42
MARTIN DUBERMAN
suasion," believing that the first order of business was to bring the
iniquity of slavery to the country's attention, to arouse the average
American's conscience. Once this was done, the Abolitionists felt,
discussion then could, and would, begin on the particular ways and
means best calculated to bring about rapid, orderly emancipation.
Some of those Abolitionists who later became intransigent defenders
of immediatism - including William Lloyd Garrison - were willing,
early in their careers, to consider plans for preliminary apprentice–
ship. They were willing, in other words, to settle for gradual eman–
cipation
immediately begun
instead of demanding that freedom itself
be instantly achieved.
But this early flexibility received little encouragement. The appeal
to conscience and the willingness to engage in debate over means alike
brought meager results. In the North the Abolitionists encountered
massive apathy, in the South massive resistance. Thus thwarted, and
influenced as well by the discouraging British experiment with gradu–
alism in the West Indies, the Abolitionists abandoned their earlier
willingness to consider a variety of plans for prior education and
training, and shifted to the position that emancipation had to take
place at once and without compensation to the slaveholder. They also
began (especially in New England) to advocate such doctrines as
"Dis-Union" and "No-Government," positions which directly parallel
Black Power's recent advocacy of "separation" and "de-centraliza–
tion," and which then as now produced discord and division within
the movement, anger and denunciation without.
But the parallel of paramount importance I wish to draw be–
tween the two movements is their similar passage from "moderation"
to "extremism." In both cases, there
was
a passage, a shift in attitude
and program, and it is essential that this be recognized, for it demon–
strates the developmental nature of these - of all - movements for
social change. Or, to reduce the point to individuals (and to cliches) :
"revolutionaries are not born but made." Garrison didn't start his
career with the doctrine of "immediatism"; as a young man, he
even had kind words for the American Colonization Society, a group
devoted to deporting Negroes to Mrica and Central America. And
Stokely Carmichael did not begin his ideological voyage with the
slogan of Black Power; as a teen-ager he was opposed to student
sit-ins in the South. What makes a man shift from "reform" to
