The post Former Director of the ACLU LGBT Project Matt Coles appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The post Civil Rights Historian Daphne Chamberlain appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Today, it peers out from above the kind of gastropub where you can order a $16 cocktail, easily fitting in with this gentrifying part of Sunset Boulevard, once known as a working-class Latino neighborhood and gay enclave. By the end of this year, the space next to the Black Cat is slated to become a Shake Shack, joining the likes of luxury supermarket chain Erewhon a block west.

Fifty-five years ago, though, photographs captured a different Black Cat, a gay bar that inspired civilians to gather under those large feline eyes and protest the unfair treatment of LGBTQ people. The photographs unsettle the mainstream LGBTQ rights narrative that begins at Stonewall and ends in marriage equality. They place Los Angeles at the locus of the fight, in addition to other cities like New York and San Francisco. They anchor the gay bar not only as a place that once scandalized society with the tenderness patrons showed one another, but also as a site of political struggle.

At the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve into 1967, the mood at the Black Cat was joyous: a trio of Black women called the Rhythm Queens sang a rock version of “Auld Lang Syne,” balloons fell, and imbibing bargoers, some in drag, embraced and kissed—men kissing men, women kissing women—as is wont on that night, at that hour.

Few knew that a dozen plainclothes cops scattered about the bar —part of what were called vice squads—were about to inform their uniformed partners outside to come in, raid the bar, and arrest its patrons for dancing and kissing one another, which was then criminalized as “lewd” conduct.

What happened next has since been characterized as a riot, but those who were there at the Black Cat describe an assault, a sudden and violent raid with little resistance. Uniformed police “rushed in and began to swing billy clubs, tear down leftover Christmas ornaments, break furnishings, and beat several men brutally,” one witness later recalled. Fourteen people, patrons and employees, were forced face down on the sidewalk and arrested. Police chased two men down the street to New Faces, another popular gay bar, and beat the owner, a woman named Lee Roy. They had mistaken her for a man in women’s clothing, having heard the name “Leroy.” When a bartender stepped in to protect her, they beat him as well, until he lost consciousness.

The New Year’s raid on the Black Cat came at a time when every state in the country had anti-sodomy laws and on the heels of anti-gay McCarthyism known as the Lavender Scare, a witch hunt that had reverberations in the upper echelons of the nation—President Lyndon B. Johnson’s closest aide, Walter Jenkins, was even arrested on a “morals charge” and forced to resign in 1964. And in Los Angeles, the Black Cat raid was one of many documented instances when the LAPD harassed, entrapped, and assaulted LGBTQ people. Often these raids resulted in plea deals, or a fine running from $1,000 to $1,500. But that wasn’t the case at the Black Cat. Six of the people arrested there were tried by jury and found guilty of lewd conduct. Two had to register as sex offenders.

Gay Angelenos’ anger and frustration toward the system had already been reaching a breaking point. Just two years prior, there had been an uprising at a popular 24-hour diner downtown called Coopers Do-nuts, complete with a crowd throwing donuts at arresting officers. What happened at the Black Cat now inspired a new coalition of gay rights organizations, helmed by Personal Rights in Defense and Education (PRIDE), and other groups facing harassment by police—hippies, anti-war activists, club owners targeted by curfews—to join together in protest two months later, on February 11, 1967. 

The gathering of several hundred people marked a watershed moment for the gay rights movement—one of the first times LGBTQ people made such a large public demand for recognition, and a promise to push back against police harassment and repression. The demonstration reframed the struggle as a fight for the civil rights of gay people and other minority communities who faced police abuse.

Although gay activists intentionally left the word “homosexual” off of their signage to appease protesters who were not prepared to take an explicitly gay rights stance, organizer Jim Kepner gave a rousing speech that called for gay people to stand up as gay people. Kepner called for building a coalition, with Black and Latino communities across L.A., to fight police violence, but found it unacceptable that even in struggle LGBTQ people weren’t recognized as such: “[T]he time has come when the love that dared not speak its name will never again be silenced. We’ve been copping out to society for centuries.”

Raids targeting gay people in Los Angeles continued after the Black Cat, and so did resistance. But the histories of this civic protest are largely neglected in the mainstream origin story of gay rights, which usually starts with the demonstrations that rocked New York City’s Stonewall Inn in 1969, and forgets altogether that it took moments like the raid at the Black Cat to make Stonewall happen. It’s a reminder that the most important framing in struggles for liberation should not be “we did it first” but rather “we did it, too.”

Today, the Black Cat serves as a more visible monument to a pre-Stonewall past. In 2008, working with longtime Silver Lake resident and activist Wes Joe, the Los Angeles Historical Conservancy designated the Black Cat a Historical-Cultural Monument for its “early and significant role in the LGBTQ civil rights movement.” The group installed a plaque that sums up the progress wrought: gay people won the right to patronize bars openly, to no longer suffer legal or labor repercussions for their sexuality, and, eventually, to participate in the institution of marriage. The plaque also reminds us that Silver Lake was the “gayborhood” before West Hollywood’s “Boystown,” populated by leather and dance bars, and the fruits of a good, if unfair, fight.

The site’s profile was heightened in 2017, when city officials and gay rights organizers reenacted the historic protest on its 50th anniversary. Mayor Eric Garcetti and several officers from the LAPD attended. One of the officers approached activist Alexei Romanoff, who had helped organize the 1967 protest, and thanked him. It was a moment that showed how far things had come, Romanoff later said.

The deep irony is that this recognition came at a time when the space no longer identified as a “gay” bar. In some ways, the Black Cat in its current resurrection stands then as a metaphor for a movement that made long strides toward equality only to have seemingly dead-ended in marriage.

Back in 1967, the media didn’t cover the demonstration outside the Black Cat, but unknown participants took photographs, which are now housed at the ONE Archives Foundation, the oldest operating LGBTQ organization in the United States, at the University of Southern California libraries. These rare photos help us begin to piece together a longer and more accurate history of the movement for gay civil rights.

Today, the Black Cat, too, displays these photographs of the protest, amid walls crowded with art. The images demand we think more deeply about what the struggle for gay bars was actually about, and what the struggle to preserve them means. Signs from 1967—“BLUE FASCISM MUST GO!” “POLICE LAWLESSNESS MUST BE STOPPED” “END ILLEGAL ENTRAPMENT”— echo the slogans calling to “defund the police” and “end police brutality” that appeared on the same street in 2020 after an officer murdered George Floyd and sparked nationwide protests.

Such glimpses into the past beg the question of whether the new Black Cat could use its history to expand that fight. Could it become a site for political action against police brutality, “Don’t Say Gay” laws, anti-trans violence? The photographs ask what fight has been lost, now that the space is no longer so anchored to its queer history.

Outside, the ubiquitous cartoon cat may still hang, but its shadow these days is dark and elongated, stretching long and thinning out at its head—having mostly run its course.

The post Can a Historic L.A. Bar’s Queer History Still Demand Justice? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That’s an incredible achievement over the short span of a decade. However, climate divestment’s increasing visibility has also cultivated an audience of detractors who argue that it is ineffective. Bill Gates is famously skeptical of the benefits of divestment because it doesn’t directly stop carbon emissions the way innovation in new low-carbon technologies might. Other opponents claim that divestment cannot meaningfully change the demand for fossil fuels. Divestment might lower share prices, but according to these critics, those lower prices make them attractive to less ethical investors, making the strategy self-defeating. Going a step further,  such critics even claim that divestment’s economic harm to companies has always been minimal—that it was so even in apartheid-era South Africa, where divestment as a tactic was born.

The problem with these critiques is that measuring divestment’s success solely on its financial impacts is a mistake. Focusing on short-term balance sheets obscures divestment’s true power: the strategy changes minds and mobilizes action, with effects that reach far beyond targeted investors and companies.

What happened in South Africa shows why this is the case. From 1960 through the 1980s, anti-apartheid activists were unable to persuade governments to push back against South Africa’s oppressive racial laws. American presidents, for example, were loath to act because South Africa was an important ally during the Cold War, acting as a regional policeman and actively warring against Marxist groups in neighboring countries. Individual congressmen were often sympathetic to imposing sanctions on South Africa, but overriding a president meant building a bipartisan movement—and creating consensus, even within a political party, took time. With governments unwilling to take action, activists in the United States and elsewhere had to look for different ways to undermine apartheid. They turned to divestment, refusing to invest in companies that did business in South Africa.

But divestment was not seen as a way to hurt the South African economy, or even to punish U.S. companies. In 1966, minister and activist George M. Houser, who helped found the American Committee on Africa (ACOA), a group dedicated to opposing colonialism in Africa, wrote a strategy paper advocating what he called “disengagement”—both withdrawing existing investments and prohibiting new ones. It reflected a growing consensus on how to strike at South Africa. At the time, ACOA was working with other groups to boycott Chase Bank (then known as Chase Manhattan Bank) because of its policy of lending to South Africa. “This campaign is not based upon the thesis that even if all of the economic power of the United States was brought to bear…the architects of apartheid would feel they had to accept new policies,” wrote Houser. Rather, he argued that this type of disengagement policy “would materially affect the outlook of many other powerful countries.” Houser’s model was the strategy that became divestment, and in many ways, continues to guide the movement today.

