Exodus Politics

Civil Rights and Leadership in African American Literature and Culture

Robert J. Patterson

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780813935270
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Using the term "exodus politics" to theorize the valorization of black male leadership in the movement for civil rights, Robert J. Patterson explores the ways in which the political strategies and ideologies of this movement paradoxically undermined the collective enfranchisement of black people. He argues that by narrowly conceptualizing civil rights in only racial terms and relying solely on a male figure, conventional African American leadership, though frequently redemptive, can also erode the very goals of civil rights.

The author turns to contemporary African American writers such as Ernest Gaines, Gayl Jones, Alice Walker, and Charles Johnson to show how they challenge the dominant models of civil rights leadership.

He draws on a variety of disciplines—including black feminism, civil rights history, cultural studies, and liberation theology—in order to develop a more nuanced formulation of black subjectivity and politics.

Patterson's connection of the concept of racial rights to gender and sexual rights allows him to illuminate the literature's promotion of more expansive models. By considering the competing and varied political interests of black communities, these writers reimagine the dominant models in a way that can empower communities to be self-sustaining in the absence of a messianic male leader.

1. “Is He the One?”: Civil Rights Activism and Leadership in Ernest Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman

The lesson she had learned from her sixty years a slave and ten years free: that there was no bad luck in the world but white people. “They don’t know when to stop,” she said, and returned to her bed, pulled up the quilt and left them to hold that thought forever.

—Toni Morrison, Beloved

The publication of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971) defined Ernest Gaines’s position as a national and international literary historian,¹ for the text makes a self-conscious effort to record African American women’s and men’s leadership in civil rights struggles from Emancipation to the middle of the civil rights movement. Like other fiction that emerges between the mid-1960s and the late 1970s, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman employs a “long” civil rights historical framework to establish a continuous, ongoing history of black freedom struggles in the New World and to emphasize that the civil rights movement occurring in the 1950s and 1960s did not emerge in a vacuum.² This engagement with historical events and leaders that have shaped black freedom struggles has earned its classification as a historical novel.³ Yet unlike most historical novels The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman is not a mere fictionalized re-creation of history; instead, it diverges from master narratives to explore in new ways the roles of black men and women in events like the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the 1963 March on Washington. Historiographies of the Spanish-American War of 1898 have not fully examined how African American men’s participation in that war altered black people’s attitudes toward civil rights. Relatedly, historiographies of the civil rights movement have not fully addressed how black women’s leadership in the movement reconstituted the movement’s goals. By defamiliarizing these events, Gaines uncovers significant moments that shape civil rights discourses.

Whereas master narratives of black civil rights struggles that emerged in the late 1960s and flourished into the 1980s reinforced the paradoxes of exodus politics by suggesting that only black men had fought and won the black freedom struggle, Gaines brings nuance to the politics of gender in historiographies of the civil rights movement. Not only does he call into question the efficacy of male formal leadership that social movement theorists have privileged in evaluating the success of the movement’s organizational and mobilization tactics, but he disrupts the related notion that normative black men’s political interests are those of the entire community.⁴ At a time when black nationalism’s emphasis on black unification contributed to the proliferation of discourses that promulgated sameness, Gaines’s text foregrounds difference, underscoring the need for a liberatory politics that will consider black community members’ sometimes competing political interests. In making this choice, he exemplifies the beginnings of a post–civil rights era development in black politics and culture later described by Cathy Cohen as the shift from an emphasis on “consensus issues construed as having an equal impact on all those sharing a primary identity based on race” to an increasing exploration of “cross-cutting issues structured around and built on the social, political, and economic cleavages that tear at the perceived unity and shared identity of group members.”⁵

Black studies, black feminist studies, and black queer studies have taken cross-cutting issues as their disciplinary points of departure and have spent the late twentieth century theorizing the discontinuities within black identities in order to foreground the multiplicity of black political concerns.⁶ When Gaines published The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, however, he entered territory that had been of particular interest primarily to black feminist critics and cultural producers. Around that same time, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) and Sula (1973) and Alice Walker’s The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970) were upsetting black aestheticians’ notion that black art would best serve black politics and civil rights attainment by depicting positive (and idealistic) images of black life and family;⁷ but even more important, they were demonstrating how a political agenda that privileged the normative black subject’s concern to regain his putatively rightful position as the head of the black household undermined the struggle to collectively enfranchise black communities. During this black women’s literary renaissance, black women writers depicted black heteropatriarchy as an institution that created as much conflict and division between men and women as white heteropatriarchy did by subordinating black women and refusing to recognize or value their specific experiences of oppression. Black women writers thought about ways to develop political agendas that did not require black women to be subjugated in order for black men to be enfranchised.

