The Martin Duberman Reader (3 page)

Then, too, even when dealing with the “obvious” neurotics, we must be careful in the link we establish between their pathology and their protest activity. It is one thing to demonstrate an individual's disturbance and quite another then to explain all of his behavior in terms of it. Let us suppose, for example, that Mr. Jones is a reformer; he is also demonstrably insecure. It does not necessarily follow that he is a reformer
because
he is insecure. The two may seem logically related (that is, if one's mind automatically links protest with neurosis), but we all know that many things can seem logical without being true.

Even if we establish the neurotic behavior of certain members of a group, we have not, thereby, established the neurotic behavior of all members of that group. To leap from the particular to the general is always tempting, but because one benighted monsignor has been caught with a Boy Scout does not mean we have conclusively proven that all priests are pederasts. Some members of every group are disturbed; put the local police force, the Medal of Honor winners, or the faculty of a university under the Freudian microscope, and the number of cases of palpable disturbance would probably be disconcertingly high. But what precisely does their disturbance tell us about the common activities of the group to which they belong—let alone about the activities of the disturbed individuals themselves?

Actually, behavioral patterns for many abolitionists do
not
seem notably eccentric. Men like Birney, Weld, James Russell Lowell, Edmund Quincy—abolitionists all—formed good relationships, saw themselves in perspective, played and worked with zest and spontaneity, developed their talents, were aware of worlds beyond their own private horizons. They all had their tics and their traumas—as who does not?—but the evidence of health is abundant and predominant. Yet most historians have preferred to ignore such men when discussing the abolitionist movement. And the reason, I believe, is that such men conform less well to the assumption that those who become deeply involved in social protest are necessarily those who are deeply disturbed.

Yet recent work in psychology suggests that the very definition of maturity may be the ability to commit oneself to abstract ideals, to get beyond the selfish, egocentric world of children. This does not mean that every man who reaches outward does so from mature motives; public involvement may also be a way of acting out disturbed fantasies. The point is only that political commitment need not be a symptom of personality disorder. It is just as likely to be a symptom of maturity and health.

It does not follow, of course, that all abolitionists protested against slavery out of mature motives; some may have been, indeed were, seeming neurotics. But if we agree that slavery was a fearful
injustice, and if it's acknowledged that injustice will bring forth protest from mature people, it seems reasonable to conclude that at least some of those who protested strongly against slavery must have done so from healthy motives.

The hostile critic will say that the abolitionists protested too strongly to have been maturely motivated. But when is a protest too strong? For a defender of the status quo, the answer (though never stated in these terms) would be: when it succeeds. For those not dedicated to the status quo, the answer is likely to be: a protest is too strong when it is out of all proportion to the injustice it indicts. Could any nonviolent protest have been too strong morally against holding fellow human beings as property?

In this regard, there has been a persistent confusion of two separate indictments against the abolitionists: first, that they disrupted the peace, and second (in the classic formulation given by Daniel Webster), that they “bound more firmly than before” the bonds of the slave. It is undeniably true that the abolitionists contributed to the polarization of public opinion and, to that extent, to the disturbance of the peace.

But it does not follow that because they stirred up passions, they made freeing the slaves more difficult. This would be true only if it could be shown that the slaves could have been freed without first arousing and polarizing opinion. The evidence doesn't support such an argument. In all the long years before the abolitionists began their campaign, the North had managed to remain indifferent to the institution, and the South had done almost nothing, even in the most gradual way, toward ameliorating it. Had the abolitionists not aroused public debate on slavery, there is no guarantee that anyone else would have; and without such a debate it is most unlikely that measures against the institution would have been taken.

The fact that the debate became heated, moreover, cannot be explained by the terms in which the abolitionists raised it; what must also be taken into account is the fact that the white South, with some possible exceptions in the border area, reacted intransigently to any criticism of the institution, however mild the tone or gradual the suggestions.

When discussing the abolitionists we must, at a minimum, cease dealing in blanket indictments, in simpleminded categorizing and elementary stereotyping. Such exercises may satisfy our own hostility to reformers, but they do not satisfy the complex demands of historical truth. We need an awareness of the wide variety of human beings who became involved in the abolitionist movement, and an awareness of the complexity of human motivation sufficient to save us from summing up men and movements in two or three unexamined adjectives.

Surely there is now evidence enough to suggest that commitment and moral concern need not be aberrational; they may represent the profoundest elements of our humanity. Surely those who protested strongly against slavery were not all misguided fanatics or frustrated neurotics—though by so believing it becomes easier to ignore the injustice against which they protested. Perhaps it's time to ask whether the abolitionists, in insisting that slavery be ended, were indeed those men of their generation furthest removed from reality, or whether that description should be reserved for those Northerners who remained indifferent to the institution, and those Southerners who defended it as a positive good. From the point of view of these men, the abolitionists were indeed mad, but it is time we questioned the sanity of the point of view.

Those white Northerners who were not indifferent to slavery—a large number after 1845—were nonetheless prone to viewing the abolitionist protest as excessive, for it threatened the cherished values of private property and Union. The average Northerner may have found slavery disturbing, but convinced as he was that the Negro was an inferior, he did not find slavery monstrous. Certainly he did not think it an evil sufficiently profound to risk, by precipitous action, the nation's present wealth or its future power. The abolitionists were willing to risk both. They thought it tragic that men should weigh human lives on the same scale as material possessions and abstractions of government. It is no less tragic that we continue to do so.

