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European journal of American studies

14-1 | 2019 Special Issue: Race Matters: 1968 as Living History in the Black Freedom Struggle

Electronic version URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/14226 DOI: 10.4000/ejas.14226 ISSN: 1991-9336

Publisher European Association for American Studies

Electronic reference European journal of American studies, 14-1 | 2019, “Special Issue: Race Matters: 1968 as Living History in the Black Freedom Struggle” [Online], Online since 29 2019, connection on 08 July 2021. URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/14226; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.14226

This text was automatically generated on 8 July 2021.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Race Matters: 1968 as Living History in the Black Freedom Struggle Jorrit van den Berk and Laura Visser-Maessen

‘Free Huey or the Sky’s the Limit’: The and the Campaign to Free Huey P. Newton Joe Street

Black Power on Campus: Challenging the Status Quo in ‘68 Caroline Rolland-Diamond

The Olympic “Revolt” of 1968 and its Lessons for Contemporary African American Athletic Activism Douglas Hartmann

The Black Arts Movement Reprise: Television and Black Art in the 21st Century Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar

Getting To That Promised Land: Reclaiming Martin Luther King, Jr. and 21st Century Black Activism in the and Europe Laura Visser-Maessen

Citizens’ Councils, Conservatism and in , 1964-1972 Rebecca Brückmann

The Whistles of : Gender and Emotions in the 1968 Presidential Campaign Maarten Zwiers

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Race Matters: 1968 as Living History in the Black Freedom Struggle

Jorrit van den Berk and Laura Visser-Maessen

1 The social and political movements that rocked the world just over half a century ago touched upon issues so fundamental to contemporary society, culture, and politics that the dust has yet to settle.1 In fact, every generation that followed the year 1968 has looked back to find new lessons, unresolved issues, and enduring legacies. As Giles Scott-Smith notes, uncovering the significance of that year—and by extension the full decade—has become “a mini-industry in itself.” A little over ten years ago, when the very first special issue of this journal marked the 40th anniversary of 1968, scholars mapped transnational linkages tying the demands of the global South to the protest cultures of the North; discussed an enduring conservative backlash against the ; and identified the lasting legacies of 1968 in the work of the American Studies community in terms of research and teaching. Indeed, these themes continue to inspire important and innovative research.2 At the same time, new questions about the legacies of 1968 and the 1960s in general are presenting themselves to us, as scholars and as citizens, ever more urgently. This is particularly true of race and racial struggle, as unresolved race matters from the past intersect with twenty-first century activism aimed at countering the continued devaluation of black lives.

2 This special issue of The European Journal of American Studies therefore centers on the black freedom struggle to explore how those “unresolved race matters from the past” weigh down on the present. Articles focus on specific events in 1968, the way they shaped the present or how they are remembered or framed in the present by scholars, activists, and their opponents. As argued below, there is a notable tendency among activists and scholars today to focus on the black, and especially radical, activism of the late 1960s. The goal is thus not to imply that the year 1968 was inherently different or more important than any year preceding or following it, but to explain why and categorize how today’s racial status quo has shaped contemporary societal and scholarly interest in that specific moment in the black freedom struggle. To facilitate this endeavor, this introduction relates the racial struggles of 1968 to those of the present (section 1) and show how these connections tie into the developing academic

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literature on the black activism of the 1960s and the 21st century (section 2). The final section outlines the individual articles that make up this special edition and their relevance in these current academic and societal debates, particularly with regard to (dis)continuities in political activism, protest cultures, backlash, and memory in relation to the ongoing black freedom struggle (section 3).

3 To understand why and how contemporary scholars and activists engage the year 1968 in their interpretation of the black freedom struggle, it is imperative to first outline how race matters today. In fact, a key demand of protest groups such as is for the universal recognition that race still matters. While this may seem like an open door to those activists and scholars who have devoted their careers to the exposure of racial and racist structures, the recent emergence of a new generation of black activists (a transatlantic phenomenon as noted below) must largely be understood in the context of the general sense of complacency about race matters that characterized many western nations only ten years ago.

4 After all, in the United States, the 40th anniversary of the year 1968 also marked the election of the first black president of the United States. When entered the White House, commentators across the —albeit for different reasons—welcomed a new dawn in race relations, as the election erroneously “confirm[ed] the view of many, especially whites, that the United States is a postracial society.”3 The president himself offered a more tempered view and attempted to educate a larger electorate about the complexities of race, America’s racial past, and the unfinished work of the .4 At the same time, Obama celebrated the tangible victories of that movement, such as legislative milestones, and emphasized comparable gains made since that time. He framed the struggle as being near completion, with its remaining “10 percent” to be solved mainly through black personal responsibility.5 By subscribing to what Jeanne Theoharis terms the “seduction of the almost-there,” he joined a long line of politicians and commentators from both parties who used and still use the memory of the civil rights movement as a “national redemption song.” Yet framing the movement as a sign of progress that validates the strength, validity, and uniqueness of American democratic values, Theoharis believes, only encourages the maintenance of the status quo, while it should serve as a reminder to deal adequately with its fundamental charge of continuous systemic as America’s “original sin.”6

5 Indeed, both scholars and a new generation of activists have criticized and distanced themselves from the ‘post-racial’ narrative that surrounded Obama’s election. In fact, the current wave of black activism cannot be separated from either. For example, many young black college graduates—whose presence represents one of the most visible gains of the 1960s movement—became politically active during the Obama administrations. Their political worldview was shaped in part by the perception that Obama’s faith in American exceptionalism did not square with the reality that the 2008 economic crisis affected them more badly than their white counterparts.7 Black millennials, moreover, had shown great enthusiasm for Obama’s candidacy, but were disillusioned by what they perceived as the president’s failure to forcefully address the economic crisis and against young blacks.8 Subsequently, in line with the protest movements of the 1960s, many young activists are again increasingly willing to achieve change as much outside as within the accepted norms of protest.9 “Until there was a black Presidency, it was impossible to conceive of the limitations of

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one,” Jelani Cobb poignantly summed up. Obama “[was] determined that he could bring about change more effectively through electoral politics; [Black Lives Matter co- founder Alicia] Garza is of a generation of activists who have surveyed the circumstances of his Presidency and drawn the opposite conclusion.”10

6 Against this background, many scholars also seek to make sense of Obama’s mixed record on race matters. Urging his readers to move “beyond the haters and hagiographers,” Michael Eric Dyson for example offers a balanced assessment of Obama’s achievements in his book The Black Presidency (2016). Among others, Dyson highlights Obama’s struggle for the Affordable Care Act, the way in which he bore “the burden” of representing blackness in America, and his efforts to fight segregation in housing and discriminatory policing late in his second term, all while contending with racially tinged criticism of his opponents. “Obama is an extraordinary figure who has done some good things in bad times, and some great things under impossible circumstances,” he concludes. Yet Dyson also criticizes Obama for neglecting to respond to crises such as the protests in Ferguson with a more acute analysis of race relations in the United States—one that could have “provided a compelling alternative to [Trump’s] vision.”11

7 Dyson’s criticism represents a growing trend among left-leaning scholars, particularly black ones, who believe that the significance of Obama’s presidency for black Americans should not prevent a critical evaluation of his actions. While symbolic acts in response to specific problems—such as the “beer summit” with Henry Louis Gates following the latter’s unjustified arrest—may be important, he largely left questions of institutionalized racism untouched. He thereby helped, in Theoharis’s words, to perpetuate the “structured blindnesses” in America’s “national fable” of upwards racial progress.12 In another example, Ta-Nehisi Coates praises him for his help of black farmers, his Justice Department’s sensitivity to uncovering racial disparities in criminal justice, and for the power of the Obamas as the “symbol of black people’s everyday, extraordinary Americanness.” However, he unequivocally faults the president for trusting too much in the “goodwill” of the nation, to the extent that “he ultimately believed [his country] to be a force for good in the world…Obama, his family, and his administration were a walking advertisement for the ease with which black people could be fully integrated into the unthreatening mainstream of American culture, politics, and myth. And that was always the problem.”13 Other black intellectuals have followed suit with even more intense critical analyses. Keeanga-Yamattha Taylor emphasizes how “the roots of the current movement against police brutality [can be traced to] the raised expectations of the Obama campaigns, as well as Obama’s ensuing silence on the critical issues facing .” The ‘post-racial’ narrative combined with the visible success of individual black Americans like the Obamas, she charges, then worsened those conditions, as they are “used to justify dismantling the state’s capacity to challenge discrimination.”14

8 Thus, we are now surveying the academic field from what might be called an unnerving ‘post-post-racial’ present. Matters of race and black lives are again at the forefront of societal and scholarly debates, as narratives of progress, successes, and failures are increasingly unsettled.15 Scholars and activists alike are revisiting the past from this vantage point and have found that the turmoil of the late 1960s and 1968 in particular is an apt window into contemporary race relations. This of course does not mean that today’s realities are essentially those of half a century ago or that interpreters of the

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present should not be wary of “how 1960s-oriented frameworks run aground when applied indiscriminately to narratives of racial violence in the new millennium.”16 However, by holding up the struggles of 1968 as a mirror to the present, persisting racial inequalities are highlighted as well as the ways in which the 1960s continue to inform and inspire explanations of and resistance to the status quo in the 21st century. After all, as Mark Twain allegedly quipped, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”

1. It Rhymes: Reverberations of 1968

9 As for many other protest movements, 1968 was a crucial year in the development of the black freedom struggle. While the judicial and legislative gains of previous years were implemented at the national and local level in the United States, emboldened activists and ordinary citizens continued to confront festering social problems as well as the hegemony of white, mainstream culture. The Fair Housing Act was established by Congress and the Supreme Court made careful moves forward in school integration with its decision in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County. But schoolboards and white teachers in places like Ocean Hill-Brownsville squared off with black residents who demanded community control over schools, while Pan-African nationalists experimented with independent education. A sweeping, multiracial Poor People’s Campaign inspired the building of a ‘tent city’ of 3,000 residents on the Washington Mall. Black Panthers and other activists confronted heavily armed police forces as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which targeted black organizations that it deemed “subversive” under the COINTELPRO program. Protests that turned violent grabbed headlines on a frequent basis, especially surrounding the , the Democratic National Convention, and the trial of the ‘.’ Part of a wave of urban unrest that characterized the 1960s as a whole, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Left mass destruction, injury, and death in its wake when riots swept over more than a hundred urban areas.17 On the cultural front, the Black Arts Movement (BAM) was in full swing, the first Black Studies programs were established, and the salute gained worldwide recognition after the Mexico Olympics. International developments were important in other ways too, as black leaders continued to strengthen the movement’s involvement with US foreign relations and anti-colonial struggles. For example, Martin Luther King had strongly denounced the War with his seminal “Beyond Vietnam” speech in 1967. Around the same time, (Kwame Turé) traveled to Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. In 1969, he permanently left the US for Guinea, where he became a spokesman for pan-Africanism.18

10 Meanwhile, fatigue with racial unrest coincided with a growing desire among the general population for an end to the social and political upheavals that also accompanied many of the other ‘rights revolutions’ of the decade. Moderate and more conservative politicians increasingly campaigned on law and order, often using a ‘colorblind’ rhetoric that evolved into the ‘post-racial’ narrative that is still with us today. Movement activists at the time struggled to come up with an effective response, especially because a growing segment of the black middle class joined such calls. These included teachers, preachers, judges, police chiefs, and politicians who were ready to join the electoral playing field opened up by the 1965 Voting Rights Act or to

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reestablish themselves as the gatekeepers of the race.19 The presidential election of Richard M. Nixon became the opening salvo of a new conservative era. Whether Nixon himself can be considered a conservative is up for debate, but several of his tactics, such as the southern strategy, became useful tools for future conservative candidates to counter the gains of the 1960s black freedom movement and the expansion of the postwar welfare state. As a result, the dream of a full-scale “revolution of values” that Martin Luther King had consistently called for in the final year of his life was never to be realized.20

11 ***

12 The legacies of 1968 are very much with us today. They continue to assert themselves as living history on many fronts: from the interpretations of and actual responses to current events by politicians, activists, and ordinary citizens on a local, national, and international scale to the scholarship that arose as a consequence of the establishment of Black Studies programs. Moreover, they are reflected in the inspiration, memory, and mythmaking drawn from that time that inform present-day (perceptions of) race relations and black activism. These in turn shape interpretations of “the path from 1968 to Trump’s election” that scholars, activists, and critics (ab)use to explain, justify, or resist today’s status quo. Samuel Moyn’s recent criticism of Mark Lilla’s popular book The Once and Future Liberal (2017), which seeks to explain why American liberals continue to lose ground to rightwing and populist movements, is a case in point. According to Moyn, Lilla pays too little attention to the role of economics and politics in the creation of structural inequalities when he criticizes the Left for stubbornly clinging to the identity politics of its late 1960s predecessors. Far more important, in Moyn’s view, is the way in which free market ideology came to dominate the entire political spectrum with the 1968 “crossroads, when neoconservatism and neoliberalism arrived.” The answer to Trump then, is not Lilla’s insistence that “spokespeople for oppressed groups…soft-pedal their indictments of white supremacy for strategic purposes, so long as white males are needed for Democrats to win elections,” but a “contemporary ” program that truly addresses structural justice for all and ensures that “markets serve more than the rich.”21

13 How the ‘1968-to-Trump’ narrative is understood thus impacts the solutions that scholars, activists, and politicians seek for the current state of affairs, which includes an increasingly grave social reality for many racial and ethnic minorities. Recent studies have convincingly shown that structural racism, that is, disparities between black and white Americans that have become institutionalized, continues to shape American society. This is visible in the overrepresentation of (young) black males in prison populations and the effects of felony disenfranchisement on the black electorate22; the consequences of historic structural injustices (including , resistance to school integration, gentrification and white flight, among others) that have now cemented ghettoes as a perpetual—rather than a mere provisional—fixture in the American landscape23; decreased accessibility to the electoral process due to gerrymandering, voter repression tactics, and court-cases like Shelby County v. Holder (2013); and continued racialized calls for ‘law and order’ and military-style policing of black communities that were set in motion by the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 and other measures adopted as a response to black protest.24 What is more, despite clear improvements in income, college graduation rates, and overall life expectancy, it is striking how many markers of progress have returned to—or even

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exceed—(pre)1960s levels, like in school segregation, racial wealth disparity, and the declining state of the black family as measured by, for example, decreased financial security and an increase in female headed households.25 Even the government’s and public’s response to the current national opioid crisis reveals the enduring disparity between black and white addicts in terms of provided empathy, available treatment, and punishment that largely date back to these law-and-order campaigns and the subsequent War on Drugs of the 1970s and 1980s.26

14 These unresolved tensions of the past and new ones are now bursting into the open. Groups like Black Lives Matter (BLM) and the (MBL), a nationwide coalition of over 50 organizations aimed at representing and ameliorating the grievances of black communities, have brought the continuing problems of police brutality, state-sponsored violence and surveillance, economic injustice, and lack of community control back to attention. The same is true for the protests in Ferguson, Baltimore, and elsewhere, some of which were accompanied by violence. The latter has revived 1960s debates among activists and scholars over the “politics of respectability,” that is, the belief that adherence to accepted, often middle class, norms of behavior and protest will lead to inclusion in mainstream society, and whether to see violent upheavals as a sign of criminality or a form of political action.27 Likewise, groups like MBL echo criticisms in the black radical tradition, articulated most notably in the 1960s in relation to the war in Vietnam by the Black Panther Party, the Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and Martin Luther King, of what Aziz Rana has labelled “national security citizenship”—the notion that minority groups can “earn inclusion” through the embrace of military service and American foreign policy— particularly when this support comes at the expense of solidarity with other marginalized groups around the world.28

15 Within the United States, such solidarity with “the oppressed everywhere” is now replicated in a new wave of ‘rainbow movements,’ predominantly against economic, social, and racial injustice (e.g. Fight for $15; the New Poor People’s Campaign; Moral Mondays; Equal Justice Initiative; prison reform organizations), environmental racism (e.g. Dakota Access Pipeline; the Environmental Justice Movement), the deportation of undocumented immigrants (e.g. United We Dream; the Dream Defenders), and a host of other issues ranging from free speech on campuses to sexual harassment and gun violence. Martin Luther King’s nine-year-old granddaughter even gave his vision a contemporary twist by pronouncing her dream of “a gun-free world” at the National Mall during the 2018 March for Our Lives.29

16 In the cultural field, the artistic expressions, protest cultures, and radical symbolism of 1968 have gained renewed currency. The 1960s Black Arts Movement has inspired a new generation of artists, while the anthem protests of NFL athletes such as Colin Kaepernick fit a tradition of athletic activism that includes Tommie Smith and John Carlos’ Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympics—topics that are further developed in the contributions to this special issue of, respectively, Jeffrey Ogbar and Douglas Hartmann. Over the past few years, the cultural representations and symbolism of 1960s Black Power activism also reached large and even international audiences through venues like the London Tate Museum’s 2017 “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power” exhibition and mass media events such as Beyoncé’s 2016 Super Bowl performance. Beyoncé’s rendition of her song “Formation” for the halftime show, featuring a dance crew sporting Afros and dressed in leather jackets and black berets,

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was reported to be a tribute to Black Lives Matter and the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party. The performance was both celebrated as a political act and denounced as divisive and anti-police in the mainstream media.30 It also renewed debates among scholars who have raised concerns about the silencing of black artists who celebrate their history, as well as debates on the commodification of Black Power by black artists.31

17 Meanwhile, responses to current activism, even at times from well-meaning whites, blacks, and movement veterans, mirror the resistance activists in the 1960s encountered. Both generations of activists, Theoharis reminds us, were and are “accused of being reckless, unreasonable, and inflexible, out for their own gain, and un- American.”32 The latter has translated among others in renewed forms of state repression of black activism, with the FBI even introducing the term “black identity extremism” as a category of domestic terrorism threats, a move reminiscent of its 1960s COINTELPRO program.33

18 Paralleling the shift from idealism to disillusionment and white backlash in the 1960s, the high optimism surrounding Obama’s election has dissipated within ten years.34 It has now been replaced by a shocking spike in hate crimes and emboldened white nationalist organizations, with the 2017 deadly clashes in Charlottesville as a tragic low point.35 How the election of Donald Trump fits into this development is a much-debated question. Ta-Nehisi Coates has for instance dubbed Trump “the first white president” because he is the first president “whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president.” Drawing an implicit parallel with the Nixon election, he argues that Trump was elected by a new ‘silent white majority’ to undo Obama’s political accomplishments. While acknowledging that Trump voters can be many things at once, he argues that explanations emphasizing economics or resentment of a “condescending Washington elite” do not account for his widespread support among whites from all demographics. Furthermore, those explanations downplay his supporters’ willingness to accept Trump’s racist pronouncements and policies as collateral damage. As such, alternative explanations for Trump’s victory help muddy the waters so “no deeper existential reckoning would be required.”36 Coates’s blunt analysis has met with abundant praise as well as equally blunt dismissals from commentators with a variety of political backgrounds. For example, self-proclaimed “anti-Trump conservative” David French criticizes Coates for overemphasizing racism and for not taking into account voters’ dislike of Hillary Clinton; fundamental disagreements over Obama’s policies, most notably concerning health care; and Obama’s favorability ratings by the end of his second term.37 Whereas it may be too early to come to a balanced assessment of the causes and consequences of Trump’s election, it is fair to say that the debate over the degree to which racism was a factor in itself illustrates the difficulty of discussing race in an allegedly post-racial world.

19 While the above has centered on the United States, it is important to note that the larger issues raised here are pertinent for other parts of the world that grapple with similarly unresolved and unsettling legacies from their racial histories, as also shown in the article by Laura Visser-Maessen in this edition. For example, US debates surrounding the taking down of Confederate statues are mirrored in Europe, where Afro-European movements are taking the lead in removing, among others, names of buildings and streets associated with past surveyors of white supremacy, slavery, and colonialism.38 Likewise, Black Lives Matter has its duplicates on this side of the Atlantic.

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These European organizations are contesting police brutality against racial minorities and other forms of structural racism, as well as claiming solidarity with their sister organizations in the US and victims of police brutality there.39 Similar movements are visible in the non-Western world, particularly Africa.40 While these movements have to be evaluated in their own situational contexts, many are connected to their American counterparts—be it through personal networks, language (such as the global adoption of “”), tactics, inspiration, and messaging, or simply by taking advantage of the awareness US-based groups have raised—and vice versa.41

2. Making Sense of the Rhymes: Surveying the Academic Field

20 While academic interest in race relations and the struggle for black freedom has been fairly consistent, it may be said that scholars’ focus has shifted, both preceding and following the societal developments just noted. Although interest in the ‘classic’ phase of the civil rights movement, the years 1954 to 1965, remains strong, recent scholarship also shows a renewed interest in the ideologies, strategies, (perceived) radicalism, and cultural icons of the late 1960s. Debates on the “long civil rights movement,” a concept that was first introduced by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall in 2005, and the influence of “Black Power Studies” as popularized by Peniel E. Joseph in subsequent years have fueled this shift.42 Anniversaries of key moments—not just 1968—may also have promoted such popular and scholarly interest through conference themes or publications, such as Black Power 50 (2016) that commemorates the fiftieth year since the slogan gained wide- spread popularity.43 These revisionist studies constitute a reconceptualization of Black Power—one that moves away from the traditional interpretation that saw the nonviolent, rights-based movement of the ‘classic’ civil rights era as the pinnacle of African American activism and considered Black Power as a symptom of its decline and splintering. To reconcile Black Power’s heterogeneous objectives and approaches, these revisionist interpretations additionally treat its emergence in a broader framework of black political and cultural nationalism and self-empowerment that started well before and lasted well beyond the late 1960s and beyond the players that earlier scholars tended to confine it to.

21 As Jeffrey Ogbar, one of the earliest proponents of such a new interpretation and contributor to this special edition, argues in Black Power (2004), it were organizations such as the Black Panthers and the that “did the most to foment the cultural shifts that reconfigured politics and identity in America.”44 Moreover, thanks to the fact that by the late 1960s, the “masses of black people […] embraced black power,” the movement changed American religion, music, education, and politics “from the bottom up.”45 Like many of the studies that have come after, Black Power shows that these organizations existed in a complex, and often mutually beneficial, relationship to the older civil rights organizations and influenced other rights-based movements with its forceful call for black self-determination.

22 More recent studies have added ever more complex and layered understandings of Black Power. In his effort to map this field, Peniel Joseph identifies several strands. Among these are works that develop connections to grassroots mobilization and activist networks in both the North and South or continuities with earlier black nationalist movements. Other scholars emphasize the intersections between race and

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class. This has led some to explore connections to the larger struggle for social and economic justice, including the work of welfare, union, and prison reform activists. Others have foregrounded the tensions between and self-defense in black politics and culture, or the influence of Black Power philosophies on campus protests as well as educational reform. The international dimensions of Black Power form another subcategory, as exemplified by the acclaimed African Americans in Ghana (2006) by Kevin Gaines which analyzes the connections between Black Power and anti-colonialism and Pan-African movements. Still others have aimed to foreground the movement’s intellectual legacy and practical and political achievements, which have mostly been neglected at the expense of its cultural politics. Or they aim to broaden understanding of some of the movement’s key figures and organizations—as does the work of Joe Street, another contributor to this issue, on the Black Panther Party—and to add new, forgotten ones. Such revisions additionally help illuminate larger questions regarding the perceived radicalism of Black Power groups, like Claude Clegg’s 2014 characterization of Nation of Islam as a conservative organization.46 Finally, gender- based interpretations of developments in the perception of black masculinity as well as the rise of black could be said to constitute a subfield of Black Power Studies in its own right.47

23 As outlined below, scholars are now also moving beyond the Black Power Studies paradigm in order to investigate connections between the (late) 1960s and present-day race relations, while being fully aware that arguments about historical continuities cannot be stretched too far. After all, 2018 is not 1968. Scholars must consider, in Bernard Harcourt’s words, how all “practices of revolt” are “situated” in time and locality.48 This also goes for the articulations and meanings of freedom, as Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang have argued in their insightful critique of the ‘long civil rights movement.’49 Particularly overusing “the Sixties as a persistent historical touchstone,” Lang has warned in a different publication, can do more harm than good, as it “has encouraged a poverty of thought about the contemporary challenges we face as citizens, residents, activists, and scholars desiring progressive social change.”50

24 Nowadays, as the scholars in the forum Fifty Years Since MLK point out, understanding racial paradigms accordingly must include questions deriving from new realities in a number of areas. Brandon M. Terry and Christian G. Appy point to the influence on black protest of the War on Terror and shifting geopolitics, as technological advances and political capital have strengthened rather than diminished “the U.S. imperial footprint and assertion of military power” on the planet. Among other things, these have altered ideas of American exceptionalism and strengthened racism through a new deference to the military and veterans as “icons of heroic victimhood” who defend the US from seemingly “outrageous and inexplicable attacks from nonwhite countries and cultures.” Moreover, the demographic growth, successes, and (perceived) failures of other minority groups, particularly Asians, Latinx, and Muslim people, in recent years should be considered in relation to (changing) interpretations of multiculturalism and black protest. Barbara Ransby and Andrew Douglas meanwhile draw attention to the heightened effects of racial capitalism, referring to the ways in which economic exploitation and racist ideologies justify and reinforce each other, and of the politics of respectability in (re)shaping today’s protest culture. Numerous other new developments need to be considered as well, including changed stereotypes of blacks,

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shifts in gender ideology, and the changing socio-economic circumstances of the white working class.51

25 Scholars who aim to connect the (late) 1960s to the present must also take into account that despite actively building on past traditions and networks of activism, many black activists today—faced with new conditions ranging from internal leadership dynamics and untrodden political and judicial terrains to the use of social media—also relish in maintaining generational splits from an older movement. To gain a sense of their unique contributions, some even insist that the modern freedom struggle “isn’t your grandfather’s civil rights movement.” They point among others to the fact that the movements of the past reproduced sexual and gender inequalities within their own ranks and depended on models of charismatic, male leadership that tended to obscure the roles of and specific repressions facing black women and the black LGBTQ community. The organization Black Lives Matter therefore posits the liberation of black queer and trans persons as the crucial factor in reshaping the methods and goals of the black freedom struggle. Simultaneously, the organizational practices of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the mentorship of therein are often quoted as being among the primary sources of historical inspiration for activists in the BLM network.52

26 Clearly, a complex collage of real and perceived lessons and failures of the past continues to inform present-day activists and their observers. By extension, in their day-to-day work, political imagination, and sense of agency, Jeanne Theoharis argues, many of today’s black activists are impeded by the misuses of 1960s civil rights history regardless, as over time the “scope of its vision has been narrowed in the service of those in power. The diversity of people who conceived, built, and led that struggle has been diminished, in part because their example offers such a potent challenge to where we are today.”53 Yet the eerie familiarity between Martin Luther King’s insistence that “our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change”54 and contemporary calls by BLM and other groups to “stay woke” underscores the necessity of engaging the living past in the present.

27 Doing so, however, is easier said than done. Considering these ‘new realties’ together with historical continuities (as well changing understandings of those histories and continuities) leads to complex questions about how we understand the present in relation to the past—and vice versa. Such complexity is compounded by the fact that these questions are not, indeed should not be, a purely academic affair. Scholars, activists, and scholar-activists debate these questions amongst themselves, with family and friends as well as with journalists, politicians, and other commentators. Many voices in these debates furthermore explicitly or implicitly express a desire for unearthing a “useable past,” that is, the ways in which understandings of history (academic history writing, but also memory and commemoration) can be employed for political and social ends by framing current realities or in determining a meaningful way forward.

28 Especially for many activists and scholars desiring progressive social change, recent events, particularly the emergence of BLM and Donald Trump, have rendered a sense of urgency and legitimacy to such endeavors. The activist community for instance has fueled these debates in multiple ways. In them, connections with the (late) 1960s have arisen organically, from 1960s movement veterans insisting on their relevancy for the

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new movement to current activists’ needs. Scholar Jeanne Theoharis for example records having countless conversations with such activists and other sympathizers in search of “fuller histories—uncomfortable, sobering histories—that hold a mirror to the nation’s past and offer far-reaching lessons for seeing the injustices of our current moment and the task of justice today” to sustain them.55 Likewise, historian Robin D.G. Kelley experienced “literally hundreds of ” of all backgrounds “come running to my courses, questioning their liberalism, seeking out more radical critiques of racial capitalism” after having read the work by Ta-Nehisi Coates.56 This desire is also visible in the many attempts to ‘#ReclaimMLK’ staged by contemporary activists to revive the civil rights leader’s radical legacy.57

29 Scholars and scholar-activists have followed suit, often in mutually beneficial roles. The last years of Martin Luther King’s life are for instance increasingly ‘rediscovered’ in scholarly publications,58 at times with the explicit purpose of aiding current activists in reclaiming his fight against the “triple evils of poverty, racism, and militarism” as a meaningful model for today’s struggles. Or Dr. King’s life is revisited to counter his ‘soft’ image that has emerged as a result of his ‘canonization’ and that is often used to critique current protest groups like BLM.59 Likewise, roughly the past five years have seen a remarkable acceleration in publications that deal with civil rights memory,60 the building of black inner-city communities, and fights against racial capitalism and systemic racism, particularly outside the South.61 Among these, books and memoirs dealing with police brutality, criminal justice reform, and Black Lives Matter often engage the 1960s to answer larger questions regarding the long-standing animosity between police and black communities, the causes and effects of riots, the (perceived) relationships between race, gender, and crime and the narrative power of such (alleged) interrelations, and (memories of) past protest traditions and struggles.62

30 Publication houses and scholars’ internal struggles as citizens to understand (and influence) today’s world push them further to explore such connections. Theoharis explicitly draws a connection between concern over the Trump presidency with her desire to write her 2018 monograph A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History, noting how “[w]e need this history more than ever.”63 Many contributors to the Fifty Years Since MLK-issue of The Boston Review explicitly or implicitly express similar motivations. Margaret Edds added a special epilogue— dramatically entitled “2016”—to her book on the mid-20th century work of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) on behalf of school desegregation to lament the Trump administration’s gutting of school diversity programs and to remind readers of how the NAACP’s lessons can inform new activism.64 Other scholars and scholar-activists in the field regularly write op-eds on contemporary events, like Russell Rickford, Barbara Ransby, Michelle Alexander, and Peniel Joseph. Michael Eric Dyson even turned his into a book-length publication.65

31 Likewise, Professor Clarence Lang published Black America in the Shadow of the Sixties (2015) after the University of Press specifically requested he develop his “ideas about the contemporary scene.” He agreed, having been transformed by his own experiences teaching in prison, witnessing Obama’s election, the conservative backlash in his home state Kansas, and the 2014 racial upheavals in Ferguson. His belief that “the field of African American history, if used critically, can be a vital tool both in reinterpreting the recent past and clarifying the political necessities of the early twenty-first century” drive these analyses. As such, he explicitly explores “the impact

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of the Sixties on the cultural symbols and outlooks that influenced black adolescence in the 1980s, young adulthood in the 1990s, and, for many of us, subsequent careers in academe,” including his own. Yet he devotes most of his work to the post-1960s rise of neoliberalism and its effect on the black community. This is a matter of professional survival too, he argues, noting how black scholars increasingly work in higher educational institutions devoted to “corporate planning models” and “a neoliberal logic that seeks to erase historical memory itself,” including by showing little concern for safeguarding black scholarly professional organizations and institutions.66

32 Lastly, the ways in which the black freedom struggle in the United States is connected to struggles for racial equality around the world, as noted above, also expresses itself internationally in activists’ and scholars’ interest in the history of the 1960s. Limiting ourselves to the European context, one illustrative example is the 2018 Martin Luther King Day event in Amsterdam that brought together black American and Dutch activists, artists, and scholars to consider race relations in the Netherlands and to reflect on the questions posed in Dr. King’s 1967 book Where Do We Go from Here.67 Moreover, “[b]lack intellectual infighting” over the relevancy of past lessons for the contemporary black freedom struggle, for example between Coates and , has spread from academia into international mainstream media outlets, such as The Guardian.68

33 Questions as to the ways in which such events and incidents initiate or sustain transnational dialogues of black activists may offer fruitful ideas for future research by (European) Americanists. Britta Waldschmidt-Nelson and Marcia Chatelain have noted how predominantly British and German historians have already begun using “the US civil rights movement as a sounding board for comparing and contrasting racial and ethnic tensions among European populations of color.” This makes sense, considering that post-World War II growth and activism of black communities in Europe, naturally led to comparisons to the black civil rights movement in the US. Additionally, the movement’s idealism and commitment to democracy also prompted young Europeans to consider the future of their respective nation’s commitment to these principles.69

34 Part of these investigations are several excellent studies focused on the European sojourns of black American movement leaders.70 Other promising work is being done by groups like the Black Diaspora and Germany (BDG) network71 and scholars working in the growing fields of Black British and Black German Studies and Black European Studies. Nonetheless, many questions remain about the sustained links, both past and present, between black activists and the theories and practices of the black diaspora in the North Atlantic region that warrant future exploration.

35 In conclusion, the readers of this special issue of the European Journal of American Studies are invited to consider several interrelated questions as they turn to the articles in this volume: How can the events of 1968 and the late 1960s more generally be understood in relation to long-term continuities or fundamental breaks in the history of the black freedom struggle? How do they challenge traditional understandings of racial progress and (radical) black activism both during the 1960s and beyond? How do they enrich our understanding of 1968 activism, including the relationship of Black Power to a host of other movements—old and new, domestic an international, within and outside of the sphere of black activism? Finally, what questions and potential answers do they raise about the nature and possible future trajectories of contemporary black activism?

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3. Race Matters: The Articles

36 Seven scholars from across Europe and the United States were invited for this special issue to critically engage black activism in the year 1968, either by tying it in to historical debates on (dis)continuities in the black freedom struggle, or by revealing long-term effects that continue to reverberate today. The results highlight traditions, innovations, and legacies in black protest and activism from US, transatlantic, and interdisciplinary perspectives and can be grouped into three broad categories.

37 Firstly, Dr. Joe Street and Prof. Caroline Rolland-Diamond assess breaks and continuities in black activism through the lens of, respectively, the Black Panther Party and Black Power on Chicago campuses. Their articles evaluate alliances within the black freedom movement as well as across racial boundaries and connect local struggles to national and international developments. The article by Street offers new insights into the Black Panthers’ “Free Huey” campaign, which started in 1968 and ran through Huey P. Newton’s trial for the murder of a police officer and his imprisonment. Street examines how the campaign transformed the Black Panther Party (BPP) into one of the most visible political organizations of the era and turned Newton into a living martyr in the eyes of radicals around the world. The campaign stands out because its success was rooted in its ability to both reflect and define 1968 radical black protest culture and because it allowed the BPP to create new links with other radical groups. Yet, Street argues, “Free Huey” also revealed ambiguities in the Black Panthers’ ideology and would contribute to its eventual decline.

38 Rolland-Diamond’s contribution explores the political context of Chicago in 1968 to build upon previous scholarship on black . She argues that such activism contributed to the rise of Black Studies and Black Power, but must also be understood in connection to the activism of Latinx and radical white students as well as local neighborhood groups. As such, her work uncovers new connections between student and non-student activists in the urban North and the manner in which they collectively tried to reinvent the meaning of democracy in the ‘long’ Sixties. This article presents black student activists as a vital force within the broader while it also expands our understanding of the complex and mutually reinforcing connections between Black Power and other activist movements during the late 1960s.

39 Another group of articles presents research by Prof. Douglas Hartmann, Prof. Jeffrey Ogbar, and Dr. Laura Visser-Maessen. These articles together explore the intersections of cultural and political activism in 1968 and explicitly engage questions of continuity, memory, and legacies in the present. By extension, all three provide a window into 21st century black activism and its future trajectory by problematizing notions of racial progress over the past fifty years. Hartmann argues that the US is going through a new era of black athletic activism. Through an analysis of the historic Olympic protest of 1968 and 21st century black athletic activism, he contextualizes and deepens our understanding of the unique features of this new wave of activism and its broader societal and theoretical significance. His comparative analysis accordingly sheds light on how and why today’s activist athletic movement is the biggest of its kind in American history and on what its strengths and shortcomings are.

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40 Ogbar explores the 1960s beginnings of the Black Arts Movement (BAM) as the cultural wing of the Black Power movement. Focusing especially on black artistic creativity on television, he traces BAM’s influence through time. Ogbar shows that an explosion of black artistic expression in the 21st century exceeds the depth and reach of BAM while still adhering to its fundamental political sensibilities. Visser-Maessen illuminates the ways in which 21st century black activists have used the almost universal whitewashing of Martin Luther King’s radical legacy after his 1968 assassination to their advantage. She analyses the elements of King’s legacy that American black activists have sought to retrieve during the #ReclaimMLK campaigns as a window into the heart of what these activists aim to achieve and what obstacles and openings they see in getting there. To spur the aforementioned question of the ways in which the black freedom struggle in the US is connected to struggles for racial equality in Europe, she also zooms in on the way current black activists in , particularly in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, use King legacy projects to advocate and justify anti-racism activism in their own, allegedly ‘color-blind’ societies. She demonstrates how these European activists follow their American counterparts in selectively tying King legacy projects to his final years and the ‘sanitization’ of his legacy, as this advances their specific goals best. She thereby underscores how 21st century local race relations indeed must be understood in a larger framework that incorporates wider global and historical issues, forces, and trends.

41 However, as Jacquelyn Dowd Hall has argued, the black freedom struggle must be understood in conjunction with what she calls the “long backlash.”72 The final group of articles therefore explores white conservatives’ responses to black activism and features contributions by Dr. Rebecca Brückmann and Dr. Maarten Zwiers. Brückmann analyzes the continuing grassroots activism of Citizens’ Councils in Louisiana after the 1964 Civil Rights Act. She analyzes the compatibilities between Massive Resistance and the surge of conservatism at the end of the 1960s. Her work demonstrates how these movements were mutually reinforcing through a much needed local case study of how the New Right depended on the infrastructure, culture, and traditions established by older, white supremacist groups and how the latter in turn adapted theirs to those of the former. As such, her work serves as a worthwhile reminder for scholars to view 21st century resistance to black activism not just through a contemporary prism, but in relation to a longer history of white supremacist movement and specifically through its conversion with the conservative movement in the late 1960s.

42 Finally, Zwiers builds on recent research into the role of emotions in politics to offer a new interpretation of the white backlash against liberal reforms in the late 1960s. Through an intersectional analysis of the role of race, class, and gender in the 1968 presidential campaign, Zwiers demonstrates how the politics of emotion explain George Wallace’s strong showing in that race—setting the stage for a style of conservative politics and rhetoric rooted in masculine that has proven to be effective until this day. It thus complements Brückmann’s findings on the importance of the South and of the 1960s convergence of white supremacist, conservative, and populist movements for understanding today’s right-wing movement at a local and national level.

43 Together, these articles tie in with the need for current scholarship to aid in telling that “more robust and fuller history we need for today.”73 In the insightful issue Fifty Years Since MLK, Brandon M. Terry has emphatically argued to let “the weight of the

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past” indeed serve as “an aid, not an obstacle, to understanding new features of our racial order.”74 It is our hope that this special issue of The European Journal of American Studies helps towards realizing this vital imperative.

44 Proper names: Ella Baker, John Carlos, Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Turé), Hillary Clinton, Ta-Nehisi Coates, , Henry Louis Gates, Colin Kaepernick, Martin Luther King, Jr., Beyoncé (Knowles), Huey P. Newton, Richard M. Nixon, Barack Obama, Tommie Smith, Donald Trump, Mark Twain, George Wallace, Cornel West.

NOTES

1. For a sample of recent work on the global contours of the revolution year, consult: Chen Jian et al., eds., The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties: Between Protest and Nation Building (: Routledge, 2018). 2. Giles Scott-Smith, “We Are All Undesirables: and Its Legacy,” European Journal of American Studies 3:2 (2008): http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/2802. For recent approaches to the study of the 1960s, also consult n1. 3. Thomas Sugrue, Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race (Princeton and Oxford: Press, 2010), 1. 4. Barack Obama, “A More Perfect Union” (speech, Philadelphia, 18 March 2008) Constitution Center, https://constitutioncenter.org/amoreperfectunion/docs/Race_Speech_Transcript.pdf; Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President at the 50th Anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery Marches” (speech, Selma, 7 March 2015), White House, http://go.wh.gov/JW2E9T. 5. Jeanne Theoharis, A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018), xii-xiv, 8-13, 19-21, 26-27, quotes on Obama’s “ten procent” and “individualized personal responsibility” comments on xiii, 20; Deborah Chasman and Joshua Cohen, “Editors’ Note,” in Brandon Terry et al., eds., “Forum 5: Fifty Years Since MLK,” Boston Review 43.1 (2018): 7; Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2017), 299-303. See also: Michael Tesler and David O. Sears, Obama’s Race: The 2008 Election and the Dream of a Post-Racial America (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2010); Michael Eric Dyson, The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2016); Michael Tesler, Post-Racial or Most-Racial?: Race and Politics in the Obama Era (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2016). 6. Theoharis, History, ix-xvii, 3-13, 15-22. Quotes on xi, xii, xiii. See also: Coates, Eight Years and Jelani Cobb, The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress (New York: Walker and Company, 2010). 7. Ruth Milkman, “A New Political Generation: Millennials and the Post-2008 Wave of Protest,” American Sociological Review 82:1 (February 2017): 22-25. 8. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), chapter 5. 9. Coates, Eight Years, 320. 10. Jelani Cobb, “The Matter of Black Lives,” New Yorker, 14 March 2016, https:// www.newyorker.com /magazine/2016/03/14/where-is-black-lives-matter-headed .

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11. Dyson, Black Presidency. Quotes on 273, 283, and 276. Dyson emphasizes that Obama is not responsible for Trump’s rise. 12. Theoharis, History, xvi. 13. Coates, Eight Years, xiii, 295, 296. 14. Taylor, #BlackLivesMatter, 19 and 5. 15. For example, a majority of Americans believes that race relations have become worse since the election of Donald Trump: Pew Research Center, “Most Americans Say Trump’s Election Has Led to Worse Race Relations in the U.S.” (December 2017): http://www.people-press.org/ 2017/12/19/most-americans-say-trumps-election-has-led-to-worse-race-relations-in-the-u-s/. 16. Clarence Lang, Black America in the Shadow of the Sixties: Notes on the Civil Rights Movement, Neoliberalism, and Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), vii. 17. David L. Chappell, “After the Dream Died: National Memories of the King Assassination and How They Played Out in Subsequent Legislation,” in Britta Waldschidt-Nelson, Marcia Chatelain and Sharon Monteith, eds., Staging a Dream: Untold Stories and Transatlantic Legacies of the March on Washington, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 11 (Washington DC: German Historical Institute, 2015): 149-153. 18. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Beyond Vietnam” (speech, New York, 4 April 1968): https:// kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/beyond-vietnam; Peniel E. Joseph, Stokely: A Life (New York: Basic Books, 2014), chapters 12-13 and 16. 19. According to , Jr. and others, black middle class support for law and order policies has contributed to the mass incarceration of people of color and strengthened the ‘politics of respectability.’ Elizabeth Hinton counters that the number of blacks who “defied the legitimacy of new policing and carceral strategies” remain both larger and underappreciated in this narrative. James Forman, Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017); Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2012); Michael Javen Fortner, Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment (Cambridge: Press, 2015); Elizabeth Hinton, “On Violence and Nonviolence,” in Terry et al., “Fifty Years,” 51. 20. For Dr. King’s “revolution of values,” see among others his speech “Beyond Vietnam.” See the critique of Samuel Moyn on the role of neoliberalism in the current status quo: Samuel Moyn, “1968 and the Crisis of Liberalism,” in Terry et al., “Fifty Years,” 92-101. 21. Moyn, “1968,” 92-101. Quotes on 92, 94, 98, 100, 101. 22. Alexander, New Jim Crow. 23. Thad Williamson, “The Almost Inevitable Failure of Justice,” in Terry et al., “Fifty Years,” 112-114. 24. Hinton, “Violence.” 25. See for example: Taylor, #BlackLivesMater, 7, 10; Alexander Nazaryan, “School Segregation in America As Bad Today as it Was in the 1960s,” Newsweek, 22 March 2018, https:// www.newsweek.com/2018/03/30/school-segregation-america-today-bad-1960-855256.html; Simone Pathe, “Today’s Racial Wealth Gap is Wider Than in the 1960s,” PBS.org, 18 February 2015, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/todays-racial-wealth-gap-is-wider-than-in-the-1960s; Sharon Austin, “Black Americans Mostly Left Behind By Progress Since Dr. King’s Death,” The Conversation, 7 February 2018, https://theconversation.com/black-americans-mostly-left-behind- by-progress-since-dr-kings-death-89956. 26. Keturah James and Ayana Jordan, “The Opioid Crisis in Black Communities,” The Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 46:2 (2018): 404-421; Anjali Om, “The Opioid Crisis in Black and White: The Role of Race in Our Nation’s Recent Drug Epidemic,” Journal of Public Health 40:4 (2018): 614-615. 27. Josie Pickens, “Ferguson: What’s Respectability Got to Do With It?” Ebony Magazine, 18 August 2014, https://www.ebony.com/news/ferguson-whats-respectability-got-to-do-with-it-987/; Barbara Reynolds, “I was a civil rights activist in the 1960s. But it’s hard for me to get behind

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Black Lives Matter,” Washington Post, 24 August 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ posteverything/wp/2015/08/24/i-was-a-civil-rights-activist-in-the-1960s-but-its-hard-for-me- to-get-behind-black-lives-matter/?utm_term=.0ab2c9c327a0; Hinton, “Violence,” 50. 28. Aziz Rana, “Against National Security Citizenship,” in Terry et al., “Fifty Years,” 81-91. Quote on 81-82. 29. Morgan Winsor, “Martin Luther King Jr.’s Granddaughter Tells March for Our Lives Crowd: ‘ that enough is enough’,” ABC News, 24 March 2018, https://abcnews.go.com/US/ martin-luther-king-jrs-granddaughter-tells-march-lives/story?id=53986952. 30. Caroline Framke, “Beyoncé Didn’t Just Steal the Super Bowl Halftime Show, She Made It a Political Act,” Vox, 7 February 2016, https://www.vox.com/2016/2/7/10934576/beyonce-super- bowl-halftime-2016-coldplay; Lisa Respers , “Why the Beyoncé Controversy Is Bigger Than You Think,” CNN, 24 February 2016, https://edition.cnn.com/2016/02/23/entertainment/ beyonce-controversy-feat/index.html; Diana Falzone, “Backlash to Beyonce’s Super Bowl Performance Continues to Grow,” , 12 February 2016, http://www.foxnews.com/ entertainment/2016/02/12/backlash-to-beyonce-super-bowl-performance-continues-to- grow.html. 31. For example, compare Marquita Gammage, “Pop Culture Without Culture: Examining the Public Backlash to Beyoncé’s Super Bowl 50 Performance,” Journal of Black Studies 48:8 (2017): 715-731 to Mako Fitts Ward, “Queen Bey and the New Niggerati: Ethics of Individualism in the Appropriation of Black Radicalism,” Black Camera 9:1 (fall 2017): 146-163. 32. Theoharis, History, xiv-xvi, xxi, 17-18, 22-26, 208-209. Quote on page 208. 33. Andrew Cohen, “The FBI’s New Fantasy: ‘Black Identity Extremists’,” Brennan Center, 11 October 2017, https://www.brennancenter.org/blog/fbi-new-fantasy-black-identity-extremists; Khaled A. Beydoun and Justin Hansford, “The F.B.I.’s Dangerous Crackdown on ‘Black Identity Extremists’,” New York Times, 15 November 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/15/ opinion/black-identity-extremism-fbi-trump.html. 34. Taylor, #BlackLivesMatter, chapter 5. 35. Federal Bureau of Investigations, “2016 Hate Crime Statistics Released,” FBI News, 13 November 2017, https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2016-hate-crime-statistics; Mark Berman, “Hate Crimes in the United States Increased Last Year, the FBI Says,” Washington Post, 13 November 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com /news/post-nation/wp/2017/11/13/hate-crimes-in-the-united-states-increased-last-year-the- fbi-says /?utm_term=.65bced64e232; Lois Beckett, “The Year in Nazi : Images of White Supremacy in Trump’s America,” The Guardian, 27 December 2017, https:// www.theguardian.com/media/2017/dec/27/the-year-in-nazi-propaganda-images-of-white- supremacy-in-trumps-america. 36. Coates, Eight Years, 341-367. Quote on 344, 348. 37. David French, “No, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Trump Isn’t ‘America’s First White President’,” National Review, 12 September 2017, https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/09/ta-nehisi-coates-wrong- hillary-clinton-not-racism-why-donald-trump-president/. Other responses to Coates’ article include: Sean Nelson, “Ta-Nehisi Coates’s ‘First White President’ Is Required Reading,” Portland Mercury, 7 September 2017, https://www.portlandmercury.com/blogtown/ 2017/09/07/19301536/ta-nehisi-coatess-the-first-white-president-is-required-reading-no- matter-how-sick-you-are-of-dft; Max Sawicky, “Ta-Nehisi Coates and the ‘First White President’: An Alternate View,” Huffington Post, 19 September 2017, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ ta-nehisi-coates-and-the-first-white-president_us_59c1240ee4b0186c2205c722; Thomas Chatterton Williams, “How Ta-Nehisi Coates Gives Whiteness Power,” New York Times, 6 October 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/opinion/ta-nehisi-coates-whiteness-power.html.

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38. Such movements exist in many European countries, most notably the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and . For an excellent exploration of the Dutch case, which includes contributions by activists on anti-racist campaigns in the Netherlands, consult Melissa F. Weiner and Antonio Carmona Báez, eds., Smash the Pillars: Decoloniality and the Imaginary of Color in the Dutch Kingdom (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2018). Important works on (anti-Black) racism in the Netherlands, with comparisons and references to other national contexts, including the United States, include Philomena Essed, Understanding Everyday Racism: An Interdisciplinary Theory (Newbury Park et al.: Sage Publications, 1991) and Gloria Wekker, White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). 39. While Black Lives Matter includes formal chapters in several countries around the world, it also aligns with local organizations, which, in turn, adopt some of its rhetoric and strategies to amplify their own message. This can make it difficult to determine the movement’s global reach. However, a spate of solidarity marches in 2016 illustrate the movement’s international influence. See for example: Sheena McKenzie, “Black Lives Matter Protests Spread to Europe,” CNN, 11 July 2016, https://edition.cnn.com/2016/07/11/europe/black-lives-matter-protests-europe/; Morgan Winsor, “Black Lives Matter Protests Go Global, From Ireland to ,” ABC News, 13 July 2016, https://abcnews.go.com/International/black-lives-matter-protests-global-ireland-south- africa/story?id=40546549; Susie Armitage, “2016 Was the Year Black Lives Matter Went Truly Global,” BuzzFeed, 8 December 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/susiearmitage/2016-was-the- year-black-lives-matter-went-global?utm_term=.rwNObBKXE#.dyJ7mrKnJ. 40. See for example Ryan Lenora Brown and Ahsraf Hendricks, “Why Africans Are Showing Solidarity with Black Lives Matter Movement,” Christian Science Monitor, 15 July 2016, https:// www.csmonitor.com/World/Africa/2016/0715/Why-Africans-are-showing-solidarity-with-Black- Lives-Matter-movement 41. See n62-64 below. 42. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” The Journal of American History 91:4 (March 2005): 1233-1263; Peniel E. Joseph, “Introduction: Toward a Historiography of the Black Power Movement,” in idem, ed., The Black Power Movement. Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 1-26. 43. Sylviane A. Diouf and Komozi Woodward, eds., Black Power 50 (New York: The New Press, 2016). 44. Jeffrey Ogbar, Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 2004), 2. 45. Ibid., 196-197. 46. Claude Andrew Clegg, The Life and Times of (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). 47. Joseph, “Historiography”; idem, “The Black Power Movement: A State of the Field,” The Journal of American History 96:3 (December 2009): 751-776; idem, “Rethinking the Black Power Era,” The Journal of Southern History 75:3 (August 2009): 707-716; idem, “Historians and the Black Power Movement,” OAH Magazine of History 22:3 (July 2008): 8-15. More recent contributions on the topics mentioned include, respectively: Nico Slate, ed., Black Power Beyond Borders (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Martha Biondi, The Black Revolution on Campus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); Russel Rickford, We Are an African People. Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Robyn Spencer, The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016); Ashley Farmer, Remaking Black Power. How Black Women Transformed an Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). 48. Bernard E. Harcourt, “Sparking King’s Revolution,” in Terry et al., “Fifty Years,” 55.

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49. Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang, “The ‘Long Movement’ as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies,” The Journal of African American History 92:2 (spring 2007): 278. 50. Lang, Black America, 120. 51. Brandon M. Terry, “MLK Now,” Barbara Ransby, “King in Context,” and Christian G. Appy, “Exceptional Victims.” All in Terry et al., “Fifty Years,” 15-17, 25-26, 29, 32, 104, 105. Quotes taken from Terry and Appy, 29, 104, 105. 52. Alicia Garza, “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement,” The Feminist Wire, 7 October 2014, http://www.thefeministwire.com/2014/10/blacklivesmatter-2/; Cobb, “The Matter.” While the diversity of the modern movement should not be dismissed, some regularly cited differences between the millennial generation and previous generations of activists include a shift of focus toward social justice, immigration, and mass-incarceration and a shift of emphasis toward intersectional analysis and decentered organizing. Such differences are noted in the writing of activists, scholars, and journalists: Garza, “Herstory”; Black Youth Project (John Rogowski and Cathy Cohen), “Black Millennials in America. Documenting the Experiences, Voices and Political Future of Young Black Americans,” https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2504668/ black-millennials-in-america-report.pdf; Cobb, “The Matter”; Milkman, “A New Political Generation”; Mychal Denzel Smith, “How ’s Death Launched a New Generation of Black Activism,” The Nation, 27 August 2014, https://www.thenation.com/article/how-trayvon- martins-death-launched-new-generation-black-activism/; Gene Demby, “The Birth of a New Civil Rights Movement,” Politico, 31 December 2014, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/ 2014/12/ferguson-new-civil-rights-movement-113906. 53. Theoharis, History, xxiv and 26. 54. Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, 2nd ed. (New York: Bantam Books, 1968), 199-200. 55. Theoharis, History, xvii-xviii. 56. Robin D.G. Kelley, “Coates and West in Jackson,” Boston Review, 22 December 2017, http:// bostonreview.net /race/robin-d-g-kelley-coates-and-west-jackson 57. Consult the article by Laura Visser-Maessen in this issue. 58. For example, see: Russell Rickford, “It’s Time to Reclaim the True Martin Luther King,” Washington Post, 18 June 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/ 2018/01/15/its-time-to-reclaim-the-true-martin-luther-king/?noredirect=on&utm_term=. 35ea61d898d6; Mary Lou Finley et al., eds., The : Martin Luther King, Jr. and Civil Rights Activism in the North (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2018); Michael K. Honey, To The Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice (n.p.: W.W. Norton, 2018); Martin Luther King, Jr. and Cornel West, The Radical King (Boston: Beacon Press, 2016); Asafo Shaka Sekou, The Radical Political Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.: A Political Study Guide (Charleston: Createspace, 2015); Alice Faye Duncan and R. Gregory Christie, Memphis, Martin, and the Mountaintop: the Sanitation Strike of 1968 (n.p.: Calkins Creek, 2018); Lewis V. Baldwin and Rufus Burrow, Jr., eds., The Domestication of Martin Luther King, Jr.: Clarence B. Jones, Right-Wing Conservatism, and the King Legacy (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2013); Jennifer J. Yanco, Misremembering Dr. King: Revisiting the Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2014); Jason Sokol, The Heavens Might Crack: The Death and Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Basic Books, 2018); Martin Luther King, Jr. and Michael Honey, “All Labor Has Dignity” (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014); , Martin’s Dream: My Journey and the Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Michael Eric Dyson, April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Death and the Transformation of America (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2009).

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59. For example, see the essays in Terry et al., “Fifty Years”; Lang, Black America; Sarah C. Thuesen, “‘Everything Changed, but Ain’t Nothing Changed’: Recovering a Generation of Southern Activists for Economic Justice,” Southern Cultures 14.3 (fall 2008): 142-152; Theoharis, History, xv, xix, 3-5, 18, 22-26, 208. See also the article by Laura Visser-Maessen in this volume. 60. In addition to the work of Theoharis and Lang, which have already been cited, examples include: Renee C. Romano and Leigh Raiford, eds., The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 2006); Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017) and What Truth Sounds Like: Robert F. Kennedy, , and Our Unfinished Conversation About Race in America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018). 61. For example, see: Khalil Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011); Michael Ezra, The Economic Civil Rights Movement: African Americans and the Struggle for Economic Power (London: Routledge, 2013); Natalie Y. Moore, The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2016); Tommie Shelby, Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2016); Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York and London: Liveright Publishing, 2017); David G. García, Strategies of Segregation: Race, Residence, and the Struggle for Educational Equality (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018); Andrea Gibbons, City of Segregation: 100 Years of Struggle for Housing in (: Verso, 2018); Richard H. Sander, Yana A. Kucheva and Jonathan M. Zasloff, Moving Toward Integration: The Past and Future of Fair Housing (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018). 62. For example, see: Alexander, New Jim Crow; Cathy Lisa Schneider, Police Power and Race Riots: Urban Unrest in and New York (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); Ta- Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (n.p.: Spiegel and Grau, 2015); Jamala Rogers, Ferguson is America: Roots of Rebellion (n.p: Mira Digital Publishing, 2015); Taylor, #BlackLivesMatter; Mary Canty Merrill, Why Black Lives Matter (Too): A Revolutionary Call to Action (Bloomington: AuthorHouse, 2016); Michael Flamm, In the Heat of Summer: The New York Riots of 1964 and the War on Crime (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017); Forman, Jr., Locking Up; Christopher J. Lebron, The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Wesley Lowery, They Can’t Kill Us All: The Story of Black Lives Matter (London: Penguin Books, 2017); Lauri Hillstrom, Black Lives Matter: From a Moment to a Movement (Santa Barbara: Greenwood, 2018); Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele, When They Call You a Terrorist (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018); Ryan Lugalia-Hollon and Daniel Cooper, The War on Neighborhoods: Policing, Prison, and Punishment in a Divided City (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018); Sheila Pree Bright, #1960Now: Photographs of Civil Rights Activists and Black Lives Matter Protests (n.p.: Chronicle Books, 2018); Barbara Ransby, Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the 21st Century (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018). 63. Theoharis, History, xxv. 64. Margaret Edds, We Face the Dawn: , Spottswood Robinson, and the Legal Team That Dismantled Jim Crow (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2016), 323-330. 65. Dyson, Tears. 66. Lang, Black America, ix-xviii. Quotes on pp. xiii, xv, xvi. 67. “Martin Luther King Day 2018: Where Do We Go from Here,” http://humanityinaction.nl/ mlk-2018/. 68. Kelley, “Coates and West”; Cornel West, “Ta-Nehisi Coates Is the Neoliberal Face of the Black Freedom Struggle,” The Guardian, 17 December 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2017/dec/17 /ta-nehisi-coates-neoliberal-black-struggle-cornel-west; German Lopez, “Cornel West’s Attacks on Ta-Nehisi Coates, Explained,” Vox, 20 December 2017, https://www.vox.com/identities/

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2017/12/20/16795746/ta-nehisi-coates-cornel-west-twitter; Melvin Rogers, , Carol Anderson, and Shailja Patel, “Ta-Nehisi Coates v Cornel West: Black Academics and Activists Give Their Verdict,” The Guardian, 22 December 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2017/dec/22/-ta-nehisi-coates-cornel-west-black-academic-activists-debate- equality. 69. Marcia Chatelain and Britta Waldschmidt-Nelson, “Introduction: Untold Stories: The March on Washington—New Perspectives and Transatlantic Legacies,” in Waldschmidt-Nelson, Chatelain, and Monteith, eds., Staging a Dream, 8. 70. Stephen Tuck, The Night Spoke At the Oxford Union: The Transatlantic Story of Antiracist Protest (Oakland: University of California Press, 2014) and Brian Ward, Martin Luther King In Newcastle Upon Tyne: The African American Freedom Struggle and Race Relations in the North East of England (n.p.: Tyne Bridge Publishing, 2017). 71. See BDG Network, The Black Diaspora and Germany Deutschland und die Schwarze Diaspora (Münster: Edition Assemblage, 2018). 72. Hall, “Long Civil Rights Movement,” 1239. 73. Theoharis, History, xviii. 74. Terry, “MLK Now,” 16.

ABSTRACTS

New questions about the legacies of 1968 and the 1960s in general are presenting themselves to us, as scholars and as citizens, ever more urgently. This is particularly true of race and racial struggle, as unresolved race matters from the past poignantly intersect with twenty-first century activism aimed at countering the continued devaluation of black lives. This special issue of The European Journal of American Studies focuses on the black freedom struggle to explore how those “unresolved race matters from the past” weigh down on the present in terms of (dis)continuities in political activism, protest cultures, backlash, and memory and to highlight the ways in which the 1960s continue to inform and inspire explanations of and resistance to the racial status quo in the 21st century. This introduction will explain why and categorize how today’s racial landscape has shaped contemporary societal and scholarly interest in the black, and especially radical, activism of 1968.

INDEX

Keywords: 1968, black activism, Black Lives Matter, Black Power, Black Power Studies, civil rights history, civil rights movement, Europe, Martin Luther King, Jr., memory, protest culture, United States

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AUTHORS

JORRIT VAN DEN BERK

Jorrit van den Berk is an Assistant Professor of North American Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands, where his teaching on US history and politics includes classes on the black freedom movement. He has authored several articles on U.S. foreign relations as well as the book Becoming a Good Neighbor among Dictators. The U.S. Foreign Service in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). His current research focuses on transatlantic relations and diplomacy and the ways in which these intersect with broader social phenomena, including racism and anti-racism.

LAURA VISSER-MAESSEN

Laura Visser-Maessen is an Assistant Professor of North American Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. She specializes in African American history and civil rights, but her teaching covers a variety of topics related to American history and culture. These range from (auto)biography, literature, and cultural memory to the American political tradition, cultural diplomacy, and racism in the US. Her book Robert Parris Moses: A Life in Civil Rights and Leadership at the Grassroots (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) became a finalist for the Hooks Institute National Book Award 2016. Her current research interests include (memories of) the civil rights movement; 20th and 21st century public school education for racial minorities in the US; the US as a reference culture for European discussions on race, racism, and black activism; Black European Studies; and black autobiography as a tool of activism.

