One of the most pointed illustrations of the need for Black Power, as a positive and redemptive force in a society degenerating into a form of totalitarianism, is to be made by examining the history of distortion that the concept has been given by the national media of publicity. In this “debate,” as in everything else that affects our lives, Negroes are dependent on, and at the discretion of, forces and institutions within the white society that have little interest in representing us honestly. Our experience with the national press has been that when they have managed to escape a meretricious special interest in “Git Whitey” sensationalism and race-war mongering, individual reporters and commentators have been conditioned by the enveloping racism of the society to the point where they are incapable of objective observation and reporting of racial incidents, much less the analysis of ideas. But this limitation of vision and perceptions is an inevitable consequence of the dictatorship of definition, interpretation, and consciousness, along with the censorship of history that the society has inflicted upon the Negro—and itself.
Reprinted from The Massachusetts Review, September, 1966. Copyright © 1966 by The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Our concern for Black Power addresses itself directly to this problem: the necessity to reclaim our history and our identity from the cultural terrorism and depredation of self-justifying white guilt.
To do this we shall have to struggle for the right to create our own terms to define ourselves and our relationship to the society, and to have these terms recognized. This is the first necessity of a free people, and the first right that any oppressor must suspend. The white fathers of American racism knew this—instinctively it seems—as is indicated by the continuous record of the distortion and omission in their dealings with the red and black men. In the same way that Southern apologists for the “Jim Crow” society have so obscured, muddied and misrepresented the record of the Reconstruction period, until it is almost impossible to tell what really happened, their contemporary counterparts are busy with the recent history of the civil rights movement.
In 1964, for example, the National Democratic Party, led by L. B. Johnson and Hubert H. Humphrey, cynically undermined the efforts of Mississippi’s black population to achieve some degree of political representation. Yet, whenever the events of that convention are recalled by the press, one sees only the version fabricated by the press agents of the Democratic Party. A year later the House representatives in an even more vulgar display of political racism made a mockery of the political rights of Mississippi’s Negroes when it failed to unseat the Mississippi delegation to the House—which had been elected through a process that methodically and systematically excluded over 450,000 voting-age Negroes, almost one-half of the total electorate of the state. Whenever this event is mentioned in print, it is in terms that leave one with the rather curious impression that somehow the oppressed Negro people of Mississippi are at fault for confronting the Congress with a situation in which they had no alternative but to endorse Mississippi’s racist political practices. I am speaking now of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.
I mention these two examples because, having been directly involved in them, I can see very clearly the discrepancies between what happened and the versions that are finding their way into general acceptance as a kind of popular mythology. The victimization of the Negro takes place in two phases: first it occurs in fact and deed; then, and this is equally sinister, in the official recording of those facts.
The Black Power program and concept being articulated by SNCC, CORE, and a host of community organizations in the ghettos of the North and South, has not escaped that process. The white press has been busy articulating their own analyses, their own interpretations and criticisms. For example, while the press has given wide and sensational dissemination to attacks made by figures in the civil rights movement—foremost among them are Roy Wilkins of the NAACP and Whitney Young of the Urban League—and to the hysterical ranting about black racism made by that political chameleon, Vice-President Humphrey, it has generally failed to give accounts of the reasonable and productive dialogue that is taking place in the Negro community, and in certain important areas in the white religious and intellectual community. A national committee of influential Negro churchmen affiliated with the National Council of Churches, despite their obvious respectability and responsibility, had to resort to a paid advertisement to articulate their position, while anyone shouting the hysterical yappings of “black racism” got ample space. Thus the American people have got at best a superficial and misleading account of the very terms and tenor of this debate. I wish to quote briefly from the statement by the national committee of churchmen, which I suspect the majority of Americans will not have seen. This statement appeared in the New York Times, July 31,1966:
We, an informal group of Negro Churchmen in America, are deeply disturbed about the crisis brought upon our country by historic distortions of important human realities in the controversy about “black power.” What we see shining through the variety of rhetoric is not anything new but the same old problem of power and race which has faced our beloved country since 1619.
