I love writing about the Freedom Movement, as I’ve learned to call the Civil Rights Movement. I can’t ever do justice to those in the movement, but I write about them anyway, because they give me so much hope.
So when Amanda made some off-hand comments about the Freedom Movement, in her response to my last post I saw a great opportunity to tangent. Not because I necessarily disagree with the points she was making, but because I like talking about the Freedom Movement. My point, in as much as I have one, is that the Freedom Movement was amazing, and its radicalism is too often ignored. It is easy for the institutions of power, like political parties, to try and recast this story as one which upholds those power structures, I believe this is wrong.
Anyway, Amanda said:
It echoes pretty neatly the way that LBJ lost the Dixiecrats by supporting civil rights, only to have Nixon come and swoop them up with his coded speeches about “law and order”.
While it’s true that the Dixiecrats left the Democratic party because of LBJ’s position on civil rights, calling that position ‘support’ is overstating it a little. There a Freedom Movement poster that said:
There’s a street in Itta Bena called Freedom.
There’s a town in Mississippi called Liberty.
There’s a department in Washington called Justice.
Throughout the early 1960s federal justice officials stood by and watched while local law enforcement broke federal law and beat up people trying to enroll to vote. What Johnson and the federal government offered to the freedom movement was certainly not support.
At the 1964 Democratic Convention, Johnson was given a clear choice between Dixiecrats and the freedom movement and he chose the Dixiecrats. Over the summer of 1964, 90,000 people across Mississippi voted in a the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party primary, which was non-segregated. Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney were murdered that summer. When the representatives of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party got to Atlantic City, Johnson wouldn’t let their case to be seated as the Mississippi delegation go to a floor vote (and tried to pre-empt any coverage they might get in front of the credentials committee by having a speech of his own). He put the MFDP delegation under surveillance. Finally offered a ‘compromise’ where he picked two of the delegation to get general seats (64 people had come). The MFDP rejected this proposal; as Fannie Lou Hamer said “We didn’t come all this way for no two seats, ’cause all of us is tired.”
I think it’s easy to forget that each town in the south needed to be desegregated, and the federal government wasn’t the people doing it, even after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. The people who were actually doing that work were in great personal danger and were not supported by the federal government.
Amanda again:
When you find yourself confused on how the principle of the public leading the politicians works, remember this: Martin Luther King didn’t think that withholding his vote from Kennedy would get the CRA passed. They had to take to the streets while voting for politicians that were mildly more amendable to their views than the alternatives.
I am a little bit confused here, because Kennedy didn’t stand for election while a Civil Rights Act was under discussion. The 1960 Civil Rights Act was while Eisenhower was still president, and Kennedy was dead by the time the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed. Also southern blacks couldn’t really vote for politicians who were mildly more amendable to their views, because most southern blacks couldn’t vote.
But leaving that aside, one of the things that I find so frustrating is the popular view of the Freedom movement lead by Martin Luther King, which pretty much ignores everyone else. I’m going to use this as an excuse to quote from the speech John Lewis, Chairman of SNCC,never gave. It was written for the March on Washington, but toned down due to pressure from the White House and more conservative organisations:
We march today for jobs and freedom, but we have nothing to be proud of, for hundreds and thousands of our brothers are not here. They have no money for their transportation, for they are receiving starvation wages, or no wages at all.
In good conscience, we cannot support wholeheartedly the administration’s civil rights bill, for it is too little and too late. There’s not one thing in the bill that will protect our people from police brutality.
This bill will not protect young children and old women from police dogs and fire hoses, for engaging in peaceful demonstrations: This bill will not protect the citizens in Danville, Virginia, who must live in constant fear in a police state. This bill will not protect the hundreds of people who have been arrested on trumpedup charges. What about the three young men in Americus, Georgia, who face the death penalty for engaging in peaceful protest?
The voting section of this bill will not help thousands of black citizens who want to vote. It will not help the citizens of Mississippi, of Alabama and Georgia, who are qualified to vote but lack a sixth-grade education. “ONE MAN, ONE VOTE” is the African cry. It is ours, too. It must be ours.
People have been forced to leave their homes because they dared to exercise their right to register to vote. What is there in this bill to ensure the equality of a maid who earns $5 a week in the home of a family whose income is $100,000 a year?
For the first time in one hundred years this nation is being awakened to the fact that segregation is evil and that it must be destroyed in all forms. Your presence today proves that you have been aroused to the point of action.
We are now involved in a serious revolution. This nation is still a place of cheap political leaders who build their careers on immoral compromises and ally themselves with open forms of political, economic and social exploitation. What political leader here can stand up and say, “My party is the party of principles?” The party of Kennedy is also the party of Eastland. The party of Javits is also the party of Goldwater. Where is our party?
In some parts of the South we work in the fields from sunup to sundown for $12 a week. In Albany, Georgia, nine of our leaders have been indicted not by Dixiecrats but by the federal government for peaceful protest. But what did the federal government do when Albany’s deputy sheriff beat attorney C. B. King and left him half dead? What did the federal government do when local police officials kicked and assaulted the pregnant wife of Slater King, and she lost her baby?
