Quote of the Day (James Baldwin, on When Americans Must ‘Work Out Our Salvation’ on Civil Rights)

“There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.”—African-American novelist and essayist James Baldwin (1924-1987), Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)

This Day in Southern History (Supreme Court Intervenes in Racial Cause Celebre)

July 26, 1950—Heeding an appeal two days earlier by future Congresswoman Bella Abzug, Supreme Court Associate Justice Harold Burton issued a stay of execution for a convicted rapist whose case raised the issue of the impact of race on the Southern criminal justice system.

The action by Burton, the only Republican among the four appointed to the high court by President Harry Truman, incensed locals gathered at the Laurel, Miss., courthouse where the death of Willie McGee had been eagerly anticipated for the past four years. In annoyed terms that would echo in reaction to the civil-rights era that would begin in a few years, they denounced “damn Communists” and “outside interference,” according to a contemporary report by Time Magazine.

The complainers were referring to Abzug and the group that had hired her, the Civil Rights Congress (CRC), which was affiliated with the Communist Party and which had, since its founding in 1946, spearheaded battles for civil rights for African-Americans, and civil liberties for white and black labor movement radicals. But the CRC victory in 1950 was short-lived, as the full Supreme Court refused to handle the appeal of the case and McGee died in the electric chair in May 1951.

I came across a brief description of the McGee case in Leandra Ruth Zarnow’s recent biography, Battling Bella. It highlighted Abzug’s courage, as a young New York Jewish woman, in venturing into the Deep South at a time when Northern white liberals were not only regarded suspiciously in the region but threatened.

But there was comparatively little in the book about the defendant. For that, readers may want to check out an NPR news segment from 10 years ago that followed the efforts of his granddaughter to ferret out the truth. (Two years later, a full-scale account of the case, Alex Heard’s The Eyes of Willie McGee, would be published.)  

The case began in the fall of 1945, when local police charged McGee with breaking into the home of Willette Hawkins, a 32-year-old white housewife, threatening her with a knife and raping her, with one of her three children, her ailing 20-month-old daughter, by her side. McGee’s lawyers at this point did not mount a vigorous defense, even urging him to plead insanity.

The most damning charge against the prosecution’s case was the composition of the jury: Not a single Black served on it. Not surprisingly, it took the 12 men and women only 2½ minutes to sentence McGee to death. It bears noting that no white man in the state had ever received a death sentence for rape.

A retrial the following year introduced a new element--a confession supposedly signed by McGee but not introduced at the first trial--but a similar result: conviction in only 12 minutes.

Matters changed dramatically once Abzug was hired by the CRC in 1948. They would press a much more hotly disputed claim: that what happened between Mrs. Hawkins and McGee was not an assault but a consensual affair. In one stroke, they had touched the proverbial third rail: interracial sexual relations.

At the time of his arrest, supporters would say, McGee did not dare to make such a claim because he feared for his life—and, indeed, threats of lynching were so numerous and credible that he had to be transported in a National Guard truck and dressed in fatigues to conceal his identity.

Still lingering in the atmosphere was the notorious Scottsboro case, in which nine African-American youths had been charged with raping two white women on a train in Alabama in 1931. The McGee case had now become a cause celebre in its own right, as:

*"Save Willie McGee" events and petition drives were held across America;

*International supporters including Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Jean Cocteau, and Richard Wright organized a rally in Paris, with similar demonstrations in Moscow and China; and

*William Faulkner, Paul Robeson, Josephine Baker, Lorraine Hansberry, and Albert Einstein supported McGee.

But, if the CRC attracted publicity to the case, its Communist affiliation also may have limited its ultimate success. By the time of Abzug’s dramatic Supreme Court appeal and Burton’s stay of execution, Sen. Joseph McCarthy had garnered headlines with his sensational claims about Communists in the State Department. 

With the nation in the grip of the Red Scare, the NAACP, President Truman, and Eleanor Roosevelt—all normally champions of civil rights—avoided involvement.