. . . The conscience of black men is corrupted because, having no power to implement the demands of conscience, the concern for justice in the absence of justice becomes a chaotic self-surrender. Powerlessness breeds a race of beggars. We are faced now with a situation where powerless conscience meets conscience-less power, threatening the very foundations of our Nation.
. . . We deplore the overt violence of riots, but we feel it is more important to focus on the real sources of these eruptions. These sources may be abetted inside the Ghetto, but their basic cause lies in the silent and covert violence which white middle-class America inflicts upon the victims of the inner city.
. . . In short, the failure of American leaders to use American power to create equal opportunity in life as well as law, this is the real problem and not the anguished cry for black power.
. . . Without the capacity to participate with power, i.e., to have some organized political and economic strength to really influence people with whom one interacts—integration is not meaningful.
. . . America has asked its Negro citizens to fight for opportunity as individuals, whereas at certain points in our history what we have needed most has been opportunity for the whole group, not just for selected and approved Negroes.
. . . We must not apologize for the existence of this form of group power, for we have been oppressed as a group and not as individuals. We will not find our way out of that oppression until both we and America accept the need for Negro Americans, as well as for Jews, Italians, Poles, and white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, among others, to have and to wield group power.
Traditionally, for each new ethnic group, the route to social and political integration in America’s pluralistic society has been through the organization of their own institutions with which to represent their communal needs within the larger society. This is simply stating what the advocates of Black Power are saying. The strident outcry, particularly from the liberal community, that has been evoked by this proposal can be understood only by examining the historic relationship between Negro and white power in this country.
Negroes are defined by two forces: their blackness and their powerlessness. There have been, traditionally, two communities in America: the white community, which controlled and defined the forms that all institutions within the society would take, and the Negro community, which has been excluded from participation in the power decisions that shaped the society, and has traditionally been dependent upon and subservient to the white community.
This has not been accidental. The history of every institution of this society indicates that a major concern in the ordering and structuring of the society has been the maintaining of the Negro community in its condition of dependence and oppression. This has not been on the level of individual acts of discrimination—individual whites against individual Negroes—but total acts by the white community against the Negro community. This fact cannot be too strongly emphasized—that racist assumptions of white superiority have been so deeply ingrained in the structure of the society that it infuses its entire functioning, and is so much a part of the national subconscious that it is taken for granted and is frequently not even recognized. It is more than a figure of speech to say that the Negro community in America is the victim of white imperialism and colonial exploitation.
It is white power that makes the laws, and it is violent white power in the form of armed white cops that enforces those laws with guns and nightsticks. The vast majority of Negroes in this country live in captive communities and must endure these conditions of oppression because, and only because, they are black and powerless. Without bothering to go into the historic factors that contribute to this pattern—economic exploitation, political impotence, discrimination in employment and education—one can see that to correct this pattern will require far-reaching changes in the basic power-relationships and the ingrained social patterns within the society. The question, of course, is: What kinds of changes are necessary, and how is it possible to bring them about?
In recent years the answer to these questions that has been given by most articulate groups of Negroes and their white allies, the “liberals” of all stripes, has been in terms of something called “integration.” According to the advocates of integration, social justice will be accomplished by “integrating the Negro into the mainstream institutions of the society from which he has been traditionally excluded.” It is very significant that each time I have heard this formulation it has been in terms of “the Negro,” the individual Negro, rather than in terms of the community.
This concept of integration had to be based on the assumption that there was nothing of value in the Negro community, so the thing to do was to siphon off the “acceptable” Negroes into the surrounding middle-class white community. It is true that the student demonstrations in the South during the early sixties, out of which SNCC came, had a similar orientation. But while it is hardly a concern of a black sharecropper, dishwasher, or welfare recipient whether a certain fifteen-dollar-a-day motel offers accommodations to Negroes, the overt symbols of white superiority and the imposed limitations on the Negro community had to be destroyed. Now black people must look beyond these goals, to the issue of collective power.
