Читать книгу Cedric Robinson - Joshua Myers - Страница 11

The Oakland to which Cap arrived was not yet the space it would become after the wartime industrial transformation that preceded an influx of Black migrants from Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and other southern states. But it was not a culturally barren place either. By the late 1920s, many of the social and political institutions that would become the foundation for the new entrants were in place. They would soon remake Oakland.

But before that occurred, earlier migrants from the South, who had increased the Black population sixfold to over six thousand people from 1900 to 1920, were drawn to service jobs and opportunities associated with the three transcontinental rail lines for which the city served as a terminus, as well as eventually those within the shipbuilding industries. Almost immediately, they asserted what Dolores Nason McBroome described as an “economic militancy” that was largely framed within its religiosity and communal determination. Utilizing self-help organizations and a growing labor consciousness, these militant postures were desires to realize and live against the racial proscriptions that continued to set the political terms for their realities. At the apex of an organizing tradition that sought otherwise terms were organizations like the National Association of Colored Women, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. Activists like C. L. Dellums, Tarea Hall Pittman, and Frances Albrier fought for employment opportunities and legal and civil rights on behalf of Black Oakland alongside religious leaders like John Snape and H. T. S. Johnson who joined their efforts by anchoring the community in the spiritual traditions they brought with them.¹⁹

As more jobs became available, the perennial challenge of housing shortages amid residential segregation reared its ugly head. Since the late nineteenth century, the neighborhoods of West Oakland had been a viable, but at times suboptimal, location for the Black community, given its close proximity to the rail lines and the requirements by some employers that workers be on call. In short order, a vibrant community of day laborers, factory workers, mechanics, and engineers had appeared. This community also included, perhaps most significantly, a large presence of Pullman porters, which by the mid-1920s under the leadership of A. Philip Randolph and Dellums was organized through the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Chambermaids, becoming a critical force in Black working-class politics throughout the country.²⁰ It was also the community that Winston Whiteside would call home, living first at 1448 Jackson Street before renting a home at 34th and West Streets, and finally securing their permanent home at 3020 Adeline Street, just north of the McClymonds neighborhood.²¹

For those unable to hop aboard the Pullman cars, opportunities were relatively sparse. Laborers were subject to the whims of uncertain market conditions. But Cap was industrious and strong-willed. He would not be denied. After finding work in downtown Oakland, he found community and meaning in the spiritual traditions that had been deposited in West Oakland. Though the African Methodist Episcopal and Baptist churches were dominant, Cap converted to the Seventh Day Adventist Church, where he would have found a resonant, deep religious experience that bound him to a vision of a new land and world beyond, but also to a strict sense of moral uprightness in the here and now.²² And he was a strict adherent to these views, eventually hosting Bible studies at his home. In their religious instruction, the Whitesides understood authority beyond earthly power, beyond our lesser human experiences. Though Cap was gentle, remembered for the power of his dignity and deep respect for others, this was a theology that could be wielded with a heavy hand. His ability to convey the necessity of moral control may have defined him more than any other set of attributes.²³ In 1933, after witnessing a store being held up at gunpoint (a toy gun, it was later discovered), Cap, who was all of 5 ft. 4 in., sprinted down the street to prevent the assailant from fleeing in a taxicab. Such an act garnered him a mention in the local papers.²⁴ He simply could not overlook a wrong. This would have meaning for Cedric’s birth and childhood.

After a year of consistent work as a janitor downtown made it possible, Cap sent for Cecilia and the girls. It was the year before the stock market crash, and Black Oakland was growing and jobs were available, even as housing accommodations remained stagnant. And then the expansion suddenly ended. As elsewhere, in Oakland, the Great Depression meant a deepening of inequality in the Black community. With unemployment crippling the community, a mix of self-help voluntarism, “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns, and labor agitation provided vehicles for activists to buoy West Oakland through the crisis.²⁵ And also, as elsewhere, the presence of radical forces provided an alternative analysis of “the problem” – one that saw it as a problem of racial capitalism.²⁶ But at the core of West Oakland during the Depression was a community, an attempt to forge togetherness in the face of hardship.

