Charisma and the Fictions of Black LeadershipExodus Politics: Civil Rights and Leadership in African American Literature and CultureMartin Luther King Jr., Heroism, and African American Literature

On the Novel and Civic Myth

Reviewed by: The American Civil Rights Movement, 1865–1950: Black Agency and People of Good Will by Russell Brooker David T. Ballantyne The American Civil Rights Movement, 1865–1950: Black Agency and People of Good Will. By Russell Brooker. ( Lanham, Md., and other cities: Lexington Books, 2017. Pp. xxx, 333. $100.00, ISBN 978-0-7391-7992-5.) Russell Brooker provides an accessible overview of the black freedom struggle from the Civil War to 1950. The American Civil Rights Movement, [End Page 771] 1865–1950: Black Agency and People of Good Will is a political science– influenced accompaniment to recent syntheses of the long black civil rights struggle, such as Stephen Tuck's We Ain't What We Ought to Be: The Black Freedom Struggle from Emancipation to Obama (Cambridge, Mass., 2010), though Brooker's account ends before African Americans made their most significant gains. His central argument concerns "people of good will"—black and white individuals who acted in African Americans' interests regardless of their motives. Black agency and pressure, not altruism, he contends, induced this conduct. The first half of his synthesis maps black activism alongside the behavior of these people of good will from 1865 to the racial nadir of the early twentieth century. The second half traces the struggle to 1950, when the southern caste system was "severely weakened" (p. xviii). The book concludes with an epilogue that reflects on connections between 1865 and 1950 and contemporary race relations. Brooker enumerates his major arguments at the outset, organizes chapters clearly, and writes in straightforward prose. He also quantifies shifting African American fortunes throughout his account, including helpful tables detailing Reconstruction-era African American college foundations, lynchings by race during "Redemption," twentieth-century black and white southern schooling data, and indices of the extent of racial segregation over time. Breaking with Tuck's nationally focused account and other scholarship examining racial unrest outside the South, Brooker portrays the civil rights struggle as a mostly southern phenomenon. His nonsouthern treatment includes shifting northern public opinion on race throughout the period, nationwide post–World War I race riots, legal decisions concerning racially restrictive covenants, and the activities of northern civil rights organizations in the South, not elsewhere. Yet while the North was a "safe haven" for African Americans in comparison with the Jim Crow South, the American civil rights struggle concerned more than destroying southern racial apartheid (p. xxi). Incorporating scholarship that examines nonsouthern civil rights struggles and that questions the nonsouthern racial consensus around the mid-twentieth century—like Thomas J. Sugrue's Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York, 2008)—would bring nuance to Brooker's analysis and enable him to explain with greater authority the subsequent nationwide white reaction to race that he hints at in the epilogue. Closer engagement with more recent historiography would also strengthen Brooker's discussion. First, Brooker'suse of civil rights movement to define activism between 1865 and 1950 welcomes a consideration of recent debates over the periodization of the civil rights movement—relevant works include Jacquelyn Dowd Hall's "The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past" (Journal of American History, 91 [March 2005], 1233–63) and Sundiata Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang's "The 'Long Movement' as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies" (Journal of African American History, 92 [Spring 2007], 265–88). Yet in Brooker'stelling, thisworkissimply "about the civil rights movement … before it [the term] got capitalized" (p. xii). Second, given the book's justifiable emphasis on the centrality of violence in infringing on black freedoms, recent military-focused Reconstruction scholarship [End Page 772] would offer a counterpoint to Brooker's argument on the use of force to preserve black rights. The book's later portion effectively details civil rights gains and organization through the 1940s. Though social, economic, intellectual, and political developments undoubtedly weakened Jim Crow segregation by midcentury, Brooker might have engaged with works that problematize the relationship between World War II–era and later civil rights activism, such as Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein's "Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement" (Journal...

