By: Andrew Gavin Marshall
NOTE:
The following is a brief sampling of some of the concepts, ideas, issues, and
events that are to be thoroughly researched and written about in two chapters
of The
People’s Book Project which will be funded through The People’s Grant, of which the
objective is to raise $1,600 from readers and supporters. If you find the
information in the following sampling of interest, please donate to the
People’s Book Project and help facilitate expanded research on these and other
related subjects into constructing two significant chapters for the book. For a
look at what other information will be included in these chapters, see the latest information on The People’s Grant.
Slavery
and the Social Construction of Race
Between 1619 and
1860, the American legal system, from that imposed by the British Empire to
that constructed following the American Revolution, “expanded and protected the
liberties of white Americans – while at the same time the legal process became
increasingly more harsh as to the masses of blacks, with a steady contraction
of their liberties.” This process marked the ‘social construction’ of race and
with it, racial superiority and inferiority, delegated to whites and blacks,
respectively.[1] Interesting to note was that between 1619 and the 1660s, the
American colonial legal system was “far more supportive for blacks; or, phrased
differently, the early legal process was less harsh.” Georgia’s original
charter, in fact, had three prohibitions: no alcohol, no free land titles, “and
no Negro slaves.” In Virginia, as late as 1672 and 1673, there were legal
records of some slaves “serving limited terms as indentured servants rather
than being sentenced to the eternity of slavery.”[2]
The colonies in the
Americas required a massive labour force, “Between 1607 and 1783, more than
350,000 ‘white’ bond-labourers arrived in the British colonies.”[3] The
Americas had both un-free blacks and whites, with blacks being a minority, yet
they “exercised basic rights in law.”[4] Problems arrived in the form of elites
trying to control the labour class. Slaves were made up of Indian, black and
white labourers; yet, problems arose with this “mixed” population of un-free
labour. The problem with Indian labourers was that they knew the land and could
escape to “undiscovered” territory, and enslavement would often instigate
rebellions and war:
The social costs of trying
to discipline un-free native labour had proved too high. Natives would
eventually be genocidally eliminated, once population settlement and military
power made victory more or less certain; for the time being, however, different
sources of bond labour had to be found.[5]
Between 1607 and
1682, more than 90,000 European immigrants, “three-quarters of them chattel
bond-labourers, were brought to Virginia and Maryland.” Following the
“establishment of the Royal African Company in 1672, a steady supply of African
slaves was secured.” Problems became paramount, however, as the lower classes
tended to be very rebellious, which consisted of “an amalgam of indentured
servants and slaves, of poor whites and blacks, of landless freemen and
debtors.” The lower classes were united in opposition to the elites oppressing
them, regardless of background.[6]
Bacon’s Rebellion
of 1676 was of particular note, as bond-labourers, black and white, rebelled
against the local elites and “demanded freedom from chattel servitude.” For the
colonialists, “[s]uch images of a joint uprising of black and white, slave and bondsman,
proved traumatic. In the face of a united rebellion of the lower orders, the
planter bourgeoisie understood that their entire system of colonial
exploitation and privilege was at risk.”[7]
In response to this
threat, the landed elite “relaxed the servitude of white labourers, intensified
the bonds of black slavery, and introduced a new regime of racial oppression.
In doing so, they effectively created the white race – and with it white
supremacy.”[8] Thus, “the conditions of white and black servants began to
diverge considerably after 1660.” Following this, legislation would separate
white and black slavery, prevent “mixed” marriages, and seek to prevent the
procreation of “mixed-race” children. Whereas before 1660, many black slaves
were not indentured for life, this changed as colonial law increasingly
“imposed lifetime bondage for black servants – and, especially significant, the
curse of lifetime servitude for their offspring.”[9]
A central feature
of the social construction of this racial divide was “the denial of the right
to vote,” as most Anglo-American colonies previously allowed free blacks to
vote, but this slowly changed throughout the colonies. The ruling class of
America was essentially “inventing race.” Thus, “[f]reedom was increasingly identified
with race, not class.”[10]
The
‘Reconstruction’ of Slavery in Post-Civil War America
Important to note has been the ways in which slaves were used
as the main labour force, and thus blacks were identified and being sustained
as a lower-class labour force. Following the Civil War, abolition of slavery
and the Reconstruction Period, there were coordinated moves – a ‘compact’ –
between the North and South in the United States, to devise a way of keeping
blacks as a submissive labour force, and one which was confined to a new form
of slavery: penal slavery. Thus, we see emerging in the 1870s and into the 20thcentury, a rapid expansion of prisons, and with
that, of southern penal systems using prisoners as forced labour. This new
legal system, which was “far less rigid than slavery,” had been referred to as
“involuntary servitude,” and, wrote one scholar, “was a fluid, flexible affair
which alternated between free and forced labor in time to the rhythm of the
southern labor market.”[11]
A famous American botanist and agricultural editor of the Weekly News and Courier wrote in 1865 that, “There must… be stringent laws to
control the negroes, & require them to fulfill their contracts of labour on
the farms.” Southern legislatures, then, began to enact what were referred to
as Black Codes, “designed to preserve white hegemony.”[12] The 12-year period
following the end of the Civil War, known as the ‘Reconstruction,’ saw the
continued struggle of newly-freed blacks to attempt to break free from being
“forced back under the political and economic domination of the large
landowners,” and to do so, they were demanding land ownership rights to the
tune of “40 acres and a mule.” This was, of course, unacceptable to vested
interests. While the Republic Party had freed the slaves, the main core of the
Party had become dominated by Northern wealthy interests, and “were unwilling
to press for thoroughgoing reform, and by 1877 had become convinced that their
interests were better served by an alliance with Southern white conservatives
than the largely illiterate and destitute ex-slave population.” In the North at
this time, the captains of industry and kings of capital (the bankers and
industrialists) were waging a continued war against organized and increasingly
radicalized labour. Thus, there was very little interest in seeking to
enfranchise black labour in the South. As the New York Times suggested, the demands for “40 acres and a mule” hit
at “the fundamental relation of industry to capital,” and “strikes at the root of
all property rights in both sections. It concerns Massachusetts quite as much
as Mississippi.”[13]
The legal system
was used to essentially criminalize black life, without making specific
references to race, laws that were passed specifically targeted blacks in
attempting to limit their mobility, the price of their labour, and to make
several aspects of typical black southern life to be deemed “criminal.” This
process was paralleled in South Africa in the construction of the apartheid
system. As one historian wrote:
Prior to the 1860s,
neither the South nor South Africa had an extensive history of large-scale
imprisonment or of hiring out prison labour to private contractors. Before the
Civil War, slave-owners had punished their own slaves. African Americans
accounted for less than 1 per cent of Alabama’s pre-war prison population; the
bulk of the 200-300 inmates of the first penitentiary built in 1841 comprised,
as in northern prisons, mostly of newly-arrived European immigrants.[14]
Many of the South’s
prisons were destroyed during the Civil War, and thus, as the Black Codes were
subsequently enacted, legislation was increasingly passed which aimed to
facilitate the leasing of convicts to private contractors, and as a result,
there was little need to rebuild the prison infrastructure; instead, have
prisoners build the new infrastructure of an industrializing South, with the
convict population from the 1870s onward largely being leased to farmers and
railroad contractors, which saved state revenues from building new prisons as
well as procuring revenue. In 1874, the governor of Alabama had complained
about spending $100,000 on convicts, and within two years of leasing out
Alabama’s inmates to private contractors, he boasted of a $15,000 profit. Thus,
prisons would never “be anything but a source of immense revenue to the state.”
