In the decades leading up to the Second World War, the United States was the world leader in White supremacist legislation. As European nations colonized much of the world during those decades, they often looked to American race laws as examples for how to rule over people of color. White Americans had, after all, been crafting such laws for hundreds of years. White southerners, in particular, were considered by many Europeans to be the world’s experts on proper race relations, due to the fact that they had lived amongst and successfully controlled large Black populations for many generations. The “White men’s” countries of the British Empire – Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa – where large populations of White settlers were sent, often considered themselves to be following in the footsteps of the United States.
Nazi Germany emerged in the midst of this wider world of White supremacy, in which it was common for Europeans to study and emulate American race law. Given this fact, it should not be surprising to discover that Nazis were influenced by American race law as well. However, scholars have failed to understand how extensive the Nazi engagement with American race law was until quite recently. On the American side, this is partly because Nazi Germany eventually descended into extremes so much more brutal than anything in the United States, that it was easy to assume that Nazis had nothing to learn about racism from the U.S. On the German side, it is partly because Germans have made a strong commitment to taking full responsibility for Nazi atrocities, making them hesitant to focus on the wider world of White supremacy that Nazis were a part of and were influenced by.
However, this scholarly lapse is also partly because as a society, when Americans think of the race laws of this era, the predominant images that come to mind are of Jim Crow. Because the Nazis did not develop a Jim Crow system of segregation, scholars have sometimes assumed too quickly that Nazis were not influenced by American race law. But as Yale law professor James Q. Whitman has recently documented in his important new book Hitler’s American Model – on which this article is based – the American race laws that the Nazis studied the most seriously were laws that applied to states outside of the South. These were laws regulating citizenship, immigration, sexual relations, and marriage rights. The fact that Nazis found such laws more helpful than Jim Crow itself should perhaps give us pause.
The figures who crafted Nazi race laws, of course, took Hitler’s perspectives very seriously. Hitler’s own statements regarding American racial practices and racial legislation would have been important to them as they began to study and debate American race law themselves. For this reason, we will start with a brief examination of Hitler’s views before turning to the legal minds of Nazi Germany, and their own engagement with American race law.
Hitler’s Praise of American Genocide
In 1928 – five years before he came to power, and over a decade before the outbreak of World War II – Hitler praised the United States for establishing its dominance through the genocide of Native Americans. White Americans, in Hitler’s words, “gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand, and now kept the modest remnant under observation in a cage,” by which he meant reservations. According to Hitler, White Americans had provided a model for other “Aryans.” Just as the United States had transformed itself into an immense global power through the conquest of the West – and the extermination of the “inferior races” that lived there – so too would Germany rise to immense power through a campaign of conquest and extermination in the lands to its east. Once the Nazis began those eastern campaigns, they sometimes referred to the Eastern European Jewish populations they exterminated as “Indians.”
For Hitler, the American conquest of such a vast and resource-rich land had been a turning point in world history, ushering in the first phase of White global domination, which Hitler now sought to complete. Indeed, the United States played a crucial role in the Nazi understanding of world history. According to Volkisch World History – a popular Nazi book about world history published in 1934 – “The most important event in the history of the states of the Second Millennium – up until the [First World] War – was the founding of the United States of America. The struggle of the Aryans for world domination received thereby its strongest prop.” In 1936, the popular Nazi text, The Supremacy of the White Race, called the founding of the United States “the first fateful turning point” in the rise of worldwide White supremacy. The genocide of Native Americans played a crucial role in that “turning point.”
Hitler not only praised the methods used to conquer the American West, he praised the racial order the United States had then created to prevent “racial mixing,” which had allowed White Americans, in his opinion, to maintain the “racial purity” of their supposed “Aryan” ancestry. Although Hitler certainly had no problems with the race-based totalitarianism of the Jim Crow South – according to his officials he praised the widespread practice of lynching there – the racial order he was most interested in involved policies that were found outside of the South. In the second volume of his notorious autobiography Mein Kampf, published in 1927, Hitler praised the American Immigration Act of 1924, which forbade Asian immigration and greatly restricted immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. Immigrants from these European countries were seen as racially inferior both by Nazis, and by many White Americans. As Hitler put it in Mein Kampf: “The American union categorically refuses the immigration of physically unhealthy elements, and simply excludes the immigration of certain races.” Germany, he said, ought to do the same.
Some of Hitler’s fellow Nazis believed that the United States would gradually decline in power due to “racial mixing,” which would lead to a weakening of the “racial purity” of White American’s supposed Aryan ancestry. Hitler disagreed, arguing that due to its recent immigration laws, the United States was on the right track to maintain a racially pure Aryan nation, which would ensure its global strength. Although White Americans had once viewed their nation as the refuge of all oppressed people, and had therefore hesitated to limit any immigrant groups, they had learned from their experience with Asian immigration that such idealistic visions were naïve and posed a threat to them. This, at least, was the Nazi interpretation. The United States had learned their lesson, and Hitler warned that it was a lesson that Europe needed to learn as well. According to Hitler, Europe would soon be unable to compete with the United States unless it too embraced race-based immigration policies. Hitler was less concerned with the question of how to segregate “inferior” races, and was much more concerned with how to build a “racially pure” nation. American immigration policies, he felt, pointed towards an effective form of the population engineering he was interested in.
Hitler, in other words, saw a certain model in the United States: conquer a vast empire of land. Wipe out the “racially inferior” people who lived there. And then, create policies to ensure “racial purity” within that land.
1933: The Prussian Memorandum
Shortly after Hitler ascended to power in 1933, a team of Nazi legal experts gathered to discuss the creation of a new system of criminal law that would suit their purposes. These men were extreme even by Nazi standards: their team was led by Roland Freisler, who later became president of the murderous Nazi People’s Court, and attended the Wannsee Conference that endorsed the total extermination of the Jewish people. They composed a radical Nazi manifesto that became known as the Prussian Memorandum, which called for a harsh new system of criminal law. The memorandum would have a major impact on events to come.
The Prussian Memorandum called for the creation of “race crimes.” One of the proposed crimes was “Causing Harm to the Honor of the Race,” which specifically targeted people of color. It criminalized public affection – such as dating or dancing – between “Aryans” and people of color, under the claim that public displays of interracial affection would create scandals and would dishonor the “German race.” In describing the criminalization of interracial public displays of affection, the Memorandum noted that in the American South, the criminalization of such actions was more severe: in the South, even completely private interracial romance was often criminalized. In other words, these most radical of Nazis who gathered in 1933 to produce a new framework for Nazi criminal law advocated a law that was less severe than similar laws in the American South, and they knew it. After a few months of debate, they eventually decided against the law entirely, out of their concern that it would damage foreign relations with “colored” nations, and would thereby weaken Germany’s position in the world.
The Prussian Memorandum also proposed a criminal offense called “Race Treason.” According to the memorandum, “Every form of sexual mixing between a German and a member of a foreign race is to be punished as race treason, and indeed both parties are to be subject to punishment.” When the Prussian Memorandum was first circulated in September of 1933, this proposal set off a huge debate in Nazi circles. Would it be considered treasonous to marry and have children, or have sexual relations of any kind, with someone who had only a small amount of Jewish ancestry… as many “Aryans” did? Who exactly would be counted as a Jew? The most extreme Nazis argued that anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent should be counted as a Jew. Although such a definition was not nearly as extreme as the American “one-drop” rule – through which a person was counted as African American if they were known to have any African ancestry at all, even if they looked entirely White – many Nazis argued that it was still too extreme. Those who were “moderate” – by Nazi standards – argued that a person should have to have at least three Jewish grandparents to be legally categorized as a Jew.
Nazis also debated the proposed criminalization of interracial marriage. Although mixed marriages were considered scandalous throughout the West, and were generally not recognized as valid, they were rarely criminalized. The United States was the major exception. However, because the criminalization of mixed marriages did not exist elsewhere in Europe, not all Nazis felt comfortable – at this early stage – with this proposed law.
1934: The Commission on Criminal Law Reform
Nazi circles debated these issues for months. On June 5, 1934, a team of Nazi legal experts gathered to officially consider the demands made by the Prussian Memorandum. The meeting, called the Commission on Criminal Law Reform, included some of the most extreme Nazis who had drafted the memorandum, as well as Nazis who thought that the memorandum went too far.
It appears that in the months of debate between the circulation of the memorandum and the meeting, that some Nazis had discussed whether or not a Jim Crow-like system of segregation would work in Germany: for the meeting opened with one of the more extreme Nazi figures – Fritz Grau – presenting an argument against Jim Crow in Germany. Grau argued that African Americans were only able to be subjected to Jim Crow because following the end of their enslavement they were kept in a politically and economically powerless position. German Jews, Grau argued, had far more political and economic influence than African Americans did, which would make it impossible to simply force segregation on them. What needed to be done, according to Grau, was to create a harsh new system of laws that would isolate Jews from society and strip them of whatever influence they had in Germany. Many such steps were already being taken: just months into Hitler’s rule, Jewish participation in the professions of law and government were outlawed. Within another few months, journalism was added to that list, and Jewish participation in universities was targeted. At this meeting, Grau argued that after Jewish participation in German society was ruthlessly criminalized – and their position thereby greatly weakened – that perhaps other steps could be taken.
With that, the meeting left the notion of segregating Jews behind, and turned towards criminalizing them. The Nazi Minister of Justice, Franz Gurtner, laid the foundations for the following discussion by explaining that he had prepared a memo to help the participants think through the topics under debate: the legal classification of Jews, and the criminalization of interracial sex and marriage. Gurtner said: “I possess here a thoroughly comprehensible synoptic presentation of North American race legislation.” The memo contained descriptions of the race laws of 30 different American states, the ways they classified African Americans and other people of color, and the different laws and variations of punishments they had regarding interracial sex and marriage. The Minister of Justice, speaking to the assembled Nazis, continued: “I am ready to make this breakdown available to you.”
Although no copies of the document that Franz Gurtner then handed out have survived, it is clear from the transcript of the conversation – first made available in 1989 – that the document was based on the work of Heinrich Krieger, a Nazi who had studied law in the United States. Krieger published articles in prestigious American journals about the laws legitimizing the subjugation of Native Americans, and would soon publish a major work titled Race Law in the United States. Based on Krieger’s work, the memo shared by Gurtner that day would have mentioned that in five states, “Coloreds are persons who have 1/8 or more Negro blood,” that in two states the proportion is 1/4, and that in others, the one-drop rule applies.
In describing the one-drop rule, Krieger wrote that in the United States, there was a “tendency in judicial practice to assign a person to the group of coloreds whenever there is even a trace of visible Negro physical features, and beyond that to do so when the Negro descent of the individual is common knowledge, without regard to how far the degree of descent reaches back.” Based on Krieger’s work, the memo also would have mentioned the variations of punishment for mixed marriages in different states: it was a misdemeanor in Nevada, a felony in Tennessee, an “infamous crime” in Maryland. Krieger wrote, “In several states imprisonment of up to ten years may be imposed, in others six months in the highest possible sentence.”
The purpose of this memo was to give the Nazis who were assembled a range of options to consider as they discussed how to best classify Jews and the criminalization of sex and marriage between Jews and “Aryans.” Throughout the entire rest of the discussion, these men made constant reference to the information presented in the memo about race laws in the United States. The transcript of this meeting includes one of the most extreme Nazis, Roland Freisler, saying: “This jurisprudence would suit us perfectly, with a single exception. Over there they have in mind, practically speaking, only coloreds.” But that didn’t matter to the men assembled: the same ideas could just as easily be applied to Jews as well.
A few months after this meeting took place, the massive National Socialist Handbook for Law and Legislation was published. The Handbook was a guide for crafting Nazi law, and included articles on a wide variety of legal subjects. The section on how to craft race legislation was titled “Volk, Race, and State.” It described the United States as the forerunner to Nazi Germany. A full quarter of the article was dedicated to describing American models of race legislation.
1935: The Nuremberg Laws
The Prussian Memorandum of 1933 and the Commission on Criminal Law Reform of 1934 involved deep and studious reflection on the race laws of the United States. These events helped lay the foundations for the infamous Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which created a full-scale racist state in Nazi Germany by stripping Jews of their citizenship and by outlawing sex and marriage between Jews and “Aryans.” The first of the three Nuremberg Laws, the “Flag Law for the Reich,” made the black swastika on a red background the official flag of Nazi Germany. It was this law that grabbed the headlines of most major American newspapers. The second law, called the “Reich Citizenship Law,” restricted citizenship in Germany to those with “German blood, or racially related blood.” The Reich Citizenship Law thus made it impossible for people of color to become German citizens, but its primary purpose was to strip Jews of their citizenship, and to thereby greatly decrease whatever remaining legal protections they had.
The Nazis had, of course, studied U.S. citizenship laws. When they looked to the United States, they found many forms of diminished, second-class citizenship. Native Americans, for example, had been considered “nationals,” but not citizens, until 1924. When the Philippines and Puerto Rico became colonies of the United States after the War of 1898, the United States engaged in complex legal maneuvers to avoid granting the people of those lands full citizenship despite the fact that the Constitution demanded that when the United States acquired new territories, that the inhabitants become citizens. The Nazis studied all of this. They were, however, primarily interested in the citizenship status of African Americans.
The constitutional amendments that had been passed after the Civil War granted people born on American soil citizenship and voting rights, regardless of the color of their skin. This meant that when White Americans prevented Black Americans from participating in the democratic process, they could not explicitly say that that was what they were doing. Nazis were fascinated by the many techniques that White Americans invented that did not mention race at all, but were designed to effectively strip Black Americans of their citizenship. From the Nazi perspective, this was a clumsy, rather than a straightforward process, designed to maneuver around America’s earlier idealistic but naïve attempt at egalitarianism. When the Nazis passed the Reich Citizenship Law, they viewed themselves as doing what White Americans did, but doing so openly and more efficiently.
The third and final of the Nuremberg Laws was the “Law on the Protection of German Blood and German Honor,” commonly referred to as the “Blood Law.” The Blood Law banned sexual relations and marriages between Jews and “Aryans,” under threat of imprisonment at hard labor. As we have seen in the discussion of the Prussian Memorandum and the Commission on Criminal Law Reform, Nazis had studied and discussed the American laws about this subject quite seriously.
American race law, in other words, had a direct influence on the Nuremberg Laws, which were a major turning point in a Nazi Germany quickly descending towards the ultimate extreme of genocide.
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In the 1920s, Black Americans looked towards India, and towards the nonviolent resistance movement led by Mahatma Gandhi. If Gandhi could use nonviolent resistance to challenge British colonialism in India, perhaps it could be used to challenge White supremacy in the United States. Although Black Americans debated the possibility, most did not feel the time was right. The renowned Black sociologist, Franklin Frazier, summarized the doubts Black Americans held about nonviolence when he said: “I fear we would witness an unprecedented massacre of defenseless black men and women.” At the time of his statement in 1924, the Ku Klux Klan had between two and three million members. Racial violence was extremely widespread. Nonviolent resistance did not seem like an option.
And yet, by the time that Martin Luther King moved to Montgomery thirty years later, Black Americans were ready to embrace nonviolent resistance on a massive scale. Something had changed in those thirty years. This is the story about that change… and specifically, about how major global events during those thirty years impacted race relations and created new possibilities for racial justice.
Part I: The Rise of Fascism & World War II
The Uncomfortable Comparison to Nazism
Black Americans were one of the first groups in the United States to express serious concern about the persecution of the Jews in Germany. In the early years of Hitler’s rule – long before he took racism to its ultimate extreme by attempting to exterminate the Jewish people – his persecution of the Jews reminded Black Americans of their own persecution in the United States. When Hitler ascended to power in 1933, the headline of one prominent Black newspaper read: “Adolph Hitler, KKK: Germany is doing to the Jewish people what the South does to the Negro.”
During Hitler’s first years, many Black Americans believed that racial oppression in the United States was actually worse than anti-Semitism in Germany. Shortly after Hitler came to power in Germany, a lynching took place in Florida that was attended by an estimated three thousand people. As was the common practice at the time, the lynching was advertised in advance so that people from the surrounding countryside could attend. The crowd tortured a Black man named Claude Neal for hours before finally killing him and hanging his body from a tree. As was also common practice, photographs were taken and sold as postcards, and parts of Neal’s body were cut off and displayed as souvenirs. The Black sociologist Kelly Miller expressed the popular Black American opinion about the first years of Nazi Germany when he wrote that in America, Blacks are “often lynched and burned at the stake… the German people have not yet reached such depths of depravity.”
Jewish Americans, of course, also watched Hitler’s rise very closely. Unlike other White Americans, they were seriously concerned that fascism might spread to the United States. In fact, unlike other peoples of European ancestry in America, Jewish Americans were not yet defined as “White,” but were widely considered to be a separate, inferior race… the so-called “Hebrew race.” This would only change after World War II, when Americans were horrified by the images coming out of the Nazi death camps… and felt guilty about not doing more to stop the Jewish genocide.
Although Jews were treated as an inferior race in America, their fear that fascism might take root in the U.S. was based less on their own experience of oppression, and more on their understanding of the racial oppression of Black Americans in the South. When Jewish Americans looked at the ways that Black Americans were violently controlled, segregated, and deprived of basic democratic and human rights in the South, they saw a system of race-based totalitarian control that to them, appeared far too similar to the system that Nazi’s were developing overseas. Jewish Americans and Black Americans already had a long history of working together on civil rights issues, and their connection deepened as fascism rose. Later on, during the civil rights movement, many of the White allies who participated in the Freedom Rides, marched in the streets, and went to jail were Jewish. Martin Luther King’s closest White friend – and one of his most trusted advisors – was a Jewish man named Stanley Levison.
To the great embarrassment of the American government and the American people, the Nazi’s themselves justified their practice of racial terrorism by comparing it to the treatment of Black Americans in the United States. When the U.S. government criticized the Nazis for their persecution of the Jews, the Nazis replied that their treatment of the Jews was no different than the U.S. treatment of Black Americans. In the words of one Nazi propagandist, “In America, Negroes are killed by mobs without fear of punishment and for the most trivial reason… The treatment of Negroes in America [is] far worse than that accorded Jews by the Nazis and America’s criticism should be turned in that direction rather than toward Germany… As we do not bother [you] about executions of Negroes, you should not bother [us.]” Images of Claude Neal’s mutilated body hanging from a tree were printed in German newspapers after the lynching, as was the fact that the U.S. Congress refused to pass anti-lynching legislation… a fact that proved that lynchings in America were not just the acts of murderous villains, but were supported by the state itself.
Hitler himself praised American practices of violent racial control, and at least during his first years in power, viewed them as a sign that the United States might one day join the global fascist revolution he was planning. During his first year in power, one of Hitler’s most important advisors, Joseph Goebbels, told him: “Nothing will be easier than to produce a bloody revolution in North America… no other country has so many social and racial tensions. We shall be able to play on many strings there.” Within three years of Goebbels statement, Congress was investigating more than 100 possible Fascist organizations in the United States. And a year later, in 1937 – two years before the start of World War II – the FBI discovered an undercover Nazi agent who had been sent to unify the different fascist organizations in the United States under the leadership of the Ku Klux Klan… and to offer generous funding to the Klan in exchange for taking orders from the Nazis.
Fascism, however, did not take hold in the United States. In many ways, the opposite happened. As the race-based totalitarianism of the Nazis became ever-more extreme, and as many people in the United States came to view Nazism as a powerful force of evil in the world, the most violent forms of racial oppression in the United States became unacceptable. Photo’s of lynchings such as Claude Neal’s caused many Americans to feel that some of their own racial practices were far too similar to the growing Nazi menace overseas.
In the years before the outbreak of World War II, racial violence steadily declined in the United States. In 1939 – when the war finally erupted – there were only two lynchings in the United States, compared to over a hundred per year a few decades earlier. Racial violence, of course, continued, but it changed: once highly public, it now became secret. Lynchings were no longer advertised and photographed; large crowds no longer gathered to participate in them. The lynching of Claude Neal – what historians refer to as a “spectacle lynching” – would be one of the last of its kind. The racial violence of the future – such as the infamous murders of civil rights workers and the many bombings of homes and churches during the civil rights movement – would be done in secret by small groups of men.
