Session 5: Wars, Great Migrations and Black Nationalism

Wake of the Civil War (1861-1865) -> for twelve years we saw the most inspiring, promising
and transforming set of measures adopted by Radical Republicans + at the same time a
backlash sustained by President Johnson and Southern states who resented the 14th
Amendment. They formed a kind of “revolution” by adopting a series of extra legal measures.
A set of discriminatory measures -customs / “etiquette”- adopted by Southern states; it was a
way to subjugate African Americans on a daily basis.

These measures were vindicated when in 1893 racial discrimination was institutionalized
and became constitutional on the ground that separate facilities and services were not a
violation of the 14th Amendment as long as they were equally offered, regardless of their
quality. The reason why a Civil War was inevitable was because of the middle ground,
accommodation, compromise tempted to reassure the South that it deserved to be in the
Union. It implies renouncing something: the promise of reconstruction. It was the price to
pay to leave the Union intact. What is exactly an ideology sustained by the material set of
policies of John Crow?

How to achieve Black Freedom when Whiteness reigns Supreme?

African Americans never renounced their freedom and equal citizenship. There was a
constant and active denigration that contained humiliation of Black Americans whatever
their position in life was, like preventing them from services such as food, housing.. in the
cultural sphere. White supremacy was a culture, a set of cultural norms, they were natural
and self-evident. They constantly presented Blackness as something to look at. We don't have
to dismiss culture as something secondary to a political system that is oppressive, they work
hand-in hand.

*Whiteness: a social status that gives advantage to white people, without showing it explicitly
outside the south, that include interpersonal prejudice but also supposedly color- blind
institutions like the courts, the federal government, policy decisions, and mass culture.

“A man was lynched yesterday”: set of practices between the wars which could be organised
in order to have political and cultural resistance, even physical resistance. Ida B. Wells,
“Lynching, our national crime”: no other nation, civilized or savage, burns its criminals; only
under that Stars and Stripes is the human holocaust possible. Twenty-eight human beings
burned at the stake, one of them a woman and two of them children, is the awful indictment
against American civilization—the gruesome tribute which the nation pays to the color line.
Raise the nation’s awareness and indignation about these usually unpunished murders

The Great Migration (1910-1970): movement of people leaving the South as a form of
self-preservation and refusal of Jim Crow laws. The political campaigns to challenge Jim
Crow were not enough. Many Black American activists organized massive campaigns
precisely to tell the entire nation what was going on in the South. The North knew about it
but did not want to hear about it. Infusing guilt and a sense of accountability was central in
the political campaigns aimed to change the system. The more they revolted, the more
Southerners brutalized the system. Black Americans never stopped revolting and occulting.
The Harlem Renaissance. Art, Pride and Politics: the long period following Reconstruction
saw the explosion of white-supremacist imageries, all designed to warp the mind toward
white-supremacist beliefs. The process of dehumanization triggered a resistance movement.
Among a rising generation of the black elite, this resistance was represented after 1895
through the concept of “The New Negro,” (a term coined by Locke). We can think of the New
Negro as Black America’s first superhero, locked in combat against the white-supremacist
fiction of African Americans as “Sambos,” by nature lazy, mentally inferior, licentious and,
beneath the surface, lurking sexual predators.

Session 7: The Second Reconstruction of America

The Civil Rights Movement was not a turning point, it came after generations and
generations of struggle -> thanks to it, the right to vote and the right to segregation were
enforced by law. First, the end of NAACP founded in the beginning of the century, it was
founded by DuBois and the second thing was the two World Wars, first the experience of
both being segregated in the army and in France there was no such thing as racial prejudice,
they were not seen as second-class citizens. Doing your job for the flag and arriving on land
where they were not segregated, in the South they were subhumans again. To what degree is
the Great Migration central to the forging of the civil rights movement? What is the point of
leaving the South? Forced the North to address the question of abolitionism due to the
Underground Railroad. The Harlem Renaissance had the goal of creating a new identity but
gave African Americans an idea of their worth and value, you reclaim the humanity of your
race. On the one hand, White Americans fancied black american music more and more, they
were allowing it to circulate the “black voice”, in the sense that consciousness left the church
and entered a wider scene.

1964-1968: revolutionary and transformatory movement in which Black Americans achieved

full citizenship. It was called the Second Reconstruction. Was it as profound and as
transformational? Was it as tragically curtailed?

It was a mass popular movement

It was a set of different acts coming from different groups, students, Church-based, who
initially were struggling on their own and converged to a mass movement. For the first time
they organized themselves together: marches, protests, they accepted the leadership of a few
people and they spread the gospel beginning in the South. Who, how, were, what. What do
they want? How did they protest?

World War II and Racial Justice in the US- Urged them to think that it was an attempt to get
victorious with racial injustice at home and nazism in Germany. Fighting against the horrible
authoritarian regime that placed some people at the bottom. Contexts: international and
political context. International context: the Cold War, it was a battle of discourses, speeches,
ideology.. It was not a good position to lecture the Russian government on Poland or
Czechoslovakia, as they were themselves oppressing their citizens.

