"THE ETHICS OF BOYCOTTS"

Remarks by the Honorable Nathaniel R. Jones

Association for Practical and Professional Ethics Thirteenth Annual Meeting

February 27, 2004

As is true of the consideration of many subjects, context is extremely important. Therefore, in discussing the Ethics of Boycotts, I chose to do so in the framework of the role of boycotts as a strategy for effecting social and economic change, with particular focus on achieving racial justice.

A few years after the founding of the NAACP in 1909, the Black community of Atlanta was involved in a gigantic struggle to provide education for the Black children of that city. As Walter White, a resident of Atlanta who later became the foremost civil rights leader of the nation as Executive Secretary of the NAACP, became head of the NAACP, he discussed the efforts to force the officials to provide schools under the "separate-but-equal" requirements of the law in his autobiography, "A Man Called White."

He wrote:

Despair and consternation had descended on Negro Atlanta. There were no high schools of any description for colored students, although Negroes were taxed for maintenance of the school system at the same rate as whites on two million dollars of Negro-owned property. As for grammar schools, only fourteen were provided to a Negro population of more than seventy-five thousand. Thirteen of that number were very old and dilapidated wooden structures which, in addition to being fire hazards, were so overcrowded that double and triple sessions were necessary to accommodate the overflow. The one brick building for Negro children had been erected for and used by whites until a new modern one was built for them. Parents of Negro children who wished their children to receive an education beyond the seventh grade had to pay tuition for that instruction at schools like Atlanta University, which were forced to maintain high school departments because of the failure of Georgia communities to furnish high school training.

And now the Negro seventh grade was to go. "Unto ever one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that to which he hath,"" patriarchal Jackson McHenry sadly observed at church that morning. Many of the older generation like Mr. McHenry advised caution and submission to prevent angering the dominant whites. But those of us who sat in the office felt that the line of surrender and compliance had to be drawn somewhere. What could we do? Negroes were voteless, outnumbered, helpless.

White noted that the school board had a plan to have citizens approve a bond issue, and would also seek to save money to build a new high school for white students by eliminating the seventh grade from "colored grammar schools." Two years before that the eighth grade had been abolished from "the colored schools." Since there had been no protest by Blacks, it was assumed that none would be lodged. But, White noted with pride that the bond issue fight pitted the Negro community against the leading newspaper, the Atlanta Georgian. Negroes voted in sufficient numbers to defeat the issue.

This is how White described events:

A new weapon for Negroes, the boycott, was used most effectively against that paper. Virtually every Negro subscriber canceled his subscription, and very few Negroes bought the paper from newsboys or news stands. Circulation dropped alarmingly. For the first time, the Georgian recognized the extent of Negro buying power. The newspaper's pride and prejudices would not permit it to abandon or backtrack on its attacks on Negroes for opposing the bond issue. It sought to placate aroused Negro subscribers by delivering the paper free, but such bribery proved equally ineffective. Many Negroes returned the papers, still rolled and folded as they had been, tossed into front yards and onto porches, to the Georgian's offices, or telephones that they did not wish the publication on their premises.

Defeat of the bond issue placed the city of Atlanta in a most embarrassing position. The city's credit was not too good in the bond market anyway because of an already excessive bonded indebtedness and the inefficiency of management of the city's fiscal affairs. War with Germany moved closer and closer with grim inevitability. Little time remained, Swallowing pride, the city's officials asked representative Negroes what minimum concessions they would accept in return for support of, or at least non-opposition to, another bond issue.

As a result of the fight the Negroes of Atlanta made, the David T. Howard High School, named after a philanthropic and greatly loved Negro to whose farm we loved to go each summer for magnificent barbecue, was erected, and the grade school was patched up.

I cite this history in order to disabuse the widely held notion that boycotts are a recent strategy or that the Montgomery Bus Boycott commenced the civil rights movement. The boycott strategy has been used in communities all across the country, north as well as south. Two of the most successful, one in Harlem led by Dr. Adam Clayton Powell against merchants who refused to hire Black clerks, and a similar one in Cleveland led by John O. Holly who was a founder of the Future Outlook League. The battle cry was "Don't Shop Wher You Can't Work."

To provide further context for a discussion of the boycott strategy, it is necessary to understand how intractable discrimination and segregation were in American communities, the virtual absence of remedial tools to eliminate it and the difficulty of obtaining a response for change.

The boycott strategy was deemed to be the most effective means of pressing for change, when used under the appropriate circumstances. During my tenure as General Counsel of the NAACP, some targets began to push back by filing lawsuits. This was particularly so when they could identify an organization rather than some amorphous assembly of individuals. The NAACP was usually so identified. My job was to defend the organization. The most celebrated of these cases was the $3.5 million suit filed in Port Gibson, Mississippi, that resulted in a judgment against the NAACP in the amount of $1.5 million. We carried that case to the United States Supreme Court and won a reversal. The law laid down by the Supreme Court represents the definitive word on economic boycotts.

I commend to you the following language of the court.:

[T]he purpose of petitioners' campaign was not to destroy legitimate competition. Petitioners sought to vindicate rights of equality and of freedom that lie at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment itself. The right of the States to regulate economic activity could not justify a complete prohibition against a nonviolent, politically motivated boycott designed to force governmental and economic change and to effectuate rights guaranteed by the Constitution itself. *

Having established the constitutionality of boycotts, the next question is when it should be most wisely and effectively used. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. provided one answer in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. In it, he set forth three tests, which I would like to leave with you: fact collection, negotiation, and self-purification. Dr. King's instruction is as dramatic as it is clear. His program is based on respect for law and its institutions, knowing full well that both could fail. Yet failure is declared only after the facts are gathered to "determine whether injustices are alive." Then negotiations are carried on with community leaders based on specific goals. A program is developed, the legal process is followed or changed through negotiation or political activity. Then, and only then, when promises are broken and people are confronted with "blasted hopes, and the dark shadow of a deep disappointment," self-purification prepares civil rights advocates for nonviolent direct action.

* The actual excerpt was missing from this document, but this is likely the quote he cited.