Robin D. G. Kelley Presentation: Everyday Forms of Resisting, JCP Summer Institute, 1991 July 12
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| Raymond Gavins | It is my pleasure to welcome to the Institute this morning Robin D.G. Kelley whom I have known since his days as a postdoctoral fellow at UNC at Chapel Hill. He has also been involved in the conception and definition of this project as a member of the advisory committee or the board, or both of the Center for Documentary Studies. I have therefore known him and his wife and beautiful little girl for some time. | 0:02 |
| Raymond Gavins | Robin was educated in California receiving his BA from long Beach California State University at Long Beach and his MA and PhD from UCLA after teaching in other universities including Southeastern and Emory. He moved to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he's associate professor of history and Afro-American Studies. | 0:41 |
| Raymond Gavins | His list of grants, fellowships and awards is extensive and impressive, as well as his public and professional service. He is an active scholar doing a great deal of research and writing. | 1:17 |
| Raymond Gavins | His book, Hammer and Hoe which some of you have in your possession at this moment was the winner of the first Elliot Rudwick prize of the Organization of American Historians. And we had a party at the OAH to celebrate a happy occasion. | 1:37 |
| Raymond Gavins | He has a number of works in progress, and I'm sure he's going to some aspects of those works in his his presentation today. | 2:03 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Well, thanks, Ray, kind of a real kind introduction, you know? Today I'm just going to hopefully develop some kind of dialogue and give this really wild presentation. It's probably gonna be really bizarre, and, you know, that's just don't throw anything at me. That's, that's all I'm asking. And it's, it's basically kind of works in progress to rethinking African American politics. As most of you know, about this book on the Alabama Communist Party. In the process, as I began writing the final stages I began to, I mean, I like the book, but, but I, I sort of began become real subcritical of what I was trying to do. What I, what I set out to do was try to understand how working people, um engage in political struggle and try to capture working people, Black people's political consciousness. | 2:26 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | And the Communist Party is one of those places where you find it. But as I began to do more work and began to read work by James Scott and E.P. Thompsons, the Making of the English Working Class and, and studies that sort of outside of American history, I began to sort of realize that so much of Black working class politics is outside of organizations. There's no question about that. Very few folks join organizations, I mean, in their reasons why. So what I wanna do is to suggest ways that we might develop a research agenda that could look at sort of everyday forms of opposition, resistance, political struggles that fall outside of the purview of the historians that fall outside of the documents themselves, that they kind of sit in archives. Anyway on the eve of, of the Second World War novelist, Richard Wright wrote which I think is some profound words, he said, quote, each day, when you see us Black folk upon the dusty land of the farms, or upon the hard pavement of the city streets, you usually take us for granted. | 3:22 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | And you think you know us, but for our, but our history is far stranger than you suspect. We are not what we've seen. The passage constitutes one of the most critical observations about the nature of Black working class politics in the Jim Crow South. 'cause right here is referring to the quotidian political struggles of everyday life. He's pointing to the distinction between the various masks Black folk wear in their many efforts to negotiate relationships or contested power in public spaces, as well as to the private world, hidden behind the public gaze here in the homes, the social institutions, thoughts, language, and attire lie, the secret of the politics of the Black poor and the working class. Okay more significantly Richard Wright is referring to the folk and I put that in quotes, making spatial references to people who are best described as the urban or rural of proletariat. | 4:25 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | So, the line upon the dusty line of the farms, or upon the hard pavement of the city streets, with very few exceptions, historians have ignored the political struggles and thoughts of Black southern working people as a class. Rather than try to penetrate the world that left few written records, scholars have tended to collapse Black working class politics into the broader framework of the Black community. | 5:19 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Part of the problem, I think, is, is linked to the limitations of a race relations paradigm, which has been used to examine Black social and political struggles. Undeniably, the scholarship has been invaluable in terms of establishing the legal and extralegal impediments to Black freedom and self-determination, examining structures of oppression and White and Black perceptions of each other. In fact, the best of the race relations literature go a bit further and examine organized efforts on the part of the Black community to transform their circumstances, whether through institution building or direct political engagement with the status quo. | 5:41 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | But race relations literature also tends to reduce African American political discourse to two interrelated bipolar paradigms. They have protests versus accommodation on the one hand, and integration versus various degrees of separatism. Now, these interpretive frameworks, which are only slowly fading from historical scholarships, not only minimizes or ignores class and general conflict, but does not allow for oppositional practices that are need of protest, nor accommodation resistant forms that can either be called integrationist or separatists. | 6:17 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Moreover, the failure to develop a class analysis of African American communities has led a number of historians to ignore interracial class differences in conflict or treat class distinctions as an aberration that has little impact on, you know, quote unquote Negro politics. Thus, mainstream Black organizations such as the NAACP are treated as, you know, representative of the African American community. | 6:50 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | And part of the reason why I wrote this book on the Alabama Communist Party, was to challenge that, that idea. And I think it, it, there it is evidence that at certain moments, you know, the Communist Party had much more popular support in the Black community in the NAACP. In 1931, the NAACP had in Birmingham had a paid up membership of six, whereas the international labor defense had about three or 400 African American members. | 7:15 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | But again, the perception is that African Americans, African, African American organizations are representative those organizations that that push certain policies rather than really looking at what people are doing, what, what they're supporting, and what people are dreaming what, what individuals are are doing in terms of not joining organizations, which is just as critical as who joins. Now by drawing examples from recent studies of southern Black working people, I like to sketch out a research agenda that might allow us to render visible hidden forms of resistance. Examine how class consciousness shapes political struggle and bridge the gulf between the social and cultural world of working class African Americans in politics. | 7:42 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | My suggestive remarks are partly indebted to political anthropologist James Scott, in the chapter you've probably all read on infrapolitics comes out of his book. Anyway, Scott argues that despite appearances of consent, marginalized groups challenge those in power by constructing and acting out a hidden transcript, a dissident political culture that manifests itself in the daily conversations, jokes, songs, folklore, and other cultural forms of the oppressed, and frequently surfaces as everyday forms of resistance, theft, foot dragging the destruction of property, et cetera or more rarely in the form of an open attack against individuals, institutions, or symbols of domination. Scott labels a whole body of behind the scenes political discourse infrapolitics, oppositional practices, which constitute the foundation of politics for all organized mass movements. | 8:29 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | These hidden forms provide the structural and cultural framework for the sorts of political actions. Social scientists generally examined. So I'm sort of doing a kind of a historical archeology here, looking at what lies beneath organized or even pon, what seems to be spontaneous forms of opposition in the Jim Crow South, where Black working people have been locked out of mainstream political institutions throughout most of the 20th century. The victims of legal and extralegal repression and have had to face racial as well as economic barriers to fair wages and decent living conditions. It should not be surprising that much of their oppositional practice remain largely at this level of politics. | 9:24 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Indeed, perhaps the most effective way to characterize the struggles of Black southern working people is by using metaphors from guerilla warfare. They were engaged in, in a protracted struggle constantly testing the limits, attacking vulnerable sites, making tactical retreats, challenging the powerful and small scale skirmishes. | 10:04 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | And one place to, to begin is to look at the spaces in which Black working people create a dissident culture. Resistance to domination is always shaped by relations of power and informed by dissident subcultures. During the era of Jim Crow, Black working people carved out social space in which they could articulate the hidden transcript free from the watchful lie of White folk. These social spaces constitute partial refuge from humiliation and indignities a, a place where they could create a discourse, a hidden transcript that negates injustice. | 10:23 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | The most obvious examples of such social sites in which Black people construct this dissident culture. This hidden transcript are in the homes, churches, bars, blues club, dance hall, social club, pool halls, barbershops, beauty parlors, et cetera. In the Black community, though often treated as two diametrically opposed cultural forms to call in responsive, a blues man's versus, or preacher's sermon articulate the grievances, struggles, dreams, and aspirations of subordinate groups of a of African Americans. | 11:00 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | They're not always articulating a radical voice and opposition to daily conditions of work and racism. And in the case of many churches some folks sat through sermons that preached against any form of resistance, at least you know, openly. But to sit in church and believe that you're closer to God than your White boss, or to, to hear how a protagonist and a blue song left the community, rather than take abuse or direct challenges to ideological hegemony. | 11:36 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Now granted, you know, it doesn't always translate into action, but you know, to be able to think beyond what people think you think, you know, it's real not what we see. That's the line out of Richard Wright, you know, is a, is a powerful step. What it means is that, you know, despite the fact that someone like Limon in his book on Black Tennessee, or Howard Ritz's book on racial relations in the urban south, despite the fact that he kind of paints a picture of a Black elite that's active in a so-called lower class that has no, just sort of acquiesces as passive misses the point about what goes on in these hidden social spaces. | 12:04 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Now, this is sort of the beauty of Larry Levine's book, Black Culture and Black Consciousness which to me is just a pioneering study of this hidden transcript. Earl Lewis is in their own interest, is a study of Black Norfolk during the 20th century, is another excellent example of, of how this hidden transcript is constructed and maintained. | 12:42 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | And here, the roots of oppositional action, you know, you wouldn't have had civil rights movement because without this hidden transcript, you know, it was that hidden transcript that informed people's actions, you know, anyway, those in power explained an enormous amount of energy and resources trying to undermine social spaces they believe were subversive. So, question about this. This is why it was so important to disguise the intentions. For example, church meetings during a, a moment of, of uprising among African Americans were often seen as a threat to power and could eventually to immense violence. | 13:04 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | To give you some examples, which for those of you who have read in my book when the Sheriff Office Union first started, they had the meetings in churches the mere fact that local police officials kind of had a feeling that something was going on. They've broken the church, you know, they've murdered Ralph Gray, they shot up other people. And in some cases, during the Cotton Pickers strike in 1935, police invaded another church that had nothing to do with the sharecroppers Union beat up three women, one of whom was like, nearly a hundred years old because they feared that in these churches on this Sunday where people are praying that something's going on, you see, I mean, if something wasn't going on, if something, if these were not free social spaces in which a hidden transfer were created, then why would people in power be so afraid of a church meeting, of a sewing club or for that matter, even a blues joint? | 13:48 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | And also people who construct these or maintain these social spaces realizes that's why the sheriff opportunity Women's Auxiliary used euphemisms like sewing clubs to refer to their organization, to protect themselves to carve out space that could, they can call their own without molestation. The African Americans were very successful in terms of maintaining this dissident subculture for a couple of reasons. | 14:47 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | First, segregation ironically allowed for more quote unquote Black social space. Authorities understood this and spent a lot of time and money cultivating stool pigeons, for example, you know, informants who went out their way to try to, you know, tell folks what's going on in, in the Black community, tell people in power. | 15:14 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | The history of stool pigeons and informants hasn't really been written. Nobody wants to touch it, you know, because that's the truth. I mean, it's, it's the sort of thing that's really necessary, but they don't wanna touch it. You know? Every, almost every major social movement involving Black folks, there's always been, you know, your Judas. I mean, that's a fact, but it's, it's an, it's an issue that needs to be examined scientifically, historically. And there's all kinds of evidence in police reports. And FBI reports, sometimes they mark out the name. | 15:34 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | But the point is that there are people who inform, and there are reasons for that, you know? The second reason why they've been so successful is because much of African American oppositional culture was oral, and it was much easier to disguise and retain than say, written documents, which could be seized and taken, and oral culture moves. | 16:06 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Julius Scott, who's this, this brilliant brother godfather of my child is writing this book about the Haitian Revolution and how information about the Haitian Revolution read throughout the South through this oral culture. Real powerful. It means better than AT&T, you know, in terms of like getting the word out. | 16:29 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Now, another place where we might find another site of work class resistance would be what I call the point of production or the workplace. Aside from, you know, organized labor struggles, what, what I think we might start paying attention to is you know, everyday forms of resistance at the workplace that manifests themselves in kind of unorganized forms. Like foot dragging, slow downs, theft and sabotage. I mean, you don't have to be a member of a union to engage and sabotage. You don't have to be a member of a union to like shuffle your feet a little bit, especially if you're tired, you know? Nor do you have to be a member of a union to to take a little from your employer, especially if you know you're being ripped off. | 16:46 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | A theft is a, a critical example. There's a lot of evidence of it. Domestic workers were adep at handholding or stealing from the employers coal miners and people residing near railroads appropriated chunks of coal and coke for the home ovens. And during the depression, they can home to torn apart by the poor, desperately need fuel. I mean, there's numerous examples that should be explored. Sabotage is an area that's probably the most underexplored of them all except for some studies of, of arson in the South. And some reference references to rural resistance strategies. Not a whole lot of historians have looked at examples of sabotage at the workplace. And this is kind of unusual, given two things. First sabotage is one of the most popular forms of working class resistance all over the world. There's been studies in South Africa, England, France, you know, Japan, Southeast Asia, everywhere you find examples of sabotage. | 17:32 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | So chances are, you know what happens here. Okay? The other more important example is that know sabotage has been a form of opposition and resistance among slaves, and