March – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Pictures John Lewis Remembering the Civil Rights Movement

John Lewis’ three part graphic novel March recalls in vivid, one might even say graphic detail, his experience of the Civil Rights Movement.  He joined a movement that had been gaining momentum and that already had towering leaders, and he emulated these leaders and interacted with them as he, in turn, led the younger contingent.  He led students and others in restaurant sit-ins and on the streets of the south to confront racism using non-violent techniques.

When I teach the History of Psychology, students have, at best, a sketchy knowledge of the civil rights movement.  We generally focus on the Brown vs. Board of Education case that went before the Supreme Court and that struck down Plessy vs. Ferguson where the court had ruled that separate railway cars for African Americans and for European Americans were fine as long as they were equal (which they almost certainly were not).  We do this because two psychologists, Mamie and Kenneth Clark played a key role in that trial – their data from the doll study – a study where they used colored dolls (their term) and white dolls to show that segregation had harmed African American Children by leading them to have internalized racism – to hate themselves because they were of African American decent.

Actually the last sentence in the last paragraph is wrong.  It is the historical way that the story is told, but when you read their data, the internalized racism, present both in the southern children in segregated schools and the northern children in integrated schools, was worse in the children in Northern Integrated Schools.  The paper does not make much of this – both groups clearly have internalized racism – but it does portend what may have actually happened – integration of the schools actually increased racism and the detrimental effects of it on blacks.

The class references this study because it is the first time that data from a social science experiment was cited in a Supreme Court decision.  And we note that it was two African American psychologists who were able to set this precedent at a time when psychology was struggling to be recognized as a viable and respectable science.  Mamie and Kenneth Clark – African Americans who experienced open racism from their doctoral supervisors - are the only two psychologists that I know of that changed not just the course of psychology but directly changed the course of history – contributing the deciding data that led to what many have cited as the most important decision of the Supreme Court in the 20^th century.  Pretty cool that this was done by minority persons – and minorities in the field.  Kenneth was the seventh African American to achieve a doctoral degree.  Mamie didn’t come much later.  And they did things no other psychologist has done.

John Lewis, whose graphic novel charts the work that he did to both call into question the failure of businesses to heed the court's call to end segregation and to work on establishing the right to vote for African Americans, picked up where the Clark's left off.  His story is an endearing one that follows an arc that was typical for many generations of important political figures in US history.  He started life as the child of poor farmers in Alabama.  He had aspirations of becoming a preacher – and his first congregation were the chickens that he was raising.  But he didn’t just preach to them – he became attached to them – and he would refuse to eat the chickens he had named when they were served for dinner.  He loved them.

Another feature of his story that is a very typical American theme is that he was driven to go to school and to do well there.  When he was needed on the farm and was forbidden to go to school because he was to work in the fields, he would hide until he saw the school bus coming and then he would run out to take it to school.  Ultimately, Lewis would see the world – as a teen he traveled to the big city of Buffalo, New York with an uncle – and he chose to go to college in Nashville, Tennessee.  It was there that he first began fighting for civil rights – he organized sit-ins at local diners.  It was also there that his work started to take precedence over his schooling - he prioritized the movement over his schoolwork.

I think that the graphic format is the right vehicle for this story.  The story is titled March and, though Lewis was erudite and gave speeches that helped the movement, his emphasis is on the actions that he and others took.  He will sometimes cite speeches (I will quote a surprising one in a moment), but it is the action of marching, not the “I’ve been to the mountain top” moments that he maintains is the reason that the civil rights protesters accomplished what they did.  And the visual emphasis of the books support this action based approach.  The story tells about deeds as much or more than it talks about words – and though there are plenty of words – they are mostly words of dialogue – decisions that are being made – they are frequently words about when and where to march.  Lewis presents himself as a man of action and this book is written and drawn to convey the actions that he took – and the actions that others took against him - not to articulate the fine grained thoughts that he had.

That said, the philosophy of nonviolence is pretty clearly articulated.  Perhaps more clearly, the teaching of the philosophy to those who marched – the training and the importance of the adherence to the principles – and the difficulty of doing this are clearly stated.  What is less clear – and perhaps it takes a bit of psychoanalysis to articulate it – is how it is that the nonviolent movement clarified how much aggression was being used by whites to suppress blacks.  The movement exposed the lie that is at the heart of American exceptionalism – an exceptionalism that maintains we are not the aggressors – we only come in when called upon – it is others that are violent and we are pacifists who are reluctantly drawn into war – and even more that it is we whites who are not the violent ones – it is the blacks (whether black hats or people of color) who are bad and do bad things (and doesn’t the doll study demonstrate that they know they are the bad ones?).