Largely the same process was undertaken in South Africa to secure labour for
the diamond mines run by the De Beers Company.[15] As William Worger wrote of
the dual development of the American South and South African convict labour
systems:
[C]apitalists in both
areas establishing new industries and constrained by expensive capital, high
fixed costs for plant and operations, and competitive struggles for market
share, viewed convict labour as essential to the introduction of machine
production, the defeat of organized labour, and the overall cheapening of the
costs of production… [I]n both cases the state, when viewed in its local and
regional rather than national and metropolitan manifestations, enthusiastically
supported the leasing of convicts to private employers… because of the enormous
financial benefits to their administrations of selling prison labour… and
because imprisonment with hard labour in industrial enterprises offered a means
to ‘discipline’ (in the discourse of the South) and to ‘civilise’ (in that of
British colonialism) African Americans and Africans convicted on the basis of
their race for acts – such as petty theft and burglary… that would not have
resulted in lengthy terms of incarceration for whites… [In both cases] convict
labour was used to divide and defeat organized labour and to enable employers
to segregate the workplace on the basis of race.[16]
Migration,
Housing, and Organizing Ghettos
It was no
coincidence that each of these convict labour systems emerged in the context
and circumstances of the development of Jim Crow segregation laws in the South
and official apartheid in South Africa. At the same time as this was taking
place in the South, massive migration of blacks from the South to the North
began, concurrently with a period of radical labour militancy and class crisis.
As such, this era saw the development of the ghettoes in major Northern cities
“as a space of containment in urban areas.” The harsh legal racism,
segregation, and cultural hatred of blacks in the South also spurred the
migration to Northern cities. Between 1882 and 1968, there were 4,723 reported
lynchings of African Americans, 90% of which took place in the Deep South.
Between 1910 and 1960, roughly 5 million African Americans migrated to the
North, Midwest, and Northeast. As Eduardo Mendieta wrote:
It is significant that
the process of northern urbanization takes place in tandem with the process of
racial gentrification. This racial gentrification is overseen by the state
itself through its housing policies. These policies ensure that the poor and
colored are concentrated in the dilapidated and poorly serviced urban centers
while wealthy whites… are granted the license and funding to flee to the
suburbs. In other words, the development of the ghetto has to be seen in tandem
with the suburbanization of the US… An overview of the different agencies and
acts used by Congress to regulate housing policies and availability reveals
that the government conspired to segregate through its loaning practices, and
actually participated in the very act of destroying housing that was and could
have been available to African Americans and poor people in the inner
cities.[17]
In fact, amazingly,
“the government [had] destroyed more low-incoming housing than it actually
built.” This process had extended right into the post-World War II period.
Between 1960 and 1977, “as the number of whites living in suburbs increased by
22 million… the inner-city African-American population grew by 6 million.”
Kenneth T. Jackson wrote, “American housing policy was not only devoid of
social objectives, but instead helped establish the basis for social
inequities. Uncle Sam was not impartial, but instead contributed to the general
disbenefit of the cities and to the general prosperity of the suburbs.”[18]
Most American ghettos first came into existence just as
economic inequalities were reaching “new heights” in the 1920s in the midst of
the long-worn battle between industrialists and organized labour. At this time,
racial segregation was increasingly a global phenomenon, when imperial and
national states were implementing social and geographical forms of segregation
“by equating urban problems such as ‘vice’, crime, disease and social unrest
with blacks and other people of color and suggesting urban division as a means
to solve these problems.” As Carl H. Nightingale wrote in the Journal of Urban History:
In the United States,
this global “racial urbanism” informed the actions of the white homeowners,
realtors, and banks that transformed an urban landscape marked by scattered
minority-black enclaves into one of the large-scale segregated majority-black
communities we know as ghettos. These first ghettos were also marked by the founding
of separate black-run institutions that served their residents.[19]
The second phase of
ghettoization in the United States occurred with the Great Depression, New
Deal, and World War II-era, a time in which there was a continued growth of
northward migration of black Americans to the industrial cities. In this
context, the New Deal’s Home Owner’s Loan Corporation and the Federal Housing
Administration “instituted highly discriminatory housing policies… [which] were
aggravated by similarly racially biased urban renewal, public housing, and
transportation policies, which not only solidified the boundaries of ghettos
but also pushed them outward from downtown.”[20]
The third major
phase of ghetto reform came about as a result of the Civil Rights Movement.