It seems to me that the Albany indictment is part of a conspiracy on the part of the federal government and local politicians in the interest of expediency.
I want to know, which side is the federal government on?
It’s a great speech, but it also makes me appreciate Mary King and Casey Hayden and the women who came after them.
What’s “support”, then? Are we permitted to steal into the election booth and shamefacedly vote for Democrats while publically condemning them and helping them lose elections by increasing the number of people who don’t vote on the theory that they’re all the same?
The problem is that voting is the LEAST you can do in furtherance of your political goals. The only way to be less involved is not to vote. I think this is exactly the time to be critical of your own party. The assumption that democrats share some common values is a decent on. The assumption that they share your values isn’t. It’s not impossible for two people in party to disagree on a given issue, or value it differently.
For instance the primary is when people can decide if they want a democrat that will fight for stricter emissions rules or one that will do everything they can to keep heavy manufacturing jobs available for local unions.
If those are you choices you need to raise awareness early. This is less important if your motivations more partisan than ideological. If all you want is your team to win it’s not that important what each person believes so long as they’re on your team. If you care strongly about specific issues than you might not care if it’s a republican voting against tighter CAFÉ standards or a Democrat.
What’s “support”, then? Are we permitted to steal into the election booth and shamefacedly vote for Democrats while publically condemning them and helping them lose elections by increasing the number of people who don’t vote on the theory that they’re all the same?
It’s unlikely that any candidate or political party is ever going to represent a given individual’s views 100%. Especially when we have 300 million individuals in a country with only two parties whose candidates have a reasonable likelihood of winning a given election. Just because two parties are both the same on a given important issue doesn’t mean that they cannot be distinctly different on other important issues. Where you think they are on the wrong side in the former case, you should try to change them. Where they are on the right side in the latter case, you should support them and vote for them.
The problem you run into is laziness masquerading as cynicism. People will focus on one such former case and generalize it to “they’re all the same” on all important issues instead of just the one or two, and use that as an excuse to not vote at all. In a way that works for those of us who are paying attention. Every lazy fool that doesn’t vote at all raises the value of the votes of people who do. But overall it leaves the field for activists and extremists on both sides, which I don’t think is in the best interests of the country.
The other issue you run into is lazy thinking; people presuming that if you support a candidate’s or party’s or political philosophy’s position on a given issue or group of issues, you support that candidate’s or party’s or philosophy’s entire set of positions. Another fallacy. In our present political environment, where the majority of people can’t be bothered to do any research or independent thinking on these things and instead depend on whatever 9- or 30-second sound bite some advocacy group puts together on one or two issues to make a decision, I’m afraid you’ll just have to suffer with it.
What I’d like to see is activism to get people to think; to get people to understand that the privilege of voting does not prevent a government or country from sliding into error and destruction; only when the electorate accepts and performs the duty of actually researching and thinking about their vote do we have hope. Voting alone is not fulfilling your duty to the United States or to your fellow citizens.
I support the Democrats because I believe that supporting them is my best chance of policies I like being enacted.
That’s not to say that they, as a group, support every policy I like, and it’s certainly not to say that they don’t do things that I dislike, but I think that right now they’re our (or my) best option.
We’re operating under a winner take all system, which I don’t like.
Supporting a third party right now is political suicide, which I don’t like.
I do want third parties to be viable in US politics, and I’d like for there to be a strong party to the Democrat’s left, or for the Democrats themselves to move leftward.
However, when we have strong, third party candidacies, for some reason, they rarely discuss Instant Runoff Voting or any of the other systems which would make a third party run viable, which I find incredibly frustrating, and makes me think of their candidacies as having less to do with ‘wanting to change the system’ and more to do with their fucking cancerously overinflated egos.
I strongly believe that Perot could have cut a deal with Bush in 1992: “Strongly support IRV, and I’ll throw my support behind you.”
I strongly believe that Nader could have cut a deal with gore in 2000: “Strongly support IRV, and I’ll throw my support behind you.”
In both cases, a strong case could be made that their third party run changed the outcome of the election.
Both candidates knew they were never going to win. Anyone with an ounce of sense knew they were never going to win. It was as obvious as it could possibly be, and yet there wasn’t a hint of trying to change the underlying structure that might, might, make such a run more than a joke.
I find this incredibly frustrating, because, like I said, I want third parties to be viable! I just don’t think it’s really possible under the current system.
If you want this too, whether you’re on the right or the left, we need to change that system.
—Myca
It was as obvious as it could possibly be, and yet there wasn’t a hint of trying to change the underlying structure that might, might, make such a run more than a joke.
Perhaps that’s true for Perot. However, Nader (or at least the supporting Green parties – but I believe Nader did, too. It’s been too long and I can’t really remember.) certainly talked up IRV. It was one of the important issues to Greens. CFR was also a big issue.
