Roads to Freedom (Page 3)

As prominent as education has been in battles over segregation and in the civil rights literature, it was only one aspect of Jim Crow. The white South needed a lot more than bad schools to keep black labor exploitable. As Michael Honey, professor at the University of Washington-Tacoma, reminds us in Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign, some civil rights protesters fought for more immediate material rewards than those promised by schools.

In 1968 Echol Cole and Robert Walker met a grisly end in Memphis. The two black sanitation workers were crushed in a faultily wired garbage truck in which they had sought shelter from bad weather--as black men, they were barred from all other shelter. Their deaths, the culmination of decades of degrading treatment, galvanized the community, especially black workers, who were already engaged in a labor struggle. Unions, with their history of barring black members, were distrusted by black workers; however, the fearless local leader of the black sanitation workers, T.O. Jones, had obtained AFSCME support. AFSCME opposed strikes, which depleted union resources, as a matter of principle. But nothing could hold back the anger that swelled in the wake of Cole's and Walker's deaths. As a Memphis labor council official put it, "Hell, T.O. nor anybody else couldn't have stopped those people from coming out. Hell, if you would have gone back there...and told those people to go back to work, they'd have killed you." While Jones tried to downplay race for the sake of white union support, in Memphis, black solidarity was ultimately a wiser bet than working-class solidarity.

King accepted an invitation to come to Memphis in March 1968, hoping he could help prevent another outbreak of the violence that had erupted there. He was invited by the Rev. James Lawson, whom he had known from Lawson's earlier work training Nashville students, including many of the founders of SNCC, in nonviolent discipline. Until King arrived in Memphis, he had never had the chance to prove his longstanding commitment to "an economic-justice agenda that went far beyond civil rights." (Honey corrects the widespread misconception that King was radicalized only late in his career--promoted by both gun-waving Black Power activists, who claimed credit for educating the popular but naive leader, and later by Reaganite conservatives, who accused King of deviating from a benign "original" movement.)

What threatened unity--apart from the ever-present white racial hatred and electoral exploitation thereof--was, in Lawson's words, the "nihilistic romanticism" of some young black Memphians who, by breaking windows and looting, stole much of the attention of the police and press. Lawson and later King tried to work with Charles Cabbage and other violence-preaching young Invaders--and even succeeded in getting them to pledge themselves to nonviolent discipline for a while.

Before the world found out whether that conciliation effort could redirect--could politicize--the self-destructive impulses of so many energetic young men in the slums, James Earl Ray's bullet changed national perceptions forever. But the sanitation workers' march resumed--the day before King's funeral, with Coretta King at its head. Eight days later, sanitation workers reached a victory that, one suspects, King would have wanted America to remember more than it does: recognition of the union, a dues checkoff and an end of racist selection in promotions. "White supremacy thus fell" with the last provision, Honey writes, and "a great cheer went up" from the strikers when it was announced. They unanimously accepted it. The victory had its limits, Honey painstakingly acknowledges. But it was more than most poor communities ever achieve.

And though the 1960s are forty years past, the civil rights struggle continues to transform the workplace. In Freedom Is Not Enough, Nancy MacLean, a professor at Northwestern University, examines employment laws and policies that arose in response to pressure from the civil rights movement. She argues that we belittle the movement by restricting its impact, or its membership, to the youthful boomers in the streets and schools. She traces popular lack of interest in "adult working people" to "the tragic tendency in our market-driven culture to worship the new and toss out the old...to value youth for its own sake and so lose the wisdom that elders glean from long experience and observation." In real life, she argues, grown-ups "spearheaded critical and creative thinking about virtually every activity of our common life." Credit for social change--even in the 1960s--"belongs to middle-aged working people as well as to middle-class student activists." After black Southerners got the ball rolling, white women and Hispanics, not just African-Americans, began to seize and widen the job opportunities created by affirmative action. By petitioning and litigating their new rights, they used affirmative action to uproot a "culture of exclusion" in which most Americans had blithely assumed that good jobs naturally belong to native-born English-speaking white men. These job-market activists met resistance at every turn from employers and conservative ideologues. The ideologues turned widespread anxiety about the shrinking job market of the 1970s and early '80s against the masses of workers whose opportunities within that market were suddenly improving. For that reason, MacLean suggests, the labor movement split over affirmative action, and more than half of America's union households voted for Nixon in 1972.

Though MacLean's book should be read alongside more evenhanded treatments of the electoral swing to the right--especially Matthew Lassiter's brilliant Silent Majority (2006), which rejects "race-reductionist" assumptions--it is vital to understanding where the struggle for civil rights has gone since the 1960s, and the case she makes for equal-employment laws is powerful. In her telling, the beneficiaries of those laws are far less ambivalent about their new job opportunities than the beneficiaries of desegregated schools were about their new educational opportunities.

Like Honey, MacLean speaks with critical appreciation of the radical coalition strategy to which King--in death and in life the most popular black leader to both black and white Americans--devoted himself. That strategy alienated potential allies at different points for the sake of other, more promising allies. In Memphis and other places, the coalition strategy bolstered the solidarity of the black community. That community sometimes sought to win white sympathy by dramatizing its victimization at the hands of employers and police. But even after mass attention was exhausted or confused, the logic of coalition-building continued to yield incremental but significant benefits. Those benefits, MacLean emphasizes, paid off for vast numbers of white female and Hispanic as well as--not at the expense of--black workers. As all these books make clear, coalition-building is a strategy that is extraordinarily difficult to understand, let alone to re-create. Coalition-building undergirded and was compatible with all the other strategies pursued by successful civil rights leaders in the past. Though African-Americans suffered unique deprivations in American history--and the original justifications for affirmative action stressed those unique deprivations--it is hard to imagine any future gain in racial equality that does not build on the coalitions of the past.

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