ON MARCH 21, 1965, MARTIN Luther King, Jr. led a march across the Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on the road to Montgomery, the state’s capitol. The march capped a brutal battle between police and black protesters, including a vicious assault on marchers on this very bridge by local and state police just weeks before. As with other demonstrations of the era, most notably in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, the whole world was watching this confrontation on television. Black protesters may thus have been bloodied, but ultimately, they, not the police, the city of Selma, nor the state of Alabama would triumph. On August 6, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson would sign the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the second major piece of civil rights legislation passed in little over a year. Solid majorities in Congress for this new civil rights act and rapidly rising support for the civil rights movement suggested that race relations in the United States had reached an historic pass.
Over the next thirty-five years, from the march across the Pettus Bridge to our own time, racial and ethnic relations, boundaries, and identities in the United States were entirely transformed. A new configuration of ethnic and racial relations, a new structure of thinking about ethnicity and race—a new discourse—emerged. Before the 1960s, white privilege and power had kept African, Asian, and Latino Americans out of the arena of real political and economic competition. African Americans were still disfranchised in their heartland of the American South and only slowly and painfully beginning to move up economic and political hierarchies in northern cities. Native Americans were a forgotten people, most wasting away in desultory and desperate poverty on reservations or in the poorest neighborhoods of western cities. Asian Americans were a tiny minority, only 0.5 percent of the population as late as 1960, because restrictive immigration laws had choked off their entry into the United States. Latinos, made up largely of a Mexican American lumpen proletariat in the Southwest and impoverished Puerto Ricans in eastern cities, were, if anything, even more marginalized than African or Asian Americans.
Only whites competed among each other for important economic and political stakes or cultural recognition. Divisions among whites were still important—economically, socially, and politically—as late as the early 1960s. Ethnic divisions appeared to have collapsed into a religious “triple melting pot” of Protestant, Catholic, and Jew by the 1950s, but the boundaries separating those religious groups still seemed durable, and religious group identities still seemed charged at the end of that decade. Widely acclaimed studies of ethnic and racial relations in the early 1960s by Gerhard Lenski on Detroit and Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer on New York predicted, as Moynihan and Glazer stated, “Religion [as well as race] seem to define the major groups into which American society is evolving as the specifically national aspect of ethnicity declines.”
In the period after 1965 a new kind of ethnic and racial relations would emerge. Not only ethnic but even religious divisions among whites would weaken, as boundaries separating Catholics, Protestants, and even Jews grew porous. This process had origins long before 1965 and by the millennium even yet would remain incomplete. Nevertheless, the merging of white ethnic and religious groups—by any measure, residential integration, the diversification of the economic elite, or intermarriage—accelerated rapidly after 1965. At the same time, African, Native, Asian, and Latino Americans entered into arenas of political and economic competition and struggles for cultural recognition with a heretofore unknown power and confidence. Together these groups remade understanding of American racial and ethnic relations. In the case of Native, Asian, and Latino Americans, this was quite literally true, for all of them not only began to assert claims for equality and recognition with a new vigor, they also began to invent pantribal Indian or panethnic Asian or Latino American identities that had hardly existed before. As dynamic as those groups were, however, it was African Americans who took the lead in asserting minority claims most aggressively and consistently, and African Americans who were most responsible for the new configuration. By the 1980s, all of these groups had invented a new conception, a new language of American social and ethnic relations, a language of “minorities” and “multiculturalism” that set African, Asian, Latino, and Native Americans apart against an undifferentiated white America. How much that conception has fit the realities of racial and ethnic boundaries, identities, and relations, and whether it, too, will soon dissolve into a new configuration is difficult to judge or predict at this time, the beginning of a new millennium.
The civil rights movement that reached its peak in 1965 had been dedicated to eliminating Jim Crow—the state impositions of racial inferiority and discrimination that existed throughout much of the South. Buoyed by the discrediting of scientific racism that followed the defeat of the Nazis, by the American government’s sensitivity to third-world nations during the Cold War, by the Democratic Party’s recognition of black voters in northern cities, and by the decisions of an activist Supreme Court, the civil rights movement waged a steady, heroic, and successful “war” of nonviolent protest against Jim Crow from the mid-fifties to the mid-sixties. The Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 broke forever state-enforced Jim Crow in the South, and made deliberate, transparent state racism forever impossible.
Yet even as King and his followers crossed the Pettus Bridge in triumph, African Americans were already rethinking the place they sought in American life and how they expected to get there. Though the mainstream civil rights organizations, the NAACP, and King’s own Southern Christian Leadership Conference, remained committed to the goal of integration and tactics of nonviolent protest and legal challenge, new voices and new leaders emerged to question both, even as the movement was reaching its zenith. The most articulate new leader was a former Nation of Islam minister named Malcolm X, a man of stunning rhetorical gifts and charisma, who became a powerful influence on young black activists. Disturbed by its corruption, Malcolm X had left the Nation of Islam in 1964, but he carried with him its emphases on black solidarity, suspicion of whites, and openness to violent resistance. In the year between his departure from the Black Muslims and his assassination in 1965, Malcom X attempted to broaden and deepen that ideology with a critique of capitalism and identification with other colonized peoples.
Malcolm X’s powerful personality, sharp rhetoric, and dramatic murder has made him a legendary figure for young blacks to this day, but he had a profound impact in his own time. In the early 1960s, while still a member of the Black Muslims, Malcolm X’s influence spread through chapters of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) throughout the North. In 1965, he also had a powerful impact on Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) activists when he delivered an electrifying speech to SNCC workers on the eve of the Selma protests. In 1963, CORE’s members ousted James Farmer in favor of Floyd McKissick, and in 1965, Stokely Carmichael took over SNCC. Both new leaders were militants and sympathetic to appeals to black solidarity. Carmichael quickly became the spokesman for a new vision of Black goals and strategies. In June of 1966, in a Greenwood, Mississippi, schoolyard Carmichael talked not of integration or nonviolence but “Black Power.” The next year Carmichael wrote a book with the political scientist Charles Hamilton that defined Black Power as “a call for black people in the country to unite, to recognize their heritage, to build a sense of community … to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations, and to support those organizations.” Yet, as Manning Marable notes, meanings of Black Power quickly came to vary across a wide political spectrum. Some on the left understood Black Power as a clarion call to a political and economic revolution and perhaps even the creation of a separate black state. Yet black Republicans—with Richard Nixon’s blessing—also seized on the phrase to suggest that Black Power could best be translated as Black Capitalism. If left and right sometimes stretched the meaning of Black Power beyond recognition, the phrase was not hollow. Its emergence marked a major turning point in racial and ethnic relations in the United States. Tamar Jacoby contends that by the spring of 1967, less than a year after Carmichael’s Black Power speech in Mississippi, the protest movements of the early 1960s seemed a “distant memory.” Jacoby asserts: “Activists’ clothes, their talk, their image, their very body language had changed completely. The word ‘Negro’ was virtually dead, so was the phrase ‘civil rights’ and the idea of a multiracial crusade.”
Jacoby exaggerates, but it was clear that African American understandings of their place in America were changing, and not just at the elite level of activists and intellectuals, but also below, among young African Americans living in northern cities. Beginning in Harlem in 1964 and rising to a crescendo in Detroit and Newark in 1967, African American ghettoes in cities across the United States erupted in riots. The eruption in Los Angeles of the Watts ghetto in 1965 cost thirty-four lives and forty million dollars in property damage. In Detroit forty-three people died, almost two thousand were injured, and fires ravaged fourteen square miles. Even the nation’s Capital was not spared. In April of 1968, Washington’s black ghettoes exploded. Martin Luther King’s assassination touched off the Washington conflagration, but many of the other riots erupted after confrontations between blacks and white police officers. In Harlem in 1964, for example, residents rioted after a white police officer shot a fifteen-year-old black youth while trying to stop a fight. In Detroit, too, the spark came after police raided an after-hours nightclub in a black neighborhood. In all, the race riots from 1964 to 1972 resulted in more than 250 deaths, 10,000 serious injuries, and 60,000 arrests.
The riots suggested that the new militancy summed up in the phrase Black Power had deep and broad roots in the African American community. This new militancy was not all-pervasive among African Americans; indeed, polling data right up until King’s death suggested broader support for him and his integrationist goals among blacks than for the newer Black Power advocates. Nevertheless, there was a palpable shift in sentiment even among those who continued to pay homage to King.
In large part, this was because of the very success of the civil rights movement. Julian Bond has described Black Power as “a natural extension of the civil rights movement … from the courtroom to the streets … [to the] ballot box to the meat of politics, the organization of votes into self interest units.” In practical terms, the Voting Rights Act had finally guaranteed blacks political rights and permitted them to compete for political power anywhere in the United States. Black Power was the new slogan of that competition. In a less tangible but meaningful way, the civil rights movement and its successes had also aroused African Americans everywhere, helped them to shed fears born of years of savage repression, and raised their expectations of equality. Yet the civil rights movement, having accomplished those goals, could not move into the next phase. Civil rights protest tactics worked effectively in the South to provoke third parties, sympathetic whites in the North, and the federal government to put pressure on the southern states. There was strong white support in the North for the crusade to sweep away state legislated discrimination. Yet when the movement turned to the North itself, to cities like Chicago, it foundered among the rising expectations of black ghetto dwellers and the ambivalence or outright hostility of many northern whites. A change in tactics and attitude, a new militancy, had been brewing among members of northern CORE chapters, particularly in San Francisco and Brooklyn, long before the movement’s final great southern victory after Selma.
Whatever the reasons, the changes in black strategies and attitudes summed up in Black Power had clearly been made, and they manifested themselves quickly in African American life. Instead of protest politics and the quest for rights, electoral politics and the drive for political office, substantive legislation and patronage began to dominate the black community. The results were impressive. Between March of 1969 and May of 1975, the number of black elected officials tripled from a little less than one thousand to nearly three thousand. In the South, the number of black office holders rose from less than one hundred in 1965 to one thousand in 1975. This was clearly the result of the Voting Rights Act, as the number of blacks registered to vote skyrocketed. In Mississippi it grew from 6.7 percent before 1965 to 59.8 percent of age-eligible blacks by 1969. Many of the newly elected, particularly in the South, won only minor posts—councilmen or school committeemen in small towns or cities. Yet almost every major city in the country would elect an African American mayor between 1965 and 1990, beginning with Carl Stokes in Cleveland and Kenneth Gibson in Newark, and ultimately including Coleman Young of Detroit, Maynard Jackson of Atlanta, Harold Washington of Chicago, Tom Bradley of Los Angeles, Wilson Goode of Philadelphia, David Dinkins of New York, and Kurt Schmoke of Baltimore. The number of black congressmen also rose from three in 1961 to thirteen in 1971 and to thirty-nine in 1993.
Black Power was not just a commitment to political mobilization; it was also a call for cultural revival and recognition. The two were not unrelated; black pride and solidarity undergirded the push for political power. In 1972, Imamu Baraka, the poet; Richard Hatcher, Mayor of Gary, Indiana; and Charles Diggs, a congressman from Detroit, presided over a black political convention in Gary that drew more than twelve thousand participants who made that link explicit. Yet Black Power’s cultural program was, in many ways, far more successful than even the new Black politics. Beginning in the late 1960s Black Power advocates launched an attack on accepted American ideals of assimilation and Anglo-American cultural supremacy. As Stokely Carmichael’s and Charles V. Hamilton’s Black Power flatly stated, “we reject the goal of assimilation into middle class America.” Native, Asian, and Latino American activists, and even some white ethnic leaders, would take up this rhetorical assault on Anglo-American culture and it would have critically important consequences for American racial and ethnic relations.
Yet of course it had revolutionary consequences for the black community too. It prompted changes in African American life, from new hairstyles and clothes to new holidays—Kwanzaa—to changes in names—personal names drawn from Islamic or African sources—and changes in the name of the race, substituting black or African American for Negro. Manufacturers, sensitive to this new market of racially conscious Blacks, made their own adjustments, producing everything from Black GI Joe and Barbie dolls to African-theme greeting cards. The most important, visible, and often controversial impact of the Black Power cultural revival was on the curricula of colleges and school systems. Before the late 1960s, the historian John Blassingame estimated, only five graduate history programs in the United States offered African American history courses and all of these were historically black colleges. By the middle 1970s, one observer estimated, there were Black Studies programs or courses in hundreds of colleges and universities across the country. These programs were often born in controversy; strikes and protests took place at schools as diverse as San Francisco State and Cornell University, and these schools would remain embattled throughout the 1970s and 1980s. By the latter decade, the numbers of Black Studies programs had begun to decline, but Black Studies and its offshoot, Afrocentric curricula, remained popular not only among many black college and university students and professors, but in the school departments of predominantly black cities like Detroit and Atlanta. Moreover, even most blacks who rejected what they perceived as the militant Afrocentrism of scholars like Molefi Asante remained fiercely committed to black pride and cultural recognition. Black Power may not have worked a political revolution, but it had worked a cultural one.
The black revolution that began in the 1960s reverberated far beyond the African American community. Native, Latino, and Asian Americans, inspired by the black example, also began to assert themselves and helped African Americans transform American ideas about race and ethnicity. Yet they did more as well. They “made” new panethnic groups that had never existed before—Native, Latino, and Asian American peoples, out of existing constituent tribal or national groups. With blacks, then, they worked to try to forge a new multicultural nation defined by the four major minorities set against a white majority. Once boasting millions of people in tribes stretching across a North America that they had once ruled alone, the census counted but 523,391 Native Americans in the United States in 1960. The intent of Federal policy in the twentieth century was to encourage Indian assimilation; however, it also unwittingly laid the groundwork for the panethnic Indian identity that emerged in the 1960s. Federally funded Indian boarding schools may have tried to suppress Indian cultures among their charges, but because they drew students from a variety of tribes they also acted as little intra-Indian “melting pots.” Policies aimed at terminating tribes and encouraging exodus from the reservation had the same effect. As Indians from all tribes gathered in the cities, they found each other there, discovered common grievances, and forged common organizations and institutions. Between 1952 and 1972, the federal government helped to relocate an estimated hundred thousand Indians to cities where they joined thousands more who had migrated to urban areas on their own.
As it would for other minorities (Latinos and Asian Americans), the black-led civil rights crusade and its successor, the Black Power movement, sparked a Native American movement that would transform the meaning of being Indian in America. Indian activism had little direct connection with either the black-led civil rights movement or later Black Power organizations, but both clearly inspired and helped shaped the new Native American protest. As Joanne Nagel states, “Red Power borrowed from civil rights organizational forms, rhetoric, and tactics but modified them to meet the specific needs and symbolic purposes of Indian grievances, targets, and locations.” Political stirrings were noticeable in the Indian community as early as 1961, when representatives from sixty tribes met at the University of Chicago to organize and lay out a common political strategy. The National Indian Youth Council (NIYC), formed out of that meeting, became a kind of nursery for later activists. In the mid-1960s, several tribes sponsored “fish-ins” to assert their claims to special treaty rights in disputed waters and territories. In 1966, Indians from several tribes gathered to protest and ultimately disrupt a meeting between the Secretary of the Interior, Stewart Udall, and the staff of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Santa Fe, New Mexico. That same year, it appears, Vine Deloria, Jr., used the phrase Red Power for the first time in a speech he made to the National Congress of American Indians.
It was, however, the occupation of Alcatraz Island in the middle of San Francisco Bay by scores of Indians on November 20, 1969, that sparked a new Red Power movement into life. The Alcatraz protesters pointed to a clause in an 1868 treaty between the Federal government and the Sioux to justify their occupation. That clause allowed Indians to claim unused federal property (in this case, the abandoned prison) on land that once had been tribal property but had been ceded to Federal authorities. The occupiers demanded that the island be remade into a center for Native American studies, an Indian Center for Ecology, and a training school. They stayed on the island for nineteen months, held news conferences, convened powwows and even launched occasional bow and arrow assaults on passing boats. The protest did not end until June 11, 1971, when Federal marshals removed the last fifteen remaining activists from the island. Alcatraz was a turning point in American Indian history, a decisive act giving birth to a Red Power movement. Indian activists like Deloria, Frances Wise, and George Horsecapture all agreed that Alcatraz “was a master stroke of Indian activism,” and “a major turning point.” Another veteran of Indian protest later told Joanne Nagel, “it started with Alcatraz; we got back our worth, our pride, our dignity, our humanity.” Alcatraz not only sparked the Red Power movement to life; it embodied the movement’s new panethnic identity. The activists who took over the island were largely urban Indians. They included Sioux, Navajo, Cherokee, Mohawks, Yakimas, and Omahas. As significantly, they self-consciously celebrated a new panethnic identity, calling themselves the “Indians of All Tribes,” who stated in their initial press release, “We the native Americans re-claim the land known as Alcatraz island in the name of all American Indians.”
Alcatraz touched off nearly a decade of Red Power protests across the country. Most were, like Alcatraz, “supratribal,” drawing on, and enacted in behalf of, a wide and various range of Native American peoples. Many were coordinated, or at least inspired, by a new Indian organization, the American Indian Movement (AIM), founded in Minneapolis in 1968 to fight for Indian civil rights and made up largely of urban Indians of diverse tribes. In 1970 and 1971, Indians occupied Fort Lawton and Fort Lewis, in Washington State, and Ellis Island, the old immigration depot in New York harbor, and tried to “invade” the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C. In 1972 caravans of Indians crossed the country in a well-publicized descent on the BIA’s offices. After 1972, protests took on a more violent tone and turned from civil rights to treaty rights issues. From February to May of 1973, activists took over the village of Wounded Knee, the site of the last great conflict in the Indian wars on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. Two Indians were killed and many more Indians and whites wounded in that protest as gun battles broke out between activists and federal officials. The last major protest event in the decade was the “Longest Walk,” another march on Washington in 1978.
By the time the Red Power protest movement had fizzled out in the late 1970s it had helped make Indians a far more powerful force in American politics than at any time in their twentieth-century history. The Indian population was too small to produce the kinds of gains in elected or appointed officials that marked African Americans’ rising political power. Yet Indians’ political clout was evident in the favorable legislation they wrung from Congress in the 1970s: the Self-Determination Act of 1975, the Health Care Improvement Act of 1976, and the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978. Federal spending on Native Americans also skyrocketed, rising 22 percent a year from the 1960s until the late 1970s. Money for urban Indians alone rose from $8.5 million to $95.6 million over the same period. The Red Power protesters helped this cause by stoking Native American solidarity and making Indian issues more visible. They may also have acted as a radical foil that more moderate, conventional organizations, like the National Congress of American Indians and the National Tribal Chairman’s Association, used to their advantage in negotiating with Congress and federal administrators. However they won their gains, Red Power produced tangible results.
Like Black Power, perhaps even more so, Red Power was as much a cultural clarion call as a battle cry for political struggle. Red Power’s call for a renewal of Indian pride was electric. One Native American remembered that this new spirit of Indian pride swept his reservation like a “tornado” in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Yet, as with Black Power, Red Power was not just in the air; it worked a revolution in Indian culture, spawning new institutions and organizations dedicated to a revival of Native American culture. Over the last thirty years tribes across the United States, for example, have set up their own museums to interpret their cultures and traditions to their own people and visitors alike. In 1998, there were over one hundred and fifty such museums listed in the Smithsonian Institution’s Tribal Museum Directory, and they meet regularly in a museum association known as the “Keepers of the Treasures.” As that name suggests, Native Americans have been as concerned with regaining control of their culture as with educating their own people and others about it. Native Americans have thus sought to retrieve sacred objects and ancestral remains from white-run institutions that had collected them for study and display. In 1990, Native Americans helped push through the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act to ensure such retrievals. In addition to museums, Indians have established their own radio shows, language classes, and tribal colleges. Today thirty-three tribal colleges, scattered from Michigan to California and Washington State to New Mexico, are members of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium. At the same time a number of major colleges and universities, including Arizona, California at Berkeley, Nebraska, Dartmouth, and Montana, have established Native American studies programs and many more offer courses in Native American history or literature.
These efforts did not merely revive specific tribal cultures and loyalties, however; Red Power political and cultural movements began to define a new people, a pantribal Indian people. In this way Red Power differed significantly from Black Power, which built on an existing race-wide consciousness of kind. Red Power emerged out of the Indian communities of the cities where tribal distinctions had blurred and intertribal marriage was common. From the beginning, organizations like AIM or NIYC pushed agendas that “emphasized the rights of all tribes and all Indians.” In part such pantribalism was simply a pragmatic recognition of how Indians could operate most effectively within the American political system. Leaders understood they could make a more powerful impact on the Federal government as a broad national Indian people than as local tribes. Deloria has argued, “Pan-Indianism … accepted the definition of Indians as an American minority group and sought to make the group an identifiable constituency with recognizable influence, a group to whom successful white politicians owed favors. Thus today, we often talk about the Indian vote … we hardly ever … speak of the tribal vote.” Yet through the Red Power movement, Pan-Indianism has become more than a political strategy; it has become a racial identity, emotionally felt and marked by distinctive “Indian” cultural customs. These included some rituals originally rooted in the cultures of specific tribes, like the sweat lodge, that eventually came to transcend their tribal origins and became “one of the things [all] Indians did.” “By the 1970s,” Deloria suggests, “it was possible to find wholly new kinds of behavior generally accepted as Indian.” Indeed, as early as 1973, a survey of Arapahoe and Shoshone high school students in Wyoming found that almost all of them identified themselves “supratribally” as well as tribally—as Native Americans or American Indians as well as Shoshone or Arapahoe. The results of the political and cultural mobilization of Native Americans were nothing short of revolutionary. Indians, pounded into passivity and hounded towards extinction in the 1950s, became confident, aggressive, and often successful political players by the 1970s. As important, buoyed by political protest, they regained pride in their heritage and helped black Americans challenge older American conceptions of assimilation. The revival of Indian pride had a remarkable effect on the Indian population. Dwindling down through the first part of the twentieth century, the Native American population began to grow after 1930, initially slowly, but by the 1960s and 1970s very rapidly. Indeed, between 1960 and 1990, the Indian population grew from a little over 500,000 to nearly 1.9 million. Natural increase did not account for this skyrocketing growth; it involved nothing less than the “deassimilation” of hundreds of thousands of Americans; once ashamed of or indifferent to their native roots, they were now eager to re-claim their native past.
Latinos had lived within the continental boundaries of the United States before Anglo- or African Americans, but it was not until the twentieth century that migration from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and other Latin American countries began to make Latinos a formidable force. Integration into world markets provoked economic dislocations throughout much of Latin America and many of the same countries suffered from the disruptions of war and revolution. Meanwhile, American economic growth accelerated, and improved communications raised awareness of the contrast between North America’s apparent promise and Latin America’s plight. By the 1970s and 1980s the urgency to migrate grew so strong that thousands crossed the southern border of the United States surreptitiously, and millions settled into a permanent illegal status after such secret crossings or after their visas for temporary stays ran out. Migration from Latin America to the United States, legal and illegal, thus boomed in the late twentieth century. Migrants from Mexico numbered less than fifty thousand in the 1910s, increased significantly in the 1920s, but fell back during the depression when some Mexican immigrants were even forced to return home. In the 1950s Mexican migration began to pick up again, rapidly accelerating by the 1970s. In the 1950s, about 250,000 Mexicans came to the United States, but by the 1970s the number increased to 650,000, and by the 1980s to over 1.5 million. Puerto Rican migration first reached significant size in the 1940s, and by 1950 there were about 300,000 first- and second-generation Puerto Ricans in the United States. By 1970, because of migration and natural increase, that population had quadrupled to almost 1.4 million and by 1980 had risen to over 2 million. Cubans had nineteenth-century roots in Florida, but the vast majority of today’s Cuban Americans or their parents or grandparents came to the United States after Fidel Castro took over Cuba in 1959. From that year to 1990 an estimated eight hundred thousand Cubans fled to the United States. Finally, civil war and economic depression sent Salvadorans and Guatemalans to the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1986, 138,000 Salvadorans, 51,000 Guatemalans and 15,000 Nicaraguans applied for amnesty under the terms of the new immigration law that went into effect that year. By 1990 there were an estimated 22 million Latinos in the United States and the number was rising so quickly that some experts predicted that there would be well over 40 million by 2010.
