racial integrity act, because the law would be applied equally to whites and non-whites. Just like with same sex marriage, the laws banning same sex marriage would apply equally of people of the same sex who wanted to marry and other people—it didn’t single out anyone, these different state laws would say, this is just the way the law is.

The state also said that the court should defer to the wisdom of the state legislature. For me as a family law professor, this is usually the explanation of courts when they don’t really know what else to say—and especially when the claim they’re making is generally unconstitutional: “let’s leave it up to a popular vote.” Here’s what the supreme court said in Loving v. Virginia: “there is patently no overriding purpose independent of invidious racial discrimination which would justify this classification.” So, we have two constitutional issues in the 14th amendment that are at play here: one would be an equality issue—black people, native people, Asians, Latinos would all be able to marry each other in this Racial Integrity Act. why? Because the Racial Integrity Act was only about white racial purity. So, a family like mine, they’d say “marry each other all you want, we don’t care about blacks and natives. all we care about is if there is a white person involved.” That is what racial integrity means.

Black and white photograph of President Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964
President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (via Wikimedia Commons).

There is also the liberty issue. The fundamental substantive due process issue which is just a legal way of saying this is a fundamental right for people to have the choice of who they want to marry. The state should not be involved in that decision. Why should we defer to the state legislature when it comes to fundamental rights? Would any restrictions on marriage be constitutional? You would have someone in most recent history like Antonin Scalia, Supreme Court Justice, who would have said “do all of these laws mean the end of all morals legislation? If we allow for the striking down of sodomy laws, does this mean that one day bestiality will become legal? Everyone can go and marry their mothers? We can have marriages with plants and animals? We can marry our dog? We have to have some line somewhere. We cannot decide this based on an idea of dignity—that’s not an appropriate road. What we do have to think about is tradition, this is the way that states have always looked at marriage, which has not always given every single autonomy the ability to make that personal choice to the individual actors.”

Let’s go a little ahead to today with marriage equality. Obergefell v. Hodges most recently deemed that marriage between same sex partners is now legal across the land. It’s like an opinion justice Kennedy was just waiting to write: the first thing he cited was Loving. Couldn’t even get off the first page without mentioning Loving v. Virginia. Why? Because there are the same constitutional ideals of equality—are similarly situated people being treated the same? —and we also have the fundamental rights issue of marriage, making these private decisions about who they want to spend their life with and have it recognized by the state. These people they would transpose these same ideals from Loving to the same sex marriage context, so then when we have Justice Kennedy writing this opinion it’s like the first thing that he can say is this is exactly like Loving. Then he goes off into this long soliloquy about “if people cannot get married then they will be lonely forever and we don’t want people to get lonely and we want children to be protected by their parents, we want to have dignity for all these different groups.”

Image of crowds outside the Supreme Court of the United States the day the court ended marriage discrimination
Supreme Court of the United States ends marriage discrimination (via Wikimedia Commons).

The reasons why marriage is a fundamental right become more clear and compelling from a full awareness and understanding of the hurt that results from laws banning interracial unions, and then also same sex unions. So when Scalia and Thomas say “let’s rely on state legislatures for these laws, we do not need to engineer from the bench, we do not want to be judicial activists,” I always say to my students: are we part of social engineering already? Are we the results of this? If those laws had not been in place now, would there be more people in the United States that would openly declare themselves to be gay, lesbian, transgender, bisexual? Would there be more people in the United States that would declare themselves to be multi-racial? Would there be more opportunities for people to be multi-racial? Because then when you look around the room maybe about 1/10 people might be of 2 different races. Is that a personal choice that someone was making, that someone’s grandfather was making, that someone’s grandmother was making? Yet here we are today still with a majority of people being of one race. Had those distinctions not been made so apparent and so illegal would we have a different nation now? Would we look like Hawaii? Would we would look like Mexico? Would we look like Brazil?

Can we ask what the role of law is in our everyday lives and the decisions that other people will make in our past that brought us here—how does that affect the way that we represent ourselves, and the way we see our current world? As I started off saying, the law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life, written by Oliver Wendell Holmes. We could say that interracial love is complicated, it’s unacknowledged, it’s part of our American past. The result of this is that integration at the most intimate level still continues to be a bit of a taboo. It’s the duty of scholarship, of art, of film, of all of us here to fulfill of all those voids in that story of American history.
GARFIELD: Thank you. Jeff Nichols, the Director and Screen Writer of Loving, has been held by acclaimed critic Peter Travers as ranking with the best American directors of his generation. After graduating from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts School of Filmmaking, Mr. Nichols went on to write and direct several internationally acclaimed features including Shotgun Stories, which received the Grand Jury Prize at the Seattle and Austin Film Festivals, and the International Jury Prize at the Venice International Film Festival. Take Shelter, which received multiple honors at the Cannes International Film Festival, including the Critics Week Grand Prize, and was later nominated for five Independent Spirit Awards. And Mud, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, was also a Spirit Award nominee. Loving was released in November 2016 to widespread critical acclaim. It was dubbed by the Hollywood Reporter at “the most relevant film this election season.” Of course, anyone who’s seen the film knows this as well. It’s insistence on the power of love to stand-up to bigotry and injustice is narrated with astounding restraint and poignancy, by a filmmaker at the top of his game. Please welcome Jeff Nichols.

Headshot of Jeff Nichols, the director and screen writer of 2016 film Loving

NICHOLS: Okay. I am definitely out of my league with these people. So, a few caveats to start, much like our president, anything that comes out of my mouth should be fact-checked, because I make movies, and I am not a professor. I thought about why I was here, and what I should talk about. And as narrow as I could possibly get I thought I should talk about the interpretation of history. Chiefly my interpretation of history.

This is the fifth film I’ve made and it’s the first one not cut from bulk creative cloth. There is a strict responsibility that comes with that. The first person I met when I started to do research on Loving was Peggy Loving, and when you sit down with the relative of this person that you are about to put on screen, you are immediately struck by how important the task you have is.

I was struck by that. But even with that, what you are seeing when you watch Loving is my interpretation of something. And that’s good and that’s bad. I tried as best as I could to adhere to the facts that I had accessible. And, at the same time I was making a point. You can’t help but make your own point through this stuff. I think it’s an important thing especially for people in an institution like this is to understand that every book you read, every film you see, is somebody’s point of view of history.

I’m 38 years old. I was born in a working middle class suburb in Little Rock, Arkansas. I have an interesting point of view on what I thought the late the 50’s and 60’s would be like. I thought a lot about, as a guy who has dedicated his life to writing screen plays, that talk about the southern experience. I thought a lot about what a southern audience would think of when they saw Loving.

And oddly enough, spending the last four months on an insane literal campaign to try and win an Academy Award I’ve been bouncing back and forth between New York and Los Angeles, in very comfortable rooms, very liberal rooms. And I was thinking about what the middle of the country would think when they saw this film. A good friend of mine, who was a minister of mine when I was growing up, I remember talking to him. He’s always been a fan of my films and I said I’m making Loving. He said “oh that’s great Jeff, that’s an important story, you should tell that story.” I said: “Well yeah, you know it has all this relevance to race, but also to marriage equality as well.” And he’s like: “Well hold on, that’s different, the Bible tells us about that.”  And here’s a man who I truly respect, and I grew up listening to, and taking a lot from. And yet he is of a generation and place that can’t wrap his mind around the validity of gay marriage. That’s who I wanted to go see this movie.