I will readily admit that Nader, himself, was running for his massive ego. I’m not sure that was obvious to most Nader voters at the time. Nader could have contributed to changing the system, but he was too full of himself & blew the best chance I’ve seen in my lifetime.
I support the Democrats because I believe that supporting them is my best chance of policies I like being enacted.
I don’t support the Democratic Party because I believe that supporting them damages the chances of policies I like being enacted. The fact is, the Democrats don’t, institutionally, support a single one of my core issues.
I know, I know, we keep having this argument but I feel like so many of you fail (or don’t wish) to understand. Are the Dems better than the Reps? Somewhat. However, neither of them supports my side of my core issues. You say that voting for Nader or Perot was “political suicide.” In terms of my political position, voting for Dems or voting for Reps is “political suicide” in the sense that both are against what I am for. Should I vote Dem anyhow? Why?
But we’ve wandered way off subject. Sorry.
Back on subject, I agree with a lot of what Maia has written here & I understand Amanda’s perspective. Maia, not being a US citizen & not experiencing our version of the 2 party system, is understandably confused about why leftists support the Democrats. Amanda, being a US citizen and experiencing the wonder of our exclusionary 2 party system, believes that the Dems are the best we can hope for and supports them. In the end, most of the disagreement can be traced back to one thing – strategy. Which strategy is best? Working within an established party or working outside of one. The rest of it is just name calling.
Then why why why (for the love of God) didn’t he try to cut a deal? It was the Green’s one moment in the sun when they had the power to cut one. Like I said, it was never anything other than obvious that they wouldn’t win, but it was a very real (and as it turns out, justified) fear that they would split the vote in a close election.
I know I’m ranting, and I’m sorry, but please understand that I’m ranting because you and I want the same thing here, and I feel like the Greens just pissed it away.
I understand what you’re saying, but there are two words missing from your analysis . . . ‘best chance’.
God knows, I don’t love the Democrats, but I believe that they’re 1) significantly less evil than the Republicans and 2) one of only two realistic options right now.
I don’t believe that there must be a conflict here. I see nothing wrong with working outside of the established parties where it’s likely to be effective (on a local or state level), working to change the system on a national level, and supporting one of the big two when a third party would serve only to split the vote (national elections).
—Myca
Then why why why (for the love of God) didn’t he try to cut a deal?
Because of his oversized ego. This is one of two main reasons why most rational Greens will never have anything to do with the man again.
… supporting one of the big two when a third party would serve only to split the vote (national elections).
The problem with this is that a 3rd party always serves to split the vote in our current system. If we follow that logic, we can never vote 3rd party nationally or locally. That is always the argument against voting 3rd party and it is always used in every single election – local or state or national.
Aside from that, state Democratic Parties hate leftist 3rd parties more than they hate the Republicans. I have witnessed this. Given that hatred and their total lack of willingness to work with any 3rd party, why would I ever vote for a Democrat?
I understand what you’re saying, but there are two words missing from your analysis . . . ‘best chance’.
Those words aren’t actually missing from my analysis. I don’t believe that a vote for either party gives my positions a “better chance” at one day becoming policy. Both parties are outright against my positions on core issues. So what should I do? For me, it has come down to vote for the 3rd party that best reflects my positions or not vote. Honestly, I’ve voted for the Democrats twice in the last 2 decades and regretted it each time as I watched them work against me afterwards.
I think that this is a worthwhile discussion to have. However, this is the first time I’ve had it in years in which I wasn’t called names in the opening comment or post or in the first comment responding to me. That’s what I mean by everything else is name calling over a difference in strategy (neither of which has been proven to work in the last several decades). Although:
… but it was a very real (and as it turns out, justified) fear that they would split the vote in a close election.
comes very close to name calling, given its history in screaming fights, and is a distraction to the discussion that should be occurring.
As soon as the Dems institutionally support IRV, CFR, a single-payer health care system, true reproductive choice, GMI, or any of a number of other issues, I’ll consider voting for them. As long as they actively work against those (especially IRV & CFR, which I see as the most likely to change the system), I can’t vote for them. My guess is that they will support single-payer health care first – and not long before the Reps do, either.
I’d just like to point out that this is an example of progressives fighting to participate in the Democratic Party, a Democratic Party that was not welcoming to them, and that blocked them from participating. I don’t know my history nearly as well as I should, but isn’t it arguable that this attempt to participate in the Democratic Party had a substantial and progressive effect on the Democrats as a party? Certainly, the southern Democrats are no longer an all white party, and it was actions like this that changed the party.
Attempting to participate in and influence the Democratic Party was only a small part of the larger strategy of the Freedom Movement, but it was a part (as was founding new and largely symbolic political parties, and working entirely outside the political system- all three are important strategies, and a large movement can have individual groups that pursue each of those strategies).
No, no, not name calling at all (or at least certainly not intended that way), I’m just saying that the fear of splitting the vote isn’t some kind of insane-o paranoia at play.
It’s part of my decision making process when thinking about this.
