Afro American Lectures (Autoguardado)

8/13/2019 Afro American Lectures (Autoguardado)

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Now since the Southern economy is devastated after the war, during the war and after the war, since

there's the loss of labor that is profound, white planters want a quick return to plantation labor, you

gotta get crops in from the field. And they understood that we don’t have slaves anymore, but there's

gotta be a way to get gang labor reorganized, have an overseer. At the same time black--white

planters want this, blacks who have been working on these plantations for example, they’ve gotta find

a way to put food on their table, but they want to have economic autonomy, be it land ownership.

They want to have their own farms. White farm-owners want blacks to sign labor contracts to committhemselves to work on the farms. Blacks reject this saying they expect the federal government to help

them out. They expect the federal government to redistribute land. So you have these really intense

conflicting expectations that are directly related to conflicting senses of what freedom meant. And if

you look at some of these items on the screen here, I'll start talking about them, you'll start seeing

where these expectations come from and why they would be so conflicted and complicated.

Black Codes forced black women back on farms. This way they would not be seen in public spaces.

This was all for the good of the woman, this is for the black women, they should really be in their

natural habitat. This would've been the language of the day, by the way. Black Codes regulated sexual

behavior. You could not dress a certain way, you could not be out at a certain hour. Black Codes

would address vagrancy, idleness, rude gestures, mischief, preaching the Gospel without a license

and so on. I mean, incredibly vague. If you're just kinda hanging out, you could be in violation of a

Black Code. If you're up to no good, being mischievous, violation of a Black Code. And all of these

could lead to fines or involuntary plantation labor.



In the place of the Black Codes, a new labor system develops. This one was much more focused--

much more explicitly focused upon labor instead of all the morality issues that you see in the

Black Codes. And this new labor system, that becomes incredibly successful for what it was, is

called sharecropping. Sharecropping revolves around credit. The whites own the land, the tools,

the seed, but they didn’t own the labor. That’s what blacks controlled. So blacks could use the

land, the tools, and the seed, but they did not get paid in cash. Instead they would rent the

white's property and their tools, etcetera. And in order to get the seed, they'd have to go to the

company store for their purchases. And the store would be sort of like Durfee's, you know,

exorbitantly priced.

Students: <<laughs>>

Professor Jonathan Holloway: So, you know, if a bag of seed on the market--I'm making

up the numbers here, might have cost one dollar, at the company store maybe it's three, three

credits, three units, or something like that. So sharecroppers would pay for their food, their

seed, etcetera with their shares, their portions of the crop that they were growing and later

harvesting for the landowner. At the end of the year when the crop in question, let's just say it's

cotton, which it would've been for a tremendous amount of the system, when the cotton is taken

to market, the cotton that black sharecroppers had planted and harvested, they would not be

able to go to market with the cotton crop. The landowner would go there, or his business

manager, and he'd sell the cotton at the market rate. Then he would come back and make a

declaration of how much he was able to get for this, settle the accounts privately with the

landowner, and the landowner and labor then settled their accounts. And then a funny thing

happened.



It is a peculiar sensation, this double--consciousness, this sense of always looking to one's self

through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in

amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness: an American, a Negro; two souls, two

thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged

strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."

Malcolm X meets Elijah Muhammad and becomes an assistant minister in Detroit temple

number one. This is where the Nation is headquartered. Malcolm X, despite the interesting ways

he's been historicized, one cannot deny the fact that he's an incredibly charismatic speaker,

powerful speaker. Elijah Muhammad recognizes this and very quickly sends Malcolm X to, to

Harlem, and establishes him as the minister of the Harlem temple. And although it's not the

headquarters of the Nation of Islam, because it's in Harlem, sort of black Manhattan, it very

quickly becomes the most important temple. And Elijah Muhammad asks, asks Malcolm X to be

his--the national spokesman for the Nation of Islam.

It's a long summer of riots in 1964. Riots aren't just in southern U.S. In fact, they're largely

urban and northern: New York City; Rochester; Paterson, New Jersey; Elizabeth, New Jersey;

Philadelphia; Chicago. It's a time of trial. And as you'll recall from my lecture on Monday as I

was wrapping it up, weeks before the Democratic National Convention convenes, the bodies of

Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney are found, August 4th. And they become martyrs of the

movement, there's no doubt about it. It's really important that you know that they were found in

Philadelphia, Mississippi, for reasons that become very important later on in this course. The

bodies are found in an earthen dam in Philadelphia, Mississippi. There was an aspiration to

have them buried together, but Mississippi state law said the races had to be buried in separate

spaces.



What happens, ultimately, is that thirty-four people die the next handful of days. Over athousand people are injured; four thousand are arrested; property damage in excess of two

hundred million, which was a ton of money in 1965 if you think about it; damage ranging across

a forty-six mile, square mile area, larger than Manhattan or San Francisco. Thirty-five thousand

adults are deemed, quote, active rioters. Seventy-two thousand are deemed close spectators.

And what, why this is important in the reports that follow is that the police are going in

intermittently. It's just one big logistics mess. Police are going in now and again to try to calm

things down. The riot would be sporadic. There'd be a hot point over here, a fire would be

started over there, or a fake fire alarm would be called, and police would go over there. The fire

department would be called to a scene and then, and then they'd be showered with bottles and

bricks and then snipers. It was an urban battle zone.