there's numerous studies of that. Now, my question is, why is it that, you know, we have all these examples during slavery, and then once emancipation happens, Black people are so loyal, they're not gonna mess up anything. They're not gonna break any tools, especially if they're working for somebody who was like their previous master. Suddenly they don't want to touch it, you know? | 18:34 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | But see, that's not true. I mean, I'm convinced, and, you know, we don't have enough studies to prove yet, but I'm pretty much convinced that sabotage is taking place constantly throughout the 20th century when people get away with it. You know, if you're pissed, I mean, we've all sabotaged something in our lives as, as workers, you know, unless we really love our job, you know so, so (laugh) in some cases, you know, I think that this, this act of resistance is, is a reality which needs to be explored because it's proof of a working class oppositional consciousness, despite the fact that this same person might be a strike breaker, the same person might not be a member of the union. | 19:04 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Now I should add though that looking at African American working class sabotage is a difficult conflict issue. And Joe Trotter's new book on coal miners in Southern West Virginia points out why it's difficult to do this. And he, he has three important points when you talk about the work habits of, of Black coal miners. First of all, African Americans in the minds hope that by doing the best job possible, it might remove the racial ceiling on occupational mobility. This is critical. That's why employers were not all that wrong when they said that, you know, Black labor is really sometimes the most efficient labor, most hardwork because it was this kind of underlying belief that if they work hard enough, possibly, you know, that might move up. Those people who didn't believe that usually did what they could to undermine the production process. | 19:42 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Secondly coal mining is a dangerous job. And it involved a number of people doing different things. And the jobs that a lot of Black coal miners did was hand loading. Now, sabotage in, in the depths of the mines could lead to injury and death of a fellow worker. And see, the whole purpose of sabotage not to hurt your workers is to hurt the employers. So it wasn't the best possible place. The coal mines, not the best possible place to engage in sabotage, unless it was something you do after, after work is over. | 20:37 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | But the interesting thing about coal production, especially in the 20th century, is that a lot of mines were open 24 hours. You have people working night shifts. So it's not like you could blow up a mine and, you know, get away with it without hurting somebody. You know? I mean, this just sort of things in the back of, of Trotter's mind, in the back of my mind about why it would be difficult to always find examples of this. | 21:08 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | The third reason is that coal miners, for the most part, had more autonomy and control than other industrial workers which means that they probably could control the pace of work more so that changed later with changes in production process. But by being able to control the pace of work, it may lead to less grievances. | 21:32 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | In any case, despite Trotter's examples and the difficulty of find, of finding sabotage in certain types of work, the fact is that sabotage was a reality in heavy industry as well as among household workers. | 21:53 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | I mean, Tara Hunter's research is brilliant on this score where the spitting and food accidentally scorching a meal was not uncommon. You know, we can't possibly believe that. It's just an accident that a domestic worker, by accident some saliva fell out of her mouth onto the plate. "Oh my goodness. Oh, I didn't mean to do that." You know, we can't imagine, for example, that it's an accident that someone would burn something in uh, in their employer's household and never burn anything at home, you know, maybe has to do with the differences in pots. | 22:07 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | But the fact is that whether, whether we like it or not, sabotage was a reality. And it, what's interesting too, about, about race culture, ideology and sabotage is that African Americans who lashed out at property protected themselves sometimes by playing the fool, by using the dominant ideology of race on their behalf. They empowered themselves. And this is what I call the cult of True Sam Hood. you've heard of the cult of true womanhood where you know, basically the whole notion that women are a certain way, but the culture of true Sam is the same thing. | 22:39 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | You know, you know, brothers and sisters could hide behind the notion that they're somehow shiftless, slow backwards by doing something, which they, I obviously know that what they're doing. | 23:17 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | And by saying, well, boss, I didn't mean to do it. And this is an example of this in, in my book, um this's, this guy Otis Debar Levitt, who was involved in and this is not an example of sabotage, but an example of the cult of Hood in action, where a guy was a member of the Communist Party was involved in this big uprising, you know, was arrested. I mean, it was a big riot that took place. May 1st, 1913, was arrested not only for fighting police, but for carrying a concealed weapon, had a big old long knife, was taken out to the court. And he tells the judge, he says, "Well, boss I went down there, you know, thinking I can get a job. 'Cause they had these signs that said workers, workers of the world. So I went there to get a job, and next thing you know, police are beaten me. I don't know what to do." (laughter) And then homeboy got off $25 fine, okay? | 23:28 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | There's another brother that was down there, did the same thing, but instead he took, he took the other body. He says, well, you know, I'm fighting for the working class and whatnot. Blood got six months on the chain gang, you know, and he didn't even have a concealed weapon. All he did was he had a walking stick, you know? | 24:18 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | So, I mean, here's empowerment. For the judge. The judge is, is edified, because he's saying, well, of course this nigger is safe. You see, on the other hand, you know, the other dude who's not safe gets six months, you know, and, and he doesn't even know what's going on in this guy. | 24:35 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Now, well, what happens? Otis Debar Levitt, who got $25 fines suspended sentence, was out in the streets the next day, organizing for the international defense, you see? So it's a way of empowering what, it's a way of empowering yourself through racist ideology and, and doing research for this kind of stuff. What you need to do, what, what, what it what it involves is, you know, looking at evidence in company, personal personnel records, landlord diaries, police reports that use terms like in that ignorant shiftless to prove that, of course, these Black people are in that ignorant shiftless. Well, I know that Black people not ignorant in that, and shiftless, at least not all of them, and not even most of them, you know, but, but the point is, is that that ideological cover allows people to move more freely. Anyway, although subterranean resistance, it's kind of everyday forms of resistance, was the most logical form of opposition, given the nature of violence, the power relations in the South, et cetera. | 24:50 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | There were, and we know this, you know, open confrontation this is what James Scott calls public declarations of the hidden transcripts moments when people are just ready to throw down, you know, ready to fight, you know, cuss out somebody. I mean, there are just explosive moments, and there are a lot of them. | 25:51 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | One example, Delores Janiewski wrote a book, Sisterhood Denied, which is about Durham, and she gives us one, several examples of, of how Durham's tobacco factories quote, you know, resentments if allowed to surface, could lead to arguments between workers or open defiance of a supervisor. And she also says, you know, sometimes knives would drawn, I mean, people would, would when they're pushed to the wall, would come out and battle you. But what I'm suggesting that it would be wrong to assume that these open declarations, you know, these willingness to fight on the, on the shop floor or in the streets, are somehow the real thing in terms of resistance, whereas hidden forms are, are false or bogus. | 26:08 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | You know, the, the point here is that worker silence. What, what, what seems to be worker silence doesn't connote satisfaction while open defiance constitutes real active resistance. Rather, those explosive moments when a Black person risked employment or bodily harm, reflect an articulation of what had always been there behind the surface. | 26:52 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | And it's not like one particular individual is, is braver than the other. The point is, is that there are moments when these things come up and people make their decisions about when they exist very carefully, is the shared grievances, which remain hidden from public view, articulated primarily in unmonitored social space. That's the glue holding together any collective organized movement. A final note, you know, is on, on this section of, of sort of resistance at the point of production, is that we should be cognizant of, you know, when we're looking at Black working class opposition, that the workplace itself is almost always segregated and tasks we're racially divided, placing Black folk in more unskilled, often dangerous positions. | 27:13 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | And there are numerous scholars who point out this as an example of the segmented labor market. But if you examine what it means in terms of creating working class oppositional consciousness, the fact is Black and White workers do not, for the most part, work, quote unquote, side by side. And this is real common. You pick up a lot of work on Black and White southern working class history, and they'll say, you know, well, Black and White work side by side, so therefore there's a potential for class consciousness and whatnot. But that's not really the case. | 28:02 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | The fact is, African Americans were forced into nigger work. They shared a specific set of experiences and grievances rooted in the specificity of the labor process, inequity in wages, and a collective memory of resistance. So, you know, if all Black folks are ham loaders in the coal mines and White folks are doing something else, then, you know, if there's a relationship between the labor process and consciousness, then the labor process in your case is hand loaded. | 28:33 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | You know, it's, it's a Black job. So in terms of resisting resistance will take on a kind of racialized meaning. You're not talking about work class's talking about Black folk resistance because it's Black folks working as hand loaders. Now in addition to that, these same Black people generally tend to share the same neighborhoods, same social institutions outside of the workplace, all of which reinforce a kind of racialized class solidarity. Given the nature of segregation, the whole notion of a shared work culture that other historians have found elsewhere doesn't usually cross racial lines, because in essence, Blacks and Whites are not doing the same jobs in the social spaces. So what, what I'm challenging here is the notion that you can even find a tradition of interracial struggle in, at the workplace. You know, even labor organizations that are quote unquote interracial are not really interracial. | 29:02 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | You're talking about Black and White unions within the same framework, but they're not really collectively interracial. And this is one of like, a huge mistake that I made in my own book. You know, I, I, I assume there was something there the period before the Communist Party I had this chapter, this prologue where I talk a little bit about this tradition of interracial collectivity. And then when you get to the Communist Party, I discover that the communist party's not really interracial. It's, it's a Black party and a White party, and Black folks turn the party to own advantage. So I'm thinking to myself, wow, you know, this is really unusual. This is amazing. But the fact is, is that if, if I had done research on 19th century Birmingham or early 20th century Birmingham, I probably would've found the same doggone thing, you know, that is a, a Black united mine workers and a White united mine workers. | 29:56 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | You see? But see, I wasn't writing about that, and not to defend myself. I mean, you know, if you want tear out the prologue, you know 'cause I mean, I make the point about the comments part, but this is self-criticism. This is making a point about, 'cause the, the new research on southern labor history always makes that argument that somehow this is like interracial unity and stuff, and that the bosses are undermining it. | 30:46 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | That's bogus. I mean, I'm, I'm convinced it's bogus. You might find some examples, but those few examples don't make a movement. You see what I'm saying? Anyway, and I'll give you one quick example. James Green wrote a, an excellent book on grassroots radicalism in the Southwest. And he talks about this, the segregated locals, I mean, the argument that a lot of labor historians have is that, you know, Black workers resisted segregated locals, and that integrated locals are somehow better than segregated locals. | 31:07 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | But what he finds is that in the brotherhood of Temple Workers Union in 1912, which is an affiliated of the IWW and located in Louisiana, that Blacks in the segregated locals didn't wanna integrate but they were complaining that they did not have control of their finances. They paid dues, and that their local couldn't control the dues. | 31:43 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | So they have a line, like during the 1912 convention, Black delegates complained that they could not quote, suppress the feeling of taxation without representation. And in the end, the same local demanded that, and I quote, a Colored executive board elected by Black union members, and designed to work in harmony with this White counterpart would be established. Okay? The point here is that Black people didn't want an integrated local, didn't want empowerment. You know, it's not being relegated to your own local, in your own neighborhood. | 32:06 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Fighting for the rights of Black workers within the larger context was the issue. The issue was that Black folks are paying dues to an organization, and they don't have any say. So, you see, so what ended up happening was when they realized that they could not create a separate, you know, colored board that would, you know have that would be empowered to make those decisions that affect the union as a whole. | 32:38 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | They fought for integration, not because they wanted to be integrated, but they wanted to have some kind of empowerment within the union. So what it requires is rethinking the history of labor organizations in the South and rethinking it not from the perspective that somehow integrated local, the more progressive but from the perspective of what Black people in those locals are thinking. You see now, to go beyond the point of production and to turn to public spaces is also important. | 32:59 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | 'Cause the richest areas of Black working plastic resistance, I think, can be found outside of the workplace in public spaces that have been deemed White space. Now, here we're seeing working people as complex human beings whose concerns and dreams are not linked exclusively to the workplace. | 33:29 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | The sort of sites of resistance I'm thinking about here are like street parks, sidewalks, public transportation, especially White owned business establishments and waiting rooms. And what's ironic about this is, you know, this is not new. The idea of studying resistance in public space is certainly not new. In fact, struggle for desegregation of the space is interested scholars for a long time. But what we do read about are well organized struggles with goals and spokespersons and organizations behind it, not the everyday posing the guerilla warfare that made mobilization of broader movements possible. Think of, think of the Rosa Parks story. | 33:44 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | I mean, it's become kind of mythical now where you know, as scholars we know better. But you know, when you see popular culture, you have, you know, a woman who becomes more elderly as time goes on, right? Who is just tired. She sits down and one day she's like, I can't get up. I don't feel like it. I'm not gonna get up. Bam, you have a movement out of nowhere. You know, she just stood up and just bam, you know? | 34:30 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | And see my point is that Black people had been resisting. Montgomery buses had been resisting on Birmingham buses, resisting on buses all over the country daily. Daily. And that was why the movement had so much resonance, okay? It was, it was that people knew, people experienced that people have done that. They stood against, you know, the police. But when someone says, okay, we're gonna boycott, it's because of their own personal experiences, collective memory of that experience and witnessing other people resist, that made a difference in terms of mobilizing the mass of the people. That was the critical issue. | 34:53 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | The other thing