Lawrence Reddick lecture, "Contrast: 1965 vs 1975," at the University of Iowa, June 12, 1978

Speaker 1: The following was recorded June 12th, 1978, as part of the 10th Annual Institute for Afro-American Culture held at the University of Iowa. The theme of the Institute was Black Culture in the Second Renaissance: A Study of Afro-American Thought and Experience 1954 to 1970. Contrast: 1965 versus 1975 is the topic of this lecture by Lawrence D. Reddick, Professor of Afro-American Studies at Harvard University. To make the introduction, here is Darwin Turner, Professor of English and Director of Afro-American Studies at the University of Iowa. Darwin Turner: As those of you who are in the institute know from hearing the tape that Professor Reddick made in 1976, Professor Reddick always gives me instructions to be brief in my introductions. And regularly, I disobey the instructions despite the fact that he is sufficiently kind to obey my requests about time. But I must add something to the facts. Professor Reddick has said that this may be the last time he joins us for the Institute for a few years. He begins to believe that people might become a little tired of seeing him or that NEH might become a little suspicious of our bringing him back so often. And in one sense, he is correct. The sense that normally, we do try to vary lecturers. Professor Reddick, however, offers a different situation and there was a very important reason that we wanted to have him for this Institute, because in part at least, he may be a kind of inspiration for this particular Institute of the 1960s. Darwin Turner: When we invited him here in 1976, he talked with me briefly and more with Professor Woodard later, and then wrote to me about the idea of something related to the '60s. What has emerged is somewhat different from his idea in concept and design, and all of the responsibilities for the weaknesses and failures are ours. Nevertheless, the credit for the emphasis upon the fact that this is a period that needs to be studied certainly should be shared with Professor Reddick. Darwin Turner: He was born in Jacksonville, Florida. He received a Bachelor's magna cum laude from Fisk University, a Master's from that same institution and a PhD with honors from the University of Chicago. He's included in numerous journals of recognition, such as Who's Who in America. He's taught at a number of institutions, such Black colleges as Kentucky State and Dillard, City College of New York, and he is now Visiting Professor at Harvard University. He's a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Negro History. He's the author of Emancipation Symphony and perhaps is best known as the author of Crusader Without Violence: A Biography of Martin Luther King Jr. During this past year, while he was a fellow at the Moten Institute, he completed a new study of the new racism in higher education. It gives me great pleasure to introduce to you this evening, Professor Lawrence Reddick, to look at the comparison between 1965 and 1975. Professor Reddick. Lawrence D. Red...: Well, ladies and gentlemen, after such a beautiful eulogy, I really don't know what I should do except to respond to my feelings. The truth is, I almost didn't make it here this time. I started out real early for me from Philadelphia, but those new super planes don't seem to run on time. And I was supposed to get a plane at 11 o'clock that came down at 12:40. And then when it picked me up, it had difficulty in landing at O'Hara and the plane I was supposed to get was gone. That disturbed Dr. Darwin Turner and he called my wife and asked her what had happened to me since I wasn't with him. And she no doubt communicated to him that she has for some time wondered what became of me when I went to these places and the people would call back and say, I hadn't arrived, you see. Lawrence D. Red...: So it may be that this kind of exaggerated praise and appreciation that we've just heard is appropriate because I may need it when I get back to Philadelphia. I like to come to these conferences for many reasons, and I'm always sorry that I can't come at the beginning and stay until the end, because I could always learn so much and enjoy so much from some of my friends and colleagues who appear and very often are gone before I get here, and some who come after I've made my departure. But I am delighted that brother Turner of Cornell is here. And I always enjoy hearing him and seeing him and remembering that very dramatic scene that took place on his campus when his troops, or maybe he was one of their troops, decided to make a march that was symbolic and appropriate to the occasion. Lawrence D. Red...: Then on the plane coming from Chicago, I met brother Yeakey and he was recalling some of the good old days in Montgomery, Alabama. And he's writing that up in a fashion that none of us who were present there ever had the chance to do. And so please look forward to his book, which should be coming out very soon. And then, we got lost after we got to Cedar Rapids and couldn't find [Aycliffe] or Yeakey for a while but we found brother Moses. And brother Moses was there, I guess in a sense, symbolically in the bulrushes. And he came out with his book, he has finished The Golden Age of Black Nationalism. So, these unexpected surprises and delights that I encounter on our trip here really make it worthwhile. Lawrence D. Red...: I might say, as a final apology for not being very eloquent tonight, that I have not had anything to eat. I feel somewhat hungry and somewhat faint. And, if I should expire before I have finished, you will please understand. But