According to economist Michael Harrington, it would have taken just $100 billion to rectify the economic injustices of the 1950s and 1960s. Moderates in powerful positions could have demanded these policy changes. Yet they did no such thing. In this case, what is the difference between so-called moderates and right-wing racists, except that conservatives speak straight and say they have no interest to end racism or poverty, while moderates are chameleons, changing their colors by the hour and using cunning rhetoric to convince the poor and disenfranchised that they are on their side but just need to wait until the right time, or even tell them that some things just cannot be changed; i.e., the capitalist economic structure. It is too much to ask, they say. For this very reason, the Reverend Martin Luther King called the liberals far more dangerous than the conservatives. - Garda Ghista (WPA)
04-10-07 - "World Prout Assembly" - In the post-bellum South at the very beginning of the Reconstruction Era, the white men gave certain rights to the black people of the South, such as abolition of slavery, then voting rights and the right to seek political office, Within ten years, the white men proceeded to take away those newly given rights. They created the poll tax and began mass lynching of blacks to terrorize and beat them back into political and social silence.
During the Civil Rights movement that began in the 1930s and climaxed in 1965 with the passage of the Civil Rights Act, white men did not return fundamental rights to black Americans.. Black people themselves organized, struggled, and through their own fervor, intellect, political savvy, morality and spirituality, got back their own rights. We can conclude that when there is no struggle at the grassroots level, rights may or may not remain with the people. But when there is struggle by the common people, those rights will remain. At least, in the history of racial equality in the United States, this has appeared to be the case.
Devastating Depression and World War II
The Depression of the 1920s in America caused radical upheaval in people’s lives. Thousands had to give up their non-viable farms, move to cities and work in factories. It meant the end of deep family traditions living on and nurturing the land. Continuing poverty led to bloody coal mining strikes, the most famous being in Harlan County, Kentucky. The song “Which Side Are You On?” (1931) took birth during those struggles and endures today. Despite leaving their farm, life remained an endless drudgery in the mines and the factories. In 1937 the average annual income in the South was $314, while in the rest of the nation it was $528. Socially, educationally, economically and politically the South remained way behind the rest of the nation, causing the common people to rise up in protest. The women, whose sufferings were the greatest, were often at the forefront of this movement. The humungous issues of out-migration, taxation, education, housing, health, agriculture and water were in chaos and needed solutions.
Women and children worked as near slaves while watching profits move from the factories and mills to outside investors. (The same scenario prevails today multiplied to the nth power. Still women are hired first because they are so easily exploited.)
And what of the black Americans? According to Ann Braden:
“the South was a literal police state in the 1930s… the terror that had descended after the Reconstruction governments were overthrown kept African Americans in total subjugation and did it by terror. Thousands of lynchings occurred. African Americans had no rights whatsoever that whites were required to respect… the determination of the few who ruled the region to keep African Americans in bondage closed off all areas of public discourses. Ideas did not circulate, and exploration of ideas is the very lifeblood of democracy. It was, in the words of one author (James Silver, writing later about Mississippi), a closed society.”
Sixty prominent blacks attended the historic Durham Conference in Durham, North Carolina in 1942, wherein many of them articulated demands that led to the writing of the Durham Manifesto. The driving disillusionment behind this Manifesto was the racism and derision that greeted African-American soldiers home from World War I – soldiers who had risked their lives, been wounded, and watched thousands of their black colleagues die in action. The Durham delegates declared in their Statement of Purpose:
“Instead of letting the demagogues guess what we want, we are proposing to make our wants and aspirations a matter of record, so clear that he who runs away may read. We are hoping in this way to challenge the constructive cooperation of that element of the white South who express themselves as desirous of a New Deal for the Negroes of the South.”
White southerners at their ensuing Collaboration Conference in Richmond, Virginia in 1942 gave a lofty but evasive response, speaking of noble ambitions to form white and black cooperation without expressing real regret and sorrow for the crimes of the past and present. Is it not better to speak clearly and directly, rather than to bury those crimes in liberal rhetoric? Would it not have been better to list immediate actions to be taken to stop all further crimes against black people?