And if you’re going to do that I think you start to craft a movie in a certain way. I did not ever want the film to speak down to people. If you use this person as an example he’s an extraordinarily intelligent guy. I never wanted to preach at him. I never wanted to make him feel like he was stupid. Chiefly because I don’t think the Lovings would want that. So you end up getting a film that has a really distinct point of view and there are pros and cons to it. But it’s a point of view I was really trying to show. It is the humanity of these two people.

I was trying to make it so that by the end of the film what you’ve seen is undeniable, its unimpeachable, the way that these two people felt about each other. And in doing so hopefully I’m also not betraying who Richard and Mildred Loving were, as far as I could tell. And there’s one big point that I had to accept, that I had to go, that I had to believe to this day, and that’s the idea that Richard and Mildred Loving fell in love sincerely, genuinely, not as a reaction to the environment around them.

And this is really the point when you think about this approach that I’m talking about. They were not two young kids who were rebelling. They were not two young kids whose parents said you will not marry that white man, you will not marry that black girl. Because, and the reason why I think that’s so important, is they genuinely loved each other. They genuinely fell in love with one another. And when that is the basis of this story I feel like your arguments start to run out of fuel. And, in order for that to happen, though, they had to be in a place that was extraordinarily unique in the Jim Crow south.

Luckily, it is my opinion that they lived in such a place. Central Point Virginia was not really even a town. Bowling Green, which was the county, see, that was the town. That’s where the sheriff came from that arrested them. That’s where the judge Bazile was that wrote the opinion that helped it get to the Supreme Court, or not the opinion, but the township of Central Point though was extremely poor, very agriculturally based and there had been a legacy of racial mingling there for decades. Mildred Loving said it at the beginning of Nancy Buirski’s documentary the Lovings’s story which was the foundation of my research, “people had been mixing for a long time we just didn’t think nothing of it”.

That’s a dramatic statement to hear from a woman in 1965 because its true to her point of view. There’s a fact that is pointed out in the film through a mildly clunky monolog written for the sheriff, where he points out that Richard Loving’s father actually worked for a black man running timber. And if you think about the psychology of a white kid growing up in the 40’s and 50’s in Virginia, and his father’s livelihood, his family’s livelihood is given to him by a black entrepreneur. That starts to change things in your brain. He’s in a community where his friends, who he raced, drag-raced cars with, they were of mixed race. They were either Native American, black or white. There had been so much racial mingling there, that there really was a unique make up in this community. You can go there today, that’s where we shot the film, where we had open casting calls, the skin tones, the cheek bones, the people’s faces there are beautiful. It is a very unique bubble. And, so, it was integral to my interpretation of this whole thing, that, that bubble exists to a degree. Now a lot of people that watched the film they call BS. That’s fine. And everybody is entitled to their opinion and certainly there is a complexity on the ground of what was really happening there. There is no way that I could reach that in film.

But what was important to me, again, was that there was an environment where these two people, they could love each other for who they were. I believe it. I made a movie about it. And what I think that does is; It shows you two people that are living in spite of the laws, in spite of the social norms around them. And, it allows them, it allows you to make the argument in the film or ask the question what’s wrong with this? And I think everybody in this room knows the answer to that. That there is nothing wrong with that. So, that’s it. That’s about all I have for this. I just wanted to give you an idea of how I approached it. And I don’t know that’s all.

GARFIELD: And we have time now for some questions for the panelists.

AUDIENCE: Was there any attempt by the state to use religion as the justification for –

NICHOLS: Yeah, I mean, in the initial thing that Justice Bazile writes, which you should read, he starts off – God separated the races, therefore he did not intend for the races to mix. But that was out, bold, that wasn’t constitutional. Yeah, that was not – that was what was actually – Bernie Cohen and Phil Hirschkop, who were two lawyers who worked for the ACLU on behalf of the Lovings, I think they saw that as a wonderful gift when they read that from the original trial.

AUDIENCE: You mentioned in 1872, the legal marriage. What happened to legal marriages after miscegenation laws?

JONES: Well, that’s a  really good question. And by the way, I should send Jeff a picture of Lucy Parsons. She looks like Ruth Negga, so she could play Lucy Parsons in the movie. But it’s a good question. The Parsons had to leave once the Democrats came into power. And as far as those other interracial marriages – first of all, I assume there were very few of them in that very limited window of a few months. But yes, I assume, you know, they would have been annulled or considered illicit relationships after the Democrats took power and interpreted the law differently.

AUDIENCE: I have a question for Mr. Nichols. I haven’t seen your other films, so I don’t know if this is a stylistic question or not. This is a really spare, minimalist film with very little dialogue and a lot of eye movement and looking at each other, not looking at people. I’m wondering what went into that choice.

NICHOLS: Yeah, and honestly, I think I got flustered and stopped talking to [inaudible]. There is another big factor in terms of my interpretation of this stuff, which is that this is the fifth film in my filmmaking career. And there are a lot of decisions that come into play, just in terms of my development as a filmmaker. I think Loving, out of the five films – they’re all my children, so I’m not going to say it’s my favorite, but it is certainly the most precise in terms of its execution. Number one, I finally had enough money to have enough days to execute everything in the script. The film I had made before that was a sci-fi film, and I didn’t know half the time what I was doing. Which is usually the way I feel on the set. That wasn’t the case for Loving. Now that being said, a big source for the way that they were portrayed in the film was archival footage that Phil Hirschkop helped Nancy Buirski, documentary filmmaker, unearth in the late 2000s when she was making a documentary. Hope Ryden was a documentary filmmaker that went down to Virginia at least two times, possibly three or four, and she had this beautiful black and white archival footage of the Lovings in their home. That combined with Grey Villet’s photographs from Life magazine is really where I started building their nature, who I thought they were. I spoke to Peggy, I spoke to Bill and Bernie, but it was really through that footage that you really realize – she is eloquent and graceful, while also completely earthy and of this place. He’s terrified. He, when a camera is put on him, just withers; he can’t handle it. I saw a lot of my own grandfather in him, in terms of that, and I thought about how difficult it would be for a man like that, who, a working-class, redneck Southern guy like my grandfather, to have to enunciate the love he felt for someone publicly. I think that would’ve been a crippling experience for my grandfather, and it looked that way for Richard Loving. So a lot of what I built was based on that interpretation. But it runs side by side with my evolution as a filmmaker, which is someone that hates expositional dialogue. That’s usually because – Kevin and I have spoken about this before – it’s usually because I’m writing fake characters in fake situations and I want to try to make them sound honest, and I want to try to make their behavior believable. and so usually I’m trying to listen to human behavior and human speech, and get it right. And a lot of times in films we have characters speak their backstories and speak their histories in ways that are completely dishonest to me, and it bothers me. So sometimes to a fault I’ve made my films and the dialogue in them redundant, and I’ve tried to make it just reflect the behavior that would happen in the moment. And make that kind of a cross I have to bear as a storyteller to try and make everything exist in two hours, in that format. So what you’re seeing is my interpretation of the Lovings, but also the evolution of me as a filmmaker.

