Then I understood that I was using Black people to weep for me, to expressmy sorrow at my responsibility, and that of my people, for their oppression: and I was mourning because I felt they had something I didn’t, a closeness, a hope, that I and my folks had lost.
Minnie Bruce Pratt
The kids will have to decide whether they want to save their souls, or change other people’s lives.
Andrew Kopkind
In the mid-sixties, when African Americans wanted to criticize white roman-ticism—whites’ love for people they imagined as marginal and nonwhite— they attacked the singing. Sometimes the forms of protest people chose implicitly revealed this critique. A group of young African Americans marched in a demonstration at a Philadelphia construction site in May 1963 chanting “We/Shall/Overcome” as they beat the palms of their hands with rolled-up newspapers. The sound of their voices turned the prayer of the popular version into a demand. Love and interracial community had nothing to do with their movement. They wanted jobs. Some leaders and artists condemned singing more directly. “Who ever heard of angry revolutionaries swinging their bare feet together with their oppressor in lily pad pools, with gospels and guitars and’I have a dream’ speeches,” Malcolm X asked over a year later, taking aim at the March on Washington. Stokely Carmichael echoed this critique in 1966: “No more prayers, no more Freedom Songs, no more dreams. Let’s go for power.” Freedom songs, nonviolence, and integration, in this view, had become part of the problem. Whether or not they were ever effective tools for achieving equality—and African Americans disagreed on this issue—for young black radicals they had become part of a new white racism, what liberal “friends” demanded from potential African American allies.1
It took a musician, however, to dissect the problem of white middle-class romanticism so powerfully evoked by images of group singing. A former Fisk University student, Julius Lester helped folksinger and organizer Guy Carawan collect, transcribe, and publish Freedom Songs, wrote articles for Sing Out! and Broadside, served as a song leader in the southern movement, and composed and wrote his own music. He also worked as a SNCC staff member and was in Mississippi for the 1964 summer project. In 1966, he wrote in “The Angry Children of Malcolm X” that the eponymous children were tired of singing. The title he chose played off that of another article, widely read and discussed among folk music fans and musicians, on the influence and legacy of folksinger Pete Seeger—”Pete’s Children.” Blacks and whites, Lester suggested, no longer shared a common parent, a common mood, or a common sense of the goals of the struggle. “At one time black people wanted to be American, to communicate with whites, to live in the Beloved Community. Now that is irrelevant.” 2
The problem, he wrote, was the way some whites’ love for blacks as authentic outsiders limited blacks’ efforts to gain equality. “SNCC had been their romantic darling, a kind of teddy bear that they could cuddle,” he wrote of white liberals in 1966. “The time had come, however, when blacks could no longer be the therapy for white society.” White liberals had “had a cause, something that would put meaning into their lives, something that their country and society had not given them. They had it in the Negro. So they came south and they loved us when we got out heads beat, our asses kicked, and our bodies thrown in jail. They loved us as we bled, loving loving loving all the while. How noble, how courageous, how wonderful it all was.” 3
For African American activists, however, “these northern protest rallies where Freedom Songs were sung and speeches speeched and applause applauded and afterward telegrams and letters sent to the president and to Congress began to look more and more like moral exercises.” White liberals “weren’t really interested in solving the problem. They simply wanted to protest against it.” What, he wanted to know, could love actually do? Could it stop the hurt and the want and the brutality? Lester quoted a SNCC veteran, “Man, the people are too busy getting ready to fight to bother with singing anymore.” “Now it is over. The days of singing Freedom Songs and the days of combating bullets and billy clubs with Love,” Lester observed, shifting his prose into the style of a song lyric: “Too much love/Too much love/Nothing kills a nigger like/Too much love.” Maybe sympathetic whites’ own need to experience transcendence and racial unity and their vision of social justice and the needs and desires of African Americans were not in harmony. Maybe the voices did not blend. Maybe people were not even singing the same song.4
The New Left grew through proposing that shared feelings of opposition, rebellion, and outrage, no matter their different sources, could unite people in action. The romance of the outsider both helped generate this coalition, what supporters from the mid-sixties through the seventies called “the movement,” a loose collection of organizations and causes from the civil rights movement, Black Power, and Chicano, American Indian, and Asian American rights movements to anti-war organizing, feminism, and gay liberation, and also limited it. The very fact that some people could experience outsider status as a cultural and psychological choice reaffirmed the class, gender, and racial differences that shared emotions denied.
In the second half of the sixties and into the seventies, white radicals announced that oppressed people of all kinds were allies, joined through their broad experience of alienation. The liberation of any one group of oppressed people, in this kind of thinking, aided in the liberation of all. Many middle-class whites used this idea to recognize and embrace their own position as outsiders. Moving in the opposite direction, many black radicals embraced the importance of difference through Black Power and other forms of black nationalism. In SNCC, in the Black Panther Party, and in civil rights organizing in places like Philadelphia and New York, Black Power emerged in part as a reaction to white romanticism. Pushing out white activists functioned as a psychological and cultural parallel to the strategic rejection of nonviolence and the political critique of liberalism.5
The role of white romanticism in both generating and limiting the movement remains largely unexamined in debates about the New Left. White romanticism was not the opposite of white supremacy but the foundation of a different kind of white privilege. If everyone was an outsider in some way, then everyone’s emotions and everyone’s liberation from oppression were important. This kind of thinking pushed white middle-class young people especially to imagine commonalities across race, class, and later gender divisions. Yet there were in fact differences and they did matter. Despite the love, despite the conscious intentions, some people had more freedom than others, and their freedom could limit the freedom of others. Some middle-class Americans’ quest for the “real” and “authentic” limited the prospects for a new mass politics on the left by denying class and other differences in the name of shared feelings and even love.
Interest, concern, and even sympathy—too much love—had a way of making the people who were its objects less than equal citizens. As some African Americans rejected this love, many middle-class whites, especially young people with some connection to the left, could not let go of their romanticism. Some clung to their dream of one big movement—Student Power as a counterpart to Black Power; some student activists refused to give up the belief that African Americans possessed some special claim to authenticity, replacing the idea of black as folk with an image of armed, urban blacks as “real” revolutionaries. Still others reacted by searching for new outsiders to love (Chinese Communists, the Cubans, or the Vietnamese) or by claiming their own sta tus as outsiders (radical feminism and gay liberation). African Americans’ growing support for black separatism and Afro-centrism strongly shaped white middle-class romanticism, but it did not end whites’ racist assertions of black authenticity.6
Black Power and White Romanticism
“Black Power for Black People,” SNCC staff ers began to declare out in the field as they tried to not only register voters but also win real political power for African Americans in the Alabama Black Belt in 1965 and 1966. “What do we want? Black Power! Black Power!” SNCC president Stokely Carmichael and young marchers chanted in June 1966 on their way across Mississippi. “We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community,” Huey Newton and Bobby Seale wrote in October 1966 in “What We Want, What We Believe,” the ten-point program and plan that helped launch the Black Panther Party. “We believe that black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.” In the mid-sixties, similar calls for black self-determination rang out across the nation, from the small towns and rural crossroads of the southern Black Belt to the urban ghettos of the Rust Belt. Part strategy, part rallying cry, and part symbol, Black Power emerged as the civil rights era’s flowering of the old separatist traditions of black nationalism. It drew upon the post–World War II activism of black veterans, the speeches and writings of recently assassinated Black Muslim leader Malcolm X, and the southern tradition of self-defense made visible in the work of North Carolina NAACP leader Robert F. Williams and the Louisiana-centered Deacons of Defense. It grew out of the civil rights organizing experience in Albany, Green-wood, and Selma and in Philadelphia, Oakland, and Detroit. It responded to the racism of white conservatives and the racism of white liberals. It provided an answer to the failure of “democratic” politics to represent all American citizens and the failures of what passed as “American culture” to offer nonracist images of black Americans. It joined the struggles of African Americans to the ongoing liberation movements of people of African descent around the globe, in Algeria and South Africa, for example, and in newly independent nations like Ghana.7
Black Power meant African American self-determination and separatism. But black self-determination meant more than political representation. It meant cultural representation. It meant not having to play either the old Uncle or Auntie role demanded by the segregationists or the new civil rights saint required by the liberals. It meant psychological freedom. Black Power just might provide an antidote to white middle-class romanticism. And white romanticism, in turn, played an essential role in producing the media attention that fed back into and shaped this particular moment in the history of black nationalism. African American activists wanted to put black “authenticity” to work to liberate African Americans. In part, they succeeded, but African Americans’ own embrace of the romance of the outsider did not escape the cultural codes of minstrelsy and worked, in turn, to generate new forms of white romanticism. SNCC’s attempt to free itself from white romanticism and the Black Panther Party’s emergence as the new “darling” of white radicals illustrated the limits of a New Left coalition dependent in part on the romance of the outsider.8
