White Supremacy and Black Liberation

1. Andrea Smith, “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy”

2. Adolph Reed, “Tokens of the White Left”
3. Glen Ford, “Race and National Liberation Under Obama”
4. Robert L Allen, “The Social Context of Black Power”

Andrea Smith, “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of

White Supremacy: Rethinking Women of Color
Organizing”
Scenario #1
A group of women of color come together to organize. An argument ensues about
whether or not Arab women should be included. Some argue that Arab women are
"white" since they have been classified as such in the US census. Another
argument erupts over whether or not Latinas qualify as “women of color” since
some may be classified as “white” in their Latin American countries of origin
and/or “pass” as white in the United States.

Scenario #2
In a discussion on racism, some people argue that Native peoples suffer from less
racism than other people of color because they generally do not reside in
segregated-neighborhoods within the United States. In addition, some argue that
since tribes now have gaming, Native peoples are no longer “oppressed.”

Scenario #3
A multiracial campaign develops involving diverse communities of color in which
some participants charge that we must stop the black/white binary, and end Black
hegemony over people of color politics to develop a more “multicultural”
framework. However this campaign continues to rely on strategies and cultural
motifs developed by the Black Civil Rights struggle in the United States.

These incidents, which happen quite frequently in “women of color” or “people of color"
political organizing struggles, are often explained as a consequence of "oppression
olympics." That is to say, one problem we have is that we are too busy fighting over who
is more oppressed. In this essay, I want to argue that these incidents are not so much the
result of “oppression olympics,” but are more a bout how we have inadequately framed
“women of color” or “people of color” politics. That is, the premise behind “women of
color” organizing is that women from communities victimized by white supremacy
should unite together around their shared oppression. This framework might be
represented by a diagram of five overlapping circles, each marked Native women, Black
women, Arab/Muslim women, Latinas, and Asian American women, overlapping like a
Venn diagram.
This framework has proved to be limited for women of color and people of color
organizing. First, it tends to presume that our communities have been impacted by white
supremacy in the same way. Consequently, we often assume that all of our communities
will share similar strategies of liberation. In fact, however, our strategies often run into
conflict, for example, one strategy that many people in US-born communities of color
adopt, in order to advance economically out of impoverished communities, is to join the
military. We then become complicit in oppressing and colonizing communities from
other countries. Meanwhile, people from other countries often adopt the strategy of
moving to the United States to advance economically, without considering their
complicity in settling on the lands of indigenous peoples that are being colonized by the
United States.

Consequently, it may be more helpful to adopt an alternative framework for women of

color and people of color organizing. I call one such framework the “Three Pillars of
White Supremacy.” This framework does not assume that racism and white supremacy is
enacted in a singular fashion; rather, white supremacy is constituted by separate and
distinct, but still interrelated, logics. Envision three pillars, one labeled
Slavery/Capitalism, another labeled Genocide/Capitalism, and the last one labeled
Orientalism/War, as well as arrows connecting each of the pillars together.

Slavery/Capitalism

One pillar of white supremacy is the logic of slavery. As Sora Han, Jared Sexton, and
Angela P. Harris note, this logic renders Black people as inherently slaveable – as
nothing more than property. That is, in this logic of white supremacy, Blackness becomes
equated with slaveability. The forms of slavery may change – whether it is through the
formal system of slavery, sharecropping, or through the current prison-industrial complex
– but the logic itself has remained inconsistent.

This logic is the anchor of capitalism. That is, the capitalist system ultimately
commodifies all workers – ones’ own person becomes a commodity that one must sell in
the labor market while the profits of one’s work are taken by someone else. To keep this
capitalist system in place – which ultimately commodifies most people – the logic of
slavery applies a racial hierarchy to this system. This racial hierarchy tells people that as
long as you are not Black, you have the opportunity to escape the commodification of
capitalism. This helps people who are not Black to accept their lot in life, because they
can feel that at least they are not at the very bottom of the racial hierarchy – at least they
are not property; at least they are not slaveable.

The logic of slavery can be seen clearly in the current prison industrial complex (PIC).
While the PIC generally incarcerates communities of color, it seems to be structured
primarily on anti-Black racism. That is, prior to the Civil War, most people in prison
were white. However, after the thirteenth amendment was passed—which banned
slavery, except for those in prison—Black people previously enslaved through the slavery
system were re-enslaved through the prison system. Black people who had been the
property of slave owners became state property, through the convict leasing system.
Thus, we can actually look at the criminalization of Blackness as a logical extension of
Blackness as property.

Genocide/Colonialism

A second pillar of white supremacy is the logic of genocide. This logic holds that
indigenous peoples must disappear. In fact, they must always be disappearing, in order to
allow non-indigenous peoples rightful claim over this land. Through this logic of
genocide, non-Native peoples then become the rightful inheritors of all that was
indigenous—land, resources, indigenous spirituality, or culture. As Kate Shanley notes,
Native peoples are a permanent “present absence” in the US colonial imagination, an
“absence” that reinforces, at every turn, the conviction that Native peoples are indeed
vanishing and that the conquest of Native lands is justified. Ella Shoat and Robert Stam
describe this absence as “an ambivalently repressive mechanism [which] dispels the
anxiety in the face of the Indian, whose very presence is a reminder of the initially
precarious grounding of the American nation-state itself… in a temporal paradox, living
Indians were induced to ‘play dead,’ as it were, in order to perform a narrative of
manifest destiny in which their role, ultimately, was to disappear.

Rayna Green further elaborates that the current Indian “wannabe” phenomenon is based
on a logic of genocide: non-Native peoples imagine themselves as the rightful inheritors
of all that previously belonged to “vanished” Indians, thus entitling them to ownership of
this land. “The living performance of ‘playing Indian’ by non-Indian peoples depends
upon the physical and psychological removal, even the death, of real Indians. In that
sense, the performance, purportedly often done out of a stated and implicit love for
Indians, is really the obverse of another well-known cultural phenomenon, ‘Indian
hating,’ as most often expressed in another, deadly performance genre called ‘genocide.’
After all, why would non-Native peoples need to play Indian—which often includes acts
of spiritual appropriation and land theft—if they thought Indians were still alive and
perfectly capable of being Indian themselves? The pillar of genocide serves as the anchor
for colonialism—it is what allows non-Native peoples to feel they can rightfully own
indigenous peoples’ land. It is okay to take land from indigenous peoples, because
indigenous peoples have disappeared.

Orientalism/War

A third pillar of white supremacy is the logic of Orientalism. Orientalism was defined by
Edward Said as the process of the West defining itself as a superior civilization by
constructing itself in opposition to an “exotic” but inferior “Orient.” (Here I am using the
term “Orientalism” more broadly than to solely signify what has historically been named
as the Orient or Asia.) The logic of Orientalism marks certain peoples or nations as
inferior and as posing a constant threat to the well-being of empire. These peoples are
still seen as “civilizations”—they are not property or “disappeared”—however, they will
always be imagined as permanent foreign threats to empire. This logic is evident in the
anti-immigration movements within the United States that target immigrants of color. It
does not matter how long immigrants of color reside within the United States, they
generally become targeted as foreign threats, particularly during war time. Consequently,
Orientalism serves as the anchor for war, because it allows the United States to justify
being in a constant state of war to protect itself from its enemies.

For example, the United States feels entitled to use Orientalist logic to justify racial
profiling of Arab Americans so that it can be strong enough to fight the “war on terror.”
Orientalism also allows the United States to defend the logics of slavery and genocide, as
these practices enable the United States to stay “strong enough” to fight these constant
wars. What becomes clear then is what Sora Han states—the United States is not at war,
the United States is war. For the system of white supremacy to stay in place, the United
States must always be at war.

Because we are situated within different logics of white supremacy, we may

misunderstand a racial dynamic if we simplistically try to explain one logic of white
supremacy with another logic. For instance, think about the first scenario that opens this
essay: if we simply dismiss Latino/as or Arab peoples as “white,” we fail to understand
how a racial logic of Orientalism is in operation. That is, Latino/as and Arabs are often
situated in a racial hierarchy that privileges them over Black people. However, while
Orientalist logic may bestow them some racial privilege, they are still cast as inferior yet
threatening “civilizations” in the United States. Their privilege is not a signal that they
will be assimilated, but that they will be marked as perpetual foreign threats to the US
world order.

Organizing Implications

Under the old but still potent and dominant model, people of color organizing was based
on the notion of organizing around shared victimhood. In this model, however, we see
that we are victims of white supremacy, but complicit in it as well. Our survival strategies
and resistance to white supremacy are set by the system of white supremacy itself. What
keeps us trapped within our particular pillars of white supremacy is that we are seduced
with the prospect of being able to participate in the other pillars. For example, all non-
Native peoples are promised the ability to join in the colonial project of settling
indigenous lands. All non-Black people are promised that if they comply, they will not be
at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. And Black, Native, Latino, and Asian peoples are
promised that they will economically and politically advance if they join US wars to
spread “democracy.” Thus, people of color organizing must be premised on making
strategic alliances with each other, based on where we are situated within the larger
political economy. Thus, for example, Native peoples who are organizing against the
colonial and genocidal practiced committed by the US government will be more effective
in their struggle if they also organized against US militarism, particularly the military
recruitment of indigenous peoples to support US imperial wars. If we try to end US
colonial practices at home, but support US empire by joining the military, we are
strengthening the state’s ability to carry out genocidal policies against people of color
here and all over the world.
This way, our alliances would not be solely based on shared victimization, but where we
are complicity in the victimization of others. These approaches might help us to develop
resistance strategies that do not inadvertently keep the system in place for all of us, and
keep all of us accountable. In all of these cases, we would check our aspirations against
the aspirations of other communities to ensure that our model of liberation does not
become the model of oppression for others.

These practices require us to be more vigilant in how we may have internalized some of
these logics in our own organizing practice. For instance, much racial justice organizing
within the United States has rested on a civil rights framework that fights for equality
under the law. An assumption behind this organizing is that the United States is a
democracy with some flaws, but is otherwise admirable. Despite the fact that it rendered
slaves three-fifths of a person, the US Constitution is presented as the model document
from which to build a flourishing democracy. However, as Luana Ross notes, it has never
been against US law to commit genocide against indigenous peoples-in fact, genocide is
the law of the country. The United States could not exist without it. In the United States,
democracy is actually the alibi for genocide-it is the practice that covers up United States
colonial control over indigenous lands.

Our organizing can also reflect anti-Black racism. Recently, with the outgrowth of
“multiculturalism” there have been calls to “go beyond the black/white binary” and
include other communities of color in our analysis as represented in the third scenario.
There are a number of flaws with this analysis. First, it replaces an analysis of white
supremacy with a politics of multicultural representation; if we just include more people,
then our practice will be less racist. Not true. This model does not address the nuanced
structure of white supremacy, such as through these distinct logics of slavery, genocide,
and Orientalism. Second, it obscures the centrality of the slavery logic in the system of
white supremacy, which is based on a black/white binary. The black/white binary is not
the only binary which characterizes white supremacy, but it is still a central one that we
cannot “go beyond” in our racial justice organizing efforts.

If we do not look at how the logic of slaveability inflects our society and our thinking, it
will be evident in our work as well. For example, other communities of color often
appropriate the cultural work and organizing strategies of African American civil rights
or Black Power movements without corresponding assumptions that we should also be in
solidarity with Black communities. We assume that this work is the common “property”
of all oppressed groups, and we can appropriate it without being accountable.

Angela P. Harris and Juan Perea debate the usefulness of the black/white binary in the
book, Critical Race Theory. Perea complains that the black/white binary fails to include
the experiences of other people of color. However, he fails to identify alternative
racializing logics to the black/white paradigm. Meanwhile, Angela P. Harris argues that
“the story of ‘race’ itself is that of the construction of Blackness and whiteness. In this
story, Indians, Asian Americans, and Latinos/as do exist. But their roles are subsidiary to
the fundamental binary national drama. As a political claim, Black exceptionalism
exposes the deep mistrust and tensions among American ethnic groups racialized as
nonwhite.”

Let’s examine these statements in conversation with each other. Simply saying we need
to move beyond the black/white binary (or perhaps, the “black/nonblack” binary) in US
racism obfuscates the racializing logic of slavery, and prevents us from seeing that this
binary constitutes Blackness as the bottom of a color hierarchy. However, this is not the
only binary that fundamentally constitutes white supremacy. There is also an
indigenous/settler binary, where Native genocide is central to the logic of white
supremacy and other non-indigenous people of color also form “a subsidiary” role. We
also face another Orientalist logic that fundamentally constitutes Asians, Arabs, and
Latino/as as foreign threats, requiring the United States to be at permanent war with these
peoples. In this construction, Black and Native peoples play subsidiary roles.

Clearly the black/white binary is central to racial and political thought and practice in the
United States, and any understanding of white supremacy must take it into consideration.
However, if we look at only this binary, we may misread the dynamics of white
supremacy in different contexts. For example, critical race theorist Cheryl Harris’s
analysis of whiteness as property reveals this weakness. In Critical Race Theory, Harris
contends that whites have a property interest in the preservation of whiteness, and seek to
deprive those who are “tainted” by Black or Indian blood from these same white property
interests. Harris simply assumes that the positions of African Americans and American
Indians are the same, failing to consider US policies of forced assimilation and forced
whiteness on American Indians. These policies have become so entrenched that when
Native peoples make political claims, they have been accused of being white. When
Andrew Jackson removed the Cherokee along the Trail of Tears, he argued that those
who did not want removal were really white. In contemporary times, when I was a non-
violent witness for the Chippewa spearfishers in the late 1980s, one of the more frequent
slurs whites hurled when the Chippewa attempted to exercise their treaty-protected right
to fish was that they had white parents, or that they were really white.

Status differences between Blacks and Natives are informed by the different economic
positions African Americans and American Indians have in US society. African
Americans have been traditionally valued for their labor, hence it is in the interest of the
dominant society to have as many people marked “Black,” as possible, thereby
maintaining a cheap labor pool; by contrast, American Indians have been valued for a
land based they occupy, so it is in the interest of dominant society to have as few people
marked “Indian” as possible, facilitating access to Native lands. “Whiteness” operates
differently under a logic of genocide than it does from a logic of slavery.

Another failure of US-based people of color in organizing is that we often fall back on a
“US-centricism,” believing that what is happening “over there” is less important than
what is happening here. We fail to see how the United States maintains the system of
oppression here precisely by tying our allegiances to the interests of US empire “over
there.”