“There Is No<i>New</i>Black Panther Party”: The Panther-Like Formations and the Black Power Resurgence of the 1990s

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewsDavid L. Chappell, Waking from the Dream: The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Shadow of Martin Luther King, Jr. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Pp. 266. $23.95 (paper).Ian M. McDowellIan M. McDowellTexas Tech University Search for more articles by this author Texas Tech UniversityPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreDavid L. Chappell’s Waking from the Dream: The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Shadow of Martin Luther King, Jr. is a work of historical recovery, reinterpretation, and continuity of the Civil Rights Movement from 1968 through the early 1990s. Chappell’s primary purpose is to expose the actions of civil rights activists following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, which were substantial yet overlooked. He maintains that the advances made after 1968 are often eclipsed by the enormity of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the symbolism of King’s leadership. However, Chappell argues that “history changing acts like those of 1964 and 1965 are extremely rare,” and they should not confine the memory of the struggle for civil rights (26). Chappell contends that a “fresh look at the post-King era” is needed, one that exposes how activists “tested the limits of equality and black power” and how “the continuing struggle for rights and equality after 1968 is central to the meaning of freedom in America” (xii–xiii).Chappell utilizes a wide range of primary sources including news articles, presidential papers, congressional records, and speeches. He draws from fifteen different archives and libraries for research including the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and the presidential libraries of Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter. Chappell’s analysis of articles and studies provides perspectives of both activists and their opposition. Also, a wide variety of secondary sources are utilized to both provide background on important civil rights actors, actions, and opponents as well as to highlight how such history has been depicted. Chappell presents his findings in six chapters covering the Civil Rights Act of 1968, the 1972 and 1974 National Black Political Conventions (NBPC), the fight to pass a full employment act, the creation of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, the 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns of Jessie Jackson, and discourse and publications concerning King’s infidelity and plagiarism.Chapter 1 and its assessment of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 is one of the most intriguing in Chappell’s book. Chappell argues that the 1968 Fair Housing Act “was a substantive answer to some of King’s most radical demands and his last real victory” (3). Chappell shows that for King a housing bill was important and would have been one of the demands at a mass demonstration King proposed for late April of 1968. Chappell maintains that King’s assassination is what made the passage of a fair housing bill possible. King’s death is shown to have fostered significant sympathy, or at least “the political need to express sympathy,” allowing the act to pass into law shortly after his death (21). Chappell argues that the bill was important upon signing because it helped to make common discriminatory actions such as redlining and blockbusting illegal while also improving African American access to financing and rental properties. While the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 are most associated with the memory of the Civil Rights Movement and King, Chappell contends that the 1968 act “is more properly his legacy” and “significant as the beginning of the post-King era” (25–26).One theme Chappell illustrates persistently is the power of the black vote—including its limitations and potential. Chappell shows that the desire to win black votes played a role influencing many conservatives and moderates to display sympathy and pass the housing act. Chappell demonstrates in chapter 2 how the black vote helped elect African Americans like Richard Hatcher of Gary, Indiana, and Carl Stokes of Cleveland as mayors. However, he contends the lack of unity shown at the NBPC’s conventions of 1972 and 1974 illustrates how institutions could not muster mass voting power. Chappell maintains only when attacked did black voters “rally at the polls to rebuff the assault” (62). In chapter 3 the black vote is shown as crucial to President Jimmy Carter’s victory in the 1976 election. Also, growing black political power is illustrated as helping garner Carter’s support for a full employment bill. The bill put into law made employment a right. However, Chappell argues the final bill might have been stronger if more blacks had registered to vote. In chapter 4 Chappell shows that black political power played an important role in drawing support for a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday and in helping to “keep opponents of King’s work in check on major, headline generating legislation” (123). Chappell’s emphasis on the importance of growing black political influence is perhaps best illustrated in chapter 5 with the presidential campaigns of Jessie Jackson. Chappell shows that Jackson’s charisma, voter registration drives, and the significance of an African American running for president helped boost black registration “in 1984 to an all-time high of 66.3 percent of those eligible” (145). Chappell argues that this growth helped push through legislative changes such as the Civil Rights Restoration Act in 1988 and a Fair Housing Act amendment, which made the 1968 act more enforceable.Chappell recognizes there was truly no leader with King’s combination of charisma, organization, and accomplishments following his assassination. However, Chappell argues that his successors continued the struggle for civil rights and justice. Chappell’s findings show that, while not united, the movement still had some leaders. Among them, King’s widow Coretta Scott King fought resolutely for full employment legislation and a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. Jessie Jackson became the charismatic voice of many African Americans, and his presidential campaigns brought increased black voter participation and political influence. Chappell maintains that the “major victories that King represented was history’s great exception” and that it should not diminish or mask recognition of the accomplishments of those who followed (91). Chappell’s book exposes an overlooked period of the struggle for civil rights, one in which courageous and significant achievements were made by less celebrated yet equally determined actors. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 104, Number 1Winter 2019 A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/701090 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Over the past few decades, scholars of the post-World War II civil rights movement have revisited key issues related to the goals, strategies, ideologies, participants, and periodization of black freedom struggles. As part of this conceptual remapping, historians of the African American experience have rethought how and where to locate the civil rights movement. This has geographically broadened the movement's scope to include previously understudied struggles in the North as well as in the South during the movement's heroic, “classical” period. Notwithstanding its significant insights, this emphasis on “nationalizing” the civil rights movement narrative carries the risk of flattening meaningful differences of historical place. Among other things, this approach can oversimplify the varying modes of white racial control and black agency across regions. This essay responds by suggesting that the task of theorizing the significance of region and place in movement narratives requires historians to more clearly delineate regional distinctions with regard to forms of black racial subordination, political and economic processes, and structures of opportunity and constraint on black mobilization and resistance during the 1960s and preceding decades. It argues in favor of the historical particularity of the South, especially the Deep South, and distinguishes this region historically from the Midwest. Finally, using St. Louis, Missouri as a focal point, the essay asserts the significance of the border South in histories of the civil rights movement more generally. Identifying this region illustrates simultaneously the instability and concreteness of regional distinctions in Black Freedom Studies.

