Strategy

by Lawrence Freedman

  12. Reinhold Neibuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Scribner, 1934).

  13. Described in James Farmer, Lay Bare the Arms: An Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Arbor House, 1985), 106–107.

  14. On Muste’s conversion from Marxism to Christian Pacifism, see Chapter 9 of Ira Chernus, American Nonviolence: The History of an Idea (New York: Orbis, 2004). Both Gregg and Niebuhr were members of FOR, although the latter’s intellectual journey led him to leave.

  15. August Meierand and Elliott Rudwick, CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement, 1942–1968 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 102–103.

  16. Ibid., 111.

  17. Krishnalal Shridharani, War Without Violence: A Study of Gandhi’s Method and Its Accomplishments (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1939). See James Farmer, Lay Bare the Heart: An Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Arbor Books, 1985), 93–95, 112–113.

  18. Paula F. Pfeffer, A. Philip Randolph. Pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990).

  19. Jervis Anderson, Bayard Rustin: Troubles I’ve Seen (NewYork: HarperCollins, 1997), 17.

  20. Adam Fairclough, “The Preachers and the People: The Origins and Early Years of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 1955–1959,” The Journal of Southern History 52, no. 3 (August 1986), 403–440.

  21. In his history of the movement, Garrow notes the comparison to Gandhi being made by a sympathetic white lady in a letter to a newspaper. David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 1955–1968 (New York: W. Morrow, 1986), 28.

  22. Ibid., 43. Bo Wirmark, “Nonviolent Methods and the American Civil Rights Movement 1955–1965,” Journal of Peace Research 11, no. 2 (1974): 115–132; Akinyele Umoja, “1964: The Beginning of the End of Nonviolence in the Mississippi Freedom Movement,” Radical History Review 85 (Winter 2003): 201–226.

  23. Scalmer, Gandhi in the West, 180.

  24. The books referred to by King were: M. K. Gandhi, An Autobiography; or, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, translated by Mahadev Desai (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1927); Louis Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (London: Jonathan Cape, 1951); Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience,” 1849; Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis (New York: Macmillan Press, 1908); Richard B. Gregg, The Power of Non-Violence; Ira Chernus, American Nonviolence: The History of an Idea (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004), 169–171. See James P. Hanigan, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Foundations of Nonviolence (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984), 1–18.

  25. Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters. America in the King Years, 1954–63 (New York: Touchstone, 1988), 55.

  26. Martin Luther King, “Our Struggle,” Liberation, April 1956, available at http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/primarydocuments/Vol3/Apr-1956_OurStruggle.pdf.

  27. Branch, Parting the Waters, 195.

  28. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 1955–1968, 111. One example: Gregg had written of the nonviolent resister: “Toward his opponent he is not aggressive physically, but his mind and emotions are active, wrestling constantly with the problem of persuading the latter that he is mistaken.” King wrote: “For while the nonviolent resister is passive in the sense that he is not physically aggressive toward his opponent, his mind and emotions are always active, constantly seeking to persuade his opponent that he is wrong.” Martin Luther King, Jr., “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” in Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (New York: Harper & Bros., 1958), 102; Gregg, The Power of Non-Violence, 93.

  29. Daniel Levine, Bayard Rustin and the Civil Rights Movement (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 95.

  30. Cited by Anderson, Bayard Rustin, 192.

  31. Aldon Morris, “Black Southern Student Sit-in Movement: An Analysis of Internal Organization,” American Sociological Review 46, no. 6 (December 1981): 744–767.

  32. For a balanced assessment of the relationship between Baker and King, see Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 189–192.

  33. Alan Fairclough, “The Preachers and the People,” 424.

  34. Morris, “Black Southern Student Sit-In Movement,” 755.

  35. Doug McAdam, “Tactical Innovation and the Pace of Insurgency,” American Sociological Review 48, no. 6 (December 1983): 748.

  36. Bayard Rustin, Strategies for Freedom: The Changing Patterns of Black Protest (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 24.

  37. Aldon D. Morris, “Birmingham Confrontation Reconsidered: An Analysis of the Dynamics and Tactics of Mobilization,” American Sociological Review 58, no. 5 (October 1993): 621–636.

  38. Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963, available at http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/resources/article/annotated_letter_from_birmingham/

  39. Rustin, Strategies for Freedom, 45.

  40. Quoted in Branch, Parting the Waters, 775.

  41. Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can’t Wait (New York: New American Library, 1963), 104–105; Douglas McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency 1930–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); David J. Garrow, Protest at Selma: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978); Branch, Parting the Waters; Thomas Brooks, Walls Come Tumbling Down: A History of the Civil Rights Movement (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1974).

