AN ANALYSIS OF AFRICAN AMERICAN, FEMINIST, AND
NATIVE AMERICAN MOVEMENTS IN THE 1960S AND 1970S
BY
SİBEL ERTÜRK
A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE INSTITUTE FOR GRADUATE
STUDIES IN ECONOMICS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES IN PARTIAL
FULFILLMENT OF REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF ARTS IN HISTORY
BILKENT UNIVERSITY
THESIS SUPERVISOR
ASSOC. PROF. DR. RUSSELL L. JOHNSON
SEPTEMBER 2001
I certify that I have read this thesis and have found that it is fully adequate, in
scope and in quality, as a thesis for the degree of Master of History.
Asst. Prof. Russel L. Johnson
Supervisor
I certify that I have read this thesis and have found that it is fully adequate, in
scope and in quality, as a thesis for the degree of Mater of History.
Dr. Walter E. Kretchik
Examining Committee Member
I certify that I have read this thesis and have found that it is fully adequate, in
scope and in quality, as a thesis for the degree of Master of History
Asst. Prof. Thomas Winter
Examining Committee Member
Approval of the Institute of Economics and Social Sciences
Prof. Dr. Kürşat Aydoğan
Ditector
ABSTRACT
The purpose of the theses is to illustrate the analogy among African American,
feminist, and Native American protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s in the
United States, and particularly to examine the division between nonviolent/legal
and militant/cultural approaches within each movement. The thesis uses primary
and secondary sources to examine to what extent the black protest movement
ideologically influenced feminism and Native American activism. Published
document collections of the black civil rights movement, women’s movement,
and Native American activism of the 1960s and 1970s, memoirs of participants,
and movement manifestos comprise the bulk of the primary sources. An
examination of the emergence of modern feminism and Native American
activism against the backdrop of the black civil rights movement reveals that the
resurgence of feminism and Indian activism in the 1960s and 1970s coincided
with the black civil rights movement and reflected certain intersections with it as
well as divergences from it. The black civil rights movement altered and
expanded American politics by providing American women and American
Indians with organizational and tactical models, along with ideas, inspiration, and
confidence. The protests of these three groups are uniquely important because
by protesting for a society in which the quality of human spirit is measured by
standards of personal dignity, potential and performance rather than by arbitrary
culturally imposed standards of place and role they helped America to live up to
its democratic ideals.
iii
OZET
Tezin amacı, Afrika kökenli Amerikalıların, Amerikalı kadınların, ve yerli Amerikalıların
1960 ve 1970’li yıllardaki protesto hareketlerinin yasal ve kültürel yaklaşımlarını
inceleyerek, bu hareketler arasındaki benzerlikleri ortaya çıkarmaktır. Tezde,
feministlerin ve yerli Amerikalıların hareketlerinin, Afrika kökenli Amerikalıların protesto
hareketlerinden ne derece etkilendiğini incelemek için hem ana, hem de ikincil kaynaklar
kullanılmıştır. Afrika kökenli Amerikalıların, Amerikalı kadınların, ve yerli Amerikalıların
basılmış belgelerinin koleksiyonları, hareketlerde bizzat yer alanların anıları, ve
hareketlerin manifestoları ana kaynakları oluşturmaktadır. Afrika kökenli Amerikalıların
hareketleri incelendikten sonra, feministlerin ve yerli Amerikalıların hareketleri
incelenince bu hareketlerin birbirleriyle benzerlikleri olabileceği gibi farklılıkları da
olabileceği gözlenmektedir. Fakat, en önemlisi, Afrika kökenli Amerikalıların medeni
haklarını kazanmak için başlattıkları hareketler kadınlara ve yerli Amerikalılara fikir,
ilham, ve güven verip, organizasyon ve taktikler açısından örnekler sunarak, Amerika’nın
politikasını değiştirmiştir. Bu üç grubun, toplum tarafından empoze edilen kalıpları ve
rolleri aşıp, aktif ve yaratıcı insanların birbirlerine saygı duyduğu bir toplumda yaşamayı
amaçlayan hareketleri, Amerika’nın kendi kuruluş ilkelerine – demokratik ideallerine –
göre yaşamasına yardımcı olduğu için özellikle önemlidir.
iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1.
Abbreviations ...................................................................... 2
2.
Introduction ......................................................................... 5
3.
The Civil Rights Movement .................................................18
4.
The Feminist Movement ..................................................... 54
5.
Native American Rights Movement .................................... 96
6.
Conclusion .........................................................................135
7.
Bibliography .......................................................................145
1
ABBREVIATIONS
AAPRP All-African People’s Revolutionary Party
AFL American Federation of Labor
AFN Alaska Federation of Natives
AIM American Indian Movement
AIPRC American Indian Policy Review Commission
AWSA American Women Suffrage Association
BIA Bureau of Indian Affairs
BPP Black Panther Party for Self-Defense
CACSW Citizens’ Advisory Council on the Status of Women
CAIN Confederation of American Indian Nations
CERT Council of Energy Resource Tribes
CIO Congress of Industrial Organizations
CLUW Coalition of Labor Union Women
COFO Council of Federated Organizations
CORE Congress of Racial Equality
DRUMS Determination of Rights and Unity for Menominee Shareholders
EEOC Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
ERA Equal Rights Amendment
ICC Interstate Commerce Commission
IDSCW Interdepartmental Committee on the Status of Women
LCFO Lowndes County Freedom Organization
2
LDF Legal Defense Fund
MEI Menominee Enterprises, Inc.
MFDP Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party
MIA Montgomery Improvement Association
NAACP National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
NARF Native American Rights Fund
NAWSA National Women Suffrage Association
NBFO National Black Feminist Organization
NCAI National Congress of American Indians
NCBC National Committee of Black Churchmen
NCNP National Conference for a New Politics
NIYC National Indian Youth Council
NOW National Organization for Women
NTCA National Tribal Chairmen’s Association
NUL National Urban League
NWP National Woman’s Party
NWPC National Women’s Political Caucus
NWSA National Women’s Studies Association
NYRF New York Radical Feminists
NYRW New York Radical Women
OAAU Organization of Afro-American Unity
OEO Office of Economic Opportunity
OFCC Office of Federal Contract Compliance
RAM Revolutionary Action Movement
RNA Republic of New Africa
SCLC Southern Christian Leadership Conference
3
SDS Students for Democratic Society
SNCC Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
UNA United Native Americans
VMLM Voice of the Women’s Liberation Movement
WEAL Women’s Equity Action League
WITCH Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell
4
INTRODUCTION
The thesis aims to place into historical perspective certain ideological
relationships between recent black activism, contemporary feminism and Native
American activism by examining their roots, mutual goals, parallel strategies,
common obstacles and various responses. This study is significant because there is
not a study yet linking the three movements in a systematic way.1 The thesis primarily
focuses on the 1960s and 1970s when massive direct actions dominated race, sex
and ethnic protests. By the 1960s and 1970s public protest involved such issues as
race, sex, ethnicity, peace, student rights, education, environmental protection,
implications of advanced technology, youth and counter culture movements, and
consumer protection.2 However, it was primarily the movements of civil rights, women
and Native Americans which led to a fundamental reexamination of American
attitudes and values. Consequently, the purpose of this study is to illustrate the
ideological interconnections among race, sex and ethnic protests, three of the most
significant movements of modern times, and particularly to examine the division
between legal and cultural approaches within each movement.
In the 1960s and 1970s blacks, women and Native Americans were often
set apart from white male protesters in other protest movements. It was not difficult
for the white protesters to enter into the dominant social currents after their protest
1
Sara Evans’s Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights
Movement and the New Left (New York: Vintage Books, 1979) which is primarily a study of the personal
rather than the ideological linkages of the civil rights and women’s movements influenced me to study
the effect of black civil rights on the movements of women and Indians. Irvin D. Solomon, who primarily
argues that women’s own protest history led to contemporary feminism offers useful methodologies in
his Feminism and Black Activism (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989).
2
David Farber, ed., The Sixties: From Memory to History (Chapel Hill & London: The University
of North Carolina Press, 1994).
5
commitment was over. Blacks, women and Indians, on the other hand, suffered
collective discriminations that prevented their easy entry into mainstream currents.
This fact distinguished their activism from the other groups that challenged the
nation’s moral and social structure during this time. There was little interaction with
other contemporary movements. After all, blacks, women and Indians were
challenging historical patterns of discrimination based on negative perceptions of
biological differences rather than simply assaulting contemporary philosophical,
political and ideological targets.
Race, gender and ethnic protests have appeared as personal and
organizational challenges to white male notions that there are inferior beings in
society who must be subjugated to their proper place and proper role. The movement
became the vehicle by which the powerless sought to achieve entry into the policymaking arena of the society. Blacks, women, and Indians commonly have been
defined by historians as analogous powerless groups. Because of their nature, i.e.
their race and sex, they are said to have different qualities from the privileged group,
white males, which sets the standards for acceptable attitudes, roles and behavior in
society.3 Such common awareness of injustice might lead to similar patterns of
protest among blacks, women, and Indians. Accordingly, the thesis examines to what
extent the black protest movement ideologically influenced feminism and Native
American activism.
The civil rights struggle produced a considerable literature focused on the
problems of African Americans and African American contributions to America. In the
1940s and 1950s, the tension between actual black life and the ideals of America
began to be widely reflected in history. Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma
3
William H. Chafe, The Unfinished Journey: America since World War II (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1995), pp. vii-viii.
6
(1944) is one of the first books to focus on race relations in the United States.4 Works
such as Herbert Shapiro’s White Violence and Black Response, August Meier’s
Negro Thought in America, and Robert H. Brisbane’s The Black Vanguard help us
understand the direct relation between the black experience and the development of
race- and color-consciousness, and illustrate that Afro-American history is no longer
perceived as adjunctive, but as central to American history.5 The civil rights struggle
of the 1960s and 1970s accelerated advances in research by historians. While the
first literature about this period was largely written by participants, many of the
contributors to the historiography were young scholars of the 1970s and 1980s and
thus writing from a fresh perspective. Not surprisingly, one important focus of
research has been Martin Luther King, Jr. For example, David J. Garrow’s Pulitzer
Prize-winning biography of King, Taylor Branch’s Pulitzer Prize-winning chronicle of
the King years, and David L. Lewis’s King offer studies of King’s contribution to the
black freedom struggle through an analysis of his nonviolent legal-oriented protest
campaigns.6 Casebooks on civil rights such as Simple Justice facilitate a multi-cultural
inquiry into anti-discrimination law by presenting civil rights issues as integrated social
problems. 7
In terms of cultural-oriented books, William L. Van Deburg’s New Day in
Babylon can be cited as the most comprehensive account of the rise and fall of
the Black Power movement and of its dramatic transformation of both African
4
Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New
Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1944).
5
Herbert Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to
Montgomery (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1988); August Meier, Negro
Thought in America: Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington, 1880-1915 (Ann Arbor:
The University of Michigan Press, 1988); Robert H. Brisbane, The Black Vanguard: Origins of the
Negro Social Revolution, 1990-1960 (Valley Forge: Judson Press, 1970).
6
David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. ad the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference (London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1988); Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters:
America in the King Years, 1954-63 (New York: Simon & Schuster Inc., 1985); James A. Colaiaco,
Martin Luther King, Jr.: Apostle of Militant Nonviolence (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988); David
L. Lewis, King: A Biography (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1978).
7
Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black
America’s Struggle for Equality (New York: Alfred
7 A. Knopf, 1975).
American and the American culture.8 As Van Deburg illustrates, as the clarification
of black identity and consciousness assumed an urgency, the focus centered on
the continuity of the black experience despite its sharp break – the forced removal
from African homes and subsequent enslavement. Accordingly, cultural-oriented
works focuses on such topics as the pan-African movement and the Afro-centric
interpretation.
Similar to African American history, women’s history began as an effort to
remedy the absence of women from historical accounts. This compensatory
history discovered and celebrated outstanding women of the past. After the
success of that endeavor, women’s history began to deal not only with
outstanding persons but with various women of different races, classes, nations,
and religions. The academic field of women’s studies, well established since the
1970s, focused on that wider concept of women.9 During this period, women’s
history dealt with the “cult of true womanhood” and “domesticity,” both seen as
cultural, male-oriented models for defining women and their roles. Some women’s
historians, influenced to some degree by Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique,
argued that American women’s history had to be understood not only by way of
events but through an ideology as well.10 It produced calls for widening women’s
history to gender studies. For instance, Rosalind Rosenberg, in Beyond Separate
Spheres, has located the beginnings of modern studies of sex differences in the
Progressive Era. She argues that many sex differences were the result of
socialization, not biology.11
That approach integrated women’s history more
effectively into the whole historiography and made it a more useful instrument in
8
William L. Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American
Culture, 1965-1975 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992).
9
Linda Kerber, Toward an Intellectual History of Women: Essays (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1997), pp. 162-167; Barbara Welter, “The True Cult of Womanhood: 18201860”, American Quarterly. Vol. 18, No.2, Part I. (Summer, 1996): pp. 151-171.
10
Betty Friedan, Feminine Mystique (London: Penguin Books, 1965).
8
the struggle for women’s emancipation. In Century of Struggle (1975), Eleanor
Flexner surveys women’s activism throughout the twentieth century.12 For
Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement
and the New Left, which is the only personal study linking the civil rights
movement and women’s activism on the base of research, Sara Evans
interviewed dozens of the central figures in the movement. These interviews and
her own personal experience provide valuable information on how the political
stance of
women was shaped by their disillusionment in the civil rights
movement.13 Jo Freeman’s The Politics of Women’s Liberation, and Alice Echols’s
Daring to be Bad are important contributions to the writing of women’s history
which explore women’s liberation from its break with the coalition of leftist activist
groups of the 1960s to its abandonment of radicalism and separatism in the
1970s.14 Casebooks such as Justice and Gender provide a comprehensive
investigation of gender and the law in the United States.15
Similar to African American and women’s historiography, in the widening
civil rights struggle, Native Americans strove for the recognition of pre-Columbian
America and Americans as well as their sufferings during the post-Columbian
settling of the continent. One of the earliest native scholars who focused on Indian
history, culture, and contemporary life was D’Arcy McNickle, who wrote They
Came Here First, which dealt with migrations, laws, invasion, war, trade,
colonialism, expansion, reservations, allotment, and self-determination.16 Vine
11
Rosalind Rosenberg, “Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern
Feminism”, The Journal of American History. Vol. 69, No. 4. (March, 1983): pp. 998-999.
12
Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Women’s Rights Movement in the United
States (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975).
13
Evans, Personal Politics.
14
Jo Freeman, The Politics of Women’s Liberation (New York: David McKay Company, Inc.,
1975); Alice Echols, Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1965-1975 (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
15
Deborah L. Rhode, Justice and Gender: Sex Discrimination and the Law (Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press, 1991).
16
D’Arcy McNickle, They Came Here First: The Epic of the American Indian (New York: J.
B. Lippincott Company, 1949).
9
Deloria, Jr., of the Standing Rock Sioux, is one of the leading scholars in Native
American studies. His book, Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto,
challenges stereotypes and scholars dealing with native culture and history. He
wrote other books, including Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties, and American
Indian Policy in the Twentieth Century.17 Indians also reflected their history
through literature. Although Native Americans offered some fiction before the
1960s, the era of native activism led to a wealth of books that has grown rapidly
since 1968 when N. Scott Momaday published his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel,
House Made of Dawn.18 Momaday’s work emphasizes the struggles of
contemporary native people to find themselves through tribal traditions, including
stories, imagination, creativity, and ceremony. James S. Olson and Raymond
Wilson’s Native Americans in the Twentieth Century, and Peter Iverson’s “We Are
Still Here” present comprehensive surveys of Native American history from the
1890s to the present.19 Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., in his Now That the Buffalo has
Gone, presents major aspects of contemporary Indian affairs by reviewing the
particular histories of seven Indian tribes.20 Felix S. Cohen’s Handbook of Federal
Indian Law, a forty-two volume collection of federal laws and treaties, is a real
contribution to American Indian historiography.21 Clifford E. Trafzer’s As Long As
the Grass Shall Grow and Rivers Flow, and Joane Nagel’s American Indian Ethnic
Renewal, which present Native voices telling their own stories of conflict,
resistance and survival,
17
provide valuable information about several historical
Vine Deloria, Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1988), Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1985), American Indian Policy in the Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
1985).
18
N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996).
19
James S. Olson and Raymond Wilson, Native Americans in the Twentieth Century
(Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984); Peter Iverson, “We Are Still Here”: American Indians in
the Twentieth Century (Illinois: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1998).
20
Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., Now That the Buffalo Has Gone: A Study of Today’s American
Indians (Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984).
21
Felix S. Cohen, Felix S. Cohen’s Handbook of Federal Indian Law (Charlottesville: Michie:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1982).
10
forces which created an urban Indian population base, a reservation and urban
Indian organizational infrastructure, and a broad cultural climate of ethnic pride
and militancy.22
Although the literature on the three movements is voluminous, no single
study examines the possible parallels between race, sex and ethnic protests. The
thesis uncovers two protest models that deal with the similar obstacles, strategies,
tactics and goals of race, sex and ethnic protests. Black, female, and Indian
assimilationists adopted legal-oriented approaches to social change, while black,
female, and Indian separatists emphasized culturally-oriented protest. The first of
the two models, the legal-traditional approach, assumes that a large number of
protesters sought primarily to create a more egalitarian society with full
integration. This group did not seek to overturn society, but rather to reform it
through traditional legal measures so that blacks, women and Indians may
participate equally. Unlike the legalists, the cultural-nationalists rejected legal
assimilation in favor of radical nontraditional alternative arrangements that stress
self-definition and intragroup strength practiced apart from the dominant group.
At the same time, not all groups fit the neat delineation of legal vs. cultural
orientation. Leading Native American activists, for example, were both reformist
and radical since they sought legal change while at the same time challenging
cultural norms like assimilation. Accordingly, this category must be seen in the
light of the efforts to understand the developments of black activism, feminism and
Indian activism, not to lock each into rigid ideological barriers. Allegiances shifted
among protesters themselves, and it is therefore difficult to establish the exact
level of participation in each of the two models in terms of numbers and intensity.
Moreover, even though some protesters’ enthusiasms shifted from one approach
22
Clifford E. Trafzer, As Long As The Grass Shall Grow and Rivers Flow: A History of
Native Americans (New York: Harcourt College Publishers, 2000); Joane Nagel, American Indian
11
to another, the transition was not necessarily sequential, as categories tended to
connect or overlap in particular ways over time and space. Civil rights, feminist
and Indian activists adopted these models from their long protest histories.
Discontent with patriarchal authority had fostered the American Revolution.
And, the same force stimulated modern activism. However, modern black activism
particularly has its ideological roots in the 1920s. In the post-World War I period
race pride and spirit showed itself in the mass movement of Marcus Garvey and
the literary achievements of the Harlem Renaissance. Through the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Afro-Americans
increased their efforts to end the “color line” during the inter-war period. With the
changing conditions of the early 1940s, some blacks departed from the traditional
legal lobbying tactics of the NAACP and began to realize more dramatic actions,
the nonviolent, direct-action and mass protest strategies of the Congress of Racial
Equality. With the Supreme Court’s Brown school desegregation decision in the
mid-1950s, many blacks felt that at last the legal struggle of the NAACP had
proved successful. But it quickly became apparent that the federal government’s
reluctance to enforce Brown and similar decisions would allow white America’s
segregation policies to continue. Through the middle and late 1950s segregation
increased. This, in turn, increased feelings of social injustice and new protests
emerged.23
Black struggles for equality emerged with the Montgomery, Alabama, bus
boycott in 1955. Innovative organizations began to adopt new protest models and
spawned new personal leadership, for instance that of Martin Luther King, Jr., who
became an internationally recognized civil rights leader. King worked primarily
through the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) until the early
Ethnic Renewal: Red Power and the Resurgence of Identity and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1996).
12
1960s, at which time younger and more impatient people carried the civil rights
movement into new phases. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and
the Congress of Racial Equality used conflict methods of protest in place of the
NAACP and SCLC’s legal consensus model. But in the face of these new militant
challenges, the NAACP and SCLC did not give up their traditional organizational
leadership in the quest for social equality. They continued to press strongly for
legislation and precedent-setting court decisions and to supply legal counsel and
financial backing for direct action.24
Therefore, into the mid-1960s black protest goals were aimed for the most
part not at overturning the fundamental structure of racist society, but rather at
altering its legal basis. As a result, despite decades of struggles and successes,
most Afro-Americans remained economically, educationally, and politically
marginal to the dominant white society. Since many Afro-Americans showed that
they were not happy with their second-class status, it was predictable that a new
militancy would emerge. The new movement appeared as the Black Power
movement, which symbolized the transition from legal-oriented to cultural-oriented
protest.
Black Power stressed self-defense, self-definition and self-determination.
Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton stated these goals in Black Power.
“Our basic need is to reclaim our history and our identity from what must be called
cultural terrorism, from the depredation of self-justifying white guilt. We shall have
to struggle for the right to create our own terms through which to define ourselves
and our relationship to the society, and to have these terms recognized.”25 For
blacks this new focus called for cultural autonomy as well as increased militancy
23
Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response, pp. 101-407; Brisbane, The Black
Vanguard.
24
Garrow, Bearing the Cross, pp. 11-172; Branch, Parting the Waters.
25
Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in
America (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), pp.13
34-35.
and departures from past legal-oriented coalition policies. Black Power stressed
nationalistic militancy that reflected earlier approaches – especially those of
Marcus Garvey, the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X. Malcolm X was the most
visible spokesperson for the Nation of Islam during the early 1960s. When he
proclaimed Black America’s right to self-defense “by any means necessary”,
disavowed what he termed the “disarming philosophy of non-violence”, and
labeled the white liberal allies of the civil rights movement deceivers and
hypocrites, many black Americans agreed.26 When Malcolm X spoke of the need
for black unity and self-determination, for community control and the
internationalization of the black struggle, he foreshadowed later, more fully
developed and institutionalized Black Power sentiment.
Black Power influenced the direction of protest thought in contemporary
America by offering organizational and tactical models, ideas, inspiration, and
confidence to those who wished to challenge traditional assumptions of the proper
place and role of American subgroups. It taught that society needed structural and
social change as well as legal change. By attacking various institutional
inequalities, Black Power helped to influence much of the protest thought of the
late 1960s and 1970s that came to characterize the more militant wings of other
cultural-oriented movements, in particular radical women and radical Indians.
It seems that the growing impact of black protest through the 1960s helped
in many essential ways to generate the emergence of other social protests of the
era, both by providing models for political activity and legal goals and by
mobilizing a new consciousness against restraining concepts of proper place and
role. Particularly representative of new social commitments in the 1960s were the
reemerging women’s movement, which attacked the notion that women’s
achievements should be limited to motherhood and corollary pursuits, and Indian
26
Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon, p.14
4.
activism, which attacked assimilation and dissolution and fought for selfdetermination. However, to assume that the women’s rights movement and Native
American movement derived directly from the black civil rights movement would
be totally to neglect women and Indians’ own rich protest histories.
While civil rights in the early 1960s created a new confidence that certain
protest ideologies could produce change, there were equally important women
and Indian-oriented events occurring simultaneously that helped to revive
feminism and Indian activism. In terms of the women’s movement, lack of federal
initiative in pressing for strict enforcement for redress of sexual discrimination,
publication of feminist books, and a sense of unfulfillment and denial of their own
potential in the civil rights movement encouraged women to speak out against
sexist practices. This, in turn, created a renewed interest among women in
collective identity, their public prospects and their private aspirations. As an
extension of the earlier legal lobbying model of the suffragists, the National
Organization for Women represented the legal approach. It stressed women’s
legal rights and petitioned federal and state governments for meaningful actions in
this area. On the other hand, radical women rejected the legal focus in favor of
cultural-based protest against women’s oppression. They took organizing skills
and ideological lessons learned in the civil rights movement and used them for
feminist purposes. Radical feminists, like black nationalists, rejected the notion
that removal of legal and political obstacles would create an egalitarian society. By
1970 radical women had created numerous organizations, and groups like
Redstockings, New York Radical Women and the Feminists became the more
visible elements of the cultural wing. Radical women, like black radicals, rejected
compromise politics. Some even chose to reject heterosexual living patterns and
favored alternative arrangements.
15
For Native Americans, funding of federal Indian programs, demographic
changes, paternalism and racism of federal institutions, and denial of Indian
ethnicity helped to revive Indian activism. The legal faction included the National
Congress of American Indians, and tribally organized groups such as the National
Tribal Chairmen’s Association, and the Native American Rights Fund. These
organizations adopted the black civil rights tactics of lobbying, petitioning, and
litigating. However, their efforts to reverse termination policies predated the civil
rights era.27 Meanwhile, whereas black radicals had called for Black Power and
received support from young Afro-Americans, so Native American radicals called
for Red Power and had their own separatist ideas. Red Power stood in contrast to
the more conservative, legal-oriented groups representing Indian interests. The
cultural-oriented faction involved such radical organizations as the National Indian
Youth Council and American Indian Movement. Despite the fact that the civil rights
movement and American Indian activists had not much contact and the fact that
the problems of American Indians and African Americans differed, the civil rights
movement was very important for the reemergence of Indian activism. Native
American activists borrowed organizational forms, rhetoric, and tactics from civil
rights, but changed them according to their needs, targets, and locations. It may
be concluded that the structure, style and rhetoric of black radicalism, radical
feminism and Indian activism have certain similarities, but the energy, leadership
and direction of each movement sprang largely from within.
The thesis, then, deals with how the movements of black civil rights,
women and Indians have been shaped by two distinct ideological approaches: the
legal and the cultural. Historians need to pay greater attention to the historical
interrelatedness of events, society, and the possibility of bettering society. It
27
The effort to detribalize and assimilate the Indians began with the Dawes Act of 1887 and
was renewed by the Eisenhower Administration16in the 1950s.
seemed useful to develop a theory of ideological interaction as an interconnection
between the three groups in order to examine the parallels and the extent of
shared protest experiences. The following chapters focus on the orientations of
black activism, feminism and Indian activism in the 1960s and 1970s with the
intent of examining more carefully the contemporary ideological relationship
between black civil rights and feminism and Indian activism. The chapters
continue to compare and contrast the 1960s and 1970s ideological thrust of the
three movements along legal and cultural lines. Hopefully, the thesis will further
historians’ understanding of race, sex, and ethnic protest. 28
28
Much of the evidence comes from secondary literature, but important primary sources
include published document collections, memoirs of participants, movement manifestos, among
other sources. For instance, Judith Clavir Albert and Stewart Edward Albert, in The Sixties Papers:
Documents of a Rebellious Decade (New York: Praeger, 1984), collect documents from the civil
rights, anti-war, and women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s. William L. Van Deburg’s Modern
Black Nationalism: From Marcus Garvey to Louis Farrakhan (New York: New York University Press,
1997) presents a collection of invaluable documents, speeches, and testimonies that trace the
development of black nationalism. SNCC volunteer Cleveland Sellers’s memoir The River of No
Return: The Autobiography of a Black Militant and the Life and Death of SNCC (Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 1990) provides an eyewitness report of the strategies and conflicts among
black activists of the 1960s. Bruce Perry’s Malcolm X: The Last Speeches (New York: Pathfinder,
1989) presents six speeches and interviews with Malcolm X, the most visible spokesperson for AfroAmericans’ right to self-defense “by any means necessary.” Malcolm X’s radical philosophies can
also be seen in Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Ballantine Books, 1973),
several volumes of collected speeches, and spoken word record albums. Similarly, activist Stokely
Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton’s statements and urgent call for a process of political
modernization are reflected in their Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York:
Vintage Books, 1967). Betty Friedan’s It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women’s Movement
(New York: Random House, 1976), Robin Morgan’s The Word of A Woman: Feminist Dispatches
(New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1994), and Sheila Ruth’s Issues in Feminism (Mountain
View: Maxfield Publishing Company, 1995) present many interviews and early feminist publications,
and the writers share their own experience in the women’s liberation movement. Casebooks such as
Roy L. Brooks, Gilbert P. Carrasco and Gordon A. Martin, Jr.’s Civil Rights Litigation: Cases and
Perspectives (Durham, North Carolina: Carolina Academic Press, 1995), Leslie Friedman
Goldstein’s Contemporary Cases in Women’s Rights (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1994), Winston E. Langley and Vivian C. Fox’s Women’s Rights in the United States: A
Documentary History (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1998), and Francis Paul Prucha’s
Documents of United States Indian Policy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990) provide
essential historical documents on significant formulations of policy in the conduct of the affairs of
blacks, women, and Indians by the United States
17 government.
