IT DID NOT take long for the renewed progression of racism to show itself. On August 9, 1965, three days after Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, Newsweek alarmed Americans by disclosing the findings of the leaked Moynihan report: “The rising rate of non-white illegitimacy,” the “runaway curve in child welfare cases,” and the “social roots” of the “American dilemma of race” were all from the “splintering Negro family.” A photograph of Harlem kids tossing bottles contained the caption, “A time bomb ticks in the ghetto.” The time bomb exploded two days later in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, when a police incident set off six days of violence, the deadliest and most destructive urban rebellion in history. In its aftermath, the victimized mockingbird that had attracted so much paternalistic compassion in the past few years became the aggressive panther that needed to be controlled.1
As Watts burned, Angela Davis boarded a boat headed for Germany. She had come back from France, studied under philosopher Herbert Marcuse, and graduated from Brandeis. Now she was headed to Marcuse’s intellectual home of Frankfurt to pursue her graduate studies in philosophy. She “felt again the tension of the Janus head—leaving the country at that time was hard for me,” as she later said. But the antiracist struggle was globalizing, as she learned in France and would learn again in Germany. Shortly after she arrived, in September 1965, an international group of scholars gathered due north in Copenhagen for the Race and Colour Conference. Davis apparently did not attend. But if she had, she would have heard lectures on the racist role of language symbolism. Scholars pointed out everyday phrases like “black sheep,” “blackballing,” “blackmail,” and “blacklisting,” among others, that had long associated Blackness and negativity.2
The language symbolism was no less striking in two new American identifiers: “minority” and “ghetto.” For centuries, racists had construed Black folk as minors to White majors, and that history could be easily loaded into their latest identifier of the supposed lesser peoples: minorities. The appellation only made sense as a numerical term, and as a numerical term, it only made sense indicating national population or power dynamics. But it quickly became a racial identifier of African Americans (and other non-Whites)—even in discussions that had nothing to do with national issues. It made no sense as another name for Black people, since most Black people lived, schooled, worked, socialized, and died in majority-Black spaces. The term only made sense from the viewpoint of Whites, who commonly related to Black people as the numerical minority in their majority-White spaces, and elite Blacks, who were more likely to exist as the numerical minority in majority-White spaces. And so, class racism—downgrading the lives of Black commoners in majority-Black spaces—became wrapped up in the term “minority,” not unlike a term that psychologist Kenneth Clark had popularized after putting aside brown and light dolls.
In 1965, Clark published his seminal text, Dark Ghetto. The term “ghetto” was known as an identifier of the ruthlessly segregated Jewish communities in Nazi Germany. Though social scientists like Clark hoped the term would broadcast the ruthless segregation and poverty that urban Blacks faced, the word quickly assumed a racist life of its own. “Dark” and “Ghetto” would become as interchangeable in the racist mind by the end of the century as “minority” and “Black,” and as interchangeable as “ghetto” and “inferior,” “minority” and “inferior,” “ghetto” and “low class,” and “ghetto” and “unrefined.” In these “dark ghettoes” lived “ghetto people” expressing “ghetto culture” who were “so ghetto”—meaning that the neighborhoods, the people, and the culture were inferior, low class, and unrefined. Class racists and some suburban Americans saw little distinction between impoverished Black urban neighborhoods, Black working-class urban neighborhoods, and Black middle-class urban neighborhoods. They were all ghettoes with dangerous Black hooligans who rioted for more welfare.3
On January 9, 1966, the New York Times Magazine contrasted these rioting “ghetto” Blacks with the “model minority”: Asians. Some Asian Americans consumed the racist “model minority” title, which masked the widespread discrimination and poverty in Asian American communities and regarded Asian Americans as superior (in their assimilating prowess) to Latina/os, Native Americans, and African Americans. Antiracist Asian Americans rejected the concept of the “model minority” and fermented the Asian American movement in the late 1960s.4
Assimilationists were negatively loading the terms “model minority” and “ghetto” with racist associations in 1966. Meanwhile, antiracists were quickly extracting negative associations from the identifier “Black,” foremost among them Stokely Carmichael. Carmichael had been born in Trinidad in 1941, and he had moved to the Bronx in 1952, the same year his idol, Malcolm X, was paroled from prison. In 1964, Carmichael graduated from Howard University. By then, Malcolm’s disciples, Carmichael included, were loading the old identifier, “Negro,” with accommodation and assimilation—and removing ugliness and evil from the old identifier, “Black.” They were now passionately embracing the term “Black,” which stunned Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Negro” disciples and their own assimilationist parents and grandparents, who would rather be called “nigger” than “Black.”5