—Myca
ps. I’m going to respond to the rest, but it turns out my job wants me to work to get paid. Capitalist pigs.
Interestingly enough, we do have one national politician who was not elected in either the Democratic or Republican party; Senator Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.)
It is possible for a politician to get elected without support of the major parties. It is incredibly difficult – Lieberman probably only won due to the advantage of incumbency. The question is, why does the support of the major parties give such an advantage to a candidate? In these days of blogs and a zillion cable channels, it’s not as if a 3rd party candidate can’t get his or her message and name out.
I think that a major reason (not the only one, of course) is that the various States’ electoral laws give established political parties an unfair advantage. For example, here in Illinois a candidate for office needs only 20% of the number of signatures to get on the ballot that an independent candidate (or a candidate of a party that did not get at least 5% of the vote in the last election) needs. Additionally, the major parties get to use the States’ electoral machinery to narrow down their candidate pool to the most popular candidate (i.e., run a primary election) for free. I’d like to see these two advantages eliminated from the start – let every candidate need to have the same number of signatures to get on the ballot regardless of party affiliation, and require that any party wishing to run a primary election pay for it. In fact, I’d like to see a legal challenge of these two issues.
Jake:
Help me out, please. I’m not familiar with what CFR and GMI mean.
Campaign Finance Reform and Guaranteed Minimum Income.
Great post Maia. I found this place via marisacat’s blog & just put up this post there in response to your piece here:
How quickly we forget. I remember in a thread a while back I made some point about teaching historical memory. It is the single most glaring lack on the part of what passes for Democratic Party activism today: they have no historical memory. They don’t remember that it was the CPA that gave us the FDR economic initiatives [among other things]. They don’t remember that it was the NWP not NAWSA that gave us women’s suffrage. They don’t remember that most of the civil rights agitation in the 20th centrury was carried out by radicals, not Democrats.
And rather unsurprisingly they complain that the IAC and ANSWER and UFPJ and their ‘dirty hippie’ ilk are the only ones organizing anti-war protests. Well, those are the only people who have been organizing anything for more than a century – what do you expect.
And Amanda, your tired shilling for the Democratic Party continues to wear thin. Go learn some history before you make more of a fool out of yourself.
Two – you forgot Bernie Sanders (eek – a socialist!!1)
Well, yeah, but from Vermont. You can get elected in Vermont if you have a big extended family that likes you.
LBJ spent his Senate career blocking all civil rights legislation,
collaborating in this with Sen. Richard Russell
see Vol 2 of Caro’s excellent LBJ Bio, _Master_of_the_Senate_
With that history,
Johnson signing of the Voting Rights act was an enormous
turnaround for him, and for the country.
Don’t get me wrong: I hated the guy.
His deterimination to “nail the coonskin to the wall” in Viet Nam was a nearly-exact analogue to W’s conviction that leaving means losing in Iraq.
Can I just say that I find the direction this comment thread has gone a bit strange. Apart from Charles (your points are really interesting, and I’ll respond to them when I get back in a couple of hours) no one has commented on the Freedom Movement.
If you want to discuss current strategy and the Democrats can you do it in the previous thread. I’d like it if future comments on this threads actually mentioned the topic of the post.
The Civil Rights movement is whitewashed in history for a fairly understandable reason: the historians want it to be remembered positively, because they want the emancipation of black Americans to be seen as a positive event.
The radical strain of the movement, specifically, the socialist part, was and is roundly rejected by the American people. Oh, we threw some redistributionist bones to “the people” in the form of a welfare surge, but mainly to deny activists a talking point and to buy some peace. As Charles notes, progressives had to do battle just to get a hearing in the political system.
The comparatively non-radical strain, that of racial equality or at least stopping the racial oppression and segregation, was mainly embraced by the American people, in time. (It wasn’t embraced at the time, but it was accepted enough to have a chance, and is now generally viewed positively outside the most deranged fringe of the white supremacists.)
So popular historians, principally the Polaroid Instamatic version of historians called “journalists”, have emphasized the latter strain while downplaying the former. Malcolm X stands in for the radical side, complete with eventual repudiation of some of his radicalism. If Americans knew the whole story of the radicals, it wouldn’t be a popular story, and the CRM would be remembered by non-leftists as “when the blacks were all marching and demanding communism”.
Instead, the CRM has resonance with us as the stirring tale of heroic resistance to an outdated but dug-in white supremacist establishment, coupled with that establishment’s eventual quasi-noble decision to yield and reform rather than clamp down. People like that story, and it makes them feel good about the civil rights advances gained by blacks at the time.
Which, our media has decided, is more important than providing comfort to future activists, or historical completeness. Real historians have done a much more evenhanded job, and probably 100 years from now when anyone gives a shit about what the real historians have to say, the understanding of the era and its events will be more complete.
It’s arguable, although the effect of the Mississippi summer project was largely that those who were most involved were disillusioned with the political system altogether. Fannie Lou Hamer was a delegate at the 1968 Democratic convention, but the movement had abandoned the Democratic party by that stage.