I'll do my best. As a matter of fight, I'm sure that with an audience of this caliber that I don't need to make much of a speech simply to remind you of some of your observations, perhaps some of your thoughts, but I'd like to tell it in a sort of a summary fashion and maybe I'll deal with some of the so-called scientific folklore of our time. Lawrence D. Red...: I've been reading so much about these close encounters with people from outer space that I thought that what I might suggest might fit into a couple of visits from such visitors. Say, for example, that some of these little men and women from Mars or some other planet had made a visit to planet Earth around 1965, anytime within those first years of that decade, they would have received a picture of what was going on in this country, which would have been so different from the picture that they would have seen coming 10 years later, that I doubt that they would have believed that their visit was to the same planet. For example, had these visitors come say about 1965, they would have been impressed with the influence that the Black people were having on the structure of American society. Lawrence D. Red...: They would have, for example, listened to and seen such mass leaders, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, and many others. They would have noticed that the Presidents that had come in those years were at least sympathetic and expressed themselves in favor of what the Black people were saying and doing, remember John Kennedy and LBJ. They might've even come on the day when LBJ was speaking to the Congress and ended up, we shall overcome. The President of the nation ending up with the last line of the Black people's song. Had they looked around, they would have noticed that the Supreme Court was headed by Charles Warren, as you know, who had not only declared segregation illegal and wrong, but that the principle of one man, one vote was basic to the political society. Lawrence D. Red...: And then Congress. You remember the Civil Rights Act of '64 and the Voters' Rights Act of '65 and about the same time, OEO. What's more, in the general population, there were liberals of every background who were falling over each other to praise and join and push and salute the work of the Black people, their objectives. So it would have seemed that American society was going through a great and basic change. And that in a few years, every vestige of racism would have been wiped out completely. In those days, it was a joy for a Black man to walk across a campus, almost any campus in the country. Many would stop and look, the young ladies would think that there goes a possible King or Malcolm, and many of them identified with what was going on. Lawrence D. Red...: Well, suppose the visit in '75, as they do in television, would be immediately exposed to our visitors and they would see a totally different picture. They would see as President you know who, Watergate, all the plans. They would see the strong Black organizations, such as SNCC, SCLC, the Panthers, RAM, infiltrated or destroyed. They would see the actual assassination of the two prime leaders who were so visible and active and persuasive and loved earlier at the beginning of the decade. And they would have noticed also that one President and his brother who wanted to be President were also slain. Lawrence D. Red...: And the general mood of the public had so changed that instead of a Black figure being admired and Black words being listened to, nobody wanted to hear what the Black people were saying. And instead of suits to advance the cause of the Black people, instead of the spirit of sportsmanship to give the Blacks a chance, it seemed that every man was for himself, every woman was for herself and even the women's lib movement, that owed so much of its inspiration to the Black movement which preceded it, chose not to think about the Black problem anymore. A very different world and a world which seems to be continuing to wipe out almost all of the gains that have been made. And at this point it would appear that instead of continuing the basic reformation of the American society, that we might be going into a period that is worse, actually worse for the Black people more than any period this side of slavery itself. Lawrence D. Red...: Maybe the final indication of how bad things are is in the apparent confusion, maybe the shock of the Black people themselves. For so many of those who might be expected to be articulate cannot find a good answer to a phrase which is as phony as racism in reverse. Which seems not to be able to regroup and come back with a new strategy to meet a new condition. Lawrence D. Red...: Well I have a few ideas as to how this great change took place and how disastrous it will be, finally. Unless those of us who believe in what the first part of the 1960s indicated might come and have the intelligence and the spirit to devise some approach to it. Some of my points are debatable. Since this is an intellectual forum, I'd be delighted for you to straighten me out when I've concluded. Lawrence D. Red...: For example, externally many things took place. But for the moment, I'd like to look internally at some of the moves that were made and some of the moves that should have been made that were not made by our own Black people had some influence in bringing down on our heads what has come. You may not agree with me on this, but I think a big blunder was made by our beloved Martin Luther King Jr. when he added his opposition to the war in Vietnam to his leadership of SCLC. Perhaps he was moved to do this, he