Initially, the tactic targeted specific companies and financial institutions who engaged in high profile projects in South Africa. In addition to the Chase campaign, Polaroid was targeted in 1970 for selling its photographic equipment for use in producing the hated passbooks used to control the movement of people in South Africa. Then, in the mid-1970s, activists began to pressure city and state governments to remove investments from companies working in South Africa.

Divestment gained steam with small victories, such as at Hampshire College in 1977 and the University of Wisconsin in 1978. Within a decade, companies found themselves constantly under criticism for their presence in South Africa. As divestments multiplied, some companies did decide to withdraw from the country.

But beyond these material effects, divestment had one huge effect that even Houser and others might not have fully foreseen: it helped build a truly national anti-apartheid movement in the United States. Up until divestment, the anti-apartheid movement in the United States saw limited success. While ACOA was technically a national committee, it was primarily a New York institution. During the Chase Bank campaign, the civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph referred to the anti-apartheid cause as “the germ of a movement.” Some activists launched consumer boycotts, but sustaining such efforts could be difficult, because many South African goods exported to the United States, such as platinum, could often be difficult to boycott. And as long as South Africa dodged the news cycle, it took the wind out of organizing sails. But divestment broke through. Where Houser was hoping to sway other countries into supporting sanctions, the strategy worked on the hearts and minds of people within the United States.

What made divestment different, and ultimately so popular? Some of it was moral appeal. It’s no coincidence that the movement gained strength quickly in churches and on college campuses: whether or not you could stop apartheid, profiting from it was immoral. Part of it, too, was political. Activists had great success reminding Americans that even as U.S. companies were shedding manufacturing jobs, they were taking advantage of cheap labor in South Africa. Amidst poverty in the United States, investments in an oppressive and immoral regime seemed doubly hypocritical.

Image created by Angus Crutcher.

But even more successful was the way that divestment created opportunities for action: in the words of activist Cherri Waters, “movements need something for people to do.” Divestment created tangible targets for people to organize around and against that were also specific to where they lived: university pension boards, church investment boards, and local governments. Lobbying these organizations was effective. Not coincidentally, this helped the movement to spread all across the country.

This widespread activation led many Republicans to endorse sanctions against South Africa against the wishes of Ronald Reagan. It simply became too difficult to ignore their constituents. Richard Lugar, a prominent Republican senator from Indiana, began supporting sanctions after complaining that he couldn’t go to his kids’ baseball games without constituents asking him what he was going to do about apartheid. Privately, Lugar was skeptical that sanctions would pass, but the pressure to do something simply became overwhelming. Congress authorized sanctions against South Africa in 1986, precisely because of that pressure.

The critics are right, in a way: divestment’s economic impact on companies was small during the anti-apartheid movement. Lowered U.S. share prices on their own were not economically damaging to South Africa. Even the withdrawal of businesses was largely a blow to South African morale.

But that doesn’t undercut the importance of divestment as a strategy. By increasing awareness of apartheid and the U.S. role in sustaining it, divestment activated a core of people who would support other actions against South Africa and beyond. This is the best way to understand divestment’s power then, and its power today. Stigmatizing companies and lowering investor confidence is important, but the tactic’s primary advantage is that it organizes people, gives them an action to accomplish, and leaves them open to pushing for even more substantive change.

Against climate change, which is not a human target and which isn’t an effect of the same sheer evil that undergirded apartheid, this approach is all the more critical. Whether it affects the bottom line or not, building a movement of people is what matters.

The post Why Divestment Defeated Apartheid and How It Might Help Beat Climate Change appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Fannie Lou Hamer—a poor, middle-aged, Black sharecropper—wasn’t having it. That August, she testified before a convention committee, alongside better-known civil rights activists, including Martin Luther King Jr., and demanded the right to represent the citizens of Mississippi as a party delegate.

Hamer was not the typical face of the growing movement, dominated by elite men and youthful radical activists, but a Mississippi Delta cotton picker with a sixth-grade education. She sat at a witness table, the committee chair behind her, stared down by 100 rank and file members and nearly 200 spectators and reporters. Two male colleagues had already read prepared statements, to little response from the audience; Hamer’s speech buzzed with authentic personal and emotional experience, and it stole the show. Her voice rose as she recounted virulent racism and state-sanctioned terror. She told how a white landlord, W.D. Marlow, evicted her from the land she farmed and the home she shared with her husband and daughters—simply because she tried to register to vote. She described how police beat her brutally, just for trying to teach other people how to register to vote. Hamer’s eight-minute plea ended with a haunting question: “Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where…our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?”

Hamer’s words resonate today, as the fight for voting rights for Black Americans and other marginalized groups continues. On November 3, Republicans blocked the John Lewis Voting Rights Act from advancing in the Senate, denying Democrats the opportunity to restore voting protections enshrined in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and recently struck down by the Supreme Court. Then, as now, Hamer’s story reminds us that famous leaders like Dr. King do not stand alone in confronting those who remain deaf to the voices of justice and unity. Ordinary Americans, too, must step up to demand change.

Hamer fought her way up from one of the poorest and most segregated places in the country to challenge a deeply divided nation. Born in October of 1917, she was the 20th child of Jim and Ella Townsend. At the time, one in four Black children in Mississippi did not live to see their fifth birthday due to malnutrition and lack of access to medical care; most hospitals refused admittance to women of color and their families. Seven of the Townsends’ children died before Hamer’s birth.

As sharecroppers farming cotton, the family was stuck in a perpetual cycle of poverty, borrowing from their landlord to cover the costs of housing, seed, equipment, and work animals, and purchasing food, clothing, and medicine at inflated prices through the landlord-owned and operated plantation commissary. Before paying the family at settlement time in December, the landlord deducted all these accrued expenses from their commissary account. If the price of cotton was high, the Townsends were able to save a little money to survive the winter. Most years, though, their share barely covered their debts. “We would just, you know, exist. Not really live, exist,” Hamer later told an interviewer.

Hamer started picking cotton at age six. She was a bright child, but by sixth grade she’d dropped out of school to help pay the family’s expenses, which would only be pressed tighter during the Great Depression. Some of her siblings moved North, or sharecropped elsewhere. In 1939, Hamer’s father, a part-time Baptist minister who supplemented the family’s income by bootlegging, died of a stroke. By then her mother had gone blind and was completely dependent on Hamer for food and shelter. Hamer found solace in her church, where the Bible and her powerful singing voice gave her spiritual and emotional comfort. In 1944, she married Perry “Pap” Hamer, a sharecropper and mechanic on the W.D. Marlow plantation outside of Ruleville, in Sunflower County. By this time, prosperity had increased in the Mississippi Delta, but many landlords continued to cheat their sharecroppers. Around her, Hamer saw fellow African Americans linger in abject poverty, unable to vote to improve their situation.

Changes were starting to brew in post-World War II America. Challenges to Jim Crow laws reached the Supreme Court, including Brown v. Board of Education, which overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine that preserved racial segregation in American schools. But in places like Mississippi white supremacists pushed back. Black people who asserted their constitutional rights faced threats, economic reprisals, physical assaults, and murder.

Hamer would have been aware of all of this when, in 1961, young people involved with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a civil rights organization founded in April 1960, came to Mississippi to empower local people to register to vote. Hamer was living with Pap and their daughters on the Marlows’ cotton plantation when SNCC activists made it to Ruleville. Hamer knew the risks in getting involved with SNCC—violence, harassment, or worse from white neighbors—but also realized she must act. In recent months, a local white doctor had sterilized her without her consent after she sought treatment for benign uterine tumors; the procedure was so common for poor Black women that it was known as a “Mississippi appendectomy.” Unable to demand restitution or accountability from the doctor, Hamer became “sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

SNCC offered her a glimpse of what was possible—the seeds for liberation. The group represented the beginning of a “New Kingdom right here on earth,” she later remarked, and “the hope that we prayed for so many years.” With the group’s support, Hamer took the voter registration literacy test; within hours, Marlow evicted her but demanded Pap and their daughters stay to finish picking the season’s crop. Unprepared, Hamer moved from neighbor to neighbor until she found a small rental. The SNCC promptly hired her to work as a community field representative to help other people register, recognizing her natural leadership abilities and nurturing them through personal and professional training. Encouraged by SNCC and other civil rights organizations, Hamer began organizing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to represent Black and marginalized Mississippians.