The community, the tradition that we are describing here, was not one without contradiction. Love transmitted through a “disciplinarian” ethic could at times be difficult for some to bear. Cap ran a tight ship. According to family lore, boys were not allowed near Cap’s daughters – and the unlucky few who were caught were severely and violently punished for such an indiscretion. Whether it was a Christian morality or a fear of the possibility of what happened with Cecilia also happening with his daughters, we can only speculate.²⁷

In Oakland and the region in general, a vibrant nightlife provided not an escape but a return to the worlds of meaning-making that industrial work tended to negate, a kind of joy and ecstasy that made sense of the realities of exploitation. And if that was not possible, they at least found – in what would soon become known as Baby Harlem – some peace of mind.²⁸ Much of what Cap had discovered in the church, Clara Whiteside likely realized in these spaces. She was constantly in search of a good time. Though she left Mobile when she was four, she would return yearly to attend Mardi Gras when she reached adulthood.²⁹ In more recent parlance, she might have been considered something of a socialite. She was beautiful, outgoing, and perhaps somewhat of a rebel to Cap’s strict sense of control. After graduating from high school, she ventured out into the social worlds of Black Oakland. It was a world which also produced a class of leadership in both the business and politics that would also have consequences for the larger Black Bay Area society. It was here where Clara met one such leader, the San Francisco club owner Frederick Hill, and began an affair. Whether or not Cap knew about this dalliance, the fact would have deeply troubled, or likely angered, him. And that it produced a child born out of wedlock – who she named Cedric – certainly may have rubbed against his Seventh Day Adventist sensibilities. But none of this prevented Cap from showering the child with the love that would ultimately shape him. His other daughters, Wilma and Lillian, were also mothers, or soon to be, within a few years of moving out on their own. Whatever the circumstances surrounding their bringing of life into the world, its end result was a close-knit network of aunts, uncles, and cousins to which Cedric would become attached. Like all families, they were “full of imperfections and contradictions,” but what their love of Cedric reveals was that it was an ethic also grounded in what Kelley describes as a kind of “holding on to each other because they had to and because their culture demanded it.”³⁰

Cedric James Hill was born on November 5, 1940.³¹ Within a year, Clara married Dwight Robinson, from whom Cedric took his surname. But their marriage was short-lived. Along with Clara, Cedric was cared for by his grandparents whom he called Daddy and Mama Do. They had just been contracted by the city to provide janitorial services to public buildings. They were continuing a Whiteside tradition of self-sustaining entrepreneurialism. There was also Cedric’s father, Frederick Hill, who played a role in his son’s life. There were some moments where he lived with him. His aunts Wilma and Lillian were a presence as well. Their children were like siblings to Cedric. They found much in common as young boys navigating life in West Oakland. Cedric’s biological grandmother, Cap’s first wife, Corine Cunningham, had even moved to Oakland. Though his family life was anything but the western sociological norm, Cedric had people.

And that is where “Ricky” – as Cedric was called – likely learned for the first time what it meant to live a Black existence, what it meant to confront the world that produced that existence with a Black ethic of confrontation. Cap instilled in Cedric a sense of patience and the necessity of rejecting impulsive thinking. When Cedric faced frustration, he was there to provide care and support.³² But it was Aunt Wilma who was most interested in things Black. Working as a teacher’s aide, she rejected the logic of white supremacy. She had no desires or plans to assimilate. She gave Cedric some of his earliest lessons in Black history and provided a sense of Black identity.³³ These were the settings that first showed Cedric that there was a depth to ways that Black people experienced these times. He would later recall that these early moments inculcated within him a certain pride in being Black.³⁴

It occurred against a backdrop of Oakland’s own transformation. In the year of Cedric’s birth, Oakland experienced an injection of the faith of the Black Radical tradition that had for so long been planted in the rural cultures of the Deep South. In the first half-decade of his life, it was rerooted in the East Bay in the very West Oakland neighborhood that his grandparents had been calling home since the late 1920s. Like other migrations, this was not simply a demographic transformation, a movement of just people, but as Robinson wrote of the Great Migration in Black Movements in America, it was a continuation of this search for a free space – a search begun by the maroons, by the emigrants, and other ancestors who knew freedom was rooted in flight.³⁵ It was a resituating of the spiritual core of African America in the West, a movement that presaged what Alain Locke called the New Negro, the creation of “a new vision of opportunity … a spirit to seize.”³⁶

And it was no mere trickle. From 1940 to 1945, the Black population in Oakland had almost tripled; by 1950, it had increased by a factor greater than five. Altogether, upward of fifty thousand Black folk came to the East Bay during the war, continuing their flight even after Potsdam.³⁷ This decade produced a monumental change in the character and tenor of the Black community, and thus the city. The material consequences were deeply meaningful for the Black migrants as the opportunity to participate in employment markets driven by the requirements of war was the ironic backdrop for all of this movement. When A. Philip Randolph threatened to march on Washington to force the hand of the United States to open the war industries to Black workers, Oakland became one place that directly benefited.³⁸ The older strongholds of rail-line work expanded, albeit temporarily, as did opportunities for Black workers to labor in the shipyards. But for Black people there was also an intense desire to start new lives. Unlike earlier migrations to the region, this movement was generated amid the hope and opportunities that arrived alongside an unprecedented industrial expansion. And maybe Oakland could be a new beginning. But they would soon realize that Oakland was still America.

