Concrete Demands

The Search for Black Power in the 20th Century

Rhonda Y. Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136331640
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Between the 1950s and 1970s, Black Power coalesced as activists advocated a more oppositional approach to fighting racial oppression, emphasizing racial pride, asserting black political, cultural, and economic autonomy, and challenging white power. In Concrete Demands, Rhonda Y. Williams provides a rich, deeply researched history that sheds new light on this important social and political movement, and shows that the era of expansive Black Power politics that emerged in the 1960s had long roots and diverse trajectories within the 20th century.

Looking at the struggle from the grassroots level, Williams highlights the role of ordinary people as well as more famous historical actors, and demonstrates that women activists were central to Black Power. Vivid and highly readable, Concrete Demands is a perfect introduction to Black Power in the twentieth century for anyone interested in the history of black liberation movements.

Part I
Roots & Routes

1
A Mad Society

Crucibles and Portents of Black Power

Let the world know that “we are Negroes and beautiful.”

—Amy Jacques Garvey (1926) ¹

Black people clamored at the murderous outrage in the almost 141-year-old republic. Just days before Independence Day in 1917, one of the most violent racial conflagrations of the 20th century exploded in East St. Louis, Illinois, just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Missouri. A growing black migrant population in the urban South and North and the attendant contest for jobs increasingly spurred white worker resentment. During World War I, labor strife had resulted in white workers striking in cities, and white employers hiring black strikebreakers. In East St. Louis, white workers believed that the city “must remain a white man’s town.”² The specter of black competition and expressions of black autonomy, alongside black people’s increase in numbers, upset the white order of things.

On July 1, armed white joyriders decided to travel through black neighborhoods and fire on black homes. Returning gunfire, black residents apparently killed two white police officers. The next day the melee amped up. White people shot, assaulted, and killed black men, women, and children. They attacked black businesses and torched black homes in Black Valley, as the “Negro” part of East St. Louis was called. On this particular occasion in 1917, in the midst of a global war that the United States had entered just three months before, black people had confronted a barrage of homegrown violence. Facing a racial scourge that spread unchecked, many black people fled elsewhere. Some stayed and fought. When it was all over, 39 black and nine white people lay dead—a travesty spurred by racial hatred and economic competition.

News traveled. While the epicenter of the incident was East St. Louis, black people’s outrage issued from elsewhere in the country, thereby exposing the linked concerns of black people across geographical boundaries. “In the shadow of the awful calamity at East St. Louis,” the Negro Fellowship League in Chicago quickly posted bulletins inviting people to gather in its Reading Room at 3005 State Street to pass a resolution from the “colored citizens of Chicago.” The league charged public officials with “reckless indifference” and “call[ed] upon press, pulpit and moral forces to demand … punishment.” The league’s founder, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, chaired that meeting. A black anti-lynching and women’s rights activist, she followed her own suggestion to take a trip to East St. Louis to gather facts about the atrocity. Immediately upon her arrival, she met numerous black women who began sharing their stories. These laundresses; mothers; widows; and wives of boiler washers, warehouse workers, graders, railroad workers, and packing house workers invited her into their burned out and looted residences where they described beatings, shootings, and people fleeing for their lives.³

Wells-Barnett’s trip resulted in a pamphlet that provided “damning descriptions” of the melee that claimed one too many black lives.⁴ The East St. Louis Massacre: The Greatest Outrage of the Century drew on over 50 interviews. There was Mrs. Emma Ballard, whose husband George worked for the Kansas City Railroad. The Ballards had four children and lived in “a six room house, nicely furnished” with a piano. The cries of “Come out, niggers” by the mob between midnight and 1 a.m., alongside seeing 14 men beaten and two killed, sent her and her children packing. Emma Ballard later found her husband in St. Louis, where they decided to stay. James Taylor told of seeing two black men who were coming home from work at 4:15 a.m. hung by a white mob from a telegraph pole and shot to pieces. He also told of black women being pulled off of streetcars after which “stalwart men jumped on their stomachs and finished them by tramping them to death.”⁵ At a time when purity, piety, and submissiveness defined the Victorian ideal of white middle-class womanhood, black women lived outside the bounds of protection.

All manner of black women and men responded to East St. Louis—from those in the working class to the middle class, to economic radicals, and nationalists. The interracial National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) organized a mass Silent Protest Parade in New York and also published a report titled “Massacre at East St. Louis” in its Crisis magazine. Founded in 1909, the NAACP became a prominent civil rights organization that waged legal campaigns to contest black exclusion and fight for integration. The Crisis was its media arm. Its editor, sociologist and NAACP co-founder W.E.B. Du Bois, reported on East St. Louis and spoke out. Others did as well.

At the Liberty League’s July Fourth rally at the Metropolitan Baptist Church in New York, the league’s founder, black socialist Hubert Harrison, unveiled the first edition of The Voice: A Newspaper for the New Negro in which he penned an editorial about the goings-on in East St. Louis. Harrison not only called for armed self-defense—“Negroes must kill white men in defense of their lives and property”—but also argued that black people should hit whites in the “pocketbook.” They should withdraw whatever money they have from local savings banks and redeposit it elsewhere. Condemning freedom U.S. style, Harrison wrote: “This nation is now at war to make the world ‘safe for democracy,’ but the Negro’s contention in the court of public opinion is that until this nation itself is made safe for twelve million of its subjects, the Negro, at least, will refuse to believe in the democratic assertions of the country. The East St. Louis pogrom gives point to this contention.”⁶

