History 467
Week 5
Due: in discussion
section, Tues. Jan. 30 or Wed. Jan. 31
Project: Bring a
written response, not longer than one typed single-spaced page, that analyzes the
main arguments of Civilities and Civil Rights through the perspectives offered by the
passages quoted below. As before,
this assignment is intended to stimulate discussion and allow you to frame your
response to the book in the form of an argument, but it is not intended to be a
formal paper that takes a substantial amount of your time.
In Civilities
and Civil Rights, William
Chafe provides a community study of the civil rights movement in Greensboro,
North Carolina. The book advances
a central argument, captured through the framework of the "Progressive
Mystique," about the dynamic interplay between black protest and white
response during the long trajectory of Greensboro's civil rights era.
At the national
level, civil rights activists who advocated nonviolent forms of protest and
civil rights activists who argued for Black Power offered their own assessments
of white moderation and white liberalism, the general boundaries of what Chafe
calls the "Progressive Mystique." Read the following two selections and then fashion your own
argument about the effectiveness of the various strategies employed by the
civil rights movement in Greensboro.
1. Excerpts from
Martin Luther King, Jr., "The Letter from Birmingham Jail" (1963):
You may well ask,
"Why direct action, why sit-ins, marches, and so forth? Isn't negotiation
a better path?" You are exactly right in your call for negotiation.
Indeed, this is the purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to
create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that
has consistently refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks
so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.
I must say to you
that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal
and nonviolent pressure. History is the long and tragic story of the fact that
privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. . . . We know
through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor;
it must be demanded by the oppressed.
I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. . . . We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.
I'm grateful to
God that, through the Negro church, the dimension of nonviolence entered our
struggle. If this philosophy had not emerged, I am convinced that by now many
streets of the South would be flowing with floods of blood. And I am further
convinced that if our white brothers dismiss as "rabble-rousers" and "outside
agitators" those of us who are working through the channels of nonviolent
direct action and refuse to support our nonviolent efforts, millions of
Negroes, out of frustration and despair, will seek solace and security in black
nationalist ideologies, a development that will lead inevitably to a
frightening racial nightmare.
**Originally
published as "The Negro Is Your Brother," The Atlantic Monthly (August 1963).
2. Excerpts from
Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of
Liberation (originally
published in 1967)
The advocates of
Black Power reject the old slogans and meaningless rhetoric of previous years
in the civil rights struggle. The
language of yesterday is indeed irrelevant: progress, non-violence,
integration, fear of "white backlash," coalition. . . . Those of us
who advocate Black Power are quite clear in our own minds that a "non-violent"
approach to civil rights is an approach black people cannot afford and a luxury
white people do not deserve.
The values of
this [American] society support a racist system; we find it incongruous to ask
black people to adopt and support most of those values. We also reject the assumption that the
basic institutions of this society must be preserved. The goal of black people must not be to assimilate into middle-class
America, for that class-as a whole-is without a viable conscience as regards
humanity. The values of that class
are based on material aggrandizement, not the expansion of humanity. The values of that class ultimately
support cloistered little closed societies tucked away neatly in tree-lined
suburbia. The values of that class
do not lead to the
creation of an open society. That
class mouths its
preference for a free, competitive society, while at the same time forcefully
and viciously denying to black people as a group the opportunity to compete. .
. . This class is the backbone of institutional racism in this country.
The concept of
Black Power rests on a fundamental premise: Before a group can enter the
open society, it must first close ranks. The advocates of
Black Power do not eschew
coalitions; rather, we want to establish the grounds on which we feel political
coalitions can be viable. . . . The northern urban ghettoes are in many ways
different from the black-belt South, but in neither area will substantial
change come about until black people organize independently to exert power. . .
. We must begin to think of the black community as a base of organization to
control institutions in that community.
Some believe that
there is a conflict between the so-called American Creed and American
practices. The Creed is supposed
to contain considerations of equality and liberty, at least certainly equal
opportunity, and justice. The fact
is, of course, that these are simply words which were not even originally
intended to have applicability
to black people. . . . There is no "American dilemma," no moral
hang-up, and black people should not base decisions on the assumption that a
dilemma exists.