CHAPTER 5

black power

In his 1968 book Look Out, Whitey! Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama! Julius Lester wrote, “As early as 1962 black SNCC staff members would have parties whenever they gathered in Atlanta and these parties were open only to black people . . . They had an experience, which was practically impossible for a white to have because black people exist separately in America while having to deal with America. A black knows two worlds, while the white knows only one.”

No white liberal, radical, or hippie wanted to be like the guy Lenny Bruce made fun of in his bit “How to Relax Your Colored Friends at Parties,” the one who’d say things like, “You know that Joe Louis was a hell of a fighter, a credit to his race,” or, “Here’s to Paul Robeson.”

In the late sixties, in the balance between politics, culture, and consciousness, politics was an even bigger deal in most black communities than in the white world. The draft affected millions of white men, but if you had money you could drag out your college deferment or find the right psychiatrist. If you were black, regardless of your age or gender or economic status, you couldn’t avoid the realities derived from hundreds of years of slavery and Jim Crow subjugation. Elections and laws had extra impact on African Americans. As Martin Luther King Jr. explained, “They say you can’t legislate morality, and that’s true, but you can regulate behavior. A law cannot make a man love me, but it can prevent him from lynching me and I think that’s pretty important also.”

1967 was four years after Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, three years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and two years after the Voting Rights Act was signed into law. In November 1966, Edward Brooke, a moderate Republican from Massachusetts, became the first African American ever elected by popular vote to the United States Senate. Yet millions of black Americans were still treated as second-class citizens and many had run out of patience. At great cost, including the death of many civil rights workers (and four young schoolgirls), there had been integration of lunch counters and buses, and voter registration of African Americans had begun in the South, but patterns of discrimination in housing, employment, banking, and the criminal justice system persisted in both the North and the South, and the wounds of generations of racist orthodoxy festered.

These and other factors that no white person could completely understand created the context in which Gil Scott-Heron, who could have gotten a scholarship to an Ivy League school, decided to attend Lincoln University, a historically black college where Langston Hughes, one of Gil’s idols, had gone. It turned out to be the perfect place for Gil to transform his musical and poetic brilliance into the contemporary culture of the time. It was there that he first heard the Last Poets, who gave him a model for how to integrate a political sensibility into jazz and R&B, and it’s also where he met Brian Jackson, who would become a longtime collaborator and bandmate.

Tom Hayden and Abbie Hoffman were among many in the white counterculture who had gone south to work in the civil rights movement earlier in the decade. Several whites, including Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and Viola Liuzzo, had been murdered by racists.

The moral power of the civil rights movement reverberated in the part of white America I grew up in through writers like James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Claude Brown, whose Manchild in the Promised Land deeply moved me as a teenager. There was a renaissance of black comedy exemplified by older, subversive “blue” comics like Redd Foxx and Moms Mabley, and civil rights pioneers Dick Gregory and Bill Cosby—who had both black and white fans.

In San Francisco, the predominantly black Fillmore district bordered the Haight, and Roy Ballard, inspired by the Diggers, created Black Man’s Free Store. Peter Coyote recalls, “When we found supermarkets resistant to long-haired freaks, we could always send a white woman with a baby there to get the cast-off food we would then give away. Blacks couldn’t get the same result, so we’d send our people to get food for their project as well.” Efforts like these were meaningful on a micro level, but on a mass scale the consequences of generations of cultural segregation and racist oppression loomed quite large.

 

Stokely Carmichael

Malcolm X’s influence grew even greater after his death. Not long before he was killed, he had said that blacks shouldn’t let whites into their organizations because regardless of how noble the intent, eventually whites would get a disproportionate amount of control through the influence of money. In January 1966, Floyd McKissick replaced James Farmer as executive director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the organization changed from an interracial, integrationist, nonviolent civil rights group into one embodying a secular version of Malcom’s philosophy. This dynamic also took hold at the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which had been formed in 1960 and quickly became one of the most effective grassroots organizations in the South. By 1967, whites had been expelled from most of its chapters and boards, and the charismatic twenty-five-year-old Stokely Carmichael had been elected president, replacing John Lewis—the last president of the organization who believed in nonviolence.

Carmichael had graduated from Howard University as a philosophy major, but inspired by the civil rights movement, he went south and led voter registration efforts for SNCC in Lowndes County, Alabama. He was arrested dozens of times and was horrified by the cruel brutality of the white Southern cops. (He served forty-nine days at Mississippi’s notorious Parchman Farm prison.)

