I find myself thinking of Malcolm...

I find myself thinking of Malcolm. Amidst the pageantry that marked the historic inauguration of Barack Obama as president of the US, and the splendid oratory and reflections of those who served the gallant and exemplary black movement as it unfolded in the US – giving character and depth to the American experience – I listened for acknowledgement of contribution from the militant tendency. I did not hear it. I was not surprised. The black church was honoured, as it should be, by the presence of many ministers of the Christian gospel who were important to the history that created the moment that was being celebrated. The moderate leadership which came out of the black church, those who turned the other cheek and advocated the turning of the other cheek, have been celebrated, and justly so. Their contribution is profound and undeniably progresses through the entire history of the US. But is that not only ‘on the one hand’? Surely there is another ‘hand’, no less profound and with no less historical importance.

That other ‘hand’ is the militant tendency; one can reasonably claim that it found its first public voice in the writings and work of David Walker whose 1829 article, ‘David Walker’s Appeal in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the world, but in Particular and Very Expressly, to those of the United States of America’, was the first argument for what became known as Black Nationalism. Walker, a self-described ‘disturber of the peace’, did not depart from the Biblical tradition, albeit grounded his argument for Black Nationalism in the historic promise of the American project itself. Using Biblical reference, Walker forcibly denounced the hypocrisy of prevailing Christian religious practice seeking divine punishment ‘on behalf of the oppressed’ while simultaneously advocating African American educational, spiritual, and political renewal. It was a theme which repeated itself throughout the historic struggle of black people in the US for the defence of the black personality itself.

Walker’s militancy was followed by that of another member of the black clergy, Henry Highland Garnet, whose tract, ‘Call to Rebellion’ in 1843, argued for the justification of violent resistance on behalf of enslaved Africans against their masters. In a famous exhortative passage of that tract, Garnet says: ‘neither God or angels or just men command you to suffer for a single moment. Therefore it is your solemn and imperative duty to use every means, moral, intellectual, and physical that promises success.’ Furthermore, Walker urges his audience to:

'...inform them that all you desire is freedom, and nothing else will suffice. If they then commence the work of death, they, and not you, will be responsible for the consequences. You had far better all die – die immediately, than live slaves, and entail your wretchedness upon your posterity…However much you and all of us may desire it, there is not much hope of redemption without the shedding of blood. If you must bleed, let it come at once – rather die freemen than live to be slaves.'

Garnet’s militancy was so potent that it moved his contemporary, Frederick Douglass, to denounce it as being too violence-oriented. Admittedly, Douglass was, at the time, wandering in the mystical world of ‘moral suasion’. In due course, he found his way and added a more mature voice to the cause of revolutionary Black Nationalism. Douglass exemplified this through his famous speech which occurred in Rochester, New York in 1852. It came to be known as ‘What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?’ Douglass responded:

'...to him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety and hypocrisy – a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.'

As with previous statements made by Walker and Garnet, Douglass’s remarks were aimed at the particular barbarity of American slavery. His words however, in addition the voices of Harriet Tubman and Frances Harper, reverberate through every moment of the historical trajectory of African peoples in the US. In the immediate post-slavery period when changing economic conditions created a new social environment and gave rise to the need for a new politics, and leading spokespersons of the anti-slavery struggles were no longer on the scene, this dialectic revealed itself in the arguments of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois.

Washington, in his famous Atlanta Exposition – the Atlanta Compromise speech – of 1895, made a distinction between political agitation against the consolidation of the infamous Black Codes and the legalisation of racial segregation, and what he called self-reliance, or the mastering of those positions in the economy that were available to African Americans. Washington advised his fellow African Americans that they could regain their rights in the South only by accepting the political status quo and working gradually to change it by proving themselves valuable, productive members of society who deserved fair treatment before the law. He decried those who argued for political agitation, especially the right to vote, yet conceded its attraction to black people; ‘ignorant and inexperienced, it is not strange that in the first years of our new life we began at the top instead of at the bottom; that a seat in Congress or the state legislature was more sought after than real estate or industrial skill; that the political convention had more attractions than starting a dairy farm or truck garden’. It is in this speech that Washington issued his famous injunction to the black race to:

'...cast down your bucket where you are...cast it down in agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the professions – no race can prosper until it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling the soil as there is in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life that we must begin, and not at the top. Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities...'

