Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [101]
The collective impact of Baker, Williams, and other militants pushed organizations like the NAACP toward greater activism, pressuring both major political parties to adopt new legislation. In 1957, Congress passed a weak civil rights act that established an advisory group, the Commission on Civil Rights. The SCLC responded by initiating the Crusade for Citizenship Campaign, which broadened its strategic agenda to include voter registration and civic education. Organized by Ella Baker, the campaign held press conferences and rallies in more than two dozen cities.
The fire of this new activism burned brightest in the South, but it also had a profound effect on Northern black communities, where legal segregation may not have existed but patterns of exclusion were deep and long-standing. In September 1957, inspired by the struggle earlier that year to desegregate Little Rock, Arkansas’s Central High School, New York activists picketed city hall in protest against racial discrimination in public schools.
Some activists concluded that they should run for office, perhaps figuring that creating legislation would be more effective than merely agitating for it. Their model was attorney Benjamin Davis, Jr., a communist who represented Harlem in the New York City Council from 1943 to 1949. Even after his political views got him convicted for violating the 1940 Alien Registration Act, known generally as the Smith Act, in a losing bid for Manhattan reelection in 1949, Davis won more Harlem votes than in his previous elections. On a similarly progressive agenda, Ella Baker ran unsuccessfully for the New York City Council in both 1951 and 1953. The attorney Pauli Murray, who would later defend Robert Williams before a national hearing of the NAACP, also ran for the council. But although Hulan Jack was elected Manhattan’s first African-American borough president in 1953, New York blacks continued to be underrepresented. In 1954, for instance, more than one million of the state’s fourteen million residents were African Americans, yet they had only one of New York’s forty-three members of Congress; one of its fifty-eight state senators; just five of the 150 state assembly members; and ten of its 189 judges.
In Harlem, activism took a cultural turn. From 1951 to 1955, radicals there published a newspaper called Freedom. Some anticommunist black nationalists, such as the writer Harold Cruse, criticized the paperʹs orientation as “nothing more than integration, couched in left-wing phraseology.” The paper soon closed, but in early 1961 many of its old staff established a new quarterly, Freedomways, as a link between black communists, independent radicals, and the left wing of the civil rights movement. For nationalists like Cruse, however, even the new magazine was compromised, due to its associations with the Marxist left.
Despite such ideological misgivings, the majority of the new generation of radicals increasingly came under the influence of the black left, best illustrated by the growing African-American fascination with Cuba. In January 1959, an unlikely band of guerrilla fighters led by Fidel Castro had wrested control of the country from dictator Fulgencio Batista. Though Castro traveled to Washington in April to reassure the Eisenhower administration of his good intentions, the U.S. government quickly concluded that the new regime was anti-American and set to work trying to destabilize it. American radicals