Working with a major Civil Rights organization, the Congress of Racial Equality
(CORE), the Ford Foundation sought to “organize the ghetto” through a program
aimed at “making working-class blacks a decipherable and controllable
constituency,” and thus:
[The Ford] foundation
sought black leaders who could be brought into the establishment fold and could
engineer orderly change in the ghetto. Having found a model to control the
black community by containing it… the Ford Foundation would use its experience with
CORE in Cleveland as a base to complete its vision for African Americans in a
post-civil rights America.[21]
A national housing
program, organized around new public-private partnerships which would benefit
the elite class, was developed to create housing for the poor. The development
of this plan – the Rockefeller Program – was the most controversial of the
initiatives under the 1968 housing legislation, which placed “little emphasis
on expanding homeownership opportunities,” and instead, stressed “the importance
of involving private enterprises in the rebuilding of cities and make use of
tax incentives to encourage such involvement.” The interesting features of the
Rockefeller Program, implemented under New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller,
were that it contemplated “that government will sponsor, develop, construct,
and possibly manage the housing project,” and while the “actual construction
work will be done by private firms as contractors… it is government which is to
rebuild the slums.” Thus, the “incentives to enlist the active involvement of
the private sector are not directly related to the task of rebuilding the
slums, except insofar as they enable private enterprise to participate in the
profits which will accrue.”[22]
The Rockefeller
Foundation itself had a significant impact upon the changing focus of urban
design. As Peter L. Laurence wrote, “between 1955 and 1965, the Rockefeller
Foundation research programme for Urban Design Studies contributed
significantly to post-war urban theory and to the emergence of the new
discipline of urban design out of the overlapping interests of the fields of
architecture, city planning and landscape design.”[23] Rockefeller influence on
city planning was thereafter established and institutionalized through the formation
of the fields of urban studies and city planning.
Educating
Africans to be “Junior Partners in the Firm”
In the first half of the 20th century, the
Rockefeller Foundation and Carnegie Corporation undertook joint projects aimed
at constructing an education system for black Americans in the South as well as
for black Africans in several British colonies. In 1911, the Phelps-Stokes Fund
was chartered with the purpose of managing “the education of Negroes both in
Africa and the United States.” This restrictive educational system for black
Americans had already been institutionalized, beginning with the
‘philanthropic’ endeavours of Wall Street bankers and northern industrialists
and capitalists at several conferences in 1898. The education was constructed
on the basis that, as one conference participant stated, “the white people are
to be the leaders, to take the initiative, to have direct control in all
matters pertaining to civilization and the highest interest of our beloved
land. History demonstrates that the Caucasian will rule, and he ought to rule.”
As one conference organizer stated:
Time has proven that
[the ‘negro’] is best fitted to perform the heavy labor in the Southern states…
He will willingly fill the more menial positions, and do the heavy work, at
less wages, than the American white man or any foreign race… This will permit the
Southern white laborer to perform the more expert labor, and to leave the
fields, the mines, and the simple trades for the negro.[24]
The conferences
resulted in what became known as the ‘Tuskegee educational philosophy,’ which
was decided upon by 1901. Three major decisions were taken at the conferences.
The first major decision was that “it was necessary that provision be made to
train a Negro leadership cadre”:
For this purpose,
then, it was concluded that certain Negro colleges would be strengthened to
educate a strong professional class – doctors, lawyers, ministers – which would
be responsible for raising the general physical and moral level of the race in
the segregated black communities… [Second], it was decided that the Negro had
been educated away from his natural environment and that his education should
concern only those fields available to him. This key decision marked the
formulation of the concept of a special Negro education. Third, it was decided
that this special education – vocational and agricultural in focus – of the
Negro had to be directed toward increasing the labor value of his race, a labor
value which, not surprisingly, would see the white capitalist as chief
beneficiary.[25]
Thus, in 1901 the
fourth conference on the issue established the Southern Education Board. The
following year, John D. Rockefeller established the General Education Board (a
precursor to the Rockefeller Foundation), which “alleviated any financial
concerns which the planners of southern Negro education might have
experienced.”[26] The Rockefeller philanthropy had extensive influence on
implementing the ‘Tuskegee educational philosophy,’ particularly through the
Southern Education Board, of which it not only helped finance, but had a shared
leadership. Eleven members of the Southern Education Board were also members of
Rockefeller’s General Education Board. With time, other funds and
philanthropies became involved, such as the Jeanes Fund, the Slater Fund, and
eventually the Phelps-Stokes Fund. Again, there was significant overlap between
these organizations. The first president of the Jeanes Fund was James H.