What the nonviolent movement was designed to do was to expose the truth that we are all aggressive – and that none of us are without blame – as effectively as any analyst’s couch ever did.  Whether it was furious counter clerks dumping bleaching chemicals on students who sat in at segregated lunch counters or the burning of the bus that carried freedom fighters to the south – or the murder of black organizers or the murders of white students who came south to help out – and whose bodies ended up buried in a dam being built – the peaceful assertion of rights – inalienable rights – exposed the hostility that those in power were using and had always used to retain that power.  And Lewis’ self-portrayal here as the student of Martin Luther King, Jr. is that while King articulated the tactics of nonviolence – Lewis, the student, practiced them more devotedly and more consistently than King did – and in doing this he pushed the issue in ways that words never could.  Lewis does not, however, try to elevate himself to a position of exceptionalism.  He feels violent impulses - most powerfully, ironically, when King is threatened and he moves to physically defend him.

One of the challenges in teaching about racial and gender battles in the History of Psychology has always been to help the students get a sense of the level of injustice that existed – and even more to get them to appreciate the levels that still exist.  OK, to be frank, this is something that I myself have struggled with.  James Cone’s visit to our campus helped me better understand this, as did Ta Nehisi Coates’.  But I think the unprovoked actions of Trump – and the actions of hate groups – and the nomination of Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court bench – have helped me and my students be much more aware and sensitive to the ongoing aggression that is at the heart of the repression of African Americans and other marginalized groups, including women.  I still have to do background work, but the students are more quickly able to see that we are not just talking about history, but the current state of affairs when talking about prejudice and marginalization.

An example of the vivid immediacy of the material that Lewis portrays is Nelson Rockefeller’s speech at the 1964 Republican National Convention.  In the speech, Rockefeller quotes himself as having said a year earlier that, “The republican party is in real danger of subversion by a radical, well-financed, and highly disciplined minority, wholly alien to the sound and honest conservatism that has firmly based the republican party in the best of a century’s traditions, wholly alien to the sound and honest republican liberalism that has kept the party abreast of human needs in a changing world, wholly alien to the broad middle course that accommodates the broad mainstream of republican principles.”  Despite this, the party nominated Barry Goldwater – who, unlike DonaldTrump, was soundly defeated in the general election.

These books are introduced and supported by Lewis attending the inauguration of a very different president – Barack Obama.  His reminiscences serve as a means of understanding how we were able to stand at that moment – the swearing in of the first president of clearly African descent – the first president who identified as a person of color.  But, it seems to me, Lewis might be asking whether that swearing in portended a backlash – a thinly veiled racist tinged backlash by the radical, well-financed and disciplined minority that would hijack not just the republican convention, but the country as a whole.  Just as the integrated black students in the north internalized self hatred more than the segregated black students in the south, northern and southern whites externalized their hatred of blacks in the wake of being ruled by one.  

Lewis' book has the potential to expose a new generation to the powerfully racist, sexist and repressive forces in their naked form that drive what I hope to be a minority of people to keep others from sharing in a privilege that we should be striving to allow all to have access to – the privilege of leading lives that are as free as humanly possible.  By focusing on denying access, I believe that those in power help to maintain the delusion that they are exceptions to the arc of being human – that they are the immortals who will always be on top.  Unfortunately this kind of thinking is not good for any of us.  It is my firm belief that a rising tide raises all ships - and by blocking the tide, we create a stagnant swamp that we will all be forced to wallow in until we are able to find fresh sources of water.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

For other posts looking at Race in America see: James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree, and applied to a Rock Musical, Dorothy Holmes presents to the 2016 Psychoanalytic Convention, 2017 Convention Aktar, Powell and Trump, hearing Ta-Nehisi Coates talk, Black Lives Matter,  John Lewis' March, Get Out, Green Book and Blackkklansman, Americanah, The Help, Selma, August Wilson's Fences, Hamilton! on screen, Da 5 Bloods, The Black Panther, and Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me.

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