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‘Free Huey or the Sky’s the Limit’: The Black Panther Party and the Campaign to Free Huey P. Newton

Joe Street

1 In October 1967, the co-founder of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP), Huey P. Newton was arrested and charged with the murder of an Oakland police officer, John Frey. Newton’s organization rallied around him, initiating a major ‘Free Huey’ campaign that ran through his trial and his two years in prison, and that rescued the BPP from oblivion. The campaign was significant enough for the Oakland Tribune to state that the trial became one of the two biggest news events of the year.1 ‘Free Huey’ also became a rallying cry for radicals across the globe. It propelled Newton into the forefront of the radical movement and transformed the BPP into one of the most visible political organizations of the era.

2 Formed in October 1966 in Oakland, California by Newton and , the BPP initially focused its energies on opposing police brutality in Oakland’s inner city and similar local neighborhoods. Attracting a small but committed membership, it conducted a sequence of armed police patrols that unnerved the Oakland Police Department while alerting locals to their rights as citizens under arrest. Inspired by black nationalist, anticolonial, and internationalist traditions, the BPP took particular influence from Marxist theorists such as Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, , and especially Frantz Fanon’s coruscating critique of French colonialism as outlined in his classic text, The Wretched of the Earth. A widely-publicized confrontation with police that followed the BPP’s armed protection of Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X’s widow, during a visit to the city in February 1967 elevated the organization to regional notoriety. On May 2, 1967, prompted by a legislative proposal to end California’s citizens’ rights to bear arms in public, the BPP conducted one of the most sensational events of the 1960s. A collection of armed Panthers entered the California State Capitol Building in Sacramento to protest the so-called Mulford Bill. A series of arrests followed that deprived the BPP of its most skilled organizers, and the organization entered a decline. In the early hours of October 28, 1967, Newton became

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embroiled in a melee with police officers Frey and Herbert Heanes, leading to Frey’s death and Newton receiving a gunshot wound. Charged with murder, Newton faced the death penalty. The BPP set about deifying its imprisoned founder, transforming him into an international icon. Convicted of voluntary manslaughter in September 1968, Newton’s conviction was quashed on appeal nearly two years later. The BPP welcomed him upon his return much like the Bolsheviks received Lenin from exile, a near- legendary leader ready to spearhead the revolution.2

3 Most historical assessments of the Free Huey campaign emphasize the role of the ‘Free Huey’ rallies in bringing the BPP to a wide audience, and similarly point to the mass media’s response to the BPP. For Jane Rhodes, the campaign rendered the BPP media icons while enabling to cement himself at the organization’s head.3 Curtis Austin, Donna Murch, and Robyn Spencer present the campaign as fundamental to the BPP’s meteoric growth as members and supporters joined in their thousands and transformed the organization.4 As the campaign gathered pace, the BPP reached out to other radical groups. Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin chronicle the inter- organizational tensions that emerged, while Joel Wilson and David Barber evaluate the BPP alliances with white radicals and Aaron Bae its multiracial alliances.5 Less interested in the popular movement to free Newton, Lise Pearlman chronicles events inside the courtroom.6

4 Such approaches underestimate the role of the Free Huey campaign in defining the BPP’s development. As important, they elide the BPP’s martyrizing of Newton. The analysis that follows demonstrates how the Free Huey campaign successfully cemented the BPP within 1968’s radical movement and iconized Huey P. Newton while also sowing the seeds for the organization’s later decline. It focuses on the three key elements of the campaign outside the courthouse to free Newton. First, it reveals the extent to which the fractious relationships between the BPP and fellow radical groups the Peace and Freedom Party (PFP) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) informed the BPP’s growing pains. Two public galas designed to elevate the BPP’s status and celebrate Newton’s birthday offer additional evidence of the BPP’s attempts to insert itself into California’s radical movement. The article then demonstrates how media representations of Newton further publicized the BPP. Coupled with the ambiguity of the BPP’s own rhetoric, this attracted both welcome and unwelcome attention, facilitating the BPP’s rise to prominence just as it encouraged repressive actions against the organization’s members. The voluminous FBI reports on BPP activities as the Free Huey campaign accelerated are testament to the magnitude of the FBI’s interest in the BPP, which was piqued by the BPP’s early forays into the public consciousness; the Free Huey campaign simply confirmed to the FBI that the BPP needed neutralizing. The article’s final section argues that Newton’s absence enabled the BPP to elevate him to near-mythological status, a process intended to maintain the campaign’s momentum but that stored problems that manifested themselves following his release in 1970. The campaign consequently emerges as the central event in the BPP’s history and as an exemplar of radical campaigning in 1968.

5 argues that the campaign intended to ensure that Newton would not be executed whilst elevating him to a symbol of everything that the BPP was fighting for and against, so countering the accusation that he was merely a criminal.7 It ensured that the people of the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond understood the disputed facts of the case and became aware of Newton’s importance to the African American

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struggle against white power. It also built upon the BPP’s early street protests to render the area around the Alameda County Courthouse a focal point for activists, the police, the media, and the wider community. Rallies nearby brought great publicity to Newton and the BPP, and evoked the pomp of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association parades. As important, the campaign transformed the BPP. On the night of Newton’s arrest, it was little more than a community group with a handful of members. Its co-founder Bobby Seale later admitted that, at this point, the BPP had ‘totally fallen apart; it didn’t exist.’8 The recently arrived SNCC activist Kathleen Neal, BPP stalwart Emory Douglas, and Eldridge Cleaver – who soon married Neal – reinvigorated an organization that was little more than the three individuals themselves.9 By the Free Huey campaign’s conclusion, the BPP was an international sensation with thousands of dollars pouring into its coffers each month and tens of thousands of sympathizers across the world. Accurate membership numbers are impossible to verify, although it is safe to state that the numbers of Panthers increased exponentially between October 1967 and November 1968.10

6 The campaign itself took numerous forms. One tactic was to ensure that members of the Party and the community were always present in the courtroom’s public gallery. This was to convey a threefold message: first, to remind Newton that the BPP was not abandoning him. Second, it reminded the court that the BPP was watching, a little like the Party’s police patrols did to the Oakland Police Department. With an African American man on trial and a gallery full of African American faces facing a white judge, white lawyers, and a majority white jury, the racial connotations of the trial would be on show throughout. Third, their presence gave the press another opportunity to publicize the Party. The Oakland Tribune, for example, regularly noted the BPP supporters in the courtroom, inadvertently suggesting that the BPP had a membership that far exceeded its real numbers.11

7 Another tactic was to reach out to other organizations, most notably the PFP and SNCC, in an effort to broaden the BPP’s support base and build a viable support infrastructure, something that the small and inexperienced BPP lacked. That Newton would be tried by a majority-white jury encouraged the BPP to reach out to the white community. It announced an alliance with the PFP in late December 1967.12 Aware that the PFP needed allies in the black community and that its links with the antiwar, civil rights, and campus movements suggested that it was committed and sincere, Eldridge Cleaver felt that it was well placed to aid Newton’s cause. As important, a BPP alliance could bring extra momentum to the PFP’s faltering quest to place itself on the ballot in the November 1968 election, particularly in the Bay Area’s black communities.13 The alliance thus signified the BPP’s tacit acceptance that electoral politics might be a necessary step towards the revolution, and that the two-party system in the nation could be disrupted and ultimately overthrown, whilst providing the BPP an infrastructure through which it could promote itself. In March, Eldridge Cleaver reinforced this message, informing the PFP’s convention of the BPP’s quest for a UN- observed plebiscite of black America over their national destiny.14

8 The alliance ensured the vigorous pursuit of the Free Huey campaign, enabling its slogan to become one of the rallying cries of the era. Immediately after its announcement, even the antagonistic Tribune published the BPP’s Ten Point Platform and Program, while the PFP flooded the Bay Area with literature publicizing both Newton and the BPP.15 It thus repositioned the BPP on the radical left while cementing

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Eldridge Cleaver’s position at the Party’s core. It also boosted the demonstrations at Newton’s trial. In November, sixty Panthers were present for Newton’s second court appearance. A court hearing late in December saw roughly 400 demonstrators, including numerous PFP members. Such was the fervor that one protester was inspired to scale the courthouse’s flagpole to remove Old Glory and re-raise it upside down to signify that the nation was in distress. The radical-countercultural magazine delightedly revealed that Newton’s supporters packed the court and reported a successful ‘Honkies for Huey’ meeting that same week, illustrating that the BPP was now a significant player in Bay Area radical circles.16

9 The other major coalition of the Free Huey period was with one of the storied organizations of the 1960s civil rights movement. Newton inducted Kwame Ture (then known as Stokely Carmichael), one of SNCC’s greatest organizers and one of the most prominent black activists in the world, into the BPP in June 1967, hoping to take advantage of his renown and organizational experience. By the end of 1967, the two organizations’ mutual appreciation extended to the negotiation of a formal bond. This foundered, however, over whether it was a formal merger, as the BPP’s negotiator Eldridge Cleaver thought, or a more flexible alliance, as SNCC’s James Forman believed. 17 The arguments would rumble through 1968 as SNCC withered and the BPP focused more intently on freeing Newton.

10 Early 1968 saw the emergence of the third chief tactic within the Free Huey campaign and the first major outcomes of the alliances. The BPP organized two major events for Newton’s birthday weekend: in Oakland on February 17, and in Los Angeles the following day. Designed to announce the partnership with SNCC and give Ture the opportunity to speak, the birthday galas were major publicity coups. Ture met with Newton in prison shortly before the Oakland gala. The discussion was apparently not as straightforward as Ture’s dazzling smile to reporters on his exit suggested, however. Rumors suggested that the two disagreed over the roles of whites and armed revolution in the African American struggle. Ture, who had witnessed the betrayal of SNCC by many of its white supporters in the previous three years, felt that Newton was naïve in believing that the BPP could prevent its white allies dominating the BPP-PFP relationship.18

11 The first gala was a mixed success. The Oakland Auditorium, almost within earshot of Newton’s cell at the Alameda County Courthouse, filled with a mixture of black, white, young, old, employed, and jobless, demonstrating widespread support for Newton. Speakers included Bob Avakian of the PFP; SNCC’s Ture, Forman, and H. Rap Brown; Newton’s mother, and his attorney Charles Garry. Ron Dellums, the recently elected Berkeley City Councilman, announced his intention to table a council motion for Newton to be set free. At center stage stood the empty wicker chair that Newton occupied for his famous photoshoot with spear and rifle. Its emptiness was a simple and effective visual ploy. A reprise took place at the Sports Arena in Los Angeles on the following day, with Maulana Karenga, a former Afro American Association colleague of Newton and founder of the LA-based African American pressure group US, and local pastor the Reverend Thomas Kilgore replacing Dellums. A crowd numbering over 3,000, including six FBI informants and one FBI agent observed matters.19 The FBI’s presence both indicated the increased importance of the BPP during 1968 and offers a taste of the extensive counterintelligence operation that the FBI waged against the BPP.

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12 Stills from Huey! Dir: Pugh (American Documentary Films, 1968). Above, left to right: unknown male, Seale, Newton’s chair, Ture (who donned his dashiki immediately before giving his speech), Brown. Below, Newton’s portrait, as depicted in Huey!

13 The BPP’s newspaper lauded the Oakland gala as the ‘first liberated rally ever held in Babylon.’20 The printed press was more hostile, and television merely ignored it, apparently a consequence of the BPP demanding $1,000 for broadcast rights. Berkeley’s KPFA radio station known colloquially as Pacifica, recorded it for radio broadcast. Famed for its willingness to engage with the Bay Area’s radicals, Pacifica’s presence demonstrates that the BPP had maneuvered itself into the center of the Bay Area radical movement.21 American Documentary Films, a radical filmmaking collective that was preparing a documentary about the BPP, also recorded the event. Its production, Huey!, juxtaposed footage of the rally with footage of BPP Treasurer Bobby Hutton’s April 1968 funeral, some white supremacists, and various Oakland police officers, before soliciting the opinions of white oppression held by some Oaklanders in a

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barbershop. Concluding with excerpts from Ture’s speech, the documentary offered a sympathetic outsider’s perspective, suggesting that the BPP sat at the core of 1968’s political expression.22

14 This coverage revealed that tensions existed at the heart of the BPP’s new coalition. Forman struggled to define the terms of the alliance.23 Bobby Seale reinforced Newton’s centrality to the BPP and the wider racial struggle before discussing the BPP’s Ten Point Platform and Program, its firearms policy, and in the community.24 In contrast to the polite applause that met Seale’s speech, pandemonium followed Rap Brown’s address. In his now familiar sunglasses and beret, Brown opened with a denunciation of before stating that the only difference between Lyndon Johnson and George Wallace was the fact that ‘one of them’s wife’s got cancer.’ Anticipating Ture’s speech, he denounced integrationism, although he mused on the potential of a rainbow alliance of the dispossessed led, of course, by black revolutionaries.25 Anointed Prime Minister of Afro-America to the crowd’s further acclaim, Ture then took the stage. Uneasy at the BPP-PFP alliance, he begrudged the presence of PFP luminaries at the event. (This was somewhat ironic given that the PFP funded Cleaver and Seale’s trip to invite Ture to the rally. He might have raised a smile, however, at the knowledge that they apparently had to denounce the PFP as liars and racists before receiving the cash.26) As if to underscore the division between him and his new comrades, Ture eschewed the BPP uniform of black leather jacket, beret and rollneck jersey in favor of a dashiki: attire more associated with Pan Africanism.27 The Tribune reported that Ture’s thoughts on the Newton trial were straightforward: Newton would be freed, or else.28 His apocalyptic speech, however, gave little indication of his sympathies for the BPP’s program, instead focusing on the value of racial nationalism to the worldwide liberation struggle. He concluded to a standing ovation, ‘The major enemy is the honky,’ a position that directly challenged the BPP’s willingness to enter into alliances with white radicals.29

15 His speech placed the BPP in a bind. It was in no position to censure its most famous recruit, despite a public address that opposed one of its own core tenets. Yet this bind is revealing of the BPP’s attempt to embed itself within the rival (black) nationalist and (white) radical political groups. This might also have prompted Ture’s insistence that the ideology of the BPP was ‘up for grabs’ in early 1968.30 Schooled in the fissiparous atmosphere of leftist and civil rights pressure groups, Ture was a wily political operator, always attentive to such schismatic tendencies. Later in 1968, Eldridge Cleaver reflected on this maneuvering, arguing that Newton’s arrest and the formation of the PFP represented an opportunity to unite Bay Area blacks with radical whites behind Newton, one that worked to the BPP’s advantage.31 Whilst skeptical of Ture’s brand of nationalism, Cleaver was acutely aware of the publicity that Ture’s appearance – and controversy accompanied it – would bring to the BPP and that enveloping Ture within the BPP would bring great benefits to the organization even though it might be problematic at a personal and ideological level.

16 Meanwhile, James Forman brokered talks with various African American groups in an attempt to extend the BPP’s foothold in southern California.32 Such work ensured that the February 18 Los Angeles rally included a cross-section of African-American radicals. The speeches that day lacked Oakland’s electricity but reinforced the sense that the BPP was entangled in a struggle for the future of African-American radicalism in California. Seale’s speech embraced the broad sweep of post-Civil War American history

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and offered a potted guide to the BPP, before ending with a ‘Free Huey or else’ chant.33 Karenga, safe on home turf, outlined his belief that only nationalism offered the black population a legitimate political ideology before telling his audience: ‘Let’s talk about how to get white people fighting each other…. Let them shoot each other… and after it’s all finished we will have a better world.’ He finished by praising Newton as a ‘symbolic figure’ for the black community.34 Rap Brown raised laughter that was loud enough even for the FBI to notice when he pondered ‘The only thing that Huey Newton is guilty of, perhaps, is that he didn’t tell me he was going down on the honkies that day.’ After repeating some of the themes of his Oakland speech he concluded nihilistically, ‘We say freedom or death. Fuck it. Black Power, brother.’35 Ture repeated many of the themes of his Oakland speech, adding that his audience should be prepared to kill police in retribution should Newton be executed.36

17 The Birthday Galas, then, reveal the inconsistency in the public messages associated with the BPP during the early stages of the Free Huey campaign. This was in part a consequence of the glare of publicity leading to the BPP’s growing pains occurring more or less in public. Observers such as the many FBI agents who tracked the organization and the press outlets that were keen to emphasize internecine disputes in the African American struggle thus gathered enough raw material with which to work. The rallies also intensified police repression of the Party. Within one week Bobby Seale was arrested in his own home and charged with conspiracy to commit murder, and numerous Panther activists were stopped and searched by local police, prompting Newton to mandate that all BPP members ‘acquire the technical equipment to defend their homes and their dependents.’37 Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice appeared at the end of the month. It was an instant sensation, selling hundreds of thousands of copies and propelling Cleaver, and hence the BPP, to international celebrity.38

18 In January, Newton gave his last press interview without Charles Garry ready to pounce on any missteps. Garry’s presence meant that interviews could take place in the courthouse’s attorney-client meeting room rather than in the dramatic surroundings of Newton’s cell.39 Reframing Newton not as a criminal – literally behind bars – but as a free man whose liberty was only temporary restricted, this could reinforce his claims to innocence by presenting him in less suggestive surroundings, even though it undercut the BPP’s suggestion that Newton was already a martyr. Illustrating the extent of the BPP’s rise, Newton’s interviewers in March were KPFA, the Los Angeles Times, his comrade Eldridge Cleaver, and Joan Didion, whose spare journalistic style was beginning to attract major attention. Didion’s piece appeared in the Saturday Evening Post on May 4 and raised the BPP to another level of celebrity. 40 It was perfectly calibrated to appeal to the Post’s genteel, conservative readership, although that issue’s cover, depicting The Beatles meeting the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India, suggested that the Post cautiously embraced elements of 1968’s counterculture, albeit in the guise of the spiritual quest of the most popular rock group of the era. While Didion suggested that the matter of Newton’s guilt was irrelevant to the situation facing the BPP, she lamented Newton’s preference for rehearsed political statements over personal confession. ‘Almost everything Huey Newton said had that same odd ring of being a “quotation,” a “pronouncement” ready to be employed whenever the need arose,’ she sniffed before suggesting that she saw Newton as little more than an ‘educational fun- fair machine… where pressing a button elicits great thoughts on selected subjects.’41 I kept wishing that he would talk about himself, hoping to break through the wall of rhetoric, but he seemed to be one of those autodidacts for whom all things specific

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and personal present themselves as minefields to be avoided even at the cost of coherence, for whom safety lies in generalization.42

19 In a later revision, Didion reflected that she was pretentious, self-absorbed, and somewhat bored during the late 1960s, belatedly acknowledging that she was unsuitable to interview, let alone understand, Newton.43 Her desire to engage Newton – a man she had not previously met – at a highly personal level exposes Didion’s youthful sense of rather than Newton’s inarticulacy. Similarly, her unpleasant reference to Newton’s education and its impact on his articulacy again reinforces the suggestion that the interview was an exercise in condescension. Rather than celebrating Newton’s determination to overcome the failures of his schoolteachers it instead reinforced any existing prejudices held by Didion’s readers even as it brought the world of the BPP further into the suburban homes of middle America.

20 By the publication of Didion’s article, such was the BPP’s repute within radical circles that the Ramparts editor David Welsh was writing that the Newton trial would ‘rock this rotten system to its foundations.’44 The BPP’s newspaper went further still, asserting that the Newton trial ‘marks the end of history.’45 Regular press conferences fed a constant stream of information to the media, the BPP’s newspaper could be found almost everywhere in the Bay Area, and flyers coated lampposts, walls, and windows. The BPP even developed a speaker’s kit, designed to offer its representatives bite-sized histories of the Party, biographies of its jailed leaders, and information on the BPP’s various legal cases and their significance for the wider African American population. This information was designed to ensure that each BPP speaker could not only detail the Newton trial but also facts pertaining to a plethora of cases, ranging from low-level harassment to police brutality, thus presenting Newton’s case as symptomatic of a wider system of repression.46

21 Even Eldridge Cleaver’s arrest following the death of BPP treasurer Bobby Hutton during a shoot-out with Oakland police in April 1968 did not contain the Free Huey campaign: Seale and Kathleen Cleaver simply took over as major spokespersons. Soon afterwards, Seale compared Newton to Jesus, echoing the BPP newspaper’s insistence that, like the Son of God, Newton ‘laid his life on the line so that twenty million black people can find out just where they are at.’47 Here, the BPP began Newton’s martyrdom, calling on Christian iconography to establish his innocence and saintliness. Whilst this was a little paradoxical given the BPP’s advocacy of Marxism (not to mention somewhat hyperbolic), it referenced the importance of Christianity to vast swathes of the African American population and created a narrative for Newton that was familiar to any American observer. It also slyly indicted the American government, suggesting that Newton’s life, like Jesus’s, hung on the whims of a capricious legal system that could sentence him to death despite being innocent of any capital crime.

22 Newton’s trial opened with the BPP in determined mood. That week’s newspaper was covered by a photomontage of Newton, headlined: ‘Free Huey Now: Huey Must Be Tried By His Peers.’48 Chanting and fist-raising Panthers paraded in front of the Alameda County Courthouse, helping to transform the public image of the Party. Rather than a disorganized rabble, the BPP appeared as highly organized and regimented, militarized even. Rather than a chaotic gathering of gun-happy youths, it was a disciplined unit. In mid-July, the BPP held a sequence of rallies in the Bay Area, all monitored by the FBI.49 Crowds peaked on July 15, with even the FBI noting the impressive sight of 1,500 people gathered outside the courthouse.50 The San Francisco Chronicle estimated that twice as

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many were present, chanting ‘Free Huey’ in an ‘awesome outburst’ of popular sentiment that was met with a police baton charge in an effort to clear the vicinity.51 Unfortunately, the BPP could not maintain the momentum. By the week’s end, numbers were dwindling, and the demonstrations ceased before the end of the month.52 The recently-bailed Cleaver, meanwhile, met with the Cuban and Tanzanian delegations at the United Nations Building in , and promised that he and other BPP members were prepared to die ‘before seeing Huey Newton sentenced to death.’53 The BPP then called for UN Observers to be placed in all American cities that had black ghettos. ‘This action is necessary,’ the BPP newspaper stated, because the racist power structure of this imperialist country is preparing to unleash a war of genocide against her black colonial subjects. Black people, on the other hand, are determined to resist this aggression by any means necessary, including revolutionary armed struggle. The hour of showdown for racist- imperialist America has dawned. The case of Huey P. Newton will be the spark that will set this showdown in motion.54

23 The BPP’s warnings reflected wider sentiments. mused that the trial could create the first martyr of the American left since the Italian-American anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. Many believed that the anarchists were executed for their political beliefs rather than for the crime they were supposed to have committed. 55 Newton, who likewise was as much on trial for his politics and his race as he was for Frey’s death, thus transfigured into the pre-eminent symbol of revolution as the country reeled from the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy. The Berkeley Barb, in full apocalyptic mode, told its readers ‘History has its pivotal points. This trial is one of them.’ It was, the Barb warned, ‘life or death for the United States.’56

24 Such extravagant language had its roots in the early stages of the Free Huey campaign. At a meeting prior to the February rallies SNCC’s James Forman outlined a taxonomy of retaliation should any African American militant leaders be assassinated: for his own death, he considered a fair price the destruction of ten ‘war factories,’ fifteen police stations, thirty power plants, one southern governor, two mayors, and 500 police. The cost for Ture and Rap Brown would be tripled, ‘and I tell you this,’ he promised, ‘the sky is the limit if you kill Huey Newton. The sky is the limit if Huey Newton dies.’57 He repeated the slogan at the Oakland birthday rally. By April, the slogan ‘Free Huey, or the Sky’s the Limit’ was on placards wielded by sympathizers at various Bay Area protests and as Newton’s trial jury considered its verdict, the BPP’s own newspaper devoted its cover to the same line.58

25 This famous slogan was more than simply a rhetorical ploy. In the first instance, ‘Free Huey’ offered blanket condemnation of the very trial itself. If the jury found him guilty, it was merely a consequence of the iniquity of the American legal system, as established in Point Nine of the BPP’s foundational document, specifically Newton and Seale’s somewhat Marxian understanding that a jury of Newton’s peers should include people from ‘similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background[s].’59 The slogan also reminded Panthers and other observers of the historic crimes perpetuated against African American people by the very legal system that was supposed to protect them. ‘Free Huey’ went further, however, rejecting even the suggestion that Newton could receive a fair trial. In denying even the slim possibility that a jury of Newton’s peers could be selected, it denounced the American legal system while asserting Newton’s innocence. Bobby Seale elaborated, stating that

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any claim for a fair trial represented ‘old white liberal[ism]’ and an ‘endors[ement of] continued racism,’ an implied swipe at the faith of the mainstream African American civil rights movement in using the law to address black inequality and white racism. Kathleen Cleaver was even blunter: ‘Asking whether a black man can get a fair trial in America is tantamount to asking if a Jew could get a fair trial in Nazi Germany.’60

26 The slogan’s second clause was more complex. ‘The sky’s the limit’ suggested that the BPP was fully prepared to take whatever means necessary to obtain justice should Newton not be freed. Seale later recalled that this statement was essentially ‘anarchistic.’61 Within the context of the BPP’s willingness to present arms in public, protest at the California State Capitol, and offer stinging rebukes to the white power structure, it was tantamount to suggesting that the BPP was readying itself for war. When pressed, though, Panthers stated that ‘the sky’s the limit’ referred to their willingness to go to the highest court in the land – the United States Supreme Court – to ensure Newton’s liberty.62 This took advantage of the statement’s ambiguity and echoed Charles Garry’s courtroom strategy in Newton’s defense. During the trial, Garry called Dr. J. Herman Blake from UC-Santa Cruz to testify about the gulf between the literal and metaphorical meanings of BPP rhetoric. He outlined the concept of signifying, a linguistic strategy used heavily by black Americans, in which the speaker talks about one particular idea while having a completely different idea in mind. The example Blake used on the witness stand was a group of young men talking of a ‘fine day today’ when a pretty woman walks past.63 The comment might ostensibly be about the weather but it also signifies the speaker’s appreciation of the woman’s beauty. If this concept were applied to ‘the sky’s the limit,’ one might suggest that the BPP had the Supreme Court in mind when using the metaphor. This claim is untenable, however. The BPP considered the California judicial system to be racist, unfair, and unrepresentative of the population. No factors suggest that the nine justices of the Supreme Court were any less so. Meanwhile, elsewhere, Seale promised reporters ‘that Huey P. Newton must be set free or the sky is the limit around the world,’ including locations well outside the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction, and Cleaver told that the BPP would do ‘anything within our power’ to protect Newton from the death penalty.64

27 Nevertheless, the BPP was canny enough to know that a full-frontal attack on white America was never more than a fanciful folly. The ‘sky’s the limit’ slogan ultimately existed both to terrify observers and rally supporters, to tap into the former’s fears of African American revolutionary power and the latter’s desire to take immediate action against oppression. The slogan’s call for action chimed with 1968’s revolutionary zeitgeist more so than any legal contingency plans. In this sense, the year’s many other upheavals were firmly encoded in the statement. As important, the BPP reemphasized rhetorical ambiguity as a key weapon in the oppositional struggle. Allied to the press coverage of the rallies and the trial itself, it suggested to whites that the BPP was more powerful than they could imagine and presented the few Panther sympathizers who were able to gain access to the courtroom as the tip of a revolutionary iceberg. It simultaneously rallied black Americans around a cause that appeared ever more apocalyptic as 1968 progressed, while suggesting that Newton was a martyr-in-waiting, again elevating him beyond his mere corporeality. With violent disorder convulsing cities across the nation in the wake of Dr. King’s assassination, the Democratic National Convention descending into chaos, and the third phase of the Tet Offensive wreaking

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havoc in Vietnam, the BPP’s statement both exploited and contributed to a tense national atmosphere.

28 The jury decided in September to convict Newton of voluntary manslaughter, a decision that Garry denounced as ‘chickenshit,’ but that saved Newton from the death penalty.65 It might have initially been a shock, but the BPP regrouped and resolved to continue the campaign, spurred perhaps by the reaction of the Oakland Police Department to the verdict. Two of its officers announced their disgust by offloading a volley of bullets into the BPP’s Grove Street headquarters in the early hours of September 10.66 The special issue of The Black Panther on September 14 retorted that the BPP would free Newton, with a portrait of the BPP leader hovering above the ‘sky’s the limit’ slogan which itself rested over a rifle. Two photographs cited the slogan and presented one young man brandishing a Bowie knife and a revolver, ready to pounce, and another aiming a rifle at an off-camera target. Kathleen Cleaver’s accompanying editorial painted an apocalyptic picture of the repression of the BPP within a Marxian critique of American capitalism, concluding that the African American population faced a stark choice between ‘total liberation or total extinction.’67

29 By the end of the year, however, the Free Huey campaign downshifted. With Newton removed to the state prison at Vacaville and subsequently the men’s colony at San Luis Obispo, Oakland-based demonstrations lacked a focal point.68 Now that the death sentence had been avoided, the BPP could shift focus to Newton’s absence, mythologizing his role in the creation and definition of the BPP. Bobby Seale wrote of the community’s role in rescuing Newton in The Black Panther in December 1968, shortly after Eldridge Cleaver fled the US to avoid returning to prison. He mentioned a plan to petition the Supreme Court to declare a mistrial but nary a mention of the sky being the limit should Newton remain imprisoned.69 The quiet abandonment of the slogan might suggest the BPP’s awareness that it was more problematic than it first appeared. More important, it reflected the recalibration of the BPP’s rhetoric and strategy, which accelerated with Cleaver’s exile.

30 Meanwhile, Newton’s physical absence paradoxically became the basis for his omnipresence. Thus his image appeared everywhere the BPP was present. He stared out of the masthead of the BPP’s newspaper each week, his profile eerily echoing Alberto Korda’s image of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, perhaps the quintessential 1968 symbol. Shot from below and lit from the left, both photographs elevate their subjects, offering them an omniscient gaze. Both men look sternly outwards, suggestively to the viewer’s left. Both sport berets, Guevara’s trademark headgear. According to Bobby Seale, he and Newton chose the beret after watching a movie about the French Resistance, in which the resistance fighters wore the headgear.70 Their decision was thus a conscious display of their antifascist credentials, one that Guevara’s death – which occurred three weeks before John Frey stopped Newton – intensified. Within months, Korda’s image became an icon, reproduced on posters, banners, and handbills across the world, helping to render its subject a legend who willingly sacrificed himself for the masses and in the process achieved apotheosis.71 The subtle, albeit unconscious, echoes of Korda’s photograph in the pages of The Black Panther fueled Newton’s own myth and suggested a similar construction of his image.

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31 First Image: Cropped version of Alberto Korda ‘Guerrillero Heroico – ’ (public domain)

32 Second Image: ‘All Power to the People’ badge (from the New York Public Library at https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/c9e83030-6be8-0135-6bb0-0550f5bf58c1; public domain). This features the same image as that used on The Black Panther’s masthead

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33 While the FBI was working to prevent the rise of a black messiah, the BPP also attempted to keep Newton the intellectual in the public eye, issuing a number of his writings and opinions, placing them in outlets such as the radical publications The Movement and the Berkeley Barb.72 The desired impact was manifold. By touting his work to other publications, the BPP opened up new revenue streams while reducing the pressure on its own organization to reach out to wealthy white radicals. Such income was essential to keep on top of the escalating cost of bail and legal fees for arrested Panthers. While the BPP presented Newton as a martyr of the black revolution, his writings ensured that he was ever present in the minds of members and supporters, enabling the BPP to maintain the momentum of the early months of the campaign.

34 This was not merely about Newton’s role as a revenue stream or focal point of BPP organizing, however. His ongoing writings ensured that he became not simply a symbol of the BPP’s campaign but one of its driving forces. By continuing to issue his writing, the BPP suggested that his incarceration was only a temporary hiatus to his physical activities and no barrier to his intellectual leadership. Newton’s prison writings might therefore be compared to Dr. Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, disseminated as a tool through which to reveal the injustice of the prevailing justice system while also ensuring that jail did not remove the writer from the struggle. Supporters could thus draw sustenance from his continued determination to fight while Newton had something to focus on during the long hours of solitary confinement that he endured.73

35 As important, such work burnished Newton’s intellectual credentials. While feted for his activism in radical circles, Newton was not renowned as an intellectual, as Didion’s dismissal suggested. The BPP Ten Point Platform and Program was in the process of becoming a classic of 1960s protest literature but Newton’s thought did not move far beyond its tightly focused ideas until his incarceration. Missives such as ‘In Defense of Self-Defense’ and ‘The Correct Handling of a Revolution’ – both written before his conviction and neither as renowned as the Platform and Program – suggest that Newton’s parameters broadened during his imprisonment. The first warned African Americans that they were close to being railroaded toward destruction and remains the greatest demonstration of Newton’s rhetorical brilliance. Its historical sweep extends from the colonial period to the 1960s, encompassing the genocide of the American Indians, internment of Japanese Americans in the 1940s, and even atomic diplomacy. It notes bitterly that, despite all of the peaceful protesting, political lobbying, praying, and petitioning, the tyrannical grip of white America over black America showed no sign of loosening. After drawing this dystopian tableau, it offers a stark conclusion: as Fanon concluded of the Algerian independence movement, armed resistance was the only option remaining.74 It thus positioned California at the forefront of the racial struggle, and placed the BPP at the very heart of 1960s protest. Using the Cuban Revolution as a model, ‘The Correct Handing of a Revolution’ presents the vanguard party as the essential vehicle for the revolution that would lead the people away from inchoate protest towards guerrilla warfare and urges readers to heed Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, another indication of the broadening of Newton’s intellectual horizons.75 This sequence of publications allowed Newton to develop a broader platform for the BPP and demonstrate that he was using his jail time to immerse himself in radical literature, place the BPP’s current struggles in context, and develop new directions for the Party to pursue. His writings thus played a crucial role in

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ensuring that Newton lived up to his billing as a central figure in the African American struggle.

36 In February 1969, Berkeley’s community theater hosted a birthday rally for over 2,000 supporters who heard a special tape-recorded message from Newton extolling the rainbow alliance of anti-imperialists and promising a new offensive that would bring about the revolutionary change that the BPP craved. Charles Garry gave a barnstorming speech, followed by the BPP’s friend, Reverend Earl Neil, who opined that the empty wicker chair onstage symbolized not merely Newton’s absence but the absence of any meaning in society without Newton.76 Neil’s mythmaking deepened the BPP’s attempt to render Newton a living martyr. Where the empty chair at the 1968 galas was an ominous vision of what might occur should the campaign fail, in 1969 the chair represented both Newton’s physical absence and his divine, even transcendental presence. He thus achieved omniscience: always listening, always thinking, and always watching. His apotheosis continued to give the BPP purpose but also detached him from his own humanity. He was no longer capable of error, doubt, or vacillation.

37 Panegyrics to Newton were not confined to the BPP’s propaganda unit. In April 1969 the New Left activist Stew Albert wrote in the Berkeley Barb, Huey’s greatness can not [sic] be locked up in San Luis Obispo…. Huey Newton is a giant who turns other men into giants…. Huey P. Newton’s greatness is that he took the best thoughts of the greatest minds the century has known and summed it up in a law book, a shot gun and a ten-point program…. Huey is a generator, the purest light of freedom our generation has produced.77

38 This was to have a major impact on Newton’s post-prison life following the reversal of his conviction in 1970.

39 Newton’s official response to freedom was telling. While expressing gratitude for his legal team’s work, he announced his belief that popular opinion, expressed largely through the BPP’s public actions, compelled the court to reverse his conviction. As important, he argued that release from prison did not constitute freedom, citing Malcolm X in the process: ‘I’m being transferred for institutional convenience, as they say, from maximum security to minimum security.’ Freedom, he suggested, could only begin with the release of all African American political prisoners; moreover, America itself was, for its black population, the prison.78

40 His release also revealed the extent to which his sanctification was complete. The Washington Post declared that he had achieved ‘legendary proportions’ among the American left and put a photograph of his release on its front page.79 Shortly afterward, Newton held court at a press conference in Charles Garry’s offices, where he seemed overwhelmed at the attention.80 In the FBI’s headquarters, J. Edgar Hoover plotted his next move, telling his agents that Newton’s release ‘offers excellent opportunity for effective counterintelligence.’81 Indeed, underneath the jubilation, the New York Times’s Earl Caldwell noticed a chilling fact: during the trial, hundreds of Panthers marched in the streets; by August 5, 1970, few remained. Significant numbers were in prison or were dead.82

41 FBI counterintelligence, disruption, and physical assaults combined with the BPP’s own structural weaknesses to hobble the organization in the years after Newton’s return. Yet in 1968, the alliances wrought by the BPP promised a new, radical successor to the civil rights movement’s interracial coalition. As the Birthday Galas suggest, this attempt at coalition building was fraught with a tension that ultimately prevented such

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a grand radical movement forming. The BPP learned that it could not dominate the entire radical movement as it had the PFP in late 1967 and early 1968, not least because it needed to contend with African American radicals whose popularity exceeded its own. Yet the Free Huey campaign, and specifically its combination of the galas’ pageantry with the BPP’s rhetorical flair, demonstrates the popular fervor in California for the BPP’s diagnosis of the United States’ problems during 1968 and the extent to which the BPP became an emblematic organization of that year.

42 Newton’s mythologizing – and the popular acceptance of him as a living martyr – also reflected these times and constituted the key factor in the BPP’s revitalization. With icons such as Dr. King and Malcolm X in their graves, Newton’s supporters feared the murder of another of a black American leader. Through sanctifying Newton, the BPP attempted to wrestle control of the African American struggle’s agenda while raising itself to international prominence. Newton briefly became a cypher through which many American radicals could project their oppositional tendencies, abetted by a propaganda campaign that elevated him into a position normally reserved for the sanctified. Yet, as Joan Didion’s profile suggests, the BPP could not control its popular image, revealing the Free Huey campaign to be as suggestive of the backlash against protest during 1968 as it was a perfect example of such protest. This backlash was certainly informed by the BPP’s own rhetoric, which was ambiguous enough to become a palimpsest onto which any observer could inscribe their own feelings about 1960s radicalism. Thus, the apocalyptic tenor of this rhetoric might have excited BPP supporters and fellow travelers but it also enabled the BPP’s opponents to justify state and federal repression. The BPP struggled to maintain the campaign’s early momentum, not least because the FBI and local police subjected its leadership cadre, and increasingly the rank-and-file, to concerted disruption. So, even as the organization tapped into 1968’s revolutionary atmosphere to boost its campaign to free Newton and suggest that the revolution was just around the corner, this very atmosphere and this very suggestion attracted the forces of reaction who sought to cage California’s Black Panthers.

43 Proper names: Newton Huey P., Frey John, Seale Bobby, Guevara Ernesto ‘Che’, Zedong Mao, Fanon Frantz, Shabazz Betty, X Malcolm, Heanes Herbert, Rhodes Jane, Cleaver Eldridge, Austin Curtis, Murch Donna, Spencer Robyn, Bloom Joshua, Martin Waldo, Wilson Joel, Barber David, Bae Aaron, Pearlman Lise, Cleaver Kathleen (nee Neal), Garry Charles, Garvey Marcus, Douglas Emory, Cleaver Eldridge, Ture Kwame (Stokely Carmichael), Forman James, Brown H. ‘Rap’, Dellums Ron, Karenga Maulana, Kilgore Thomas, Hutton Bobby, Marshall Thurgood, Johnson Lyndon, Wallace George, Didion Joan, Welsh David, King Dr. Martin Luther, Jr., Kennedy Robert F., Blake Dr. J. Herman, Eisenhower Dwight, Hilliard David, Korda Alberto, Neil Earl, Albert Stew, Hoover J. Edgar, Caldwell Earl

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NOTES

1. Oakland Tribune 5 January 1969, cited in Jane Rhodes, Framing the Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon (New York: New Press, 2007), 116-117. 2. Earl Caldwell, ‘Newton is Freed on $50,000 Bail’ New York Times August 6, 1970, 24; idem., ‘Young White Army Rallies to Newton’ NYT August 7, 1970, 14; ‘Huey P. Newton’s release from prison’ KPIX Eyewitness news report, August 5, 1968 at https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/sfbatv/ bundles/208428 (consulted April 26, 2018) 3. Rhodes, Framing the Black Panthers 103-5, 116-80, 190. 4. Curtis J. Austin, Up Against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party (Fayetteville: University of Press, 2006) 114, 127, 170, 183-4; Donna Jean Murch, Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010) 139, 151-4, 155-62; Robyn C. Spencer, The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016) 66-7, 80-1. 5. Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr., Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013) 104-5, 109-14, 123, 126, 135-6, 144-5, 273, 288; Aaron Byungjoo Bae, ‘The Struggle for Freedom, Justice, and Equality Transcends Racial and National Boundaries: Anti-Imperialism, Multiracial Alliances, and the Free Huey Movement in the San Francisco Bay Area’ Pacific Historical Review 86 (2018), 691-722; Joel Wilson, ‘Invisible Cages: Racialized Politics and the Alliance between the Panthers and the Peace and Freedom Party’ and David Barber, ‘Leading the Vanguard: White New Leftists School the Panthers on Black Revolution’ in Jama Lazerow and Yohuru Williams (eds.), In Search of the Black Panther Party: New Perspectives on a Revolutionary Movement (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006) 191-251. 6. Lise Pearlman, The Sky’s The Limit: People v. Newton, The Real Trial of the 20th Century? (Berkeley: Regent Press, 2012) 331-475. 7. Cleaver cited in Rhodes, Framing the Black Panthers, 118. 8. FBI telegram, October 28, 1967 Huey Newton FBI File #HQ105-165429 section one (hereafter FBIHPN); FBI report, ‘The Black Panther Party for Self Defense’ November 16, 1976, 16, 23 Eldridge Cleaver FBI file #100-HQ-447251 Section 29; Seale comments in All Power to the People (Lew-Lee, 1996) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBNiERw0WYU (consulted July 18, 2016) at 24 minutes. 9. Stephen Shames and Bobby Seale, Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers (New York: Abrams, 2016), 29; Kathleen Cleaver (ed.), Target Zero: A Life in Writing, Eldridge Cleaver (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 118; Jane Rhodes, ‘Black Radicalism in 1960s California: Women in the Black Panther Party’ in Quintard Taylor and Shirley Ann Wilson Moore (eds.), African American Women Confront the West, 1600-2000 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 351. 10. Shames and Seale, Power to the People, 32 suggests 5,000 members in November 1968. 11. Rhodes, Framing, 119 12. Bloom and Martin, Black, 109. 13. Cleaver, ‘Bunchy’ in Cleaver (ed.), Target Zero, 127-128; Shames and Seale, Power, 34; Wilson, ‘Invisible Cages’, 194; ‘New Left on Coast Begins Ballot Drive’ New York Times August 16, 1967, 18. 14. Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party (London: Arrow, 1970), 240-241; Eldridge Cleaver, ‘Black Paper by the Minister of Information’ (text of a speech at the PFP founding convention, March 16, 1968) The Black Panther Black Community News Service May 4, 1968, 12 (hereafter The Black Panther).. 15. Rhodes, Framing, 122-3

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16. Seale, Seize the Time, 240; Pearlman, Sky’s The Limit, 342, 351-352; ‘Backers Pack Court for Huey’ Berkeley Barb 5, 24 (December 15-21, 1967), 1, 3. 17. Huey P. Newton, Executive Mandate No. 2: June 29, 1967 in Toni Morrison (ed.), To Die for the People: The Writings of Huey P. Newton (New York: Writers and Readers Publishing, 1972), 9-10; Peniel E. Joseph, Stokely: A Life (New York: Basic, 2014), 87-94, 97-99,161-163; Austin, Up Against, 129-132 18. Joseph, Stokely, 240-241. 19. Ibid., 243; FBI letter, March 5, 1968, 1-3 FBIHPN section one; transcript of speeches, February 18, 1968 rally, Los Angeles, 13 FBIHPN section one; FBI report, ‘Huey Percy Newton’ May 24, 1968, 15 FBIHPN section one; Huey! dir: Sally Pugh (American Documentary Films, 1968) at https:// diva.sfsu.edu/collections/sfbatv/bundles/191359 (consulted January 28, 2016). My thanks to Eamonn Kelly for uncovering the secret history of this documentary. 20. ‘Huey Must be Set Free’ The Black Panther March 16, 1968, 20. 21. Rhodes, Framing, 127. 22. Huey (1968). 23. James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (: University of Washington Press, 1997), 531. 24. Audio recording of Bobby Seale speech at February 17, 1968 BPP rally at ‘Huey Newton Birthday Rally February 17, 1968 (Bobby Seale, H Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael)’ https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_uwaka7dKU (consulted January 25, 2016). 25. ‘H. Rap Brown Free Huey Rally, February 1968’ transcript at The Pacifica Radio/UC Berkeley Social Activism Sound Recording Project: The Black Panther Party http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/ MRC/rapbrown.html (consulted January 25, 2016: hereafter UCB: BPP); Pearlman, Sky’s The Limit, 358; Pictures of Oakland rally The Black Panther March 16, 1968, 12-13. 26. Wilson, ‘Invisible Cages,’ 201, 219n43; Seale, Seize the Time, 245-246. 27. Pictures of Oakland rally The Black Panther March 16, 1968, 12-13. 28. Rhodes, Framing, 125. 29. ‘Stokely Carmichael Free Huey Rally, February 1968’ transcript UCB: BPP http:// www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/carmichael.html (consulted January 25, 2016); ‘H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael in Oakland’ KQED News report, February 17, 1968 at https://diva.sfsu.edu/ collections/sfbatv/bundles/189468 (consulted January 28, 2016); Rhodes, Framing, 126. 30. Ture quoted in Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 280. 31. Morry Wright, ‘If the Pigs Don’t Kill Cleaver, Watch Him’ Berkeley Barb 7, 5 (August 2-8, 1968), 11. 32. Earl Anthony, Picking up the Gun: A Report on the Black Panthers (New York: Pyramid, 1971), 103-104. 33. FBI transcript of Bobby Seale speech at February 18, 1968 rally, Los Angeles, 15-26 FBIHPN section one. 34. FBI transcript of Ron Karenga speech at February 18, 1968 rally, Los Angeles, 36-43 (quotes 40, 42) FBIHPN section one. 35. FBI transcript of H. Rap Brown speech at February 18, 1968 rally, Los Angeles, 47-56 (quotes 49, 56) FBIHPN section one. 36. FBI transcript of Stokely Carmichael speech at February 18, 1968 rally, Los Angeles, 57-84 FBIHPN section one. 37. Seale, Seize the Time, 256-257; ‘Interview with Bobby Seale’ KPIX Eyewitness News report, February 25, 1968 at https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/sfbatv/bundles/206885 (consulted January 28, 2016); ‘Complaint for Injunction and Declaratory Relief’ April 19, 1968 Huey P. Newton collection microfilm at Northumbria University reel 7: illegible file name (fifth such file on reel); Huey P. Newton, ‘Executive Mandate No. 3: March 1, 1968’ in Morrison (ed.), To Die 12-13 (quote).

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38. Kathleen Rout, Eldridge Cleaver (Boston: Twayne, 1991), 62, 100, 134, 164; Colin McGlashan, ‘Black Panther Warning: ‘Set Huey Newton Free – or the sky’s the limit’ The Observer September 8, 1968, 5. 39. Pearlman, Sky’s The Limit, 355; Joe Street, ‘Shadow of the Soul Breaker: Solitary Confinement, Cocaine, and the Decline of Huey P. Newton’ Pacific Historical Review 84 (2015), 343. 40. Marc Weingarten, The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote & the New Journalism Revolution (New York: Three Rivers, 2005), 116-123. 41. Joan Didion, ‘Black Panther’ Saturday Evening Post May 4 1968 in Reporting Civil Rights: Part Two, American Journalism 1963-1973 (New York: Library of America, 2003), 676, quote: 679. 42. Ibid., 678. 43. Joan Didion, The White (Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 1979), 20. 44. ‘From Riches to Rags on Road to Revolution’ Berkeley Barb 6, 12 (March 15-21, 1968), 8; David Welsh, ‘Huey, the Police, and the White Community’ The Black Panther March 16, 1968, 14. 45. ‘Huey Must be Set Free’. 46. Rhodes, Framing, 145, 149. 47. Henry Weinstein, ‘“Free Huey”: A White Man’s View’ Daily Californian May 20, 1968, 15; ‘Huey Must be Set Free’. 48. The Black Panther June 10, 1968. 49. Rhodes, Framing, 153; ‘A Rally For Huey Newton’ San Francisco Chronicle 15 July 1968, 2; FBI teletype 16 July, 1968; FBI teletype 17 July, 1968; FBI teletype 19 July, 1968; FBI teletype, July 20, 1968; ‘Trial of Huey P. Newton’ FBI letterhead memo, July 22, 1968, 1; ‘Trial of Huey P. Newton’ FBI letterhead memo, July 22, 1968, 2; FBI teletype 19 July, 1968: all FBIHPN section two. 50. ‘Trial of Huey P. Newton’ FBI letterhead memo, July 16, 1968 FBIHPN section two; ‘Black Panthers Support Huey P. Newton at the Alameda Courthouse’ KTVU News footage July 15, 1968 at https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/sfbatv/bundles/220765 (consulted January 28, 2016). 51. ‘“Free Huey, Free Huey” – An Awesome Outburst’ San Francisco Chronicle 16 July 1968, 1, 16; ‘Bobby Seale Describes Police Conduct at Alameda Courthouse’ KTVU News footage, July 15, 1968 at https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/sfbatv/bundles/220766 (consulted January 28, 2016). 52. ‘Trial of Huey P. Newton’ FBI letterhead memo, July 22, 1968, 2; ‘Trial of Huey P. Newton’ FBI letterhead memo, July 29, 1968, 1; ‘Trial of Huey P. Newton’ FBI letterhead memo, August 16, 1968, 3: all FBIHPN section two. 53. FBI teletype, ‘Trial of Huey Newton’ August 8, 1968 FBIHPN section two. 54. ‘Free Huey at the U.N.’ The Black Panther September 14, 1968, 3. 55. Ward Just, ‘The Making of a Martyr’ Washington Post July 28, 1968, B2. 56. James Schreiber, ‘Crossroads Trial: Nation’s Life at Stake’ Berkeley Barb 7, 3 (July 19-25, 1968), 3. 57. Forman, Making, 526. 58. Carson, In Struggle 282; Pearlman, Sky’s the Limit 397; The Black Panther September 7, 1968, 1; FBI memo, July 16, 1968 FBIHPN section two; ‘Bobby Seale Calls for Huey P. Newton’s Release’ KPIX Eyewitness News report, c. August, 1968 at https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/sfbatv/ bundles/190419 (consulted January 28, 2016). 59. ‘October 1966 Black Panther Party Platform and Program’ in Philip S. Foner (ed.), The Black Panthers Speak (New York, Da Capo, 1995), 3. A later and equally notorious Bay Area trial proved that the BPP was correct to claim that a jury of one’s peers was likely to be friendly. Former San Francisco City Supervisor Dan White shot and killed the city’s mayor, George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk in November 1978. His trial jury included a considerable number of people who, like White, were working-class Catholics. None lived near the Castro, the center of San Francisco’s gay community and Milk’s adopted locality; none were black, gay or lesbian. He was acquitted of murder and convicted of voluntary manslaughter. Randy Shilts, The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk (London: Penguin, 1993), 309.

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60. Both quotes: Weinstein, ‘Free Huey’, 16. See also Wilson, ‘Invisible Cages’ 199-201; Wallace Turner, ‘Negroes Press Nomination of Indicted Militant’ New York Times February 5, 1968, 70. 61. Shames and Seale, Power, 31. 62. Seale, Seize the Time, 277; Pearlman, Sky’s The Limit, 467-468. 63. Charles Garry and Art Goldberg, Streetfighter in the Courtroom: The People’s Advocate (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1977) 142. 64. ‘Bobby Seale Calls for Huey P. Newton’s Release’; Wallace Turner, ‘Black Panthers, White Power: Violent Confrontation on Coast’ New York Times July 20, 1968, 10. 65. Garry and Goldberg, Streetfighter, 150. 66. Bloom and Martin, Black, 199. 67. ‘The Sky’s the Limit’ The Black Panther September 14, 1968, 5; ‘The Sky’s the Limit’ ibid., 8; Kathleen Cleaver, ‘Racism, Fascism, and Political Murder’ ibid. 68. Street, ‘Shadow’, 343. 69. Bobby Seale, ‘Huey Newton: How the Black Panther Party and the community can still set him free from prison’ The Black Panther December 21, 1968, 7. 70. Shames and Seale, Power, 42. 71. Michael Casey, Che’s Afterlife: The Legacy of an Image (New York: Vintage, 2009), 48-49, 110-3, 123-133. 72. FBI airtel, March 4, 1968, 3 FBI COINTELPRO: Black Extremist 100-448006 section one; Rhodes, Framing, 164-165. 73. Street, ‘Shadow,’ 334-7, 340-9. 74. Newton, ‘In Defense of Self Defense: Executive Mandate Number One’ in Foner (ed.) Black Panthers Speak, 41. 75. Newton, ‘The Correct Handling of a Revolution’ ibid., 40-45 (quote, 44); idem., ‘Talks to The Movement’ ibid., 50-66. 76. Tim Findley, ‘Newton’s Message at Berkeley Party’ San Francisco Chronicle 17 February 1969, 8; ‘Message From Huey’ The Black Panther 3 March 1969, 2. 77. Stew Albert, ‘Freeing Huey: Here’s How to Do it’ Berkeley Barb 8, (17 April 25-May 1, 1969), 3 (reprinted The Black Panther May 4, 1969, 3). 78. ‘Message from Huey, June 2, 1970’ The Black Panther June 6, 1970, 3. He nods to Malcolm X, ‘Message to the Grass Roots’ in George Breitman (ed.), Malcolm X Speaks (New York: Grove, 1965), 8. 79. Leroy F. Aarons, ‘Hundreds Greet Newton on Release from Prison’ Washington Post August 6, 1970, A3 (quote); ‘Huey Newton Savors Freedom’ Washington Post August 6, 1970, 1. 80. Huey Newton comments at San Francisco press conference, c. Aug. 5, 1970, UCB: BPP http:// www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/pacificapanthers.html#1970 (consulted Feb. 19, 2013); ‘Huey P. Newton’s release from prison’ KPIX Eyewitness news report, August 5, 1968 at https:// diva.sfsu.edu/collections/sfbatv/bundles/208428 (consulted April 26, 2018). 81. FBI teletype August 6, 1970 FBI Black Extremist 100-48006 section twenty. 82. Caldwell, ‘Young White Army Rallies to Newton’ New York Times August 7, 1970, 14.

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ABSTRACTS

In October 1967, the co-founder of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, Huey P. Newton was arrested and charged with the murder of a police officer. His organization, which was on the point of collapse, rallied around him, courtesy of a major campaign that ran through his trial and his two years in prison, making ‘Free Huey’ a rallying cry for radicals across the globe. It transformed the BPP into one of the most visible political organizations of the era whilst redefining Newton as one of the key icons of 1968. As important, the ‘Free Huey’ campaign enabled the BPP to surf 1968’s radical tide, forging links with other radical groups as it grew to international prominence. Yet this newfound fame was not unproblematic, since it revealed the ambiguities of the BPP’s philosophy and elevated Newton to mythic proportions that no living human could match. The ‘Free Huey’ campaign thus reveals both the ability of radical groups to generate and exploit the revolutionary fervor of the year and the problems inherent in such an approach.

INDEX

Keywords: Black Panther Party, San Francisco Bay Area, African American radicalism, 1968, Protest, 1960s protest, Free Huey, rhetoric, signifying, mythologizing, FBI, Black Power

AUTHOR

JOE STREET

Joe Street is an Associate Professor in American History at Northumbria University, Newcastle, UK. He specializes in 20th century American and African American history, having written several articles on the 1960s and the civil rights and Black Power movements, including “The Historiography of the Black Panther Party” (Journal of American Studies, no. 44) and “The Shadow of the Soul Breaker: Solitary Confinement, Cocaine, and the Decline of Huey P. Newton” (Pacific Historical Review, no. 84). He is also the author of the monographs Dirty Harry’s America: Clint Eastwood, Harry Callahan and the Conservative Backlash (University Press of Florida, 2016) and Culture War in the Civil Rights Movement (University Press of Florida, 2007). He is currently writing a new volume on the Black Panther Party to be published with the University of Georgia Press in 2021.

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Black Power on Campus: Challenging the Status Quo in Chicago ‘68

Caroline Rolland-Diamond

1 Scholarly and popular accounts of Chicago in 1968 bring to mind images of violence that have overshadowed all forms of social and political activism in the city at that time1. During the night of April 4, as news of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination spread, the West Side erupted into what had become a usual scene of black desperation. Before the night had ended, burned cars, looted stores, broken bottles, rocks, and street battles between thousands of black residents and overwhelmed police officers provided the local version of the expression of anger that took center stage in black ghettos across the nation. A few months later, the city experienced another spell of violence when the Chicago Police Department brutally clashed with antiwar protesters outside the Hilton hotel during the Democratic National Convention. These two stories prominently appear in many Sixties retrospectives, usually after a brief mention of the 1966 Open Housing campaign led by King as part of his attempt to “bring the movement north.”2 But they usually are told separately, intersecting only insofar as civil rights activists, young black “rioters,” and New Left activists all ran into the muscular Chicago-style politics of law and order under the all-powerful mayor Richard J. Daley.

2 In the vast literature on the Sixties, a relatively small number of studies focus specifically on student mobilization, and the Windy City seldom makes the list of American cities affected by major college student protests. The first wave of Sixties scholarship emerging in the late 1980s and 1990s dealt almost exclusively with white New Left students, often members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). These studies have provided us with rich accounts of student radicalization and of the role of the growing antiwar movement in this process. Since that time, other scholars have expanded our knowledge of the connections between the New Left and the counterculture, the rise of the , and the role student journalists played in the links between the New Left, the labor movement, and the civil rights movement.3 Yet, most accounts have explored the Movement as it unraveled at

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prestigious universities, such as and the University of California at Berkeley, or in a specific college town, such as Madison, Wisconsin and Austin, .4 Neither the University of Chicago (UC) nor Northwestern University (NU) in the leafy suburb of Evanston to the north—Chicago’s most elite universities—were the site of spectacular confrontation between student activists and the administration that lasted long enough to make national or international headlines.

3 Since the 2000s, scholars have examined the mobilization of black college students on a series of campuses from Cornell University to the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, San Francisco State College, and Merritt College in Oakland.5 Again, Chicago has only appeared as second fiddle in this new wave of studies. Martha Biondi’s Black Revolution on Campus stands as the only work covering the Chicago scene with its account of the short-lived black student protests that took place at Northwestern University in May 1968, and at Crane Junior College (today Malcolm X College) on the city’s Near West Side in 1969.6 Taken together, these stories are invaluable to documenting the various faces of Black Power on campus and to historicizing the hopes and expectations that surrounded the creation of the first Black Studies departments across the country. They are also key to understanding, in the words of historian Ibram Rogers, how this wave of student activism constituted a “social movement in its own right.”7 As Donna Murch’s Living for the City and Jakobi Williams’s From the Bullet to the Ballot have shown, black student activism should not be seen as a mere product of larger campaigns for civil rights and Black Power but actually played a crucial role in the invention of Black Power.8 Adopting a similar approach, this article takes black student protesters seriously as full-fledged activists. Yet it argues that focusing exclusively on the actions of African American students on campus obscures other local mobilizations led by African American college students in collaboration with Latinx and white radical students, as well as non-student activists to transform their universities and their city.

4 This article bridges the gap between the growing scholarship on the local Black Power movement that focused on the mobilization of neighborhood activists, and the more limited body of literature on Black Studies and Black Power on campus. It shows how black college students in Chicago acted in close collaboration with other activists, on and off campus, to alter the racial and social status quo in Daley’s Chicago. By examining the role black college students played in a citywide movement, challenging racial and social inequalities in the late 1960s, this article illuminates the connections that existed between student activism and neighborhood politics in the urban North. It argues that black college students played a key role in maintaining the interracial collaboration that was necessary for the radical challenge social and racial justice activists tried to create in Daley’s Chicago. It tells a story that adds college students alongside radical community organizers, welfare mothers, labor unionists, and grassroots politicians to the list of Black Power activists who tried to reinvent the meaning of American democracy in the long Sixties.

