Advanced Ideas About Democracy
Reading by Vincent Harding
A woman holds pennants at the National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana in 1972. Photo: LeRoy Henderson.
Theologian, historian, and nonviolent activist Vincent Harding (1931–2014) provides an annotated list of historic events for teaching the full story of the Civil Rights Movement.
Concrete historical examples from the post-World War II freedom movement are endless, but a number of them, outlined below, suffice to suggest the richness of the stories available for teaching about the struggle for democracy.
These excerpts were selected by the editors from Harding’s essay in Hope and History: Why We Must Share the Story of the Movement. They highlight stories that are not addressed in-depth elsewhere in Putting the Movement Back Into Civil Rights Teaching.
The Sit-ins and Freedom Rides
King’s 1966 Chicago Campaign
The Poor People’s Campaign
The Struggle for Black Studies and Black Education
Attica
The Gary Convention
The Sit-Ins and Freedom Rides
Reflection on these signal events of the early 1960s can only deepen our continuing sense of wonder at and appreciation for the powerful role played by young people in the mounting of awesome challenges to Southern antidemocratic practices, in the calling of the entire nation to its best self. What strikes us no less sharply is the fact that the distance from the sit-ins and freedom rides to Tiananmen Square is far shorter than we may imagine. For in both situations we are drawn by the great courage and moral authority of costly, nonviolent civil disobedience led by young people who are willing to die for the advancement of democracy in their society.
Facing these audacious actions, focusing on the sit-ins and freedom rides, it is impossible to escape certain central, continuing themes and questions crucial to the study and practice of expanding democracy: the role of youth; the power of sacrificial, often joyful, nonviolent direct action; the inevitability of frequently violent resistance from those who seek to maintain the status quo. And of course, there was always the important question: How shall nonviolent democratic activists respond to violent acts of repression? (During much of the sit-in and freedom-ride action, there was a conscious decision to respond to violence by regrouping and advancing even more deeply into the contested territory, refusing to allow the momentum to pass into the hands of the attackers.)
Finally, one of the most important issues brought to the fore by the study of the sit-ins and freedom rides was the capacity of such movements — largely by virtue of their audacity and sense of moral authority — to attract participating allies from the white majority and thereby offer them a new purpose in life.
King’s 1966 Chicago Campaign
This is an important counterpoint to the Mississippi story, for it provides significant lessons concerning some of the differences and similarities, between organizing for justice and democracy from Southern, rural-based settings, and carrying on such organizing work in the quintessential bastion of Northern, urban, de facto segregation. (How Chicago came to be such an archetype of American racism, and at the same time developed some of the nation’s most powerful Black urban cultural gifts, is another fascinating and paradoxical story for our students to explore.)
The immediate failure of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s (SCLC) relatively whirlwind kind of organizing approach, compared to the years of digging in, planting, nurturing, and harvesting that went on in Mississippi [by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party], is most instructive, especially for those of us who seek to work for justice and democratic development in such Northern settings.
Many important questions are raised here concerning the goals, methodologies, and focal points for pro-democracy work in the deteriorating cities, in the cities where poorer Black folks and their middle-class kindred are living farther and farther apart. (Some of these issues are best seen, of course, from a perspective like the story of the election of Harold Washington as the first Black mayor of Chicago, some 17 years after King’s 1966 campaign.) Here, too, as we consider the power of the forces of Mayor Richard Daley, it is possible to introduce and reflect on the role of urban political machines and their African American constituents. What has been their function as proponents of, or hindrances to, the flowering of serious democratic development?
At the same time, the King-Chicago story cannot be approached without our cultivating a sense of the great, explosive, urban pressures that were building in the United States by the time King’s organization arrived in that city, thus providing a very different and far more volatile setting for community organizing than had been known before. Indeed, one of the most important questions that arises out of the Chicago experience is the part played by the urban uprisings in the expansion of American democracy. How many doors to democratic participation were opened because of the fires on their threshold? What happens to such doors and the participatory access when the fires are banked — or when they begin to burn inwardly, out of control, consuming vital parts of many young lives?
The full article includes sections on the Poor People’s Campaign, the Struggle for Black Studies and Black Education, Attica, and the Gary Convention.
© 1990 Blackside Inc. Reprinted with permission from Vincent Harding, Hope and History: Why We Must Share the Story of the Movement (Orbis Books, 1990).
Intellectual McCarthyism
Scholar Charisse Burden-Stelly suggests there are more stories that are missing from the traditional curriculum on the Civil Rights Movement, obscured by what she refers to as intellectual McCarthyism. In an interview in April 2021 on The Dig podcast, she explains:
So because racial liberalism is by and large consonant with the pedagogy of the state, we know much more about, for example, a Thurgood Marshall than we know about a William Patterson, or we know about Brown v. Board of Education, but we don’t know as much about Scottsboro or the Rosa Lee Ingram case, or we know about the NAACP, but we don’t necessarily know about the Civil Rights Congress. And so I call this knowing and not knowing intellectual McCarthyism. And I think it’s import- ant to understand because when we only study Black liberalism, or when we try to read everything through a Black liberal framework, we miss the broader transformative or counter hegemonic or liberatory project as at the sort of intersection of Black liberation and socialism.
We often teach about the impact of McCarthyism on Hollywood and the labor movement. It would be important to also consider the impact it had on the Civil Rights Movement — and what is taught about that history in K-12 classrooms.