about Rosa Parks, and this is just an aside, was that this is a woman who was a veteran of movement. At 17 years old, she was supportive of the international labor defenses, struggle to free this gospel board. She was secretary of the naacp, 1943. She had gone to Highland Folk School. I mean, everything. She was a veteran of the movement. You know, she wasn't like some old seamstress who just didn't feel like getting up. And that has something to do with like the sexism in the way in which some of our sisters have been written. But it also has to do with this idea that somehow grassroots people can't move, have no politics, have no conscience. | 35:28 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | You see, now what I wanna do is, is turn to a specific example to, to make my point about public transportation and look at Birmingham during World War II. Now, it's no accident that public transportation became one of the most important sites of resistance during the war. | 36:04 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | First, as more rural residents moved into the city to take advantage of wartime employment, the sheer number of people moving to and from work over taxed are already limited feed to either street cars and buses. Battles over space, as well as the manner in which space was allocated, resulted in intense racial conflict. Second, public transportation, unlike a waiting room or a water fountain, was commodified space. When one pays for a service, that one depends on for her or his livelihood. There seems to be less willingness to accept certain forms of domination, particularly forms that affect one's ability to get his get to one's destination on time. I mean, getting to work on time is important. If, if the bus keeps passing you up, it kind of messes you up. I mean, it's kind of logical. | 36:21 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Finally, Birmingham's buses and street cars might be regarded as moving theaters. I like to use that metaphor. I think it's useful. | 37:08 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | And here I'm using theater in two ways. One, as a site of performance, and two, as a side of military conflict. You know, like a theater. First plays of conflict, repression and resistance are performed, which passengers witness or participate in a wide variety of skirmishes that shaped the collective memory of the passengers illustrate the limitations as well as possibilities of, of resistance to domination and draw more passengers into this quote unquote performance. | 37:17 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Second, theater as a military metaphor is particularly appropriate in light of the fact that in Birmingham, at least all bus drivers and streetcar conductors carry guns in Blackjack, no question. And it's not like their guns didn't have bullets in it. | 37:46 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | I mean, they, they had weapons and they used them regularly to maintain order, I should say, maintain the social order. | 38:00 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Despite the repressive police-like atmosphere and public transportation. Black passengers, especially youth, still resisted of course, well over the course of 12 months, beginning September, 1940 1, 55, this is just one year period, 55 incidents were reported in which African American passengers either refused to give up their seats or sat in the White section. Okay? It's 55. That's based more than one a week. | 38:09 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | More importantly, in most incidents, the racial compartmentalization of existing space was not the primary issue. Rather, most Blacks who had no alternate means of transportation focus their complaints on the manner in which they were treated by operators and other passengers on issues like incorrect change, on, on the power of drivers to allocate or limit space for Black passengers. And the practice of forcing Black folk to pay at the front door and where they have to enter to the center doors. | 38:40 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | It was not uncommon for, for instance, for half empty bus or a streetcar to pass up African-Americans on a pretext. The space needed to be preserved for potential White riders, nor was it unusual for Black passengers to pay pay at the front of the bus and be left standing while she or he attempted the board at the center door. Black female domestics regularly of having been passed up by bus drivers resulting in their being late to work or leaving them stranded at night in hostile White communities. | 39:10 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | So here it's a question of bodily harm, you know, missing the bus potential bodily harm. Well, not every Black passenger was willing to breach the public transcript of accepted behavior. Many resisted constantly testing the limit to Jim Crow. Some Black men boldly sat down next to White female passengers and challenged the operators to move them with knife in hand. And there's numerous examples of that. Sort of Stagger Lee figures. | 39:39 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Others refused to pay their fare, or in fact, some cases there was incidents in which passengers would pay half their fair and say, well, if I'm gonna be Jim Crow, why should I give you the whole modern money? You know, which is really a powerful statement of protest. These people are not, you know, members of organizations, don't have any plans, sitting back there strategizing, but they're pissed. But everyday indignities. | 40:04 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Others refuse—others simply pick fights with bus drivers and White passengers. That was pretty common too. A slight majority of resistors were women who did not fit the prim and proper Rosa Park stereotypes. Dozens of Black women were arrested for fighting or cursing out the operator, and that was pretty common too. African American passengers adopted a score of other oppositional practices, many directed at the symbols of inequality and segregation. | 40:26 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | The most common forms include hiding or moving the color dividers on the segregated buses. You know, they had those color dividers up which were movable, usually insisting on paying, paying part of the fare or holding the center door while dozens of unpaid passengers forced away into the bus. And that was pretty common. And, and, you know, the anonymity of of the crowd is amazing. 'cause once you've open that center door and you got like 30 Black folks squeezing in the bus, it's like, who can tell who, who, who didn't pay? Who did pay? And sometimes they force everyone get off the bus. But, you know, the situation's sort of amazing. Vandalism was also common. | 40:56 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Perhaps the most fascinating and often overlooked form of resistance was the use of sound to invade space designated for White people. Black passengers were rejected frequently from making too much noise, which in many cases turned out to be harsh words, directed at a conductor or a passenger, or a monologue about racism in general. One passenger on the East Lake western line, for example, was arrested after he quote, started talking in a loud voice of Negroes about White people. You know, it's a free country. He should be able to talk right in the back of the bus. Well, no, 'cause he's invading White space with his voice. You know, I mean, an analog might be, and if you to stretch it, you know, the brothers on the bus with boombox is invading space, you know? And in this case, some of it had real direct political resonance. | 41:40 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | The critical point here is that self activity on the part of Black passengers, most of whom were poor working class force, mainstream Black political organizations, organizations to at least consider conditions on Jim Crow buses and street cars. Now, in this broader article I'm working on, it's about this particular struggle. | 42:29 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | What ends up happening is the NAACP had no interest in the struggle until the woman by the name of Pauline Cars was beaten up when she was thrown off the bus, beating up by a street car conductor. And it was the people on the buses that went to the NAACP and said, look, this is what's going on on the bus. You gotta do something. And half the people who run the NAACP don't ride the bus. They drive cars. I mean, you have people like Charles McPherson, you know, a very successful doctor, EW Tagger, a successful dentist. | 42:48 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Why should he ride the bus? When he has a nice car, you know, he, he's making it pretty well. So he didn't really know what was going on. Well, when the issue was brought up, they decided, okay, what we're gonna do is we're gonna at least investigate the situation they investigated and eventually dropped it. | 43:16 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | The other organization that was brought into this struggle during World War II was the Southern Negro Youth Congress. And they developed an organization to fight specifically around racism on common carriers, as they called it. But it kind of died out. But 'cause for the Southern Eagle Youth Congress, it was more important were other issues, not struggles on the buses. So my point is that there is a relationship between the self activity of the everyday and what organizations do. Organizations are sometimes brought into the fold by what everyday people do. | 43:32 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | It's just not a, a distinction. And to say that everyday form of resistance is irrelevant to real struggles, is missing the relationship between the masses of people and what organizations eventually are forced to do. Now, there's another story to this, another side to this issue, and that is what passengers resisted. The way they've resisted, tells us a great deal about how working class and poor Blacks viewed segregation. | 44:01 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Now, this is critical, and and I'll probably be criticized for it, but I don't really care. Sitting with White folks for most Black passengers was not the issue. You know, it wasn't the issue. Rather, African Americans wanted more space for themselves. They wanted to receive equitable treatment with dignity. They wanted to be personally treated with respect. They wanted to get to work on time without having to be left standing in the rain. | 44:29 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | And above all, they wanted to exercise power over institutions that controlled them, or I wish they were dependent. I was watching, this is a show that comes on BET with the kids. Yeah, it's, they're the ones who sponsored that, that magazine. And there's a sister on there who like interviews or has like a whole posse of kids. Yeah. | 44:56 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | And there's this one, this one episode where they were talking about sitting on the front of the bus and the kids kept saying, you know, Rosa Parks fought for rights to sit in the front and Black people still sitting in the back, you know, missing the point entirely. It's not about, it's about having the right to wherever you wanna sit. And, and a lot of these kids felt like they should sit in the front because we fought for that right. | 45:16 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | You know, of not realizing that the issues was power. And the issue was freedom to do what you want. And the issue was how you get treated. You see? But the way mass media kind of turned the right struggle around, missed that point. Anyway, the fact that most regular Black writers were not primarily concerned was challenging the idea of allotting separate but equal space for Blacks and Whites did not diminish and mitigate repression on Birmingham's public transit system. Their very acts of insubordination challenge the system of segregation, whether they were intended to or not. You know— | 45:36 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Because of increased police intervention, harshly punitive measures, and more vigorous and forth and segregation laws. Um, so in the end, repression really slowed down struggle. Um, and, and the relationship between repression and what I'm talking about is real critical because, you know, this, it's not an accent that I'm trying to look at Black in for politics, because it's true that repression was so enormous. Racism was so vicious. You know, that these were the forms of struggle that people, in most cases had to adopt. You know, that power relations shaped that form. | 0:01 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | And that's sort of a, a running theme in, in all this. Um, it, it wasn't that, that people were simply scared, but the power of, of the ruling classes in the south was so enormous, and people still carved out space. People still struggle despite that racism, despite the fear of being lynched and brutally beaten in that whole psychological warfare that went along with it. | 0:39 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Um, now keeping Black bodies out of White space was seen by those in power as necessary, remaining control over African Americans, keeping them in their place. But even when working people did not invade White space, as we saw with the Black passengers on Birmingham buses, the voices, poses attitudes and styles were regarded as challenges to the status quo. | 1:02 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | And having said this, I would like to suggest one last area of inquiry. Probably the most bizarre area you can imagine, but you know, what the heck? Um, and that is the dress or outward appearance with cultural studies people call the politics, the style of African Americans as counter hegemonic discourse. The most obvious blatant examples, of course, you know, I mean, these really obvious, like folks arrested for wearing anti lynch buttons, you know, the NAACP have. There's numerous examples of that sort of thing. | 1:26 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | But what I'm talking about something a little bit more subtle, take the act of getting dressed up to go to the marketplace of refusing to look like the dominant image of what Black working people are supposed to look like of seizing status through your clothes. I mean, this may be a simple statement, but when we think about like a lot of these White photographers who did like the farm security administration pictures, you know, that Richard Wright used for the basis of his book in the forties. | 1:56 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Well, a lot of these people like, you know, kind of crumple clothes, overalls looking pretty dirty 'cause they're like working on the farm and whatnot. Um, but, but we know that when, when people were not working, they're not gonna go to the marketplace looking dirty. You can look nice. That's empowerment in a certain kind of way. | 2:22 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | It may not lead to anything other than a certain sense of personal dignity or, but it does eventually mean a challenge to White society because in so many backwater towns in the south, Black folks who were dressed up, Black, working people who insisted on looking a certain kind way, whether they're going to church or just going to buy groceries many of those walking in front of poor working class White folks who were not dressed up were seen as a real threat, were seen as people stepping out of their place. | 2:42 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | And there's no accident that a number of African American men in particular were dressed down as they put it, stripped. Um, and some were lynched just for the clothes they wear and the way they walked. | 3:12 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | You see, I mean, they sometimes go get some mail order shoes and, you know, looking fly, walking down the street, you know, shoes polished. And they're working people, they're working on a farm, but they're insisting on transforming the popular image of how they should look. You see? But that's one subtle example. | 3:25 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | A more blatant example would be Black soldiers who after World War I and after World War II wore their uniforms. And we know of numerous examples of Black soldiers who insisted on wearing uniforms after the war and were lynched for that. That's a challenge, that status quo, whether they like it or not. You see, and there's also more examples in Birmingham buses and other buses, which servicemen resisted on the buses or other public spaces. | 3:41 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | And in the process of resisting made reference to their uniform, it's like draping itself in the American flag. It's like, "You gonna touch me? You can deal with me. You can lynch me, and I'm representing the US government. What kind of fascist place is this? I fought, and this is proof. I got my uniform on. I was over in Nazi Germany, getting my butt kicked, fighting for democracy. And what you gonna lynch me?" You see, the uniform made a difference. If you didn't have a uniform, he couldn't say that in the same powerful way. You see the uniform made a difference in terms of the clothes. | 4:08 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Um, my favorite example though, and this is really bizarre and I love it is, is a zoot suit. The zoot suit did have a life in the south. Um, and though it was mainly a north and urban phenomenon, it could be found throughout various southern cities. Beaumont, Texas is a real good example because that's one of the sites of Zoo Soit riots in Beaumont. Now, it may not seem so revolutionary today, but at that moment, during World War ii, when it came about, it was a break from the current style, the zoot suit was a status symbol that could hide any occupation from shoeshine boy to librarian. | 4:38 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | If you're in a zoot suit, you know, no one could know what you are, what you do, no one could label you. Um, and more importantly, it was the ticket into like the cool hip underground world as a Lindy Hop of jazz. Um, which was itself an oppositional culture. It was an embl of ethnicity and a way of negotiating identity. The zoot suit was a Black and Chicano style. There's no question, you know, there are very few White folks wearing zoot suits during World War ii. It was after the war when they called the Italian cut, and they started wearing 'em. You know what I'm saying? But, but it was, it was a suit that represented a subversive refusal to be subservient. Now, there's certain particular politics about the suit. It's kind of interesting. Um, it became popular around World War II at a time when the war production board instituted a 26% cutback in the use of fabrics as part of, of the rationing program. | 5:13 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Uh, the regulations forayed the zoot suit. So what happened was people bought bootleg zoot suits and were produced and sold in mass numbers. Now, wearing the suit was a deliberate flouting of regulations. Um, and servicemen saw it as an unpatriotic act. 