Stalled Out in History

ON JUNE 23, 1953, it was reported in The New York Times that the NAACP had officially established integration as the association's programmatic policy of pursuing civil rights within the legal framework of the "separate but equal" doctrine growing out of the Supreme Court decision in the Plessy v. Ferguson case of 1896.

This change in policy occurred during the last months of the Truman administration. Eisenhower Republicans won the election in November 1952. Two years later came the Brown decision of 1954, and, in retrospect, it might appear from the civil rights record that the NAACP—as early as 1952—was changing its declared policies in prescient anticipation of the Supreme Court's coming change of heart toward overturning the Plessy doctrine.

Following the Brown decision came the upsurge of civil rights protest activities of the 1960s, but it remained a question as to how many of the new black activists actually understood the legal and constitutional ramifications behind the Supreme Court's overturning of Plessy v. Ferguson's separate but equal doctrine by way of the Brown decision, which made the integration of public school systems the "law of the land. "

The Plessy v. Ferguson separate but equal doctrine was handed down by the Supreme Court in 1896. The decision was the result of a suit brought against the state of Louisiana by Homer Adolph Plessy, a New Orleans black of mixed French and African-American heritage. The presiding judge of the Louisiana Court prior to the Supreme Court's decision was John H. Ferguson. Plessy's legal suit opposed a New Orleans ordinance that would legalize a railroad company's right to impose racially separate railroad-car facilities for blacks and whites in state and interstate travel.

Following Plessy's appeal the U. S. Supreme Court upheld the Louisiana court's decision to legalize the railroad company's right to establish the system of separate facilities for blacks and whites, provided the facilities were "equal" in terms of accepted standards of passenger accommodations. According to the Supreme Court, such a racially separate accommodation was not, essentially, a legal or substantive violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. However, the end result was that the high court's decision both legitimized and encouraged the pervasive spread of legally imposed (Jim Crow) segregation throughout the entire South, not only in railroad travel but also in all other areas of Southern institutional, political, educational, social, cultural, and economic life.

It has to be remembered that prior to the 1890s race relations in the South were fluid and indecisive. It was not until after the Plessy v. Ferguson decision that unqualified and rigid segregation evolved into the Southern states' way of life.

The real issue here is that, legally, the separate but equal doctrine could not, did not, make it socially possible, or economically possible, for a railroad company to render equal facilities to whites and blacks on a railroad train any more than the Southern states could render equal facilities to blacks and whites in public school education in terms of facilities, tax appropriations, or equal pay for teachers.

On June 23, 1953, The New York Times said, "NAACP, setting integration as a goal, drops the 'separate but equal' theory. " On June 24 it said, "NAACP plans 10-year anti-segregation program. " On June 25 it said, "NAACP plans no suits for separate facilities. " And later in June The Times said, "Thurgood Marshall urges NAACP to help communities implement court bans on segregation. "

These reports in the media, though an accurate gauge of the NAACP's changing civil rights temper in the early 1950s, were somewhat misleading on the question of integration as social policy. In the first place, the NAACP had not, at least since the 1930s, accepted separate but equal as a matter of policy principle. The NAACP had never accepted segregation, either de facto or de jure. Working within the framework of separate but equal was, for the NAACP leadership, a pragmatic policy of temporary accommodation to the realities of segregation.

Segregation was not only legally sanctioned in the South, it was also socially sanctioned by dominant whites both North and South. Anti-segregation sentiments were expressed through such slogans as "racial equality, " "anti-discrimination, " and "equal rights. " But the term "integration" was hardly to be heard or read—it was not a part of the civil rights vocabulary. When did the concept of integration emerge?

THE RECORD REVEALS that the term "integration" as NAACP social policy appears in 1940 in response to the government's Selective Service Act. The United States was shaping up for World War II with a new draft law. The NAACP responded by insisting that the War Department eliminate segregated Army units. But as in World War I, the War Department refused. The NAACP demanded that the government racially integrate the armed forces, and thus did "integration" enter the post-World War II civil rights lexicon.

It should be noted that Roosevelt, who had delivered the famous Executive Order 8802 in 1941 outlawing racial discrimination in hiring practices for federally financed defense industries, did not buck the military on the question of segregated Army units. This was left for Harry Truman, who in July 1948 issued Executive Order 9981, directing the military to eliminate racial segregation immediately. Although the military hedged, it was because of the Korean War that the military found it easier to implement the desegregation of the military.

One of the factors leading to military desegregation in the Korean War was that unlike previous wars, the United States was fighting a non-white nation, and had no "racial" qualms about using blacks liberally as infantry. This was not the military's sentiment when the United States was fighting against white European nations.

