Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (105 page)

1969
: Supreme Court nominees are withdrawn on grounds of their ‘racism and incompetence.’ Black Panthers are killed in a police raid in Chicago. Land begins to be returned to Native Americans. The United States ends censorship.

1970
: Civil rights for women; in federal contracts companies must employ a quota of women. The Equal Pay Act is passed in the U.K. Divorce is made legal in Italy. The first desegregated classes are held in the United States.

1971: Bussing introduced to ensure a ‘racial balance’ in some U.S. schools. Switzerland accepts female suffrage. Slum primary schools in the U.K. are cleared. Medicare is implemented in Canada. The first women are ordained as priests (by the Anglican bishop of Hong Kong).

1972:
Andrew Young becomes the first African American elected from the South to Congress since Reconstruction. Indians march on Washington, D.C. First woman governor of the New York Stock Exchange.

1973’.
In the United States abortion is made legal. The first black mayor of Los Angeles is elected.
³⁴

The change didn’t end there, of course (the following year saw the first Hispanic and women governors of U.S. states, and the first female bishops). But the years of turbulence were over (which was also related to the ending of the war in Vietnam, and the economic downturn following the oil crisis in 1973 – see chapter 33 below). Not that all the change was in one direction, toward greater freedom for minority groups, women, and homosexuals. An alternative list reads as follows:

1964: Bantu Laws amendment, designed to limit the settlement of Africans to peripheral areas, is introduced in South Africa.

1966:
Apartheid is extended to South West Africa (Namibia).

1967:
Resettlement villages are accelerated in South Africa.

1968: Humanae Vitae,
papal encyclical, prohibits use of artificial contraceptives by Roman Catholics.

1969
: The Stonewall police raid on a homosexual club in New York results in several days of violence after the club is set on fire while police are inside. Anti-egalitarian ‘Black papers’ are published in Britain. Arthur Jensen, in the
Harvard Educational Review,
argues that African Americans score consistently less well on IQ tests than do whites.

1970:
In South Africa all black Africans are consigned to one or other of the ‘Bantu homelands.’ Several books about race are banned in South Africa.

1971:
South African Bantu areas are brought under control of central government.

1972
: South Africa abolishes coloured representatives on municipal councils.

Throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, the growing illiberalism of South African society and the violence associated with the advance of the blacks in America, were increasingly seen as part of the same malaise – the same dilemma, as Myrdal had called it – circumstances that combined to produce some sharp thinking about race. Though these authors might match King in rhetoric, they rarely matched him in Christian feeling.

One of the authors James Baldwin had read when he was in Paris was Frantz Fanon, a black psychiatrist born in the French West Indian island of Martinique in 1925. After training in psychiatry in Paris, Fanon was assigned to a hospital in the North African colony of Algeria during the rising against the French. The experience appalled him; he took the Algerians’ side and wrote a number of books in which, like Baldwin in the southern states of America, he became a spokesman for those suffering oppression. In
A Dying Colonialism
(1959) and
Black Skin, White Masks
(1960), originally published in French, Fanon proved himself an articulate critic of the last days of imperialism, and his activities for the FLN (National Liberation Front), including an address to the First Congress of Negro Writers in 1956, drew the attention of the French police.
³⁵
Later that year he was forced to leave Algeria for Tunisia, where he continued to be one of the editors of
El Moudjahid,
an anticolonial magazine. His most poignant book was
The Wretched of the Earth
(1961), conceived at the time Fanon was diagnosed as suffering from leukaemia, and which consumed his final strength.
³⁶
Fanon was a more polemical writer than Baldwin, and a less gifted phrase-maker. But like the American his works are designed to worry whites and convince blacks that the battle – against racism and colonialism – can be won. Where
The Wretched of the Earth
was different was in Fanon’s use of his experiences as a psychiatrist. Fanon was intent on showing fellow blacks that the alienation they felt as a result of colonialism
was
a result of colonialism, and not some natural inferiority inherent in the black race. In support of his
argument he reported a number of psychiatric reactions he had seen in his clinic and which, he said, were directly related to the guerrilla war of independence then being waged inside the country. In one case an Algerian taxi driver and member of the FLN had developed impotence after his wife had been beaten and raped by a French soldier during interrogation. In another, two young Algerians, aged thirteen and fourteen, had killed their European playmate. As the thirteen-year-old put it, ‘We weren’t a bit cross with him…. One day we decided to kill him, because the Europeans want to kill all the Arabs. We can’t kill big people. But we could kill ones like him, because he was the same age as us.’
³⁷
Fanon had many stories of disturbances in young people, and especially among the victims of torture. He pointed out that torture victims could be divided into two – ‘those who know something’ and ‘those who know nothing.’ He said he never saw those who knew something as patients (they never got ill; they had in a sense ‘earned’ their torture), but among those who knew nothing, there were all sorts of symptoms, usually related to the type of torture – indiscriminate, mass attack with truncheons or cigarette burns; electricity; and the so-called ‘truth serum.’ Victims of electric torture, for example, would develop an electricity phobia and become unable to touch an electric switch.
³⁸