  24 Existential Strategy

  1. Tom Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir (New York: Collier, 1989), 87. For a history of SDS, see Kirkpatrick Sale, The Rise and Development of the Students for a Democratic Society (New York: Vintage Books, 1973).

  2. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1993), 286.

  3. William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). First published 1956.

  4. David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (New York: Anchor Books, 1950).

  5. Erich Fromm, The Fear of Freedom (London: Routledge, 1942).

  6. Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter-Culture (London: Faber & Faber, 1970), 10–11.

  7. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology (New York: Citadel Press, 2001), first published in 1943; Existentialism and Humanism (London: Methuen, 2007), first published in 1946.

  8. Albert Camus, The Plague (New York: Vintage Books, 1961). First published in 1949.

  9. The ambiguity toward Mills is evident in Irving Horowitz, C. Wright Mills: An American Utopian (New York: The Free Press, 1983). This is explored in John H. Summers, “The Epigone’s Embrace: Irving Louis Horowitz on C. Wright Mills,” Minnesota Review 68 (Spring 2007): 107–124.

  10. C. Wright Mills, Sociology and Pragmatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 423. Published posthumously.

  11. In Listen Yankee (New York: Ballantine, 1960), he defended the Cuban Revolution in the imagined words of a Cuban revolutionary.

  12. Robert Dahl, Who Governs: Democracy and Power in an American City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962).

  13. David Baldwin, “Power Analysis and World Politics: New Trends versus Old Tendencies,” World Politics 31, no. 2 (January 1979): 161–194. He is drawing here on Klaus Knorr, The Power of Nations: The Political Economy of International Relations (New York: Basic Books, 1975).

  14. Robert Dahl, “The Concept of Power,” Behavioral Science 2 (1957): 201–215.

  15. Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz, “Two Faces of Power,” The American Political Science Review 56, no. 4 (December 1962): 947–952. Also see Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz, “Decisions and Non-Decisions: An Analytical Framework,” The American Political Science Review 57, no. 3 (September 1963): 632–642.

  16. C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956).<
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  17. Theodore Roszak, The Making of Counter-Culture, 25.

  18. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959).

  19. Tom Hayden and Dick Flacks, “The Port Huron Statement at 40,” The Nation, July 18, 2002. The statement was produced as a mimeographed pamphlet in 20,000 copies and sold for 35 cents. Note the use of the word rebels.

  20. Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir, 80. On the impact of Mills, see John Summers, “The Epigone’s Embrace: Part II, C. Wright Mills and the New Left,” Left History 13.2 (Fall/Winter 2008).

  21. The Port Huron Manifesto can be found at http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/huron.html.

  22. Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir, 75.

  23. Port Huron Manifesto.

  24. Richard Flacks, “Some Problems, Issues, Proposals,” July 1965, reprinted in Paul Jacobs and Saul Landau, The New Radicals (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 167–169.

  25. Tom Hayden and Carl Wittman, “Summer Report, Newark Community Union, 1964,” in Massimio Teodori, The New Left: A Documentary History (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), 133.

  26. Tom Hayden, “The Politics of the Movement,” Dissent, Jan/Feb 1966, 208

  27. Tom Hayden, “Up from Irrelevance,” Studies on the Left, Spring 1965.

  28. Francesca Polletta, “Freedom Is an Endless Meeting”: Democracy in American Social Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

  29. Lawrence J. Engel, “Saul D. Alinsky and the Chicago School,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 16, no. 1 (2002).

  30. Robert Park, “The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the City Environment,” The American Journal of Sociology 20, no. 5 (March 1915): 577–612.

  31. Engel, “Saul D. Alinsky and the Chicago School,” 54–57. One of Burgess’s courses taken by Alinsky was on the “pathological conditions and processes in modern society,” which included “alcoholism, prostitution, poverty, vagrancy, juvenile and adult delinquency.” This would be done through “inspection trips, survey assignments, and attendance at clinics.”

  32. He got to know Capone’s number two, Frank Nitti, and through him the mob’s operations, from “gin mills and whorehouses and bookie joints to the legitimate businesses they were beginning to take over.” Given that they had much of the local political class and police force in their pockets, he argued that there was not much he could do with the information he gathered. As he later noted, “the only real opposition to the mob came from other gangsters, like Bugs Moran or Roger Touhy.” He claimed to have learned “a hell of a lot about the uses and abuses of power from the mob, lessons that stood me in good stead later on, when I was organizing.” “Empowering People, Not Elites,” interview with Saul Alinsky, Playboy Magazine, March 1972.