For some black male critics, however, these representations were complicit with white assaults on black manhood: Ishmael Reed and Addison Gayle, among others, excoriated black women writers (and cultural producers more generally) for conspiring to decenter political concerns that, in their view, should take precedence on black communities’ public agendas.⁸ The controversy shows how difficult it is to disrupt monolithic notions of black subjectivity and politics. Gaines’s text, which at times struggles to foreground Miss Jane’s voice, importantly diverges from this pervasive trend among black male cultural producers. Critics thus have praised The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman for developing a multidimensional black female character who has a distinctly “feminine” voice.”⁹

Gaines remains attentive to the historical and cultural processes that have rightfully made black men like Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. especially prominent in black civil rights historiography. Yet he also examines how lesser-known people, especially black women, and more quotidian acts of resistance contributed to civil rights successes. His exploration troubles the arbitrary boundaries historiographers and everyday people have erected between leadership and activism, as well as between civil rights and other social movements. Gaines’s desire to center Miss Jane’s story gestures toward a larger cultural movement with the goal of disrupting masculinist civil rights discourse and articulating new discourses that will be more broadly emancipatory, conceiving of civil rights as encompassing not just racial rights but the gender rights, sexual rights, and economic rights with which they intersect.

In this chapter, I argue that by foregrounding Miss Jane’s story as exemplary of black women’s leadership across decades of black freedom struggles, Gaines decenters exodus politics as the political model of black leadership. He emphasizes the complementary and mutually constitutive aspects of black women’s and black men’s leadership (in terms of both formal and bridge leadership) and demonstrates that sole dependence on a male leader keeps communities from recognizing their own empowering role in freedom struggles. Gaines challenges communities to discard their messianic hopes (which privilege formal leadership over bridge leadership) and instead to view political change as an ongoing process in which their participation remains necessary. My analysis of exodus politics in this chapter is especially concerned with how Gaines engages two of the four questions that I raised in the Introduction: (2) Who will lead the movement, and how can leadership be redefined to include the work both men and women do to mobilize participants? and (3) What paradigms of leadership—communal or individual—should African Americans adopt?

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, which I will subsequently refer to as Miss Pittman, chronicles the triumphs, trials, and tribulations of a 110-year-old protagonist, Miss Jane, whose life extends from slavery through the contemporary civil rights movement. Although this time frame makes African American civil rights attainment the telos of a century-long struggle, it resists the notion that the history of this period has shown a linear trajectory of progress. Encompassing both individual and communal transformations, Miss Pittman reveals the processes by which the African American masses come to, in the words of Keith Byerman, “a consciousness of their role in history” and demonstrates the leadership activities that help create this awareness.¹⁰ It also shows how the characters’ understanding of civil rights and leadership evolves through changing historical, economic, political, and cultural contexts. In particular, the characters grow to understand civil rights, activism, and leadership in terms that exceed gender norms that would otherwise limit their political achievements and access.¹¹ Gaines’s presentation of male and female leadership roles in the civil rights movement is central to his book and is especially nuanced and complex, in ways that are best illuminated by an exploration of formal and bridge leadership in that movement.

Bridge Leadership and Formal Leadership

Male formal leaders have been the face of the civil rights movement in the political imagination and civil rights historiography.¹² As Robnett states, they held the titled positions, “usually provide[d] the press statements[,] and [were] responsible for decision making regarding organization tactics, goals, and strategies.”¹³ It was men therefore who came to dominate civil rights leadership discourses. Yet it is ironic that a small group of visibly public men would come to symbolize the movement’s leadership when the majority of leaders were actually women. In her groundbreaking How Long, How Long? African-American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights (1997), Robnett discovered, from interviews with black women who had been active in the civil rights movement, that many women who were excluded from formal leadership positions exerted a less visible but just as influential form of grassroots leadership. While male formal leaders used their access to national media outlets and government institutions to agitate for civil rights, female bridge leaders grounded themselves in communities where, using one-on-one interactions and formal and informal meetings, they linked individuals to the broader movement. If formal leaders could be thought of as macro-mobilizers, bridge leaders might be seen as micro-mobilizers who catalyzed the macro-movement, using what Robnett called “prefigurative strategies” (strategies aimed at changing individual consciousness and identity) to spur political action. As an often neglected and understudied group in the movement, bridge leaders typically secured movement followers and sustained the movement over the long term. In foregrounding their contributions and conceptualizing their activities as leadership, Robnett not only contested the primacy of male formal leadership but provided a more comprehensive and nuanced way of understanding, evaluating, and valuing the types of leadership positions that women typically held.

Bridge leaders’ main role inside communities was to raise consciousness and make legible the goals of the civil rights movement so that individuals would see themselves as essential agents in the movement’s success. As Robnett explained, bridge leaders used “frame bridging,” or “providing those already predisposed to one’s cause with information sufficient to induce them to join the movement”; “frame amplification,” or “convincing individuals that their participation is crucial and that the movement’s goals can be achieved”; “frame extension,” or “incorporating concerns not originally part of the movement’s goals but valuable as a means of expanding support”; and “frame transformation,” or “the process whereby individually held frames are altered . . . to achieve consensus with the movement’s goals.”¹⁴ They engaged in these activities, Robnett wrote, “to foster ties between the social movement and community and between prefigurative strategies (aimed at individual change, identity, and consciousness) and political strategies (aimed at organizational tactics designed to challenge the existing relationships with the state and other societal institutions). Indeed, the activities of bridge leaders in the civil rights movement were the stepping stones necessary for potential constituents and adherents to cross formidable barriers between their personal lives and the political life of civil rights movement organizations.”¹⁵ The different types of “frame” activities that Robnett listed collectively illustrate the various points on the spectrum of political consciousness in which bridge leaders found potential adherents and the differing tactics necessary to integrate those members into the movement. It is significant that the term frame modifies each of the bridging activities because the word emphasizes how the activities aim to alter, or reframe, potential adherents’ understanding of their agency, their relationship to the movement, and the movement’s relationship to them.

