CHAPTER TEN

The American Revolution

“Negroes Are the Ones Best-Suited to Govern the United States Today.” This declaration appeared on the front page of Correspondence’s special Emancipation Proclamation issue published in January 1963.1 The start of the new year marked the centennial of the proclamation, and the symbolism of “100 years of freedom” sparked numerous and varied responses, including celebrations, commentary, and renewed activism from a wide range of parties with some interest in or opinion on the contemporary black struggle. Correspondence used the occasion to present its interpretation of that struggle and to place distance between itself and the Marxist Left. An editorial titled “Why This Issue?” explained that the issue “is unmistakably Nationalist in tone and content. The reason for this is very simple. Anyone who knows the Negro community knows that the greatest emancipation is taking place among those Negroes who are proud of their blackness and separateness. By stressing rejection of the institutions of American society rather than seeking integration into them, these Negroes are achieving an unparalleled freedom and independence of thought.”2 The editorial also articulated the position on the black struggle that Jimmy and Grace had been developing over the preceding two years: “At this time, in this country, revolutionary philosophical and political leadership can only come from the Negroes,” and this fact made it clear that “the ideological paternalism which socialists have always maintained in regard to the Negro struggle is only white supremacy in a radical guise.”3

The special Emancipation Proclamation issue was full of arguments for and expressions of the new nationalism that had emerged since 1961. The lead article argued that the United States needed “a government that is in tune with the world revolution now sweeping Latin-America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East” and that “the Negroes are the only social force in this country which is part of this world revolution.”4 Also appearing on the front page was a piece by Selma Sparks, a member of the Liberator editorial board, describing the growth and depth of Bandung-style internationalism among Harlem nationalists since the UN demonstration following Patrice Lumumba’s death, particularly in support of the Cuban Revolution.5 The fifth installment of Reginald Wilson’s “What Are We Fighting for Anyway?” series questioned “the alleged progress of the Negro during the past hundred years” and the notion that the centennial was cause for celebration. The article reported on “the real situation of the Negro in America” by detailing numerous recent cases of racist violence and official malfeasance across the country. “In his revolutionary struggle for freedom,” Wilson concluded, “the only thing the Negro in America has to celebrate in 1963 is his awakening.”6 Several pieces in Correspondence’s Emancipation Proclamation issue dealt with black history and black pride, such as Gwen Mallett’s “I’m Glad I’m a Negro” and Conrad Mallett’s “Rediscovering Negro History.” A letter in the “Readers’ Views” section argued for the rejection of the word “Negro” in favor of “Afro-American,” while another letter asserted that nationalism “undoubtedly” brings self-improvement: “Every nationalist becomes a scholar. His scope becomes enlarged to a world scope where before it was just his block. His ego really grows because he truly grows himself. He gets a purpose and becomes a free-thinking person.”7

Further evidence of the new nationalism appeared under the banner “Introducing Rev. Albert B. Cleage, Jr.” in the form of excerpts from a speech Cleage had recently delivered on the future of the black struggle, showcasing his militant rhetoric and bold pronouncements on white duplicity and the need for an assertive black nationalist political program. Grace gave Cleage’s remarks the title “The Negro Struggle Is a Struggle for Power” and introduced them with a prefatory statement praising Cleage for his role in the local black movement.8

The issue also included a “Black Art” supplement that was in some ways the most telling feature of the issue. It featured works by several Detroit visual artists and poets; a profile of singer, actress, and activist Abbey Lincoln; and two essays on Jazz, one of them by Lincoln’s husband, the drummer and activist Max Roach. The supplement aimed to showcase local artists while emphasizing the importance of art and artists in the development of black cultural identity and the larger black struggle. Lincoln and Roach were among the Harlem activists who instigated the UN protests and the anti-imperialist activity that Selma Sparks described on the front page of the issue. The profile of Lincoln, titled “Black Beauty,” praised her combination of artistic talent, integrity, and racial pride. It particularly noted that she “refused to press her hair,” instead choosing to wear a natural hairstyle as both a statement of personal values and a larger cultural and political statement. “The moment Negro women begin to wear their hair NATURALLY,” Correspondence asserted, “they will automatically feel different. Then, and only then, will they know that they are beautiful black women—like Abbey Lincoln—based on their own standards.”9

Correspondence’s Emancipation Proclamation issue served as a prescient statement on the arrival and dramatic impact of the Black Power movement during the second half of the decade. Jimmy and Grace were already thinking and writing about a notion of black power in 1963. Writing to Conrad Lynn in January, Grace said that “the past period” of activism and theoretical work had advanced their thinking on two points: the international character of the Negro struggle; and the need for “black power” (her quotation marks), which she specified as being “not in any old eight Southern states but in the cities where Negroes are fast becoming a majority.” She also told him he “would be absolutely amazed” if he had seen the enthusiastic response when they raised the idea of Negro self-government in Detroit with people over the past few weeks. “Out of perhaps twenty-five people, most of them Negroes, only one has shown any hesitation—and he is a ‘radical’—i.e. someone who says he is ready but that the people are not.”10

Jimmy also began formulating a concept of black power and projecting the significance of the idea in his writings during the early 1960s, when few observers anticipated or took seriously the prospect of the civil rights struggle’s transforming into a struggle for black power. In his 1963 “Black Political Power,” a review essay of black journalist Louis Lomax’s 1962 book The Negro Revolt, Jimmy noted that in some quarters of black opinion and politics there was a rising nationalist sentiment, rejection of integration, and desire for black political power, all of which he saw as pointing to the next stage of the black revolt. He chided Lomax for being “a Negro who still thinks in terms of white power as naturally as he thinks of eating when he’s hungry. His mind simply has not stretched beyond the idea of whites ruling and giving Negroes a greater share in this rule.”11 The essay ends with a prediction that, within months, would begin to be realized in Detroit by the successful formation of the Freedom Now Party (FNP) and within three years would be dramatically proved accurate with the rise of the Black Power movement. “The struggle of the Negroes in the very near future,” he wrote, “will be the struggle for black political power, and by black political power is meant, not the power of Negroes to put white men in office, to whom they can go and ask for things, but rather their own power to dispose of things.”12

The Black Revolution of 1963

All of this placed Jimmy and Grace in the midst of the currents of black radical politics that were challenging racial liberalism, in Detroit and nationally, and would culminate in the year ahead. The dramatic events of 1963 led participants and observers alike to speak of a racial revolution. During the summer of 1963 Newsweek magazine conducted a nationwide survey in an attempt to understand the motivations and meanings of the rising “Negro revolution in America.”13 Martin Luther King Jr. described “the Negro Revolution of 1963” in his book Why We Can’t Wait, asserting that “no one can doubt that as the Negro left 1963 behind he had taken the longest and fastest leap forward in a century.”14 Journalist and popular historian Lerone Bennett Jr. also used the theme of revolution in his recounting of the year’s developments. Drawing on the imagery, emotions, and violence of the year’s most dramatic events, Bennett summarized 1963 as “a year of funerals and births, a year of endings and a year of beginnings, a year of hate, a year of love. It was a year of water hoses and high-powered rifles, of struggles in the streets and screams in the night, of homemade bombs and gasoline torches, of snarling dogs and widows in black. It was a year of passion, a year of despair, a year of desperate hope. It was 1963, the 100th year of black emancipation and the first year of the Black Revolution.”15