Reviewed by: Walter F. White: The NAACP's Ambassador for Racial Justice by Robert L. Zangrando and Ronald L. Lewis Guorong Xie Walter F. White: The NAACP's Ambassador for Racial Justice. By Robert L. Zangrando and Ronald L. Lewis. (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2019. Pp. viii, 445. $59.99, ISBN 978-1-946684-62-2.) This book is a monographic study of the life of prominent civil rights leader Walter F. White, who fought for racial justice throughout his lifetime. It consists of three parts. The first part describes White's early career, focusing on how he demonstrated his coordination, organization, and leadership abilities as an assistant to Executive Secretary James Weldon Johnson of the NAACP. White worked against the Ku Klux Klan and made investigations on lynching, which successfully evoked the conscience of American society and got the support of the House of Representatives for antilynching legislation. These successes not only enhanced the NAACP's influence in the country but also earned White a good reputation. He was promoted to be the executive secretary of the NAACP in 1929, thus initiating his quarter-century-long leadership of the civil rights movement. The second part of the book explains how White became a civil rights leader who had powerful lobbying capacity. He tapped into the rising political power of African Americans to expand their influence in the Democratic Party and the federal government. White also had direct access to President Franklin D. Roosevelt via Eleanor Roosevelt, which made it possible for him to gain support from the federal government for civil rights. In addition, the Four Freedoms proposed by President Roosevelt became weapons for White to compel the federal government to forbid racial discrimination in employment and ameliorate the conditions of African American soldiers, which laid a solid foundation for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The third part of the book describes White's civil rights activities during the early period of the Cold War. Based on realistic considerations, White chose to cooperate with the federal government to remove any suspected communist members in the NAACP on one hand, and he was actively engaged in cultural diplomacy and devoted his energy to transnational political activities on the other hand. He lobbied the U.S. government to give economic development aid to nations like India and Haiti in order to win more support from the Third World for America. His strategy was different from that of other civil rights leaders and helped African Americans make progress, even during the Cold War. Unlike the mainstream narrative on White, Walter F. White: The NAACP's Ambassador for Racial Justice merges White's struggle for racial justice into the long civil rights movement, which enables readers to have a full picture of the history of the movement. The civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s never did run smoothly, and its achievements were inseparable from the efforts of African American leaders, as represented by White, in the first half of the twentieth century. The book also makes contributions by examining White's struggle for civil rights from a transnational perspective. White linked African Americans' fate tightly with that of people of color worldwide through participating in the Pan-African movement, anticolonial movement, and overseas civil rights activities. These transnational political activities compelled the American government to respond to African Americans' demands and created a more favorable environment for eliminating racial discrimination at home. [End Page 749] Two aspects are neglected in the book, and they are worthy of attention. First, Robert L. Zangrando and Ronald L. Lewis do not explain clearly why the NAACP's struggles shifted from antilynching legislation to school integration in the 1940s. Neither do they explain how White, as executive secretary of the NAACP, exerted influence on these changes. Second, White devoted his efforts to lobbying the upper class and paid little attention to African Americans' daily life and economic problems, a fact on which the authors do not make any critical comments. Guorong Xie Wuhan University Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association

“Down Where the South Begins”: Black Richmond Activism before the Modern Civil Rights Movement, 1899–1930

