Black Citizenship and Authenticity in the Civil Rights Movement

Front matter

ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH IN RACE AND ETHNICITY

Randolph Hohle

BR

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1 1 Good Black Citizenship and Personal Ethics 21 2 Mobilizin g the Black Community:

Social Ethics, Social Capital, and the Black Family 40 3 Civic Ethics and Embodied Performances 60 4 Black Authenticity and an Ethics of Autonomy 82 5 The Transformation of SNCC and Local Activism 102

Introduction

On March 2, 1955, Montgomery, Alabama police arrested a young black woman by the name of Claudette Colvin for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. Local black leaders began to plan a bus boycott to protest her arrest and use her as a test case to challenge segregated busing. At the last minute, the same local leaders called off the boycott after they discovered the details of Claudette and her reaction to the arrest. Claudette hit, kicked, and cursed the police as they dragged her off the bus. She was also an unwed pregnant teen. Claudette’s response to the arrest and status as an out-of-wedlock pregnant teen would undermine the legal challenge because she did not reflect the type of black citizen that could be used to argue that blacks deserved protective civil rights legislation. Luckily, a local activist by the name of Rosa Parks who did conform to the type of black citizen who would be deserving of rights lived in Montgomery. Accounts of Parks, then and today, describe her as a ‘tired, old, seamstress’ whose long day of work left her ‘neck and shoulders particularly sore’, who ‘calmly’ said no to the bus driver who asked her and three other black passengers to give up their seat for a white passenger. Her character was pristine. No rational person, even a white person from Montgomery, could argue that she did not deserve a seat on her bus ride home from work. It was the normative image that Parks embodied, the racially non-threatening “good black citizen” that local Montgomery activists, including a young minister named Martin Luther King, would organize a year-long bus boycott around.

Following the successful conclusion of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, local black struggles everywhere began to emphasize that blacks exhibit good black citizenship during sit-ins, marches, and everyday life. Throughout the next decade and all over the South, and especially before organized movements, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organized pedagogical seminars and role-playing simulations that instructed blacks on how to be good black citizens when protesting and confronting bad whites. This included instructions on how to speak, how to minimize emotional outbursts, how to sit, dress, walk, and respond to whites. As the movement secured protective legislation, notably the 1964 Civil Rights Act and

1965 Voting Rights Act, national rights were intrinsically linked with the embodied image of the good black citizenship: a racially non-threatening and idealized representation of the good American.

Yet, at the same time the dominant liberal faction of the civil rights movement was securing citizenship rights, they faced an internal challenge from the black nationalist groups over the desirability and political ramifications of good black citizenship. Malcolm X articulated an argument that suggested blacks needed to reclaim control of their bodies in order to shape an ‘authentic’ black identity as an integral part of constructing separate black communities rather than further racial and civic integration. Despite his death, civil rights activist organizations, notably SNCC and the Congress Of Racial Equality (CORE), drew from Malcolm’s discourse of black authenticity and placed it into a political context. Thus began the era of two diverging, competing, yet paradoxically connected forms of black political representation. The bifurcation of black citizenship has produced competing projects over how to struggle for new rights and equal opportunities regarding jobs, adequate housing and schools, and access to the social welfare system.

This book examines the normative shift and subsequent struggle for black political representation that emerged in the black civil rights movement. It focuses on the historical and sociological construction of the two pillars of embodied black political representation, what I define as good black citizenship and black authenticity, and how they became synonymous with national or local black struggles, and influenced the style of subsequent black politics and the state’s response to racial inequality. Rather than focus on a polemical question of whether the civil rights movement was progressive, revolutionary, or conservative, I focus on the paradoxical and nuanced legacy of the movement as it pertains to American citizenship and contemporary black political representation. The civil rights movement is one of the most well known, well researched, and arguably the most defining period in 20"-century American civic culture. Its impact and influence on subsequent political struggles and social movements has been thoroughly documented.! Past scholarship has also addressed questions specific to the movement itself, such as how did it start, why did it end the way it did, its impact on identities, music, and literature, the importance of non-violence as a strategy, and its role in social policy and the white responses to the movement.” Despite the amount of scholarly work on the civil rights movement, questions remain as to the movement’s broader impact on America’s civic culture, specifically, how they redefined American citizenship.

