Welcome to the third meeting of this Black Kos-hosted reading group of Thomas Sugrue's
Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North.
Of course, you don't have to be a member of Black Kos to join this discussion; it's open for anybody and the more, the merrier! Come and join us on The Porch every Monday night at 7:30-ish (postponed last night, my apologies! for the next 7 or so weeks.
Tonight we will be covering Chapter 3, titled "1776 for the Negro," which will complete the first part of the book titled "Unite and Fight."
Weeks One and Two discussions are here for your review.
Chapter 3: 1776 for the Negro
Objective Summary: Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma: an "objective" view at the American race "problem"- Myrdal believed that American morality and the "American social reform tradition" would lead to a solution- AAD focused on the South but saw the inequities of the North and that Northern whites were blind to the race "problem"-Myrdal downplays "black political activism" and the critiques of labor and public policy by leftists-Northern white resistance to black protests, esp. w/r/t military segregation and employment in defense plants-riots in Harlem and Detroit-The effects of Executive Order 8802-New demands for inclusion by blacks during and because of The Second World War.
Well, I never did get to reading even one page of Myrdal's An American Dilemma (so much on my plate!) but it is interesting that Sugrue seems to be tracing, in part the casting of the black civil rights movement as a "morality play" to Myrdal; for example, "the challenge of solving the America's Negro problem would be to appeal to the moral sentiments and the reason of ordinary white Americans" and that Myrdal "tapped a deep root in the American reform tradition: a faith in human perfectibility." (p. 60). Myrdal, in Sugrue's reading, casts the South as "the enemy" and even, dare I say, an exception, to "the American reform tradition" and Northern whites as "innocents" and as a place where the institutions were in place where black people, with some white help and "social engineering", could solve the "Negro problem."
Sugrue's "takedown" of Myrdal seems pretty brutal but with a gentle touch and is best summed up by his overall view that Myrdal "advocated for social change not structural change"; a sort of do-gooder version of good ole' American rugged individualism (which was never meant for black folks anyway). Sugrue also (rightly) notes Myrdal's reliance on the empirical social science data as opposed to the empirical reality of what seems to be going on in the streets around him at the time of AAD's writing; two very different stories, to be sure.
There is a sharp contrast here with the black uprisings that followed (for the most part) World War I and the black uprisings during World War II (esp. those that took place in Detroit and Harlem). Clearly, black people and black leadership had every reason not to trust a Democratic administration when one considers the segregation inherent in New Deal programs, the unwillingness of President Roosevelt to support anti-lynching legislation, and having to fight and protest simply to gain wartime employment in defense plants. Last but not least there was the utter hypocrisy of asking blacks to help fight against freedom abroad while remaining oppressed at home. Sugrue lays out graphically that at every level of black society from soldiers to prospective defense plant workers; from newly arriving migrants from the South to black domestics with "growing insolence" (p. 66) that black people were not only in revolt but were meeting resistance from Northern whites.
And the much heralded Executive Order 8802, which banned racial discrimination in defense plants, was proving to be toothless and merely "rhetorical" in many cases yet, as Sugure states, was occasionally effective not only increasing black employment in defense industries, but in revealing the workplace discrimination against blacks in those jobs and served to have a "galvanic effect on civil rights activists" themselves (p. 71).
After all, protests and marches and even riots were beginning to show some tangible results. And, with the emergence of the United States as the post-war superpower on the world stage, Sugrue shows a black community more than willing to join their fellow Americans on that world stage and, if need be, to call out American hypocrisy w/r/t to the supposed "Negro problem."
Next Week: Chapters 4 and 5
1943 Detroit Race Riots
An optimistic overview of African Americans and The New Deal from The Roosevelt Institute
James Baldwin- Notes of a Native Son- Baldwin's account of the death of his father and the 1943 Harlem Riots