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26 February 2009
The Role of Writers in Interracial Understanding
Interview with Bernard LaFayette
Bernard LaFayette Jr. is an educator, minister and veteran civil rights activist who marched beside Martin Luther King Jr. In this interview with eJournal USA, he talks about how writers did much groundwork for racial reconciliation and the election of Barack Obama. LaFayette currently is the director of the Center for Nonviolence and Peace Studies at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston, Rhode Island.
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
From “Letter from Birmingham Jail” by Martin Luther King Jr., 1963
When asked how writers have helped pave the way for the election of Barack Obama as the first African-American president of the United States, Bernard LaFayette did not hesitate:
“Well, of course, Martin Luther King would be the one that had a great deal of influence over the thinking of people like Barack [Obama]. And you can see Martin Luther King’s philosophy and methodology reflected in the way he campaigned. Martin Luther King was eclectic, in the sense that he believed in being inclusive, and he was always a strong supporter of other ethnic groups, and you can see that by how they supported the [civil rights] movement. He was open to them and made them feel welcome. In fact, many people gave their lives in the movement who were not African Americans, and they knew the risk that they were taking, but they did it because the movement included them, and they wanted to be included in the movement. And that is one of the things that you see reflected in Barack, the inclusiveness. As Martin Luther King says, people should be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.
“To even go further than that, Martin Luther King did not even judge people based on their political attitudes or their theories. He always tried to find something deeper in individuals that could be cultivated and brought out. You take Hegel, for example. Hegel was a German philosopher who was not very, let’s say, enamored of black folks. Martin Luther King did not discard him simply because Martin Luther King didn’t agree with everything he said. He tried to find something in his philosophy that he could agree with, and that’s the Hegelian outline, the search for truth, the thesis, antithesis and synthesis. And that was the approach that Martin Luther King also used in trying to get his point across. He does this very clearly in the Birmingham Jail, where he was understanding of those who criticized him and tried to berate him.”
LaFayette thinks King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is among the most influential of King’s writings, not only on the civil rights movement but on Barack Obama.
“You can see it reflected in the way he went about running his campaign. And now you see it more evidently in his selection of his cabinet and the people he wants. Even those who criticized him and doubted his competency, he did not use that against them or let that be a barrier. He looked beyond those kinds of things, and was looking deeper, in terms of the person’s skill and what they had to contribute. Because they are not working for him, they are working for the country,” LaFayette says, adding, “He did not run to be a candidate for black folks, he ran to be president of the country. And he wanted to represent all people.”
LaFayette says, “[Barack Obama] obviously is very clear about his own ethnicity. He doesn’t make any apologies for it, and he doesn’t try to deny it or cover it up. He’s the product of a biracial couple. … So was W.E.B. Du Bois … Adam Clayton Powell. A lot of the people who stood up and spoke out and that kind of thing, and people who wrote, they were reflecting something deeper than the color of their skin. And it’s no secret that black folks have white parents.” LaFayette’s own great-grandfather was a French soldier who was an officer in the Cuban army.
“The writers like Martin Luther King and the writers like W.E.B. Du Bois and the writers like James Baldwin, they raised the consciousness of people. They helped them to appreciate these people who were enslaved. Now interestingly enough, neither of Barack’s parents’ forefathers experienced slavery.” Nevertheless, Obama had his own experiences of dealing with discrimination and a black man’s place in society. He made the best of that. He went to Harvard and became editor of the Harvard Law Review. “The way you get to editor of the Law Review is that you’ve got to win the support of your peers. And that is exactly what Barack did,” LaFayette says. “Your peers have to think you represent them. The writers, like Baldwin, for example, he sort of was a clarion call to black people to appreciate who they were, to stand up, not just be black, be African American.”
Malcolm X is another example of a writer who did this, LaFayette says, adding that he was also biracial.
“He had to fight for himself to appreciate his blackness, and that identity. He made black people feel proud. What was interesting during this period, the sixties, is that while Martin Luther King was saying let’s be universal, let’s be inclusive, let’s be part of America, and let’s insist that we be accepted, on the other hand, Malcolm X was saying let’s appreciate our difference. Let’s not assimilate and just become a melting pot and then just blend in with everybody else and accept all the values and everything else; let’s appreciate our distinctness and our uniqueness; and in many cases he said let’s be unto ourselves because they don’t want us, and you shouldn’t want to be with someone who rejects you. When you take what Malcolm X was saying, in terms of helping people to appreciate their own identity, and what Martin Luther King was saying — let’s demand that we be respected as equals — that’s where you get the Hegelian approach that Martin Luther King used, that’s saying you go from the thesis to the antithesis and the opposite philosophical positions, when you take the best out of both of those, and that is the thing that produced Barack.”
LaFayette, who spoke with Malcolm X two weeks before he was assassinated, says Malcolm’s position was evolving too.
