Nonviolence before King

The Politics of Being and the Black Freedom Struggle

Anthony C. Siracusa

• Verlag: The University of North Carolina Press
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781469663012
• Thema: Historia
• Thema: Historia afroamericana

In the early 1960s, thousands of Black activists used nonviolent direct action to challenge segregation at lunch counters, movie theaters, skating rinks, public pools, and churches across the United States, battling for, and winning, social change. Organizers against segregation had used litigation and protests for decades but not until the advent of nonviolence did they succeed in transforming ingrained patterns of white supremacy on a massive scale. In this book, Anthony C. Siracusa unearths the deeper lineage of anti-war pacifist activists and thinkers from the early twentieth century who developed nonviolence into a revolutionary force for Black liberation. Telling the story of how this powerful political philosophy came to occupy a central place in the Black freedom movement by 1960, Siracusa challenges the idea that nonviolent freedom practices faded with the rise of the Black Power movement. He asserts nonviolence's staying power, insisting that the indwelling commitment to struggle for freedom collectively in a spirit of nonviolence became, for many, a lifelong commitment. In the end, what was revolutionary about the nonviolent method was its ability to assert the basic humanity of Black Americans, to undermine racism's dehumanization, and to insist on the right to be.

Part I Imagining Nonviolence

1 Race and the Problem of Pacifism in the United States

The Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a pacifist organization dedicated to ending violence, was central to the nonviolent fight against Jim Crow. Founded in 1916 as the Great War wracked Western Europe and Jim Crow hardened into a violent way of life in the United States, the FOR believed that the segregation of Black and white people, like the isolating distance between the capital and laboring classes, was the root of widespread lynching in the United States. These American pacifists saw social isolation from one other, and the ignorance and enmity that resulted from such segregation, as the primary driver of racial violence in the United States. American racism and class conflict were analogs to the caustic nationalism fueling the bloodletting in Western Europe, and FOR leaders believed that meaningful engagement across lines of difference among people from different backgrounds could cure the U.S. of its scourge of lynching.

Over the course of its first three decades, the FOR intentionally entered violent conflicts to test a political “method” steeped in the religious “principles” of Quaker pacifism with the goal of building interracial and cross-class alliances that proved violence was not the only way to solve seemingly intractable conflicts. Its work contributed directly to the process of imagining nonviolence in the United States, and later proved indispensable to local experiments with nonviolent direct action.¹

But by themselves, the pacifist politics of noncooperation—the refusal to fight—proved to be a threadbare response to the violence of lynching in the United States. As hundreds of thousands of Black Americans migrated from the southern countryside to cities across the United States during the First World War, they were routinely met with brutal mob violence. Self-defense was a common choice for Black families facing armed vigilantes, both in the South and along the trail of the Great Migration, and the birth of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 made litigation a premier strategy in the fight against Jim Crow. For most Black people, religious or otherwise, pacifism was irrelevant at best and foolish at worst, and the philosophy of nonviolence that became so central to the Black freedom movement was neither a staple of Black thought in the early twentieth century nor a legible philosophy in the fight against Jim Crow.

The FOR launched a process of imagining nonviolence—including experimentation with nonviolent direct action—that stretched over decades and contributed to the development of religious nonviolence as a political philosophy in the Black freedom struggle. The white southerner Howard Kester was at the leading edge of the FOR’s effort to conceptualize and advance a constructive nonviolent force in the fight against Jim Crow in the 1920s and 1930s. He organized interracial southern groups around an “aggressive pacifism” in the interwar era, but was fired by the FOR late in 1933 for organizing interracial groups of striking workers who kept and used guns for self-defense. To his white bosses in New York, the purity of a pacifist commitment to do no violence outweighed the importance of Kester’s interracial organizing in the South.