As racial terrorism decreased in the United States, it rapidly escalated in Germany. Still, when Hitler enacted the infamous Nuremberg Laws in 1935 – which made it illegal for Jews and non-Jews to marry or have sexual relations, and which stripped Jews of their basic citizenship rights – Black Americans felt that Hitler had passed laws for Jews that were quite similar to the laws that governed Black Americans in the South. As one Black journalist wrote, “What else are Jim-Crow laws but fascist laws?… It is difficult to believe that Hitler to save time did not copy them directly from the Southern statutes.” When the world condemned the Nuremberg Laws, Nazi’s once again defended their actions by comparing them to the United States.
Hitler waited until after the Olympic games – hosted in Germany in 1936 – to violently enforce those laws. Only then did the Nazi’s drop their excuse that they were simply engaging in racial practices no different from the U.S. During that year, W.E.B. Du Bois – a leading civil rights figure and perhaps the most renowned Black intellectual of his generation – spent six months in Germany. When he returned, he wrote that the persecution of the Jewish people was reaching a point where it could be compared only to the slave trade itself… and things were getting worse. By the time that war broke out in 1939, the vast majority of Black Americans had come to believe that Jewish persecution in Germany had become far worse than their own. During World War II, Black American soldiers viewed themselves as going to war with an especially brutal form of White supremacy. They vowed to fight for a “double victory:” against fascism overseas… and against racial oppression at home.
Fighting the Nazis with a Segregated Army
As the United States prepared to enter the war, it developed a powerful story about what its citizens would be fighting for. In fighting the Nazis, they were going to save the world from totalitarian control, and ensure that the people of the world could live freely and democratically. The story of freedom and equality, however, clashed with America’s practice of racial oppression. The story of democracy clashed with the fact that Black Americans were often denied their basic political rights, such as the right to vote.
The segregated military that was sent to fight overseas placed this contradiction right before the eyes of the world. The U.S. forces included over one million Black Americans, who were organized into segregated military units. At home and abroad, Black servicemen were housed separately, worked separately, ate their meals separately, and were often denied access to recreational activities such as swimming pools and movie screenings. The people of the world had often heard about American segregation, but during the Second World War, it arrived in their own countries.
For example, when U.S. forces gathered in England to prepare for the massive military operation known as D-Day, those forces included 130,000 Black Americans. England was an almost entirely White country, and although the English had colonized much of the world, there was no segregation. The English treated soldiers of all races with respect. Under serious threat from the Nazis, they were delighted to have soldiers of any race arrive to support them, and were disturbed by the segregation they witnessed and by the racial attitudes of White American soldiers.
Those attitudes sometimes exploded into violence overseas, as they did at home. Racial violence sometimes occurred when White soldiers tried to enforce segregation overseas, and when Black soldiers resisted. The most explosive situations, however, involved the ways that White soldiers sought to control Black American interactions with European women. In the South, interactions between Black men and White women were heavily controlled, and Black men often faced violence if their actions were interpreted as sexual. A kind word or a smile given by a Black man to a White woman was viewed as potentially being the first step on the road to interracial sex, and was violently policed. When White men engaged in that violent policing, they thought of themselves not only as protecting White women, but as protecting the purity of the “White race:” a White woman giving birth to a Black child was a thought that horrified White supremacists, and was something they sought to prevent at all costs. Black Americans pointed out that this obsession with White “racial purity” was shared by the Nazis… a point they also highlighted by criticizing the fact that the American military segregated the blood supply so that White soldiers, if wounded, would not be given “Black blood.” The obsession with “pure blood” was clearly one that Hitler shared as well.
White soldiers often feared that if Black soldiers interacted with White women in Europe, that they would feel they could do so at home. Black soldiers were warned not to interact with European women while stationed in Europe, but that was impossible. When Black soldiers were off base in an all-White country, they were unavoidably going to interact with White women. When they did, White soldiers sometimes attacked them. There were numerous cases of White soldiers intimidating Black men who were talking to White women in European restaurants or bars, and in some cases brawls broke out between groups of White and Black soldiers… with European men siding with the Black Americans, who from their perspective had done nothing wrong. In France, a White soldier shot a Black soldier in the back simply for speaking to a French woman who was serving him coffee. It was also true that some White soldiers overcame a lifetime of deeply ingrained prejudice after fighting alongside their Black American brothers. But as historian Jason Sokol emphasizes, “While black American veterans remembered that some white soldiers lost their prejudices during the war, those memories were far outweighed by accounts of whites who violently defended Jim Crow” in the military.
Racial segregation and racial violence in the U.S. military harmed America’s reputation with its European allies, but it had a far more devastating impact in non-European nations. When the people of Africa and Asia witnessed the racist treatment of Black American servicemen – such as the 22,000 stationed in India – they realized that they were witnessing how they would be treated if they went to the United States. For many of them, the treatment of Black Americans reminded them of their own status as colonized people, viewed as racially inferior by their European rulers. This led people around the world to feel a sense of solidarity with Black Americans, and it led an increasing amount of Black Americans to feel a sense of solidarity with colonized people. Some came to feel that they were essentially a colonized people themselves. Furthermore, just as Black Americans did not feel that the United States’ claims of fighting for freedom and democracy applied to them, many colonized people did not feel that the French or British claims to be fighting for democracy applied to them either.
As the historian Thomas Borstelmann writes, “Africans listened carefully as the major colonial powers on their continent – Britain, France, and Belgium – condemned Germany for its efforts to rule over other peoples.” Colonized peoples “were dismayed at the apparent surprise of Europeans at the success of fascism, which seemed not so different from colonialism.” Aime Cesaire – a famous poet and politician from the French territory of Martinique – wrote that before Europeans were the victims of fascism, “they were its accomplices,” before it was inflicted on them, they had “absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples.”
Many of the most influential anticolonial freedom fighters shared this perspective. Early in the war, Mahatma Gandhi published an article titled “British and American Nazism.” In a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt shortly after the United States entered the war, Gandhi wrote: “Dear friend, I venture to think that the allied declaration that the Allies are fighting to make the world safe for freedom of the individual and for democracy sounds hollow so long as India and, for that matter Africa are exploited by Great Britain and America has the Negro problem in her own home.” He told a reporter that “The Allies have no moral cause for which they are fighting, so long as they are carrying this double sin on their shoulders, the sin of India’s subjection and the subjection of the Negroes and African races.” Gandhi’s words echoed the feelings of hundreds of millions of colonized peoples… and of a rising number of Black Americans.
During the war, U.S. officials, ordinary citizens, civil rights workers, and business leaders all grew increasingly concerned that racism in the United States was undermining America’s relations with its allies in Africa and Asia. As Walter White – the president of the NAACP – stated, when describing the effects of the segregated military overseas: “I have seen bewilderment in the eyes of brown, yellow and black peoples in the Pacific at the manifestations of race prejudice by some American whites, not only against American Negro servicemen but against the natives whose aid we need now in winning the war, and whose friendship we will need after the war if we are to have peace.”
Even Fortune magazine – dedicated not to racial justice, but to business interests – wrote that “The Negro’s fate in the US affects the fate of white American soldiers in the Philippines, in the Caribbean, in Africa; bears on the solidity of our alliance with 800 million colored peoples in China and India; influences the feelings of countless neighbors in South America.” In other words, during World War II, there was widespread concern that racism in the United States threatened the ability of the United States to build and sustain positive relations with important military allies. In the words of historian Nico Slate, when “domestic racism threatened the war effort by alienating ‘colored’ nations,” that racism became unacceptable.
By the end of the war, President Truman believed that the United States needed to end its most notorious racial practices in order to emerge as a major world leader. Believing that lynchings did more than anything else to destroy the image of the United States as a land of freedom, and concerned that denying Black Americans the right to vote undermined America’s ability to portray itself as a land of democracy, Truman urged Congress to outlaw lynching and to protect the right to vote. With many powerful segregationists in the Senate, he was unsuccessful. However, Truman did issue an executive order in 1948 calling for full equality in the military, stating that it was “essential that there be maintained in the armed services of the United States the highest standards of democracy.” Although the military resisted the change, it would be totally desegregated within six years. The world would continue to hear about racial segregation in the United States for many years to come, but they would no longer witness it in their own countries.
Part II: The Cold War and Decolonization
White Supremacy Becomes a National Security Problem
World War II devastated Europe, and destroyed the ability of European nations to control their colonies. In the years following the war, these colonies gradually gained their independence, and dozens of new African and Asian nations formed.
As European power faded and the era of colonization came to a close, two so-called “superpowers” emerged: the Soviet Union, and the United States. These superpowers both sought to influence the emerging African and Asian nations. U.S. officials quickly became obsessed with the fear that the new nations would turn to Communism, which they believed would ruin the world economy and perhaps plunge it into another Great Depression… which might then lead to another major war. U.S. officials believed that their nation’s new role as a superpower was to help re-establish a healthy global economy in a world that had been torn apart.
They also wanted to ensure that the United States would gain control over strategic resources – such as the massive amount of oil required for future wars, and the uranium needed for nuclear weapons – which were available in Europe’s old colonies. As both the United States and the Soviet Union tried to gain control of such resources, the emerging nations of Africa and Asia often came to view both sides as trying to replace their old colonial rulers. Rather than form strong alliances with either superpower, the emerging nations sought neutrality. They resented U.S. and Soviet attempts to influence their political direction, and fiercely guarded their right to develop whatever kind of political and economic system they believed would best serve their new nation.
In their efforts to control their own resources, many emerging nations pushed out the foreign businesses that had previously controlled those resources. They often broke up the large farms and plantations established during colonial times, and redistributed land to the people. Many U.S. officials saw these actions as attacks on private property, which they associated with Communism. In reality, they were usually just attempts by a recently liberated people to do away with the leftover structures of colonialism. U.S. officials often saw Communism where there was none… and wherever they imagined Communism, they also imagined the hidden influence of the Soviet Union.
The assumption that the Soviet Union was behind each and every Communist act – real or imagined – was due in part to the fact that the vast majority of U.S. officials had a very weak understanding of these new nations, which the United States had never seriously interacted with before. The assumption was also partly due to fear: unlike other nations, the people of the United States had never had to worry about foreign invasions… but Pearl Harbor had changed that. Despite their immense wealth and power, the people of the United States felt extremely insecure in the decade following the Second World War, and imagined danger everywhere. Finally, U.S. officials assumed that the Soviet Union wielded far greater influence than it really did because of their racial beliefs: they viewed Africans and Asians as childlike, doubted their ability to make sophisticated political decisions by themselves, and therefor assumed that some outside force was influencing them. Many White Americans would later assume that so-called “outside agitators” – meaning Communists – were the true forces behind the civil rights movement for the same reason: they doubted that Black Americans could have built such a powerful movement on their own.
The competition between the United States and the Soviet Union became known as the “Cold War.” During the Cold War, the old tradition of White supremacy in the United States grew from an international embarrassment into a serious national security concern. In the past, U.S. relations with Africa and Asia were usually not worked out with actual African and Asian people, but with their European colonial rulers who sympathized with the racial beliefs of White Americans. In the era of decolonization, the United States had to deal directly with African and Asian leaders, and American traditions of White supremacy reminded those leaders of their old colonial rulers. Because White supremacy caused African and Asian leaders to distrust the United States, it pushed them to build stronger economic and political ties with the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union, meanwhile, waged a relentless, global propaganda campaign against the United States by publishing endless stories about American racial oppression. It was an extremely effective way to undermine the United States’ claim that it was dedicated to spreading freedom and democracy. U.S. officials desperately tried to claim that racism was a part of America’s past that was quickly dying out, and that it only existed in isolated areas of the South that did not represent the nation as a whole. However, that story was impossible to sell: for in this new era, prominent Africans and Asians travelled to America much more frequently… and they were disturbed by what they saw.
The United Nations and the Humiliation of Foreign Dignitaries
During the Second World War, a friend of Mahatma Gandhi’s travelled by train through the American South, speaking with Black Americans about the similarities between British imperialism in India and White supremacy in the United States. Her name was Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya. One of the major leaders of the Indian struggle against British colonization and a major leader in the fight for women’s rights, Kamaladevi was a friend of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and had recently attended President Roosevelt’s inauguration. Now, the ticket collector on the train approached the distinguished guest of the United States and ordered her to move to the “colored” section.
Like Rosa Parks fourteen years later – and like Mahatma Gandhi half a century earlier, in South Africa – Kamaladevi refused to move. The ticket collector asked her where she was from. Kamaladevi could have explained that she was a distinguished guest from India and a friend of the President’s wife. Instead, she replied: “It makes no difference. I am a colored woman obviously and it is unnecessary for you to disturb me for I have no intention of moving from here.” With those words, Kamaladevi chose to identify with the struggles of people of color in the United States… and across the world. When the ticket collector stalked away to notify his superiors, he may have learned something about Kamaladevi, for he did not bother her again. One year later, Mahatma Gandhi would state in a speech before the Indian Congress that “I do not regard England, or for that matter America, as free countries. They are free after their own fashion, free to hold in bondage the colored races of the earth.”
The humiliation of foreign dignitaries soon became a serious problem for the U.S. government. In 1945, after the war, the United Nations was founded in order to develop international cooperation, protect against human rights abuses, and prevent future wars. The headquarters for the United Nations was in New York City, meaning that representatives of countries around the world who worked with the UN suddenly poured into the United States. These representatives often lived in New York, where they became all-too familiar with the racially segregated neighborhoods that existed outside of the South. In New York, representatives from Asia, Latin America, and Africa had humiliating – and sometimes dangerous – racial experiences. In fact, in 1964 – nearly two decades after its founding – fifty-five representatives from Africa and Asia submitted a petition asking that the United Nations be relocated to another country where they would be treated as equal human beings.
From New York City, these representatives would often drive down Highway 40 to meet with officials in Washington D.C. The hotels and restaurants along Highway 40 were segregated… meaning that African diplomats often walked into meetings in the nation’s capital shortly after suffering humiliating experiences. As one African ambassador described his experience of trying to get a simple cup of coffee while driving along Highway 40: “When I asked for coffee, the good woman said she could not serve me. She said, ‘That’s the way it is here.’ I cannot say how I felt. I was astonished. I was so angry.” When journalists asked for the waitresses’ side of the story, she replied: “He looked like just an ordinary run of the mill nigger to me. I couldn’t tell he was an ambassador.”
Worse yet was the fact that Washington D.C. itself – supposedly the very symbol of U.S. freedom and democracy – was segregated.
“To Secure These Rights”
President Truman responded to these serious problems by establishing the Committee on Civil Rights in 1946, just one year after the end of World War II and the founding of the United Nations. The President instructed this committee to report on the current status of civil rights in the United States, and to recommend how to move forward. A year later, the Committee delivered a 178-page report titled To Secure These Rights. The report, in the words of historian Mary Dudziak, “highlighted the foreign affairs consequences of race discrimination.”
To Secure These Rights stated that “Our foreign policy is designed to make the United States an enormous, positive influence for peace and progress throughout the world. We have tried to let nothing, not even extreme political differences between ourselves and foreign nations, stand in the way of this goal. But our domestic civil rights shortcomings are a serious obstacle… We cannot escape the fact that our civil rights record has been an issue in world politics. The world’s press and radio are full of it.” Communist nations “have tried to prove our democracy an empty fraud, and our nation a consistent oppressor of underprivileged people.”
According to the Presidential Committee on Civil Rights, developing “better international relations” required reforming racial segregation in the nation’s capital. The Committee’s report stated that “The shamefulness and absurdity of Washington’s treatment of Negro Americans is highlighted by the presence of many dark-skinned foreign visitors. Capital custom not only humiliates colored citizens, but is a source of considerable embarrassment to these visitors… Foreign officials are often mistaken for American Negroes and refused food, lodging, and entertainment.” To these foreign visitors, Washington D.C. appeared to be “a graphic illustration of a failure of democracy.”
Following the release of the report, President Truman delivered a special message to Congress, stressing that the nation’s capital needed to be turned into “a true symbol of American freedom and democracy,” meaning that it needed to be desegregated. “If we wish to inspire the peoples of the world whose freedom is in jeopardy, if we wish to restore hope to those who have already lost their civil liberties [to totalitarian regimes,] if we wish to fulfill the promise that is ours, we must correct the remaining imperfections in our practice of democracy.” Truman was unable to desegregate Washington D.C., but the next president – Dwight Eisenhower – did. Eisenhower believed in White superiority, and supported segregation. But he also knew that a segregated capital humiliated foreign dignitaries and pushed potential allies towards the Soviet Union… and that was unacceptable. The desegregation of the nation’s capital began in 1953, and was complete by 1955.
American Propaganda: Telling Stories About Race and Democracy
As racial progress slowly moved forward, the world’s newspapers remained full of stories of racial oppression in the United States. A paper in Fiji reported that “the United States has within its own borders one of the most oppressed and persecuted minorities in the world today.” In Ceylon, a reporter wrote that “in Washington, the seated figure of Abraham Lincoln broods over the capital of the U.S. where Jim Crow is the rule.” U.S. officials responded to such stories by waging a global propaganda campaign that, in the words of historian Mary Dudziak, painted “American race relations in the best possible light for dissemination overseas.”
In the late 1940s, the United States Information Service was formed in an effort to influence global opinion. In 1950, it published a pamphlet titled The Negro in American Life, which was quickly spread around the world. The Negro in American Life began with the story of slavery, and of how theories of racial inferiority had developed in order to justify it. It claimed that although the United States still suffered from some of these old beliefs, it had made remarkable progress. After admitting the sins of America’s past – which the whole world clearly knew about, and which would therefor be impossible to hide –the pamphlet proceeded to paint a rosy picture: “Some Negroes,” it stated, “are large landowners; some are wealthy businessmen… They are physicists, chemists, psychologists, doctors.” The pamphlet described – and greatly exaggerated – recent Supreme Court cases, making it sound as if a ruling that had struck down segregation in a single university had abolished segregation in all universities. The message was that the United States, although flawed, was a land of constant progress, where good triumphed over evil, and where racism would soon be gone.
In order to enforce this narrative, the State Department – the branch of government in charge of foreign relations – also sent successful Black Americans on overseas speaking tours. In looking for these candidates, the State Department examined their previous public statements to ensure that they were anti-Communists who truly believed that racial progress was being made in the United States. U.S. officials knew that the peoples of Africa and Asia would trust a story about racial progress much more if they heard it from Black Americans, and they hoped that foreign publications would report the positive statements they made overseas.
However, even as some Black Americans travelled abroad to paint a more positive picture of race relations, others fought to keep the world focused on racial oppression. Many believed that the United States would not embrace serious racial reform without intense international pressure. Some Black Americans travelled the world, speaking not of progress, but of continuing atrocities. Some filed petitions with the United Nations, urging it to investigate human rights abuses against Black Americans in the South. Some of these petitions – including one written by the renowned Black American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois – were deeply researched and filled with profoundly troubling statistics about the poverty and violence faced by Black Americans. These petitions gained massive news coverage around the world, undermined the government’s story of racial progress, and caused many U.S. officials to feel that civil rights activists were pushing the emerging nations of Africa and Asia away from the United States, and towards the Soviet Union. For this reason, many civil rights activists were put under intense government surveillance during the Cold War.
Although the U.S. government put great efforts into promoting the story of racial progress – and repressing those who undermined it – a report on these efforts published in 1952 revealed that they were largely unsuccessful. Stories, quite simply, would not be enough to change the negative opinions that the majority of the world’s population held about racism in the United States. Nor was the desegregation of the single city of Washington D.C., or of the U.S. military. If the people of the world were ever going to believe the story of racial progress, that story would have to be based on something more substantial… on something that applied to all of American society.
The International Dimension of Brown v. Board of Education
In 1954, the Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education ruled that racially segregated public schools were illegal. The case had reached the Supreme Court at the end of 1952, during the last weeks of Truman’s presidency… and shortly after the report that American propaganda about racial progress was failing. The Truman administration quickly informed the Supreme Court that if they decided that the segregation of schools was constitutional, it would send a signal to the world that racial oppression was enshrined in the Constitution… and that equality, justice, and democracy were not. A positive ruling, on the other hand, would show the world that the American story of racial progress was real.