Protest activity in the South impacted northern communities and struggles within them. The Birmingham campaign, in particular, provided an impetus for organizing and movement building nationally. The mass movement to desegregate Birmingham dramatically exposed the depths and depravity of white supremacy, but it also showed that the brutal hand of southern reaction could be stayed, at least partially, by mass action. In response, black communities across the country mobilized to demonstrate their solidarity with the struggle in Birmingham. Within a week of the May 10 settlement that brought the campaign to a close, supporters staged large rallies in Cleveland, Los Angeles, and Chicago.16 Other support rallies occurred in other cities throughout May and into the summer, raising a total of $159,856 for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).17

Detroit was one of these cities. In early May, leaders of the Detroit branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) issued a “Call to Action” urging “Freedom loving Detroiters” to “Reinforce the Birmingham Freedom Fighters.” The call urged mass participation in a “protest rally and demonstration” on May 10 at the site of Old City Hall in downtown Detroit to “make Detroit and the world more aware of the tragedy in Birmingham Alabama.” Cosponsored by the local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the rally was conceived as an expression of solidarity and also as a demonstration of local political resolve. “We must dramatize our awareness of the Federal Government’s responsibility to protect the rights of Negro citizens,” the NAACP leaders explained. “We must by our attendance at the rally … emphasize the need of immediate and effective action by the Kennedy Administration.” The featured speaker at the rally was Birmingham World editor and civil rights activist Emory O. Jackson.18

The strong language of the call notwithstanding, the rally was hastily organized and poorly attended. The interracial crowd was estimated at 300 people, much less than might be expected in a city that not only boasted strong traditions of political protest and civil rights activism, but was also home to a black population with strong ties to the South, and Alabama in particular. As previously discussed, Detroit’s African American population had grown steadily through migration from the South over the preceding half century. Between 1910 and 1940 the city’s black population rose from 5,741 to 149,119, reflecting an increase from 1.2 percent of the total population to 9.2 percent. In 1950, the census recorded 300,506 African Americans in the city, reflecting 16.2 percent of the total population. By 1960 there were 482,229 African Americans in Detroit, making up 28.9 percent of the city’s nearly 1.7 million residents.19 Like other cities, the tremendous growth of Detroit’s black population during and after World War II was contemporaneous with the rising civil rights movement. Thus, the evolution of political consciousness among black Detroiters in this period was informed both by experiences of southern racism—either directly or through kinship ties and collective memory—and by its urban, northern variant. While the rally did not seem to reflect this consciousness, it did serve as a catalyst for subsequent organizing and political mobilizations.

Cleage delivered an impromptu speech during the rally in which he declared that such a small affair was woefully inadequate, suggesting that a large mass march would be a more appropriate and effective demonstration of the black community’s political resolve.20 By 1963 Cleage had earned a reputation as a powerful speaker and one of the city’s most outspoken activists, and his call for a mass march was part of a broader critique he had been making of the city’s traditional black leadership. Following the May 10 rally (and perhaps in response to Cleage’s exhortation), members of various black community organizations met at the Detroit National Urban League office on Mack Avenue to discuss how they could support the Birmingham struggle.21 The meeting was planned and organized by Rev. C. L. Franklin, pastor of New Bethel Baptist Church (and father of singer Aretha), and real estate developer James Del Rio. The assembled group agreed to sponsor a march and to raise $100,000 for King and the Birmingham struggle. They selected Franklin to head the organizing effort and scheduled a mass meeting for May 17 to begin planning the march and formally launch the new organization, the Detroit Council for Human Rights (DCHR).

Known for his theatrical preaching and stylish dress, Franklin has been described as “the most popular black, Baptist preacher of his generation” and “the most imitated soul preacher in history.”22 Franklin assumed the leadership of the New Bethel Baptist Church in 1946 and he soon became a local celebrity. His congregation had grown into the thousands during the 1950s, and by 1963 he had achieved national celebrity for his powerful and entertaining sermons, performed on radio broadcasts, on records, and before live audiences during national gospel road shows.23 By this time he had also assumed a role in the local civil rights struggle, and he had connections to the national civil rights leadership, including King.24

Over 800 people attended the May 17 meeting held at Franklin’s church, which had moved to its new sanctuary on Linwood Avenue two months earlier. The participants voted to hold a march down Woodward Avenue on June 11 that would conclude with a mass rally at Cobo Arena, where the main speaker would be either Martin Luther King or Ralph Abernathy. Franklin was elected chairman of the organization, and the all-black board of directors included Cleage. Three days later, Franklin wrote to the Detroit City Council requesting permission “to hold a parade on the evening of June 11 which would facilitate an estimated 100,000 marchers on foot.” He explained that the purpose of the march was “to demonstrate our sympathy for those American citizens in Birmingham, Alabama who are engaged in a struggle for first class citizenship and to make known to people in Detroit our own displeasure over that segment of our population which is deprived of the full measure of their constitutional rights.” He added that the DCHR expected to raise $100,000 at the rally “to be donated to the struggling peoples of Birmingham.”25

Over the course of the next five weeks, the DCHR finalized the plans for the march and mobilized broad support and enthusiasm. The date was changed to June 23, King’s participation was confirmed, and the event was billed as both the “Walk to Freedom” and the “Freedom March.” Under the leadership of Franklin, Cleage, Del Rio, and Tony Brown, who had been hired as march coordinator, the DCHR organized all over the city. They held weekly meetings in various churches around the city to build momentum for the march. Many churches held premarch rallies, and other Michigan cities sent delegations.26

By all accounts, the march was a tremendous success. Estimates of the number of participants ranged from 125,000 to 250,000, and King told the crowd that “what has been done here today will serve as a source of inspiration for all the freedom-loving people of this nation.” He opened his speech by expressing “the deep joy that comes to my heart as I participate with you in what I consider the largest and greatest demonstration for freedom ever held in the United States.”27 Marchers made their way down Woodward Avenue carrying signs that read, “We Shall Be Free,” “Evers Did Not Die in Vain!,” “Stop Jim Crowism!,” “Black Peoples’ Revolt,” and “White Man Listen, We Will Take Our Rights!”28 Thousands more lined the streets, cheering the marchers on as they made their way to Cobo Arena, where King delivered “a thunderous, dramatic climax” to the march. During his speech, which included an early version of his famous “I Have a Dream” oration, King brought the crowd to its feet when he asserted, “We want Freedom … and we want it now!” The other platform speakers were DCHR board member and longtime activist Snow Grigsby, Detroit mayor Jerome Cavanagh, Representative Charles C. Diggs Jr., United Auto Workers (UAW) president Walter Reuther, and Cleage, with Franklin serving as master of ceremonies.29

