Content area
Full Text
Abstract
During the middle of the 1960s, civil rights leaders and intellectuals debated future strategies for the movement. Black leaders and intellectuals from various ideological viewpoints articulated different approaches for achieving racial equality up to and in the wake of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Previous historians have written as if there were only two dominating ideologies. However, this article argues that there were four competing ideological viewpoints: George Schuyler's conservatism, Malcolm X's black nationalism, Kenneth Clark's racial liberalism, and Bayard Rustin's socialism. Looking at these four figures not only provides four different ways of viewing the civil rights struggle, but also contributes to our understanding of the civil rights movement based outside of the South, and the reasons for the decline of racial liberal ideology by the middle of the 1960s.
Introduction and Literature Review
Unfortunately, the dominant narrative of the civil rights struggle still rests, in part, on the premise that the integrationist racial liberalism of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the separatist black nationalism of Malcolm X were the only significant strands of black thought between 1954 and 1965 (Theoharis and Woodard, 2003, p. 2). This false binary, which still shapes popular understandings of the era, obscures the myriad perspectives black intellectuals held during the mid-1960s. Thus, it is more useful to speak of a "spectrum" of black intellectual thought because it allows scholars to more easily grasp that there was a range of ideological perspectives among blacks- from conservative to socialist- like the blended, yet distinct colors of a rainbow. Historically, black intellectuals have never thought in a singular fashion. Neither have they confined themselves to only two ways of seeing the world.
Constructing black thought in this bipolar way also maintains other false binaries that recent scholars have been working to break down. Namely, that the civil rights movement suddenly shifted northward and became more urban, angry, and less-deserving of public support after 1965. And that the northern movement represented a distinct break from the rural, southern, and more moral movement of the previous decade (Theoharis and Woodard, 2003, pp. 5-7; Singh, 2004, pp. 5-11). Scholars of the civil rights movement in the South have often characterized it as springing entirely from the types of social, political, and...