What is the message of alice walker short story elethia

Fine Arts In The Modern World: LA_104_

1.Carefully read the information about the Harlem Renaissance in your textbook and focus on Jacob Lawrence’s Migration series (1940-41; figure 36.2). While your textbook only shows one of the 60 images in the series, you can see all 60 images including the official titles and explanations at: http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2015/onewayticket/. Look through all 60 images online and explain the series IN YOUR OWN WORDS. What did Lawrence achieve with this series? How does the artist help his audience to understand the exodus of African-Americans who left their homes in the South to re-settle in the North of the US around the time of WWI? How does the artist portray the rural South? How does he portray the urban North? What meaning does the series hold for today’s viewer? Write a minimum of 100 words including a short explanation of the “Harlem Renaissance.”

2. Look at Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1974-1979; multimedia; figure 36.12). Read the information in your textbook as well as texts on REPUTABLE internet sites, such as https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/dinner_party (click on the “Teacher Packet” for detailed imagery). There are also several Youtube films about The Dinner Party including one with the artist.

To complete this assignment, describe the art work including the history of the work’s creation as well as its position as one of the foremost feminist art works. Comment on the work’s effectiveness, i.e. does it still have meaning for today’s viewers? Explain why or why not. Write a minimum of 100 words.

3. The artists Christo (b. 1935) and Jeanne-Claude (1935-2009) created environmental projects on a grand scale. The costs for all the projects were carried by the artists and their budgets did not aim at major profits. After the projects had been taken down, all materials were donated to be re-used. Read your textbook (p. 496) and the links to the artists’ website (listed below).

Focus on The Gates in New York City (2005). Expand your knowledge by reading the Khan Academy webpage on The Gates (https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-1010/minimalism-earthworks/a/christo-and-jeanne-claude-the-gates), and some New York Times articles (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/arts/design/GATES-REF.html).

Describe this NYC project and explain the effect on the visitors in at least 75 words. In your opinion and based on your reading, what made The Gates so successful and fascinating?

Christo and Jeanne-Claude: http://www.christojeanneclaude.net/ and http://christojeanneclaude.net/artworks/realized-projects

Liberation and Equality ca. 1930–2000

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Figure 36.1 JEFF WALL, After Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, “The Preface,” Edition of 2, 1999–2000. Cibachrome transparency, aluminum light box, fluorescent bulbs, 751⁄4 � 1061⁄4 � 101⁄4 in. Wall made this large-scale backlit cibachrome photograph from a scene he himself staged with a hired actor and a fabricated set. He is inspired by subjects and images drawn from the history of art and literature.

“This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.” James Baldwin

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Anticolonialism and Liberation

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While the mood of despair pervaded much of the postwar era, a

second, more positive spirit fueled movements to achieve libera-

tion and equality in many parts of the world. Two major liberation

movements marked the second half of the twentieth century. The

first involved efforts on the part of colonial nations to secure

political, economic, religious, and ethnic independence. It also

aimed to reduce poverty and raise standards of living in the

world’s industrially underdeveloped nations, thus bringing them to

the productive status of nations with more highly developed

economies.

The second movement for liberation, fired by opposition to

age-old social injustices and ingrained prejudice, involved the

demand for racial, ethnic, and gender equality. Engaging world-

wide participation, the movement embraced a lengthy struggle for

civil rights in the African-American population of the United

States, the demand for equality among feminists throughout the

West, and a recognition of the inequalities suffered by those of

untraditional sexual orientation.

The movements for liberation and equality—colonial, racial,

and sexual—provided the context for some of the most signifi-

cant literature, art, and music of the twentieth century. In the long

run, all artworks must be judged without reference to the politics,

race, or gender of the artists who created them. Nevertheless, the

works included in this chapter are better understood as expres-

sions of a unique time and place in the history of the humanistic

tradition.

In the postwar era, the weakened European nations were unable to maintain the military and economic forces nec- essary to sustain their empires. At the same time, their colonial subjects increased their efforts to free themselves of Western rulers.

One of the earliest revolts against colonial rule took place in India. During World War I, the Indian National Congress came under the influence of the Hindu Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948). Gandhi, whose followers called him “Mahatma,” or “great soul,” led India’s struggle for inde- pendence from Great Britain. Guided by the precepts of Hinduism, as well as by the Sermon on the Mount and the writings of Thoreau and Tolstoy, Gandhi initiated a policy of peaceful protest against colonial oppression. His program of nonviolent resistance, including fasting and peaceful demonstrations, influenced subsequent liberation movements throughout the world. Gandhi’s involvement was crucial to India’s emancipation from British control,

which occurred in 1947, only one year before he was assas- sinated by a Hindu fanatic who opposed his conciliatory gestures toward India’s Muslim minority.

Between 1944 and 1960, many nations, including Jordan, Burma, Palestine, Sri Lanka, Ghana, Malaya, Cyprus, and Nigeria, freed themselves from British rule. Syria, Lebanon, Cambodia, Laos, North and South Vietnam, Morocco, Tunisia, Cameroon, Mali, and other African states won independence from France. And still other territories claimed their freedom from the empires of the United States, Japan, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Italy.