Heteropatriarchy and White Supremacy

Heteropatriarchy is the building block of US empire. In fact, it is the building block of the
nation-state form of governance. Christian Right authors make these links in their
analysis of imperialism and empire. For example, Christian Right activist and founder of
Prison Fellowship Charles Colson makes the connection between homosexuality and the
nation-state in his analysis of the war on terror, explaining that one of the causes of
terrorism is same-sex marriage:

Marriage is the traditional building block of human society, intended both to unite
couples and bring children into the world… There is a natural moral order for the
family ... the family, led by a married mother and father, is the best available
structure for both childrearing and cultural health. Marriage is not a private
institution designed solely for the individual gratification of its participants. If we
fail to enact a Federal Marriage Amendment, we can expect not just more family
breakdown, but also more criminals behind bars and more chaos in our streets.

Colson is linking the well-being of US empire to the well-being of the heteropatriarchal

family. He continues:

When radical Islamists see American women abusing Muslim men, as they did in
the Abu Ghraib prison, and when they see news coverage of same-sex couples
being “married” in US towns, we make this kind of freedom abhorrent-the kind
they see as a blot on Allah’s creation. We must preserve traditional marriage in
order to protect the United States from those who would use our depravity to
destroy us.

As Ann Burlein argues in Lift High the Cross, it may be a mistake to argue that the goal
of Christian Right politics is to create a theocracy in the United States. Rather, Christian
Right politics work through the private family (which is coded as white, patriarchal, and
middle class) to create a “Christian America.” She notes that the investment in the private
family makes it difficult for people to invest in more public forms of social connection. In
addition, investment in the suburban private family serves to mask the public
disinvestment in urban areas that makes the suburban lifestyle possible. The social decay
in urban areas that results from this disinvestment is then construed as the result of
deviance from the Christian family ideal rather than as the result of political and
economic forces. As former head of the Christian Coalition, Ralph Reed, states: “The
only true solution to crime is to restore the family,” and “Family break-up causes
poverty.” Concludes Burlein, “‘The family’ is no mere metaphor but a crucial technology
by which modern power is produced and exercised.”

As I have argued elsewhere, in order to colonize peoples whose societies are not based on
social hierarchy, colonizers must first naturalize hierarchy through instituting patriarchy.
In turn, patriarchy rests on a gender binary system in which only two genders exist, one
dominating the other. Consequently, Charles Colson is correct when he says that the
colonial world order depends on heteronormativity. Just as the patriarchs rule the family,
the elites of the nation-state rule their citizens. Any liberation struggle that does not
challenge heteronormativity cannot substantially challenge colonialism or white
supremacy. Rather, as Cathy Cohen contends, such struggles will maintain colonialism
based on a politics of secondary marginalization where the most elite class of these
groups will further their aspirations on the backs of those most marginalized within the
community.

Through this process of secondary marginalization, the national or racial justice struggle
takes on either implicitly or explicitly a nation-state model as the end point of its
struggle—a model of governance in which the elites govern the rest through violence and
domination, as well as exclude those who are not members of “the nation”. Thus, national
liberation politics become less vulnerable to being co-opted by the Right when we base
them on a model of liberation that fundamentally challenges right-wing conceptions of
the nation. We need a model based on community relationships and on mutual respect.

Conclusion

Women of color-centered organizing points to the centrality of gender politics within

antiracist, anticolonial struggles. Unfortunately, in our efforts to organize against white,
Christian America, racial justice struggles often articulate an equally heteropatriarchal
racial nationalism. This model of organizing either hopes to assimilate into white
America, or to replicate it within an equally hierarchical and oppressive racial
nationalism in which the elites of the community rule everyone else. Such struggles often
call on the importance of preserving the “Black family” or the “Native family” as the
bulwark of this nationalist project, the family being conceived of in capitalist and
heteropatriarchal terms. The response is often increased homophobia, with lesbian and
gay community members construed as “threats” to the family. But, perhaps we should
challenge the “concept” of the family itself. Perhaps, instead, we can reconstitute
alternative ways of living together in which “families” are not seen as islands on their
own. Certainly, indigenous communities were not ordered on the basis of a nuclear
family structure—is the result of colonialism, not the antidote to it.

In proposing this model, I am speaking from my particular position in indigenous

struggles. Other peoples might flesh out these logics more fully from different vantage
points. Others might also argue that there are other logics of white supremacy that are
missing. Still others might complicate how they relate to each other. But I see this as a
starting point for women of color organizers that will allow us to re-envision a politics of
solidarity that goes beyond multiculturalism, and develop more complicated strategies
that can really transform the political and economic status quo.
Adolf Reed, “Tokens of the White Left”
For more than twenty years I refused on principle to use the phrase "the white left." I did
not want to give any credence to the view, commonly expressed among black activists in
the late 1960s and after, that the leftist critique of American society was somehow white
people's property.

I maintained this resolve through SDS's 1969 proclamation of the Black Panther Party as
the "vanguard of the black revolution" based only on the Panthers' willingness to align
with whites-and subsequent gushes of Pantherphile exoticism, I kept it through the
"separate black movement divides the working class" line, which was one crude
"Marxist" alternative to examining black politics,

And I held on through similarly evasive Procrustean analyses, for example, casting the
civil-rights movement as a "bourgeois democratic revolution." My resolve was unshaken
through endless reification of the "black community" as a collective subject. Even when
Frederic Jameson, editor of Social Text, told me early in the Reagan era that he had
published an article that he knew was drivel and didn't even conform to the
bibliographical format of the rest of the journal because he "wanted to publish something
by a black author and that's what there was," I remained true.

I stayed patiently silent as the Democratic Socialists of America anointed one star Black
Voice after another throughout the 1980s, with never a hint of concern about the
anointed's institutional links to any sort of autonomous black political activity. And I
endured the total lack of curiosity about Jesse Jackson's new political fame and what his
antics since 1984 have to do with tensions and cleavages among blacks.

I'm ready to toss in the towel. When all is said and done, it really is all too much the
white left. In far too many quarters, identifying with progressive politics is perfectly
compatible with reliance on racial shorthand and, therefore, with the disposition to view
Afro-American life as simultaneously opaque to those outside it (thus the need for black
interpreters and line-bearers) and smoothly organic (with exceptions made for the odd,
inauthentic "sellout" leaders).

Perhaps I am finally giving in to this view because I'm old and tired. Perhaps it's the
result of attrition. Mostly, though, it seems that the farther the memory-much less the
actuality-of real political movements recedes on the horizon, the worse this problem has
become. I confess that it is quite dispiriting. It also makes the issue of blacks' role in the
left a matter for real concern; more and more that role seems to be in a line stretching
back at least to Melville's Queequeg, that is, to put whites in touch with their "deeper
humanity."

This complaint has absolutely nothing to do with leadership, or even representation, in

left institutions. It's about Jim Crow standards on the left: the suspension, when making
judgments about black people and politics, of critical scrutiny, along with the tough-
minded, Enlightenment skepticism that is the foundation of the left critique's unique
power.

The key problem is that whites on the left don't want to confront complexity, tension, and
ambivalence in black politics. In general, they simply do not see political differences
among black people. They do not see that blacks are linked to social, political, and
economic institutions in a variety of different ways, and that those different links, and the
networks that flow from them, shape interests and ideological perception no less, and no
less subtly, than among whites.

Because of racial stratification, black and white links differ. For instance, middle-class
black people, largely because of housing segregation, are more likely than middle-class
whites to live close to poor people. And black people, especially in the middle class, are
more likely to be public employees, thanks to more nearly equal employment
opportunities in the public sector.

Examining how the public-sector economy is woven into the logic of black politics
should be a central project for the left. We need to take account of the fact that, more than
ever, black individuals at all class levels are likely to have direct connections-themselves
or through relatives, friends, and neighbors-with the operation of public institutions. And
we need to assess what that means for shaping varying black political perceptions.

The fundamental principles of this sort of social structure, however, are the same for
blacks and whites, and, therefore, they should not be incomprehensibly foreign to whites.
It's astounding to see repeatedly in the left press the contrast between the subtlety and
critical confidence with which writers dissect politics in Somalia, Bosnia, Indonesia, and
Ukraine, and the total absence of those qualities in discussions of Afro-Americans.

As a result of this failing, attention to black politics on the left tends to revolve around
thin and simplistic definitions of good guys and bad, "true" leaders and false. This
distorts political judgment into a search for authenticity, hauntingly like white youth's
quest in the 1960s for the most "authentic" blues-"pure" and untarnished by
instrumentation, cultivated virtuosity, air-conditioned nightclubs, or indoor plumbing.
(No Bobby Bland or Little Johnny Taylor need apply, just solitary old guys on porches of
croppers' shacks in the Delta, playing acoustic guitars with neck bones.) It's also the exact
meaning of exoticism and has horrible political consequences.

The "pure" black experience is monadic and antithetical to complexity in either orchestral
arrangements or politics. Assigning authenticity requires "finding" the pulse of the
community. (Actually, as with SDS and the Panthers, it requires designating the pulse-
thus whites determine black legitimacy, as they have since Booker T. Washington's day
at the turn of the century.)

This places a premium on articulate black people who will talk to the left. Whites tend to
presume their inability-or tend not to want to expend the effort-to make critical
judgments that might second-guess their designated black voices of authenticity, and
therefore do not attend closely to the latter's substantive arguments. The result is that
these "authentic" voices are treated mainly as personalities-without much regard to the
political implications of the stances they project.

In fact, it is apparently possible to maintain one's status as Bearer of the Left's Authentic
Race Line while articulating arguments that scarcely resemble views we normally think
of as leftist. So Cornel West can retain his star status in the white left as he blathers on
conspicuously about rampant "nihilism in black America," spouting breezy, warmed-over
versions of the stock conservative-and utterly false-narrative of the fall from some earlier
organic community, claiming that black Americans suffer from a "collective clinical
depression," calling for a "politics of conversion" and cultivation of a "black love ethic"
(is this Robert Schuller meets Barry White, or what?), as well as embracing the black
conservatives' self-help rhetoric.

That West's explicit embrace of victim-blaming, pathologizing rhetoric about inner-city

poor black people has provoked no real controversy in the left underscores the fact that
the "noble savage" face of exoticism inevitably is only the obverse face of the "nasty
savage" coin. The premise of blacks' deeper humanity is at bottom an assumption of their
essentially different humanity, and all it takes is a rude street encounter or a smashed car
window to turn Martin Luther King, Jr., into Bigger Thomas as the avatar of the racial
essence.

Ironically, this is the "othering" that the cultural-politics jockeys rattle on about from
critique of one advertisement or Hottentot exhibit to the next. Yet they fail to grasp the
dangers of their own breathless claims about the importance of race. Often, as with
Michael Dyson's fawning endorsement of William Julius Wilson's line on black poverty,
they also show an unexpected tolerance for talk about those "other," nasty savages.

This helps to explain why "underclass" imagery-properly spun with sanitizing allusions
to ultimate sources in vaguely "structural" dynamics-has struck so many on the left as
reasonable, as I've learned the hard way.

The simplistic, exoticizing approach to black politics is also susceptible to rhetoric about
black people's intrinsic spirituality. This not only evokes hoary claims that blacks are
closer to nature than whites, it also underwrites an increasingly troubling mystification of
the church's role as the font of authenticity in black political life.

After black Americans fought from the moment of Emancipation for the right to vote,
then for two-thirds of the next century against Jim Crow disfranchisement, it's incredible
to hear the left's black stars routinely and blithely dismiss the ability to elect leaders and
participate in shaping public institutions as less genuine than religious expression as a
form of black political engagement.

This view's currency reflects the fact that several of its proponents- like West and Dyson-
are ministers and thus propagandists for the church. But it floats on whites' inclination to
see black Americans as spiritual folk, huddled organically around the camp meeting,
communing with the racial essence through faith in things unseen.

That might seem harsh, but what else would explain the apparent absence of concern
about church/state separation when West, Dyson, and others rhapsodize about religion as
the basis of genuinely black political experience? Moreover, the effort to associate black
legitimacy with the church is especially problematic now, when reactionary forces among
black Americans are gaining steam precisely through church-based initiatives and
jeremiads on the theme of moral crisis. These forces-in which church leaders are
prominent-actively propagate moral and police repression as alternatives to humane
social policy; calls for driving young people into churches, and jail if church fails,
substitute for calls for job programs and decent educational opportunity.

In Cleveland and elsewhere, multi-denominational groups of influential black ministers

have been agitating against gay-rights legislation, abortion, and gender equality. In many
cities, black church-based groups are fighting sex education, contraceptives in the
schools, and needle-exchange programs. And black church groups are becoming
increasingly visible in the coalition of the Holy Roller Right.

Elevating church-based activity as most authentically black-besides overlooking the fact

that most black people do not belong to any church -rationalizes the right's agenda of
"privatization," and the ultimate dismantling of public functions. Encouraging church-
based initiatives-which are inevitably inadequate responses to massive problems of state-
supported dispossession - is part of the right's self-help program.

These are concerns that do not arise either in the patter of the left's black line-bearers or
in response to them. They should be at a minimum, topics for strategic discussion,
particularly in an otherwise rigorously secular left.

The prevailing take on black politics is part of a deep cynicism. As we spin further and
further away from mundane political struggles, there is ever less pressure on the star
black voices to engage politics concretely. Instead of analysis of the way that black
people and politics connect with the institutional exercise of power, we get either utterly
predictable rehearsals of standard bromides and litanies-reminiscent of a Las Vegas act
gone stale ("we need to build coalitions of the oppressed [here include a string of groups]
that are multiracial but guard against racism, sexism, homophobia," et cetera, ad
nauseam)-or the glib sophistries that fly under the "cultural-politics" flag.

Panegyrics on behalf of the intrinsic worth and significance of rap music, the repackaging
of 1940s zoot suits and other youth fads as political opposition, incessant nattering about
"positionality," representations m popular culture, and "voices" heard and silenced - these
are by now formulaic exercises, as politically empty and wrong-headed as they are
superficially clever. They replace in the left's public forum careful attention to the
intricate social and institutional relations that shape black political resources and practice.

They also reduce to a discourse on how white people think about black people and how
black people supposedly feel about it, buttressing a suspicion that this is all most whites
care much about anyway, when it comes to deciphering what's up with black Americans.

So what can be done? Is there any useful way out of this situation I've described? The
reflex is to layout a detailed way of thinking about black people and politics. Until
recently, I'd certainly have acted on that reflex. Now all it seems sensible to say is that the
most important warrants are: (1) to insist on focusing discussion of black politics
concretely, in relation to government, public policy, and political economy and (2) to
presume that political dynamics operating among blacks are not totally alien, that is, they
are understandable without the need for special native interpreters.

