Confederate "Heritage" Month 2023, April 26: Theodore Bilbo and "repatriation" of Black Americans to Africa
Confederate "Heritage" Month 2023, April 26: Theodore Bilbo and "repatriation" of Black Americans to Africa
As a matter of fact, when Mr. Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence he never once thought of the Negro. When he spoke of men, he thought of white men of European origin. When he talked of the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, he was oblivious of any consideration of the Negro. If we fairly scrutinize and weigh intelligently what Mr. Jefferson real)y did say and write on the subject of the Negro during more than half a century subsequent to the day he penned the Declaration of Independence we will unmistakably find irrefutable proof of our contention that he had no thought of the Negro when he said "All men are created free and equal."
A leftie criticism of the deficiencies of American traditions? A Woke Librul trashing one of the Founding Fathers? An excerpt from The 1619 Report?
Well, no. It was one of the most notorious white racists in American history was the rancid Theodore Bilbo, Governor of Mississippi (1916-1920/1928-1932) and US Senator from Mississippi (1935-1947), in a 1939 Senate speech. And a good reminder that sweeping, out-of-context criticism of famous figures from the American past may be something very different than critical thought.1
The Britannica entry on Bilbo notes in its first paragraph that he is “best known for his racist and demagogic rhetoric.”2
This recalls a famous meeting in 1965 between President Lyndon Johnson and then-Alabama Gov. George Wallace where LBJ was pushing Wallace to require the voter registrars in Alabama to follow the law and register Black voters without any shenanigans:
Wallace resisted the notion of sending federal troops into Alabama when the voting rights issue was at play, and Alabama was almost at a boiling point. Wallace is called to the White House and like JFK, LBJ had a rocking chair in his Oval Office. He was six feet-three inches tall and he would frequently have somebody where John is sitting, on a couch that was far lower than the rocking chair. [laughter] And Johnson would rock the chair up and literally lean over them [laughter] and look down at them. Now, bear in mind as I mentioned, LBJ's six feet-three inches tall, and George Wallace is five feet-four inches tall. So it's like a snake over a mongoose. [laughter] It was ridiculous. But I'll read the passage:
He's asking George to send federal troops in and Wallace says, "I don't have the power to do this." He says, "Oh, yes, Mr. President, there's no point about that.
Johnson says, "Then why don't you let them vote?"
Wallace says, "Well, you know now, I don't have the power. That belongs to the country registrars in the State of Alabama." And Wallace insists that, no, he didn't have the legal authority.
Johnson says, "Well, George, why don't you persuade them?"
He says, "Well, I don't think I can do that."
He said, "Now, don't shit me about your persuasive powers, George. You know, I sat down this morning and when I got up, all three of the TV sets" – I'm going to just quote this – "all three of the TV sets in my Oval Office were on and you were talking to the press, George. And you were hammering me, George. I heard you, you were hammering me."
He said, "No, no, Mr. President."
He says, "No, no, no, you were hammering. And you were good." He said, "You were so good, I almost believed it myself." [laughter]
But then at the very end of the conversation he says, "Now, George, you've worked your life in politics. Let's not think about 1965. Let's think about 1985, George. Neither of us will be around. We'll be dead. Now, what do you want people saying about you and your State of Alabama? Do you want people to say, 'George Wallace, he built,' or do you want people to say, 'George Wallace, he hated'?" [my emphasis]3
Actually, Wallace will mostly be remembered for his racist and anti-democracy politics. But late in his life and political career, he at least nominally said that segregation had been wrong.
Theodore Bilbo lived to age 69 and spent most of his life in public service. And basically the only thing for which he is remembered is being a nasty white racist bigot. And he would probably be proud of that legacy.
Todd Legum recounts Bilbo’s role in promoting a version of what we now know as the far-right white-replacement theory:
The "great replacement theory" can be traced back at least to Theodore G. Bilbo (D-MS), the brazenly racist U.S. Senator who held office from 1935 to 1947. Bilbo, an antisemite who acknowledged being a member of the Ku Klux Klan during an appearance on "Meet the Press," warned that at "the present rate of interbreeding and miscegenation and intermarriage between the [n-words] and the Whites… there’ll be no Whites, there’ll be no Blacks in this country. We’ll all be yellow [or brown]."
In 1947, Bilbo published a book Separation or Mongrelization: Take Your Choice. In the book, Bilbo argued that "great civilizations of the ages have been produce[d] by the Caucasian race" and the "mongrel not only lacks the ability to create a civilization, but he cannot maintain a culture that he finds around him." He asserted that the nation must choose between a "White America and a mongrel America."4
Bilbo in 1939 gave a notorious speech in the Senate - from which the opening quote above is taken - advocating the “voluntary” colonization of African-Americans out of the country out of the United States to Liberia.5 "It is a rational and realistic formula for the solution of the race problem in the United States," he declared. He had already proposed euphemistically-labeled "repatriation" legislation in 1938.
It’s an example of how selective reading of history can be and is used to promote extremist and false readings of history. Bilbo in 1939 quoted Abraham Lincoln at some length in statements where Lincoln referred to colonization without, of course, any kind of context of what the larger context was and where Lincoln actually stood on slavery and rights for Black Americans.
