Lawrence D. Reddick lecture, "Ralph Bunche and Black Intellectual Leadership," at the University of Iowa, June 6, 1977

Speaker 1: The following was recorded June 6, 1977, as part of the Ninth Annual Institute for Afro American Culture. Ralph Bunche and Black Intellectual Leadership is the subject of this talk by Lawrence D. Reddick, Professor of History at Temple University. He is introduced by Dr. Darwin Turner, Chairman of the Afro-American Studies Program at the University of Iowa. Dr. Darwin Turn...: Ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to welcome you this evening to the second public lecture in this year's Ninth Annual Institute for Afro-American Culture at the University of Iowa. This year's Institute is the third successive, which has been sponsored through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. I should apologize incidentally to the participants who will hear this certainly in every evening lecture and in most of the afternoon lectures, but we do like to keep the visiting public informed of the number of institutes we've had. And as we were reminded last year, representatives NEH are always happy to have us keep the public reminded of their generosity and our gratitude, and they have been generous to us and we definitely are grateful. Dr. Darwin Turn...: Last year, during an Institute, which compared Blacks in American culture from 1845 to 1860, and from 1945 to 1960, I invited Lawrence Reddick to speak. Professor Reddick presented a brilliant overview of the forces which culminated in the Black surge of the 1960s. In particular, he emphasized the Black intellectual forces, which prepared the battlefield for the so called militants or revolutionaries of the 1960s. Because I am rarely willing to quit while I'm ahead, I have invited Professor Reddick this year to back up 15 years, to talk about the Black intellectual forces during the period of 1930 to 1945. Dr. Darwin Turn...: Like our lecture of last night, Dr. Reddick matured during the Depression years. Born in 1910, he earned a Bachelor of Arts Magna Cum Laude from Fisk University in 1932, a master's from the same institution in 1933 and a PhD with honors from University of Chicago in 1939. While earning his doctorate Professor Reddick taught at Kentucky State College and Dillard University. Subsequently, he was appointed curator of the Schomburg Collection. I've been meaning to ask him sometime whether he was any influence on a Tolson, curator of the Schomburg Collection of the New York City Public Library, a post he held from 1939 to 1948 while he taught at the City College of New York and The New School of Social Research. Dr. Darwin Turn...: In 1948, Professor Reddick, a native of Florida, returned to the South to serve as Chief Librarian and Professor of History at Atlanta University, where he remained until 1955 and as Chairman of the History Department at Alabama State College from 1955 to 1960. Since then, he's been a Professor of History at Coppin State Teachers College and Temple University. His term at Temple, I understand ends June 30, and this fall he will begin an appointment at Harvard University. Recipient of a Julius Rosenwald fellowship, Professor Reddick is the author of Emancipation Symphony, Our Colleges and Industrialization of the South, Our Cause Speeds On and Crusader Without Violence, a biography of Martin L. King, Jr. He is the coauthor of The Southerner as American and the author of numerous articles. Tonight, he will focus on Ralph Bunche as perhaps the most gifted, in the opinion of Professor Reddick, the most gifted of the Black intellectuals who matured during the 1930s. It gives me great pleasure to introduce Professor Lawrence Reddick. Professor Lawre...: Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, I think in these visitations, and especially in these introductions, several things might be harmful to a successful lecture. In the first place, I do not eat a meal when I have classes in the afternoon, all I can take is a bowl of soup in order not to become drowsy and to maybe forget the lecture. But today I have been wined and dined as I cannot afford to provide for myself. So I confess to you that physically, I am absolutely unfit to try this lecture this evening. So if you see the spectacle of not only members of the audience going to sleep, but the speaker himself becoming drowsy, if you're really my friend Darwin, you will come up and hold me. Or if you have pens or a little jab, try to keep me awake. Second, shall I call it mistake, is for the speaker to know so much about you or learn so much about you, that he delivers an obituary. And after he's done that, the only graceful thing to do is to simply lay yourself down and let somebody say here lies the remains. Professor Lawre...: Moreover, I've been here quite a part of the day. And some of the discussions that we have had may be much more interesting than anything I prepared to say. But since this is, as they say, a paid public announcement, it might be wise for me to try to do at least a little something on what I'm supposed to do. And maybe in the question period, I can get into some of these discussions, which would grow out of some of the things that were said this afternoon in our general bull session. Professor Lawre...: I think the first point I'd like to make about this subject is I suppose that theoretical argument, that Black expression during the decade