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Chapter Eight "DO YOU UNDERSTAND YOUR OWN LANGUAGE?" BlackAmericans' Attack on Caste BLACKS rebelled against slavery and caste ahnost from the beginning of their history in North America, but more than two hundred slave rebellions were swiftly and ruthlessly punished.! Free blacks, free but excluded from the civic culture, protested but usually in vain. ''We are natives of this country; we only ask that we be treated as well as foreigners/'2 pleaded one such free black, Peter Williams, pastor of St. Phillip's Episcopal Church in New York in 1819. North Carolina-born David Walker, living as a free man in Boston in 1828, wanted to know how the U.S. could call itself a republic of liberty when he could not even find a man of color "who holds the low office of a Constable, or one who sits in a Juror Box."3 In addition to the stringent rules of racial caste, the situation of blacks was utterly different from that of immigrants in that they could not even return to an identifiable homeland from which their ancestors came. Only America was their home now. ''This land," wrote Walker, "which we have watered with our tears and our blood is now our mother country." Walker pleaded of white Americans, "Do you understand your own language? Hear your language proclaimed to the world, July Fourth, 1776, 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that ALL men are created EQUAL!!,"4 In their struggle to dismantle the structure of caste pluralism, black protest leaders appealed to the redemptive message of America's civil religion, the nation's God-given destiny to liberate mankind. By enslaving blacks it had steeped itselfin sin. To continue slavery would quickly bring down the wrath of God, as George Mason and Thomas Jefferson, Virginian slave owners and champions of human rights, had acknowledged. If Americans failed to abolish slavery, Frederick Douglass warned his white audiences, ''your fathers will have fought and bled in vain ... and American Republicanism will become a hissing and a byword to a mocking earth!"S W. E. B. Du Bois urged America in the twentieth century to "awake!" "Put on thy strength, America-put on thy beautiful robes ... let us [italics mine] be true to our mission."6 But the walls of caste were not shattered until the 1960s and 1970S, after the embittered Du Bois had lSI 152 TRIUMPH OF THE CIVIC CULTURE given up on the American dream and become a Communist and moved to Ghana. Writing in 19+2, before the race riots in Detroit and Harlem of 19+3, Gunnar Myrdal was confident that the spread of education combined with the growing acceptance of the impartial administration of justice and the repudiation of racial theories of caste would lead to improved conditions for blacks.7 All three factors not only led to better conditions for blacks but also contributed to the ultimate success of the civil rights revolution; so did four other developments that were less predictable at the time Myrdal wroteAnAmericanDilemma: the emergence oftelevision nightly news programs, by which Americans were forced to face the ugliest aspects of white racism; the role of churches, primarily the black churches, as a moral influence in politics, around the issue of race, and the appearance of one particular churchman and charismatic leader, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.; the ideological competition between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, which forced Americans, and particularly American leaders, to look at domestic politics as a part ofan international struggle; and the ability ofthe executive branch ofthe federal government to quickly mobilize the military within hours to enforce the orders of federal courts to abolish legal segregation. Dismantling Caste in the Courts Myrdal was right in predicting that the courts would take a more active role in opposing caste. ''The Negroes," he said, "are awarded the law as a weapon in the caste struggle."8 When Justice John Harlan wrote in his famous dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 that "the law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved,"9 he was pronouncing a goal and not describing reality. Few people were listening to him at the time, and only marginal progress was made by the courts in attacking the structure of caste in the decades that followed. The Court's insistence in Plessy that segregation...

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