The first thing Carmichael did in his new role was to withdraw SNCC from an upcoming White House Conference on Civil Rights. He wanted to immediately differentiate the new iteration of SNCC from its past, and shortly thereafter he found an ideal rhetorical way to do so with the slogan “Black Power,” which was also the name of a book that Carmichael would coauthor in 1967. The phrase had appeared in Richard Wright’s 1954 book of the same name and had recently been adapted by SNCC’s Willie Ricks. However, it was Carmichael who injected “Black Power” into the national conversation in a widely covered speech in Greenwood, Mississippi, following the March Against Fear, at which civil rights hero James Meredith had been shot. Carmichael, who had the looks of a movie star, was a mesmerizing speaker: “This is the twenty-seventh time I have been arrested and I ain’t going to jail no more! The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin’ us is to take over. What we gonna start sayin’ now is Black Power!”

In the summer of 1966, Carmichael was one of the first black leaders to oppose the war in Vietnam, and in a speech at Berkeley, he popularized the chant, “Hell no, we won’t go!” And it was Carmichael who first said, “No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.”

Because of his affinity for the mass media, some in the movement mocked him as “Starmichael,” but it was that media savvy that took radical views into the living rooms of Middle America. On the CBS news show Face the Nation, Carmichael, dressed in a conservative suit and tie, flashed a Dennis the Menace smile as he calmly refused to rule out violence if injustice to African Americans persisted. He called for black soldiers serving in Vietnam to return and instead fight for voting rights at home. (“Are you calling for desertion?” CBS’s Martin Agronsky asked incredulously.)

For a time, Carmichael made a point of criticizing Martin Luther King Jr. When King asked for a suspension of picketing outside the White House for the wedding of President Johnson’s daughter Luci, Carmichael sent King a telegram: “You have displayed more backbone in defending Luci than you have shown for the colored people of Vietnam being napalmed by Luci’s father.” Carmichael proudly asserted that “LBJ could stand in front of Congress and say, We shall overcome, but he will never say, We want Black Power.” At some protests, SNCC signs read, Save Us from Our Black Leaders, referred to King as an Uncle Tom, and mocked him as Black Jesus.

Yet, as Dick Gregory pointed out in his memoir Callus on My Soul, “As militantly as the White press portrayed Stokely, he only got into one fight during the entire Movement. As much as he and Dr. King differed, the only physical altercation Stokely ever had was when somebody pushed Dr. King during a demonstration.” When King gave a sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta reiterating opposition to the Vietnam War, he invited Carmichael to attend and the SNCC leader applauded respectfully from a pew in the first row.

For his part, King refused to lend SCLC’s name to a New York Times ad signed by seven other mainstream civil rights groups repudiating Black Power. He understood that Stokely Carmichael had a different constituency than he did. He explained to Andrew Young, “If Stokely is saying the same thing I am saying, he becomes like my assistant.”

Carmichael saw the freedom movement of American blacks in the context of what he viewed as an international struggle for justice. In July 1967, he traveled to Cuba and was seated as a delegate at a convention held by the Organization of Latin American Solidarity. Later that year, he visited Communist China and North Vietnam. Even so, Carmichael was disappointed by the dogmatism and authoritarianism of Communist regimes. In February of 1968 he said that communism and socialism were not ideologies “suited for black people.” He advocated an African ideology “which speaks to our blackness. Nothing else.”

Carmichael became an immediate target of the political establishment. A week before he was elected governor of California, Ronald Reagan sent a posturing telegram to Carmichael asking him to cancel all of his speeches in California, as if the mere presence of the SNCC leader would lead to public catastrophe.

Carmichael only served as president of SNCC for one year. He was succeeded by the equally radical H. Rap Brown, who soon became known for the quote, “Violence is as American as cherry pie.” In 1968, Carmichael married South African singer Miriam Makeba, and in 1969 he renamed himself Kwame Ture and moved to Guinea. Until the end of his life, Ture remained a thought leader among African Americans. He often answered the phone by asking, “Ready for the revolution?”

 

Adam Clayton Powell

One afternoon in late 1967, I saw Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. speak on the Berkeley campus. At the time, he was being accused of corruption and wanted to rally national support. Powell had been the most powerful black congressperson in US history. In 1961, after sixteen years in Congress, he had become chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor, where he presided over the creation of Medicaid, the expansion of the minimum wage, education and training for the deaf, nursing education, aid for elementary and secondary education and school libraries, and legislation that made lynching a federal crime.

Powell maintained a strong connection with his Harlem district as pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, where he had offered the pulpit to Malcolm X and organized and supported many boycotts to empower the community. He also had a flamboyant lifestyle, which made him an easy target for his political enemies. Powell was accused of mismanaging his committee’s budget, taking trips abroad at public expense, and bringing two young women with him on overseas travel at government expense. Powell’s defense was, “I will always do just what every other congressman and committee chairman has done and is doing and will do.” He refused to pay a slander judgment won by a constituent in his Harlem district and feelings against him reached a critical mass in the House, which voted to exclude him in March 1967. Powell would eventually be vindicated. Represented by Arthur Kinoy, he prevailed in a lawsuit that claimed the House had no right to exclude him, and he was reelected by his constituents.