Carmichael had not been SNCC president long when the organization unexpectedly participated in a march across Mississippi in June 1966, taking up, along with other groups, the banner of James Meredith, wounded by a shotgun blast on the second day of his Memphis-to-Jackson one-man March Against Fear. Arrested in Greenwood, where he had worked as a SNCC field secretary in 1963 and 1964, Carmichael told the large crowd that gathered when he was released: “This is the twenty-seventh time I have been arrested. 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’ … The white folks in the state of Mississippi ain’t nothing but a bunch of racists,” Carmichael continued angrily. “What do we want?” Carmichael asked again and again. “Black Power,” the crowd chanted repeatedly in return, “Black Power. Black Power.” Carmichael, SNCC activists, and local blacks’ call for “Black Power” took place amidst growing black militancy in places like Oakland, where Newton and Seale founded the Black Panther Party that fall, and Atlanta, where members of the Revolutionary Action Movement were at work radicalizing some SNCC field secretaries.9
Newspapers and television reports suggesting that “Black Power” shocked both whites and many blacks appeared immediately and remained in the news all summer. Journalists spoke with black leaders, many of whom were quick to attack Carmichael and the phrase. Martin Luther King Jr., quoted repeatedly, criticized “Black Power” as “an unfortunate choice of words … that will confuse our allies, isolate the Negro community and give many prejudiced whites, who might otherwise be ashamed of their anti-Negro feeling, a ready excuse for self-justification.” Roy Wilkins, executive director of the NAACP, argued that “no matter how endlessly they try to explain it, the term’black power’ means anti-white power.” Much more hostile than King, he insisted “black power” meant “separatism,” “wicked fanaticism,” “ranging race against race,” and “in the end only black death.” He attacked the concept as “the father of hatred and the mother of violence.” On June 11, former SNCC chairman John Lewis resigned from the organization, and later that summer, he told journalists that SNCC adopted the “Black Power” cry and the black panther symbol “to scare hell out of the white people. I agree with Dr. King that racism is implied in the slogan.” Talk of Black Power alienated white supporters, he argued: “bewildered,” many whites were “having second thoughts. They don’t understand the talk of’black power.’ Whites who have identified with the oppressed Negroes begin now to identify with other whites who might seem threatened by the talk of black power.” Hosea Williams, a staff member for King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, accused SNCC of “racism in reverse.” 10
Editorials and newspaper columnists compared Black Power advocates to white supremacists. The Los Angeles Times editorial page announced, “Extremism has not been limited to white yahoos.” Black “extremists,” “consciously setting out to frighten whites,” had halted “racial progress.” The Wall Street Journal complained without irony that black activists “relegated” white marchers in Mississippi “to a status of second-class citizenship” and expressed “ill-feelings toward whites.” SNCC’s new slogan, many papers insisted, was increasing congressional opposition to the 1966 civil rights bill. Syndicated journalists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak accused SNCC of “subverting the distant dream of a bi-racial society that the movement originally fostered.” Network newscasts showed footage of Carmichael speaking at a voter registration rally, a portrait described by one sympathetic television critic who criticized the coverage as “short, sharp, and demagogic.” 11
Important politicians joined the chorus. Hubert Humphrey called Black Power “apartheid.” Senator Robert F. Kennedy denounced it as potentially “damaging not only to the civil rights movement but to the country.” African American leaders, he argued, should not reject white help in the fight for equality. President Johnson stated forcefully, “We are not interested in black power, and we are not interested in white power. But we are interested in American democratic power with a small’d.’ “ 12
Only a few white journalists tried to explain the popularity of Black Power with African Americans and why many were angry with “white moderates” who were supposed to be their friends. The Christian Science Monitor criticized all the editorializing as “a panicky overreaction,” and Newsweek, surprisingly ambivalent rather than harsh, called Carmichael “a rebel with a cause.” “It is precisely the’democratic power with a small “D” of which Mr. Johnson spoke,” journalist Tom Wicker argued, “that has denied [blacks] their rights, equality, jobs and comforts for a full century … If the honest and needed promises of the white majority are not fulfilled with at least deliberate speed, then who is jeopardizing what?” In the Nation, journalist Paul Good described “the frustrating phenomenon of white power which the majority of whites were taking for granted.” White Americans’ power, he argued, “had a disabling influence in its ability even to recognize the powerless position in which the American Negro found himself.” Maybe the new advocates of Black Power had good reasons for being angry with white liberals.13
Despite these exceptions, the intensity and tone of the reaction to the phrase “Black Power” made clear how much many whites’ support for civil rights depended upon a particular fantasy of African Americans as outsiders. Poor rural black folks “grateful” for white northern help fit the vision, as did nonviolent activists who bowed like saints beneath the clubs of southern segregationists. Malcolm X had described these southern blacks as powerless people who “picket and boycott and beg some cracker for a job.” African Americans who carried guns or ran for office did not fit this romance of the good black folk. Neither did blacks who demanded their rights rather than asked whites to grant them. For many white Americans, Black Power advocates were just too hard to love.14
In July and August, Carmichael traveled everywhere, taking the talent for public speaking he had developed in Delta towns like Greenwood, Mississippi, and rural crossroads like Lowndes County, Alabama, to northern cities wracked by violence. He put aside his trademark overalls and jean jacket— farmer’s clothes—at times for dark suits and ties but even more frequently for the more urban attire of leather jackets, sunglasses, and slacks. Here at last, according to Ebony, was a black leader who “walks like Sidney Poitier, talks like Harry Belafonte and thinks like the post-Muslim Malcolm X.” In July, Carmichael spoke to black militants, many of them young gang members, in a union hall in Chicago. In Cleveland in August, just after rioting there had ended, he announced bluntly, “When you talk of’black power,’ you talk of bringing this country to its knees.” Black men, he argued repeatedly, should refuse to fight in imperial America’s war against the colored people of Vietnam. He was always on television, frequently photographed, and repeatedly quoted in the papers. Under Carmichael’s leadership, Newsweek argued, “SNCC speaks for a growing bloc of the disaffected when it argues that … a black man ought to hit back when a white man hits him, that white liberals are all right only if they know their place and stay in it.” Again, without irony, journalists described whites in the kinds of terms once reserved to describe African Americans’ own oppression.15
In his widely read, discussed, and quoted piece “What We Want” in the September 22, 1966, issue of the New York Review of Books, Stokely Carmichael addressed the problem of white romanticism as central to SNCC’s turn to Black Power. “We cannot be expected any longer to march and have our heads broken,” he said, “in order to say to whites: come on, you’re nice guys. For you are not nice guys. We have found you out.” Liberals were not exceptions: “They complain,’What about me?—don’t you want my help any more?’ These are people supposedly concerned about black Americans, but today they think first of themselves, of their feelings of rejection … Black Americans,” he argued, “have been almost the only people whom everybody and his momma could jump up and call their friends. We have been tokens, symbols, objects.” In the future, blacks would name their own friends and allies: “Too many young middle-class Americans, like some sort of Pepsi generation, have wanted to come alive through the black community. They’ve wanted to be where the action is—and the action has been in the black community.” The tone and image of the nonviolent southern civil rights movement, he complained, appealed much more strongly to white liberals than it did to young blacks. African Americans did not want to hurt whites or “’take over’ the country”: “The white man is irrelevant to blacks, except as an oppressive force. Blacks want to be in his place, yes, but not in order to terrorize and lynch and starve him. They want to be in his place because that is where a decent life can be had.” 16
Stokely Carmichael gives a Black Power speech at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1966. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
In part, white journalists reported on Carmichael’s activities because he was articulate, photogenic, and provocative. But he also made good copy because he was president of SNCC. In the fall of 1966, SNCC still had an integrated staff (the remaining white staff members would be voted out of full membership in the organization that December). The organization’s funding base and celebrity status, too, still depended to an important degree on white romanticism. Not surprisingly, white SNCC activists and supporters felt betrayed when Carmichael said they were irrelevant. When Carmichael and other African American activists criticized these white civil rights supporters for feeling rejected, they felt even more wounded. Writing for the Village Voice in late 1966, a white former SNCC activist was shockingly candid: “I’m mad. It’s the kind of anger one might feel in, say, a love relationship, when after entering honestly you find that your loved one’s been balling with someone else, and what’s worse, enjoying it.” The metaphor of intimate romance reflects the reality that for many white volunteers, involvement with SNCC produced the intense emotions—pleasure in and fear about identification and connection, tidal waves of longing and desire, the frisson of being hyperaware of the present—so often generated by sexual relationships.17
In the second half of 1966 and early 1967, black activists and scholars stepped up their attacks on white romanticism. Young African Americans, Julius Lester argued, had begun “to feel uneasy” with building a movement around the image of “well-dressed, well-mannered, clean Negroes … being beaten by white southerners:
Was this not another form of the bowing and scraping their grandparents had had to do to get what they wanted? Were they not acting once again as the white man wanted and expected them to? And why should they have to be brutalized, physically and spiritually, for what every other American had at birth?