"Richard Schur offers a provocative view of contemporary African American cultural politics and the relationship between African American cultural production and intellectual property law." ---Mark Anthony Neal, Duke University "Whites used to own blacks. Now, they accomplish much the same thing by insisting that they 'own' ownership. Blacks shouldn't let them. A culture that makes all artists play by its rules will end up controlling new ideas and stifling change. Richard Schur's fine book explains why." ---Richard Delgado, Seattle University What is the relationship between hip-hop and African American culture in the post--Civil Rights era? Does hip-hop share a criticism of American culture or stand as an isolated and unique phenomenon? How have African American texts responded to the increasing role intellectual property law plays in regulating images, sounds, words, and logos? Parodies of Ownership examines how contemporary African American writers, artists, and musicians have developed an artistic form that Schur terms "hip-hop aesthetics." This book offers an in-depth examination of a wide range of contemporary African American painters and writers, including Anna Deavere Smith, Toni Morrison, Adrian Piper, Colson Whitehead, Michael Ray Charles, Alice Randall, and Fred Wilson. Their absence from conversations about African American culture has caused a misunderstanding about the nature of contemporary cultural issues and resulted in neglect of their innovative responses to the post--Civil Rights era. By considering their work as a cross-disciplinary and specifically African American cultural movement, Schur shows how a new paradigm for artistic creation has developed. Parodies of Ownership offers a broad analysis of post--Civil Rights era culture and provides the necessary context for understanding contemporary debates within American studies, African American studies, intellectual property law, African American literature, art history, and hip-hop studies. Weaving together law, literature, art, and music, Schur deftly clarifies the conceptual issues that unify contemporary African American culture, empowering this generation of artists, writers, and musicians to criticize how racism continues to affect our country. Richard L. Schur is Director, Interdisciplinary Studies Center, and Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Drury University. Visit the author's website: http://www2.drury.edu/rschur/index.htm. Cover illustration: Atlas, by Fred Wilson. © Fred Wilson, courtesy Pace Wildenstein, New York.

Resisting “Law and Order” in California: Howard Moore Jr., Angela Davis, and the Politics of Prison Radicalism

You Can’t Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice after the Civil Rights Movement by Greta de Jong

This research paper explores the literary responses to the Civil Rights Movement, focusing on both African American and white American literature. It begins by providing a historical context, highlighting key events and figures, and the socio-political climate of the era that influenced literary production. Prominent African American works, such as Richard Wright's "Native Son" and James Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time," are analysed for their thematic focus on identity, racism, and empowerment. These works are contrasted with white American literature, including Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" and Alex Haley's "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," which often address themes of guilt, complicity, and allyship. A comparative analysis reveals distinct thematic and narrative approaches between the two literary traditions. African American literature tends to foreground direct experiences of racial oppression and the quest for justice, while white American literature frequently explores the moral responsibilities and roles of white individuals in combating racism. The paper also examines the enduring relevance of these literary works, their influence on subsequent generations of writers and activists, and their reflections on the progress and ongoing challenges in the fight for racial equality. It underscores the importance of literature as a tool for social change and a means of documenting and understanding the complexities of the Civil Rights Movement.

Radio and the Struggle for Civil Rights in the South. By Brian Ward. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004. Pp. xiv, 437. Foreword by John David Smith, acknowledgements, abbreviations, introduction, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95.) At the height of the civil rights movement, radio, more so than television or print media, served as African Americans' main source of news and entertainment. Scholars, however, have generally overlooked this essential element of African-American life. Brian Ward, in Radio and the Struggle for Civil Rights in the South, fills this significant gap in the historiography of the civil rights movement with a richly detailed analysis of the role radio played in the black freedom struggle during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Ward's book is divided into three chronological parts. In part one, he examines the ways national civil rights organizations, namely the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Urban League, attempted to use radio between 1930 and 1960 to rally white support for the fight against Jim Crow. He also looks at efforts by white organizations, specifically the Commission on Interracial Cooperation and the Southern Regional Council, to better race relations through racially progressive programs. Ward's exhaustive research makes clear that the programs that these groups sponsored challenged racial stereotypes and social norms. His claim that these programs helped to change the nation's attitudes toward African Americans and southern racial practices, however, is less than convincing given