—from
The Antislavery Vanguard
(1965)

Beginning with
The Antislavery Vanguard,
continuing with Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman's
Antislavery Reconsidered
(1979), and culminating in Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John Stauffer,
Prophets of Protest
(2006), the reputation of the nonviolent abolitionist movement has by now been thoroughly rehabilitated. Not so John Brown, who utilized violence in attempting to free the slaves. Most African Americans have long regarded John Brown as a heroic figure, but few whites have, and even fewer white historians. With the notable exception of David S. Reynolds's 2005 biography, most white historians have continued to denounce Brown as a dangerous psychopath. The distinguished and influential C. Vann Woodward portrayed him as a “monomaniac,” a man whose family history was riddled (in fact it wasn't) with insanity. Others have assailed him on grounds ranging from incompetence in business dealings to being a tyrannical father.

Few mention Brown's remarkable lack of racism, rare in his own day among whites, still not commonplace in ours. Perhaps more remarkable still, Brown practiced what he preached. He forbade his family to discriminate against blacks, had close friendships with many, admired black culture, and insisted on social integration, on living and working among them.

None of which necessarily justifies his resort to violence against slavery, but his actions both in Missouri and at Harper's Ferry raise a profound set of questions. Who, if anyone, has the right to kill? And from what source does that right derive? When does (or should) taking another life bring honor, and when disgrace? Is there such a thing as a just war—the American Revolution? World War II? Or—since war always involves the slaughter of innocents, including innocent young soldiers misled or forced into battle—should every resort to violence, whether between nations or individuals, be denounced?

What of the right to self-defense? On what grounds would one deny the right of Jews earmarked for destruction in the Warsaw
Ghetto or while being led to the gas chambers to violently resist? What of the right of black slaves—Nat Turner? Toussaint L'Ouverture? Denmark Vesey?—their lives stolen, their bodies brutalized, to slit the throats of their self-designated masters? Does the same exculpation extend to revolutionaries (Americans? Algerians? Cubans? Egyptians? Libyan?) who take up arms against tyrannical regimes? What about a woman who stabs her rapist? A gay person assaulted by a fag basher? A sex worker abused and threatened by a customer?

Should we validate self-defense solely for those directly in jeopardy? Or is it also legitimate to fight on behalf of the liberation of others? If the answer to the latter is “no,” then do we automatically denounce the International Brigades that fought against fascism in Spain? If the answer is “yes,” then on what grounds do we exempt John Brown, who fought to liberate blacks?

Perhaps the only consistent possible reply is to deny, under any and all circumstances, the right to commit violence. That's the stance of the War Resisters League, and of any number of other groups committed to nonviolence. Before signing up, be sure to understand that what's at stake would include the right to spank your child.

T
he slogan “Black Power” has caused widespread confusion and alarm. This is partly due to a problem inherent in language: words necessarily reduce complex attitudes or phenomena to symbols that, in their abbreviation, allow for a variety of interpretations. Stuart Chase has reported that in the thirties, when the word “fascism” was on every tongue, he asked a hundred people from various walks of life what the word meant and got a hundred widely differing definitions. And in 1953 when the
Capital Times
of Madison, Wisconsin, asked two hundred people, “What is a communist?” not only was there no agreement, but five out of every eight admitted they couldn't define the term at all. So it is with Black Power. Its definition depends on whom you ask, when you ask, where you ask, and, not least, who does the asking.

Yet the phrase's ambiguity derives not only from the usual confusions of language but from a failure of clarity (or is it frankness?) on the part of its advocates and a failure of attention (or is it generosity?) from its critics. The leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) who invented the slogan, including Stokely Carmichael and Floyd McKissick, have given Black Power different definitions on different occasions, in part because their own understanding
of the term continues to develop, but in part, too, because their explanations have been tailored to their audiences. The confusion has been compounded by the press, which has frequently distorted the words of SNCC and CORE representatives, harping on every connotation of violence and reverse racism, minimizing the central call for racial unity.

For all these reasons, it is still not clear whether Black Power is to be taken as a short-term tactical device or a long-range goal—that is, a postponement or a rejection of integration; whether it has been adapted as a lever for intimidating whites or organizing blacks, for instilling race hate or race pride; whether it necessitates, permits, or encourages violence; whether it is a symptom of Negro despair or of Negro pride, a reaction to the lack of improvement in the daily lives of Negro Americans or a sign that improved conditions are creating additional expectations and demands. Whether Black Power, furthermore, becomes a constructive psychological and political tactic or a destructive summons to separatism, violence, and reverse racism will depend at least as much on developments outside the control of its advocates (like the war in Vietnam) as on their conscious determination. For all these reasons, it is too early for final evaluations; only time, and perhaps not even that, will provide them. At most, certain limited and tentative observations are possible.

If Black Power means only that Negroes should organize politically and economically in order to improve self-regard and to exert maximum pressure, then the new philosophy would be difficult to fault, for it would be based on the truisms that minorities must argue from positions of strength rather than weakness, and that the majority is far more likely to make concessions to power than to justice. To insist that Negro Americans seek their goals as individuals and solely by appeals to conscience and love, when white Americans have always relied on group association and organized protest to achieve theirs, would be yet one more form of discrimination. Moreover, when whites decry SNCC's declaration that it is tired of turning the other cheek, that henceforth it will actively resist white brutality, they might do well to remember that they've
always considered self-defense acceptable behavior for themselves: our textbooks view the refusal of the revolutionaries of 1776 to sit supinely by as the very essence of manhood.