The ongoing significance of race in American politics demands scholars go back to the civil rights era and understand the various and flexible ways race makes social policy meaningful. Despite the media-manufactured and pseudo-intellectual debate over a post-racial America, sociological research continues to demonstrate that race is as important as ever. In a way, this book highlights the way race has changed to the point that one of the effects of good black citizenship is to hide race in plain sight: the body. Many Americans do not have time or interest to rationally digest the nuances of political and economic policy. Monetary theories that insist on a strong dollar and the imminent dangers of national debt and the consequences of privatization are indeed complex, but also embedded with racial meanings in order to attract broader white support. The cultural meanings in racial bodies, as shown on television during a press conference, on the streets sleeping or protesting, standing in line inside the social services office, or sitting in a chair behind a desk in a political office, all help shape how audiences interpret and understand the political meanings embedded in social policy.

THE NORMATIVE SHIFT IN BLACK POLITICAL STRUGGLES

Although black struggles for civic and economic equality started well before the civil rights movement, it did go through a profound shift under King’s leadership. At the turn of the 20" century, black politics were splintered around many competing factions. They included the Fabian-socialism of the early work of W.E.B. Dubois,’ the race-first-class-second approach represented by the New Negro Movement, the class-first-race-second approach associated with A. Phillip Randolph, the work-hard approach associated with Booker T. Washington, the Garveyites’ Back to Africa Movement, and the liberal approaches of the Dubois’s later work and the formation of the NAACP. These debates divided and crisscrossed approaches to achieve racial equality. The civil rights movement that took shape around King’s leadership represented a normative shift to a “liberal project” that bypassed the race-first/class-first question in favor of emphasizing good black citizenship. I define the faction of the civil rights movement associated with King as the liberal project because of its emphasis on individual citizenship rights, as the means to achieve equality clearly reflects the long political tradition of western liberalism.

The liberal project differed from the past struggles on one key measure: how they targeted who and what counted as good American citizenship as a way that tied the fate of blacks and whites together. This required blacks exercising power over the self to appear racially non-threatening in order to change whites’ perceptions of what it meant to be black and white in post-war America. For instance, white segregationists could not easily dismiss the black protests as a communist plot to take over the South because good black citizens did not look like, or act like, dangerous individuals bent on taking over the world. Indeed, a central argument I make in this book is that it was more than just the use of non-violence that made the movement successful. If it were just non-violence, then the non-violence of the preceding 50 years, and the non-violence of the subsequent 50 years, would have produced social change. Non-violence worked because it was part of a larger project of good black citizenship, and when situated against the violent white segregationists, distinguished good blacks from bad whites, and severed the relationship between whiteness and good American citizenship.

The internal debates and tensions within the black struggle were temporarily quelled with the ascension of King as the movement’s most symbolic and prominent public figure. No longer concerned solely with issues of economic equality, King in particular begins to ask the question of what should constitute good American citizenship. Certainly not whites who used poll taxes and violence to stop blacks from voting. Certainly not Alabama whites who outlawed the NAACP as a foreign organization and fired all public employees, mainly teachers, found to be NAACP members. If good citizenship cannot be defined in terms of race, how should society draw exclusionary boundaries to define and set limits of good citizenship? For King, southern whites represented the opposite of idealized American citizenship, and thus, whites’ bad citizenship was ultimately their biggest weakness in their almost hegemonic control of southern life.