Thus, on the question of integration it has to be remembered that it was Truman, not Roosevelt, who had furthered civil rights by setting up the first governmental Civil Rights Commission in 1947 and in 1948 issued an executive order that was mainly responsible for the popularization of the concept of integration in daily use. From that point on until the early 1950s, the word "integration" became more and more synonymous with civil rights when it had not always been so.

It was also for these reasons that the NAACP was first emboldened to announce that integration was its official new social policy in civil rights—a signal departure from the separate but equal legal doctrine to which the NAACP had always adopted an ambivalent accommodation. This was because although the NAACP had never philosophically embraced Plessy v. Ferguson, the association possessed no legal, constitutional, or practical activist means of fighting the doctrine until provided such means by the Brown decision of 1954.

But if the NAACP and its philosophical supporters among blacks had no legal way of opposing segregation or a separate but equal policy, their accommodation or ambivalence registered a consensual opposition to any segregationist doctrine. Simply adopting the philosophical stance of pro-integration did not mean, ipso facto, that the black (or white) adherents of integration possessed any such thing as a philosophically consensual or socially implemental policy approach to what later came to be known as "full integration. " In effect, the NAACP had simply extended its former concept of integration, applicable to U.S. military policy, to the projection of integration as its general social policy.

Generally speaking, blacks were almost as ambivalent toward the implied meanings of "full integration" as the traditional NAACP had been toward the implied intents of the separate but equal doctrine. Of course, the Brown decision, which legally zeroed in on one tangible, visible social institution—the public school systems—for experimental integration, would give the NAACP at least one objective social arena in which to carry out the court's mandated experiment in the "theory and practice" of racial integration. However, public school education, or education in general, while a crucial and important institutional aspect of our multifaceted social makeup, represents only one feature, so to speak, of our political, economic, and cultural aggregation of social structures. There are many others, for example, corporations, public housing agencies, real estate housing agencies, sports management firms, voluntary associations, labor marketing firms, political brokerage firms, governmental agencies, organized religious groups, professional organizations, restricted neighborhood residential groups.

DURING THE LATE 1940s and up to 1954, the nation was, generally, in an uproar of racial conflict, especially in the South. Most of the clashes had to do with the integration aspects of public services in transportation and racial exclusion in restaurants, barber shops, hotels, recreation centers, auditoriums, and airports. One of the prominent areas of conflict in integration practices was in sports, both professional and collegiate. Riots erupted over racially mixed tennis matches; scheduled football games between schools were canceled because a team fielded black players. Racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan mounted threats against white establishments and agencies that yielded to integration efforts.

After 1942, however, it was the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), rather than the NAACP, that was in the forefront of integrating public places, especially in the North—18 years before the black students' Greensboro, North Carolina "sit-ins" of 1960. During this postwar period, racial integration in terms of actual practice was occurring, as historian E. Franklin Frazier described it, in those areas which were "secular" as opposed to "sacred."

"Secular" relations referred to the way people of both races related or intermingled in the streets, in places of amusement, on streetcars, subways, trains, and buses, and in restaurants, commercial establishments, stores, and other public places. This stage of integration was described as "secondary" or "secular" because the settings were more or less impersonal.

The next stage, described as "sacred" or "primary," was ushered in by the Brown decision, which ordered integration in what was considered one of the more "sacred" of social institutions (along with churches, clubs, associations, fraternities, and the family). From that point through the 1960s and into the 1980s, the progress of racial integration as public or social policy can be seen as an ongoing and subtly changing thematic process that has left the majority of the black population stranded and stalled at the very edges of the institutional battlegrounds, while the inner sanctums of institutional power and prestige—political, economic, cultural, and educational—were protected from change.

If one looks at this integrative process in terms of its social history, in terms of its implied intents and objectives, and also in terms of its long-range feasibilities in the struggle against segregation, certain factors must be kept in mind. What Frazier saw in 1957 as "sacred" has now been congealed by the ingathering of these "sacred" institutions into a more forbidding and exclusive inner sanctum of economic and political power. Only a few selected blacks are permitted to integrate into these "sacred" domains.

It cannot be denied that blacks (often irrespective of class origins) have been integrated through several of those secondary stages, as Frazier described them, into vastly broader participation levels than was possible in 1950, 1960, 1970, and 1980. Here, one must cite such areas as the arts, sports, education, and politics. Yet vast numbers of blacks who were never touched by "trickle-down" benefits of civil rights victories and desegregation can still claim that racism and segregation are still realities in American society.

We still hear the voices of our black nationalism ideologists who eschewed the imperatives of integration in favor of various forms of separatism. However, these same separatist tendencies do not put into practice what they preach by actually rejecting the apparent fringe benefits of integration.