Correspondence ran a banner at the top of its next issue that read, “250,000 Detroiters Walk for Freedom,” along with a front-page report on the march by Gwen Mallett, “Freedom Walkers Pledge ‘We Shall Overcome.’ ” Mallett explained that the sentiment “This is OUR DAY” captured the general feeling among the marchers.30 She also reported that, despite wide endorsement of the march from white liberal, labor, and religious organizations, the vast majority of the demonstrators were black. Estimating whites as no more than 2 percent of the quarter million demonstrators, she said that the presence of only a mere “sprinkling of whites among the marchers” reinforced the attitude among “more and more Negroes” that “this is our fight.”31 To illustrate the mood of the march, she cited several slogans carried on placards that were more militant than those reported in other news outlets. “White Man Wake Up or Wake Up Dead” read one. A nine-year-old child carried a sign reading “Ready or Not, Here We Come,” and another child’s placard declared, “100 Years Overdue, Freedom Now.” Among the more humorous signs was “Freedom Now, Said Tom, Democratically.” Echoing Correspondence’s Emancipation Proclamation issue, another placard read, “Negroes Best Suited to Govern Themselves.” The political cartoon by Reginald Wilson on the front page of this issue depicted Gus and Greasy, regular characters in his cartoons, talking against the backdrop of two scenes of white police beating African Americans. One scene involves a police dog, suggestive of the televised images of Bull Connor and his police force brutalizing civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham during the preceding weeks. “The question should be,” one man says to the other, “when will WHITES be fit for self-government?”32

Mallett reported that the “holiday spirit” prevailing along the march route carried over into the rally afterward, but this wore thin when “people began to get disenchanted with the platitudes mouthed by white dignitaries” such as Cavanagh and Reuther. The crowd’s discontent vanished when Cleage took the podium to speak. “In the challenging manner for which Cleage is noted,” wrote Mallett, who was a friend and political ally of his, Cleage “immediately transformed the holiday spirit of the crowd into a fighting spirit for freedom.” He stressed the specific issues faced by blacks in the North around which they must fight. “The crowd let him know they accepted the challenge” as they applauded and cheered, and they responded, “That’s right.” “When Cleage repeated again and again, ‘We must FIGHT and FIGHT, and FIGHT,’ the hall shook as they shouted after him, ‘FIGHT and FIGHT and FIGHT!’ ” During his speech Cleage announced a boycott of local supermarkets Kroger and A&P to protest their hiring practices, in response to which “the whole assembly stood and cheered.” King followed Cleage at the podium, further exciting the crowd. “As he addressed the audience,” Mallett reported, “you could see the faces of some being literally transfigured into the faces of free people.” The “fervor” of the crowd especially rose when King repeated the now famous phrase “I have a dream” and then ended the speech with the equally evocative phrase “Free at last,” at which point “several women began to shout ‘Free at last, my Lord, free at last.’ ”33

Although Detroit’s Freedom March was eclipsed by the much more celebrated March on Washington held two months later, the Detroit march was a major event when it happened in the summer of 1963. It made national news and was widely recognized as one of the largest civil rights rallies in the nation’s history.34 With broad participation from Detroit’s black community, labor unions, and civic groups, the march raised thousands of dollars for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and gave an indication of the extent of the support for the efforts of southern freedom fighters in other parts of the country. Furthermore, the energy and activism that the march embodied evidenced the emerging political sensibilities and drive toward political action in Detroit during the early 1960s. As Franklin declared two weeks before the march, the event served as “a warning to the city that what has transpired in the past is no longer acceptable to the Negro community.” Punctuating this political resolve, Franklin added, “We want complete amelioration of all injustices.”35

Franklin’s assertive rhetoric reflected the militant mood building among black Detroiters during the spring and summer of 1963. It was, too, a forecast of the increasingly aggressive politics of the coming months and years, though, ironically perhaps, Franklin would soon be positioned (or position himself) at odds with the most militant voices in Detroit’s black activist community. The march had helped to foster a sense of unity and collective purpose, and this was an important factor in mobilizing people around previously identified concerns. Indeed, the months that followed the march saw an intensification of black grassroots activism and political organizing, building on and extending the organizational and strategic resources reflected in the march. Yet, this increased political consciousness and activity generated new ideas and organizational forms, and with them came competing articulations of political objectives—as well as different strategic approaches to realizing them. These organizational and leadership rivalries certainly proved counterproductive at times, but they also represented creative tensions that ultimately had a generative impact on the development of black protest politics. Two areas of protest—economic discrimination and police brutality—would be particularly important to the movement that was building.

Detroit activists critiqued and challenged economic discrimination through a series of boycotts and selective-patronage efforts during the spring and summer of 1963. In early June the Detroit chapter of CORE began picketing Kroger’s stores in opposition to the chain’s discriminatory employment policies, while at the same time, but with no apparent connection, an organization of black clergy leaders named the Negro Preachers of Detroit and Vicinity launched a selective-patronage campaign against the A&P supermarket chain to expand employment opportunities for African Americans. These efforts, which began at least two weeks before the Freedom March, highlight the ways in which, by the summer of 1963, economic activism was reemerging as an important vehicle for black Detroiters to challenge the city’s racial status quo. Both Rev. Cleage and Snow Grigsby used the Freedom March as a platform to advocate for aggressive economic activism. Grigsby addressed economic protest strategies during his speech at the Cobo Arena rally, and he distributed an open letter addressed to “All People of Goodwill” that championed the strategy of selective patronage.36 The letter called for “Negroes [to] set a specific date to cease purchasing anything other than food and medicine for 30 days, to focus attention on the economic contribution of the Negro to the business community, and job discrimination perpetuated by unions. It is high time that job opportunities be more commensurate with purchasing.”37

Cleage made a similar appeal, calling for Detroit’s black community to support the recent campaigns of CORE and the Negro Preachers of Detroit and Vicinity to force the Kroger and A&P food chains to hire black managers and department heads.38 In the most recent issue of the Illustrated News, released just days before the march, Cleage and his coeditors had run a full-page announcement of the selective-patronage campaigns against Kroger and A&P. Urging their readers to support the campaigns with the exhortation “Do Not Buy Where You Cannot Work,” Cleage and his collaborators were drawing on the spirit if not the direct historical example of mass protests and boycotts that went under this slogan in the 1930s.39

They were also drawing attention to a new mood, as they perceived it, rising in black communities across the country and energizing the civil rights struggle. Both in the South—symbolized most dramatically by the mass protests in Birmingham—and in the growing black urban communities of the North, Cleage and his collaborators found that African Americans showing a marked willingness to engage in militant mass action. Cleage forcefully argued this position in an editorial that appeared in the same issue of the Illustrated News as the selective-patronage announcement. Putting a militant intonation to the familiar civil rights movement refrain, Cleage titled his editorial “Not Someday—But Now! We Shall Overcome” and began by asserting that “one hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation the Negro has at long last begun his march to freedom.” Reflecting in particular on the struggle in Birmingham as well as the mobilization in Detroit for the Freedom March, Cleage proclaimed that “everywhere people are coming to accept the fact that the Negro has completely rejected gradualism and tokenism.” Black protest activity was being driven by the militancy and resolve of the masses, with “Negro leadership everywhere,” Cleage wrote, “reflecting the fighting temper of the Negro community.”40