Despite the political success of the liberal project, it could not silence the competing black nationalist project rumbling in SNCC, CORE, and dozens of other urban black political groups. The success of the liberal project made the rise of black nationalism and black authenticity possible because the latter was responding to new problems created by the liberal project’s successful elimination of legal forms of segregation. The black nationalists challenged whether or not blacks could be integrated into an otherwise ‘white America’ as individuals as opposed to a group, which raised the question of what should be the normative basis of black political representation. Would blacks at the bottom of the socio-economic hierarchy who did not reflect good black citizenship be excluded from power? Could there be black politicians that represented black people? Or would blacks have to support white politicians ignorant of the black lived experience? How would economic and political power be dispersed within the black community and between the black and white communities? In perhaps an oversimplified statement, the black nationalists challenged the liberal project over the key issue of who and what would represent black citizenship. Although there was some overlap in how each defined black families, sexualities, masculinities, and femininities, boundaries formed and hardened around their different understandings of citizenship.

In this book, I argue that the key to understanding this normative shift and struggle for black political representation lies in an understanding of the importance of the body, citizenship, and ethics in the civil rights political struggles. The civil rights movement destabilized an arbitrary American moral order that based membership privileges on white skin color. Yet, the destabilization of America’s moral civic code came at a price for black America. The competing normative ideals of black citizenship created boundaries between national and local struggles that has stalled subsequent struggle for racial and civic inclusion. These boundaries have contributed to the increased marginalization of blacks who cannot conform to the good black ideal because gains in racial progress only benefit a small and narrow segment of the black polity. This book maps out an understanding of this split and the contemporary implications which have, among other things, cemented national black politics with ideas of good black citizenship and an ethics of caution, and local black politics with ideas of black authenticity and an ethics of autonomy.

GOOD BLACK CITIZENSHIP

Historically, citizens have identified with national understandings of citizenship through the emphasis of a common language, the development of media, collective remembrance of holidays and traumatic events, literature, public intellectuals, and active citizenship, which simultaneously linked citizens with each other and the state.* The cultural basis of national citizenship accompanies a notion of idealized citizenship. When I say “idealized citizenship”, I am not referring to official membership of a state, the legal right to vote, the obligation to be civically active, or access to state welfare systems.° Idealized citizenship refers to how a nation prefers to see itself in relation to idealized cultural values and beliefs. Subsequently, idealized citizenship creates forms of good citizenship that citizens use to justify the inclusion of some into the core of society and the exclusion of others at the margins.° Good citizenship is not contrasted to its opposite of bad citizenship. It is defined by the degree it reflects idealized citizenship. The black movement drew from an idealized understanding of American citizenship as it made claims for rights and civic inclusion. Good black citizenship refers to a form of black political representation that reflects idealized citizenship, which in turn produces a racially non-threatening black political agent. For the liberal project, the idea of being racially non-threatening meant emphasizing the idealized notions of good citizenship in an effort to debunk harmful black stereotypes that blacks were lazy, violent, and morally unfit for American citizenship. Thus, a key part of understanding the civil rights movement is understanding how it made good black symbolic citizenship claims as it justified the need for rights and the value of their civic engagement.’

Good citizenship is not active citizenship, although the two are sometimes used interchangeably. The value of active citizenship assumes that extensive involvement in community will ultimately produce some change because there is some inherent good in active participation. The problem with this perspective is that blacks were, and have been, ‘active’ in their communities for some time. They formed national organizations like the NAACP and local fraternal organizations and whites still denied them the right to use an integrated toilet. Local black organizations today are actively trying to improve the urban community and have experienced a backlash and reduction to state-funded services to the black community. In other words, if simply being active was enough to produce change, blacks would have had the right to vote long before 1965 and would have adequate municipal and state support in urban areas today.

Social movements do not make claims to enter the civic polity as is, but want to change the meanings embedded in the normative aspects of citizenship. In this regard, the black civil rights movement attempted to overcome the tension of American liberalism between individual and group rights articulated in the ‘race question’. The civil rights movement targeted the normative meanings behind who counts as a good citizen in order to change what counts as good citizenship. Once blacks were no longer universally defined as bad citizens, then whites could not morally justify the continued and universal discrimination of blacks. Therefore, an important but overlooked part of the civil rights movement was how it compelled changes in whites. It would be a mistake to say the civil rights movement made whites more racially tolerant. The movement did marginalize violent racist whites to the margins. The rest of the southern and northern whites did change how they spoke of blacks, if they ever spoke of them at all. Yet, whites did eventually relinquish their overt resistance to blacks at the same time they were trying to redefine good white citizenship in anticipation of the post—civil rights era.