Like African Americans, Latinos lived on the margins of American economic, political, and cultural life until the 1960s, and, as with African Americans, a revolution in Latino life in the United States began in that decade. Mexican and Puerto Rican struggles for civil rights extended back into the early twentieth century, but the successes of the black-led civil rights movement inspired and energized Latinos as never before. Cesar Chavez and his United Farmworkers Union were among the most successful of the new organizations. Engaging in its first strike in 1965 and winning its first contract battles in 1966, Chavez’s UFW was more like a social movement than a union. Learning from King and the black civil rights movements, the UFW did not launch a single strike but a series of continuous strikes blending into a single struggle on behalf of Mexican American farm workers. Chavez also pledged the UFW to nonviolence, a major break from Mexican traditions, and deliberately cultivated the sympathies of a broader public, reaching it through television and tying it to the movement through boycotts and volunteerism. Employing the same tactics as King’s SCLC, the UFW’s strikes began to blend into a broader civil rights struggle. The UFW would have a checkered subsequent history, but, as Geoffrey Fox has said, “from this period [the late 1960s and afterward] in part, because of Cesar Chavez’s strategic discoveries, and in larger part because of the structural changes that had made the movement possible, the history of Mexican American political consciousness ceases to be a separate story from that of other protesting groups in the United States.”
In the turbulence of the 1960s, trends of growing group assertion and solidarity in the Latino community paralleled the rise of Black Power among African Americans. As in the black community the new militancy appealed first to younger activists. In 1969, the National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference met for the first time in Denver and endorsed the idea of a national Chicano political party. Shortly thereafter, students in San Antonio founded La Rada Agnate (the United People) to contest local elections. The conference also heard the Chicano poet Aurita proclaim the Spiritual Plan of Aztlan, a vague claim to the American Southwest as the original homeland of the Mexica, Aztec, and other ancient Mexican peoples. In Los Angeles another group, the Brown Berets, emerged out of a church youth group, seeking to pull young Mexican Americans together into a coherent political force. Halfway across the country in Chicago, Illinois, a Puerto Rican gang called the Young Lords began to move from fights over street turf to community organizing. Jose Jiminez, their leader, had been impressed by black protest and inspired by Malcolm X while serving time in jail. By 1969, the Young Lords had established branches in New York and later Philadelphia. Like SNCC or CORE, these organizations led the shift to a more militant Latino politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a politics of group solidarity, pride, and self-assertion—“Brown Power.”
Yet just as importantly, they saw themselves as members of more than just their own national groups—Mexicans or Puerto Ricans, for example. There were, of course, the black models that they saw as allies in their liberation struggle. Yet they also began to see the even closer links that potentially bound Puerto Ricans and Mexican Americans as Latinos—speakers of the same Spanish language. A riot in the Puerto Rican neighborhood of Chicago, provoked by conflicts with the police, eventually sparked the creation of a Spanish language community organization that served both the city’s large Puerto Rican and Mexican American communities. In 1969, Jiminez and the Young Lords moved further afield, traveling to Los Angeles to link up with the leaders of the National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference and the Brown Berets. These were only small groups of young people, but they were pulling out of the radical rhetoric and ideology of the era and using a language of solidarity and liberation to forge a new panethnic identity for the Latino community in the United States. Geoffrey Fox suggests that “it was in the name of solidarity that various Chicano, Puerto Rican, and other Latino groups began exploring the alliances that would become key to building a wider Hispanic identity.”
As in the African American community, Latino political mobilization followed quickly upon the emergence of group consciousness. Several groups emerged in the 1970s to encourage Latino voter registration—including, for example, the Southwest Voter Registration and Education Project (1974) and the National Puerto Rican Coalition (1977). The success of such groups is hard to measure. On the one hand, the percentage of Latinos of voting age registered to vote did not increase between 1972 and 1988. Indeed, it fell from a little over 44 percent to 35 percent in that time. Nevertheless, the absolute number of Latinos registered and participating in the election process rose significantly, simply because the volume of Latino migration to the country was so huge. These numbers and a new Latino self-confidence paid off in an increase in elected officials and significant political appointments. By 1993, there were 196 Hispanic mayors in the United States and more than fourteen hundred municipal officials. The latter figure represented a gain of 45 percent from 1983. Progress was, however, most clearly visible at the Federal level. The number of Latino congressmen rose from three in 1961 to seventeen in 1993. Many of the gains came in the 1980s and 1990s when Latinos picked up eleven seats. As early as 1979, Latino politicians of all backgrounds had created their own organization: the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. This increasing electoral strength in turn prompted an accompanying surge in federal appointments. While President Johnson appointed only three Latinos to the federal bench, President Carter selected nine Latino justices.
Again, as for Blacks and Native Americans, Latino or Hispanic Power, or its constituent elements—“Brown,” Chicano or “Borriqueno” (Puerto Rican) Power, was as much a cultural movement as a political one. Latinos, like African Americans, challenged prevailing notions of assimilation, attempted to construct or preserve the integrity of group culture, and demanded recognition and respect for their cultural difference. Also as with African Americans, this effort created and drew strength from Hispanic or Latino ethnic studies programs in universities around the United States. In 1984, one survey estimated that 23 percent of higher education institutions in America offered courses in Hispanic studies and 6 percent permitted undergraduates to major in Hispanic or Latino Studies. Frank Bonilla, founder and longtime director of one such Latino Studies Center at the City University of New York, contended that such programs were necessary to rectify the distortions and demeaning stereotypes of standard accounts of Latinos, to help create a Latino intelligentsia, and to maintain a Latino “perspective” in the study of American life and community. In some universities, particularly in California, such programs were Chicano Studies, in the northeast, Puerto Rican Studies, and in the Southeast, at Florida International University, for example, Cuban Studies. Yet some programs broadened to encompass the cultures of a variety of nationalities within the broad framework of Latino Studies.
As with African Americans, Indians, and Latino Americans, a new Asian American solidarity and self-confidence emerged in the critical years of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Asian American “movement” of that era differed from the other three in a number of ways. The battlegrounds for Asian Americans were more likely to be campuses than neighborhood streets, for example. The initial major battles were the Third World Strikes, at San Francisco State College in the fall and winter of 1968 and 1969 and the University of California at Berkeley in the winter of 1969. William We suggests, “probably more than any other single event, the Third World Strike at San Francisco State symbolized the potential of Asian American activism.” The critical organizations in these early battles, the Intercollegiate Chinese for Social Action, the Asian American Political Alliance in California, and Asian Americans for Action on the East Coast drew heavily from college students. This did not mean that the movement had no links to local Chinatowns and other Asian American communities, or that students were not interested in making those links. Indeed, in 1970, members of the AAA established the Asian American Community Center in New York’s Chinatown and began work to preserve the neighborhood. Still, the initiative in the Asian American movement came largely from the campuses. Another important difference was the importance of the antiwar movement in provoking the new Asian American consciousness. In part, this reflected the movement’s campus roots, but it also reflected the special significance of a war in Asia and its racial consequences for Asian people in the United States. Nevertheless, as We notes, “Although the antiwar movement politicized a generation of Asian Americans, the Black Power movement moved them toward the goals of racial equality, social justice, and political empowerment.” At the “Asian American Experience in America—Yellow Identity Conference” held in Berkeley in 1969, Isao Fujimoto talked about the need “to shatter the myth of assimilation and to prove how the racist, colonialist majority exploited the minorities.”
If the Asian American movement was inspired by Black Power, however, it undertook the same kind of effort as the Latino movement did to raise the consciousness of Asian Americans from various groups and simultaneously knit them together into a single panethnic entity, The names of student organizations suggested this deliberate attempt to forge a new group. Indeed, the Asian American Political Alliance may have been the first organization in American history to use the term Asian American. The choice of the name suggested both the rejection of the western “Oriental,” as blacks had rejected Negro, and the recognition, as Yuji Ichioka argued, that “If we rallied behind the Asian American banner … we could extend our influence.”
While young Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino Americans caught the spirit of a new “Yellow Power,” dramatic changes in immigration to America promised to make that rallying cry more than an empty slogan. Asian immigrants had been all but excluded from the continental United States since the turn of the century. Grudging acknowledgment of Cold War constraints allowed a small trickle of Chinese and other immigrants to enter the United States in the 1950s. In 1965 Congress completely overhauled the immigration laws. Inspired by the civil rights movement, the historic new law did away with the old noxious racist quotas that favored northwestern Europeans. Nevertheless, few believed that the new law would produce any significant changes in the origins of immigrants. While signing the bill, President Johnson remarked, “The bill we sign today is not a revolutionary bill,” and Congressman Emmanuel Celler argued that abolition of nationality quotas would not end continued European dominance among the immigrants. Yet taking advantage of the new law’s opportunities for educational, occupational, and family reunification exemptions, immigrants poured into the United States from Asia. In the 1970s, millions of Laotian, Cambodian, and Vietnamese refugees fleeing the debacle in Indochina added to this already surging immigrant tide from Asia. The number of Asian Americans thus rose more than 140 percent in the 1970s and more than 100 percent in the 1980s.
These numbers gave the Asian American community more political heft than they had ever enjoyed before. That heft, and the new sense of political consciousness among the Asian American leadership, translated into some important political gains for Asian Americans. By 1992, for example, there were nine Asian American congressmen. Asian Americans also won local offices in Monterey Park, Gardena, Cerritos, and Torrance, California, in the 1980s as well as the governorship of Washington in 1996. Hawai‘i is the heartland of Asian American politics, however. In 1990, the Governor, Lieutenant Governor, and fifty-four state legislators were Asian Americans—largely Japanese Americans—in Hawai‘i. Despite recent gains, the Asian American population has not increased enough to give the group the kind of voting power that African or Latino Americans can boast of in many states. Furthermore, Asian Americans, particularly the new immigrants, have been, if anything, even less likely to register to vote than members of the other two groups. A survey of California voters in 1990 found that only 39 percent of Asian Americans were registered to vote, compared to 65 percent for whites, 58 percent for blacks and 42 percent for Latinos. On the other hand, Asian American politicians have some advantages the other groups do not. If they cannot tap as many votes, such politicians can and have tapped the rich financial resources of upwardly mobile Asian Americans. Asian Americans, as Yen Le Espiritu points out, have been more likely to donate money to campaigns than other groups, and Asian American politicians have parlayed those resources into success even when they have run in overwhelmingly non-Asian states or districts.
Ethnic Studies have played an important role for the Asian American movement, perhaps an even more important role than in the African American or Latino American movements. Indeed, the demand for Asian American Studies was the principal goal of the Movement’s first major battles, the San Francisco State and California-Berkeley strikes. Students also staged a three-day takeover of a hall at the City University of New York in 1971 to force the establishment of Asian American Studies Programs. William We suggests that the initial willingness of colleges and universities to set up Asian American studies programs lasted only until about 1973, and many Asian American programs disappeared in the late 1970s and 1980s. Yet, he points out, there was a noticeable revival in the 1980s, producing new programs at M.I.T. and new courses and programs at a number of other East Coast colleges. The dramatic increase in Asian American student enrollments fueled this resurgence of interest in schools all across the nation. Like Latino and Black Studies professors, Asian American Studies scholars have sought to “raise the ethnic consciousness and self awareness of Asian American students” and to challenge perceived assimilationist or mono-cultural biases in the teaching of what America has been or should be. Such efforts, as for many Latino programs, have also helped shape a panethnic Asian American entity by linking together the experiences of Chinese, Korean, Japanese, or other groups by, as one Asian American writer has contended, demonstrating “how Amerika screwed [all of] us.”
The late 1960s and early 1970s were a watershed for African, Native, Latino, and Asian Americans. The small radical organizations proclaiming Black, Red, Brown, or Yellow Power foreshadowed broader political mobilization and cultural revivals among blacks, Latinos, and Asian Americans. Politically, the high-point of this multicultural coalition probably came with Jesse Jackson’s campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988, but through the 1980s and into the 1990s, representatives of all three groups continued to battle for cultural recognition by urging adoption of new course requirements or curriculum changes. Most of these efforts met stiff opposition from many whites, however, and in these and other battles over busing, immigration reform, or affirmative action, or through polarizing events like the O. J. Simpson Trial or the Los Angeles race riots, the boundaries between these groups and the white majority became hotly contested battlegrounds.
Such fights helped sharpen the identities and raise the consciousness of many minorities, but they also helped define a new “whiteness” in America. For while Asian, Latino, and African Americans were mobilizing over the last thirty-five years, whites were changing, too. In part they changed because of an internal transformation and in part as reaction to the newly self-conscious minorities, particularly African Americans. Because of these internal changes and external influences, ethnic and religious identities took on entirely new meanings among white Americans.
The initial response of many white Americans to the tumult of the late 1960s was to join in the celebration of ethnic roots, the assertion of ethnic group solidarity, and the challenge to old assimilationist ideals. The emergence of neighborhood activists like Barbara Mikulski in Baltimore or Stephen Adubato in Newark, the creation of organizations like Geno Baroni’s Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs and a sudden flurry of books and articles by writers like Michael Novak or Richard Gambino seemed to herald a “white ethnic revival.” Ironically, this revival represented both a resistance to the new challenge of black and minority power and an appropriation of Black Power rhetoric and ideas of ethnic assertion and pride. Most observers believe that the white ethnic revival was but a temporary interlude. Joshua Fishman suggests that by the late 1970s the ethnic boom seemed to have subsided considerably.
While the ethnic revival flashed and then sputtered, a more long-lasting and fundamental revolution appeared to be remaking the meaning of whiteness in America. Over the course of the period from the 1960s to the 1980s, white ethnic neighborhoods would all but disappear in American inner cities and, though “ghosts” of such ethnic residential clusters reappeared in some suburbs during this period, they too proved transient. Perhaps more important, intermarriage rates among white groups skyrocketed. These were not just rates for marriages across ethnic boundaries, which had been steadily rising among most nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European migrant groups since the 1930s and 1940s; these were rates also for marriage across religious boundaries, which had remained low through the 1950s. The “triple melting pot” of Americanizing Protestants, Catholics, and Jews had fully emerged out of the old ethnic identities only in the 1950s, but by the 1960s and 1970s even it seemed to be fading away. While European Americans might still call themselves Irish, Italian, or Russian, and certainly Catholic or Jewish after the 1960s, those identities, even the religious ones, were increasingly freely chosen, not socially or politically determined. The social boundaries separating these groups were now lightly defended and porous.
There were both long- and short-term causes for these dramatic changes. The long-term causes lay in the rising social mobility of white ethnic groups. There is evidence that the older groups, like Irish and German Americans, achieved occupational and educational parity with white native-stock Americans sometime in the early twentieth century, and some newer groups, like Jewish Americans, had even surpassed native-stock Americans by the 1940s. The rise of unions, World War II prosperity, and the GI Bill significantly accelerated upward mobility for white ethnic Americans from the 1930s through the 1950s. By the 1950s and 1960s, Catholics and Jews were cashing in on this occupational progress and moving out of cities to the suburbs in increasing numbers—again, abetted by federal help from FHA and other programs. Such white ethnics had also achieved significant political power, as vital parts of the Democratic Party’s New Deal coalition, as well as cultural power, as Jewish studio owners and the Catholic Church (through the Legion of Decency) consolidated their influence over America’s film industry.
Yet it was the tumultuous events and movements of the 1960s that catalyzed these long-term trends and all but collapsed the already weakening boundaries separating white ethnics and religious groups. Kennedy’s election and martyrdom and the Second Vatican Council’s ecumenism, for example, undermined the old mutual enmity between Catholics and Protestants that had been a premise of political and social organization in the urban North since the nineteenth century.
One of the most remarkable and yet often overlooked trends of the last thirty-five years, reflecting these collapsing boundaries, has been the decline of the “Protestant Establishment.” This does not mean that an economic elite, much less an elite class, has disappeared in America. Indeed, on the contrary, there is substantial evidence that the richest Americans have become richer and more powerful over the last twenty years as they added significantly to their proportion of the nation’s wealth. That elite also remains overwhelmingly white, despite some minor inroads from Asians, Blacks, and Latinos. Yet that elite is by no means still exclusively Protestant. Not only Catholics, but Jews have moved into the corporate elite and have began to fill up the preparatory schools and men’s eating clubs that make up its organizational subcommunity. G. William Domhoff, long-time analyst of American elites, suggests that Catholics had penetrated the elite as early as the 1960s and Jews, he noted in 1998, “are [now] not merely ‘the most middle class’ and the most affluent white immigrant group. They have become full-blooded members of the power elite …” Moreover, though much of the elite organizational subculture—the men’s eating clubs, preparatory schools, and country clubs—endures or even thrives, there is little or no recognition of the public authority of a social elite now in the United States. Indeed, as David Brooks has recently suggested, members of the new elite themselves do not believe in the social authority of elites.
The elite has changed in America for several reasons. One has been the changing nature of the economy—the rise in recent decades of sectors like computers or communications open to new entrepreneurs and the stagnation of the old, corporate-dominated heavy industries. But the civil rights and antiwar movements set the process in motion in the 1960s. Both encouraged what would become a broadly pervasive skepticism about authority in American culture. The civil rights movement also made it difficult to justify open racial or ethnic exclusion or prejudice at any level for any group, helping Catholic and Jewish Americans into the upper reaches of economy and society.
If, ironically, civil rights helped undermine the legitimacy of ethnic discrimination among upper-class whites, the Black Power, Latino, and Asian American movements also helped prompt racial solidarity among working-class and lower middle-class whites. The new challenge—African, Latino, and Asian Americans fighting for equality in arenas of politics and society that had once been closed to them—encouraged whites to forget ethnic differences and band together to resist perceived threats to jobs, neighborhoods, or simply status. This had been going on for a long time. White resistance to African American competition in employment and housing ignited violence in Chicago, Detroit, and other city neighborhoods in the 1950s. Yet it surfaced more broadly in the 1960s and 1970s, driving groups like lower middle-class Jews and working-class Italians together, in the embrace of a vaguely defined whiteness, in embattled neighborhoods like Canarsie in New York. In the new racial competition of the 1970s and 1980s, white simply made more sense, seemed a more rational and functional identity to Irish or Italian or Polish ethnics as conflicts between whites and racial others eclipsed older ethnic rivalries.
And yet, if the older white ethnic identities ceased to be “rational” or functional, seemed no longer to mean much in contests for power and resources, or even to reflect social realities in terms of group institutional infrastructure and endogamy, they nonetheless did not die. Indeed, white ethnic identities have never thrived as much in American public life as they have in the last thirty years. The politics and protests of the white ethnic revival might have petered out by the middle to late 1970s, but the cultural production of the revival continues to this day. As Marilyn Halter has documented, celebration of racial and ethnic pride has become big business, spawning products from key chains, ethnic cookbooks, and greeting cards to homeland tours and hosts of ethnic festivals. She points out that much of the new ethnic marketing is directed at the multicultural minorities, but a substantial amount of the new ethnic trade targets white ethnic groups like the Jews and Irish. Genealogy, once the preserve of the old Protestant elite, has become a hobby for hundreds of thousands of more common folk. The web site of the National Genealogical Society, for example, lists Irish, Jewish, Italian, Canadian, Belgian, and Norwegian American genealogical societies or resources as well as links to traditional genealogical groups such as the Daughters of the American Revolution. Like black, Asian, and Latino studies, white ethnic studies programs sprouted up in universities and colleges. As early as 1973, 135 colleges and universities offered courses in the history or culture of one or more of the white ethnic American groups. Irish Studies, for example, has emerged as an academic discipline only within the last forty years. All the major Irish Studies programs at Boston College, Catholic University, the College of St. Thomas, New York University, and Notre Dame have been founded in the last forty years, as has the American Conference for Irish Studies, the national academic organization devoted to the encouragement of scholarship and teaching in Irish Studies. As Lawrence McCaffrey, one of the founders of the Conference, suggested recently, “In American colleges and universities, Irish Studies enjoys a prestige unimaginable forty five years ago.”
Perhaps the most striking evidence of this ethnic cultural revival, however, has been the explosion of white ethnic images in American television and movies. Images of Italian Americans, for example, have become far more numerous and prominent in the movies than ever before. Films featuring Italian Americans since the 1960s have included The Godfather and its two sequels; Rocky and its four sequels; First Blood, featuring the character “John Rambo,” and its two sequels; Mean Streets; Raging Bull; Goodfellas; Moonstruck; and Saturday Night Fever. All of these films were spectacular financial successes, or critically acclaimed, or both. Five of the films—Rocky, The Godfather, Saturday Night Fever, Rambo: First Blood, and Rocky IV—were ranked among the top fifty money-making films of all time at one time or another in the 1980s. In 1988, Moonstruck finished ninth among the top-grossing films of the year; Rambo III was thirteenth. In 1990 The Godfather Part III, Rocky V, and Goodfellas were all among the top fifty grossing films.
Some of the profits from these movies were as unexpected as they were huge. Rocky was made on a shoestring, $1 million, but grossed more than $56 million at the box office. A year later Saturday Night Fever, made quickly and cheaply to cash in on the disco-dancing craze, earned over $70 million. Since 1972, three films about Italian Americans—The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, and Rocky—have won Academy Awards for best picture. Little wonder, then, that Richard Alba has pointed out that Italian Americans have become“Hollywood’s favorite ethnic group” in the last thirty years.
Italian Americans were not the only ethnics to enjoy a new prominence in American movies and television. Depictions of Jews, for example, had been surprisingly rare in the movies before the 1960s. Indeed, Lester Friedman notes that the number of films about Jews actually fell to an all-time low in the 1950s. Before the tumult of the 1960s, Jewish studio owners and producers worried about the public’s response to Jewish characters, but in the postassimilation age, Jews and other ethnics became much more marketable. In the 1960s, Friedman points out, more films were made about Jews than in any other decade in the history of motion pictures.
In many cases, the new depictions of ethnics still traded on older stereotypes—Italian gangsters and Irish cops, for example. Yet most depictions were more complex than they had been before. Friedman suggests that the new wave of films about Jews presented “an unparalleled range of Jewish characters,” and even many of the Italian American criminal characters featured on screen seemed to provoke public fascination, even sympathy, in the new era. Mary Waters reports from her surveys in the 1980s that people of mixed ancestry, with English or German as well as Italian forefathers, for example, invariably identified as Italian. They saw, she said, “Italian as a good ancestry to have … because they [Italians] have good food and a warm family life.”
If white ethnics seemed more visible, more celebrated after the 1960s than ever before, most social scientists nonetheless dismiss the new interest in white ethnic identities as little more than a consumer fad. Joanne Nagel argues that symbolic white ethnic identities hardly have the same meaning for white ethnics as the “mandatory ethnicity” imposed on African, Asian, or Latino Americans. Mary Waters agrees, contending that for white ethnics “ethnicity is not something that influences their lives unless they want it to” and that it “cannot be the same as an identity that results from and is nurtured by societal exclusion and rejection.” Marilyn Halter and Joshua Fishman take the new white ethnic identifications more seriously but agree that such allegiances do not mean the same as they once did, when they represented real political and economic interests and identifications were forged in competition for power and resources. Halter locates the new ethnic identifications in “a search for recognizable or familiar points of reference in a cold, impersonal, and fragmented world … a longing to feel included.”