Beyond that we'll just have to wait and see what happens, won't we?
Glen Ford, “Race and National Liberation Under Obama”
I’m here to talk about race and national liberation under Obama. It’s quite clear that there
is a general understanding here that liberation and progressive movements of all kinds
have suffered a paralytic effect under this Obama administration. I’m not going to
directly address that paralysis in other people’s communities, I’m going to address what
the Obama candidacy and now presidency has meant to Black America—the paralysis
that set in along traditionally active elements of the Black community.

I want to put this in a little bit of a political perspective. I’m not a professor but I think I
do understand a little bit about the subject. There are several ways to look at the Obama
phenomenon. I’m going to go back to a larger context. Obama represents, in Black
America, the ultimate conflict between two very ancient political currents. Two ancient
currents in Black political thought. One of those currents is the imperative towards self-
determination, and that involves a rejection of the American model of exploitation and of
the domination of one people by another.

That imperative demands political autonomy for Black people and it tends to demand
political autonomy, self-determination, for other people as well. That is the root of Black
anti-imperialism, which is why Blacks have always been the group that is most distrustful
of American military adventures abroad. That is born out not just by the literature that we
can examine from history but by all the polling that’s been taken since the major political
polls have been keeping track of Black political opinion. We have always been most
opposed of any group to US military adventures abroad. Sometimes our opposition was
incoherent, but there has always been that basic opposition.

I’d like to give an example. I love this little factoid that comes out of polling. In February
of 2003, about five or six weeks before the invasion of Iraq, the Zogby organization
conducted a poll. Zogby is always very good about breaking it down by race. They asked
the question—it was very clear at this point in history that the US was going to invade
Iraq, so the question was: “Would you favor an invasion of Iraq if it would result in the
death of thousands of Iraqi civilians?”

A big, strong majority of white males said, “Yes! Let’s do it, I don’t care about thousands
of dead, innocent, civilian Iraqi men, women, and children.” More than a third of white
women said, “Sure, go ahead, that’s the price we—they—got to pay.” About the same
percentage of Latinos said “Go ahead on with the invasion,” regardless of the
consequences to Iraqi men, women and children out of uniform. Seven percent—seven
percent!—of African-Americans gave the thumbs up for the invasion if that were going
to be the price that Iraqis paid for the invasion. If you know anything about polling, seven
percent is negligible—that’s just like, people who ask, “What did you say?” See what I’m
saying? This means there was near unanimity in the Black community that the Iraqi
people should not be done such harm by the American military machine.

I’ll never forget that statistic, I think it goes to the heart of the tendency, that part of the
ancient current that exists in Black America. That gave actual, numerical quantity to that
ancient tendency. This tendency also calls for transformation of US society. That
sometimes means separation from white society and sometimes it does not. But it does
call for a transformation of white society in the United States, because even separation
means transformation. Then there’s the other current. There are two main currents that
have always existed in Black society, including before emancipation. That other current
demands Black elevation, and Black recognition, under an otherwise still existing status
quo of American society. It does not demand transformation of society except in terms of
internal Black upward mobility. And it worships Black faces in high places. That is the
main manifestation of it.

I’m going to add a word of caution here. That tendency is not strictly integrationist, it is
not necessarily assimilationist. In fact, both these tendencies—the self-determinationist
tendency and the Black upward mobility tendency—are infused in a general framework
of Black nationalism or Black peoplehood. Because the fact of the matter is that Black
people are, at root, nationalist. And that is why the struggle within the Black
community—whether you are talking about this elevationist, upward mobility tendency
or some sort of transformational principle—the struggle is always within the group. And
the argument is always, “What’s good for Black people?” See, that root is a nationalist
framework. Nationalist terms of reference. So we can’t talk about a “nationalist
tendency” and an “integrationist tendency.” That doesn’t make much sense in the real
world.

Now, both of those tendencies are warring, of course. But they exist within not only
distinct political movements in the history of Black people, and not just within discreet
political personalities, historical personalities among Black people. Let’s talk about WEB
DuBois—we’ll see what looks like great vacillations over a career. It’s not so hard and
fast as that. Because the fact of the matter is that these two currents exist within almost
every Black individual, and they are warring with each other. And people go back and
forth. These are real, real tendencies within basically every Black American. This must
be understood to understand why it seems that we vacillate and go between... how can
people who call themselves revolutionaries, as we saw in this Obama adventure, that is
still unfolding—people can call themselves revolutionaries and be Obama-ites at the
same time? Yes they can! Because these are warring tendencies within the same
individuals.

So I wanted to get that groundwork out of the way and bring us to the near history.
Another way to look at the Obama candidacy is to take a look at what corporate America
has been doing in terms of its strategy to infiltrate, negate, somehow put its mark on,
Black political activity. Because Black people are central to what goes on in the United
States. Not just because we are clustered in the cities. But because, we are central to what
America is. And other people are taking cues to what we do, as well. So they figured out,
“We have to do something about these Black people, we can no longer just treat them as
invisible people, as we could in the previous era”—before Civil Rights, before we stood
up, before Black Power. So you’re going to have to deal with them some kind of way.

And racist folk in the corporate structure wrestled with themselves for a very long time.
In fact they gave us a respite after the Civil Rights and Black Power movements where
they didn’t mess with us and they carried out some very stupid and ineffectual strategies
which gave us some breathing space which I wish we had taken advantage of—but, shit,
that’s old man talk. It did not happen. In the post-Civil Rights era, the Republican
Party—which is the most coherent mouthpiece for corporate capital, not only one, the
Democrats are too, but the Republicans do it in a distilled form that we can recognize
easily—at first, they looked to create some kind of counter to the self-determinationist
tendency which had become paramount in Black America in the Black Power movement
by creating what one might call a comprador class: a compliant class.

During the Nixon era, all these government agencies that promoted Black business were a
part of that. That was a political program. It was expected that these Black businessmen
would become Republicans. So the corporate right at that time, working through the
Republican Party, tried to revive Black Republicanism. It did not take. It could not take.
Because the last Black person elected to congress from a Black congressional district was
in 1935 and that was Oscar De Priest. There has not been a Black Republican from a
Black congressional district since then. So, Black Republicanism was dead but they
didn’t quite understand that, so they kept on beating that dead horse for awhile.
When they saw that that wouldn’t work, they decided maybe they could influence Black
folks by giving up chairs and all kinds of funding to Black right-wing academics. So we
saw the rise of Thomas Sowell and Glenn Loury and a whole coterie of them. They put
them on the speaking circuits, and the American Enterprise Institute got them on
television all over, and... nothing. Nothing happened in Black America. White folks have
a lot to say: “Ah, well, Glenn Loury says...” or “Thomas Sowell said...”—but it had
absolutely no impact on the internal dynamics of Black America. So then they said,
“Well, damn, what can we do with these people?” Aside from the general policy of mass
Black incarceration. But what could they do at that level of politics?

Finally, in the mid-90s, the Bradley Foundation, out of Milwaukee Wisconsin—that was
George Bush’s favorite foundation, and it should be, because the Bradley foundation
basically created the Bush regime’s domestic policy as it related to Blacks. That is, the
“Black Outreach” policy. And the Bradley Foundation, they were not geniuses, but
finally they grappled with a racism so virulent in these circles that they could not tolerate
more than two or three Black people at the cocktail party. It was really that basic. So the
very concept of creating some kind of larger Black astro-turf organization as they had
created in the environmental movement and all kinds of other movements, just by
funding these things, was beyond them because of their racism.

At the Bradley Foundation a couple of their executives overcame that basic virulent
racism and said “Let’s astroturf some Black stuff.” So they created a wedge issue that had
never existed in the Black community before—public vouchers for private schools.
Vouchers for private schools, if it had been a subject of conversation even in Black
communities, was associated with segregation academies. That was the history. No Black
folk had ever marched or demonstrated for Black folks to get vouchers for private schools
before the mid to late nineties when the Bradley foundation came up with it. And after
they hit upon that wedge issue they then created out of whole cloth an organization called
the Black Alliance for Educational Options.

They funded it initially to the tune of two million dollars, gathered a group of mainly
Black Democrats in Milwaukee for their initial meeting, then got together with the whole
right-wing conspiracy [laughs] of foundations, the great funders, to raise probably about
ten million dollars in the next two years to put these guys on a publicity tour and use their
vast media resources to make this appear to be the new Black politics that was examining
other options—especially related to education, which has always been an issue that was
held dear in the Black community. And their first candidate was Cory Booker of Newark,
New Jersey.

Cory Booker was part of the initial meeting, I believe it was in 1998, the formative
meeting of the Black Alliance for Educational Options, in Milwaukee. He became then
their shining star. He was introduced to the world by the Manhattan Institute. The
Manhattan Institute is that part of the vast capitalist conspiracy where the division of
labor calls for them to do media, because they are in New York. So Cory had his coming-
out party at the Manhattan Institute’s media-centered luncheons.

He then announced his candidacy for mayor. He was a one-term, thirty-one or thirty-two
year old city councilman. A nobody. And he announced that he wanted to be mayor of
Newark, New Jersey. And all of a sudden he had five million dollars at his disposal. And
Sharpe James, long talked about as the most powerful Black politician in New Jersey, had
nothing close to that. To make a long story short, Cory almost won.

That was in 2002 and that was the year of the great jump-off when corporate America,
through their various organizations, decided that they were going to penetrate the
Democratic Party in the ghetto. They had never done that before. There were corrupt
politicians, there always have been, but nobody was toeing the line, who were direct
surrogates for the corporate line—a line that was concocted, was invented by the Bradley
Foundation. So in 2002 Cory Booker almost won in Newark, but Artur Davis won, taking
a congressional seat from Earl Hilliard, in Alabama. The same formula, came with gobs
of money, out of nowhere and swept Earl Hilliard away. Then, a couple of months later,
Denise Majette, came from nowhere, with three times the money that Cynthia McKinney
had, and swept her out of her congressional seat in Atlanta. And all of a sudden, this
corporate plan, this strategy which had been birthed in Milwaukee was now bearing fruit.
And they had their little caucus in the Congressional Black Caucus. The Congressional
Black Caucus has not come out with a coherent progressive position since because they
always acted on consensus. Once those two—and others who were to follow—infested
the caucus, there could be no consensus. So, just in 2002, they successfully neutralized
the Congressional Black Caucus. They’ve never been able to say since that they are the
conscience of the congress because of the events of 2002.

The US media, corporate media, played that up as a battle royale between the “new”
Democrats and the “old guard:” the “Civil Rights-oriented Democratic establishment.”
That meant there was an expectation and an eagerness on the part of the corporate media
and the public that’s influenced by that for these “new” Democrats. And 2002 is when
Barack Obama made his big move. And Barack Obama’s magic—this is his personal
skill—was able to capture and appeal to both of these tendencies in Black America: the
tendency that seeks Black elevation, and Black respect and Black recognition, and
worships Blacks in high places—and the one that is progressive.

So Barack Obama, essentially a corporate politicians, also speaks—and speaks to well—

to peace issues, that’s his famous October 2002 antiwar speech. And he gave great,
skillful rhetorical flourishes towards single-payer. So he seemed to embody and appeal to
both of these tendencies. And he had both of things work. There was a desperation in
Black America. The result, of course, was that Black America was neutralized as I have
never seen. And I’ve been a reporter for forty years and I have never seen something like
this in my experience.

In the 2008 campaign, organized Black America raised no questions—not one!—in an

organized fashion, to Barack Obama. It was the first time in my forty years that we did
not raise the demand of a “Marshall Plan for the Cities.” I’ve been hearing about a
Marshall Plan for the Cities ever since I’ve paid attention to things of that nature and we
didn’t even raise that. No one wanted to say anything that might somehow upset this
march, this ascendancy—except the Uhuru Movement. In 2008, the Uhuru Movement,
also called the African People’s Socialist Party, headquartered in Tampa-St. Petersburg,
Florida, interrupted one of Obama’s town hall meeting campaign stops. They unfurled a
banner at the back of the room that said a very simple question.

It said, “What about the Black community, Obama?” That’s really damn simple. And
they didn’t even shout it. But it stood out in this strange and weird campaign where Black
folks, for the first time in my memory had made no noise at all and not tried to impact on
the dialog at all during this whole display. It flustered Obama because he wasn’t used to
being challenged. He stuttered and stumbled and lied but he was clearly set off of his
stride.

So it was proper that on September 12 of this year, the Uhuru Movement—and I’m not a
member—the Uhuru Movement who had made that intervention, that solitary
intervention during the campaign, called for the formation of a Black is Back coalition
for peace, social justice, and reparations. And some of us answered that call—some from
the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement.

And we set the date for a demonstration in Washington, DC for November 7. That gave
us eight weeks but we were determined that, coming from a position of total quietude,
anybody who can make noise, anybody that can pick up a flag and plant it somewhere,
that’s progress. My own assessment was that if we got 200, 250 people, that we had
successfully planted a flag and the effort would be a success. I would have been
overjoyed, as I told this brother, with 500, because that’s twice as good. But we got our
200, 250. But more important than the raw numbers—and these were good people, really
dedicated activists, and much younger than the geriatric marches that we are used to
seeing—it was really quite invigorating. I got tired, other people weren’t tired—why?
Because they were young!
But the elements that were there were significant. Larry Hamm from the People’s
Organization for Progress in Newark, New Jersey. And that is the grassroots organization
with membership in northern New Jersey. If you’re not shaking with Larry Hamm,
nothing’s shaking, all right? And because it’s grassroots, not a lot of people like those in
this room—please, I’m not being presumptuous, who talk things out and share principles
that verge on socialism, sometimes—Larry Hamm is in charge of an organization of
regular folk who respond to day-to-day concerns and are not immersed in all the
doctrine—and therefore, however, are quite vulnerable to the “Black faces in high
places” appeal.

And he shared with us at the rally on November 7 that he had great problems motivating
staunch members of the organization, real activists, people who can be expected to turn
out and put their bodies on the line. Confront the police, as soon as Larry said it was
necessary. These people were extremely reluctant even after all the evidence that Barack
Obama is the bankers’ president. See, I didn’t want to go into all of that about how
Barack Obama is the bankers’ president, because all y’all know that, you see? That would
be extraneous.

But he fought for the bus to come down from Newark, to make this statement, to plant
the flag of opposition to this president. That was a very brave thing for him to do and it
shows that the cracks are widening in what seemed to be near unanimous support for
Barack Obama. What seemed to be a near triumph of that tendency that is just for Black
elevation and some modicum of respect and to see Black faces in high places, over the
principles and actual necessities of Black life.

