Truth about Malcolm X

That Jim Crow was an embarrassment in the Cold War was a common argument put forward by liberals and civil rights advocates then and now, but the claim had little persuasive force at the time. As with slavery, the end of Jim Crow was mostly a matter of Christian faith correcting a long-settled injustice and that the steady rise of Black Americans through hard work, discipline, and education subverted claims that they were innately inferior. Civil rights laws kicked over a rotten edifice that the country -- even the South -- had come to recognize could no longer be sustained as a matter of justice or fact. Avoiding embarrassment in debates at the UN was beside the point.

Antislavery sentiment, slavery, and Jim Crow were a lot more complicated than that. Take, for example, "Twelve Years A Slave," the remarkable and true account of Solomon Nothrup's captivity in the pre-Civil War South.

Northrup, an educated and free Black farmer in the North, was kidnapped while visiting Washington DC, sent in chains to New Orleans, and there sold into slavery and harsh labor in the backwoods of Louisiana. Eventually, Northrup got an itinerant carpenter to send word back to Northrup's family so that they could try to free him. Northrup's wife got high level political help and procured a legal writ that, amazingly, local officials in the South honored, freeing Northrup.

Northrup's account of slavery left no doubt as to the cruelty and evil of slavery and was a revelation when it was published. One of the most stunning aspects is how the carpenter who was so instrumental in freeing Northrup had nothing to gain and no motive other than that, when pressed to think about slavery, recognized that it was wrong and so agreed to help free Northrup at the risk of his own life and the end of doing any work in the South.

The core support for slavery and Jim Crow was that ordinary, honest, moral people could accept them and see no evil in doing so. People are inclined to think that their own society and its ways are essentially good even if flawed. But slavery and Jim Crow nevertheless fell because plain, ordinary people eventually saw the evil in them and took risks and burdens on themselves to end them.

Were antislavery leaders zealots, cranks, and extremists? Yes, many of them were. But, like Northrup's carpenter, ordinary, sensible people who had no connection whatever with organized antislavery efforts eventually saw the wrong in slavery -- which is a major reason why it and Jim Crow were ended.

Your failure lies in your assumption that before 1960 "other means existed".

The Cold War and the need to win hearts and minds in the Third World made American apartheid an overwhelming propaganda embarassment. A frequent argument at the time was the, "if we don't treat blacks better they'll turn communist". In the age of subversion, disaffected minorities had become a national security threat. It is true that after the Holocaust the cause of racism was thoroughly discredited among opinion makers. But that doesn't mean they meant to spend the political capital required to upend the traditional way of life of an entire culture. It is one thing to say racism is wrong. It is entirely another to be willing to send federal troops into Mississippi. Cold War geopolitical self-interest made it necessary. Absent that self-interest, a nonviolent campaign would have been crushed in blood as blacks were crushed between 1877 and 1890.

The British loved Gandhi because he allowed them to flatter themselves about their benevolence when the hard truth was.

1. Given how thinly the British were spread in the administration of the Raj, repression was a very chancy option that could backfire disastrously. Order Indian soldiers, who had mutinied once already, to fire on an Indian crowd, they just might not do it. Repression is expensive and postwar England flatly could not afford it.

2. Kill the Anglicized Indians of the Congress Party and who will replace them ? Fiery nationalists like Subhas Chandra Bose (just as MLK was replaced by the Panthers and the Black Power movement).

3. India did not have a large white settler population that British conservatives would have had to support like the Ulster Protestants. It did not have a large white settler population with no problem whatsoever with killing as many Indians as they have to to preserve their privileged status quo and not have to go back home penniless white trash.

I don't ask black people to do anything different than what white people would do. I don't think black people had to be pink plaster saints to deserve freedom (and that is an implication of nonviolence that I always despised). Just people. Just ordinary, fallible human beings who get mad when treated with deliberate evil, no differently than white people would. White people would never for one minute think they had to be pink plaster saints of "turn the other cheek" nonviolence to deserve freedom. To think that you have to be better than others to deserve the same rights they have is to put yourself on a lower plane, as if you somehow have to doubly compensate for the "inferiority" of your blackness by being a saint. It is deference.

One final reply and then I am done with your ignorant ravings.

If "kaffir" is not the equivalent of "nigger", why shouldn't it be used ? Is it not a white supremacist term of contempt for black people ? A white supremacism that was the core of Afrikaner culture ?

I understand the "some of my best friends are black", need of the white supremacist mentality to believe in its own goodness and virtue and react with fury when its essential evil is laid bare. The Afrikaners were like that too, certain that the Zulus loved them for their goodness and would reject the "outside agitators". They deluded themselves that the "kaffirs" would take their side. Like white Southerners who insisted that "our coloreds are happy. Just outside agitators riling them up." The same basic patterns.

There is no other minority in American history that had an entire ideology created to justify their oppression, an ideology as comprehensive as anti-semitism. There is no other minority that was the target of that level of concentrated evil. I know it offends you to look in the mirror and be told there is evil there but facing the truth is the only way to move forward.

I am just old enough to remember seeing "white" and "colored" drinking fountains as a boy and to have seen and experienced the turmoil of the 60's as a teen. The Cold War had very little to do with the end of Jim Crow, which instead perished from its utter injustice and lack of any basis in fact. I am sure that you were told otherwise, probably by teachers, but you can establish the truth of what I am saying by reading the newspapers of the era. Most of the attack on Jim Crow was against its injustice and folly, not that it was an impediment to Cold War propaganda.

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