On June 9, 1963, Hamer and several SNCC colleagues were returning home to Mississippi after two weeks in Charleston, South Carolina, where they learned nonviolent protest and voter registration techniques. During a layover at a bus terminal in Winona, Mississippi, police arrested them for trying to integrate the terminal restaurant and washrooms—despite recently enacted federal rulings outlawing segregated seating on interstate buses and in terminals. The police department in Winona was known for unrestrained cruelty toward Black prisoners. Hamer and her colleagues survived four days of terror, including brutal beatings and sexual assault, before they were released.

In the convention hearing room in Atlantic City, Hamer relayed what she’d been through in stark terms, describing the punches and “horrible screams” that echoed in the Winona jail, and how the police pulled up her dress, exposing her bare body. The television audience was awed; President Lyndon Johnson, who listened to the convention live, was frightened. While he personally agreed that Mississippi, with a population that was half Black, shouldn’t be allowed to seat an all-white delegation at the convention, he was losing support from white southern Democrats who were flocking to the segregationist George Wallace and the ultra-conservative Barry Goldwater. Seeking to blunt the impact of Hamer’s speech, Johnson called a press conference to pull cameras away from the hearing room, and soon negotiated an agreement with prominent civil rights leaders, including Dr. King, to seat the all-white delegation and give a paltry two nonvoting seats to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

Hamer was deeply betrayed—“We didn’t come all this way for no two seats,” she told a reporter—but her demands for representation had not failed. A year later, Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which reinforced the rights secured by the 14th and 15th Amendments, made poll taxes and literacy tests illegal, voided other laws that obstructed the rights of citizens to vote, and allowed federal registrars to monitor voter registrations and elections in states with histories of disenfranchisement. In 1968, at the DNC convention in Chicago, a reconstituted Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, now known as the Loyalist Party, was seated on the floor; Mississippi’s all-white delegation was turned away. A record 340 Black delegates and alternates from across the country sat and voted for the party’s nominees. In 2006, President George W. Bush signed the Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, and Coretta Scott King Voting Rights Act Reauthorization and Amendments Act of 2006, reaffirming the 1965 law.

Today America faces a new voting rights crossroads—the kind of moment Hamer, who continued to face hardship but continued her activism until her death in 1977, would find all too familiar. In 2013, the Supreme Court reversed key provisions of the Voting Rights Act. Federal oversight rolled back. State and local officials closed polling sites, made voting hours shorter, purged voter rolls, and passed stricter voter ID laws. In September, Texas passed SB1, one of the most restrictive voting laws in the nation.

Once again, it is harder to vote in minority and poor communities, and once again, advocates are pushing back. On November 4, the Department of Justice sued Texas over SB1, arguing that it violates federal voting rights laws. Congress is still considering the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. If these bills become law, they will help secure voting rights by setting national standards safeguarding access to the ballot, improving election security, ending congressional gerrymandering, securing elections from foreign influence and dark money, and easing access to voter IDs.

This time around, we don’t have Fannie Lou Hamer to call on us to fix our deeply and profoundly broken democracy. But we carry her story, which reminds us of the travails generations of Black Americans have endured in the fight for their civil rights—and that a single, ordinary voice can bring about the extraordinary change we want to see.

The post The Mississippi Sharecropper Who Helped Black Americans Win Voting Rights appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Finally coming face-to-face with Bertonneau’s image, I was shocked. I had been reading about Bertonneau for book research. But while Bertonneau fought valiantly for the rights of black Americans, he didn’t look “black” himself. In the photo, his skin was fair, his eyes were light, and his hair was wavy. In contemporary America he might read as Latino, with a complexion somewhere on the spectrum between Pope Francis pale and Marco Rubio tan. Looking at the late great Bertonneau reminded me that the way passersby perceive a stranger’s race on the streets of America doesn’t necessarily match their actual background. Indeed, one’s own ethnic background may not even be what one assumes it is—as genetic testing has recently made clear to millions of Americans.

The leading civil rights litigants of the Reconstruction era, including Bertonneau, lived these complex racial realities—and it led them to challenge racism by challenging the concept of race itself. Most were openly mixed-race Creoles from New Orleans with roots in both Africa and Europe. This gave them a piercing perspective on American white supremacy and a unique legal arsenal for attacking it.

The most famous civil rights plaintiff of them all, Homer Plessy, who challenged railcar segregation at the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896, was described in the African American New Orleans Crusader newspaper as being “as white as the average white Southerner.” To launch his case, he had had to out himself to the train conductor as mixed-race to get ejected from the whites-only car. Plessy’s ethnic background was estimated to be seven-eighths European and one-eighth African but it was impossible to pin down for sure. That was the whole point. As Plessy’s lawyers asked the Supreme Court justices, “Is not the question of race … very often impossible of determination?” Plessy’s case was an attempt to resist not merely segregation but binary racial labels like “white” and “colored” altogether.

It was only after Plessy, Bertonneau, and the other leaders of the first civil rights movement had been defeated—and indeed because of their defeat—that the black-white binary solidified. Even on the Census, multiracial options dwindled and then died out. Tellingly, on the 1910 Census, Homer Plessy was black but, in 1920, white.

These early Creole civil rights activists who fought against the constricting racial categories of “black” or “white” defined themselves not by color but by culture—much as Latinos in the U.S. do today. Creoles came in every shade and had no pretense to racial purity. What bound the community together was their linguistic roots in a Romance language—French and its Caribbean Kreyol off-shoots—and their Mediterranean-influenced mindset.

Following the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, as Latin American Nouvelle-Orléans/Nueva Orleans was turned into Anglo-American New Orleans, the Creole community was racialized by outsiders. Anglo-Americans, who were wary of influential free-born Creoles and who were increasingly making “whiteness” a prerequisite for citizenship, obsessed over who among the Creoles had family-tree roots in African soil. The Anglo-Americans began revoking rights, including suffrage, on the murky basis of “race.” Soon after the purchase, they passed an “anti-miscegenation” law requiring whites to marry whites, blacks to marry blacks, and biracial people to marry one another.

Activists like Bertonneau and Plessy, who descended from this third group, fought against all racial categorizations. They were skeptical of the Anglos’ concept of race and their arrogant presumption to assign it on sight. After all, Plessy had had to explicitly tell the train conductor that he was mixed-race to launch his test case.

For nearly 30 years, Creole activists brought a series of cases that needled the Anglo-Americans’ binary view of race. This legal tradition was launched at the height of Radical Reconstruction when the light-skinned newly elected Orleans Parish sheriff, Charles St. Albin Sauvinet, was refused a drink in a French Quarter bar in 1870 and responded by suing for “violation of his civil rights.” In court, the Creole Sauvinet explained that his roots were in the Caribbean, where race was no black-or-white matter. “Whether I am a colored man or not is a matter I myself do not know,” he told the court. And he pointed out that no one could know anyone’s race for sure. Of his two drinking buddies, he remarked, “Finnegan and Conklin who were with me are said to be white men. I do not know. To all appearances they are.” But, of course, as Sherriff Sauvinet himself proved, you couldn’t necessarily ascertain people’s backgrounds by sight.

Sauvinet’s line of argument was seconded by Creole civil rights plaintiff Josephine DeCuir in her challenge to riverboat segregation. In 1872, she’d bought a first-class “ladies’ cabin” ticket for a journey upriver from New Orleans only to be asked to move to the inferior “colored cabin.” The ship’s crew cuttingly referred that section as “the Freedman’s Bureau,” which DeCuir took as a grave insult since she’d been born free into a wealthy slave-holding family. In court, DeCuir, who had roots on the European, African, and North American continents, was described as being the color of a “law book.” To problematize the whole concept of race for the jury, her attorney called to the stand a light-skinned French Quarter resident of Caribbean descent, one Mr. Duconge. In New Orleans, where his Creole heritage was widely known, Duconge explained, he was considered a person of color but in the rest of America, where he was a stranger, he was considered a white man. Hoping to show the jury how absurd the American racial system looked—and, indeed, still looks—to the rest of the world, he offered the statement: “the difference between a white man and a colored man is that the colored man has a darker face than the white man, but you can find a quantity of colored men reputed to be colored men who have white faces.”

Creoles then, like Latinos now, accepted that in the New World—in the U.S. no less than the Caribbean and Latin America—people from different continents have been mixing for centuries. Ultimately, in this view, New World people have become a race unto ourselves—referred to as la raza in Spanish. But Anglo-Americans rejected this reality by engaging in the dastardly fool’s errand of retroactively sorting New World people back out into definitive races, a practice that continues to this day.

Unfortunately, the brilliant Creole legal strategy to challenge racism by challenging race did not win in its time. While Sheriff Sauvinet’s civil rights victory was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, the justices overturned DeCuir’s state court victory and Homer Plessy lost his precedent-setting case 7-to-1.

