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Violence, Non-Violence and Black Manhood in the Civil Rights Era’ Gender & History, Vol.19 No.3 November 2007, Pp

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Violence, Non-Violence and Black Manhood in the Civil Rights Era’ Gender & History, Vol.19 No.3 November 2007, Pp Gender & History ISSN 0953-5233 Simon Wendt, ‘“They Finally Found Out that We Really Are Men”: Violence, Non-Violence and Black Manhood in the Civil Rights Era’ Gender & History, Vol.19 No.3 November 2007, pp. 543–564. ‘They Finally Found Out that We Really Are Men’: Violence, Non-Violence and Black Manhood in the Civil Rights Era Simon Wendt The non-violent demonstrations against racial segregation that took place in Birm- ingham, Alabama, in 1963 represent one of the major events in the history of the civil rights movement in the United States. Organised by Revd Martin Luther King Jr’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Birmingham campaign exposed the viciousness of southern racism. Pictures of peaceful black teenagers be- ing felled by high-powered streams of water and of demonstrators being bitten by snarling police dogs shocked the United States and the world. However, although SCLC was genuinely committed to philosophical non-violence, the reminiscences of Andrew Young, the right-hand man of Martin Luther King during the 1960s, call at- tention to the ambivalent attitudes that the movement’s non-violent protest strategy evoked among some male activists. Recalling the Birmingham demonstrations in his memoirs, Young expressed his concerns about two female student activists, Dorothy Cotton and Diane Bevel, who participated in peaceful protest marches. ‘I had been brought up to respect women, and part of that respect was taking care for their safety’, Young wrote. ‘On the occasions that Dorothy and Diane did march, I stayed as far away from them as possible. I didn’t trust myself not to defend them if they were attacked’.1 Andrew Young’s memories hint at the intricate relationship between violence, non-violence and manhood in the African American freedom struggle of the 1950s and 1960s. Young’s understanding of what it meant to be a man challenged the movement’s non-violent orthodoxy and implied an obligation to defend black women against racist attacks. Probing this gendered dimension of violence and non-violence in the civil rights movement can help us better understand the opposition that activists frequently encountered when organising in the Deep South. Concentrating on what sociologist Robert Connell has called ‘marginalized’ masculinities also sheds light on the meanings of defensive violence for those African Americans who complemented demonstrations and voter registration drives with armed self-defence.2 Finally, a focus on gender allows us to comprehend some of the differences between the role of violence in the southern civil rights struggle and the Black Power movement. C The author 2007. Journal compilation C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2007, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 544 Gender & History Only recently have historians begun to explore masculinity in the black freedom movement. An early example is Gender and the Civil Rights Movement, an edited collection of essays that explores the social and cultural dimensions of manhood and womanhood in the civil rights struggle. Its editors, Peter Ling and Sharon Monteith, explicitly acknowledged ‘the profound association of the attainment of dignity with manhood’.3 More recently, scholars have produced a number of sophisticated studies that examine this seemingly banal truism in greater detail. Steve Estes, for instance, studying the protest strategies of African American activists and their white racist opponents, found that both sides ‘framed their actions in terms of claiming or defending manhood’, using this ‘masculinist’ rhetoric to mobilise followers and supporters.4 In Brothers’ Vietnam War: Black Power, Manhood, and the Military Experience, Herman Graham analysed the strategies of black GIs to create new forms of assertive masculinity to overcome marginalisation and discrimination in the late 1960s. In the Black Power era, according to Graham, black nationalist consciousness and opposition to racial discrimination became constitutive elements of a new conception of black manhood.5 Scholars of armed resistance in the southern civil rights struggle, on the other hand, have hinted at the interrelationship between black masculinity and armed self-defence against racist aggression.6 However, these scholars have neither examined how certain notions of gender impeded the activists’ organising efforts, nor have they studied how the relationship between violence and black manhood changed over the course of the 1960s. A closer look at civil rights organising in the Deep South reveals that the non- violent strategy’s connotations of effeminate submissiveness seriously