McGee’s last message to his wife Rosalie, written the night before his electrocution, continues to resonate, nearly 70 years later:

To wife Rosalie, the night before he died: “Tell the people the real reason they are going to take my life is to keep the Negro down….They can’t do this as long as you and the children keep on fighting. Never forget to tell them why they killed their daddy. I know you won’t fail me. Tell the people to keep on fighting.”

Quote of the Day (John Sayles, on the 1980 GOP National Convention)

“In 1980, I covered the Republican National Convention in Detroit for a magazine [The New Republic]. The Republicans put most of their delegates across the river in a hotel in Canada. They put cardboard over the windows of the buses so when they went through the funky Detroit neighborhoods they wouldn’t see them on the way to the Joe Louis Arena. These delegates from Kansas and other parts of the country did not even see these neighborhoods, so in effect they could never admit that these areas exist. They never saw them. This is what you’re asked to do for most American films, and it may be appropriate for certain movies, but it’s one of the reasons that Americans don’t know anything about their own history.” — Indie actor-screenwriter-director-novelist John Sayles interviewed by Antonio D’Ambrosio, “An Interview with John Sayles,” The Believer (Issue 61, March 2009)

Forty years ago today, in his third attempt, Ronald Reagan took the decisive step in his 12-year campaign to achieve the nation’s highest office when he accepted the Republican nomination for President. He would go on to move the GOP in a new, more conservative direction and solidify the support of the party faithful in a manner not seen until the rise of Donald Trump. 

The so-called "Rockefeller Republicans" of moderate liberals--named for the New York Governor who, 20 years before, had successfully pressed Richard Nixon to add a more pro-civil-rights stance to the party platform at that year's convention--were well on their way to dinosaur status.

With a genial smile and a wave of the hand, Reagan had also confirmed that the Republican commitment to civil rights that had been a part of its philosophy since Abraham Lincoln had considerably softened—or, at very least, had become secondary to its visceral dislike of government, the primary means for ensuring equality before the law.

In his acceptance speech at the convention, Reagan hailed "that American spirit which knows no ethnic, religious, social, political, regional, or economic boundaries." It is easy to miss from the sonorous tones that the word "racial" is missing from this list. From the perspective of 2020, it is much harder to miss a particularly piquant phrase: "a great national crusade to make America great again."

The role of racism in the GOP realignment that began with Richard Nixon’s election in 1968 is a fraught one. Arguing that race has been central to the swing toward the GOP over the last half-century is counter-productive, as it not only angers individuals who resent being labeled racist, but also fails to account for the concerns of particular elections, including prosperity and national security.

But the observation by filmmaker John Sayles offers another way of viewing this. After the postwar period of convulsions over race, much of the electorate preferred not to look at its continuing presence on the American scene. It was just too ugly and painful. Better to move away, even to block one’s view of this.

That tendency was embodied in Reagan. In a PBS “Newshour”roundtable discussion of "The Reagan Legacy" with Jim Lehrer following the President’s death in 2004, historian Richard Norton Smith noted that Reagan was “one of those classic examples of conservative Republicans who on the personal level would gift their shirt off their back to someone in need whoever it is but who on a cultural and philosophical level can often be accused of at least insensitivity.” He was personally kind to individual African-Americans.

In recent years, Reagan’s stock among historians has risen, with Siena College Research Institute poll results released last year showing that he had risen from 18^th in the last time these scholars were surveyed to 12^th. But I think that improvement will itself come in for revision, and that Reagan will slip back to something close to his prior ranking.

