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

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?

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 Rights 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.

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 crimes. 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.

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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)

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?

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)

AC: 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?

PJ: 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/

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Stokely Carmichael: A Life

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.

Muhammad Ali Helped Make Black Power into a Global Brand

Muhammad Ali did not simply choose to be a cultural icon. He was also chosen. Elevated by unsurpassed boxing skills and athletic prowess to become heavyweight champion of the world, Ali transcended sports through radical political activism that has, with the passage of time, been largely smoothed off its rough edges. He broke the mold introducing a new brand of masculinity, more humorous and more vulnerable than anything the world had seen before.

Political friendships with Malcolm X and membership in the Nation of Islam announced the newly crowned boxing champ as a provocateur, one whose Cheshire cat smirk hid rivers of simmering anger, pain, and barely contained rage. For a time, boxing offered an outlet for the rage Ali felt about the unceasing racial humiliations of Jim Crow and the violence meted out against civil rights demonstrators across the country.

Malcolm X photographs Ali in February 1964, after his first defeat of Sonny Liston to become world heavyweight champion. Via Wikipedia. — Malcolm X photographs Ali in February 1964, after his first defeat of Sonny Liston to become world heavyweight champion.
Source: Library of Congress.

But by 1967 Ali had seen enough. The most visible Nation of Islam member in the aftermath of Malcolm X’s 1965 assassination, Ali’s resistance to the draft and friendship with Civil Rights leader Stokely Carmichael made him perhaps the most visible Black Power activist of his generation. In doing so, Ali bridged the worlds between sports, popular culture, politics, and activism in unimaginably profound ways. While contemporaries such as Cleveland Browns running back Jim Brown and Boston Celtics star Bill Russell were outspoken civil rights activists, none matched Ali’s youth, charisma, and global appeal.

Accounts of Ali’s political courage during the 1960s tend to play up his anti-war exploits at the expense of his Black Power activism. In truth, the Black Power organization offered the earliest and most sustained resistance against the Vietnam War. Black Power activists made anti-war protests a core element of their political program, with a diverse range of groups including the Black Panthers staunchly opposing America’s involvement in Vietnam and efforts by the U.S. military to ratchet up the number of African Americans fighting on the front lines.

Muhammad Ali in 1966. Via Wikipedia. — Muhammad Ali in 1966.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Ali’s now legendary statement that “no Viet Cong ever called me a n——” took place against a historical and political landscape that framed American foreign policy in Southeast Asia as a part of imperial wars of aggression against nonwhite peoples of the world. The sound bite remains a revolutionary act of political defiance precisely because Ali distilled lessons taught by Black Power revolutionaries with an economy of language that was the Nation of Islam’s and Malcolm X’s credo — make it plain.

Throughout the late 1960s Ali became a cultural touchstone for black America. He dazzled militant students with lectures on black history, his own political travails, and the need for principled resistance. An entire generation of black athletes, most notably Olympic sprinters John Carlos and Tommie Smith, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar worshipped Ali as the pinnacle of athletic achievement.

As time passed, Ali helped make Black Power into a global political brand. His love for Africa, rage against political inequality and thirst for social justice made him a human rights ambassador. Ali’s public persona, while lacking the sharp edges of others, outraged America’s politicians and pundits, who branded him a traitor. For many whites, Ali’s political alliance with black radicals made him a frightening role model for restless youths with a penchant for mayhem that could be seen in urban riots cascading across the country.

Ali’s reclamation of his boxing title in 1974 coincided with a transformed American landscape. The man hadn’t changed, but the times had, recognizing his political defiance to participate in a now unpopular war as the principled choice of a true maverick. By the 1990s, America embraced the once dangerous and reviled anti-war protester as a national treasure, one whose gait and sharp tongue had been considerably slowed by Parkinson’s disease.

Lost in neoliberalism’s warm embrace of Ali’s image via global marketing and branding deals is how this universally recognized icon for human rights found his political métier in the maelstrom of the Black Power era. Just as contemporary Black Lives Matter activists have identified the criminal justice system as a gateway to racial oppression, Ali and his Black Power generation marked the Vietnam War as a multifaceted nightmare that linked race, war and poverty in ways that impacted not just America, but the world.

This post was originally published in the Austin American Statesman on June 8th, 2016.

*Banner image: Muhammad Ali 1971. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

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.

Reading Magnum: A 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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