As the new chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, Stokely Carmichael was one of the leaders of the Mississippi March Against Fear in the summer of 1966, alongside King and Floyd McKissick of the Congress of Racial Equality. The massive march careened through Mississippi towns, battling segregationist resisters, mobilizing and organizing locals, and registering the latter to vote. On June 16, 1966, the March Against Fear stopped in Greenwood, Mississippi, one of the buckles of the belt of majority Black southern counties still ruled by armed Whites. “We been saying freedom for six years and we ain’t got nothing,” Carmichael shouted at a Greenwood rally. “What we gonna start saying now is Black Power!” “What do you want?” Carmichael screamed. “BLACK POWER!” the disempowered Greenville Blacks screamed back.6
Quickly blown by the fans of the American media, the maxim whisked through all the majority Black urban areas and rural counties that were politically controlled, economically exploited, and culturally denigrated by White assimilationists and segregationists. Antiracists, who would soon be reading Malcolm’s autobiography, had been looking for a concept to wrap around their demands for Black control of Black communities. They latched onto Black Power as firmly in the North as they did in the South, and Martin Luther King Jr. learned why later in the summer. After an open housing march on August 5, 1966, through a fuming White neighborhood in Chicago, King told reporters he had “never seen as much hatred and hostility on the part of so many people.”7
There was nothing more democratic than saying that the majority, in this case the disempowered Black majority, should rule their own local communities, should have Black power. But just as sexists could only envision male or female supremacy, northern and southern racists could only envision White or Black supremacy. And the twenty urban rebellions that ensued in the summer of 1966 only confirmed for many racists that Black Power meant Blacks violently establishing Black supremacy and slaughtering White folks. Time, the Saturday Evening Post, the U.S. News and World Report, the New York Post, and The Progressive are a few of the many periodicals that condemned the start of the Black Power movement.8
Even prominent Black leaders criticized Black Power. Roy Wilkins of the NAACP sang from the hymnal of assimilationist comebacks to antiracist ideas: he redefined the antiracist idea as segregationist and attacked his own redefinition. “No matter how endlessly they try to explain it, the term ‘Black power’ means anti-white power,” Wilkins charged at the NAACP’s annual convention on July 5, 1966. “It is a reverse Mississippi, a reverse Hitler, a reverse Ku Klux Klan.” Vice President Hubert Humphrey added his two licks at the convention. “Yes, racism is racism—and there is no room in America for racism of any color.” Riding the opposition to Black Power, Goldwater Republicans made substantial gains in the midterm elections of 1966.9
Carmichael did not stop promoting Black Power, however. He traveled around the nation in the final months of 1966 to build the movement. In October, he gave the keynote address at a Black Power conference at the University of California at Berkeley. In nearby Oakland that month, two community college students, incensed that their peers were not living up to Malcolm X’s directives, had organized their own two-man Black Power conference. Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale composed the ten-point platform for their newly founded Black Panther Party for Self Defense, demanding the “power to determine the destiny of our Black Community,” “full employment,” “decent housing,” reparations, “an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of Black people,” freedom for all Black prisoners, and “peace”—quoting Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. In the next few years, the Black Panther Party grew in chapters across the country, attracting thousands of committed and charismatic young community servants. They policed the police, provided free breakfast for children, and organized medical services and political education programs, among a series of other initiatives.10
The growth of the Black Panther Party and other Black Power organizations in 1967 reflected the fact that Black youngsters had realized that civil rights persuasion and lobbying tactics had failed to loosen the suffocating stranglehold of police brutalizers, tyrannical slumlords, neglectful school boards, and exploitive businessmen. But nothing reflected that realization, and that effort to release the stranglehold, more than the nearly 130 violent Black rebellions from coast to coast between March and September that year. And yet racist psychiatrists announced that these “rioters” suffered from schizophrenia, which they defined as a “Black disease” that manifested in rage. To Moynihan-Report-reading sociologists, the male rioters were raging from their emasculation. Meanwhile, racist criminologists suggested that the rioters were exuding urban Blacks’ “subculture of violence,” a phrase Marvin Wolfgang used in 1967 for his classic criminology textbook.11