1. Black Power on Campus

5 Many scholars have shown that Black Power did not suddenly emerge in 1966 when Stokely Carmichael, the new chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), uttered these magic words in Greenwood, , but rather

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evolved years before out of the mobilizations of radical labor activists, black nationalists, low-income mothers, preachers, and ex-Communists. Chicago is no exception. To anyone who cared to look, Black Power sensibilities were very visible on the city’s West and South Sides by the early 1960s. Grassroots organizations such as the militant protest group The Woodlawn Organization (TWO) were already discussing issues of black pride, empowerment, and self-determination that would become standard Black Power demands in the second half of the decade. African American parents who participated in the massive Freedom marches and one-day that kept thousands of black pupils away from school (225,000 on October 22, 1963, about 124,000 in February 1964, and about 100,000 in June 1965) to protest overcrowded and dilapidated schools demanded both “equality now” and “community control” of neighborhood schools. To them, racism pervaded Chicago’s education and housing policies under Mayor Daley. As evidence of this racism, superintendent of Chicago public schools Benjamin Willis decided to shorten the school day for black students, institute double shifts and install temporary classroom trailers (quickly dubbed “Willis Wagons”) instead of transferring black students to nearby white schools with empty classrooms. Regaining control of the schools, they believed, was the only way to ensure quality education for their children.9 Meanwhile, since 1964 the militant group ACT, founded by Lawrence Landry, had been organizing regular protests against all-white fire-stations, as well as police harassment and brutality in black neighborhoods.10

6 Few college students were involved in ACT in the first couple of years of its existence, but as the group spread its message of “self-determination, self-respect, and self- defense” among poor black residents, it started to attract a number of students determined to use their college education to make a difference.11 Black Power sensibilities fully reached Chicago campuses in 1966 in the aftermath of the failed Open Housing campaign led by Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to desegregate housing in the city. The empty promises of the “pact” signed by King and Mayor Daley to end the protests left many activists involved in the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO), the umbrella organization of community groups involved in the Chicago Freedom Movement, steaming with anger.12 Many black college and high school students had participated in the Chicago Freedom Movement, and their disillusionment led to impatience with the slow pace of change in the city and in its schools and universities, in a context marked by a larger movement for student power and the radicalization of the black movement for justice and equality.13

7 As the Black Power message of racial pride, nationalism and empowerment resonated with an increasing number of black youths, protest started to brew on campuses across the city. At the University of at Chicago Circle (UICC), the local branch of the University of Illinois that opened in 1965, as well as at Loop Junior College, Wilson Junior College, and other campuses of the Chicago City Colleges, activists formed chapters of the Afro-American Student Association (AASA). Members of this new organization, which was modeled after the black student unions created around the same time in other parts of the country, shared their views on readings by such thinkers as Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X, and discussed what they believed was their unfair treatment as black students in white-dominated universities.14 Such discussions led to demands for support and recognition by the administration and faculty. Through 1966 and 1967, members of these chapters directed most of their energy at raising their

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student consciousness about the status of minorities on campus. Yet their concerns were never limited to university issues, and they tried to rally other youths to the larger cause of black liberation and empowerment in the city. At a time when black communities across the nation were divided over strategy—between the more moderate approach favored by organizations like the Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the more confrontational Black Power one supported by SNCC and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)—these young radicals highlighted the crucial role black college students had to play within the community.15

8 James Harvey, a student at Wilson Junior College (today Kennedy-King College) in the South Side neighborhood of Englewood, was one of them. An active participant in the organization ACT, he helped to organize a “Black Power Forum” on campus on December 7, 1966. While this “forum” was only attended by about twenty people, the discussion reflected the new ideas that were circulating among a small group of black college students—members of ACT and the local AASA chapter. Fully aware of the strong resistance mustered by “Daley’s Democratic machine” to any challenge to its power, black college activists picked up an idea explored around the same time by the Chicago Freedom Movement: reaching out to the members of the powerful South Side gang, the Blackstone Rangers, to unite them with college students and ghetto youths in Black Power bloc around the objective of community empowerment. Considering the balance of power in Chicago, only such an alliance had the potential to effect social change in the two massive South Side and West Side ghettos. Particularly promising in their eyes (and worrisome in the eyes of the undercover police officer who attended the meeting) was the Rangers’ recent politicization. The gang was planning to run an aldermanic candidate for the next municipal election to challenge the local candidate handpicked by the Daley machine, as well as to open businesses to “keep the money in the community.” Such attempt at “black unity” reflected the rising militancy of the larger black movement for justice and equality that was hardly unique to Chicago: a pamphlet entitled “Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afroamerican Student” that circulated on campuses throughout the Midwest advocated a similar alliance of students, residents, and gang members.16

9 In 1967 and 1968, efforts to link student activism and community empowerment intensified. The Afro-American Student Association sought to mobilize black college and high school students in coordination with ACT and grassroots West Side and South Side community organizations. During their meetings, the young activists discussed numerous issues ranging from the rights of African Americans in the war in Vietnam to school inequalities, urban renewal programs, and police harassment.17 The group Black, Active and Determined (BAD) organized several operations on campuses to alert their “brothers and sisters” to the necessity of mobilizing actively on and off campus to challenge the racial and social status quo.18 In June 1967 at the University of Chicago, the newly formed Society for the Promotion of Lobbying in the Interest of Black Students (SPLIBS) submitted a list of demands to the administration: increasing the number of black undergraduates and setting up academic support programs for both prospective students from nearby high schools and UC students. 19 Four months later, head of SPLIBS Linda Murray directly attacked the university for being racist and displacing poor black residents from Woodlawn “the same way it had already done in Hyde Park.”20

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10 Like their counterparts in other cities, Chicago’s black students, influenced by Malcolm X’s speech on Afro-American history and by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton’s views on Black Power, began to forcefully demand change in curricula and admissions as a first step toward their “liberation.” Echoing Malcolm’s call to use “any means necessary” to achieve their goals, they threatened the administration of their respective schools with disruption if their demands were not met. Confronted with this new militancy, most universities and colleges were forced to listen as they grew concerned about their ability to avoid disruptions to their operations. They were not the only ones worrying. Black student activism was closely monitored by members of the Chicago Police Red Squad as it was no longer limited to a few colleges and universities. In the fall of 1967, black high school students across the city started to voice their anger at what they considered to be conditions of racial discrimination visited upon them by white students, teachers, and school administrators. And, like their older peers in college, they drew a direct link between their “oppression” at school and the way the overall “white power structure” operated in Chicago under Mayor Richard J. Daley. As these students lived at home in the city’s impoverished black neighborhoods, the connection was not hard to see. And like black college students, they were determined to make their voices heard.

11 On November 22, 1967, the Chicago Sun-Times covered several incidents of “school unrest” that escalated into violence on the city’s Near North Side. The series of incidents started at Waller High School, a school in which black students represented just under 50% of a total of about 2,400 students and Puerto Ricans another 5-6%. After a black student claimed to have been pushed around by white students, hundreds of his fellow schoolmates took to the streets to demand respect. The protest escalated when the school principal called the police, prompting the youth to go into the nearby housing project for support. After a clash with the police, protest broke out at Cooley High School, where 1,000 out of the school’s 1,700 students walked out against police harassment in solidarity with Waller students. Further south, at Englewood High School, a school listed as 99.9 % black, 400 students protested the dismissal of Owen Lawson, a teacher accused of “over-emphasizing Negro history,” and threw bottles at the police. Two years after the last school , the issue of school community control was still hot. Private schools were not exempt from this wave of protest: at nearby Mendel Catholic High, a school with only 100 black students out of a total of 1,400, African American pupils charged “mistreatment by faculty and other students” and demanded that “Negro achievement be recognized in Mendel’s history classes,” that the school hire black teachers, and that it cease its “unfair grading” of black students.21 On February 21, 1968, on the third anniversary of Malcolm X’s assassination, students from Calumet High School and Hyde Park High School clashed with their school administration and the police when they tried to commemorate the slain activist and his legacy. They circulated a leaflet extolling Malcolm X and Black Power at fifteen high schools with a high or substantial number of black students, encouraging a significant number of students to walk out.22

12 Meanwhile, college students continued to organize. In January 1968, Black students at UICC staged an all-night sit-in at the administration building to protest both the beating of a black student of Dominican descent by the campus police and the larger discrimination they faced at the two-year old public institution. They published a pamphlet denouncing “repression” and calling for “student control of student affairs.”

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While the university’s agreement to open dialogue and investigate the alleged beating temporarily defused the situation at UICC, mobilization continued. In February, after three young men were shot and killed on the campus of State University in Orangeburg during a civil rights protest, black students from Crane Junior College on the Near West Side of Chicago held a funeral march in the neighborhood. In the previous two years, the organizing energy of Stan Willis, Robert Clay, and Henry English, all working-class students from the area, had turned Crane into a hotbed of black power and community activism. Using the Afro-American History Club they had founded in 1966 as a platform to invite black nationalist speakers on campus, they advocated for a new curriculum and the recruitment of more black teachers and administrators in order to “make Crane intellectually and socially relevant to the community as a whole.”23 On March 6, 1968, the Black Conscious Committee, composed of black students from Roosevelt University, met to discuss the best ways to “make black people more aware of their status and role in the white community.” As a first step towards mobilization, the group recommended that “Black people should be more cognizant of current black orientated literature, magazines, and the work of black brothers.”24 Like their peers at other educational institutions in the city, the main concern of Roosevelt’s black students was the “community,” and they advocated the need for “Black control of Black schools in Black communities.”25

13 The same year, UICC, Roosevelt, and Crane students actively participated in the creation of the Black Student Congress with representatives from thirteen other Chicago colleges. Formed to “organize Black students for liberation,” the Congress issued a 17-point “statement of purpose.” The activists mixed what had by then become traditional black campus movement tropes, such as demands that the “curriculum of [their] respective colleges and universities be re-oriented for Black People with Black teachers for a Black Studies program,” and for “the establishment of a Black educational institution for Black people,” with declarations of support to “all revolutionary movements of non-white peoples in their struggle against oppression,” and “the right of armed struggle” against “the racist police state.” The statement concluded with an ominous call to “maintain maximum ability to obtain our goals, and defend our people by any means necessary.”26 The Black Power storm had fully hit Chicago campuses.

2. Challenging the War, Challenging the City

14 The community orientation of the Black Power movement on Chicago campuses made the growing mobilization of black students very worrisome to municipal authorities. Since the city had won the bid to host the August 1968 Democratic National Convention, Daley had insisted that nothing would come to disturb the proceedings. Selling the image of Chicago as a racially calm city in contrast to other cities like New York, Los Angeles, , and Newark that had been hit by devastating outbreaks of violence, the mayor of Chicago had downplayed the 1966 Division Street and West Side uprisings as mere “juvenile disturbances,” and repeatedly claimed that all Chicagoans loved their city. While the Kerner Commission report on the 1967 urban rebellions highlighted the responsibility of “white America” in the making of the ghetto, Daley did not hesitate to claim that since “there was no ghetto in Chicago,” no trouble was to be expected.27 As for the “outside agitators” who intended to “harass the convention,”

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they were warned that the police were ready to stop them. Yet, as the mayor fully knew, there was no shortage of homegrown “agitators” and “rioters.” To make matters worse, this diverse and growing group seemed determined to join their forces.

15 On the South Side and West Side, Chicago Freedom Movement activists continued to press for justice and equality in education and housing, and were increasingly adopting the militant tone of Black Power activists. While Daley’s reelection in 1967 for his fourth term as mayor left many disillusioned about their ability to challenge the Democratic machine, the announcement of a desegregation plan for Chicago public schools by the new Superintendent of Schools, James Redmond, who replaced Willis in 1966, revived mobilization. Adopted under pressure following the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO)’s complaint that the city’s school system violated Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the federally-mandated plan included a very controversial busing plan to alleviate overcrowding in black schools. While the local black community was divided over the meaning and potential effects of the busing plan, the strong resistance opposed by white parents to its implementation galvanized black activists. 28 They joined the chorus of voices, on and off campus, denouncing the role of the city in maintaining racial inequality and fueling racism through its educational and urban renewal policies.

16 Not all the opposition was directed at the Daley administration. Indeed, the war in Vietnam attracted its share of protesters, but because the Democratic National Convention was going to take place in Chicago, the mayor took any antiwar activity as an attack against him. The antiwar movement had steadily developed on Chicago campuses since 1965, and included activists from SNCC, Students for a Democratic Society, the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (SMC), the Chicago Peace Council (CPC), and the Chicago Area Draft Resisters (CADRE), an umbrella group of people and organizations who opposed the U.S. Selective Service System. While protest activities were often dominated by white college students, black opposition to the war was widespread. Galvanized by their awareness of the racial inequalities of the draft system and by their outrage at the repression world heavyweight champion and Nation of Islam member faced when he refused his induction, many black students publicly denounced the war as “brutal and racist.” They were not the only ones doing so. On March 25, 1967, during his first appearance at an antiwar march, Martin Luther King also came out forcefully against the war. After leading 5,000 people down State Street with Al Raby of the CCCO, King told the crowd that he opposed the war because it was immoral, racist, and took money and attention from War on Poverty programs. This declaration reflected King’s progressive radicalization since the days of the Open Housing Campaign and the “pact” with Daley. As the SCLC leader also increasingly denounced the economic inequalities that prevented true progress for black Americans and advocated for a guaranteed income for all, he warned the nation that the stakes were high. In the title of what became his last book, he asked “Where do we go from here: chaos or community?”29

17 While King did not convert to Black Power, his opposition to the war and his insistence on the necessary focus on community empowerment resonated with young black activists in Chicago, and encouraged them to mobilize against the upcoming convention alongside grassroots activists. Black students became more vocal against the war. Robert “Bob” Brown, a former CORE activist who had been elected the regional chairman of SNCC in 1967, participated in many antiwar meetings and rallies alongside

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white activists, and was often heard leading chants of “Hell, No, We Won’t Go!”30 On January 27, 1968, the National Black Anti-War and Anti-Draft Union, a group of seventy blacks who had just formed a separate caucus during the Student Mobilization Committee’s national conference at the University of Chicago, announced that it planned to join the April International Days of Protest against the war. James Harvey was selected to be the new group’s regional chairman for Chicago.31 Shortly afterwards, famed black comedian and local civil rights activist declared that he intended to organize daily marches in Chicago starting in May in an effort to move the convention to another city and “to embarrass Chicago into improving housing and economic conditions for Negroes.”32 The 36 year-old was no longer exactly young himself, but his popularity among students guaranteed that his call would be followed by many black youths.

18 The explosion of the West Side on April 5, 1968, following the news that King had been assassinated in Memphis, provided a blatant rebuttal to Daley’s claim that there was no ghetto in his city. The uprising began when high school students clashed with the police. The students had started marching from one school to the next to mobilize fellow students to walk out in some kind of improvised tribute to King. Before order could be restored, nine people had died and large swaths of the West Side had been leveled by fires. While Daley first tried to blame “black nationalists” and “outside agitators” for the outbreak of violence, it was clear to everyone that the West Side explosion was the result of “pent-up frustrations and grievances,” and that it had taken place against a backdrop of poverty, segregation, and despair.33 For the mayor, though, the first order of business was not to address these issues, but to restore order and make sure no similar event would happen again until the convention. To this end, one week after the events, he ordered the Chicago Police Department to “shoot to kill arsonists” and “shoot to maim looters.”

19 The stakes suddenly changed for black activists who had been mobilizing for change in the city. They were ready to use the attention the convention was going to bring as an opportunity. While Black Power activists’ call for self-defense on and off campus took on greater relevance, Dick Gregory cancelled his plans to march in the city and encouraged every black Chicagoan not to participate in the convention protest in order to avoid possible bloodshed. As if to confirm his dire predictions, the April 27 antiwar parade and rally turned violent when the police tried to prevent the crowd numbering about 5,000 people from approaching the Civic Center, resulting in 50 people arrested and 15 others wounded.34 Activists all over the city drew two lessons from the April events: they needed to carefully weigh the possible costs and benefits before launching a protest and, considering the balance of power, the radical activist community needed to close ranks more than ever.

3. Closing Ranks Against the Daley Machine

20 However, in the Black Power era, unity was not easy. On campuses where Black Power sentiments were strong, the key words were nationalism and separatism. For white radical students who had been fighting side by side with black students since the early 1960s, the growing appeal of a separatist rhetoric had created a challenge. Everywhere around the nation, white radicals had been forced to design new strategies and to consider the possibility that their approach, too, was marked by racism, albeit

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unconscious or involuntary. In its “Declaration on Racism” and its “Resolution on SNCC” adopted by the SDS National Council of June 18, 1966, SDS had declared its support of Black Power as a “strategy for social change and a mode of organization” in the wider black ghettoes’ struggle for survival, while recognizing the “enormous problems that ha[d] been raised by the emergence of black nationalism within the movement.” Highlighting the connections between the black rebellion in the American ghettos and the fight against imperialism abroad, SDS officials had then concluded: “We have a special responsibility to fight racism among our own white population. In the context of that struggle against racism in the white population we will be able to aid the struggle for black survival and for black liberation in every way we can.”35

21 One way to provide such help was to become involved in local efforts to empower black, Latinx, and working-class white residents in their struggle to be heard on issues such as the impact of the city’s urban renewal plans and universities’ expansion plans on their neighborhoods. Such efforts were not new. In November 1965, the University of Chicago “Friends of SNCC” chapter had organized a series of weekly seminars to encourage students to support SNCC’s activities down South, as well as to engage in community organizing in North Kenwood and in Chicago’s Hispanic neighborhoods to help people “gain their civil rights.”36 In the context of rising Black Power sensibilities, the dominant mood among activists became more radical. On November 15 and 16, 1966, the Conference on the City and the University (CCU) organized a two-day event on the “Crisis in the City” at the University of Chicago. Seeking to raise greater awareness of the problems faced by neighborhoods such as Woodlawn, the panel discussion brought together the famed radical radio host Studs Terkel, Al Raby, Florence Scala, a West Side resident and leader of the movement opposing the development of a University of Illinois at Chicago Circle campus in the Harrison- Halsted area, and Clark Kissinger, former SDS leader active in the Committee for Independent Political Action (CIPA), a local organization aimed at challenging local Democratic candidates handpicked by the Daley machine. Attended by a large crowd of students, the “Crisis in the City” conference discussed the “Chicago school system, urban renewal housing in Chicago, youth in the ghetto, and the politics of fighting slums.”37

22 The local activists in the Chicago Freedom Movement set up a “School of Community Organizing” (SCO) in the spring of 1967. “Needing ‘hard’ information on urban renewal, public housing, welfare, health facilities, social welfare agencies, census, property ownership,” the Chicago Freedom Movement turned to college students. Black, white, and Latinx volunteers from various campuses were asked to help gather “data on the rules and regulations of existing public aid agencies, voting records of incumbent politicians, graphical illustrations of the financial power structures within the Chicago ghettos, and details on present and contemplated plans for Chicago Urban Renewal.” They were trained during two very intense ten-day workshops in March and April of 1967, with the participation of of the local SDS program called JOIN (Jobs or Income Now), and of Al Raby of the CCCO. A pamphlet describing the initiative explained that “political and economic power for the poor must become working objectives” and that “staff and resources must be redirected toward creating and strengthening organizations of Negro, Spanish, and white poor.” While the research was conducted by college students, the school was largely overseen by community organizers with the objective to “recruit, train, and place some twenty to thirty new

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organizers in the city every three months.”38 A few months later, the School of Community Organizing organized a “free university” in Chicago to continue the research and data collection effort.39

23 Yet, in spite of these initiatives, persistent racial tensions threatened to undermine the radical activist community. At the University of Chicago, SPLIBS kept its meetings closed to white students—even a local student newspaper journalist who wanted to report on their discussions. Separatism was also on the rise in the student antiwar movement.40 When in January of 1968 black members of the Student Mobilization Committee announced at a conference at the University of Chicago that they were forming a separate “Black caucus,” their decision was immediately supported by Latinx students.41

24 Indeed, Latinx students were also organizing at that time. In Chicago, most Latinx students were either of Puerto Rican or Mexican descent. Some student activists decided to join the Latin American Defense Organization (LADO), a local civil rights radical organization formed in the barrio around Division Street and Damen Avenue after the June 1966 uprising in that neighborhood to defend the population against “racism, discrimination, police violence, economic exploitation, and hard living conditions.”42 On the campuses of the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, Loop Jr. College and several high schools in the city, most Latinx students joined the Organization of Latin American Students (OLAS) and made similar demands for recognition and respect as those submitted by their fellow black counterparts. In a city as segregated as Chicago, the appeal of nationalist and separatist discourses among black and Latinx students was not surprising.43 Most minority students did not live on campus but commuted to school from their neighborhood, and their views were informed by the growing mobilization for justice and equality in the city. They were keenly aware that their status as students granted them with a specific responsibility to use the skills and knowledge they acquired to the benefit of the community. While their immediate goal was to transform their universities and colleges, they ultimately worked for the community. Yet, precisely because of this community focus, black and Latinx students were also aware that they needed to make alliances if they wanted to stand a chance to improve the living conditions of the residents of their neighborhood in Richard Daley’s Chicago. They thus continued their mobilization for Black/Brown Power, while remaining open to possible support from white student radicals, as long as they stayed in the driver’s seat.

25 The tensions that followed the April West Side explosion increased in the upcoming months leading to the Democratic National Convention (DNC). As the city made it clear that any disruption during the DNC would be met with force, local black and Latinx student activists were faced with difficult questions: Should they participate in the antiwar activities and seize the opportunity to get heard as “the whole world will be watching”? Would their voices be heard or drowned in the midst of the crowd? Should black and brown students continue their local activities and stay away from an event that increasingly seemed to be heading toward a violent clash between the police and demonstrators? While all were opposed to the war and saw it as an illegal, immoral, and racist war that captured millions of dollars that should have been spent on War on Poverty programs or other grassroots initiatives, many black students believed that the likely clash between protesters and the police made participation not worth the risk. They could be more useful to the cause of black community empowerment if they

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continued their work along with other local activists to force the city to address community concerns such as education, employment, housing, health, and police harassment. Black Power activism increased on local campuses.

26 Like their peers on Chicago campuses, African American students at Northwestern University (NU) also felt that change was necessary. Although their number had more than tripled since 1966, when Northwestern established a specific program to increase black enrolment from some fifty students to about one hundred and sixty, black students remained a very small and isolated minority on campus, and many complained of discrimination.44 On May 3, 1968, around 7 am, they took action. As one student told the guard watching the entrance to the Bursar’s Office that he needed to enter to pick up a form, loud voices rose up nearby, prompting the guard to leave his post. Within minutes, a group of one hundred students, members of the black student organization, For Members Only, had taken control of the building. Their leader, James Turner, presented the administration a petition listing several demands: that Northwestern University recognize its institutional racism, enroll more black students, increase financial aid, create dedicated student housing for black students, establish an African American studies curriculum, and desegregate the university’s real estate holdings in Evanston.45

27 A tense standoff followed. Many in the Northwestern community believed their alma mater ranked high among the racially progressive forces in the Chicago area; they were shocked by the accusation of racism. Moreover, responding to the list of grievances presented in April by representatives of For Members Only and the Afro-American Student Union, Northwestern had already agreed to create a separate meeting room for black students by the next academic year.46 Dean of students Roland Hinz, the only white person allowed in the office the weekend of the Bursar’s Office takeover, went in to negotiate. Thirty-eight hours later, the administration agreed to a large number of the students’ demands, thus ending the confrontation. It promised to reserve student housing for African Americans, increase student participation in policy matters, and create what is today the university’s Department of African American Studies.

28 The “Northwestern pact,” as it became known, divided the NU community. While some radical students deplored the fact that NU had made no concession concerning its real estate holdings in the city of Evanston, most were relieved by the outcome and lauded the administration for finding a way out that avoided both an occupation over several days similar to the one that had taken place at Howard University in Washington in March, and the stalemate and violent escalation that had paralyzed Columbia University in New York City a few weeks before.47 A vocal minority denounced Northwestern’s “capitulation” to black demands.48 To the students, faculty members, local politicians, and members of the general public, who wrote indignant letters to the trustees of the university, to the city’s three major dailies, and to the local student newspaper, Northwestern University was the latest institution to succumb to the Black Power storm that had been gaining strength in Chicago since 1966 and showed no sign of abating.49

29 Indeed, on May 4, 1968, the same day that Northwestern protest ended, three hundred students from the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle (UICC) and members of the Concerned People of the Westside met on campus to discuss the university’s latest expansion plan. Soon, the heated discussion turned to how necessary it was for the local black community to get a greater voice both on campus and in the Halsted-

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Harrison neighborhood where the campus was located. On May 10, some sixty black students from the Illinois Institute of Technology sent an ultimatum to the administration: they demanded an end to the police harassment of students and local residents, a reform of disciplinary procedures, free access to campus facilities for people from the community, admission of more students from the surrounding high schools, and the creation of a black studies department. 50 The following week, African American students from the private Catholic DePaul University threatened the school administration with violent protest if it did not create a Black Studies program, hire black faculty members, and put an end to the discriminatory practices of campus fraternities and sororities.51 On May 15, sixty members of SPLIBS seized control of the University of Chicago administration building to demand that the university enroll more black students, add courses on African American history to its curriculum, and stop expanding in the Woodlawn area until it found housing for the families it displaced.52 A few days later, protests spread to Northeastern Illinois State College and Chicago State College.53

30 The May 1968 events marked a turning point in the way city officials responded to the black college student mobilization. Because of its location in midst of the South Side Hyde Park/Woodlawn/Kenwood area, the University of Chicago had been a regular provider of student activists in support of racial equality since the days the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) was founded there by in 1943. The rise of black student activism in the fall of 1967 and early 1968 could then be interpreted by the mayor’s office as yet another example of student “agitation” at the South Side institution. But when traditionally conservative Northwestern University followed suit, the Daley administration was forced to recognize the growing appeal of Black Power rhetoric and to admit that no institution was protected against accusations of racism. It also came to terms with the idea that protest was growing in unprecedented ways across the city. New institutions that had remained relatively quiescent until then suddenly faced challenges, while others which had already been experiencing mobilization continued to be “attacked.” Worse, while the city of Chicago was trying to recover from the April 4 West Side uprising, Black Power student talk of “ultimatums,” “violence,” and calls to use “any means necessary” to achieve their goals took on a new meaning. Particularly threatening to the Daley administration was the possible rapprochement between radical student activists, black, Latinx and white, and between these student activists and non-student grassroots organizers, or, to put it simply, between the campus and the ghetto.

31 Indeed, SDS members, who were very active both on Chicago community college campuses and at more prestigious universities like UC, Northwestern, DePaul, and Loyola, were also determined to work in support of black and Latinx students on and off campus. After the SDS National Office had tried for awhile to promote student- worker alliances with very limited success, the student organization changed its position in 1968 as it continued its radicalization. It was no longer time to only resist “the system.” Now was the time to organize for the revolution that was both upcoming and necessary. In this perspective, the SDS National Office, based on the West Side of Chicago, designed a new strategy of alliance with revolutionary black and Latinx youth groups under the name “Revolutionary Youth Movement”: while black and Latinx working-class students would be the vanguard of the revolution, radical white students would provide them with all the support they needed, while continuing to organize their own community against racism.54 On the city’s campuses, this strategy translated

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into more joint actions. At Northeastern Illinois State College, white radical students came out in solidarity with black students’ demands and threatened their administration with further disruption if the school did not yield to Black Power demands for changes in the curriculum and admissions.55 Meanwhile, members of the Organization of Latin American Students (OLAS) were trying to raise the consciousness of Latinx students by denouncing their economic, social, and linguistic problems, while developing strategic contacts with SDS, Vanguardia, another Latinx student group at UICC, as well as with the Afro-American Club at Loop Junior.56 More threatening to the universities and to the municipal authorities were the joint student-community actions that continued against the expansion plans of universities such as UC, IIT, or UICC, which the activists tied to the city’s overall urban renewal program.

32 While most black and Latinx youths had stayed clear from the protest during the Democratic National Convention, the violent confrontation that took place only confirmed to the young radicals that it was necessary to maintain multiracial coalitions. If the police were ready to launch what the official investigative report called a full-scale “police riot” to prevent any challenge to the existing balance of power in the city, activists of all backgrounds needed to coordinate their actions.57 While racial and class tensions surely existed between black, Latinx, and white student activists, the shared objective of effecting meaningful change in Chicago made it possible for a powerful multiracial coalition to develop. Contacts and collaborations had by then existed for over two years, in spite of the separatist appeal of Black Power, but they reached an unprecedented level when, by the end of 1968, Bobby Rush and Bob Brown of SNCC, along with twenty-year old , formed the Chicago section of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. For Mayor Daley, who had been keeping a close eye on the rise of black nationalist organizations and student groups in the city, this creation did not bode well, especially as the local BPP soon announced that it intended to collaborate with other activist groups in the city. Daley was determined to prevent such an alliance “by any means necessary.” He ordered the Chicago Police Department to launch an all-out assault on student activists, in collaboration with the FBI Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), the Internal Revenue Service, and the Military Intelligence Group stationed in Illinois. While law enforcement agencies often competed with each other, in Chicago, they displayed an unusual level of collaboration toward the same goal.58

33 Bobby Rush and Bob Brown were already seasoned activists in spite of their young age, but Fred Hampton’s activist record was even more striking: not only had he been active in the NAACP in Maywood, Illinois where he grew up, but he had already managed, as chairman of the West Suburban Youth Chapter of the NAACP, to successfully mobilize the 500 black students of his high school to demand more recruitment of black faculty and administrators, as well as better recreational facilities for Maywood poor black residents. Upon graduation from Proviso East High School, he enrolled in a two-year pre-law program at Triton Junior College in River Grove, Illinois while continuing to be an active leader of the NAACP Youth group. In 1968, he took classes at Crane Junior College and UICC, and decided that it was high time that a section of the BPP existed in Illinois, and particularly in Chicago.59

34 The story of the rapid rise of the Black Panther Party in Chicago and in Illinois is now well known, in part thanks to Jakobi Williams’s book From the Ballot to the Bullet. During the winter of 1968-1969, Black Power student activism reached a new high. For

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instance, in February 1969, members of the Black Student Alliance (BSA) at Roosevelt University organized a series of class disruptions to teach Black Studies, and demanded the creation of a Black Studies Department that would be placed under their control, vowing to continue their action “by ANY MEANS NECESSARY.”60 Similar actions took place at Crane Junior, Chicago State College, Southeast College, UICC, and the University of Chicago, as young activists became galvanized by the arrival of the Panthers. The disillusionment with the ability of the Chicago Freedom Movement to achieve its goals and defeat the Daley machine, as well as the self-defense rhetoric mixed with the paramilitary style and community focus of the Panthers, proved irresistible. By 1969, the Illinois Black Panther Party (ILBPP) was active in many high schools in the city and had established local chapters at Chicago State University, Crane Junior College, Illinois Institute of Technology, Northeastern Illinois University, Roosevelt University, UICC, Wilber Wright Junior College, and Woodrow Wilson Junior College.61 Under chairman Fred Hampton’s leadership, BPP members reinforced the existing alliances between white, Latinx and black youths on and off campus.

35 The “Rainbow Coalition” Hampton formed between the BPP, SDS, the Puerto Rican Young Lords, and the white working-class Young Patriots, created a formidable challenge to Daley. While the Panthers’ free breakfast program, which fed over 2,000 children daily in Chicago, ensured the organization’s popularity in the black ghetto, the Coalition’s attempt at improving housing conditions for poor black, Latinx and white residents of the city, desegregating schools and recreational facilities, addressing the issues of high unemployment and poverty, providing health care facilities to the poor, and denouncing political corruption and police brutality, guaranteed that the Rainbow Coalition and its leader would be high on the list of the local authorities’ “subversive forces” to be “neutralized.”62 Sure enough, on Dec. 4, 1969, the Illinois State police killed Fred Hampton during a raid on his West Side apartment while the ILBPP chairman was sleeping in his bed. Another Panther, Mark Clark, was also killed.63

36 The Rainbow Coalition did not survive the death of Fred Hampton; it fell apart under strong racial and class tensions that were undermining it from the start. Nor did it exist long enough to fully test its ability to effect change in Daley’s Chicago. Racial and social inequalities persisted fairly unchanged until Daley died in office in 1976. Yet the Rainbow Coalition and the other ad hoc multiracial student alliances that developed in Chicago from 1966 to 1969 show how most black student activists understood Black Power as a larger project, of which the transformation of the university was only one part. Ultimately, their goal was to empower the black community politically and socially on and off campus. To this end, Black Power student activists not only used ideas and tools developed outside the campus by grassroots activists to force the universities and colleges to change, but they also brought the rhetorical, research and analytical skills they learned in school to the benefit of grassroots Black Power activists in the neighborhoods. Their action thus highlights the deep connections between the student and non-student Black Power movements, making it impossible to understand them separately. While together these activists did not manage to immediately alter the status quo in Chicago, their mobilization and experience ultimately paved the way towards the future multiracial political coalition that elected Harold Washington as the first African American mayor of the city.

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NOTES

1. See for instance David Farber, Chicago ’68 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); the movie “Medium Cool,” by Haswell Wexler, 1969; and “The Sixties – The Years That Shaped a Generation,” PBS Documentary, 2005. 2. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, (New York: Bantam, 1987) and Maurice Isserman and , America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) are two examples of such surveys of the Sixties. The SCLC’s “northern campaign” plan is presented in Alan Anderson and George Pickering, Confronting the Color Line: The Broken Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in Chicago (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 160-207. 3. In addition to the classic G. Norman Van Tubergen, “The Student Press and Campus Unrest,” Journalism Quarterly 47:2 (1970): 368-372, see John McMillian, Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Kaylene Dial Armstrong, How Student Journalists Report Campus Unrest (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018); and Errol Salamon, “The ‘Free Press’ of Unionized Journalists and Students: An Alternative Journalistic Collaboration.” Journalism Practice 12:5 (2018): 565-584. 4. Stefan M. Bradley, Harlem v. Columbia University: Black Student Power in the Late 1960s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012); Doug Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); Matthew Levin, University: Madison and the New Left in the Sixties (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013). 5. Dikran Karagueuzian, Blow It Up!: The Black Student Revolt at San Francisco State and the Emergence of Dr. Hayakawa (Boston: Gambit, 1971); William H. Exum, Paradoxes of Protest: Black Student Activism in a White University (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985); Richard P. McCormick, The Black Movement at Rutgers (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990); Donald Alexander Downs, Cornell ’69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); Wayne Glasker, Black Students in the Ivory Tower: African American Student Activism at the University of Pennsylvania, 1967–1990 (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts, 2002); Joy Ann Williamson, Black Power on Campus : The University of Illinois, 1965-1975 (Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 2003). 6. Martha Biondi, The Black Revolution on Campus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 79-113. On the making of the first Black Studies departments, see also Fabio Rojas, From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 2010). 7. Ibram Rogers, The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965-1972 (New York: Palgrave, 2012), 18. 8. Donna Murch, Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010) and Jakobi Williams, From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013). Scot Brown in Fighting for Us: Maulana Karenga, the US Organization, and Black Cultural Nationalism (New York: Press, 2003) similarly argues that California public universities and colleges played a crucial role in the rise of political radicalism in the 1960s. 9. Editorial, “WE ACCUSE! Benjamin C. Willis, Superintendent of Chicago Public Schools,” Chicago Defender, August 16, 1963. Dionne Danns, Desegregating Chicago’s Public Schools: Policy Implementation, Policy, and Protest, 1965-1985 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 14-15.

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10. Andrew J. Diamond, Chicago on the Make: Power and Inequality in a Modern City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 181-186. 11. “Urge Poor in 8 Cities to Boycott Poverty War,” Jet 28:15 (22 July 1965): 4; “Group Set ‘Black Power’ Confab,” Jet 30:24 (22 September 1966): 6. 12. Peniel Joseph, “Rethinking the Black Power Era,” The Journal of Southern History 75:3 (August 2009): 707-716. On the Chicago Freedom Movement, see Anderson and Pickering, Confronting the Color Line; James R. Ralph, Northern Protest: Martin Luther King Jr., Chicago, and the Civil Rights Movement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Mary Lou Finley, , Jr. et al. (eds.), The Chicago Freedom Movement: Martin Luther King Jr. and Civil Rights Activism in the North (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2016), and Caroline Rolland-Diamond, Black America: Une histoire des luttes pour l’égalité et la justice (XIXe-XXe siècle) (Paris: La Découverte, 2016), 337-340. 13. William Van Deburg in New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, 2-11), has argued that Black Power activists drew their inspiration from student power protests and sit-ins that showed them that a small cadre of determined activists could shut down universities. The Student Against the Rank movement that took place at the University of Chicago in 1966 is a good example of this. For a detailed study of the links between student and community activism across racial lines, see Caroline Rolland-Diamond, Chicago le moment 68: Territoires de la contestation étudiante et répression politique (Paris: Syllepse, 2011). 14. On the emergence of black student associations on community campuses, see Murch, Living for the City, 71-116, and Peniel Joseph, “Dashikis and Democracy: Black Studies, Student Activism, and the Black Power Movement.” Journal of African American History 88:2 (Spring 2003): 182-203. 15. The teach-in organized on January 26-27, 1968 by the Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity at the University of Chicago to discuss the topic “The Church Confronts Black Power” highlighted this division over Black Power: Ebony magazine editor Lerone Bennett declared “I’m deeply convinced that black power is the only alternative to disaster in this country,” to a mixed crowd of students, clergy, and community activists. “Black Power Trends Examined,” Chicago Maroon, 30 January 1968. See also “Wilkins Raps Separatism in Rights Drive,” Chicago Tribune, 9 January 1968. 16. Investigator’s Report, December 12, 1966, Box 203, Folder 1077 ACT, Red Squad Files, Chicago History Museum (hereafter CHM). “Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afroamerican Student,” Vertical File, C.L. Negroes – Afroamerican Student Movement, Labadie Collection, University of Michigan Library. For more on the politicization of the Blackstone Rangers and the attempts at forging alliances between gangs, civil rights and Black Power groups, see Andrew J. Diamond, Mean Streets: Chicago Youths and the Everyday Struggle for Empowerment in the Multiracial City, 1908-1969 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 261-283. 17. Afro-American Student Association Press Conference and Demonstration, April 15, 1967 and Afro-American Student Association Meeting, April 21, 1967, Box 203, Folder 1077, Red Squad Files, CHM. 18. Black Active and Determined (BAD), “Brothers and Sisters Dig This,” Box 216, Folder 1088 BAD, Red Squad Files, CHM. 19. “Supplementary Statement regarding the 1967 Proposals from SPLIBS,” annexed to the letter sent by the Dean of Students Charles D. O’Connell, to the SPLIBS, May 15, 1968, Document 47, Box 211, Folder 1086 University of Chicago 1967-1971, Red Squad Files, CHM. 20. “Murray Charges that Chicago is Racist Institution,” Chicago Maroon, 31 October 1967. 21. “Teacher’s Ouster Protested by 400 at Englewood High,” Chicago Sun-Times, 21 November 1967; “School Unrest Leads to Near North Side Violence,” “Waller Principal Blames Disturbance on Rumor,” “23 Hurt, Nab 70 in Disturbances near Schools,” Chicago Sun-Times, 22 November 1967; “School Gangs Fight Cops,” Chicago Tribune, 22 November 1967; “Negro Groups Ask Teacher be Returned,” Chicago Tribune, 27 November 1967. For a more detailed analysis on high school

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student protests, see Andrew Diamond and Caroline Rolland, “Au-delà du Vietnam: Chicago 1968 et l’autre mouvement étudiant-lycéen,” Histoire@Politique. Politique, Culture, Société 6 (September- December 2008). 22. “Malcolm X Day Rites Erupt in 2 City Schools,” Chicago Tribune, 22 February 1968. 23. Quoted in Biondi, Black Revolution on Campus, 107. 24. Interview Report, Black Conscious Committee, March 8, 1968, Folder 1086 Roosevelt University (1) 1967-68, Red Squad Files, CHM. 25. Williams, From the Bullet to the Ballot, 68. 26. “Chancellor at U.I. to Hear Negro Gripes,” Chicago Tribune, 20 January 1968; Surveillance report on “Black Power demonstration and sit-in at the UICC on Jan. 19, 1968”, February 2, 1968, and “Repression,” January 25, 1968, Box 212, Folder 1086 UICC 1967-1971, Red Squad Files, CHM; “Black Students of the University of Illinois at Chicago, Statement of Purpose, Box 211, Folder 1086 Southeast Campus Chicago City College, 1968-1970, Red Squad Files, CHM. 27. Mike Royko, Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago (Boston: E.P. Dutton, 1971), 130; Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor, American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley, His Battle for Chicago and the Nation (Boston: Little, Brown, 2000), 483. Kerner Commission, Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968). 28. Danns, Desegregating Chicago’s Public Schools, 19-42. 29. Rolland-Diamond, Chicago le moment 68, 23-71. Martin Luther King, Jr, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967). 30. Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr, Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 131. 31. Interview Report, Student Mobilization Committee, January 27, 1968, Box 198, Folder 1064 B SMC 1968, Document 6, Red Squad Files, CHM; “Student Anti-War Strikes Set,” Chicago Sun-Times, January 30, 1968. 32. “Convention Protest Canceled by Gregory,” Chicago Tribune, 16 April 1968. 33. “Why the West Side Exploded,” Chicago Sun-Times, 14 April 1968. 34. “Intelligence Report, April 24, 1968, Box 209, Folder 1086 IIT, Red Squad Files, CHM; “Anti- War Protesters Battle Police,” Chicago Tribune, 28 April 1968; “Opinion of the People,” Chicago Peace Council, The Struggles. I. A. 7 a, Alternative Literature Ephemera, Northwestern Library Special Collection. 35. “Racism Resolution,” 1966, Students for a Democratic Society Papers, Series 3, Box 36, Folder 6, Wisconsin State Historical Society; “Resolution on SNCC,” passed by the National Council of SDS, June 18, 1966, Spec/Labd 31399769 lab 1-7-99, Labadie Collection, University of Michigan Library. 36. “SNCC plans seminars,” Chicago Maroon, 12 November 1965. 37. “Crisis in the City Reaches Campus with Two-Day Conference at Ida Noyes,” Chicago Maroon, 15 November 1966. 38. Students against the Rank, Spring Work Project, February 22, 1967, Box 201, Folder 1068 SAR 1967-68, Red Squad Files, CHM; “Notes from Chicago: Beyond the Power Structure,” The Movement 2:5 (May 1967): 12. 39. “A New ‘Free University’ Will Open This Summer,” Chicago Maroon, 14 April 1967. 40. “SPLIBS Eject Maroon Writer,” Chicago Maroon, 23 January 1968. 41. Interview Report on Student Mobilization Conference at UC, Jan. 29, 1968, Box 198, Folder 1064B SMC 1968, Red Squad Files, CHM. 42. Surveillance Report, Vanguard, Dec. 5, 1967, Box 212, Folder 1086 - UICC, 1967-1970, Vol. 1, Red Squad Files, CHM. On the Division Street riot, see Diamond, Mean Streets, 295-296. See also Lilia Fernandez, Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

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43. “Militant Organizers Dig In,” The Movement 3:4 (April 1967): 3; “Chicago Chicanos,” The Movement, 4:9 (September 1968): 7; Clara López, “LADO: The Latin American Defense Organization,” Diálogo 2 (1997): 23-27. 44. “Develops Program to Recruit Negroes,” Daily Northwestern, 4 March 1966. 45. Excerpts from the petition are reproduced in and Paul Starr, eds. The University Crisis Reader. Volume One: The Liberal University Under Attack (New York: Random House, 1971), 297-298, 306-310. 46. “N.U. Negro Students to Get Meeting Room,” Chicago Tribune, 30 April 1968. 47. On the Howard movement, see Lawrence B. de Graaf, « Howard: The Evolution of Black Student Revolt », in Julian Foster and Durward Long, eds., Protest! Student Activism in America (New York, William Morrow and Company, 1970), 319-344, and Armstrong, How Student Journalists Report Campus Unrest. On the Columbia events, see the Cox Commission Report, Crisis at Columbia: Report of the Fact-Finding Commission Appointed to Investigate the Disturbances at Columbia University in April and May 1968 (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), and Robert McCaughey, Stand, Columbia: A History of Columbia University (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). 48. “434 Profs Commend N.U. Pact,” Chicago Tribune, 7 May 1968; “N.U. Prof Assails Yielding to Students,” Chicago Tribune, 7 May 1968; Rep. Michel Hits ‘Shameful Surrender’ to N.U. Minority,” Chicago Tribune, 8 May 8 1968; “2 N.U. Profs Praise Pact with Negroes,” Chicago Tribune, 11 May 1968; “N.U. Subcommittee OK’s Demands of Negroes,” Chicago Tribune, 12 May 1968. 49. “Black Separatism Move on the Rise,” Chicago Tribune, 30 July 1968. 50. Petition and Information report, dated May 10, 1968, Folder 1086-IIT, Box 209, Red Squad Files, CHM; “I.I.T. Selects Committee to Hear Negroes,” Chicago Tribune, May 8, 1968; “I.I.T. Replies to Demands by Negroes,” Chicago Tribune, 28 May 1968. 51. “De Paul Gives Blacks Reply to 9 Demands,” Chicago Tribune, 22 May 1968. 52. “Contingent Call for a Student Strike,” May 1968, Box 1, Folder Student Activities, University of Chicago Special Collections; “Response by Dean of Students Charles O’ Donnell to SPLIBS,” May 15, 1968, Box 211, Folder 1086 UC 1967-69, Red Squad Files, CHM; “U. of Chicago Acts, Puts End to Sit-In,” Chicago Tribune, 16 May 1968; “U. of C. White Students Await a Reply to Demands,” Chicago Sun-Times, 17 May 1968. 53. “Call to a Confrontation,” May 26, 1968, Box 206, Folder 1086 Chicago State College, and Interview Reports on “Black Caucus at NISC” May 20 and 27, 1968, Box 210, Folder 1086 NISC 1968-69, Red Squad Files, CHM. 54. “Revolutionary Youth Movement - Toward Unity of Theory and Practice”, “Toward a Revolutionary Youth Movement,” “Hot Town: Summer in the City,” and “Revolution is a Rainbow Thing,” SDS Radical Education Project, Series 3, Box 48, Folder 4, Students for a Democratic Society Papers, Wisconsin State Historical Society. 55. Surveillance Report on Demonstration – black students’ sit-in at NISC, Nov. 25, 1968, Box 210, Folder 1086 NISC, Red Squad Files, CHM. 56. “Chicago Chicano,” The Movement 4:12 (September 1968). 57. On the DNC confrontation, see David Farber, Chicago ‘68 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 165-207. 58. Rolland-Diamond, Chicago le moment 68, 257-298. 59. Williams, From the Bullet to the Ballot, 55-56. 60. Rogers, Black Campus Movement, 1. 61. Williams, From the Bullet to the Ballot, 77. 62. Jon Rice, “The World of the Illinois Panthers,” Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard (eds), Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles outside the South, 1940-1980 (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 45-49; Williams, From the Bullet to the Ballot, 3-13.

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63. Jeffrey Haas, The Assassination of Fred Hampton (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2010); Williams, From the Bullet to the Ballot, 167-190.

AUTHOR

CAROLINE ROLLAND-DIAMOND

Caroline Rolland-Diamond is Professor of American History and American Studies and Director of the Centre de Recherches Anglophones at the University Paris Nanterre, France. She specializes in post-World War II American and global history. She has written several books and articles on this era, with an emphasis on the black freedom struggle and student protest in the US, including Black America: une histoire des luttes pour l’égalité et la justice (XIXe-XXIe siècle) (Editions La Découverte, 2016), Révoltes et utopies: la contre-culture américaine des années 1960 (co-written with Andrew Diamond and Romain Huret, Editions Fahrenheit, 2012), and Chicago: le moment 68. Territoires de la contestation étudiante et répression politique (Éditions Syllepse, 2011).

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The Olympic “Revolt” of 1968 and its Lessons for Contemporary African American Athletic Activism

Douglas Hartmann

1 In the years leading up to the 50th anniversary of the most famous protest in modern sport history—the clenched fist salutes of Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the victory podium at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics—a remarkable thing happened: a new generation of activist African American athletes and other allies burst onto the stage. The movement has been headlined by the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s extraordinary decision to kneel during the playing of the American national anthem during NFL pre-game ceremonies in 2016, his being black-balled out of the league, and his subsequent (and ongoing) condemnation of police brutality against African American men and other form of racial injustice in the U.S. Kaepernick’s acts of defiance have warranted a huge outpouring of support in some quarters—including reenactments at colleges and high schools and across different sporting events and other venues all across the country—and equally intense backlash in others.

2 But the roots of Black athletic activism go back several years before Kaepernick, at least to the emergence of Black Lives Matter movement itself, and the scale and scope of contemporary Black athletic activism extends well beyond Kaepernick’s “take a knee” campaign as well. In the summer of 2016 alone, actions included: NBA star and American Olympian Carmelo Anthony urging athletes to quit worrying about their endorsement deals and speak out on police killings; tennis player Serena Williams offering support and then a clenched fist salute on the hallowed grounds of Wimbledon, after years of protests with her sister Venus against racist treatment of crowds at an event in California; the testimonials of Anthony and fellow NBA stars Chris Paul, LeBron James, and Dwyane Wade at the ESPYs awards on ESPN; WNBA players and teams, led by the Minnesota Lynx, dressing in support of Black Lives Matter and against police shootings; the NBA moving next year’s annual All-Star game out of North Carolina because of that state’s LGBTQ politics.1

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3 What is remarkable about all this is that in the last decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first, African American athletes—even those known to be thoughtful and politically aware—had been conspicuous by their silence on social issues, shying away from public commentary on any issues perceived to be controversial or political in any way. Perhaps the poster-child of this apolitical attitude was the basketball star Michael Jordan. When pushed to speak out on racial issues in the 1990s and express support for Democratic candidates in his home state of North Carolina, Jordan reportedly demurred: “Republicans buy sneakers too.”2

4 So why is all this now? How unique is this current wave of African American athletic activism? And what larger lessons or implications can we draw from it?

5 These are very important questions, and the overarching goal of this paper is to provide some historical perspective on them. I will do this by setting this current wave of activism, advocacy, and mobilization in the context of the Black Olympic activism of the late 1960s—that is, the “Revolt of the Black Athlete” that gave rise to Smith and Carlos’s iconic victory stand demonstration.3 Using the activism of 1968 as both a historical touchstone and a comparison point will, I believe, help us better theorize the African American athletic activism that is happening today. At least four primary and overarching arguments will result: first, that athletic mobilization is closely related to and grows out of larger racial movements of the period (the Civil Rights/Black Power movement in the case of 1968, and Black Lives Matter today); second, that the athletic activism we are witnessing in the contemporary moment is bigger, broader, and more sustained than any prior in American history; third, that sports-based protest remains polarizing and that critics are increasingly emboldened to use sports for their own political purposes; and fourth, while the contemporary movement may reveal the substantial dependence of the athletic establishment on African American athletes, its real societal power still lies in the ability of athletic activists to attract attention and impact broader cultural narratives about race and social justice.

6 These arguments, which are meant to be suggestive not definitive, will be developed in three main parts. I will begin by providing a basic historical overview of the organizing effort behind Smith and Carlos’s iconic victory stand gesture—specifically, the year- long effort to mobilize an athlete boycott of the 1968 Mexico City Games, what organizers called the “Olympic Project for Human Rights” (OPHR). In the second portion of the paper, I will then compare and contrast the athletic activism of the late 1960s with the protests and advocacy which we are currently witnessing; it is in this section that I will develop the analytic points outlined above. The paper will conclude by suggesting the lessons these movements and the reactions they have provoked hold for our understandings of race, protest, and politics in sports as a way to highlight the unique challenges of social change in and through athletic activism.

7 In terms of data and methods, the first part of the paper will be based upon the historical research and sociological analysis that I and others have produced on the Black athletic revolt of 1968 over the years.4 The second part of the paper is informed by new and emerging scholarly treatments of this new, contemporary wave of athletic activism as well as my own reading of media coverage and online archival sources.5 I have also conducted interviews with a handful of athletes, administrators, and reporters involved with African American athletes and their protests over the past few years. The final section on the unique cultural status of sport as a site for protest and social change is informed by my own research and writing on the racial space of

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modern Western sport as “serious play,” and norms separating sport and politics. Again, the overarching goal is to provide historical perspective and a conceptual overview to begin to make sense of the new, 21st century era of Black athletic activism.

1. The Original Revolt: The Basics of 1960s Athletic Activism and Olympic Protest

8 The African American athletic revolt of 1968 was not the single, spontaneous act of two isolated, malcontents as is sometimes implied or assumed. Quite the contrary, it was the result of a year-long attempt by Tommie Smith along with other athletes and activists—including his San Jose State teammate and friend Lee Evans and their sociology instructor Harry Edwards—to organize a black boycott of the 1968 Olympic Games. It was an organizing campaign they called “the Olympic Project for Human Rights” (OPHR). Until recently, it was the largest, most-well known, and most impactful athletic protest movement in U.S. history.6

9 The boycott effort and larger movement it gave rise to started innocently and almost unexpectedly in the fall of 1967 when Smith told a reporter that he was open to the possibility of an Olympic boycott following a race in Tokyo, Japan. Smith’s comments provoked an incredible level of national and international attention (and outrage) and over the months to come, Smith, Evans, Edwards, and others at San Jose State—the home of one of the greatest collection of sprinters in U.S. history—reached out to other elite, Olympic caliber athletes in hopes of building support for a boycott. Their early efforts included a highly publicized workshop on athletic activism in Los Angeles, the creation of organizing pamphlets, telephone calls and mailings all over the country, and a major national press conference in New York City in December of 1967. In New York, activists from all across the civil rights spectrum such as Martin Luther King, Jr., H. Rap Brown, and Louie Lomax spoke in support of a list of demands for racial justice within the athletic establishment.

10 Although a boycott never materialized, the athlete activists were extraordinarily active and nationally visible in the months leading up to the Games. The OPHR organized a highly successful boycott of the fabled New York Athletic Club (NYAC) indoor track meet, attracted endorsements and assistance from prominent black athletes such as Lew Alcindor (the UCLA basketball star who became one of the greatest players in the sport’s history as Kareem Abdul Jabbar), All-Star football running back and aspiring actor Jim Brown, Bill Russell from the Boston Celtics, and the man who integrated Major League Baseball, Jackie Robinson. As spokesperson and lead organizer of the movement, Harry Edwards himself was profiled in national publications such as the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, and Newsweek. Also, dozens of smaller scale protests resulting from black athlete’s complaints about “everything from unfair dress codes to inadequate treatment of injuries by prejudiced athletic trainers” began to emerge on predominantly white college and university campuses across the country.7

11 Perhaps not surprisingly, the activism and organizing efforts generated fairly significant backlash and opposition along the way. White sportswriters and reporters across the country condemned the boycott initiative and all athletically-based protest from the beginning and almost universally, as did leaders and elites within the athletic establishment such as the International Olympic Committee President, the American Avery Brundage, and U.S. Olympic legend Jessie Owens. At one point, then-California

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Governor called for Edwards to be dismissed from his Cal State instructorship. (Edwards, in turn, called Reagan “a petrified pig, unfit to govern.”) The Vice President of the United States, , in the middle of his own unsuccessful campaign for the White House, even stepped in to try to convince the athletes to call off their boycott threat.8

12 There are several points about the 1968 Olympic protest movement that bear particular significance for contemporary, 21st century race-based athletic activists and initiatives. One has to do with the basic vision, targets, and specific objectives of athletic advocacy and mobilization. The Olympic activism of 1968 is often understood or remembered for its condemnation of prejudice and discrimination in the athletic arena. Such interpretations are understandable. After all, the athletic realm was the target of its most specific and memorable demands for action (for example, reinstatement of Muhammad Ali to his heavyweight boxing title or the removal of American Avery Brundage from his leadership of US and international Olympic organizations), and some of its most tangible accomplishments were reforms in the world of sport itself (more on this shortly). However, such a sport-centric emphasis is a kind of revisionist history. The primary motivations and goals of the OPHR from its initial launch onward were not about protesting against racism in sport, but rather involved using the prominence of African American athletes to call attention to societal racism more generally in service of the larger movement for racial justice.

13 In one of his earliest interviews, for example, Tommie Smith asked the questions: “What the hell is going on in the U.S.? I’m a human. What kind of rights do I have? What kinds of rights don’t I have? Why can’t I get those rights?” The answers, Smith came to conclude, were because of “racial ostracism.”9 The advocacy of Smith and his teammates was just part of the larger movement against that racism, their attempt to contribute to the ongoing struggle. There have been a lot of marches, protests, and sit-ins on the situation of Negro ostracism in the US. I don’t think this boycott of the Olympic will stop the problem, but I think people will see that we will not sit on our haunches and take this sort of stuff. Our goal would not be just to improve conditions for ourselves and our teammates but to improve things for the entire Negro community.10

14 Basketball star Lew Alcindor put it succinctly in this widely-publicized quote from the organizing workshop in the fall of 1967: [L]ast summer I was almost killed by a racist cop shooting at a black cat in Harlem…. Somewhere each of us have got to make a stand against this kind of thing. This is how I take my stand—using what I have.11

15 This emphasis on societal rather than athletic racism signals the emergence of a sophisticated and newly emerging understanding of sport and its relationship to race, racism, and social change, one that persists today. After the breakthrough successes of early 20th century superstar athletes like Jackie Robinson, Joe Louis, and Jessie Owens, black athletes (and many others in both the sporting establishment and African American leadership circles) viewed sport as an inherently, almost automatically progressive social space and prided themselves on being leaders in the struggle for racial equity by their athletic accomplishments alone. In the earlier, Jim Crow- segregationist part of the century, athletes could fulfill a progressive role simply by being athletes. Their athletic prowess spoke for itself as a direct rebuke to racist beliefs about segregation and black inferiority. In the 1960s, however, as more and more black athletes were coming to the fore and as the civil rights movement was breaking down

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barriers for African Americans in society at large, this was no longer the case. In this new historical context, in fact, athletic success was beginning to have the opposite function or effect. Increasingly in the1960s, mainstream white America was coming to view black athletes, both domestically and internationally, as symbols of the openness of American race relations, using their success as an argument against the need for further social change.12 In other words, black athletic stars were being used to legitimate the racial status quo. As high jumper Gene Johnson explained: The United States exalts its Olympic star athletes as representatives of a democratic and free society, when millions of Negro and other minority citizens are excluded from decent housing and meaningful employment.13

16 Socially conscious, politically committed African American athletes were becoming acutely aware of the way they were being used and, more importantly, unwilling to tolerate it. This recognition was a major motivator for the African American athletes who participated in protests in the year leading up to the 1968 Olympic Games. They would, as Harry Edwards put it, “no longer allow” mainstream America to “use [themselves] to rationalize its treatment of the black masses.”14

17 OPHR activists tried to frame this new understanding of sport as a vehicle for social change as consistent with sport’s long celebrated history as a leader in the quest for racial justice and civil rights, often going to great lengths to explain that it was not sports that they were protesting. Again, Tommie Smith: I recognize that Negroes have had greater opportunities in sports in general and the Olympics in particular than they have had in other fields. I’m am an athlete, I have stature only in the field of athletics and any action I take can only be effective there.15

18 This framing was a tough sell, however. More often than not, Smith and his compatriots were seen as radicals and militants, ungrateful black Americans and traitors to sport’s ideals of itself and its place in society.

19 The reasons for this treatment were complicated and remain that way still today. They stem, at least in my analysis, from the ways in which sport idealism, liberal democratic idealism (especially regarding individualism, competition, and merit), and the mainstream culture of civil rights and social change all combine to create an ideological structure that allows only certain, individualistic and formalist kinds of racial advocacy, equity, and justice.16 Sport participation, in this popular idealization, almost automatically exemplifies and thus contributes to racial advancement and understanding; protesting in or through sport, simply is not compatible with these idealized conceptions.

20 This framing calls our attention to another key factor animating this new conception of sports and the need for a more instrumental approach to using its power to contribute to social change: the broader social context of the Civil Rights Movement and the complexities of the struggle for racial justice by the late 1960s. Just as all the events of 1968 radicalized many young people in the United States, so too for African American athletes. It is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine activism among Black athletes emerging in the absence of the evolving struggle for civil rights and racial justice. Indeed, the threat of an Olympic boycott along with all of the various mobilizations and protests that followed were less the result of mistreatment in sport than it was a growing frustration with the limitations of the Civil Rights movement itself. As Edwards put it in one of their earliest organizing pamphlets: “The roots of the protest

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spring from the same seed that produced the sit-ins, the freedom rides and the rebellions in Watts, Detroit and Newark.”17 According to Lee Evans, A lot of militancy was rising in the black community. We stopped referring to ourselves as colored or Negro. You were black or you were not black. An Afro haircut was a statement of black nationalism. Nineteen sixty-seven was the first year I was proud of my skin being black.18

21 The tensions between the emphasis on civil rights in the earlier 1960s and the emergence of the black power phase of the movement (and its more structuralist or systemic orientation) in the later years of the decade created obvious tensions for activist-minded athletes who were ideologically more comfortable with the former but pressured toward the latter. They help explain why support for the OPHR was limited, even among the most politically conscious athletes. Legendary long jumper Ralph Boston, for example, may have sympathized with some of the activist’s goals, but did not believe they were sufficient to justify an all-out Olympic boycott. (It is not accidental that Smith refused to call the victory stand demonstration a “black power” salute, though the more radical Carlos did and it quickly came to be understood that way and remains so today). Still, the more basic point here is that athletic protest would have been inconceivable were it not for these broader movements, and the radicalization of the struggle.

22 Smith, Evans, and Carlos, and their like-minded teammates, experienced much of this on the predominately white college campuses on which they lived, studied, and trained.19 Other activists—such as students in the Black Union at SJS—pressured their African American athlete classmates to be more involved and, more specifically, to take a stand in service of the movement’s demands for more structural, institutional changes in society. Black student-athletes also took courses on black history and culture that served to help them understand what was happening in the country and to re-imagine their role and responsibilities therein. (Again, Edwards, a sociology instructor, had many of sprinters in his popular courses on black leadership and social change in American society). At San Jose State, a successful protest at a fall football game really opened their eyes to the possibility of using race-based activism on the fields of athletic competition to bring racial inequities to larger public attention.

23 So what did all the athletic organizing, advocacy, and activism of the Olympic Project for Human Rights accomplish? The subtitle of Amy Bass’s 2004 study of the movement, “Not the Triumph but the Struggle,” captures one way, perhaps the dominant way, to answer this question. There were surely some successes—the calling out of old-school bigotry and racism in the athletic establishment and the boycott of the NYAC track meet early in 1968, for example. But an Olympic boycott itself never materialized, Smith and Carlos and their various allies were treated harshly, and none of this seemed to change many American minds about American race problems or the need for further social change.

24 However, we should not be too dismissive. For one thing, the race-based Olympic activism of 1968 gave rise to other protests and forms of athletic radicalization in the late 1960s and early 1970s. There is no doubt that the radicalism of the Black athletes who pushed for an Olympic boycott in 1968 paved the way for Arthur Ashe’s protests against South African , Curt Flood’s stand for free agency in professional baseball, or race-based athletic protests at colleges and universities ranging from Wyoming, BYU, and the University of Texas at El Paso.20 Moreover, the athletes’ rights

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movement of the early 1970s21 owed much—vision and tactics and basic inspiration—to the Olympic Project for Human Rights as did the organizing and mobilization that led to the unionization of professional athletes in the United States across the period. Even the rise of women’s sports and the Title IX movement was part of this wave of activism and athletic reform.

25 At a broader level, the Olympic activism of 1968 also paved the way to new understandings of sport’s role in society and athletes’ understanding of themselves as social actors. One key accomplishment of the athletic activists of 1968 was to keep issues of racial inequality and racism in the public eye, in front of the American public and even on a global stage. This was no easy task or simple accomplishment. At a moment when much of mainstream, white America would have rather gotten past Civil Rights and racial justice and moved on to other things, the ability to use the threat of an Olympic boycott constituted an enduring general lesson about the cultural power and primary social change function of sport. In my view, the biggest accomplishments of the activism of 1968 were symbolic and cultural, involving the media attention and the powerful platform that athletes and their voices were afforded due to their status and standing as exceptional athletes.

