An unfinished revolution

  E. Victor Wolfstein   Wolfenstein
is a professor of political science at UCLA.    

Approximately 100 years ago, the great African American social
theorist W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “The problem of the 20th
century is the problem of the color line.” Black and white
were the colors most on his mind, but his vision of the world
encompassed its many hues. Nor was he insensitive to other lines of
difference and domination, such as the one between social classes,
or between men and women. And these lines criss-crossed.

In “The Souls of Black Folk,” Du Bois vividly
portrays a young black woman named Josie, who is poor,
hard-working, ambitious ““ and who sacrifices her ambitions
for the well-being of her family. Race, class and gender each play
a part in determining her life chances. In short, the problem of
the color line is multi-dimensional; but Du Bois properly, and with
great prescience, placed it before his contemporaries.

Much has changed between then and now. Then, white supremacy was
the law of the land. Black people had been disenfranchised
politically, stripped of their civil rights by Jim Crow laws, and
frequently reduced to economic peonage. They also were the victims
of a truly horrific campaign of terror and intimidation.

Between 1890 and 1917, some two to three black Southerners were
hanged, burned at the stake, or otherwise murdered each week. That
was also a time when workers had virtually no rights that employers
were legally bound to respect and when women did not have the right
to vote.

Daily Bruin File Photo Dr. Martin Luther King
was a leader in the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Now, legal
white supremacy is a thing of the past; African American women and
men, and women generally, have been enfranchised; and workers have
the legal right to form unions, to strike, and otherwise to act in
their own best interests. Hence it is no exaggeration to say that
the century just concluded witnessed a social revolution in this
country.

How did this great change come about? Stated negatively: it was
not a generous dispensation from the socially high and mighty.
Those who benefit from an existing social order don’t
voluntarily surrender their advantages. They use all means possible
to retain them, including the ideological masking of their
interests.

So, stated positively: the transformation of American society
has been the work of the disadvantaged and the dispossessed. As
Malcolm X rightly said, “It’s not in the nature of
power to back up in the face of anything but some more
power.” Progressive change results from the exercise of power
by ordinary people, working together for the realization of their
collective interests and against the entrenched privileges of
social elites.

There are multiple levers of popular power. Take the example of
the civil rights movement. One approach to the problem of the color
line, favored by the NAACP, was judicial. The landmark Supreme
Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which
overturned the doctrine of “separate but equal” in
education, was the most dramatic result of this strategy. It was
also a beginning: the end of de jure school segregation set the
stage for a broadened assault on white supremacy in the South; and
that struggle brought to the fore Dr. Martin Luther King and the
strategy of nonviolent direct action.

Nonviolent direct action disrupted the normal operations of
white racist power. When white politicians and police responded to
these peaceful actions with the brutal use of force, they
effectively yielded the moral high ground to the demonstrators, and
this helped members of the movement to gather around themselves a
large and sympathetic following of both races.

Daily Bruin File Photo Malcolm X was a leader
in the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

The march on Washington in 1963, at which Dr. King delivered his
rightly famous “I have a dream” speech, testified to a
nonviolent revolution in progress; and the Civil Rights Act of 1964
and Voting Rights Act of 1965 set the seal of victory on this phase
of the movement.

Just as nonviolent direct action grew out of the judicial
strategy that preceded it, so the militant political protests of
the late 1960s were the legacy of the preceding struggles. On the
one hand, they built upon the civil rights movement’s
strategy of collective engagement.

On the other, they were a response to the limitations of the
movement ““ to its inability to engage effectively de facto
racism in the North or the problems of poverty that were endemic to
black communities north and south. Malcolm X, especially after he
left the Nation of Islam, was the most forceful and influential
spokesperson for the more militant perspective; and the force of
his words was amplified by the ghetto uprisings of the period
““ including the one in Watts in 1965.

Thus we come to UCLA, which was one of the centers of political
protest activity in Los Angeles. I was reminded of the terrible
glory of that place and time at a gathering last spring, when the
Center for African American Studies celebrated its 30th
anniversary.

The speakers strongly evoked both the feeling of being part of a
collective movement that was literally transforming lives and the
hardships and pain that accompanied bringing something radically
new into existence. That something new included, of course, the
center itself; and, as several speakers emphasized, the organized
power of African American students played a vital role in forcing
the UCLA administration to act affirmatively in the matter.

Daily Bruin File Photo Angela Y. Davis a former
UCLA professor, speaks to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the
Center of African American Studies at a recent gathering. 1960s.
One should not think, however, that the exercise of popular power,
at UCLA or more generally, was without contradiction. There were a
variety of tensions within and between organizations ““
including the one between women and men. Power, it became clear,
was gendered as well as raced. Feminist struggles of various kinds,
as well as the assertion of rights by lesbian and gay activists,
grew out of the movement (including the anti-war side of the
movement). And these overlapping and conflicting political
tendencies combined to alter, in quite radical ways, how we live
our lives.

I have been telling an American tale. It would be vastly more
complicated, and its tragic elements would be far more pronounced,
if I broadened it beyond national borders.

But either way, I want to derive two morals from the story.
First, the realm of freedom has been significantly expanded by the
collective action of ordinary people. We are the beneficiaries of
their often heroic efforts. Second, the problem Du Bois posed has
only been partially solved, the revolution is unfinished and, in
some instances, its accomplishments are under fire. (I have in mind
the attacks on affirmative action and a woman’s right to
choose.)

Let’s hope that, in the century now dawning, we will keep
the wheel turning and cover just a little more ground.