Robnett’s description of how bridge leaders connected “prefigurative” to “political” strategies is important because it elucidates how women’s activism and leadership—at the grassroots level—integrally molded the civil rights movement’s national achievements as women developed and implemented local programs and activities that engendered support for the broader movement. Consider, for example, the leadership philosophy of Septima Clark, a teacher and longtime activist who established the Citizenship Schools, which taught reading to adults across the Deep South. Clark believed that “direct action [w]as a distraction from the more substantive process of local leadership development and education” and preferred “face-to-face contact which drew people into activities until they were immersed in a movement culture that altered consciousness and impelled action.”¹⁶ Although Clark did not altogether dismiss the importance of direct action, or of male formal leadership, she insisted that communities needed to develop, train, and sustain their own leaders and constituents/followers. By accentuating the roles bridge leaders held and the strategies they employed, Clark also subverted the “Great Man” theory of leadership that has been so persistent in the black political imagination. Clark foregrounded consciousness-raising as necessary to “local leadership development and education” and thus as crucial to the continuation of black freedom struggles.

Although Robnett maintained that the majority of bridge leaders were women while the majority of formal leaders were men, she did not place the two types of leadership in binary opposition; she pointed out that some men were in fact bridge leaders, while some women were formal leaders, and claimed that both types of leadership were necessary and that they complemented and reinforced each other. Her work, along with that of other revisionist historiographers exploring the transformative influence of female bridge leaders on the long civil rights movement, has thus provided a broader discursive context to theorize black leadership generally and to challenge the priorities of exodus politics.¹⁷ Female bridge leaders did more than mobilize support for the civil rights agenda: they reshaped that agenda by formulating specific initiatives and programs and by foregrounding cross-cutting issues. Their prefigurative strategies not only brought the movement new supporters but helped broaden the movement’s scope. Without this grassroots activity, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to mobilize and sustain a movement or to enable it to grow and change.

Gaines’s novel is a powerful precursor to these theoretical developments, destabilizing the traditional narrative of the civil rights movement and assumptions about the relationship between the movement’s leaders and its participants. It depicts men and women functioning as both bridge and formal leaders and employing both prefigurative and political strategies. Miss Jane, Big Laura, Ned, and Jimmy all act outside their socially constructed gender roles of (female) bridge and (male) formal leaders, thereby frustrating the paradoxes of exodus politics while simultaneously complicating their own statuses as leaders in civil rights struggles. Readers see how a movement develops in local communities and how local concerns and struggles are bridged to a broader movement for the long term. Activities like teaching black people how to read and encouraging them to overcome their fear of random white violence emerge as an important foundation for increased black political activity. Miss Pittman emphasizes in particular how bridge leaders transform individuals who in turn transform others to further build their communities. This accomplishment, which is no small feat, forms a marked contrast to an exodus politics in which communities become disillusioned, disaffected, and immobilized in the absence of a formal leader.

Like Gaines’s Miss Pittman, Andrea Lee’s novel Sarah Phillips explores how black people experienced these feelings more intensely following King’s death—at a time when they were wondering about the future of black leadership and of the black freedom struggle more generally. In a provocative reading of the novel, Aida Hussen concludes, “King’s assassination . . . is a fundamentally disorienting event because it signals the symbolic loss of the figure of the leader who once lent organization and intelligibility to both loyal identificatory impulses and rebellious, disidentificatory impulses.”¹⁸ Her argument illuminates some of the consequences of aligning a movement too closely with its formal leadership: African American writers such as Lee warn against letting the loss of one formal leader signify the end of, or a disruption in, black freedom struggles. They eschew singular models of political organization and leadership because such models do not produce self-empowered and self-led communities. These writers conceptualize ways to develop bridge and formal leaders who fulfill multiple roles within their communities; they aim to produce highly functional leaders who continuously train the next generation of leaders, thereby keeping the political movements alive.

Much literary criticism has ignored Miss Jane’s leadership roles or argued that her assumption of these roles is implausible. Such arguments rely upon masculinist formulations of leadership that exclude the...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Civil Rights, Leadership, and Exodus Politics
• 1. “Is He the One?”: Civil Rights Activism and Leadership in Ernest Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
• 2. “The Refusal of Christ to Accept Crucifixion”: Bridge Leadership in Alice Walker’s Meridian
• 3. “The Important Thing Is Making Generations”: Reproduction and Blues Performance as Forms of Civil Rights Leadership in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora
• 4. “We All Killed Him”: The Limits of Formal Leadership and Civil Rights Legislation in Charles Johnson’s Dreamer
• Epilogue: Is There Life after Exodus Politics?
• Notes
• Bibliography