US Civil Rights Made in India From Piyush Agrawal

[Guest guest]

IAmUC, sudhapca wrote:

US civil rights 'made in India'

BBC South Asia correspondent Nick Bryant will shortly take up a  new

posting

after nearly three years in the region. Prior to that he was a BBC 

correspondent in Washington. 

 

Completing a book in South Asia has been anything but dull. 

Much of the conclusion was written in a maharajah's palace; the final

typos 

were corrected in a military encampment high in the quake-affected

mountains

of  Pakistan's North West Frontier Province. 

The first academic reviews came through at an internet cafe in 

rebel-controlled territory in northern Sri Lanka, with a stern

portrait of the  Tamil Tiger

leader Vilupillai Prabhakaran frowning down on me; and the finished 

manuscript went to print just as Nepal's 'Ringroad Revolution' was

reaching its 

climax. 

Take the morning of Saturday, 8 October 2005. With the final deadline

less 

than 48 hours away, I had awoken uncharacteristically early so that I

could be 

seated at my desk before dawn. 

Three hours later, when my laptop began to wobble from side to side

I 

strongly suspected that I needed a screen break. Moments later, when

my desk  began

to shudder, I realised that South Asia must have been struck by a

major 

earthquake. 

Appropriate setting 

That afternoon, I boarded the first flight to Islamabad, clutching a

printout

of the final chapter and the latest wire copy from Reuters: 'Dozens

are

feared  dead in a major earthquake', a figure which had risen to over

70,000 by

the end  of the week. 

The book, The Bystander: John F Kennedy and the Struggle for Black

Equality, 

focuses on the often fraught relationship between Jack Kennedy and

the

American  civil rights movement, seemingly an unlikely topic for a

correspondent

based in  Delhi. 

But, as it turned out, the setting ended up being entirely

appropriate. 

As I quickly discovered, many of the main heroes of the book - the

often 

isolated officials in the Kennedy administration who called

repeatedly for the 

President to mount a much more aggressive assault on racial

segregation in the 

American south - all spent formative portions of their careers in

India. 

They were committed Indophiles - or more accurately, Gandhiphiles. 

 

Chester Bowles, the Deputy Secretary of State in the Kennedy

administration, 

laboured hard to prevent barbers, restaurateurs and real estate

agents from 

discriminating against African diplomats based in Washington and New

York, 

cities which were then considered a hardship posting. 

Mr Bowles also dedicated himself to making sure the State Department

and 

Foreign Service, which were almost all-white enclaves at the end of

the 1950s, 

recruited a greater number of black applicants. 

Prior to taking up the post, Mr Bowles had served as the US

ambassador to 

India and Nepal in the early 1950s. 

'Last chance' 

The same position was occupied by the much-lamented J K Galbraith,

the 

cerebral Harvard economist who had long argued that America would

never live up  to

its democratic ideal unless its system of racial apartheid was

completely 

dismantled. 

>From the ambassador's residence in Delhi, Galbraith watched in fear

and 

dismay as black fury broke loose in the spring and summer of 1963,

and 

demonstrators took to the streets in over a thousand American cities,

both north  and

south. 

"This is our last chance to remain in control of matters," Mr

Galbraith wrote

to attorney general Robert Kennedy in June of that year, "and of

avoiding

the  most serious eventuality which is the possible need to use force

to

restrain  Negro violence." 

Then there is Harris Wofford, who toiled as Kennedy's chief civil

rights 

advisor before resigning in frustration in the early summer of 1962

because of 

the President's moral timidity on the fissile question of racial

reform. 

The author of India Afire, which was published in 1951, Wofford

became a keen

student of the philosophy of Gandhian non-violent action, the

highly-successful  strategy which had driven the British from India. 

 

On returning to America in the early 1950s, Mr Wofford discussed

these ideas 

with a young preacher based in Montgomery, Alabama, the so-

called 'cradle of

the  Confederacy.' His name was the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King,

Jr. 

Dr King himself made the long journey to India in 1959, three years

after the

famed Montgomery Bus Boycott had made him a hero on the

subcontinent. 

"To other countries I may go as a tourist," he declared on touching

down at 

Delhi airport, "but to India I come as a pilgrim." 

'Made in India' 

So when Dr King sent children onto the streets of Birmingham,

Alabama, in the

spring of 1963, in the most climactic confrontation of the civil

rights era,

he  used the same tactic of mass civil disobedience which Gandhi had

pioneered with  the Dandi Salt March 33 years earlier. 

Both men knew that to reveal the hatred of their opponents was to

demonstrate

the righteousness of their cause - in Gandhi's case, dismantling

British

rule;  in King's, dismantling segregation. 

 

There are even contemporary parallels between the struggle for black

equality

and the ongoing battle in India challenging the inequities of the

caste

system. 

The recent furore sparked by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's speech

exploring

the possibility of reservations (affirmative action) for India's

lower

castes in  the private sector has loud echoes of the controversy

surrounding

President  Lyndon Johnson's support for the preferential treatment of

racial

minorities in  a famous commencement address at Washington's Howard

University in

1965. 

As Mr Johnson declared: "You do not take a person who, for years, has

been 

hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him to the starting line of

a race

and  then say, 'you are free to compete with all the others', and

still justly 

believe that you have been completely fair." 

As I write now, the finished book is sitting on my desk - with the

insignia 

of its New York publisher on the jacket but hopefully with signs

inside that

it  was ultimately 'Made in India'. 

 

Story from BBC  NEWS:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/south_asia/4989356.stm

 

Published:  2006/05/22 11:35:21 GMT

 

© BBC MMVI

 

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