Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Black Liberation
Black Liberation
Liberation
BLACK
LIBERATION
A Comparative History
of Black Ideologies
in the United States
and South Africa
George M. Fredrickson
Oxford
2 4 6 8 1 09 7 5 3 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Acknowledgments
The research, writing, and editing that made this book possible could not
have been accomplished without the generous help of many people and
institutions. The principal research was done in the following repositories:
the Stanford University Library, especially the library of the Hoover Institution; the Rhodes and Bodleian libraries of the University of Oxford; in
South Africa, the libraries of the Universities of the Witwatersrand, Cape
Town, Durban-Westville, and South Africa (UNISA); and the Harvard
University Library. I hope that the many librarians and curators who
rendered me special service will forgive me for not mentioning each of
them. In my zeal to get at the documents they provided, I oftenand
inexcusablyfailed to note their names. I can, however, name two scholars who assisted my research in a direct and exceptional way: Louis Harlan and Robert Edgar provided me with primary materials from their own
files that turned out to be of enormous value. I also received help in
locating sources from Thomas F. Jackson and Ian Solomon.
Intensive work on this project began in 1988-89 when I was Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford. Dr. Stanley Trapido offered me the hospitality of his seminar in South African History and Politics, and I had the rare opportunity of presenting my preliminary findings
to four successive meetings of the seminar. The feedback that I received
from Stan Trapido and the other members of this distinguished group of
South Africanists was invaluable. I would also like to thank Professor
Shula Marks of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London for inviting me to present a paper describing my project to
her seminar and for the useful criticism that I received on that occasion.
During my research trip to South Africa in the spring of 1989,1 benefited
from the hospitality and advice of several South African scholars, especially Bruce Murray, Charles van Onselen, Tim Couzens, and Philip Bon-
viii
Acknowledgments
ner of the University of the Witwatersrand; Christopher Saunders, Herman Giliomee, David Welsh, Francis Wilson, and Helen Bradford of the
University of Cape Town; and Colin Bundy of the University of the Western Cape. While in Cape Town, I learned much about the links between
American and South African freedom struggles during an extended interview with Allan Boesak. On a subsequent visit to South Africa in the
summer of 1992, I received input from Tom Lodge, Fatima Meer, Mewa
Ramgobin, Greg Cuthbertson, and William Freund, among others.
The manuscript was completed and revised while I was a fellow of the
W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University in 1993. I wish to thank the Institute and its director, Henry Louis
Gates, Jr., for the financial support that enabled me to bring the work to
fruition. The staff of the Du Bois Institute, especially its associate director, Randall Burkett, rendered me every possible day-to-day assistance,
and I also learned a great deal from the weekly seminars that provided me
and other fellows with a chance to present our work to a discerning and
critical audience.
Portions of the manuscript dealing with black religious nationalism
were read by James Campbell, Randall Burkett, and Richard Newman,
all of whom provided extensive and perceptive comments. A complete
draft of the book benefited from the close scrutiny of Anthony Marx,
Clayborne Carson, and Sterling Stuckey. I often, but not always, followed
the advice of these highly valued friends and colleagues. Consequently,
they deserve much of the credit for the strengths of the book but bear no
responsibility for its shortcomings.
Sheldon Meyer of Oxford University Press played his customary role as
peerless editor, providing a full measure of the encouragement and
friendly guidance that gives an author confidence and sense of direction. I
would also like to thank Stephanie Sakson for a highly professional job of
copy editing, and Andrew Albanese and Joellyn Ausanka for guiding the
book through the press. Last but not least, my wife Helene deserves much
credit for accepting gracefully the disruptions in our life that pursuit of
this project entailed and for proofreading the text in its various incarnations, employing her acute sense of linguistic propriety to catch many
errors.
G.M.F.
Contents
Introduction
Contents
7. "Black Man You Are on Your Own": Black Power and Black
Consciousness
277
Pan-Africanism in South Africa, 1944-1960; The Rise of Black Power in
the United States; Black Consciousness in South Africa; Comparing Black
Power and Black Consciousness
Epilogue
319
Notes
325
Index
367
Black
Liberation
Introduction
This book might be considered a sequel to my earlier study White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History, but it
is not one that I planned or expected to write when that work was published in 1981. White Supremacy compared the attitudes, ideologies, and
policies associated with white or European domination over blacks and
other people of color in the history of both societies. In the introduction, I
acknowledged the "obvious limitations" of this approach: "Comparative
studies of nonwhite responses and resistance movements would be enormously valuable and should be done. But a useful prelude to such a work
is awareness of what nonwhites were up against. . . ."1
At the time, nothing was further from my mind than writing my own
study of the other side of the black-white confrontation. I thought of
White Supremacy as a one-shot excursion into comparative history involving South Africa, after which I would revert to my previous vocation as
simply an historian of the United States with a special interest in blackwhite relations. But two things happened to change my mind. The first
was my growing sense of the unlikelihood that anyone else would undertake a study such as the one I had proposed. It eventually dawned on me
that the broad understanding of South African history that I had acquired
in writing White Supremacy had prepared me exceptionally well to carry
on such work and that if I did not do it no one else was likely to in the
foreseeable future. The second new consideration was the remarkable
course of events in South Africa in the 1980s. I watched with fascination
as a massive resistance movement challenged white supremacy as it had
never been challenged before. Like most other observers writing in the
previous decade, I had not expected such a development; my studies of
the ideas and institutions associated with white domination had made it
seem that the apartheid regime was backed by sufficient white power and
determination to make it, if not invulnerable, at least in control of the
3
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
10
Introduction
religion in its relation to political thought and action but have not felt
obliged, for example, to treat the fascinating subject of musical and literary influences. Other scholars have produced, and are producing, work of
high quality on a broad range of specific encounters and interactions
between African-Americans and black South Africans, and I have made
use of such work for my purposes in addition to probing some previously
unexplored connections uncovered by my own research in primary
sources.4 But a full treatment of the cross-cultural exchanges would require a great deal of additional research in rare and scattered materials. I
can imagine a splendid book on the subject that might use this one as a
point of departure. But my concern with the detailing of links and influences has been subordinated to rny interest in comparison. Exactly how
an African-American idea got to South Africa, or vice versa, matters less
to me than what happened to it when it got there. I am interested in how
broadly similar conceptualizations of black liberation were modified or
reinterpreted to suit local circumstances and in what occurred when similar ideologies were acted upon under conditions that were in some ways
very different.
The analytical and interpretive aspects of the study are consistent with a
general theory of race relations that will be familiar to readers of my
earlier book, The Arrogance of Race.? But since the focus there was
mainly on white racism, I need to say something about how these assumptions could be applied to my treatment of black racial consciousness. I do
not use the theory in an explicit and systematic way in the main body of
the work and most of what I say there does not stand or fall on the
reader's judgment of its validity. But it does represent one way of making
sense, in a very abstract and general way, of my principal findings. From
Max Weber, I have learned to think of "status" as a basis for social
grouping and stratification that differs from "class." Status consciousness
is the sense shared by members of a social group of how much esteem,
honor, and prestige they possess relative to other groups in the same
society; class consciousness is the awareness of a shared economic interest
possessed by groups that have a distinctive relationship to the marketplace or the means of production. These two sources of identity and
inequality often coincide and become mutually reinforcing, but they can
vary independently. In multi-ethnic or multi-racial societies a principal
form of status consciousness is based on ethnicity in the broad sense of
real or presumed differences in group ancestry. Societies like the United
States and South Africa have traditionally had the character of ethnic
status hierarchies, as well as being divided into social classes. An AfricanAmerican physician in the early twentieth century, to take one example,
would have a complex social position. He would be economically middle
class, the member of a lower ethnic status group, and of high professional
or educational status within the group. Which social identity loomed largest in his consciousness and motivated his actions at a particular moment
would depend on the situation in which he found himself. In his relations
Introduction
11
with whites, he would be made to feel his lower ethnic status; in seeking
payment from poor patients his class identity might be uppermost in his
mind; and in the affairs of the black community his in-group status would
give him a claim to prestige and leadership. My understanding of white
racism is that it is fundamentally a commitment to maintaining, through
discriminatory action or inaction, a higher ethnic status than blacks and
other people of color. The efforts of blacks to enhance their ethnic status
requires a conscious repudiation of the sense of social inferiority that the
hierarchical structure of racial and ethnic relations is meant to inculcate.
Logically speaking, the oppositional status consciousness of a subordinated group could take one of three political forms: the assertion of a
claim to equal status in a common, nonracial society (a universalist or
cosmopolitan response), a reversal of the ethnic hierarchy that would
place formerly subordinated groups in a position of dominance over their
erstwhile superiors (an ethnic supremacist response), or the achievement
of group self-esteem by ceasing to belong to the same society as the
former ethnic superordinates (a separatist response). The latter consummation might be achieved by exterminating, expelling, or deporting the
other group, by seceding or emigrating from its domain, or by partitioning
what had been a common territory.
This Weberian thought experiment conveys a sense of the theoretical
possibilities of a rebellious black consciousness in the United States and
South Africa, but it is devoid of the power to predict which of the alternatives will be pursued most strenuously and consistently. As Weber would
have been the first to acknowledge, only the kind of history that acknowledges a complex multiplicity of causes and interactions can provide the
answers. Much of this study can be seen as an account of how the alternative approaches to black liberation were discussed, debated, and put into
action with varying consequences. But it will also show how they could
lose their abstract purity and fuse or amalgamate in various ways. For
example, the separatist impulse could play a role, perhaps an indispensable one, in movements that aimed ultimately at equal status in a common
society. It seems evident that the cosmopolitan or universalist response to
white supremacy has been historically predominant in the formal ideologies of both struggles, which is somewhat more surprising in the case of
South Africa than of the United States. Blacks in South Africa were never
emancipated by force of arms and promised equal citizenship in a colorblind republic. (The reneging on this commitment in the United States
after Reconstruction could not destroy the dream that it engendered.) A
major concern will be how to explain the failure of black supremacist or
separatist perspectives to become ascendant among a brutally oppressed
majority, as well as the continued viability and vitality of some forms of
black separatism among a minority that was promised equal civil and
political rights in the 1860s and actually achieved them a century later
It is also clear that full-blown black supremacismdo to the whites as
they have done to uswas rarely, if ever, seriously advocated by credible
12
Introduction
black leaders and intellectuals in either society. In the United States, such
a turning of the tables was of course a physical impossibilityexcept
perhaps in the Deep South during Reconstruction, when whites complained of a "black domination" that never actually occurred. But in
South Africa it was to a fear of black supremacy that the architects of
segregation and apartheid appealed as justification for their actions. But
no evidence survives that black resisters ever proposed their own upsidedown version of apartheid. The most extreme and draconian measure that
was ever publicly advocatedand this was a raritywas that when blacks
took power the whites would be "pushed into the sea." The current
slogan of a tiny minority of black extremists"one settler, one bullet"
probably expresses an intense commitment to racial separatism rather
than a fixed intent to commit genocide.
The usual poles of the debate on the goals of black liberation in both
the United States and South Africa were equitable incorporation into a
common society with whites, on the one hand, and the creation of a selfdetermining black nation on the other. In the case of South Africa, the
alternatives came to be designated as "nonracialism" and "Africanism";
in the United States as "integratioriism" and "black nationalism." A way
to describe the dichotomy in language that would apply to both societies
would be to call it a tension between color-blind universalism and racially
defined nationalism. But it would be misleading to conceive of a repetitive controversy between fixed and clear-cut alternatives. Although there
were some consistent advocates of both positions, many of those who
tried to define black liberation were actually seeking to combine the
essential insights provided by both orientations. White supremacy was,
after all, both a violation of universalist conceptions of human rights and
the oppression of one historically constructed "racial" group by another.
A main concern of this study is to understand and compare the efforts of
black liberationists in both societies to resolve the issue of the proper
balance in the struggle of universalist and ethnocentric perspectives, as
well as to probe the political consequences of the solutions that they
embraced.
The issue often arose in the context of discussions about what role
whites should play in the black struggle. Roughly parallel debates in both
countries developed on the issue of whether black movements should
welcome or exclude whites who professed to be friendly to the cause of
liberation. Often, but not always, the decision made reflected whether
liberation itself was conceived as the triumph of an inclusive universalism
or primarily in terms of ethnic or racial nationalism.
Besides trying to conceive the ultimate ends of the freedom struggle,
movement leaders and intellectuals also confronted comparable questions
of the means to be used in the struggle. The abstract alternatives in both
cases were threefold: the pursuit of gradualist reform using the channels
available to blacks within the legal-constitutional system established by
whites, nonviolent resistance to challenge that system in the hope of
Introduction
13
1
"Palladium of the People's Liberties":
The Suffrage Question and the
Origins of Black Protest
15
16
17
Beginning with the Parliamentary Reform Act of 1832 Britain was gradually extending the suffrage down the economic and social scale, a process
that did not result in universal suffrage until well into the twentieth century. This gradualism was in perfect accord with the liberal conception of
the vote as a privilege to be granted as a matter of policy rather than a
fundamental right.
Practice in the United States developed quite differently but not in such
a way as to signify the unequivocal triumph of universal adult or even
male suffrage as a democratic principle. The mass enfranchisement of
white males that took place in "the Jacksonian era" was based on a
conception of the "people" that was not only limited by race and gender
but was also predicated on the assumption that most white males were
actual or potential property ownersas indeed they were at a time when
landowning farmers outnumbered wage earners and agricultural tenants
in the white male population. Hence universal manhood suffrage was
more a product of American conditions than an application of radical
democratic principles. In the version of American "republicanism" that
was still dominant at the time, Thomas Jefferson's view that the "independence" that came from private property was essential to a responsible and
virtuous electorate remained influential. If some men without property
now gained the suffrage it was on the assumption that most of them would
soon attain the independence necessary to good citizenship by hard work
or migration to "vacant lands" in the West. What was radical about America was not its willingness to enfranchise the working classes but rather its
expansive belief that virtually all white males could rise into the propertied and entrepreneurial classes. When the industrial revolution and
mass immigration of the mid- to late nineteenth century brought genuine
proletarianization and destroyed dreams of a democracy of yeoman farmers and small entrepreneurs, there were serious efforts to abandon universal manhood suffrage and introduce property and educational qualifications. They failed to achieve their aims, except to the extent that they
were able to do so by such indirect means as tougher registration requirements and secret ballots that the voter had to read for himself, not so
much because of the strength of radical democratic theory as because
uneducated and relatively impoverished voters and the (mostly Democratic) politicians whom they had elected to office refused to consent to
their own disfranchisement or loss of power.5
The enfranchisement of southern blacks that took place in the South
under the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 and '68 was an implicit assertion of a
more radical conception of democracy than nineteenth-century liberals or
republicans had previously been willing to contemplate. It appeared to
build on the American precedent of universal manhood suffrage, but its
context was very different from the one that had enfranchised all white
males earlier in the century. For the first time, an uneducated, propertyless
local majority was given the vote and the potential power to rule over an
educated and propertied minority. When the time came to amend the
18
Constitution to guarantee black voting rights, however, the call of a handful of radicals to embody the principle of universal manhood suffrage in the
fundamental law of the land was rejected. The Fifteenth Amendment mandated only a racially impartial suffrage, and the way was open for disfranchisement of blacks through a variety of tests that were seemingly nonracial
but actually designed to have a discriminatory impact. This decision was
not so much a reflection of racist intent as of a refusal to move from a liberal
to a radical-democratic conception of the suffrage.6
If it did not require universal suffrage, nineteenth century political
liberalism nevertheless found it increasingly difficult to justify voting restrictions based purely on race. The ideal of civil equality and the growing
commitment to equality of opportunity implied that ascriptive disabilities
should have no part in determining political participation. Limitations on
the political rights of women could perhaps be justified on the grounds
that they were represented in civic affairs by their husbands, but no such
rationale was available in the case of blacks. Consequently there was a
tension, and at times an open conflict, between liberal political theory and
racist ideologies that would base voting rights on membership in a superior, "self-governing" race. Liberalism, carried to its nonracial conclusion, was an ideology to which blacks and their white allies could appeal
in the struggles for equal citizenship in late nineteenth-century America
and South Africa.
In his speech at the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Antislavery
Society in 1865, Frederick Douglass made the case for black manhood
suffrage. Blacks want the vote, Douglass argued, "because ours is a
peculiar government based on a peculiar idea, and that idea is universal suffrage. If I were in a monarchical government, or an autocratic or
aristocratic government, where the few bore rule and the many were
subject, there would be no special stigma resting upon me because I
did not exercise the elective suffrage . . . , but here where universal
suffrage is the rule, where that is the fundamental idea of government,
to rule us out is to make us an exception, to brand us with the stigma
of inferiority. . . ."7
Here was the heart of the case for black suffrage as put forth by black and
white Radicals during the Reconstruction era. Although mainstream liberal theory, even in the United States, did not require universal manhood
suffrage, it offered no clear basis for enfranchising all males of one race and
not of another. The only way to restrict black voting rights would be to
transform general American practice and establish educational or property
tests that applied impartially to black and white alike. The Reconstruction
Acts of 1867 and '68 seemed to follow Douglass's logic, but in fact they
deviated from it by making loyalty to the Union a qualification for the
suffrage. Ex-slaves who were putatively loyal were enfranchised, but exConfederate leaders who were considered of doubtful loyalty were denied
the right to vote and hold office during the Reconstruction process. Most
congressional Republicans who voted for black suffrage in the South were
19
not radical democrats or firm believers in racial equality. They were conventional nineteenth-century liberals and moderate white supremacists who
were persuaded that the extraordinary challenge of reconstructing the
Union on a permanent basis and insuring the future success of the Unionsaving Republican party required measures that in other circumstances
they would have deemed unwise or unjustified. It was no wonder then that
they held back from making universal male suffrage a part of the Constitution when they framed the Fifteenth Amendment in 1869. The half-hearted
and conditional nature of the northern white support for black suffrage in
the South also revealed itself in the retreat from voting-rights enforcement
efforts in the 1870s. In the absence of a consistent and determined federal
force to police elections, the struggle of white supremacists to gain control
of southern state governments by terrorizing and intimidating black voters
could not be resisted. Once in power, the "Redeemers" began to restrict
black suffrage through a variety of devices that made no direct reference to
race, a process that culminated in the massive constitutional disfranchisements of the period 1890-1910. For Frederick Douglass and other heirs of
the radical-abolitionist tradition, these devices were so blatant in their
discriminatory intent that they violated liberal conceptions of equal rights,
to say nothing of radical-democratic conceptions of government by the
people.8
The qualified "nonracial" suffrage that accompanied the grant of responsible government to the Cape Colony in 1854 represented the high
point of mid-Victorian racial liberalism within the British empire. Following in the wake of slave emancipation and an effort to remove all legal
disabilities from the indigenous Khoisan peoples of the Western Cape
(known to whites as "Hottentots") it represented a sincere effort to apply
the liberal political principles that were then triumphing in Britain to a
multi-racial colonial environment. In recommending that the property or
wage qualification be kept relatively low, the Crown's Attorney General,
William Porter, called it "just and expedient to place the suffrage within
the reach of the more intelligent and industrious of the men of colour,
because it is a privilege which they deserve, and because by showing to all
classes, those above and below them, that no man's station is, in this free
country, determined by the accident of his colour, all ranks of men are
stimulated to improve or maintain their relative positions." This conception of the vote as a privilege to be earned in a society of open social
classes, and not to be denied because of accidents of birth, comes close to
the heart of the mid-Victorian liberal faith. Social hierarchy was taken for
granted in a more frank and open way that would have been likely in the
United States with its more egalitarian mores, but the hierarchy had to be
the "natural" consequence of acquired individual qualities, not the artificial product of racial and ethnic prejudice. The white settlers who approved the "color-blind" Cape franchise did not necessarily agree with the
view that race was in principle irrelevant to social classification. Realizing
that no explicit color bar would be countenanced, representatives of the
20
21
more blacks acquired property. In the South, on the other hand, violence,
intimidation, and fraud first reduced the black electorate, and the formal
legal and constitutional provisions that completed the process provided
loopholes allowing poor and illiterate whites to remain on the voter rolls
and gave local registrars the authority to turn away blacks who actually
met the property, educational, or "good character" requirements that
were the official basis of inclusion. It was very difficult to make the facts
of southern disfranchisement conform to any recognized liberal principles. In the eyes of blacks, certainly, nothing could be perceived except
the arbitrary and tyrannical exercise of white power; for there was no
room for a privileged elite that could realistically view suffrage as a reward for self-improvement. Finally, from the vantage point of 1900, the
historical trajectories of black enfranchisement might have seemed very
different in the South and the Cape. In the former political rights previously exercised were being denied and seemed likely to diminish further
in the future; in the latter, recently conquered and incorporated Africans
were apparently being offered a stake in the new political order that the
white man had imposeda modest one to be sure, but one that could
grow in timeif one believed, as many Africans did, in the promise of
future self-government implied by the Cape liberal slogan of "Equal
rights for every civilized man south of the Zambezi."11
During the South African War of 1899 to 1902, Africans and Coloreds
in the Cape were led to expect that a British victory over the Afrikaner
republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State would lead to an
extension of the Cape's nonracial electoral system to a larger South Africa
unified under the British Crown. But these expectations were dashed
when it became clear after 1902 that the imperial objective was accommodation of white settlers and not political rights for blacks. As the prospect
of a self-governing white supremacist South Africa came into view, the
Cape liberal idea became the basis of black protest and political mobilization. At approximately the same time, a group of black Americans met at
Niagara to launch a militant civil rights struggle based mainly on protest
against the evasion of constitutional guarantees of equal voting rights in
the southern states.
The struggle to gain, preserve, and extend voting rights thus became a
common preoccupation of the black protest politics that emerged in the
United States and South Africa during the nineteenth century and persisted into the twentieth. Before examining, connecting, and comparing
these suffrage-based struggles, it may be useful to draw out some of the
implicit assumptions that underlay this emphasis on the ballot as source of
racial equality and empowerment.
If a subordinate group defines its cause as equal political rights with a
dominant group, it is apparently affirming the possibility of sharing a common polity with its current oppressors. It also appears to be acknowledging
that the kind of political order that the dominant group has established for
itselfin this case, Western-style representative democracyis an accept-
22
able basis for a more inclusive system. The political community to which
African-American and black South African protest leaders were ostensibly
seeking access was the one already constituted by whites. In demanding
"equal rights," they were implicitly assenting to a conception of rights held
by their conquerors or former masters, Their formal objection to the status
quo, therefore, was to its exclusivenessits explicit or implicit use of racial
tests or color barsand not to what were regarded as its essential or
intrinsic characteristics. Protest movements emphasizing extension of the
suffrage are therefore likely to be radical reformist rather than revolutionary, unless the franchise or agitation for it is viewed merely as an available
means for creating a revolutionary group consciousness. If equal rights is
indeed all that is being sought, and if there is some hope of achieving it,
more radical objectives such as the dictatorship of the proletariat or full
national self-determination would seem to be ruled out. In situations of
racial inequality and conflict, agitation for equal voting rights seems to
imply a desire for incorporation or integration into a color-blind democratic order. Hopes for vengeance, turning the tables, restoring an independent past, or establishing a new independent nationalityall potentially
powerful emotions among oppressed racial or ethnic groupshave to be
resisted, suppressed, or at least kept under wraps if a struggle aims at
constitutional reform to eliminate racial exclusiveness in voting and holding office. For a social revolutionary or radical nationalist, demanding and
using the vote is at best a device to raise consciousness and at worst a
diversion from the true task of overthrowing the existing economic and
social order, as well as the government that sustains it.
Even if one rules out revolutionary cynicism as a motive for equalrights political struggles, the aim of such agitation is more ambiguous than
it appears at first glance. Attaining the vote may be regarded as a step
toward a genuinely color-blind society in which race becomes totally irrelevant and individuals identify themselves in other ways for political purposes. In such a polity, there would be no need for racially based parties,
factions, or voting blocs because race had ceased to be an indicator of
economic or cultural interests. But a less Utopian and more ethnocentric
viewpoint is possible. The vote might be viewed as a way of unifying and
mobilizing a group that would increase its self-consciousness and solidarity, enabling it to pursue its collective needs and interests more effectively.
The implicit model here is an ethnic political pluralism in which each
distinct racial or ethnic group within the same society retains a strong
sense of its identity and special interests, especially in the realm of culture
and international affiliations, and uses its voting power to further group
goals. According to this viewpoint, race or ethnicity is an essential and
durable characteristic of human beings and not merely the artificial construction of racists. Equal rights does not. mean the disappearance of race
but rather the right to be a racially conscious person, loyal to one's own
kind, without being penalized for it or inhibited in the pursuit of essential
group interests.
23
Such a perspective could not be clearly articulated until well into the
twentieth century, for previously there had been no pluralist social or
cultural theory to sustain it. The universalistic conceptions of culture and
civilization that predominated in the nineteenth century left little room
for the political accommodation of enduring group differences. But the
emphasis on race pride that often accompanied universalistic demands for
individual equality and assimilation, as well as the recurring endorsement
of separate action and group solidarity as a means to the attainment of
equality and political incorporation, reveal the persistent tension between
cosmopolitan, genuinely color-blind perspectives and those which viewed
blackness as existentially inescapable and culturally invigorating. It was
not so much a matter of choosing between integrationist cosmopolitanism
and racially pluralistic ethnocentrism as a basis for political action, as
finding a way to reconcile them so that blacks could find fulfillment in two
ways at onceas the generic human beings of liberal theory and as a
special people whose unique historical experience could be represented or
symbolized by reference to skin color.
The Ballot in African-American Protest Thought, 1840-1905
The origins of black protest politics in the United States can be found in the
activities and organizations of northern free blacks in the pre-Civil War
period. The black population of the northern states was small, only about a
quarter of a million in 1860, and the majority were impoverished laborers
and servants whose full energies were required to keep their heads above
water in a hostile environment, in which they were forced to compete on
unequal terms with poor white immigrants (mostly Irish) for menial, lowpaying jobs. But a small, educated elite emerged in cities like New York,
Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland. As clergymen, teachers,
journalists, and small-scale entrepreneurs, this vanguard of the black middle class was the only fraction of the black population of the United States
that had the freedom, means, and leisure to engage in sustained political
protest. Southern free blacks, approximately equal in number to those in
the North, had greater freedom of movement and expression than the
slavesand a small number were relatively affluentbut they were denied most civil and political rights and were likely to be intimidated or
ruthlessly repressed if they gave any sign of protesting against their condition or of allying themselves with their brothers and sisters in bondage.
Northern free blacks, on the other hand, could express themselves freely,
form associations for political purposes, and in some states could even vote
on the same basis as whites (as in most of New England) or by meeting
special property qualifications (as in New York after 1821).12
Northern free blacks founded newspapers, formed local associations,
held a series of national conventions beginning in 1830, and espoused a
variety of causes of importance to the black community. Their preeminent
cause was of course the abolition of slavery. A complex and difficult
24
relationship existed between black abolitionists and the white-led antislavery societies that agitated the nation in the 1830s and helped begin the
process of sectional polarization that led to the Civil War. Most prominent
black abolitionists were early supporters of William Lloyd Garrison (they
were most of the original subscribers to his fiery antislavery organ The
Liberator), and many of them remained loyal to this white champion of
immediate emancipation throughout the antebellum period. Endorsing
Garrison's Christian perfectionism, black abolitionists such as Charles
Remond, William Wells Brown, Robert Purvis, James Forten, and William Whipper found little justification for racially specific organizations or
activities. Other free black protest leaders, especially among those based
outside of Garrisonian New England, had a greater tendency to act independently of whites. The Reverends Henry Highland Garnet of Troy,
New York, Lewis Woodson of Pittsburgh, and Samuel Cornish of New
York City carried the idea of separate action to the point where they
anticipated some of the ideas later espoused by black nationalists. Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who eventually made his home in Rochester, New York, and was the most conspicuous and influential of all the
black abolitionists, began as a follower of Garrison, then broke with him
over a number of issues, most notably Garrison's opposition to Douglass's
founding of an antislavery journal of his own to rival The Liberator. But
Douglass remained opposed to black separatism in principle, accepting it
only when it could be justified on purely tactical grounds as promoting the
ultimate objective of an integrated egalitarian society.13
In states where black suffrage was denied entirely, as in Pennsylvania
after 1838, or was granted to blacks on a discriminatory basis, as in New
York, the struggle for equal political rights rivaled or even at times
eclipsed the battle against southern slavery. In the 1840s and '50s, Douglass and Garnet mobilized New York blacks around the suffrage issue. In
1856 Garnet addressed a state convention of representatives of New
York's five or six thousand qualified black voters and called for them to
use their precious ballots to support the new Republican party in the
upcoming presidential election. Showing a pragmatic attitude toward use
of the ballot, Garnet argued that the Republicans, with all their shortcomings, came "nearest to liberty and justice," for the party's "great principle
was to stop the progress of slavery." The convention then devoted itself to
its main business of organizing a petition campaign for extension of the
franchise. In the 1850s, Garnet joined a number of black leaders in advocating emigration to Africa or the West Indies as part of an effort "to
establish a grand center of Negro nationality." But his pan-African perspective did not prevent him from attaching great importance to black
participation in the American political system.14
The educated and relatively affluent free blacks who expressed themselves in sermons, newspapers, pamphlets, and books sometimes complained that they were "leaders without followers." As victims of caste
discrimination, they knew that their own attainment of equal rights with
25
white Americans depended on the removal of the disabilities that American racial order imposed on all blacks; hence they had no difficulty in
seeing themselves as representatives of the black community as a whole.
But the thoroughly middle-class outlook and style of life that most of
them manifested, as revealed by their characteristic preoccupation with
temperance and "respectability" and sustained by their economic independence as professionals and small business owners, tended to cut them off
from some of the most immediate concerns of working-class blacks. Their
attitude toward the black masses was at times critical and condescending;
lower-class blacks were objects of improvement and uplift more than
comrades in a struggle. Martin Delany, one of the most militant and
nationalistic of antebellum black leaders, was given to chastising lower
class blacks for being willing to work as servants, forgetting apparently
that most of them had no other choice.
Most of the free black leaders were self-made men, who had dragged
themselves from poverty or even from slavery to economic independence
and respectability. Like self-made men in most societies, they tended to
lack patience with those who had been unable to overcome similar handicaps. Radical and militant on questions of racial injustice, they were also
likely to have relatively conservative attitudes on other social questions.
Implicitly or explicitly, they endorsed a less than egalitarian view of society in general. Along with most white abolitionists, they accorded legitimacy to what they viewed as just and normal social hierarchies, those
based on character, education, and property acquired through honest
effort. Consequently their concept of race leadership was of the vanguard
type: their role was not to articulate the actual feelings and grievances of
the masses; it was rather to elevate the masses so that they would have the
proper feelings and understand their true and legitimate grievances. This
style of leadership was to predominate in black politics for a long time to
come.15
These pioneer protest leaders were attempting to develop and inculcate an ideology of liberation that would synthesize an idealized American nationalism with an incipient black nationalism. Much has been
made of the allegedly irreconcilable conflict between integrationists and
nationalists that arose in the antebellum period over whether blacks
should establish racially exclusive bodies or seek to liberate themselves
from American racism by emigrating to Africa or the West Indies. The
extreme positions in these debates do indeed seem impossible to reconcile. William Whipper of Philadelphia, for example, was an unconditional integrationist who believed that blacks should never engage in
independent reform activity or patronize segregated institutions. Martin
Delany on the other hand argued in a notable book of 1852 that blacks
had no future in the United States and should depart en masse for any
destination that would afford them racial self-government. (At that
point, he focused on the West Indies; later he would turn his attention to
Africa.) In his 1854 report, "The Political Destiny of the Colored Race,"
26
Delany argued that the suffrage in the United States would not give
blacks true citizenship, because it would not make them "an essential
part of the ruling element of the country in which they live." As a
disadvantaged minority, blacks could do no more with the ballot than
give their "approbation to that which our rulers may do."16
Most free black activists struggled to find a middle ground between
total integration and total separation that would allow them to maintain a
dual identity. The black campaign against slavery and racial discrimination was based on identification with the promise of America as a land of
liberty and equality, but to escape the burdens of racism and attain equality as American citizens, blacks had to develop racial pride and solidarity.
Apart from Delany, no prominent black leaders of the antebellum period
proposed that African-Americans secede en masse from the American
republic and establish a separate state. The historian Leonard Sweet has
captured the dominant attitude: "Blacks were nationalistic about their
color and capabilities, indispensable ingredients in self-pride and creativity. Yet their nationalism did not preempt their demands for inclusion as
Americans." Most antebellum emigrationists actually viewed the expatriation of some blacks to Africa or the West Indies as a supplement to the
struggle for inclusion in American nationality and not as a substitute for
it, the logic being that independent black achievements abroad would
help to mitigate white American racial prejudices. Anti-emigrationists
such as Frederick Douglass, who generally attacked such proposals as a
distraction from the struggle at home, also called on blacks to develop
pride of race and solidarity as a people. The basic objective was to achieve
political integration without sacrificing a sense of black identity and peoplehood. "Blacks realized," according to Sweet, "that they had a common
history of suffering and oppression that differentiated themselves from
other groups and that, as a proscribed minority, they had special interests
and special needs which required them to band together as a unit."17
Black consciousness and solidarity for the purpose of incorporation into
an idealized American nation may not meet the requirements imposed by
a strict standard of nationalism. What kind of nationalism is it, one might
ask, that does not envision a separate national state or even manifest any
clear conception of a distinctive national culture? But we lack another
word to describe group identity and pride based on a common color,
origin, and experience of oppression. For nineteenth century blacks, the
America of their dreams and expectations was not the particular manifestation of a white or Anglo-Saxon race spirit. It was a universal nation
based on color-blind principles of equality and human rights, a nation that
did not require its citizens to surrender their ethnic or racial distinctiveness and the pride that went with it.
This nationalistic integrationism was normally sustained by the belief
that racial prejudice was not innate or natural. "CONDITION and not
color, is the chief cause of the prejudice under which we suffer" was
one striking formulation of a doctrine accepted by most black abolitionists
27
28
for pride and dignity but could not face up to the ways that it maintained
and reinforced the positive self-image and status pretensions of white
Americans.19
When the Civil War brought emancipation and the use of black troops
to defend the Union, black leaders rejoiced in the impending fulfillment
of their hope for full-fledged membership in the American nation. Frederick Douglass, in particular, viewed the war in millennialist terms as an
apocalypse that would regenerate the nation and make it true to its promise as a land of freedom and equality. Martin Delany, the most thoroughgoing of prewar separatists, now accepted a commission in the Union
army and for the time being abandoned the idea of a black exodus from
the United States. In the South black slaves voted with their feet against
the Confederacy and offered themselves en masse to the Union armies as
laborers and soldiers, thus making a significant and perhaps decisive contribution to the Union victory. As the South was going down to defeat
before an army and navy that included almost 200,000 blacks, most of
whom were ex-slaves, northern black leaders were preparing a campaign
for equal suffrage. They found a receptive white audience in the North
when they claimed that blacks had earned the right to full citizenship and
that they were the most "loyal" segment of the southern population.
Without their votes, it was plausibly argued, the South could not be
reconstructed in such a way as to assure the future safety of the Union.
Furthermore, if American democracy was extended in a color-blind way
to the southern states, there would be great opportunities for the black
elite to find a constituency and exert political leadership.20
During Reconstruction the former slaves of the defeated South voted in
massive numbers for the Republicans and constituted the backbone of the
party in most states. But they did not dominate the politics of the region;
white Republicans held a controlling share of the top leadership positions
and elective offices except in South Carolina, which for a time came closer
than any other state to achieving the "black domination" that southern
white supremacist myth-makers would later claim was characteristic of
Radical Reconstruction throughout the region. (South Carolina's combination of a substantial black majority and lack of a significant body of
white Republican voters made it atypical of the ex-Confederate states.)
Although deferring in most cases to the leadership of white "scalawags"
and "carpetbaggers" substantial numbers of blacks were elected to local,
state, and federal offices16 served in the United States House of Representatives and two in the Senate during and immediately after the period
of Republican ascendancy. Many self-educated ex-slaves were elected to
local offices, but most of the blacks who gained state or federal office had
been free before the Civil War and had enjoyed exceptional educational
advantages, including college or university training for a significant number. Some of these were "black carpetbaggers," members of the northern
free black elite who had come to the South as soldiers, missionaries, or
Freedman's Bureau officers. In short, the freedmen were represented to a
29
30
31
designed to preserve the loyalty of the black elite. On the state and local
level in the North, Republicans sometimes put black loyalists at the bottom of the ticket or appointed them to minor offices. A more substantial
indication of the party's continued concern for black rights, or at least for
the difference black voters might make in close elections, was its role in
the passage of state laws calling for equal access to public accommodations to replace the federal Civil Rights Act of 1875, which the Supreme
Court declared unconstitutional in 1883.24
If a significant group of black politicians, many of whom depended for
their livelihood on the Republican party, continued to put their faith in
reviving the party's nagging commitment to equal rights, a group of black
intellectuals and journalists began to explore political "independence" as
an alternative to automatic support of the party of Lincoln and emancipation. T. Thomas Fortune, editor of the New York Globe, one of several
black newspapers founded in the post-Reconstruction North, was the
era's most conspicuous advocate of political independence. In a speech
before the Colored Press Association of Washington in 1882, Fortune
castigated the Republican party for forgetting its original principles and
abandoning southern blacks to the not so tender mercies of white
supremacist "redeemers." "The Republican party," he charged in his characteristically forceful fashion, "has degenerated into an ignoble scramble
for place and power." Consequently it was no longer "binding upon colored men further to support the Republican party when other more advantageous affiliations" could be obtained. It was of course impossible for a
black man to be a "Bourbon Democrat," but he could be "an independent, a progressive Democrat." More generally he called upon blacks to
vote as individuals, concentrate on local rather than national issues, and
divide on issues of public policy that did not involve their fundamental
rights.25
The rise of Grover Cleveland as a reform-minded President who
seemed less hostile to blacks than previous Democratic standard bearers
caused a flurry of black interest in the Democratic party. After Cleveland
appointed a few black Democrats to minor federal offices during his first
term, interest increased, and Fortune supported him for reelection in
1888. But Douglass and most black opinion-makers, including the editors
of most of the black journals, remained steadfast in their loyalty to the
Republicans. The problem with independency was that neither party was
prepared to make significant concessions to a black electorate that was
diminishing and ceasing to be a factor in southern contests. Continuing
support of the Republicans, despite the high level of frustration that this
entailed, was based on the assumption that they at least had an incentive
to resist the march toward disfranchisement that was insuring Democratic
control of southern elections. When the Republicans gained control of
both houses of Congress in 1888, they came close to fulfilling their
longstanding pledge to pass a law providing for federal supervision of
southern elections to prevent the intimidation of black voters. Henry
32
33
talist enterprise and develop their own class and ideological divisions
before there could be a color-blind class conflict with blacks on both sides.
In the short term, then, the main task facing blacks was to work the
capitalistic system in order to compete successfully with whites. Anticipating almost all the principal doctrines of Booker T. Washington, with
whom he would later be closely allied, Fortune included in his otherwise
radical and quasi-Marxist book the advocacy of self-help, industrial education, cooperation with ruling-class southern whites, and encouragement
of black capitalist enterprise. "All over the country," he concluded, "the
colored man is coming to understand that if he is ever to have and enjoy a
status at all commensurate with that of his fellow citizens, he must get a
grip upon the elements of success which they enjoy with such effect, and
boldly enter the lists, a competitor who must make a way for himself."29
Such an interpretation of Fortune's ideology puts his call for political
independence and an end to bloc voting in a new light. Fortune was not
advocating that blacks as a group put their weight behind a party other
than the Republicans, whether it be a reformed Democracy or a laborite
third party. Instead he was calling in effect to blacks to rely less heavily on
parties and electoral politics in general as a basis for group advancement.
In Black and White, he put forth a harshly negative view of Reconstruction and black participation in it that echoes the charges of many white
critics and anticipates Booker T. Washington's view that blacks had tried
to walk before they had learned to crawl. "Illiteracy," he wrote, ". . . has
been the prime cause of more misgovernment in the South than any other
one cause, not even the insatiable rapacity of the carpet-bag adventurers
taking precedent over it." His account of what happened in South Carolina repeats the anti-Radical views of the Redeemers and their northern
apologists in every particular except their justification of the deliberately
provoked riots and massacres used to rectify the situation: "By the side of
robbery, the embezzlement, the depletion of the treasury of South Carolina, and the imposition of ruinous and unnecessary taxation upon the
people of the state by the carpet-bag harpies, aided and abetted by the
ignorant negroes whom our government had not given time to shake the
dust from their feet before it invited them to seats in the chambers of
legislature, we must place the heartless butcheries of Hamburg and
Ellerton."30
If Fortune implied, without quite saying it categorically, that the enfranchisement of "ignorant" blacks during Reconstruction had been a mistake
and that more stress needed to be put on preparing for the ballot than on
exercising it, other prominent black intellectuals of the 1880s were coming
to this conclusion in a more straightforward fashion. John Bruce, a prominent black journalist who would have a long career as a "race man" and
advocate of separatist activity, concluded after the Supreme Court decision of 1883 restricting federal action on behalf of civil rights that "we
have already paid too much attention to politics." The focus should shift,
he argued, to education.31
34
The same point was made more strongly in George Washington Williams's History of the Negro Race in America (1882), a book that would be
quoted in suffrage debates in South Africa. Williams, an Ohio clergyman
and the first black member of the state legislature, was, like Fortune,
highly critical of Radical Reconstruction, The failure of the "Negro governments" was inevitable, he contended, "because they were not built on
the granite foundation of intelligence and statesmanship." As a result of
their fall, "a lesson was taught the colored people that is invaluable. Let
them rejoice that they are out of politics. Let white men rule. Let them
enjoy a political life to the exclusion of business and education, and they
will sooner or later be driven out of their places by the same law that sent
the Negro to the plantations and schools. And if the Negro is industrious,
frugal, saving, diligent in labor, and laborious in study, there is another
law that will quietly and peaceably, without a political shock, restore him
to his normal relations in politics." Blacks will regain the ballot, he concluded, when they can pay taxes and read their own ballots, when they
are "equal to all the exigencies of American citizenship."32
That education and economic self-help had a higher priority than political participation and even the exercise of political rights was still a minority
viewpoint in the 1880s. Only after 1890, when the defeat of Lodge's Force
Bill and the wholesale constitutional disfranchisenient of Mississippi blacks
made loss of southern voting rights appear irreversible, did this approach
win wide acceptance among black leaders and intellectuals. Its foremost
champion was Booker T. Washington, the principal of Tuskegee Institute
and, after the death of Frederick Douglass in 1895, the most influential
black man in the United States. Washington argued in 1900 that "we made a
mistake at the beginning of our freedom in putting the emphasis on the
wrong end. Politics and the holding of office were too largely emphasized,
almost to the exclusion of every other interest." What had been forgotten
was that "the individual or race that owns the property, pays these taxes,
possesses the intelligence and substantial character, is the one which is
going to exercise the greatest control on government, whether he lives in
the North or whether he lives in the South." He made it clear that he did
"not favor the Negro's giving up anything which is fundamental and which
has been guaranteed to him by the Constitution of the United States." It
was legitimate and indeed desirable for the South to restrict the franchise
on the basis of property and education, but it should not do so, Washington
warned, in a racially discriminatory fashion. Despite his reputation as an
accommodationist, Washington protested openly on a number of occasions
against the tendency of the disfranchising constitutional conventions to
provide loopholes enabling poor and illiterate whites to meet the new
voting qualifications. Like most nineteenth-century liberals, but unlike
radical democrats such as Frederick Douglass, he believed that the ballot
was a privilege to be reserved for the certifiably competent and intelligent
members of the community. For blacks and whites alike, it should serve as a
reward and incentive for the attainment of certain minimum standards of
35
civilization and social efficiency. (He would have had no objection to the
electoral system of the Cape Colony of South Africa.) Although Washington's powers of persuasion were not sufficient to prevent southern white
supremacists from enacting a suffrage that was impartial in form only, it is
less than fair to charge him with abandoning the cause of equal political
rights.33
Whether applied fairly or unfairly, the establishment of new tests for
voting would keep most southern blacks from the polls. But for Washington this was a small price to pay for a chance to concentrate on activities
he deemed more fundamental for group progress than voting. His program of industrial education, for which he succeeded in getting substantial
support from northern philanthropy and from southern state legislatures,
was part of a larger plan to rehabilitate a "backward" black peasantry and
make them competitive in a developing capitalist society. Like most
Americans of the late nineteenth century, Washington believed that economics was a more important source of power and status than political
participation. He also accepted the view that prejudice and discrimination
were a response to poverty and immorality. Like T. Thomas Fortune, he
apparently believed that southern blacks would be treated as equals and
granted full political rights when they had produced a substantial and
prosperous class of landowners and businessmen. Like advocates of black
self-help in later periods, he regarded Jewish commercial success in the
teeth of prejudice as a model for blacks to follow. In his estimation, it was
incompatible with black pride to assume that blacks could make progress
only through political activity aimed at influencing public policy in their
favor.
Whether Washington's emphasis on self-help and autonomous economic action constitutes a kind of proto-nationalism that anticipates the
doctrines of Marcus Garvey (as Garvey himself believed) or whether
Washington was a long-term integrationist who was simply calculating
what it would take to win full acceptance from white Americans remains
in dispute, mainly because he was careful not to divulge his views on
whether black Americans were destined to remain a separate people or be
absorbed as individuals into a color-blind America. Whatever his real
thoughts about race, it is clear that blacks in South Africa and throughout
the world saw Washington as a model of black achievement and self
reliance who refuted the racist canard that blacks could achieve nothing
on their own. The view of Tuskegee as a thoroughly modern and progressive institution run by blacks for blacks was a powerful inspiration for
those living under white colonial domination. Washington's legacy was
therefore ambiguous; he was an accommodationist on the question of
political rights and social segregation who also championed a black selfreliance and capacity for progress that contradicted white supremacist
ideology. Du Bois' criticism would be directed mainly at the first aspect,
and Garvey's praise would focus on the second.34
After 1900, a group of northern black intellectuals and professionals led
36
by W. E. B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter charged that Washington's acceptance of a qualified suffrage had encouraged southern white
supremacists to nullify the Fifteenth Amendment. Du Bois, Trotter, and
the other black radicals who founded the Niagara Movement in 1905
made federal action to restore equal voting rights on the Reconstruction
basis of universal manhood suffrage a centerpiece of their neo-abolitionist
campaign for black equality. Washington was condemned not only for
acceding to a qualified suffrage but also for leaving control of the franchise in the hands of southern white supremacists, which assured a discriminatory result. This was a valid criticism of Washington's policy. In his
desire to accommodate southern whites and win their support for black
education and economic opportunity, Washington opposed congressional
legislation to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment; almost alone among
prominent black leaders he had withheld his support from the Force Bill
of 1890. Washington was not unintelligent or naive; he must have realized
that he was surrendering in practice what he persisted in affirming in
principleequal access to the ballot box. Like George Washington Williams, he believed that equal political rights would be restored when
blacks had rehabilitated themselves economically and morally. His critics
replied that political power was essential to equality of economic opportunity. Reverting to the logic of Reconstruction radicalism, they maintained
that only through the ability to influence public policy by voting and
holding office could blacks protect the fundamental civil rights that were
essential to the improvement of their economic condition. According to
Du Bois, writing in 1903, "The power of the ballot we need in sheer selfdefenseelse what will keep us from a second slavery?"35
The most persuasive defense of Washington's approach is that he was
making the best of a bad situation. Federal interventionism had failed
once and was unlikely to be revived in the foreseeable future. This being
the case, conciliation of southern whites in the hope of getting them to
acquiesce in the improvement of black education and the development of
black enterprise, leading perhaps to a decline of race hostility and an
eventual willingness to restore political rights, might be the best strategy
available. It was a sad commentary on the strength of American racism at
the turn of the century that this analysis could not be easily refuted.
The Cape Suffrage and the Origins of Black Protest Politics in
South Africa
Black protest politics in South Africa could not begin until British troops
and white settlers had overcome the violent resistance of independent
Africans against European conquest. Furthermore, reformist activity of a
kind that was analogous to the African-American struggle for equality
could develop only in constitutional contexts that provided some mechanisms for African political participation and representation. Without a
sanctioned way of expressing concerns or presenting grievances and the
37
possibility that complaints would be addressed, the only politics conceivable would have been the politics of rebellion or revolution. The necessary conditions for lawful black protest activity of a significant kind in
southern Africa first came into being in the eastern Cape Colony in the
late nineteenth century. By the 1880s, the Xhosa chiefdoms on the eastern
frontier had lost their independence but had not suffered enslavement or
a total denial of political rights. In fact some of their former subjects were
invited to participate as voters in what white liberals and humanitarians
claimed was a "color-blind" political system.
For reasons peculiar to the history of the Cape colony, therefore, the first
African political leaders who adjusted to the reality of European domination focused on issues involving the suffrage that many of them believed
were analogous to those then facing African-Americans. Even if they had
not been drawn to the comparison for reasons of their own, they could not
have avoided it; for white enemies of the Cape African franchise were
inclined to use it against them. In 1891, J. H. Hofmeyer, leader of an
emergent political organization of Afrikaners called the Bond, argued for
new suffrage qualifications designed to reduce the number of African voters by pointing to the alleged consequences of black voting in the United
States. It had led to "fraud, violence, and bloodshed; to a systematic falsification of the register." According to Hofmeyer, the federal government
had been forced to "stand by and wink," while southern whites used force
to keep blacks from the polls. The only way to prevent such a disaster from
befalling the Cape was to diminish the African electorate.36
The circumstances that gave the suffrage to some recently conquered
indigenes in a self-governing British colony were unique to the Cape.
When the colony was granted representative government in 1854, the
majority of the white population were descendants of Dutch colonists,
many of whom resented British hegemony and the forced Anglicanization
previously undertaken by colonial authorities. Since English settlers were
a substantial but distinct minority, the American system of white manhood suffrage would have led to Afrikaner predominance. One way of
preventing Afrikaners from controlling the new representative institutions was to admit a proportion of the Colored population to the electorate, on the assumption that they could be induced to support Englishspeakers against their former slavemasters. Of course English hegemony
could also have been assured, at least temporarily, by setting a very high
property qualification for the franchise. But this would have dangerously
embittered the relatively poor but fiercely proud Afrikaner farmers, who
had earlier rebelled against British rule or trekked away to form independent republics in the interior of South Africa, and was also opposed by
missionaries and liberal imperial officials, who believed that some people
of color were capable of becoming "civilized" and should be rewarded for
their efforts. Although the analogy is far from perfect, there is some
resemblance between the mixture of idealistic and self-interested motives
that led northern Republicans to impose black franchise on the South
38
after the Civil War and those which impelled English authorities and
settler representatives to extend the franchise to people of color in the
mid-nineteenth century Cape. In both cases, adherence to liberal ideals of
equal rights helped to enable one ethnic or sectional division of the white
population to maintain its hegemony over another.37
In the decades immediately after their enfranchisement, the Colored
voters of the Western Cape failed to organize independently and define an
interest of their own. They did not, for example, mobilize against the
draconian Master-Servants law of 1856, which subjected many of them to
quasi-serfdom on white farms. An extraordinarily heterogeneous population of uprooted, detribalized indigenes and ex-slaves of diverse origin,
they mostly lacked a group consciousness that transcended paternalistic
dependence on the local white notables who monopolized office-holding.38
It was otherwise in the Eastern Cape, which was an expanding frontier
until the 1880s. The Xhosa tribesman of the Ciskei and Transkei fought
no less than ten wars against white expansion, beginning in the 1780s and
lasting for a century. Few indigenous populations put up a more determined and effective resistance against white colonial conquest. The recurring pattern was for a conquered area to be first ruled directly by the
British crown and then absorbed into the Cape Colony. In 1865 the Ciskei
was attached to the Cape, and the Transkei was incorporated piecemeal
during the 1870s and '80s. The result was a vast increase in the Bantuspeaking African population of the colony and a smaller, but still substantial, increase in the nonwhite electorate, Since most of the new African
voters helped to send English-speaking representatives to the Cape Parliament, it is not surprising that it was the political spokesmen for an increasingly self-conscious Cape Afrikaner community, namely Hofmeyer and
the Afrikaner Bond, who began the agitation for suffrage restriction.39
One distinct group of newly incorporated Africans adapted with alacrity and enthusiasm to the white man's electoral contests. The most eager
voters tended to be those who had been converted to Christianity and
attended mission schools. Beginning in She early nineteenth century,
Christian missionaries established stations throughout the territory that
would become South Africa, especially in areas under British control. As
the region came under British rule in the mid to late nineteenth century,
the Eastern Cape and the Transkei became a veritable hotbed of mission
activity, and the location of notable boarding schools for Africans, such as
Lovedale, a Presbyterian institution, and Healdtown, a Methodist training center. The missionaries believed that conversion and "civilization"
went hand in hand; peoples born in barbarism could not become good
Christians until they had changed all their habits and become culturally
British. Most Africans in the Eastern Cape as elsewhere did riot readily
forsake all of their traditional customs to adopt the white man's ways, and
the process of conversion was slow and uneven. Even those who responded with apparent enthusiasm to a mission education were not as
39
thoroughly transfigured as their teachers liked to imagine; for they remained African in many of their deepest feeling and loyalties.40
The best opportunities for establishing Christian communities under
missionary direction were among people whose way of life had already
been severely disrupted. Refugees from the devastating series of wars
resulting from the expansion of the Zulu Kingdom in southeastern Africa
in the early nineteenth centurythe mfecanewere particularly susceptible to missionary influence; defeat and the weakening of chiefs and traditional authorities left a political and cultural vacuum that missionaries
were eager to fill. The Mfengu peoplewho fled from Natal to the Cape
Colony in 1835, allied themselves with the British in subsequent wars with
the Xhosa in the eastern Cape, and were eventually awarded with a
substantial grant of landwere favorite targets of missionary endeavor; a
substantial portion of them became Christians and peasant producers
involved in the market economy. The first of the African politicians who
urged their compatriots to vote and get involved in Cape politics came
from this ethnic group.41
White missionaries viewed their charges as cultural inferiorspeople
living in the darkness of barbarism and heathenism. At best their
attitudes toward Africans were benevolently paternalistic, at worst arrogantly disdainful. They were also of course enemies of African independence and contributed significantly to the expansion of European hegemony. But in their own ethnocentric way, missionaries were champions
of African potential, at least in comparison with most white settlers
with their belief in unalterable black subservience and inferiority. British missionaries of the mid-nineteenth century, especially those who
carne from dissenting churches or from the Church of Scotland, shared
many attitudes with the general run of white American abolitionists;
they were likely to support movements for humanitarian reform, including the abolition of slavery and caste inequality. Although they had
little or no respect for traditional African culture, many of them nevertheless affirmed that properly nurtured Africans were eventually capable of reaching a level of civilization that would make them worthy of
civic and political equality with white colonists. For the most part, the
early- to mid-nineteenth century missionaries were not racist in the
strict sense of biological determinism. In their view, Christian belief,
Victorian sexual morality, the Protestant work ethic, literacy in the
English language, and adaptation to a market economy were inseparable elements of a civilized standard that Africans were capable of
attaining.42
Some Africans fulfilled their expectations. This converted and "civilized" minority became the nucleus of an elite of Western-educated
blacks who sought to modernize their more tradition-minded compatriots and prepare them for participation in the Cape's theoretically nonracial polity. The missionaries also imparted economic attitudes and skills
40
that helped to give this class a material foundation for meeting the
suffrage qualifications and for making alliances with influential whites.
Missions often provided individual families with small lots for cultivation
and encouraged them to produce for the colonial market. The eastern
Cape in late nineteenth century thus became a growth area for a new
kind of African peasantry. The market for farm produce began expanding rapidly in the 1860s and then went on to greater heights as a result of
the diamond and gold rushes of the '70s and '80s. Much land on the
Eastern Cape frontier remained in African possession, and the demand
for foodstuffs was so great that it could not be met exclusively by white
farmers. Even after some Africans began trekking to the mines of Kimberley and the Witwatersrand to labor under conditions that quickly
grew oppressive, others were prospering by growing foodstuffs to meet
the new demand created by a burst of urbanization and industrialization.
In the eastern Cape a community of interest developed between the
emerging class of peasant producers and the white middlemen or commercial capitalists who handled their crops and supplied them with consumer goods. Historian Stanley Trapido has argued that this nexus provided the interracial liberalism of the Cape with a material base that
gave it greater staying power than if it had been merely an afterglow of
mid-nineteenth century British humanitarianism.43
But the most prominent and articulate of the early post-conquest African political leaders were not likely to be personally engaged in peasant
production. They were more apt to be the sons of prosperous peasants
who had acquired more education than was needed for farming and
sought careers of a more sedentary and cerebral kind. By the 1880s and
'90s a small number of converted Africans had graduated from mission
high schools and were finding employment as clerks, interpreters, minor
civil servants, journalists, or even clergymen. They were the vanguard of
a Western-educated intelligentsia that would assume leadership in the
struggle for African rights, especially equal rights for "civilized" blacks, in
a colonial order that they hoped or imagined would live up to the highest
ideals of Victorian liberalism.44
The forerunner or founding father of this new intellectual elite was Tiyo
Soga, son of a Xhosa headman, who attended the Presbyterian school of
Lovedale in the years immediately after its founding in 1841. When a
frontier war forced the temporary closing of the school in 1846, he was
sent to Scotland for further education at Glasgow University and the
United Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Edinburgh. He returned to
the Cape in 1857 with a degree in theology, ordination as a Presbyterian
minister, and a pious Scottish wife. As the first black clergyman in South
Africa, he confined himself for the most part to his duties as a missionary
and generally avoided speaking out on political issues. Fully sharing the
mission philosophy that no civilization was possible without Christianity,
he was in no position to object to European domination and imperial
expansion so long as exposure to the gospel went with it. But in 1865 he
41
42
Most of the black politicians operating within the late nineteenthcentury colonial system showed a strong partiality for the British side in
the developing Anglo-Boer conflict in southern Africa. Noting that the
Afrikaners in their independent republics denied all political and civil
rights to blacks, while the British in the Cape and Natal at least paid lip
service to the idea of "equal rights for every civilized man" regardless of
race, they tended to be on the lookout for any signs of an Afrikaner
conspiracy to reduce them to servitude. The homes of most Christianized
and educated Africans in the late nineteenth arid early twentieth century
had a picture of Queen Victoria on the wall, just as many black homes in
post-Civil War America honored Abraham Lincoln. Analogous to the
way many African-Americans of the Reconstruction era and afterwards
identified Lincoln, the North, and the Republican party with freedom and
the defense of their rights against the white supremacists of the South,
most "Progressive" Africans viewed the Queen, the British empire, and
the English-speaking liberal politicians of the Cape as their defenders
against the unvarnished racism of the Afrikaners.
It was in response to the growth of the Afrikaner Bond that members of
the educated elite of the Eastern Cape came together in Port Elizabeth in
1882 to form the first black political organization in South Africa
Imbumba Yama Nyama (literally "hard, solid sinew," or tightly unified
group.) The announced purpose of the new organization was to unify
Africans politically so that they could fight for their "national rights."
Immediate concerns of Imbumba members included overcoming sectarian divisions among African Christians and protecting the franchise. Reacting to the move among Afrikaners to raise the qualification for the
suffrage, an Imbumba conference of 1883 passed a resolution to be submitted to Parliament requesting that "the franchise should be as it is at
present and not raised, so that browns [Africans and Coloreds] may always have the right of voting." This pioneer effort to organize Africans
for political assertion was apparently a bit ahead of its time, for Imbumba
disappears from the historical record after 1884. But the precedent would
be remembered.47
A founder of Imbumba and the key figure in the birth of African
protest politics in the Cape during the 1880s and '90s was John Tengo
Jabavu, a second-generation Methodist convert of Mfengu ancestry. Born
in 1859, Jabavu attended the Methodist school at Healdtown, qualified as
a teacher, taught a few years in mission schools, and then embarked on a
career in journalism as editor of the Xhosa-language edition of a missionary newspaper. In 1884, he became involved in electoral politics, serving
as canvasser for a white parliamentary candidate who was seeking the
African vote. Shortly thereafter, he accepted help from his white political
patrons to found his own newspaper, Imvo Zabatsundu ("Native Opinion"), the first black-owned and -operated journal in South Africa. Imvo
became a forum for African viewpoints and was quick to protest government actions viewed as contrary to black interestsalthough the most
43
44
45
46
47
now British South Africa. The resulting mobilization of the small Colored
middle class under its own educated elite exhibited the tensions and contradictions created by the group's racially marginal status. Colored political leaderslike Abdul Abdurhahman, the Cape Malay physician who
was the dominant figure in the APO from shortly after its founding until
his death in 1940were willing at times to cooperate with Africans in a
common struggle for Cape liberal principles, but were more immediately
concerned with the rights and privileges of their own group, which in
South Africa's emerging three-tiered racial system gave them some advantages over Africans. Unlike the African organizations, the APO tended to
embrace the goal of total assimilation into European society; in other
words, Colored politicians and intellectuals usually lacked the sense of
nationality or distinctive peoplehood that was a virtually inescapable component of African consciousness.55
Nevertheless, there was one tendency in the early twentieth-century
Colored search for identity that reached out to a larger world of black and
brown peoplea kind of pan-Negroism that was stimulated by contact
with black Americans or black American ideas. A key figure in the agitation that led to the founding of the APO was F. Z. S. Peregrine, a West
African of apparently mixed racial origin who had been educated in England and had lived in the United States during the 1890s. After a brief
career as a journalist and editor in Buffalo, New York, he attended the
first Pan-African Congress in London in 1900 and then emigrated to Cape
Town with the intention of spreading Pan-African ideas among the Colored population. Besides attempting to found race-conscious organizations, he established a newspaper, the South African Spectator, in which
he reported on the struggles of black people throughout the world and
especially in the United States. An admirer of both Booker T. Washington
and W. E. B. Du Bois (he would be distressed when they had a falling
out), he encouraged Coloreds to emulate their American cousins and
organize themselves along race lines in order to press more effectively for
equal rights. He also called for solidarity with Africans who were engaged
in a similar struggle. Identifying fully with Washingtonian ideas of group
progress, he regarded a qualified but genuinely impartial suffrage as an
incentive for black self-improvement, a reward for advancing on the path
to full equality with whites. According to a leading historian of Cape
Colored politics, Peregrine's moderate Pan-Africanism and emphasis on
racial pride and self-help "proved a catalyst in Coloured political organization in Cape Town," even though he did notpresumably because of his
somewhat marginal status as a recent immigrantplay a major role in the
founding of the APO and in its subsequent activities. His paper continued
for several years to promulgate race pride and solidarity among the Colored population and thus helped to counter the eagerness of many members of the Colored elite to identify completely with Europeans and work
merely for a downward shift of the color line to include them, but not
Africans, among the ruling caste.56
48
49
Washington's strategic retreat on the suffrage issue and also made them
think twice about demanding more than the most liberal segments of
British and white South African opinion seemed willing to grant. In other
words, they resembled Washington in their reluctance to challenge directly the principle of white or European hegemony.58
As early as 1886, Jabavu's pioneer journal of African opinion, Imvo
Zabantsundu, featured a debate on the American example. The Reverend P. J. Mzimba, a black Presbyterian missionary following the footsteps
of Tiyo Soga, called on Africans to refrain from political activity and
concentrate on education. Politics, he argued would offend white missionaries and impede their essential efforts to uplift Africans. To support his
case, he cited the similar advice George Washington Williams had given
to African-Americans in his History of the Negro Race. "Let the experience of Africans in America give warning in time to Africans in Africa to
let politics alone at present," Mzimba advised. "Let us be content to be
ruled by colonists. Let us only have to do with politics in order to encourage those white men who desire to give us schools and books." Imvo
editorialized against Mzimba's analogy, arguing that the unsettled conditions that made black suffrage problematic in the United States did not
exist in the Cape colony, where political involvement did not carry the
same risks and in no way conflicted with an emphasis on education. In
subsequent editorials of the late 1880s, Jabavu presented the AfricanAmerican example of economic self-help and independence as a model
for his own people to followwithout, however, subscribing to the view,
soon to be fully articulated in the United States by Booker T. Washington,
that they had to deemphasize politics in order to do it. Because the Cape
African suffrage was restricted to "civilized natives" and did not threaten
white domination of the colony, its exercise and preservation seemed to
harmonize fully with a philosophy of gradual advancement through economic self-help and education that accommodated to white rule.59
When the possible extension of the Cape franchise to the rest of a
unifying South Africa became the main preoccupation of African leaders
around the turn of the century, American franchise struggles assumed
greater relevance. The most incisive comparative analysis of the black
suffrage question in the two societies came from the pen of Alan Kirkland
Soga, a leader of the South African Native Congress and editor of Izwi
Labantu. An unjustly neglected figure in the history of black politics in
South Africa, Soga was perhaps the most significant and influential African intellectual of the first decade of the twentieth century. In a sense, he
played W. E^. B. Du Bois to Jabavu's Booker T. Washington. The youngest son of the Reverend Tiyo Soga, he was educated in Scotland under
the supervision of his then-widowed Scottish mother, studying law and
humanities at Glasgow University. Returning to South Africa, he identified with his father's people and embarked on a career in the civil service
of the Cape Colony at a time when there was no official bar against blacks
in responsible government jobs. But Soga soon discovered that there was
50
51
52
the inculcation of duty and the dignity of labor, and the practiced application of brains to manual work, he has no equals." He also praised Washington for his "attempts to conciliate black and white, to appease angry
passions, and to lead men's thoughts away from the turmoil and strife
fostered by continual political agitation." Not surprisingly, therefore,
Soga condemned in the strongest terms those African-Americans who
had recently disrupted an address of Washington in Boston and deprived
him of the right to speak. "Unity for common objects, and the common
safety, is the only hope of the black man's salvation," he wrote, and this
need for solidarity meant that "the black man cannot afford to see the
leaders of the race subjected to insult, or degraded by members of the
race without the most solemn protest." He then quoted at length another
black South African editor, F. S. Z. Peregrine, who was dispensing similar judgments to the Coloreds of the Western Cape. Peregrino compared
the squabbles among black Americans to "the vagaries of the mythical
kilkenny cats" and described the attack on Washington as an indication
that black Americans had failed to develop " 'Race Pride.' "64
The reactions of Soga and Peregrino reflect the enormous international
prestige of Washington as an exemplar of black celebrity and achievement. But when Soga turned in subsequent articles to the question of the
franchise, he distanced himself from Washington and embraced Fortune's
position, which he paraphrased as realization that "the franchise is too
important to be left to the whim of the states." He then quoted the editor
of the New York Age at length on why he disagreed with Washington's
willingness to allow state governments to set property and educational
qualifications for voting. Fortune's view was "that the suffrage question is
the basic principle of national citi/enship, that it should therefore be
controlled absolutely by the Federal Government," and that "in a democracy like ours," all men who are liable for taxation and military service
"should have an equal voice in the election of those who spend his taxes
and levy wars that he must fight, and make laws regulating his conduct in
the social and civil compact."65
Soga attached enormous importance to the suffrage. "The ballot," he
wrote, "is a guarantee of protection, and in that sense is the Palladium of
the People's liberties. Its denial or withdrawal from any class may be regarded as opening the door to oppression, crime, and virtual slavery."
