Cultural Globalization and the US Civil Rights Movement

Steve Spence

The eyes of the world are concentrated on Alabama.
— Milton Obote, Prime Minister of Uganda, 1963

On May 7, 1963, Sidney W. Smyer stood up during a secret meeting, announced “I’m a segregationist, but I’m not a damn fool,” and handed the US civil rights movement a watershed victory.1 Birmingham’s leading realtor and past president of its chamber of commerce, Smyer agreed to endorse a plan ending segregation in the city’s downtown shopping districts.2 The plan represented a clear victory for the nonviolent resistance campaign led by Martin Luther King, Jr., and for several crucial days Smyer remained the only member of the white establishment willing to publicly support it.3 Smyer’s decision provoked a flood of recrimination from white Birmingham, but it also broke the stalemate, and it proved to be the beginning of the end of segregation in Alabama. Within the broader history of the US civil rights movement, it is hard to overestimate the importance of the Birmingham campaign.4 And in this campaign’s successful conclusion, it is hard to overestimate the importance of Smyer’s leadership within Birmingham’s white community.

Smyer’s motivations were complex, but unquestionably they include his personal encounters with the array of forces that today we recognize as globalization.5By May 1963, all Birmingham knew that the bitter, bloody conflicts fought over the city’s most quotidian spaces — parks, lunch counters, and public bathrooms — were taking place on a world stage. Much of white Birmingham remained willing to continue its long crusade against “outside agitators,” meddling federal officials, and what many identified as a vast communist conspiracy. Smyer’s experiences during the previous two years gave him a much different view of the forces buffeting his city, and they prepared him to act on this worldview.6In brief, Smyer’s journey from Dixiecrat politician to reluctant integrationist is a story of jet airplanes, satellite television, and global immanence. Smyer’s journey is important in itself, but it also carries broader implications. An unlikely cosmopolitan, Smyer’s global awareness helps illuminate a fundamental, and neglected, facet of the US civil rights movement as a whole: in its ambitions and its successes, the movement must be understood as a harbinger of cultural globalization. A thickening network of social and economic linkages enabled the movement to mold a shadowy force, “world opinion,” into a weapon. A critical mass of worldwide media networks enabled it to disseminate images of mayhem and stoic fervor that overflowed institutional and personal buffers. And a cultural landscape shaped by massive, global flows of both people and media images helped transform the imaginative possibilities open to the movement’s leaders, its thousands of foot soldiers, and its opposition.

Nationalist frameworks have long dominated popular and scholarly accounts of the movement, but recently its transnational contexts have begun to attract scholarly attention.7 Much recent work focuses on the intricate dance engaged between movement activists and federal Cold Warriors, and a number of studies now have demonstrated that the anticommunist propaganda and shooting wars of the 1950s and 1960s formed a crucial context for the era’s discourse on civil rights.8What also began to coalesce in the early sixties, however, was a broadening realization that “international relations” far exceeded the Cold War, or any of the other traditional concerns of the State Department or Pentagon. As a result, analysis of the civil rights movement benefits from an understanding of globaliztion as a fabric of finely grained, local phenomena, with effects that extend well beyond the briefs of foreign secretaries and ministers of defense.

During the crucial span between May 1961 and August 1963, Birmingham offers a crucible of these forces at play. In these years Birmingham reveals itself as a new kind of locality, prefiguring the spaces that Arjun Appadurai has recognized in contemporary neighborhoods threaded through by the vectors of globalization.9As Appadurai argues, locality as such is best understood as a phenomenological experience, a series of felt relationships that link local subjects to the neighborhoods they inhabit and construct. Such structures of feeling are both amorphous and densely complex, and marking their historical evolution and breakpoints is of course a difficult business. Birmingham in 1961 – 63, however, presents a moment of unusual clarity, as the city transformed suddenly from provincial capital into international dateline. As I demonstrate below, May 1961 unleashed a flood of international journalism — narratives, still images, television documentaries, and radio sound bites — with Birmingham as their site and subject. These media gave the city new meanings for national and international audiences, and in the process they also shifted its residents’ place in the world. For those who called Birmingham home, adjusting to their city’s new contexts meant reordering the mental landscapes and felt relationships that heretofore had rendered the city’s spaces relatively legible, navigable, and stable.

This international flow of media images amplified the effects of other transnational flows — other “scapes,” in Appadurai’s well-known terminology — that inflected the self-and place-fashioning of Birmingham’s local subjects. As commodities, people, and media images flowed into and out of the city with increasing scope and intensity, their movements eroded the rituals of deference and spatial taboo that embodied segregation. Among movement activists, for example, the city’s new contexts revealed kinships in places like Addis Ababa, Mecca, and New Delhi.10As Brenda Gayle Plummer notes, by 1961 “the epoch that treated Afro-Americans as an isolated people had passed, and [international] linkages became a standard convention of movement rhetoric even when no actual joint action was contemplated.”11 In Alabama and elsewhere, the early 1960s marked a turning point in the freedom struggle’s self-conceptions.