We saw Charles Barron—everyone here is familiar with Charles Barron, city councilman
from Brooklyn and former Panther Party Member—and I was in two debates with
Charles Barron in December and then, I believe, of March of this year. We had these
debates in Harlem. We called them the “Great Debates,” because, you know we speak
large—between those who said in the negative, “Is Barack Obama good for Black
America?” and those who said in the positive. And Charles Barron was on the positive
side in both of those debates. Larry Hamm, also, was an Obama-ite, and actively
campaigned for Barack Obama.

And here’s Charles Barron, making one of the most dynamic speeches. Clearly splitting
with members of the December 12 Movement, which is one of the big activist groups
here in New York, on this subject. That is, putting his political capital on the line.
Because he sees that it is necessary. I don’t see him just as a weathervane trying to see
which way the wind is blowing. These guys are actually putting their political capital at
risk—people with real organizations, who are going blow to blow with their own
constituency. Saying that it is necessary that we split with this Obama man.

So I believe that we are seeing cracks that will get wider and wider as the crises become
more frequent and deeper. As the treachery becomes more and more apparent. I don’t
think that Black America is going to be the backwater that it was—and shamefully so!—
in 2008. I believe we’re coming out. We’re getting over this high, this rush. Please
forgive us! [laughs] It was a high, it was a rush, and people are coming back to their
senses. And there is great political space being created to organize the way we used to do,
under these new circumstances.
Robert L Allen, “The Social Context of Black
Power”
In the summer of 1966 two events occurred which were to have momentous impact on
the black liberation movement. Superficially they appeared unrelated, but both were
responses to the oppression of black people in the United States and, in the dialectic of
history, they were to become deeply intertwined. The setting for the first event was a hot
summer day in Mississippi. James Meredith, the first black man to graduate from the
University of Mississippi, had been making his famous "march against fear" through his
home state. Joining the march were FBI men, newspaper reporters and photographers,
assorted well-wishers, and Stokely Carmichael. It was June.

Carmichael was then new to his post as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee, but he was no stranger to Mississippi. Mississippi was an especially hated
symbol of black oppression. Carmichael was intimately acquainted with the economic
deprivation and political disenfranchisement which still, despite so-called civil rights
legislation, were the central facts of life for the black residents of that state. He knew of
Mississippi violence-the violence which struck down Meredith just shortly after his bold
journey began. He knew that demonstrations and marches had not, and cou1d not,
substantially alter these facts. He and other SNCC staff members had been searching for
some other more efficacious and direct means for attacking a monolithic exploitative
edifice which seemed impregnable and without moral compunction. They thought they
had found a solution in the idea of black political power. Willie Ricks, another SNCC
staffer on the Meredith march, reduced this concept to two words: black power. The two
words were forcefully expressive and could be used to make a lively chant, as
Carmichael and Ricks soon showed.

The news media pounced upon this new slogan. They treated it as a hot item and flashed
the chant across the country, much to the consternation of a nervous American public. At
that time nobody outside of a handful of people in SNCC could give a rational
explanation of what black power meant. But many black people who heard the new
expression grasped its essence easily. It related directly to their experience, their lack of
power. On the other hand, the mass mind of white America was gripped with fear and
horror at the thought that blackness and power could be conjoined.

The second event of concern to us in that summer was much less dramatic, although of
equal importance, and its implications were not to become the subject of hysterical
debates. In fact, except among insiders who knew better, if was almost a routine
occasion. Certainly an address by McGeorge Bundy, president of the multi-million-dollar
Ford Foundation, to the annual banquet of the National Urban League in Philadelphia
could not be construed as headline-making news. Bundy told the Urban Leaguers that the
Ford Foundation, the biggest foundation in the country, had decided to help in the task of
achieving "full domestic equality for all American Negroes." This announcement came as
no immediate surprise to Bundy's hearers. For some time the foundation had been
involved in efforts to upgrade black higher education, and it had given money to Urban
League projects in the field of housing. It was, there" fore, logical to think that in time the
foundation might expand these efforts.

What the Urban League delegates and the American public did not know was that the
gigantic Ford Foundation, which already had fashioned for itself a vanguard role in the
neocolonial penetration of the Third World, was on the eve of attempting a similar
penetration of the black militant movement. This was the hidden relationship between
black power chants in Mississippi and the August meeting in the City of Brotherly Love.
Both events represented responses, although with totally different objectives, to the crisis
that trapped the black population and to the by then obvious fact that the formal gains
won by the civil rights movement had not solved the problem of oppression of the black
nation.

(2)

The interrelation of the Ford Foundation and black power cannot be understood without
first recalling the social context in which the black freedom movement found itself in the
summer of 1966. The main ingredients of this context were: The civil rights phase of the
black liberation struggle was drawing to a stalemated conclusion, and, in its wake,
followed the urban revolts, sparked by stagnating conditions in the ghettos; new leaders,
such as Robert Williams and Malcolm X, who were the cutting edge of an embryonic
nationalist movement, had been destroyed before they could organize an effective and
continuing cadre of followers; and, finally, the Vietnam war and other developments in
the Third World were having an increasing impact on black militant thinking in the
United States.

To begin, the traditional southern-based nonviolent civil rights movement had largely
ground to a halt and was in its death throes. Innumerable demonstrations and marches in
countless cities had drawn thousands upon thousands of black people into hopeful
activity. They let themselves be brutalized, beaten, jailed, and killed, following the
admonitions of moralizing leaders who told them to "love your enemy" and "turn the
other cheek." All of this suffering must surely culminate in freedom some day, the
leaders said.

By the summer of 1963, after years of intense struggle and many deaths, it seemed that
some dramatic new step must be taken to bring the longed-for freedom a little closer.
Grass-roots leaders talked about marching on Washington and shutting that city down
until blacks were granted full equality. But this militant sentiment was quickly co-opted
by the Kennedy Administration and the liberal labor coalition in the Democratic party,
which has long claimed the black vote as its inalienable possession. Thus, the March on
Washington, which drew over 250,000 participants, became a summer picnic held in the
honor of John Kennedy and his civil rights bill, which blacks were led to believe was the
answer to their prayers.

But not all was sweetness and light on that noteworthy day. There was dissent and
grumbling in the wings. John Lewis, then chairman of SNCC, had written a militant
speech not in keeping with the harmonious feelings scheduled to be put on public display
in the capital. The speech was censored by march organizers. The uncensored version
read in part:

In good conscience, we cannot support the Administration's civil rights bill, for it
is too little, and too late. There's not one thing in the bill that will protect our
people from police brutality. . . . What is in the bill that will protect the homeless
and starving people of this nation? What is there in this bill to insure the equality
of a maid who cams $5.00 a week in the home of a family whose income is
$100,000 a year?1

Lewis was asking pertinent questions, but these were "outside" the sphere of civil rights
and, therefore, were not appropriate areas for federal intervention. The Civil Rights Law
that was eventually passed in 1964 required, at least on paper, the ending of racial
discrimination in voting procedures, certain areas of public accommodation and public
facilities, and some places of employment. It also provided for public school
desegregation. The catch, in this and in the 1965 Voting Rights Act, was in enforcement.
Blacks who believed that their civil rights had been infringed upon were required to go
through lengthy and elaborate procedures to secure redress. Even so, enforcement was
slow, sporadic, and largely ineffective. Federal registrars were sent in, occasionally.
Some of the worst areas they never reached. The net result of this procrastination was that
black people and their leaders were educated to the fact that legislation means nothing
without effective enforcement. And enforcement, particularly when legislation flies in the
face of social convention or established interests, depends on power. The federal
government had the power, but it needed the support of the southern reactionaries who
chaired major committees in the Senate and House. Hence, civil rights laws became
merely more testimony to the truism that American democracy is subservient to the
economic and political interests of those who hold power.

The experience of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party in 1964 provided more
confirmation of this fact. Voter registration drives were a central concern of SNCC from
1961 to 1965. At that time SNCC activists thought that voting strength could be used
effectively to pressure the national Democratic party-a party that claimed to be the friend
of black people. Thus SNCC decided that by creating a parallel political structure in the
form of the MFDP, they could then challenge and defeat the racist Mississippi
Democratic Party at the national convention in Atlantic City. By pledging their
unwavering loyalty to the national slate, which the "regular" delegation did not, the
MFDP dissidents believed they could secure the ouster of the racist state delegation and,
thereby, record a victory for the democratic process. But the national party, seeking
support in the South, decided to employ the vicious weapon of racism once again and

1
Joanne Grant (ed.), Black Protest (Greenwich, Connecticut: Fawcett Publications, Inc.,
1968), p. 375.
rebuffed the challengers.2 This was another bitter but enlightening lesson for the black
movement.

The civil rights movement failed not only because of these setbacks but also because
even the small victories it won benefited mainly the black middle class, not the bulk of
the black poor. Thus blacks who were "qualified" could get jobs. If there were no jobs in
industry, there were frequently openings in the anti-poverty programs for those with
suitable credentials. After desegregation laws were passed, more affluent blacks could
dine at downtown restaurants or take in shows at previously segregated theaters. Those
who had the money and the stomach for a fight could even buy homes in formerly all-
white suburbs.

In its heyday the integrationist civil rights movement cast an aura which encompassed
nearly the whole of the black population, but the black bourgeoisie was the primary
beneficiary of that movement. Hence, in 1966, despite eleven years of intense civil rights
activity and the new anti-poverty programs, the median income of a black family was
only 58 percent of the income of an average white family, and black unemployment still
ran twice as high as white unemployment, despite the war-induced prosperity which the
country was enjoying. In some categories, conditions were considerably worse.
Unemployment among black teen-agers ran at 26 percent. In the Hough area of
Cleveland, which experienced a rebellion in 1966 and again in 1968, black
unemployment in 1965 ran at 14 percent, only two percentage points below what it was
in 1960. Another important indicator, the black subemployment rate, which reflects part-
time work, discouraged workers and low-paid workers, was 33 percent in 1966 in the
"worst" areas of nine major cities.

The quality of education, despite some gains in the number of years of formal schooling
attained, remained low. Thus black students tested out at substantially lower levels than
white youths: up to three years' difference in "level of achievement" among twelfth-
graders. Residential segregation proved to be the toughest nut for the integrationist
movement to crack. In 1966 a survey of twelve cities in which special censuses were
taken revealed increased rates of segregation in eight of them.

Perhaps the most significant indication of the middleclass nature of the civil rights
movement was the fact that it did absolutely nothing to alleviate the grim plight of the
poorest segments of the black population. As late as 1968, a group of six doctors found
evidence of widespread and long-standing malnutrition and starvation in the rural South.
The situation in the cities was little better. A joint 1967 report by the U. R Bureau of

2
The fact that four years later the challengers were seated at the Chicago convention was more
indicative of the growing militance of the Afro-American movement than suggestive of any
change of heart on the part of national Democrats. In 1964 the MFDP was itself a militant
movement, but by 1968, national Democrats viewed the seating of a then comparatively moderate
MFDP as a means of discrediting black militants and of proffering to black people the frail hope
that electoral politics-under the protective wing of the Democratic party was still a viable means
for effecting social change.
Labor Statistics and the Bureau of the Census outlining the social and economic
condition of blacks in this country concluded that "perhaps the most distressing evidence
presented in this report indicates that conditions are stagnant or deteriorating in the
poorest areas." In U.S. cities of one million population or more, the percentage of
nonwhite families living in "poverty areas" between 1960 and 1966 remained constant at
34 percent. In New York and Chicago, however, the percentage increased. In Cleveland's
Hough district, median family income declined over this same period. In the Watts
district of Los Angeles also conditions did not improve.

It is in these figures that one sees clearly the genesis of urban rebellion. For poor blacks,
North and South, the civil rights movement accomplished virtually nothing besides
raising false hopes. The promised salvation was not forthcoming. An explosion was
inevitable.

The explosion began in 1964 with the Harlem rebellion and fourteen other urban revolts.
City after city was shaken as the conflagration spread across the country in subsequent
"long hot summers." The rebellions were almost entirely spontaneous and unorganized
eruptions, but they had an underlying drive, a basic logic: Most of the attacks and looting
were directed against the property of white merchants who exploit the black community.
This was the pattern in Harlem and a year later in the Los Angeles revolt. Black people
were in a sense "reclaiming" the merchandise which had been stolen from them in the
form of underpaid labor and exploitative prices.

By their actions the black "rioters"-who by no means were an insignificant minority-were

vigorously repudiating the civil rights Negro leaders. They were calling for new
leadership willing to confront head-on the problems arising from oppression and
powerlessness, and who could speak to the needs of the majority of the black masses.

[cut section about Robert F. Williams]

Malcolm, the ideological father of the black power movement and one man to whom
Harlem's angry masses looked for new leadership, was killed just fifty weeks after he
officially broke with the Nation of Islam-the Black Muslims. During that last year of his
life Malcolm made two trips to Africa and the Middle East which seriously influenced his
thinking. He began carefully to re-evaluate the social and political ideas which he had
accepted while in the Muslims. He set up the Organization of Afro-American Unity-
patterned after the Organization of African Unity-which he hoped would implement his
new ideas and launch a decisive attack on the problems confronting blacks in America.
Assassins' bullets cut down this new beginning before it bore fruit.

Malcolm had become a follower of Elijah Muhammad, "Messenger of Allah," while

serving a ten-year prison term for armed robbery. Before that he had lived in the
underworlds of Harlem and Boston's Roxbury district. He was probably attracted to the
Muslims by their open denunciation of the ''white devils" as oppressors of the black race
and Muslim campaigns for self-help and moral uplift among converts-factors which
brought many ex-convicts into the Nation. Released from prison in 1952, Malcolm's keen
mind and penchant for oratory soon thrust him into the top Muslim leadership. In 1954,
he was appointed minister of Temple No.7 in Harlem. He became the first "national
minister" in 1963. Malcolm traveled over the country evangelizing, and establishing new
temples, while adroitly sparring with critics. He was quick-witted, with a biting sense of
humor, and he knew how to handle an audience-black, white, or mixed.

Malcolm was an activist, and this was· at the root of his split with Muhammad. In the
19608 the Muslims were increasingly charged by black militants with talking tough but
never doing anything. The freedom movement was gaining momentum, and it was no
longer enough simply to denounce "white devils." The Muslims abstained from any form
of political or social activism, and Malcolm was beginning to have his doubts about the
wisdom of this policy.

