Cover Story
THE QUESTION OF integration has proven to be a considerably more complex matter than many of its advocates initially suspected when the United States Supreme Court handed down its opinion in the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka on May 17, 1954. At that time the court of Chief Justice Earl Warren held that "in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' had no place."
The day after the decision was handed down The New York Times ran a quite revealing story. It quoted Thurgood Marshall, who was then one of the principal legal strategists in the Brown case, predicting that as a result of this decision school segregation would be stamped out in no more than five years. He also informed The Times that by 1961 all forms of segregation in the United States would be eliminated.
Marshall's comments, which were not unrepresentative of much of middle-class leadership of the period, were based on two assumptions. The first assumption was that the American system was a racially democratic polity. This view also held that the United States under its current economic arrangements was committed to guaranteeing the civil rights of all its subjects, regardless of race, creed, or color. This belief, however, was maintained in the face of considerable historical and empirical evidence to the contrary.
The second assumption was somewhat more complex. The pro-integrationist legal strategy, which Marshall helped organize, was predicated upon a very particular philosophic understanding of the nature of equality. This view assumed that integration was the most desirable form of social equality, that social rights were indivisible from civil rights or political rights, and that absolute integration was to be preferred over political and institutional autonomy.
FROM THE TIME when slaveholder Thomas Jefferson failed to do the right thing at Monticello, on down to the very present, the relationship between white dissident movements and black America has been a tangled, complex, and often problematic one. Through the centuries of the American story, black interests have been consistent. But white interests have fluctuated, and white support for black aspirations has fluctuated with them. The history of these relationships has been especially shifty due to the very different interests of the different sorts of white people who have, at different times, either sought, or found themselves in, alliance with black America.
We, of all colors and classes, are inheritors of that history, and of its contradictions. Most white readers of this magazine will locate their forebears in that history of relationship and struggle in the historical stream epitomized by the white abolitionists of the mid-19th century. The abolitionists comprised a largely educated and affluent movement heavily concentrated in America's Northeast quadrant. Later successors of the white abolitionists were found among the Northern liberal whites who went south in support of the black freedom movement of the 1960s.
In both historical instances, relatively privileged whites publicly identified themselves with the defense of African-American human rights. This defense was stated in terms of detached moral judgment, or idealism, or conscience, to coin a catch phrase. These two interracial episodes, abolitionism and the civil rights movement, represent the historical ground that we white folks in the Christian peace and justice movement tend to claim as our precedents and to hold up as high-water marks in the development of a religiously rooted movement for social change in America. They comprise the grid through which we conceive politics, race, history, and our places in them.
See to it that no one falls away from God; that no bitter root springs up through which many may become defiled; that there be among you no fornicator or godless person like Esau, who sold his birthright for a meal. You know that afterward he wanted to inherit his father's blessings, but was rejected because he had no opportunity to alter his choice, even though he sought the blessing with tears. —Hebrews 12:15-17
TODAY'S YOUNG GENERATION OF African Americans is inthe midst of a spiritual crisis. I am referring specifically to those black women and men who, like me, were born in the mid-to-late 1960s and came of age during the '80s under the Reagan administration. The promise of integration, the freedom for blacks to assimilate into white society, was gained at the expense of our cultural birthright; that sense of community and morality that sustained our elders through thick and thin. Consequently, black America, at one time the moral conscience of the nation, now finds itself to be a reflection of this society's most base values.
The concept of integration is, ultimately, a spiritual issue for black America. Not a political issue. Not a social issue. Not an economic issue. This is not to say that there aren't political, social, and economic ramifications for blacks in our daily existence in white America. But blacks' involvement in these three areas can only be edifying to ourselves, and to this nation, when our spiritual and moral vision is clear.
And it used to be. Unlike the generation of blacks who reached maturity before, and during, the early '70s, my generation has no memory of credible black leaders, such as Malcolm X or Martin Luther King Jr. Nor do we have a relationship with those indigenous institutions, such as the black church, that developed as a consequence of racism and segregation. The debilitating effects of racism and segregation notwithstanding, blacks had been able to instill a sense of self and community. But the practice of integration created the illusion of equality with the wider culture, effectively wresting control of the black freedom movement by holding it hostage to federal good will and weakening or destroying those institutions that influenced blacks' worldview.
AMERICA'S SOCIETY IS more thoroughly integrated today in terms of race relations than at any point in its entire history. Since 1964, the number of black elected officials has increased from hardy 100 to 7,000. The number of African Americans enrolled in colleges and universities has quadrupled; the number of black-owned banks and financial institutions has increased tenfold; the percentage of African Americans in the middle class and professions has significantly expanded.
Perhaps the most striking changes in public perceptions of race have occurred in popular culture, social institutions, and the media. American music, theater, public education, sports, and the arts are now heavily influenced by the rhythms and patterns of African-American life. Black images in commercial advertisements are commonplace. Blacks remain underrepresented in the ownership and management of cultural and social institutions, but are nearly omnipresent, its employees and prominent public representatives, particularly in the state sector.
Despite these symbols of racial advancement, in recent years incidents of racist harassment, vigilante violence, and social disruption have escalated. Hundreds of African-American students have been victimized by intimidation or outright threats on university campuses across the country. White youth are forming "while student unions" at several institutions to push back affirmative action and the preferential recruitment of minorities as faculty and students.
FOR MANY BLACK PEOPLE, integration is almost an obselete word. It is certainly not a goal for which oppressed black women now strive. Over the last 30 years, if female veterans of the 1960s civil rights movement have learned anything, they have learned how integration works in America with regard to black women. A few with middle-class training, values, and goals are taken into the white-dominated institutions of the society. Allowed presence and the illusion of power and acceptance, they become instruments the institutions try to use to accomplish two goals: to show the public that the particular institution is neither racist nor sexist and to control other black people, the non-middle class "unruly outsiders" (female and male) pressing the institution to change what the "outsiders" take to be discriminatory policies.
Black women have learned that integration for them has meant the same as it has meant for black men. Unless they are constantly on guard, they can become "tokens" by which social institutions attempt to reinforce the American myth that only a few blacks are intelligent enough or educable enough to be trained for success at the high decision-making levels of the society.
So, if by integration one means the thorough interconnection of masses of black people and masses of white people in interconnected social systems for the purpose of achieving the well-being of all the people, there has been no real integration of black people as a whole into American society. The question here, then, is not how integration has helped or hindered African-American women's activities and relationships. The question is: How has black people's contact (not integration) with American social systems and movements impacted upon those areas of black life in which black women have historically focused their time, energy, and concern?
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.
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