26 Much of the symbolic power of sport revealed by the activism of 1968 was illustrated and embodied in the organizing of Harry Edwards himself. Scholars have often focused on his organizing acumen and his role in educating Smith, Evans, and Carlos and their brethren.22 Given the limited number of Olympic caliber athletes who endorsed an actual boycott, however, it was Edwards’ media savvy, personal charisma, and public relations genius that really made the movement and the threat of a boycott even relevant.

27 Edwards’ public relations skills were on display in December of 1967 when he, along with Martin Luther King, Jr., appeared at a press conference in support of the boycott proposal and a list of six protest demands. These demands were part of a strategy intended to convinced otherwise reluctant athletes to consider supporting the boycott. There was no reason to expect that any of the demands they offered would really be enacted. After all, no institution or individual had the power or authority to enact them. But this was not the point. Edwards and his collaborators were using the demands to force their agenda for racial change in the public eye. Edwards and the OPHR were at their most brilliant in the summer and late fall of 1968. Even after it became clear to insiders that the possibility of an all-out, full-fledged black boycott of the US Olympic team was gone, Edwards kept the essential collapse of the boycott out of the media, and when questions mounted he mysteriously announced a change in strategy explaining the OPHR would not announce its intentions until after the team reached Mexico City. “There is only one thing more confusing than a rumor,” he told reporters, “and that’s a million rumors.”23 Again, the point was to use the threat of a boycott—predicated on the prominence of black athletes and America’s desire for their international success—to focus attention to the cause of racial injustice in the United States. This was a lesson that has endured.

28 And when it comes to illustrating the cultural power of sport protest for generating public attention, there is no better example than the victory stand demonstration itself. This paper is not the place for a full review of the symbolic brilliance of this protest gesture and the lessons it holds with respect to Olympic ceremony and sport ideology, especially as they pertain to liberal democratic ideologies of race, sport, and

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social justice.24 But one thing that is striking about this demonstration is that it did not do or say much more than simply assert that race and racism—the race of Smith and Carlos, their identity as African Americans and the injustices experienced—was a topic of epic, global import. The enduring power of the victory stand gesture crystalizes sport’s expressive potential and unique ability to focus cultural attention to issues of race and racial injustice (rather than force any particular material or institutional change). It shows us the remarkable ritual, cultural power of sport to capture attention and send messages—regardless of what other concrete, tangible results may or may not accrue. All of this is the legacy and achievements of the Olympic activism of 1968.

2. Contextualization, Comparison, Contrast: Contemporary Black Athletic Activism

29 The history of the OPHR’s 1968 boycott project and the protests of athletes of the period more broadly reminds us, first and foremost, that the African American athletic activism of the contemporary era is far from unprecedented. To the contrary, it is part of a long historical legacy of socially-minded and activist oriented black athletes —“Protest 2.0” as David Leonard (2017) describes it, the “heritage” as Howard Bryant calls it, or the “fourth wave” of an even longer trajectory of racial change through sport according to Harry Edwards in his plenary keynote to the North American Society for the Study of Sport in the fall of 2016.25 And this legacy is not just abstract or imagined. Media coverage of the most recent generation of activism regularly harkens back to the 1960s, especially Smith and Carlos’s iconic victory stand demonstration, and athlete-activists often invoke memories themselves as inspirational.

30 None of this is surprising. Much of what we know—or think we know—about black athletic activism (not to mention sport-based activism more generally) has been informed by scholarly reading and understanding of the lessons of 1968.26 Here it is also worth noting that athlete activists from the 1960s such as Kareem Abdul Jabbar and John Carlos himself have also both come out in support of Kaepernick and other forms of activism in and around the sporting arena. In fact, Harry Edwards has served Kaepernick as something of a confidant, collaborator, and counselor, and Carlos has taken on a lead role in the contemporary athletic activist movement, promoting their racial causes and defending athletes’ right to speak out. So situating the athletic activism of today in the context of the history of 1968 is not only about abstract connections, but about concrete historical precedents and direct social comparisons.27

31 The parallels are notable. Today’s athlete activists—like those who came before them in 1968—are well-informed, deliberate, and reflective, responding thoughtfully to social issues such as police brutality and profiling, persistent racial gaps in education or income, and even hateful gender and sexuality policies outside the world of sport. They are, moreover, voicing these concerns in concert with other public and community leaders and often in direct collaboration with other, non-sport activists and organizers. Sometimes their motivations are quite personal, stemming from their own ongoing individual experiences with racism and discrimination (tennis player James Blake’s experience with police brutality comes to mind). More often, activist athletes speak and act in support of communities of color — their communities — that continue to face persistent racism and discrimination.

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32 In a society that continues to be plagued by disproportionate police brutality, persistent racial gaps, and overt bigotry and bias, Black athlete activists do not take their activities lightly or think of them as disrespectful or anti-American. Quite the contrary and in the legacy of 1968, they understand activism as consistent with the higher moral standards, ideals, and aspirations of both American democracy and sport culture. These athletic activists, it seems apparent, also know that their demonstrations are unlikely to produce concrete social change, on the one hand, and that they will confront backlash and opposition on the other. Indeed, for many the whole point is to call attention to issues that are otherwise being ignored.

33 Much like the Olympic mobilization of the late 1960s, the current wave of African American athletic activism did not materialize overnight. Although Colin Kaepernick’s “take a knee” campaign has occupied much of the current public attention, the immediate roots of this awareness and protest can be traced to back several years to the anger and outrage that emerged in the black community and beyond about police brutality and the shootings of young black men such as Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown—and the subsequent emergence and consolidation of the Black Lives Matter movement. LeBron James and his Miami Heat teammates tweeting out a picture of themselves in hoodies, with heads bowed in support of Trayvon Martin, a few years back was just one prominent early example. St. Louis Rams football players entering the field in the “hands up” gesture of Ferguson protestors was another. Others recall when the entire Phoenix Suns team wore jerseys in solidarity with Latinos who felt threatened by proposed anti-immigration legislation in Arizona. Since then, we’ve witnessed an array of NBA players led by Chris Paul threatening to boycott the NBA All- Star Game unless something done to disavow the blatant racism of then-owner Donald Sterling, and WNBA players standing in support of protesters calling out police brutality and unjust shootings across the country.28 And perhaps most amazingly, in the fall of 2015 members of the University of Missouri football team used the threat of a boycott to help force the removal of their university’s President for his (mis)handling of instances of racial bigotry on campus at that institution.29

34 Setting this activism—just a partial representation of all the race-based athletic activism of the present—in the context of the athletic protests of 1968 also helps highlight what is extraordinary and indeed historically distinctive about the current wave of activity.

35 One of characteristics that is most unique is the size, scale, and sustainability of the athletic mobilization we are witnessing today. The activism of the current era is not limited to a small set of the most elite, Olympic caliber or even college scholarship athletes, but extends broadly to include an extremely large numbers of athletes and supporters across the full spectrum of the sporting system. Sports all across the athletic landscape have witnessed a range of gestures, statements, and protest actions, and this mobilization has occurred at all levels of sport ranging from professional athletics to collegiate and university sport and including high school and even youth athletics.30 While a full documentation of the larger movement as a whole remains to be done, it is apparent nonetheless apparent that we are not just talking about dozens of activists and actions (as was the case in the 1960s), but hundreds and even thousands of actions and activists all across the country.31

36 My own interviews and tracking suggests that a broad base of involvement has been in place since the early days of the larger Black Lives Matter movement; however, the size

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and scope of the movement was particularly evident in response to Kaepernick taking a knee to push back against systemic racism and police brutality. In the days, weeks, and months that followed his initial actions, hundreds of demonstrations of support and solidarity appeared at high school and recreational sports fields across the country.32 Drawing inspiration from Kaepernick, activists and demonstrations moved from the spectacle of Fox NFL Sunday or 80,000 seat stadiums to the playing fields of interscholastic high school sports and local parks and recreation centers with old rusty bleachers and a few hundred friends and family. There is much room to investigate the relationship between the gestures of professional black athletes and youth emulating their actions, but clearly sports activism in the new era is grassroots as well as elite.

37 Another historically unique feature of the current wave of activism is the role of female athletes of various races. The social awareness and public stances against racism and other social injustices of professional athletes such as Serena and Venus Williams, soccer player Megan Rapinoe, and the entire Minnesota Lynx WNBA team obviously come to mind.33 Though often not embraced in the press, public, and scholarly arenas, it seems to me that women have been particularly active and influential—if, sometimes, behind the scenes—in mobilizing athletic resistance in colleges and universities and at more local, grassroots levels. For example, in the upper-midwestern colleges and universities where I have been observing, it is female athletes—and especially female athletes of color—who have been far more likely to take a knee or speak out in support of athletic activism in public. And as details about the University of Missouri football boycott become public, it will likely be clear that it was women of color activists who really pushed the behind-the-scenes discussions of what and how African American athletes could use their status to contribute to larger social causes. This, of course, is in marked contrast to 1968 when female athletes (including the great Wyomia Tyus) and women in general were marginalized and ignored in both the boycott organizing effort as well as attempts to stand in support of Smith and Carlos in the aftermath of their protest.34

38 The support and involvement of white teammates, coaches, managers, and owners is also at a much higher level today than it was in the past. It is not entirely unprecedented for white coaches and teammates to stand in support of their players’ right to free speech or even larger projects of racial justice: the late Dean Smith, basketball coach at the University of North Carolina, comes to mind, as does San Jose State track coach Bud Winters or UCLA’s legendary John Wooden. But the number of white teammates and coaches and others who have come out in support of athletic activism and even joined the fray themselves today is at a whole new level. White players and coaches all across the sporting landscape have stood in support of their teammates right to free speech and political expression even if they have not always gone so far as to endorse their actual causes and analyses. The actions of the NBA and WBNA have been unprecedented in this respect. The leagues have been extremely proactive in support of the racial and social justice advocacy of their players (including moving their annual All-Star Game in the wake of homophobic policies passed in North Carolina), and coaches such as Greg Popovich (of the Spurs) and Steve Kerr (of the multi-time champion Golden State Warriors) have been outspoken not only in support of activist athletes and their causes but also in terms of actively opposing the President’s racial rhetoric and policy agenda. Together, professional basketball coaches

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and players have been the preeminent modern day athletic actors to seize the platform for public awareness and advocacy afforded by the sports arena.

39 While the sporting establishment may appear to be more tolerant and accommodating of athletic activism today than in 1968, this is not necessarily because sports leaders/ elites have become more supportive of Black athletes and their causes. More likely, it is because they are far more dependent on—and aware of—the labor of African American athletes than they have in the past.35 This can be seen in collegiate circles where the NCAA has, for the most part, acknowledged the rights to speech of student-athletes yet also taken steps to minimize opportunities for public attention and controversy. It is perhaps most evident in the case of the NFL where owners, who are among the most politically conservative in the sporting establishment (not to mention the fan base), have repeatedly been forced to negotiate agreements on various racial and social issues with its African American-dominated players union.36 The increased structural power of Black athletes is, in my view, among the primary lessons of one of the most remarkable and yet still underappreciated episodes of the current era of Black athletic activism: the threatened football boycott at the University of Missouri in 2015.

40 On a Saturday afternoon that fall the news came that some 30 African American members of the University of Missouri football had announced they would not practice or play until the President of their institution resigned. Just as this was sinking in, a second unexpected and almost entirely unprecedented thing happened: Missouri football coach Gary Pinkel, and a host of players and coaches tweeted his/their support of the protest and their commitment to honor the boycott unless the student-athletes’ demands were met. The boycott threat bears many of the characteristics and traits I have highlighted above. Like the athlete activists of 1968 or LeBron and his teammates in Miami, these young men were not only protesting against mistreatment within the world of sport, they were also trying to use the platform that their prominence as athletes afforded them to speak to racism on campus and in society. Additionally, they worked in concert with other student activists on campus—in this case, with African American students who were protesting about racism and the inattention to racism on campus, especially in the aftermath of the events in Ferguson, Missouri, just outside of the St. Louis metro where many of these students grew up. The Missouri football players were not just sympathetic to the grievances and demands of the student groups, they were in direct communication with them.37 Once again, this broader historical context and social connections to others in the activism community, in other words, were crucial.

41 What was exceptional about the activism of the athletes on this highly ranked team was their demands and their insistence that changes need to be taken before they would play football for the University. Harkening back to the Olympic boycott threat of the 1960s, this was more than just using sport as a platform of political expression. Exactly what role the football players boycott threat had in hastening the President (and the Chancellor’s) departure is still being debated, but surely the chain of events was linked. The University of Missouri would have reportedly been assessed a million dollar penalty if the team did not lay its scheduled game against BYU the next weekend—and this amount does not even begin to factor in the revenue that would have been lost from ticket sales, concessions, and television rights and advertising the would have been lost if the special game at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City had not happened.

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42 At base, this episode encapsulates the prominence and real power of African American athletes in sports, on campus, and in American society more generally. All of the money and attention we lavish on athletes and athletics in this country has put African American athletes in a unique and, frankly, powerful material or institutional position. What we are witnessing today is athlete activists and their allies using the power afforded to them by virtue of how the institutions of sport and the public rely upon them and their athletic performances. Some—such as the NFL “Player’s Coalition”— have begun to use this power to push for concrete social change in the world of sport as well as outside of it, but it remains to be seen if this approach will gain momentum and find success.38

43 The extent to which the most profitable enterprises of the entire sports industry in the United States are dependent upon African American personalities and performances also helps us to understand another of the most significant and historically unprecedented aspects of contemporary athletic activism: the corporate support they have received. Again, it is undoubtedly Colin Kaepernick who has made the biggest headlines on this front with his endorsement deal with Nike in the fall of 2018. But this was not a corporate one-off. Numerous corporate partners and sponsors ranging from Under Armor to Ford Motor Company issued statements in support of athletes and their right to free speech in the aftermath of Trump’s comments regarding players and the national anthem in the fall of 2017.39 Such statements and corporate campaigns represent a stark, 180 degree shift from the corporate presentation and use of racial images and political issues in the apolitical, Michael Jordan-era marketing of the 1990s.

44 Of course, not all corporations and business entities were on board. For example, NFL activist Brandon Marshall was dropped as a spokesperson for Century Link and the Air Academy Federal Credit Union when he knelt in September of 2016. And John Schnatter of Papa John’s Pizza blamed protests for a drop in sales and a 24 percent fall in company stock value in fall of 2017, claiming the controversy was “polarizing the customer, polarizing the country.”40 But while there were corporate cleavages, the fact remains that Nike not only retained Kaepernick as a spokesperson but doubled down on him in 2018 with a new campaign that featured images of Kaepernick (who had not played football in two years) superimposed against the tag line “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.” The advertising campaign provoked an immediate backlash in some circles (with some critics destroying Nike gear publicly on social media), but it also resulting in a record 31 percent sales increase for branded merchandise in the same week. Real questions can be posed about whether Kaepernick’s deal is, in the words of Carrington and Boykoff, “activism or just capitalism?,” but never before have corporations been so involved and active—not only in tolerating but in terms of actively marketing activism and protest.41

45 If the size, scope, sustainability, and support of contemporary athletic activism stands in contrast to that of 1968, the two movement waves have several features in common that deserve attention. For one, like Smith, Evans, and Carlos before them, the activist athletes of today understand their focus as being about racism, prejudice and discrimination in society rather than in sport—an attempt to use their prominence as athletes to call attention to larger societal injustices associated with race. In the last two years alone, athlete activists have explained their activism as protests against “systematic oppression,” “[in]equality and social justice,” “racism and injustice in our criminal system,” and “oppression of people of color in the United States.”42 And

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others, like football player Michael Bennett, have challenged their fellow athletes to become a “force for real social change” in America.43

46 A second point of commonality or continuity between the two eras of athletic activism involves the larger social context and the direct social connections of athletes to other social activists.44 Those athletes who have chosen to use their status as public figures to speak out on social issues are not just speaking off the cuff, nor are they isolated malcontents. They are responding to social issues such as police brutality and profiling or hateful gender or sexuality policies outside of the world of sport and working in concert with other public leaders and, more often than not, in close communication with other activists and organizers.

47 With a few exceptions, athletic activists today also appear to be less focused on pushing for concrete, tangible goals or reforms, and more oriented—perhaps drawing out the lessons of 1968—on making statements or sending messages designed to drawing attention to racial causes and related social issues. The NFL anthem demonstrations, and others before and after them, brought renewed attention to issues of racism and police brutality that athletes like Kaepernick and so many others had hoped to put onto the national agenda. More than this, these protests and demonstrations forced Americans — of all different backgrounds and political orientations — to take sides, or at least to no longer remain passive or ignore these issues. Sports pundits, fans, talk- radio, op-ed columnists, bloggers, and mainstream news networks have spent much air time and ink taking positions in favor or opposition of protest and athlete activism, and diagnosing how sports leagues should operate with regards to social issues.

48 To be clear, this public attention and discussion is not necessarily all in support of progressive racial visions and causes. Quite the opposite, this advocacy tends to provoke conflict and opposition as much as sympathy or support—which brings me to one of my final and most important points of comparison between the sport-based movements of 1968 and those of today: backlash and opposition.

49 That athletic activism is polarizing and provokes backlash is far from new. Public opinion was strongly divided in the 1960s with the strong majority of Americans condemning Smith and Carlos then (just as they did with otherwise, now revered figures like Martin Luther King Jr. or Muhammad Ali). So, too, with the activism of the early 21st century. Polls from media sources including Yahoo News and YouGov as well as HuffPost, YouGov, and Morning Consult show a starkly divided public in terms of opinions about athletic advocacy and activism.45

50 What is new, however, is the way in which right wing politicians, reporters, and public opinion leaders are using sport and athletic activism more generally for their own organizing, mobilizing, and political posturing, to solidify their own constituencies and positions. President Trump’s threats against NFL players in the fall of 2017 serve as Exhibit A. Trump’s public complaints about the NFL and the potential of protests are significant because if anything, the “take a knee” campaign seemed to be dying down as Kaepernick himself was blackballed out of the league. But Trump used the threat of athletic protest as a rallying cry for his base. While presidents have always used sport for political effect, they have almost always have done so carefully and cautiously, to build solidarity and consensus rather than provoke division. Obviously what has happened in the last few years was different—and not entirely unsuccessful. In June of 2018, in fact, pollsters predicted Trump would continue his attacks precisely because

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the media attention they received and the ways the polling numbers worked to play to his base so effectively.46

51 The dynamics here are fascinating, and have their own effects on athletic activism itself. To wit: Trump’s challenge seems to have emboldened athletic activists and may even have brought some others into the fold; keep in mind that with Kaepernick having been blackballed out of the league, activism among football players in the 2017 season had been almost non-existent until after Trump’s September press conference.47 The key point, however, is that sport-oriented protests, politics, and movements have come to be as much about counter-protest as about protest, and thus turned into multi-party, conflict-driven dramas with complicated and multi-directional impacts on political mobilization all across the ideological spectrum.48 I am reminded here of how LeBron James took the admonition of Fox New’s Laura Ingraham to “shut up and dribble!” in early 2018 as an invitation to share his thoughts on race and racism in American society.49 An intriguing exchange in itself, one wonders also how it was received by different audiences and communities and if any minds at all were changed.

52 Scholars should begin studying more carefully the dynamic dance of sport-based protest and counter-protest, how it plays for different constituencies in society, and how it impacts athlete activists (and potential athlete activists) themselves. On this latter front, it stands to reason that backlash against sports-based activism is going to be harsher and be more consequential for athletes who are less successful and prominent. In other words, it is not the LeBron James’ or Colin Kaepernick’s of the world to be worried about; it is the young African American men and women athletes and their supporters in colleges and high schools or in even at local playgrounds with a conscience and a voice and a desire to speak out. Perhaps the last word on this polarization, backlash, and conflict should be given to these athletic activists—who well understand that their advocacy is not necessarily about finding immediate sympathy and support but rather about the more basic, baseline goal of bringing attention to and provoking conversations about racial injustice in America.

53 An African American Division III collegiate soccer player in Minnesota named Olivia House told a story at a “Take a Knee” rally in Minnesota in the leadup to the 2018 Super Bowl that makes the point powerfully.50 The story was about House’s own national anthem demonstrations before competitions at her school. She talked about how she was initially disappointed that her gestures failed to provoke a great deal of attention among those in attendance. “I kneeled and a few of my teammates put their arms on my shoulder in support, but that was about it. Nothing else really seemed to come of it.” But then House started hearing from her teammates about conversations they had had with their parents who were at the games. These parents were far from supportive of her demonstration and indeed in some cases were openly critical of her, the coaches who allowed her protest, and members of the team who supported her. According to House, her teammates told her about exchanges at the family dinner table that were tense, testy, and sometimes confrontational. And here, finally, she felt vindicated. Such conversations were, for this relatively unknown female athlete, the essence of success— not because they produced any concrete action or even changed anyone’s minds; rather, because her symbolic stand had forced folks who probably did not know or care much about racism in America to have to think and talk about it.

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3. Some Larger Lessons and Implications: Protest, Politics, and the Culture of Sport

54 To talk about issues of racism and social injustice—or, really, social problems of any sort—in an arena that aspires to be apolitical, a culture that is conflict-averse, and a political moment that is chock full of unrest is difficult to say the least. But if this review and overview has demonstrated anything, it is that sport can provide a platform for socially-minded, change-oriented athletes and supporters to call attention to racial issues and injustices and, more generally, to provoke difficult conversations and public debate on topics that are otherwise ignored, minimized, or avoided. Note that I said “can provide”—not that it always will or necessarily does. This brings us to two sets of questions: first, when this is possible and what it requires; and, second: what can stand in the way and/or, how can it go wrong.

55 Answers to the first set of questions can be extracted from the material above and summarized fairly concisely. Key factors that are necessary (though not always sufficient) to produce sport-based, racially-oriented activism include: the presence of broader movements of activism and change; a critical mass of well-positioned, highly motivated, and self-conscious activists and supporters; an understanding among those activists that athletic activism is largely about using sport as a platform for communication and self-expression; and, the recognition that sport-based advocacy is more likely to engender blow-back and opposition than support or concrete social change.

56 The second set of questions about the challenges and even barriers faced by athletic advocacy is significantly more complicated. One point is that sport-based activism faces many of the same, basic challenges that all social movements confront. As identified in the sociological literature, this would include factors such as finding resources, building social infrastructure and networks, and coordinating across otherwise varied interests and disparate communities.51 And this is not even to delve into the incredible difficulty of making social change in the first place: power, after all, does not give itself up without a fight.

57 I will not go into all of these general movement dynamics and social forces here. Rather, what I want to do is focus on the particular challenges faced by athletically- based activism and organizing. At the core of the special challenges of athletic activism is the unique cultural status of sport itself—what I have called sport’s “serious-play” cultural status and the deeply rooted normative prohibitions for the separation of sport and politics.52 These animating and defining characteristics are what we might think of as the “deep cultural structure” of sport and its unique place in Western culture and American social life. And race, it turns out, is central here as well—in particular, its normative whiteness and its commitment to colorblind meritocracy.53

58 In the last year or two—especially in the public discussions and debates that unfolded in the fall of 2017 with Donald Trump’s attacks on athletic activists—there has been a lot of talk about whether athletes actually have a right to protest or not. Some have construed this as a legal or first amendment / free speech issue. Others think of it more as a labor issue, focusing on contracts and agreements between leagues and conferences and their players or unions (depending upon if they are collegiate or professional). But the most common refrain among sports fans and American sports

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reporters who oppose athletic activism is a sense of frustration, annoyance, or exhaustion derived from the belief that the sports world simply is not the right place for such demonstrations, discussions, and debates. Even if they sympathize the players and their social and political views, adherents to this critical line of thinking just do not see sports as a proper venue, especially not during the crucial moment of the national anthem or other traditional sporting ceremonies and rituals.54

59 At least two different variations on this theme have played out. One comes from fans (and others) who see sport as purely a form of entertainment. These folks watch and consume sports precisely for the purpose of getting away from the regular news, from the muddy complexities and social conflicts of everyday life. This is a low-brow, don’t- want-to-be-bothered mode of objection. It has yielded some extreme and often racially- charged reactions (Laura Ingraham’s “shut up and dribble”), but generally is seen in the more innocuous request for sports to just be a site of leisure, a distraction, or even an escape from the stresses and problems of the modern world. These critics want their athletes to play the game and not bring any social problems into the safe, innocuous space of sports, much less such contentious issues as racism, brutality, and injustice. In this view, protest or any sort of talk of non-sport social issues is simply out of place.

60 Other protest critics take a higher road (one that is both culturally complicated and analytically revealing). In this second, more idealistic view, the athletic realm stands, or at least is supposed to stand, on higher moral ground than other popular pursuits. According to this way of thinking, sports, when practiced properly, are believed to be an inherently positive social force — breaking down barriers, transcending the social fray, and contributing to unity, solidarity, and a larger social good. The use of anthems, flags, and ceremonies only enhances sport’s special cultural status and social function. Sport is, in this vision, already and almost inevitably a positive, progressive social practice and force; the inverse implication of this idealized conception of sport is that activism and protest should not be necessary in the first place.

61 As is often the case in American culture and society, idealized beliefs about race and racial progress are an important component of this romantic ideal of sport as a powerful, inherently progressive, and almost sacred social space.55 Sport leagues themselves often tout themselves as a leader in racial advancement, celebrating their history of openness and access to people from all racial backgrounds. Further, they often attribute this history to a deeper moral commitment to fairness, meritocracy, and the virtues of unfettered competition. For sport scholars, these ideals have obvious limitations and shortcomings. For example, in variations on theories of colorblindness and colorblind racism championed by the sociologist Eduardo Bonilla Silva and others, 56 critics argue that such ideals make it tough to see racism and discrimination within the world of sport or yield an individualistic, meritocratic vision of racial justice wherein it is difficult to address larger institutional or systemic inequities. And this is not to mention how African American athletic prowess too often reinforces some of the worst Western stereotypes about black bodies, moralities, and mentalities. But the key point in this context is that the idealized conception of sport as a progressive space means that any kind of activism, protest, or advocacy in or through sport is not only unnecessary, it actually undercuts the conviction of sport’s inevitable and ongoing contribution to advancement for people of color, inter-racial harmony, and racial justice.

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62 These colorblind, individualist ideals are at the heart of another deeply entrenched belief in the American imagination and the culture of Western sport: namely, that sport and politics need to be kept separate from one another. There is a very certain naiveté in viewing sport as a special or sacred and thus apolitical space. As Kyle Green and I have written, sports and politics have long been intertwined in American culture.57 American football is a prime example. The abundance of football’s “political” entanglements can be traced back to the early 1900s when, only a few years after the sport’s origin, then-President Theodore Roosevelt stepped in to “save” football with the creation of the NCAA (part of the whole muscular Christianity movement). Or, perhaps more relevant to today’s American professional sports landscape, one can look to the introduction of the national anthem in the context of World War II or the now-common use of military flyovers and ceremonies for the purposes of recruitment into the American Armed Services today. Are these political or not? Though many Americans do not think of these practices as “political,” they clearly promote specific visions of national unity and solidarity — visions of the nation that not everyone may agree with. Nevertheless, the desire to keep politics and protest out of sports, just one other dimension of the serious-play paradoxes the define the cultural status and function of modern sport, remains fairly constant and almost an article of faith among many American sports enthusiasts.

63 Athletic activists and their allies (as well as their opponents) are almost always caught within prevailing, paradoxical double-standards of sport as a somehow special, sacred, or apolitical cultural space. To give an example that goes back to the protests of 1968: while public opinion polls in the 1970s showed that some saw athlete activists like Tommie Smith and John Carlos as heroes and many others saw them as villains, almost everybody agreed that sport was not a place for politics. The two sides simply disagreed on what counted as protest and politics. Those who sided with Smith and Carlos did not seem them as political protesters but rather as athletes standing up for what was good, right, and morally just—in the idealistic way that high-minded sport supporters have long celebrated sport. In contrast, the majority who were against them saw Smith and Carlos’s demonstration as disruptions of the social status quo, thus political and inappropriate in the context of sports.58

64 Something similar is going on with the polarized public opinions about athletic activism today.59 What tends to divide people is whether they see race-based statements and stands in the realm of sport as legitimate (in which case they are receptive to advocacy which they see as not only acceptable but socially justice, moral) or not (in which case they are dismissed as political and thus inappropriate and out-of- place). On this point, I would note that in recent years African American athletes have been criticized for being political when they have declined to go to the Trump White House after championship seasons, when there was no such outcry when New England Patriots quarterback declined Obama’s invitation earlier in the decade. At issue, here, are not the principles or high ideals about sport, but rather which or whose statements are accepted within some conventional or mainstream view of national identity and social solidarity and which are deemed as protest and thus inappropriate—or, in short, political.

65 Yet it should also be noted that adherents to visions of sport as somehow sacrosanct are often as annoyed by Donald Trump’s attention to protest and the racial politics of sport as they are by the actions of athlete activists. From what I am calling a “low-brow

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perspective,” both Trump and the athletes protesting are seen as guilty of making too big a deal of sports, games, and play; from the higher-brow, sport-as-sacred perspective, Trump is seen as sullying the purity and inherent social positivity of athletic pursuits with his with brazen and profane destruction of the barrier between sports and politics. These latter critiques especially can be seen in the impassioned defenses of the sanctity of football that have filled pre-game shows in recent years, players and coaches linking arms to protect “” during the national anthem, or New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft invocation of unity and a color-blind harmony when announcing his painful break with his old friend at the highpoint of the NFL national anthem protests in 2017. In these cases, the back-and-forth between the anti-police brutality protests and Trump’s attacks on them disrupted the normally comfortable set of assumptions that have justified sport as deeply intertwined with traditional democratic ideals of meritocracy and liberal individualism.

66 In the starkly polarized context of current politics and race relations, these conflicting, serious-play ideals about sport and politics and racial justice have meant that enacting any kind of racial advocacy or consciousness-raising is invariably identified and thus dismissed as playing politics with athletics. And when Trump entered the sport-based/ racial activist fray in earnest in 2017 (albeit as an aggressive critic), these idealized cultural conceptions seem to have made it easier for many in the mainstream, especially white Americans, to effectively opt out of the discussion of race altogether even if they purported to sympathize with athletic activists. This happened in at least two different ways.

67 On the one hand, Trump’s right-wing political conservatism allowed those in the mainstream to frame athletic activists as left-wing, racial extremists and then settle into a comfortable middle-ground that was dismissive of talk of race in and around sport no matter what it was about or who was saying it. On the other hand, even as African American athletes and others managed to make racism and racial injustice a part of the public discussion, much of the conversation has come to focus on individual athletes and whether their personal experiences rendered their statements legitimate or acceptable. How has racism impacted them? Are their complaints legitimate? Instead of talk about the seriousness of systemic racism within the criminal justice system and the persistence of racism in American life, public dialogue focused on the individuals doing the protesting and their relationships with the league and fans. Reflective of liberal and individualistic approaches to thinking about race and sport, this watered-down otherwise complicated conversations about racism, and often contained them strictly within the boundaries of sport. In either case, we see once again how American ideals — about individualism, sport as sacred, and visions of race, race relations, and racism — allow some conversations, but make other, more sociological ones more difficult.

68 What is at stake in understanding the unique cultural status of sport when it comes to race, protest, and politics is not just whether we agree with the particular causes of athlete activists, African American or otherwise. What is also at stake is how we understand sport and athletes in society, especially when it comes to issues of racial justice and social change. Will the prevailing cultural stereotypes and norms about athletes and political and protest hold or change? Can we begin to see sport as something more than an arena for entertainment and release, or some other kind of

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cultural arena and space? If social change is hard, sometimes cultural change of this sort may be even harder.

69 I am more sympathetic than most Americans when it comes to recognizing, thinking through, and ultimately taking action on the racial problems African American athletes feel compelled to prioritize for public conversation. However, if the sports world — by which I would include reporters and commentators as well as owners, managers, and even fans — wants to be true to the ideals of sport as an arena for racial progress, social mobility, and fairness, these are conversations that cannot and should not be avoided. In many ways, in fact, athletes raising fists or kneeling or speaking out — about racism or police brutality or other social issues — puts that conversation and our ideals about sport and politics and social change on the table, and forces sports fans of all racial backgrounds and political orientations to consider the larger social and racial issues of the society in which they live. This requires us all to think about sport not only on its own terms, but in terms of how it is situated and functions in the larger social context— a context which includes a world marked by deep and persistent racial inequalities and injustices. Remembering these basic facts is imperative — not only for our scholarly understandings of sport and race and activism, but for any hope we may have to use our collective obsessions with athletics to make the world a better, less racist, and more equitable place.

70 Proper Names: Muhammad Ali, Carmelo Anthony, Michael Bennett, James Blake, Ralph Boston, H. Rap Brown, Jim Brown, John Carlos, Harry Edwards, Lee Evans, Craig Hodges, Olivia House, Laura Ingraham, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, LeBron James, Gene Johnson, Michael Jordan, Colin Kaepernick, Steve Kerr, Robert Kraft, Louie Lomax, Joe Louis, Martin Luther King, Jr., Brandon Marshall, Jesse Owens, Chris Paul, Gary Pinkel, Greg Popovich, Mahmoud Abdul Rauf, Meghan Rapinoe, Jackie Robinson, Theodore Roosevelt, Bill Russell, John Schnatter, Dean Smith, Tommie Smith, Donald Sterling, Donald Trump, Wyomia Tyus, Dwayne Wade, Serena Williams, Venus Williams, Bud Winters, John Wooden.

NOTES

1. See Lindsay Gibbs, "Carmelo Anthony Issues A Powerful Plea To Fellow Athletes In The Wake Of Violence," ThinkProgress, 8 July 2016. Accessed 16 October 2018. https://thinkprogress.org/ carmelo-anthony-issues-a-powerful-plea-to-fellow-athletes-in-the-wake-of- violence-4cf02a6ebc4a/; Char Adams, "Serena Williams' Wimbledon Win Photo Is Important," Bustle, 25 April 2018. Accessed 16 October 2018. https://www.bustle.com/articles/171600-why- serena-williams-victorious-raised-fist-photo-at-wimbledon-is-important; "LeBron James on Social Activism: 'We All Have to Do Better'," ESPN.com, 14 July 2016. Accessed 16 October 2018. http://www.espn.com/espys/2016/story/_/id/17060953/espys-carmelo-anthony-chris-paul- dwyane-wade-lebron-james-call-athletes-promote-change; Christina Cauterucci, "The WNBA's Black Lives Matter Protest Has Set a New Standard for Sports Activism," Slate Magazine, 25 July 2016. Accessed 16 October 2018. http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2016/07/25/ the_wnba_s_black_lives_matter_protest_has_set_new_standard_for_sports_activism.html; David

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Aldridge, "Decision on All-Star 2017 Looms over Hornets, Charlotte," NBA.com, 25 July 2016. Accessed 16 October 2018. http://www.nba.com/2016/news/features/david_aldridge/07/25/ morning-tip-nba-moves-2017-all-star-game-from-charlotte/. 2. There were exceptions, of course. For example, NBA players Craig Hodges speaking out against racism in the city of Chicago or Mahmoud Abdul Rauf refusing to stand for the National Anthem. See, Bryant, Howard, The Heritage: Black Athletes, a Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism (Beacon Press, 2018). But these were the acts of individuals who failed to find support among other players or among the general public and who were rather quickly isolated and ostracized by the league. 3. Harry Edwards, The Revolt of the Black Athlete (New York: Free Press, 1969). 4. Douglas Hartmann, Race, Culture, and the Revolt of the Black Athlete: The 1968 Olympic Protests and Their Aftermath (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); idem, “Activism, Organizing, and the Symbolic Power of Sport: Reassessing Harry Edwards’s Contributions to the 1968 Olympic Protest Movement,” Journal for the Study of Sports and Athletics in Education 3:2 (2009): 181-195; Amy Bass, Not the Triumph but the Struggle: The 1968 Olympics and the Making of the Black Athlete (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Kevin Marinelli, "Placing Second: Empathic Unsettlement as a Vehicle of Consubstantiality at the Silent Gesture Statue of Tommie Smith and John Carlos," Memory Studies 10:4 (2016): 440-458; Dana D. Brooks and Ronald Althouse, “Revolt of the Black Athlete: From Global Arena to the College Campus,” Journal for the Study of Sports and Athletes in Education 3:2 (2009): 195-214. Fritz G. Polite and Billy Hawkins, Sport, Race, Activism, and Social Change: The Impact of Dr. Harry Edwards’ Scholarship and Service (: Cognella, 2012); David J. Leonard and C. Richard King, “The Legacies of Harry Edwards for Sport Sociology,” Journal for the Study of Sports and Athletes in Education 3:2 (2009): 133-252; Othello Harris, “Muhammad Ali and the Revolt of the Black Athlete,” in Muhammad Ali: The People’s Champ, edited by Elliot J. Gorn (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 54-69; David K. Wiggins, “The Future of College Athletics Is at Stake: Black Athletes and Racial Turmoil on Three Predominantly White University Campuses, 1968-1972,” Journal of Sport History 15:3 (1988): 304-333. 5. Joseph N. Cooper, Charles Macaulay, and Saturnino H. Rodriguez, "Race and Resistance: A Typology of African American Sport Activism," International Review for the Sociology of Sport 54:2 (March 2019): 151-181; Aram Goudsouzian, "From Lew Alcindor to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Race, Religion, and Representation in Basketball, 1968– 1975," Journal of American Studies 51:2 (2016): 437-70. doi:10.1017/s0021875816000621; George B. Cunningham and Michael R. Regan, "Political Activism, Racial Identity and the Commercial Endorsement of Athletes," International Review for the Sociology of Sport 47:6 (2011): 657-669; Emmett L. Gill, Jr., “‘Hands Up, Don’t Shoot’ or Shut Up and Play Ball? Fan-Generated Media Views of the Ferguson Five,” Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment 26:3-4 (2016): 400-412; Jon Dart, “‘Messing About on the River.’ Trenton Oldfield and the Possibilities of Sports Protest,” in Sport, Protest and Globalisation, edited by Jon Dart and Stephen Wagg (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2016), 289-310; Kwame Agyemang, John N. Singer, and Joshua Delorme, "An Exploratory Study of Black Male College Athletes’ Perceptions on Race and Athlete Activism," International Review for the Sociology of Sport 45:4 (2010): 419-435; David J. Leonard and C. Richard King, “Revolting Black Athletes: Sport, New Racism, and the Politics of Dis- Identification,” Journal for the Study of Sports and Athletes in Education 3:2 (2009): 215-232. See also "U.S. National Anthem Protests (2016–present)," Wikipedia, 12 March 2019.

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Accessed 13 March 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ U.S._national_anthem_protests_(2016–present). 6. The early accounts of “the revolt” were dominated by Harry Edwards (Edwards, The Revolt and idem, "The Olympic Project for Human Rights: An Assessment Ten Years Later," The Black Scholar 10:6-7 (1979): 2-8. doi:10.1080/00064246.1979.11414041. See also Vincent Matthews and Neil Amdur, My Race Be Won (New York: Charterhouse, 1974))— who not only played a leading role in the events of 1968 but also emerged as a leader of the nascent field of sport sociology and sport studies more generally (see Harry Edwards, Sociology of Sport (Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press, 1973). See also Leonard and King, “The Legacies”; Hartmann, “The Symbolic Power”; David K. Wiggins, "‘The Struggle That Must Be’: Harry Edwards, Sport and the Fight for Racial Equality," The International Journal of the History of Sport 31:7 (2014): 760-77). However, in the late 1970s and 1980s a more formal history or historiography began to take shape: A.H. Grundman, “Image of Collegiate Protest and the Civil Rights Movement: A Historian’s View,” Arena Review (October 1979): 17–24; Donald Spivey, “Black Consciousness and Olympic Protest Movement,” in Sport in America: New Historical perspectives, edited by Donald Spivey (Westpoint, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984), 239-262; Edwards. "The Olympic Project”. A new wave of popular reporting and public history culminating in an extraordinary two-part, Sports Illustrated cover story based upon Kenny Moore’s extensive and exclusive interviews with Tommie Smith (Kenny Moore, “A Courageous Stand,” Sports Illustrated, 5 August 1991 and idem, “The Eye of the Storm,” Sports Illustrated, 12 August 1991). In the following decade a more formal and extensive historiography on the movement was produced (Harris, “Muhammad Ali”; Douglas Hartmann, "The Politics of Race and Sport: Resistance and Domination in the 1968 African American Olympic Protest Movement," Ethnic and Racial Studies 19:3 (1996): 548-66; Bass, Not the Triumph; Hartmann, Race, Culture, and The Revolt) along with a series of retrospectives on the life and career of Harry Edwards himself (Leonard and King, “The Legacies”; Leonard and King, eds., Journal for the Study of Sports and Athletes in Education 3:2 (2009); Wiggins, “The Struggle”). In recent years, another wave of writing, more autobiographical, from key players in the movement has appeared (Tommie Smith, Delois Smith, and David Steele, Silent Gesture: The Autobiography of Tommie Smith (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008) and John Carlos with Dave Zirin, The John Carlos Story: The Sports Story that Changed the World (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011)), along with a collection of more popular accounts and treatments, including Howard Bryant, The Heritage. Black Athletes, a Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism (Beacon Press, 2018); Richard Hoffer, Something in the Air: American Passion and Defiance in the 1968 Mexico City Games (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009); Dave Zirin, What’s My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2005). 7. Wiggins, “The Future”, 305. 8. Hartmann, "Politics of Race and Sport”. 9. Hartmann, Race, Culture, and the Revolt, 39. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 56. 12. William Gillis, From Jack Johnson to Lebron James: Sports, Media, and the Color Line (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016). 13. Ibid., 84.

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14. Edwards, The Revolt, appendix E. 15. Hartmann, Race, Culture, and the Revolt, 43. 16. See, for an extended discussion: Hartmann, Race, Culture, and the Revolt, chapter 3. 17. Edwards, The Revolt, xvii. 18. Hartmann, Race, Culture, and the Revolt, 45. 19. David K. Wiggins, “Prized Performers, but Frequently Overlooked Students: The Involvement of Black Athletes in Intercollegiate Sports on Predominantly White University Campuses, 1890-1972,” Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport 62 (June, 1991): 164-177. 20. David K. Wiggins, “Critical Events Affecting Racism in Athletics,” in Racism in College Athletics: The African-American Athlete’s Experience, edited by Dana Brooks and Ronald Althouse (Morgantown, WV: Fitness Information Technology, 1993), 23-49. 21. Jack Scott, The Athletic Revolution (New York: Free Press, 1971). 22. Polite and Hawkins, Sport, Race, Activism; Leonard and King, “The Legacies”. 23. Hartmann, Race, Culture, and the Revolt, 144. 24. John J. MacAloon, “Double Visions: Olympic Games and American Culture,” in The Olympic Games in Transition, edited by Jeffrey O. Seagrave and Donald Chu (Champaign, Il: Human Kinetics Books, 1988), 279-294; Marinelli, “Placing Second”; see also Hartmann, Race, Culture, and the Revolt, 15-26, 152-160. 25. David Leonard, “Student-Athlete Revolt 2.0,” The Undefeated, 20 November 2016; Harry Edwards, “From Robinson to Kaepernick: The Evolution of Athletic Activism.” North American Society for the Study of Sport, Keynote Address, 2016. http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=OimoyyxOHpE; Bryant, The Heritage; see also: Cooper, Macaulay, and Rodriguez, "Race and Resistance”. 26. See, for example: Jules Boykoff, "Protest, Activism, and the Olympic Games: An Overview of Key Issues and Iconic Moments," The International Journal of the History of Sport 34:3-4 (2017): 162-183; Cathal Kilcline, “Sport and Protest: Global Perspectives,” The International Journal of the History of Sport 34:3-4 (2017): 157-161; Herbert G. Ruffin II., “‘Doing the Right Thing for the Sake of Doing the Right Thing’: The Revolt of the Black Athlete and the Modern Student-Athletic Movement, 1956-2014,” The Western Journal of Black Studies 38:4 (2014): 260-278; Polite and Hawkins, Sport, Race, Activism; Christine O’Bonsawin, “From Black Power to Indigenous Activism: The Olympic Movement and the Marginalization of Oppressed Peoples, 1968-2012,” Journal of Sport History 42:2 (2015): 200-219; see also, Hartmann, “Politics of Race.” 27. Cf. Jere Longman, “Kaepernick’s Knee and Olympic Fists are Linked by History,” The New York Times, 6 September 2018. 28. “Heat Don Hoodies After Teen’s Death,” ESPN.com, 24 March 2012. Accessed 20 March 2019. http://www.espn.com/nba/truehoop/miamiheat/story/_/id/7728618/miami-heat-don-hoodies- response-death-teen-trayvon-martin; Douglas Hartmann, “The Silent Speech of Athletes,” The Society Pages, 27 March 2012. Accessed 20 March 2019. https://thesocietypages.org/editors/ 2012/03/27/the-silent-speech-of-athletes/; “No Fines for Rams Players’ Salute,” ESPN.com, 2 December 2014. Accessed 20 March 2019. http://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/11963218/the- five-st-louis-rams-players-saluted-slain-teenager-michael-brown-sunday-game-not-fined; Jeff Goodman, “Chris Paul: Boycott a Real Possibility,” ESPN.com, 25 July 2014. Accessed 20 March 2019. http://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/11261909/chris-paul-los-angeles-clippers-says- sitting-possible-donald-sterling-remains. 29. Leonard, “Student-Athlete Revolt”. 30. Cooper, Macaulay, and Rodriguez, "Race and Resistance.” 31. Leonard, “Student-Athlete Revolt”. 32. "U.S. National Anthem Protests (2016–present)," Wikipedia.

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33. Adams, "Serena Williams' Wimbledon”; Cauterucci, “WNBA's Black Lives Matter Protest”. 34. Steven N. Waller, Dawn M. Norwood, Lequez Spearman, and Fritz G. Polite, "Black American Female Olympic Athletes Have Not Reaped the Same Social Standing and Economic Benefits That Their Counterparts Have since the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City," Sport Science Review 25:1-2 (2016): 53-72. See also, Hartmann, Race, Culture, and the Revolt, 124-126. 35. Scott Brooks and Michael A. McKail, “A Theory of the Preferred Worker: A Structural Explanation for Black Male Dominance in Basketball,” Critical Sociology 34:3 (2008): 369-387; William C. Rhoden, $40 Million Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete (New York, NY: Crown Publishers, 2006). 36. Charles Modiano, “The NFL, Activism, and #BlackLivesMatter,” in Football, Culture, and Power, edited by David J. Leonard, Kimberly B. George, and Wade Davis (New York: Routledge, 2017), 228-253. 37. Joel Anderson, "The University Of Missouri's Football's Long, Tense History With Racism On Campus," BuzzFeed, 15 November 2015. Accessed 13 March 2019. https://www.buzzfeed.com/ joelanderson/mizzou-footballs-long-fraught-history-with-racism-on-campus. 38. Louisa Thomas, “Political Football: Michael Bennett Wants NFL Players to Be a Force for Social Change,” The New Yorker, 17 December 2018. 39. "U.S. National Anthem Protests (2016–present)," Wikipedia. 40. Ibid. 41. Ben Carrington and Jules Boykoff, “Is Colin Kaepernick’s Nike Deal Activism—or Just Capitalism?” The Guardian, 6 September 2018. 42. Ibid. 43. Thomas, “Political Football”. 44. John Branch, “The Awakening of Colin Kaepernick,” The New York Times, 8 September 2017. 45. "U.S. National Anthem Protests (2016–present)," Wikipedia. 46. Perry Bacon, Jr. and Dhrumil Mehta, “Why Trump Is Likely to Keep Talking about the NFL Protest,” FiveThirtyEight.com, 1 June 2018. Accessed 25 October 2018. https://fivethirtyeight.com/ features/many-americans-agree-with-trumps-nfl-anthem-stance-so-hell-likely-keep-talking- about-it/. 47. Arnie Stapleton, “NFL National Anthem Protests Named Top Sports Story of 2017,” The Associated Press, 25 December 2017. 48. Sharon Erickson Nepstad and Alexis M. Kenney, "Legitimation Battles, Backfire Dynamics, and Tactical Persistence in the NFL Anthem Protests, 2016– 2017," Mobilization: An International Quarterly 23:4 (2018): 469-483. 49. Stefan Stevenson, “LeBron James Thanks Laura Ingraham a Year after ‘Shut Up and Dribble,’” Fort Worth Star Telegram, 17 February 2019. 50. This story comes from a “Take a Knee” protest event I observed at the East Side Freedom Library in St. Paul, Minnesota on 24 January 2018. For more on protests in and around the 2018 Minnesota Super Bowl, see: Dave Zirin, “Hot Protest in an Ice Cold Super Bowl City,” The Nation, 1 February 2018. 51. Cf. Dan Wang, Alessandro Piazza, and Sarah A. Soule, “Boundary-Spanning in Social Movements: Antecedents and Outcomes,” Annual Review of Sociology 44 (2018): 167-187; Laurel R. Davis-Delano and Todd Crosset, “Using Social Movement Theory to Study Outcomes in Sport- Related Social Movements,” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 43:2 (2008): 115-139. 52. Douglas Hartmann, Midnight Basketball: Race, Sports, and Neoliberal Social Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), especially chapters 3 and 4.

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53. Douglas Hartmann, “Rush Limbaugh, Donovan McNabb, and ‘A Little Social Concern:’ Reflections on the Problems of Whiteness in Contemporary American Sport,” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 31 (2007): 45-60; idem, “What Can We Learn From Sport If We Take Sport Seriously as a Racial Force? Lessons from C.L.R. James’s Beyond a Boundary,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 26:3 (2003): 451-483. 54. David Steele, “After Another Police Shooting, Silence from Kaepernick’s Critics Speaks Volumes,” Sporting News, 20 September 2016; see also, "U.S. National Anthem Protests (2016– present)," Wikipedia. 55. Hartmann, Race, Culture, and Revolt, chapter 3. 56. Eduardo Bonilla Silva, Racism Without Racists: Color-blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States, Fourth Edition (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014); see also Meghan A. Burke, "Colorblind Racism: Identities, Ideologies, and Shifting Subjectivities," Sociological Perspectives 60:5 (2017): 857-865; Leslie G. Carr, “Colorblind” Racism (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997); Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “Color-Blind Dreams and Racial Nightmares: Reconfiguring Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era,” in Birth of Nation’hood, edited by T. Morrison and C. Brodsky (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1997), 97-168. 57. Douglas Hartmann and Kyle Green, “Politics and Sports: Strange and Secret Bedfellows,” in The Social Side of Politics, edited by Douglas Hartmann and Christopher Uggen (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 87-102. 58. Hartmann, Race, Culture, and the Revolt, 202-204. 59. Scott Clement and Emily Guskin, “Poll: 53 Percent of Americans Say It’s ‘Never Appropriate’ to Kneel During the National Anthem,” The Washington Post, 23 May 2018; see also: Jonathan Intravia, Alex R. Piquero, and Nicole Leeper Piquero, "The Racial Divide Surrounding United States of America National Anthem Protests in the National Football League," Deviant Behavior 39:8 (2017): 1058-1068; Maxwell Strachan, “Black Americans Support Colin Kaepernick. White People? Not So Much,” Huffington Post, 6 September 2016.

ABSTRACTS

This overview of the 1968 African American Olympic protest movement provides historical context and a comparative touchstone for understanding the current wave of Black athletic activism in the United States. At a basic level, the exercise reminds us that sport-based activism is not unprecedented and, when it emerges, tends to be connected with the larger social movements of the day (the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s and Black Lives Matter more recently). The comparison also shows contemporary activism to be the biggest and broadest mobilization of African American athletes and their supporters in American history, propelled especially by the participation of women and athletes across multiple sports and levels of participation. However, athletic activism remains as polarizing as ever and the most significant impacts of athletic activism still appear to be primarily symbolic or cultural. The final section of the paper highlights the cultural dimensions of sport—its “serious play” status, normative prohibitions against politics, and its individualistic, colorblind visions of race and social justice— that make athletically-based activism of all sorts challenging.

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INDEX

Keywords: race, sports, protest, activism, social movements, culture, politics

AUTHOR

DOUGLAS HARTMANN

Douglas Hartmann is Professor and Chair of Sociology at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA. He is the author of among others Midnight Basketball: Race, Sports, and Neoliberal Social Policy (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and Race, Culture, and the Revolt of the Black Athlete: The 1968 Olympic Protests and Their Aftermath (University of Chicago, 2003) and co-author of Migration, Incorporation, and Change in an Interconnected World (Routledge/Taylor Francis, 2015, with Syed Ali) and of Ethnicity and Race: Making Identities in a Changing World (Pine Forge Press, 2007, with Stephen Cornell). Hartmann is the past editor (with Chris Uggen) of Contexts Magazine and co-publisher of The Society Pages, an open access social science hub. He is past president of the Midwest Sociological Society and co-PI of the American Mosaic Project and the Kids’ Involvement and Diversity Study (KIDS).

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The Black Arts Movement Reprise: Television and Black Art in the 21st Century

Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar

“How much longer are they gonna treat us like animals? The American correctional system is built on the backs of our brothers, our fathers and our sons. How much longer? It's a system that must be dismantled piece by piece if we are to live up to those words that we recite with our hands on our hearts. Justice for all. Not justice for some, but justice for all. How much longer?”—Cookie Lyons, “Empire” (2015)

“[The] artist’s role is to raise the consciousness of the people….Otherwise I don’t know why you do it.”—Amiri Baraka1

1 In 1969, Larry Neal, one of the most visible black writers of his generation, emerged as a chief exponent of a new artistic movement that was unfolding alongside the Black Power Movement. For those curious about it, he explained that art had a critical role in the Black Freedom Movement2 as a force to complement grassroots activism and political struggle. Black artists were intimately connected to, and profoundly aware of, the black freedom struggle; and their work reflected this familiarity. “The Black Arts Movement,” Neal noted, is radically opposed to any concept of the artist that alienates him from his community. The movement…speaks directly to the needs and aspirations of black America. In order to perform the task, the Black Arts Movement proposes a radical reordering of the Western cultural aesthetic. It proposes a separate symbolism, mythology, critique, and iconography.3

2 Throughout the United States a new black mood coalesced around aesthetes who formulated new and audacious articulations of identity and politics that resonated with wider black America. The Black Arts Movement (BAM) would have an indelible impact on the cultural landscape of the country. It transformed the arts and literature in innumerable ways from theatre, to murals, fashion, and more.

3 A half-century after Neal’s decree, there has been an unprecedented explosion of black arts in the United States, exceeding the depth, scope, reach and influence of the BAM,

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while simultaneously adhering to the fundamental political sensibilities that made the movement a distinct historical moment. As television has become a hyper-visible medium for this modern expression, the opportunities for majority-black cast television shows have grown considerably. There has been a record number of black shows and, for the first time, majority black dramas that have simultaneously aired more than one season. These shows, both comedies and dramas, have largely become creative spaces to showcase black creative work from music, through dance, literature and visual arts. Significantly, too, they engage major political issues that resonate in the black community, from sexuality, and gentrification, to class conflict, and police brutality. In fact, most black shows have explicitly or implicitly addressed the Black Lives Matter movement—the largest black social justice movement in decades. Several have been as direct as to mention, by name, some of those unarmed black people killed and victimized by police. Ultimately, black artists in TV have forged a moment in history that is not only unprecedented in black visibility, but unchartered in political expression. This movement embraces many of the fundamental tenets of the Black Arts Movement, moving into a creative cultural medium that has increased visibility and reach in ways few would have imagined a half-century earlier.

4 In what ways have these new expressions of black art in television aligned with the impulse of the BAM? How has the most recent generation of writers, directors and showrunners made critical connections between entertainment and the politics of the wider black community? Can these television shows—targeted to a multi-racial audience—prove commercially viable as platforms of black social and political expression? To what degree can commercially viable TV speak of and be in dialogic form with a broad-based black political movement like Black Lives Matter—even if that movement is unpopular among most whites? How do these shows reflect the evolving gendered readings and representations of blackness? This paper explores the development, technological and market dynamics that have given rise to a new space for black television, and, simultaneously, a new space for the expression of black political art.

1. History of Blacks on TV

5 In the earliest days of television in the United States, race functioned as it had in other, more conventional, spaces for American popular culture. Whiteness was a normative expression of the range of the human experience. White characters appeared as leading men, beautiful and desired women, smart, virtuous, industrious, and brave. They also appeared as scoundrels, villains, ugly, dumb, stupid, servile, and cowardly. People of color—from Native Americans, through Asians and black people—were never afforded this range, and, instead, were largely absent, or used as background props to white- centered narratives. Despite short-lived shows like “The Hazel Scott Show (the summer of 1950), or “The Nat ‘King’ Cole Show” (1956-1957), the vast majority of scripted black images on TV were narrowly constructed. In the role as supporting characters, they generally operated as servants, like Rochester of the “Jack Benny Program” (1949-1965) or “Beulah” (1950-1952). In 1951 the wildly popular radio show, “Amos ‘n Andy,” was adapted for TV for CBS. In its original format, two white actors provided voices for the black characters who were derived from classic minstrel, blackface routines. When “Amos ‘n Andy” aired in 1951 with black actors, they remained little

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more than coarse caricatures. NAACP protests led CBS to temper the offensive nature, while still satisfying the demands of its largely white audience. In 1953 the show was cancelled, yet remained in syndication until the dawn of the Black Power Movement in 1966.4

2. Black Nationalism

6 By the early 1960s, as the Civil Rights Movement unfolded, projecting new, real-time images of black people as civilized, peaceful, well-dressed citizens facing down the ignorant, mean-spirited and savage forces of white supremacy. From the neatly- dressed and youthful activists like and Ruby Doris Smith speaking to national media, or peaceful high school children facing down water hoses and police dogs in Birmingham, these hopeful agents of integration and racial reconciliation stood in contrast to images of black people long propagated in popular culture as servile, lazy, feckless, and content with subordination to whites. For the long-suffering, indolent Negroes idealized in white popular art, the civil rights activists and their national leadership proved anathema. Simultaneously, another image of blackness entered the popular gaze, challenging white artistic caricatures as well as those on the front lines of civil disobedience. These black nationalists were sartorially identical to their integrationist counterparts; however, ideologically, they vitriolically disagreed with integrationists, with a fervor equal to their criticism of racist whites who opposed civil rights.

7 There had been no single national figure more prominent than Malcolm X in fomenting the Black Power Movement. As the Civil Rights Movement unfolded, Malcolm emerged as the most vocal black critic of its ambitions. The national spokesman for the Nation of Islam (NOI), the largest black nationalist group in the country, Malcolm castigated the idea that black people should sacrifice their safety to integrate with whites who were their “open enemies.” White people’s history of committing vast crimes and abuses against humanity—rape, enslavement, genocide, lies, terrorism, state-sanctioned violence and oppression—was evidence of the futility of integration, the NOI argued. Black people, Malcolm believed, would be best served forming their own nation, separate and distinct from whites and their wicked ways.5

8 Malcolm often discussed the internalization of black self-hate and ideas surrounding black aesthetics. As he noted, black people were not only denied access to schools, but when they did have access, those school books either erased or maligned black people. Black people were denied access to the professional spaces in which popular culture was institutionalized in TV and film, even if they were present in grotesque caricatures for popular consumption. Images of a full complexity of black life and humanity were denied; and black beauty was oxymoronic. He asked an audience in 1963, “Who taught you to hate the color of your skin? Who taught you to hate the texture of your ? Who taught you to hate the shape of your nose and the shape of your lips? Who taught you to hate yourself from the top of your head to the soles of your feet? Who taught you to hate your own kind?”6

9 While the minister chastened black people for capitulating to white popular culture and its anti-black expressions, he also mocked whites in a range of ways. Echoing the Nation of Islam’s de-pedestalization of whiteness, Malcolm ridiculed “Negro” supplicants to white supremacy who had been so in love with their oppressors that

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they wanted to be like them. They even applied toxins to approximate their oppressors’ “animal-like” appearance, from skin whitener, to lye and painful hair-straightening rituals. They wanted to be like the “pig-colored” white man, have his dog-like “snout” of a nose and his “dog-like” hair.7 Whites had never been as publicly ridiculed in the history of the United States.