  33. Engel, “Saul D. Alinsky and the Chicago School,” 60.

  34. “Empowering People, Not Elites,” interview with Saul Alinsky.

  35. Saul D. Alinsky, “Community Analysis and Organization,” The American Journal of Sociology 46, no. 6 (May 1941): 797–808.

  36. Sanford D. Horwitt, “Let Them Call Me Rebel”: Saul Alinsky, His Life and Legacy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 39.

  37. Saul D. Alinsky, John Lewis: An Unauthorized Biography (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 104, 219.

  38. Saul D. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946), 22.

  39. Horwitt, “Let Them Call Me Rebel,” 174.

  40. Charles Silberman, Crisis in Black and White (New York: Random House, 1964), 335.

  41. “This did not work out,” he recorded in a notebook. See Horwitt, “Let Them Call Me Rebel,” 530.

  42. Nicholas von Hoffman, Radical: A Portrait of Saul Alinsky (New York: Nation Books, 2010), 75, 36.

  43. The two rival organizations had reunited in 1955.

  44. El Malcriado, no. 14, July 9, 1965, cited by Marshall Ganz, Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 93.

  45. Randy Shaw, Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chávez, the UFW, and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009), 87–91.

  46. Von Hoffman, Radical, 163.

  47. Ganz, Why David Sometimes Wins.

  48. Miriam Pawel, The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chávez’s Farm Worker Movement (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009).

  49. Von Hoffman, Radical, 51–52.

  50. Horwitt, “Let Them Call Me Rebel,” 524–526.

  51. “Empowering People, Not Elites,” interview with Saul Alinsky.

  52. Von Hoffman, Radical, 69.

  53. David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: Quill, 1999), 455.

  25 Black Power and White Anger

  1. Malcolm X made no strategic statement. The key themes come over in his autobiography, written with Arthur Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992).

  2. David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography (New York: Picador Press, 2000).

  3. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (London: Macgibbon and Kee, 1965), 28; Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), 152, first published 1948. See Sebastian Kaempf, “Violence and Victory: Guerrilla Warfare, ‘Authentic Self-Affirmation’ and the Overthrow of the Colonial State,” Third World Quarterly 30, no. 1 (2009): 129–146.

  4. Preface to Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 18.

  5. Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Violence,” The New York Review of Books, February 27, 1969. An extended version appeared in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt, 1972).

  6. Paul Jacobs and Saul Landau, The New Radicals: A Report with Documents (New York: Random House, 1966), 25.

  7. Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years 1965–68 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 486.

  8. SNCC, “The Basis of Black Power,” New York Times, August 5, 1966.

  9. Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 12–13, 58, 66–67.

  10. Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 488 (see chap. 23, n. 21).

  11. Martin Luther King, Jr., Chaos or Community (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1968), 56.

  12. Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton (New York: Random House, 1970), 79–81.

  13. Stokely Carmichael, “A Declaration of War, February 1968,” in Teodori, ed., The New Left, 258.

  14. John D’Emilio, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (New York: The Free Press, 2003), 450–451.

  15. Bayard Rustin, “From Protest to Politics,” Commentary (February 1965).

  16. Staughton Lynd, “Coalition Politics or Nonviolent Revolution?” Liberation, June/July 1965, 197–198.

  17. Carmichael and Hamilton, Black Power, 72.

  18. Ibid., 92–93.

  19. Paul Potter, in a speech on April 17, 1965, available at http://www.sdsrebels.com/potter.htm.

  20. Jeffrey Drury, “Paul Potter, ‘The Incredible War,’ ” Voices of Democracy 4 (2009): 23–40. Also Sean McCann and Michael Szalay, “Introduction: Paul Potter and the Cultural Turn,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 18, no. 2 (Fall 2005): 209–220.

  21. Gitlin, The Sixties, 265–267 (see chap. 24, n. 2).

  22. Mark Rudd, Underground, My Life with SDS and the Weathermen (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), 65–66.

  23. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (London: Sphere Books, 1964); “Repressive Tolerance” in Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore, Jr., and Herbert Marcuse, eds., A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 95–137; An Essay on Liberation (London: Penguin, 1969).

  24. Che Guevara, “Message to the Tricontinental,” first published: Havana, April 16, 1967, available at http://www.marxists.org/archive/guevara/1967/04/16.htm
.

  25. Boot, Invisible Armies, 438 (see chap. 14, n. 22). On Snow, see 341.

  26. Matt D. Childs, “An Historical Critique of the Emergence and Evolution of Ernesto Che Guevara’s Foco Theory,” Journal of Latin American Studies 27, no. 3 (October 1995): 593–624.