Cleage and his coeditors felt that the economic boycott was one important facet of that fight, and they used the pages of the Illustrated News to inform readers about boycotting and selective patronage nationally and to encourage support for such efforts in Detroit. Under the headline “Boycotting May Hit Detroit A&P,” the April 29 edition of the paper cited a Wall Street Journal report of a boycott of the 150 A&P stores in Philadelphia “until the chain hires additional Negro employees.” The Illustrated News added that A&P was the twentieth company to be boycotted in Philadelphia during the past three years, and suggested that similar campaigns were beginning to take root in Baltimore and New York, as well as Detroit. The paper explained, “Three Detroit ministers,” who had returned to Detroit after “traveling to Philadelphia to study the program there, have organized a boycott for Detroit.”41 Indeed, the Philadelphia selective-patronage campaign was extremely successful. Led by Rev. Leon Sullivan and other members of a group called 400 Ministers, the Philadelphia boycott movement began in 1960 and had won agreements with several employers securing jobs for African Americans—usually supervisory, clerical, and skilled positions.42

This wave of activity, he argued, was sweeping up much of the “old guard” black leadership. Indeed, a consistent theme in the paper and in Cleage’s analysis and public pronouncements, and one of the things that made him a controversial and often antagonistic or polarizing figure in local black political circles, was a sharp criticism of old-guard leadership, especially in the city. Reflecting on the impact of the Birmingham campaign, he criticized local black leaders who praised John F. Kennedy for his “Civil Rights stand,” and he asserted that the president “did nothing until he was forced to act by the increasing pressure of the NEGRO PROTEST. Rev. Martin Luther King dragged Kennedy kicking and screaming into the twentieth century.”43

Three weeks after the Freedom March, the Michigan Chronicle announced that A&P had reached an agreement with the Group on Advanced Leadership (GOAL) to hire five Negro managers within the next year. The agreement also called for the promotion of twenty-one black employees and the hiring of twenty-one to replace those promoted, and included terms about the fair display of “Negro-produced goods.” These successful selective-buying campaigns not only represented civil rights activism in Detroit, but were also consistent with the type of activism that was emerging in urban centers across the country. The focus on employment patterns highlighted the economic dimensions of American racism as experienced in the North, and efforts around economic activism and coordinated economic action among black Detroiters were consistent with a broader national effort among black communities—many initiated and led by black clergy.

In the midst of this activity, the murder of Cynthia Scott over the Fourth of July weekend brought the struggle against police brutality to the center of black protest politics in Detroit. Just thirteen days after the Freedom March, black citizens of Detroit launched a major protest against the Detroit Police Department in response to Scott’s murder by a white officer. An African American woman known to many in the area as a prostitute, Scott was enjoying after-hours Fourth of July celebrations with an acquaintance, Charles Marshall, when police encountered her. According to police reports, Scott attempted to stab officers who were trying to apprehend her and then ran to escape, at which point patrol officer Theodore Spicher shot her. Marshall, however, disputed the official version of events. He reported that Scott did not attack the officers with a knife, nor did she run to escape. Rather, she told the officers that they had no basis to arrest her and then walked away, at which point the officer began shooting. She was shot twice in the back and then once in the stomach after she had collapsed.44

Word of the shooting quickly spread throughout Detroit’s black neighborhoods, and within nine hours a crowd of protesters had gathered at police headquarters. Numbering as many as 5,000, the crowd marched around the building chanting “Stop Killer Cops! Stop Killer Cops!” When city prosecutor Samuel H. Olson later declared that the officer’s actions were justified, frustration and anger was widespread throughout the black community, and various organizations took action. The NAACP demanded a full and immediate investigation into the shooting. Uhuru, a recently formed radical student organization based at Wayne State University held street rallies and sit-ins, and GOAL organized a picket line at police headquarters. GOAL’s Milton Henry served as the attorney for the Scott family.45

This was the context and community spirit in which the DCHR made plans for a major civil rights gathering in Detroit and the creation of a formal network of protest organizations to be called the Northern Negro Leadership Conference was conceived. The DCHR had made the call for the conference before the Freedom March. The success of the march and the subsequent activism it helped to inspire further solidified the group’s intention to create a formal coalition of northern civil rights groups. Based on the structure and principles of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), this new coalition would link Detroit’s civil rights organizations with activists from urban communities throughout the Northeast and Midwest.46 The DCHR planned a major conference, to be attended by such activists, to launch the new Northern Negro Leadership Conference.

The first mass planning meeting took place at Franklin’s New Bethel Baptist Church on September 27, and within a month political and ideological differences manifested themselves. These came to a head on October 21 during a meeting of the organization’s executive board. The differences revolved around the organization’s relationship to an emerging black nationalist sentiment, the efficacy of integration as an objective, and the strategy of nonviolence for the black freedom movement. In what amounted to a recanting and reversal of the original conference plans, Franklin suddenly imposed restrictions on the event, seeking to limit the range of potential delegates and issues to be discussed at the conference. An article in the Illustrated News a week later reported that Franklin, who was the DCHR’s chair, had expressed his opposition to “black nationalist and other radical groups” who might infiltrate the conference. Although the board had approved the plans for a conference open to all black organizations in all northern urban centers, Franklin insisted that the participation of such people “must be prevented at all costs,” saying that such groups would hold positions counter to his own. One such position was critical of nonviolence. Cleage responded by saying that many black people had begun to question the philosophy of nonviolence and embrace the principle of self-defense.47

Franklin’s turnabout may have been simply a response to the involvement of the newly created Freedom Now Party (FNP). Earlier in the summer, seasoned activists William Worthy and Conrad Lynn had begun to publicly discuss the idea of an all-black political party. Their vision was to create a vehicle that could move beyond what they—and others—took to be the limiting politics of civil rights protest, as represented most visibly in the summer of 1963 by the March on Washington. Worthy and Lynn used the occasion of the march to announce the formation of the FNP, declaring, “We are the political expression of the mighty black crusade for freedom that nobody can halt or suppress.”48 In the two months to follow, Cleage had become a member of the FNP and had invited Worthy and Lynn to speak at the Northern Negro Leadership Conference, doing so with the approval of the DCHR’s board.

Franklin, however, insisted that the conference must not endorse the party. He found himself at odds with the political perspective of the FNP, which “repudiates and breaks with the established party system which serves only to sustain the enslavement of Afro-Americans!” Franklin, unwilling to stray far beyond the integrationist ethic of mainstream civil rights agitation, wanted to avoid association with the FNP’s “desire to achieve our own destiny through our own efforts,” or its recognition that “our struggle for freedom and equality can issue, meaningfully, only from our own leadership and candidates.” As the DCHR’s chair, Franklin explained to his fellow board members that he “could not afford to be labeled a black nationalist.”49 In response to Franklin’s ideological impositions, Cleage resigned from the DCHR. Explaining his decision, he said, “In renouncing the independent black political action represented by the FREEDOM NOW PARTY and the new Negro image which is called ‘black nationalism,’ the DCHR has renounced any reason for its existence.”50

Cleage and GOAL quickly decided to sponsor a competing conference, which they called the Northern Negro Grass Roots Leadership Conference, to be held the same weekend. GOAL’s Milton Henry was close to Malcolm X and arranged for him to address the conference.51 Grace and Jimmy assumed prominent roles in the conference, with Grace as one of the central organizers and Jimmy as the conference chairperson.