Postwar reconversion meant another kind of (re)turn – to a racially ordered labor market that reserved the proverbial blessings of the prosperity of the 1950s for those who could claim property in whiteness. This made perfect sense, given that much of that prosperity was also extracted from the larger colonial theater, another racial order. Despite this, Black Oakland fought an extremely valiant fight for fairer employment – a fight that included activists from across the ideological range. Migration to Oakland from the South continued despite the decline in job opportunities for Black workers. Faced with a rising population that needed work, Black civil rights leaders addressed this question head on by seeking to end discrimination in the hiring process.

The year that Cedric was born, Clara was able to land a gig at the California Department of Unemployment. She stayed there for forty-four years.³⁹ For most, however, such opportunities were fleeting. Though we do not know for sure how Clara experienced workforce discrimination and whether or not she was approached by activists in her capacity in the department, there was much agitation among Black organizers with respect to city jobs. One of their targets was transportation. Oakland’s Key System, which directly affected Black life, drew organizers and activists who sought to overturn the discriminatory methods it deployed when it came to staffing its operations. The labor militancy of earlier periods continued, with activists like Dellums, Albrier, and Pittman working to provide space for new migrants in the workplace as well as in the housing markets.⁴⁰ That militancy crossed racial lines in critical ways as well, despite the fact that unions did not have the best record when it came to Black membership and participation. When white workers executed a general strike in 1946, Black workers refused to cross the picket lines. It might have appeared to some that class solidarity and racial solidarity could in fact go hand in hand if the stakes were clarified – that it did not necessarily mean making a choice toward one end or another. But Oakland was not destined to become an interracial worker’s utopia, as the next decade and a half demonstrated.⁴¹

Perhaps stewing from the fallout of Oakland’s general strike of 1946, the city fathers – Republicans, all – made it their goal to extend a kind of growth liberalism toward a vision of what they called “an industrial garden.”⁴² In order to execute their vision, business-minded liberals, known as the downtown faction, had to unseat their main rivals for political power, ironically Oakland’s chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.⁴³ In place of violent race hate as a modus operandi, the downtown faction imagined a political economy that realized racial capitalism through softer means: workplace and housing discrimination as requirements for capital growth. It was a vision of capitalism that connected development to a sense of the good life, with the garden metaphor representing both a real geographic location and the imagined idyll of the American dream. Tranquility meant the protection of middle-class status, a homeowner’s liberalism. It drew resources from the state to support such development and in the end prefigured a neoliberal reality that was still decades away. The growth of the garden was a private affair, supported by a kind of state capitalism that privileged those white property holders as the citizens that mattered. This of course meant that prevention of Black access to the garden could have been easily predicted, as this very tactic was practiced nationwide. The industrial garden, however, was an apt metaphor. Access to the garden, as in all systems of private property, needed to be managed – it needed police. And in the Oakland metro area it came in the form of state-sanctioned housing segregation coupled with the surveillance of migrant communities and the repressive politics of juvenile delinquency.⁴⁴

The children of the migrants were Cedric’s classmates in the public education systems in place in Oakland, where he thrived in a community of Black educators. But the further up one went within these systems, the inequalities emerged. Notorious for their “tracking” initiatives, these schools became incubators for what reformers would label in more recent years as the “school-to-prison” pipeline. They were tracked on a pyramidal basis with the majority of the children of migrants placed at the lower rung. They received an inferior education by design, and the expectation in many cases was that these students would merely drop out. For those who did not make it through an education system that denied Black capacity for thought, reform school became their fate.⁴⁵

Clara had remarried and was living on Calmar Avenue in Berkeley. By using her address, Cedric was able to attend the nearly-all-Black Burbank Junior High School. During his junior high years, Cedric was remembered as popular, “a leading character,” and in one instance he welcomed and befriended a Japanese student, a child whose family had experienced the internment camps. Years later, they remembered that Cedric was the only one that was willing to reach out to them, cultivating a relationship in what was for them a hostile environment. At Burbank, Cedric also nurtured his artistic side, taking up painting and photography lessons as well as portraying a “mystery” character in the yearbook, challenging students to identify him based on several clues; an act that endeared him to many of his classmates. He exerted a memorable presence among the adults at Burbank as well. More than fifty years later, Cedric’s physical education teacher reached out to him to tell him how proud he was of the work he would come to do.⁴⁶