The lily-white FOR ultimately failed to demonstrate the “positive” nonviolent force it wrote about so often in the 1920s. But in the wake of Kester’s firing, a cohort of Black intellectuals and organizers joined the FOR to serve in staff and leadership positions—Howard Thurman, Bayard Rustin, and James Farmer—and the work of these men moved the FOR from idea to action in developing the nonviolent “social force” envisioned by the pacifists. Each was a pacifist upon joining the FOR, and each was committed to the project of joining personal ethical practice with effective nonviolent politics. As Black pacifists, they brought unique sensibilities and new networks to the FOR. And Thurman’s ideas, in particular, contributed directly to imagining nonviolence as a practical and powerful force for Black Americans. The organizing acumen of Rustin and Farmer bolstered the FOR’s fledgling effort to develop a political technique—nonviolent direct action—that expressed the ethics of nonviolence.²

By the early 1940s, the FOR’s effort to develop “techniques which are themselves immediate ends” began to bear fruit as the organization became the first in the United States to formally support and actively experiment with nonviolent political methods in what they called the “field of race relations.” The FOR’s work was foundational to imagining nonviolence as a politics of being, and the FOR’s local organizing led to nonviolent direct-action campaigns in communities across the country—a cornerstone in the foundation of the midcentury nonviolent revolt against Jim Crow.

Origins of the U.S. Fellowship

The Fellowship of Reconciliation was founded in Cambridge, England, one week after Germany and Russia declared war on each other in August 1914.³ The group came together after the publication of English Quaker Henry Hodgkin’s “Message to Men and Women of Goodwill,” where Hodgkin declared, “War spells the bankruptcy of much that we too lightly call Christian.”⁴ He implored his fellow Christians to find better methods than war to solve the world’s major conflicts, and nearly seventy U.S. activists heeded his call at Garden City, Long Island, in early November 1916. These U.S. pacifists, previously “unknown to one another” and emerging from “different social groups and various faiths,” found themselves “drawn together by a common feeling that the time was ripe for a deeper expression of the Christian message.” These founders belonged primarily to existing Christian peace organizations—the Student Christian Movement, the World Alliance of Churches for Promoting International Friendship, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, among others—but they were joined in their belief that the newly organized Fellowship of Reconciliation offered the best chance to meet the “profound need of uniting men and women of all nations.”⁵

Establishing an office in New York City in 1916, the FOR named Quaker Edward W. Evans as its first secretary and appointed Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) youth leader Gilbert A. Beaver to the General Affairs Committee. Helen S. Daley was appointed head of the Study Group Committee, and Haverford philosophy professor Rufus Jones was appointed to head the Conference Committee.⁶ While its charter commitment was a refusal to “take part in war,” the FOR believed its charge “clearly involves … very much more than the question of War.” Such conflicts are not an “isolated phenomenon,” the founders wrote, but are rather “one out of many unhappy consequences of the spiritual poverty of society.” Acknowledging “the gulf between the present state of society and the ideal conceived,” FOR members stated in 1916 their belief that the “immediate realization of that ideal” was possible by acting in a “spirit of love” in all aspects of one’s “personal and social life.”⁷ This idea, that a social ideal might be realized through personal acts of love, became a hallmark of the FOR’s approach and a core element of the politics of being, the animating impulse in the FOR’s search for a method to transform the violence plaguing American life.

The FOR’s primary orientation to social change was Christian. The organization called “the life and teaching and death of Jesus” a “revolutionary principle” and implored its small but growing membership to live like Jesus “here and now, in every relationship,” across the spectrum of “personal, social, commercial, national, and international life.”⁸ FOR leaders believed it unnecessary to wait for social change, suggesting instead that such change would emerge from living in new ways here and now. FOR leaders believed their unique charge was to discover the “full implications” of applying this way of life “to all the great problems of industrial and social life,” and they sought the “development of local groups” to apply FOR principles to domestic conflicts in the United States. The FOR cited its tactics as “conversation,” “correspondence,” and “the use of literature,” and said its goal was to “enlist and develop spiritual and intellectual leaders who can make special contributions to Christian thought and practice.”⁹