Fanon’s aim, like R. D. Laing’s, was to show that mental illness was an extreme but essentially rational response to an intolerable situation, but he was also answering what he saw as oversimple arguments by European scientists and social scientists regarding ‘the African mind’ and African culture. In the mid-1950s, the World Health Organisation had commissioned a survey by a Scottish psychiatrist, Dr J. C. Carothers, on ‘Normal and Pathological Psychology of the African.’ Carothers had worked in Kenya and been medical officer in command of prisons there. His survey had concluded, ‘The African makes very little use of his frontal lobes. All the particularities of African psychiatry can be put down to frontal laziness.’ Carothers actually put forward the idea that the ‘normal’ African is like a ‘lobotomised European.’
³⁹
Fanon countered dismissively, arguing that Carothers had missed the point. At that stage, he said, African culture (like black American culture, like Baldwin’s writing) was the
struggle
to be free; the fight – violence itself – was the shared culture of the Algerians, and took most of their creative energy. Like King, they had become ‘creative extremists.’ Fanon did not live to see peace restored to an autonomous Algeria. He had been too busy completing his book to seek treatment for his leukaemia, and although he was taken to Washington in late 1961, the disease was too far advanced. He died a few weeks after his book was published, aged thirty-six.

Polemical writing, like Fanon’s, was exactly the sustenance blacks needed in the 1960s, and in America, after James Baldwin changed his stance in a series of novels,
Another Country
(1962),
Blues for Mister Charlie
(1964), and
Going to Meet the Man
(1965), his place was taken by Eldridge Cleaver. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1935, Cleaver liked to describe himself as having been ‘educated in the Negro ghetto of Los Angeles and at the California state prisons of San Quentin, Folsom and Soledad.’ Though ironic, this was also true, as
Cleaver had read widely in jail (he had been convicted of marijuana possession) and met several other inmates who nurtured his rebellious instincts. He eventually became minister of information in the Black Panther Party, an African-American paramilitary organisation. His first book,
Soul on Ice,
released the same year that King was assassinated, was a wide-ranging attack on Baldwin. ‘There is in James Baldwin’s work,’ wrote Cleaver, ‘the most gruelling, agonizing, total hatred of the blacks, particularly of himself, and the most shameful, fanatical, fawning, sycophantic love of the whites that one can find in the writings of any black American writer of note in our time.’
⁴⁰
For Cleaver, as with Fanon, the situation facing African Americans was too urgent to allow the luxury of becoming an artist in any wider sense; the problem was so all-enveloping that to turn one’s back on it, or place it in a wider context, as Baldwin attempted to do from time to time, was for Cleaver an avoidance akin to race crime. Three themes are interlaced in
Soul on Ice,
which was written in prison. One is the everyday brutality of whites toward blacks, highlighted by prison routine. Two, Cleaver’s thoughts on international race politics, white myths about race, Africa, black history, black food, black music, showing how to build a countervailing and sustaining myth. And three, Cleaver’s progressive thoughts about sex between the races, from the first essay, where he confesses that for him, as a young man, he found white women more attractive than black, to the last essay, a far more lyrical, near-mystical paean of praise to ‘Black Beauty’ – ‘Let me drink from the river of your love at its source.’
⁴¹
Pointed as his criticisms of Baldwin were at the time, the latter’s works have survived in better shape than Cleaver’s essays.