Such explanations may underestimate the importance of white ethnic identities and overlook the critical, if new, ways in which white ethnic identities serve their members’ interests. To claim loyalty to their specific ethnic group may not have helped or hindered the upward mobility of Irish Americans or Italian Americans after the 1960s, for example. Yet understanding themselves as part of a broad tradition of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European immigrants may, in fact, have been very useful to third- or fourth-generation Irish or Italians in the late twentieth century. Matthew Jacobson uses the term Ellis Island Whiteness to define such people’s identities. Ellis Island whites are not just people from a specific European nation but all the people who share a story of immigrant flight from Europe to America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It does not matter whether it is an Irish story or an Italian or Jewish one, only that it is part of the same great epic of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European immigration to America. In the thirty years since the 1960s, Ellis Island Whiteness, grounded in this heroic story, has served the interests of such people well. As Jacobson suggests, their story of immigration, discrimination, and ultimate success has provided them a rhetorical weapon to help fend off African American or other minority claims for power or resources. First, it absolves white ethnics from responsibility for the establishment of America’s oppressive racial regime because they arrived long after that regime was instituted through slavery. More important, this myth of a white ethnic triumph over poverty and against prejudice also offers a rebuttal to black or other minority demands for special government redress for sufferings of discrimination. Ellis Island Whiteness, however, also helped white ethnics make successful claims for full acceptance on their own terms to places in the highest ranks of American society. In the 1950s, ambitious white ethnics believed that they had to hide their backgrounds and conform to the cultural dictates of a Protestant establishment if they wished to gain acceptance by the WASP elite; such tensions were a commonplace, for example, for the Irish American characters in the writer John O’Hara’s novels. If white ethnics had continued to hold that belief in the 1960s and after, the old Protestant Establishment might not have collapsed so swiftly. Yet in the 1970s and 1980s, white ethnics no longer thought such conformity necessary. They now claimed a heritage as good as any other, and a series of national commemorations from the nation’s Bicentennial in 1976 through the Centennial of the Statue of Liberty in 1986 confirmed their claim by establishing the Ellis Island epic as one of the foundational stories of the nation. The renovation of Ellis Island in the early 1990s and its elevation to the status of a national icon, rivaling or even surpassing Plymouth Rock or Jamestown in popularity, capped this rise of Ellis Island Whiteness. In Jacobson’s terms, Ellis Island Whiteness had routed Mayflower Whiteness.
The emergence of these new multicultural and white ethnic identities provoked several issues, which became important points of conflict between whites and minorities, especially African Americans, over the course of the 1970s and 1980s. Such issues did not erupt outside of the political process but were enmeshed in it. The two major political parties tried to capitalize on these issues throughout the era in order to gain political advantage. Generally, the Republicans played upon them to try to pry whites from both North and South out of the Democratic Party and make the GOP the nation’s majority party. In this effort they had some success—at least initially—rolling up big election victories behind Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Political competition over these issues, however, did more than disrupt the partisan balance, it helped exacerbate ethnic tensions, sharpen group identities, and charge boundaries.
The first such issue was school busing—busing children from one neighborhood to another in order to racially integrate local schools. The Supreme Court decisions at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s helped shift the battlegrounds of school integration from self-consciously legislated school segregation in the South to the segregation of schools in the North, reflecting residential segregation that school departments permitted or even encouraged. Court-ordered desegregation in Detroit, and particularly in Boston, encountered fierce, often violent, resistance from whites in the early and mid-1970s. Busing controversies, however, extended beyond a few cities to become critical issues in national politics as George Wallace and later Richard Nixon took up opposition to it. Nationally, polls found that three quarters of whites surveyed opposed busing throughout the 1970s.
While the struggle over busing rose to a climax in the 1970s, a new conflict over immigration began brewing in that decade. Few of the older anti-immigration groups like the Daughters of the American Revolution played a critical role in the new anti-immigration fights, and there seemed to be less interest in overturning the 1965 immigration reform law’s repeal of the older racist quotas, than on enforcing the restrictions of that and subsequent laws more rigorously. In particular, the movement sought to limit, and perhaps even roll back, the tide of illegal or undocumented aliens who had come to the United States in such great numbers since the mid-1960s. Opponents of illegal immigrants lodged a wide range of grievances against them, but one of the most popular was the suggestion that illegal immigrants were costing taxpayers in welfare, public schooling, and public supported health services. As early as 1975, the state of Texas tried to bar undocumented children from attending local schools. More seriously, in 1994, California voters passed a referendum, Proposition 187, to deny public services to illegal aliens. Courts overturned such laws, but the size of the majority for the California referendum, 59 percent to 41 percent, suggested the power of anti-immigrant feelings in the state at that time. Most legislative efforts to restrict or roll back illegal immigration focused not on the existence of public services for illegal immigrants but on employment of them. Again, as early as 1971, states like California passed laws to punish employers who hired illegals. Throughout the seventies and eighties Congress considered several bills that would have sanctioned employers but passed none of them. Sentiment, however, was strong enough to push the legislation through one or the other of the chambers throughout that period. From 1982 to 1985, congressional efforts focused on the Simpson-Mazzoli Bill, named after Republican Senator Alan Simpson and Democratic Congressman Romano Mazzoli. A version of this bill, a compromise mix of employer sanctions with amnesty for illegals who were longtime residents of the nation, passed as the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986.
Though most critics of illegal immigration were not overtly racist or opposed to immigration per se, the campaign against illegal immigrants exacerbated ethnic tensions. As David Reimers notes, the new nativism’s focus on illegals may have funneled a broader disquiet with increasing immigration onto the most vulnerable target. Given that illegal immigrants were overwhelmingly (though by no means exclusively) Latino or Asian, the conflicts over them fed and fed off racial and ethnic tensions. Moreover, some of the more vociferous critics of immigration, like the political commentator and presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan, trod very close to the old racism when they openly questioned the ability of newer immigrants to assimilate into American society.
Struggles over affirmative action began as early as the 1960s and have lasted to the present. The phrase affirmative action may have appeared first in an executive order issued by John F. Kennedy in 1961, but the first meaningful argument in behalf of the concept came in Lyndon Johnson’s famous speech at Howard University in 1965. “It is not enough,” Johnson said, “just to open the gates of opportunity … we seek … not just equality as a right and theory, but equality as a fact and result.” Johnson later issued an executive order of his own, Order no. 11246, authorizing new federal agencies and empowering old ones to create minority hiring requirements for the government and for businesses with government contracts. Ironically, however, it was the Nixon administration’s Philadelphia Plan, requiring Philadelphia construction firms under federal contract to meet specific goals for minority hiring, that became the most important first step in implementing the executive order. By 1971, the Supreme Court had agreed to the basic factor underlying the affirmative action concept: that statistics reflecting disproportionately few minority employees may prove discrimination even when overt evidence of discrimination could not be found.
By then, however, affirmative action had also become controversial. Though the Nixon Administration had introduced the Philadelphia Plan in 1969, within a few years President Nixon began to court the growing ranks of affirmative action’s opponents. White workers and students claiming reverse discrimination continued to bring suits against governments, businesses, or universities in the courts, despite the Supreme Court’s earlier decision. The most celebrated case was Alan Bakke’s claim against the University of California at Davis Medical School. Bakke argued that he was a stronger applicant than some of the minority students accepted by the School. While the court agreed with Bakke in this instance it did not overturn affirmative action programs in general as a means of overcoming discrimination against minorities. Nevertheless, affirmative action has remained controversial. Ronald Reagan attacked it in his first press conference, and his administration led an open assault on Executive Order 11246. More recently, conservatives in California placed the issue of affirmative action on the state ballot in 1996 and won their battle, thereby preventing the state or its agencies from employing affirmative action policies.
A host of other issues, incidents, and events have emerged or erupted over the last thirty years that have marked off and reinforced the racial and ethnic boundaries of the new multicultural era. The educational curriculum has been one particularly hotly contested battleground. Probably the most broadly divisive question in cultural contests over education has been the issue of the primacy of the English language. In the face of extensive immigration, several older-stock white organizations have sought to reaffirm the nation’s commitment to English as the nation’s official language. Some states have responded to the pressure by passing resolutions confirming the official status of English. Most battles over language have centered on the practical issues of languages in schools and, in particular, bilingual education programs. Californians, taking advantage of their easy referendum process, voted to dismantle those programs in 1998, but the issue has been controversial throughout the Southwest, particularly in metropolitan areas with large immigrant populations. Less long-lasting, but indicative of the cultural tensions emerging over school curricula, was the controversy over Ebonics, “Black English” or “African American Vernacular English” as linguists describe it. That controversy erupted when the Oakland School Board encouraged its teachers to begin with an understanding of the African American vernacular to teach students standard English. Critics saw it as a kind of African American bilingual program—or worse, as an indulgence of improper English.
Beyond the fights over language, there were also struggles over history standards and new social studies curricula, such as the proposed New York State Social Studies curriculum in 1991. These conflicts ran all the way up the educational hierarchy and across the country, provoking battles at California-Berkeley and San Francisco State, Cornell, and California State-Northridge over courses and academic programs from the 1960s through the 1990s.
Many of these battles in the culture wars took place in rarefied academic circles and may have seemed distant to ordinary Americans, but there was plentiful evidence of more pervasive ethnic and racial polarization. Small riots broke out periodically in cities across the country from the seventies to the nineties, and turf fights in white or minority neighborhoods were common. Lynching also continued: as late as 1980, twelve lynchings of blacks by white mobs or vigilantes were reported in Mississippi alone.
In the 1990s race seemed as important as it had ever been in the United States. Three incidents in that decade underlined and reinforced the stubborn persistence of racial and ethnic animosity. In 1992 Los Angeles policemen arrested an African American man, Rodney King, for a driving violation. A videotape of the arrest showed that some of the officers mauled King while apprehending him, but a jury in the largely white and conservative Simi Valley suburb of Los Angeles found them not guilty of police brutality. On April 29, 1992, shortly after the verdict became known publicly, minority neighborhoods in Los Angeles exploded in angry violence over the verdict. When the violence subsided, fifty-eight people were dead, more than thirteen thousand were arrested, and more than one thousand buildings were destroyed. About two years after the King riot, Nicole Brown Simpson, former wife of O. J. Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman were found dead at Nicole Simpson’s home in a Los Angeles suburb. O. J. Simpson, a legendary football player and television and film personality, was charged with the crime. Combining sex, celebrity, and violence, the trial drew unprecedented attention. The case, however, was no mere media ballyhoo; it had serious racial overtones and became both a stark reflection of the depth of racial division and an aggravation of that animosity. Polls revealed not only public interest among both blacks and whites but almost diametrically opposed opinions between the races about Simpson’s guilt. The Simpson case raised once again the persistent issue of white police prejudice in the testimony of policeman Mark Fuhrman, who led the investigation of Simpson. More important, the case’s alleged black male violence against a white woman told a story that lay at the heart of the oldest and darkest fears of white Americans’ racial imagination. In the midst of Simpson’s trial, Lewis Farrakhan, former Nation of Islam minister outspoken in his condemnations of whites (particularly Jews), called for a million black men to march on Washington on October 16, 1995, in order to “recommit and renew our determination to do God’s will and seek justice, freedom, and empowerment for our people.” A million men did not come, but hundreds of thousands did. Here again, opinion surveys revealed a sharp racial split: blacks applauded the Million Man March, but whites, suspicious of Farrakhan’s militant and racially hostile rhetoric, were skeptical.
As recently as the mid-1990s, then, racial division seemed as intractable as it had ever been in America. Indeed, shortly after the Rodney King riot in Los Angeles, a Time magazine reporter lamented, “It had not exactly been unknown that race relations were worsening. … But not until last week did many whites and blacks realize how deep an abyss had been opening at their feet.” American discussions of race had become so bitter and charged that the Clinton administration launched not one but two initiatives to encourage racial understanding: the National Endowment for the Humanities’ National Conversation on American Pluralism and Identity and the President’s Committee on Race.
But what was the real state of American ethnic and racial relations at the end of the millennium? The language of a multicultural America, composed of an undifferentiated white (if shrinking) majority and African, Asian, and Latino American minorities, has become commonplace in talking about race and ethnicity in America. But does it adequately describe the reality of America’s racial and ethnic identities, boundaries, and cultures?
For African Americans, it appears that racial identities remain central and racial boundaries remain charged. African Americans still lag economically behind whites. Indeed, after some success in closing the income gap with whites over a roughly thirty-year period from World War II to the early 1970s, black progress seemed to slow through the 1970s and much of the 1980s. Some scholars suggest that it may even have halted or slipped backward. Andrew Hacker points out, for example, that median white family income rose by nearly 9 percent between 1970 and 1990, but black median income grew but 2 percent. Similarly, average black male earnings relative to whites rose from a ratio of $450 to $1,000 in 1939 to one of $654 to $1,000 in 1969, but, from 1969 to 1989, it rose to only $716 to $1,000.
As Hacker and others note, however, such statistics can mask more complicated economic changes in the black community. African American middle classes expanded significantly in the 1970s and 1980s, but the ranks of impoverished blacks did not decline substantially. The persistent economic difficulties of unskilled black workers—complicated by an economy that offered fewer blue-collar opportunities and by problems of drugs, violence, and family rupture—remained an important source of division between blacks and whites in America. African Americans had an interest in maintaining or expanding welfare programs as well as government-funded programs aimed at alleviating poverty. Many whites, particularly working-class whites, who had once backed New Deal welfare programs, now came to see government programs as black programs.
Yet even the black and white middle classes did not necessarily share the same interest. Scholars, like the general public, disagree over the efficacy of affirmative action programs, but it is true that a disproportionate number of African Americans, and middle-class African Americans in particular, have found jobs in local, state, or federal governments. As Hacker points out, African Americans held 20 percent of the jobs in the Postal Service and made up the same proportion of the Armed Services, about double their percentage of the total population. Police officer was one of the fastest growing occupations for blacks between 1970 and 1990, rising by almost 300 percent. Even higher up the economic scale, the government is an important employer for African Americans; one third of all black lawyers and almost one third of all black scientists worked for the government in 1990. This means that the black middle class has a heavy stake in maintaining or expanding governments and insuring—through affirmative action, strict antidiscrimination, or old-fashioned political patronage—that such governments hire African Americans.
This distinct black economic interest undergirds a distinct black politics. African Americans have made up a powerful and visible voting bloc in the American electorate for the entire thirty-five-year period from 1965 to the present. Black support for the Democratic Party, begun with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and confirmed by Johnson’s civil rights legislation, has rarely fallen below two-thirds in presidential elections, and even many congressional elections, in the last three decades. Most African Americans clearly believe that such solidarity is critical to defend and advance their interests, whether in electing sympathetic white Democrats to the presidency or their own as congressmen or mayors. Such political solidarity, however, also continues to sustain the group, reinforce identity, and charge its boundaries.
It is difficult to tell how long such identities and boundaries will endure, for there have been some noticeable trends in recent years that appear to have undermined black solidarity. The rising tide of immigration from the Caribbean and more recently Africa, for example, has brought thousands of African or African-descent people to the United States. By 1990 there were nearly one and a half million foreign-born blacks in the United States, and they constituted nearly a quarter of the black population in New York. Such immigrants bring their own perspectives on race and race identity to the United States. As Mary Waters has reported, many West Indian black immigrants have tried to distance themselves from American blacks, viewing American blacks as lazy and obsessed with racial slights. These West Indians believed that they enjoyed higher status in America as members of their own immigrant peoples than as members of a black racial group and thus insisted on identification with their Caribbean homelands rather than with Black America. As black immigration increases, it appears to open a potential fissure in Black racial solidarity in America. There are also trends toward racial integration that may be sapping black solidarity. There is some evidence, for example, that the economic boom at the end of the 1990s began to pull members of all races in, even the poorest blacks and minorities of urban ghettoes, and promised to recast African American conceptions of the economic interests of their race. There has also been a rising trend in intermarriage across the black and white boundary. As late as the 1950s, southern states officially banned such marriages altogether. The 1960s swept away such laws, and the sexual revolution of the decade and its emphasis on individual sexual and romantic fulfillment not only helped reinforce civil rights but inspired tolerance in opening up romantic and sexual relations across racial lines. Thus the number of black-white marriages has tripled since 1970. African Americans have also begun to break into the government elite and become national heroes—Martin Luther King, for example, and popular culture icons such as Michael Jordan.
Still race, at least as defined in black and white terms, continues to matter in America, and it is likely to matter for a long time. Black immigrants, for example, may insist on their separate ethnic identities, but, as Waters points out, the “overwhelming pressure” of the broader culture appears to force a significant proportion of their children to merge into an African American melting pot, identify as African Americans, and take up African American culture. Waters found that only a minority of the American-born children of black immigrants identified with their parents’ ethnic group, and most of them were the children of successful middle-class immigrant parents. A larger proportion of the children of black immigrants found that the structure of race relations and white perceptions in the United States lumped them with native black Americans, and they accepted that racial designation. They thus rejected their parents’ ethnicity along with their disdain for African American culture. These second-generation blacks eagerly took up black youth culture from “Black English” to rap and hip-hop music.
Moreover, there have been clear limits to the extent of black social integration even over the last ten years. Black residential segregation has dropped only slightly over the last decade, despite the economic boom. As professor John Yinger told the New York Times in the summer of 2001, “One of the surprising things about black-white segregation over the years is that it has been, and remains, so much higher than other kinds.” Similarly, for all the powerful and pervasive influence of the civil rights and sexual revolutions, marriages between blacks and whites still account for less than 10 percent of all marriages among black males.
Certain trends among whites have also suggested that the boundary between blacks and whites could remain tense for many years. Particularly striking has been the weakening of alliances that once crossed the racial border. Union decline has sapped the strength of class coalitions across racial boundaries. Yet racial tension and conflict may not be as much a result as a cause of the decline of class feeling and union strength. As Bruce Nelson has recently argued, over the last thirty years, white workers have often strongly resisted black challenges to seniority systems or to white monopolies of skilled positions. Thomas Edsall and others have also charted dramatic shifts of white blue-collar workers from Democrats to conservative Republicans over a whole range of social issues, but particularly over race, in the 1980s. More recently, scholars such as Thomas Sugrue, Nelson, and others, cite evidence of white worker resistance to African American integration of jobs and neighborhoods back to the earliest years of the civil rights era, in the 1940s and 1950s, casting doubt on how viable working-class alliances across racial lines have ever been. Whatever the potential for working-class alliances across racial lines may have been in the past, the possibility of such cross-race, class coalitions has seemed more distant in recent years.
Not only did working class alliances across racial lines break down in the new era of race relations, but cooperation between blacks and their longtime white allies, American Jews, also seemed to founder. The apparent demise of alliances between blacks and Jews has seemed a particularly telling example of the new hardening of racial boundaries. Jews had played a prominent role in supporting black civil rights back into the early twentieth century. Jews had helped found the NAACP and the Urban League and over time had played an increasingly important role in sustaining both organizations. From that time through the great civil rights struggles of the 1960s, Jews played an unusually significant role in black struggles. Such efforts reflected an historic Jewish commitment to protecting minority rights, a commitment rising both out of the values of Jewish culture and the practical consideration of Jewish vulnerability as a small non-Christian minority in a largely Christian and sometimes anti-Semitic American society.
Yet even as Jews and blacks fought together in civil rights struggles, strains appeared in their relationship. In the 1950s and 1960s, blacks and Latinos crowding into clothing manufacturing, for example, bridled at the Jewish monopoly of union leadership in these trades and the failure of those leaders to work aggressively for the new minority workers’ needs for better pay and working conditions. The turning point in black-Jewish relations, however, came in 1968, in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Ocean Hill-Brownsville. In an experiment aimed at improving the education of poor African American children, the city, drawing on Ford Foundation funding, sought to increase local input and control of the schools in that black neighborhood. The experiment turned into a two-year war pitting black activists against the schoolteachers and their union, the United Federation of Teachers. Many of the teachers and the union’s leadership were Jewish, and the battle dissolved into a bitter wrangle of charges and countercharges of racism and anti-Semitism. Ocean Hill-Brownsville was the first broadly visible revelation of the new strains in black-Jewish relations, but in succeeding years there would be many more. Some Jewish organizations would line up against black ones over legal challenges to racial affirmative action plans, such as the DeFunis case in 1974 and the Bakke case in 1978. These cases were, Cheryl Greenberg notes, “the first time black and Jewish organizations had publicly and formally positioned themselves on opposite sides of a civil rights question.” Meanwhile, some popular black leaders, most notably the Nation of Islam minister, Lewis Farrakhan, spoke openly and heatedly of alleged longtime Jewish exploitation of blacks extending as far back as the slave trade. Black and Jewish leaders also clashed over foreign policy, most notably over Israel and its treatment of Palestinian Arabs.
The growing divisions between blacks and Jews appeared to grow out of increasing divergences of perceived interests. Jews had, by and large, been successful in American life and became even more so after the 1960s as the old Protestant elite collapsed and new industries emerged. Despite suffering discrimination and stereotyping, Jews, Cheryl Greenberg suggests, understood their success as vindication of America’s potential to work best as a race-blind meritocracy, rewarding individuals, not groups. Trying to win power or success through assertion of group solidarity and group claims, such as affirmative action allotments, Jews believed, only threatened to set a dangerous precedent that could easily be exploited to establish the privileges of some groups over others. Such notions clashed with many African Americans’ sense of how the United States had worked—or better, had not worked—for them in the past, as well as their conviction that they had to assert group claims to expect any measurable change in their people’s status.
Clashes of black and Jewish interests did not take place only over affirmative action. Everyday encounters between Jewish teachers or social workers and black students or clients exacerbated the conflicts too. There were also conflicts over neighborhood turf. Jews, as Gerald Gamm and others have noted, were more likely to move quickly out of racially changing neighborhoods than Catholic ethnics, who more often dug in and resisted the influx of new minorities. Still, particularly in the outer borough neighborhoods of New York City, where many lower middle- and working-class Jews had settled, movement out of old neighborhoods was not easy, and clashes over territory provoked mutual hostility between blacks and Jews. “Physical closeness to blacks,” Jonathan Rieder argued in his book on the New York neighborhood of Canarsie, “widened the chasm” between Jews and Italians on one side and African Americans on the other. Yet blacks and Jews clashed not just because of conflicting interests, but also because of changing understandings of what constituted a minority in American life. As Greenberg suggests, the new multiculturalism set in motion by Black Power “putting race first as it does, removes Jews from the outsider community that they helped to legitimize. Instead, Jews have become Euro-Americans with their cultures and contributions subsumed under that broad heading (and their victimization by other Europeans thereby effaced). Now outsiders are racial minorities, African Americans, Asian Americans, native Americans and Hispanics.” This is not simply a rhetorical redefinition. Jews’ easy upward mobility into the highest ranks of the American elite made Jews look “settled and safe,” in short, no different from other whites, to blacks and many other minorities. Indeed, some African Americans and other minorities have seen Jewish opposition to affirmative action and other minority causes as evidence of a Jewish retreat from their civil rights traditions and identification with their new white-skin privilege.