Black Power, they hoped, would free them from the way nonviolent direct action had taken the minstrelsy of the folk off the stage and into the streets. “It isn’t my job to make black people love everybody,” Stokely Carmichael told a journalist. “Whites get nervous when we don’t keep talking about brotherly love. They need reassurance,” he insisted. “But we’re not about to divert our energies to give it to them.” Historian Vincent Harding criticized white Christians, full of “hostility and fear,” telling blacks “you must love—like Christ and Doctor King.” Black power, they hoped, would free them from the love. African American poet June Meyer mourned that for whites, African American life remained “an imagining, a TV spectacular, the product of rank intuition, the casualty of gross misrepresentation, and grist for statistical games … an object, a titillation, a scare, an unknown reality and an unfamiliar voice.” 18
The journalist Andrew Kopkind perceptively argued in January 1967:
What galls SNCC people most is the way white radicals seem to have treated SNCC as a kind of psychotherapy, as a way to work out problems of alienation and boredom and personal inadequacy. A season of organizing in Mississippi, despite (or because of) the dangers and discomforts, was often more therapeutic for the white organizer than the blacks being organized. To SNCC, that was a form of unconscious racism, manipulation, and white supremacy. What is happening now is that many of those whites feel hopelessly rejected by their Negro Friends, like patients whose analyst suddenly leaves town.
By embracing separation, African Americans announced they would no longer provide the resources for white therapy. As I. F. Stone wrote, “SNCC is reacting against a new version of the white man’s burden.” 19
In fact, African American psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint claimed in Ebony and the New York Times Magazine, Black Power grew out of this white problem. African American activists working in Mississippi told him that whites working in the movement there were “beatniks, left overs, white trash, sluts, etc.,” who came south “looking for excitement and adventure” and the chance to become “martyrs” and act like “big wheels.” To prove they were free of prejudice, black activists told Poussaint, white workers had sex with African Americans and “indulg[ed] in all manner of unconventional behavior” that blacks believed they would never have tried at home. One young black activist said of the white summer project volunteers, “Some of them are worse than the white segregationists because they are out here feeling sorry for the’poor colored folks’ and they are doing nothing more than satisfying their own needs by being nice to the Negroes. Whites didn’t do anything on my project in Greenwood in the summer of’64 but raise hell and sleep around.” The experience of working with whites made black SNCC staff members in Mississippi advocate separation, Poussaint argued. Supporters of Black Power “appeared to be seeking a sense of psychological emancipation from racism through self assertion and release of aggressive angry feelings.” Forty years later, Charles Hamilton, former SNCC activist and the coauthor with Carmichael of the 1967 book Black Power, remembered that white students wanted to work with blacks down south because they believed “the glamour and the drama were in the black community.” 20
Black SNCC activists used the growing call for black psychological and cultural autonomy as a way to frame their struggle with white romanticism. “We must launch a cultural revolution to unbrainwash an entire people,” Malcolm X had demanded, a “journey to our rediscovery of ourselves.” “The American Negro,” James Baldwin chimed in, “can no longer, nor will he ever again be controlled by white America’s image of him.” It was not African Americans’ fault if white liberals, in Julius Lester’s words, “took this act of self-assertion by blacks as a personal insult.” It was not their fault that whites felt “rejected.” Even Time noticed the change, the fact that self-determination meant cultural as much as political power. What was new about the late sixties, the magazine argued, was “the new Negro’s determination to take over his own destiny and accept no definition of blackness but his own.” 21
Some urban African Americans took to the streets to attempt to liberate their neighborhoods and make sure that no one could mistake them for singing fools. As a Watts resident put it, “Folk singing is out. Karate is in.” In the uprisings in New York, Los Angeles, Newark, Chicago, and elsewhere in the summers of 1964 and 1965 and 1966 and 1967, people rebelled against both white supremacy and white romanticism. What community leader Reverend Albert Cleage said about Detroit described how many residents of these communities felt that summer: “Black people want control of black communities.” Acts of violence also generated catharsis and release, the rush of adrenaline and emotion, the feeling, if just for a moment, that a person had what Carmichael called “psychological equality.” Out on the streets, while the fire burned and the stuff was there for the taking, a person could feel free.22
Seale and Newton did not start the Black Panther Party to appeal to white college kids. They designed the Panthers’ ten-point program, the armed patrols to “police” the police, and the Panther uniform—black berets, black pants, and black leather jackets—to appeal to young black men in cities like Oakland. The two men quickly realized, however, that they could tap some white students’ love for black outsiders. Presenting themselves as “authentic” black revolutionaries, they sold Mao Tse-tung’s Little Red Book to white radicals on the streets of Berkeley and used the money to buy some of the organization’s first guns. White radicals embraced them with all the fervor some Berkeley students had once channeled into the campus’s very active Friends of SNCC chapter. after a uniformed and armed march into the California state capitol building in Sacramento in May 1967, the Black Panthers began to attract the attention of white radicals across the country. In some white left circles, militant urban blacks began to play a symbolic role similar to singing black activists—they became crucial reservoirs of authenticity.23
At the end of the summer of 1967, as some American cities literally still burned, white student radicals and some white liberals rushed to support African Americans’ increasingly militant political demands. The National Student Association, exposed a year and half earlier in Ramparts magazine as the recipient of secret CIA funding, held its annual meeting that August. The mostly white delegates voted to accept the NSA black caucus’s resolution endorsing the “liberation of blacks by any means necessary.” Although NSA was more a vehicle for liberal than radical student activism, the organization accepted this phrase, popularly attributed to Malcolm X.24
Two weeks later, over Labor Day weekend in Chicago, much of the New Left —over three thousand delegates representing more than two hundred organizations—gathered for the National Conference for a New Politics (NCNP). Only about three hundred of the participants were African American, but the black caucus demanded “two tests of sincerity” from whites: the power to cast 50 percent of the votes on every resolution and the acceptance of a thirteen-point program, which included, for example, a call for the creation of “white civilizing committees” in white communities to “humanize the savage and beast-like character that runs rampant through America.” The black voting plank passed two to one. Interviewed by a journalist, one white delegate said, “We are just a little tail on the end of a very powerful black panther. And I want to be on that tail—if they’ll let me.” A conference organizer claimed the convention “gives us entrée into the ghetto.” Militant blacks would play the role, these white radicals believed, formerly held in Marxist thought by the industrial working class. They would be the agents of historical change. Still, some participants and organizers condemned many white delegates’ refusal to engage in serious debate about these demands as a “travesty of radical politics at work” and “a vulgar joke.” Some white radicals missed the chance to make a “new politics” by indulging in white romanticism and failing to challenge radical blacks. These white left ists’ capitulation to black demands fit the long history that began when some white teenagers fell in love with black music and some SDS activists fell in love with SNCC.25
After Oakland police arrested Huey Newton that October for allegedly shooting and killing a police officer, white Bay Area radicals and especially Berkeley students found a way to support black militants in the Panthers’ “Free Huey” campaign. Early in 1968, some of them independently formed a support organization unofficially called “Honkies for Huey.” The radical and mostly white Peace and Freedom Democratic Party, founded June 23, 1967, to provide a political vehicle for opposition to the Vietnam War, became the first organization to officially and publicly ally itself with the Black Panther Party. In early 1968, an intense voter registration drive succeeded in placing the party on the ballot in California and a few other states. That summer, at the party’s national convention, delegates nominated Panther Eldridge Cleaver for president. The party was strongest in California, and the state convention there also nominated Huey Newton for Congress. Peace and Freedom Party members attended “Free Huey” rallies and passed out pamphlets describing Newton as one of many African American victims of police brutality and corruption. At the opening of Newton’s trial in July 1968, an orange Peace and Freedom Party truck provided sound for the rally. In the fall, the Peace and Freedom Party worked on Cleaver’s presidential campaign.