Nationally I think you’d be hard pressed to argue it made the Democratic party more progressive in the long term (Johnson may be a total shit, and have a whole chant dedicated to his awfulness, but his record is substantially more progressive than Clinton’s). Unfortunately I don’t know nearly as much about the local politics in the south now, as I do about the local politics in the south in the 1960s. So I can’t really comment on the effect of the Dixiecrats leaving.
In the early 1960s there were other attempts to realign the Democratic party. SDS’s Port Huron statement is most famous for its introduction: ” We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit…” But a lot of the rest of the piece is a lot more mundane, and included a plan to realign.
These attempts were, obviously, largely unsuccessful, but the work that was done as part of these attempts was really important, and obviously helped build the movement.
While I think organising to realigning the Democratic party is probably pretty futile (and a damn sight harder now than it was then – given the importance of money in the electoral system), some good would probably come out of an organised attempt to realign the Democratic party that was centred around getting the Democratic party elected.
Here’s the thing, the MFDP, didn’t campaign for Johnson come November. They continued to criticise the Democrats from the left, and didn’t have a problem with other people doing the same.
Robert I think your analysis is hampered by lack of information about the Freedom Movement.
The Civil Rights movement is whitewashed in history for a fairly understandable reason: the historians want it to be remembered positively, because they want the emancipation of black Americans to be seen as a positive event. The radical strain of the movement, specifically, the socialist part, was and is roundly rejected by the American people. Oh, we threw some redistributionist bones to “the people” in the form of a welfare surge, but mainly to deny activists a talking point and to buy some peace. As Charles notes, progressives had to do battle just to get a hearing in the political system.
Or, perhaps historians have got it right; the civil rights movement was in fact about getting rid of racism and getting blacks the right to equal opportunity in America. It’s not an attempt to ignore or eliminate the story of the radicals. It’s just a recognition that the attempt to push American society towards Socialism (which hardly deserves the label “progress”) was an attempt by a small minority of political radicals to piggyback their agenda on a movement whose participants in general rejected it as unrelated (since they wanted equal opportunity, not handouts) and undesirable. It just wasn’t a significant part of the movement.
It wasn’t a small minority, Ron. A lot of people think it was, because of the whitewashing I mentioned. Particularly, Martin Luther King has been de-radicalized for the comfort of white America.
And that’s OK, on balance. The net effect of the CRM was the positive changes for blacks, and for race relations in general. (Scary to think about how bad it used to be, to reflect that today’s fairly awful status really is a big improvement.) So it doesn’t really matter all that much what they were really after; what they actually accomplished turned out for the good.
Maia, what data do you think I am missing in my analysis? I’m always willing to learn more, and perhaps you have a different perspective because of your geographical and social isolation from the events in question. But I studied the 60s movements fairly comprehensively as a young leftist, and still more as an old conservative.
I agree with Amanda! All we have to do is keep voting for democrats and hope really really hard that they maybe give us a moment of their time inbetween funding wars of aggression and larding bills with billions in pork. After all, what else can we do? Winner take all! We’re helpless! Alas!
For the record, I disagree with your main thesis. I think, if anything, it works the other way round. The majority of white people who fought for civil rights were strongly influenced by either Christ or Marx (and sometimes both). Communists were probably the most reliable white group to fight racism in the 1950s and 1960s (Carl and Anne Braden spring to mind, as well as all the red diaper babies in SNCC, the Highlander Folk school, and pre 1960s campaigns particularly against lynching). This should be an indictment on other ideologies, including liberals (who were often too busy red-baiting to actually fight on these issues). The association of communists with the Freedom movement is more likely to strengthen the support for the redistribution of wealth (which according to polls is actually reasonably strong, even if your country), rather than discredit the freedom movement.
But the reason I think you are lacking in information is that most of the time it wasn’t clear to me who you were talking about. Mainly I can’t figure out who you think the non-radical strain of the movement was. There doesn’t seem to be much evidence that the redistribution of wealth was a particularly pivotal division within the movement, and support for the redistribution of wealth was certainly across groups.
I would argue that the primary division within the movement wasn’t based on economics but on modes of organising. The more top down methods of SCLC or the grass-roots style of SNCC (to greatly simplify things).
I’m also really unsure about what you mean by saying people gave the movement enough support to give it a chance. Are you talking here about people, or structures of power?
This also has to be an extremely qualified argument: “coupled with that establishment’s eventual quasi-noble decision to yield and reform rather than clamp down.” It’s not clear whether you’re talking about national establishment, or l0cal establishment. Because I don’t think the national establishment did much reforming, and the local establishment definitely clamped down (up to and including murder).
If you have specific groups or individuals, or power structures, to back up these statements, then I apologise for implying it was lack of information. But without those specifics your post read to me, as someone who was making a bunch of assumptions about the movement which didn’t match up with what happened.
If it helps I agree with this paragraph:
If you substitute ‘ruling class’ for ‘people’.