"In the swift fierce years since the 1954 school desegregation decision, a rash of seemingly

unrelated mass phenomena has appeared on the American scene, deviating radically from the

prevailing hotdog and malted milk norm of the bloodless, square, superficial, faceless, Sunday

morning atmosphere that was suffocating the nation's soul. And all of this in a nation where the

so called molders of public opinion, the writers, politicians, teachers and cab drivers are willful,

euphoric liars or zip-dam ostriches and owls, a clique of undercover ghosts, a bunch of Walter

Jenkinses, a lot of coffee drinking, cigarette smoking, sly, suck assing, status seeking, cheating,

nervous, dry balled, tranquilizer gulched, countdown minded, out of style, slithering snakes. No

wonder that many innocent people, the manipulated and the stimulated, some of whom were

game for a reasonable amount of mystery and even adventure, had their minds scrambled.

These observers were not equipped to either feel or know that a radical break, a revolutionary

leap out of their sight, had taken place in the secret parts of this nation's soul. It was as if a

drive--it was as if a driverless vehicle were speeding through the American night down an

unlighted street toward a stone wall and was boarded on the fly by a stealthy ghost with a

drooling leer on his face, who, at the last detour before chaos and disaster, careened the vehicle

down a smooth highway that leads to the future and life; and to ask these Americans to

understand that they were the passengers on this driverless vehicle and that the lascivious ghost

was the Saturday night crotchfunk of the Twist or the "Yeah, Yeah, Yeah!" which the Beatleshigh-jacked from Ray Charles, to ask these Calvinistic profligates to see the logical and

reciprocal links is more cruel than asking a hope to die Okie music buff to cop the sounds of

John Coltrane."

It's a heck of four sentences, and really one of the sharpest cultural critiques that I've seen in

quite some time. Now, taking back to the very beginning of this course, when I talked about the

ironies of John Jack's existence. Remember, the, the charcoal rubbing of the headstone, saying

that you couldn't understand, you know, American freedom without understanding slavery. You

might remember, I forward—I, I shot forward two hundred years to talk about Eld--excuse me,

Ralph Ellison, saying that southern whites could not talk, sing, walk, make love, or make war

without thinking of blacks. Eldridge Cleaver is doing the same thing here, in a very different



voice, very different voice, mind you. But he's telling about this moment of fascination of white

America, progressive, left leaning, white America especially, with blackness. Part of that

fascination grows out of the martyrdom of folks like Malcolm X, of course, Medgar Evers,

Emmett Till, but it also grows out of this anxiety about what we are as a country during the

Vietnam era. It grows out of an anxiety that you see reverberating through radical left groups,largely white groups like the Students for a Democratic Society.

So the irony is, you know, the way we historicize a group like the Panthers who we hear a lot

about, is that, you know, they're the most militant, you know, race nationalist group on the

scene. And SNCC, whom less is well known about the group, of course, but it turns out that

SNCC, which starts out as this, as this, you know, very polite, respectable group of college kids,

white and black, committed to voter registration drives and leadership organization--leadership

development, they says, "To hell with all of that. Whites are out. It's about a black agenda." So

the coalition collapses, and in, and in short order, Carmichael is essentially forced out of SNCC

because he's now gone far afield of what SNCC has actually--has become. So the Panthers--now

we're in early 1968--are trying to make sense of themselves as an organization.

We real cool. We

Left school. We

Lurk late. We

Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We

Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We

Die soon.

It's a poem that starts out with an assertion of, you know, cool aesthetic that we would see

reverberating through the Panthers, certainly, that quickly moves through the despair of living

in an inner-city in an African American enclave, caught up in drinking and games. Caught up in

an anti-establishment ethos, as she mentioned in describing the poem, but then ultimately

caught up in a moment, a language of despair and of hopelessness. "We jazz June. We die

soon." Although King doesn't know that he's going to be assassinated, what you see in the final

two years of his life, someone who was truly establishment, Martin Luther King, certainly, you

see in the last two years of his life sort of a reckoning with the intransigence of certain problems

in the North that create a mindset where you have young men who are hopeless in the

possibilities for the future, and of course, like the young men, he too would die soon. And we'll

pick up that narrative on Wednesday. Thank you.



Blaxploitation

So you have in this clip justice being exacted along the terms that in the Black--Blaxploitation

vernacular made the most sense. But still, what kind of messages are being offered here? And

when you were in the movie theater, I mean the production value, the acting and such, you

know, in the, the gun being pulled out of the afro, these are all humorous, but in the movie

theater, these are moments of celebration. This is a whole different kind of cultural logic that

people had not seen before, not on a screen, and they wanted to celebrate it.

Now as I did on Monday, I was talking about the incredible cultural power of the moment, and

the interesting narratives of misogyny and hyper-masculinity you see in Blaxploitation films.

This is also an era that you see the beginning of an incredible renaissance in black women's

literature especially. The great author Toni Morrison appearing on the scene with The Bluest

Eye in 1970. Alice Walker, who would become most famous for writing Colored --ha-ha, I justnoticed here, in my typing these notes here, I wrote, I wrote Colored People--The Color Purple.



Just noticed that big old typo. Anyway, Alice Walker, who published that book in 1982, but in

the seventies, she was doing an incredible amount of recovery work. For example, who’s, who

here has heard of Zora Neale Hurston? I mean pretty much everybody. None of your hands

would have gone up prior to the nine--early 1970s. And the hands are being raised now because

of Alice Walker's, essentially, detective work. She makes it her mission, for example, to discoverZora Neale Hurston's grave, unmarked. Zora Neale Hurston had this incredible moment in the,

in the late thirties and forties, but disappears. She dies penniless, she’s working as a maid, her

writing disappears.



the Rodney King beating; and the riots and rebellion in South Central, Los Angeles following the

acquittal of the white policemen who beat him all reveal the special coding that linked people's

awareness of race and crime and the ways that the media reinforced the stereotype that crime

was the special province of the black male.

Afro American Lectures (Autoguardado)

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