Rhetoric of the 1960s: Movements

Shared Characteristics of the Movements

Sixties' Movements used diverse media

Music. The relatively cheap production of phonograph records and later tapes, and the potential for gathering people at a concert, meant that music was a important media for this movement. Songs such as Bob Dylan's "The Times they are a'changin'" were key rhetorical artifacts supporting 60s movement activities. The joint performance of music was a powerful ritual uniting members of a movement.
Mass Rallies. Diverse arrays of speakers appeared at mass rallies. Voices enhanced by bullhorns and public address systems diffused the words. Chants of slogans, singing of songs, and call-response (audience reaction to speeches) provided communicative experiences that united the movement, developed pride in its power and celebrated the rhetoric that energized its members. The Street. Less organized than the mass rallies were the street. In its disorganized form, these were riots. Buildings and other property were burned. Police were confronted with violence. There is dispute whether these events were productive or not for movements. They certainly focused discontent and communicated that discontent to the establishment. But they also stimulated a wish for "law and order" that created resistance to addressing the discontent.
Institutional Sites. Two institutional sites were particularly important to diffusion of the rhetoric of movements in the 1960s. The Black churches of the South provided an institutional home for the civil rights movement, and to a lesser extent the Black Power movement. These churches provided both a public space where meetings and rallies could be held, and a leadership structure that could maximize the power of the movement to organize energies of its members. The college campuses were a second institutional site. This site was important because it provided a concentration of movement activists, maintained an idealistic commitment to free speech and novelty of ideas, and a focus for resistance. Unlike the Black churches, the leaders of colleges and universities resisted the movements of the 60s and in many cases were targets of the movements. But the geographical and institutional campus was not easily controlled and movements, even those attacking their administrations, thrived in the atmosphere.
Mimeograph Machine. The printing press of the 1960s was the mimeograph machine. Put another way, this was the "social media" of the decade. Mass produced one page flyers announced events, trumpeted causes, and urged action. Late in the period, the photocopy machine had been invented and took the place of this printing relic.
The mass media of minor importance. Sixties movements did not generally use the mass media to diffuse their messages. American mass media were controlled by institutional powers and did not provide access to leaders of the movements. Even mass media that tried to provide such voice often selected their own leaders to present to the public at large, and these leaders often had no authority within the movement. Where the media were important in movements, was television's ability to disseminate stark visual images that expanded the limits of "direct" experience that rhetors for the movement could talk about as a common experience for their members. For example, a famous photograph of a naked Vietnamese child running down a road in Vietnam with the flames from an American napalm bomb burning her flesh was stark image of American use of military power. Such images, seen by everyone, became a part of common experience and the stuff of rhetorical proof.

The movements focused discontent well

The movements of the 60s were particularly adept at at Stage 1 of movement rhetoric: focusing discontent. Direct action created demonstrations of the moral bankruptcy of the system. Pictures of young African Americans being felled by high-power fire hoses, or pursued by snarling police dogs, or being beaten with police batons were projected on television screens. Burned buses and even murdered activists made the point about the validity of the critique. The movements were adept at using the images broadcast as news by the mass media to attract energy.

The movements generated confrontation

The movements succeeded in countering the cooptation and suppression strategies of the dominant order through three characteristics:

Physical Confrontation. In both violent and non-violent ways, the movements challenged the legitimacy of the established orders. Peaceful lunch hour sit-ins challenged white power, threatened vigilante violence from resisting white citizens, and would lead to police violence. In the process, that laws kept people from the simple act of eating at a lunch counter were demonstrated. Images of Black Panthers patrolling the streets with automatic weapons and ammunition belts created such fear in law enforcement that they would invade an apartment in the middle of the night and kill panthers lying asleep in their beds. Such actions not only prevented cooptation of members of the movement who felt under siege, they also served a proof that the movement's charges of militarism and violence against the dominant order were given validity in the images.
Rhetorical Confrontation. Such strategies as name calling (calling police officers "pigs"), polemic rhetoric (a construction of the established order as the "enemy"), and a totalizing rhetoric of exaggeration (painting the enemy with a broad brush as if there were no variation of opinions within the dominant order) polarized agents of the dominant order and those in the social movement. Rhetorical confrontation made compromise with the dominant order unthinkable for those in the movement, and inflamed the agents of the dominant order thus inducing the over-response of the dominant order in physical confrontation.
Moralistic Identity. The moral rhetoric characteristic of American social movements when combined with rhetorical confrontation and the violence of the dominant order created a moral distinction between movement and dominant order. Such a dramatic drawing of moral distinction, ofttimes with the dominant order's own values, gave fervent commitment to those in the movement. It also made the compromise appropriate in cooptation seem irresponsible and even wicked.

The perfection of strategies of confrontation in the sixties was a great power of the movement.