Such a limited class orientation was reflected not only in the program and goals of the civil rights movement, but in its tactics and organization. It is very significant that the two oldest and most “respectable” civil rights organizations have constitutions which specifically prohibit partisan political activity. CORE once did, but changed that clause when it changed its orientation toward Black Power. But this is perfectly understandable in terms of the strategy and goals of the older organizations. The civil rights movement saw its role as a kind of liaison between the powerful white community and the dependent Negro one. The dependent status of the black community apparently was unimportant since—if the movement was successful—it was going to blend into the white community anyway. We made no pretense of organizing and developing institutions of community power in the Negro community, but appealed to the conscience of white institutions of power. The posture of the civil rights movement was that of the dependent, the suppliant. The theory was that without attempting to create any organized base of political strength itself, the civil rights movement could influence national legislation and national social patterns by forming coalitions with various “liberal” pressure organizations in the white community —liberal reform clubs, labor unions, church groups, progressive civic groups, and at times one or other of the major political parties.
I think we all have seen the limitations of this approach. We have repeatedly seen that political alliances based on appeals to conscience and decency are chancy things, simply because institutions and political organizations have no consciences outside their own special interests. The political and social rights of Negroes have been and always will be negotiable and expendable the moment they conflict with the interests of our “allies.” If we do not learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it, and that is precisely the lesson of the Reconstruction. Black people were allowed to register, vote, and participate in politics because it was to the advantage of powerful white allies to promote this. But this was the result of white decision, and it was ended by other white men’s decision before any political base powerful enough to challenge that decision could be established in the Southern Negro community. (Thus at this point in the struggle Negroes have no assurance—save a kind of idiot optimism and faith in a society whose history is one of racism—that if it were to become necessary, even the painfully limited gains thrown to the civil rights movement by the Congress will not be revoked as soon as a shift in political sentiments should occur.)
The major limitation of this approach was that it tended to maintain the traditional dependence of Negroes, and of the movement. We depended upon the good will and support of various groups within the white community whose interests were not always compatible with ours. To the extent that we depended on the financial support of other groups, we were vulnerable to their influence and domination.
Also, the program that evolved out of this coalition was really limited and inadequate in the long term, and one which affected only a small select group of Negroes. Its goal was to make the white community accessible to “qualified” Negroes and presumably each year a few more Negroes armed with their passport—a couple of university degrees—would escape into middle-class America and adopt the attitudes and life styles of that group; and one day the Harlems and the Watts would stand empty, a tribute to the success of integration. This is simply neither realistic nor particularly desirable. You can integrate communities, but you assimilate individuals. Even if such a program were possible its result would be, not to develop the black community as a functional and honorable segment of the total society, with its own cultural identity, life patterns, and institutions, but to abolish it—the final solution to the Negro problem. Marx said that the working class is the first class in history that ever wanted to abolish itself. If one listens to some of our “moderate” Negro leaders it appears that the American Negro is the first race that ever wished to abolish itself. The fact is that what must be abolished is not the black community, but the dependent colonial status that has been inflicted upon it. The racial and cultural personality of the black community must be preserved and the community must win its freedom while preserving its cultural integrity. This is the essential difference between integration as it is currently practiced and the concept of Black Power.
What has the movement for integration accomplished to date? The Negro graduating from M.I.T. with a doctorate will have better job opportunities available to him than to Lynda Bird Johnson. But the rate of unemployment in the Negro community is steadily increasing, while that in the white community decreases. More educated Negroes hold executive jobs in major corporations and federal agencies than ever before, but the gap between white income and Negro income has almost doubled in the last twenty years. More suburban housing is available to Negroes, but housing conditions in the ghetto are steadily declining. While the infant mortality rate of New York City is at its lowest rate ever in the city’s history, the infant mortality rate of Harlem is steadily climbing. There has been an organized national resistance to the Supreme Court’s order to integrate the schools, and the federal government has not acted to enforce that order. Less than 15 per cent of black children in the South attend integrated schools; and Negro schools, which the vast majority of black children still attend, are increasingly decrepit, overcrowded, understaffed, inadequately equipped and funded.
The rate of school dropouts is increasing among Negro teenagers, who then express their bitterness, hopelessness, and alienation by the only means they have—rebellion. As long as people in the ghettos of our large cities feel that they are victims of the misuse of white power without any way to have their needs represented—and these are frequently simple needs (to get the welfare inspectors to stop kicking down your doors in the middle of the night, the cops to stop beating your children, to get the landlord to exterminate the vermin in your home, the city to collect your garbage)—we will continue to have riots. These are not the products of Black Power, but of the absence of any organization capable of giving the community the power, the Black Power, to deal with its problems.
