Reading on the Civil Rights Movement: colored cosmopolitans and transnational activists

While writings on the civil right abound, as a historian of South Asia, I dont often get time to read these books. Yesterday, Christina Thomas, a student at Messiah who is working on Messiah’s Multicultural history alerted me to a recent book, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing by Joy Degruy Leary (2005) that tries to explain PTSD on a longer and more devastating terms–as experienced by terrorized communities in the United States. Seems like a timely answer to a question about this I had posted in an earlier blog. Of course, Christina’s research has revealed that Rachel Flowers, Messiah’s first African American student, was herself active in the movement for Civil Rights in the Philadelphia area. Keep an eye out for more on the Flowers family history in coming months.

I have found other works useful here like Nico Slate’s Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in India and the United States (2012). The writings of David Blight such as American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era (2011). I learned among other things the role played by international students in the civil rights movement, such as those at Tougaloo in MI. Some of these students participated in the movement and were forcibly evicted from eating places. In May 1964 Ram Manohar Lohia, a member of the Indian Parliament himself traveled to Jackson, MI and protested segregation when he refused to leave a “whites only” restaurant. When the US government offered to apologize for this incident by way of Senator Adlai Stevenson, Lohia rebuffed the move by saying that Stevenson should go and apologize to the Statue of Liberty! (see Slate’s book for more details, esp p. 239). Interestingly, Lohia had traveled in the US in the early 1950s and spoke about Gandhi’s method of satyagraha at Fisk University’s Race Relations Institute.

Dont forget Ian Chaney’s White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (1996) to get a sense of the prejudice experienced by various racial and ethnic groups in the United States and how these were unpacked and processed in the law courts. A number of curious claims were made by the law courts that vaccillated in defining Hindus in the United States either as “caucasian” or “non-white Asiatics.” These legal cases are repleted with such, often times hilarious definitions (see Slate, p. 29). But there were serious repercussions as well. There is the case of Bhagat Singh Thind who relocated from CA to NY in order to start life anew when he failed to gain citizenship on the west coast. A more tragic history unfolded in the case of one Vaishno Das Bagai (1891-1928) who frustrated by his repeated failure to secure citizenship in the United States committed suicide in 1920. More details about his life can be found at http://www.aiisf.org/stories-by-author/876-bridges-burnt-behind-the-story-of-vaishno-das-bagai A copy of Das’s suicide note can be found in the South Asia in North America Collection at the University of California-Berkeley. Check out Newspaper clip, “Here’s Letter to the World from suicide”Microfilm BANC MSS2002/78cz Box 5 Folder 18.

There were international students who participated in the civil rights movement about whom much is not known. For example Ahmed Meer and Jaswant Krishnayya who were Indian students at MIT traveled through much of the American South in 1961. In 1960, veteran Gandhian activists from India, Acharya Kripalani and his wife Sucheta visited the US in 1960 and spoke to SNCC activists at Morehouse College. They also met with the Kings who had visited India a year earlier. I recently found out that in 1959, my own mother in law Mary Varughese traveled to the United States by ship to study at Lindenwood College in Missouri. She experienced segregation and racial animosity while in the United States though her “international” status sometimes helped her escape the full brunt of segregation. I need to ask her more about this.

Obviously, one needs to consider the life and work of the white Anglican educationist Charles Freer Andrews (1871-1940) whose anti-racist and social activism took him to India and to other places around the world, including the United States. Andrews a close friend of Gandhi and Tagore became a staunch opponent of British racism in India. In the US he met with WEB DuBois, George Washington Carver and others. Why mention this on a blog on the civil rights? These interstitial transnational activists created a wide circle of friends, an “affective community” where ideas and practices circulated around the globe to provide a wider context to the unfolding civil rights movement in the United States (for more see Leela Gandhi’s 2006 book on Affective Communities, . These cross cutting histories certainly merit further research…and I certainly wish I could do more here. I might add, I am starting work on Andrews who also taught at St. Stephen’s College (1907-1914), my alma mater in Delhi.

So much for now…hope you have found this interesting reading…trying to make some limited sense of them in the space of this page has been a most helpful exercise for me…

bernardo

Filed under Uncategorized | Comments Off on Reading on the Civil Rights Movement: colored cosmopolitans and transnational activists