AUDIENCE: In the article in Time Magazine, evidently Mildred Loving claimed never to be African American, she claimed she was Native American. And I’m just curious, is there a reason you didn’t kind of deal with that, or how did you – because in the movie it’s not really – it looks like, yeah, there’s mix, but it looks like their brothers and family are all African American.

NICHOLS: And they look like that today. And if you go speak to her grandson, who looks very much like that, he 100% claims to only be Native American, and actually took issue with the fact that the film would claim that she was African American. Which – the film really doesn’t – if you watch the film, it just doesn’t, it’s just not [inaudible]. Again, the monologue, by the sheriff, he mentions Cherokee and Rappahannock blood running around in all of those people, and then just being kind of mixed up, as he puts it. There is actually a certificate that was not her marriage certificate, where she actually put Native American, I think on her original arrest records she put “mixed race” and she put “black and Cherokee.” I’m not actually sure she was Cherokee. That might’ve just been what she thought Native American was, although there were Cherokees in that area, but mostly it was Rappahannock. You know, the film didn’t – I don’t know, the film – there was never a time to have him talk about it. It just didn’t seem like a conversation they were having. But the thing that I find fascinating about it is really just how elusive identity is, and how personal it is. It’s certainly not something I consciously didn’t want to talk about, because at the end of the day that’s the whole enchilada. The reason why – there are lots of reasons, one of the main reasons why the state’s case fell apart in the Supreme Court is because it was based on pseudo-science. It was based on the idea, if you read these anti-miscegenation laws, that if you show one drop of Negro blood. They were trying to – you could see them in the laws trying to wrangle scientific language to support their case. And it of course was ridiculous. But no, it’s a fair question. I can’t really answer it as a storyteller. I just – there wasn’t a place where they would sit down and be like, you know, I’m actually Native American. Like I just couldn’t hear Mildred saying it. So that’s probably why I didn’t show it.

MAILLARD: And I think there’s been exceptionalism accorded to intermingling with Native people as opposed to African people. Because just think of in your own personal life, people will readily, as I said when I was up there, will readily tell you that they have Native ancestry.

NICHOLS: I am 1/32 Cherokee.

MAILLARD: Yeah. But then like, nobody can tell me that – nobody will come up and be like I am 1/32 black. One out of one hundred people can do that. And that would even stem from Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson wrote: “Are the beautiful mixtures of red and white just so pleasing to the eye, not like the bileless mixture of white and black, which is more akin to an orangutan,” or something like that, right? So there’s always been – okay, it’s great to have Native and white mixed together, and people would claim that as maybe some way, some entire of equality with whites that would be treated differently than African equality with whites.

AUDIENCE: Were there other states that had the anti-miscegenation laws, and then their legislatures just by the normal process vacated those laws? Were there other court decisions, either from the Circuit or the Supreme Court that addressed them?

MAILLARD: Yeah, definitely, there was an earlier one in Virginia, there was one in California, Michigan had one at one time, and then it back. So at one time there were 41 states in the United Stances that had them since 1865 all at different times. And then strangely – some of them were really surprising. Like in South Carolina, they didn’t actually have one until after the Civil War. It was more based on – I think you mentioned a little bit – based on reputation than an actual blood thing. So someone could be very dark and look like me and just be considered a white person because they were rich. The same way like in Brazil, Pelé is considered white because – Pelé’s a soccer player – because he’s rich and not necessarily based on skin tone. So at one point in time, almost every state had it, but it was never all at the same time across the United States.

AUDIENCE: This year also marks the fiftieth anniversary of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? So I would like to get your sense about how you view how Hollywood has treated the evolution, how Hollywood has treated interracial couples, marriages, on film and get your feedback on some notable aspects of that.

MAILLARD: Well this is weird because I’m writing a commentary on the [New York] Times for that next month and that’s why we were talking about the Times. There’s actually – for Hollywood, there are a lot of movies that are out right now. Get Out, the horror movie, that is coming out next Friday. United Kingdom, which is kind of the Loving for Britain. So I think there’s always a fear of approaching this. One would be financial, because maybe they think that the film won’t sell, and I think you could speak to that a little bit more. But then always this – I think it’s a legacy of what we think of as personal and what represents us as a people. And then there’s a body of film with an absence of interracial families, which teaches us through its absence that this is not something that is normal. Because you can walk out on the street, you can walk out here on campus and it’s like, all these kids out there, mixed ancestry. But then you don’t see that on screen. And it’s almost as if these people are saying, I’m not seeing myself on screen, I’m not being represented. And this is teaching people your own existence, your own marriage, your own family is abnormal.

NICHOLS: I’ll try and answer this as honestly as I can. I’m not being politically correct, so excuse me. But I think – for one, as an example, Loving was the easiest film I’ve ever had get financed. There were multiple people that wanted to tell the story. There were some people who didn’t want Joel in the part, or didn’t know who Ruth was, and that is a totally different conversation. But I found multiple people that wanted to be a part of this. And now you can certainly add the success of a couple of my movies and where I was in my career; that helped, all of that helped. But I do think there was an appetite to have this story told very well. So set that aside, but that’s just truth, that happened. The thing is – talking about this is – I’m part of the problem. When you hear about Hollywood, I’m a white male writer and I’m the one, when I create fictional stories, that doesn’t create an interracial couple at the center of it just from scratch. And as I sit here and think about that, and think about being part of the solution and part of the problem, I do think that there might be something to this idea that sometimes either – one, you just don’t even think about it. And that’s a big issue. LIke, you’re just like, well, it didn’t occur to me to make those people interracial. But I think another part of it is – so I’ve made five films basically all in the South, and Loving is the first one that addresses race. And that is – there’s a reason for that. When I started making contemporary Southern fiction, and I had read a lot of Harry Crews, I read a lot of Larry Brown, obviously William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. I wanted it to reflect things that I had seen out my door growing up in Arkansas. I knew if you take a film like Mud for instance, if I enter a black character into that film, I’m going to have to talk about it. It’s going to become – it’s not something that can just happen as a character in a vacuum, especially in Arkansas in the river in a community that is still extraordinarily segregated. So much so that when we were filming some high school sequences there, our producer’s like – I think we should really incorporate some black students into this. I said, I agree, and we did, and some of the white high school students that we brought in as extras gave them a hard time. So it’s not that it’s not a subject that I shy away from or don’t want to talk about, but it becomes the story a lot of times. And I think for a lot of writers, my self wholly included, sometimes we don’t know how to express it, how to talk about it, how to show it. Making Loving and being on this circuit, being the first feature film to screen at the African American History Museum in DC, has been extraordinary [inaudible] for me, but it’s also opened up my eyes up to my limited point of view. And I would like to think that I am now a storyteller on the other side of a point of view than I was before Loving. It is a complex issue, but I think that has something to do with it. I think interracial relationships specifically – and you all talk eloquently about this – I still think it’s something that’s difficult for Americans to talk about, because we don’t talk about sex very well. It’s why we don’t talk about marriage equality very well, either.

JONES: I just wanted to say, about 1967, that particular moment. People in my small town later used to say that the school I went to, grades one through eight, a very tiny school, that it was integrated peacefully because it wasn’t a high school. There was a lot of fear around the idea that integrating high schools mean kids would fall in love with each other, that kind of day to day interaction. And you do see that in some, you know, not only Central High in Little Rock, but other places around the country, that intense opposition to integration. The other thing is we have to remember the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which opened up workplaces to people of color for the first time, and made discrimination illegal. Various kinds, more and more housing was becoming integrated to a certain extent. And then in 1965, of course the Civil Rights Act related to voting. So it is a particular time when for the first time in history, I think, more Americans are encountering people who are different from themselves in the workplace, in school. And so yeah, 1967 I think is kind of a defining moment there.