Cleaver and Seale, however, openly criticized their supposed allies. As Cleaver told a Berkeley journalist to show just who was in charge of this coalition, “If the Peace and Freedom Party tried to hurt us we would have to be in a position to hurt the Peace and Freedom Party.” Much like black militants at the 1967 NSA and NCNP conventions, Cleaver at least seemed to be testing just how far he could go and retain masochistic white radical support. Cleaver put the Peace and Freedom Party in an impossible position. If the party protested this verbal abuse, their actions would demonstrate they took the Black Panther Party as equals. Any complaint would also risk destroying the alliance. And Peace and Freedom Party members earned national press attention and instant radical credentials in return for their work for the Panthers, a rather large payoff given the difficulty of third-party organizing in twentieth-century America.26
Other organizations followed the Peace and Freedom Party into support for, if not outright alliance with, the Black Panther Party. No group fused white romanticism of black radicals and political ideology more powerfully than the SDS faction that eventually became the Weather Underground. In the spring of 1969, SDS members including Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, and Jeff Jones wrote a position paper named after a line in the 1965 Bob Dylan song “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows” appeared in New Left Notes as SDS’s 1969 national convention opened in Chicago. Embracing without often specifically referencing the political analysis of Malcolm X, Robert F. Williams, and other black radical intellectuals, the Weather collective reminded the white New Left that the fight for black liberation formed an essential part of the war being waged abroad against U.S. imperialism by the Chinese, the Cubans, the Vietnamese, and other people of color. African Americans, in this form of black radical thought, were members of the third world, “part of the international revolutionary vanguard.” This “black proletarian colony” lived scattered all over the United States.
What Weather activists understood as solidarity and identification veered toward exploitation. Once again, white activists were using African Americans’ “authenticity” for their own liberation. Panther phrases, terms, and forms of analysis filled “You Don’t Need a Weatherman.” America was “Babylon” and “the mother country,” terms used often by Newton in his speeches and writings. The call for “white mother country radicals” to work everywhere, “handing out Free Huey literature” and “bringing guys to Panther rallies,” answered Newton’s and Cleaver’s call for white allies. And Weather quoted Newton directly, circulating the words that helped make him the newest black “darling” of the white left: “In order to be a revolutionary nationalist, you would by necessity have to be a socialist.” Using the Panthers’ by then famous word for the police, Weather even argued that “the fight against the pigs” would provide “the glue” to hold all the pieces together, unifying the single-issue organizations and student, black liberation, and anti-war work into “city-wide” and regionally based movements. White young people, the collective insisted, needed to look at “Mao, Che, the Panthers, and the Third World for our models.” In every meaning of the term, Weather “adopted” the Panthers, approving of them and following them, yes, but also taking them up and using and incorporating them, becoming a white version of armed black men, a new form of white Negro.27
This kind of thinking emerged over the New Left at the end of the sixties. White radicals attacked their own “white skin privilege” and vowed “smashing the pig means smashing the pig inside ourselves.” They embraced a “ghetto-equals-colony” analysis. They bought and read and discussed collections of speeches and writings by Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, George Jackson’s Soledad Brother, and H. Rap Brown’s Die, Nigger, Die. They agreed with Brown, former militant SNCC president turned Black Panther, that “violence is necessary. It is as American as cherry pie.” They wore buttons and gave money and assembled to free Huey Newton and Angela Davis and the Panther 21. If black radicals did not want white activists to work in black communities, white radicals would make sure they knew they had allies. Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, a New York City–based anarchist group, took its name from an Amiri Baraka poem. The White Panther Party’s model was obvious. Weather Underground members promised to destroy “our own honkiness.” White radicals worked, in yet another of the many ironies of the long history of racism in America, to make their own separate movement equal in its militancy and its radicalism to the movement for black liberation.28
Was fighting to free Huey Newton organizing in the white community? It was if radicals persuaded other whites to support black liberation. Was fighting the pigs organizing in the white community? It was if the police attacked white students, white radicals, and hippies, as had happened at the 1968 Democratic Convention and elsewhere. Was the takeover of Columbia University organizing in the white community? It was if activists defined the university as a white “imperialist institution” invading “the black colony.” The lines were not always easy to draw, and there were many ways to organize in white America. Still, in its founding position paper and in later communications, as some members of this collective helped dissolve SDS and went underground, Weather struggled most with the second piece of SNCC’s warning, the charge that whites not use black activism as a form of therapy, as a means to white self-liberation.
Weather’s political analysis insisted that black radicals formed the bridge that joined the movement in the United States to the global struggle, to Cuba and Fidel and Che and Vietnam and the National Liberation Front. African American militants connected home and abroad materially, as members of the third world even though they lived in the first. They connected home and abroad ideologically, as victims of U.S. imperialism like black and brown people everywhere. And they connected home and abroad symbolically, as the example of militancy that once again spurred white students on to greater activism. As the ultimate outsiders, African American militants marked an outside on the inside, a “real” home within the compromised homeland, a space of alienation at the heart of the empire. They marked a space of American innocence.29
A palpable desire to win black radical approval mixed with Weather’s political analysis and sharp denunciation of white supremacy and imperialism. White radicals not supporting complete black self-determination, they argued repeatedly, were not really fighting American imperialism, no matter how much they spoke out in support of the Vietnamese or other third world revolutionaries. With far greater perception than many white radicals, the collective understood the white racism at work in both asking blacks to wait for a white movement to join them and allowing blacks alone to make the revolution that would free everyone. This insight left them with little space in which to plot their own actions: building “a white movement which will support the blacks in moving as fast as they have to and are able to and still itself keep up with that black movement enough that white revolutionaries share the cost.” The awkwardness of the words here matched the difficulty of the task. Still, Weather members insisted on becoming the white allies of black liberation at a time when many black militants—the Panthers were of course the exception—did not want white help. But their disregard for the demands of black nationalists like Stokely Carmichael, Rap Brown, Maulana Karenga, and Amiri Baraka suggested that Weather, too, had trouble with black self-determination. Equating the police harassment of anti-war demonstrators, “youth with long hair,” and other white, middle-class rebels with the long-established, brutally systematic police oppression of poor blacks brought Weather close to indulging in the racism they rightly denounced in other white radicals.30
Underground in the early seventies, Weather cast themselves as militant blacks’ most reliable white friends. Every day, they reminded white Americans, police officers and prison officials murdered African Americans just as U.S. soldiers murdered the Vietnamese. Panther Fred Hampton and prison activist George Jackson were exceptional only because some whites knew their names. “Black and third world people were going up against Amerikan imperialism alone,” and militant whites had to help them. In “New Morning—Changing Weather,” issued December 6, 1970, they criticized themselves for believing “only bombings or picking up the gun” was “authentically revolutionary.” A month later, the New York Panther 21, arrested in April 1969 and charged with conspiracy to kill police officers and destroy buildings, published an open letter asking Weather to continue the armed struggle. Despite sharp self-criticism of its own “military error,” Weather turned away from this analysis and resumed bombing targets. Weather publications cheered Panther Angela Davis’s and H. Rap Brown’s escapes into the underground, and they called on white radicals “to build a new world on the ruins of honky Amerika.” Some people had to prove that “even the white youth of Babylon” would use violence to destroy U.S. imperialism. When they wrote, “What we do or don’t do makes a difference,” it sounded more like a plea than a fact.31
This 1970 Chicago Police Department wanted poster shows eight members of the Weather faction of Students for a Democratic Society. Associated Press.
