Integration or Separation? Malcolm X’s College Debates, Free Speech, and the Challenge to Racial Liberalism on Campus

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 1033-1059
Author(s):  
Garrett Felber
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Free Speech ◽  
Cumulative Effect ◽  
Youth Participation ◽  
Malcolm X ◽  
Nation Of Islam ◽  
Student Union ◽  
Racial Liberalism

Abstract Malcolm X participated in over thirty speaking engagements at prominent colleges and universities between 1960 and 1963. His popularity on campuses coincided with a new epoch of civil rights struggle as students became involved in Freedom Rides and sit-in campaigns to desegregate lunch counters and interstate travel. Most invitations were debates on the topic “Integration or Separation?” which pitted Malcolm against an integrationist opponent. The insertion of racial separatism into a discourse that took integration as an unquestioned aim of the movement pushed students to question and defend their own understandings of racial liberalism. Nearly a dozen invitations were extended by NAACP student chapters that had been revitalized amid the new flurry of student involvement. Years before the founding of the first Black Student Union (BSU) at San Francisco State, these chapters were far more ideologically diverse and active than their forbearers, and often invited Malcolm X to speak out of a commitment to students’ rights to free speech and academic freedom. When administrations blocked and cancelled his visits, students became politicized around issues of academic liberties, thereby situating the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X at the nexus of early debates within the student free speech movement. These became part of the early challenge to university paternalism. While these debates and lectures have often been discussed individually, this essay looks at their cumulative effect by situating them during the emergence of student radicalism on campus and the growth of youth participation in the civil rights movement.

The Department Store Movement in the Postwar Era

2019 ◽  
pp. 116-147
Author(s):  
Traci Parker
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Department Store ◽  
Community Leaders ◽  
Department Stores ◽  
Preliminary Testing ◽  
White Community ◽  
Racial Liberalism ◽  
The Relationship

Chapter 4 considers the department store movement and the birth of a modern middle-class consciousness in the 1940s and 1950s. Department stores remained key battlegrounds and took on greater significance as black purchasing power had reached an unprecedented level of $8-9 million by 1947 and the relationship between consumption and citizenship had changed. For the most part, the department store movement remained a fight for jobs in the immediate postwar era, taking on consumer issues as it saw fit. This phase of the movement marked a period of preliminary testing that would eventually lead to militant protests in the 1950s and 1960s. Under the leadership of the National Urban League (NUL) and American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), the movement relied on intercultural education and moral exhortations. Emblematic of racial liberalism and the early civil rights movement, the NUL and AFSC believed that if respectable blacks and white community leaders simply asked store officials to hire African Americans in sales and clerical, they would, and after that “their attitude about integrated workplaces and African Americans generally would change,” helping them “topple barriers in other industries and locations.”

God, Morality, and Politics

1979 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-9
Author(s):  
Eugene Carson Blake
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Chief Executive ◽  
National Council ◽  
World Council Of Churches ◽  
The World ◽  
Church And Society ◽  
World Council ◽  
National Council Of Churches

Eugene Carson Blake has in recent years been actively associated with the Christian citizens' movement, Bread for the World. Before retiring as Secretary of the World Council of Churches in 1972, he served both church and society in many leading capacities, as a distinguished pastor, the chief executive officer of his denomination (the United Presbyterian Church), university and seminary trustee, and president of the National Council of Churches. In 1960, he preached a sermon in the Episcopal Cathedral of San Francisco, where the late James A. Pike was Bishop. This sermon, welcomed by the Bishop, led to the establishment of the Consultation on Church Union. In the forefront of the civil rights movement, Blake was jailed, vilified, and denounced as a communist. In 1978, he was made the subject of a biography, Eugene Carson Blake: Prophet With Portfolio, by R. Douglas Brackenridge (Seabury Press). This present essay is a revised version of an address delivered at Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas, as “The Willson Lecture.”

Does the Movement Need a King?

2016 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 465-470 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER J. LING
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Malcolm X ◽  
Henry Louis Gates ◽  
Cornel West ◽  
Martin Luther King

Not every book sent for review comes with two pages of endorsements from the great and the good. Stokely is accompanied by glowing approval from such familiar names as Henry Louis Gates, Cornel West, Robin D. G. Kelley, Michael Eric Dyson, Gerald Horne, Charles Oglethorpe, and David Levering Lewis. Even without the para-textual apparatus to guide one's judgement, however, there is enough in this biography of Stokely Carmichael for any scholar of the civil rights movement to relish. This may not be the “definitive biography” that John Stauffer declares it to be, but it is indisputably important. In essence, Joseph argues that Stokely is the missing panel in a triptych of heroes, flanked on either side by the already canonized Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. In key respects, he insists, Stokely was the synthesis of Malcolm and Martin.