In his autobiography, he admitted that, while still in the Nation, he began to think the
Muslims could be a "greater force in the American black man's over-all struggle-if we
engaged in more action."3

But such ideas clashed with the aims of Muhammad and his lieutenants. Malcolm was
suspended from the Muslims in December 1963, allegedly for his highly publicized
"chickens coming home to roost" remark about President Kennedy's assassination. It soon
became clear, however, that the suspension was to be of indefinite duration and that he
was no longer welcome among Muslims. The following March, Malcolm announced that
he was breaking completely with Muhammad. He said that he was willing to plunge into
the civil rights struggle around the country because every local campaign "can only
heighten the political consciousness of the Negroes .... "4

Carefully reshaping his thinking, shifting Muslim dogma and dropping unacceptable
tenets while incorporating new ideas picked up from his wide experiences with non-
Muslims, Malcolm started constructing his political ideology.

He realized the need for unity among black people if they were effectively to attack
racism and exploitation in America. He called himself a disciple of black nationalism,
which he carefully defined as the effort of blacks to organize a movement of their own to
fight for freedom, justice, and equality. The kernel of black nationalism, he said, was the
idea that black people should control the economy, politics, and social institutions of their
own communities. Thus he identified black nationalism with the general concept of self-
determination.

After the split Malcolm no longer endorsed utopian separatism: the doctrine that blacks
should return to Africa or devote their efforts to setting up a black state in the United
States. He still rejected integrationism, as either phony tokenism or an attempt to

3
The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Grove Press,
1965), p. 293.
4
Quoted in George Breitman, The Last Year of Malcolm X
(New York: Merit Publishers, 1967), p. 19.
assimilate blacks into a decadent white society. Unlike the Muslims, who attributed the
cause of black oppression to the evil of the white race, Malcolm realized that it was in the
structure of society to which one could trace, not only the roots of black people's misery,
but also the genesis of white racism itself. In a speech in May 1964, Malcolm argued:

The system in this country cannot produce freedom for an Afro-American. It is

impossible for this system, this economic system, this political system, this social
system, this system, period. It's impossible for this system, as it stands, to produce
freedom right now for the black man in this country.5

In answer to a question from the audience he said, "It's impossible for a white person to
believe in capitalism and not believe in racism. You can't have capitalism without racism.
And if you find someone and you happen to get that person into a conversation and they
have a philosophy that makes you sure they don't have this racism in their outlook,
usually they're socialists or their political philosophy is socialism." He thus carefully and
consciously avoided falling into the defeatist trap of attributing racism to "human nature."

Although he advocated self-determination for blacks, Malcolm understood that this could
never be achieved within the framework of an exploitative, capitalist system. Again,
unlike other black nationalists, Malcolm realized that it was in the interests of militant
blacks to work for change throughout American society. For it is only if the total society
is changed, that the possibility of genuine self-determination for blacks can be realized.
Black control of black communities will not mean freedom from oppression' so long as
the black communities themselves are still part of or subservient to an outside society
which is exploitative.

Malcolm did not live long enough to elaborate fully a program of action. He did advocate
that blacks engage in bloc voting, although he noted that sometimes, as in 1964, there
was not much choice between a Republican wolf and a Democratic fox. In its statement
of aims, the Organization of Afro-American Unity stated that it would "organize the
Afro-American community block by block to make the community aware of its power
and potential; we will start immediately a voter-registration drive to make every
unregistered voter in the Afro-American community an independent voter; we propose to
support and/or organize political clubs, to run independent candidates for office, and to
support any Afro-American already in office who answers to and is responsible to the
Afro-American community."6 In the economic sphere the OAAU merely pledged that it
would "wage an unrelenting struggle" against economic exploitation of all forms.

Malcolm realized that the system he opposed was based ultimately upon force, and that
the dynamic of radical social change in America was moving inexorably toward a violent
confrontation. In a speech in New York on April 8, 1964, Malcolm described the process
he saw unfolding:

5
Breitman, The Last Year of Malcolm X, p. 33.
6
Breitman, The Last Year of Malcolm X, p. 109.
 So today, when the black man starts reaching out for what America says are his
rights, the black man feels that he is within his rights-when he becomes the victim
of brutality by those who are depriving him of his rights to do whatever is
necessary to protect himself. An example of this was taking place last night at this
same time in Cleveland, where the police were putting water hoses on our people
there and also throwing tear gas at them-and they met a hail of stones, a hail of
rocks, a hail of bricks. A couple of weeks ago in Jacksonville, Florida, a young
teen-age Negro was throwing Molotov cocktails. Well, Negroes didn't do this ten
years ago. But what you should learn from this is that they are waking up. It was
stones yesterday, Molotov cocktails today; it will be hand grenades tomorrow and
whatever else is available the next day. . . There are 22 million African-
Americans who are ready to fight for independence right here. . . I don't mean
any nonviolent fight, or turn-the-other-cheek fight. Those days are over. Those
days are gone.7

As though he wanted to be certain that his audience (which was mostly white) had not
misunderstood, Malcolm added that the black revolt was being transformed into "a real
black revolution. "Revolutions are never fought by turning the other cheek. Revolutions
are never based upon love-your-enemy and pray-for-those-who-spitefully-use-you. And
revolutions are never waged singing "We Shall Overcome." Revolutions are based upon
bloodshed.”8

Thus Malcolm saw the black revolt metamorphosing into a violent revolution. But
strangely, at the end of this speech, he seemed to retreat from the position he had taken
throughout his talk. "America," he said, "is the first country on this earth that can actually
have a bloodless revolution." Why did he think this was so? "Because the Negro in this
country holds the balance of power, and if the Negro in this country were given what the
Constitution says he is supposed to have, the added power of the Negro in this country
would sweep all of the racists and the segregationists out of office. It would change the
entire political structure of the country.”9

This was clearly inconsistent with the major thrust of his speech. Malcolm had no faith in
the efficacy of political reform. Only a few moments earlier he had pointed out that the
black man "can see where every maneuver that America has made, supposedly to solve
[the race] problem, has been nothing but political trickery and treachery of the worst
order." Malcolm apparently held ambivalent attitudes on the question of violence. He
advocated self-defense; yet he knew that no revolution was made using the tactics of self-
defense. He knew that the black revolt held the potential of turning into a revolution and
that revolutions involve aggressive violence; yet he could conclude that America might
be the first country to experience a bloodless revolution.

This ambivalence probably stemmed from misgivings Malcolm had about potential allies.

7
George Breitman (ed.), Malcolm X Speaks (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1965), p. 49.
8
Breitman, p. 50.
9
Breitman, Malcolm X Speaks, p. 57.
He knew that for the black revolution to succeed it needed revolutionary allies, and he
saw two possible sources of such allies: militant whites in the United States and the
people of the newly emerging nations-the former colonies of Africa and Asia, and the
oppressed people of Latin America. But he had grave doubts about so-called white
radicals. He thought that many of them could not seriously identify with a struggle the
aim of which was to undermine and destroy the basic premises and institutions of their
own society.

The remainder, he thought, would probably be co-opted: "You can cuss out colonialism,
imperialism, and all other kinds of 'ism,' but it's hard for you to cuss that dollarism. When
they drop those dollars on you, your soul goes.”10 As far as white workers were
concerned, he had no faith at all that they could be anything but reactionary and racist.

With beliefs such as these, it would be natural for Malcolm to hesitate to advocate that
blacks undertake anything more than self-defense. His major concern, wisely, was to
prevent genocide, not encourage it. He knew that in a revolutionary situation only the
presence of revolutionary forces outside the black communities could prevent mass
slaughter of the black population. He saw no such forces in evidence, and therefore was
forced to equivocate, tom between the seemingly conflicting needs of racial survival and
social revolution.

In spite of his reservations about white radicals and militants, Malcolm still regarded
them as potential allies. He believed that some whites were genuinely fed up with the
system, and he thought that some type of alliance might occur if they could establish
proper communication with black militants. "Proper communication," to Malcolm's mind,
definitely was not the kind of black-white alliances that had existed in the past in which
the black component was usually only an appendage to white-controlled organization.

In any case, such an alliance was for the moment only a secondary consideration; the first
was the creation of black unity. Militant blacks, he said, had to consolidate their own
forces, work out their own program and strategy, and build a strong movement before
there could be any meaningful move toward an alliance with whites. The immediate goal
of white militants, Malcolm thought, should be to build a viable movement within white
communities. Any linkup that might then occur would be between equals.

It was in Africa in the last year of his life that he saw the best and most numerous allies
of American blacks. He was implacably opposed to the thesis that since black people are
only a minority in this country, they should accept the leadership of white liberals.
Malcolm argued that black people should identify with the majority of the world's
oppressed and downtrodden peoples and elevate the black freedom struggle to the level
of an international struggle for human rights.

Malcolm believed that the people of Africa, Asia, and Latin America were victims of "the
international power structure," that U.S. neocolonialism was the main weapon of this

10
Breitman, The Last Year of Malcolm X, p. 32.
power structure, but that the colonial revolt had shown the enemy to be invincible no
longer. International capitalism, he believed, was slowly being beaten back and replaced
with various kinds of socialisms. At an OAAU rally in Harlem on December 20, 1964,
less than a month after his last return from Africa, Malcolm said:

Almost every one of the countries that has gotten independence has devised some
kind of socialistic system, and this is no accident. This is another reason why I say
that you and I here in America-who are looking for a job, who are looking for
better housing, looking for a better education-before you start trying to be
incorporated, or integrated, or disintegrated, into this capitalistic system, should
look over there and find out what are the people who have gotten their freedom
adopting to provide themselves with better housing and better education and
better food and better clothing. None of them are adopting the capitalistic system
because they realize they can't. You can't operate a capitalistic system unless you
are vulturistic; you have to have someone else's blood to suck to be a capitalist.
You show me a capitalist, I'll show you a bloodsucker... 11

That capitalism, in its colonial quest, bred racism was self-evident to Malcolm. In his
view this partly accounted for the presence of racism in a supposedly egalitarian
America. That same America had profited greatly from the colonial slave trade and now
she stood as the "last bulwark of capitalism." Urging that U.S. blacks "internationalize"
their fight for freedom, Malcolm contended that black people, as victims of domestic
colonialism, should view their struggle in terms of the worldwide anticolonial revolt; and
he took concrete steps to make this more than mere rhetoric. He formulated a plan for
linking the domestic freedom movement to the international anticolonial revolt. "The
civil rights struggle," he reasoned in his April address in New York, "involves the black
man taking his case to the white man's court. But when [the black man] fights it at the
human-rights level, it is a different situation. It opens the door to take Uncle Sam to the
world court. Uncle Sam should be taken to court and made to tell why the black man is
not free in a so-called free society. Uncle Sam should be taken into the UN and charged
with violating the UN charter of human rights."12 At another point Malcolm drew an
analogy to give clarity to his argument: "If South Africa is guilty of violating the human
rights of Africans then America is guilty of worse violations of the rights of twenty-two
million Africans on the American continent. And if South African racism is not a
domestic issue, then American racism also is not a domestic issue."

On his last trip to Africa, in July 1964, Malcolm began marshaling support for his plan to
bring the American racial problem before the United Nations under the human rights

11
Breitman, The Last Year of Malcolm X, pp. 35-36.
12
This was not the first time blacks had sought to arraign the U.S. before the United Nations.
Nearly two decades ago the Civil Rights Congress under the leadership of attorney William L.
Patterson presented a petition to the UN charging the U.S. government with committing the crime
of genocide against the black race. The petition contained 135 pages of damning evidence
implicating the entire governmental structure of the U.S. in the systematic oppression, maiming
and murder of black men, women and children.
provision of its Charter.13 He was admitted as an observer to the Cairo conference of the
OAU, where he made an impassioned plea for the African nations to arraign the United
States before the UN. He also made personal visits to individual heads of African states.
Malcolm's activities in Africa caused deep concern in Washington.

The New York Times reported that State Department officials said that if "Malcolm
succeeded in convincing just one African government to bring up the charge at the United
Nations, the United States government would be faced with a touchy problem." The
newspaper report said the United States would find itself in the same category as South
Africa in a debate before the world body.

Throughout his travels in Africa, Malcolm was followed. On July 23, 1964, the day
before he was to address the OAU conference, his food was poisoned at his hotel in
Cairo, and he was seriously ill. On his return to the United States, Malcolm became a
familiar figure at the UN. By the fall of 1964 his plan to indict the U. S. Government was
in high gear, and Malcolm was becoming an increasingly serious threat to U.S. overseas
interests. It was reported that the State Department attributed to Malcolm's activities a
good part of the strong stand taken by African states against U.S. intervention in the
Congo. As long as Malcolm remained in Muhammad's Nation of Islam, he was of no
concern to the power structure. Freed of Muslim restraints, Malcolm threatened to bring
the impact of the world revolution right into this country.

He did not live to see his plan come to fruition. On the morning of February 13, 1965, his
home was fire-bombed by professionals. He and his family barely escaped injury.
Malcolm at first blamed the Muslims, but he soon suspected that other parties were at
work. As he said, he knew intimately the Muslims' capabilities and limitations. The
following Sunday the "other parties" were more successful. Malcolm was shot to death at
a meeting in New York.14

The assassination threw Harlem into a panic. Many feared that a bloodbath would follow
in which Malcolm's supporters and Muslims would gun each other down on the streets.
As it turned out, the Muslim Temple in Harlem was fire-bombed but no one was killed.
The more sophisticated were not afraid of such a mindless orgy of murder. They saw
instead in Malcolm's death a continuation of a calculated pattern which began with the
forced exile of Robert Williams, led to the jailing of Bill Epton, militant leader of the
Harlem chapter of the Progressive Labor party, on "criminal anarchy" charges for his role
in the Harlem rebellion, and now climaxed in the removal of yet another militant black
leader: It was this continuing decimation of militant black leadership that posed the real
danger, not a bloodbath triggered by warring blacks.

Malcolm X died, but not his ideas. One of the most important of these was how the

13
Malcolm's hopes for implementing this plan might also have played a part in his ambivalent
feelings concerning the necessity for a violent revolution.
14
Malcolm's fears that he might be assassinated for political reasons were not the result of
paranoia. See, for example, Eric Norden's article in the February 1967 issue of The Realist.
struggle of blacks in this country was bound up with the outcome of revolutionary
struggles in the Third World. This message was especially timely because it was at the
end of 1964 and beginning of 1965 that the United States started its massive buildup in
Vietnam, and Malcolm was one of the first black leaders to stand in opposition. He did so
not because he was a pacifist or morally outraged. He opposed the war out of a sense of
solidarity with the Vietnamese liberation fighters. Malcolm had great admiration for the
courage of the Vietnamese guerrillas: "Little rice farmers, peasants, with a rifle-up
against all the highly-mechanized weapons of warfare-jets, napalm, battleships,
everything else, and they can't put those rice farmers back where they want them.
Somebody's waking up." Implicit in Malcolm's admiration was his recognition of a
principle which is fundamental to guerrilla struggles everywhere: namely, that the
revolutionary spirit of the people is more effective than the enemy's technology.