Dillard, a member of the Southern Education Board, an agent of the Slater Fund,
and a member of Rockefeller’s General Education Board. In 1923, Dillard became
a trustee of the Phelps-Stokes Fund. The Jeanes Fund, headed by Dillard,
instituted the concept of the ‘Jeanes teacher’:
a local Negro who
could make contact in the rural communities as no one else could and who could
adapt the school curriculum to the conditions of these communities. Hygiene,
home economics, and industrial and agricultural training were to form the
backbone of the curriculum for Jeanes rural schools. In 1925, the Jeanes school
concept was transferred to Kenya, largely owing to the vigorous advocacy for
such a transplantation by representatives of the Phelps-Stokes Fund.[27]
The Tuskegee/Phelps-Stokes educational philosophy quickly
garnered the attention of British missionary educators in Africa. Two
influential British missionary educators visited the Tuskegee Institute in
1912, with the idea in mind that they could adapt this educational philosophy
to Britain’s colonies in Africa. One of these missionaries was J.H. Oldham,
former secretary of the World Missionary Conference, and editor of the International Review of Missions, “the quasi-official journal of the Protestant
missionary societies in Great Britain from its inception in 1912.” Having
become well-acquainted with the American philanthropists involved in
organization black education, Oldham introduced Thomas Jesse Jones to British
colonial officials in charge of educational policy in Africa, and in 1924,
“Oldham became the Phelps-Stokes Fund’s representative in the United Kingdom
and intensified his vigorous lobbying efforts to have Phelps-Stokes
Fund/Tuskegee concept incorporated into official mission and colonial
educational policy.”[28]
As Kenya’s colonial
secretary stated, the educational philosophy would ensure “an intelligent,
cheerful, self-respecting, and generally docile and willing-to-learn African
native.” In 1925, Jones successfully negotiated for financial aid from the
Carnegie Corporation to finance the establishment of a Jeanes training school
in Kenya. The funding from Carnegie included direct funding for the school, as
well as facilitating white educators from Africa to come to the U.S. to
“investigate” the Southern educational system, as well as implementing
intelligence tests for Africans (just as the major philanthropies had been
propagating around the United States as part of their support for eugenics
programs). Jones also turned to other major foundations for support, such as
Rockefeller’s International Education Board (which had Anson Phelps-Stokes as a
trustee), as well as the Laura Spellman Rockefeller Memorial, which all
subsequently provided major grants to establish several schools across
Africa.[29]
Jones and the major
foundations further supported the development of black education in South
Africa, helping cement the apartheid system that was being developed. As Jones
himself stated, the education of black South Africans in the Tuskegee
philosophy can maintain their subordination to the white ruling class, and keep
them as “junior partners in the firm.”[30]
Managing
the Poor through Social Welfare
Another major area
of concern in these chapters is on the ‘moral construction’ of the poor, going
beyond (but not ignoring) the ways in which the poor are ‘created’ and
‘maintained’ as a social group (i.e., noting the political, economic, and
social policies and institutions that create and sustain poverty as a powerful
social force), but also in looking at how the poor are, as a group, “regulated”
and how society “morally constructs” views and perceptions of the poor, so that
they are vilified, demonized, and politicized as “deviants.”
The origins of
‘welfare policies’ and other forms of ‘social welfare’ emerged several hundred
years ago as a response to the inability of the economic system to benefit the
masses of society, and thus, to prevent – often in the midst of an economic
crisis – mass social unrest, rebellion, or potentially, revolution, social
welfare policies were implemented as a means of social control: to alleviate
some of the tensions from the gross systemic inequalities, and secondly, and
often overlooked, as a means of regulating the behaviour, “work ethic” and
prospects of the poor; to maintain them as a cheap labour force. This is done
through the methods in which social welfare is provided: the process of
applying for social services and welfare, the conditions required to be
applicable, the demands which must be met by the applicant as determined by the
state, the state intervention in the family and personal life of recipients
(often through social workers), and other means of both expanding and detracting
the amount of people on welfare as a means to sustain the labour force
according to the demands of industry. As such, it is important to analyze the
origins of “social work” as a means of “social control” and “managing the
poor.”
Originating in the 16th century, relief giving
to the poor began to be transferred from the private realm to the state. In
Britain, the poor had to be registered and begging had to be authorized, and
the Elizabethan Poor Laws, passed in 1572, “established a ‘poor rate’ tax and
provided for secular control of the poor by justices of the peace, so-called
overseers of the poor.” The poor were separated into three categories: “a) the
poor by impotency, b) the poor by casualty, and c) the thriftless poor.” The
third category, “thriftless poor,” were viewed as being responsible for their
own condition, and thus had to “work for relief.” In the 18th century,
workhouses began to emerge as a “policy innovation” to establish “worth” among
the poor, to make them productive to the industrial class through contracting
cheap labour in return for minor poverty relief. In the 19th century,
the poorhouse “had become the official last resort for the poor.”[31]
The poorhouse and workhouse were often examined in the works
of Charles Dickens. One is often reminded of the character Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol,
when approached by collectors seeking donations for poor relief, with the
collector stating, “At this festive time of year, Mr. Scrooge, it is more than
usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the poor and
destitute.” To which Scrooge replied, “Are there no prisons?”
“Plenty of prisons.”
“And the union workhouses – are they
still in operation?”
“They are. I wish I could say they
were not.”
“The Treadmill and the Poor Law are
in full vigour, then?”
“Both very busy, sir.”
“Oh, from what you said at first I
was afraid that something had happened to stop them in their useful course. I’m
very glad to hear it.”
Refusing to donate, Scrooge stated, “I
help to support the establishments I have mentioned — they cost enough; and
those who are badly off must go there.”
“Many can’t go there; and many would
rather die.”
Scrooge replied, “If they would
rather die… they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
This scene
reflected the ideology and philosophy of elites in that era, and indeed, up
until present day. The poorhouses of that era were terrible, where “conditions
were so awful, the act of relief itself became the test of necessity.” Much
like the stigma of welfare in today’s context, “[t]hose who presented
themselves to the poorhouse were casting themselves outside of moral society,”
as entrance into that situation “symbolized and made painfully concrete a loss
of social status, citizenship, and even the right to one’s own labor and
physical freedom.” The New Deal following the Great Depression in the 1930s
reaffirmed, with its expanded welfare and social services, the stipulation that
relief must only be in exchange for work and labour. This represents a “moral
construction” of poverty and “the poor,” because they are deemed as being
required to work for relief, as in, they are undeserving of relief without
conditions, regardless of their circumstances. The “stigma” of poverty and welfare
are such that the poor are viewed as generally undeserving of anything, of
being the cause of their own poverty, and thus, if they want/need relief, they
had better work for it. It was through working and labour that the poor, then,
were able to provide a “social worth” in return for “poor relief.” It is thus
no coincidence that social security and unemployment insurance were “restricted
to individuals classified by policy as workers, that is, individuals with a
relatively prolonged and steady formal work history.” As a result, this led to
the exclusion of “agricultural and domestic workers as well as those in
marginal jobs who moved in and out of work,” which, not coincidentally,
included a significant portion of the black population in the United States.[32]
With the New Deal, the state in America moved into the realm
of activity previously the focus of the philanthropic foundation. In fact,
these private foundations were pivotal in the formation of the New Deal. As
Barry Karl and Stanley Katz noted, “Franklin Roosevelt preferred to conceal the
fact that so many of his major advisers on policy and some of his major
programmes in social reform were the result of support by one of more of the
private foundations,” particularly through the Rockefeller Foundation and the
Social Science Research Council, funded by the Rockefeller and Carnegie
foundations.[33] The support from such foundations, which represent the most
elite interests within society and the capitalist class itself, founded and run
by the wealthiest and most powerful bankers and industrialists of the era,
represented an elite fear generated by the mass social unrest of the era
brought on by the Great Depression, which was created by that very same class.