Powell was a lot older than those in the Berkeley audience, but his track record spoke for itself. “You know, you white kids and your protests are very impressive,” he said, “but you don’t seem to have any leaders. That’s okay—there are a lot of great black leaders, we have Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, James Farmer,” and then he jokingly pointed to himself, “and Big Daddy. Use one of ours.”

The crowd of several hundred Berkeley lefties laughed, but the various white radical and hippie clusters, whatever their other differences, were all pretty phobic about empowering any particular leader. Nevertheless, Powell’s point about the richness of black leaders at the time was undeniable. In addition to those he mentioned, the Black Panthers were emerging, the NAACP still mattered, and even though it wanted nothing to do with white people, so did the Nation of Islam. No one of any race was more well known than the NOI’s most famous convert, Muhammad Ali.

 

Ali!

During the years 1965 and 1966, Muhammad Ali successfully defended his boxing title seven times, yet he was the only heavyweight champion since Jack Johnson not to be invited to the White House. (I liked to think that if JFK had not been killed, he would have had Ali there.) In August 1966, the champ announced that he was filing for conscientious objector status and would not fight in the Vietnam War, saying to a confrontational press corps, “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.” At the time, Ali was going against the grain of popular opinion, even in the black community. According to Time, only 35 percent of blacks and fewer than 20 percent of whites opposed the war.

On February 6, 1967, Ali fought Ernie Terrell, who had persisted in calling him “Clay” in prefight interviews. The champ won by a unanimous decision, taunting Terrell as he punched him, “What’s my name? What’s my name?” Just six weeks later, on March 22, Ali successfully defended his title for the ninth time, knocking out Zora Folley in the seventh round.

Five weeks after that victory, Ali formally refused to step forward when his name was called at the US Army induction center in Houston, Texas. He was arrested and was immediately stripped of his title by the New York State Athletic Commission. Within the next few weeks, other states followed suit and Ali would not be able to box again in the United States until 1970. He defiantly told reporters, “No, I am not going ten thousand miles to help murder, kill, and burn other people to simply help continue the domination of white slave masters over dark people the world over. This is the day and age when such evil injustice must come to an end.”

On June 4, 1967, in his Cleveland office, recently retired Cleveland Browns superstar Jim Brown (at the time, he held the record for lifetime rushing yards in the NFL) convened a meeting of several top African American athletes with Ali. The group included Boston Celtics center Bill Russell (already a five-time NBA MVP), Bobby Mitchell and Jim Shorter of the Washington Redskins, Willie Davis of the Green Bay Packers, Sid Williams and Walter Beach of the Browns, Curtis McClinton of the Kansas City Chiefs, and Lew Alcindor, who would soon rename himself Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and go on to become the all-time leading NBA scorer. (Alcindor was then a sophomore at UCLA, but already one of the most famous college basketball players in the country.)

“Muhammad Ali was one of my heroes,” recalled Abdul-Jabbar years later. “He was in trouble and he was someone I wanted to help because he made me feel good about being an African American.” Cleveland attorney Carl Stokes, who would be elected in November as the first black mayor of a major American city, also attended.

There was no precedent in American history for any sports figure having taken such an aggressive antiestablishment stand, and some of the athletes tried to get Ali to soften his position. The army offered Ali an arrangement similar to what Joe Louis had during World War II, in which he would be spared combat and could just do boxing exhibitions. Some of Ali’s advisers were attracted to this option because it would have preserved the champ’s ability to make big money in the short run, but Ali wouldn’t consider it. Instead he spoke of the depth of his beliefs. “He was such a dazzling speaker, he damn near converted a few in that room,” recalls Jim Brown.

It is likely that Ali persuaded a lot of young America as well. At this point in time, he was the most popular American to publicly oppose the war, and to many young people he validated the antiwar movement in the same way that the Beatles had validated psychedelics.

On June 20, 1967, Ali was found guilty after a jury deliberation of only twenty-one minutes. Stokely Carmichael later said, “No one risked or suffered like Muhammad Ali. I didn’t risk anything. I just told people not to go.” Philosopher Bertrand Russell, then ninety-five years old, had convened an International War Crimes Tribunal in Stockholm to evaluate the situation in Vietnam, and wrote a letter to Ali that said, “You have my wholehearted support.”