In Central America, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere, however, internal conflicts provoked military intervention by First World powers, that is, the industrialized capitalist nations, including the United States, most of Western Europe, Japan, and Canada. Between 1964 and 1975, the United States succeeded France in an unsuccessful effort to defend South Vietnam from communist control. The Vietnam War—the longest war in American history—cost the lives of some 50,000 Americans and more than fifteen million Vietnamese. More recently, in Eastern Europe, the demise of Soviet authority has unleashed age-old ethnic conflicts, producing fragmentation and bloodshed.

Liberation and Literature in the Islamic World While India achieved its emancipation from British con- trol, a related drive for liberation was underway among the members of the country’s Muslim minority. The quest for an autonomous Muslim state on the Indian subcontinent resulted in the creation of an independent Pakistan in 1947. Other parts of the Islamic world, however, were not so successful. For instance, brutal massacres, riots, and rev- olution plagued Egypt for decades before it became an independent nation in 1971. Impeding the success of inde- pendent Muslim states was the fact that the West, even after granting them their independence, continued to influence key aspects of their economies, such as the pro- duction of oil.

Equally challenging was the process of modernization itself: specifically, the incompatibility between the agenda of modernization, focused on Western-style capitalism and democratic reform, and the fundamentals of Muslim tradition based in the Qur’an and a governing theocracy. In most parts of the Islamic world, the difficulties of introducing modern legal and constitutional innovations into centuries-old Islamic societies proved overwhelming. To this day, in fact, minority elements within the Islamic world remain in violent opposition to the culture of modernization and to Western intrusion in Muslim affairs.

If Western technology and imperialism have weighed heavily in the transition from ancient to modern times, Muslim culture has nonetheless flourished. In India, the poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal (1876–1938) envisioned Islam as the leading moral force in South Asia. While supporting the formation of an independent Muslim state in Pakistan, he emphasized the importance of achieving brotherhood among India’s Muslim, Christian,

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READING 36.1

Q Based on the evidence of these two poems, how would you describe the Muslim response to Western values?

READING 36.2

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and Hindu populations. Educated in law and philosophy at Oxford, England, Iqbal anticipated a pan-Islamic community that transcended ethnic, racial, and national loyalties. He urged his followers to replace Islamic mysticism and passive contemplation with an activist spirit. In his poems, he gave voice to the despair felt by Muslims who viewed imperialism and Modernism as twin threats to spirituality and divine law.

Islamic Poems

Iqbal’s “Revolution” (1938)

Death to man’s soul is Europe, death is Asia To man’s will: neither feels the vital current. In man’s hearts stirs a revolution’s torrent; Maybe our old world too is nearing death.

Iqbal’s “Europe and Syria” (1936)

This land of Syria gave the West a Prophet Of purity and pity and innocence; And Syria from the West as recompense Gets dice and drink and troops of prostitutes. 10

Liberation and Literature in Latin America From the time of Christopher Columbus, the peoples of Latin America have served the political and economic interests of First World countries more powerful than their own. And even after the European nations departed from the shores of Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, and other Latin American states in the early nineteenth century, the intolerable conditions that had prevailed in the long era of colonialism persisted: the vast majority of Latin Americans, including great masses of peasants of Native American descent, lived in relative poverty, while small, wealthy, landowning elites held power. These elites maintained their position by virtue of their alliance with the financial and industrial interests of First World nations, including (especially since the 1890s) the United States.

Spanish-speaking and predominantly Catholic, the rapidly growing populations of the more than two dozen nations of Latin America have suffered repeated social upheaval in their attempts to cope with persistent prob- lems of inequality, exploitation, and underdevelopment. The long and bitter history of the Mexican Revolution, commemorated in the murals of Diego Rivera (see Figure 34.7), provides a vivid example. From country to country, political and social reformers have struggled to revolution- ize the socioeconomic order, to liberate Latin America from economic colonialism, and to bring about a more equitable distribution of wealth. Support for these essen- tially socialist movements has come from representatives of the deprived elements of society, including organized labor

and, often enough, from the Catholic Church, which has acted on behalf of the masses as an agent of social justice. The “liberation theology” preached by reformist elements in the clergy advanced a powerful new rendering of Christian dogma.

Latin America’s artists rallied to support movements for liberation. During the 1960s, the outpouring of excep- tionally fine Latin American prose and poetry constituted a literary boom, the influence of which is still being felt worldwide. Among the champions of reform was the Chilean Pablo Neruda (1904–1973), one of Latin America’s most prolific Spanish-language poets. His poems, often embellished with violent, Surrealist images, endorse a radical, populist ideology. In “The United Fruit Co.” he describes the corruption of justice and freedom in the “Banana Republics” of Latin America. The poem, phrased as a mock Last Judgment, smolders with indigna- tion at the United States’ policies of commercial exploita- tion in the nations south of its borders.