Nevertheless, he had some difficulty applying Fortune's radical-democratic
principle to South Africa, because all that he and SANC were calling for
was an extension of the Cape's qualified suffrage to the other British colonies. Acknowledging "the weakness of the Cape Colony franchise," because it did not even give the vote to all blacks who paid taxes, Soga
nevertheless refrained from calling for a lowering of the qualification and
invoked Washington to justify such prudence. At a time when white liberals in the Cape were advocating a nonracial franchise to the rest of South
Africa but were also willing to consider raising the qualifications to make it
more palatable to the white settler communities, Soga found "no call for
53
black men to agitate the question on the matter of rights, for there are some
things that may be right in principle, but it is not always expedient to
demand them. The force of this truth is more apparent to Booker Washington than to some of his countrymen. . . . " Where Fortune's doctrine was
immediately and directly applicable was to the question of who should
control the suffrage. Using the language of American federalism, Soga
reported that the SANC suffrage petition had "urged that the question of
the enfranchisement of His Majesty's native and Colored subjects should
not be left to the decision of the States." Language from the petition itself
referred to the former republics as "proposed Federal States" in the process of "reconstruction and admission . . . into the Union" under a "British
Constitution" that provided equal rights to its black subjects. In Soga's
thinking, Britain was equivalent to the federal government of the United
States and the newly incorporated colonies were analogues of the southern
states that had failed in their bid for secession and then had to be reconstructed under the egalitarian political principles that allegedly set the
terms for unification. The danger was that Britain would follow the American example and fail to enforce its constitutional principles in recalcitrant
states or provinces: ". . . surrender of a principle in the Transvaal, hitherto
recognized by the oldest colonythe Cape of Good Hope,will be to
reproduce, in course of time, similar conditions to those existing in the
Southern States. . . ."66
Soga's views of 1903 and 1904, and those of the South African Native
Congress for which he was principal spokesman, closely paralleled those
of relatively pragmatic northern African-American leaders who tried to
support Booker T. Washington's work in the South without forgoing
their right to protest or conceding the principle of federal protection of
the ballot. Fortune was the most conspicuous of these, but others included Bishop Alexander Walters of the African Methodist Episcopal
Zion Church, who was first president of the Afro-American Council, and
Kelly Miller, dean of Howard University and the nation's most prominent black academic. Before he began his direct attack on Washington in
1903, W. E. B. Du Bois had shared this basic perspective. Men like
Fortune, Walters, and Miller did not follow Du Bois into the neoabolitionist camp of William Monroe Trotter, partly because they attached a high value to race unity and strategic flexibility, believing that
both accommodationist and protest strategies had their place in the
larger black movement.67
This inclusive or "all-in" approach was the theory behind the AfroAmerican Council. Such hopes for a federated unity of northern and
southern black leaders would soon be a casualty of the Washington-Du
Bois controversy. But before the militant opposition to Washington crystallized in the Niagara Movement of 1905, the Fortune-Walters-Miller
concept of a diversified but coordinated struggle could serve as a model
for Soga, Peregrino, and like-minded black South Africans. A biographical sketch of Soga in the Colored American Magazine of February 1904,
54
which appears to have been written by Soga himself despite its nominal
authorship by a member of the magazine's staff, likened the aims of the
South African Native Congress to those of the Afro-American Council:
"Unfortunately, the, higher interests of the natives are suffering by the
divisions over politics and the native press, and it is sincerely hoped that
for the protection of these larger interests the Native Congress, which is a
body akin to the Afro-American Council, will be able to draw the most
intelligent classes together in unity and social cooperation."68
From Soga's perspective, the disrupter of unity among Cape Africans
the equivalent of the Trotter and the Boston rebels in the United States
was John Tengo Jabavu, who in 1903 arid 1904 stood aloof from the
Congress, repudiated in principle the idea of separate black political organizations, and supported the white political party that sought unity between English and Afrikaners rather than the one that stood for the
British hegemony that Soga believed was the only hope for extension of
the Cape liberal suffrage throughout South Africa. Jabavu did protest
against the treaty of Vereininging and defend the Cape franchise, but his
strategy was to curry favor with prominent white politicians rather than
join in a separate black political movement that he believed would serve
only to alienate whites. One is tempted to compare his position on black
politics with that of Frederick Douglass toward the end of his career.
Douglass had refused to join the Afro-American League because of a
similar opposition to forming separate national organizations for quasipolitical purposes. Both Douglass and Jabavu favored a political integrationism that precluded independent action of the kind favored by Fortune
and Soga. But there were differences between the political contexts in
which the two men operated that explain why Douglass usually projected
the image of a protest leader while Jabavu appeared at this time to be
playing an accommodationist role. Douglass backed a political party that
at one time had fought for the legal and political equality of blacks, and he
never gave up hope of reviving the spirit of Reconstruction-era Radical
Republicanism. Jabavu worked with white politicians who were liberal
paternalists and pragmatic defenders of white supremacy. Both were leaning on weak structures, but Douglass at least had some claim on a tradition within his party that promised more than a token suffrage for a
"civilized" black minority.69
From the vantage point of historical hindsight, Soga's broader analogy
between the circumstances and possibilities of black politics in the United
States and South Africa appears to have been an unstable compound of
insight and illusion. His likening of the British Empire to the American
Union as an arena within which blacks could gain political rights was, time
would show, seriously defective. The British empire was moving toward
decentralization; London would take progressively less responsibility for
the rights of people of color in the commonwealths to which it was according self-government. Once South Africa was defined as an autonomous
white settler society like Australia or Canada, the hopes of blacks for
55
equal rights as royal subjects were doomed. Furthermore, the South African Union that came into being in 1910 was not the kind of federal union
under the dominance of English-speakers and British traditions that Soga
anticipated. Rather it was a unified state with an Afrikaner majority and
an English minority that had its own fiercely white supremacist component. The Cape franchise survived for a quarter of a century after union,
but only as a local exception to the general practice of excluding blacks
from the electorate. The United States on the other hand was moving
toward centralization; federal power was increasing at the expense of the
states. It took more than half a century for the centralization of government to manifest itself in the enforcement of the equal suffrage rights for
all citizens, regardless of race, as prescribed by the Fifteenth Amendment; but the growth of federal activism that began in the Progressive era
and accelerated during the New Deal was a precondition for the success of
the voting rights movement of the 1960s. Hence Soga's assumption that
the political-constitutional contexts of the two struggles were comparable
in the possibilities that they offered for black enfranchisement was wishful
thinking.70
Soga showed more prescience when he warned that if the suffrage was
denied to Africans and people of color in a South African union they
would suffer a further erosion of their rights and be reduced to "virtual
slavery," as appeared to be happening to blacks in the American South in
the wake of disfranchisement. The steady expansion of segregation and
legalized discrimination after 1910 were a realization of his worst fears.
Soga's belief in the ballot as the bedrock of black progress was what
made African-American discourse seem to him so relevant to his assessment of the black situation in South Africa. Like black American leaders
from Frederick Douglass to W. E. B. Du Bois and beyond, he did not
conceive of the right to vote as simply the chance for blacks as individual
citizens to participate in governing themselves. In a context of white prejudice and discrimination, suffrage might provide the race as a whole with a
weapon to resist oppression and the means to create an environment in
which collective efforts for social, economic, and cultural betterment
would have some chance of success. This perspective enabled the oppressed group to develop a sense of pride, patriotism, and self-interest,
while at the same time looking forward to participating with whites as equal
citizens of a common polity. It was thus an integrationist nationalismto
be distinguished from pure assimilationism on the one hand and separatist
nationalism on the otherthat dominated the thinking of protest leaders
in the United States and South Africa at the turn of the century.
The hopes for a color-blind democracy in which distinctive groups
could remain different without being unequal was linked to an optimistic
vision of human progress and enlightenment. Differences of opinion on
political tactics and strategy may obscure the fact that black leaders at the
beginning of the twentieth centuryDouglass, Washington, Fortune,
Trotter, and the young Du Bois in the United States; Soga and Jabavu in
56
South Africashared not only a sense of race pride and loyalty but also a
liberal Victorian view of human history as the march of humanity toward
a higher level of "civilization." The movement of the West from feudalism, aristocracy, and superstition toward democratic capitalism, civic
equality, and an enlightened Christianity compatible with modern science
and technology was seen as the proper and inevitable path for black
people and for multi-racial societies with a history of slavery and white
supremacy. Such values were not regarded as "Western" in any racial or
ethnic sense but as universal, reflecting the God-given capacity and destiny of all the nations and races of the world.71
Events of the twentieth century would soon challenge this liberalprogressive faith and make it harder to sustain. As the status of black
people in the United States and South Africa deteriorated in the early
years of the new century, liberal progressivism began to seem less compelling as a political ideology on which blacks could base their hopes for
freedom and self-determination. Both Fortune and Soga later became
disillusioned with liberal values and modes of action. Fortune's growing
sense of the strength of American racism led him by the early 1920s to an
association with Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association and the editorship of the Garveyite organ The Negro World. Although Fortune continued to urge African-Americans to fight for their
constitutional rights, this affiliation signified a deemphasis on liberal reformism in an American political context and the willingness to collaborate with a separatist form of nationalism that he would found have
anathema in earlier years.72
As white settler hegemony over South Africa became more and more
inescapable, Soga began to wonder if the British surrender of African
rights might be due to the desire of capitalists to exploit African labor
without the interference of a state committed to the protection of basic
human rights, and he simultaneously registered serious doubts about
whether Western civilization was an entirely desirable model for blacks to
follow. By 1908, Izwi was making favorable references to socialism and to
traditional African customs. "All that the blackman need do," Soga wrote
in that year, "is to borrow the best that Western civilization offers. But we
must get rid of the educated black serf who will blindly tie his race to the
juggernaut of Western civilization, through sheer ignorance abandoning
the social qualities that have preserved them hitherto from the social
decay which is unavoidable under the present effete systems of European
civilization." In addition to his other more-or-less forgotten achievements, A. K Soga may also have been one of the forerunners of that
special blend of Western economic radicalism and African communalism
that would later be known as "African socialism."73
2
'Ethiopia Shall Stretch Forth Her Hands":
Black Christianity and
the Politics of Liberation
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extent that radical white Christians such as William Lloyd Garrison practiced what they preached. The great evangelical revival that swept the
United States in the early nineteenth century affected free blacks and
slaves with pious masters, bringing many into the Christian fold for the
first time and intensifying the faith of others. When the revival spawned a
movement for radical reform that in the North encouraged the belief that
slavery was a sin and had no place in a Christian republic, the side of black
Christianity that affirmed an ideal of interracial fellowship with whites
was powerfully energized. History seemed in the process of validating a
belief shared with some whites that obviously served the cause of black
emancipation from servitude.6
Nevertheless, the opposite tendencytoward a Christianity that affirmed difference from whites rather than identity with them and found a
special place for blacks in God's providential designalso had deep roots
in the antebellum black experience. As several scholars have demonstrated, the Christianity of the slaves was far from being a carbon copy of
that of their masters. Differing from the white prototype in modes of
worship, choice of central Biblical texts, and ethical priorities, it laid the
foundations for an African-American cultural nationalism. Whether it also
implied a political nationalism is more problematic. But a strain of thought
among antebellum free blacks made an explicit connection between black
religious distinctiveness and a future of political self-determination. This
early separatist thinking was encouraged by the setbacks and disappointments that beset the antislavery cause, as southern whites geared for a
militant defense of slavery and many northern whites excoriated and
mobbed the abolitionists for advocating racial equality and threatening the
peace of the union. These pioneer black nationalists put forth a prophetic
view of black redemption that would inspire African-American emigrationists, the first Pan-Africanists, and leaders of the "Ethiopian" movement among black Christians in South Africa. St. Clair Drake called this
pattern of thought and imagery "Ethiopianism" or "the Ethiopian myth."
The extent to which this world view became a major source for twentieth
century black protest and resistance is a question that can profitably be
addressed only after the genealogy of this black religious nationalism has
been explored.7
Ethiopianist Thought in the Nineteenth Century
The biblical source of the Ethiopian vision was a somewhat obscure passage in Psalms 68:31, which prophesied that "Princes shall come out of
Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch forth her hands unto God." The context is provided by the next line"Sing unto God, ye Kingdoms of the
Earth"but readers could well ask why Egypt and Ethiopia are singled
out while other kingdoms or parts of the world that were known in biblical
times are not named. The use of "Ethiopia" as a synonym for black Africa
as a whole, and not merely for the actual Christian kingdom also known
62
as Abyssinia, has a remote origin in the English language and was commonplace during the era of the Renaissance and Reformation. In Elizabethan drama, for example, Africans are often referred to as "Ethiops."
During the Middle Ages, a positive image of blacks had arisen from the
hazy knowledge that there were black Christians to the south of Islamic
North Africa. The legend of Prester John, the saintly black Christian
monarch of Ethiopia, had fueled the hopes of Crusaders that blacks
would someday join Europeans in a successful holy war against Islam.8
The association of black Africans with Christian triumphalism receded
after the Crusades and would have found relatively few European adherents once slave traders began to transport massive numbers of heathen
West Africans to the New World in the sixteenth century. But the notion
that Africans or Ethiopians had a starring role in the drama of Christian
redemption reemerged in Western thought during the eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries. The eighteenth-century Swedish philosopher
and mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg believed in an historical sequence of
"true churches," the most recent of which was the European Christian
Church. But Europe's day was coming to an end, he prophesied, and a
new and purer church would soon emerge elsewhere. Although Swedenborg did not clearly specify that the new church would arise in Africa, his
descriptions of blacks in the interior of that continent as more spiritual
than other people led some of his followers to believe that Africa was the
destined site of his "New Jerusalem."
During the nineteenth century, British and American Swedenborgians
were influential in promulgating a millenarian view of African destiny. In
fact they made a creative synthesis of Christian eschatology with an emerging ethnology based on the belief in permanent differences in temperament and capacity among human races, a doctrine that in other hands
would justify white superiority and dominance over blacks. According to
some Swedenborgians, blacks were the race that God and nature had
endowed with the greatest aptitude for Christianity. Whites were naturally too cerebral, self-seeking, and aggressive to meet the standards of
the Sermon on the Mount; only Africans had the believing, affectionate,
and altruistic temperament that was the right soil for the full flowering of
Christian faith and virtue. Hence the prophecy of Ethiopia stretching
forth her hands unto God meant that the redemption of Africa would
realize the Kingdom of God on earth. This religious version of "romantic
racialism" had a considerable impact on white American abolitionists,
colonizationists, and advocates of missions to Africa. It found its most
eloquent statement and largest audience in Harriet Beecher Stowe's
epoch-making antislavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin.9
No evidence has been uncovered to show that Swedenborgian eschatology directly influenced the thought of free black Christians in earlynineteenth century America, but black abolitionists certainly became
aware of such ideas when antislavery whites began to invoke them in the
1840s. At that point, however, their function would have been to give
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our head against our will and desire, and drag us from our very, mean, low,
and abject condition." The final clause on the necessity of self-help is of
crucial importance; what could make Ethiopianism an activist, potentially
political faith was a recognition that the prophecy was conditional, that
God would help blacks only if they helped themselves.12
Walker's Appeal also featured his own version of the romantic racialist
conception of black moral superiority and messianic destiny: "I know," he
wrote, "that the blacks, take them half enlightened and ignorant, are more
humane and merciful than the most enlightened and refined European that
can be found in all the earth." Fie applied this racial contrast to the history
of Christianity in the course of refuting Thomas Jefferson's negative assessment of black capacities in Notes on Virginia. If one were to judge whites by
their behavior, Walker wrote, one would have to conclude that they "have
always been an unjust, jealous, unmerciful, avaricious and bloodthirsty set
of beings, always seeking after power and authority." Conversion to Christianity had not changed their essential nature, for they had been incapable
of following its moral precepts. "The blacks of Africa and the mulattoes of
Asia," however, "have never been half so avaricious, deceitful and
ummerciful as the whites." Ironically reversing Jefferson's "suspicion" of
black inferiority, Walker was impelled to "advance my suspicion of them,
whether they are as good by nature as we are." Whites had long been
exposed to the Gospel but had been unchanged by it; "the Ethiopians" had
not, but they were now "to have it in its meridian splendorthe Lord will
give it to them to their satisfaction." In the footnote that concluded this
comparison of the races, Walker proclaimed as his "solemn belief, that if
ever the world becomes Christianized (which must certainly take place
before long) it will be through the means under God of the Blacks." The
prophecy that Africans would be redeemers of Christendom and harbingers of the salvation of the world had been put to a new usethe mobilization of blacks against slavery and oppression.13
As a fervent opponent of the African colonization movement of the
1820swhich he regarded as a proslavery plotWalker did not support
an immediate campaign to redeem Africa through the agency of converted American blacks. He believed that Americans, black and white,
must redeem themselves from the corruption and demoralization of slavery and racism before they sent missionaries to Africa. But the failure of
the abolitionist movement to mount an effective challenge to the slave
power in the 1830s and '40s, which became painfully obvious with the
passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, brought some of the black
abolitionists who followed in Walker's footsteps to the sad conclusion that
slavery was becoming more entrenched. The Fugitive Slave Act dampened black hopes for abolishing slavery in the foreseeable future, posed a
direct threat to the liberty of northern free Negroes, and caused an upsurge of interest in emigration from the United States. At first the new
emigrationist movement of the 1850s shunned Africa as a destination and
focused its attention on potential havens that were closer to home and
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easier to reach, such as Canada and the West Indies. The ill-repute of the
American Colonization Society and its Liberian colony continued to deter
blacks from contemplating a return to the continent of their ancestors,
even though Liberia became independent in 1847. For the emigrationists
of the early 1850s, the Promised Land for blacks fleeing white racial
tyrannythe American equivalent of Pharaohwas any place on earth
where they might hope to establish an independent nation of their own.
By the late 1850s, however, a small group of prominent black intellectuals
overcame their repugnance at the African colonization idea and made an
explicit connection between their desire to provide a refuge for oppressed
American blacks and their hopes for the redemption of Africa.14
One of these was the Reverend Henry Highland Garnet, the pastor of
black congregations within the predominantly white Presbyterian church
and the most conspicuous representative of the black activist clergy. In his
notable 1848 address, The Past and Present Condition, and the Destiny of
the Colored Race, he provided Africa with a glorious past, describing the
achievements of ancient Egypt and Ethiopia, and invoked the Ethiopian
prophecy as a sign of greater things to come: "It is said that 'Princes shall
come out of Egypt, and Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto
God.' It is thought by some that this divine declaration was fulfilled when
Philip baptised the converted eunuch of the household of Candes, the
Queen of the Ethiopians. In this transaction, a part of the prophecy may
have been fulfilled, and only a part." In the same address, however, he
explicitly rejected the notion that African-Americans had a separate destiny from white Americans. "It is too late," he said, "to separate the black
and white people in the New World," and he went so far as to predict that
"this western world is destined to be filled with a mixed race." Blacks in the
United States faced great obstacles in their struggle for inclusion; echoing
David Walker's "suspicion" of white moral depravity, Garnet noted that
"the besetting sins of the Anglo-Saxon race are, the love of gain and the
love of power." But he nevertheless proclaimed himself an American
patriot: "America is my home, my country, and I have no other."15
This affirmation did not impel Garnet to discourage all blacks from
emigrating, as Frederick Douglass normally did. Even before the passage
of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Garnet endorsed a limited and selective
emigration, not only within the Americas, but also to Liberia. As might
be expected, he was prominent in the emigration movement of the 1850s;
after 1858 his attention focused on Africa, and he became the president of
the African Civilization Society, a white-supported effort to build up an
independent black Christian nation in West Africa to serve as a base for
the evangelization of the continent. The further aim was "to establish a
grand center of Negro nationality, from which shall flow streams of commercial, intellectual, and political power which shall make colored people
respected everywhere." But Garnet did not advocate the mass emigration
of American blacks to Africa. The scheme he endorsed contemplated
sending only a few thousand a year, and he did not rule out the possibility
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deed he was critical of the more intense varieties of black religiosity and
viewed them as a hindrance to the cause of black liberation. Accepting the
romantic racialist view of blacks as naturally pious, he saw this trait as part
of the problem rather than the key to a solution. "The colored races are
highly susceptible of religion," he wrote; "it is a constituent principle of
their nature and an excellent trait in their character. But, unfortunately for
them, they carry it too far. Their hope is largely developed, and consequently, they usually stand stillhope in God, and really expect Him to do
that for them, which it is necessary they should do themselves." Delany's
critical comments on black religious excesses did not mean, as some historians have suggested, that he was anti-religious. Read in context his remarks
show that he was no atheist or agnostic: he was rather a liberal, nonsectarian Christian who believed that God's purposes must be achieved by men
working through the "fixed laws of nature" that God had laid down rather
than merely praying and waiting for a miraculous intervention.
This attitude explains the ambivalence toward missions and missionaries
that he manifested after he became actively interested in African colonization. His concern was that mere Christianization of Africa was not enough
to redeem the continent if religious conversion was not accompanied by the
reconstruction of society, the development of natural resources, and a full
application of "the improved arts of civilized life." Delany was an admirer
of the economic and technological achievements of Western capitalist society, and he feared that black people's reputed emotionalism, supernaturalism, and susceptibility to religious fervor might impede their efforts 1o
become equal to whitesand independent from themby preventing
them from developing the practical skills and physical resources that their
"elevation" demanded. He thus laid bare a tension within Ethiopianism,
and within black nationalism generally, between the mystical, romantic
racialist, black chauvinist aspect, and the stress on self-help endeavors that
were modeled to a considerable extent on white or European examples of
material achievement and "civilization."19
Nineteenth-century Ethiopianist thought attained its highest level of
complexity and sophistication in the writings and sermons of Eidward
Blyden and Alexander Crummell. Both emerged from the African diaspora in the New World to become Protestant missionaries and educators
in Liberia. Their trans-Atlantic perspective on the black experience made
them early and effective exponents of what was called Pan-Negroism in
the nineteenth century and Pan-Africanism in the twentieth. Blyden was
born and raised in the Danish West Indies and spent eight months in the
United States in 1850 vainly seeking admission to a theological seminary
before emigrating to the West African republic, where he completed his
education and was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1858. Active in
Liberian politics and education for more than thirty years, he also served
as a promoter of the persistent efforts of the American Colonization
Society to encourage African-American emigration to Liberia.20
Crummell grew up in New York as a close friend of Henry Highland
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Garnet and other future members of the city's African-American intellectual elite. Like Garnet, he was ordained in a predominantly white denomination, but he encountered even more discrimination from the Episcopal
hierarchy than Garnet had suffered at the hands of white Presbyterian
authorities, and in 1848, while on a fundraising trip to England, he accepted a fellowship to Cambridge and stayed there long enough to take a
degree in 1853. Instead of returning to the United States and engaging in
the domestic struggle against slavery and racism, as he had originally
intended, he accepted the commission of the Episcopal Church of the
United States to serve as a missionary to Liberia, where he remained for
twenty years. During that time, he was often closely associated with
Blyden. Both men labored mightily to raise the religious, educational,
and cultural level of Africa's only independent black republic and to
increase its "civilized" population by attracting the right kind of black
immigrants from the New World. Blyden ended his career in Africa, but
political difficulties forced him to move from Liberia to Sierra Leone in
1885; Crummell returned to the United States in 1873, where he became a
prominent black intellectual figure, the principal founder of the American
Negro Academy in 1897, and a major influence on the Pan-Negro thought
of the young W. E. B. Du Bois.21
The thought of Blyden and Crummell during their Liberian years elaborated the essentials of an Ethiopianist world-view. They differed somewhat
in emphasis, with Crummell stressing the religious or spiritual aspects of
African redemption more than Blyden, who paid greater attention to the
political and economic prerequisites for black self-determination. According to the providential view of black history that they shared with other
nineteenth century nationalists, the Africans of antiquity, especially the
black inhabitants of Egypt and Ethiopia, had attained a high level of civilization and were in fact the progenitors of the civilization that later flowered in
Europe. Subsequently, however, Africa had fallen into degeneracy and
barbarismaccording to Crummell this was because they had incurred the
wrath of God for lapsing into the practice of idolatry. Europe had progressed mainly because of its early embrace of Christianity, which was
essential to the highest form of civilization. But an officially Christian
Europe had flagrantly violated the ethical precepts of its own religion by
enslaving Africans and taking them to labor on the plantations of the New
World. This apparent catastrophe was in fact part of God's design for the
redemption of Africa and the black race. People of African descent in the
New World had benefited from their exposure to the religion of their
masters. The natural characteristics of blacks as a gentle and affectionate
race enabled them to respond to the altruistic ideals of their European
religious mentors without being infected by their actual greed and hypocrisy. It was the mission of some converted and civilized American blacks to
return to Africa as missionaries or settlers and redeem the land of their
ancestors from heathenism and barbarism. In this way the Ethiopian prophecy would be fulfilled. For Blyden, especially, the building up of "Negro
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In the case of Blyden, it appears that a commitment to racial particularism eventually predominated over universalist conceptions of progress
toward a world civilization. Blyden's views on race, as ably summarized
by his biographer Hollis Lynch, did not crystallize until the 1870s, but
they quickly hardened into a rigid ideology. In his hands the standard
romantic racialist notion that each race or nation had distinctive innate
characteristics and that blacks and whiles were opposites in temperament
and aptitude was combined with some of the doctrines of nineteenthcentury scientific racism. Blyden did not acccept the racist conception of a
hierarchy of superior and inferior races, but he did come to believe in the
superiority of pure races over mixed ones and to view miscegenation with
as much disdain as any white supremacist. Of apparently unmixed African
ancestry himself, he viewed mulattoes as inferior to pure blacks and as an
undesirable, disruptive element in any "black" community that incorporated them. To some extent his prejudices derived from Liberian politics.
Colonists from the United States and the West Indies had divided into
mulatto and Negro parties, with the browns establishing an early ascendency over the blacks; Blyden and the equally dark-skinned Crummell
had been fervent champions of the darker party. In their view the mulatto
elite had adopted the exclusiveness, arrogance, and highhandedness of
their southern white ancestors and was especially culpable for its cruel
and disdainful treatment of the colony's indigenous African population.
Crummell, for the most part, kept his anti-mulatto biases to himself after
he returned to the United States, but Blyden cultivated his color prejudices until they became almost an obsession. In his efforts on behalf of the
American Colonization Society, he made strenuous efforts to prevent
mulattoes from joining the exodus to Liberia and openly proclaimed that
he wanted "pure Negroes" only. Late in his life, he told a friend that he
wanted nothing on his tombstone but "He hated mulattoes." His view
that only those of unmixed ancestry could be trusted to embody the black
genius anticipated some of the rhetoric of Marcus Garvey after World
War I.25
In his comparisons of the innate characteristics of Europeans and
blacks, as expertly summed up by Hollis Lynch, Blyden repeated the
familiar romantic racialist litany of black virtues and white vices but gave
them a twist of his own:
The European character, according to Blyden, was harsh, individualistic,
competitive and combative; European civilization was highly materialistic;
the worship of science and industry was replacing that of God. In the character of the African, averred Blyden, was to be found "the softer aspects of
human nature": cheerfulness, sympathy, willingness to serve, were some of
its marked attributes. The special contribution of the African to civilization
would be a spiritual one. Africa did not need to participate in the mad and
headlong rush for scientific and industrial progress which had left Europe
with little time or inclination to cultivate the spiritual side of life, which was
ultimately the most important one.26
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Bois foretold a better world emerging from the dialectical struggle between the Strong Man and the Submissive Man, ending his commencement speech with the supplication, 'You owe a debt to humanity for this
Ethiopia of the Outstretched Arm.' "30
Du Bois's first major effort to formulate a philosophy of race revealed
his debt to Crummell and might be regarded as an effort to translate
Ethiopianism into an idiom compatible with the secular philosophy and
social science that Du Bois had learned at Harvard and the University of
Berlin. His paper on "The Conservation of Races," delivered in 1897 to
the National Negro Academy (the organization of the black cultural elite
that Crummell and others had founded), was essentially a revision of
Ethiopianism that dispensed for the most party with its specifically Christian and biblical underpinnings. It differed from Blyden's recent reformulation of the Ethiopian tradition to make it more Africa-centered by
retaining a central role for African-Americans in the redemption of the
race. Like Crummell and Blyden, Du Bois in 1897 regarded race as a
fundamental and irreducible fact of enormous consequence. There could
be no doubt, he affirmed, "of the widespread, nay universal, prevalence
of the race idea, the race spirit, the race ideal, and as to its efficiency as
the vastest and most ingenious invention of human progress."
Du Bois at this time was able to combine racialism and civilizationism
by viewing progress toward modernity as the achievement of particular
nations and races, a notion that he derived in part from his graduate work
in Germany. But all races or nations, and not just Germans or AngloSaxons, were capable of attaining the highest levels of development. If
blacks were to become modern and progressive, they had to develop their
own race consciousness and sense of their unique gifts and potentialities.
This meant that African-Americans should not aim at assimilation into
white society, as Frederick Douglass had proposed, but should cherish
and nurture their sense of racial distinctiveness. "For the development of
Negro genius, of Negro literature and art, of Negro spirit," Du Bois
wrote, "only Negroes bounded and welded together, Negroes bounded by
one vast ideal, can work out in its fulness the great message we have for
humanity." Consequently, "the advance guard of the Negro peoplethe
eight million people of Negro blood in the United States of America
must come to realize that if they are to take their just place in the vanguard of Pan-Negroism, then their destiny is not absorption by the white
Americans." African-Americans should regard themselves rather as "the
first fruits of this new nation, the harbinger of that black tomorrow which
is yet destined to soften the whiteness of the Teutonic society."31
Believing that black Americans were members of a great historic race
and should provide leadership for the race's struggle to realize its "genius," Du Bois at the outset of his career took a direct interest in Africa
and encouraged his fellow African-Americans to do likewise. In the same
year that he exhorted the Negro Academy to conserve and develop the
race, he wrote to Belgian authorities proposing a limited African-
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between blacks in the United States and Africa. Turner is mainly remembered as an outspoken proponent of emigration to Africa; but he is also
significant for having helped forge a link between independent black Christianity in the United States and the separatist Ethiopian movement in
South Africa. More than that, he exemplified the political potential of
church-based Ethiopianism more effectively than any African-American
leader of the nineteenth century.37
Born free in South Carolina, Turner became a preacher before the Civil
War, first for the white southern Methodists and then for the AME
Church. While serving during the war as pastor of an important congregation in Washington, D.C., Turner fervently supported the Union cause,
led in the agitation for the enlistment of black troops, and when the use of
blacks became government policy, played a major role in recruitment. As
a reward for his efforts, he was made a chaplain to black soldiers, the first
African-American minister to hold such a position in the United States
Army. Appointed an official of the Freedmen's Bureau in Georgia after
the war, Turner proselytized successfully for his church among the exslaves and was one of a number of black clergymen to enter Republican
politics, winning election to the state legislature in 1868. But Turner's
deep disillusionment with black prospects for gaining political equality in
the United States began when the white-dominated Georgia state legislature refused to seat blacks. As a leading black Republican in Georgia,
Turner did manage to hold minor federal offices during the Reconstruction era, but neither his personal ambitions nor those he held for his race
were fulfilled. Subsequently he emerged as the era's leading proponent of
black emigration from the United States to Africa, and its most consistent
and thoroughgoing supporter of black separatism.38
Turner had a relatively simple message that he presented in a blunt and
salty fashion. The failure of Reconstruction convinced him that whites
were unalterably opposed to black equality in the United States and that
African-American liberation could be achieved only among other blacks in
Africa. Any doubts he may have had on the subject were put to rest when
the Supreme Court in 1883 declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional. His conviction that hopes for black advancement and civil rights in
the United States were futile seemed borne out by the wave of lynchings
that swept the South beginning in the late 1880s. Addressing an emigration
convention in 1893, Turner put the issue in stark, unvarnished terms: "To
passively remain here and occupy our present ignoble status, with the
possibility of being shot, hung, or burnt," was clearly unacceptable. "To do
so would be to declare ourselves unfit to be free men. . . . For God hates
the submission of cowardice. But on the other hand to talk about physical
resistance is literally madness. . . . The idea of eight or ten million of exslaves contending with sixty million people of the most powerful race under
heaven!" Obviously the only alternative was a mass exodus.39
Turner cannot be dismissed as a voice in the wilderness futilely trying to
wean blacks from their blind devotion to America. His emigrationism
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Bishop Turner paid an historic visit to South Africa in 1898 and cemented
an enduring relationship between African Methodism in the United States
and what was called Ethiopianism in South Africa. At about the same
time, African-American Baptists were establishing missions in the southern part of the African continent. But it would be wrong to see independent black Christianity as an export from the United States. Impulses of
purely indigenous origin, as well as other foreign influences, contributed
to the rise of a Christian alternative to white-dominated missions. A
version of Ethiopianist religious nationalism that was more sharply focused on Africa and that appeared to present a more serious challenge to
white domination than the American variant came into prominence in
South Africa between the 1870s and the 1910s. Before detailing the sustenance that it received from African-American sources, we must place it
firmly in its South African context.
The immediate cause of the secession of Africans from white mission
churches was a growing pattern of discrimination against black ministers
and evangelists. Beginning with the education and ordination of Tiyo Soga
by the Presbyterians in the 1850s, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists in southern Africa began to prepare selected African converts
for evangelical work and eventual ordination. Some mid-nineteenth century white missionaries anticipated that Africans would gradually take over
many of their responsibities and that a "native clergy" would eventually
assume a central role in the redemption of black South Africa from heathenism. But the rise of racist and imperialist ideas in the late nineteenth century penetrated even the missionary establishment and raised new doubts
about the capacity of even the most pious and educated blacks for the
independent exercise of religious authority. The condescending paternalism that had always characterized the mission enterprise tended to harden
into a caste system with white ministers fully in charge for the foreseeable
future and the black clergy fixed in the role of perpetual auxiliaries.44
The resulting tensions were felt in all the major missionary denominations but with some differences in the timing and results. The Scottish
Presbyterians in the Cape Colony had a high educational requirement and
ordained relatively few Africans, but appeared willing to accord more
respect and responsibility to the black clergy than denominations with less
exacting standards. Nevertheless, the most prominent black Presbyterian
divine after the death of Tiyo Soga, the same P. J. Mzimba who had advised
Africans to eschew politics in 1886, seceded from the Free Church of
Scotland in 1898 to form the independent Presbyterian Church of Africa,
taking with him most of the congregation at Lovedale where the Presbyterians had their school and headquarters. Mzirnba complained of racial slights
81
and asserted that the time had come for blacks to govern themselves in
ecclesiastical matters. The American Congregationalists in Natal were obligated by their system of church government to grant considerable autonomy to local congregations; but, as early as the 1880s, one black minister
went further than was allowable when he turned an important mission into
a totally independent community church. The problem grew worse in the
1890s, when the independence-minded factions of two congregations, one
in Natal and one composed of Zulu migrants to Johannesburg, seceded and
joined together to form a new "Ethiopian" demoninationthe Zulu Congregational Church. More than most other denominations, however, the
American Congregationalists learned their lesson and later attracted many
of the secessionists back to the fold by granting greater autonomy to black
ministers and congregations. Small-scale schisms also took place during the
1890s among Lutheran and Anglican converts in the Transvaal.45
The most dramatic and far-reaching secessions took place, as earlier in
the United States, among the Methodists. The combination of hierarchical structure and a willingness to license large numbers of relatively uneducated exhorters or evangelists meant that Methodism had an almost builtin tendency to involve substantial numbers of blacks in active religious
work without granting them independent authority. The evangelical populism characteristic of the Methodists attracted Africans in search of an
emotionally sustaining faith somewhat more readily than the more staid
and elitist approach of the Anglicans, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists, but its episcopal form of governance kept the converts under close
supervision. The first assertion of black Methodist independency in South
Africa took place in 1883 in Thembuland in the Transkei. Nehemiah Tile,
a black evangelist and probationary minister at odds with his white supervisor, cooperated with the chief of this still quasi-independent tribe to
form the Tembu National Churchthe first completely autonomous
black Christian church in South Africa. This incident demonstrates how
religious independency could sometimes play an important role in the
struggles of traditionalist African communities to resist white domination
and, after the consolidation of white rule, in the internal politics of "native reserves."46
The Methodist secession that had the greatest impact and aroused the
most concern among whites throughout South Africa involved a relatively
urbanized and detribalized group of Africans on the industrializing Witwatersrand in the early 1890s. The most prominent of the few African Methodist ministers who had been ordained in the 1880s, the Reverend
Mangena Mokone of Kilnerton near Pretoria reacted to racial discrimination and segregation within the Methodist mission community of the
Transvaal by resigning from the Methodist clergy in 1892 and founding
the independent Ethiopian Church in 1893. No discussion of precisely
why the name was chosen survives, but it undoubtedly reflected the same
broad biblical use of the term as a synonym for African that was current
among black Americans in the nineteenth century and was; in all likeli-
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gave the AME Church staying power, more than anything else, was the
return of the African students who were educated at Wilberforce and
other colleges in the United States. The church provided fellowships to
about 30 such students at the beginning of the twentieth century, and
several of them became ministers who came back to South Africa to
serve in AME pulpits. Thoroughly imbued with the values of the
African-American middle class but more sensitive to African needs and
expectations than American-born blacks were likely to be, they served
as an effective bridge between the American mother church and its
South African adherents.54
If an accommodationist avoidance of political assertiveness and the
promotion of self-help in the spirit of Booker T. Washington became the
keynotes of official AME policy in South Africa, it is doubtful that religious independency in general can be made to fit this mold. Although
separatist church leaders frequently disavowed political concerns and proclaimed that their members were obligated to obey the "authorities established by God," it was difficult to prevent members from making their
own connections between religious and political independence. White
fears that religious autonomy would lead directly to violent rebellion may
have been exaggerated, but the danger that a charismatic prophet or
messiah could turn popular religious enthusiasm into a divinely inspired
mass uprising was a real oneas the revolt in neighboring Nyasaland in
1915 demonstrated. Led by John Chilembwe, an African protege of Joseph Booth who was affiliated with the American black Baptists, it demonstrated that a visionary Ethiopianist preacher could arouse Africans to
violent resistance against white domination. Nothing equivalent occurred
in South Africa. (The nearest approximation was in 1921 when the African prophet Enoch Mgijima's refusal to disperse his encamped followers
at Bulhoek resulted in their being massacred by white troops.) The Zulu
rebellion that took place in Natal in 1906 was essentially a last stand of
Zulu traditionalists against European political and cultural hegemony.
Some members of the independent African churches supported the
mainly non-Christian rebels, but others remained loyal to the colonial
authorities. South African Ethiopianisin before the 1920s could not be
accused of inspiring revolutionary millennialism; as whites became aware
of its essentially nonviolent character, they became more tolerant of the
independent churches.55
But a failure to rise up did not mean that members of separatist
churches were politically inactive. The history of African resistance to
colonial rule in rural districts and African reserves is just beginning to be
written, but it is already evident that Ethiopian churches were sometimes
at the root of organized opposition to government schemes for the systematic control and exploitation of African peasants. In the Qumbu district of
the Transkei, for example, members of Mzimba's African Presbyterian
Church led the effective campaign of 1902 for noncooperation with the
Cape government's effort to set up appointed councils of Africans to
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rubber-stamp the decisions of government officials and take the heat for
imposing unpopular taxes. A recurring pattern that developed in rural
areas saw separatist Christians cooperating with traditionalists against
"progressive" government programs that were sometimes supported by
Africans in mission churches.56
Despite the lack of an explicit political program, the independent
churches undoubtedly provided an outlet for feelings of resentment of
white domination that went beyond a desire to be left alone to practice
their religion as they saw fit. The Rev. James Dwane, who had broken
with the AME Church to form a separate black "Order of Ethiopia"
within the Anglican Church, testified to the South African Native Affairs
Commission of 1903-5 that the Ethiopians did not officially oppose white
rule, "but in the practical teaching and training the tendency is to set the
black race against the white race." Other commission informants testified
that Ethiopians condemned those who remained in the white-dominated
mission churches as toadies of the white man and traitors to their race.
Respect for Europeans and acceptance of their supremacy was apparently
being eroded in the African independent churches.57
Clergymen of the Ethiopian churches took an active role in the protest
organizations that were formed in the South African colonies between the
Anglo-Boer war and the emergence of the Union of South Africa in 1910.
Mzimba, Dwane, and James Godukaleader of the African National
Mission Churchwere all active in the South African Native Congress of
the Cape (the organization for which A. K. Soga was a leading spokesman); F. M. Gow of the Capetown AME church served for a time as
president of the African People's Organization. In the Transvaal, the
most visible minister of an independent church who engaged in agitation
for African political rights was H. R. Ngcayiya, leader of the Ethiopian
Church, founded in 1908 as the result of a secession from the AME
Church that may have been a reaction to its political moderation. In 1912
Ngcayiya helped to found the South African National Native Congress,
later the African National Congress, and served for many years as one of
its chaplains. In Natal, Abner Mtimkulu, minister of the Bantu Methodist
Church, was for decades a leading figure in Natal's black politics and
eventually became a senior chaplain of the ANC. Obviously political
passivity was not the general reaction of religious separatists in the early
twentieth century.58
It would be misleading, however, to describe the Ethiopian ministers
who were politically active in the early twentieth century as radical black
nationalists. Joseph Booth's goal of black political self-determination, as
distinguished from purely religious separatism, was not part of the public
agenda of the politically active clergy and laity who were based in the
independent African churches. In fact they normally advocated a liberal
reformism that differed in no essential way from the stances of African
protest leaders such as A. K. Soga, the Reverend Walter L. Rubusana,
and the Reverend John R. Dube, who had remained clergymen or promi-
88
nent laymen in white-dominated mission churches. Mtimkulu, for example, was a follower and close associate of Dube, a non-separating Congregationalist and one of the most moderate of the African political leaders
of the period between 1900 and 1940, It is therefore difficult to make
direct and unambiguous correlations between Ethiopianist religious separatism and the mainstream movement for African rights that coalesced in
the National Congress. Ethiopianist clergy may have been prominent in
the founding of the movement, but it is'difficult to detect any distinctive
contribution that they made to its program or ideology. In other words,
early religious separatism did not straightforwardly or inevitably translate
into the Africanist or "orthodox nationalist" view of the South African
future that was suggested by the slogan "Africa for the Africans." In the
1920s, Pan-Africanist rhetoric occasionally appeared in the sermons and
speeches of prominent clergymen, but it was at least as likely to issue from
African ministers in the white-dominated denominations as from those in
the independent churches. Of course private attitudes may have differed
from public positions. The independent churches were not well situated to
carry on radical political agitation. They existed on the sufferance of the
government and could not minister to the souls of their adherents if
suppressed or denied recognition.59
The linkage that some historians would like to make between religious
independency and the developing liberation struggle in South Africa is
thus very difficult to substantiate if one concentrates on religious differences among an African elite that included clergy and socially prominent
members from both white-controlled and independent churches. From
the beginning, a majority of the leaders of the National Congress remained within the mission churches and this proportion grew over time;
contrary to what might have been anticipated, the correlation between
religious independency and mainstream political activism became weaker
rather than stronger as the twentieth century progressed. After a rapid
expansion in the 1920s, the Ethiopian churches themselves went into
decline, losing members to separate churches of a different typethe
resolutely other-worldly Zionist or Pentecostal churches that eschewed
political activity and concentrated on faith healing and religious ecstasy.
Furthermore, as some of the post-World War I mission churches became
relatively more liberal in their attitude toward African authority and
participation in church governance, the tendency of missionized Africans
to secede and form their own churches of the same denominational type
declined. The educated elite that dominated the African political organizations of the interwar period were often pious Christians, but they rarely
made any explicit connection between their reformist political program
and divine prophecies concerning the special destiny and mission of the
black race.60
On the surface, therefore, Ethiopianism merely contributed to a reformist black politics in South Africa, helping to inaugurate a liberation movement but not adding anything essential to its spirit and ideology. On a
89
deeper level, however, the beliefs that it nurtured may have helped to set
in motion an Africanist countercurrent to the dominant tradition of protest for equal rights with Europeans in a common society. In 1908, the
New Kleinfontein and Boksburg Native Vigilance Association of the
Transvaal responded to the failure of political agitation to prevent the
growth of discriminatory legislation in the province by declaring a day of
prayer and humiliation and offering a "petition to God" rather than to the
unresponsive white authorities. The God to whom they addressed their
appeal was the God of the Ethiopians:
We feel that our sympathies should be broad enough to include the whole of
the African races when we approach our Maker. For instance, the atrocities
which our brethren are suffering under the administration of the Congo Free
State should appeal to us with a loud voice for our sympathy and prayers.
Undoubtedly the time has come for the sons of Africa to stretch forth their
hands unitedly, as was prophesised [sic] of us in Psalm 68 verse 31. ... [God]
will bless us and send a wave of his spirit, which will pass through the whole of
Africa from the Cape to Egypt, the effects of which will be felt even by our
brethren in America, who come from the same original stock as ourselves.61
So stated, the Ethiopian idea called for the fraternal union of blacks
throughout the world in opposition to white oppression. Noticeably absent were millennialist expectations for the triumph of brotherly love
between blacks and whites in South Africathe hope of mainstream
Christians and liberal reformists. Race apparently provided the natural
limit of human sympathy. An appeal for divine help and not an incitement
to revolution, this "petition to God" revealed a way of thinking about the
world that could readily be turned to militant or revolutionary purposes.
It contained seeds of the radical Africanism of later decadesthe claim
that South Africa was a black man's country and not a multi-racial one,
which meant that Africans alone had the right to determine its destiny.62
The prayer also shows what could happen to the Ethiopian myth when it
passed from African-American to African hands. The American version
had made New World blacks the providential redeemers of Africa; the
Transvaal Vigilance Associations saw the "wave of His spirit" originating in
Africa itself, conquering the continent, and later being felt "even by our
brethren in America." Such Africanism was undoubtedly widespread
among supporters of Ethiopianism in South Africa and helps to explain
much of the resistence to the AME Church's emphasis on AfricanAmerican agency and guidance. But African Methodist congregations in
remote rural areas and native reserves enjoyed considerable autonomy
from the church's cautious hierarchy and could themselves serve as centers
of Africanist opposition to white hegemony. In the 1920s, a women's boycott of white traders and government-sponsored schools in the Herschel
district in the Northeastern Cape was associated with a shift of membership
from the regular Methodist to the African Methodist Church. According to
historian William Beinart: "Religious separatism was being linked to a new
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view of the worldwhich is another way of saying that its Africanism was
more political than cultural. Because they had absorbed from Western
secular thought the idea that peoples have a right to self-determination,
and from the scriptures brought by European missionaries a special sanction for their own particular struggle, Ethiopianists had been able to begin
challenging the West in more direct ways than if they had resisted Western
cultural influences more successfully. By the 1930s and '40s, Ethiopianism
would be less effective in sustaining opposition to white domination than
Marxism, democratic liberalism, or a de-Christianized Pan-Africanism.
One lesson that might be drawn from this aspect of South African history
is that cultural insularity in the face of oppression can be a prescription for
political impotence.
What Happened to American Ethiopianism?
In the United States, as in South Africa, a politicized Ethiopianism got a
new lease on life in the years immediately after World War I; but by the late
1920s this scripturally based black nationalism sank beneath the surface of
political struggle into the realms of a mostly symbolic or cultural creativity,
surviving as one element of an essentially escapist lower class black religiosity. St. Clair Drake has described the process well. As a result of "the
gradual secularization of black leadership" beginning at the end of the
nineteenth century, he argues, " 'vindication of the race' passed from the
hands of those who believed in Providential Design and Biblically sanctioned Ethiopianism into the hands of trained historians, anthropologists,
and archaeologists." Ethiopianism lingered as "a basic subsidiary reinforcing myth in Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association
(UNIA)," but the Pan-Africanism that survived into the era of decolonization was mainly under the guidance of secular intellectuals. Nevertheless,
according to Drake, Ethiopianism survived at the grass roots:
By the mid 1920's Ethiopianist ideas were so deeply embedded in the urban
subcultures of the Afro-American urban communities, from the impact of
the Negro church and the UNI A, that an apperceptive mass was present to
which founders of cults and social movements could appeal. All of these cults
provide meaningful schemes of living to the identity quest for a small fraction
of the black population in the United States. Their political influence as
organized groups is minimal. . . ,68
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enamored of this passage, Garveyism will receive detailed treatment elsewhere in this study. In the present context, however, it suffices to say that
Garveyism was transitional between nineteenth century Ethiopianism and
the largely secularized Pan-Africanism that succeeded it. The rise of the
UNIA was the first and only time that an association of Ethiopianist
religious ideas with a militant form of political nationalism became the
wellspring of a mass movement.69
The black churches of the United States, as we have seen, were characterized by a "dialectical tension" between accommodation and resistance. But
the churches of the Holiness-Pentecostal typewhich were the most likely
after the 1920s to invoke Ethiopianist mythologywere also the least
likely to encourage political activism or militancy. The main loci of political
engagement by black Christians, as would become clear in the era of Martin Luther King, Jr., would be the mainstream black Baptist and Methodist
churches (especially the former). Although Ethiopianism had been an element in the thinking of these churches since their formation, the main
emphasis was increasingly on the apparently nonracial interpretation of the
Gospel that was reflected in the AME Church's motto "Christ our Redeemer, Man our Brother"the universalist message that King expressed
eloquently and translated into militant politics as nonviolent direct action
in the 1950s and '60s. St. Clair Drake described this version of black Christian thought as a moderate alternative to Ethiopianist nationalism, one that
managed to retain a special role for blacks in the drama of human redemption: "Since black nationalism seemed unrealistic to moderate black leaders as a goal for American Negroes, the concept [of 'black messianism'] as
developed in the United States from Booker T. Washington to Martin
Luther King, Jr., (with overtones even in Stokely Carmichael) was that
their suffering would 'save' America and the world."70
The portrayal of blacks as divinely inspired agents for the redemption of
America from the sins of racism and selfish materialism, which King
brought to full consciousness, did have a subtle relationship to the Ethiopianist tradition. The belief, originating in the black nationalism and romantic racialism of the early to mid-nineteeth century, that blacks had a
natural aptitude for Christian self-sacrifice became in the 1950s and early
'60s the implicit basis for a crusade "to redeem the soul of America" and
realize its promise as an egalitarian interracial society. King's dream substituted an integrated "beloved community" for the original Ethiopianist
image of a black Christian Utopia, but it shared with more overtly nationalistic versions of black Christianity the conviction that the African-American
experience of enduring the agony of slavery and segregation without losing
faith in a God of love and justice meant that the freedom struggle of black
people had divine approbation and would someday bring full liberation
from white oppression. But to achieve that goal without the separation
from whites that Turner and Garvey had advocated would require the
conversion and redemption of the oppressors. Only as truly exemplary
Christians could blacks hope to accomplish that enormous task.71
3
Protest of "The Talented Tenth":
Black Elites and
the Rise of Segregation
95
blacks in both the North and the South. After emancipation, there was a
brief challenge to some forms of public discrimination during the Reconstruction years, but the older pattern quickly reasserted itself. When the
Radicals opened new kinds of opportunities and facilities to the mass of
freedmen in the Southpublic schools, orphanages, hospitals, insane
asylums, and so onthey rarely tried to do so on an integrated basis,
Their efforts were controversial enough, they realized, without incurring
the added burden of directly challenging the racial mores of a region (and
a nation) that remained dead-set against the "social equality" of blacks
and whites. Blacks themselves contributed to the post-Civil War pattern
of separation; they used their new freedom to join or establish separate
black churches, fraternal organizations, and other kinds of associations. If
one includes in the term segregation all forms of de facto, customary, and
voluntary social separation of the races, the South was already a generally
segregated society before the passage of the notorious Jim Crow laws of
the 1890s and early 1900s. This circumstance has led some historians to
argue that the legislation merely confirmed a preexisting pattern rather
than constitute a new departure in racial policy.2
In South Africa, too, there were policies that could have been described as segregationist well before the word became shorthand for a
comprehensive "solution to the native problem" after the war between
Great Britain and the Afrikaner republics. The Dutch Reformed Church
in the Cape instituted separate services for Europeans and people of color
in 1857. Applying the principle of "no equality in church or state," the
Afrikaner republics simply excluded Africans and Coloreds from virtually
all institutions and facilities open to whites, thus guaranteeing that whites
and blacks would inhabit different worlds except to the extent that they
came together as masters and servants. Finally, the English colony in
Natal pioneered formal geographical or territorial segregation by assigning most Africans to extensive reserves that were governed by a set of
laws and regulations different from those that applied to white settlements. It can be argued with some persuasiveness that all the ingredients
of a segregationist policy were in place before 1902 and thereafter merely
had to be elaborated and made more systematic.3
If segregation is viewed broadly as any form of contrived separation
between groups denned as racially distinct and inherently unequal, one
would have to conclude that it flows directly and irresistibly from deeply
rooted and persistent patterns of unequal ethnic status. From this perspective, the "growth" of segregation is merely the emergence of new contexts
or situations to which the logic of racism can be applied. As historians
have often pointed out, segregation is mainly an urban phenomenon; in
rural situations where the distinctions between masters and servants (or
slaves) are firmly and clearly established, there is no need to take conscious action to separate the races in order to maintain social distance and
racial hierarchy. But in citiesplaces where people who do not know
each other bump and jostle in public placesthere is no way to indicate
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old positions that have become unpopular and change course in ways that
betray previous ideological commitments in order to win or retain
officeis a recurring feature of American politics. The shift in Republican race policy after Reconstruction that came to fruition in the 1890s was
an example of such an adjustment. Republicans, who during Reconstruction had believed that they needed southern and black votes in order to
control the federal government, had learned by the 1890s that they could
win without blacks and the South and without the political risk of alienating white supporters by vigorously espousing the cause of an increasingly
unpopular racial minority. By this time, the party's most influential constituency was big business and its carnp followers rather than the small
entrepreneurs, farmers, and artisans whose democratic-republican idealism had given the party its radical and reformist edge during the era of
sectional controversy and the War for the Union. In the age of McKinley
and Republican hegemony in the Midwest and parts of the Northeast
there seemed no profit in resisting Jim Crow, particularly since the
African-American voters who remained important to the party in some
parts of the North had nowhere to go except to a Democratic party that
harbored active southern segregationists.8
On the state level in the South, Democratic political partisanship played
a major role in the movement to legalize segregation. The Populist movement of the 1890s briefly threatened Democratic hegemony, especially on
those occasions when Populists appealed to African-Americans to vote
their class interests as poor farmers rather than wasting their ballot on
Republicans or succumbing to planter pressure to vote Democratic. The
Populists failed in their efforts to reorient southern politics on a class
basis, and one-party Democratic rule was reestablished by all the former
Confederate states by 1898. But the politics of racial antagonism and
white solidarity that the Democratic establishment had used to defeat the
Populists survived the political challenge that had called it forth. Racebaiting became an avenue to power for personalities and factions within
the Democratic party and encouraged a climate of opinion in which it was
good politics to propose new ways to humiliate blacks and block the path
to "social equality." In ways that no one explicitly acknowledged, a kind
of bargain was struck between the economic elite of planters, merchants,
and manufacturers and the mass of white farmers and mill workers. Although it was hardly a fair deal, lower class whites at least enhanced their
social status at the expense of blacks (the dictum that the lowest white was
superior to the highest black was now enshrined in law), while the elite,
which did not need segregation laws to ensure its position on top of the
heap, retained its dominance over the South's exploitative, low-wage
economy. Legalized segregation was thus a key element in a southern
settlement based on one-party government, low wages, and official white
supremacy that would last for nearly half a century. 9
But this Woodwardian explanation for the rise of Jim Crow ignores one
crucial element. If African-Americans had accommodated without pro-
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ingly assertive black community in its place. It also called forth futile
boycotts and other protests against such laws once they were passed. In
the end southern blacks accommodated to the Jim Crow system because,
absent federal intervention on their behalf, they lacked the power to do
anything else. That state of forced acquiescence would last until the 1950s
and '60s.11
The rise of what was called segregation in South Africa in the early
twentieth century has many distinctive features that would seem to make
direct comparison with what happened in the United States tenuous and
difficult. It was above all a response of white authorities to the unsettled
relations between Europeans and Africans in the wake of the South African War of 1899-1902. As the former colonies and republics of the region
moved toward unification under British auspices between 1902 and 1909,
the question that was uppermost in the minds of influential Europeans was
how to define and develop a common "native policy" that would prove
satisfactory to major white interest groups. The fact that the issue was
formulated in such a fashion indicated that a strong consensus existed
behind white supremacy and the belief that Africans had only such rights as
Europeans found to be compatible with their own security and interests.
Now that independent African societies had ceased to offer military
opposition to white expansion, blacks were of interest to whites mainly as
a source of labor. But "native policy" could not be based purely and
simply on economic advantage. The British government and the missionary or humanitarian lobbies to which it listened had to be persuaded that a
self-governing South Africa would meet some minimal standard of fairness to "subject races." Segregation emerged as the magic solution to the
problem of reconciling British traditions of "fair play," settlers' aspirations for self-government within the British empire, and the desire of
white farmers and mine owners to have ready access to cheap and exploitable African labor.12
The South African Native Affairs Commission, which was dominated
by British colonial officials, met and took testimony between 1903 and
1905. In its report it set the pattern for future racial policy when it recommended that the country be divided into white and African territories.
The basis for such a separation already existed in the heavy concentration
of African population in areas such as the Transkei, Zululand, and the
northern Transvaal, where white farmers were few and most land remained in the possession of Bantu-speaking peasant communities. What
could be more humanitarian and in accordance with enlightened principles of "aborigines' protection" than to declare these areas "native reserves" and thus halt white expansion on their borders? Of course these
areas were not economically self-sufficient, even in 1905. Large numbers
of Africans would have to leave them to work in white mines, farms, and
households for extended periods in order to sustain themselves. But if
they did so, they could be regarded as transients or temporary sojourners
in white areas rather than as candidates for citizenship. Their political
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in 1916, Africans were assigned less than 8 percent of the total despite the
fact that they outnumbered whites by more than four to one. They were
scarcely mollified by a provision that future surveys and adjustments
might lead to a slight increase in the percentage of land set aside for
African occupancy.16
The Land Act did not spring primarily from abstract theorizing about
racial adjustment; it derived mainly from the desire of capitalistic white
farmers to gain easier access to black labor and eliminate the competition
from the large number of African peasants who occupied white-owned land
as renters or sharecroppers. Under the legislation, quasi-independent African farming in areas designated as "European" was prohibited, leaving the
Africans there with no choice except to become wage workers or "labor
tenants." (Labor tenancy meant working for several months of the year
directly for white farmers in return for the right to occupy a bit of land on
which subsistence crops and a few head of livestock might be raised.) The
Land Act was unevenly enforced and sharecropping persisted in some
areas as late as the 1930s, but historians are generally agreed that the
legislation was the death knell of the African peasantry that had prospered
from the expanding market opportunities of the late nineteenth century.
Large scale capitalistic farming characterized by the direct supervision of
low-paid and essentially rightless black contract laborers by white farm
owners or managers was clearly the wave of the future in South Africa.17
Industrial employers of black labor also benefited from the act because
the African reserves that it designated were already overcrowded; family
subsistence there depended on the opportunities of male family members
to go forth to work in the mines and other white-owned industrial enterprises under short-term labor contracts (usually nine months in the
mines). Such a labor force was "ultra-exploitable." Its wages could be
fixed at a low level, and labor contracts precluded the right to organize
and strike for higher wages. The one major white interest group that
derived no direct benefit from the Land Act and might even be disadvaritaged by it was the working class. As low-paid African workers became
increasingly available, employers would be tempted, especially in hard
times, to substitute cheap blacks for expensive whites. Only with the
economic "color bar" legislation of the 1920s did white labor gain a protected and privileged position within the framework of segregation.18
Other than use of the same word to describe the process that was
occurring, what did legislation to require separate public facilities in the
American South have in common with the kind of separation proposed by
the South African Native Affairs Commission and mandated by the Natives' Land Act? The principal motivationto insure white domination
was clearly similar, although one might conclude that social ascendancy
was the center of concern in the United States, while the impulse to
dominate and manipulate black labor played a more obvious role in the
South African case. Also analogous was the desire to assure white dominance through legislation designed to prevent the kind of race mixing and
103
group interaction that a laissez-faire policy would have permitted. Urbanization, commercialization, and industrialization, if uncontrolled, would
bring whites and blacks together under conditions in which traditional or
customary forms of racial dominance could no longer be expected to
work. Slavery had been abolished, and deportation or absolute territorial
segregation was ruled out because of the extent to which both the South
and South Africa were dependent on black labor. Furthermore, segregation could be presented to the world as a more just and equitable system
than straight-out white supremacy (or, to use the expressive Afrikaner
word for unabashed white domination, baaskap). As John Cell has argued, one of the great advantages of segregationist ideology was that its
claims of "separate but equal" could mystify the process of racial domination and permit the illusion of justice and fairness. Despite the major
difference in form and function between Jim Crow and native segregation, there was enough similarity to inspire comparable reactions from
black leaders and movements in the two societies.19
One might think of Jim Crow as the effort to maintain caste distinctions
between racially defined groups that lived in close physical proximity,
shared elements of a common American culture, and often competed for
the same work. The pressure to extend and codify a preexisting pattern of
customary social separation arose in the first instance from the desire of
whites to draw a color line in facilitiesmoving and stationarywhere
the races would scarcely have been congregating and jostling each other if
the South had not been in the throes of urban and industrial modernization. But there would have been no need for new laws if AfricanAmericans had not been making rapid gains in education, economic efficiency, and political-legal sophisticationadvances that made many of
them unwilling to defer to informal or extralegal means of denying them
equal access to public amenities. As southern blacks migrated to the
North in increasing numbers between 1890 and 1914 and en masse after
1914, the question of whether Jim Crow would follow them across the
Mason-Dixon line became a live issue; for white opposition to "social
equality," while most intense in the South, was scarcely limited to that
region.
Native Segregation was a scheme intended to perpetuate the state of
vulnerability and exploitability in which African societies found themselves after a European military conquest that, for many of them, had
only recently taken place. Outside of a tiny Westernized elite, most Africans remained rooted in traditional cultures and communities. But increasing numbers were present in the developing, white-dominated areas as
migrant workers. The danger, as conceived by white supremacists, was
that they would find permanent homes there, become detribalized, and
imbibe dangerous Western notions of democratic rights that would lead to
a new kind of threat to white rule. In other words, they would become
very much like African-Americans. Native segregation can therefore be
viewed as a preemptive strike against the more competitive and disorderly
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pattern of race relations that existed in the United States and to which the
Jim Crow laws were a response. They were also, as Shula Marks has
pointed out, a recognition of the continued vitality and "pulsating remains" of African kingdoms and chiefdoms. But this was more true in
Natal where the Zulu monarchy persisted as a source of popular allegiance than it was in the Cape where a century of border wars, black
migrations, and missionary activity had significantly weakened traditional
authorities and solidarities by the end of the nineteenth century.20
A good way to understand how South African and southern segregation
could be so close in spirit and ideology and so different in method and
procedure is to view the former as a kind of macro-segregation that was
meant to make the micro-segregation of the Jim Crow South unnecessary.
(The coming of micro-segregation, or "petty apartheid," laws to South
Africa after 1948 reflected in part the failure of the original segregation
scheme to arrest or control the movement of blacks to the white urban
areas and the growth of a substantial "modernized" segment of the black
population that demanded inclusion in a common democratic society.) Of
course the underlying fact that black South Africans would be a majority in
a unified and color-blind South African polity, while African-Americans
were a minority even in the southern states, gave to South African white
supremacists a sense of urgency and concern about their own future dominance or even survival that North American racists, except perhaps in the
"black belts" of the Deep South, could rarely match.
Between about 1910 and the American entry into World War I in 1917
some white Americans advocated what amounted to a nationalization of
the southern Jim Crow system, and others proposed and attempted to
legislate a form of territorial or "possessory" segregation that went beyond the social segregation laws that were now firmly in place in the
southern states. The attempt to segregate the United States in a more
formal and comprehensive way was not consciously modeled on the precedent of the Union of South Africa, but the Natives' Land Act as an
example of macro-segregation did provide some inspiration for proposals
to disengage the races in a more radical fashion through legal controls on
residence and landholding. As white supremacists consciously or unknowingly called for an imitation of South African-type segregation, protestoriented members of the black elite and their neo-abolitionist white allies
mounted a campaign to prove that all forms of legalized segregation were
contrary to American ideals. The result of their efforts was the successful
launching of the twentieth-century civil rights movement.
African-Americans Mobilize Against Segregation
Organized black responses to the rise of official segregation in the United
States and South Africa came predominantly from the same elites that
had been in the forefront of protest against disfranchisement or restriction
of voting rights. It is in fact somewhat artificial to separate the suffrage
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during the years since his address, to facilitate "the legal creation of a
distinct status of civil inferiority for the Negro." The charge undoubtedly
overestimated Washington's influence on the actions of southern state legislatures, but a growing number of educated, middle class blacks, especially
in the north where such people did not have to tread so carefully to avoid
being terrorized or even lynched, shared Du Bois's belief that Washington's efforts to accommodate the white South were giving the impression
that blacks had no objection to being Jim-Crowed. If that impression were
not countered, legal segregation might well spread from the South to the
North and find new avenues of expression.22
Representatives of the northern black elite did not find it easy to turn
against Booker T. Washington and embark on a crusade against segregation. Washington's enormous popularity among liberal and moderate
whites in both the North and the South gave him access to resources and
political leverage that no other black leader could come close to matching.
He developed a virtual stranglehold on the white philanthropy that sustained black education, and, especially during the first administration of
Theodore Roosevelt (1901-05), he controlled the patronage appointments
that Republican presidents continued to make available to black supporters. He was also known for his promotion of black business enterprise; the
Negro Business League (founded in 1902) was based on the assumption
that increasing separation of the races offered new opportunities to entrepreneurs who would go after the black market. As ghettos began to form in
northern cities, a new group of businessmen catering primarily to blacks
began to replace an older economic elite that had relied on white clients or
customers. These emerging black capitalists were receptive to Washington's doctrine of self-help and to his accornmodationist politics. Washington also had the power to deny his critics a fair hearing in the black community. Many black newspapers depended on the subsidies that Washington
gave them and could thus be relied upon to reflect his views and ignore
people or movements of which he did not approve. It therefore took an
extraordinary sense of moral outrage and an acute feeling of imminent
danger to one's personal prospects and ambitions to bring a member of the
educated black elite into direct and public conflict with Washington. But by
1905, partly out of sheer frustration at Washington's authoritarianism and
ability to control the life chances of middle class African-Americans, a
group of blacks, mostly northern professional men, were ready to launch a
militant movement repudiating Washington's accornmodationist tactics
and calling for outspoken agitation against all officially sanctioned forms of
racial segregation and exclusion.23
The Niagara Movement, founded by 29 members of the educated black
elite at Fort Erie, Ontario, in 1905, was the brainchild of W. E. B. Du
Bois and reflected his thinking throughout its brief existence. The paradox of the movement was that its membership was all black, but some of
its patron saints were white abolitionists, and its ostensible goal was the
incorporation of African-Americans into a reconstructed American de-
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mocracy in which the color line had been abolished. Although Du Bois's
call for "the conservation of races" and espousal of "Pan-Negroism" in the
1890s had seemed to point to some form of black separatism, his political
thought and behavior at the time of his break with Booker T. Washington
in 1903 was more in the spirit of Frederick Douglass than of Martin
Delany or Alexander Crummell. Then, as at other times in his career, Du
Bois was in fact walking a tightrope between the view that blacks were a
permanently distinct people with a destiny apart from white Americans
and the seemingly contrary notion that white and black should work
together to create a more inclusive American nationality. As David Levering Lewis has pointed out, Du Bois viewed the "double consciousness" of
the African-American that he described so eloquently in Souls of Black
Folk ("his twoness,an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two
unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body") as the potential source of a strong hyphenated identity rather than as a pathological
condition that had to be resolved by rejecting the United States and
embracing Africa. His aim, he made clear, was not to choose between
being an American and being a Negro but to gain the right to be both.
Washington's acquiescence to southern segregationism drew out the integrationist or Americanist side of Du Bois's racial thought, because it
threatened black compliance with an invidious and damaging form of
racial separation that he believed would impede the progress of the race.24
For Du Bois and other founders of the Niagara Movement, the politics
of protest against denial of equal rights was an interracial American tradition deriving from the antislavery movement and not a suitable arena for
the conspicuous display of racially specific symbols or loyalties. Of the
three "friends of freedom." whose memories were especially honored at
the Fort Erie meetingWilliam Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass,
and Albion W. Tourgee (the Reconstruction era "carpetbagger" who returned north to become the most conspicuous white champion of black
equality during the Gilded Age), two were white. In homage to another
white "friend of Freedom," the second meeting of the movement was held
at Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, the scene of John Brown's raid. Since
the centenary of Garrison's birth fell in 1905, Du Bois prepared a document he called "The Garrison Pledge of the Niagara Movement," which
began as follows: "Bowing in memory of that great and good man, William Lloyd Garrison, I, a member of the race for whom he worked and in
whom he believed, do consecrate myself to the realization of that great
ideal of human liberty which ever guided and inspired him." Besides basic
civil liberties and the right to vote, this neo-Garrisonian agenda included
"the freedom to enjoy public conveyances and freedom to associate with
those who wish to associate with me." The universalist, interracial character of the movement's official ideology was also on display in the "Niagara Address to the Nation" that Du Bois read to the 1906 meeting:
"Thank God for John Brown! Thank God for Garrison and Douglass!