was a man of the highest ideals. But my suggestion at that time, and Ralph Bunche's suggestion at that time, to give it a little authority, was that brother King should have either stuck with the civil rights movement, stuck with SCLC, or he should have resigned from SCLC and left that organization to someone else and joined in his opposition to that terrible war. Lawrence D. Red...: I think tactically, it was a blunder because it brought down on the head of the movement the supreme crisis of a nation that destroys any humanitarian feeling. That is, when a nation is engaged in a war of destruction, it will not brook, maybe it cannot brook, the kind of open criticism that was directed at the war. And so, from the president down, the door of the White House was slammed in the face of the civil rights movement. And that gave an excuse for the man in that White House to encourage the likes of J. Edgar Hoover to engage in one of the most shameless efforts to smear a decent human being. But my belief is that had King not opposed the war, had King stayed with SCLC, that this would not have happened. I may be wrong, but the excuse, the impulse from the White House would not have been there. Lawrence D. Red...: I would say in terms of this same sort of criticism, that our brothers and sisters who believed in Black Power made a big mistake and attacking Martin Luther King Jr. and his reforms. King was a reformer. King was a religious and idealistic leader, but he was able to get more people in motion who had never been in motion before and thus his contribution was indeed great. Privately, he would admit he knew little about economics. Privately, he was growing and even in his books, his last books were much better than his first books and the last project, which he planned, but not get a chance to see in reality was the Poor People's Campaign. But the rise of the Black Power impulse, instead of concentrating the fire upon the society, concentrated much of its fire upon the reformist weaknesses of the King movement and caused many a person who was not willing to go the whole way to desert or stop supporting the movement. So I think it was a tactical blender for the Black Power advocates to do that. Lawrence D. Red...: I say in the third place, that the whole movement for social change during the 1960s operated as though nobody in the movement had an ounce of economic sense in his head. In the beginning, money was flowing in. In one year, SCLC received in contributions $1 million. A million dollars. And when someone suggested to the board that may be the gold and coins would not be coming in so much so often for so long and that the budget of SCLC, the spending budget should be 50% of the income in order to save something for the rainy day, those gentlemen of the cloth would quote scripture and say, the Lord always takes care of his people and he's taking care of us in this storm and he will take care of us in the storms to come. And so, many of the organizations ran out of money. And, the great absence of some idea of budgeting, some idea of realizing where the contributions came from, some idea of what caused the contributions to come and what might cause them not to come. It was very hard to get into discussion of the practical aspect of the movement while things were going so beautifully. Lawrence D. Red...: I would say further that a great tactical error was made in the policy of open meetings and open membership. I know it was the good spirit of social change, sometimes a good idealistic and religious spirit, ye all come. But it used to frighten me that persons could come from nowhere, could join the meeting, could make a small contribution, could denounce one of the obvious villains of the day and such persons would not only be admitted to the audience, but very often admitted to the planning councils. And so it was easy for the FBI and the CIA and all of those groups to walk into our meetings, to find out what was going on, to plot and plan, and not only in field fleet, but disrupt and in a large measure destroy some of the beautiful movements that we had. Lawrence D. Red...: Another word of caution that was uttered when these things were going on, was that it can't all be idealism. You deal with human beings who have responsibilities and obligations and unless some arrangement is made to help them take care of those organizations, they are liable to the devil, they are liable to enticement, they're liable to defection. And so, there were those who had children and they were in the movement and some said we've got to give some kind of salary so that these people can have milk on the table for their babies. We can't expect it to be idealism completely, but it was hard to get that over. They believed so much in volunteers for the rank and files, but here again, I think it was relatively easy for the well-heeled so-called intelligence agencies to pick off somebody here, to pick off somebody there. Somebody who did not receive from full time given to the movement enough to keep his children or his family in ordinary clothing and some assurance where and when the next meal would come. Lawrence D. Red...: My final criticism of some of the movement leaders was that near the end of the 1960s, there was a contagion that some of us have called freedom high. They became intoxicated by their own oratory. They became intoxicated in the denunciation of the enemy's progress, the Black people. And so you had, really, violent orators who had no force whatsoever to use violence as an instrument of social change. Please understand me, the use of violence for social change