Neruda’s “United Fruit Co.”(1950)

When the trumpets had sounded and all 1 was in readiness on the face of the earth, Jehovah divided his universe: Anaconda, Ford Motors, Coca-Cola Inc., and similar entities: 5 the most succulent item of all, The United Fruit Company Incorporated reserved for itself: the heartland and coasts of my country, the delectable waist of America. 10 They rechristened their properties: the “Banana Republics”— and over the languishing dead, the uneasy repose of the heroes who harried that greatness, 15 their flags and their freedoms, they established an opéra bouffe: they ravished all enterprise, awarded the laurels like Caesars, unleashed all the covetous, and contrived 20 the tyrannical Reign of the Flies— Trujillo the fly, and Tacho the fly, the flies called Carias, Martinez, Ubico1—all of them flies, flies dank with the blood of their marmalade 25 vassalage, flies buzzing drunkenly

1 The twentieth-century dictators of Latin America: Rafael Molina Trujillo brutally dominated the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961; “Tacho” was the nickname for Anastasio Somoza, who controlled Nicaragua from 1937 until his assassination in 1956; Tiburcio Carias, self-styled dictator of Honduras, was supported during the 1930s and 1940s by the United Fruit Company; Maximilian Martinez was the ruthless dictator of El Salvador during the 1930s and 1940s; Jorge Ubico seized power in Guatemala in 1931 and served as a puppet of the United States until 1944.

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Q What sentiments dominate this poem? Q What is the function of Neruda’s mock

Last Judgment?

The Quest for Racial Equality

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became the center of economic opportunity, as well as the melting pot for black people from other parts of the world. But white frustration and fear of black competition for jobs led to race riots in over twenty-five cities during the “bloody summer” of 1919 (Figure 36.2).

Between 1920 and 1940, the quest for racial equality and a search for self-identity among African-Americans inspired an upsurge of creative expression in the arts. Centered in Harlem—a part of Manhattan occupied large- ly by African-Americans—poets, painters, musicians, and dancers forged the movement that came to be called the Harlem Renaissance.

The Harlem Renaissance made the self-conscious “rebirth” of the African heritage the principal part of an intellectual and cultural quest for racial identity and equali- ty. A leading figure of the movement was the writer, folk- lorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960). Hurston made use of African-American dialect to create some of the strongest female characters in early twentieth- century fiction. Her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, is widely regarded as a classic of black literature.

on the populous middens: the fly-circus fly and the scholarly kind, case-hardened in tyranny. Then in the bloody domain of the flies 30 The United Fruit Company Incorporated sailed off with a booty of coffee and fruits brimming its cargo boats, gliding like trays with the spoils of our drowning dominions. 35 And all the while, somewhere in the sugary hells of our seaports, smothered by gases, an Indian fell in the morning: a body spun off, an anonymous 40 chattel, some numeral tumbling, a branch with its death running out of it in the vat of the carrion, fruit laden and foul.

The most turbulent liberation movement of the twentieth century addressed the issue of racial equality—an issue so dramatically reflected in the African-American experience that some observers have dubbed the century “The Race Era.” Since the days of slavery, millions of black Americans had existed as an underprivileged minority population liv- ing within an advanced industrial state.

The Dutch took the first Africans to America in 1619, and during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, thousands of slaves were imported to the American colonies, especially those in the South. For 250 years, until the end of the Civil War, slavery was a fact of American life. The Emancipation Proclamation issued by Abraham Lincoln in 1863 facilitated the liberation of the slaves, but it was not until 1865—with the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution—that all slaves were finally freed. This and other constitutional amendments guaranteed the rights of black people; nevertheless, the lives of African-Americans continued to be harsh and poor by comparison with those of their former white masters. Separation of the races by segregated housing, inferior schools, and exclusion from voting and equal employment were only a few of the inequities suffered by this minority in the post-emancipation United States. It was to these issues and to the more general problem of racism that many African-Americans addressed them- selves after World War I.

The Harlem Renaissance World War I provided African-Americans with new oppor- tunities in education and employment. During and after the war, over five million African-Americans migrated from the South to the northern states. New York City

Figure 36.2 JACOB LAWRENCE, “Race riots were numerous. White workers were hostile toward the migrants who had been hired to break strikes.” Panel 50 from “The Migration” series, 1940–1941; text and title revised by the artist, 1993. Tempera on gesso on composition board, 18 � 12 in.

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READING 36.3

Q To what extent do the circumstances described in these poems (written fifty years ago) still pertain?

READING 36.4

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Hurston’s contemporary, Langston Hughes (1902–1967), was one of the most eloquent voices of the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes was born in Missouri and moved to New York in 1921, where he became the first African-American to support himself as a professional writer. A musician as well as a journalist and a novelist, Hughes was the rare poet whose powerful phrases (“a dream deferred,” “a raisin in the sun,” and “black like me”) are enshrined in the canon of American literature and in the English language. His poems, which capture the musical qualities of the African oral tradition, fuse everyday speech with the rhythms of blues and jazz. Hughes, who regarded poets as “lyric historians,” drew deeply on his own experi- ence: his “Theme for English B” records his response to the education of black students in a dominantly white culture. In “Harlem,” a meditation on the “bloody summer” of 1919, Hughes looks to the immediate past to presage the angry riots that have recurred regularly since the 1960s in America’s black ghettos.

Like the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, the Chicago- born poet Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000) drew upon the idioms of jazz and street slang to produce a vivid picture of the black ghettos in her city. The first African-American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for poetry (1949), Brooks brought to attention the plight of black peo- ple—especially young black men and women—in American society. The two poems in Reading 36.4 are representative of the early part of her long and productive career.

The Poems of Hughes

Hughes’ “Theme for English B” (1949)

The instructor said, 1

Go home and write a page tonight. And let that page come out of you— Then, it will be true. 5

I wonder if it’s that simple?