In the briefing that Truman’s administration sent to the Supreme Court, the leading foreign policy official in the United States – Secretary of State Dean Acheson – was quoted at length:
During the past six years, the damage to our foreign relations attributable to [race discrimination] has become progressively greater. The United States is under constant attack in the foreign press, over the foreign radio, and in such international bodies as the United Nations because of various practices of discrimination against minority groups in this country. As might be expected, Soviet spokesmen regularly exploit this situation in propaganda against the United States, both within the United Nations and through radio broadcasts and the press, which reaches all corners of the world. Some of these attacks against us are based on falsehood or distortion; but the undeniable existence of racial discrimination gives unfriendly governments the most effective kind of ammunition for their propaganda warfare.
The message was clear: a ruling in favor of segregation would do great damage to foreign relations and to national security. The Supreme Court Justices had likely already come to this conclusion. During World War II, they had often considered national security when making their rulings. For example, in 1940 they had ruled that schools could expel students who refused to salute the flag, writing that “national unity is the basis for national security.” Most notoriously, when the Court ruled in Korematsu v. United States that the internment of Japanese Americans was constitutional, they did so largely for national security reasons. In Korematsu, the Supreme Court decided that racial discrimination would protect the United States; in Brown, they decided that discrimination would hurt it.
The Justices were well-travelled men who had personally witnessed how American racism caused the people of the world to distrust the United States. For example, when Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas went to India in 1950, the first question Indians asked him was “Why does America tolerate the lynching of Negroes?” While in Pakistan, a man Douglas describes as a “Mongol prince” warned him that the Soviet Union would defeat the United States in the battle for Asia, because Asians did not view the wealthy and powerful United States as a land of justice. Shortly before the Brown v. Board of Education case arrived at the Supreme Court, Douglas wrote: “Neither wealth nor might will determine the outcome of the struggles in Asia. They will turn on emotional factors too subtle to measure. Political alliances of an enduring nature will be built not on the power of guns or dollars, but on affection.” That affection depended on doing away with government support of racial oppression. Other Justices agreed.
However, the Brown ruling did not mention national security as one of the reasons for the decision. To have done so would have undermined the notion that the ruling was based purely on the principles of equality enshrined in the Constitution. The ruling gave the U.S. government the story of racial progress it needed to gain the favor of the emerging nations of the world. It had the exact effect on international opinion the government had hoped for. Three months after the decision, the National Security Council reported that in Africa, “the decision is regarded as the greatest event since the Emancipation Proclamation, and it removes from Communist hands the most effective anti-American weapon they had.” Two years after the ruling, the State Department reported that “Criticism of the United States because of color discrimination practices… has markedly declined.”
Epilogue: The Civil Rights Movement
The civil rights movement began a year after the Brown decision, when long-time activist Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery. The people of the world watched the events of the civil rights movement closely. While marveling at the rise of Martin Luther King, they expressed outrage at all the injustices that occurred during the movement. The world was outraged when Emmitt Till was brutally murdered in 1955; outraged when violent mobs gathered to prevent the integration of schools in Little Rock in 1957; outraged when nonviolent college students were beaten during the sit-ins of 1960; outraged when the buses of the Freedom Riders were bombed in 1961 and when peaceful protestors were attacked in Birmingham and Selma in 1963 and 1965.
Meanwhile, U.S. officials continued to worry that these episodes of racial violence would contribute to pushing the new nations of the world towards the Soviet Union. When Eisenhower sent troops to protect Black students in Littlerock; when Kennedy decided to take a stand and protect the Freedom Riders; and when Johnson pushed for the most important civil rights legislation of the century, they did so in response to pressures at home created by the civil rights movement… and to serious pressures from abroad created by the Cold War.
However, something had changed after the Brown decision. Although the world continued to express outrage, it increasingly viewed the U.S. government as being on the side of racial progress. The Supreme Court decision that segregated schools were unconstitutional led much of the world to feel that the U.S. government had taken a strong stand against segregation. The world’s outrage began to shift away from being directed at the U.S. government itself, and to being directed at the most explicitly racist parts of the United States, which the world increasingly viewed as being in conflict with the U.S. government rather than being supported by it. This new global opinion that the U.S. government was actively working for racial progress was sealed with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination based on race, religion, gender, and national origin.
Although the United States had indeed made remarkable progress, racial conflict showed no signs of ceasing after the Civil Rights Act. In fact, the civil rights movement spread dramatically outside of the South in the second half of the 1960s. As race-based poverty continued to increase during the civil rights movement, the movement became more militant. Riots flared across America’s cities, and it became increasingly clear that White American racism was not just a southern problem. Despite these facts, the world had become less critical… not of American racism, but of the American government that they built relations with. Meanwhile, by the time the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, U.S. officials had begun to feel that Communism was much less of a threat. The continuing racial oppression at home no longer seemed to pose much of a national security concern. And so, just as the civil rights movement was turning its attention towards the kinds of race-based poverty that plagues America to this day, one of the major pressures in pushing forward racial justice in the United States – the international pressures – began to fade.
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Why did Black Americans in the 1920s think that nonviolent resistance would not work for them?
The Uncomfortable Comparison to Nazism
During the first years of Hitler’s rule, many Black Americans felt that they faced an even worse kind of racism in the U.S. than the Jews did in Germany. Why?
Why did Jewish Americans fear that fascism might spread to the United States? Why did that fear cause them to work more closely with Black Americans?
How did the rise of Nazism overseas contribute to a decline in racial violence in the United States?
In what way did racial violence change during the 1930s?
How did the Nazi’s respond to the U.S. criticism of the Nuremberg Laws?
Fighting the Nazis with a Segregated Army
During World War II, the military blood supply was racially segregated, and Black men in the military were warned not to interact with European women when overseas. Why did Black Americans feel that these practices were similar to those of the Nazis?
How did the colonized peoples of Africa and Asia feel about the United States when they witnessed the segregated military arrive in their own countries?
How did the segregated military influence the way that colonized people thought about Black Americans?
Unlike Europeans and White Americans, colonized peoples were not surprised by the rise of fascism in Europe. Why not?
Why did so many Americans – including President Truman – become concerned that racism in the United States was hurting the war effort during World War II?
What did President Truman do to ensure that racism would be less of a problem in future wars?
White Supremacy Becomes a National Security Problem
Why did dozens of new African and Asian nations emerge after World War II, and why did U.S. officials fear the spread of Communism amongst these new nations?
The emerging nations of the world were desperately poor and needed support. So why did they seek neutrality instead of forming strong alliances with either the USSR or the United States?
What caused U.S. officials to misinterpret the spread of Communism amongst the emerging nations of the world?
Why did racism in the United States cause the emerging countries in Africa and Asia to build stronger economic and political ties with the Soviet Union?
The United Nations and the Humiliation of Foreign Dignitaries
Describe the experiences of African and Asian diplomats in the United States, and how those experiences hurt the United States’ ability to build positive relations with the nations they represented.
“To Secure These Rights”
How did racism harm U.S. international relations, according to the government report titled To Secure These Rights? What did the report suggest must be done to solve the problem?
American Propaganda: Telling Stories About Race and Democracy
How did U.S. propaganda frame racial oppression in the United States? What was the purpose of this propaganda?
Why do you think U.S. propaganda about race openly discussed the painful history of slavery, instead of trying to hide that history?
Why did U.S. officials feel it was important to send Black Americans abroad as part of their propaganda campaign?
Many government officials viewed Black Americans who strongly criticized racial oppression as harming national security? Why?
Do you think the government repression and surveillance of strongly critical Black Americans should be considered a form of propaganda? Why or why not?
Why were the government’s efforts at framing racial oppression unsuccessful? What else was necessary, and what important lesson does this teach us about how propaganda functions?
The International Dimension of Brown v. Board of Education
Why did President Truman’s administration try to influence the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education?
The Supreme Court Justices considered the issue of national security in their decision to desegregate schools. So why was national security not mentioned in their ruling?
According to the National Security Council and the State Department, how did the Brown decision influence international opinion about American race relations?
Epilogue: The Civil Rights Movement
The world continued to be outraged by racial oppression in the United States for many years after the Brown decision to desegregate schools. In what way did the world’s outrage change after Brown, and why was that new kind of outrage less of a problem for the U.S. government?
Rosa Parks was born in Alabama, in 1913, shortly before the outbreak of World War I. Her father travelled constantly, always searching for work. When the war broke out, factories in the North rushed to find more workers, and began hiring Black Americans for the first time. Rosa’s father joined a million other Black southerners on the journey North in hopes of finding a better life and better economic opportunities. Rosa’s mother, wanting to remain close to her family, decided to remain in the South.
The young Rosa and her mother moved in with her grandparents, who had both been slaves. She grew especially close to her grandfather, who was the son of a slave woman and a slave owner. Rosa said that the slave woman probably had a lot of White ancestry herself, because her grandfather’s African ancestry was not visible at all: he appeared White. Still, her almost totally White grandfather was a slave. While still a little boy, a new owner took possession of him, beat him mercilessly, and even tried to starve him. Because of this, Rosa said that her grandfather developed “a very intense, passionate hatred for white people.” He wouldn’t let his daughters work in White houses, and wouldn’t let his grandchildren play with White children. Whenever there was Ku Klux Klan activity going on, Rosa’s grandfather would stay up all night on the front porch with his rifle, practically daring the hooded nightriders to come onto his property. Rosa would sometimes join him. She later expressed, “I wanted to see him kill a Ku Kluxer.”
The young Rosa may have learned from her grandfather to stand her ground when threatened by White folks. When she was ten, a White boy threatened to hit her. Rosa picked up a brick and dared him to. But when her grandmother heard about this, she scolded Rosa severely, telling her that she should never retaliate even if White people hurt her. Her grandmother warned that if she acted like that, she would get lynched before she even had a chance to grow up. Rosa began to sob, feeling, in her own words, that her grandmother had taken the side of the “hostile white race against me.” She told her grandmother, “I would rather be lynched than be run over by them. They could get the rope ready for me any time.”
The Beginning of Rosa’s Activism
When Rosa was 18 years old, she met Raymond Parks. She was impressed by how Raymond – like her grandfather – refused to be intimidated by White people. Raymond believed that self-defense was an important part of the Black freedom struggle. He carried a gun, and worked with the local chapter of the country’s leading civil rights organization: the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP. Rosa later wrote that he was “the first real activist I ever met.” She admired him, fell in love with him, and the two were soon married. The year was 1932, during the Great Depression.
Raymond’s activism placed him in constant danger. He attended secret meetings at night, and Rosa often feared that he would not make it home alive. Because of the danger, Raymond didn’t want Rosa to get involved. But when the meetings were held in their own house, Rosa participated. She recalled that the men would spread their guns out on the table in case the Ku Klux Klan raided the meeting. In her autobiography, she wrote that “There was a little table about the size of a card table that they were sitting around. This was the first time I’d seen so few men with so many guns.” She wrote that the table was “so covered with guns, I don’t know where I would have put any refreshments.”
Rosa became more deeply involved in activism in 1943, when she became the secretary for the local branch of the NAACP in Montgomery. Soon, she found herself working with a small group of the most committed activists in that city. Rosa worked especially closely with a man named E.D. Nixon. Nixon was one of the most brilliant and experienced activists in the state, and inspired Rosa to join him in helping Black Americans register to vote.
At the time, only thirty-one out of thousands of Black Americans were registered in Montgomery. In order to register, Blacks were forced to answer a long list of questions about the law that were so technical that even professional lawyers often failed the test. They had to pay a substantial, often-unaffordable fee to register. They also had to identify their employer, who was usually White and would often fire them for registering to vote. And finally, Black Americans who successfully registered would have their names printed in the newspaper, turning them into potential targets for violent White supremacists. Rosa overcame all these obstacles herself, successfully registering to vote. She worked closely with Nixon to help other Black folks in Montgomery study for the tests, raise the money for the fees, find new jobs if they were fired, and gain the courage to potentially face violence.
Rosa Parks and E.D. Nixon also sought to use the law against Whites who attacked or killed Black people or who raped Black women. Such crimes were common in the South, but almost always went unpunished. Although her position as NAACP secretary might sound tame, that position involved the dangerous job of investigating instances of racial violence. Rosa Parks often risked her life journeying down the isolated, dusty roads of rural Alabama, interviewing survivors and witnesses of racial assaults. In response to the especially brutal rape of a young woman named Recy Taylor just a year into Rosa’s position as secretary, Rosa and E.D. Nixon helped to develop a national campaign to bring the perpetrators to justice. Although the campaign did not achieve this goal, it was one of the most successful campaigns of the decade in terms of bringing national awareness to racial violence in the South. The nationwide contacts that Parks and Nixon developed through the campaign would later become a crucial source of outside support during the Montgomery bus boycott.
Rosa Parks was, in other words, a leading investigator of racial violence and an anti-rape activist who had helped develop effective national campaigns… all over a decade before she famously refused to move from her seat on a bus in Montgomery.
The History of Busing in Montgomery
Rosa Parks was hardly the first Black American to resist segregated transportation. In fact, between 1900 and 1906, as laws enforcing segregation spread across the South, twenty-five Southern cities staged bus boycotts. The first Montgomery bus boycott occurred in 1900. Only, buses didn’t exist yet: it was streetcars that were segregated. Although the rights gained from that first Montgomery boycott were quickly lost again, the resistance to segregated transportation continued.
During World War II, the fight against segregated busing spread across the South once more, as Black veterans demanded equal treatment. They were not about to die fighting the horrendous racism of the Nazis in Europe, while refusing to fight racism at home. During the war, buses became frequent scenes of confrontation. Unlike other segregated spaces, such as restaurants or movie theatres – where Black Americans were often not allowed at all – buses forced White and Black Americans into extremely close quarters. When Whites humiliated Black busriders, the humiliation was made greater by the fact that so many people were watching. And there was no way to escape, because the bus was often moving. The tension on the buses was increased even further by the fact that bus drivers were given police powers and carried guns in order to enforce segregation.
Montgomery was close to two air force bases, which brought Black servicemen from across the country to the city. During the war, when one of these servicemen resisted the orders of a bus driver, a policeman was called and the man was shot. In another instance, a Black veteran refused to move from his seat, and the bus driver shot him in the leg. In a third instance, when a Black female army lieutenant refused to give up her seat to White passengers, police beat her and took her to jail. In 1945, during the last year of the war, two members of the Women’s Army Corp refused to move from their seat and were beaten by the driver. Although resistance to segregated transportation happened in other areas of the South as well, the fact that Montgomery had two air force bases meant that it “stood at the epicenter of the guerilla war on buses,” to use the words of the great historian Glenda Gilmore.
The air force bases in Montgomery contributed to resistance in another way as well: the bases were not segregated. In 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt had ordered all military industries to be desegregated in order to prevent a massive march on Washington. This meant that, even in the most racist parts of the South, Blacks and Whites worked side by side on military bases. In Montgomery, one out of every fourteen civilians – including Rosa Parks – worked on these desegregated bases during World War II. The buses on the air force bases were also desegregated, and Rosa would often ride with a White woman and her little boy while on the base bus. Once they boarded the city bus, however, they would have to stop their conversation as Rosa went to the back. Mrs. Parks wrote that “You might just say Maxwell [air force base] opened my eyes up. It was an alternative reality to the ugly policies of Jim Crow.”
The fact that so many Black Americans in Montgomery were treated equally while riding the buses on the air force bases increased their resistance to the humiliation and danger they faced when riding the city buses. During and after World War II, an increasing amount of Black civilians refused to give up their seats to Whites. They were usually beaten and arrested, and in one case, when a woman tried to take the police to court for beating her, two policemen raped her daughter in retaliation. Rosa Parks would have known many of these people, and as the NAACP secretary, would have been involved in documenting their cases.
Events Leading up to the Boycott
In 1946, the organization responsible for launching the Montgomery bus boycott was founded: the Women’s Political Council. It soon became the most radical organization in the city. As Jeanne Theoharis, author of the powerful book The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks writes: “By the early 1950s, people knew to bring their complaints about bus segregation to the WPC [Women’s Political Council.] The women of the organization, three hundred strong by 1954, collected petitions, met with city officials, went door to door, packed public hearings, and generally made their outrage around bus segregation publicly known.” The president of the Council, Jo Ann Robinson, described the organization as “‘woman power,’ organized to cope with any injustice, no matter what.”
In 1954, a year and a half before the Montgomery bus boycott, Jo Ann Robinson sent a letter to the mayor of Montgomery, informing him that a boycott would be organized if conditions on buses were not improved. She reminded him that three out of four riders were Black, and that the bus system would collapse without the financial support of Black riders. The struggle against segregated busing escalated in 1954 for a reason: the Supreme Court outlawed segregated schools that year, leading many Black Americans to feel that the time was right to challenge segregation in other areas as well.
As the Women’s Political Council began to plan for a boycott, the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP considered a different strategy for fighting segregated busing: by challenging its legality in the court of law, just as they had successfully challenged the legality of segregated schools. To challenge the segregation laws, they first needed someone to be arrested for breaking those laws. Then, instead of pleading guilty to breaking the law, the NAACP lawyers would instead claim that the law itself was unconstitutional. The local courts in the South, of course, would never accept this claim… and so, the NAACP would appeal the case to higher and higher courts, with the ultimate goal of taking the case to the Supreme Court. With this goal in mind, the local NAACP – including Rosa Parks and her political partner E.D. Nixon – waited for the right arrest to be made, which would allow them to build a case.
Soon, the daughter of a local minister was arrested for refusing to move from her seat on the bus, but her father was uncomfortable with the NAACP building a big case around his daughter. And so, Rosa Parks and E.D. Nixon continued to wait. On March 2, 1955, a high school student named Claudette Colvin was arrested for refusing to move from her seat. Claudette had recently written a paper on resistance to segregation. As she later explained, “We had been studying the Constitution in Miss Nesbitt’s class. I knew I had rights.”
Colvin and her parents said that they were willing to build a case around her arrest, even if it meant facing lynch mobs. However, E.D. Nixon doubted that the young Claudette could hold up under the pressure. Moving her case from the local courts into the state courts, and then into the federal courts and up to the Supreme Court would take many months… months during which the phone might be ringing all night with death threats, months during which she would be constantly demonized in the local media. It was one thing to courageously face a single moment of danger, and another to withstand months and months of constant, intense harassment. Nixon felt that they needed to build a case around someone who had proven they could tough it out.
Claudette was heartbroken when the leaders of Montgomery decided that she was not suitable to build a case around. Even those who had believed in her seemed to turn their backs when it was discovered that she was pregnant. Many people believed that being a young, unwed mother was shameful, and began using her pregnancy as an excuse for not supporting her. Claudette later wrote that Rosa Parks was the only one that helped her through this painful time. Parks saw great leadership potential in Colvin, and invited her to attend the NAACP Youth Council that she had recently founded. Under Rosa’s guidance, these youth travelled the state raising awareness, urging voter registration, and even experimenting with disobeying laws enforcing segregation. Parks made Claudette the secretary of the Youth Council, and urged other youth to follow her example of resisting segregation on the bus. Some of them did, but with no arrests.
Although Claudette had hoped that a case would be built around her, and was deeply hurt by the rejection of Montgomery’s leaders, she trusted that if anyone was up to the task, it would be Rosa Parks. As she later expressed, “There was a time when I thought I would be the centerpiece of the bus case. I was eager to keep going in court. I had wanted them to keep appealing my case. I had enough self-confidence to keep going.” However, “having been with Rosa at the NAACP meetings, I thought, Well, maybe she’s the right person – she’s strong.”
The Arrest of Rosa Parks
On the morning of December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks went to work. During her coffee break, she met with the president of the local college to discuss organizing an NAACP workshop, and during her lunch break, she met with the lawyer who handled Claudette Colvin’s case. By the end of her day, she was tired. As she boarded the bus to go home, she was looking forward to getting some rest.