Sumner and Phillips, Nat Turner and Robert Gould Shaw. . . . Thank
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God for all those today, few though their voices may be, who have not
forgotten the divine brotherhood of all men, white and black, rich and
poor, fortunate, and unfortunate."25
William Monroe Trotter, the fiery and contentious anti-Washington
radical from Boston who was second only to Du Bois as a catalyst for the
Niagara Movement, must have been delighted to take the Garrison
pledge, because he lived and breathed the New England abolitionist tradition and modeled his entire career on Garrison's example, to the point of
emulating the great abolitionist's vituperative, often ad hominem rhetoric. Unlike Du Bois, he never evinced the slightest interest in a distinctive
African-American culture, and he consistently opposed all forms of publicly sanctioned separation of the races, even those that more pragmatic
black protest leaders came to view as advantageous in the short run. (Yet,
as if to demonstrate how difficult it is to dichotomize black leaders as
"separatists" or "integrationists," he later broke with the NAACP because of its domination by white liberals and formed a rival organization
that was virtually all black in membership.)26
Why then did the Niagara Movement depart from the interracial abolitionist precedent by limiting its membership to blacks? One reason was that
there were at that moment very few whites who would have been interested
in joining forces with anti-Washington black radicals. Most whites who
believed themselves to be "friends of the Negro" in the northern antislavery traditionsuch as Oswald Garrison Villard, the influential New York
editor and grandson of the great abolitionistwere still under Washington's spell, having been persuaded that he spoke for the great majority of
African-Americans. Especially since Trotter had been jailed for his role in
the "Boston riot" that silenced Washington in Boston in 1903, white racial
liberals had tended to view the anti-Washington radicals as intemperate
troublemakers. But the cause of black civil rights was not entirely without white supporters in 1905. John Milholland, a wealthy industrialist
and unreconstructed Radical Republican, had founded the Constitution
League in 1904; its program of immediate and full enforcement of the rights
blacks were meant to enjoy under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments was almost identical to that put forward by black radicals at Fort
Erie. As it happened, a close working relationship quickly developed between the Constitution League and the Niagara Movement. The former
had black members who were also Niagarans, and Du Bois at one time
actually held office in both organizations. In some states the two organizations became almost indistinguishable. But no formal merger took place,
and whites were at no time admitted into full membership the Niagara
Movement, even though some professed an interest in joining.27
The most likely explanation for the movement's racial exclusiveness
was that it had a second purpose in addition to agitation for equal civic
and political rights that was the sole raison d'etre of the Constitution
League. Besides starting a new agitation for fulfillment of the Garrisonian
dream of a racially egalitarian American republic, it was meant to arouse
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110
All black professionals and intellectuals, even in the North, did not
follow Du Bois's lead in challenging Washington's leadership. Some, such
as Kelly Miller, the dean of Howard University, remained on the fence
hoping to reconcile the competing factions of the black middle class.
Others, such as the Boston lawyer William H. Lewis, a graduate of Amherst and Harvard Law School, found it to be in their professional interest
to take the side of the powerful Washington against the insurgents. But it
remains true that the Washington-Du Bois controversy was rooted in the
conflict of two conceptions of black leadershipone based on education
and intellectual or professional distinction and the other on economic
success and efficiency. Du Boisians and supporters of the Niagara Movement placed a higher premium on "civic equality" and the struggle against
segregation, while the Washingtonians emphasized self-help, racial solidarity, and the potential benefits of a separate black economy. There was
no absolute or necessary contradiction between the two approaches; indeed they might be seen as mutually reinforcing aspects of the black
struggle for power and justice in American society. It was the promotion
of segregation as the white supremacist's solution to the race problem in
the early twentieth centuryand Washington's apparent acquiescence in
itthat impelled Du Bois and other members of the "talented tenth" to
risk rupturing the black middle class by adopting an uncompromising
stand of opposition to white-imposed racial separatism. Paradoxically,
their sense that the issue had to be thrashed out within the black community led them to pursue this goal through a racially exclusive movement.32
The Niagara Movement devoted most of its energies to resisting the
spread of segregation (especially separate schools) to the North, and it had
some success in these endeavors. But it failed in its aim to become the new
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voice of black America and began to decline after its first two or three years
of existence. Its failure was due in part to internal factionalism and feuding,
but its inability to get off the ground was due mainly to the effectiveness of
Washington's implacable opposition. Since most black newspapers were
subsidized or influenced by Washington and most liberal white journals
viewed him with reverence, the Niagarans got little sympathetic attention
from the press. Lacking the resources to mount expensive publicity or
lobbying campaigns, they were unable to raise funds from white philanthropists and wealthy "friends of the Negro" because Washington again stood in
the way. There was also the perennial problem that even those whites who
had the strongest theoretical commitments to racial equality were reluctant
to back an all-black organization over which they had no control. Such
circumstances forced Du Bois and his supporters to shift their tactics,
abandon the Niagara effort, and throw their lot in with a new interracial
and initially white-dominatedcivil rights organization.33
By 1909, a few white members of the social justice wing of the American Progressive movement were at last ready to acknowledge that
African-Americans were suffering from an extreme form of social injustice. This broadening of concern from the plight of the white working
class, and especially the women and children who worked in factories and
lived in slum conditions, to the racial discrimination that intensified the
problems of blacks came in part from the experiences of white social
workers and settlement-house residents with poor African-Americans in
major northern cities. But the event that precipitated the founding of a
new organization was the Springfield, Illinois, race riot of 1908.
William English Walling, the scion of a Kentucky slaveholding family
who had become a settlement house worker, a socialist, and a leading
progressive journalist, wrote in the Independent for September 3, 1908,
that a tide of racism was flowing northward from the segregated South
and had now reached the hometown of the Great Emancipator. He called
for a movement to stop this flood and begin a new effort to fulfill the
dreams of racial justice and equality that he identified with Lincoln and
the northern cause in the Civil War. Soon afterwards, he joined with Mary
White Ovington, a social worker from an abolitionist family who had
taken a special interest in New York's African-American population, and
Henry Moskowitz, a Hungarian-born Jewish social worker, to lay the
groundwork for an interracial organization to combat violence and discrimination against blacks. Among the early recruits to the campaign was
Bishop Alexander Walters of the African Methodist Zion Church, a
former president of the Afro-American Council who had held aloof from
the Niagara Movement but had presided over the council's rejection of
Washington's hegemony in 1907. Walling also enlisted two of the leading
women in the social justice movement, Lillian Wald and Florence Kelley.
But his most important recruit was Oswald Garrison Villard, the grandson of William Lloyd Garrison, who was editor and publisher of the New
York Evening Post and a wealthy philanthropist with a special interest in
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the plight of African-Americans. Villard was persuaded to head the effort, and he issued the call for 60 prominent whites and blacks to meet on
Lincoln's birthday in 1909 to form a new national organization to advance
the cause of black civil rights.34
The National Negro Committee, which at its second meeting in 1910
renamed itself the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People, was essentially a coalition of white interracial liberalsa large
proportion of whom were descendants of abolitionists or, if old enough,
had themselves been Radical Republicans during the Reconstruction era
and the Niagara Movement black militants. (Booker T. Washington was
conspicuously absent at the founding meetings.) The program of the new
association was virtually the same as that of the Niagara Movement. It
called for enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments in the
southern states in order to restore free access to the ballot box and open
public facilities to blacks on an unsegregated basis. It also demanded federal action against lynching and other violence against African-Americans
and was vigilant in its efforts to identify and resist any tendencies to extend
the southern Jim Crow system to the northern states. To accomplish these
objectives, it sponsored litigation, lobbied, legislative bodies, and engaged
in efforts to educate the public about the extent of racial discrimination and
why it was unjust and unjustifiable. Focusing almost exclusively on the civil
and political rights of blacks, it paid little attention to their economic
problems. Another interracial organization founded at about the same
time, the National Urban League, assumed the main responsibility for
dealing with the employment, housing, and social welfare of the hundreds
of thousands of African-Americans who were migrating from the southern
countryside to the cities during the second decade of the twentieth century.
The Urban League was a relatively conservative and accommodationist
social agency that concentrated on adjusting the needs of black migrants to
the requirements of American capitalism. The reformist NAACP's lack of
an economic program meant that the mainstream movement for black
advancement in the United States would develop with few ties to the labor
movement and little affinity for socialist perspectives on the condition of
blacks and other underprivileged groups in American society.35
Most of the national officers of the NAACP in its earliest years were
prominent white progressives, but from the beginning the rank-and-file
membership, as well as the leadership of the local branches, was composed mainly of middle-class blacks. What gave many African-Americans
confidence in the new organization, beyond their approval of its forthright commitment to civic and political equality, was Du Bois's conspicuous role in its founding and leadership. Some of the Niagara militants
were uncomfortable with the dominant position assumed by whites. Trotter detected too much moderation at the 1909 meeting and spoke from the
floor in favor of more radical positions on the enforcement of civil rights.
Presumably because of his vociferousness and reputation as a hothead, he
was left off the committee of 40 (including a dozen blacks) that was
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114
Among those who read The Crisis with great interest were members of
the educated elite of black South Africans, who were simultaneously
engaged in efforts to organize and protest against their own system of
segregation. Despite the obvious differences between Du Bois's situation
and theirs, they found the African-American debate on how to respond to
Jim Crow relevant to their own discussions of how best to confront the
challenge of "native segregation."
The National Congress in Comparative Perspective
In February 1909, the national convention to draw up a constitution for
the Union of South Africa released to the press the product of its
deliberationsa draft that denied blacks voting rights in three of the
four provinces and restricted membership in parliament to Europeans.
In response, a small number of highly educated Africansthe equivalent of Du Bois's "talented tenth"took the lead in efforts to unite
Africans across tribal and provincial lines to resist the imposition of a
constitution that provided whites with a monopoly of substantive political rights and representation in the governing bodies of the new state.
Earlier African political activity had, for the most part, been confined
within the boundaries of the four colonies that were now being unified
and had usually been intra-tribal as well. As we have seen, the Ethiopian movement in the churches had asserted a new ideal of spiritual
unity across ethnic divisions, but religious Pan-Africanism had produced
no clear political direction, and its fragmentation into several competing
sects had precluded the kind of solidarity that was required to meet the
challenge of white unification. What Africans desperately needed in
1909 was a common European policy to counter the common "native
policy" that was a principal aim of the whites who were framing a
constitution for the Union of South Africa.38
To become law, the South Africa Act had to be endorsed by the four
colonial assemblies and then approved by the British parliament. African
opinion was virtually unanimous against the act, and organized protest
quickly developed. The obvious response was to call a convention of
Africans from all the colonies of South Africa to register this opposition.
The South African Native Convention, hosted by the Orange River Colony Native Congress, met in late March 1909 in Bloemfontein. Among
the delegates were the leading members of the educated elite, some of
whom would play prominent roles in the formation of the South African
Native National Congress three years later. According to historian Andre
Odendaal, the meeting of the convention "was a seminal event in the
history of African political activity in South Africa. It was the first occasion in which African political leaders and fledgling political associations
co-operated formally. The meeting was a major step toward formation of
a permanent national African political association."39
On the basis of a creed strikingly similar to the one being enunciated
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in the same year by the National Negro Committee (later the NAACP)
in the United States, the convention called for a clause in the constitution that would in effect replicate the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the American Constitution. It would provide for all inhabitants
of the Union "full and equal rights and privileges, subject only to the
conditions and limitations established by law and applicable alike to all
citizens without distinction of colour or creed." Elected president and
secretary of the convention, respectively, were those stalwart champions
of the Cape color-blind franchise Walter Rubusana and A. K. Soga.
The vice president was John Dube of the Natal Native Congress, who
would later be first president of the South African Native National
Congress.40
Despite African protests, the colonial parliaments approved the color
bar provisions of the proposed constitution, and a revised draft was
sent to the British parliament for ratification. Believing that the British
tradition of fair-minded liberalism was their last line of defense, African
and Colored leaders rallied behind a white champion of color-blind constitutionalism, W. P. Schreiner, who proposed to lead a delegation to
Britain to plead the cause of South African blacks. Schreiner, brother
of the novelist Olive Schreiner and a true believer in the letter of the
Cape liberal tradition, had led the white opposition to including racially
restrictive clauses in the proposed constitution. He was that rare phenomenon among early twentieth-century white South Africans, a true
racial liberal comparable to the neo-abolitionists who helped found the
NAACP.
The African elite professed great admiration for Schreiner, and one
African newspaper even dubbed him "our South African Abe Lincoln."
Included in the delegation to Britain that Schreiner headed were Dr.
Abdul Abdurahman of the (predominantly Colored) African Political
Organization; John Tengo Jabavu, the moderate Cape leader who had
held aloof from the efforts of his more radical Cape rivals to unify Africans across colonial boundaries but who shared their opposition to the
South Africa Act; and three representatives of the South African Native
Convention: Rubusana and Daniel Dwanya from the Cape and Thomas
Mapikela of the Orange River Colony. John L. Dube of Natal, who was
ostensibly in Britain for other purposes, served as a de facto member of
the delegation. Despite the fact that the delegation represented the entire
spectrum of educated black opinion and notwithstanding its strenuous
efforts to mobilize British public and parliamentary opinion against the
South Africa act, it failed in its mission. The government was too strongly
committed to devolving power to whites in what it deemed to be colonies
of European settlement to hear pleas for the rights of "natives"even
when, as in the exceptional case of South Africa, they made up a substantial majority of the population.41
After parliament approved the South Africa Act and the whitedominated Union became a fait accompli, African protest politics lost some
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of the momentum that had sent the delegation to London. The Native
Convention failed to assemble again or assume a permanent form; its
leaders were left clinging to the slender hope that the white minority would
rule benevolently and consent to the gradual extension of political rights to
"civilized" blacks throughout South Africa. A qualified suffrage for Africans and Coloreds remained in force for the Cape Province and was given
special protection in the constitutionit could only be abrogated by a
special two-thirds vote of both houses of parliament sitting together. Since
their right to the suffrage was based in part on access to landholding, a court
decision would later hold that the Natives' Land Act of 1913 did not apply
to Cape Africans. Their own voting and landowning rights apparently
safeguarded, many of the Eastern Cape Xhosa who had been in the forefront of the suffrage agitation in the period between the signing of the
Treaty of Vereininging in 1903 and the seating of the first Union government in 1910 retreated into political passivity or concentrated on local
issues. Preparing to assume their place in the vanguard of the movement
for African rights were educated Africans from areas where no modicum of
African rights was entrenched, especially Zulus from Natal and Tswana
and Sotho from the Free State and the Transvaal.42
The first two years of Union saw the beginnings of agitation for the
systematic "segregation" of whites and Africans. The government, led by
Louis Botha and his South African Party, sought to harmonize the interests
of Afrikaners and English-speaking South Africans at the expense of Africans, who became pawns to be moved about and sacrificed as suited their
white overlords. In 1911 African contract workers were denied the right to
strike and an act regulating mines and factories authorized the exclusion of
blacks from skilled, responsible, and high-paying jobs. By 1912 legislation
to implement the South African Native Affairs Commission's recommendation for a division of the country into black and white areas was
being considered by parliament. Threatened with this juggernaut of segregationism, a group of African professional men, based mainly in Johannesburg, seized the initiative and called for another national conference. Their
clear intention this time was to form a permanent organization that could
unify Africans in defense of their rights and interests against a white government that had revealed its discriminatory intentions.43
The prime movers in the effort to forrn a native congress were four
African lawyers, educated abroad, who had recently begun to practice in
JohannesburgAlfred Mangena, Richard Msimang, Pixley ka Izaka
Seme, and George Montsioa. Among the first black South Africans to
practice law, they all came from Christiae enclaves and had received a
mission education before being sent abroad for advanced training. Mangena, Msimang, and Seme were Zulus from the Kholwa (African Christian) community of Natal, and Montsoia was a Barolong (Tswana) from
Mafeking. Their legal training had taken place in England, and they had
been called to the bar or articled there (Mangena and Seme were barristers, Msimang and Montsoia solicitors). Returning to South Africa at
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the time of Union, these four young lawyers were living exemplars of the
mission ideal of elevating Africans to "civilized" status; furthermore
they had been thoroughly immersed in British traditions of personal
rights and liberties. What they saw happening in South Africa was a
flagrant violation of everything they had been taught to revere, and they
were prepared to take vigorous action on behalf of their less fortunate
and enlightened compatriots.44
Although Mangena, the first black barrister to practice in South Africa, was the senior member of this quartet, it was Pixley Seme who took
the lead in summoning a new congress. Before going to England to
study law at Jesus College, Oxford, Seme had been a student in the
United States, first at Mt. Hermon School in Massachusetts and then at
Columbia University, where he received a B.A. in 1906. Little is known
about the specific influences brought to bear on him during his American sojourn, but undoubtedly he was exposed to African-American
thought during the height of the Washington-Du Bois controversy. While
at Columbia, he gave an oration on "The Regeneration of Africa" that
sounds remarkably like Du Bois, especially the Du Bois who advocated
"Pan-Negroism" in his 1897 address on "The Conservation of Races."
Seme spoke of the unique "genius" possessed by each race of mankind;
argued that Africans were no exception, as demonstrated by the pyramids of Egypt, "all the glory" of which "belongs to Africa and her
people"; noted that the long dormant African genius, stimulated by
contact with a more "advanced" civilization, was reviving as blacks developed a healthy "race consciousness"; and predicted that "a new and
unique civilization is soon to be added to the world." The great obstacle
to the regenerative process was fragmentation and tribal rivalries, but
this divisiveness was being overcome, partly through the agency of Africans educated abroad who "return to their country like arrows, to drive
darkness from their land." The young Seme was obviously an heir of the
great tradition of nineteenth-century black nationalism, which had come
to fruition in the early thought of Du Bois. In harmony with this tradition, he combined a belief in the "ancestral greatness" and innate capabilities of Africans with a belief that "the essence of efficient progress
and civilization" was "the influence of contact and intercourse, the backward with the advanced."45
What Seme had in mind when he took the lead in calling for a national
congress of Africans was set forth in an article he wrote for an African
newspaper in 1911:
There is to-day among all races and men a general desire for progress and co-operation, because co-operation will facilitate and secure that progress. . . ,
It is natural therefore, that there should arise among us this striving, this selfconscious movement, and sighing for Union. We are the last among all the
nations of the earth to discover the precious jewels of cooperation, and for
this reason the great gifts of civilization are least known among us today. . . .
The South African Native Congress is the voice in the wilderness bidding all
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the dark races of this sub-continent to come together once or twice a year in
order to review the past and reject therein all those things which have retarded our progress, the things which poison the springs of our national life
and virtue; to label and distinguish the sins of civilization, and as members of
one house-hold to talk and think loudly on our home problems and the
solution of them.46
According to this formulation, Seme was proposing an agency for African self-improvement and cooperation across ethnic and regional divisions that would not necessarily be a protest organization. He was not
advocating "de-tribalization" or the merging of white and black South
Africa into a single, nonracial nation; for he stressed the fact that chiefs
and traditional leaders were being invited to the forthcoming assembly
and would be given a prominent place in the organization. He was himself
a Zulu and proud of it; later he would marry the daughter of the Zulu
paramount chief, Dininzulu, whom he had previously persuaded to serve
as an honorary vice president of the Native Congress. Like the other
lawyers involved in founding the South African Native National Congress
(SANNC) Seme retained a strong ethnic allegiance and often had chiefs
as clients. His governing idea was not the obliteration of tribal loyalties
and distinctions among Africans but rather the subordination of traditional allegiances to a broader conception of black nationality. This of
course required exorcising "the demon of [inter-tribal] racialism." As his
distinction between "the gifts of civilization" and "the sins of civilization"
might suggest, he thought it essential that Africans respond selectively to
modernizing influences, absorbing those that were beneficial and compatible with their best traditions and rejecting those that were not.47
When the congress assembled in Bloemfontein in January 1912, Seme
responded to the Union government's assault on black rights by making
protest an explicit function of the organization. In his keynote address, he
complained that "in the land of our birth, Africans are treated as hewers
of wood and drawers of water." In the new Union formed by the white
people, "we have no voice in the making of laws and no part in their
administration." Consequently, it was necessary to form an association for
the dual purpose of "creating national unity and defending our rights and
privileges." In Seme's conception, the new congress combined the selfhelp and racial-solidarity themes of Booker T. Washington's followers
with the protest orientation of Du Bois and the NAACP. While a law
student in England, Seme had sought Washington's endorsement of his
efforts to establish an organization of African students. Some correspondence ensued and they actually met on one occasion. For reasons that are
somewhat unclear, the meeting was unsatisfactorypossibly, according
to Louis Harlan, because Washington refused to "take a more active
interest in African causes." It is also possible that Washington perceived
in Seme some of the militancy and aggressive political activism that he
associated with the Du Bois camp in the United States.48
If the SANNC at its founding contemplated NAACP-type constitu-
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not so much for his ability to accommodate whites, as for his success in
building up a school of his own that had impressed the world. As Louis
Harlan has recognized, "the separatist concept that was Tuskegee conservatism in the American context became radical nationalism in the African." African visitors to Tuskegee were generally more impressed with
the fact that a black man was in charge than that the form of education
being offered was calibrated to mollify white fears of "over-educated"
African-Americans. When Dube applied Washington's concept of industrial education to Africans in his Ohlange Institute, he gave whites the
impression that he was training a docile work force, when in reality he
was educating much more broadly than this concept suggested. His real
aim, according to Manning Marable, was to "create a class of independent and aggressive entrepreneurs" and "moderate political activists,"
thus laying the foundations for "an independent, aggressive intellectual
class." A Washingtonian emphasis on building character and the acquisition of skills and capital was being fused with Du Bois's conception of a
"talented tenth" committed to leading their race or nation to freedom
and equality.52
Furthermore, the policies of the South African government made political action necessary before the process of accumulation and individual
enterprise that Washington recommended could plausibly begin. Du Bois
had charged that the South's denial of civic and political equality to blacks
fatally hobbled them in the economic race of life, but Washington could at
least reply that the rights to purchase land and take one's labor to a better
market were not formally abrogated. In South Africa, however, blacks
worked under special contracts which made leaving work a penal offense,
and in 1912 the parliament was preparing legislation that would not allow
Africans to purchase or rent land in more than 90 percent of the country.
It was therefore more glaringly obvious than in the American case that
agitation for equal rights under the law was an essential precondition for
the economic and entrepreneurial development of the African population. After the Land Act was passed, Congress protested that its consequence for Africans was "To limit all opportunities for their economic
improvement and Independence: To lessen their chances as a people of
competing freely and fairly in all commercial enterprises." In South Africa, therefore, the "petty-bourgeois" goals of Booker T. Washington
could not be pursued with the remotest hope of success if political activity
and protest were eschewed; a DuBoisian agitation for constitutional
rights was patently necessary to give Africans any chance at all in a
competitive, capitalist economy.53
If the protest orientation of the National Congress in its early years
resembled that of the NAACP, the fact that it was composed exclusively
of blacks and lacked white liberal sponsorship and involvement made it
more analogous to the Niagara Movement or to the Afro-American Council. What was more, the implication that it was the "congress" of a colonized people addressing an imperial overlord expressed a straightforward
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national consciousness that no African-American movement could duplicate. (The prototype was the Indian National Congress founded in 1885.)
As the original inhabitants and the majority of the population in South
Africa, Africans could imagine themselves as the South African nation in
ways that were not open to the African-American minority when they
thought about the future of the United States. One reasonbeyond their
belief that the Union constitution protected their established rightsthat
kept some African leaders in the Eastern Cape from joining the congress
or playing a prominent role in it was the special tradition of interracialism
that survived, if only in attenuated form, in that province. The moderate
John Tengo Jabavu refused to participate in the founding of the SANNC
because he did not believe in racially exclusive movements; instead he
founded a rival organization, the South African Races Congress, which
was theoretically open to members of all racial groups.54
Seme's Pan-African rhetoric and the all-African membership of the Congress did not commit the SANNC to the Ethiopianist goal of "Africa for the
African." Its official objective was a common democratic society in which
Africans, whites, coloreds, and Indians would be equal; its separatist character reflected the weakness of white racial liberalism in the Union of South
Africa more than it did the strength of Africanist ideology. There was no
abolitionist tradition that predisposed an influential group of whites to
champion the public equality of blacks. The closest equivalent was "the
Cape liberal tradition," and most of the heirs of this tradition had supported the South Africa Act. Only W. P. Shreiner had emerged as a prominent and consistent defender of black political rights throughout the
Union. In the northern provinces there were virtually no whites who dissented from the white supremacist consensus. Consequently the go-italone posture of the National Congress could be regarded as a pragmatic
necessity for the pursuit of equal rights rather than as the model for an
ethnically defined African nation. The subsequent history of the congress
would be filled with tension between cosmopolitan and ethnocentric perspectives but would see the inclusive and incorporationist perspective
called at different times "multi-racialism" or "nonracialism"prevail
again and again.55
Besides being constituted as a national rather than an interracial movement, the SANNC differed from the early NAACP in another obvious
respect. The Western-educated elite, which had monopolized representation at the National Convention of 1909, moved to enlist the support of
traditionalists by inviting the chiefs of the various tribal groups to the
founding meeting, giving them special recognition, and making them honorary vice presidents of the SANNC. The organization's constitution,
which was not actually approved until 1919, provided for an upper house
of chiefs in addition to the assembly of elected delegates. It was a clear
reflection of the basic differences between the two black communities and
their histories that no equivalent source of traditional authority existed
among African-Americans. But this difference does not vitiate compari-
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son between the early American civil rights movement and early African
nationalism in South Africa. Chiefs did not in fact have much influence in
running the congress and making its policy. Their role was indeed "honorary," and the real source of authority was an educated elite with a worldview strikingly similar to that of the African-American "talented tenth"
who constituted the membership of the Niagara Movement and the black
component in the NAACP (which would assume executive leadership of
the association by 1920).56
The first executive committee of the SANNC was composed of four
clergymen, three lawyers, two teachers, an editor (Plaatje), and a building
contractoran occupational profile strikingly similar to that of the early
black board members of the NAACP, four-fifths of whom were professionals with ministers and lawyers again predominating. The AfricanAmerican professional middle classsmall as it was relative to that of
white Americanswas much larger and more firmly established than the
black South African elite; as we have seen, the development and progress
of the former served to some extent as a model for the latter. As the careers
of leaders like Seme and Dube demonstrate, some of the ethos of the
African-American middle class had been absorbed and brought back to
South Africa by early nationalist leaders who had received part of their
education in the United States. What led to the creation of new national
protest organizations at about the same time was not, however, a process of
emulation. There is no evidence that the founders of the National Congress
were influenced or inspired in any way by the recent establishment of the
NAACP in the United States. What drove them to comparable action was a
similar sense of how segregation threatened the aspirations of educated,
middle-class blacks.57
The black educated elites of the two countries had acquired professional status and competence on the expectation that their qualifications
would lead to "careers open to talent" in the white-dominated society.
The educations they received from mission institutions and in liberal,
ostensibly color-blind universities in the northern United States or Great
Britain had inspired hopes that by becoming "civilized," they would have
expanded opportunities. As we have seen, optimism about the prospects
of incorporation into a progressive, liberal-capitalist society seemed
firmly rooted in the "color-blind" or theoretically nonracial liberalism of
the mid-Victorian era, the ideological current that sanctioned slave emancipation in the United States and was the basis for the impartial franchise
and equality under the law that distinguished the "liberal" Cape Colony
from the other, more blatantly discriminatory South African colonies or
republics to the North. A belief that Reconstruction-era constitutional
reforms opened the way for a steady advancement to full equality within
American society had raised the spirits of African-American achievers.
Similarly, a conviction that British-inspired Cape liberalism with its promise of "equal rights for every civilized man" was the wave of the future for
the entire area south of the Zambezi had given hope to educated Africans
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that fair treatment under the benevolent umbrella of the British empire
was only a matter of time. These expectations were shattered around the
turn of the century by an upsurge of white racism and the beginnings of
segregationism as a deliberate public policy with applications far beyond
what middle class blacks had previously acknowledged to be legitimate
provisions for social differentiation.58
The impulse to organize in defense of individual rights, rather than
merely striving to succeed as individuals, was a defensive reaction by
black elites against white aggression. The Jim Crow laws and practices of
the United States, and their tendency to spread from the South to the
North, heaped the same indignities on black professionals as they did on
servants and field hands. The new South African constitution denied
educated blacks the political opportunities and governmental responsibilities for which they felt themselves fully qualified, and the discriminatory,
segregationist laws of the Union parliament put a low ceiling on black
aspirations for social and economic advancement. Calling attention to the
particular class and status concerns of the elite is not meant to expose a
lack of commitment to the interests and rights of black peasants and
workers. Recognizing that no black meritocracy was possible under white
supremacy forced the conclusion that individual talent and virtue could be
rewarded only by gaining legal and political equality for all members of
the oppressed and subordinated racial groups. If the special economic
problems of the lower classes received less attention than socialist or
labor-oriented radicals thought they deserved, it was because of the elite's
sincere belief that an open, nonracial capitalist society was in the best
interests of all classes.59
The ethos shared by elite black activists in the two societies during the
second decade of the twentieth century is well represented in a notable
book published in 1920The Bantu Past and Present by Silas M.
Molema. Of a slightly younger generation that the founders of the
SANNC, Molema came from a prominent Baralong family with chiefly
connections. After studying at Lovedale, he went abroad in 1914 to
study medicine at the University of Glasgow and was still in Scotland,
having recently received his degree, when his book was published. He
returned to South Africa in 1921 and began a long career as a prominent
physician and sometime leader of the African National Congress. The
Bantu Past and Present was mostly a somewhat rambling compilation of
historical and ethnographic information about black South Africans, but
it concluded with a discussion of contemporary race relations and made
some explicit comparisons between the American and South African
situations.
What the southern United States and South Africa had in common were
enforced patterns of "complete separation" in "all walks of life." Acknowledging the obvious demographic and historical differences, Molema found
a fundamental similarity in the extent to which blacks were exposed to "a
strong feeling of dislike and contempt." In the United States, the Negro's
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"educational and industrial progress have [sic] fanned the flames of colour
prejudice, and his political aspiration have fanned them more, till, between
black and white, there is drawn by the latter a rigid line in all matters social,
religious, civil, and political."
The South African situation was not identical because the educated or
"civilized" element was a much smaller proportion of the whole black
population; "for the Bantu are educationally and socially far behind
American Negroes." But the tiny African elite was experiencing the same
painful rejection as its more numerous African-American counterpart. It
was, he argued, the "civilized" and not the "uncivilized" Bantu who experienced the most prejudice. Their pain was acute, because "the more
civilized a man is, the more keenly is he apt to feel the stigma of the
prejudice he encounters, the disabilities which he is placed under solely
by reason of his colour, and the determination of the ruling class to ignore
his intellectual attainments, forcing him down to the level of his rudest
brethren."
Molema noted the contempt with which black teachers and ministers
were treated by white educational and religious leaders, the expulsion of
Africans from civil service jobs as clerks and interpreters so that whites
could hold these positions, and the exclusion of black lawyers and physicians from professional facilities and opportunities"from everything
that is white." He concluded that "a civilized black man . . . keenly feels
the stigma which is eternally placed upon him; he bitterly resents the
social ostracism to which he is subjected." He then quoted some passages
from the first chapter of Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk on the despair of
cultivated African-Americans whose strivings had run up against a similar
wall of white rejection.60
Echoing Du Bois's call for leadership by a "talented tenth," Molema
stressed the necessity of a self-conscious elite to uplift and represent the
black masses. University educated blacks "are the interpreters, the demonstrators and exponents of the new and higher civilization to their struggling brethren. They are also the mouthpieces and representatives of their
fellow-countrymen to the advancing white race." No more than Du Bois,
however, was Molema calling for a slavish imitation of everything white
and a categorical repudiation of black culture and the African past. The
educated elite was to play a complex mediating role: "They should study,
uphold, and propagate their national customs and institutions, only modifying and abolishing such as are pernicious, and seem calculated to clash
with the best in civilization and to arrest progress." For Molema, as for
the young Du Bois, public equality and progressive development did not
require cultural uniformity based on European models or a self-betraying
renunciation of Africa.61
By the time Molema's book was published, Du Bois and to some extent
the other blacks who were giving direction to the NAACP had moved
beyond the unabashed elitism of the years of the Niagara Movement and
the beginnings of the twentieth-century civil rights struggle. Black workers
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were by then joining the association in substantial numbers and socialdemocratic perspectives were having some influence on black staff members such as Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson (the first AfricanAmerican executive secretary). In the SANNC, soon to be renamed the
African National Congress, the principal founderswhose basic attitudes
Molema expressedwere being challenged by spokesmen for an emerging
African workers' movement. But the belief that the professional middle
class were the natural leaders of the race and that its concerns and aims
should predominate in the framing of a black or African political agenda
had taken deep roots and would survive the upheavals of the 1920s in both
organizations.62
Besides being similar in the social-psychological profiles of their leadership, the NAACP and the National Congress were remarkably alike for at
least three decades in the reformist assumptions that they held and in the
means that they employed for the advancement of blacks. For the most
part, they sought liberation from prejudice and discrimination through
nonconfrontational means: the publicizing of black grievances, the lobbying or petitioning of public authorities and legislative bodies, and the
support of legal challenges to discriminatory laws and policies. They assumed that the whites in power could be influenced by black opinion
because of shared liberal-democratic values that whites were knowingly
violating when they discriminated against blacks. Protest based on the
expectation of significant reform could therefore take place within the
existing constitutional framework. Violent or revolutionary action was
ruled out from the beginning, but the congress, impressed by Gandhi's
passive resistance campaigns on behalf of South African Indians, listed
nonviolent action as a possible means of protest. Although Congress
members and supporters participated in nonviolent actions in 1913 and
again in 1919, mass civil disobedience did not become a central tactic of
the organization until the 1950s. Generally, as in the NAACP, there was a
fear that mass action could get out of control and impede the campaign to
persuade whites of the justice of the black cause by alienating those who
might otherwise be sympathetic.63
The NAACP's legalistic reformism had a justification that the congress's lacked: it had the letter of the United States Constitution as a basis
for its egalitarian claims. There was no way the South African constitution
could be construed as a charter of rights for Africans. For a time, the hope
persisted that the British parliament, which had the right to disapprove
South African legislation until 1930, could be persuaded to disallow the
most flagrantly discriminatory laws on the grounds that they violated the
rights of British subjects. But by the 1920s it was clear that this was a vain
hope. The decline and atrophy of the congress between the two world
wars, at a time when the NAACP was relatively vigorous and enjoying
some limited successes, especially in the courts, can be attributed partly to
the inescapable fact that a reformist campaign for civil rights had an
inherently better chance to yield fruit in a legal and constitutional context
126
that could be interpreted as favorable to black rights than in one that was
patently unfavorable. In 1930, Dr. Albert B. Xuma, a young African
physician and future president of the ANC, applied the knowledge that he
had gained during thirteen years studying and interning in the United
States to make the contrast explicit. After noting the violation of American constitutional principles that could be found "in certain sections of the
United States," he affirmed that "liberty and justice is the foundation
stone in the law of the land. It gives hope and citizenship rights to all
alike. . . . In test cases of serious consequence the Supreme Court of the
United States has sometimes, if not always, upheld the spirit and letter of
the Constitution." He then proceeded to tell the contrasting story of
proliferating color-bar legislation in South Africa from the Natives' Land
Act of 1913 to the Native Administration Act of 1927. Although he may
have romanticized somewhat the American situation in 1930, there was
substance to Xuma's view that the American standard was equality under
the law, whereas the official South African policy was differential and
discriminatory treatment.64
Resisting the High Tide of Segregation, 1913-1919
The NAACP and SANNC had barely come into existence when the segregation movement intensified and expanded, finding new and more radical
applications for its principles. The year 1913 saw major new segregationist
initiatives in both societies, and black attention was focused more sharply
than ever before on the meaning and consequences of governmentenforced racial separation. During the war that broke out in Europe in 1914
the mettle and resolve of both organizations were tested under conditions
that were fraught with ambiguity. In some respects the war period provided
new opportunities to challenge discriminatory racial policies, but it also
tempted black leaders to accommodate to segregation in the hopes of
receiving a better deal within its parameters. Black thought and action on
the segregation issue between 1913 and 1919 took somewhat parallel forms
in the two societies, but efforts to affect government policy had differing
degrees of success. These varying outcomes helped to put race policy in the
two societies on divergent paths, one leading to gradual improvement in
the status of blacks and the other to gradual deterioration.
In the United States, the election of Woodrow Wilson in 1912 as the
first president since the Civil War born south of the Mason-Dixon line
threatened to nationalize the southern Jim Crow policy. The armed forces
had been segregated since the enrollment of substantial numbers of
African-Americans during the War for the Union, but in the civil service
blacks worked alongside whites. In 1913, the 24,500 blacks who worked
for the federal government constituted slightly more than 5 percent of all
government employees. If they were somewhat underrepresented on the
basis of population, it was nonetheless evident that the federal civil service provided far and away the best opportunity that blacks possessed for
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128
129
New Republic article entitled "My View of the Segregation Laws," which
was not published until shortly after his death in 1915, was specifically
directed at the residential ordinances. Like Pickens he noted that the vice
district was always in the area designated for black occupancy; the result
was that the whorehouse might be next door to the schoolhouse and that
"when a Negro seeks to buy a house in a respectable street he does it not
only to get police protection, but to remove his children to a locality in
which vice is not paraded." As a promoter of black business enterprise,
Washington complained that the segregation laws never prohibited whites
from owning stores and businesses in black neighborhoods and thus were
inherently inequitable since, as a practical matter, there were no equivalent opportunities for blacks in white neighborhoods. Washington was
thus impelled, posthumously as it turned out, to adopt the protest orientation that he had previously eschewed. Segregation was clearly beginning
to threaten the prospects of those for whom he spokethe black strivers
who had been willing to tolerate racial separatism so long as it did not
preclude the chance to make a decent living, accumulate property, and
establish a middle-class home.70
When the NAACP went to court to challenge the residential segregation ordinances it spoke for a vital concern of all blacks who aspired to
middle-class status, whether they happened to consider themselves followers of Washington or Du Bois. For the Washingtonians, it was an extension of segregation beyond what could be allowed to occur without public
protest, while for the Du Boisians it represented a further development of
the kind of practices and policies that they had always found intolerable.
The NAACP won a notable victory when it challenged the Louisville
Ordinance in the federal courts and had it declared unconstitutional in
1917 on the ground that it denied the Fourteenth Amendment right not to
be deprived of property without due process of law. The toleration of
segregation by federal courts was shown to have limits: separate railway
cars and separate seating on streetcars were, for the time being, constitutional, but legally mandated separate neighborhoods were not.71
The importance of this victory has not been fully appreciated because it
obviously did not prevent black ghettoization by restrictive covenants,
zoning laws, and other devices. But black ghettos have at least been
allowed to grow, and neighborhoods in major American cities have gone
through brief "integrated" periods before becoming all-black. What
would have happened, one wonders, if the core idea of the residential
segregation laws had been effectively implemented; if, in other words,
blacks had been forbidden by lawas well as being discouraged by prejudiced realtors and the threat of extra-legal violencefrom moving into
white neighborhoods. More living space for blacks would have to be
provided through formal decisions by predominantly white political authorities. Since it would have been politically difficult if not impossible to
displace white residents of inner-city neighborhoods, politicians and plan-
130
ners would have had to establish separate black suburbs in the less desirable segments of the urban periphery. In short, something like the black
townships and "group areas" of South Africa might have resulted.
The South African Native National Congress had been formed in anticipation of new legislation requiring land segregation, and its fears were
realized when the Natives' Land Act was passed in 1913. This law, which
inspired Clarence Poe's abortive plan for rural segregation in the American South, became the object of a sustained protest campaign that served
as the principal focus of the congress's activity for several years. Full
implementation of the act was delayed pending the report of a commission that would study the map of South Africa and draw lines on it to
designate precisely which areas would be reserved for Africans, but the
law's immediate abolition of "squatting" or sharecropping on whiteowned land by Africans who did not work part of the year directly for
white farmers had the immediate effect, especially in the Orange Free
State (where Africans had never had the right to own land) of causing
mass evictions. By 1914, homeless blacks with herds of livestock that no
longer had a place to graze were clogging the roads and tracks of the Free
State.72
The congress agreed that the act as written had to be opposed, but
there was division in its ranks about whether to accept the principle of
spatial segregation and argue for a fair division or reject the idea out of
hand. John L. Dube, the president of the SANNC, like his "patron saint"
Booker T. Washington, was more comfortable as an accommodationist
than as a protester, and his tendency to seek a better deal for Africans
within a segregationist framework would weaken and dilute the campaign
against the Land Act. In a letter to the American supporters of his industrial school written at the time of his election to Congress's presidency in
1912, Dube confessed that he had undertaken the responsibility out of a
sense of duty "to keep in check, the red-hot republicanism that characterize [sic] some of our leaders, and is calculated to injure rather than help
our cause." In 1914, he wrote to Prime Minister Botha and represented
the Congress as making "no protest against the principle of segregation so
far as it can fairly and practically be carried out."73
There was no question in the minds of Congress's leadership that the
Land Act itself was the prelude to a patently inequitable distribution of
territory, and when the government failed to respond to pleas and petitions, the SANNC dispatched a delegation to Great Britain in an effort to
get parliament to overrule the act. As in the campaign against the South
Africa Act in 1909, African leaders put their faith in the British traditions
of liberalism and legal equality that had significantly shaped their own
view of the world. The delegatesDube, Plaatje, Walter Rubusana, Saul
Msane, and Thomas Mapikelacarried with them a petition objecting to
the act because of the limitations it placed on the right to acquire property, enter freely into contracts, or move about at will in search of economic opportunity. They appealed in particular to the humanitarian lobby
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132
the principle of the Land Act and that Plaatje's militant opposition could
be disregarded by those responsive to African opinion. When word of
Thema's concession of the principle got back to South Africa, a militant
anti-segregationist faction, led by Seme and Saul Msane, forced the
resignation of Thema and Dube for sanctioning the theory of territorial
separation and strongly endorsed Plaatje's position. As Thema wrote to
Buxton after the accommodationists had been ousted, "the Congress is
divided into two camps with regards to the policy of segregation."
Plaatje, who had emerged as the spokesman for the dominant faction,
was offered the presidency; after he declined it for personal reasons, S.
M. Makgatho, the vigorous and relatively radical leader of the congress
in the Transvaal, was chosen. Makgatho and the new executive secretary, Saul Msane, stiffened up the SANNC's opposition to government
policies, especially to the Native Administration bill of 1917, which proposed that Africans be represented in electoral assemblies with limited
powers within their own territories but not in the central government.76
The dispute in the congress over land segregation bears a rough resemblance to the earlier Washingtori-Du Bois controversy in the United
States, with Dube and Thema hoping to establish a basis for black selfhelp within the framework established by white segregationists, and
Seme, Plaatje, Makgatho, and Msane resisting any concessions to white
authority that would compromise the ideal of equal citizenship. But divisions on the segregation issue were not as clear-cut in either case as this
abstract formulation would suggest, and the image of a clash between
separatist accommodationists and integrationist protesters is an oversimplified view of the debates. As we have seen, Washington was ambivalent
about the segregation of public transport, and at the end of his life took a
public stand against residential and territorial segregation. As the full text
of his letter to Buxton reveals, Thema (who spoke for Dube as well)
would be willing to contemplate dividing the land on racial lines only if
blacks were represented in the government and had a voice in deciding
the lines of demarcation.
If the putative accommodationists were not really accepting a whiteimposed plan of segregation, neither were those who adopted an apparently more radical stance repudiating all forms of racial separatism on
principle. Du Bois was strongly committed to the encouragement of
separate black institutions, a Pan-African ethnic consciousness, and a
distinctive African-American culture. His opposition to legally imposed
segregation did not mean that he favored the total assimilation of blacks
into Euro-American society. Equal political and civic rights were for him
a necessary foundation for autonomous group development. Plaatje and
Seme also had Pan-Africanist views, as well as strong attachments to
their particular ethnic communities. Sounding more like Washington
than Du Bois, Plaatje and other protest-oriented Congress leaders often
disavowed any aim of "social equality with the white man," and they did
not in fact object to the general pattern of separate facilities, institu-
133
tions, and associations for white and black in South Africa so long as
separation was voluntary or consensual and not merely a front for white
monopolization of power and privilege. Indeed the congress itself was a
manifestation of separatism despite its platform of political inclusion. In
neither case can opposition to the laws and policies that whites used to
make blacks "separate and unequal" be construed as advocacy of social
and cultural assimilation.77
The willingness of the Dube-Thema faction to accommodate to government segregationist policies if they could influence their implementation
and derive some practical advantage from them was analogous to the
response of Du Bois and the NAACP to the mobilization of AfricanAmericans for participation in the First World War. When the United
States took up arms against Germany in 1917, the NAACP supported the
war effort and called for equal opportunities for blacks in all its phases,
including the armed forces. Traditionally, blacks in the armed forces had
been enlisted in separate units under white officers, precisely the way
colonial powers utilized "native troops" in their own wars. When it became clear that there was no chance of fully integrating the First World
War army, Joel Spingarn, the white president of the NAACP, backed by
Du Bois and The Crisis, decided to settle for the attainable objective of a
separate officer training camp for black officers in an effort to shift the
line of military segregation from the horizontal to the vertical. If blacks
had to fight in separate units, Spingarn and Du Bois argued, they should
at least have their own black officers.
This compromise proposal proved acceptable to a government that
was willing to pay a limited price for black support of the war effort, but
it caused a major controversy among the leaders of the black protest
movement. William Monroe Trotter and his National Equal Rights
League attacked it as an ignoble concession to the principle of segregation, and within the NAACP itself there was sufficient opposition to
prevent the organization from officially endorsing the camp. But it was
difficult for a pragmatic, reformist movement for black advancement to
avoid compromising with segregation when the choice was between
some movement toward the equalization of facilities and the status quo
of separate-and-flagrantly-unequal. On future occasions, the NAACP
would favor upgrading separate black schools and equalizing teachers'
pay, despite the fact that such a stand conceded the legitimacy, or at
least the inevitability, of educational segregation. Du Bois's endorsement of a separate training camp was the product of a logic that would
sometimes prove compelling, the realization that segregation per se was
not the issue; it was rather how to increase the resources and opportunities available to the black community.78
If we look in a broader way at elite black responses to the First
World War, we find remarkable parallels between the basic positions of
the NAACP and the SANNC. The association's patriotic disposition
was carried to its logical conclusion in Du Bois's famous editorial in
134
The Crisis of July 1918, calling on blacks to "close ranks" and give
wholehearted support to President Wilson's crusade to make the world
safe for democracy. "Let us, while this war lasts," wrote Du Bois,
"forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder
with our white fellow citizens and the allied nations that are fighting for
democracy."79
In 1914, the congress took a similar stand and suspended agitation to
the point of calling back the delegation sent to Britain to protest the
Natives' Land Act. Like the NAACP, the congress believed that its hopes
for justice and equality for blacks would be enhanced by wartime loyalty
and contributions to the national cause. The SANNC even encouraged
blacks to enlist in the armed forces, despite the fact that the only way they
could do so was to volunteer for labor contingents that were not only kept
out of combat in France but were kept in closed compounds so that the
inmates could have no contact with local whites or even with black soldiers from other allied countries. The total lack of any reward for black
patriotism and the refusal of the government to employ black manpower
except under the most humiliating circumstances made it difficult to maintain the no-protest policy. In 1916, the grievances of black military laborers, the report of the land commission, and the prospect of the new
discriminatory actions by parliament forced Congress to renew political
agitation in the midst of the war. Unlike African-Americans, who appeared to be getting something for their loyaltyin addition to the officer's camp, the Wilson administration appointed blacks to positions as
advisers on African-American mobilizationblack South Africans faced
renewed humiliations and no suspension of government assaults on their
rights and interests. For the moment at least, the parallel strategies of
seeking a better deal by offering to stand fast with whites at a time of
national peril seemed more productive in the American case than in the
South African.80
In retrospect, it is clear that the period 1913-18 represented a critical
stage in the history of white supremacy in both the United States and
South Africa. In both cases the segregation movement surged forward
and made clear its intentions to make legal separation of the races as
thorough and comprehensive as the interests of whites required or permitted. But in the United States blacks and their white liberal allies managed
to hold segregation in check, not rolling it back but at least limiting its
growth; in South Africa, the congress failed to erect any effective barriers
to a continuous and accelerating increase in the kind of segregationist
policies that at a further stage of development would be called apartheid.
The achievement of the NAACP during Wilson's presidency has for the
most part been overlooked by historians, who have tended to stress the
failure to block segregation of the civil service. It is undeniable that this
action was a serious setback for the cause of civil rights. Intrusion of the
southern caste system into the federal government, Professor Kelly Miller
13:5
136
ment of black advisers on African-American mobilization for war foreshadowed the New Deal's similar efforts to consult blacks on their stake
in measures to deal with the Great Depression.83
If African-Americans came out of the war period with something to
show for it that would not completely disappear in the generally reactionary decade that followed, South African blacks gained nothing from their
support of the war and in fact saw their rights increasingly assaulted.
Seeing no need for black cooperation in what was regarded as strictly a
white man's war, the South African government pushed new measures for
territorial and political segregation while the conflict was still going on.
The Native Administration bill, which mandated a separate and subordinate set of political institutions for Africans based on the territorial divisions projected by the Land Act, did not actually become law during the
war, but it was clearly on the agenda for the future, and the SANNC had
no weapons in its arsenal that might avert it. Another delegation was
dispatched to Britain in 1919, but there was no reason to expect that it
would have any greater success than earlier deputations. The frustration
and disillusionment of the period between the passage of the Land Act
and the end of the war would force the South African Native National
Congress (soon to be renamed the African National Congress) to explore
new and more radical methods of protest and resistance in the immediate
postwar years.84
The contrast between the limited success of the NAACP in combating
the spread of segregation in the United States and the total failure of the
SANNC to do likewise in South Africa was clear evidence of a major
difference in the long-term prospects of the two movements. NAACP
would face a long uphill struggle, and its elitist character and commitment
to legalistic reformism would prevent it from being fully equal to the task
of ending government-enforced segregation in the South. But at least the
uphill direction of its struggle was established. The congress, on the other
hand, was on a downward slope as the 1920s began. Lacking the constitutional legitimacy and influential white allies that made the NAACP's task
easier, the SANNC faced a grim future of futile protests against new white
supremacist initiatives. Not until it abandoned its efforts to reform an
inherently racist constitutional system and reached beyond the elite to
draw the masses into the struggle would it have the capacity to shake the
foundations of segregation.
4
"Africa for the Africans":
Pan-Africanism and
Black Populism, 1918-1930
138
vancement of Colored People and the South African Native National Congress (renamed the African National Congress in 1923).l
The main demographic trend of the period in both countries was the
massive movement of black population from the countryside to the cities,
which began with the hornefront labor shortage of the war years but
continued unabated up to the time of the Great Depression. It was among
the newly urbanized black and brown people of Harlem, Chicago, Johannesburg, and Cape Town that the new racial consciousness first took root.
Its most dramatic and potent manifestation was Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which spread from its base
in Harlem throughout the African diaspora as well as to parts of Africa
itself. Black South Africa showed great interest in Garvey's vision of
"Africa for the Africans," despite having only a limited opportunity or
inclination to join his association and participate directly in its activities.
The new South African organization that expressed the mood of the 1920s
and demonstrated the kind of mass appeal that characterized the Garvey
movement in the United States was the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union of Africa (ICU), under the charismatic leadership of Clements
Kadalie. As its name suggests, the ICU had a Pan-African perspective; its
leader was not even South African in origin but in fact an immigrant from
Nyasaland (now Malawi) who never learned to speak a South African
native language. At times the ICU espoused a black nationalist ideology
similar to Garvey's and even shared officers with the relatively small
South African branch of the UNIA. The ICU followed a somewhat different path and ended up at a different point on the spectrum of black
ideologies. But such a divergence may tell us something important about
the contrasting circumstances that conditioned efforts to create mass
movements among blacks in the two countries during the 1920s.
Both the UNIA and the ICU have been characterized as "populist"
movements. One of the most elusive and problematic terms in the lexicon
of historians and political scientists, populism is more easily denned in
terms of what it is not than of what it is. But with the help of the political
theorist Margaret Carnavon and the historian Lawrence Goodwyn, it may
be possible to arrive at a concept of populism that applies to both the
UNIA and the ICU and serves to distinguish them from rival black movements of the liberal or Marxist: type. The essential and most obvious
ingredient of populism is opposition to the exercise of authority by established or self-appointed elites who profess to act for the good of the
people, in favor of a leadership that presents itself as the actual voice of
the people. Populists normally encourage forms of popular participation
in decision-making that at least give the appearance that the people are
ruling directly. The concept of an enlightened vanguard, a meritocracy, or
a "talented tenth" called upon to elevate the benighted or undeveloped
masses is almost as antithetical to populist thinking as an aristocracy
based on birth. A black populism would be opposed not only to white rule
but also to the claims of educated or "advanced" black elites such as
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workers do not write to the Governor-General when they want more pay.
They strike and get what they should."6
In 1919, after the strikes by municipal workers had been forcibly repressed, the Transvaal Congress moved to direct action on a broader front
and attempted the kind of mass resistance to legalized white supremacy
that James Weldon Johnson was merely contemplating. The resulting campaign of civil disobedience against the hated pass laws was not the first such
action by Africans. In 1913 and 1914 black women in the Orange Free State
had successfully resisted new regulations extending the pass laws to females. But the 1919 actions on the Witwatersrandwhich took the form of
collecting passes from thousands of black workers and turning them in to
the authoritieswas the first time the congress or one of its branches had
involved itself in mass civil disobedience against racist laws. The anti-pass
campaign focused on a form of labor control that effectively prevented
African workers from exercising the basic rights that all white workers took
for granted. (It was the fact that they carried passes binding them to white
employers that made strikes by Africans illegal.) Since pass laws also inconvenienced and humiliated middle-class blacks, agitation against them was
the perfect vehicle for inter-class solidarity among Africans.7
The National Congress's interest in organizing black labor peaked in
1920 when several SANNC leaders were involved in attempts to form a
single national union for African and Colored workers. Thereafter, however, efforts within the congress to redirect the black protest movement
along economic or class lines quickly ran out of steam. Similarly, the
NAACP in the United States retreated from its efforts to encompass the
cause of black labor and reverted by 1921 to its earlier emphasis on civil
rights and the status concerns that resonated most strongly with the middle class. Neither the congress nor the NAACP proved capable during the
early 1920s of broadening its base much beyond the educated elite and
thereby preempting some of the terrain on which their populist rivals
would flourish.8
To explain these comparable failures to create a cross-class coalition to
fight for the most basic needs of the laboring majority, one needs to look
at the United States and South Africa separately. Of critical importance in
the American case was the crushing defeat of militant labor by the forces
of organized capital in the early 1920s. The destruction of radical industrial unions that might have opened their ranks to blacks left behind a
labor movement composed mainly of conservative craft unions that were
likely to maintain rigid barriers against black membership. Outside the
South, blacks did not predominate in any particular line of work, except
in such special niches of the railroad industry as pullman car porters and
redcaps; consequently there was no real future for a separate black labor
movement. In the mid-1920s, the socialist A. Philip Randolph began his
long struggle to organize the sleeping-car porters, but from the start his
objective was to use this all-black union as the entering wedge for black
participation in an interracial labor movement. 9
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In the black belt of the Deep South, where a racially based labor movement was conceivable, efforts of blacks to unionize met with vicious repression. The effort to form a black sharecropper's union in rural Arkansas in
1919 led to a riot and subsequent reign of terror that may have claimed the
lives of over 200 blacks, making it one of the most murderous racial pogroms in American history. The NAACP defended the 122 blacks charged
with murdering the three whites killed in the disorders and with other
alleged offenses arising from the "deliberately planned insurrection of negroes" conjured up by the white supremacist imagination. In 1923, the
association won a landmark victory when the Supreme Court set aside the
convictions on the grounds that fair trials had been impossible given the
atmosphere of mob rule in which they took place. But the decision did not
uphold the right of sharecroppers to organize in defense of their economic
interests. Under the circumstances existing in the South during the 1920s,
the NAACP could well argue that the priority it gave to establishing the
right to a fair triala goal that it pursued not. only through litigation but
also by lobbying for federal anti-lyriching legislationwas justified as a
necessary first step to gaining economic rights. NAACP assistant secretary
Walter White, who spearheaded the campaign against lynching, viewed the
threat of "rope and faggot" for "uppity" blacks as the cornerstone of an
oppressive labor system,10
In South Africa, the effort of the left wing of the ANC to make workers' struggles the congress's main concern was also the casualty of a pattern of repression that prevented an African labor movement from getting
organized to the point where it had real bargaining power. The agitation
of 1919 did not lead to abolition of the pass laws, although some exemptions were later introduced that eased the burden of the educated elite
and thus made confronting the authorities on the issue seem less urgent.
The deflation and unemployment of 1921 cut the ground out from under
working-class agitators and movements and decreased the pressure from
below on the ANC. In 1923 the Urban Areas Act tightened the controls
on black migrants to urban areas and made organizing black workers
more difficult than ever. In these circumstances, the more conservative
element of the ANC, composed mainly of professionals and businessmen
who sought to distinguish themselves from workers by seeking special
recognition as "civilized" Africans, reasserted its dominance over the
organization.11
White repression was thus deterring both the NAACP and the ANC
from putting an economic or class-based struggle at the top of their agendas. In the American South, the association found that it had to deal with
extralegal terrorlynching and pogromsbefore it could get to the point
of defending unionization and strikes. In South Africa, official repression
of black labor through pass laws and influx controls made a trade union
orientation seem increasingly futile or dangerous. But ideology was also a
factor in both cases. As has been suggested, the educated elite that dominated the ANC was divided between strong adherents of liberal capital-
143
ism and a minority that was receptive to socialist ideas. If anything, the
NAACP was even less susceptible to the kind of economic radicalism that
would sustain a militant working-class struggle. This stance was partly the
result of the continued dominance of the association's board of directors
by liberal white philanthropists, but most of the black officers and active
members were also proponents of liberal capitalism; they normally voted
Republican because the party of big business was also the party that had
freed the slaves and passed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments.
(The Democratic party, although somewhat more sensitive to the economic concerns of working people, tolerated the segregationism of its
southern wing.) W. EL B. Du Bois, by this time a democratic socialist, was
beginning to find this economic liberalism constraining, but most of his
colleagues in the association saw their cause as the elimination of racial
caste in an otherwise satisfactory capitalist democracy.12
That these elite protest organizations did not become mass movements
of a populist type in the 1920s was due to more than their inability to
reconcile the interests of middle-class and working-class blacks. Individual rightspolitical, civil, or economicwere of vital concern to all Africans or African-Americans, but focusing on them to the exclusion of
cultural issues could not satisfy the need of people who had been humiliated by white supremacy for sources of group pride and a positive sense of
identity. Du Bois understood this, and in the pages of The Crisis, he called
for black cultural revitalization as well as for the right to vote or sit
anywhere in the streetcar. It was also understood by Levi Mvabaza, who
accompanied his 1919 advocacy of the rights of black workers with an
attack on white missionaries and an assertion of the collective rights of his
people to the land they had once possessed: "The white people teach you
about heaven and tell us after death you will go to a beautiful land in
heaven. They don't teach you about this earth on which we live . . . if we
cannot get land on this earth neither shall we get it in heaven. . . . The
God of our chiefs, Chaka, Moshoeshoe, Rile, Sandile, Sobuza, Lentsoe,
etc., gave us this part of the world we possess."13
As organizations, neither the NAACP nor the ANC was able during
the 1920s to give adequate expression to the powerful feeling among
blacks that they had been wronged not just as individuals or members of
social classes but as a people or nation. The affirmation of black or
African identity was a task that would have to be undertaken by other
movements.
Elite Pan-Africanism
In the United States and South Africa blacks could become conscious of
being a people or a nation only through accepting a concept of "race"
originally constructed by white supremacists and then turning it to positive uses. Ethnicity in a purely cultural sense was problematic in the
American case and dangerously divisive in the South African. African-
144
145
able to obtain their release from slavery, and by the time they had children of their own, they had been freed and were important men in their
own right. They have multiplied exceeding, being numbered by hundreds
and thousands in that country to which their grandfathers were taken and
sold."15
As in the United States, however, the problem of class or status differences among blacks complicated the process of providing specific content
for an all-encompassing black or African identity. Would the unifying
ideology be the liberal progressivism of educated elites, which would have
to be imposed from the top down, or a new, more radical Africanism
based on common elements in the experience of black workers and peasants? And to what extent would solidarity from the bottom up be based
on a synthesized or reconstructed traditionalism and to what extent on
new identities created by migration and industrialization?
During the decade or so following World War I, Pan-Africanism was an
insurgent force in political thought and expression throughout the black
world. But there were three distinct varieties of the impulse to establish
links between blacks in the New World and in Africa that competed for
the allegiance of black intellectuals and activists in the United States and
South Africa. There was a conservative Pan-Africanism associated with
the legacy of Booker T. Washington and represented in the 1920s by
J. E. K. Aggrey; a liberal reformist Pan-Africanism led by Du Bois and
manifested in the four Pan-African conferences that took place between
1919 and 1927; and the populist Pan-Africanism of Marcus Garvey and
the Universal Negro Improvement Association.16
The origins of the conservative or accommodationist strain in postwar
Pan-Africanism can be found in Booker T. Washington's intermittent
involvement with Africa between 1900 and his death in 1915. Washington's attention was initially drawn to Africa because colonial officials and
educated Africans solicited his advice on how to train "natives" for useful
roles in Europe's African colonies. Believing that the problems of American Negroes and indigenous Africans were similar, Washington enthusiastically promulgated the Tuskegee model of industrial education. His commitment, however, was not great enough to induce him to travel to Africa
and provide advice in person. In 1903, he turned down invitations to pay
officially sponsored visits to South Africa and Rhodesia, explaining that
he had too much to do at home. But his contacts with educated Africans,
either by exchange of letters or when they turned up at Tuskegee, led him
to contemplate a form of Pan-African cooperation. "I myself, at various
times," he wrote to one of his African correspondents in 1906, "have
advocated an understanding between the intelligent Negroes of the world,
looking to the developement [sic] of the masses." In 1912 he presided
over an International Conference on the Negro at Tuskegee, but most of
the attendees were white missionaries rather than "intelligent Negroes";
only one black African is known to have been present.17
Washington's conceptiou of Pan-African activity was of educated blacks
146
and benevolent whites joining forces to assault the ignorance and immorality of the masses of black people throughout the world. But he inadvertently helped to inspire a nationalistic conception of black solidarity. According to the historian Kenneth King, "with many Africans it was not so
much the white money behind Tuskegee as the black president and allblack staff that gave it much of its appeal"; for the young Marcus Garvey,
who thought he was following in Washington's footsteps when he founded
the Universal Negro Improvement Association, Tuskegee was (in King's
words) "an island of black pride and racial solidarity."18
During the 1920s, the leading proponent of black-white cooperation for
the redemption of Africathe accomrnodationist side of Washington's
messagewas James Emman Kwegyir Aggrey, a native of the Gold Coast
(now Ghana) who spent twenty-two years in the United States, mostly as
a student and teacher at Livingstone College in North Carolina, before
returning to Africa in 1920 as an emissary of the Phelps-Stokes Fund. The
original target of this fund's philanthropy had been black education in the
American South. It had strongly supported Booker T. Washington's program of practical, industrial training, and for this reason its 1913 report on
Negro education had incurred the hostility of W. E.B. Du Bois. It was
partly to head off a similar reaction from some segments of black opinion
that the fund appointed Aggrey to its commission to survey the education
of colonial Africans and make recommendations for its improvement.
Aggrey strongly disapproved of Marcus Garvey's militant version of PanAfricanism, and his principal mission during his tour of Africa was to
counter Garveyite propaganda and try to halt the spread of its influence.19
Aggrey should not be written off as a stooge of white imperialists who
deserves no place in the history of Pan-Ai'ricanist thought. He was a man of
strong convictions and the authentic heir of a major tradition of black
nationalist expression. Like Washington, he was an advocate of racial accommodation, but he arrived at this position by a different route. His
inspiration was essentially religious rather than down-to-earth and pragmatic; in fact he was a latter-day exponent of the Ethiopian myth that had
played such a conspicuous role in nineteenth-century black nationalism. As
a child in the Gold Coast, Aggrey had been converted to Christianity and
educated by white Methodist missionaries. It is not known precisely how or
why he emigrated to the United States at the age of 22 to become a student
at Livingstone, the main seat of learning of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. AMEZ missionaries were active in the Gold Coast, and it
is likely that he had some contact with them before coming to America. In
any case, he was ordained an elder in the AMEZ Church in 1903, just a year
after he had earned a B.A. from Livingstone. As a Christian who took the
Golden Rule seriously, Aggrey could not condone racial animosities or
conflicts, but this did not mean that he lacked race pride or favored an
amalgamation of the races. His favorite metaphor for improved blackwhite relations was reminiscent of Washington's fingers-and-hand analogy
147
except that it was explicitly color-coded: a piano with the black and white
keys remaining quite distinct while playing in harmony.20
As a minister in one of the two great African Methodist denominations,
Aggrey was heir to the Ethiopian myth and the romantic racialist tradition
of viewing blacks as a people with a special aptitude for Christianity. In a
speech before the Foreign Missions Conference of North America in
1922, he used the story of the Magi to illustrate the differing gifts that the
three great races brought to Christianity. The whites brought the gold of
material success, Asians the "frankincense of ceremony," and blacks the
"myrrh of child-like faith," which is of course the essential ingredient:
"We look for a Christ who loves all men, Who came to die for the whole
world; we believe in God as a child believes. If you take our childlikeness,
our love for God, our belief in humanity, our belief in God, and our love
for you, whether you hate us or not, then the gifts will be complete."21
Aggrey was often heckled by blacks in South Africa, both in 1921 and
during the second visit of a Phelps-Stokes Commission in 1924, because
many in his audience believed that white Christians would take advantage
of any turning-of-the-other-cheek and use it to perpetrate further injustices
against unprotesting blacks. History would later show that the Sermon on
the Mount could serve the cause of black liberation only when it was
accompanied by acts of nonviolent resistance against unchristian racism.22
Aggrey's visits to South Africa were associated with efforts to export a
white-sponsored scheme for interracial cooperation originating in the
American South. In 1919, with backing from the Phelps-Stokes Fund, the
Commission on Interracial Co-operation was founded in Atlanta. Its purpose was to improve race relations by bringing the "best" representatives
of both races together for discussions and problem-solving. The framework of legalized segregation was taken for granted, and the object was to
improve facilities for blacks in order to make "separate but equal" more
than a legal fiction. In South Africa, the fund subsidized the Joint Councils of Europeans and Natives that brought together white liberals and
educated Africans. But the ANC kept the Joint Councils at arm's length
and discouraged the involvement of its officers. Like the Commission on
Interracial Cooperation, the Joint Councils endorsed some forms of
segregationthey acceded to the general pattern of reserved territories
and separate political institutionsbut protested vigorously against economic color bars that advantaged white workers and discouraged black
industry and initiative. As historian Paul B. Rich has noted, South African white liberals were influenced in the 1920s by currents of American
thought that rejected assimilationist models of group relations in favor of
some form of racial or ethnic pluralism.23
The most prominent black leaders to participate in the racial cooperation
movements were Robert R. Moton, Booker T. Washington's successor at
Tuskegee, and Davidson Don Tengo Jabavu, son of John Tengo Jabavu and
a professor at Fort Hare Native College. Moton, who carried on in the
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150
Pan-African Association, which was founded as a result of the conference, lasted for only about a year, and hopes for an international black
movement went into abeyance until Du Bois revived them during the war
years.27
In his important book The Negro, published in 1915, Du Bois set forth
the conception of Pan-Africanism that would guide the deliberations of
the postwar congresses. Much of the work was a history of the black race
that stressed its past achievements and future potentialities. When he
came to denning Pan-Africanism, Du Bois was careful to avoid putting it
on a narrow, chauvinistic foundation. Increasingly influenced by democratic socialist ideas, he saw no conflict between "a unity of working
classes everywhere" and "a unity of the colored races"; both were steps
toward "a new unity of man." According to the historian William Toll, he
"fused race consciousness with, rather than opposing it to, class analysis"
and thus gave new meaning to the African-American struggle for equal
rights, making it part of a worldwide struggle against the oppression of
classes, races, and nationalities which stemmed from an unholy alliance of
white racial arrogance with capitalist imperialism. Consciousness of race
did not lead to black separatism and parochialism but to participation in a
great international movement against the color line. "There is slowly
arising not only a curiously strong brotherhood of Negro blood throughout the world," he wrote, "but the common cause of the darker races
against the intolerable assumptions and insults of Europeans has already
found expression. Most men in the world are colored. A belief in humanity means a belief in colored men."28
But Du Bois found a special role for blacks in the larger struggle of
"darker races" against Western imperialism. With a touch of the romantic
racialism that inspired Aggrey, he asked if the liberation struggle of colored peoples would require the kind of violence that was then raging in
Europe, or "will Reason and Good prevail? That such may be the case,
the character of the Negro race is the best and greatest hope; for in its
normal tradition it is, at once, the strongest and gentlest of the races of
men." Du Bois's Pan-Africanism of 1915 was not a call for colonial revolution but rather an appeal to the decency and rationality that he believed
was within the capacity of all human beings and might be rekindled in
Europeans and Euro-Americans by the black example of moderation and
nonviolence.29
Du Bois's memorandum for the Paris Pan-African Congress of 1919
reflected this nonviolent reformism; it internationalized D. D. T. Jabavu's
Cape liberalism more than it anticipated an ideology of anti-colonial revolution. In it, Du Bois stressed such objectives as "political rights for the
civilized" and "development of autonomous governments along the lines
of native customs with the object of inaugurating gradually an Africa for
the Africans." The resolutions that came out of the congress were in the
same cautious spirit. Africans "should have the right to participate in the
government as fast as their development permits," or in other words when
151
"they are civilized and able to meet the tests of surrounding culture."