'cause number one, you had young kids, males walking around in zoot suits when they should be in uniforms as far as other, other servicemen were concerned. And two, there weren't suits that go against the regulation. I mean, this supposed rationing cloth. And these dude have like, really wide, you know, pants with the tight, you know, ankles, big old shoulder pads and big old bow ties and stuff, hats out to here. And they're like walking down the street saying, you know, you think I'm going to somebody's White man's pool? What's up? You know? So it's like this challenge by just wearing a suit. | 6:07 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Um, the language of zoot suitors also created a kind of resistive meaning the zoot suit, the, the hips or language at least was the verbal equivalent of jazz itself. It was improvisational, it required sophistication, speed, and a broad repertoire of words. Like, much like bebop. The music itself had this sort of same element. It was a running set of variations on themes. | 6:54 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Um, and what's most important about the hipster language, which, you know, I found all throughout places like Birmingham and places like New Orleans. Um, but what's interesting is that the language of hipsters stood in direct opposition to the past. The stereotype of the stuttering tongue-tied sambo and were therefore threatening figures in sort of White, mainstream southern society especially, but White society all over the country. | 7:22 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | And, you know, in addition to numerous amount of terms that people use, the most important term that came out of the forties was use the term man, you know, as an inversion of, of the term boy, which Black folks are being called boy by White people. They called each other "man." "What's up, man?" You know, which is common today. But the forties was the time when it became really popular among Black youth. So between the, the clothes and the language, I mean, it was oppositional. | 7:48 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | And other proof of it is the violence that was directed and meted out against zoot suiters in Beaumont, Beaumont, Texas in 1943. White servicemen not only beat zoot suiters on site, but engaged in a sort of ritualistic stripping. I mean, a lot of 'em had their clothes pulled off. I mean, to, to, I mean, you know, you could just beat somebody up, you know, and really hurt 'em. But if you're taking their clothes, apparently those clothes must mean something to you. Whether it was, again, intended by the, the wearer. | 8:16 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Now, while the zoot suit was not created and warned as a direct political statement itself, the attacks against the zoot suiters made it all more evident to the wearers that they were outcast, they were disinherited. It further encouraged a disengagement from mainstream America and compel Black and Chicano youth to continue creating an alternative language style and even music in opposition to American racism, and also be enforced ethnic associations and solidarity, as well as the pleasures of, of identity. | 8:42 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Now, to conclude and make a couple of other points, by shifting our focus from formal organized politics to info politics, not to diminish organized politics at all, but to shift and then go back and look at the relationship it not only allows us to recuperate the oppositional practices of segments of the Black community generally deemed inarticulate, but we essentially opened the door to a richer reinterpretation of mainstream Black and interracial political movements. The lesson here is that contrary to the works of, of race relations scholars not all of them, but some of them who paint a portrait of an active Black elite in a passive working class. | 9:12 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | The most oppressed section of Black community always resisted, you know, working people. Poor people did resist whether, whether it was in ways that we liked or not but they did so in a manner that was intended to cover their tracks. That's the whole purpose. Why should you resist and, and, and be caught? You know, it just doesn't seem to make sense. | 9:54 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | We, we try to do things that would make sure that you ensure as much safety as possible. They divide strategies of survival and resistance that grew out of their specific social and historical locations. And those strategies change as conditions. Conditions change. Cognizant of the racial and class dimensions of power in the deep south, Black working people tend to adopt evasive strategies to resist material and symbolic domination from stealing coal to vandalizing buses. And occasionally a few individuals openly challenge authority and isolated acts of resistance. | 10:14 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | And in many cases issues of personal dignity and or state sanctioned violence outweighed material needs. So issues like police brutality, for example, where at the top of the agenda of a, a number of Black urban poor folk, whereas, you know, just getting more welfare wasn't as more as important as police brutality at certain moments. | 10:47 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | During the depression, men and women gambled with their relief checks by insisting that welfare, welfare authorities treat them more courteously in the midst of war, thousands of unemployed and working poor Black residents risk, arrest, or beatings to resist racist practices on public transportation. The historical and structural relationship between the hidden transcript and organized political movements during the age of Jim Crow suggested even when Black working people adopted more public direct forms of resistance, few join organized political movements. And that's a fact. Um, and those who did were drawn to certain kinds of organizations. | 11:07 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Those rare political movements able to mobilize segments of the Black working class community were successful because they articulated the grievances, aspirations, and dreams that remain hidden from public view. In other words, they articulated the hidden transcript. | 11:42 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | A case in point might be the Alabama Communist Party. Although intense repression was a critical factor in its ability to become a mass organization, the central point is that because the party in its auxiliaries were composed of poor Black people, community activists simply brought local oppositional practices into the movement. In short, they enveloped organized radicalism with their own infrapolitics. | 11:58 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Everyday forms of resistance and survival were far more common than dramatic marches and demonstrations within the party. Uh, for example, when a family's electricity was shut off for non-payment, communists organizes surreptitiously appropriated electricity from public outlets or other homes by using heavy gauge copper wire jumpers. They also found ways to reactivate water mains after they had been turned off. | 12:21 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | In short, the communist led neighborhood committees worked from an understanding of power relations that develop out of the everyday oppositional practices in specific social locations of the poor. And understanding of info politics also helps explain why mainstream Black organizations and organized labor sometimes failed to mobilize Black working people. | 12:45 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | To return to our Birmingham example, during the thirties, communists were more successful than the traditional Black elite in their efforts to garner the court from economically disadvantaged Blacks because of the party's local leadership of products of that dissident subculture, a shared collective memory of work and exploitation and daily indignities. | 13:05 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | For the most part, the Black elite did not regard the activities of working with people as politically significant. But the inability of traditional Black leadership to mobilize support from the poor cannot be attributed entirely to their insensitivity or inability to understand poor people's lives. Rather, in many cases, the Black middle class was merely acting out in their own past a small class of Black businessmen and religious leaders not all exploited consumer base of poor and Black working class Blacks ensure peaceful relations by creating alliances with White industrialists and a handful of security, enough respectability to retain the franchise. | 13:24 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Black politician Robert Durr, a preacher from Mississippi who moved to Birmingham in 1931, was offered capital from the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company to launch an anti-union Black newspaper, The Weekly Review. With columns, he used to exhort the Black masses to accept the plight and utilize only the proper channels to improve conditions. | 13:59 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | In an interview granted five years later, Durr offered an explanation of his politics. He says, "By all means, keep in with the man who hires you and pays you." | 14:18 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Many Black working people understood this attitude all too well. Referring to the role of "big niggers" in playing in participating in electoral politics, a Black miner interviewed in the late 1930s had this to say about the Black elite. "They go down and register and tell the White folks that they can control the rest of the niggers in town. They get a light handout, and that's all there is to it. Now, they've been trying to get all the niggers in the mines to vote, meaning the coal mines, if they do it, it'll be a different story." | 14:26 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | There's so much we do not know about Black working class infrapolitics about the hidden world in which counted hegemonic ideology is constructed, if not always openly articulated. | 14:57 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Nevertheless, I'm convinced that such an approach offers some of the richest insights into 20th century Black political struggle in general, and the origins of the Civil Rights movement in particular, but to, in, to unveil the political significance of these hidden transcripts requires that we think differently about politics as well as the artificial divisions between political history and social history. | 15:08 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | I think James Scott says the best when he says "So long as we can find our conception of the political to activity that is openly declared, we are driven to conclude that subordinate groups essentially lack a political life, or that what political act they do have is restricted to those exceptional moments of popular explosion. To do so is to miss the immense political terrain that lies between quiescence and revolt. And that, for better or worse, is the political environment of subject classes. It is to focus on the visible cosign of politics and miss the continent that lies beyond." (applause) | 15:29 |
| Speaker 2 | Anyway, we are close to break time. I have about 10:15. I think it might facilitate the coherence of the question and answer session if we thought about taking our break early now permitting Robin to regroup and you to refresh and let's regroup again at say 20 is now ready to to engage in some exchange with you. So I have to sort of take Well, you can go ahead. Okay. | 16:03 |
| Speaker 3 | I I really appreciate some of the, the comments that you made. Um, some of 'em confirmed some of my own views about, about resistance and protests and obviously kind of parallels some things that have already been done, as you mentioned about, about slavery. | 17:04 |
| Speaker 3 | But here, I guess I wish could kind of raise the courts of Tara Hunter, who was here the other day, kind of dealt with some issues are similar to this, in which, in both, I guess for bit of dialogue, but I, I want to ask, how would you, how would you respond to the view or the criticism if you'll, that, that an important component of protest or resistance is that, is that the object of your resistance or opposition vis this case for White power structure? [Indistinct] knows that, that you are resistant, that you protest something and, and hence much of what you described as a court is hitting hitting transcript of this influence politics that Scott talked about was not really resistant to protests at all, but, but maybe was a display anger, maybe in some cases, these cases, even judges, you know, that's term or just simply a personal agenda that somebody might have had if they were trying to get frustration case might be. | 17:20 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Well, no, that's, that's a real important point. Um, one of the mistakes that, that I think some of the previous scholars in, in like European history and other histories is made was, and it's been corrected, you know, assuming that somehow pe when people resist or rebel, they do so on the basis of ideals, these broad sweeping ideals like defending a constitution or, you know, making a revolution. | 18:36 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | But even when you look outside the United States the Russian Revolution was, was made in part by a number of peasants who went down to World War I, who were just sick and tired of getting the, the shot at who didn't, who went down there with no boots and stuff and said, look, my crops are ready to be tended. I'm gone. And they jetted. They went back to the crops, worked on it, and in the process undermined the czar, you know, undermine well, in this case it wasn't czar, it was the the sort of provisional counsel. | 19:00 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | But the, the point is, is that their self activity wasn't intended to make a revolution. Their self activity wasn't intended to tend their crops to get out of a situation that they felt dangerous. And in the process, that constant engagement with what was happening in, in Leningrad, what was happening you know, in terms of the, of seizing power, all that affected them. | 19:31 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | When they began to realize that possibly the Bolshevik Party and Lenin might, because they opposed World War I, might in fact help them get their crops together, help them get land that was take that they never had in the first place as serfs. You know, then that dialogue between their mass action and leaders of of organizations eventually led them to, to actually be supportive of the Russian Revolution. | 19:53 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Another good example from the United States is, you know, the Civil War, WEB Du Bois's classic Black Reconstruction made this point clear, 1935, he said, look, you know, Black folks were engaged in a general strike. All these slaves left the plantation. They didn't leave the plantation saying to themselves, "Hey, if I leave the plantation, I can undermine the Confederacy by just withholding my labor and support the union troops, and then we could win the war." | 20:17 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | They were trying to get out of a situation. When they saw union troops nearby, they said, "Hey, I could move, go over to the side of the Yankees. I won't be a slave anymore." And, you know, through rumor and all kinds of other stuff, people believed that once you got to the union side, you're free. You see in the process that action, that self activity on the part of African people who were enslaved undermine the Confederacy. | 20:44 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | So I, I don't think you can ever find, with the exception of a few leadership positions, people who leave written documents who are saying they're fighting for, for these broad ideals and causes. You can't find any kind of mass movement in which there's not a dialogue between people's personal needs and angers and frustrations and the broader goals of the movement. And those goals are always changing on the basis of that self activity. You know, I mean, that's one way to explain it. | 21:07 |
| Speaker 4 | It's obvious that, that you're doing for Black workers in 1940s and fifties. But a group of scholars who were writing in the sixties and seventies [indistinct] forties Herbert Gutman and Nestle Laws, and a whole bunch of scholars have done for the institution of slavery. | 21:37 |
| Speaker 4 | And I, I guess all of us know the criticism that have been enlarged against those, those scholars for, for maintaining that anything that somebody did could be looked at as an, as an act of resistance. And I'm sure that, that you, you, you've gotten the kind of criticism of continue to get it and probably get it here today. | 22:01 |
| Speaker 4 | But the point that I want to make is, is that those same criticisms that we lodge against those scholars writing in the 1960s and seventies seem to be same kind of criticisms that we lodge against you, your study the same kind of thing that we talked about on Monday when, when Tara was here. | 22:21 |