Learning of their defeat, the Creole Citizens’ Committee that had planned Plessy’s civil disobedience and funded his suit put out a statement: “Notwithstanding this decision … we … still believe that we were right.” Indeed, they were. The Supreme Court could permit the states to draw stark lines between black and white but that didn’t make actual Americans any less mixed.

An older Cuban-born gentleman illustrated this point precisely when he raised his hand after I presented at the Miami Book Fair last November. Recounting his introduction to race in America, he explained that he’d moved to Miami as an 8-year-old boy, in 1960, and at the neighborhood supermarket encountered his first segregated water fountains. Florida had lived under Jim Crow for more than half a century but to the boy it was brand new. Flummoxed, he asked his mother which fountain he should drink from. To the child, the people on the streets of Florida with their full range of skin tones didn’t look much different from the people on the streets of Cuba. But while Cubans acknowledged that they had mixed roots on different continents and thought of themselves, even in the same families, as lighter or darker, the Americans insisted that everyone was distinctly either “white” or “colored.” While Cubans considered “Cuban” to be an ethnicity, Americans refused to see “American” that way—even though they too were a New World melting-pot society.

On his mother’s advice, the boy chose the whites-only water-fountain—after all, he was light-skinned and it was clearly the superior appliance. His decision echoed E. Arnold Bertonneau’s in the previous century. After losing his federal case challenging school segregation and the racial binary, Bertonneau moved out to California and he, too, became “white.”

Americans long ago abolished the segregated water fountains but the binary racial mindset survives both in the American psyche and in American outcomes in health, wealth, education, and criminal justice. But the Latino concept of la raza has the potential to again take up the torch of challenging American racism by challenging the idea of race itself. Through this lens, America is not a society of warring tribes but a dysfunctional family. Warring tribes can only make peace treaties; dysfunctional families are better adept to reconcile and heal. At the dawn of Jim Crow, W.E.B. DuBois observed, “the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color-line.” The question of the 21st century may be whether we continue to see ourselves divided by race or unified as la raza.

The post The New Orleans Creoles Who Challenged Racism by Challenging Race Itself  appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The grand building, with its elaborate stonework, also provided a fitting home for a man two local journalists called “the cop who would be king,” Frank Rizzo, who occupied the mayor’s office from 1972 to 1980.

Few figures have ever loomed as large over a time and place as Frank Rizzo did over Philadelphia. Like the statue of Penn high atop City Hall, Rizzo cast a long shadow—figuratively and literally. “Big Frank” stood 6 foot, 2 inches tall, and towered over most contemporaries. More important, he was the quintessential “backlash” politician of the late 20th century, an emblem of urban, white ethnic populist conservatism.

Rizzo opposed public housing, school desegregation, affirmative action, and other liberal programs he deemed “unfair advantages” for people of color. He had a combative style and a penchant for divisive and offensive comments. And he defied partisan politics; Rizzo was a Democrat when he campaigned for Republican Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign in 1972.

Rizzo’s controversy-stoking positions and personality attracted a significant base of support in white ethnic, blue-collar Philadelphia. But he and his Philadelphia supporters were more than products of a specific time and place. They were harbingers of a broader shift in American politics—blue-collar conservatism—that remains a potent political force today.

Rizzo and his brand of blue-collar politics developed at a critical point in modern U.S. history. He owed his rise to the most powerful social movement of his era: the push for African-American civil rights during the 1960s and 1970s. Protests against segregation roiled northern cities like Philadelphia every bit as much as their Southern counterparts—and spurred the rise of a conservative response that proved just as transformative as the civil rights movement it opposed. In Philadelphia, this response grew out of a white, working- and middle-class effort to safeguard “neighborhood” and white ethnic institutions and traditions. As civil rights activists sought to integrate neighborhoods, schools, and work sites, white Philadelphians—many first- and second-generation Americans of European ancestry—fought back, treating African-American advances as a zero-sum game they were losing.

As civil rights protests intensified, blue-collar white ethnics joined a nationwide clamor for “law and order.” Rizzo personified “law and order” and promised to restore it in Philadelphia.

Born in 1920 to Italian immigrants, Rizzo had grown up in a row house in a heavily Italian-American section of South Philadelphia. Blue-collar, white ethnic Philadelphians liked that Rizzo was no “egghead,” as they put it. He had dropped out of high school and followed his father’s footsteps into the Philadelphia Police Department. Starting out as a beat cop, he later earned promotions—and a reputation for taking on vice and illegal gambling, and for leading raids on hot spots favored by gay people.

Fellow officers loved him, calling him “a cop’s cop” or “Cisco Kid,” after a popular television cowboy. He rapidly rose through the ranks of the police department, to deputy commissioner in 1963, acting commissioner in 1966, and, finally, police commissioner in 1967.

As Philadelphia’s top cop, Rizzo was fond of saying that the way to treat criminals was “scappo il capo,” an Italian phrase he translated as “crack their heads.” Critics, especially African-Americans, argued that his aggressive policing and “Gestapo tactics” went too far. In 1970, to choose just one example, he ordered police raids on Black Panther Party headquarters throughout the city, allowing police to conduct strip searches in full view of the media. But Rizzo’s admirers never wavered in their support for the controversial police commissioner, and enthusiastically backed him when he resigned his position to run for mayor as the “toughest cop in America” in 1971. When he won, he became the first former police commissioner elected mayor of a U.S. city, and he quickly placed his supporters’ concerns atop his agenda.

Responding to demands for neighborhood sanctity during his campaign, Rizzo promised he wouldn’t allow new public housing in any neighborhood that didn’t want it. In office, he followed through, fighting the construction of several planned public housing projects and either killing them entirely or delaying their completion for years. Rizzo was also a vocal opponent of “busing”—a widespread euphemism for opposition to school desegregation—and he personally intervened to stop state-mandated public school integration efforts. The city halted all student transfer plans in favor of something called “voluntary desegregation.” As a result, Philadelphia’s public school system became one of the most segregated in the nation. It remains so today.

These controversial policies made Rizzo incredibly popular with his base, which supported him through scandals and political fights. Charges of misappropriating public funds and using the police as a personal spy ring, along with frequent public gaffes, made Rizzo a target among liberals in his own Democratic Party. Rizzo survived a primary challenger in 1975 and coasted to his second term in the mayor’s office, but he was enraged by his liberal critics and promised retaliation, telling reporters that he would “make Attila the Hun look like a f****t” when dealing with his political enemies. The comment became one of the most famous of his entire career—an incendiary statement typical of his aggressive masculinity.

None of the controversies around Rizzo ever jeopardized the support he received from white ethnic, blue-collar Philadelphians. They applauded his inflammatory remarks as the mayor “speaking his mind” and “telling it as it is.” They cheered his opposition to public housing, school desegregation, affirmative action, and other liberal programs they perceived as “unfair.” These voters helped Rizzo overcome a recall drive in 1976. They even supported his 1978 campaign to change the city charter to allow him to run for a third, consecutive term as mayor—an effort that only fell apart after the mayor told an audience to “vote white” for charter change, mobilizing a new anti-Rizzo coalition.

Rizzo served out his remaining two years in City Hall before being termed out. But he made several more attempts to regain the mayor’s office, first as a Democrat in 1983, and then as a Republican in 1987. He lost both of those races to W. Wilson Goode, who helped pull together the anti-Rizzo coalition and Philadelphia’s first African-American mayor. Rizzo ran his final mayoral race as a Republican in 1991, but he died after suffering a heart attack on the campaign trail.

Rizzo came to exemplify a larger movement of white working- and middle-class Americans away from liberal politics. In Richard Nixon’s America, for example, Rizzo was a key part of the president’s efforts to wrest white, blue-collar voters away from the Democratic Party. While Nixon employed the famed “Southern strategy” to attract white voters in the South, he similarly considered Rizzo essential to his “urban strategy.”

Racism and resentment fed Rizzo’s political appeal and usefulness to Nixon, but there was also a positive, affirmative aspect to his supporters’ enthusiasm, based on a cultural identity built on shared values of hard work, sacrifice, toughness, pride, and tradition. Rizzo’s backers saw a bit of themselves in an immigrants’ son who had dropped out of high school and worked his way up to the highest position in the city. He often played up his humble ethnic roots, especially as he grew wealthy. As one supporter said when Rizzo ran for mayor in 1971, “He’s one of us. Rizzo came up the hard way.”

There is another way to understand this support. Working- and middle-class whites of the time were engaged in a newly emergent form of identity politics—which amounted to white racial identity politics, cloaked in the language of class pride. Rizzo’s supporters used class identity and class-based rhetoric to avoid accusations of racism. When white neighborhood activists in South Philadelphia fought the construction of the Whitman Park public housing project that Rizzo halted in 1973, they never publicly mentioned race. Rather, they argued that public housing tenants would not take the same pride in their homes as homeowners.

