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George Rawick and the Settings of Genius

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George Rawick and the Settings of Genius David R. Roediger A White Intellectual among Thinking Black Intellectuals: George Rawick and the Settings of Genius I was in the crowd for perhaps my friend George Rawick’s last public talk, given at the Univer- sity of Missouri at St. Louis in 1988. Serious health problems, which would soon take his life, weighed on the meandering lecture. In the question-and-answer period, the anthropologist Enoch Page focused matters and engaged George around the then-new Spike Lee film School Daze and the ways it commented on intra-racial class conflict. When the questions turned to color prejudice in the black community—a topic so productive of keen interest and easy conclusions that “everybody’s prejudiced” among some white students—George was fully transformed. Now lecturing forcefully, he did not speak for sup- pressing discussion of the issue but for framing it. Such prejudices had wicked force and material foundation, during and after slavery, he observed. But from the mixing of various African ethnici- ties into an African American people to the care of mixed-race children during the Jim Crow era, he asked, did not the uncommon ability of black communities to incorporate difference, even across the color line, constitute the main story, especially if the white community was the object of comparison?1 South Atlantic Quarterly 109:2, Spring 2010 DOI 10.1215/00382876-2009-033 © 2010 Duke University Press Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/109/2/225/470296/SAQ109-02-01RoedigerFpp.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 226 David R. Roediger I heard in the way that a very ill Rawick warmed to that particular topic an index of his political and historical commitments but also one fully leav- ened by his autobiography. He and I, a quarter century apart in age, bonded during the fifteen years prior to his death not only over thinking about history and revolutionary commitments together but also because we both intensely felt ourselves the beneficiaries of the openness of black communi- ties, movements, and intellectuals. At a post–Black Power time when white Left common sense had it that black nationalism had driven white radicals from the interracial beloved community of civil rights, he was frequently a spokesperson for Facing Reality, a group led by C. L. R. James, perhaps the senior black radical intellectual most admired by young Black Power advocates. I was mentored and embraced as a young student and writer by the great black Left-nationalist historian Sterling Stuckey, despite my headlong and headstrong retreats from African American topics. Indeed I was later shocked to learn that Stuckey was seen by some liberal writers as wanting to erect racial boundaries in the beloved community of scholars studying African American history, as my experience was just the opposite. When Rawick and I met in restaurants and coffee shops and ultimately in nursing homes and hospitals, in St. Louis, we shared, often unspoken, a sense of great good fortune that thinking black intellectuals had helped us find voices. This essay makes no claims that we shared an experience exactly and still less that Rawick’s very idiosyncratic life typified anything about infinitely varied white intellectuals and an equally heterogeneous black intellectual tradition. Instead it is the peculiar and unfinished nature of collaboration in Rawick’s case that makes his story revealing of the ways in which white intellectuals variously have entered black intellectual life. Rawick described his mid-1950s political transformation away from the certainties of the “white Left”—the very term would have been a new one among white radicals at the time if it were used at all—with a startling simplicity that telescoped truths and, as we shall see, somewhat outran reality at times. Rawick told me in a published interview from 1989 that an anonymous black thinker turned him around: The Young Socialist League had a meeting. Bayard Rustin had been to Montgomery where he met Martin Luther King and had run some workshops on nonviolence. After the meeting a black worker asked me what we wanted them to do. I asked him what he wanted to do. We were interrupted and then he wandered off. I realized that I had no program. He went away without any answer. I had recently been Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/109/2/225/470296/SAQ109-02-01RoedigerFpp.