New Directions

2018 ◽  
pp. 144-168
Author(s):  
Elaine Allen Lechtreck
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Malcolm X ◽  
Catholic Bishop ◽  
New Directions ◽  
Sanitation Workers ◽  
Bobby Seale

This chapter depicts directions far removed from the nonviolent civil rights movement. It includes the rhetoric and actions of New Leaders such as Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Bobby Seale, and James Forman, descriptions of incendiary riots, ministerial responses to the riots, the efforts of Rev. Frank McRae to end the Sanitation Workers Strike in Memphis, King’s assassination, and the dramatic Demand for Reparations. Significant were the responses to the events from Episcopal Bishop John Hines, Rev. Dr. Ralph Sockman, John Morris of the Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity (ESCRU), W. W. Finlator, Rev. Ed King, and Rabbi James Wax. Also significant were the transformation of Roman Catholic Bishop Joseph Durick, the changes in the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee (SNCC), and the new directions of Will Campbell who began to see that the racist was perhaps the greatest challenge of the day.

Beginnings

2020 ◽  
pp. 13-48
Author(s):  
Johanna Fernández
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Malcolm X ◽  
Structural Racism ◽  
Black Panthers ◽  
The Social ◽  
Federal Housing ◽  
Young Lords ◽  
The City

In 1968, José “Cha Cha” Jiménez sat in solitary confinement wrestling with his record of recidivism. He was the leader of the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican and Mexican gang, which he’d joined to survive Chicago’s mean streets. But his life was about to change. Like other Puerto Rican, Mexican and black American youth, Cha Cha’s people were recent migrants to the city who’d been displaced by urban renewal— structural racism in the form federal housing policy —which forced them to settle in densely populated blocks on the edges of white ethnic neighborhoods. Outnumber, they faced hostility, reaction, and even terror from white resident who resented their presence in Chicago. But with the new confidence produced by the civil rights movement, street organizations like the Young Lords desegregated public spaces with brawn and asserted the rights of racialized people to the city. The social movements also opened up possibilities for self-transformation. Like Malcolm X, Cha Cha was politicized in prison. He transformed the gang into the Black Panthers’ Puerto Rican counterpart—a herculean feat made possible by a series of unforeseen circumstances and conscious interventions, including that of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton and his Rainbow Coalition.

Narrative inversion as a tactical framing device

2010 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 124-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriel A. Acevedo ◽  
James Ordner ◽  
Miriam Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Nation Of Islam ◽  
Master Narrative ◽  
Racial Reconciliation ◽  
Narrative Strategy ◽  
Discursive Analysis ◽  
Counter Narrative ◽  
Counter Narratives ◽  
The Empirical Analysis

This paper will draw from recent work in the study of counter-narratives and will apply a sociologically informed perspective to the empirical analysis of discourse. By focusing on the Black Nationalist group The Nation of Islam (NOI) this article will introduce the counter-narrative strategy of “narrative inversion.” Based on discursive analysis of textual materials from early NOI speeches, recordings, and writings, we hope to show how the NOI employed a specific framing tactic of inverting American and Judeo-Christian master narratives to create a powerful ideological schema for attracting potential members. Our analysis demonstrates that early organizers of the NOI created counter-narratives by positioning themselves in direct opposition to the pervasive master narrative of white superiority. We will compare the NOI’s countering strategy to that of Martin Luther King’s moderate civil rights movement and show how the NOI was also able to capitalize on the more restrained messages of racial integration, non-violent protest, and racial reconciliation emanating from the moderate civil rights movement. The discursive process of inverting more moderate messages explains, to a great extent, the movement’s early success as a radical alternative to the mainstream civil rights movement.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Amanda Brown
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Psychological Transformation ◽  
Early Expression ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Long Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Howard Thurman

This chapter introduces the African American intellectual and theologian Howard Thurman and the physical embodiment of his thought: the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples. The Fellowship Church, which Thurman cofounded in San Francisco in 1944, was the nation’s first interracial, intercultural, and interfaith church. Amid the growing nationalism of the World War II era and the heightened suspicion of racial and cultural “others,” it successfully established a pluralistic community based on the idea “that if people can come together in worship, over time would emerge a unity that would be stronger than socially imposed barriers.” Rooted in the belief that social change was inextricably connected to internal, psychological transformation and the personal realization of the human community, it was an early expression of Christian nonviolent activism within the long civil rights movement. The Introduction locates the Fellowship Church within its historical context and argues that, rather than being “56 years ahead of his time” as the SF Gate reported in 2010, the Fellowship Church was actually right on time—a distinct product of its historical moment and a provocative expression of midcentury liberal American thought.

James Baldwin’s Apocalypse

2020 ◽  
pp. 23-46
Author(s):  
Dan Sinykin
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
Black Writers ◽  
Malcolm X ◽  
Ishmael Reed ◽  
Amiri Baraka ◽  
Sun Ra ◽  
Economic Liberalism ◽  
Aesthetic Form

In the 1970s, critics asked, what happened to James Baldwin? In The Fire Next Time, Baldwin called for a moral revolution in which each American would radically transform and save America from racial warfare. A decade later, in No Name in the Street, Baldwin delivered an analysis of the failures of economic liberalism that heralded a generic shift in his literary career, transforming him from a prophet of the jeremiad—the nationalist holding out hope for American exceptionalism through individual reformation—to an apocalyptic visionary. The chapter shows how Baldwin’s apocalyptic turn—yet unregistered in the scholarship—emerged from a milieu of apocalypticism among black writers and artists in the mid- to late 1960s, including Amiri Baraka, Sun Ra, Ishmael Reed, and Malcolm X, all searching for an aesthetic form to solve a problem of political agency for black Americans in the wake of the civil rights movement.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document