10 While there were strains of the Black Freedom Movement that ridiculed whiteness and white people for a range of deficiencies, from morality to beauty, rhythm, and hygiene, the core thrust of the movement—inherited from Malcolm—was not about hating whites. It was, as, cultural studies scholar Reiland Rabaka states, “about loving black people, and defending them against anti-black racist assaults…both physical and psychological.”8 But, not only was the denunciation of whiteness anathema to the Civil Rights Movement, the thrust of a conspicuous celebration of black beauty was also a departure from the movement, which did very little explicit promotion of black pride. Centered on philosophies of racial reconciliation, integration and common humanity, the fundamental basis of the movement was, of course, legal, not social or cultural in nature. The Civil Rights Movement aimed to realize legal rights for all citizens. And that legal drive was the destruction of laws that prevented access to voting, justice, schools, hospitals, parks and every type of public accommodation. Generally, driven by integrationist ambition, the modern Civil Rights Movement was not theoretically congruent with the mélange of social, political and cultural blackness in the Black Power Movement.9

11 Malcolm profoundly resonated with a younger demographic of black people who listened to his lectures and read his speeches. Many joined the NOI or remained on its fringes, attending local Temples of Islam. Many others, however, were not willing to convert to the Nation of Islam, or commit to its stringent lifestyle demands, or believe all of its dogma. Many, for example, did not agree that whites were biologically and immutably wicked. But the foundational elements of his message were compelling, particularly the exaltation of black pride, and self-determination. A list of those who praised him or who credit him for influencing them reads like a who’s who of the Black Power and Black Arts Movements: Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, Maulana Karenga, Eldridge Cleaver, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee), Kalamu ya Salaam, and Nikki Giovanni among them.10

3. Black Power Movement

12 Malcolm X broke from the NOI in 1964, converted to Sunni Islam, aligned with radical whites and many non-African Americans, and was assassinated in 1965. A year later, the Black Power Movement emerged, asserting the importance of three foundational components among an otherwise ideologically diverse movement: black pride, the right to black self-determination, and self-defense. Far from monolithic, various permutations of Black Power manifested themselves in diverse organizational forms, such as revolutionary nationalist groups like the Black Panther Party, and the Revolutionary Action Movement, to the Black Student Movement, which fundamentally transformed higher educational across the United States. Black students formed black cultural centers, black student unions, demanded more black faculty, staff and students. And, importantly, they demanded a new academic field of study: black studies. In this process they realized an expansion of epistemological boundaries,

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forging new points of inquiry and approaches to study. There were, of course, many critics, black and white, to these efforts. Integrationist civil rights leaders like NAACP head , decried “reverse segregation” and “black Jim Crow studies,” insisting that it would leave black students ill-prepared after graduation.11 Academics who valued the core thrust of Black Power, like Nathan Hare, challenged Wilkins, explaining in 1969 that the forceful Black Power demands from students “for more black professors and black students have padded white colleges with more blacks in two years than the decades of whimpering for ‘integration’ ever did.”12 The first of racial and ethnic studies programs, black studies was followed by women’s studies, Latinx Studies, Asian American studies, and gender and sexuality studies programs and departments. These institutions, over the succeeding decades hired faculty, trained scholars, made important contributions to various disciplines and established professional associations across the globe.13

13 It may seem ironic that this movement to increase the black presence in white spaces was not orchestrated by civil rights integrationists. What is critical to note in the exponential increase of black faculty, staff and students at white colleges and universities is that these Black Power exponents demanded black self-determinative institutions within these campuses. These students formed black organizations, homecoming courts, dorms and even separate graduation ceremonies in some schools. In contrast, the integrationist drive, for many in the Civil Rights Movement, idealized and envisioned a melting pot scenario as evidence of their struggle’s greatest achievement. Black people, they hoped, would be intimately woven into the fabric of the United States, as had various European ethnic groups. Black power, however, insisted on the same access to resources and citizenship that was afforded whites, but did not demand nor seek any amalgamation or dissolution into white spaces. Blackness and black people were too beautiful, too valuable, too worthy to be lost in a sea of whiteness. Their institutions, cultural, and religious work and expressions were too precious to be forfeited to whites as the cost for integration. Desegregation, on the other hand, granted access, while black people could simultaneously maintain a degree of self-determination and control over their social, intellectual, religious, and professional work.14

14 Across the United States, black power made critical interventions in the mainstream in ways not envisioned by integrationists of the Civil Rights Movement who viewed integration as a “promised land” for people of color. The reach of black power was vast, affecting every facet of black life. Because racism’s toxicity reached black people across professional, private and public arenas, black resistive work similarly found expression in multivalent ways. The hostility to black development in most professions prompted African Americans to forge professional associations in these respective fields, facilitating greater mentorship, opportunities, and leadership. African Americans faithfully saw the power of such efforts to reform space—even those spaces and institutions under the control of white people. The faith in this level of agency contrasts with what scholars like Frank B. Wilderson call “Afro-Pessimism,” who argue that only the “revolution that will destroy civil society as we know it would be a more adequate response” than the efforts done by these activists. Wilderson insists, that “a lot of repression happens on the level of representation, which then infiltrates the unconscious of both the black and the white person. Since these structures are ontological, they cannot be resolved (there is no way of changing this unless the world

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as we know it comes an end…).”15 On the matter of “representation,” artists have fundamentally operated against this thesis, believing, instead, that they can offer critical and powerful counterhegemonic representations that subvert anti-blackness. The scope of this belief was so vast that it emerged as a movement of its own.

4. Black Arts Movement

15 The black nationalist thrust and its explicit celebration of black beauty, black history and identity inexorably affected young black artists. Blackness was not deficient or incomplete without whites. Black humanity, they argued, was always whole, and appealing to whites for integration was not going to make black people free. Access to resources and black control of institutions that were essential to their healthy survival was real freedom. As writer Ishmael Reed explains, young black artists “gave the example that you don’t have to assimilate. You could do your own thing, get into your own background, your own history, your own tradition and your own culture. I think the challenge is for cultural sovereignty and Black Arts struck a blow for that.”16 Nationally, the reverberations of this new consciousness took root. Various organizations formed in the BAM that nurtured, trained, and inspired black artists in the performance arts in particular. From the fine arts students at historically black colleges and universities like Howard University, to the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/ School and Negro Ensemble in New York, the Inner City Cultural Center in Los Angeles, or the Black Ensemble Theater Company in Chicago, black actors, writers, theatre and film technicians sharpened their professional skills, positioning themselves to take advantages of expanded opportunities in TV and film.

16 The political thrust of Black Power understood the utility of the arts, including literature—especially in its commodified and corporate mediated form—as an extension of white domination. Consequently, artists found particular value in the words of Frantz Fanon who wrote about the important role that writers have in liberation movements: “[T]he native intellectual used to produce his work to be read exclusively by the oppressor, whether [to charm] or [denounce] him through ethnic or subjective means; now the native writer progressively takes on the habit of addressing his own people.” This is what Fanon referred to as “a literature of combat, in the sense that it calls on the whole people to fight for their existence as a nation.”17 Across the United States, black people utilized culture as a strategic tool in a multi-faceted freedom movement. It pulled from an array of sources and intellectual traditions spanning generations. The work was constitutive of an eclectic mélange of modalities, media and folk expressions, even in its efforts to carve out innovative interpretative and expressive work. As Kalamu ya Salaam, a BAM-era writer noted, “do not necessarily be like / anything you heard before & / yet it will still sound familiar.”18

17 In Los Angeles Maulana Karenga emerged as the most visible cultural nationalist on the West Coast. As co-founder and head of the organization Us, Karenga promoted the philosophy of Kawaida, which “called for the reclamation of black Americans’ African past and identity through a set of cultural, social, and political practices based in the African value system.”19 On the East Coast, playwright, poet and black nationalist Amiri Baraka established a strategic and ideological partnership with Karenga and Us, adopting Kawaida as a guiding philosophy for his work in Spirit House, a Newark-based home for the arts and political organization.20 While Karenga and Baraka emerged as

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two of the most visible adherents of the cultural nationalist thrust of the BAM, the movement was much more than these two. Across the country black young people embraced the hallmarks of black power aesthetics: bubas or dashikis, African names, and natural hair styles.

18 Like the larger Black Power Movement, the BAM, was not ideologically monolithic, despite the general belief that culture played an essential component to the black liberation. Kawaida, for example, insisted on the revitalization of African culture among black people in America, while others like the Black Panther Party had regarded African-centered culture as politically impuissant. In 1969, Linda Harrison, a Black Panther, dismissed cultural nationalism, writing that too many have been duped into believing “there is a dignity inherent in wearing naturals; that a buba makes a slave a man; and that a common language – Swahili—makes us all brothers.” The monetization and swift capitalist exploitation of cultural nationalism, she explained, evinced its impotence. The “power structure…condones and even worships anything that is harmless and presents no challenge to the existing order.”21 And, despite her androcentric references above, many Panthers attacked the cultural nationalist followers of Kawaida for their revisionist notions of African patriarchy.

19 The Black Panther Party, which had its own internal debates and struggles around patriarchy and , had, by late 1968 (two years after its founding) become mostly female and instituted policies against sexism within its ranks. Women led chapters of the BPP across the country and were central all programs, from its newspapers, to free breakfast, and health centers. In 1970 the BPP became the first national black co-ed organization to publicly endorse both the Women’s Liberation Movement, and the Movement.22 Unlike the organizations that Karenga and Baraka led, the Panthers did not demand that women and men operate in separate spheres. As historian Ashley Farmer details, followers of Kawaida, “steeped in idealism, and the prevailing patriarchy of the day…originally defined the African Woman as an activist who induced through child rearing, education, and homemaking.”23 As major exponents of the belief that culture can move the people closer to liberation, many women within the Kawaidist tradition challenged what was, in essence, a replication of the dominant white standards of patriarchy. In fact, across the United States, white society—its religious, educational, political, military and police institutions—were rigidly patriarchal and homophobic (not to mention racist). It is remarkable that Kawaida’s female cult of domesticity was heralded as defiant to white cultural values. As many women activists observed, these values were more aligned with white Victorianism than a modern liberation movement.24

20 In the late 1960s black women across the country were agents of a wide expanse of activist work, and increasingly vocal about and resistive to being relegated to the margins of any struggle—cultural or otherwise. Given the ubiquity of their critical work, the conventional proscriptions to place women in their “natural” space in the home fell out of favor. The Kawaidists in Us in 1969 wrote that “Black Men [were] inspired by Black women who are capable of carrying on the revolution in their absence… [and] inspired even more by Black women who can carry on the revolution in their presence.”25 By 1974 both Baraka and Karenga, perhaps inspired (or prodded) by their memberships within their respective organizations, firmly denounced sexism and revised their dictums regarding gender. Karenga wrote that black people cannot be free until they purge “sexism [and] male chauvinism” from their communities. Baraka, who

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offended many whites with vitriolic writings and speeches, argued that patriarchy and racist animus were “counterrevolutionary” and that, instead, an advanced, sophisticated politics of freedom must denounce “reactionary chauvinism either racial or sexual.”26 For a movement aimed to disrupt European cultural standards and values, the irony was not lost on how some cultural nationalists had simply dressed conventional white American cultural standards in superficial African trappings. The power of this historical moment, however, demonstrates that these young activists and artists were not static, but open to debate, revise, and reconsider their politics.

21 Reiland Rabaka outlines the tensions in the BAM as artists attempted to disrupt old notions of cultural normativity that were, essentially, racist and sexist. Viewing the movement from a black feminist or womanist interpretation, therefore, “moves past the tired tendency to concentrate on the more male-dominated organizations and institutions.” Women, from Jayne Cortez, Gloria House, Sonia Sanchez, to Elma Lewis, Gwendolyn Brooks and Nikki Giovanni made foundational cultural expressions—from plays to novels—to the era.27 The efforts to make critical contributions to the political struggle of black people through art was fundamental to the BAM. And that advancement could not abandon half of the black community. Women were involved at every stage—even in the face of opposition. Their works, like Toni Cade Bambara’s anthology The Black Woman, or I know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, added depth, dimension, and served as testimonies to the centrality of women in the wider black community and its freedom movement. Angelou, Bambara, Baraka, Neal, and scores of others introduced into national consciousness cultural works that challenged and critiqued various forms of oppression, while proving dynamic and agile enough to respond to the shifting social and political circumstances from which they emerged. They remained tethered to the wider black community, and politically and artistically adapted to new exigencies and opportunities.

22 The celebrated intellectual and writer James Baldwin, who was older than the literary figures of the BAM, had a dialogue in 1971 with one of the most visible figures of the movement, Nikki Giovanni, on the PBS television series “SOUL!” Giovanni respected Baldwin, as did many of her generation. In recognizing their relationship as writers across generations, tied by a constant utilization of art as a tool of freedom work, Baldwin noted that artists bear a particular challenge and responsibility to the people who consume their work. But as a black artist, in particular, the challenge is made more acute when the artist forges a counterhegemonic aesthetic as many in the Black Arts Movement did. He explained that, “it’s hard for anybody, but it’s very hard if you’re born black in a white society. Hard, because you’ve got to divorce yourself form the standards of that society.”28 The elder writer also offered a caveat about the copious celebration of blackness in commodified forms. “The danger of your generation, if I may say so … is to substitute one romanticism for another. Because these categories — to put it simply but with a certain brutal truth — these categories are commercial categories.”29 Here Baldwin warns against the ways in which black art is appropriated, stripped of its most subversive and powerful components and meanings, and packaged for popular consumption. These “commercial categories” can also mean a base social construction of racial constructs that are, themselves, consequences of toxic racial orders that need to be destroyed, not reinforced by revised notions of blackness. Still, the utility of art as a resistive tool is clear to Baldwin who later appears to endorse Nigerian literary giant Chinua Achebe who, in a similar dialogue with Baldwin, explained the importance of political art. “Those who tell you ‘Do not put too much

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politics in your art’ are not being honest. If you look very carefully you will see that they are the same people who are quite happy with the situation as it is… What they are saying is don’t upset the system.”30 The opportunities for black writers to allow their politics to shape the images of blackness steadily grew from the 1970s.

5. TV in the Post-Black Power Era

23 Reflecting the profound cultural, and social shifts across the country during the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, the 1970s witnessed an expansion, though limited, in black representation on TV. From “Sanford and Son,” through “Good Times,” “The Jeffersons,” and “What’s Happening,” black comedies emerged, often with high ratings. Generally, they had white executive producers, mostly white directors and writers. In fact, when “Good Times,” which was set in a Chicago public housing project, debuted in 1974 with an all-black cast, all of the staff writers were white. Although the creators, Eric Monte and Michael Evans, were black, the show’s white executive producer, Norman Lear, assembled an all-white team to bring the show into fruition, with depth, color, and dimension. The politics of race were evident in the earliest discussions about the cast. Lear wanted to remove James Evans, the father and husband, from the show, creating a black household with three children and a single mother in public housing. Esther Rolle, who was cast to play mother Florida Evans, protested. Rolle later argued that, “I introduced the black father to this country,” when she refused to accept the part unless there was a father to the household. This was the first time that a black main character on TV was both a father and husband. The show debuted on CBS with a white lead writer, Allan Manings, as a producer.31

24 Typical of the era, Lear assembled a team that crafted a “black” family, including its speech, interests, political sensibilities, and humor largely derived from the white imagination. This included the articulations of Michael, the youngest Evans, who was, himself a Black Power advocate, complete with dashikis and clenched fist. Jokingly referred to as the “militant midget” by his family members, Michael’s character was the political reflection of the era, though distilled through white conceptions of black power.

25 In the midst of the Black Arts Movement, with black playwrights, novelists, poets and other literati, the incongruence between black comedy, a black family and black politics fully conceived, written, produced and packaged by whites could not be lost. The commercial presentation of black people was, of course, how American popular culture had created images of black people since the minstrel shows of the 19th century. The political currents of the country, however, would demand more than what the white imagination offered, and the producers expanded their staff, hiring two black writers from the prestigious Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival. Michael Moye, one of the two black writers recalls the “cast was happy to see me” as a critical creative component to the narratives of the show.32

26 The lack of familiarity with the lived experience of black people was so striking, recalls Moye, who remembers a white writer asking if black girls played with Barbie dolls. (They did). Moye had to also explain to the white writers that, in general, black people who were so destitute as to be forced to ask for welfare, were not gleeful, but viewed it with some degree of disappointment and embarrassment.33 The complexity of black lives, filtered through the white imagination, was, therefore, often reduced to the

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limits of white exposure to black people, as well as constricted by a litany of often hostile images consumed by whites the entirety of their lives. And though there were no black dramas or even leading black characters on white-majority dramas of the decade, the dramatic mini-series “Roots” hosted a heavily-black cast and became the most watched television miniseries in history. Based on Alex Haley’s book of the same name, “Roots,” focused on the author’s family history, traced to an enslaved African from the 18th century. It aired in January 1977 and its final episode captured an astounding 100 million viewers. In all, it became the most watched show in history to that date, ultimately honored with over 25 television awards.34 With many white stars as well, the show demonstrated a breadth of black dramatic performances that was unprecedented on TV. Still, no black-led dramas resulted from the success of the miniseries.

27 Black characters remained largely marginal on TV shows throughout the 1980s, from “Dallas,” through “The Dukes of Hazard,” “Cheers,” and “Family Ties,” although they had become stock sideline characters in a range of dramas, from “Hill Street Blues,” and “St. Elsewhere,” and “L.A. Law,” with occasional centric stories for the black characters. Notably, however, “The White Shadow” debuted in 1978 as the first network drama with a majority black cast. Created by Ken Howard and Bruce Paltrow, two white writers, the show starred Howard as a basketball coach in a mostly black high school in South Central Los Angeles, often helping his players with personal crises outside of school. To some degree the show pandered to white savior tropes, where whites, ostensibly working in the interests of a black group, push against authority and prove to be more effective than black leaders.35

28 The 1980s and 1990s also witnessed a range of black comedies that addressed issues in black communities with a balance of humor and light-hearted engagement. Series like “The Cosby Show,” “227,” “Family Matters,” “A Different World,” “Martin,” and “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air” were largely all-black settings, reflecting the largely segregated social reality of the United States. While they tended not to focus on explicitly black themes or make racial references like their predecessors in the 1970s, issues like police brutality, apartheid, and racism appeared in storylines for multiple shows.36 Unlike the first wave of black TV shows, these series generally had black creators, executive producers, staff writers and directors. The most significant of this cohort of show was “The Cosby Show,” (1984-1992), which, itself, exhibited a high water mark in its cultural nationalist references and allusions.

29 “The Cosby Show” rarely explicitly engaged race in its dialogue, but was fully ensconced in a palpable black cultural space as no TV show had been theretofore, while winning dozens of awards and garnering the highest ratings on TV. With black writers, directors, creators, consultants and a black executive producer, the show, centered on the life of an upper-middle-class family, headed by a medical doctor and lawyer, featured copious amounts of African American artistic expression throughout the series’ nine-year run. Black visual artists, writers, actors, musicians and guest stars from Stevie Wonder, Dizzy Gillespie, Lena Horne through Nancy Wilson and Mariam Makeba appeared. Additionally, black institutions from colleges to Negro League baseball teams and Tuskegee Airmen were referenced.37 This “Cosby Show,” though so firmly grounded in a black-centered space, eluded white discomfort or alienation by not explicitly engaging in racial matters. In many ways, it superficially adopted the “race neutral” dialogue of the majority white sitcoms, while also crafting a litany of

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cultural markers that reflected the race of the cast—much as white shows had done. “A Different World,” a spinoff of “The Cosby Show,” differed from its parent show by openly discussing race and a range of social issues, while simultaneously celebrating African American culture like its parent show. Real world events became important stories to episodes.

30 After the 1992 verdict which exonerated four L.A. police officers in the videotaped beating of black motorist Rodney King, several TV shows addressed the ensuing civil unrest in Los Angeles in their storylines. When “A Different World,” announced its plans to start its sixth season with a story around the L.A. Rebellion, Susan Fales-Hill, the head writer, and director Debbie Allen, both black women, faced resistance from NBC executives. After a “tense” round of debates, Allen noted that NBC and the show would likely suffer if the wider black community and its leaders thought that the network had silenced the show’s political voice. The network relented and the episodes (Parts I and II) became part of a wider historical moment in television history when escapist comedic entertainment shifted to more topical and polarizing issues.38 Some may dismiss these efforts as part of what philosopher Hubert Marcuse refers to as the ability of oppressive apparatus to coopt subversive art for its own capitalist exploits.39 But Allen and Fales-Hill, two black women, operating in a vastly male and white domain, saw their work as offering social and political critiques. Though their work was not revolutionary, Marcuse’s essential idea of cooption and exploitation from the controlling apparatus may have merit. The network was not offering any transformation of society, only a means to profit from detailing its problems. But the agency of the artists cannot be entirely dismissed. They are engaged in their own space to resist the pervasive anti-black representation—leading to violence—that Afro- Pessimists insist permeates society.

31 The covering of the urban unrest was important enough that a critic at the New York Times reported that the many shows that addressed the L.A. Rebellion were part of a trend of “the politicizing of TV’s prime-time comedy.”40 It appeared that more black creative control made these shows more likely to engage the political exigencies faced by the wider black community. At the same time, however, there was tepid willingness from studio executives to fully allow substantive or regular engagement with these issues. Moreover, black shows remained relegated to comedies, often considered too light to address controversial or serious social issues. While dramas may have more creative agility, there had been no black dramas with black leads to last a season on TV. New technologies and shifting demographics, however, would indelibly change the television landscape and the politics therein after the turn of the century.

6. New Business Models, New Art

32 In 2013 Wired magazine noted that the current crop of prestige dramas in terms of quantity and quality had surpassed anything witnessed in any prior era of television. The rise of so many platforms for TV—network broadcast, basic and expanded cable, as well as new streaming forms from , Amazon, Hulu and more—has created what the magazine hails as the “platinum age of TV,” exceeding the superlative “Golden Age of TV” that many have assigned to the expansive and high quality viewing now available.41 The competition has generated the best from the creative minds of studios

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fighting for an audience. No era has afford a broader representation of a diversity of characters for actors of color.

33 In the second decade of the 21st century, the expansion of networks and channels led to disruptive business models that have fundamentally altered the “television” market. When “Good Times” debuted in 1974, there were three national networks, with a systematic effort from each to reach the widest market of viewers for high ratings and advertisement revenue. Given that roughly 83 percent of the country was white, network executives, who were all white, created white majority shows with little to no racial diversity. And, as noted above, white executives placed creative control of people of color (almost always black people) in the hands of whites who often pandered to the gross ignorance or expectations of the wider white market. By 2013, the demographic landscape of the country, network executive leadership and consumer markets had all diversified considerably. Importantly, so many shows air simultaneously across so many different networks and platforms—from cable to streaming services—that creating a series for a general [white] audience does not have the same business advantages that it did 40 years earlier.

34 Given the racialized viewing patterns of TV, the shift in the delivery of shows has meant that the power of black viewership has been amplified beyond any point in history. While representing 13 percent of the country, African Americans are over 20 percent of the viewing market, consuming TV at a higher rate than any other racial/ ethnic group.42 This means, for example, that if 100 shows are on simultaneously, and 90 are shows with all-white characters, the white target audience, evenly-divided across the shows would, theoretically, have a lower average rating than the five black- targeted shows, each, on average. In addition to black-owned and black-oriented networks like TVOne, OWN, and BET, black-targeted shows expanded rapidly on networks like Bravo, VH1, and E!, which have aired several reality shows and scripted shows with majority-black casts. Dozens of black executive producers, creators, writers, directors have animated and altered the landscape of television in scripted and reality shows.

35 Between 2011 and 2016, scripted television shows across various platforms increased by over 70 percent. Between 2002 and 2016, the number of television shows increased from 182 to 455 original scripted shows.43 The opportunities for producers, writers, and directors of color have expanded to new levels, but the general landscape remains vastly unrepresentative of the country and viewer demographics. A 2017 report that examined “all 234 original, scripted comedy and drama series airing or streaming on 18 networks during the 2016–17 television seasons” found that “65 percent of all writers’ rooms had zero black writers, and across all shows, less than 5 percent of writers were black.” Furthermore, it found that, Over 90% of showrunners are white, two-thirds of shows had no Black writers at all, and another 17% of shows had just one Black writer. The ultimate result of this exclusion is the widespread reliance on Black stereotypes to drive Black character portrayals, where Black characters even exist at all—at best, ‘cardboard’ characters, at worst, unfair, inaccurate and dehumanizing portrayals.44 (Emphasis in original).

36 While five percent of showrunners, or executives who hire and fire staff, were black, (all other people of color combined accounted for 3.9 percent of showrunners), black showrunners universally hired diverse writing staffs, including white writers, even for black shows. At the same time, however, 69 percent of white showrunners hired no

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black writers.45 Though incredibly limited, the opportunities for majority-black cast television shows have resulted in a record number of black shows and, for the first time in history, majority black dramas that have simultaneously aired more than one season. These shows, ranging from comedies to dramas, have largely proved to be more than just vapid, escapist entertainment. These shows have become part of a veritable movement of black artistic expression, highlighting black culture, history, politics and more. This movement aligns closely with the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s in a host of ways.

7. Black Lives Matter and Social Justice Movements

37 Before HBO’s “,” (2002-2008) no majority black drama had lasted for more than one season on network or cable TV since “The White Shadow” (which, of course, centered on its white lead). ABC’s “Lincoln Heights,” (2007-2009) stands out as a renewed, multi-year black drama on network TV. The second decade of the 21st century, however, witnessed a vast expansion of black series and dramas in particular. As of the 2017-2018 season, there are at least a dozen majority-black American TV dramas on cable and streaming that have been renewed for at least once: “Queen Sugar,” “Greenleaf,” “The Haves and Have-nots,” (OWN); “Power,” (Stars) “Empire,” (Fox) “Luke Cage,” “Seven Seconds,” (Netflix); “,” “Tales,” “The Quad,” (BET); “Black Lightening,” (CW), “The Chi” (Showtime) and “Underground.” (WGN). Unlike earlier majority-black cast dramas, these universally have black creators, executive producers, writers, and directors. In various ways, the echoes of the earlier Black Arts Movement are manifested in these series. Of course, black control and self- determination had been a fundamental component of the Black Arts Movement—as with the broader Black Power Movement. And while these series have all developed outside of the original major three networks (ABC, CBS, NBC), they did not arrive without some precedent of black showrunners. As Angelica Jade Bastién notes in The Atlantic, this proliferation of black shows “is built on the success that showrunners like the powerhouses and Mara Brock Akil have worked for in recent years. When Scandal’s Olivia Pope sauntered onto television screens in 2012, she was the first black female TV lead in almost 40 years.”46

38 But more importantly, the notion of black self-determination was predicated on the principle that black art would always address, complement and be in dialogic form with the social, political currents of the wider black community. In his most subversive stage, Amiri Baraka went as far as to say that, “the black artist’s role in America is the destruction of America as he knows it.”47 As a virulent critic of racism, militarism and imperialism, the context of Baraka’s charge was significantly farther-reaching than the agendas of most members of the current cohort of black creatives in Hollywood. Most of these writers, for example, do not emerge from the political activist or black nationalist tradition that characterized so many of the BAM. Few, for example, give homage to political groups or leaders or tout their militant bona fides. The notion, however, that black artists and their work be substantively tied to the interests of the black community certainly resonates with Baraka’s later charge that the “artist’s role is to raise the consciousness of the people….Otherwise I don’t know why you do it.”48 Like Sonia Sanchez, Askia Muhammad and dozens of others have noted, art cannot be isolated from the community it represented.49 It constantly operates as a reflection of

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its cultural, social, political tensions, interests, and impulses. This principle is most salient in the degree to which black television shows have grappled with the largest black social justice movement since the Black Power era.

39 Fomented by the high-profile killings of unarmed black people and subsequent acquittals of the killers, Black Lives Matter emerged in 2013 when founders, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and , initiated #BlackLivesMatter on social media in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, who stalked and killed unarmed black teen Trayvon Martin in 2012. Across the country hundreds of small-scale rallies, as well as massive marches with thousands of people have brought BLM into the political arena as no social movement in decades. Utilizing peaceful actions based on civil disobedience, activists have initiated crowds so large as to stop traffic on major highways, and streets in major cities from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles in ways not witnessed even during the Civil Rights era. Like the poets, singers, literary figures and playwrights of the Black Arts Movement, the creative forces behind the large corpus of black television have engaged the politics of BLM with creative dexterity.

40 In the spirt of black artists and intellectuals of the Black Power era, writers and producers of these new black dramas have found their work inextricably tied to the wider social and political currents of the black community. Every show mentioned above has explicitly addressed racial bias in policing. The types of police actions have ranged from menacing police stops, verbal harassment, to corrupt planting of evidence, beatings, and killing. Some have gone as far as to graphically depict police malfeasance and brutality.

41 “Queen Sugar,” created, directed and executive produced by Ava DuVernay, with also an executive producer, is one of several dramas that have created storyline arcs across a season addressing Black Lives Matter. Premiering September 6, 2016, the series centers on the three Bordelon siblings: two sisters and a brother in rural Louisiana. One sister, Nova, is a -based journalist. The character speaks at rallies, and writes about cases of police terror in the black community, providing the show a space to even recognize and name real victims of lethal police force. The other sister, Charley, a wealthy businesswoman, is horrified when her teenaged son, Micah, falls victim to an abusive police officer who forces his pistol in her son’s mouth, traumatizing the child, and, ultimately, inspiring him to join a BLM high school activist group. The only brother, Ralph-Angel, who works on his sister’s sugar cane farm, had been formerly incarcerated, creating a nod to the carceral state of Louisiana, which infamously imprisons more of its citizens than any other state in a country that incarcerates more of its citizens than any country on earth.50

42 “Queen Sugar’s” thematic multivalence offers critiques of race, class, gender, and sexuality with sublime nuance. Storylines detail characters who wrestle with issues often explored by social scientists, activists and policy makers, like drug addiction, class conflict, and the carceral state. More than an undifferentiated whole, class and ideological differences play out within the Bordelon family, as when the wealthier Charley bails out and assumes control of the family business—itself with roots dating to the enslavement of black people in the 19th century. And a prominent white family, with inter-generational wealth and landownership, offers a foil to the Bordelons. Avoiding easy caricatures of southern racism, the white family’s effort to disrupt the black-owned sugar plantation is treated without stock racist vulgarity and clichéd coarseness. Yet, the civility and respect the white family displays for Charley Bordelon

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appears perfunctory, and even as a deceptively insidious attempt at cooption. In some respects, this relationship operates as a metaphor for the overtures that some white elites have offered black elites as a surreptitious means of minimizing threat and shoring up white hegemonic control. And while the intersection of class and race are explored, the show has remained closely-tied to the current events of police killings of black people. In the first two seasons (with every episode directed by a woman, most of them black), the series addresses BLM, even showing a mural featuring some of the most well-known victims of violence where their killers, mostly police, were all acquitted: Mike Brown, Eric Garner and Trayvon Martin.

43 In March 2017, FOX premiered a ten-part limited series, “Shots Fired,” that follows the federal investigation of a shooting of an unarmed white teen by a black police officer. An inversion of the racial profile for most of the high-profile police shootings, the show features a black federal investigator and a black federal police agent. A black officer’s killing of an unarmed white teen prompts a federal investigation, as a premise, challenges the viewer to reconcile the power of law enforcement which operates with virtual impunity when it comes to killings of civilians in the U.S.—regardless of the race of those involved.51 The show demonstrates, over the span of the season, the complexities of power, class, and race, which are never neatly separated. The black investigators are sensitive to the endemic racial inequalities in the fictional southern town, Gate City— as they carry federally-sanctioned authority. They find themselves confronted with systemic racial discrimination against blacks, even as the black officer benefited from some degree of protections from the wider police department, where he serves as the only officer of color.

44 Show creators Gina Prince-Bythewood and have created, written and directed TV series for more than two decades, and in each case adding depth to black characters, while anchoring their experiences in the political and cultural fabric of wider society. In this case, the salience of social justice and the scrutiny of police action is a stark departure from the general narrative of TV crime dramas.

45 Crime dramas, universally, depict the police as capable, non-racist, sincere officers of the law and justice, even with personal flaws. Since the 1970s, most have included capable black law enforcement characters, even if they are almost never leads. In “Shots Fired,” unlike nearly every crime drama since the 1950s, the police—and the justice system more broadly—do not appear unfettered by the endemic racism that, in reality, marks the criminal justice system.52 As the story unfolds, police malfeasance, cover-ups and gross class inequalities lay bare a world that is not a neat binary of white affluence, black poverty, white power and black impuissance, although these tropes remain convenient shorthand for the political, economic, and social landscape of both the show and the real world. References to private for-profit prisons, compromising politicians, passionate social justice activists and career-driven officers make the drama a rich text for subverting a popular genre without facile attempts at neat conclusions.

46 The production of the show was not without some deep emotional investment in the storyline and a strong sense of engagement with the issue of , brutality and corruption. In fact, filming of one essential scene (when the young black officer shoots an unarmed white teen) was scheduled the day after a Minnesota officer killed an innocent black motorist, Philando Castile, which happened to be recorded

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live. Mack Wilds, who portrayed the officer on set, was horrified by the Castile killing. Wilds noted that upon entering his trailer, “the first thing I see is the … recording. I broke into tears. Like, inconsolable-nobody-could-tell-me-anything tears…I didn’t want to work that day.” The creators, Gina Prince-Bythewood and Reggie Bythewood met with the actor and explained that the show was an important tool to address the very issue that had so disturbed him. “We’re doing this for a reason. It’s more than just trying to make great television,” they noted. “We’re trying to make something. You are one of the voices helping us do it.” Similarly, Aisha Hinds, who plays an activist who protests police brutality, details how emotionally vexing—and important—she found her work. “It was incredibly purposeful,” Hinds stated, because you felt like you were doing work that was important, necessary … and relevant. These things were happening so frequently that before you sat and really went through all the emotions of one experience and one encounter and one injustice, another one was behind it. Your emotions were getting muddled to the point where people’s emotions were becoming numb. You couldn’t keep up with your own grief. People needed to cry out, and this show presents an opportunity to cry out, and continue the conversation.53

47 “Shots Fired” was so tied to the coverage of police shootings that one reviewer noted that, at moments, the episodes “feel more like a documentary that chronicles the aftermath — in a small southern American city — of the murder of a black teen as well as a young white man. Law enforcement and media responses are starkly different based on race. Just like in real life.”54 The intention to weave popular black political interests into black art had been a foundational concern for the Black Arts Movement. Fifty years later, creative voices, operating with more power and influence than any other era in American popular culture, have found their professional space an important arena for a resistive form of black art that was simultaneously mainstreamed. Price-Bythewood did not equivocate on her and her co-creator’s agenda with their work. “We had an intent — absolutely — to raise consciousness and say something dealing with these shootings. For Reggie and [me] and many others, [this] is the civil rights issue of our day. When you see these shootings happen, it seems like one of the first things the victim loses is their humanity. And when they lose that …they lose everything.”55

48 The many direct references and allusions to Black Lives Matter are stark. The fall 2015 premiere of the second season of the most watched black drama, “Empire,” the main characters host a concert which simultaneously operates as a rally against mass incarceration and a protest against the main character’s arrest. The improbably popular main character Cookie announces that the people must resist the incessant harassment and racist treatment from police and courts. The episode opens with a guest appearance from real life hip-hop super producer Swizz Beatz. Beatz informs the concertgoers — as well as the millions of viewers on TV—of the vast numbers of (several hundred thousand) black men who are currently being held in mass incarceration. The season opener was not the only reference to the concerns of the wider black community around police and criminal justice. When police arrest Cookie Lyons in a later episode, she announces to onlookers “If I die in police custody, I did not commit suicide,” an allusion to the who was arrested after being stopped for not using a turn signal in July 2015. Her death in her jail cell was ruled a suicide. It was not the only show to exercise a degree of “edutainment” (a marriage of education and entertainment) regarding imprisonment statistics and black people.

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49 Season 4, episode 7 of the hit comedy “Black’ish” opens with a quote from Russian novelist and philosopher Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” The main character, Dre, then gives a series of sobering numbers of the prison industrial complex, noting that although comprising 13 percent of the U.S., black people are 36 percent of those in prisons and jails, while Akon’s song “Locked Up” plays.

50 The finale of the third season of “Being Mary Jane” (December 2015) ends with the main character’s niece being stopped by a hostile police officer who follows a script nearly identical to the Sandra Bland stop. Similarly, “The Quad,” in its second season (2018) features a storyline of the black female president of fictional Georgia A&M University pulled over and arrested by a hostile officer. In the spirit of #SayHerName, a social media and grassroots effort to keep the name of victims of police harassment and violence who are women and girls, an episode of “Shots Fired” actually, repeats the threat that a Texas State Trooper, Brian Encinia, gave motorist Bland, “I will light you up!”56

51 Resonating with BAM writers, the executive producer of “Empire,” Sanaa Hamri, explains that, “‘Empire’ is fearless in talking about what is current, what is really happening, whether it’s about bipolar disease in the black community, whether it’s being a gay male in the black community … So with that said, of course we’re going to tackle issues like black lives matter because it matters to us.”57 And while Shonda Rhimes’ “Scandal,” Irv Gotti’s anthology series “Tales,” and Craig Wright’s “Greenleaf” have all created episodes centered on police killings of unarmed black people, the creative power of the new wave of black television is also characterized by its agility to explore black art, beyond the vitiation of black rights and the subversion of justice. The creative contours venture beyond these themes, often providing a fierce celebration of the wider black community, beyond trauma.

8. Black Art and Its Inheritors

52 In a wider society where black alterity is normalized, and black writers complain that the wider white staff constructs cardboard black characters with very little substance, these black shows have made vast intertextual allusions to black creative predecessors of various platforms. Across shows, many episodes have been homages to the literary canon of black writers, musicians, intellectuals, and political leaders. The episode, “I Get Physical,” (Season 2, episode 4) of “Luke Cage,” alone, references former Congresswoman and U.S. presidential candidate , early aviator Bessie Coleman, heavy weight champion Joe Louis, hip-hop artists Mobb Deep and D-Nice, corporate leaders Reginald Lewis, Earl Graves, anti- activist and suffragist Ida B. Wells, and musical superstar Beyoncé. Passing references to these figures are made organically in a way that demands viewer familiarity with the names, while simultaneously not disrupting the story arch. These allusions operate as important components to enrich and add verisimilitude to the depictions black communities. They are also resistive gestures to Hollywood’s historic tendencies to evade black complexity, history, and agency.

53 Like the Black Arts Movement, these shows, largely created, written and directed by African Americans, have forged a salient line of inheritance from cultural antecedents of black art. Unlike the BAM artists who often viewed their work as bolder, blacker, and

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more defiant than the work of those whom they succeeded, there is a copious amount of references to black artists in these shows, evincing a continuity, rather than a break in creative expression. “The Quad” has done this with aplomb, referencing titles of literary classics as episode titles from Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Maya Angelou’s I Know why the Caged Bird Sings to Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and James Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain. Often tied directly to the theme of the episode, the writers do not give short shrift to hip-hop, actually playing Kendrick Lamar’s informal anthem of BLM, “Alright,” during a protest scene and episode titles derived from hip-hop songs, like Tupac’s “Holla if Ya Hear Me.” Note that just as the BAM was not solely occupied with assailing against racism, these shows have offered a conspicuous celebrations of black arts— across mediums.

54 Hip-hop songs as titles for episodes has been a prominent device among these shows, most of which have been created by those of the Hip-Hop Generation.58 The titles of all episodes of “Luke Cage” come from hip-hop groups Gang Starr (season one) and Pete Rock & CL Smooth (season two) song titles.59 In addition to “The Quad,” the “Black’ish” spinoff, “Grown’ish,” which centers on the college life of eldest child of the Johnson family, has episodes named after hip-hop classics, like Kanye West’s “Late Registration,” Wu-Tang Clan’s “C.R.E.A.M. (Cash Rules Everything Around Me),” and newer hits like The Weeknd’s “Starboy,” and Drake’s “If You're Reading This, It's Too Late.”

Conclusion

55 The expansion of black creative control in television is remarkable in many ways. The access to power from executive positions as showrunners, through executive producers, directors and writers is not without significance. Black directors, such as veterans like Neema Barnette, and Mario Van Peeples, through Oz Scott, , , Kasi Lemmons, -Whitfield, Seith Mann, Millicent Sheldon, and many others have been afforded professional space to engage their craft. In realizing their talents, they have achieved notoriety, awards, honors and acclaim. This had occurred while bridging chasms across black creative space, politics and culture. Showrunners from Ava DuVernay, Lee Daniels, Courtney Kemp, Shonda Rhimes, and Cheo Hodari Coker have unprecedented access to influence and power, even as they universally offer art that complements wider social justice activism, politics and critical critiques from the margins of society. And like the BAM, they reflect a gender balance that far exceeds that of the white mainstream. Black women are central—if not dominant—in this movement. They have created black female characters in virtually every show from university presidents to powerful Washington insiders who influence the geo-political landscape, that defy constricted representations generally found in white-scripted shows. The power of the self-determinative spirit resoundingly manifests itself in these shows.

56 The core thrust of the explosion of black shows must be understood as a convergence of a wide range of forces, including pressure from black creative communities, new technologies and platforms for viewing shows, and Hollywood studios responding to demographic shifts in its market and the allure of profit making. In fact, one report found that “broadcast network TV advertising expenditure “focused on black audiences (defined as ad dollars placed on programming with greater than 50% black viewers) …

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increased by 255%” between 2011-2015.60 But more than just access to influence in television, the black creative class in television has been careful to provide a critical view of the social and political tensions in black communities and the country more broadly. They have, most importantly, upended and challenged conventional narratives of police and the criminal justice system, giving a critical voice and visibility to black political concerns. There is little question that this is an apogee of black creativity and exposure in the arts. No moment in history has witnessed a greater visibility of black people, their lives, beauties, flaws, strengths and weaknesses. And essential to this movement are the salient allusions to the creative antecedents who struggled, pushed and forged art that, while invisible to most white Americans, had always given depth, and humanity to the black community. The early 21st century finds these articulations and creative works consumed by millions of Americans across racial and ethnic lines. These shows—unlike much of the work of the BAM—are consumed by non-African American audiences, although racialized viewing patterns remain solidly in practice. All-white, or mostly-white casts have a significantly higher percentage of viewers who are whites. Similarly, majority-black cast shows have higher percentages of black viewers.61 Despite divergent TV viewing habits, non-blacks have been central to the success of many black shows. The reach, therefore, of this art is exponentially more far-reaching than the bulk of work from the BAM-era artists. Whether this translates into the power, political, and social impact that artists may want is another matter.

57 Even as the degree of access and influence remains limited, and the exigencies of racism remain, the rise of a this black creative class in Hollywood, its assiduous efforts to maintain black self-determinative work, give homages to black art, and celebrate the fullness of black humanity are core elements to the creative agenda that overlaps perfectly with the ambitions of the Black Arts Movement. Though not necessarily revolutionary in their artistic expressions, the BAM, itself, was never monolithic. Some art addressed sexism within the black community, while others glorified love, the joys of dance, song and family. Its artists understood the multi-dimensionality of black people. It also understood the utility of art in protest and social justice. In space where black humanity and complexity are systematically absent, the assertion of the fullness black humanity is a resistive act. This is especially acute with social justice struggles. As Larry Neal explained in 1969, BAM was the “aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept.”62 In some ways, many black artists have utilized their roles in television to become the artistic wing of the social justice struggles of their day.

58 Proper names: Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, James Baldwin, Mara Brock-Akil, Sanaa Hami, Malcolm X, Ishmael Reed, Chinua Achebe, Michael Moye, Ava DuVernay, Shonda Rhimes, Gina Prince-Bythewood, Reggie Rock Bythewood, Sandra Bland, Salim Akil, Cheo Hodari Coker, Lee Daniels.

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NOTES

1. “Revolution Song,” The Guardian, 3 August 2007, https://www.theguardian.com/ books/2007/aug/04/featuresreviews.guardianreview12, accessed 6 August 2018. 2. Historians have come to call the modern, roughly 20-year struggle for black freedom in the United States the Black Freedom Movement. It captures the ideological diversity of two separate, but related movements: civil rights and black power. See Hasan Jeffries, “Black Freedom Movement,” in Keywords for African American Studies (New York: New York University Press, 2018), 22-24, eds. Erica R. Edwards, Roderick A. Ferguson, Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar. 3. Quoted in Reiland Rabaka, Hip Hop’s Inheritance: From the Harlem Renaissance to Hip Hop (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2011), 105. 4. Donald Bogle, Heat Wave: The Life and Career of Ethel Waters (New York: Harper-Collins, 2011); Elizabeth McLeod, The Original Amos 'n' Andy: Freeman Gosden, Charles Correll and the 1928–1943 Radio Serial (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005). 5. E.U. Essien-Udom, Black Nationalism: The Search for an Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 154; Malcolm X, “Message to the Grassroots,” in Malcolm X Speaks, ed. George Brietman (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 6-8. 6. Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, “Black Power: The Looks,” in Black Power 50, edited by Sylviane Anna Diouf and Komozi Woodard (New York: The New Press, 2016), 126. 7. Ibid. 8. Rabaka, Hip Hop’s Inheritance, 99. (Emphasis in original). 9. For more on the Black Power Movement, see Ashley D. Farmer, Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017); John H. Bracy, Jr. Sonia Sanchez, James Smethurst, editors, SOS―Calling All Black People: A Black Arts Movement Reader, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014); Peniel E. Joseph, ed. The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era, (New York: Routledge, 2006). 10. Komozi Woodard, A Nation Within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), xii; Rabaka, Hip Hop’s Inheritance, 96-100, 111; Jerry Watts, Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual (New York: New York University Press, 2001), passim. 11. The body of scholarship on the Black Power Movement has expanded vigorously in the last decade. See Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity, Revised Edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019); Ibram H. Rogers, The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965–1972 (New York: Palgrave, 2012), 137; Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ‘Till the Midnight Hour (New York: Holt, 2006). 12. Rogers, The Black Campus Movement, 137. 13. Martha Biondi, The Black Revolution on Campus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 1-4; Stefan M. Bradley, Upending the Ivory Tower: Civil Rights, Black Power and the Ivy League (New York: New York University Press, 2018), 10-21. 14. Biondi, The Black Revolution on Campus, 1-4; Rogers, The Black Campus Movement, 1-2, 115, 192; Bradley, Upending the Ivory Tower, 10-21. 15. Frank B. Wilderson, “Public Talk, Ohio State University,” https://english.osu.edu/events/ frank-b.-wilderson-iii-afro-pessimism-and-ruse-analogy-public-talk, accessed 13 February 2019.

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16. “The Black Arts Movement (BAM) by Kalamu ya Salaam,” African American Literature Book Club, https://aalbc.com/authors/article.php?id=2087, accessed 12 August 2018, accessed 17 January 2019. 17. Reiland Rabaka, Hip Hop’s Inheritance, 102. 18. Kalamu ya Salaam, “Food for Thought” in New Black Voices, edited by Abraham Chapman (New York: Mentor, 1972), 378-79. 19. Ashley D. Farmer, Reclaiming Black Power, 97. 20. Komozi Woodard, A Nation within a Nation, 2, 66-67. 21. “On Cultural Nationalism,” The Black Panther, 2 February 1969, 6. 22. Ogbar, Black Power, 100-106. 23. Farmer, Remaking Black Power, 94. 24. Ibid., 100. 25. Ibid., 101. 26. Ibid., 122. 27. Rabaka, Hip Hop’s Inheritance, 114. 28. “James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni’s Extraordinary Forgotten Conversation About the Language of Love and What It Takes to Be Truly Empowered,” Brain Pickings.com, https:// www.brainpickings.org/2016/04/04/james-baldwin-nikki-giovannis-dialogue/, accessed 23 August 2018. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Gregory Simms, "Ja'Net DuBois Tells Diet And 'Good Times' Secrets During Swing Through Chi," Jet 52:25 (8 September 1977): 62–63; “E! True Hollywood Story: Good Times,” 20 August 2000. 32. Michael Moye, interview from “The Interviews,” American Television Academy Foundation, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T6qEAuwcv8 and https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=v9ndj3LOkmY, accessed 11 August 2018. See also Kathleen Fearn-Banks, The A to Z of African-American Television 49 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press), 169. 33. Michael Moye, interview from “The Interviews,” American Television Academy Foundation, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T6qEAuwcv8, accessed 8 January 2019. 34. “Top 100 Rated TV Shows Of All Time,” 21 March 2009, https:// tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/reference/top-100-rated-tv-shows-of-all-time/, accessed 17 February 2019. 35. Kathleen Fearn-Banks and Anne Burford-Johnson, Historical Dictionary of African American Television (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005), 57. 36. Among other shows, “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air,” NBC’s Season 1 Episode 6 addressed police harassment, as did “A Different World” (1992) in its sixth season debut in 1992. 37. Ron Krabill, Starring Mandela and Cosby: Media and the End(s) of Apartheid (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 102-105. See also Kathleen Franz and Susan Smulyan, Major Problems in American Popular Culture (Boston: Cengage Learning, 2011), 375-378; Henry Louis Gates and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, African American Lives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 38. “How ‘A Different World’ dealt with the L.A. riots and set the stage for a more political TV,” The Washington Post, 27 April 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ entertainment/tv/how-a-different-world-confronted-the-la-riots-25-years-ago/ 2017/04/26/ffe9bea0-28fa-11e7-b605-33413c691853_story.html? noredirect=on&utm_term=.a48fe043482a, accessed 17 August 2018. 39. “Herbert Marcuse,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ marcuse/#AesDim, accessed 17 February 2019.

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40. John J. Connor, “Critic’s Notebook; The Politicizing of TV’s Prime-Time Comedy,” New York Times, 21 October 1992, https://www.nytimes.com/1992/10/21/news/critic-s-notebook-the- politicizing-of-tv-s-prime-time-comedy.html, accessed 17 August 2018. 41. While many have called television of the 1950s the “golden age,” critics have recently applied that appellation to this current era’s explosion of creativity. See “Welcome to the Platinum Age of TV,” Wired, 19 March 2013, https://www.wired.com/2013/03/platinum-age-of-tv/, accessed 5 August 2018; Todd Leopold, "The New, New TV golden age," CNN, https://www.cnn.com/ 2013/05/06/showbiz/golden-age-of-tv/, accessed 24 January 2015; Lee Cowan, "Welcome to TV's second "Golden Age"," CBS, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/welcome-to-tvs-second-golden- age/, accessed 24 January 2019. 42. “Who's Watching What: TV Shows Ranked by Racial and Ethnic Groups,” USA Today, 28 June 2017, https://eu.usatoday.com/story/life/tv/2017/06/27/whos-watching-what- tv-shows-ranked-racial-and-ethnic-groups/103199848/, accessed 19 August 2018; “For Us By Us? The Mainstream Appeal of Black Content,” Nielson.com, 8 February 2017, http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2017/for-us-by-us-the-mainstream- appeal-of-black-content.html, accessed 19 August 2018. 43. “The New, New TV Golden Age,” CNN, https://www.cnn.com/2013/05/06/showbiz/golden- age-of-tv, accessed 14 January 2019; Littleton, Cynthia, "Peak TV: Surge From Streaming Services, Cable Pushes 2015 Scripted Series Tally to 409," Variety, Variety Media, LLC, 16 December 2015, accessed 12 January 2016; David Carr, "Barely Keeping Up in TV's New Golden Age," The New York Times. Accessed 24 January 2019. 44. Darnell Hunt, “Race in the Writers’ Room: How Hollywood Whitewashes the Stories that Shape America,” Foreword by Mara Brock Akil, https:// hollywood.colorofchange.org/, accessed 18 August 2018. 45. Ibid. 46. “Claiming the Future of Black TV,” The Atlantic, 29 January 2017, https:// www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/01/claiming-the-future-of-black- tv/514562/, accessed 17 August 2018. 47. Amiri Baraka, Negro Digest, 14:6 (April 1965): 65. 48. Jerry Watts, Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual (New York: New York University Press, 2001); see Woodard, Nation Within a Nation. 49. David L. Smith, “Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts of Black Art,” boundary 2 15:1/2 (Autumn, 1986 - Winter, 1987): 235-254. 50. Correctional Populations in the United States, 2013 (NCJ 248479). Published December 2014 by U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). By Lauren E. Glaze and Danielle Kaeble, BJS statisticians, https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=5177, accessed 6 August 2018; Adam Gopnik, “The Caging of America,” The New Yorker, 30 January 2012. 51. It is exceedingly rare for a police officer to be found guilty of killing someone while on duty. Studies reveal that over 99 percent of police killings of civilians are never convicted. In fact, although about 1,000 people are killed by police annually, none was convicted in 2014 and 2015. Matt Ferner and Nick Wing, “Here’s How Many Cops Got Convicted Of Murder Last Year For On-Duty Shootings,” The Huffington Post, 13 January 2016. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/police-shooting- convictions_us_5695968ce4b086bc1cd5d0da, accessed 11 February 2019. 52. Dozens of studies have documented widespread, national, historical and contemporary racial bias in the criminal justice system, from rates of police stops, convictions, sentencing, in every region of the country. See Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness (New York: The New Press, 2012);

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John F. Pfaff, Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform (New York: Basic Books, 2017). 53. “Real life is the spoiler alert for Fox’s new ‘Shots Fired,’” The Undefeated, 21 March 2017, https://theundefeated.com/features/fox-shots-fired/, accessed 19 August 2018. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid. 56. “‘Being Mary Jane’ Finale Addresses Police Brutality Against Black Women In Disturbing Closing Scene,” The Urban Daily, 16 December 2015, https:// theurbandaily.cassiuslife.com/3081496/being-mary-jane-finale/. 57. “‘Empire’ is Fearlessly Tackling Black Live Matter,” Screener, 28 September 2016, http:// screenertv.com/television/empire-season-3-tackles-black-lives-matter-police-brutality/, accessed 2 August 2018. 58. The term “Hip-Hop Generation,” has been adopted by some scholars and journalists to describe those African Americans born between 1964 and 1982, raised with hip-hop music as a salient cultural marker in an era after both the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. Additionally, this makes a critical demographic distinction between the white Generation X that overlaps temporally with this group. These two generations, though of the same age, matured in very different social, political and cultural contexts, thereby necessitating different nomenclature and theoretical framing. See Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007) and Bakari Kitwana, The Hip-Hop Generation Young Blacks and the Crisis in African-American Culture (San Jose: Civitas Books, 2003). 59. “Luke Cage Season 2 Episodes Are Named after Pete Rock & CL Smooth Songs,” Complex, 7 March 2018, https://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2018/03/luke-cage- season-2-episodes-named-after-pete-rock-cl-smooth-songs, accessed 20 August 2018. 60. “For Us By Us?”. 61. The country’s highest-rated show on cable TV, “The Walking Dead,” hosts a multiracial cast, with main characters who are black, white, and Latino. https:// www.usatoday.com/story/life/tv/2016/11/01/robert-bianco-why-tv-needs-diversity/ 92839696/; Alex Welch, “‘The Walking Dead’ Returns on Top,” 15 February 2019, https://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/weekly-ratings/cable-top-25-feb-4-10-2019/, accessed 17 February 2019; “Who's Watching What: TV Shows Ranked by Racial and Ethnic Groups,” USA Today, 28 June 2017, https://eu.usatoday.com/story/life/tv/ 2017/06/27/whos-watching-what-tv-shows-ranked-racial-and-ethnic-groups/ 103199848/, accessed 19 August 2018; “For Us By Us?”. 62. “The Black Arts Movement (BAM) by Kalamu ya Salaam,” African American Literature Book Club, https://aalbc.com/authors/article.php?id=2087, accessed 12 August 2018.

ABSTRACTS

Beginning in the late 1960s, the Black Arts Movement grew as the cultural wing of the Black Power Movement. It was represented by a rich cross section of artistic work, often forged by young urban artists in genres as diverse as music, dance, visual arts, literature and theatre. No

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aesthetic was unaffected by inflections of this new black consciousness. This article explores the ways in which, a half-century after the Black Arts Movement, African Americans in television have cultivated an aesthetic and politics that resonate with the core thrust of the Black Arts Movement, one that sets black people in the center of their own cultural and political narratives, and inextricably bound to the wider movements of social justice in black communities.

INDEX

Keywords: Black Arts Movement, Black Lives Matter, Black Power Movement, TV, Arts

AUTHOR

JEFFREY O.G. OGBAR

Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar is Professor of History and Director of the Center for the Study of Popular Music at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, Connecticut, USA. His research has centered on African American history. He has developed courses, lectures, and published articles on subjects as varied as pan-Africanism, African American Catholics, civil rights struggles, black nationalism, and hip-hop. Professor Ogbar has held fellowships at Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research. Here he completed work on his book, Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), which won Choice Magazine’s “Outstanding Academic Title” in 2005. His book Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas, 2007) won the W.E.B. Du Bois Book Prize (Northeast Black Studies Association, 2008). He is also editor of multiple books, including a co-edited volume, Keywords for African American Studies (New York University Press, 2018).

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Getting To That Promised Land: Reclaiming Martin Luther King, Jr. and 21st Century Black Activism in the United States and western Europe

Laura Visser-Maessen

1 Among a host of symbolic representations in the video clip to “Formation” (2016)— including singer Beyoncé atop a police car sinking in post-’s floodwaters and black women in Black Panther-inspired outfits dancing in lines forming an ‘X’—a black man holds up a fake newspaper. Paradoxically called The Truth, it features a picture of Martin Luther King. Its captions read “More Than A Dreamer,” followed by, “What is the real legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and why was a revolutionary recast as an acceptable Negro leader?”1 While the King reference has received short shrift in clip analyses, its inclusion, which indiscriminately squares him with Malcolm X and the Black Panthers and all three into a blanket continuum with black protest today, provides a key insight into understanding the black activist avant- garde of the 21st century. Irrespective of her intentions2, invoking the complex cultural memory of King’s legacy after his assassination on April 4, 1968, in this way goes beyond providing a corrective history lesson. It points to the heart of what this current movement for black rights aims to achieve and what obstacles and openings it sees in getting there.

2 For scholars and activists who have studied the black freedom struggle, it is a given that King’s legacy not only has been ‘whitewashed’ to neutralize its radical elements but also that this ‘sanitized’ version is used to undermine similar ones in today’s movement. Less attention, however, has been devoted to what current black activists do with this given in a positive sense. This article therefore documents some of the ways in which left-leaning black activists in the United States and western Europe and their supporters use the ‘sanitization’ of King’s legacy to their advantage. Particularly

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the recent #ReclaimMLK campaigns in the US and black engagement with King legacy projects in Europe, evidenced here through the case studies of the United Kingdom and the Netherlands3, reveal how it can be used as a potent tool to justify present-day protests. The objective then is to contribute to the growing literature on today’s black movement, rather than to the King legacy itself, by analyzing some of its hitherto unrecorded activities4. Highlighting what elements of King’s legacy these activists seek to ‘reclaim’ provides a valuable window into the possible trajectory of the 21st century black freedom struggle. Moreover, doing so advances Brian Ward’s argument on how European King legacy projects can illuminate how “local history is always shaped by broader regional, national, and international trends and forces”—a necessary insight for understanding and ameliorating race relations today.5

1. The ‘Sanitization’ of King

3 Debates on the significance, representation, and politicization of King’s legacy are not new; the fierce battles in the 1980s to get January 15 accepted as a federal King holiday or surrounding the building of the King memorial on the Washington Mall stand as testimony.6 In the past decade, however, such debates have taken on new significance, as civil rights movement anniversaries and Barack Obama’s election reinforced the idea of a ‘post-racial’ society while actual conditions for America’s black and working class returned to pre-1968 levels.7 Black Lives Matter (BLM), the resurgence of mass protests in Ferguson and elsewhere, and the election of Donald Trump further contested such complacency. As explained elsewhere in this volume,8 to understand, resist, or justify today’s racial status quo, academics, commentators, and activists therefore increasingly look to the late 1960s.

4 The renewed negotiation of King’s legacy fits this larger trend. This is not strange considering the applicability of King’s analysis of America’s ‘triple evils’ of racism, poverty, and militarism to today. In his book Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (1967), King argued that only a radical restructuring of American society could upend the ways in which the nation’s political and economic elites utilized these intertwined forces to maintain power domestically and globally, as exemplified by the . By valuing power, profits, and western (white) chauvinism over morality and equality, he contended, the US and the world remain unstable. He therefore pressed the underprivileged of all backgrounds to unite and demand structural solutions through nonviolent civil disobedience and by challenging white moderate complacency following President Johnson’s welfare and civil rights reforms. Viewing these as highly inadequate, his solutions included a guaranteed income, quality housing and education, and demilitarization.9 But today, scholar Jermaine McDonald observed, little appears to have changed. America still counts 45 million poor, commits to questionable military enterprises and expenditures, and the 2008 “bailout of the financial sector rather than a bailout of the citizenry highlight[s] our continued commitment to a property-, profit-, and corporate-centered economy.”10 Moreover, King’s post-1965 efforts to expose the covert racism behind so-called ‘colorblind’ practices in the North resonate as they evolved into the alleged ‘post-racial’ society black activists are challenging today. Unsurprisingly, the book’s sales have spiked since Trump’s inauguration.11

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5 Yet it is noteworthy that in the last five to ten years, the negotiation of King’s legacy in itself has increasingly become another tool to fight this status quo. Left-leaning scholars and activists perform a mutually reinforcing role in arguing that King’s ‘canonization’ is holding back today’s efforts for racial justice. At times calling it the “domestication,” “sanitization” or “Santa Clausification” of King, they argue that his articulation of the ‘triple evils,’ criticism of white moderates, and confrontational methods have purposely been downplayed because America as a nation is unwilling to confront the righteousness of his analyses.12 Instead, the overemphasis on the ‘pre-1965,’ Southern- based King rendered him “meek and dreamy, not angry, intrepid, and relentless, and thus not relevant or, even worse, at odds” with today’s movement.13 This spurred the increased ‘rediscovery’ of his final years in scholarly and popular publications that foreground his post-1965 economic and human rights activism in the North; outline the relevancy of his analyses of race, class, and empire for 21st century activism; highlight King’s unpopularity then to predict a similar redemptive future for current demonized groups like BLM; or flatten dichotomies between the pre- and post-1965 King and between him and black nationalism.14

6 While McDonald critiqued the ‘sanitization’ theory for assuming that “American collective memory of King lacks sophistication and depth, is rooted in a cultural amnesia, and is fixed,” his analysis of left- and rightwing invocations of King after the Ferguson and Baltimore protests confirm that its effects are nonetheless real. They not only shape public discourse on BLM, but through distortions and selective co-optations of King’s 1963 “Dream” speech also paradoxically advance color-blind racism, law-and- order policies, and the politics of respectability.15 It also turned King into “some Christ- like savior,” Jamal Smith critiqued. “Such framing implies that we need a sole leader to guide us, and it helps actual enemies of his goals say that they, too, were with King” and “that unless a black civil rights activist behaves like the King that they’ve conjured in their selective memories, then that activist isn’t truly pro-civil rights.”16 Mike Huckabee’s statement that King would be “appalled” by BLM or Steve Bannon’s proclamation that King “would be proud of Donald Trump” are living proof.17 Left-wing politicians, too, regularly traded meaningful change for empty King tributes; even Obama hailed King as proof of “American exceptionalism” to declare “endemic” racism over.18 Some blacks from an older generation use King to chastise BLM for deviating from the movement’s message of respectability and love, although anger was as much part of it19—something King recognized and often used as leverage20. This makes collective memory of King so precarious, McDonald argued: What is at stake in the public discourse about [King and BLM] is the right way to form a community, the right way to challenge authority, the right way to express dissent about the social situation, and the right way to think about what it means to be black and what it means to be American today.21

7 This renders the discussion of King’s legacy—as much as his actual one—a useful tool for challenging the status quo, especially because his ‘canonization’ has provided the infrastructure for doing so. That MLK Days or anniversaries of his death are simply ‘there,’ makes him a logical point of departure. “From kindergarten through college, almost all students in the United States celebrate the annual MLK holiday,” Kevin Bruyneel noted. This means that “[t]heir sense of citizenship and its relationship to America’s racial past and future is…produced and reproduced through the story of King’s life and legacy, most often by means of the benign tropes of [his] haloed living myth.”22 The media attention King legacy events generate accelerates their utility.

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Already in the 1960s activists exploited King’s fame even if they resented it behind-the- scenes.23 His ‘canonization’ over time has only worsened this. “King,” McDonald summarized, “has become the moral arbiter and symbol of racial justice in America.”24 And that is exactly what makes reviving King’s admission before he died that America is fundamentally racist over others who made similar points so essential.

