You Can't Hurry Soul: Redefining Integration Politics of Martin
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
You Can’t Hurry Soul: Redefining Integration Politics of Martin, Malcolm, and the Supremes BY ERIC GONZABA It is logical to assume that the understood national narrative of the Civil Rights Movement would consist almost strictly of political history: Park’s defiance on the city bus, King’s dream, and the clinched fists of black power. History is complicated, and since most Americans’ education of history occurs during grade school, we can expect a rudimentary survey of the movement at best. However, the narrative of the twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement, like all history, is much more complex. It affected all aspects of American life, beyond the top-down political history found in so many American history textbooks. Still, the question remains: beyond the social, legal, political, and economic themes found in so many academic studies on the era, can popular culture change our understanding of one of the most dynamic social movements in history? It is of no surprise that the cultural history of the Civil Rights Movement (and specifically in this analysis—music) was often dismissed or ignored, at least until the expressly political sounds of Brown’s Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud or Gaye’s What’s Going On of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Historiography shows us that our past is defined not by popular trends of dance, film, or music, but rather politicians, law, and war. In terms of the Civil Rights Movement, the era has traditionally been reduced to an analysis of the struggle through the competing ideologies of Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Though Dr. King and Malcolm Valley Humanities Review Spring 2012 1 X were two enormously influential leaders of the era, this narrow analysis can ultimately hinder our understanding of the complexity of the movement. Contemporary scholars have begun to take down this false narrative of the movement with impressive works on music, dance, film, and other elements of black popular culture. This modern historical revisionism would expectedly challenge King and Malcolm’s prominence as the centerpiece of the movement. That, however, is not the intention of this analysis. Rather, scholarship is lacking not just on the seemingly apolitical history of the Freedom Struggle, but also on King and Malcolm’s respective opinions and ideologies in 1960s popular culture. Conventional portrayals of these two men produce a false, overly simplified dichotomy of the leader’s ideologies, from visions of the “apostle of nonviolence”1 in King to the apparent “hate that hate produced”2 rhetoric of Malcolm X. If King and Malcolm were such political titans in their day, we could expect this ideological difference to be played out in other realms of America like popular music as well, and this is in fact the case. Even within seemingly apolitical music from artists like the Supremes, who ask relatively simple questions like Where Did Our Love Go, real political imagery of integration versus separatism emerges. This analysis begins with a brief breakdown of this dichotomy through a discussion of both men’s views of popular culture, specifically the music, of that time. Finally, in an effort to see their ideologies in practice, a case study is presented focusing on the Supremes, challenging contemporary black scholarship’s assertion of their crossover sellout status, and arguing that they serve as a model for visualizing the conflicting ideologies of integration that Dr. King and Malcolm X hold. 1 “Breaking News.” CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, CBS News. (April 4, 1968) 2 “The Hate that Hate Produced.” News Beat, WNTA-TV (New York, New York: July 13-17, 1959) Valley Humanities Review Spring 2012 2 King, Malcolm: On Music The views on popular music by the two unofficial leaders of the Civil Rights Movement expressed here were hard to come by. Admittedly, there is little discussed by either man on the subject, a fact which is in some way pertinent to our understanding of what role music played in each of their ideologies. Although scarce, King and Malcolm’s passing comments are revealing. Dr. King’s view on the role of music is probably best expressed in his 1967 book Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community. In the book, King presents the future challenges of the movement. Beyond the legislative and judicial successes of the decade, King switched his focus to overcoming economic and social inequalities in an era in which riots and growing impatience threatened the very continuation of the nonviolent, King-led movement. King addressed music’s role by writing a story centered on his children: Even the Negroes’ contribution to the music of America is sometimes overlooked in astonishing ways. Two years ago my oldest son and daughter entered an integrated school in Atlanta. A few months later my wife and I were invited to attend a program entitled “Music That Has Made America Great.” As the evening unfolded, we listened to the folk songs and melodies of the various immigrant groups. We were certain that the program would end with the most original of all American music, the Negro spiritual. But we were mistaken. Instead, all the students, including our children, ended the program by singing “Dixie”. As we rose to leave the hall, my wife and I looked at each other with a combination of indignation and amazement. All the students, black and white, all the parents present that night and all the faculty members had been victimized by just another expression of America’s penchant for ignoring the Negro, making him invisible and making his contributions insignificant. I wept within that night. I wept for my children and all black children who have been denied a knowledge of their heritage; I wept for all white children, who, though daily miseducation, are taught that the Negro is an irrelevant entity in American society; I wept for all the white parents and teachers who are forced to overlook Valley Humanities Review Spring 2012 3 the fact that the wealth of cultural and technological progress in America is a result of the commonwealth of inpouring contributions. 3 King’s remarks here highlight, at least to some extent, his feelings on the importance of popular culture. His position, expressed using a story centered on children, is reminiscent of his preferred tactic of placing children in the literal front lines of the movement in Birmingham and Selma, tactics criticized by Malcolm X as undignified. As Malcolm described, “Real men don’t put their children on the firing line,” suggesting King’s tactics were cowardly and warranted for adults only.4 Most interesting in King’s passage is his expressed feeling of victimization over gospel’s (“the Negro spiritual”) lack of representation at the school program. His sadness that black students would not have “a knowledge of their heritage” is particularly relevant to the historian, whose study focuses on the idea that history is about identity. King found the lack of gospel’s inclusion as an inhibition to promoting African American self-worth and political power. If gospel, or African American music in general, was left out of the narrative, King feared this would create a subtle but powerful barrier to fair representation and eventual racial equality. King also noted that such an absence helped to continue white cultural domination. This remark alludes to King’s view that music can instill and perpetuate racial tensions within the white community. Moreover, at the end of the passage, King signals that the most sickening part of the concert, gospel’s exclusion, prevented white America from recognizing that African American music and culture were part of a “commonwealth of inpouring contributions.” This is the classic, if not stereotypical, Dr. King imagery found in early King ideology. James H. Cone’s work Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare examines the rather 3 Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010), 43–44. 4 M.S. Handler, “Malcolm X Terms Dr. King's Tactics Futile,” New York Times, May 11, 1963, 9. Valley Humanities Review Spring 2012 4 extraordinary ideological transformations both Dr. King and Malcolm X experienced in their lives. Cone saw King’s initial position on integration “defined by an optimistic belief that justice could be achieved with love,” that overcoming the severe racial strife between black and white America should happen not by black separatism or violence, but by racial harmony.5 Dr. King’s view on black separatism had changed, however, by the time he wrote his passage on the school music incident in Where Do We Go From Here in 1967. Likewise, further reading after this passage shows King’s continued insistence that African Americans reclaim their identity within themselves. In fact, most of Dr. King’s writing here is his grappling with the growing Black Power movement that he saw splitting the broader Civil Right Movement. Although he understood the growing impatience of blacks with integration ideology, King still insisted “[t]here is no salvation for the negro through isolation.”6 Malcolm’s view of music and popular culture is less explicit. Despite this, there are a few revealing hints in his discussion of dancing and African American style in Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Malcolm recalls Boston’s Roseland State Ballroom’s segregated dances. According to Malcolm X, even the bands that played at the segregated dances were race-specific: “The fact is that very few white bands could have satisfied the Negro dancers.”7 Malcolm continues with probably one of the more memorable passages early on in his autobiography, describing African American men styling their own hair into conks, emulating the straight-haired look of fashionable whites and upper class blacks at the time.