Rosa Parks did not sit in the White section. She took a seat in the middle of the bus. However, the White section in the front soon filled up, and the bus driver called out for the Black folks sitting in the middle to move further back. When he yelled, “You all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats,” Rosa Parks thought to herself that obeying such orders “wasn’t making it light on ourselves as a people.” In that moment, she thought about the NAACP Youth Council that she led, later explaining that “an opportunity was being given to me to do what I had asked of others.” It was time for her to become “an example of what I was preaching.”
When Rosa Parks refused to move, the bus driver walked back to her and asked: “Are you going to stand up?” Rosa Parks looked him straight in the eye and said, “No.” She calmly explained to him that she was equal to any other person. He then told her, “Well, I’m going to have you arrested.” Her response was simply, “You may do that.” Parks understood the risks. Other Black women had been beaten, raped, and even killed after police had arrested them for refusing to give up their seats. She later said, “As I sat there, I tried not to think about what might happen. I knew that anything was possible.”
While Parks had not planned to be arrested, she expected that the day would come. As she told an interviewer years later, “I had felt for a long time, that if I was ever told to get up so a white person could sit, that I would refuse to do so.” The historian Jeanne Theoharis has written that on “That evening, as she waited on that bus, there was thunder in her silence.” Within the quiet thunder of Rosa Parks were thoughts of how she could use her arrest to organize the community.
Organizing the Boycott
Word of Parks arrest quickly spread. When E.D. Nixon received the call, he turned to his wife and said, “I believe Jim Crow dropped in our lap just what we are looking for.” Nixon believed that Rosa Parks was the perfect person to build a case around. Whereas Nixon had doubted Claudette Colvin, he was certain that Rosa Parks was unbreakable. In his own words, “If there ever, ever was a woman who was dedicated to the cause, Rosa Parks was that woman.” She was a “real fighter” who wouldn’t be scared off by White violence. As a religious, hardworking, and dignified woman who was widely respected for her activism, Rosa Parks was also the perfect symbol for people to organize around.
E.D. Nixon quickly bailed Parks out of jail. That evening, they discussed building a case around her, agreed that this was the opportunity they had been waiting for, and then went to sleep. But not everyone slept that night. Rosa Parks and E.D. Nixon had decided to build a legal case around her arrest, not a boycott. It was the Women’s Political Council that did that, and Jo Ann Robinson in particular. Robinson had wanted to stage a boycott when Claudette Colvin was arrested, but had waited to get everyone’s support. This time, she was not going to wait.
Robinson, a professor at Alabama State College, secretly met with her most trusted students on campus in the middle of the night. Working until dawn, they printed out fifty thousand notifications of a bus boycott to be held the following Monday, when Rosa Parks went to trial. They were able to work quickly because the Women’s Political Council had been planning a boycott for months, and were just waiting for the right time and place. The Council had already planned distribution routes to ensure that each of Montgomery’s fifty thousand Black citizens would quickly receive word of the boycott. Within twenty-four hours of Rosa Parks’ arrest, tens of thousands of Black Montgomerians would receive this message:
Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown in jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person… If we do not do something to stop these arrests, they will continue… The next time it may be you, or your daughter, or mother… We are, therefore, asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday.
However, simply delivering the message was not enough. A successful boycott would require more extensive organizing, and no one was better at organizing in Montgomery than E.D. Nixon. At 3 a.m., as Robinson was printing the notifications, she called Nixon to inform him of her plans. Nixon believed that the boycott would be made much more successful if all the ministers in town urged their congregations to participate on Sunday. And so, at 3 a.m., Nixon began to consider how to organize the ministers.
Nixon needed a central meeting place for the ministers to gather, and Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, located in the central town square, came to mind. The minister at Dexter was new in town, which could be helpful. Many of the ministers competed for leadership roles and distrusted each other, but no one had any reason to distrust the newcomer. He might be the perfect person to organize the ministers. Nixon also believed that the new minister’s remarkable speaking skills could inspire and unify the community. For all of these reasons, Nixon called the new minister around 6 a.m. and asked for his support. The new minister was, of course, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
That evening, nearly fifty ministers gathered at Martin Luther King’s church and agreed to endorse the boycott. Events were moving quickly: Rosa Parks had been arrested on Thursday evening. Thanks to Jo Ann Robinson, by Friday afternoon most Black Montgomerians knew the plans for the boycott. On Friday evening, the ministers endorsed the boycott. On Sunday, they urged their congregations to stay off the buses. And on Monday, Rosa Parks went to trial, and the Montgomery bus boycott, destined to ignite the civil rights movement, began.
The First Day of the Boycott
On Monday, December 5, 1955, Black Montgomerians stayed off the buses. While those with cars drove people to work, thousands walked many miles, and some even rode mules. Whatever it took to not ride the buses, they did.
At Rosa Parks’ trial, people flooded the courthouse, and hundreds had to stand outside. The trial lasted a mere half hour: Rosa Parks was found guilty of breaking state segregation laws. The ruling gave Rosa’s lawyer, Fred Gray, an opportunity to put the NAACP’s plan into action: he challenged the law as unconstitutional. Once a law was challenged as unconstitutional, it was supposed to immediately move out of the state courts, and into the federal courts, where the judges represented the U.S. government rather than the state government. The hope was that higher and higher courts would debate the case of Rosa Parks, with the Supreme Court making the final decision. Southern lawyers, however, were able to prevent this from happening, but Parks’ lawyer learned from his mistakes, and built a second case… around the teenager, Claudette Colvin, who had been abandoned earlier by the activists of Montgomery. It was the case built around Colvin, not Parks, that eventually reached the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of Colvin. Until that ruling ended segregated busing in Montgomery, the boycott continued for a long 381 days.
The initial plan had been for a simple one-day boycott. But inspired by the success of the morning, leaders met shortly after Parks’ trial and created an organization that could sustain a boycott that could last until the busing laws were changed. The organization was called the Montgomery Improvement Association, and Martin Luther King was elected to be its leader.
The leaders at the meeting decided on three demands for the boycott. Believing that asking for total desegregation was too radical for the city to agree to, the first demand was for first come, first-serve seating, with Black Americans sitting from the back towards the front, and Whites sitting from the front towards the back. With this plan, segregation would remain, but Blacks would not be forced to stand next to empty seats reserved for Whites.
The second demand was for courteous treatment. Especially important was that Black Americans not be asked to pay at the front, and then exit the bus to enter through the back. This practice was not only humiliating, but the buses often drove away before the paying customers had reentered. The third demand was for the hiring of Black bus drivers on primarily Black routes. This demand aimed to create Black jobs, which was an essential demand, given that most Black Americans cared far more about economic equality than integration.
Neither Rosa Parks nor Jo Ann Robinson were present at this meeting. Despite the fact that these two women had spent years laying the groundwork for this moment, they were living in a patriarchal, male-dominated society that viewed public leadership as a man’s role. With the creation of the Montgomery Improvement Association, the ministers took over these public leadership roles, despite the fact that Rosa Parks and Jo Ann Robinson had far more political experience than virtually every minister.
However, there were other reasons for why Rosa Parks and Jo Ann Robinson did not step forward into public leadership roles. Robinson had to downplay her involvement in order to protect her job. She could also sense a spirit of rebellion in the air, and felt that the best way to build a peaceful and sustainable movement was to have the ministers assume leadership. In Robinson’s words, these ministers were able to give “Christian guidance to a rebellious people,” many of whom valued self-defense more than nonviolent resistance.
As for Rosa Parks, the success of the movement depended on crafting a public image of her that everyone could rally behind, and that no one could attack. And so, Rosa was presented to the public as a hardworking, good Christian woman who didn’t move from her seat when ordered to because she was simply too tired. This was a safe, noncontroversial image that produced sympathy and support from people all over the country. However, there were plenty of hard working, good Christian Black women in Montgomery. It was Rosa Parks’ long history of activism that gained her a special level of respect and allowed the community to unanimously support her.
And yet, the White and Black communities were so separate that the White community was unaware of the fact that Rosa Parks was a veteran activist. And for the boycott to be successful, it would have to stay that way: Rosa’s activism would become a well-kept secret… a secret that, for decades, went down in the history books as reality.
The White Backlash
Negotiations between Black leaders and White city officials broke down quickly. Two meetings were held during the first week of the boycott, with leading White supremacists invited to the second. The Black leadership had originally believed that city officials would be willing to consider their modest proposal for a more polite form of segregation, and for good reason: a bus boycott in Louisiana two years earlier, asking for similar terms, had been won within a week. After the failed meetings, however, the Black leadership began planning for a yearlong campaign.
The city immediately moved to cripple the boycott, announcing that Black cab drivers, who had promised to drive Black community members for the same price as the bus, would receive fines if they reduced their fares. Within days, the boycott could no longer rely on cabs. Advice from the leaders of the Louisiana boycott two years earlier allowed Black Montgomerians to swiftly create a massive car-pooling system, with over 200 volunteer drivers picking people up from forty car-pooling stations.
The Montgomery Improvement Association was soon coordinating up to 20,000 rides per day. Police responded by ticketing cars that were “overloaded.”
However, most Whites were not angered by the boycott. Many simply didn’t care, and some even supported it. Many Black maids, working in White houses and caring for White children, reported that the families they worked for gave them donations to support the boycott. White housewives sometimes picked up their maids so they wouldn’t have to walk to work. One even fired her maid after discovering that she had ridden the bus, telling her that if she didn’t stand up for her people, she was an untrustworthy person. Some White people decided not to ride the bus themselves.
Many White Montgomerians prided themselves as racially progressive and looked down on the more aggressively racist areas in the South. They avoided a new organization, called the White Citizens Council, which was formed after the passage of Brown vs. Board of Education. The Council was thought of as a Ku Klux Klan for businessmen and politicians. It pressured employers to fire anyone who failed to support its racist policies, pressured insurance agencies to cancel insurance policies on cars and homes, and boycotted the businesses of anyone who was judged to support racial equality in any way. The Council waged economic warfare to maintain White supremacy, preferring it to the violent methods of the Ku Klux Klan. Whereas violence created negative attention, economic retaliation usually remained invisible to the outside world, making it a more effective form of control.
The Montgomery bus boycott became an opportunity for the White Citizens Council to spread its roots into the capital of Alabama. A month into the boycott, they held a twelve hundred person rally, during which the police commissioner joined. The next day, the local paper exclaimed that “In effect, the Montgomery police force is now an arm of the White Citizens Council.” Many prominent citizens soon joined, including the mayor. While these White leaders never called for violence, joining the Council sent a clear message to the general public that the more aggressively racist behavior that White Montgomerians traditionally looked down on was now acceptable.
Things began to get ugly. The kind of positive statements some Whites had originally made about the boycott now led to economic attacks from the White Citizens Council. One White woman, after praising the determination of the Black community, was fired, began receiving threatening phone calls, and would hear tapping on her window late at night. Her friends and colleagues began avoiding her. After a year and a half of isolation and intimidation, she took her own life. With very few exceptions, sympathetic White people played it safe and kept their mouths shut.
Meanwhile, Black carpool drivers found their vehicles vandalized, covered in acid, their brakes cut, their tanks filled with sugar. Nails were scattered across the streets of Black neighborhoods. Cars full of Whites began hurling food, stones, and balloons filled with urine at Black Americans walking to work. Police cars began waiting next to the car-pooling stations, ticketing each car as it pulled in to pick up passengers, usually for completely imaginary infractions.
The cost of the tickets and car repairs soon became overwhelming. If the boycott was to continue under these conditions, it would require outside financial support. However, although nearly two months into its existence, the boycott had received little outside attention. That would soon change as White violence continued to escalate, and was met by the profound leadership of Martin Luther King.
The Suffering of Martin Luther King
The ticketing of car-pool drivers soon escalated to arrests. Martin Luther King was one of the first to be arrested… for driving five miles over the speed limit. As White animosity increased, King had begun receiving dozens of death threats per day, and as the police car travelled further and further out of the city, he began to tremble in fear that he was being taken to a lynch mob. When the car instead pulled up to the jail, he was relieved. A friend appeared within minutes and bailed King out.
When he returned home, his wife and newborn child were sleeping. As he stood looking at them, the phone rang. The voice on the other end told him, “If you aren’t out of this town in three days, we’re going to blow your brains out.” King put the phone down and tried to sleep, but he felt broken and filled with fear. He doubted himself. He had never wanted this. He had gotten involved in the boycott because he thought it would only last a few weeks. Unable to sleep, he made himself a pot of coffee. He later said that at this moment, “ I was ready to give up. With my cup of coffee sitting untouched before me I tried to figure out a way to move out of the picture without appearing a coward.”
I sat there and thought about a beautiful little daughter who had just been born… She was the darling of my life. I’d come in night after night and see that little gentle smile. And I sat at that table thinking about that little girl and thinking about the fact that she could be taken away from me at any minute. And I started thinking about a dedicated, devoted and loyal wife, who was over there asleep. And she could be taken from me, or I could be taken from her. And I just couldn’t take it any longer.
King began to pray over his coffee: “Lord, I must confess that I’m weak now. I’m faltering. I’m losing my courage.” As he continued to pray, he began to “hear an inner voice saying to me, ‘Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo I will be with you, even until the end of the world.’” For the rest of his life, whenever King felt that death was at his doorstep, he focused on this moment and found the strength to overcome his fear.
Days later, Coretta Scott King heard a thump outside their home and then footsteps running away. She rushed to the back of the house, and within seconds a bomb ripped through the front room. King was away addressing a mass meeting. When he was told of the bombing of his home, and the possible death of his family, he shocked the crowd with his calm reaction, later commenting that “My religious experience a few nights before had given me the strength to face it.”
He arrived home to find a large, angry crowd surrounding his house. “As I walked towards the front porch,” he later wrote, “I realized that many people were armed. Nonviolent resistance was on the verge of being transformed into violence.” As word of the bombing spread the crowd grew larger and the anger intensified. King later said that he feared that a “race war” would break out. Stepping onto his smoldering porch to address the crowd, he urged them to remain peaceful and to not allow their anger at the assassination attempt to grow into physical retaliation against Whites. “Brothers and sisters,” he said, “Don’t get panicky… don’t get your weapons. I want it to be known the length and breadth of this land that if I am stopped, this movement will not stop.”
However, even as King urged his sisters and brothers not to get their weapons, the bombing convinced him that it was time to arm himself. He applied for a handgun the next day but was denied a permit. That same evening, a bomb was thrown at E.D. Nixon’s house. King called the governor of Alabama the next day to request the gun permit from him directly, but the governor told him that was a decision to be made by the local sheriff.
It was at this crucial point in time, as King was beginning to wrestle with facing an increasingly violent situation with methods of nonviolence, that he would meet the strategist and mentor who would guide him for many years to come.
The Entrance of Bayard Rustin
When Martin Luther King’s home was bombed, a group of civil rights activists based in New York City sent support. They were worried that King would not be able to sustain a peaceful movement in the face of rising White violence. The situation felt especially serious because they had received word that Black Americans were smuggling weapons into Montgomery. Fearing a possible race war, the group sent the most experienced nonviolent activist in the country to examine the situation and offer advice.
His name was Bayard Rustin. Rustin had been dedicated to spreading the teachings of nonviolent resistance for two decades by the time the Montgomery bus boycott took place. During his extensive travels, he staged his own sit-ins at restaurants, single handedly desegregating at least one. He was once beaten by four police officers for refusing to move from the front of the bus, and when he was taken to jail to be beat some more, he instead guided the officers into a calm discussion and was released. While serving two years in prison for refusing military service during World War II, he successfully desegregated the athletics program, the dining hall, and the education programs within the prison.
Bayard Rustin had helped to found a number of organizations dedicated to the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, and was invited to India shortly after Gandhi’s assassination in 1948. Gandhi’s disciples were deeply impressed by Rustin. In the chaos following Gandhi’s death, they believed that Rustin’s expertise would help keep the spirit of Gandhi alive in India, and invited him to spend a year there. Rustin was tempted by the invitation, but unable to accept. He travelled to Africa, speaking with leaders of decolonization movements, and offering advice on building nonviolent independence struggles. By the time Bayard Rustin was sent to advise Martin Luther King, he was a globally recognized leader of nonviolent resistance.
When Rustin visited King, guns were scattered throughout the house. Rustin asked if having guns was compatible with the philosophy of nonviolence, and King replied that yes, it was. He intended to harm no one and would only use the guns in self-defense. Rustin cautioned King, telling him: “If, in the flow and heat of battle, a leaders house is bombed, and he shoots back, that is an encouragement to his followers to pick up guns. If, on the other hand, he had no guns around him, and they all know it, they will rise to the nonviolent occasion.” The point was not that King’s followers might be inspired to shoot if King started shooting: the point was that King’s followers might be inspired to shoot if they thought that shooting was even a possibility.
Rustin told King a story that night: when he had gone to India, it became clear to him that the masses of Indians did not have a deep belief in nonviolence. They were ordinary people who believed in the basic right to defend themselves. Many also believed that violence was justified if using violence could solve a problem. Whereas Gandhi viewed nonviolence as a way of life that you lived and breathed at every moment, most Indians viewed it as a strategy to be used only when it was effective. This meant that, as soon as nonviolent resistance did not seem effective, that many Indians would abandon it.
However, they didn’t abandon it because Gandhi, by accepting nonviolence as a complete way of life, ensured that his followers would never have reason to doubt what kind of action he might take. They could have complete faith that he would always reject violence. In this way, Mahatma Gandhi turned himself into a powerful symbol of nonviolence that the people of India could have great faith in… a symbol that could inspire a mass movement. If King was to become such a symbol, he would have to adopt nonviolence not only as a strategy, but as a way of life as well.
King had been inspired by a lecture on Gandhi while in college, and reportedly purchased half a dozen books about the great Indian freedom fighter afterwards. A friend remembered that as a graduate student, King would stay up late at night debating with those who believed that violence was necessary to overthrow oppressive conditions. King had transitioned smoothly from studying Gandhi in college to putting Gandhi’s teachings into action, leading a nonviolent movement for over two months by the time Bayard Rustin arrived to council him. And yet, Rustin later said, “The fact of the matter is, when I got to Montgomery, King had very limited notions about how a nonviolent protest should be carried out.” Other experienced nonviolent activists felt similarly. When it came to the details of how to build a movement, King had a lot to learn.
Rustin did everything he could to support King. He mentored King in nonviolent strategy and philosophy. He helped to shape King’s image in the media. He introduced King into the vast network of nonviolent activists that he had spent twenty years building. During the boycott, Bayard Rustin wrote the first article ever published under King’s name. And when King later wrote a book about the Montgomery bus boycott, called Stride Towards Freedom, Rustin had a major influence on the book. And yet, the book never mentions Rustin: the insights that Rustin helped Martin Luther King gain were presented as if they came directly from King himself. And this was exactly as Bayard Rustin had wanted: it turned King into a more powerful symbol.
However, Bayard Rustin needed to stay invisible for another reason: he was an openly gay man living in an age when many people considered homosexuality to be immoral, or even criminal. King’s allies worried that any association with Rustin would open King up to charges that he was taking advice from “immoral” people, or perhaps engaging in “immoral” practices himself. King ignored their advice and continued to rely on Rustin. Rustin understood that his sexual orientation was a threat to the movement, and made his visit to Montgomery as brief as possible, doing most of his work for King from New York City. When the two men needed to talk personally, King would meet with him secretly outside of Montgomery. Rustin’s invisibility would not last forever though: in 1963, despite the protests of his colleagues, King hired Bayard Rustin to organize the famous March on Washington. The job was far too big to keep a secret, and after its incredible success, Bayard Rustin became the most famous openly gay man in the nation.
Mass Arrests
Bayard Rustin arrived in Montgomery at the perfect time – February 21, the day that a grand jury called for the arrest of one hundred and fifteen boycott leaders. When the previous intimidation had failed to stop the boycott, the city dug up an old law from 1903 that had outlawed boycotts in response to the streetcar protests a half-century earlier. Rustin counseled the Montgomery leaders to not allow the city to humiliate them with images of being arrested and dragged off by police. They should instead dress in their finest clothes and proudly present themselves at the jail. They took his advice, and a huge crowd gathered outside. In Rustin’s words, the Black community was “thrilled to see their leaders surrender without being hunted down.”