8 Besides inspiration, correcting King’s story offers the psychological benefits of ownership over the telling of history and racial pride by returning him to the black community. This does not mean that all who engage in such efforts relate to King’s message and tactics or agree on their applicability for today in equal measure; like many who used nonviolence in the sixties, some use the ‘reclaim’ banner because it is strategic or popular. That it is fashionable largely results from the genius of the #ReclaimMLK campaigns. These originated in 2015 when the Ferguson Action Group proposed to use MLK Day for nationwide protests under the hashtag #ReclaimMLK, but it is now a catch-all phrase for any initiative that uses him to justify civil disobedience and/or advances a ‘radical’ social agenda linking racism to economics and state power at home and abroad.25 Even organizations not rooted in black activism per se jump on the ‘reclaim’ bandwagon. For instance, Aaron Handelsman used a 2015 King Day Symposium to promote the multicultural Detroit People’s Platform by linking the organization’s goals to King’s ‘triple evils,’ while Christians, particularly southern ones, use the banner to end churches’ isolation from today’s social battles.26 Some groups do so even if their goals are not fully compatible with BLM or King. A 2018 article in The Socialist Worker titled “Reclaim MLK the Radical” for instance urged its readers to “answer King’s question about what kind of society could replace capitalism by arguing and fighting for the alternative—.”27

2. Reclaiming King in the USA

9 American ‘ReclaimMLK’ campaigns capture a complex paradox that illuminates the inherent difficulties in contemporary left-leaning black activists’ path forward. On the one hand, many reject King’s charismatic leadership model, reliance on the Church, and outdated ideas on women and the family.28 This resentment reflects the broad- based constituency of the new movement, which largely operates under the generic label Movement for Black Lives (MBL) to stress its multi-organizational and grassroots leadership base. On the other, King’s ‘post-1965’ message resonates with their own solutions, as visible from MBL’s Platform of policy demands29. Many also already worked in organizations for social and economic justice prior to joining MBL and #ReclaimMLK campaigns.30 Their views further align with today’s broader move towards progressivism through the Occupy and Trump resistance movements. In these, people of color, women in particular, play notable roles as well. Scholar-activist Barbara Ransby accordingly characterized MBL as “a multi-issue, Black-led mass struggle” rooted in an older tradition of “Black feminist politics” that “rejected the hierarchical hetero-patriarchal politics of respectability.”31 Its best-known organization BLM, known for its decentralized structure and female and queer leadership, largely helped define the new movement as such. Yet King’s outsized ‘canonization’ and contemporary black activists’ own regular demonization32 then ensures that despite their resentment of one-man shows, King remains a vital tool in getting their message accepted.

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10 Their interaction with King is therefore often selective or framed to suit contemporary purposes. #ReclaimMLK campaigns for instance de-emphasize or ignore King’s controversial behavior towards the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), Ella Baker, , or the “assertive women” of the National Welfare Rights Organization during his 1968 Poor People’s Campaign.33 When these figures are mentioned, it is often to stress how their presence ‘pushed’ King towards his ‘post-1965’ radical message34—a line of thinking that simultaneously validates their own activist outlook and keeping King center-stage. But it occasionally means stretching his radical propensity. BLM’s Hawk Newsome called King “a father of intersectionality” for embracing broad-based coalitions35—a simplification that divorces the theory from the black feminist thought from which it came and King’s pragmatics as a church and national civil rights leader. “They wouldn’t have killed him if he was a good Negro,” Anti Police-Terror Project co-founder Cat Brooks gushed in another example. “They let the good Negroes go on and…be up in the White House. He wasn’t a good Negro—he was a warrior and a revolutionary.”36 This description ignores that until 1967, King was regularly invited to the White House because he was seen as a voice of ‘reason’ and ‘middle-class values,’ while the members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)—whose ideals and practices BLM mirrors most—were snubbed.37

11 Such instances may support McDonald’s critique that advocates “of the domestication thesis seek to retrieve a radical King that borders on hagiographic.”38 Some genuine criticisms of King for instance by SNCC are dismissed as naivety or malevolence.39 The need for meaningful engagement with the conventional wisdom that King’s later years were his least successful is often discounted in favor of the more urgent objective of showcasing the continued relevancy of his analyses. Although the activists behind the #ReclaimMLK campaigns often point to specific acts or policy demands of King’s, their success in fact hinges on such flexibility in engaging with his legacy. Theirs is a movement that, as explained elsewhere40, thrives on deliberately resisting and embracing their predecessors. Doing so aids their sense of self-importance while enabling access to past activist networks and traditions on which they can build. Such flexibility additionally facilitates encompassing the diverging goals of MBL’s broad- based membership and enticing their target audiences, who often have flawed or incomplete understandings of King and American racism. Carefully balancing between reviving concrete solutions King proposed and exploiting the vagueness that defines his legacy among movement insiders and outsiders alike are thus crucial to #ReclaimMLK’s success.

12 Moreover, their need to turn an inconvenient hero into a convenient one can be seen as a creative response to the larger power mechanisms in which they are caught. #ReclaimMLK’s objective was using the holiday to draw attention not to the man, but to the marginalized obscured by King’s ‘canonization,’ that is, the people whom groups like BLM aim to foreground in their leadership, like the poor, queer, and transgender. “Our movement draws a direct line from the [sanitized] legacy of Dr. King,” the Ferguson Action Group stated, “We resist efforts to reduce a long history marred with the blood of countless women and men into iconic images of men in suits behind pulpits.”41 Such proclamations also reflect the influence on black millennial activists of Black Studies, which has gravitated towards bottom-up activism and ideas of a ‘long’ civil rights movement in which black nationalism and the late 1960s are no longer automatically viewed as a tragic end to a heroic tale.42 Many simply view their use of King as part of

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an evolutionary process; they focus on the aspects they can use—like King the ‘radical’ or ‘the internationalist’—to ‘reimagine the dream’ according to their context and objectives, and improve and update it where necessary, for instance with phenomena like climate change and gentrification.43

13 ‘Reclaim’ activists especially revere King ‘the provocateur’ by copying his ‘disruptive’ methods, like direct action. King neither invented civil obedience nor automatically embraced it without reservations.44 But, as Charlene Carruthers of the Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100) underlined, reminding the public of how much agitation defined his work is imperative.45 Atlanta’s mayor and BLM opponents in Oakland for instance chastised BLM for shutting down the Bay Bridge and an Atlanta freeway in 2016 by falsely claiming King had done neither.46 Moreover, since “many ask us to ‘wait and see’ and ‘respect’ politicians aimed at hurting us,” an MBL statement reads, that “call is even more urgent.”47

14 ‘Reclaim’ activists therefore insist on turning MLK Day from a commercialized day of service into one of protest.48 After all, one activist stated, “King was not killed because of his charity work. He was killed because of his challenge to the status quo.”49 Subsequently, MLK Days in dozens of cities have increasingly witnessed marches, ‘die- ins,’ and other forms of direct action.50 Oakland has seen annual “Reclaiming King’s Radical Legacy” marches since 2015. During one, two subway stations were shut down and the Bay Bridge during another to dramatize America’s long history of police brutality and black resistance. As one activist chained between cars proclaimed: “I’m out here for [police brutality victims] Tamir Rice, Rekia Boyd, for my mother, myself, for [abolitionist] Harriet Tubman.”51 Another was more blunt: If your brunch is disrupted this Martin Luther King Day weekend, if you get caught in traffic because of a blockade…take that moment to acknowledge that those are the ways in which you can really celebrate the legacy of Dr. King. That moment of inconvenience is simply the turning of the wheels of progress, brought to you by those with the courage to stand up and say, ‘enough.’52

15 Showing the same divisions within the black community as in the 1960s, some such protests co-exist with official celebratory marches of ‘hope.’ In 2017, Sacramento witnessed three marches that all laid claim to King’s legacy, but the ‘traditional’ one would make King “roll over in his grave,” one #ReclaimMLK activist clarified. “He hated capitalism, he stood up for justice against police, and these official events are hand-in- hand with corporate interests and corrupt institutions.” In their alternative march, activists blocked traffic to the Capitol, waving signs with “THIS WAS NOT THE DREAM,” while a third went through an underprivileged neighborhood.53

16 Characterizing MLK Days as days of action also spur King’s proclamations on structural racism. Questioning charity work such as painting school walls, one Philadelphia activist explained, means prodding “why you have to paint that wall every year. What kind of public funds are not coming into the schools for education and maintaining our schools in a healthy condition?”54 Explaining the continued relevance of King’s ‘triple evils’ analyses becomes easy then, although Carruthers nuanced that “[n]o one should own Dr. King’s legacy. At best, our work has the potential to help broaden the narrative about who he was and what he fought for—and more importantly, going forward, what other people should fight for.” Yet, she admitted, “[t]he ‘reclaiming’ is absolutely about moving people forward into his critique about capitalism and moving into a world without poverty.”55 #ReclaimMLK campaigns accordingly combine issues of black unemployment, poverty, healthcare, environmental racism, education, housing, and

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police brutality to underscore their interrelation. Over the years on MLK Day, Oakland activists for instance combined police brutality protests with a Jobs and Economy March for the People, resistance to the Trump agenda, and proposals for reallocating law enforcement funds to affordable housing and healthcare, using the slogan “healthcare not warfare” to question police treatment of blacks with mental health problems.56

17 #ReclaimMLK campaigns thus deliberately mirror King’s 1967 calls for a just distribution of power and wealth by demanding investment in black communities through divestment in oppressive systems.57 BYP100 Chicago used MLK Day to release its Agenda to Build Black Futures that among others championed reparations alongside divestment from the prison-industrial complex. “Chicago’s violence will end when we are able to create a more just and equitable society,” its BLM chapter agreed. This was to be done by picking “up the mantle that King provided us and demand fair housing, jobs, fully funded schools and equal redistribution of wealth. We must confront the triple evils that King highlighted by resisting despair and instead beginning to organize with the conviction that history is on our side.”58 In words that rather echo SNCC or Black Power advocates, MBL’s national #ReclaimMLK program additionally calls for community control and building parallel institutions that “reflect the values of the world we want to live in.”59 Solidarity with victims of oppression everywhere automatically derives from this. New York’s 2015 ‘Reclaim’ March therefore went from Harlem to the United Nations, while those in Oakland in past years have encompassed demands to drive ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) from the Bay Area and to safeguard indigenous land rights. They were supported by groups like the Arab Resource and Organizing Center and #Asians4BlackLives.60 The director of the immigrant rights group Juntos justified joining Philadelphia’s 2018 MLK Day of Action by linking King’s views on militarization to “the war in this country about low wages for people of color, it’s the over-policing, it’s the [immigration] raids. When ICE goes into people’s homes and kicks down doors with guns pointed, there are children in the room.” As such, she believed,“[I]f King were alive today, he would stand with us.”61

18 To strengthen these points, ‘Reclaim’ campaigns deliberately invoke the centrality of King’s “I Have A Dream”-speech in the ‘sanitized’ telling of his narrative, and replace it with his ‘post-1965’ words, particularly on police brutality, urban uprisings, systemic racism, and economic justice. The hashtag #MLKAlsoSaid was introduced in 2015 for that purpose. As scholar-activist Ibram Kendi wrote, “We are reclaiming King from all those people who like to imagine that King had nothing else to say after 1963…who have buried the socialist MLK, the antiwar MLK, the MLK of Black power.”62 Especially King’s 1967 book, his “Beyond Vietnam” and “The Other America” speeches feature heavily in #ReclaimMLK campaigns. The only pre-1965 King text regularly cited is his 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail. After all, its ardent defense of civil disobedience and condemnation of white moderate allies, as one political commentator said, “reads like a rebuttal of BLM critics.”63 When BLM interrupted campaign events of ‘progressive friends’ like , supporters therefore happily used the letter in defense. Activists have also used it as discussion material at MLK Days and used quotes in blogs, on social media and protest signs.64 In 2017, black artist Daniel Rarela pasted quotes under pictures of King and contemporary activists to stress the timeliness and justification of their fights: “I wanted to shatter this false image of a Martin Luther King

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who everyone loved, never got arrested, was universally popular and made zero privileged people feel uncomfortable or angry enough to want to kill him.”65

19 Activists thus push King’s post-1965 words consciously, often abetted by scholars at panels and ‘teach ins’ at MLK events. To popularize the links between King’s final years and today, past Cornell University’s MLK Day Lectures have spotlighted BLM’s founders and scholar-activists like Russell Rickford, who explained how King’s legacy had been “tamed.” Western North Carolina University’s 2018 MLK Day festivities combined visits from BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors and New Jim Crow-author Michelle Alexander with the local start of the ‘new’ Poor People’s Campaign (PPC), a forty day project of peaceful protests in thirty states modeled after King’s. Spurring connections between King and today’s activism is also done outside organized contexts; one teacher in Oakland simply used the holiday to let his students compare BLM’s guiding principles to their classroom charter.66

20 But the focus on the ‘post-1965’ King just as often emerges organically from present- day concerns in the black community, especially when backed by vehicles like MLK Days. In 2017, two of MBL’s three Days of Action for the holiday were set aside to commemorate his “Beyond Vietnam” speech. Nonetheless, local groups could set their own priorities,67 which often translated into a focus on King’s 1966-1968 economic agenda. In Chicago, activists used it for “centering the hood” through discussing King’s economic activism in Chicago with North Lawndale residents.68 Racial minorities in New York, united in a citywide alliance, attacked liberal politicians like Mayor de Blasio for using MLK Day “as a fig leaf for their own racist policies.” Protesting how the administration’s housing policies disproportionally harmed their communities, they reclaimed King in their defense: “Would Martin Luther King Jr. support so-called ‘progressive’ politicians who are perpetuating racism and displacing communities of color? No. He would stand with people fighting against those policies.”69

21 Anniversaries of King’s assassination are equally suitable for popularizing ‘ReclaimMLK.’ After all, to explain King’s presence in Memphis—where he was shot when he had come to support a sanitation workers’ strike—acknowledging his thoughts on class and racial struggles is essential. This can then again be used to counter ‘sanitized’ versions of King’s legacy to further contemporary activism. In 2018 marches “to keep the Dream going” were organized nationwide, with protesters in Portland copying the “I am a Man” signs of the 1968 sanitation strikers and King’s son Martin and others in Memphis reminding Americans of the work on poverty still left undone. In preparation for a general May Day strike and joint “Fight Racism, Raise Pay” demonstrations with Fight for 15, Chicago activists used the 2017 anniversary for teach-ins on King’s and labor’s commonalities.70 Unions also exploit the anniversary to profile their present-day organizing work. The AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees), whose workers organized the 1968 sanitation strike, organized an “I Am 2018” campaign that intended to “spark a nationwide movement to organize workers and poor people in the fight for racial and economic justice.”71 When doing so, union activists regularly cite King’s connections with labor, while glossing over labor’s history of internal racism or King’s controversial siding with union leaders like at the 1964 Democratic National Convention despite their open disdain for the MFDP’s uneducated blacks.72 In fact, in 1968 King was not even universally embraced in the Memphis black community as the sanitation workers’ spokesman.73 Yet if ‘ReclaimMLK’ efforts help in fostering connections between worker

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and anti-racist platforms, MBL’s Richard Wallace argued, this can help redefine ‘labor issues’ to include ones that disproportionally affect people of color, like legislation banning citation of criminal records on job applications.74

22 The fiftieth anniversary memorial of King’s death in Washington, D.C., also realigned explicitly with the ‘post-1965’ King. It featured an interfaith ‘rally2endracism,’ geared at analyzing connections between King’s ‘triple evils’ analyses and today. BLM’s DeRay McKesson emphasized King’s message of “moral courage and systemic change” as a model for churches to enter social justice struggles, while Reverend William Barber II, co-organizer of the new PPC, invoked King’s mythmaking to boost activism: “We cannot be those who merely love the tombs of the prophets…We find the place they fell; we reach down in the blood; we pick up the baton and carry it forward.” Others emphasized King as a would-be supporter of BLM and immigration reform and used the occasion for networking and practical organizing for today’s fights, like training participants in lobbying Congress.75

23 Similar sentiments were expressed at the week-long 2018 King memorial events in Memphis. Unsurprising, given that Memphis is still the poorest metropole in the US and protesters consistently encounter city-sponsored resistance, such as during BLM’s and Fight for 15’s efforts to organize McDonalds’ workers.76 Over time, using the anniversary to advocate structural change has become a natural technique for local activists, like through the recent “Poverty Report: Memphis Since MLK” that the National Civil Rights Museum—located at the motel where King died—commissioned. Black activist Wendi Thomas even bought the ‘MLK50’ internet domain to cover local counter-voices to prevent the anniversary from becoming “a cover-up. King’s legacy has been ground down [and] stuffed into a casing of respectability by city officials and civic leaders. Among the corporate sponsors of the museum’s MLK50 events are global corporations that don’t pay their workers a living wage.”77

24 Aware of such reporting, the city government recognizes the anniversary’s political usages. It reluctantly acquiesced to ‘Take‘EmDown901’ activists’ calls to remove the city’s Confederate monuments by April 4, supported a(n aborted) ‘reverse march’ that traced the February 1968 march of the sanitation strikers, and initiated commemoration events like a free flower planting campaign. Local activists interpreted these gestures as diverting from meaningful change.78 After meeting with local BLM activists, black CNN political commentator Angela Rye attacked Mayor Jim Strickland at one MLK50 event. “[I]s this the Memphis that Dr. King would have seen in the promised land when the right to protest is met with the black listing, literally, of activists?,” she asked bluntly, “Are you proud of this Memphis—that Memphis that sounds entirely too familiar to the Memphis that rejected Dr. King in 1968?” Rather than organizing “empty commemorations,” she urged the city to “work woke” by supporting BLM’s anti-poverty policies like the $15 minimum wage. Afterwards, Strickland dismissed Rye as an ‘outside agitator.’ This prompted a local black reverend in an open letter to underscore the irony of the ‘outsider agitator’ claim that was hurdled on King himself in Memphis. Honoring King, he wrote, meant listening to BLM’s structural critiques. After all, he concluded in a line that captured the heart of #ReclaimMLK: “What Memphis needs as we remember this anniversary of King’s crucifixion isn’t a public relations campaign but a resurrection.”79

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3. Reclaiming King in Europe

25 While less focused on a full-fledged ‘resurrection,’ black European activists and their supporters have found benefit in similarly using the ‘later’ King and criticism of his ‘sanitization.’ This is both logical and paradoxical, reflecting their position in (western) European society and complex relation with the US-based black freedom struggle.

26 What Afro-European anti-racist movements share with the ‘post-1965’ King and MBL is the belief that they are fighting a society that refuses to accept that race is a problem. Anthropologist Gloria Wekker for example explained the “dominant way in which the Dutch think of themselves, as being a small, but just, ethical nation; color-blind, thus free of racism.”80 Such ideas were forged in complex, often imagined, long-standing notions of national identity, like the Dutch view of itself as a tolerant nation that emerged in its 17th century sea faring days or France’s self-identification through its Republican founding principles. But they were reinforced in the post-colonial era, when Europeans faced the psychological, socio-economic, and demographic changes that came with the loss of empire.81 For instance, when King visited Newcastle in 1967 amidst fierce battles over Britain’s post-colonial immigration waves, Brian Ward recorded how most balked at the idea of British identity as “an elusive, decidedly mongrel and multicultural affair.”82 Integration had to mean assimilation—a notion that similarly drove multicultural societies elsewhere in Europe.83

27 Europeans’ tendency to discuss racism through prisms of culture, class, and ethnicity, their emphasis on Nazi crimes, and the rise of the welfare state strengthened Europe’s color-blind myth. This, scholars Sara Salem and Vanessa Thompson argued, was facilitated by the “absence of a European discourse that clearly articulates racism as a social phenomenon embedded in the relational matrix of domination comprised of intersetting structures such as capitalism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, etc.”84 Most European black communities were too small and lacked a strong black press to counterbalance this, even as Europeans unmistakably ruled their colonies through oppressive racist structures85. The limited presence of black academics and educational institutions’ marginal attention to colonial history further enable colonial amnesia.86 Black challenges to national narratives of race, empire, memory, and identity also regularly face intense criticism—as Wekker has for her book White Innocence,87 especially from right-leaning figures in academic circles and public life—that, intentionally or not, upholds the status quo. “In contexts such as the Netherlands, France, and Germany,” Salem and Thompson therefore concluded, overall “racism is always something that happens over there, or that happened back then.”88

28 American race relations especially enhance the myth of European ‘colorblindness.’ Black Americans are partly to blame too: to discredit American racism, black artists, soldiers, intellectuals and activists—from to Ta-Nehisi Coates—often described European countries as “racial havens.”89 Because such characterizations were designed to comment on American racial practices rather than European ones, this unintentionally strengthened ideas of European exceptionalism. While American blacks, particularly well-known ones, often were treated better in Europe, their descriptions often excluded—or strategically ignored—instances of similar racist European behavior in the colonies or the experiences of black Europeans, with whom they had little contact.90 Malcolm X’s shock at being turned away from France in 1965

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despite his well-developed global views on race for instance testifies to the depth and complexity of Europe’s ‘colorblind’ myth.91

29 Europeans in turn used American race relations either as “a cautionary tale or as a guide” for racial conflicts at home.92 As British artist-activist Akala put it, “We didn’t have a domestic form of apartheid, we don’t have police who shoot 12-year-old kids— it’s as if we think, if you’re not as sick as America, then you’re a well country.”93 Consequently, Salem and Thompson assert, “European forms of racism remain uncovered and unchecked, allowing European states and actors to unknowingly deflect attention from local racist practices.”94 Moreover, post-World War II hegemony of (an albeit commercialized) African American culture overshadowed local black identities.95 Akala lamented how British Caribbean barbershops often display pictures of King, Malcolm X, and Marcus Garvey, which show “that, until recently, black British people haven’t had the same respect for black history made in Britain.”96 But this is also the result of deliberate intent: many educational institutions prefer the teaching of the American movement over local resistance movements to curb homegrown racial tension. As Stephen Tuck observed, “while remembering Martin Luther King Jr. and his dream may help young Britons to consider the question of racial justice, it can be used to forget about the British dimensions of that question, too.”97

30 Indeed, countless European actors today (mis)use King’s legacy for their own purposes. His popularity ratings echo US patterns; in Britain, King’s ‘Dream’-speech is better- known than it was in 1963.98 Many King-invocations betray how universal his ‘sanitized’ legacy has become, similarly allowing it to be used for practices that oppose his ideology. Dutch right-wing populist Geert Wilders, on trial for inciting hatred and discrimination, used King to defend his promise at a 2014 campaign rally to reduce the Dutch Moroccan population. Labeling it , he vowed, like King did in a 1957 speech, to go to prison in the name of freedom—never mind the speech’s actual call for racial equality, as Dutch critics swiftly pointed out.99 Moreover, as in the US, Europeans (ab)use King to undermine local black activism. Already in the 1960s European conservatives used their American counterparts’ warnings of race riots and Black Power to pass anti-immigrant legislation, with British ones even hailing “King as a nonviolent role model for immigrants who were threatening to fight for their rights.”100 Although left-leaning European outlets such as The Guardian and Paris Review are increasingly publishing American leftists’ arguments regarding King’s ‘radical’ legacy, this still happens, even by movement allies. British activist Reni Eddo-Lodge regularly has moderate white well-wishers using King against her, “to prove to me that my work is misguided, that I am doing it wrong.”101

31 Although American anti-racism movements continue to inform European activism— through local BLM chapters, the copying of discourse, and cultural influences like Beyoncé102—black European movements are increasingly asserting their own voice. In Britain, Eddo-Lodge even detected a true “renaissance of black critical thought and culture.”103 Global capitalist excesses and the (often related) rise of right-wing populism104 throughout the western hemisphere in recent years have fueled European anti-racism movements. Like their American counterparts, these highlight systemic racism, economic inequality, and black invisibility. Racial and ethnic minorities increasingly voice experiences of everyday racism and ‘double consciousness,’ as visible from the #MeTwo movement,105 while left-leaning activists and scholars foreground local racial histories to counter what Ward termed “contemporary appeals to a

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reactionary kind of white racial, ethnic and religious chauvinism that celebrates a mythical, idealized, racially pure and uniformly Christian British” and European past. 106 Moreover, the sympathy European progressives bequeath American victims of police brutality has not translated to support for racial justice movements at home. This has raised black Europeans’ interest in developing ‘pan-Afro-European’ identities through newly-found initiatives like the European Network Against Racism. After all, British journalist-activist Rob Berkeley argued, “there is a greater chance of being able to shape, influence and be influenced by the discussion among fellow Black Europeans than to intervene in the exceptional American story.”107

32 Yet King paradoxically remains a useful tool for gaining that black European independent voice. Already in the 1960s European activists used King for their own advantage. In 1963, Jamaican immigrants marched in London on the day of the March on Washington to protest racism in Britain, while British civil and immigrant rights campaigns exploited his and other American movement leaders’ visits. Newcastle University presented King an honorary doctorate in 1967 explicitly to “realise the parallel between Dr. King’s present concerns in America and the situation in Britain,” including passage of a British Race Relations Bill. Black British activists borrowed heavily from Malcolm X and Black Power advocates as well, although these comparisons did not always apply.108

33 Black and white European activists—influenced by multiple sources and protest traditions of their own—thus used the US movement as they saw fit. As Tuck noted, “American styling was a strategic choice by British activists. They were well aware that British discrimination was not Mr. James Crow esq., but they chose to portray it as such.”109 When King visited Berlin in 1964, West German activists, like Italian ones, mostly embraced King as a political activist fighting for democracy. But East German ones emphasized his theological doctrines to safeguard the Protestant church’s existence by portraying King’s God-inspired capitalist critiques as compatible with . Dutch Baptists invited King to the European Baptist Federation Convention in Amsterdam that year to convince American Baptists to spur their Church’s involvement in social justice struggles. European activists in the environmentalist, anti-imperialism, and anti-nuclear proliferation movements and those fighting the Soviet regime have used King’s emphasis on democracy and pacifism. Prior to and in the revolutionary year 1989, Germany saw a remarkable number of King commemorations, King-inspired peace seminars, and nonviolent training institutes. Protestant church leaders, particularly in , and non-religious dissident groups spurred such gatherings, at times aided by American movement activists. In them, King’s tradition was emphasized as a model through testimonials, artwork, and exhibitions, ‘peace prayers’ featuring King citations, and singing movement songs like ‘.’110

34 This not only underscores how historical movements and processes can overlap, but also how activists worldwide utilize King to help fuel their own activist needs that emerge organically from their grassroots contexts. Today, many black European activists follow their American counterparts in selectively tying King legacy projects to his final years and his ‘sanitization’ because this advances their needs best. To argue that Europe has a race problem (and thus justify their existence), it makes sense to use the most famous black activist their countrymen (think they) know and love—King—in absence of similarly revered local blacks. This allows black and white citizens to

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consider activists’ causes and investigate their own instances of ‘whitewashing’ black history. This can bolster activism from finding new members and allies to renewed inspiration. Moreover, King’s post-1965 priorities align the best with their goals, that is, demonstrating that racism is real, systemic rather than individual, intrinsically tied to class and global power structures, and that fighting it requires black self-awareness and representation, confrontational strategies like direct action, and targeting moderate allies rather than white supremacists. In this, King is mostly claimed as a democratic socialist rather than a priest, with King commemorations used as vehicles to uncover like-minded figures and patterns in the individual European contexts. Current black activism in Britain and the Netherlands is a case in point.

35 The current British black ‘renaissance’ indeed cannot be separated from what Rob Berkeley called “the liberal social model,” which spurred Britain’s own “rush to a ‘post- racial’ world view.” White backlash to recent Eastern European and Muslim immigrant arrivals, however, exposed its limitations and largely fueled the 2016 Brexit campaign. The latter caused a massive spike in violent incidents and overt racial hostility, generating a wake-up call for many black Britons.111 Eddo-Lodge likewise attributed her quest for recovering local black history to 21st century immigrant hatred: “I needed to know why, when people waved Union Jacks and shouted ‘we want our country back’, it felt like the chant was aimed at people like me. What history had I inherited that left me an alien in my place of birth?”112 The continued systemic racism minorities experience in housing, employment, education, and policing, combined with the decline of progressive institutions like unions, furthered such quests. Incidents like the 2017 fire in London’s Grenfell Tower underscored the institutionalized nature of racism, tying it unmistakably to class. Despite differing regional experiences, many black Britons reached similar conclusions. This sparked bestselling books, like Eddo- Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race (2017), David Olusoga’s Black and British (2017), Afua Hirsch’s Brit(ish) (2018), and Akala’s Natives (2018), and demands for increased black British representation in among others the fashion and film industry and even on banknotes. Eddo-Lodge therefore concluded that her views were “considered wildly radical back in 2012. But by 2017, the politics of the western world had changed drastically. People were looking for answers—a balm to soothe, or an antidote to fight back.”113

36 Utilizing King legacy projects provide one such means. The fiftieth anniversary of King’s death, for instance, prompted The Guardian to invite eleven well-known black Britons’ thoughts on King. All confirmed his continued relevancy for fighting contemporary race relations in the US and Britain, impressing, in screenwriter Bola Agbaje’s words, how “now more than ever it’s important for us to be reminded of people who fought for justice and equality.” Many highlighted the impact of the ‘strong’ and confrontational King, particularly the ‘post-1965’ one, on their work and worldview. In this, a remarkable number addressed King’s ‘sanitization,’ and implicitly or explicitly noted how challenging this could help the contemporary British movement in upending the nation’s ‘post-racial’ myth. Actor Lennie James chastised “the way that Martin’s legacy has been usurped to make his message more comfortable. He was frightening to white America, and to white Europe too.” Akala agreed, citing King’s anti-capitalist and ‘Black Power’ stances and the need to acknowledge his doubts on how “realistic his dream was,” particularly since nowadays “black liberals and people who are desirous of acceptance want to remember him as the safe, ‘can’t we all get along?’ Martin of 1963.” Eddo-Lodge directly linked the ‘whitewashed’ version of

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King she was taught in school to her activism. King, she recounted, was presented as a “benign hero” for local blacks to emulate while little was taught “about what he was struggling against, or the movement he came from.” But like her American counterparts, she found a weapon in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail to justify “disrupting the order of things…I think the world needs to be careful about how they memorialise him, and not make what he was saying more palatable to a white audience who don’t wish to feel challenged on race.”114 In another publication, she therefore used the fiftieth anniversary of his death as an entrance for telling the forgotten story of the King-inspired 1965 Bristol bus boycott to contest Britain’s erasure of local black history. “To assume that there was no civil rights movement in the UK is not just untrue,” she charged, “it does a disservice to our black history, leaving gaping holes where the story of progress should be. Black Britain deserves a context.” Recovering more local black history could then serve as a direct remedy against the systemic racism Brexit exposed: “[L]ooking at our history shows racism does not erupt from nothing, rather it is embedded in British society. It’s in the very core of how the state is set up.”115

37 The Guardian-interviews further underscore the significance of King commemoration events in black Britons’ racial awareness, most notably of his visit to Newcastle. There King stressed the applicability of his analyses on the ‘triple evils’ and ‘complicity of silence’ to Britain, whose de facto segregation made it similar to the seeming color- blind “position that the northern cities of America have passed through.”116 However, “[e]verything that Martin Luther King had to say on 13 November 1967 sounds eerily contemporary,” novelist Jackie Kay observed—a realization that prompted her and Carolyn Forche to publish an anthology of poems (2017) by black poets from the trans- Atlantic region reflecting on King’s ‘post-1965’ analyses for today. Playwright Robert Williams said he listened to the speech for his participation in the 2017 Freedom on the Tyne project, which consisted of numerous cultural, educational, and community activities held in Newcastle to commemorate its fiftieth anniversary. He called the speech “powerful, inspiring, emotive—such a great antidote to Trump’s America.”117

38 The project itself, also known as Freedom City 2017, was likewise shaped by contemporary events: the pro- and anti-immigration battles that characterized Newcastle in 1967 were replicated by pro- and anti-Trump and Pegida rallies in 2017. And as King was invited to support local pro-immigration advocates, so Freedom City was founded to “reaffirm his call to progressive social activism.” Utilizing the anniversary became not only logical but imperative, Brian Ward noted: “In the midst of this changing, and for many, increasingly alarming and fractured world, King’s message assumed ever greater significance and appeal.” But unlike in 1967, when King’s visit was largely a university event, now local minority groups, activists, and artists joined national and international ones to make it a “truly civic” affair that underscored King’s message. Although the program was set largely by organizations and institutions that in their leadership not necessarily reflected the diversity they sought to celebrate, local minority groups’ participation created some space to shape the commemoration by linking their objectives to King’s. Chi Onwurah, a local MP of biracial descent, for instance, promoted the event in the House of Commons with a heartfelt plea to eradicate contemporary injustice and wealth disparity: I want every child in Newcastle and beyond to know not only that Martin Luther King came to Newcastle, but that he came for them…Those three themes of poverty,

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racism and war not only speak to them but are to be answered by them—by every child and every adult in Newcastle and throughout the country.118

39 Black activism in the Netherlands has likewise become more visible in the past decade, initiated largely by black activist millennials in the urban west and amidst a similar backlash against the multicultural society following the arrival of immigrants and refugees since World War II. Occasionally these ‘old’ and ‘new’ communities of color form precarious alliances, as is visible in the new DENK or after the alleged police brutality death of Aruban-born Mitch Henriquez in 2015119. But recent debates over the integration of Muslims also reinforce the subordinate position of the Afro- and Caribbean Dutch, as they confirm the idea of racism as a ‘new’ phenomenon that exists (if at all) predominantly in relation to these newcomers. This is enhanced by the near erasure of the Dutch colonial past (and black resistance to it) in school curricula and withdrawal of governmental support for institutions that safeguard such history, like the NiNsee (Dutch Institute for the Study of Dutch Slavery and its Legacy) in 2012.120

40 Contemporary black activism therefore centers on the denial of systemic racism— despite multiple records confirming its existence in employment, education, and policing—and black representation, particularly by increasing national awareness of Dutch black history and countering racial stereotypes. This includes efforts to ‘decolonize’ museums and school curricula; the removal of references in public places celebrating the Dutch colonial past; and ending the tradition of Black Pete (Zwarte Piet). Black Pete is the caricature black helper of Saint Nicholas (the Dutch version of Santa Claus). Whites annually dress up as him, complete with blackface. Protests against Black Pete have intensified in the past decade, with black activists using the annual parade that commences the festivities for nonviolent protests. These have regularly resulted in (false) arrests and violent incidents; local authorities even cancelled the 2017 protest after whites blocked the buses carrying the activists to the parade on the freeway. In 2018, protesters were again greeted with violence.121

41 Dutch King legacy projects are well-suited to foist attention to these issues. A good example is the King Lecture Series at Amsterdam’s Vrije Universiteit, held regularly on the anniversary of King’s death since 2008. The University, which presented King an honorary degree in 1964, launched the series to inspire “the contemporary Zeitgeist.”122 But Dutch black activists critique that in its speaker selection, the series perpetuated the idea that racism is not a Dutch problem and that its organizers, and white institutions in general, therefore need to facilitate Dutch black representation. Artist and activist Quinsy Gario noted in a blog entitled “The Ghettoization of Martin Luther King’s Legacy” that the Series featured either white speakers with questionable backgrounds in racial areas and blacks in an entertainment role. Or black speakers from abroad, like , who are inadequately informed to address racism in the Netherlands. Its 2017 edition headlined a Dutch-Moroccan actor and Dutch-Turkish anthropologist, but, Gario argued, this only further sidelined the “grassroots marginalized black bodies” that resemble King’s and remind the Dutch population of its slavery past. In true #ReclaimMLK-fashion, he then connected the Series’ speaking practices to the Wilders-incident, arguing that Geert Wilders would not have been able to abuse King if his work had not been deliberately removed from his lived experience. Both incidents, Gario then argued, justify demands for more black representation in the nation’s white institutions to advance them from within. Whether or not the

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scrutiny on the Series speaking practices facilitated it, the 2018 Series did feature four black Dutch speakers who explicitly addressed their own lived experiences.123

42 Other examples support the value of using MLK legacy events to contest issues of black representation and commemorating local black history. In 2018, black American and Dutch activists, artists, and scholars united in Amsterdam for MLK Day to discuss Dutch race relations, using Where Do We Go from Here? as a starting point. 124 Airco Caravan, a white artist and human rights activist, used the fiftieth anniversary of King’s death for her Monument for Martin Luther King project. She presented fifty statues of King to black individuals, organizations, and places that advance the black freedom struggle in the US and the Netherlands, with the goal of connecting these fights across time and space, and thus “keep King’s dream alive.” American recipients included , the Obamas, and the Riverside Church where King gave his Vietnam speech. Dutch ones included Quinsy Gario, Gloria Wekker, and organizations and places connected to the Dutch colonial past, such as the NiNsee and the statue of Surinamese freedom fighter Anton de Kom. One King statue appeared at Kattenburgereiland, where the slave ship De Leusden was built. It was shipwrecked near Surinam in 1737. With 600 dead slaves, it is the biggest shipping disaster in Dutch history, yet generally unknown to its citizens. The project, Caravan admitted, therefore explicitly challenged white-centered renditions of Dutch history.125

43 Another recipient was the Black Archives, founded in 2015 by the Dutch Afro-Caribbean social enterprise New Urban Collective (NUC) that fosters the socio-economic advancement of Dutch people of color. The Archives house 5,000 books and archives on race and colonial history predominantly by Dutch black activists and writers who have received short shrift in Dutch educational institutions. It also organizes exhibitions and other activities that advance “Black and other perspectives that are often overlooked elsewhere.” While the Archives emerged from organic grassroots black activism, it considers itself part of the global black freedom struggle. Besides its Afro-Caribbean roots, it touts international guests like as a badge of legitimacy. NUC’s logo is based on the two clasped hands symbol of SNCC, and the idea of the Archives was inspired by the role black educational institutions played in sustaining the American movement and co-founder Mitchell Esajas’ experiences with the King archive at Morehouse College.126

44 Esajas, an anthropologist-turned-activist of Surinamese-African descent, showcases how the American movement can be key in black identity formation worldwide without this taking away grassroots movement ownership and agency. His activism was born from his lived experience as a black man in the Netherlands. Yet he always considered King a role model, having been taught about his marches and ‘Dream’ speech. His understanding of King, however, developed when he earned a John Lewis Fellowship in Atlanta in 2016, where he was exposed to King’s post-1965 legacy, its ‘sanitization,’ and ideas of the ‘long civil rights movement.’ This spurred his thinking, while joining local BLM marches against police brutality transformed him emotionally. He now felt the Dutch movement had to move beyond single issues like Black Pete, and, like the American ones, invest time in education and seeking international allies to “develop a comprehensive vision and agenda focused on the root causes of the problem.”127

45 Reading Where Do We Go From Here?, Esajas explained when addressing the 2018 MLK Day in Amsterdam, advanced his thinking on King’s continued global relevancy. Esajas’ speech perfectly illustrates how much the American-based movements and scholarship

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on them shaped his outlook and lexicon, but also how Dutch King Legacy projects are perfect tools for the own activism. The setting of the King Day facilitated this of course, as did his inclusion of another Dutch King Legacy project, the “We Have a Dream” exhibition on King, Nelson Mandela, and that the Nieuwe Kerk (New Church) in Amsterdam hosted that month.128 In the speech, Esajas consciously or subconsciously followed the American #ReclaimMLK playbook. After drawing on his audience’s knowledge of the ‘pre-1965’ King, he related how his legacy had been ‘sanitized’—borrowing Cornel West’s phrase “the Santa Clausification of King”—to obscure his ‘post-1965’ message. This was also the King the Nieuwe Kerk exhibition emphasized. The simplified ideas of racism emerging from this ‘sanitized’ characterization of King—defined as Jim Crow-style segregation and KKK violence while ignoring the covert racism King encountered in the North—thereby harm all anti- racism movements, he argued, as it allowed the exhibition to disconnect the battles of King, Mandela, and Gandhi from Dutch anti-racist struggles and thus to move racism outside the Dutch realm. Using King’s condemnation of white moderates, he then rebuked Femke Halsema, now mayor of Amsterdam, for trying to silence them when she indeed told them that they could not use “the American concept of ‘white privilege,’” because [i]n the Netherlands black people do not have to be in the back of the bus separately. You cannot just move a discourse from a country that has had systematic oppression to here, and say to the Dutch: you are doing the same thing… If you call everything racism, you cannot find the real racists anymore. (translation Esajas)

46 He countered this reasoning with reports demonstrating systemic racism in the Netherlands and the vilifying treatment of anti-Black Pete activists like himself, although their nonviolent protests resembled those by King that Dutch progressives celebrated at the exhibition. Extending the line between King’s tradition of resistance to that of forgotten Afro- and Caribbean Dutch activists, he concluded by stating how they all come together in the Black Archives and its goal of ending whites’ efforts of “appropriating, silencing, sanitizing and Santa Clausifying black history” in the Netherlands and worldwide.

47 While the Dutch remain slow in embracing local anti-racist struggles, these examples show that King and the American-based movement can be used effectively to force an opening for conversations on race and activism in the Dutch context. This does not mean that the strategy has no limitations; for example, calling activists’ journey to the Saint Nicholas parade a ‘Freedom Ride’ actually halted such conversations as many Dutch people considered the equation too offensive. Moreover, as many pan-Africanists discovered in the 1960s, just copying activist models and transplanting them to different locales will only get grassroots activists so far. Like their American counterparts and those who study them, black European activists should take Cha-Jua’s and Lang’s warnings against the “totalizing perspective” of a ‘long civil rights movement’ that flattens “chronological, conceptual, and geographic differences”129 to heart when assessing its global application. Nonetheless, in the short run, it remains a useful instrument for forging an own identity that is both separate from and part of a larger struggle, and thereby spur that home-grown black renaissance.

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Conclusion

48 The ‘reclaiming’ of King’s legacy by American and European left-leaning black activists and their supporters has become one effective tool among many to justify contemporary activism, precisely because of the existence of its ‘sanitized’ version. Besides speaking to black activists’ creativity and agency in exploiting the collective memory of King for their own benefit, the almost universal embrace of the ‘post-1965’ King in these efforts indicates that the black freedom struggle’s trajectory will increasingly pivot towards questions of structural racism, poverty, human rights, and state power. ‘Reclaim’ efforts also reveal what activists perceive as the biggest problems moving forward; historical comparisons are always more informative about the present than they are of the past. Hence, activists’ selective foregrounding of King’s criticism of white moderates and his ‘triple evils’ analyses rather underscore their own rocky relationship with white progressive allies and the tenacity of the ‘post-racial’ narrative in today’s unearthing of structural racism than that it speaks truthfully to King’s lived experience or unequivocally proves racism’s immutable force, unaffected by time and change. While King’s legacy will remain contested, the remarkably similar way in which American and European activists utilize it today suggests that 21st century local race relations indeed must be understood in a larger framework that incorporates the wider global and historical issues, forces, and trends shaped by what Ward termed the “entwined histories of the Black Atlantic and the Atlantic world.”130 So it makes sense for today’s activists to see in King’s insistence on “a network of mutuality”131 both an enduring problem definition and a solution that may finally lead to that promised land.

49 Proper Names: Bolo Agbaje, Airco Caravan, Michelle Alexander, Akala, Ella Baker, William Barber III, Rob Berkeley, Beyoncé, Bill de Blasio, Rekia Boyd, Cat Brooks, Charlene Carruthers, Ta- Nehisi Coates, Patrisse Cullors, Angela Davis, Frederick Douglass, Reni Eddo-Lodge, Mitchell Esajas, Mahatma Gandhi, Quinsy Gario, Marcus Garvey, Femke Halsema, Aaron Handelsman, Mitch Henriquez, Afu Hirsch, Jesse Jackson, Lennie James, Jackie Kay, Martin Luther King III, Martin Luther King, Jr., Anton de Kom, John Lewis, Nelson Mandela, DeRay McKesson, Hawk Newsome, Barack Obama, Chi Onwurah, Daniel Rarela, Walter Reuther, Tamir Rice, Russell Rickford, Bayard Rustin, Angela Rye, Bernie Sanders, Jim Strickland, Wendi C. Thomas, Donald Trump, Harriet Tubman, Richard Wallace, Gloria Wekker, Geert Wilders, Robert Williams, Malcolm X, Benjamin Zepahniah

NOTES

1. Beyoncé, “Formation.” Filmed [2016]. YouTube video, 4:47. Posted 9 December 2016. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDZJPJV__bQ. King reference at 3:31.

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2. This could be support of #ReclaimMLK, providing a black history lesson, provocation, or documentation of themes important to today’s movement. 3. While more examples from European countries can be found, due to the limited scope of this article and language barriers, I have focused on Britain and my own native country the Netherlands. 4. Due to the limited academic research on these activities and to be as up-to-date as possible, this article is predominantly based on newspaper clippings, activists’ blogs, and interviews. Online articles accessed August 1, 2018. 5. Brian Ward, Martin Luther King in Newcastle Upon Tyne (Newcastle: Tyne Bridge Publishing, 2017), 17. 6. Kevin Bruyneel, “The King’s Body,” History and Memory 26:1 (Spring/Summer 2014): 75-108; Jeanne Theoharis, A More Beautiful and Terrible History (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018), 3-5, 9-10; Clarence Lang, Black America in the Shadow of the Sixties (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), 10-11, 45, 74-75. 7. See Jorrit van den Berk and Laura Visser-Maessen, “Race Matters” in this volume of the European Journal of American Studies. 8. Ibid. 9. Martin Luther King, Jr. Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (New York and London: Bantam Books, 1967). 10. Jermaine M. McDonald, “Ferguson and Baltimore according to Dr. King,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 36:2 (Fall/Winter 2016): 153-154. See also Brandon Terry et al., eds., “Forum 5: Fifty Years Since MLK,” Boston Review 43.1 (2018). 11. “Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘Where Do We Go From Here’ Turns 50,” Beacon Broadside, 20 June 2017, http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2017/06/martin-luther-king-jrs-where-do- we-go-from-here-turns-50.html. 12. Cornel West, ed., The Radical King (Boston: Beacon Press, 2016); Lewis V. Baldwin and Rufus Burrow, Jr., eds., The Domestication of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2013); Jennifer J. Yanco, Misremembering Dr. King (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014); Theoharis, History, xv, xix, 3-5, 18, 22-26, 208. 13. Ibid. Theoharis, 17. 14. See Lang, Shadow, 80; Gwendolyn Simmons, “Living it Out: Martin Luther King Jr. Revisited,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 24:2 (Fall 2008), 189-213; Terry et al., “Fifty Years”; Russell Rickford, “It’s Time to Reclaim the True Martin Luther King,” Washington Post, 18 June 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2018/01/15/its-time-to-reclaim- the-true-martin-luther-king/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.35ea61d898d6; Thomas J. Sugrue, “Restoring King,” Jacobin, n.d., https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/01/restoring-king/; Michael K. Honey, “Martin Luther King Jr.,” Nation, 3 April 2018, https://www.thenation.com/article/ martin-luther-king-jr-50-years-later/; Jeanne Theoharis, “MLK Would Never Shut Down a Freeway,” Root, 15 July 2016, https://www.theroot.com/mlk-would-never-shut-down-a-freeway- and-6-other-myths-1790856033; Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou, “Martin Luther King’s Radical Legacy,” Dissent Magazine, 15 January 2017, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/martin- luther-kings-radical-legacy-poor-peoples-campaign-black-lives-matter-socialist; , Martin Luther King (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2013); Thomas F. Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Mary Lou Finley et al., eds., The Chicago Freedom Movement (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2018); Michael K. Honey, Going Down Jericho Road (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007); Michael K. Honey, To The Promised Land (n.p.: W.W. Norton, 2018); Asafo Shaka Sekou, The Radical Political Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Charleston: Createspace, 2015); Jason Sokol, The Heavens Might Crack (New York: Basic Books, 2018); Michael K. Honey, ed., “All Labor Has Dignity” (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014);

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Clayborne Carson, Martin’s Dream (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Michael Eric Dyson, April 4, 1968 (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2009). 15. McDonald, “Ferguson,” 143-155. Quote on 151; Lang, Shadow, 45; Theoharis, History, xv, xix, 3-5, 18, 22-26, 208. 16. Jamil Smith, “Martin Luther King, Jr. Doesn’t Belong To You,” New Republic, 18 January 2016, https://newrepublic.com/article/127879/martin-luther-king-jr-doesnt-belong. 17. Theoharis, History, 4-5, 23; Shane Croucher, “Steve Bannon,” Newsweek, 23 May 2018, https:// www.newsweek.com/steve-bannon-martin-luther-king-would-be-proud-donald-trump-940196. 18. Smith, “Belong”; Theoharis, History, 8-10, 13, 15-17, 21, 26. Quotes on 13, 21. 19. Ibid. Theoharis, 22-26. 20. See his Birmingham jail letter. 21. McDonald, “Ferguson,” 153. 22. Bruyneel, “Body,” 102. 23. See the SNCC-SCLC rivalry. 24. McDonald, “Ferguson,” 144. 25. Ibid., 151; David Iaconagelo, “How young activists are reclaiming a more radical version of Martin Luther King,” Christian Science Monitor, 16 January 2017, https://www.csmonitor.com/ USA/2017/0116/How-young-activists-are-reclaiming-a-more-radical-version-of-Martin-Luther- King-Jr. 26. Aaron Handelsman, “Detroit People’s Platform,” Building Movement Project, 19 January 2015, http://www.buildingmovement.org/blog/entry/detroit_peoples_platform_reclaiming_mlk; Leigh Cuen, “Activists Fight to Reclaim MLK’s More Radical Message of Protest,” Vocativ, 18 January 2016. 27. Yuri Prasad, “Reclaim MLK the Radical,” Socialist Worker, 10 March 2018, https:// socialistworker.co.uk/art/46247/Reclaim+Martin+Luther+King+the+radical 28. Brandon M. Terry, “MLK Now.” In: Terry et al., “Fifty Years,” 25. 29. https://policy.m4bl.org/platform/. 30. Barbara Ransby, Making All Black Lives Matter (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 11-28. 31. Ibid., 3. 32. Ibid. Ransby, 123-129. 33. McDonald, “Ferguson,” 151; , Parting the Waters (New York: Touchstone, 1989), 847; Simmons, “Living,” 196-197. 34. Ibid. Simmons; Opal Tometi, “Celebrating MLK Day,” Huffington Post, 18 January 2015, https:// www.huffingtonpost.com/opal-tometi/reclaiming-our-movement-l_b_6498400.html. 35. Clark Mindock, “Martin Luther King Anniversary,” Independent, 3 April 2018, https:// www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/martin-luther-king-assassination- anniversary-fifty-years-black-lives-matter-a8285641.html. 36. Bradley Allen, “Fourth Annual March to Reclaim King’s Radical Legacy,” 16 January 2018, https://bradleyallen.net/2018/01/reclaim-kings-radical-legacy/. 37. Laura Visser-Maessen, Robert Parris Moses (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 176. 38. McDonald, “Ferguson,” 151. 39. See Sugrue, “Restoring” and Simmons, “Living.” 40. Van den Berk and Visser-Maessen, “Race Matters.” 41. Alice Speri, “‘Every Generation Must Reappropriate the Lessons of the Past,’” Vice News, 15 January 2015, https://news.vice.com/article/every-generation-must- reappropriate-the-lessons-of-the-past-protesters-reclaim-mlk-day-in-rallies-across-us; Shani Saxon-Parrish, “The Movement for Black Lives is Urging You to #ReclaimKing,”

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Colorlines, 15 January 2016, https://www.colorlines.com/articles/movement-black- lives-urging-you-reclaimmlk-weekend. 42. Van den Berk and Visser-Maessen, “Race Matters.” 43. Speri, “Generation”; Rick Hampson, “King’s legacy respected, reinterpreted by activists,” USA Today, 19 January 2015, https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/01/18/selma-martin- luther-king-michael-brown-eric-garner-ferguson/21870187/; Tometi, “Celebrating.” 44. For example, King refused to join the Freedom Rides and was initially hesitant of the children’s marches in Birmingham (Branch, Waters, 466-469, 753-754). 45. Iaconangelo, “Activists.” 46. Theoharis, History, xv, 23; Sekou, “Legacy.” 47. https://m4bl.net/. 48. Valerie Russ, “50 Years After Martin Luther King Was Slain,” Powerinterfaith.org, 15 January 2018, https://powerinterfaith.org/50-years-after-martin-luther-king-was-slain-debate-simmers- on-how-to-honor-him/. 49. Hampson, “Respected.” 50. Speri, “Generation”; Justina Coronel, “Community activists try to reclaim Martin Luther King Jr. Day,” 47ABC, 15 January 2018, http://www.wmdt.com/news/maryland/community-activists- try-to-reclaim-martin-luther-king-jr-day-through-human-billboard/686140570. 51. Julia Carrie Wong, “Black Lives Matter protesters block San Francisco’s Bay Bridge,” The Guardian, 19 January 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/19/black-lives- matter-protesters-block-san-franciscos-bay-bridge. 52. Kazu Haga, “Shut It Down,” East Point Peace Academy, 8 January 2015, http:// eastpointpeace.org/reclaimthelegacy/. 53. Sammy Caiola and Claudia Buck, “Thousands march for racial unity,” Sacramento Bee, 16 January 2017, https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article126822459.html. 54. Russ, “Years.” 55. Smith, “Belong.” 56. Wong, “Bridge”; “Reclaiming Martin Luther King Jr’s Legacy,” IndyBay, 14 January 2015, https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2015/01/14/18766865.php; “Martin Luther King Jr’s Radical Legacy Lives On,” IndyBay, 13 January 2016, https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/ 2016/01/13/18781764.php; “Reclaiming King’s Legacy in the Age of Trump,” IndyBay, 16 January 2017, https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2017/01/16/18795372.php; “We Will Not Comply,” IndyBay, 11 January 2018, https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2018/01/11/18805788.php. 57. Cuen, “Activists.” 58. Smith, “Belong”; “Black Lives Matter Chicago and Martin Luther King,” Root, 16 January 2017, https://www.theroot.com/black-lives-matter-chicago-and-dr-martin-luther-king-j-1791178208. 59. Saxon-Parrish, “Movement.” 60. Ibid.; “Reclaiming,” IndyBay 2017. 61. Russ, “Years.” 62. Ibram X. Kendi, “Reclaiming MLK’s Unspeakable Nightmare,” Black Perspectives, 16 January 2016, https://www.aaihs.org/reclaiming-mlks-unspeakable/. 63. Spencer Lachmanec, “Martin Luther King Jr, The Extremist,” Rantt Media, 9 February 2017, https://rantt.com/martin-luther-king-jr-the-extremist/. 64. Ibid.; Megan Garber, “The Revolutionary Aims of Black Lives Matter,” Atlantic, 30 September 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/black-lives-matter-revolution/ 408160/; Mark Engler, “MLK Was a Disruptor,” Salon, 18 January 2016, https://www.salon.com/ 2016/01/18/ mlk_was_a_disruptor_how_black_lives_matter_carries_on_martin_luther_kings_legacy_of_effective_activism/; Imani Gandy, “Dr. King and the White Moderate,” Angry Black Lady Chronicles, 13 August 2015,

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https://rewire.news/ablc/2015/08/13/dr-king-white-progressive/; Brian Blair, “Ending White Supremacy,” Republic, 16 January 2018, http://www.therepublic.com/2018/01/17/ black_lives_matter_panel_tackles_kings_classic_letter_from_jail_wed_a1_news_secondary/. 65. Mic Staff, “Artist Creates ‘Letter From a Birmingham Jail’ Memes,” Movement, 16 January 2018, https://mic.com/articles/165598/artist-creates-letters-from-birmingham-jail-memes-to-stop- people-from-whitewashing-mlk#.o4NCYYreY. 66. Daniel Aloi, “MLK Lecture Feb. 3,” Cornell Chronicle, 26 January 2016, http://news.cornell.edu/ stories/2016/01/mlk-lecture-feb-3-features-black-lives-matter-co-founders; “Editorial,” Ithacan, 1 February 2017, https://theithacan.org/opinion/editorial-sanitizing-kings-legacy-dishonors- his-core-message/; Carolyn Morrisroe, “Updated,” Mountain Xpress, 11 January 2018, https:// mountainx.com/news/mlk-day-events-offer-chance-for-celebration-action/; “WYNC Events,” January 2018, https://www.wnyc.org/events/wnyc-events/2018/jan/14/50-years-after-mlk- dream-deferred/; Bret Turner, “From MLK to #Black Lives Matter,” Teaching Tolerance, 9 January, 2018, https://www.tolerance.org/magazine/from-mlk-to-blacklivesmatter-a- throughline-for-young-students. 67. Barbara Ransby, “Black Lives Matter is Democracy in Action,” New York Times, 21 October 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/21/opinion/sunday/black-lives-matter- leadership.html. 68. “Black Lives Matter Chicago.” 69. “Citywide Alliance Against Displacement,” 13 January 2017, https:// eastharlempreservation.org/citywide-alliance-displacement-martin-luther-king-jr-day-rally/. 70. Errin Haines Wack, et al. “MLK Honored as Thousands March,” Fox News, 5 April 2018, http:// www.foxnews.com/us/2018/04/04/resilience-resolve-and-renewed-commitment-to-mlks- legacy.html; Justin Miller, “Fight for 15 and Black Lives Matter Join Forces,” American Prospect, 4 April 2017, http://prospect.org/article/anniversary-mlk-death-fight-15-and-black-lives-matter- join-forces. 71. Honey, “Martin”; Berry Craig, “Martin Luther King Championed Civil Rights and Unions,” AFL-CIO, 2 April 2018, https://aflcio.org/2018/4/2/martin-luther-king-jr-championed-civil- rights-and-unions; Marni Von Wilpert, “Fighting for Public Sector Union Rights,” Economic Policy Institute, 12 January 2018, https://www.epi.org/blog/struggling-for-public-sector-union- rights-50-years-after-mlks-assassination/; Rob Wolfe, “N.H. Union Members Invoke Spirit of MLK,” Valley News, 5 April 2018, https://www.vnews.com/New-Hampshire-State-Employees- MLK-16646185. 72. Visser-Maessen, Moses, 237. 73. See Honey, Jericho. 74. Miller, “Fight.” 75. Michelle Boorstein et al. “On the Anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Death,” Washington Post, 4 April 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/ wp/2018/04/04/on-the-anniversary-of-martin-luther-kings-death-faith-groups- sharpen-their-focus-on-systemic-racism/?utm_term=.1971031d8d39. 76. Tom Charlier, “How Memphis Has Changed,” Commercial Appeal, 2 April 2018, https:// eu.commercialappeal.com/story/news/2018/04/01/martin-luther-king-jr-assassination- memphis-sanitation-strike-orange-mound-frayer/1082081001/; Miller, “Fight.” 77. Wendi C. Thomas, “Behind the Veneer of ‘I Am Memphis,’” Citylab, 1 April 2018, https:// www.citylab.com/equity/2018/04/behind-the-veneer-of-i-am-memphis/557027/. 78. Ibid. 79. Ibid.; Wendi C. Thomas, “The Meeting With Memphis Activists That Fueled Angela Rye’s Fire,” MLK50, 24 February 2018, https://mlk50.com/angelarye-7bc7ed543463; “Transcript,” MLK50, 25 February 2018, https://mlk50.com/transcript-angela-rye-tells-memphis-dont-just-stay-woke- work-woke-489b90728fa5; Noel Hutchinson, “Mr. Mayor,” Commercial Appeal, 28 February 2018,

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https://eu.commercialappeal.com/story/opinion/contributors/2018/02/27/opinion-mr-mayor- memphis-needs-progress-not-pr/377507002/. 80. Gloria Wekker, White Innocence (Durham and London: Duke University Press), 2. 81. Sara Salem and Vanessa Thompson, “Old , New Masks,” Ninety Sixty Nine 3:1 (2016): 4-9; , “The People that Walked in Darkness.” In: William E. Leuchtenburg, ed., American Mosaic (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2017), 50. 82. Ward, Newcastle, 183-184. 83. Ibid.; Wekker, Innocence, 7. 84. Ibid. Wekker, 4, 6-7; Salem and Thompson, “Racisms,” 3, 9-17. Quote on 3. 85. Fairclough, “People,” 45. 86. Wekker, Innocence, 13; Ward, Newcastle, 15; Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018), 235. 87. Nella van den Brandt et al., “White Innocence,” Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies, 5:1 (2018), 67-82. 88. Salem and Thompson, “Racisms,” 5. 89. Marcia Chatelain and Britta Waldschmidt-Nelson, “Introduction.” In: Britta Waldschmidt- Nelson et al., eds., Staging a Dream, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute (Washington DC: 11:2015), 8; Fairclough, “People,” 45-46. 90. Ibid. Fairclough. 91. Stephen Tuck, “The March on London.” In: Waldschmidt-Nelson et al., Dream, 93. 92. Ward, Newcastle, 17, 161. 93. “From Lennie James to Akala,” Guardian, 25 March 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/us- news/2018/mar/25/martin-luther-king-50-years-on. 94. Salem and Thompson, “Racisms,” 3-4. Quote on 3. 95. Rob Berkeley, “The Missing Link?” In: Antony Lerman, ed., Do I Belong? (London: Pluto Press, 2017), 45-48, 50. 96. “Lennie,” Guardian. 97. Tuck, “March,” 95-96; Eddo-Lodge, Talking, 1. 98. Ibid. Tuck, 95. 99. “Geert Wilders Defends ‘Fewer Moroccans’ Chant,” DutchNews, 8 December 2014, https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2014/12/geert-wilders-defends-fewer-moroccans- chant-quotes-martin-luther-king/; Quinsy Gario, “De Gettoïsering van het Gedachtegoed van Martin Luther King, Jr.,” OneWorld, 11 April 2017, https:// www.oneworld.nl/achtergrond/de-gettoisering-van-het-gedachtegoed-van-martin- luther-king-jr/; Francisco van Jole, “Hé, Wilders,” Joop, 8 December 2014, https:// joop.bnnvara.nl/opinies/he-wilders-dit-is-wat-martin-luther-king-echt-zei. 100. Tuck, “March,” 90; Ward, Newcastle, 164, 167, 186-187, 203. 101. Eddo-Lodge, Talking, 100-101, 231-232. Quote on 100. 102. Berkeley, “Link,” 44-46. Quote on 44. 103. Eddo-Lodge, Talking, 235. 104. Ward, Newcastle, 36. 105. Simran Shoaib, “Bigotry Against Muslims and Ozil Ignites #MeTwo Campaign in Europe,” Global Village Space, 8 August 2018, https://www.globalvillagespace.com/bigotry-against- muslims-and-ozil-ignites-metoo-campaign-in-europe/. 106. Ward, Newcastle, 15. 107. Berkeley, “Link,” 44, 46, 50-52. Quote on 52. European black movements can nonetheless affect American ones; activists like King and Malcolm X benefitted through financial support, gaining legitimacy at home, and broadening their thinking. (Tuck, “March,” 92-93; Fairclough, “People,” 43-44, 46, 47, 51).