NICHOLS: And also, when we put this trailer up on YouTube, Focus chose to close down the message section because of the vitriol. So it’s out there.

AUDIENCE: My question is for Mr. Nichols. I have two questions. I saw the movie about two months ago, I was really impressed with your work with the actors. You mention that your theme was love, and showing that they genuinely love each other, to me that seemed very real in the film. I’m curious how long were you working with Joel and Ruth, the rehearsing process, like how long did you work with them. And my second question is what exactly compelled you to make this film now.

NICHOLS: I don’t rehearse. And I introduced Joel and Ruth – I cast them kind of in a vacuum with one another, which seems a really stupid idea in hindsight. But they’re such great actors that they were able to not only build the character of Mildred and the character of Richard, they actually built the couple, which is where I think if they’re given any accolades, that’s what they need to be given accolades for. Because that’s hard to do. Especially when we got lunch together out in LA one time, like several months before we started filming, and then they should have gotten two weeks before we started filming. And we don’t rehearse, we just kind of hang out. I took them to all the real places and all the real locations, a lot of them are in the film, so they are just really great actors. What I’ll say about their behavior in the film is what I try to do on the page is set that behavior out, the way people cross through a room, the way they react to one another when they’re sitting closely to one another, if you take the first scene in the film as an example. I try and put that on the page, and then when you hire very intelligent actors, which I did in this case, they’re there with it. They understand it and it actually doesn’t take a lot of rehearsal in my experience. Other directors would disagree. There were a lot of reasons why I chose to do this back in 2012. I was flattered by the producers when they approached me, first off. I grew up in Little Rock and I attended Little Rock Central HIgh. I graduated in 1997; the desegregation crisis was in 1957. I was inundated with civil rights history as a result of this, and I didn’t know about Richard and Mildred Loving. I was ashamed of that back then and I was curious as to why more people didn’t know about them. Also, my best friend growing up was gay, and he is from Arkansas, and the man that he married is from Texas, and they got married outside of Syracuse. I was the best man at their wedding, and I realized neither one of them could get married in their home states. And that angered me. So I had – I was kind of pissed off. And also I saw Richard and Mildred’s story as set out in Nancy Buirski’s documentary, as this beautiful, beautiful way to cut through all of my anger. And to talk about humanity. Again, it seemed to disarm all of these points, just in its sincerity. And that is a – I just haven’t seen that a lot, especially something that I felt like was true.

AUDIENCE: I saw the movie, Jeff, and loved it. One thing I can tell you about it – my wife and I watched it late at night and did not fall asleep. I think it’s probably safe to say that most Americans get their history from movies, so, rather than from the scholarship that we write. Which seems to bring with it a special responsibility when you’re dealing with actual events. Now, I imagine that a lot of the dialogue we hear is made up. The reason I ask this in part is I was just on a panel with a film critic and I railed against movie after movie that depicted history and made stuff up. And the film critic looked at me and said, Michael, you’ve got it all wrong. If you want to learn facts, go read a book. If you want to feel something, go see a movie. And it struck me that this is a movie which really captures the feel of things, in a way that I think is extremely powerful and important. But I fear that most Americans who see this will stop right here, stop with the movie and never go beyond that. So did you feel that sense of responsibility and if you did, how did you cope with it?

NICHOLS: I felt less responsibility, you know, outward to an audience and more just to Richard and Mildred. There was actually a TV movie of this made on Showtime in the late 1990s, with Timothy Hutton. And it no longer exists mainly because Bernie Cohen was an advisor on that film, and Phil Hirschkop was not, and when the film came out, there was only one lawyer. And Phil is very good at suing people, and he made it so that that film does not exist. Yeah. But Mildred was alive to see it, and she said – about the only thing they got right were our names. And I didn’t want that. So I tried to adhere as close to fact as possible. A lot of the lines are taken directly out of their mouths from the documentary. I made up one big thing and I tried, though, to not make anything up that I couldn’t point to some fact. And this is more about the [inaudible], it’s not entirely striking the heart of your question. But there’s a very dramatic scene in the film where they sneak back into the county to give birth to their first child. That happened. And then they are subsequently rearrested. That happened. Those two things did not happen together. So that is my taking creative license. One to make kind of this first section of the film really laid down in a cohesive way. But also just to make it dramatic as hell. And heartbreaking. So that’s an example of, well okay I had this fact and I had this fact, I’m going to condense those two things and that’s the license that I’m giving myself. But through the whole thing, and the critic that you spoke to I think was – you’re right – I just wanted to get the essence of them and the essence of the story correct. But I’ve been shouted at at these things before for not fully understanding the tone and the situation of the Jim Crow South in this period. And the damage and the anger and the hurt that came from it, because I just made a movie that focused on love. So there are certainly people, and I think they are completely justified in a lot of ways, for saying that my point of view through the film is limited. And so at some point you just have to focus on the people who you’re trying to represent, try to get them right, and still try to make a movie that people will watch.

AUDIENCE: This is a little off topic. I’m with an organization here at UT, Events Entertainment, and one of our committees is Showtime, we put on films for the students. This is absolutely a film that we would love to bring to UT, so I was wondering if we could get your contact information.

NICHOLS: You betcha.


You may also like:

Slavery and Freedom in Savannah
Historical Perspectives on The Birth of a Nation (2016)
Purchasing Whiteness: Race and Status in Colonial Latin America


The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Women’s March, Like Many Before It, Struggles for Unity

Originally posted on the blog of  The American Prospect, January 6, 2017.

By Laurie Green

For those who believe Donald Trump’s election has further legitimized hatred and even violence, a “Women’s March on Washington” scheduled for January 21 offers an outlet to demonstrate mass solidarity across lines of race, religion, age, gender, national identity, and sexual orientation.

The 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (The Center for Jewish History via Flickr)

The idea of such a march first ricocheted across social media just hours after the TV networks called the election for Trump, when a grandmother in Hawaii suggested it to fellow Facebook friends on the private, pro-Hillary Clinton group page known as Pantsuit Nation. Millions of postings later, the D.C. march has mushroomed to include parallel events in 41 states and 21 cities outside the United States. An independent national organizing committee has stepped in to articulate a clear mission and take over logistics. And thousands of local organizations, many of them formed just in the last month, have already chartered buses to bring demonstrators to the National Mall region, where the march is scheduled to kick off at 10 a.m. at the intersection of Independence Avenue and 3rd Street SW.

Despite its “Women’s March” moniker, the national organizing committee’s striking diversity signals an increasing emphasis on defending “human rights, dignity, and justice,” as the event’s official website states, by unifying across difference. The organizing committee includes four national co-chairwomen—Tamika Mallory, Carmen Perez, Linda Sarsour, and Bob Bland—who are African American, Latina, Palestinian American, and white, and who all have extensive backgrounds as social justice organizers and professionals with local, national, and global experience.

584085481a00002500ccac35

Linda Sarsour, Carmen Perez, and Tamika Mallory serve on the Women’s March national organizing committee (via Huffington Post).

