Converting historical narratives into general causal claims
Politics
This writing exercise aims to help you recognize the difference between and the relationship between narrative descriptions of specific episodes and general claims about recurrent political processes. Each of the following single paragraphs, drawn from different works of history, is a narrative description of how and why racist, anti-black authorities in various places in the South tried to reenforce white supremacy. Distinguish between those narratives that suggest that the intensity of reactionary white power varied from place to place and those that suggest uniformity.
For each of these six narratives, write one precise sentence in your own words which restates the author’s proposed explanation for white racist authorities’ behavior. In doing so, distinguish between what can be relatively similar explanations.
In a second sentence, restate this explanation as a general proposition which relates the author’s favored cause to the outcome we are all trying to understand through our Mississippi case studies (changing practices of racist enforcement across places and time) through a relationship that could be used to compare a larger number of cases. This proposition should apply to various places in Mississippi and to various years in the same place in the state, and perhaps even to other states. For this general proposition, use general concepts rather than place names or proper names. Such sentences should all take the form of:
__________________________ caused variation in white racist enforcement practices over time/in different places.
Finally and most importantly: What might have been the possible implications of each specific and general explanation of white supremacy for those who sought to challenge and defeat anti-black racism at the time or in the current day?
- In addition to heavy reliance on violence and economic reprisal, across the Delta the initial, almost instinctive, white reaction to black activism was often an attempt to reassert the rituals and stereotypes of the caste system. A white bank teller became enraged when black civil rights worker Sam Block tried to cash a check made out to “Mr. Sam Block.” The teller not only refused to cash his check but angrily scratched through the “Mr.,” muttering that anyone who would make such a check out had to be a “damned fool.” As black civil rights workers sat in an Indianola courtroom, they were sprayed with an aerosol insect bomb by a white man. . .
James Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth, Oxford: Oxford University Press, (1992), p. 237.
- “When the armored car of the Birmingham police rumbled into the spotlight, it was regarded as a grotesque but rare example of local police power run wild. In the past weeks the mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, has boasted of the armor he has accumulated for next summer. It includes “Thompson’s Tank,” a thirteen-thousand-pound armored battle wagon, carrying a task force of twelve men armed with shotguns, tear gas, and submachine guns. The mobile equipment also includes three troop lorries, two searchlight tanks and three giant trailer trucks, nearly five hundred men, plus a reserve pool of deputies, state troopers, civilian city employees and neighborhood citizen patrols. This local army awaits nonviolent demonstrators with undisguised hostility and the familiar trigger-happy eagerness for confrontation.
Martin Luther King Jr., “Hammer on Civil Rights,” The Nation, Mar. 9, 1964.
- It is true that the police have exercised a degree of discipline in handling the demonstrators. In this sense they have conducted themselves rather "nonviolently" in public. But for what purpose? To preserve the evil system of segregation. Over the past few years I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends. Perhaps Mr. Connor and his policemen have been rather nonviolent in public, as was Chief Pritchett in Albany, Georgia, but they have used the moral means of nonviolence to maintain the immoral end of racial injustice. As T. S. Eliot has said: "The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason."
Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” April 16, 1963.
- It is white power that makes the laws, and it is violent white power in the form of armed white cops that enforces those laws with guns and nightsticks. The vast majority of Negroes in this country live in these captive communities and must endure these conditions of oppression because, and only because, they are black and powerless. I do not suppose that at any point the men who control the power and resources of this country ever sat down and designed these black enclaves, and formally articulated the terms of their colonial and dependent status, as was done, for example, by the Apartheid government of South Africa. Yet, one cannot distinguish between one ghetto and another. As one moves from city to city it is as though some malignant racist planning-unit had done precisely this-designed each one from the same master blueprint. And indeed, if the ghetto had been formally and deliberately planned, instead of growing spontaneously and inevitably from the racist functioning of the various institutions that combine to make the society, it would be somehow less frightening. The situation would be less frightening because, if these ghettoes were the result of design and conspiracy, one could understand their similarity as being artificial and consciously imposed, rather than the result of identical patterns of white racism which repeat themselves in cities as distant as Boston and Birmingham.
Stokley Carmichael “Toward Black Liberation,” The Massachusetts Review, Autumn, 1966, p. 644.
- Delta legislators also led the way in engineering changes from district to at-large county supervisor’s elections and school board contests. Two separate bills required at-large school board elections in Coahoma, Leflore, and Washington counties. Both bills required that school board members own real estate worth five thousand dollars, a tidy sum when average wealth of Delta blacks was taken into account. The legislature also passed a bill making the office of school superintendent an appointive rather than elective one in ten counties, four of them in the Delta, allowing countywide referenda on the matter elsewhere.
James Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 237.
- During the first decade after World War II, some white southerners began to open their arms to a more egalitarian ethos as others continued to resist any pushes, however small, toward black civil rights. The Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education further polarized these two tendencies. Citizens’ Councils rose in massive resistance, and cowed into silence the small segment of white southerners that might have tolerated integration. Even when faced with the 1955 Montgomery boycott, the rising star of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, many whites still refused to believe that southern blacks desired civil rights or that they possessed the capacity to organize themselves into movements. The 1960 student sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, and Nashville, Tennessee, opened thousands of eyes, if few minds and hearts. Direct action protests provoked gruesome white violence, and some southern communities fractured in the face of such extreme bigotry.
Jason Sokol, There Goes my Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006, p. 10.
Daniel Kryder
Developed at Brandeis University through a grant from the Davis Educational Foundation