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Notes

1. Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), 407; McWhorter, “Marshall’s Law,” Legal Affairs, September – October 2003, www.legalaffairs.org/issues/September-October-2003/story_mcwhorter_sepoct03msp.
2. The most frequently cited scholarly accounts of the Birmingham movement are Glenn T. Eskew, But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); and the relevant sections of three biographies: Andrew Manis, A Fire You Can’t Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham’s Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999); David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: Harper Perennial, 1986); and Adam Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987. The most broadly influential account, however, is surely found in Taylor Branch’s best-selling Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954 – 63 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989). Although Branch was trained as a journalist, his three-volume history of “America in the King years” is an important historiographic achievement. For scholarly assessments of its strengths and limitations, see “AHR Forum: Taylor Branch’s America in the King Years,” American Historical Review 114 (2009): 978 – 1016
3. Meeting minutes recorded on May 7 document the movement leaders’ concern about Smyer’s singularity. “Record Book of the Christian Movement for Civil Rights and Southern Christian Leadership Conference,” Ruth Barefield-Pendleton Papers, 97-006, box 1, Archives Division, Birmingham Civil Rights Institute (BCRI).
4. Success in Birmingham revived the tottering reputation of King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), fueling a massive surge in fund-raising as well as sympathy demonstrations throughout the nation and the world. It also set the stage for King’s closing address to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, remembered today as the “I Have a Dream” speech. One index of the campaign’s centrality is offered by volume 2 of Branch’s history of the movement, which opens with a twelve-chapter section titled “Birmingham Tides.” Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963 – 65 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999).
5. Smyer’s varied civic initiatives in the years leading up to 1963 are detailed in Eskew, But for Birmingham, 165 – 92.
6. Smyer was not alone among Birmingham’s white leadership in recognizing these trends. For example, in 1962 Sheldon Schaffer of the city’s Southern Research Institute made similar arguments in a series of talks to the Rotary Club, several Kiwanis Clubs, the Young Men’s Business Club, and Howard College business students. “Regional Economic Trends and Their Implications for Birmingham,” Albert Burton Boutwell Papers, file 264, box 41, folder 22, Department of Archives and Manuscripts, Birmingham Public Library (BPL). A collection of essays documenting similar tensions in fourteen southern cities is Elizabeth Jacoway and David R. Colburn, eds., Southern Businessmen and Desegregation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982).
7. Scholarship on the movement is vast and often tendentious. Even the descriptor “civil rights movement” is challenged by scholars seeking to locate the events of 1954 – 65 within the broader contexts of African Americans’ four-hundred-year struggle against racial oppression. In a 2005 article, historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall surveys three decades of scholarship and makes an influential argument for a “long” civil rights movement, expansive in both time and place. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91 (2005): 1233 – 63. For a trenchant counterargument, see Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang, “The ‘Long Movement’ as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies,” Journal of African American History 92 (2007): 265 – 88. Book-length studies of African Americans’ engagement with international affairs include James H. Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935 – 1961 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Penny M. Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937 – 1957 (Ithaca, NY.: Cornell University Press, 1997); Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935 – 1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); and Plummer, ed., Window on Freedom: Race, Civil Rights, and Foreign Affairs (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
8. Book-length studies include Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000); and Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003).
9. Arjun Appadurai, “The Production of Locality,” in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 178 – 99.
10. On Addis Ababa, see my discussion below of the 1963 Conference of African Heads of States and Governments. On Mecca: Malcolm X visited Birmingham in 1959 to promote membership in the Nation of Islam, and on his return to Chicago he praised the growth of the Nation’s Birmingham temple. He returned the following year, delivering a key speech in Birmingham during a tour of the South. See Wayne Taylor, ed., Malcolm X: The FBI Files, wonderwheel.net/work/foia/1961/040361-050561/ southerntour60-61pdf and www.wonderwheel.net/work/foia/1959/041059-051959/010859- 030459chi pdf (accessed June 8, 2011). For more on Malcolm X’s tours of southern states, see Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (New York: Viking, 2011), 136 – 37; 178. On New Delhi: Alabama native John Lewis, a central figure in the 1961 Freedom Rides, struggled to balance his commitments to the rides with interviews for a two-year appointment in India offered by the American Friends Service Committee. Lewis accepted the appointment largely based on the example of his mentor, Gandhian scholar and activist Jim Lawson. John Lewis and Michael D’Orso, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 144.
11. Plummer, Rising Wind, 296.