Regarding the impact of Dixiecrat/Civil Rights Movement on Democratic party in the South: Well, we are living it in the election of George W. Bush and the rise of the theocratic Republican party. It can be argued that the emphasis on religion fills the void that occurred when it no longer became acceptable to emphasize race. It is a proxy for race nonetheless for reasons I won’t go into because it would take too much space.
So the short answer is that it was a gradual decline that occurred among white people, first, in national elections — president, senator, house delegation — in that order. State houses are still surprisingly Democratic, but of course, the majority are very conservative, because elected local officials only have to contend with the local landscape. So the strength of local Democratic politicians in the South has almost no impact on the voting patterns of the majority of state residents in federal elections.
As for LBJ, he was a political tactician who more than likely would diss any group if he thought it would benefit more than it would cost his position. So I don’t make too much of any single incident. The larger picture is clear: he supported major Civil Rights legislation between 1964 and 1966, including Title VII and the VRA, and he did it knowing that it would realign voting patterns in the South for the foreseeable future in a way that would not be positive for his own political fortunes or those of his party. It’s hard for me to imagine any president since having walked with such certainty into the abyss. So however much I dislike LBJ on policy, substance, or style, I believe that the major civil rights accomplishments of the ’60s would not have occurred but for him.
And whatever Maia thinks about the relative merits of the parties, perhaps she should go to some of these Southern states and consult the local blacks about the relative differences. When viewed from their close-up perspective, the differences are apparently meaningful, because the voting patterns of white and black residents are almost mirror images of each other in national elections. As a fellow professional from Mississippi but educated elsewhere once told me in the context of a business transaction in Mississippi: It doesn’t matter what you think it’s about, in Mississippi, anything important is always about race.
Maia:
For the record, I disagree with your main thesis. I think, if anything, it works the other way round.
You think that the media has emphasized the Communist backing of the CRM, and ignored the part about civil rights for black people? (That would be the opposite of my thesis.) Okay. I’m pretty sure that you don’t mean that, so I’m left wondering what you do mean.
Mainly I can’t figure out who you think the non-radical strain of the movement was.
Er…the people involved with it who weren’t (economic) radicals? There were a lot of ordinary people on the ground during those years. Not all of them were Marxists or socialists; some of them were just people who didn’t approve of white supremacy and/or segregation.
I’m also really unsure about what you mean by saying people gave the movement enough support to give it a chance. Are you talking here about people, or structures of power?
Both. The populace didn’t rise up and exterminate the marchers. The power structure (mostly) didn’t shut down free speech and go to martial law when there were disruptions. There were exceptions, tragedies, and crimes, but as a whole, the movement was allowed to organize, allowed to exist, allowed to march, allowed to make its case in the public eye. Yes, the government harassed the leadership, but not in a way that shut down the movement. MLK spent time in the Birmingham jail, he didn’t spend twenty years under house arrest with FBI men guarding the door.
This also has to be an extremely qualified argument: “coupled with that establishment’s eventual quasi-noble decision to yield and reform rather than clamp down.” It’s not clear whether you’re talking about national establishment, or l0cal establishment. Because I don’t think the national establishment did much reforming, and the local establishment definitely clamped down (up to and including murder).
As I thought I had made clear, I am here talking about the narrative, not about the actual historical events.
Barbara:
So however much I dislike LBJ on policy, substance, or style, I believe that the major civil rights accomplishments of the ’60s would not have occurred but for him.
They might have, but not nearly so soon or in nearly so comprehensive a way. LBJ was a bastard, but a bastard in the service of great causes.
It doesn’t matter what you think it’s about, in Mississippi, anything important is always about race.
Man, have you got that right. Purist market fundamentalists who think that all behavior is rationally self-interested behavior should visit Mississippi and watch white people voting themselves poor to spite blacks they’ve never met.
Robert:
I’m a purist market fundamentalist, and I don’t see a conflict between that and irrational voting patterns. According to Bryan Caplan’s theory of rational irrationality, people are most likely to hold irrational views when there is little cost to doing so.
For example, the effect of any one person’s vote on the outcome of any given election is almost certain to be nil, so people, as individuals, pay no price for holding irrational political beliefs. The election’s going to turn out the same no matter how you vote, so you might as well vote in a way that makes you feel good. Conversely, there’s often a real cost to irrational behavior in the marketplace.
The reason that market processes produce better outcomes than political processes isn’t that people are always rational, or even that people always behave rationally in the marketplace (they don’t). It’s that people behave a hell of a lot more rationally in the marketplace than they do in the voting booth. (Well, that and a bunch of other stuff about incentives and prices and feedback mechanisms.)
You don’t have to persuade me of the benefits of a market economy, Brandon. ;)
In Mississippi, poor whites routinely vote down property tax levies to fund the (appalling) schools – because they don’t want blacks to have access to good schools. The fact that their own kids wind up in those schools (there are private schools, which pretty much all upper or middle class whites attend) either doesn’t register, or they’d rather spite the blacks. It’s incredibly stupid.