CHAPTER I
THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
This chapter will review the legal and cultural factions of black activism in
order to facilitate discussion of common ideological influences and shared protest
characteristics among the black civil rights movement, feminist activism, and
Native American activism in later chapters. During the 1960s and 1970s, while the
legal faction called for nonviolent legal action within the democratic system to
transform the social structure of the country, the cultural faction supported a
violent, cultural- oriented movement and the creation of two separate societies –
one black, one white. It can be argued that the cultural faction, which produced
various gains in psychological and cultural empowerment, complemented the
legal faction, which was successful in reaching its goals of desegregation and
voting rights.
Events in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the
twentieth century significantly affected black people and provided the necessary
conditions for the civil rights movement. Emancipation (1863) and the
Reconstruction period (1867-1877) provided legal freedom but left many blacks
destitute. Intimidation and an unequal system maintained economic bondage. The
Ku Klux Klan, a terrorist group, arose during Reconstruction to preserve white
supremacy by intimidating blacks who sought to exercise their political rights. By
the 1890s, the southern states had begun to pass Black Codes, laws to
disfranchise blacks, segregate them in all areas of life, and relegate them to a
subservient status. At the turn of the century, Jim Crow laws segregated many
schools, railroad cars, hotels, and
hospitals. Poll taxes and other devices
18
disfranchised blacks.1 Blacks could not hope for support from the courts. In the
1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, the Supreme Court upheld “separate but
equal” facilities for blacks and whites.2 White violence created such an
atmosphere of terror that protest followed the slave pattern of indirection, secrecy,
and withdrawal into a separate black world. In spite of their powerless position,
blacks often found ways of resisting white domination – ranging from playing the
Sambo type of a happy, carefree, irresponsible Afro-American or the “Uncle Tom”,
who seemed to have faith in white allies and the efficacy of civil rights legislation,
to quiet acts of subversion and sabotage.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the main spokesperson for the race
was the accommodationist leader Booker T. Washington, who supported gradual
change rather than political action. Washington advised adjustment to the biracial
situation and to disfranchisement. He stressed self-help, racial solidarity,
economic accumulation, and industrial education. His conciliatory stance was
based on the belief that blacks should take responsibility for their own
advancement. The most prominent critic of Washington’s accommodationist
policies was the black progressive W. E. B. Du Bois. By 1900, Du Bois argued
that until blacks gained their full political rights, democracy would never be theirs.
In place of accommodation and programs for industrial arts, Du Bois emphasized
political power, civil rights, and education. He brought black leaders together to
form the Niagara Movement, an important precursor of the National Association
for the Advancement of the Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban
League (NUL).3
1
August Meier, Negro Thought in America (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press,
1988), pp. 3-16; Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and
Black America’s Struggle for Equality (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), pp. 62-103.
2
Kluger, Simple Justice, pp. 90-102.
3
NAACP and NUL’s strategies such as working within the American democratic framework
rather than against it were stated in NAACP’s19
journal, The Crisis, and in NUL’s journal Opportunity.
Since neither Du Bois nor Washington could stop discrimination, lynching
and the loss of voting rights in such an unjust environment, some African
Americans saw
the need for a cultural-oriented, nationalist, and separatist
movement. Jamaican secessionist Marcus Garvey founded the Universal Negro
Improvement Association in 1914 during the heightened white racism of the early
twentieth century. Garvey directly opposed the white system by stressing the
beauty of blackness, black pride, self-esteem, and Pan-Africanism. Similar
sentiments would resurface when disappointments with the achievements of the
1960s civil rights movement turned into support for black nationalism. Moreover,
mass migration to northern cities in the twentieth century provided a stronger base
for dealing with racism. The city became the center of black intellectual thought
and cultural development. It created the possibility of a northern support system
for the southern-based civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The Harlem
Renaissance, led by black poets like Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and
Claude McKay, provided a creative outburst of talent and nationalism. Another
cultural renaissance would mark the transition from the civil rights movement to
the black power movement in the 1960s.4
World War II fostered a reborn spirit of legal protest to bring white racial
ideology into conformity with America’s democratic ideology. The legal wing of
black activism undertook both legal action, confined to courthouses and legislative
chambers, and nonviolent direct action, filling the streets with masses of
nonviolent marchers exercising the right to protest for constitutional goals.
Massive nonviolent direct action exposed racist brutality, pressured the federal
government to enforce civil rights, and awakened the conscience of the nation to
see the injustices in the society.
4
William L. Van Deburg, ed., Modern Black Nationalism: From Marcus Garvey to Louis
Farrakhan (New York: New York University Press, 1997), pp. 23, 51, 57, 64, 317, 374; Herbert
20
Until the mid-1950s, the battle for civil rights in the South was led by the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded
in 1909. The NAACP focused on public education, legislative lobbying and court
action to attain equality for blacks. The NAACP’s tax-exempt Legal Defense and
Education Fund, later known as the Inc. Fund, became one of the nation’s most
respected legal machines. Through the 1950s the Inc. Fund participated directly in
many important Supreme Court civil rights decisions. The greatest NAACP
achievement was the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of
Education, declaring “separate but equal” racial segregation in public schools
unconstitutional; the Court ruled that separate schools were inherently unequal.
However, after the decision, public schools and accommodations remained
segregated as the Southern states embarked on a campaign of “massive
resistance”. White Citizens’ Councils were instituted in the South to resist
integration, and the Ku Klux Klan became more active. The legal strategy of the
NAACP was unable to cope with such defiance. Moreover, between 1956 and
1959, the Southern states attacked the NAACP, either outlawing it, as in Alabama,
or passing laws and issuing injunctions to weaken its operation.5
Further, the Supreme Court weakened the effectiveness of the Brown
decision. It ruled on May 31, 1955 that desegregation should merely be carried out
“with all deliberate speed.” This ruling, known as Brown II, let Southern
segregationists respond with a policy of deliberate delay and evasion.6 Therefore,
blacks lost confidence in legislation and legal action to achieve full citizenship. A
more active method was needed, something which would supplement the moderate
legalist strategy of the NAACP, compel the Southern states to comply with the law,
Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery (Amherst: The
University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), pp. 161-169.
5
Kluger, Simple Justice, 761-764, 776-791, 902-974; James Colaiaco, Martin Luther
King, Jr.: Apostle of Militant Nonviolence (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), pp. 20-21.
6
Kluger, Simple Justice, 912-942; Colaiaco,
Martin Luther King, Jr., pp. 20-21.
21
and persuade the President and Congress to take a more active role in support of
civil rights. This method, initiated in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, was mass,
nonviolent direct action. Montgomery expanded the arena of black protest from the
courts and legislatures to the streets. Thereafter, the branch of the movement led by
Martin Luther King, Jr. expanded in the form of the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference (SCLC), created in 1957 to coordinate nonviolent protest activities in the
South.7 The nonviolent method revolutionized
race relations in the South and
affected the politics of the whole nation.
The Montgomery protest is a turning point in the civil rights movement. On
December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a member of the NAACP, was arrested for violating
the city’s segregated transportation ordinance by refusing to give her bus seat to a
white man. To protest the arrest of Rosa Parks, black activists boycotted the
Montgomery city buses. The Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), which
directed the protests, filed a lawsuit, Browder v. Gayle. It requested that segregation
on buses not only in Montgomery, but also in the entire state of Alabama be
declared unconstitutional as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th
Amendment to the Constitution. Responding to MIA’s federal suit, the City
Commission undertook legal action of its own. On February 21, King and other
leaders of the boycott were indicted by a Montgomery County grand jury for violating
an obscure 1921 Alabama anti-boycott statute. But this tactic failed to crush the
boycott.
Afro-Americans appeared to have gained a victory when the Montgomery City
Lines, acting on orders from their Chicago parent company, the National City Lines,
decided to desegregate buses on 23 April. But the order was repealed on 9 May,
when the City Commission secured a state court injunction prohibiting
7
David J. Garrow, Bearing The Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference (London: Jonathan Cape
22 Ltd., 1988), pp. 83-125.
desegregation of the buses. Meanwhile arguments in the Browder v. Gayle case
concluded in the U.S. District Court. On June 4, 1956, the protest proved
successful when bus segregation in Montgomery was declared unconstitutional by
a special three judge panel. On December 20, the Supreme Court’s bus integration
order became legally effective in Montgomery. Scattered white resistance
continued, however; for example, in late December Ku Klux Klan members fired at
integrated buses in Montgomery. 8
The Montgomery bus boycott initiated the era of mass nonviolent protest for
civil rights in the South. For the first time, an entire black community had resisted
Jim Crow successfully. In 1956, bus boycotts were organized in Birmingham and
Mobile, Alabama, and Tallahassee, Florida;
many
other
southern
cities
desegregated their buses voluntarily, without court intervention.9 The civil rights
movement could not have ended legalized segregation in the South without the
combined action of nonviolent protest and litigation.
On May 17, 1957, the first large civil rights demonstration, the Prayer
Pilgrimage
to
Washington,
helped
to
get
support
for
the
Eisenhower
Administration’s proposed civil rights legislation. Later that year, Congress passed
the first major civil rights law since the Reconstruction era. The Civil Rights Act of
1957 created the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, established a Civil Rights
Division in the Justice Department and empowered the federal government to
obtain injunctions preventing interference with the right to vote. Still, the failure of
the 1957 Civil Rights Act to protect black voting rights led the Eisenhower
Administration to propose the Civil Rights Act of 1960, which authorized federal
district courts to appoint voting referees to protect the right to vote in areas where it
was denied or prevented by local officials. The act also authorized the Department
8
9
David L. Lewis, King: A Biography (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1978), pp. 44-86.
Colaiaco, Martin Luther King, Jr., p.23
18.
of Justice to file suits in defense of voting rights. While the Civil Rights Acts of 1957
and 1960 represented progress, this legislation was still insufficient to guarantee
the right to vote for black Americans and did not overcome the problems of
segregated schools and public accommodations.10
By 1960 the legal faction of the civil rights movement focused on a massive
nonviolent assault on segregation, using the tactics of sit-ins, mass marches and
civil disobedience. On February 1, 1960, four black students of North Carolina
Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro refused to leave a whites only
lunch counter at Woolworth’s department store, and the sit-in movement, a
milestone in the struggle for black equality, was born. The students' arrest and
removal from the whites only lunch counter at Woolworth’s led other student
protesters to stage sit-ins in Southern states. Sit-ins continued to spread in the
South, and by the end of 1961 nearly two hundred cities in the South had begun to
desegregate. The success of nonviolent mass actions soon challenged the legal
oriented wing of the movement, especially the NAACP and King factions. The idea
of changing laws began to give way to an ideology of changing attitudes and
practices. Most of the protests were supported by SCLC affiliates, local CORE
chapters and NAACP Youth Councils. Protests began to be conducted not only at
lunch counters, but also at department stores, libraries, supermarkets, theatres and
hotels.11
In particular, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which
began under SCLC and King sponsorship in 1960, underwent an important
transformation. It quickly adopted the new “eyeball to eyeball” or “putting your body
10
Roy L. Brooks, Civil Rights Litigation: Cases and Perspectives (Durham, North Carolina:
Carolina Academic Press, 1995), p. 518.
11
Colaiaco, Martin Luther King, 29-31; Rhoda Lois Blumberg, Civil Rights: The 1960s
Freedom Struggle (Boston: Twayne Publishers,
24 1984), pp. 68-81.
on the line” tactics of confrontation and possible arrest.12 By 1966 both CORE and
SNCC had undergone a radical ideological evolution from demands for integration
to an emphasis on black nationalism. Their protest experiences led organizations
like SNCC and CORE away from the established NAACP legal model, which had
long stressed assimilation within the framework of traditional American goals and
concepts, to new models of activism and rejection.
After John F. Kennedy took office as president in 1961, King published an
article in The Nation, “Equality Now”, urging the new president to take a “radically
new approach to the question of civil rights” by sponsoring far-reaching legislation
and issuing executive orders to end racial discrimination.13 However, Kennedy
hoped that stronger enforcement of the current civil rights acts of 1957 and 1960
would be sufficient to maintain the confidence of black voters without risking the
loss of his political support in Congress. In place of new civil rights legislation,
Kennedy decided to pursue a policy that would guarantee blacks the right to
register and vote. The Administration argued that a massive voter registration
campaign would direct the attention of blacks away from the protests and increase
the number of Democratic voters for the next election. To educate blacks in
understanding the electoral process, the Administration sponsored a Voter
Education Project.14
But many blacks became disappointed with Kennedy’s actions. During its
first two years, the Administration failed to protect civil rights in the South. Even
though in November 1962 the President issued an executive order banning
discrimination in federally-funded housing, the order was so poorly implemented
that it had minimal effect. Even the Voter Education Project was a disappointment.
12
Judith Clavir and Stewart Edward Albert, The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious
Decade (New York: Praeger, 1984), 8; Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide ( New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), p. 122.
13
Colaiaco, Martin Luther King, Jr., pp. 32-33.
25
Although the Justice Department initiated some voting rights suits, it was hampered
by weaknesses in the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960. By 1964, only 40 percent
of the black population of voting age in the South was qualified to vote, as
compared with 70 percent of whites.15
The weaknesses in the Kennedy Administration‘s civil rights policy were
first exposed by the Freedom Rides of 1961. After becoming CORE’s national
director, James Farmer announced a plan to test Southern compliance with a
December 1960 United States Supreme Court decision, Boynton v. Virginia,
prohibiting segregation in interstate transportation facilities. In May 1961, thirteen
Freedom Riders got on two buses, a Greyhound and a Trailways, in Washington,
D.C. and began a trip to challenge segregation in the South. New Orleans was
their destination. The Freedom Riders tried to challenge segregation in terminal
restaurants, restrooms, and waiting rooms, exposing the defiance of federal law in
the South. The Riders accepted the legal penalty of imprisonment for their civil
disobedience. The Freedom Rides went beyond the nonviolent strategy pursued
by the sit-ins. They not only disrupted public order in the South but also compelled
the federal government to fulfill its responsibility to protect citizens attempting to
exercise their civil rights. On May 29, 1961 Kennedy formally petitioned the
Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to act against segregation in interstate
bus terminals; on September 22, the ICC issued an order banning segregation in
both interstate carriers and terminal facilities.16
The Freedom Rides inspired the Southern nonviolent protest movement.
Moreover, the Rides gave an important strategic lesson to King and the SCLC. In
order to arouse public sympathy sufficient to pressure the federal government to
14
Harris Wofford, Of Kennedys and Kings: Making Sense of the Sixties (Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992),159; Colaiaco, Martin Luther King, Jr., p. 33.
15
Colaiaco, Martin Luther King. Jr., p. 33.
16
Garrow, Bearing the Cross, pp. 154-172; Kluger, Simple Justice, p. 952; Colaiaco,
Martin Luther King, Jr., pp. 38.
26
enforce civil rights in the states and localities, white racists had to be provoked to
use violence against nonviolent protesters. This lesson was applied in 1962, when
James Meredith attempted to become the first black man to enter the University of
Mississippi. After Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett defied a federal injunction by
preventing Meredith’s enrolment, President Kennedy sent federal marshals to the
University to enforce the court order. When they were rebuffed by a rioting white
mob, the President was compelled to send federal troops and National
Guardsmen. On October 1, 1962, James Meredith registered as a student at the
University of Mississippi.17 Thereafter, provoking a crisis to arouse sympathy and
force the federal government to take action in support of civil rights became a part
of the strategy of nonviolent direct action.
The first test of SCLC’s capacity for nonviolent action occurred in Albany,
Georgia, in 1962. In 1961, most Albany blacks were not registered to vote, and the
city’s public facilities were completely segregated. In late 1961, Albany blacks
engaged in massive nonviolent protests, disrupting civil order for a year. The goal
of the movement was to overturn segregation not only in bus stations and lunch
counters but in all public facilities in the city. By the end of 1962, however, the
movement failed to reach its goal of complete desegregation. Although the city
complied with the ICC ruling and desegregated its bus terminals, the remaining
public facilities were closed or kept segregated after being sold to a group of
Albany businessmen. There were no efforts to hire black bus drivers, policemen or
sales clerks, and department store lunch counters remained segregated.
Conditions remained the same until the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of
1964.18
17
18
Blumberg, Civil Rights: The 1960s Freedom Struggle, pp. 92-117.
Garrow, Bearing the Cross, pp. 176-216.
27
However, the Albany campaign had some positive results. It showed that
blacks in the South could be united for nonviolent protest. The Albany protests
mobilized more blacks than any action since the Montgomery bus boycott. After
Albany, thousands of blacks were added to the voter registration rolls.19 As a test
of the method of nonviolent direct action against racism, Albany also provided
valuable strategic lessons for the SCLC. King explained that the boycott of
downtown stores had been an effective but limited tactic because the movement’s
direct action methods had not been combined with a boycott so as to inflict a
maximum penalty on the business leaders. King argued that nonviolent direct
action would be more effective if concentrated against one aspect of the
segregationist system.20
A more unambiguous triumph for nonviolent direct action was the
Birmingham campaign. In 1963, protesters resisted segregation by creating
disorder that forced the business community to make significant concessions to
black citizens and by attracting national support for strong civil rights legislation.
Finally, the Kennedy Administration had been persuaded to intervene actively in
support of civil rights.21 Writing on “The Meaning of Birmingham”, activist Bayard
Rustin concluded that the campaign was a turning point in the black struggle for
equality. Before Birmingham blacks had fought for limited civil rights goals, such
as desegregation of public accommodations and integrated schools. But now
blacks had broadened their goals and were “demanding social, political, and
economic changes.”22
During the summer of 1963, nonviolent protests increased with the March
on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, the largest mass
demonstration in the history of civil rights. The March was planned by black
19
20
Ibid., pp. 226-227.
Ibid., pp. 226-227.
28
leaders, such as King, A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, James
Farmer of CORE, John Lewis of SNCC and Whitney Young of the National Urban
League, to show mass support for a new Civil Rights Bill.23 Although King believed
that the March got national support for the Civil Rights Bill, many young black
militants accused its leaders of selling out to the racist system.24 Despite the
criticisms, the March on Washington was an important point in the black freedom
struggle.
In January 1964 the states ratified the 24th Amendment outlawing the poll
tax in federal elections, and, in July, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was finally
passed. The latter came in response to movement pressures, police terrorism in
Birmingham in 1963, the 1963 March on Washington, the final nonviolent
campaign against segregated public accommodations in the South by the SCLC in
the spring of 1964 at St. Augustine, Florida, and pressure from President Lyndon
B. Johnson. The Act prohibited discrimination in the use of federal funds and in
places of public accommodation and gave additional powers to the Civil Rights
Commission. It also established an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
(EEOC) to eliminate unlawful employment practices.25 Most important, however, is
the fact that civil rights laws were enforced only after the federal government was
compelled to do so by a crisis provoked by the nonviolent masses on the march.
Moreover, at a time when many blacks in Northern ghettos were beginning to
support the violent attitude of leaders like Malcolm X, the March and the St.
Augustine campaign proved that nonviolence was an effective way of attacking
racial injustice.
21
Lewis, King: A Biography, pp. 171-209.
Colaiaco, Martin Luther King, Jr., p. 70.
23
Blumberg, Civil Rights: The 1960s Freedom Struggle, pp. 108-111.
24
James H. Cone, Martin, Malcolm & America: A Dream or A Nightmare (New York: Orbis
Books, 1991), p. 113.
25
Brooks, Civil Rights Litigation, pp. 262-272.
29
22
Despite the 24th Amendment, voting rights were still limited since the
amendment only dealt with federal elections and did not address voter registration
questions. As a response, on July 20, 1963 King and the SCLC went to
Mississippi to assist SNCC and CORE in registering black voters. The Freedom
Summer Project began with the autumn 1963 Freedom Vote, a mock election
organized by SNCC’s Robert Moses. Robert Moses and most SNCC leaders
argued that the ballot rather than King style demonstrations would be most
effective in gaining civil rights for blacks in the South. The goals of the Freedom
Project included registering black voters, establishing Freedom Schools to teach
them the essentials of the democratic process, and organizing the Mississippi
Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) to challenge the all white Mississippi
Democratic delegation at the National Convention in August 1964. Even though
the project aimed to show the racial conditions in the deep South and to force the
federal government to enforce civil rights laws, it disillusioned its participants since
the federal government failed to intervene to protect citizens working for racial
justice from white terror. The most important event of the Freedom Project
occurred in August at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New
Jersey. Since blacks were illegally excluded from the electoral process in
Mississippi, MFDP wanted to be recognized as the state’s legitimate Democratic
Party. They expected the support of both the national Democratic Party and
President Johnson as evidence of their commitment to protect the voting rights of
Mississippi blacks. They were destined to be disappointed.26
The repudiation of the MFDP in Atlantic City contributed to the
disillusionment of SNCC, now alienated from the President, the Democratic Party,
Northern white liberals and King. The disillusionment of SNCC had serious
26
Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in
America (New York: Vintage Books), pp. 97-107.
30
consequences for the civil rights movement. The anger and frustration that
prompted the Black Power movement already existed. Further, as the 1964
Democratic National Convention indicated whites were unwilling to support black
equality.27 On the other hand, three years after the Convention, Stokely
Carmichael and Charles Hamilton viewed it as the turning point in the black
liberation movement: “The major moral of that experience was not merely that the
national conscience was generally unreliable but that, very specifically, black
people in Mississippi and throughout this country could not rely on their so-called
allies.”28
Since King believed that the franchise was essential for blacks to progress
in the South, he sought a means to pressure the federal government to enact
major legislation to protect the right to vote. He argued that nonviolent direct
action could achieve what the Freedom Summer Project failed to achieve. While
SNCC continued to focus on black voter registration in rural Mississippi, King and
the SCLC sought to dramatize the issue of voting rights in Selma, Alabama,
through nonviolent marches. Although the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had ended
legal segregation, it did not guarantee the constitutional right to vote. Nonviolent
direct action in Selma succeeded in achieving the democratic right to vote by the
Voting Rights Act of 1965. Therefore, the Selma campaign marked the culmination
of the civil rights movement in the South.29
The major means of winning civil rights in the South had been the legalism
advocated by the NAACP, involving legislation and court action. But, if not for
mass, nonviolent direct action provoking white racist violence, arousing the
conscience of the American public and compelling the federal government to take
decisive action, segregation would have not been defeated in the South by 1965.
27
William L. Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American
Culture, 1965-1975 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 4.
31
In the following years, as the civil rights movement became national, King pursued
nonviolent action in the North. But Northern cities presented a more difficult
challenge than the South, and the nonviolent method no longer had the same
effect. Although the legal barriers to equality had been abolished, the majority of
blacks did not have the economic wherewithal to take advantage of the
opportunities now available to them. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting
Rights Act of 1965 could not entirely change the oppressive living conditions in the
ghettos of the North. Therefore deeper economic and social changes were
required in order to overcome segregation, unemployment, inadequate housing
and schools, family deterioration and police brutality. During the next few years
domestic developments such as riots in the Northern ghettos and foreign
developments such as the war in Vietnam, which prevented the President’s goal
of building the Great Society, worked to divide the movement and replaced civil
rights as the nation’s primary concern. Race riots in Watts, Newark, Detroit and
numerous other cities seemed to confirm the view of many civil rights activists that
in order to be fully integrated into American society, the freedom movement must
enter a new phase, concentrating on economic and social reforms to improve the
lives of blacks in the ghettos.30
Chicago became the first stop in the campaign to eradicate urban poverty.
King called for massive civil disobedience to transform Chicago into a just city.
However, the fact that in response Chicago Mayor Richard Daley announced the
construction of recreational facilities and the appointment of a committee to
improve relations between police and the black community did nothing to
eradicate slums and poverty in Chicago. Therefore, King decided to move the
28
Carmichael and Hamilton, Black Power, p. 96.
Garrow, Bearing the Cross, pp. 357-430; Brooks, Civil Rights Litigation, p. 920.
30
Colaiaco, Martin Luther King, Jr., pp.
32 178-198.
29
demonstrations from the ghettos to the white neighborhoods and suburbs. He
believed whites could not ignore protests in their own neighborhoods.31
On August 19, Mayor Daley applied for and received a legal injunction
against the marches. King responded by announcing that he would lead a
massive march the following Sunday into the all white working-class suburb of
Cicero, beyond the jurisdiction of the injunction. A march to Cicero would almost
certainly provoke brutal white violence, creating a crisis that neither the Mayor nor
the federal government could ignore. On August 26, King and leaders of the
Chicago Movement met at the Palmer House with the Mayor and members of the
Chicago Real Estate Board, the Chicago Housing Authority and the business
community and reached an agreement. The Leadership Council for Metropolitan
Open Housing would be established to provide education and direction for the
fulfillment of the agreement. Therefore, after demonstrations, and threats of
demonstrations, nonviolence appeared to be successful in Chicago.32
Some criticized the agreement, however. SNCC and CORE rightly argued
that the housing agreement did not promise real change in the lives of many
ghetto residents, who were in need of jobs and quality education, and lacked the
economic resources to move to better neighborhoods. Blacks could not be equally
integrated into American society if the nation was not willing to redistribute political
and economic power. Thus, Chicago in fact exposed the limitations of the
nonviolent method in the North. The violence that subsequently emerged in
Northern cities contributed to the defeat in 1966 of a national open housing bill,
designed to eliminate discrimination in the sale or rental of housing.33
31
Ibid., pp. 149-177; Garrow, Bearing the Cross, pp. 497-500.
Garrow, Bearing the Cross, pp. 529-530.
33
On the other hand, the Chicago campaign had forced the nation to face the deeply
rooted problems of the urban slums, preparing the way for the enactment of the Fair Housing Act
of 1968, which was stronger than the failed 1966 open housing bill. Colaiaco, Martin Luther King,
Jr., pp. 173-177; Brooks, Civil Rights Litigation,
33 pp. 277-280.
32
To end ghetto riots, King had insisted the federal government must institute
a massive program, costing billions of dollars, to provide employment, quality
education, decent housing and adequate health care for all citizens. Because the
federal government failed to respond with such reforms, King decided that the
poor of all races must be mobilized for another nonviolent March on Washington.
At a meeting of the SCLC on December 4, 1967, King announced plans for a
mass, nonviolent Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D. C., and argued that
massive nonviolent direct action provided a constructive alternative to riots. But
the initial demonstration was badly organized, and a group of young militants
disrupted the demonstration. Therefore, King was tempted to cancel the
campaign. However, the campaign laid the foundations for the “Rainbow Coalition”
of blacks, Hispanics, Native American Indians and other minority groups that
became the basis for the presidential candidacy of Jesse Jackson in 1984. The
Poor People’s Campaign, which was ultimately ruined by King’s assassination,
became the final, desperate attempt to make human rights a national priority.34
Meanwhile, by the mid-1960s new angry voices of protest were pressing
strategies
different
from
the
traditional
integrationist
approach
of
such
organizations as the NAACP and the SCLC. The bloody riot in the Watts
neighborhood of Los Angeles in 1965 revealed that the end of legal segregation
and racially discriminatory voting restrictions in the southern states did not
address the main problems of the poor. Urban blacks suffered less from a denial
of their civil rights than from unemployment, inadequate housing and limited
educational opportunities. Although they were enfranchised, they did not bother to
vote because none of the parties addressed their problems. Residential
segregation was sustained by laws, regulations and institutional practices that
were color-blind but had the effect of disadvantaging blacks more than whites.
34
Colaiaco, Martin Luther King, Jr., p.34
202.
King attempted in Chicago in 1966 to use nonviolent direct action to bring about
open housing and equal employment opportunities, but he could not overcome the
opposition of the political machine, the business community and the working class
white ethnics who used violence to prevent black entrance to their neighborhoods.
As riots broke out in other cities in the summers of the late 1960s and as white
backlash increased, it became clear that white racism was too deep to be
overcome by civil rights laws that addressed the symbols of black inequality rather
than the real causes. In a speech at Howard University in June 1965, President
Johnson announced that it would be better to go beyond equal rights and begin to
work for the equalization of life chances by pursuing a war on poverty.35 Similarly,
black leaders like Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph proposed a New Deal
type coalition between blacks, white liberals and organized labor to push for
increased government expenditures for social programs to provide a decent
standard of living.36 But the Vietnam War and the rightward drift of American
politics leading to the election of Richard Nixon as president in 1968 prevented the
war on poverty and the politics of interracial social democracy. As a response, a
new radical, sometimes violent, cultural wing of the civil rights movement argued
that blacks should give up the hopeless struggle for integration and seize the
power to determine the destiny of their own ethnic community “by any means
necessary.”37
The reaction of young black civil rights activists in the South against King’s
interracialism and nonviolence led to the emergence of the “Black Power”
movement. For many young activists, the failure of the Democratic Party in its
1964 convention to seat the black delegation from Mississippi destroyed the
image of white liberalism. In both SNCC and CORE, the spirit of “black and white
35
36
Ibid., pp. 150-151.
Garrow, Bearing the Cross, pp. 265-267.
