A Cause of Negro Non-Violence: Desire for Middle - Class Image

GORDON A. FELLMAN 4G is a Teaching Fellow in Social Relations. A graduate of Antioch College, he is currently preparing a thesis for the Ph.D. in Sociology. He has been closely associated with a number of groups seeking equality for Negroes.

February 1, 1960, is now a signal date in American social history. The chronology and importance of the sit-in movement, which began on that day in Greensboro, North Carolina, are well enough known that they need not be repeated here. It is sufficient to note only that less than nine months later, lunch counters in over 110 communities in the South are for the first time serving both white and Negro customers. Non-violent resistance, the tactic of protest in the Southern cities and in Northern sympathy demonstrations, was never before used so widely or so successfully in America. Why was this strategy used? Why were students, ordinarily inactive in off-campus social and political affairs, the initiators and backbone of the movement? And why did it happen at this time?

The significance of choosing a particular instrument of social change--revolution, the ballot, or non-violent resistance for example--lends itself to more than a single explanation. One can interpret non-violent resistance, whether in South Africa, India, or America, in terms of realpolitik; when the other side has all the guns, it is convenient and wise to be non-violent. Or there is a moral explanation: the resisters regard violence as evil, under all circumstances. They feel that the dignity of man must be maintained even, or perhaps especially, in protest movements. And one can note that religion is a more active salient influence in the life of the Negro than of the white, and the southern Negro church is a more important agency of community cohesion and ethical teaching than is the northern today.

Both these insights into the reasons for non-violent resistance in the sit-in movement are no doubt valid. They deal with the Negroes' beliefs. In addition, one may profitably examine motives for the behavior which becomes fused with those beliefs.

Every minority group in America has sought to "better itself." The process of moving up and getting more, social mobility, involves learning how the middle class dresses, walks, talks, reads, buys, sells, eats, thinks, lies, steals, etc. All classes but the lower determine who shall enter into them. If one wants to become middle class, which in this context is defined as a white collar economic position and a constellation of surface forms that accompany it, one emulates those forms and somewhere along the way becomes employed in the white collar world.

The immigrant to America, of Italian, Irish, Jewish, Negro, or any other descent, has been discriminated against, that is to say, rejected by the middle class, not because of anything innately Italian, Irish, Jewish, or Negro, but because of the extreme difference in appearance and behavior between him and the already middle class American. The problem of tolerance in America has never been met by an acceptance of differences but by a reduction of them.

The American Nego is not a recent immigrant. But unlike the white immigrant groups, the Negroes did not join together in ethnic communities upon arrival in the "land of the free" and were thus not able together to accustom themselves to the new society and to pursue mobility aims in the classic Lower East Side-to-"respectable" apartments-to-suburbia fashion of the other major immigrant communities, Slavery meant that members of the same African village or tribe were forcibly separated and settled in different parts of this country and even that members of the same family were split from each other. Linguistic and cultural traditions were literally destroyed in the forced movement of Africans to the United States. A new culture had to be created. With no education, no economic opportunities, nothing indeed but subsistence living and that sweet soft singing' in the cotton-fields, the culture which has long been stereotyped as that of Crown and Amos 'n' Andy was born. Its predominant features, to the white observers, were sensuous ones --sex and uncontrolled violence.

With Emancipation, the Negro was free to do as he pleased in America; but the hoped-for change in status did not come about. In effect, as the New York Post remarked about Senator Byrd's practice of shipping in West Indies Negroes to work in his Southern orchards at less than the U.S. minimum wage, the white man no longer owned his slaves; he rented them. Some individual Negoes were able to earn positions of esteem in the Negro community and even gained respect in the white community, insofar as they became the liasons and chief deferrers to the whites. But nearly all Negroes remained in the economic lower classes.

The whites remained at best ambivalent toward the Negro culture. It represented much of what they had repressed in themselves. At worst, they distorted it terribly--stereotypes inevitably are caricatures, Partly because of little contact with Negroes, the whites did not recognize Negroes' desires to become middle class, that is, their increasingly widespread commitment to education, work, and non-violent behavior. The worst in Negro culture became no different from the worst in white culture, but through absence of personal acquaintance of whites and Negroes, the whole of Negro culture became inaccurately identified with the worst.

The problem of the Negro remained one of convincing the whites of his genuine commitment to middle class white values, in order to move successfully into the dominant American middle class life. He tried straightening his hair, and even bleaching his skin. But the guaranteed preparations didn't quite work. And so the Negro, albeit unconsciously, sought to convince the white that even if his appearance would never be white, his behavior did not conform to the stereotype of the sexually licentious, Knife-wielding darkie. In the fact of so little opportunity for mutual contact and understanding a spectacular tactic was called for.