The plight of women was pitiable. To own even three dresses was an untold luxury to thousands. In 1933, five thousand unemployed female clerical workers applied for seventy-five jobs, which comes to 66 applicants per position. (Today at Northern Kentucky University, USA, the human resources department receives 75-100 applicants for each clerical/secretarial position – a clear sign of the present economy. Leaving aside the higher population ratio, it still leaves a minimum 74 women unemployed and insidiously ensnared in credit card debt.) In 1935 Ellen S. Woodward was retained as assistant administrator for the Works Progress Administration (WPA). In this position, she organized life-saving projects such as collective sewing rooms, where women could sew together, talk together, and make a little money together. It did wonders for their morale. WPA also distributed countless clothes stitched in those sewing rooms to the needy persons. Millions of clothes sewn in Kentucky sewing rooms in 1943 went to children in the impoverished rural and mining communities.
From Protest Movement to Political Action
The relatively unknown, unsung hero Baynard Rustin was a key organizer in the 1963 March on Washington and played a major part in collapsing the legal foundations of white racism while leading many political activities of the time, such as the desegregation of public institutions. He points out in his article, “From Protest to Politics,” that grass-roots, collective struggle was the key factor in the success of the Montgomery bus boycott. Every strata of African-Americans participated. Feeling the thrill of victory, they moved en masse to lunch counters, to schools, and demanded basic municipal rights such as police protection.
It was the political work of the black masses, often inside the Democratic Party, that led to greater equality for all southerners. While originally a protest movement, it grew into a political movement, and then beyond to a social movement that began to demand far more than just voting rights or the right to sit down in the bus. People began demanding rights across the board, particularly the right not to be poor and not to live in segregated ghettoes. They learned that once past the external obstacles of physical integration in public places, there remained the deeper, internal obstacles that affected not only blacks but all poor Americans. They learned about the fatal flaws of the economic system called capitalism, which perennially feeds wealth to an oligopoly while leaving the masses in a state ranging from moderate comfort to abject impoverization. Their struggle moved from the racial domain to the domain of economic class war. This struggle did not yet see completion.
The sit-ins by blacks led to the diminishing of McCarthyism (akin to the present homeland security). Black protests fueled widespread political debate on college campuses where before there was silence. Primarily it led to a resurrection of the national war on poverty that had been abandoned since the People’s Party in the late 1800s.
Moderate vs. Radical
From Rustin we learn about the levels of sensitivity of white Americans. Moderates told blacks that racial problems are so enormous that we really should not tackle them; militancy is a futile option, and what we need is “intelligent moderation,” another way of saying to keep the status quo intact and undisturbed. Funds would never be available, they said, to bring about such massive social and economic changes. Clearly, moderates lead comfortable lives. Yet as Rustin says, their “admonitions to the Negro to adjust to the status quo… are … immoral.” He further says, “moral” equals “radical.” The People’s Party (aka the Populist Party) of the late 1800s, comprising the poorest segments of society, was radical in its demands. As a result of being radical, many of their policy demands were incorporated into the Democratic Party platform and some even became federal policy. Thus we can understand that if a political party takes a moderate stance on issues, its legacy will be nil.
The key to success in the civil rights movement was forming large coalitions. The March on Washington, which was a coalition of blacks, white liberals and radicals, trade unionists, and churches, led to the passing of the Civil Rights Act. While some blacks complain that liberalism equals hypocrisy, Rustin says that some level of hypocrisy needs to be overlooked in the name of achieving common goals, as without coalition forming, no individual group can succeed. While conservatives openly oppose strengthening medicare, social security and educational aid – issues which affect all Americans – religious groups as well as unions invariably support these causes, hence the essentiality in forming common-cause coalitions. In the early 1900s as today, as throughout history, the prime grievance is economic injustice. For this cause, many groups can coalesce to fight for greater economic democracy.