A band of shrewd Goldwater politicians proclaimed that the “lazy” rioters demonstrated the need to reduce the welfare rolls and impose work requirements. But welfare mothers resisted. In September, the newly formed National Welfare Rights Association (NWRO) staged a sit-in in the chambers of the Senate Finance Committee, causing Louisiana senator Russell Long to blast the association as “Black Brood Mares, Inc.” Congress still passed the first mandatory work requirement for welfare recipients.12
ANGELA DAVIS GREW restless in Frankfurt, Germany, reading about the surging Black Power movement, “being forced to experience it all vicariously.” Davis decided to return to the United States during the summer of 1967. She arranged to finish her doctorate at the University of California at San Diego, where philosopher Herbert Marcuse was teaching after being politically muscled out of Brandeis. In late July on her way home, she stopped in London to attend the Dialectics of Liberation conference, where Marcuse and Carmichael were the featured speakers. Her natural hairstyle stood out like a signpost, and she quickly nestled in with the small Black Power contingent.13
When Davis arrived in southern California, she was itching to get involved in the Black Power movement. Like Black Power activists everywhere, she brought the movement to her backyard: she helped build UC San Diego’s Black Student Union. That fall, wherever there were Black students, they were building BSUs or taking over student governments, requesting and demanding an antiracist and relevant education at historically Black and historically White colleges. “The Black student is demanding . . . a shaking, from-the-roots-up overhaul of their colleges,” reported the Chicago Defender.14
In November, Davis took the short trip up to Watts to attend the Black Youth Conference. Walking into the Second Baptist Church, she noticed the colorful African fabrics on the energetic and smiling young women and men who were calling each other “sister” and “brother.” It was her first real Black Power gathering in the United States. She felt exhilarated seeing Black as so beautiful.
Taking in the workshops, Davis learned that the minds of the attendees were as colorfully different as their adornments. Some activists were articulating Du Bois’s old, antiracist socialism, delighting Davis. Other activists talked about their back-to-Africa, separatist, anti-White, community service, or revolutionary aspirations. Some FBI agents posing as activists aspired to collect notes and broaden the ideological fissures. Some activists aspired to ferment a cultural revolution, destroying assimilationist ideas and revitalizing African or African American culture. Black Power appealed to activists of many ideological stripes.15
Black Power even appealed to the face of the civil rights movement. Indeed, the civil rights movement was transforming into the Black Power movement in 1967, if not before. “No Lincolnian Emancipation Proclamation, no Johnsonian civil rights bill” could bring about complete “psychological freedom,” boomed Martin Luther King Jr. at the annual convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) on August 16. The Negro must “say to himself and to the world . . . ‘I’m black, but I’m black and beautiful.’” King brought on a chilling applause from SCLC activists, who waved signs that read, “Black Is Beautiful and It Is So Beautiful to Be Black.”16
King made his way out of the good graces of assimilationist America that year. Assimilationists still wanted to keep him in the doubly conscious dreams of 1963, just as they had wanted to keep Du Bois in the doubly conscious souls of 1903. But King no longer saw any real strategic utility for the persuasion techniques that assimilationists adored, or for the desegregation efforts they championed. He now realized that desegregation had primarily benefited Black elites, leaving millions wallowing in the wrenching poverty that had led to their urban rebellions. King therefore switched gears and began planning the SCLC’s Poor People’s Campaign. His goal was to bring poor people to the nation’s capital in order to force the federal government to pass an “economic bill of rights” committing to full employment, guaranteed income, and affordable housing, a bill that sounded eerily similar to the economic proposals on the Black Panther Party’s tenpoint platform.
The title of King’s speech at the SCLC convention was the title of the book he released in the fall of 1967: Where Do We Go from Here? “When a people are mired in oppression, they realize deliverance only when they have accumulated the power to enforce change,” King wrote. “Power is not the white man’s birthright; it will not be legislated for us and delivered in neat government packages.” The road to lasting progress was civil disobedience, not persuasion, King maintained. He bravely critiqued the all-powerful Moynihan Report, warning about the danger that “problems will be attributed to innate Negro weaknesses and used to justify neglect and rationalize oppression.” Moynihan assimilationists responded to King as firmly as they responded to segregationists, classifying the SCLC’s Poor People’s Campaign and King as extremist. King, they said, had become an anarchist. His own critique of antiracists as extremists and anarchists in his Birmingham Letter four years earlier had boomeranged back to hit him.