35
together” that had characterized both organizations before 1963 had given way by
1965 to a feeling that the presence of whites in the movement prevented the
growth of black initiative. By 1966 racial exclusiveness was the basic policy of
both SNCC and CORE.38 There also emerged the issue of nonviolence versus
self-defense. For King, the advantages of retaliatory violence were illusory. The
ghetto riots of the summers had devastated black neighborhoods without
improving the lives of the urban poor. In contrast, King pointed to the solid
accomplishments of nonviolent protest, which defeated segregation and secured
the right to vote in the South with minimum loss of life. “Fewer people have been
killed in ten years of nonviolent demonstrations across the South than were killed
in one night of rioting in Watts,” King said.39 On the other hand, the brutal beatings
and killings of civil rights workers who had followed King’s rules for nonviolent
action and whose pleas for federal protection had gone unanswered created
frustration and anger.
A civil rights march in Mississippi in June 1966 divided King and the SCLC
from SNCC, led by Stokely Carmichael.40 As the march went on, some young
activists from SNCC and CORE attacked the main beliefs of the civil rights
movement: integration and nonviolence. The issues in Mississippi were whether
whites should be allowed to participate in the march and whether a black selfdefense organization, the Deacons for Defense, should provide armed protection.
When Carmichael voiced the view of black militants who wished to exclude whites
from the march, King argued that to reject whites would be a “shameful
repudiation” of those who had “suffered, bled and died in the cause of racial
37
Van Deburg, Modern Black Nationalism, p. 113.
Carmichael and Hamilton, Black Power, pp. 34-56.
39
Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1968), p. 58.
40
This march was a protest against the shooting of solitary marcher James Meredith.
Meredith, who had been the first black man to enroll in the University of Mississippi, was
38
36
justice”.41 On the march a rhetorical struggle developed between King’s stress on
racial reconciliation and Carmichael‘s stress on polarization and conflict. Instead
of King’s chant that “We Shall Overcome”, militants chanted “We Shall Overrun”.42
Finally, in Greenwood on June 16 Carmichael announced that he was fed up with
going to jail and tired of asking whites for freedom. “What we gonna start saying
we want now is black power”. He then shouted “Black Power” several times, and
the audience shouted it back.43
Thus the original implications of Black Power were self-defense against
racist violence and an unwillingness to continue requesting equality from whites.
From now on, blacks would confront power with power rather than offer love in
return for hate. And this led to black Americans’ assertion of alternative protest
ideologies like militant nationalism. The new protest concept was especially
reflected in Black Power, which focused on self-defense and retaliatory violence.
Black Power opponents interpreted the slogan as representing violence, anarchy,
and revenge. At a conference during the Mississippi march, King had suggested
using “black consciousness” or “black equality” as alternative slogans without the
violent connotation of “Black Power.” That conference ended with a compromise.
It was agreed that for the rest of the march, neither “Black Power” nor “Freedom
Now” would be chanted.44 However, since the media now directed attention to the
“Black Power” slogan, the civil rights movement would lose much support in white
America. As proponents of Black Power began to rival those who cried “Freedom
Now”, the nonviolent method and goal of integration became debatable. The
Mississippi march showed a deep division in the civil rights movement between
attempting to march across Mississippi to expose the continuing white racism in the state when he
was shot. Various civil rights organizations vowed to complete the march Meredith had started.
41
King, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, p. 28.
42
Ibid., pp. 25-26.
43
Cleveland Sellers, The River of No Return (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
1990), pp. 166-167.
44
King, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here:
37 Chaos or Community?, p. 44.
SCLC, NAACP and the National Urban League – which advocated nonviolence
and integration – and the black radicals of SNCC and CORE – who advocated
violence and separatism.
The Black Power movement drew inspiration from earlier leaders like
Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, the founder of the Nation of Islam, and
Malcolm X, the onetime Muslim leader and the founder of the Organization of
Afro-American Unity (OAAU). The basic ideas of Black Power were especially
expressed by Malcolm X. According to Malcolm X, nonviolence without the
sanctioning of self-defense was a betrayal of black manhood and a concession to
white ideas of black submissiveness and inferiority. He also regarded integration
as a surrender to white supremacy, because its aim of total assimilation into white
society implied that blacks had nothing worth preserving. He affirmed a positive
black culture and identity that must be respected, preserved and given some form
of political expression.45 Malcolm X aimed to internationalize the struggle of AfroAmericans and thus to “expand the civil rights struggle to the level of human
rights, and to put American racism on trial before the U.N.”46 Similarly, the OAAU
stated that “our struggle is part of a larger world struggle of oppressed peoples
against all forms of oppression. We must change the thinking of the AfroAmericans by liberating our minds through the study of philosophies and
psychologies, cultures and languages that did not come from our racist
oppressors. Provisions are made for the study of languages such as Swahili and
Arabic. These studies will give access to ideas and history of mankind at large and
thus increase our mental scope.”47
The OAAU also presented alternatives for racism in language. For instance,
the term “Negro” was “a badge of slavery” and helped “to prolong and perpetuate
45
285.
Alex Haley, Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Ballantine Books, 1873), pp. 267-
38
oppression and discrimination”. Therefore, they accepted the use of “Afro-American,
African, and Black Man” in reference to persons of African heritage.48 Similarly, since
the term “integration” was “promoted by those persons who expect to continue a type
of ethnic discrimination and who intend to maintain social and economic control of all
human contacts by means of imagery, classifications, quotas and manipulations
based on color, national origin or racial background and characteristics”, they rejected
this term as intended to mislead Afro-Americans. They claimed that “our assertions
toward full opportunity can be made on the basis of equality as opposed to the
calculated tokens of ‘integration’.”49 The OAAU concluded that “in areas where the
United States government has shown itself unable and/or unwilling to bring to justice
the racist oppressors, murderers, who kill innocent children and adults, the OAAU
advocates that the Afro-American people insure ourselves that justice is done –
whatever the price and by any means necessary.”50
According to the book which stated the new racial philosophy, Black Power by
Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, “The Concept of Black Power rests on a
fundamental premise: Before a group can enter the open society, it must first close
ranks”. The aim was “bargaining strength in a pluralistic society,” and the model to be
followed was the way that white ethnic groups such as the Jews, Irish and Italians
had been able to exert political power by voting as a bloc.51 But another argument in
the book had more radical implications. The authors likened the internal form of
colonialism that characterized black-white relations in the United States
to the
oppressive system of white domination that prevailed in South Africa and Rhodesia.52
Therefore, some Black Power advocates like Carmichael shifted from the reformist
46
Bruce Perry, Malcolm X: The Last Speeches (New York: Pathfinder, 1989), p. 89.
Van Deburg, Modern Black Nationalism, p. 111.
48
Van Deburg, Modern Black Nationalism, p. 115.
49
Ibid., p. 114.
50
Ibid., p.113.
51
Carmichael and Hamilton, Black Power, pp. 44-45.
52
Ibid., pp. 6-31.
39
47
model of ethnic mobilization in a pluralist society to a revolutionary model of national
liberation from colonialism.
Black Power groups included both pluralists and nationalists. Pluralists
pursued Black Power in the economic, educational and political institutions of their
communities in order to promote black empowerment and participation at the state
and national levels. The nationalists divided into three groups: territorial separatists,
revolutionary nationalists and cultural nationalists. All saw violence not only as a
strategic necessity but as a psychological need. But their violence rarely went beyond
armed self-defense. In fact, the aim of Black Power was neither violence nor the
exclusion of whites. It was rather self-determination for black people.
For the territorial nationalists, black Americans
constituted a nation – a
“community of suffering” – therefore they sought to establish a national homeland.53
Development of the territorial separatist position can be seen in the ideological
changes which occurred in CORE, which was founded in Chicago during World War II
as a nonviolent, direct-action protest organization. It gained recognition during the
early 1960s for its southern freedom ride campaign and for making demonstrations at
the 1964 New York World’s Fair. By 1965, CORE also had become engaged in
community development projects, offering tutoring, sports and craft programs, job
counseling and information on health care, family planning and voter registration. In
addition to launching a resettlement and community development campaign and
starting a “country cousin” program to help settle displaced black farmers in urban
areas, CORE sought to expand the teaching of African languages. They also hoped
to develop black cultural centers and craft workshops. Their emphasis on scholarship
and the creation of black studies programs showed the efforts of blacks to recover
53
Van Deburg, Modern Black Nationalism,
p. 197.
40
their heritage, to develop a positive self-image, and to challenge the historical
rationalization of the dominant cultural system.54
In 1968, CORE officially excluded whites from membership. As black
nationalism grew, delegates to the annual convention in Columbus, Ohio, discussed
the concept of a black nation state. Some demanded that the seaboard states from
Maryland to Florida should be given to black separatists. Under Roy Innis’ leadership,
CORE prepared a three part program for the national liberation of black America. Part
I involved support of the Community Self-Determination Act, which was introduced in
Congress in July 1968. The bill promoted the establishment of community
development
corporations. Part II adapted the community control theme to non-
economic areas such as schools, health care facilities, law enforcement agencies.
Part III stated that when Afro-Americans began to assert power through control of
their community institutions, the black “colonies” would compose a “nation within a
nation”. From then on, black people would control the institutions within their spheres
of influence.55
During the period between 1965-1975, others expanded Innis’ dream of a citystate federation composed of “a series of islands with land separating us”.56 Members
of the Nation of Islam and the Republic of New Africa (RNA) were especially
important in presenting proposals for the acquisition of sovereign territory. The most
important plan to acquire sovereign territory in the boundaries of the U.S. was
formulated by Milton and Richard Henry, who dropped their “slave names,” and
adopted the names Gaidi and Imari Obadele.57 In their view, the states of South
Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana constituted “the subjugated
territory” of the black republic. The RNA’s “government in exile” would work to
“consolidate the revolution” by constructing new institutions guaranteed to improve
54
55
Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon, pp. 133-135.
Ibid., pp. 137, 139.
41
the lives of residents. Ujamaa, the Tanzanian model of cooperative economics and
community self-sufficiency, would serve as a guide for the structuring of the republic’s
economy. U.S. government reparations payments of land and $400 billion would
sustain the new nation. If federal officials rejected their demands, the RNA was
prepared to use the power of the black ballot or to fight a “people’s war” in support of
the black homeland. In the Anti-Depression Program that it presented to Congress in
1972, the RNA made a case for black freedom and sovereignty as the solution to both
racial unrest and black dependence, outlined the New African lifestyle and worldview,
and placed the organization’s separatist goals in the context of white America’s
frontier experience of “building a new world on virgin land.” They argued that a New
Africa would be realized through creative cultural activity. Black theatre, dance, and
art would flourish within the altered social context as a result of the experience of
winning independence. Full development of the nation-state concept would allow
black America to become a completely separate nation.58
A second nationalist approach was pan-African emigration. Through their
return to “Mother Africa” activists hoped to show that Black Power actually meant
African Power. They were convinced that Pan-Africanism was the highest political
expression of the separatist ethic. Therefore, they studied African history and culture
and formed organizations to promote travel, technical assistance and repatriation.59
Similarly, SNCC and Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael argued that “the only
position for black man is Pan-Africanism” and advocated an activist program that
proposed to acquire a land base on the continent. Carmichael believed black people
everywhere should realize that they were “first of all and finally Africans.”60 He also
56
Ibid., p. 140.
Ibid., p. 145.
58
Van Deburg, Modern Black Nationalism, p. 197.
59
Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon, p. 152.
60
Van Deburg, Modern Black Nationalism,
p. 203.
42
57
organized the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (AAPRP) in support of PanAfrican unity and black revolutionary struggle.61
Similarly the National Committee of Black Churchmen (NCBC), which was
founded in 1967, was committed to assisting the Afro-American community in its
freedom struggles. It coordinated the activities of black caucuses, supported African
liberation movements and issued a “Black Manifesto”. It claimed that the nation’s
“racist churches and synagogues” owed Afro-Americans $500 million in hardship
reparations. The NCBC document, which resembled the original Declaration of
Independence in 1776 in language and style, was ratified on July 4, 1970, at a Black
Solidarity Day rally in New York.62 In the declaration, after black citizens declared
their grievances, they stated:
We, therefore, the Black People of the United States of America in all parts of
this Nation, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the World for the Rectitude of our
Intentions, do, in the Name of our good People and our own Black Heroes – ...
Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and all Black People past and present, great and
small - Solemnly Publish and Declare, that we shall be, and of Right ought to be,
FREE AND INDEPENDENT FROM THE INJUSTICE, EXPLOITATIVE CONTROL,
INSTITUTIONALIZED VIOLENCE AND RACISM OF WHITE AMERICA, that unless
we receive full Redress and Relief from these Inhumanities we will move to renounce
all Allegiance to this Nation, and will refuse, in every way, to cooperate with the Evil
which is Perpetrated upon ourselves and our Communities. And for the support of this
Declaration, with a firm Reliance on the Protection of divine Providence, we mutually
pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred.63
While political nationalists thus pursued their separatist dreams, cultural
nationalists proposed a black cultural renaissance as a key component of the
revolutionary struggle for Black Power. By asserting their cultural distinctiveness in
clothing, language and hair style and by exposing their historical experiences through
the literary and performing arts, cultural nationalists aimed to encourage self
actualization and psychological empowerment. For them, black culture was Black
Power.64
61
Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon, p. 305.
Van Deburg, Modern Black Nationalism, p. 223.
63
Ibid., pp. 227-228.
64
Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon,43
p. 171.
62
Militant cultural nationalism was especially reflected by the Los Angeles-based
US organization and its leader, Maulana Ron Karenga. US embraced every aspect of
the cultural renaissance in leading the West Coast “back to black” movement in
clothing and hairstyles; teaching Swahili as a “non-tribal” language of “selfdetermination”; sponsoring community based arts events; and inaugurating the
celebration of black holidays such as Uhuru Day (August 11, commemorating the
1965 Watts riot) and Kuzaliwa (May 19, celebrating Malcolm X’s birth).65 Karenga
also instituted the celebration of Kwanzaa as an alternative to the “economic
entrapment and alienated gift-giving” that characterized white America’s approach to
the Christmas season. This Afro-American holiday of the “first fruits”, which was
initiated in Los Angeles from December 26, 1966, to January 1, 1967, was derived
from the harvest-time festivals of African agriculturists. Participants sought to honor
their communal heritage through symbol and ceremony.66
In seeking to “take things which were traditional and apply them to the
concrete needs of Black people”, Karenga developed the Nguzo Saba, seven key
rules by which blacks seeking liberation were to “order their relations and live their
lives”. Each of the principles – Umoja (unity), Kujichagulia (self-determination), Ujima
(collective work and responsibility), Ujamaa (cooperative economics), Nia (purpose),
Kuumba (creativity), and Imani (faith) – reflected values in traditional African cultures.
The Nguzo Saba would promote the growth of “a new world and new people” within
contemporary Afro-America.67
The Nguzo Saba and Kwanzaa were components of the ideology and practice
of Kawaida, the theory of cultural and social change adopted by US. Kawaida theory
held that black Americans needed to pursue a cultural revolution before they could
mount a successful political campaign to seize and reorder established institutions of
65
66
Ibid., p. 171.
Ibid., p. 172.
44
power and wealth. The cultural revolution would make the political revolution possible.
It also would secure the gains of the political struggle. The cultural revolution was
designed to establish and reinforce a distinctive black national culture.68
The most popular figure of the Black Power movement’s cultural wing was
Howard University educated poet/dramatist Le Roi Jones, more commonly known as
Amiri Baraka. Like Karenga, who, influenced by Malcolm X, adopted a Swahili name,
Jones adopted the name Imamu (spiritual leader) Amiri (prince) Baraka (blessed
one). Baraka adopted US beliefs and argued that to be racially conscious was to be
cultured – that is, consciously black. In 1965 Baraka dedicated the Black Arts
Repertory Theatre/School in Harlem to the education and cultural awakening of
African Americans. It served as a model for many community theatre-workshopschools that promoted cultural expression and “hard-core nationalism” during the late
1960s. In Newark, he combined repertory theatre with an African Free School whose
curriculum was developed around the black value system of Kawaida. Soon, Baraka
organized Newark’s first Afro-American Festival of the Arts, began a literary
magazine, An Anthology of Our Black Selves, and launched Jihad Publications with a
volume of poetry entitled Black Art. 69
Baraka sought to bring both nationalist cultural concepts and political ideas to
the black masses. Culturally-oriented blacks were obliged to create a pragmatic
politically-involved art. Baraka sought to promote electoral participation both as a
consciousness raising exercise and as a mechanism to obtain political power from the
group of “stooges, thieves, and toms” in public office through the US-inspired Black
Community Development and Defense Organization, the politically active United
Brothers of Newark, and the united front coalition, Committee for United Newark.70
67
Van Deburg, Modern Black Nationalism, pp. 276-288.
Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon, pp. 172-173.
69
Ibid., pp. 176-177.
70
Ibid., p. 179.
45
68
Baraka used diverse organizational techniques and forms. He played a major
role in organizing the Congress of African Peoples in 1970 and served on the
committee of the first National Black Political Convention, in Gary, Indiana in 1972. At
gatherings such as the national black political conventions held in Gary and in Little
Rock, Arkansas in 1974, delegates debated political strategy and sought to develop
new techniques of community mobilization.71 In Newark, Baraka opened Spirit House
to political meetings, walked picket lines and distributed leaflets at his plays. He
challenged those he met on the street with the consciousness raising greeting, ”What
time is it?” - expecting that his query would get the response: “It’s Nation time! The
land is gonna change hands!”72 Baraka’s voter registration and performance oriented
fund-raising activities contributed greatly to Kenneth Gibson’s becoming Newark’s
first black mayor in 1970.73
Baraka’s culturally manifested activism could be violent. For example, in New
York, he encouraged looters during the Great Blackout. He cruised Lenox Avenue in
a sound truck, shouting “Now’s the time. They can’t see you. Rip these stores off.
Take everything. Come on out and get it!”74 During the 1967 riots in Newark, he was
arrested and tried on charges of resisting arrest and unlawfully carrying firearms.
Baraka’s poem “Black people!”, which encouraged ghetto residents to intone “magic
words” (“up against the wall mother fucker this is a stick up”), take “magic action”
(“smash the windows daytime, anytime, together”), and do a “magic dance” in the
street (“take the shit you want. Take their lives if need be”) may be the best evidence
of his militancy.75
Black culture had revolutionary possibilities. It could help raise the nationalist
spirit. It was capable of posing an alternative to white values and revealing to Afro71
Van Deburg, Modern Black Nationalism, pp. 138-143.
Ibid., pp. 155-157.
73
Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon, p. 180.
74
Ibid., p. 180.
75
Ibid., p. 180.
46
72
Americans how their oppression must be brought to an end. Therefore, the revolution
can not only be achieved by guns, but also by matters of the spirit and intellect.
Culture, like politics, was an instrument of change. Black Power was both a cultural
and political revolt. To free the nation was to free the culture – and vice versa. By
articulating a new black consciousness, Afro-American artists raised political
awareness and intensified popular commitment to social activism. Black cultural
expression promoted racial unity, encouraged self actualization and facilitated the
transmission of revolutionary messages to all manner of Afro-Americans. To many
revolutionary nationalists, however, cultural nationalists became an enemy of the
people, an “afro-cosmic lunatic” whose passion for “weird rituals and strange
fashions” stultified rather than advanced the cause of black nationalism.76
The most popular revolutionary nationalist group was the Black Panther Party
for Self-Defense (BPP), which was founded in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby
Seale in Oakland, California. It took its name from the symbol of the Lowndes County
Alabama Freedom Organization (LCFO), formed by Stokely Carmichael. They
adopted the name and symbol of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense because it
was not in a panther’s nature to initiate attack but, when backed into a corner, the
animal would strike back forcefully. For Newton, the ideology of the Panthers was
that:
The people had been stripped of their birthright and their dignity, not by any
philosophy or mere words, but at gun-point.... At bottom, this is a form of selfdefense. Although that defense might at times take on characteristics of aggression,
in the final analysis the people do not initiate; they simply respond to what has been
inflicted upon them…. Though it may mean death, these men will fight, because
death with dignity is preferable to ignominy.77
The BBP’s aim was to enforce civil rights laws and constitutional guarantees,
which it believed the Southern movement had neglected. Initially, the Panthers
focused on protecting black communities from police brutality and instituting local self76
Ibid., p. 174.
47
help programs. This activity led a shoot-out in the Oakland ghetto during which
Newton allegedly killed a white policeman. The Panthers began an all-out campaign
to “free Huey” that won his release after he was initially convicted of manslaughter. By
1967 the organization began to adopt a violent, revolutionary, all-black character
based on teachings of Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon and the Latin American revolutionary
Che Guevara.78
The Panthers’ notoriety and attractive power among young blacks emerged
from the group’s militant style and the response they got from the establishment.
They were armed, using their arsenal both as a self-defense mechanism and as an
aid in recruiting people to the organization. Panther leaders argued that the gun was
only a strategic political tool and not a fetish or an end in itself. War could be
abolished only through war. H. Rap Brown, successor to Stokely Carmichael as
SNCC chairman in 1967, announced that “violence is as American as cherry pie.”
Brown later threatened: “If America doesn’t come around, we are going to burn
America down.”79 The Panthers also noted that California law made it legal for any
citizen to carry a loaded, unconcealed weapon. Therefore, they were exercising their
citizenship rights in gathering enough firepower to protect their families.80
Beyond the guns, the BPP represented community control and black self-help.
Their community oriented social welfare efforts were not entirely innocent, however.
The Panthers sought to institute a “survival program” which would help organize black
America until the revolution could be launched. The Black Panther survival program
provided breakfasts for children, free shoes and clothing, legal assistance, and
medical care. They operated liberation schools. The Party spread groceries through
its nationwide People’s Free Food Program run by Angela Davis. There also was a
Free Busing to Prisons Program, an Intercommunal News Service, and a People’s
77
78
Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, pp. 111-112.
Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon, pp. 2-9.
48
Free Plumbing and Maintenance Program designed to improve housing conditions.81
The BPP stated as its “major political objective, a UN-supervised plebiscite to be held
throughout the Black colony ... for the purpose of determining the will of Black people
as to their national destiny.”82
In order to facilitate realization of “revolutionary justice,” the Panthers also
promoted voter registration to place more black and poor people on juries. They
protested the eviction of black tenants, counseled welfare recipients, and
accompanied community residents as they sought redress of grievances from school
and government officials. Once Huey Newton informed authorities that armed
Panthers would begin to direct traffic at a dangerous intersection in the Oakland black
community unless a signal was placed there to insure the safety of neighborhood
children; city workers soon installed the signal light. In all such instances, the Party
followed its ideological goals. Since “the people and only the people make
revolutions, the goals of the revolution could be achieved only if the people were kept
from perishing from lack of care and sustenance.”83
The Panthers had warned that domestic guerilla activity would increase if black
America’s demands were not met. Like Malcolm X, who once advocated sending
armed guerillas into Mississippi to protect black lives, they believed that the masses
respected and would imitate those who threw a Molotov cocktail in support of black
freedom. Strategic guerilla resistance could be far more effective than random rioting
or mass marches.84
Inspired by the BBP, a domestic guerilla group, the Revolutionary Action
Movement (RAM) called for unceasing “war with the white world”, engaged in
protests against police brutality, and developed various programs to educate African
79
Excerpts from H. Rap Brown’s Die Nigger Die! in Albert, The Sixties Papers, p. 157.
Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon, p. 156.
81
Ibid., p. 160.
82
Albert, The Sixties Papers, pp. 162-163.
83
Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon,49
p. 160.
80
Americans according to the principles of political revolution. RAM activists, who were
considered dangerous anarchists by law enforcement authorities, were committed to
building racial solidarity and were not opposed to promoting the use of guerilla
warfare tactics against their racial foes.85
Domestic guerilla groups such as RAM, the Black Liberation Front and the
Black
Liberation
Army
recognized
the
Panthers’
position
on
combining
consciousness raising with the provision of community social services by an aboveground “program of practical action”. The domestic guerillas called for the creation of
a Black Urban Army, adopted anarchistic slogans such as “Kill, baby, kill” and
sought justice “in the tradition of Malcolm X and all true revolutionaries”. They said
that the U.S. was about to reap what it had sown and declared that America was
about to become the “Blackman’s Battleground.”86
White America’s response to revolutionary nationalists resulted in a
narrowing and popular distortion of Black Power’s meaning. In its truest connotation,
however, Black Power increased racial pride and self-esteem. The slogan “Black is
Beautiful” showed the positive affirmation of black identity that had replaced the
sense of ugliness and inferiority.87 In political and social terms, rather than the
radical alienation from the American political and social system that had
characterized the black nationalism of Stokely Carmichael, Huey Newton, James
Foreman or Amiri Baraka, a validation of black ethnic solidarity and action within the
context of a liberal pluralist society triumphed.
Therefore, while the nonviolent direct action of the Southern crusade proved
successful in reaching its short term goals of desegregation and voting rights, Black
Power produced various gains in psychological and cultural empowerment. In the
84
Ibid., p. 165.
Ibid., pp. 165-166.
86
Ibid., p. 166.
87
George M. Fredrickson, Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies
85
in
50
late 1960s the civil rights movement sought to achieve its goals through such
ideologically different organizations as the NAACP, CORE, SCLC and SNCC – all of
which pursued at some point in their evolution a commitment to legal and
integrationist strategies. The legal wing of black activism undertook both legal action,
confined to court houses and legislative chambers, and nonviolent direct action,
filling streets with masses of nonviolent marchers exercising the right to protest for
constitutional goals. Massive nonviolent direct action exposed racist brutality,
pressured the federal government to enforce civil rights, and awakened the
conscience
of the nation to see the injustices in the society. Among the legal-
oriented groups, the NAACP became the most visible because of its efforts in
working for desegregation and its success in 1954 when the Supreme Court
announced a decision banning segregation in public schools. The major means of
winning civil rights had been the legalism advocated by the NAACP, involving
legislation and court action. The branch of the movement led by Martin Luther King,
Jr., expanded in the form of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to
coordinate nonviolent protest activities in the South. If not for mass, nonviolent direct
action, segregation would not have been defeated in the South by 1965. The
enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 proved
the power of nonviolent direct action to affect legislative reform. In the following
years, as the civil rights movement became national, King pursued nonviolent action
in the North. But the Northern cities presented a more difficult challenge than those
of the South, and the nonviolent method no longer had the same effect. Although the
legal barriers to equality had been abolished, the majority of blacks did not have the
economic opportunity to take advantage of the opportunities now available to them.
Accordingly, deeper economic and social changes were required in order to
improve the lives of blacks in the ghettos. The backgrounds of SNCC and CORE
51 York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 297.
the United States and South Africa (New
demonstrate how rapidly and fundamentally the approach of black protest changed in
the 1960s from traditional consensus models to new conflict models. Some young
activists from SNCC and CORE attacked the main beliefs of the civil rights
movement: integration and nonviolence. The new protest concept was especially
reflected in Black Power, which focused on self-defense and retaliatory violence.
While political nationalists pursued their separatist dreams, cultural nationalists
proposed a black cultural renaissance as a key component of the revolutionary
struggle for Black Power. Through the establishment of black studies programs in
colleges and universities, and African-American art, literature, music, drama and film,
the Black Power movement helped Afro-Americans regain a rich heritage in which to
take pride and a collective identity to celebrate. The resulting self-respect and selfconfidence are important means of empowerment in the continuing struggle for black
equality.
At this point, it would be easy to assume that the impact of black protest
through the 1960s helped to generate the emergence of the protests of women and
Native Americans, both by providing models for political activity and legal goals and
by mobilizing a consciousness against restraining concepts of proper place and role.
However, to assume that the women’s rights and Indian rights movements derived
directly from the black civil rights movement would be to neglect women and Indians’
own protest histories. The following chapters will examine the contemporary
ideological and behavioral relationship between black civil rights on the one hand and
feminism and Native American activism on the other. The chapters will compare and
52
contrast the 1960s and 1970s’ ideological thrust of the three movements along legal
and cultural lines.
53
CHAPTER II
THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT
In order to determine if there were common ideological influences or shared
protest characteristics between feminist activism and the civil rights movement, this
chapter will review the legal and cultural factions of the feminist movement. The
fact that the antislavery movement and black male suffrage preceded the women's
movement and women's suffrage, and contemporary civil rights appeared before
contemporary feminism may lead us to conclude that women's actions in the cause
of feminism have resembled black actions in the cause of civil rights. However, it
might not be true to conclude that feminism derived entirely from civil rights
because of seemingly interconnected protest actions and ideologies. In fact,
women's participation in the sometimes violent abolitionist movement prepared
them for their own struggle. As abolitionists, women observed directly the
ideologies and tactics of protest, a sphere which had been considered beyond what
Barbara Welter called "the True Cult of Womanhood" and Sheila Rothman called
women’s "proper place", which was defined by patriarchal control of social
institutions.1 But during Reconstruction, women leaders drew criticism from black
liberals for "selfishly" supporting their own cause during the "Negro's Hour" by
objecting to the inclusion of the word "male" in the section of the 14th Amendment
that extended the franchise to the "Freedman".