is historic and was just as legitimate as nonviolent change, which was advocated by Martin Luther King Jr. But some of those most violent of orators never had a core, never had an underground group, never had any group that could actually, with intelligence, invoke violence. But what the orators often did was to incite and excite the angry masses, and very often they could start a fire or a riot and could not stop it. Lawrence D. Red...: I remember in one large city, after one orator had visited there, inflamed the people about their just grievances, they left the meeting and began to burn and destroy. They destroyed some of the stores of fair-minded merchants as well as those who were unfair. What kind of movement is it that will destroy those who are willing to meet your demands as well as those who ignore or defy your demands? I know there were six cities, when the houses and shops were burning, in which the mayors made contact with Black leaders and as much as said, "if you can stop the destruction that is going on, we will agree with all of the ten demands that you have submitted to the city counsel and to the mayor". And if we had the control and the discipline to not only start the fires but to stop the fires, that would have made it a political instrument of great consequence. And I think to go from town to town, from city to city making speeches or to carry a gun that people will see as a symbol of violence, it seems to me that this was a great mistake and caused the movement to lose some of its integrity. Lawrence D. Red...: Now let me back away from some of these internal mistakes. I think we've seen in the turndown, in the backlash, a very ugly side of the real spirit of the American people. I guess all of us have a good side and a bad side, but there is really a bad side. Historically from the 16th century, it seems that Western Europe has had the opportunity and the incentive and the inventions to support the subjugation not only of the New World, but of the whole world. And as you know, they came from Western Europe, the Native American Indians were here. They took the land away from him, they pushed him back and even now, without the graciousness of time, will not give him very much for that great loss, not from the continent that was taken away from him. Lawrence D. Red...: And you also know that since it was difficult to get enough Europeans to come over to tame the primitive forest and since the Native American Indian could escape to his homeland, that the African was forcibly brought and made to do the hard slave labor. That you know, but some of my students seem to have ideas that maybe some of the advanced religious groups did not have slaves or indulge in slavery at all, or that maybe some of the New England colonies and states did not have slavery. And so I'm sure you correct your students as I correct mine to make it clear that every one of the so-called original 13 colonies had slaves, every one. Every religion had them. They had various excuses, but they all were in it. Lawrence D. Red...: Well, that was long ago. But today, the condition of economic development that required muscle labor has just about passed away. And one of the reasons that unemployment is so high, one of the reasons it is so difficult for Blacks and others to get good jobs is that the physical labor that was once performed by man is now, for the most part, performed by machines. If you were looking at your TVs a few months back when there was a so-called revolt of the farmers, I doubt if you saw a single farm laborer walking. What you saw were men driving tractors, 10,000, 20,000, $30,000 tractors. You saw the farmers from $50,000 to $100,000 farms. That is, the farm workers picking cotton, working in the wheat fields, all of these are just about gone, the machines do that now. Lawrence D. Red...: You recall, too, that as late as the 1960s, half of the Black women who had jobs were domestics. But every night we see on the TV some new invention. You press a few buttons and the cooking is done. There are all sorts of magic sweepers, until domestic labor is almost gone. I remember when I worked down in Alabama, we would ride up and down the roads and men would dig the ditches and would clear the way and they would put down the pavement. But very few men are doing that now. Those big earth movers are there and all sorts of machines. Lawrence D. Red...: And so it is that as muscle labor is needed less and less, the original reason for bringing in the African becomes less and less important. And so it would seem that as mechanization and computerization increase, the difficulty of Blacks securing jobs will decrease. Many things that were so laborious, so physical can now be done by pushing a button, and even in the railway stations where at one time Black men had to lug the bags around, I see young white women pushing around and riding around on those new little trucks, and that's another area in which once physical labor was very important, and now the machines are coming in. Lawrence D. Red...: Finally, I would say that during the 1960s, there was an upsurge in what we call Black Studies and an upsurge in permitting or inviting, in some places, the Blacks to become a part of the educational system. But now that this beautiful period has passed, and the Blacks seem not to have that strong force, there is at the present time a concerted effort to limit, to diminish, and in many places, to deny completely the kind of education that is needed in order to function in a society that is dependent upon literacy and the ability to manipulate machinery. Lawrence