Carrying on in the great tradition of nineteenth-century pan-Negroism,
Du Bois and the other representatives of the international black elite that
met in Paris continued to view Western civilization as embodying a universal standard of human progress and enlightenment to which people of
color were expected to conform. What was wrong with whites, essentially,
was that they had failed to live up to their own best values.30
The Pan-African congressesthey met again in 1921,1923, and 1927
did not actually call for the complete independence of African colonies
from European hegemony, in part because of the role played in their
deliberation by Francophone Africans like Blaise Diagne, who represented Senegal in the French national assembly and was a minister of the
French government. Du Bois was obliged to concede that whether a
particular colony became part of a sovereign African state in the future or
was assimilated into a Euro-African democratic nation depended on the
disposition of the colonial power. But in his discussion of Pan-Africanism
in Darkwater, a book of essays published in 1920, he set forth his personal
vision of a "new African world state" that would achieve the objective of
"Africa for the Africans guided by organized civilization." He recommended specifically that the former German colonies, and perhaps those
of Belgium and Portugal as well, be placed under the direct control of the
League of Nations and gradually brought up to a standard of civilization
that would entitle this new African state to full independence.31
Leading black Americans, he argued, should be put on the international commission set up to guide this emerging nation toward selfgovernment, but their participation should not be viewed as encouraging
New World blacks to emigrate to Africa: "The Negroes in the United
States and the other Americas have earned the right to fight out their
problems where they are, but they could easily furnish from time to time
technical experts, leaders of thought, and missionaries of culture for
their backward brethren in the new Africa." Here again Du Bois drew
on the tradition of nineteenth-century Pan-Negroism, which had seen a
special role for African-Americans as the vanguard of the race. Years
later, Du Bois provided his clearest statement of the African-American
stake in the independence of Africa. "I do not believe," he wrote in the
Pittsburgh Courier in 1936, "that it is possible to settle the Negro problem in America until the color problems of the world are well on the
way toward settlement. I do not believe that the descendants of Africans
are going to be received as American citizens so long as the people of
Africa are kept by white civilization in semi-slavery, serfdom, and economic exploitation."32
In practice, Du Bois's Pan-Africanist enterprise was quite congruent
with the "talented tenth" reformism of the NAACP. It was essentially a
matter of the international black elite joining forces with friendly and
progressive whites in the major Western nations to publicize black grievances and petition their governments to recognize the basic human rights
152
of Africans and people of African descent. Unike the rival Garvey movement, this version of Pan-Africanism did not seek mass support or eschew
cooperation with white humanitarians. At the meeting in Belgium in 1921
whites actually outnumbered blacks in the audience, and the guest list for
the London meeting in 1923 included several prominent whites. Just as
the capitalist liberalism of most of the white philanthropists and middleclass blacks who directed the NAACP prevented Du Bois from incorporating his socialist ideas into the association's program, so the need to accommodate moderate to conservative elements of the international black
elite, especially the Francophone African officialdom, kept his larger
vision of a struggle against capitalist imperialism from finding expression
in the congresses' resolutions.33
Nevertheless, Du Bois failed to gain the sustained backing from the
NAACP for his international efforts. In the flush of the immediate postwar interest in the "self-determination" of subject peoples around the
world, the association highlighted the question of Africa's future at its
1919 convention but in fact gave only limited and grudging support to the
Paris congress. In the 1920s, the association made clear its position that
the destiny of Africa was tangential or irrelevent to the basic aim of
securing equal citizenship for African-Americans. Lacking significant support from the "talented tenth" in the United States and making no strong
impression on the masses of black people anywhereif inclined to PanAfricanism at all they were likely to prefer Garvey's populist version
Du Bois's initiative had little historical impact except to help provide a
genealogy for the more vital and influential Pan-African movement associated with the decolonization of Africa that emerged after World War II.
(And this connection would not have been made so strongly if a more
openly radical Du Bois had not been around to draw attention to his
earlier efforts.)
In South Africa, the Pan-African congresses of the 1920s had little
impact, except briefly on the fading, old-guard leadership of the ANC.
Sol Plaatje, who was in contact with Du Bois, displayed a keen interest in
the 1919 and 1921 congresses but was unable to attend either. John L.
Dube did represent the ANC at the 1921 meeting, but he neither played a
conspicuous role in the proceedings nor maintained an interest in the
movement after he returned to South Africa. In general, Du Boisian PanAfricanism seemed to have had no greater attraction for the ANC than it
did for most of the leadership of the NAACP.34
Populist Pan-Africanism: The Garvey Movement
The third major strain of Pan-Africanismthe populist variety associated
with Marcus Garveystruck a more responsive chord in the ANC, as it
did in the hearts and minds of black people from an astonishing variety of
social and cultural backgrounds throughout the world. No one can be
certain how many members Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Asso-
153
ciation actually had at its high pointGarvey's own figures of four million in 1921 and six million in 1923 were undoubtedly inflatedbut there
can be no doubt that its numbers far exceeded those of any other black
organization in history, both within the United States and internationally.
(One historian's estimate of a milllion members in the United States and
an equal number elsewhere at the movement's height is not beyond the
realm of possibility.) Its appeal to race pride and call for the development
of Africa into a great independent nation or empire were clearly what
millions of blacks throughout the world had been waiting to hear.35
Garvey was born in Jamaica in 1887 and began his career as a printer
and trade unionist. His roots were in the skilled and educated upper strata
of the black working class of the island, and he resented the predominantly "colored" or mulatto group that constituted the middle class of
Jamaica's three-tiered race/class system even more than he did the tiny
white upper class that maintained British colonial hegemony. In 1912, he
traveled to Great Britain, where he encountered more prejudice against
blacks than he had expected and ended up associating with a small group
of Africans who were protesting against conditions in their home colonies. According to his autobiography, the great inspiration for his subsequent career as a "race leader" was the reading in London of Booker T.
Washington's Up from Slavery, which showed what a black man could do
and also what needed to be done: "I asked, 'Where is the black man's
Government?' 'Where is his King and his Kingdom?' 'Where is his President, his country and his ambassador, his army, his navy, his men of big
affairs?' I could not find them, and then I declared, 'I will help to make
them.' " On the boat returning to Jamaica in 1914, he fell into conversation with a West Indian who was returning from Basutoland (now Lesotho) in southern Africa with his Basuto wife, and learned of "the horrors
of native life in Africa." Only days after he arrived back in Jamaica, he
founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League in an effort to deal with the common problems of New
World and African blacks.36
The UNIA began with more modest and narrowly Washingtonian objectives than Garvey's later recollections might suggest. Its initial aim was to
establish "a Tuskegee in Jamaica." To gain advice on how to set up his
projected "Industrial Farm and Institute," Garvey wrote to Washington
and, after receiving an encouraging response, resolved to travel to the
United States to visit Tuskegee and confer with its principal. But by the
time he arrived in New York in 1916, Washington had died, and Garvey's
objectives had broadened. He decided to shift his base of operations from
Jamaica to the United States and turn the UNIA into a multi-faceted
organization for black uplift and solidarity. He seems to have thought
briefly about joining forces with the NAACP, but a visit to its offices gave
him the impression that it was staffed by a mulatto elite similar to the one
that had snubbed him in Jamaica. In 1917, Garvey and a handful of initial
recruits established the New York branch of the UNIA.37
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The meteoric rise of the UNIA from these beginnings to the great
convention of 1920, attended by thousands of members from branches all
over the United States and around the world, reveals that Garvey was a
truly remarkable propagandist and organizer. Word about the movement
was spread through its newspaper, the Negro World, and the single activity that attracted the most attention and support was the Black Star Steamship Line launched in 1919, which proposed to establish communications
between the black diaspora in the New World and Africa through a fleet
of vessels owned by the UNIA and tens of thousands of black shareholders. Other enterprisesincluding factories, retail stores, laundries, and
restaurantswere also initiated, presaging a separate black economy far
beyond the imaginations of Booker T. Washington and the Negro Business League. By 1920 the organization had developed all the trappings
and auxiliaries of an African empire-in-exile, with its own uniformed
paramilitary units, titles of nobility, and patriotic rituals.38
But Garvey's personal charisma, boundless energy, and organizing
skills would not have been enough to launch a mass movement if circumstances had been less favorable. World War I inspired movements for
independence among a great variety of oppressed or thwarted nationalities and ethnic groups. The imperial powers were physically weakened as
the result of the war they had fought among themselves, and the principle
of self-determination that became associated with the allied cause not
only brought the actual liberation of most of Ireland from British rule and
various Eastern European societies from Austro-Hungarian domination
but also stimulated ongoing efforts to create an independent India and a
Jewish homeland in Palestine. Although Garvey's enterprise was in some
ways more similar to Zionism than to the other nationalist movements
given stimulus by the war, his own favorite model for an African liberation movement was the anti-British struggle in Ireland.39
The time was also ripe for the African-American community, which
would provide the majority of UNIA's membership and most of its financial support, to embrace more radical forms of racial separatism and selfhelp. The war had a paradoxical effect on black Americans: it gave them a
new sense of their potential economic strength, but at the same time it
inspired pessimism about the prospects for political and civil equality in
the United States. The cut-off of European immigration and the warstimulated boom in manufacturing had opened new employment opportunities, leaving many blacks temporarily more prosperous than they had
been before the conflict. But the fact that blacks had some money to
invest does not explain why they invested it in Garvey's Africa-oriented
black separatist enterprises. What turned them in that direction was disillusionment with the fact that patriotic black participation in the war effort
had not brought progress toward full citizenship, a lowering of the barriers of segregation, or even protection from racial violence. One of Garvey's first major addresses as head of the UNIA in the United States was a
155
vigorous protest against the East St. Louis race riot of July 1917. The
subsequent riots of 1919 served to make blacks receptive to Garvey's
message that blacks had no future of equality or self-determination in a
strictly American context but should look to an independent Africa as the
instrument of their liberation. As early as February 1919, Garvey announced that "Negroes have got to win their freedom just as the Russians
and the Japanese have doneby revolution and bloody fighting. Negroes
in the United States cannot do this. They would be hopelessly outnumbered and it would be foolish to attempt it. But in Africa, where there are
over four hundred million Negroes, we can make the white man eat his
salt."40
These remarks reveal that Garvey's priority was African liberation, but
he did not at this time regard battling for equal rights in the American
context as futile provided that it was linked to the larger struggle. In a
speech of April 19,1919, devoted mainly to attacking Du Bois's gradualist
approach to African self-determination, Garvey made explicit the connection between African-American and African liberation. "Be ready for the
day when Africa shall declare for her independence," he advised a convention of 3000 UNIA delegates. "And why do I say Africa when you are
living in the West Indies and America? Because in those places you will
never be safe until you launch your protection internally and externally.
The Japanese in this country are not lynched because of fear of retaliation. Behind these men are standing armies and navies to protect them.'"11
But after 1921 Garvey came close to severing the link he had earlier
made between protesting injustice in America and overthrowing colonialism in Africa. By 1922 he was seeking an accommodation with the Ku Klux
Klan and other extreme white supremacist groups in an effort, to generate
support for government-subsidized emigration to Africa leading to a "total
separation" of the races. Black Americans who believed in the potential
efficacy of protesting against lynching, disfranchisement, and segregation
now concluded that Garvey was an enemy of their cause. Although it would
oversimplify and distort the post-1921 Garvey movement as a whole to
describe it simply as a "back to Africa" movement, Garvey expressed
himself at times in precisely those terms, at least when he was contemplating the long-term future of the black race. His "True Solution of the Negro
Problem" (1922) was unambiguous in its advocacy of emigration as the only
permanently viable alternative to racial oppression:
If the Negro were to live in this Western Hemisphere for another five hundred years he would still be outnumbered by other races who are prejudiced
against him. He cannot resort to the government for protection for government will be in the hands of the majority of the people who are prejudiced
against him, hence for the Negro to depend on the ballot and his industrial
progress alone, will be hopeless as it does not help him when he is lynched,
burned, jim-crowed and segregated. The future of the Negro, therefore,
outside of Africa, spells ruin and disaster.42
156
But Garvey did not hew to a rigid line on this issue, and in 1923 he
backtracked from his dismissal of the domestic struggle. "To fight for
African redemption," he wrote, "does not mean that we must give up our
domestic fights for political justice and industrial rights. . . . We can be as
loyal American citizens or British subjects as the Irishman or the Jew, and
yet fight for the redemption of Africa, a complete emancipation of the
race." Garvey rarely expressed himself in this bicultural vein; had he done
so consistently there would have been little difference between his PanAfricanism and that of Du Bois.43
To understand the role of ideology in the Garvey movement, it may be
helpful to invoke George Rude's distinction between "derived" and "intrinsic" ideologies. Enunciated by Garvey and official representatives of
the UNIA was a "structured" set of beliefs that has a specific intellectual
history. This ideology obviously had some grass-roots appeal or it would
not have aroused the support of black communities in the United States
and elsewhere. But it could be roughly adhered to without being embraced in all of its aspects and implications; popular or "intrinsic" beliefs
would intervene to create a mix that could differ in significant ways from
official movement doctrine. Garvey, in his most characteristic rhetorical
vein, seemed to have given up on America, but many of his followers
clearly had not. Local Garveyites in Cleveland or Los Angeles might in
fact view race pride and solidarity as a means of getting ahead in a liberal
capitalist America rather than as a disengagement from American realities and prospects. In South Africa, Garveyism would be filtered through
a different set of lenses and associated with other "intrinsic" beliefs.44
Considered as a "derived" or "structured" ideology, Garveyism was
based in part on the social Darwinist racial theories that were popular in the
Western world around the turn of the century, with the significant difference that the concept of inherent black incapacity that was normally central
to the white supremacist version was emphatically rejected in favor of the
view that all races, including blacks, were potential winners in the struggle
for existence. Garvey vividly described the evolutionary challenge facing
blacks in his Philosphy and Opinions: "We are either on the way to a higher
racial existence or racial extermination. This much is known and realized
by every thoughtful race and nation; hence we have the death struggle of
the different races of Europe and Asia in the scramble for the survival of
the fittest race." William H. Ferris, a leading Garveyite intellectual, made
the debt to social Darwinism even more explicit in a 1920 editorial in The
Negro World: "The Negro has recently learned what the Teutons learned in
the forests of Germany two thousand years ago, namely that the prizes of
life go to the man strong enough to take and hold them. And he, the Negro,
now realizes that the Darwinian and Spencerian doctrines of the struggle
for Existence and the Survival of the Fittest are the hard facts, which he
must face in his struggle upwards."45
Garvey and the official ideologists of his movement believed that the
races as defined by the physical anthropologists of the nineteenth and early
157
twentieth centuries were real entities that had always existed and always
would exist. (In contemporary parlance they had an "essentialist" view of
race.) Second, they held that racial prejudice and antagonism were natural
and inevitable when two races came into contact. In one of his earliest
writings after arriving in the United States, Garvey attributed the "progress" made by African-Americans since emancipation to "the honest prejudice of the South"; it gave them "a real startthe start with a race consciousness." Garvey saw no reason to condemn white supremacists for
their "honest prejudice"; they were simply acting out of their God-given
race consciousness, and blacksinstead of harboring illusions about a
human brotherhoodshould learn to do the same. In an Easter Sunday
sermon on "The Resurrection of the Negro" in 1923, he called on blacks to
replicate "the attitude of sovereignty" shown by "the great white race" and
"the great yellow race." On another occasion in 1923, he wrote that the
UNIA acknowledged that the white man could do what he wanted in his
own country: " . . . that is why we believe in not making any trouble when
he says that 'America is a whiteman's country,' because in the same breath
and with the same determination we are going to make Africa a black man's
country." The great races, he argued on several occasions, were engaged in
a struggle leading to "the survival of the fittest group." The only way to
avoid such a conflict was for each race to concentrate within its own natural
"habitat." "The time has really come," he announced in his Philosophy and
Opinions, "for the Asiatics to govern themselves in Asia, as the Europeans
are in Europe and the Western world, so also is it wise for the Africans to
govern themselves at home. . . ,"46
A third element of Garvey's racialism was a conception of race purity,
which led himin a way reminiscent of Edward Blydento oppose intermarriage and distrust mulattos, especially when they assumed positions of
race leadership. But he never actually attempted to exclude mulattos
from his movement. Accepting the white American definition of the
racesthe rule that "one drop of Negro blood makes a man a Negro"
he called for "100 per cent. Negroes and even 1 per cent. Negroes" to
"stand together as one mightly whole to strike a universal blow for liberty
and recognition in Africa." His call for race purity and race integrity did
not mean drawing a color line within communities of predominantly African descent; it was aimed rather at encouraging pride in African ancestry
and discouraging future intermixture with whites. A number of relatively
light-skinned African-Americans were prominent in the UNIA in the
United States, and in South Africa the movement attracted substantial
support among the Coloreds of Cape Town. His attack on Du Bois and
the leaders of the NAACP was not on their light skins per se, but rather
on what he took to be their color prejudice and amalgamationist goals
"They believe that in time, through miscegenation, the American race
will be of their type." He also charged that the NAACP represented a
privileged and snobbish "colored" elite like the one that he had found so
objectionable in the West Indies.47
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159
160
basic instinct was to seek a middle way that respected private property,
small business, and a free market but resisted concentrated wealth and
favored cooperative enterprises over large corporations owned by the
rich.51
The career of the Garvey movement in the United States was meteoric;
it gained strength until 1923 when Garvey was convicted of mail fraud and
began to decline after he was sent to prison in 1925. When he was pardoned in 1927 and promptly deported to Jamaica, he left behind no more
than a shadow of the mass movement of the early 1920s. There can be no
doubt that the personal charisma and magnetism of Garvey was an essential element in the movement's success and that his removal from the
scene left a vacuum that no one else could fill. His personal downfall
stemmed from the failure of his economic enterprises, especially the
Black Star Line and from the successful efforts of the African-American
elite, including leaders of the NAACP, to persuade an already hostile
United States government to act against hima campaign that was motivated more by revulsion to his dealings with the Ku Klux Klan than to the
alleged financial improprieties that provided the actual basis for prosecution and deportation. Historians have acquitted Garvey of criminality,
finding that it was corrupt associates and his own mismanagement or poor
judgment that made him vulnerable to persecution.52
The American UNI A, however, was more than Garvey writ large.
While it would be wrong to ignore his personal significancecharismatic
individuals do sometimes affect the course of history, and the AfricanAmerican community has shown a tendency over the years to personify its
aspirations in the form of a single, heroic race leaderit would be equally
mistaken to assume that Garvey created something out of nothing and
had perfect control over his own creation. What is known about local
chapters of the UNIA suggests a greater continuity with the Washingtonian gospel of economic self-help in a segregated environment than
Garvey's Africa-first rhetoric might suggest. The most active Garveyites,
it appears, were likely to be inhabitants of black urban ghettos in both the
North and the South who were neither part of the educated elite nor
members of the lower class of poorly paid, unskilled, and often unemployed laborers and servants. Workers with some skills and some property or savings and proprietors of marginal businesses with a ghetto clientele formed the nucleus of UNIA chapters. These "strivers" were not
people who had given up on the American dream of material success.
But, in the tradition of Booker T. Washington, their aspirations had narrowed to a purely economic sufficiency within a capitalist context. They
were attracted to Garvey's message of racial pride and solidarity because,
unlike either the liberal elite who backed the NAACP or the black radicals of the 1920s who hoped for an interracial socialism, they viewed the
American color line as a permanent fact of life and sought whatever
advantages might come to blacks through collective effort within the context of segregation. Their celebration of Africa was more a symbol to
161
inspire hopes for the success or viability of social and economic separatism in the United States than a commitment to become politically involved in the struggle for African independence. The possibility of actually emigrating to Africa seems to have entered the consciousness of
relatively few American Garveyites.53
As a genuinely popularand populistform of black nationalism;,
the Garvey movement played a critical role in the development of
African-American thought. It created a mass movement by synthesizing
two ideologies with deep roots in the black American experience
nineteenth-century pan-Negroism, including some elements of the Ethiopianist religious tradition, and the Washingtonian philosophy of economic self-help and group solidarity. It was no accident that Garvey's
patron saints were Washington and Edward Blyden. But Garvey limited
his appeal and compromised his legacy when he moved to an accommodation with white racists after 1921, which included not only an endorsement of segregation laws but also a reluctance to protest, as he had done
earlier, against lynching and racial pogroms. Such an orientation did not
reflect race pride and assertiveness, but quite the contrary. AfricanAmerican nationalists of later years would draw much inspiration from
Garvey, but they would rarely repeat his mistake of trying to do business
with the worst enemies of their race.54
Black Populism in South Africa: Garveyism and the ICU
162
doctrine of "Africa for the Africans" to its logical conclusion. Except for
some millennialist movements in the Transkei that incorporated rumors
about the coming of Garvey and black Americans into their expectations
of a sudden and miraculous elimination of their white rulers, Africans
who fell under the spell of the Provisional President of Africa did not
normally announce that they intended to expel or subordinate the white
minority. Often they invoked race pride and racial solidarity in the course
of demanding basic civil and political rights in a multi-racial society.
The UNIA never became a mass organization in South Africa. Although seven branches were formed by 1926more than in any other
African countryfive of them were located in the greater Cape Town
area (the others were in East London and Pretoria), and it is doubtful that
total membership ever exceeded a few hundred. The association's success
in Cape Town was due partly to the stimulus provided by a lively group of
West Indian and African-American expatriates, who in South Africa were
classified as "Coloreds" rather than as Africans. It seems likely that a
majority of Cape Town Garveyites were from the Colored community. If
so, access to a positive "Negro" identity would have relieved the discomfort of being caught in the middle between Europeans and "natives."56
The leading exponent of Garvey's message in South Africa was based in
the Western Cape and was well suited to bring the message of "Negro"
unification to a population with a high degree of phenotypical and cultural
diversity. James Thaele, the son of a Basuto chief and a Colored mother,
began his education at Lovedale and then spent ten years as a student in
the United States, earning two degrees at all-black Lincoln University in
Pennsylvania. An enthusiastic disciple of Garvey while still in America,
he returned to South Africa in 1923 and became active in several organizations in Cape Town. His principal achievement was the creation, for the
first time, of a strong ANC branch in the Western Cape. Thaele made this
breakthrough by overcoming the image of the congress as a strictly "native" organization and recruiting a substantial Colored membership. He
was also for a time one of the principal leaders of the ICU, was active in
the local UNIA, and in 1925 founded a newspaper, obviously modeled on
Garvey's Negro World, called The African World. This journal, which
functioned as the official organ of the Western Cape ANC, carried on its
masthead the slogan "Africa for the Africans and Europe for the Europeans." The Garvey movement had already attracted sympathetic attention
in the ANC before Thaele returned to South Africa, but his presence as
an important congress leader helped to maintain interest in the UNIA.57
As a source of rhetoric and symbolism, if not of specific plans and
projects, the Garvey movement for a time had a pronounced influence on
the South African National Congress. In 1920, the congress newspaper
Abantu Batho gave extensive and sympathetic coverage to the great
UNIA convention of that year. In 1921, the president of the Cape Province African Congress (and the future president-general of the national
ANC), the Reverend Z. R. Mahabane, gave an address reviewing the
163
Mahabane, however, was not proposing that Africans take back their
birthright by force. He was suggesting rather that they "launch a big constitutional fight" for "the divine right of peoples" to "self-determination."
He went on to conclude that a just and peaceful future for South Africa
would result from "the full and free cooperation of all white and black
races of the land." Soon to be a supporter of the Joint Councils movement, Mahabane showed how it was possible to combine Garveyite rhetoric with a relatively moderate, constitutionalist approach to the black
struggle in South Africa.59
The example of Garveyism may have helped inspire the congress to
change its name in 1923 from the South African Native National Congress
to the more Pan-African-sounding African National Congress. In 1927,
the congress added the UNI motto "One God One Aim One Destiny"
to its letterhead. But it is doubtful whether there was a "wholesale embrace of Garveyism" that signaled the "radicalization" of the ANC after
1925, as Robert A. Hill and Gregory A. Pirio have argued. The eclecticism that Mahabane demonstrated in 1921a combination of the Garveyite rhetoric of black self-determination with a moderate, even accommodationist, attitude toward the white presence in South Africawas
characteristic of several ANC leaders who appeared to be embracing
Garveyism. When Sol Plaatje visited the United States in 1921-22, he
participated eagerly in UNIA activities, speaking to several branches, but
he also addressed the NAACP convention and was dazzled by a visit to
Tuskegee. Plaatje returned from the United States with a heightened
conception of the value of black pride and self-help, but this did not alter
his stance as a moderate within the ANC, a spokesman for collaboration
with large white-owned corporations against the more militant and confrontational posture of ANC president-general S. M. Makgatho. One of
Garvey's most devoted disciples among the ANC leaderhip was T. D.
164
Mweli Skota, secretary general from 1923 into the 1930s. Instrumental in
the change of name in 1923 from "native" to "African," Skota combined
his devotion to Garvey with a dedication to enhancing the status of the
black elite. His African Yearly Register, published in 1930, was a Who's
Who of eminent Africans who had succeeded in distinguishing themselves
from the masses either by the "progressive" attainments valued by Western civilization or by traditionalist criteria. Maneuvering adroitly between
moderate and radical factions of the ANC, Skota was able to synthesize
his Garveyism with either liberalism or Marxism depending on the current disposition of the top leadership of the ANC.60
Even James Thaele, probably the most thoroughgoing Garveyite within
the ANC, did not interpret "Africa for the Africans" to mean that blacks
should literally take back South Africa from the white settlers. He went
beyond Mahabane's "big constitutional fight" by advocating (but not actually practicing) Gandhian nonviolent resistance. He also called upon Africans to withdraw from white mission churches and for the black separatist
denominations to unite in one great African church. But he did not follow
the Garveyite logic of "Africa for the Africans" to the point of calling for
a black takeover of South Africa. According to historian Peter Walshe,
"Garvey was . . . a symbol of Negro success in a world dominated by
whites, but Thaele's admiration of his hero certainly stopped short of any
rigorous defense of his African projects." A temporary radicalization of
the ANC did take place after 1927 when the ANC elected J. T. Gumede
president-general to succeed the more conservative Z. R. Mahabane and
at the same time called on the South African government to use its good
offices with the American government to obtain Garvey's release from
prison. Like his predecessor, Gumede employed Garveyite rhetoric on
occasion, but the radicalism that led to his ouster from the top post of the
ANC in 1930 was his embrace of Marxism and the Soviet Union, not his
Africanism. Many in the ANC were skeptical about Garveyism or indifferent to it, and there was no apparent correlation between attraction to the
world-view of the UNIA and militancy, or lack of it, in the battle against
white supremacy in South Africa. As in the case of grass-roots Garveyism
in the United States, the emphasis on race pride and solidarity was more
often invoked for the purpose of improving the position of blacks within a
segregated society than for the revolutionary goal of overthrowing European domination.61
The impact of Garveyism in South Africa went well beyond the interest
expressed by some members of the ANC leadership. Rumors and distorted notions about Garvey and his projects fueled millennialist movements in rural areas. The expectation of these movements was that black
Americans would come in force to liberate their South African cousins
from white rule. Such hopes also contributed to the grass-roots support
for the great mass movement of the 1920s, the Industrial and Commercial
Union of Africa (ICU)an organization that, unlike the ANC but like
the UNIA in the United States, deserves to be characterized as an expres-
165
sion of black populism. In the late 1920s, the ICU organized in rural areas
and interacted with the local African movements that prophesied the
corning of the Ameliki (Americans).
Conditions in the countryside and in the "native reserves" made rural
Africans receptive to prophecies of miraculous redemption. In basic economic terms, the problem was that there were too many people on too
little land. White expropriation of most of the best farmland, which was
made official policy in the Natives' Land Act of 1913, had left Africans
without the means to produce an agricultural surplus or even to maintain
self-sufficiency. Because of overuse and erosion, once-fertile land deteriorated in quality, making it increasingly difficult to scratch out a living in
the areas assigned to Africans. To maintain their families, increasing numbers of men had to leave their kraals to work for extended periods in the
mines or as unskilled laborers in the rapidly growing urban areas. The
class of relatively prosperous market farmers that had emerged in the late
nineteenth century and provided the economic base for the "progressive"
African elite was in serious decline by the 1920s. This reversal of fortunes,
and the blatantly white supremacist government policies that hastened it,
deprived the liberal incorporationist ideology of "equal rights for every
civilized man regardless of race or color" of any material basis in the rural
life of the early twentieth century. At the same time, exposure to Christian beliefs and to the cosmopolitanism of the mines and cities had weakened the hold of tribal customs and values as well as respect for chiefs and
other traditional authorities. The fact that traditional leaders and forms of
governance were often coopted or manipulated by white officials further
reduced their prestige and credibility among Africans who were looking
for relief from worsening economic and social conditions and a way of
viewing the world that offered some hope for the future.62
When both progressive and traditionalist ideologies failed to provide
solutions to the desperate economic and cultural plight of rural Africans
during the 1920s, many turned to the separatist Christian churches. In
1921 only about 50,000 blacks out of a total of 1.3 million rural black
Christians belonged to Ethiopian churches rather than white-dominated
mission churches. By 1936, there were over a million. "The appeal of
these independent churches," according to the historian Helen Bradford,
"lay in their proto-nationalism, and in their pledges to lead blacks literally
and figuratively to the promised land." Some of these churches were of
American origin, especially the African Methodist Episcopal Church and
the black Baptists. The South African AME hierarchy in the 1920s was
notably conservative and accommodationist; in its quest for respectability
and official toleration, it opposed Garveyism or anything like it. But on
the local level, AME members and even some clergymen participated in
millennialist agitation.63
A number of smaller African-American sects also had followers in
South Africa. Among these was the African Orthodox Church, which was
directly allied with the Garvey movement. Under the leadership of Arch-
166
167
ing Garvey. He was actually a Zulu born in Natal and baptized Elias
Wellington Butelezi. Butelezi began his career as a confidence man by
practicing Western medicine without a license in Natal and Basutoland
(now Lesotho); but in 1925 he met Ernest Wallace, a West Indian representative of the UNIA in Basutoland and became a convert to Garveyism.
Moving to the Transkei in 1926, he passed himself off as a black American
born in Chicago who had arrived in Africa on one of Garvey's ships to
proselytize for the UNIA. What he actually preached in the Transkei was
not simply the orthodox Garveyite message of black pride, solidarity, and
commitment to the ultimate liberation of Africa from European colonial
rule; he also latched on to the local fantasies about the impending arrival
of black American liberators and gave them added credence. He traveled
throughout the Transkei and some of the districts of the Eastern Cape
Province, winning converts to his doctrine of miraculous redemption.
Updating the postwar rumors of an American claim to South Africa,
Wellington contended that King George had awarded South Africa to the
United States for aiding Britain in the war and that Prime Minister Jan
Christiaan Smuts had been ready to comply, but that the new prime
minister J. B. M. Hertzog (elected in 1924) had reneged and was about to
go to war with a mythical black-dominated America in order to preserve
white rule in South Africa. Wellington regaled his followers with prophecies of a millennium achieved through the exercise of black American
power in the form of ships, troops, and bombing planes. It was the aircraft
that caught the fancy of his audiences, and they were inspired to act by
Butelezi's warning that destruction would rain from the air, not only on
Europeans, but also on Africans who did not belong to the Wellington
movement. Besides joining the movement and paying for its identification
cards, adherents were advised to paint their houses black, kill their white
pigs, and destroy possessions that were white or derived from pigs. Many
did so, and when the Americans failed to arrive as predicted in 1927,
Wellington held on to much of his following by claiming that liberation
had to be postponed because not all the pigs had been killed. But in that
same year, the authorities became alarmed, arrested Wellington, and
banished him from the Transkeian territories.66
The historical significance of the Wellington movement is difficult to
determine. Wellington himself was probably an imaginative charlatan
who knew how to profit from popular hopes and fears. The large sums of
money he collected for memberships in the UNIA apparently went into
his pockets rather than into the coffers of the organization. Also, his
activities and message had a tenuous or ambiguous relationship to the
history of African resistance to European domination. He did not ask his
followers to challenge or confront white power; just as Mgijima had
called on the Israelites to wait quietly for the coming of God and the end
of the world, Wellington called on his followers to await the coming of the
Americans. According to Robert Edgar, the historian of the Wellington
phenomenon: "A fundamental passivity characterized his movement. Al-
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169
170
eluded that an all-black movement was a practical necessity and, what was
more, might gain strength from the "race consciousness" behind it. His
ultimate hope, however, was that black labor would develop sufficient
strength and solidarity to force white labor to accept its claims. As a
short-term separatist and long-term integrationist, Kadalie differed profoundly from Garvey in basic philosophy, but at times he was willing to
appeal to Garveyite "race consciousness" in order to gain support for his
union. When he concluded that the Garveyites were becoming too influential in his movement and were threatening to take it over, he turned
against them.71
In May 1925, the ICU was a relatively small organization concentrated
mainly in the Cape, but it was on the verge of a great expansion that
would turn it into a genuine mass movement. Kadalie proclaimed his
intentions in The Workers' Herald:
We are aiming at the building up in Africa of a National Labour Organization of the aboriginals, through which we shall break the wills of white
autocracy. We must prevent the exploitation of our people in the mines and
on the farms and obtain increased wages for them. We shall not rest there.
We will open the gates of the Houses of legislature, now under the control of
the white oligarchy, and from this step we shall claim equality with the white
workers of the world to overthrow the capitalist system of government and
usher in a co-operative Commonwealth, a system of Government which is
not foreign to the aboriginals of Africa.72
111
agitation, as the union moved into rural areas or native reserves and galvanized a variety of local struggles.73
Between 1926 and 1929, the ICU penetrated the rural areas of Natal,
the Orange Free State, and the Transvaal, established over a hundred
new branches, and swelled in total membership from less than 30,000 to
somewhere between 150,000 and 250,000, making it the first genuine
mass movement among Africans. The secret of its success was that it was
able to provide support and leadership for protest meetings, strikes, and
boycotts in response to a range of grievances that had been building up in
African communities. It mobilized labor tenants against landlords, workers against employers, squatters against efforts to drive them from
European-owned land, and even women who brewed beer at home
against municipal beer halls. It also mounted legal challenges to discriminatory public policies, and attempted to establish producer and consumer
cooperatives. In these local struggles, it was relatively unencumbered by
ideology, even the doctrines that Kadalie himself was proclaiming at the
time. It was even prepared to cooperate with millennialist movements of
the Wellington type. Wherever Africans were protesting injustice or exploitation the ICU seemed to be involved. Because of its populist character and ideological flexibility, it became the receptacle of ideas and
feelings that emerged spontaneously in particular African communities,
even very traditional ones, rather than following the example of the ANC
or the Communist party by attempting to modernize the consciousness of
the people it was trying to help. The kind of folk Africanism of the
Ethiopian churches and the millennial movement readily found expression in the activities of ICU branches.74
On the national level, however, Kadalie was drifting into an alliance
with white liberals and moderate socialists that would prove disastrous.
Once he broke with the Communists, Kadalie was courted by a coterie of
liberal "friends of the natives" who, with the best of intentions, contributed to the demise of the ICU as a national organization. Under the
influence of his new white patrons, Kadalie sought help from the British
Labor party, and in 1928 an organizer named William Ballinger was sent
from England to help Kadalie turn the ICU into a proper trade union on
the British model. Ballinger found much that was wrong, and he pressed
hard for reforms of finance and structure in what in fact was a loose and
inefficent organization bedeviled by the corruption of some of its officers
and in the process of disintegrating at the center at the very time that it
was attracting the most support on the local level. Ballinger failed to
understand, however, that the ICU gained more mass support when it was
serving as a vehicle or facilitator of popular protest than when it was
trying to school African workers in trade unionism. He also moved too
readily from an advisor's role to that of de facto boss of the ICU. Kadalie,
who contributed to his own undoing by imagining for a time that he could
replicate the British Labor party among disfranchised African workers,
soon found that he had little power in his own organization, and in 1929
172
173
174
A study of ICU organizers in South Africa found them to be predominantly people with some education and middle-class pretensions who
were threatened with downward mobility by the growth of segregation
and economic discrimination. Many were younger men from middle-class
Christian families who were on the verge of falling into the laboring
masses despite enough education in mission schools to give them higher
ambitions. Although such fears of status decline do not figure so prominently in the seemingly more hopeful expectations of American Garveyites, a toehold in the middle class requiring a struggle to move upward
or avoid slipping downward would provide an adequate description of the
social position of those most inclined to be activists in both movements.
Being on the boundary between the middle and lower classes gave these
leaders empathy with those below them whose ranks they had recently
escaped from or might soon join and also some of the self-discipline and
competence of the established middle class. They were clearly in a better
position than the elite to give direction to popular struggles.78
Both movements capitalized on the betrayal of liberal-reformist hopes
in the post-World War I era. In the United States, the integrationist neoabolitionism of the NAACP survived and was not entirely without influence in the 1920s, but the reality for most African-Americans in urban
ghettos was the struggle for economic survival in a separate and unequal
world. The 1919 race riots and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan throughout
the nation encouraged the Garveyite view that simply agitating for equal
rights in the American context was futile and that a race-conscious PanAfrican movement was the only route to power and self-esteem. In South
Africa, the failure of a 1919 mission to Britain dashed the longstanding
hope of the black elite in the National Congress for the intervention of
British liberals and humanitarians to insure "equal rights for every civilized man" within the empire, and the efforts of the government after
1924 to establish new color bars and a more comprehensive segregation
program further weakened expectations of a gradual lowering of racial
barriers. Even the Anglophone white liberals of South Africa, on whom
the congress had relied to influence white opinion on behalf of racial
justice, tended to embrace an idealized version of government-imposed
segregation in the 1920s, leaving many Africans with the sense that the
only salvation was through separatist or independent action. If help was
coming from outside, it seemed more likely to come from AfricanAmericans or from a Pan-African movement than from white Christendom. The only question was whether solidarity should be based exclusively or primarily on race and the expectation of African nationhood or
on the class foundation that was theoretically possible in a country where
the subordinated racial group was also the overwhelming majority of the
working class, broadly defined.79
The reasons why the American UNIA and the ICU failed to sustain
themselves as mass movements into the 1930s were also analogous. Government repression played a role in both casesin the United States,
175
176
111
178
5
"Self-Determination for Negroes":
Communists and Black Freedom
Struggles, 1928-1948
180
ments seeking change; if it was moving to the right and seeking to ally
itself with the broader progressive tendencies through "popular front"
activities, it aroused suspicions of ulterior motives and conspiratorial
aims. Radical black intellectuals who were attracted by Communist opposition to capitalism and racism often found it difficult or impossible to
surrender their minds and talents to a party bureaucracy that had little
respect for the free play of the intellect and the imagination. If they
cooperated with Communists at all, their affiliation as members or "fellow travelers" was likely to be troubled and brief (although there were
some conspicuous exceptions, especially in cases where the Communists
deliberately and pragmatically refrained from imposing their usual discipline over particularly prominent members or fellow-travelers from the
intellectual and artistic world).1
The contention that Communists tried to "use" other people for their
own ends may be a valid judgment on the motives of some of them, but it
cannot be used to predict the actual consequences of their alliances and
collaborations. At times when the party lacked a distinctive public agenda
of its ownas during the "popular front" era of the late 1930s and again
between the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and the end of
the war in 1945it is an open question as to whether it was furthering its
own ultimate goal of proletarian revolution or providing a boost to the
liberal or social democratic reformism that it disdained at other times. It is
difficult, for example, to know who was using whom when the American
Communists put their skills as labor organizers at the service of John L.
Lewis and the new industrial unionism of the CIO (Congress of Industrial
Organizations) in the mid-1930s. The result was a strengthened and more
progressive labor movement but not one that the Communists could
readily dominate. Lewis, a committed non-Communist, thought that he
was using the Communists, rather than vice versa, and he may have been
right.2
In their efforts during the 1920s and '30s to appeal to blacks and to
progressive whites troubled by the flagrant racial injustices of American
and South African society, Communists enjoyed a special advantage. No
one else in those decades was fighting so intently and assertively for the
abolition of segregation and the complete equality of the races. In the
United States, the NAACP shared the same goals, but its gradualist,
nonconfrontational approach of working within the existing legal and
political system made it seem comparatively conservative and accommodationist. Its concentration on civil rights issues and reluctance to confront
the economic sources of black disadvantage provided an opening for the
Communists to contend that blacks were being oppressed, not merely as
members of a racial or national minority, but also as workers and peasants
exposed to an acute form of capitalist exploitation. What was more, the
Communist party seemed to provide a unique model for what later generations would call "racial integration" or "nonracialism" and even for the
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the 1930s, the Communists found themselves by the late 1940s on the
periphery. In South Africa something nearly opposite was the case. From
the doldrums of the mid-1930s when the party almost withered away, it
moved into a strong and enduring alliance with what was becoming the
main liberation movement, the African National Congress. By the '50s
South African Communists were an influential and seemingly indispensable part of the struggle against apartheid, while in the United States they
watched from the sidelines in diminishing numbers while anti-Communist
liberal reformers, black and white, took control of the campaign against
Jim Crow. Differences in the extent and effect of government repression
will not explain this divergence. South Africa under the Afrikaner nationalists was even more repressive of civil liberties than America during the
heyday of McCarthyism. In 1950, at a time when a few Communist leaders were being tried in the United States under the Smith Act, the South
African party was banned and driven underground. A closer examination
of the asymmetrical ups and downs of the two Communist parties and of
their changing relationships with other movements and tendencies may
yield a deeper explanation of how the differing political and social contexts in the two countries affected the long-term prospects for Communist
involvement in the struggle against white supremacy.
Apprehending the precedents and intellectual resources that Communists brought to their encounters with American and South African racism
requires a look at how international socialist movements, and those that
emerged in United States and South Africa, dealt with the problems of
white supremacy and racial inequality before the period of intense Communist concern that began in the mid- to late 1920s. The classic Marxism
of the nineteenth century derived from an effort to make sense of the class
conflicts that had developed in Europe between the industrial working
class and those who owned the means of production. Socialism was born
in societies that were, or appeared to be, racially and culturally homogeneous, and its early adherents had difficulty coming to terms with ethnically divided societies. Racial or ethnic consciousness on the part of oppressed peoples was not taken seriously as an historical force in its own
right; it had to be either a vanishing remnant from the precapitalist past or
a form of "false consciousness"an ideological construction designed to
obscure the underlying reality of class domination. It was bound to disappear with the maturation of capitalism and the full proletarianization of
working people.
Marx, Engels, and their nineteenth-century followers could not ignore
the ethnic nationalisms emerging on the periphery of Western Europe,
and Marx himself came to favor the independence of Ireland from
Englandbut not, as Lenin later noted, "from considerations of 'justice
to Ireland,' but from the standpoint of the interests of the revolutionary
struggle of the proletariat of the oppressing i.e., the English nation against
capitalism." Marx's calculation was that English workers could not feel
solidarity with their comrades in Ireland and thereby develop true class
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consciousness so long as their nation oppressed the Irish. Such a logic did
not lead, as it might have done, to a call for the liberation of Asian and
African colonies from European domination. Although Marx was highly
critical of British rule in India, he concluded that it was historically necessary. The progress of humanity required "a fundamental revolution in the
social state of Asia"a transformation from "Asiatic despotism" to capitalism, and this was precisely what colonial domination was providing.
"Whatever may have been the crimes of England [in India]," he wrote in
1853, "she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that
revolution."6
A late twentieth-century reader is likely to be struck by Marx's profound
Eurocentrism, at how deeply his theories were imbued with nineteenthcentury notions of inevitable progress from 1 ower to higher forms of civilization. Europe was the model for the rest of the world, in socialism as in all
else, and its historical mission was to bring uncivilized or backward people
up to its standards. Once they had been modernized, colonial subjects
would lose their ethnic consciousness and fight for liberation, not as members of oppressed nationalities, but rather as part of the international proletariat. Marxists, for the most part, repudiated biological racism, characterizing it as a bourgeois ideological device to divide the working class along
ethnic lines. To the extent that movements against Western imperialism or
white domination relied on a sense of cultural distinctiveness or ethnic
particularism rather than on universalist and internationalist assumptions,
Marxists would find them theoretically unsound and could support them
only opportunistically in the hope of eventually correcting their consciousness. Given its nineteenth-century Eurocentric assumptions, classic Marxism seemed singularly ill-equipped to deal with what W. E. B. Du Bois in
1903 called "the problem of the twentieth century""the problem of the
color line."7
Early-twentieth-century socialists in both the United States and South
Africa faithfully reflected European Marxist thinking and made little effort
to adjust their class analysis to take account of the racial diversity and
inequality in their own societies. As Eugene Debs, the leader of the American Socialist party, wrote in 1901: "We have nothing special to offer the
Negro, and we cannot make special appeals to all the races. The Socialist
Party is the Party of the whole working class regardless of color." The race
problem, he contended, was created by the capitalists; workers and socialists had no responsibility for solving it other than appealing to blacks as
fellow workers to join them in the class struggle. When that struggle was
won, "the race problem [would] disappear." In theory, then, socialists
advocated racial fraternity and should have welcomed blacks into their
ranks. In practice, they often condoned discrimination and failed to make
an issue of the racially exclusionary policies of the American labor movement. Occasionally, there were calls for at least recognizing that blacks
suffered from special disabilities or disadvantages that would have to be
addressed before they could be expected to join the broader working-class
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had come to maturity. Marx had assumed that the most "advanced" nations would take the lead, for how could you have a proletarian revolution without a fully developed proletariat? In Russia, the Bolsheviks
apparently came to power because of the support they received from
peasants and minority nationalities. The proletariat alone could never
have provided the necessary base. One of Lenin's great contributions to
Marxist thought came from his effort to explain this surprising development and use his explanation as the basis for a new and improved model
for world revolution. It was Leninist doctrine, rather than anything that
can be derived directly from Marx, that provided American and South
African Communists with good reasons to be vitally interested in questions of race and nationality and some ideological guidelines for solving
them.
Lenin argued that capitalism had entered a new stage, not clearly foreseen by Marx, in which the class struggle had moved beyond the internal
politics of the industrialized nations on which Marx had focused to the
international arena created by Western imperialism. Imperialism, as the
"highest stage of capitalism," meant that the viability of the capitalist
system now depended as much on the exploitation of colonies and dependencies as on the exploitation of domestic workers. In fact some of the
fruits of imperialism were now being used to improve the conditions of
the domestic proletariat in a effort to cool its revolutionary ardor. Noting
the beginnings of national liberation movements in Asia, Lenin hypothesized that good revolutionary opportunities might exist at points where
imperial domination was most fragilethe "weakest links" in the world
capitalist system.
As the Russian Revolution demonstrated, you did not need to have an
advanced proletariat in order to have a Communist revolution. All you
needed were the kind of opportunities for seizing power that World War I
had provided for Russia and a Communist party to take advantage of
them. In Leninist thought the party rather than the proletariat in whose
name it acted was the real agent of revolution. If it lacked a proletarian
mass to galvanize into revolutionary action, the party should work with
other materials such as the one the Bolsheviks had found at hand in
Russiapeasants with a hunger for land, minority nationalities thirsting
for independence, or at least the right to self-determination, and radical
intellectuals with a mission to set the world right or bring freedom to their
people.
National liberation movements in European colonies should be supported by Communists throughout the world even if their leadership and
ideology was not purely Communist; for victories against Western imperialism could weaken the world capitalist system and bring it closer to
collapse. As the Bolsheviks had done in Russia, Communists must affirm
that every national group has the right to secede from a nation or empire
into which it has been incorporated against its will. As participants in
fronts or blocs working for national liberation, Communists should exer-
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rise as much control as possible and dominate them if they could. But
tactical compromises would be necessary; peasants could not be turned
into class-conscious proletarians overnight, and independence-minded
"national bourgeoisies" could be allies in the short term, even if ultimately they had to be overthrown to make way for socialism.11
The most problematic element in the Leninist strategy for abetting
andif possiblecoopting nationalist revolutions was the question of
how much cooperation there could be with movements that aimed at
independence on the basis of ideologies that were antithetical to Communist doctrine. How could Communists retain their autonomy and remain
loyal to the international workers' movement if they gave full support to
"bourgeois national movements"? At the Second Comintern Congress of
1920, Lenin advanced the argument that Communists in the non-Western
world should generally support movements for national independence
even if they were led by bourgeois elements. He was challenged by the
Indian Communist M. N. Roy, who contended that the native bourgeoisie
was unreliable and would in the end compromise with imperialism. Lenin
subsequently clarified his position by acknowledging the need to distinguish between colonial bourgeois movements with a revolutionary antiimperialist potential and those that lacked it. But it was left to Stalin to lay
down specific guidelines.12
In his 1925 address to the university that the Soviet Union had established for the training of Asian and African revolutionaries, Lenin's successor noted that "the national bourgeoisie" in colonial areas had a tendency
to split between a wealthy strata willing to compromise with imperialism
and a petite bourgeoisie prone to support a nationalist revolution. The role
of the Communists would depend on how far this process had gone. If it had
not yet begun, as in Morocco, Communists should "do everything to create
a united national front against imperialism" and should not even organize
themselves into a separate party. Where it was occurring, but where "the
compromising section of the bourgeoisie cannot yet become welded with
imperialism," as in Egypt or China, Communists must move from "the
policy of a united national front to the revolutionary party of workers and
peasants." Here the Communists would have their own party but would
form a "bloc" with "the party of the revolutionary bourgeoisie." As part of
such a bloc, they must retain their freedom to agitate and propagandize on
their own terms and be in a position to work for "actual leadership of the
revolutionary movement." In a third case, such as India, where "the compromising section of the bourgeoisie" had "come to an agreement with
imperialism," the task was to create "a revolutionary anti-imperialist bloc"
under "the hegemony of the proletariat" that would expose the "treachery"
of the native bourgeoisie.13
To give movements for national self-determination a place in the dialectic of world revolution, Communists needed to develop a working
conception of what constituted a nation. Stalin, the architect of a Soviet
nationalities policy that proclaimed the group rights of territorial ethnic
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Beyond the theoretical obstacles to making the United States and South
Africa conform to Leninist or Stalinist models of national oppression,
there was also the practical problem arising from the fact that the founding members of the American and South African Communist parties were
radicals of European extraction whose initial expectation had been that
they would revolutionize the white workers first and then go on to bring
the gospel of Marx and Lenin to people of color. In China, India, and
Egypt, the first Communists had also been members of the oppressed
group, a circumstance that obviously made it easier for them to get involved in movements for national liberation. The initiating role of whites
in the United States and South Africa meant that the party would have to
overcome black suspicions of would-be liberators who were also members
of the dominant race. The question of how a white-dominated party could
take the lead in the movement to liberate blacks from racial domination
was difficult to resolve. In South Africa the obvious answer was to "Africanize" the party, but this took time. In the United States, the Communist
party could not become a predominantly black organization without giving up its claim to speak for the American working class as a whole. How
to accommodate black needs and interests within a mostly white party was
a major challenge for American Communists.
At the beginning of the 1920s, Communists in both the United States
and South Africa concentrated mainly on organizing white workers. The
predominant view was that most blacks were not yet proletarians and
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191
cated Communists. The ANLC did not prosper, however, and black membership in the party remained minuscule through the late 1920s. In 1929,
the party had no more than 150 to 200 black members.18
The South African party also began to make special efforts to recruit
blacks in the mid-1920s. After supporting the Rand rebellion, despite its
racist overtones, and even endorsing the nationalist-labor coalition in the
election of 1924, the party awoke to discover that a government backed
by white labor was intensifying discrimination against Africans. On their
own initiative, the leading white Communists (who were as yet receiving
little guidance from Moscow) decided to concentrate on recruiting blacks
and acquiring influence in black protest politics and labor organizations.
When the Hertzog government proposed and enacted laws protecting
white labor from African competition, Communists had to acknowledge
that white workers were becoming a privileged caste and were virtually
beyond the reach of left-wing agitation.
Africans, who were more blatantly exploited, seemed a better target.
By the late '20s, the great majority of party members were Africans,
although whites still held the top leadership positions. At the party's
Annual Conference of 1929, twenty black and ten white delegates claimed
to represent a mostly black membership of about 3000. Black Communists, encouraged by the party to take leading roles in other organizations,
were influential in the ICU until Kadalie expelled them in 1926. They
then concentrated on the African National Congress, and in 1927 Eddie
Khaile, the first black member of central committee of the CPSA, was
elected general secretary of the ANC. To recruit Africans, white Communists made use of their own version of the mission schoolnight classes
taught, by white Communists that offered literacy in English along with
indoctrination in Marxism. With many times the black membership of the
American party, the South African party of 1929 might be said to have
recruited a respectable nucleus on which to build.19
These Africans, it is worth noting, were not attracted to a revised
version of the Communist message tailored to their special concerns as an
oppressed nation. The early converts, like early African converts to Christianity, were asked to embrace a whole new way of looking at the world
that involved a universalist conception of salvation rather than the particularities of race and ethnicity. Once again, a portion of the African population demonstrated its willingness to break decisively with the past and
adopt Western conceptions of progress and liberation.
In 1928, the Communist International, responding mainly to the American failure to attract blacks, made a bold move to combine the class
struggle with the kind of nationalistic aspirations to which Garvey had
appealed. The new emphasis on "Negro self-determination" as a necessary component of the struggle against capitalist imperialism was an unwelcome surprise to most black Communists in the United States and
South Africa. Having made the difficult adjustment to a "class" perspec-
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tion to the white colonials." In the United States most blacks were tenant
farmers in the South, living under "semi-feudal and semi-slave conditions," but increasing numbers were migrating to the North and becoming
unskilled workers. Communists must work to raise the class consciousness
of this new proletariat and simultaneously "fight for the acceptance of
Negro workers into all organizations of white workers, and especially in
the trade unions." They must also seek to organize "the masses of peasants and agricultural workers in the South." In order to accomplish these
tasks, Communists must agitate for full legal and political equality for
blacks and root out "white chauvinism" in their own ranks. The call for
work among rural southern blacks was new; the American party had
previously assumed that its work began only after blacks had left the
countryside and joined the urban-industrial proletariat. But agitation
among peasants and farm workers required a new slogan, beyond the
usual "Black and White, Unite and Fight": "In those regions of the South
in which compact Negro masses are living, it is essential to put forward
the slogan of 'the Right of Self-Determination for Negroes.' " What this
meant exactly was not clearly specified, and further discussions and resolutions would be necessary before it was definitely decided that blacks had
the right to establish an independent black-belt republic if they chose to
do so.27
The similar resolutions concerning South Africa were a bit clearer on
the meaning of self-determination. Communists should continue their
promising work among the black proletariat and fight for their admission
to white unions. Rural oppression should be addressed (as in the American black belt) by calling for "the confiscation of the land of the landlords." In addition, "The Party must determinedly and consistently put
forward the slogan for the creation of an independent Native republic
with simultaneous guarantees for the rights of the white minority, and
struggle in deeds for its realization."28
The congress and the executive committee of the Communist International approved the black self-determination policy over the strenuous
objections of most of the delegates from the United States and South
Africa. The Americans, including all of the black delegates except Haywood, argued that blacks were not an "oppressed nation" with a right to
self-determination but rather a "racial minority" that could be incorporated into the struggle only when it became proletarianized. What the
party could offer blacks in particular was support in their struggle for civil
rights, for success in that campaign would lower barriers to their joint
action with white workers. The South African delegation, which was
severely criticized for racial chauvinism because of its all-white composition, took a similar stand, arguing in addition that the African nationalism
the new slogan sought to accommodate scarcely existed in South Africa.
Since black organizations such as the ANC were seeking incorporation
into the colonial state rather than independence, party leader S. P. Bunting argued, a strategy aimed at cooperation with a revolutionary national-
197
ist bourgeoisie was misguided, for no such entity existed in South Africa.
Although Haywood and La Guma provided a modicum of local backing
for the new policy, the conclusion of many historians that the selfdetermination policy was imposed by Moscow on reluctant local party
organizations appears unchallengeable.29
Between 1928 and 1930, Communists in the United States and South
Africa debated the precise meaning and application of the new slogans.
Although the problem that Bunting identifiedthe lack of a national
revolutionary movement for Communists to supportremained unresolved, the South African party at least knew that the black republic was
not a mere propaganda device, for they had been ordered to "struggle in
deeds for its realization." White Communist leaders such as Bunting and
Edward Roux swallowed their misgivings and struggled dutifully to implement the new policy. In the United States, however, the requirement in
the resolutions of 1928 to "put forth the slogan of the Right of SelfDetermination" was not followed by orders to struggle for its implementation, but rather by a renewed emphasis on explaining "to black workers
and peasants that only their close union with the white proletariat and
joint struggle with them against the American bourgeoisie can lead to
their liberation from barbarous exploitation"a statement that seemed
to deprive the slogan of nationalist implications. It was possible to view
self-determination as a mere propaganda slogan designed for local agitation in the South and not a major deviation from the party's main stress
on interracial solidarity.30
In 1930, the secretariat of the Communist International responded to
the confusion of American Communists about how seriously the new line
needed to be taken. The first indications were that they did not have to
take it seriously at all. Two American Communists cabled from Moscow
that "self-determination is an agitation slogan, while the aim of immediate action is the concrete struggle against Jim Crowism and other discriminatory actions of the bourgeois state." "State separation," or the idea that
a southern black republic might be allowed to secede from the American
Union, was, according to the cable, not an immediate issue and could be
played down. On the basis of this information, the American party deleted the words "to the point of separation" from its own statement on
"the right of self-determination."
Later in the year, however, the Comintern's Negro Commission stiffened the resolution, making it clear that self-determination was more
than "an agitation slogan" and that mass actions should be organized to
support the right of black-belt Negroes to form a government of their own
and secede from a capitalist America if they so desired. At the same time,
however, the Comintern stressed the fact that this black nationalist
agenda applied only to the southern states and that interracial proletarian
revolution was still the program for the North. At this point, partly because some of those most resistant to the new policy had been on the
losing side in a factional struggle and had been purged from the party,
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lively Communists in each country adjusted to the constraints and opportunities that they faced.
In South Africa, the "native republic" thesis failed to bear fruit partly
because of a bewildering series of changes in its interpretation. In 1930 the
Comintern interpreted it to mean that the South African revolution would
be a two-stage affairthe independent native republic would precede the
establishment of socialism. Since cooperation with the African bourgeoisie
was now ruled out, "the only class capable of uniting the national revolutionary front is the native proletariat." But the visit of the American Communist Eugene Dennis as Comintern, representative in South Africa resulted in the rejection of the two-stage model for one that anticipated a
simultaneous national and Communist revolution. In 1934, party leader
Lazar Bach announced that the native republic was a plural rather than a
singular concept; it meant "a voluntary association of national republics
Sotho, Tswana, Swazi, Zulu, Xhosain a federation of independent native republics." This formulation was remarkably faithful to Stalin's official
conception of how to resolve the national question in the Soviet Union but
flew directly in the face of the ANC's commitment to an inclusive (nontribalized) African nationalism and was hence unlikely to win the support
of those blacks most actively involved in the struggle against white supremacy. It also, ironically enough, anticipated some features of the 1950s
"homelands" policy of the Afrikaner Nationalists.36
But the party's decline in the early '30s cannot be attributed exclusively
or even primarily to such ideological gyrations. More important were two
other developments: a series of purges that deprived the party of its most
experienced leaders and the state repression of the Communist movement
made possible by new legislation permitting the government to arrest and
imprison suspected agitators almost at will or exile them to a part of the
Union other than the one in which they had been active. As factionalism,
purges, and state repression decimated the party, discussions of the true
meaning of the "native republic" thesis became increasingly academic.
South Africa of the early '30s in fact provided little scope for radical
action of any kind. The depression failed to inspire much new militancy
because it could not make the impoverished conditions of blacks much
worse than they already were, and, in any case, rebounding gold prices
made the economic crisis less severe and long-lasting in South Africa than
in most other industrializing countries. The main effect of the depression
was to unify the whites politically. In 1933 the two principal white political
parties formed a coalition government, and a year later they merged to
form a single "United party" committed to economic stabilization and the
preservation of white supremacy.37
In the United States, the situation was rather different. The depression
released liberal and radical impulses that had been held in check by the
prosperity and conservative, pro-business political climate of the 1920s.
The limited economic gains that blacks had made in finding industrial
employment and establishing small businesses during the '20s were wiped
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out in the early '30s. Since the new party line authorized mobilizing blacks
on the basis of their class grievances in urban-industrial areas, the Communists had no qualms about taking the lead in organizing blacks to demand
unemployment relief, resist evictions from ghetto apartments, and demonstrate for the hiring of blacks on public works. Because of its conspicuous
role in agitating such "bread-and-butter" issues, the Communists built up
a substantial reservoir of good will among urban African-Americans. In
the course of these actions, black Communists sometimes violated the
sectarian imperatives of the left turn by working in cooperation with nonCommunist groups, but they did not try to conceal who they were and
what they stood for.38
Following the orders of the Comintern, the party also expended considerable energy and ingenuity on the difficult and dangerous task of organizing sharecroppers and farm laborers in the southern black belt. According
to historian Robin Kelley, they had more success than has previously been
acknowledged. In working with rural blacks, he argues, Communists did
not try to impose ideological orthodoxy, but rather demonstrated a surprising degree of tolerance for the culture of the people they were dealing
with. For one thing, they did not insist that black Christians renounce
their faith in favor of Marxist atheism. The "self-determination" thesis
was translated to mean gaining rights to the land, a cause that black
farmers could readily appreciate. Drawing on folk memories of what had
been attempted and promised during Reconstruction, Communists appealed to the deeply rooted belief of many rural African Americans that:
they had a right to the land they worked and to political control of communities in which they were the overwhelming majority. The Communist-led
Sharecropper's Union of Alabama had no chance of reaching the bulk of
black farm workers in the state, but it persisted in some counties for
several years despite horrendous violence and intimidation and may have
had as many as 10,000 members at its peak in 1935. W. E. B. Du Bois of
the NAACP condemned such organizing as irresponsible because it endangered black lives in a hopeless cause, but the deadly danger and
apparent futility of the endeavor could not dampen the zeal of fearless
Communist organizers.39
The party's biggest success in winning credibility among blacks throughout the nation resulted from its prominent role in the defense of the
Scottsboro boys. After nine black teenagers were condemned to death in
1931 for allegedly raping two white women in a railroad car in Alabama,
the Communist-backed International Labor Defense (ILD) rushed to
their aid and managed to gain control of the defense, beating back the
efforts of the NAACP to take charge of the case. The ILD provided the
boys with a competent defense for their appeals and subsequent trials,
and the Communist party made the injustice of the conviction into an
international cause celebre, using it as the occasion for rallies and
marches throughout the world. Although party literature described the
Scottsboro defense as an application of the "self-determination" slogan
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In May 1934, Pravda announced an abrupt reversal of policy on the question of whether Communists could cooperate with the non-Communist
left. Alliances with socialists and social democrats (heretofore condemned
as "social fascists") were now permissible. Hitler's coming to power in
Germany and the likelihood that he would attack the Soviet Union forced
Stalin to repudiate the sectarianism of the left turn and adopt the slogan
"united action by the working people" against fascism. European socialists
had earlier responded to the Nazi triumph by calling for an alliance with the
Communists, and Stalin was now ready to oblige them. By the time of the
Seventh Congress of the Communist International in July 1935, the "united
front of the working class" had become a "people's united front" against
fascism that might include, in addition to working-class parties and movements, "progressive" segments of the bourgeoisie. The overriding purpose
was to mobilize the "democratic capitalist" nations against Hitler and on
the side of the Soviet Union; in pursuit of such cooperation against a
common enemy, Communists were compelled to play down or conceal the
fact that their ultimate objective was the overthrow of capitalism itself and
not merely the defeat of its ultra-right or fascist manifestation.41
In the United States, the effort to establish a popular front led Communists to revise their views of Roosevelt and the New Deal. Initially denounced as an American variety of fascism, the New Deal was recast by
1936 into the role of useful ally in the struggle against fascism, although
such support did not bar Communists from trying to move it further to the
left. In South Africa, the popular front policy sanctioned a revival of the
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effort to work with the pro-segregationist South African Labor party that
had been abandoned in the mid-1920s. In both cases, the new line meant
deemphasizing black self-determination. This de facto withdrawal of the
concessions to black nationalism made in 1928 was part of the broader
policy of putting national struggles against imperial domination on the
back burner, if not abandoning them entirely. Since the Soviet Union was
now seeking the support of colonialist nations like Britain and France,
overt support for national liberation movements had to be deemphasized.
Inevitably, some blacks and Asians who had joined the Communist movement primarily because of its opposition to imperialism became disillusioned and left the party.42
The popular front policy enabled American Communists to work
closely with the kind of middle-class black reformers whom it had previously condemned as lackeys of the ruling class. In 1935, the International
Labor Defense came to an agreement with the NAACP and the American Scottsboro Committee (a non-Communist black coalition) to cooperate in efforts to appeal the conviction of the Scottsboro boys. In ghettos
like Harlem and the South Side of Chicago, campaigns to increase black:
employment in public agencies, works projects, transit systems, and retail
stores serving blacks that were initiated and led by non-Communist black
leaders received the full support and cooperation of the party. In Harlem,
for example, Communists developed a close working relationship with the
Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., who was emerging as the most
prominent black politician in the country. By jettisoning talk about a
black republic and endorsing the reform agenda of the northern black
middle class, Communists gained respectability among the black liberals
and moderates who had previously considered the party too radical and
divisive.43
But the party failed in its attempts to draw the most prominent black
civil rights organization into a working alliance. Recalling past Communist behavior and wary of being manipulated by those who did not fully
share its cautious, pragmatic, and legalistic approach to black amelioration, the NAACP rejected the party's calls for a working alliance and
forced it to conduct rival campaigns against lynching and Jim Crow in the
southern states. Before 1939, however, it appeared that a Communistbacked coalition might win this competition and replace the association as
the vanguard of the civil rights movement.
The most ambitious Communist bid to exert leadership in black politics
was through its involvement in the National Negro Congress, a federation
of black and interracial organizations that sought to put pressure on the
New Deal to include blacks in its plans for national recovery and incorporate racial justice into its reform agenda. Instrumental in the founding of
the congress were John P. Davis, an influential black lawyer and political
organizer, A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car
Porters and the nation's most prominent black labor leader, and Ralph
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205
ate with Communists did not mean that they were ready to accept Communist leadership or discipline. Such alliances were inherently unstable and
could not survive a major shift of the party line.