1
Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Women’s Rights Movement in the United States
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1975), pp. 62-101; Sheila Rothman,
Women’s Proper Place: A History of Changing Ideals and Practices, 1870 to the Present (New York:
Basic Books, 1978); Barbara Welter, “The True Cult of Womanhood”, American Quarterly, Vol. 18.
No.2. Part 1 (Summer, 1966): pp. 151-174; Linda K. Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds,
Women’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History” in Kerber, Toward an Intellectual History of
Women: Essays (Chapel Hill: University of North
54 Carolina Press, 1997), pp. 159-199.
Women then decided to form a more women centered and women run
movement.2 This lack of male concern for feminist goals would also separate
blacks and women in the 1960s.
The organized women's movement in the United States grew from the first
women's rights convention which was formed by women's rights leaders Elizabeth
Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848.
Their
Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions, which equated female status with
chattel slavery and urged women to pursue rapidly and effectively their own legal
and political rights, is one of the most important documents of organized feminism.
The manifesto included a call for suffrage, which would become the central issue
for feminists until the ratification of the 19th or Suffrage Amendment in 1920.3
Women began to organize at a national level, coordinate appeals, sign petitions
and systematically demand their fundamental rights as human beings and
American citizens only in the 19th century and after the emergence of organized
abolitionism. And by so doing, women also demonstrated how legal-oriented
protests can become radical challenges to deeply rooted cultural norms.4
Women organizationally began their legal-oriented commitment in 1869
through the creation of both the National Women Suffrage Association (NWSA) and
the more moderate American Women Suffrage Association (AWSA) which
campaigned for the vote until ratification of the 19th Amendment.5 Feminist tactics
continued to be legalistic as organized women avoided broader social issues, and
favored policies focused on getting the national franchise.
2
Flexner, Century of Struggle, pp. 145-146; Winston E. Langley and Vivian C. Fox, Women’s
Rights in the United States: A Documentary History (Westport: Praeger, 1998), pp. 143-144.
3
Langley, Women’s Rights in the United States, pp. 82-85; Flexner, Century of Struggle, pp.
xii, 74-75.
4
Flexner, Century of Struggle, pp. 15, 105-112.
5
Sheila Ruth, Issues in Feminism (Mountain View: Maxfield Publishing Company, 1995), pp.
482-484.
55
Though legalistic tactics dominated, the late-nineteenth century also
witnessed the emergence of women who criticized legal feminism as being
conservative and irrelevant to women's true concerns. They viewed the feminist
cause other than as a suffrage movement, challenged the prevailing concepts of
place and role and formed a women's cultural-oriented approach to protest. Women
who protested cultural oppression argued that women's domestic sphere denied
half of humanity its individual rights, and that there were economic and social
restraints in society working to convince the public that women's primary concern
should remain homemaking. Obtaining the vote would not solve the problems.
Rather, to acquire true freedom the basic structure of the society should be
changed. Feminists like Victoria Woodhull, who supported free love and supported
new feminist freedoms, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who rejected conventional
domestic life for an independent career, and Emma Goldman, who advocated birth
control, became strong examples to women who supported alternative cultural
patterns and greater opportunities for human advancement through non-traditional
means.6
From the 1920s through the 1960s the legacy of feminism continued in two
ways: by groups like the National League of Women Voters, which was formed
after 1920 from earlier suffrage organizations, the National Federation of Business
and Professional Women's Clubs (1919), and a growing number of similar women's
organizations on the one hand; and by a small group of women demanding support
for an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) on the other. Both supported legal reform
efforts; however, the ERA came to symbolize divisiveness in the movement. Alice
Paul and her militant National Woman's Party (NWP) separated from the
organizational reformers. Beginning in 1923, the NWP supported a federal ERA in
6
Angela H. Zophy, Handbook of American Women’s History (New York: Garland, 1990), pp.
217, 232, 235-236.
56
order to realize the full power of American women. The militancy of Paul and her
followers offered new protest models based on direct-action tactics, which
established standards women’s rights activists followed during and after the
1960s.7
The legal oriented aspects of modern feminism emerged from some protest
events and reformist actions of the early 1960s. During this time, two public events
focused attention on the role of women in society. In 1961, President Kennedy
established a Commission on the Status of Women, the first national commission of
its kind, and the most important national action related to women since the creation
of the federal Women's Bureau in the Department of Labor in 1920.8 Another
significant factor was the impact of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, a 1963
best-seller which convinced many women that it was wrong to accept that their
greatest reward lay in being a happy housewife. Friedan stated that the post World
War II female image in the United States was associated with motherhood and
domestic creativity, restricted by a social control system. Friedan concluded that
blind dedication to the husband, kitchen and child became a self-fulfilling prophecy
– a feminine mystique. "The core of the problem for women today is… identity – a
stunting or evasion of growth that is perpetuated by the feminine mystique.... Our
culture does not permit women to accept or gratify their basic need to grow and
fulfil their potentialities as human beings, a need which is not solely defined by their
sexual role."9 By questioning the gender norms of contemporary culture, the book
focused women's attention on feminist issues. As with the Kennedy commission's
report, Friedan's open attack on the institution of housewifery led many women to
7
Jo Freeman, The Politics of Women’s Liberation (New York: David McKay Company, Inc.,
1975), p. 63.
8
The federal Women’s Bureau was created to investigate women’s special needs in the work
force. See Handbook of American Women’s History, p. 379; Public Papers of the Presidents of the
United States: John F. Kennedy, 1963 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964), pp. 233,
409.
9
Betty Friedan, Feminine Mystique (London:
Penguin Books, 1965), p. 69.
57
be aware of their inferior positions. As a result of the book and the increasing
federal and state actions, many women began to liken their protests to those of
blacks, especially in the areas of economics and education. Thus, developing from
more modest circumstances in the early 1960s, modern feminism rapidly
advanced.
In 1961 President Kennedy established the Commission on the Status of
Women
by
signing
Executive
Order
10980,
charged
with
developing
recommendations for overcoming discrimination in government and private
employment on the basis of sex and for developing recommendations for services
which would enable women to continue their role as wives and mothers while
largely contributing to the world around them. Eleanor Roosevelt served as
chairperson of the commission until her illness and death in 1962, when Esther
Peterson, head of the Women's Bureau, took her place. Kennedy's personal or
political reasons for creating such a commission are debatable. Some argued that
he appointed it under the urging of Roosevelt and Peterson, who argued that the
president must act more than symbolically to repay women campaign workers and
loyalists. Others have stated that Kennedy acted to defuse the politically volatile
issue of an Equal Rights Amendment for women.10 Whatever the reason, the idea
of a commission demonstrated the Kennedy administration's willingness to act
clearly on behalf of women and helped to return women's issues into the public
policy arena.
Although the commission's report still emphasized women's role as wives
and mothers, it had a real impact on female consciousness and commitment to
feminist issues. With publication of the commission's final report, American Women,
in October 1963, the inequalities of sex discrimination became clear. The report
10
Susan M. Hartman, From Margin to Mainstream: American Women and Politics Since 1960
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), pp. 50-55.58
called for taking both private and public action in all parts of the country to end sex
discrimination. It emphasized the deeply rooted discrimination in employment and
education, something the Women's Bureau had been emphasizing for four
decades. At the insistence of member Marguerite Rawalt, the commission left the
question of a federal Equal Rights Amendment open for future consideration.11
Therefore, with the report, capable spokespersons on women's issues became
increasingly visible and vocal.
Two recommendations of the report were realized with the establishment of
an Interdepartmental Committee on the Status of Women (IDSCW) and a Citizens'
Advisory Council on the Status of Women (CACSW). The CACSW's Family Law
and Policy Task Force, under the direction of feminist Marguerite Rawalt, became
militant because of its non-traditional demands and its aggressive approach in
achieving those demands. The IDCSW and the CACSW sponsored several
national conferences of state commissions on the status of women.12 The
president's commission, the IDCSW, the CACSW, and state commissions all made
legislative proposals addressing the unequal treatment of American women in
education and employment. Later some of the recommendations were enacted into
law, but the more important fact was that it produced a new national atmosphere
which cared about women's own concerns and determinations. The most important
fact for the developing movement was that the commissions which met in national
conferences brought together feminist organizers who otherwise might never have
met.
The new national responsiveness arose not only from women's concerns,
but also, and in large part, from an awareness of the assertion by black Americans
to gain their full rights as citizens. This awareness emerged from the increased
11
12
Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, 1963, pp. 409-410.
Freeman, The Politics of Women’s 59
Liberation, pp. 184-190.
protests of the black community, which led to unprecedented legal and non-legal
actions. Soon women applied these actions to their own cause. Although black civil
rights historically might have inspired women by encouraging a new public
awareness and by showing a need for a strong social struggle, women usually
shaped their own female directed movements. Further analysis of the women’s
movement’s legal actions will help reveal to what extent the civil rights movement
affected and was affected by the women's movement.
In 1963 Congress further showed interest in women's issues by passing an
anti-sex discrimination law, the Equal Pay Act of 1963. This important act required
employers to pay equal wages to men and women for demonstrably equal work,
efforts and responsibilities. The act might have passed because of a favorable
recommendation by the president's commission and unexpectedly strong support
from organized labor. However, Catherine East, executive secretary of the CACSW
and aide to the Kennedy Commission and to Esther Peterson at the Women's
Bureau, asserted that it was Peterson who personally put the legislation through
Congress.13
Although the legislative history of the act is not clear, it is clear that the act
was very important. For instance, congressional testimony by women's rights
advocates and organizational spokespersons further solidified the women's
communication network. Perhaps more important was the fact that significant
women pushed for a law that would not have to compete with the standard race,
religion or national origin clauses of past civil rights measures. Therefore, the Equal
Pay Act set a legal precedent by specifically addressing sex inequity, and thus
became a model for other legal reform actions.
After Kennedy’s death, President Lyndon B. Johnson took important
executive action, promoting more women to high governmental positions than any
60
previous
president.
Reflecting
past
civil
rights
assertions
and
his
own
administration's recognition that women were victims of a special kind of
discrimination, Johnson in 1964 stated "The glory and greatness of America lies in
the open door, the open door of equal opportunity for all our citizens regardless of
their sex...."14 In 1968, Johnson also issued an executive order forbidding federal
contractors from discriminating against women and requiring business to create
new programs aimed to increase their employment of women and minorities. These
were known as affirmative action programs.15 Such actions provided inspiration for
those who wanted government and society to give females greater encouragement
in their personal and collective aspirations. In this respect, the actions of the federal
government in establishing the president's commission, the Equal Pay Act of 1963
and Johnson's women's rights position evolutionally separated contemporary
feminism from civil rights: Feminism largely grew from women's and their
supporters' own energies. Moreover, these actions demonstrated a new federal
commitment to view sex discrimination as a real policy-making arena similar to, but
contextually different from, the way in which government approached the issue of
race discrimination.
One of the most important measures was the addition of the word "sex" to
the categories of “race, religion and national origin” in Title VII of the important 1964
Civil Rights Act.16 Title VII represented a direct intersection between civil rights and
feminism. The act was not only designed to eliminate race discrimination, but it also
included provisions to eliminate sex discrimination in employment. Complaints of
13
Hartman, From Margin to Mainstream, pp. 53-58.
Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1963-64, Vol. I
(Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1964), p. 768.
15
Bruce Schulman, Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism: A Brief Biography with
Documents (Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1995), pp. 114-121, 200-208; Freeman, The
Politics of Women’s Liberation, pp. 75-76, 191-193, 207.
16
Roy L. Brooks, Civil Rights Litigation: Cases and Perspectives (Durham, North Carolina:
Carolina Academic Press, 1995), pp. 354-359, 485-486; Langley, Women’s Rights in the United
States, pp. 280-283.
61
14
both blacks and women led the federal government to put the two concerns in the
same policy making arena based upon perceptions of similar problems.
Congresswoman Martha Griffiths had originally sponsored the provision on sex in
the Civil Rights Act in spite of the opposition of civil rights supporters, who felt that
the sex issue might decrease support for the more important race issue. Title VII
passed with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and became one of the most important
federal measures of contemporary times.17
Title VII gave the federal government the power to guarantee women's
equality in all aspects of employment. Other provisions created the Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to control implementation of the act.
The EEOC held unprecedented authority to investigate written complaints of unjust
employment practices and to issue employment guidelines. However, before 1972
the commission could only refer actions to the attorney general's office and advise
on matters of sex discrimination.18 Although this law raised the hopes of many
women, it did not provide the means of adequately realizing these hopes.
The EEOC further alienated many feminists by giving the lowest priority to
sex charges. When it took action, the commission exercised the "Bona Fide
Occupational Qualification" guideline, which permitted unequal sex treatment if
unavoidable, if the employer acted in good faith, or if relevant state laws claimed to
protect rather than to discriminate against women. In its 1967 annual report the
commission focused on discrimination against blacks rather than discrimination
against women.19 The EEOC's insensitivity to gender problems convinced many
women that government still lacked serious commitment to change, and this led to
17
Hartman, From Margin to Mainstream, pp. 57-58
Deborah L. Rhode, Justice and Gender: Sex Discrimination and the Law (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 57-58; Hartman, From Margin to Mainstream, pp.
57-113.
19
Hartman, From Margin to Mainstream, pp. 57-113; Brooks, Civil Rights Litigation, pp. 466484.
62
18
a new position on the sex issue not by the actions of the federal government or by
other protesters, but by direct actions and policies of feminists themselves.
The restrictions on women in education and employment in the early 1960s
showed their effective minority status in American society. Women, like blacks, had
often been segregated in occupations thought appropriate for them. Also, like
blacks, few women held positions of power or decision-making. For example, there
had never been a woman president, vice-president, or Supreme Court justice.
Before 1970 only three women had won elections for governor and none had won
on her own; each succeeded her husband after he left the gubernatorial office. In
the early 1960s there was not a single women mayor who governed a major
American city. Through the middle of the decade women held only 4 percent of
7700 state legislative seats, and of those 308 women, only forty-five served in the
upper houses.20
The role of women in organized labor was little better. In 1965 no women sat
on the executive council of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of
Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). Similarly, only men chaired the council's
committees. Even in the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and the
International Ladies Garment Workers Union, with over 80 percent female
membership, no women held leadership positions.21 As patterns of this type
became more evident, new feminist visions of social and economic equality began
to increase.
As a result of their own new awakening to unequal status and actions and
partially as a result of the government's new commitment to civil rights,
expectations among women rose during the early 1960s. Women perceived that
changing patterns in race relations and notions of proper social spheres during the
20
21
Hartman, From Margin to Mainstream, pp. 2-22, 49.
Freeman, The Politics of Women’s 63
Liberation, pp. 20-36.
1960s resulted primarily from the activities of protesters. Women gained new
confidence that sex egalitarianism could be realized through similar collective
actions. Therefore, the new feminists did not entirely ideologically depart from civil
rights and other historical protests. Their common approach was to extend the past
questions of inequality toward new insights derived from the contemporary protest
atmosphere.
Feminist efforts led to a new action group dedicated to investigate and
eradicate gender inequality. The movement for such an organization began in June
1966, when women met in Washington, D.C., for the Third National Conference of
Commissions on the Status of Women. During the conference some participants
joined with Betty Friedan, who suspected that the EEOC was not fully enforcing
Title VII in sex discrimination cases, to form the first national feminist action
organization since the emergence of the National Woman's Party. Friedan and
other professional women formed the National Organization for Women (NOW), a
legal oriented group which eventually became the nation's largest and most active
feminist organization in the 1960s and 1970s.22
NOW's statement of purpose read: "To take action to bring women into full
participation in the mainstream of American Society now, exercising all the
privileges and responsibilities thereof in truly equal partnership with men."23 The
statement created a direction for new legal feminist commitments, as the creation
of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1957) earlier had directed the
civil rights movement in a legal direction. We may substitute blacks for women and
whites for men in the statement of purpose to reach such a conclusion.
22
Betty Friedan, It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women’s Movement (New York: Random
House, 1976), pp. 73-87.
23
Ibid., p. 87.
64
NOW represented an NAACP or an SCLC for women.24 They agreed to take
immediate action against all forms of sex discrimination in education and
employment by using tactics that had proved effective in the civil rights movement,
including sit-ins, marches and boycotts. Thus a new women's legal oriented protest
movement, one which focused on various women's establishment causes apart
from the civil rights movement, emerged.
NOW directed its first actions at forcing the government to act in accordance
with the sex provisions of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. NOW pursued
several sex discrimination cases under the sex and race mandate of Title VII. The
organization immediately formed task forces to confront sex biases in employment,
education, religion, poverty, law, politics and the media; special committees
handled public relations, finance, legislation and legal activities.25 Therefore, the
approach demonstrated a typical legal oriented pattern of protest for both blacks
and women, the approach of pressing the government for meaningful commitment
and then closely examining the government's actions to ensure they realized stated
policies.
Apart from its commitment to legal activities, NOW also focused on the black
civil rights tactics of lobbying, litigation, and mass marches on Washington. Another
similarity with the older civil rights movement emerged when NOW created a taxexempt legal arm patterned after the NAACP's "Inc. Fund". One of the legal
section's first proposals included the changing of women's protective work laws,
which it thought could lead to an important decision in civil rights for women
comparable to Brown v. Board of Education.26
The conclusions of NOW’s first annual report in November 1967 influenced
the movement's legal tactics for years. The report outlined future legal actions and
24
25
Freeman, The Politics of Women’s Liberation, p. 81.
Ibid., pp. 71-102.
65
recommended
judicial
redress
by
assisting
plaintiffs
on
appeal,
having
discriminatory state laws declared unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment,
pressuring the EEOC to issue definitive guidelines on classified advertising in
newspapers, advertising state labor laws and pension and retirement plans and
pursuing face to face interviews with all agencies or bureaus empowered to act on
sex discrimination cases. At the same time, NOW pursued such serious feminist
reforms as legal abortion, equal employment opportunity, child care facilities,
maternity leave, job training for displaced women and the right to equal educational
opportunities.27
As a result, the early experience of NOW demonstrated that feminists
immediately recognized the need for their own legal oriented rights movement. The
organization was not only influenced by older groups like the NAACP and NAWSA,
but also it pursued a pressure and litigation approach that clearly reflected their
common experiences. Perhaps the most obvious similarity between NOW and the
NAACP or the SCLC was this preference for legal oriented or non-violent goals
rather than for cultural and radical or violent solutions.
Partly in response to the new feminism, in 1967 President Johnson attacked
the problem of sex discrimination by issuing Executive Order 11375, which
prohibited gender bias by all employers holding federal contracts. The order also
strengthened the enforcement powers of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance
(OFCC) as described under Executive Order 11246. The sex provision was very
important since it assured female inclusion in Executive Order 11246, stating that
all employers holding federal contracts involving at least one third of their personnel
had to agree to OFCC non-discrimination guidelines. In 1971 the OFCC issued
26
27
Ibid., p. 82.
Ibid., p. 71-102.
66
Revised Order No.4, setting significant new policies on sex discrimination.28 NOW
saw the OFCC's action as an affirmation of its success in pressuring the federal
government to expand policies of fair employment for women and other
minorities.29
Revised Order No.4 and its modifications contained new affirmative action
enforcement provisions that could revolutionize social struggles in America.
Immediately both blacks and women thought that the OFCC's action would end
race and sex discrimination in both educational and employment arenas. Here was
an important intersection between civil rights and feminism as both grasped the
federal government's new commitment to open previously closed doors for blacks
and women.
NOW took measures to force full public and private compliance with Order
No.4. After the order's passage, NOW and other legal oriented women filed
complaints of sex discrimination against many corporations and institutions of
higher learning holding federal contracts. Charges of university and college
discrimination led to new government investigations and resulted in orders for
educational institutions to provide affirmative action plans for hiring and promoting
both blacks and women.30
The new legal oriented feminist movement passed from national to local
issues by the late 1960s. For instance, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on July 24,
1970, the Pittsburgh Human Relations Commission ordered the Pittsburgh Press to
stop its separate want-ads columns. During the 1970s NOW and other women's
rights reform groups continued to force the EEOC to take a strong stand against
sex segregated want-ads as the Pittsburgh commission had done. And by the late
75-76.
28
Rhode, Justice and Gender, pp. 184, 162; Freeman, The Politics of Women’s Liberation, pp.
29
Freeman, The Politics of Women’s Liberation, pp. 75-77
Hartman, From Margin to Mainstream,
67 pp. 108-112.
30
1970s, most major newspapers had adopted non-gender ads.31 The Pittsburgh
NOW's local initiative demonstrated that the legal approach sought to use the
power of government for the benefit of women at both local and national levels.
Although NOW had achieved many important legal and political successes
by the early 1970s, divisiveness had appeared in NOW's second annual
conference in 1968 when a final draft of "A Bill of Rights for Women” was
presented. The bill was mainly proposed by Betty Friedan, who called for the
achievement of a number of long-standing feminist goals, including an Equal Rights
Amendment and “equal employment opportunity.” The eighth principle of Friedan’s
Bill of Rights for Women, “the right of women to control their own reproductive
lives," caused controversy, however.32 Principle VIII offended NOW's conservative
wing, which insisted that the organization should restrict itself only to economic and
legal issues.
The new social question related to reproductive rights convinced
many members that media interest in this controversial subject would destroy the
political effectiveness of the organization. In 1968 this led the conservative faction
under Cleveland attorney Elizabeth Boyer to depart from NOW.33 The Boyer group
formed the Women's Equity Action League (WEAL), a more conservative women's
rights organization than NOW that stressed only non-controversial legal issues like
equality in employment and education.34 Therefore, the growing feminist movement
began to splinter as the black civil rights movement had before it.
WEAL incorporated under the laws of Ohio in 1968. Elizabeth Boyer favored
systematic, legal battles against sex discrimination primarily in the areas of taxes,
employment and education. WEAL filed class action suits against many colleges
and universities.35 NOW later joined WEAL in these actions, but the more radical
31
Freeman, The Politics of Women’s Liberation, pp. 78.
Ruth, Issues in Feminism, pp. 532.
33
Freeman, The Politics of Women’s Liberation, p. 81.
34
Hartman, From Margin to Mainstream, p. 61.
35
Freeman, The Politics of Women’s 68
Liberation, pp. 152-154.
32
feminist groups refused to support the tactic. During its college challenges, WEAL,
as NOW had done earlier, followed the footsteps of black civil rights organizations
by creating a tax-exempt Legal Defense Fund (LDF) patterned after the NAACP's
Inc. Fund.36 WEAL became respected by the federal government for its responsible
approach in contrast to the disruptive antiwar and student protests, and members
often were called to testify before legislative committees on women's rights.37
Because it rejected confrontation politics and favored working through the system,
some radicals condemned WEAL as the "Aunt Janes" of the feminist movement, a
name derived from the "Uncle Tom" used by black militants to describe blacks
seeking gradual, legal reform as opposed to immediate, total upheaval.38
While WEAL and NOW had different goals in their attacks on the barriers to
women's full and equal participation in society, both agreed on the primary goal of
achieving a significant constitutional change in the form of a federal Equal Rights
Amendment. The ERA remained the most important issue that united almost all
feminist factions, whether radical, moderate or conservative. Feminists convinced
many legislators that the ERA was a necessary civil rights issue, a real 14th
Amendment for women. The ERA had won a few committee approvals since its first
introduction in Congress in 1923, but it did not receive support from both houses
until the 92nd Congress completed action in March 1972.39
As women began to form new voting groups and demand recognition and
response from politicians, both parties adopted pro-women attitudes. As a result of
this and other efforts to secure more equal representation, the number of female
delegates to the Democratic and Republican conventions increased in 1972. An
unprecedented number of women began running for office, winning elections and
accepting high appointive positions. Equally significant shifts occurred at the state
36
37
Hartman, From Margin to Mainstream, p. 100.
Ibid., pp. 153-154.
69
level. Between 1969 and 1976 the number of female state legislators doubled. The
number of women in the U.S. Congress rose from 12 in 1968 to 18 in 1975. In the
years 1970-1974 the number of female nominees of the two major parties
increased by nearly 50 percent. Increased political participation decreased race as
well as sex divisions.40 The increases suggested that the Democratic and
Republican parties had altered their policies regarding women and recognized new
power groups.
From their observation of the black experience, some women's advocates
quickly perceived that judicial victories could be one of the most important devices
of change. Just as the Supreme Court had started a series of decisions on civil
rights in the late 1940s and 1950s, culminating in the Brown decision, women's
rights advocates pressed the Court to address the issue of sex discrimination in the
1960s and 1970s.
By 1973 the Supreme Court began to make some significant decisions
affecting women. Specifically, in Frontiero v. Richardson (1973), the Court ruled
that military fringe-benefit payments must be uniform regardless of the sex of
military personnel. Reflecting a new judicial dualism, the Court addressed the issue
with the same approach that it had used in earlier civil rights cases; in part its
decision read: "Classifications based on sex, like classifications based on race…
are inherently suspect, and must therefore be subjected to strict judicial scrutiny."41
Women continued to force the courts in the same ways blacks had done and won
many important cases through the late 1970s.
38
Friedan, It Changed My Life, p. 77.
Langley, Women’s Rights in the United States, p. 290-293.
40
Hartman, From Margin to Mainstream, pp. 49, 79-98. Similarly, as a result of black efforts to
secure more equal representation, the number of black elected officials increased from 100 in 1964 to
1400 in 1970. In March 1969, there were 994 black men and 131 black women who held offices. By
May 1975, this figure increased to 2969 black men and 530 black women. In the latter year, there were
18 blacks in Congress, 281 serving as state legislators or executives and 135 mayors of cities, towns,
or municipalities. See Manning Marable, Race, Reform and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in
Black America, 1945-1982 (London: MacMillan Press, 1997), pp. 126, 134.
41
Langley, Women’s Rights in the United
70 States, p. 296.
39
The Court's most important and controversial decisions were related with
reproduction. In June 1965 the Court found in Griswold v. Connecticut that state
laws regulating the distribution and use of contraceptives violated the right of
privacy. On January 22, 1973, the Court announced by a seven-to-two decision in
Roe v. Wade, later sustained in Doe v. Bolton (1973), that states did not have
regulatory power over abortions during the first three months of pregnancy.
Although the ruling was a victory for women, it was not clear regarding the
particulars of the abortion issue. Feminists pressed the Court for further
clarification, and in 1976, in Missouri v. Danforth, the Court prohibited state
requirements that a husband must consent to a wife's abortion.42 In the 1979 Belloti
v. Baird decision, the Court further clarified
the consent issue by ending a
Massachusetts law requiring people below age 18 to receive parental consent
before proceeding with an abortion. In the wake of Danforth and Baird, however,
the Court dealt a setback to poor women by defending the constitutionality of the
Hyde Amendment, which allowed legislators to withhold Medicaid funds for
abortions. On June 15, 1983, the Supreme Court again affirmed the 1973 Roe and
Doe decisions by ending an Akron, Ohio, ordinance that had sought to put a variety
of restrictions on physicians and women seeking abortions.43 To ensure the
response of the courts and government to women's issues, feminists renewed
efforts through pressure-group tactics on courts and legislatures.
Feminism in the 1960s and 1970s led to the growth of many different
organizations at both local and national levels. The development of these groups
represented many interests and also reflected the intent of feminists to
institutionalize their goals through collectivist actions. By 1979, a Women's Action
Almanac listed numerous groups, from the Women's Caucus for Art to the National
42
Leslie Friedman Goldstein, Contemporary Cases in Women’s Rights (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1994), pp. 10-14, 15-28; Richard E. Morgan, The Law and Politics of Civil Rights and
71
Women's Political Caucus (NWPC).44 The NWPC, for example, took the first action
to institutionalize and politicize the growing women's movement. By 1973 every
state had active caucuses. At first, the NWPC focused on realizing political
objectives, such as helping women win elections to public office. But by the mid1970s it began to include broad social issues such as women's health care and
family planning. Its also published a newsletter and a quarterly, Women's Political
Tİmes, and disseminated educational material and data concerning women's
political interests. Like NOW and WEAL, the NWPC often testified before
Republican and Democratic committees and federal and state legislative bodies.45
The growing legal oriented branch of feminism began to include women of
different backgrounds. The combination of race and gender led black women to
view the new feminism from two perspectives: as victims of both racism and
sexism. In May 1973 many leading black women gathered in New York to create a
new feminist group, the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO). Former New
York Human Rights Commissioner and then Chair of the EEOC Eleanor Holmes
Norton was especially effective in creating the NBFO. The NBFO's Statement of
Purpose primarily concerned self-definition and the development of positive self
images for black women. The NBFO demonstrated that black women were seeking
to address their particular concerns through organizational means, apart from both
civil rights and feminist activists.46
When working women gathered into the Coalition of Labor Union Women
(CLUW, 1974) to address their unique problems, their experience was similar to
that of other specialized groups like the NBFO. Most women in paid labor saw their
needs as financial and thus wanted the pay and protections that were usual for
Liberties (New York: Knopf, 1985), p. 368.