Still, neither the march, scheduled for the day after Trump’s inauguration, nor its organizers can pretend to possess perfect harmony and clarity on the direction of this nascent movement. For example, the initial organizers dropped the original moniker, the “Million Women March,” in response to criticism that it was disrespectful to African American women who had participated in a Philadelphia march by that same name in 1997. The latter had taken place two years after the iconic Million Man March. This year’s initial organizers also faced criticism that the name “March on Washington” failed to show deference to the historic role of black activists in the 1963 March on Washington, recognized as a high point of the civil rights movement. The new national committee explicitly describes its mission as one that builds on earlier movements for social justice.

Women in attendance at The Million Woman March on October 25, 1997, in Philadelphia, Pennyslvania.

Women in attendance at The Million Woman March on October 25, 1997, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (via Idealistic Ambitions).

 

Such internal tensions are par for the course in the history of marches on Washington, whether they involved racial justice, women’s rights, or political protest. The several thousand women who paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue in the 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession, the day before President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, were not as unified as they might have appeared. Participants included immigrant women sweatshop workers, who linked the right to vote to their movement to organize against deadly factory conditions and piecework wages. But noticeably absent from the front of the march were black women’s organizations, who supported the effort but whose participation was spurned by the militant young suffragist Alice Paul, who feared it would jeopardize support from Southern white women. These African American women ended up participating, but they were required to march behind all the other women. All the women who marched down Pennsylvania Avenue stood up to jeers and violence, but they themselves were divided by an ugly racism rooted in political pragmatism.

By contrast, some historic marches on the Capitol demonstrated racial unity against all odds. The largest convergence on Washington prior to 1963 was the 1932 Bonus Army March, which brought together World War I veterans at the height of the Great Depression. In 1924, these veterans had been honored with the promise of an old-age “bonus” redeemable in 1945. But times were desperate, and the men wanted their bonuses early. An estimated 20,000 unemployed veterans hopped freight trains, caravanned in automobiles, or walked to the capital from as far away as California, and vowed to stay put until the government delivered. Their protests placed them in a direct confrontation with President Herbert Hoover. Things came to a head on July 28, 1932, when General Douglas MacArthur ordered soldiers wielding machine guns, bayonets, and tear gas to evict the veterans from their encampment and torch their tents. The debacle, which featured news coverage of government troops attacking unarmed veterans, is thought to have helped Franklin Roosevelt beat Hoover by a landslide that November.

bonus_marchers_05510_2004_001_a

Bonus marchers in 1932 (via Wikimedia Commons).

On the surface, the Bonus Army March may appear to have little relevance for organizers of this month’s march. But the gathering was actually a show of unity that brought together both men and women, both whites and blacks. In 1932, not only the veterans but also their wives and children poured into Washington, forming a genuine community. And despite the fact that the U.S. military had maintained racially segregated units during World War I, white and black veterans caravanned to the capital together. For two months, they and their families squeezed in beside one another as their children played between the rows of tents. They experienced MacArthur’s onslaught together, an early demonstration of racial and gender solidarity not unlike what the Women’s March expects to deliver this year.

The Bonus March was still fresh in the minds of another group of protesters, this time comprised only of African Americans, who used the threat of a mass demonstration to pressure the government for racial justice in 1941. It was the eve of the nation’s entry into World War II, and a labor organization known as the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters initiated a March on Washington Movement that threatened to bring 100,000 African American protesters to the capital on July 1 unless President Roosevelt moved to desegregate the military and order an end to racial discrimination in the burgeoning defense industry. Anxious that reports of racial injustice would damage his credibility with the Allies, Roosevelt blinked on June 25, and this march never took place. In the end, Roosevelt failed to desegregate the military; but he did prohibit discrimination by defense contractors, and established a Fair Employment Practices Committee to mediate disputes.

Portrait

After Roosevelt desegregated the armed forces, Howard Perry became the first African American US Marine Corps recruit in 1942 (via Wikimedia Commons).

The role of women in this World War II–era movement holds a lesson for the women rising up to oppose Trump’s presidency today. It may be widely known that the 1941 protest was a direct precursor of the 1963 March on Washington. But less well-known is that the full, official name of black union in question, led by A. Philip Randolph, was the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids. The avid participation of maids, as well as of the union’s Ladies’ Auxiliary, which included porters’ wives, enabled Randolph to up his original participation projection from 10,000 in January of 1941 to 100,000 just a few months later.

Just as significantly, even though Randolph ended up canceling the demonstration, it spawned a March on Washington Movement, with chapters across the country, that persisted until 1946. Women continued as leaders in both the local and national organizations, and drew particular attention to discrimination against black females in the defense industry and other employment sectors. Women organizing this month’s demonstration at both the local and national levels are drawing on the historic organizing role of women—even those who have been forgotten—to create a lasting movement.

Anna Arnold Hedgeman (via Hamline University).

Perhaps the most famous march on Washington in the 20th century took place in August of 1963, when a quarter of a million people united to demand black civil rights. The march brought together white liberals who turned out to support African Americans, as well as Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, and Native Americans, in an extraordinary show of unity against racial oppression.

Nevertheless, yearly commemorations of this historic march fail to note unsettling backstories involving women leaders, whose important roles have been largely forgotten. Its top organizers, A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, did not invite a single woman to speak, not even Rosa Parks—despite strong criticism from prominent black female civil rights advocates, including the one woman on the central organizing committee, Anna Arnold Hedgeman. Ultimately, organizers did arrange for six women, including Parks, to sit on the dais and be honored as women. But as the program shows, none of the ten keynote addresses heard that day was delivered by a woman.

Most Americans remember only one: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Often forgotten is the full name of the event: the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Photographs of the event show hundreds of women bearing signs calling for everything from higher wages and jobs for all to better schools and voting rights. Many are union members. Female domestic and agricultural workers, the backbone of Southern activism since the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, also marched, at a time when federal law excluded them from minimum wages, Social Security, and from union-organizing protections.

Those photographs are testament to the role of women workers in organizing public protests. One thread running through all of these major 20th-century marches is the way civil justice issues involving race, gender, jobs, wage equity, and immigration all tended to intertwine. In the wake of the bitter election of 2016, post-election analyses have focused disproportionately on “the white blue-collar worker,” “the middle class,” or “the 1 percent.” Overlooked are the economic security and job concerns of Latina, black, and other women who toil in service, agricultural, and manufacturing jobs, at wages so low they qualify for food stamps. Such women would be devastated by the social-services restructuring proposed by GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan, of Wisconsin.

As women and men march on Washington once again, the demonstrations of 1913, 1932, 1941, and 1963 hold important lessons. The outward show of “unity” at the Woman Suffrage Procession masked its racism. The 1932 Bonus Army March speaks to the potential for diverse groups to come together in the face of extreme adversity—just as progressives are unifying today in the face of Trump. The 1941 march illustrated how organizing for a demonstration can plant the seeds for a sustained movement. And the solidarity celebrated in 1963 hid the relegation of women leaders to second-class citizenship. Ideally, the Women’s March on Washington will both avoid some of these pitfalls and help women forge new alliances that will last well beyond the event itself.
bugburnt
More by Laurie Green on Not Even Past:
1863 in 1963.
Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600 – 2000.

