Toward a New Abolitionism: Race, Ethnicity, and Social Transformation

Abstract

In December 1861, abolitionist leader Wendell Phillips (1864) declared to audiences in Boston and New York: “[I]n the quarter of the century that has passed, I could find no place where an American could stand with decent self-respect, except in constant, uncontrollable, and loud protest against the sin of his native land” (p. 417). If we may forgive his use of a male pronoun, Phillips was referring, of course, to the anti-slavery movement that preceded the Civil War, and emphasizing the need to have used sustained political dissent to end slavery. Although social movement scholars have neglected it, abolitionism was one of the most important social movements in American history, for it called attention again and again to the evil of slavery, placed this “peculiar institution” on the national agenda, and, depending on which historians one reads, precipitated the Civil War. The history of abolitionism and other American social movements illustrates the importance of protest as recognized by Phillips. The women’s suffrage movement that began at Seneca Falls used marches, sit-ins, and other forms of protest before it finally won the right to vote some 70 years later. The labor movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries engaged in strikes and other actions to boost substandard wages and end inhumane working conditions. The 1960s ushered in a new era of activism, and the two major social movements of that decade again illustrated the value and necessity of mass political activity. Through constant, uncontrollable, and loud protest, the Southern civil rights movement ended legal segregation, while the Vietnam anti-war movement opposed a war in a faraway land that some likened to genocide. Many of us old enough to remember these two movements grew up during the 1950s, when one of the worst problems the star of the popular Leave it to Beaver TV show faced was that his mother wanted him to eat Brussels sprouts, and when racial and ethnic inequality and other social problems were far removed from our newspapers and TV screens. As children, we made the mistake of believing what we recited in secondary school, that America was “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” When the 1960s began and we grew old enough to know better, our new knowledge led some of us to become active in the civil rights and anti-war movements and others to sink into despair. It led some of us to rely on our religious faith for strength as we worked to change society, and it led others of us, at least people like me who were active in the anti-war movement, to abandon a God who could let something like Vietnam happen.