A handful of New York writers such as Norman Mailer, George Plimpton, James Baldwin, and Pete Hamill formed a committee to reinstate the championship to Ali, but in most of the establishment world, the reaction was overwhelmingly negative. An editorial in the New York Times condemned Ali, as did virtually every major sports writer in the United States. Many older black celebrities rebuked Ali, including Jackie Robinson and Joe Louis. Howard Cosell, the ABC broadcaster who had previously been one of his biggest boosters, was too nervous about pressure from his network to lend his name to efforts to support Ali. The argument was almost totally generational for both blacks and whites. Most younger people got it; most older people were deeply offended. They hadn’t gotten the memo about the moral horror of the war in Vietnam or its lack of any relevance to America’s interests. They blindly trusted the government, just as they had during World War II.

Although Ali was idolized by pot-smoking hippies, when he spoke at colleges he often talked about his Muslim values, which included no smoking, drinking, or drugs. He was usually greeted with adulation, except on a few occasions when interracial couples walked out, offended by his disapproval of such relationships.

Ali publicly maintained the Nation of Islam’s separatist principles, but in his personal life he continued to work with whites, like his trainer Angelo Dundee, and befriended many of his white supporters. He usually adhered to the NOI insistence on staying out of electoral politics, but he made an exception and publicly endorsed Dick Gregory when he ran a quixotic write-in campaign for mayor of Chicago.

By 1971, public opinion about the war would change so much that the United States Supreme Court unanimously overturned Ali’s conviction. In subsequent decades, he was invited by several presidents to the White House and became one of the most popular people in America and around the world; but in 1967 he was on the cutting edge, at moments virtually alone with his conscience and beliefs.

Singer/actor Harry Belafonte said, “He was in many ways as inspiring as Dr. King, as inspiring as Malcolm. Out of the womb of oppression he was our phoenix . . . They could not break his spirit nor deny his moral imperative.”

Although they had differing religious beliefs, Martin Luther King Jr. and Muhammad Ali privately had great respect for each other. When Ali first won the championship in 1964, King was the only black leader to send him a telegram of congratulations. Two days after Ali refused induction, King preached from the pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist Church: “He is giving up millions of dollars in order to stand up for what his conscience tells him is right. No matter what you think of Muhammad Ali’s religion, you have to admire his courage.”

King met with Ali for about two hours on March 29, 1967. Afterward, the champ affably told reporters that although he disagreed with King regarding integration, the two men could still talk civilly like Kennedy and Khrushchev did.

 

Riots

The worst American race riots of the century took place during the summer of 1967. For some time, the black community in Newark, New Jersey, had been objecting to “redlining” (which placed undue economic burdens on black neighborhoods), lack of opportunity in education, training, and jobs, and police brutality.

On July 12, a black cab driver, John Weerd Smith, was arrested, beaten, and taken to Newark’s Fourth Precinct, where he was charged with assaulting the officers and making insulting remarks. In the eyes of the community, Smith hadn’t done anything remotely wrong. He had passed a parked police car, and was then pulled over by the two white officers.

Word of the unfair treatment spread quickly and over the course of five days, riots and destruction ultimately left a total of twenty-six people dead, including a police officer and a firefighter. Hundreds more were injured, over a thousand people were arrested, and property damage exceeded ten million dollars.

On July 23 in Detroit, police raided the Blind Pig, an unlicensed after-hours bar, and things got out of control and triggered a riot which also lasted five days, resulting in forty-three deaths, over 1,100 injuries, more than 7,200 arrests, and more than two thousand buildings were looted or destroyed. (To put this into context, the widely reported 2014 riots in Ferguson, Missouri, after the police killing of Michael Brown, resulted in no additional fatalities and less than one hundred arrests.)

Riots triggered by confrontations with police also occurred that summer in Tampa, Syracuse, Milwaukee, and Buffalo. Racial conflicts of this scale had not occurred in the United States since the Civil War. Many in the black community objected to the word “riot” and preferred the words “revolt” or “rebellion.”

President Johnson appointed a commission to study the underlying causes of the riots. It was chaired by Otto Kerner, the governor of Illinois, and included New York Mayor John Lindsay, Massachusetts Senator Ed Brooke, I.W. Abel, the president of the United Steelworkers of America, and Roy Wilkins, executive director of the NAACP.

The commission’s final report was released on February 29, 1968, in book form, selling an astounding two million copies. The main conclusion was that the riots resulted from black frustration at the lack of economic opportunity. The report stated, “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” It criticized the mass media as well: “The press has too long basked in a white world looking out of it, if at all, with white men’s eyes and white perspective.”

The commission’s suggestions included more diversity on police forces, stronger employment programs, the creation of housing opportunities in the suburbs for African Americans, and for public housing to be built on “scattered sites” instead of large high-rise projects.