43
Morgan, The Law and Politics of Civil Rights Liberties, p. 368.
44
Freeman, The Politics of Women’s Liberation, p. 154-156.
45
Ibid., pp. 160-161.
46
Ibid., pp. 156-157.
72
men. Labor women agreed that they needed class solidarity and desired to fight
collectively for special women's interests in the trade union movement. They gained
such policy victories as convincing the American Federation of Labor and Congress
of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) to change its anti-ERA position. In this
respect the CLUW continued legal oriented feminism's tradition of organizational
tactics while adopting reformist positions and strategies. At the same time, as
women of all socio-economic groups and races were entering the paid labor force
in great numbers, many of them joined the CLUW as a realization of both historical
and existing feminist protest aims.47
Therefore, the movement toward legal oriented activity became a major
tactical approach of contemporary feminism. Nevertheless, feminists, as civil rights
groups like the NAACP and SCLC had, realized that court decisions, legislative
actions and other governmental actions could eliminate only those discriminatory
forces under the control of the legal system. In order to eradicate more pervasive
discrimination,
many
women's
organizations
began
massive
educational
campaigns to win women's support. The legal and educational approaches are
mutually supportive, as civil rights advocates had successfully demonstrated by the
1960s.
In 1969 a group of NOW members in Pittsburgh formed a work collective,
KNOW, Inc., a reprint house for feminist literature. KNOW provided literature on
the women's movement at low prices. In addition to spreading feminist presses,
many women's periodicals appeared, including Ms. Magazine edited by Gloria
Steinem and others. These periodicals included women's culture, legislation and
scholarship. They and publications such as the National NOW Times, like the
NAACP's The Crisis and National Urban League's Opportunity, served educational
and functional purposes. Women's literature soon led to the opening of many
47
Ibid., pp. 165-166.
73
women oriented bookstores.48 Like Afro-American bookstores, feminist bookstores
became powerful places for spreading traditionally neglected history, cultural
expression and other services.
In order to ensure the institutionalization and spread of feminist ideas and to
offer common background for those interested in the teaching and scholarship of
feminist studies the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) emerged in
1977.49 New journals such as Feminist Studies and Signs: A Journal of Women in
Culture and Society showed the growing acceptance of the organized women's
movement.50 The NWSA, new journals and other localized efforts such as new
study programs and campus women's centers represented feminist attempts to
ensure the institutionalization of feminism and to raise society's consciousness
regarding social issues in America similar to earlier and existing black studies and
academic cultural movements on campuses.
The emphasis on scholarship and the creation of black studies and similar
women's studies programs showed the efforts of both blacks and women to recover
their heritage, to develop a positive self-image, and to challenge the historical
rationalization of the dominant cultural system. Women's actions of the 1960s and
1970s could be characterized as a new women's spirit, like an earlier race spirit,
which sought to increase the awareness of blacks in America. Studies on the life
and culture of blacks and women have been important sources of information for
scholars of traditionally neglected black and women's history.
In post World War II America, blacks and women realized that organization
and other collective actions were essential for achieving their goals. Lobbying and
litigation often proved the best tactics for organizations working in the legal system.
While the NAACP and SCLC led such black actions, NOW, WEAL and the NWPC
48
49
Ibid., pp. 154-157.
Ruth, Issues in Feminism, p. 1.
74
led feminists in achieving meaningful change through the judicial, political and
legislative processes. In July 1978 feminists showed their commitment to pressure
politics by marching on Capitol Hill to encourage the extension of the deadline for
ratifying the ERA, a march which resembled King's massive 1963 demonstration.
Then, in 1978 the federal government expanded its definition of minority to include
"women”. Congress responded by extending the period for ratification of the ERA
from March 1979 to June 30, 1982, so that proponents might gain the required
votes in state legislatures in three more states. Despite the extension, the time
allowed for ratification expired before the ERA was ratified by the states. Even so,
the women's movement and its allies in Congress promised to continue to fight. On
January 3, 1983, Speaker of the House Thomas P. O'Neil reintroduced the ERA
into the Congress as House Joint Resolution One.51
The determination to apply pressure through the courts, legislatures, political
systems and academia is one of the similarities between
the new feminist
movement and modern black activism. As these movements broadened their goals
and stressed further activism, both faced internal dissension. In the 1960s great
factional disputes had emerged over goals and methods in the civil rights
movement; similar divisions developed over the style and priorities of women’s
rights. Especially CORE and SNCC changed their strategies and favored more
militant action. For instance, Stokely Carmichael moved from student activism to
nationalism and then to Nkrumah based socialism.52 Women's rights advocates
also experienced both radical and conservative factionalism, as can be seen by the
division at the 1968 National Organization for Women conference. Moreover, by the
early 1970s other rivals such as the National Women's Political Caucus and the
50
Feminist Studies (Feminist Studies Inc., 1972); Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
Society (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1975).
51
Freeman, The Politics of Women’s Liberation, pp. 209-211, 216, 221.
52
See Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in
America (New York: Vintage Books, 1967). 75
race, sex, class oriented National Black Feminist Organization joined in a coalition
with NOW.53
Both the black and women's movements initiated strong organizations to end
prevailing systems of social control depriving the groups of similar rights, especially
the right to end illogical notions of proper spheres and the right to define their own
existence as human beings. However, judicial decisions and legislation could
eliminate only legal discrimination. In order to eradicate the firmly established
unjust practices, many rights advocates initiated massive new political and
educational campaigns to further institutionalize the new social order.
In the movements factions and individuals emerged who shifted from
conventional
legal
protest
to
unconventional
radical,
sometimes
violent,
approaches. The radical women’s approach rejected many organizational reform
goals and favored a theoretical analysis of gender based on intragroup strength
and solidarity and attacked normative cultural values, especially the notions of
women's proper sphere as only related to reproduction, domesticity and family.
Radicals rejected the legal oriented consensus models of protest and favored
conflict models, what they called zap actions.54 They created a large protest arena
for a wide cultural oriented movement varying from small consciousness raising rap
groups to separatist actions.
The true measure of radical action in contemporary feminism lies in the
degree of militancy and other behaviors which seek not only to reform but to disturb
society by its new style of self definition and self expression. Radical feminism can
be seen as a non-conventional, women centered method of protest, an effort to
change fundamentally the framework and prevailing values of society. As Sara
Evans argues, women's involvement in civil rights and the New Left taught them the
53
Hartman, From Margin to Mainstream, pp. 70-71, 87, 97-98, 109, 111, 120.
76
meaning of psychological oppression and led to their challenging that oppression.
Moreover women's involvement in civil rights and the New Left not only brought
them new awareness about the restrictions of sex, but also shaped the actions of
many future radical feminists.55
Radical consciousness appeared during the early 1960s civil rights summer
projects, many of which were led by groups like the Student Non-Violent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Council of Federated Organizations
(COFO). Women who were involved in the southern phase of the movement found
themselves treated as second- class citizens and given inferior roles. Women
resented the domestic chores which made them movement "housekeepers".56
Therefore, women in the civil rights movement found themselves excluded
from policy making positions, an intolerable practice for a professedly egalitarian
movement. In 1964 Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, a founding member of SNCC,
addressed this issue in a memorable female position paper titled, "The Position of
Women in SNCC", which led Stokely Carmichael to respond that "the only position
for women in SNCC is prone."
57
The prone story led to female unrest. Indeed, the
new phrase "women's liberation" might have been invented as a reaction to
Carmichael's statement.58
In 1965 two white female members of SNCC, Casey Hayden and Mary King,
prepared a paper comparing the inferior role of women in the civil rights movement
to the role of blacks in society.59 Thus, King and Hayden made one of the first
effective arguments against the pervasive gender/class/caste systems in the
54
Alice Echols, Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1667-1975 (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press), p. 72.
55
Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights
Movement and the New Left (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), pp. 48-133.
56
Ibid., pp. 24-82.
57
Ibid., p. 87.
58
Robin Morgan, The Word of a Woman: Feminist Dispatches (New York: W. W. Norton and
Company, 1994), pp. 32-33.
59
Evans, Personal Politics, pp. 98-101.
77
southern civil rights movement. Like Smith Robinson's position paper on SNCC
sexism, their protest faced male ridicule and served as a further cause for the
formation of new radical groups. After this event women's caucuses began
appearing in the movement and female workers began gathering for solace,
fellowship, and networking.
Women in the New Left experienced treatment similar to women in the civil
rights movement. Women were seldom represented in the New Left hierarchy and
were given clerical chores and other menial tasks. Women suffered male verbal
abuse when they sought to declare their subordinate status at a Students for
Democratic Society (SDS) conference in December 1965, or when female SDS
supporters proposed a "women's plank" in 1966.60 Such male responses led
women to form autonomous women's caucuses and awareness groups.
One of the most important incidents of women's political action in the New
Left occurred in 1967 at the National Conference for a New Politics (NCNP) in
Chicago. Although the Conference recognized over two hundred civil rights and
peace groups, the new women's caucus achieved only informal status. As a
reaction to this, a group of Chicago feminists formed one of the first groups of
women's liberation, which attracted disenchanted radical women and led to a
dramatic schism between the New Left and the new feminists. Such women
concluded that working for their own freedom in male dominated protest structures
was impossible. If women wanted to achieve true liberation, they would have to do
it alone.61 Also, these politically active radicals began to reject the existing protest
framework. Both Black Power and radical feminism in the 1960s grew from an
ideology based on new group consciousness and new militant actions.
60
61
Ibid., pp. 126-211.
Ibid., pp. 195-199.
78
As a result, modern radical women determined not to make coalitions with
men and favored an all women's movement, which resembled the attitudes of the
cultural wing of the black civil rights movement. For instance, by 1967 Black Power
advocates such as Stokely Carmichael had also rejected the politics of coalition.
This rejection of coalition politics was based on the belief that the goal of selfdetermination was indisputable and that the radical approach was the only means
for success.62 To realize this, new styles of leadership emerged in both
movements, initiated by blacks like Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown and Huey
Newton, and by new feminists.
In 1967 Jo Freeman founded women’s first national radical newsletter, Voice
of the Women's Liberation Movement (VWLM). It demonstrated that culturaloriented women used communication devices in the same way NOW and WEAL
did in the legal phase. VWLM was the first important radical communications
medium that reached out to women of various localities and ideologies. VWLM
further represented a new women centered movement by demanding the
replacement of the more historical and conventional "women's rights" term of the
legal oriented wing with the phrase "women's liberation”. Therefore, the radical
wing of the women's movement originated the term “women's liberation”.63
After publication of VWLM began, three other radical feminist journals
appeared: No More Fun and Games (1968), Notes from the First Year (1968) and
Lilith (1976). Notes from the First Year and later Notes from the Second Year
(1970) became especially important sources of militant feminist thought. The
journals convinced many women that their oppression was political and deserved
as much attention as any of the other 1960s reform causes.64
1967).
62
See Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power (New York: Vintage Books,
63
Freeman, The Politics of Women’s Liberation, pp. xiii, 109-111.
Echols, Daring to be Bad, pp. 53, 60,
79284.
64
In 1967 Shulamith Firestone and Pamela Allen formed New York City's first
radical women’s organization, New York Radical Women (NYRW). NYRW later
evolved into Redstockings and New York Radical Feminists. NYRW saw the key to
women’s liberation in their collective wisdom and collective strength. NYRW
abandoned women's caucus type actions and favored formal action-oriented
liberation groups. They believed that women could operate independently of the
larger society and that radicals should operate independently of reform groups like
NOW and WEAL, which emphasized change through traditional legal and lobbying
tactics.65
The Feminists, a group led by Ti-Grace Atkinson, show the central issues
and experiences of radical feminism.66 In Atkinson’s words, the group left NOW in
October 1968 after serious deep rooted value conflicts “between those who want
women to have the opportunity to be oppressors … and those who want to destroy
oppression itself".67 The Feminists reveal the ideas that led some women to move
from legal-oriented to cultural-oriented protest. The Feminists adopted various
women centered goals, which involved aggressive theoretical attacks on women's
sphere and oppression. The Feminists became one of the nation's most militant
women's organizations. They argued that some work was better than other work,
but no person was better than any other one, and that all women were capable of
power but they no longer wanted the male values imposed on women.68
Like young, militant blacks of the early 1960s, the new feminists adopted an
anti-organizational strategy and favored direct encounters. The concept of
leaderless organization in both movements fostered broad based allegiance and
65
Ibid., p. 72-82.
Ti-Grace Atkinson had received her B.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. When she
joined NOW in 1967, she was a registered Republican with no prior political experience. However,
Atkinson was familiar with feminist ideas. See Judith Harlan, Feminism: A Reference Book (Santa
Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 1988).
67
Echols, Daring to be Bad, pp. 168-169.
68
Echols, Daring to be Bad, pp. 167-185.
80
66
encouraged development of individuals' talents rather than dependence on a
hierarchical structure. They believed that power should be shared in the struggle
against the larger oppressor, not monopolized by a few. Therefore, the internal
dynamics of protest reflected the character of its external demands against the
whole society.
The legal oriented branch of the women's movement disapproved the
radicals' tactics as self-defeating and extremist.69 Similarly, "to some it is abhorrent,
to others dynamic; to some it is repugnant, to others exhilarating; to some it is
destructive, to others useful," as Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote about Black Power
demands.70 His words described not only civil rights experiences, but the similar
split in the ideologies of radical and reform feminism. Also while both black and
women reformers sought to destroy the legal structure of racism and sexism, both
black and women radicals sought to go beyond this by attacking the psychological
assumption of inequality.
The 1968 Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City witnessed one of the
earliest such attacks. Radical women gathered for their first mass militant
demonstration against prevailing cultural assumptions of beauty. Led by the
NYRW, they formed a coalition to stop the Pageant's exploitation of women. The
protests at Atlantic City were planned to publicize that women were forced to play
the Miss America role – not by beautiful women but by men for whom women had
to act that way, and by a system that had so well institutionalized male supremacy
for its own ends. Women protesters marched in Atlantic City carrying such signs as
"Miss America Sells It" and “Up Against the Wall, Miss America” and “Miss America
Is a Big Falsie.”71 In an action to parody the pageant's ceremony, radicals crowned
a sheep as Miss America. Other direct actions in the city resulted in six arrests.
69
Hartman, From Margin to Mainstream, pp. 61-66.
81
When the protesters dropped girdles, false eyelashes and other things related to
fashion into a "freedom trashcan", the press misrepresented the act, and a myth of
feminists as "bra burners" resulted.72 As a result of the protest, women learned the
meaning of the term sex object, and how to regard both the physical flattery and the
physical insults of men.
By directly confronting some deeply rooted gender notions, the Miss
America demonstration made the hopes of cultural-oriented feminists a feasible
reality. Moreover, many women, as blacks had earlier, began to realize the
paradoxes of a cultural system that supported notions of proper appearance and
conduct. Blacks had long been faced with the Sambo type of a happy, carefree,
irresponsible Afro-American. Similarly, the "cult of true womanhood" stated proper
female behavior, emphasizing a devotion to piety, purity, domesticity and beauty.
Both imposed standard behavior on blacks and women demanding submission,
subservience, beauty and docility in the presence of white males. Women had been
so influenced to accept this nineteenth century notion that it, like the Sambo type,
became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
As can be seen from the radicals' actions at Atlantic City, protest standards
changed; personal commitment and group and individual challenges became
increasingly militant. The tactics of radical women's protest were largely derived
from the earlier street style of SNCC and other black militants, who emphasized a
shift from negotiation to personal confrontation. SNCC called this its "eyeball-toeyeball" tactic; Huey Newton and the Black Panthers called it their "shock-a-buku"
tactic.73 Radical women used the term "zap action" to describe similar tactics. Thus
the Miss America protest was the first radical zap action to focus the nation's
70
Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1968), pp. 37-38.
71
Echols, Daring to be Bad, pp. 95-96, 70.
72
Morgan, The Word of A Woman, p. 30.
82
attention on the growing militancy of women in attacking stereotypes and
encouraged many women to join the movement.74
In 1968 some founders of the NYRW formed a new group. Although the
Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (WITCH) had neither an
organizational hierarchy nor a true communication network among the local
"covens", various WITCH covens were unified by their commitment to aggressive
public female behavior for radical causes.75 The first WITCH zap action occurred on
Halloween 1968. Women in witches' costumes circled the entrance to the New York
Stock Exchange, where they "hexed and spooked" all who entered.76 WITCH had
chosen Wall Street because it represented the most visible symbol of the male
power structure. This and other zap actions influenced other women to act similarly
in local covens. Although they were autonomous from the New York group, they
centered their ideology on "The WITCH Manifesto", a document that symbolized
many of the central currents of radical feminism. This paper stated that "WITCH is
an all women Everything." It further stated that "the power of the Coven is more
than the sum of its individual members, because it is together."
77
Other WITCH
actions involved protests against the Valentine's Day bridal affairs in New York and
San Francisco in 1969, by which time WITCH began to represent feminist cultural
oriented encounter tactics.78 The direct WITCH tactics represented a new phase of
local and national actions.
At the same time, the tactics of the Redstockings, another group of women
who had left the NYRW, became widely imitated by cultural-oriented women. The
first “speakout” was organized by Redstockings. Twelve women spoke out,
73
122.
Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), p.
74
Echols, Daring to be Bad, pp. 76, 94.
Ibid., p. 76.
76
Ibid., pp. 76, 97.
77
Judith Clavir Albert and Stewart Edward Albert, The Sixties Papers: Documents of a
Rebellious Decade (New York: Praeger, 1984), p. 529.
75
83
describing their abortions to an audience. Other speakouts concerned subjects
such as rape, sexual harassment, and incest. While Redstockings abandoned
WITCH type guerrilla tactics, they favored new consciousness raising techniques.
This ideal can also be seen during the southern civil rights campaigns in the early
1960s. Carol Hanish and Kathie Amatniek, members of the NYRW, were influenced
by black activists who used to "rap" about white injustice as symbolized by "the
Man".79 Thus, consciousness raising for both blacks and women became a strategy
through which they sought unity.
Redstockings were also one of the first radical feminist groups which argued
that not only were men at the root of the problem, but that they were the enemy of
the movement as well. A classic document of women's liberation, the
“Redstockings Manifesto”, reflected this in its articles II, III, and V:
II. Women are an oppressed class… We are exploited as sex objects,
breeders, domestic servants and cheap labor. We are considered inferior beings,
whose only purpose is to enhance men's lives.
III. We identify the agents of our oppression as men. Male supremacy is the
oldest, most basic form of domination. All other forms of exploitation and
oppression ... are extensions of male supremacy: men dominate… All men receive
economic, sexual, and psychological benefits from male supremacy. All men have
oppressed women…
V. We regard our personal experience, and our feelings about that
experience, as the basis for an analysis of our common situation… Our chief task
at present is to develop female class consciousness through sharing experience
and publicly exposing the sexist foundation of all our institutions. Consciousness
raising is not "therapy", which implies the existence of individual solutions and
falsely assumes that the male-female relationship is purely personal, but the only
method by which we can ensure that our program for liberation is based on the
concrete realities of our lives.80
Consciousness raising in women's liberation groups became an important
force which led to feelings of a new cultural feminist sisterhood. Simply meeting
away from men became a feminist act for some women. Their sharing of
experiences led them to understand that their grievances were derived not from
78
Echols, Daring to be Bad, pp. 97-98.
Freeman, The Politics of Women’s Liberation, pp. 116-119.
80
Mary Beth Norton, ed., Major Problems in American Women’s History: Documents and
Essays (Lexington, Massachusetts: D. C. Health
84 and Company, 1989), p. 400.
79
personal shortcomings, and this inspired them to work actively for the cause of
liberation. One of the more important results of the radical consciousness raising
movement was that its ideas became institutionalized through radical handbooks,
including essays, books, position papers and other reference works. For instance,
Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1962), Shulamith Firestone's Dialectic of
Sex (1952) and Kate Millet's Sexual Politics (1971) provided the ideological sources
for the cultural oriented wing.
French existentialist Simone De Beauvoir's conclusions on female liberation
and independence provided important radical feminist analysis. De Beauvoir
adopted the biology-equates-to-class-oppression framework from which radical
feminism eventually adopted its principles. In The Second Sex, she argued that to
keep women in their place, men based patriarchy on the assumption that the
female sphere reflected nature's biological order. Her analysis of gender
oppression influenced radical feminists to further attack women’s cultural based
oppressions, and awakened women who always had doubts about patriarchy, the
invisible controlling factor in their lives. The Second Sex provided an ideological
support for cultural-oriented feminism.81
In 1970, Redstockings cofounder Shulamith Firestone's Dialectic of Sex
presented one of modern feminism's first and most important political analyses of
the sources of women's oppression. Many radicals accepted Firestone's theory that
all oppression, especially racism and sexism, emerged from sexual inequalities and
that biological differences led to a male dominance, which in turn led to an
omnipotent patriarchy. Men's dominance of women created a prototype of other
power relationships, especially racism and sexism. Firestone stated that racism
was sexism extended. Firestone also provided an important sense of protest legacy
by stating that the contemporary radical feminist position was derived from an
85
earlier radical feminist position, especially from Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B.
Anthony, Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party.82
Feminist, author and sculptor Kate Millett added to radical thought by
defining a new theory of patriarchy and the need for feminist revolution to get rid of
psychosexual oppression. In Sexual Politics, Millett examined social myths, the
history of women's radical protest, anthropological writings, psychology and some
selected literary figures to prove her theory that male domination was rooted in
male invented roles and not in nature. Millet focused on patriarchy, its methods of
containment, and the constantly fortified sexual politics upon which it rests. Millett
concluded that a sexual revolution that abolishes double standards toward male
and female sexuality and ends traditional sexual taboos would bring the institution
of patriarchy to an end, abolishing both the ideology of male supremacy and the
traditional socialization.83
De Beauvoir, Firestone and Millett’s political theories on dominance and
revolution had an important impact on the growing radical movement. They all
agreed that women needed to unite as an oppressed class in order to make
revolution against the oppressive patriarchy. This radical ideology became a
pattern of "men as the enemy".84
The radical movement focused more solidly on the issue of feminist
antipathy for men than did literature. As SNCC and other Black Power groups had
excluded whites, radical women argued similarly that men would be antithetical to
their cause. Black Power advocates like Stokely Carmichael had long stated that a
"white question" existed in the movement, and thus whites should return to their
own communities and work for change, leaving blacks free to lead their own
81
Simone De Beauvoir, The Second Sex (London: The New English Library, 1962).
Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (Istanbul: Payel, 1993).
83
Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Istanbul: Payel, 1987).
84
Echols, Daring to be Bad, p. 185. 86
82
struggle.85 A similar “man question” can be seen in the NOW organizing convention
in 1966. NOW solved the question in favor of full participation by men.86 The man
question, therefore, never became divisive in the traditional, legal wing of the
movement.
Unlike members of the traditional faction, however, many of the radicals had
worse experiences with men in the civil rights and New Left movements. As a result
they argued that men could not really empathize with the unique problems of
women, would try to secure the positions of leadership in the feminist movement for
themselves as they had done in previous movements, and would add an
unnecessary psychological burden to women. Many radicals even declared outright
ideological and cultural warfare against males. This attitude led to some sharp
terms like "male chauvinist", and "the oppressor".87 The terms meant to reverse the
traditional patterns of gender based social insults, but the radicals' use of the term
oppressor had deeper political connotations. Oppression for them meant
nonsensical sex-based inequalities. Of course, not all the radicals were anti-men.
Many argued for the inclusion of men in the movement, but critics of the movement
have often used the "man-hater" theme to make radical feminism seem worse.88
The Feminists, led by Ti-Grace Atkinson, took one of the earliest firm,
collective positions against men. The Feminists stated that men were oppressors of
women and thus the enemy. The Feminists' 1968 slogan “Men Are the Enemy”
became radical feminism's most criticized ideological stance.89 But in order to have
a revolution you must have a revolutionary theory.
Unlike legalists, most radicals went far to emphasize their anti-men policies.
The Feminists' ideology focused on marriage as a symbol of male oppression. The
85
Carmichael and Hamilton , Black Power, pp. 61-63.
Hartman, From Margin to Mainstream, pp. 58-59.
87
Evans, Personal Politics, p. 120.
88
Echols, Daring to be Bad, p. 99.
89
Hartman, From Margin to Mainstream,
87 p. 60-61.
86
organization adopted a one-third marriage rule, which stated that no more than
one-third of its membership might be married or in cohabitation with males. The
Feminists held a sit-in at the New York City Marriage Bureau and confronted Mayor
John Lindsay with a list of charges claiming that "women were being illegally made
sex slaves in the unholy state of matrimony."90 The anti-men argument led to the
institutionalization of a noticeable pro-women line resting on the cultural
assumption of women's need for identity and autonomy from historical oppression.
This pro-women/anti-men line was best symbolized by activist Valerie
Solanas who carried the anti-men position to its extreme in the "SCUM Manifesto".
Solanas is notorious for shooting pop artist Andy Warhol, for which she is
appreciated by many radicals who believed she committed a political act. In SCUM,
the Society for Cutting up Men, Solanas urged women to "eliminate" men, because
males were the very antithesis of women's liberation.91 But most radicals adopted
the anti-men line for a greater cultural autonomy from males rather than for a
society based upon Solanas's female totalitarianism.
Nevertheless, the radical women’s movement in the 1970s became
characterized by an increasing number of women's separatist living arrangements
based on intragroup norms of role and place. Separatism and communalism
reflected many characteristics of radical feminism: female autonomy and self
sufficiency, freedom from patriarchal dominance, various anti-male perspectives,
lesbian unity, consciousness raising tactics and the notion of women as an
oppressed class. Radical separatists argued that pride, self expression, sexual
fulfillment and all other ingredients of human dignity could be achieved only through
separation from the male patriarchal system. This position was derived from the
theories of the Republic of New Africa and the Nation of Islam, which had sought to
90
91
Echols, Daring to be Bad, pp. 169-170.
Ibid., pp. 104-105.
88
achieve similar autonomy and independence through various forms of physical
separation from white society. The right to exercise dominion over community and
self and the power to preserve that existence free from outside interference moved
both blacks and women toward independent lives.
Women's centers, which served as temporary settlement houses for
movement women, became the first institutional separatist actions. These
institutions provided a place for women who wanted to pursue alternative lifestyles
and escape from male dominance. There were also centers which departed from
extreme separatist actions. They admitted that its goals, such as full independence
from the control and influence of male-dominated institutions, could not be
achieved without contact with men. The fact that they collaborated with men in the
business world demonstrated flexibility in the separatist position.92 Some black
militants had also learned to deal with the dominant white culture even though they
chose to withdraw from it. The Black Panthers, for example, practiced
psychological separatism but sought working coalitions with white radicals; other
black nationalist organizations, like the Republic of New Africa or the Nation of
Islam, rejected any collaboration with whites. Female separatism similarly shows
divisions over the degree of necessary separation from the oppressor.
Although radical feminists demonstrated the strongest and most complete
commitment to cultural autonomy, other women sought answers to their problems
in similar terms. For example, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Gerda Lerner have
examined the "separate cultures" and "female world" themes. For them, women's
culture symbolized group identity, solidarity and awareness.93 The manifestation of
cultural identity showed itself in new personal commitments or in an insistence on
redefining women as a cultural group or in completely separatist ventures.
92
Freeman, The Politics of Women’s Liberation, pp. 103-146.
89
In the early 1970s radical women began to call for a revision of history,
which would lead to new theories of women regarding their past, present and
future. Conventional male-centered history was attacked by many radicals who
wanted to show the origins of prevailing oppression and to use history as an
important mass consciousness raising tool. The attention given to women's history
showed similarity with the developments in black history in the 1960s, which sought
to integrate black experiences into American history and to explore deeply the
special characteristics of African people. Therefore, blacks and women began to
redefine past events to present themselves as a group of active people in history.
In particular, cultural oriented women began to shift their emphasis from zap
actions and protests to theories and practices to institutionalize women's own
sense of history and self. Writings like Sheila Rowbotham's Hidden From History
reflected this theme.94
Moreover, in the 1970s, radicals demanded women's studies programs in
colleges just as blacks had demanded black studies in the 1960s. The demands of
women, like the demands of blacks, were based on the assumption that history had
been used by the powerful to perpetuate their control over less powerful or
minority groups. It was ironic that blacks often knew more about white history than
their own, and women often knew more about male history than their own. The new
National Women's Studies Association, the Women's Studies Abstract and the
Women's Studies Newsletter spread important information about women's studies
efforts.95
Like history, sexism in language was another cultural arena for which radical
feminists presented alternative models. Radicals argued that nouns, pronouns and
titles in the language often reflected a sense of male supremacy, and that language
93
Norton, ed., Major Problems in American Women’s History, 2-10, 129; Kerber, Toward an
Intellectual History of Women, pp. 162-167.