of the 1930s does not fit a theory of the history of ideas. I understand that this is quite a distinguished audience here, that approximately half the members sitting here already have the PhD, that another third are within striking distance and the others are thinking about whether or not it's worthwhile to continue in such a pursuit. And I'm sure that these scholars are familiar with this theory of the history of ideas that a succeeding period generally develops or departs from current literary ideals and ideas of the period that had come before. Professor Lawre...: If this were so, we should find during the 1930s a continuation of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, but I don't see any line of continuity between these two decades, the 20s and the 30s. As a matter of fact, if we agree that Alain Locke is the legitimate father of the Harlem Renaissance, we surely cannot find Richard Wright of the 1930s as a legitimate son. I think the contrast is very great. In my view, and I'm willing to argue this with you, the 1920s, especially the last half of that decade, was a period of the individual expressing himself. It was the exposure of talent, a new talent, and the declaration on the part of the writers and the orators that they would speak up and speak out, whether or not it pleased white folks, or even whether or not it pleased Black folk. Professor Lawre...: And so we had this luminous flame that we call the Renaissance and quite a few things happened. But the 1930s is not at all a continuation. And we don't find this same flame in the stirring words and in the movements of the 1930s, even the 1940s. I've suggested that Richard Wright is perhaps the most typical Black author of the 1930s. When I say this, I am thinking not only of his Native Son, which was like no novel written during the 1920s, but I'm also thinking of his book, Twelve Million Black Voices, which is a kind of history and commentary that we would not find at all during the 1920s. Even the fashions and literature and expression had changed. Professor Lawre...: Instead of these literary dinners in the downtown hotels of New York or in the homes of the rich and enlightened in the suburbs, during the 1930s, we have uptown, the house rent parties. And instead of the individuals insisting upon the right and privilege of saying what their egos might provoke them to say, during the 1930s, it seems to me that there is more a realization that the social order has to be changed more of a reaching out and more of an inclusion of the masses of humanity in what is to be done and in terms of what is to be said. Professor Lawre...: Instead of the well phrased sonnets of Countee Cullen, we have Angelo Herndon in Atlanta, Georgia, leading a group to protest their joblessness. And Angelo is using the slogan, "you can't kill the working class." And from that, he converted it into the book, Let Me Live. And instead of these sessions on poetry, which were so popular, from '25 to '30, we have James Ford and Ben Davis telling us about self determination for the Black Belt. And they're thinking of the Black Belt down in the South and not as Marcus Garvey may have thought of it across the seas in mother Africa. Professor Lawre...: I say that we really have during this period of the depression, a social realism that is more of a contrast than a continuation of the Renaissance. Now in this period in which the fist and the face of hunger has displaced the image of the good genteel white folk coming to the Cotton Club in Harlem or to the kind of novel that Van Vechten wrote or to this sort of touch quickly, the exotic primitive that has been discovered in the urban ghetto, we have not only these meetings in the squares and on the streets, but if any intellectual has anything to say during the 1930s and does not include the masses of the people, what he says really doesn't count. Professor Lawre...: This period of the 1930s stretching through the 40s is also a period in which we might call it the heyday of the Black college. I think if anyone wished to study the influence of the thinking that went on in the Black colleges of this country, especially in terms of what you might call race relations or the Black experience, all one would need to do would be to visit Atlanta University or Fisk University or Howard. And there were other places too. But think of it, at Atlanta, we had W. E. B. Du Bois, we also had there, Ira De A. Reid, and you had these men writing books of the type Black Reconstruction and Sharecroppers All. We are all sharecroppers. And they had their magazine Phylon. Professor Lawre...: Over at Fisk or at one time, not only was Charles S. Johnson leading the group, but Horace Mann Bond was there with his education of the Negro, they used the word Negro in those days, and the American social order. E. Franklin Frazier, who published that time a little earlier and a little later, not only the Negro Family in Chicago, but the Negro Family in America, the Free Negro Family, Bertram W. Doyle and such students as Lewis Wade Jones. Charles S. Johnson was putting out books under the title of To Stem The Tide and Into the Main Stream. Professor Lawre...: I am a Fisk man, and I hate to admit it, but as brilliant as was the work done at Atlanta University and Fisk, it was even more impressive at Howard. Howard called itself the capstone of Negro education and I suppose it deserved it, because