Whereas there is general agreement on the social construction of citizenship, far less attention has been made on the material aspects of citizenship, unless material benefits are reduced to economic benefits. Good citizenship is embodied. Indeed, the civil rights movement’s impact on American civic culture did not happen just because it made symbolic citizenship claims that blacks were good citizens deserving of rights. If it were that easy, Brown v Board of Education would have produced racial equality and the subsequent struggles to desegregate public facilities and to outlaw poll taxes would not have happened. If blacks could have just pointed to their military service, church attendance, desire for entrance into union membership, and the right to vote as proof of their good citizenship, then they would not have had to march, sit-in, and endure police violence. While blacks shared the same democratic values as whites, the negative stereotypical meanings attached to black skin overrode shared cognitive understandings of democratic values. The key aspect of the movement was not only the stories and claims of good citizenship, but how an idea of good black citizenship was materialized at the level of the body. Conversely, the black nationalists did not just shout black power. They also used discourses of black authenticity to shape an authentic black self at the level of the body to prove to other blacks that they were capable of governing an all-black community.

Social theory conceptualizes the body as a cultural variable within cultural, political, historical, and ecological contexts.’ The body is central to our understandings of power—the power over the self and the power to control other’s bodies. The one thing that all marginalized people have power over, with the exception of children, is their body.? We can manipulate the shape and presentation of our bodies for a variety of reasons. Social movements fashion their bodily postures, gestures, style of speaking, and physical appearance around some idealized notion of who they are. Thus, we should not view bodies as socially neutral. They are the effects and products of power, which in turn produce their own effects onto society. Understanding this two-way causality, how bodies are produced and what they produce, is important for explaining how the civil rights movement was successful at simultaneously obtaining rights and producing competing normative ideas of black citizenship that bifurcated black political struggles.

The underlining theoretical argument I pursue is that exercising power over the self can produce change in others. The basis of my theoretical approach to the body comes from synthesizing the theories of performances (dramaturgical theory) and performativity. Performativity has to do with how the ritualized bodily practices can create new arrangements, categories, identities, limits, and connections with others to sustain a community. The ritualized repetitions of bodily movements and postures that conform to normalized codes reproduce those same codes, which erect boundaries and sets limits to ones identity.!° Bodies, and subsequently identities, are the effects, not causes, of a performance. Audiences compel us to adhere to a performance much differently than laws or threats.!! Normalized codes organize the audience’s expectations which bind performance to the audience. Thus, some performances can pin groups to the margins. For instance, in Stigma, Goffman referred to a process of “minstrelization”, when “the stigmatized person ingratiating acts out before normals the full dance of bad qualities imputed to his kind; thereby consolidating a life situation into a clownish role”. Whereas the ritualized repetition of some scripts can keep marginalized groups at the margins, movements can also draw from other scripts to create new performances, which in turn produce new identities and scripts that compel behavioral changes in others.

Not all performances get their intended meaning across. A successful performance has to do with the competence of carrying out and completing the performance. The importance for properly carrying out a performance is that it binds performer/audience together. The “fusion” of performer and audience is necessary for symbolic communication: the process of having others correctly understand and be swayed by your argument.” The physical appearance of the body is important for successfully communicating political messages. The body limits possible rival interpretations because the performer is using her body to fill in the blanks, or connect the dots, for the audience member. Thus, it is not enough to act the part. You also have to look the part. The liberal project used citizenship schools and role-playing to ensure that black bodies, from the style of dress down to the pronunciation of words, reflected good black citizenship. The embodied margin of error for blacks is much smaller than for whites. Blacks must account for every movement to limit the use of racially embedded critiques designed to debunk black claims for equality without addressing the grievance.