Although the U.S. economy recovered in the Reagan era, the results were not shared evenly. Inequality rose during his eight years in office, as shown by Capital and Main’s Abby Kingsley in an article for Fast Company Magazine. Numerous initiatives begun during his administration widened the gap between rich and poor, including:

* The Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 1981, which made hundreds of thousands of families ineligible for Aid to Families with Dependent Children;

* A 74% reduction in the budget allocation for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in the 1980s;

*Reagan’s 1981 breaking of a strike by the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, which dramatically underscored the decline of American unions;

*The 1981 tax cut, which reduced the tax burden for the top bracket while redistributing it toward the middle; and

*Stock buybacks' legalization in 1981 by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which encouraged corporations to prioritize stock value over distributing earnings to employees through bonuses or salary raises.

African-Americans’ economic advances, only recently gained, were materially affected by all of this. Reagan’s tone and rhetoric likewise signaled that Blacks could not look to the federal government for help. 

Campaigning in Georgia in 1980, the candidate noted that Confederate President Jefferson Davis was “a hero of mine.” His continual invocation of “states’ rights” cut little ice with a group that had heard that concept used to undercut their rightful demand for their own rights at the ballot box and in the workplace.

Reagan's belief in laissez-faire government was matched only by his laissez-faire managerial style—a work practice that got him in trouble during the Iran-contra scandal. He simply did not notice things, much like the bus riders from outside Detroit who propelled him toward the Presidency in July 1980.

Whatever else happens this election year, there will be no more cardboard that can be used to obscure  problems experienced by African-Americans. It will be impossible to turn away from them again, and the burden will be all the heavier on Americans 40 years after the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan to find the solutions that he did not see as a priority.

Quote of the Day (Paige Glotzer, on the Real Origins of Baltimore’s Struggles)

“Going back to the 19th century, there’s a long history of Baltimore officials trying to cordon off what areas of the city black people could live in. A lot of policies grew out of that, like where roads, highways and schools were built….Housing segregation set Baltimore up to be one of the hardest hit cities in the subprime housing crisis. That was because a lot of the lending that spurred the crisis was predatory, based in long-time policies of housing segregation. That meant cities such as Baltimore had many areas that had very high foreclosure rates. Especially after the recession, the city really did lose a lot of its tax base and people not only lost their jobs like so many others across the country, but also lost their homes. We’re still dealing with the impact on having so many people, especially African Americans, have their wealth wiped out through foreclosure and housing segregation.”— Paige Glotzer, a former Baltimore resident and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, quoted in Mahita Gajanan, “Long Before Trump's Tweets, Baltimore Had Become a 'Target.' Here's How Segregation Helped Create Its Problems,” Time, July 29, 2019 

For any reader who might nod in agreement with Donald Trump about Baltimore being a rodent- and crime-ridden city, even being the Democrats are fools to rush to the city’s defense, you might want to start by understanding how the city got to this sorry point, through a little bit of history—a subject I suspect the President never has studied much. Paige Glotzer’s reflections are an excellent place to begin.

After that, you might be interested in seeing which other cities are rat-infested. Guess what? Quite a number are in red states the President won in 2016—though it is unlikely you’ll ever hear him allude to this.

Finally, you might want to know about at least one force responsible for the rodent problem: son-in-law Jared Kushner’s own company.

Surprise, surprise!

Quote of the Day (Reinhold Niebuhr, on Race Pride as ‘A Perennial Corruption of Man's Collective Life’)

“If we imagine that race pride is only a vestigial remnant of barbarism, which civilization is in the process of sloughing off; if we do not understand it as a perennial corruption of man's collective life on every level of social and moral achievement, we are bound to follow wrong policies in dealing with specific aspects of the problem. An engineer who dammed up an ocean inlet under the illusion that he was dealing with a mountain stream would be no more foolish than our social engineers who are constantly underestimating the force and the character of the social stuff that they are manipulating.” — American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), Love and Justice: Selections from the Shorter Writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, edited by D. B. Robertson (1957)

Quote of the Day (Kerry Washington, on Race and Limitations)

“I don't want to not be African. The goal is to live in a world where my race doesn’t limit my access, where I can see myself represented in the highest level of society without any limitation." —Actress Kerry Washington, on preferring not to live in a color-blind world, quoted in “Kerry Washington: I Choose to Feel Optimistic, Because I Couldn't Get Out of Bed Otherwise,” In Style, September 2016