In Malcolm X, the organizers of the conference found an ideal representative. His presence would draw a sharp contrast to the more moderate DCHR conference taking place downtown. By 1963, Malcolm was perhaps the most able and influential spokesperson for black nationalism. His uncompromising advocacy for black people’s humanity; his equally charged railing against white supremacy and white liberal hypocrisy; his unrelenting criticism of mainstream civil rights leaders and their commitment to integration; his powerful rejection of nonviolence and his call for self-defense; all of this made Malcolm the embodiment of the political project that Jimmy, Grace, Cleage, and the other organizers sought with the Northern Negro Grass Roots Conference.

The American Revolution

Against this background, during the summer of 1963 Jimmy’s “State of a Nation” found a wider audience. In 1961, Grace and Jimmy met W. H. “Ping” Ferry of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions and the Fund for the Republic, whose thinking about the nation’s current economic and social challenges paralleled Jimmy’s analysis of automation. The next year Grace shared a copy of “State of a Nation” with Ferry. Impressed with the document, Ferry shared it with Leo Huberman for possible publication by Monthly Review Press, which quickly agreed to publish it.52 Over the next year, Jimmy revised the document into a slightly more broadly conceived manuscript that he initially titled “But Only One Side Is Right: The Industrial and Social Revolution in America.”53 Monthly Review Press published it in July 1963 as The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook.54 Thus, the internal document that had helped to solidify the Boggses’ split with C. L. R. at the beginning of 1962 now reappeared, in different form, as a statement of Jimmy’s thinking about revolutionary change in the midst of the “Black Revolution” of 1963. The appearance of the book at this moment announced its author as both an important interpreter of and contributor to the great escalation of black protest that made 1963 a pivotal year in the black freedom movement.

Published in the summer of 1963, the book arrived at a pivotal moment in the civil rights movement, and its thought-provoking assessment of the movement’s meaning and possible trajectory established its author as an original and penetrating analyst of the black freedom struggle.55 The American Revolution, however, is not only or even principally about the civil rights movement or black protest. Its starting point, both narratively and analytically, is the labor movement, tracing its decline and its failure in the face of changes in the industrial economy brought on by automation. It then moves to an analysis of the economic as well as social implications of automation. This proved to be one of the most celebrated features of the book, catapulting Jimmy into a national debate during the early 1960s about the effects of automation on employment and the future of the industrial economy.

Drawing on Jimmy’s study of automation during the 1950s, the book argues that automation was making black labor obsolete. This would turn a generation of young people into “outsiders”—a group of people who had no real prospects of entering the system—and this fact, he said, would shape the meaning and future directions of the civil rights movement. Amid an eruption of books on “the Negro revolt” and a similarly exploding body of writing on poverty and economic production, The American Revolution was unique in its linking of the technological and economic change of automation to the social and political changes being forged by the black struggle and its exposure of them as related historical processes. The automation debate had already identified increasing job loss among African Americans as a central concern, but Jimmy’s singular contribution was to look beyond the relationship between automation and black joblessness to see a deeper connection—both historically and sociologically—between changes in the industrial economy and the unfolding of the black struggle for democratic rights over the preceding two decades. His understanding and particular articulation of the civil rights movement and automation as related social phenomena of the 1960s distinguished the book from others published at the time.

The book also marks a significant point in Jimmy’s intellectual and political trajectory. For one thing, it rather suddenly raised his profile as a thinker and activist. Widely read in both black radical and Marxist circles, and published across the world in translations in six languages,56 the notoriety the book brought to its author opened up new opportunities for intellectual and political engagement. In this sense, The American Revolution marked a new stage in his activist career. The book also marked a shift in Jimmy’s relationship to the labor movement and to Marxism, both of which had been central coordinates of his political life during the preceding two decades. During most of the 1950s, even as he was an active unionist, Jimmy had been a vocal critic of the UAW and the labor movement in his Correspondence columns and elsewhere. By the early 1960s his critiques grew especially strident, culminating in The American Revolution, which put forward a devastating indictment of the American labor movement. He argued that it had irreversibly devolved into a special interest group bearing no relation to its origins in the 1930s, when industrial unionism represented a genuine movement for social change.

The American Revolution received an immediate and overwhelmingly positive response. In the issue of Monthly Review that directly followed its publication, the editors reported that readers had written them describing The American Revolution as “the best thing MR has ever done.” Letters commending the book for its clarity and insight into the history and future of the labor movement, the Left, and the black struggle came from across the country and from abroad. “The demand for copies has been so great,” wrote editors Huberman and Paul Sweezy, “that we have decided to do a second printing of the issue as a $1 paperback.”57

Perhaps the most surprising correspondent was Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher and internationally renowned peace activist, who wrote to Jimmy shortly after the book was published saying he was “greatly impressed” with the “power and insight” of his “remarkable book.”58 Russell’s letter initiated an improbable but remarkable correspondence between the two men over the next several months in which they discussed such topics as the March on Washington (which occurred eight days after Russell’s letter), the efficacy of nonviolence in the civil rights movement, the impact of automation on the consciousness of American workers, and the internal dynamics and divisions of the civil rights struggle.

Actor and activist Ossie Davis was similarly taken by The American Revolution. When this “little book came into my life,” Davis recalled years later, it left him with the sensation of being “born again”: “I read every word of it and it opened my mind, my thoughts. It was immediately apprehended by me in every possible way. When I read it, I said, ‘Yes, of course, Amen. Even I could have thought of that.’ Immensities of thought reduced to images so simple that coming away from the book I was indeed born again. I could see the struggle in a new light. I was recharged, my batteries were full, and I was able to go back to the struggle carrying this book as my banner. Ruby and I bought up copies and mailed them to all the civil rights leaders, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Whitney Young. We thought all of them should have access to this book. It would give them an opportunity to be born again.”59 Davis’s comments illuminate the ways in which the book propelled Jimmy into national discussions and activist networks. His remarks also provide a vivid example of how the publication of the book brought Jimmy’s analysis and ideas to a broader audience while also opening up new relationships—including the decades-long friendship that Jimmy and Grace shared with Ossie Davis and his wife, Ruby Dee.60

The responses from Russell and Davis, situated as they were in distinct spheres and political spaces, suggest the wide reach and impact of the book. The American Revolution stretched across conventional realms of political analysis and appealed to a varied readership that included, for example, radical trade unionists, civil rights activists, longtime leftists, young internationalist-minded black radicals, and people watching current trends involving technological and economic change. Indeed, while readers like Russell and Davis found themselves drawn to the book primarily for its analysis of the rising black struggle, its examinations of automation, the meaning of work, and the failure of the labor movement spoke to other readers. For example, Wyndham Mortimer, a major figure in the formation of the UAW and the Congress of Industrial Organizations during the 1930s, wrote to Jimmy after “having just finished reading your very fine and thoughtful book.”61 Mortimer agreed with and appreciated Jimmy’s critique of the union. As a participant in the storied Flint sit-down strikes in 1937, the veteran gave the highest praise to his younger comrade: “I think your book is the best thing that has happened to the UAW since the sit-down strikes.”62 Another reader, Minnie Livingston of Technocracy Inc. in the state of Washington, wrote to congratulate Jimmy “on your excellent analysis of America’s economy,” while a radical labor activist in Chicago appraised the book as “one of the most important, if not the most important, and one of the most lucid books produced by the American left in generations.… [This] book surely belongs at the top of the list of works of the ‘New Left.’ ”63