I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem. I went to school there, then Durham, then here to this college on the hill above Harlem. I am the only colored student in my class. 10 The steps from the hill lead down into Harlem, through a park, then I cross St. Nicholas, Eighth Avenue, Seventh, and I come to the Y, the Harlem Branch Y, where I take the elevator up to my room, sit down, and write this page: 15

It’s not easy to know what is true for you or me at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I’m what I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you: hear you, hear me—we two—you, me, talk on this page. (I hear New York, too.) Me—who? 20 Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love. I like to work, read, learn, and understand life. I like a pipe for a Christmas present,

or records—Bessie, bop, or Bach. I guess being colored doesn’t make me not like 25 the same things other folks like who are other races. So will my page be colored that I write? Being me, it will not be white. But it will be a part of you, instructor. 30 You are white— yet a part of me, as I am a part of you. That’s American. Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me. Nor do I often want to be a part of you. 35 But we are, that’s true! I guess you learn from me— although you’re older—and white— and somewhat more free.

This is my page for English B. 40

Hughes’ “Harlem” (1951)

What happens to a dream deferred? 1

Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore— And then run? 5 Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over— like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. 10

Or does it explode?

The Poems of Brooks

Brooks’ “The Mother” (1945)

Abortions will not let you forget. 1 You remember the children you got that you did not get, The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair, The singers and workers that never handled the air. You will never neglect or beat 5 Them, or silence or buy with a sweet. You will never wind up the sucking-thumb Or scuttle off ghosts that come. You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh, Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye. 10

I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children.

I have contracted. I have eased My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck. I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized Your luck 15 And your lives from your unfinished reach,

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READING 36.5

Q In what ways are these poems descriptive? Are they also didactic? How so?

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From Wright’s The Ethics of Living Jim Crow (1938)

My first lesson in how to live as a Negro came when I was 1 quite small. We were living in Arkansas. Our house stood behind the railroad tracks. Its skimpy yard was paved with black cinders. Nothing green ever grew in that yard. The only touch of green we could see was far away, beyond the tracks, over where the white folks lived. But cinders were good enough for me and I never missed the green growing things. And anyhow cinders were fine weapons. You could always have a nice hot war with huge black cinders. All you had to do was crouch behind the brick pillars of a house with your hands 10 full of gritty ammunition. And the first woolly black head you saw pop out from behind another row of pillars was your target. You tried your very best to knock it off. It was great fun. I never fully realized the appalling disadvantages of a cinder environment till one day the gang to which I belonged found itself engaged in a war with the white boys who lived beyond the tracks. As usual we laid down our cinder barrage, thinking that this would wipe the white boys out. But they replied with a steady bombardment of broken bottles. We doubled our cinder barrage, but they hid behind trees, hedges, 20 and the sloping embankment of their lawns. Having no such fortifications, we retreated to the brick pillars of our homes. During the retreat a broken milk bottle caught me behind the ear, opening a deep gash which bled profusely. The sight of blood pouring over my face completely demoralized our ranks. My fellow-combatants left me standing paralyzed in the center of the yard, and scurried for their homes. A kind neighbor saw me, and rushed me to a doctor, who took three stitches in my neck.

I sat brooding on my front steps, nursing my wound and 30 waiting for my mother to come from work. I felt that a grave injustice had been done me. It was all right to throw cinders. The greatest harm a cinder could do was leave a bruise. But broken bottles were dangerous; they left you cut, bleeding, and helpless.

When night fell, my mother came from the white folks’ kitchen. I raced down the street to meet her. I could just feel in my bones that she would understand. I knew she would tell me exactly what to do next time. I grabbed her hand and babbled out the whole story. She examined my wound, then 40 slapped me.

“How come yuh didn’t hide?” she asked me. “How come yuh awways fightin’?”

I was outraged, and bawled. Between sobs I told her that I didn’t have any trees or hedges to hide behind. There wasn’t a thing I could have used as a trench. And you couldn’t throw very far when you were hiding behind the brick pillars of a house. She grabbed a barrel stave, dragged me home, stripped me naked, and beat me till I had a fever of one hundred and two. She would smack my rump with the stave, and, while the 50 skin was still smarting impart to me gems of Jim Crow wisdom. I was never to throw cinders any more. I was never to fight any more wars. I was never, never, under any conditions, to fight white folks again. And they were absolutely right in clouting me with the broken milk bottle.

If I stole your births and your names, Your straight baby tears and your games, Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages,

aches, and your deaths,

If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths, 20 Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate. Though why should I whine, Whine that the crime was other than mine?— Since anyhow you are dead. Or rather, or instead, 25 You were never made.

But that too, I am afraid, Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said? You were born, you had body, you died. It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried. 30

Believe me, I loved you all. Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved,

I loved you All.

Brooks’ “We Real Cool” (1959)

The Pool Players. Seven at the Golden Shovel.

We real cool. We Left school. We

Lurk late. We Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We Die soon.

Richard Wright and the Realities of Racism Richard Wright (1908–1960) was born on a cotton planta- tion in Mississippi and came to New York City in 1937, just after the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance. Wright brought to his writings the anger of a man who had known physical punishment and repeated injustice at the hands of white people. In his novel Native Son (1940), the night- marish story of a poor, young black man who kills his white employer’s daughter, Wright examined the ways in which the frustrated search for identity led some African- Americans to despair, defiance, and even violent crime. The novel won Wright immediate acclaim and was rewrit- ten for the New York stage in 1941.

