A Comparison of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X in the Black and Mainstream Press, 1955-2011

<p>Most historians of the black protest movement claim that the mainstream media misrepresented Martin Luther King and Malcolm X as opposing figures, without detailing how the media achieved this, how these representations influenced King and Malcolm X’s posthumous media images, or how African-American media representations of the pair differed from mainstream representations. In order to understand how this misrepresentation came to be, and what its implications were for memory of the two after their deaths, this thesis examines the representation of King and Malcolm X in mainstream and African-American newspapers from the beginnings of their public careers until 2011. Newspapers drew on their pre-existing views of American race relations to evaluate the importance of King and Malcolm X. During their lifetimes newspapers selectively conveyed the ideologies of both men, embracing King’s leadership while distrusting Malcolm X. After their deaths, newspapers sanctified King and discussed him extensively, often confining his significance to the battle against legal segregation in the South. Newspapers gave Malcolm X less attention at first, but rehabilitated him later, beginning with African-American newspapers. The failure of the black protest movement to end racial disparities in standards of living, combined with King’s appropriation by the mainstream media, paved the way for much greater attention to Malcolm X by the late 1980s. By this time, newspapers represented King and Malcolm X as politically compatible, but continued to give them distinct personas that still affect public images of African-American leaders, such as Barack Obama, to this day.</p>

A Comparison of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X in the Black and Mainstream Press, 1955-2011

<p>Most historians of the black protest movement claim that the mainstream media misrepresented Martin Luther King and Malcolm X as opposing figures, without detailing how the media achieved this, how these representations influenced King and Malcolm X’s posthumous media images, or how African-American media representations of the pair differed from mainstream representations. In order to understand how this misrepresentation came to be, and what its implications were for memory of the two after their deaths, this thesis examines the representation of King and Malcolm X in mainstream and African-American newspapers from the beginnings of their public careers until 2011. Newspapers drew on their pre-existing views of American race relations to evaluate the importance of King and Malcolm X. During their lifetimes newspapers selectively conveyed the ideologies of both men, embracing King’s leadership while distrusting Malcolm X. After their deaths, newspapers sanctified King and discussed him extensively, often confining his significance to the battle against legal segregation in the South. Newspapers gave Malcolm X less attention at first, but rehabilitated him later, beginning with African-American newspapers. The failure of the black protest movement to end racial disparities in standards of living, combined with King’s appropriation by the mainstream media, paved the way for much greater attention to Malcolm X by the late 1980s. By this time, newspapers represented King and Malcolm X as politically compatible, but continued to give them distinct personas that still affect public images of African-American leaders, such as Barack Obama, to this day.</p>

Seeing Like an Activist

There are few movements more firmly associated with civil disobedience than the civil rights movement. In the mainstream imagination, civil rights activists eschewed coercion, appealed to the majority’s principles, and submitted willingly to legal punishment in order to demand necessary legislative reforms—and facilitate the realization of core constitutional and democratic principles. Their fidelity to the spirit of the law, commitment to civility, and allegiance to American democracy provided the blueprint for activists pursuing racial justice and set the normative horizon for liberal philosophies of civil disobedience. Seeing Like an Activist charts the emergence of this influential account of civil disobedience in the civil rights movement and demonstrates its reliance on a narrative about black protest that is itself entangled with white supremacy. Liberal political theorists whose work informed decades of scholarship saw civil disobedience “like a white state”: taking for granted the legitimacy of the constitutional order, assuming as primary the ends of constitutional integrity and stability, centering the white citizen as the normative ideal, and figuring the problem of racial injustice as limited, exceptional, and all-but-already solved. In contrast, building on historical and archival evidence, this book shows how civil rights activists, in concert with anticolonial movements across the globe, turned to civil disobedience as a practice of decolonization in order to emancipate themselves and others from a racial order that needed to be fully transformed. We can recover this powerful alternative account only by adopting a different theoretical approach—one which sees activists as themselves engaged in the creative work of political theorizing.

