Blacks In and Out of the Left

257 Pages·2013·1.084 MB·English

by  Michael C. Dawson

BLACKS IN AND OUT
OF THE LEFT
The W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures

BLACKS IN AND OUT
OF THE LEFT
Michael C. Dawson
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, En gland
2013
Copyright © 2013 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All right reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Dawson, Michael C., 1951–
Blacks in and out of the left / Michael C. Dawson.
p. cm. – (The W. E. B. Du Bois lectures)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0 -6 74-0 5768- 5 (alk. paper)
1. African Americans—P olitics and government—2 0th century.
2. African Americans— Politics and government— 21st century.
3. African Americans—R ace identity— Political aspects. 4. Right and
left (Po liti cal science)—H istory. 5. Social movements— United States—
History. 6. Po liti cal culture— United States— History. I. Title.
E185.615.D395 2013
323.1196'073—dc23 2012039298
Contents
Preface vii
1. Foundational Myths: Recovering
and Reconciling Narratives of Res ist ance 1
2. Power to the People? 41
3. Who and What Killed the Left 126
4. Modern Myths: Constructing
Visions of the Future 175
References 213
Notes 221
Ac knowl edg ments 229
Index 233

Preface
In the fall of 2009 I was invited to deliver the W. E. B. Du Bois
lectures by the Du Bois Institute at Harvard University. This book
represents a substantial revision of those lectures. The original title
of those lectures was “Blacks and the Left: Past, Present, and Fu-
ture.” But that was not quite right. In one way or another blacks
and black movements in the Americas have been constituent parts
of radical progressive movements since the Founding, well before
anything such as a left had been conceived. African Americans,
their organizations, and/or black movements had been constituent
parts of pre–R evolutionary War radical actions, the antislavery
and suff rage movements, and the populist and farmers’ movements
that swept the South and West during the last few de cades of the
nineteenth century. And, as Carole Horton, Jeff rey Perry, and
other contemporary authors have shown, blacks had a complicated
but active relationship to the growing American labor movement
at the end of the 1800s. The twentieth-c entury relationships be-
tween African Americans and the left were arguably even more
complex, and the title “Blacks and the Left” too much implied
that blacks stood outside the left, either in opposition to or in alli-
ance with it, as opposed to being a key part of the left and having
a fraught relationship with its organizations and its activists.
I take the current title, Blacks In and Out of the Left, in at least
three ways. First, the title is meant quite literally and temporally.
At diff erent times, individual African Americans and black orga-
nizations have actually been in and out of the left during specifi c
viii Preface
eras and at various places, as leftist movements often had diff erent
regional and local characters during periods of heightened activ-
ism, as did the black movement itself.
Second, I also am signifying through the title that even when
blacks w ere an active part of the left, it was common for black
activism not to be a central part of activist discourses outside the
black community. The same claim probably could be made even
more strongly about the Asian American and Latino activism of a
generation ago. In general, there was often a fairly high level of
awareness among activists of color about what was going on in
each other’s communities, while it was often the case that white
radicals of various stripes knew very little, and what they thought
they knew was stupefyingly incorrect. Sociologist and former
Students for a Demo cratic Society leader Todd Gitlin is an excel-
lent example of someone who thinks he knew what was going on
in not just nonwhite movements but also the women’s as well as
gay and lesbian movements. The startling lack of information he
has about those movements is matched only by the vacuousness of
his interpretation of that history.
Third, black radicalism and the study and analysis of it have also
been in and out of scholarly discourses— mostly out, except in
black studies. There are of course many scholars who have been
studiously applying their talent to the study of black radicalism
with excellent eff ect. Historians such as Mark Solomon, Robin
Kelley, Carole Boyce Davies, Glenda Gilmore, Randi Storch, and
Martha Biondi have greatly expanded our knowledge of race and
radical movements in the United States. Phi los op hers such as
Tommie Shelby and my colleague Robert Gooding- Williams
have made important contributions analyzing radical black pol iti-
cal thought. When we start looking at work that purports to
Preface ix
describe the movements of the left, the origins of Marxism in the
United States, or even the move to the right in the United States
during the past thirty years, however, we see not only a stunning
absence of analysis of black activism and the po liti cal thought gen-
erated in the context of black struggles for freedom, equality, and
justice but also a more general absence of taking race seriously as a
historical phenomenon that has profoundly shaped American in-
stitutions, politics, and civil society, as well as individual prefer-
ences, norms, and ideologies. I will attempt to both substantiate
these claims and further develop all three meanings of “in and out
of the left” over the next few chapters.
The result of attempting to work out the relationships between
blacks and the left is a book unlike any of my other scholarly work,
and not just because it is an expansion of a set of lectures as opposed
to a manuscript based on a developed research agenda and substan-
tial empirical work. Unlike my past (and future) work, this manu-
script is not built upon the empirical analysis of public opinion
about race and politics in the United States. Consequently, it does
not make use of the extensive statistical analysis that typifi es the
great majority of my scholarly corpus. Further, this book does not
purport to be a taken as either traditional social movement or
original historical research (although it mightily and unashamedly
relies on the magnifi cent work of a number of historians). This
work is an attempt to systematize refl ections on key moments in
black pol iti cal history in order to see what lessons, if any, are rele-
vant for contemporary American politics and democracy.
This book attempts to begin to answer a question that a num-
ber of colleagues and friends asked after the publication of my
Black Visions in 2001. The stylized form of the question was:
“Michael, you have analyzed black ideologies and black politics