Yet as Greenberg contends, “most Jews do not see themselves privileged as simply white people … instead they view themselves as outsiders … an insecure minority with a separate culture and a set of beliefs and values.” And, as important, they are a people with a history of suffering oppression. Jewish American remembrances of the Holocaust, the Nazi slaughter of over six million European Jews, would have occurred whatever the state of their relations with other minorities or whatever the changes in their own status. Yet the pattern of the remembering, particularly its timing—emerging in the late 1960s and early 1970s—suggests that it must have been influenced by the cultural and social strains and by the confusion that Jewish people were trying to work through as they moved from the outside to the inside. It suggests the dilemma of American Jews in the late twentieth century: on the one hand, a people reminded of their vulnerabilities by the recent horrors visited on their European cousins; on the other hand, a people enjoying the greatest economic and social success in their American history as many of them moved into the highest ranks of the American economy.
Such invocations of the Holocaust, like the Ellis Island narratives, could be dismissed as mere rhetorical strategies for masking Jewish and white ethnics’ new white privilege, not unlike the privilege that whites have long enjoyed in the South. Indeed, roiling protests over busing in the North, resistance to affirmative action there, the flight of millions of northern white ethnics from the Democratic party to George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan—even the sudden popularity of country-western music above the Mason Dixon line—convinced observers as diverse as social scientists Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan, historian Michael Denning, and journalist Peter Applebone that the United States was being “southernized” in the late twentieth century. It appeared that diverse ethnic and religious groups in the North had collapsed into a single white people confronting African Americans and other minorities, i.e., a southern, bipolar pattern of group identity had spread across the nation.
Yet it is not clear that this “southernization” has yet happened or even will happen. In recent years, as states in the South turned increasingly to the Republican Party, states in the northeast, particularly New England, have pivoted in turn in the opposite direction to the Democrats. This has happened for many reasons, but one may be that the charged racial battles of the seventies and eighties—the fights over busing, for example, now seem old and dormant. With the end of the big black migrations, and with declining crime rates, slashed welfare rolls, and rising prosperity, racial relations in the North have quieted. The absence of racial controversies may simply have allowed other issues that divide northern whites from southern, both cultural and economic, to emerge. Still, one wonders whether the Ellis Island whites, who make up such vast proportions of the white populations in northeastern states, have forged a pluralist political culture different from what exists in the South. Most historians of race relations in the North would be skeptical of an assertion that relations between whites and blacks there have been anything but bipolar, or that whites have ever treated blacks as just another ethnic group. But is there a liberal flip side to Ellis Island whiteness traditions? Is there still a lingering sense of being outsiders, perhaps, or a wariness of political and cultural hegemonies that helps make those northeastern states where Ellis Island whites are numerous approach ethnic and racial diversity differently from the way it is approached in the South? Though Jews have achieved great success and have quarreled with blacks in recent decades, they remain among the most, if not the most, liberal voters in the nation on almost all issues, including minority rights. Even Catholics, who were and remain more conservative than Jews on a host of issues, nonetheless remain more liberal and more Democratic than American Protestants, and far more so than evangelical Protestants. It is too early to tell entirely, but in the Northeast, and perhaps the other parts of the United States, white people may still be a different shade of white than white people in other parts of the nation, most notably the South.
Blacks and whites, however, do not necessarily define the new America. Growing populations of Latinos, Asians, and even Native Americans and, as important, the rising self-consciousness of all these new groups has assured that. Yet, at the close of the century, it is still not clear what the future of each of these groups in America will be. Will the new panethnic identities endure and grow stronger or are they too weak to override the diverse national allegiances of their peoples? Furthermore, what will the relationships of these minorities be to whites and blacks—working with African Americans to remake America into a multicultural nation or seeking assimilation into white culture and admission into white privilege?
There is substantial evidence, for example, to suggest that Native Americans will continue to be a vital group. Despite urbanization, many Native Americans remain on reservations, where they provide a core group of strong identifiers and sustain the tribal museums, colleges, and other organizations that are at the heart of the Indian organizational infrastructure. Economic interests help bolster a separate Indian identity as well. Most Native Americans on reservations are still poor in comparison to whites and, as with blacks, this helps to nourish their sense of difference. And like African Americans, Native Americans depend heavily on the federal government to alleviate this poverty. Some reservations have recently increased their wealth by opening gambling casinos, but these too depend on tribal identification and solidarity. There are, then, many reasons why Native Americans will remain a distinct, bounded people.
Nevertheless, Native American ethnicity is complicated in the late twentieth century. The upsurge of Red Power and pantribal identity did not eliminate tribes. Indeed, tribes are the foundation of Native American ethnicity; they are the only legally sanctioned Indian communities as well as the original touchstones of Indian ethnicity for all Native Americans. Tribal identities probably could not have melted into broader Indian identities, given the communal, political, and economic roles that they play. Tribal allegiances thus persist as a potential source of division among Native Americans. Another source of division that has emerged more recently is the conflict between urban and reservation Indians. During some of the Red Power protests, older Native Americans on reservations sometimes resented urban activists who claimed to speak for them even though, as some reservation residents believed, these activists knew little about their problems.
There is, however, a broader, more fundamental problem looming for American Indian identity and solidarity in the future. The dramatic rise in the Indian population recorded by censuses since 1960 speaks to that problem, for the census figures include hundreds of thousands of people who decided to declare themselves Indians who had not identified themselves in that way in the past. Who is or can be an Indian then? Is it a matter of self-identification, and if so, is being an Indian an identity lightly worn, an ethnic option not forced by circumstance but chosen as a lifestyle? This kind of Indian identification seems more akin to white ethnic symbolic allegiances than to African or even Asian or Latino American racial identities. It appears to have all of the same attractions—a legendary past, romantic homelands, traditional rituals, and evocative values. Indeed, it may offer more than that, for Native Americans are also eligible for affirmative action programs.
Indian leaders are aware and wary of the sudden popularity of Indian identification. They have assailed New Age writers claiming Indian roots like Jamake Hightower, author of The Primal Mind. The Association of American Indian and Alaska Native Professors issued a statement in 1993 attacking “ethnic fraud” and the Indian “wannabies,” who claim authority to speak as Indians as well as take jobs and apply for grants as Indians. Most such Indian leaders demand that all people claiming to be Indians establish their membership in a tribe through proof of ancestry. Yet the fact that in the last twenty years only half to two-thirds of Native Americans did so suggests the complications of Indian identity and solidarity that have emerged from 1965 to the birth of the twenty-first century. It reveals the variable meanings of being Indian and the varying porousness of the boundaries of those different Indian ethnicities: from a hard core of oppressed tribal people on reservations; to new Indian migrants exploring pantribal identities in cities; to people who had long been integrated into white society and opt for Indian status because it satisfies needs for belonging and tradition.
What does the future hold for the migrant peoples in the multicultural configuration, Asian and Latino Americans? More specifically, what will become of their newly minted panethnic identities? There has been a significant amount of cultural production among both Asian Americans and Latino Americans over the last thirty years. Among Asian Americans, for example, there has been a remarkable burgeoning of ethnic literature written by authors like David Louie, Frank Chin, and Maxine Hong Kingston. Museums in New York, Seattle, and Los Angeles and scholars in Asian American Studies programs have also worked hard to recover and fashion a new Asian American history. Latino American literature, movies, and art have also flourished during the last forty years, suggesting a cultural base for the broader panethnic identity. More important in providing common ground to disparate Latino nationalities is, of course, the Spanish language itself. In this case, Latino ethnicity profits not just from the work of a few cultural activists but from an explosion of profit-driven media outlets seeking to capitalize on the growing Spanish language market here in the United States as well as the even bigger one lying on its doorstep in neighboring countries to the south. As Geoffrey Fox notes, “No other minority now or in the history of the United States has had as extensive an apparatus for maintaining its language.” There are, for example, two national Spanish language television networks: Univision, first broadcasting as Spanish International Network in 1969, and Telemundo, which began in 1986. With Spanish-speaking migrants continuing to pour into the country and the prospect of producing programming for huge markets south of the border, neither the Spanish language media behemoth nor the visibility it gives to the language is likely to die soon.
What is difficult to determine is whether such cultural production helps individual Asian and Latino Americans mark off a distinct identity from whites while at the same time finding common ground with members of other nationalities in their panethnic group. There is evidence that American-born members of both groups are more sympathetic to such panethnic identities and cultures than immigrants are. But it is not clear how vital such culture is to the everyday life of members of the new American-born generations or how critical it is to their self-identification. Survey data suggests, for example, that although the vast majority of second- and later-generation Latinos use English, not Spanish, in everyday life, a substantial proportion know and honor Spanish as the ancestral language.
Even if new American-born generations are sympathetic to panethnic identities, conflicts among nationalities within the two groups are not likely to disappear soon. Immigrants tend to hold such national loyalties dear, and now (and probably for a long time in the foreseeable future) they make up substantial proportions of both the Latino and Asian American groups. Moreover, even for later generations, the differences among the various national groups, reinforced by enduring class and regional differences, simply seem too strong to become irrelevant soon.
Among both Latinos and Asians, members of each group’s nationalities have entered the country with very different backgrounds, for very different reasons, and at very different times—with very different subsequent histories. Some Asian American groups, such as Japanese and Korean Americans, carry long traditions of mutual enmity with them to the United States. Similarly, among Latino Americans, Cubans understand themselves to be political exiles from Communism and thus have a history and historical memory very different from those of Mexicans or Puerto Ricans.
Class and regional distinctions reinforce these national differences and exacerbate internal conflict. Among both Latinos and Asians, members of some groups either enter America better equipped than others or have been here long enough to learn the necessary skills that enable them to reap the benefits of the American economy. Japanese and, to a lesser extent, Chinese Americans have generally been very successful at moving up the American economic ladder. Vietnamese and Filipinos have come later than the Japanese and, in most cases, with less education than the Chinese, and thus struggle to move up. Among Latinos, many of the initial Cuban exiles were well educated and middle-class, setting them apart from the mass of their fellow Latinos. Regional divisions also fracture the panethnic groups, particularly Latinos. The three biggest constituent elements—Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban Americans—all have their own regional heartlands, the Southwest, the Northeast, and south Florida respectively, and mix only in certain limited contexts, such as in Chicago or New York.
National loyalties reinforced by class and regional differences inevitably complicate Asian American or Latino American panethnic organizational efforts. Among Latinos, the two largest groups—Puerto Ricans and Mexicans—have worked together in the same pan-Latino organizations or crusades, but they continue to eye each other warily. Some Puerto Ricans, Fox suggests, “fear that any Hispanic agenda that gets worked out will necessarily be a Mexican American agenda in which the Puerto Ricans’ particular concerns will be lost.” In 1994, several Puerto Rican organizations, miffed at Chicano indifference to the advancement of a Puerto Rican candidate for the Supreme Court, banded together in an ad hoc coalition, “Boricua First,” and issued a statement complaining that “our issues … get diluted within a larger Hispanic or Latino agenda.” Moreover, neither shares the rabid anti-Communism that dominates the third most powerful Latino group, Cuban Americans. Asian American panethnic efforts suffer from some of the same internal conflicts. Japanese and Chinese Americans dominated the early Asian American movements and resulting pan-Asian organizations, but the dramatic influx of Filipinos and Vietnamese since 1965 has altered the numerical balance of power and raised new issues within the Asian American group. Conflicts between Japanese and Chinese American leaders and Filipino or Vietnamese staff or clients have chronically troubled Asian American social service organizations, for example. Yen Le Espiritu recounts the lament of Filipino community advocates about an Asian American welfare agency in California: “The funding is dominated by the Chinese and Japanese. The director is Japanese and the next person is Chinese. They hire Filipinos, but only for the lower jobs or community workers way down the organizational ladder.”
What interests, then, hold these groups together? What Geoffrey Fox asked about Latino Americans could apply equally to the disparate groups of Asian Americans: “Is there an issue important to all Hispanics, rural and urban Mexican Americans, inner city Puerto Ricans, Dade County Cubans, and all the many other Hispanic populations equally? And more important to them than the non-Hispanics? How many such issues are there where they all have common interest?”
Issues that are critical to African Americans, such as affirmative action and government action in behalf of workers and the poor, although subject to debate, remain important to Latino Americans, primarily because the great majority of Latino immigrants remain near the bottom of the American economic hierarchy. Immigration restriction and enforcement laws and Spanish language issues are also critical to many Latino Americans. Nevertheless, Latino Americans have not rallied around a clear cluster of interests into a solid voting bloc. While black support for the Democratic Party ran from two-thirds to four-fifths or more in the 1980s and 1990s, Latino support for the Democrats has never been nearly as large. In the presidential elections of the eighties, the Latino Democratic vote ranged from 55 percent to 66 percent. Moreover, Latinos have displayed little consistency in individual races. In 1986 Latinos voted two to one for a Republican Senatorial candidate in Florida, a little less than two to one for a Democratic candidate for Senate in New York, and 57 percent to 43 percent for a Democratic Senate hopeful in Colorado.
Asian American political preferences and allegiances have, if anything, been even more variable. Many Asian Americans have little interest in the perpetuation of affirmative action programs, at least in colleges and graduate schools. While some wish to maintain solidarity with African and Latino Americans against what they perceive as continuing racism in America, others believe that open admissions at universities will favor Asian American students. Few other issues bind all other Asian Americans together. They have thus displayed few consistent partisan preferences over the last thirty years. Outside of Hawai‘i, Yen Le Espiritu concluded in 1992, “as a group, Asian Americans have not aligned themselves with either the Republicans or the Democrats.” She points to evidence that Asian Americans split almost evenly between the Democrats and Republicans in the 1984 elections. The Los Angeles Times found the same ambivalence among Southern California’s Chinese Americans in the 1990s.
What such numbers suggest is not just a question about the internal coherence and solidarity of each group, but a question about the larger group’s solidarity as part of an alliance of multicultural others opposed to a white majority. Jesse Jackson’s campaign in 1984, the Rainbow Coalition, posited such an alliance of racial and other outsiders. Yet in the fiery passions of Los Angeles, exploding after the Rodney King verdict, the differences and latent hostilities among these multicultural partners became all the more evident as Latinos and Koreans fought openly with African Americans. At a fundamental level, the viability of a multicultural coalition lies ultimately in a shared sense of exclusion, understanding that the boundary between all these groups on one side and whites on the other remains so charged and impassable that it renders tensions among the minorities themselves insignificant.
Such groups have certainly shared that sense of exclusion in the past, but do they still do so in the present, and will they in the future? One answer may be found in evidence of interracial dating and marriage. Rates have risen dramatically since the 1960s and have increased enormously in just the last two decades. In 1980, a Gallup survey found that just 17 percent of the nation’s teenagers had dated someone of another race; by 1997, 57 percent had done so. Yet the changing rates also reveal that some racial and ethnic boundaries remain more important than others. Asian-white and Latino-white rates of dating and intermarriage far exceed black-white proportions.
In 1997, ABC Television broadcast a new version of Hammerstein’s musical “Cinderella.” In 1957, when the show first opened on Broadway, white actors and actresses played all the leading roles. In the new television version, Brandy, a young African American singer, played Cinderella; Roberta Peters, a white actress, was her stepmother; one stepsister was white and one black; the Prince, Paolo Montalban was Filipino American, but his father, played by Victor Garber, was white and his mother, played by Whoopi Goldberg, was black. In one sense this new version of Cinderella seemed a natural embodiment of the multicultural revolution that began in the 1960s. “In the truest form of the word, it is truly a rainbow,” Montalban contended. Yet in another sense, the show suggested an America where race and ethnicity were irrelevant, even invisible—where a young black heroine might have a white stepmother and black and white stepsisters and, more remarkably, a young hero would be Asian, with a white father and a black mother. Brandy inadvertently acknowledged as much when she suggested that “when you watch the movie, you forget that everyone is a different race.”
Whether this version of Cinderella captures a real present or prefigures a probable future is difficult to tell. Given the evidence of weak political solidarity and the porous boundaries revealed in the dating and marriage data for some Asian and even Latino Americans, race seems likely to decline in significance over the next half century. If the long run of economic growth of the late 1990s returns and opens up sufficient opportunity for all races, softens racial competition, and tempers ethnic rhetoric, then, for the best-educated, upwardly mobile, and longest resident Asian and even Latino Americans, race may indeed become irrelevant. Yet for African Americans, as the political, economic, and intermarriage evidence suggests, race is likely to remain critical into the foreseeable future and the new version of Cinderella still a fantasy.
ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brooks, David. Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000.
Brooks’s book is a wry and skeptical discussion of the emergence of the new American elite in the post1960s era that is itself disdainful of the pretensions to authority displayed by elites.
Daniels, Roger. Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life. New York: Harper Collins, 1990.
Daniels’s history is a comprehensive, basic survey of immigration to the United States that is very useful as an overview or as an introduction to the subject. It is arranged chronologically by immigration era and then by group within each era.
Edsall, Thomas Byrne. The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics. New York: Norton, 1991.
The Edsall book is a brilliant analysis of how linkages forged over racial, welfare, and taxation issues broke up the old Democratic majority coalition in American politics and helped to lure many blue-collar workers, “Reagan Democrats,” into the Republican Party.
Fishman, Joshua, et al. The Rise and Fall of the Ethnic Revival: Perspectives on Language and Ethnicity. New York: Mouton, 1985.
Several authors, including Fishman himself, analyze the impact and durability of the ethnic revival. Fishman’s essay traces the shift in the meaning of ethnic identity for white ethnics.
Fox, Geoffrey. Hispanic Nation: Culture, Politics, and the Constructing of Identity. Seacaucus, N.J.: Carol, 1996.
Fox’s very readable study traces the origins of Latino or Hispanic panethnicity from the “Brown Power” radicals of the 1960s through the creation of the Spanish-language and television-media empires in the 1980s and 1990s. In doing this, however, Fox also points out the persistence of internal rivalries and regional differences that still divide the group as well as the effects of American popular culture on language retention of new generations of Hispanics that threaten its future.
Glazer, Nathan, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1970.
This classic of American ethnic studies wisely detected the surprising durability of white ethnic loyalties in New York City during the 1960s, after most social scientists had declared them long dead. Like many observers of the period, however, they overestimated the potential persistence of religious divisions in American life.
Goldfield, David. Black, White, and Southern: Race Relations and Southern Culture, 1940 to the Present. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990.
Goldfield’s work is a careful, well-documented and sober recounting of modern racial politics in the South through the civil rights revolution and its aftermath. While acknowledging the revolutionary impact of the civil rights movement, Goldfield also recounts persisting inequalities and conflicts.
Greenberg, Cheryl.“Pluralism and Its Discontents: The Case of Blacks and Jews,” in David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and Susan Heschel, eds. Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
Greenberg’s short essay thoughtfully analyzes recent relations between Jewish and African Americans and the causes of their growing mutual suspicions.
Hacker, Andrew. Two Nations, Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal. New York: Scribner’s, 1992.
Though many have hailed African American progress since the civil rights revolution, Hacker was far less sanguine in the early 1990s, pointing to a wide range of persistent inequalities and enduring sources of tensions.
Halter, Marilyn. Shopping for Identity: The Marketing of Ethnicity. New York: Schocken, 2000.
Halter’s book documents the emergence of ethnic marketing in American industries, from greeting cards to tourism. This marketing, she argues, is directed not only at the “multicultural” racial groups like African and Latino Americans but at white ethnics like Jewish and Irish Americans.
Jacoby, Tamar. Someone Else’s House: America’s Unfinished Struggle for Integration. New York: Basic Books, 1998.
Jacoby’s book is an exhaustive look at racial politics over the last third of the twentieth century. She decries the emergence of Black Power ideologies and the abandonment of integrationist goals among blacks. The book discusses points of contention, including local control of schools, busing, affirmative action, and Afrocentric curricula, both nationally and in three cities—New York, Detroit, and Atlanta.
Krickus, Richard. Pursuing the American Dream: White Ethnics and the New Populism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976.
This is a contemporary account of the “white ethnic revival” of the 1970s that provides a comprehensive survey of the revival’s organizations and leaders across the country.
Le Espiritu, Yen. Asian American Pan-Ethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992.
This is a sophisticated examination of the recent emergence of an Asian American panethnic identity among Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and other ethnic groups descended from immigrants from Asia. It focuses on the evolution of this new group identity through electoral politics, funding of social service agencies, census category definitions, and responses to anti-Asian violence.
Marable, Manning. Race, Reform and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945–1982. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1984.
In this chronological overview of American racial politics, Marable recognizes the gains of the “Second Reconstruction,” but he is critical of white and black leaders for their failure to understand that the central issue was “not the narrow battle for integration or political rights but the effort to achieve economic democracy.”
Nagel, Joanne. American Indian Ethnic Revival: Red Power and the Resurgence of Identity and Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
This sociological study explores the revival of Native American ethnicity through the “Red Power” political movement and the creation of a number of new cultural movements and institutions. Nagel is also concerned with the evolution of a panethnic Indian identity and its relation to tribal identities.
Nelson, Bruce. Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
This book investigates the “intersection of class and race” in twentieth-century American society through a study of white and black longshoremen and steel-workers. Building on previous studies of “whiteness,” Nelson argues powerfully for the need to consider “the role of the worker’s own agency in building and defending the ramparts of racially based inequality.”
Reimers, David. Still the Golden Door: The Third World Comes to America. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.
This is a smart, well-researched, and rich examination of the shift, during the second half of the twentieth century, from Europe as the principal source of American immigration to Latin America, Asia, and Africa. In addition to his thorough treatment of the groups themselves, he examines the making of immigration legislation since World War II.
Rieder, Jonathan. Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985.
This is an exceptionally rich investigation of racial tensions in an outer borough New York neighborhood that carefully and thoroughly explores the attitudes of white Italian and Jewish ethnics towards blacks in the post civil rights era.
Smith, Carolyn, ed. The 88 Vote—ABC News. New York: Capital Cities/ABC, 1988.
A compendium of the results of ABC exit poll surveys, not only from the 1988 election but from several elections in the 1980s that break down votes by ethnic identity as well as other demographic categories.
Waters, Mary. “Optional Ethnicities: For Whites Only?” in Silvia Pedraza and Ruben G. Rumbaut, eds. Origins and Destinies: Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in America. Belmont, Cal.: Wadsworth, 1996.
Well known for work on optional ethnicities, Waters reminds us here that white racial attitudes restrict how much Mexican Americans and even African immigrants can invent or choose their group identities.
Wei, William. The Asian American Movement. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993.
This is a rich and insightful survey of the emergence of the Asian American protest movement. It takes the reader from early campus battles at San Francisco State and the University of California at Berkeley to the creation of Asian American social-service programs, cultural organizations, and Asian studies programs, as well as a rising Asian American presence in electoral politics. Wei’s study analyzes Asian Americans’ new energy and organizational proliferation and their simultaneous efforts to forge a panethnic Asian American identity.
Zweigenhaft, Richard, and G. William Domhoff. Diversity in the Power Elite: Have Women and Minorities Reached the Top? New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.
This is Domhoff’s most recent analysis of the American elite in a series stretching back to the 1960s. Using a variety of methods to identify elite members, he chronicles the emergence of Jews among the elite, noting the continued underrepresentation of minorities such as Latinos and blacks.
Malcolm X gave this speech to the Militant Labor Forum on April 8, 1964, shortly after he had left Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam. The speech offers the broad outlines of Malcolm X’s new vision for African American political strategies; the disdain for civil rights protest and integration; the appeal to black pride and celebration of black nationalism; links between the black cause in the United States and the causes of the Third World; and support for peaceful revolution by ballot if possible but violent revolution if necessary.
Source: Malcolm X, “The Black Revolution,” Two Speeches by Malcolm X (New York: Merit, 1965), taken from Thomas R. Frazier, ed., Afro-American History, 2d ed. (Belmont, Cal.: Wadsworth Publishing, 1988), pp. 383–396.