hampered the efforts of civil rights activists to win over male African Americans to the movement’s cause. Conversely, those black southerners who were forced to use defensive violence to protect the movement beamed with pride at their ability to protect themselves and their communities. A comparison of armed resistance efforts in southern civil rights campaigns with those of post-1965 Black Power groups such as the Black Panther Party shows both commonalities and differences with regard to the interrelationship between self-defence and gender. In both phases of the black freedom struggle, activists regarded their armed actions as an affirmation of black manliness. In the southern movement, however, the affirmation of manhood remained a by-product of the physical imperative to protect black lives against racist terrorism. Among Black Power militants and their black nationalist precursors, by contrast, self-defence, while initially intended to stop police brutality and other forms of racist oppression, ultimately came to be utilised mainly as a symbol of militant black manhood. The Black Power movement’s affirmative message countered traditional stereotypes of black male powerlessness and instilled a positive black identity into many activists. At the same time, however, the gendered discourse it produced tended to perpetuate black women’s subordination. Violence and black manhood prior to the civil rights era To fully comprehend the gendered entanglements of the civil rights era, it is necessary to understand the complexities of the violent history of the American South. ‘Violence’, sociologist Michael Kimmel has pointed out, ‘has long been understood as the best way to ensure that others publicly recognize one’s manhood’.7 In particular, in the southern region of the United States, such concepts of ‘manly’ violence were powerful. Dixie’s C The author 2007. Journal compilation C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2007 Black Manhood in the Civil Rights Era 545 violent nature stemmed from the region’s long-time status as a frontier settlement, antebellum notions of honour and chivalry, and white southerners’ violent strategies to suppress the resistance of black slaves. Armed conflict between white settlers and Native American tribes coupled with the long tradition of extra-legal vigilantism in the region fostered a culture that encouraged the carrying of weapons. For many men, armed protection became a simple necessity. But violence also reflected an important aspect of southern male identity. Antebellum notions of honour and chivalry created an idea of masculinity that subsequent generations learned, used and reinforced, primarily through the use of force. White men felt pressured to prove their manhood, and the skilful use of firearms and the willingness to defend one’s honour frequently served this end.8 The gendered nature of southern violence carried special significance for black men, who learned that violence, race and gender were inextricably linked. Prior to the legal victories of the civil rights movement, violence was an important means of racial control. Antebellum plantation owners maintained their power over black slaves primarily through the threat of brutal punishment, suppressing any signs of unrest or rebellion. This racial hierarchy affirmed the manliness of white men and signified for them the relative powerlessness of male and female slaves. ‘From the point of view of whites’, as Craig Thompson Friend and Lorri Glover have noted, ‘enslavement equalled emasculation’.9 Although the end of the Civil War marked the end of the ‘peculiar institution’, white violent oppression continued. In the aftermath of the war, racist organisations such as the Ku Klux Klan launched a reign of terror that echoed the brutality of antebellum slave patrols. Gail Bederman’s research has shown that middle-class white men at the turn of the twentieth century construed such violent symbols of white supremacy as a reflection of white male power.10 This racist ideology, which allowed white men to subjugate African Americans and to control white women, primarily targeted black men. ‘Racist oppression took many forms and damaged Afro- American men and women in numerous ways’, historical sociologist Orlando Patterson concluded in his study on the consequences of slavery, ‘but the single greatest focus of ethnic domination was the relentless effort to emasculate the Afro-American male in every conceivable way and at every turn’.11 Lynching was an additional example of the gendered nature of racial violence in the American South. When mob violence emerged as a new form of social control in the 1870s and 1880s, most white men conceptualised lynching exclusively in terms of ‘protecting’ white women from stereotypical black rapists. White men used this form of ritualised murder primarily to maintain economic, political and racial hierarchies, but it also allowed
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