That engaging and welcoming spirit followed Cedric to Berkeley High, a school notable for its legacy of student activism and engagement but also, as Kelley points out, for its racism. Nevertheless, Cedric’s ever-present intellectual curiosity would again serve him well. This was all despite the fact that, like most migrant children, he experienced some level of “tracking” once he got there. In Cedric’s case, he was encouraged to take a shop class, despite his high marks in college preparatory classes like English, mathematics, and foreign languages. Black students at Berkeley were often placed on a trajectory toward skilled labor, perhaps, or less. Even as jobs were disappearing, as discrimination toward Black working-class people was increasingly a problem, “tracking” prepared students like Cedric for jobs that might one day be obsolete or for more infamous destinations, like the California Youth Authority.⁴⁷

Yet he seemed to evade these tracks, excelling in all of his academic work, as well as in leadership positions, serving as vice president of his class (for the H-11 semester), Bicycle Court Judge, and the Circle B society, while remaining active in the track team, the jazz club, and the Spanish club. He was a budding photographer and writer. In a short story he wrote for English V, “Joshua Fit De Battle,” he told a tale of racist violence in the segregated South. A white man had murdered a ten-year-old Black boy for calling him “white trash.” He was acquitted. And his grandfather, Joshua, who had been talked out of taking matters into his own hands, was left to surmise whether it was possible that God was really “gonna give the world to the meek …”⁴⁸ This story was written two years after the murder of Emmett Till, and one could see in its main character some shadows of Cap. It was also in his teenage years that Cedric would begin a lifelong love of music. Miles Davis was his favorite and, in what was a common experience of Black folk of this generation, sneaking into the clubs for Cedric was a rite of passage. He had even encountered Miles on one of those nights. Literally. Miles, unaware of the teenager’s presence, stepped on his foot. Cedric took it as a point of pride.⁴⁹

For some who remembered those times, life at Berkeley, for a student like Cedric whose interests and friendships were eclectic, would have been alienating. Though he had developed relationships across racial lines, it would not have been enough to convert guidance counselors and administrators who would have categorized him as a Black student with West Oakland roots and thus relegated to a particular station in life. Despite these plans for him, Cedric lived on his own terms and shaped the educational vision that he required for himself, eventually graduating in 1958, ranking 95th in a class of 565, and deciding that he would continue his education, rather than function in and as what Berkeley schooling imagined for people like him.⁵⁰ Among those from his community who knew him, this was expected. In fact, many children from Seventh Day Adventist families excelled academically. The socialization of the youth within these settings prepared them for classroom instruction.⁵¹ It was clear, however, that Cedric’s desire to know guided him as well.

Though they might not have shared all of his political sensibilities, Cedric’s family shaped him immeasurably. And they were proud of his achievements. He was his mother’s favorite topic of conversation. They sent him off to college with a sense of self, a sense of purpose, and a sense of how that connected to his Blackness. Aunt Wilma’s earliest lessons were the foundation for the intense library sessions that were to come. He saw models of what it is to be in community and to convene spaces for the purposes of learning and grounding. He saw it in how Daddy and Mama Do built spaces within their church groups’ religious instruction which were also for each other, for community.

It does seem a cliché that scholars, whose politics align with the folk, are intimately influenced by elders in their family – elders who are without degree and without portfolio. But the prominence of a cliché does not mean the absence of a truth. In fact, it might contain an important lesson. We are not self-created, and our capacity for and recognition of genius exists in places where regard for our humanity is kept at the fore. This may be that lesson.

In a 1999 interview where he evoked Whiteside’s influence, Cedric also framed the question of genealogy and political struggle within the deeper registers of African cultural traditions. He reminded us of the importance that enslaved Africans gave to a “world view in which the reiteration of names (an African convention in which the name of a recently deceased loved one is given to the next child born) reflected the conservatism and responsibilities of a community.” As families grew, it was necessary to maintain “the resolve to value our historical and immediate interdependence.”⁵² The Whitesides had the ability to make Cedric Robinson, to inform his orientation, because he lived a life that tapped into an ongoing, living tradition of how to be in and beyond this anti-Black world – a tradition that would then be represented and made available to us. To reiterate their names within a project of and for Black Study is to remind ourselves that we too are interdependent. Our work is only possible when it is connected to communities of meaning that reside in spaces often held from view. It is an urgent and prescient meaning of intellectual genealogy.