D. Red...: Now it is strange that many persons who could understand Jim Crow, who could understand segregation, don't seem able to understand what's going on today. You don't have the bigot who would say "get those Black people out of here" or "I can't sit down in a train with Black people". It's more, shall we say, modern, courteous, and polite. You have not the old, racial bigot but you have the competitive liberal. One who knows about the Black heroes and Black athletes. One who can talk the talk of liberalism but practices the art of constriction. Some of these competitive liberals even tried to learn the dances and make an effort to identify that way. And so a freshman coming to one of the big universities might find some strange people holding out the welcome mat. And those who look for jobs may be surprised that strange people come up and offer fellowship and direction. But there is, I believe and I think I see in all the universities that I have visited and have had a chance to look around a bit, there is at the present time, not to enlarge and increase the scope and number and power of independent activist Black scholars, but to curb them and frustrate them and limit what they're doing. Lawrence D. Red...: And so, tokenism has come back. Tokenism is all over. The effort is made to corrupt those of our fellows who feel that they must try to make it on their own. And the final straw I would say is this, that even those colleges that were the children of the age of segregation, those Black colleges of the South are today being taken over by other people. Lincoln University of Missouri, it was founded on the initiative of Black veterans of the American Civil War, the latest figure I get is that it is now 70% not Black. Of course, it would be very fine, those institutions were always open in terms of the administration, the people there, for others to come in. But others are taking them over, and one of the newspapers in that state has said the time has come for a white president of Lincoln. I remember in the old football days, West Virginia State was really a stronghold. Presidents of the type of John W. Davis, who had the spirit and had scholarship, he had school spirit and all that. If you go there today, it's almost like any municipal college, in which it seems there is no direction. Lawrence D. Red...: And though there are some movements toward Black students being absorbed by predominantly, previously all-white institutions. In terms of faculty and control and budget, it seems that the trend is away from the Black college in a different direction. For example, in the state of Georgia, 14% of the faculties of the historically Black colleges are white, maybe we should say is white, 14%. But only 1% of the faculties of the historic white universities and colleges in Georgia have Black faculty. Only 1%. And so it would seem, then, that what the Supreme Court started in 1964 and 5, which looked like a great opening up of opportunity for Blacks has turned out to be what I call desegregation in reverse, in that others are reaping a great deal of the benefit, and the kind of inspiration, the kind of sense of community that the students used to have at some of these institutions seems to be lost. Lawrence D. Red...: I say to people sometimes that I was really educated, really put together at Fisk University. For it was there that I felt that I was a part of whatever went on, I was a part of the main. And I always felt that if I had two other Fiskites with me, we would meet any challenge, we would go anywhere. And I remember once, three of us were in Cincinnati and they didn't want to serve us and we threatened to break up the man's place. Even that wild, lawless spirit was part of our feeling of identity. And as one father said, I'm sure other fathers said it too, he said "you know, it's a funny thing about the students at Fisk". He says "anytime my daughter, who went to Fisk," he would say, "sees a Fisk man, she has to kiss him". He says, "I went to a different school, we don't have that practice". Lawrence D. Red...: So there was certain sense of unity, a certain sense of integrity that is very hard to pick up in other places. If you remember Du Bois' essay on a Black student at Harvard in the 19th century, he says that it was good for him that he went to Fisk first, because having gone to Fisk first, there was nothing that Harvard could do to pull him apart or make him forget his role as a student, his role as a person, his role in life. Lawrence D. Red...: Well, maybe I have rambled on longer than my allotted time, but I would like to make this suggestion to this group, and especially those who are members of the conference in the sense that they might be expected to turn out some papers or something. I think that what was missing so much during the 1960s was the influence and leadership of intellectuals. We didn't analyze enough, we didn't write enough. And what has happened? Other people are writing our biographies, are interviewing our activists. They are telling our story. Do you know that of the books that are published today, seven on the Black people are published by non-Blacks, against one published by Blacks? Now we don't want an exclusive on our experience. We do want to get views from all people from all around, but it is a mistake that we will surrender our story to others. So I would say to those particularly who are in this seminar: write these things. Write your experiences. Write up your observations. Because if you don't, somebody less qualified, less understanding, less sympathetic will. Lawrence D. Red...: Thank you very much.