Welcome to the second 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 for the next 7 or so weeks. Tonight we will be covering Chapters 1 and 2 and here's last week's discussion to get you started. Week 1 meeting and discussion.
Chapter 1: Sweet Land of Liberty Objective Sypnosis: - Some biography on Anna Arnold Hedgeman: Childhood in Anoka, Minnesota- graduation from Hamline University- teaching career at Rust College in Mississippi-movement back North through Springfield, Ohio (where she seemingly begins to see "Jim Crow northern-style") and eventually to New Jersey and Harlem-her radicalization from promoting "racial uplift" to seeing and understanding the systemic intertwining of race and class- "fusion of religion and radicalism"-bittersweet experience of the 1963 March on Washington. - Separatist movements that already existed within the black community in Harlem- basically the United Negro Improvement Association headed by Jamacian immigrant Marcus Garvey, which "offered a compelling vision of self-help and a celebration of pride in African ancestry"-lingering effects of UNIA influence. -Panorama of black intellectuals and artists in Harlem- The Great Depression and the Communist Party-Communist Party the most willing to help out black activists-internationalist perspective of black activists Several things leaped out upon reading the fascinating biographical sketch of Anna Arnold Hedgeman. I was struck by the more than superficial similarities of Hedgeman's story with that of Dr. W.E.B. Dubois. Like Dr. Dubois, Ms. Hedgeman came from a small Northern town where there were few blacks (a similarity that she also shared with NAACP President Roy Wilkins, as Sugrue mentions). While she did attend a northern college, she had to go South to find work as a teacher; it was upon looking for work that she began to run up against employment discrimination. Yet still, some of her most bitter experiences in racism began when she taught in the Deep South for a couple of years. And it seems that when she had that experience of living in the South, then she could readily identify and fight against "Jim Crow northern-style." I was not surprised that Mrs. Hedgeman so readily accepted the idea that poverty was a moral deficiency; the idea was (and is) quite prevalent. It was actually by working with the YWCA and in working with FERA and in watching the stunning black poverty of the Great Depression that Hedgeman began to apply a class and systemic analysis to racial inequality; even nowadays, few people connect the dots. Lastly, I wasn't surprised to read on Hedgeman's wiki bio that she was a founding member of the National Organization for Women. In the other parts of the chapter, I felt that something was missing (albeit for a good reason). For example, Sugrue does not get into the fact that Marcus Garvey was opposed by a number of black "integrationist" leaders like Dr. Dubois (which is fairly well-known) and the primary subject of Chapter 2, A. Philip Randolph. Nor does he go into some of the fissures thin the Communist Party/ black activists although in the latter case, those fissures are a significant story in Chapter 2. Chapter 2: Pressure, More Pressure, and Still More Pressure Objective Summary: Formation of the National Negro Congress- Segregation and the New Deal- Black/organized Labor alliance-A. Philip Randolph-employment desegregation in defense industry- 1941 March on Washington This book was my introduction to the National Negro Congress and I simply loved Sugrue's (and Lester Granger's) depiction of the NNC meeting in Chicago where "Black clubwomen mingled with their peers in black fraternities, but also with Pullman porters, meatpackers, and steelworkers" (33). There is also here, I think, the critical link in the movement for black civil rights that is missing today; the alliance between the black freedom struggle and labor; if anything is missing nowadays it isn't yet another religious leader a la Dr. King (black America has more than enough of those, and even a few good ones like Rev. Barber) but someone like A. Philip Randolph, who cultivated all sorts of alliances across the many different and varied spectrums of the black community, white liberals (Socialists and Communists), and labor unions. Only by effectively linking race and class could black activists have have taken on the thrice-elected President of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, and won the concessions that they did. Only by effectively linking race and class with FDR's notions of "the four freedoms" that Roosevelt talked about so eloquently could he make him do it.
Chicago Defender story on Executive Order 8802 July 5, 1941.
And even with a victory of that magnitude...it was only the beginning. Next Week: Chapter 3 and (maybe) Chapter 4
Gandhi and African Americans: A little sidenote here: If reading and doing some background research on these two chapters did nothing else, it should disspell the simplistic "lily-white" history of the black civil rights movement which basically reads: Dr. King and his associates basically learned the techniques of non-violent from Mahatma Gandhi and that these techniques were some sort of new thing or great revelation March 1922 issue of the NAACP magazine The Crisis
Gandhi in the March 1922 issue of The Crisis
Black Americans were fully digesting the ramifications of the Indian independence movement early in the 1920's and were actually doing non-violent civil disobedience on the Gandhi model even in the late 1930's and, as we shall see next week, all through the 1940's.
1941 March on Washington FDR's Four Freedoms Speech-Delivered January 6, 1941
Amended 3/9/16 KEB