the near total refusal of southern radio stations to air them and the enduring indifference to problems confronting African Americans in places where these programs were broadcast (p. 22). Also, while the effort of civil rights organizations to win airtime for black programs is both important and fascinating, to say that it was foundational for black protest, as does Ward, is a stretch in light of the fact that those who participated in the bus boycotts of the 1950s and the students who ignited the direct action protests of the 1960s were unlikely to have heard many, if any, of these broadcasts. Part one, therefore, tells us less about the origins of the civil rights movement than Ward maintains. Part two considers how civil rights groups, individual activists, and sympathetic broadcasters used radio to support and report on southern black activism during the peak years of the civil rights struggle. …

Reviewed by: Tasting Freedom: Octavius Catto and the Battle for Equality in Civil War America by Daniel R. Biddle and Murray Dubin Barbara A. Gannon Tasting Freedom: Octavius Catto and the Battle for Equality in Civil War America. Daniel R. Biddle and Murray Dubin. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-1-59213-465-6, 632 pp., cloth, $35.00. Well before Rosa Parks decided she would not give up her place on a bus, the black men and women of Civil War-era Philadelphia fought for their place on streetcars. Journalists Daniel Biddle and Murray Dubin tell the story of these men and women as part of a broader examination of the civil rights struggle of African Americans in Philadelphia before, during, and after the Civil War. They do so through the lens of one man's life, and death, that of Octavius Catto—principal of an all-black school, orator, and talented baseball player. Despite his short life (he was murdered in 1871 at the age of thirty-two), he was an important civil rights figure. That few Americans today remember him or the other African Americans in this early struggle for equality is one reason the authors wrote this book: they wanted everyone to understand that "the civil rights movement in the mid-twentieth century was the second or third organized effort by African Americans to be treated as the equals of white persons. This book is about the first civil rights movement" (1). The authors are journalists, not historians, and do not pretend to engage any particular scholarly debate; rather, they wrote this book to remind Philadelphians about a forgotten aspect of their city's history. To tell this story, the authors cross a number of traditional boundaries of time and space that delineate historical studies, because they want to show that the free [End Page 381] states were not always totally free and that the slave states included free black men and women. Moreover, like the geographical border between slavery and freedom, the temporal boundaries that divide the prewar, wartime, and postwar periods are not as relevant as one might think when discussing the African American struggle for freedom. Prewar antislavery agitation and postwar efforts to define freedom exist as different points on the same line within the broader context of the first civil rights movement. In that spirit, the book begins in Charleston; Catto's friends and family lived in that precarious place occupied by free black Americans in the South before the Civil War. Even under these less than ideal circumstances, Catto's family and their community struggle to create a larger space for free black men and women within a slave society. Eventually, his family went north to Philadelphia, where they joined a vibrant community working with its white allies in the antislavery movement—while creating a number of all-black organizations, including the Institute for Colored Youth. Catto served as principal of this pioneering black high school. In addition to creating important African American institutions, he and his cohorts struggled to break the color line, with mixed results. They succeeded in integrating the streetcars but failed in their attempt to integrate local baseball leagues. The authors also describe the virulent racism of white Philadelphians, particularly Irish immigrants, who used mob violence to oppose their efforts, exacerbating these struggles. Ultimately, this type of violence led to Catto's untimely death on Election Day 1871. While the book's title suggests that it is about Octavius Catto's life, its subject is actually the broader civil rights movement in nineteenth-century Philadelphia. One of the first chapters describes the antislavery movement in Philadelphia in the late 1830s and 1840s and details the violent opposition to abolitionism and abolitionists; Catto was a child during this era and played no role in this particular movement. In fact, much of the antebellum period description is of the activities of other prominent black and white civil rights leaders, such as Frederick Douglass and Lucretia Mott. This approach is understandable, given the paucity of sources on African Americans like Catto and his family, who may have been relatively well-known in their time but did not leave enough...