Friends and enemies, tonight I hope that we can have a little fireside chat with as few sparks as possible being tossed around. Especially because of the very explosive condition that the world is in today. Sometimes, when a person’s house is on fire and someone comes in yelling fire, instead of the person who is awakened by the yell being thankful, he makes the mistake of charging the one who awakened him with having set the fire. I hope that this little conversation tonight about the black revolution won’t cause many of you to accuse us of igniting it when you find it at your doorstep.
I’m still a Muslim, that is, my religion is still Islam. I still believe that there is no god but Allah and that Mohammad is the apostle of Allah. That just happens to be my personal religion. But in the capacity which I am functioning in today, I have no intention of mixing my religion with the problems of 22,000,000 black people in this country. Just as it’s possible for a great man whom I greatly respect, Ben Bella, to be a Muslim and still be a nationalist, and another one whom I greatly respect, Gamal Nasser to be a Muslim and still be a nationalist, and Sukarno of Indonesia to be a Muslim and still be a nationalist, it was nationalism which enabled them to gain freedom for their people.
I’m still a Muslim but I’m also a nationalist, meaning that my political philosophy is black nationalism, my economic philosophy is black nationalism, my social philosophy is black nationalism. And when I say that this philosophy is black nationalism, to me this means that the political philosophy of black nationalism is that which is designed to encourage our people, the black people, to gain complete control over the politics and the politicians of our own community.
Our economic philosophy is that we should gain economic control over the economy of our own community, the businesses and the other things which create employment so that we can provide jobs for our own people instead of having to picket and boycott and beg someone else for a job.
And, in short, our social philosophy means that we feel that it is time to get together among our own kind and eliminate the evils that are destroying the moral fiber of our society, like drug addiction, drunkenness, adultery that leads to an abundance of bastard children, welfare problems. We believe that we should lift the level or the standard of our own society to a higher level wherein we will be satisfied and then not inclined toward pushing ourselves into other societies where we are not wanted.
All of that aside, tonight we are dealing with the black revolution. During recent years there has been much talk about a population explosion and whenever they are speaking of the population explosion, in my opinion they are referring primarily to the people in Asia or in Africa—the black, brown, red, and yellow people. It is seen by people of the West that as soon as the standard of living is raised in Africa and Asia, automatically the people begin to reproduce abundantly. And there has been a great deal of fear engendered by this in the minds of the people of the West, who happen to be, on this earth, a very small minority.
In fact, in most of the thinking and planning of whites in the West today it’s easy to see the fear in their minds, conscious minds and subconscious minds, that the masses of dark people in the West, in the East rather, who already outnumber them, will continue to increase and multiply and grow until they eventually overrun the people of the West like a human sea, a human tide, a human flood. And the fear of this can be seen in the minds, in the actions, of most of the people here in the West in practically everything that they do. It governs political views and it governs their economic views and it governs most of their attitudes toward the present society.
REASON FOR FILIBUSTER
I was listening to Dirksen, the Senator from Illinois, in Washington, D.C., filibustering the civil-rights bill and one thing that he kept stressing over and over and over was that if this bill is passed it will change the social structure of America. Well, I know what he’s getting at, and I think that most other people today, and especially our people, know what is meant when these whites who filibuster these bills, and express fears of changes in the social structure, our people are beginning to realize what they mean.
Just as we can see that all over the world one of the main problems facing the West is race, likewise here in America today, most of your Negro leaders as well as the whites agree that 1964 itself appears to be one of the most explosive years yet in the history of America on the racial front, on the racial scene. Not only is this racial explosion probably to take place in America, but all of the ingredients for this racial explosion in America to blossom into a world-wide racial explosion present themselves right here in front of us. America’s racial powder keg, in short, can actually fuse or ignite a world-wide powder keg.
And whites in this country who are still complacent when they see the possibilities of racial strife getting out of hand and you are complacent simply because you think you outnumber the racial minority in this country, what you have to bear in mind is wherein you might outnumber us in this country, you don’t outnumber us all over the earth.
And any kind of racial explosion that takes place in this country today, in 1964, is not a racial explosion that can be confined to the shores of America. It is a racial explosion that can ignite the racial powder keg that exists all over the planet that we call earth. Now I think that nobody would disagree that the dark masses of Africa and Asia and Latin America are already seething with bitterness, animosity, hostility, unrest, and impatience with the racial intolerance that they themselves have experienced at the hands of the white West.
And just as they themselves have the ingredients of hostility toward the West in general here we also have 22,000,000 African-Americans, black, brown, red, and yellow people in this country who are also seething with bitterness and impatience and hostility and animosity at the racial intolerance not only of the white West but of white America in particular.
BLACK NATIONALIST PARTY
And by the hundreds of thousands today we find our own people have become impatient turning away from your white nationalism, which you call democracy, toward the militant uncompromising policy of black nationalism. I point out right here that as soon as we announced we were going to start a black nationalist party in this country we received mail from coast to coast, especially from young people at the college level, the university level, who expressed complete sympathy and support and a desire to take an active part in any kind of political action based on black nationalism, designed to correct or eliminate, immediately evils that our people have suffered here for 400 years.
The black nationalists to many of you may represent only a minority in the community. And therefore you might have a tendency to classify them as something insignificant. But just as the fuse is the smallest part or the smallest piece in the powder keg it is yet that little fuse, that ignites the entire powder keg. The black nationalists to you may represent a small minority in the so-called Negro community. But they just happen to be composed of the type of ingredient necessary to fuse or ignite the entire black community. And this is one thing that whites—whether you call yourselves liberals or conservatives or racists or whatever else you might choose to be—one thing that you have to realize is, where the black community is concerned, although there the large majority you come in contact with may impress you as being moderate and patient and loving and long suffering and all that kind of stuff, the minority who you consider to be Muslims or nationalists happen to be made of the type of ingredient that can easily spark the black community This should be understood. Because to me a powder keg is nothing without a fuse.
1964 will be America’s hottest year; her hottest year yet; a year of much racial violence and much racial bloodshed. But it won’t be blood that’s going to flow only on one side. The new generation of black people that have grown up in this country during recent years are already forming the opinion, and it’s a just opinion, that if there is to be bleeding, it should be reciprocal—bleeding on both sides.
It should also be understood that the racial sparks that are ignited here in America today could easily turn into a flaming fire abroad which only means it could engulf all the people of this earth into a giant race war. You cannot confine it to one little neighborhood, or one little community, or one little country. What happens to a black man in America today happens to the black man in Africa. What happens to a black man in America and Africa happens to the black man in Asia and to the man down in Latin America. What happens to one of us today happens to all of us. And when this is realized I think that the whites—who are intelligent even if they aren’t moral or aren’t just or aren’t impressed by legalities—those who are intelligent will realize that when they touch this one, they are touching all of them; and this in itself will have a tendency to be a checking factor.
The seriousness of this situation must be faced up to. I Was in Cleveland last night, Cleveland, Ohio. In fact I was there Friday, Saturday and yesterday. Last Friday the warning was given that this is a year of bloodshed, that the black man has ceased to turn the other cheek, that he has ceased to be non-violent, that he has ceased to feel that he must be confined to all these restraints that are put upon him by white society in struggling for what white society says he was supposed to have had a hundred years ago.
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. And 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. Couple weeks ago in Jacksonville, Florida, a young teenage 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. The seriousness of this situation must be faced up to. You should not feel that I am inciting someone to violence. I’m only warning of a powder-keg situation. You can take it or leave it. If you take the warning perhaps you can still save yourself. But if you ignore it or ridicule it, well death is already at your doorstep. There are 22,000,000 African-Americans who are ready to fight for independence right here. When I say fight for independence right here, I don’t mean any non-violent fight, or turn-the-other-cheek fight. Those days are gone. Those days are over.
If George Washington didn’t get independence for this country non-violently, and if Patrick Henry didn’t come up with a non-violent statement, and you taught me to look upon them as patriots and heroes; then it’s time for you to realize that I have studied your books well.
POWER OF MINORITY
Our people, 22,000,000 African-Americans, are fed up with America’s hypocritical democracy and today we care nothing about the odds that are against us. Every time a black man gets ready to defend himself some Uncle Tom tries to tell us, how can you win? That’s Tom talking. Don’t listen to him. This is the first thing we hear: the odds are against you. You’re dealing with black people who don’t care anything about odds. We care nothing about odds.
Again I go right back to the people who founded and secured the independence of this country from the colonial power of England. When George Washington and the others got ready to declare or come up with the Declaration of Independence, they didn’t care anything about the odds of the British Empire. They were fed up with taxation without representation. And you’ve got 22,000,000 black people in this country today, 1964 who are fed up with taxation without representation, and will do the same thing. Who are ready, willing and justified to do the same thing today to bring about independence for our people that your forefathers did to bring about independence for your people.
And I say your people because I certainly couldn’t include myself among those for whom independence was fought in 1776. How in the world can a Negro talk about the Declaration of Independence when he is still singing “We Shall Overcome.” Our people are increasingly developing the opinion that we just have nothing to lose but the chains of segregation and the chains of second-class citizenship.
STRUGGLES WILL MERGE
So 1964 will see the Negro revolt evolve and merge into the world-wide black revolution that has been taking place on this earth since 1945. The so-called revolt will become a real black revolution. Now the black revolution has been taking place in Africa and Asia and in Latin America. Now when I say black, I mean non-white. Black, brown, red or yellow. Our brothers and sisters in Asia, who were colonized by the Europeans, our brothers and sisters in Africa, who were colonized by the Europeans, and in Latin America, the peasants, who were colonized by the Europeans, have been involved in a struggle since 1945 to get the colonialists, or the colonizing powers, the Europeans, off their land, out of their country.
This is a real revolution. Revolution is always based on land. Revolution is never based on begging somebody for an integrated cup of coffee. 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. Revolutions are never compromising. Revolutions are never based upon negotiations. Revolutions are never based upon any kind of tokenism whatsoever. Revolutions are never even based upon that which is begging a corrupt society or a corrupt system to accept us into it. Revolutions overturn systems, and there is no system on this earth which has proven itself more corrupt, more criminal than this system, that in 1964 still colonizes 22,000,000 African-Americans, still enslaves 22,000,000 Afro-Americans.
There is no system more corrupt than a system that represents itself as the example of freedom, the example of democracy and can go all over this earth telling other people how to straighten out their house, and you have citizens of this country who have to use bullets if they want to cast a ballot. The greatest weapon the colonial powers have used in the past against our people has always been divide and conquer.
America is a colonial power. She has colonized 22,000,000 Afro-Americans by depriving us of first-class citizenship, by depriving us of civil rights, actually by depriving us of human rights. She has not only deprived us of the right to be a citizen, she has deprived us of the right to be human beings, the right to be recognized and respected as men and women. And in this country, the black can be 50 years old and he is still a “boy.”
I grew up with white people. I was integrated before they even invented the word and I have never met white people yet—if you are around them long enough—who won’t refer to you as a “boy” or a “gal,” no matter how old you are or what school you came out of, no matter what your intellectual or professional level is. In this society we remain “boys.”
AMERICA’S STRATEGY
So America’s strategy is the same strategy as that which was used in the past by the colonial powers: divide and conquer. She plays one Negro leader against the other. She plays one Negro organization against the other. She makes us think we have different objectives, different goals. As soon as one Negro says something, she runs to this Negro and asks him what do you think about what he said. Why anybody can see through that today—except some of the Negro leaders.
All of our people have the same goals. The same objective. That objective is freedom, justice, equality. All of us want recognition and respect as human beings. We don’t want to be integrationists. Nor do we want to be separationists. We want to be human beings. Integration is only a method that is used by some groups to obtain freedom, justice, equality and respect as human beings. Separation is only a method that is used by other groups to obtain freedom, justice, equality or human dignity.
So our people have made the mistake of confusing the methods with the objectives. As long as we agree on objectives, we should never fall out with each other just because we believe in different methods or tactics or strategy to reach a common objective.
We have to keep in mind at all times that we are not fighting for integration, nor are we fighting for separation. We are fighting for recognition as human beings. We are fighting for the right to live as free humans in this society. In fact, we are actually fighting for rights that are even greater than civil rights and that is human rights.
We are fighting for human rights in 1964. This is a shame. The civil-rights struggle has failed to produce concrete results because it has kept us barking up the wrong tree. It has made us put the cart ahead of the horse. We must have human rights before we can secure civil rights. We must be respected as humans before we can be recognized as citizens.
Among the so-called Negroes in this country, as a rule the civil-rights groups, those who believe in civil rights, they spend most of their time trying to prove they are Americans. Their thinking is usually domestic, confined to the boundaries of America, and they always look upon themselves as a minority. When they look upon themselves upon the American stage, the American stage is a white stage. So a black man standing on that stage in America automatically is in the minority. He is the underdog, and in his struggle he always uses an approach that is a begging, hat-in-hand, compromising approach.
Whereas the other segment or section in America, known as the nationalist, black nationalists, are more interested in human rights than they are in civil rights. And they place more stress on human rights than they do on civil rights. The difference between the thinking and the scope of the Negroes who are involved in the human-rights struggle and those who are involved in the civil-rights struggle—those so-called Negroes involved in the human-rights struggle don’t look upon themselves as Americans.
They look upon themselves as a part of dark mankind. They see the whole struggle not within the confines of the American stage, but they look upon the struggle on the world stage. And, in the world context, they see that the dark man outnumbers the white man. On the world stage the white man is just a microscopic minority.
So in this country you find two different types of Afro-Americans, the type who looks upon himself as a minority and you as the majority, because his scope is limited to the American scene; and then you have the type who looks upon himself as part of the majority and you as part of a microscopic minority. And this one uses a different approach in trying to struggle for his rights. He doesn’t beg. He doesn’t thank you for what you give him, because you are only giving him what he should have had a hundred years ago. He doesn’t think you are doing him any favors.
NO PROGRESS
He doesn’t see any progress that he has made since the Civil War. He sees not one iota of progress because, number one, if the Civil War had freed him, he wouldn’t need civil-rights legislation today. If the Emancipation Proclamation, issued by that great shining liberal called Lincoln, had freed him, he wouldn’t be singing “We Shall Overcome” today. If the amendments to the Constitution had solved his problem, still his problem wouldn’t be here today. And even if the Supreme Court desegregation decision of 1954 was genuinely and sincerely designed to solve his problem, his problem wouldn’t be with us today.
So this kind of black man is thinking, he can see where every maneuver that America has made—supposedly to solve this problem—has been nothing but political trickery and treachery of the worst order. So today he doesn’t have any confidence in these so-called liberals: Now I know that you—all that have come in here tonight don’t call yourselves liberals. Because that’s a nasty name today. It represents hypocrisy. So these two different types of black people exist in the so-called Negro community and they are beginning to wake up and their awakening is producing a very dangerous situation.
So you have whites in the community who express sincerity when they say they want to help. Well how can they help? How can a white person help the black man solve his problem? Number one: you can’t solve it for him. You can help him solve it, but you can’t solve it for him today. One of the best ways that you can solve it—or to help him solve it—is to let the so-called Negro, who has been involved in the civil-rights struggle, see that the civil-rights struggle must be expanded beyond the level of civil rights to human rights. Once it is expanded beyond the level of civil rights to the level of human rights, it opens the door for all of our brothers and sisters in Africa and Asia, who have their independence, to come to our rescue.
CRIMINAL SITUATION
Why, when you go to Washington, D.C., expecting those crooks down there to pass some kind—and that’s what they are—to pass some kind of civil-rights legislation to correct a very criminal situation, what you are doing is encouraging the black man, who is the victim, to take his case into the court that’s controlled by the criminal that made him the victim. It will never be solved in that way. Just like running from the wolf to the fox. The civil-rights struggle involves the black man taking his case to the white man’s court. But when he fights it at the human-rights level, it is a different situation. It opens the door to take Uncle Sam to the world court. The black man doesn’t have to go to court to be free. 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 United Nations and charged with violating the UN charter on human rights.
You can forget civil rights. How are you going to get civil rights with men like Eastland and men like Dirksen and men like Johnson? It has to be taken out of their hands and taken into the hands of those whose power and authority exceed theirs. Washington has become too corrupt. Uncle Sam’s conscience—Uncle Sam has become bankrupt when it comes to a conscience—it is impossible for Uncle Sam to solve the problem of 22,000,000 black people in this country. It is absolutely impossible to do if in Uncle Sam’s courts—whether it is the Supreme Court or any other kind of court that comes under Uncle Sam’s Jurisdiction.
The only alternative that the black man has in America today is to take it out of Senator Dirksen’s and Senator Eastland’s and President Johnson’s jurisdiction and take it downtown on the East River and place it before that body of men who represent international law and let them know that the human rights of black people are being violated in the county that professes to be the moral leader of the free world.
Any time you have a filibuster in America, in the Senate, in 1964 over the rights of 22,000,000 black people, over the citizenship of 22,000,000 black people or that will effect the freedom and justice and equality of 22,000,000 black people, it’s time for that government itself to be taken before a world court. How can you condemn South Africa? There are only 11,000,000 of our people in South Africa, there are 22,000,000 of them here. And we are receiving an injustice which is just as criminal as that which is being done to the black people of South Africa.
So today those whites who profess to be liberals—and as far as I am concerned it’s just lip profession—you understand why our people don’t have civil rights. You’re white. You can go and hang out with another white liberal and see how hypocritical they are. While a lot of you sitting right here, know that you’ve seen whites up in a Negro’s face with flowery words and as soon as that Negro walks away you listen to how your white friend talks. We have black people who can pass as white. We know how you talk.
We can see that it is nothing but a governmental conspiracy to continue to deprive the black people in this country of their rights. And the only way we will get these rights restored is by taking it out of Uncle Sam’s hands. Take him to court and charge him with genocide, the mass murder of millions of black people in this country—political murder, economic murder, social murder, mental murder. This is the crime that this government has committed and, if you yourself don’t do something about it in time, you are going to open the doors for something to be done about it from outside forces.
I read in the paper yesterday where one of the Supreme Court Justices, Goldberg, was crying about the violation of human rights of 3,000,000 Jews in the Soviet Union. Imagine this. I haven’t got anything against Jews, but that’s their problem. How in the world are you going to cry about problems on the other side of the world when you haven’t got the problems straightened out here? How can the plight of 3,000,000 Jews in Russia be qualified to be taken to the United Nations by a man who is a Justice in this Supreme Court, and is supposed to be a liberal, supposed to be a friend of black people and hasn’t opened up his mouth one time about taking the plight of black people down here to the United Nations?
POLITICALLY MATURE
Our people are becoming more politically mature. Their eyes are coming open. They are beginning to see the trend in all of the American politics today. They notice that every time there is an election it is so close among whites that they have to count the votes over again. This happened in Massachusetts when they were running for governor, this happened in Rhode Island, it happened in Minnesota, and many other places, and it happened in the election between Kennedy and Nixon. Things are so close that any minority that has a bloc vote can swing it either way.
And I think that most students of political science agree that it was the 80 percent support that Kennedy got from the black man in this country that enabled him to sit in the White House. Sat down there four years and the Negro was still in the doghouse. The same ones that we put in the White House have continued to keep us in the doghouse. The Negro can see that he holds the balance of power in this country politically.
It is he who puts in office the one who gets in office. Yet when the Negro helps that person get in office the Negro gets nothing in return. All he gets is a few appointments. A few handpicked Uncle Tom handkerchief-head Negroes are given big jobs in Washington, D.C. And then those Negroes come back and try and make us think that that administration is going to lead us to the promised land of integration. And the only ones whose problems have been solved have been those handpicked Negroes. A few big Negroes got jobs who didn’t even need the jobs. They already were working. But the masses of black people are still unemployed.
The present administration, the Democratic administration, has been there for four years. Yet no meaningful legislation has been passed by them that proposes to benefit black people in this country, despite the fact that in the House they have 267 Democrats and only 177 are Republicans. They control two thirds of the House. In the Senate there are 67 Democrats and only 33 Republicans. The Democrats control two thirds of the government and it is the Negroes who put them in a position to control the government. Yet they give the Negroes nothing in return but a few handouts in the form of appointments that are only used as window-dressing to make it appear that the problem is being solved.
TRICKERY AND TREACHERY
No, something is wrong. And when these black people wake up and find out for real the trickery and the treachery that has been heaped upon us you are going to have revolution. And when I say revolution I don’t mean that stuff they were talking about last year about “We Shall Overcome.” The Democrats get Negro support, yet the Negroes get nothing in return. The Negroes put the Democrats first, yet the Democrats put the Negroes last. And the alibi that the Democrats use—they blame the Dixiecrats.
A Dixiecrat is nothing but a Democrat in disguise. You show me a Dixiecrat and I’ll show you a Democrat. And chances are, you show me a Democrat and I’ll show you a Dixiecrat. Because Dixie in reality means all that territory south of the Canadian border. There are 16 Senatorial committees that run this government. Of the 16 Senatorial committees that run the government, ten of them are controlled by chairmen that are from the South. Of the 20 Congressional committees that help run the government, 12 of them are controlled by Southern segregationists.
Think of this: ten of the Senatorial committees are in the hands of the Dixiecrats, 12 of the 20 Congressional committees are in the hands of the Dixiecrats. These committees control the government. And you’re going to tell us that the South lost the Civil War? The South controls the government. And they control it because they have seniority. And they have seniority because in the states that they come from, they deny Negroes the right to vote.
If Negroes could vote south of the—yes, if Negroes could vote South of the Canadian border—south South, if Negroes could vote in the southern part of the South, Ellender wouldn’t be the head of the Agricultural and Forestry Committee, Richard Russell wouldn’t be head of the Armed Services Committee, Robertson of Virginia wouldn’t be head of the Banking and Currency Committee. Imagine that, all of the banking and currency of the government is in the hands of a cracker.
In fact, when you see how many of these committee men are from the South you can see that we have nothing but a cracker government in Washington, D.C. And their head is a cracker President. I said a cracker President. Texas is just as much a cracker state as Mississippi—and even more so. In Texas they lynch you with a Texas accent and in Mississippi they lynch you with a Mississippi accent.
And the first thing this man did when he came in office was invite all the big Negroes down for coffee. James Farmer was one of the first ones—the head of CORE. I have nothing against him. He’s all right—Farmer, that is. But could that same President have invited James Farmer to Texas for coffee? And if James Farmer went to Texas, could he have taken his white wife with him to have coffee with the President? Any time you have a man who can’t straighten out Texas, how can he straighten out the country. No, you’re barking up the wrong tree.
If Negroes in the South could vote, the Dixiecrats would lose power. When the Dixiecrats lost power, the Democrats would lose power. A Dixiecrat lost is a Democrat lost. Therefore the two of them have to conspire with each other to stay in power. The Northern Dixiecrat puts all the blame on the Southern Dixiecrat. It’s a con game, a giant political con game. The job of the Northern Democrat is to make the Negro think that he is our friend. He is always smiling and wagging his tail and telling us how much he can do for us if we vote for him. But, at the same time he’s out in front telling us what he’s going to do, behind the door he’s in cahoots with the Southern Democrat setting up the machinery to make sure he’ll never have to keep his promise.
This is the conspiracy that our people have faced in this country for the past 100 years. And today you have a new generation of black people who have come on the scene who have become disenchanted with the entire system, who have become disillusioned over the system and who are ready now and willing to do something about it. So in my conclusion in speaking about the black revolution, America today is at a time or in a day or at an hour where she is the first country on this earth that can actually have a bloodless revolution. In the past revolutions have been bloody. Historically you just don’t have a peaceful revolution. Revolutions are bloody, revolutions are violent, revolutions cause bloodshed and death follows in their paths. America is the only country in history in a position to bring about a revolution without violence and bloodshed. But America is not morally equipped to do so.
