The Lost Massey Lectures (21 page)

Then, how profoundly alien our present establishment is!—that has in one generation crept up on us and occupied all the positions of power. It has been largely the product of war, of the dislocations after World War I, the crash programs of World War II, and going on for twenty years the chronic low-grade emergency of the Cold War. It is fanning again into war.

The term “establishment” itself is borrowed from the British—for snobbish and literary reasons, and usually with an edge of satire. But we have had no sovereign to establish such a thing, and there is no public psychology to accept it as legitimate. It operates like an establishment: it is the consensus of politics, the universities and science, big business, organized labor, public schooling, the media of communications, the official language; it determines the right style and accredits its own members; it hires and excludes, subsidizes and neglects. But it has no warrant of legitimacy, it has no tradition, it cannot talk straight English, it neither has produced nor could produce any art, it does not lead by moral means but by a kind of social engineering, and it is held in contempt and detestation by the young. The American tradition—I think the
abiding
American tradition—is pluralist,
populist, and libertarian, while the establishment is monolithic, mandarin, and managed. Its only claim, that it is efficient, is false. It is fantastically wasteful of brains, money, the environment, and people. It is channeling our energy and enterprise to its own aggrandizement and power, and it will exhaust us.

I would almost say that my country is like a conquered province with foreign rulers, except that they are not foreigners and we are responsible for what they do.

Let me assess our situation as soberly as I can. The system at present dominant in America will not do, it is too empty. On the other hand, it is possible that classical American democracy is necessarily a thing of the past; it may be too wild, too woolly, too mixed—too anarchic, too populist, too pluralist—for the conditions of big population and high technology in a world that has become small. I hope not, for I love the American experiment, but I don't know.

We Americans have not suffered as most other peoples have, at least not since the Civil War a century ago. We have not been bombed, we have not been occupied. We have not cringed under a real tyranny. Perhaps we would not ride so high today if we knew what it felt like to be badly hurt.

The American faces that used to be so beautiful, so resolute and yet poignantly open and innocent, are looking ugly these days, hard, thin-lipped, and like innocence spoilt without having become experienced. For our sake, as well as your own, be wary of us.

It is a deep personal privilege to address a nation-wide Canadian audience. Over and above any kinship of U.S. citizens and Canadians as North Americans there is a singular historical relationship between American Negroes and Canadians.

Canada is not merely a neighbor to Negroes. Deep in our history of struggle for freedom Canada was the north star. The Negro slave, denied education, de-humanized, imprisoned on cruel plantations, knew that far to the north a land existed where a fugitive slave if he survived the horrors of the journey could find freedom. The legendary underground railroad started in the south and ended in Canada. The freedom road links us together. Our spirituals, now so widely admired around the world, were often codes. We sang of “heaven” that awaited us and the slave masters listened in innocence, not realizing that we were not speaking of the hereafter. Heaven was the word for Canada and the Negro sang of the hope that his escape on the underground railroad
would carry him there. One of our spirituals, “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” in its disguised lyrics contained directions for escape. The gourd was the big dipper, and the north star to which its handle pointed gave the celestial map that directed the flight to the Canadian border.

So standing to-day in Canada I am linked with the history of my people and its unity with your past.

The underground railroad could not bring freedom to many Negroes. Heroic though it was, even the most careful research cannot reveal how many thousands it liberated. Yet it did something far greater. It symbolized hope when freedom was almost an impossible dream. Our spirit never died even though the weight of centuries was a crushing burden.

To-day when progress has abruptly stalled and hope withers under bitter backlashing, Negroes can remember days that were incomparably worse. By ones and twos more than a century ago Negroes groped to freedom, and its attainment by a pitiful few sustained hundreds of thousands as the word spread through the plantations that someone had been reborn far to the north.

Our freedom was not won a century ago—it is not won to-day but some small part of it is in our hands and we are marching no longer by ones and twos but in legions of thousands convinced now it cannot be denied by any human force.

To-day the question is not whether we shall be free but by what course we will win. In the recent past our struggle has had two phases. The first phase began in the early 'fifties when Negroes slammed the door shut on submission and subservience. Adapting non-violent resistance to conditions in the United States we swept into southern streets to demand our citizenship and manhood. For the south with its complex system of brutal segregation we were inaugurating a rebellion. Merely to march in public streets was to rock the
status quo
to its roots. Boycotting
busses in Montgomery, demonstrating in Birmingham, the citadel of segregation, and defying guns, dogs, and clubs in Selma, while maintaining disciplined non-violence, totally confused the rulers of the south. If they let us march they admitted their lie that the black man was content. If they shot us down they told the world they were inhuman brutes. They tried to stop us by threats and fear, the tactic that had long worked so effectively. But non-violence had muzzled their guns and Negro defiance had shaken their confidence. When they finally reached for clubs, dogs, and guns they found the world was watching, and then the power of non-violent protest became manifest. It dramatized the essential meaning of the conflict and in magnified strokes made clear who was the evil-doer and who was the undeserving victim. The nation and the world were sickened and through national legislation wiped out a thousand southern laws, ripping gaping holes in the edifice of segregation.

These were days of luminous victories. Negroes and whites collaborated for human dignity. But there was a limitation to our achievements.

