Kevin Gaines

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Kevin Gaines | Whose Integration Was It? An Introduction | The Journal of American History, 91.1 | The History Cooperative

Whose Integration Was It? An Introduction

In 1965 the African American political scientist Preston King reviewed Negro Thought in America, 1880–1915, by the historian August Meier, for the African Review, a politically ambitious but short-lived magazine dedicated to advancing the radical Pan-African agenda of the government of Ghana and its president, Kwame Nkrumah. King's route to Ghana was propelled by his conscientious objection to Jim Crow segregation. While studying for his doctorate at the London School of Economics, King carried on a routine correspondence with the draft board in his home-town of Albany, Georgia, until its officials discovered that he was black. From then on draft officials dispensed with common courtesy, addressing King by his first name only, in keeping with the demeaning Jim Crow custom. King protested by refusing to serve in the military under such conditions and was convicted of noncompliance with draft officials. He soon learned that the State Department, in apparent collusion with his draft board, had revoked his U.S. passport, depriving him of his already second-class U.S. citizenship. Faced with extradition to Georgia and certain imprisonment, King was granted asylum by the government of Ghana in 1962.¹	1
King thus brought a unique perspective to Meier's text, one that led him to question the terms on which full citizenship was being extended to African Americans. The problem with Meier's study, according to King, was its confusion surrounding the term "integration." Meier's analysis of African American leadership was based on a false premise—"a contradiction or inconsistency between African American demands for black solidarity, on the one hand, and their protests against segregation, on the other." Meier had projected onto the African American past a contemporary view of integration that denied the legitimacy of autonomous black institutions. In doing so, Meier, although a staunch ally of the movement, failed to comprehend the difference between integration as the demise of separate black institutions and desegregation, namely, the overthrow of the regime of racial subjugation defined by the exclusion of black people "from access to power, wealth, education, status and dignity." For King, efforts at intraracial cooperation among segregated blacks were not a rejection of integration, but rather a means of employing separateness to overcome its effects, with the ultimate goal of desegregation.²	2
As King's quarrel with Meier suggests, the fissures in the concept of integration were becoming impossible to ignore. In the eleven years since the decision in Brown v. Board of Education, integration had generally described a top-down vision of racial change endorsed by U.S. officialdom, northern liberals, and the civil rights establishment, a process orchestrated and managed primarily by policy makers. Who, except bigots and extremists, could possibly object to that exemplary vision of equality and color-blind liberalism? But the nonenforcement of Brown and the persistence of segregationist violence even after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 had bred many skeptics. Watching those and other world events from Ghana, King perceived a tension between official U.S. support for desegregation and U.S. use of military force abroad against Congolese and Vietnamese nationalists. At that fateful juncture, the choice Meier described between "Negro ethnocentrism" and "a complete identification with the American nationality" seemed no real choice to King, but rather "a leap from the frying pan into the fire." While welcoming President Lyndon B. Johnson's strong support for voting rights legislation, King was troubled by LBJ's reminder that equal rights were necessitated by the fact that all Americans, regardless of race, were fighting together in Vietnam. For King, that amounted to an unacceptable quid pro quo: "America radically accelerates the pace of desegregation, requiring in turn that Afro-Americans restrict their identity to America and render blinkered support to U.S. chauvinism; i.e.: They integrate." Thus, Meier's understanding of civic identity as a zero-sum choice for African Americans—either a complete identification with their American nationality or an African American identity deemed chauvinist, with no middle ground—resembled for King the restrictive terms of integration and citizenship imposed on African Americans by U.S. officialdom.³	. . .

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