“He said to the media, ‘You’d better listen to Martin Luther King; otherwise you are going to have to listen to me.’ He tried to visit Martin Luther King in jail in Selma, and the authorities would not allow him to do that. … He began to listen to Martin Luther King very intensely. Had both of them lived, they would have joined arm in arm in the struggle. There would have been a synthesis. So the synthesis was broken with their deaths. But their concepts and their ideas continued to live until people were able to come together. See, the election of Barack Obama was a synthesis. It was a coming together of every aspect of black and white, young and old.”
Writers are crucial to the process, LaFayette says: “That was the thing that really spun the ideas, and people began to have more appreciation for the thinkers, because there was critical thinking that was going on. And that had a lot to do with raising consciousness of people. So they began to imagine what it would be like if we had a world of peace and a world of — you might say — collaboration with each other. And the kind of thing that made them reject the idea that we had to have enemies and we had to describe people as evil. The writers are influential in helping people to think about it another way. And that’s the important contribution. Because it’s hard to imagine something different when we have lived all of our lives, our history is written in our textbooks based on one war after another. … You had to break through that cycle. … That’s what the writers did in terms of challenging people in their thinking, like Martin Luther King and some of the others we are talking about.”
LaFayette says historical relationships between races are exemplified by Tuskegee University, and he relates its story. Named after an American Indian chief, it was started by freed slave Lewis Adams (1842-1905), who, according to LaFayette, was the son of a plantation owner and a slave. This gave him privileges other slaves didn’t have.
“He didn’t have to go out in the fields and work. He stayed in the house. In fact, his mother was working in the house. When the children, the other white children, of this plantation owner came home, they played school with him. He was their brother, same age, that kind of thing, so they played school and that’s how he learned his academics. So he could read and write and all those other things. So he was getting the practical skills on the plantation and then he was getting the academic skills from his sisters and brothers.” After the slaves were freed as the Civil War progressed and the Union Army implemented the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, which mandated their freedom, Lewis had to leave the plantation. His father wanted to do something for him, as LaFayette tells it, “So his father asked him, ‘What can I do for you? I hate to see you go like that; you’re my son.’ And he said, ‘Give me some property over here across from the plantation, and I’ll set up shop. And we can still work for you, but you have to pay us.’ So he gathered up all the ones who didn’t leave, and they became skilled craftsmen, and they went back to their jobs on the plantation, but now as hard workers. That was the beginning of Tuskegee Institute, and it had Booker T. Washington as the principal.”
LaFayette says close relationships between slaves and slaveholders were not unusual in the South.
“They were like family. … That’s who nursed their mothers and grandmothers when they got ill, stayed with them all night. They stayed in the house with them, in the bedroom, because they were taking care of these people. There was a kind of deep love that transcends paternalism. They depended on each other … so you find some curious situations, a relationship that doesn’t square with the hostility and image of the hangings and things.” He says it was “individual and culturally driven by particular relationships between people. To Kill a Mockingbird is an example. That depicts what it was like in many cases.” To Kill a Mockingbird, a novel by Harper Lee that later became a film starring Gregory Peck as a southern white lawyer defending an innocent black man, portrayed just such a dynamic.
So could the current coming together to elect Barack Obama be reconciliation after years of separation? LaFayette says yes.
“There was sort of an undercurrent all the way along there of people helping each other. A lot of blacks benefited because a lot of whites, individuals, not the white community, but individual whites were very generous and wanted to give back to blacks.” He tells of his father-in-law, who built the first federal housing in Tuskegee. “A black man, back in the forties. He owned lots of housing and that sort of thing. ... That [is an] example of the white people in this community allowing him — I have to say that because they could have stopped him — building the first public housing. That was unheard of,” and something, he says, that was “repeated in many times in small southern towns.”
“Every bill that was passed, every court ruling in the civil rights movement, the majority of the people who voted for it, who were in power, were white. How many blacks did we have on the Supreme Court in ‘54? Not one.” Thurgood Marshall, later the first African American to become a Supreme Court justice, successfully argued Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, a case that ruled racial segregation in schools was illegal.
“So what I’m saying is that all of the things that blacks have experienced in a negative way, all those things are true, and it has been horrible, it has been horrific, it’s been devastating. But at the same time, we have to look through those blemished and bloodstained curtains and see people who stood up and people who also sacrificed and gave their lives so change would come. So we can’t look at it from just one side. A life is a life. You only have one life to live, whether you are black or white. It’s one thing if somebody takes your life; it’s another thing if you give your life. Because you could just stay on and be quiet, you know.”
Writers, activists, and ordinary people helped bring us to where we are now, in LaFayette’s view: “I think I would say that all of these paths led to where Obama is walking.”
See “Prize-winning Book Recounts Press Role in Civil Rights Era,“ “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and the publication Multicultural Literature in the United States Today.
The opinions expressed in this interview do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.