Negroes were outraged by inequality; their ultimate goal was freedom. Most of the white majority were outraged by brutality; their goal was improvement, not freedom nor equality. When Negroes could use public facilities, register and vote in some areas of the south, find token educational advancement, again in token form find new areas of employment, it brought to the Negro a sense of achievement but it brought to the whites a sense of completion. When Negroes assertively moved on to ascend the second rung of the ladder a firm resistance from the white community developed. This resistance characterized the second phase which we are now experiencing. In some quarters it was a courteous rejection, in others it was a stinging white backlash. In all quarters unmistakably it was outright resistance.

The arresting of the limited forward progress by white resistance revealed the latent racism which was deeply rooted in U.S. society. The short era of widespread good will evaporated rapidly. As elation and expectations died, Negroes became more sharply aware that the goal of freedom was still distant and our immediate plight was substantially still an agony of deprivation. In the past decade little had been done for northern ghettos. All the legislation was designed to remedy southern conditions—and even these were only partially improved. A sense of futility and frustration spread and choked against the hardened white attitudes.

Non-violence as a protest form came under attack as a tactical theory and northern Negroes expressed their dismay and hostility in a succession of riots.

The decade of 1955 to 1965 with its constructive elements misled us. Everyone underestimated the amount of violence and rage Negroes were suppressing and the amount of bigotry the white majority was disguising.

The riots are now in the center of the stage, and are being offered as basis for contradictory positions by whites and Negroes. Some Negroes argue they are the incipient forms for rebellion and guerrilla tactics that will be the feature of the Negro revolt. They are represented as the new stage of Negro struggle replacing the old and allegedly outworn tactic of nonviolent resistance. At the same time some white forces are using riots as evidence that Negroes have no capacity for constructive change and in their lawless behavior forfeit all rights and justify any form of repressive measures. A corollary of this theory is the position that the outbursts are unforgivable, ungrateful, and menace the social order.

I would like to examine both questions: Is the guilt for riots exclusively that of Negroes and are they a natural development to a new stage of struggle.

A million words will be written and spoken to dissect the ghetto outbreaks, but for a perceptive and vivid expression of culpability I would submit two sentences written a century ago by Victor Hugo:

If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.

The policy makers of the white society have caused the darkness; they created discrimination; they created slums; they perpetuate unemployment, ignorance, and poverty. It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society. When we ask Negroes to abide by the law, let us also declare that the white man does not abide by law in the ghettos. Day in and day out he violates welfare laws to deprive the poor of their meager allotments; he flagrantly violates building codes and regulations; his police make a mockery of law; he violates laws on equal employment and education and the provisions for civic services. The slums are the handiwork of a vicious system of the white society; Negroes live in them but they do not make them, any more than a prisoner makes a prison.

Let us say it boldly that if the total slum violations of law by the white man over the years were calculated and were compared with the law-breaking of a few days of riots, the hardened criminal would be the white man.

In using the term white man I am seeking to describe in general terms the Negro's adversary. It is not meant to encompass all white people. There are millions who have morally risen above prevailing prejudices. They are willing to share power and to accept structural alterations of society even at the cost of traditional privilege. To
deny their existence as some ultra-nationalists do is to deny an evident truth. More than that it drives away allies who can strengthen our struggle. Their support serves not only to enhance our power but in breaking from the attitudes of the larger society it splits and weakens our opposition. To develop a sense of black consciousness and peoplehood does not require that we scorn the white race as a whole. It is not the race
per se
that we fight but the policies and ideology that leaders of that race have formulated to perpetuate oppression.

To sum up the general causes of riots we would have to say that the white-power structure is still seeking to keep the walls of segregation and inequality substantially intact while Negro determination to break through them has intensified. The white society unprepared and unwilling to accept radical structural change is resisting firmly and thus producing chaos because the force for change is vital and aggressive. The irony is that the white society ruefully complains that if there were no chaos great changes would come, yet it creates the circumstances breeding the chaos.

Within the general cause of riots it is possible to identify five specific elements: (1)
The white backlash
(2)
Pervasive discriminatory practices
(3)
Unemployment
(4)
War in Vietnam
(5)
Urban problems and extensive migration.

The white backlash is a primary cause because it explains the ferocity of the emotional content of the outbursts and their spontaneity. Negroes have endured insults and humiliation for decades and centuries but in the past ten years a growing sensitivity in the white community was a gratifying indication of progress. The depravity of the white backlash shattered the hope that new attitudes were in the making. The reversion to savage white conduct marked by a succession of murders in the south, the recrudescence of white hoodlumism in northern streets and coldly systematic withdrawal of support by some erstwhile white allies constituted a
grim statement to Negroes. They were told there were firm limits to their progress; that they must expect to remain permanently unequal and permanently poor; they were warned not to confuse cautiously measured improvements with expectation of full equality. The white backlash declared true equality could never be a reality in the United States.

The pervasiveness of discriminatory practices is so taken for granted that its provocative effect is readily forgotten. There are generational differences in character among Negroes. The older generation has substantially inured itself to daily insults but a younger generation has a lower threshold of tolerance. The thousands of fences, visible and invisible, that confine Negroes to restricted neighborhoods, schools, jobs, and social activity incite an intensely hostile reaction in the young. They have rejected the old way and cannot be soothed and tranquilized by promises of a new way in some distant future. Discrimination cuts off too large a part of their life to be endured in silence and apathy.