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This instance of the unlikely convergence of segregationist policies with a defense of black people provides the story at the heart of the legal scholar Anders Walker’s fascinating intellectual history of integration debates. The Burning House traces Clarence Thomas’s position back to intellectual exchanges between legal professionals like Justices Earl Warren and Lewis Powell and midcentury authors as disparate as Eudora Welty and James Baldwin, demonstrating how the legal history of integration intertwined with literary history. Most of the authors extolled the virtues of the African-American culture that arose under Jim Crow. Some, most notably Robert Penn Warren, argued that African-American art depended upon the separation from white Americans that Jim Crow provided as a means of extolling the virtues of segregation and arguing for its continuation. Others, including Ralph Ellison, praised African-American culture to question what form integration ought to take. If integration required assimilation into white America’s violent culture, they opposed it. But if integration entailed what civil rights activist James Farmer called “unity through diversity”—the peaceful coexistence of various peoples and their separate cultures—they welcomed it.
full: https://www.bookforum.com/review/19542 _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