90
tended to destroy female dignity and self concept and set women apart from the
traditional power structure. This belief led radical women to advocate eliminating
gender oriented pronouns from the English language.96 Like some black radicals,
radical women argued that language transformed symbolism into reality. For OAAU
and other black nationalists of the late 1960s, the words “Negro” and “nigger” had
become unacceptable white images for blacks. In some respects, radical women's
attempts to reform the language showed the same nationalistic solidarity. This was
demonstrated in their determination to eliminate words, phrases and titles based on
male-defined images of sex and marital status. In other words, both blacks and
women thought that language could corrupt thought.
The practice of changing names by cultural oriented females became
increasingly common by the end of the 1970s. Radical women began to take
revolutionary or liberation names like Betsy Warrior and Ann Fury to get rid of their
names inherited from male parents and to symbolize a break with maleness.97 The
use of such liberation names was not unique to the women's movement; black
nationalists and members of the Nation of Islam had done the same. For example,
Malcolm Little adopted the initial X to replace the "white slave master name
of ‘Little’ which some blue eyed devil named Little had imposed upon my paternal
forebears."98 Similarly, young nationalists of the 1960s, like author and playwright
Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), adopted Pan-African names to symbolize their
ancestry and black pride.
By the late 1960s women were militantly challenging not only language
distinctions and self concepts but entire life styles and value systems. By the early
94
Sheila Rowbotham, Hidden From History (London: Pluto Press, 1992).
Ruth, Issues in Feminism, pp. 1-18.
96
Millett, Sexual Politics, p. 83.
97
Ruth, Issues in Feminism, pp. 83-85.
98
Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm
X (New York: Ballantine Books, 1973), pp. 199.
91
95
1970s this led women to openly address a new, heretofore taboo, feminist issue:
lesbianism. Lesbianism became a means of redefining women's lives beyond the
boundaries of traditional male designed roles and became one of the most
controversial elements of the new radical feminism.
At its 1971 national conference the National Organization for Women
accepted the oppression of lesbians as a legitimate concern of feminism.99 And by
the mid-1970s radical feminists began to view lesbianism as a political statement
against the oppression of women by men. Charlotte Bunch stated the political
aspects of lesbianism/feminism as follows: "The Lesbian has recognized that giving
support and love to men over women perpetuates the system that oppresses her…
Women-identified lesbianism is, then, more than a sexual preference, it is a political
choice."100 Such extreme positions caused lesbianism to become a controversial
issue in the women's rights movement. Not all feminists supported these attempts
to politicize the personal priorities of certain women. Some argued that lesbianism
was not a real movement issue, that it would encourage attacks in the form of
lesbian baiting and that ultimately the "lavender herring" of lesbianism would
destroy the movement. 101
However, the lesbianism tide survived. After she left NOW, Rita Mae Brown,
active in the New York chapter of NOW, called a meeting of lesbians from which
Radicalesbians emerged. The new group argued that lesbianism was the purest
expression of feminism since heterosexual women were actually consorting with
the enemy. The group stated its ideology in "The Woman Identified Woman", one of
99
Freeman, Politics of Women’s Liberation, pp. 99-100.
Ibid., pp. 137-138.
100
92
the papers on contemporary lesbianism/feminism. Radicalesbians stated: "As the
source of self hate and the lack of real self are rooted in our male-given identity, we
must create a new sense of self… It is the primacy of women relating to women, of
women creating a new consciousness of and with each other, which is at the heart
of women's liberation."102
Apart from separatist ventures, during the 1970s feminists worked
cooperatively to create and spread educational and cultural information by and for
women only. In publications like the Boston Women's Health Book Collective's Our
Bodies, Ourselves and Shere Hite's The Hite Report, special emphasis was placed
on explaining gynecological matters and other female concerns such as rape and
abusive husbands.103 As a result of such publications, women's health centers
rapidly increased in number. Other women took alternative measures to show their
sense of separateness through publication. The Women's Rights Almanac,
Woman's Almanac, Women's Action Almanac and New Woman's Survival Catalog
spread useful information through mass market techniques in the 1970s.104 As
women increased their efforts psychologically and materially to reach each other,
some feminist oriented presses appeared, such as The Feminist Press in Old
Westbury, New York, and the lesbian oriented Diana Press in Baltimore.105 Thus,
the 1970s can be seen as a period during which a wide range of female literature
appeared in unprecedented volume
and reached equally unprecedented
audiences.
Modern black and feminist radicalism both passed through similar stages as
101
Friedan, It Changed My Life, 189, pp. 211-213.
Linda Nicholson, ed., The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory (New York:
Routledge, 1997), pp. 153-157.
103
Boston Women’s Health Collective, Our Bodies, Ourselves: A book by and for Women (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1973); Shere Hite, The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study on Female
Sexuality (New York: A Dell Book, 1981).
104
Echols, Daring to be Bad, p. 259.
105
Ibid., 273; Ruth, Issues in Feminism,
93 p. 463.
102
protesters not satisfied with traditional goals and strategies pursued more radical
solutions. Blacks and women learned early in the evolution of their movements that
organization and other collective behaviors were essential for achieving their goals.
Lobbying and litigation became the best tactics for organizations committed to
working within the system. As we have seen, the NAACP and the SCLC led such
black legal actions; NOW, WEAL and the NWPC have represented feminist efforts
to achieve meaningful change through the judicial, political and legislative
processes. As these movements broadened their goals and stressed further
activism, both faced internal dissension. In the 1960s factional disputes emerged
over goals and methods within
the civil rights movements. CORE and SNCC
especially adopted a more militant strategy. Women’s rights advocates also faced
radical and conservative factionalism, as can be seen in the division at the 1968
NOW conference. Judicial decisions and legislation could eliminate only legal
discrimination. In order to eradicate the deeply rooted de facto practices, many
rights advocates launched massive new political and educational campaigns to
further institutionalize the growing structures of the new social order.
The similarity of race and sex activism can especially be seen in terms of a
new militancy, an activist approach that rejected the mass membership, legal
oriented groups and generally accepted traditional protest patterns. While activists
in each movement emphasized self-sufficiency, collective loyalties and personal
commitments, they subsequently rejected coalition politics and embraced black or
women centered solutions. While the legal-oriented wing grew primarily from
national reform efforts, the radical wing evolved from the dissatisfaction women felt
with their roles in civil rights and the New Left and to a lesser extent from a
disaffection with the priorities of the legalists. Feminist radicalism aimed to attack
the roots of cultural-based sexism. Moreover, women like Shulamith Firestone and
94
Kate Millett offered a kind of synthesis of political theories of female autonomy
similar to black nationalism. Other groups and individuals, such as Redstockings,
the NYRW, and Ti-Grace Atkinson reflected a determination by women in the late
1960s and the 1970s to define for themselves a new sense of history and
community to gain control of certain cultural-defined imperatives. Some groups
rejected traditional gender arrangements in favor of alternative living patterns. In
sum, both blacks and women have sought greater cultural control and self-identity.
Contemporary feminism reflected the nature of black civil rights, but it did not grow
from civil rights – even though civil rights set a mood for liberation and offered
protest models.
95
CHAPTER III
NATIVE AMERICAN RIGHTS MOVEMENT
In order to determine if there were common protest characteristics between
the civil rights movement and Native American activism, this chapter will review the
Native American rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The fact that the civil
rights movement led President Lyndon B. Johnson to fight the problem of race
through massive federal programs, such as the Great Society, the War on Poverty,
and the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, may lead one to assume that the civil
rights movement helped to end the terminationist federal Indian policy and
encourage American Indian ethnic renewal. Cultural change and reform politics in
the 1960s led Indians to lobby successfully for access to the federal poverty
program budget. Native Americans were influenced by the African American
struggle for justice, and, just as African Americans faced resistance, so did the
Native Americans. Despite the fact that there was little cooperation between black
and Indian protestors in actions such as the 1968 Poor People’s March, when
American Indians joined other white and nonwhite poor groups to march on
Washington, D.C., and despite the fact that the problems of American Indians and
black Americans differed, the civil rights movement was very important for the
emergence of Indian activism. Native American activists borrowed organizational
forms, rhetoric and tactics from civil rights but changed them according to their
needs, targets and locations. Most importantly, in contrast to the integrationist ideas
of the legal-oriented civil rights movement, modern Indian activists have generally
agreed the thrust of their movement should be to maintain Indian separatism. This
was true of both the legal and the
96
cultural wings of Indian activism.
Centuries of federal support of removal and assimilation policies prompted
Indians to resist the system, just as policies of segregation and discrimination led
blacks to resist the white order. Following the policy of previous administrations, in
his December 1829 message to Congress, President Andrew Jackson advocated a
coercive removal policy for Indians in the southeastern states. Jackson denied
native autonomy, asserted the primacy of states’ rights over Indian rights, and
called for the removal of all eastern Indians to designated areas beyond the
Mississippi. In 1832 he condoned Georgia’s defiance of a Supreme Court decision
(Worcester v. Georgia) that denied the right of a state to extend its jurisdiction over
tribal land.1 In 1838 a resisting faction of the Cherokee Indians were forcibly
marched to Oklahoma by federal troops. This event, the “Trail of Tears,” was made
under such harsh conditions that almost a quarter of the Indians died on the way.
The Cherokee removal exposed the prejudiced and greedy side of American
democracy.2
Another crucial step in Indian policy came in the 1870s and 1880s. Some
reformers had long argued against segregating the Indians on reservations, urging
instead that the nation assimilate them individually into white culture. These
assimilationists wanted to use education, land policy, and federal law to eradicate
tribal society. Congress began to adopt the policy in 1871 when it ended the
practice of treaty-making with Indian tribes. Deciding to give each Indian a farm,
Congress in 1887 passed the Dawes Severalty Act, the most important legal
development in Indian-white relations in over three centuries. Aiming to end tribal
life, the Dawes Act divided tribal lands into small plots for distribution among
members of the tribe. In addition, American citizenship was granted to Indians who
1
Francis Paul Prucha, Documents of United States Indian Policy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1990), pp. 47-48, 60-62.
2
Vine Deloria, Jr., ed., American Indian Policy in the Twentieth Century (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), p. 50. 97
accepted land, lived apart from the tribe, and adopted the habits of civilized life.
Many tribal members had adopted white cultural attributes and had become
individual landowners. More significantly, the Dawes Act led to much Indian land
being given over to white settlers. In 1500, Native Americans controlled three billion
acres but by 1887 whites had reduced their land base to 150,000,000 acres. By the
time the United States repealed the Dawes Act in the 1930s, Native Americans
controlled a mere forty-eight million acres. By the 1960s the Cherokees, Choctaws,
Chickasaws, Creeks and Seminoles – the Five Civilized Tribes of Oklahoma – had
lost most of their tribal lands.3 Although the Snyder Act gave citizenship to all
Native Americans in 1924, state restrictions continued to disfranchise many Native
Americans into the 1960s.4 Indians, after decades of neglect, fared slightly better
under the New Deal. In 1934, Congress passed the Indian Reorganization Act, also
known as the Indian New Deal, a reform measure designed to stress tribal unity
and autonomy instead of attempting to transform Indians into self-sufficient farmers
by granting them small plots of land.5 Modest gains also occurred in education, but,
more than three hundred Native Americans remained the nation’s most
impoverished citizens.
In the face of such developments, Native Americans had never been
passive. Individual tribes like the Pueblos in the 1920s and pan-Indian groups like
the Society of American Indians or the Native American Church had been
demanding equality and respect for tribal integrity for years. The modern Native
American protest movement, marked by pan-Indian organizations, interest group
lobbying, political activism and militancy, began during the last years of World War
II and continued when attacks on the Indian New Deal increased during the
3
Prucha, Documents of United States Indian Policy, pp. 171-174; Clifford E. Trafzer, As
Long As the Grass Shall Grow and Rivers Flow: A History of Native Americans (New York: Harcourt
College Publishers, 2000), p. 330.
4
Prucha, Documents of United States Indian Policy, pp. 320-321.
5
Ibid., pp. 222-225.
98
Eisenhower administration’s policy of termination – a new effort at assimilating or
detribalizing Indians – in the 1950s.6 Termination policies, in fact, prompted many
Indians to move to urban centers in search of work. This, in turn, helped to
stimulate American Indian political activism and the emergence of the Red Power
movement in 1969.
The Indian rights movement had legal and cultural wings just like the civil
rights movement. The legal faction involved moderate organizations such as the
National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), as well as newer, mainly tribally
organized groups such as the National Tribal Chairmen’s Association (NTCA), the
Native American Rights Fund (NARF), and the Council of Energy Resource Tribes
(CERT). Like the legal wing of black activism, these Indian organizations worked
within the system, lobbying, petitioning, and litigating. And in the same way that the
major goal of Black Power was self-determination for black people, the main aim of
the legal-oriented Indian activists was tribal self-determination. Self-determination
involved a new respect for tribal cultures and a commitment to their survival
through preservation of treaty rights, consultation on policy changes, and economic
self-sufficiency. The cessation of tribal sovereignty by federal law in 1871, the
citizenship campaigns of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the termination
program of the 1950s all looked to the disappearance of tribal values. The Bureau
of Indian Affairs had controlled tribal government, restricted property disposal, and
taken control of the schools, hospitals and jobs on the reservations. Even the
Indian Reorganization Act, although it was committed to self-determination,
required the approval of the Secretary of the Interior for all newly written tribal
6
James S. Olson and Raymond Wilson, Native Americans in the Twentieth Century
(Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984), p. 99
157.
constitutions. Each constitution also had to delegate significant veto powers over
tribal affairs to the Secretary of the Interior.7
As in the case of blacks, federal Indian policy had long demanded that
Indians abandon their traditional culture, while it refused to admit them to full
participation in Anglo society. Assimilation, which meant cultural imperialism,
allotment, citizenship, education, termination and relocation, were designed to
transform Native Americans into farmers and workers living like Euro-Americans.
Like blacks, Indians believed that total assimilation into white society implied that
they had nothing worth preserving, and therefore they attacked federal policies in
the 1960s and 1970s.
Indian activists, like black civil rights protestors, initially thought that
grievances could be addressed effectively through legislation and litigation. During
the late 1960s, Native American organizations attempted to watch for legislative
actions by the federal and state governments which acted for termination or
restricted tribal liberties. The most significant of the legal-oriented organizations
was the National Congress of American Indians, which was founded in 1944 by
tribal leaders to lobby for or against particular legislation. Members of the
organization included the elected leaders of all tribes participating in the Indian
Reorganization Act of 1934. They aimed to lobby on behalf of specific tribes and to
work for voting rights and civil equality. The NCAI used the courts to obtain justice
in the same way that the NAACP had for African Americans. They sued federal and
state governments over discrimination in employment, fishing rights, and over
issues involving schooling and the violation of treaty rights. The successes of the
NAACP persuaded NCAI members such as Vine Deloria, Jr. to go to law school. At
a meeting with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, he saw the opportunity to
7
Olson, Native Americans in the Twentieth Century, p. 161; Christopher K. Riggs,
“American Indians, Economic Development, and Self-Determination in the 1960s”, Pacific Historical
100
establish a legal program in the same way that African Americans had. However,
unlike the NAACP, it was never the intention of the NCAI to seek integration into
American society, but rather to ensure Native American cultural integrity.8
The efforts of tribes and the NCAI to reverse termination policies were
longstanding and predated the civil rights era. The legal faction led by the NCAI
worked in support of the Indian Claims Commission and the Navajo-Hopi
Rehabilitation Act for years. But the termination program of the early 1950s forced
the NCAI into broader action. When Senator Arthur Watkins’s termination policies
became effective in 1954, NCAI supporters met in Washington, D.C., to protest the
end of tribal trusteeship. At its 1954 convention in Omaha, Nebraska, the NCAI
denounced termination and for the next five years led the fight for survival of tribal
trust status. Other groups like the Indian Rights Association and the Association on
American Indian Affairs, liberal organizations such as the National Council of
Churches, and several Quaker relief groups joined the NCAI in opposing
termination. Between 1954-1970, many tribes sent delegations to Washington,
D.C., to protest attempts to terminate them.9
In time, in large part due to fierce Indian opposition to termination, federal
policy started to shift toward self-determination. In 1958, President Eisenhower
announced that in the future no tribes would be terminated unless they requested
it.10 However, during the late 1950s and the 1960s the Bureau of Indian Affairs and
Congress tried unsuccessfully to negotiate several tribes into termination. For
example, in the 1950s the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers planned to construct the
Kinzua Dam and flood thousands of acres of Seneca land in western New York.
Seneca leaders opposed the plan and demanded compensation, but Congress
Review, Vol. 69, No. 3 (2001): pp. 431-463.
8
Joane Nagel, American Indian Ethnic Renewal: Red Power and the Resurgence of
Identity and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 162-163.
9
Olson, Native Americans in the Twentieth Century, pp. 157-158.
101
offered compensation only if they agreed to develop a termination plan. With the
help of the NCAI, the Senecas successfully refused congressional demands. But
the NCAI had always to be on guard against termination attempts even after the
federal government had ended the policy.11
Unlike black activism, Indian activism did not follow a definite pattern – first
legal and then cultural-oriented events. Late in the 1950s disputes between the
more traditional tribal leaders who dominated the NCAI and younger, mostly urban
Native Americans, divided the NCAI. Young militants were less willing to accept
tribal customs, and supported pan-Indian values.12 They believed that most of the
tribal leaders had surrendered to Euro-American control through the Bureau of
Indian Affairs (BIA). Subsequently, these more violent and cultural-oriented activists
were greatly influenced by the black rebellion of 1965-1975. Young nationalist
militants viewed more conservative groups as black radicals saw the NAACP and
the SCLC. Radical Indians argued that their people held economic and political
power which had not been coordinated collectively by conservative tribal leaders.
The differences between legalists and younger activists first clearly
emerged during and after the American Indian Chicago Conference in 1961. In
June 1961, Native Americans from sixty-seven tribes met at a conference at the
University of Chicago to declare their opposition to termination and to secure
“Indian involvement in the decision-making process for all programs that would
effect them”.13 In their Declaration of Indian Purpose, they said:
We believe in the inherent rights of all people to retain spiritual and cultural
values and that the free exercise of these values is necessary to the normal
development of any people. Indians exercised this inherent right to live their
own rights for thousands of years before the white man came and took their
10
Felix S. Cohen, Felix S. Cohen’s Handbook of Federal Indian Law (Charlottesville:
Michie: Bobbs-Merrill, 1982), p. 182.
11
Nagel, American Indian Ethnic Renewal, pp. 159-166.
12
Pan-Indian goals such as increased identification, cultural renaissance, organizational
growth and political activism were adopted by new ethnic groups composed of survivors from many
Indian tribes.
13
Olson, Native Americans in the Twentieth
102 Century, p. 159.
lands.... When Indians speak of the continent they yielded, they are not
referring only to the loss of some millions of acres in real estate. They have
in mind that the land supported a universe of things they knew, valued, and
loved. With that continent gone, except for the new parcels they still retain,
the basis of life is precariously held, but they mean to hold the scraps and
parcels as earnestly as any small nation or ethnic group was ever
determined to hold to identity and survival.14
But younger Native Americans such as Clyde Warrior, Melvin Thom and
Herbert Blatchford disagreed. They believed that too much time had been wasted
on patience, caution and cooperation, and they were ready for a more aggressive
policy. Several months after the Chicago meeting, they met at the Indian
Community Center in Gallup, New Mexico, and formed the National Indian Youth
Council (NIYC). The NIYC’s slogan reflected its intertribal and Indian nationalist
stance: “For a Greater Indian America”. At the Gallup meeting, the leaders of the
NIYC denounced racism, ethnocentrism, and paternalism and demanded a new
role for Native Americans in determining the policies affecting their lives. In their
“Statement of Policy”, they stated:
Weapons employed by the dominant society have become subtler and
more dangerous than guns - these, in the form of educational, religious and
social reform, have attacked the very centers of Indian life by attempting to
replace native institutions with those of the white man.... The major problem
in Indian affairs is that the Indian has been neglected in determining the
direction of progress and monies to Indian communities.... Our viewpoint,
based in a tribal perspective, realizes, literally, that the Indian problem is
the white man, and, further, realizes that poverty, educational drop-out,
unemployment, etc., reflect only symptoms of a social-contact situation that
is directed at unilateral cultural extinction.15
Stokely Carmichael had called for Black Power and had received support
from young African Americans in SNCC and the BPP, and the same was true for
Native Americans who called for Red Power and had separatist ideas. As the black
radical faction called for self-determination and condemned black conservatives as
“Uncle Toms”, the NIYC called for self-determination and condemned Native
14
15
Ibid., p. 159.
Ibid., p. 159; Nagel, American Indian
103Ethnic Renewal, p. 129.
American conservatives as “Uncle Tomahawks” who accepted BIA policies.16 In
1964, the NIYC, in part motivated by the then-rising activism of African American
civil rights leaders, moved from rhetorical protest to open activism by supporting
tribal protest actions asserting fishing rights in the Pacific Northwest. For years,
Native Americans at Puget Sound in Washington had fished to sustain their families
and had retained earlier treaty rights to fish along the several rivers in that region.
In 1954, Congress had recognized these treaty rights and exempted them from
state fishing and hunting regulations. Many Native Americans refused to purchase
state fishing licenses or comply with boat, line and net regulations because of the
exemptions. State game wardens, under political pressure from commercial
fishermen who denied the existence of any special Indian rights, began disturbing
Native American fishermen along the Nisqually, Green and Puyallup rivers, by
seizing their boats, cutting their nets and beating them. State courts in Washington
also fined and jailed Native Americans for breaking state game laws. Under the
direction of the NIYC, Native Americans from many tribes arrived in Puget Sound
to fish in open defiance of state game laws.
These “fish-ins” were the precursors of the Red Power movement.17 The
term “fish-in” shows one of the similarities between the African American civil rights
movement and Native American treaty rights activism. In part, Indians “were forced
to adopt the vocabulary and techniques of blacks in order to get their grievances
serious consideration by the media”.18 However, Indian leaders modified these
tactics to suit their needs. Between 1964-1966 many fish-ins took place in
Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana; and in 1966 the Department of Justice
16
Olson, Native Americans in the Twentieth Century, p. 160.
Nagel, American Indian Ethnic Renewal, p. 161.
18
Vine Deloria, Jr., Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1985), 25.
104
17
intervened in the cases of arrested and indicted Indian demonstrators.19 In 1974,
Federal District Judge George H. Boldt interpreted the 1855 Camp Stevens treaty
to mean that Indians and whites were to share equally all fishing rights. The
decision reaffirmed tribal rights and the fish-in movement was defined as a
successful activist undertaking in showing whites that for the first time a younger
generation of Native Americans was insisting on controlling the state and federal
policies affecting their tribes.20
In addition to gaining a legal victory for Native American fishing rights in the
Northwest, the fish-in movement provided a training ground for future Red Power
activists. The fish-ins taught Indian activists that the redress of tribal grievances
could be pursued by an alliance of tribal and supra-tribal organizations and
collective action. And, they learned that attracting the attention of the media
through the recruitment of national entertainment figures to support Northwest
tribes was important for obtaining judicial and legislative review. These lessons
were very useful for other Indian activist groups, especially for members of the
American Indian Movement, which spread activism across the country and became
the most militant Native American organization.21
In 1968 some militant Indians chose to copy the Black Panthers and other
civil rights groups. In that year, Dennis Banks and George Mitchell founded the
American Indian Movement (AIM). Like the Black Panther Party in Oakland, AIM’s
first goal was to address police brutality against nonwhites in Minneapolis. In
common with urban African-Americans, Native Americans were faced with
substandard housing, low incomes and high rates of welfare dependence in a
Minneapolis ghetto called “the reservation.” In 1968 a group of Chippewas formed
19
Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., Now That the Buffalo has Gone: A Study of Today’s American
Indians (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984), pp. 177-211.
20
Prucha, Documents of United States Indian Policy, pp. 267-268; Nagel, American Indian
Ethnic Renewal, p. 162.
21
Nagel, American Indian Ethnic Renewal,
105 p. 162.
an “Indian patrol” to follow and watch the police on weekend nights in Native
American neighborhoods. By patrolling Minneapolis and St. Paul streets after dark,
AIM activists stopped police officers from harassing individual Indians and exposed
police violence. AIM’s direct intervention was successful in reducing the number of
arrests of Indians.22
From 1969 to 1972, AIM’s program expanded to include a variety of public
welfare and political training projects. AIM pressured city officials in Minneapolis to
establish a center for Indian culture, and after seven years of political effort, a $1.9
million public institute was opened. By creating their own housing corporation, AIM
leaders initiated the construction of homes for Indians in Minneapolis. Funded by
the federal government’s Housing and Urban Development Department, AIM used
a $4.3 million grant to build 241 homes. In Minnesota’s public school systems,
Indian militants fought to change the educational curriculum to include a more
multicultural perspective. When local school boards ignored AIM’s demands, the
organization founded urban Indian schools in Minneapolis, St. Paul and Rapid City,
South Dakota. In challenging the racism of the penal system, AIM backed an Indian
candidate’s successful election to the Minneapolis State Parole Board in 1972.23
Thus, AIM was successful in educational, economic, and social welfare
work among Indians. Unlike more traditional Indian public interest organizations,
AIM had a vision of American society without oppression. Their criticism of the
system grew both from their own resistance leaders of the 19th century and from
Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1976, Dennis Banks observed that AIM
was founded because of the “many deaths in this country of Native Americans”, but
22
Olson, Native Americans in the Twentieth Century, pp. 166-167.
Manning Marable, Race, Reform and Rebellion: the Second Reconstruction in Black
America, 1945-1982 (London: MacMillan Press,
1984), pp.156-157.
106
23
added that a broad coalition of poor people and workers of different nationalities
and races was essential in order to change American society.24
In the mid-1960s other Native American groups emerged. All were
influenced by the NIYC in actively demanding federal acceptance of the policy of
self-determination. For instance, several tribal leaders among the Sioux formed the
American Indian Civil Rights Council, which focused on equal opportunities and
equal treatment for all Native Americans. Another organization, the Indian Land
Rights Association, focused on restoration of traditional tribal lands, condemning
the idea behind the Indian Claims Commission that monetary settlements could
satisfy Native American grievances. The Alaskan Federation of Natives was formed
in 1966 to regain tribal lands and to prevent exploitation of state resources. In 1968,
Lehman Brightman, director of Indian Studies at the University of California, formed
the United Native Americans, a group of Native American young people and
college students committed to pan-Indian values, self-determination and civil
equality. Wallace “Mad Bear” Anderson gathered a series of “North American
Indian Unity Conventions”. In order to make sure that their own interests would be
represented, tribal leaders on the reservations formed the National Tribal
Chairman’s Association in 1971. Regional organizations also appeared in the
1960s. Robert Hunter formed the Nevada Intertribal Council, representing many
tribes in the Great Basin. Gerald One Feather, Frank Lapointe and Ray Briggs
established the American Indian Leadership Conference, an activist organization of
Sioux youth in South Dakota. Ernie Stevens played an important role in the
California Intertribal Council, an organization of 130,000 Native
California. All demanded changes in public policy.25
24
25
Ibid., p. 157.
Olson, Native Americans in the Twentieth
107 Century, pp. 160-161.
Americans in
The emerging political activism of young urban Native Americans in groups
like AIM, the NIYC, and the United Native Americans helped inspire nationalism on
the reservations. Traditionalists and full-bloods had always resented BIA
paternalism and manipulation, but in the 1960s they began to demand a new
respect for tradition. Tribal leaders such as Thomas Banyacya, Mad Bear
Anderson, Clifton Hill and Rolling Thunder called for a return to traditional customs,
revival of tribal religions, the use of tribal chiefs and open councils selected by
traditional means, and the abandonment of majority rule and elections in favor of
consensus politics.26 Central to tribal self-determination was the question of
religion. The Ghost Dance, Sun Dance, Dream Dance, peyotism and other Native
American religions had been outlawed on reservations late in the 19th century and
early in the 20th century, and not until the 1930s did the federal government relax
the pressure. But in the 1960s, as white attitudes changed as a result of civil rights
activism and pan-Indian activism, freedom of religion for Native Americans became
law.27 Another important reservation group advocating the old ways was the
National Traditionalist Movement of the Iroquois League. Like Black Power
activists, they believed that only by separating themselves from Euro-American
culture and from other tribal cultures could particular Native American identities
survive.28 Although these tribal values contradicted pan-Indian goals and caused
more conflict between various Native American groups, the demands of tribal
traditionalists helped prevent the assimilation process. Therefore, not only were
national pan-Indian groups lobbying and demonstrating for self-determination, but
individual reservation tribes were also resisting BIA control.