The mass arrests were an incredible mistake on the part of White Montgomery: they turned the boycott from a primarily local affair into an international media sensation. Although the bombing of King’s home had gained significant media attention, major newspapers like the New York Times still relied on southern reporting, which was obviously biased. With the mass arrests, reporters from around the country flooded into Montgomery, and the boycott became front-page news for the first time. Along with the outside attention came the desperately needed outside financial support that allowed for the continuation of the boycott.
White Montgomery’s efforts to destroy the boycott backfired again when Martin Luther King was placed on trial. A stream of Black Americans took to the stand, describing the terrors they faced on the bus. One woman described how her husband, after getting into an argument with a bus driver, had been shot and killed by a police officer. Another woman described how her husband had been dragged by the bus when he was forced to enter through the back door, which closed on his leg as he began to enter and then sped away. When Martin Luther King was found guilty of organizing an illegal boycott, he posted bail and walked outside to a cheering crowd, telling them: “We will continue to protest in the same spirit of nonviolence and passive resistance, using the weapon of love.” Headlines across the nation the following day portrayed King not as a guilty criminal, but as the American Gandhi.
The tide had turned. It had taken three months, but the world was now watching, and it had taken the side of the boycotters. Financial assistance poured in, allowing Black Montgomerians to make it through the remaining nine months of the boycott, which only ended when the Supreme Court ruled that Montgomery’s segregated bus practices were unconstitutional.
The Development of King’s Philosophy
Martin Luther King’s early philosophy developed over the course of the Montgomery bus boycott, and is beautifully expressed in his first book, Stride Towards Freedom: The Montgomery Story. While his philosophy matured over the years, Stride Towards Freedom offers an excellent portrayal both of King’s early philosophy, and of the principles that would guide him for the rest of his life.
In Stride Towards Freedom, King describes love as a revolutionary force. In defining what kind of love was revolutionary, he turned to the ancient Greeks, explaining that they had different terms for different kinds of love, such as eros for romantic love, or philia for the love one has for ones friends. Revolutionary love – the love that was necessary for nonviolent resistance – was agape: the love for all humanity. Unlike eros or philia, agape was not a kind of love that hoped for anything in return, such as friendship or romance. It was not a love that was focused on ones own self. Agape was a love that desired the best for all people, near or far, known or unknown, friend or enemy. King referred to it as “the love of God operating in the human heart.”
King believed this love was revolutionary because true love of humanity would not tolerate injustice, and thus demanded resistance… a resistance, however, that hurt no one, that healed divisions rather than increased them: a nonviolent resistance. King believed that racism had shattered the human community, and wrote that “…if I respond to hate with a reciprocal hate I do nothing but intensify the cleavage in broken community. I can only close the gap in broken community by meeting hate with love.” “Love, agape, is the only cement that can hold this broken community together. When I am commanded to love, I am commanded to restore community, to resist injustice, and to meet the needs of my brothers.”
King wrote that whereas other forms of resistance created winners and losers and pushed the sisters and brothers in the human community further apart, “The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community.” He emphasized that nonviolent resistance “does not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win his friendship and understanding.” It attacks forces of evil rather than “persons who happen to be doing evil. It is the evil that the nonviolent resister seeks to defeat, not the persons victimized by evil.”
During the Montgomery bus boycott, it was the forces of segregation that were under attack… not the White people who supported segregation, who were, in King’s words, people who had been “victimized by evil” by the fact that they had been raised in a society that made it nearly impossible for them not to become racist. In order to emphasize that the bus boycott had no intention of hurting Whites, King decided to not even use the term “boycott” to describe the Montgomery movement. Understanding that many people associated that word with the economic retaliation of the White Citizens Council, which used boycotts to harm Black Americans and their supporters, King instead spoke of noncooperation with evil. The outcome of noncooperation with evil did not involve anyone getting hurt: the outcome was justice. In the case of the Montgomery bus boycott, the just outcome was the desegregation of buses. White people may not have liked it, but it didn’t hurt them.
Nonviolent resistance was also revolutionary because it created what King called a “permanent, positive peace,” rather than a “negative peace.” As he told a White man who accused of him of destroying the “peaceful and harmonious race relations” in Montgomery: “Sir, you have never had real peace in Montgomery. You have had a sort of negative peace in which the Negro too often accepted his state of subordination. But this is not true peace. True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice. The tension we see in Montgomery today is the necessary tension that comes when the oppressed rise up and start to move forward toward a permanent, positive peace.” Negative peace was created when conflicts were not resolved, but pushed beneath the surface where they could be easily ignored by the dominating side in a conflict. It was a form of peace that required someone’s defeat and subordination. Nonviolent resistance was able to create a “permanent, positive peace” because it did not solve conflicts through dominating and defeating people, but by healing broken community.
Nonviolent resistance needed to avoid “not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit.” Internal violence, such as hatred of the oppressor, was always at risk of turning into physical violence. In King’s words, overcoming internal violence “can only be done by projecting the ethic of love to the center of our lives.” It was no easy task to help an oppressed community keep their focus on love, when it was so natural to hate those that hurt you. During the most difficult times of the boycott, King called for massive community meetings on a daily basis in order to bring the people together and keep their energy focused on the dignity and righteousness of their cause. All speakers were asked to focus their words on nonviolence and on love in order to strengthen the resolve of the Black community.
However, King emphasized that the love they spoke of – of agape – did not mean having the warm feelings associated with other kinds of love. In his words, “It would be nonsense to urge men to love their oppressors in an affectionate sense. Love in this connection means understanding.” What needed to be understood was that it was not the nature of White people to be racist and oppressive, but that they had been born into a society that made them that way, and that this could change. It was this understanding that allowed Black Americans to manage the “internal violence” that was naturally felt towards ones oppressors, and to stay true to the nonviolent resistance that would eventually heal the broken human community.
King’s message that a true love of humanity demanded nonviolent resistance made sense to many White people outside of the South. Many had previously viewed resistance to oppression as a form of aggression, or as something that they did not need to become involved in because they were not oppressed themselves. More importantly, King’s steadfast focus on using the “weapon of love” to overcome oppression led many White Americans to feel a sense of shame… just as it was intended to. In King’s words, nonviolent resistance worked only because of its power “to awaken a sense of moral shame in the opponent.” Only the painful emotional pressure of feeling shame had the power to turn enemies into friends.
Although King often spoke of turning enemies into friends, he understood that hardcore enemies were usually set in their ways. The true target of shame was ordinary White Americans. It was through forcing them to feel shame that Black Americans could gain a broad base of support… support in the form of financial donations, in the form of positive media portrayals, in the form of political pressure at the voting polls, and in the form of active White allies struggling side by side with Black Americans. When King wrote that “he who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it,” he framed resistance to oppression as the natural activity of all decent people. His message forced many ordinary White Americans to wrestle with their conscience, and to support the Black American freedom struggle.
Rosa Parks After the Boycott
As for Rosa Parks, her story was no simple, civil rights fairytale with a clean-cut happy ending. She and her husband both lost their jobs over the boycott. In retaliation to their activism, the landlord raised their rent, and they found it impossible to make ends meet. The boycott had taken a serious toll on their health: Raymond Parks, constantly fearing for his wife, slept with his gun, suffered a nervous breakdown, and began drinking heavily. Rosa Parks had suffered from severe sleeplessness and developed a heart condition. This was the harsh reality of activism… a story that would be repeated thousands and thousands of times as the civil rights movement swept the South.
Eight months after the end of the boycott, Rosa and Raymond Parks abandoned Montgomery and moved north to Detroit. Although continuing to live in poverty, Rosa Park’s activism never ceased. In Detroit she worked on issues of housing discrimination and police brutality. She saw Malcolm X deliver some of his most famous speeches, including “Message to the Grassroots,” “The Ballot or the Bullet,” and what came to be known as his “Last Message,” delivered a week before his death. Following that last talk, Rosa and Malcolm fell into a long conversation. His house had just been bombed and he still smelled of smoke.
Although Rosa and Malcolm appeared so different on the surface, they were similar in many ways and enjoyed each other’s company. Parks later surprised interviewers by telling them that Malcolm X was her greatest hero. His position on self-defense reminded her of her grandfather, and she expressed that she felt that King may be asking too much of Blacks: “We shouldn’t be expected not to react to violence,” she told a reporter. “It’s a human reaction and that’s what we are, human beings.” She also admired Malcolm’s international perspective. Like him, she viewed the Black American freedom struggle as just one part of the larger, global freedom struggles being waged by colonized peoples during the civil rights era. Although Martin Luther King shared this perspective as well, Parks may have admired the fact that Malcolm X worked to build solid alliances with racially oppressed people around the world.
In 1964, Rosa Parks played an essential role in the election of the Black congressman John Conyers. He immediately hired her onto his staff, ending her long period of poverty. The office of John Conyers became a hotbed of Black political activism, and because he was often in Washington D.C., Rosa Parks played a major role in running the Detroit office. She not only met with the many people who poured into the office, she travelled all over the city, meeting with people at schools, hospitals, senior citizens homes, and community meetings. She listened to what the people needed and reported back to the congressman.
Just as Rosa had supported young activists in Montgomery in the years before the boycott, she became a major supporter of the young people who became involved in the civil rights movement. She cherished the “Black is Beautiful” culture that developed in the late 1960s, viewing it as an act of self-love that was essential not only for personal happiness, but for effective resistance to injustice. She supported the calls of the younger generation for Black Power. Indeed, Rosa Parks had long been familiar with the essence of Black Power, as was Martin Luther King: at a mass meeting during the Montgomery bus boycott, King had explained that “…until we as a race learn to develop our power, we will get nowhere. We’ve got to get political power and economic power for our race.”
Racial integration was only meaningful if it led to an actual share of power, and the young militants who Rosa Parks supported did not feel that that was happening. Rosa Parks was calm and soft-spoken, but like the youth, she was impatient. As historian Jeanne Theoharis writes, her “impatience was rooted in a tenderness toward people’s suffering that made it impossible for her and many others in the Black Power movement to rest easy in the face of continuing injustice.”
Young Black militants did not view Rosa Parks as a civil rights icon whose day had passed, but as a fellow freedom fighter. They thrilled at being able to spend time with her. Although Parks was portrayed to the world as the very opposite of the stereotype of the angry, Black militant, the militants themselves knew better. As Rosa Parks’ biographer Jeanne Theoharis writes, “In the popular imagination, black militants do not speak softly, dress conservatively, attend church regularly, get nervous, or work behind the scenes. Fundamentally, they are the opposite of a middle-aged seamstress who spoke softly and slowly. And yet there were many militants like Mrs. Parks who did just those things.”
As one of Rosa’s friends put it: “She’s quiet – the way steel is quiet.”
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Thinking About Connections Across Time: Although slavery had been destroyed fifty years before the birth of Rosa Parks, she was part of a generation of Black Americans whose elders had once been slaves. How do you think being raised amongst ex-slaves might have influenced the perspectives of young children like Rosa Parks?
Making Connections Between Past and Present: Rosa Parks’ grandfather looked White, but because he had African ancestry, he was thought of as Black, and was thus made a slave. Back then, this was known as the “one drop” rule: even if a person was 99% White, if they had “one drop” of African ancestry, they were defined as Black. Do you think that this way of defining “White” and “Black” still exists today, or have things changed?
The Beginning of Rosa’s Activism
Thinking About Strategy: What strategies did White Southerners use to prevent Black Americans from voting? What strategies did Black Americans – like Rosa Parks and E.D. Nixon – use to gain the vote?
The History of Busing in Montgomery
Thinking About Global Context: Why did World War II make Black Americans even more determined to fight for their freedom?
Thinking About Local Context: How did the local context of Montgomery – specifically, the fact that it had two air-force bases – contribute to that city later staging a bus boycott?
Events Leading Up to the Boycott
Thinking About National Context: In what way did the Supreme Court outlawing segregated schools in 1954 contribute to the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955?
Thinking About Strategy: Why did E.D. Nixon feel that Claudette Colvin was not the right person to build a legal case around?
Organizing the Boycott
Thinking About Strategy: Describe the role that Jo Ann Robinson and the Women’s Political Council played in starting the boycott, and why they were able to be so effective.
Thinking About Strategy: Why did E.D. Nixon think that the ministers needed to be organized to make the boycott successful? Why did he offer Martin Luther King an important role in organizing the ministers?
The First Day of the Boycott
Thinking About Strategy: Describe the strategy of Rosa Parks’ lawyer.
Thinking About Gender: Why were the ministers, rather than Rosa Parks and Jo Ann Robinson, chosen to become the leaders of the boycott?
Thinking About Public Presentation: Describe the image of Rosa Parks that was presented to the public, and why this image was chosen.
The White Backlash
Thinking About Strategy: Describe the strategies used by the White Citizens Councils to enforce racial oppression, including why they disagreed with the Ku Klux Klan, and how they prevented White people from helping Black Americans.
The Entrance of Bayard Rustin
Thinking About Strategy: Why did Bayard Rustin tell King that it was important that he didn’t arm himself, even for protection? According to Rustin, why did King need to adopt nonviolence as a complete way of life?
Thinking About Public Presentation: Describe two reasons why Bayard Rustin, despite being a major influence on Martin Luther King, kept his role invisible to the public.
Mass Arrests
Thinking About Strategy: How did the Black community prevent themselves from looking like “guilty criminals” to the eyes of the world when they were arrested? Why were the mass arrests a major strategic error on the part of White Montgomery?
The Development of King’s Philosophy
Thinking About Strategy: Why did Martin Luther King believe that agape was a revolutionary kind of love?
Imagine You Were There: Imagine you were in the crowds listening to Martin Luther King speaking about revolutionary love. How would you have reacted? Would you have agreed with him? Why or why not?
Thinking About Strategy: Why did King choose to use the term “noncooperation with evil,” instead of the term “boycott”? What was positive about one term, and negative about the other?
Making Connections Between Past and Present: What did Martin Luther King mean by “negative peace” and “positive peace?” Do you think “negative peace” exists in your community today? Please explain.
Thinking About Strategy: What did Martin Luther King mean by “internal violence of spirit?” Why did the Montgomery movement need to prevent this “internal violence,” and how did they prevent it?
Thinking About Strategy: Why did Martin Luther King feel it was important for White Americans to feel a sense of shame?
Rosa Parks After the Boycott
Thinking About Strategy: In what ways did Rosa Parks disagree with Martin Luther King, and why?
Thinking About Perspectives: What did Rosa Parks think of the phrases “Black is Beautiful” and “Black Power?”
In 1904, a Christian priest from England traveled to India. Troubled by the degrading way the English treated the Indians, he began to preach that true Christians would never seek to dominate or control others. Before long, this man joined the struggle to liberate India, causing him to be considered a traitor by his own people. Fighting for the rights of all Indians, he travelled to China, Fiji, and South Africa, where Indians were used as cheap labor and worked under slave-like conditions. In South Africa, he met Gandhi, became one of his closest friends, and stayed by his side as one of his chief advisors for over two decades, until Gandhi, sitting in his prison cell, informed him that the time had come for Indians to know that they could win this struggle on their own.
The man’s name was Charles Freer Andrews. In 1929, Andrews travelled to the United States, where he toured the country’s Black universities lecturing on the nonviolent resistance strategies Mahatma Gandhi was using to force the British out of India. The word that Gandhi used for his style of nonviolent resistance was satyagraha, meaning “soul force.” Gandhi believed that effective nonviolent resistance required people to become strong-souled spiritual warriors, called satyagrahis. Satyagrahis needed to be able to overcome the temptations of anger and violence that would arise when they and their loved ones were beaten, jailed, or even killed. A truly strong souled person could even love their enemies… and out of the force of their integrity, convert would-be enemies to their cause.
This message reminded a deeply religious Black America of the teachings of Jesus, and especially of his teachings from the Sermon on the Mount. In that sermon, Jesus tells his followers that if someone strikes them on their cheek, that instead of striking back they should “turn the other cheek,” offering the other side to be hit as well. This sermon had a powerful effect on the young Gandhi. In Gandhi’s interpretation, Jesus was not asking his followers to engage in weak submission by allowing themselves to be hit. He was asking them to have faith in the potential goodness of the very person hitting them, and by turning the other cheek, to offer them a chance to right their wrongs. Most people would feel a sense of shame at hitting a person who reacted to violence with peace, and many people would be forced to question themselves. Whereas violence only increased the divisions between people, the dedication to nonviolence symbolized by turning the other cheek had the potential to bring people together. For this reason, Gandhi referred to nonviolence as the “discipline of love,” and it was this discipline that Gandhi asked of his own disciples – the satyagrahis fighting for freedom in India.
The sense that Gandhi’s teachings embodied the highest ideals of Christianity allowed the teachings that fueled the Indian freedom struggle to later fuel the Black American freedom struggle. When Martin Luther King later commented that, despite being a Hindu, Gandhi had lived according to Jesus’s teachings better than any other person on the planet, he was simply repeating what Black Americans had been saying for decades. In the 1930s, two decades before King’s statement, Gandhi had entered into discussions with Black American religious leaders. One of these first discussions helped Gandhi recognize the genius of Black American spirituality and its potential for political liberation. It was with the internationally renowned Black scientist, George Washington Carver.
The Mahatma and the Scientist
George Washington Carver was a deeply religious man. As a professor at Tuskegee University, he not only engaged in scientific study, but also led a weekly Bible class for over thirty years. Carver credited his strong religious faith for providing him with the insight and inner peace he needed to be a good scientist, and viewed science as a way to understand and honor God’s creation. In his own words, Carver said he prayed to “…the Great Creator silently daily, and often many times per day, to permit me to speak to him through the three great Kingdoms of the world, which he has created… the Animal, Mineral and Vegetable kingdoms; their relations to each other, our relations to them and the Great God who made all of us.”
Carver’s scientific research was dedicated to supporting impoverished Black American farmers, who often struggled to grow food on land that, for generations, had been used for growing cotton plants. Over time, the cotton had stripped the nutrients from the soil, robbing the land of its ability to grow healthy food. Carver discovered that sweet potatoes, soybeans, and peanuts restored the nutrients that the cotton plants had stripped away. He traveled the South, teaching farmers how to restore their impoverished soil. He also taught farmers how to use the resources they had around them in innovative ways – most famously, describing dozens of uses for the peanut, including many uses for the shells alone, from patching roads to insulating houses. If Black families could use their resources well, Carver believed they could invest more in their businesses and their children’s education, and over time, elevate themselves as a community.
While lecturing on satyagraha at Tuskegee in 1929, one of Gandhi’s closest friends, Charles Andrews, befriended Carver. He quickly realized that Carver and Gandhi were similar in important ways. The Mahatma and the scientist were both committed to helping the poorest members of their societies. Gandhi struggled to find teachers willing to travel through India’s villages for little pay to help farmers learn simple strategies for improving their lives, and was very interested in Carver’s discoveries. George Washington Carver created simply written, illustrated pamphlets which, in the words of historian Nico Slate, “addressed how poor farmers could preserve fruit for the winter, produce goods they previously bought, and improve the physical conditions of their homes.” Carver would send these educational pamphlets to Gandhi, who put them to good use in India.
Carver viewed his support of India’s farmers as support for the Indian freedom struggle. More food and of higher quality would translate into a stronger Indian population that was more capable of fighting for their freedom. Carver sent Gandhi a special diet that he hoped would give Gandhi more strength with which to fight for his people. There was also a religious dimension to Carver’s support of Gandhi: both men viewed farming not only as a tool that allowed oppressed communities to be more independent, but also as a sacred connection to the land that brought people closer to God’s miracle. For Gandhi, this meant that agricultural work could potentially help people gain the spiritual strength necessary for nonviolent resistance. Gandhi and Carver also urged the poor to avoid purchasing what they could make for themselves, partly so they could gain economic independence, and partly so that they could develop a faith in their abilities that would make them spiritually stronger.
For Gandhi, spiritual strength was essential for political liberation. Gandhi believed that the strong-souled satyagrahis necessary for waging a nonviolent war against the British also needed to be capable of total self-reliance. Through many hours of discussion with Charles Freer Andrews, George Washington Carver developed his own Christian interpretation of satyagraha, or soul-force. When Andrews returned to India, Gandhi was so impressed by what he heard about Carver that he asked his friend to write an article on him so that Indians could learn from Carver’s example. Gandhi and George Washington Carver would correspond for the remaining decade of Carver’s life.