#BlackProtest from the web to the streets and back: Feminist digital activism in Poland and narrative potential of the hashtag

In this article, I would like to take a somewhat closer look at the politics of hashtags surrounding wave of street actions known as Black Protest (Czarny Protest), held nation-wide in Poland on October 2016. Analysing the use of social media as the form of digital activism, I strive at both mitigating the fallacy of digital dualism and demystifying the notion of ‘Twitter revolutions’. The term was popularized by over-enthusiastic accounts of the social movements between 2009 and 2011. I propose to see the employment of social media platforms as the form of weak opposition and to some extent, to explain its efficiency by the ability to reclaim and mobilize the narrative power of hashtags. ‘Weak’ here means everyday, often mundane, and hence under-recognized acts as opposed to activity considered ‘heroic’ and placed in the spotlight, with all gender-based ideological and interpretative undercurrents associated with such a juxtaposition.

Atlantic Affinities

This Chapter deals with Anglophilia as an animating principle in a lot American anti-slavery thought and practice. It begins with an account of how early anti-slavery activists appropriated Wilberforce, Clarkson and Sharp into their rituals, before moving on to discuss how after 1833 William Lloyd Garrisonian and his supporters deliberately set out to create a continuous link between the British past and the American present, perhaps most evident in the elevation of 1 August (Emancipation Day in the Caribbean) into the American abolitionist calendar. These affinities cut across racial lines. African Americans were just as quick to appropriate figures such as Wilberforce and Clarkson, weaving them into a black protest tradition that elevated abolitionism into a global struggle, even if in doing so they put themselves at personal risk. Anglophilia not only shaped how the American anti-slavery movement should be understood but also how it should be remembered.

Shooting Back

Chapter 7 explores the powerful, deliberate, and fresh iconography that Black Lives Matter activists have inspired. They have used historic juxtapositions, symbolic deaths, and satiric Internet memes to create supporting imagery for their news stories. Many of these approaches have evolved the images of black protest—from the iconic photographs of snarling German shepherds and lunch counter sit-ins, to the contemporary depictions of human chains across highways and mass die-ins.

Disobedience In Black

Philosophical and political questions about the legitimacy of uncivil disobedience have been a core preoccupation of African American political thought since its inception. Additionally, a systematic misreading of black protest movements, particularly the US Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, has been a fundamental referent for philosophical defenses of a right to civil disobedience. This essay takes Candice Delmas’s defense of uncivil disobedience as a point of departure to reflect on how African American political thought challenges dominant liberal understandings of dissent, and to consider the conceptions of political obligation that should accompany accounts of principled lawbreaking.

De/Constructing White Supremacy: Contending Antipodal Politics in Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940)

Arguably, fear, anger and despair dominate the poor, uneducated, twenty-year-old Bigger Thomas’s daily existence in Richard Wright’s Native Son. Nevertheless, old lies of white supremacy that have held black people in perpetual turmoil are crushed through violent reaction when Bigger strikes at white hegemony through the killing of Mary Dalton. This backlash throws the white community into panic mode. Apparently, African Americans’ increased susceptibility to the inferiority complex of the 1930s was dictated by the dubious racial stratification that allotted a place of superiority to the white race over the black race, which was considered inferior. This misconception was supported by Arthur de Gobineau’s The Inequality of Human Races ([1853] 1915) and Lucien Levy-Bruhl’s How Natives Think (1926). Bigger’s humanity, like that of other African-American youth of this period, is overwhelmed by the racial prejudices of the supremacist whites which demand that they must be meek, submissive and self-debased. As summed up at the trial of Bigger, American society gives black people no options in life and essentially denies them the basic rights of all humans to fulfil their destiny in relationship to the measure of their intelligence and talents. These denials have led to anger, shame and fear which have snowballed into crime and murder. We may, without difficulty, agree that Wright’s portrayal of the killing of Mary is not in any way designed to make Bigger a hero of the black protest against racial marginality. Rather, Bigger is created to accentuate the effects of suffocating social conditions that could turn an individual into an American “native son” raised in an atmosphere of transcendental hopelessness and weaned on the diet of violence, hatred and viciousness which provided the immediate platform for the launching of a backlash against American racism. Using the foregoing as its standpoint, this article examines white/black antipodes and race tensions in Richard Wright’s Native Son. It employs the Freudian conceptual construct of the human psyche, divided into the id, ego and superego, as a theoretical framework. A parallel of the hypothesis is conceived to expound the white/black taxonomy in race discourse. In Freudian psychology, the id is irrational and it projects pleasure principles. The ego is, however, rational and mature, while the superego mediates between the id and the ego. These paradigms are used to explore the collective psyche of race theorists in the paper.