Almost immediately after the book’s publication, Jimmy began receiving speaking invitations and requests for his writing. In September 1963 alone, letters arrived inviting him to four distinct speaking engagements. One asked him to participate in a conference at Princeton University, and another invited him to give an address on “The Revolution of the Unemployed” at McGill University in Montreal. A community group in Toledo, Ohio, asked Jimmy to address their organization. And Monthly Review, which had published the book and seen firsthand the positive response it elicited, asked Jimmy to be one of the speakers at a forum it was holding at the Town Hall in New York on “Where Is the Negro Liberation Movement Going? How Will It Get There?” In each case, the person extending the invitation had read The American Revolution and cited its power and insight as the impetus for the invitation. Thus, when the Northern Negro Grass Roots Leadership Conference convened in early November, Jimmy—already a well-recognized activist in Detroit—was fast becoming known nationally. When GOAL chose Jimmy to chair the conference, they placed before the dozens of activists who came from across the country a veteran activist with strong ties to the local Detroit movement and an increasing visibility in the national movement.

The Northern Negro Grass Roots Leadership Conference

The Northern Negro Grass Roots Leadership Conference opened on the morning of Saturday, November 9, with over 100 activists and leaders of local movements from several cities across the country attending. Among them were Dan Watts, editor of Liberator magazine; New York school boycott leader Rev. Milton A. Galamison; journalist and FNP cofounder William Worthy; Don Freeman, director of the Afro-American Institute in Cleveland, Ohio; Selma Sparks, a Brooklyn activist and member of the Liberator advisory board; Harlem rent strike leader Jesse Gray; Lawrence Landry, Chicago school boycott organizer; and Sam Jordan of San Francisco. The conference gave them the opportunity to share and discuss ideas with each other and the many Detroit activists who participated, including people that Jimmy and Grace were already working with such as Rev. Cleage, Milton and Richard Henry and other members of GOAL, and Charles Johnson and other members of Uhuru.

The conferees participated in workshops throughout the day at Mr. Kelley’s Lounge and Recreation Center on Chene Street that focused on organizing strategies and various political and economic issues arising out of the conditions of urban black communities such as de facto segregation in northern schools and housing discrimination.64 For example, workshops on self-defense and independent political action fostered spirited discussions probing the precepts of civil rights reform. Conference participants issued sharp critiques of the philosophy of nonviolence and its application by King and others in the mainstream civil rights organizations, arguing in favor of the principle of self-defense. Some people made appeals for retaliatory violence as an appropriate response to continued brutality against African Americans. The idea of independent political action was also a highly charged topic, with several participants declaring the need for black people to organize independently of white influence. A significant portion of the discussion during the workshops was devoted to the Freedom Now Party (FNP), and its cofounder William Worthy responded to a series of questions about the party’s platform and program.65

A workshop on economics similarly drew conferees into extended discussions of protest tactics and principles. These included consideration of a proposed Christmas boycott initiated by the Association for Artists for Freedom, a new organization formed by John Oliver Killens, James Baldwin, Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, and others in the wake of the September 1963 bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. They asked black people to refrain from the season’s consumer activity as an act of sacrifice in memory of the six black children murdered (the four girls killed in the bombing and two boys killed in the city later that day), and as a demonstration of unity and economic strength.66 The workshop also dealt with economic boycotts as a political weapon. During this discussion, activists from Cleveland shared their struggle to force a local General Motors distributor to change their discriminatory hiring practices and asked GOAL and others throughout the country to support a nationwide action against the automaker.67

The next morning, the conference participants began plotting the course for a new organization. They drafted and accepted a set of resolutions that emerged from the workshops, elected a nine-person steering committee to work out the procedures for the organization, and selected Chicago as the site of the next national meeting to be held in six months.68 Among the resolutions were endorsements of the Freedom Now Party and the principle of self-defense.69 These resolutions indicate how these activists were moving beyond the parameters of established civil rights orthodoxy and were anticipating the ideas and commitments of the Black Power movement. The articulation of these ideas at the conference bears a direct connection to the nationalist organizations and black radical politics that had developed over the preceding two years. The conference created an opportunity for connections and fellowship between activists from various places in a way that fostered a sense of collective purpose and political engagement that also, along with specific political ideas and programs, would soon emerge as a prevailing ethic of Black Power. The foretelling of these ideas and this ethic achieved full expression during the mass rally at the conclusion of the conference on Sunday night. A crowd of approximately 2,000 gathered at King Solomon Baptist Church to hear speeches by Cleage, William Worthy, and Malcolm X. Malcolm’s passionate and moving “Message to the Grass Roots” made a fitting climax to the conference.70

Malcolm began his speech with a call for black people to unite around a common cause and common struggle. He then addressed the nature of that struggle by describing the difference between what he called a “black revolution” and a “Negro revolution.”71 First, he said, it is necessary to make clear what a revolution is—to apprehend the motives, objectives, methods, and results of a revolution. Malcolm argued that revolutions are fundamentally about land—that is, access to the resources from which a subjugated people obtain an independent existence and build a nation. Furthermore, he asserted that revolution is a necessarily bloody experience, as the dispossessed must fight to gain land and independence. Drawing on the American, Russian, and Chinese Revolutions as historical examples, Malcolm explained, “I cite these revolutions, brothers and sisters, to show you that you don’t have a peaceful revolution. You don’t have a turn-the-other-cheek revolution. There’s no such thing as a nonviolent revolution. The only kind of revolution that is nonviolent is the Negro revolution. The only revolution in which the goal is loving your enemy is the Negro revolution.”72

Embedded in Malcolm’s denunciation of the “Negro revolution” was his critique of civil rights leadership. He brought the point home with satire and rhetorical flair, using the taxonomy of slave society that he referenced in his 1961 appearance in the city. “There were two kinds of slaves,” Malcolm asserted, “the house Negro and the field Negro.” The house Negro identified with the master, would protect the master’s interests as his own, and was reluctant to run away from the plantation. The field Negro, on the other hand, hated the slave master, plotted and prayed for his demise, and would jump at the opportunity to escape.73 For Malcolm, the slave society approximated contemporary American society, in which class position and proximity to whites conditioned one’s response to racial oppression. “This modern house Negro loves his master,” Malcolm insisted, chastising African Americans who sought racial integration. “He wants to live near [white people]. He’ll pay three times as much as the house is worth just to live near his master.” In contrast, blacks who rejected the goal of integration, preferring separation from white society, stood in the tradition of the field Negro. “If someone came to the field Negro and said, ‘Let’s separate, let’s run,’ he didn’t say ‘Where we goin?’ He’d say, ‘Any place is better than here.’ ”74

Malcolm’s analysis of slave society was a parable for the 1960s. The field Negro represented the masses, and his or her rebellious act of running away from the plantation symbolized the nationalists’ desire to gain autonomy from white society. On the other hand, the house Negro represented integrationists, and his or her investment in the slave system symbolized civil rights leaders’ desire for integration. Through this historical analogy, Malcolm restated the essence of his message to the grass roots: the civil rights movement and its leadership could only offer a “Negro revolution”; it could not bring black liberation. It was up to the black masses—the grass roots—the descendants of field Negroes, to move the struggle ahead and to achieve full and complete liberation.