In the period around the 1964 election of Lyndon B. Johnson, demonstrations plummeted 75 percent as blacks moved towards greater political involvement. However, demonstrations are the sign of radical activism, while political involvement manifested primarily by voting cannot be called radical. Hence, once this deceleration occurred, there was correspondingly less motivation for political leaders to oblige the poor and implement even moderate social and economic change. Clearly, politicians respond only to a tremendous revolutionary force, as was demonstrated by the People’s Party and again by the civil rights movement the 1950s and early 1960s. (Today, even massive peaceful demonstrations involving 100,000 people have zero effect on governments anywhere. In a recent interview, Arundhati Roy ponders on the apparent futility of modern protest demonstrations and hunger strikes in an era of corporate hegemony, and wonders whether physical, armed resistance, as carried out by Maoists in India, is the only solution. )
Conclusion
According to economist Michael Harrington, it would have taken just $100 billion to rectify the economic injustices of the 1950s and 1960s. Moderates in powerful positions could have demanded these policy changes. Yet they did no such thing. In this case, what is the difference between so-called moderates and right-wing racists, except that conservatives speak straight and say they have no interest to end racism or poverty, while moderates are chameleons, changing their colors by the hour and using cunning rhetoric to convince the poor and disenfranchised that they are on their side but just need to wait until the right time, or even tell them that some things just cannot be changed; i.e., the capitalist economic structure. It is too much to ask, they say. For this very reason, the Reverend Martin Luther King called the liberals far more dangerous than the conservatives.
It is no less true today. Rather, it is worse. The moderate leaders of the Democratic Party such as Reid, Pelosi, Clinton and Obama spout rhetoric giving the impression that they care for the people. But in fact, they never utter the words “poor” and “poverty.” Their level of sensitivity for the poor and downtrodden, both here and in Iraq, Afghanistan and the myriad other countries where economic devastation wrought by US economic policies leads tens of thousands of farmers to commit suicide, appears to be at the same level as the conservatives, who at least have no pretensions regarding their views of the poorer economic strata.
Baynard Rustin says groups in the South were not ready to form coalitions to usher in radical change in society – economic and social change. He equates “radical” with “moral.” He clarifies that what we need even today is radical thinking and radical action to work for radical change. “Radical” means going to the root or origin. It also means to be extreme, particularly with regard to ushering drastic political, economic and social changes in the society. Hence, according to Prout World Editor Trond Overland, it means finishing the roots of oppression and exploitation. Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar said that Lenin and Mao were intellectual moralists; however, they shifted to militant immorality when they realized that communism had failed completely.
Radical change cannot be carried out alone. We know that millions of people, black and white, were engaged in the civil rights movement on the local, regional and national levels. We need to form coalitions. We need to think beyond meeting our individual economic needs and move towards thinking for the collective welfare.
The Reverend Martin Luther King was one of the greatest orators ever seen in the United States. His powerful words inspired millions of ordinary people. But in the final analysis, it was those ordinary people who carried out the revolution. It was ordinary people who went to the corner restaurant and sat on a chair reserved for whites. It was people like Rosa Parks who just sat down on the bus, feeling tired and angry at racist oppression via having to stand after a long day’s work. It was those millions of ordinary people who changed the nation and brought it one step further in the march towards perfection. In the words of Neohumanist, Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar:
“The collective body of those who are engaged in the concerted effort to bridge the gap between the first expression of morality and establishment in universal humanism is called society.” If morality is the starting-point of the journey of society, then those who are at its helm must be moralists. And since society aims to establish universalism, those people must be universalists. And if the gap between morality and universal humanism is to be bridged, spiritual praxis is a must… Their philosophy of life must be, “Morality is the base, spiritual praxis is the means, and life divine is the goal.”
Posted by proutist-universal on April 14, 2007 07:52 AM