Leadership

Patterns of leadership in these movements varied. Often the leadership was dispersed. Lifestyle (cultural) movements particularly discouraged leaders and explored alternative leadership arrangements. There was always a leadership function, although it might be dispersed rather than centralized.
Often the problem of Task 2 (Directing Energy) was controlling the energy. Riots were uncontrolled energy. As indicated above the benefit of these is disputed.

Civil Rights Movement

A Brief History of Race in US

Western society and race. Race as marker was a characteristics of Western society since the 1500s. Slavery was based on a color marker. From 1730s through 1860s, skin color represented free status: white assumed free, black assumed slave. African Americans could be free but would need to prove free. Whites did not.
American Apartheid. After freedom, Southern political leaders reinvent a rhetoric of race around hierarchy of races. Scientific racism provides needed proof of racial grades. Law then inscribes that difference into a social code. And symbols of inferior status were constructed to texture daily life. Thus, there is a rhetoric of day-to-day life that inscribes racial inferiority.
African American community is split on how to confront this apartheid. Booker T. Washington recognizes an African American niche in the society and urges the freed slaves and their descendants to exploit it. W.E.B. DuBois resists and urges resistance by all to this apartheid. The Niagara Movement, which DuBois founded, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) which it spawns, begins a sixty year legal battle to overturn apartheid.
In the 1950s their effort becomes a movement. In 1948, the Democratic Party with Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota taking the lead opposed apartheid in its national convention platform. Southern Democrats broke away and nominated their own candidate for President. Then in 1954, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in a suit brought by the NAACP that segregation in schools was unconstitutional (thus, unAmerican). This set off massive resistance in the South. The movement resists this Southern backlash.
The next decade: 1955, Montgomery Bus boycott. Murder of Emmet Till. 1960, Greensboro sit ins. 1961, Freedom Rides through South. 1963, Birmingham summer. March on Washington. 1965, Congress passes Voting Rights Bill. 1968, King Assassination.

Civil Rights Groups and Leaders

Civil Rights is formally a fragmented movement with much cooperation among groups, but each maintaining a leadership structure.

Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Martin Luther King's group.
Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Originally a group organized with dispersed leadership to provide training in non-violent techniques. Eventually transformed under Stokeley Carmichael into Black Power group.
Congress for Racial Equality (CORE). Sponsored Freedom Rides. Led by James Farmer.
National Urban League. Emphasized ghetto conditions North and South. Takes the movement to the North. Founded in New York City in 1910, but led during the Civil Rights Era by Whitney Young.

Media of Communication

Black Churches above all. It was said that "Sunday was the most segregated day of the week" in the South. American Apartheid kept places of worship strictly separated. The movement took advantage of this institutional division to organize. The African American church became the heart of the Civil Rights Movement. The church served as a headquarters of sorts for the activities. And, the ministerial corps provided leaders such as Martin Luther King. Finally, in a movement where morality was a key rhetorical theme, the African American church provided a moral symbol of the movement.
Mass Rallies. The March on Washington is the outstanding example of the rally, but in hundreds of places throughout the South supporters were called together to hear King and the other dynamic orators of the movement, to sing "We Shall Overcome" and to demonstrate their solidarity.
Music. The gospel music of the Black church was important, but none more so that "We Shall Overcome" that became the rhetorical symbol of the movement.

Mode of Rhetorical Engagement

Physical confrontation was at the heart of the movement's strategy. The movement's commitment was to non-violent physical confrontation with the symbols of American Apartheid. This was an asymmetrical violence where the demonstraters were committed to non-violence and the enforcers of American Apartheid would respond with violence. Note that this was a strategy that the movement did not control. It depended on being able to predict the violence of Apartheid. This was predictable, however. Tracing back to slavery violence against African Americans was a part of the modus operadi of Southern leadership. After abolition, the Ku Klux Klan renewed the use of violence to control African Americans. So, expectations of the use of violence to resist the movement was to be expected. This set up the rhetorical strategy of moral inequivalence.
The Strategy of Moral Inequivalence worked like this:
- Material base. The induced violence demonstrated the character of the system. The images of this violence were carried as news in the Mass Media.
- Rhetorical component. There were two rhetorical parts to the strategy. First, celebrate your non-violence. Non-violence had to be taught and insisted upon in directing the energy of the movement. But it also had to be declared as the philosophy of the movement. It created the image of the African American victim. The rhetoric rested on the myth of the Christian martyr, celebrating the early history of the Christian Church in which Roman authority martyred the founders of the church. The rhetoric even taught Christ's message to "Love thy enemy" thus giving the movement a New Testament content. The second rhetorical part of the strategy was to ground the moral values of the movement in American myths. This was "Equality before the Law." The Declaration of Independence with its charge that "All men are created equal" became the central document of this celebration of American commitment. Thus, the lawless violence of the Apartheid system became the "UnAmerican" element rather than the movement.
- Catharsis. Thus the demonstration of moral inequivalence condemned the corrupt system of American Apartheid as UnAmerican. It solicited the national political system in battle against it. The movement became the fulfillment of the American mission.