Issuing warnings ahead of time and “communiqués”—they took the term from Latin American revolutionaries—afterward, Weather used literal explosions to write their condemnation of racism and imperialism on the buildings that housed government and related corporate power. On June 9, 1970, they bombed the New York City Police headquarters for its occupation of black neighborhoods. On February 28, 1971, they bombed the U.S. Capitol in retaliation for the invasion of Laos. On August 30, 1971, they bombed the Department of Corrections in San Francisco and the Office of California Prisons in Sacramento in response to the murder of George Jackson. On September 17, 1971, they bombed the New York State Department of Corrections for the killing of prisoners, many of them black, at Attica. On May 19, 1972, they bombed the Pentagon in retaliation for the bombing of Hanoi. In at least fift een bombings claimed by Weather Underground, the group acted eight times in response to violence against African Americans and at least four times in response to violence in Southeast Asia. They carried their commitment to attacking racism and imperialism as far as they could without attacking people. Yet they had little contact with black radicals. Even the under grounds were segregated, with Davis and Brown moving in different circles. In the context of the early seventies, the Weather Underground wrote and acted as if they wanted black radicals to know that some white Americans, too, could be real revolutionaries. They wrote and acted as if they were perpetually auditioning for the role of militant blacks’ favorite whites.32
Despite their political differences, other white radical organizations in the late 1960s and the 1970s, including the White Panther Party and the Symbionese Liberation Army, shared Weather’s desire for the approval of black radicals and especially the Black Panthers. Like Weather, they adopted various versions of what scholar Laura Browder has called “revolutionary blackface.” 33
White Panther Party leader John Sinclair had a deep, decade-long interest in black culture. In college as the sixties began, he fell in love with beatnik poetry, the hard bop jazz of John Coltrane, and the marijuana that was an essential part of the jazz scene. He ended up in Detroit for graduate school, helped found the Detroit Artists’ Workshop, and slowly came to radical politics through his own problems with Michigan cops. Busted repeatedly for possession of pot, Sinclair believed he understood what the Panthers meant when they talked about “the pigs.” Released after serving a six-month sentence, he and former members of the Artists’ Workshop created Trans-Love Energies (TLE) to unite student and other urban activists with the counterculture.34
In 1968, MC-5, a rock group connected with TLE, played at the Yippies’ “Festival of Life” during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Sinclair, the band’s manager, was there to see the musicians plug into a hot dog stand and play on the grass because the Yippies had failed to get a permit and set up a stage. He was there, too, to help the group throw equipment into a van as the police, provoked by Abbie Hoff man, closed in on the park. He arrived back in Ann Arbor, where TLE had moved to escape police harassment, convinced that law enforcement officials everywhere overreacted to gatherings of anti-war and Black Power activists and hippies. Sinclair also believed he had the experience and the skill, unlike the Yippies, to organize alienated white young people into a national movement. Fellow TLE member Pun Plamondon had spent the summer in jail on a marijuana charge, reading works by Newton and Cleaver and anything else he could find on the Black Panther Party. TLE, he suggested to Sinclair, should form a support group for the Black Panther Party. On November 1, 1968, Plamondon and Sinclair founded the White Panther Party.35
Quoting Newton, Cleaver, Latino land activist Reies Tijerina, and Mao, they set the White Panthers up as black militants’ white counterparts, as black-face white militants. after reprinting the Black Panthers’ program, the White Panthers offered their own ten-point plan. Most famously, they called for “total assault on the culture by any means necessary, including rock and roll, dope, and fucking in the streets.” Again copying the Black Panthers, Sinclair and Plamondon chose for themselves the titles “Minister of Information” and “Minister of Defense.” “We take as our heroes, those that we have been told to hate and to fear; Eldridge Cleaver, Rap Brown, Fidel,” Plamondon wrote at the end of the document. “Black Panthers are our Brother[s], we join them in the liberation of the planet.” 36
The White Panthers described their members as former pot smokers and peace-loving hippies, forced by police harassment to fight back, just like the Panthers. Sinclair, influenced by black radical thought, saw the counterculture as a kind of oppressed “youth colony,” existing in solidarity with other “colonies,” from Newark and Detroit to Vietnam, oppressed by U.S. imperialism. Like African American cultural nationalists, Sinclair argued, the youth colony sought self-determination through creating an alternative culture: “We have to realize that the long-haired dope-smoking rock and roll street-fucking culture is a whole thing, a revolutionary international cultural moment.” Plamondon, on the other hand, stuck close to his continuing romanticization of the Black Panthers: “Get a gun brother, learn how to use it. You’ll need it, pretty soon. You’re a White Panther, act like one.” 37
On one level, the White Panthers seemed like an extension of Sinclair’s long obsession with jazz and black urban life, a Yippie-influenced form of performance art and an exaggerated, self-conscious playing with the old white Negro role. It was hard, in this sense, to take the White Panther Party seriously. It was also hard, at least for J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and Michigan’s police, not to take the White Panther Party seriously. Whatever the intentions of the members (and the evidence suggests different members possessed different intentions), the White Panthers’s white Negroism embodied all too well some whites’ fears that white radicals would unite with militant blacks. Plamondon, especially, seemed over time to forget that their acts were an act. Underground in flight from charges related to the September 1968 bombing of a CIA building in Ann Arbor, he stockpiled arms and visited Cleaver in Algeria. The FBI reacted to the White Panthers’ white Negroism by attempting to destroy the organization. Hoover placed Plamondon on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list and labeled the White Panthers one of the most dangerous radical groups in America.38
Sinclair’s belief that the counterculture could be a revolutionary political culture came true, though not as spectacularly for Sinclair’s freaks and hippies as it did for Christian evangelicals in the 1970s and 1980s. Still, whether or not the White Panthers were ever much more than a kind of Black Panther Party fan club and a provocation aimed at the police, they did expose the limits of white romanticism. Plamondon’s identification with the Panthers circled all the way back around into caricature. Mimicking the Black Panthers’ own complicated uses of white Americans’ fears and fantasies about armed black men, he played a white man’s version of a black man’s version of white fantasies about armed black men. The long history of American racism made it impossible, though, for this play to be a comedy. However much love motivated Plamondon’s performance, it ended up looking more like another form of white privilege.39
The Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) followed this kind of identification even further. Members (almost all white dropouts from the middle class) took up Swahili names and what they imagined as black urban forms of speech and body language in an effort to spark black revolution. In 1974, six SLA members died in a shootout and fire that erupted when law enforcement offi-cials stormed their safe house in Los Angeles. This kind of play could be dangerous: Weather Underground members would later end up in prison, convicted of helping black radicals, members of a group called the Black Liberation Army, kill two police officers and a guard in a Brink’s truck robbery gone wrong in 1981. White identification with black radicals began as a way to bury contradictory desires for self-invention and historical connection in the symbolic power of blackness. It ended in something real, all right, if not exactly the “real” white radicals were looking for. From one perspective, white SLA members achieved their desire. They may not have ever been able to actually become the black radicals they played. But in trying to live like black radicals, some of them certainly died like black radicals, in a spray of police bullets.40
Weather and other white radical groups created a self-consciously radical version of the old white “love,” the belief that blacks were the ultimate outsiders. They thought that black radicals were “real” revolutionaries, and they wanted to be “real” too. Despite the difference between the political ideology of SDS in 1963 or 1964 and Weather in 1969 or 1970, this kind of thinking was entirely consistent with SDS’s earlier identification with SNCC. “Being real” always carried with it, however consciously or unconsciously, the problem of white romanticism. When African Americans served as resources or objects for making white people “real,” they could not be subjects. As objects, they could not be equals.
Everyone Is a Nigger
Most white radicals took their identification with African American activists in different directions than Weather, the White Panthers, and the SLA, sustained by their continuing faith in one big movement. after the Mississippi Summer Project ended and the ERAP projects gradually fell apart, some SDS members and other college students joined Old Left survivors, pacifists, and the old nuclear freeze activists in building a movement to oppose the Vietnam War. African American former civil rights activists like Robert Moses and James Bevel played important roles in this work, and SNCC remained a powerful model. These white radicals tried to organize around other left issues the way young African American activists organized around civil rights.