Malcolm’s message met with an enthusiastic reception, in part because it sanctioned the emerging ideas and political sentiments of those gathered for the Northern Negro Grass Roots Leadership Conference. His words gave voice to new forms of oppositional consciousness and endorsed new modes of political engagement, modes that those assembled at the conference had begun to envision or in some cases were already practicing. This was true for the activists and organizations there representing local movements all over the country, and especially those from Detroit. Indeed, herein lies part of Malcolm’s power and appeal at the conference. His call for black revolution at King Solomon Baptist Church would reverberate many times during the subsequent months and years in Detroit and beyond.

“Into the Sunshine of a Different Society”

About a week after the Northern Negro Grass Roots Leadership Conference, Jimmy and Grace flew to New York, where Jimmy participated in the aforementioned forum at Town Hall. Organized by Monthly Review Associates, the event engaged a lively crowd in a discussion of the topic “Where Is the Negro Liberation Movement Going? How Will It Get There?” As one of the panelists, Jimmy shared the platform with Bruce Moore from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Boggses’ friend Conrad Lynn, veteran civil rights activist and attorney, lawyer to Robert Williams, and most recently the chairperson of the National Committee for a Freedom Now Party.75 Also appearing on stage was actress and activist Ruby Dee, who “completed the program with exciting dramatic readings from various writers and poets.”76 The Town Hall forum reflected its organizers’ belief that there was a growing need to give serious thought to and discussion of the future course of action in the black freedom movement. In its announcement for the meeting, Monthly Review Associates explained the rationale for the event: “Since the Birmingham crisis last May, the Negro liberation movement has experienced an extraordinarily rapid growth. Scores of new towns, cities, and counties in the South have erupted and, no less important, the movement has for the first time taken hold in the great metropolitan centers of the North. Demonstrations of all kinds … have shown that this is now a militant mass movement … yet it must be admitted that the progress that has been achieved toward the movement’s goal of freedom and equality for Negro Americans has been very small.”77

To examine this “paradox”—the apparent inability of the movement, despite its strength and militancy, to achieve meaningful change in the conditions of African Americans—the forum sought to foster public discussion and debate of critical issues. “Does the difficulty lie in the strategy and tactics of the movement itself?” the organizers asked. “Or is it to be sought in the character of the U.S. power structure? How can more, and more rapid, gains be won in the future?” The forum invited attendees to consider these and other questions concerning the very objective and nature of the struggle by hearing the thoughts of “three men who we know have been thinking deeply about the problems of the liberation movement.”78

The writer covering the forum for the Muhammad Speaks newspaper reported that “knowledgeable observers called” the event “one of the most provocative, analytical, and incisive discussions of the black freedom movement ever to be held in New York.” Lynn made the case that massive public investment, along with fundamental economic reorganization, would be required to provide necessary levels of employment as well as tackle major social needs around housing and schools. Moore, whose remarks garnered “a rousing reception,” said that “integration is no longer the answer.” Forecasting changes in his organization and in the entire movement, Moore told the crowd that “we must shift our emphasis,” explaining that the sit-ins—the protest activity that led to SNCC’s founding—“are becoming obsolete” in the face of other needs. “The vote is more significant than a hot dog. Economic power is more important than a theatre ticket.” Jimmy struck a similarly militant tone, exhorting the audience to recognize and embrace the revolutionary implications of the black revolt and doing so, according to the Muhammad Speaks reporter, with a “penetrating and devastating logic” that “brought constant cheers from the audience.”79

Jimmy’s speech at the Town Hall event gave him the opportunity to address a large public gathering with the ideas he had articulated in his book. In a style that he would consistently deploy in speeches and meetings over the coming years, Jimmy sought to challenge and provoke his audience:

Now I did not come here to comfort you. I came here to disturb you. I did not come here to pacify you. I came here to antagonize you. I did not come here to talk to you about love. I came here to talk to you about conflict.

I say this at the outset because the American people have lived for so long under the illusion that America is an exception to the deep crises that wreck other countries—that they are totally unprepared to face the brutish realities of the present crisis and the dangers that threaten them. The American people have lived so long with the myth that the United States is a Christian, capitalist, free democratic nation that we can do no wrong, that the question of what is right and wrong completely evades them.80

The topic of his speech was “the American Revolution, which as now is primarily a Black Revolution.” He told the audience that “sometimes a Revolution starts because the people believed that the country in its present form can do more for them than it is already doing. So they go out and ask for those things which they call their ‘Rights’ under the system.… If they get these ‘Rights,’ and then don’t press any more, then the country has made a social reform.… But if they don’t get what they believe are their ‘Rights,’ and they continue to fight for them, they begin to make a Revolution.”81

This, he explained, was precisely the pattern that black protest had followed in the years since the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, during which time no Supreme Court decision, agency of the government, or social or political institution of American life had been able to guarantee the rights that were granted to black citizens under the Constitution. “The Negroes,” he said, “have been left … to devise means of struggle for themselves.… So the myth that American Democracy protects the rights of Negroes has been exploded.” He went on to assert that “under this Democracy of which Americans are so proud, there has been more systematic exploitation of more people than there has been under any other political system. This is the truth which the Black Revolution is beginning to expose.” He said that as the Black Revolution proceeds, it will show that there is another form of society, an alternative to the status quo of American democracy, which had benefited the few at the expense of the many, for “democracy is a system which has been made possible by the worst kind of class society in the world—the class society that is based upon the systematic exploitation of another race.”82

This public discussion at the Monthly Review forum intersected with the private conversation that Jimmy and Bertrand Russell had been carrying on in their letters during the summer and fall of 1963. Russell had developed a strong interest and concern with the plight of African Americans, leading him to read widely in both the history of African Americans and contemporary material on America’s racial conflict.83 He received newly published works from editors and writers such as James Baldwin, who sent Russell a copy of his The Fire Next Time, published at the beginning of 1963, and Jimmy’s The American Revolution, which Monthly Review editors Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy had sent to Russell that summer. Russell believed that the combined effects of America’s international policies and its internal social crisis posed the primary threat to world peace. In his initial letter to Jimmy, Russell sought his views on the likely directions that American workers’ political consciousness would take in the face of automation and the possibility of a greater reaction in American political culture. “Will [American workers] not embrace a more harsh authoritarianism and delve for new victims … ?” he asked. Russell also questioned to what extent “American whites, whose living standards have depended upon the exploitation of American negroes and non-European peoples, will understand the American negro revolt. If they fail to make common cause with it, will not the result be a further impetus towards neo-fascist popular Government?”84