Thus, social security and the New Deal were a means of securing social
control.[34] The New Deal, however, also had a profoundly negative impact upon
the “race question” in the United States, which broadly affected the black
community. As Christopher G. Wye wrote in the Journal
of American History:
[T]he New Deal public
housing and emergency work programs played an important part in alleviating the
problems generated by the Depression, [but] they also contributed to the
preservation of perhaps the two salient components which combine to produce a
caste-like Negro social structure – residential segregation and a distinctly
racial occupational pattern.[35]
Civil
Rights: From “Black Power” to “Black Capitalism”
The major
foundations – Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller – were also heavily involved in
the Civil Rights movement, but with specific aims of social control. In the
1950s, the Ford Foundation began taking an interest in the Civil Rights
movement, and after convening a study on how to “improve race relations,” the
Ford Foundation began giving grants to black colleges “to improve the quality
of their educational offerings.”[36] By 1966, the Civil Rights movement was one
of the major areas of Ford Foundation funding. Against the backdrop of the
summer of 1966 in which there were 43 “urban disorders” (riots in ghettos),
which had been “precipitated by confrontations between blacks and the police,”
the Ford Foundation announced that it would “direct significant resources to
the social justice area.” Among the aims of the Foundation were: “to improve
leadership and programming within minority organizations; to explore approaches
to better race relations; to support policy-oriented research on race and
poverty; to promote housing integration; and to increase the availability of
legal resources through support of litigating organizations and minority law
students.”[37]
The Ford Foundation
also sponsored the Grey Areas program in the early 1960s, which evolved into
President Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” as a program for “urban renewal,” but
was, in fact, concerned with issues arising out of poor people’s (and
particularly poor people of colour’s) resistance to major urban growth projects
undertaken by a coalition of corporations and corporatist labour unions
following World War II. As Roger Friedland wrote:
Political challenge by
the poor, and especially the nonwhite poor, threatened the dominance of the
corporations and labor unions and the growth policies they pursued. It was the
poorest neighborhoods which were displaced by urban renewal and highway
construction, whose housing stock was depleted by clearance, whose employment
opportunities were often reduced both by the expansion of office employment
stimulated by central business district growth and by restrictive unionization
on large construction projects and municipal jobs, and whose services were
constrained by the enormous fiscal costs of the growth programs.[38]
It was in this
context that the Ford Foundation established programs aimed at ameliorating the
antagonisms within the impoverished communities, not through structural or
systemic change of the causes of poverty, but through organization,
institutionalization, and legalistic reform programs, thus leading to the
government’s “War on Poverty.” The same approach was taken in regards to the
Civil Rights movement.
There was a
transformation between 1966 and 1967 of the notion of ‘black power’, which was
increasingly viewed by elites and ‘authorities’, such as J. Edgar Hoover of the
FBI, as “the beginning of a true black revolution.” Many advocates of ‘black
power’ saw it as the beginnings of a revolt against “white western imperialist”
America.[39] The Civil Rights movement was originally “launched by indigenous
leadership and primarily mobilized the southern black community.” Thus, it was
essential for large foundation funding of the movement, to effectively control
its direction and impetus. This “elite involvement would seem to occur only as
a response to the threat posed by the generation of a mass-based social
movement.” The major foundations “supported the moderate civil rights
organizations in response to the ‘radical flank’ threat of the militants, while
non-elites (churches, unions and small individual donors) spread their support
evenly.”[40]
Elite patronage of
the Civil Rights movement “diverted leaders from indigenous organizing and
exacerbated inter-organizational rivalries, thereby promoting movement
decay.”[41] Foundation funding for civil rights did not become significant
until 1961-62, five years after the Birmingham bus boycott, and the peak of foundation
support for civil rights was in 1972-73, four to five years after the
assassination of King.[42] This indicated that foundation grants to civil
rights were ‘reactive’, in that they were designed in response to changes in
the movement itself, implying that foundation patronage was aimed at social
control. Further, most grants went to professionalized social movement
organizations (SMOs) and in particular, the NAACP. While the professional SMOs
initiated only 14% of movement actions, they accounted for 57% of foundation
grants, while the classical SMOs, having carried out roughly 36% of movement
actions, received roughly 32% of foundation grants. This disparity grew with
time, so that by the 1970s, the classical SMOs garnered 25% of grants and the
professional SMOs received nearly 70% of grants. Principally, the NAACP and the
NAACP Legal Defense Fund were the most endowed with foundation support.[43]
Many of the foundations subsequently became “centrally involved in the
formulation of national social policy and responded to elite concerns about the
riots.”[44]
It became clear
that the older, established and moderate organizations received the most
outside funding, such as the National Urban League, the NAACP and the Legal
Defense and Educational Fund.[45] As the black struggles of the 1960s
increasingly grew militant and activist-oriented in the latter half of the
1960s, “foundation contributions became major sources of income for the
National Urban League, the Southern Regional Council, and the Legal Defense and
Educational Fund.”[46] The attempt was to promote reform instead of losing
their vested powers and interests in the face of a growing revolution.
The NAACP and the
National Urban League represent the more moderate civil rights organizations,
as they were also the oldest, with membership primarily made up of middle class
African Americans, leading to many, including King himself, to suggest they
were disconnected from the reality or in representing poor blacks in
America.[47] The radicalization of the black protest movement led to the
emergence of challenges to the NAACP and Urban League in being the ‘leaders’ in
civil rights, as new organizations emerged which represented a broader array of
the black population. Among them were the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE),
the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which Martin Luther King led.