Martin Luther King Jr. called the report a “physician’s warning of approaching death, with a prescription for life,” but the Congress and president made no effort to implement any of the commission’s proposals. (When Dr. King was assassinated a few months later, riots broke out again in over one hundred American cities.)

 

Amiri Baraka

One of the most prominent people arrested in the Newark riot was poet LeRoi Jones, who was charged with carrying an illegal weapon and resisting arrest. Jones’s poetry had been influenced by the beats, and he remained close with Ginsberg until the end of his life. At Jones’s trial, as supposed evidence of his guilt, the judge read a portion of Jones’s poem “Black People!” including the lines: “All the stores will open if you will say the magic words. / The magic words are: up against the wall mother fucker / this is a stick up!” (In 1969, Jefferson Airplane used the phrase in the chorus of “We Can Be Together,” on their Volunteers album.)

The poet was initially convicted and sentenced to three years in prison, but an appeals court reversed the conviction on the basis that the decision had been made primarily for his writing. Jones joked that he was charged with holding two revolvers “and two poems.”

In 1967, Jones visited Professor Maulana Karenga in Los Angeles. Karenga had started an organization called US after the Watts riots of 1965; he was influenced by Malcolm X’s short-lived Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU). In 1966, Karenga created the year-end holiday Kwanzaa as a gift-giving alternative to Christmas. He said his goal was to “give blacks an opportunity to celebrate themselves and their history, rather than simply imitate the practice of the dominant society.” Kwanzaa was inspired by African traditions, and the name is derived from the Bantu “First Fruit” celebration. Shortly after meeting Karenga, Jones changed his name to Amiri Baraka.

That same year, Baraka’s second book of jazz criticism, Black Music, was released, as was a movie version of his play Dutchman, which portrayed a shy black man being teased and seduced by a white woman (a film I saw while on acid).

 

Dashikis and Afros

In an article in the Harlem paper the Amsterdam News, reporting on the Newark riots, reporter George Barner referred to a new African garment called a dashiki, a colorful gown worn by men that was based on African clothing and was created by a black-owned company called New Breed, run by J. Benning. Within the next couple of years the dashiki was worn in public by many black celebrities, including Jim Brown, Sammy Davis Jr., Wilt Chamberlain, and Bill Russell.

Around the same time the natural Afro hairstyle became popular with many young black women. Kathleen Cleaver, who was married to Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, explained in a 1968 interview, “The reason for it . . . is a new awareness among black people that their own natural physical appearance is beautiful . . . For so many, many years we were told only white people were beautiful. Only straight hair, light eyes, light skin was beautiful, and so black women would try everything they could to straighten their hair and lighten their skin to look as much like white women . . . But this has changed because black people are aware.”

 

Black Panthers

Adapting the name from the Mississippi organization that Stokely Carmichael had supported, the Black Panther Party was created in late 1966 in Oakland, California. It was the brainchild of Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, both of whom had been heavily influenced by Malcolm X when they were student activists at Merrit College. In April 1967, the Black Panther Party opened its first official headquarters in an Oakland storefront and published the first issue of the Black Panther: Black Community News Service. Their core identity was armed citizens’ patrols which monitored the behavior of police officers and challenged police brutality in Oakland.

The Panthers also instituted a variety of community initiatives, most notably the Free Breakfast for Children program. Although the Panthers were highly regarded by black nationalists, they also had strong ties to white lefties and the hippie counterculture. Their operation was initially funded from sales on the streets of Berkeley of pocket-sized books containing sayings of Chairman Mao; they were primarily bought by white college kids. The Panthers also welcomed financial support from wealthy liberals such as Bert Schneider, who was a producer on The Monkees TV series, Easy Rider, and the antiwar documentary Hearts and Minds. The first few issues of the Panther newspaper were printed on a Gestetner mimeograph machine borrowed from the Diggers.

At the time, only sixteen of Oakland’s 661 police officers were African American. Newton had the Panthers memorize portions of California’s open-carry gun laws, and the group would record incidents of police brutality by following police cars. Membership started to really grow in February 1967, when the party provided an armed escort at the San Francisco airport for Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X’s widow and keynote speaker for a conference being held in his honor.

Don Mulford, a Republican assemblyman who represented Oakland, quickly responded to the Black Panther police patrols in 1967 with a bill to strip Californians of the right to openly carry firearms. The legislation, known in the press as “The Panthers Bill,” passed and was signed by Governor Reagan. While the bill was being debated, the Panthers burst onto the national scene on May 2, 1967, when thirty members, led by Bobby Seale, appeared at the state capitol building in Sacramento carrying rifles, shotguns, and handguns, which evoked both fears of and aspirations for an armed insurrection. Six of them actually entered the assembly chamber. Some legislators took cover under their desks. The Panthers claimed that they were within their rights to be in the capitol building with their guns, but they exited peacefully when ordered to do so by police.