It is the nature of such circumstances that the choice of tactic may, by unconscious design, meet the requirements of the moment. And this is what happened. The perfect way both to fight for one's rights and at the same time to convince one's opponent that one is not an uncontrolled savage, is to fight, to resist--non-violently. The pictures and stories of Negroes at lunch counters and on picket lines, being spat upon, cursed, struck, beaten, dragged away and yet never speaking back, never lifting a limb in self-defense--this "new Negro" broke the image of slovenly, slap-happy, sex-and violence- ridden Sambo, and dramatically demonstrated his commitment to middle class ethics.

The sit-ins were initiated by college students, picketing dime stores in their college towns. Although later joined by large numbers of working-class Negroes, college students were the logical initiators of the new social protest for a variety of reasons.

Integration in education, via the Supreme Court decision, had become the symbolic issue of equal rights. Except perhaps for their teachers, the students were most affected and most concerned about the inferior schools they and their younger brothers and sisters attended. As college students they knew that neither their college preparatory work not the courses of learning now open to them were on a par with those available in the North or even in the white South. They had sacrificed the immediate gratifications of job and family for education and were aware that on paper their degrees should entitle them to positions of responsibility and respect in the community. Yet in the South their expectation almost invariably met frustration. In a similar fashion college students in the 'thirties were faced with an unpredictable future and became active in liberal and radical protest movements, many of whose flavor and tactics paralleled those of the sit-ins.

An important aspect of college is that it removes most students from the conservative influence of home and establishes a community easily amenable to self-organization, discussion, and collective action. No other segment of the Negro community is organized so. Although college students are assembled fundamentally for the purpose of education and the social trappings that usually accompany it in this country, close association for these purposes blends readily into the possibility of organization for other purposes of common concern.

College students, too, more than any other group in the Negro community, are intellectually aware of the crime of discrimination. They study history, politics, economics, anthropology, sociology, biology, and psychology, and thereby become acquainted with the evidence for the innate equality of races, with the American ideal of legal and social equality, and with the fact of historical inequality. This group, then, is least likely to accept itself as inferior to the whites and most likely to pourish an emotional resentment of discrimination.

Members of a protest group put themselves in danger of suffering for their actions. Where households are involved, the threat of economic sanctions and physical violence is potentially overwhelming. The college student, away from his family, with no dependents of his own, and not yet tied to a position in the market structure of the community, is probably the freest political being in the society. Ideologically, he is in a college or university community, the one institution which takes most seriously the ethos of the society. Politically, he lives on campuses with others of identical interests. In most cases, because either of his youth or of his dark skin, he can not vote and so can neither organize via the polls not suffer the possibility of losing his vote.

The times, as well as the students, were appropriate for action. Sit-ins began in the border states, precisely where the implementation of the Supreme Court's 1954 school decision was evident, and where the Negro had been less intimidated than the deep South. After six years, there was "token integration" and little more in a number of school systems. Southern Negro college students recognized that token equality is in effect no equality at all.

World War II and the Korean conflict had taken thousands of Negroes away from their homes and into integrated armed services. Some were exposed to the experience of fairly dignified treatment in Northern cities and to a view of the life of the Northern Negro, at least a few steps better than that of the Southerner. Service in England, France, Germany, Norway, Denmark, Hawaii, Japan, Korea, gave new insights into the possibilities of interracial harmony and understanding. It may well be that large numbers of Negroes had never really accepted themselves as the legal, intellectual, and moral equals of the white man before this time. I recently met a young Negro woman, born and raised in Roxbury, Massachusetts, who told me that it had never occurred to her that the Negro was not inferior to the white until someone insisted she read Gunner Myrdal's An American Dilemma. Once familiar with Myrdal's thesis that America is split between loyalty to its ethical dictum of equality and its preference for a system of quasi-slavery, the lady resolved to learn more and to serve her people. She is now working nights to support her way through a social science course in college.

Although the American Negro has not a community historically continuous with those of his African ancestors, he can identify in a real way with the post World War II African countries' independence aspirations. Both the African and American Negroes have suffered the domination of the white man. Both now seek freedom and equality. The American Negro student has waited six years to see a handful of Negro students isolated and separated in otherwise all-white schools. How strange and embarrassing it must be for him to confront his African contemporary whose nation is planning and beginning to move from stone-age culture to industrialism in the course of a single generation.

Previous successful non-violent protests no doubt encouraged the Negroes to undertake new demonstrations. Most notable of the earlier successes was the 1956 Montgomery bus boycott, which also marked the emergence of strong magnetic leadership--an essential factor in the success of any sustained social movement. In the Montgomery conflict, Martin Luther King came to embody the ethic, the youth, the drive of the Negroes' protest. Although King was not on the scent in the early sit-ins,R-