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Professor's book reveals how American intellectuals distanced themselves from the civil rights movement
July 24, 2001
EDITORS: Carol Polsgrove is available for interviews and can be reached at 812-855-1255 or cpolsgro@indiana.edu. Media copies of her book are available from Carolyn Sawyer at W.W. Norton & Co. at 212-790-4267 or csawyer@wwnorton.com.
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- People today would like to think that most American intellectuals supported the civil rights movement and helped to bring about social change, but a new book by an Indiana University journalism professor reveals how much of this is myth.
In Divided Minds: Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement (W.W. Norton), Carol Polsgrove reveals that many of America's leading great minds chose not to take an unpopular stand on the issue of school desegregation in the years after the U.S. Supreme Court's historic 1954 decision outlawing legal segregation of public school children.
Polsgrove argues that a similar relationship continues to exist today between the nation's scholars and the public about issues of great national importance.
"In terms of intellectuals speaking to the public, which is my focus in the book, I think we're seeing as little of that now, if not even less than at that time. I don't get a sense that academicians feel an obligation to talk publicly," said Polsgrove, a native of Louisville, Ky., who was a reporter for the Associated Press in the 1960s.
"Changing media cultures have had something to do with it," she said. "I believe that there's also a self-protection, a need not to be political. This is a hangover still from the Joseph McCarthy years, followed by all the upheaval over Vietnam, which resulted in a feeling that it's better if we don't get engaged in the public realm."
Polsgrove spent five years researching a period between 1953 and 1965, when Cold War tensions affected national dialogue about civil rights. She examined the personal papers of influential writers such as Richard Wright and Rayford Logan. Among her findings was a discovery of how some black intellectuals were silenced by anti-communist fears common at the time.
"Some of them were tainted by communist associations. Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison both had been involved in the American Communist Party," she said. "Wright had moved to Paris partly to get away from the 'Red Chill' and not to go before the investigative committees. In Paris, he was marginalized and had a hard time speaking about the domestic issues back here. He remained a figure about whom there was considerable ambivalence back in the United States, among black editors as well as whites.
"Around the time of the Brown decision, I have found evidence of his difficulties getting a very innocuous piece that was, however, critical of America into magazines. He tried Ebony, The Atlantic and Paris Review and just bounced from one to another. At Ebony, in particular, the publisher said he was taking cracks at America and they couldn't run it."
This isn't the first time that Polsgrove, an IU faculty member since 1989, has looked at intellectual discussion as presented in the nation's leading magazines. Her 1995 book, It Wasn't Pretty, Folks, But Didn't We Have Fun: Esquire in the Sixties (W.W. Norton; forthcoming in paperback from RDR Books), looked at an extraordinary group of journalists who helped influence public dialogue during that time.
African American intellectuals encountered an attitude held by many that it was more important to protect America's reputation than to address a serious social issue at the height of the Cold War. "On the one hand, people who supported desegregation made the Cold War argument that we need to do it because it makes America look bad to have these racial problems," she said. "On the other hand, it would make America look bad if there was a lot of upheaval and chaos."
In Divided Minds, Polsgrove recounts how leading white intellectuals, including Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist William Faulkner and famed Jewish intellectual Hannah Arendt, failed to meet the challenge of racial change after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision and how white editors at U.S. magazines sought out more moderate voices.
"So part of my story is how people were excluded from this debate, and I'm sure the same thing happens now," said Polsgrove, a former editor at Mother Jones and The Progressive. "I've been an editor. I know about pieces we haven't run and why, and sometimes it's because we were afraid of the political repercussions."
In her book, Polsgrove also writes about how historians Lawrence Reddick, Howard Zinn and James Silver, all faculty at Southern universities, courageously put themselves and their careers at risk to speak out for desegregation. For example, Reddick was pressured out of his teaching position at Alabama State University by then-Alabama Gov. John Patterson.
One of her heroes in the book is James Baldwin, whose 1963 book, The Fire Next Time, presented a powerful challenge to other intellectuals. She tells how Baldwin quickly became an effective spokesman for civil rights, not always with the approval of movement leaders. One of her discoveries was information on the unpublicized visits that Baldwin made to Selma, Ala., to support the voting rights efforts there.
After Baldwin appeared on the cover of Time magazine and after the 1963 demonstrations in Birmingham, Ala., he was invited by then-U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy to talk about the racial crisis. Polsgrove sheds new light on that dramatic, historic meeting and argues that it helped bring about President John Kennedy's appeal to the nation to see segregation as a moral issue.
"Baldwin did wonderful work and was an exemplary figure," she said. "At some sacrifice of the work he wanted to do, which was to write fiction, he went to the South and wrote about the movement and appeared at fund-raisers. He really put himself out there."
Though her book is critical of intellectuals, Polsgrove said its real message is for all of us.
"We do have a class of people who are thinkers and who spend their lives trying to understand what is going on in society. Many of them are in universities," she said. "We had them then, and as a class, their response was not very stellar. I don't think we'd better rely on them now.
"Everybody who has some feeling of responsibility for the society in which they live has to rely on their own thinking," she added. "They don't need me to tell them that. They understand that. But that's the lesson to be drawn. You can't assume that somebody else is taking care of it."
(George Vlahakis, 812-855-0846, gvlahaki@indiana.edu)