Similarly, Philadelphia’s building and construction unions, which also backed Rizzo, vehemently opposed the U.S. Department of Labor’s so-called Philadelphia Plan, which guaranteed equal opportunity hiring on federally backed construction projects in the Philadelphia area. But they avoided explicitly racial arguments, contending instead, that new policy of affirmative action threatened hard-won labor and seniority rights.

These white identity politics, combined with the politics of relatability in Rizzo’s “one of us” populism, transferred easily to the national stage. Ronald Reagan was especially adept at making appeals to blue-collar whites. In the 1980s, the press dubbed the white working- and middle-class voters who responded to Reagan’s appeals blue-collar values “Reagan Democrats.” But back in 1970s Philadelphia, these same voters had already been “Rizzocrats.”

The post When Philadelphia’s Foul-Mouthed Cop-Turned-Mayor Invented White Identity Politics appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The group of Americans whose views of the flag have been most shaped by real historical events are African Americans. Since the Civil War, African Americans have looked at the battle flag and rightly seen its role in a long, persistent history of slavery, segregation, and racial oppression. In forging that association, though, the battles of the 1960s may have been more important than those of the 1860s. And the state of race relations today is equally important when the flag, which was a symbol of racism in the past, is associated with justifying racism in the present. In polls, many African Americans support ending the official use of the Confederate flag, no doubt in part to make a statement about the continuing need to address institutional racism and white supremacy in American society.

For its white supporters, the meaning of the Confederate flag has shifted with time so that it is now much more closely tied to the country’s divisions today than to those of its past. While the meaning and salience of the flag is rooted in the Civil War and the Confederacy, the battles of the 1950s and 1960s—as well as those of the 1990s—prove more important in understanding the current debate than the battles of the 1860s. Flag supporters today are expressing resentment against African Americans and “concessions” granted to them as well as opposition to what they see as destabilizing social, cultural, and economic trends that have cost them status in the social hierarchy and put them at a relative disadvantage for the future. Thus, for supporters and detractors of the battle flag alike, it is a potent symbol of the America we want in the future.

Seeing the flag only through its historical association with the Confederacy and the South obscures the reality of its appeal today: Support for the flag today is nearly as strong in the Midwest as in some parts of the South. Its white supporters, who tend to be less educated and have lower incomes, do not act on past loyalties so much as out of a sense of grievance about opportunities for themselves and their children in the future. Likewise, some opponents of the flag have a grievance in the flag’s historic connection to structural racism, which has resulted in widespread denial of civil rights as well as lost income, education, and sense of belonging for blacks. They call for its removal as a symbolic gesture of moving onward toward a future that does not repeat our past. These twin grievances speak to deep and growing divides in American society.

Thus, the facile description of the battle flag as a relic of a previous Civil War prevents us from comprehending its distressing implications for the future of the country. It also prevents us from addressing—and perhaps healing—the growing rifts in American society that the flag has come to mark.

In June 2015, protestors rallied to remove the Confederate flag from South Carolina’s statehouse, a day after Governor Nikki Haley described it as a “deeply offensive symbol of a brutally offensive past” following Dylann Roof’s racially-motivated murder of nine people. Photo by Rainier Ehrhardt/Associated Press.

While today’s Confederate battle flag appears much the same as it did in the 1860s—as it has been copied on everything from state flags to coffee cups—its associations have shifted significantly over time. To understand why we’re still fighting about its symbolic meaning, you have to understand how it has been used since the Civil War, particularly in the last 80 years, as new meanings for the flag have been forged.

In the decades immediately after the Civil War, white Southerners revered the Confederate battle flag, but well into the 20th century, they flew it mostly on Confederate memorial days, during veterans’ reunions, and at monument unveilings. The flag’s use at this time was regional and tied to the memory of the war.

But in the late 1930s, display of the battle flag expanded when Congress nearly passed an anti-lynching bill, leading to increased white Southern fears of federal intervention in Southern race relations. In 1948, the battle flag’s use by the Dixiecrats—the segregationist, independent Southern Democratic Party that ran South Carolina governor J. Strom Thurmond for president—spurred the flag’s popularization.

In the 1950s, it became an ornament of popular culture, with Confederate flags flown in a multitude of contexts and featured on coffee mugs, T-shirts, beach towels, bikinis, and many other items. All served as symbols of a white Southern identity, an affirmation of pride in the region and its customs.

At the same time that it became a ubiquitous consumer culture item, the Confederate battle flag was used as the banner of the Ku Klux Klan, the White Citizens’ Councils, segregationist mobs, and others opposed to the civil rights movement and racial change, cementing its association with white supremacy. In 1956, Georgia adopted a new state flag that prominently featured the battle flag, and in the early 1960s both Alabama and South Carolina began to fly it over their capitols.

During the 1960s, African Americans, empowered by their victories in the civil rights movement, unsuccessfully challenged its use. In the 1970s and 1980s, black legislators proposed removing the Confederate flag from the Alabama capitol and adopting a new Georgia state flag, but their efforts failed.

During a 1966 civil rights march in Chicago, white men waved Confederate flags and displayed a crude sign with the words “White Power” and a swastika. Courtesy of the Associated Press.

The fate of the Confederate flag became a major national issue in 1993, when the United States Senate denied a patent renewal to the United Daughters of the Confederacy because its seal included a Confederate flag—in this case not the provocative battle flag, but the Stars and Bars, the first official flag of the Confederacy. Illinois Senator Carol Moseley-Braun, the nation’s first black, female senator, gave a moving speech in which she stated that the Civil War was fought “over the issue of whether or not my ancestors could be held as property, as chattel, as objects of trade and commerce.” A flag that stood for that cause, she argued, should not be “underwritten, underscored, adopted, and approved by this United States Senate.” Her view prevailed as the Senate voted.

At about the same time, disputes about the battle flag began in earnest over its place atop the state capitols in Alabama and South Carolina, on the capitol grounds in Florida, and as part of the state flag in Georgia and Mississippi. In each state, African Americans called for an end to such public uses of the flag, and for several years debates raged over the issue. Many whites had not changed their minds about the flag. Proponents claimed that they sought only to defend their heritage and honor their ancestors. Some, including prominent citizens, spoke of their ancestors who fought for the Confederacy—a cause they still considered noble.

But a closer look at opinion polls shows that history was not the major source of this white affinity for the flag. Southerners were neither informed nor enthusiastic about their history. A 1994 Southern Focus Poll found that nearly two-thirds of Southerners did not claim Confederate ancestors, and about half said that, “the Civil War doesn’t mean much to me personally.” Over 40 percent could not name a Civil War battle and only 32.8 percent could name one other than Gettysburg, which had been the title of a motion picture the year before.

By the 1990s, African Americans and some whites opposed the public use of the battle flag because of its historical association with slavery, the Confederacy, and racism. White support for removing the flag often came from the states’ elite, who worried that continued display of the flag threatened economic development. In Georgia, for example, the Atlanta business community’s fear that the flag would make attracting industry more difficult and present Georgia as a less welcoming place for the international community during the 1996 Olympics played a role in Governor Zell Miller’s decision to call to change his state’s flag, although he later withdrew the proposal in the face of opposition from the legislature.

Across the South, a new economically focused elite joined with activists to call for an end to the official use of the flag. The campaign to eliminate the battle flag from the existing state flag of Mississippi drew support from what sociologist John Shelton Reed described as “a truly remarkable coalition of historic adversaries: civil rights activists and country-club Republicans; student newspapers and university presidents; casino managers and fundamentalist ministers; trial lawyers and industrialists; college professors and football coaches.” In South Carolina in 2000, another “diverse confederation of business, civic, education, government and religious interests,” as one study put it, kicked off a fight to take the flag off the capitol.

To historians of the South, the Southern elites’ renunciation of the flag was remarkable. At the turn of the last century, the Southern elite promoted the Lost Cause, the white South’s celebration of the Confederacy as heroic and honorable; but by the turn of the 21st century, as historian Thomas Brown has observed, much of the South’s elite led the campaign to remove the very flag that symbolized it.

The battle over the flag began to take a new shape as these “remarkable coalitions” fought to remove it and public opinion began to shift. While a Mississippi referendum held in 2001 voted to reject a new design for its state flag, in other states public controversies ended in compromise. Georgia changed its flag—not once but twice between 2001 and 2003. In Florida, Governor Jeb Bush, as part of a construction project, took the flag off the capitol grounds and put it in a museum. In South Carolina and Alabama, the flag came down from the capitol dome and moved instead to the statehouse grounds. That most of the states achieved some form of compromise reflected increased African American political power and a change in attitudes among some white Southerners.

Polls confirmed this shift. In the 1980s, as John Shelton Reed noted, only 23 percent of Southern whites polled opposed the use of Confederate flags in public schools, while among blacks, 45 percent objected. By 2000, two polls, by CBS and CNN, showed Southern opposition to the official use of the flag had risen into the low-forties, with opposition outside the South slightly higher, although in neither poll did it reach 50 percent.