26
Ibid., p. 166.
The American Religious Freedom Act President Carter signed in 1978 was the
culmination of the process begun in the 1960s. See Prucha, Documents of United States Indian
Policy, p. 312; Olson, Native Americans in the Twentieth Century, pp. 198-199.
28
Olson, Native Americans in the Twentieth
108 Century, pp. 166-167.
27
Unlike black activists, in many demonstrations, legalist tribal organizations
and cultural-oriented pan-Indian activists acted together. For instance, in 1966,
sixty-two tribes met in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where Secretary of Interior Stewart
Udall was meeting with BIA officials. Initially, Udall excluded Native American
leaders from the BIA meeting which was to plan changes in Native American
education programs. Not until the NCAI and Vine Deloria, Jr., a former member of
the National Indian Youth Council, and president of the NCAI, threatened to use the
black civil rights tactics of mass march and civil disobedience, did the federal
government open the sessions to pan-Indian leaders.29 This early activism
determined the stance of the coming larger, more militant and cultural-oriented
movement. The term “Red Power” was first uttered during this 1966 convention of
the National Congress of American Indians by Vine Deloria, Jr. Santa Fe can be
depicted as a triumph for self-determination because Indians had forced the Interior
Department to consult with them and allow them to attend a planning meeting for
the first time.30
In another instance, both the new pan-Indian organizations and
traditionalists gathered to oppose a measure. An examination of the varying views
of the Omnibus Bill of 1967 can help to reflect the complexities of Indian selfdetermination as well as the Indian policy-making process during the Great Society
era of the 1960s. On May 16, 1967, Secretary of Interior Udall promised that
American Indians would be consulted on the Omnibus Bill which would insure selfsufficiency and consultations – two key aspects of the NCAI’s vision of selfdetermination. Despite such promises, this Great Society legislative initiative
provoked strong Indian opposition, and it never became law. The conflict over the
bill stemmed from the existence of competing visions of the nature of Indian self-
29
30
Nagel, American Indian Ethnic Renewal, p. 163.
Ibid., p. 162.
109
determination. On the one hand, the measure’s supporters saw economic
development as the key to Indians’ ability to determine their own destiny. On the
other hand, the bill’s opponents also desired economic development but believed
that the Omnibus Bill endangered tribal self-determination by threatening tribal
lands and giving the Interior Secretary too many new powers. Moreover, some
argued that the Interior Department had drafted the bill without incorporating
suggestions from tribal leaders. The proposal’s defeat marked an important
moment in the development of self-determination. Not only had radical Indians
blocked a bill they opposed, but the controversy also provided a chance for Native
Americans to clarify the meaning of self-determination and to lay the groundwork
for expanded self-determination in the future.31
The complexities of Indian self-determination revealed themselves in
another instance in 1969, when activist groups gathered to oppose the new
Secretary of Interior, Walter Hickel. At the Western Governors’ Conference in
Seattle in July 1969, Hickel had remarked that the federal government had been
too protective of the tribes, making them dependent on the government. As a result
of the negative response of such groups as the United Native Americans, the
National Traditionalist Movement and AIM to Hickel’s views, President Richard M.
Nixon announced in 1970 that the BIA would no longer pursue termination as a
national policy, and would support self-determination and tribal sovereignty. Nixon
expanded Indian influence in the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Office of
Economic Opportunity and supported legislation returning Blue Lake and 48,000
acres to the Taos Pueblo.32 With Nixon’s help, Paiute, Yakama, Havasupai, Warm
Springs, and other tribes secured a portion of their lands that the United States had
31
Olson, Native Americans in the Twentieth Century, p. 167; Riggs, “American Indians,
Economic Development, and Self-Determination in the 1960s”, Pacific Historical Review (2001): pp.
431-463.
32
Prucha, Documents of United States
110Indian Policy, pp. 258-260.
stolen from them. And the federal government recognized tribes that it had
terminated, including Menominee, Wyandotte, Modoc, Ottawa, Paiute, Peoria, and
others. Nixon further supported the creation of tribal governments among
Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, Muscogee and others.33
Although Nixon announced the end of termination in 1970, most Native
Americans continued to face threats to their tribal existence. There were legal
assimilationists who wanted to break up the reservations, distribute the land among
tribal members and absorb Native American families into the mainstream of
American life. Many militants favored self-determination as long as their own
organizations enjoyed enough power to dictate the planning and implementation of
federal Native American programs. Other tribes feared that legislation supporting
self-determination was another subterfuge, a subtle way of removing the federal
government from Native American affairs in one more move toward assimilation.
But if self-determination was not a solution to all Native Americans, it was
nevertheless a major change in Native American history since for the first time the
federal government was dealing correctly with Native American concerns.
One impact of termination policies had been an increase in the number of
Native Americans moving to the cities. Rather than being assimilated, however,
there emerged in the cities a new interest in tribal values, a desire for pan-Indian
unity, an increasing emphasis on self-determination, and a stronger sense of
urgency and militancy in the Native American community. Many of the young
activists pushing for self-determination did not themselves live on the reservations.
Tribal differences had always weakened Native American political movements in
the past and would continue to be a problem in the future, but the dramatic
increase of urban Indians had great political consequences. On the reservations,
political interests focused usually on local issues. It was difficult to initiate political
33
111
Trafzer, As Long As the Grass Shall
Grow and Rivers Flow, p. 402.
movements beyond the tribal level. The Society of American Indians, the Native
American Church, and the National Congress of American Indians were
exceptions, but they also suffered from tribal differences.34 The demographic
changes that caused the rise of black militancy in American cities produced similar
results among the American Indians who left the reservations. Like black militancy,
Indian militancy exposed and challenged white racial hegemony. The civil rights
movement helped to lift much of the negative connotation related to being an
American Indian and encouraged many people to renew their interest in their
cultural heritage and to rethink their racial identification. For Native Americans, as
for blacks, it was a time to get rid of negative stereotypes, to reinvent ethnic and
racial social meanings and self-definitions, and to embrace ethnic pride. It was the
beginning of a period of tribal resurgence and the emergence of supra-tribal
identification and activism. Moreover, the federal response to black protest – civil
rights legislation, the Great Society and the War on Poverty – spread to American
Indians, who were quickly mobilizing after black activism.
The federal government promoted Indian ethnic revival both by funding
Indian organizations and by providing incentives for Indian ethnic identification and
activism. The growth of non-BIA and non-IHS (Indian Health Service) funds
expanded funding for urban Indians, since neither agency had funded urban
programs other than programs for relocation. Great Society programs assisted both
reservation communities and urban Indians: The Manpower Development and
Training Act of 1962 and the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which established
the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), which in turn funded such programs as
Head Start, Upward Bound, and the Neighborhood Youth Corps. The growth of
funding
for Indians during the 1960s led President Johnson to establish the
National Council on Indian Opportunity in 1968 to help coordinate programs for
34
112 Century, p. 165.
Olson, Native Americans in the Twentieth
Native Americans. The National Council helped establish organizations and
increased urban Indian institutions. The War on Poverty provided Indian
participation in federal spending and local organization. Indian participation in OEO
programs contributed to the emergence of many publications, including Warpath,
Akwesasne Notes and Americans Before Columbus, which encouraged a new
militancy.35
The settlement of land claims by the Indian Claim Commission and the
United States federal court system during the 1970s offered Indian activists an
important source of funding. Legal services programs gave Indians access to legal
counsel. This permitted Native Americans for the first time to confront more directly
concerns such as sales contracts, wage claims and family-related issues. The
California Indian Legal Services Program started a project that became the Native
American Rights Fund (NARF). A Ford Foundation grant in 1970 permitted NARF
to open its doors in Boulder, Colorado. NARF quickly emerged as a major force in
many different struggles related to tribal sovereignty, federal recognition, fishing
and hunting rights, taxation, use of natural sources, water rights, religious freedom,
education and health care. The increasing OEO (Office of Economic Opportunity),
CETA (Comprehensive Employment Training Act), ANA (Administration for Native
Americans), and Indian Education funds for urban Indians led to a growth in urban
Indian social, economic and political programs. As a result, new programs became
bases for urban Indian reform and activist organizations, educational and cultural
programs, and a new urban Indian ethnicity. Thus, Native American awareness of
their history and ethnicity increased. These programs also radicalized their
participants. Expanded funding of urban Indian programs spread to established
organizations and led to the development of new urban Indian organizations, which
35
Prucha, Documents of United States Indian Policy, pp. 248-249; Nagel, American Indian
Ethnic Renewal, p. 129.
113
had an important role in providing services and a sense of community to tribally
diverse urban Indians.36
Although increased funding helped to reform Indian institutions and
increase the worth of Indian ethnicity, legislation such as the Voting Rights Act of
1965 and the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968 reflected the desire of congressional
representatives to prevent Indian voting and restrict the power of tribal
governments over their members. The Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968 reaffirmed
the applicability of much of the Bill of Rights to Native Americans, including free
speech. However, the interpretation of the act led to many lawsuits against different
tribes, contesting tribal authority and sovereignty in various realms. For example,
the case of Dodge v. Nakai in 1968 confirmed the suspicions of those who feared
the repercussions of the act. Ted Mitchell, a non-Indian attorney who headed the
legal services program of the Navajo Nation, had an angry confrontation with Annie
Wauneka, a prominent member of the tribal council. Mitchell had laughed scornfully
after Wauneka had answered a question during a tribal council advisory meeting in
the Council chambers. Furious at Mitchell’s behavior, she sought him out the
following day in the chambers, slapped him and ordered him to leave the room. The
advisory committee then voted to banish Mitchell from the reservation. Under the
terms of the Civil Rights Act, Mitchell was able to sue successfully in federal court
to return to the Navajo Nation and to obtain financial compensation. Dodge v. Nakai
thus prompted the federal courts to assume general jurisdiction in matters involving
suits against the tribe. This assumption clearly constituted a major setback to the
assertion of greater tribal sovereignty and undermined the workings of tribal
governments, including the tribal courts.37
36
John A. Andrew, Lyndon B. Johnson and the Great Society (Chicago: The American
Way Series, 1998), pp. 64-78; Nagel, American Indian Ethnic Renewal, pp. 126-129.
37
Peter Iverson, “We Are Still Here”: American Indians in the Twentieth Century (Illinois:
Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1998), pp. 169-171. 114
Moreover, although 1965 Voting Rights Act outlawed literacy tests, which
were used to discriminate against Indians as well as blacks, impediments to Indian
voting were still being devised by political establishments. Of course, Indian voting
produced some positive results such as the election of Indians at the state and
local level. For instance, in 1966 fifteen Indians were elected to state legislatures.
In 1972 the Navajos elected eight of their people to public office. In 1985, fourteen
Navajos held elective office, including positions in both houses of the New Mexico
and Arizona state legislatures.38 However, to raise Indian voting levels, and to elect
more Indians to office, Indians had to continue to press for change. Since the legal
faction failed to overcome setbacks to the assertion of greater tribal sovereignty
and the achievement of civil rights, a Red Power movement, like the Black Power
movement, seemed necessary to some.
American Indian protest activism increased at the end of the 1960s. The
increase in collective action might be partly the result of limited Indian involvement
in the civil rights movement, partly the result of increased tribal activism arising as a
result of the Pacific Northwest fish-ins, partly the result of unsatisfactory results of
the legal faction and partly a response to the general atmosphere of activism of the
late 1960s.
The occupation of Alcatraz in 1969 marked the beginning of Red Power.
Native American activism, which was motivated by the struggle against termination
and the actions of tribal leaders, increased and became violent at Alcatraz. On
November 20, 1969, Native American students at San Francisco State College and
the University of California at Berkeley, inspired by the militant activism of AfroAmerican students, took control of Alcatraz, a former prison on an island in San
Francisco Bay. The leaders of the occupation came from several tribes: Earl
38
Here”, 169.
Prucha, Documents of United States Indian Policy, pp. 249-252; Iverson, “We are Still
115
Livermore was a Blackfoot, Richard Oakes a Mohawk, Dennis Hastings an Omaha
and John Trudell a Sioux. Other Native American students in the Bay Area seeing
an opportunity to focus more attention on Native American affairs, organized the
Indians of All Tribes, and claimed the island by the terms of an 1868 Sioux treaty
that granted Indians the right to unused federal property on Indian land. Alcatraz
had been abandoned by the federal government since the early 1960s when the
federal penitentiary was closed. In a press statement, Indians of All Tribes claimed
the island by “right of discovery” and declared their right of occupation:
We plan to develop on this island several Indian institutions:1. A CENTER
FOR NATIVE AMERICAN STUDIES...2. AN AMERICAN INDIAN
SPIRITUAL CENTER...3. AN INDIAN CENTER OF ECOLOGY...4. A
GREAT INDIAN TRAINING SCHOOL...and AN AMERICAN INDIAN
MUSEUM... In the name of all Indians, therefore, we claim this island for
our Indian nations.... We feel this claim is just and proper, and that this land
should rightfully be granted to us for as long as the rivers shall run and the
sun shall shine. Signed, INDIANS OF ALL TRIBES.39
Indians also aimed to use the occupation as a psychological-political basis
for launching a pan-Indian movement known as the Confederation of American
Indian Nations (CAIN). Using pan-Indianism, they hoped to create support for selfdetermination and to resolve the ideological problem between tribal selfdetermination and pan-Indian unity.40 Similarly, black territorial nationalists were
convinced that pan-Africanism was the highest political expression of the separatist
ethic.
The
occupation
continued
with
proclamations,
news
conferences,
powwows, celebrations, assaults with arrows on passing vessels, and negotiations
with federal officials. Federal officials were reluctant to remove the Indians.
President Nixon worried about the political consequences of sending federal troops
and risking a military confrontation. As a result of the support of church,
philanthropic groups and students in San Francisco and supporters from all over
39
Nagel, American Indian Ethnic Renewal, p. 132.
116
the world, the federal government did not have any other option than to let them
stay, hoping that time and boredom would end the crisis. In the first months of the
occupation, workers from the San Francisco Indian Center gathered food and
medical supplies and transported them to Alcatraz. Over time, however, hardships
emerged when federal officials interfered with delivery boats and cut the supply of
water and electricity to the island. As a result tensions on the island grew.
The negotiations between Indians of All Tribes and the federal government
collapsed. Those on Alcatraz elected a central council to “suggest, not to govern”,
but boredom and intertribal rivalries weakened the organization. After two years, as
public interest in the occupation declined, federal marshals removed the remaining
protesters.41 But the occupation of Alcatraz and the activist movement transformed
American Indian ethnicity. Red Power activism, and in particular the occupation of
Alcatraz, forced Indians to reexamine their acquiescence to the non-Indian world
and seek to determine their own social and cultural responsibilities. The landing on
Alcatraz marked the beginning of sweeping efforts among American Indians to
reclaim their cultural heritage. The movement’s identification of common Indian
problems and rights reaffirmed Native Americans’ shared history and culture and
provided a base from which to appeal to constituents, recruit participants, build
organization and begin protest actions.42 The idea of cultural autonomy was also
used by Black Power advocates. The right to exercise dominion over community
and self and the power to preserve that existence free from outside interference
moved both blacks and Indians toward independent lives.
The Alcatraz occupation not only marked a turning point in American
Indian protest and ethnicity but also had an important impact on the future direction
of AIM. Before Alcatraz, AIM was an Indian rights organization, mainly concerned
40
41
Olson, Native Americans in the Twentieth Century, p. 169.
Ibid., p. 170.
117
with monitoring police treatment of native people in cities. As with the civil rights
activism of the late 1960s, it focused on education, urbanity and Indian ethnic
identification. As the Black Panther Party provided an organization for the
participants in Black Power, AIM provided an organization for the participants in
Red Power. AIM played an important role in the spread of supra-tribal protest
action during the 1970s and in shaping Red Power’s agenda, tactics and strategies
for drawing attention to American Indian grievances. It influenced the attitude of
collective actions of Indians through urban Indian centers, Indian churches, Indian
charitable organizations, and Indian powwows. The most important factor
contributing to AIM’s influence on Red Power protest was the AIM leaders’ skill at
encouraging the news media to reflect Indian problems and protests.43
Red Power protest events occurred initially in urban centers and at national
monuments and landmarks, but later activism spread also to Indian reservations.
The participants in the occupations and takeovers of 1970 and 1971 were Indians
with varied tribal backgrounds, mainly living in urban areas, often associated with
AIM or with the NIYC or some other supra-tribal organization. Red Power activists
took their tactics from the Alcatraz occupation. For example, on November 3, 1970,
in Davis, California, Indians scaled a barbed wire fence and occupied an old Army
communications center for use in development of an Indian cultural center. Several
participants in the successful Indian invasion of Alcatraz took part in the Davis
assault.44 After federal officials retook Alcatraz in June 1971, Indians of All Tribes
moved their protest to an abandoned Nike missile base in the Beverly Hills. While
this occupation lasted only three days, it set the pattern for a series of similar
occupations during the next several years.45 Many involved unused or abandoned
42
Nagel, American Indian Ethnic Renewal, p. 140-141.
Ibid., pp. 166-168.
44
Ibid., pp. 162-166.
45
Ibid., pp. 162-166.
118
43
federal property such as government buildings or sites in national parks. These
occupations aimed to draw attention to American Indian grievances such as
unsettled land claims, poor living conditions on reservations, and failure to
recognize cultural and social rights or to allow tribal self-determination. Most
occupations, such as those that occurred in 1970 and 1971 at Fort Lawton and Fort
Lewis in Washington, at Ellis Island in New York, at the Twin Cities Naval Air
Station in Minneapolis, at former Nike Missile sites on Lake Michigan near Chicago
and at Argonne, Illinois, and at an abandoned Coast Guard lifeboat station in
Milwaukee, lasted only a few days or weeks. Many of these occupations took on a
festive air as celebrations of Indian culture and ethnic renewal, while others
represented efforts to provide educational or social services to urban Indians.46
Similarly, the activities of black cultural nationalists had represented African culture
and ethnic renewal, while the activities of revolutionary nationalists, particularly
those of Black Panther Party, had aimed to provide educational or social services
to urban Afro-Americans.
Alcatraz-style take-overs and occupations ceased as the Red Power
movement’s attitude shifted. As the 1970s proceeded, American Indian protest
occupations lasted longer and became more serious, sometimes violent, revealing
the depth of the grievances and the difficulty in solving the problems. The reasons
for the increase of Alcatraz-like events and the reasons for the shift from
occupations of federal property to different forms of confrontation after 1972 were
linked to changes in the organizational support for supra-tribal collective action, the
Indian urban population, and the American Indian Movement.
Unlike the Black Power movement, for a time the Indian movement moved
back from a cultural stance to a legal one. The “Trail of Broken Treaties” protest
revealed a shift in AIM’s tactics. Red Power began to focus on tribal issues, such
46
Ibid., p. 165.
119
as treaty violations, land claims and tribal governmental matters, rather than on
supra-tribal issues, thus linking itself to the more traditional segment of Indian
society. Red Power activists referred to this as a shift from civil rights to treaty
rights. Despite its tribal treaty rights theme and its focus on reservations, the Trail of
Broken Treaties became an urban event. In the summer of 1972, activist leaders
like Hank Adams of the fish-ins in Washington and Dennis Banks of AIM met in
Denver to plan the Trail of Broken Treaties caravan. The name came from the
forced removal to Oklahoma of the Cherokee Indians by President Andrew Jackson
that became known as the Trail of Tears. Activists hoped to get media support for
self-determination by moving many Native Americans from the West Coast to
Washington, D.C, during the last month of the 1972 presidential campaign. In
Minneapolis, where many Chippewas joined them, the caravan leaders issued their
Twenty Points, including demands for a complete revival of tribal sovereignty by
repeal of the 1871 ban on new treaties, the granting of full government services to
the unrecognized eastern tribes, a review of all past treaty violations, complete
restitution for those violations, formal recognition of all executive order reservations,
and acceptance of the tribal right to interpret all past treaties. They also demanded
elimination of all state court jurisdiction over Native American affairs.
In Washington, they discovered that the leaders had not made sufficient
arrangements for an effective protest. Most of the caravan went to the BIA building,
where they demonstrated for several hours. When federal guards in the building
tried to push some of the demonstrators outside, the affair became violent. The
goal of the organizers quickly shifted from meetings and demonstrations to an
occupation of the BIA building. For six days they held the building, demanding
forgiveness and a return to tribal sovereignty. Files were seized, and some BIA
property was damaged. Caravan leaders claimed that federal agents had infiltrated
120
the movement and had done most of the damage. One week later, on November 8,
federal authorities offered the Native American protesters protection from
prosecution and $66,000 for return transportation. The protesters accepted the
offer, and the crisis was over.47
The strength of such groups as AIM, Indians of All Tribes, and UNA, and
the Trail of Broken Treaties, illustrated a new sense of independence and political
aggressiveness, especially among young urban Native Americans. The militant
attitude opened a wide breach between radical groups such as AIM, UNA, and the
NIYC and the more traditional NCAI and NTCA. Since the Indian New Deal, the BIA
had dealt directly with tribal leaders, and both the NCAI and the NTCA were
national unions of elected tribal officials. Most of the militant, pan-Indian
organizations questioned the legitimacy of tribal governments established under the
Indian Reorganization Act, and opposed both the appointment of tribal leaders by
the BIA and the election of tribal leaders through majority rule. Elections were
unacceptable to militant groups like AIM which considered elections to be a EuroAmerican imposition on older Native American beliefs in consensus and hereditary
right. Tribal rolls, moreover, contained mostly those of mixed ancestry who were
little interested in the survival of tribal culture and tribal sovereignty. They voted for
people who would promote their individual economic interests rather than tribal
welfare. The concepts of representative government, interest group politics, and
majority rule were strange to tribal traditions of consensus, unanimity and inherited
authority. Militants depicted elected leaders as being conservative and subservient,
representative only of rural mixed bloods ready for directions from the BIA and
Euro-American culture. On the other hand, both the NCAI and the NTCA
condemned the occupation of Alcatraz in 1969 and the Trail of Broken Treaties
47
Deloria, Jr., Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties, pp. 45-147; Nagel, American Indian
Ethnic Renewal, pp. 168-171.
121
caravan in 1972, claiming that the militants were fanatics who would only bring
destruction.48
In fact, however, the appearance of pan-Indian militant organizations led
tribal politicians to listen to tribal moderates, and thus some tribal governments
broadened their base. The Bureau of Indian Affairs seemed to recognize this, and
in 1970, for example, it restored the right of the Five Civilized Tribes in Oklahoma to
choose their own tribal leaders without BIA interference; that right had been taken
away in 1960 as a means of guaranteeing compliance with federal policy. The
federal government did not surrender total power to tribal authorities, but important
changes in their relationship took place in the 1970s.49 At the same time, Red
Power’s urban constituency threatened to increase the population base demanding
federal Indian services. This alarmed both federal officials, who feared that the
federal Indian budget could increase, and Indian tribes, which feared that their
share of the federal Indian budget could decrease. Thus, for different reasons, the
rise of Red Power encouraged federal officials and Indian tribes to join forces. For
federal policymakers, self-determination, with its emphasis on Indian tribes, “tribal
self-sufficiency,” and “government-to-government” relations, became a much more
attractive policy, given the spectre of “Indian rights” and expanded urban Indian
programs as the alternative. For Indian tribes, who were fighting for treaty rights
and local community survival and who feared loss of federal funding to urban Indian
programs, federal self-determination offers were nice opportunities.50
After its brief foray into legalism with the Trail of Broken Treaties ended
badly with the BIA building occupation, Red Power protest activity shifted once
again to emphasize longer, more violent events, often on or near reservations.
48
Olson, Native Americans in the Twentieth Century, p. 172.
Vine Deloria, Jr., American Indian Policy in the Twentieth Century (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1985), pp. 135-153; Olson, Native Americans in the Twentieth Century, p. 198.
50
Nagel, American Indian Ethnic Renewal,
122 pp. 162-163.
49
AIM’s interest in reservation issues increased tensions between urban and
reservation groups. The protests became less celebratory and turned harsher and
more inner-directed. For instance, at a Cass Lake, Minnesota, convention in the
spring of 1972, AIM leaders condemned the Chippewa Tribal Council for letting
Euro-Americans and BIA officials exploit tribal resources, especially fishing rights
on the Chippewa lakes. AIM activists appeared to have agreed with Black Panther
leaders who argued that the gun was a strategic political tool since for a few days
AIM leaders, with their guns, blocked the roads into the convention center and
demanded that the Chippewa Tribal Council take a militant stand on fishing rights.51
The events on the Pine Ridge reservation in the spring of 1973, a ten-week
long siege that came to be known as “Wounded Knee,” clearly illustrated Indian
grievances as well as tensions between elected tribal leaders and the militants of
the new pan-Indian organizations and tensions between AIM and federal
authorities. The conflict at Wounded Knee, a small town on the Pine Ridge
reservation in South Dakota, became a major media event which represented
Native American militancy. It involved a dispute within Pine Ridge’s Oglala Lakota
Sioux tribe over the tribal chairman, Richard Wilson. Wilson was viewed as a
corrupt puppet of the BIA by some in the tribe, including members of AIM. An effort
to impeach Wilson led to a division of the tribe into two groups. These groups
armed themselves and provoked a two-and-half-month-long siege that involved
tribal police and government, AIM, reservation residents, federal law enforcement
officials,
the
BIA,
local
citizens,
famous
entertainment
figures,
national
philanthropic, religious, and legal organizations, and the news media.
The siege began on February 27, 1973, with the arrival of a caravan of 250
AIM supporters led by Dennis Banks and Russell Means. The protesters promised
to continue to fight at Wounded Knee until the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
51
123 Century, p. 170.
Olson, Native Americans in the Twentieth
had reviewed all broken treaties, Richard Wilson had been removed as Oglala
tribal chairman, and BIA corruption had been exposed to the whole world. The
armed conflict after AIM’s arrival might be depicted as a standoff between AIM and
its supporters on the one hand and the Wilson government and its supporters,
including the FBI, on the other. The next several weeks were characterized by
shootouts, roadblocks, negotiations, visiting delegations and the movement of
refugees. Some discontented tribal factions supported AIM. In an earlier election,
Wilson had defeated Gerald One Feather, a full-blood and traditionalist from the
village of Oglala; Wilson won with the support of the mixed-bloods and assimilated
Native Americans dependent upon tribal jobs and government assistance. Fullbloods therefore came to Wounded Knee to demonstrate their own opposition to
the leadership of Richard Wilson and to the brutality of the tribal police. Another
group wanted AIM to help them terminate all “unit leasing” rules which prevented
them from combining individual allotments into tribal or community grazing and
farming lands. Ten days of negotiations between AIM leaders and the FBI, also
involving Senators George McGovern and James Abourezk of South Dakota and
representatives of the National Council of Churches, failed to end the confrontation.
Even though federal authorities considered an open assault on the village, which
would have ended in violence and death, no assault was ordered. And on March
11, AIM leaders announced the creation of the Oglala Sioux Nation, declared
independence from the United States, and defined their national boundaries
according to the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868.52
The siege ended on May 9, 1973, when AIM leaders agreed to leave the
trading post and immediate village if the federal government would send lawyers
and investigators to meet with Oglala full-bloods and traditionalists to discuss the
problems of broken treaties. The government team arrived at Pine Ridge in May,
52
124 Treaties, pp. 63-83.
Deloria, Jr., Behind the Trail of Broken
where they met with the Oglala full-bloods and finally admitted that only Congress
had the power to act on treaty violations. By the end of the stand-off two Indian
militants were dead, and many were wounded.
The failure of the May 1973 government commission meant Pine Ridge
became an “occupied zone”. Local Indians who participated in the Wounded Knee
takeover were tried, imprisoned, and assassinated. Means announced his
candidacy for tribal chairman in the next Oglala elections, and during 1973
occasional violence continued on the reservation. The rivalry between Richard
Wilson’s mixed blood BIA-faction and Means’s full-blood revolutionary faction
turned to hatred. Arson, beatings, and murders increased. In October 1973 BIA
police shot and killed Pedro Bissonette, an AIM leader and president of the Oglala
Sioux Civil Rights Organization. The subsequent tepee funeral and procession
became another AIM event designed to demonstrate hatred for Richard Wilson and
the BIA. In the end, the mixed-bloods prevailed, and Wilson defeated Means in the
election.53 When two FBI agents at Pine Ridge were assassinated in 1975, Indian
leader Leonard Peltier was blamed for the murders and was ordered to serve a life
sentence in a federal prison. In three years, Indian mixed-bloods, local white police
officers and the FBI were responsible for the execution or disappearance of over
three hundred Indians in Pine Ridge and across the country. In 1976 the FBI
declared that AIM had replaced the Black Panther Party and other black nationalist
organizations as the “number one terrorist organization in the United States”.54
Two important federal responses after the events at Wounded Knee helped
to institutionalize Indian protest. In 1973 Senator James Abourezk of South Dakota
introduced a Senate resolution that established the American Indian Policy Review
Commission (AIPRC). The Commission led two years of hearings, at which many
53
54
Olson, Native Americans in the Twentieth Century, pp. 173-174.