In the South, the popular front policy actually weakened the party's
effort to gain support among black sharecroppers and farm workers.
After 1935, the emphasis of party work in the South was on making
common cause with white liberals. Through its involvement in such organizations as the Southern Conference on Human Welfare, the party helped
to bring New Deal liberalism and progressive reform to the most conservative part of the country. Opposition to lynching and poll taxes could
command the support of an advanced guard of southern liberals, but a
frontal attack on Jim Crow, to say nothing of a call for the confiscation
and redistribution of land in the black belt, was a cause that was likely to
be beyond the pale for even the most progressive southern whites of the
1930s. In their efforts to draw whites into a liberal-labor coalition, the
party virtually abandoned its organizational activities among poor blacks
and left them at the mercy of landlords and the biased bureaucrats and
local officials who normally administered New Deal programs in the rural
South.46
In South Africa, the popular front policy of the Communists coincided
with the revival of black protest activity that was provoked by the prospect of a new government assault on African rights. The 1932 union of
Prime Minister J. B.M. Hertzog's National party and Jan Christiaan
Smuts's South African party had been premised on the understanding that
Smuts and his followers would abandon their opposition to Hertzog's
longstanding plan to strip Cape Africans of the limited suffrage that was
"entrenched" in the constitution of 1909. (Since the repeal of entrenched
clauses required a two-thirds vote of both houses of parliament, Hertzog
needed more than the majority that he had won in the election of 1929.)
By 1935, the Prime Minister, with the backing of the new United party,
was ready to make the constitutional changes necessary to remove an
anomalous remnant of nineteenth-century Cape liberalism from the
South African political system. Hertzog proposed that Cape Africans be
removed from the common voters' roll and that a Natives' Representative
Council be established to advise the government on matters relating to
the African population. (Africans throughout the Union would indirectly
elect twelve members of the Council and four would be chosen by the
government.) Instead of the Cape suffrage being extended throughout the
Union, as Africans had once hoped, the government had opted instead
for a further restriction of black voting rights.47
The main vehicle for African protest against Hertzog's Representation
of Natives bill was a new organizationthe All African Convention. The
African National Congress, which might otherwise have been expected to
act in defense of African rights, had never had a large following among
those who were now threatened with disfranchisement. The elite Cape
Africans who had qualified as voters on the common roll had generally
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was called to Moscow (whence he never returned), and the word came
down that Kotane's position was the correct one in light of the new
popular front policy. As Kotane's biographer Bryan Bunting has pointed
out, Kotane always had a preference for popular fronts, because he
sensed that the African "bourgeoisie" was not really a bourgeoisie at all
but a part of the oppressed masses. As victims of national and racial
oppression, the black educated elite had every reason to fight for a black
republic, and Communists should support them to the hilt.53
In the late '30s, Kotane became very active in the ANC. As chairman of
the organization in the Western Cape, he was successful in turning one of
the weakest congress branches into one of the strongest. In 1939, he was
chosen to be general secretary of the Communist party, replacing another
African, Edwin Mofutsanyana (a loyal functionary who lacked Kotane's
charisma and close connections to the nationalist movement). Despite his
conspicuous role as the leader of the Communist movement in South
Africa, he continued to be active and influential in the ANC and cooperated closely and amicably with its moderate, non-Communist leaders
throughout the 1940s. Kotane was an effective link between mainstream
"bourgeois nationalism" and Communism, because he himself was as
much a nationalist as a Marxist-Leninist, if not more so. Had he merely
been using nationalism in a manipulative fashion he could not have played
this mediating role so effectively. "It should not be forgotten," he said in a
speech of 1939, "that all people have national pride within them and that
Communists as we might be, we still feel and suffer the position of the
races of our origin or are proud of the achievements of our races. I arn
first a Native and then a Communist. I came to the Communist Party
because I saw in it the way out and the salvation for the Native people."54
By 1939, therefore, an African with strong nationalist sentiments and
an undeniable dedication to the cause of national liberation as an end in
itself led the Communist party of South Africa. Indeed it can almost be
said that the Communist party was prepared to subordinate its own ideology and ambitions to the cause of a non-Communist African democratic
republic in ways that went beyond what Lenin would probably have found
acceptable. Kotane came close to saying to African nationalists that he
and his party would support them to the fullest without trying to impose
their own ideology on the nationalists' movementwhich would have
been directly contrary to Stalin's injunction that Communists in antiimperialist fronts should always seek to dominate. Whether one chooses
to interpret Communist motives in such a benign fashion or not, it was
clear in 1939 that the party was finding a secure and respected place in
mainstream African protest politics.
The party was also having some success in organizing interracial and
black trade unions. The one area where it was making little headway, and
even regressing, was in its effort to confront the special problems of rural
blacks. In 1930, two African CommunistsElliot Tonjeni and Bransby
Niobehad made some progress in organizing farm workers in the West-
210
ern Cape before being banned from the province. Their work, which has
not been studied closely, might very well have important similarities to
the contemporaneous Communist work among Alabama sharecroppers in
the United States. But there was little or no effort to follow up these
initiatives. During the popular front period of the late '30s, the Communists directed almost all of their attention to the problems of urban
working-class or petit bourgeois Africans. Yet peasants and farmworkers
still made up a majority of the total African population of the Union. As
in the United States, work in rural areas was difficult, dangerous, and
likely to provoke violence. Consequently it did not fit well with the popular front emphasis on establishing alliances with "progressive" whites or
with its generally moderate and cautious approach to black protest. From
the perspective of some of the most militant black liberationists, the
trouble with the Communist party of both countries in the late '30s was
that it was not radical enough.55
Communists in the United States and South Africa had by 1939 established roughly similar relationships to the broader black struggles against
white supremacy. Their most obvious contribution was to make the ideal of
a racially integrated or nonracial society seem plausible and attractive to a
large number of blacks. No other group in South Africa both preached and
practiced racial egalitarianism. The liberal interracial movement there, as
in the American South, remained paternalistic and hierarchical in its basic
assumptions. Benevolent whites generally did things for blacks rather than
make common cause with them. In the United States, the NAACP rivaled
the party in its insistence on an integration]st ideal and in fact condemned
the Communists' "black self-determination" slogan as a form of racial separatism. But, especially after the party jettisoned this slogan in the mid-'30s,
Communists and the organizations they influenced or controlled provided
a better model for interracial fraternity than the association. By the late
'30s, the NAACP had evolved into a virtually all-black organization and
functioned more as a black pressure group and ethnic defense organization
than the interracial neo-abolitionist movement that some of its founders
had envisioned. Only the Communist party and its fronts gave the appearance of blacks and whites shoulder to shoulder in a common cause. The
responses of blacks who visited the Soviet Union or heard reports of race
relations there graphically demonstrate how attractive the interracial ideal
was to many blacks in both societies during the 1930s and how Communists
were able to capitalize on it. Observing or hearing that the Soviets treated
blacks as equals and mixed freely with them was often the main consideration that led blacks to join the party or at least develop strong sympathies
with the Soviet Union and the Communist movement. The later charge of
white supremacists in the two societies that Communists were "behind" the
idea of racial integration had a grain of truth in it. In the 1930s, at least, no
one had done more than the Communists to convince blacks that a nonracial society was possible.56
In neither case, however, did Communist interracialism lead to a mas-
211
sive influx of blacks into the party or into closely affiliated organizations,
even during the popular front era when the stringent requirements for
membership or collaboration that had existed during the "left turn" were
relaxed. One reason why sympathy for Communist racial ideology and
gratitude for Communist actions did not translate more frequently into
active affiliation was the gap between the world-view of ordinary Africans
or African-Americans and that of the party. Communists stopped attacking black Christianity after 1934, but their atheism and secularism remained unmistakable and continued to be a barrier to whole-hearted
involvement of large numbers of blacks in their movement. Historian
Robin Kelley has argued persuasively that some black sharecroppers in
Alabama were able to merge their religious culture and their social radicalism as they struggled under Communist leadership for a better life on
the land. But the autobiography of the Alabama black Communist Hosea
Hudson suggests that durable commitment to the Communist movement
required a kind of conversion experience and the acceptance of a new
gospel. Black Communists like Hudson might carry some of their traditional religious culture into the new church, as did slaves converted to
Christianity on the plantations of the American South and Africans baptized by European missionaries. But becoming a committed and active
Communist, like becoming a Christian earlier, was often a painful and
disruptive process; it required the acceptance of new gods and a new way
of life, which normally meant a weakening of communal ties and relationships. Only a minority were prepared to substitute Marx and Lenin for
Christ or the dictatorship of the proletariat for the millennium.57
Beyond the ideological barriers were some practical obstacles making
blacks think twice about joining the "reds." For most Africans or AfricanAmericans joining the Communist movement or revealing sympathy for it
was dangerous or at least disadvantageous. In South Africa and the
American South, black Communists during the 1930s were in danger of
losing their lives to white vigilantes or law enforcersor at best, as the
nightmarish experiences of Angelo Herndon revealed, spending much
time in hellish jails. Even in the freer atmosphere of the northern states
an open affiliation with the extreme left might still mean the loss of a job
or a brutal beating at the hands of the police. As was often pointed out at
the time, it was hard enough to be black without being red as well.58
The vulnerability of African-Americans was one reason W. E.B. Du
Bois held himself aloof from the Communist party during this period and
advised other blacks to do the same, despite his personal attraction to
Marxism and admiration for the Soviet Union. Du Bois believed that a
proletarian revolution was unlikely in the United States and that even if
one should occur blacks would not necessarily benefit. Modifying significantly the orthodox Marxist interpretation of history as a struggle of
economic classes, Du Bois believed that white workers were so strongly
prejudiced against blacks that they would fail to treat them as equals even
in the context of a conflict against white capitalists. It would therefore be
212
folly for blacks to tie their fortunes to the Communists. His own proposal
for a separate black cooperative economy, which was a principal reason
for his break with the more consistently integrationist NAACP in 1934,
resulted from his belief that anti-capitalist blacks had to go it alone and try
to make a life for themselves in a hostile racial and economic environment. In his view the Communist faith in the ability of black and white
workers to "unite and fight" was based on a serious underestimation of
the strength and autonomy of white racism. Other prominent AfricanAmerican intellectuals who were influenced by Marxism, such as the
political scientist Ralph Bunche and the economist Abram Harris, were
more hopeful than Du Bois that black and white workers could find
common ground and learn to cooperate in their mutual self-interest, but
they shared Du Bois's belief that a social revolution was extremely unlikely in the United States. Consequently they remained independent of
the party and advocated a reformist social democracy.59
In South Africa, there was no prominent black intellectual like Du Bois
to raise troubling questions about the fit between Communist aims and
the ethnic or national interests of blacks. Even if there had been, he
would probably not have given so much weight to the racism of white
workers. In South Africa, unlike the United States, the revolution of a
black proletariat without any support from whites was conceivable. Inhibiting the educated black elite from embracing Communism were commitments to the Christianity learned in mission schools and lingering hopes of
a peaceful transition to a more democratic society. It was easy, however,
for ANC liberals to work quite closely with black Communists such as
Kotane, who appear to have made few ideological demands on the more
moderate members of the congress.60
Parallels between the two narratives of Communist involvement in
black politics are striking, but the more deeply we probe the more we
become aware of variations and contrasts. In 1939 the American party
was a predominantly white organization with a handful of AfricanAmericans among the leadership but more for show than as an independent source of power within the organization. Harry Haywood, whose
commitment to a synthesis of Marxism and black nationalism led him to
defend the self-determination policy after it had been quietly jettisoned
during the popular front era, was ousted from the leadership, although he
remained a party member. The Communist party of South Africa was
overwhelmingly black in membership and had an African nationalist in its
top position. The relatively small number of whites in the party were
overrepresented in the leadership, much as blacks were in the United
States. But the apparent symmetry of the contrast breaks down in the face
of evidence that the whites in the South African party had an influence
over policy far beyond what their numbers would justify. What was evolving in fact was a symbiotic relationship between a small, relatively privileged white party and a larger black one. Since many of the whites were
wealthy professionals and most of the black Communists were self-
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214
the Communists lost the virtual monopoly on the integrationist, antiracist position that they had enjoyed in the late '20s and early '30s, their
position in the forefront of the black struggle for equality became precarious. To the extent that they were willing to cooperate with liberals, and
liberals with them, Communists could continue to play a role in the
politics of black liberation from Jim Crow. But should a deep rift develop
between liberal and Communist goals or priorities, the latter were in
danger of being pushed to the margins of the struggle for equality.63
The Second World War and the Parting of the Ways
The Stalin-Hitler pact of August 1939 brought an abrupt end to the Popular Front and again put Communists at odds with liberals and social
democrats. Now that the Soviet Union was no longer immediately threatened by Nazi Germany, the Comintern ordered national parties not
merely to abandon the alliances they had formed to resist the spread of
fascism but to denounce the military mobilization of the Western allies
against Germany aggression as preparations for "an imperialist war." In
the United States this meant opposition to the defense build-up of 194041 and aid to the alliesalso the position of right-wing isolationists and
German sympathizers. In South Africa it entailed the more extreme step
of adopting a pacifist stance in a nation that was actually at war. Britain's
declaration of war on Germany in September 1939 caused a split in the
ruling United party; the dominant faction led by Smuts managed to persuade a parliamentary majority to endorse a war in defense of the British
Empire, despite strenuous opposition from Hertzog's Afrikaner nationalist wing of the party and from the emerging Purified National party
(which had opposed Hertzog and the United party in the name of an
uncompromising Afrikaner republicanism). Thus American and South
African Communists were asked not simply to condone Nazi aggression in
Western Europe but also to put themselves on the same side as the most
reactionary elements in their own societies.64
The American party responded to the Comintern's about-face with
alacrity and moved resolutely to commit the mass organizations that it
influenced to the new peace position. Among these were the National
Negro Congress and the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. To the
extent that Communists were successful in maneuvering these organizations into line behind the new Soviet policy, pro-preparedness liberals and
New Dealers angrily withdrew and accused the party of using domestic
reform movements as a front for their cynical machinations on behalf of a
foreign power. To dedicated Communists, of course, unconditional support of the Soviet Union and its national interests could be justified as a
way of protecting the wellspring of world revolution. The result of the
shift was a narrowing of the base of Communist support and a decline of
its influence within the African-American community, as in other nonCommunist constituencies that had been wooed during the Popular Front
215
era. But party endorsement of the Stalin-Hitler pact was not as important
to the party's loss of black support as it is sometimes represented as being.
Front activities involving black organizations and movements had begun
to unravel or at least show signs of stress before the pact was announced.
By the late '30s non-Communist community leaders in northern ghettos
were learning how to steal the party's thunder by organizing their own
protest demonstrations, and some of them began to wonder if Communist
involvement was really essential.65
The principal focus of Communist interest, the National Negro Congress, was already foundering by 1937-38, mainly because it had failed to
hold the black churches and middle-class organizations within its orbit. The
increasingly visible role of the Communists and the CIO in the congress
which also meant more prominence for white radicalswas not so much
the result of a left-wing conspiracy to rule or ruin as a simple matter of
necessity given the organization's shrinking base of support among blacks.
The economic and trade unionist emphasis of the congress was not peculiarly Communist; it had also been pushed by social democrats such as
Bunche and Randolph. But even at the height of the depression most
blacks probably did not view their problems primarily in economic or class
terms. Popular boycotts based on the slogan "Don't Buy Where You Can't
Work" reflected national rather than class consciousness and were difficult
for Communists and socialists to support. The inability of congress leaders
such as John W. Davis to appeal to the black sense of nationality or peoplehood meant that the organization never really had a chance to fulfill its
ambition to become the voice of the black community. As one faction after
another dropped out because it found that Congress did not adequately
address its needs or embody its attitudes, the congress came to rely increasingly on the CIO and white radicals, especially those in the Communist
party, for funding and organizational work.
The congress was already a shadow of its original self when the Communists and CIO delegates at the 1940 meeting pushed through their peace
resolution. (The role of the CIO was not simply the result of Communist
influence; John L. Lewis, the mineworkers' chief who headed the CIO,
was an isolationist). But for A. Philip Randolph, the democratic socialist
president of the congress, the passage of the peace resolution was the last
straw. Randolph had refrained from making a prowar resolution to reflect
his personal view that the allied cause against Hitler should be actively
supported, for he believed that the organization should concern itself
exclusively with the group interests of African-Americans and that divisive foreign policy issues and hidden agendas had no part in such a movement. His resignation was a major turning point in the history of the black
protest movement, because it turned one of the most effective and charismatic black protest leaders into an uncompromising anti-Communist.66
If the pact delivered the coup de grace to the party's efforts to exert
leadership in the black community, it did not have much effect on black
party membership. Most of the black members weathered the storm,
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217
218
219
but its modest gains pale alongside the nine-fold increase in NAACP
membership between 1941 and 1945. Wartime moderation may not have
made party work among blacks totally futile, but it had deepened the gulf
between the party and the mainstream of the black protest movement that
had opened during the period of the Stalin-Hitler pact. Many AfricanAmerican activists came out of the war agreeing with Randolph's verdict
on the party: "The history and record of this cult shows that it conforms
with rigid fidelity to the rapidly changing, unpredictable climate of Soviet
Russia, without regard to the national interests of any other group. When
the war broke, the Communists who had posed as the savior of the Negro
dropped him like a hot potato."74
The South African party did somewhat better in gaining and holding
the respect of blacks during the war, because it did not allow the moderation of the national party to prevent vigorous involvement in local protests. Like the CPUSA, the CPSA eschewed strikes and mass protests for
the duration and focused on issuing calls for the equal inclusion of blacks
in the military and war industries, arguing that discrimination hindered
the effort to defeat the Axis powers. African Communists such as Kotane
and Marks worked closely with Alfred B. Xuma, the moderate president
of the ANC, to build up the African Nationalist movement and prepare it
for more forceful actions in the postwar years. In 1944, when the war was
virtually won, the ANC and the Communist party embarked on a joint
campaign against the pass laws, which mainly took the form of circulating
petitions condemning the pass system and presenting them to the government. Sometimes described as a reawakening of radical protest, the campaign was actually a relatively tame affair. Unlike the ANC anti-pass
campaign of 1919 and the Communist-led pass burnings of 1930, the 1944
protest did not involve civil disobedience and seemed to be based on the
naive assumption that the government might be persuaded to repeal the
pass laws merely because it received evidence that Africans found thern
oppressive.75
Despite its lack of a militant stance in national affairs, the party increased its black membership during the war and gained added legitimacy
in the eyes of Africans outside the party. In part, these gains resulted from
the simple fact that the government eased up on the persecution or repression of Communists as a consequence of the alliance with the Soviet
Union. During this brief and special moment in South African history
Communism became almost respectable. The Friends of the Soviet
Union, an organization founded by white Communists at the beginning of
the war, had by its end enlisted the mayor of Johannesburg and the
minister of justice as official patrons. In 1944, one white Communist in
Johannesburg and two in Cape Town were elected to city councils. But the
Communist gains in black membership and support, while clearly facilitated by the party's new aura of legitimacy and respectability, were due
principally to the role that party members came to play in the internal
politics of African townships. This local political activity revolved around
220
the elected advisory boards that were analogous to the Natives' Representative Council on the national level. The Communist decision before the
war not to boycott the shadow representative institutions that the government had set up as an alternative to black participation in the actual
governing of the country now began to bear fruit. During the war African
urban townships grew very rapidly as hundreds of thousands moved from
rural areas to the cities in response to the wartime demand for labor.
Since the authorities generally failed to provide the infrastructure to meet
the most basic needs of this growing population, desperate overcrowding,
serious food shortages, lack of water, and other severe economic hardships resulted. Communists elected to township advisory boards or serving as officers of residents' associations often took the lead in protesting
these conditions to the authorities and demanding their alleviation. By
putting their skills as organizers arid agitators at the service of communities striving to satisfy their elemental material needs, Communists earned
the respect and gratitude of a large number of urban Africans. According
to historian Tom Lodge, "the early forties were the years in which the
Communists successfully established themselves as a popular force in
local urban politics."76
The American Communist party failed to find an equivalent sphere of
activity during the war years; in the United States there was no set of
grass-roots institutions and organizations to which Communists had access that could serve as a springboard to influence in local black communities. The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution made it impossible to
institute the kind of separate-and-unequal political segregation that was
one of South Africa's special contributions to the history of white supremacy. Although most blacks were effectively disfranchised by theoretically
color-blind electoral restrictions, the legal fiction that they possessed the
right to vote on the same basis as whites had to be maintained. Hence
southern African-Americans had no officially recognized elected councils
that were authorized to petition white authorities for the redress of grievances. In politics, if not in public facilities, exclusion rather than legalized
separation was the rule. Virtually the only institutions that provided a
forum for the discussion of community problems were the churches, and
normally Communists were not welcome there.
Electoral politics in the urban North did provide an opportunity for
Communists to put themselves and their positions before the public; in
New York the party and its allies in the CIO took control of the locally
competitive American Labor Party in 1944, thereby gaining a firm foothold in the city's politics. But the New York situation was unique; in cities
such as Chicago the party had little visibility or impact among blacks
because African-American political leadership was under the thumb of
Democratic political machines. Where the American two-party system
provided the structure for black electoral action, it was more difficult for
Communists to exert influence than in the completely segregated and
detached politics of the African townships. Ironically, political segrega-
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tion meant that the South African Communists were able to weather it
without losing their major role in the politics of black liberation, while the
American party was being virtually annihilated as a source of radical
thought and action in the United States. The contrast of subsequent Communist roles in black freedom strugglesincreasingly important in South
Africa and decreasingly so in the United Statescannot be attributed to
any greater state tolerance of party activities in South Africa; for the new
Nationalist regime forthrightly banned and criminalized the party in 1950,
at about the same time that a small number of Communist leaders in the
United States were being prosecuted under the Smith Act for conspiring
to overthrow the government. The credibility of the parties before proscription helped to determine how they weathered it.
Differences in the quality and astuteness of Communist leadership may
help to account for the greater ability of the South Africans to turn the
war to their advantage. The CPUS A had no leaders with the kind of
resonance among blacks and the ability to cultivate linkages between the
party and the black community that Moses Kotane and J. B. Marks demonstrated. The closest equivalent was Paul Robeson, the brilliant actor,
singer, philosopher of Third World liberation, and champion of the Soviet
Union. But Robeson was not a party member. As a prestigious exemplar
of black achievement and assertiveness, he provided influential support
for some of the party's positions; but, unlike Kotane, he lacked a firm
base in organized black protest politics. The most prominent blacks
within the party tended to be uncharismatic functionaries with a limited
ability to galvanize their compatriots and forge alliances with community
leaders.80
Even if American Communists had been more adept at showing blacks
that they had a genuine and steadfast commitment to their cause, they
would probably still have failed to match the success of their South African counterparts. The most significant factor accounting for the contrast
of fortunes was that the American Communists faced strong competition
from an interracial liberalism that appeared to be the wave of the future,
whereas the South African party did not. The partial success of the March
on Washington Movement in 1941 and subsequent Supreme Court decisions outlawing white primaries, segregation in higher education, and
restrictive real estate covenants made the period between 1941 and 1948 a
time when hopes that equal rights for blacks could be achieved within the
context of democratic capitalism steadily increased. During the war, the
Communist party itself had briefly endorsed the reformist doctrine that
racial discrimination could be eliminated without the overthrow of capitalism. But this heresy was repudiated in the left turn of 1945, and Communists reverted to their normal view that no true progress toward equality
was possible without a proletarian revolution. When President Harry
Truman and the Democratic party endorsed a number of civil rights reforms in 1947 and 1948, the gradualism and liberalism of the NAACP
223
seemed vindicated, and the Communist claim that capitalism and racial
equality could not coexist lost credibility.81
Black South Africans had much less reason to put their trust in liberal
reformism. As earlier chapters have shown, what passed for liberalism in
South Africa in the period before the 1940s was the product of British
influences and projected an idealistic view of the British empire as a place
where all "civilized" subjects of the crown had equal rights regardless of
color. A tattered remnant of this tradition was the Cape African suffrage
which Hertzog abolished in 1936. By World War II, the notion that Africans could be relieved from racial oppression by some action of the King,
the parliament, or the British Empire was a dead letter. South Africa was
de facto an independent republic, and its ruling white minority had no
inclination to extend rights to Africans, even those who met a "civilization" test. South African white "liberalism" in the 1920s and '30s was
analogous to the southern white liberalism of the same period; it objected
to flagrant mistreatment of black as a violation of Christian ethics and
Western liberal values, but its remedy was a more equitable form of
segregation rather than equal rights in a common society. Even this form
of liberalism was in retreat in the postwar period. Jan Hofmeyr, Smuts's
deputy prime minister and his putative successor, was its last major exponent among South Africa's white political leadership, and his behavior did
not always conform to his professed principles. In the election of 1948, the
Afrikaner National party made Hofmeyr's alleged liberal tendencies a
main campaign issue, claiming that when he succeeded the aging Smuts as
prime minister blacks would be made equal to whites. The charge was
absurd, but it was effective. The nationalists won control of the government and imposed the more stringent, elaborate, and blatantly unequal
form of segregation that became known as apartheid. It was blindingly
obvious to most politically conscious South African blacks that they had
no basis whatever to expect that their status of noncitizenship and abject
legal inferiority would be overcome or even ameliorated by some form of
liberal reformism.82
Harry Truman and the Democratic party were the unexpected victors in
the 1948 American election, partly and perhaps mainly because of the
solid support they received from black voters. Overwhelmingly, blacks
resisted the attractions of the Progressives, a left-wing party with Communist backing but with a prominent mainstream political figure as its
standard-bearer that opposed the Cold War policies and anti- Communist
"loyalty" programs of the Truman administration. African-Americans supported Truman in large part because they believed his party's platform
when it proclaimed its commitment to equal rights for black Americans
and thought that the Democrats might actually be able to deliver on some
of their promises. It apparently did not bother them that Truman and the
liberals in the Democratic party were strongly anti-Communist or that the
Progressives had taken an even stronger stand in favor of equal rights.
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6
"We Shall Not Be Moved":
Nonviolent Resistance
to White Supremacy, 1940-1965
226
Nonviolent Resistance
227
228
Nonviolent Resistance
229
230
Nonviolent Resistance
231
232
strong interest in Gandhi and his method. As early as 1922, James Weldon
Johnson, the executive secretary of the NAACP, wrote: "It will be of
absorbing interest to know whether the means and methods advocated by
Gandhi can be as effective as the methods of violence used by the
Irish. . . . If noncooperation brings the British to their knees in India,
there is no reason why it should not bring the white man to his knees in
the South." Other black activists and intellectuals were skeptical or unsure that Gandhism would work for blacks in an American context, but
the black press frequently heralded Gandhi's virtues and achievements,
and, as Sudarshan Kapur has recently demonstrated, calls for a black
American Gandhi sometimes appeared in editorials. But one needs to be
wary of overestimating the extent to which black Americans were ready
for militant nonviolence before the 1940s. Some of Gandhi's strongest
defenders were moderates or conservatives who viewed his rejection of
the use of force as supporting a quietistic alternative to the Marxistinspired radicalism that was spreading during the 1930s among the younger generation of educated African-Americans. They clearly did not view
themselves as preparing the way for militant mass action. One writer in
the Chicago Defender in 1933 found that the teachings of Christ, the
accommodationist interracial philosophy of Booker T. Washington, and
the nonviolence espoused by Gandhi were perfectly compatible.15
It was A. Philip Randolph, the African-American labor leader, who
made a link between the depression-era readiness of blacks to engage in
more militant and confrontational forms of protest and the diffuse but
persistent African-American fascination with Gandhi and Gandhism. Randolph's March on Washington Movement, discussed above in relation to
Communist involvement with black causes in the 1930s and '40s, was the
first serious effort to create a nonviolent mass movement of AfricanAmericans. The Committee on Racial liquality (CORE), founded in 1942
as an action-oriented offshoot of the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation,
was more consistently Gandhi an in theory and practice and pioneered
such important nonviolent tactics as the sit-in and the freedom ride. But
during the 1940s and '50s CORE was neither a black-dominated organization nor a prospective mass movement. Interracial but predominantly
white in its early years, it had no solid base in the black community and
represented little more than the individual consciences of the small number of radical pacifists who were its members. Two of themJames
Farmer and Bayard Rustinwere African-Americans who would later
play important roles in the civil rights movement, but during the '40s they
were known more for a principled but unpopular pacifism than for effective race leadership. Randolph, on the other hand, was a mainstream
black leader whose prominence and popularity during the 1940s made him
the most influential and prestigious black spokesman of that decade.16
Randolph was less than an ideal candidate for the role of American
Gandhi; for he totally lacked the religious inspiration that Gandhi considered indispensible for satyagraha. Although the son of an African Method-
Nonviolent Resistance
233
ist Episcopal minister, he had early lost his faith and become a life-long
atheist. His convictions came mainly from the strain of Marxist thought
that had produced twentieth-century democratic socialism. Something of
an economic determinist, he believed that human beings acted out of
mundane, material concerns more than out of conscience or idealism. As
a labor organizer and founder of the most important black trade union,
the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, his inspiration for militant action derived most directly from the confrontational tactics recently used
by labor in its struggles with management. Randolph was impressed with
how, during the late 1930s, the United Auto Workers had carried the
strike weapon to the verge of nonviolent revolution in the sit-down occupations of Detroit auto plants. More generally he hailed the effectiveness
of "great masses of workers in strikes on the picket line." Not only was
Randolph no pacifist or unconditional believer in nonviolence, but the
major campaigns that he launched were directed primarily toward the
inclusion of blacks on an equal basis in the emerging American "warfare
state" of the 1940s. A final problem complicating any characterization of
Randolph as a pioneer of African-American nonviolent resistance was the
fact that during the 1940s he did not actually lead, or even participate in, a
militant nonviolent action. A master of self-promotion, publicity, and
bluff, he achieved his victories simply by threatening mass demonstrations; no one knows whether he could actually have produced one.17
There is no evidence that Randolph's call for a march on Washington in
1941his initial campaign to pressure the government into giving blacks
equal access to the defense jobs that were opening upwas directly
inspired by Gandhi's campaigns in India. But in one respect Randolph
was closer to the spirit of Gandhi than the more orthodox Gandhians in
pacifist groups like the Fellowship of Reconciliation. His decision to exclude whites from the March on Washington Movement was motivated in
part by his fear that white Communists would try to take over the movement as they had apparently taken over the National Negro Congress
during Randolph's presidency. But a deeper motive was his sense that
African Americans needed more experience of acting communally in
defense of their rights and that group pride and solidarity could be
achieved only if they acted independently of whites under their own
leaders. "The essential value of an all-Negro movement such as the March
on Washington Movement," he explained in 1942, "is that it helps to
create faith by Negroes in Negroes. It develops a sense of self-reliance
with Negroes depending on Negroes in vital matters. It helps break down
the slave psychology and inferiority complex in Negroes which comes with
Negroes relying on white people for direction and support."18
If Gandhi's campaigns were designed to restore pride and honor to
Indians as a national or ethnic group, whether occupying minority status
as in South Africa or constituting the bulk of the population as in India,
Randolph's March on Washington Movement sought to achieve something similar for African Americans. Randolph was no black rationalist in
234
any ordinary sense. He had little feeling for African roots or the cultural
distinctiveness of African-Americans, and his ultimate goal was assimilation of the black population into a democratic and color-blind American
society. He favored an all-black protest movement because "Negroes are
the only people who are the victims of Jirn Crow, and it is they must take
the initiative and assume the responsibility to abolish it. Jews must and do
lead the fight against anti-Semitism, Catholics must lead the fight against
anti-Catholicism, labor must battle against anti-labor laws and practices."
In disarmingly simple terms Randolph made a point that Gandhi also
expressed: any group seeking liberation from subjugation must make selfassertion and independent action a central part of its struggle, otherwise it
will remain dependent on its putative emancipators. Randolph was always
willing to accept the help of white liberals and to participate in interracial
organizationsas a realist and a pragmatist he acknowledged that the
African-American minority could make little headway without outside
help. But by limiting exposure to the dangers and potential hardships of
nonviolent direct action to blacks themselves, he sought to insure their
priority and pride of place in the broader movement for racial justice and
equality.19
The March on Washington Movement accomplished part of its initial
purpose in 1941 when President Roosevelt signed an executive order
discouraging racial discrimination in hiring under government defense
contractsthe most significant federal action in support of AfricanAmerican rights since Reconstruction. But Randolph did not disband
the movement; he foresaw enforcement problems and wished to continue agitating for the movement's second original goal of desegregating
the armed forces. By September 1942, Randolph's vision had expanded,
and he contemplated an extensive use of what he called "non-violent
good will action" against all forms of racial discrimination and segregation. In his address to the policy conference of the March on Washington
Movement he drew explicitly on the Gandhian model: "Witness the
strategy and maneuver of the people of India with mass civil disobedience and non-cooperation and marches to the sea. . . . The central principle of the struggle of oppressed minorities like the Negro, labor, Jews
and others is not only to develop mass demonstration maneuvers, but to
repeat and continue them." He then went on to advocate an ambitious
program of action including mass marches, organized pressure to register voters in the southern states, and public protests against segregated
public facilities.20
Randolph discussed more fully what a comprehensive nonviolent freedom struggle would look like in the essay he contributed to the notable
wartime collection of black viewpoints, What the Negro Wants, published
in 1944. In the light of subsequent nonviolent actions his proposals may
not seem very bold or militant. It is noteworthy that none of them actually
involved civil disobedience, which may be the reason he no longer explicitly invoked Gandhi as a precedent. He endorsed the tactic that CORE
Nonviolent Resistance
235
236
well as to his concern about how blacks would vote in the forthcoming
presidential election, President Truman ordered the gradual desegregation of the armed forces. Randolph immediately called off his campaign
despite the strenuous objections of Rustin, at this time still a dedicated
pacifist, who favored resistance against conscription whether or not the
armed forces were being desegregated. The Randolph-Rustin split of
1948 revealed the difference between the former's conception of nonviolent direct action as a political tool in the struggle for racial equality and
the latter's unconditional opposition to violence in any form. The future
effectiveness of a nonviolent movement might depend on its ability to
combine Randolph's skill at political maneuver and acute sense of the
need to involve masses of blacks in nonviolent resistance with Rustin's
more principled and disciplined approach to direct action. Neither large
numbers of imperfectly controlled protesters nor small groups of welldisciplined and right minded satyagrahi were likely to challenge southern
segregation successfully.23
By the early 1950s the stirrings of thought and action that pointed
toward an application of Gandhi's methodsif not his philosophyto
the black American freedom struggle appeared to have dissipated, leaving little impression. Randolph devoted himself during these years mainly
to his perennial struggle from inside the American labor movement to win
full acceptance of blacks in unions and labor federations. CORE, after
having used direct action to desegregate restaurants and recreation facilities in some northern and border cities, foundered on the question of
what to do next. Moving south seemed unthinkable, because demonstrators coming from the North were likely to risk (or even lose) their lives
without having much impact in a region where whites seemed firmly
committed to segregation and blacks were apparently cowed and quiescent. Consequently CORE declined in the early '50s and was almost
moribund in 1954 when the Supreme Court declared school segregation to
be unconstitutional.24
The civil rights movement was not, as is sometimes supposed, on a
steady upward trajectory from the March on Washington Movement to
the Civil Rights Acts of 1964-65. The onset of the Cold War and the antiradical hysteria personified by Senator Joseph McCarthy put a damper on
militant protest movements of all kind. Although CORE was staunchly
non-Communist, its members were often accused of being "reds" by people who shared the common belief that only Communists believed in
racial equality. Since direct action often interfered with customary property rights, it was unacceptably radical to many Americans whatever its
ideological coloration, Randolph was protected from red-baiting to some
extent because of his long record of opposition to Commmunist influences
in black organizations and in the labor movement; but in 1951, at the
height of McCarthyism and the Korean War, he acknowledged the final
congressional defeat of efforts to establish a federal Fair Employment
Practices Commission. Randolph had hoped that the kind of agency estab-
Nonviolent Resistance
237
lished during the war in response to his threatened march could become a
permanent office concerned with equalizing black economic opportunities, and for a decade he had devoted much of his attention to this campaign. But the reactionary climate of opinion in the early '50s made such
legislation impossible. One can only speculate as to exactly why Randolph
did not propose a new march on Washington during the postwar years to
push for a permanent FEPC. Perhaps his keen tactical sense told him that
the time was not ripe.25
But progress of a sort was being made in the struggle for civil rights in
the late '40s and early '50s. The NAACP was winning the court victories
against segregation and discrimination that culminated in Brown v. the
Board of Education in 1954. But one effect of the apparent success of the
association's legal strategy was to convince white liberals and moderate
black leaders that mass protest and direct action were unnecessary. When
the extreme repressiveness of McCarthyism declined somewhat with the
fall of McCarthy himself, the argument that gradual steps toward desegregation would aid the United States in the Cold War became increasingly
persuasive. Desegregation without violence or disorder, if it could be
achieved, would show the Africans and Asians whom the United States
hoped to secure as allies in the conflict with the Soviet Union that steps
were being taken to curb the American habit of humiliating people because of the color of their skins. In the period just before blacks in
Montgomery, Alabama, began boycotting buses late in 1955, white Americans who considered themselves liberal or tolerant in racial matters, as
well as the large number of middle class blacks who put their faith in the
legal strategy of the NAACP, were likely to be unreceptive to the notion
that mass nonviolent protest against segregation was either necessary or
promising. If anything, it might endanger the gains that were being
made.26
Nonviolence in South Africa
In South Africa, as in the United States, the war years brought discussions
of nonviolent protest as a possible tactic in the struggle against white
supremacy. But rather than declining in the early cold war period, the
interest in nonviolent action grew, and "passive resistance" campaigns
were undertaken, first by the Indian community and later by the African
National Congress. In the late '40s and early '50s, mass civil disobedience
became the first line of defense against apartheidthe intensification of
segregation and discrimination that resulted from the electoral victory of
the Afrikaner Nationalists in 1948. A fundamental difference was emerging between the likely future of black people in the two societies if events
continued on their present course. The situation of African-Americans
undoubtedly improved in some important respects during the period between 1941 and 1955. In fact this was a period of great economic gain
relative to whites. Despite the success of racially conservative elements in
238
blocking civil rights legislation in Congress, the Supreme Court was continuing to make decisions that chipped away at the edifice of legalized
discrimination. In South Africa, however, the legal and political status of
Africans, Indians, and Coloreds came under increasing attack from white
supremacists in the late 1940s and early '50s; as a result the kind of
gradualist legal methods and reformist tactics that were bearing some fruit
in the United States were shown to be totally ineffectual in the South
African context. Consequently, nonviolent direct action was embraced
out of desperation.27
The South African Indian community, a relatively small but locally
significant minority, was the seedbed of nonviolent thought and action in
the 1940s. (Because of restrictions against their movement Indians remained concentrated mainly in Natal, especially in the city of Durban,
with a smaller contingent in the Transvaal). Here the influence of Gandhi
was direct and personal. After his return to India in 1914, the Mahatma
kept an eye on South African affairs and from time to time provided
advice and guidance for South African Indian leaders and organizations.
Gandhi's approach to the rights of Indians in South Africa was to seek to
have them included within the privileged or "civilized" segment of an
ethnically divided societyalso the aim of the relatively conservative
leaders who dominated South African Indian politics in the 1920s and
'30s. An agreement negotiated between the governments of India and
South Africa in Cape Town in 1927 and endorsed by Gandhi provided for
assisted repatriation to India for those who wished to return to their
homeland and promises of improved conditions for those who chose to
remain in South Africa; it also provided limited assurances of Indian
privileges relative to Africans, although it fell far short of establishing
their equality with whites.
By 1939, it was evident that the Europeans were unwilling to open the
way for the eventual social and political equality of Indians and were in
fact preparing to make new assaults on their economic rights as a
property-owning and trading community. At the same time, a younger
generation that had been born in South Africa and was committed to
remaining thereunlike some of their elders who had been born in India
and had a sojourner mentalitywas coming to maturity and beginning to
contest the leadership of the old guard. Among this younger group was a
radical element that not only favored reviving the Gandhian method of
militant nonviolent protest against the new assaults on Indian rights but
also proposed transcending the ethnocentric Gandhian legacy by making
common cause with Africans against the white racist regime.28
Dr. Yusuf M. Dadoo, leader of the young radicals in the Transvaal,
attempted in 1939 to organize Indians for militant action against a legislative proposal for their residential and commercial segregation. Dadoo was
a Marxist who had helped form the Non-European United Front in 1938.
In 1939 he joined the Communist party and would remain a faithful
member of the CPSA for the remaining forty four years of his life, eventu-
Nonviolent Resistance
239
ally becoming its chairman. But Dadoo saw no conflict between his Marxism and the employment of Gandhian rhetoric and tactics. He professed
great respect for Gandhi and acknowledged his leadership of the PanIndian cause. When Gandhi advised Dadoo to suspend the proposed
action of 1939 while the former attempted to negotiate a settlement, the
latter complied. After the war broke out, the plans for passive resistance
were shelved for the duration, although Dadoo did manage to get himself
jailed for his antiwar agitation during the period of the Stalin-Hitler pact.
(Conveniently for his dual allegiance, Communists and Gandhian Indian
nationalists could agree in 1940 to oppose a war that involved the defense
of the British empire.) In a statement issued on the eve of his trial in early
1941, Dadoo addressed prospective passive resisters in language that was
clearly inspired by Gandhi rather than Marx: "The path before passive
resisters is one of suffering. They must be armed with the weapon of truth
and so steeled in the school of self-discipline that they will be able to
endure the trials of the struggle with calm dignity, unflagging determination, uncomplaining stoicism, ungrudging sacrifice and unswerving loyalty
to the cause. Such an attitude of mind and behavior will disarm all opposition and open the road to the vindication of justice."29
During the war, young radicals also gained influence in the organizational life of the larger Indian community of Natal. Here Indians confronted a persistent campaign by white politicians to stem what they
regarded as Indian intrusion into white residential and commercial areas.
The agitation led the Union government to pass a law in 1943 temporarily
banning real estate transfers between whites and Indians. The Indian elite
split on the question of how to respond to the threat of segregation. The
older and more conservative element that still dominated the Natal Indian
Congress favored efforts to reach a compromise with white authorities,
allowing perhaps a restriction of residential rights in return for an acknowledgment of the trading rights that were of crucial importance to the
merchant elite that constituted the established leadership.
The emerging radical opposition, which organized itself as the AntiSegregation Council during the war, was a remarkable coalition between
a small group of young professionals, the first generation of South African
Indians to achieve that status, and the vigorous trade union movement
that had sprung up among the Indian urban working class. In 1945 the
radicals took control of the Natal Indian Congress and elected Dr. G. M.
(Monty) Naicker as president. Like Dr. Yusuf Dadoo in the Transvaal,
Naicker was a British-educated physician; unlike Dadoo, however, his
political inspiration was exclusively Gandhianhe never joined the Communist party or proclaimed himself a Marxist. In 1951, when he was asked
to recall what Gandhi had meant to him, Naicker professed that as a
young man he had "made a deep study of the writings of Gandiji" and
then when the time came for nonviolent resistance in South Africa, he
had heard "the voice of Mahatma Gandhi calling for action."30
Under the leadership of Dadoo and Naicker, the Indian Congresses of
240
Natal and the Transvaal undertook a passive resistance campaign beginning in 1946; before it was over they had managed to attract international
attention, culminating in the first United Nations resolution condemning
racial discrimination in South Africa. The provocation was the Asiatic
Land Tenure and Indian Representation Act of the Smuts government.
This law anticipated the Group Areas Act of the apartheid era by denying
to Indians the right to reside or trade in urban areas specified for exclusive
white occupancy. Dubbed "the Ghetto Act" by the protesters, its enactment was a response to the success of Indians in competing with white
merchants as well as an effort to stop a growing Indian middle class from
seeking better housing outside of the run-down areas in which Indians had
traditionally concentrated. The campaign began when 15,000 people took
a pledge to disobey the act in Durban on June 13,1946; subsequently 1700
volunteers came forward in that year to participate in specific acts of civil
disobedience in Natal. Ultimately more than 2000 demonstrators were
arrested. The principal action was the occupation of vacant lots in areas
set aside by the law for Europeans. Assaults by white hooligans severely
tested the nonviolent convictions of the demonstrators, as did the conditions in some of the jails in which they were incarcerated for trespass.
Late in the campaign, the Transvaal, and Natal Indian congresses combined to repeat a famous march of Gandhi; they sent a mass of demonstrators across the border between Natal and the Transvaal in violation of the
laws restricting the movement of Indians from one province to another.
Of those arrested during the two years of actions, virtually all (including
Dadoo and Naiker) refused bail. Gandhi, who died in 1947 in the midst of
the South African Indian struggle, gave full support to the campaign,
although he continued to disapprove of proposals for a joint struggle of
Indians and Africans that the South African passive resisters were beginning to take quite seriously.31
Although it aroused international indignation and led to a United Nations General Assembly vote condemning South Africa, the Passive Resistance Campaign failed utterly to induce the South African government to
give up its plans to impose residential and commercial segregation on
Indians. The effort was called off in 1948 just as the Nationalists were
coming to power on the platform of comprehensive segregation for all
non-Europeans. At that point it had become clear that Indians could
achieve little on their own and that their movement would have to be
merged into the larger black struggle for liberation. The previous year, in
the "Doctors' Pact" signed by Dadoo, Naicker, and Dr. A. B. Xuma, the
presidents of the two Indian congresses had joined with the president of
the ANC to endorse a common program of universal suffrage, equal
economic opportunity, equal access to education, and the end of all legalized segregation and discrimination. But the reality of a joint effort would
be difficult to achieve; many Indians retained hopes for a special status
closer to whites than to Africans, and many Africans were resentful of
Indian privileges, suspicious of Indian culture, and distrustful of the In-
Nonviolent Resistance
241
dian traders with whom they often had to deal. In 1949, the precarious
state of Indian-African relations in Natal was revealed when Zulus in
Durban rioted against Indians, killing a substantial number while the
police looked on.32
The Indian Passive Resistance Campaign provided part of the inspiration and leadership for the most significant example of nonviolent resistance in South African historythe Defiance Campaign of 1952, formally
a joint effort of the African National Congress and the South African
Indian Congress. But Indians were junior partners in that campaign and
sometimes found that their claims to special knowledge of the philosophy
and practice of nonviolence were resented by Africans who thought of
themselves as acting on a self-generated impulse rather than following the
lead of others. The specifically African roots of the massive nonviolent
resistance that was undertaken in the 1950s can be found in the debates
that took place in the congress during the 1940s on the question of
whether or not to cooperate with the segregated political institutions that
the white government claimed gave some representation to Africans. The
leadership of the ANC during the Second World War favored working
within the system for whatever advantages Africans could get out of it.
Communists in the ANC leadership tended to view elected township
advisory boards, the Natives' Representative Council, and the provisions
for white representation of Africans in parliament as opportunities for
agitation and infiltration. Some of the old-guard moderates in the leadership continued to believe that the channels provided by the government
for the expression of African opinion could still provide a means of nudging the government and white political opinion in the direction of justice
for Africans.33
The African National Congress Youth League, founded in. 1944 out of
the impatience of younger members with the ANC's lack of militancy,
has drawn the attention of historians mainly because some of its leaders
espoused a mystical Africanist philosophy that anticipated the later PanAfricanist and Black Consciousness movements. But for our present
purposes it is more significant that it challenged the leadership's accommodation to the separate-and-unequal political structure and came out
for a boycott of all the existing representative bodies. It wished in effect
to base resistance policy on what Gandhi had called "noncooperation."
Furthermore, the Youth League from the beginning advocated mass action and civil disobedience. Shortly after its first meeting, the organizers
sought and obtained an interview with Dr. A. B. Xuma, the ANC president, in which, according to a summary in the ANC files, the young
rebels accused the leadership of following an "erratic policy" as "was
shown by the fact that there was no programme of actionno passive
resistance or some such action. Dr. Xuma replied that the Africans as a
group were unorganized and undisciplined, and that a programme of
action such as envisaged by the Youth League would be rash at that
stage."34
242
Xuma's postponement of mass action until some distant day when the
ANC had organized and disciplined the masses enjoyed the support of
Communists in the ANC leadership. Congress's most ambitious wartime
campaignthe anti-pass agitation of 1944 which was jointly sponsored by
the Communist partydid not involve the civil disobedience that had
been a part of some earlier anti-pass campaigns, namely the turning in,
discarding, or burning of the hated documents. Instead, the 1944 protesters merely circulated a monster petition protesting the pass system that
was then presented to the government (which of course proceeded to
ignore it). The Youth League's early anti-Communism was in part a response to the wartime timidity of a Communist-influenced movement that
did not wish to impede the war effort by engaging in militant and disruptive action. Its view of Communists as unreliable associates with an
agenda of their own paralleled that of the March on Washington Movement in the United States and had a similar justification. After the war,
the congress went partway toward the Youth League's goal of a boycott of
segregated institutions when the ANC-dominated Natives' Representative Council adjourned indefinitely in 1946 after it became clear that the
government would pay no attention to its deliberations. But Xurna and
the older generation of leaders continued to believe that mass action was
ill-advised because it would lead only to violence and repression. In 1949
the votes of Youth Leaguers prevented Xutna from being reelected to the
presidency, and their Programme of Action became the official position of
the ANC.35
The Programme of Action redefined the aims of the South African
liberation struggle and gave it a new tactical direction. For the first time in
an ANC policy statement, it called for "political independence" and "the
right of self-determination" for "African people." Other Youth League
statements made it clear that this demand for "National freedom" did not
mean "Africa for the Africans" in an exclusionary sense, but it did imply
that the majority would seize power from the racist minority. It thus repudiated the ANC's traditional belief that Africans would be gradually elevated to participatory status by whites who had been persuaded that it was
the decent and democratic thing to do. The heart of the action program
itself was the establishment of a "council of action" to work for "the
abolition of all differential political institutions the boycotting of which we
accept and to undertake a campaign to educate our people on this issue,
and, in addition to employ the following weapons: immediate and active
boycott, strike, civil disobedience, non-co-operation and such other means
as may bring about the accomplishement of our aspirations." The first
thing to be done was to prepare "for a national stoppage of work as a mark
of protest against the reactionary policy of the government."36
The methods of resistance proposed were precisely those that Gandhi
had used in the Indian independence struggle, including his distinctive
way of raising consciousness and testing discipline through the hartel, or
one-day strike. But nowhere in the Programme of Action or in the surviv-
Nonviolent Resistance
243
ing Youth League documents that anticipated it was there any mention of
Gandhi and his campaigns. It is also noteworthy that the triumphant
Youth Leaguers made no reference to the recent Indian Passive Resistance campaign in South Africa itself. This failure to cite Gandhian or
Indian precedents for nonviolent resistance makes sense if one recalls that
the Youth League was seeking to make the ANC an authentically and
distinctively African movement. Its literature emphasized that Africans
should not follow the leadership of Europeans or Asians arid should not
base their struggle on "foreign" ideologies such as Marxism. Gandhism
was never explicitly included among the alien ideologies being rejected,
and the method of action being adopted was strikingly similar to Gandhi's.
But nowhere did the Youth Leaguers reveal any sympathy for the religious
or philosphical nonviolence that Gandhi had espoused. Furthermore, the
idea that the oppressor could be converted through his exposure to the
undeserved suffering of the oppressed was alien to Youth League thinking. For them, even more than for A. Philip Randolph in the United
States, nonviolent direct action was simply an available means to exert
pressure and disrupt the plans of the white supremacists; it did not imply a
repudiation of violence under all circumstances. In Gandhi's terms, the
Youth League was proposing passive resistance but not satyagraha. But
the emerging new leadership of the ANC conformed to the Gandhian
precedent in one sense even while it departed from it in others. As we
have seen, Gandhi had always conceived of his movement as an authentic
expression of Indian culture or the Indian soul. The Youth League was
striving to make the ANC a manifestation of the African soul which meant
that it could not be based on values identical to those of Indian nonviolent
resisters.37
A question not really faced then or later by ANC ideologists was where
to find, or how to convey, the traditional African cultural values that
would inspire people to make the sacrifices and endure the suffering
essential to the effective practice of nonviolent resistance. The composite
and unifying African nationalism to which the intellectuals in the Youth
League referred was in fact a construction of their own which would have
to be explained to Zulus, Xhosa, Tswana, and members of the other
African tribal or ethnic groups. The role that religious beliefs might play
as a stimulus to African nationalism and a source of morale and courage
in the struggles to come was not fully explored. Most of the Youth Leaguers were themselves Christians, but they came from a variety of denominational backgrounds. Anton Lambede, the founder of the movement, and
A. P. Mda, its president from 1947 to 1949, were practicing Roman Catholics. Oliver Tambo was a devout Anglican, who prepared at one time for
the priesthood. Walter Sisulu also had a strong Anglican upbringing, and
Nelson Mandela was a Methodist, although not a noticeably devout one.
What is striking is that all of the leading Youth Leaguers were affliliated
with missionary churches; none was a member of an independent African
church or had any experience of separatist "Ethiopian" Christianity. In a
244
remarkable letter written in 1949, Nelson Mandela addressed the question of what role Christianity should play in the African liberation movement and concluded on a note of great uncertainty:
The question of our attitude toward the Christian religion is a very delicate
and complicated affair. . . . It might well be, however, that as the forces of
nationalism gather momentum in the political field there might be a corresponding upsurge of the same factors in other fields as well, including the
religious field. I might mention the emergence of such denominations as the
Bantu Methodist Church, the Bantu Presbyterian Church, and the AME
Church, [which] despite the fact that they still embrace the Christian faith is
not without significance. The existence of such Religions as Shintoism and
Buddhism among the Japanese, Hinduism and Mohammedanism among the
Indians, which are religions fashioned and firmly embedded in the National
traditions and philosophies of these nations and which extol and deify their
national heroes, cannot fail to exercize its influence on the future attitude of
the African nation toward the Christian faith.38
Nonviolent Resistance
245
assuring the dominance of Europeans for all time to come. If the ANC
had not responded in some dramatic fashion to the apartheid legislation
passed between 1949 and 1952, its claim to be in the forefront of the
struggle for African rights would have lost most of its credibility. The
ANC did in fact gain significantly in prestige and membership as the
result of its new militancy, although it failed to stem the tide, of repressive
arid discriminatory legislation.
The most serious organizational and ideological problem that the National Congress confronted as it began to implement the Programme of
Action was whether it should invite the participation and cooperation of
groups that did not share the Youth League's original Africanist impulse.
The Nationalist government's legislative barrage was not aimed exclusively at Africans. The principal victims of the Group Areas Act were
Indians and Coloreds. The Coloreds in the Cape were also the targets of
an effort to remove from the South African Constitution the entrenched
clause protecting their limited voting rights. White radicals, along with
those of other races, found their civil liberties denied by the Suppression
of Communism Act of 1950a measure that created such a broad and
flexible definition of statutory Communism that it made the search for
shades of red during the McCarthy era in the United States look almost
benign by comparison. Sometime between 1949 and 1952, key members
of the group of Youth League insurgents who were taking control of the
ANCespecially Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, and Walter Sisulu
made a crucial decision for reasons that went unrecorded but can readily
be imagined. They decided to downplay the Youth League's original Africanist nationalism and depart decisively from its nativist tendency to have
no truck with movements and ideologies of "foreign" inspiration. Under
their influence, the congress welcomed support from whites, Indians,
Coloreds, Communists, Gandhians, Christiansanyone, in other words,
who repudiated apartheid and was willing to work against it.
Rarely has a liberation movement made fewer ideological demands on
its supporters. Some in the ANC continued to fear that cooperation with
whites, Indians, and Communists would lead to non-Africans taking
charge of the movement. There was tension in 1950 over the implementation of the first step in the Programme of Actiona one-day work stayaway. The Communists took the initiative by declaring May Day as the
occasion for a one-day general strike to protest the Suppression of Communism Act. Rather than simply falling in behind the May Day hartal, the
ANC hastily organized its own day of protest for June 26. But in 1951 the
ANC national executive, which included the Communists Moses Kotane
and J. B. Marks, invited the leaders of the South African Indian Congress
and the Franchise Action Council of the Cape (a predominantly Colored
group) to discuss taking joint action against "the rising tide of national
oppression." The resulting conference of executives backed a plan for all
three groups to engage in nonviolent direct action in a coordinated fashion. In the end, the African National Congress and the South African
246
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248
from the plan to escalate actions to the point of mass noncooperation and
something like a black general strike. Had this occurred, the campaign
would have had more than "nuisance value" for the government. Naboth
Mokgatle, a rank-and-file Communist, was critical of the campaign because it operated at the outset with small numbers of trained volunteers
(and thus had to turn away some potential recruits), rather than encouraging the masses to engage in spontaneous action. He recalled in his autobiography how he told a meeting attended by Nelson Mandela that the right
way to "break the apartheid machine" was "to throw in its spokes, its
wheels, and all its parts everything they couldsand, rags, stonesto
jam it. By that, I told them, I meant that hundreds and thousands of
volunteers should flood police stations, courts, and prisons." There may
have been validity to Mokgatle's claim that a slow-developing campaign
gave the government a chance to respond effectively, but it is also clear
that the original plan seemed calculated to produce as its end result just
the breakdown Mokgatle was calling for. (Except in the highly unlikely
event that the government met the campaign's demands at an earlier
stage.) No one knows what would have happened if the economy had
been brought to its knees and the authority of the government effectively
undermined. The white settler regime could not have withdrawn from
South Africa as the British did from India. Perhaps the safest conclusion
as to what was anticipated from the Defiance Campaign is that its instigators did not really know what would happen but agreed that something
new had to be tried because the old protest methods had proved unavailing against the onslaught of apartheid.45
Although the campaign failed to jam apartheid or even to slow it down,
it did serve to give the ANC new legitimacy and credibility as a vehicle for
popular black protest. Although Indian Congress leaders played a major
role in directing nonviolent activity and in putting their own bodies on the
line, the response of the masses of Indians was disappointingmuch less
than had been seen in the passive resistance of 1946-48and virtually all
the rank-and-file resisters were Africans mobilized by the ANC. As a
consequence, the contribution of Indians as forerunners and co-sponsors
of the campaign tended to be forgotten, and the ANC's position at the
forefront of the anti-apartheid struggle was solidified. A left-wing rival,
the Non-European Unity Movement centered in the Western Cape had
criticized the ANC for more than a decade because of its failure to implement a policy of total noncooperation with the "herrenvolk," but it never
recovered from the do-nothing image that it acquired from its opposition
to the Defiance Campaign.
The ANC's membership on the eve of the campaign has been estimated
at between 7000 and 20,000, a large proportion of whom must have been
members of the educated elite or "African bourgeoisie." The actions of
1952 brought a dramatic upsurge of membership until the organization
could claim 100,000 members. If this figure was not inflated, it had to
have included many working-class adherents. Membership soon dropped
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back to about 30,000 during the inactive period following the campaign,
but supporters greatly exceeded the hard core willing and able to pay
dues. Considered as a recruiting device, therefore, the campaign was a
great success. More difficult to measure was the change of consciousness
that resulted. But it seems safe to conclude that it helped many Africans
to lose a sense that white domination was an unfortunate and painful fact
of life that could not be changed and to acquire hope that liberation was
possible. As one young activist reported at the time, "there has been a
transformation in the thinking of Africansa revolutionary transformation." Never again could the regime argue with any plausibility that Africans were content with their situation.46
Nevertheless, the results of the campaign did little to encourage a belief
that South Africa could achieve racial justice through nonviolent action.
The apartheid regime was not the British government in India. (Even in
India most nonviolent actions were successfully repressed, and Gandhian
resistance was not the most important factor behind the British decision
to grant independence in 1947.) The nationalist regime of the 1950s was
hard-bitten, determined, and fanatical in its devotion to white supremacy.
Its draconian response to the civil disobedience of 1952 foreshadowed the
total ruthlessness of its subsequent efforts to repress African resistance.
One of its most effective devices, first put into effect at the time of the
Defiance Campaign, was to disable the resistance by lopping off its leadership. This was accomplished initially by banning leaders from public activity, later by accusing them of serious crimes and tying them up in long
trials, and ultimately by imprisoning them after conviction for subversive
activity or without trial under emergency laws or regulations. Under such
repressive circumstances, it was virtually impossible to organize public
protest demonstrations, to say nothing of mounting mass campaigns of
civil disobedience.47
Although outright civil disobedience was difficult and dangerous after
1952, some types of nonviolent action were still possible. In the mid-'50s,
the ANC participated in a number of boycotts or noncooperation campaigns, such as resistance to forced removals of Africans from the Western Areas of Johannesburg to what is now Soweto, a boycott of the
schools to protest the new curriculum mandated by the Bantu Education
Act of 1953, and boycotts of buses in Evaton and Alexandria in an effort
to roll back fare increases. The bus boycotts had the greatest success, for
here the issues were economic rather than political, and the adversaries
were private bus companies rather than the state. But these were essentially spontaneous local initiatives; the ANC supported them but was
unable to harness them to a broader political movement. Most historians
agree that the school boycott and attempts to resist the forced removals
near Johannesburg were conspicuous failures. They revealed that the
collapse of the Defiance Campaign and the subsequent repression had left
the ANC incapable of carrying out sustained and coordinated nonviolent
campaigns.48
250
The most impressive nonviolent actions of the mid to late '50s were the
mass demonstrations of African women against legislation extending the
pass laws to them for the first time. Earlier efforts to force women to
carry passes, going back to 1913, had been met with refusals to comply
that had forced the authorities to back down. In the 1950s, the women
resisted again. In 1955 1000 to 2000 women, predominantly African but
including whites, Indians, and Coloreds, demonstrated at the seat of government in Pretoria under the leadership of the interracial Federation of
South African Women (FSAW). Closely allied to the ANC and its
Women's League, the FSAW had been formed in 1954 to draw attention
to women's issues and coordinate women's protests. Spontaneous pass
burnings in 1956 showed the depth of feeling on the pass issue among
African women. In the first seven months of that year an estimated 50,000
women participated in 38 demonstrations. The campaign culminated with
another mass rally in Pretoria, this time with 10,000 to 20,000 women
participating. Demonstrations continued through 1957 and 1958. Especially dramatic was the mass refusal of female servants in Johannesburg to
register under the new law in 1958, an action that included efforts to
blockade government offices. But after many women were arrested for
obstructing the issuance of passes, the ANC took direct charge of the
campaign and called off civil disobedience. By 1959 the anti-pass campaign had dissipated, succumbing to government repression and the movement's loss of faith in the efficacy of nonviolent resistance.49
Under the circumstances that prevailed, it is not surprising that. Congress's commitment to nonviolence began to wane. An editorial in the
December 1958 issue of the ANC's journal Liberation reviewed a decade
of struggle and repression, concluding that "one of the most important
concepts behind the 1949 plan of work [the Programme of Action], which
is related to the Gandhian 'satyagraha' idea, is clearly inadequate to meet
the changed conditions of 1959." The editorial lamented that the Defiance Campaign's aim of filling the jails with protesters had become the
policy of the government, which was trying 156 leaders of the resistance
for treason. But this rejection of nonviolent direct action did not lead to a
straightforward endorsement of violent resistance. "There is," the editorial concluded, "only one power that can end this system: the systematic,
massive, enlightened and determined organization of the people in their
national liberation organizations and trade unions. And for such organization, Congress needs a new sort of plan; a plan not based upon emotional
platform appeals and heroic gestures, but upon relentless work, day and
night, throughout the land, in town and country
" The plan referred to was probably the "M Plan" conceived by Nelson Mandela in
1953. It was essentially a method to counter repression by establishing a
closely knit cellular organization that would allow the Congress to function and grow outside of the glare of public scrutiny. Implicit in the M
Plan, however, was the possibility that ANC cells in a Nazi-like South
Africa would function like the underground movements in occupied Euro-
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251
pean nations in World War II and engage in sabotage and other acts of
clandestine violence.50
The ANC's propensity to engage in public nonviolent resistance and
thereby expose its leadership to prosecution and incarceration had thus
pretty much exhausted itself even before the crisis of 1960 and the banning of public dissent against apartheid. The killing by police of 70 demonstrators from the breakaway Pan Africanist Congress as they tried to turn
in their passes at the police station in Sharpeville revealed something that
the ANC already knew that efforts at mass civil disobedience were
likely to lead to deadly violence and that the blood shed would be that of
the protesters.
Even ANC president Albert Lutuli, a devout Christian and strong believer in the possibility of reaching the white conscience and achieving a
reconciliation of the races, had to admit reluctantly by 1964 that he could
not criticize those in the congress who had chosen the path of violent
resistance. In 1952 Lutuli had tried to make Christian nonviolence the
keynote of the ANC's struggle when he had concluded the speech resigning his chieftainship with the ringing affirmation that "the Road to Freedom is Via the CROSS." Although not as charismatic or eloquent as
Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr., Lutuli might have been the prophetic
leader of a nonviolent crusade if he had been allowed to play that role. As
it was, he was either banned or on trial for virtually the entire period of his
presidency. He could not attend meetings, lead protests, or make public
statements. Lutuli's Nobel Peace Prize, the first to be awarded to an
advocate of nonviolent protest against racism, was not so much a recognition of anything he had been able to accomplish as a tribute to what he
stood forhis seemingly impossible dream of a peaceful transition to
democracy and racial equality in South Africa. Chief Lutuli had sought in
vain to make the advocacy and practice of nonviolence in South Africa live
up to Gandhian ideals (in 1955 he criticized "our campaigns" for failing to
embody adequately "the gospel of 'Service and sacrifice for the general
good' "); but even if he had succeeded and if the South African struggle
had been more deeply penetrated by the spirit ofsatyagraha, it is doubtful
that the outcome would have been much different.51
The ANC remained nonviolent (if not purely Gandhian) for as long as
it did partly because of its deep underlying commitment to a democratic
multi-racialism. In 1955, the Congress Alliancea federation of African,
Indian, Colored, and white groups under the general leadership of the
ANCadopted and promulgated "the Freedom Charter," which signified the organization's decisive break with the Africanist tendency to see
the future of South Africa in orthodox black nationalist terms. When the
Charter proclaimed that "South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black
and white," it meant, that the enemy could not be defined as the white
race and that liberation would have to be something other than victory in
a race war. A commitment to the ultimate reconciliation and democratic
coexistence of whites and blacks in South Africa prevented Congress
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254
could then be expanded as necessary to make certain that all whites were
given seats. The issue that arose two years later in Montgomery was
exactly the same, but in this case the boycott lasted for a year rather than
for only a few days as in Baton Rouge and thus could attract the attention
of the country and serve as the catalyst for a broader movement.57
The Montgomery bus boycott did not begin, as is commonly believed,
because a previously nonpolitical black woman felt tired and decided on
the spur of the moment to refuse the bus driver's command to give up her
seat to a white passenger. It is true that Rosa Parks had probably not
intended to engage in civil disobedience, on that particular day. But as a
longtime activist and secretary of the local NAACP, she understood very
well what she was doing when she defied the segregation law; and the man
she contacted after her arrest, E. D. Nixon, was an important civil rights
leader (he had earlier been president of the state NAACP and currently
headed the Montgomery chapter) who had been actively seeking an incident that would provide a legal test of the bus segregation policy and an
occasion for mobilizing the black community against it. The prime instigator of the boycott, Nixon was a Pullman car porter and union organizer;
as a longtime admirer of A. Philip Randolph and an officer of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, he had been drawn to the prospect of
nonviolent resistance by the March on Washington Movement of the
previous decade. His principal associate in the initial mobilization for a
protest against the treatment of Rosa Parks was Joanne Robinson, leader
of the Women's Political Council, a group that had also been concerned
about the bus situation.
It was only after Nixon and Robinson had decided to launch a boycott
and had called a meeting of the black ministers of Montgomery to generate support that, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., emerged as leader
of the protest. King was drafted to be the head of the Montgomery
Improvement Association partly because Nixon's work schedule kept him
away from the city for several days each week. As pastor of the most
fashionable black Baptist church in Montgomery and a recent arrival in
town who had not acquired many enemies, King was viewed as a safe
consensus choice to head the boycott effort. It was only after he had
assumed this position that his talents as an orator and inspirational leader
became fully apparent,58
That King did not start the boycott does not mean that he was unimportant or that he was merely the creation of a movement made by others.