You may also enjoy:
George Forgie discusses the work the Emancipation Proclamation left undone.
bugburnt

History Calling: LBJ and Thurgood Marshall on the Telephone

By Augusta Dell’Omo

When President Lyndon B. Johnson called Thurgood Marshall to offer him the position of Solicitor General of the United States, Johnson reiterated his commitment to doing the job that Abraham Lincoln started by “going all the way” on civil rights, but he warned Marshall that the appointment would cause the Senate to go over him with “a fine tooth comb.” In the July 1965 phone call, Johnson speaks on a wide variety of issues including the image of the United States abroad, the state of the Civil Rights Movement, the importance of “Negro” representation in the justice system, and finally, his thinly veiled, ultimate goal of placing Marshall on the Supreme Court. A monumental historical moment, LBJ’s call to Marshall set in motion a series of events that would culminate in Marshall becoming the first African American Solicitor General and the first African American Supreme Court Justice of the United States.

Thurgood Marshall talks to President Johnson at the White House (via Wikimedia Commons).

Thurgood Marshall rose to fame in the 1940s for his work with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, created by Marshall as the legal arm of the NAACP, designed to assault discrimination and segregation. Amassing a huge array of legal victories such as in Smith v. Allwright (1944), Shelby v. Kraemer (1948), and most famously Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), Marshall came to be known as “Mr. Civil Rights.” At the time of Johnson’s call, Marshall was serving on the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, having been appointed in 1961. Johnson, however, had his attentions focused on not just the Civil Rights Movement, but also the growing war in Vietnam. Throughout June and July of 1965, Johnson was forced to consider raising the number of active ground forces and found himself continually at odds with his advisors and the American public. Coupled with the public resignation of the US Ambassador to South Vietnam, Johnson, who often did not want to focus on foreign affairs, found himself facing a series of political and military losses. Johnson hoped to focus his moral idealism and religious convictions on the civil rights struggle, and when told he should de-emphasize civil rights, Johnson remarked, “well, what the hell is the presidency for?”

This recording of the telephone conversation between LBJ and Thurgood Marshall is included in a collection LBJ’s White House telephone conversations made on Dictaphone Dictabelt Records between November 1963 and November 1969. Johnson initially began recording conversations and speeches while in the Senate and continued that practice as President. The recording of presidential meetings and phone calls was first begun by Franklin Delano Roosevelt who aimed to improve consistency in White House public statements and messaging, while also having the option for conclusive proof in the case of false claims made about the administration.

lyndon_johnson_meeting_with_civil_rights_leaders-1

President Johnson meeting with Dr. King and other leaders of the Civil Rights Movement (via Wikimedia Commons).

The recording elucidates the tensions Johnson felt between the morality of the Civil Rights Movement and the practicalities of the political climate that he experienced throughout his presidency. Johnson’s actions during the Civil Rights Movement have been a subject of intense study by historians, who seek to understand where the motivations for Johnson’s involvement came from, and how strongly moral and religious principles guided him in comparison with political realities. Randall B. Woods argues that Johnson’s moral and ethical idealism drove both his home front and war front actions, while Sylvia Ellis contends that pragmatism and realism governed Johnson’s racial and foreign policies.[1] Johnson began the phone call to Marshall with an exasperated sigh stating that he has “a very big problem,” which he hopes Marshall will help him with. His tone seems exhausted and his choice to view the appointment as a problem, points to his pragmatism and recognition that the political climate made Marshall’s nomination very challenging. Throughout the call, Johnson never refers to the position as a great honor, but rather an opportunity to raise the character and image of the United States abroad, (he even tells Marshall that he “loses a lot” by taking the position). He seems to view the nomination of Marshall as a duty as well as a politically calculated choice of a “Negro” who is also “a damn good lawyer.” The pragmatic influence takes hold, and Johnson’s political calculations continue to be apparent, as he expresses the difficulties with pushing Marshall’s nomination through Congress, and not wanting to be “clipped from behind.”

thurgoodmarshall1967

Thurgood Marshall in 1967 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Johnson’s comments, however, could be viewed through the lens of morality, rather than pragmatism. His statements about Marshall being a symbol for the “people of the world” could reflect his view that Marshall would be an important beacon of equality across the world. Furthermore, his obvious admiration for Marshall’s political abilities and his strong conviction to back him regardless of what anyone else said, could show Johnson’s commitment to making a decision that reflects his own moral compass. Johnson says that he “doesn’t need any votes” and that he isn’t doing this for the votes, but rather because he wants “justice to be done.” This recording does not solve the debate on Johnson’s ambiguity, but rather continues it, with Johnson’s statements supporting both pragmatism and morality, depending on how one hears the recording.

What is left unsaid is just as interesting. Marshall says very little throughout the conversation. When Johnson describes Marshall as a symbol for “negro representation,” Marshall does not really respond. The question of Marshall’s role as a “race man,” who clearly defines his identity as “black” and seeks to bring about the progression of black people, has been a subject of much debate among historians and legal scholars that is not resolved by this conversation.[2] But this telephone call offers a snapshot of the struggle between practicality and morality would dominate the careers of both Thurgood Marshall and Lyndon Johnson.

bugburnt
Audio recording of this phone call may be found on Youtube. The original is housed at the LBJ Library: Recording of Telephone Conversation between Lyndon B. Johnson and Thurgood Marshall, July 7, 1965, 1:30 PM, Citation #8307, Recordings of Telephone Conversations – White House Series, Recordings and Transcripts of Conversations and Meetings.

Other Sources:
Wil Haygood, Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America (2015).
David Kaiser, American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War (2000).
Abe Fortas, “Portrait of a Friend,” in Kenneth W. Thompson, ed., The Johnson Presidency: Twenty Intimate Perspectives of Lyndon B. Johnson (1986).

[1] Randall B. Woods “The Politics of Idealism: Lyndon Johnson, Civil Rights, and Vietnam,” Diplomatic History Volume 31, Issue 1, 2007. Sylvia Ellis, Freedom’s Pragmatist: Lyndon Johnson and Civil Rights, (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2013).

[2] Sheryll D. Cashin “Justice Thurgood Marshall: A Race Man’s Race-Transcending Jurisprudence,” Howard Law Journal, Vol. 52, No. 3, 2009.

bugburnt
Also by Augusta Dell’Omo on Not Even Past:
Trauma and Recovery, by Judith Herman (1992).

You May Also Like:
Jennifer Eckel reviews the HBO production Thurgood (2011).
Not Even Past contributors provide an overview of the history of the Civil Rights Movement.
bugburnt

Stokely Carmichael: A Life

by Peniel Joseph

June 2016 marked fifty years since Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) called for “Black Power!” during a political rally for racial justice in Greenwood, Mississippi. Carmichael defined Black Power as radical social, political, economic, and cultural self-determination Carmichael’s political legacy indelibly shaped civil rights and Black Power organizing and provides important historical context for understanding the contemporary movement for black lives.

Poised between Dr. Martin Luther King’s shield and Malcolm X’s sword, Stokely Carmichael stands as the bridge between two generations of black political activists. Born in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, Carmichael arrived in America in 1952, attended the prestigious Bronx School of Science, and was mentored by Bayard Rustin, the openly gay black social-democratic activist and pacifist who would serve as a key advisor to King and organize the March On Washington in 1963.

