CRS 568

The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader.
Clayborne Carson et al. eds.
Chapter Two: “Fighting Back.”
Introduction by Darlene Clark Hine
Selection 1, Brown et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka et al.
Selection 3, “The Atlanta Declaration”
Selection 4, “Black Monday: Segregation or Amalgamation…America Has Its Choice.”
Selection 6, “The Long Shadow of Little Rock.”

Readings on the Rhetoric of Social Protest
Charles E. Morris III and Stephen Howard Browne eds.
“A Confrontation at Columbia: A Case Study in Coercive Rhetoric.”
James R. Andrews

Introduction by Darlene Clark Hine
The intro serves as the organizing statement for all of the coming selections. Hineexplains the term “fighting back” has a “double meaning, signifying bothblack protest against segregation and inequality, and the massive resistance of white southerners determined to preserve a distinct way of life grounded in the ideology of white supremacy” (61). The selections aligned with the black protest are the more well known of the selections, and the selections espousing white supremacists views are less known but interesting in how they couch the argument against desegregation. Hine explains several of the supremacist participated in white Citizen Councils and the doctrine of interposition (62), the idea an individualstate of the US may oppose any federal action it believes encroaches on their sovereignty.

Reading through Hines, this move using the doctrine of interposition seems steeped in the trope of white womanhood, since Hines points out this chapter contains “Black Monday: Segregation or Amalgamation…America Has Its Choice,” and closes the introduction with a recounting of a roundtablediscussion at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. The talk revealed a “deep-seated anxiety and suspicion among whites that school integrationwas but a harbinger of racial intermarriage” (64). While the segregationists leveraged the courts and existing laws as well as the civil rights movement did, the warrants and ideology under-girding the segragationist actions seem especially specious.

Selection 1, Brown et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka et al.
The selection is the official court opinion of the US Supreme Court on the matter of segregation and public schools. Interestingly it brings up Plessy v. Ferguson and explains how even though its application to inter-state transportation was good enough on its own, its later application to education proved unconstitutional since it deprives the children of minority groups pf equal educational opportunities. This decision seems to come from, as Professor Kieve pointed in class, because it touches on larger American values. In this case, the value is the ideologicalalconcept of America as a meritocracy, a place where through qualifications, hard work, and a level playing field all citizens of this country can advance themselves in the social and economic spheres. In two spots within the selection the idea of same “educational qualifications” (70, in several cases of African American graduate and law students) and “similiar age and qualifications” (71, discussing the Sweatt v. Painter case) are brought up as the deciding factor for the court on the issue of segregation. While Chief Justice Warren does allude to the patriotic concepts of individuals participating in democracy, the military, indoctrination to American culture, and professional training in preparation for the workforce, the most important and re-occurring theme is the violation of a mythicalsystem where people advance through talent and not class or wealth. This is a positive for the civil rights movement, but at the same timedisplays the importance of aligning movement rhetoric to the cultural fables of a given society.

Selection 3, “The Atlanta Declaration”
This is the NAACP’s official reaction to the Browndecision, and in a affirmation of what I said about Selection 1, the NAACP couches the decision in terms of being “American,” while all those opposed to the decison are “un-American.” Again, I think it was a savvy and ethical move, but at the same time I think its an interesting move in the battle over civil rights. The direction of the supremacists–the importance about the purity of the white race and the maintenance of a strict class hierarchy– does sound and is un-American, and yet at the same time played on long held beliefs of superiority and inferiority about races often backed through (at the time) credible science, which still plague us today in things like the IQ test (the IQ test is a direct descendant of what’s now called scientific racism and the American created, Nazi enacted eugenics movements of the 20th century).

Questions
Was the value of meritocracy that important to the American self-image? How did the states who chose to openly fight the dismantling of Jim Crow think they could win? Did they not understand in the era of Cold War and trying to win hearts and minds of undeveloped nations–where many citizens would be considered black in the US– the public image they projected? Did they not understand how un-American they looked in trying to resist the rulings of the centralized, Federal government who considered itself in all ways in a fight against the destabilizing forces of Communism?

Selection 4, “Black Monday: Segregation or Amalgamation…America Has Its Choice.”
This text produced by Judge Tom P. Brady uses three strategies to prove his claim

1. A re-interpretation of history favorable to the South and white Americans
2. Covert threats of violence in response to Brown v Board of Education
3. The use of patriotism

For the most part the piece is a racist screed which uses the above mentioned tactics coupled with the trope of the victim South and her maligned, white children.  It seems the precursor to what is often heard on conservative talk radio today; just replace “negro” (Brady’s term) with “woman,” “immigrant,” or “homosexual,” and change “Brown v. Board of Education” to any court case or piece of legislation dealing with the aforementioned groups.  In Aristotelian terms, it is effective.  Still (and although I am not a huge fan of this term nor the concept) it is unethicalsince it focuses on winning the argument through a savage mistelling of history, the threat of violence, and the use of chauvinism masquerading as patriotism.  This is a prime example of what Booth calls “win rhetoric.”