Technological innovation that proved fundamental → television. All of a sudden, middle

class people saw what was going on in the South. Black Americans not violently protesting in
the street and the police crashing on them. Brown v. Board of Education: the Supreme Court.
Why was it possible? Why did the Supreme Court change its mind?

Session 8: The Struggle after 1968; Social Divide & Cultural Politics

Urban unrest from 1965 to 1968 in Los Angeles, Chicago, Newark, Detroit… In 1964, two
weeks after the landmark Civil Rights Act passed, a six-day-long protest-turned-uprising in
Harlem broke out, 6 days of intense rebellion and violence. In 1965, two weeks after the
signing of the Voting Rights Act, The Watts Rebellion erupted in the predominantly Black
neighborhood of Watts in Los Angeles, resulting in the death of 34 people.

In 1964 erupted what the media called the race riots, rebellions or uprisings. Black revolts
spread throughout the country in 1968 due to the assassination of Martin Luther King -> end
of the Civil Rights Movement. The Civil Rights Movement put a formal ending to segregation
in the South; all the practices of discrimination were banned. In 1965, after the signing of the
Voting Rights Act, activists kept pushing for more. The ability to cast their ballots without
intimidation was given back to Black Americans. America could not help but wonder how it
was possible that after achieving these stunning victories, African Americans seemed more
frustrated and disappointed. Why is it that they were burning their neighborhoods at the
time when segregation and discrimination was officially illegal? It was a contradiction.

WHAT'S GOING ON ? MARVIN GAYE vs « IT 'S BEEN A LONG. A LONG TIME COMIN’,
BUT I KNOW. A CHANGE GON' COME.” SAM COOKE

“The Kerner Commission” aka Special Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders

(1967-1968) was formed by President Johnson in July 1967, headed by Illinois Gov. Otto
Kerner Jr., to examine the causes of urban race riots.

The Kerner Report (1968) -> “our nation is moving towards two societies -one white,
one black- separate and unequal”. What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done?

The summer of 1967 again brought racial disorders to American cities, and with them shock,
fear and bewilderment to the nation. The worst came during a two-week period in July, first
in Newark and then in Detroit. Each set off a chain reaction in neighboring communities. On
July 28, 1967, the President of the United States estab­lished this Commission and directed
us to answer three basic questions: What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done
to prevent it from happening again?

Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white–separate and unequal.
Reaction to last summer’s disorders has quickened the move­ment and deepened the division.
Discrimination and segrega­tion have long permeated much of American life; they now
threaten the future of every American.

In the face of major social unrest, President Johnson told Martin Luther King Jr. to calm the
situation, Black Americans were upset, poor and frustrated. In 1968 Martin Luther King Jr.
was killed, so President Johnson appointed a National Advisory Commission on Civil
Disorders. This deepening racial division is not inevitable. The move­ment apart can be
reversed. Choice is still possible. Our principal task is to define that choice and to press for a
national resolution. Violence cannot build a better society. Disruption and dis­order nourish
repression, not justice.

Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally
unknown to most white Americans. What white Americans have never fully understood but
what the Negro can never forget–is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto.
White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.
Underlying causes: races and poverty.

The Civil Rights Act was binding for the first time, it was a legal framework that prohibited
discrimination and segregation. As it was binding and enforcing, you had no choice but to
comply. Why is it exactly that at the moment of a democratic presidency violence erupted?
Most white Americans did not know about the situation Black Americans lived in.
Epistemology of ignorance -> ignoring the formal reality.

White and Black Americans live in two separate worlds, we do not call that a nation.
President Johnson was upset because there was not much he could do, he could not take any
brutal steps to improve the lives of African Americans. One of the key findings of the Kerner
report was that not because Black Americans were inherently criminal or because of the
culture of poverty, not because they were going to behave asocially, the reality was that they
were suffering poverty constantly. The white man created the ghetto, sustained it and
eventually ignored it. If you don't understand the ghetto, you won't understand how it is
contested into flames.

Americans elected Nixon because they wanted calm, the end of riots and the end of
criminality, cast them out of demands. Security at the expense of justice.

Black Power

Kwame Ture (formerly known as Stokely Carmichael) & Charles V. Hamilton -> Black
Power: The Politics of Liberation.

I ain't going to jail no more. The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin' us
is to take over. What we gonna start sayin' now is Black Power! (Stokely Carmichael)

It is necessary to understand that Black Power is a cry of disappointment. Black Power was
born from the wounds of despair and disappointment. It is a cry of daily hurt and persistent
pain (Martin Luther King)

In 1966, Stokely Carmichael saw so much intolerance and violence both in the South and the
North that thought that non-violence was not the solution, so he parted ways with Dr. King.

The Black Panther Party

The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, otherwise known as the Black Panther Party
(BPP), was established in 1966 in Oakland, California by 2 students: Huey Newton and
Bobby Seale.

It was a revolutionary organization with an ideology of Black nationalism, socialism, and

armed self-defense, particularly against police brutality. It was part of the Black Power
movement, which broke from the integrationist goals and nonviolent protest tactics of the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference led by Martin Luther King, Jr.