Like the current generation of Black Lives Matter activists, Carmichael devoted his energies to exposing American myth and lies. At Howard University he became the most charismatic and outspoken student activist in the Nonviolent Action Group (NAG), the campus satellite of the larger Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”). SNCC grew from lunch counter sit-ins that spread across the south, then nationally, in the winter of 1960 into the most important grassroots civil rights organization in postwar American history. The group, guided by the political and organizing genius of Ella Jo Baker, organized for voting rights, set up freedom schools, and civic education in some of the most dangerous parts of America.

While attending Howard University, Carmichael participated in local struggles in Washington, D.C., and Cambridge, Maryland for racial and economic justice, the desegregation of restaurants and public accommodations, and the integration of the building trades. Beginning in 1961, he traveled to Mississippi where he was arrested as a Freedom Rider and jailed in Parchman Penitentiary, alongside future March On Washington speaker, SNCC chairman, and Georgia Congressman John Lewis. By Stokely’s count, between 1961 and 1966 he was arrested twenty-seven times for civil rights activism.

Like many of his Howard colleagues, Carmichael utilized non-violence as a political tactic, rather than a way of life. His own political philosophy hewed close to the social-democratic teachings of Rustin, the Marxist-Leninism he imbibed in study groups in high school, and the pan-Africanism he reveled in while hearing reports of successful liberation movements in Ghana and listening to South African singer Miriam Makeba (his future wife) on the radio.

Carmichael’s allegiance to civil rights struggle did not prevent him from listening to Malcolm X at Howard University or form friendships with black nationalists and political radicals who fit outside the civil rights mainstream. Despite his militancy, Stokely led the Second Congressional District during Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964 and dutifully protested outside the Democratic National Convention on Atlantic City’s Boardwalk in a vain effort to seat the Mississippi Freedom Party Delegation led by sharecropper turned activist Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer.

The Democratic Party’s refusal to seat an integrated delegation that organized for democracy under the threat of death convinced Stokely to forever abandon mainstream politics. He re-emerged from the disappointment in Atlantic City as one of SNCC’s biggest voices supporting independent black politics, which took shape in tiny Lowndes County, Alabama during 1965-1966. Carmichael helped to organize sharecroppers, poor people, and community activists to create the Lowndes County Freedom Organization that would be nicknamed the Black Panther Party.

By the time he called for Black Power in 1966 Stokely Carmichael had become a touchstone to multiple streams of political and cultural radicalism. Carmichael spread the word about black being beautiful before James Brown, came out against the Vietnam War before Dr. King and Muhammad Ali, and helped to popularize the Black Panthers by headlining “Free Huey” rallies in Oakland and Los Angeles, California.

In doing so, Carmichael defied the dictates of American hegemony by traveling overseas to Cuba, challenging the Johnson Administration’s moral and political integrity, and vowing to go to jail rather than ever serving in the armed forces.

Global black lives mattered to Carmichael. During his 1967 tour of Africa, the Middle East, Cuba, and Europe he visited Conakry, Guinea and met former Ghanaian Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah and Guinean President Sekou Toure. By 1969 Carmichael relocated to Conakry where he argued that Pan-Africanism represented Black Power’s highest stage and would, over the next three decades until his premature death in 1998, remain an unapologetic black revolutionary.

Contemporary movements for racial and economic justice owe a deep debt to Carmichael’s legacy of grassroots organizing, student activism, and willingness to speak truth to power. Before Black Lives Matter activists identified the criminal justice system as a gateway to racial oppression, Stokely Carmichael called out America as an empire who subjugated black and Third World people domestically and internationally. As a local organizer, Carmichael testified before civil rights commissions, attended conferences, participated in debates, and mapped policy strategies to help build two black independent political parties. Hounded by the FBI, local law enforcement, the State Department, and the CIA, Carmichael remained a committed political revolutionary until his dying breath. Carmichael’s legacy extends to the iconography of the black freedom struggle. His friendships with Martin Luther King Jr., Fidel Castro, Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Toure, the Black Panthers, Angela Davis, Kathleen Neal Cleaver, Ella Baker, and Fannie Lou Hamer offer nothing less than a political and intellectual genealogy of postwar decolonization and anti-racist movements, one that continue to reverberate from Black Power to Black Lives Matter.

Further Reading:

Peniel Joseph, Waiting Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America, (2006).
A panoramic history of the Black Power era that reframes the chronology and relationship between civil rights and Black Power activists, with a focus on local leaders and national and global icons.

Peniel Joseph, Stokely: A Life, (2014).
A political and intellectual biography of Stokely Carmichael/Kwame Ture that argues for his place in postwar global history alongside of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.

Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, (2011).
The most comprehensive and powerful biography of Malcolm X ever written. Places Malcolm within the sweeping activist traditions and history of post Marcus Garvey America and traces his local, regional, national, and global impact on black liberation struggles.

Rhonda Y. Williams, Concrete Demands (2014)
Examines the history of the black power era through local, bread and butter movements for policy and municipal transformations and in the process illuminates the movement’s practical efforts to transform democratic institution in American society,

Bryan Shih & Yohuru Williams, eds., The Black Panthers: Portraits From An Unfinished Revolution, (2016).
Impressive collection of oral histories and interviews of the most iconic black revolutionary organization of the Black Power era.

Photo Credits:
Featured image: Stokley Carmichael speaking at an SDS conference at UC Berkeley on October 29, 1966. Source: Digital History
https://urbanintellectuals.com/?s=stokely+
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/carmichael-stokely
https://www.crmvet.org/images/imgslave.htm
http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/blackspeech/scarmichael-2.html

Reading Magnum: Photo Archive Gets a New Life

by Steven Hoelscher and Andrea Gustavson

When photographer Bruce Davidson boarded a Greyhound bus on May 24, 1961 in Montgomery, Alabama, he joined a group of 27 students, ministers, and activists determined to challenge the South’s segregation laws. In response to two earlier busses carrying anti-segregationist Freedom Riders—the first one firebombed and the second attacked by a mob wielding iron pipes—the federal government stepped in and ordered armed National Guard soldiers to provide protection. It was a moment of high drama in the Civil Rights movement, one that both exposed the bitter racism along the way from Montgomery to Jackson, Mississippi, and one that sorely tested the activists’ belief in nonviolent action. Davidson’s photographs portray something of that drama as they show a secret meeting before the ride, young men and women waiting to board the bus at the segregated station, groups along the route including white men heckling the Freedom Riders and black residents standing among National Guardsmen.

One picture succinctly captures the complicated emotions and political tensions of the scene: taken from inside the bus looking out, it portrays both the young activists and the armed escort ordered to protect them (above). This photograph, and others like it, circulated widely from the November 12, 1961 issue of The New York Times, to Raymond Arsenault’s 2007 Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice, and to the cover of Davidson’s own 2002 book, Time of Change: Civil Rights Photographs, 1961-1965. An icon of the Freedom Riders’ struggle, it is featured on the 2010 American Experience documentary website.