Such integrationist-separatist pronouncements force us all to live with the fact that white-inspired segregation and black-inspired separatism are not to be equated as analogues in our "theory and practice" of full racial integration as the future culmination of civil rights or as the ultimate goal of complete "racial equality. " What it all might mean is that after 36 years of civil rights—of integrationism—since the Brown decision, we might have reached the societal limitations, the societal saturation points, for racial integration as it was perceived by the NAACP in 1953. It might mean that the notion of "full integration" was a chimera to begin with—a mirage of racial equality on the democratic social-change horizon. This raises the controversial question: Is full racial integration really necessary in the interests of racial democracy?

IN ORDER TO ANSWER this question cogently, even on a provisional premise of inquiry, we must re-examine the ideological nature of the integrationist-civil rights leadership at its very inception. This should not be a critically pejorative exercise motivated by partisan judgments based on notions of social, racial, political, or cultural ethics. Ethically or morally, there is nothing anti-humanistic in the concept of racial integration as a social or racial ideal. But as Robert C. Smith, a perceptive social investigator at San Francisco State University recently suggested, the problem with the civil rights-integrationist leadership (the NAACP and its philosophical supporters) was:

The ideology of liberal integration, unlike its radical and nationalist counterparts, lacks a tradition of a self-conscious set of ideas, doctrines and myths that have been passed down from generation to generation. Rather integrationist thinking, like its patron ideology in the larger society, tends to be ad hoc, characterized by philosophical pragmatism ... The ideology has been developed on the run, without systematic attention to problems of causation or internal consistency or coherence.

Nothing bears witness to the soundness of this critical assessment of integrationist social philosophy more than a look at the historical circumstances in which the NAACP first projected integrationism in terms of social and/or racial policy. It was in connection with its demand for the elimination of segregation in the U.S. military by the proposed policies of inducting blacks into the Army on a non-segregated basis. Such a policy would, if adopted by the War Department, have eliminated the long-standing tradition of segregated "all-black regiments."

During the 1930s, when the NAACP was initiating its first legal efforts to assemble its school segregation cases leading to Brown, the term "integration" rarely, if ever, cropped up in black intellectual or political literature. However, some 36 years later, it is both ironic and symptomatic of the essential meaning of racial integration in terms of its present and future implications that integration's most prominent success story has been the integration of blacks in the U.S. military—the very first social category cited by the NAACP in pressing for federal government-sponsored racial integration. In 1940, it was not the public school system (Brown), nor public transportation, nor public housing for which the NAACP pressed its demands for integration or desegregation.

But more ironic is that the present-day inheritors of the NAACP's early civil rights programming reject both the significance and importance of the armed forces' success in integrating blacks, even though the armed forces have integrated blacks to a degree that outstrips any other sector of the country's biracial encounters. In the May 1987 issue of Atlantic Monthly, Charles C. Moskos reported that "some 400,000 blacks serve in an active-duty force of 2.1 million":

Most of these men and women serve in the enlisted ranks, many as non-commissioned officers, or NCOs, and an increasing number can be found in the officer corps. Blacks occupy more management positions in the military than they do in business, education, journalism, government, or any other significant sector of American society. The armed services still have race problems, but they are minimal compared with the problems that exist in other institutions, public or private ...

The estrangement between civilian black leadership and the black officers in the military is mutual ... Black officers view some aspects of the civilian black leadership's agenda as highly dubious. Black officers distrust black leaders in civilian life who would seek advancement through racial politics or as supplicants of benevolent whites.

IT MAY WELL BE that the general conclusion to be drawn from the ironies that becolored the contemporary outcome of racial integration is that the 50-year outcome of the integrative process has been for it to reach the societal boundaries of its inherent possibilities. The suggestion here is that American society, which is multiracial, multiethnic, and multicultural, has reached its internal limit, or saturation point, allowable for racial integration as the NAACP once defined it.

The United States is not anymore a simplistic black versus white encounter (in political, economic, and cultural terms). In present-day America, what groups (whites, blacks, Indians, Japanese, Chinese, Latinos, immigrants, white ethnics) are going to integrate with whom? And for what compelling reasons?

As the original prototype of the disadvantaged racial minority, the civil rights banners of integration have been blurred from recognition by the new, contending banners of other racial and ethnic group demands for pluralistic comity—not biracial equity—of political, economic, cultural, educational, and other rewards in America's 21st century. In this regard it is well that blacks, as a minority group, downplay the significance of whatever individual successes have been achieved via integration (even intermarriage assimilationism, which is peripheral to fundamental group problems).

For black leaders it may well be that they can refuse to swallow the implications of the integration successes of the military, just so long as it is understood that the U. S. military, as an institution, is but a reverse mirror of the societal culture from which the military draws its elements. As such, it hardly represents a future projection of who the United States might become in terms of integration. Thus future black leadership options lie in the direction of black political, economic, and cultural group consolidation—not for separatism, but for group plural accommodation to the changing face of racial and ethnic configurations taking place before our very eyes in America today.