When the fight over the flag was revived in 2015, after Dylann Roof’s murders, there were again calls to remove the Confederate flag from the capitol grounds in South Carolina. After initially opposing the idea, Governor Nikki Haley and much of the state’s Republican establishment, worried in part about how its continued presence might discourage outside investment, endorsed taking down the flag. Later that summer, the legislature voted to remove the flag, although only after a contentious debate in the House. By then, opposition to the flag had spread to other states and the governor of Alabama, too, ordered the battle flag removed from its capitol grounds.

In the aftermath, national opinion polls showed opposition to the flag had continued to grow. Three polls found support for removal of the flag had risen, in one to 57 percent and in another to 55 percent. Over roughly two decades, support for ending official use of the flag has risen significantly. The shift in public attitudes no doubt in part reflects generational change, although surely some people changed their minds because of the flag’s association with racism. Far from being fixed in the historical past, both support and opposition to the flag has been malleable over the years—as its meanings have shifted for different groups of people.

But even though opposition to the flag’s display grew, support for the flag was still consistently strong, as more than 40 percent of Americans still favored its public display. Once the flag came down in Alabama and South Carolina, pro-flag protests increased. Groups formed to put up flags along highways and in other public places, and the debate over flying the Mississippi state flag intensified. In Charlottesville in 2017, a protest by white nationalists, some of whom carried Confederate flags, led to the death of a young woman there to challenge them. That same year, a candidate who made the Confederate flag and monuments central to his campaign almost won the Republican nomination for governor of Virginia and a year later became his party’s nominee for the U.S. Senate.

Opinion had shifted but no consensus had emerged.

In 2017, a high school student in North Bend, Oregon wore a Confederate flag hoodie while waving an American flag and checking his phone. The school district banned all representations of the Confederate flag from school property following a fight between two students. Photo by Bethany Baker/The Coos Bay World. Courtesy of the Associated Press.

If this were about a Southern identity rooted in the Civil War, you would also expect the division over the flag to be regional, but in polls from 2000 through 2015, support for the Confederate flag in the Midwest almost equaled, and, in one poll, even exceeded that in the South. People driving through rural areas of states such as Maine and Michigan report seeing privately displayed Confederate flags. The symbolism of the flag has moved outward from the South to find new likeminded supporters.

The flag now seems to appeal to people who share demographic characteristics and partisan affinities, rather than history. In a 2015 poll, people who made under $50,000 supported the flag by 16 percentage points more than those who made over $50,000. Similarly, those who had not attended college were 18 percentage points more supportive than the college-educated. A still larger difference existed between rural and urban support; 60 percent of rural residents favored keeping the flag up, while only 36 percent of city dwellers did. Partisan divisions were equally significant; 70 percent of Democrats agree that the flag should come down from government buildings, whereas only 39 percent of Republicans do.

These divides reflect a fundamental division over values, a determination to preserve a certain vision of what America has been and a sense of grievance about what some people believe it is becoming. To understand how this connects to the Confederate battle flag, we need to reexamine the ideology of the Lost Cause, which persists today less in any specific memory of the Confederacy and more through the social values it promoted.

The Lost Cause emerged in the decades after the Confederacy’s defeat in part out of a sense of regional grievance and a sense that the North did not respect the honor of the Confederates. At its height in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Lost Cause not only celebrated the service and sacrifice of Confederate soldiers, but also offered a model of the good society as one built both on white supremacy and also on deference to aristocratic leaders and loyalty to the social order. That social vision of the Lost Cause—along with the emphasis on conformity and order necessary to maintain a rigid, repressive racial system—helped make white Southerners particularly given to tribalism, accepting of hierarchy, and invested in symbols that supported both. The battle flag now represents that vision of a traditional, conservative social order where strict social hierarchies still apply.

This meaning of the flag, tied to the ideology of the Lost Cause, has stayed fairly consistent over the last 70 years. In 1951, contemporary news accounts quoted a store owner in Knoxville, Tennessee saying, “The Southerner loves his country, his women, his church, and his whiskey. The flag is a symbol of all these things so dear to his life.” 45 years later, a letter to the editor of a Birmingham, Alabama, newspaper explained, “As a Southern-American, I am tired of being told by others what the Confederate flag means to me….Speaking for myself, Southern heritage represents a way of life….It represents a time when you could walk the streets without fear. A time when the little man had a chance to make a life for his family. A time when God’s law was above all else.”

Most of the flag’s proponents tie those values to the United States, not to the Confederacy, which helps explain the seemingly paradoxical fact that the region with the strongest ties to the Confederate flag is also the region with the largest percentage of people who think it is important for the pledge of allegiance to be repeated in schools and who see America as a great country. Rallying around the Confederate flag may be, in the minds of many of its proponents, much more about preserving a traditional, hierarchical America than about perpetuating the memory of the Confederacy, much less reviving it.

Before a 2015 Confederate flag rally in Vicksburg, Mississippi, a woman shows off a flag that has been altered to signal defiance. Photo by Justin Sellers/The Vicksburg Evening Post. Courtesy of the Associated Press.

Fighting to keep the flag flying offers a way for some to express their sense of grievance with an America where non-whites have more power than they did previously. After South Carolina’s 2015 fight over the flag, a Winthrop University poll asked: “Do you feel that generations of slavery and discrimination do or do not make it difficult for Blacks to get ahead?” Of those who believed that history did not make upward mobility difficult for blacks, 58 percent said that they approved of flying the flag on the capitol grounds; only 30 percent disapproved.

Although in no way a typical flag supporter, Dylann Roof provides both an example of the blatant form racism takes as well as evidence of how loyalty to the Confederate flag is often the result of contemporary resentments rather than historical loyalties. Although much remains unknown about Roof’s motives and beliefs, what is known so far suggests he was more interested in the history of black and white relations than the history of the Confederacy. Stirred by the shooting of Trayvon Martin, Roof embraced a radical white supremacy, railing about black crime and claiming blacks had taken over. His cause became race war and the restoration of white supremacy.

On a pre-massacre journey around South Carolina, Roof had his picture taken not only with Confederate flags but at Confederate historical sites. In an insightful analysis of that tour, Washington Post reporters noted that in Charleston Roof did not appear to have visited Fort Sumter. They found it “odd for someone who drives a car with a Confederate license plate to ignore the place where the Confederacy began.” They continued: “But when the totality of pictures on his Web site, and the manifesto he posted there, are considered, it becomes apparent that the only part of the Confederacy that interested him was slavery. There are no pictures of Civil War battlefields, no screeds about the heroic Robert E. Lee, George Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg, no Lost Cause ideology.”

On his Facebook profile picture, he wore a jacket on which he had sewn the flags of South Africa and Rhodesia. Any flag associated with white supremacy, it seemed, would do. Roof found inspiration not in the Confederacy but, as historian Edward Ball, who covered his trial observed, in Nazi Germany.

If Roof was not a typical flag supporter, his route to embracing the battle flag was by no means his alone. White nationalists, many from outside the South, embrace the flag simply as a symbol of white supremacy. Also like Roof, white nationalists and neo-Nazis display the battle flag along with a host of other racist and neo-Nazi symbols. Their ideological racism owes more to a nativist strain of American thought, epitomized by the Klan of the 1920s and Nazism, than to the Lost Cause itself.

Other supporters of the flag may not rally with white supremacists, but race plays a central role in their defense of the battle flag. At a 1994 protest over the flag at the South Carolina capitol, a white woman shouted at a black counter-protester: “We’ve given you everything you’ve asked for! We’re tired of it.” And in the midst of the South Carolina debate in 2000, after the NAACP called for an economic boycott of the state, state Senator Arthur Ravenel claimed, “the flag is a lot stronger now with the boycott a-goin’ on than it was before. You don’t really think the General Assembly of South Carolina is gonna knuckle under to the N-A-A-C-P, headquartered in…wherever the hell they are—where is it, New York?”

Flag advocates have often argued that if the state took the flag down or removed it from a state flag, blacks would only ask for more. One respondent to a Mississippi newspaper poll cited by John Shelton Reed said that if Mississippi adopts a new state flag, “They’ll want us to change the state flower because they don’t like the smell.” Another respondent to the same poll, though, suggested more was at stake, complaining “that too many concessions” have been made to blacks already.

This use of the word “concessions” emerges from a profound form of racial politics that intertwines a rhetoric of resentment with conceptions of history. Supporters seem to fear that admitting the flag’s ties to racial oppression in the past will justify and lead to “concessions” to African Americans in the present. Honoring the flag, then, represents a denial of America’s racial past, which makes it easier to oppose programs—such as affirmative action or even welfare—that are perceived as disproportionately helping blacks.