In the autobiographical sketch The Ethics of Living Jim Crow (1938), Wright records with grim frankness the expe- rience of growing up in a racially segregated community in the American South. “Jim Crow,” the stage name of a pop- ular nineteenth-century minstrel performer, Thomas D. Rice, had come to describe anything pertaining to African- Americans, including matters of racial segregation.

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Didn’t I know she was working hard every day in the hot kitchens of the white folks to make money to take care of me? When was I ever going to learn to be a good boy? She couldn’t be bothered with my fights. She finished by telling me that I ought to be thankful to God as long as I lived that they didn’t 60 kill me.

All that night I was delirious and could not sleep. Each time I closed my eyes I saw monstrous white faces suspended from the ceiling, leering at me.

From that time on, the charm of my cinder yard was gone. The green trees, the trimmed hedges, the cropped lawns grew very meaningful, became a symbol. Even today when I think of white folks, the hard, sharp outlines of white houses surrounded by trees, lawns, and hedges are present somewhere in the background of my mind. Through the years 70 they grew into an overreaching symbol of fear.

It was a long time before I came in close contact with white folks again. We moved from Arkansas to Mississippi. Here we had the good fortune not to live behind the railroad tracks, or close to white neighborhoods. We lived in the very heart of the local Black Belt. There were black churches and black preachers; there were black schools and black teachers; black groceries and black clerks. In fact, everything was so solidly black that for a long time I did not even think of white folks, save in remote and vague terms. But this could not last 80 forever. As one grows older one eats more. One’s clothing costs more. When I finished grammar school I had to go to work. My mother could no longer feed and clothe me on her cooking job.

There is but one place where a black boy who knows no trade can get a job, and that’s where the houses and faces are white, where the trees, lawns, and hedges are green. My first job was with an optical company in Jackson, Mississippi. The morning I applied I stood straight and neat before the boss, answering all his questions with sharp yessirs and nosirs. I 90 was very careful to pronounce my sirs distinctly, in order that he might know that I was polite, that I knew where I was, and that I knew he was a white man. I wanted that job badly.

He looked me over as though he were examining a prize poodle. He questioned me closely about my schooling, being particularly insistent about how much mathematics I had had. He seemed very pleased when I told him I had had two years of algebra.

“Boy, how would you like to try to learn something around here?” he asked me. 100

“I’d like it fine, sir,” I said, happy. I had visions of “working my way up.” Even Negroes have those visions.

“All right,” he said. “Come on.” I followed him to the small factory. “Pease,” he said to a white man of about thirty-five, “this is

Richard. He’s going to work for us.” Pease looked at me and nodded. I was then taken to a white boy of about seventeen. “Morrie, this is Richard, who’s going to work for us.” “Whut yuh sayin’ there, boy!” Morrie boomed at me. 110 “Fine!” I answered. The boss instructed these two to help me, teach me, give me

jobs to do, and let me learn what I could in my spare time.

My wages were five dollars a week. I worked hard, trying to please. For the first month I got

along O.K. Both Pease and Morrie seemed to like me. But one thing was missing. And I kept thinking about it. I was not learning anything and nobody was volunteering to help me. Thinking they had forgotten that I was to learn something about the mechanics of grinding lenses, I asked Morrie one 120 day to tell me about the work. He grew red.

“Whut yuh tryin’ t’ do, nigger, get smart?” he asked. “Naw; I ain’ tryin’ t’ git smart,” I said. “Well, don’t, if yuh know whut’s good for yuh!” I was puzzled. Maybe he just doesn’t want to help me, I

thought. I went to Pease. “Say, are yuh crazy, you black bastard?” Pease asked me,

his gray eyes growing hard. I spoke out, reminding him that the boss had said I was to

be given a chance to learn something. 130 “Nigger, you think you’re white, don’t you? “Naw, sir!” “Well, you’re acting mighty like it!” “But, Mr. Pease, the boss said . . .” Pease shook his fist in my face. “This is a white man’s work around here, and you better

watch yourself!” From then on they changed toward me. They said good-

morning no more. When I was just a bit slow in performing some duty, I was called a lazy black son-of-a-bitch. 140

Once I thought of reporting all this to the boss. But the mere idea of what would happen to me if Pease and Morrie should learn that I had “snitched” stopped me. And after all the boss was a white man, too. What was the use?

The climax came at noon one summer day. Pease called me to his workbench. To get to him I had to go between two narrow benches and stand with my back against a wall.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “Richard, I want to ask you something,” Pease began

pleasantly, not looking up from his work. 150 “Yes, sir,” I said again. Morrie came over, blocking the narrow passage between the

benches. He folded his arms, staring at me solemnly. I looked from one to the other, sensing that something was

coming. “Yes, sir,” I said for the third time. Pease looked up and spoke very slowly. “Richard, Mr. Morrie here tells me you called me Pease.” I stiffened. A void seemed to open up in me. I knew this

was the showdown. 160 He meant that I had failed to call him Mr. Pease. I looked at

Morrie. He was gripping a steel bar in his hands. I opened my mouth to speak, to protest, to assure Pease that I had never called him simply Pease, and that I had never had any intentions of doing so, when Morrie grabbed me by the collar, ramming my head against the wall.

