African American Jeremiad Rev: Appeals For Justice In America

Conclusion: The Enduring Black Jeremiad

Conclusion The Enduring Black Jeremiad THE AFRICAN AMERICAN jeremiad has been a staple of black protest rhetoric from before the Civil War to the modern Civil Rights era and after; its success in achieving major reforms, however, has not been constant. The Civil War and Civil Rights eras represent twin historic peaks when issues of vital concern to African Americans commanded national attention and redress. Voiced by Frederick Douglass between 1863 and 1872 and Martin Luther King, Jr., between 1955 and 1965,compellingblackmoralappealstoAmericanswereinstrumental in creating climates of opinion needed for making substantial social, legal, and political gains. Douglass and King used the powerful ritual of the jeremiad to legitimate the goals that they sought, raise guilt among white Americans, and demand social change. Unique contemporary conditions significantly contributed to the temporary positive responses received by Douglass’s and King’s jeremiads. The Civil War and Second World War gave unprecedented impetus to antiracist trends in the North, and perceptions of white Northern self-interest in both periods encouraged the use of national political power to force change in Southern racial practices. Even these two great leaps forward, fostered by unusually propitious national and international conditions, had important limits. At its height, reform went only so far as to guarantee civil and legal equality and mainly affected the unique Southern caste system. When black jeremiahs expanded their agendas to include structural economic changes that would reconstruct the North, too, a reform consensus among blacks and white Northerners failed to materialize. Mostwhites,includingmanywhohadlentcrucialsupporttothestruggles against slavery and for blacks’ legal rights, balked at subsequent 218 Conclusion proposals for economic change. Where black leaders like Douglass, Du Bois, and King considered economic reforms necessary to give substance to the forms of democracy, most whites regarded such proposals as illegitimate invasions of personal property rights. Not only did impetus for reform halt at the wall of economic justice but, as changing conditions altered Northern whites’ perception of their interests in relation to black aspirations, even previous gains in the civil and political spheres became vulnerable to encroachment or reversal. Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King, Jr., were all most successful in stressing the need for civil rights and least effective when advocating basic economic change. This record suggests that the African American jeremiad is, paradoxically , both radical and conservative. In affirming normative American social beliefs, the jeremiad helps sustain the current order . Sacvan Bercovitch’s thesis that the American jeremiad’s primary function is to maintain social control points to its predominant conservatism . For Bercovitch, the American jeremiad offers a symbolic, formulaic analysis of contemporary society that precludes more radical analyses and defuses potentially disruptive social discontent by transferring it to the soothing realm of rhetorical ritual.1 To the extent that major black intellectual and political figures have employed a rhetoric anchored in social consensus, they have had to keep their goals within its nonrevolutionary bounds. On the other hand, the jeremiad typically voiced by national black leaders seems consistently to have been more searching in examining American social faults and bolder in prescribing reforms than its most usual white counterparts. For example, abolitionism, the first great American social cause championed by black jeremiahs such as Douglass, was initially considered a suspect radical cause, violating norms of respectable behavior and opinion. Furthermore, after Douglasshadhelpedforgeapublicconsensustoendslavery,hepushed on with his jeremiads to demand sweeping racial political and legal equality and—when this seemed forthcoming—for opportunities for economic equality. A similar pattern emerges in the careers of W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King, Jr., who labored to transform once radical causes Conclusion 219 suchasracialdesegregationintoeminentlyrespectable,moderategoals in the minds of most Americans. Yet at moments when the parameters of tolerable reform shifted somewhat, prominent black jeremiahs have typically repositioned themselves to champion new, more radical issues on the outer edge of the prevailing social–political consensus. Although black jeremiahs such as Douglass, Du Bois, Wells, Bethune, and King made great contributions to American society in their times, it is significant that these leaders all eventually came to be considered too radical even by many whites who had formerly supported them.2 The African American jeremiad tradition offers another telling exampleofhowanondominantgroup ’sacceptanceoftheculturalnorms and values of a dominant group is a double-edged phenomenon. Historians have noted the internalization of the ideology of domesticity by most nineteenth-century American women and of slaveholders’ paternalistic ideology by black slaves. The assumption by blacks and women of cultural ideals and conventions promulgated by...