Gandhi’s Disciple, Mirabehn
In 1935, Black American leaders would finally make direct contact with Gandhi. Howard Thurman, one of the country’s greatest philosophers of religion and a professor at Howard University, led a group of three other Black Americans on a mission to India. The opportunity for the trip arose when a group of Christian students in India invited Thurman to lead a six-month speaking tour on Christianity at Indian universities. Thinking that this might be an opportunity to make direct contact with Gandhi, the philosopher accepted.
Thurman was unsure of how to organize a meeting with Gandhi, but a solution to that problem soon emerged. As the small group prepared for the trip, a European disciple of Gandhi’s arrived in the United States: Madeleine Slade, who Gandhi had renamed Mirabehn. Mirabehn was the daughter of a famous British admiral, and, like Charles Andrews, had embraced Indian liberation. Howard Thurman quickly arranged a meeting with Mirabehn and invited her to lecture at Howard University.
Speaking before a large crowd, she compared Gandhi’s teachings to the teachings of Jesus. She reminded them that Jesus was from the Near East, which, like India, was part of the continent of Asia. When she told the crowd that “the greatest spiritual teachings of the world have all come from the darker races,” she was repeating a theme that many of Gandhi’s disciples had emphasized on visits to the United States. As Sarojini Naidu, the Indian poetess and nonviolent resistance leader had told a gathering of Black Americans a decade earlier, “The African must remember the colored Christ. Preachers did not understand Christ until taught by my Master, Mahatma Gandhi. Jesus, remember, was not a white man, but an Asiatic like me.” By emphasizing that Jesus was “an Asiatic like me,” Indians sought to emphasize a shared spiritual heritage with Black Americans. And by emphasizing that the freedom struggle in India was based on ideas very similar to those of Jesus, Gandhi’s disciples also emphasized that Black Americans could use their own religious tradition for political liberation.
In his autobiography, Thurman wrote that during her lecture, Mirabehn spoke in a calm and gentle tone. And yet, “the intensity of her passion gathered us all into a single embrace, and for one timeless interval we were bound together with all the peoples of the earth.” Howard University’s students were fully prepared to take her message seriously. In 1930, five years before Mirabehn’s visit, two students inspired by Gandhi had refused to move to the back of a segregated bus. The president of the university, Mordecai Johnson, had long urged his students to follow Gandhi’s example. Years later, Mordecai Johnson’s lectures would convince a young man named King – who thought that nonviolence was impractical – to go out and purchase half a dozen books on Gandhi.
Howard Thurman had hoped that through Mirabehn, he and his group would be able to arrange a visit with Gandhi himself. He was not disappointed. Mirabehn, impressed with her experience at Howard University, told him, “You must see Gandhiji while you are there. He will want to visit with you and will invite you to be the guests of the ashram. I’ll talk with him about it upon my return and you will hear from him.” True to her word, Mirabehn returned to India and informed Gandhi of the impressive Black American philosopher who wished to meet him. Gandhi immediately responded, writing Thurman a postcard that read: “Dear friend… I shall be delighted to have you and your three friends whenever you can come before the end of the year.” Gandhi reminded Thurman that his ashram did not have any western comforts such as running water. But the Mahatma assured Thurman that “we will be making up for the deficiency by the natural warmth of our affection.”
The Pilgrimage of Friendship
The trip of the four Black Americans to India was called the “Pilgrimage of Friendship.” When it was announced, India’s colonial rulers attempted to block their voyage, fearing that it would make their rule of India more difficult. The British knew that many Black American intellectuals believed that racial oppression in the United States and European colonization across the world were different parts of the same global problem of White supremacy. If Black Americans could weaken White supremacy in India by supporting Gandhi, that would help weaken the global power of White supremacy, including its hold on the United States. Many Indians felt the same way, viewing Black Americans as important allies who could potentially strike a major blow against White supremacy in one of the strongest nations in the world. As historian Gerald Horne explains, “The far-sighted Thurman sensed earlier than most that engagement with India could be mutually beneficial, striking a blow against white supremacy globally, which would have a decided impact locally.”
A British official scolded the YMCA, which was hosting the trip, saying, “You do not know what you are asking. If an American educated Negro just travelled through the country as a tourist, his presence would create many difficulties for our rule – now you are asking us to let four of them travel all over the country and make speeches!” Despite the protest from the British Empire, the Pilgrimage of Friendship somehow moved forward. However, Thurman’s group was followed everywhere they went by British spies, and it was made clear that they would be removed from India the second they were suspected of contributing to the Indian freedom struggle.
Arriving in India in September of 1935, the group was met with a pleasant surprise: everywhere they went, Indians were well informed of the struggles of Black America. The communication between Black and Indian intellectuals had led many Indians to become interested in the struggle against racial oppression in the United States. But there were also unpleasant surprises: Indians wanted to know why Black Americans had accepted Christianity despite knowing that the religion had been forced on their ancestors by slave masters. One Indian commented that he had read of “one incident of a Christian church service that was dismissed in order that the members may go join a mob, and after the lynching came back to finish the worship of their Christian God.” He told Howard Thurman, “I think that an intelligent young Negro, such as yourself, here in our country on behalf of a Christian enterprise, is a traitor to all of the darker peoples on earth.”
Thurman discovered that being a Christian made it difficult for some Indians to trust him, later writing that “everywhere we went, we were asked, ‘Why are you here, if you are not the tools of the Europeans, the white people?’” Although Gandhi and his disciples had developed a profound respect for Christianity, the majority of Indians seemed to view it as a religion that, in Thurman’s words, “had made its peace with color and race prejudice in the West.” And although many of Gandhi’s disciples believed in a “colored Christ,” other Indians viewed Black Americans as worshipping a white skinned, blue eyed, blond haired savior. This fact caused some Indians to doubt that Black Americans would be useful allies in the global struggle against racial oppression.
Howard Thurman did not take these criticisms lightly. When the Indian man who accused him of being “a traitor to all of the darker peoples on earth” demanded that Thurman explain himself, they entered into a conversation that reportedly lasted for five hours. However, Thurman’s full response would come years later, in the form of a book titled Jesus and the Disinherited. In that book, Thurman argues that Jesus, as a member of a Jewish community conquered by the Roman Empire, had a great deal in common with racially oppressed and colonized people. For Thurman, the religion of Jesus was the perfect response to oppression, which was why Gandhi himself had adopted some of Jesus’s teachings. In response to his time in India, Thurman would also help found the first interracial church in the United States, called the Church For the Fellowship of All Peoples, located in the diverse city of San Francisco and still pastored by one of Thurman’s students today. When Thurman left Fellowship in 1953, the young Martin Luther King considered the position. He chose one in Montgomery, Alabama, instead. It is said that Martin Luther King kept a copy of Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited with him as he travelled, and that he reread it so often that it eventually fell apart.
Meeting the Mahatma
After more than five months in India, and with less than two weeks to stay, Thurman’s group finally had an opportunity to meet Gandhi. The Mahatma was travelling and invited them to stay at his encampment. He normally waited inside of his tent to receive visitors, but when the Thurmans arrived, he came out and welcomed them with greater warmth than Gandhi’s secretary had ever seen before. Gandhi immediately launched into intense questioning about the state of Black America. He wanted to understand all the issues that Black Americans faced and the details of the struggle. The brilliant philosopher had been examined many times before, but Thurman would later write in his autobiography, “Never in my life have I been a part of the that kind of examination: persistent, pragmatic questions about American Negroes.”
Soon, it was Thurman’s turn to ask questions. When he asked if nonviolence required “direct action,” Gandhi may have become concerned that Thurman thought that non-violent resistance did not involve much activity. Gandhi explained that he regretted using the term nonviolence. Instead of helping people understand the actions they needed to take, the term “nonviolence” only described what kind of actions they should not take. However, Gandhi was clearly asking for something much more profound than simply refraining from violence. He had been trying to find a translation for the Hindu practice of ahimsa, which meant to care for all things, through all of ones actions. Hindus considered “actions” to include not only physical actions, but any form of internal movement, including mental and emotional activity. Thus, ahimsa meant developing caring speech, caring feelings, and caring thoughts. Because of this, Gandhi considered translating ahimsa as love, but thought that the word, so heavily associated with romance, would be misleading. And so, he went with nonviolence.
Mahatma Gandhi told Howard Thurman that nonviolence was the “greatest and activist force in the world… Without direct active expression of it, nonviolence to my mind is meaningless.” Thurman pressed Gandhi, in the words of scholar Sudarshan Kapur, “to explain how to train individuals and communities in nonviolent resistance. Gandhi argued that constant practice in nonviolent living was essential.” Individuals and communities that had not developed a nonviolent heart and mind through the way they lived their daily lives would not be capable of nonviolent resistance. It would have been clear to Thurman that the ashrams, or spiritual communities, founded by Gandhi, were meant to support people in developing a nonviolent consciousness. Thurman would also have understood that the church could play this role in the United States.
Before their discussion ended, Howard Thurman’s wife, Sue Bailey Thurman, begged Gandhi to come to America, exclaiming that “We have many a problem that cries for solution, and we need you badly.” Gandhi replied, “I must make good the message here, before I bring it to you.” Gandhi’s connections with men such as George Washington Carver helped him believe that the strong religious faith of Black Americans would give them the strength and inspiration to embrace nonviolent resistance on a massive scale. In Gandhi’s final words to them, he prophesized, “It may be through the Negroes that the unadulterated message of non-violence will be delivered to the world.”
Two decades later, shortly after the success of the Montgomery bus boycott, Martin Luther King’s mentor, Bayard Rustin, reminded King of Gandhi’s prophesy.
The Journey of Benjamin Mays
Towards the end of 1936, Benjamin Mays – a friend of Martin Luther King’s father and the dean of Howard University’s School of Religion – also met with Gandhi. With Mays, Gandhi went into more detail about the intense spiritual activity required by nonviolence, saying that nonviolent resistance “is much more active than violent resistance. It is direct, ceaseless, but three-fourths invisible and only one-fourth visible.” Gandhi added, “Non-violence is the most invisible and the most effective… a violent man’s activity is most visible while it lasts. But it is always transitory.”
More than two decades later, Martin Luther King would explain that although nonviolent resistance was not very physically active, it was intensely spiritually active. King learned this through the message that Gandhi was now teaching Benjamin Mays. Because nonviolence is active mostly in a spiritual sense, it is invisible. The action is spiritual work taking place inside a person – such as the work of overcoming anger or of learning to love – and that action cannot be seen. As Gandhi tells Mays, that “invisible” work is “ceaseless.” It is ceaseless because, as Gandhi told Howard Thurman, it requires the constant practice of nonviolent living.
Benjamin Mays told Gandhi, “I have no doubt in my mind about the superiority of non-violence but the thing that bothers me is its exercise on a large scale, the difficulty of so disciplining the mass mind on the point of love. It is easier to discipline individuals.” He asked Gandhi what he would do if the people in a nonviolent resistance campaign broke down and became violent. Benjamin Mays summarized Gandhi’s response, writing that nonviolent campaigns sometimes needed to be cancelled “if hate develops and love ceases to be the dominant motive for action.” He added that, “In nonviolence, the welfare of the opponent must be taken into consideration.” If the opponent is humiliated, the nonviolent campaign will produce division instead of unity, and create tension that will lead to violence in the future. Leaders had to always be ready to call off campaigns in order to regroup and find ways to maintain the integrity of nonviolent resistance.
Finally, knowing that many Black Americans doubted that nonviolent resistance could work for them since unlike the Indians, they were a small minority, Mays also asked, “How is a minority to act against an overwhelming majority?” Gandhi reminded him that he had begun his own nonviolent resistance struggles in South Africa, where the Indians were a small minority. Gandhi believed that nonviolent resistance had the power to convert people to a cause. If an oppressed minority used nonviolence, the majority of people could be impressed enough to come to their aid.
When Mays – a future teacher of Martin Luther King – returned to the United States, he wrote: “The Negro people have much to learn from the Indians. The Indians have learned what we have not learned. They have learned how to sacrifice for a principle. They have learned how to sacrifice position, prestige, economic security and even life itself for what they consider a righteous and respectable cause.” In another article, he expressed that he was unsure if nonviolent resistance could truly free India. But he did say this: “The fact that Gandhi and his non-violent campaign have given the Indian masses a new conception of courage, no man can honestly deny. To discipline people to face death, to die, to go to jail for the cause without fear and without resorting to violence is an achievement of the first magnitude. And when an oppressed race ceases to be afraid, it is free.”
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Bibliography
This story was especially influenced by the profound scholarship of Nico Slate. I am extremely grateful for his feedback and support!
Thinking About Strategy: How did Gandhi interpret Jesus’s teaching of “turning the other cheek?” Why did Gandhi think this teaching could overcome division, and create unity?
The Mahatma and the Scientist
Thinking About Science: In what way was George Washington Carver’s scientific research dedicated to supporting impoverished Black farmers?
Thinking About Strategy: Why did both Gandhi and George Washington Carver consider farming and nutrition to be an important part of fighting for freedom?
Gandhi’s Disciple, Mirabehn
Thinking About Strategy: When Gandhi’s disciples met with Black Americans, why did they focus on discussing Christianity? Why did they emphasize that Jesus was “Asiatic?”
The Pilgrimage of Friendship
Thinking About Global Context: Why did Black Americans and the people of India want to support each other? And why did the English want to prevent this?
Thinking About Strategy: Why did many Indians doubt that Black Americans would be useful allies in the struggle against racial oppression?
Thinking About Religion: How did Howard Thurman respond to the Indian criticisms of Black American Christians?
Meeting the Mahatma
Thinking About Public Perception: Why did Gandhi regret using the term “nonviolence” to describe his vision of resistance?
Thinking About Strategy: According to Gandhi, what did people need to do to effectively train themselves for nonviolent resistance? What role did the ashrams in India have in this training… and what role might the churches in America have?
The Journey of Benjamin Mays
Philosophical Thinking: According to Gandhi, why was nonviolence mostly “invisible?” Why was it “ceaseless?”
Thinking About Strategy: Why did Gandhi believe that nonviolent resistance needed to “consider the welfare of the opponent,” and never humiliate the opponent?
Thinking About Strategy: According to Gandhi, why could a small and oppressed minority successfully use nonviolent resistance against an overwhelming majority?
When Jack Johnson became the world’s first Black heavyweight champion in 1908, he instantly became a hero for people of color everywhere. Images of him dominating White fighters in the ring inspired colonized and racially oppressed people across the world to take up boxing. In the United States, his success was viewed as threatening the myth of White supremacy, and Johnson was forced into exile. Settling in revolutionary Mexico, he befriended the Mexican president and even trained his generals. This is the story of Jack Johnson.
Boxing: The Struggle Against Racial Oppression
In the decades before the rise of Jack Johnson, racial prejudices were growing worse. In the 1880’s and 1890’s, White Southerners in the United States were working hard to re-establish the dominance they had lost over Black Americans after the Civil War. As racist laws were passed and racial violence increased, many Black men sought jobs that allowed them to leave the country. Some became sailors, travelling across the sea from nation to nation. Others roamed the world as travelling performers, or as boxers moving from one prizefight to the next.
During their travels, these men encountered colonized peoples, and realized that racism was used to justify the domination of people not only in the United States, but all across the world. Returning home, they told stories that helped their communities realize that they were not alone… that there were people all around the world who had similar experiences to them, who sympathized with them, and who might even want to work alongside them in their shared struggle against racial oppression.
It was the boxers who communicated this message with the most force. When Black boxers fought White opponents overseas, they gained the respect of colonized people, and became symbols of their shared struggle against White supremacy. Boxers did what most racially oppressed people could only dream of – publicly dominate their oppressors.
As the new century of 1900 dawned, the rise of film turned the Black boxer into an even more powerful symbol of resistance. Like many new technologies, film was created and controlled by European and American imperial powers, and was used to spread images and stories of their dominance. In the United States, early films portrayed the successful control of the Philippines, and most popularly, the conquest of Native Americans. Because these films were intended to prove the toughness and superiority of White American men, they appealed mostly to White Americans. But there was one form of film that appealed to people of all colors, from all across the world: the interracial fight film.
In the earliest interracial fight films, the fighters could not be seen clearly due to the grainy quality of the film. What could be seen clearly, however, was the image of a lighter man versus a darker man. Because these early films were silent, local entertainers across the world would narrate the fight to the audience, in their own language, allowing audiences to imagine that they were watching their own people. In this way, the low visual quality and the silence of the films actually helped interracial fight films to become globally popular. White people from all across Europe and the United States could imagine that the lighter figure was one of their own countrymen proving their dominance over people of color, while racially oppressed and colonized people could imagine that the darker figure was one of their people fighting back against their oppressors.
One of these films would ignite a global boxing craze, force governments to realize the power of film to undermine their authority, and even contribute to splitting the world into two halves: White people and the so-called “darker races.” This was the film of Jack Johnson, soon to be the most famous Black man on the planet, demolishing the White world champion in 1908.
Jack Johnson & a World Split in Two
Although interracial boxing was popular, world championship matches were restricted to White men. Determined to compete on the world stage, Jack Johnson chased the World Heavyweight Champion, Tommy Burns, around the world for two years, relentlessly challenging him and insulting him whenever Burns turned down a fight. Johnson would even purchase ringside tickets to Burns’ boxing matches and hurl insults at him as he fought.
In 1908, Burns finally caved in to Johnson’s relentless pressure while in Australia. The match immediately generated global attention, and was recorded with newer, higher quality film, allowing millions of people across the world to see the expressions on the men’s faces as they fought. White supremacists, at first excited about the films potential to prove White dominance, quickly wished the film had never been made. The Black boxer not only demolished the world champion in front of a crowd of 20,000, he smiled as he fought, as if conquering the best White fighter in the world was an effortless feat. Police broke up the fight and forced the cameras to stop rolling. The myth of White supremacy was being threatened.
Johnson’s success was deeply troubling to many White people. Just a few years earlier, in 1905, Japan had defeated Russia in the Russo-Japanese War, becoming the first non-White country to defeat a powerful White nation. Johnson’s effortless victory contributed to a growing fear that people of European ancestry were losing their position of power in the world. A call went out for a “great White hope” to challenge Johnson and prove to the world that “the White race” was indeed superior to all others. However, Johnson defeated all who challenged him – often easily. As the famed author Jack London wrote, while Johnson fought, he also “rested, smiled and dreamed. This dreaming expression was fascinating. It was certainly deceptive, for suddenly, the lines on the face would harden, the eyes would glint viciously,” and Johnson would release a downpour of powerful blows.
Johnson’s films became popular all over the world, creating a worldwide passion for boxing amongst racially oppressed and colonized peoples. This concerned colonial rulers, but the more they tried to prevent the showing of the films, the more people of color across the world wanted to see them. The global search for a “great White hope,” and the popularity of Johnson’s films amongst people of color, contributed to a growing division of the world into two halves during the first decade of the twentieth century: White people, and everyone else. In this new century, the color of skin began to identify people more than their culture or national background. It didn’t matter if the “White hope” was American or Italian; German or Russian. In the twentieth century, these diverse groups began to find a common identity in being “White” that they did not have before. Likewise, people from the rest of the world found that they, for the first time, had something in common as well, simply by belonging to the so-called “darker races.” Films encouraged this division by mass marketing, and greatly profiting from, images of racial competition.
Johnson’s Exile & the Mexican Revolution
In 1912, U.S. authorities found an excuse to have Johnson arrested. His crime was engaging in a consensual relationship with a White woman – a crime the authorities called “White slavery.” Johnson fled the country. His fights had made him a wealthy man, and he travelled extensively, lived lavishly, and boxed everywhere he travelled. While living in Spain and Cuba, he fell in love with Spanish culture. After seven years on the run, he decided to settle down in Mexico City, in 1919, during the final years of the Mexican Revolution. He was inspired by the revolutionary atmosphere and quickly befriended – and became the boxing instructor – of prominent Mexican authorities, including a group of high-ranking generals.