you'll have there a galaxy of intellectuals who covered most of the fields of economics, sociology, history, and political science. You recall that Abe Harris was there, Emmitt Dorset, Alain Locke was still around, or he was not of that crowd, Charles Thompson was The Journal of Negro Education, and in my book above all, it was Ralph J. Bunche. Professor Lawre...: Now this was the time when no publication house, no survey would be dare put out unless somebody from Fisk or Atlanta University or Howard had given the okay or had written the book or at least had written the introduction to it. Things are so different today. And this is one of the subjects that I am tempted to veer away from my assignment and discuss, how does it happen today that Black scholars are producing only one fifth of the books that are published about the Black experience? There are many explanations, and maybe we should go into that a little later, but the off the cuff suggestion I make is this, the American society is competitive. The Europeans who settled this country and who gave birth to all of the generations afterwards, know better than they know anything else, how to get the dollar, how to make the money. Professor Lawre...: And when Black books became profitable in the book market, then you had the onrush of non-Black scholars that today four fifths of the books are produced by those who are not at Fisk or Howard or Atlanta University, but those who, in my opinion, generally write from the outside. And they will fight you and they will do everything to destroy you if it means that their books will be projected. As a matter of fact, some of the conflict going on in the field of Black studies is not between blacks at all, the blacks are only spectators at some of these writers who are debating with each other. But that's something of a tangent. Professor Lawre...: But to go back to the period of the 1930s, my suggestion is that the supreme intellect, the finest of them all was Ralph Bunche. And I speak of Bunche in terms of the period from 1930 to 1939, because after '39 Bunche shifted and went into a different career. You remember the W.E.B. Du Bois was with NAACP since its founding about 1909 or 1910, until he left it or was fired from it around 1934. And Du Bois parted from the NAACP because he felt that though it had done a good job in the courts had spread a great deal of what you might call education or propaganda that the NAACP had no instruments for dealing with the economic distress that had come upon the people of this nation and the Black people in particular. Professor Lawre...: And he argued it out, he fought it out with the board of the NAACP and with its chief spokesman, Walter White. And those of you who were with us this afternoon know that I emphasize the struggle for power, the struggle for program, rather than the differences, the slight differences that might have been between these two men in terms of their skin color or the complexion. And so Du Bois went down to Atlanta University and the president there, John Hope, gave him a blank check to do, to teach, to write anything he wished to teach. Professor Lawre...: And Du Bois came out with a very persuasive theory that if the great energy, the Black people and the allies of the black people had expended in trying to break through the walls of prejudice and achieve civil rights had to yielded so little, would it not be, shall we say, a conservation of energy to stop banging our heads against that wall and strengthen ourselves as best we might even behind this wall of separation or segregation. There was a certain logic about it. And Du Bois wrote a whole book, Dusk of Dawn, in which he elaborated this theory. Professor Lawre...: But the same time, Du Bois was teaching a course at Atlanta University entitled Karl Marx and the Negro. This was perhaps the only course with that title in the country. And the joke is that Du Bois had more of an effect upon himself than he had upon his students. So by the time that Du Bois was ready to leave Atlanta University or the new president who had succeeded John Hope when John Hope died, Rufus Clement had decided that Du Bois should leave. By that time, which was 1944, Du Bois had become convinced that liberalism had very little to offer, that the self-segregation that he had developed in his book would not be effective. And he moved to the left. Professor Lawre...: And as you know, later, he joined the Communist Party. And as you know, to follow him out, he did not wish to die upon this soil that had rejected him and had citizenship in Ghana and died there. But my point is that during the 1930s, Du Bois stood for a sort of Black nationalism and called off the war against segregation and discrimination. Now, Charles S. Johnson at Fisk had a strategy and his strategy was to manipulate the liberal and the industrial interest in the South through statistics. And in that way to bring about change. This had limited success also. Professor Lawre...: But I think it was Ralph Bunche and John P. Davis in Washington who hit upon the formula that I believe was most appropriate to the time and is worthy of our study today. John P. Davis was a little man born in Washington, D.C., rather light skinned fellow who went to Bates College, was on the debating team. And when he came to Washington and saw what was going on there, where FDR and the New Deal was trying to set up these