Bobby Seale told reporters afterward: “Black people have begged, prayed, petitioned, demonstrated, and everything else to get the racist power structure of America to right the wrongs which have historically been perpetuated against black people. All of these efforts have been answered by more repression, deceit, and hypocrisy. As the aggression of the racist American government escalates in Vietnam, the police agencies of America escalate the oppression of black people throughout the ghettos of America. Vicious police dogs, cattle prods, and increased patrols have become familiar sights in black communities.”

Shortly after Seale finished speaking, police arrested the group on felony charges of conspiracy to disrupt a legislative session, charges which were eventually reduced to a misdemeanor.

Headlines around the country ran above evocative photos of armed black Panthers wearing berets, bomber jackets, and dark sunglasses, walking the halls of the California capitol building. In the underground press, the Panthers were front-page news. Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver were overnight counterculture celebrities, and in the black community they were fierce new role models of self-empowerment.

The Black Panther Party published a ten-point program on May 15, 1967, in the second issue of the Black Panther newspaper. Their demands included general goals such as full employment, an end to police brutality, and better education and housing, but also called for blacks to be exempt from the military draft and for all blacks to be released from federal, state, county, and city jails.

With typical hysterical hyperbole, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called the party “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country,” and he supervised an extensive program of surveillance, infiltration, and harassment designed to undermine Panther leadership, incriminate party members, discredit and criminalize the party, and drain the organization of resources and manpower. Many members of the Black Panthers were killed in police raids in various parts of the country.

Due to Huey P. Newton’s flair for the dramatic, a poster of him sitting on a wicker throne, wearing a beret and black leather jacket, holding a rifle in one hand and a spear in the other, soon appeared widely in head shops, college dorms, and in black communities.

On October 28, 1967, Newton was celebrating the end of probation from an assault charge when he was pulled over by Oakland policeman John Frey, and Frey was killed. Newton claimed that the officer was shot accidentally by another cop, but the Black Panther leader was arrested for murder. “Free Huey” quickly became a national slogan of the counterculture. He was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in September 1968, but the conviction was later reversed on appeal. Subsequent trials resulted in hung juries, so the charges were eventually dismissed.

The passage of decades has not fully dissipated the air of controversy that surrounded the Black Panthers. It is certain that the FBI and other law enforcement agencies targeted them wildly out of proportion to any possible threat they posed to society. It was politically driven and in some cases illegal. It is equally clear that the Panthers were not a monolithic group and that some members engaged in criminal behavior that had little or nothing to do with politics. Nonetheless, in the context of 1967, the image the Panthers projected of self-empowerment was a big deal.

 

Martin Luther King Jr.

In retrospect, it blows my mind how little Martin Luther King Jr.’s name was present in the underground press of the time. In 1967, Dr. King’s last full year of life, he remained America’s most sophisticated, progressive, spiritual, and intellectual leader. A large part of the explanation must be that he was thirty-eight years old at a moment when baby boomers of all races were convinced that they, and they alone, had some ineffable kind of authenticity.

Stokely Carmichael was not the only prominent African American who derided King’s commitment to nonviolence. Julius Lester wrote that King “was too Sunday school.” Adam Clayton Powell Jr. called him “Martin Loser King.” Many on the white new left, anxious to be au courant with black people of their generation, followed suit. In America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s, Michael Kazin and Maurice Isserman, both members of the SDS, wrote: “By the summer of 1967, most white new leftists would probably have agreed that the old interracial and nonviolent civil rights movement was not only over but was proven a failure.” I asked Kazin how it was that SDS paid so little attention to King at the time and he responded, “I respected Dr. King but he was older and he was a Christian preacher.”

Steve Wasserman, who first supported the Panthers when he was a Berkeley High School student, speculates, “Maybe it’s because he wore a suit and tie?” Although in recent decades I have come to regard King as both a saint and the preeminent American social change agent of my lifetime, I was not paying much conscious attention to him either, and yet it’s clear that King’s moral and political force was indispensable to the fragile balance of American political and spiritual thought in 1967.

As spring of 1967 loomed, while King was enduring contempt from some of the younger black activist world, he permanently shattered his relationship with many in the liberal and moderate worlds when he decided to publicly oppose the war in Vietnam.

King had long harbored grave doubts about the war, in part because of his ideological affinity with American pacifists, and also because he was inclined to support third world countries in conflict with European colonists. He identified with various African independence movements, particularly that of Kwame Nkrumah, who had become the first president of Ghana after the country’s nonviolent assertion of independence from Great Britain in 1957. Mahatma Gandhi’s successful effort to end the British colonization of India was also one of the defining examples of nonviolence that inspired King’s approach to the civil rights movement.

