Abstract/Description

The standard historical account of the rise and fall of Jim Crow views the Black struggle for civil rights as in no small part a struggle to overcome the accommodation of racial segregation promoted by Booker T. Washington, most seminally through his 1895 formulation, "cast down your bucket where you are." However, this paper argues that Bookerism was in fact integral to the intellectual and religious framework of the civil rights movement because Bookerism facilitated the incorporation of caste ideology into the thought of some of the movement's key architects. I call the incorporation of caste ideology into a formulation or program "caste-thinking." Focusing on Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King, Jr., I show how the caste-thinking in the civil rights movement derived from American academic sociology, which shaped Thurman's and King's conceptualizations of the American racial order; and from Gandhian nonviolence, which Thurman and King came to see as essential for overcoming American racism. The modern mainstream American sociology of race developed by conceptualizing caste in India as a model for maintaining white supremacy in America without “race friction” between Blacks and whites. Gandhi sought to cleanse untouchability from caste while affirming caste as the stabilizer of Indian society. Both sociology and Gandhi utilized Bookerism to legitimize the notion that caste, in its ideal form, was an acceptable way of managing social hierarchy with malice toward none and mutual benefit for all in a society. To both, Washington's efforts to deter racial violence by accommodating Jim Crow, especially Jim Crow’s expropriation of Black manual labor, showed how the oppressed could thrive peacefully under caste hierarchy. Bookerism thereby authorized the mobilization of caste ideology on behalf of those subjugated through caste. Bookerism was the felt but seldom seen bucket in which Black Gandhians carried sediments of caste-thinking from the intellectual streambeds of sociology and Gandhian nonviolence into the fight against segregation. Caste-thinking obscured Dalit and anti-caste movements from the view of Black Gandhian theory and praxis, even as Black Gandhians identified deeply with Dalits when visiting India. It inhibited Black Gandhian attempts to develop effective nonviolent alternatives to forms of Black militancy that rejected the caste-thinking imperative of affirming and redeeming institutions of social control. Ultimately, King cast down the bucket, with its sediments of caste-thinking, on what he famously called the “mountaintop” of civil rights achievement.