King’s book seemed to complement Stokely Carmichael’s coauthored Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, published shortly after Where Do We Go from Here? Carmichael and scholar Charles Hamilton gave innovative new names to two kinds of racism. They named and contrasted “individual racism,” which assimilationists regarded as the principal problem, and which assimilationists believed could be remedied by persuasion and education; and “institutional racism,” the institutional policies and collections of individual prejudices that antiracists regarded as the principal problem, and that antiracists believed only power could remedy.17
And White American power did not appear up to the task. On January 17, 1968, President Johnson submitted his State of the Union to Congress. Representatives and senators and their constituents were raging, raging not against discrimination, but against all the protests, whether nonviolent or violent, opposing the Vietnam War, racism, exploitation, and inequality. When Johnson thundered that “the American people have had enough of rising crime and lawlessness,” the applause was deafening. After three straight summers of urban rebellions, some of those applauding the speech, both in the Capitol and around the country, actually feared that a violent Black revolution could be on the horizon. And their fears were reflected in a new blockbuster film that broke box-office records weeks after Johnson’s address.18
When White astronauts land on a planet after a 2,000-year journey, apes enslave them. One astronaut escapes, and in one of the iconic scenes in Hollywood history, at the end of the movie he comes upon a rusted Statue of Liberty. The astronaut—Charlton Heston—and the viewers realize with dismay that he is not light-years from home, but back on Earth. Planet of the Apes took the place of Tarzan in racist popular culture, inspiring four sequels between 1970 and 1973, three more in the twenty-first century, a television series, and a host of comic books, video games, and other merchandise—you name it, the franchise produced it. While Tarzan put on America’s screens the racist confidence of conquering the dark world that prevailed in the first half of the twentieth century, Planet of the Apes held up in full color the racist panic during the second half of the twentieth century of the conquered dark world rising up to enslave the White conqueror.
By 1968, both Democrats and Republicans had popularized the call for “law and order.” It became a motto for defending the Planet of the Whites. “Law and order” rhetoric was used as a defense for police brutality, and both the rhetoric and the brutality triggered urban rebellions that in turn triggered more rhetoric and brutality. And no one could explain all of this better in early 1968 than a giant of a man and thinker and writer, the former convict turned Malcolm X disciple Eldridge Cleaver, who had become minister of information for the Black Panther Party. “The police are the armed guardians of the social order. The blacks are the chief domestic victims of the social order,” Cleaver explained. “A conflict of interest exists, therefore, between the blacks and the police.”
Cleaver penned these words in what seemingly became the most heralded literary response of the era to the mobilizing law-and-order movement. In vividly angry, funny, disgusting, lucidly insightful detail, Cleaver described “a black soul which has been ‘colonized’” by “an oppressive white society.” Released in February 1968, 1 million copies of Soul on Ice were sold in no time. The New York Times named the part memoir, part social commentary one of the top ten books of the year. Soul on Ice was timely and frigidly controversial. Cleaver mused in the book on his bloodcurdling transformation from a “practice run” rapist of Black women to an “insurrectionary” rapist of White women and finally to an optimistic human rights revolutionary. “If a man like Malcolm X could change and repudiate racism, if I myself and other former Muslims can change, if young whites can change, then there is hope for America,” he concluded.