This almost exclusively white group of pacifists belonged to a much wider movement in the early twentieth century that sought to square Christian ideas with the scientific revolution and an emerging positivism. This shift in epistemology gave rise to a religious modernist movement that included intellectuals who placed the Bible in a historical context to explain its meaning. The FOR’s claim that “the life, death, and teachings of Jesus” provide a “revolutionary principle” was part of a broader intellectual movement to understand the historical figure Jesus of Nazareth within the political and social context of first-century Palestine. A focus on what Albert Schweitzer called the “historical Jesus” challenged the biblical literalism of fundamentalist Christians, who argued that the Bible was the direct and infallible word of God. This modern religious movement was buoyed by positivist notions of social perfectibility, a vision that informed the work of Social Gospel advocates like Walter Rauschenbusch and Washington Gladden, among many others. These religious people and the thousands of others who preached the Social Gospel coordinated outreach programs that provided clothes, food, and health services for increasingly urban populations concentrated in subpar living conditions. Some of these religious leaders, seeking to bolster their ethical argument in favor of charity and outreach, suggested that socialist practices were clearly evident in the life of Jesus. In this Progressive Era moment, an epoch of “superabundant organizations” as associational life grew dramatically in the United States. The FOR staked out its claim as the “central organization” to facilitate the “growth of the Movement” designed to bring together people of all classes and races in a “common quest” to apply the revolutionary and nonviolent principles of Jesus of Nazareth “to the problems of social and national and international life.”¹⁰

But the FOR struggled to move beyond its primary charge of opposing war, which it named as among the most acute problems in “social and international life.” “As Christians we are forbidden to wage war,” the FOR’s founders wrote in 1916, seeking instead to apply “the broad and fundamental principles of Christianity to International Affairs.”¹¹ For the vast majority of Black Americans, however, opposing war was neither a spiritual imperative nor an activist endeavor. American wars tended to produce significant advancement for African Americans. Crispus Attucks, a New England man of African descent, was a hero to many for being among the first patriots to die in the years leading up to the Revolutionary War.¹² More than 200,000 Black troops fought for freedom on the side of the Union in the American Civil War, what Frederick Douglass called “an abolition war” whose “comprehensive and logical object” was ending slavery.¹³ At the turn of the twentieth century, more than 3,000 African Americans fought in the Spanish-American War in both Cuba and the Philippines, demonstrating bravery and commitment to nation alongside whites despite fighting in segregated units. In the First World War, more than one million African Americans responded to draft calls from the U.S. government, and more than 370,000 served in the U.S. Army.¹⁴ And while he later regretted the decision, W. E. B. Du Bois called for Blacks to “close ranks” and support President Woodrow Wilson in “the Great War.”¹⁵ As the United States fought wars both overseas and at home under the banner of democratic ideals, Black Americans urged the nation, through sacrifice and loyalty, to vouchsafe the promise of life and liberty for every American.

A. Philip Randolph, a son of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church and an emerging Black labor organizer, notably broke from Du Bois in condemning the First World War as a “sham” and a “mockery” of American ideals. Writing with his co-editor Chandler Owen in their Harlem newspaper The Messenger in 1919, the two argued that “the sham democracy about which Americans prate” would be revealed as “a rape on decency and a travesty on common sense.” Owen and Randolph questioned the wisdom of Black Americans fighting in a segregated army for a Jim Crow society that lynched them with impunity.¹⁶ The two were well aware that Black Americans were expected to “accommodate white expectations” under the threat of death, and African Americans were often killed as a matter of common practice with no consequences for their killers.¹⁷ As Richard Wright has written, Black Americans in this period “were shot, hanged, maimed, lynched, and generally hounded until they were either dead or their spirits broken,” a grim reality that led a generation of historians to characterize this early twentieth-century moment as the “nadir” of Black life in America.¹⁸

The Black response to this routine violence was manifold. The Great Migration led to an exodus of nearly two million Black Americans out of the former Confederacy between 1915 and 1940.¹⁹ Many of those who stayed in the South moved from rural to urban areas, but whether in rural areas or urban, North or South, Black Americans committed themselves to developing their own institutions as segregation and violence hardened in the early twentieth century. Black banks, businesses, schools, and churches expanded dramatically before 1940 and provided critically important space for day-to-day life for Black people in America.²⁰ These efforts at building Black institutions emerged as among the most important efforts at making freedom in the age of Jim Crow.

Efforts to formalize collective resistance to white supremacy and Jim Crow took a number of forms in the early twent...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations and Map
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Imagining Nonviolence
• Part II: Practicing Nonviolent Direct Action
• Part III: Building a Movement: The Politics of Being
• Epilogue: Of Agnostic Nonviolent Technicians and the Conscience of the Congress
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index