Imagining American Democracy

• In Event: 066 - Section on Political Sociology Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 03. The Politics of Culture

Abstract

On April 11, 1949, 75% of the student body of The City College of New York refused to attend classes in protest of the college administration’s handling of accusations of racism against two professors: William E. Knickerbocker stood accused of administering the Romance Language Department according to an anti-Semitic agenda, while a faculty investigatory committee had found Economics Professor William C. Davis guilty of segregating a student dormitory by Jim-Crow principles. In striking, City College students, Jewish and black alike, “lumped” together Knickerbocker’s anti-Semitism and Davis’ Jim-Crowism, coming to understand them as commensurate cases of American racism. While the strike was an impressive enactment of student unity, it was only achieved after eight months of contentious intra-student conflict. In order to unite as a collective actor, City College students carried out a ferocious debate regarding the nature of American society in the early post-war period. At stake for students, who were divided, not between Jews and blacks, but between students with liberal and leftist political dispositions, was whether the United States was a structurally racist society, and whether capitalism and racism were intrinsically linked in the structuring of the social position of Jews, blacks and other minorities in the U.S. The paper develops the analytical usefulness of the concept “social imaginary” while historicizing anti-racist struggles in the U.S. Not only did racial and ethnic categories have different meanings in the late 1940’s, but also a different political culture structured anti-racist struggle in ways unfamiliar to us today.

Author

• Daniel Aaron Sherwood, The New School for Social Research