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Saving the Nation in the Age of Black Insurgency

2017; Duke University Press; Volume: 14; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/15476715-4209326

1558-1454

Karen Ferguson,

Law, Rights, and Freedoms

In the months since I was invited to participate in this roundtable, Donald Trump’s election has sharpened the parallels between today’s racial politics and those of the late 1960s. During the 2016 campaign, Trump capitalized on being the “law-and-order candidate,” repeating the pledge of white conservatives like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan who called for an iron-fisted police and legal response to deal with the black insurgency of the late 1960s. Trump’s renewal of this slogan in his campaign, along with his invocation of “carnage” to describe inner-city America, speaks to the fact that five decades later—and at the end of the groundbreaking term of a twice-elected black president—the ghetto conditions and state violence that prompted Black Power and black rioting still persisted, and black protest was in flower again, especially against the police and prison systems.1In the context of Trump’s ruthless promises and actions to exclude and criminalize nonwhite Americans, it is tempting to look to the reform efforts of 1960s elite white liberals like Lyndon Johnson or Robert Kennedy with nostalgic longing. Their velvet-gloved efforts, which seemed to meet the demands of black activists partway, might now seem like the antithesis of Trumpism—shining examples, at least by comparison, of good governance and social inclusion. However, we need to remember that both white-liberal reform efforts and conservative crackdown in the 1960s originated in an enduring white-elite conception of African Americans not as citizens but rather as an alien group that had to be constrained to save the nation. This core belief helps explain why, despite the successes of the black freedom struggle, including Obama’s presidency, black America in 2017 looks a lot like it did in 1967.African Americans’ very presence, let alone their fight against their position as an enslaved and then exploited racial caste, has given the lie to foundational national values of liberty and equality throughout American history. While the nation and its elites have most often thrived despite and because of this contradiction, at key points—like the American Revolution, the Civil War, and their aftermaths, as well as the civil rights/Black Power era—the conflict it created over the future of African American citizenship became existential for both.The predominant white response to these crises was violent crackdown akin to “law and order,” but conflict-averse elite liberals found an alternate solution. They focused on a strategy they hoped would save the nation by ending racial confrontation and upholding the notion of equality through the removal or separation of black people from the mainstream of American society. These reformers would literally eliminate what would become known as the “Negro problem.” The justification for this strategy was a developmentalist ideology that adherents framed as benevolent, and which they funded through major philanthropic initiatives. This rationale claimed that the only way African Americans could become full citizens would be for them to establish a society of their own, one separate from white America. In fact, the white philanthropic fantasy of “separate so that they may become equal” stretches back to the early republic and the decades that followed, when many powerful white Americans, Presidents Madison and Lincoln among them, worked through the American Colonization Society in a largely futile effort to remove blacks from American soil for what Madison hoped would be “a rapid erasure of the blot from our Republican character.”2 A century later, in the context of emancipation, Gilded Age philanthropists underwrote the industrial educational project through a similar developmentalist ethos in order to keep African Americans in the rural South, sharecropping and out of politics, thus cementing Northern elites’ contribution and commitment to Jim Crow.3Although these episodes are well known to historians, when I began a book project about the liberal establishment’s response to Black Power, I was surprised to discover this separatist aspiration still present in the 1960s, a period in which I had been taught that liberals were integrationists. Instead, my case study of the Ford Foundation—at the time the world’s largest philanthropy and a preeminent social-policy incubator—found that its leadership continued to look to racial development through separatism as a solution to what it still called the “Negro problem.”4 This strategy corresponded with the 1966 arrival of McGeorge Bundy as the foundation’s president. Reacting in full crisis mode to the rash of urban rioting that followed the Voting Rights Act—which many whites deemed to have solved the “Negro problem”—Bundy warned that the United States was instead imperiled by a “true social revolution at home,” requiring a response at the “level of effort . . . we now make as a nation in Vietnam.”5 Taking on this national threat, he averred that through liberal reform, exemplified by the Ford Foundation, “the country of Abraham Lincoln” would “inevitably . . . right these ancient wrongs, and . . . by peaceful means.”6So, what did Bundy’s foundation do to manage America’s “Negro problem” in the age of black insurgency? He and his officers reverted to the counterintuitive policy of black assimilation through racial separatism conjured by his philanthropist predecessors, including Lincoln. In a strategy that paralleled and found purchase with the efforts of policy makers from the federal to the local levels, Ford’s reformers advocated for the continuing isolation of urban ghettos. That way, they promised, these neighborhoods could be revitalized and their residents could prepare themselves through what the foundation called their “social development” to eventually assimilate into the mainstream of American society. However, thanks to the ongoing black freedom movement, Bundy and his officers, unlike their forerunners, also had to find a nondisruptive way to represent the African American public in the nation. In response to this dilemma, the foundation fostered the creation of a new black leadership class that could broker for the black poor and represent them in the American establishment—a kind of elite pluralism that would demonstrate that the nation was living up to its ideals while damping down black insurgency. This program intersected with black activism of the time in its advocacy of racial separatism, black capitalism, cultural revitalization, and strong black leadership. Indeed, both supporters and critics saw Bundy as a daring iconoclast for treating with black radicals. However, this vanguardism turns retrograde when interpreted through the lens of American philanthropy’s default solution for the “Negro problem.”From 1966 until the mid 1970s, Bundy’s foundation would lead the way on social development by partnering with black activists and other elite liberals on a number of initiatives that are today considered among Black Power’s major legacies. For example, in an experiment in self-governance and autonomous education, the foundation planned and underwrote black community-control school demonstrations in New York City, including the infamous one in Brooklyn’s Ocean Hill-Brownsville. The foundation also pioneered the community development corporation, a model that continues to predominate in public-private efforts to spur economic growth in inner-city neighborhoods. Further, it founded and funded all-black and even radically Afrocentric performing-arts organizations for the cultural uplift of ghetto residents.Despite their high profile, these social-development efforts had little impact on the plight of poor urban communities. Instead, individual leadership development—fostered through initiatives like making community development corporations the incubators of an impressive group of what the foundation called “public entrepreneurs” and an ambitious scholarship program that played a significant role in the creation of an expanded black professional class—was the only concrete and lasting accomplishment from the 1960s of the Ford Foundation’s efforts for African Americans. In fact, this model of elite affirmative action offered such an effective sop to the claims of Black Power that it would become the dominant policy response of the federal government, corporate America, and public and private institutions across the United States.7 In the meantime, the foundation steadily relinquished its ambitious social-development agenda. Despite ongoing ghettoization, once the nation- threatening conflict and disorder of the riots were over, so was the need to confront the Sisyphean task of dealing with old and new problems facing inner-city communities. The foundation stripped down the goals of its philanthropy for African Americans to the fostering of individual minority leadership to ensure that, despite ongoing racial inequality, African Americans could be appropriately represented in the nation’s public life. It had thus found its answer to the “Negro problem,” and the nation had been saved once again from this fundamental internal contradiction. However, also once again, the universal black equality that was the ultimate promise of elite liberals’ racial separatism remained elusive.Barack Obama’s election represented the ultimate fruition of the strategy of elite pluralism, initiated at first to manage the threat of black insurgency and in the end permeating the top echelons of American institutional life. His rise exemplifies the ascension of a new black elite in the United States and the long-term success of 1960s establishment liberals’ race management strategy. Yet here we are again, with a conservative, white president promising to come down hard on the so-called carnage that liberal reforms have not fixed. If history is our guide, that will not happen unless black lives truly begin to matter to the nation, as a fulfillment rather than a betrayal of its promise.