Before long, Johnson had befriended the Mexican President himself: Venustiano Carranza. During his exile and travels around the world, Johnson had met many powerful people and had developed unique insights about racism, imperialism, and global politics. The two men spent long hours speaking in private. Johnson found a protector in Carranza: when the U.S. government pressured Mexico to return Johnson to the United States, the Mexican president refused. Johnson later wrote that Carranza “made every effort to make my stay in the Mexican Republic a pleasant and comfortable one.”
Unlike other exiles in Mexico, Johnson chose to travel through dangerous territory, staging boxing matches wherever he went. He later wrote that President Carranza provided “me with escorts of soldiers when I had occasion to travel in sections of the country infested by bandits or revolutionists.” Johnson described how a train he was on was stopped by a “horde of savage Yaqui Indians… When I told them who I was, they were sufficiently interested to halt their looting.” The leaders of the raiding party apologized, and Johnson, who had learned to speak some of the Yaqui dialect, spent some time in conversation with them before reboarding the train. Despite using the derogatory term “savage” to describe the indigenous people of northern Mexico, the fact that Johnson had studied their language and enjoyed speaking with them revealed his respect for the diversity of Mexican culture.
Johnson, however, was not admired everywhere he went. Tens of thousands of White Americans lived in Mexico. Most were from the South and many were the children of Confederate veterans who had fled to Mexico when the South lost the Civil War. Historian Gerald Horne describes how, on one occasion, a White restaurant owner named Walter Sanborn
refused to serve Johnson. Johnson left but returned a few hours later with three or four of Carranza’s generals. They drew their pistols and demanded that Sanborn apologize. Mexico, they informed him, “was not a white man’s country.” Sanborn was forced to shake hands, embrace, and finally serve Johnson.
Stories of Jack Johnson denouncing White supremacy and standing up to racist attitudes in Mexico were extremely popular amongst Black Americans in the United States. On one occasion, a member of the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce named D.H. Moore was travelling with his friends in Mexico. When they walked into a restaurant where Johnson was dining, Moore said with disgust that “no nigger could eat with white people” where he came from. Johnson calmly walked over to him and delivered a swift uppercut. Such stories of Johnson as “a tough lone opponent of white supremacy,” to use Gerald Horne’s words, infuriated White Americans and delighted people of color. Historian Theresa Runstedtler explains that Black newspapers used such stories to help Black Americans realize the “potential for transnational racial solidarity.”
The Mexican Revolution threatened major U.S. business interests in Mexico, leading many Mexicans to fear a U.S. invasion. According to a spy ordered by the U.S. government to monitor Johnson’s activities, in a speech “given before a cheering crowd in front of the Vega Hotel in Nuevo Laredo, Johnson said that when and if the gringos invaded Mexico, American blacks would stand alongside their Mexican brothers.” He even urged Black American soldiers to join the Mexican army instead, where they would not be discriminated against.
Johnson encouraged Black Americans to abandon the oppressive atmosphere of the United States and to make their home in Mexico. Hoping to encourage Black migration to Mexico, he started “Jack Johnson’s Land Company” in Mexico City to sell land to Black Americans, placing ads for the company in Black newspapers that read:
Colored People. You who are lynched, tortured, mobbed, persecuted and discriminated against in the boasted ‘Land of Liberty…’ OWN A HOME IN MEXICO where one man is as good as another.
The U.S. government viewed Johnson’s statements and activities as a serious threat. During World War I – which was happening at the same time as the Mexican Revolution – there had been concerns that Black Americans would not feel loyalty towards the United States, and might side with enemy nations. Germany had even tried to convince Mexico to invade the United States, and some believed that Black Americans might join forces with such an invasion.
When President Carranza was assassinated in 1920, Jack Johnson knew his time in Mexico was up. The next government, hoping for a better relationship with their powerful northern neighbor, told Johnson he had thirty days to leave. He was tired of living in exile, and would later write that “I was not satisfied with my lot in life. There was nothing, I felt, that would compensate me for continuing as an exile from my home and friends, so I thought constantly of returning.” As Johnson crossed the border and surrendered, he was smiling. On the way to his jail in Chicago, thousands of fans cheered for him at every train stop.
Johnson served one year and one day. Upon release, he headed straight to Harlem, where thousands of fans carried him through the streets on their shoulders. Soon, the Black American artistic movement known as the Harlem Renaissance would explode, accompanied by an upsurge in Black radicalism during the 1920s. These artistic and political movements were led by Black freedom fighters calling themselves the “New Negroes”… Black men and women who felt that the previous generation had been too passive.
The powerful symbol of Jack Johnson had helped pave the way for the more militant Black culture of the 1920s. In the words of historian Theresa Runstedtler “The defiant heavyweight had, in many respects, changed how his colored fans saw themselves, laying the groundwork for an increasingly militant and global movement against white domination.” Like earlier boxers, Johnson had been at the center of the “developing black counter-culture,” soon to be embodied by the younger Harlem Renaissance artists, writers, and jazz musicians. The stories of his international travels “inspired black Americans back home to expand their geographic imaginations and to envision their racial struggles as part of a global problem,” and had “played an integral role in the emergence of a popular black global imagination and a more confident race consciousness that touched the lives of ordinary people of color within and beyond the United States.”
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Thinking About Global Connections: As an increased amount of Black men began traveling across the world, what did they learn? When they returned home, what did they tell their communities?
Thinking About Technology: How was film used by American and European imperial powers? Why did interracial fight films become globally popular?
Jack Johnson & a World Split in Two
Thinking About Global Context: Why was Johnson’s success in the boxing ring so upsetting to White Americans and Europeans? What else was happening in the world that caused them to be so fearful?
Thinking About Technology: How did films of interracial boxing contribute to the diverse people of the world beginning to split into two groups: “White” people, and members of the “darker races” (known today as “people of color”)?
Johnson’s Exile and the Mexican Revolution
Thinking About Movement and Migration: Why did ten’s of thousands of White Americans live in Mexico?
Thinking About Global Connections: Why did Jack Johnson encourage Black Americans to move to Mexico, and even join the Mexican army? Why did Johnson’s statements seriously concern the U.S. government?
Thinking About Historical Significance: According to this text, why might boxing be historically significant? What does the history of boxing teach us about important world events?
During the last year of his life, Malcolm X spent five months in Africa and the Middle East, and almost another month in Europe. In Africa, he built powerful relationships with anti-colonial resistance leaders and the presidents of new nations emerging from colonialism. In the Middle East, presidents and kings recognized Malcolm as the emerging leader of Islam in the United States, and gave him lavish support. In Europe, Malcolm X built relationships with the younger generations of African, Asian, and Middle Eastern leaders who were preparing for their future leadership roles through their studies at Oxford and other elite universities.
The story of the international Malcolm X culminates with Malcolm’s activities abroad during the last year of his life, and explores why Malcolm thought these travels were necessary for the Black liberation struggle in the United States. However, the roots of Malcolm’s internationalism began before his birth: the roots lie in his mother’s heritage, with the political organization his parents dedicated their lives to, and with the values and visions Malcolm’s parents raised their children with.
Marcus Garvey and the United Negro Improvement Association
Malcolm’s mother, Louise Langdon, was a light skinned Afro-Caribbean woman from the small island of Grenada. At the age of seventeen she moved to Montreal, Canada, during World War I. Montreal was a day’s drive from Harlem, New York, where tens of thousands of other Afro-Caribbeans migrated at this time. In Harlem, they contributed to the formation of a politically radical community that soon became known as the Black capital of the United States.
Afro-Caribbean men and women often experienced serious racism in the United States for the first time in their lives. Such treatment stunned and infuriated them. Many of the most militant Black voices from this period came from Afro-Caribbeans, most famously, from Marcus Garvey. Garvey preached that Black Americans, Afro-Caribbeans, and other members of the African diaspora needed to stop thinking of themselves as a small minority surrounded by overpowering White forces. Instead, they needed to think of themselves as members of the massive African and African diasporic population, which, if united, could gain complete freedom from White domination. Because Asia also suffered from European colonialism, Garvey went even further, advocating a united Asia working alongside a united Africa in the global battle against White supremacy.
Achieving complete freedom, Garvey taught, required the total separation of Blacks from Whites. This required self-sufficiency. Ideally, no people of African ancestry would rely on Whites for anything. They needed to create their own businesses, farms, banks, schools, and all other institutions. Over time, they would grow strong enough to begin building a new nation for themselves back in Africa, making their separation complete. In an era when the Ku Klux Klan would soon boast four million members, this vision of absolute separation seemed necessary to many Black Americans. To turn the vision into a reality, Garvey founded the United Negro Improvement Association, which quickly created chapters in cities across the United States and throughout the African diaspora.
This was the vision that Malcolm X’s mother had dedicated her heart and soul to when she moved to Montreal. It was through the United Negro Improvement Association that she met Earl Little, who became her husband and Malcolm’s father.
A Beautiful and Tragic Family
Earl Little was a skilled carpenter from Georgia, where more Blacks were lynched than any state except Mississippi. His skills placed him in economic competition with Whites, placing him in constant danger. Tall, dark, muscular, and proud, Earl Little was not the kind of man who allowed himself to be intimidated, no matter what the risks. However, after receiving a number of violent threats, he headed north… to Montreal, where he embraced the vision of Marcus Garvey and began working alongside Louise Langdon to make Garvey’s vision a reality.
Louise Langdon and Earl Little, drawn together by a shared vision, were married two years later. It was 1919, the year of the Red Summer, when race riots in dozens of cities killed hundreds of Black people and many Black Americans created the type of self-defense societies Malcolm X would later advocate. Louise and Earl’s fierce dedication to Garvey’s vision, combined with Louise’s excellent writing skills and Earl’s ability to speak fearlessly and eloquently, made them excellent candidates for spreading Garvey’s message to more dangerous parts of the country where the movement was still unknown. The young couple was asked to start a chapter of Garvey’s movement in Nebraska – a state with forty-five thousand Ku Klux Klan members. The goal was to support a Black community that faced constant terror, but because of that terror, few Black people in Nebraska were willing to join Garvey’s movement. Many feared that Malcolm’s parents would do nothing but bring violence to their communities.
While Louise was pregnant with Malcolm in the winter of 1925, the Ku Klux Klan visited their house to ask for her husband. Luckily, he was away, travelling on speaking engagements as his son would later do. The Klan shattered the windows of their house and left. As Malcolm later wrote, “they rode off, their torches flaring, as suddenly as they had come.” The family moved to Indiana, but the Ku Klux Klan soon forced them move on. Moving to Michigan, their house was bombed. The fire department never arrived, and detectives refused to investigate the case. Malcolm was five years old.
Far from crushing their spirits, the terror they faced inspired Louise and Earl Little to work even harder for Black liberation. By the time of the bombing, Malcolm’s father had begun taking his son to United Negro Improvement Association meetings. These meetings made a great impression on the young Malcolm, who later wrote that ‘The meeting always closed with my father saying several times and the people chanting after him, ‘Up, you mighty race, you can accomplish what you will!’”
Marcus Garvey’s visions of Black freedom governed the household. The children learned how to care for themselves so that they would not learn to rely on the unreliable White world, and would grow up to able to contribute to Black independence. Malcolm’s older brother Wilfred recalled that “Our mother used to take us out into the woods and show us different herbs and tell us what they could cure.” Each child was given a plot of garden to care for and learned to grow their own food. The household was filled with a variety of Black American and Caribbean newspapers, and the children were regularly tutored about current events and the history of Africa and the African diaspora.
This resilient family, however, was soon broken. One night, Malcolm’s father “slipped” on the trolley tracks and was crushed by a train. His death was almost certainly a murder. Wilfred, the oldest son, began hunting in order to feed the family that had grown to eight children, and Hilda, Malcolm’s ten-year-old sister and the oldest daughter, began taking care of the younger children while their mother worked. However, no amount of hard work was enough to cover their basic needs, and the children sometimes became dizzy from malnourishment.
Louise continued to gather the hungry children around the stove each evening, teaching them French and telling them stories of their ancestry. But within a few years the single mother with eight hungry children was pushed past her breaking point. She began talking to herself. One day the police found her walking barefoot through the snow, unsure of who she was. She was declared insane and was institutionalized for the next twenty-four years. Welfare officials placed the children in different homes. The once strong family had been broken.
The Nation of Islam
At Malcolm’s new school, he excelled academically, emerging at the top of his class. But when he told his teacher he’d like to become a lawyer to help his mom, the teacher said, “A lawyer – that’s no realistic goal for a nigger.” Malcolm lost his interest in school and was expelled at the age of fourteen. Drawn to big city life, jazz music, and dancing, he soon made his way to Harlem, and quickly entered the criminal underworld to make ends meet. At the age of twenty, Malcolm was arrested for burglary. He would spend six years in prison, and emerge a transformed man.
While he was in prison, Malcolm’s brothers and sisters began following a religious organization called the Nation of Islam. The Nation was founded by a mysterious figure named W.D. Fard, who arrived in the Black communities of Detroit in 1930. Claiming to be an Arabic man, Fard travelled from door to door in Black communities selling silks and other items. Fard explained to his customers that the silks he sold were the same fabrics they would have worn in their original homeland, where he was from: the Islamic holy land of Mecca.
Black Americans began to gather around Fard to hear more about their original homeland. Many of them had recently left the South during the Great Migration, leaving behind their communities, churches, and professions with high hopes of a better life in the North. Instead, they found themselves forced into ghettos filled with a pervasive sense of hopelessness. Fard arrived during the especially difficult times of the Great Depression, and his stories helped hopeless Black Americans reinvent themselves and discover a sense of pride.
He told them that their language had been Arabic, and that their true religion was Islam. He explained that White people had invented the term “Negro” to hide the true sacred identity of Black Americans, who were descendants of the Black Tribe of Shabazz, which had been enslaved and taken from Mecca. Because the Tribe of Shabazz was both Black and from Mecca – which, as a part of the Middle East, was part of Asia – Fard taught that Black Americans were the descendants of Afro-Asians.
Soon, many Black Americans in Detroit were taking Fard’s advice, abandoning what Fard told them were their slave names, eating in the way he said their ancestors ate, and practicing their original religion of Islam. As Fard’s popularity grew, he began speaking to audiences of Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association – the same organization that Malcolm’s parents had dedicated their lives to. The U.S. government had recently deported Garvey, and his organization was struggling to survive without him. As Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association fell apart, many of its members found hope in the organization founded by W.D. Fard: The Nation of Islam.
Like Garvey, the Nation preached the separation of Blacks and Whites. Like Garvey, the Nation believed that this separation required Black Americans to be self-sufficient and eventually to not rely on Whites in any way. Like Garvey, who talked about Afro-Asian unity against White supremacy, the Nation also taught a strong Afro-Asian connection, built into the very ancestry of Black Americans. However, there were also major differences between the two groups: whereas Garvey taught that Whites and Blacks should separate because they were simply too different to ever get along, the Nation of Islam taught that White people were actually devils. And whereas Garvey taught that political action was necessary for Black liberation, the Nation of Islam taught that Black Americans should totally separate themselves from the political system, which, having been created by White devils, would never support them.
Despite the differences between Marcus Garvey and the Nation of Islam, Malcolm’s brothers and sisters were drawn to the new organization, which seemed similar to the values they were raised with. They tried to convert Malcolm to the Nation while he was in prison. When they told him that the Nation of Islam taught that White people possessed an evil, devil nature, Malcolm thought the idea was ridiculous. But when he reflected on his family’s own experiences, and when he thought of the history of how Europeans colonized and enslaved people wherever they went, Malcolm came to believe that what at first seemed ridiculous might actually be accurate. In prison, Malcolm was seriously studying history, and the more he studied, the more he started to believe that the Nation of Islam might be correct.
Malcolm wanted to learn more. W.D. Fard had mysteriously disappeared long before the conversion of Malcolm’s family, and the Nation of Islam was now led by Fard’s top disciple, Elijah Muhammad. Muhammad claimed that Fard had been a human incarnation of Allah, and that he, Muhammad, continued to receive messages directly from God. From prison, Malcolm was soon writing to Elijah Muhammad on a daily basis, and came to believe that Elijah possessed such great wisdom that he truly was a divine being in direct communication with Allah. When Malcolm was released from jail, Muhammad began to personally train him, and Malcolm quickly emerged as a major leader in the Nation of Islam.
The Afro-Asian Conference
By the time the Montgomery Bus Boycott turned Martin Luther King into a major civil rights leader in 1955, Malcolm had already founded dozens of temples for the Nation of Islam and was the leader of the Nation’s temple in Harlem. During that year, an event overseas captured his attention, inspired him to think more internationally, and began the long process that led him to finally break with the Nation of Islam nine years later.
In 1955 twenty-nine emerging African and Asian nations gathered to discuss unifying with one another at the Bandung Conference – also known as the Afro-Asian Conference – held in Indonesia. Many of these nations were currently at war with their colonial rulers. Some had recently gained independence, but although free, realized how easy it would be for powerful countries and corporations to continue to control their resources and to use their populations as cheap labor. The nations gathered at the Afro-Asian Conference met to discuss how, although individually weak, they could gain strength through unifying and supporting one another.
As the great Malcolm X scholar Manning Marable writes, “Malcolm closely monitored these events, which to him fulfilled the divine prophecy foretelling the decline and fall of European and U.S. power.” The Afro-Asian Conference may have reminded Malcolm of Garvey’s teaching that Afro-Asian unity could overcome global White supremacy. The event caused him to seriously consider the potential for Black American participation in international alliances. Marable writes that after the Afro-Asian Conference, Malcolm’s “sermons made increased references to events in Asia, Africa, and other Third World regions, and he emphasized the kinship Black Americans had with non-Western dark humanity.” However, because the Nation of Islam taught that Black Americans should not concern themselves with politics, Malcolm had to be careful about expressing these ideas.
The First Journey Abroad, and the First Doubts
In 1958, Elijah Muhammad sent Malcolm on a trip to the Middle East to build ties between the Nation of Islam and the Muslim world. Although Malcolm was treated with respect, Islamic leaders in the Middle East gave the Nation of Islam only lukewarm support. Plans were made for Elijah Muhammad to visit the holy city of Mecca and take the hajj, and a full scholarship was later given to one of Elijah’s sons to study at a major Islamic university. However, these were merely respectful gestures. The Islamic world was not inclined to build strong connections with the Nation of Islam.
The trip forced Malcolm to realize that many of the teachings of the Nation of Islam were seen as incorrect or even sacrilegious by the rest of the Islamic world. Malcolm was told that teaching that White people were devils was blasphemy, and that Islam was a religion of universal brotherhood that did not believe in racial differences. On this trip, Malcolm also realized that, according to traditional Islam, it was heretical for Elijah Muhammad to claim that he was Allah’s messenger.
Malcolm said nothing of these doubts when he returned to the United States. He wrote nothing of them in his Autobiography. He remained a completely humble servant to Elijah Muhammad for another half a decade. But Malcolm slowly made changes. Instead of saying that White people literally were devils, he began to say that they acted like devils. Malcolm now felt it was important to speak not only to Black people, but to all people. He began speaking at colleges, and by 1960 had emerged as a popular speaker amongst college students of all races.
It was during this time that members of the Nation of Islam began criticizing Malcolm. Five years before the Nation assassinated him, many followers of Elijah Muhammad were already concerned that Malcolm was moving away from Elijah’s teachings. By the time Malcolm began writing his Autobiography in 1963, these tensions had grown worse. Malcolm was deeply troubled by the fact that important figures in the Nation of Islam doubted his loyalty, and originally hoped to use the Autobiography to prove his loyalty. The first chapters, written during this time, portray Malcolm as an uneducated, hardened criminal, which was untrue. Scholars now believe that Malcolm X exaggerated his ignorance and his criminal past in order to emphasize the power that the Nation of Islam had to save even the lowliest of peoples.
Although Malcolm’s Autobiography began with this gesture of loyalty, it would not end that way. His loyalty was about to be pushed past its limit.