The soon-to-be leader of the largest mass black nationalist organization, Marcus Garvey, called the East St. Louis massacre “a crime against the laws of humanity,” “the laws of the nation,” “Nature,” and “the God of all mankind.”⁷ Garvey co-founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and African Communities Imperial League in 1914 in Jamaica with Amy Ashwood, whose parents’ house often served as a base for meetings.⁸ Upon immigrating to the United States, she helped Garvey build the U.S.-based UNIA as well. Appalled by the assault on black life in East St. Louis, Marcus Garvey asserted: “This is no time for fine words, but a time to lift one’s voice against the savagery of a people who claim to be the dispensers of democracy.”⁹

These particular black women and men, who only later became iconic leaders in the fight for black freedom, not only met and influenced each other, but also on occasion shared the same public stage as they battled white supremacy. The year before the East St. Louis pogrom, Marcus Garvey and Ida Wells-Barnett had met in Chicago, where she lived. Apparently, Wells-Barnett had “impressed” Garvey with her “determined militancy, initiative, and proven track record on the lynching problem.”¹⁰ In a 1917 article, Garvey praised her “among others, as being ‘conscientious workers … whose fight for the uplift of the race is one of life and death.’”¹¹ In November 1918, not only did Wells-Barnett speak at a UNIA meeting with Garvey and trade unionist A. Philip Randolph, but the UNIA also appointed her and Randolph as delegates to the Versailles Peace Conference. The State Department, however, denied them passports.¹²

This diverse group of, at times, incongruous compatriots—integrationists, nationalists, and socialists—sought freedom for black people. Indeed, they shared a commitment to challenging white supremacy and advancing black equality and racial pride. They did not, however, always agree on how to achieve this broad purpose. In fact, how they imagined their status relative to white people in the United States and each other often led to different claims, end goals, and even fractious battles and critiques. Therein lies the portentous power embedded in the representative responses and interactions of Wells-Barnett, Du Bois, Harrison, Randolph, and Garvey. Intended to protect, liberate, advance, and fortify black people, such anti-racist struggles included black women’s radical critiques against race, gender, and class oppression; liberal and nationalist demands for self-determination (whether economically, territorially, culturally, or institutionally); and tactics from civil disobedience to self-defense. These social struggles, as well as the complexity of political alliances forged, sustained, terminated, and forgotten over time, expose the overlaps as well as the range of progenitors, positions, platforms, and unresolved issues that prepared the soil for the emergence of post–World War II rights and power struggles.

The travesty of East St. Louis, and the impromptu and organized, quotidian and organizational reactions to it, spotlighted the concrete experiences of being black in the United States. Black people’s hopes for an unqualified freedom in the face of tenacious white illiberality produced concrete demands. This included establishing self-reliant and autonomous black institutions and communities sometimes within and other times separate from the United States. Throughout the early to mid-20th century, white supremacist political, economic, and social relations consistently thwarted black people’s desire for dignity, joy, safety, and fairness. This was so whether in East St. Louis, Chicago, New York, or in other rural and urban home-places across the nation. Such stark realities, at the very time that the United States was making the world safe for democracy, rendered questionable the nation’s ability to extend justice to black people.

In the early 20th century, racial segregation, violence, and imperial expansion helped water black militancy, global anti-racism, and nationalist ideologies and struggles—all of which would have to cross-pollinate to create political and social environments that produced the era of expansive Black Power politics in the 1960s and 1970s. The philosophies and actions of race-conscious and proud black people in the early 1900s would help seed the soil.

Race-Conscious Black People

While the deadly strife of 1917 registered as an outrage, it was not as if black people at the turn of the 20th century and in the early 1900s experienced something totally new. Black communities had to consistently navigate the daily offenses, personal indignities, and systemic inequalities that followed on the heels of centuries of enslavement. After the Civil War and Reconstruction, many generations of black people devised multiple and divergent strategies to survive and experience joy and autonomy, and in the 20th century this included advancing their economic stations and fighting for freedom unqualified by race. These race-conscious intellectuals and activists made countless demands for personhood, citizenship, nationhood, and respect. As they did so, they experienced legal and extralegal terror. Violence was part of a broader cache of mundane practices and institutional behaviors that became more entrenched through modernized forms of de jure and de facto racism in the post-slavery era. Wells-Barnett’s early experiences and ongoing activism poignantly and aptly convey these realities.

This daughter of enslaved parents not only reported on, but also personally suffered the wrath of, state-sanctioned inequality and mob violence. As the story goes: In 1884 the single Ida B. Wells had purchased a ticket for the first-class car, or “ladies car,” on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad. She took her seat on the Memphis-bound train and waited for her ticket to be collected. When the white conductor reached her, he asked her to move. Wells refused, and a struggle ensued. It ended with the conductor dragging her from the ladies car to the rousing applause of white passengers—but not before she bit that conductor’s hand and fought valiantly against two other white men who handled and removed her. Wells sued the railroad, and actually won a $500 settlement. The Tennessee Supreme Court, however, reversed the decision on appeal. Wells’s case preceded the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) by not quite a decade. In order to test state-mandated segregation, Homer Plessy bought a first-class ticket—that is, for travel in the white section of the train. He was arrested and, in his case, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld legalized segregation, thereby establishing the “separate but equal” clause. Efforts to redeem and exalt the nation as white began to suffocate hopes for black social and political equality that had accompanied the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments and Reconstruction.

The same year as the Plessy incident in 1892, Ida Wells became an exile from her home in Memphis. Already an outspoken journalist 25 years before the East St. Louis massacre, Wells had written an editorial in her newspaper, the Free Speech, that publicly critiqued white people for their murderous behavior, particularly the lynching of three black businessmen—Calvin McDowell, Henry Stewart, and Thomas Moss, owners of the People’s Grocery. The store was a concrete incarnation of the drive to establish independent black businesses, provide needed goods to the black community, and achieve financial securi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I Roots & Routes
• PART II The Expansive Era
• Epilogue: Echoes
• Select Bibliography
• Index