DuBois’ response to Washington is best expressed in his classic work ‘The Souls of Black Folk’. He argues that in black thought Washington represents ‘the old attitude of adjustment and submission.’ Essentially, Washington argues that ‘black people give up, at least for the present, three things. First, political power. Second, insistence on civil rights. Third, higher education of Negro youth’, and that African Americans should concentrate all their energies on industrial education, the accumulation of wealth, and the conciliation of the South. In his essay ‘On Booker T. Washington and Others’, Dubois’ position is clearly stated:

'...the black men of America have a duty to perform, a duty stern and delicate, a forward movement to oppose a part of the work of their greatest leader. So far as Mr. Washington preaches Thrift, Patience, and Industrial training for the masses, we must hold up his hands and strive with him…But so far as Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice, North or South, does not rightly value the privilege and duty of voting, belittles the emasculating effects of cast distinction, so far as he, the South, the Nation does this, we must unceasingly and firmly oppose them.'

DuBois indicates that Washington’s policies had been pursued for 15 years, however what did these accomplish? ‘(1) The Disenfranchisement of the Negro. (2) The legal creation of a distinct status of civil inferiority for the Negro. (3) The steady withdrawal of aid from institutions for the higher training of the Negro’. DuBois was clear that:

'...these movements are not, to be sure, direct results of Mr. Washington’s teachings; but his propaganda has, without a shadow of doubt, helped their speedier accomplishment. The question then comes: is it possible, and probable, that nine millions of men can make effective progress in economic lines if they are deprived of political rights, made a servile caste, and allowed only the most meager chance for developing their exceptional men? If history and reason give any distinct answer to these questions, it is an emphatic NO.'

It is interesting to note the trajectory followed by the tendencies represented by Washington and DuBois which began in the days prior to Emancipation. It cannot be argued that Washington’s great achievement, his success at the Tuskegee Institute, had a lasting and beneficial impact on the lives of those it touched, and as a source of inspiration for the wider black population. Of course, the irony is that the school itself was only possible because one of its founders, a former slave, was able to parlay his influence over black voters into guaranteed funding for what would essentially be a teachers college. Reconstruction was over by1880, and the infamous Black Codes had already begun to disenfranchise blacks, a condition that Washington did not believe merited militant opposition.

DuBois continued to be recognised for his agitated voice – in 1909, in response to the worst racial violence ever witnessed in a northern city (Springfield, Illinois), DuBois was among a group of people uniting in Niagara Falls to establish the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In 1909, DuBois founded and became the editor of ‘The Crisis’ magazine, the monthly organ of the NAACP. He remained editor until 1932 when he broke with the growing conservatism of the organisation he helped to initiate. DuBois’s deepening internationalist perspective became evident in 1911 when he instituted a movement for a pan-African congress that was eventually to be held in Paris during the sessions of a peace conference in 1919. At this first pan-African Congress, DuBois’s political insightfulness was reflected in the resolutions passed. In particular, the resolutions proclaimed that the land of defeated Germany, representing approximately one million square miles and 12 and a half million inhabitants, was to become a major part of an ‘internaltionalized African state’ along with the territories of two smaller and weaker European powers, namely Portugal and Belgium. The resolutions further demanded ‘safeguards against economic exploitation, cultural subjection and for increased self-rule, educational and medical facilities for all Africa’. At a preparatory conference held in New York prior to the first PAC, Dubois offered two resolutions; the first concerned the return of Germany’s African colonies to Africans, and the second indicated that ‘if lynchings of Negroes were not stopped in America, a revolution of twelve million Negro citizens might be used to stop it’.