Cleaver’s book became the manifesto of Black Power masculinity to redeem the tragic colonized male, whose soul was “on ice,” whose being was the “Black Eunuch.” The book demonstrated that Black Power masculinity had in fact accepted the racist idea of the emasculated Black man, an idea popularized by the ever-popular Moynihan Report of 1965. For all his antiracist strikes on assimilationist ideas, prisons, and policing, for all his antiracist Marxist strikes on White supremacist capitalism and the Black bourgeoisie, Cleaver’s queer racism and gender racism were striking. Black homosexuals were doubly emasculated (and thus inferior to singularly emasculated White homosexuals): they were emasculated as Black men and emasculated through the “sickness” of homosexuality, Cleaver argued. In Cleaver’s gender racism, the Black woman and the White man were “silent” allies; the White man placed the White woman “on a pedestal” and turned “the black woman into a strong self-reliant Amazon.” And yet, Cleaver ended Soul on Ice with an impassioned love letter “To All Black Women, from All Black Men.” “Across the naked abyss of negated masculinity, of four hundred years minus my Balls, we face each other today, my Queen,” Cleaver wrote. “I have Returned from the dead.”19
For all of his gender racism, Cleaver was still uniquely antiracist in his regal attraction to Black women, and especially to his new wife, Kathleen Cleaver, the Black Panther Party’s national communications secretary. A product of a globetrotting military family, civil rights activism, and the SNCC, Kathleen was the first woman to enter the Panthers’ Central Committee. To all those Black men refusing to date or appreciate Black women, and viewing White women as superior, Eldridge was unequivocal in his disdain. This new generation of Jack Johnsons were shrewdly understood by the Martinique-born psychiatrist Franz Fanon, who had married a French woman before becoming one of the godfathers of Black Power masculinity by authoring the anticolonial grenade The Wretched of the Earth (1961). “By loving me [the white woman] proves I am worthy of white love,” Fanon wrote in Black Skin, White Masks (1952). “I am loved like a white man. I am a white man. . . . When my restless hands caress those white breasts, they grasp white civilization.” And these Black assimilationist men—desiring to be White men, and constantly justifying that desire through imagining the wrongs of Black women—were quite numerous inside and outside of the Black Power movement in the late 1960s. Black men sought out White women because Black women’s intense self-rejection caused them to stop seeking male attention and let themselves go, as Black psychiatrists William Grier (father of comedian David Alan Grier) and Price Cobbs argued in an influential 1968 text, Black Rage.20
Beliefs in pathological Black femininity and masculinity informed beliefs in the pathological Black family, which informed beliefs in pathological African American culture. They were like legs holding up the seat of America’s racist ideas. Sociologist Andrew Billingsley was one of the first scholars to strike at those legs. His seminal study, Black Families in White America, broke the ground on antiracist Black family studies in 1968. He refused to analyze Black families from the criteria of White families. “Unlike Moynihan and others, we do not view the Negro as a causal nexus in a ‘tangle of pathologies,’ which feeds on itself,” he wrote. Instead, he viewed the Black family as an “absorbing, adaptive, and amazingly resilient mechanism for the socialization of its children.” Billingsley made the same case about African American culture. “To say that a people have no culture is to say that they have no common history which has shaped and taught them,” Billingsley argued. “And to deny the history of a people is to deny their humanity.”21
ON FEBRUARY 29, 1968, as Americans were reading Soul on Ice, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders released its final report on the urban rebellions of 1967. Back in July, LBJ created the commission to answer the questions, “What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again and again?” With the nine White and two Black investigators representing groups hostile to Black Power and touting the new status quo motto, “law and order,” antiracists did not expect much from the Kerner Commission (named after its chair, Illinois governor Otto Kerner Jr.).