Selection 6, “The Long Shadow of Little Rock.”

This selection is the retelling of the Little Rock integration by Daisy Bates, president of the Arkansas NAACP and editor-and- chief of the Arkansas State Press.  This text demonstrates the physcial actions engendered by the rhetoric surrounding the doctrine of interposition, and it demonstrates how the rhetoric of non-violence effectively leveraged the actions of the racist segregationists.  It does this by 

1. Juxtaposing the actions of the segregationist mob to the naivety and innocence of a school girl
2. Asking, within the subtext of the selection, how the actions of the mob can mesh with a free and democratic country (think millieu–the USSR is portrayed as a totalitarian, Stalinist dystopia)

Not only does the book this excerpt is taken from serve as a site of public memory, but it’s also a model of savvy rhetoric on severallevels.  The choice by Bates to put her experiences in a book (highly esteemed in a society who believes in the cult of literacy), the recounting, in the first person, of student Elizabeth Eckford (a young woman only wanting to attend school and be a productive member of American society), and most of all, the unflinching retelling of the events are shocking.  In pursuing the continuation of segregation, racist Southerns forgot to consider how their actions would play on a larger stage; they seem to have forgotten that their actions would contribute to their ethos and the determination of the validity of their cause.  Bates, by putting this ignorance in direct opposition of a young girl trying to attend school, creates an emotionalmoment that touches readers at the level of their values.  If the United States leads the free world, practicing the form of government supposedly most advantageous to the happiness of the individualal citizen, then how could the actions of the white Citizen Councils or segregationist Southerners be condoned?

Readings on the Rhetoric of Social Protest
Charles E. Morris III and Stephen Howard Browne eds.
“A Confrontation at Columbia: A Case Study in Coercive Rhetoric.”
James R. Andrews

This essay defines the difference between persuasive and coercive rhetoric. According to Andrews

[P]ersuasion aims at moving a receiver to select one of the many avenues of action open to him [sic], coercion attempts to offer only one route by removing all other approaches from the realm of the possible.  (166)

This is important for Andrews as he examines the rhetoric of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) when they seized and occupied campus buildings at Columbia University in protest of the university’splans to acquire public land from the Harlem community and continue its relationship withthe Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA).  The problem for Andrews was the outright refusalto speak or compromise with the school administration during the occupation, and the demand from SDS that all demonstrators be given amnesty in any resolution university administrators offered.  For Andrews, this fits squarely in the aforementioned definition.  While this may seem nothing more than a criticism from a more conservative member of the faculty (Andrews was a professor at Columbia during the take over), the real value comes from comparing and contrasting the SDS take over to the demonstrations of the SCLC we’ve read up to this point.

Throughout the essay Andrews is in conversation withScott and Smith, and uses their work to demonstrate how coercive rhetoric, while satisfying on the immediate level via the ability to deny the establishment its right to rule, does nothing in the long runfor the overall movement nor the righting of the immediate wrong made visible by the protest.  Andrews quotes Scott and Smithon page 169, saying “altercation with the police is enough.  It is consummatory,” and then proceeds to explain how the inevitable violent confrontaion the SDShad with the police was a null act.    Since prior to the incidence the SDS wanted amnesity, since they refused solutions nor offered any clear, immediate one, and because they actually angered undecided faculty, administrators and other students by not allowing students go to class, professors to work, or administrators to carry out their duties, when the police did come and use violent means to remove them the support the SDS did receive was minimal to what an observer would expect.  This lack of outright support leads Andrews to call for a sustained study and accounting for the differences between coercive and persuasive rhetoric by the end of the essay.

Again, I my take differs on what Andrews considers important.  He want to examine, in response to Scott and Smith, “cases in which civility and decorum are discarded for ends that are not obviously and unquestionalby just” (170), and I think, to question what he saw as the more ugly, radicalside of the social movements of the 1960s.  For me, I think the essay serves as template for explaining how civil rights movement rhetoric proved more effective than the rhetoric of the segregationists.  In states like Arkansas, where students were stopped from entering the recently desegregated high school, this article gives incite on the motivation of Governor Faubus and other interpositionist segregationist.  By offering only one choice, by pressing for a speceific and unsustainable resolution, the interpositionistsegregationists became unlikable.  This may seem obvious today, but as pointed out by Brady and his speech, there seemed to be a general disbelief on the part of Southerners as to why they were being vilified.  The interpositionist segregationists could not conceptualize their rhetoricalstrategy no longer worked in the milieu of Cold War America.  They were now unlikable (perhaps ineffective is a better adjective) in a society now concerned with displaying an egalitarisn, united front on the world stage.