Foundations increased funding for all of these organizations, but as activism
and militancy accelerated in the latter half of the 1960s, the funding declined
for the more radical, militant and activist organizations and increased
dramatically for the established and moderate organizations. This trend
continued going into the 1970s.
In 1967, Martin Luther
King’s SCLC received $230,000 from the Ford Foundation, yet after his
assassination, the organization received no more funding and virtually fell to
pieces. That same year, the Ford Foundation gave the NAACP $300,000, and gave
the Urban League $585,000. The Rockefeller Foundation granted the League
$650,000, with the Carnegie Corporation coming in with $200,000. The Ford
Foundation also gave the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) $175,000 in
1967.[48]
In 1968, with the
SCLC out of the picture, Ford increased funding for CORE to $300,000, increased
grants to the NAACP to $378,000, and gave the Urban League a monumental grant
of $1,480,000. The same year, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie
Corporation gave the NAACP $500,000 and $200,000 respectively. Clearly, the
foundations were supporting the older established and moderate organizations
over the new, young and activist/radical organizations. For the following year,
1969, CORE received no more grants from foundations, while the Ford, Rockefeller
and Carnegie foundations increased their grants to the NAACP and the Urban
League. In 1974, the NAACP received grants of $950,000 from the Ford
Foundation, $250,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation, and $200,000 from the
Carnegie Corporation. The Urban League received grants of $2,350,000 from the
Ford Foundation and $350,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation.[49] The strategic
use of foundation funding helped undermine and outmaneuver the radical and
militant civil rights organizations, while strengthening and institutionalizing
the reform-oriented organizations.
This co-optation of
the civil rights movement was so vital to these elite interests for the
principle reason of the movement taking its natural course, out of an ethnic or
race-based focus and into a class and global social focus. A. Philip Randolph,
a civil rights leader, spoke in 1963 at an ALF-CIO convention at which he
stated, “The Negro’s protest today is but the first rumbling of the
‘under-class.’ As the Negro has taken to the streets, so will the unemployed of
all races take to the streets.”[50] The aim of foundation funding for the Civil
Rights movement was to direct it from a potentially revolutionary position –
that of ‘Black Power’ – and transform it into a reformist and legalistic movement,
ostensibly to establish “Black Capitalism.” Thus, instead of changing the
systemic and institutional structures of society which had created racism,
segregation, and exploitation, the “success” of the Civil Rights movement
(apart from the very real achievements of securing basic civil rights for black
citizens) was seen by elites as the ability of blacks to rise within the
institutional and hierarchical system which dominated society, not to challenge
or change it fundamentally.
The
“Excess of Democracy”
In the 1970s, elite
intellectual discussion was dominated by what was referred to as “democratic
overload,” or what the Trilateral Commission referred to in a report of the
same title as, “The Crisis of Democracy.” One of the principal authors of this
1975 report was Samuel Huntington, who wrote that the 1960s saw a surge in
democracy in America, with an upswing in citizen participation, often “in the
form of marches, demonstrations, protest movements, and ‘cause’
organizations.”[51] Further, “the 1960s also saw a reassertion of the primacy
of equality as a goal in social, economic, and political life.”[52] Of course,
for Huntington and the Trilateral Commission, which was founded by Huntington’s
friend, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and banker David Rockefeller, the idea of
“equality as a goal in social, economic, and political life” is a terrible and
frightening prospect. Huntington analyzed how as part of this “democratic
surge,” statistics showed that throughout the 1960s and into the early 1970s,
there was a dramatic increase in the percentage of people who felt the United
States was spending too much on defense (from 18% in 1960 to 52% in 1969,
largely due to the Vietnam War).[53]
Huntington wrote
that the “essence of the democratic surge of the 1960s was a general challenge
to existing systems of authority, public and private,” and that, “People no
longer felt the same compulsion to obey those whom they had previously
considered superior to themselves in age, rank, status, expertise, character,
or talents.” He explained that in the 1960s, “hierarchy, expertise, and wealth”
had come “under heavy attack.”[54] He stated that the three key issues which
were central to the increased political participation in the 1960s were:
social issues, such as
use of drugs, civil liberties, and the role of women; racial issues, involving
integration, busing, government aid to minority groups, and urban riots;
military issues, involving primarily, of course, the war in Vietnam but also
the draft, military spending, military aid programs, and the role of the
military-industrial complex more generally.[55]
Huntington
presented these issues, essentially, as the “crisis of democracy,” in that they
increased distrust with the government and authority, that they led to social
and ideological polarization, and ultimately, to a “decline in the authority,
status, influence, and effectiveness of the presidency.”[56] Huntington
concluded that many problems of governance in the United States stem from an
“excess of democracy,” and that, “the effective operation of a democratic
political system usually requires some measure of apathy and noninvolvement on
the part of some individuals and groups.” Huntington explained that society has
always had “marginal groups” which do not participate in politics, and while
acknowledging that the existence of “marginality on the part of some groups is
inherently undemocratic,” it has also “enabled democracy to function
effectively.” Huntington identifies “the blacks” as one such group that had
become politically active, posing a “danger of overloading the political system
with demands.”[57]
Huntington, in his
conclusion, stated that the vulnerability of democracy, essentially the ‘crisis
of democracy,’ comes “from the internal dynamics of democracy itself in a highly
educated, mobilized, and participant society,” and that what is needed is “a
more balanced existence” in which there are “desirable limits to the indefinite
extension of political democracy.”[58] Summed up, the Trilateral Commission
Task Force Report essentially explained that the “Crisis of Democracy” is that
there is too much of it, and so the ‘solution’ to the crisis, is to have less
democracy and more ‘authority’.
To have “less
democracy,” however, required careful and strategic moves and considerations.
Primarily, the means through which this objective would be reached was through
the disciplinary measures of the “free market” and “regulation of the poor.”