Racial Formation and Re-formation in Twentieth-Century Civil Rights Movements Joseph R. Stuart (bio) Backroads Pragmatists: Mexico's Melting Pot and Civil Rights in the United States. By Ruben Flores. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. 353 pages. $29.95 (paper). Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement: Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in New York City. By Sonia Song-Ha Lee. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. xi + 332 pages. $34.95 (paper). The Jim Crow Routine: Everyday Performances of Race, Civil Rights, and Segregation in Mississippi. By Stephen A. Berrey. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. xci + 331 pages. $29.95 (paper). Race, Religion, and Civil Rights: Asian Students on the West Coast, 1900–1968. By Stephanie Hinnershitz. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015. 268 pages. $28.95 (paper). The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland. By Robyn C. Spencer. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. 260 pages. $24.95 (paper). At the close of her landmark article "The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past," the historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall asks, "How can we make ourselves heard without reducing history to the formulaic mantras on which political narratives usually rely?" Too often, Hall argues, the ways that individuals and social structures work for or against certain groups remain "invisible to citizens trained in not seeing and in thinking exclusively ahistorical, personal terms."1 Scholars must nuance and complicate readers' oversimplified views of the civil rights movement by helping them recognize how individuals and organizations foment social, political, economic, and racial change. The past will always be used politically; it is up to those of us [End Page 291] who research and write history to reveal the messy combination of individual agency and societal structures that create the racial, gendered, political, and economic ecospheres Americans inhabit. The five books under review here affirm that civil rights histories did not begin with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education or end with Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1968 assassination, and that race in civil rights movements went beyond the oversimplified black–white binary. But more than this, these five scholars make larger arguments about civil rights movements in the United States by highlighting the ways that racial formation and identification informed social movements from the 1930s to the 1970s and from California to New York City. Sonia Song-Ha Lee's Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement examines "the political world in which Puerto Ricans and African Americans conceptualized their racial and ethnic identities" in response to New York City's long civil rights movement (3). Lee argues that, although that two groups frequently lived in geographic proximity and faced similar discrimination, they were not natural allies. Americans defined Puerto Ricans as a racially "in-between" people, neither white nor black (unsurprisingly, they fought to be identified with whites rather than African Americans). Despite that preference, twentieth-century sociologists and anthropologists from Oscar Lewis to Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer identified Puerto Ricans through a racialized "culture of poverty," as did government programs, which linked Puerto Ricans with African Americans. Over time, however, many Puerto Ricans began to work with African Americans for civil rights in matters of antipoverty policy. Indeed, one of Lee's great contributions, building on the historiographical trend toward examining interracial political coalitions after World War II, is her exploration of the ways that politics and class created common ground for members of different racial groups within civil rights movements. Despite their shared economic disenfranchisement, New York's Puerto Ricans did not fight for political, social, and labor gains using the tactics embraced by African Americans before World War II. For instance, Lee shows that black and Puerto Rican members followed different paths in the struggle for justice in the workplace in the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU). Puerto Ricans' fragile status in the United States made them less willing to incur the wrath of their union bosses. African Americans, who did not fear deportation or other punitive measures, fought vocally for labor rights and used their connections to black community and...

In the hebrew bible, when God creates the universe, she doesn’t simply reveal her work to the whole of humanity. She picks a particular people and gives them the burden of living with the knowledge that there is only one God. This sets them aside from all other peoples of their time, who believed that there were many gods, assigned to many peoples. Although God has not picked this people because of any superior traits, their experience of being chosen gives them a feeling of specialness, but it also makes them resented and even hated.I tell this familiar story to indicate how fraught and complex the relation between particular identities and universal ideals has been. I think we can draw from the story two lessons relevant to understanding the stirring and powerful defense of what is normally called “identity politics” published by Paul Von Blum in this issue of Tikkun.First, God doesn’t make herself easy to discover. Rather, at least since the days of the Patriarch, she has been what Pascal called a “hidden God.” The knowledge she represents is extraordinarily valuable and can be acquired only through complex processes of reflection, not by attending to what is obviously the case.Second, every identity is related to a universal idea. Some forms of identity recognize this relation, others deny it, but none escape it. And, contrariwise, universal ideas realize themselves only through particular cases, through what Kant called “the crooked timber of humanity.”Who cannot be moved by Von Blum’s wonderful story? He speaks with passion as a white man who has been a leading figure in African American studies, a participant in the Civil Rights Movement who lived to see an African American president, and an intellectual who can see the commonalities in the oppression of women, gays, Asian Americans, Latinos, and disabled people. I appreciate how he sees the need to include a critique of social and economic inequality alongside his affirmation of identity politics.Nonetheless, I think there is a better way to tell the story that Von Blum tells. Let me try to do so by taking up three fundamental moments in his essay: the Obama victory in 2012, the role