Black Nationalism

Locating the Movement

Black Nationalist groups and leaders
- Black Power. An identity movement celebrating pride in being Black. Stokely Carmichael took the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) away from the Civil Rights Movement with this move. The became non-integrative urging a separatism. Concentrated in the South.
- Black Muslims. Centered in the Islamic faith, the Black Muslims were headquartered in Chicago and organized Black neighborhoods in Northern Urban cities. Elijah Muhammad was the spiritual leader, operating almost exclusively through a print medium. Malcolm X was the great speaker of the Muslims until he fell from the organization. He was assassinated by Muslims.
- Black Panthers. A militant armed movement dedicated to defending the Black urban community with weaponry. Leaders were Huey P. Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, and Bobby Seale. Concentrated in Northern Urban areas, particularly on the West Coast.
These groups were united by their commitment to build African American power within the African American communities. Thus, they differed from the Cicil Rights movements because they were non-integrative, identifying with the people of color of the world and attacking the United States in a polemic rhetoric. Seen in terms of the dispute between DuBois and Washington, they were the the descendants of DuBois.

Historical Roots: The question of violence

Racial violence has had a presence throughout American history
- During slavery there was considerable evidence of physical violence against slaves. Thieves would have hands severed, runaways feet. Slaves were whipped for the terror value. Abolitionist Theodore Weld had documented the widespread use of violence in Slavery as It Is.
- After the Civil War, the White leadership of the South turned to the Ku Klux Klan to reestablish political power through physical intimidation and killing of politically active African Americans.
- Lynching continued into the 20th century with the White community gathering as African Americans accused of crimes were hanged without trial. Between 1900 and 1909, nearly 800 African Americans were lynched in the United States. By the 1930s, this was down to 120, but lynchings continued into the 1960s.
- By 1960, living in the African American communities remained dangerous. All though African Americans were 10.5% of the US population in 1960, they were the victims of over half the murders committed in the United States.
The question this history posed is: What should be the response to that violence? The two answers defined the difference between the Civil Rights and Black Nationalist movements:
- The Civil Rights movement believed the proper response was non-violence in the face of violence. Philosophically it believed that this non-equivalency starkly represented the moral inequivalency that would deliver integration.
- The Black Nationalist movement believed that Blacks should arm and defend themselves against this violence. Philosophically they believed that power would be delivered only when militancy led to an active defense of the community.

Historical Roots: The Economic Power of African Americans

The other issue central to the Black Nationalist position was the systematic separation of the African American community from the capitalist economic system.
In 1960, despite the fact African Americans were 10.5% of the population, only 2.2% of US businesses were owned by African Americans. In fact, the predominant pattern in Urban African American communities was that economic resources were owned by absentee owners who left the community with the wealth. The exception to this rule were the segregated services such as barber and beauty shops. The urban riots of the 1960s and 1970s were notable for targeted non-Black owned businesses in their communities.

Media of Communication

Primarily the streets. The rhetoric of Black nationalism was spread through the African American public sphere in the urban areas of the North.
Mass rallies were particularly important in the Black Power phase of the movement. Having grown out of the Civil Rights movement this habit carried over.
Black Muslims organized through their mosques, thus patterning the importance of the Black church. They also had the most active use of print media, publishing newspapers in major Northern urban areas.

Mode of Engagement

Physical Confrontation with Black Nationalism was violent. Shoot outs with police occurred regularly costing lives on both sides. Philosophically they demonstrated a willingness to defend against violence. Thus, violence was motivated as a defensive rather than an offensive strategy.
There was also a symbolic theater of defense. Security was provided by the movement for their leaders, visible at all appearances. There was similarly an armed presence. Often the security was uniformed. Militant display was a part of their visual rhetoric.

Style of the Rhetoric

Polemic. Strong language was used to condemn the system. Vocabulary was confrontational. There was no expectation of peaceful change.
Prominent was a narrative of warfare. The antagonist was "the White man." The protagonist the "strong Black soldier." There were two plots: the system oppressing and killing Blacks, and the strong Black soldier resisting.
Narrative of the Black community. There was a second narrative prominent. The antagonist was designated with the vocabulary of the "house nigger" or "Uncle Tom," the African American who would kowtow to the Whites to curry favor. They did the White man's bidding. The protagonist was active Black Pride. The plot featured the rise of a Black consciousness.
The rhetoric was also marked by a kind of common sense logic. Economic pragmatism explained the conditions of the ghetto. The rhetoric was based in description of "reality" rather than an idealistic dream.
The alignment of identity was by race, not with the United States. Their nationalism was exclusively identified with the Black community.