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 A White Intellectual among Thinking Black Intellectuals 227 at an NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] meeting and was put down for having a program. There were ten other white radicals who had come to present programs; all were variants of “Join Us” coupled with some abstractions. I found that “Join Us!” provoked a deep silence.2 In that silence, Rawick also discovered a commitment to oral history and other forms of investigation of the central role of the unheralded, and espe- cially of slaves, in history and in struggle. In accounting for how he later came to write the pathbreaking history of slavery, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community, and to edit, under the title The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, upward of ten thousand pages of published narratives by (extra)ordinary ex-slaves, Rawick credited a particular and celebrated black intellectual, recalling: In 1964 in London, C. L. R. James told me, I want you to give a lecture here, in [James’s] living room, on American history. After the lecture he asked, “What do we know about the slaves’ reaction to slavery?” I told him not a hell of a lot. He asked, “Is there any material we have?” I told him what little I knew of the slave narratives. That began the process of my collecting and publishing The American Slave.3 Placing himself physically, politically, and eventually professionally among thinking black intellectuals, Rawick became one of the most important intellectuals bridging the Old Left and the New, as well as perhaps the U.S. thinker most able to envision how a history of the whole working class might be written. From 1964, when he finished and signed a long manifesto/article, “The American Negro Movement,” until the mid-1970s, when his health began to seriously fail, Rawick was arguably the most influential student of the U.S. working class, although he is almost never counted among the founders of the “new labor history,” which emerged in that period. He published the most important historical articles in Radical America, the journal affiliated with Students for a Democratic Society, and impacted greatly such radi- cal scholars as Peter Linebaugh, Franklin Rosemont, Noel Ignatiev, Enoch Page, Robin D. G. Kelley, Rosemary Feurer, Huw Beynon, Margaret Wash- ington, Bruno Cartosio, George Lipsitz, Nando Fasce, Ferruccio Gambino, and Peter Rachleff. His influence on Eugene Genovese, then the leading U.S. Marxist historian of slavery, led to major changes in the latter’s pre- sentation of slave resistance, if not to all that Rawick would have wanted. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/109/2/225/470296/SAQ109-02-01RoedigerFpp.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 228 David R. Roediger Eric Foner at the time found From Sundown to Sunup superior to any other recent history of slave culture and equally astute on the history of racism. Genovese termed it “the most valuable work I know by a white man on slave life in the United States.” August Meier and Elliott Rudwick’s 1986 study Black History and the Historical Profession counted Rawick as the first histo- rian to place the slave community at the center of his analysis.4 There were two crowning glories. First was the incredible appearance of more than forty volumes of slave recollections, done without massive grants (though with important help from Ken Lawrence, Jan Hillegas, and others) and, through much of his career, without a tenured job. The second involved a remarkable, for his time and still, ability to write about the history of slavery and that of industrial workers together—indeed an impressive inability to write about them apart or even to read the daily papers without thinking of slave resistance. Rawick’s essays concentrating centrally on slavery, as well as those focus- ing on the industrial working class, reflected brilliant insights into the ways in which race and class worked, and worked together, in U.S. history. His 1969 Radical America article, “Working Class Self-Activity,” popularized the term used in its title, in and beyond the United States. It pinpointed how the mass industrial unions of the 1930s—organizations whose suc- cesses Rawick brilliantly situated transnationally alongside the degradation of other working classes in the same decade by fascism, Nazism, and Stalin- ism—came to be: “The unions did not organize the strikes; the working class in the strikes and through the strikes organized the unions.”5 Even From Sundown to Sunup leaves, though it does not really completely leave, the “everynight” life of slaves in its two brilliant materialist and psychoana- lytical final chapters, concentrating there on capitalism and on the white racism that shaped the slave’s existence. Italian writer Ferruccio Gambino has best taken the measure of these chapters, writing of how they showed “the taming of the sexual impulse according to a new work schedule and fatigue, the dictatorship of the seasonless clock, the postponement of grati- fication as a virtue per se led whites to justify [racial] superiority.”6 Rawick’s most significant insight—if he wrote nothing else, these words would establish him as a critically important contributor to the history of slavery—came when he intervened in 1968 in stalled, ill-premised debates over whether more slaves were rebellious “Nat Turner” types or quiescent, damaged “Sambo” figures.
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