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108. Tuck, “March,” 85-86, 88; Ward, Newcastle, 166-167, 170-171, 190-194. Quote on 171; Fairclough, “People,” 50-51. 109. Ibid. Tuck, 86, 88; Brian Ward, “A King in Newcastle,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 79:3 (Fall 1995): 599-632. 110. Ibid. Tuck, 90; Chatelain and Waldschmidt-Nelson, “Introduction,” 8; Michael Haspel, “Martin Luther King Jr.’s Reception as a Theologian and Political Activist in Germany” and Heinrich Grosse, “The March on Washington and the American Civil Rights Movement as an Inspiration for Social Protest Movements in West and East Germany.” In: Waldschmidt-Nelson et al., Dream, 49-64, 65-80; “Martin Luther King Preekte in 1964 in Amsterdam,” Andere Tijden, 16 January 2017, https://anderetijden.nl/artikel/673/Martin-Luther-King-preekte-in-1964-in- Amsterdam. 111. Berkeley, “Link,” 41, 42. 112. Eddo-Lodge, Talking, 9, 225, 228. Quote on 9. 113. Ibid., 229-238. Quote on 230-231; Berkeley, “Link,” 44, 45; Reni Eddo-Lodge, “On the 50 th anniversary of King’s Death,” Independent, 3 April 2018, https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/ martin-luther-king-day-black-civil-rights-movement-uk-bristol-bus-compnay-a8286046.html. 114. “Lennie,” Guardian. Also subsequent paragraphs. 115. Eddo-Lodge, “Anniversary.” 116. Ward, Newcastle, 180-181, 207; “Lennie,” Guardian. 117. Ibid. “Lennie.” 118. Ward, Newcastle, 13-19, 207-246. Quotes on 210, 215, 231. 119. On June 28, 2015, Henriquez died in police custody in the Hague after an unnecessarily violent arrest, during which a neck brace was wrongly applied. The incident spurred mass protests. (Gordon Darroch, “Mass arrests in the Hague,” Guardian, 3 July 2015, https:// www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/03/the-hague-arrests-protest-death-police-custody- mitch-henriquez) 120. Wekker, Innocence, 1-25. 121. “Peaceful Protest against Black Pete stopped on the way to Dokkum,” Stop Blackface, 19 November 2017, http://stopblackface.com/updates-videos-peaceful-protest-against-black-pete- stopped-on-the-way-to-dokkum/; “‘Black Pete’ character sparks clashes in the Netherlands,” SkyNews, 17 November 2018, https://news.sky.com/story/black-pete-character-sparks-clashes- in-the-netherlands-11556549; Wekker, Innocence, 139-167. 122. “Martin Luther King Jr. Lezing 5 April,” Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, https://www.vu.nl/ nl/nieuws-agenda/events/martin-luther-king-jr-lezing/index.aspx. 123. Ibid.; Gario, “Gettoïsering.” 124. “Martin Luther King Day 2018,” Humanity In Action, 2018, http://humanityinaction.nl/ mlk-2018/. 125. “Monument for Martin Luther King, Airco Caravan, 2018,” PublicArt.Amsterdam, 2018, https://publicart.amsterdam/projecten/lmk50/; “Monument for Martin Luther King,” n.d., https://www.mlk50.nl/. 126. http://www.theblackarchives.nl/ and http://nucnet.nl/new-urban-cafe/the-black-archives; Talk Esajas (no title), 15 March 2017, Radboud University Nijmegen; Mitchell Esajas, “Lessons From the Civil Rights Movement,” Humanity in Action, 27 July 2016, https:// www.humanityinaction.org/knowledgebase/730-lessons-from-the-civil-rights-movement- reflections-on-the-long-movement-for-black-liberation-from-atlanta-to-amsterdam. 127. Ibid.; Mitchell Esajas, “The Santa Clausification of Martin Luther King Jr.,” Black Archives, 15 January 2018, http://www.theblackarchives.nl/blog/the-santa-clausification-of-dr-martin- luther-king-jr-in-de-nieuwe-kerk-amsterdam.html?lang=nl. 128. Esajas, “Santa.” Also subsequent paragraphs.

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129. Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang, “The ‘Long Movement’ As Vampire,” Journal of African American History, 92:2 (Spring 2007): 2655-288. Quote on 269. 130. Ward, Newcastle, 17, 18. 131. Ibid.

ABSTRACTS

For those who have studied the black freedom struggle, it is a given that King’s legacy has not only been ‘whitewashed’ to neutralize its radical elements but also that this ‘sanitized’ version is used to undermine similar ones in the current movement for racial equality. This article, however, zooms in on the ways in which today’s left-leaning black activists use the existence of this ‘sanitized’ version of King’s legacy to their advantage. Particularly the recent #ReclaimMLK campaigns in the USA and black engagement with King legacy projects in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands reveal how it can be used as a potent tool to justify contemporary protests. This provides valuable insights into the possible trajectory of 21st century black activism as well as the interrelation between the black freedom struggles on both continents.

INDEX

Keywords: 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., civil rights, collective memory, King legacy, Black Lives Matter, #ReclaimMLK, MLK Day, black freedom struggle, post-racial society, colorblind racism, Afro-European activism, Black Atlantic

AUTHOR

LAURA VISSER-MAESSEN

Laura Visser-Maessen is an Assistant Professor of North American Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. She specializes in African American history and civil rights, but her teaching covers a variety of topics related to American history and culture. These range from (auto)biography, literature, and cultural memory to the American political tradition, cultural diplomacy, and racism in the US. Her book Robert Parris Moses: A Life in Civil Rights and Leadership at the Grassroots (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) became a finalist for the Hooks Institute National Book Award 2016. Her current research interests include (memories of) the civil rights movement; 20th and 21st century public school education for racial minorities in the US; the US as a reference culture for European discussions on race, racism, and black activism; Black European Studies; and black autobiography as a tool of activism.

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Citizens’ Councils, Conservatism and White Supremacy in Louisiana, 1964-1972

Rebecca Brückmann

1 “Did you ever see anything like it?” asked The Citizen, the Citizens’ Councils of America’s monthly publication in May 1968. “Within a couple of hours” after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination on April 4, 1968, “the nation’s Liberal Establishment, official and unofficial,” had “donned sackcloth and ashes and plunged into an orgy of public- breastbeating [sic],” the magazine continued. “Can you imagine any other time in history when a man with the record of MLK could be transformed by the alchemy of propaganda from a real instigator of violence into instant sainthood?” The Citizen opined and concluded that “the wages of integration and ‘black power’ are violence, anarchy and death.”1 The conservative Louisiana newspaper The Shreveport Journal, edited by George Shannon, condemned King’s “senseless, barbaric” murder pro forma, but noted that “the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. has become the victim of the passions he excited. His brand of ‘non-violence’ – provocative and contemptuous of law – begets violence just as violence undisguised does.”2 In Metairie, a community in the New Orleans Metropolitan Area, the 50-year-old New Orleans native and president of the South Louisiana Citizens’ Council (SLCC), Jackson G. Ricau, wrote that to “deplore the assassination is one thing” but denounced the, in his view, “extravagant praise to an imposter who has done more to advance the cause of Communism than perhaps any other person in America.”3

2 In what has been termed the “master narrative” of the Civil Rights Movement, the classical phase of civil rights activism started with the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education verdict, which declared in public education as unconstitutional, and culminated in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act that toppled legal segregation and anti-black voting rights restrictions. According to this narrative, by 1966 the movement had begun to unravel; King’s assassination during his Memphis campaign in support of the striking sanitation workers marked the end of an era.4 Confined to the South and centered around the supposedly universally

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liked Martin Luther King, whom in fact 63 percent of US-Americans disapproved of in a 1966 Gallup poll, this “dominant narrative” framed Black Power activism, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s post-1965 Poor People’s Campaign in pursuit of economic justice, urban riots, and anti-war and social justice activism in the late 1960s and 1970s as detached or substantially different from the earlier, non-violent civil rights struggle.5 In her influential 2005 article, the historian Jacquelyn Dowd-Hall criticized this narrative and proposed to re-evaluate a Long Civil Rights Movement that “took root in the liberal and radical milieu of the late 1930s” and transcended a southern sectional experience.6 Historiographical critiques have argued that the “long civil rights movement” thesis in turn is too totalizing and glosses over qualitative and quantitative differences in civil rights activism through the decades.7

3 Massive Resistance faces comparable questions. In their comments on King’s assassination in 1968 as well as during their Massive Resistance campaign throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, segregationist politicians, grassroots activists, and their media outlets attacked the civil rights movement from a variety of hostile positions, including denouncing civil rights activists as communist agents, condemning what they perceived as a liberal conspiracy against states’ rights, and portraying integrationists as outside agitators or lawless rabble rousers. As the historian George Lewis has shown, white supremacist resistance encompassed “a diverse array of ploys and strategies,” and political elites as well as grassroots activists shaped Massive Resistance’s varied tactics.8 Massive Resistance is simultaneously part of a long history of white supremacy and a specific counter-campaign to the Brown decisions in particular and the gains of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s more broadly.9 Similar to the Civil Rights Movement, white supremacist resistance against racial equality did not vanish after the and Voting Rights Act of 1965. After federal legislation and court decisions dismantled Jim Crow, the grassroots segregationist movement in the South splintered but also formed diverse coalitions. Massive Resistance’s grassroots protagonists in Louisiana not only found new homes in the George Wallace presidential campaigns of 1968 and 1972, but exerted discursive influence on broader conservative tropes such as law and order, welfare state reform, and morality. This article examines grassroots segregationist groups in Louisiana between 1964 and 1972, particularly Citizens’ Councils, a grassroots movement across the South that originated in Indianola, Mississippi in 1954. Citizens’ Councils officially sought to circumvent desegregation in a “respectable,” legal manner, but did not shy away from exerting political, social, and economic pressure.

4 The story of Louisiana’s council movement after 1964 is a story of decline, revitalization, coalition building, and diverse survival strategies in a changing social, economic, and political landscape. In the second half of the 1960s, Louisiana’s grassroots segregationists were still determined to defend white supremacy and everyday white privileges. They continued tried and tested tactics, including mass mobilization, direct action, and boycotts. In addition, the post-1964 Council movement in Louisiana intensified its white voter mobilization, and put a renewed focus on polarizing, emotional social issues like law and order, welfare, fiscal responsibility, individual morality, and heteropatriarchal discourses on the dangers that desegregation allegedly posed to white women. Segregationist women were vocal activists, too, and a number of them played integral roles in keeping the grassroots movement in the public eye.

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5 Louisiana’s councils sought to re-capture the initiative after 1965. The historian Stephanie Rolph argued that Mississippi’s Citizens’ Council’s “unwavering commitment to white supremacy ensured its continued relevance,” and that the Council’s “shifting political allegiances […] ultimately saw success in its convergence” with mainstream conservatism.10 Louisiana councils’ tactics in the second half of the 1960s, too, exemplify the fluidity of white supremacy and its compatibility with a range of conservative ideological positions.

6 Historian Neil McMillen’s study on the Citizens’ Councils identified two focal points of council activism in Louisiana: the Protestant Northwest and the Catholic Southeast.11 In 1955, the first Citizens’ Council of Louisiana was founded in Homer, Claiborne Parish, and the parish’s stalwart segregationist politician, William M. “Willie” Rainach, became the first president of the state-wide Association of Citizens’ Councils a year later. By the Council’s first anniversary, twenty-eight of Louisiana’s sixty-four parishes had Council chapters, claiming 75,000 to 100,000 members in total.12 One of the most influential councils in the state was the Citizens’ Council of Greater New Orleans (CCGNO), whose strength McMillen attributed to the “high quality of its leadership,” including that of Plaquemines Parish’s leader and Dr. Emmett Lee Irwin, the former chief of surgery at Louisiana State University’s Medical School and CCGNO president from 1956 until his death in 1965.13 Several local councils co-operated in the CCGNO. In the mid-1950s, thousands of people attended the group’s rallies, and the CCGNO claimed a membership of up to 50,000.14 In 1958, Jackson Ricau, Joseph Viguerie and other CCGNO members withdrew from the council over internal rifts and formed the SLCC which became the second most active group in southern Louisiana.15 The SLCC attempted to steer clear of the CCGNO’s increasing anti-Semitism, and presented itself as “the more ‘respectable’ wing” of the local Council movement, counting about 2,000 members in 1960.16

7 Already during the 1940s, black activists in Louisiana had intensified their fight for equal access, especially to education. In New Orleans alone, over 50 percent of the city’s pupils were black, but their public schools were infamously overcrowded and understaffed, forcing over 10,000 pupils into the platoon system, that is, rotating school hours that allowed the first half of pupils to attend schools in the morning, and the other to then fill their places in the afternoon.17 After years of unsuccessful petitions to the Orleans Parish School Board, New Orleans lawyer and civil rights activist Alexander Pierre (A.P.) Tureaud filed suit in 1952 with the support of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s Legal Defense and Education Fund. Bush v. Orleans Parish School Board asked for the desegregation of New Orleans’ public schools, and thus became a rallying point for the council movement.18 When a federal district court ruled that the parish had to proceed with desegregation in 1956, the CCGNO organized mass rallies, supported by numerous state politicians and network ties with other southern states’ councils. By 1957, the CCGNO “had more than half” of Louisiana’s total council members, McMillen observed.19

8 Louisiana never reached the membership numbers of the Council movement’s birthplace Mississippi, however. In 1960, only thirty-four out of sixty-four parishes had councils.20 Internal strife plagued the movement, and when Louisiana’s councils could not prevent the token desegregation of William Frantz and McDonogh No. 19 Elementary Schools in New Orleans in November 1960, the councils began to collapse. The movement had already shown signs of a downturn by the late 1950s, and when

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William “Willie” Rainach left the ACCL, the state-wide association whittled into a splinter group.21 Both the regional movement and local groups such as the CCGNO faced fewer contributions and less publicity.22 By the early 1960s, “the Council movement had disintegrated as a statewide force,” concluded the historian Adam Fairclough.23 The remaining council movement in the 1960s was characterized by a struggle against its influence’s erosion and constant infighting. In February 1962, the Shreveport attorney and ACCL president Charles L. Barnett sent a letter to Willie Rainach to initiate a meeting at Alexandria, writing that “[r]igor mortis has about set in on the Council. Maybe we ought to at least have a meeting and say a few final words.” Months later, Rainach proposed to re-organize the state’s council movement by following the organizational models of labor unions. The new statewide organization “Citizens’ Councils of Louisiana, Inc.” resulted from this effort.24

9 In the meantime, Louisiana’s council movement experienced a short second spring with its nationally publicized “Freedom Rides North” campaign. Initiated by CCGNO executive and Perez aid George Singelmann, these “reverse” Freedom Rides solicited black families from the South for one-way bus and train tickets to Northern destinations, including Chicago, New York, and Hyannis, Massachusetts, near the Kennedy’s residence. Although condemned even by local media who called the CCGNO’s publicity stunt “sick sensationalism, bordering on the moronic,” the council was successful in evoking nationwide publicity and reinvigorating its organization. The Citizens’ Council of Louisiana successfully solicited funds from its members to permanently establish its biweekly newspaper The Councilor, and the group’s finance committee chairman Rainach, secretary-treasurer Touchstone, and president Barnett cited the Freedom Rides North as the “first prong” of their renewed “offensive.”25

10 By 1964, however, the state organization was again preoccupied with internal rifts. Charles Barnett and Willie Rainach accused Ned Touchstone and the Shreveport council official Courtney Smith of grandstanding. Touchstone met the reproach by accusing Rainach and Barnett of inaction. Additionally, the council fought over Rainach’s support for the Republican candidate Charlton Lyons over Democrat John J. McKeithen in Louisiana’s 1964 gubernatorial election as well as The Councilor’s topical direction. This spat led to the expulsion of Touchstone and Smith from the Citizens’ Council of Louisiana’s board of directors and marked “an official break” in the organization during the year of the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Rainach later recalled. Touchstone and Smith, however, stood their ground in Shreveport and continued the newspaper’s publication, which became increasingly conspiratorial and rabidly racist and anti-Semitic in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1972, Ned Touchstone was accused of embezzling.26

11 The SLCC under Jackson Ricau, meanwhile, continued its steady stream of propaganda throughout the mid-1960s but had little pull in terms of public mobilization. In 1964, the SLCC supported ’s presidential bid and, like Rainach, Lyons for governor. The SLCC urged the repeal of the Civil Rights Act which the Council deemed a violation of the Thirteenth Amendment’s anti-slavery provisions, because, in their view, “[f]orcing anyone to serve another against his wishes is […] ‘involuntary servitude,’ and therefore in plain violation of the Constitution.”27 In 1965, the SLCC campaigned against the appointment of the Archdiocese of New Orleans’s first black auxiliary bishop Harold R. Perry. The SLCC, personified through Ricau, entangled its white supremacy with conservative tropes of individualism and freedom of choice, but

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continuously failed to steer clear of race baiting. Ricau, for example, stressed to fellow council members in 1965 that, in his view, conservatives were “by far the most powerful pressure group in America,” and stated that “the emotional appeal inherent in the racial issue” would promise success if “the Nordic people” stood up “before the last remaining pure whites wind up with their backs against the Rio Grande.”28

12 Despite the SLCC’s grandstanding rhetoric and the ACCL’s repeated attempts at re- organization, by the time the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964, the regional council movement’s influence on Louisiana politics had waned. There were, however, enclaves of continuous activism and successful solicitation of publicity for council policies, centered in New Orleans and the surrounding parishes as well as in Shreveport. These councils’ actions continued well into the 1970s. Keenly aware of their deteriorating strength, these Louisiana grassroots segregationists sought alliances with other white supremacist (splinter) groups, including the (KKK), and were still able to mobilize thousands of supporters. Council officials in Louisiana diversified their activism and talking points, moreover, to incorporate conservative themes, which enabled them to transcend the narrow scope of anti-desegregation activism and find a footing among broader conservative conversations.29

13 Despite council members’ attempts to cloak their white supremacists interests in the colorblind rhetoric of “law and order” or “freedom of choice” conservatism, this language was never more than a thin veneer for their underlying racism. Nonetheless, grassroots segregationists’ actions were able to infuse white supremacy into mainstream conversations, and the segregationist counter-movement’s protagonists continued to exert influence on public discourses even after their membership numbers dwindled and their funds thus dried up.

14 In 1965, the CCGNO and the SLCC kicked back into gear at Bogalusa, Washington Parish. The historian Adam Fairclough has termed the crisis of Bogalusa “a landmark, a turning point” in Louisiana’s civil rights movement. Racial tensions erupted in this rural town between 1964 and 1966 and again in 1967 when the local high school desegregated. Local black community leaders and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) activists challenged the continued segregation of public facilities in this town dominated by the Crown-Zellerbach sawmill. Civil rights activists pressed for the desegregation of all public facilities, and they urged improvements to black neighborhoods and the employment of black police officers and black civil servants. When Bogalusa mayor Jesse Cutrer’s assurances yielded few results, black activists picketed downtown stores and entered establishments in order to “test” the town’s Civil Rights Act compliance.30

15 Segregationists’ reactions were swift. The local Original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (OKKK) blossomed and included local civil and business leaders. The Klan was a force to be reckoned with in Louisiana in the mid-1960s. The Anti-Defamation League estimated that by 1965, seventeen klaverns with about 1,000 members had been established. The League deemed several of them “extremely militant and violent.”31 The Southern Conference Education Fund reported that in 1965, about eight hundred KKK members lived in Bogalusa and many more in the surrounding areas, “the largest per capita concentration of Klansmen in the nation.”32

16 Indeed, the OKKK’s actions in Bogalusa became increasingly violent, including assaults on black children. Bogalusa’s local police force was at least sympathetic to the white supremacist cause, and law enforcement ceased until the Justice Department filed

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contempt charges and federal courts issued injunctions against the KKK’s interference and the police’s negligence.33 White supremacists’ violence and the police’s refusal to protect black civil rights workers put the national spotlight on the Deacons for Defense and Justice between 1965 and 1966, black activists who protected demonstrations and served as armed security detail for black rights campaigners.34

17 Black Louisianans could not count on the state’s political officials, either. Both Governor McKeithen and Bogalusa mayor Cutrer equated civil rights and white supremacist activism. Cutrer, for example, praised a segregationist parade and rally as “very orderly and well conducted” and “carried out in such a manner as to reflect credit on the local citizens who organized it,” thereby taking a swipe at CORE officials like James Farmer whom he deemed an outsider. Cutrer also complained that the civil rights movement had “cost the city $96,000” during the first half of 1965 for increased police presence and related expenses. McKeithen stated that Louisiana had no need for the KKK, but he also called Farmer “trash.” The governor thus echoed the SLCC, who had warned him in an open letter that Farmer was a “known trouble-maker” and an “outside agitator” who should be kept out of Louisiana.35 The mounting confrontations between white supremacists and black activists in Bogalusa eventually forced the state’s and federal government’s hand, however. McKeithen dispatched a three-men committee, comprised of state senator Michael O’Keeffe, Alexandria lawyer Camille Gravel, and state AFL-CIO leader Victor Bussie, to mediate.36

18 When the CCGNO learned of the governor’s mediating committee in April 1965, it asked to be included in the “negotiations and mediation.” Bussie rebuffed the council’s demand by stating that the committee “was concerned with Bogalusa, not New Orleans.”37 The CCGNO had sensed an opportunity to reinvigorate its group, however. Four days after the CCGNO unsuccessfully asked to be included in the mediation attempt, it made its true intentions clear when it announced a segregationist rally in cooperation with the United Conservatives of Louisiana (UCL) at a press conference. Denouncing the Bogalusa mediation committee, CCGNO executive secretary George L. Singelmann proclaimed that Sheriff James Clarke, district judge John Rarick, and Leander Perez would speak at the rally (albeit the latter’s speech was thwarted by McKeithen’s intervention, a fact the CCGNO bitterly decried at their rally). Singelmann also hinted that the council would charter busses to bring people from New Orleans to Bogalusa. The UCL’s and CCGNO’s press conference’s moderator, James M. Ellis, stressed that their protest rally was “not of a racial nature” but “a conservative movement.”38 Six months later, James M. Ellis, an auto repairman, would be revealed as a KKK member by Georgia Representative Charles L. Weltner, who, in order to expose the Klan’s influence in Bogalusa, placed Ellis’s and other members’ names in the Congressional Record.39

19 The CCGNO was in the midst of the Bogalusa commotion. Their actions illustrate that the group had no qualms to align itself with the most extreme Ku Klux Klan forces in order to defend white supremacy and to stay relevant. Their campaign also shows that Bogalusa was the last hurrah of ordinary CCGNO mobilization tactics, that is, activating the white community for large rallies and drumming up publicity. During the spring and summer of 1965, the CCGNO piggy-backed on the KKK, and the CCGNO’s most active official in Bogalusa, Jack Helm, was also a KKK member.40

20 Although – or because – the CCGNO’s actions in Bogalusa were entangled with the Klan from the start, cloaking their white supremacist activism in the colorblind rhetoric of

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conservatism became one of the CCGNO’s main strategies. At the May 7, 1965 rally, which the Times Picayune reported as a cry for the “return of conservatism,” district judge and future Congressman John Rarick was the main speaker. Rarick lamented the lack of official support for the rally. He alluded to conspiracy theories about paid protesters in the Civil Rights Movement when he stated that “[n]o one has paid you $10 for marching.” Rarick proclaimed that the segregationist protesters were “telling the world this is our country. We want our country back.” Rarick denounced that Voting Rights Act, and he declared that he favored “segregation not because of hate or fear” but because he was “a free man.” If Martin Luther King were successful, Rarick continued, “there will be no such thing as freedom.” He urged the crowd to “stand up for America and for individual freedom,” which allowed them to “discriminate against anyone we may choose […].”41 A who-is-who of Louisiana’s council movement took to the podium, including Singelmann, Courtney Smith, Ned Touchstone, and William Simmons, executive director of the Citizens’ Councils of America, who urged the crowd to support George Wallace. The turnout was solid: the police estimated that 2,000 people had attended a prior protest march, waving small confederate flags. Around 3,000 assembled for the subsequent rally at Goodyear Park.42

21 For the CCGNO, the Bogalusa mobilization was a prime possibility to revitalize its influence. The group’s Bogalusa campaign sought to mobilize local and regional, direct action resistance against desegregation that had slowed down since the early 1960s, but the group simultaneously attempted to transcend a southern sectional battle by appealing to supposedly trans-regional, conservative policies and strategies to circumvent racial equality.

22 Notoriously hard to pin down, conservatism after the Second World War has been described “as a social and political movement” of intellectuals and grassroots activists who eventually established “a mass following” and substantial “influence over the Republican party,” according to the historian Kim Philipps-Fein.43 The tenets and ideological roots of this new wave of conservatism are varied, but they include traditionalism, anti-communism, backlash to racial equality and liberal social movements, laissez-faire capitalism, opposition to governmental interventions (including the New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society), and freedom of choice, often emanating from suburbia.44 Understood as less of a fixed category and more of “a collective identity that evolves in the course of struggles and collaborations over meaning,” as the sociologists Neil Gross, Thomas Medvetz, and Rupert Russell argued, Louisiana’s councils found compatibilities with conservative ideology in their quest for continued white supremacy. In Bogalusa, the CCGNO tested the water.45

23 Shortly after the passage of the Voting Rights Act and while the white supremacist mobilization in Bogalusa crested in the summer of 1965, the CCGNO had a kick-off rally for several voter registration events in an attempt to register as many white people as possible. The CCGNO’s acting chairman C.E. Vetter organized small neighborhood rallies, and Jack Helm, a member of the group’s board of directors, was slated as a speaker to “prove to the crowd that the […] Voting Rights Act was written by the of the United States.” The CCGNO proclaimed the (hopelessly unrealistic) goal of registering 60,000 white voters in New Orleans between August and October 1965.46 With the electoral flank covered, the CCGNO also put forth a legal strategy to defend white supremacy in Bogalusa. Singelmann announced “new legal approaches to the racial situation” in July 1965. In cooperation with the National States’

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Rights Party, the CCGNO filed affidavits against black civil rights leaders, which charged that they had violated Louisiana law that forbade common-law marriages.47 Hitting civil rights activists with charges of immorality would soon become one of the CCGNO’s preferred strategies.

24 Before the Bogalusa segregation rally at Goodyear Park on May 7, 1965 came to a close with a “” sing-along and a benediction, the CCGNO’s official Jack Helm gave a final address. Helm had stepped onto the public scene in 1963 as president of Parents and Friends of Catholic Children, Inc., a segregationist New Orleans organization which opposed the desegregation of parochial schools. In Bogalusa, Helm told the crowd that he was “glad to be here with you white, God-fearing citizens; and God is with us.” His direct invocation of whiteness was no coincidence: Helm was Louisiana’s grand dragon of the United Klans of America (UKA), and he served as a linchpin between the council movement and Louisiana’s Klans in the early to mid-1960s.48

25 Helm’s Klan affiliation was not a secret. Only three weeks later, he was announced as a “leader of the Citizens Council of Greater New Orleans and principal speaker” at a Bogalusa Klan rally.49 Again in mid-July 1965, Jack Helm was introduced in his official capacity as a CCGNO official and spoke at a well-attended Klan rally on a farm in nearby Crossroads, Mississippi.50 The collaboration between klaverns and other white supremacist grassroots groups in Washington Parish and the neighboring Mississippi delta resulted in several big rallies during the summer of 1965, in which council and Klan members alike denounced civil rights activists and federal officials, whom UKA’s Imperial Wizard Robert Shelton called “tennis-shoe wearing […] sex perverts.”51

26 The Klan’s reascent in Louisiana did not go unchallenged. In the autumn and winter of 1965 and 1966, the House Un-American Activities Committee began to investigate the Klan’s actions in Louisiana. In October 1965, Helm spoke at a UKA rally in Philadelphia, Mississippi, which was also attended by several people under indictment for the Mississippi murders of , , and Andrew Goodman. Helm introduced himself as a representative of the “Louisiana Citizens Council” and told the crowd that the congressional investigation into the KKK would not harm the Klan. Helm assured his audience that the group would still be here when the Congressmen “are dead and buried and I hope it will be soon.”52 In January 1966, Helm became one of the six Louisiana men whom the House committee questioned in D.C. The fifty-five-year-old declined to answer but wore a “large confederate flag emblem on his lapel.”53

27 A month later, Helm appeared at a meeting of the Citizens’ Councils of Louisiana’s board of directors with the support of Ned Touchstone. Helm’s public association with the Klan made him a liability to the CCGNO. Whereas prior to the congressional hearing, Helm, also in his capacity as president of Parents and Friends of Catholic Children, Inc., was still on the roster of speakers at CCGNO events, the UKA official lost his standing with the majority of the Council. His affiliations with a racist terror organization could no longer be ignored or obfuscated. Helm was fired from his job at L.P. Smith & Company in New Orleans, for which he had worked for twenty years, and suspended as local draft board chairman of the Selective Service.54 Out in the open as Louisiana UKA’s grand dragon in 1966, Helm received a triumphant return to the Klan after his testimony in D.C., however, when seventeen klaverns rallied in New Orleans, dedicating their meeting to the theme “Jack M. Helm Is Coming Home.” Helm then became the Imperial Dragon of the Universal Klans of America, a group of South

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Louisiana Klan members who split from the UKA in 1967. When Victor Bussie’s home was bombed in Baton Rouge the same year, Helm was at the center of police investigations. He denied any involvement.55

28 Despite the CCGNO’s silence on their member Jack Helm’s actions, the KKK official was not the only white supremacist extremist linked to the group in the mid-1960s. On May 30, 1965, the black Washington Parish sheriff’s deputy O’Neal Moore and his partner Creed Rogers drove their patrol car near Bogalusa, when a man in a passing pickup truck shot at them. Moore, a father of four daughters, was killed. The police arrested the 41-year-old former Marine Ernest McElveen who worked at the Bogalusa’s papermill. McElveen, who was charged with murder, was a CCGNO member, a member of the National States’ Rights Party, and a member of the National Rifle Association. Neither McElveen nor the men whom the police thought to be co-conspirators were convicted due to a lack of evidence.56

29 In Bogalusa, the CCGNO walked the line between its customary white supremacist agitation and an outright alignment with the KKK. After Jack Helm’s public exposure, he ceased to be a public official for the group, who seems to have feared (further) bad press. While the CCGNO’s interventions in Bogalusa on the one hand showed that the group could rally substantial grassroots support for white supremacy and was not anathema to cooperating with the KKK, on the other hand the crisis masked the fact that Bogalusa was one of the few instances in which regional cooperation between segregationist grassroots groups to defend white supremacy were successful. Finding and creating opportunities to unify the fractured council movement in Louisiana was crucial to its continuance, however. Bogalusa proved valuable here, as did state and national electoral politics.

30 The passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 put the council movement across the South on the defensive. Willie Rainach readily admitted in 1977 that prior to the Act, the Louisiana Joint Legislative Committee on Segregation, in tandem with the state’s councils, had harassed voter registrars and purged voting rolls of supposedly “unqualified” or “improperly registered” voters.57 After the passage of federal civil rights and voting rights legislation, Louisiana councils not only called upon Governor McKeithen to reject federal aid funds rather than to integrate the state’s public schools, they initiated white voter registration drives to counter black voter registrations.58 In 1965, Leander Perez warned that the CCGNO had to “get organized, get registered and vote,” because unless white people casted a bloc vote, the country’s future would not be “a pleasant picture.” Perez asked for 122,000 additional white voters to fight “the curse of the Second Reconstruction period for the South.” The CCGNO’s acting chairman, C.E. Vetter announced plans for neighborhood voter registration meetings. Vetter remarked that this action marked “a new policy” for the Council, which was now actively seeking out supporters instead of asking people to come to them. The CCGNO even offered car rides to voter registrar’s offices – an illustration of the organization’s waning mobilization strength. Indeed, the CCGNO’s finances were just as dire: in June 1965, Vetter admitted that only half of the council members had paid their annual dues since the beginning of the year.59

31 Electoral politics, nonetheless, proved another rallying point for the struggling councils. In March 1965, 300 delegates of the Citizens’ Council of Louisiana attended a strategy meeting in Baton Rouge when they heard about a possible Voting Rights Bill. Half the group marched over to the governor’s mansion, where they confronted

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McKeithen in his morning clothes and in search of a cup of coffee. McKeithen assured the agitated councilmen, including Shreveport’s Courtney Smith, that he had no intention of supporting the legislation.60 When the Voting Rights Act passed a few months later, the councils in North and South Louisiana alike found themselves on the backfoot. They, too, started white voter drivers and rallied white communities against black candidates. “Do you want Negro’s [sic] elected to office in Shreveport?” the Shreveport Citizens’ Council asked its members, urging them to double their efforts.61 In New Orleans’s Ninth Ward, the site of the city’s first public school desegregations in 1960, the CCGNO campaigned furiously against Nils Douglas, a black civil rights attorney who ran for the state legislature. “The white voters of the 9th Ward are faced with the most serious challenge since Reconstruction time,” the council wrote, and urged its alleged “10,000 present and former members” in the area to cast their ballot for Ernest J. Hessler, Jr.62 Douglas lost to the segregationist Hessler, but he organized the Southern Organization for Unified Leadership (SOUL) to mobilize black voters. In 1973, Douglas was appointed as Orleans Parish Criminal District Court Commissioner. Ernest “Dutch” Morial became the first black state Representative since Reconstruction in 1966.63

32 In contrast, John R. Rarick, judge of the 20th judicial district court at St. Francisville, became the great white hope for the councils. Rarick, who had made a name for himself by issuing a restraining order against picketing CORE members in East Feliciana Parish, ousted 24-year veteran U.S. Representative James H. Morrison in the 6th district Democratic primary runoff in September 1966.64 Rarick, whom historian Fairclough deemed “one of the most extreme and politically ambiguous segregationists in the state,” was a native of Goshen, Indiana, and had come to Louisiana as an army trainee during the Second World War . He had not only been a frequent speaker at CCGNO events but also “cultivated” the support of the KKK.65 Rarick, nonetheless, threatened to sue his opponent Morrison for libel when the latter distributed campaign cards that showed Rarick’s name with a picture of a robed Klansman. The CCGNO campaigned vigorously for Rarick, and he beat out Morrison by 5,000 votes. When Rarick challenged McKeithen for the governorship in 1967, however, he was soundly defeated.66

33 Rarick, who in a speech to the 77th continental Congress of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), two weeks after King’s assassination, said that King had “showed more disrespect for the law and did more to aid and abet communist causes than all peace-marchers in the land” to repeated applause, also pledged his support to George Wallace’s presidential campaign. House Democrats subsequently stripped Rarick of his seniority, and he lost the race for assistant Democratic Senate leader to Edward M. Kennedy.67

34 Seeing themselves as outcasts from the Democratic Party, Louisiana segregationists joined Wallace’s 1968 presidential bid in droves, a campaign that helped “unify some of the key players” of southern Massive Resistance and national groups of the grassroots right.68 During his Democratic presidential campaign in 1964, Wallace had already wooed Louisiana’s council movement.69 In 1967, Wallace was the principal speaker at the Citizens’ Councils of America’s annual leadership in New Orleans. He shared a podium with Louisiana’s right-wing political elite, including Leander Perez and Lieutenant Governor Aycock. In his address “Stand Up For America,” Wallace insinuated that neither party could stop his candidacy or his “mass movement.” In April 1967, 2,000 people assembled at a $25-a-plate dinner in Baton Rouge honoring

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him and , the Governor of Alabama and George’s wife who had vowed to defy the federal court order of Lee v. Macon County Board of Education to desegregate Alabama’s schools, the SLCC reported enthusiastically.70 Wallace’s presidential ambitions invigorated the council movement in Louisiana across internal fractions.

35 Louisiana’s councils took the plunge into fulltime support for Wallace’s American Independent Party in 1968. “Everyone’s tied up in this thing,” commented Singelmann, executive director of the CCGNO in October 1968, who ran the downtown section of four headquarters in New Orleans’s metropolitan area. Citizens’ Councils successfully drove petitions in their “Operation Dixie” to place Wallace on the Louisiana ballot. Leander Perez served as the state chairman of the Louisiana Wallace Campaign Fund. Singelmann stated that the Wallace campaign schedule left him with no time for his usual CCGNO duties, but fervently praised the campaign efforts as “amazing, just fantastic,” and a mobilizing tool for many young people. The councils were not only fighting to survive, they wanted to cultivate a continuous force for white supremacy by recruiting young whites. Wallace easily carried Louisiana in November 1968.71

36 Louisiana’s grassroots coalition for George Wallace unraveled after the presidential election, however. Two camps, one surrounding Wallace presidential elector Dr. S.R. Abramson, and one George Singelmann, argued over who was the legitimate of Louisiana heir. The segregationists eventually settled the dispute, and both Singelmann and Abramson represented their respective districts at the party convention in Baton Rouge in January 1969.72 The American Party of Louisiana ran newspaper advertisements which asked members of the two parties to change their affiliation from “the Hubert H. Humphrey party, the Rockefeller party, the Nixon party, to the real alternative, the American Party,” an undertaking that the Alexandria Daily Town Talk called “ineffectual.” Although the American Party of Louisiana organized several groups under the title of “Association of Wallace Voters” in the spring of 1969 in order to siphon off voters from the major parties, Democratic candidates throughout the next years easily won their campaigns against Republican or American Party candidates. By 1968, the state’s black voter numbers had nearly doubled since 1964. In 1969, C.E. Vetter wrote to Ned Touchstone that the Citizens’ Council of Louisiana “is non existent [sic] at this time and we will find ourselves in deep water if we don’t look out.”73 The revitalization of the state organization did not come about. In 1972, Roy M. Harris, president of the Citizens’ Council of America, predicted that if Wallace did not receive the Democratic presidential nomination, “the entire South” would go for . After Wallace bowed out after surviving an assassination attempt, Nixon proved the effectiveness of the Southern Strategy and carried Louisiana.74

37 Southern resistance to school desegregation was ongoing after the Civil Rights Act, and white flight came into full effect. In Louisiana in 1966, sixty-five segregated private schools enrolled approximately 16,500 students. Even in cosmopolitan New Orleans, almost no residential integration had occurred for the past nineteen years, a city report noted in 1969, and black residents were “concentrated in public housing projects.”75 Louisiana’s council movement fought hard to preserve this status quo in the second half of the 1960s. By 1966, only fourteen parishes had remaining active councils, however, which collected annual membership dues of $3.00.76 Courtney Smith urged fellow council members to not give up and encouraged them to get creative in order to refill their ranks: “Do whatever is necessary to draw a crowd. Hire a band – have a local

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talent contest – bring a speaker that will draw – hold a cake auction – arrange a debate […]. THINK!”77

38 In addition to councils’ attempts to mobilize white supremacists with direct action and white voter drives, grassroots segregationists, in cooperation with political officials, patrolled the boundaries of white supremacy through social issues. In 1964 and 1965, the CCGNO called for a boycott against car manufacturer Ford and other companies they deemed integrationist, and it urged white people to stop buying music records by black artists. That same year, the group organized a New Orleans rally in May to condemn the 10th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, at which George Singelmann declared that if school desegregation proceeded at the same pace as it had in the past decade, it would take another “870 years to finish the job.”78

39 Notwithstanding Singelmann’s frequent racist outbursts, in the mid- to late 1960s, the councils again sought to activate “ordinary” white citizens against racial equalization, and they utilized a broader, conservative, and supposedly colorblind jargon on freedom of (school) choice and individual liberties, welfare and fiscal responsibility, law and order, and morality.79 The timing was right. Between 1968 and 1969, Louisiana’s council movement tapped into public moral panics about (the intersections) of civil rights and anti-war protests, the women’s liberation movement and changing sexual mores (including the Supreme Court verdict in Loving v. Virginia in 1967, which rendered Louisiana’s racial “intermarriage” laws unconstitutional), the welfare (state) expansion of Johnson’s Great Society, and fears of riots, increasing crime rates, and a supposedly impending “race war” run by Black Power advocates.80 The Shreveport Journal and the Shreveport Times regularly published pieces that accused Martin Luther King and other civil rights and student protestors of associating with “militants” and stressed their responsibility for the possible “touch off” of a “guerilla warfare summer.” The CCGNO and the SLCC seized on this sensationalist climate and refuted the “myth of inevitability” they said falsely surrounded desegregation.81

40 The CCGNO embarked on a “crusade to save our children” in May 1967, a series of meetings that urged resistance to federal guidelines on school desegregation, and pleaded with Louisiana’s officials to reject federal funds rather than to desegregate.82 The CCGNO and SLCC continued their defamation campaigns against prominent civil rights activists, including Martin Luther King, James Farmer, and Urban League director Whitney M. Young, Jr.83 In 1969, the CCGNO appropriated civil rights rhetoric when Singelmann and several men and women staged a “peaceful sit-in,” as he called the group’s actions, at the New Orleans city council to protest the removal of the Confederate flag at city hall.84

41 The CCGNO’s and SLCC’s most tenacious strategy to reach mainstream audiences was interweaving racial allusions and gendered fears with the rhetoric of law and order, morality, and individual responsibility. Rehashing a white supremacist favorite, both groups warned of the dangers that desegregation allegedly posed to white girls and women. The SLCC made good on its promise to win over conservative voters by appealing to the emotional aspect of racial equality and published sensationalist allegations of arranged transportation for white Catholic school girls to the homes of black boys for “social visits.” This white supremacist, heteropatriarchal outlook on white women was echoed by a CCGNO’s meeting that provided “self-defense instruction for women.” Advertisements in southern council publications for a pepper “self- defense spray” for women made racialized allusions to having been tested on the mean

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streets of Chicago.85 In connection, Louisiana’s councils reverted to a masculinist discourse on law and order, particularly in connection to crimes against white women. In January 1968, the CCGNO urged Governor McKeithen “to sign the death warrants for all convicted rapists now confined to death row at Angola.” Council chairman Vetter elaborated that his was the “only hope we have of being able to walk the streets again without fear of bodily harm.”86

42 Despite this stylization of white female victimhood, white women were also vocal segregationists in Louisiana. Several officials of the Shreveport Citizens’ Council, founded in 1963, were women.87 The most infamous women’s group were the so-called Cheerleaders, a gathering of neighborhood women and female council members who protested the desegregation of William Frantz and McDonogh No. in 1960 and 1961.88 A prominent member of the core group of Cheerleaders who assembled everyday was Una Gaillot, who had also founded her own organization, “Save Our Nation, Inc.” (a play on the integration supporting, liberal group “Save Our Schools”). Born in 1920, Gaillot was a religious fanatic and segregationist militant to whom desegregation was a religious principle, on which she published a number of pamphlets. The mother of three was excommunicated from the Catholic Church alongside Jackson Ricau and Leander Perez in 1962 for her segregationist agitation.89 Whereas Perez was supposedly repentant and thus quietly re-admitted to the church before his death, Una Gaillot officially “renounced” the church in 1969 and confirmed her white supremacist views.90 In the mid- to late 1960s and early 1970s, Gaillot was still a segregationist activst. She protested her son Kenneth’s integrated army unit, the hiring of black priests, and unsuccessfully took to court to enforce the racial labeling of banked blood in state hospitals.91 Louisiana’s council movement, alike to right-wing movements across the nation, was male-dominated in rhetoric and official personnel; however, women were far from being mere pawns.

43 In the mid-1960s, the councils also dismissed or ridiculed black civil rights activists’ experiences with violence and police brutality. In May 1966, the SLCC pushed backed against civil rights activists’ demands for a civilian police review board in New Orleans. “What with Watts still fresh in our minds,” the SLCC wrote, “the spurious allegations” of police violence were particularly non-credible. Instead of backing a review board, people should “strengthen” the police department “in case of attack this summer by Negro revolutionaries.”92 A few months later, the SLCC again asked for more support for the police, charging that the Civil Rights Act had exacerbated crime rates. If the federal civil rights and voting rights legislation were repealed, the SLCC continued, the country could return to “constitutional government and reduce crime […].”93 The SLCC also stoked panic of Black Power, calling it the “domination over the Whites in every field of endeavor […].”94

44 The council movement’s other social focus was state and federal spending. When calling upon the governor to reject federal aid to education rather than to integrate the state’s public facilities in February 1965, the Citizens’ Councils of Louisiana simultaneously presented a resolution that asked McKeithen to initiate “a statewide voluntary birth-control program in all state health facilities” as a means of saving money and replacing lost federal funds.95 The state organization’s representatives and McKeithen met a few days later “and discussed the group’s idea of setting up voluntary centers to combat illegitimacy and save welfare expenses,” the Times

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Picayune reported. McKeithen did not object but announced that, “virtually,” the state already had “voluntary birth control now.”96

45 In line with their bid to cut welfare spending and their racialized appeal to morality, Louisiana’s councils called for open access to birth control and reproductive health clinics. “It is an outrage that Louisiana is the one state that does not have planned parenthood clinics,” Singelmann complained at the Citizens’ Council of Louisiana convention in March 1965 in Baton Rouge.97 The Citizens’ Council simultaneously pushed for stronger a implementation of Louisiana’s statutes on the prohibition of common-law marriages, and Singelmann criticized the number of people on the state’s “Aid to Dependent Children” provision.98 The Council’s demands for free birth control, easier access to Planned Parenthood clinics, and an end to common-law marriages, then, were not a sudden case of altruism or a feminist awakening but a calculated bid to cut off poor, predominantly black recipients from welfare, thereby reinforcing post- Moynihan Report stereotypes about black families. In his speech, Singelmann referred to “persons in the lower income bracket […] anxious to learn of planned parenthood” and the “thousands of dollars” of welfare provisions saved due to birth control programs in Chicago and North Carolina.99 “[I]f we could get the Negro married and responsible for their children,” Singelmann clarified the Council’s intentions, “everyone would benefit.” The anti-common-law-marriage provisions Louisiana’s state law could serve as “a weapon we could use. We could accomplish miracles,”100 he proclaimed, showing bold optimism that this line of argument would reinvigorate the Councils’ political firepower.

46 Singelmann and fellow councilors tapped into a pervasive discourse on population growth, resource distribution, birth control, and family planning at the time. National and international anxiety about exponentially increasing population numbers, and appeals to curb social consequences like cycles of poverty, food and space shortages, and natural resource depletion, had found their way into Louisiana’s local newspapers. 101 As part of the federal War on Poverty, the Health, Education and Welfare Department (HEW) and the newly established Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) allocated over a billion dollars to local birth control counseling initiatives across the nation between 1964 and 1967. In 1965, the Supreme Court ruled in Griswold v. Connecticut that states’ ban on contraceptives for married was unconstitutional, and by 1970, fourty-eight of Louisiana’s sixty-four parishes had established family planning clinics for low-income residents.102

47 In February 1966, seven months before Planned Parenthood’s founder passed away, the Citizens’ Councils of Louisiana’s president Dr. Emile Ventre met fellow councilors in New Orleans. The group discussed the anticipated “opposition from the Catholic Church” to their plans to boost Planned Parenthood in Louisiana and thus receive OEO funds for birth control counseling in the state. Ventre assured the group that the bishops of Shreveport and New Orleans would be cooperative, but that the Council would have to assure a number of “points” before the Catholic Church agreed to the group’s campaign for Planned Parenthood. These included the adherence to the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s Title VI, which prohibits racial discrimination in federally financed projects, and an assurance that the Council’s campaign would allow for supervision “to make sure [the] program goes along with what the Catholic Church wants.”103 The state organization instructed local councils to convey information on Planned Parenthood, and to form a small committee to sponsor the Council’s program.

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The committee was to be comprised of “Ladies, outsiders, and other persons as well as Citizens Council members.” Ventre added that volunteer doctors to “staff a clinic” were particularly welcome.104

48 The Council was aware of the delicateness of its endeavor in predominantly Catholic southern Louisiana. It could, however, build on a growing chasm between the Catholic clergy and the laity in regard to birth control. After the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), moderate Catholics had hoped that Pope Paul VI would relax the church’s stance on “artificial” contraceptives. With a 7,000 word encyclical in 1967, however, Paul VI rejected all forms of birth control other than abstinence (and the temporary use of the rhythm method). The contrast between Catholic doctrine and lay practice thus sharpened, and a poll in the same year showed that thirty percent of Roman Catholics used artificial birth control and seventy percent had hoped for the Church to allow contraception.105

49 The Council made no mention of abortion in its Planned Parenthood campaign planning. Importantly, as the historian Caroline Hymel has noted, the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 “reflected a nation-wide consensus in favor of legalized abortion” that was mirrored in Louisiana, where “only 23 percent” completely disapproved abortion in 1975.106 With the exception of a 1974 SLCC publication that called Nelson Rockefeller an “internationalist and abortionist,” Louisiana’s Councils seemed to steer clear of the debate boosted by the Christian Right.107 The Council’s own booster campaign, however, seems to have faltered without success. Planned Parenthood of Louisiana was not established as a statewide organization until 1984.

50 The Council was not out of the mainstream with its attempt to bolster the support for birth control counseling and family planning in the Pelican state. Indeed, it latched onto an emerging, supposedly progressive discourse on reproductive rights and gave it a white supremacist spin. The Council sought to capitalize on (inter-)national conversations and well-funded initiatives for social reform. Their goal was to ensure preferential treatment to white people and continued racial inequality by different means than segregation and disfranchisement: population control and welfare cuts to poor black families, disguised in the language of scientific and social progress and fiscal responsibility.

51 In the late 1960s, Louisiana indeed cut the “Aid to Families with Dependent Children” program (AFDC). Already in 1959, the state had passed a law that excluded women from the program if they had had “an illegitimate child” while enrolled for benefits. As a result, over 2,000 children lost their aid in 1960. After national and international protests, the law was abolished.108 The multiple cuts to the program’s budget and mandatory work provisions, however, resulted in welfare activists’ continued protests in 1968.109 CCGNO members openly mocked and demonized the group of black women who led the New Orleans Welfare Rights Organization. The Council called the women’s criticism of welfare cuts “the funniest news story in years,” if it “were not for the tragic aspect.” C.E. Vetter denounced the group as “immoral women and their illegitimate children” who were “clamoring for more money to continue their immorality,” while “decent, law-abiding citizens” paid for their lifestyle. “It is high time [that] the people of this state quit coddling this cancerous condition and force these people to be responsible for their acts by prosecuting them to the fullest of the law,” Vetter added. 110 The Council movement in Louisiana thus interwove conservative ideology on individualism, morality, and personal and fiscal responsibility with white supremacy,

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painting black men and particularly black women as morally unfit, lazy, and promiscuous.

52 The most mainstream success in the late 1960s, however, came with the council movement’s rhetorical focus on the conservative dogma of “freedom of choice” and “freedom of association,” and they found allies in Governor McKeithen and Lieutenant Governor Aycock. The state legislature had subsidized the continuance of racial segregation in education by several grant-in-aid acts between 1954 and 1967, which sponsored children to attend private, segregated schools. By 1966, the grants program was putting a strain on Louisiana’s budget and was $100,000 short of funds.111 Federal courts, moreover, had systematically ruled against Louisiana’s and other southern state’s efforts to circumvent desegregation by pupil placement plans, re-zoning, and grant-in-aid programs.112

53 By 1969, fifteen years after the first Brown decision, HEW’s and federal courts’ patience with Louisiana was wearing thin.113 Louisiana segregationists had no intention of giving up, however, and the governor, who had declared that “segregation is the best of way of life for Louisiana” in 1966, supported the segregationist grassroots actions. In August 1969, ten thousand whites assembled at Lake Charles stadium for a rally against school desegregation. The protest was organized by the newly formed “Concerned Citizens For Quality Education” (CCQE), a group with close ties to the American Party of Louisiana. The CCQE called for a holiday on October 13, termed “freedom of choice day,” to protest integration through white school boycotts.114 Against the objections of Parent-Teacher Associations and the NAACP, McKeithen obliged. He declared October 13, 1969, “freedom of choice” day, but refrained from making it a compulsory holiday.115

54 Segregationists’ high hopes to kick off another round of statewide defiance did not materialize, however. In Monroe, the civil rights group “The Black Citizens Council of Ouachita Parish” ironically designated October 14, 1969 as a holiday to “celebrate the death” of token desegregation.116 The state’s segregationist elite and grassroots groups were no match to the combined powers of the federal executive and judiciary. By February 1970, integration was “becoming a social reality,” and around thirty percent of the state’s black children attended formerly white schools.117

55 The most ardent segregationists, among them the SLCC and the CCGNO, had still not given up, however. At the beginning of the 1970/1971 school year, anti-desegregation riots and fights between black and white students broke out after schools in Thibodaux, Terrebonne Parish, and Houma desegregated. In April 1971, the CCGNO launched another statewide white voter registration drive and kicked into gear for a 1972 Wallace presidential campaign. In 1972, the SLCC’s president Jackson Ricau lauded Governor Edwin Edwards for sending 300 police officers to Southern University in Baton Rouge, where students had protested for weeks and occupied administration buildings in pursuit of better facilities and services. In the confrontation, a police officer killed two 20-year-old students, Leonard Brown and Smith.118 Louisiana’s organized grassroots segregationists could not muster the strength to mobilize substantial, public support for their continued propaganda, though.

56 The zenith of the White Citizens’ Council Movement had passed in the second half of the 1960s, when federal legislation and court orders made effective, continued defiance of desegregation orders virtually impossible and the movement had splintered. A number of Louisiana’s councils, nonetheless, proved adaptive and dynamic in their post-1965 activism. Councilors continued their fight for white supremacy – they not

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only fought to survive a changing landscape, but to create a next generation of Louisiana white supremacists, and to activate a broader spectrum of white people across the nation in favor of everyday white privilege. The councils showed creativity and political flexibility in aligning their white supremacist cause with varied aspects of conservative talking points and by appropriating civil rights language, and thus exemplified the fluidity of white supremacy and its ability to rejuvenate in mainstream conversations. Councilors allied with (fellow) extremist groups like the KKK and independents, Democrats, and Republicans alike when seeking and establishing ideological commonalities beyond a southern sectional crisis. The councils pushed for a white supremacist spin to conservatism not only in Louisiana, but on a national stage with their campaigns for Wallace, welfare cuts, and freedom of choice for whites. The state’s segregationists lost the battle for Jim Crow, but they were a far cry from giving up on the battle for white supremacy, and the strategy to cloak the defense of white privileges in colorblind rhetoric would be a strategy that reverberates until today.

NOTES

1. “Editorial Opinion: The Wake,” The Citizen, May 1968, Vol. 12, No. 8, 2. 2. “’Non-Violence’ Breeds Violence,”The Shreveport Journal (SJ), April 5, 1968, 8-A. Shannon officially joined the staff of the Citizens’ Councils of America in 1971, see “Shannon Joins Citizens Council,” The Shreveport Times (ST), September 21, 1971, 26. 3. Reprint of Jackson G. Ricau’s letter, newspaper clipping, Opelousas Daily World (ODW), April 11, 1968, Kim Lacy Rogers/Glenda Stevens Collection, #317, Box 2, Folder 15, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, New Orleans (ARC); South Louisiana Citizens’ Council (SLCC), The Citizens’ Report, February 1975, Kim Lacy Rogers/Glenda Stevens Collection, #317, Box 2, Folder 19, ARC. 4. See Kathryn L. Nasstrom, “Between Memory and History: Autobiographies of the Civil Rights Movement and the Writing of Civil Rights History,” The Journal of Southern History 74, no. 2 (2008).: 330-331; Jacquelyn D. Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” The Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (2005), 1234. 5. Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” 1234, 1254; Frank Newport, “Martin Luther King Jr.: Revered More After Death Than Before,” Gallup News Service, January 16, 2006, https://news.gallup.com/poll/20920/martin- luther-king-jr-revered-more-after-death-than-before.aspx. See also Jeanne Theoharis, A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018). 6. Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” 1234-1235, 1263. 7. See Eric Arnesen, “Reconsidering the ‘Long Civil Rights Movement’” Historically Speaking 10, no. 2 (2009): 31–34; Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang, “The "Long Movement" as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies.” The Journal of African American History 92, no. 2 (2007): 265–88.

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8. George Lewis, Massive Resistance: The White Response to the Civil Rights Movement (London/New York: Hodder Arnold, 2006), 8-9. Also see Numan V. Bartley, The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South During the 1950’s, 2nd ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997). 9. See Lewis, Massive Resistance, 4. Also see Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 10. Rolph, Resisting Equality: The Citizens' Council, 1954-1989 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018), 3. 11. Neil R. McMillen, The Citizens’ Council. Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction 1954-64, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 59-61. 12. McMillen, The Citizens’ Council, 61-63. 13. McMillen, The Citizens’ Council, 64-67; also see Donald E. Devore and Joseph Logsdon, Crescent City Schools: Public Education in New Orleans 1841-1991 (New Orleans: University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1991), 239. 14. McMillen, The Citizens‘ Council, 65-66. 15. The Citizens’ Report, SLCC, December 1967, Kim Lacey Rogers and Glenda Stevens Collection, 317, Box 2, Folder 15, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, New Orleans (ARC). 16. McMillen, The Citizens’ Council, 69-70. 17. Devore and Logsdon, Crescent City, 179-225; Liva Baker, The Second Battle of New Orleans: The Hundred-Year Struggle to Integrate the Schools (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1996), 3; Davison M. Douglas, “Bush v. Orleans Parish School Board and the Desegregation of New Orleans Schools,” unpublished manuscript, 2, 56–57, https:// www.fjc.gov/sites/default/files/trials/bush.pdf; New Orleans Improvement League, “A Study of some tangible Inequalities in the New Orleans Public Schools,” ca. 1957, 2, A.P. Tureaud Papers, Reel 11, Box 13, frame 392, ARC; “Louisiana,” Southern School News, December 1954, 6. 18. Devore and Logsdon, Crescent City, 232; Baker, The Second Battle, 3; Douglas, Bush, 3. 19. McMillen, The Citizens’ Council, 65-66. 20. McMillen, The Citizens’ Council, 68. 21. McMillen, The Citizens’ Council, 71. 22. Glen Jeansonne, Leander Perez: Boss of the Delta (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 240-241. 23. Adam Fairclough, “A Political Coup d’État? How the Enemies of Earl Long Overwhelmed Racial Moderation in Louisiana,” in Massive Resistance: Southern Opposition to the Second Reconstruction, ed. Clive Webb (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 70. See also McMillen, The Citizens’ Council, 68. 24. Charles L. Barnett to William Rainach, February 24, 1962, William M. Rainach Papers, 087, Box 15, Folder 152, Northwest Louisiana Archives, Louisiana State University Shreveport (LSUS); William Rainach to Charles L. Barnett, December 24, 1962, Rainach Papers, Box 15, Folder 152, LSUS. 25. “Freedom Bus,” The Louisiana Weekly, April 14, 1962, 1 and 7; Leslie H. Whitten, “Louisiana Cancels Transfer Of Negro Families to District,” The Washington Post, April 26, 1962, B6; circular letter by the Citizens’ Council of Louisiana (signed by William Rainach, Ned Touchstone, and Charles L. Barnett), received on June 30, 1962, Rainach Papers, Box 15, Folder 152, LSUS. See also Clive Webb, “‘A Cheap Trafficking in Human Misery’: The Reverse Freedom Rides of 1962.” Journal of American Studies 38, no. 2 (2004): 249–71.

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26. Touchstone to Rainach, April 22, 1964, Rainach Papers, Box 15, Folder 152, LSUS; Minutes of the meeting of the Citizens’ Council of Louisiana’s board of directors, Alexandria, April 25, 1964, Rainach Papers, Box 15, Folder 152, LSUS; Touchstone to Rainach, February 21, 1964, Ned Touchstone Papers, 392, Box 5, Folder 64, LSUS; Interview with William M. Rainach, August 19, 1977, 12, interviewer: Hubert Humphreys, Homer, Louisiana, Oral History Collection, #17, LSUS; see, for example, “ADL- Superpressure Group – Gestapo of the Establishment,” entered into the Congressional Record by John Rarick, December 6, 1971 and December 15, 1971, Touchstone Papers, Box 1, Folder 15; “A Quick Note, Dictated by Mr. Ned Touchstone” to “Mr. Graham,” October 11, 1973, Touchstone Papers, Box 3, Folder 31; “Confidential Memorandum To Taylor O’Hearn From N.O.T.,” by Ned Touchstone, November 7, 1972, Touchstone Papers, Box 8, Folder 128, LSUS. 27. The Citizens’ Report, SLCC, July 1964, October 1964, and November 1964, Kim Lacey Rogers and Glenda Stevens Collection, 317, Box 2, Folder 12, ARC; “Lyons Given Endorsement By Council,” ST, February 29, 1964, 4. 28. The Citizens’ Report, SLCC, January 1965, Extra, and September-October 1965,Kim Lacey Rogers and Glenda Stevens Collection, Box 2, Folder 13, ARC; also see “Roman Catholics: Historic Bishop,” Time Magazine, October 8, 1965, 70. 29. A CCGNO board member and one of its most active public speakers between 1964 and 1966, Jack M. Helm, was also a member of the United Klans of America in Louisiana, see “LA. Men Silent At Klan Probe,” The Times Picayune (TP), January 8, 1966, 1. On the Mississippi Council’s strategy see Stephanie R. Rolph, “The Citizens' Council and Africa: White Supremacy in Global Perspective,” The Journal of Southern History 82, no. 3 (2016): 621-623. 30. Adam Fairclough, Race & Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915-1972 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999), 345-351. 31. Anti-Defamation League of B’NaiB’Rith, FACTS, Domestic Report, May 1965, Vol. 16, no. 3, A.P. Tureaud Papers, 1909-1972, Series III, reel 11, ARC. 32. Southern Conference Educational Fund, “The Southern Patriot,” Vol. 23, No. 5, May 1965, Tureaud Papers, Series III, reel 15, ARC. 33. “Thousands Jam Klan Rally Near Bogalusa,” ST, July 22, 1965, 7-D; Gavin Scott, “Court Orders Klan to Halt Intimidation at Bogalusa,” ST, December 2, 195, 4-A; Fairclough, Race & Democracy, 356. 34. Fairclough, Race & Democracy, 356-366; Gavin Scott, “Court Orders Klan to Halt Intimidation at Bogalusa,” ST, December 2, 1965, 4-A; see Simon Wendt, “"Urge People Not to Carry Guns": Armed Self-Defense in the Louisiana Civil Rights Movement and the Radicalization of the Congress of Racial Equality.” Louisiana History 45, no. 3 (2004): 270-273. 35. “Return of Conservatism Urged at Bogalusa Rally,” TP, May 8, 1965, 1; “Thousands Jam Klan Rally,” 7-D; “Delay in Bogalusa Suggested,” TP, May 5, 1965, 1; “Marchers Hit,” TP, July 13, 1965, 14; “’Keep Agitators Out,’ Says Ricau,” TP, July 18, 1965, 2. 36. “Racial Session,” TP, April 24, 1965, 1 and 9; Fairclough, Race & Democracy, 364. In August 1965, Louisiana also set up its first statewide biracial committee, comprised of 42 civil leaders picked by Governor McKeithen, see “La. Bi-Racial Committee Named,” Alexandria Daily Town Talk (ADTT), August 24, 1965, section B, 5. 37. “Racial Session,” TP, April 24, 1965, 9.