The Montgomery bus boycott turned into much more than anyone could
have anticipated at the outset. What started as a call for a fairer system of
bus segregation ended up as the first major nonviolent challenge to segregation itself. King and the movement matured simultaneously, each becoming by the boycott's end much more than either had been at the
beginning. What made Montgomery different from Baton Rouge two
years earlier was the adamant refusal of the white political authorities to
accede to the modest original demands of the protesters. What would
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256
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257
Branch, believes that King remained a Niebuhrian rather than a Gandhian even after being being indoctrinated in nonviolence by Smiley and
Rustin. The basis of King's nonviolent politics, he argues, was not Gandhi's writings, which he shows no signs of having actually read closely, but
rather the discussion of Gandhism in Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral
Society (1932).62
Assessing Branch's thesis requires a brief exegesis of Niebuhr's remarkable chapter on "The Preservation of Moral Values in Politics." First of
all, Niebuhr attacked the claims of Gandhism that there was an absolute
moral distinction between violence and nonviolence, pointing out that the
latter, as practiced by Gandhi, sometimes involved coercing and injuring
(economically at least) the target of the protest. Since it involved coercion
and power, effective nonviolence could not maintain the kind of ethical
purity that Gandhi ascribed to satyagraha. But Niebuhr went on to argue
that there was a difference between actions, whether violent or nonviolent, which were inspired by "moral goodwill" and those that were not,
and that "nonviolence is usually the better method of expressing good
will" and was "a type of coercion which offers the largest opportunities for
a harmonious relationship with the moral and rational faculties in social
life."
After making this pragmatic and relativistic defense of nonviolence,
Niebuhr went on to discuss the application of this "type of coercion" to
American social problems and made his remarkable prophecy that the
"emancipation of the Negro race in America probably waits on the adequate development of [nonviolent] social and political strategy." What
would happen would not be a conversion of whites to racial justice but
rather a demonstration of the fact that "the white race will not admit the
Negro to equal rights if it is not forced to do so." If one desired a
sophisticated defense of nonviolence that faced up to implications for the
power politics of the real world but made it a morally sensitive and
responsible doctrine that had special application to the condition of
African-Americans, one could find it in Niebuhr. Taylor Branch believes
that this is precisely what King did, but that he allowed the media and
others to portray him as a pure Gandhian for the public relations advantage that this provided. As direct evidence for this somewhat devious
strategy, Branch offers a secondhand report that King once told a colleague that nonviolence was "merely a Niebuhrian stratagem of power."63
But it is difficult to hold that Niebuhrian realism was the ideology that
King drew from the Montgomery experience without indicting him for
hypocrisy. Continually and insistently in the period during and after the
boycott, he spoke and wrote of the power of love to disarm and convert the
oppressor and of the redemptive quality of undeserved suffering. The goal
of nonviolence, as he normally expressed it, was not a Niebuhrian balance
of power that could check but not eliminate the human capacity for evil;
lather it was "the beloved community" in which the prejudice and greed
that lay behind racial discrimination had been eliminated. In an article
258
published in the magazine Fellowship in May 1956 while the boycott was
still going on, King wrote that his protest depended entirely on "moral and
spiritual forces" and that its "great instrument is the instrument of love."
The organization King founded after the boycott to encourage and coordinate nonviolent resistance throughout the Souththe Southern Christian
Leadership Conference (SCLC)issued a pamphlet explaining its ideas
that is, to all appearances, an unqualified celebration of Gandhism: "The
basic tenets of Hebraic-Christian tradition coupled with the Gandhian
conception of satyagrahatruth forceis at the heart of SCLC's philosophy," and its "ultimate aim is to foster and create the 'beloved community'
in America where brotherhood is a reality,"64
It remains true, however, that the bus boycott was more obviously an
economic weapon to coerce the oppressor than a demonstration of concern for his soul. As Niebuhr had argued in the case of Gandhi's boycotts
in India there was dissonance between the movement's idealistic philosophy and the understanding of power politics that its actions demonstrated.
An early statement of King's that came close to recognizing that nonviolence was an exertion of power was his 1957 assertion that "a mass movement exercising nonviolence is an object lesson in power under discipline." By the time of the Birmingham campaign of 1963, King's rhetoric
had lost some of its exalted idealism, and he was more willing than previously to recognize that coercion as well as a purely moral force was at
work in nonviolent resistance. "Lamentably," he wrote in his famous
Letter from Birmingham Jail, "it is an historical fact that privileged
groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the
moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold
Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals." In this reversion to Niebuhr, King did not quite concede that nonviolence, rather than being a way of awakening a sense of justice and humanity in the oppressor, was simply a form of coercion available to people
who could not exert force in any other fashion, but he came very close to
doing so.65
Does this mean, as David Garrow has argued, that King's experience
with white resistance to his nonviolent campaigns cured him of the Utopian belief that returning love for hate would change the oppressor's
attitudes and make "the beloved community" possible? If we view Gandhian idealism and Niebuhrian Christian realism as two poles to which
King was attracted, but to differing degrees at different times, then it
would make sense to see him moving from an early phase in which he was
closer to Gandhi in his thinking to a later one in which experience had
increased his respect for Niebuhr's Christian realism.
Interpreters of King's thought have often pointed to the "Hegelian" or
mediative tendency in his thinking, his attraction to contrary points of
view and his efforts to reconcile them. In fact synthesizing Gandhi and
Niebuhr did not require dialectical gymnastics, because the GermanAmerican Protestant theologian and the Hindu lawyer turned resistance
Nonviolent Resistance
259
leader and holy man shared some basic assumptions that would set them
off from those who merely employed nonviolent means because violence
was not a safe or practical option. The key point on which they agreed
was on the need to act in the present so that in the future there was a
possibility of reconciliation with one's current oppressors or enemies.
Denning one's enemies as nonhuman or innately malicious and thereby
justifying their annihilation could never be morally defensible. Niebuhr
believed that "goodwill" might sometimes dictate violence, and Gandhi
conceded that violence could sometimes result from peaceful protests. To
both menand to Kingglorification of violence as an instrument of
group liberation or advantage was rejected not simply because it was
impractical under circumstances such as those that the African-American
minority faced in the United States, but also because it did not admit the
possibility that current oppressors and oppressed could ever be members
of the same harmonious community. The hope of humanizing and rehabilitating the oppressors because one would have to live with them in the
future did not inevitably require a total abstinence from violence and
certainly not from coercive methods of nonviolence. Circumstances and
patterns of behavior might have to be somewhat changed before any
sense of common humanity could be awakened. But clearly violence and
coercion had to be restrained and kept at a minimum; assassinations and
other terrorist acts directed at enemies signified a desire to make them
vanish forever. Resistance that showed by its restraint that it wished
members of the oppressive class, race, or ethnic group to change their
ways rather than disappear from the face of the earth offered the hope of
a peace that was not the peace of the grave.66
There was one sense in which King's cause was closer to Gandhi's than
to that of the white Christian moralistswhether realists like Niebuhr or
unconditional pacifists like Glenn Smiley and A. J. Mustewho came
from the Social Gospel tradition. The apparent contrast between King,
the integrationist, and Malcolm X, the black nationalist, has obscured the
fact that the southern civil rights movement was preeminently the expression of a group struggling collectively for its rights as a people and not
merely as individual Christian believers or American citizens. To the
considerable extent that the movement, and King as its most representative voice, found nonviolence to be the appropriate protest vehicle of a
distinctive people struggling for its liberation, it recapitulated the "national" or "ethnic" impulse of Gandhian struggles in India and South
Africa. Historian William Chafe has summed up very effectively the "national" roots of the movement, noting that "its strength was rooted in the
collective solidarity and vitality of black institutions" and that "it spoke
for a united community." Not often noted is the fact that SCLC, despite
its commitment to an integrated society, deviated from the practice of
older civil rights organizations by having an all-black rather than an interracial leadership. One need not deny the significance of the extrinsic
sources of nonviolent ideology that influenced King and the leadership of
260
SCLC to recognize that the readiness of large numbers of black southerners to accept the discipline of nonviolence derived in large part from the
fact that it was, in the words of Nathan Huggins, "consistent with a
traditional black Christian belief and a kind of stoic Christianity." Much
as Gandhism in India drew strength and cultural resonance from aspects
of traditional Hinduism, southern nonviolence drew heavily on AfricanAmerican folk Christianity and thus possessed a comparable ethnocultural authenticity.67
Whatever its precise rationale and however it may have changed over
time in the thinking of King and others, the insistence on nonviolent
methods that King first articulated at Montgomery contributed enormously to the success of the civil rights movement. Nonviolence did not
shame many southern white supremacists into accepting blacks as equals.
Court decisions banning segregated facilities, such as the one that ended
the Montgomery boycott, did not usually result in actual integration because whites often responded with their own boycott of desegregated
institutions. But the ultimate banning of Jim Crow by federal legislation
in 1964 would not have been possible if northern white racism had not
been neutralized. The belief that black protest was strictly nonviolent was
probably essential to the process of winning northern public sympathy
and ultimately government backing. Sociologist Inge Powell Bell explained this necessity as resulting from the lack of a public consensus
behind the ideal of racial equality: " . . . the Negro's claim to equality and
his right to use strong methods to attain it were so widely questioned by
the prevailing culture that even the members of the movement had to
legitimate their activity in their own eyes by denying the extent of the
coercion they used and by renouncing the right of self-defense." Whether
or riot Bell is right about self-doubts within the movement itself, it seems
likely that the northern white majority that came to favor federal action
against segregation found black assertiveness worthy of sympathy only
because it was framed by an aura of heroic nonviolence. Blacks, it
seemed, could be regarded as equals only if they showed themselves to be
morally superior to whites. Many northern whites also had a fear of black
violence stemming from stereotypical reactions to urban crime and disorder that the King's "Negro Gandhi" image must have helped to mollify.
From a purely public-relations perspective, therefore, the nonviolent imagery was extremely effective.68
Besides providing the movement with a nonviolent theory and practice,
the Montgomery bus boycott set a pattern for the broader civil rights
movement in several other respects. Despite the founding of SCLC in
1957, the movement did not become a single coordinated campaign with a
centralized organization at its head. Several organizations competed or
cooperated under the broad banner of a nonviolent movement for civil
rights. The NAACP continued to focus primarily on legal actions, but
some of its local chapters in the South participated in, or even initiated,
nonviolent direct action. The Student Non-violent Coordinating Commit-
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261
tee (SNCC), founded in 1960 to coordinate the student sit-ins that began
in Greensboro, North Carolina, was inspired by King and SCLC but
chose to be independent. In the first year or two of its existence, SNCC
proclaimed a somewhat more radical version of Gandhian nonviolent
resistance than King himself espoused. Under the spiritual guidance of a
charismatic divinity student, James Lawson, who had spent three years in
India and knew Gandhism first-hand, SNCC satyagrahis broadened the
agenda for nonviolent action beyond civil rights and viewed themselves as
involved in the early stages of a nonviolent revolution that would not only
bring legal and political equality to African-Americans but also radically
transform the American social and economic system as a whole. Finally, a
revitalized CORE brought its nonviolent experience and expertise to bear
in the Freedom Ride of 1961.69
But the movement's diversity and decentralization went beyond a pluralism of national organizations. The deepest sources of energy and activism were, as in Montgomery, local black communities marching under a
variety of organizational banners, the most important of which in a particular confrontation with white power might represent a purely local
entity. Sociologist Aldon Morris has highlighted the importance of these
"local movement centers." The supra-local organizations had a complicated and protean relationship to these centers. SCLC and SNCC began
as efforts to federate or coordinate these local movements. At a later
stage, they might be called in by local movements to add support to a
campaign already in progress. Finally, by 1963 and 1964, they were planning and attempting to carry out broader campaigns that might involve
entire states or focus on communities selected for strategic reasons in the
battle for national opinion. As in Montgomery, the black churches served
as the institutional base for the local movement centers.70
The central role of the black churches and the black clergy in the
nonviolent civil rights struggle was almost inevitable given the facts of
black political and social life in the South. No other high status figures or
community leaders had as much independence from the white power
structure as ministers. Unlike professors or teachers, for example, they
were not employed by white-dominated or -funded institutions. Unlike
doctors, lawyers, and businessmen they did not engage in activities subject to government control or regulation. Similarly, the churches were the
only permanent institutions, except for fraternal organizations, within
which southern African-Americans could expect to make collective decisions and govern themselves. Before they were movement centers, the
churches were community centers. As the movement gained force and
recruited supporters, it quickly became apparent that the only places mass
meetings could be held were the churches; no other halls were likely to be
at the disposal of black activists.
To say that the clergy and the churches were indispensible is not the
same as saying that they originated the movement. The southern black
churches did not have a history of social activism or militancy, at least not
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he politicized and empowered black Christianity. The Christian Millennium, the "beloved community," and the racially integrated American
democracy fused into a single vision among those who heard King's sermons and marched with him.72
If the religious sanction for nonviolence helped to account for the mass
appeal, high morale, and steadfastness of the movement, how can we
explain the comments of many of King's followers to the effect that his
absolute nonviolence went beyond what they could really accept? There is
no doubt that most southern African-Americans believed that they had a
right to self-defense and were uncomfortable with an absolute prohibition
of violence. Not fighting back when attacked by white racists was difficult
and could be justified only if it could be demonstrated that such behavior
was essential to the cause. But such an attitude did not preclude admiration for those who conformed to what Christians had to recognize was a
higher ethical standard than the one to which ordinary people could be
expected to adhere. It was part of King's charisma among black and white
Christians that he projected the image of exceptional and almost superhuman virtue, the kind of holiness or saintliness that is often an attribute of
religious and moral authority. In noting the problem caused by King's
personal repudiation of self-defense, critics have sometimes failed to note
two important factors that eased the tension in the movement. First, King
did not insist that everyone in the movement endorse his position on selfdefense or behave in a thoroughly nonviolent fashion; unless, of course,
they were taking part in a nonviolent action and had taken a special
pledge forswearing retaliation. More even than Gandhi, King refrained
from imposing his entire philosophy of life on his followers. Second,
disagreement on the abstract right to self-defense did not prevent a consensus behind the more fundamental proposition that for reasons of expediency and morality, aggressive violence was ruled out. Blacks could not
hope to win an out-and-out race war and mobilizing for one would undermine the hope of someday living in harmony and equality with the white
majority.73
The nonviolent civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s is rightly
regarded as one of the most successful reform movements in American
history. It achieved virtually all of its formal objectives; the SCLC's Birmingham campaign of 1963 and the massive March on Washington under
multiple sponsorship later the same year provided impetus for the Civil
Rights Act of 1964, which successfully outlawed the segregation of facilities open to the public. In 1965, the protests in Selma culminating in the
March to Montgomery led even more quickly and directly to the voting
rights legislation that effectively employed federal power to guarantee
that southern blacks had free acess to the ballot box. The barest recitation
of these well-known facts is sufficient to refute any unqualified assertion
that the movement failed. At a bare minimum, it sped up a course of
development that was making the United States into a modern state based
on equal citizenship under the law. The legal strategy of the NAACP
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265
increasingly aware of what had not been achieved, especially after the
failure of his 1966 campaign for open housing in Chicago, and he turned
during the last two years of his life to the advocacy of a form of democratic socialism and the organization of the poor for nonviolent action on
the basis of class or economic status rather than race.75
Comparing Nonviolent Struggles
Unlike the transit of people and ideas from the United States to South
Africa that characterized the spread of earlier ideologies such as Ethiopianism, Washingtonianism, and Garveyism, links between the American
and South African nonviolent resistance movements of the 1950s and '60s
were relatively tenuous. The South African Defiance Campaign of 1952
was not very much, if at all, in the thoughts of the Montgomery bus
boycotters and subsequent southern nonviolent protesters. Similarly the
American movement, once it emerged, does not seem to have had a
significant, discernable influence on the thinking of the anti-apartheid
movement in South Africa. Compared with the attention given earlier to
Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, or even W. E. B. Du Bois, King
and his actions did not cause a great stir in South Africa during his
lifetime. The popular black press, to the extent that censorship and repression allowed, did report occasionally on developments in the southern
segregation struggle, but a review of important ANC literature for the
period when King was active failed to yield references to him and the
American movement. Apparently the ANC had little inclination to identify itself publicly with the American civil rights movement.76
This relative lack of mutual awareness and cross-fertilization was partly
an accident of chronology. The Defiance Campaign occurred at a time
when African-American interest in militant nonviolence protest was at a
low ebb; in 1952 the March on Washington Movement was dead, and
CORE was barely surviving. By the time that the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56 showed the possibilities of nonviolent protest against Jim
Crow in the American South, South African interest in Gandhian methods was beginning to decline, as a result of the failure of the Defiance
Campaign and subsequent boycotts to make any dent in the armor of
apartheid. The most obvious result of nonviolent activism in South Africa, it seemed, was to provoke the government to greater repression and
discrimination. At the time when the first student sit-ins of 1960 signified
that the American civil rights movement was about to engage in nonviolent direct action on a broad front in the South, the African National
Congress, having been banned and driven underground, was in the process of repudiating its nonviolent past and joining with the Communist
party to carry out sabotage and prepare for armed conflict. Militant nonviolence was apparently demonstrating its utility in one case and its futility in the other. The American and South African struggles seem to have
diverged decisively. The coming of the rigorous and oppressive apartheid
266
regime at the same time that civil rights for blacks became a mainstream
political issue in the United States would have provided ample cause for
South African black intellectuals and protest leaders to break their habit
of making close analogies between their own struggle for rights and the
apparent progress of black Americans toward full equality.
The social ideologies of the two movements diverged during the 1950s
even more decisively than did their choice of means to be employed in the
struggle for liberation. In 1948, the ANC and the NAACP, then clearly
the organizational expressions of the black struggle for equality, were
headed by men of similar social and economic beliefs. Walter White,
executive secretary of the association, and the American-educated Dr.
Alfred B. Xuma, president-general of the congress, were both liberals
who believed that racial justice could be achieved through the gradual
reform of an essentially capitalistic society. A difference between them,
however, was that White would have no truck with Communists, whereas
Xuma was willing to cooperate with them in the pursuit of immediate
objectives. During the 1950s and early '60s, the NAACP remained an
anti-Communist liberal reform group. The direct-action groups that were
at the forefront of the southern struggle did not fully share the association's fear of Communist subversionone of King's closest advisers, Stanley Levison, had a party background, and SNCC at no point excluded
Communists from membership. But the dominant assumption within the
leadership of the nonviolent movement, at least up to 1963, was that its
goals were compatible with democratic capitalism and were indeed a
fulfillment of its promises of common citizenship and equal opportunity.
It was only when some activists concluded in 1964 and 1965 that substantive black equality would not be achieved through pending or enacted
civil rights legislation and required a fundamental transformation of the
American economic and social system that broadly radical perspectives
began to emerge, especially in SNCC.77
In South Africa, on the other hand, the triumph of the militant Youth
Leaguers in 1949 led to the decline of bourgeois-liberal ideas and influences in the ANC during the '50s. Although initially anti-Communist, the
Youth Leaguers, unlike the old-line conservatives in the ANC, were not
advocates of liberal capitalism; for the most part they favored "African
socialism," which meant trying to adapt the communal ethos of the precolonial African village to the economic life of a modern nation. The working alliance between the militant African nationalists and Communists
that was cemented during the 1950s was premised on Communist support
for African nationalism within South Africa and nationalist support for
the Communist or Soviet position in world affairs. Hence the ANC journal Liberation, condemned American intervention in Korea and in 1958
maintained that the United States had inherited from the European colonial powers the role of principal antagonist to the independence movements of Africa and Asia. Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolution, on the other hand, was applauded. Communist manipulation or an
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268
situation of southern blacks and black South Africans was the same
neither had the right to vote. Some forms of nonviolence are difficult to
reconcile with democratic theory because they seek to nullify decisions
made by a properly constituted majority. But in both of these instances
the protesters were denied the suffrage and were able to argue that their
employment of extraordinary means of exerting pressure was justified by
their lack of access to other forms of political expression. Since 1943 the
official aim of the African National Congress had been universal suffrage,
and in the United States gaining the right to vote was a central goal of the
civil rights struggle. John Lewis of SNCC recognized this commonality in
his speech at the March on Washington in 1963: "One man, one vote is
the African cry. It is ours, too." Attainment of equal suffrage would
presumably reduce, if not eliminate entirely, the need for nonviolent
direct action, especially in South Africa where blacks would then constitute a majority of the electorate. As Chief Lutuli put it in 1952, "NonViolent Passive Resistance" is "a most legitimate and humane political
pressure technique for a people denied all effective means of constitutional striving." Speaking at the Prayer Pilgrimage to Washington in 1957,
King made a litany of the phrase "Give us the ballot," and promised that
if it were done "we will no longer have to worry the federal government
about our basic rights. . . . We will no longer pleadwe will write the
proper laws on the books."80
The social and economic content of the democracy to be achieved
through a nonracial suffrage was not firmly established in either case. The
Congress Alliance's Freedom Charter of 1955 had indicated that government ownership of some basic industries would be an essential part of the
new order. In the United States, civil rights leaders such as A. Philip
Randolph and Bayard Rustin were longstanding advocates of democratic
socialism, and King had a strong inclination in that direction that surfaced
toward the end of his career. But, as in the South African Communist
conception of a two-stage revolution, the cause that required immediate
attention was political and civil emancipation, a sine qua non for further
progress.
The two movements were also comparable in that they recruited
most of their leadership from a similarly situated section of the black
communitywhat a sociologist might describe as the educated elite of a
subordinate color caste. Studies of the social composition of the ANC
through the 1950s have shown conclusively that the organization was
dominated by members of "an African bourgeoisie" or "petite bourgeoisie." Since membership in this group depended more on education and
professional qualifications than on wealth or relationship to the means of
production and since this class did not function as a middle or buffer
group within the larger society, the Marxian terminology is not entirely
adequate. Distinguished both by their prestigious and privileged position
within their own communities and by their lack of opportunity in the
white dominated core society, members of the African elite were pushed
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269
270
Nonviolent Resistance
271
272
draw independent churches into the struggle, but it did not have time to
accomplish much before it was banned. What King did that no South
African leader had a chance of doing was to fuse a black folk Christianity
that was his own heritage with the Gandhian conception of nonviolent
resistance to define a cause that stirred the souls of its followers and
disarmed the opposition of many whites. The more obviously conditional
and pragmatic civil disobedience that characterized the Defiance Campaign did not have the same resonance.86
Of course the resonance of the American movement was in part the
result of the extensive and usually sympathetic press coverage that it
received, and, by the '60s, of its exposure on national television. The
Defiance Campaign by contrast received relatively little attention from
the white South African press and the international media (which is one
reason why it did not figure more prominently in the thinking of AfricanAmerican passive resisters.) The possibly decisive effects of contrasting
press or media treatment suggests that differences in the nature of the
movements may tell us less about why they ultimately succeeded or failed
than we are likely to learn from examining their external circumstances
what they were up against.
The American protesters faced a divided, fragmented, and uncertain
governmental opposition. The most important division among whites that
the movement was able to exploit was between northerners who lacked a
regional commitment to legalized segregation and southerners who believed that Jim Crow was central to their culture. A key element in the
kind of success the movement was able to achieve stemmed directly from
its ability to get the federal government on its side and to utilize the U.S.
Constitution against the outmoded states'-rights philosophy of the southern segregationists. When King proclaimed that "civil disobedience to
local laws is civil obedience to national laws," he exploited a tactical
advantage the South African resisters did not possess; for they had no
alternative to a direct confrontation with centralized state power. South
African black protest leaders had long tried to drive a wedge between
British imperial and South African settler regimes, but the withdrawal of
British influence beginning as early as 1906 had rendered such hopes
illusory. For all practical purposes, South African whites in the 1950s were
monolithic in their defense of perpetual white domination. In the United
States it was of course federal intervention to overrule state practices of
segregation and disfranchisement in the southern states that brought an
end to Jim Crow. In South Africa there was no such power to which
protesters could appeal against apartheid.87
The geopolitical context of the cold war and decolonization of Africa
and Asia also cut in opposite ways, ultimately helping the American
movement and hindering the South African. In the United States, the
competition with the Soviet Union for the "hearts and minds" of Africans
and Asians, especially by the early '60s when several African nations had
achieved independence, made legalized segregation a serious interna-
Nonviolent Resistance
273
274
able; the full potential of nonviolent resistance may not been have been
exhausted, and the sabotage campaign that resulted from the decision
was, in the short run at least, a disastrous failure that devastated the
organization. Historian Tom Lodge has pointed to the relative success of
the last mass nonviolent action of the 1960sthe three-day stay-at-home
of 1961and has also noted that one ANC-affiliated organization that
was not banned immediately after the Sharpeville massacre of 1960the
South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU)had a capability for
politically motivated strikes that was never fully exploited. Clearly the
sabotage campaign that became the center of resistance activity in the
1960s exposed the ANC's top leadership to arrest and imprisonment. If
nonviolence had its inherent limitations as a resistance strategy under the
kind of conditions that prevailed in South Africa, it would be hard to
establish from its record of achievement in the 1960s and '70s that the
resort to violence, however justifiable in the abstract, represented a more
effective method of struggle. Of course the key historical actors, such as
Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo did not have the benefit of historical
hindsight and can scarcely be condemned for trying something different
when nonviolent resistance had obviously failed to move the regime and
had become more and more difficult to undertake. Furthermore, sabotage at least kept the ANC visible at a time when the government was
trying to destroy it. A revival of sabotage actions in the late '70s would be
instrumental in restoring the ANC to the forefront of the anti-apartheid
struggle.90
Martin Luther King, Jr., first showed a strong interest in South African
affairs in 1957 when he acted as chairman of an international "Declaration
of Conscience" against human rights violations under apartheid. In 1959,
he wrote to Chief Lutuli to express his admiration for the ANC president's courage and dignity and to forward a copy of Stride Toward Freedom. The Sharpeville massacre in 1960 and the awarding of the Nobel
Peace Prize to Lutuli for his espousal of nonviolent resistance heightened
King's interest and prompted him. to speak out more frequently against
apartheid. In a 1962 address to the NAACP national convention, King
invoked Lutuli to exemplify his doctrine of nonviolence: "If 1 lived in
South Africa today, I would join Chief Lithuli [sic] as he says to his
people, 'Break this law. Don't take the unjust pass system where you must
have passes. Take them and tear them up and throw them away.' "91
King made his fullest statement about South Africa in a speech given in
London, England, on December 7, 1964, as he was on route to receiving
his own Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo.
In our struggle for freedom and justice in the U.S., which has also been so
long and arduous, we feel a powerful sense of identification with those in the
far more deadly struggle for freedom in South Africa. We know how Africans there, and their friends of other races, strove for half a century to win
their freedom by non-violent methods, and we know how this non-violence
Nonviolent Resistance
275
was met by increasing violence from the state, increasing repression, culminating in the shootings of Sharpeville and all that has happened since. . . .
even in Mississippi we can organize to register Negro voters, we can speak to
the press, we can in short organize people in non-violent action. But in South
Africa even the mildest form of non-violent resistance meets with years of
punishment, and leaders over many years have been silenced and imprisoned. We can understand how in that situation people felt so desperate that
they turned to other methods, such as sabotage.92
Like Mandela two decades later, King was sensitive to the differences
between the two movements that would make nonviolence more feasible
and effective in the American case. But in the same speech he indicated a
way that nonviolence could be brought to bear against apartheid. "Our
responsibility presents us with a unique opportunity," he told his British
audience. "We can join in the one form of non-violent action that could
bring freedom and justice to South Africa; the action which African leaders have appealed for in a massive movement for economic sanctions."
Almost exactly one year after his London speech, King made another
strong appeal for sanctions against South Africa in an address on behalf of
the American Committee on Africa. "The international potential of nonviolence has never been employed," he said. "Non-violence has been
practiced within national borders in India, the U.S. and in regions of
Africa with spectacular success. The time has come fully to utilize nonviolence through a massive international boycott. . . ."93
King, who gave vigorous support to the sanctions movement for the
remaining few years of his life, did not of course live to see the antiapartheid movement come to fruition without unleashing the violent revolution that so many thought would be necessary for the overthrow of
official white supremacy. It is now possible to argue that the breakthrough
that came with the release of Nelson Mandela and the unbanning of the
ANC was as much, if not more, the result of international nonviolence as a
fruit of the strategy of violent resistance inaugurated by the congress in the
1960s. The apartheid regime was not in fact decisively defeated on the
battlefield or driven from power by a successful domestic insurrection. The
armed struggle of the ANC served to remind the world that blacks were
determined to be liberated from white oppression, but it was the moral
disapproval of much of humanity that destroyed the morale and selfconfidence of South Africa's ruling whites, and the increasingly effective
economic sanctions that persuaded its business community and those in
the government whom they influenced that apartheid had no future. Of
course those sanctions would have been lighter and the disapprobation less
sharp if the domestic resistance of the 1980s had not provoked the government into a final effort to use force to suppress dissent. But that domestic
resistance was primarily a matter of withdrawing cooperation from the
regime. Although violence occurredand to some extent was encouraged
by the ANC's call from exile to make the country "ungovernable" the
276
organized opposition within South Africa mounted a great domestic boycott to parallel the international one. The spirit of Gandhi, long since
repudiated by the ANC, was alive and well in the nonviolent United Democratic Front, the domestic movement that rallied behind the ANC's goal of
a nonracial democratic South Africa.94
In 1989, the Front defied government banning orders, and as the Mass
Democratic Movement mounted the first disciplined nonviolent actions
against specific segregation policies since 1960. Conspicuous as leaders of
the marches and sit-ins that brought petty apartheid to an end even before
the release of Nelson Mandela were clergymen such as Allan Boesak and
Desmond Tutu both of whom had been greatly influenced by King and the
church-based American Freedom Struggleand the demonstrations they
led featured the singing of African-American freedom songs. Nonviolence per se may not have been sufficient to liberate South Africa, but it is
no longer possible to deny that it played a major role in bringing that
nation to the brink of democracy. It would not be beyond the power of
historical analogy to describe the successful anti-apartheid movement as
Birmingham and Selma on a world scale.
7
'Black Man You Are on Your Own1
Black Power and
Black Consciousness
278
late 1960s in the United States, advocates of Black Power and black
nationalism challenged the integrationist ideology of the civil rights movement and gave new emphasis to African roots and identities. Shortly
thereafter, the South African Black Consciousness movement, borrowed
some of the new African-American language of black pride arid selfdetermination to question in a new way the ANC's insistent nonracialism.
Both movementsBlack Power and Black Consciousnesssought to encourage what Jean-Paul Sartre has called an "anti-racist racism"; they
accepted the racial identity constructed for them by white oppressors and
turned it against its creators by using it as a basis of solidarity and struggle
against white domination.1
The postwar Pan-African movement was inaugurated at a conference in
Manchester, England, in 1945. Unlike the earlier Pan-African conferences
in which Du Bois and other African-Americans had played key roles, this
one was dominated by representatives from Great Britain's African colonies, who anticipated that the winds of change in the British Empire would
blow in favor of self-government. The only African-American in attendence was Du Bois himself, who was an observer rather than an official
delegate. South Africa had two representatives, but they were chosen in an
irregular and haphazard way; their main qualification was that they happened to be in England at the right time. The conference did pass resolutions denouncing the discriminatory policies of the Smuts government, but
its deliberations attracted relatively little attention in South Africa. According to a leading historian of Pan-Africanism, the role of South Africa
in the postwar movement was "peripheral" and "diminishing."2
Nevertheless, the election of Kwame Nkrumah as prime minister of the
Gold Coast in 1951 and the subsequent struggle that led to the independence of Ghana in 1957 made black Americans and South Africans keenly
aware of the rise of a free Africa. The ANC cabled congratulations to
Nkrumah after his 1951 election victory and sent representatives to the
Pan-African conference that the president of the new nation of Ghana
hosted in 1958. Within the ANC a faction emerged that identified strongly
with Nkrumah and his brand of Pan-Africanism. In the United States, the
rise of Nkrumah did not have a dramatic effect on organizations and
ideologies; but the hero of West African independence was cheered by a
huge crowd in Harlem when he visited the United States in 1956, and
interviewers seeking to gauge the impact of recent events in Africa on
black Americans found a new sense of pride along with strong expectations that the regal image of Nkrumah would replace the negative stereotypes of blacks that were the stock-in-trade of white supremacists.3
The African-American organization that paid closest attention to Africa during the 1940s and early '50s was the Council on African Affairs, a
small group of black radicals that sought to influence American policy on
Africa. From its inception in 1937 the organization had taken a particular
interest in South Africa; its principal founder was Max Yergan, who had
spent seventeen years as a representative of the international YMCA in
279
South Africa. His South African experiences, which had included a significant behind-the-scenes involvement in African politics, had changed him
from a Christian liberal into a Marxist-Leninist; from its founding therefore the Council on African Affairs was resolutely leftist and pro-Soviet.
In 1939, Paul Robeson assumed the chairmanship of the council, and this
celebrated singer, actor, and friend of the Soviet Union became the personification of the organization in the eyes of the public as well as a
dominant force in its deliberations.4
In 1945, Du Bois invited Yergan and Robeson to participate in the PanAfrican conference, but neither did so; and the council took no official
notice of it, probably because the Communist party opposed the conference. (Its principal convenor, George Padmore, was known for his belief
that Communism and Pan-Africanism were incompatible ideologies.) It
was indicative of Du Bois' own growing sympathy for the Soviet side in the
Cold War that he continued to be deeply involved in the affairs of the
council. The rise of the militant anti-Communism and the witch-hunt atmosphere of the McCarthy era doomed the organization to a marginal position in African-American life. In 1948 Yergan underwent a strange conversion to fervent anti-Communism. This radical shift of allegiances of course
split the organization, and Robeson and Du Bois emerged victorious in the
ensuing struggle for control. The subsequent history of the council until its
dissolution in 1955 was similar to that of other organizations that had been
designated as "Communist fronts." It was in effect harassed out of existence and was replaced by the pacifist and interracial American Committee on Africa as the principal American expression of solidarity with African liberation. It is indicative of the weakness of black nationalism in the
United States during the 1950s that there was no significant group of black
intellectuals and activists who gave strong support to the non-Communist
Pan-Africanism represented by Nkrumah and Padmore.5
The expression "Black Power," which would become the slogan for a
black nationalist revival in the late '60s and early '70s, was first used in a
widely noticed way in 1954 when it served as the title of black novelist
Richard Wright's account of his trip to the Gold Coast to observe the
nationalist movement. But Wright was the antithesis of a cultural PanAfricanist who glorified African traditions. A confirmed modernist and
rationalist, Wright deprecated the customs and values that Africans inherited from their precolonial past. He defended the independence movement as necessary to the modernization of Africa rather than as the
revival of a glorious precolonial ethos, and his advice for Nkrumah and
other emerging African leaders was "the militarization of African life" to
root out the tribalism and superstition of "the fetish-ridden past." For
Wright, who spoke for a segment of the African-American intellectual
community, the emergence of "Black Power" in Africa or the United
States was to be welcomedbut only if it was the fruit of the progressive
scientific and technological spirit that had energized the West, and not the
reflection of a romantic belief in the African soul.6
280
In South Africa, on the other hand, a mystical and philosophical PanAfricanism was an indigenous growth as well as a way of thinking encouraged by the rise of independence movements elsewhere in Africa. Anton
Lembede, the founder of the ANC Youth League in 1944 and its guiding
spirit until his death in 1947 at the age of thirty-three, was a major exponent of the idea that Africanism represented an alternative to Europeanism in all of its aspects. For Lembede, the white man's civilization was
based on materialism, rationalism, and individualism, whereas the true
nature of the African was spiritualistic, intuitive, and communal. Rejecting Marxism as merely another Western materialistic philosophy, he called
upon Africans to overthrow Western intellectual and economic domination by returning to what he conceived of as the essential outlook of their
ancestors. Government would be based on the kind of localized consensus
that had ruled traditional African societies, and the economy would be
socialistic in the sense of community control of resources rather than as the
fulfillment of a mechanistic Western ideology. Under Lembede's influence
the Youth League initially adopted for its slogan the old Ethiopianist and
Garveyite slogan of "Africa for the Africans"; the first affirmation in its
1944 creed was that "We believe in the divine destiny of nations." The
nation in question was defined as all Africans "from the Mediterranean
Sea in the North to the Indian and Atlantic Oceans in the South" who were
expected to unify and "speak with one voice." It followed that "an African
must lead Africans" because "no foreigner can . . . truly and genuinely
interpret the African spirit which is unique and peculiar to Africans only."
Lembede made it clear that the whites and Indians resident in South Africa
were foreigners who should not presume to give leadership to the African
liberation struggle.7
Lembede's notion that each nation has "its own divine mission" was
influenced to some extent by his reading of European romantic nationalists, and at times he seemed to be propounding an Africanized version of
the message that Afrikaner nationalists had derived from some of the
same sources. But Lambede's cultural nationalism also had roots in the
lived experience of Africans who had been deprived of ancestral lands
and denied the right to follow traditional customs. It came ultimately
from the same deeply rooted impulses that had given rise to Ethiopianism, Garveyism, and Africanist millennialism earlier in the century.
His "imagined community" was not some specific historical nation that
was seeking to regain its lost independence but rather black Africa as a
whole. Africa, as "a black man's country," must be unified: "Out of its
heterogeneous tribes," he wrote in 1946, "there must emerge a homogeneous nation. The basis of national unity is the nationalistic feeling of
Africans, the feeling of being Africans irrespective of tribal connections,
social status, educational attainments, or economic class."8
Within the African National Congress, however, Lembede's thoroughgoing cultural nationalism never became the predominant ideology. The
active members of the Congress, including many of the more militant
281
younger adherents who belonged to the Youth League during the late
'40s, were too deeply embued with the cosmopolitanism and universalism
that they had learned in mission schools, at Fort Hare Native College, or
from their associations with white liberals and radicals to become wholehearted and consistent Africanists. The Youth League Manifesto of 1948
sought a middle ground between Lembede's Africanism and the universalist liberalism that had previously dominated the thinking of the ANC.
Instead of calling for a definitive choice between Africa and Europe, it
advocated "a policy of assimilating the best elements in European and
other civilisations and cultures on the basis of what is good and durable in
the African's own culture and civilisation." While affirming the Africanist
principle that "Africa was, has been and still is the Blackman's continent," it went on to reject as "extreme and revolutionary" the kind of
African nationalism that "centres around Marcus Garvey's slogan
'Africa for the Africans' "and "the cry 'hurl the Whiteman to the sea' "
in favor of a "moderate" version based on the realization that in South
Africa "the different racial groups have come to stay." The goal therefore
was not complete Africanization but rather "the abandonment of white
domination" and "the inauguration of a free society where racial oppression and persecution will be outlawed." Lembede's influence persisted,
however, in the manifesto's assertion that, as a practical matter, Africans
would have to go it alone, for they "will be wasting their time and deflecting their forces if they look up to Europeans either for inspiration or help
in their political struggle." Indians and Coloreds were also oppressed but
in ways different from Africans; they should therefore form their own
organizations which could then cooperate with the ANC "on common
issues."9
The manifesto of 1948 was especially clear on one pointthat there
should be no cooperation with Communists. "There are certain groups,"
it noted pointedly, "which seek to impose on our struggle cut and dried
formulae, which so far from clarifying the issues of our struggle, only
serve to obscure the fundamental fact that we are oppressed not as a class,
but as a people, as a Nation. Such wholesale importation of methods and
tactics which might have succeeded in other countries, like Europe, where
conditions were different, might harm the cause of our people's freedom. . . . " Commenting on the manifesto in a personal letter written in
October 1949, Nelson Mandela, then national secretary of the Youth
League, wrote that "The ground plan and cornerstone of our policy is
African nationalism which is the exact antithesis of Communism." But
after the Communist party of South Africa was banned in 1950 because of
the danger that it was thought to pose for the apartheid regime, those
Youth leaguers who had moved into the ANC leadership repudiated their
earlier anti-Communism and cemented the alliance with the underground
Communist party and its sympathizerswhite and blackthat would
become a permanent ANC policy. Besides calculating that "the enemy of
my enemy is my friend," emerging leaders such as Nelson Mandela, Wai-
282
ter Sisulu, and Oliver Tambo concluded that the United States, which was
then supporting the South African government as a cold war ally, was now
the principal international enemy of liberation movements, while the Soviet Union, whatever one thought of its form of government, was ready
and able to aid in struggles against Western imperial domination. It was
those former Youth Leaguers who retained a strong distrust of Communists (especially white ones) who became the Pan-Africanist dissidents of
the 1950s.10
During the early 1950s, the ANC pursued a strategy of alliances with
organizations representing the other South African racial groups. As we
have already seen, the Defiance Campaign of 1952 was undertaken under
the joint sponsorship of the ANC arid the South African Indian Congress.
In 1953, Professor Z. K. Matthews, a leading African intellectual and
longtime ANC stalwart, proposed in a speech to the congress's Cape
provincial conference that a "CONGRESS OF THE PEOPLE, representing all the people of this country irrespective of race or colour" be convened "to draw up a FREEDOM CHARTER for the DEMOCRATIC
SOUTH AFRICA OF THE FUTURE." Shortly thereafter the Congress
of Democrats, a small organization composed of white leftists, and the
South African Coloured People's Organization were formed to join with
the ANC and the SAIC in the "Congress Alliance." The Congress of the
People, in which each of the congresses was equally represented, was held
in June 1955, and out of it came the "Freedom Charter," the document
that remains to this day the fundamental statement of the ANC's philosophy. Besides calling for political democracy and a partial socialization of
the economy, it asserted in the first clause of the preamble that "South
Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white"a clear repudiation
of the Africanist view that South Africa was similar in all essential respects
to the black nations that were struggling for independence elsewhere in
the continent.11
The name given in the 1950s to the new doctrine of inter-group relations was "multi-racialism," and the Freedom Charter appeared to advocate a policy of ethnic federation rather than a straightforward form of
majoritarian democracy. "ALL NATIONAL GROUPS SHALL HAVE
EQUAL RIGHTS," the charter proclaimed, which meant "There shall
be equal status in the bodies of state, in the courts and in the schools for
all national groups and races." It was the multi-racial aspect of the charter
that aroused the opposition of the minority that called itself "PanAfricanist" and eventually broke away to form a separate organization.
The Pan-Africanists objected strenuously to the equality of representation with the African majority that was accorded to the three smaller
racial groups in the Congress Alliance and also apparently in the "democratic" government of the future. This denial of special claims of the
Bantu-speaking Africans as the original inhabitants of most of South
Africa and the overwhelming majority of the current population seemed
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to them perversely unfair, and they looked for a conspiratorial explanation. The villains of the piece, they concluded, were white Communists.
It did appear, in fact, that the Freedom Charter itself was written
mainly by white members of the Congress of Democrats and was not even
seen by ANC president Albert Lutuli before its presentation to the Congress of the Peoplealthough it was later formally approved without
amendment by a special conference of the ANC. The socio-economic
program of the charternationalization of banks and "monopoly industry," equal access to land, and the establishment of a welfare statewas
in fact social-democratic rather than Communist in character; there was
little in it that the British Labor party or the French Socialist party would
have found objectionable. As advocates of a form of democratic socialism
themselves, the Africanists were in no position to condemn the charter as
the blueprint for a Communist South Africa. But it was their conviction
that Communists concealed their true motives until they gained control of
a movement or organization that could then be used to further the interests of the Soviet Union. Such an interpretation of the origins of the
Freedom Charter could be found in an influential book published in 1956
by George Padmore, one of the leaders of the international Pan-African
movement and a major influence on Pan-Africanist thinking in South
Africa.12
It was, however, as whites as well as Communists or fellow travelers
that the Congress of Democrats had allegedly conspired to highjack the
African liberation struggle. Beneath universalist ideologies, the PanAfricanists believed, were deeper loyalties determined by racial or ethnic
origin. The Pan-Africanists also distrusted Indian leaders, some of whom
were also Communists, for similar reasons; it was believed that they were
maneuvering for ethnic advantage in a post-apartheid South Africa rather
than simply enlisting in the struggle for majority rule. Many Africanists
believed that whites and Indians were alien "settlers" in South Africa and
not part of the nation that was seeking self-determination. (Coloreds, in
light of their partially indigenous ancestry, might be included.) The harsh
attacks on radical Europeans and Indians as untrustworthy outsiders in
which some Pan-Africanist engaged led their opponents in the Congress
Alliance to accuse them of racism.13
Robert Sobukwe, the most astute and articulate of Pan-Africanists, had
a compelling and effective response to the charge that he and his followers were guilty of a black version of the racism that was the bane of South
Africa. A man of undeniable humanity and integrity who was chosen to
head the breakaway Pan-Africanist Congress in 1959, Sobukwe described
the Pan-Africanists as the only true nonracialists or anti-racists because
they alone denied the significance of the color distinctions that the regime
had made the basis of apartheid. The Congress Alliance, he contended,
had actually endorsed and perpetuated these white-imposed racial divisions by organizing itself as a federation of ethnically exclusive organiza-
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tion. If race was thus denned as the unavoidable legacy of racism, it was
indeed difficult to deny its power.15
The Charterists and Pan-Africanists of the 1950s also differed on the
historical and sociological meaning of South Africa. The Congress Alliance was premised on what Robert Sobukwe derided as "the fashionable
doctrine of South African exceptionalism." According to this view of
South African society, it differed in kind from the emerging nations in the
rest of Africa, because of its substantial and permanent non-African minority populations. It might be justified for Tanzania, Ghana, or Nigeria
to disregard its few European or Asian residents and conceive of its nationalism as a pure reflection of African culture and personality, but South
Africa was a multi-racial and multi-cultural society, and its nationalism
should derive from common political and economic concerns rather than
from the cultural identity of a single group, albeit a majority. The PanAfricanists, on the other hand, envisioned South Africa as essentially no
different from other African societies. "Our contention," said Sobukwe at
the inaugural convention of the PAC in 1959, "is that South Africa is an
integral part of the indivisible whole that is Afrika. She cannot solve her
problems in isolation from and with utter disregard of the rest of the
continent." Since the aim of the PAC was the ultimate incorporation of
South Africa into a United States of Africa, the existence of a white
minority of less than one-sixth of the population in one corner of the
continent would ultimately pale into insignificance.16
It would, however, be misleading to assume that a pure form of one or
the other of these competing ideologies was wholeheartedly and unambiguously embraced by all the leaders and members of the rival organizations of 1959-60. A close examination of the rhetoric of both the ANC
and the PAC reveals that each incorporated attitudes associated with the
other, if only in a muted or covert fashion. The ambivalence of the ANC is
evident in the fact that it remained a racially exclusive organization that
did not in fact admit whites, Indians, or Coloreds directly into its ranks but
required them to organize separately. An implict Africanism persisted
among ANC supporters to the extent that they noted with satisfaction that
an all-African organization was the flagship in the anti-apartheid fleet and
would in the end have the strongest voice in deciding South Africa's
future. PAC ambivalence was more obvious; it indulged freely in antiwhite rhetoric while protesting loudly and strenuously against charges that
its policy of racial mobilization meant that it had embraced a racially based
nationalism that would deny meaningful citizenship in a future South
African democracy to members of other races.
Perhaps the difference between the two organizations that had the
greatest effect on the kind of support that they received from blacks was
how militant and ready for bold action each was perceived as being. The
top leadership of both organizations came from the same relatively welleducated middle class circles. But the PAC was led by less-experienced or
-established figures who thought the ANC was insufficiently militant and
286
If we conceive of black nationalism in the way that George Padmore, Robert Sobukwe, and Kwame Nkrumah didas an idealist Pan-Africanism
that is neutral in the cold war and carries on a struggle against imperialism
that is independent of the one sponsored by the Soviet Unionwe would
be hard pressed to find much of it in the United States in the 1950s and
early '60s. Nkrumah may have inspired black pride, but he did not find
many close students and followers of his philosophy. George Padmore's
seminal book of 1956 arguing for the incompatibility of Communism and
Pan-Africanism was not even published in the United States until 1971.
287
Du Bois and Robeson, for the most part, ignored Pan-Africanist thought
that was not also pro-Soviet, and their preeminence among black radicals
discouraged debates over the nature of black liberation similar to the ones
taking place in South Africa. But black nationalism in a special American
sense was undergoing a revival among some of the least articulate and
most desperate segments of African-American societythe inhabitants
of northern urban ghettos. This reawakening would sew some of the seeds
for the multi-faceted resurgence of African-American nationalism that
took place in the late 1960s.
Before the 1950s, the desire for a separate African-American nationhood was oftenas in the case of the Garvey movementclosely associated with hopes for the redemption or liberation of Africa and the advocacy of at least some black American emigration to the mother continent.
But at times the desire for independent nationhood, or at least its cultural
and psychological equivalent, was more loosely tied to Africa and envisioned autonomy as being achieved within the existing territory of the
United States or elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere. Disillusionment
with the United States and the prospects that it offered for the equality
and dignity of black people, rather than strong attraction to Africa,
was the common thread running through the entire history of AfricanAmerican separatism. In 1947, W. E. B. Du Bois cogently described the
essential context of American black nationalism in all periods. "The socalled Negro group . . . while it is in no sense absolutely set off physically
from its fellow Americans, has nevertheless a strong, hereditary cultural
unity born of slavery, common suffering, prolonged proscription, and
curtailment of political and civil rights. . . . Prolonged policies of segregation and discrimination have involuntarily welded the mass almost into a
nation within a nation." What is striking about this description of the
essence of African-American nationalismcoming as it did from the father of Pan-Africanism himselfis that it makes no direct mention of
Africa. It also suggests how hopes of ending segregation and discrimination could have led many black leaders to identify with a reformed, racially egalitarian America. (Du Bois, however, would have insisted that
this commitment to the American Dream should not require a loss of
national or ethnic consciousness.) Belief that this project was unrealizable
because of the strength of white racism, on the other hand, has led to
separatismthe desire for secession from the United States, if not in a
literal political and territorial sense, at least in a cultural and psychological one.19
In the late 1950s Americans began to notice a new manifestation of this
broader nationalist impulsethe growing and increasingly visible Black
Muslim movement. The Nation of Islam was founded in Detroit in 1930
by a shadowy figure who went under various names, one of which was W,
D. Fard. Fard claimed to be the reincarnation of Noble Drew Ali, the
recently deceased leader of an earlier Islamic cult called Moorish Science
that had established several temples in northern cities between 1913 and
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1925. After Fard mysteriously disappeared, Elijah Poole, who took the
name of Elijah Muhammed, became the leader of the cult and the "messenger" sent by Allah to redeem African-Americans from Christianity
and white domination. The Nation grew slowly during the 1930s and
actually declined during the war years when Elijah Muhammed was imprisoned for draft resistance. But beginning in 1945 the movement began
to grow steadily and during the late 1950s this growth accelerated markedly. The number of temples doubled from 15 in 1955 to 30 in 1959, giving
the Nation a presence in 28 cities in 15 states. In that year a television
documentary viewed by millions of Americans represented the nation as a
black "hate group."20
Elijah Muhammed preached that blacks were the original human beings
created in the image of God, whereas whites were "devils" who had been
created later by a mad scientist and given power to rule the world for 6000
yearsan era that would soon come to an end. Islam was the black man's
religion (Elijah Muhammed claimed that "so-called Negroes" were really
"Asiatics" and not racially distinct from Arabs), and Christianity was the
white man's faith that had been taught to blacks in order to keep them
subservient and exploitable. Divine retribution would, in the near future,
be visited on the white devils, and blacks would be restored to their
rightful place as masters of the world. In expectation of this apocalypse,
blacks should separate themselves from whites and endeavor to establish
an independent nation of their own, either by emigrating to Africa or by
gaining sovereignty over a portion of the United States (usually described
as several southern states). It reflected the vagueness of the Nation's sense
of Africa and its meaning for black Americans that it was the prospect of a
separate nation within North America that was most often proclaimed as
the movement's political objective. It seems likely, however, that the
minds of the faithful were more apt to dwell on the prospect of divine
intervention to come than on strategies for the achievement of a separate
nationhood in the here and now. According to E. U. Essien-Udom's classic study of 1962, "The Nation of Islam is not a political movement.
Although black nationalism is ideally a separatist type of political ideology, the Nation of Islam is in fact apolitical. It is also nonrevolutionary."21
The Nation, like other successful messianic or millenarian religious
movements, created a separate world for its converts that isolated and
protected them from the pain of confronting the world outside. For the
mostly lower-class urban blacks who were attracted to the movement, it
offered relief from poverty, desperation, painful feelings of worthlessness
or inferiority, and the physical dangers of drug addiction or criminality.
Significantly, its greatest appeal was to people in northern ghettos who
would gain little from the achievement of the civil rights movement's goal
of ending legal segregation in the southern states. Successful in turning
convicts and drug addicts into sober, law-abiding citizens, the Nation
posed no direct danger to the American racial or economic status quo.
The anger of its adherents against whites was not usually channeled into
289
confrontational action but found its outlet mainly in ritualistic denunciations and eschatological fantasies. The news reports suggesting that the
Muslims were about to go to war against white America were not the
result of a real threat to the social order; they stemmed rather from the
guilt and anxiety that the civil rights movement was producing among
whites in the late '50s and early '60s. The usual subtext of reports on "the
hate that hate produced" was that something needed to be done quickly
to address legitimate African-American grievances or a race war might
occur. The civil rights movement capitalized on this fear by offering itself
as an antidote to the spread of the kind of violence-prone black racism
that the Nation allegedly represented.
But the angry racial separatism of the Muslims had the potentiality of
being redirected from the realm of millenarian expectation and moral rehabilitation (where Elijah Muhammed tried to keep it) into the sphere of political confrontation and conflict that the nonviolent civil rights movement
had created. The pioneer of this refocusing of nationalist sentiments was of
course Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little. His celebrated autobiography
one of the great classics of African-American literaturetells a story too
well known to require repeating beyond simply recalling that he had risen
from a life of petty crime and penal servitude to become the charismatic
minister of the Nation's New York temple and that it was mainly as a result
of his efforts that the Nation experienced its phenomenal growth during the
late '50s and early '60s. A brilliant orator and commanding personality, he
brought Elijah Muhammed's message concerning the sins of white America and the proximity of divine retribution to a black audience that went far
beyond the ranks of potential converts to a religious cult that demanded a
total commitment and strict discipline from its members. When Malcolm
spoke, listeners found that they did not need to accept the literal truth of his
fantastic account of human history but could appreciate it instead as appropriate allegorical or symbolic rendering of the black experience.22
Malcolm's resignation from the Nation of Islam in 1964 stemmed in
part from the tension in his relationship with Elijah Muhammed that
developed when Malcolm discovered that his leader practiced the marital
infidelity that he had strictly forbidden to his followers. Also threatening
his position in the movement was Elijah Muhammed's growing jealousy
at the fact that Malcolm's fame was beginning to exceed his own. But
added to these personal antagonisms was the issue of whether Muslims
should engage in political action. Malcolm was impressed by the activism
of the civil rights movement, although he noisily repudiated its goal of
integration; in 1962 and '63, he attempted on several occasions to get
permission from the Messenger of Allah to participate in demonstrations
or other actions aimed at increasing black employment opportunities in
New York and New Jersey. Permission was invariably denied, but Malcolm and the members of the New York temple sometimes violated these
instructions and surreptitiously lent their support to the battle for economic opportunity in the urban North. Malcolm hovered on the fringes of
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292
Americans were a minority of all impoverished Americans, this redefinition of the problem opened the possibility of coalitions with other disadvantaged groups, such as Indians, Mexican-Americans, Appalachian
whites, and segments of the white urban working class. It was also an
approach that seemed for a time to have some support from the federal
government. In his Howard University speech of June 1965, President
Lyndon Johnson announced that the logical next step in the pursuit of
racial equality was to go beyond equal rights and begin to work for the
equalization of life chances by waging a "war on poverty." Veteran black
leaders such as Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph proposed a New
Deal-type coalition between blacks, white liberals, and organized labor to
push for vastly increased government expenditures for social programs
designed to provide all Americans, but especially blacks, with a decent
standard of living.
But the war on poverty and the politics of interracial social democracy
were casualties of the Vietnam War and the rightward drift of American
politics leading to the strong showing of George Wallace and the election
of Richard Nixon in 1968. Martin Luther King, Jr., shared the view that
the economics of poverty and privilege had to be the new focus of the
freedom struggle, but he also appreciated the depths of American racism
and lacked the faith of Rustin and Randolph in the willingness of white
liberals and labor unions to support a redistribution of wealth that would
primarily benefit blacks. Unlike them, he also realized that the Vietnam
War was a disaster for those hoping for racial justice in the United States
and that stopping it was a precondition for progressive domestic action.
His last national campaign, which he did not live to see come to fruition,
was an interracial poor people's march on Washington. Unlike most, other
black leaders of the late '60s whether militant and revolutionary or
moderate and reformistKing never surrendered his belief that nonviolent direct action could play a major role in the struggle for a just and
decent society. But now it was the poor of all races and not the AfricanAmerican community as such that he hoped to lead in nonviolent protest
against economic inequality.26
It was the reaction of young black civil rights activists in the South against
two of King's cardinal principlesinterracialism and nonviolencethat
provided the immediate context for the emergence of the Black Power
slogan. For many of them, the failure of the Democratic party in its 1964
convention to seat the insurgent black delegation from Mississippi tarnished the image of mainstream white liberalism beyond repair. In both
SNCC and CORE, the spirit of "black and white together" that had characterized both organizations before 1963 had given way by 1965 to a growing
feeling that the presence of whites in the movement was inhibiting to the
growth of black initiative. Even those whites who volunteered for hazardous duty in the South were criticized for their reluctance to accept black
leadership and their inablity to relate successfully to black communities.
This increasing distrust of left-leaning whites did not derive so much from
293
relations with veterans of early civil rights campaigns like Bob Zellner of
SNCC or Jim Peck of CORE as from the tension between black organizers
and the hundreds of inexperienced volunteers who had flooded into Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964. White students from the Ivy
League and rural southern black activists did not in fact have much in
common and were bound to misunderstand each other a good deal of the
time. By 1966 racial exclusiveness was the basic policy of both SNCC and
CORE. Even stronger emotions surrounded the issue of nonviolence versus self-defense. The brutal beatings and killings of civil rights workers who
had followed King's rules for nonviolent engagement and whose pleas for
federal protection had gone unanswered had created a deep reservoir of
frustration and anger.27
Preparations for a civil rights march in Mississippi in June 1966 to
protest the shooting of solitary marcher James Meredith a few days
earlierbrought into the open the long-simmering conflicts between
King and SCLC, and SNCC, now led by Stokely Carmichael. Carmichael,
a charismatic orator and agitator, had been born in the West Indies, grew
up in New York City, where he attended an integrated elite high school,
and emerged as a leader of militant students at Howard University in the
early stages of the civil rights movement. The immediate issues in Mississippi were whether whites should be allowed to participate in the march
and whether a black self-defense organization, the Deacons for Defense,
should provide armed protection. The compromise hammered out authorized the inclusion of both the Deacons and white sympathizers, although
relatively few whites actually showed up. On the march itself a rhetorical
struggle developed between King's gospel of racial reconciliation and
Carmichael's stress on polarization and conflict. Finally in Greenwood on
June 16, Carmichael, fresh from being held by the police, announced that
he was fed up with going to jail and tired of asking whites for freedom.
"What we gonna start saying we want now is 'black power.' " He then
shouted "Black Power" several times and the audience shouted it back.
The context reveals that the original implications of Black Power were
self-defense against racist violence and an unwillingness to continue petitioning whites for equality. From now on, blacks would confront power
with power rather than offer love in return for hate. According to one
Black Power advocate: "What King apparently did not foresee was that
his strategy of confrontation would also unveil white barbarism to such a
degree that young blacks would reject his philosophy of nonviolence."28
The panic over the Black Power slogan in the white press in 1966 was
due primarily to its association with violence, which made it seem part of
the same spirit that was erupting in the ghettos. But, initially at least, the
only violence that was being sanctioned was self-defense against racist
assaults. The secondary association with racial exclusiveness was particularly shocking to white liberals who had identified strongly with the ideal
of integration. Charges of black racism compelled African-Americans to
make the argument, originally put forth by Malcolm X, that blacks could
294
not be racist because they lacked the power and inclination to dominate
whites the way that whites continued to dominate blacks. Here differing
definitions of racismfor liberal whites it was a prejudiced attitude and
for Black Power advocates it was a hierarchical social ordermade communication difficult. But the essence of Black Power was neither violence
nor the exclusion of whites; it was rather self-determination for black
people. According to Julius Lester, it meant simply that "Black people
would control their own lives, destinies, communities. They would no
longer allow white people to call them ugly," Blacks were tired of having
whites define who they were and what, they might become, especially
since white "friends of the Negro" failed to deliver on their promises of
racial justice and at times used their egalitarian rhetoric to cover up
substantive inequalities.29
During the racial polarization that look place in the years between 1966
and 1968, liberal whites tended to withdraw their active support from the
struggle for racial equality, either because they believed that the goal
already had been achieved or because they saw no place for themselves in
the redefined freedom struggle. At the same time, blacks from a variety
of ideological backgrounds were endorsing Black Power in the basic sense
of community control and self-determination. Shortly after the events in
Mississippi, a prominent group of black clergymen took out an ad in the
New York Times endorsing the idea that blacks must develop "group
power," because they had been oppressed as a group and not as individuals arid had as much right as other American racial or ethnic groups to
unify and exercise power on behalf of their own community. In 1967, a
national Black Power conference was held at which a range of black
organizations, including the NAACP and the National Urban League,
were represented. Its principal convener, the Reverend Nathan. Wright,
Jr., described the purpose of Black Power as going beyond civil rights and
getting black people to address themselves to "the far more basic business
of the development by black people for the growth in self-sufficiency and
self-respect of black people."30
These early formulations of the Black Power program did not directly
challenge the status quo of American society. They did not in fact sanction either a total and permanent separation of the races or revolutionary
action to liberate blacks from oppression. They merely substituted the
idea of corporate or group integration for the individualist version that
had previously prevailed. According to Nathan Wright: "The Thrust of
Black Power is toward freeing the latent power of Negroes to enrich the
life of the whole nation." What, blacks were doing, he argued, was following the example of other ethnic groups: "The basic American tradition is
for each rising ethnic group to devise arid execute its own plan for economic, political, and civic freedom and development. So it must be with
the Black people of our land." Individualist integration, according to
Wright, had not been a goal of other groups, and it need not be for
blacks.31
295
To be sure, Wright was one of the least militant of the major Black
Power advocates of 1966 and '67; he was essentially a conservative whose
thinking recalled at times the accommodationist "self-help" tradition of
Booker T. Washington. But those who used a more confrontational rhetoric often ended up advocating a reformist ethnic pluralism similar to
Wright's. According to the book that in 1967 was taken as the definitive
statement of the new racial philosophy, Black Power by Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, "The Concept of Black Power rests on a
fundamental premise: Before a group can enter the open society, it must
first close ranks." The aim was "bargaining strength in a pluralistic society," and the model to be followed was the way that white ethnic groups
such as the Jews, Irish, and Italians had been able to exert political power
by voting as a bloc.32
E!ut another argument in the book had more radical implications the
analogy made in the first chapter between the situation of AfricanAmericans and that of colonized peoples of Africa and Asia. Here the
authors likened the internal form of colonialism that characterized blackwhite relations in the United States to the oppressive system of white
domination that prevailed in South Africa and Rhodesia. If, in fact,
"black people in this country form a colony, and it is not in the interest of
the colonial power to liberate them," what reason was there to expect
that the mobilization of blacks as a pressure group within the American
political and economic system would result in their incorporation on a
basis of equality? In his speeches and writings of 1966 and '67, Stokely
Carmichaelthe chairman of SNCC and the most visible of those who
explained Black Powerwas in the process of shifting his allegiance from
the reformist model of ethnic mobilization in a pluralist society to a
revolutionary model of national liberation from colonialism. "Traditionally for each new ethnic group," he had told the readers of the Massachusetts Review in September 1966, "the route to social and political integration in America's pluralistic society has been through the organization of
their own institutions with which to represent their communal needs
within the larger society. This is simply what the advocates of Black
Power are saying." But in a speech in London in July 1967, he sounded a
different note:
Black Power to us means that black people see themselves as part of a new
force, sometimes called the Third World: that we see our struggle as closely
related to liberation struggles around the world. We must hook up with these
struggles. We must, for example, ask ourselves: when black people in Africa
begin to storm Johannesburg, what will be the reaction of the United
States? . . . Black people in the United States have the responsibility to
oppose, certainly to neutralize, white America's efforts.33
In London Carmichael stopped short of calling for an AfricanAmerican insurrection in support of the international anti-imperialist
struggle. By 1968, however, he was openly advocating revolution and
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as black capitalism in the election of 1968. Black politicians in the Democratic party generally denned the concept as a mobilization of black voters
behind stronger civil rights legislation and liberal reform. Perhaps the
most articulate and thoughtful of those who defined Black Power in this
way was Shirley Chisholm of New York, the first black woman to serve in
Congress and in 1972 the first African-American to mount a serious campaign for the presidential nomination of one of the major parties.36
As the radical '60s gave way to the relatively conservative '70s, it became clear that Black Power had made a significant difference in the
attitudes of black America. Especially evident was a significant increase
in racial pride and self-esteem. The slogan "Black is beautiful" summed
up the positive affirmation of black identity that had replaced the widespread sense of ugliness and inferiority that psychologists in the 1950s had
found to be widespread among blacks. There was also an increasing willingness to identify with African culture; African-Americans in the late
'60s and early '70s wore African clothes, adopted African hairstyles, and
began to celebrate African holidays. A coherent African-American cultural ethnicity was in the process of being constructed out of a combination of African and specifically African-American traditions. But in political and social terms what had triumphed was a validation of black ethnic
solidarity and action within the context of a liberal pluralist society and
not the radical alienation from the American political and social system
that had characterized the black nationalism of a Stokely Carmichael, a
Huey Newton, a James Foreman, or an Imamu Baraka.?7
By killing the dream of integration into a color-blind society, Black
Power delivered a body blow to the Utopian view of America as a land
where a new kind of citizen would emerge free of inherited ethnic or
racial associationsthe essential human being existing outside of history
and culture. But as other groups imitated the black example of identity
politics and the assertion of group interest as the highest good, giving rise
to the notion that rather than a "melting pot," the nation was a "mosaic"
of fixed and permanently distinguishable parts, it became an open question whether an inclusive American identity and common civic consciousness was still possible. In the 1970s and '80s the broadly humanistic and
cosmopolitan vision of America put forth by black integrationist leaders
such as Martin Luther King, Jr., A. Philip Randolph, and Bayard Rustin
in the 1950s and '60s showed few signs of life. The demise of the dream of
"black and white together" was historically explicable and arguably the
product of a more realistic assessment of national capacities, but it was
nevertheless a tragic failure of American civic culture to realize its highest
aspirations.
Black Consciousness in South Africa
298
the entire history of black protest in South Africa. But close examination
of the circumstances of its growth and the content of its ideology shows
that the African-American influences were less important than local conditions and indigenous currents of thought. The reading of Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, Malcolm X, James Cone, and other American
Black Power advocates was clearly a stimulus, but the adoption of
African-American concepts and slogans was selective rather than wholesale, and the ideas that were appropriated were often reinterpreted to fit
South African conditions.
Black Consciousness rose to fill the vacuum created by the banning of
the ANC and PAC in 1960, but only after a hiatus of nearly a decade that
saw little organized and visible political activity among Africans. The
focus of attention in the early '60s was on the futile efforts of the outlawed
organizations to maintain a presence within the country through sabotage
or other acts of violence against the regime. The repression that succeeded in making the Congresses virtually invisible within South Africa
after 1964 meant that they existed thereafter mainly as emigre organizations seeking to organize guerrilla forces in neighboring African states
and to rally international support against the apartheid regime. Inside
South Africa, the voices raised in public against the government's racist
policies during the mid to late 1960s tended to be those of white dissidents. The ANC's white auxiliary, the Congress of Democrats, was
banned under the Suppression of Communism Act in 1962, and most of
the white radicals who had been conspicuously associated with it were
placed under personal banning orders throughout the decade. Consequently, white dissent came primarily from self-styled liberals who favored eliminating racial discrimination and thereby transforming South
Africa into a Western-type democracy (rather than into a socialist society
of either the Marxist or Africanist type).38
The clearest organizational manifestation of this impulse was the Liberal party, founded in 1953 under the leadership of the novelist Alan
Paton, among others. The Liberal party welcomed black members and
was the only interracial party in South Africa until 1968 when it disbanded
rather than comply with a new law prohibiting racially mixed political
organizations. The principal plank in its platform after 1954 was universal
suffrage, but there was virtually no support among white South Africans
for creating a black-majority electorate, and the Liberals failed to elect a
single member to parliament. At the time of Sharpeville, a few young
Liberals gave up on constitutional reform and endorsed direct action.