codes for industry and labor and saw that black people had no representatives in these conferences, he set up a paper organization, and one of his colleagues was Robert Weaver, and I understand Weaver was with you a few days ago. And they call this the Joint Committee on Recovery. But aside from John P. Davis, Rob Weaver, sometimes, and a secretary, there was no such organization yet Davis and Weaver did push themselves into these conferences and did a great deal of good in representing the interests of the Black people. Professor Lawre...: The NAACP contributed a little money, the Urban League contributed a little money to keep the office open, and some of the Black sororities and fraternities contributed a little money. But Davis knew that this could not last this hand to mouth procedure. And so he was looking for Ralph Bunche and Ralph Bunche was looking for him. And the two of them got together and decided that they would use some of the good money of Howard University and call a conference at Howard, which would be a very different conference than had ever been called before, perhaps in the history of the Black people in this country. Professor Lawre...: And this was a conference that would air every significant point of view as what ought to be done about the condition of the Black people in the years of Depression and with Roosevelt in office. Another feature of this conference was that all of the different slices of the Black community would be invited to attend and participate the preaches the school teaches, but the main base would be those workers, and especially those workers who were organized, this would be the main, shall we say, undergirding of this conference. And so they had a conference at Howard university. Everybody spoke. Almost everybody took it in his stride except Kelly Miller, ol' Dean Kelly Miller, who was then retired and who wants it called the great conference, the Sanhedrin, in the midst of the 1920s, that didn't amount to very much. Professor Lawre...: He felt that there was too much radicalism on the Howard campus. And he reported the conference to the authorities. And the authorities came and they questioned Bunche and some of the others. While Bunche in this, as in everything, was quite fearless, spoke with him, but he followed out the conference that met in 1935. And one year later, the National Negro Congress had its first meeting in Chicago. I say that this National Negro Congress was the baby of Ralph Bunche and that if it had realized fully the possibilities that Bunche saw, it would have been a turning point in the history of this country and it could be that the problems we have today would not be here because I believe that his theory was absolutely sound, especially for that time. Professor Lawre...: And so Bunche as the father of the National Negro Congress felt that now what was coming to be was a valid solution to the so called Black problem that would actually take care of it. I suppose, most of you have seen Bunche or a picture of him. He was quite impressive as a human being, somewhat light skin, but he would reject absolutely the label of mulatto. He was well-built, he was athletic, his features were well chiseled, he was quite masculine, he parted his hair a little, but there was nothing pretty about it, you see? He was an outstanding athlete. He was also an outstanding thinker and he few of the moods and the touchiness that many of the outstanding people we know seem to manifest. Professor Lawre...: Bunche was also very Black, but very universal. There was nothing local about him. He was born in Detroit, but he never was a Detroiter, feeling that, that was the city of the world. He was born poor, but not hurting poor. His father was a barber, his mother was a musician, but not professional. Her health was not very good. And so in order to have a climate that was more conducive to the needs of her medication, the family went South, to the Southwest and to New Mexico. And as bad luck would have it, both of his parents died within months of each other. But true to the tradition of the Black extended family, the grandmother came into the scene and took the two children, Ralph and his sister, on to California. Professor Lawre...: In California, Bunche was an outstanding student. And as I've said, an outstanding athlete, and he worked in real jobs, he was a janitor. He was a cleanup man. And all of this, it seems to me, went into the making of Ralph Bunche. Professor Monroe of Harvard Department of Government was a visiting lecturer over in Los Angeles. And Bunche struck him and he persuaded Bunche to come East and study at Harvard. And as you know, Bunche did, getting his master's degree there and finally his PhD. But Harvard, as ever, was reluctant to hire a Black son, no matter how brilliant. Professor Lawre...: You remember Dr. Du Bois, was a brilliant Black son of Harvard and his suppression of the African slave trade was number one in the Harvard historical series. It was not too Black, shall we say, to help Harvard achieve a reputation in that field. But he, though the soul of European culture, was maybe too Black to be hired there. So Du Bois was not hired. Bunche was not hired, but he was recommended that he should go down to Washington where there was a fine Black school and maybe they could get him a job there. So Harvard's loss was Howard's gain. And Bunche established the Department of Political