Chapter 12 Activities

Activity 1:  The Cost of Taking a Stand
Activity 2:  Black Panther Party Manifesto of 1966
Activity 3:  1951 UNESCO Statement on Race

ACTIVITY 1: THE COST OF TAKING A STAND
Judge Julius Waties Waring of Charleston , South Carolina , was born in 1880.  He was the son of a slave holder and had the kind of “aristocratic” upbringing typical of the Southern white establishment. 

But as a judge, he gradually turned against many of the ideas he had grown up with.  By the 1940s, he had come to believe that the racial hierarchy in the South was unjust.

“There is absolutely no reasonable explanation for racial prejudice,” he wrote in his dissent in a 1951 test of “separate but equal,” Briggs v. Elliot.  “It is all caused by unreasoning emotional reactions and these are gained early in childhood….Segregation in education can never produce equality and …is an evil that must be eradicated.”

Waring’s opinions shocked white society in South Carolina and around the South.  He received death threats, was socially shunned, and had a cross burned on his lawn.

QUESTIONS:

  1. What does it take to stand out against public opinion in this way?
  2. Have you ever been in a situation in which you have taken a stand which made you unpopular?
  3. Can you imagine a situation in which you would take such a stand?

Divide the class into small groups.  Each group should create an improvisation in which one member of the group goes against prevailing opinion.  What are the consequences likely to be of such an act?  What are the rewards – if any?

ACTIVITY 2:  BLACK PANTHER PARTY MANIFESTO OF 1966 (extracts)

  1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community
  2. We want full employment for our people
  3. We want an end to the robbery by the CAPITALIST of our Black Community
  4. We want decent housing, fir for shelter for human beings.
  5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.
  6. We want all black men to be exempt from military service.
  7. We want and immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of black people.
  8. We want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, country and city prisons and jails.
  9. We want all black people brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their black communities, as defined by the constitution of the United States .
  10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held through out the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate, for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.

QUESTION: Which of these demands do you think alarmed the authorities the most? Do you think that his Manifesto would find many supporters today?

ACTIVITY 3:  1951 UNESCO STATEMENT ON RACE

Scientists are generally agreed that all men living today belong to a single species, Homo sapiens, and are derived from a common stock….Some of the physical differences between human groups are due to differences in hereditary constitution and some to differences in the environments in which they have been brought up.  In most cases, both influences have been at work….

National, religious, geographical, linguistic and cultural groups do not necessarily coincide with racial groups; and the cultural traits of such groups have no demonstrated connection with racial traits.  Americans are not a race, nor are Frenchmen, nor Germans….Moslems and Jews are no more races than are Roman Catholics and Protestants….

Such a classification does not depend on any physical character, nor does, for example, skin color by itself necessarily distinguish one major group from another.  Furthermore, so far as it has been possible to analyze them, the differences in physical structure which distinguish one major group from another give no support to popular notions of any general “superiority” or “inferiority” which are sometimes implied in referring to these groups….

The scientific material available to us at present does no justify the conclusion that inherited genetic differences are a major factor in producing the differences between the cultures and cultural achievements of different peoples or groups.  It does indicate, on the contrary, that a major factor in explaining such differences is the cultural experience which each group has undergone….

There is no evidence for the existence of so-called “pure” races….

QUESTIONS:

  1. Read this statement carefully.  What does it mean?
  2. Why do you think a United Nations Agency felt the need to issue such a statement shortly after World War II?
  3. The statement was issued a half-century ago. Is this still a relevant message for our time?  Why or why not?