Liberals in Cape Town cooperated with the Pan-Africanist Congress in
organizing protest demonstrations immediately after the massacre, and
during the early '60s, the sabotage campaign of Umkhoto we Sizwe was
supplemented by that of the African Resistance Movement, a secret organization of young white Liberals and others committed to the violent
overthrow of the Afrikaner Nationalist government. The only white ever
executed for resistance to apartheid was the Liberal saboteur Frederick
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John Harris, who was put to death in 1964 after a bomb he had planted
killed one person. Another militant Liberal, Patrick Duncan, resigned
from the party in 1963 in protest against its official policy of nonviolence
and, after fleeing abroad, was accepted as the first white member of the
PAC. The odd symbiosis between the radical wing of the Liberal party
and the Pan-Africanists was due primarily to a shared anti-Communisrn
and a belief that the ANC was under the influence of the Soviet Union.39
Electoral failure, internal dissension, and the banning of its leaders put
the Liberal party on the path to oblivion even before its forced dissolution
in 1968. Besides being hobbled and ultimately destroyed by repression, it
simply failed to attract enough white support to become a force in European politics. It actually fared better among Africans, who eventually
constituted a majority of the membership, but their numbers remained
insufficient to influence the liberation movement. (Its most conspicuous black supporter was Jordan Ngubane, a prominent intellectual and
founder of the Youth League who had never retreated from the league's
original anti-Communism.) The liberal ideology nevertheless took root
on the campuses of the English-speaking white universities and came to
predominate in the principal political organization on these campuses, the
National Union of South African Students (NUSAS). Like the Liberal
party, NUSAS was opposed to racial segregation and sought to involve
blacks in its own activities. Although the organization was not permitted
to organize on the campuses of the "tribal colleges" established under
apartheid, it recruited among the small and diminishing number of Africans allowed to attend the predominantly white universities through loopholes in the separate education laws and also solicited representatives
from the African colleges to attend its conventions as guests or observers.
After some of its members were implicated in the African Resistance
Movement in 1964, NUSAS became less militant in its opposition to the
regime and devoted itself thereafter mainly to fighting against state interference with academic freedom. But it retained its commitment to a
racially integrated society and its own policy of interracial membership
stood as symbolic protest against the pattern of total separation that the
government was imposing with increasing rigor.40
At the 1967 annual NUSAS conference at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, the black delegates were forced by the host institution to eat
separately from whites and to occupy separate living quarters far from the
conference venue. Among those subjected to this treatment was Steve
Biko, a student at a medical school for nonwhites established under the
auspices of the University of Natal in Durban. At the July 1968 conference Biko provoked a searching discussion of whether there was any point
in Africans continuing their affiliation with NUSAS in the light of their
minority status and second-class treatment. He pressed the issue again at
a meeting of the University Christian Movement (UCM), another interracial organization that also met during the winter vacation period of 1968.
The UCM, which was allowed to organize formally on black campuses
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302
pened to be. Even people who were of mostly white ancestry and appearance could be as black as any other African-American provided that they
were part of the group that had been historically classified and treated as
such (in accordance with the extraordinary American custom of considering anyone of known black ancestry to be black) and provided also that
they currently identified themselves with the struggle for black liberation
and self-determination. Whether or riot the new American affirmation of
a non-genetic blackness influenced the racial thinking of Black Consciousness, there can be no doubt that both movements innovated significantly
in making race consciousness more a matter of existential choice and
political awareness than of biological determination.45
Another way that Black Consciousness departed from the Pan-Africanist
precedent and drew closer to American black nationalism of the 1960s was
in its emphasis on psychological rehabilitation as a precondition for political resistance. The Pan-Africanists had believed that the masses were fully
conscious of the injustices perpetrated upon them because of their race and
that the anger that they naturally felt made them ready at any time for a
massive uprising against white domination. Leaders needed only to provide the spark in the form of some dramatic act of confrontation and
provocation. But the fact that Sharpeville had led to massive repression
and political quiescence rather than to a general uprising of Africans had
cast doubt on their belief in revolutionary spontaneity. For the advocates of
Black Consciousness, the state of affairs in post-Sharpeville South Africa
revealed that blacks were held in subjugation not merely by force but by
their own sense of impotence and inferiority. Consequently the primary
task of their movement was to "conscienti/e" black people, which meant
giving them a sense of pride or a belief in their own strength and worthiness. Only in this way could the psychologically debilitating effects of white
domination be overcome. EC's rejection of alliances with white liberals
and radicals was based on a conviction that the whites in such relationships
tended to assume authority and behave paternalistically, thus preventing
blacks from overcoming their inferiority feelings. Malcolm X's distinction
between forced segregation and voluntary "separation" was central to the
South African Black Consciousness movement, and the slogan "Black is
beautiful" had as much resonance for its adherents as it did for American
Black Power advocates.46
But the idealist view that consciousness precedes praxis was more
clearly and insistently affirmed in South Africa than in the United
Statesat least in the early and classic formulations of the Black Consciousness philosophy. The very difference in the names generally assigned to the two movements suggests a muted philosophical difference.
In the United States, the growth of black pride and a positive sense of
identity was not divorced conceptually in most formulations from the
actual exercise of black power. Awareness of a positive black identity was
indeed a precondition for community organization and the application of
political pressure, but consciousness was expected to be translated quickly
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into forceful action, and the exercise of power in turn was supposed to be
essential for the full development of consciousness.
The most obvious reason that consciousness was divorced more sharply
from power in early Black Consciousness thinking was the significant
difference in the political rights and economic conditions of blacks in the
United States and South Africa. Only people who could vote could plan
to exercise power at the polls, and it was futile to think about a separate
black economy if blacks had virtually no resources they could mobilize.
Furthermore, the South African government was willing to tolerate the
public expression of BC ideology only so long as it remained convinced
that the movement was a purely intellectual and cultural one that was not
actually proposing any kind of political resistance. After the Black People's Convention was established in December 1971 as a broad-based
"political" expression of Black Consciousness (an initiative that Steve
Biko initially opposed because it would expose the movement to persecution), the government concluded that the rhetoric of "conscientization"
was a cover for seditious action and that BC ideology could act as a
stimulus to acts of defiance and insurrection. Eight BC leaders, including
Biko himself, were banned in early 1973. The following year the leading
BC activists in Durban were arrested for treason after they defied a
government ban on holding a rally to celebrate the victory of FRELIMO
over the Portuguese in Mozambique.47
But the idea that consciousness was itself a kind of power had an
intellectual basis as well as a tactical one. One of the features of Black
Consciousness that distinguishes it from the mainstream of the AfricanAmerican movement was the extent to which religious beliefs and associations shaped its ideology and mode of operation. Virtually all of its leaders were practicing Christians with affiliations to one or another of the
mainstream interracial churches, and the movement's institutional origins
were as much in churches and religious associations as in in student organizations. It will be recalled that the United Christian Movement was the
cradle of SASO and that the principal white patronage and financial
support that the movement received was from church groups both in
South Africa and abroad. Of particular importance in aiding and abetting
the movement was the resolutely anti-apartheid Christian Institute, which
was led by radical white clergymen. Anti-racist white ministers such as the
Methodist Basil Moore, the renegade Dutch Reformed predikant Beyers
Naude, and Anglican priest Aelred Stubbs were strong supporters and
major facilitators of the Black Consciousness movement. The ban on
cooperation with white liberals did not extend to fearless men of God who
saw BC as a religious movement designed to purge the Church of the sin
of white supremacy. A large number of black clergymen, mostly within
the "historic" churches originally established by European missionaries,
became prominent advocates of Black Consciousness; they predominated
in the leadership of the "adult" wing of the movementthe Black People's Convention.
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305
intellectual stimulus; he established direct connections with black theologians in South Africa, contributing papers to their symposia and commenting on their work.49
Cone and the theologians of Black Consciousness in South Africa
agreed that white missionaries had preached a form of Christianity that
had helped to sustain racist and colonialist oppression. It had not only
helped to justify slavery and imperialism but had also taught black converts that their own cultural traditions were worthless and that resistance
against white domination was sinful. But this was not the fault of the
Gospel itself; it had resulted rather from an interpretation of it that served
the selfish interests and sinful appetites of Europeans. Blacks had the
right and the need to interpret the Christian religion in the light of their
own situation as an oppressed people. Passages in the New Testament that
presented Jesus as the champion of the poor and oppressed were the basis
for a theology of liberation. Christ himself was black, if not literally at
least in the sense that blackness had come to symbolize the state of being
oppressed that He had been sent to overcome. In Cone's formulation of
1970, "blackness is an ontological symbol and a visible reality which best
describes what oppression means in America." For the South African
black theologians, it stood for oppression in their country in an even more
obvious sense. To affirm blackness as a positive identity in either society
was to be freed in spirit and committed to a struggle for liberation from
physical oppression. As the South African theologian Manas Buthelezi
put it: "As long as somebody says to you, You are black, you are black,'
blackness as a concept remains a symbol of oppression and something that
conjures up feelings of inferiority. But when the black man himself says, 'I
am black, I am black', blackness assumes a different meaning altogether.
It then becomes a symbol of liberation and self-articulation."50
It would be wrong to suppose, however, that those in South Africa who
were stimulated by Cone to pursue the project of creating a distinctive
black theology ended up in total agreement with his forthright apology for
Black Power. In the end Cone was too extreme in his separatist rejection
of whites to meet the needs of most African churchmen, who, despite
their endorsement of Black Consciousness, remained in denominations
that had both white and black communicants. Once again, the locus of
religious involvement in African political activity was the "historic" or
mission churches rather than in the African independent churches. What
Black Consciousness implied for these churches was that their black majorities should have a proportionate role in the leadership or hierarchy. It
could not mean that these churches should be exclusively black or that
black clergymen who condemned apartheid were ready to stop cooperating with the small number of white ministers and priests who were doing
the same. The proponents of Black Theology showed an interest in the
independent churches and expected to learn something from them about
how traditional African religion could be reconciled with Christianity, but
they found it difficult to make common cause with the leaders of these
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308
the other thing which causes that: The American Black man is, essentially you
know, he is accepted; he is truly American in many ways. You know he has
lived there for a long time. All he is saying is that "Man I am an American, but
you are not allowing me to live like an American here in America." He has
roots with Africa . . . but he does not reject his Americanness.55
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310
organizations did not plan or direct the uprising, but they could take some
credit for instilling the mood of black self-assertion that produced it.
Nevertheless, the historical fate of the Black Consciousness ideology
after 1977 defied predictions made at the time that its way of thinking
would soon predominate in the black resistance movement, eclipsing the
nonracial nationalism of the ANC. An estimated 60 percent of the student
rebels who fled the country after the uprising were recruited into the
guerrilla army that the ANC was organizing in friendly African states.
The Pan-Africanist Congress, which as we have seen was ideologically
closer to Black Consciousness, was in no position to receive them in large
numbers. Disabled by factionalism and incompetent leadership and without the reliable supply of arms that the ANC received from the Soviet
Union and the nonmilitary help it obtained from Western supportersthe
PAC was virtually defunct by the late '70s. While young recruits in the
guerrilla army camps were being indoctrinated in the ANC view of the
world by veteran emigres, the Black Consciousness activists who were
arrested and sent to Robben Island were being reeducated by Nelson
Mandela, Walther Sisulu, Gavin Mbeki, and other ANC leaders who had
been incarcerated there since the early 1960s. Hence it was the ANC and
not organizations that tried to carry on in the Black Consciousness tradition that derived the most benefit from the "conscientization" of blacks
that was occurring in the late 1970s.59
Within South Africa, many of the staunchest supporters of Black Consciousness reorganized in 1978 to form the Azanian People's Organization
(AZAPO). But from the outset, the new group revealed that it was
deviating in significant ways from the original BC ideology. Like those
Black Power advocates in the United States who had first defined their
oppression in exclusively racial terms and then had come to appreciate the
class dimension of black inequality, AZAPO defined apartheid as not
merely a form of racial oppression but also as a form of class domination.
What needed to be overthrown was "racial capitalism," and the agent of
revolution would not be blacks as a national or racial group but the black
working class as the victim of both race arid class oppression. Whites,
including white workers (who were not true proletarians but rather part of
the exploiting group) would have no part in the liberation struggle. Hence
the main thread of continuity between the PAC, Black Consciousness,
and AZAPO was the exclusion of whites from the resistance movement
and by implication from charter membership in the post-apartheid South
African nation.60
It is beyond the scope of this study to provide a detailed account and
full analysis of the events of the tumultuous 1980s in South Africa. But a
brief summary of the general pattern of black resistance and ideological
development can convey a sense of the fate of Black Consciousness. The
main source of domestic resistance to the apartheid regime beginning in
1983 was the United Democratic Front (UDF), a coalition of organizations African, Colored, Indian, and whitethat was originally estab-
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313
coexist in the ANC with those whose nonracialism came from ideological
convictionChristian, Marxist, or liberal democratic. Just as the question of whether South Africa would become a welfare state based on
capitalist relations of production or a genuinely socialist society after
liberation could be postponed until after white rule was overthrown, so
the question of a national culture for South Africa could be deferred until
the people were able to decide it for themselves. What may have been
crucial to the ANC's victory in the struggle for popular support was less
the specific character of its ideology than the fact that its primary commitment to political democracy meant that it could accommodate a greater
range of ideological styles or preferences than its more rigid and intolerant rivals were able to do.
Comparing Black Power and Black Consciousness
Black Power and Black Consciousness had a great deal in common, beyond the sharing of slogans like "Black is beautiful" and "Before a group
can enter [or create] the open society, it must first close ranks." Perhaps
the most durable contribution of both was to instill in many black people a
new sense of self-worth and competence that made traditional patterns of
racial deference impossible to maintain. The rejection of white leadership
and significant participation in the freedom struggle that the two movements shared had more lasting effects in the United States, but the contrast must be qualified by the acknowledgment that a minority has reason
to feel more anxious about its ability to determine its own destiny than a
majority; it can much more easily find itself the instrument of some other
interest than its own. Clearly the ideal of total assimilation into a middleclass society and culture that reflected only European or Euro-American
values and historical experiences was now recognized as a confession of
cultural inferiority and was no longer an acceptable ambition for blacks in
either society. Those in the United States who had been lured by the
image of a melting pot of races and nationalities and those in South Africa
who had been persuaded by missionaries that Africans could be reborn as
white Christians with dark skins had learned that proposing to whiten
black peopleliterally or figurativelywas a genteel way of advocating
genocide.
On a more practical level, the emphasis on community organization
and self-help that was common to both movements had empowering consequences. In South Africa, the communal resistance of the '80s built to
some extent on the community organizing of the '70s, much of which was
associated with the Black Consciousness movement. In the United States,
the election of African-Americans in substantial and increasing numbers
to federal, state, and local offices was the result not simply of voting rights
legislation but also of Black Power's call for mobilizing the vote behind
black candidates and causes. In 1986 American Black Power asserted
itself on behalf of South African liberation when the political clout of
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church-sponsored organizations as a vehicle for its message was that religious expression was less closely monitored than other forms. In the
United States, the more charismatic or notorious Black Power advocates
had many forums; they were interviewed on television and radio, wrote
articles for prominent liberal journals, had their utterances reported
(sometimes accurately) in daily newspapers, and published their books
with major commercial publishers.
Steve Biko put his finger on the basic difference between the situations
faced by the two movements. One embodiedin its most characteristic
and durable expressionsthe desire of a minority to be included, but on
its own terms, within a society that it could never dominate. The other
reflected the ambition of a majority to rule in its native land. This difference seems so fundamental that the degree of similarity that our inquiry
has revealed may seem surprising. But numbers are not the whole story.
Blacks in South Africa were even more of a minority from the standpoint
of how much power they were officially allowed to exercise than AfricanAmericans. But their potential power was of course much greater. The
sense of that potential power, however long it might take to be realized,
may be part of the reason why representative expressions of black protest
in South Africa since the 1960s have generally been delivered in a calmer
and less angry tone of voice than the equivalent expressions of AfricanAmerican grievance. Black Americans have been haunted by the inherent limits of their potential power as a minority community and have at
times found it very difficult to conceive of true self-determination ever
occurring. The persistence of white racism and black disadvantage has
aroused anger, but the difficulty of finding a credible strategy to achieve
liberation has bred frustration, if not despair. The fear that the most
determined and courageous resistance to white supremacy might prove
unavailing helps to account for the affirmation in African-American writing of what Huey Newton called "revolutionary suicide," the willingness
to die bravely and defiantly in a struggle that has no guarantee of success.
The most famous expression of this sentiment is Claude McKay's poem of
1919, "If We Must Die":
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead.68
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ment of the 1970s was unwilling to allow blacks to acquire the kind of
bargaining power that might actually bring genuine reform and had the
strength and ruthlessness to prevent it. BC ideology was eclipsed by
Charterism, not only because of the strategic advantages of the ANC that
have already been described, but also because the international pressure
that the liberation struggle needed to help make the government receptive to basic change could not readily be brought to bear on behalf of a
movement that seemed to be espousing black chauvinism. An inestimable
advantage that the ANC possessed in its competition with the PAC and
Black Consciousness groups for international support was that its official
ideology transcended race in the name of a common humanity.
The success of the ANC of the 1980s in appealing to "the conscience of
the world," which included the United States and the nations of Western
Europe as the prime sources of economic leverage over South Africa,
raises the difficult and sensitive issue of whether African-American leaders and intellectuals since the late '60s have hurt the cause of black liberation by generally assuming that there was no such thing as a white American conscience to be appealed to and that the only path to racial justice is
through an ethnocentric exercise of power and pressure. The question
becomes inescapable if we contrast the relatively self-contained AfricanAmerican strugglewith its reluctance since the late '60s to cooperate
closely with sympathetic members of other raceswith the way that the
main liberation movement in South Africa has opened its doors to the full
participation of all of South Africa's racial groups. Of course the significant difference in the nature of the two movements must be acknowledged. The African National Congress has been the government-inwaiting of a multi-racial nation with a black majority, while the NAACP
and the Congressional Black Caucus are lobbying or exerting political
pressure on behalf of a minority. Clearly there is a need for the straightforward representation of blacks as a group with particular needs and interests. But why is there no broad-based, anti-racist political movement in
the United States, a multi-cultural alliance of all people who believe in
racial equality and multi-cultural democracy? There are such anti-racist
organizations in an increasingly multi-racial EuropeSOS RACISME in
France is one example. Perhaps the level of distrust among racial groups
in the United States has reached the point that no one group would be
able to take the initiative because they would be viewed by the others as
pursuing an agenda of their own. If while progressives took the lead, the
fear of white paternalism and cultural hegemony would undoubtedly inhibit the involvement of people of color, especially blacks. The cultural
left's image of America as a racial and ethnic mosaic seems to encourage
groups to firm up their boundaries and perfect their interior designs
rather than seek a way to make each fragment, part of a larger pattern that
reveals a vision of liberty and justice for all -that, in other words, reconstructs fundamental American values until they provide a clear mandate
for racial and cultural democracy.
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318
Epilogue
The victory of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress in the
1994 elections was the culmination of a remarkable series of events, beginning with Mandela's release from prison in 1990, that has brought an end
to legalized white domination in South Africa. In the light of this enormous breakthrough, and taking into account the foregoing history of
black liberation struggles in the United States and South Africa, what
useful comparisons can be made between the current situation and future
prospects of blacks in the two societies?
One possible assessment would celebrate the victory over apartheid in
the 1990s as roughly equivalent to the triumph of the American civil rights
movement over legalized segregation and de facto disfranchisement thirty
years earlier, the operative assumption being that the American precedent was similarly successful. The result in both cases, according to this
optimistic evaluation, was an end to official racism and the removal of the
principal barriers to the achievement of a color-blind democratic society,
From this vantage point, the essential struggles are over, and white racism
is, if not quite dead, at least deprived of most of its power.
It would be difficult, however, to sell this triumphalist analogy to some
of the most acute observers of black-white relations in the United States
in the 1990s. A pessimistic view of black progress since the '50s has taken
hold, not only among black intellectuals, but also among some of the most
respected white students of the American race relations. The eminent
sociologist Andrew Hacker concluded his bleak portrayal of the condition
of African-Americans in 1992 by noting that "legal slavery may be in the
past, but segregation and subordination have been allowed to persist." He
concludes his horrendous account of black deprivation and disillusionment without offering even a glimmer of hope that the situation will
improve: "A huge racial chasm remains, and there are few signs that the
coming century will see it closed."1
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320
Epilogue
In the light of this growing pessimism about the prospects for racial
equality in the United States, a quite different comparative analysis suggests itself. South African blacks, it could be argued, have achieved something that has eluded African-Americans and will probably continue to
elude them. Despite the problems that remain, black South Africans have
thrown off the shackles of white domination and have achieved genuine
self-determination, while African-Americans remain at the mercy of a
white majority that remains racistnot in the old-fashioned sense of
openly advocating the legal subordination of blacks, but in the new sense
of denying the palpable fact that blacks as a group suffer from real disadvantages in American society and will continue to do so unless radical
action is taken. When Nelson Mandela celebrated his electoral victory, he
consciously echoed Martin Luther King, Jr., by exclaiming "Free at
Last!" But King never used this cry, as Mandela did, to celebrate a victory
already won. On the contrary, it was what he hoped blacks would be able
to shout when, at some time in the near or distant future, they actually
realized their dream of freedom and equality. If in fact this dream has
permanently faded, a contrast between black South African winners and
African-American losers can be made that would justify the disillusionment of many blacks with their prospects for equality in American society
and encourage racial separatism and polarization.
This reversal of the comparative perspective of a few years agowhen
it was possible to argue that. African-American progress might be a model
for black South Africans, but one that would be very difficult for them to
emulatemay turn out. to be valid. Yet there is a third way of making the
comparison that, like the first, stresses similitude more than stark contrast
but nevertheless acknowledges that racism is not dead or toothless. It is
somewhat more hopeful in regard to African-American prospects than
the winners-and-losers comparison but a bit less sanguine about the future
of South Africa. It might well be the case, advocates of this view could
maintain with some cogency, that the two liberation struggles are at a
similar stagesignificant progress has been made but major challenges
still remain. Consequently they can learn important lessons from each
other about how to proceed in the future.
There are a number of similarities between post-Jim Crow black America and post-apartheid black South Africa. Legalized segregation has
been abolished for all time, just as racial slavery was in the previous
century. The right of blacks to vote and hold office has been assured. But
in both cases whites retain sufficient power to prevent either society from
moving decisively and quickly beyond legal and political rights for all to
the achievement of social and economic equality. This lack of substantive
equality is most obvious in the case of the United States, where whites
dominate the electorate, as well as the economy, and "the politics of race"
is a fact of life pushing government social policy in a conservative direction. But it is also true in South Africa, despite the black-majority electorate. The negotiated settlement that led to the end of apartheid and the
Epilogue
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322
Epilogue
(to use historian Manning Marable's phrase) is possible within the next
few years, however unlikely it may seem today.3 Nelson Mandela's unconquerable spirit during his twenty-seven years of imprisonment shows the
value, in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, of faith in ultimate freedom. White anti-racists looking for a role to play might also take
inspiration from the career of those Europeans in the ANC who suffered
imprisonment, exile, and the loss of family members or even their own
extremities from letter bombs sent by government assassins, but never
gave up the struggle and are now part of the government. What would
have to be accomplished by a Third Reconstruction would not be entirely
dissimilar from the challenge faced by the new government in South
Africa. Some creative combination of affirmative action, government
anti-poverty programs, and the encouragement of black self-help would
be needed if a significant narrowing of the economic gap between whites
and blacks is to be achieved.4
The black struggle in the United States might also learn something
from the ideological and tactical flexibility that the ANC has demonstrated. "All-in" movements that incorporate as many shades of black
opinion as possible can involve more people and exert more pressure
than divisive, sectarian movements.5 But, as the experience of the ANC
also demonstrates, there is a difficult choice that sometimes has to be
made between accommodating the full range of black opinion and cooperating with anti-racist whites. Some principled anti-racists have recently
accused the NAACP of putting black solidarity ahead of the struggle
against all forms of bigotry and discrimination in the United States. Inviting Louis Farrakhan of the black racialist and anti-Semitic Nation of
Islam to a summit meeting of black leaders in 1994 was not the same as
endorsing his views, but it did give him a measure of legitimacy and was
deeply troubling to many of the association's white and integrationminded supporters. It might conceivably be contrasted with the decision
made during the 1980s by the ANC and its domestic surrogate, the
United Democratic Front, to give interracialism or "nonracialism" a
higher priority than black unity. Besides welcoming the participation of
anti-apartheid whites, the African leadership reached out to the Indian
and Colored communities but made no concessions to Pan-Africanist and
Black Consciousness hardliners who categorically rejected cooperation
and reconciliation with whites. The mainstream liberation movement proclaimed that South Africa was a multi-racial and multi-ethnic society that
could be fused into a single nation on the basis of shared democratic
values.
Martin Luther King, Jr., articulated a similar vision of American nationality as the fulfillment of the democratic ideals expressed in principle by
Jefferson and Lincoln but, more often than not, flagrantly denied when
African-Americans laid claim to equa! lights. King's dream of a future
United States as "a beloved community" from which racism and racial
exclusiveness had been banished is in danger of being lost in an era of
Epilogue
323
Notes
Introduction
1. George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American
and South African History (New York, 1981), xx.
2. For a theoretical conception of ideology consistent with the one employed in
this study, see Martin Seliger, Ideology and Politics (London, 1979). According to Seliger, "An ideology is a group of beliefs and disbeliefs (rejections)
expressed in value sentences, appeal sentences and explanatory sentences"
that is "designed to serve on a relatively permanent basis a group of people to
justify in reliance on moral norms and modicum of factual evidence and selfconsciously rational coherence the legitimacy of the implements and technical
prescriptions which are to ensure concerted action for the preservation, reform, destruction, or reconstruction of a given order" (120).
3. See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Quentin Hoare
and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, eds. and trans. (New York, 1971), 3-23. As will
become evident, however, my "organic intellectuals" may speak for a Weberian "ethnic status group" as well as for a social class in the Marxian or
Gramscian sense.
4. Significant works on connections between black America and black South
Africa include J. Mutero Chirenje, Ethiopianism and Afro-Americans in Southern Africa, 1883-1916 (Baton Rouge, 1987); James Campbell, "Our Fathers,
Our Children: A History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the
United States and South Africa" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1989); William Manning Marable, "African Nationalist: The Life of John Langalibele
Dube" (Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland, 1976); Robert B. Edgar, ed., An
African American in South Africa: The Travel Notes on Ralph J. Bunche, 28
September, 19371 January, 1938 (Athens, Ohio, 1992); Donald B. Coplan, In
Township Tonight! South Africa's Black City Music and Theatre (Johannesburg,
1985); Tim Couzens, "Moralizing Leisure Time: The Transatlantic Connection
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326
327
shows that even the Radical Republicans had difficulty defending black suffrage as a matter of natural or inalienable right.
5. On the history of the suffrage and popular politics in the United States, see
Chilton Williamson, American Suffrage: From Property to Democracy (Princeton, 1960), and Michael McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865-1928 (New York, 1988).
6. See Brock, American Crisis, 288, 297-98.
7. Philip S. Foner, ed., The Life and Writing of Frederick Douglass, vol. 4 (New
York, 1955), 149.
8. Among the more valuable studies that shed light on black loss of voting rights
in the South are William Gillette, Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869-1879
(Baton Rouge, 1979), and J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 18801910 (New Haven, 1974).
9. J. L. McCracken, The Cape Parliament, 1854-1910 (Oxford, 1967). The quotation from Porter is on p. 65. See also Stanley Trapido, "White Conflict and
Non-white Participation in the Politics of the Cape of Good Hope" (Ph.D.
diss., University of London, 1969).
10. See note 9 above; Stanley Trapido, " 'The Friends of the Natives': Merchants,
Peasants, and the Political and Ideological Structure of Liberalism in the
Cape, 1854-1910," in Shula Marks and Anthony Atmore, eds., Economy and
Society in Pre-industrial South Africa (London, 1980), 247-74.
11. On the origins of the slogan, see Fredrickson, White Supremacy, 185.
12. On the situation of northern free blacks, see Leon F. Litwack, North of
Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (Chicago, 1961), and Leonard P. Curry, The Free Black in Urban America (Chicago, 1981). On southern
"free Negroes," see Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the
Antebellum South (New York, 1972).
13. Insight into the political ideas and actions of the free black elite can be
derived from Benjamin Quarles, The Black Abolitionists (New York, 1969);
Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, They Who Would Be Free: Blacks'
Search for Freedom, 1830-1861 (New York, 1974); Sterling Stuckey, ed., The
Ideological Origins of Black Nationalism (Boston, 1972); and David E. Swift,
Black Prophets of Justice: Activist Clergy Before the Civil War (Baton Rouge,
1989). On Douglass's prewar career and ideas, see especially William S.
McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York, 1991), 91-182, and Martin, The
Mind of Frederick Douglass, passim.
14. Joel Schor, Henry Highland Garnet: A Voice of Black Radicalism in the
Nineteenth Century (Westport, Conn., 1977), 142-44, 161. Garnet's American nationalism was most strongly affirmed in his The Past and Present
Condition and the Destiny of the Negro Race (1848); see Howard Brotz, ed.,
Negro Social and Political Thought, 1850-1920: Representative Texts (New
York, 1966), 199-200.
15. Pease and Pease, They Who Would Be Free, 288-93. For a general discussion of predominance of the "vanguard" style of black leadership, see John
Brown Childs, Leadership, Conflict, and Cooperation in Afro-American Social Thought (Philadelphia, 1989).
16. For a juxtaposition of the viewpoints of Delany and Whipper, see Stuckey,
ed., Ideological Origins, 195-236, and 252-60 (quote from Delany on 196-
328
97). See also Martin R. Delany, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and
Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (Philadelphia, 1852).
17. Leonard I. Sweet, Black Images of America, 1784-1870 (New York, 1976),
172 and passim. On the duality of black and American nationalism in Frederick Douglass, see David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass' Civil War: Keeping
Faith in Jubilee (Baton Rouge, 1989), 10121. Douglass wavered briefly in his
opposition to black expatriation when he endorsed some emigration to Haiti
on the eve of the Civil War.
18. Sweet, Black Images, 101. On the self-help ideology among antebellum free
blacks, see especially Frederick Cooper, "Elevating the Race: The Social
Thought of Black Leaders, 1827-1850," American Quarterly 24 (1972): 60425. Martin Delany was one of the few who dissented from the view that
condition and not color was the problem. Unlike most other black abolitionists, he tended to see racism as deeply rooted and probably ineradicable.
19. See George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate
on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (rev. ed., Middletown,
Conn., 1987), 33-42, and The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on
Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality (Middletown, Conn., 1988), esp. 21635.
20. Blight, Frederick Douglass' Civil War, 116-20; Cyril E. Griffith, The African
Dream: Martin R. Delany and the Emergence of Pan-African Thought (University Park, Pa., 1975), 83-88; Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War
(Boston, 1953).
21. See Thomas Holt, Black Over White: Negro Political Leadership in South
Carolina During Reconstruction (Urbana, 1977), 73-77 and passim, and John
Hope Franklin, Reconstruction: After the Civil War (Chicago, 1961), 86-92.
22. Foner, ed., Life and Writings, 4: 31,164 (quote); Martin, The Mind of Douglass, 71-72.
23. Some of the works that have influenced my view of southern Reconstruction,
in addition to those already cited, are Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's
Unfinished Revolution (New York, 1988); Michael Perman, The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869-1879 (Chapel Hill, 1984); Mark W. Summers, Railroads, Reconstruction, and the Gospel of Prosperity: Aid Under the
Radical Republicans (Princeton, 1984); and Eric Anderson and Alfred A.
Moss, eds., The Facts of Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of John Hope
Franklin (Baton Rouge, 1991). For a perceptive analysis of the problematic
circumstances of black politicians, see W. McKee Evans, Ballots and Fence
Rails: Reconstruction on the Lower Cape Fear (New York, 1974), 155-57.
24. On the Republican party and blacks after Reconstruction, see Vincent P. De
Santis, Republicans Face the Southern QuestionThe New Departure Years,
1877-1897 (Baltimore, 1959), and Stanley Hirshon, Farewell to the Bloody
Shirt: Northern Republicans and the Southern Negro, 1877-1893 (Bloomington, 1962). For an example of how black loyalty to the Republican party
encouraged equal accommodations laws in the North, see David A. Gerber,
Black Ohio and the Color Line, 1860-1915 (Urbana, 1976), 46.
25. Quoted in Emma Lou Thornbrough, T. Thomas Fortune: Militant Journalist
(Chicago, 1972), 59-60. See also Bess Beatty, A Revolution Gone Backwards:
The Black Response to National Politics, 1876-1896 (Westport, Conn., 1987),
48-49. Fortune repeated this anti-Republican rhetoric in his book Black and
White, Land, Labor, and Capital in the South (1884; New York, 1968), 126.
329
26. On the politics of the suffrage question in 1890, see Hirshon, Bloody Shirt,
190-235. The standard work on the disfranchisement process in the South is
Kousser, Shaping of Southern Politics.
27. Fortune, Black and White, 147-58, 170-74 (quote on 174; emphasis in the
original); Thornbrough, Fortune, 89.
28. Fortune, Black and White, 180-85 (quotes on 180-81).
29. Ibid., 193-94. Other anticipations of Washington can be found on pp. 73, 8081 (where he attacks classical education and advocates industrial schools), 8790, and 128.
30. Ibid., 56, 106.
31. Quoted in Beatty, Revolution Gone Backward, 58. For the context, see
Peter Gilbert, ed., Selected Writings of John Edward Bruce (New York,
1971), 23.
32. George Washington Williams, A History of the Negro Race from 1619 to
1880, 2 vols. (New York, 1882), II: 527-28. For information on Williams,
see John Hope Franklin, George Washington Williams: A Biography (Chicago, 1985).
33. Booker T. Washington, The Future of the American Negro (New York, 1900),
132-33, 141, 151. On Washington's career up to the turn of the century, see
Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader,
1856-1901 (New York, 1972). For an analysis of Washington's ideas in the
context of the black thought of the time, see August Meier, Negro Thought in
America, 1880-1915 (Ann Arbor, 1963).
34. This interpretation of Washington draws on William Toll, The Resurgence of
Race: Black Social Theory from Reconstruction to the Pan-African Conferences (Philadelphia, 1979). On self-help and the Jewish model, see Meier,
Negro Thought, 105-6. For more on Washington's influence on Africans, see
Chapter 3 below.
35. W.E.B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk (Chicago, 1903), 11. Meier, Negro
Thought, and Toll, Resurgence of Race, provide insights into the WashingtonDu Bois controversy. For a fuller discussion of the controversywith an
emphasis on the segregation issuesee Chapter 3 below.
36. Quoted in Trapido, "White Conflict and Black Participation," 139-40.
37. See Fredrickson, White Supremacy, 162-98, and idem, Arrogance of Race,
2,36-53.
38. Fredrickson, White Supremacy, 131-34; J. S. Marais, The Cape Coloured
People, 1652-1937 (1939; Johannesburg, 1968), passim; Gavin Lewis, Between the Wire and the Wall: A History of South African "Coloured" Politics
(Cape Town, 1987), 6-10.
39. Fredrickson, White Supremacy, 184-85; T. R. H. Davenport, The Afrikaner
Bond: The History of a South African Political Party (Cape Town, 1966),
118-23.
40. My understanding of these mission-trained political leaders draws heavily on
two works by Andr6 Odendaal, Vukani Bantu! The Beginnings of Black Protest Politics in South Africa to 1912 (Cape Town, 1984), and "African Political
Mobilization in the Eastern Cape, 1880-1910" (D.Phil, diss., University of
Cambridge, 1983). These works overlap to a degree, but each contains significant material that is not in the other.
41. Colin Bundy, The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry (2nd ed., Cape
Town, 1988), 32-43.
330
331
332
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
333
14. See Floyd J. Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality: Colonization and
Emigration, 1787-1863 (Urbana, 1975).
15. Henry Highland Garnet, The Past and Present Condition of the Colored Race:
A Discourse . . . (1848; Miami, 1969), 11, 26-29.
16. Joel Schor, Henry Highland Garnet: A Voice of Black Radicalism in the Nineteenth Century (Westport, Conn., 1977), 150-74 (quote on 161).
17. Victor Ullman, Martin R. Delany: The Beginnings of Black Nationalism (Boston, 1971), 225 and passim. Martin R. Delany, The Condition, Elevation,
Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852; New
York, 1968).
18. Quote on Ethiopia is taken from Gayraud S. Wilmore, Black Religion and
Black Radicalism, 155; Delany's statement on emigration appears in Condition of the Colored People, 183.
19. Delany, Condition of the Colored People, 37-38; 42-43; Miller, Search for
Black Nationality, 122-23, 171, 178; Ullman, Delany, 221 and passim.
20. For biographical information on Blyden, see Hollis Lynch, Edward Wilmol
Ely den: Pan-Negro Patriot, 1832-1912 (New York, 1970).
21. For information on Crummell, see Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Alexander Crummell: A Study of Civilization and Discontent (New York, 1989).
22. Edward W. Blyden, "The Call of Providence to the Descendents of Africa in
America" in Blyden, Liberia's Offering (New York, 1862), as reprinted in
Howard Brotz, ed., Negro Social and Political Thought (New York, 1966),
112-26 (quote on 117); Alexander Crummell, Africa and America: Addresses
and Discourses (New York, 1969), 405-53. See also Hollis Lynch, ed., Black
Spokesman: Selected Published Writings of Edward Wilmot Blyden (New
York, 1971), passim; and Moses, Crummell, 79-80, 133, 220, 278.
23. Moses, Crummell, 207-9, 251, 295. For a good example of CrummeH's thinking in his last years, see his "Civilization, the Primal Need of the Race" (1897)
in John H. Bracey, August Meier, and Elliott Rudwick, eds., Black Nationalism in America (Indianapolis, 1970), 139-53. On Blyden's emerging Africanist perspective see Lynch, Blyden, 121 and passim.
24. Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 20-21, 59-61, and passim;
Fredrickson, Black Image in the White Mind, 101-9 and passim.
25. Lynch, Blyden, 58-83, 138-39; Moses, Crummell, 255-56, 269. Moses reveals that in the 1890s Crummell was privately anxious about the extent of
mulatto influence in African-American affairs but was nevertheless willing to
accept Du Bois and other "distinguished men of mixed race" into the Negro
Academy.
26. Lynch, Blyden, 61-62.
27. Ibid., 67-77. For a general account of the development of Pan-Africanist ideas
in the twentieth century, see Immanuel Geiss, The Pan-African Movement: A
History of Pan-Africanism in America, Europe, and Africa (New York, 1974).
28. Crummell, Africa and America, 46-51.
29. Walker quote is from Stuckey, Ideological Origins, 108.
30. David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Biography of a Race, 1868-1919
(New York, 1993), 101. Post-millennialism was the belief that the Second Coming of Christ would take place after a thousand years of peace. Since human
betterment to a point of virtual perfection would precede the millenium, this
viewpoint was compatible with optimistic reformismin contrast to premillennialism, which envisioned Christ returning to judge a world that had be-
334
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
335
336
1. See John W. Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of
Segregation in South Africa and the American South (Cambridge, Eng., 1982),
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
337
2-3; and Saul Dubow, Racial Segregation and the Origins of Apartheid in
South Africa, 1919-1936 (New York, 1989), 22-25.
George Wilson Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont in America (New York,
1938), 512-15; Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities: The South, 18201860 (New York, 1964), 266-71; Leon Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro
in the Free States, 1790-1860 (Chicago, 1961), passim. On the rise of a
pattern of customary segregation during Reconstruction, see Joel Williamson, After Slavery: The Negro in South Carolina, 1861-1877 (Chapel Hill,
1965), 274-99, and Howard N. Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban
South, 1865-1890 (New York, 1978), 127-254. It is Rabinowitz who calls
attention to the relatively benign segregation of public facilities during
Reconstruction, which he describes as a movement from "exclusion to
segregation."
See George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in
American and South African History (New York, 1981), 177,185-86, 257-68.
For a good summing-up of the urbanist interpretation of segregation, see
Cell, Highest Stage, 131-35.
See Pierre van den Berghe, Race and Racism: A Comparative Perspective
(New York, 1967), 25-34, and Edna Bonacich, "A Theory of Ethnic Antagonism: The Split Labor Market," American Sociological Review 37 (1972): 549,
553-58.
For a persuasive development of this thesis, see Herbert Blumer, "Industrialization and Race Relations," in Guy Hunter, ed., Industrialization and Race
Relation: A Symposium (London, 1965), 220-53.
C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (3rd rev. ed., New York,
1974), 31-109. See also Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life
After Reconstruction (New York, 1992), 132-59.
See Vincent P. De Santis, Republicans Face the Southern QuestionThe New
Departure Years, 1877-1897(Baltimore, 1959), and Stanley Hirshon, Farewell
to the Bloody Shirt: Northern Republicans and the Southern Negro, 1877-1893
(Bloomington, 1962). On the original Republican party, see especially Eric
Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party
Before the Civil War (New York, 1970).
See Woodward, Strange Career, 67-109; Ayers, Promise of the New South,
249-309; and Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War (New York, 1986). Lillian Smith, in Killers of
the Dream (New York, 1963), provides an suggestive interpretation of Jirn
Crow as based on a bargain between "Mr. Rich White" and "Mr. Poor White"
(pp. 154-68).
For evidence of black resistance to customary or privately enforced segregation and data on black landowning, see Ayers, Promise of the New South,
140-46, 208, 513-14n. On the Tennessee law of 1881, see Joseph H. Cartwright, The Triumph of Jim Crow: Tennessee Race Relations in the 1880s
(Knoxville, 1976), 106 and passim.
Rabinowitz, Race Relations, 333-38; August Meier and Elliott Rudwick,
"The Boycott Movement Against Jim Crow Streetcars in the South, 19001906," in Meier and Rudwick, Along the Color Line: Explorations in the
Black Experience (Urbana, 1976), 267-89.
On the thinking behind South African segregation, see Cell, Highest Stage,
192-229, and Dubow, Racial Segregation, 21-29.
338
13. Cell, Highest Stage, 196-210; South African Native Affairs Commission,
1903-1905, 5 vols. (Cape Town, 1905).
14. The fullest account of the development of segregation in the 1920s and '30s is
Dubow, Racial Segregation.
15. See Leonard M. Thompson, The Unification of South Africa, 1902-1910 (Oxford, 1960).
16. On the significance of the Land Act, see Colin Bundy, The Rise and Fall of the
South African Peasantry (2nd ed., Cape Town, 1988), 213-14.
17. Ibid., 230-32 and passim.
18. See Fredrickson, White Supremacy, 230-34, 241-42.
19. In White Supremacy, I stressed the basic differences between Jim Crow and
"Native Segregation" (pp. 239-54). John Cell in The Highest Stage of White
Supremacy emphasized the parallels. I now believe that I was right to contrast
the objective or structural aspects of these two systems of racial domination,
but that, culturally and ideologically speaking, there was more similarity in
the segregationist impulseand in the black response to itthan I had allowed for. Cell's emphasis on the way segregationespecially if it was allegedly "separate but equal"could mask or obscure the brutality of the system
and actually convince moderate to liberal whites that it was a humane and
enlightened race policy adds an important dimension to our understanding of
the segregationist mentality in the early twentieth century.
20. Shula Marks, The Ambiguities of Dependence in South Africa: Class, Nationalism, and the State in Twentieth-Century Natal (Baltimore, 1986), 5.
21. Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader,
1856-1901 (New York, 1972), 218, 236-37, 230-31.
22. W. E.B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk (New York: New American Library,
1982), 80, 88.
23. These observations about Washington's influence are based on Louis R. Harlan's magisterial two-part biography, Booker T. Washington: The Making of a
Black Leader (New York, 1972) and Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of
Tuskegee (New York, 1983). On the receptivity to Washington's doctrines of
an emerging business class, see August Meier, Negro Thought in America,
1880-1915 (Ann Arbor, 1963), 139-57.
24. David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race (New York,
1992), 281-82; Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 45-46. See Chapter 2, above,
for a discussion of Du Bois's racialism of the late 1890s.
25. Otto Olsen, The Carpetbagger's Crusade: A Life of Albion Winegar Tourgee
(Baltimore, 1965), 353; W. E. B. Du Bois, Against Racism: Unpublished Essays, Papers, and Addresses, Herbert Aptheker, ed. (Amherst, 1985), 81-83;
Philip S. Foner, ed., W. E. B. Du Bois Speaks: Speeches and Addresses, 18901919 (New York, 1970), 173.
26. See Stephen R. Fox, The Guardian of Boston: William Monroe Trotter (New
York, 1971), 97-99, 140-141.
27. Elliott W. Rudwick, W. E, B. Du Bois: Propagandist of the Negro Protest
(New York, 1968), 100-102; Fox, Guardian, 124-26.
28. W. E.B. Du Bois, "The Talented Tenth, "in The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative American Negroes of Today (New York, 1903), 50-54.
29. Du Bois, Against Racism, 60; Arnold Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of
W. E. B. Du Bois (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), 87.
339
30. Meier, Negro Thought, 178-80; Rudwick, Du Bois, 118; Fox, Guardian,
113-14.
31. "The Niagara Movement Platform," in August Meier, Elliott Rudwick, and
Francis L. Broderick, eds., Black Protest Thought in the Twentieth Century
(2nd ed., Indianapolis, 1971), 61.
32. Fox, Guardian, 44-45; Meier, Negro Thought, 214-17 and passim. For an
eloquent recent statement of the compatibility of self-help and protest, see
Roy L. Brooks, Rethinking the American Race Problem (Berkeley, 1990).
33. Rudwick, Du Bois, 103-19; Fox, Guardian, 101-14; Lewis, Du Bois, 376-77.
34. Charles Flint Kellogg, NAACP: A History of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People, 1909-1920 (Baltimore, 1920), 10-15; Rudwick, Du Bois, 120-29; Meier, Negro Thought, 180-82.
35. Kellogg, NAACP, 15-90 and passim; Nancy J. Weiss, The National Urban
League, 1910-1940 (New York, 1974), 47-70 and passim. For a critique of the
"noneconomic liberalism" of the NAACP, see B. Joyce Ross, J. E. Spingarn
and the Rise of the NAACP, 1911-1939 (New York, 1972).
36. Fox, Guardian, 127-29; Kellogg, NAACP, 21-22; Ida B. Wells, Crusade for
Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (Chicago, 1970), 324-28; Rudwick, Du Bois, 124.
37. Kellogg, NAACP, 103; Rudwick, Du Bois, 151-83; Lewis, Du Bois, 472, 49495.
38. On how Africans attempted to unify before the establishment of the South
African Union, see Andre Odendaal, Vukani Bantu! The Beginnings of Black
Protest Politics in South Africa to 1912 (Cape Town, 1984), 64-196.
39. Ibid., 167-80 (quote on 168).
40. Ibid., 175 (quote), 178.
41. Ibid., 193, 197-227.
42. Ibid., 284; Andre Odendaal, "African Political Mobilization in the Eastern
Cape" (D.Phil, diss., Cambridge University, 1983), 262-64.
43. Odendaal, Vukani Bantu!, 256-79; Peter Walshe, The Rise of African Nationalism in South Africa: The African National Congress, 1912-1952 (Berkeley,
1971), 30-31.
44. Walshe, African Nationalism, 31-33.
45. Sheridan Johns III, Protest and Hope, vol. 1 of Thomas Karis and Gwendolen
Carter, eds., From Protest to Challenge: A Documentary History of African
Politics in South Africa, 1882-1964 (Stanford, Calif., 1972), 69-71. For biographical information on Seme, see Gail M. Gerhart and Thomas Karis,
Political Profiles, 1882-1964, vol. 4 of Karis and Carter, eds., From Protest to
Challenge (Stanford, Calif., 1977), 137-39.
46. From Imvo Zabatsundu, Oct. 24, 1911, reprinted in Johns, Protest and Hope,
71-73.
47. Ibid., 92.
48. Seme quoted in Walshe, African Nationalism, 34; Louis R. Harlan, "Booker
T. Washington and the White Man's Burden," American Historical Review 71
(1966): 464.
49. See R. Hunt Davis, Jr., "John L. Dube: A South African Exponent of
Booker T. Washington," Journal of African Studies 2 (Winter 1975-76):
497-528.
50. Quoted in ibid., 497-98. Dube's links to Washington are further explored in
340
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.
75.
76.
77.
78.
79.
80.
81.
82.
83.
84.
341
lawyer who argued it: William B. Hixon, Moorfield Story and the Abolitionist Tradition (New York, 1972), 139-42. See also Rice, "Residential
Segregation."
The congress's first secretary, Sol Plaatje, wrote a vivid account of the effects
of the Land Act in the Orange Free State. See his Native Life in South Africa
(London, 1916).
John Dube to Members of the American Committee of the Zulu Christian
Industrial School, Jan. 27, 1912, copy in the Booker T. Washington Papers,
Library of Congress; Petition to the Prime Minister from the Rev. John L.
Dube, Feb. 14, 1914, reprinted in Johns, Protest and Hope, 84-86 (quote on
85). See also Walshe, African Nationalism, 47-49.
Walshe, African Nationalism, 50-51; "Natives' Land ActNo. 27 of 1913.
Native Protest," undated document signed by John L. Dube and Walter Rubusana in Anti-slavery Society Papers, Brit. Emp. S22 G203, Rhodes Library,
Oxford University. (This is apparently the petition that the delegation brought
to England in 1914.)
Willan, Plaatje, 174-204.
Selope Thema to Travers Buxton, undated (received March 28,1917), Buxton
to Thema, March 29,1917, and Thema to Buxton, Aug. 15,1917, Antislavery
Society Papers, Brit. Emp. S22 G203, Rhodes Library, Oxford University;
Walshe, African Nationalism, 52-61.
For a strong statement of Plaatje's advocacy of public equality and opposition
to the social mingling of the races, see Willan, Plaatje, 111. The statement was
made in 1902, but as Willan points out, it sustained Plaatje "for many years
afterward."
On the training camp controversy, see Ross, Spingarn, 84-97; Rudwick,
Du Bois, 198-201; Fox, Guardian, 217-19; Jane Lang Scheiber and Harry
N. Scheiber, "The Wilson Administration and the Wartime Mobilization of
Black Americans," Labor History 10 (1969): 442-45.
The Crisis 16 (July 1918): 111.
Albert Grundlingh, Fighting Their Own War: South African Blacks and the
First World War (Johannesburg, 1987), 12-13, 105-6, and passim; Johns,
Protest and Hope, 86-88.
Weiss, "The Negro and the New Freedom," 67, 69 (quote from Miller on 69).
Weiss's article stresses the failure of the effort to stop segregation in the civil
service, but her own data supports the conclusion that worse was possible and
averted.
Quoted in Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma (New York, 1944), 832.
See Scheiber and Scheiber, "The Wilson Administration and Black Americans."
Grundlingh, Fighting Their Own War, 132-41, 155-56.
Chapter 4
342
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
343
tion and Mulattoes in the United States (New York, 1980); and George M.
Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South
African History (New York, 1981), 129-31.
Magema M. Fuze, The Black People, and Whence They Came: A Zulu View,
H.C. Lugge, trans., A. T. Cope, ed. (1922; Pietermaritzburg and Durban,
1979), 8. (First published in Zulu in 1922 but apparently written shortly after
the turn of the century.)
There was also a Marxist version of Pan-Africanism that emerged late in the
1920s and will be treated in Chapter 5 below.
Louis T. Harlan, "Booker T. Washington and the White Man's Burden,"
American Historical Review 71 (1966): 275 and passim. Booker T. Washington to Moussa-Mangounsled, Nov. 12, 1906, Washington Papers, Library of
Congress.
Kenneth J. King, Pan-Africanism and Education: A Study of Race Philanthropy and Education in the Southern States of America and East Africa (Oxford, 1971), 17-18.
Ibid., 98, 128, and passim; Edwin W. Smith, Aggrey of Africa: A Study in
Black and White (London, 1929), 119-22 and passim.
Smith, Aggrey, 121-24. On AMEZ activities in West Africa and the significance of Aggrey's recruitment, see Walter L. Williams, Black Americans and
the Evangelization of Africa, 1877-1900 (Madison, Wise., 1982), 150.
Quoted in Smith, Aggrey, 188.
Ibid., 171-77. On Christian nonviolence see Chapter 6 below.
On the CIC, see Morton Sosna, In Search of the Silent South: Southern Liberals and the Race Issue (New York, 1977), 20-41, and Wilma Eykeman and
James Stokley, Seeds of Southern Change: The Life of Will Alexander (Chicago, 1962). On the Joint Councils, see Paul Rich, White Power and the
Liberal Conscience: Racial Segregation and South African Liberalism (Johannesburg, 1984), 4-5, 11-32.
Robert R. Moton, "Installation Address at Tuskegee," in Herbert Aptheker,
ed., A Documentary History of the Negro People of the United States, 19101932 (Secaucus, N.J., 1973), 126; D.D.T. Jabavu, The Black Problem
(Lovedale, 1920), 58.
Jabavu, Black Problem, 63-64, 153, and passim (quote on 153).
D.D.T. Jabavu, The Segregation Fallacy and Other Papers (Lovedale, 1928),
17,19-20, 38-39, 75, 85, 124-25.
Owen Charles Mathurin, Henry Sylvester Williams and the Origins of the PanAfrican Movement, 1869-1911 (Westport, Conn., 1976), 71-76 and passim; J.
Ayodelde Langley, Pan-Africanism and Nationalism in West Africa (Oxford,
1973), 27-29.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Negro (New York, 1915), 241-42; Toll, Resurgence of
Race, 168-69.
Du Bois, Negro, 242.
Aptheker, ed., Documentary History, 1910-1932, 248-52. On "civilizationism," see Wilson Jeremiah Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism,
1850-1925 (Hamden, Conn., 1978).
W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater (1920; New York, 1975), 56-74. For an account
of Du Bois's difficulties with Franco-African assimilationists, see Elliott M.
Rudwick, W. E. B. Du Bois: Propagandist of the Negro Protest (New York,
1968), 208-35.
344
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
345
346
61. See Walshe, African Nationalism, 166-69. On Gumede's pro-Soviet radicalism, see Chapter 5 below.
62. On the conditions of rural South Africans by the 1920s, see especially Colin
Bundy, The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry (2nd ed., Cape Town,
1988), 146-54, 221-36; William Beinart and Colin Bundy, Hidden Struggles in
Rural South Africa: Politics and Popular Movements in the Transkei and Eastern Cape, 1890-1930 (London, 1987), 1-46, 222-29; and Helen Bradford, A
Taste for Freedom: The ICU in Rural South Africa, 1924-1930 (New Haven,
1987), 21-62.
63. Bradford, Taste for Freedom, 48-49. On the AME Church's early work in
rural areas and its involvement in local politics, see James Campbell, "Our
Fathers, Our Children: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the
United States and South Africa" (Ph.D. diss. Stanford University, 1989), 21959.
64. Richard Newman, "Archbishop Daniel William Alexander and the African
Orthodox Church," International Journal of African Historical Studies 16
(1983): 615-30. For an account of the Israelite massacre, see Robert Edgar,
They Chose the Plan of God (Johannesburg, 1988).
65. Bradford, Taste of Freedom, 214-18; Smith, Aggrey, 180-81.
66. This account is based primarily on Robert Edgar's "Garveyism in Africa:
Dr. Wellington and the American Movement in the Transkei," Ufahumu 6
no. 1 (1976): 31-57. A shorter version appears in Collected Seminar Papers,
South African Studies Seminar, Vol. 6 (London: Institute of Commonwealth
Studies, 1976), 100-110. See also Beinart and Bundy, Hidden Struggles,
250-55.
67. Edgar, "Garveyism in Africa," 47.
68. Ibid., 33; Bradford, Taste of Freedom, 217-18.
69. Hill and Pirio, " 'Africa for the Africans,' " 214-42 (quote on 215); Bradford,
Taste of Freedom, 4-5, 126. A good general account of the ICU is Sheridan
Johns III, "Trade Union, Political Pressure Group or Mass Movement? The
Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union of South Africa," in Robert I.
Rotberg and Ali A. Mazrui, eds., Protest and Power in Black Africa (New
York, 1970), 695-754.
70. Hill and Pirio, " 'Africa for the Africans,' " 217; Worker's Herald, April 2,
1925; Clements Kadalie, My Life and the ICU: The Autobiography of a Black
Trade Unionist in South Africa, Stanley Trapido, ed. (London, 1970), 220-21.
71. From Messenger, July 1924, reprinted in Vincent, ed., Voices of a Black
Nation, 288-94.
72. Workers' Herald, May 15,1925, quoted in Johns, "The ICU of South Africa,"
695.
73. For more on the relations between the Communist party and the ICU, see
Chapter 5 below.
74. This is the picture of the ICU at the grass roots that emerges from Bradford's
Taste of Freedom. Membership information is drawn from the survey of
growth on pp. 1-20.
75. See Johns, "The ICU of South Africa," 729-45; and Wickens, ICU, 167-86.
76. Beinart and Bundy, Hidden Struggles, 282-83, 291-93, and 270-320, passim.
77. Tolbert, UNIA and Black Los Angeles, 94.
78. Bradford, Taste of Freedom, 63-74.
79. For perspectives on the frustration of black South Africans with white liberal-
80.
81.
82.
83.
347
ism as a force for gradual reform, see Walshe, African Nationalism, 61-114,
passim; and Saul Dubow, Racial Segregation and the Origins of Apartheid in
South Africa, 1919-1936 (New York, 1988).
Cronon, Garvey, 138-69; Johns, "The ICU of South Africa," 731-32,748,753.
For evidence of Garvey's autocratic and sectarian tendencies, see especially
Stein, World of Garvey, 140-42, 153-70. For more on the radicals who were
purged by the UNIA and the ICU, see Chapter 5 below.
Kadalie's anti-white rhetoric is quoted Johns, Protest and Hope, 301.
These were essentially the conclusions that Du Bois, who had criticized Garvey for his separation in the 1920s, came to during in the 1930s. See his Dust
of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (1940; New
York, 1968). For an incisive recent exposition of white working-class racism,
see David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the
American Working Class (London, 1991).
Chapter 5
1. Famous black intellectuals and artists were a problem only for the American
party, since black South Africa had not yet produced a cultural elite with some
prestige in the white community. Two African-American creative geniuses
whom the party treated with kid gloves have been the subjects of excellent
recent biographies. See Martin Bauml Duberman, Paul Robeson (New York,
1988), and Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 1, / Too
Sing America (New York, 1986).
2. See Bert Cochran, Labor and Communism: The Conflict That Shaped American Unions (Princeton, N.J., 1977), 94-102.
3. Evidence of the generally favorable image of Communists in the black community in the early depression years can be found in the responses to a survey of
black newpaper editors conducted by Du Bois in 1932. See The Crisis 39
(April and May 1932): 117-19, 154-56, 170. See below for more discussion
and analysis of African-American attitudes toward Communism.
4. For a good account of the shifting Comintern positions on various issues,
including the liberation of colonized and racially oppressed peoples, see Fernando Claudin, The Communist Movement from Comintern to Cominform,
Brian Pearce, trans., 2 vols. (New York, 1975).
5. Among the significant revisionist studies that deal partly or mainly with CP
relations with the black community are Maurice Isserman, Which Side Were
You On? The American Communist Party During the Second World War (Middletown, Conn., 1982); Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the
Depression (Urbana, 111., 1983); and Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe:
Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill, 1990). The
older interpretation stressing Soviet manipulation of the American party received its class formulation in Theodore Draper, American Communism and
Soviet Russia (New York, 1960), and was reaffirmed in Harvey Klehr, The
Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade (New York, 1984).
A recent history of the post-World War II freedom struggle that stresses the
positive contributions of Communists is Manning Marable, Race, Reform,
and Revolution: The Second Reconstruction in Black America (Jackson, Miss.,
1991).
6. Stephen P. Possany, ed., The Lenin Reader (Chicago, 1966), 246; Karl Marx,
348
"British Rule in India," in David Fembach, ed., Surveys from Exile (New
York, 1974), II: 307. For an incisive brief critique of Marx's views on ethnic
nationalism, see Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx (Oxford, 1978), 147-48,
7. W.E.B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk (1903; New York: Signet Classics,
1982), xi.
8. Philip S. Foner, American Socialism and Black Americans: From the Age of
Jackson to World War II (Westport, Conn., 1977), 92-127 (Debs quoted on
104).
9. Quoted in H. J. and R. E. Simons, Class and Colour in South Africa, 18501950 (Harmondsworth, Eng., 1969), 155.
10. Ibid., 162-65, 271-99, and passim. The American Socialist party also produced some outright segregationists in its early days, at least in Louisiana. See
Foner, American Socialism, ch. 6.
11. See V. I. Lenin, National Liberation, Socialism, and Imperialism (New York,
1968), 110-21, 165-71, and passim.
12. Martin Legassick, Class and Nationalism in South African Protest: The South
African Communist Party and the "Native Republic" (Syracuse, 1973), 39-41.
13. Joseph Stalin, Marxism and the National and Colonial Question (New York,
1934), 214-18.
14. Ibid., 8, 168.
15. Lenin on the United States (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1967), 305-6.
16. The South African Communist party and the Industrial and Commercial
Workers' Union of Africa (ICU) actually supported the Afrikaner Nationalist/
South African Labor party coalition in 1924 on the assumption that it was an
anti-capitalist front. In the early '30s, the South African Communists briefly
embraced an ethnic pluralist version of self-determination (see below, this
chapter).
17. Philip S. Foner and James S. Allen, eds., American Communism and Black
Americans: A Documentary History, 1919-1929 (Philadelphia, 1987), 28-30.
(The proposed conference was never actually held.) Throughout the 1920s
Communists emphasized the vanguard role of African-Americans. See Wilson Record, The Negro and the Communist Party (1951; New York 1971), 15,
24, 28-29, 58.
18. Foner and Allen, Communism and Black Americans, 53-65, 88 (quote), 109
29; Record, The Negro and the Party, 31-51. Estimates of black membership
in the CP are from Klehr, Heyday of Communism, 5. According to Record,
" . . . by 1928 there were probably less than two hundred Negro Communists
in the United States" (52).
19. Edward Roux, Time Longer Than Rope: A History of the Black Man's Struggle for Freedom in South Africa (Madison, Wise., 1964), 161-69, 198-217;
Simons and Simons, Class and Colour, 324-27, 352-56, 386-88, 392-93.
20. Foner and Allen, Communism and Black Americans, 16-23 (quote on 19).
Theodore Draper appears to be responsible for discovering that Briggs anticipated the self-determination doctrine (American Communism and the Soviet
Union, 322-26).
21. On the South African side the main debaters have been white veterans of
the CPSA. Roux in Time Longer Than Rope sees the policy as an imposition and part of a pattern of disastrous meddling by the Comintern
(p. 256). Simons and Simons in Class and Colour attempt to show that the
South African Colored Communist James La Guma played a major role in
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
349
persuading the Comintern to adopt this policy and that, in doing so, he
spoke for the sentiments of radical blacks in South Africa (pp. 386-415).
The most authoritative presentation of the case that the self-determination
policy demonstrated the American party's slavish and self-destructive subservience to the Comintern is Harvey Klehr and William Thompson, "SelfDetermination in the Black Belt: Origins of a Communist Policy," Labor
History 30 (1989): 354-66. There is to my knowledge no sustained effort by
an historian to establish the indigenous origins of the policy, but Philip S.
Foner and Herbert Shapiro have disagreed with Klehr and Thompson's
contention that the policy hindered the work of the party among southern
blacks. They view it rather as an efficacious revival of the Reconstructionera demand for "land to the tiller" (American Communism and Black
Americans: A Documentary History, 1930-1934 (Philadelphia, 1991), xi,
xxv). The basis for arguing that at least one black American made an
important contribution to the development of the policy can be found in
Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American
Communist (Chicago, 1978).
Haywood, Black Bolshevik.
Ibid., 132-33, 158 (quote), 218-30; Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia, 334 (Hall on Stalin); Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London, 1983), 306-7.
Haywood was out of favor during the Popular Front era and World War II,
returning to prominence in the party when it revived the self-determination
policy in the late '40s. Haywood's Negro Liberation (New York, 1948) was the
definitive restatement of the case for the right to establish a black nation in
the American South.
Haywood, Black Bolshevik, 235-37. The biographical information on La
Guma is from Gail M. Gerhart and Thomas Karis, Political Profiles, 18821964, vol. 4 of Thomas Karis and Gwendolen M. Carter, eds., From Protest to
Challenge: A Documentary History of African Politics in South Africa, 18821964 (Stanford, Calif., 1977), 53-54.
Ibid, (both sources); Simons and Simons, Class and Colour, 390-412, passim;
Legassick, Class and Nationalism, 11-12.
Theses and Resolutions Adopted by the Sixth World Congress, summary as
reported in International Press Correspondence, Dec. 12, 1928, in Foner and
Allen, Communism and Black Americans, 197-98.
Ibid., 198.
For arguments of black American Communists against self-determination,
see Foner and Allen, Communism and Black Americans, 164-72, 180-88.
The arguments of the South African delegates (all white) to Sixth World
Congress can be found in the Bunting Papers, Cullen Library (A949), University of the Witwatersrand. Accounts of the reactions of American and South
African Communists to the policy include Record, The Negro and the Party,
54-71; Klehr and Thompson, "Self-Determination in the Black Belt"; Simons
and Simons, Class and Colour, 386-97; Sheridan Johns III, "Marxism, Leninism in a Multi-Racial Environment: The Origins and Early History of the
Communist Party of South Africa, 1914-1932" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1965), 431-33, 444-54, and passim; Edward Roux, S. P. Bunting: A
Political Biography (Cape Town, 1944), 86-100.
Foner and Allen, Communism and Black Americans, 197-98.
350
351
also Philip S. Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619-1981 (New
York, 1981), 215-37.
46. See Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, 159-92.
47. My principal source on the crisis of 1935-37 is Thomas Kaiis, Hope and
Challenge, 1935-1952, vol. 2 of Karis and Carter, eds., From Protest to Challenge, (Stanford, Calif., 1973), 3-66.
48. Ibid., 6-10, 31-46.
49. For somewhat differing views of what happened, see ibid., 8, and Mary
Benson, South Africa: The Struggle for a Birthright (Minerva Press, n.p.,
1969), 66-69.
50. Karis, Hope and Challenge, 8-10; Benson, South Africa, 70.
51. Simons and Simons, Class and Colour, 480-85, 500-506; Brian Bunting, Moses Kotane: South African Revolutionary (London, 1974), 78-83; Naboth
Mokgatle, The Autobiography of an Unknown South African (Berkeley,
1971), 188-201, and passim. In 1938, the Communists were also involved in
forming the Non-European United Front, an organization bringing together
African, Indian, and Colored radicals.
52. My treatment of Kotane is based on Bunting, Kotane, a work that has its
obvious biases but is convincing in its estimate of Kotane's significance
(Comintern Special Resolution on South Africa (1928) is quoted on p. 33).
53. Ibid., 4, 46, 52-53, 64-65 (quote). See also Gerhart and Karis, Political
Profiles, 50-52.
54. Bunting, Kotane, 89 and passim.
55. Roux, Time Longer Than Rope, 232-37.
56. Eslanda Robeson (wife of Paul Robeson) reported in the diary of her trip to
South Africa in 1936 that discussions with prominent African academics at
Fort Hare Native College had led to general agreement on the proposition
that the Soviet Union had solved the race problem. For the first time, "men
and women and children of all races, colors, and creeds walk the streets and
work out their lives in dignity, safety, and comradeship." African Journey
(New York, 1945), 49.
57. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, 107-8; Nell Irvin Painter, The Narrative of Hosea
Hudson: His Life as a Communist in the South (Cambridge, Mass., 1979),
75-109.
58. See Angelo Herndon, Let Me Live (New York, 1937), for a graphic account of
how much persecution and pain a black Communist in the South might have
to endure.
59. Du Bois's thinking of the 1930s was summed up in Dusk of Dawn: An Essay
Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (New York, 1940). Historical
accounts of the controversies involving Du Bois and the NAACP during the
early '30s include Wolters, Negroes and the Depression, 231-63; Harvard
Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National
Issue: The Depression Decade (New York, 1978), 244-56; and B. Joyce Ross,
./. E. Spingarn and the Rise of the NAACP, 1911-1939 (New York, 1972), 18698.
60. A recent work that provides new insights into the political attitudes of the
African elite during this period is Alan G. Cobley, Class and Consciousness:
The Black Petty Bourgeoisie in South Africa, 1924 to 1950 (New York, 1990).
61. On Haywood's fall from grace, see Naison, Communists in Harlem, 128-29,
352
79.
80.
81.
82.
83.
353
Hirson, Yours for the Union, 183-90. The attitudes and actions of the Youth
League will be examined more closely in Chapters 6 and 7 below.
For the new position on the race issue, see Haywood, Negro Liberation.
There is relatively little scholarship on black-Communist relations in the immediate postwar period beyond two works by Gerald Home: Black and Red:
W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War (Albany,
1986) and Communist Front? The Civil Rights Congress, 1946-1956 (Rutherford, N.J., 1988). These works are valuable for the wealth of factual information they present, but in my opinion they are marred by a tendency to treat
the Communist party in an uncritical and celebratory fashion.
On Robeson, see Martin Bauml Duberman, PaulRobeson (New York, 1988),
and Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of
Black America (New York, 1987), 303-58.
See Chapter 6 below for more on the early successes of the civil rights
movement.
See Rich, Liberal Conscience, 77-122. On Hofmyer, see Alan Paton, Hofmyer: A South African Tragedy (London, 1964).
See Chapter 7 below for a discussion of postwar black radical movements.
Chapter 6
1. The literature on nonviolence is vast, but there is surprisingly little socialscientific or comparative historical work on the subject. Among the books that
have informed my understanding of nonviolent protest are M. K. Gandhi, Nonviolent Resistance (New York, 1961); Richard B. Gregg, The Power of Nonviolence (Philadelphia, 1934); Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral
Society (New York, 1932), ch. 9; Judith M. Brown, Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope
(New Haven, 1989); Erik Erikson, Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant
Nonviolence (New York, 1969); and Joan V. Bondurant, Conquest of Violence:
The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict (Berkeley, 1965).
2. Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, 242.
3. Examples of such third parties might be the influential segment of British
domestic opinion that sympathized with Gandhi's campaigns in India and the
liberal elements in the northern United States who supported the southern
civil rights movement in the 1960s and were instrumental in getting Congress
to pass the Civil Rights Acts.
4. See M. K. Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa (Ahmedabad, 1961); Maureen
Swan, Gandhi: The South African Experience (Johannesburg, 1985); and Robert A. Huttenback, Gandhi in South Africa: British Imperialism and the Indian Question (Ithaca, 1971).
5. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and
Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983); Gandhi, Non-violent Resistance, 386.
6. See Brown, Gandhi, 77-88, and passim.
7. Ibid., 386-88 and passim. A spirited defense of Gandhian nonviolence on
utilitarian or pragmatic grounds is Gregg, Power of Non-violence.
8. Gandhi, Non-violent Resistance, 70-71,173. For a full list of the methods that
can be employed in a nonviolent campaign, see Bondurant, Conquest of
Violence, 40-41.
9. Gandhi, Non-violent Resistance, 174,222.
354
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
355
Cold War on black protest in the 1940s and '50s. See Race, Reform, and
Reconstruction: The Second Reconstruction in Black America (2nd ed., Jackson, Miss., 1991), 13-60. In my opinion, however, Marable's bias against
anti-Stalinist social democrats like Randolph leads him to understate their
achievement and overemphasize the dampening effect of the Cold War on the
civil rights movement. McCarthyite hysteria began to decline by the mid-'50s,
and thereafter the cold war was clearly more of an advantage than a hindrance
to the movement. (Unless of course one defines the objectives of the civil
rights movement differently from the way contemporaries did.)
For a provocative discussion of the significance of black economic gains in the
period during and immediately after World War II, see William Julius Wilson,
Power, Racism, and Privilege: Race Relations in Theoretical and Sociohistorical Perspectives (New York, 1973), 22-27.
Frene N. Ginwala, "Class, Consciousness, and Control: Indian South Africans, 1860-1946" (D.Phil, thesis, University of Oxford, 1974), 366-412;
Eissop Pahad, "The Development of Indian Political Movements in South
Africa, 1924-1946" (D.Phil, thesis, University of Sussex, 1972), 40-156. Unfortunately, there is no adequate published history of the South African Indian community or of its political activities.
Dr. Yusuf Mohamed Dadoo: His Speeches, Articles, and Correspondence with
Mahatma Gandhi [1939-1983], E. S. Reddy, comp. (Durban, 1991), 55-67
(quote on 64), 366-85, and passim; Ginwala, "Class, Consciousness, and
Control," 412-13; Pahad, "Indian Political Movements," 157-58.
Monty Speaks: Speeches of Dr. GM (Monty) Naicker, 1945-1963, E. S.
Reddy, comp. (Durban, 1991), 54 and passim; Dowlat Bagwandeen, A People
on TrialFor Breaching Racism: The Struggle for Land and Housing of the
Indian People of Natal, 1940-1946 (Durban, 1991), 167-68 and passim.
Bagwandeen, People on Trial, 165-92; Dadoo: Speeches, 14-122; Monty
Speaks, 25-56.
For the text of the Doctor's Pact of 1947 and reactions to the riots of 1949, see
Thomas Karis, Hope and Challenge, 1935-1953, vol. 2 of Karis and Carter,
eds., From Protest to Challenge (Stanford, Calif., 1973), 272-73, 285-88. For
a detailed discussion of the movement to joint action, see Dilshad Nomenti
Cachalia, "The Radicalization of the Transvaal Indian Congress and the
Moves to Joint Action, 1946-1952" (B.A. honors diss., University of the
Witwatersrand, 1981).
See Peter Walshe, Rise of African Nationalism: The African National Congress,
1912-1952 (Berkeley, Calif., 1971), 262-81; Karis, Hope and Challenge, 6998, 168-300, passim.
Amplification of Notes: A.N.C. Youth League (interview with the presidentgeneral, Dr. A. B. Xuma) (21/2/44), ANC collection, University of the Witwatersrand Library, AD 1189, Box 9, LA III-6. For the text of ANCYL manifesto
of 1944 and other documents concerning the early history of the organization,
see Karis, Hope and Challenge, 300-339. See also Walshe, Rise of African
Nationalism, 281-85, 312-14, 349-61, and Gail M. Gerhart, Black Power in
South Africa: The Evolution of an Ideology (Berkeley, 1978), 45-84.
In addition to the sources cited in the previous note, see Tom Lodge, Black
Politics in South Africa Since 1945 (London, 1983), 20-27.
Karis, Hope and Challenge, 337-38.
See Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa, 75-76 and passim.
356
38. Nelson Mandela to Francis (?), Oct. 6, 1949, carbon of typescript, University
of the Witwatersrand Library, AD 1189, ANC Associated Organizations, LA
IV 2; ANCYL correspondence, 1949. On the religious affiliations of the
Youth Leaguers, see Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa, 52, 125 (on
Lembede and Mda); Gail M. Gerhart and Thomas Karis, Political Profiles,
1882-1964, vol. 4 of Karis and Carter, eds., From Protest to Challenge (Stanford, Calif., 1977), 143-45,151-53 (on Sisulu and Tambo); and Fatima Meer,
Higher Than Hope: The Authorized Biography of Nelson Mandela (New
York, 1988), 62. For a broader discussion of the role of independent black
Christianity in protest politics, see Chapter 2, above.
39. Karis, Hope and Challenge, 475.
40. Ibid., 403-40; Lodge, Black Politics, 33-66. Still valuable for its detailed
account of the rise of apartheid and the African response to it is Gwendolen
M. Carter, The Politics of Inequality: South Africa Since 1948 (2nd ed., New
York, 1959).
41. Karis, Hope and Challenge, 410-16, 458-82.
42. Ibid., 458-66 (quotes on 461-62); Lodge, Black Politics, 36-66.
43. Lodge, Black Politics, 43-45; See also Karis, Hope and Challenge, 419-23.
44. Chief A. J. Lutuli, "The Road to Freedom Is Via the Cross," statement of
Nov. 12, 1952, in Karis, Hope and Challenge, 487-88.
45. Naboth Mokgatle, The Autobiography of an Unknown South African (Berkeley, 1971), 307.
46. Letter from Bokwe "Joe" Matthews to Z. K. Matthews, 16 Sept. 1952, Z. K.
Matthews Papers (B2.82), University of Cape Town (microfilm; original at the
University of Botswana). For the ANC membership figures, see Lodge, Black
Politics, 61, and Karis, Hope and Challenge, 427. On the Non-European Unity
Movement, see ibid., 112-20, 494-508. With its base mainly among Colored
intellectuals in the Western Cape, the NEUM was a source of insights into the
system of racial oppression in South Africa that were rigorous and often
perceptive. But its uncompromising commitment to noncooperation with segregation went to the point of refusing to work for anything less than its
immediate and total overthrow. Such an orientation precluded most forms of
political action and mobilization.
47. On the repression of the '50s, see Thomas Karis and Gail M. Gerhart, Challenge and Violence, 1953-1964, vol. 3 of Karis and Carter, eds., From Protest
to Challenge (Stanford, Calif., 1977), 6, 36, 80-82, and passim. See Brown,
Gandhi, 386-88, for a discussion of the limitations of Indian nonviolence.
48. See Lodge, Black Politics, 91-187; Karis and Gerhart, Challenge and Violence, 19-35 and passim; and Edward Feit, African Opposition in South Africa: The Failure of Passive Resistance (Stanford, 1967).
49. Cheryl Walker, Women and Resistance in South Africa (New York, 1991),
165-226, passim. Lodge, Black Politics, 142-46.
50. "War Against the People," Liberation 34 (Dec. 1958): 4-6. For discussions of
the "M Plan," see Karis and Carter, Challenge and Violence, 35-40, and
Lodge, Black Politics, 75-77. The Treason Trail, beginning in late 1956, kept
black leaders in the dock for more than four years before they were found not
guilty.
51. Luthuli: Speeches of Chief Albert John Luthuli (Durban, 1991), 7, 44, 71,
146-47, and passim. See also Albert Luthuli, Let My People Go: An Autobiog-
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
357
raphy (London, 1962). Despite the spelling in both of these titles, "Lutuli" is
now generally accepted as correct.
Some of these issues will be dealt with more extensively in Chapter 7 below.
My understanding of the ANC's post-Sharpeville attitude toward violence has
been informed by Steven Mufson, The Fighting Years: Black Resistance and
the Struggle for a New South Africa (Boston 1990), 96 and passim, and Stephen M. Davis, Apartheid's Rebels: Inside South Africa's Hidden War (New
Haven, 1987). For Frantz Fanon's advocacy of violence, see especially The
Wretched of the Earth (New York, 1966).
Quoted in Asian Times (London), June 26, 1987. (Clipping found in Reddy
collection, Indian Documentation Centre, University of Durban-Westville.)
On the CAA petition, see Gerald Home, Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois
and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War (Albany, 1986), 185. For an
account of the ASAR, see George Houser, No One Can Stop the Rain:
Glimpses of Africa's Liberation Struggle (New York, 1989), 12-20. A review of
The Crisis for 1952 and 53 (vols. 59, 60) turned up several references to the
injustices of apartheid, but the only way readers would have known about the
^Defiance Campaign was from the publication in January 1953 of the text of the
petition to the United Nations. See The Crisis 60 (1953): 38. There may have
been some coverage in black weekly newspapers, but if so it does not appear to
have influenced political thought and leadership in a significant way.
The Wofford speech, which was shown to King by E. D. Nixon, is printed for
the first time in David Garrow, ed., We Shall Overcome: The Civil Rights
Movement in the 1950's and 60's (Brooklyn, 1989), III: 1151-162 (reference to
South Africa on 1160).
Among the works that have provided a localistic perspective on the movement are William H. Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North
Carolina and the Black Struggle for Freedom (New York, 1980); David R.
Colburn, Racial Change and Community Crisis: St. Augustine, Florida, 18771980 (New York, 1985); and Robert J. Norrell, Reaping the Whirlwind: The
Civil Rights Movement in Tuskegee (New York, 1985). A work that effectively
demonstrates the connections between local "movement centers" and the
regional or national movement is Aldon D. Morris, The Origin of the Civil
Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York,
1984).
On the Baton Rouge boycott, see Morris, Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, 17-26.
Pfeffer, Randolph, 172-73; David Garrow, ed., Walking City: The Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955-1956 (Brooklyn, 1989), 202-8, 345-46, 545-51, and
passim.
See J. Mills Thornton, "Challenge and Response in the Montgomery Bus
Boycott and 1955-56," in Garrow, ed., Walking City, 367, for a persuasive
description of how King grew during the boycott. On the context of "massive
resistance," see especially Nunan V. Bartley, The Rise of Massive Resistance:
Race and Politics in the South During the 1950s (Baton Rouge, 1969).
Martin Luther King, Jr., Stride Toward Freedom (New York, 1958), 76-86;
David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference (New York, 1986), 66-68; Morris;, Origins of
the Civil Rights Movement, 157-62; Adam Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul of
358
76.
77.
78.
79.
80.
81.
82.
83.
84.
85.
359
need for empowering the poor, see especially Garrow, Bearing the Cross,
431-624, and Thomas F. Jackson, "Recasting the Dream: Martin Luther
King, Jr., African-American Political Thought and the Third Reconstruction,
1955-1968" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1993).
It is difficult to prove a negative, but for what it's worth, I can affirm that
these observations are based on an extensive reading in the South African
protest literature of the 1950s and '60s.
For an incisive account of the radicalization of SNCC, see Carson, In Struggle, 96-190. On the relationship of King and Stanley Levison, see Garrow,
Bearing the Cross, passim.
Bokwe "Joe" Matthews to Z. K. Matthews, 20 Nov. 1952, Matthews Papers
(B2, 89). For a good example of ANC anti-Americanism, see Nelson Mandela,
"A New Menace in Africa," Liberation (March 1958): 22-26. The full extent of
American support for the apartheid regime in its early years has recently been
revealed in Thomas Borstelmann, Apartheid's Reluctant Uncle: The United
States and Southern Africa in the Early Cold War (New York, 1993).
For King's early identification with liberation struggles, see Garrow, Bearing
the Cross, 63 (quote), 71, 91.
Lewis quoted in Carson, In Struggle, 94; Lutuli is quoted from the statement
he made after being removed from his chieftainship in 1952, as reprinted in
Karis, Hope and Challenge, 487; King quoted in David Levering Lewis, King:
A Biography (Urbana, III., 1978), 93.
See Leo Kuper, An African Bourgeoisie: Race, Class, and Politics in South
Africa (New Haven, 1965), 101-3, and passim, and Alan Cobley, Class and
Consciousness: The Black Petty Bourgeoisie in South Africa, 1924 to 1950
(New York, 1990).
Steven M. Millner, "The Montgomery Bus Boycott: A Case Study in the
Emergence and Career of a Social Movement," in Garrow, ed., The Walking
City, 512-13. For an analysis of the middle-class aspirations of the student
protesters of the early '60s, see Carson, In Struggle, 12-15.
On the role of boycotts in the South African struggle, see Lodge, Black
Politics, 181-82 and passim. The significance of consumer boycotts for the
success of desegregation campaigns in southern cities is clear from all accounts of the movement, but few historians have generalized about them or
reflected on their importance. For the rudiments of such a discussion, see
Fred Powledge, Free at Last? The Civil Rights Movement and the People Who
Made It (Boston, 1991), 83, 369.
The localized basis for the southern movement is set forth effectively in
Morris, Origins of the Civil Rights Movement. On the peculiarities of the
Eastern Cape, see Lodge, Black Politics, 45-60 and passim. For a valuable
analysis of the organizational assets that southern African-American urban
communities brought to the civil rights struggle, see Doug McAdam, Political
Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970 (Chicago,
1982), 94-106.
See Lodge, Black Politics, 170-71, on the ANC's failure in Alexandria. My
understanding of how SCLC operated is based primarily on Morris, Origins of
the Civil Rights Movement, and Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul. On the role
of community organizations in South Africa during the 1980s, see Mufson,
Fighting Years, 323-24.
360
86. On the PAC's overtures to the independent black churches, see Lodge, Black
Politics, 81.
87. King is quoted in Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 92. For an earlier formulation
of these contrasts of political context, see George M. Fredrickson, "The
South and South Africa," in idem, The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality (Middletown, Conn., 1988),
254-69.
88. See Jackson "Recasting the Dream," 108-10, and Renee Romano, "Burden
on Our Backs: Domestic Racism and American Foreign Policy" (unpublished
seminar paper, Stanford University, 1992).
89. Sheridan Johns and R. Hunt Davis, Jr., eds., Mandela, Tambo, and the African National Congress: The Struggle Against Apartheid, 1948-1990 (New
York, 1991), 173-74 (excerpted from the Washington Times, Aug. 22, 1985).
90. Tom Lodge, Black Politics, 196-99. On the revival of sabotage in the late '70s,
see Anthony Marx, Lessons of Struggle: South African Internal Opposition
(New York, 1992), 93-94.
91. George M. Houser, "Freedom's Struggle Crosses Oceans and Mountains:
Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Liberation Struggles in Africa and America," in Albert and Hoffman, eds., We Shall Overcome, 189-91; Lewis, King,
259; Branch, Parting the Waters, 599.
92. Martin Luther King, Jr., "Address on South African Independence," London, England, Dec. 7, 1964. Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers, Library, and
Archives, Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Change, Atlanta,
Georgia.
93. Ibid., 2; Address of Dr. Martin Luther King on Dec. 10, 1965, for the benefit
of the American Committee on Africa, Hunter College, New York City
Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers, Library, and Archive, Atlanta, Georgia.
94. Good accounts of developments in South Africa in the 1980s are Marx, Lessons of Struggle, Mufson, The Fighting Years, and Richard Price, The Apartheid State in Crisis, 1975-1990 (New York, 1991). Oliver Tambo, speaking on
behalf of the ANC, explicitly repudiated "passive resistance" in 1966 (Johns
and Davis, Mandela, Tambo, 134). I learned first-hand about the extent to
which the UDF had revived the Gandhian tradition of noncooperation on two
recent visits to South Africa. In April 1989 I saw the Mass Democratic Movement in action and interviewed Allan Boesak about it. In July 1992 I interviewed Mewa Ramgobin, a leader of the Indian community of Natal and a
former UDF treasurer. For him, the domestic protest of the 1980s, which
featured a boycott of elections and leaders going to jail without paying fines or
making bail, was a vindication of Gandhism.
Chapter 7
1. See Jean Paul Sartre, Black Orpheus, S. W. Allen, trans. (Paris, n.d.), 59.
2. Immanuel Geiss, The Pan African Movement: A History of Pan Africanism in
America, Europe, and Africa (New York, 1974), 399-408 (quote on 403);
Peter Walshe, The Rise of African Nationalism in South Africa: The African
National Congress, 1912-1952 (Berkeley, Calif., 1971), 337-38.
3. Walshe, Rise of African Nationalism, 337; Thomas Karis and Gail M. Gerhart, Challenge and Violence, 1953-1964, vol. 3 of Thomas Karis and
Gwendolen Carter, eds., From Protest to Challenge: A Documentary History
361
of African Politics in South Africa, 1882-1964 (Stanford, Calif,, 1977), 32023; Harold R. Isaacs, The New World of Negro Americans (New York, 1964),
95, 276, 290, 292, 306; Robert G. Weisbord, Ebony Kinship: Africa, Africans,
and the Afro-American (Westport, Conn., 1973), 184.
4. This account is based mainly on Hollis Lynch, Black American Radicals and
the Liberation of Africa: The Council on African Affairs, 1937-1955 (Cornell
University African Studies and Research Center, 1978). On Max Yergan, see
David H. Anthony, "Max Yergan in South Africa: From Evangelical PariAfricanist to Revolutionary Socialist," African Studies Review 34 (1991): 2755.
5. See note 4. On the American Committee on Africa, see Chapter 6 above.
6. Richard Wright, Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos
(New York, 1954), 348 and passim. Wright expressed similar opinions in White
Man, Listen! (New York, 1957).
7. Gail M. Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa: The Evolution of an Ideology
(Berkeley, 1978), 45-76; Thomas Karis, Hope and Challenge, vol. 2 of Karis
and Carter, eds., From Protest to Challenge (Stanford, Calif., 1973), 300-322
(quotes on 308 and 317).
8. Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa, 60. For a provocative recent treatment
of the cultural and psychological basis of nationalism, see Benedict Anderson,
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
(London, 1983). On Lembede's Africanist precursors, see Chapters 2 and 4
above.
9. Quotes from Karis, Hope and Challenge, 326-30. See also Gerhart, Black
Power in South Africa, 64-75.
10. Karis, Hope and Challenge, 330; Nelson Mandela to Francis (?), Oct. 6,1949,
carbon of typescript, University of Witwatersrand Library, ANC associated
organizations, LA IV 2. For more on how and why non-Communists in the
ANC came to ally themselves with Communists and to side with the Soviet
Union against the United States, see Chapters 5 and 6 above.
11. Karis and Gerhart, Challenge and Violence, 11-14, 63-64, 105, 205 (quote
from Matthews on 12).
12. Ibid., 205-8; Gail Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa, 124-172, passim;
George Padmore, Pan-Africanism or Communism? (1956; New York, 1971),
339-40. For other presentations of the Communist conspiracy theory of the
Freedom Charter, see also Jordan Ngubane, An African Explains Apartheid
(New York, 1963), 164; and Richard Gibson, African Liberation Movements:
Contemporary Struggles Against White Minority Rule (London, 1972), 50-55.
13. See Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa, 151-64.
14. For Sobukwe's views as head of the PAC, see the 1959 documents reprinted in
Karis and Gerhart, Challenge and Violence, 506-17. For biographical information on Sobukwe, see Benjamin Pogrund, Sobukwe and Apartheid (New
Brunswick, N.J., 1991).
15. Sobukwe quote is from Karis and Gerhart, Challenge and Hope, 514.
16. Ibid., 516.
17. See Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa, 221-24, 317-19; Leo Kuper, An
African Bourgeoisie: Race, Class, and Politics in South Africa (New Haven,
1965), 364-87.
18. Karis and Gerhart, Challenge and Violence, 669-71; Tom Lodge, Black Politics in South Africa Since 1945 (London, 1983), 240-55.
362
19. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Crisis 54 (Dec. 1947): 362-63. See Chapters 2 and 4
above for discussions of earlier manifestations of black nationalism or separatism.
20. E. U. Essien-Udom, Black Nationalism: A Search for an Identity in America
(Chicago, 1962), 46-48, 55-60, 83-87. Essien-Udom's work remains the best
account of the Black Muslims before the 1960s. But see also C. Eric Lincoln,
The Black Muslims in America (Boston, 1961).
21. Ibid., 312 and passim.
22. Malcolm X, Autobiography (New York, 1965). Bruce Perry's deeply researched Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America (Barrytown, New York, 1992) adds many details and corrects some errors or
misrepresentations.
23. Perry, Malcolm, 211-12 and passim.
24. On Malcolm's thought in 1964-65, see Perry, Malcolm, 288-367, passim, and
Eugene Victor Wolfenstein, The Victim of Democracy: Malcolm X and the
Black Revolution (Berkeley, 1981), 300-346. Perry stresses the conflicts and
confusions in Malcolm's thinking, while Wolfenstein finds the consistent advocacy of "an anti-imperialist struggle for national liberation" (p. 300). These
viewpoints can perhaps be reconciled if one acknowledges that Malcolm knew
what he wantedthe liberation of blacks from white supremacybut remained uncertain as to how to attain itor indeed whether it was even
possibleunder the conditions that existed in the United States during the
1960s.
25. Julius Lester, Look Out, Whitey! Black Power's Gon' Get You Mama (New
York, 1968), 91.
26. The fullest published account of King's campaigns for economic justice can be
found in David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York, 1986), 527-625. For an
incisive analysis of the thought behind this effort, see Thomas F. Jackson,
"Recasting the Dream: Martin Luther King, Jr., African-American Political
Thought and the Third Reconstruction" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University,
1993).
27. The shifting attitudes in SNCC are well described and analyzed in Clayborne
Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 111-211, passim. On CORE'S similar evolution toward
separatism and away from nonviolence, see August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement, 1942-1968 (New York,
1973), 374-408.
28. A good account of the Meredith march can be found in Carson, In Struggle,
206-11. Carmichael did not actually invent the term Black Power, even in the
context of the mid-'60s. Adam Clayton Powell, for one, had used it earlier.
Carmichael was not even the first to use it on the Meredith march; but his
usage was the first to be widely publicized. The quote on the rejection of
nonviolence is from James Boggs in Floyd Barbour, ed., The Black Seventies
(Boston, 1970), 35.
29. Lester, Look Out, Whitey.', 100.
30. Gayraud S. Wilmore and James H, Cone, eds., Black Theology: A Documentary History (Maryknoll, N.Y., 1979), 27; Nathan S. Wright, Jr., Black Power
and Urban Unrest: Creative Possibilities (New York, 1967), 61.
31. Wright, Black Power and Urban Unrest, 7; Wright, "The Crisis Which Bred
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
363
Black Power," in Floyd Barbour, ed., The Black Power Revolt (Boston, 1968),
116-17.
Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of
Liberation in America (New York, 1967), 44-45.
Stokely Carmichael, Stokely Speaks: From Black Power to Pan-Africanism
(New York, 1971), 35, 97.
For Carmichael's revolutionism of 1968, see ibid., 134-36.
This discussion is based mainly on Manning Marable, Race, Reform, and
Revolution: The Second Reconstruction in Black America (Jackson, Miss.,
1991), 86-148 (quote on 110); John T. McCartney, Black Power Ideologies:
An Essay in African-American Political Thought (Philadelphia, 1992); and
William L. Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement in
American Culture, 1965-1975 (Chicago, 1992), 112-91. Conspicuous separatists (or in William Van Deburg's terminology, "territorial nationalists"), in
addition to those named above, included the poet Imamu Baraka (Leroi
Jones) and Imari Obadele I (Richard Henry), founder of a sect called the
Republic of New Africa. Prominent among those that political scientist John
McCartney labels "counter-communalists"but whom I prefer to call, in
accordance with the terminology of the late '60s and Van Deburg's classifications, "revolutionary nationalists"were (in addition to Newton and other
Black Panther leaders such as Eldridge Cleaver) James Foreman, the former
SNCC leader, and Robert L. Allen, author of the book that made the strongest case for a black-led revolution against American capitalism: Black Awakening in Capitalist America (New York, 1969).
On Chisholm's significance among "the Black Power pluralists," see McCartney, Black Power Ideologies, 151-65. For a more general discussion of
the pluralist tendency, see Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon, 113-29.
See Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon, 193-291, for an extensive treatment
of the impact of Black Power on African-American and American culture.
On the "hiatus of the 1960s," see Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa, 251 59.
On the Liberal party, see Douglas Irvine, "The Liberal Party, 1953-1958," in
Jeffrey Butler, Richard Elphick, and David Welsh, eds., Democratic Liberalism in South Africa: Its History and Prospect (Middletown, Conn., 1987),
116-33; Lodge, Black Politics in South Africa, 210-12, 240-41, 307-10 (on
Duncan's career in the PAC), and passim; and Janet Robertson, Liberalism in
South Africa, 1948-1963 (Oxford, 1971).
On NUSAS in the '60s, see Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa, 257-59;
Lodge, Black Politics in South Africa, 322-23; and Baruch Hirson, Year of
Fire, Year of Ash: The Soweto Revolt: Roots of a Revolution (London, 1979),
65-68. Jordan Ngubane's special synthesis of liberalism and African nationalism is expounded in An African Explains Apartheid.
Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa, 259-70; Hirson, Year of Fire, 68-84;
Robert Fatten, Black Consciousness in South Africa: The Dialectics of Ideological Resistance to White Supremacy (Albany, 1986), 63-80; N. Barney
Pityana, Mamphela Ramphele, Malus Mpumlwana, and Lindy Wilson, eds.,
The Bounds of Possibility: The Legacy of Steve Biko and Black Consciousness
(Cape Town, 1991), 154-78 and passim.
Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa, 288-90; Aelred Stubbs, ed., Steve
BikoI Write What I Like (1978; San Francisco, 1986), 80-86 (quote on 86).
364
43. Stubbs, ed., BikoI Write What I Like, 67; Gerhart, Black Power in South
Africa, 259. It is also worth noting, however, that BC, like the PAC, was
willing to tolerate the permanent presence of whites in South Africa. According to the SASO policy manifesto of 1971, "South Africa is a country in which
both black and white live and shall continue to live together" (B. A. Khoapa,
ed., Black Review, 1972 (Johannesburg, 1972), 40).
44. Stubbs, ed., Eikol Write What I Like, 49-53; Khoapa, ed., Black Review,
1972, 42-43.
45. See Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa, 211, for an analysis of this similarity. Gerhart, however, creates confusion when she writes that "the term black
by the late 1960s in the United States had become a loose synonym for
'nonwhite'-a new catchall term encompassing all victims of racial discrimination." Clearly one had to have some specifically African ancestry to qualify as
"black." Other nonwhites, such as Asians and American Indians, have never
been so designated. Hence, curiously enough, the South African designation
has become broader than the American. It parallels in its usage the newer
American designation "people of color," which was popularized by the multicultural movement of the 1980s.
46. Lodge in Black Politics in South Africa provides the basis for this comparison,
although he does not actually make it explicit (see pp. 83-86 and 323-24).
47. Sipho Buthelezi, "The Emergence of Black Consciousness: An Historical
Appraisal," in Pityana et al., eds., Bounds of Possibility, 124-28.
48. On the religious character and associations of BC, see especially Fatten,
Black Consciousness in South Africa, 107-19, and Hirson, Year of Fire, 7881. On the role of religion in Biko's life and thought, see Lindy Wilson,
"Bantu Steve Biko: A Life," in Pityaria et al., eds., Bounds of Possibility, 20,
43-44. N. Barney Pityana, the second most important of the original student
leaders, became a clergyman and eventually the director of the World Council
of Churches' Program to Combat Racism.
49. The best source on the development of Black Theology is Wilmore and Cone,
Black Theology: A Documentary History. Among its major expressions were
Albert B. Cleage, The Black Messiah (New York, 1968); James H. Cone,
Black Theology and Black Power (New York, 1969), A Black Theology of
Liberation (Philadelphia, 1970), and God of the Oppressed (New York, 1972);
and Gayraud S. Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism (New York,
1972). A work that shows the connections between American and South
African versions is Dwight N. Hopkins, Black Theology: USA and South
Africa (Maryknoll, N.Y., 1989).
50. James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 7. Buthelezi quoted in
Louise Kretzschmar, The Voice of Black Theology in South Africa (Johannesburg, 1986), 62.
51. See Kretzschmar, Voice of Black Theology, 43-70.
52. Cone, Black Theology of Liberation, 6; Buthelezi quoted in Hopkins, Black
Theology: USA and South Africa, 99; Cone quoted in Basil Moore, ed., The
Challenge of Black Theology (Atlanta, 1973), 48; Allan Boesak, Farewell to
Innocence: A Socio-Ethical Study of Black Theology and Black Power (Johannesburg, 1976), 78. For a discussion of the differences, see Kretzschmar, Voice
of Black Theology, 65-68.
53. Khoapa, ed., Black Review, 1972, 42.
54. Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa, 276. Emphasis added.
365
55. Stubbs, ed., BikoI Write What I Like, 69; Steve Biko, Black Consciouness
in South Africa (New York, 1978), 99.
56. Stubbs, ed., Biko-I Write What I Like, 132-36.
57. See Anthony Marx, Lessons of Struggle: South African Internal Opposition,
1960-1990 (New York, 1992), 39-60, 194-95, and Geoff Budlender, "Black
Consciousness and the Liberal Tradition," in Pity ana et al., eds., Bounds of
Possibility, 234-35. For a good example of white leftist criticism of BC, see
Hirson, Year of Fire, passim.
58. See Marx, Lessons of Struggle, 64-72, and Lodge, Black Politics in South
Africa, 328-39.
59. Keith Mokoape, Thenjiwe Mtintso, and Welile Nhlapo, "Towards the Armed
Struggle," in Pityana et al., eds., Bounds of Possibility, 142-43; Marx, Lessons of Struggle, 91-105.
60. Lodge, Black Politics in South Africa, 344-46; Marx, Lessons of Struggle, 8791.
61. Budlender, "Black Consciousness and Liberalism," in Pityana et al., eds,
Bounds of Possibility, 235.
62. Good accounts of black politics in South Africa in the 1980s can be found in
Marx, Lessons of Struggle, 106-234; Robert M. Price, The Apartheid State in
Crisis: Political Transformation in South Africa, 1975-1990 (New York, 1991),
152-219; and Steven Mufson, The Fighting Years: Black Resistance and the
Struggle for a New South Africa (Boston, 1980).
63. Revealing statements of former Black Consciousness supporters who embraced nonracialism as a more advanced form of struggle can be found in Julie
Frederickse, The Unbreakable Thread: Non-racialism in South Africa (Bloomington, Ind., 1990), 114-15, 134-35, 161-62.
64. Nelson Mandela, Nelson Mandela Speaks: Forging a Democratic, Nonracial
South Africa (New York, 1993), 39.
65. See Lodge, Black Politics in South Africa, 223, and Frederikse, Unbreakable
Thread, 100, 242, on the gradual implementation of nonracialism in the ANC.
66. See Price, Apartheid State, 166-67, 251, and passim.
67. On the debates within the Black Consciousness movement in the mid-'70s,
see Marx, Lessons of Struggle, 75-85.
68. For the text of McKay's poem, as well as some commentary on it, see Nathan
Irvin Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York, 1971), 71-72. On Newton's
concept of "revolutionary suicide," see McCartney, Black Power Ideologies,
139-40, and Newton's book Revolutionary Suicide (New York, 1973). Newton
distinguished revolutionary suicide from "reactionary suicide," the throwing
away of one's life out of despair without engaging in direct resistance to the
oppressor.
69. Quoted in Mufson, Fighting Years, 70. A recent book that recounts in detail
the history of white South African involvement in the anti-apartheid movement is Joshua M. Lazerson, Against the Tide: Whites in the Struggle Against
Apartheid (Boulder, Colo., 1994).
70. Price, Apartheid State, 166; Gibson, African Liberation Movements, 25, 30.
Epilogue
1. Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal
(New York, 1992), 218-19.
366
Index
367
368
Index
Index
American Labor party, 220
American Negro Academy, 68
American Negro Labor Congress, 190-91
American redemption, 74, 93
Americans for South African Resistance,
253
Anderson, Benedict, 227
Anglican Church, 81,87
ANLC (American Negro Labor Congress),
190-91
Anti-racist racism, 278
Anti-Segregation Council, 239
Anti-Slavery and Aborigines' Protection
Society, 131
Antislavery movement, 23-24, 273
Apartheid, 223, 244-45, 277, 300, 309, 310,
320-21. See also specific person or
organization
APO (African Political Organization), 46,
47, 115
Appeal. . . to the Colored Citizens of the
World (Walker), 63-64
Asiatic Land Tenure Act, 240
Assimilation: cultural, 45-46. See also
Integration; specific person or
organization
"Atlanta Compromise" speech
(Washington), 105
Azanian People's Organization (AZAPO),
310, 311
Bach, Lazar, 200, 208-9
"Back to Africa" movement, 154, 169, 190
Ballinger, William, 171-72
Bantu Authorities Act, 246
Bantu Education Act (1953), 249
Bantu Methodist Churches, 87, 244
The Bantu Past and Present (Molema),
123-24
Bantu Presbyterian Churches, 244
Bantu Prophets (Sundkler), 90
Baptist Churches, 58,75,80,86,93,165,262
Baraka, Imamu, 297
Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 253-54, 255
BCP (Black Community Programmes), 300
Beaumont Commission, 131
Beinart, William, 89-90
Bell, Inge Powell, 260
"Beloved community" (King), 257, 258,
262, 264, 312, 317, 322-23
Bible, 57, 61, 63, 75, 89, 92, 93, 306
Biko, Steve, 299-301, 303, 304, 307-9, 315
Birmingham, Alabama, 258, 263, 270, 271
Black: definition of, 301-2
Black Capitalism, 314
369
370
Index
Index
parties in, 43; protest movements in, 87;
and segregation, 95, 96, 104, 105, 207;
suffrage in, 19-23, 36-56,101, 105, 116,
205-6, 223, 245; traditional authority in,
104; and the UNIA, 162. See also Cape
liberalism
Cape liberalism, 40, 47, 54, 205, 206; and
Pan-Africanism, 148, 149, 150, 298; and
segregation, 96, 121, 122-23, 131; and
suffrage, 20, 21, 41, 43, 45, 52-53
Cape Province African Congress, 162
Capitalism, 16, 56, 67, 112, 139, 159,170,
172; and Black Power, 296-97, 314; and
communism/Marxism, 32-33, 186, 188,
191-92, 194, 195, 198, 202, 211, 222,
223, 224; and Marxism, 32-33; and
nonviolent resistance, 266, 267; and PanAfricanism, 150, 152; racial, 310; and
segregation, 9697
Cartnichael, Stokely, 93, 293, 295-96, 297,
298, 304, 306-8
Carnavon, Margaret, 138, 139
Cell, John, 103
Chafe, William, 259
Charterists. See Congress Alliance;
Freedom Charter
Chilembwe, John, 86
Chisholm, Shirley, 297
Christian Institute, 303
Christian perfectionism, 24
Christian redemption, 62, 64, 7172
Christianity, 57, 60, 68
Church of England, 166
Church of God and Saints of Christ, 166
Churches. See Religion; Separatist
churches; specific denomination
CIO (Congress of Industrial
Organizations), 180, 204, 215, 220
Ciskei region, 20, 38
Civil disobedience, 125, 219, 308;
Gandhian, 226, 228, 229; individual vs.
mass, 229; King's views of, 272; in South
Africa, 226, 237, 240, 241, 242, 246, 247,
249, 250, 251, 272, 286; in the U.S., 234,
235, 254; and World War II, 235. See also
Strikes
Civil Rights Act (1866), 29
Civil Rights Act (1875), 31, 33, 77, 97
Civil Rights Acts (1964, 1965), 14, 236,
263, 273
Civil Rights Congress, 221
Civil Rights Movement: African influence
on the, 252-53; and Black Power, 278;
and black racism, 289; and class issues,
269-70; culture/ethos of the, 271-72;
371
372
Index
Clergy {continued)
271; discrimination against black, 80-81;
and Ethiopianism, 74-80, 87, 92-93; and
inferiority of blacks, 80-81; and
nonviolent resistance, 261-62, 269, 270,
271; ordination of black/African, 41, 83,
86; in the Republican Party, 77; in the
Southern United States, 77; and the
UNI A, 92-93. See also specific person
Cleveland, Grover, 31
Colonialism, 151, 267, 305; and Black
Power, 295-96; and civilizationism, 69;
and communism/socialism, 184, 186-87,
188-89,195-96, 203, 208, 217; and
Ethiopianism, 69, 86-87
Colonization movement, 27, 62, 64-67. See
also Emigration; Liberia; specific person
or organization
Colored American Magazine, 50, 51, 53
Colored Press Association, 31
Coloreds: and African consciousness, 47;
and the ANC, 194-95, 312, 322; and
Black Consciousness, 47, 310-11; and
black solidarity/pride, 47; and Cape
liberalism, 47; and civilization, 44; and
communism, 217; consciousness
movement among, 46-47; and the
definition of black, 162, 301-2; and
Europeanization, 47; Great Britain's
relationship with, 46-47; and the ICU,
194-95; leadership of, 47; and PanAfricanism, 47, 281, 283; political
activism of, 46-47,194-95, 246; and
political issues, 310-11; segregation of,
46, 246; and self-determination, 194-95;
and suffrage, 37-47, 53, 224, 245, 246;
and the UNIA, 162
Coloured Voters Act, 246
Comaroff, Jean, 90-91
Commission on Interracial Co-Operation,
147, 213
Committee Against Jim Crow in Military
Service and Training, 235
Committee on Racial Equality (CORE),
232, 234-35, 236, 261, 265, 292, 295
Communism: and African independence,
192, 195, 196, 198, 200, 208-9, 273; and
African socialism, 56; and alliances with
other organizations, 179, 187, 196-97,
198-99, 202, 203-5, 207, 210; and Black
Consciousness, 309, 311-12; black
suspicions of, 189; and capitalism, 186,
188, 191-92, 194, 195, 198, 202, 211,
222, 223, 224; and class issues, 184-85,
189-90, 203, 215; and colonialism, 184,
Index
The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and
Destiny of the Colored People of the
United States (Delany), 66
Cone, James, 298, 304-6
Congo, 74
Congregationalist Church, 75, 80, 81
Congress Alliance, 251-52, 268, 282, 28384, 285
Congress of Democrats, 282, 283, 298
Congress of Industrial Organizations
(CIO), 180, 204, 215, 220
Congress of the People, 283
Congress of South African Trade Unions
(COSATU), 311
Congress Youth League. See Youth League
Congressional Black Caucus, 316
Consciousness movement: among Coloreds,
46-47. See also Black Consciousness
"The Conservation of Races" (Du Bois),
73,117
Constitution League, 108
Constitution, South African: and the ANC,
312; and the SANNC, 121; and
segregation, 101, 114-15, 116, 123, 125,
136; and the South Africa Act, 114-15;
and suffrage, 116, 205, 245
Constitution, U.S., 125-26, 136, 272. See
also Fifteenth Amendment; Fourteenth
Amendment
Constitutions, state, 32
Consumer boycotts, 270
Cooperative commonwealths, 159, 160,
170, 171, 173
CORE. See Committee on Racial Equality
Cornish, Samuel, 24
Corruption, 21, 30, 33, 37, 167
COSATU (Congress of South African
Trade Unions), 311
Council on African Affairs, 252-53, 278-79
Crime, 235
The Crisis (NAACP magazine), 113-14,
119, 133-34, 143, 148, 169, 253
Crummell, Alexander, 67-72, 73, 74, 75,
79, 301
The Crusader (ABB journal), 192
Cultural assimilation, 45-46
Cultural diversity, 71-72, 91
Cultural nationalism: and Black
Consciousness, 308-9; and Black Power,
296, 297, 314; and missions/missionaries,
143; and Pan-Africanism, 113, 280; and
religion, 61, 76; and segregation, 124,
132; and separatist churches, 76; and
white supremacy, 143. See also specific
person or organization
373
374
Index
Index
of, 61-62; and Christian redemption, 62,
71-72; and civil rights, 71-72; and
civilization, 67, 68; and civilizationism,
69-74, 79-80; and class issues, 91, 92;
and the clergy, 74-80, 87, 92-93; and
colonialism, 69, 86-87; and colonization,
62, 64-65, 66-67; contributions of, 8889, 91-92; decline of, 88, 91; and
democratic liberalism, 92; and
emigration, 61, 65-66, 67, 74, 77, 78;
and Hegelian idealism, 72; and human
solidarity, 72; impact of, 114; and
imperialism, 69, 79, 80; and inferiority of
blacks, 63, 78; and integration, 65, 73,
93; and Marxism, 72-73, 92; and
materialism, 71, 72-73, 74; and
millennialism, 168; and missions/
missionaries, 62, 67, 74-81, 83, 85, 88,
90; and nationalism, 63, 66-67, 83-84,
93; in the nineteenth century, 61-74; and
Pan-Africanism, 63, 67, 68, 71, 73, 74,
82, 83, 84-85, 88, 92, 147; and
paternalism, 80, 85; and political
activism, 84-88, 90-93; popular, 74-80;
and progress, 71-72, 73; and protest
movements, 63-64, 86, 87, 89, 91-92;
Providential Design theory of, 75; and
racial purity, 71-72; and radical
Africanism, 89; and religion, 59; revision
of, 73; and secularization, 91, 92; and
self-help, 64, 66-67, 76, 84, 86; and
separatism, 61, 65, 73, 76-80, 86-87, 88,
89-90; and slavery, 63, 76, 79; sources
for, 61; and the Swedenborgians, 62-63;
and violence/intimidation, 77-78, 86; and
whites, 74, 84-85, 86, 87, 90-91. See also
Romantic racialism; specific organization
Ethnicism: and Black Power, 297, 308, 314;
and class issues, 184; and democracy, 72;
and equality, 15-16, 71-72; and
nationalism, 183-84; and populism, 139;
and republicanism, 66; and socialism,
183-84; and suffrage, 15-16, 22, 23
Europeanism: and Pan-Africanism, 280,
281
Europeanization, 41, 47, 56
Europeans: and the ANC, 321; innate
characteristics of, 70
Evangelicalism, 61
Fair employment practices, 234, 235, 23637
Fairclough, Adam, 264
Fanon, Frantz, 252, 296
Fard, W. D., 287-88
375
376
Index
Index
248, 253; and Pan-Africanism, 277, 280,
281, 282, 283; and political issues, 31011; and World War II, 217
Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union
of Africa (ICU): accomplishments of the,
177; aims of the, 175-76; and the ANC,
173; and black solidarity/pride, 162;
branches of the, 195; and the British
Labor party, 171-72; and capitalism,
172; and class issues, 169-70, 174,17576; and Coloreds, 194-95; and
communism, 169, 170, 171, 175, 191,
195, 199; corruption in the, 171; decline/
demise of the, 171-72, 174-75; and
economic issues, 173, 174; and
Ethiopianism, 176; and labor issues, 16872,175-76; leadership of the, 162, 175;
arid liberalism, 171; and localism, 172;
membership of the, 171; and
millennialism, 171; and nationalism, 138,
172, 175; and Pan-Africanism, 138, 149,
169, 172; as a populist movement, 138;
and race issues, 169-70; repression of
the, 174-75,177; and segregation, 171,
172, 174, 177; and self-determination,
172; and self-help, 172; and separatism,
172; and socialism, 168,170, 171; spread
of the, 171; and the UNIA, 168-72, 17378; and whites, 171-72, 175, 176
Industrial education, 35, 36, 51, 105,109,
120, 145, 146
Inferiority of blacks, 18, 27, 290, 313; black
belief in the, 302; and the definition of
black, 301-2; missionaries' views of, 3940; and religion/Ethiopianism, 57-58, 63,
78, 80-81, 305. See also Racism
Integration: and abolitionism, 26-27; and
black solidarity/pride, 25-27; and
liberalism, 23; and nationalism, 25-27,
55-56; and the Niagara Movement, 1067; and religion/Ethiopianism, 58, 59, 60,
65, 73, 93; and South Africa, 58; and
suffrage, 22. See also Segregation;
specific person
Intermarriage, 135, 157
International Conference on the Negro
(1912), 145
International Labor Defense (ILD), 201-2,
203
Ireland/Irish, 27, 183-84, 231
Islam, 68, 71. See also Nation of Islam
Israelite sect, 166, 167
Isserman, Maurice, 218
Izwi Labantu ("Voice of the People"), 43,
49, 50
377
378
Index
Index
McCarthyism, 183, 236-37, 245, 279
McKay, Claude, 315
Mahabane, Z. R., 162-63, 164
Makgatho, S. M.,132, 163
Malcolm X (aka M. Little), 259, 289-91,
293-94, 298, 301, 302, 304
Mamiya, Lawrence H., 59
Mandela, Nelson: and ANC, 245, 250, 274,
275, 282, 319, 320; and Black
Consciousness, 281-82, 310, 312, 317;
and Christianity, 243-44; and the
Defiance Campaign, 246; on democracy,
273; imprisonment of, 322; M Plan of,
250; and nonviolent resistance, 248, 273,
274, 275-76; release from prison of, 275,
276, 319
Mangena, Alfred, 116-17
Manifesto of 1948 (Youth League), 281
Manye, Charlotte, 82
Mapikela, Thomas, 115, 130-31
Marable, Manning, 120, 296, 322
March in Mississippi (1966), 295
March to Montgomery, 263
March on Washington (1963), 263, 268,
289-90
March on Washington (1968), 292
March on Washington (Scottsboro Boys),
231
March on Washington Movement
(Randolph), 216-17, 218, 221, 222, 232,
233-34, 235, 242, 254, 265
Marks, J. B., 206, 218, 221, 222, 245, 246
Marks, Shula, 104
Marx, Karl, 183-84, 185-86, 189, 211, 239
Marxism: and Black Consciousness, 312;
and black liberation leadership, 137-38,
178, 296, 312; and Black Power, 296; and
capitalism, 32-33, 296; and class issues,
284; and colonialism, 184; and
Ethiopianism, 72-73, 92; and
nationalism, 137; and Pan-Africanism,
280; and populism, 139; and racism, 183;
revision of, 185-87; and revolutionary
nationalism, 296; and segregation, 97; as
a Western materialist philosophy, 280;
and whites, 318. See also Communism;
Marx, Karl; Socialism; specific person or
organization
Mass Democratic Movement, 276
Massachusetts Antislavery Society, 18
Master-Servants Law (1856), 38
Materialism, 71, 72-73, 74, 93
Matthews, E. K.,267
Matthews, Joe, 267
Matthews, Z. K.,282
379
380
Index
Missions/missionaries (continued)
segregation, 100; and sources of
authority, 46; in the Southern United
States, 76; and suffrage, 38-40
Mississippi, March in (1966), 295
Mnika, Alfred, 172
Mofutsanyana, Edwin, 206, 209, 213
Mokgatle, Naboth, 248
Mokone, Mangena, 81-83
Molema, Silas M., 123-24, 125
Montgomery, Alabama: bus boycott in,
237, 253-56, 257, 260, 261, 262, 265,
267, 269; March to, 263; nonviolent
resistance in, 270
Montsioa, George, 116-17
Moore, Basil, 303
Moral Man and Immoral Society
(Niebuhr), 257
Moroka, J. S., 244, 246
Morris, Aldon, 261
Moses, Wilson Jeremiah, 69
Moskowitz, Henry, 111
Moton, Robert R., 147-48
Mozambique, 303, 307
Msane, Saul, 130-31, 132
Msimang, Richard, 116-17, 230
Mtimkulu, Abner, 87, 88
Muhammed, Elijah (aka E. Poole), 28890, 304
Mulattoes, 70, 157, 301
Muste, A. J.,259
Mvabaza, Levi, 140-41, 143
My Life and the ICU (Kadalie), 169
"My View of the Segregation Laws"
(Washington), 129
Mzimba, P. X, 49, 80-81, 86, 87
NAACP. See National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People
Naicker, G. M. "Monty," 239-40
Naidoo, H. A.,217
Nasanov, N. (aka Bob Katz), 193-94
Natal: British administration in, 42;
Ethiopianism in, 81, 84, 85, 86, 87; and
the ICU, 171; Indians in, 239, 241;
nonviolent resistance in, 226, 240; and
segregation, 95, 104; traditional authority
in, 104; Zulu rebellion in, 86
Natal Indian Congress, 229, 239-40
Nation: definition of, 187-89
Nation of Islam, 287-92, 322
National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People (NAACP):
accomplishments of the, 134-35, 142; as
an all-black organization, 210; ANC
Index
communism/Marxism, 137, 194, 221, 266;
and emigration, 25; ethnic, 183-84; and
integration, 25-27, 55-56; and
millennialism, 165; and nonviolent
resistance, 227, 251; and Pan-Africanism,
280, 285, 286, 312; and populism, 161;
and protest movements, 25-26; and
religion/Ethiopianism, 59, 63, 66-67, 8384, 93, 243-44, 304; revival of, 287, 304;
revolutionary, 296, 314; and segregation,
117, 118; and self-help, 66-67; and
separatism, 56, 288, 296; and suffrage,
22; weakness in U.S. of black, 279; and
Zionism, 137. See also Cultural
nationalism; Pan-Africanism; Selfdetermination; Separatism; specific
person or organization
Native Administration Act (1917/1927),
126, 132, 136, 175
Native Life In South Africa (Plaatje), 131
"Native republic" thesis, 192-93, 194, 200,
208
Native Segregation, 97, 103-4, 114
Natives' Land Act (South Africa, 1913):
and land distribution, 321; and populism,
161, 165; and segregation, 101-2, 104,
116,120, 126, 128, 130-32, 134, 136, 185
Natives' Representative Council, 205, 207,
220,241,242
Naude, Beyers, 303
The Negro (Du Bois), 150
Negro Business League, 106, 154
Negro Commission, 194, 195, 197
Negro Factories Corporation, 159
Negro Sanhedrin, 190
Negro World (UNIA newspaper), 56, 154,
156, 162
Negro-folk theologians, 75
New Deal, 136, 202-3, 204, 205, 213, 214
New Kleinfontein, 89
New York Age (newspaper), 50, 51, 52
Newton, T. Huey, 296, 297, 304, 315
Ngcayiya, Abner, 87-88
Ngubane, Jordan, 299
Niagara Movement, 21, 36, 53, 106-11,
112, 121, 122, 124, 318
Niebuhr, Reinhold, 226, 256-59
Niobe, Bransby, 209-10
Nixon, E. D., 254, 262
Nixon, Richard M., 292, 296
Nkrumah, Kwame, 278, 279, 284, 286
Non-European United Front, 217
Non-European Unity Movement, 248
Nonviolent resistance: and abolitionism,
231; and African rights, 237-52; and
381
382
Index
and Indians, 283; leadership of the, 28586; and the meaning of race, 284-85; and
the meaning of South Africa, 285;
militancy of the, 284-85, 300; and
multiracialisrn, 312; and selfdetermination, 283; and terrorism, 286;
and whites, 285, 299. See also Poqo
Pan-Negroism. See Ethiopianism; PanAfricanism
Parks, Rosa, 254
Parliamentary Voters Registration Act
(1887), 43
Pass laws, 141, 142, 230, 242, 246, 250
Passive Resistance Campaign (1946), 240,
241, 243, 246
Passive resistance. See Nonviolent
resistance
The Past and Present Condition, and the
Destiny of the Colored Race (Garnet), 65
Paternalism: acceptance of, 41; of African
Americans toward Africans, 85; and
Black Consciousness, 311; black fears of,
316; and communism, 210, 213; and the
inferiority of blacks, 302; and liberalism,
54, 273; and missions/missionaries, 80,
85; and religion/Ethiopianism, 57-58, 80,
85; and segregation, 96, 131
Paton, Alan, 298
Patronage, 30-31
Peasantry, African, 40, 102, 198
Peck, Jim, 293
Pentecostal Churches, 58, 88, 90, 93
People's Front, 207
Peregrino, F.Z.S.,47, 52
"Petition lo God," 89
Phelps-Stokes Fund, 146, 147
Phillips, Wendell, 107
Philosophy and Opinions (Garvey), 156,
157
Pickens, William, 128
Pinchback, P.B.S.,50
Pirio, Gregory A., 163
Pityaria, Barney, 304
Plaatje, Sol, 119, 122, 130-32, 152, 163
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), 97, 127
Poe, Clarence, 127-28, 130
Political issues: and African independence,
49; and Black Consciousness, 303, 309
10; and civilization, 48-49; and class
issues, 32-33; and Coloreds, 46-47, 19495, 246, 310-11; and communism, 203-4,
206, 207, 212-13; and economic issues,
32-33, 35 36; and Europeanization, 41;
and Indians, 310-11; and missions/
missionaries, 41; and Pan-Africanism,
Index
114, 145, 280; and religion/Ethiopianism,
59, 84-88, 90-93, 244; and segregation,
101, 136, 206, 207; and self help, 29, 49;
and separatism, 101; and strikes, 274,
286; and suffrage as a means of
structuring/organization, 36-37. See also
Native Administration Act; Political
parties; specific person, organization, or
issue
Political parties, 43, 97-98, 143, 220-21,
296-97. See also specific party
Poll taxes, 205
Polygamy, 79, 90
Poole, Elijah (aka E. Muhammed), 28890, 304
Popular Front. See United Front
Populism: anti-white, 149; and the black
middle class, 139; and capitalism, 139;
and communism/Marxism, 139, 179, 190;
and economic issues, 139; failure of, 175;
interracial, 176-77; and liberalism, 139;
meaning/characteristics of, 138-39; and
nationalism, 161; and Pan-Africanism,
152-61; and property issues, 139; and
race/ethnicity, 139; and segregation, 98;
and self-determination, 139; white, 159,
176. See also specific organization, e.g.
Industrial and Commercial Workers'
Union of Africa (ICU) or Universal
Negro Improvement Association
(UNIA)
Poqo, 286, 301
Porter, William, 19
Poverty, 291-92, 322
Powell, Adam Clayton Jr., 203
Prayer Pilgrimage (1957), 268
Presbyterian Church of Africa, 80
Presbyterian Churches, 75, 80, 81
Prester John, 62
Prisons, 235
Programme of Action (ANC), 242-43, 245,
250
Progress, 71-72, 73
Progressive party (South African), 43, 44
Progressive party (U.S.), 221, 223
Progressivism, 56,111-12
Proletariat, 186, 187, 189-90, 196, 200,
208, 211-12
Property issues: and civilization, 48; and
class issues, 25; and equality, 16; and the
future of South Africa, 321; and
liberalism, 16; and nonviolent resistance,
236, 239; and populism, 139; and
Reconstruction, 29; and segregation,
128; and sources of authority, 46; and
383
384
Index
Racism (continued)
suffrage, 14, 15, 18, 19-20, 48-49, 224;
Washington on, 35; and white populism,
176. See also Inferiority of blacks;
Protest movements
Radical Africanism, 89
Radical Reconstruction, 28, 34, 48
Radical Republicans, 54, 95, 99, 112
Radicals: and African socialism, 56; and
Black Consciousness, 301, 302, 303, 309;
and communism, 180, 186, 192, 200, 204,
215, 224; and Ethiopianism, 89; as
heroes, 318; and nonviolent, resistance,
238, 239; and Pan-Africanism, 281, 287;
suppression of, 245, 298. See also specific
person or organization
Railroads. See Public facilities/
transportation
Rampersad, Arnold, 109
Rand Rebellion, 185, 191
Randolph, A. Philip: and Black Power,
292, 297; and communism, 215, 236; and
democratic socialism, 268; and the March
on Washington, 216-17, 218, 232, 23335, 237, 254; and the military, 234, 23536; and the National Negro Congress,
203, 215, 216, 233; and nonviolence, 231,
232-37, 243, 254, 256; and the sleepingcar porters, 141, 177, 203, 233, 254
Reconstruction, 33, 34, 201, 231, 273;
overview of, 28-30; Radical, 28, 34, 48;
and segregation, 95, 96, 98; and suffrage,
36, 48; Third, 321-22
Reconstruction Acts (U.S., 1867, 1868),
17-18,29,51
Reddy, E. S., 252
Redeemers, 19, 31,33
Redemption: of African Americans, 288;
American, 74, 93; Christian, 62, 64, 7172; human, 93; of whites, 306. See also
African redemption; Black redemption
Reform Act (Great Britain, 1932), 17
Religion: and abolitionism, 57, 60; and
African independence, 243-44;
ambivalences in, 59, 60; and Black
Consciousness, 303, 305, 314-15; and
Black Power, 306; and Black Theology,
304-6; and the Civil Rights Movement,
261-62, 271-72; and civilization, 48, 56;
and communism, 201, 204, 211, 215, 220;
and cultural assimilation, 46; and cultural
nationalism, 61, 76; and Ethiopianism,
59; and inferiority of blacks, 57-58; and
integration, 58, 59, 60; and
millennialism, 165-66; and nationalism,
Index
Roy, M. N., 187
Rubusana, Walter, 43, 45, 87, 115, 130-31
Rude, George, 156
Rudwick, Elliott, 231
Rural areas: and communism, 196, 201,205,
209-10; and labor issues, 171,196,201,
205,209-10; and segregation, 95,130
Russian Revolution, 185-89
Rustin, Bayard, 232, 235, 236, 256, 257,
268, 292, 297
SACTU (South African Congress of Trade
Unions), 274, 285
St. Louis, Missouri, race riots in, 154
Sanctions movement, 275, 314
SANNC. See South African Native
National Congress
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 278
SASO. See South African Student
Organization
Satyagraha, and nonviolent resistance, 227,
228, 229, 232, 235, 236, 243, 247, 250,
251, 257, 258, 261
Schreiner, William P., 115, 121
Scientific racism, 213
SCLC. See Southern Christian Leadership
Conference
Scottsboro boys, 201-2, 203, 231
Secret ballots, 17
Secularization, 91, 92
Segregation: benefits of, 101, 103; and the
black middle class, 97, 99, 105, 106, 110,
122-23, 127, 129; and black migration,
103; black mobilization against, 104-14;
and black solidarity/pride, 110; and the
Civil Rights Movement, 270; and the
civil service, 126-27, 134-35; and class
issues, 96-97, 98, 123, 124; and the
clergy, 75; and communism/socialism, 96,
97, 180, 185, 191, 199, 203, 206, 207,
220-21; comparison of African and
African American, 123-24; and
competition, 96, 102, 124; court decisions
concerning, 97, 127, 237, 255; and
cultural nationalism, 124, 132; de facto,
264; and the Du Bois-Washington
controversy, 10611; and economic
issues, 96-97, 105, 106, 128, 129, 147,
148; and entrepreneurs, 106, 128, 129;
and ethnic status, 95-96; failure of
original, 104; and the Fifteenth
Amendment, 97, 99, 108, 135, 220; and
the Fourteenth Amendment, 97, 99, 108,
127, 128, 129, 135; and Great Britain,
100, 115, 125, 130-31, 134;
385
386
Index
Index
South African Native National Congress
(SANNC): African-American influence
on the, 118, 119-20; and black solidarity/
pride, 118; and class issues, 139-40;
constitution of the, 121, 229; decline of
the, 136; and the Du Bois-Washington
controversy, 119-20; and economic
issues, 120; and education, 119, 120; and
Ethiopianism, 121; forerunners of the,
114, 115; formation of the, 87, 116-18,
121; and labor issues, 140, 141; lack of
accomplishments of the, 134, 136;
leadership of the, 116-18, 122, 124-25,
138-39; and liberalism, 121, 137-38, 174;
membership of the, 121; NAACP
compared with the, 121-23, 124-26, 136;
and nationalism, 118, 120; and
nonviolent resistance, 229-30; and PanAfricanism, 121; program of the, 118-19;
protest orientation of the, 120-21;
purpose of the, 117-18; reformist
assumptions of the, 125; and segregation,
122-23, 125, 130-33, 134, 136; and selfhelp, 118, 119; and separatism, 120, 13233; tensions within the, 121; and the
tribal chiefs, 121-22; and tribalism, 118;
and whites, 120, 121; and World War I,
133-34. See also African National
Congress; specific person
South African Party (SAP), 43, 116, 205
South African Races Congress, 121
South African Spectator (newspaper), 47
South African Student Organization
(SASO), 300, 303, 306-7, 311
South African Students' Movement, 309
South African War (1899-1902), 21, 42, 44,
46, 100, 189
South Negro Youth Congress, 216
Southern Christian Leadership Conference
(SCLC), 258, 259-60, 261, 262, 271, 295
Southern Conference for Human Welfare,
205, 214
Soviet Union, 272. See also Communism
Soweto uprising, 309-10, 311, 314
Spingarn, Joel, 113, 133
Spoils system, 30
Springfield, Illinois, race riot in (1908), 111
Stalin, Joseph, 187-89, 194, 195, 198, 202;
pact with Hitler of, 214-15, 217, 219, 239
Stein, Judith, 159
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 62
Stride Toward Freedom (King), 256, 274
Strikes: and Aggett's death, 318; and Black
Consciousness, 309, 311; and draft
resistance, 235; and labor issues, 102,
387
388
Index
Suffrage (continued)
17-18, 20, 35, 37, 38, 42, 43, 45, 46, 48,
51, 52-53, 116; and racism, 14, 15, 18,
19-20, 48-49, 224; and Reconstruction,
28-29, 36, 48; and religion, 38-40, 42;
and the Republican party, 37-38; and
republicanism, 17; as a reward, 34-35; as
a right vs. privilege, 16, 17, 19, 20; and
secret ballots, 17; and segregation, 101,
104-5, 127, 135, 148; and self-help, 15,
47; and separatism, 54, 14849; and
social revolution, 22; and the South
African constitution, 116, 245; universal
manhood, 16, 17, 18, 19, 36, 37, 45; and
violence/intimidation, 19, 21, 30, 31-32,
50; who should control the, 53; and
women, 16, 18. See also Cape liberalism;
Fifteenth Amendment; Jim Crow;
specific legislation, person, or
organization
Sumner, Charles, 107
Sundkler, Bengt, 90, 91
Suppression of Communism Act (South
Africa, 1950), 245, 246
Suppression of Communism Act (South
Africa, 1962), 298
Swazi, 200
Swedenborgians, 6263
Sweet, Leonard, 26
Taft, William Howard, 127
"Talented tenth," 109, 110, 114, 120, 122,
124, 138,139, 151-52, 173
Tambo, Oliver, 243, 245, 274, 282
Tema, S. S.,230
Tembu National Church, 81
Territorial segregation. See Residential/
territorial segregation
Thaele, James, 162, 164, 169, 173
Thema, Richard Selope, 131-33
Third Reconstruction, 321-22
Tile, Nehemiah, 81
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 94
Toll, William, 150
Tolstoy, Leo, 227
Tonjeni, Elliot, 209-10
Tourgee, Albion W., 107, 317
Transkei: and African independence, 166;
Ethiopianism/religion in, 41, 81, 83, 8687; land issues in, 43; millennialist
movements in, 162; and segregation, 100;
and suffrage, 20, 38; and the Wellington
movement, 166-67
Transvaal: British administration in the, 45;
Coloreds in the, 46; Ethiopianism/
Index
and capitalism, 159; and class issues, 159,
173; and the clergy, 92-93; and
communism/socialism, 164, 175, 190,
192, 198; conventions of the, 163; and
cultural nationalism, 158-59; decline of
the, 160, 174-75; and economic issues,
154, 159-60; effects of the, 161; and
emigration, 154, 155-56, 161, 175, 177;
and Ethiopianism, 92-93, 158-59, 161;
failure of the, 178; Fortune and the, 56;
founding of the, 146, 153; and the ICU,
168-72, 173-78; and ideology, 156-59,
175-76; and the KKK, 154, 160, 174; and
labor issues, 159, 168-72, 175, 177;
leadership of the, 159, 173-74, 175; and
localism, 156, 160; membership of the,
152-53, 159, 160, 162; motto of the, 163;
and nationalism, 138, 175; and PanAfricanism, 138, 145, 146, 149, 152-61,
174, 175, 280, 281, 284, 290, 301; as a
populist movement, 138, 145, 152; and
racial purity, 70, 157-58, 162; and
racism, 157, 161; and religion, 165-66;
repression of the, 17475; and
segregation, 154, 160,161; and selfdetermination, 154,163; and self-help,
154, 160, 161, 175; and separatism, 56,
93, 154, 161, 175, 194, 287; and social
Darwinism, 156-57, 158; spread of the,
138, 154, 160; and suffrage, 35, 154; and
urbanization, 138; and violence/
intimidation, 154; and whites, 154, 156,
157, 161, 164, 176; and World War I, 154
University Christian Movement (UCM),
299-300, 303
University of Natal, 299
Up from Slavery (Washington), 153
Urban Areas Act (South Africa, 1923), 142
Urbanization: and communism, 220-21;
and labor issues, 138, 140, 142; and
segregation, 95-96, 103, 128-30; and the
UNIA, 138
Utopianism, 297
Victoria (queen of Great Britain), 42, 82,
149
Vietnam War, 267, 292
Villard, Oswald Garrison, 108, 111-12,
113, 127
Violence/intimidation: and Black
Consciousness, 298; and Black Power,
293, 314; against blacks, 21, 23, 30, 50,
291; as a catharsis, 252; and the Civil
Rights Movement, 264, 295; and
communism, 211, 252; and emigration,
389
390
Index