Why is America in a position to bring about a bloodless revolution? 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. It would wipe out the Southern segregationism that now controls America’s foreign policy, as well as America’s domestic policy.
And the only way without bloodshed that this can be brought about is that the black man has to be given full use of the ballot in every one of the 50 states. But if the black man doesn’t get the ballot, then you are going to be faced with another man who forgets the ballot and starts using the bullet.
Revolutions are fought to get control of land, to remove the absentee landlord and gain control of the land and the institutions that flow from that land. The black man has been in a very low condition because he has had no control whatsoever over any land. He has been a beggar economically, a beggar politically, a beggar socially, a beggar even when it comes to trying to get some education. So that in the past the type of mentality that was developed in this colonial system among our people, today is being overcome. And as the young ones come up they know what they want. And as they listen to your beautiful preaching about democracy and all those other flowery words, they know what they’re supposed to have.
So you have a people today who not only know what they want, but also know what they are supposed to have. And they themselves are clearing another generation that is coming up that not only will know what it wants and know what it should have, but also will be ready and willing to do whatever is necessary to see that what they should have materializes immediately. Thank you.
Black Power was probably the fundamental text of the newly conceived multicultural nation and one of the most significant documents in American race relations in the late twentieth century. Carmichael and Hamiltion stress, in particular, black self-reliance and solidarity and reject assimilation and dependence on whites, even white liberals. These major themes of Black Power will be taken up by Indian, Asian American, and Latino American activists in the 1960s and 1970s and set the agenda for the new multiculturalism for a generation.
Source: Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power (New York: Vintage Books, 1967).
Today, the American educational system continues to reinforce the entrenched values of the society through the use of words. Few people in this country question that this is “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” They have had these words drummed into them from childhood. Few people question that this is the “Great Society” or that this country is fighting “Communist aggression” around the world. We mouth these things over and over, and they become truisms not to be questioned. In a similar way, black people have been saddled with epithets.
“Integration” is another current example of a word which has been defined according to the way white Americans see it. To many of them, it means black men wanting to marry white daughters; it means “race mixing”—implying bed or dance partners. To black people, it has meant a way to improve their lives—economically and politically. But the predominant white definition has stuck in the minds of too many people.
Black people must redefine themselves, and only they can do that. Throughout this country, vast segments of the black communities are beginning to recognize the need to assert their own definitions, to reclaim their history, their culture; to create their own sense of community and togetherness. There is a growing resentment of the word “Negro,” for example, because this term is the invention of our oppressor; it is his image of us that he describes. Many blacks are now calling themselves African-Americans, Afro-Americans or black people because that is our image of ourselves. When we begin to define our own image, the stereotypes—that is, lies—that our oppressor has developed will begin in the white community and end there. The black community will have a positive image of itself that it has created. This means we will no longer call ourselves lazy, apathetic, dumb, good-timers, shiftless, etc. Those are words used by white America to define us. If we accept these adjectives, as some of us have in the past, then we see ourselves only in a negative way, precisely the way white America wants us to see ourselves. Our incentive is broken and our will to fight is surrendered. From now on we shall view ourselves as African-Americans and as black people who are in fact energetic, determined, intelligent, beautiful and peace loving.
There is a terminology and ethos peculiar to the black community of which black people are beginning to be no longer ashamed. Black communities are the only large segments of this society where people refer to each other as brother—soul-brother, soul-sister. Some people may look upon this as ersatz, as make-believe, but it is not that. It is real. It is a growing sense of community. It is a growing realization that black Americans have a common bond not only among themselves, but with their African brothers. In Black Man’s Burden, John O. Killens described his trip to ten African countries as follows:
Everywhere I went people called me brother.… “Welcome, American brother.” It was a good feeling for me, to be in Africa. To walk in a land for the first time in your entire life knowing within yourself that your color would not be held against you. No black man ever knows this in America [p. 160].
More and more black Americans are developing this feeling. They are becoming aware that they have a history which pre-dates their forced introduction to this country. African-American history means a long history beginning on the continent of Africa, a history not taught in the standard textbooks of this country. It is absolutely essential that black people know this history, that they know their roots, that they develop an awareness of their cultural heritage. Too long have they been kept in submission by being told that they had no culture, no manifest heritage, before they landed on the slave auction blocks in this country. If black people are to know themselves as a vibrant, valiant people, they must know their roots. And they will soon learn that the Hollywood image of man-eating cannibals waiting for, and waiting on, the Great White Hunter is a lie.
With redefinition will come a clearer notion of the role black Americans can play in this world. This role will emerge clearly out of the unique, common experiences of Afro-Asians. Killens concludes:
I believe furthermore that the American Negro can be the bridge between the West and Africa-Asia. We black Americans can serve as a bridge to mutual understanding. The one thing we black Americans have in common with the other colored peoples of the world is that we have all felt the cruel and ruthless heel of white supremacy. We have all been “niggerized” on one level or another. And all of us are determined to “deniggerize” the earth. To rid the world of “niggers” is the Black Mans’s Burden, human reconstruction is the grand objective [p. 176].
Only when black people fully develop this sense of community, of themselves, can they begin to deal effectively with the problems of racism in this country. This is what we mean by a new consciousness; this is the vital first step.
The next step is what we shall call the process of political modernization—a process which must take place if the society is to be rid of racism. “Political modernization” includes many things, but we mean by it three major concepts: (1) questioning old values and institutions of the society; (2) searching for new and different forms of political structure to solve political and economic problems; and (3) broadening the base of political participation to include more people in the decision-making process. These notions (we shall take up each in turn) are central to our thinking throughout this book and to contemporary American history as a whole. As David Apter wrote in The Politics of Modernization, “… the struggle to modernize is what has given meaning to our beliefs.… So compelling a force has it become that we are forced to ask new questions of our own institutions. Each country, whether modernized or modernizing, stands in both judgment and fear of the results. Our own society is no exception” (p. 2).
The values of this society support a racist system; we find it incongruous to ask black people to adopt and support most of those values. We also reject the assumption that the basic institutions of this society must be preserved. The goal of black people must not be to assimilate into middle-class America, for that class—as a whole—is without a viable conscience as regards humanity. The values of the middle class permit the perpetuation of the ravages of the black community. The values of that class are based on material aggrandizement, not the expansion of humanity. The values of that class ultimately support cloistered little closed societies tucked away neatly in tree-lined suburbia. The values of that class do not lead to the creation of an open society. That class mouths its preference for a free, competitive society, while at the same time forcefully and even viciously denying to black people as a group the opportunity to compete.
We are not unmindful of other descriptions of the social utility of the middle class. Banfield and Wilson, in City Politics, concluded:
The departure of the middle class from the central city is important in other ways.… The middle class supplies a social and political leavening in the life of a city. Middle-class people demand good schools and integrity in government. They support churches, lodges, parent-teacher associations, scout troops, better-housing committees, art galleries, and operas. It is the middle class, in short, that asserts a conception of the public interest. Now its activity is increasingly concentrated in the suburbs [p. 14].
But this same middle class manifests a sense of superior group position in regard to race. This class wants “good government” for themselves; it wants good schools for its children. At the same time, many of its members sneak into the black community by day, exploit it, and take the money home to their middle-class communities at night to support their operas and art galleries and comfortable homes. When not actually robbing, they will fight off the handful of more affluent black people who seek to move in; when they approve or even seek token integration, it applies only to black people like themselves—as “white” as possible. This class is the backbone of institutional racism in this country.
Thus we reject the goal of assimilation into middle-class America because the values of that class are in themselves anti-humanist and because that class as a social force perpetuates racism. We must face the fact that, in the past, what we have called the movement has not really questioned the middle-class values and institutions of this country. If anything, it has accepted those values and institutions without fully realizing their racist nature. Reorientation means an emphasis on the dignity of man, not on the sanctity of property. It means the creation of a society where human misery and poverty are repugnant to that society, not an indication of laziness or lack of initiative. The creation of new values means the establishment of a society based, as Killens expresses it in Black Man’s Burden, on “free people,” not “free enterprise.” (p. 167). To do this means to modernize—indeed, to civilize—this country.
Supporting the old values are old political and economic structures; these must also be “modernized.” We should at this point distinguish between “structures” and “system.” By system, we have in mind the entire American complex of basic institutions, values, beliefs, etc. By structures, we mean the specific institutions (political parties, interest groups, bureaucratic administrations) which exist to conduct the business of that system. Obviously, the first is broader than the second. Also, the second assumes the legitimacy of the first. Our view is that, given the illegitimacy of the system, we cannot then proceed to transform that system with existing structures.
The two major political parties in this country have become non viable entities for the legitimate representation of the real needs of masses—especially blacks—in this country. Walter Lippmann raised the same point in his syndicated column of December 8, 1966. He pointed out that the party system in the United States developed before our society became as technologically complex as it is now. He says that the ways in which men live and define themselves are changing radically. Old ideological issues, once the subject of passionate controversy, Lippmann argues, are of little interest today. He asks whether the great urban complexes—which are rapidly becoming the centers of black population in the U.S.—can be run with the same systems and ideas that derive from a time when America was a country of small villages and farms. While not addressing himself directly to the question of race, Lippmann raises a major question about our political institutions; and the crisis of race in America may be its major symptom.
Black people have seen the city planning commissions, the urban renewal commissions, the boards of education and the police departments fail to speak to their needs in a meaningful way. We must devise new structures, new institutions to replace those forms or to make them responsive. There is nothing sacred or inevitable about old institutions; the focus must be on people, not forms.…
The adoption of the concept of Black Power is one of the most legitimate and healthy developments in American politics and race relations in our time. The concept of Black Power speaks to all the needs mentioned in this chapter. It is a call for black people in this country to unite, to recognize their heritage, to build a sense of community. It is a call for black people to begin to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations and to support those organizations. It is a call to reject the racist institutions and values of the society.
The concept of Black Power rests on a fundamental premise: Before 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. Traditionally, each new ethnic group in this society has found the route to social and political viability through the organization of its own institutions with which to represent its needs within the larger society. Studies in voting behavior specifically, and political behavior generally, have made it clear that politically the American pot has not melted. Italians vote for Rubino over O’Brien; Irish for Murphy over Goldberg, etc. This phenomenon may seem distasteful to some, but it has been and remains today a central fact of the American political system. There are other examples of ways in which groups in the society have remembered their roots and used this effectively in the political arena. Theodore Sorensen describes the politics of foreign aid during the Kennedy Administration in his book Kennedy:
No powerful constituencies or interest groups backed foreign aid. The Marshall Plan at least had appealed to Americans who traced their roots to the Western European nations aided. But there were few voters who identified with India, Colombia or Tanganyika [p. 351].
The extent to which black Americans can and do “trace their roots” to Africa, to that extent will they be able to be more effective on the political scene.
A white reporter set forth this point in other terms when he made the following observation about white Mississippi’s manipulation of the anti-poverty program:
The war on poverty has been predicated on the notion that there is such a thing as a community which can be defined geographically and mobilized for a collective effort to help the poor. This theory has no relationship to reality in the deep South. In every Mississippi county there are two communities. Despite all the pious platitudes of the moderates on both side, these two communities habitually see their interests in terms of conflict rather than cooperation. Only when the Negro community can muster enough political, economic and professional strength to compete on somewhat equal terms, will Negroes believe in the possibility of true cooperation and whites accept its necessity. En route to integration, the Negro community needs to develop a greater independence—a chance to run its own affairs and not cave in whenever “the man” barks—or so it seems to me, and to most of the knowledgeable people with whom I talked in Mississippi. To OEO, this judgment may sound like black nationalism … [Jencks, New Republic, April 16, 1966].
The point is obvious: black people must lead and run their own organizations. Only black people can convey the revolutionary idea—and it is a 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. In the past, white allies have often furthered white supremacy without the whites involved realizing it, or even wanting to do so. Black people must come together and do things for themselves. They must achieve self-identity and self-determination in order to have their daily needs met.
Black Power means, for example, that in Lowndes County, Alabama, a black sheriff can end police brutality. A black tax assessor and tax collector and county board of revenue can lay, collect, and channel tax monies for the building of better roads and schools serving black people. In such areas as Lowndes, where black people have a majority, they will attempt to use power to exercise control. This is what they seek: control. When black people lack a majority, Black Power means proper representation and sharing of control. It means the creation of power bases, of strength, from which black people can press to change local or nation-wide patterns of oppression—instead of from weakness.
It does not mean merely putting black faces into office. Black visibility is not Black Power. Most of the black politicians around the country today are not examples of Black Power. The power must be that of a community, and emanate from there. The black politicians must start from there. The black politicians must stop being representatives of “downtown” machines, whatever the cost might be in terms of lost patronage and holiday handouts.
Black Power recognizes—it must recognize—the ethnic basis of American politics as well as the power oriented nature of American politics. Black Power therefore calls for black people to consolidate behind their own, so that they can bargain from a position of strength. But while we endorse the procedure of group solidarity and identity for the purpose of attaining certain goals in the body politic, this does not mean that black people should strive for the same kind of rewards (i.e., end results) obtained by the white society. The ultimate values and goals are not domination or exploitation of other groups, but rather an effective share in the total power of the society.
Nevertheless, some observers have labeled those who advocate Black Power as racists; they have said that the call for self-identification and self-determination is “racism in reverse” or “black supremacy.” This is a deliberate and absurd lie. There is no analogy—by any stretch of definition or imagination—between the advocates of Black Power and white racists. Racism is not merely exclusion on the basis of race but exclusion for the purpose of subjugating or maintaining subjugation. The goal of the racists is to keep black people on the bottom, arbitrarily and dictatorially, as they have done in this country for over three hundred years. The goal of black self-determination and black self-identity—Black Power—is full participation in the decision-making processes affecting the lives of black people, and recognition of the virtues in themselves as black people. The black people of this country have not lynched whites, bombed their churches, murdered their children and manipulated laws and institutions to maintain oppression. White racists have. Congressional laws, one after the other, have not been necessary to stop black people from oppressing others and denying others the full enjoyment of their rights. White racists have made such laws necessary. The goal of Black Power is positive and functional to a free and viable society. No white racist can make this claim.…
One of the tragedies of the struggle against racism is that up to this point there has been no national organization which could speak to the growing militancy of young black people in the urban ghettos and the black-belt South. There has been only a “civil rights” movement, whose tone of voice was adapted to an audience of middle-class whites. It served as a sort of buffer zone between that audience and angry young blacks. It claimed to speak for the needs of a community, but it did not speak in the tone of that community. None of its so-called leaders could go into a rioting community and be listened to. In a sense, the blame must be shared—along with the mass media—by those leaders for what happened in Watts, Harlem, Chicago, Cleveland and other places. Each time the black people in those cities saw Dr. Martin Luther King get slapped they become angry. When they saw little black girls bombed to death in a church and civil rights workers ambushed and murdered, they were steaming mad. We had nothing to offer that they could see, except to go out and be beaten again. We helped to build their frustration.
We had only the old language of love and suffering. And in most places—that is, from the liberals and middle class we got back the old language of patience and progress. The civil rights leaders were saying to the country: “Look, you guys are supposed to be nice guys, and we are only going to do what we are supposed to do. Why do you beat us up? Why don’t you give us what we ask? Why don’t you straighten yourselves out?” For the masses of black people, this language resulted in virtually nothing. In fact, their objective day-to-day condition worsened. The unemployment rate among black people increased while that among whites declined. Housing conditions in the black communities deteriorated. Schools in the black ghettos continued to plod along on outmoded techniques, inadequate curricula, and with all too many tired and indifferent teachers. Meanwhile, the President picked up the refrain of “We Shall Overcome” while the Congress passed civil rights law after civil rights law, only to have them effectively nullified by deliberately weak enforcement. “Progress is being made,” we were told.
Such language, along with admonitions to remain nonviolent and fear the white backlash, convinced some that that course was the only course to follow. It misled some into believing that a black minority could bow its head and get whipped into a meaningful position of power. The very notion is absurd. The white society devised the language, adopted the rules and had the black community narcotized into believing that that language and those rules were, in fact, relevant. The black community was told time and again how other immigrants finally won acceptance: that is, by following the Protestant Ethic of Work and Achievement. They worked hard; therefore, they achieved. We were not told that it was by building Irish Power, Italian Power, Polish Power or Jewish Power that these groups got themselves together and operated from positions of strength. We were not told that “the American dream” wasn’t designed for black people. That while today, to whites, the dream may seem to include black people, it cannot do so by the very nature of this nation’s political and economic system, which imposes institutional racism on the black masses if not upon every individual black. A notable comment on that “dream” was made by Dr. Percy Julian, the black scientist and director of the Julian Research Institute in Chicago, a man for whom the dream seems to have come true. While not subscribing to “black power” as he understood it, Dr. Julian clearly understood the basis for it: “The false concept of basic Negro inferiority is one of the curses that still lingers. It is a problem created by the white man. Our children just no longer are going to accept the patience we were taught by our generation. We were taught a pretty little lie—excel and the whole world lies open before you. I obeyed the injunction and found it to be wishful thinking.” (Authors’ italics)
A key phrase in our buffer-zone days was non-violence. For years it has been thought that black people would not literally fight for their lives. Why this has been so is not entirely clear; neither the larger society nor black people are noted for passivity. The notion apparently stems from the years of marches and demonstrations and sit-ins where black people did not strike back and the violence always came from white mobs. There are many who still sincerely believe in that approach. From our viewpoint, rampaging white mobs and white night-riders must be made to understand that their days of free head-whipping are over. Black people should and must fight back. Nothing more quickly repels someone bent on destroying you than the unequivocal message: “O.K., fool, make your move, and run the same risk I run—of dying.”
When the concept of Black Power is set forth, many people immediately conjure up notions of violence. The country’s reaction to the Deacons for Defense and Justice, which originated in Louisiana, is instructive. Here is a group which realized that the “law” and law enforcement agencies would not protect people, so they had to do it themselves. If a nation fails to protect its citizens, then that nation cannot condemn those who take up the task themselves. The Deacons and all other blacks who resort to self-defense represent a simple answer to a simple question: what man would not defend his family and home from attack?
But this frightened some white people, because they knew that black people would now fight back. They knew that this was precisely what they would have long since done if they were subjected to the injustices and oppression heaped on blacks. Those of us who advocate Black Power are quit clear in our own minds that a “non-violent” approach to civil rights is an approach black people cannot afford and a luxury white people do not deserve. It is crystal clear to us—and it must become so with the white society—that there can be no social order without social justice. White people must be made to understand that they must stop messing with black people, or the blacks will fight back!
Next, we must deal with the term “integration.” According to its advocates, social justice will be accomplished by “integrating the Negro into the mainstream institutions of the society from which he has been traditionally excluded.” This concept is based on the assumption that there is nothing of value in the black community and that little of value could be created among black people. The thing to do is siphon off the “acceptable” black people into the surrounding middle-class white community.
The goals of integrationists are middle-class goals, articulated primarily by a small group of Negroes with middle-class aspirations or status. Their kind of integration has meant that a few blacks “make it,” leaving the black community, sapping it of leadership potential and know-how. As we noted in Chapter I, those token Negroes—absorbed into a white mass—are of no value to the remaining black masses. They become meaningless showpieces for a conscience-soothed white society. Such people will state that they would prefer to be treated “only as individuals, not as Negroes”; that they “are not and should not be preoccupied with race.” This is a totally unrealistic position. In the first place, black people have not suffered as individuals but as members of a group; therefore, their liberation lies in group action. This is why SNCC—and the concept of Black Power affirms that helping individual black people to solve their problems on an individual basis does little to alleviate the mass of black people. Secondly, while color blindness may be a sound goal ultimately, we must realize that race is an overwhelming fact of life in this historical period. There is no black man in this country who can live “simply as a man.” His blackness is an ever present fact of this racist society, whether he recognizes it or not. It is unlikely that this or the next generation will witness the time when race will no longer be relevant in the conduct of public affairs and in public policy decision-making. To realize this and to attempt to deal with it does not make one a racist or overly preoccupied with race; it puts one in the forefront of a significant struggle. If there is no intense struggle today, there will be no meaningful results tomorrow.
“Integration” as a goal today speaks to the problem of blackness not only in an unrealistic way but also in a despicable way. It is based on complete acceptance of the fact that in order to have a decent house or education, black people must move into a white neighborhood or send their children to a white school. This reinforces, among both black and white, the idea that “white” is automatically superior and “black” is by definition inferior. For this reason, “integration” is a subterfuge for the maintenance of white supremacy. It allows the nation to focus on a handful of Southern black children who get into white schools at a great price, and to ignore the ninety-four percent who are left in unimproved all black schools. Such situations will not change until black people become equal in a way that means something, and integration ceases to be a one-way street. Then integration does not mean draining skills and energies from the black ghetto into white neighborhoods. To sprinkle black children among white pupils in outlying schools is at best a stop-gap measure. The goal is not to take black children out of the black community and expose them to white middle-class values; the goal is to build and strengthen the black community.
“Integration” also means that black people must give up their identity, deny their heritage. We recall the conclusion of Killian and Grigg: “At the present time, integration as a solution to the race problem demands that the Negro foreswear his identity as a Negro.” The fact is that integration, as traditionally articulated, would abolish the black community. The fact is that what must be abolished is not the black community, but the dependent colonial status that has been inflicted upon it.
The racial and cultural personality of the black community must be preserved and that community must win its freedom while preserving its cultural integrity. Integrity includes a pride—in the sense of self-acceptance, not chauvinism—in being black, in the historical attainments and contributions of black people. No person can be healthy, complete and mature if he must deny a part of himself; this is what “integration” has required thus far. This is the essential difference between integration as it is currently practiced and the concept of Black Power.
The idea of cultural integrity is so obvious that it seems almost simple-minded to spell things out at this length. Yet millions of Americans resist such truths when they are applied to black people. Again, that resistance is a comment on the fundamental racism in the society. Irish Catholics took care of their own first without a lot of apology for doing so, without any dubious language from timid leadership about guarding against “backlash.” Everyone understood it to be a perfectly legitimate procedure. Of course, there would be “backlash.” Organization begets counterorganization, but this was no reason to defer.
The so-called white backlash against black people is something else: the embedded traditions of institutional racism being brought into the open and calling forth overt manifestations of individual racism. In the summer of 1966, when the protest marches into Cicero, Illinois, began, the black people knew they were not allowed to live in Cicero and the white people knew it. When blacks began to demand the right to live in homes in that town, the whites simply reminded them of the status quo. Some people called this “backlash.” It was, in fact, racism defending itself. In the black community, this is called “White folks showing their color.” It is ludicrous to blame black people for what is simply an overt manifestation of white racism. Dr. Martin Luther King stated clearly that the protest marches were not the cause of the racism but merely exposed a long-term cancerous condition in the society.
We come now to the rhetoric of coalition as part of the traditional approach to ending racism: the concept of the civil rights movement as a kind of liaison between the powerful white community and a dependent black community. “Coalition” involves the whole question of how one approaches politics and political alliances. It is so basic to an understanding of Black Power that we will devote an entire chapter to the subject.
The Native American Graves and Repatriation Act, passed in 1990, was part of a broad effort by Native Americans to overturn older notions of them as primitive others and assert claims for respect and control of their heritage. It required museums, which collected Native American human remains in an earlier era for research and display, to return those remains and/or sacred artifacts used in burials of the bodies to tribal descendants.
SEC. 4. ILLEGAL TRAFFICKING
(a) ILLEGAL TRAFFICKING. Chapter 53 of title 18, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end thereof the following new section: SEC. 1170. ILLEGAL TRAFFICKING IN NATIVE AMERICAN HUMAN REMAINS AND CULTURAL ITEMS
“(a) Whoever knowingly sells, purchases, uses for profit, or transports for sale or profit, the human remains of a Native American without the right of possession to those remains as provided in the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act shall be fined in accordance with this title, or imprisoned not more than 12 months, or both, and in the case of a second or subsequent violation, be fined in accordance with this title, or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.