Bilbo found willing collaborators in this propaganda stunt from a small group of black nationalists, though colonization schemes never had significant support among African-Americans, not in the 19th century and certainly not in 1939. While forms of Black nationalist politics have been and continue to be important, they have been plagued with the kinds of problems that radical political trends often encounter:
The emigration [colonization] idea had a long heritage, but the direct inspiration for the 1930s agitation was Marcus Garvey, the most prominent figure in the history of black nationalism worldwide. Garvey, a Jamaican, arrived in Harlem during World War I and gained notice for his fierce anticolonial rhetoric. He energized his followers with a message of race pride, militant separatism, and economic nationalism. His defiant espousal of self-defense subjected him to charges of subversion, but his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) galvanized a mass protest movement around the slogan "Back to Africa." Initially identified with the political left, Garvey gradually acquired more conservative credentials, including a controversial meeting with the head of the Ku Klux Klan in 1922. His move to the right did not mollify the federal government, which investigated him for mail fraud growing out of a UNIA-sponsored steamship company. He was charged, tried, and imprisoned in 1925 and subsequently deported, and the UNIA entered a long twilight of organizational decline.6
Bilbo attracted the support of a fringe group, the Peace Movement of Ethiopia (PME, an American group), which had a nationalist orientation similar to Garvey’s though sectarian differences existed, as well as Garvey’s UNIA. This was a weird corner of fringe politics, in which basically rightwing political ideology and narrow sectarian trumped mutual racial hatreds, as Michael Fitzgerald explains:
The Peace Movement, UNIA, and the other supporters of repatriation did agree on some issues---or at least they had common aversions. They shared anti-Semitic sentiments, often expressed in anti-Communist terms, but the growing vogue of a multi-ethnic Left in the black community represented the unifying threat.
And he notes that Garvey himself opposed Italy’s “invasion of Ethiopia, but he was more apt to claim credit as one of the ‘first Fascists’ than to mouth anti-fascist slogans against the Italian leader Benito Mussolini.” A perfect soulmate for a character like Theodore Bilbo.
And Bilbo needed some kind of nominal black allies to give what credibility he could to this crackpot racist scheme: “The resulting African American [black-nationalist] advocacy for the bill legitimized the rest of Bilbo's racialist agenda. … Bilbo taunted the civil rights forces with bis own black support, which cast doubt on their claim to speak for the entire race.”
That schtick has been going on for a long time. (See: Thomas, Clarence.)
Bilbo’s Senate speech in May 1938 made his attitudes pretty clear:
Bilbo's four-hour oration, delivered on May 24, did attract limited press attention, including a Newsweek column on the senator and his proposal. The speech otherwise created problems. In one passage, he observed that no nation could prosper while degraded by the blood of inferior racial types. Avowing kinship, he noted that Hitler's "Germans appreciate the importance of race values," an accurate if understated observation. Bilbo claimed to speak for seven million African Americans who supported emigration, but his remarks were scarcely designed to elicit their sympathy. The senator termed the Negro by nature incapable of creative thought. African Americans of mixed ancestry he called "the saddest spectacle" on the planet, quoting a saying that "God created the whites. I know not who created the blacks. Surely a devil created the mongrels."7
Theodore Bilbo was a genuinely horrible human being. And the main function of his crackpot “repatriation” scheme was to illustrate that fact. As a national political issue, it was a fizzle. And foreign policy developments were not favorable for what attraction such a ridiculous scheme might have drawn.
Black nationalists were suspected of disloyalty and of pro-Japanese sentiments; indeed, Garveyites bad long sympathized with Japan, which they identified as the leading non-European power. Among Bilbo's bereft allies such sympathies bad a special logic: if racial injustice could not be redressed by repatriation, then perhaps an apocalyptic Japanese victory was necessary. One repatriationist offshoot, the Pacific Movement of the Eastern World, openly promoted Japan as the potential liberator of Africa. Elijah Muhammad, the black Muslim leader [whose movement Malcolm X later joined] , and scores of bis followers were jailed for draft resistance.8
In an earlier post this month, I quoted David Bell, “It matters that when Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, he used the words ‘all men are created equal’ and not ‘all white men are created equal’.” Ghouls like Theodore Bilbo did not and do not care. The David Bell article quoted there is: Whose Freedom? New York Review of Books 09/23/2021 issue. <https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/09/23/whose-freedom/> (Accessed: 2023-11-03).
Britannica Editors (2022): Theodore G. Bilbo. Britannica Online 10/09/2022. <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Theodore-G-Bilbo> (Accessed: 2023-18-04).
Undergrove, Mark (2012): In: The Presidency of LBJ. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum 03/26/2012. <https://www.jfklibrary.org/events-and-awards/forums/past-forums/transcripts/the-presidency-of-lbj> (Accessed: 20223-18-04). He is quoting from his book Indomitable Will, based on a White House tape of the conversation.
Legum, Todd (2022): The right's embrace of a deadly racist conspiracy theory. Popular Information 05/16/2022. (Accessed: 2023-17-04).
Bilbo, Theodore (1939): Voluntary Resettlement of American Negroes in Africa. Congressional Record 04/24/1939, 4650-4676. <https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRECB-1939-pt5-v84/pdf/GPO-CRECB-1939-pt5-v84-1-1.pdf> (Accessed: 2023-17-04).
Fitzgerald, Michael (1997): "We Have Found a Moses": Theodore Bilbo, Black Nationalism, and the Greater Liberia Bill of 1939. Journal of Southern History 63:2, 293-320. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/2211284> (Accessed: 2023-17-04).
Ibid.
Ibid.