Good black citizenship made non-violence meaningful. There was nothing violent about the NAACP, yet, their legal strategies limited how much change they could make. Changes in laws do not equate to cultural changes. The passage of laws, specifically the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act, were made possible because racially non-threatening good black citizens were performing the non-violent protests. I refer to how the body makes political demonstrations meaningful as an “embodied performance”. Embodied performances are the normative meanings embedded in the bodies during a public political performance, including protests and speeches. The embodied performances of each local movement reinforced idealized American citizenship by pitting good blacks against bad whites. The repetition of the performances compelled changes in how whites responded and subsequently, who counted as a good citizen narrowed. Whereas the liberal project intended to exclude bad whites from the notion of good citizenship, it also had the unintended effects of excluding blacks who could not, or did not want to, conform to the narrow ideal of good black citizenship.

The passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act is an important turning point in the history of the civil rights movement for a number of reasons. For one, it was the culmination of an 11-year struggle. However, it was also simultaneously the high point of the movement and the moment it began to decline. There is still no definitive answer why. Explanations have ranged from King’s assassination, to the infighting between the different organizations, to the loss of the movement’s unitary identity."* Yet, King was killed three years after the Voting Rights Act when the movement was already in decline, organizational strife was constant, and the tensions between the black nationalists and liberal project undermined the potential of a unitary black identity prior to the Voting Rights Act. Thus, rather than say the movement declined in 1965, I argue that the Voting Rights Act was a turning point in the larger struggle for racial equality. Once blacks had the legal right to vote, the problem on how to proceed stumbled over the question of what should be the representation of black citizenship. Rather than a universal acceptance of good black citizenship as the representation of black citizenship, the black nationalists challenged the liberal project over desirability to ‘deracialize’ blacks and for ignoring blacks confined to the urban slums. However, the tension between the two projects was never resolved. Instead, it split black political representation into two levels. Good black citizenship became synonymous with national black citizenship and black authenticity became synonymous with local black citizenship.

BLACK AUTHENTICITY

Not all social movements and political struggles are about inclusion. Whereas the liberal project drew from idealized citizenship to move blacks into the core of American society, the black nationalists made claims of authenticity to distinguish themselves from the center. Black authenticity refers to the embodied ideal of racially pure black identity based in opposition to notions of whiteness and deracializing strategies. The idea behind authenticity is that it is exclusive and limited to a certain population. For Benjamin, the bourgeoisie created authenticity through “distance” or the social gap between them and the proletariat articulated through statuses like ‘master’ and ‘genius’! In this case, black authenticity was unattainable to whites because whites could never understand the black lived experience. Black authenticity was an embodied practice exclusive to blacks. Blacks could create and maintain an authentic black existence by abstaining from vice, bodily mutilations, and interracial sex to create real and symbolic distance between blacks and whites.

Political groups present authenticity as something that is natural rather than cultural. Subsequently, authenticity creates essentialist understandings of cultures that naturalize political constructs like race. For instance, racial and ethnic groups create a coherent sense of authenticity through various cultural practices, such as preparing foods and raising children, music, dance, and expressions of grief during a funeral procession. Sometimes groups maintain these practices through the preservation of the group’s native language or religion. In the case of black Americans, whites abolished their native languages and religions through the system of slavery. Therefore, the black nationalists’ construction of black authenticity was an effort to redefine and then use an empowered black culture as the means of achieving political and economic power. The naturalization of black authenticity allowed the black nationalists to define the presence of whites as the problem, not part of the solution.

Malcolm X best articulated and represented black authenticity. Malcolm shaped a modern idea of black authenticity by combining Elijah Muhammad’s discourse on black sustainability with Garveyism, violent postcolonial struggles of independence, and assumptions about ethnic white communities and the ‘American Dream’. Although the Nation of Islam abstained from voting and involvement in the civil rights movement, Malcolm emerged as the leading black nationalist political figure and symbolic alternative to racial integration. By the mid-1960s, and after the assassination of Malcolm, SNCC broke from the liberal project and began to use discourses of black authenticity in relation to the limitations of organizing urban black areas around good black citizenship.