[cut section about Vietnam and Ho Chi Minh]

The American escalation of the [Vietnam] war prompted protest activity in this country.
In the spring of 1965, twenty-five thousand antiwar demonstrators marched in
Washington. As opposition to the war mounted, Martin Luther King urged President
Johnson to issue "unconditional and unambiguous" pleas for peace talks. King's statement
raised the question of a possible alliance between the civil rights movement and the
antiwar movement. Robert Browne, an Afro-American college professor and activist in
the antiwar movement, summarized in late 1965 the reasons favoring such an alliance:
(1) the recognition that the civil rights movement represents the moral conscience
of America and therefore naturally belongs in the vanguard of the Vietnam
protest, felt now to be the number one moral issue confronting American society.
(2) the argument that the billions of dollars being diverted to the Vietnam war
represents funds which might otherwise be available for giving substance to the
programs necessary for raising the Negro to a level of real equality in American
life.
(3) the belief that the civil rights objectives are unachievable under the present
organization of American society and therefore must necessarily be fought for as
part of a large effort to remake American society, including its foreign policy.
(4) the view that the Vietnam war is intimately involved in American racist
attitudes generally, and therefore falls naturally within the range of American
Negroes' direct sphere of interest.15

Within the context of the moderate civil rights movement which still existed at that time,
these were advanced arguments. The latter two arguments particularly were soon to be
sharpened and used by black militants in their attacks on government policy.

On January 6, 1966, SNCC issued a statement opposing the Vietnam war and in essence
supporting draft resistance. According to SNCC staffer Fred Meely in an unpublished
report, the origins of this statement can be traced to a SNCC Executive Committee
meeting in April 1965, during which chairman John Lewis urged the Organization to take

15
17 Freedomways, Vol. 5, No.4.
a formal stand against the war. The first big antiwar march-backed primarily by Students
for a Democratic Society-was to take place on April 17, and the Executive Committee
voted to support the SDS march. At a full staff meeting in November of that year, SNCC
discussed at length the question of taking a public stand on the war, the draft, and the
relation of the war to the plight of Afro-Americans. It was decided to have a statement
drafted and circulated to the staff for approval and to hold workshops on these issues at
SNCC's projects. The statement was prepared and submitted for staff comment in
December.

On January 4, 1966, SNCC worker Sammy Younge, Jr., was murdered in Tuskegee,
Alabama, when he sought to use the "White" restroom at a gas station. This incident
precipitated the antiwar statement. "Samuel Younge was murdered because U.S. law is
not being enforced. Vietnamese are being murdered because the United States is pursuing
an aggressive policy in violation of international law. The U.S. is no respecter of persons
or law when such persons or laws run counter to its needs and desires." The statement
continued:

We are in sympathy with and support the men in this country who are unwilling
to respond to the military draft which would compel them to contribute their lives
to U.S. aggression in the name of the "freedom" we find so false in this country.

It suggested that the "building [of] democratic forms within the country" was a valid, if
not legal, alternative to the draft. It would be a few months yet before SNCC took an all-
out draft resistance stand and began to develop a national antidraft program.

(3)

In summary, then, this is the social and political climate in which Stokely Carmichael
found himself in the summer of 1966. Carmichael attempted to pick up the threads of
Malcolm X's thought and apply them to this social context.

But he was uncertain as to how to move. He was tom between reformism and revolution.
He could not decide at that time whether he was a black rebel or a black revolutionary.
His ambivalences were indicative of the uncertainties which permeated the black militant
movement, and they were a prophecy of the open split which was soon to develop
between rebels-for-reform and revolutionaries.

Carmichael's class background was not unlike that of other SNCC members. Born in
Trinidad, Carmichael came to this country at the age of eleven with his family and settled
in New York City. After attending the elite Bronx High School of Science, Carmichael
received a bachelor's degree from Howard University in 1964. While at Howard he was
active in the student government as well as a local civil rights organization called the
Nonviolent Action Group. Thus, before joining SNCC, the up-and-coming young man
was being primed for the black middle class. This was true of most SNCC activists in
1966. Although they may have come from poor or working-class families, the young
students themselves were headed for middle-class status. Their whole college experience
was designed to inculcate them with the values of the black bourgeoisie, including its
terrible ambivalences and self-hatred. As E. Franklin Frazier and others have noted, the
black bourgeoisie is divided between conflicting compulsions to identify with blacks or
with the white middle class. Depending on circumstances, it vacillates between these two
contradictory identities. The fact that most of SNCC's staff come out of such a
background makes it easier to comprehend and account for the ideological twists and
turns taken by the organization. These ideological waverings were reflective of the
insecurity and equivocation of the black middle class, which SNCC in a sense
represented.

In a widely read article published in the September 22, 1968 issue of the New York
Review of Books, Carmichael struggled with the problem of power: how to attack and
weaken oppressive white power and create in its stead the liberating force of black
power. Most of what Carmichael wrote then was not new. It was based upon the
nationalist tradition which extended from Martin R. Delaney through Malcolm X.
Actually, it must be admitted that Carmichael's early statements did not go as far as the
militant internationalism and anticapitalism of Malcolm X or the revolutionary violence
then being advocated by Robert Williams from exile in China. But where Malcolm and
Williams were stopped before they could organize a mass following, Carmichael was not.
A young and charismatic leader, his ideas served as a catalyst for the intellectual
development of black rebels and revolutionaries alike. Where Malcolm X had battered
himself against a wall of hostility and indifference, the SNCC leader was successful in
injecting the issue of self-determination into a black freedom movement which had
appeared stalemated. The urban rebellions legitimized and gave prominence to this issue
and made it a matter for serious discussion and planning among both black militants and
the white power structure. Both were probing the strengths and weaknesses of the idea of
black self-determination.

Starting with the "basic fact that black Americans have two problems: they are poor and
they are black," Carmichael wrote that SNCC, "almost from its beginning," sought to
develop a program aimed at winning political power for impoverished southern blacks.
He did not foresee, however, that the growing militancy of the black middle class would
lead that class also to demand political power. But political for the black bourgeoisie, the
black elite, is not the same as political power for the black poor, the bulk of the black
population. It is quite possible for this elite group to achieve a measure of political and
economic power within the American capitalist system, but this does not necessarily
imply any change for the black majority. Just as the civil rights movement made
important gains for the middle class but left the poor largely untouched, there
is no intrinsic reason to think a bourgeois black power movement will not follow a
similar course. This is the central issue which later was to split the black power
movement into moderate and militant factions, with the Congress of Racial Equality
being a leading organization among the former while SNCC and the Black Panthers took
the lead among the militants.

Furthermore, Carmichael almost certainly did not expect then that white corporate leaders
would court and pander to the political and economic aspirations of the black bourgeoisie
as a way of countering the revolutionary thrust of the militants. Just as early opponents of
the Vietnam war thought of that conflict as a mistake inadvertently made by the U. S.
Government, so did black power advocates in 1966 view black oppression as a curable
malady which was basically foreign to the American social system. Certainly the more
sophisticated war opponents and black militants talked about things being wrong with the
system, but what they had in mind were deficiencies in the social structure. They were
not yet thinking, as Carmichael later would, that perhaps the system in its totality must be
redesigned. Instead, the antiwar people thought that the deficiency could be remedied by
electing peace candidates to Congress who would end the war. The black power militants
identified the deficiency as general lack of black participation in the political process.

As a result of this orientation, it was not surprising that black power emerged initially as
an effort to reform the social system. At that time black militants were sophisticated
enough to know that integration was not satisfactory because it did not change political
relations and consequently could not affect the oppression suffered by most blacks.
Hence it was logical to conclude that only the political integration of black people as a
group into American society could offer any real hope. Therefore Carmichael defined
black power as group integration into the political process. "In such areas as Lowndes
[County, Alabama], where black men have a majority, they will attempt to use it to
exercise control. This is what they seek: control. Where Negroes lack a majority, black
power means proper representation and sharing of control. It means the creation of power
bases from which black people can work to change statewide or nationwide patterns of
oppression through pressure from strength-instead of weakness. Politically, black power
means what it has always meant to SNCC: the coming together of black people to elect
representatives and to force those representatives to speak to their needs."

A year later Carmichael would use virtually the same definition of black power in the
book which he co-authored on the subject. In it, however, he made it explicit that he
thought of black power as only another form of traditional ethnic group politics. "The
concept of Black Power rests on a fundamental premise: Be/ore a group can enter the
open society, it must first close ranks. By this we mean that group solidarity is necessary
before a group can operate effectively from a bargaining position of strength in a
pluralistic society.”16

This belief that black people are much like other ethnic groups in America lies at the
heart of the reformist tendency in black nationalism. In his book, The Crisis of the Negro
Intellectual, Harold Cruse argues that if America could only be forced to face the fact that
competing ethnic groups are its basic social reality, then a kind of "democratic cultural
pluralism" could be established resulting in genuine black equality. Nathan Wright,
chairman of the 1967 Newark Black Power Conference, expressed a similar view in his
book, Black Power and Urban Unrest. Wright urged black people to band together as a
group to seek entry into the American mainstream. For example, he called for organized
efforts by blacks "to seek executive positions in corporations, bishoprics, deanships of

16
Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hanrilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in
America (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 44.
cathedrals, superintendencies of schools, and high-management positions in banks,
stores, investment houses, legal firms, civic and government agencies and factories."17

Wright's version of black power is aimed at benefiting the black middle class. This
bourgeois approach also characterized CORE's brand of black nationalism. What this
approach overlooks is the fact that black people are not like other ethnic groups in
American society. To begin with, blacks came to these shores, not as immigrants seeking
a better life, but as slaves intended for use as forced laborers. The racist ideology erected
to justify slavery served after the Civil War to keep blacks oppressed and subservient,
even though it was in the economic interests of white industrialists to hire black workers.
But these businessmen, infected by their own racist dogma, preferred to import foreign
labor. With the advent of the civil rights movement, the monolithic structure of racism
began to show cracks, but by then it was already too late. Black people were to enjoy the
unfortunate distinction of being among the first surplus products of an advanced
American technology and economic system. Thus accelerated technological innovation in
a decreasingly competitive and increasingly monopolist economy combined with racism
have acted in concert to phase black people out of American society.

It would have made sense at the close of the Civil War to plan for the assimilation of
black people as a group into the American mainstream. Racism made this impossible.
Now, as racism begins to crumble, the requirements of an advanced technological
economy increasingly exclude black workers from the active labor force. Hence racism,
the stepchild of slavery, prevented black people from following in the footsteps of other
ethnic groups.

Today, even if racism were vanquished, blacks would find their situation basically
unaltered because almost always they do not possess the skills valued by the economy.
Even under ideal circumstances, this lack of skills would require a generation to correct.

Finally, as city governments are increasingly integrated with state and federal agencies,
and municipal political machines are disbanded, an important mechanism for ethnic
group advancement is shut off to blacks. For it is city hall which has been a traditional
stepping-stone to economic security and political power for European ethnic groups. The
current move to rationalize city govermnent and integrate it into the larger national
structure is one of the prime requirements for the smooth functioning of a complex and
advanced society. A consequence of this process is that city politics can no longer be a
free-for-all scramble responsive to the ethnic group (or groups) which can muster the
most votes. Instead, the city government itself becomes a mechanism for the realization
of national priorities-and this necessarily tends to eliminate a major
channel for the anticipated advancement of black people as an ethnic group.18

17
Nathan Wright, Jr., Black Power and Urban Unrest (New York: Hawthorn, 1967), p. 43.

18
There are vastly more blacks employed in government today than ever before, but this is not
reflective of a net increase in political power for the group, since almost all of these positions are
lower-level jobs which have no political weight.
Economically, Carmichael in his New York Review article called for a cooperative effort
among black people. "When we urge that black money go into black pockets, we mean
the communal pocket. We want to see money go back into the community and used to
benefit it. We want to see the cooperative concept applied in business and banking." This
concept was later incorporated into the CORE program.

Economic cooperatives, frequently advocated in the past, were to be the salvation of the
black community. But this economic program assumes that the economy is still open to
new enterprises, be they individual or collective. This assumption is unrealistic in an era
when small businesses are failing at a high rate and large-scale commercial enterprises,
because of the virtual monopoly of gigantic corporations, are extremely difficult to
launch. The Small Business Administration reports that not more than 3 percent of all
U.S. business concerns are owned by nonwhites. A flagrant example of this economic
imbalance is seen in Washington, D.C., where about two thirds of the population is black,
but only some two thousand out of twenty-eight thousand businesses are owned by
blacks, and their volume is only an infinitesimal fraction of the whole. This situation is
not likely to change to any significant degree. The failure rate on special small business
loans, many of which are granted to black businessmen, is about double the rate of
regular loans.

More importantly, even if a cooperative economic venture were successfully initiated, its
managers, in order to keep it afloat, would have to be responsive to the demands and
constraints imposed by the over-all competitive economic system rather than to the needs
of the surrounding black community. For example, a retail food cooperative would find
itself in direct competition with huge supermarket chains. which control not only retail
outlets, but also farms and ranches, processing and packaging plants, advertising
agencies, and transportation and distribution facilities. Without this kind of horizontal
and vertical monopoly, a cooperative business would encounter insurmountable obstacles
that would make large-volume, price-competitive and efficient operation virtually
unachievable. On the other hand, the establishing of a large-scale cooperative monopoly
would be extraordinarily difficult because of the heavy financing required and the
adamant opposition of firms already solidly entrenched in the industry. Hence a black
retail cooperative would very likely find itself forced to charge higher prices or to operate
at a loss.

Even if the cooperative somehow managed to survive these difficulties, benefits to the
community from such a marginal undertaking would be minimal at best. The major
beneficiaries from the cooperative would be the administrators and managers hired to
operate it. After all, their salaries must be met before there can be any price reductions or
dividend payments. Consequently, black capitalism, even on a cooperative basis, would
function primarily to the advantage of middle-class blacks who have management skills-
the class least in need of such benefits because it is increasingly favored by American
society at large.