Figure 2_Davidson Freedom Riders verso

Verso from press print by Bruce Davidson, taken “aboard the Freedom Riders’ bus, Montgromery [sic] Alabama, 1961.” Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

The photographic print that brought the image from Davidson’s photo agency, Magnum Photos, to newspapers, magazines, textbooks, and websites carries its history on its back. If we turn over the print, we find a message board of scribbled notes, agency stamps, archival references, photo credits, hastily written captions, and a stamp identifying the photo as part of the Magnum Photo New York Print Library. So many times has the photograph been sent to various publishers and then returned to Magnum that a staff member wrote in bold, black lettering, the word “RETIRED,” suggesting that this particular print’s utility has come to an end.

Hoelscher_F13_C

Like the print itself, the collection of photographs to which it belongs is now also retired—at least from its previous occupation of carrying the image it bears to publishing venues. Davidson’s print came out of retirement in the summer of 2010—or, more accurately, it took on a new life—when the Magnum Photo New York Print Library was opened for research at the Harry Ransom Center, a research library and museum at the University of Texas at Austin. The Magnum Photos collection, as it is now known, is comprised of some 1,300 boxes containing more than 200,000 press prints and exhibition photographs by some of the twentieth century’s most famous photographers. Once Magnum began using digital distribution methods for its photographs, the function of press prints as vehicles for conveying the image became obsolete and these photographs became significant solely as objects for both monetary and historic value.

Figure 4_Capa

Death of a Loyalist militiaman. Córdoba front, Spain, 1936, ©Robert Capa/Magnum Photos

Magnum’s visual archive is a vast, living chronicle of the people, places, and events of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Images of cultural icons, from James Dean and Marilyn Monroe,to Gandhi and Castro, coexist in the Magnum Photos collection with depictions of international conflicts, political unrest, and cultural life. Included are famous war photos from the Spanish Civil War and D-Day landings to wars in Central America, Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as unforgettable scenes of historic events: the rise of democracy in India, the Chinese military suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, the U.S. Civil Rights movement, the Iranian revolution, and the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Figure 3_Arnold

Marilyn Monroe reading James Joyce’s Ulysses. Long Island, New York, 1955, ©Eve Arnold/Magnum Photos

Finally, scenes of everyday life in a wide range of historical contexts—from immigrant communities in New York City to Romani communities in Czechoslovakia, and much more—comprise an extraordinarily valuable visual archive.

Figure 8_Chang

A newly arrived immigrant (Tang Z) eats noodles on a fire escape. New York City, 1998, ©Chien-Chi Chang/Magnum Photos

Figure 7_Hoepker

View from Brooklyn. New York City, September 11, 2001, ©Thomas Hoepker/Magnum Photos

Magnum Photos was formed in 1947, in the wake of the Second World War, by four photographers seeking to retain the rights to their images while working on projects that aligned with their own interests rather than solely responding to commissions from magazines and newspapers. Henri Cartier-Bresson, David “Chim” Seymour, George Rodger, and Robert Capa created a business model that fundamentally changed the practices of photojournalism, allowing the image-maker, rather than the magazine, to retain control over published work. This shift allowed Magnum photographers to emphasize their artistic integrity and fosters independence in terms of subject matter.

Figure 5_Meiselas

Soldiers search bus passengers along the Northern Highway in El Salvador, 1980 by Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos.

The result was a new way of doing assignment photography so that members of the Magnum collective were free to pursue projects that spoke to their personal, political, and artistic concerns. While Magnum’s working model has evolved over time, Capa’s initial idea was that members would place images, often in the form of extended photo-essays, in various publications and across several geographic markets. The publication fees earned would be shared between the photographer and the agency with part of the earnings made available to finance further projects. Although Magnum Photos was formed during and sustained by the postwar heyday of picture magazines such as Life, Look, Picture Post, and Illustrated, the cooperative still exists and recently celebrated its 65th anniversary.

Figure 6_Franklin

A column of T59 tanks makes its way from Tiananmen Square along the Avenue of Eternal Peace. A solitary protester stands determined in the center of the road, blocking the tanks. Beijing, China, June 4, 1989, ©Stuart Franklin/Magnum Photos

The organization of the Magnum Photos collection at the Harry Ransom Center directly reflects the working practices of the photography collective. A key component of Capa’s plan was the repackaging, recaptioning, and redistributing of images as photo-essays once the images were no longer immediately newsworthy. Practically speaking, this meant that images like Eve Arnold’s iconic photograph of Malcolm X might have been made into multiple prints and filed in several different file folders that eventually were placed into archival boxes including the box designated “Eve Arnold 1961-1964,” another designated “X, Malcolm 1925-1965,” and a third designated “Historical 1960s,” and a fourth designated “Social Protest.”

Figure 10_Arnold Malcolm x

Malcolm X during his visit to enterprises owned by Black Muslims. Chicago, IL, 1962, ©Eve Arnold/Magnum Photos.

Eventually the physical photographs were returned to the Magnum office to be stored in file cabinets and boxes labeled by photographer and by a range of subjects and thematic groupings. This organizational structure has been preserved in the archival collection at the Ransom Center. The 169-page finding aid has sections for individual photographers, public personalities, and geographic regions. It also contains subject groupings such as “World War II” or “Motherhood” or “National parks” and also more idiosyncratic thematic categories such as “Time and Measurement” or “Historical Emotions, 1970s.”

Figure 9_Koudelka

Reconstruction of a homicide. In the foreground: a young gypsy suspected of being guilty. Jarabina, Czechoslovakia, 1963, ©Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos

These subject categories evolved along with the press print library as different librarians, archivists, and interns sought to structure the collection in ways that would make the images accessible and reusable. In this way, the press print library with its organizational structures and its multiple copies of each photograph was an attempt to make the objects—the press prints—function in service of the image content.

Historians are encouraged to visit the Reading and Viewing Room at the Harry Ransom Center, where the Magnum Photos collection is open for scholarly research and teaching and fellowships are available to support that research. To be sure, many of Magnum’s images are available online through its website. But to understand these photographs in their historical context—both how they circulated throughout the world and how the photo agency kept them in the public’s eye—direct engagement with these remarkable primary sources is essential.

bugburnt

Reading Magnum: A Visual Archive of the Modern World by Steven Hoelscher

This essay is derived from a longer article to be published in Rundbrief Fotografie. We thank the editor for permission to reprint here.

Want to read more about Magnum Photos and photojournalism? Click here.

bugburnt

Head Photo:  National Guard Soldiers escort Freedom Riders along their ride from Montgomery to Jackson, Mississippi. Montgomery, Alabama, 1961, ©Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

All photos: Courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center with permission from Magnum Photos for any promotional work associated with Reading Magnum.

bugburnt

Next Page »

Recent Posts

  • Review of Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons: A Story of Language, Race, and Belonging in the Early Americas (2022) by Kirsten Silva Gruesz
  • Breaking ChatGPT: Good Teaching Still Beats the Best AI
  • Remembering Rio Speedway
  • Fear Not the Bot: ChatGPT as Just One More Screwdriver in the Tool Kit
  • Bearing the Nation: Eugenics and Contentious Feminism in Post-Revolutionary Mexico
NOT EVEN PAST is produced by

The Department of History

The University of Texas at Austin

We are supported by the College of Liberal Arts
And our Readers

Donate
Contact

All content © 2010-present NOT EVEN PAST and the authors, unless otherwise noted

Sign up to receive our MONTHLY NEWSLETTER

  • Features
  • Books
  • Teaching
  • Digital & Film
  • Blog
  • IHS
  • Texas
  • Spotlight
  • About