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The Creation of an African-American Counterpublic: the Impact of Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality on Black Radicalism During the Black Freedom Movement, 1965- 1981

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The Creation of an African-American Counterpublic: the Impact of Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality on Black Radicalism During the Black Freedom Movement, 1965- 1981 The Creation of an African-American Counterpublic: The Impact of Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality on Black Radicalism during the Black Freedom Movement, 1965- 1981 A thesis submitted to Kent State University in partial Fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Masters of Arts By Austin C. McCoy May, 2009 Thesis written by Austin Charles McCoy B.A., The Ohio State University, 2004 M.A., The Ohio State University, 2007 M.A., Kent State University, 2009 Approved by ___Elizabeth Smith-Pryor__________, Elizabeth Smith-Pryor, Advisor ___Kenneth J. Bindas______________, Kenneth J. Bindas, Chair, Department of History ___John R.D. Stalvey______________, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………..……..v INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………….….1 CHAPTERS I…………………………………………………….…………………….12 II………………………………………………….………………………41 III…………………………………………………………………………75 CONCULSION………………………………………………………………….118 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………...……………………..132 iv Acknowledgments This achievement is a testament to the strength of my family. I am forever indebted to my parents, Angelith and Melvin McCoy, my siblings, Brandenn, Jeff, and K.C. McCoy as well as my grandmother, Mrs. Gladys Smith. I am also grateful for my partner, Jessica Winck, and her patience and ability to put up with my antics during my stay here at Kent State. I also could not have completed this thesis without the critical support of my advisor, Dr. Elizabeth Smith-Pryor. Dr. Smith-Pryor helped clarify and shape my project with her insight, guidance, and critical eye. I also want to thank my other committee members, Dr. Zachery Williams and Dr. Timothy Scarnecchia. They were instrumental in providing feedback during the preliminary stages of my writing process. I also appreciate the whole committee’s efforts in pushing me to ask larger questions of my study, subjects, and sources. I would also like to extend thanks to everyone in the History Department—my fellow students, faculty, and staff. I have appreciated the conversations and support over the last couple of years and I am grateful for having the opportunity to pursue and obtain a Master’s degree in History from Kent State University. v Introduction: For cultural critic Harold Cruse, the mid-1960s constituted a turning point for the development of black political thought in the United States. In Cruse’s seminal work, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, where he famously delivered a devastating critique of black political thinkers, he argued, “The Negro movement is at an impasse precisely because it lacks a real functional corps of intellectuals able to confront and deal perceptively with American realities on a level that social conditions demand.”1 In 1967, Cruse’s statement was at least half correct. The black movement definitely seemed to be at the crossroads. By this time, the black political mood had shifted from the dominant liberal-integrationist visions that black Americans such as Martin Luther King, Jr. had once advocated to the nationalist-tinged black power idea that Stokely Carmichael had popularized a year earlier. Black Americans in Newark violently responded to an incident of police brutality in July of that year.2 The revolutionary nationalist Black Panther Party had taken its place as one of the leading black political organizations in the United States. 1 Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the Failure of Black Leadership, (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1967), 472. 2 Peniel Joseph, Waiting ‘til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2006), 183. 1 2 Even the title of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s newly published book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? posed the question of uncertainty for the movement.3 But was the black movement at an impasse because of its lack of intellectuals? Cruse’s claim that the black movement lacked “a real functional corps of intellectuals able to confront and deal perceptively with Americans realities…” may be too far reaching and is too grounded in his own political sympathies. Cruse structured his argument in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual around a critical analysis of the integrationist/nationalist dichotomy. He criticized integrationists on a variety of fronts including their tendency to turn a blind eye to intracommunal relations within a class- stratified black community. Cruse also criticized black power advocates for their failure to develop adequate theories grounded in black history.4 Cruse demanded black activists engage in cultural activism based upon the black American experience.5 Cruse’s conclusions led him to paint a bleak picture of black political thought during this period: It was historically unfortunate that the American Negro created no social theorists to back up his long line of activist leaders, charismatic deliverers, black redemptionists, and moral suasionists. With a few perceptive and original thinkers, the Negro movement conceivably could long ago have aided in reversing the backsliding of the United States towards the moral negation of its great promise as a new nation of nations. Instead the American Negro has, unwittingly, been forced to share in many of the corrupted values of the society—not enough, to be sure, to cancel out completely his inherent potential for social change. However, the intellectual horizons of the black 3 Martin Luther King, Jr. Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (New York, Harper & Row 1967). 4 Cruse, 13, 557. 5 For his elaboration on the importance of cultural activism see Cruse, 96-111. 3 intelligentsia have been so narrowed in scope and banalized by the American corrosion that Negro creativity has been diminishing since the 1920s.6 While Cruse contributed the concept of cultural political activism to the debate regarding black political thought during the 1960s, he underestimated black activist-intellectuals’ abilities to express and test new ideas and to build and retain the intellectual energy needed for the Black Freedom Movement to move forward. Stokely Carmichael and political scientist Charles V. Hamilton published their explanation of black power, entitled Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, in 1967 where they aspired to outline Carmichael’s vision of a black power politics grounded in black American’s political experiences and based upon political experimentation. They also included a rebuke of interracial politics and integration that would have made Cruse agree, at least momentarily. In King’s book, Where Do We Go From Here, he too questioned white Americans’ and the Federal Government’s commitment to racial justice and couched his outline for black political action in America’s tortured history of race relations. To be fair, Cruse did acknowledge his rush to publish The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual in his fear of the work losing a sense of relevancy. While we may criticize Cruse for his haste, we cannot fault him for his inability to render correct predictions. Since The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual appeared during the height of the production of what sociologist Steven Steinberg calls the “scholarship of confrontation,” Cruse could not have foreseen the proliferation of complex, yet imperfect, visions of black freedom 6 Cruse, 565. 4 and liberation.7 He could not have anticipated the wave of intellectual work that black feminists produced criticizing black and white men, as well as white feminists, from various ideological stripes. Ultimately Cruse’s willingness to raise questions about black activist-intellectuals’ politics in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual was significant during this period because he took his contemporaries seriously. Maybe the state of black intellectuals was not so bleak as Cruse would suggest? This thesis analyzes the role that black radical activist-intellectuals played in creating and articulating the values, discourses, and rhetoric of the Civil Rights, Black Power, and Black Feminist Movements.8 In this study I will argue that one should view these formations as intellectual and discursive movements where participants and organizations consciously imagined and developed new ways of analyzing American society. Moreover, black radical activist-intellectuals created movement institutions and a variety of forms of texts including speeches, fiction, non-fiction works, poetry, manifestos, and organizational publications that transmitted their political values and 7 Steinberg’s “scholarship of confrontation” refers to the number of publications that black radicals produced in response to American race relations during the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. Steven Steinberg, Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), x, 69-70. 8 This study draws upon Lynda Mead’s definition and insights regarding discourse: “’discourse’ is used…to specify a particular form of language with its own rules and conventions and institutions within which the discourse is produced and circulated. In this way, it is possible to speak of a medical discourse…which refers to the special language of medicine, the form of knowledge it produces…” Lynda Mead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 4. This study also assumes that language can be used as a way to exclude and discipline individuals who do not fit into established parameters of discourse. See Michel Foucault, “The Discourse on Language,”
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