Robert:
I know. But when, in a room full of leftists, a libertarian suggests that a problem with the democratic process is actually a problem with market processes, it needs correctin’.
I’m not saying I find your explanation implausible—I’d be surprised if there weren’t considerable racist sentiment left among poor Southern whites—but how do you know that this is driven by anti-black sentiment rather than anti-tax sentiment?
Robert:
Well, you are wrong. If you actually read polls from the time, people actually rejected the civil rights movement, making excuses such as “they are demanding too much” and “They are asking to change society to much quickly”. And certainly they saw civil rights leaders as marxists, commies etc….whatever they were or not
Particularly, Martin Luther King has been de-radicalized for the comfort of white America.
Well, equality for blacks in the South (and elsewhere, for that matter) was pretty damn radical, so I wouldn’t necessarily say that.
I would certainly agree that MLK’s image has been edited. For whose comfort I can only speculate. But I’d say that one group would be atheists and secularists. For example, when January 15th rolls around you’ll hear him referred to as “Dr. Martin Luther King”. But if you’re going to use his titles, he is properly referred to as “Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King”. Somehow that rarely makes it into print or electronic media. And whenever he’s quoted, you’ll find that generally all references to a deity are edited out, which if you read his writings or transcripts of his speech you’ll see is a lengthy task. His most important title was “Reverend”, not “Doctor” – he organized and led from his spiritual side, not his academic one. It was the black churches and the white ones that supported them that provided the base for his organization. “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” was to a bunch of Black pastors. His speeches are chock full of scriptural references and preaching, all used to justify his positions. Yet somehow he’s “Dr. Martin Luther King” and very, very few of the sound bites you hear ever show how deeply rooted in religion, and Christianity in particular, his philosophies, hopes, dreams and works were.
Socialists seem quick to claim him as one of their own. Let’s see them embrace the whole man, not just a thin edit of him.
As far as whitewashing any Socialist or Communist tendencies of MLK and the Civil Rights Movement leadership; it’s funny that at the time (and I was around then), the movement’s leadership and other observers held that such allegations were simply a smear campaign mounted by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI to discredit him.
I’m not going to say that there weren’t Socialists, etc., involved in the movement. There certainly were. I’m saying that they’re getting short shrift by the historians because their efforts and effects in piggybacking Socialism onto the Civil Rights movement just weren’t that important. It was never really the focus of the movement, so there’s no particular need to comment on it a lot.
In fact, one of the main tenets of those working for racial equality and civil rights in the United States all the way back to Frederick Douglass have held that they did NOT want governmental handouts; they weren’t looking for welfare or “reparations” or any other Socialist program. They were simply looking for equality of opportunity, and were quite willing to depend on their own resources. Never mind the fact that to have tried to change that and base the fight for Civil Rights on socialism would have been political and social poison. It simply was against the entire philosophy of the racial equality movement, which was to include blacks fully into American society, not to pervert it so as to make them a special case.
RonF: You do realize King’s doctorate was in theology, right?
Also, ‘socialism’ (a very broad ideology) is not necessarily atheistic in nature. For example, here in Canada, the CCF (precursor to our social democratic party, the NDP) was born out of the Social Gospel movement. A valiant attempt at vilifying the ignorant, atheist straw-commies, regardless.
As far as I can tell, Ron, you’re criticizing a nonexistent problem. A lexis search of major newspapers shows that they’ve used the phrase “Dr. Martin Luther King” 102 times in the past month, versus 97 uses of the phrase “Rev. Martin Luther King” — a completely inconsequential difference.
I’m not expert enough on the freedom movement to be able to refute what you say about their priorities, but you’re not citing any historians or documentation either. Although MLK didn’t represent the whole of the movement, his writings make it clear that he considered being anti-poverty and anti-war essential parts of his activism, not irrelevant side issues.
It’s true that MLK wasn’t a communist, but as far as I can tell he did favor what I’d call a form of mixed-market socialism:
Ron continues:
Again, I don’t know how representative MLK’s views were of the movement as a whole (although given his leadership role in the SCLC, it seems clear that his views had a significant constituency), but what you say here certainly isn’t true of his views. He advocated a basic universal income, for example.
It’s always been my impression that the Welfare Rights movement of the 1960s and 70s and the Civil Rights movement had a lot of overlap, and saw each other as complementary — or even as different parts of the same Movement — not adversarial. But I could be mistaken about that; I’m not a historian.
I would call King a democratic socialist, as a first approximation. He was a unique man, and we’re probably not going to find a perfect label.
As far as usages of MLK’s titles go, I’m referencing more what I hear on TV and see in the Chicago Tribune during Black History Month and 1/15. Not a scientific sample, I’ll grant.
I’d stand by the editing of his remarks. His work is heavily invested with references to God, God’s law, scripture, etc., but you see little of that in the sound bites, etc., every 1/15.
That’s an interesting set of quotes from MLK; it’s not surprising that in seeking equal rights for a downtrodden group he’d touch on the subject of economics and society. And as you noted, there’s a big difference between a few quotes from one man and a general theme of the movement.