DuBois was a driving force in subsequent pan-African Congresses, and continued to be a militant voice in opposition to Jim Crow in the US. The organisation he helped to establish, the NAACP, went on to become the leading voice in the African American community. Through the inspired work of a team of dedicated lawyers, – later headed by Thurgood Marshall – a thirty year legal campaign against segregation took place which subsequently led to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Oliver Brown et al v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, effectively ending segregation in public schools throughout the South.

The two tendencies were also to be found in the cultural explosion of the early 1900s, the Harlem Renaissance. The assimilationist tendency, historically associated with Booker T. Washington, found its voice in this new era and among other places, in the work of Peter Schuyler. In his essay ‘Negro Art Hokum’, Schuyler derided the notion that there was any such thing as a Black aesthetic. His essay opens with the assertion:

Negro Art, made in America, is as non-existent as the widely advertised profundity of Cal Coolidge...Negro art there has been, is, and will be among the numerous black nations of Africa; but to suggest the possibility of any such development among the ten million colored people in this republic is self-evident foolishness.

This, Schuyler argued, would be easily understood ‘if one stops to realize that the Aframerican is merely a lamp-blacked Anglo-Saxon’. Further, that ‘apart from his color which ranges from very dark brown to pink, your American Negro is just plain American’. As far as music was concerned, Schuyler grudgingly ceded that ‘from dark-skinned sources have come those songs based on Protestant hymns and Biblical texts known as spirituals, work songs and secular songs of sorrow and tough luck known as the blues, that outgrowth of ragtime known as jazz (in the development of which whites have assisted)’, but these ought to be seen merely as ‘the contributions of a caste in a certain section of the country…any group under similar circumstances would have produced something similar.’

Schuyler’s essay was equally as famous for the furor it caused as it was for the response that it evoked from Langston Hughes, published just a week after Schuyler’s. In a seminal essay entitled ‘The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain’ Hughes charted an approach to the issue of a black aesthetic that assigned the emergence, development, and security of such an aesthetic to the artist themselves. For Hughes, the social material that the artist apprehended and with which the artist worked was essentially the function of class. In a manner reminiscent of DuBois, Hughes infused his analysis of the problems confronting the artist with a class analysis of the black population itself. There is the Negro middle-class whose ‘children go to a mixed school. In the home they read white papers and magazines. And the mother often says “don’t be like niggers” when the children are bad’. ‘The whisper of “I want to be white” runs silently through their minds…one sees immediately how difficult it is for an artist born in such a home to interest himself in interpreting the beauty of his own people. He is never taught to see that beauty. He is taught rather not to see it, or if he does, to be ashamed of it when it is not according to Caucasian patterns.’

Then there is the ‘high class Negro’ in whose home Hughes argues there is often just more aping of things white. ‘The family usually attends a fashionable church where few really colored faces are to be found. And they themselves draw a colour line… Nordic manners, Nordic faces, Nordic hair, Nordic art (if any) and an Episcopal heaven. A very high mountain indeed for the would-be racial artist to climb in order to discover himself and his people’

Then there are the ‘low-down folks, the so-called common element, and they are the majority – may the Lord be praised!’ Theirs was the credo ‘work maybe a little today, rest a little tomorrow. Play awhile. Sing awhile. O, let’s dance!’ It is out of this culture, of finding pride in their unique experience as Africans in the US, Hughes argues, that comes ‘a wealth of colourful, distinctive material for any artist because they still hold to their own individuality in the face of American standardizations’. That ‘without going outside his race, and even among the better classes with their “white” culture and conscious American manners, but still Negro enough to be different, there is sufficient matter to furnish a black artist with a lifetime of creative work.’

The poetry of Langston Hughes, and the artistic creations of other members forming the radical tradition in the first quarter of the 20th century were matched by the explosion of black pride generated by the work of the Honourable Marcus Mosiah Garvey and the formidable organisation he created, the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Founded in 1916, by 1920 the UNIA had become the largest and most powerful organisation of black peoples globally. The UNIA convention in Harlem that same year attracted some twenty-five thousand delegates from around the world.