Quote of the Day (James Baldwin, on Those Who Think ‘History Flatters Them’)

“People who imagine that history flatters them (as it does, indeed, since they wrote it) are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin and become incapable of seeing or changing themselves, or the world.”—African-American novelist-essayist James Baldwin (1924-1987), “White Man’s Guilt,” Ebony, August 1965, collected in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948-1985 (1985)

One of the great pleasures of listening to Regina King graciously accepting her Best Supporting Actress Oscar early in the week was her immediate acknowledgement of the man who originated If Beale Street Could Talk, the property that won her the award: author James Baldwin.

Given my lack of time and tight writing schedule in recent years, I have read Baldwin’s nonfiction—The Fire Next Time and his essays—rather than If Beale Street Could Talk or his other novels. I hope to remedy this, at some point.

In the meantime, Baldwin’s urgent, eloquent polemics on racism remain, unfortunately, all too relevant these days. A teen preacher who gave up his ministry, Baldwin remained a secular prophet to the end of his days, warning that the condition that Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal called “An American Dilemma” would imperil the nation’s future as surely as it had poisoned its past.

This past week, further underscoring Baldwin’s continuing significance, we witnessed multiple revelations in Congressional testimony by a convicted fixer about the former boss who once couldn’t get enough of his schemes, a politician who thinks that “history flatters” him. 

Yet none of these has dismayed me as much as the “Make America Great Again” hats worn by friends or “liked” in their Facebook posts. 

I try to get my mind around the idea that so many people I have known all my life support the kleptocrat who popularized that phrase, a monster of privilege and power who has been unable to convincingly rebut the story that he referred to nations led by African-descended heads of state as “shithole countries,” or that African-Americans would be “too stupid” to vote for him.

In 1965, Baldwin complained when the moderately liberal Robert Kennedy made the prescient prediction that in 40 years an African-American might become President: “From the point of view of the man in the Harlem barber shop, Bobby Kennedy only got here yesterday and now he is already on his way to the Presidency. We were here for 400 years and now he tells us that maybe in 40 years, if you are good, we may let you become President.”

For all his continual rage about the state of race relations he displayed at points like this, by the 1980s Baldwin lamented, watching the ascent of Ronald Reagan to the Presidency, that he had underestimated “the reality, the depth, and the persistence of the delusion of white supremacy in this country.” 

I think he would laugh bitterly at the notion that the nation’s first African-American President would spark a reaction based on the most preposterous political urban legend propagated in my lifetime: the “birther” movement favored by only one GOP primary candidate in 2016—the successful one!—and teasingly embraced by a North Carolina Congressman who is now offended by any suggestion that he might be racist.

For those who want to “Make America Great Again,” I have two questions:

1)What stopped it from being great?

2)When did it stop being great?

The answers to those two questions will not only shed much light on how history is currently understood—or, really, misunderstood—by a large part of the electorate, but what hope might exist, if any, of bringing America to become the nation for which Baldwin so desperately yearned.

In a way, it is not surprising that the current occupant of the Oval Office believes that “history flatters” him; how can he believe otherwise when he understands neither himself nor history? What is surprising—to me, anyway—is how many people still believe him, even as evidence of his mismanagement and criminal ways grows daily. 

One of Baldwin’s novels is Another Country. But the same title can do double-duty to describe a new realm created by our current President. 

I know that bigotry and violence dotted America’s past, but I never thought till now that a wider, safer space could be created for the intersecting forces of racial division, class resentment and unreason. 

But, far better than anyone thought at the time, Baldwin anticipated much of the current mass psychology that has led America to its present uncertain state:

“The history of white people has led them to a fearful baffling place where they have begun to lose touch with reality – to lose touch, that is, with themselves—and where they certainly are not truly happy, for they know they are not truly safe. They do not know how this came about; they do not dare examine how this came about.”