In late 1964, Congress nearly unanimously passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, giving Lyndon Johnson tremendous power to pursue the Vietnam War and spurring older peace activists into action. Johnson’s subsequent decision in March 1965 to send combat troops to South Vietnam and to bomb North Vietnam inspired some of these activists, beginning at the University of Michigan, to hold informational meetings they named “teach-ins” where they were joined by middle-class young people already politicized by the growing student movement. SDS called for a March on Washington against the war, and on April 17 at least twenty thousand people showed up in what was then the largest anti-war demonstration in American history. In August, anti-war activists formed the National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam—the name evoked the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—to try to bring some organization to the scattered and diverse movement and to begin planning for direct action. That fall, Berkeley’s anti-war organization, the Vietnam Day Committee, tried to block trains full of future soldiers traveling to the Oakland induction center, and activists held the first mass draft card burnings in New York.41
In January 1966, SNCC issued a position paper condemning the war and encouraging draft resistance, and later that year, mostly white anti-war activists began to build an anti-draft movement. In April 1967, the Spring Mobilization Committee, or the Mobe, another umbrella group, organized sim ultaneous protests in New York and San Francisco and drew an unprecedented 250,000 participants. Vietnam Summer began two months later, and though it received much less press attention than San Francisco’s Summer of Love, several thousand volunteers canvassed door-to-door educating citizens about the war. In October, more than 100,000 people marched on the Pentagon, as the newly named “hippies” joined radical white students and older peace activists and added some drama—they tried to levitate the Pentagon— to the usual march and protest ritual. As increasingly radicalized SNCC activists had traveled to Africa, SDS celebrities like Hayden met with members of the National Liberation Front (NLF) of Vietnam in Czechoslovakia. The test, Hayden announced, sounding the same themes he had used in his earlier reporting from the South, was “whether we as Americans can identify enough with the suffering and ordeal of the Vietnamese people to feel what they feel… We are all Viet Cong.” That November, Hayden met with the NLF in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and proved their “decency” by bringing home three American POWs. In SDS and elsewhere, student activists modeled their anti-war work on civil rights organizing.42
SDS struggled once again, after the glorious beginning of the ERAP projects, to live up to its image of SNCC and CORE. Having rejected both a single focus on college student organizing and the leadership of the anti-war movement, nationally SDS remained confused about what to do with its exploding membership. At the end of 1966, delegates to the SDS national council meeting in Berkeley debated whether the national organization should get involved in draft resistance work. Again, SNCC served as a model. One plan, based on the Freedom Votes, proposed issuing potential draftees with a “freedom draft card” printed with a declaration: “I want to work for democracy. I do not want to fight in Vietnam … I want to build, not burn. The work done by many young Americans in Alabama and Mississippi is a prime example of what I want to do.” 43
SDS national secretary Gregory Calvert made this continuing identification with black activists clear in his January 1967 report. Neither “traditional political organization” nor “ideological clarity” was important for SDS, he wrote. “What counts is that SDS be where the action is. What counts is that SDS be involved in the creation of a cutting-edge freedom struggle.” SDS, in other words, needed to be like SNCC and CORE and other radical black organizations.44
Calvert acknowledged how much SDS still valued SNCC’s approval:
We have to admit that—like it or not—we live in urban industrial capitalist America and not in the rural South. We owe SNCC a deep debt of gratitude for having slapped us brutally in the face with the slogan of black power, a slogan which said to white radicals, “Go home and organize in white America, which is your reality.”
Calvert’s choice of metaphors positioned black separation as a violent attack on the very body of white radicalism. Again, the language suggested an intimate relationship gone bad, rather than a disagreement over strategy. White radicals, he made clear, did not have to give up their love for black outsiders. They just needed to work on the relationship, making their identification with black radicals less literal. Instead of copying radical black activists’ particular actions—going to work in black communities in the rural South or the urban North—SDS members should look at black activists more broadly, as a model for militancy. Black radicals worked for their own liberation, their own freedom. Being a white radical meant doing the same thing, working for the liberation and freedom of the white radical. In contrast, Calvert argued, “the liberal” always fought other people’s battles, translating her “conscience into action for others.” She worked from a sense of distance, a measure of the space between herself, the subject, and poor African Americans, the object of her activism. “The gap,” however, was “not between oneself, what one [was], and the underprivileged.” Instead, the crucial motivation for radical activism was “the gap between’what one could be’ and the existing conditions for self-realization.” “The radical” worked from a different sense of distance, a measure that collapsed the distinction between subject and object, between the activist and the focus of the activism. In Calvert’s interpretation, radical African Americans, in embracing Black Power, made themselves both the subjects and the objects of their activism. Historically, reformers had worked to remake the existing world into “what could be,” their visions of utopia. Calvert instead told white activists to make possible their vision of their best self. Radical or “revolutionary consciousness” emerged in “the perception of oneself as unfree, as oppressed,” “the discovery of oneself as one of the oppressed.” In this way, Calvert’s model mirrored Beats’ and folk fans’ use of their love for outsiders to discover and make their own difference. Activism began with the activist looking inside rather than outside, at the self rather than at the world. All “authentic” activists were outsiders.45
Calvert’s speech clearly articulated ideas long percolating in the New Left and offered a logical extension of Hayden’s earlier argument. Black and white radicals shared both “gut-level alienation from America-the-Obscene-andthe-Dehumanized” and “the burden of oppression,” Calvert insisted, even if they needed to work separately, in their own communities. This shared alienation, an internal and subjective perception rather than the common class status the Old Left had understood as an external and objective “fact,” united blacks and whites working for change. External conditions certainly shaped that inner perception, but the key was how a person saw her own identity. The self became the subject and the object, the actor and the thing acted for. This shift aligned New Left political analysis with the broader shift s in the culture, particularly the powerful idea that authenticity, the “real,” existed as an internal, rather than external, quality.46
Collapsing the distinction between subject and object certainly seemed more democratic. “Liberal” activism positioned the activist above the people acted for, the subject above the object. Whatever the source of the activists’ privilege—race or class position, religious beliefs, country of origin, or some combination of these—activism reasserted the superiority of the person acting, even when a person worked to change the very conditions that granted this status. Black activists avoided the problem of this paradox by working to free themselves, by being the subject and the object, both the person acting and the person acted for. White romanticism, however, made this solution more difficult for the white New Left. What problems did white middle-class children of plenty have?
Many white radicals could not make this shift. They reacted to Black Power and black separatism simply by drafting other outsiders to play the role—Appalachian miners and their families, Cuban and Vietnamese revolutionaries, Latino migrant farmers, and even the white working class. They moved to eastern Kentucky to make documentaries and picket mining companies. They followed Cesar Chavez and worked for the United Farm Workers organizing strikes in California and Texas. They traveled to Cuba to help with the sugarcane harvest, or met with resistance fighters of the National Liberation Front in Budapest or Havana or even Hanoi. And they moved to Detroit or Newark or Oakland, got a job in a factory, tried to blend into the working class, and got back to the Old Left task of organizing unions. Environmental-ists dropped living people altogether—they liked their fantasy Indians—and romanticized nature instead as a place uncorrupted and innocent, harmonious and pure. Ecology evolved as the study of perfectly balanced “ecosystems,” “natural” alternative communities, self-regulating communes of plants and animals, water and earth. If black militants did not want their help, some white radicals went to work elsewhere, for other causes, against other injustices, and they took their romanticism with them.47
Still, some white radicals did go to work liberating themselves. Looking inside, making and naming the self, was often part of this process. If they were white and draft age and no longer protected by deferments, they organized draft resistance, became conscientious objectors, and fled to Canada. If they were women, they combined participatory democracy and their understanding of Maoism and invented consciousness-raising. They built radical feminist women’s organizations, discovered women’s history, and created womyn’s culture. If they were black women, they became black feminists or womanists because white women’s feminism left them out and black nationalist men all too often wanted to build an alternative black world with women’s hands and backs and wombs. If they were gay and lesbian, they built organizations like the Lavender Menace and created their own gay liberation movement. If they were Native American, they worked for Red Power or built the Native American Movement. If they were Latinos, they joined the Brown Berets and the Young Lords and La Raza. If they were Asian Americans, they joined the Red Guard or Wei Min She. Like black activists before them, all these people made themselves both the subject and the object of their activism. They looked, as Calvert had suggested, at the gap between what they could be and what society allowed them to be and went to work to erase it. This kind of work, the rich proliferation of many separatisms, flourished well into the seventies and early eighties.48
Some white Americans worked to liberate themselves by romanticizing the project of cultural separatism rather than black radicals. The hippies in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, New York City’s East Village, Atlanta’s Little Five Points, and elsewhere, the white kids building rural communes in California, Vermont, Colorado, and Tennessee—these mostly middle-class young people did not just copy earlier bohemians, the Beats and, even more recently, Ken Kesey’s LSD missionaries and hippie avant-garde, the Merry Pranksters. African Americans’ brash cultural nationalism, well covered if often caricatured in the national media, shaped them as well. Like some radical African Americans, they too took new names—Sunshine and Wavy Gravy instead of Afeni and Malik—and wore new clothes, created their own art, and invented their own cuisine and their own spiritual practices. They too lived self-consciously against the world, whatever they called it, the system, the machine, the mainstream. The very way of life of white middle-class America—adulthood spent chained to a career or a house, a marriage, a car, and the kids—oppressed them, killing their spirits, killing their inner lives, killing their pleasure. Freedom meant not working. It meant having lots of sex. It meant taking drugs. But just like white middle-class folk music fans before them, they remade their own privilege by asserting their innocence. Taking up cultural separatism, the mostly white participants in what in 1968 the scholar Theodore Roszak named “the counter culture” recast themselves as outsiders. They did not make themselves the political allies of poor urban or rural blacks.49
Some African Americans expressed their frustration with the hippies that moved into black and poor urban neighborhoods for the cheap rents. “The hippies really bug us,” one black New Yorker told a reporter. “Because we know they can come down here and play their games for a while and then escape. And we can’t, man.” “after the hippies go back to their middle-class homes,” another African American told a reporter, “we’ll still be here.” “Hippies have a romantic attachment to the Negro as an Outsider,” a professor wrote in the Nation in 1967, “but they view him as part of the hated Establishment as soon as he becomes an accepted member of the social order.” “How can a Negro drop out?” a New York hippie asked a reporter. “He’s there, at bedrock, all the time.” For the hippies, all too often African Americans served as sources of authenticity, objects and not subjects, conveyers of coolness and realness and rebellion.50
Unlike much of the New Left, hippies did not use blackness to solve the contradictions between the desires for unfettered self-invention and yet for deep connection that conveyed authenticity. Journalist Tom Wolfe, a sensitive observer of the early counterculture, noticed this shift under way as early as the mid-sixties in San Francisco:
The whole old-style hip life—jazz, coffee houses, civil rights, invite a spade for dinner, Vietnam—it was all dying, I found out, even among the students at Berkeley, across the bay from San Francisco, which had been the heart of the “student-rebellion” and so forth. It had even gotten to the point that Negroes were no longer in the hip scene, not even as totem figures. It was unbelievable. Spades, the very soul figures of Hip, of jazz, of the hip vocabulary itself, man and like and dig and baby and scarf and split and later so fine, of civil rights and graduating from Reed College and living on North Beach, down Mason, and balling spade cats—all that good elaborate petting and patting and pouring soul all over the spades—all over, finished, incredibly.