| Speaker 4 | How do we know that these indeed were acts of resistance? How do you actually get at it 25 years from here? You can write about anything that people do and categorize it as something you know, so my, my point is, how do we cross that very thing of saying that what folks did, person gets on, on the bus with boom box raise as hell some of those folks, I would, I would suspect it didn't make any difference that they were all Black folks on the bus then would've done the same thing. Right? You know, whether it was a mixed group or all White, and we done the same thing, right? So, so how do we do we cross that very, very thin line of categorizing activities, human behavior as acts of resistance, right? As political statements? | 22:42 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Well just, okay, I'll give you two, two answers. One specific one regarding like boom boxes and stuff, what that really means. I wouldn't go as far as saying it's like conscious acts of resistance, but I think the problem is, is that we can't see that as racial resistance. 'cause it's true, you know, nothing but Black folks on the bus. A lot of it has to do with generational opposition. A lot of it has to do with living in a world where you feel really alienated. And, and one of the ways to sort of transcend that alienation is by, by creating an identity and seizing public space with your body, with your music or whatever. | 23:27 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | I mean, that's what graffiti art is all about. You know, it's about saying, you know, if graffiti artists didn't hit the subways and get, didn't hit public buildings, they could have done that stuff on paper. But the whole idea is to put it on subways and, and public buildings to make a statement about your own identity and to really say, look, people on the subways treat us like dirt. | 24:04 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Now you might say, well, fighting against the way you're treated on the subways is not real resistance because, you know, subways aren't important. What's important is a fight against racism. But in terms of how people experience it, they resist. Now, the, the broader question about how can we tell what is resistance and what's not, I'm not, I'm not gonna sit here and say everything is resistance, that's bogus. | 24:27 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | And nor am I gonna say that every single self active act on the part of, of Black working people is meant or intended to be oppositional. Sometimes it's not intended to, but it becomes that way. In the case of, of slaves who are, who are taking their own labor power away from the masters, what they're trying to do is get away to save their own hides. They're not trying to undermine the whole Confederacy. | 24:48 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Just because someone doesn't consciously have some kind of broad, ideal to sort of transform society doesn't mean that their acts are not directed at trying to change the situation. This is the critical thing. Is someone trying to change something? Is someone venting out anger? Is someone trying to get revenge? These are the critical issues of what constitutes resistance. | 25:13 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | In the case of domestic workers, I, I heard that there was a previous discussion about, you know, whether spitting on somebody's food is resistance or not. You know, there's no question about that. You know, anyone who would think it's not resistance misses the point that spit is not supposed to be in the food. I mean, I don't think spit is, is meant—I've never, I've never really spit in my own food and tasted it. So I don't know, maybe they intended to make it feel better, taste better. (laughter) | 25:33 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | But the point is that they're, they're venting their anger. There's no question about that. And their anger is, is and, and their anger and revenge is shaped by the specific power relationships and specific everyday indignities that they face as a domestic worker. Not, they're not, I mean, the spit is not meant for the whole race. It's meant for that moment at that, you know. | 26:02 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | But that doesn't mean that that doesn't eventually translate into something. Sometimes it doesn't mean anything. I mean, as far as like what it leads up to, but it is a way to vent anger and, and, and, you know, from indignities that one experiences, and that's what working class opposition's all about. It's working people whose lives are affected by work, by place, by racism and, and, and people who don't wanna take it, you know, they're not gonna accept it, proof that they're not gonna accept it is these acts of resistance. Whether it leads to anything else is another issue, whether it's successful or not, is another issue altogether. | 26:25 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | But it at least lays the foundation and says, look, Black people are not passive. Don't, don't acquiesce, don't accept their plight. 'cause all this other stuff is evidence that they, you know, that they're, they're opposing. | 27:01 |
| Speaker 3 | Would you say— | 27:15 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | I'm sorry. Well, she should just say, talk out. I mean, I, I I hate to make those decisions. Okay. Because I know you had your hand up for— | 27:16 |
| Speaker 3 | I mean I guess I was first introduced to this notion about transcript, public transcript, not concept. And I mean so much about this disturbs me, I don't know how, how to start. But one is that in particular, from your presentation morning, it seems to suggest any act of deviant behavior on the part of oppressed people have some political significance or can be interpreted as some form of opposition. And our concern, I mean, we take that to the logical conclusion that we are about to say, like the, the, you know, you know, Friday night fish fry and, and Saturday night juke joints are preliminary to taking state power. And, and the point is that— | 27:24 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | See, but that's not the point. | 28:17 |
| Speaker 3 | No, no. It is the point because unless we understand mean that oppression breed a certain kind of behavior that doesn't even tell me that that behavior is, is is opposition also, unless we assume we buy some of the myth that's been suggested by White folks as if Black folks somehow or another, less than human beings. And we all of a sudden find out through slave narratives that they didn't like the masters. And now we said, oh, that's some form of resistance. | 28:19 |
| Speaker 3 | But I I, when I was reading Scott book, and he has a long quotation from, from, from the sister that the master had beat her daughter. And she said, well, you know, she let, I don't wanna try to report her, but that, you know, she hated him. She didn't like the master, whatever. And I'm like, I mean, are we surprised that these people did not like their master? | 28:48 |
| Speaker 3 | And what is important to me about the major question is how, how do we—how do oppressed people come to a terms of some collective consciousness and challenge the state? | 29:07 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | I mean, obviously people were going to, going to engage in certain kind of behavior that, that indicate they don't like their circumstances, but what becomes political is when that that interpreted one, some activity occurs that challenges the state. | 29:18 |
| Speaker 3 | Uh, now what would certainly then have to do if we don't buy that, and we certainly have to, and I would like for you to give another, some definition of politics. Particularly to suggest that wearing a zoot suit has something to do with some resistance to oppression or domination, requires some different definition of politics. | 29:37 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | When, when you vote, do you vote for the person you think is gonna win? | 29:57 |
| Speaker 3 | No. | 30:01 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | You vote for the person who you think represents you or represents the ideas or some kind of issue. Okay? Because this, it seems to me like what you're saying is that challenges have to be challenges to the state. Any kind of resistance has to be one that can win. Anything that loses is bull. | 30:02 |
| Speaker 3 | No, no, no, I said it has to be focused on the state— | 30:16 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Focus on the state. But, but again, I mean— | 30:18 |
| Speaker 3 | —oppression is in fact a collective phenomenon. | 30:21 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Okay. But, but it strips— | 30:23 |
| Speaker 3 | And act yourself can't suggest anything other than how individuals carve out some kind of space for themselves, how they respond as human beings in oppress society. For them to move from a nigger wearing a zoot suit to some revolutionary activity, I think it— | 30:24 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Yeah, but I never said that the zoot suit can automatically lead to revolutionary activity. That's not the point. The point is that the wearing the zoot suit is oppositional. It may be retrograde, but it's oppositional no matter what. It's resistive in terms of how those particular young people experience oppression. And the other thing is that I would never suggest that somehow oppression breeds the fish fry. The fish fry is carving out space. It's not oppression that breeded the fish fry. | 30:40 |
| Speaker 3 | What I said was the fish fry is preliminary to revolution activity, the thing that having fish fry impact could behavior. What, what? It seems to be something is at work here. | 31:09 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Uh, well see, I know that, no, I think you're doing is as you're imagining that that the only political activity or significance is activity that is openly, consciously resistive, challenging the state— | 31:22 |
| Speaker 3 | When about that. Yeah. | 31:34 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Yeah. Well, when, when when most people, and we're not just talking about Black people. That's why I try to have some kind of comparative situation with the Soviet Union, with Europe, with Asia, everybody, everyone experiences oppression doesn't always see or go to college to learn that the state has something to do with how White folks are treating them. You see, in other words, sometimes we think as academicians that somehow all these folks have this knowledge of all these interconnected relationships between the state industry and et cetera. | 31:35 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | For an average man who's 25 years old, who has a 10th grade education, who's working on a shop floor and a steel mill, what's affecting him at that moment is the fact that it's 110 degrees. White folks are making more money than he is. You know, he got called a stupid nigger in front of all his coworkers, and he's pissed. | 32:07 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | He doesn't wanna shed tears, you know, because he knows that, you know, he's supposed to be a man and he's not supposed to do that. So instead, what does he do? He stops working as fast as he worked before. He, maybe throws some kind of foreign object in big old pot of steel to try to, you know, see what would happen. I mean, he does things that would vent out his anger and frustration at that moment. | 32:29 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Now, now, how does that relate to broader political movements? Well, it's possible that later that afternoon he's walking down the street and he says, "Man, I'm just sick and tired of how these people treat me." And someone says, "Well, you know, why don't you join the union?" I said, "What are you talking about?" "Join the union." | 32:53 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | You know, in the case of the Communist Party, that's what a lot of people did. They were pissed off about specific incidents, and they were brought into the pale of, of a radical organization because that some people refuse to join radical organizations and said, I'm on my own. You know? | 33:08 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | And my point is, is not to romanticize any of these acts at all, or even suggest that somehow they would translate into something much bigger. That's a problem for those people who are trying to build a much big movement. For most everyday people, what they want is revenge at the moment. Better situation at that, at that minute. And we might sort of say, well, they, they have a limited consciousness. Well, sure they have a limited consciousness, but the point is, is that it is oppositional. | 33:23 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | And I think that one of the points that we also miss is that there's not, it's not an accident that, you know, building a collective movement is so difficult. That's not an accident at all. Repression has to do with why people choose the forms of opposition. They, they do repression, racism, the, the viciousness of denying people education, atomization of people's everyday life in which they don't even know that the state has something to do with why they're getting low wages. | 33:48 |
| Speaker 3 | But suggest that—I'm not suggesting that oppressed people no matter what the formula must understand something about the state for them to be engaged in some, you know, revolutionary opposition activity. What I am suggesting though, is that, that either we need some more concept that work with or we come, you know, we end up crashing, smothering everything together to the point that does not make any sense. | 34:17 |
| Speaker 3 | Clearly, if, if we come to some agreement that throwing a wrench in, in the machine or a spitting in, in the masters food in fact constitutes some opposition, and clearly we don't have to use the same concept that describe that activity, as the activity when people organize and understand that they're actually having to take in some collective effort to change the circumstance they're alive. | 34:48 |
| Speaker 6 | But would that have to happen if the cook put grind up glass in the master's food, it's going kill him. That doesn't have to be collective action. | 35:16 |
| Speaker 3 | No, no— | 35:26 |
| Speaker 6 | Master's die a brutal death. | 35:27 |
| Speaker 3 | She killed the masters. She killed the masters, that's not changing the institution of slavery— | 35:28 |
| Speaker 6 | And well, but it does get rid of an oppressive master. You know what I'm saying? Is it have to be a collect, a conscious collective act? | 35:32 |
| Speaker 3 | No, my point is, we can call that over one, but I am suggesting that for, for conceptual clarity, we certainly need a different concept to refer to individual activities to deal with their immediate circumstances out of frustration, whatever, as opposed to collection activity that explicitly challenging. | 35:39 |
| Speaker 6 | My point is that if it's goal directed, even if it's on an individual level, the goal is to lead to the—it could be a political, it leads to early death of the master. It could be a political statement. | 35:59 |
| Speaker 3 | I mean, I suggest we can call it what we want, but certainly we need some distinction between that kind of activity. | 36:10 |
| Speaker 6 | And Scott calls it infrapolitics. | 36:18 |
| Speaker 3 | I'm saying, but he calls it that, all of to suggest that all of it, that this in fact somehow relate to by, in fact, as political, importantly as is most of what he would call public politics, a public transcript. And even to the point it gets kind of bizarre, even to the point of, of somehow or another reconstructing the Uncle Tom, to suggest that this may be in fact a disguised Lenin. | 36:20 |
| Speaker 3 | And it leads further and forward to, well, what, what eventually comes that we don't have no conceptual means of discerning what constitutes political behavior with a conscious understanding of transforming the daily lives of, of, of oppressed people. And, and when someone pissed off and throw a wrench— | 36:48 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | See, he's not, he's not, Scott's not collapsing these things into one category category called politics. | 37:15 |
| Speaker 3 | Well, he's that maybe something— | 37:20 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | No, no, he, he is, but, but it is | 37:21 |
| Speaker 6 | True trying to validate on another category. | 37:24 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | He's explaining why— | 37:26 |
| Speaker 6 | Without denying earlier cases, | 37:28 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Right, exactly. He's explaining, he says, the important question that Scott's trying to get at is why is it, well, two questions. Why is it that people do join organizations and when they do join, what do they bring to those movements? And in the case of an organization, let's take the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. | 37:29 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Well, okay, pick, pick, pick an organization that you think is like the most clear in terms of, of opposing state power. The most clear in terms of what— | 37:49 |
| Speaker 3 | United States in 1991? | 37:58 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | It was, right or no. Any, no. Any, any period. Any period. What organization? | 37:59 |
| Speaker 3 | Black Panther Party. | 38:04 |
| Speaker 3 | The Black Panther Party. Okay, back up. Okay, now we what shaped their politics? See, what, what what Scott is saying is that Huey Newton came out of a situation and Bobby Seale came out of a situation that shaped their politics. They, as Black men every day hung out with some Lumpen brothers who were pimps sisters who were prostitutes, people whose everyday lives was on the street. | 38:05 |
| Speaker 3 | Now, in, on the street, what's the most important issue that affects you? Police brutality. Okay. In other words, as people living every day getting their ass kicked by cops, it's no accident that police brutality became the most important issue to lead to the Black Panther Party. It wasn't some kind of people go in the library reading the Constitution, you know, or reading about it. What was the issue was that, that that, that the everyday poses the resistances to police brutality. | 38:28 |
| Speaker 3 | The hidden transcript where people are behind the scenes in the bar saying, "Those damn cops, I should blow 'em away. You know, they just make me sick, you know, with their, you know, Ku Lux Klannish attitudes and their Gestapo outfits, that's bogus." | 38:55 |
| Speaker 3 | So it was that experience and those everyday limited resistances to police brutality and experiences of getting it and being behind in the bars on the streets, talking about the cops that then eventually translated into what the Black Panther Party became. | 39:08 |