His economics and science are a bit shaky there. “Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that’s two-thirds water?” Well, let’s see. First, the world is not 2/3 water, although 2/3 of it is covered with what is a relatively thin layer of water. Second, my guess is that about 95% or more of it is undrinkable, being ocean water or polluted naturally or unnaturally. Water has to be collected, purified, pumped, and distributed, and all the human labor and infrastructure dedicated to that has to be paid for. The amazing thing is that it costs so little; but then, the U.S. is blessed with adequate resources (not that we aren’t doing our damndest to screw them up), whereas other countries have limitations. Sure, the questions have to be asked. But there are very good answers for all of them.
Am I my brother’s keeper? I do think we all have a responsibility to each other. I hold that the level of responsibility is something that each individual has a right to determine for themselves, and that government should be the last resort, not the first, to fulfill that responsibility.
mattbastard, as far as his Doctorate in Theology goes, that was the result of his spirituality and his desire to explore it, not the source.
“You need to learn baby learn so you can earn baby earn” never sounded like much of a socialist sentiment to me! I agree with Maia that what has been emphasized are well-known public statements of MLK Jr. over private writings — but I think it’s also fair to say that MLK did distinguish between his “public ministry” and his own private views in different ways. His first priority was ensuring equal legal treatment for African Americans, and I don’t think it’s unfair to emphasize that part of his message. He clearly tailored what he said, to some degree, in order to promote acceptance of his “core” mission, and that was already too radical for many people. To put it another way, he would have been happier in a free market system that ended racial inequality than a socialist one that tolerated it.
King vehemently opposed the Vietnam War as well as US anti-communist invervention in places such as Latin America, saying that the US was “on the wrong side of a world revolution”. He blamed capitalists for the direction the country was taking.
King also supported a guaranteed minimum income and an economic bill of rights. At the time of his death, he was organizing the Poor People’s Campaign, “a multiracial army of the poor” that would descend on Washington until a poor people’s bill of rights was enacted. This was by far the most ambitious and wide-scale project he had worked on in his life up until that point. And of course, tragically, his life only led up until that point.
He didn’t “touch upon” poverty and economics, Ron. They were as central to his politics as racial equality. You’re right that he didn’t ask for “government handouts”. No, he called for a “radical changes in the structure of our society” to redistribute power and wealth. He wouldn’t have approved of the welfare programs that would succeed him; not because it gave too much, but because it gave too little.
It seems that all the reasons why the CRM couldn’t possibly have been socialist in nature go around in a circle. The CRM wasn’t socialist because its supporters defended it from allegations of socialism, forgetting how grave that charge was back then – as evidenced by the fact that CRM’s detractors labelled it as such, which of course does not count as evidence that it WAS socialist, whereas its proponents’ of the same somehow does. The CRM wasn’t socialist because King only strongly denounced poverty and wealth disparity in his private life. (Never mind that King was only the public face of a movement whose body was made of far more radical elements.) No, in the years before his death, he made many fiery speeches about capitalism and imperialism that aren’t remembered today because of the whitewashing of the record, a distortion that even many free market right wingers accept to have occurred. The CRM wasn’t socialist because its focus was only on race and legal issues, since that was all that we got out of it and that’s all I learned about it. You figure this one out.
I’d agree with you for the most part, Robert, except I don’t know if the whitewashing occurred to protect the CRM (Freedom Movement, fine) or the current structure of wealth and power. It’s entirely possible it could have started out with the former, but I doubt how important such considerations are today, when being the friend of a friend’s cousin’s socialist wife no longer means you wake up in a windowless three by three cell in the middle of the night.
I’m still hesitant to label the FM socialist definitely; there was enough internal variation that the safest thing we can agree on was that it was race-based insurrection of the leftist persuasion. But the heart of its philosophy is certainly not amenable to that of a corporate capitalist system that has been okely-dokely reformed by some laws against overt – and dammit, I mean OVERT – racism.
“For example, the effect of any one person’s vote on the outcome of any given election is almost certain to be nil, so people, as individuals, pay no price for holding irrational political beliefs. The election’s going to turn out the same no matter how you vote, so you might as well vote in a way that makes you feel good. Conversely, there’s often a real cost to irrational behavior in the marketplace.”
This completely doesn’t jibe with the rest of right wing philosophy. By this reasoning, people will act most rationally where the danger of market discipline is most severe – which means those on the brink of starvation or unemployment, no? If not, please explain to me why having an underperforming portfolio or even the risk of having no pension fund is comparable to the risk having no job or a home that isn’t shared by rodent vectors of the bubonic plague. If so, then that means market rationality is most consistently exemplified by those getting the shaft end of the system… isn’t wealth the reward for market rationality? We should something in the way of a revolving door income mobility, sort of like the one that exists in north Europe, whose dogged toughness toward poor citizens is legend.
But of course, I’m sure there are mitigating factors out there somewhere. Any random assortment of crackpot social theories that always end up justifying the same class of fat old rich guys at the top.
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