Jimmy wrote a reply about two weeks later in which he addressed Russell’s questions and further articulated his own ideas about the coming social conflicts. “Your questions are very big questions,” he told the philosopher, issuing the caveat that his answers were necessarily speculative, before launching into his analysis. “I believe that it will probably be in the north rather than in the south that the bitterness of the whites will overflow in spontaneous actions of a Fascist character,” Jimmy wrote, adding that he foresaw economic issues to be a central catalyst. He felt that confrontations could also come from the threat of blacks gaining political power in many areas of the South where they are the majority of the population. Similar conflicts could come in the North, he said, where in the large cities there had been a “concentration of Negroes in the central districts with the whites in the suburbs commuting daily to the centers of power through (or, by means of expressways, over) the Negro areas.”85

Russell sent an enthusiastic reply two weeks later, expressing appreciation for Jimmy’s comments and seeking to extend the dialogue. “I cannot see how the Negro revolt can stop short of a challenge to capitalism,” he offered. He also ascribed to the African American struggle an important role internationally, viewing the black movement as a promising means for opposing the Cold War and its logic of nuclear conflict: “I do think that the Negro revolt could be the means of opposing effectively and for the first time the assumptions of the United States and the race towards nuclear annihilation.”86 Russell also gave his analysis of the March on Washington, which had taken place three weeks earlier. “The March was deeply impressive but disappointing,” he wrote, “because the depth of feeling that one imagines negroes in America to experience about their treatment did not gain reflection in the demonstration.”87

Russell had sent a strong message of support to the march, calling it “the real Emancipation Proclamation,” but cautioned that “it must lead to an end to indifference, to suffering and mass murder, in short, to a revolution into thinking and acting as Americans.” The text of Russell’s message was released to the press in London on August 27 and read during the march the next day. “I am convinced that the march on Washington is a turning point in the history of the United States,” he proclaimed. “The Negro in the United States is on the move and he will not stop. The meaning of this is that the values and the practices which have formed the United States over three hundred years are being fundamentally challenged.” In a part of the statement that likely resonated with African Americans, but that earned condemnation from the mainstream American press, Russell said “The number of Negroes who have died through torture, lonely murder and systematic maltreatment in this period without doubt is in excess of those killed by the Nazis in the course of their unparalleled barbarism in Europe.”88

Like he had done with the March on Washington, Bertrand Russell sent a statement to be read during the Town Hall meeting. Unlike the celebrated gathering in Washington, however, where his words seemed to be consistent with the mood of the hour, Russell’s message to those assembled in New York was at variance with the general tenor of the event. He expressed his “wholehearted and complete sympathy” with “the movement towards [racial] equality,” but declared, “I do not believe that this end will be achieved if the Negro movement adopts methods of violence.” He feared that the “rapidly increasing sympathy” with “the Negro cause” among many whites would “very largely cease if the movement abandons persuasion and attempts, instead, to use force.”89 Russell’s memorandum was titled “Should the Negro Movement in the U.S. Remain Non-Violent?” and it was timely, as this very question and variants of it were a matter of great discussion and debate at the end of 1963. His counseling against violence was tantamount to an endorsement of nonviolent protest and represented a refusal to consider the possible merits of other forms of protest. This, of course, did not resonate with a meeting devoted to discussing new perspectives on the black struggle. Furthermore, in his reasoning against organized violence, Russell implicitly placed an importance on appeals to white support and sympathy, a strategy that many in the movement had come to question, if not abandon. Russell, in effect, urged a moderation that was out of step with the ideological orientation of the event.90

Jimmy challenged and critiqued Russell’s analysis. Addressing the audience following the reading of Russell’s message, Jimmy refuted the philosopher’s position in both tone and substance. For one thing, he asserted that the black freedom movement was for more than just equality, as Russell had indicated. More importantly, Jimmy rejected Russell’s advocacy of nonviolence. As he explained to Russell in a letter following the forum, “When I appeared at Town Hall in New York and heard your telegram addressed to that meeting and warning Negroes against violence, I who was speaking next had to say that whereas I too would like to hope that issues of our revolt might be resolved by peaceful means,” he believed that “the issues and the grievances were so deeply imbedded in the American system and the American people that the very things you warned against might just have to take place if the Negroes in the U.S.A. to walk are ever to walk the streets as free men.”91

Jimmy wrote this letter on December 29, three months after Russell’s previous letter to him and one month after the Town Hall forum. “It has been a long time since you wrote,” the letter began, “and lots of events have transpired, and yet nothing has changed.”92 The most dramatic of these was the assassination of President Kennedy the day after the Town Hall event. This of course had been preceded two months earlier by the Birmingham church bombing, which occurred just four days before Russell’s last letter to Jimmy. The year 1963 thus drew to an end shaken by the experience of public violence and threatened by impending confrontations around the status of its black citizens. These were the social dynamics on Jimmy’s mind when he sat down to pen his letter to Russell on December 29. “To this date,” he wrote, “no one in this country wants to take responsibility for the thousands of Negroes who have been beat up, shot up, jailed up in this country just for asking for some normal rights that are common in most countries.” Further challenging Russell’s warning African Americans against violence, he cited the experiences of and prevailing mood among many African Americans: “I do not believe that the temper of the Negroes is such that they will take eight more years of the kind of beatings and jailings that they have taken since 1954, just to prove that they are entitled to the things that everyone else has. In fact, I believe that period is over; that the Black masses will either retaliate—or they won’t act at all. But the one thing that they will not take any more is beatings.”93

Jimmy continued to explain the rejection of nonviolence and embrace of self-defense as a political principle. He made statements that were similar in their tone and argument to statements that the many critics of nonviolence would make later in the decade and that some, notably Malcolm X, were already making in 1963. For example, he wrote, “The one thing that always goes unnoticed in all the eulogizing of the nonviolent behavior of the Negro is the open, direct violence of the American whites against the Negroes.” Implicit in such eulogizing, he said, was a readiness to accept the violence of the whites. “And if a nation has not felt aroused by the bestialities of whites, it has no right to expect anything different from the Negroes who have been on the receiving end of these bestialities for over 300 years.”94

Jimmy also responded to Russell’s proposal, made in his last letter, that black organizations tax African Americans and their white sympathizers $1 monthly to raise the funds that “would enable much to be done in the struggle.” Jimmy responded to this with a comment on the nature and current dynamics of the black movement. “I think that perhaps here you are not aware of what is taking place totally in this country,” he said, telling the philosopher that black Americans did not all speak with the same voice, as he seemed to assume. “This is not just a crusade for Negro rights as most Negroes thought it was at the beginning and many still think it is. This is a struggle to change a system, and as it becomes clear that it is not just a struggle for some rights and that each right that the Negroes win will help destroy a system, lots of Negroes are going to fall by the wayside in the struggle.” Emphasizing the revolutionary potential of the black struggle, and placing it in historical relation with the Russian Revolution of 1917, he continued: “In fact, already the separation is getting sharper between those who are going to struggle and those who just want to be like other Americans, and splits are developing between Negroes as they developed between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks in Russia which means that there isn’t any organization in this country which all of Negroes can support.”95

Jimmy recognized and acknowledged that the civil rights movement was to experience divisions and splits, and that a new movement was soon to emerge from this. His statements, in short, anticipated the emergence of the Black Power movement. Though his words predicted trouble ahead, Jimmy closed his letter to Russell on a hopeful note: “Here’s hoping … that both of us will still be around to weather the storms and emerge into the sunshine of a different society, call it what you may.”96