| Speaker 3 | It didn't mean that just because you're getting your butt kicked by cops, that you're gonna form a Black Panther party. There are other, you know processes involved and what, why they came about with an organization in the first place, but it did shape the politics of the Black Panther party. And that's what he's talking about, the relationship between this infrapolitics and then what eventually comes out of it. | 39:25 |
| Speaker 3 | Now, the fact is Black folks have lost most of the battles. They fought, like most oppressed peoples have fought most lost most of the battles they fought. And again, it's not by accident. You wouldn't have had a fight against police brutality without police. And what, what's the role of the police keep people in their place, in the Black community, and they spend a lot of money, taxpayers money and police to keep Black folks where they are, you know, to keep things the way they ought to be. | 39:44 |
| Speaker 3 | And that is the critical issue of why this infrapolitics takes on the forms of, it takes because of repression. You know? And that's, we have to go back to that to scholarship where people are so beaten down and reevaluated and say, Hey, there's something to say about how much money and time people spent keeping Black folks in their place. And there's something to say about what are the limitations of, of opposition— | 40:07 |
| Speaker 7 | Garvey and the UNIA. | 40:27 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Oh, Garvey definitely is, is a good example. 'cause you're talking about rural and urban Black folks across the world whose primary experience is racism. You know, who's being told everywhere they go, colored people can't do this, Black folks can't do this, this, that, and the other. | 40:29 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | And for Garvey, the resonance of his message, it's not that Garvey was such a great speaker, or he was able to hypnotize people, but Garvey was speaking to people what they already knew. And that is, "White people treat us like dirt. We gotta have our own pride. We have to reinvent Africa in a certain powerful way that has resonance to us feeling good about ourselves." You know? | 40:49 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | And when Garvey eventually switched on that hidden transcript and said, you know, the Ku Klux Klan is about, you know, as is, is tantamount to our organization in terms of defending White rights, Black folks left Garvey movement. No, Garvey wasn't strong enough by just verbal power alone through charisma to keep Black folks in Garveyism. | 41:12 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | In fact, some of those same Garveyites left the Garvey movement and formed their own nationalist movement, or emerged in other organizations like the Communist Party with their Garveyite ideas and imposed those ideas on local CP structures. You know? | 41:32 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | So again, if there was no kind of resonance of some kind of everyday feeling about how racism affects lives and a feeling of lower self-esteem or efforts to try to lower Black people's self-esteem, there would be no mass movement. Garvey would be standing on the corner. It was a soapbox talking about stuff, and no one would listen to him, and we wouldn't be sitting here talking about it. You see? | 41:47 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | So in other words, it was the experiences and the everyday struggles of Black people. Part of it again, is in this dissident culture. It what, how, how can Black folks feel sense of solidarity without talking about it? You don't just look at another Black person and say, "Hey, you know, you kind of look like me. 'cause the chances are they don't" (laughter). Yeah. | 42:10 |
| Speaker 3 | But I mean, that only repeats the obvious. I'm trying to you know, understand what is being said other, other than the obvious, even when we think about the Panthers it was, you know it was clear obviously by whatever supportive families had in terms of brutal, which is still this day. | 42:30 |
| Speaker 3 | And I guess I'm saying the last, last, the notion of this private script and such I'm more concerned about the, the I, I guess maybe move from that, but I'm not even sure at this point be interpreting what amounts to large extent deviant behavior, particularly by — | 42:54 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Yeah. But, but what's deviant though? | 43:22 |
| Speaker 3 | Well, deviant since that is not accepted by the founding culture, because I don't mean deviant—I interpret deviant behavior as, as some form of opposition. And I think that is cause a serious problem when we try to and understand political activity and, and what direction Black folks are going. | 43:24 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Well, just to, to say this last thing, and I think this might, might clarify again, I wouldn't suggest, and I don't think Scott's even suggesting, and if he does, he's romanticizing that any sort of what's, what I call oppositional behavior or actions is somehow revolutionary rebellious or progressive oppositional behavior is self-activity. | 43:49 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | And self-activity is just what people decide to do at a certain moment, whether we like it or not, you know, and in the case of Black youth, for some Black folks, of course, you know, sitting on the bus and having to hear someone's boombox is just a nuisance, you know, but this, and, and, and it is a nuisance. | 44:18 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | But on the other hand, you know, people making decisions to do that, not because of any ideals, but that's what they do. And I think that what I'm suggesting is that in doing working class history, we have to move away from romanticizing people's actions and turn to a kind of self activity and understand politics. | 44:37 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | It's a real complex thing where people are moving in directions that we may not like, but they are moving. And that's the whole issue. And it's not the obvious. 'cause if it was the obvious, you wouldn't get scholars saying stuff reducing all Black political action to the actions of elite. Nor would you get scholars continuing to say, you know, Garveyism is about Garvey and not about the UNIA. You see, I think that | 44:54 |
| Speaker 8 | That was actually kind of a wonderful example that you just gave. And I think that, and I might formulate my question a slightly differently than you, but I think that it, maybe the essence is probably the same and that, you know, there is, there is a difference between being angry, mad and upset and deciding even on a subconscious level to resist right? | 45:17 |
| Speaker 8 | So that you think about, you know, two brothers get on the bus in Harlem and they have a boombox, both of, and one of them has a sense of his resistance to a structure that he feels very much oppressed by. And all of rap music at this point, or at least a segment of rap music, addresses that very fundamentally, this idea that we are part of this thing in the system that consistently. | 45:46 |
| Speaker 1 | And the Black woman in front of him says, turn the shit off or get off the bus. And the brother whips out a gun and he blows the sister away. Is that resistance? | 0:01 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | That's certainly self activity. | 0:15 |
| Speaker 1 | You know, resistance for what? Right. I mean, I mean, I think that it sort of, | 0:17 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Well, but, but, but let's, let's, let's paint the portrait in a different way. The same, the same, the same incident. Those two sisters are resisting, you know, they're, they're resist. Well, what do you mean? So what, so what | 0:23 |
| Speaker 3 | I mean, raised an important question here, because what you want to do is suggest if she wouldn't have made a point, the question pointed is suggest that these brothers getting on the bus with boombox represent some of, some resistance, some space. But she's ready because, so what, what does it mean when they blow the sister brains out? | 0:37 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | It's vicious. | 0:57 |
| Speaker 3 | Because no matter how you— | 0:57 |
| Speaker 1 | That's what I'm saying. That's the dichotomy then between youth that are completely out of control and rebels without a cause and a group of brothers who are playing music that comes out of the same, the same core. Right. But music is actually about, and they perceive themselves as being resistors to systems of oppression. | 1:00 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | But see, it misses the point about what the intention of music is. Because the intention of music wasn't to convince that brother to blow these two sisters away at all. | 1:26 |
| Speaker 1 | No, no, no, no, no. I'm not using music is the excuse I'm using who they are. Right. And how they've conceptualized and formulated and constructed themselves. Right. Right. Are they, who in that situation? I'm saying who in fact is the resistor in terms of what you've been discussing, also in relationship to the notion of like, performance that you sort of laid out. | 1:32 |
| Speaker 4 | And then even if you take situation, even if you take the illustration that you used, of the two individuals who went to court that they may very well have been trying to organize the community in a political way. But when they got in the court, you had the one individual with a knife who say, puts on the mask, and as you said, he was out the next day. And then you have the other individual who made no bones about the fact that he was out to try to organize the Black community. Now, it would seem to me that this individual who chose to put on the mask was oppositional only when he felt that there wasn't going to be any say any, any punishment that as long as he's out there in the community he could be as heroic as he wanted. But then once he comes into conflict with the powers that be, he goes into this role playing it. | 1:53 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Yeah. But, but what I'm saying is that you can, by looking at that dissident subculture that's created, that legitimizes his role playing, that legitimizes his trickster attitudes, because there's so much evidence of people of, 'cause Black folks realize what he was doing. They weren't stupid. 'cause if they were, if they didn't realize that they wouldn't even listen to him when he went out the next day. I mean, the point is, is that by studying things like this hidden transcript and by seeing how culture of, you know, manifests itself in political action, then than being in trickster certainly makes more sense than going in front. In fact, the guy who went in front of the court and got six months, | 2:57 |
| Speaker 4 | That's not being oppositional. That's— | 3:38 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Being conforming to the particular stereotype. It's being No. And therefore | 3:41 |
| Speaker 4 | You are acceptable into a, you're acceptable. You're acceptable to the powers that be. Whereas the individual who's going to project this militant stance is going to be— | 3:45 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Prison in jail for six months, | 3:57 |
| Speaker 4 | For six months— | 3:59 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | And forgotten, | 4:00 |
| Speaker 4 | Not forgotten by the people in the community. | 4:01 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Yes. That's what ended up happening in the context of, see, you gotta think about the historical context. This is the 1930s. In the 1950s, it made a heck of a lot more sense to go to jail, you know, to in the fifties and sixties because the moment had changed. The, the, the hidden transcript had, you're shaking your head because you're probably right. 'cause in some cases it didn't make more sense. But in the case of Birmingham in 1963 with, you know, operation confrontation, when you had masses of people who were not only willing, but you had TV cameras on you, it made more sense to go to jail in Birmingham in 1934 was to almost get killed or get your hands broken. | 4:04 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | And Black folks in the community understood that Otis Debar Lemon was the product of that that that working class community, the other guy was not a product of that particular working class community. You see people who was in, in his community in Greenwood, you know, which is a kind of a industrial suburb of Birmingham, those individuals understood and respected him and understood what he was doing, because they would've done the same thing too. And many of them had tried to do it. There's a whole tradition of that. | 4:40 |
| Speaker 4 | So then they were all not really all that oppositional. | 5:09 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Well, no, oppositional is not the same thing as saying revolutionary. I mean, I think that people are expecting, it's, it's kind of a lot to expect that any, any person who can be shot, beaten, killed on a whim, that somehow should be revolutionary. | 5:12 |
| Speaker 4 | You need to talk about the trickster tradition. | 5:29 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | The trickster tradition is a real thing. And it does. | 5:30 |
| Speaker 4 | We write about the trickster. Well, yeah. Wouldn't subscribe to that. See, but for example, the— | 5:33 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | You was gonna say something I, | 5:37 |
| Speaker 5 | Your Birmingham 1930, 25 fine in 1930 was about the same as six months in jail. 30 cents a day. | 5:40 |
| Speaker 1 | Send me to jail. (laughter). Yeah. | 5:58 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | But, but, but, but see, but Ned Goodwin, who went to jail, spent a hundred dollars and six months hard labor. I mean, a hundred dollars and six months hard labor, you know? | 6:03 |
| Speaker 1 | Would you respond to her question though? I mean, okay. | 6:14 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | No, I'm, see, I don't, I think this, I think he, I don't want you to, to misunderstand me, because there's no way that I would suggest that killing two sisters on the bus is any kind of resistance. It's self activity in terms of that he's responding to all kinds of stuff, not just, and, and he's making decisions that are, are, we can say wrong, bad, horrible decisions, but it's not like he's not a self active individual. I mean, he, you know, he, he's self active and this is the vicious things that he's doing. | 6:16 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | And, and in the case of a lot of the zoot suitors too, I mean, the zoot suiters were in some ways rebellious, but in other ways very reactionary as far as like relationships with women. I mean, think of, of Tiny Grimes singing— | 6:49 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Malcolm, you know, you know, well, and Malcolm's a good example for different reasons. | 7:03 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | But in Tiny Grimes in 1943, sang a song with Charlie Parker on no, 1945 with Charlie Parker on Alto Sacks. And these things, "Romance without finance just don't make sense, baby, baby, please give up that gold. Romance without finance, you know, is a nuisance. Mama, mama, please give up that gold. You're so great and you're so fine. You ain't got no money. You can't be mine. It ain't no joke to be stone broke. Honey. You ain't lying." | 7:08 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | So we're talking about someone on one hand is resisting some aspects, but see, resistance is not pure. It's not, it's not like pure water. It's nasty. Sometimes a reactionary act. And this is a great scholarship of, you know, Paul Willis, A reactionary act can be resisting one thing, but undermining all kinds of stuff. | 7:29 |
| Speaker 1 | I agree. I disagree with your, your, your primary formulation. I don't want you to think that I disagree at all, because I don't. Um I think what I the thing that I, I think I hear you saying, the thing that I think needs to be further further define, define really is, is really what it means to be resistive. . And what does it mean to be, because you see, if Black people we're not all pushing ahead, right. | 7:50 |
| Speaker 1 | We can be a very, very, very, very reactionary people. You see what I'm saying? And, and, and I think that we have to sort of, sort of, sort of clear that out a little bit and talk about in what ways have, have some of us deviated way, way, way, way away. Anything that speaks about being resistive and progressive and forward thinking about where we need to arrive as a collective people. | 8:17 |
| Speaker 1 | And what has become the most reactionary Lumpen part of us that really needs to be just as corrected as any retarded White person, or messed up Asian, you know what I mean? Because that's a part of who we are as well. Exactly. It's not this, everything that we do in terms of like, actions against White society, White people, Black people, is resistive in nature. | 8:42 |
| Speaker 6 | Okay. Then answer that one. I think it's it's not only a matter of resistance but it's a matter of survival during the general strike. during slavery. I think sometimes we read politics and other kind of consciousness and things from our contemporary eyes. But if for these people in a hostile society, it was a matter of survival. It was a matter of not only of politics, but it was a matter of psychology. It was a safety valve like going to church. It was an emotional catharsis. That's how they kept their sanity to go to church, shout event and appeal it. This was an outlet for them. This was not all of it. So I think we, it was a matter of survival. And the other thing it was, it was a means and, and they survived by means of deception. | 9:08 |
| Speaker 6 | A deceiving, the massacre deceiving the dominant of the oppressor. | 10:09 |
| Speaker 6 | An interesting book, I think that some of you might be familiar with about Howard Thurman, the Great Black Mystic has written a book entitled Jesus and the Disinherited. And he says, this is characteristic of people who are oppressed. | 10:14 |