Leaving the Nation of Islam
In 1964 Malcolm discovered that Elijah Muhammad had been sleeping with and impregnating his young secretaries. Malcolm had heard these rumors for a long time, but as someone who believed that Elijah Muhammad was a divine being, he simply couldn’t believe this was true. As the rumors spread, however, Malcolm knew that people would begin to ask him questions, and he needed to know how to respond. This caused him to investigate the rumors personally. When he found them to be true, Malcolm’s faith in Elijah Muhammad was shattered.
Malcolm officially left the Nation of Islam on March 8, 1964. He did not criticize the Nation or expose the sexual misconduct of Elijah Muhammad. Instead, he told the press that as a minister with the Nation, he was not allowed to become involved in the civil rights movement in the way that he wished to. “It’s going to be different now,” he said. “I’m going to join in the fight wherever Negroes ask for my help.” However, powerful figures within the Nation believed that Malcolm had spread the rumors about Elijah Muhammad himself, so that he could split the Nation apart, form his own group, and elevate himself as a leader. Although they considered retaliation, the threat to Malcolm’s life at this point was not nearly as serious as it would soon become.
Malcolm’s departure from the Nation of Islam left him confused and depressed. Luckily, he knew exactly what his new path would be. He had doubted the Nation’s teachings for years and was ready to embrace traditional Islam. Malcolm immediately founded a new Islamic organization, called Muslim Mosque Incorporated, which would teach traditional Islam to Black Americans and allow them to become part of the global Islamic community. In order to spiritually renew himself and gain recognition as a leader of traditional Islam, Malcolm X travelled to the Middle East for the second time. He would visit the holy city of Mecca, and take the hajj.
The Hajj
When Malcolm arrived in Saudi Arabia, he discovered that he would not be allowed to enter the holy city of Mecca before he attended the Hajj Court. Because the teachings of the Nation of Islam were considered heretical, Malcolm had to prove to the court that he had abandoned the Nation and embraced traditional Islam. Malcolm was prepared: he had begun studying traditional Islamic teachings with the leading scholar of Islam in the United States, Dr. Mahmoud Shawarbi. Shawarbi believed that Malcolm had the potential to emerge as a great leader of Islam in the United States, and believing this, provided Malcolm with contacts to the royal family of Saudi Arabia. With the backing of the royal family, the judge quickly recorded Malcolm’s name in the Holy Register of True Muslims, giving Malcolm access to Mecca. He had now been formally acknowledged as a member of the global Islamic community. Before leaving, the judge told Malcolm, “I hope you will become a great preacher of Islam in America.”
During Malcolm’s first visit to the Middle East in 1958, he had been told that Islam viewed all of humanity as one family, with no racial divisions. Now, as he participated in the hajj in 1964, he witnessed this single human family with his own eyes, and experienced it with his own heart. In Malcolm’s words, he met Whites on the hajj who “were more genuinely brotherly than anyone else had ever been [to me.]” He wrote to Alex Hayley, who was helping him write the Autobiography, that “I began to perceive that ‘white man,’ as commonly used, means complexion only secondarily; primarily it describes attitudes and actions.” Islam, Malcolm wrote, had the power to remove that negative “white” attitude from the person with white skin color.
From Mecca, Malcolm wrote home to his followers at the newly established Muslim Mosque Incorporated, telling them that what he had witnessed was so profound that it had “forced me to rearrange much of my own thought pattern, and to toss aside some of my previous conclusions.” He told them, “I have eaten from the same plate, drank from the same glass, slept on the same bed or rug, while praying to the same God… with fellow Muslims whose skins was the whitest of white, whose eyes the bluest of blue…[for] the first time in my life… I didn’t see them as ‘white’ men.”
Malcolm now envisioned spreading Islam to Americans of all races. He wrote to his followers that he could imagine the next generation of White youth adopting Islam and overcoming the long legacy of White racism. People of color in particular would benefit from becoming part of a global community of 750 million Islamic people, many of who had also suffered from White supremacy, and could be potential allies.
Among the Expatriates in Ghana
Before returning to the United States, Malcolm X visited Ghana. In 1957, Ghana had become the first sub-Saharan, Black African nation to gain its independence. Many Black Americans grew hopeful that Africa, free from colonial rule, would once again become a proud land. The president of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, invited Black Americans to journey to Ghana to help build the new Africa. Over three hundred joined, including Maya Angelou and Richard Wright, two of the greatest Black American novelists; Pauli Murray, one of the first Black American activists to put Gandhi’s teachings into action; and Julian Mayfield, who had been forced into exile after creating armed self-defense societies to fight the Ku Klux Klan.
The most important Black American expatriate to Ghana was W.E.B. Du Bois himself – perhaps the greatest Black intellectual of the era. Although scorned in the United States as a communist, Du Bois was an international hero, known as the Father of Pan-Africanism and hailed as the leader of global unity against White supremacy. President Kwame Nkrumah was a great admirer of Du Bois, and was so close to Du Bois’s wife, Shirley Graham, that he called her “mother.” Although Du Bois had died shortly before Malcolm arrived in Ghana, Shirley Graham took Malcolm under her wing, and introduced him to President Nkrumah. Like W.E.B. Du Bois and Shirley Graham, the president of Ghana believed that any single African nation, emerging from colonialism, would be weak and easily exploited. African unity was necessary for African success. While Malcolm had been raised with a vision of African unity, these leaders in Ghana provided Malcolm with a new idea of what Africa needed to unify against: the economic system of capitalism.
In Ghana, Malcolm found himself in a community of anti-capitalist revolutionaries who believed that the nature of capitalism was to exploit helpless individuals, communities, and even entire nations in order to make an economic profit and gain power. They believed that without a combination of unity and socialist laws to prevent the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few, it would be easy for large corporations to gain control of the resources of Africa. If this happened, the continent would simply move from an old colonialism, in which Africa was controlled by European governments and military forces, to a new colonialism, in which Africa was controlled by massive foreign corporations, often with the unspoken support of Europe or the United States. The revolutionaries in Ghana believed that just as racism had justified the old colonialism, that it would justify what they now called neocolonialism: the capitalist exploitation of Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans.
In the words of historian Manning Marable, when Malcolm returned to the United States, “For the first time, he publicly made the connection between racial oppression and capitalism, saying, ‘It’s impossible for a white person to believe in capitalism and not believe in racism.’” What Malcolm meant was that because capitalism relied on exploitation, and because exploitation often relied on racism, that whoever promoted capitalism also promoted racism… whether they did so consciously or not.
This new perspective led Malcolm to claim, in his own words, that “The [capitalist] system in this country cannot produce freedom for an Afro-American.” This was exactly the opposite of what he had previously believed: influenced by Marcus Garvey’s and Elijah Muhammad’s teachings, Malcolm had believed that Black liberation depended on Black capitalism – on the development of Black businesses and institutions. In Ghana, Malcolm began to think that people of color could not gain their freedom through participating more effectively in an economic system that, in Malcolm’s view, literally depended on racial exploitation.
While in Ghana, Malcolm’s perspectives on race also continued to change. In Ghana, African revolutionaries worked alongside European, Asian, and Latin American revolutionaries, all fighting against neocolonialism and for a united Africa. Some of Kwame Nkrumah’s most trusted advisors were White people. The revolutionaries who Malcolm so admired considered his previous anti-White beliefs to be politically immature. What mattered to them was not race but a shared vision and a willingness to fight for it. Whereas in Mecca, Malcolm had witnessed the racially unifying power of religion, in Ghana, he witnessed the racially unifying power of shared political beliefs. In Mecca he had prayed with Whites; in Ghana, he saw the possibility of fighting for freedom alongside them.
Malcolm’s time in Ghana also helped him evolve his understanding of gender. For his entire adult life, he had believed in the Nation of Islam’s teaching that women were subordinate to men, and that their role was primarily to raise children and take care of the home. In Ghana, Malcolm found himself in an environment where some of the most respected leadership figures were revolutionary women, such as Shirley Graham, who was regularly visited by revolutionaries and dignitaries from across the world, and who made an effort to mentor Malcolm. When he returned to the United States, Malcolm made sure that women had leadership positions in the political organization he founded. He would write to his expatriate friend in Ghana, Maya Angelou, asking her if she would join his cause. She accepted… but Malcolm’s life would not last long enough for Angelou to work alongside him.
The Organization of Afro-American Unity
Malcolm returned from his month abroad on May 21st, 1964. With eight months left to live, he went to work creating a new image for himself as a major leader both of civil rights and of Islam. To accomplish this, he downplayed his controversial anti-capitalist perspectives, and elevated the story of how his journey to Mecca had changed his views on Whites and provided him with a vision of universal brotherhood.
Before departing for his month abroad, Malcolm had already established his own religious organization, Muslim Mosque Incorporated. He now went to work building a new political organization: the Organization of Afro-American Unity. The name was inspired by the thirty-two African nations that had founded the Organization of African Unity a year earlier to prevent the spread of neocolonialism. The purpose of Malcolm’s Organization of Afro-American Unity was to unify the many civil rights groups engaged in the Black liberation struggle in the United States – to build what Malcolm called a Black united front. Malcolm then planned to link the Black united front in the United States, to the united front of African nations against neocolonialism.
Before going public with his new organization, Malcolm gathered with representatives from the major civil rights groups to discuss building the Black united front. Martin Luther King was in jail, but a representative was sent to speak on his behalf. Malcolm proposed that it was time to internationalize the Black American freedom struggle and to bring human rights abuses against Black people in the United States to the United Nations. The group, including King’s representative, agreed.
Their agreement was likely based on the fact that civil rights laws were often passed but not enforced, which caused these leaders to increasingly doubt the sincerity of the U.S. government. Some were starting to agree with Malcolm that the passage of laws with no enforcement mechanisms was a purposefully deceitful strategy to fool the world into thinking the U.S. was taking action when it wasn’t. By the time Malcolm gathered these leaders together, the groundbreaking Supreme Court decision Brown vs. Board of Education had existed largely unenforced for an entire decade. During that time, Black poverty had worsened, and it appeared that the fight against poverty that lay ahead would be far more difficult than the fight against desegregation. For these reasons, as historian Manning Marable writes, civil rights leaders gave Malcolm the task “of contacting those governments in Africa and the Middle East that might be expected to endorse the initiative [of bringing U.S. human rights abuses before the UN.] His subsequent activities abroad in the second half of 1964 were an attempt to implement this strategy.”
Before returning to Africa and the Middle East, Malcolm made a fateful decision. He had come to believe that the Nation of Islam was harming Black Americans and preventing the spread of true Islam in the United States. Malcolm now sought to destroy the Nation of Islam. Aware that he was placing his life in danger, he made several major talk show appearances and told the story of the sexual misconduct of Elijah Muhammad. He then returned to Africa and the Middle East – this time, not for one month, but for five. His five months away probably allowed him to live five months longer.
Malcolm’s Five Months Abroad
Malcolm’s epiphany at Mecca and his commitment to the struggle against neocolonialism made him a hero in Africa and the Middle East. Arriving in Cairo, the Egyptian government placed him in a luxury suite as a guest of the state. His travel expenses for the entire five months were paid for by the Supreme Council on Islamic Affairs, which held a massive reception for Malcolm, and awarded his new organization twenty scholarships to Al-Azhar University – one of the greatest centers of Islamic learning in the world. With the twenty scholarships, Malcolm could provide the leaders of his new Muslim Mosque Incorporated with the best Islamic education possible. Perhaps even more importantly, these scholarships would mean that Malcolm would have twenty of his most trusted people living deep in the heart of the Middle East, where they could build diplomatic ties and strong connections to the world of Islam. The message was clear: the Supreme Council on Islamic Affairs wanted to establish Malcolm X as the leader of Islam in the United States.
From Egypt, Malcolm travelled to Saudi Arabia. As in Egypt, he was a guest of the state with all expenses paid for. Here, Malcolm X was named the World Islamic League’s representative in the United States. The League granted Malcolm’s Muslim Mosque Incorporated fifteen scholarships to the Islamic University of Medina, the second holiest city in Islam. Malcolm also met with Saudi officials to discuss the funding of a mosque to be built in Harlem.
In Cairo, Malcolm attended the Organization of African Unity conference and urged African leaders to go to the United Nations and accuse the U.S. of human rights abuses. Malcolm argued that if they were willing to go before the United Nations and describe the racist practices of Whites in South Africa as human rights abuses, they should be willing to do the same for the United States. While many African leaders privately agreed, the Organization of African Unity rejected Malcolm’s proposal. Condemning South Africa was one thing; condemning the most powerful nation on the planet was another. The emerging African nations could not risk turning the United States into an enemy.
Of course, Malcolm didn’t give up easily. Believing that he could convince African leaders if he could talk with them in more private settings, Malcolm spent months travelling across Africa. In mid-October, he finally found success: following a speech before the Kenyan parliament, the parliament voted to support Malcolm’s human rights proposal. This was all Malcolm needed. If only one leader from one nation accused the United States of human rights abuses at the United Nations, the United Nations as a whole could be forced to take up the debate. Malcolm had taken a major step towards internationalizing the civil rights movement.
Each step Malcolm took, however, placed his life in greater danger. His steps forward as an Islamic leader caused the Nation of Islam to believe that Malcolm was now truly in a position to destroy them. His steps forward in accusing the United States of human rights abuses made the U.S. government view Malcolm as an enemy of the state. When members of the Nation of Islam assassinated Malcolm, police forces knew in advance. When that day came, the police who were usually stationed at Malcolm’s events were absent.
In England
In December of 1964, Malcolm X was in England, speaking before the most prestigious debating society in the world: the Oxford Union. He had chosen to speak to an English audience for specific reasons. Despite the changes Malcolm had gone through, the media in the United States continued to portray him as a violent, racist extremist, which made it difficult for Malcolm to recruit members and raise money for his new organizations. In the words of historian Stephen Tuck, the Oxford Union debate appealed to Malcolm “for the prestige and legitimacy it would confer on him and his cause.” Unlike the U.S. media, which aired only the most controversial portions of Malcolm’s speeches, the BBC promised to air the entire speech live.
Remaking his image was only part of Malcolm’s reason for going to England. The future leaders of England’s ex-colonies were trained at elite universities such as Oxford, and Malcolm sought to build relationships with these future leaders of Africa and Asia, who could potentially become future allies in the struggle against neocolonialism. Malcolm also sought to build relationships with the common people who had moved to England from the old colonies. Whereas Malcolm viewed the future leaders studying at Oxford as potential allies fighting neocolonialism back in their homelands, he viewed the ex-colonized people living within England – and France as well – as a potential “internal resistance force” that could fight neocolonialism from the inside.
Malcolm admired the way that Africans, Afro-Caribbeans, and Asians worked together in England to solve the common problem of racism. Returning home, he told his followers that they could accomplish much more if all people of color worked together. Although Malcolm did not allow Whites to join his Organization of Afro-American Unity out of his belief that Whites often came to dominate the organizations they joined, the organization welcomed all people of color. Malcolm would die in the arms of one of its Japanese members, Yuri Kochiyama, whose family had been forced into internment camps during World War II and who worked with atomic bomb survivors.
Less than two weeks before his death, Malcolm returned to England. Days before speaking at the London School of Economics, he fell sick with the flu. The sickness, however, was a blessing in disguise. Malcolm had been through many changes in the past year, and the sickness gave him much needed space for reflection. He had recently secured the release of his mother, who had been institutionalized for twenty-four years. When his Afro-Caribbean friend Jan Carew came to visit him, it became an opportunity for Malcolm to reflect on his own Afro-Caribbean ancestry.
Malcolm told Jan, “After my father was murdered, she had nine mouths to feed, and she had to do it all by herself. It’s only now that I can understand what a terrible life she lived. We all had to pitch in, but she did most of the toiling…night and day, day and night… I used to daydream that when I grew up I’d become a lawyer and give her all the things she never had. And now I realize, too, that seeing her slaving day after day, I began to hate the system that made her life one of endless drudgery.”
Jan asked Malcolm if it was true that he had in fact changed, and Malcolm replied, “No. I’m one and the same person, the son of a mother and father who were devoted Garveyites all their lives. The son of a father who was murdered and a mother who was mentally crucified by racists. I’m carrying on the work they started, just as my children will carry on my work when I’m gone. Before they carted my mother off to a mental hospital and tore our family apart, she kept telling us that without an education we’d be like people blindfolded in a forest pockmarked with quicksand. I strayed from those teachings of hers for years, but I came back, didn’t I?”
Malcolm had come back to his mother’s teachings. In a way. He no longer believed in Marcus Garvey’s Black separatism. He no longer believed in Garvey’s notion that that the development of Black capitalism would lead to Black liberation. But at the time of his death Malcolm was beginning to build the sort of Black united front his parents had raised him to believe in. He was beginning to build a bridge between a unified Black America and a unified Africa, as his parents had dreamed of. And through Islam, Malcolm was even laying the hopeful foundations for the Afro-Asian solidarity that Marcus Garvey taught would overcome global White supremacy, and the colonialism and neocolonialism it supported. Malcolm’s parents would have been very proud of their son.
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Marcus Garvey and the United Negro Improvement Association
Thinking About Movement and Migration: Why did the Afro-Caribbeans who migrated to Harlem become some of the most radical members of Harlem’s Black community?
Thinking About Strategy: How did Marcus Garvey think that people of African ancestry could gain freedom from White domination? Why did he believe that people of African and Asian ancestry should unite?
Thinking About the National Context: What was going on in the United States during Marcus Garvey’s time that led many Black Americans to believe that freedom would only come when Blacks totally separated from Whites?
A Beautiful and Tragic Family
Imagine You Were There: Imagine you were present at a United Negro Improvement Association meeting with Malcolm’s father and mother, Earl Little and Louise Langdon. You are all discussing the possible difficulties with carrying through Marcus Garvey’s plans. What difficulties would you mention, and how would you suggest overcoming them?
Thinking About Strategy: Why did Malcolm’s parents teach their children to grow their own food and to learn about the healing powers of different plants? What did this have to do with Black liberation?
The Nation of Islam
Thinking About Similarity and Difference: In what ways were the ideas of Marcus Garvey and the Nation of Islam similar? In what ways were they different?
Thinking About Changing Perspectives: How did Malcolm first react to the Nation of Islam’s belief that White people were “devils,” and why did his thoughts change?
The Afro-Asian Conference
Thinking About Global Connections: Why was Malcolm X inspired by the Afro-Asian Conference? Why did he feel that this event on the other side of the world was relevant to Black Americans?
The First Journey Abroad, and the First Doubts
Thinking About Changing Perspectives: How and why did Malcolm X’s views begin to change after his first journey to the Middle East?
Thinking About Public Presentation: How did Malcolm portray himself in the first chapters of his Autobiography, and why? What can this teach us about the challenges of using sources in history?
The Hajj
Thinking About Changing Perspectives: How, and why, did Malcolm’s views on Whites change when he took the Hajj?
Among The Expatriates in Ghana
Thinking About Multiple Perspectives: Describe the different perspectives on capitalism held by Marcus Garvey on the one hand, and the anti-capitalist revolutionaries in Ghana who Malcolm X came to agree with.
Thinking About Changing Perspectives: How, and why, did Malcolm’s views on race continue to change while in Ghana?
Thinking About Changing Perspectives: How, and why, did Malcolm’s views on women change while in Ghana?
The Organization of Afro-American Unity
Thinking About Public Presentation: When Malcolm returned from Ghana, how did he portray himself to the American public, and why? Why did he choose to downplay certain parts of his thinking, while highlighting others?
Thinking About Strategy: Describe the strategy of Malcolm X’s Organization of Afro-American Unity.
Thinking About Strategy: Why did many civil rights leaders agree with Malcolm X that it was time for Black Americans to turn to the United Nations for help?
Malcolm’s Five Months Abroad
Thinking About Strategy: Why did Malcolm X think it was important to build ties to Islamic leaders in the Middle East, on the one hand; and African leaders, on the other?
Thinking About Repercussions: How did Malcolm X’s activities abroad place him in danger, and why?
In England
Thinking About Public Presentation: Why was Malcolm X struggling to portray himself to the American public, and why did he thinking that debating at the Oxford Union would help?
Thinking About Strategy: Why did Malcolm X think it was important to build relationships with colonized people living within countries like England and France?