“(b) Whoever knowingly sells, purchases, uses for profit, or transports for sale or profit any Native American cultural items obtained in violation of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act shall be fined in accordance with this title, imprisoned not more than one year, or both, and in the case of a second or subsequent violation, be fined in accordance with this title, imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.”
(b) TABLE OF CONTENTS. The table of contents for chapter 53 of title 18, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end thereof the following new item:
“1170. Illegal Trafficking in Native American Human Remains and Cultural Items.”
SEC. 5. INVENTORY FOR HUMAN REMAINS AND ASSOCIATED FUNERARY OBJECTS
(a) IN GENERAL. Each Federal agency and each museum which has possession or control over holdings or collections of Native American human remains and associated funerary objects shall compile an inventory of such items and, to the extent possible based on information possessed by such museum or federal agency, identify the geographical and cultural affiliation of such item.
(b) REQUIREMENTS. (1) The inventories and identifications required under subsection (a) shall be
(A) completed in consultation with tribal government and Native Hawaiian organization officials and traditional religious leaders;
(B) completed by not later than the date that is 5 years after the date of enactment of this Act, and
(C) made available both during the time they are being conducted and afterward to a review committee established under section 8.
(2) Upon request by an Indian tribe or Native Hawaiian organization which receives or should have received notice, a museum or federal agency shall supply additional available documentation to supplement the information required by subsection (a) of this section. The term “documentation” means a summary of existing museum or Federal agency records, including inventories or catalogues, relevant studies, or other pertinent data for the limited purpose of determining the geographical origin, cultural affiliation, and basic facts surrounding acquisition and accession of Native American human remains and associated funerary objects subject to this section. Such term does not mean, and this Act shall not be construed to be an authorization for, the initiation of new scientific studies of such remains and associated funerary objects or other means of acquiring or preserving additional scientific information from such remains and objects.
(c) EXTENSION OF TIME FOR INVENTORY. Any museum which has made a good faith effort to carry out an inventory and identification under this section, but which has been unable to complete the process, may appeal to the Secretary for an extension of the time requirements set forth in subsection (b)(1)(B). The Secretary may extend such time requirements for any such museum upon a finding of good faith effort. An indication of good faith shall include the development of a plan to carry out the inventory and identification process.
(d) NOTIFICATION. (1) If the cultural affiliation of any particular Native American human remains or associated funerary objects is determined pursuant to this section, the Federal agency or museum concerned shall, not later than 6 months after the completion of the inventory, notify the affected Indian tribes or Native Hawaiian organizations.
(2) The notice required by paragraph (1) shall include information
(A) which identifies each Native Amrican human remains or associated funerary objects and the circumstances surrounding its acquisition;
(B) which lists the human remains or associated funerary objects that are clearly identifiable as to tribal origin; and
(C) which lists the Native American human remains and associated funerary objects that are not clearly identifiable as being culturally affiliated with that Indian tribe or Native Hawaiian organization, but which, given the totality of circumstances surrounding acquisition of the remains or objects, are determined by a reasonable belief to be remains or objects culturally affiliated with the Indian tribe or Native Hawaiian organization.
(3) A copy of each notice provided under paragraph (1) shall be sent to the Secretary who shall publish each notice in the Federal Register.
(e) INVENTORY. For the purposes of this section, the term “inventory” means a simple itemized list that summarizes the information called for by this section.
SEC. 6. SUMMARY FOR UNASSOCIATED FUNERARY OBJECTS, SACRED OBJECTS, AND CULTURAL PATRIMONY
(a) IN GENERAL. Each Federal agency or museum which has possession or control over holdings or collections of Native American unassociated funerary objects, sacred objects, or objects of cultural patrimony shall provide a written summary of such objects based upon available information held by such agency or museum. The summary shall describe the scope of the collection, kinds of objects included, reference to geographical location, means and period of acquisition and cultural affiliation, where readily ascertainable.
(b) REQUIREMENTS. (1) The summary required under subsection (a) shall be
(A) in lieu of an object-by-object inventory;
(B) followed by consultation with tribal government and Native Hawaiian organization officials and traditional religious leaders; and
(C) completed by not later than the date that is 3 years after the date of enactment of this Act.
(2) Upon request, Indian tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations shall have access to records, catalogues, relevant studies or other pertinent data for the limited purposes of determining the geographic origin, cultural affiliation, and basic facts surrounding acquisition and accession of Native American objects subject to this section. Such information shall be provided in a reasonable manner to be agreed upon by all parties.
SEC. 7. REPATRIATION
(a) REPATRIATION OF NATIVE AMERICAN HUMAN REMAINS AND OBJECTS POSSESSED OR CONTROLLED BY FEDERAL AGENCIES AND MUSEUMS. (1) If, pursuant to section 5, the cultural affiliation of Native American human remains and associated funerary objects with a particular Indian tribe or Native Hawaiian organization is established, then the Federal agency or museum, upon the request of a known lineal descendant of the Native American or of the tribe or oranization and pursuant to subsections (b) and (e) of this section, shall expeditiously return such remains and associated funerary objects.
(2) If, pursuant to section 6, the cultural affiliation with a particular Indian tribe or Native Hawaiian organization is shown with respect to unassociated funerary objects, sacred objects or objects of cultural patrimony, then the Federal agency or museum, upon the request of the Indian tribe or Native Hawaiian organization and pursuant to subsections (b), (c) and (e) of this section, shall expeditiously return such objects.
(3) The return of cultural items covered by this Act shall be in consultation with the requesting lineal descendant or tribe or organization to determine the place and manner of delivery of such items.
(4) Where cultural affiliation of Native American human remains and funerary objects has not been established in an inventory prepared pursuant to section 5 or where Native American human remains and funerary objects are not included upon any such inventory, then, upon request and pursuant to subsections (b) and (e) and, in the case of unassociated funerary objects, subsection (c), such Native American human remains and funerary objects shall be expeditiously returned where the requesting Indian tribe or Native Hawaiian organization can show cultural affiliation by a preponderance of the evidence based upon geographical, kinship, biological, archaeological, anthropological, linguistic, folkloric, oral traditional, historical, or other relevant information or expert opinion.
(5) Upon request and pursuant to subsections (b), (c) and (e), sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony shall be expeditiously returned where
(A) the requesting party is the direct lineal descendant of an individual who owned the sacred object;
(B) the requesting Indian tribe or Native Hawaiian organization can show that the object was owned or controlled by the tribe or organization; or
(C) the requesting Indian tribe or Native Hawaiian organization can show that the sacred object was owned or controlled by a member thereof, provided that in the case where a sacred object was owned by a member thereof, there are no identifiable lineal descendants of said member or the lineal descendants, upon notice, have failed to make a claim for the object under this Act.
(b) SCIENTIFIC STUDY. If the lineal descendant, Indian tribe, or Native Hawaiian organization requests the return of culturally affiliated Native American cultural items, the Federal agency or museum shall expeditiously return such items unless such items are indispensable for completion of a specific scientific study, the outcome of which would be of major benefit to the United States. Such items shall be returned by no later than 90 days after the date on which the scientific study is completed.
(c) STANDARD OF REPATRIATION. If a known lineal descendant or an Indian tribe or Native Hawaiian organization requests the return of Native American unassociated funerary objects, sacred objects or objects of cultural patrimony pursuant to this Act and presents evidence which, if standing alone before the introduction of evidence to the contrary, would support a finding that the Federal agency or museum did not have the right of possession, then such agency or museum shall return such objects unless it can overcome such inference and prove that it has a right of possession to the objects.
(d) SHARING OF INFORMATION BY FEDERAL AGENCIES AND MUSEUMS. Any Federal agency or museum shall share what information it does possess regarding the object in question with the known lineal descendant, Indian tribe, or Native Hawaiian organization to assist in making a claim under this section.
(e) COMPETING CLAIMS. Where there are multiple requests for repatriation of any cultural item and, after complying with the requirements of this Act, the Federal agency or museum cannot clearly determine which requesting party is the most appropriate claimant, the agency or museum may retain such item until the requesting parties agree upon its disposition or the dispute is otherwise resolved pursuant to the provisions of this Act or by a court of competent jurisdiction.
(f) MUSEUM OBLIGATION. Any museum which repatriates any item in good faith pursuant to this Act shall not be liable for claims by an aggrieved party or for claims of breach of fiduciary duty, public trust, or violations of state law that are inconsistent with the provisions of this Act.
The Black Panther Party for Self Defense emerged in Oakland in 1966. The Panthers were probably the best known of the most militant and radical wing of the new black politics. They drew up their platform, reprinted below, in October of 1966.
Source: Huey Newton, “Huey Newton Speaks from Jail,” Motive 29 (October 1968): 8–16; The Black Panther Party, “Platform and Program of the Black Panther Party,” October 1966, in Thomas Frazier, ed., Afro-American History, 2d ed. (Belmont, Cal.: Wadsworth Publishing, 1988).
HUEY NEWTON INTERVIEW
QUESTION: The question of nationalism is a vital one in the black movement today. Some have made a distinction between cultural nationalism and revolutionary nationalism. Would you comment on the differences and give us your views?
HUEY P. NEWTON: Revolutionary nationalism first is dependent upon a people’s revolution with the end goal being the people in power. Therefore, to be a revolutionary nationalist you would by necessity have to be a socialist. If you are a reactionary nationalist your end goal is the oppression of the people.
Cultural nationalism, or pork chop nationalism, as I sometimes call it, is basically a problem of having the wrong political perspective. It seems to be a reaction instead of a response to political oppression. The cultural nationalists are concerned with returning to the old African culture and thereby regaining their identity and freedom. In other words, they feel that the African culture automatically will bring political freedom.
The Black Panther Party, which is a revolutionary group of black people, realizes that we have to have an identity. We have to realize our black heritage in order to give us strength to move on and progress. But as far as returning to the old African culture, it’s unnecessary and not advantageous in many respects. We believe that culture itself will not liberate us. We’re going to need some stronger stuff.
A good example of revolutionary nationalism was the revolution in Algeria when Ben Bella took over. The French were kicked out, but it was a people’s revolution because the people ended up in power. The leaders that took over were not interested in the profit motive where they could exploit the people and keep them in a state of slavery. They nationalized the industry and plowed the would-be profits into the community. That’s what socialism is all about in a nutshell. The people’s representatives are in office strictly on the leave of the people. The wealth of the country is controlled by the people and they are considered whenever modifications in the industries are made.
The Black Panther Party is a revolutionary Nationalist group and we see a major contradiction between capitalism in this country and our interests. We realize that this country became very rich upon slavery and that slavery is capitalism in the extreme. We have two evils to fight, capitalism and racism. We must destroy both racism and capitalism.
QUESTION: Directly related to the question of nationalism is the question of unity within the black community. There has been some question about this since the Black Panther Party has run candidates against other black candidates in recent California elections. What is your position on this matter?
HUEY: A very peculiar thing has happened. Historically, you have what Malcolm X calls the field nigger and the house nigger. The house nigger had some privileges. He got the worn-out clothes of the master and he didn’t have to work as hard as the field black. He came to respect the master to such an extent that he identified with the master, because he got a few of the leftovers that the field blacks did not get. And through this identity with him, he saw the slavemaster’s interest as being his interest. Sometimes he would even protect the slavemaster more than the slavemaster would protect himself. Malcolm makes the point that if the master’s house happened to catch on fire, the house Negro would work harder than the master to put the fire out and save the master’s house, while the field black was praying that the house burned down. The house black identified with the master so much that, when the master would get sick, the house Negro would say, “Master, we’s sick!”
Members of the Black Panther Party are the field blacks; we’re hoping the master dies if he gets sick. The black bourgeoisie seem to be acting in the role of the house Negro. They are pro-administration. They would like a few concessions made, but as far as the overall setup, they have more material goods, a little more advantage, a few more privileges than the black have-nots, the lower class, and so they identify with the power structure and they see their interest as the power structure’s interest. In fact, it’s against their interest.
The Black Panther Party was forced to draw a line of demarcation. We are for all of those who are for the promotion of the interests of the black have-nots, which represents about 98 percent of blacks here in America. We’re not controlled by the white mother country radicals nor are we controlled by the black bourgeoisie. We have a mind of our own and if the black bourgeoisie cannot align itself with our complete program, then the black bourgeoisie sets itself up as our enemy.
QUESTION: The Black Panther Party has had considerable contact with white radicals since its earliest days. What do you see as the role of these white radicals?
HUEY: The white mother country radical is the offspring of the children of the beast that has plundered the world exploiting all people, concentrating on the people of color. These are children of the beast that seem now to be redeemed because they realize that their former heroes, who were slavemasters and murderers, put forth ideas that were only façades to hide the treachery they inflicted upon the world. They are turning their backs on their fathers.
The white mother country radical, in resisting the system, becomes a somewhat abstract thing because he’s not oppressed as much as black people are. As a matter of fact, his oppression is somewhat abstract simply because he doesn’t have to live in a reality of oppression.
Black people in America, and colored people throughout the world suffer not only from exploitation, but they suffer from racism. Black people here in America, in the black colony, are oppressed because we’re black and we’re exploited. The whites are rebels, many of them from the middle class and as far as any overt oppression this is not the case. Therefore, I call their rejection of the system a somewhat abstract thing. They’re looking for new heroes. They’re looking to wash away the hypocrisy that their fathers have presented to the world. In doing this they see the people who are really fighting for freedom. They see the people who are really standing for justice and equality and peace throughout the world. They are the people of Vietnam, the people of Latin America, the people of Asia, the people of Africa, and the black people in the black colony here in America.
This presents something of a problem in many ways to the black revolutionary, especially to the cultural nationalist. The cultural nationalist doesn’t understand the white revolutionaries because he can’t see why anyone white would turn on the system. He thinks that maybe this is some more hypocrisy being planted by white people.
I personally think that there are many young white revolutionaries who are sincere in attempting to realign themselves with mankind, and to make a reality out of the high moral standards that their fathers and forefathers only expressed. In pressing for new heroes, the young white revolutionaries found these heroes in the black colony at home and in the colonies throughout the world.
The young white revolutionaries raised the cry for the troops to withdraw from Vietnam, to keep hands off Latin America, to withdraw from the Dominican Republic and also to withdraw from the black community or the black colony. So we have a situation in which the young white revolutionaries are attempting to identify with the oppressed people of the colonies against the exploiter.
The problem arises, then, in what part they can play. How can they aid the colony? How can they aid the Black Panther Party or any other black revolutionary group? They can aid the black revolutionaries first, by simply turning away from the establishment, and secondly, by choosing their friends. For instance, they have a choice between whether they will be a friend of Lyndon Baines Johnson or a friend of Fidel Castro. A friend of mine or a friend of Johnson’s. These are direct opposites. After they make this choice, then the white revolutionaries have a duty and a responsibility to act.
The imperialistic or capitalistic system occupies areas. It occupies Vietnam now. It occupies areas by sending soldiers there, by sending policemen there. The policemen or soldiers are only a gun in the establishment’s hand, making the racist secure in his racism, the establishment secure in its exploitation. The first problem, it seems, is to remove the gun from the establishment’s hand. Until lately, the white radical has seen no reason to come into conflict with the policeman in his own community. I said “until recently,” because there is friction now in the mother country between the young revolutionaries and the police; because now the white revolutionaries are attempting to put some of their ideas into action, and there’s the rub. We say that it should be a permanent thing.
Black people are being oppressed in the colony by white policemen, by white racists. We are saying they must withdraw.
As far as I’m concerned, the only reasonable conclusion would be to first realize the enemy, realize the plan, and then when something happens in the black colony—when we’re attacked and ambushed in the black colony—then the white revolutionary students and intellectuals and all the other whites who support the colony should respond by defending us, by attacking the enemy in their community.
The Black Panther Party is an all black party, because we feel, as Malcolm X felt, that there can be no black-white unity until there first is black unity. We have a problem in the black colony that is particular to the colony, but we’re willing to accept aid from the mother country as long as the mother country radicals realize that we have, as Eldridge Cleaver says in Soul on Ice, a mind of our own. We’ve regained our mind that was taken away from us and we will decide the political, as well as the practical, stand that we’ll take. We’ll make the theory and we’ll carry out the practice. It’s the duty of the white revolutionary to aid us in this.
QUESTION: You have spoken a lot about dealing with the protectors of the system, the armed forces. Would you like to elaborate on why you place so much emphasis on this?
HUEY: The reason that I feel so strongly is simply because without this protection from the army, the police and the military, the institutions could not go on in their racism and exploitation. For instance, as the Vietnamese are driving the American imperialist troops out of Vietnam, it automatically stops the racist imperialist institutions of America from oppressing that particular country. The country cannot implement its racist program without guns. The guns are the military and the police. If the military were disarmed in Vietnam, then the Vietnamese would be victorious.
We are in the same situation here in America. Whenever we attack the system, the first thing the administrators do is to send out their strong-arm men. If it’s a rent strike, because of the indecent housing we have, they will send out the police to throw the furniture out the window. They don’t come themselves. They send their protectors. To deal with the corrupt exploiter, we are going to have to deal with his protector, which is the police who take orders from him. This is a must.
QUESTION: Would you like to be more specific on the conditions which must exist before an alliance or coalition can be formed with the predominantly white groups? Would you comment specifically on your alliance with the California Peace and Freedom Party?
HUEY: We have an alliance with the Peace and Freedom Party because it has supported our program in full, and this is the criterion for a coalition with the black revolutionary group. If it had not supported our program in full, then we would not have seen any reason to make an alliance with them, because we are the reality of the oppression. They are not. They are only oppressed in an abstract way; we are oppressed in the real way. We are the real slaves! So it’s a problem that we suffer from more than anyone else and it’s our problem of liberation. Therefore we should decide what measures and what tools and what programs to use to become liberated. Many of the young white revolutionaries realize this and I see no reason not to have a coalition with them.
QUESTION: Other black groups seem to feel that from past experience it is impossible for them to work with whites and impossible for them to form alliances. What do you see as the reasons for this and do you think that the history of the Black Panther makes this less of a problem?
HUEY: There was a somewhat unhealthy relationship in the past with the white liberals supporting the black people who were trying to gain their freedom. I think that a good example of this would be the relationship that SNCC had with its white liberals. I call them white liberals because they differ strictly from the white radicals. The relationship was that the whites controlled SNCC for a very long time. From the very start of SNCC until recently, whites were the mind of SNCC. They controlled the program of SNCC with money and they controlled the ideology, or the stands SNCC would take. The blacks in SNCC were completely controlled program-wise; they couldn’t do any more than the white liberals wanted them to do, which wasn’t very much. So the white liberals were not working for self-determination for the black community. They were interested in a few concessions from the power structure. They undermined SNCC’s program.
Stokely Carmichael came along, and realizing this, started Malcolm X’s program of Black Power. Whites were afraid when Stokely said that black people have a mind of their own and that SNCC would seek self-determination for the black community. The white liberals withdrew their support, leaving the organization financially bankrupt. The blacks who were in the organization, Stokely and H. Rap Brown, were left angry and bewildered with the white liberals who had been aiding them under the guise of being sincere.
As a result, the leadership of SNCC turned away from the white liberal, which was good. I don’t think they distinguished between the white liberal and the white revolutionary; because the revolutionary is white also, and they are very much afraid to have any contact with white people—even to the point of denying that the white revolutionaries could help by supporting programs of SNCC in the mother country. Not by making programs, not by being a member of the organization, but simply by resisting.
I think that one of SNCC’s great problems is that they were controlled by the traditional administrator: the omnipotent administrator, the white person. He was the mind of SNCC. SNCC regained its mind, but I believe that it lost its political perspective. I think that this was a reaction rather than a response. The Black Panther Party has NEVER been controlled by white people. We have always had an integration of mind and body. We have never been controlled by whites and therefore we don’t fear the white mother country radicals. Our alliance is one of organized black groups with organized white groups. As soon as the organized white groups do not do the things that would benefit us in our struggle for liberation, that will be the point of our departure. So we don’t suffer in the hangup of a skin color. We don’t hate white people; we hate the oppressor.
QUESTION: You indicate that there is a psychological process that has historically existed in white-black relations in the U.S. that must change in the course of revolutionary struggle. Would you like to comment on this?
HUEY: Yes. The historical relationship between black and white here in America has been the relationship between the slave and the master; the master being the mind and the slave the body. The slave would carry out the orders that the mind demanded him to carry out. By doing this, the master took the manhood from the slave because he stripped him of a mind. In the process, the slave-master stripped himself of a body. As Eldridge Cleaver puts it, the slave-master became the omnipotent administrator and the slave became the super-masculine menial. This puts the omnipotent administrator into the controlling position or the front office and the super-masculine menial into the field.
The whole relationship developed so that the omnipotent administrator and the super-masculine menial became opposites. The slave being a very strong body doing all the practical things, all of the work becomes very masculine. The omnipotent administrator in the process of removing himself from all body functions realizes later that he has emasculated himself. And this is very disturbing to him. So the slave lost his mind and the slave-master his body.
This caused the slave-master to become very envious of the slave because he pictured the slave as being more of a man, being superior sexually, because the penis is part of the body. The omnipotent administrator laid down a decree when he realized that in his plan to enslave the black man, he had emasculated himself. He attempted to bind the penis of the slave. He attempted to show that his penis could reach further than the super-masculine menial’s penis. He said “I, the omnipotent administrator, can have access to the black woman.” The super-masculine menial then had a psychological attraction to the white female (the ultra-feminine freak) for the simple reason that it was forbidden fruit. The omnipotent administrator decreed that this kind of contact would be punished by death.
At the same time, in order to reinforce his sexual desire, to confirm, to assert his manhood, he would go into the slave quarters and have sexual relations with the black women (the self-reliant Amazon), not to be satisfied but simply to confirm his manhood. If he could only satisfy the self-reliant Amazon then he would be sure that he was a man. Because he didn’t have a body, he didn’t have a penis, but psychologically wanted to castrate the black man. The slave was constantly seeking unity within himself: a mind and a body. He always wanted to be able to decide, to gain respect from his woman, because women want one who can control.
I give this outline to fit into a framework of what is happening now. The white power structure today in America defines itself as the mind. They want to control the world. They go off and plunder the world. They are the policemen of the world exercising control especially over people of color.
The white man cannot gain his manhood, cannot unite with the body, because the body is black. The body is symbolic of slavery and strength. It’s a biological thing as he views it. The slave is in a much better situation because his not being a full man has always been viewed psychologically. And it’s always easier to make a psychological transition than a biological one. If he can only recapture his mind, then he will lose all fear and will be free to determine his destiny. This is what is happening today with the rebellion of the world’s oppressed people against the controller. They are regaining their mind and they’re saying that we have a mind of our own. They’re saying that we want freedom to determine the destiny of our people, thereby uniting the mind with their bodies. They are taking the mind back from the omnipotent administrator, the controller, the exploiter.
QUESTION: You have mentioned that the guerilla was the perfect man and this kind of formulation seems to fit directly with the guerilla as a political man. Would you comment on this?
HUEY: The guerilla is a very unique man. This is in contrast to Marxist-Leninist orthodox theories where the party controls the military. The guerilla is not only the warrior, the military fighter; he is also the military commander as well as the political theoretician. Regis Debray says “poor the pen without the guns, poor the gun without the pen.” The pen being just an extension of the mind, a tool to write down concepts, ideas. The gun is only an extension of the body, the extension of our fanged teeth that we lost through evolution. It’s the weapon, it’s the claws that we lost, it’s the body. The guerilla is the military commander and the political theoretician all in one.