| Speaker 6 | And he gives one story from the Jim Crow South in Mississippi where there was a a White policeman in one city in Mississippi, I don't remember the city, a small town in Mississippi killed a blind Black man. The man was blind and the police killed. The Black community was up in arms. It was very tense. And that, and when they had the funeral of the judge, the police, the posse, all of them were there because they didn't want violence to break out. So before the minister got up to preach, the sheriff called him aside and said, "Now, preacher is very volatile situation on you. It's tense. You are not, you can't preach, but you can give a central prayer." | 10:30 |
| Speaker 6 | And when the preacher prayed, he prayed for an hour, and he said everything in the prayer that he, he'd have said it was service (laughter), but the, the police could not arrest him because he was not talking to the people. He was talking to God. This was a form of deception, and yet it was also a form of resistance. So I think we have to look at that. I think we reading politics into it, which it might, we might read it as a political statement, but I think for many of these people, it was just a mere matter of survival. And I think this is an area that we've got to look at. In addition to saying that they were making a political statement that they were, that they were resisting. | 11:16 |
| Speaker 6 | But it was by another example in the song is that when a White or a White woman, a Black person was working for a maid in a White woman's house, and she got angry with the White woman she was working for, she couldn't just come out and say, out of this, I'm not gonna take it, but she would stop singing. She was sing a song, you see that woman dress so fine, she ain't got head on her mind (laughter). That was her way of inventing her feeling and expressing it. And I think you've gotta look in the area of deception. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. | 11:58 |
| Speaker 7 | Yes. Okay. In terms of the action that you're talking about, I think you have to look at it in terms of what, what are the goals and purpose in terms of how, in terms of this action and the strategies and so on, and whether it has been systematic and, and, and whether or not it's acceptable. And so over time, in terms of the protest individual acts approach, they've seen that there was a systematic way that Black people reacted in terms of those who consider themselves not in an organized group or organized form of protest. And so it has been documented over time looking at it in terms of different areas of states, regions or whatever that these people did. With poison the Master, they would break objects and so on. So you have to look at the goals and purpose and what caused that action, whether it was violent or nonviolent action. | 12:27 |
| Speaker 7 | And also in terms of the saliva in the food, my mother related to me concerning people that worked in restaurant, that this was a common act when somebody, when the employer would come in there and they weren't getting just wages, or they were angry with a customer, they would throw meat on the floor before they were cooking, or they could spit in the food. And this was going on all the time in restaurants and so on. And this was stairway because they cannot just come out. They, because the other part of it was that livelihood was being affected, and therefore this act of protest was going on. And I was also the zoot suit. And I think when we look at material culture and say, these are the acts of protests, we also have to look at the roots of things too. | 13:16 |
| Speaker 7 | And in terms of generally associated the zoot suits with the Puerto Ricans. And then when you look at Malcolm X, and even with my father, because he wore a zoot suits when he was in New York, and he conked his hair and so on. And this was a statement, as you said, socializing and being with the women and thinking later on, we come into the political statement because of, you have to look at what the action meant in response to what in the environment. | 13:59 |
| Speaker 7 | And also, I remember when I went to the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History, and I had on my little tailor made suit, and I was shopping in Sears. And and a White customer came up to me and she got very angry, "Well, why aren't you over here? And I want uh someone to wait on me. Why are you over there talking, socializing?" And I'm in there as a customer. And it was because I was dressed professionally that that was not expected behavior on the part, as you said, in terms of working class. | 14:24 |
| Speaker 7 | Then I went to the University of Alabama, and I was standing in line to pay my bill. And this is when they had this conference on southern women and so on. And this woman did this deliberately. She was sitting with her family, and she came up to me and said, "The floor over there ain't clean." Now I'm gonna tell you my reaction. But I knew that was her reaction of putting me in my place. And I was considered to be an uppity nigger. And this is the association, educated, well dressed, so forth, that you are outta your place and put the person in their place. | 14:52 |
| Speaker 8 | I want add an additional point on the value, as I see this kind of, kind of a word is focused on the hidden transcript. I, I think that what, what one needs to be mindful of is that that this does not provide complete interpretations and that, that the value may be in, um supplementing other ways of trying to, to, to interpret events and, and, and acts. And as you were talking, I mean, this was very thought provoking for me. | 15:24 |
| Speaker 8 | I was thinking of a, of a of, of a recent focus on the decline in the production of Black PhDs and the, and interpret explanation that's given, and the kind of evidence that, that that's used and how it, how it's incomplete. And the focus, particularly for me was is very important on production of Black PhDs because the period of time that, that the increase occurred in the late sixties, early seventies. By the mid seventies, I exactly coinciding with my own experiences in both undergraduate and grad school, and the period of time of the decrease at a time that I'm a professor that teaching Black students and, and observing what is happening as they move into that, you know, um leads something else to be explained about what was going on during those two periods of time. | 15:58 |
| Speaker 8 | That, that your focus on the hidden transcript might help us to get at. For example, the traditional interpretation of, of the, of the decline is that there's been a a decrease in the recruitment efforts of grad students. The lack of availability of funding and the pool of available students are not there. What in fact is missing is an understanding of just who the people were, who were grad students during this time, and what were some of the experiences that led to their success. | 16:56 |
| Speaker 8 | And I think this focus on the hidden transcript might help us to get at that, for example, just relating my own experiences and how I've talked to so many other people who went through the same period of time. And, and I'm coming to find that people have the same experiences. Give you one or two examples, brief examples. | 17:32 |
| Speaker 8 | The bookstore. The bookstore was the library for us. Most of us had these limited fellowships. And we couldn't buy all of the books that we had in these classes. And, and, and it was intended, many of us saw for it to be that way, to get us in these schools coming out of the radicalism of the sixties, to get us into these graduate schools, designed for failure to prove that we weren't worthy in the first place. Particularly for those of us who came from from Black institutions. | 17:49 |
| Speaker 8 | We weren't prepared, assumed to be, we were soon to be unprepared to make it anyway. And they were designed to, to fail. And they could say, see there, they couldn't make it when in fact, it did the opposite. It produced you know, probably the largest number of, of Black PhDs at any point in time in the history of higher education. But one of the things that we did, some of the things that we did were actually sort of acts of resistance and aimed at surviving. And in many instances, using deception, the bookstore was a place for studying. Um, I went to the bookstore regularly, and the bookstore was my reserve room, you know, and I would go, and I can remember being in Madison, Wisconsin, in the bookstore, and I would go there every day that I needed to study something that had the most recent books. | 18:19 |
| Speaker 8 | And I remember once a bookstore attendant haven't observed this over, you know, several weeks. You know, this guy comes in, sits on the floor, grabs open 'em up. He studied particularly statistics. 'cause I needed to get different examples of the derivations and the notations were different. So I needed different books. And I would lay all my books out, and I would just go out and do my work. And finally, this attendant had the, had the property manager asked this attendant to do this, and I had a bigger beer. And you and I looked, and the attendant asked me, said sir, you can't do this. You're going to have to . You can't, you can't come in here and do this. And I said, very politely, call the police and have 'em to just drag me out because I'm gonna sit here and I'm gonna study. | 19:05 |
| Speaker 8 | And went back to doing my work. And they never did anything. They never did anything. Another example, real quick, quick example was in learning how to use unit record computer equipment, for those of us who are from that period, you know that when you use the punch card, you had to have a card read. You had no idea to learn how to use the card read. You had to learn how to use the, the duplicate to duplicate these cards. You had to learn how to use the counter sorter. You say you had these big old massive machines. I'd never saw these machines before. , there were grad students who were advanced grad students, all White students who were really essentially competitors to us. And, and a parted to this, um attempt to show that wWhiteldn't make it. And after all, we were sort of selectively put in there. | 19:51 |
| Speaker 8 | And when they came from all these prestigious places where they were, they were, they were supposed to be teaching us how to use these equipments. 'cause they ran the labs. I would go over and they would consciously, openly, but in private one-on-one tell you, I'm not gonna help you. You know? And instead of us, you know you know, mounting a big protest. I, I mean, I wasn't in position, nor did I think anybody else to mount a protest against this kind of action. We began to do use sabotage. And one of the things I did, I bought a book that had pictures, and I used to go over in the evening and learn how to use these machines. And they were lack, they were even, you know, sneaker. And I finally, when I finally learned how to use these machines, you know, unbeknownst to most of them, because it was open 24 hours a day, and I would go into wee hours in the moment morning, I learned how to use these machines. | 20:33 |
| Speaker 8 | All of 'em. I could use all of 'em very well. Not only I would do two things. One of the things I would do is I would go over in the daytime and jam all the machines. (laughter), you keep putting the entry key on the, on the, on the key punch. And all the s go there, no, in advance, those things were very expensive, could easily jam a count of salt. Most of the machines were very sensitive. I would jam all the machines. And to the, to the point where after I doing this for about a week, it, the snickering kind of ceased. And apparently the people who had to get the machines prepared were very upset. So they would send people to meet me at the door, you need any help? You know, I can machine. The second thing I would do was whenever I saw another Black student come in and starting to use the machine and looking like they couldn't do it, I would go over and help them. | 21:18 |
| Speaker 8 | And it got to the point that many of the people in the program thought that I worked there. You know, because I would do that. These were acts of survival and resistance. And I think for many of us, particularly coming out of the protest movement of the sixties, as radical students were found ourselves for the first time in positions of extreme subordination, and we figured out ways to resist, I think the resisting. And I think that it was gold directing. And I think that a case like this may be a better case for study, because unlike the situation of trying to deal with primary sources, we can using, using oral interviews, we can actually talk to people and document the extent to which this kind of, these kinds of acts worldwide. And, and we can do a more systematic effort. But I think it is important to understand the value of this kind | 22:11 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Work. Exactly. Yeah. That story has all the elements of, you know, what I'm trying to, to point out, especially like towards the end where Black students decided, you know, collectively we need to get through this. And you, you know, it's, again, it's not just the, the skin color that leads to collective action, but a shared experience, shared experience of being denied, you know, access to the machines and just sort of being mistreated as a whole. You know. Um, | 23:04 |
| Speaker 7 | You mentioned that, um I want the question about this. I mentioned that in 60, that they used the term man in preference to, boy, well, how do you explain it in terms of the Sea Islands Blacks and the Carolinas, and also those from the Caribbean that they have a ion for them as the people in the sixties, because you, you get them all the time referred to, oh man, so and so, man this. | 23:28 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Probably, I, I don't, I, I'm not in a position to, to say one way or the other. 'cause I haven't really done the research on that, but I'm, you know, yeah, you have the voice, but but I, I would guess that yes, you know, in fact it certainly does have a certain kind of resonance. You are also talking about communities that are, but also refer— | 23:58 |
| Speaker 7 | To females as men. There's no gender distinction in their thing. | 24:19 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Yeah. Some, someone who's like, who's a yeah, who's a linguist might say, well, you know, that's when you translate, you know, I guess you would know African. | 24:23 |
| Speaker 5 | West African language. To what extent do you run the risk of getting someone indicted for the activities by interviewing that person in public? | 24:32 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Hey, that's— | 24:53 |
| Speaker 5 | —Textbook White supremacy. The whole idea of maximum historic justice cannot be publicized, cannot be announced, cannot be publicized. | 24:56 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Yeah. It just happens. Well, what, what most of the scholars who are doing this kind of work, dealing with like recent acts, illegal acts generally just change the names of people, you know. I mean, I've, especially sociologists do this a lot, you know, they'll just use pseudonyms to protect people's identity you know, as one way to get around it. | 25:05 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | And I, and I totally agree that oral history, in fact, I had a note here that I never did mention oral history is the best way to get at the self activity of, of peoples, with all this complexity and contradiction. Um, I, I wanna just clarify something. And that is, you know, because people resist specific forms of oppression does not always translate into anything progressive at all. It could be retrograde, it could be reactionary. In fact, the ability of it could be individualistic. | 25:27 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | In most cases, it is individualistic the ability of someone to be able to you know, get more lard or more cornmeal or more flour from the welfare agent. You know sometimes might involve acts that, you know, doesn't translate into kind of collective justice at all. But, you know, the point is that, you know, your family counts. You wanna get more large, more cornmeal, more flour. So it doesn't always translate into these things that the problem of how to build a collective movement is another problem. | 25:55 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | On the other hand, a collective movement cannot be built without an understanding of the hidden transcript. There's no question about that. You can't just go in there with, you know, a constitution in your hand and say, you know, these are the ideals. They're pretty lofty. Let's solve the problem. Every successful movement whether it's around evictions and stuff like that, have begun with this direct everyday problems of people. | 26:26 |
| Speaker 3 | Yeah. I mean, that's all, I mean, that's all Marxist literature. So I mean, that, that's not anything, | 26:46 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | It might be over, but— | 26:52 |
| Speaker 3 | That, that, that's not new in terms of the concept or that you want to offer about looking at the private transcripts of Black folks, the idea of as, as the Marxist used to say, the concrete conditions of, of the masses. | 26:54 |
| Speaker 3 | But my question, I wanna raise the question to you in another way. Um but sometimes Black scholars have, have developed various categories in trying to understand Black political behavior. And some nationalists, Pan-Africanists, Marxists, the radical, conservative, liberal, the point that they have developed categories as an effort to understand the different forms of political activity in the Black community. | 27:09 |
| Speaker 3 | And, and how that not only related to the condition of Black folks, but, but as well as the goals and object. And more importantly, how those very ideologies you want call moment intersect with the state. We can all disagree with, with various categories. But my question is by, by your new emphasis on, on the private transcript of working class Blackness how would that intersect with those other kind of projects and efforts? How would that, in particular, looking at different forms of pop culture, dress and— | 27:40 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Right. | 28:21 |