“Now be careful, nigger!” snarled Morrie, baring his teeth. “I heard yuh call ’im Pease! ’N’ if yuh say yuh didn’t, yuh’re callin’ me a lie, see?” He waved the steel bar threateningly.

If I had said: No, sir, Mr. Pease, I never called you Pease I 170 would have been automatically calling Morrie a liar. And if I

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Q Describe the character, Pease: is he a believable figure?

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said: Yes, sir, Mr. Pease, I called you Pease, I would have been pleading guilty to having uttered the worst insult that a Negro can utter to a southern white man. I stood hesitating, trying to frame a neutral reply.

“Richard, I asked you a question!” said Pease. Anger was creeping into his voice.

“I don’t remember calling you Pease, Mr. Pease,” I said cautiously. “And if I did, I sure didn’t mean . . .”

“You black son-of-a-bitch! You called me Pease, then!” he 180 spat, slapping me till I bent sideways over a bench. Morrie was on top of me, demanding:

“Didn’t you call ’im Pease? If yuh say yuh didn’t, I’ll rip yo’ gut string loose with this bar, yuh black granny dodger! Yuh can’t call a white man a lie ’n’ git erway with it, you black son-of-a-bitch!”

I wilted. I begged them not to bother me. I knew what they wanted. They wanted me to leave.

“I’ll leave,” I promised. “I’ll leave right now.” They gave me a minute to get out of the factory. I was 190

warned not to show up again, or tell the boss. I went. When I told the folks at home what had happened, they

called me a fool. They told me that I must never again attempt to exceed my boundaries. When you are working for white folks, they said, you got to “stay in your place” if you want to keep working. . . .

The Civil Rights Movement Well after World War II, racism remained an undeniable obstacle to equality. Ironically, while Americans had fought to oppose Nazi racism in Germany, black Americans endured a system of inferior education, restricted jobs, ghetto housing, and generally low living standards. High crime rates, illiteracy, and drug addiction were evidence of affluent America’s awesome failure to assimilate a popula- tion that suffered in its midst. The fact that African- Americans had served in great numbers in World War II inspired a redoubled effort to end persistent discrimination and segregation in the United States. During the 1950s and 1960s, that effort came to flower in the civil rights movement.

Civil rights leaders of the 1950s demanded enforcement of all the provisions for equality promised in the United States Constitution. Their demands led to a landmark Supreme Court decision in 1954 that banned school segre- gation; by implication, the ruling undermined the entire system of legalized segregation in the United States. Desegregation was met with fierce resistance, especially in the American South. In response, the so-called “Negro Revolt” began in 1955 and continued for over a decade. It took the form of nonviolent, direct-action protests,

including boycotts of segregated lunch counters, peaceful “sit-ins,” and protest marches. Leading the revolt was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968), a Protestant pastor and civil rights activist who modeled his campaign of peaceful protest on the example of Gandhi. As president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King served as an inspiration to all African-Americans.

The urgency of their cause is conveyed in a letter King wrote while confined to jail for marching without a permit in the city of Birmingham, Alabama. It addressed a group of local white clergy, who had publicly criticized King for breaking laws that prohibited black people from using public facilities and for promoting “untimely” demonstrations. After King’s letter was published in The Christian Century (June 12, 1963), it became (in a shorter version edited by King himself) the key text in a nation- wide debate over civil rights: it provided philosophic justi- fication for the practice of civil disobedience as a means of opposing injustice. King’s measured eloquence and rea- soned restraint stand in ironic contrast to the savagery of the opposition, who had used guns, hoses, and attack dogs against the demonstrators, 2400 of whom were jailed along with King.

From King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963)

My dear Fellow Clergymen, While confined here in the Birmingham City Jail, I came 1 across your recent statement calling our present activities “unwise and untimely.” Seldom, if ever, do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. But since I feel that you are men of genuine goodwill and your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I would like to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.

I think I should give the reason for my being in Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the argument of “outsiders coming in.” Several months ago our local affiliate here in 10 Birmingham invited us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent direct action program if such were deemed necessary. We readily consented and when the hour came we lived up to our promises. So I am here, along with several members of my staff, because we were invited here. Beyond this, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here.

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in 20 an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outsider agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere in this country.

You deplore the demonstrations that are presently taking place in Birmingham. But I am sorry that your statement did not express a similar concern for the conditions that brought the demonstrations into being. I would not hesitate to say that it is unfortunate that so-called demonstrations are taking 30

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place in Birmingham at this time, but I would say in more emphatic terms that it is even more unfortunate that the white power structure of this city left the Negro community with no other alternative.

In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: 1) collection of the facts to determine whether injustices are alive; 2) negotiation; 3) self-purification; and 4) direct action.

You may well ask, “Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches, etc.? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are exactly right in your call for negotiation. Indeed, this is the purpose of 40 direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. So the purpose of the direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.

My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges 50 voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but as Reinhold Niebuhr1 has reminded us, groups are more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This “wait” has almost always meant “never.” We must come to see with the distinguished jurist of yesterday that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” We have waited for more than 60 three hundred and forty years for our constitutional and God- given rights.