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38. “Bogalusa Rally Plans Are Made: May 7 Is Selected by Conservative Group,” TP, April 28, 1965, section 2, 2; “Delay in Bogalusa Rally Suggested,” 1 and 3; “Return of Conservatism Urged,” 1. 39. “Bogalusa Klan Names Are Revealed by Solon,” ST, October 30, 1965, 9-A; Don Lee Keith and L.G. Hountha, “Security Tight For 2 Marches,” TP, July 12, 1965, 1. 40. “LA. Men Silent At Klan Probe,” 1. 41. “Return of Conservatism Urged,“ 1. 42. “Return of Conservatism Urged,“ 1. 43. Kim Phillips-Fein, “Conservatism: A State of the Field.” The Journal of American History 98, no. 3 (2011): 727. 44. See George Lewis, “Virginia's Northern Strategy: Southern Segregationists and the Route to National Conservatism.” The Journal of Southern History 72, no. 1 (2006): 145; Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001); David W. Noble, “Conservatism in the USA,” Journal of 13, no. 4 (1978): 635–52; Phillips-Fein, “Conservatism”: 723-743; Julian E. Zelizer, “Rethinking the History of American Conservatism.” Reviews in American History, 38, no. 2 (2010): 367–92. 45. Neil Gross, Thomas Medvetz and Rupert Russell, “The Contemporary American Conservative Movement.” Annual Review of Sociology 37 (2011): 330. 46. “Citizens Council Rally Planned,” TP, August 23, 1965, section 3, 3. 47. Don Lee Keith and L.G. Hountha, “Security Tight For 2 Marches,” TP, July 12, 1965, 1; “Bogalusa Rejects Plan,” TP, July 13, 1965, 5. 48. “Rau Addresses Parent Group,” TP, March 25, 1963, section 2, 5; “Return of Conservatism Urged,” 1; see Lance E. Hill, Deacons For Defense (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 126. 49. “’Invocation’ at Klan Rally Is Not According to Grand Dragon’s Hoyle,” ADTT, May 24, 1965, 25. 50. “Marchers Hit,” 14. 51. “Thousands Jam Klan Rally,” 7-D. 52. W.F. Minor, “Miss. Figures At Klan Rally,” TP, October 25, 1965, 7. 53. “LA. Men Silent At Klan Probe,” TP, January 8, 1966, 1. 54. Minutes of the meeting of the Citizens’ Councils of Louisiana’s board of directors, February 19, 1966, 3, Ned Touchstone Papers, 392, Box 5, Folder 63, LSUS; “Citizens Council to Hear Speakers,” TP, October 12, 1965, 16; “Draft Director Suspends Helm,” TP, March 16, 1966, 1. 55. “KKK Rift Seen in Baton Rouge,” TP, March 13, 1967, section 3, 16; Jack Owens, “Bombing Order Denied By Helm,” TP, October 17, 1967, 1. 56. See Fairclough, Race & Democracy, 367; Kenneth F. Englade, “Search for Ambushers of Policemen Continues,” ST, June 2, 1965, 10-A; Ed McCusker, “White Man Is Held in Death of Bogalusa Negro Deputy,” ST, June 4, 1965, 3-A; John Fahey,“M’Elveen Case Hearing Aired,” TP, June 8, 1965, 3. 57. Interview with William M. Rainach, August 19, 1977, 5, LSUS. 58. “Reject Funds: Councils‘ Plea,“ TP, January 31, 1965, 8. 59. “Get Organized, Perez Advises,” TP, September 2, 1965, section 2, 25; “Probe of Reds’ Role Is Urged,” TP, June 29, 1965, 7; “Drive Starts in Plaquemines,” TP, August 18, 1965, 7; “375 Are Listed To Vote In N.O.,” TP, August 24, 1965, 12; “Band Together, Perez Cautions,” TP, October 6, 1966, section 3, 12; also see Jeansonne, Leander Perez, 241.

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60. “Citizen Council Members Call on Gov. McKeithen,” newspaper clipping, ca. March 1965, Wellborn Jack Papers, 425, Box 74, Folder 2037, LSUS. 61. Circular letter by Courtney Smith to “Shreveport Subscribers to the Councilor and Shreveport Citizens Council Members,” September 13, 1965, Wellborn Jack Papers, Box 74, Folder 2036, LSUS. 62. Circular letter by the CCGNO, undated, ca. February 1966, signed by George Singelmann, Leander Henry Perez Papers, 1954-1969, Box 1, Folder “Hessler Campaign, CC Letter,” New Orleans Public Library, Special Collections (NOPL). 63. Kent B. Germany, New Orleans After The Promises: Poverty, Citizenship, and the Search for the Great Society (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 2007), 250. 64. Charles M. Hargroder, “Deputies Raid La. Core Office,” TP, October 13, 1963, 29; Ben Thomas, “LeBlanc, Rarick Force La. Demo House Runoffs,” TP, August 15, 1966, section 2, 2; Bill Neikirk, “Rarick Ousts Rep. Morrison,” TP, September 25, 1966, 1. 65. Fairclough, Race & Democracy, 373. 66. Bill Neikirk, “Rarick Claims Election Fraud,” TP, August 9, 1966, 10; “Rarick Ousts,” 1; “Gov. McKeithen,” TP, November 5, 1967, 2. 67. “Rarick Speech Hailed By D.A.R.,” TP, April 18, 1968, 19; “Rarick Behind Wallace Drive,” TP, September 20, 1967, 12; Edgar A. Poe, “Demo Liberals Strip Rarick of Seniority,” TP, January 30, 1969, 1. 68. Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States (New York and London: The Guilford Press, 1995), 85. 69. Speech by George C. Wallace, June 17, 1964, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Brooks Read Collection, 21522-35P, Folder 13, Louisiana State Archives, Baton Rouge (LSA); Ned Touchstone in a circular letter to members of the board of directors and council presidents of the Citizens’ Councils of Louisiana, received April 2, 1964, Rainach Papers, Box 15, Folder 152, LSUS. 70. “Iron Hot, Wallace Claims,” TP, February 18, 1967, 2; Special Release, SLCC, May- June 1966, Kim Lacey Rogers and Glenda Stevens Collection, Box 2, Folder 14; ARC; The Citizens’ Report, Special, SLCC; March-April 1967, Kim Lacey Rogers and Glenda Stevens Collection, Box 2, Folder 15, ARC; advertisement for the 12th Annual Leadership Conference of the Ciitzens’ Councils of America, TP, February 15, 1967, 27. 71. “Gov. Williams Lauds Wallace,” TP, October 26, 1968, 19; “Wallace Sign-Up Held in Parish,” Opelousas Daily World (ODW), April 30, 1968, 12; Carroll P. Trosclair, “Citizens Council Now Working For Wallace,” ODW, October 6, 1968, 4; see James H. Gillis, “Wallace Is Given Plurality in Record Louisiana Vote,” TP, November 7, 1968, 1. 72. K. Mack Sisk, “Wallace Party Control Issue,” ODW, December 3, 1968, 4; Adras LaBorde, “Wallecites Organize,” ADTT, December 6, 1968, 6; Gerald Hambleton, “American Party Lays Organizational Plans,” ADTT, December 8, 1968, 6; “American Party Settles Squabble,” ODW, December 10, 1968, 11. 73. “American Party Organizers in Weekend Session in Baton Rouge,” Opelousas Daily News, January 28, 1969, 16; “Efforts to Get Voters to Change Registration Prove Ineffectual,” ADTT, January 12, 1969, 5; “American Party Officials Meet,” ODW, March 2, 1969, 2; “Democrats Thwart GOP, American Party Efforts,” TP, February 2, 1972, 14; “State’s Negro Voters Near Double Since ’64,” States-Item, October 22, 1968, newspaper clipping, Charles B. Rousseve Papers, 320, Box 4, Folder 16, ARC; C.E. Vetter to Ned Touchstone, undated, ca. May 1969, Touchstone Papers, Box 6, Folder 85, LSUS.

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74. “South Nixon’s If No Wallace,” TP, May 27, 1972, 21; Fairclough, Race & Democracy, 441; also see Joseph A. Aistrup, The Southern Strategy Revisited: Republican Top-Down Advancement in the South (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2015). 75. Jim Leeson, “Private Schools For Whites Face Some Hurdles,” Southern Education Report (SER), November 1967, 13-15; Edward J. Lepoma, “N.O. Population Report Released; Little Integration Noted Since 1950,” States-Item, September 19, 1969, newspaper clipping, Rousseve Papers, Box 4, Folder 17, ARC. Also see Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 76. Memorandum by Courtney Smith, May 27, 1966, Touchstone Papers, Box 8, Folder 125, LSUS; letter by Wellborn Jack to the CCGNO, January 25, 1965, Wellborn Jack Papers, Box 75, Folder 2036, LSUS. 77. Circular letter by Courtney Smith to “All Council Presidents and Secretary Treas.,” undated, ca. 1966, Touchstone Papers, Box 8, Folder 125, LSUS. 78. CCGNO Bulletin, undated, ca. May 1964, Perez Papers, Box 1, Folder “Miscellaneous,” NOPL; advertisement by the CCGNO, The Councilor, February 16, 1965, newspaper clipping, Touchstone Papers, Box 35, Folder 1965, LSUS; “Leftists Reminded of School-Mix Failures,” The Councilor, May 9, 1964, 1. 79. CCGNO Bulletin, undated, ca. May 1964, Perez Papers, Box 1, Folder “Miscellaneous,” NOPL. 80. Robert C. Maynard, “Black Nationalists Predict Race War,” The Washington Post, September 24, 1967, section C, 1. This was the first of a seven-article series on “The Black Revolutionaries.” 81. John Chamberlain, “King and Students Could Touch Off Guerilla Warfare Summer,” ST, March 31, 1968, 3-B; John Steen, “Dr. King Rallies War Protestors, Black Power for Demonstrations, SJ, February 7, 1968, 3; The Citizens’ Report, SLCC, February 1966, Kim Lacey Rogers and Glenda Stevens Collection, Box 2, Folder 14, ARC. 82. “Citizens Council Series to Begin,” TP, May 2, 1967, section 3, page 5. 83. “Citizens Council Against Farmer,” February 24, 1969, 18; “Citizens Council Urges Change,” TP, February 18, 1968, 8. 84. “Want Flag Restored,” ADTT, June 6, 1969, 7. 85. The Citizens’ Report, SLCC, March 1964 and April 1964, Kim Lacey Rogers and Glenda Stevens Collection, Box 2, Folder 12, ARC; “Citizens Council to Hear Speakers,” TP, October 12, 1965, 16; see, for example, “Self-Defense Spray Helps Protect American Women,” The Southern Review, July 16, 1969, Touchstone Papers, Box 45 (no folders), LSUS. 86. “Council Seeks Rapist Death,” TP, January 10, 1968, 8. Not until 1978 were prison population statistics collected by race; the Louisiana State Penitentiary (Angola), however, was infamous for its mistreatment of black prisoners. 87. See minutes of the meeting of the Shreveport Citizens’ Council, August 13, 1963 and August 15, 1963, Touchstone Papers, Box 5, Folder 62, LSUS. 88. See Brückmann, Rebecca. “Massive Resistance and Southern Womanhood: Women's Activities in the Segregationist Counter-Movement.” Ph.D. dissertation, Freie Universitaet Berlin, 2014. 89. See Jeansonne, Leander Perez, 264-265. 90. “Woman Ousted By Church Renounces It,” ST, December 23, 1969, 2-A; Wesley Jackson, “Excommunicate Holds to Her Views,” TP, September 24, 1978, 16. On Perez’s readmission, which only came to be known to the public at his funeral and evoked

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protests, see “Priests Object To Perez Rites,” undated newspaper clipping, ca. March 1969 and “Bishop Perry Defends Rites,” TP, March 26, 1969, newspaper clipping, Rousseve Papers, Box 4, Folder 17, ARC. 91. “New Archbishop Accepts Pastoral Staff in Orleans,” ST, October 14, 1965; John Lang, “Mrs. Gaillot Fights to Keep Son Out of Integrated Unit,” ADTT, September 4, 1965, section B, 4; “N.O. Woman Loses Bid to Label Blood,” ST, July 28, 1972, 36. 92. The Citizens‘ Report, SLCC, May-June 1966, Kim Lacey Rogers and Glenda Stevens Collection, Box 2, Folder 14, ARC. 93. The Citizens‘ Report, SLCC, December 1966, Kim Lacey Rogers and Glenda Stevens Collection, Box 2, Folder 14, ARC. 94. The Citizens‘ Report, SLCC, January 1969, Kim Lacey Rogers and Glenda Stevens Collection, Box 2, Folder 16, ARC. 95. “Reject Funds; Councils’ Plan,” TP, January 31, 1965, 8. 96. “McKeithen Doubts Recall Actions Over Compliance,” TP, February 13, 1965, 4. 97. Chet Folkes, “Citizens Councils Object to Welfare Expenses in State,” States-Item, newspaper clipping, March 13, 1965, Wellborn Jack Papers, Box 74, Folder 2037, LSUS. 98. Folkes, “Citizens Councils Object to Welfare Expenses in State,” Wellborn Jack Papers, Box 74, Folder 2037, LSUS. 99. Folkes, “Citizens Councils Object to Welfare Expenses in State,” Wellborn Jack Papers, Box 74, Folder 2037, LSUS. On the link between birth control, welfare, and racism, see Johanna Schoen, Choice and Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 3-13. 100. “Citizens Councils Object.” 101. See, for example, “Solons Told Birth Control Urgent Need,” Monroe News-Star (MNS), January 19, 1966, 1; William J. Eaton, “Poverty Projects Include Date on Birth Control,” Shreveport Times, January 15, 1966, 11; “Birth Control Clinics Slated All over India,” ODW, March 27, 1966, 11; Patricia McCormack, “Battle to Clip Stork’s Wings Advances, but Not Fast Enough,” ST, June 30, 1968, 7-E. 102. “Anti-Poverty Program May Finance Projects Involving Birth Control, “ ADTT, January 15, 1966, A-5; “Louisiana Birth Plan Program Lauded As No. 1 in the Nation,” Basile Weekly, January 21, 1970, 3. Planned Parenthood criticized the OEO for exempting unmarried women and women not living with their husband from its birth control distribution. Although federal funds, which accounted for 90% of the Office’s budget, prohibited the disbursement of contraceptives to singles, the remaining 10% of private funds could be used for this purpose. HEW, in contrast, did not limit the disbursement of contraceptives. See “Congress May Pass Birth Control Bill,” ADTT, June 13, 1966, A-3. With Eisenstadt v. Baird in 1972, the Supreme Court confirmed unmarried people’s right to contraceptives. 103. Minutes of the meeting of the board of directors, Citizens’ Councils of Louisiana, February 19, 1966, Touchstone Papers, Box 5, Folder 63, LSUS. 104. Minutes of the meeting of the board of directors, Citizens’ Councils of Louisiana, February 19, 1966, Touchstone Papers, Box 5, Folder 63, LSUS; letter by Courtney Smith to “All Local Councils,” undated, ca. 1966, Touchstone Papers, Box 8, Folder 125, LSUS. 105. Dennis Redmond, “Pope Paul VI Rejects All Artificial Birth Controls,” ST, July 30, 1968, 5; “How Catholics View Their Church, Newsweek, March 20, 1967, 71-72; “Magazine Says Catholics Polled on Birth Control,” MNS, March 13, 1967, 5; see also Marian Faux, Roe v. Wade: The untold story of the landmark Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal (1st Cooper Square Press ed. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001), 184-185.

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106. Caroline Hymel, “Louisiana's Abortion Wars: Periodizing the Anti-Abortion Movement's Assault on Women's Reproductive Rights, 1973-2016.” Louisiana History 59, no. 1 (2018): 68. 107. The Citizens’ Report, SLCC, November 1974, Vol. 16, No.7, Kim Lacey Rogers and Glenda Stevens Collection, 317, Box 2, Folder 18, ARC. 108. Germany, New Orleans After The Promises, 225-229. 109. Germany, New Orleans After The Promises, 229-231. 110. “Protest of Cut in Welfare Hit,” TP, November 25, 1968, 2; Germany, New Orleans After The Promises, 231. 111. Jeansonne, Leander Perez, 303; “Private School Funds Studied,” TP, October 6, 1966, section 3, 12. 112. See “Citizens’ Council Praises Louisiana Grant-in-Aid,” TP, April 12, 1966, section 3, 11; “School Grants-In-Aid Law Voided By Court,” TP, August 27, 1967, 1; Jeansonne, Leander Perez, 303-305; Fairclough, Race & Democracy, 437. 113. See Jim Leeson, “Desegregation: A New Approach, A New Deadline,” SER, January/ February 1968, 14-17; Vernon A. Guidry Jr., “HEW Threatens Action Against LSU on Mixing,” SJ, June 6, 1969, 1; Margaret Martin, “School Board Ordered To Submit New Plans For Desegregation By July 5,” SJ, June 6, 1969, 1. On differences between the Johnson and the Nixon administrations’ approach to the desegregation mandate, see James K. Batten, “The Nixonians and School Desegregation,” SER, June 1969, 22-28. 114. G. Michael Harman, “Whie Citizens React Quickly To Total Desegregation Order,” ODW, August 17, 1969, 5; M. Gene Mearus, “B.R. Protest March Draws Large Crowd,” ADTT, August 17, 1969, 1; Fairclough, Race & Democracy, 442-443; Vernon A. Guidry Jr., “Citizens Group Asks For School ‘Holiday’,” ADTT, September 28, 1969, 1. 115. Vernon A. Guidry Jr., “’Choice Day’ Proclaimed; Legal Action Threatened,” TP, October 9, 1969, 8; “’Freedom of-Choice Day’ Set,” TP, October 13, 1969, 18. 116. “’Freedom’ Day Is Uneventful,” TP, October 14, 1969, 12; “Negro Group to Observe ‘Death’ Of Choice Plan,” ODW, October 10, 1969, 5. 117. Fairclough, Race and Democracy, 444. 118. C.M. Hargroder and Claire Punkey, “Parish State of Emergency Is Proclaimed,” TP, September 22, 1970, 1 and 2; “White Voters’ Drive Launched,” TP, April 3, 1971, section 4, 3; “Ricau Praises Edwards Move,” TP, November 30, 1972, section 7, page 16.

ABSTRACTS

This article examines the development of Massive Resistance, in particular Citizens’ Councils, in Louisiana after the council movement in the South had passed its zenith when being unable to prevent the passage of federal civil rights and voting rights legislation. This article argues that grassroots white supremacist groups in Louisiana faced a winding path of decline and revitalization, and a number of councils proved adaptive to the changing political, social, and economic landscape by devising activist strategies that focused on direct action, white voter registration, and tapping into broader conservative discourses on law and order, welfare, and morality. Similar to questions about a “long civil rights movement,” white supremacist

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resistance against the civil rights movement did not vanish in the latter half of the 1960s but transformed its rhetoric while seeking to align with the conservatism.

INDEX

Keywords: 1960s; Civil Rights; Citizens’ Councils; Conservatism; Critical Whiteness; Grassroots; Gender; Louisiana; Massive Resistance; New Right; Racism; Voting Rights; Wallace; White Supremacy.

AUTHOR

REBECCA BRÜCKMANN

Rebecca Brückmann is an Assistant Professor of North American History and its transcultural context at Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. She received her PhD from the Graduate School of North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. Her research interests focus on Southern history, the history of racialization, and borderlands history. She has published several articles on women in white supremacist movements and on racism in cultural production.

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The Whistles of George Wallace: Gender and Emotions in the 1968 Presidential Campaign

Maarten Zwiers

1 Few had foreseen it: Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election. The Republican establishment shuddered during the primaries, but then quickly fell in line behind its new leader. The rise to power of Trump – or more specifically, his political style – had been long in the making, despite the disbelief that gripped the country after Election Day. Since the 1960s, the GOP crafted a political message catering to the conservative white vote set loose by the civil rights revolution. This message was partly based on the idea of middle-class respectability. But beneath the thin veneer of this suburban American Dream, a much darker vision lurked: a hyper-masculine and racist vision finally exposed by the presidency of Donald Trump. His rhetoric about immigrants (“bad hombres” and “rapists”), women (“grab them by the pussy”), and Washington politics (“drain the swamp”) harken back to the ambitions of George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama who ran for the presidency in 1968.1 Republicans appropriated, fine-tuned, and whitewashed his message in the following decades, hoping that people would eventually forget one of their main sources of inspiration. But with Donald Trump in the White House, it is hard to deny how a Wallaceite agenda has increasingly determined the course of the Republican Party.

2 George Wallace’s impact on Republican politics has been a topic of debate amongst historians. Wallace’s foremost biographer, Dan Carter, connects the Alabama governor’s race baiting with the racialized program of the GOP. Republicans started accommodating segregationist white southerners once their old party, the Democrats, gave in to demands of the civil rights movement. Carter made this argument most explicitly in his slim volume From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich, in which he draws a direct line between Wallace’s “politics of anger” and the Republican agenda of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Newt Gingrich, the Republican Speaker of the House between 1995 and 1999.2 A group of younger scholars challenged Carter’s race-based approach, pointing out the similarities between racial sentiments in the North and

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South and thus deconstructing the idea of southern exceptionalism. Their thesis rests on the fact that postwar economic development led to increased suburbanization in the South. Attitudes in southern suburbia turned out to be not that different from suburbs in the North and West; its inhabitants all shared a kindred class ideology. In his book The Silent Majority, historian Matthew Lassiter explained how a racially charged “Southern Strategy” was disastrous for southern Republicans running in the 1970 midterm elections.3 Political scientists Byron Shafer and Richard Johnston made a similar argument in their book The End of Southern Exceptionalism. They concluded that “the engine of partisan change in the postwar South was, first and foremost, economic development and an associated politics of social class.”4 Economic diversification and the emergence of a southern middle class explain Republican success in the region, and suburban values in the South did not differ much from suburban values in the North.

3 A factor that is often overlooked in efforts to explain partisan change in the South (and the development of modern conservatism in the United States more broadly) is gender, especially a gendered political style that plays on voters’ emotions. In The Rise of Southern Republicans, political scientists Earl Black and Merle Black devote some attention to gender, pointing out how a majority of southern white men (57 percent) and a plurality of southern white women (49 percent) can be considered core Republicans. They also concluded that besides race, gender and religion in fact trumped economic class in separating core Republicans from core Democrats in the post-Jim Crow South.5 Black and Black examined voting patterns, however, and did not pay much attention to the political style that attracted these voters. Other scholars have studied grassroots organizations led by women, for instance groups that fought school integration or supported Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign.6 Kari Frederickson demonstrated how familial metaphors (in particular an “explosive language of sex and domesticity”) functioned in the campaign of 1948.7 Historian Steve Estes takes a comparable approach in his examination of Citizens’ Council rhetoric, a discourse influenced by masculine ideas about honor, violence, and social control.8 Analyses that foreground gender as a crucial cultural factor in segregationist opposition, partisan change, and the general appeal of conservative populism remain rather sparse however, despite their strong explanatory power. “Historians are familiar with the political narrative of the modern South,” Frederickson noted, “but few have examined the cultural dimensions of political resistance and change during this tumultuous period.”9

4 This article incorporates gender as an analytical tool to examine the development of modern conservatism in the United States from an intersectional perspective.10 It suggests to move beyond the race/class binary and include gender (and sexuality) to understand the interlocking mechanisms that gave rise to a new style of conservative politics. Although intersectionality originated as a paradigm to study interdependent systems of oppression and discrimination especially women of color encounter, some scholars have recently proposed to extend its theoretical boundaries. “Framing intersectionality as only about women of color gives masculinity, whiteness, and maleness an intersectional pass,” legal scholar Devon Carbado argued.11 The following text builds on Carbado’s insights and offers an intersectional analysis of a demographic that was heavily invested in the dominant power structures of U.S. society: the voters who supported George Wallace and Richard Nixon in the 1968 election. These voters felt threatened in their race, class, and gender status by groups who became more vocal

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in their opposition to the heteropatriarchal system during the 1960s. A strong sense of white victimhood provided fertile ground for a recalibration of American conservatism.

5 The 1968 presidential campaign thus constituted a pivotal moment in the rise of a more authoritarian form of conservative politics. George Wallace and Richard Nixon ripped the New Deal coalition of the Democratic Party apart that year, with a masculine message of law and order at home and peace with honor in Southeast Asia. It was a message that combined race and class issues in a gendered discourse that defended traditionalism and white privilege. Such language evoked an emotional response from working- and middle-class whites (the so-called Silent Majority) who longed for a restoration of an orderly society based on “family values” and a return to power for the United States on the world stage.12 Feelings of victimization and emasculation resulted in a yearning for “tough” leaders who would crack down on civil rights radicals, unruly student protesters, feminist activists, and North-Vietnamese guerrillas. As the establishment candidate, Democrat Hubert Humphrey had trouble convincing voters he could play such a role. As an outsider, Wallace was in an ideal position to attack Washington politics represented by Humphrey. Nixon had been out of the political limelight for almost six years, after his disastrous campaign for the governorship of California in 1962. In 1968, people remembered him as the hard-boiled communist hunter on the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and as Dwight Eisenhower’s vice-president. For the Silent Majority, the suburban American Dream reached its peak during the Eisenhower years. Nixon but especially Wallace practiced a political style that fed on feelings of anger, fear, and anxiety. This style was extremely powerful in attracting voters who felt they were losing control over their lives and over the destiny of their country.13

6 Historians have become increasingly interested in the role of emotions in politics, specifically how they relate to gender.14 At the same time, political scientists have begun to pay more attention to populism, studying it for instance as a thin-centered ideology dividing “the pure people” from a “corrupt elite” or as a specific political style.15 This article combines insights from gender studies, political science, and the history of emotions to explain George Wallace’s appeal in the 1968 presidential election. Wallace’s populist campaign set the stage for an emotional style of conservative politics that remains effective until this day. A focus on gender and emotions may not only offer an intersectional synthesis between the race- and class- based approaches that have dominated historiography, but it also gives an explanation for the failure of liberal politicians to find an effective response to populist conservatism – a style drenched in toxic masculinity that is now a prominent feature of political cultures across the globe.16 George Wallace was one of its most important historical agents in the United States. During the 1960s he channeled it to the national level, where it was subsequently picked up by elements within the conservative movement. As such, the whistles of Wallace can still be heard in contemporary U.S. politics – a powerful weapon in the hands of reactionary demagogues and a formidable barrier to progressive change.

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1. Whistling Dixie: White Victimization and the Southern Heartland

7 George Wallace’s first real claim to national fame came in June 1963, when he orchestrated his Stand in the Schoolhouse Door at the University of Alabama. A few months before, in his inaugural address as governor, he had promised the white people of his state that segregation would last forever. When a federal district court ordered the flagship school of Alabama to desegregate that summer, Wallace traveled to Tuscaloosa to prevent the registration of two black students, Vivian Malone and . It was a quixotic effort from the start; the Department of Justice had dispatched Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach and a contingent of federal marshals to oversee the admission process. When President Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard, Wallace finally had to give up his delaying action. Although the governor was forced to withdraw, he emerged victorious from this confrontation with federal power. In the first place, he had kept his promise to the Alabama people he would fight for segregation, even against great odds. Secondly, the stand gave him the opportunity to reframe his segregationist message into an all-American defense of constitutional values. According to Wallace, the presence of federal officers on the campus of the University of Alabama offered a frightful example of the oppression of the rights, privileges and sovereignty of this State by officers of the Federal Government. This intrusion results solely from force, or threat of force, undignified by any reasonable application of the principle of law, reason and justice.17

8 Such rhetoric struck a chord outside the Jim Crow South. In contrast with the outright segregationist content of his inaugural address, Wallace’s speech at the University of Alabama almost sounded dignified, although the underlying objectives of his actions were pretty clear: the denial of black students to enroll in the school. In the week following the Stand in the Schoolhouse Door, Wallace received more than 100,000 telegrams and letters congratulating the governor for his vindication (or interpretation) of constitutional principles. Wallace’s attempt to stop Katzenbach and his marshals had been broadcast on national television, widening the range of his message. Over fifty percent of the correspondence he received after his stand came from outside the region and 95 percent of it was positive about the governor’s performance in Tuscaloosa. Wallace began to realize the appeal of his words outside the South. “They all hate black people, all of them. They’re all afraid, all of them,” he discovered. “Great God! That’s it! They’re all Southern! The whole United States is Southern!”18 These feelings of hate and fear would be central to the national campaigns George Wallace began to wage after 1963.

9 Wallace’s forays into the North began in earnest in 1964, when he participated in a few presidential primaries of the Democratic Party. He did surprisingly well in Wisconsin and Indiana, where he capitalized on the growing unrest among blue-collar and middle-class whites disturbed by the civil rights revolution. “Clearly the phenomenon of George Wallace was a force to reckon with in an era of sometimes violent social change,” said Indiana Governor Matthew Welsh, who campaigned against Wallace as a substitute for Lyndon Johnson. “In the Milwaukee suburbs and the Calumet steel towns, where white Americans felt threatened by blacks, there was voter reprisal.”19 Wallace did not campaign on an openly racist platform. He instead touted a small government

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program opposed to federal interference in state and local matters – the same ideas he had articulated when he tried to prevent the racial integration of the University of Alabama a year earlier. The pending Civil Rights Act served as his main target. But instead of denouncing its anti-segregationist nature, Wallace preferred to describe it as a step towards totalitarianism engineered by Washington bureaucrats hungry for power. He used southern humor to parry uncomfortable questions at rallies. His audiences greeted such responses with applause and laughter.20 Wallace’s states’ rights agenda and his political style created “emotional turmoil” in a state that was far removed from the civil rights battles then happening in the .21

10 The Welsh campaign encountered similar problems Hubert Humphrey had to deal with in 1968, when Nixon and Wallace confronted him with challenges from the right. Like Humphrey, Welsh ran as the establishment candidate. He introduced a significant tax increase during his administration (which did not enhance his popularity) and he was also an outspoken civil rights supporter. Welsh rightly feared Wallace would easily win the state Democratic primary without significant opposition, which was the reason why he entered the race. The Indiana governor made sure to inform voters he was not campaigning for personal glory, however. His slogan was “Clear The Way for LBJ. Vote for Welsh the 5th of May,” indicating he was supportive of continuity in federal politics. In order to defeat Wallace, Welsh mobilized the Democratic Party machine in Indiana and consulted with members of its congressional delegation. The governor feared a successful Wallace campaign “would revive and give credence to a racist philosophy my administration had worked very hard to defuse.”22 With Wallace barnstorming through the state, it would be hard to suppress “the latent bigotry held in check by the new social pressure for equality among all people.” For Welsh, the reputation of Indiana (and the embarrassment a Wallace victory would cause) seemed to be foremost on his mind.23 Wallace threatened to crack the veneer of precarious racial progress that covered a long history of structural racism in the North.

11 George Wallace’s strong showing in Wisconsin, Indiana, and the border state of Maryland indicated the appeal of his politics outside the Jim Crow South. How can this popularity be explained? Wallace expressed the anxiety and anger many white Americans felt about civil rights concessions by the federal government, especially how it threatened their white privilege. Such emotions were not limited to working-class whites; political scientist Michael Rogin discovered how “anti-Negro feeling is even more salient in the urban middle class.” Suburbanites in Wisconsin had “sought to create homogeneous communities; the potential presence of Negroes terrifies them, as they perceive a threat both to property values and life styles.”24 The Civil Rights Act (then under discussion in the U.S. Senate) not only destroyed the legal basis for segregation in the South, but also opened the door for challenges to white privilege in the North. For many years, the federal government had been actively involved in making the suburban American Dream a reality for middle- and upper-class whites by subsidizing the development of suburbs and highways and providing them with low- interest mortgages through the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). The results of these policies were twofold: despite massive government assistance, whites thought they had achieved their place in suburban America on the basis of hard work alone, a false sense of meritocracy. Secondly, once the federal government attempted to alter some of its racialized policies (for instance through the Civil Rights Act and later the

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Fair Housing Act), white suburbanites felt victimized by the Washington bureaucracy without realizing how it had helped them achieve their privileged position.25

12 As a deus ex machina, George Wallace appeared on the national scene in the early sixties to give an unadulterated voice to feelings of anger and fear felt by whites in the North and South. As Welsh observed, in the North these feelings were more suppressed, because of a perceived general support for the fight against racism. Wallace broke this with language that was not outright racist, but definitely had a racialized undertone. He was saying what many white suburbanites were feeling: resentment towards Washington for interfering in their lives. Wallace thus formed a bridge between southern and northern whites angry with the federal government. “If white southerners felt threatened by civil rights struggles prior to 1964, that threat mostly fostered fear, discomfort, and anxiety,” historian Jason Sokol observed.26 Such emotions were not that different from the feelings a significant number of whites in the North had. Instead of beneficiaries from federal policy, these groups began to regard themselves as victims. They also began to look at the South in a different light: no longer as a dark and gothic bastion of American apartheid, but as a region victimized by a government eager to please minorities.

13 Federal support for minority rights made the “forgotten Americans” yearn for a society that appeared to be vanishing: a community based on traditionalism and white control. According to political scientist Paul Taggart, this idea of a lost “heartland” is central to (the appeal of) populist politics. “It assumes or asserts that there was a good life before the corruptions and distortions of the present,” Taggart explains. He uses the term “heartland” because “heartlands are something that is felt rather than reasoned, and something that is shrouded in imprecision.”27 Southern segregationists often described their region as the actual heartland of Americanism, a locally controlled polity with respect for time-honored customs and under constant attack from outside forces, be it the central government, civil rights radicals, or other “un-American” elements, including communist agents. Such an idealistic Jeffersonian vision of the South was not very credible as long as it was used to defend the worst excesses of Jim Crow. However, once federal legislation dismantled institutionalized segregation, this vision became much more palatable in other parts of the country, especially when civil rights activists began to intensify their protests outside the South. Wallace’s remarkable performance in the 1964 primaries already signaled the latent presence of what Rogin described as “middle-class authoritarianism” and the potential of a right-wing populist message based on a heartland with typically southern values.28 “A lot of the people attracted to George Wallace are just people who think America has passed them by, leaving them confused, screwed-up and unhappy,” journalist Pete Hamill remarked in 1968, “they want to go back.”29 Governor Wallace, who defiantly stood up against federal power in 1963, promised a resurrection of the heartland these voters were longing for.

2. Dog Whistles from the Deep South: Wallace and the Advent of American Authoritarianism

14 The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 dealt a fatal blow to the laws and many of the customs that upheld segregation, clearing the way for a “northern” revamping of the region. The South finally appeared to be ready to move into the American mainstream. But what defined this mainstream? With Jim Crow

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gone, it suddenly became clear the North was not without sin either – a fact foreshadowed by Wallace’s success in the 1964 primaries. The North “was no longer, and perhaps never had been, quite the picture of health it had always seemed,” famed southern historian James Cobb pointed out. The angry campaigns against racial integration that happened in northern states during the late 1960s “made it all too apparent that white racism was hardly confined to white southerners.”30 By 1968, a general apprehension about the direction of the country took hold in Middle America. This process had been going on for some time: according to historian James Patterson, the year 1965 served as the hinge for the sixties. The early 1960s had much more in common with the consensus climate of the Eisenhower years, Patterson claimed. The tumultuous change we now associate with “the Sixties” began in 1965, with the military escalation in Vietnam, the riots in Watts, the fracturing (and radicalization) of the civil rights movement, and cultural transformations that led to increased polarization in U.S. society. Three years later, these developments had reached a boiling point.31 The simultaneous politicization of evangelical religion increased public awareness of traditional values and bolstered opposition to progressivism.32 The political climate was thus favorable to a southern populist like George Wallace: the country seemed to be spinning out of control, creating anxiety among a significant number of voters.

15 In October 1968 Time magazine reported that 81 percent “of the public believe that law enforcement has broken down. Even more believe that a ‘strong’ President can do something about it.”33 Since the Stand in the Schoolhouse Door, Wallace had been crafting an image of himself as a tough leader who dared to stand up to federal intrusion, and as a champion of police power. In 1968, this image made him popular in the North. At campaign stops in Illinois and Missouri he told cheering crowds how an Alabama-style police state might be the solution to the nation’s law and order problem. “If they [the police] could run this country for about two years… they’d straighten it out,” he shouted.34 Hostility to government interference and enthusiasm for law enforcement totalitarianism seems contradictory, but for Wallace supporters they were in fact complementary; what these voters wanted was an end to the lawlessness and permissiveness they associated with Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. The masculine message and performance of George Wallace gave Americans estranged from establishment politics hope to reclaim control over their lives. Such sentiments (being in control and resisting the domination of others) define manhood in the Western world and especially in the United States.35 Right-wing populists like Wallace use a masculine posture to present themselves as “strong male leaders who are vigorous in nature, plain-spoken and authoritarian in character and style,” social scientist Susi Meret noted. These politicians offer seemingly simple answers “to the growing feelings of dispossession, insecurity and distrust that frequently emerge in times of crisis.”36 In short, anxious voters distressed by rapid social change turn to strong masculine leaders who promise a restoration of control and order.

16 The problem for Hubert Humphrey was his complete identification with the Johnson administration and its policies at home and abroad. He initially seemed reluctant to challenge LBJ’s decisions, especially with regard to U.S. military conduct in Vietnam. “We don’t need another Aaron Burr in this Republic,” Humphrey told reporters in July 1968, referring to Thomas Jefferson’s troublesome vice president. “Of course I want to look to the future – on everything… But that doesn’t mean I want to repudiate the past. I want to start with what we got, in every area, and build on it.” Such statements

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provoked the ire of antiwar protesters, who brought picket signs to Humphrey rallies saying: “Hubert Has A Military-Industrial Complex.”37 Blue-collar and middle-class voters, anguished about social unrest and dissatisfied with Great Society programs geared towards minorities and the poor, turned to Wallace or Republican candidate Richard Nixon, who campaigned on a more toned-down program of states’ rights and law and order. The riots that accompanied the Democratic National Convention in Chicago only exacerbated the image many Americans had of Humphrey and his party: wherever the Democrats went, chaos erupted. A telephone poll indicated approval of the harsh police response against the demonstrators. Only 21.3 percent of respondents agreed with the statement “Chicago Police and National Guardsmen are using excessive force in suppressing these demonstrations,” while almost 59 percent disagreed.38

17 Calls for small government and stronger law enforcement can be interpreted as coded race words. GOP strategist Lee Atwater gave a striking description of these so-called dog whistles in an interview that addressed the 1968 campaign. “You start out in 1954 by saying ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ – that hurts you. Backfires,” Atwater explained. “So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff.”39 Wallace supporters had little trouble decoding the dog whistles of their champion. “Y’all know about law and order,” one of them said. “It’s spelled n-i-g-g-e-r- s.”40 Yet racial appeals alone do not explain the popularity of Wallace. Republican Congresswoman Catherine May of Washington for instance wondered why so many people in her state – according to her, a liberal state without profound racial problems – had Wallace stickers on their cars. Racism undoubtedly formed the core of Wallace’s attraction; a millwright and Wallace supporter working at Ford’s Rouge factory near Detroit unabashedly declared: “I guess I’m what you might call a racist.”41 But also middle-class whites with a decent income and education had warm feelings for the governor, because he promised a return of traditional American values, which implied a restoration of white control. At the same time, Wallace voters did not just oppose black militancy, but all sorts of protests against the dominant culture. A blue-collar suburbanite from Los Angeles said: “punks, the queers, the demonstrators and the – we’re going to put them on a barge and ship ’em off to . Or better, sink it.” He believed Wallace would be elected president.42 Working-class parents who had saved money for years to put their children through college felt a similar resentment towards affluent students who rebelled against a “rotten system.” They considered student activists “spoiled brats, profane, obnoxious, unwashed, promiscuous, to whom everything was offered and from whom nothing has been demanded.”43 Not just government support for minorities, but also entitled youth and establishment politicians aroused the ire of Middle America and of Wallace voters in particular.44

18 The American Independent Party (AIP) of George Wallace played on such outrage and promised a solution to the “riots, minority group rebellions, domestic disorders, student protests, spiraling living costs, soaring interest rates, a frightening increase in the crime rate, war abroad and loss of personal liberty at home.” Although racial matters were important for the AIP, it was not a single-issue party. Its platform gave hope to white Americans who felt ignored by Republicans and Democrats. A vote for Wallace would result in a return of the United States to “its accustomed and deserved position of leadership among the community of nations” and “relief from the continued turmoil, frustration, and confusion” caused by “the fearful and inept leadership of our national political parties.”45 Before formulating policy proposals, the AIP platform first described the feelings (of fear, frustration, and confusion)

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experienced by its target audience. George Wallace articulated these feelings again in one of his final campaign speeches, delivered on October 24, 1968, in a sold-out Madison Square Garden. He also pledged to give the “average man on the street” control back over his life. “We are going to turn back to you, the people of the states, the right to control our domestic institutions,” Wallace declared.46 George Wallace and the AIP thus offered strong leadership in dealing with social problems and foreign entanglements that caused the negative emotional state of Middle America.

19 Besides the content of Wallace’s message, his style and performance also stirred the emotions of audiences at AIP rallies. Wallace biographer Dan Carter characterized it as “a kind of soft-porn racism in which fear and hatred could be mobilized without mentioning race itself.”47 The huge crowd at Madison Square Garden, swept up by roaring renditions of “Dixie” and “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy,” responded passionately whenever their leader attacked the federal government, intellectuals, or left-wing hecklers who had managed to enter the hall. In the meantime, Wallace bumped up and down the stage, switching effortlessly between angry rhetoric and crude jokes meant to emasculate his opponents. “That’s alright,” he told a longhaired protester. “That’s alright honey – that’s right sweetie-pie – oh, that’s a he. I thought you were a she.”48 Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson described Wallace rallies like the one in Madison Square Garden as a combination between a religious revival and a political “Janis Joplin Concert.”49 Supporters sometimes used biblical language to laud the Alabama governor. An admirer from the industrial heartland of Pennsylvania even claimed, “Wallace is a new Messiah!”50

20 Wallace’s showmanship contrasted sharply with the dour speeches of Richard Nixon, whose campaign staff called his appearances “drills.”51 Yet in the end, Nixon narrowly beat Humphrey in the race for the presidency. During the final weeks of the campaign, the Democratic candidate had made an impressive comeback. In a speech in at the end of September, he declared his independence from the Johnson administration by saying he would consider a bombing halt of North Vietnam if it offered a reasonable chance for peace. The labor unions eventually also began to campaign more actively for Humphrey in order to stop the “Wallace infection.”52 Many blue-collar voters returned to the Democratic Party in November, while suburbanites often chose for the lite version of law and order presented by Richard Nixon.53 George Wallace had nonetheless waged a formidable campaign, winning 13.5 percent of the national vote and 46 ballots in the Electoral College. Moreover, with Nixon in the White House, at least parts of his Deep South program reached the highest levels of the federal government. According to Hubert Humphrey, a “perfumed, deodorized” version of Wallace had won the presidential election of 1968.54 Although Nixon initially belied Humphrey’s disparaging description (he advocated a guaranteed minimum income for poor families and endorsed a bill lifting federal compulsory minimum sentences for the sale and possession of drugs), a merciless attitude towards welfare and crime eventually took hold during the 1970s and 1980s. Gendered and racialized notions about poverty and criminal behavior discredited “maternalist social welfare programs.” Its proponents demanded tough policies that disproportionately targeted minorities and simultaneously buttressed the power of dominant groups in U.S. society. 55 In the long run, such masculinist and racialist visions of law and order – visions that constituted the core of the Wallace campaign – were implemented throughout the nation.

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Conclusion

21 In the spring of 2016, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild attended a Trump rally in New Orleans, Louisiana. Two to three thousand people were waiting in the Lakefront Airport hangar, carrying placards that said “TRUMP: MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN” or “SILENT MAJORITY STANDS WITH TRUMP!” Cheers broke out when the candidate climbed the stage. The crowd kept cheering as Trump delivered the punch lines of his stump speech. “Our country is going to hell,” he yelled. “But we’re going to make it great again!” The audience was primarily white. An older Trump admirer showed a sign with the words “KKK FOR TRUMP.” During previous rallies, Trump had called protesters “bad, bad people… you hear that weak voice out there? That’s a protestor… They aren’t protestors. I call them disruptors.” Sometimes he even asked for violent retribution against hecklers, instructing his supporters to knock “the crap out of him, would you?” Such aggressive and masculine rhetoric proved to be very effective. Trump beat Texas evangelical Ted Cruz in the Louisiana primary and eventually won the election for president of the United States.56

22 In many ways, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign resembled George Wallace’s attempt to become president in 1968. Hochschild described Trump as an “emotions candidate,” whose speeches evoked “dominance, bravado, clarity, national pride, and personal uplift,” thus inspiring “an emotional transformation.” Angry and distraught Americans who went to his rallies no longer felt abandoned, but thought they could reclaim control over their lives. Negative sentiments had been transformed into positive emotions; they were no longer strangers in their own land.57 Hochschild developed a so-called “deep story” to uncover the feelings of her conservative respondents. This deep story revolves around average white Americans (Christian, heterosexual, monogamous, predominantly male) standing in line to climb a hill and reach the American Dream. But then people of color, women, and refugees start cutting in line, often with the assistance of the federal government; Barack Obama is helping them. Hochschild’s respondents strongly identified with the white male Americans in the deep story.58 Their sense of betrayal and abandonment by the political establishment led to desperation, nostalgia for the past, and a vote for Donald Trump.

23 Similar feelings characterized the people who voted (or who contemplated voting) for George Wallace. His appeal was based on “the ethos of the locker room,” a masculine code that attracted young white males (between eighteen and thirty-five years old) to the AIP.59 But white women opposed to busing were enamored with the Alabama governor as well. After all, he voiced “the unease of the housewife who does not want to see her child bussed to an integrated school.”60 The National Action Group (NAG), an anti-busing organization founded by women in the Detroit suburb of Pontiac, invited Wallace as keynote speaker and he also traveled to South Boston to proclaim his opposition to busing there, an indication of his nationwide appeal by the early 1970s.61 Although Wallace did not win in 1968 and his presidential aspirations were cut short by an assassin’s bullet in 1972, the Republican Party continued to nurture his style and program, while the Democrats slowly turned away from its blue-collar and lower middle-class base. The consequence of these decisions on the right and left was the development of a very volatile political climate in which a significant number of white voters began to feel estranged and under threat – a climate comparable to the mid- and

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late 1960s. Back then, labor unions were still strong enough to convince their members to vote for the Democratic candidate. But in 2016, the old industrial heartland of the United States (and a former Democratic stronghold) backed Donald Trump, who also had substantial support in the suburbs.62

24 Trump’s victory was the result of long-term structural developments in U.S. society and its economy. The demise of the heavy industry sector and the concomitant outsourcing of blue-collar jobs that started in the 1970s left many working-class Americans without any perspective. The global flow of work and people brought other challenges too; the influx of migrants from across the world (but especially from Latin America) made the United States a more diverse country, but it also caused anxiety among Americans who identified with the Silent Majority. With jobs going out and immigrants coming in, they felt that their idea of America was disappearing – that they were losing control. The Republican Party, taking stock of Wallace’s successful politics of rage, continued to encourage such feelings, while the Democrats embarked on a more neoliberal course after the disastrous 1972 campaign of George McGovern. These political responses to social change generated potential for a populist reaction, either from the left or the right. For decades, Democrats managed to hold on to their “blue wall” states in the Rust Belt – Bill Clinton on the basis of a progressive economic platform (that was quickly toned down once he had won the White House) and Barack Obama with a grassroots coalition after the financial crisis of 2007-2008.63 But the socially progressive character of the Obama administration and the fact that he was the first black president also created resentment, evidenced by an explosive growth of right-wing militia groups since his election.64 These latent white supremacist sentiments – articulated by George Wallace, cultivated by the Republicans, and ignored or disparaged by the Democrats – finally burst into the open in 2016, when the establishment of both parties was caught unawares by a phenomenon they had created: a déjà vu of the 1968 campaign, but this time, the demagogue won. The presidential elections of 1968 and 2016 indicate how right-wing populism based on authoritarianism and toxic masculinity can effectively arouse lurking feelings of alienation, anger, anxiety, and fear. As such, they demonstrate the remarkable power of gender and emotions in political campaigns.

25 Proper names: Lee Atwater, Aaron Burr, Bill Clinton, Ted Cruz, Dwight Eisenhower, Newt Gingrich, Barry Goldwater, Pete Hamill, James Hood, Hubert Humphrey, Thomas Jefferson, Lyndon B. Johnson, Nicholas Katzenbach, John F. Kennedy, Vivian Malone, Catherine May, George McGovern, Richard Nixon, Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan, Michael Rogin, Hunter S. Thompson, Donald Trump, George Wallace, Matthew Welsh.

NOTES

1. “From Mexican Rapists to Bad Hombres, the Trump Campaign in Two Moments,” Washington Post, October 20, 2016, accessed September 6, 2018, https://wapo.st/2MPcwna; “Trump Calls to ‘Drain the Swamp’ of Washington,” USA Today, October 18, 2016, accessed September 6, 2018, https://usat.ly/2CAjrw7. George Corley Wallace (1919-1998) was governor of Alabama from 1963

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till 1967, from 1971 till 1979, and from 1983 till 1987. Wallace was a populist who toned down his segregationist message in the 1970s. He participated in the Democratic presidential primaries of 1964, 1972, and 1976. In 1968, Wallace ran as a third-party candidate for the presidency. He was shot in 1972 at a rally in Maryland, paralyzing him from the waist down and ending a very successful primary campaign. 2. See Dan T. Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963-1994 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995) and The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, The Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (2nd ed., Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000). 3. Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), especially chapter 10. For a short description of this newer scholarship, see Patricia Cohen, “Interpreting Some Overlooked Stories From the South,” New York Times, May 1, 2007. For a critical discussion of their work, see Glenn Feldman, review of The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism, ed. Matthew D. Lassiter and Joseph Crespino, Journal of Southern History 77, no. 3 (August 2011): 783-786. 4. Byron E. Shafer and Richard Johnston, The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race, and Partisan Change in the Postwar South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 2. 5. Earl Black and Merle Black, The Rise of Southern Republicans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 251, 373. On page 373 they write: “Low-income religious whites, for instance, were almost as pro-Republican as high-income secular white men.” Both Carter and Shafer and Johnston also began to underscore the importance of religion in understanding southern political culture. See their contributions in Angie Maxwell and Todd G. Shields, Unlocking V.O. Key Jr.: Southern Politics for the Twenty-First Century (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2011). 6. See for instance Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) and Lassiter, The Silent Majority, 24-25. 7. Kari Frederickson, “‘As a Man, I Am Interested in States’ Rights’: Gender, Race, and the Family in the Dixiecrat Party, 1948-1950,” in Jumpin’ Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights, ed. Jane Dailey, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, and Bryant Simon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 261. 8. Steve Estes, “A Question of Honor: Masculinity and Massive Resistance to Integration,” in White Masculinity in the Recent South, ed. Trent Watts (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), 69, EBSCO Academic Collection. 9. Frederickson, “‘As a Man, I Am Interested in States’ Rights,’” 261. A more recent study that “positions Jim Crow as a system of cultural exchange and power” is Stephen A. Berry, The Jim Crow Routine: Everyday Performances of Race, Civil Rights, and Segregation in Mississippi (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 4. Gender also remains an understudied category in the research on populism. See Niels Spierings et. al., “Gender and Populist Radical-Right Politics: An Introduction,” Patterns of Prejudice 49, nos. 1-2 (2015): 4, 5-6. 10. A central element of intersectionality theory “is the idea that all of us have multiple identities – race, gender, class, sexual orientation, and so on – and these multiple social identities intersect in ways that shape the form and extent of discrimination we experience.” See Devon W. Carbado and Mitu Gulati, Acting White? Rethinking Race in “Post-Racial” America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 69. 11. Devon W. Carbado, “Colorblind Intersectionality,” Signs 38, no. 4 (2013): 841. On the same page Carbado concluded: “The point of departure for this essay was the idea that many scholars frame intersectionality more narrowly than is theoretically necessary… My hope is that this engagement will end some of the abstract debates about what intersectionality can and cannot do and encourage more scholars to push the theoretical boundaries of intersectionality rather than disciplining and policing them.”

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12. Richard Nixon popularized the term “Silent Majority” on November 3, 1969, in a speech on the Vietnam War. 13. Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2008), xii. 14. A recent example of this “emotional turn” scholarship in political history is Frank Costigliola, “‘I React Intensely to Everything’: Russia and the Frustrated Emotions of George F. Kennan, 1933-1958,” Journal of American History 102, no. 4 (March 2016): 1075-1106. See also Barbara Keys, “Henry Kissinger: The Emotional Statesman,” Diplomatic History 35, no. 4 (September 2011): 587-609. 15. Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Populism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 5-6; Benjamin Moffitt, The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), 25-37. EBSCO Academic Collection. 16. Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present (London: Allen Lane, 2017), 8, 75-76. Toxic masculinity can be described as “the harmful impact of masculinities that emphasize dominance, the use of violence to solve problems, and the suppression of emphatic emotions, like sadness, fear and compassion.” Kyle C. Ashlee et. al., “Fostering Critical Awareness of Masculinity around the World,” in Global Agenda for Social Justice, ed. Glenn W. Muschert et. al. (Bristol: Policy Press, 2018), 1: 73. 17. E. Culpepper Clark, The Schoolhouse Door: Segregation’s Last Stand at the University of Alabama (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 256; “Statement and Proclamation by Governor George C. Wallace, University of Alabama, June 11, 1963,” Alabama Department of Archives and History, accessed August 18, 2018, http://www.archives.state.al.us/govs_list/ schooldoor.html. 18. Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich, 6. Emphasis mine. 19. Matthew E. Welsh, “Civil Rights and the Primary Election of 1964 in Indiana: The Wallace Challenge,” Indiana Magazine of History 75, no. 1 (March 1979): 27. President Johnson was already sure of the nomination and did not participate in the Indiana primary. 20. Ibid., 17, 27. For the use of humor in politics, see for example Chris Smith and Ben Voth, “The Role of Humor in Political Argument: How ‘Strategery’ and ‘Lockboxes’ Changed a Political Campaign,” Argumentation and Advocacy 39, no. 2 (2002): 110-129, and David M. Rhea, “There They Go Again: The Use of Humor in Presidential Debates, 1960-2008,” Argumentation and Advocacy 49, no. 2 (2012): 115-131. 21. Welsh, “Civil Rights and the Primary Election of 1964 in Indiana,” 26. 22. Ibid., 2. 23. Ibid., 8-9. 24. Michael Rogin, “Wallace and the Middle Class: The White Backlash in Wisconsin,” Public Opinion Quarterly 30, no. 1 (1966): 106. 25. Lassiter, The Silent Majority, 3-5; Michael Stewart Foley, Front Porch Politics: The Forgotten Heyday of American Activism in the 1970s and 1980s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013), 43-44; Jason Sokol, There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 224-227; Jeanne Theoharis, “Hidden in Plain Sight: The Civil Rights Movement outside the South,” in The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism, ed. Matthew D. Lassiter and Joseph Crespino (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 52. 26. Sokol, There Goes My Everything, 225. 27. Paul Taggart, “Populism and Representative Politics in Contemporary Europe,” Journal of Political Ideologies 9, no. 3 (2004): 274. Emphasis mine. 28. Rogin, “Wallace and the Middle Class,” 100. 29. Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (London and New York: New Press, 2010), 131-132.

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30. James C. Cobb, Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 217. See also Theoharis, “Hidden in Plain Sight,” 51. 31. James T. Patterson, The Eve of Destruction: How 1965 Transformed America (New York: Basic Books, 2012), xiii-xv. 32. For a comprehensive study on the advent of (Sunbelt) evangelical politics, see Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2011), especially part IV. 33. “The Fear Campaign,” Time, October 4, 1968. 34. “Neither Tweedledum, Nor Tweedledee,” Time, September 20, 1968. 35. Douglas Schrock and Michael Schwalbe, “Men, Masculinity, and Manhood Acts,” Annual Review of Sociology 35 (August 2009): 280. 36. Susi Meret, “Charismatic Female Leadership and Gender: Pia Kjærsgaard and the Danish People’s Party,” Patterns of Prejudice 49, nos. 1-2 (2015): 83. 37. “In Search of Political Miracles,” Time, July 26, 1968. The same article described Humphrey as “a liberal in the New Deal-Fair Deal-Great Society sense of the term. Solution-by-government does not alarm him, and neither does the rustle of federal billions leaving the Treasury.” 38. Charles Kaiser, 1968 in America: Music, Politics, Chaos, Counterculture, and the Shaping of a Generation (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988), 246. 39. Alexander P. Lamis, “The Two-Party South: From the 1960s to the 1990s,” in Southern Politics in the 1990s, ed. Alexander P. Lamis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999), 8. According to legal scholar Ian Haney López, dog whistle politics “simply means speaking in code to a target audience.” Although he examines “coded talk centered on race… the term could encompass clandestine solicitations on any number of bases.” See Ian Haney López, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 4. 40. “Nixon’s Hard-Won Chance to Lead,” Time, November 15, 1968. 41. “The Wallace Factor,” Time, September 27, 1968. “Even in such relatively tranquil and liberal states as Connecticut, Kansas, and Washington, support [for Wallace] is abundantly in evidence,” the reporter discovered. 42. “The Fear Campaign,” Time, October 4, 1968. 43. Ibid. 44. Marshall Frady, “The American Independent Party,” in History of U.S. Political Parties, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (New York and London: Chelsea House Publishers, 1973), 4: 3430-3431. 45. “American Independent Platform of 1968,” in History of U.S. Political Parties, 4: 3447. 46. George C. Wallace, “Speech at Madison Square Garden, October 24, 1968,” in History of U.S. Political Parties, 4: 3492-3493. 47. Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich, 4. 48. Wallace, “Speech at Madison Square Garden,” 3496; “Alabamian Given Lengthy Ovation,” New York Times, October 25, 1968. 49. Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich, 18. 50. “Support from the Guts,” Time, March 1, 1968. 51. “In Search of Political Miracles,” Time, July 26, 1968. 52. Carter, The Politics of Rage, 351-352; Carl Solberg, Hubert Humphrey: A Biography (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1984), 388-389. 53. J. Michael Ross, Reeve D. Vanneman, and Thomas F. Pettigrew, “Patterns of Support for George Wallace: Implications for Racial Change,” Journal of Social Studies 36, no. 2 (1976): 85-86. The authors concluded on these pages that “Republicans liked him [Wallace] far better than was thought to be the case… Many voters who liked Wallace were even more positively inclined toward Nixon and voted for the Republican candidate.” See also Joseph Lowndes, “From Founding Violence to Political Hegemony: The Conservative Populism of George Wallace,” in

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Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, ed. Francisco Panizza (London and New York: Verso, 2005), 163. 54. David Farber, The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994), 226. 55. Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, Getting Tough: Welfare and Imprisonment in 1970s America (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017), 4-5; Ross, Vanneman, and Pettigrew, “Patterns of Support for George Wallace,” 89-90. 56. Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York and London: Free Press, 2016), 222-224. 57. Ibid., 225. Hochschild does not mention Wallace in her book. 58. Ibid., 135-145. 59. Dan T. Carter, “Legacy of Rage: George Wallace and the Transformation of American Politics,” Journal of Southern History 62, no. 1 (February 1996): 10-11. Trump dismissed his lewd comments about women as “locker room talk.” See Louis Nelson, “From ‘Locker Room Talk’ On, Trump Fends Off Misconduct Claims,” Politico, December 12, 2017, accessed January 17, 2019, https:// politi.co/2VFAgLy. 60. “Wallace’s Army: The Coalition of Frustration,” Time, October 18, 1968. 61. Elizabeth Gillespie McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 222, 227, https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/ 9780190271718.003.0010. 62. Christine J. Walley, “Trump’s Election and the ‘White Working Class’: What We Missed,” American Ethnologist 44, no. 2 (2017): 234-235. 63. Joshua Mound, “What Democrats Still Don’t Get About George McGovern,” The New Republic, February 29, 2016, accessed January 17, 2019, https://bit.ly/1QGTSEw. See also Oscar Winberg, “Insult Politics: Donald Trump, Right-Wing Populism, and Incendiary Language,” European Journal of American Studies 12, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 4-5, par. 11-13, https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.12132. 64. “Antigovernment Movement,” SPLC, accessed January 17, 2019, https://bit.ly/2Hhs1SK.

ABSTRACTS

Gender and emotions are important factors in the rise of modern U.S. conservatism. This article examines the 1968 presidential election as a pivotal moment in the development of the New Right. During that campaign, George Wallace practiced a masculine political style that evoked an emotional response from anxious voters who felt alienated and angry. Wallace set the stage for a conservative political strategy that remains effective until this day.

INDEX

Keywords: emotions, gender, masculinity, populism, U.S. South, conservatism

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AUTHOR

MAARTEN ZWIERS

Maarten Zwiers is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Contemporary History at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. His main area of expertise is the history and culture of the US South. He is the author of Senator : Mississippi’s Jim Crow Democrat (Louisiana State University Press, 2015), has published in Southern Cultures and the Southern Quarterly, and contributed to The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and The Mississippi Encyclopedia. His research primarily focuses on rural history and regional identity, often from an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective. Zwiers wrote about the rise of right-wing populism in the United States and Europe and compared rural in a study of Lynyrd Skynyrd and Normaal, a band from the Dutch countryside. Besides his work on segregationist politics, he is currently developing a new project about the rise of agrarian leftwing radicalism in the United States and the Dutch Northeast.

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