Marable, Race, Reform and Rebellion,
125 p. 158.
Indian leaders were invited to testify, and published a multi-volume final report in
1976. Although its recommendations were ignored, the AIPRC’s activities helped to
prevent activism by providing Indian activists a place for expressing their
grievances.55 And during the AIPRC hearings, Congress passed the most
significant self-determination legislation of the 1970s – the Indian Educational
Assistance and Self-Determination Act of 1975, which provided greater tribal
autonomy and reaffirmed the federal responsibility to Indian tribes. Its passage was
surely affected by the presence of the native rights movement’s radical wing, Red
Power.56
Although the occupation of Alcatraz in 1969, the Trail of Broken Treaties
caravan in 1972, and the occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973 were the most
dramatic acts of Native American militancy, they were not the only ones. During the
1970s there occurred both long term and short term occupations. Many of these
occupations were similar to that at Wounded Knee. They occurred on reservations
and involved tribal factions associated with AIM or urban tribal members. For
instance, in 1970, after refusing an Indian Claims Commission offer of forty-seven
cents per acre for the 3,368,000 acres they had lost, Pit River tribesmen claimed
and occupied portions of Lassen National Park and Pacific Gas & Electric
Company land in northern California.57 Other demonstrators took over Ellis Island
to protest the loss of Native American land. In Littleton, Colorado, Native Americans
occupied a BIA office to protest discrimination and corruption, and several Sioux
camped on top of Mount Rushmore to claim it as a tribal heritage. In 1974, activists
occupied a former girls’ camp on state owned land at Moss Lake, New York, for six
months. Other similar events involved the eight day takeover of a tribally owned
55
Prucha, Documents of United States Indian Policy, pp. 272-274; Nagel, American Indian
Ethnic Renewal, p. 177.
56
Prucha, Documents of United States Indian Policy, pp. 274-276; Deloria, Jr., American
Indian Policy in the Twentieth Century, pp. 179-180.
57
Olson, Native Americans in the Twentieth
126 Century, p. 174.
Fairchild electronics assembly plant on the Navajo reservation in New Mexico in
1975, and a three day and a later one day occupation of the Yankton Sioux
Industries plant on the reservation near Wagner, South Dakota, in 1975. All of
these tribal or reservation-based occupations reflected both the divisions inside
native communities and the continuing tensions between urban and reservation
Indians. In many cases both the urban and reservation
groups were tribal
members but were divided in their perspective and approach.58
The five week armed occupation of an empty Alexian Brothers noviciary by
the “Menominee Warrior Society” near the Menominee reservation in Wisconsin in
1975 clearly illustrated the divisions that could occur within tribes. As part of the
policy of federal termination of Indian tribal treaty rights, the Menominee
Termination Act had been implemented in 1961. As the tribe struggled to
reorganize itself as a corporation and community outside the federal trust
relationship, disputes arose about the strategies of various groups within the tribe.
The efforts on the part of the tribally based Menominee Enterprises, Inc. (MEI) to
fund tribal programs through the sale of reservation land to whites led to the tribe’s
near economic collapse in 1970. The economic crisis put MEI, which was
associated with the reservation and tribal government, in a competition with
Determination of Rights and Unity for Menominee Shareholders (DRUMS), founded
off-reservation by younger, more activist members of the tribe and based in the
nearby cities of Chicago and Milwaukee. DRUMS supported restoration of the
federal-tribal trust relationship and eventually prevailed through lobbying and
activism. In 1973, the tribe’s trust status was restored by the Menominee
Restoration Act. In addition to the Indian struggle against termination, the
58
Nagel, American Indian Ethnic Renewal,
127 pp. 173-175.
Menominee’s fight for legal rights in Wisconsin was also a national and symbolic
issue.59
The last major event of the Red Power era occurred in July 1978, when
many Native Americans marched to Washington, D.C., at the end of the “Longest
Walk”, a protest march that had begun in San Francisco. The Longest Walk aimed
to symbolize the forced removal of Native Americans from their aboriginal
homelands, to draw attention to the problems of Indians and to expose and
challenge the backlash movement against Indian treaty rights. This backlash could
be seen in the increasing numbers of bills in Congress to abrogate Indian treaties
and to restrict Indian rights. Unlike the events of the mid 1970s, the Longest Walk
could be depicted as a peaceful and spiritual event that included tribal spiritual
leaders among its participants.60 Thus, Red Power completed its festive Alcatraz
days and violent confrontations with a traditional quest for spiritual unity. As the
actions of Black Power led to a new era of community control and black self-help,
the trail from Alcatraz to the Longest Walk led to a new era in Native American
history, characterized by assertive self-determination and the demand for tribal
sovereignty.
Similar to African Americans, moreover, Native Americans
promoted
cultural reconstruction by engaging in a variety of cultural preservation and renewal
efforts. For instance, the California Luisenos decided to visit a number of libraries,
museums, government agencies and private collections in order to photograph,
photocopy and tape anything they could find relating to their culture. Their efforts
led to the creation of the Luiseno Culture Bank, a broader cultural renewal involving
cultural language classes and instruction in the traditional crafts, ceremonies,
medicine and spiritual practices. Cultural renewal also eased community
59
Prucha, Documents of United States Indian Policy, pp. 234-236, 264-266; Nagel,
American Indian Ethnic Renewal, pp. 174-175.
128
construction and institution building. Similar renewal and taking back tribal culture
and history could be seen in the tribal museum which was established by the AkChin Indian Community of Arizona.61
Native American cultural innovation mainly involved the emergence of
supra-tribal or pan-Indian cultural forms. Indian culture could be seen particularly in
the cities, where there was no single dominant tribal culture and where populations
of tribally diverse native people gathered, intermarried with one another, shared
tribal traditions and created new cultural institutions and practices. For instance, the
supra-tribal cultural institutions in the Los Angeles Indian community involved
Saturday night powwows, Fifth Sunday sings, and the Los Angeles City-County
Native American Indian Commission, a political organization. These kinds of
institutions provided the basis for Indian community and culture. They borrowed
from various tribal cultures and urban culture to build supra-tribal or Indian urban
cultural forms such as powwows and dance clubs, Indian centers and social
organizations, Indian Christian churches and Indian bowling leagues and softball
teams. Sometimes various tribal ceremonial practices were redirected in the
service of more modern events, such as school promotions and graduations,
scholastic honors, elections to organizational offices, and sports activities.62
The renaissance in native cultures was reflected in the spread of traditional
and popular cultural forms and institutions: native newspapers, radio and television
shows and news networks; popular culture and fine arts, including films, music, art,
fiction, dress, jewelry and craft; telephone hotlines; electronic mail networks;
religious and spiritual practices; powwows and tribal and intertribal gatherings. The
construction of native culture was the central part of American Indian ethnic
60
Nagel, American Indian Ethnic Renewal, pp. 175-176.
Ibid., pp. 200, 196.
62
Ibid., pp. 202-203.
129
61
renewal. It resembled the African American process of cultural construction and
reconstruction.
Some tried to construct culture through their writings. For instance, in 1969,
Vine Deloria, Jr., published Custer Died For Your Sins. Deloria’s criticism of EuroAmerican attitudes, his examination of termination, and his call for a redefinition of
Indian affairs exposed significant issues to Americans. N. Scott Momaday was
another significant author who won the Pulitzer price for fiction in 1968 for House
Made of Dawn. Momaday and Leslie Marmon Silko, the author of Ceremony
(1977), introduced characters who were army veterans, struggling with life on the
reservation and in the city, but finding harmony through the power of the land and
the cultural traditions of their communities. Writer Dee Brown explored the history
of the Indian wars in the American West in his famous Bury My Heart at Wounded
Knee in 1970. In general, the books of Deloria, Momaday, Silko, Brown and other
Native American writers criticized Euro-Americans’ attitudes and views of history.63
Red Power activism was effective in changing policies and creating
individual ethnic renewal through the use of traditional dress and the incorporation
of ceremonial practices as a part of protest action. Tribal protest groups and supratribal protesters used such ceremonial material as dances, curses, prayer vigils and
Indian dress and adornment. The use of tribal ceremonial practices by both tribal
and supra-tribal protest groups helped to construct community.64 And, just as civil
rights workers used music to capture the nation’s attention and boost their own
morale, with such songs as “We Shall Overcome”, the same was true for the Native
American movement. Peter La Farge, a cowboy who had been adopted by the
Tewa Tribe of the Hopi nation, recorded songs protesting the abuse of Native
63
Vine Deloria, Jr., Custer Died For Your Sins (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
1988); N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996); Dee
Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (New York:
Bantam Books, 1972). For Silko’s Ceremony, see Trafzer, As Long As the Grass Shall Grow and
Rivers Flow, pp. 480-481.
130
Americans by whites in a 1968 Folkways recording entitled As Long As the Grass
Shall Grow. Indian musicians performed various styles, from folk to rock. Buffy
Sainte-Marie wrote and sang a variety of songs, including “Now That the Buffalo’s
Gone” and the more famous “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.” Floyd Westerman
used some of the main themes from Custer Died For Your Sins in an album. Also
the rock bands Redbone and XIT attracted the attention of the nation.65
The central part of the cultural reconstruction process, however, was study
and instruction in cultural history. Some Native American studies programs offered
language courses in Ojibwe, Dakota, Lakota, Navajo, Kumeyaay, Luisena and
Hupa. The ethnic studies programs that were established in
colleges and
universities after 1970 reflected a renewed interest in ethnicity and cultural
diversity. In addition to courses on American Indian culture and history offered by
general academic departments, more than seventy American Indian, Native
American, or native studies programs and centers were created in the United
States. These programs became important resources in cultural revivals and
restorations.66 The faculties of Native American studies units supported the
publication of such scholarly journals and publications as the American Indian
Culture and Research Journal, the American Indian Quarterly, Wicazo Sa Review,
Ethnohistory, and many books published by academic presses such as those at the
University of California, San Diego State University and Pembroke State
University.67
Support for the writing of Indian history came from other sources, as well.
The American Indian Historical Society, established in 1964, was headed by Rupert
Costo and Jeannette Henry Costo. The Costos changed the way in which scholars
64
Nagel, American Indian Ethnic Renewal, pp. 187-205.
Iverson, “We Are Still Here”, p. 172.
66
Nagel, American Indian Ethnic Renewal, p. 198.
67
Trafzer, As Long As the Grass Shall Grow and Rivers Flow, p. 409; American Indian
Quarterly (Hurst, Texas: Southwestern Indian 131
Society, 1974).
65
studied native people and were among the earliest new Indian historians. The
Society sponsored convocations for native scholars. It also published a national
newspaper, Wassaja, from 1972 to 1984 and a scholarly journal, The Indian
Historian, from 1964 to 1982. The Indian Historian reflected the changing times and
the determination of native people to have a voice in their history. Through its
Indian Historian Press, the Society published over fifty books. The first, Textbooks
and the American Indian, written by Jeannette Henry Costo, criticized publishers for
their inadequate treatment of American Indians in American history. The Indian
Historian Press opened new areas of inquiry and published the work of native
authors.68
Similarly, D’Arcy McNickle’s Center for American Indian History at the
Newberry Library in Chicago, which was founded in 1972, provided primary
collections and other resources for Indian and non-Indian scholars, traditional
Indian historians, and community archivists. The McNickle Center encouraged a
new Native history. McNickle’s words may be given as a summary of the
experience of Native Americans, African Americans, and women in the 1960s and
1970s: “People are like Grass....They toss and sway and even seem to flow before
the forces that make for change,...but when the rude force moves on, people are
found still rooted in the soil of the past.”69
As the civil rights movement challenged the prevailing racial hegemony by
redefining black ethnicity through the assertion of black pride and Black Power,
Red Power, with the Alcatraz occupation , occupation of the BIA building, Trail of
Broken Treaties, Wounded Knee and subsequent events challenged cultural
depictions of Indians as victims of history, powerless, and subjugated. As a result,
the Alcatraz occupation and the subsequent activist events stimulated Indian ethnic
68
Trafzer, As Long As the Grass Shall Grow and Rivers Flow, p. 409; American Indian
Quarterly (Hurst, Texas: Southwestern Indian Society, 1974).
132
pride and led to a resurgence in American Indian identity. Moreover, the tribally
mixed, urban membership of many Red Power organizations, such as AIM, the
NIYC and Indians of All Tribes, and the Indian nationalism of the movement, which
emphasized the rights of all tribes and all Indians, legitimized and empowered
supra-tribal Indianness as an identity. Thus, Red Power supported a new identity,
the American Indian, and broadened its political and electoral influence.
Like the Black Power movement, the Red Power movement was not only a
political mobilization; it was also a movement for transformation and cultural
renewal. As black cultural nationalists proposed a black cultural renaissance as a
key component of the revolutionary struggle for Black Power, Red Power activists
did similarly. By asserting their cultural distinctiveness in clothing, language and
hair style and by exposing their historical experiences through the literary and
performing arts, both Black Power and Red Power activists aimed to encourage
self-actualization and psychological empowerment. Through cultural renewal, many
American Indian communities successfully fought assimilation and dissolution. As
African Americans had to fight against negative stereotypes of themselves, the
same was true for Native Americans. Although hippies were willing to accept the
noble savage figure, and to build communes trying to copy Hopi Indian ways, the
majority of Americans had seen the original inhabitants as savages to be
slaughtered in movies, or as happy servants.70 Red Power activism constituted an
image of American Indians as victorious rather than victimized, confronting an
oppressive federal bureaucracy, demanding redress of grievances, challenging
images of Indians as powerless, redefining “red”, “native”, and “tribal” as valued
statuses which had moral and spiritual significance. This transformation in the
meaning and worth of Indian identity was a primary reason for the increase in
69
70
Ibid., p. 174.
Nagel, American Indian Ethnic Renewal,
133 p. 187-205.
American Indian self-identification during the 1970s. The Red Power movement not
only gave Native Americans an ethnic pride, but also led them to reconnect with
their tribal and spiritual heritage.
Apart from their protest actions, Red Power activists mainly concerned
themselves with the religious and spiritual values of tribal life. Many became Sun
Dancers for the first time; many sought instruction in tribal history and traditions
from tribal leaders; many learned their tribal languages; and many abandoned
Christian religions and adopted native spiritual traditions. The interest in religion
was generated by the participation of some medicine men in some of the marches
on Washington during the mid-1970s. Indians founded an Ecumenical Council to
discuss traditional teachings and concern over the loss of native languages and
culture. As a result of these events, many young people gave up their careers in
Indian organizational work and returned to their reservations to learn tribal ways.71
The return of Native Americans to tribal cultural traditions resembles the return of
African Americans to their religious and cultural roots. The reasons of both
communities for returning to traditional practices were similar: the emptiness and
lack of meaning in the larger consumer society, a desire to hold family together, an
urge to connect with others and to strengthen community, and an effort to close
gaps between generations.
71
Ibid., p. 191.
134
CONCLUSION
By reviewing the contemporary movements of women and Indians, this
study has demonstrated that they resemble the history of black civil rights protest
in having experienced legal and cultural ideological currents. As a result of legal
and psychological oppression, many blacks, women and Native Americans have
sought to resist oppression through various self directed actions that have
resulted in movements. Such movements to a degree have been responsive and
vulnerable to external forces and extant models. Each rebelled against those
forces that restricted them to minority status, proper spheres and proper roles.
Consequently, despite similarities in protest ideologies, the energy, leadership and
direction of each movement grew largely from within.
Just as the old discontent with patriarchal authority fostered American
Revolution, the modern discontent with patriarchal authority spawned modern
activism. The American Revolution compelled people to reevaluate their social
relations. By attacking established institutions and rejecting all compromise with
corrupt society, religious revivalists, prophets, utopians, blacks, women, Indians,
workers and many other groups from the 1830s to the 1920s inspired a variety of
movements in the 1960s and 1970s. Though the American Revolution and
subsequent movements did not bring about a massive restructuring of American
society, they raised fundamental questions about the meaning of equality in
American society that still have not been answered to everyone’s satisfaction.
The social and political discontent of the 1960s led to new protests that
questioned existing race, gender and ethnic inequities, the legitimacy of authority,
and the privileges of leadership.
This new protest era led to a resurgence
135
of historical feminism and Indian activism. Both women and Indians began to see
themselves as oppressed groups and began to respond by using their own rich
protest history and by agitating for structural change. Although contemporary
feminism and Indian activism followed similar dramatic black initiatives and
victories, it would be wrong to assume that civil rights alone caused this flowering
of the women’s liberation movement and Indian activism.
While civil rights in the early 1960s created a new confidence that certain
protest ideologies could produce change, there were equally important women
and Indian-oriented events occurring simultaneously that helped to revive
feminism and Indian activism. In terms of the women’s movement, President
Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women fostered women’s reawakening,
as did other 1963 events, like the Commission’s Report, the publication of Betty
Friedan’s Feminine Mystique and the passage of the Equal Pay Act. All of these
developments had an important impact on raising women’s consciousness of
their status as a historically disadvantaged group. Moreover, the legislative
struggle leading to Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act – and the subsequent lack
of federal initiative in pressing for strict enforcement of sex redress under that
measure – led many women to mobilize ideologically for a new struggle. Similarly,
a sense of unfulfillment and denial of their own potential encouraged feminists to
speak out against the sexist practices of the civil rights movement and the New
Left. All of these developments created a renewed interest among women in
collective identity, their public prospects and their private aspirations.
As an extension of the earlier legal lobbying model of the suffragists, the
National Organization for Women represented the legal approach. Its founders
stressed women’s legal rights and actively petitioned federal and state
governments for meaningful actions in this area. For its organizers, NOW was a
136
militant civil rights group. Indeed, NOW even saw itself as an “NAACP for
women”.1 By the 1970s there emerged other feminist legal-oriented groups like
the Women’s Equity Action League and the National Women’s Political Caucus.
And the legal thrust of contemporary feminism became symbolized in the strong
campaign for a federal Equal Rights Amendment.
On the other hand, radical women in the 1960s and 1970s came to reject
the legal branch and favored cultural-based protest of women’s oppression.
Radicals were determined to attack both institutions which discriminated against
women and the common cultural biases that sustained those institutions. Many
young female radicals took the organizing skills and ideological lessons acquired
from civil rights and began to use them for feminist purposes. They aimed to
achieve total liberation. They adopted certain feminist ideologies from the past in
striving to achieve that liberation, particularly in cultural arena. The principle
ideological tactics and goals of radical feminism paralleled the strategies and
objectives of black nationalism, with its revolutionary perspectives on cultural selfdetermination, agitation and immediacy. Therefore, radical women, like black
radical nationalists forcefully and dramatically rejected the notion that removal of
legal and political obstacles alone would create a truly egalitarian society. In this
pursuit of nonconsensus goals, radical women, like radical blacks, adopted
uncompromising politics and confrontation tactics. Some radicals even chose to
reject the dominant heterosexual living patterns in favor of alternative
arrangements.
Radical ideology and tactics increasingly attracted supporters from other
protest groups and even from women not previously supportive of feminism. By
1970 radicals had created various organizations. While groups like the
1
Jo Freeman, The Politics of Women’s Liberation (New York: David McKay Company,
Inc., 1975), p. 81.
137
Redstockings, New York Radical Women and the Feminists represented the more
visible elements of the cultural wing of the movement, less noticeable local groups
and individuals formed the movement’s true rank and file. There never appeared a
radical organization of truly national proportions that matched the scope and
program of SNCC and CORE in the black movement. Yet radical women were
moved by the ambiguities and ironies of existence and failed protest ideology like
that expressed by black Americans.
In terms of Indian activism, funding of federal Indian programs and claims
awards helped to revive Indian activism, as did demographic changes. These
developments led to an awareness of the worth of Indian ethnicity and
encouraged Indian ethnic identification. Moreover, the legislative struggle leading
to the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968 which contested tribal authority and
sovereignty in various realms led many Indians to mobilize ideologically for a new
struggle. Cultural depictions of Indians as victims of history, powerless, and
subjugated led Indians to initiate a cultural renaissance. All of these developments
created a renewed interest among Indians in pan-Indian cultural forms.
More
traditional-legal
oriented
organizations
involved
the
National
Congress of American Indians, as well as newer, mainly tribally organized groups
such as the National Tribal Chairmen’s Association, and Native American Rights
Fund. All of these organizations worked within the system, lobbying, petitioning,
and litigating. The efforts of tribes and the NCAI to reverse termination policies
were longstanding and predated the civil rights era.
Red Power served as a radical foil to these moderate organizations
focusing on Indian self-determination. While much of the self-determination
legislation of the 1970s had been lobbied for and had worked its way through
congressional committees both before and during the early years of protest, it is
138
difficult to imagine that congressional deliberations on these bill occurred without
knowledge of what was happening outside. The extensive media coverage of
events such as the occupation of Alcatraz Island, the Trail of Broken Treaties, the
occupation of the BIA building, the sieges at Wounded Knee and on the
Menominee reservation, the Longest Walk, and many other collective action
events helped to reform federal Indian policy. The complementary interests of
Congress and the tribes in focusing Indian expenditures on reservation
communities certainly determined the shape of self-determination legislation, but
its passage was just as certainly effected by the presence of the native rights
movement’s radical wing, Red Power.
Despite the fact that the civil rights movement and American Indian
activists had little direct contact and despite the fact that the problems of American
Indians and black Americans differed, the civil rights movement was very
important for the emergence of Indian activism. Native American activists
borrowed organizational forms, rhetoric, and tactics from civil rights but changed
them according to their needs, targets and locations. For instance, the black lunch
counter “sit-in” became the tribal “fish-in”; Black Power became Red Power; AIM’s
police monitoring activities in Minneapolis resembled the actions of the Black
Panthers in Oakland. The common theme of both movements can be seen in the
civil rights movement’s more violent and cultural wing, Black Power. Both Black
Power and Red Power supported ethnic pride. Red Power’s emphasis on striving
for self-determination and developing a new pride in Indian identity and
background resembled the black pride dimension of African American ethnic
mobilization during the civil rights period. Another similarity was the power to the
people theme of the civil rights movement, adopted mainly by Black Power
activists, that similarly emerged from the calls for self-determination on Indian
139
reservations. The targets of urban black America, such as police, schools and
colleges, and white racism, became the targets of urban Indians, as well.
This leads to the conclusion that the structure, style and rhetoric of black
radicalism, radical feminism, and Indian activism have certain similarities. Perhaps
the best comparison can be made by citing the parallels between the terms “Black
Power” and “Brotherhood” on the one hand and “Sisterhood is Powerful”, and
“Red Power” on the other. All reflect the radicals’ revolutionary commitment to
achieving independent group power and solidarity. All rejected stereotypes such
as Sambo, domesticity and savagery. The key to liberation, radicals argued, lay
in “telling it like it is”, consciousness raising and self-determination.2 In all cases,
local rap sessions and contact groups provided ideological insights
for the
movements. As participants talked about their experiences, they became aware of
the fact that they shared common grievances and visions of a more equitable
future linked with cultural imperatives of self-determination.
A certain comparison may be drawn, as well, among black, feminist and
Indian attempts to recover and reconstruct their past. New approaches influencing
the methodology and interpretation of history became popular, resting on the
assumption that blacks, women, and Indians were distinct groups whose behavior
in the present and past had been manipulated by white supremacist males. Since
history traditionally had been written from a white male perspective, that approach
had been the only significant measure of the past. Radical perceptions
represented a crucial turning point. Positions stated in such writings as H. Rap
Brown’s Die Nigger Die!, the “Redstockings Manifesto” and the “Declaration of
Indian Purpose” addressed the central theme of radical ideology: what is a group’s
identity and who defines it? Efforts to deal with that issue produced many black
2
William L. Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American
Culture, 1965-1975 (Chicago: University of Chicago
140 Press, 1992), p. 216.
studies, women’s studies and Indian studies curricular innovations and numerous
black cultural centers and women’s and Indian centers at the nation’s colleges
and universities.
Assaults upon white male dominance and appeals to cultural autonomy
attracted considerable public attention as blacks, women, and Indians
documented their historically marginal status in American life. Black Pride
practitioners sought to discard all white cultural interpretations in favor of traditions
and symbols associated with a new pan-Africanism. Similarly, the new feminist
analysis emphasized rejection of white male images of femininity. The Miss
America protest of 1968 was the first event to focus the nation’s attention on this
matter. Later assaults like the WITCH bridal fair actions in New York and San
Francisco further underscored these beliefs. Authors like Shulamith Firestone and
Kate Millett articulated influential ideological restatements of women’s cultural
identity. Through cultural renewal Indians sought to discard assimilation and
dissolution in favor of pan-Indianism. Red Power not only gave Native Americans
an ethnic pride but also led them to reconnect with their tribal and spiritual
heritage.
Another convergence among the three movements is that much of the
radicals’ cultural thrust resulted in restated separatist thought and ventures. As in
the case of black militancy, there emerged thoughts of physical separation and
mental autonomy. Some women did as blacks had done and adopted a personal
or collective vision
manifested in a perception of shared female identity. In
addition, there appeared certain women who severed past affiliations with men to
establish alternative all-female living arrangements and allegiances. While militant
black groups like the Republic of New Africa had advocated and exhibited similar
patterns, women did so with greater difficulty, in part because of their more
141
random distribution throughout the population across class, ethnic, religious, racial
and regional lines, and in part because they lacked control of any geographically
definable territory such as an all-black neighborhood or an independent African or
Caribbean nation-state that blacks could turn to for identity. Accordingly,
separatist communities by women were harder to achieve and were more
creative. Some took the form of women’s health care and self-help experiments,
while others took shape in physically autonomous endeavors. Women who
became practitioners of separatism, or psychological and cultural nationalism
demonstrated best the radicals’ ideological dedication to intragroup strength,
purpose and solidarity.
Similarly, modern Indian activists adopted separatist ideas to achieve selfdetermination. Modern Indian activists, like Black Power activists, believed that
only by separating themselves from Euro-American culture could particular Native
American identities survive. For instance, in 1973, AIM leaders declared their
independence from the United States by announcing the creation of the Oglala
Sioux Nation. Just as black nationalists used Pan-Africanism as a separatist ethic
to achieve self-determination, cultural-oriented Indian nationalists hoped to create
support for self-determination using pan-Indianism. The emerging political
activism of young urban Native Americans in groups like the UNA, AIM, and the
NIYC helped inspire nationalism. By asserting their cultural distinctiveness in
clothing, language, and hair-style and by exposing their historical experiences
through the literary and performing arts, Red Power activists aimed to encourage
self-actualization and psychological empowerment.
Thus, an examination of the emergence of the new feminism and Indian
activism against the backdrop of the black civil rights movement reveals that the
resurgence of feminism and Indian activism in this era coincided with black civil
142
rights and reflected certain intersections with it as well as divergences from it.
Contemporary feminism and Indian activism paralleled and reflected the nature of
black civil rights, but neither grew from civil rights nor reflected a mere ideological
extension of it. For women and Indians political strategy might have been partly
historical and partly borrowed, but spiritual empowerment came entirely from
within. A combination of elements in addition to civil rights emerged in the 1960s
to give rise to contemporary feminism and Indian activism. Women’s and Indians’
own histories helped define the ideological thrust. Furthermore, women of the
1960s and the 1970s learned the techniques of modern protest thought and action
from a number of historical and contemporary sources. Civil rights, pacifism, the
student movement and the New Left, for example, prepared women to form and
lead their own self-defined and self-directed movement. However, while other
1960s movements such as the antiwar and student protests have long ended, the
historical fight against racism and sexism still challenges American society today.
The effect of civil rights on contemporary feminism and Indian activism may
best be described as historically coincidental. Civil rights certainly prepared the
way for women’s liberation and Indian ethnic identification and offered protest
models, but it neither constructed nor offered formal ideological bridges among
the three movements. Rather, the three protest movements pursued independent
courses aimed to force change in the American social system. Activists in all
movements followed legal and cultural strategies. Some combined both of these
approaches in an attempt to obtain legal redress, self-definition and selfdetermination. There were numerous instances of people and groups shifting from
one strategy to another to meet the changing protest needs as conditions and
priorities seemed to require. Yet each of the movements designed its own plans
for action. Each movement worked for individual and group survival. All pursued
143
ideological courses designed to create a more egalitarian, cooperative society in
which the quality of human spirit is measured by standards of personal dignity,
potential and performance rather than by arbitrary culturally imposed standards of
proper place and role.
144
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