The black nationalist emphasis on black authenticity presented a different type of citizenship claim than the liberal project. The liberal project emphasized individual membership while the black nationalists emphasized group membership. In this regard, the black nationalists were early entrepreneurs of multicultural and cosmopolitan understandings of citizenship that question the plausibility and desirability of universal citizenship in favor of group rights or rights to protect difference.’® The black nationalists sometimes made claims demanding succession, and sometimes they demanded group rights. In either case, they used discourses of black authenticity to reject liberal ideals that racial equality could be achieved through individual black successes.

In turn, the black nationalists had an entirely different political project that targeted the body and focused on local action.

The black body became the point at which the black nationalists attempted to wrap black authenticity around black citizenship. Before one could articulate a black-first or black-only political discourse, blacks had to look, act, and master the part. However, because black authenticity was set in opposition to good black citizenship, black authenticity began to reflect a racially threatening embodied black agent for two reasons. The first was the use of emotions. Bodies emote and feel sensations. They also produce emotions and sensations in others. We can re-feel events just as we can re-remember them. Political struggles use emotions to build a sense of community, create solidarity bonds between members, create moral shocks for recruitment, and can lead to a movement’s decline.” Central to being a racially non-threatening good black citizen was not arousing fear or anger in others. The liberal project trained black activists how to limit embodied displays of anger, such as waving their arms in a frantic manner, raising the pitch of their voice, or folding their arms while glaring at another in silence. In contrast, the black nationalists combined the free expressions of emotions like anger with a hypermasculine and a ‘tightly’ disciplined, soldier-like, muscular body. I define this process as “figurative violence”: when the body is used to produce negative emotions like fear in others. The black nationalists used violent black stereotypes for their advantage. They appeared intimidating and frightening to prevent violent attacks by whites and to ward off white social workers and police from intervening in black neighborhoods. The paradox was that the expression of emotions presented one as authentic, and thus, credible when organizing local urban blacks, but harmful when making national claims for rights.

A second difference is found in the opposing ethics of optimizing and abstention. The idea of optimizing the self is to conform as close as possible to a culturally prescribed ideal. The logic behind optimizing the self is to make one ‘better’. The liberal project used their citizenship schools to optimize good black citizenship by instructing better posture, better pronunciation of words, and better handwriting in an effort to make blacks better citizens. In contrast to optimizing, the idea behind abstaining is to make oneself better through negation. The black nationalists provided blacks with guidance on how to distance oneself from all associations of whiteness by abstaining from destructive practices that ranged from mutilating the body (altering hair, lightening skin tone, and drug use) to creating all-black political associations. These divergent practices over the body led to two overall political ethics, an ethics of caution and an ethics of autonomy.

ETHICS OF CAUTION AND ETHICS OF AUTONOMY

While public discourse often conflates ethics with a value statement, sociologically ethics refer to the procedures, regulations, and guidance that direct how people do things appropriately.'® Ethics are not something that is reducible to laws. From political elites to graffiti artists, social groups of all kinds shape an acceptable way to do things by establishing limits and guidelines for individual behavior. The liberal project emphasized acceptable behaviors conducive to good black citizens and provided sanctions for bad behavior. The liberal project used role-playing simulations to prepare blacks on how to refrain from emotionally lashing out when they endured violence from the police and other bad whites. If any blacks responded to police violence with violence, King would publically condemn their actions even if perpetrators were not affiliated with the movement. Malcolm used public ridicule, scorn, and shame to enforce ethical guidelines by lacing comments about rival black leaders in sarcasm and humor. “Well, I heard Roy say at the rally the other night that he was % or % Scandinavian. And he seemed to be lost in that Scandinavian dream somewhat . . . Well, every time I hear Martin he’s got a dream. And I think the Negro leaders have to come out of the clouds and wake up, and stop dreaming and start facing reality”. In the absence of laws and other sanctions, shame provided adherence to ethical guidelines.