The depth of this reasoning can be seen in a national poll from 2000 that asked whether “the government in Washington is paying too much, not enough, or about the right amount of attention to the needs and problems of blacks and other minorities.” Of those who thought the government paid too much attention to the needs of blacks, 74 percent wanted the Confederate flag to continue to fly over state capitols. Among those who thought it did not pay enough attention, only 22 percent favored flying the flag—a difference of 52 percentage points. Thus, support for the flag has become associated with the denial of a long history that could justify future policies supporting blacks.

Dylann Roof again provides a surprising example of this thinking. In a little-noticed section of the racist screed that he prepared before the murders, he wrote, “I wish with a passion that n—–s were treated terribly throughout history by Whites, that every White person had an ancestor who owned slaves, that segregation was an evil an oppressive institution, and so on. Because if it was all true, it would make it so much easier for me to accept our current situation,” by which he meant the loss of white supremacy. “But it isnt [sic] true. None of it is. We are told to accept what is happening to us because of ancestors wrong doing, but it is all based on historical lies, exaggerations and myths.” Roof’s formulation wrongly assumes a current world of black domination, but his reasoning nonetheless implies a realization that if history did show that whites had oppressed blacks for centuries, actions to help African Americans would be justified.

In his 1982 book Southerners, John Shelton Reed wrote that white Southerners’ sense of identity owed much to a culture of grievance, in part a response to a long history of Northern criticism and condescension. But he also questioned the depth of Southerners’ interest in the Confederacy and astutely suggested that the “link between attachment to the Confederacy and Southern identification may run at least as much from the identification to the attachment as vice versa.” Today, this complex sense of grievance, not loyalty to the Confederacy, contributes to identification with the flag.

Three decades later, we can see that supporters have embraced the battle flag as a symbol of multiple grievances, including resentment over the increased—if not fully equal—status of African Americans, the power and influence of economic and cultural elites, and a perceived loss of traditional values. Country music and Southern rock, which have used the flag as a symbol of alienation and defiance, have also done their part to build this meaning for the flag—and to spread its use outside the South and even in Germany, Ireland, and Italy among other countries. To modify and extend Reed’s formulation: A shared sense of white grievance explains the modern embrace of Confederate symbols rather than the other way around.

A member of the “Take ‘em Down Coalition” holds a sign in support of removing Confederate monuments at a 2015 rally in front of City Hall in New Orleans, while protesters wave Confederate flags in the background. Photo by Gerald Herbert/Associated Press.

Symbolic statements are significant, as are the changes in the official use of the Confederate flag: The removal of a symbol so closely associated with white supremacy is a good thing in and of itself, particularly if the battle flag actually stimulates racism, as one experimental study by psychologists has suggested. If the flag debate can be made to serve as a prelude to a more fundamental discussion of the heritage of slavery, segregation, and racial oppression, and spur Americans to address structural inequalities in our society, it will become even more important.

It may be difficult to grasp that what appears to be the ultimate American regional symbol—it is, after all, a Confederate battle flag—is now no longer tied exclusively to the South or to its particular history, but that is the nature of symbols. One danger of continuing to treat the flag as a regional issue is that it allows people who live outside the South to dismiss the flag and its historical associations as yet another sign of uniquely southern failings, when racism plagues communities across America today.

What’s more, focusing on the Civil War origins of the flag ignores the divide within American society today, one that transcends geography and in which so many—blacks and whites—have a sense of grievance. More than region, race and racism shape attitudes toward the flag. The sense of grievance among flag supporters, rooted in part in the fear that whites are losing their influence and their opportunities in a changing America, has made it a potent symbol waved in defiance of a perceived economic and cultural elite that supports its removal.

In this sense, fights over the official display of the battle flag are not so much about the flag itself—which has a symbolic meaning that has shifted over the years—but about the America we want to have in the future. Confining our analysis to the flag’s historical association with the South obstructs our understanding of how race and inequality are dividing us now, and it has kept us from engaging in a fundamental rethinking of America’s racial past and present. What we need to see more clearly is that the ongoing struggle over the meaning of the Confederate flag could be an opportunity for reconciliation of these pressing cultural divisions in American society: White nationalism must be condemned, the injustices of the American racial order must be corrected, and all Americans’ fears for the future need to be addressed.

The post Today’s Battle Over the Confederate Flag Has Nothing to Do With the Civil War appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The complexity of the struggle to desegregate public libraries can be seen in the way it played out very differently in two Southern cities: Jackson, Mississippi, and Birmingham, Alabama. In Jackson, nonviolent protest unleashed brutal white violence against blacks, and was resolved only by means of federal intervention and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s filing of a class action lawsuit. In Birmingham, despite initial pushback from whites, public libraries were desegregated surprisingly quietly and relatively peacefully, though the city would soon be reeling from a series of bloody confrontations elsewhere.

In Mississippi, the participants in the struggle included a band of courageous black college students called the “Tougaloo Nine.” Named after the historically black Tougaloo College, a private, liberal arts institution that had been founded by Northern Christian missionaries to educate free slaves and their descendants, the Nine were highly disciplined and organized, and used the tactics of nonviolent resistance to draw attention to the institutionalized racial discrimination and inequality around them.

Shortly after opening the Jackson, Mississippi Public Library on March 27, 1961, the white director was asked by two newspaper reporters if she was aware that a group of black students was coming to the library that day. She was not, she said, but after the reporters left she immediately phoned the police. “Contact us when the students arrive,” they responded. Unbeknownst to the director, while she was talking to police, the nine Tougaloo College students—four women and five men, and all members of the NAACP—were preparing for Mississippi’s first sit-in demonstration. NAACP mentors told all to dress well, sit quietly in the library, and avoid violence.

The four women wore dresses, the men dress shirts and ties; some added sport coats. First they visited Jackson’s George Washington Carver branch, which served blacks, and requested books that they knew were not there. At about 11:00 a.m., they walked to the main library.

“I went into the library and I stood up by the card catalog and was thumbing through it,” Ethel Sawyer later recalled. “After I didn’t see the…title of the book I wanted, I went over and sat at one of the tables…until the time I was interrupted.” Albert Lassiter stood in front of the card catalog with a clear view of the front door. “I had seen what a billy club could do to a guy’s head, so I positioned myself so I could see the blows coming. I didn’t want to get a blind shot.”

Ten minutes passed. During that time, the librarian called police, then approached the students, asking if she could help them. We’re doing research, they responded. She suggested that they visit one of the two black branches. Immediately thereafter, a group of policemen came in and told the students to get out of the library. But “nobody moved,” Sawyer said. About a minute later, the police chief told them they were under arrest. Six officers placed all the students into squad cars, and at the station charged them with breach of the peace.

In jail that evening, Tougaloo students worried. “Reflecting back on Emmett Till, the history of lynching connected with Mississippi,” Joseph Jackson told an OC Weekly reporter in 2015, “the later it got that night, I was in fear of my life.” He began rehearsing what he would say if the Ku Klux Klan came for them. “Please, Mr. Klansman, don’t hang me. I have a wife and two little children in Memphis, and if you release me this night, I promise you I will never, ever come back here to Jackson, and violate your Jim Crow laws.” “Well, that sounds very good,” one cellmate responded, “but you know what the Klansman would say? ‘N—–, you should have thought of that before you entered our segregated public library!’”

Several days later, the students were taken to the courthouse to be tried, and, again, reporters were ready. So were a hundred supporters who cheered the “Tougaloo Nine.” When the crowd began to applaud the students as they arrived for their trial, the police chief yelled, “That’s it! Get ‘em!” Police then set upon the crowd with nightsticks and dogs, as once again reporters captured the event with cameras snapping. In the melee, NAACP representative Medgar Evers and several women and children were beaten, two men were bitten by the dogs, and an 81-year-old man suffered a broken arm when police beat him with a club.

To describe the melee, white segregationists defaulted to their canned response. In his daily column, a Jackson newspaper staff writer complained, “A quiet community has been invaded by rabble-rousers stirring up hate between the races, and following are the…publicity media feeding an integrated North the choicest morsels from the Mississippi carcass.…The Negro who has so long held the guiding and helping hand of the white,” he warned, “may lose that hand as he climbs the back of his benefactor and teacher to shout into halls where he is not welcome.”

Amid the din, the Tougaloo Nine went to trial. They were quickly found guilty of breach of the peace. Each student was fined $100, and their 30-day sentences were suspended on condition that they “participate in no further demonstrations.” None of the students testified, but a police captain said they had been arrested because their presence at the library could have caused “trouble.” Medgar Evers later argued that the brutality exercised on those black supporters set into motion the broader desegregation activities in Mississippi. On January 12, 1962, the NAACP filed a class action lawsuit and five months later a federal judge ordered the Jackson Public Library to desegregate.

In Alabama, the desegregation of Birmingham’s Public Library progressed quite differently.