The need for "psychological equality" and "black consciousness" was also stressed in
Carmichael's 1966 article. "Only black people can convey the revolutionary idea that
black people are able to do things themselves. Only they can help create in the
community an aroused and continuing black consciousness that will provide the basis for
political strength." This thought would later be taken to its logical extreme by cultural
nationalist Ron Karenga: "The revolution being fought now is a revolution to win the
minds of our people." Karenga would argue that the black revolt could not proceed until
the cultural revolution had been won. "We must free ourselves culturally before we
succeed politically." The cultural nationalist would replace the hope of black revolution
with a curious mystique encompassing black culture and art and reactionary African
social forms. "To go back to tradition is the first step forward," wrote Karenga. In essence
the cultural nationalists asked nothing more than that black people be accorded
recognition as a distinct cultural group. If it meant pacifying rebellious ghettos, white
America was only too happy to grant this minor concession.

The question of potential allies is perhaps one of the most difficult problems facing black
militants. Carmichael struggled with the problem but without much success. He was
looking for a numerically significant section of the white population which might become
an ally of blacks. He thought that poor whites might play this role. "We hope to see,
eventually, a coalition between poor blacks and poor whites." Yet, a few lines later, he
stated: "Poor whites everywhere are becoming more hostile-not less-partly because they
see the nation's attention focused on black poverty and nobody coming to them."
Carmichael suggested that middle-class young whites assume the task of organizing poor
whites, but he didn't seem to have much confidence in the successful outcome of this
project. Perhaps he realized that poor whites were as much trapped by their own racism
as blacks were trapped by white racism. He certainly recognized this fact in the case of
white industrial workers-long the hope of the white left-who, seeing their own security
threatened, can now be counted among the most vicious racists in the country.

When the young white activists failed to "civilize" the white community, they were
roundly castigated and attacked by black militants for not being serious radicals. But this
easy criticism missed the point. If black survival really is at stake, as black militants are
fond of asserting, then black radicals must assume primary responsibility for seeing to it
that hostile whites are neutralized and friendly whites are won over to an effective joint
struggle. This is not to say that black organizers should begin flooding into white
suburbs. Obviously not. It is to say, however, that it is ridiculous to contend that racism
and exploitation are the white man's problems. For if racism and exploitation are allowed
to continue, it will be the black community as a whole, not sympathetic middle-class
white students, which will be the greatest loser. It is thus politically irresponsible to
lament that no domestic allies are in sight. The black radical, if he is serious, must take it
upon himself to search out, and if necessary create, allies for the black liberation struggle.

The original formulation of black power as expressed by Carmichael contained not only
the seeds of militant black reformism but also the genesis of revolutionary black
nationalism.

Any social order maintains itself through the exercise of power, whether directly or
indirectly. In particular, the groups or classes within a society which enjoy a privileged
status as a result of the functioning of the social system seek to preserve that system in a
stable equilibrium. They do this by accumulating and using power. Power is based
ultimately on (1) the availability of force, and (2) the existence of pervasive social
attitudes or social mythologies, accepted by all segments of the society, that justify the
actual use of force against external or internal threats. Whether a threat exists and how it
is defined is normally determined by those who hold power. 1n a theocracy, for
example, force may be available in the form of a holy army, and the loyalty of the army is
assured by a religious mythology which is accepted and internalized by soldiers and
commanders alike.

In the United States force is available to the ruling structure in the form of police and
army. These forces may be deployed in the name of "freedom," "law and order," or "the
American way." This rhetoric is based partly on popular ideas about the nature of
American society and partly on the social mythology of "private property rights." The
defense of which is the most socially important ultimate-though not always immediate-
justification for the use of force. Nearly all Americans believe, because they have been
taught from childhood to believe, that those who are designated as "owners" have an
inherent and inalienable right to use in any manner they alone see fit that which is termed
"property."19

The social consequences of this belief are enormous. Thus the disposition of property,
such as industrial plants, corporations, banks, retail and wholesale consumer enterprises,
etc., which decisively affects the lives of millions of people and which derives its value
and meaning from its social nature is left in the hands of private individuals or small
groups whose overriding concern is the profits accruing from this property rather than its
social utility. Profits in turn create wealthy owning and managerial classes, and an
economic dictatorship of these classes is subtly imposed on the whole society. The result
is the partial nullification of political democracy.

That political democracy in the U.S. has not been totally destroyed is evident in the
passage of reform measures and laws aimed at curbing the power of various economic
interests. But at the state and national levels particularly, the country's legislative
machinery has allied itself-through the apparatus of the Democratic and Republican
parties-with one wing or another of the economic establishment. As this establishment is
not yet monolithic there is room within its ranks for considerable dissension. conflict and
change. Consequently, it is open to some outside pressure for reform, but it is not open to
an attack on its own position of power nor will it knowingly tolerate an effective
challenge to the social fiction on which that power is predicated.

The socially shared belief in the sacrosanct qualities of private property is a fundamental

19
The term "property" as used here does not refer to personal or family belongings such as
clothing, a house, or an automobile. Rather, it refers to social property; that is, property (e.g., a
supermarket) the use of which requires the active economic involvement of larger social
groupings (e.g., employees, customers).
premise of the ideology of capitalism. To the extent that the general American population
accepts the mythology of private property-that is, the notion that private individuals
should be the sole determinants of the disposition of what is in reality social property-it
will continue to defend the privileges and prerogatives of those classes which benefit
most from this mythology. The reason for this is that the educational system implants and
reinforces the belief that this social myth can operate to the individual advantage of any
given person if only he works hard enough or displays sufficient cunning. Hence many an
American,· even if sophisticated enough to recognize the injustices of the social system,
will nevertheless vigorously defend it because of the insistent hope that some day he or
his children will achieve a full measure of security and comfort within that system.

This discussion raises several questions. Is the capitalistic competitive game fixed? If so,
why? Are there alternative methods of ordering social relations within a society? As far
as black people are concerned, there can be little doubt that the game is fixed. Blacks for
the last hundred years have been "free" to beat their way to the top. Many have tried, but
in relative terms, black people today are just about exactly where they were at the close
of the Civil War; namely, at the bottom of the heap. In 1966 Carmichael knew that the
game was fixed, but he was not yet ready to deal with the question of whether it was the
nature of the capitalist game to be fixed. That is, he was not at that point an anticapitalist.
To take such a position would require more time and thought.

The American social mythology of private property and the government's monopoly on
force were both implicitly challenged in the 1966 article. This challenge was made
explicit by the urban rebellions which have occurred since 1964. Carmichael raised the
question of whether a country "where property is valued above all" could be the setting
for a humanistic society. He recognized that it was this ideology which justified the use
of force against black people-be they called "uppity niggers," "rioters," or just plain
"criminals." That being the case, one could only conclude, as Carmichael did, that the
black man "may also need a gun and SNCC reaffirms the right of black men everywhere
to defend themselves when threatened or attacked."

Carmichael couched these implicitly revolutionary thoughts in cautious language. Since

1966, however, it has become ever more clear that the black revolt will be accompanied
by violence because those who propagate the mythology of property rights will not allow
peaceful change. It is precisely this social fiction of property rights, and the system of
force and exploitation which it justifies, which stand as the prime enemies of black
people. It is in this sense that the looting which accompanied urban rebellions was a
rudimental revolutionary act. Looting constitutes a direct assault upon the edifice of
private property. As sociologists Russell Dynes and E. L. Quarantelli have noted: “The
looting that has occurred in recent racial outbreaks is a bid for the redistribution of
property.”20 This statement expresses the objective social implication of an act whose
immediate motive may be any number of personal or subjective factors. The question this
poses for black militants is: Can such a redistribution be effected within the present social
framework? Black rebels, advocates of bourgeois nationalism, think this is altogether

20
Transaction, May 1968.
possible. Black revolutionaries think not; they are increasingly anticapitalist.

Carmichael identified the black communities as exploited colonies of the United States.
He added: “For a century, this nation has been like an octopus of exploitation, its
tentacles stretching from Mississippi and Harlem to South America, the Middle East,
southern Africa, and Vietnam; the form of exploitation varies from area to area, but the
essential result has been the same-a powerful few have been maintained and enriched at
the expense of the poor and voiceless colored masses.”

This identification of the black struggle with anticolonial movements in the Third World
had revolutionary implications. At the psychological level it shattered the sense of
isolation felt by many black militants. They could view themselves as part of a
worldwide revolution. "Black Power is not an isolated phenomenon," wrote Julius Lester,
a former SNCC field secretary. "It is only another manifestation of what is transpiring in
Latin America, Asia, and Africa. People are reclaiming their lives on those three
continents and blacks in America are reclaiming theirs. These liberation movements are
not saying give us a share; they are saying we want it all! The existence of the present
system in the United States depends upon the United States taking all. This system is
threatened more and more each day by the refusal of those in the Third World to be
exploited. They ate colonial people outside the United States; blacks are a colonial people
within. Thus, we have a common enemy. As the Black Power movement becomes more
politically conscious, the spiritual coalition that exists between blacks in America and the
Third World will become more evident."21

At the ideological level, Carmichael's thesis gave militant black intellectuals a powerful
analytical tool. Black writer Lawrence P. Neal touched upon this when he pointed out
that the colonial model "breaks down the ideological walls which have contained the
struggle thus far. It supplies the black theorist and activist with a new set of political
alternatives."22

If black people formed a dispersed semicolony within this country, superficially unlike
other colonies, but sharing certain features with them, then a "new set of political
alternatives" might exist in the form of a black national liberation struggle. National
liberation stands in sharp contrast to the strategy of integration; and it represents a distinct
advance over traditional black nationalism, which frequently drifts toward escapist
solutions as a consequence of its unconscious defeatisms. In the years following World
War II, national liberation movements flourished throughout the Third World. To the
extent that the domestic colonial view of black America is valid, its theories and
experiences can be of invaluable aid to the black liberation movement.

[cut section on Frantz Fanon]

(4)

21
Julius Lester, Look Out, Whitey! (New York: Dial Press, 1968). p. 138.
22
Floyd B. Barbour (ed.) , The Black Power Revolt (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1968), p. 141.
At its 1966 national convention meeting in Baltimore, Maryland, the Congress of Racial
Equality endorsed black power. A unanimously adopted resolution said in part:

Black Power is effective control and self-determination by men of color in their

own areas.
Power is total control of the economic, political, educational, and social life of our
community from the top to the bottom.
The exercise of power at the local level is simply what all other groups in
American society have done to acquire their share of total American life.

The summer of 1966 was an important turning point for CORE, as it was for SNCC.
Until then, CORE had been an integrationist organization relying on the tactics of
nonviolent, direct action to achieve its goals. Founded by James Farmer in 1942 as an
offshoot of the Quaker-pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation, CORE immediately set out
on an activist course. It organized the first sit-ins in Chicago in 1942, and it sent the first
"freedom riders" through the South in April 1947.

Over the years the organization's membership grew from the initial handful of black and
white activists. Like SNCC, CORE was a middle-class organization. It differed from
SNCC in that SNCC members, being younger, were not yet committed to middle-class
jobs or middle-class lifestyles. It was, therefore, easier for SNCC members to identify
with the impoverished black majority. CORE differed from the NAACP in that the latter
is wealthier, better established, and more solidly bourgeois. The NAACP aims at
reforming certain aspects of a system whose assumptions it shares. It carries out these
reformist efforts through the socially accepted channels of the ballot box, court cases, and
legislative lobbying. CORE, on the other hand, while being a more militant and less
affluent organization than the NAACP, still does not reject the basic ideological
assumptions of American society, although it may question them. CORE employed less
orthodox and more militant methods of reform. It used direct-action techniques in an
effort to bring pressure on institutions it sought to change. As some observers have noted:
"At a given point, after pressure from outside the system has been successful, it is
possible for the less privileged reformist group to be allowed to work inside the
system."23

CORE was eclipsed by William L. Patterson's Civil Rights Congress until 1951, then by
Martin Luther King's campaigns in the middle 1950s and the student sit-ins which began
in 1960. It was not until it organized the renowned "freedom rides" to Alabama and
Mississippi in 1961 that CORE was catapulted into national prominence. As a result of
these activities, the organization's membership began to change. In 1963, black members
for the first time accounted for more than half of CORE's total membership. CORE was
attracting to its ranks militant, middle-class blacks who were disillusioned with the
NAACP. The following year, the Brooklyn chapter announced that it would organize a
"stall-in" on the opening day of the New York World's Fair to protest discrimination in

23
Fitch and Oppenheimer, Ghana, p. 27.
hiring practices at the fairgrounds. This was indicative of the organization's new
militancy and the shifting of its focus to the urban North. This announcement touched off
a heated controversy both within and outside of CORE.

Another sign of CORE's shifting center of gravity occurred in Novemher 1964. Clarence
Funnye, then chairman of the Manhattan chapter, announced that his group would
abandon demonstrations in favor of long-range economic and social programs in Harlem.
The organization still had integration as its goal, but it was trying to address itself to the
needs of northern blacks, for whom de facto segregation and the lack of adequate housing
and jobs were more serious problems than the kind of de jure discrimination which had
characterized the South. A further sign was the interest expressed by the downtown New
York chapter in organizing an independent political party. The chapter chairman asserted
that this was necessary because existing local political organizations were incapable of
bringing about needed improvements. Meanwhile, Brooklyn CORE was then involved in
organizing rent strikes.

At its 1965 convention-the theme of which was "Black Ghetto: The Awakening Giant"-
CORE rescinded its constitutional ban on partisan political activity. The new emphasis
within the organization was summarized and in effect given official sanction by National
Director James Farmer:

The major war now confronting us is aimed at harnessing the awesome political
potential of the black community in order to effect basic social and economic
changes for all Americans, to alter meaningfully the lives of the Black Americans
. . . and to bring about a real equality of free men.24

The government could not do this job, Farmer asserted, because of its built-in resistance
to fundamental change. "We can rely upon none but ourselves as a catalyst in the
development of the potential power of the black community in its own behalf and in
behalf of the nation."

It is clear that the objectives we seek-in the wiping out of poverty and
unemployment, elimination of bad housing, city planning for integration in
housing and schools, quality education-are political objectives depending upon
responses we can exact from political machinery. We can no longer rely on
pressuring and cajoling political units toward desired actions. We must be in a
position of power, a position to change those political units when they are not
responsive.25

Farmer contended that what was needed was "independent political action through
indigenous political organizations" modeled after the MFDP." Such ghetto-oriented
political movements must avoid, at all costs," he said, "becoming an adjunct to, or a tool

24
Francis L. Broderick and August Meier (eds.), Negro Protest Thought in· the Twentieth
Century (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), p. 422.
25
1bid., p. 425.
of, any political party, bloc, or machine. They must be controlled by the interests of the
black ghetto alone."26

Another significant development at the 1965 convention was the introduction of a

resolution opposing United States involvement in the Vietnam war. The resolution was
tabled, however, on a plea from Farmer.

