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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| Carol Polsgrove, Divided Minds: Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Norton, 2001) |
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THE ROLE of the intellectual in politics and in print is often most vexing when the two fields are combined. In Divided Minds, Carol Polsgrove studies intellectuals who employed this combination from the early 1950s to the mid-1960s. More specifically, her book is an examination of a select group of mostly male writers, academics, and journalists, beginning with William Faulkner and moving to various others including Robert Penn Warren, James Baldwin, C. Vann Woodward, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Howard Zinn, and Kenneth Clark. Arguing that those with the resources, position, and privilege to call themselves "intellectuals" are inherently engaged in politics, Divided Minds depicts the varied engagement of White and Black intellectuals with racial justice, freedom of speech, and the demands of multiple loyalties. While certainly interested in developing the frequently disparate positions that divided Black and White intellectuals, Polsgrove is also at pains to show the differences that could separate those whose similarity (of class, colour, or politics) was sometimes more apparent than real. Perhaps the greatest strength of the book is that it places numerous styles of academic and literary intellectual engagement on view. In this sense, Divided Minds is a collective biography for a certain kind of leadership class, as Polsgrove designates them in her prologue. |
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The White response of Part One, "Brown v. Board and the White Resistance, 1954–57," is not the massive resistance of Southern Whites to the Supreme Court's decision: it is the slow and incomplete awakening of White intellectuals to their participation in the nation's racial problems. Barely cognizant of White privilege and the structural presence of racism in the North, White intellectuals' discourse on race in the early 1950s was at best muffled. Any change was to be made only at the infinitesimal rate allowed by the politics of gradualism. William Faulkner was a limit case for this kind of divided and dilatory White intellectual, and Polsgrove's depiction shows him caught among a loyalty toward home, a desire for national change, and a conviction that local change must happen slowly. His 1956 rhetoric of supporting Mississippi interests "even if it meant going out into the street and shooting Negroes," (15) shown here as typical of Faulkner's divided public persona and perhaps the product of unscrupulous reporting by interviewer Russell Warren Howe, dramatically brings out the unwillingness of White intellectuals to consider justice from the point of view of those on the receiving end of segregation. |
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In addition such major figures as Faulkner, there are many who enter and then depart after brief attempts to mark the debate. Hannah Arendt published, then later recanted, an argument against forced desegregation in the wake of the federal government's 1957 intervention in Little Rock. Norman Mailer published the first parts of what became "The White Negro" at this time, employing shock and sexuality to re-center the debate around what he saw as the true cause of racial conflict: not white fear of desegregation, but of miscegenation. Yet nationally, Divided Minds shows that Arendt and Mailer were exceptions, finding some way to place their concerns about race and civil rights on public view, even if their intellectual peers disputed their analysis, or questioned their seriousness. However, once the protests of the late 1950s and early 1960s began, there was less room for disengagement. |
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It was also true that there was less room for merely well-intentioned White engagement. In part two, "Gathering Strength, 1957–1963," James Baldwin is the central figure. Already an intellectual and literary force in New York City, with the publication of "Letter from a Region of My Mind" in The New Yorker in November 1962, Baldwin moved into the small group of intellectual Black representatives to White America. Baldwin put eloquently into print the despair and contempt for Whites — both those well-meaning and racist — that was common among Black intellectuals and Black Americans more widely, and did so in a national magazine. The effect on his public presence was electric, and Polsgrove, working from Baldwin's essays, other published accounts of his public activities, and some original fieldwork, crafts one of the best narratives yet of this period of his life. Her rendition of the volatile meeting of Baldwin and a varied group of Black and White intellectuals, artists, and political workers with Robert Kennedy in late May 1963 is vivid, and suggestive in its links to the federal government's later civil rights policy. Polsgrove shows Baldwin constantly on the move at this time, adding to our knowledge an account of his activities in Selma, Alabama, in late 1963 and early 1964 in support of civil rights. |
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For Polsgrove, Baldwin acts as a figure of great contrast to all the others in Divided Minds. His lack of a clear political history insulated him from the kind of disappointment with direct action that Wright and Ellison underwent in regard to Communism; in addition, his uncompromising rhetoric toward White America gave him credibility among Black Americans. His status as activist-without-portfolio stands in strong relief to one of Polsgrove's background themes: the conflicts that arose among intellectuals who wrote, the intellectuals who published the writings, and the intellectuals who received and read them. For Baldwin, freedom of speech was not limited by institutional affiliation, a problem manifested here in academic freedom, particularly in the circumstances surrounding C. Vann Woodward, Lawrence Dunbar Reddick, and other Southern historians who broke scholarly silences about race and the legacy of slavery. Yet this same focus serves as a significant limit for the book, building a definition of "intellectual" around the resources of time to write and access to serious publication venues, and perhaps inadvertently around the male privilege that constituted a right to speak politically in the United States. |
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Further, while Divided Minds occasionally invokes the tension between activism in print and activism through public action, some consideration of these intellectuals in relation to other civil rights era political workers would have served to fulfill Polsgrove's central thesis about engagement. It should be noted that the debates most under her scrutiny are those that were carried out in politically-minded journals, in academic forums, and in a few national publications like The New Yorker. Divided Minds does show various styles of print-based political work, and the third section, "The Last Campaigns, 1963–1965," does to a degree turn to more direct political action by Baldwin and Howard Zinn. But the vast portion of the discourse on race and civil rights covered here is of the written kind, which at times makes more for an internal history of this select group than a study of their engagement with the civil rights process as such. That the essays and other publications of these writers were read outside of their own circles, especially in the case of Baldwin and the New Yorker piece of 1962 (which a year later became the majority of his famous essay The Fire Next Time), seems both inarguable and potentially useful to Carol Polsgrove's portrayal of these figures. It must be acknowledged that the process of writing and publication is itself a positive process of the division of minds, splitting the words of those who write from their own limited context and intentions, and unleashing them for the irritation and inspiration of others. |
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David LaCroix
University of Wisconsin - Madison
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