In early April 1963, Southern Christian Leadership Council Executive Director Wyatt Walker recruited fair-skinned Addine “Deenie” Drew to pass as white and case the downtown library to prepare for a public library sit-in. Attired like a middle-class white, in blue and white silk dress and hat, she entered the library unhindered, walked through reading rooms and stacks, and after noting all entrances and exits, left the building to call Walker from a pay phone across the street. The experience was so traumatic, she later recalled, she had to “look down at my feet and tell them to keep walking.” On April 9 she and other black students entered the library, and sat reading at desks, undisturbed. Whites stared, but said nothing. When librarians took no action, students left quietly.

Disappointed that they had provoked no incident, Walker planned a second sit-in the next day. He told 12 students to approach the library that afternoon, and asked Shelley Millender, a student at Miles College, another historically black school, to speak for the group once they got inside. As they approached the library two white men came up to Millender. “I was really afraid that day,” he later recalled. If violence occurred, he hoped the media would be there to photograph the incidents. He was unaware the two men were newspaper reporters whom Walker had tipped off. They followed him into the library, and as the other students gathered, Millender spoke to librarians at the circulation desk.

Birmingham had a library for Negroes, the librarian said; Millender should go there. Millender and the librarian then had “quite a little skirmish in terms of rhetoric,” he later recalled, and when finished, Millender sat at a desk with several other students. Police came, but after several phone calls and much muffled conversation refused to arrest them. Forty-five minutes later students left “voluntarily and without incident or disturbance,” the library director later told his board, although when they walked through a crowd of young whites, some uttered remarks like “it stinks in here,” and “why don’t you go home?” “We were there to get arrested,” Millender said; when that did not happen, they saw no purpose in staying.

At a quickly assembled board meeting the next day, the library director wanted approval of his actions the previous day and guidance for what he perceived would be inevitable future sit-ins. The board discussed alternatives, and although it rejected any use of the library for sit-in demonstrations, it approved the director’s actions and unanimously passed a resolution that “no persons be excluded from the use of the public library facilities” because of race. The very next day, Birmingham’s Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene “Bull” Connor, arrested Martin Luther King Jr. and 132 other protesters, and in subsequent weeks, millions of television viewers across the county watched Connor’s minions using fire hoses and police dogs on black demonstrators. Then, on September 15, the nation was shocked when four adolescent black girls attending Sunday School died in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.

By “quietly desegregating” in the midst of a violent summer, the Birmingham Public Library actually functioned as a lone mediating site for facilitating racial reconciliation. Perhaps board members approved the effort to counter the national image of violence Connor helped create for their city; perhaps they feared cameras capturing and news media reporting on similar violence in their library. At a July board meeting, the library director reported a distinct increase in the number of blacks using the main library facilities, and particularly the formerly white branch closest to a black neighborhood. When the director testified in court in December, he reported that the Birmingham Public Library was an integrated institution. But the media—national and local—had largely ignored the library in its coverage.

For many years the activists who desegregated these libraries remained “hidden figures” in the history of the civil rights era and the South.

It wasn’t until June 24, 2018, that the American Library Association (the world’s oldest and largest such organization) formally recognized the activists and their struggle, by passing a “Resolution to Honor African Americans Who Fought Library Segregation” at its annual conference in New Orleans. The resolution apologized for the role the Library Association played in supporting segregated libraries and discriminating against African American librarians. And it commended, “African Americans who risked their lives to integrate public libraries for their bravery and courage in challenging segregation in public libraries and in forcing public libraries to live up to the rhetoric of their ideals.”

The post The African American ‘Hidden Figures’ Who Desegregated the South’s Public Libraries appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

From the earliest days of the republic to the present, politicians have sought to limit the ability of non-whites to vote. What has changed is the nature of suppression—either the addition of regulations, or the deregulation of parts of the process—as well as the degree to which would-be vote suppressors reveal their intentions.

The American problem with voter suppression started with a void in the original Constitution, which did not include a right to vote. This omission allowed states to suppress the votes of non-whites by various means.

In the antebellum period, the pattern of suppression was deregulatory and explicit, as Americans pursued the ideal of a “white man’s republic.” States expanded the franchise for white males by eliminating property and tax-paying qualifications for voting, while at the same time explicitly excluding women, Native Americans, and African Americans.

In 1800, only five of 16 states mandated white-only voting. By 1860, 28 of 33 states, comprising about 97 percent of the nation’s free black population, had adopted such racially restrictive suffrage. In 1860, no state imposed property qualifications for voting and only a half-dozen had tax-paying requirements. As the winners in this new political order, white men shaped the nation’s laws and policies without regard to women or minorities.

This shift in voting rights did not occur without challenge. In Pennsylvania, in 1835, William Fogg, an African American whom election officials had turned away from the polls, filed America’s first voting rights lawsuit.

In the suit, Fogg v. Hobbs, he charged that election officials had violated the state’s color-blind constitution—“all men are born equally free and independent”—by barring him from voting just because he looked black. Fogg contended that he qualified as a legal voter under Article III, Section I of the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1790, which granted voting rights irrespective of race to “every freeman of the age of twenty-one years, having resided in the State two years next before the election, and within that time paid a State or county tax.”

Fogg won his case in a lower court, but the Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld the state’s appeal in 1837 by writing black people out of American democracy. The court ignored the state constitution and found that “no coloured race was party to our social compact,” and that there was no basis on which “to raise this depressed race to the level of the white one.”

The court did hold out hope for future generations, albeit in a perverse way, by noting that a black man’s “blood, however, may become so diluted in successive descents to lose its distinctive character; and, then, both policy and justice require that previous disabilities should cease.”

This idea of excluding blacks from the “social compact” reemerged when Pennsylvania adopted a new constitution in a convention that began on May 2, 1837, and lasted until February of the following year. This 10-month deliberation took three times longer than the convention that drafted the nation’s constitution in Philadelphia in 1789, and its delegates played on the common prejudice that African Americans lacked the moral and mental fitness needed for suffrage. They charged that unscrupulous men of wealth would buy the black vote and corrupt elections with voter fraud. They raised the specter of blacks flooding into states not just to vote, but also to hold public office. A whites-only suffrage, they argued, would preserve the integrity, independence, and virtue of the vote.

Delegate Benjamin Martin, a Democrat from Philadelphia County, spoke for the majority at the Pennsylvania convention when he said, “It is altogether futile and useless to pursue the experiment of making the African and Indian equal to the white citizen.” Perhaps thinking about the Fogg suit, Martin continued that voting rights would ill-serve blacks, because an aroused public would turn them away from the polls, thus “holding out expectations to them which could never be realized.” He warned of attracting African Americans to the state. Look to Philadelphia, he said, where blacks congregate “from all the southern States, and have so corrupted each other, that they are now in a situation far worse than the bondage from which they have escaped. It is impossible to walk through Cedar ward, in a clear warm evening, for the black population.”

African Americans countered such claims and protested “white-only” suffrage by issuing “The Appeal of Forty Thousand Citizens Threatened with Disenfranchisement to the People of Pennsylvania.” The appeal asked why the new state constitution denied “that all men are born equally free by making political rights depend on the skin in which a man is born? Or to divide what our fathers bled to unite, to wit, TAXATION and REPRESENTATION.”

The appeal said that the freedom of all depended on the freedom of the least powerful and that “when you have taken from an individual his right to vote, you have made the government, in regard to him, a mere despotism, and you have taken a step toward making it a despotism for all.”

Such appeals proved unavailing in Pennsylvania and across America. Without a guarantee of the vote in the U.S. Constitution or any federal voting rights laws, the disenfranchised black people of Pennsylvania and other states had no recourse to any authority higher than their discriminatory state constitutions and hostile state courts.

This represented a serious retreat for the country. In the 18th century, African Americans who met other qualifications could vote in most states of the new republic. But by the mid-19th century, those suffrage rights had been lost.

The Civil War changed that. After the war, African American men regained the right to vote—only to lose those rights within decades, after Reconstruction. The Fifteenth Amendment did pass in 1870, but it did not explicitly grant voting rights to minorities, it only prohibited the states from denying the right to vote based on race, color, or condition of previous servitude. After Reconstruction, states evaded the Amendment with seemingly race-neutral laws such as literacy tests and poll taxes.

It would not be until 1965 that African Americans and other racial minorities regained the vote with the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

But in the 2010s, our current decade, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a piece of the Voting Rights Act. And struggles for full access to the ballot continue, with states restricting voting opportunities through measures such as photo voter ID laws, voter purges, felon disenfranchisement, polling place closings, and gerrymandered legislative districts. Although the players and the issues in voting rights may change over time, today’s arguments would seem familiar to those involved in the antebellum fights over voting. And the stakes are very much the same: Who has the right to vote in America and who benefits from exclusion?

The post Suppressing Voting Rights Is as Old as the Republic—But the Tactics Keep Changing  appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.