Charles Morgan Jr., a white lawyer who was on the board of the SCLC, is quoted in Michael Ezra’s Muhammad Ali: The Making of an Icon as saying that King was deeply affected by the boxer’s courage in refusing induction. “Martin had opposed the war for a long time but his hands were tied by our Board. Then Ali spoke out publicly, he took the consequences, and I believe it had an influence on Martin. Here was somebody who had a lot to lose and was willing to risk it all to say what he believed.” (When SCLC finally opposed the war, it was Morgan, by then one of Ali’s lawyers, who wrote their position paper.)

King’s feelings about Vietnam were also influenced by Thich Nhat Hanh, a young Vietnamese Buddhist monk who had first written to him in 1965. Hanh was an anti-Communist, but he objected to Western domination of Vietnam and to the American-backed Catholic government, which was discriminating against roughly 80 percent of the Vietnamese population who were Buddhists. At the request of A.J. Muste, whose teachings on nonviolence had so deeply influenced King and many of his colleagues, King met with Hanh in person in Chicago in the spring of 1966.

After that first meeting, King equated the Vietnamese monks’ struggle with the civil rights movement. Hanh fasted with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and radical Catholic priest Father Daniel Berrigan, and meditated with Thomas Merton. He was eventually granted a three-minute private meeting with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Hanh published his first book, Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire, in 1967. On January 25 of that year, King wrote to the Nobel committee recommending the monk for the Peace Prize. Two weeks later, on February 11, 1967, Muste died at the age of eighty-two. King said that without him, “The American Negro might never have caught the meaning of true love or humanity.”

Some of King’s closest advisers urged him to stay out of the public debate about the war. They felt it would burden the civil rights agenda with a position unpopular with many current allies, and would certainly alienate President Johnson, who had masterfully orchestrated the passage of civil rights and antipoverty legislation. Even pacifists such as Bayard Rustin and Andrew Young were opposed to the idea of King participating in a massive peace march scheduled in New York for April 15. King’s most loyal theological allies, Rabbi Heschel and John Bennett of the Union Theological Seminary, were avoiding the march, which was expected to be particularly radical in tone.

Reverend James Bevel, who was passionate in opposing the war, helped to finally persuade King to join the march. Once that decision was made, King’s advisers all agreed that he should make a speech in advance to carefully lay out his thinking, rather than have his views commingled with the cacophony of voices that always resounded at peace demonstrations. (Their concerns were well founded. Much of the press coverage of the march focused on fringe activities such as the display of Communist flags and the burning of an American flag.)

Dr. King’s speech on April 4 at Riverside Church in New York turned out to be one of the most thoughtful and compelling antiwar speeches of the entire movement. He began with a simple statement: “I come to this great, magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice.” He then proceeded to lay out his reasons for opposing the war.

King said that “America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube.” He also pointed out that African Americans were disproportionately serving, and consequently being wounded and killed in the war.

King had spent hours urging frustrated young black people not to be violent—to eschew Molotov cocktails and rioting due to tactical concerns, but also as a moral issue. How, he rhetorically asked, could he urge them to be nonviolent in American slums, but to be violent in a foreign country? King also felt a special obligation as a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. As he had done within the civil rights movement, he questioned his fellow Christian leaders: “Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the One who loved His enemies so fully that He died for them?”

King also restated the antiwar arguments that had surfaced at the teach-ins. Vietnam was not a “domino” in the Cold War but an independent society. The US had supported Ngo Dinh Diem, a Catholic dictator who persecuted the Buddhist majority. After Diem was deposed, the US propped up a series of military leaders, none of whom exhibited any commitment to democracy. The current US ally was General Nguyen Cao Ky, who had expressed his admiration for Adolph Hitler in a recent interview. On February 25, 1967, King said, “I see our country today intervening in what is basically a civil war, destroying hundreds and thousands of Vietnamese children with napalm.” King separately observed: “Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken—the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments.”

King concluded with specific proposals: end the bombing in North and South Vietnam, a universal cease-fire, curtailment of the military buildup in neighboring Thailand and Laos, inclusion of the Communist National Liberation Front in a future Vietnamese government, and a firm date for removal of all foreign troops.

This was a radical speech, considerably to the left of liberal Democrats such as Robert Kennedy, and consistent with the positions of the black and white countercultures, who were nonetheless largely ignoring him at the time. Afterward King told reporters, “Like Muhammad Ali puts it, we are all, black and brown and poor, victims of the same system of oppression.”