| Speaker 3 | How is that kind help us understand that? | 28:23 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Well, two things. One, it would show that none of those categories are entirely purely appropriate and that people come with multiple consciousness. You know, for a Black woman whose experiences are of, you know, as a woman and as an African American, as possibly as a working person too. I mean, the simple category of nationalists just doesn't always fit. | 28:25 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | And sometimes nationalists has a patriarchal element to it, which affect or make difficult, you know, placing women's specific struggles within that category. And sometimes it's not silence, though, you know, if you would read the major documents by nationalist organizations in the sixties and early seventies it wasn't until a lot of Black women broke away from that and began to voice, you know, a kind of resurgence of Black feminism. It's not a new thing, it's an old thing, but a resurgence of it that you get to get that voice that was silenced in other documents. | 28:50 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | The other thing is that it would also show how popular culture and cultural forms are so dynamic and historical and not static under any circumstances. I mean, sometimes we could sit here and talk about the conk as a kind of a reactionary hairstyle because it's straightening hair and, you know, and you know, that natural is what really counts, because when you're natural, you're like more African. But in the forties, you know, people weren't thinking in those terms. | 29:24 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | You know, there are ways, and I'm not in a position now to interpret the conk or interpret the Jheri curl or any of that stuff, but what I'm saying is that these these transformations are always taking place in relationship to the broader confines, broader contours of, of American capitalism. And that's why African American styles are always co-opted, transformed, and represented to you always, every single, not just the zoot suit, but take the Afro. | 29:48 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | The Afro was, was, I mean, no one could deny. I mean, a few people could deny that the Afro was intended as a really conscious statement. I mean, people said, so, you know, there's so much evidence of that. But then pretty soon Clarol came up with a product that can make your natural more natural, you know, I mean, in other words, corporate capitalism. And, and you know, Robert Allen talks about this in Black Awakening—is able to take styles that were meant for one purpose, turn it around and give it back to you, and it sort of loses its original intended meaning. And pretty soon people move forward. | 30:16 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Dreadlocks is a good example. Now, I had, I just gave a lecture to some high school students about the high, and we're talking about high top fades. We're talking about hip hop and whatnot. And a lot of them didn't know that the high top fade when, when it first came out, like on the East Coast, people used to use the term crown, and they used crown to sort of give back to Black males a sense of royalty. I mean, that was the purpose, the intention. And to also to to reject, resist the Jheri curl. Jheri curl was considered at that moment reactionary, especially considering that a lot of White people started getting perms to make their hair look like a Jheri curl. Black people looking like, you know, with their hair straight, you know, | 30:50 |
| Speaker 3 | Too expensive. Right. | 31:24 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | It sure did. | 31:26 |
| Speaker 3 | Right. Exactly. | 31:30 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Exactly. And it's amazing because, you know, my father would talk about having a bowl on your head and get your hair cut around, and then people go back to that. But then for these kids in 1991, they just thought the high top fade was a fad. I said, what, what kids would like consciously did this? How this, again, and I know you don't like this 'cause you know, you know and I'm not saying that though, having the high faith somehow leads to revolutionary activity. I'm saying that it is self activity that has to be understood and dealt with in order to understand the broader framework of why people do things. | 31:31 |
| Speaker 3 | That's the key self activity that has to be understood. I think even when we look at the Afro and, and the way the Afro was coopted by, by the state and cooperative to assume maybe that reinterpretation of what that really meant. 'cause I remember, and, and so when we began to label those things that some form of opposition or resistance, it may be something else. | 32:03 |
| Speaker 3 | And, and what you read, it seems what you are doing is reading into the self activity and giving it political meaning that I don't, that that's what we disagree. it represents something. But I think we disagree on the kind of political meaning you and important that, for instance, the Afro, the jeans at a certain point, that represented, anyway, a certain kind of political statement, but two or three years after the Afro, I mean, you know, navy said you gonna be Black and navy too. Jeans, the price, the jeans went up astronomical because the commercial world, they would co-op at for purpose and may in fact say something about the participants themselves in terms of how they really understood what they were doing. | 32:25 |
| Speaker 6 | Represents what on Du Bois called the double consciousness. It's an identity crisis that African Americans have had when they first set foot on this country. And if you look at it, you, you look at the, the main meta officers of, of Blacks, Black people. We were Negroes, we were Colored, Black. Now we are African American. I mean, and no other, and no other racial group, no other ethnic group in this country has done through as many metamorphoses of name and am news report of one who was, who didn't want to offend any of us, had to write an article. And he wrote it this way, "A Negro policeman arrested a Colored man in a Black neighborhood." (laughter) | 33:14 |
| Speaker 6 | But I think this is a part of that type of consciousness that when we look at the hairstyle change, and all of this is still a such identity that two of us that we encountered. | 34:02 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | I, you, you, I know you had your hand up for a long time, so Yes. | 34:14 |
| Speaker 9 | I want to thank you for giving me some justification for what I was ashamed of. I was a zoot suit wearer (laugh), and I had no idea making any kind of public statement. I had my knob shoes, my pimp chains, wide hat, zoot suit and had my hair conked. Now I conked my hair 'cause I saw a man called Cab Calloway called Hidey hidey ho. He could shake his hair over his head and throw back. And I did the same thing. | 34:18 |
| Speaker 9 | Now, I did not impress the White community, but I certainly got first by the Black community. My mother made me cut that junk off my head, take that suit off because I was offending the Black community. So it's different from what I didn't know. I was making a statement, didn't intend. I wanted this make everybody's in the neighborhood. | 34:41 |
| Speaker 9 | Now, something else, I rode the bus in Alabama, Birmingham from 53 to 55. And you compare that fellow on the bus got kind of loud to the Russian peasants in the, the go of 1970. And the Russian peasants had been fighting this brother for a long time since the Crimean War. But I remember, but one time seeing this man on the bus in Birmingham being loud, and he was not on the of offense to the White, he was also offensive to the Black people. , I do remember having to move that little sign up when you got in the back. And I remember having to stand in line while the heights got on first. I don't remember any cases of the, of the bus driver can guns. 'cause usually they call the policemen come in and register right at once, at once, violated the rules. | 34:57 |
| Speaker 9 | But I'm concerned about using the exception to the rule for historical research. Now, we did a project, remember during the time of slavery, and we talk about the sabotaging and the plantation system by the, by the Black workers. When you change the labor to the sharecropping system, it's all together different because then you're gonna share in a profit, instead of trying to sabotage the main crop, you're going to try to make 'em produce more. | 35:45 |
| Speaker 9 | But that was a theory that you read, but all the time, excuse the expression, but it's called peeing on the cotton. You hear that question. Everybody was saying that one of the way to sabotage the system, that the people would pee on the cotton. | 36:10 |
| Speaker 9 | Now what I did, we had— I proved this not to be true. We simply plant two rows of cotton. I took a grad student, gave him a whole year. This job was just to pee on the (laughter). But let me tell you something. You know, any chemistry mm-hmm. Urine. Urine is really a fertilizer. The more you pee, the more you grow. (laughter) But scholar still say that the way you sabotage the system of you pee on the cotton. That's a lie (laughter) | 36:22 |
| Speaker 10 | Peeing on the cotton is something different from what you describing here. You pee on your cotton at the time of picking so that you have a way of balancing the scale that has been already chipped, to cheat and you pee on it's wet when it's weighed, and therefore it's heavy and you get more in your weight. | 37:06 |
| Speaker 9 | But scholars said it would kill the cotton. People seem to think that salt will kill something, but I'm telling you that salt in the proper propulsion make it grow more. And the scholars said that they were peeing on the cotton so that it wouldn't grow and produce. It just died. And it didn't, it did not work out. | 37:25 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Well. The scholars were the ones who were wrong though. | 37:46 |
| Speaker 9 | No. | 37:49 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | And see, it, it's funny 'cause the scholars in this case are the ones who are wrong, who didn't understand what, you know, the sister here said, you know, well, Black folks did understand who picked the cotton. The other thing too is that the, the fact that there is this, this debate over the meaning of something is to me evidence, some evidence to suggest that, you know, we can't ignore this exception to the rules. I mean, I don't think that that, see my, what I started out here was talking about the oli whole idea of what's representative. And I don't think, like when, when people go back and do like African American political history, they say, well, what's representative are nationalist movements, integrationist movements, et cetera, et cetera. And they will tell me that for understanding African American history, the Communist party in Alabama was not representative. | 37:49 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | I'm insisting that the Communist Party in Alabama had in the sharecropper union had about 10,000 members. And the international labor defense had about 3000 members. And the right to vote club had about 700 members. And the unemployed councils had about between 1500, 2000 members. And the party itself had a couple of thousand in Birmingham and a few spread out throughout Alabama. Now to tell me that, that's not representative, of course it's not every Black person, but not every Black person join an organization. So I'm sort of caught between trying to capture a segment of the Black working class self activity and politics, which is very relevant and deal with the facts. On the other hand that most Black folks didn't join an organization. I mean, no one, no one could argue that that, except for organizations that had sort of like voluntary elements, whether it's church groups, whether it's organizations that are not explicitly political. | 38:34 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | And what I'm insisting too is that those organizations though not explicitly political, had some kind of, of meaning that had to do with the secular. And if it's something has to do with trying to transform the secular, whether you're successful or not, that's politics. You know, because I mean, when you think about how we vote when we go to the polls, are we voting for revolution? Are we voting for change in state power? A lot of times we're voting for things that affect us personally, individually. And if that's not politics, then, you know, nothing's politics. You see, and I'm not trying to put as much weight, like, you know, like I think that which is a matter of miscommunication. I'm not saying that there should be as much weight on those organized forms as these kind of everyday poses and these kinds of efforts. I mean, 'cause it shouldn't be. What I'm saying is that there's a connection between the two that needs to be explored. That's all I'm saying. And that, and the state obviously knows because the state puts more pressure, um repressing organizations than they zoo, than they do zoot suitors, you | 39:21 |
| Speaker 8 | Know, some people just miss slavery votes as being significant for and worthy of study because the, the actual numbers, you know, vary in terms of how people report 'em. But it, but, but definitely the major slave revokes in that term and report were, were infrequent. But nevertheless, it does give us a sense that there were actual acts of resistance. And so people focus on slavery, folks, the whole body literature, and they're more exceptional. | 40:23 |
| Speaker 11 | And why these things are the exception now until we do the kind of research that you are talking about doing, we may find that they may very well not be the exception, but until we get out there and take a fresh approach to it, I think we're gonna be stuck with the same old traditional history that we have always | 40:52 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Done. Exactly. Exactly. In fact, when you made the remark about, you know, not seeing a lot of people resisting on the buses, what we might find in fact is that Birmingham is an unusual place. And World War II, we know was an unusual moment. But Birmingham, there's no question that bus drivers and streetcar conductors carried guns. I mean, that was like in all of the records and documents. And there was no question that 1941, there were 55 incidents of resistance around seating. Not to mention another 120 odd incidents that have to do with issues like being shortchanged you know, going out to the center door and just fighting on the bus. And I think that, you know, again, I'm not trying to romanticize African American opposition at all. What I'm trying to do is capture an element of working class self activity that's really contradictory, that's really complex. | 41:08 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Because again, the same people who sometimes use this one element are, are oppressing others. I mean, the same ones who are fighting for manhood, for example, know even the, like Black [indistinct] says, well, manhood is something that we need to get are the same Negroes who kept scholars like Anna Julia Cooper out of some mainstream Black scholarly organizations around the turn of the century. I mean, that's oppressing Black women's rights as scholars on the one hand, but insisting and resisting the dominant idea of what Black people look like in scholarship. | 41:58 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Those things are contradictory. But, but dang, you know, aren't we all contradictory? I mean, can we like do the kind of scholarship that would allow for contradiction, you know, that can understand both things that, that go against each other? I mean, that's, that's sort of what what I'm suggesting. And I think, you know, some other scholars are trying to do the same thing, you know? And I think that probably we all do it, not even know it, you know, in our scholarship. | 42:33 |
| Speaker 12 | I want to ask one quick question. I know that back when you were a graduate student, this started out as something different from what it became, and, but yet I, I think it still has some relevance and that is in regards to South African Blacks and the Communist Party there. Just briefly, what do you think one might get out of this study in regards to that question? | 42:56 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Oh, in terms of South Africa? Yeah. Um, I, I should explain, when I started out on my dissertation back in the early eighties, my plan was to do a comparative study of the South African Communist Party and the Communist Party in, in Birmingham. And look at questions of race class and radicalism and South Africa, not just for studying Communist party, but just for studying African American opposition is like a good comparative example. 'cause you're talking about an industrialized country where, um African peoples, again, develop a dissident subculture from their own social spaces and bring that whether to the workplace and public spaces and and all these, a lot of efforts to study African politics. Sometimes they use this framework that's European and say, well, African politics has to be understood in terms of a left the right center. And the ANC represents the left, the, you know, the p a C is kind of a nationalist organization, but it's not that simple because you gotta understand the context. | 43:23 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Even if you take African languages, and you would know much more about this than me, but from what I understand in West Africa, there are not, there are no words that can translate into opposition party. And the words that often use are enemy. So if you're talking about you know, trying to build a two party state or multi-party state where the names of parties are, you know, enemy, it's like benefits. | 44:22 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | Obicherry, who's a West African scholar sort of made this point to me a few years back, it doesn't translate the same way. Liberal politics doesn't work in a kind of West African context. And for us to, to say that we're purely American is to miss the beauty of Du Bois is double consciousness. You know, that we are African peoples coming out of certain cultural traditions and you know, we have, you know, adopted, transformed, interpreted elements of what we understand as American culture or White American culture too, you know, which is a hodgepodge of things. | 44:42 |
| Robin D.G. Kelley | So we're both of these things and sometimes they're contradictory, but that's okay. You know, whether we like it or not, historical actors are gonna move away that we don't like. And, and I think my job as a historian is to try to figure out, and in all of our jobs as historians, is to figure out how do they move and why, you know, what are the consequences of that movement? | 45:15 |
| Speaker 13 | Okay. I think at this point then we have reached closure and on behalf of the institute, Robin, I'd like to thank you for— | 45:36 |
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