What we have to do as a vanguard of the revolution is to correct this through activity. The large majority of black people are either illiterate or semi-literate. They don’t read. They need activity to follow. This is true of any colonized people. The same thing happened in Cuba where it was necessary for twelve men with the leadership of Che and Fidel to take to the hills and then attack the corrupt administration, to attack the army who were the protectors of the exploiters in Cuba. They would have leafleted the community and they could have written books, but the people would not respond. They had to act and the people could see and hear about it and therefore become educated on how to respond to oppression.
In this country black revolutionaries have to set an example. We can’t do the same things that were done in Cuba because Cuba is Cuba and the U.S. is the U.S. Cuba had many terrains to protect the guerilla. This country is mainly urban. We have to work out new solutions to offset the power of the country’s technology and communication. We do have solutions to these problems and they will be put into effect. I wouldn’t want to go into the ways and means of this, but we will educate through action. We have to engage in action to make the people want to read our literature. They are not attracted to all the writing in this country; there’s too much writing. Many books make one weary.
QUESTION: Kennedy before his death, and to a lesser extent Rockefeller and Lindsay and other establishment liberals, have been talking about making reforms to give black people a greater share of the pie and thus stop any developing revolutionary movement. Would you comment on this?
HUEY: I would say this: If a Kennedy or a Lindsay or anyone else can give decent housing to all of our people; if they can give full employment to our people with a high standard; if they can give full control to the black people to determine the destiny of their community, if they can give fair trials in the court system by turning the structure over to the community; if they can end their exploitation of people throughout the world; if they can do all these things, they will have solved the problems. But I don’t believe under this present system, under capitalism, that they will be able to solve these problems.
I don’t think black people should be fooled by their come-ons because everyone who gets in office promises the same thing. They promise full employment and decent housing; the Great Society, the New Frontier. All of these names, but no real benefits. No effects are felt in the black community, and black people are tired of being deceived and duped. The people must have full control of the means of production. Small black businesses cannot compete with General Motors. That’s just out of the question. General Motors robbed us and worked us for nothing for a couple hundred years and took our money and set up factories and became fat and rich and then talks about giving us some of the crumbs. We want full control. We’re not interested in anyone promising that the private owners are going to all of a sudden become human beings and give these things to our community. It hasn’t ever happened and, based on empirical evidence, we don’t expect them to become Buddhists overnight.
QUESTION: The Panthers’ organizing efforts have been very open. Would you like to comment about the question of an underground political organization versus an open organization at this point in the struggle?
HUEY: Some of the black nationalist groups feel that they have to be underground because they’ll be attacked, but we don’t feel that you can romanticize being underground. They say we’re romantic because we’re trying to live revolutionary lives, and we are not taking precautions. But we say that the only way we would go underground is if we’re driven underground. All real revolutionary movements are driven underground.
This is a pre-revolutionary period and we feel it is very necessary to educate the people while we can. So we’re very open about this education. We have been attacked and we will be attacked even more in the future, but we’re not going to go underground until we get ready to go underground because we have a mind of our own. We’re not going to let anyone force us to do anything. We’re going to go underground after we educate all of the black people and not before that time. Then it won’t really be necessary for us to go underground because you can see black anywhere. We will just have the stuff to protect ourselves and the strategy to offset the great power that the strong-arm men of the establishment have and are planning to use against us.
QUESTION: Do you see the possibility of organizing a white Panther Party in opposition to the establishment, possibly among poor and working whites?
HUEY: As I said before, Black Power is people’s power and as far as organizing white people we give white people the privilege of having a mind and we want them to get a body. They can organize themselves. We can tell them what they should do, but their responsibility, if they’re going to claim to be white revolutionaries or white mother country radicals, is to arm themselves and support the colonies around the world in their just struggle against imperialism. Anything more than that they will have to do on their own.
QUESTION: What do you mean by Black Power?
HUEY: Black Power is really people’s power. The Black Panther Program, Panther Power as we call it, will implement this people’s power. We have respect for all of humanity and we realize that the people should rule and determine their destiny. Wipe out the controller. To have Black Power doesn’t humble or subjugate anyone to slavery or oppression. Black Power is giving power to people who have not had power to determine their destiny. We advocate and we aid any people who are struggling to determine their destiny. This is regardless of color. The Vietnamese say Vietnam should be able to determine its own destiny. Power of the Vietnamese people. We also chant power of the Vietnamese people. The Latins are talking about Latin America for the Latin Americans. Cuba, si and Yanqui, no. It’s not that they don’t want the Yankees to have any power; they just don’t want them to have power over them. They can have power over themselves. We in the black colony in America want to be able to have power over our destiny, and that’s black power.
QUESTION: How would you characterize the mood of black people in America today? Are they disenchanted, wanting a larger slice of the pie, or alienated, not wanting to integrate into Babylon? What do you think it will take for them to become alienated and revolutionary?
HUEY: I was going to say disillusioned, but I don’t think that we were ever under the illusion that we had freedom in this country. This society definitely is a decadent one and we realize it. Black people cannot gain their freedom under the present system, the system that is carrying out its plans to institutionalize racism. Your question is what will have to be done to stimulate them to revolution. I think it’s already being done. It’s a matter of time now for us to educate them to a program and show them the way to liberation. The Black Panther Party is the beacon light to show black people the way to liberation.
You notice the insurrections that have been going on throughout the country; in Watts, in Newark, in Detroit. They were all responses of the people demanding that they have freedom to determine their destiny, rejecting exploitation. The Black Panther Party does not think that the traditional riots, or insurrections, that have taken place are the answer. It is true that they have been against the Establishment, they have been against authority and oppression within their community; but they have been unorganized. However, black people have learned from each of these insurrections.
They learned from Watts. I’m sure that the people in Detroit were educated by what happened in Watts. Perhaps this was wrong education. It sort of missed the mark. It wasn’t quite the correct activity, but the people were educated through the activity. The people of Detroit followed the example of the people in Watts, only they added a little scrutiny to it. The people in Detroit learned that the way to put a hurt on the administration is to make Molotov cocktails and to go into the streets in mass numbers. So this was a matter of learning. The slogan went up, “burn, baby, burn.” People were educated through the activity and it spread throughout the country. The people were educated on how to resist, but perhaps incorrectly.
THE PLATFORM
1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.
We believe that black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.
2. We want full employment for our people.
We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the white American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.
3. We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our Black Community.
We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules was promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of black people. We will accept the payment in currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over fifty million black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.
4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.
We believe that if the white landlords will not give decent housing to our black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.
5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the presentday society.
We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.
6. We want all black men to be exempt from military service.
We believe that black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like black people, are being victimized by the white racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.
7. We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of black people.
We believe we can end police brutality in our black community by organizing black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all black people should arm themselves for self-defense.
8. We want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.
We believe that all black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.
9. We want all black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.
We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that black people will receive fair trials. The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the black community from which the black defendant came. We have been, and are being tried by all-white juries that have no understanding of the “average reasoning man” of the black community.
10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate, for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; …
So when we turn to a Black Agenda for the Seventies, we move in the truth of history, in the reality of the moment. We move recognizing that no one else is going to represent our interests but ourselves. The society we seek cannot come unless Black people organize to advance its coming. We lift up a Black Agenda recognizing that white America moves towards the abyss created by its own racist arrogance, misplaced priorities, rampant materialism, and ethical bankruptcy. Therefore, we are certain that the Agenda we now press for in Gary is not only for the future of Black humanity, but is probably the only way the rest of America can save itself from the harvest of its criminal past.
So, Brothers and Sisters of our developing Black nation, we now stand at Gary as people whose time has come. From every corner of Black America, from all liberation movements of the Third World, from the graves of our fathers and the coming world of our children, we are faced with a challenge and a call: Though the moment is perilous we must not despair. We must seize the time, for the time is ours.
We begin here and now in Gary. We begin with an independent Black political movement, an independent Black Political Agenda, an independent Black spirit. Nothing less will do. We must build for our people. We must build for our world. We stand on the edge of history. We cannot turn back.
On March 11 and 12, 1972, more than three thousand African American political and cultural leaders met at a National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana, cochaired by Congressman Charles C. Diggs of Detroit, Mayor Richard Hatcher of Gary, and the poet Imamu Baraka. The convention’s “National Black Political Agenda” is excerpted here. Addressed to black people, it reflects well the new spirit of Black Power, with its emphasis on black self-determination and self-reliance.
Source: Claybourne Carson et al., The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader (New York: Penguin, 1991), pp. 493–499.
INTRODUCTION
The Black Agenda is addressed primarily to Black people in America. It rises naturally out of the bloody decades and centuries of our people’s struggle on these shores. It flows from the most recent surgings of our own cultural and political consciousness. It is our attempt to define some of the essential changes which must take place in this land as we and our children move to self-determination and true independence.
The Black Agenda assumes that no truly basic change for our benefit takes place in Black or white America unless we Black people organize to initiate that change. It assumes that we must have some essential agreement on overall goals, even though we may differ on many specific strategies.
Therefore, this is an initial statement of goals and directions for our own generation, some first definitions of crucial issues around which Black people must organize and move in 1972 and beyond. Anyone who claims to be serious about the survival and liberation of Black people must be serious about the implementation of the Black Agenda.
WHAT TIME IS IT?
We come to Gary in an hour of great crisis and tremendous promise for Black America. While the white nation hovers on the brink of chaos, while its politicians offer no hope of real change, we stand on the edge of history and are faced with an amazing and frightening choice: We may choose in 1972 to slip back into the decadent white politics of American life, or we may press forward, moving relentlessly from Gary to the creation of our own Black life. The choice is large, but the time is very short.
Let there be no mistake. We come to Gary in a time of unrelieved crisis for our people. From every rural community in Alabama to the high-rise compounds of Chicago, we bring to this Convention the agonies of the masses of our people. From the sprawling Black cities of Watts and Nairobi in the West to the decay of Harlem and Roxbury in the East, the testimony we bear is the same. We are the witnesses to social disaster.
Our cities are crime-haunted dying grounds. Huge sectors of our youth—and countless others—face permanent unemployment. Those of us who work find our paychecks able to purchase less and less. Neither the courts nor the prisons contribute to anything resembling justice or reformation. The schools are unable—or unwilling—to educate our children for the real world of our struggles. Meanwhile, the officially approved epidemic of drugs threatens to wipe out the minds and strength of our best young warriors.
Economic, cultural, and spiritual depression stalk Black America, and the price for survival often appears to be more than we are able to pay. On every side, in every area of our lives, the American institutions in which we have placed our trust are unable to cope with the crises they have created by their single-minded dedication to profits for some and white supremacy above all.
BEYOND THESE SHORES
And beyond these shores there is more of the same. For while we are pressed down under all the dying weight of a bloated, inwardly decaying white civilization, many of our brothers in Africa and the rest of the Third World have fallen prey to the same powers of exploitation and deceit. Wherever America faces the unorganized, politically powerless forces of the non-white world, its goal is domination by any means necessary—as if to hide from itself the crumbling of its own systems of life and work.
But Americans cannot hide. They can run to China and the moon and to the edges of consciousness, but they cannot hide. The crises we face as Black people are the crises of the entire society. They go deep, to the very bones and marrow, to the essential nature of America’s economic, political, and cultural systems. They are the natural end-product of a society built on the twin foundations of white racism and white capitalism.
So, let it be clear to us now: The desperation of our people, the agonies of our cities, the desolation of our countryside, the pollution of the air and the water—these things will not be significantly affected by new faces in the old places in Washington, D.C. This is the truth we must face here in Gary if we are to join our people everywhere in the movement forward toward liberation.
WHITE REALITIES, BLACK CHOICE
A Black political convention, indeed all truly Black politics must begin from this truth: The American system does not work for the masses of our people, and it cannot be made to work without radical fundamental change. (Indeed, this system does not really work in favor of the humanity of anyone in America.)
In light of such realities, we come to Gary and are confronted with a choice. Will we believe the truth that history presses into our face—or will we, too, try to hide? Will the small favors some of us have received blind us to the larger sufferings of our people, or open our eyes to the testimony of our history in America?
For more than a century we have followed the path of political dependence on white men and their systems. From the Liberty Party in the decades before the Civil War to the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln, we trusted in white men and white politics as our deliverers. Sixty years ago, W. E. B. Du Bois said he would give the Democrats their “last chance” to prove their sincere commitment to equality for Black people—and he was given white riots and official segregation in peace and in war.
Nevertheless, some twenty years later we became Democrats in the name of Franklin Roosevelt, then supported his successor Harry Truman, and even tried a “non-partisan” Republican General of the Army named Eisenhower. We were wooed like many others by the superficial liberalism of John F. Kennedy and the make-believe populism of Lyndon Johnson. Let there be no more of that.
BOTH PARTIES HAVE BETRAYED US
Here at Gary, let us never forget that while the times and the names and the parties have continually changed, one truth has faced us insistently, never changing: Both parties have betrayed us whenever their interests conflicted with ours (which was most of the time), and whenever our forces were unorganized and dependent, quiescent and compliant. Nor should this be surprising, for by now we must know that the American political system, like all other white institutions in America, was designed to operate for the benefit of the white race: It was never meant to do anything else.
That is the truth that we must face at Gary. If white “liberalism” could have solved our problems, then Lincoln and Roosevelt and Kennedy would have done so. But they did not solve ours nor the rest of the nation’s. If America’s problems could have been solved by forceful, politically skilled and aggressive individuals, then Lyndon Johnson would have retained the presidency. If the true “American Way” of unbridled monopoly capitalism, combined with a ruthless military imperialism could do it, then Nixon would not be running around the world, or making speeches comparing his nation’s decadence to that of Greece and Rome.
If we have never faced it before, let us face it at Gary: The profound crisis of Black people and the disaster of America are not simply caused by men nor will they be solved by men alone. These crises are the crises of basically flawed economics and politics, and of cultural degradation. None of the Democratic candidates and none of the Republican candidates—regardless of their vague promises to us or to their white constituencies—can solve our problems or the problems of this country without radically changing the systems by which it operates.
THE POLITICS OF SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION
So, we come to Gary confronted with a choice. But it is not the old convention question of which candidate shall we support, the pointless question of who is to preside over a decaying and unsalvageable system. No, if we come to Gary out of the realities of the Black communities of this land, then the only real choice for us is whether or not we will live by the truth we know, whether we will move to organize independently, move to struggle for fundamental transformation, for the creation of new directions, towards a concern for the life and the meaning of Man. Social transformation or social destruction, those are our only real choices.
If we have come to Gary on behalf of our people in America, in the rest of this hemisphere, and in the Homeland—if we have come for our own best ambitions—then a new Black Politics must come to birth. If we are serious, the Black Politics of Gary must accept major responsibility for creating both the atmosphere and the program for fundamental, far-ranging change in America. Such responsibility is ours because it is our people who are most deeply hurt and ravaged by the present systems of society. That responsibility for leading the change is ours because we live in a society where few other men really believe in the responsibility of a truly humane society for anyone anywhere.
WE ARE THE VANGUARD
The challenge is thrown to us here in Gary. It is the challenge to consolidate and organize our own Black role as the vanguard in the struggle for a new society. To accept that challenge is to move independent Black politics. There can be no equivocation on that issue. History leaves us no other choice. White politics has not and cannot bring the changes we need.
We come to Gary and are faced with a challenge. The challenge is to transform ourselves from favor-seeking vassals and loud-talking, “militant” pawns, and to take up the role that the organized masses of our people have attempted to play ever since we came to these shores: That of harbingers of true justice and humanity, leaders in the struggle for liberation.
A major part of the challenge we must accept is that of redefining the functions and operations of all levels of American government, for the existing governing structures—from Washington to the smallest county—are obsolescent. That is part of the reason why nothing works and why corruption rages throughout public life. For white politics seeks not to serve but to dominate and manipulate.
We will have joined the true movement of history if at Gary we grasp the opportunity to press Man forward as the first consideration of politics. Here at Gary we are faithful to the best hopes of our fathers and our people if we move for nothing less than a politics which places community before individualism, love before sexual exploitation, a living environment before profits, peace before war, justice before unjust “order,” and morality before expediency.
This is the society we need, but we delude ourselves here at Gary if we think that change can be achieved without organizing the power, the determined national Black power, which is necessary to insist upon such change, to create such change, to seize change.
TOWARDS A BLACK AGENDA
So when we turn to a Black Agenda for the seventies, we move in the truth of history, in the reality of the moment. We move recognizing that no one else is going to represent our interests but ourselves. The society we seek cannot come unless Black people organize to advance its coming. We lift up a Black Agenda recognizing that white America moves towards the abyss created by its own racist arrogance, misplaced priorities, rampant materialism, and ethical bankruptcy. Therefore, we are certain that the Agenda we now press for in Gary is not only for the future of Black humanity, but is probably the only way the rest of America can save itself from the harvest of its criminal past.
So, Brothers and Sisters of our developing Black nation, we now stand at Gary as people whose time has come. From every corner of Black America, from all liberation movements of the Third World, from the graves of our fathers and the coming world of our children, we are faced with a challenge and a call: Though the moment is perilous we must not despair. We must seize the time, for the time is ours.
We begin here and now in Gary. We begin with an independent Black political movement, an independent Black Political Agenda, an independent Black spirit. Nothing less will do. We must build for our people. We must build for our world. We stand on the edge of history. We cannot turn back.
To those who say that such an Agenda is “visionary,” “utopian,” and “impossible,” we say that the keepers of conventional white politics have always viewed our situation and our real needs as beyond the realm of their wildest imaginations. At every critical moment of our struggle in America we have had to press relentlessly against the limits of the “realistic” to create new realities for the life of our people.
This is our challenge at Gary and beyond, for a new Black politics demands new vision, new hope and new definitions of the possible. Our time has come. These things are necessary. All things are possible.
Molefi Asante of Temple University was one of the leading exponents of Afrocentrism. Afrocentrism emerged out of black power’s cultural challenge to the primacy of Anglo American culture and sparked a number of controversies in colleges and school systems in the 1980s and 1990s. This selection from Asante’s book The Afrocentric Idea reflects Afrocentrism’s rejection of the alleged objectivity of white scholarship, the reorientation of perspective to place Africa at the center of history and Europe on the periphery, and the horrors that slavery visited on African Americans.
Source: Molefi Asante, The Afrocentric Idea (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), pp. 3, 58, 126–127, 159.
DANCING BETWEEN CIRCLES AND LINES
What has fascinated me is the manner in which most of my colleagues have written theory and engaged in the social sciences in relationship to African people. They have often assumed that their “objectivity,” a kind of collective subjectivity of European culture, should be the measure by which the world marches. I have seldom fallen in step, insisting (gently) that there are other ways in which to experience phenomena, rather than viewing them from a Eurocentric vantage point.
My work has increasingly constituted a radical critique of the Eurocentric ideology that masquerades as a universal view in the fields of intercultural communication, rhetoric, philosophy, linguistics, psychology, education, anthropology, and history. Yet the critique is radical only in the sense that it suggests a turnabout, an alternative perspective on phenomena. It is about taking the globe and turning it over so that we see all the possibilities of a world where Africa, for example, is subject and not object. Such a posture is necessary and rewarding for Africans and Europeans. The inability to “see” from several angles is perhaps the one common fallacy in provincial scholarship. Those who have delighted us most and advanced thought most significantly have been thinkers who explored different views and brought new perspectives.…
AFRICAN FOUNDATIONS OF NOMMO
Any interpretation of African culture must begin at once to dispense with the notion that, in all things, Europe is teacher and Africa is pupil. This is the central point of my argument. To raise the question of an imperialism of the intellectual tradition is to ask a most meaningful question as we pursue African rhetoric, because Western theorists have too often tended to generalize from a Eurocentric base. What I seek to demonstrate in this section is the existence of an African concept of communication rooted in traditional African philosophies. Later, I will expand this by referring to a close description and examination of Akan culture, particularly as that culture exemplifies the use of words in the organization of society.…
CHOOSING FREEDOM
The Europeanization of human consciousness masquerades as a universal will. Even in our reach for Afrocentric possibilities in analysis and interpretation we often find ourselves having to unmask experience in order to see more clearly the transformations of our history.
Nat Turner and Henry Highland Garnet represent two powerful symbols in African American history. They stand against the tide of Europeanization in their discourse, even though the representational language of their discourse was American English. Yet the individual sense of community responsibility was in both their cases a striking motif of Afrocentricity.
In the old spiritual, “Good Lord, I done done, Good Lord, I done done, I done done what you told me to do,” are all the complexities of the messianic idiom in the history of black discourse. As Shango, Anokye, Sundiata, and Tarharka receded into the past, Africans, enslaved in America, found in certain Judeo-Christian tenets the heroics of Moses, the mission of Jesus, and the heady wine of rebellion. Garnet gathered the cloak to himself, but he was not the first or the last to try the delicate messianic maneuver.
The messianic idiom is the most prevalent motif in radical black discourse. In fact, in traditional black politics, such as Jesse Jackson’s case, one sees its continuation. Such a formula, all-encompassing in its focus, is nothing more than the transformation of the idea of mission into a radical individualistic posture. The messiah is mission-oriented and feels a moral or supra-rational need to stand as the deliverer of the people. Our tenure in the United States is replete with acts of individual courage and valor where the one attempts to make a sacrifice for the whole. Few of these acts ever resulted in major victories, but their frequent happening is fact enough to demonstrate the internal thrust for group and even, in some cases, national salvation. To have a mission in the sense of messianism implies deliverance as an objective. No other historical motif is so present in radical black discourse, probably because so much of it is clothed in religious symbolism.
Yet messianism has no tradition in Africa; it became for the African in America, enslaved and abused, the one tenet of an apocalyptic-Judaic-Platonic heritage that immediately made sense. Domination by whites assured the individual transformations that would give meaning to the dynamics of liberation discourse even if they dressed up and went to church. The enormous emancipatory possibilities were present because someone dared to risk life to make them so. In this sense, the position I have staked out recognizes the inherent problems of a Eurocentric perspective when one treats the question of black protest discourse. Inasmuch as the protest discourse is engaged in a liberation project from extreme Eurocentric practice, it becomes impossible for a Eurocentric critique to reveal the many intricacies of the protest discourse. The reason for this is that the discourse pits itself against the universe of the critiquing ideology.
Radical spokespersons have indicated their sense of mission in the dynamism of their rhetorical style; their force of speech has given substance to the search for something better. …
THE SEARCH FOR AN AFROCENTRIC METHOD
Throughout this book, I have been arguing that all analysis is culturally centered and flows from ideological assumptions; this is the fundamental revelation of modern intellectual history. An Afrocentric method is concerned with establishing a world view about the writing and speaking of oppressed people. Current literary theories—phenomenology, hermeneutics, and structuralism, for example—cannot be applied, whole cloth, to African themes and subjects. Based as they are on Eurocentric philosophy, they fail to come to terms with fundamental cultural differences. Consequently, some authors have mistaken European agitation, manifested as a rhetorical reaction to social, religious, and political repression, with African protest discourse that seeks the removal of oppression. Repression presumes that the persecuted have certain rights; oppression is the denial of these rights and humanity.
The principal crisis with which the Afrocentric writer or speaker is concerned remains the political/cultural crisis with all of its attendant parts, economic and social. Indeed, the same themes spring to life in the revolutionary work of African American musicians, artists, and choreographers who challenge assumptions about the universality of Eurocentric concepts. We are on a pilgrimage to regain freedom; this is the predominant myth of our life.