Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [100]
These successes were the fruits of concerted efforts by a new generation of African-American leaders that supported confrontational challenge. In New York City, Ella Baker was elected branch president of New York City’s NAACP in 1952, and went on to build interracial coalitions around two issues that affected nearly all blacks—police brutality and public school desegregation. Meanwhile, in Mississippi, NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers eschewed King’s nonviolent approach for one of armed self-defense, committing himself to investigating and publicizing racist crimes. In 1957, Baker, Bayard Rustin, and liberal attorney/activist Stanley Levison drafted a series of papers to develop what would become the agenda of the new Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). What these individuals shared was a willingness to place their own lives at risk. They were all critical of the slow pace of reforms by older civil rights leaders; economic boycotts, civil disobedience, and youth organizing, they believed, should spearhead their protests.
The frightening specter of McCarthyism and virulent anticommunism had taken its toll among black liberals. America’s most prominent African-American sociologist, E. Franklin Frazier, for example, had been investigated by the FBI for belonging to the Negro People’s Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy in the 1930s. Educator and Eleanor Roosevelt confidante Mary McLeod Bethune was grilled by authorities for membership in the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born. But the political virus had run its course, and as the anticommunist demagogues retreated, there was a rebirth of a black left, whose resurgent fortunes were symbolized by the status of controversial singer and actor Paul Robeson. Banished from stage and screen during the years of McCarthy repression, Robeson had had his passport confiscated by the State Department, yet in 1958 his comeback tour across the United States received strong support from the black community. These concerts coincided with the publication of his manifesto Here I Stand, part memoir and part political commentary, which emphasized the struggles for independence in Africa as well as the fight for civil rights within the United States. The book was widely praised in the African-American press, yet did little to endear Robeson to white authorities. When the prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, called for a national celebration of the singer’s sixtieth birthday, the United States tried unsuccessfully to pressure his government to cancel the event.
Perhaps no single person better symbolized the trends toward militancy than Robert F. Williams. After serving in the military and working as a laborer, Williams returned home to North Carolina in 1955, where he soon joined campaigns for civil rights. His charisma and militancy attracted followers, and he was soon elected head of the Monroe, North Carolina, branch of the NAACP. Controversy first beset him in 1959 when, following the acquittal of a white man who had assaulted an African-American woman, Williams told the press that maybe blacks should “meet violence with violence in order to protect themselves.” The NAACP national leader, Roy Wilkins, publicly distanced the association from these remarks and had Williams suspended. In turn, Williams’s supporters condemned Wilkins’s actions, which sparked a long-suppressed debate within the civil rights community.
Williams subsequently became involved in a well-publicized “kissing case,” in which he defended two black boys—ages eight