Part IV: Racial Rights and Sex Rights

Sen. Barack Obama and Rev. Jeremiah Wright

Gov. Sarah Palin and Sen. Hilary Clinton

Some feminists called Brown v. Board of Education the “Negro’s second hour,” and ruefully observed that race rights had trumped women’s rights again. The U.S Senate had failed to approve the ERA with the required two-thirds majority the year before the 1954 Brown decision. Nineteen years would pass before ERA would be meaningfully reconsidered by both houses. Meanwhile, African Americas’ rising expectations were frustrated by the non-enforcement of the Supreme Court’s “all-deliberate-speed.”

Ten years after Brown v. Board came the third “Negro’s hour,” as Congress proceeded to enact the 1964 Civil Rights Act in a climate of ferocious racial confrontations south and north. For better and worse, most Americans took it for granted that, as W.E.B. Du Bois had famously predicted, the 20th-century’s insuperable problem remained the color-line. Civil Rights meant racial rights, sexual rights, only incidentally. Almost no one in a policy position that mattered remembered, if ever she knew, that by the time Du Bois died the previous year in Ghana, he had posited the problem of class as the equal of race. For Du Bois, civil rights absent the primacy of class analysis was doomed to a politics of identity rather than advanced by the economics of opportunity.

When Representative Howard Smith, courtly southern racist and chairman of the House Rules Committee, inserted the word “sex” into Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, his annoyed and amused colleagues (congresswomen Edith Green and Martha Griffiths excepted) moved on to more pressing considerations. Smith’s “mischievous, frivolous” maneuver did register ominously on the civil rights establishment. The NAACP, the National Urban League, and the National Council of Negro Women feared defeat of the bill and also shared organized labor and working women’s concerns.

Women – affluent white women – were not to be allowed to distract the nation from the serious business of black advancement. ERA feminists seemed to hear Frederick Douglass’s admonition repeated. Mainstream voices echoed Douglass when the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission (EEOC) timidly took seriously Title VII’s sexual nondiscrimination mandate. The arbitral New Republic demanded to know why “a mischievous joke perpetrated on the floor of the House [should] be treated by a responsible administrative body with this kind of seriousness?”

In the interim between Brown’s implementation and the wind down of the Great Society, the women’s movement caught the high winds of social change generated by the new black civil rights movement in its sails. The breaking of traditional molds, the rising decibel level of discourse in the agora and in the academy, the psychedelic aesthetics of personal realization and pharmacological liberation, the radicalizing of politics and validation of civil disobedience steadily reshaped gender and race. Moreover, all the people who mattered were under 30 [years of age]. It only somewhat exaggerates the importance of the experience to cite the tumultuous 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), as pivotal in the relations between the sexes and the races. The ideas and experiences that feminists took away from that extraordinary interracial group catharsis were indeed part of the grounding of American feminism’s so-called second wave.

The Freedom Summer brought together college-age black and white women as equals in a black-run organization for the first time in the history of the women’s movement. Kathleen Cleaver, Marian Wright Edelman, and Eleanor Holmes Norton, Anne Moody, Mary King, and Casey Hayden exemplified feminism’s future cadres of leading professionals, writers, academics, journalists, and social activists. The memoirs and monographs about the Freedom Summer document enough interracial heterosexual sex to have provoked an annoyed SNCC veteran’s protest that “They act like people had a movement so they could have sexual relations.”

The feminist position papers drafted by Mary King and Casey Hayden and argued at SNCC’s Waveland Center brought to a head simmering issues of black male sexism (viz., Stokely Carmichael’s infamous remark [at a 1964 SNCC staff meeting, that “The only position for women in SNCC is prone.”]; perceived black hostility to white; shared values of white and black women complicated by shared black males; and, above all, the institutionalized hypocrisy of gendered hierarchy in a movement pledged to the broadest possible inculcation of democracy.

Anne Moody and the women who came of age in Mississippi admiring Fannie Lou Hamer and reading Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique ended their Freedom Summer committed to the “fully equal partnership of the sexes” of the National Organization for Women (NOW) [founded] two years later.

C. Vann Woodward [Pulitzer Prize-winning historian whose work helped shape America’s perception of Southern racial attitudes] described the civil right euphoria of the sixties as a second Reconstruction. He worried that it might end like the first. But the reconstruction carried on (if with a diminishing euphoria) into the Nixon 1970s, and survived the Reagan 1980s and arrived, much maimed, in the Clinton 1990s.

The rights of women advanced pari-passus: The 1965 Voting Rights Act; the 1968 Fair Housing Act; affirmative action policies for minorities; for women, Roe v. Wade in 1973, one year after Congress finally committed the ERA to the states for ratification. Title VII for both. The feminist scholar Ruth Rosen entitled her valuable 2000 book, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America.

The civil rights bibliography is charged with similar titular exuberances about the transformation of American democracy by the black freedom struggle. With the reinstallation of the second Bush administration, however, it appeared that Woodward’s fears about the neutering, if not legislative and judicial, nullification, of the cornerstone achievements of civil rights and feminism were more than justified.

But fast forward four years and we find the great experiment in plutocratic populism and the crusade against a syllogism of terror are facing imminent repudiation. The United States may be entering another of its periodic cycles of progressive renewal in which the long struggles of the civil rights and feminist movements are reaching a historic climax headily exemplified by the presidential candidacies of a black man and woman. Three decades hence, with its projected nonwhite population majority, assertions about a post-racial and post-sexist America will surely have been empirically corroborated.

We shall know within a few days how correct many of us were to place our racial and feminist faith and contributions in an unprecedented presidential option. Not many weeks ago, the old spectre of black-white gender grievances stalked the political landscape. One could almost hear Elizabeth Stanton and Susan Anthony objecting to yet another “Negro hour,” and furious that old Frederick Douglass insists that they stand aside for a black male after so much selfless service to blacks. The body language and coded statements of the female opponent betrayed her agreement with the founders of the suffrage movement. Once again, gender trumped merit, the media and the blogs predicted a significant revolt of embittered Hillary supporters, supposedly hell-bent on revenge by voting for the GOP candidate.

Almost simultaneously, however, race threatened to trump both gender and merit when the male presidential candidate’s stentorian pastor [Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s minister of some 20 years] called down God’s wrath upon a nation of white racists and warmongers [in a post 9/11 sermon] to the unmitigated consternation of a shocked and repelled public. The bright vision of the post-racial republic presided over by a stellar person of color suddenly darkened in the wake of Wright’s Dionysian jeremiads. Whether or not, as Senator Obama’s erstwhile [former] pastor declaims, our 21st-century is to be crippled by the problem of Du Bois’s 20th-century will become much clearer in the aftermath of this historic election. Sarah Palin’s significance invites another lecture.

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