Garvey’s message was as simple as it was unique and controversial. While previous advocates of Black Nationalism had aimed at mobilising African Americans to lift themselves above conditions of servitude and oppression that had been imposed on them in the US, Garvey argued for a global pan-Africanist movement focusing on Africa. Garvey spoke of a ‘Negro Empire’, but (controversially) saw this in terms of a colonising project: ‘It is only a question of a few more years when Africa will be completely colonized by Negroes, as Europe is by the white race’. Garvey was also extremely defensive about the leadership role that himself and the UNIA were required to embrace in this project, denouncing those as opportunist who:

'...now that our organization has started to bear fruit we find some of these doubting Thomases of three or fours ago are endeavouring to mix themselves up with the popular idea of rehabilitating Africa in the interest of the Negro. They are now advancing spurious “programs” and in a short while will endeavoir to force themselves upon the public as advocates and leaders of the African idea.'

Garvey’s brand of Black Nationalism did not preclude even more controversial activities such as his occasional meetings with the Ku Klux Klan who happened to share his racially exclusive view of society. Whatever one may think of Garvey and the contradictory and sometimes confusing ideology he expounded, one cannot seriously challenge the impact that his call for an African homeland, governed by Africans ‘at home and abroad’, had among the global black population at the time and in the present. Garvey’s creed of racial pride and racial solidarity continues as a mobilising force in black cultures around the world, and has inspired every major Afrocentric movement and leader from Malcolm X, who saw him as ‘the father of Black Nationalism’, to the Rastafari movement for whom he is a critically important prophet.

And then there was Malcolm, El Hajj Malik Shabazz, fittingly eulogised by Ossie Davis as ‘our own Black shining prince’. He came out of prison in 1952 as a recent convert to the Nation of Islam. Within a few years, he had become the face of that movement and the chief assistant to its leader, Elijah Mohammed. However, Malcolm’s political appeal went beyond the parameters established by the Nation of Islam and he inevitably found himself at odds with the more conservative approach as advocated by Elijah and the elders. Malcolm’s self-definition offers some insight as to what these clashes may have been about:

'I am a black nationalist freedom fighter. Islam is my religion, but I believe my religion is my personal business. It governs my personal life and my personal morals… If we keep our religion at home, keep our religion between ourselves and our God, but we come out here, we have a fight that is common to all of us against an enemy who is common to all of us.'

For Malcolm, Black Nationalism means ‘that the black man should control the politics and the politicians in his own community.’ Like DuBois and Garvey before him, Malcolm, especially after his break with the Nation in 1964, saw the fate of African Americans as being linked with the fate of all peoples of colour globally:

‘When we look at other parts of this earth in which we live, we find that black, brown, red and yellow people in Africa and Asia are getting their independence. They’re not getting it by singing “We Shall Overcome”. No, they’re getting it through nationalism. It is nationalism that brought about independence of the people in Asia. Every nation in Asia gained its independence through the philosophy of nationalism. Every nation on the African continent that has gotten its independence brought it about through the philosophy of nationalism. And it will take Black Nationalism to bring about the freedom of the twenty-two million Afro-Americans here in this country where we have suffered colonialism for the past four hundred years.’

Malcolm’s forthright talk and his unrelenting and militant denunciation of stubborn racial injustice influenced an entire generation of activists including Stokely Carmichael of the Students Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and later of the Black Panther Party. It was Stokely who coined the slogan ‘Black Power’, and through his organising work in Lowndes County, Alabama, adopted the Black Panther as the symbol of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization. The symbol became more famous some years later as the official symbol of the Black Panther Party founded by Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and others in Oakland, California, organised largely on principles advocated years previously by Malcolm X.

From David Walker, Frederick Douglass, DuBois, Langston Hughes, Garvey, Malcolm, SNCC, the Black Panthers, and the countless millions who have given dedicated service, the militant tradition has progressed through the entire history of Africans in the US. However, they are not yet invited to the table to celebrate the highest victory within the approved structures. Langston Hughes’ may well have been speaking of them collectively:

I, Too

I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
‘Eat in the kitchen,’
Then.
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed
I, too, am America.

* Lincoln Van Sluytman is an activist.
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