SNCC proposes that it is now time for the black freedom movement to stop pandering to the fears and anxieties of the white middle class in the attempt to earn its “good will,” and to return to the ghetto to organize these communities to control themselves. This organization must be attempted in Northern and Southern urban areas as well as in the rural black-belt counties of the South. The chief antagonist to this organization is, in the South, the overtly racist Democratic Party, and in the North the equally corrupt big city machines.
The standard argument presented against independent political organization is, “But you are only 10 per cent.” I cannot see the relevance of this observation, since no one is talking about taking over the country, but taking control over our own communities.
The fact is that the Negro population, 10 per cent or not, is very strategically placed because of—ironically—segregation. What is also true is that Negroes have never been able to utilize the full voting potential of our numbers. Where we can vote, the case has always been that the white political machine stacks and gerrymanders the political subdivisions in Negro neighborhoods, so the true voting strength is never reflected in political strength. Would anyone looking at the distribution of political power in Manhattan ever think that Negroes represented 60 per cent of the population there?
Just as often the effective political organization in Negro communities is absorbed by tokenism and patronage—the time-honored practice of “giving” certain offices to selected Negroes. The machine thus creates a “little machine,” which is subordinate and responsive to it, in the Negro community. These Negro political “leaders” are really vote deliverers, more responsible to the white machine and the white power structure than to the community they allegedly represent. Thus the white community is able to substitute patronage control for audacious Black Power in the Negro community.
This is precisely what Johnson tried to do even before the Voting Rights Act of 1966 was passed. The national Democrats made it very clear that the measure was intended to register Democrats, not Negroes. The President and top officials of the Democratic Party called in almost one hundred selected Negro “leaders” from the Deep South. Nothing was said about changing the policies of the racist state parties, nothing was said about repudiating such leadership figures as Eastland and Ross Barnett in Mississippi or George Wallace in Alabama. What was said was simply, “Go home and organize your people into the local Democratic Party—then we’ll see about poverty money and appointments.” (Incidentally, for the most part the war on poverty in the South is controlled by local Democratic ward heelers—outspoken racists who have used the program to change the form of the Negroes’ dependence. People who were afraid to register for fear of being thrown off the farm are now afraid to register for fear of losing their children’s Head Start places.)
We must organize black community power to end these abuses, and to give the Negro community a chance to have its needs expressed. A leadership that is truly “responsible” —not to the white press and power structure, but to the community—must be developed. Such leadership will recognize that its power lies in the unified and collective strength of that community. This will make it difficult for the white leadership group to conduct its dialogue with individuals in terms of patronage and prestige, and will force them to talk to the community’s representatives in terms of real power.
The single aspect of the Black Power program that has encountered most criticism is this concept of independent organization. This is presented as third-partyism which has never worked, or a withdrawal into black nationalism and isolationism. If such a program is developed it will not have the effect of isolating the Negro community but the reverse. When the Negro community is able to control local offices, and negotiate with other groups from a position of organized strength, the possibility of meaningful political alliances on specific issues will be increased. That is a rule of politics and there is no reason why it should not operate here. The only difference is that we will have the power to define the terms of these alliances.
The next question usually is, “So—can it work, can the ghettos in fact be organized?” The answer is that this organization must be successful, because there are no viable alternatives—not the war on poverty, which was at its inception limited to dealing with effects rather than causes, and has become simply another source of machine patronage. And “integration” is meaningful only to a small chosen class within the community.
The revolution in agricultural technology in the South is displacing the rural Negro community into Northern urban areas. Both Washington, D.C., and Newark have Negro majorities. One-third of Philadelphia’s population of two million people is black. “Inner city” in most major urban areas is already predominantly Negro, and with the white rush to suburbia, Negroes will in the next three decades control the heart of our great cities. These areas can become either concentration camps with a bitter and volatile population, whose only power is the power to destroy, or organized and powerful communities able to make constructive contributions to the total society. Without the power to control their lives and their communities, without effective political institutions through which to relate to the total society, these communities will exist in a constant state of insurrection. This is a choice that the country will have to make.