Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement From the 1950s to the 1980S
Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer (eds)
Vintage Press, 1995. Published in Australia by Random House. 692 pp., $22.95
Review by Arun Pradhan
The history of the US civil rights movement comes alive in this book. Its stories will draw you into the horror and anger of what can only be described as a war against African-Americans. But they are also accounts of inspirational battles and tremendous heroism, the results of which we all too often take for granted.
Over a decade in the making, the Voices of Freedom project is an offshoot of the Eyes on the Prize documentary series. It speaks through the voices of people who lived — and indeed made — this turbulent time in history.
So we read recollections of the leaders (from Huey Newton and Angela Davis to Jesse Jackson), the "powers that be" (from presidential advisers and FBI agents to the cops on the street) and the people who made it a mass movement (from high school students and trade unionists to homeless blacks).
Refreshingly, those who have put together Voices make no pretence of "neutrality", which they deem impossible. However, they do let history and its participants speak for themselves.
The message is loud and clear right from the beginning, which briefly establishes the context of US-style slavery before moving to the brutal murder in 1955 of Emmett Till in the southern state of Mississippi. The 14-year-old Till's only crime was to speak about the white friends, including girlfriends, that he had in the north .
From this point, the book provides an overview of the growth in the civil rights movement. Reading it is like putting a jigsaw of familiar events and people into a finished and flowing whole. The pieces of the puzzle range from Muhammad Ali to more recent movements for affirmative action.
Although it does not attempt to analyse history, one of the book's major strengths lies in its documentation of the changing politics of the movement, as reflected in the changing icons — from King to the Panthers.
The rise of King
"No I'm not." These were the words of long-term black activist Rosa Parks when asked if she would stand and let whites take her bus seat. In Montgomery (Alabama) in 1955, this was enough to get her arrested. Fellow activist E.D. Nixon turned the event into an opportunity, and with Parks' permission began organising a mass bus boycott.
Pressuring a new young preacher in the area, Nixon managed to arrange an organising meeting of 20 people. They launched what was initially planned as a one-day boycott for December 5. It succeeded beyond all expectations and was still continuing the following February, having involved more than 40,000 people, and having cost downtown merchants over $1 million and the bus companies 65% of their income.
The state fought back, fining countless black drivers on trumped up charges and prohibiting car pooling. It took a year, but in December 1956 "legal" segregation on buses was ended.
The young preacher thrust into the centre of this campaign was 26-year-old Dr Martin Luther King. His own trial and imprisonment on fabricated speeding charges and the bombing of his house shot King into the national spotlight. After the campaign, key activists formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and elected King its president.
The Montgomery buses were just the first step, as black people still could not use white restaurants, schools, hotels or even water fountains.
The strategy put forward by the SCLC to end further segregation was grounded in non-violent resistance, as developed by Gandhi. King would argue, "If you use the law 'An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth', then you end up with everyone blind and toothless". SCLC workshops concentrated on passive resistance, and their goal would often be mass arrests aimed at making the prison system unworkable.
This strategy greatly influenced other groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Voices vividly describes the dramatic growth of student sit-ins at lunch counters.
The first 15 students to order lunch and wait until they were kicked out or arrested at a white bar in Little Rock (Arkansas) received much press attention. Within months, the phenomenon spread to 78 cities in the south, involving 50,000 black students and white supporters and more than 2000 arrests. Solidarity picket lines and rallies were organised in the north, targeting chains that practised discrimination in the south.
The stakes were raised when a small group of activists took to the country in the "freedom rides". White and black students rode through towns, blatantly defying segregation on buses and at stop-offs. They abided by their nonviolent principles even when they came under attack from the Ku Klux Klan, the brutal attacks often involving members of the local police force, with FBI knowledge.
The consistent liberalism of the SCLC had an objective basis, particularly in view of the contradiction between federal laws and state laws. The broad aim was to pressure President John F. Kennedy and provoke federal intervention in the south.
The international attention drawn to draconian laws in places like Mississippi often succeeded in forcing Kennedy's hand, leading to legal compromises with southern governors or even the deployment of federal marshals to protect activists from attacks and lynching.
In the earlier stages of the movement, this often proved to be an effective tactic. However, King's strategy began to be questioned. Divisions arose, with the SCLC concentrating on its high profile "big guns", who were reluctant to defy or offend the federal government, while the SNCC devoted more attention to building up local grassroots leaderships and became increasingly militant.
This occurred in the context of mass rallies in Albany in 1961 and Birmingham in 1963, which showed cracks in the SCLC's influence as protesters increasingly fought back against police attacks.
Enter Malcolm X
Although Voices devotes only one chapter specifically to Malcolm X, its strength lies in placing his politics and impact in context. His "rebirth" from prison in 1952 as a minister of the Nation of Islam placed him not just at the other end of the religious spectrum from King, but also much to the left of the scale politically.
In 1962 Stokely Carmichael, later the president of the SNCC, helped organise a campus debate between Malcolm X and Bayard Rustin, a central leader of the SCLC. Rustin argued for "nonviolence ... with the aim of integrating into the American capitalist system", although he did criticise this system.
Malcolm X not only opposed non-violence as a philosophy but also denounced it as a tactic. He stressed that change had to come "by any means necessary". Carmichael noted the growing influence of Malcolm X's arguments on the SNCC.
Through the recollections of biographer Alex Haley, entertainer Harry Belafonte and wife Betty Shabazz (to name just a few), Voices documents the rapid evolution of Malcolm's politics. However, it does so relatively superficially. It brushes quickly through his suspension from the Nation of Islam in 1963, his pilgrimage to Mecca and shift away from separatist, anti-white politics while clearly maintaining his radicalism.
While the interviews in this section do capture his trajectory towards a class analysis of black oppression, they do not delve deeply into this aspect of his development. They nonetheless contain interesting records of meetings in which Malcolm attempted to engage with the broader civil right movements leadership.
Tragically, his political development was cut short when Malcolm was shot on February 21, 1965, while giving a speech in Harlem. Peter Bailey, who had worked with Malcolm in trying to establish a new group, commented: "He talked about self-determination. He talked about self-defence. He talked about education, but the right kind of education. He gave emotional and practical reasons why we had to have an international posture ... He left changed minds."
Many of those "changed minds" were to soon find themselves in a new group called The Black Panther Party for Self Defence.
[To be concluded.]