“It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition.  The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace.  But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength.  This fight begins, however, in the heart and it now had been laid to my charge to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair.” – James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

The cover of Better Day Coming by Adam Fairclough is a powerful reminder of what African Americans faced for the last half of the 19^th century and much of the 20^th century.  Soldiers holding rifles with bayonets stand on one side, a line of tanks on the other.  In the middle, a line of black men march by, signs that read “I AM A MAN” hanging around their neck, bayonets and gun barrels pointed at them.  The black struggle for equality was more than a fight for civil rights; it was, in essence, an effort to be recognized as human.  For centuries, their oppressors viewed them as subhuman, nothing more than wild man beasts that weren’t good for anything, but hard work.  To whites, blacks were savages that would rape, steal, and engage in all sorts of immoral behavior.

Better Day Coming allows the reader to experience the sheer ignorance that pervaded the mentalities of whites from 1865 through much of the 20^th century.  Fairclough expertly works in an underlying theme of distortion and delusion, which enabled many whites to ignore reality and deny the truth that they desperately tried to avoid coming to grips with.  It was this fear, this wanting desire to hide from reality that James Baldwin writes about in his book, Notes of a Native Son:

“They preferred the invention because this invention expressed and corroborated their hates and fears so perfectly.  It is just as well to remember that people are always doing this.  Perhaps many of those legends, including Christianity, to which the world clings, began their conquest of the world with just some such concerted surrender to distortion.”

To truly understand the struggle of African Americans and the warped mentalities of their oppressors, one must first understand the human tendency to believe what one wants rather than what one knows.  It is a thin line, of course, as what one wants will eventually become all that they know.  The greatest freedom and the greatest flaw of the human mind is the ability to choose what to believe and what not to believe.

As illustrated in Better Day Coming, Southern whites had no problem believing that blacks were savages, a race of vicious rapists who preyed on white women like lions prey on gazelles.  This allowed whites to justify lynching blacks, even when they were arrested for other, unrelated crimes.  After all, whites were convinced that they were removing an immoral and barbaric creature from the Earth.  Additionally, lynch mobs faced little to no legal repercussion for their actions, further illustrating the value whites placed on the lives of blacks.  However, as Ida B. Wells would eventually discover, most cases involving rape were overwhelmingly false.

Fairclough writes, “The white obsession with rape was out of all proportion to the danger.  Yet as the journalist Wilbur J. Cash argued in his classic analysis The Mind of the South, the ‘Southern rape complex’ performed the crucial task of reinforcing both white supremacy and white patriarchy.”

Whites feared losing their power and first class status, which is precisely why irrational attitudes towards blacks polluted their minds.  To go from owning a person to having them become a neighbor was, for many whites, a terrible thing to deal with it.  As Fairclough illustrates throughout much of Better Day Coming, the approach whites took to curb black progression did not change much.  They utilized laws directly at first, and when the government passed the 14^th and 15^th amendments, whites exploited legal loopholes to oppress blacks.

Blacks, on the other hand, utilized a variety of approaches, some of which were combined, as seen during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.  At first, blacks focused on dealing with the situation that was presented to them rather than opposing it.  The personal betterment of the black people was at the forefront of this movement known as accomodationism, which began with Booker T. Washington.  Rather than fight the system, blacks would grow within it.  Washington faced scrutiny from prominent black leaders, as he was seen as a traitor by some, most notably Ida B. Wells and W.E.B. DuBois.

Accomodationism was embraced by whites as they viewed it as blacks accepting their place at the bottom of society.  As a result, accomodationism was soon replaced by direct opposition to the injustices that were put in place to keep blacks down.  One can only ignore the executioner in the corner for so long.  Eventually, the executioner executes, as that is his job, and the blacks realized this when accomodationism had become stagnant, leaving blacks unfulfilled.

Accomodationism did enable many blacks to prepare for the next phase in their journey towards equality.  When the time came to oppose the unjust system, there were more educated blacks, who were able to step into leadership positions, allowing for greater organization and more effective legal battles (E.g., Brown vs. Board of Education).

However, there were black leaders who did call for a more radical opposition as was the case with Marcus Garvey and his “Back to Africa” campaign or Malcolm X and Black Power–they were successful in their own right.  But it was Martin Luther King who combined accomodationism with direct opposition.  The result was a non-violent and legal form of protest that proved both effective in changing policy, but more importantly, in changing the majority of whites’ opinions.  The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the March on Washington were evidence of this approach, and both were influential in bringing about change.  The March on Washington, where MLK delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, led to the passing of the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the National Voting Rights Act (1965).

Better Day Coming is a book that accurately paints a picture that is grim and disturbing yet empowering and uplifting.  While many of the approaches that African Americans took were initiated by separate leaders with separate agendas, it is through history’s eyes that we see how connected they were, with each movement being a step on the staircase leading from society’s basement to its first floor.  While blacks have succeeded in being recognized as regular people both under law and by most of society, racism and discrimination still exist, both in its old form and a new, subtler kind of division.  The current state of closet racism can be summed up by Rev. L. Francis Griffin’s quote on the final page of Better Day Coming:

“In essence, there’s a new status quo here.  There is still a battleground, the lines of separation still exist–but the pressures are not such that there will be… all-out fighting.  It’s a cold war now, and I look for it to go on.”