Maya Angelou’s books are very different. Her message is that blacks are already free – not in the political sense, maybe, but in every other sense. It is her isolation of the political from the rest that is her more important, and contentious, point. In
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,
the first of her five-part autobiography, published in 1969, Angelou records her life until she has her first baby at the age of sixteen.
⁴²
We are treated to the richness of black life in Stamps, Arkansas, not a million miles from Little Rock, Cleaver’s birthplace and the scene of so much racial violence. Angelou re-creates brilliantly her childhood world ‘of starched aprons, butter-yellow piqué dresses, peanut patties, and games of mumbledypeg, with bathwater steaming on the cooking stove.’ When bad things happen, tears course down her cheeks ‘like warm milk.’
⁴³
But there is more to this soft-focus world than scoops of corn thrown to the chickens. Although her father is absent for much of the time, the emotional and intellectual life of the family left behind – mother, son, and daughter – is not much impoverished. William Shakespeare ‘was my first white love’ in a world where Kipling and Thackeray jostle with Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, and W. E. B. Du Bois.
⁴⁴
Maya, or Marguerite as she then was, has a genuine affection for her brother Bailey and her mother, a strong, upright, beautiful woman who is not cowed by the system. As the children grow up, the adult world of work and discrimination encroaches on their idyll – for example, in the form of the dentist who would rather stick his hand in a dog’s mouth than a ‘nigger’s.’
⁴⁵
But this is not presented as tragedy. Maya and
her mother retain their interest in the world, keep control of it, and keep thinking. Their lives remain rich, whatever changes fate has in store. Of course Angelou hates the system of discrimination, but her books emphasise that life is made up of two kinds of freedom: one big political freedom, and countless little freedoms that come from education, strength of character, humour, dignity, and thought. At one point her mother is asked, ‘You all right, momma?’ ‘Aw,’ she replies, ‘they tell me the whitefolks still in the lead.’
⁴⁶

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
fits as easily into a canon of works written by female authors as it does one written by blacks. Women’s emancipation, though not involving violence on anything like the same scale as the civil rights movement, offered several parallels throughout the 1960s. The decade saw major changes in almost all areas of sexual liberation. In 1966 the Kinsey Institute had begun its important early study of homosexuality, which found that 4 percent of males and 2 percent of females were predominantly or exclusively homosexual, and that no fewer than 37 percent of men reported at least one homosexual experience.
⁴⁷
In the same year, William Howell Masters and Virginia Johnson’s
Human Sexual Inadequacy
showed that about half of all marriages suffered from one sexual problem or another (inability to maintain an erection or premature ejaculation in men, inability to achieve orgasm in women).
⁴⁸
A year after, in 1967, modern mass-market, hard-core pornography began to appear, produced by Scandinavian magazine publishers. In that year too Hugh Hefner, the publisher of
Playboy,
then selling 4 million copies a month, made the cover of
Time.
⁴⁹
On 3 November 1968, Al Goldstein launched
Screw,
the self-proclaimed aim of which was to become the
Consumer Reports
of the ‘sexual netherworld.’ A year later Philip Roth published
Portnoy’s Complaint,
exploring the ‘agony and ecstasy’ of male masturbation, and
Oh! Calcutta!
was produced in London and off Broadway, with full-frontal nudity and explicitly sexual dialogue. Nineteen-seventy saw the first pubic hair to be shown in a commercial magazine,
Penthouse.
In 1970 the President’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography reported that there was no substantial basis for the belief that exposure to erotica caused sex crimes. Some kind of closure was achieved in this area in 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court voted seven to two to legalise abortion, and in the same year, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its diagnostic manual, declaring that gays and lesbians did not suffer from a mental disorder.