Feeling Riots

This chapter reflects upon the multiple interpretations of major urban rebellions in the United States between 1964-1969 to understand how descriptions of the major race riots, especially the metaphor of the powderkeg, created and reflected racialized political feelings where hopelessness replaced hope as the emotional framework for racial liberalism and as the possibility of integration ebbed. The assassinations of John Kennedy and, later, Malcolm X, along with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 evacuated black hope from political liberalism and replaced it with different political emotions, including rage, frustration, and fear. Blacks feared white terrorism and whites feared blacks. This impasse augmented the hopelessness and anger that undergirded riots. It prompted the passage of the 1967 DC Crime Bill and helped undermine the 1968 Civil Rights Bill as protest was elided with crime in news accounts and in public policy, effectively mystifying the context and content of urban rebellion. As the War on Poverty transformed into the War on Crime, feelings became a major rhetorical vector of policy discussions about urban rebellion. Law and order rhetoric reasserted white statism as the only permissible loyalty and effectively harnessed white anxiety and anger towards ending any possibility of black equality through the law.

A Movement Forgotten

While they came up short in achieving equality for former slaves, the first movement abolitionist program of black uplift and its commitment to African American rights and incorporation helped nurture a generation of reformers who would continue this racially redemptive quest. If they could not vanquish white prejudice, first movement abolitionists understood that eradicating the inequities of slavery required more than ending the institution of human bondage alone. Just as importantly, completing abolition meant reconstructing the society that made slavery a viable institution in the first place; a lesson well taken in the Post-Civil War South. The most enduring legacy of America’s first abolition movement was its abiding faith that a world free from black oppression and racial inequality was possible. It was this audacity to imagine such a society that inspired not only first movement abolitionists, but likeminded exponents of black equality and racial justice that would follow in their footsteps—from immediate abolitionists in the antebellum period to Radical Republicans during Reconstruction, and beyond.

W. E. B. Du Bois, Respectable Child-Rearing, and the Representative Black Body

This chapter examines W.E.B. Du Bois’s food politics by closely scrutinizing the health-related advice he gave to his daughter, Yolande Du Bois. This chapter demonstrates that Du Bois and many other middle-class race leaders, self-anointed or otherwise, took great pains to control their children’s diets and to impart the significance of making thoughtful food choices. Du Bois considered black bodies, particularly those of the elite members of the black community, as exhibits of black equality and saw the task of preserving the black body as one not only of enormous individual concern but of significance to the advancement of the entire race.

Narrating the Present-Past in Frederick Douglass’s Life and Times

This chapter finds in Frederick Douglass’s final autobiography a case study for what it means to narrate the present-past. The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass points backward to bondage, bringing the author face to face with his former master. For nineteenth- and twenty-first-century readers alike, the tableau of the ex-slave sharing a sentimental moment with the man who once abused him suggests that the radical abolitionist had become a reactionary. But this chapter advances a different interpretation of the signal episode. By underscoring the elisions, revisions, and omissions that distinguish this moment in Life and Times from contemporaneous news coverage of the event, and by deploying narrative theory to illuminate both accounts, the chapter argues that Douglass’s work enacts the challenge of fighting for black equality amid a political landscape that posed the forgetting of bondage as the condition for national reunion.

The Spirit of Brown

This chapter lays the foundation for an understanding of the socio-legal race problem and possible solutions. It begins with the Supreme Court’s inglorious racial history in which the Court, from Dred Scott up to Brown v. Board of Education, engaged in a pattern and practice of sabotaging black equality granted by Congress. Racial oppression, including the torture and murder of blacks without trial, was part of a national narrative largely written by the Supreme Court. Brown was a conscious attempt by the Court to reverse its inglorious racial past. Brown had a profound effect on racial progress, changing the legal status of blacks which in turn greatly improved their socioeconomic and socio-cultural position in our society. But the Court, in the years following this landmark decision, did not remain faithful to the spirit of Brown. It began to impede black progress through its civil rights rulings by suppressing the black equality interest litigated in those cases. This is juridical subordination, which can be resolved if the Supreme Court remains faithful to the spirit of Brown. This is good social policy.

Juridical Subordination

This chapter focuses on the socio-legal race problem; namely juridical subordination. The Supreme Court engages in this form of racial subordination when its rulings freeze or impede racial progress for the sake of pursuing a nonracist, competing interest. Juridical subordination most often occurs today in the name of racial progress; in other words, when the Court’s vindication of a black equality norm (such as racial omission or racial integration) in reality inhibits black advancement. Since the end of Jim Crow, the black equality interest has been defined in ways that compete not only with the civil-rights-era norms but with other legitimate norms. Focusing on cases involving antidiscrimination law and racial preference (or affirmative action) law, this chapter illustrates how the Court can avoid juridical subordination in its civil rights cases.

Equality

This chapter examines the spiritualists' uniquely egalitarian sense of individual liberty that underlay their view of society and reform and reflected, in part, the relatively inclusive nature of the movement. Radical spiritualists—which, at least for a time, included most of them—believed that emancipation should lead beyond the absence of slavery toward black equality. They saw a complete and critical reexamination of U.S. policy toward the Indians as inseparable from emancipation and black equality. Having always advocated women's rights on one level, they became increasingly predisposed to a practical egalitarianism. The chapter first considers how spiritualism became a kind of secularist Western Christianity before turning to spiritualists' discussion of race, gender, and racial equality, their views on slavery and emancipation, and their special kinship with Native Americans. It also looks at how the Civil War unfolded into a struggle for slave liberation while also emancipating a radicalism in the Republican Party with a heavy dose of social radicalism and persistent calls for a thorough reconstruction of American civilization.

Taking Charge in North Carolina

This chapter describes the role of Chambers's law practice and law firm as a locus and focal point of the African American struggle for racial equality in North Carolina from the mid-1960s onward. Chambers and the firm were well known to African Americans in every corner of the state, and Chambers provided legal representation, mostly free of charge, to civil rights demonstrators and activists of every persuasion and mode of protest while also advancing the interests of black citizens in other ways. In 1968, James Ferguson managed Rev. Dr. Reginald Hawkins's gubernatorial campaign, designed to energize the state's newly enfranchised black electorate. Ferguson and Adam Stein represented and insurgent, racially-mixed delegation from North Carolina at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Stein assisted striking black cafeteria workers at UNC-Chapel Hill, adroitly securing most of their goals despite a highly-charged political atmosphere. Ferguson convinced a disciplinary panel at Duke University to forego punishment of black students who had occupied the administration building. Working ceaselessly, Chambers and his partners encountered racist judges, endured the occasional missed paycheck, but kept on, persuaded that their work was essential to the goal of full black equality.