of identity politics in the New Left, and the case of Paul Robeson, a great figure of the forties and fifties.According to Von Blum, the 2012 election demonstrates the political strength of the identity politics approach. No one who watched the TV coverage of the Democratic Convention would fail to agree that it was a marvelous demonstration of a party largely composed of female, gay, Latino, and African American delegates. Members of Obama’s political team originally based their strategy on the theme of identity or, as they put it, demographics as opposed to economics. They portrayed the Republicans as waging war on women, as anti-immigrant, and as older fat-cat white men who don’t understand how the country has changed.These themes were powerful, and they certainly helped Obama, but there is good reason to think that had Obama restricted his campaign to them, he would have lost the election. Twelve to eighteen months before the election, Obama looked like a failed president. After all, he had failed to address the huge economic turning point that took place during his first term — the vast growth in inequality and the end of the “full employment” economy — presenting it as a mere economic downturn from which we could expect to “recover.” Even given the pathetic character of the Republican field, there was good reason to believe that the American people would turn to an alternative to Obama, not because of racism or sexism or homophobia, but because he had simply failed to address the central problem of his time: the patent failure of finance-led capitalism.What saved Obama and made his 2012 victory potentially important was Occupy Wall Street, which invented the figure of the 1 percent and in doing so brought the language of class and inequality back into American politics. Slowly, and in his own cautious way, Obama took the language of Occupy Wall Street and refashioned his campaign around it. Eventually he was running a good old-fashioned populist campaign of the people against the wealthy elite. Of course, “the people” included groups (African Americans, women, gays, etc.), each of which was understood to have its special needs and contributions. But it also invoked a broader class-based identity that subsumed and transcended them all. Since his election Obama has continued to use this identity-group-surpassing class language. But it is doubtful that he will be able to act on these words, since he fell into the trap of placing the problem of the budget deficit at the center of his presidency when he took office in 2008, and it is very difficult to see how he can escape this self-inflicted wound.Occupy Wall Street was not an example of identity politics. Rather, it was the expression of good old-fashioned Marxist-derived leftism. It was effective because it took direct aim at what we all share — our participation in and subordination to the finance-driven capitalist system that organizes the modern world, bringing all governments, including the U.S. government, to their knees. Anyone who participated in the Occupy events knows that identity politics was intrinsic to them — in other words, problems of sexism, racism, homophobia, and so forth arose and had to be addressed within Occupy. But if it had not been for that marvelous eruption of a buried leftist consciousness, we might well have a Republican president today.Let me now turn to Von Blum’s account of the 1960s. Quite rightly, he writes, “The African American freedom and liberation struggles of that era constituted one of the moral highlights of twentieth-century American history.” But he goes on to describe them as “an earlier manifestation of identity politics,” arguing that “without identity politics, the rebellious 1960s would have faded into historical insignificance.”This account of the 1960s is, in my view, misleading. The consciousness of the great movements of the 1960s was not one of identity politics, but just the opposite: it was a consciousness based on the shattering of social identity and the reaching out at the deepest possible levels to achieve solidarity with people utterly unlike oneself. This was not only characteristic of the Civil Rights Movement, whose message was universalist and social democratic, but also of the student movements of the period. These were not based on “student power” or other inward-turned artifacts of the Seventies, but on the deep conviction that one could not be free while peasants in Vietnam were not free, or while black people in Mississippi were not free, or while women forced to resort to illegal abortions were not free.The identity politics that came to predominate in the Seventies had exactly the opposite spirit. It counterposed the fight against one’s own oppression against what was perceived as the oppression of others. How are we to understand the emergence of identity politics in this sense? Some argue that it began with the Black Power movement of the 1960s, but this is at best a partial truth. When the cry for Black Power emerged in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s, there was a felt need among African Americans for a separate black organization and a corresponding emphasis on identity. However, at that point, the Civil Rights Movement was centrally concerned with class issues (“poverty”) as well as with the incipient war in Vietnam, so there was a shared class politics that lay behind the wish to affirm a particular identity. Even more important, the African American community was not an ethnic community to be compared with other immigrant communities but was essentially a quasi-nation that had grown up in the United States through slavery and liberation, so that the insistence on a separate identity rested on a historical basis.The true spirit of identity politics, a politics that contrasted one’s own liberation to that of others, came with the women’s movement, which erupted in the early Seventies. Anyone reading the literature of what was then called “women’s liberation” will find statements like that of Cathy Cade, a lesbian documentary photographer who explained, “In the black movement I had been fighting for someone else’s oppression and now there was a way that I could fight for my own freedom.” In a similar vein, activist Mimi Feingold said, “Women couldn’t burn draft cards and couldn’t go to jail so all they could do was to relate through their men and that seemed to me the most really demeaning kind of thing.” And the feminist Combahee River Collective proclaimed, “The most profound and potentially the most radical politics come out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression.”To be sure, there is continuity between Black Power and these statements by women of the Seventies. All oppressed peoples have to fight directly against their own oppression. As so many