You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, it is rather strange and paradoxical to find us consciously breaking laws. One may well ask, “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws. There are just laws and 70 there are unjust laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.

Now what is the difference between the two? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the 80 segregated a false sense of inferiority.

Let us turn to a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a majority inflicts on a minority that is not binding on itself. This is difference made legal. On the other hand a just law is a code that a majority

compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal.

I hope you can see the distinction I am trying to point out. In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law as the rabid segregationist would do. This would lead to anarchy. One who 90 breaks an unjust law openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for law.

Of course there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was seen sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar2

because a higher moral law was involved. It was practiced superbly by the early Christians.

We can never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany 100 was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.” It was “illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.

In your statement you asserted that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But can this assertion be logically made? Isn’t this like condemning the robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? We must come to see, as federal courts have consistently affirmed, that it is immoral to urge an individual to withdraw his efforts to gain 110 his basic constitutional rights because the quest precipitates violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber.

Over the last few years I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. So I have tried to make it clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to gain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends. T. S. Eliot has said that there is no greater treason than to do the right deed for 120 the wrong reason.

I wish you had commended the Negro sit-inners and demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer, and their amazing discipline in the midst of the most inhuman provocation. One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will include old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy-two-year-old woman of Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride the segregated buses, and responded to one who inquired about 130 her tiredness with ungrammatical profundity: “My feets is tired, but my soul is rested.” One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at the lunch counters they were in reality standing up for the best in the American dream and the most sacred values in our Judeo- Christian heritage, and thus carrying our whole nation back to great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the

1 An American Protestant theologian (1892–1971) who urged ethical realism in Christian approaches to political debate (see chapter 35).

2 The Chaldean king of the sixth century B.C.E., who, according to the Book of Daniel, demanded that these Hebrew youths worship the Babylonian gods. Nebuchadnezzar cast them into a fiery furnace, but they were delivered unhurt by an angel of God (see Figure 9.7).

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Q What arguments does Dr. King make for nonviolence and negotiation?

Q Evaluate the claim (line 53) that “groups are more immoral than individuals.”

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founding fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

I hope this letter finds you strong in the faith. I also hope 140 that circumstances will soon make it possible for me to meet each of you, not as an integrationist or a civil rights leader, but as a fellow clergyman and a Christian brother. Let us hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear- drenched communities and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all of their scintillating beauty.

Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood 150 Martin Luther King, Jr.

While Dr. King practiced the tactics of nonviolence to achieve the goals of racial integration and civil rights in America, another protest leader took a very different tack: Malcolm Little (1925–1965), who called himself “Malcolm X,” experienced firsthand the inequities and degradation of life in white America. For a time he turned to crime and drugs as a means of survival. Arrested and sentenced to prison in 1946, he took the opportunity to study history and religion, and most especially the teach- ings of Islam. By the time he was released in 1952, he had joined the Nation of Islam and was prepared to launch his career as a Muslim minister.

Malcolm and other “Black Muslims” despaired over per- sistent racism in white America. They determined that black people should pursue a very different course from that of Dr. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. African-Americans, argued Malcolm, should abandon aspirations for integration. Instead, they should separate from white Americans in every feasible way; they should create a black nation in which—through hard work and the pursuit of Muslim morality—they might live equally, in dignity, free of the daily affronts of white racism. These goals should be achieved by all available means, vio- lent if necessary (armed self-defense was a first step). Only by fighting for black nationalism would African- Americans ever gain power and self-respect in racist America. Little wonder that Malcolm was feared and reviled by white Americans and deemed a dangerous radi- cal by more moderate black people as well.

In 1963, Malcolm addressed a conference of black leaders in Detroit, Michigan. In this speech, which later came to be called “Message to the Grass Roots,” Malcolm addressed a large audience representing a cross section of the African-American community. The power and imme- diacy of his style is best captured on the tape of the speech published by the African-American Broadcasting and Record Company. Nevertheless, the following brief excerpt

provides a glimpse into the ferocious eloquence that Malcolm exhibited throughout his brief career—until his death by assassination in 1965.

From Malcolm X’s Message to the Grass Roots (1963)

. . . America has a very serious problem. Not only does 1 America have a very serious problem, but our people have a very serious problem. America’s problem is us. We’re her problem. The only reason she has a problem is she doesn’t want us here. And every time you look at yourself, be you black, brown, red or yellow, a so-called Negro, you represent a person who poses such a serious problem for America because you’re not wanted. Once you face this as a fact, then you can start plotting a course that will make you appear intelligent, instead of unintelligent. 10

What you and I need to do is learn to forget our differences. When we come together, we don’t come together as Baptists or Methodists. You don’t catch hell because you’re a Baptist, and you don’t catch hell because you’re a Methodist. You don’t catch hell because you’re a Methodist or Baptist, you don’t catch hell because you’re a Democrat or a Republican, you don’t catch hell because you’re a Mason or an Elk, and you sure don’t catch hell because you’re an American; because if you were an American, you wouldn’t catch hell. You catch hell because you’re a black man. You catch hell, all of us catch 20 hell, for the same reason.