The conclusions of the Kerner Commission shocked the United States like the rebellions it investigated. The commission members unabashedly blamed racism for the urban rebellions. It said, “What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” The racist mainstream media had failed America, the report concluded: “The press has too long basked in a white world looking out of it, if at all, with white men’s eyes and white perspective.” In the afterglow of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act—as the United States proclaimed racial progress—the Kerner Commission proclaimed the progression of racism in its most famous passage: “Our nation is moving towards two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”22
Everyone seemed to have an opinion about the 426-page document, and it was purchased by more than 2 million Americans. Richard Nixon blasted the report for exonerating the rioters, as did the racists whom Nixon was attracting to his presidential campaign. Martin Luther King Jr., in the midst of organizing his Poor People’s Campaign, christened the report “a physician’s warning of approaching death, with a prescription for life.” President Johnson felt that his own physicians had overblown White racism. And he was probably worried about the report’s damaging effects on the half-truth of racial progress and the costs of its prescription for life. The report recommended the allocation of billions of dollars to diversify American policing, to provide new jobs, better schools, and more welfare to poor Black communities, and to eradicate housing discrimination and construct affordable, fresh, and spaced-out housing units for the millions of Black residents who had been forced to live in rat-infested and deteriorating houses and high-rise projects. Johnson and his bipartisan peers deployed the cost excuse, in the midst of more costly deployments for the hated war in Vietnam. Then again, Johnson did push through one recommendation: the creation of more police intelligence units to spy on Black Power organizations. The president created a second presidential commission on civil disorders later in the year, but this time, he selected the members more carefully. This commission recommended sharp increases in federal spending on police weapons, training, and riot preparation. Washington had no problem following through.23
ANGELA DAVIS SPENT the morning of April 4, 1968, at the new office of the SNCC in Los Angeles. The newly organized SNCC chapter was her new activist home as she shuffled back and forth between Los Angeles and her doctoral studies at UC San Diego. In the afternoon of April 4, she made a printing run. That evening, she heard someone scream, “Martin Luther King has been shot!” In disbelief at first, she felt an overwhelming sense of guilt when she confirmed the news. Like other Black Power activists, she had cast King aside as a harmless leader—harmless in his religious philosophy of nonviolence. “I don’t think we had realized that his new notion of struggle—involving poor people of all colors, involving oppressed people throughout the world—could potentially present a greater threat to our enemy,” Davis remembered. “Never would any of us have predicted that he would be struck down by an assassin’s bullet.” Apparently, King knew. The night before, he gave quite possibly the most bone-chilling, hope-inspiring, courage-inducing speech of his legendary speaking career at the Mason Temple in Memphis. He spoke of the “human rights revolution,” of impoverished “colored peoples of the world” rising up demanding “to be free” in the Promised Land. “I may not get there with you,” he said, his voice arresting. “But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!”24
Reeling from the assassination, Davis joined with the leaders of other local Black Power groups and organized a massive rally at the Second Baptist Church in Los Angeles. Attendees were urged to renew and escalate their fight against racism. As Davis saw it, “Racism was Martin Luther King’s assassin, and it was racism that had to be attacked.” She and her fellow rally organizers were intent on channeling the anger in Los Angeles away from physical confrontations with the well-equipped Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), which had many officers who had been recruited from the Deep South. They succeeded. But the fire this time was elsewhere. In the week following King’s assassination, more than 125 cities experienced another wave of urban rebellions, which led to another backlash of law and order from racist Americans. Aspiring presidents, including George Wallace and Richard Nixon, rode the backlash. Maryland governor Spiro T. Agnew quipped to Black leaders, “I call on you to publicly repudiate all black racists. This, so far, you have been unwilling to do.” Agnew became such a celebrity that Nixon named him his running mate.25
King’s death transformed countless doubly conscious activists into singly conscious antiracists, and Black Power suddenly grew into the largest antiracist mass mobilization since the post–Civil War period, when demands for land had been the main issue. The Godfather of Soul noticed Black America’s brand new bag. With segregationists saying they should not be proud, with assimilationists saying they were not Black, James Brown began in August 1968 to lead the chant of millions: “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud,” a smash hit that topped the R&B singles chart for six weeks. All these Black Power chants caused some African Americans to trash their racist color hierarchies within Blackness (the lighter, the better). Some activists ominously inverted the color hierarchy, judging one’s Blackness to be based on the darkness of the skin, the kinkiness of the hair, the size of the Afro, the degree of Ebonics fluency, or the willingness (of a light-skinned Black) to date a dark-skinned Black, or on whether someone wore Black leather or African garb or could quote Malcolm X. Antiracist Black Power activists engaged in the process of unearthing and trashing all of the deep-rooted assimilationist White standards. They were in the process of stopping Black people from looking at themselves and the world through what Du Bois had termed “the eyes of others” (and what the Kerner Commission had termed the “white perspective”). Antiracist Black Power compelled the controversial search for new standards, for Black perspectives, for Black people looking at themselves through their own eyes.