The man who chaired this convention was Floyd McKissick, then national chairman. The
following year, in March, McKissick was named to replace Farmer as national director.
McKissick was born in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1922. He graduated from
Morehouse College in Atlanta, one of the great training institutions for the black
bourgeoisie, and then went on to the University of North Carolina Law School where he
took a law degree. McKissick mixed civil rights activity with his legal career, and,
beginning in 1960, he became one of the leaders of the sit-in movement in North
Carolina.

The black power resolution passed by CORE in 1966 seemingly eliminated racial
integration as the group's goal and instead replaced it with the goal of "racial co-existence
through black power." But what is this "racial coexistence" if it is not simply another
form of group assimilation? CORE had substituted militant-sounding group integration
for the now discredited goal of individual integration. The difference was in degree, not
in kind.

The resolution also contained the sentence: "It is significant to note that historically the
only times in the United States when great numbers of Black people have been mobilized
has been around the concept of Nationalism, as in the case of Marcus Garvey and the
Muslims." This is important to keep in mind, because at subsequent conventions, the
organization would be racked by disputes between orthodox black nationalists and those
who adhered to the new nationalist position advocated by Roy Innis. The traditional
nationalists wanted CORE to come out in favor of a separate territory for black people,
but Innis projected the idea of a black nation of city-states dispersed throughout the
country. In 1968 this dispute would provoke a split in CORE's ranks.

On the question of violence, CORE tried to straddle the fence. The Baltimore meeting
adopted a resolution urging "that CORE continue its adherence to the tactic of direct
nonviolent action, that the concepts of nonviolence and self-defense are not
contradictory, nonviolent meaning nonaggressive, but not precluding the natural,
constitutional and inalienable right of self-defense."

CORE was reshaping itself. It was attempting to respond to and organize the new
militancy which had infected certain parts of the black middle class, as a result of the

26
In 1968 Farmer himself ran unsuccessfully for Congress as the liberal Party and Republican
Party candidate in the newly created Twelfth Congressional District in Brooklyn. This was hardly
an exercise in the kind of "independent 'politics" which he advocated in 1965. Rather it
represented an alliance between him and the liberal wing of the power structure, and led him
ultimately into the Nixon Administration.
rebellions initiated by the black masses. In so doing, CORE was to assume a role akin to
that played by bourgeois nationalist political elites in an underdeveloped country
undergoing a transformation from colonialism to neocolonialism.

(5)

By the time SNCC and CORE raised the cry of black power, the sophisticated, white
establishment already had begun to sketch the general outlines of its response to the new,
black militancy. It was not so much the specific slogan of black power that motivated this
response; rather it was prompted by the same domestic conditions that underlay the rise
of black militancy: The failure of the civil rights movement to alleviate the continuing
impoverishment of the black communities and the consequent urban outbreaks.

The rebellions especially forced white reactionaries and liberals alike to conclude that
direct white administration of the black ghettos, at least in some instances, was no longer
operating satisfactorily. Some new form of administration was clearly called for if the
ghettos were to be pacified and "law and order" restored. Of course there were some,
mostly at the state and local government levels, who thought brutal repression to be the
best answer. Traditional liberals, though, still hoped to find a panacea in government-
sponsored social welfare programs. But a drastically new situation necessarily calls forth
a drastically new response. The black rebellions, which threatened to set the torch to
every major American city and seriously disrupt the functioning of the economy,
represented just such a drastically new situation.

The beginnings of the new response could be glimpsed in Ford Foundation president
McGeorge Bundy's August 2, 1966 address to the National Urban League's annual
banquet in Philadelphia. "We believe," said Bundy, "that full equality for all American
Negroes is now the most urgent domestic concern of this country. We believe that the
Ford Foundation must play its full part in this field because it is dedicated by its charter
to human welfare." Bundy told the Urban League meeting that in addition to the familiar
fields of jobs, education, and housing, the Foundation thought that the areas of
leadership, research, communication, and justice were also important concerns for the
black movement. He suggested that "stronger leadership" was needed because "it is easier
to understand and work for the recognition of basic civil rights than it is to understand
and work for the improvements in skills and schools, in real opportunity, and in the
quality of life itself, which are the next business of us all." In other words, as the civil
rights movement faded away a new breed of black and white leader was required to
negotiate "the road from right to reality."

In the area of research, Bundy threw out several questions which he said needed answers:
"What kinds of better schools will help most to turn the tide of hope upward in the
ghettos? What patterns of cooperation-among whites and Negroes-business, labor, and
government-can bring new levels of investment to both the city center and the southern
rural slum? What really are the roots of prejudice and how can we speed its early and
widespread death?" The first two questions are especially significant because Bundy was
later to become deeply embroiled in New York City's school decentralization dispute, and
the Foundation would play a leading role in promoting private business investment in the
ghetto. Anticipating this latter development, Bundy urged in his remarks that "strong-
minded business leadership can put itself in the forefront of the effort to open doors for
the Negro."

Significantly, Bundy also hinted that the political arena was to assume greater importance
in the black struggle. "We know . . . that political influence brings political results," he
told the group. He did not say, however, that the Foundation would soon play an indirect
part in electing Carl Stokes as the first Negro mayor of Cleveland.

Communication is of utmost importance, Bundy stressed, because "the prospects for

peaceful progress are best when men with different parts to play keep talking straight and
clear, one to another. Nothing is more dangerous in such a time than for men to lose
touch with each other."

In this Bundy' was absolutely right. He knew that the rebellions signaled a serious
breakdown in communication between ghetto residents and municipal, state, and federal
power structures. Thus communication, which in the lexicon of those who wield power is
synonymous with control, had to be restored at any cost.

As for justice, Bundy simply said that it should be given top priority.

Finally, Bundy came to the heart of what he wanted to say. He told the Urban League
group that there are certain interlocking institutions which bind blacks and whites
together. One of the most important of these is the city, and "the quality of our cities is
inescapably the business of all of us. Many whites recognize that no one can run the
American city by black power alone," the reason being, he suggested at a later point, that
urban black majorities would still be faced with white majorities in state houses and the
U. S. Congress. But if the blacks bum the cities, then, he stated, it would be the white
man's fault and, importantly, "the white man's companies will have to take the losses."
White America is not so stupid as not to comprehend this elemental fact, Bundy assured
the Urban Leaguers. Something would be done about the urban problem. "Massive help"
would be given to the ghettos, and the Ford Foundation would take the lead in organizing
the campaign.

Thus the Ford Foundation was on its way to becoming the most important, though least
publicized, organization manipulating the militant black movement. Housed in an
ultramodern headquarters building on East Forty-third Street in New York, the
Foundation is deeply involved in financing and influencing almost all major protest
groups, including CORE, SCLC, the National Urban League, and the NAACP. Working
directly or indirectly through these organizations, as well as other national and local
groups, the Foundation hopes to channel and control the black liberation movement and
forestall future urban revolts.

The Foundation catalogs its multitude of programs and grants under such headings as:
public affairs, education, science and engineering, humanities and the arts, international
training and research, economic development and administration, population,
international affairs, and overseas development. The list reads like a selection from the
courses offered by a modem liberal arts college. Race problems are listed as a subclass of
public affairs.

Under the leadership of Bundy, former Special Assistant to the President for National
Security Affairs-and in this capacity one of the chief architects of this country's
aggression in Vietnam-the Ford Foundation in 1966 made an important decision to
expand its activities in the black movement. Prior to that time, the organization had
limited its activities among black Americans to philanthropic efforts in education and
research projects, all aimed at incorporating more blacks into the middle-class
mainstream. 'The 1966 decision, which was made in response to the black rebellions, was
a logical extension of an earlier decision to vigorously enter the political arena.

Established in 1936 by Henry and Edsel Ford, the Foundation initially made grants
largely to charitable and educational institutions in the state of Michigan. According to its
charter, the purpose of the organization is "To receive and administer funds for scientific,
educational and charitable purposes, all for the public welfare, and for no other purposes .
. ." Most of the Foundation's income has derived from its principal asset: Class A
nonvoting stock in the Ford Motor Company.

In 1950, serving as an outlet for war profits, the Foundation expanded into a national
organization, and its activities quickly spread throughout the United States and to some
eighty foreign countries. In a special Board of Trustees' report prepared at that time, the
Foundation announced its intention of beciming active in public affairs by "support[ing]
activities designed to secure greater allegiance to the basic principles of freedom and
democracy in the solution of the insistent problems of an ever changing society." This
vague mandate, which at first meant little else than underwriting efforts to upgrade public
administration, was gradually brought into sharper focus as the Foundation experimented
with new programs.

In 1962, Dyke Brown, then a vice president with responsibility for public affairs
programs, could write that the Foundation's interest had "shifted from management and
public administration to policy and the political process." He added that these programs
"tended to become increasingly action- rather than research-orientated," which meant that
the Foundation had to be prepared to take certain "political risks." How an officer of a
supposedly nonpolitical, nonpartisan philanthropic institution could justify such a
statement can be understood by examining how the Foundation views its relationship to
the major political parties and the government. Simply stated, the Foundation sees itself
as a mediator which enlightens Democrats and Republicans as to their common interests,
and the reasons why they should cooperate.

For example, the Foundation has sponsored many "nonpartisan" conferences of state
legislators and officials with the purpose of stressing "nonpolitical" consideration of
common problems. Such bipartisan activities insure the smooth functioning of state and
local political machinery by reducing superfluous tensions and· other sources of political
conflict which might upset the national structure and operation of U.S. corporate society.

One specific role of the private foundations vis-a-vis the government was made explicit
by Henry T. Heald, Bundy's predecessor as president of the Ford Foundation, in a speech
given at Columbia University in 1965. "In this country, privately supported institutions
may serve the public need as fully as publicly supported ones," Heald said. "More often
than not they work side by side in serving the same need." What accounts for the growth
of this "dual system of public and private decision in community and national affairs"?
Heald continued,

For one thing, privately supported organizations enhance the public welfare by
their relatively broad freedom to innovate. They can readily try out new ideas and
practices. They can adopt improved techniques and standards that may become
models for other institutions in their fields, both public and private.27

In short, Heald argued that, through their activities, private foundations could serve as a
kind of advance guard, paving the way for later government activity, not only in the usual
fields of education and scientific research, but also in the area of "social welfare." Hence,
the private foundation can act as an instrument of social innovation and control in areas
which the government has not yet penetrated, or in areas where direct government
intervention would draw criticism.

An example of the former is the federal anti-poverty program. Well in advance of federal
efforts in this field, the Foundation made grants for comprehensive anti-poverty projects
in Boston, New Haven, Oakland, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and North Carolina.

Over the years, then, the Foundation's objectives shifted as it assumed a more aggressive
role in American society and the American empire abroad. No longer simply a charitable
organization in a strict sense, the Foundation has become a major social institution,
dedicated to preserving social stability and encouraging economic development of
neocolonial nature, both in the United States and in those parts of the world which the U.
S. Government and business interests consider to be of strategic importance.

Stability and capitalist development are essential to the tranquil internal growth and
external expansion of the American empire. Instability and underdevelopment, whether at
home or abroad, breed violence and revolution. It is for this reason that by the end of
1966 the Foundation had committed seventy-two million dollars to research in population
control in the United States, Britain, Europe, Israel, Australia, Asia, and Latin America. It
is for this reason that it devotes approximately one-fifth of its annual budget to training
personnel and building economic institutions in underdeveloped countries. It is for this
reason that a year after Bundy's Philadelphia speech, the Foundation was to grant a
substantial sum to CORE-the money to be used for "peaceful and constructive efforts" in

27
"American Foundations and the Common Welfare," by Benry T. Heald (Ford Foundation
pamphlet SRl9).
Cleveland's rebellious Hough district. And it is for this reason that in September 1968, it
announced plans to invest an initial ten million dollars in the building of black capitalism.

To come to the point, the Ford Foundation had shaped itself into one of the most
sophisticated instruments of American neocolonialism in "underdeveloped nations,"
whether abroad or within the borders of this country.

This is the general line of Foundation thinking which confronted Bundy as he stepped
from his "little State Department" in the White House at the beginning of 1966. And he
was ideally suited to further advancing these aims. From his years of working in the U.S.
power structure, Bundy had nurtured a keen appreciation for the complexities involved in
political manipulation and the seemingly contradictory policies which often must be
pursued simultaneously in order to obtain a given end.

Bundy summarized his political outlook in an article entitled "The End of Either/Or,"
published in January 1967, in the magazine Foreign Affairs.28 Bundy first asserted that
foreign policy decisions are related to U.S. national interests, although he did not state
who determines these interests or sets priorities. He then went on to criticize those who
view foreign policy options in terms of simple extremes. "For twenty years, from 1940 to
1960, the standard pattern of discussion on foreign policy was that of either/or: Isolation
or Intervention, Europe or Asia, Wallace or Byrnes, Marshall Plan or Bust, SEATO or
Neutralism, the U.N. or Power Politics, and always, insistently, anti-communism or
accommodation with the Communists."

The world is not so simple, Bundy wrote, and "with John F. Kennedy we enter a new age.
Over and over he [Kennedy] insisted on the double assertion of policies which stood in
surface contradiction with each other: resistance to tyranny and relentless pursuit of
accommodation; reinforcement of defense and new leadership for disarmament; counter-
insurgency and the Peace Corps; openings to the left, but no closed doors to the
reasonable right; an Alliance for Progress and unremitting opposition to Castro; in sum,
the olive branch and the arrows."29

Bundy learned that it is necessary to work both sides of the street in order to secure and
expand the American empire. Hence he was a stanch supporter of Kennedy's and
Johnson's war policies in Vietnam, while at the same time stressing the necessity of
keeping channels open to the Soviet Union. Such a man was perfectly suited to work with
black groups, including black power advocates, while at the same time local governments
were arming and preparing to use force to suppress the black communities. The seeming
contradiction here, to use Bundy's word, was only a "surface" manifestation.

[cut section about Black Panther Party and 10-point program]

Reforms are ends in themselves when implemented by the power structure, but when

28
Vol. 45, No.2.
29
Bundy, p. 192
implemented by the ordinary working people of the black community, through an
independent black political party, reforms can become one means to the creation of a
revolutionary new society. The critical question is who, or more specifically, what class
controls the making of reforms, and for what purpose? Both the Panthers and SNCC
considered themselves to be revolutionary black nationalist organizations. Black
nationalism is usually treated by the mass media as a sensational but peripheral
phenomenon of no more than passing interest. Actually, nationalism is imbedded in the
social fabric of black America, and this must be understood if the problems of the black
liberation movement are to be fully appreciated.