Instead, they dissolved the contradictions in drug trips, dancing, and spiritual practices borrowed liberally from what they knew of Eastern and American Indian religions. They lost themselves in their own bodies and inside their own minds. They experienced ecstasy, holiness, and the dissolving of boundaries. They saw visions.51
The counterculture was broad enough to include the Pranksters, who helped invent it with their rebellion against the black-clad, too serious beatniks, and red-diaper babies with Beat pasts like poet and anti-war activist Allen Ginsberg. It made room for dropouts from New Left organizing like Paul Potter and from the academy like Timothy Leary. A former professor turned LSD advocate, Leary told everyone to “turn on, tune in, drop out.” “If all the Negroes and left -wing college students in the world,” he warned in a 1966 Playboy interview, “had Cadillacs and full control of society, they would still be involved in an anthill social system unless they opened themselves up first.” 52
Rock and roll came back, more whitened than ever, as rock. Like some fantastical love child of the Newport Fort Festival and the ERAP projects, rock festivals like Woodstock and Altamont, for better or worse, gave the counter-culture nation concrete form. The journalist John Landau wrote in the rock magazine Rolling Stone, founded that year, “Rock was not only viewed as a form of entertainment.” It was much more, “an essential component of a’new culture,’ along with drugs and radical politics.” Other bands across the country and even the Beatles took up the West Coast groups’ fusion of lyrical subjects pioneered by Dylan: vaguely political rhetoric, barely disguised drug references, apocalyptic imagery, and calls for liberation. For many fans, political and cultural revolt, at the level of language and feeling, were one. Rock was the new revolution, and its demonstrations, its direct actions, were the ever larger concerts and festivals popping up like mushrooms in hippie-rich areas along the coasts. Two 1969 events—Woodstock and Altamont—came to symbolize the best and the worst of these new paradoxically countercultural institutions.53
Promoters of Woodstock, which was advertised as “three days of peace and music,” chose this name for their August 1969 music festival to evoke the countercultural charisma of Dylan, who had a home in Woodstock, New York, even though the event was actually held on a farm over an hour away. Expecting one hundred thousand fans come to hear the music of Joan Baez, Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and others, promoters were overwhelmed when half a million people showed up, most of them without paying. Abbie Hoff man and other political activists had persuaded the organizers to include what became “Movement City,” a place for political groups like SDS to set up booths and both print and distribute literature. But what exactly was there for these groups to do at Woodstock beyond the old campus literature table model of passing out leaflets? As desperate food and water shortages and inadequate bathroom and medical facilities threatened to shut down the festival, the expensive printing press, missing key parts, sat abandoned in the rain.54
The journalist Tom Smucker, a member of the SDS off shoot Movement for a Democratic Society, came to the festival to try to reconcile his own commitments to both “Rock and Roll and the Movement.” “They both developed at the same time,” he argued, “and both, in some ways, dealt with the same problems—Race, Sex, Repression, Class.” How could a fan and a political radical reconcile the fact that rock was both a part of the capitalist system the New Left by then openly opposed and yet also central to the counterculture’s great cultural rebellion? At planning meetings, “politicos” suggested various approaches, ways “to relate politically to a Rock Event.” Ideas ranged from “Point out to people that what they were doing isn’t real. Bread and Circus, Co-optation, The Plastic Straightjacket, that it is happening under capitalism and therefore phony” to “Point out to people that Rock and Roll is good, that it is’Ours,’ but it’s run by capitalist corporations and thus mistreated, stolen from’US’ … That, of all things, the Promoters are trying to make money off this.” At Woodstock, however, Smucker found that the New Left groups were essentially irrelevant. after a bad night of rain Friday, Smucker recalled, “we awoke to hear the U.S. Committee to Aid the National Liberation Front announcing over their loudspeaker,’Get Your Dry Che Guevara T-Shirts: Only Two Dollars.’ That’s called Radical Politics.” It was the hippies, members of New Mexico’s Hog Farm commune, Smucker had to admit, who did the real organizing—feeding people mountains of free vegetarian food and helping users come down from bad trips. Building the (temporary) alternative community, not getting people to read damp pamphlets, was for Smucker and many fans the political accomplishment of the festival.55
At Woodstock, people felt what journalist Andrew Kopkind called “the intense communitarian closeness of a militant struggle,” without having to go south or to the cities and face the cops, without becoming urban guerrillas, without trying to take over Columbia University or build People’s Park. “No one in this century,” he wrote, “had ever seen a’society’ so free of repression. Everyone swam naked in the lake, balling was easier than getting breakfast, and the’pigs’ just smiled and passed out the oats.” Most people at Woodstock had not participated in the great political struggles of the decade. For them, “Woodstock must always be their model of how good we will all feel after the revolution.” 56
Four months later, Altamont, of course, gave all this rock and roll community-building a bad name. The Rolling Stones decided to give San Francisco a present, a free concert that December. There, instead of peace, love, and understanding, four people died. One, a black man named Meredith Hunter, was stabbed to death by members of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang, hired by the Stones, in a stupid gesture of romantic rebellion, to provide security at the concert. The Angels were for many on the left the white working-class equivalent of the Black Panthers, the literal embodiment of the outsider now armed to fight back, and part of their countercultural celebrity lay in the fact that they were not black. Up around the stage, the Angels beat others too. Three more men died less dramatically. One fell in a ditch and, too stoned or drunk to come out, drowned. Two others sitting by a campfire were run over by a car. Rock was still a rebellion—parents and policemen certainly hated it—but it no longer seemed like a new, post–Black Power path to the Beloved Community. The rock revolution, the magical liberation, was over.57
By the end of the sixties, the burned-out remnants of both radical political groups and the urban counterculture began to collect in pockets of the country. These people were still searching for meaning, but they had given up on politics on the one hand and quick routes to a new consciousness on the other. Some communes, like the Ananda Co-Operative in the foothills of the Sierras, grew up around spiritual leaders, in this case an American yogi named Kriyanda, and ran meditation centers as well as organic farms. Over the hills from Oakland, the members of Vocations for Social Change lived together in two brown shingle houses in the woods and ran a clearinghouse for information about groups, projects, and jobs. In 1968, Allen Ginsberg’s nonprofit Committee on Poetry bought a farm near Cherry Valley, New York, and Ginsberg took his own nontraditional domestic arrangements—there were always lots of people staying with Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky and a pot of soup that could be stretched for dinner—to the country, creating a commune-like retreat for himself and other poets. Other alternative communities grew up around the growing interest in environmentalism and living lightly on the earth and a romanticization of Native Americans.58
Some communes originated not so much to try out new spiritual practices and domestic arrangements but out of a conscious desire to step away from radical political organizing and lead a slower, simpler life. Raymond Mungo, a former peace activist, described a year in the life of a commune in Vermont in his book Total Loss Farm. “The farm in Vermont had fooled us, just as we hoped it would when we moved there in early’68,” he admitted. “It had tricked even battle-scarred former youth militants into seeing the world as bright clusters of Day-Glo orange and red forest.” But Mungo also remembered the whole sequence of events that led many radical activists to retreat to the country:
When we lived in Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Washington … we dreamed of a New Age born of violent insurrection. We danced on the graves of war dead in Vietnam, every corpse was ammunition for Our Side; we set up a countergovernment down there in Washington, had marches, rallies and meetings; tried to fight fire with fire. Then Johnson resigned, yes, and the universities began to fall, the best and the oldest ones first, and by God every 13-year-old in the suburbs was smoking dope and our numbers multiplying into the millions. But I woke up in the spring of 1968 and said, “This is not what I had in mind,” because the movement had become my enemy; the movement was not flowers and doves and spontaneity, but another vicious system, the seed of a heartless bureaucracy, a minority Party vying for power rather than peace. It was then that we put away the schedule for the revolution, gathered together our dear ones and all our resources, and set off to Vermont in search of the New Age.