On April 15, King joined pacifist leader Dave Dellinger, Harry Belafonte, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Stokely Carmichael, and a quarter of a million others in New York City’s Central Park. More than two hundred draft cards were burned and then the vast crowd marched to the United Nations.

The next day, President Johnson ominously said in an interview that the FBI was “watching” the antiwar movement. Meanwhile, most of the American public still clung to the hope that their government was on the right track. Polls showed that 80 percent of Americans thought that bombing petroleum facilities near Hanoi would end the war.

King’s decision to oppose the president drew attacks from many in both the black and white liberal communities to whom he had previously been a hero. The NAACP board voted sixty to zero to condemn him. The New York Times headline read, “NAACP Decries Stand of Dr. King on Vietnam: Calls It a ‘Serious Tactical Mistake’ to Merge Rights and Peace Drive.” (King had suggested no such thing.) Some argued that the war was actually good for the civil rights movement because of its integrated battalions. King was also criticized by Dr. Ralph Bunche, the other black American who had won a Nobel Peace Prize, and by Carl Rowan, who as the ambassador to Finland and director of the United States Information Agency had been the highest-ranking African American in the Kennedy administration. In his masterpiece At Canaan’s Edge, Taylor Branch wrote that Rowan “angrily told King that millions of their fellow black people would suffer for his insults against the greatest civil rights president in American history.”

A highly critical Washington Post editorial said of King, “He has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, and to his people.” A New York Times’ editorial was headlined, “Dr. King’s Error,” and called his position “wasteful and self-defeating” and “a fusing of two public problems that are distinct and separate.”

King bitterly rebuked his liberal critics. “There’s something strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press that will praise you when you say, ‘Be nonviolent toward [racist Alabama sheriff] Jim Clark,’ but will curse and damn you when you say, ‘Be nonviolent toward little brown Vietnamese children.’” He concluded, “And I don’t know about you, I ain’t gonna study war no more.”

By the end of April, Alabama’s segregationist governor George Wallace announced that he would run for president on a platform of “victory” in Vietnam and hoped to win by securing the “white backlash” vote. Wallace denied being a racist, although he chanted, “Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” in a 1963 speech. King said, “The white backlash is merely a new name for an old phenomenon,” and described Wallace in an interview as “perhaps the most dangerous racist in America today.”

The riots made it obvious that de facto segregation and bias in the North were almost as corrosive as legal Jim Crow had been in the South. As the unprecedented wave of urban violence was finally dying down, on August 16, 1967, at the peak of the media focus on Black Power, King addressed over one hundred attendees in Atlanta on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the founding of SCLC. While he proudly listed the accomplishments of the civil rights movement in the previous decade (SCLC had voter registration teams in seventy-nine Southern counties at the time), King acknowledged that in America, blacks on average still had half of the average wealth of whites, and double the unemployment and infant mortality rates.

For some time, the supposedly “moderate” King had been saying that it didn’t mean all that much to get people the right to sit at a lunch counter if they didn’t have the money to pay for a meal. In 1962, King had started “Operation Breadbasket” to deploy the tactics of the civil rights movement to address racial economic imbalances. A key tactic of the organization was to foster “selective buying” (boycotts) as a means to pressure white businesses to hire African Americans and purchase goods and services from black contractors.

In 1966, King expanded Operation Breadbasket and chose twenty-five-year-old Jesse Jackson to run the Chicago chapter. Six feet three inches tall, with a prodigious Afro and a compelling oratorical talent, Jackson quickly became SCLC’s most visible Northern leader.

Operation Breadbasket helped create 2,200 new black jobs in Chicago, “bringing new income to the Negro community of about $18 million,” according to an October 1967 interview with King in the Detroit Free Press. They had pressured the mass retailer Hi-Lo into depositing enough money into local, black-owned banks to double their assets within a year, and to increase advertising in black-owned community newspapers.

And despite criticism from all sides, King continued to spread his message. In his speech at the SCLC convention in Atlanta in August 1967, he urged, “The Negro must rise up with an affirmation of his own Olympian manhood.” Noting the appeal of the phrase “Black Power,” King insisted that true power meant the ability to affect social and political change. “What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless . . . and that love without power is sentimental and anemic.”

In that same speech in Atlanta, King called for a guaranteed annual income for all Americans, a proposal which would still be radical fifty years later.

King remained committed to nonviolence. He mocked those who suggested that the Watts riot had been a meaningful form of activism, reminding his audience that it had produced scant results other than a few more water sprinklers. He pointed out that it was a practical impossibility for black violence to accomplish anything meaningful given the predominance of whites in political, military, and police power structures. But King’s most powerful argument was the cosmic one: “Darkness cannot put out darkness; only light can do that.”

Meanwhile, at the same time, in the same country, the hippies were still trying to make the world a brighter place.