Science there. And during the years when Bunche was associated with Howard, I think he did the clearest and most fundamental analysis of the Black problem in America and what could be done about it. Professor Lawre...: I could try to paraphrase him, but if you don't mind, I will read a few paragraphs of what Bunche himself said. Here's one, "Throughout the world today, wherever whites and blacks are present in any significant numbers in the same community, democracy becomes the tool of the dominant elements in the white population in their restless determination to keep the blacks suppressed." He says, "Wherever, this is true, whether the blacks constitute the overwhelming majority of the population, as in South Africa, or a minority as in the United States. That seems to me that this is basic to whatever you wish to analyze. Again, in reality, the Negro population in the United States is a minority group only in the narrowly racial sense. In every other respect, it is subject to the same diverse influences impinging upon the life of every other group in the nation. Economically, the Negro," they used this word then, "In the vast majority is identified with the peasant and proletariat classes of the country, which are certainly not in the minority." This was contrary to the thinking of many. Professor Lawre...: He goes on, and I'll skip two of these passages and refer you to the Journal of Negro Education from 1935 to 1941, where you will find the words of Ralph Bunche. And I recommend those journals to you for reading. And also Bunche put out a little book, which is almost a collector's item now called A World View of Race, small thing, little less than 100 pages, but it seems to me the most illuminating analysis of the position of Black and other ethnic groups in the world and the way the dominant order manipulates them. Professor Lawre...: So Bunche says, "The factors of race and even slavery do not fully explain the perpetuation of the race problem. Much of what is called prejudice against the Negro can be explained in economic terms." Then he goes on to the question of the Black leadership. "Negro leadership, however, has traditionally put its stress on the element of race. It has attributed the plight of the Negro to a peculiar racial condition. Leaders and organizations alike have had but one hidden view, the elimination of discrimination against the race. This attitude has been reflected in the tactics, which they have employed to correct the abuses. They have not realized that so long as this basic conflict and the economic interest of the white and black groups persist and it is a perfectly natural phenomenon and a modern industrial society, neither prayer nor logic nor emotional appeal will change things substantially. Professor Lawre...: These leaders lead up blind alleys and are chiefly formulating programs of escape." He says, "No minority groups should relent in its most determined fight for its rights, but its leadership should recognize the limitations of opportunistic and socially blind policies. The only realistic program for any minority group in modern America is one which is based upon an intelligent analysis of the problems of the group in terms of the broad social forces which determine the condition. No program of opportunism, no amount of idealism can overcome or control these forces. The only hope for real improvement in the condition of the masses of any American minority group is the hope that can be held out for the betterment of the masses, including the masses of the dominant group. Their basic interests are identical and so must be in the programs and the tactics." Professor Lawre...: If you'll bear with me, I'll read about three other paragraphs. Bunche analyzed with a great deal of specificity what most of these organizations, including the NAACP and the National Urban League were actually doing. These are the fundamental characteristics of these so called programs for improvement. Number one, adherence to policies of escape based upon racialism, that's what he said before. Number two, lack of mass support among the people. Number three, dependence upon white benefactors for financing the program. Number four, reluctance to encourage the development of a working class psychology and the avoidance of class interpretation. And number five, a tendency directly or indirectly not to take the main analysis of what's happening in the social order, but to take their ideological cues from white sympathizers. Professor Lawre...: And he goes on to say, as maybe he said in the quotation that I've read before that less emphasis on race and more on economics and the broad political and economic forces must be joined with a control of the decision making by the Black group itself. I think that might be enough to suggest where Bunche stood. He was saying in effect that it would be a beautiful thing if blacks alone could achieve their redemption and equality without joining with other groups. He said, "Despite the difficulty in order to bring about the desirable change, there must be a combining of forces with other exploited groups in the social order." Professor Lawre...: Now, it was lucky for Bunche that during the mid 30s, there were some unions, some organized workers who were willing to reach out hands to those of the Bunche persuasion. The clothing workers, all of those just about who went into the new organization, the CIO, John