This led to the neoliberal era, where this program of “reducing democracy” took
place not only in the United States, but on a global scale. The disciplinary
means undertaken in the ‘Third World’ nations were brought on by the 1980s debt
crisis, and the World Bank and IMF “structural adjustment programs” which
invariably expanded poverty, debt, and supported ruthless dictatorships which
suppressed their own populations. This era also saw the “globalization of the
ghetto” with the rapid development of urban slums around the world, to the
point where over one billion people today live in slums. In the United States,
the middle classes began to be mired in debt, particular the expansion of
student debt, which served as a disciplinary feature, so that students were no
longer activists or mobilized, but simply had to graduate and get jobs to pay
off their debts.
A 1971 memo written
by a representative of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce reflected the fear inherent
in the Trilateral Commission report of a few years later at the problems posed
to elite interests by the “excess of democracy.” It referred to these “excesses”
as a “broad attack” on the American economic system. The memo noted that, “the
assault on the enterprise system is broadly based and consistently pursued. It
is gaining momentum and converts.” While noting that sources of the attack
include leftists and revolutionaries, it also acknowledged that the “attack”
was being joined “from perfectly respectable elements of society: from the
college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals,
the arts and sciences, and from politicians.” The author of the memo stated
that, “If our system is to survive, top [corporate] management must be equally
concerned with protecting and preserving the system itself.” It went on:
But independent and
uncoordinated activity by individual corporations, as important as this is,
will not be sufficient. Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range
planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period
of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in
the political power available only through united action and national
organizations.[59]
The memo then went
on to articulate a major program of “counter attack” with an emphasis on
changing the educational system, the media, and bringing the state and courts
more directly into the business community’s orbit. This era saw the emergence
of the major right-wing think tanks, and the expanded influence of business
leaders in the media, government, and universities, crowned with the
Reagan-Thatcher era of neoliberalism: privatization, deregulation,
debt-expansion, impoverishment, and punishment.
Punishing
the Poor
In regards to the
black population, who created quite a stir among the American elites in the
1960s and into the 1970s, the response from the elite sector was similar as to
what it was during the Reconstruction period following the Civil War: mass
incarceration. Reagan’s “war on drugs” led to a rapid expansion of legislation
purportedly aimed to reduce the problems of the illicit drug trade in the
United States (while the Reagan administration secretly supported the drug
trade in covert operations abroad, such as in Nicaragua, the Iran-Contra
Scandal, etc.).
The growth of the prison population in the United States from
1975 onward was marked simultaneously by a decline in welfare recipients. In
fact, the largest prison systems were established in states with the weaker
welfare systems. Between 1980 and 2000, “the number of people incarcerated in
the United States increased by 300 percent, from 500,000 to nearly 2 million.”
The parole and probation population, by 2000, included 3.8 million people, and
by 1998, “nearly 6 million people – almost 3 percent of the adult population –
were under some form of correctional supervision.” As reported in the journal, Punishment & Society:
The impact of these
developments has fallen disproportionately on young African-Americans and
Latinos. By 1994, one of every three black males between the ages of 18-34 was
under some form of correctional supervision, and the number of Hispanic
prisoners has more than quintupled since 1980. These developments are not primarily
the consequence of rising crime rates, but rather the ‘get-tough’ policies of
the wars on crime and drugs.[60]
As sociologists
Katherine Beckett and Bruce Western wrote, “in the wake of the Reagan
revolution, penal and welfare institutions have come to form a single policy
regime aimed at the governance of social marginality,” or, in other words, the
management of the poor and non-white populations. Thus, reduced welfare
spending as a method of social control was replaced with increased
incarceration and imprisonment.[61]
The prison system
itself, which had its origins in the application of social control, functioned
through segregation and discrimination, has not evolved from these
institutional ideologies that saw its development over several hundred years.
The prison and incarceration, according to philosopher and historian Michel
Foucault, was “a new form of repression, designed to consolidate the political
and economic power of capitalism under the modern state,” in what he termed,
“the disciplinary society.”[62]
Just as took place
during the criminalization of black life following the Civil War, the
criminalization of black life following the Civil Rights Movement saw not only
the growth of incarceration rates for the black community, but also saw the
growth of the use of the prison population as a source of cheap labour. In
today’s context, with privatization of prisons, outsourcing of prison labour,
and other forms of exploitation of the “punished” population, this has given
rise to what is often referred to as the “prison-industrial complex.”[63]
Conclusion
This article was
but a brief sampling of some of the information, issues, ideas, events, and
processes that will be thoroughly researched and written about in two chapters
for The People’s Book Project. If you found the information enlightening,
interesting, or important, please contribute to the People’s Grant goal of
raising $1,600 to finance the completion of two chapters on this subject, which
will include a great deal more than was sampled above, deeper analysis, more
detailed and documented understandings, and a much wider, global
contextualization. This was but a minor fraction of what can be completed with
the support of readers. Help get this important information into the public
sphere. As the global economic crisis rapidly expands the global rates of
impoverishment, as the middle class vanishes into debt and poverty, and as our
societies are reorganized to “manage” these social, political, and economic
changes, this history is vital to understanding not only the objectives, ideas
and actions of elites, but also the ways in which the people may challenge
them.
Notes
[1]
A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., “Racism and the Early American Legal Process,
1619-1896,” Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science (Vol.
407, No. 1, May 1973), page 1.
[2]
Ibid, page 6.
[3]
David McNally, Another World is Possible:
Globalization and Anti-Capitalism (Arbeiter
Ring Publishing, 2006), page 149.
[4]
Ibid, page 150.
[5]
Ibid, pages 151-152.
[6]
Ibid, pages 152-153.
[7]
Ibid, page 153.
[8]
Ibid, pages 153-154.
[9]
Ibid, pages 154-155.
[10]
Ibid, page 155.
[11]
William Cohen, “Negro Involuntary Servitude in the South, 1865-1940,” The Journal of Southern History (Vol. 42, No. 1, February 1976), page 33.