Dawn, a woman drifting in the early seventies between communes and then living at one outside Taos, New Mexico, recalled the series of steps through which she too had dropped out. after attending the University of Illinois for a while, she left to work on the McCarthy campaign. “I had just started to get into SDS and that kind of thing when I went to the Chicago Convention and was arrested at a sit-in. after the Convention I was convinced that there was no way to work for change within the system … At first I wanted to make a new beginning, as an artist, but that meant that I’d still have to participate in the competitiveness of that society,” she recalled. “So it all came down to the realization that it wasn’t possible to live in that society and not feel alienated.” The communes were SNCC field sites and SDS ERAP projects abstracted from their surrounding communities, shorn of any attempt to organize politically.59
Most communes did not last long—organic farming, earning a living from the land, many members found out quickly, was extremely hard, and impossible unless everyone contributed his or her labor. The field, the vegetable patch, was as difficult a place to work, in different ways, as the field, the Delta town or Newark neighborhood or campus, had been in an earlier life. Members adopted a voluntary primitivism—making their own clothes, eating a simple, mostly homegrown and vegetarian diet, scavenging for building supplies, and even collecting food stamps and welfare—that was difficult to sustain. The communes that survived often had outside sources of funding— they ran businesses or attracted members with money—or they were organized around religious leaders or practices. Belief, faith even, gave form to the search for meaning that animated these communal experiments, structuring individuals’ explorations in ways that promoted the survival of the group. Without some kind of spiritual or religious cohesiveness, it was too easy for members’ individual inner trips to work against the need of the commune. If one person’s “thing” or “bag” or “yoga” was to meditate all day and other people needed to have lots of sex or explore the woods, who would weed the lettuce patch and cook the rice and beans? 60
Other folks with weekends or weekly hour-long time slots and not whole lives to dedicate went to places like the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, south of San Francisco, or to retreats and group sessions to try Gestalt or EST, primal scream therapy or the human potential movement, yoga or the meditation practices and teachings of particular spiritual leaders. Esalen, an “experiment in living,” was a model for the new therapeutic and spiritual retreats that became a weekend in the counterculture camps, the part-time way to expand your consciousness. At Esalen, Richard Perls, one of Paul Goodman’s collaborators in the invention of Gestalt therapy, preached “the Now Trip,” a strange fusion of encounter sessions, skinny-dipping, folk and rock music, Tai Chi exercises, and drugs designed to free people from “the Rut” and get them to live in the present and pay attention to their senses. Perls popularized the mantra “Do your own thing.” At Esalen, a little romping in nature, a little nakedness, a little true communication, and a little sex, and people would find the way to inner growth and inner peace. The author Henry Miller had lived in Big Sur, and his works, especially Tropic of Capricorn, finally openly available after years of censorship for their sexual explicitness, became a kind of sacred map for these trips: “There is only one great adventure and that is inward toward the self, and for that, time nor space nor even deeds matter.” The inner journey became the most important route to rebel legitimacy. By 1967, even the Beatles had a yogi.61
Black Power and black separatism did not succeed in preventing “blackness” from playing its old historical role in American culture as the ultimate marker of outsider status. The “nigger” analogy, popping up all over the place in the late 1960s and 1970s, made this clear. SDS reprinted as a pamphlet Jerry Farber’s March 3, 1967, article from the Los Angeles Free Press, “The Student as Nigger: How to Be Slaves.” Students from kindergarten to graduate school, Farber argued, were an “academic Lowndes County.” They had “no voice.” In October 1967, the Village Voice named hippies “the new niggers.” East Village freaks, the New York weekly argued, faced “opposition from every corner, muggings and rape and even murder.” Naomi Weisstein’s article “Kinder, Küche, and Kirche as Scientific Law: Psychology Constructs the Female,” originally published in the Boston Free Press in 1969, was reprinted in Psychology Today in October 1969 as “Woman as Nigger.” That same year, Yoko Ono used the phrase “woman is the nigger of the world” in an interview with a British women’s magazine. Three years later, she and John Lennon made it the title of a song about women’s oppression and sang it on Dick Cavett’s television show.62
There was, in this phrasemaking, a genuine attempt to imagine and create alliances across racial and other boundaries. Lennon turned to California congressman Ron Dellums, chairman of the Black Caucus, to support his and Ono’s use of the word as radio stations refused to play the single. On the Cavett show, Lennon read a statement of support from Dellums:
If you define niggers as someone whose lifestyle is defined by others, whose opportunities are defined by others, whose role in society is defined by others, then good news!—you don’t have to be black to be a nigger in this society. Most of the people in America are niggers.
On one level, Dellums’s statement made political sense. A coalition of the oppressed and the alienated—the people without self-determination—could form a new majority. On another level, this kind of thinking failed to take into account the long history of white romanticism of African Americans. How could a group of people symbolize reality and yet be real? How could they confer authenticity on others and yet be people themselves?
The romance of the outsider—some white middle-class college students’ identification with southern black civil rights activists—helped make the white New Left. The romance of the outsider—some white New Left activists’ identification with urban black militants—also helped radicalize the New Left. In the end, however, the romance of the outsider helped destroy the New Left, or at least white activists’ dream of becoming a part of a broad and effective multi-racial and multi-issue progressive political alliance. African Americans could not be resources in some white people’s quest for transcendence and yet also be equal allies in a collective fight for political transformation. In the white New Left, the intersection of two ideas about reality—that the real and authentic existed inside the self and that blackness marked the richest sites of realism and authenticity—produced a whole new level of minstrelsy.
SDS member Bill Ayers was working for the ERAP project in Cleveland when Stokely Carmichael spoke at a church there in 1966 a few weeks after he began using the phrase “Black Power” in Mississippi. Black people had to take their freedom, Carmichael argued. They could not wait for other people to give it to them. Black people had to define their own standards of morality, wisdom, and beauty. They could not let others define these key values for them. White people should go organize their own people. “I thought Stokely made perfect sense,” Ayers remembered. “But by that time I thought I was Black.” 63
No matter how much a white middle-class radical made common cause with the oppressed, at the deepest level her assertion of self supported the status quo. It supported a world where white middle-class people possessed the privilege of self-invention. It supported the age-old American fantasy that the limits of history did not have to apply, that a person could make herself anything. It supported the very structures of class and racial privilege radical politics was supposed to oppose. The postwar history of white middle-class Americans’ love for outsiders haunted and limited New Left attempts to build a new political coalition on the basis of alienation.
In the last two decades, scholars, former activists, and public intellectuals have continued to search for the “real” politics of the period. The arguments vary. “Real” politics are interracial, nonviolent, and anti-separatist. “Real” politics focus on class and economic issues. “Real” politics shun the expressive, the theatrical, and the performative. “Real” politics are not “cultural.” In a culture, however, in which “real” has long been a synonym for “authentic” and conveys not just efficacy but emotional resonance and inner truth, this kind of criticism is useless. In America, the romance of the outsider always racializes the concept of the real. And looking for “the real,” no matter what the professed political beliefs of the seeker, perpetuates the politics of inequality.
