I watched the PBS hour-long account of the formation an important, though short-lived organization, the Niagara Movement. In begins with discussion of 3 important Negroes of that era: Booker T. Washington, the man who essentially made Tuskegee Institute into a major black university; W. E. B. Du Bois, then a young scholar; and William Monroe Trotter, a Boston journalist. The narrative rightly contrasts the backgrounds of the 3; Washington born into slavery and struggling to gain an education at a newly founded univeristy following the Civil War and Emancipation; while Du Bois and Trotter were raised in New England towns that had few blacks; towns in which they excelled, and both attended Harvard U.
At the Atlanta Exhibition of 1895 Booker Washington presented a speech that would be called the great compromise. He blamed earlier black leaders for attempting to exert their new freedom by beginning at the top, running for political office, orating, becoming senators, representatives, etc. This was wrong-headed. Blacks should have begun at the bottom. The tv program acknowledged it was a major speech, but did not quote it. In that speech, Washington told a story of a ship in distress that comes across a friendly vessel as requsts fresh water, as they were dying of thirst. The other ship urges the distressed vessel to cast your bucket where you are. The captain of the distressed vessel refuses - they cannot drink ocean water. Eventually, they cast they bucket, and it is fresh water, as they have floated near the flow of the Amazon River when it empties into the ocean. He then urges blacks to cast their bucket in the South with their white neighbors; and he urges the whites not to look to foreign immigrants, but to the 8 million Southern blacks whom they know and who are ready to work for them without causing strikes and labor troubles; people who were loyal to them in the past. Moreover, in this way the races could be separate as the fingers on the hand, but united and strong when needed for the power of the hand. This was interpreted as a policy of avoiding politics, and getting basic education for employment in the South.
The highly educated New Englanders may have been somewhat ambivalent, but with continued lynchings and civil rights retreats and violations, eventually they formed the Niagara Movement to promote legal protest against growing white racism. There were divisions in the new NM between Trotter, who opposed female memberships, and Du Bois, and eventually the Niagara Movement was nigh bankrupt. After anti-black pogroms in Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln's former base, white liberals also saw aneed for an organization to defend black civil rights, and the NAACP was formed with Du Bois on its board, while what was left of the Niagara Movement falls.
The program gives the illusion that protest was basically a New England obscession. No mention on the program of Ida Wells, born a slave in Mississippi, moved to Memphis and writing and part owner of a black newspaper. She had been dragged from the White Ladies car on a train, sued, won a civil rights case, and then lost it. In the 1890s a mob wrecked her press and she had to flee north. In 1898 a fusion ticket won in Wilmington, N C., white Populist and black Republicans, but it was literally overthrow and run out of town by white racists. Not all Southerners were advocates of Washington, but to survive, some had to flee north.
Ida Wells wrote much against lynchings of blacks. But the largest single lynching, of 11 men who had been found innocent in court, occurred in New Orleans in 1891, a lynching of 11 Italians - members of the black hand, probably an earler name for the Mafia. What was different - the newly created nation of Italy protested this act to Washington, and the Federal government tole New Orleans to lay off the Italians. Abyssinia, the only independent black African nation at that time, was not strong enough to protest lynchings of blacks in the US.
When West Indian Marcus Garvey arrived in the US, he planned to visit Booker Washington, and was quite dispppointed to learn of the death of the leader of Tuskegee. Garvey would go on to found the Universal Negro Improvement Assn., which in the 1920s far surpassed the NAACP in memberships. Garvey's black nationalism was om some ways a continuation of the Washington approach and his disdain for the light-skinned Du Bois was mutual. In the 1930s the NAACP would be challenged by a more vigorous protest group, the International Labor Defence (a Communist Party front), but the CPUSA would also play with the black nationalism with its promotion of an Black Belt inside the US.
In 1948 the NAACP was captured by the Democrats and became a Dem. front group, in opposition to the Henry Wallace Progressive Party - which was the civil rights movement in the South of that era. Du Bois supported the Progressives, not Truman, and the NAACP fired Du Bois.
Garvey was deported, but black nationalism rose again with the Black Muslims.
Hugh Murray
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