L. Lewis in the NMU those days, not of this day. And there were these progressive unions, these working class organizations that seem to furnish the materials for the implementation of Bunche's idea. So Bunche was happy in Chicago in 1936 at the first meeting of the National Negro Congress. And it is my guess and my projection that if the world had remained as it was then, and if the National Negro Congress had, had say about five of six years in order to clean out the kinks that are always present in a new organization, that we would have seen real progress, perhaps a permanent progress. Professor Lawre...: But the world changed around 1939, World War II broke out. And when World War II broke out, the distrust that the Soviet Russia had of the so called democracies, was so great that Soviet Russia decided that in order not to be destroyed by Hitler, that it would be better to reverse its political position and sign a temporary pack with the enemy in order to buy some time. Well, this was disturbing enough, because most of the progressive unions and most of the progressive thinking among scholars at the time looked upon the USSR with all of its weaknesses and shortcomings as essentially a workers state, the most important thing in the world. And if any concession had to be made in order to save the workers state, this concession should be made. Professor Lawre...: And so it happened that the National Negro Congress had in it many who believed in the Bunche analysis of what was going on, but also believed that the workers state should be preserved. And so they shifted their concern from what was generally called the democratic front or the popular front of the Soviets with the so called democracies against Hitler and for a while they were talking about a plague on both of your houses. And they had shifted from the full support of what the National Negro Congress was doing in order to mobilize defense, almost at any price of the workers state. Professor Lawre...: And so A. Phillip Randolph who had been persuaded to become president of the National Negro Congress, noting the shift began to say that the National Negro Congress was not what it had started out to be and therefore it was not for him and his followers. And so at the second meeting of the National Negro Congress, and finally at the third meeting of it, it came apart, it dissolved. It dissolved basically on the changed international situation. And it dissolved because the progressive elements in the labor movement that Bunche had counted on were looking more toward the East than they were toward Harlem or toward the Black population. Professor Lawre...: But even now I say, that what Bunche said is still true and though the world changed and did not permit the realization of this thinking, I still believe it is worth our best effort. So Bunche watched [inaudible] unwind, he shifted and began working with Gunnar Myrdal on the American Dilemma. He volunteered to work with the US State Department that he would not have touched at first. And finally, as you know, ended up with the United Nations. He was such a brilliant man that he excelled here. I say that Bunche invented shuttle diplomacy. He was the one who achieved a truce between Arab and Jew when Henry Kissinger was perhaps a little boy is still growing up in Germany. Professor Lawre...: Bunche was also Head of the Trustee Committee of the United Nations, and he did many things. But one of the inhibitions of a member of that international organization is that you cannot publicly criticize the member nations if you're a member of the staff. So Bunche became silent and we never got that great volume, which would have been an expansion of what he wrote in a World View of Race. The last I saw Ralph Bunche, he was on the road between Selma and Montgomery marching with Martin Luther King. We had seen him in 1959 when we were visiting India and Bunche gave us the best advice anyone gave us on those we should see and those we should not see. Professor Lawre...: For example, he said, "Don't let the American ambassador in India meet you when you first get to India, because if you do the people of India will assume that you're speaking for the state department, but only see him when you're about to leave." This was the wisest counsel we received from anyone. And Martin Luther King was accepted as the greatest living exemplar of non-violent resistance as manifested by Mohandas Gandhi. He was a great success and when he came back, he was confident. He gained the confidence in this foreign country that he had not received in his homeland. And so he went on from that to other things. But Bunche felt that it was symbolic, even though he was a member of the United Nations staff for him to march with Martin Luther King. And he did say to us one day, "This is all that I can do, but at least I can do this much." Professor Lawre...: So I conclude by saying to you, that if I had to name two men whose social thought that I believe is permanent and worthy of study, I would name Du Bois and I would name Ralph Bunche. But I saw Du Bois and Ralph Bunche in debate once and Du Bois looking much smaller, looking more defensive retreated before Ralph Bunche. So scholars and citizens, I say to you that if I had to mention only one man, one person, whose analysis in that time was so keen that it still endures today, my nomination would be Ralph Johnson Bunche. I thank you.