[12]
Ibid, page 34.
[13]
Brian Kelly, “Labor, Race, and the Search for a Central Theme in the History of
the Jim Crow South,” Irish Journal of American
Studies (Vol. 10, 2001), page 58.
[14]
William H. Worger, “Convict Labour, Industrialists and the State in the US
South and South Africa, 1870-1930,” Journal
of Southern African Studies (Vol. 30,
No. 1, March 2004), page 68.
[15]
Ibid, pages 68-69.
[16]
Ibid, page 85.
[17]
Eduardo Mendieta, “Plantations, Ghettos, Prisons: US Racial Geographies,” Philosophy and Geography (Vol. 7, No. 1, February 2004), page 52.
[18]
Ibid, pages 52-53.
[19]
Carl H. Nightingale, “A Tale of Three Global Ghettos: How Arnold Hirsch Helps
Us Internationalize U.S. Urban History,” Journal
of Urban History (Vol. 29, No. 3, March
2003), page 262.
[20]
Ibid, page 265.
[21]
Karen Ferguson, “Organizing the Ghetto: The Ford Foundation, CORE, and White
Power in the Black Power Era, 1967-1969,”Journal
of Urban History (Vol.
34, No. 1, November 2007), pages 69, 96.
[22]
William J. Quirk and Leon E. Wein, “Homeownership for the Poor: Tenant
Condominiums, the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, and the
Rockefeller Program,” Cornell Law Review (Vol. 54, No. 6, July 1969), pages 849, 855.
[23]
Peter L. Laurence, “The Death and Life of Urban Design: Jane Jacobs, The
Rockefeller Foundation and the New Research in Urbanism, 1955-1965,” Journal of Urban Design (Vol. 11, No. 2, June 2006), page 145.
[24]
Robert F. Arnove, ed., Philanthropy and Cultural
Imperialism: The Foundations at Home and Abroad (Indiana University Press, 1980), pages 180-181.
[25]
Ibid, page 181.
[26]
Ibid.
[27]
Ibid, page 182.
[28]
Ibid, pages 185-186.
[29]
Ibid, pages 188-190.
[30]
Ibid, page 194.
[31]
Evelyn Z. Brodkin, “The Making of an Enemy: How Welfare Policies Construct the
Poor,” Law & Social Inquiry (Vol. 18, No. 4, Autumn 1993), pages 655-656.
[32]
Ibid, pages 656-658.
[33]
Barry D. Karl and Stanley N. Katz, “The American Private Philanthropic
Foundation and the Public Sphere 1890-1930,” Minerva(Vol. 19, No. 2, Summer 1981), page 268.
[34]
J. Craig Jenkins and Barbara Brents, “Capitalists and Social Security: What Did
They Really Want?” American Sociological
Review (Vol. 56, No. 1, February 1991),
page 129.
[35]
Christopher G. Wye, “The New Deal and the Negro Community: Toward a Broader
Conceptualization,” The Journal of American
History (Vol. 59, No. 3, December
1972), page 639.
[36]
Lynn Walker, “The Role of Foundations in Helping to Reach the Civil Rights
Goals of the 1980s,” Rutgers Law Review, (1984-1985), page 1059.
[37]
Ibid, page 1060.
[38]
Roger Friedland, “Class Power and Social Control: The War on Poverty,” Politics & Society (Vol. 6, No. 4, December 1976), pages 459-461.
[39]
Robert C. Smith, “Black Power and the Transformation from Protest to Policies,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 96, No. 3, (Autumn, 1981), page 438
[40]
J. Craig Jenkins and Craig M. Eckert, “Channeling Black Insurgency: Elite
Patronage and Professional Social Movement Organizations in the Development of
the Black Movement,” American Sociological Review, Vol. 51, No. 6, (Dec., 1986), page 814.
[41]
Ibid, page 815.
[42]
Ibid, pages 819-820.
[43]
Ibid, page 821.
[44]
Ibid, page 826.
[45]
Herbert H. Haines, “Black Radicalization and the Funding of Civil Rights:
1957-1970,” Social Problems, Vol. 32, No. 1, Thematic Issue on Minorities and
Social Movements, (Oct., 1984), page 38.
[46]
Ibid, page 40.
[47]
Martin N. Marger, “Social Movement Organizations and Response to Environmental
Change: The NAACP, 1960- 1973,” Social
Problems, Vol. 32, No. 1, Thematic Issue on
Minorities and Social Movements, (Oct., 1984), page 22.
[48]
Ibid, page 25.
[49]
Ibid.
[50]
Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the
United States (Harper: New York, 2003),
page 464.
[51]
Michel J. Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of
Democracy. (Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral
Commission, New York University Press, 1975), page 61.
[52]
Ibid, page 62.
[53]
Ibid, page 71.
[54]
Ibid, pages 74-75.
[55]
Ibid, page 77.
[56]
Ibid, page 93.
[57]
Ibid, pages 113-114.
[58]
Ibid, page 115.
[59]
Lewis F. Powell, Jr., “Confidential Memorandum: Attack of American Free
Enterprise System,” U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 23 August 1971: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/supremecourt/personality/sources_document13.html
[60]
Katherine Beckett and Bruce Western, “Governing Social Marginality: Welfare,
Incarceration, and the Transformation of State Policy,” Punishment & Society (Vol. 3, No. 1, January 2001), pages 43-44.
[61]
Ibid, page 55.
[62]
Robert P. Weiss, “Humanitarianism, Labour Exploitation, or Social Control? A
Critical Survey of Theory and Research on the Origin and Development of
Prisons,” Social History (Vol. 12, No. 3, October 1987), page 333.
[63]
Rose M. Brewer and Nancy A. Heitzeg, “The Racialization of Crime and
Punishment: Criminal Justice, Color-Blind Racism, and the Political Economy of
the Prison Industrial Complex,” American
Behavioral Scientist (Vol. 51, No. 5,
January 2008).
No comments:
Post a Comment