Jews have said, when I have been attacked as a Jew, I must respond as a Jew. This was the case for blacks, and it was the case for women. But there was an additional factor in women’s liberation that gave it great force. Historically women had subordinated themselves to others, above all in their family life. They had sacrificed to make the Jewish community work, to give the socialist movement its ethos, to build the Civil Rights Movement in the South, and to support the draft-age men who refused to fight in Vietnam. The women’s liberation movement was a way of saying that women would not do this anymore. It was unfortunate, but perhaps inevitable, that it presented fighting for oneself and fighting for others as either/or alternatives, rather than as complementary. The spirit that one has to be “for oneself ” is the spirit not only of identity politics but also of neoliberal economics, and these two world-shaping forces have been inextricable bedmates from the 1970s to this day.Von Blum might respond by saying that I miss the point in that the different stigmatized identities (women, gays, African Americans, Latinos, and so forth) have bonded with one another to form a new universal coalition based on multiple identities, but I have seen very little evidence of this — although much exhortation. What I have seen is quite familiar to an American historian: a Democratic Party completely in thrall to the banks and the insurance companies that gains liberal credibility by asserting various forms of individual rights for oppressed groups. This will not change the fact that the United States has developed a third-world-style class structure that is utterly different from any other developed society. To understand the oppression of women and blacks, we have to understand their place in that class structure.Let me now address the example that Von Blum gives of Paul Robeson. No one can know how happy I am to hear of his course on Robeson, one of the most cruelly neglected and stigmatized Americans of all time. But Von Blum’s account of Robeson’s life misses a crucial point. Von Blum offers Robeson as an object lesson of someone committed to his own African American people but also able to transcend that commitment through what he calls Robeson’s “profound humanism.” But in fact what allowed Robeson to transcend a narrow racial politics was Communism, not humanism. Von Blum doesn’t even mention Communism in regard to his course on Robeson, an omission Robeson would never have stood for! Even as we recognize that Robeson’s failure to condemn Stalinism was a failure, so we have to recognize that his artistic achievements, political leadership, global role, place in the history of the labor movement, and so forth were all the results of his Communist ideas and party membership, which gave him his standpoint and base of support.While Robeson undeniably suffered because he was black, he was primarily persecuted because of his Communism. After World War II, when Robeson’s fame was at its height, the U.S. government sent famous African American artists like Louis Armstrong around the world to perform in order to counter Cold War Soviet charges of American racism. Robeson, a great singer and actor, was never sent. On the contrary, the government was at that very moment trying to destroy his life by preventing him from appearing in public.The point to be learned from Robeson’s life is not that one can transcend identity politics through humanism and become a fighter for all peoples, but rather that America’s rulers can happily tolerate and co-opt expressions of identity politics that do not challenge capitalism but will mercilessly squash leftist struggles that resist class oppression alongside other forms of oppression.Just recall the persecution of other great black leaders and writers shaped by the Popular Front. For example, W.E.B. Du Bois, one of our greatest historians, was marginalized in the same way that Robeson was. Richard Wright was portrayed as “too angry” and “out of touch” by a new generation of blacks who saw themselves as “omni-American.” Martin Luther King was redbaited and harassed by the FBI, and even today is portrayed as a mainstream liberal, for example, in the selection of quotations that adorn his statue in Washington. Missing from King’s monument are such remarks as the following: “I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos, without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.”To conclude: Von Blum seems to take for granted a dichotomy that was invented in the Seventies: the Left vs. identity politics. The assumption seems to be that the Left was only concerned with white men and their economic interests until the proponents of identity politics pointed out that there were women and blacks and gays present. In fact the abolitionists, who were both black and white, created the first American Left, inventing its characteristic tactic, namely agitation, when they rejected the idea that African Americans should be returned to Africa.Similarly, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women was not the product of some stand-alone feminist consciousness, unknown to the Left. Rather it is a Jacobin work, intrinsic to the French Revolution. Its central point is the analogy between the illegitimate power of nobles and that of husbands. As any reasonable, historical work on the Left will show, the modern Left’s origins lay in the critique of the family and private property during the Protestant Reformation, so that many of the issues that appear to some to have emerged in the 1970s have actually been discussed for centuries.The difference between the historic Left and the identity politics that emerged in the Seventies is not that only the latter addresses race, gender, and sex. Rather, the historic Left — or, better, the universalist ideals created in the eighteenth century — frame our choices in terms of what we believe and what we are to do. That framing makes it possible for us to recognize differences in the structure of oppression, for example, the fact that blacks (including black women) are demeaned and degraded, while (white) women are idealized in a way that infantilizes them. This is not a question of competitive victimization, nor of “intersectionality”; rather it is a question of understanding slavery, capitalism, and the connections between them.Identity politics, by contrast, is concerned not with what we think but with who we are. We need identity politics: we need voices that speak for the pain of particular experiences and situations, and for the absences in pretended universals. But let us not mistake those voices for the kind of comprehensive understanding that alone can contest the illegitimate and often destructive power that rules this country and much of the globe.