THE SEARCH FOR Black perspectives was especially taken up in schools and colleges, where Black student activists, educators, and parents were demanding the newest academic discipline, Black Studies. “When the focus in these classrooms is almost exclusively . . . white . . . and almost never black,” Barbara Smith argued to the faculty at Mount Holyoke College, “dissatisfaction among those students with historical and cultural roots which are not white and European is inevitable.” From 1967 to 1970, Black students and their hundreds of thousands of non-Black allies compelled nearly 1,000 colleges and universities spanning almost every US state to introduce Black Studies departments, programs, and courses. The demand for Black Studies filtered down into K–12 schools, too, where textbooks had presented African Americans to “millions of children, both black and white, as . . . sub-human, incapable of achieving culture, happy in servitude, a passive outsider,” as Hillel Black explained in The American Schoolbook in 1967. Early Black Studies intellectuals went to work on new antiracist textbooks. They weathered criticism from assimilationist and segregationist intellectuals of all races who looked down on Black Studies as separatist or inferior to the historically White disciplines. And they looked down on the new field for the same racist reasons they had looked down on historically Black colleges, institutions, businesses, groups, neighborhoods, and nations. Anything created by Black people, run by Black people, and filled by Black people, they thought, must be inferior. And if it was struggling to thrive, it must be the fault of those Black people. Racist ideas not only justified discrimination against Black people, but justified discrimination against Black establishments and against ideas promoted by Black activists, such as Black Studies.26
Nevertheless, Black Studies and Black Power ideas in general began to inspire antiracist transformations among non-Blacks. White members of the antiwar Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and collectives of Hippies became sympathetic to Black Power and began pledging to “burn out the influence of racism from White Americans,” as a White leader of the Communist Party of the United States urged in 1968. In founding the Young Lords Party in 1968, Puerto Rican antiracists recognized the “high degree of racism [that] existed between Puerto Ricans and Blacks, and between light-skinned and dark-skinned Puerto Ricans,” as New York branch co-founder Pablo “Yoruba” Guzmán put it—a racist color hierarchy that existed within all the multicolored Latina/o and Chicana/o ethnicities. The emerging Brown Power movement challenged all these color hierarchies just as the emerging Black Power movement challenged the color hierarchies within all the multicolored Black ethnicities.27
THE LOS ANGELES SNCC survived its office being ransacked by the LAPD after King’s assassination. But it could not survive the gender infighting that plagued many coed organizations. Black organizations had to contend with the popular theories of emasculated Black men from the Moynihan Report. Whenever Angela Davis and two other women asserted themselves, the group’s racist patriarchs inevitably started reverberating the myths of Black womanhood, saying they were too domineering and were emasculating them. Kathleen Cleaver faced similar problems in the Black Panther Party, as did Frances Beal in her New York SNCC office.
Beal had become involved in civil rights and socialist activism in college before living in France in the early 1960s. By December 1968, she was back in the states and helping to found the Black Women’s Liberation Committee in the SNCC. It was the first formal Black feminist collective of the Black Power movement. Beal provided Black feminists with one of their main ideological manifestoes, “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female,” a 1969 position paper that circulated further the next year when it appeared in Toni Cade Bambara’s one-of-a-kind anthology, The Black Woman. “Since the advent of black power, Black men are maintaining that they have been castrated by society but that black women somehow escaped this persecution,” Beal pointed out. Actually, “the black woman in America can justly be described as a ‘slave of a slave’”—a victim of the double jeopardy of racial and gender discrimination. Beal cited labor statistics showing that non-White females accrued lower wages than White females, Black men, and White men—statistics that undermined the Frazier-Moynihan thesis that Black men were the most oppressed, a sensational thesis that had mobilized activists to defend the Black man. Beal’s thesis of Black women having it the worst was no less effective in mobilizing activists to defend the Black woman. The rise of Black feminism and Black patriarchy led to ideological showdowns inside and outside of Black Power organizations over who had it the worst.28
In SNCC Los Angeles, the gender conflict—and then the Communist hunts—got so bad in 1968 that the chapter closed its doors by summer’s end. Angela Davis then started seriously considering joining the Communist Party, a party she felt had not paid “sufficient attention to the national and racial dimensions of the oppression of Black people.” But the CPUSA’s new Che-Lumumba Club did. And this collective of Communists of color became Davis’s entryway into the Communist Party in 1968, and her leap into campaign work for the first Black woman to run for the US presidency, CPUSA candidate Charlene Mitchell.29
In the 1968 presidential election, Mitchell squared off against Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey. Across from the Democrats ran the Republican presidential hopeful, Richard Nixon. His innovative campaign unveiled the future of racist ideas.