So we’re all black people, so-called Negroes, second- class citizens, ex-slaves. You’re nothing but an ex-slave. You don’t like to be told that. But what else are you? You are ex-slaves. You didn’t come here on the “Mayflower.” You came here on a slave ship. In chains, like a horse, or a cow, or a chicken. And you were brought here by the people who came here on the “Mayflower,” you were brought here by the so-called Pilgrims, or Founding Fathers. They were the ones who brought you here. 30

We have a common enemy. We have this in common: We have a common oppressor, a common exploiter, and a common discriminator. But once we all realize that we have a common enemy, then we unite—on the basis of what we have in common. And what we have foremost in common is that enemy—the white man. . . .

As long as the white man sent you to Korea, you bled. He sent you to Germany, you bled. He sent you to the South Pacific to fight the Japanese, you bled. You bleed for white people, but when it comes to seeing your own churches being 40 bombed and little black girls murdered, you haven’t got any blood. You bleed when the white man says bleed; you bite when the white man says bite; and you bark when the white man says bark. I hate to say this about us, but it’s true. How are you going to be nonviolent in Mississippi, as violent as you were in Korea? How can you justify being nonviolent in Mississippi and Alabama, when your churches are being bombed, and your little girls are being murdered, and at the same time you are going to get violent with Hitler, and Tojo, and somebody else you don’t even know? 50

If violence is wrong in America, violence is wrong abroad. If

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Q How does Malcolm justify black violence? Q How do his perceptions differ from King’s?

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it is wrong to be violent defending black women and black children and black babies and black men, then it is wrong for America to draft us and make us violent abroad in defense of her. And if it is right for America to draft us, and teach us how to be violent in defense of her, then it is right for you and me to do whatever is necessary to defend our own people right here in this country. . . .

The Literature of the Black Revolution The passage of the Civil Rights Act in America in 1964 provided an end to official segregation in public places; but continuing discrimination and the growing militancy of some civil rights groups provoked a more violent phase of the protests during the late 1960s and thereafter. Even before the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968, the black revolution had begun to assume a trans- national fervor. American voices joined those of their black neighbors in West India, South Africa, and elsewhere in the world. Fired by apartheid, the system of strict racial segregation that prevailed legally in South Africa until 1994, the poet Bloke Modisane (1923–1986) lamented:

it gets awful lonely, lonely; like screaming, screaming lonely screaming down dream alley, screaming blues, like none can hear

In Black Skin, White Masks (1958)—the handbook for African revolution—the West Indian essayist and revo- lutionary Franz Fanon (1925–1961) defended violence as necessary and desirable in overcoming the tyranny of whites over blacks in the colonial world. “At the level of individuals,” he wrote, “violence is a cleansing force.” In the United States, where advertising media made clear the disparity between the material comforts of black and white Americans, the black revolution swelled on a tide of rising expectations. LeRoi Jones (b. 1934), who in 1966 adopted the African name Imamu Amiri Baraka, echoed the mes- sage of Malcolm X in poems and plays that advocated mil- itant action and pan-Africanism. Rejecting white Western literary tradition, Baraka called for “poems that kill”; “Let there be no love poems written,” he entreats, “until love can exist freely and cleanly.”

Baldwin and Ellison Two luminaries of American black protest literature were James Baldwin (1924–1987) and Ralph Ellison (1914–1994). Baldwin, the eldest of nine children raised in Harlem in conditions of poverty, began writing when he was fourteen years old. Encouraged early in his career by Richard Wright, he became a formidable preacher of the gospel of equality. For Baldwin, writing was a subversive act. “You write,” he insisted, “in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you

probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world. In some way, your aspirations and concern for a single man in fact do begin to change the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks or people look at reality, then you can change it.”

In his novels, short stories, and essays, Baldwin stressed the affinity African-Americans felt with other poverty- stricken populations. Yet, as he tried to define the unique differences between black and white people, he observed that the former were strangers in the modern world—a world whose traditions were claimed by those who were white. As he explained in the essay “Stranger in the Village” (1953):

[European Whites] cannot be, from the point of view of power, strangers anywhere in the world; they have made the modern world, in effect, even if they do not know it. The most illiterate among them is related, in a way that I am not, to Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aeschylus, da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Racine; the cathedral at Chartres says something to them which it cannot say to me . . . . Out of their hymns and dances come Beethoven and Bach. Go back a few centuries and they are in their full glory—but I am in Africa, watching the conquerors arrive.

But Baldwin uncovered a much overlooked truth about the character of the modern world: that black culture has influenced white culture, and especially American culture, in a profound and irreversible manner:

The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too. . . . One of the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that no other people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men, and vice versa. . . . It is precisely this black–white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.

Baldwin’s contemporary, Ralph Ellison, a native of Oklahoma and an amateur jazz musician, came to Harlem during the 1930s to study sculpture and musical compo- sition. He was influenced by both Hughes and Wright and soon turned to writing short stories and newspaper reviews. In 1945, he began the novel Invisible Man, a fiction masterpiece that probes the black estrangement from white culture. The prologue to the novel, an excerpt of which follows, offers a glimpse into the spiritual odyssey of the “invisible” protagonist, an unnamed black man who lives rent-free in a Harlem basement flat illuminated by 1369 light bulbs he has connected (illegally) to the city’s electrical grid (see Figure 36.1). It broaches, with surrealis- tic intensity, some of Ellison’s most important themes: the nightmarish quality of urban life and the alienation