Chapter ten

Black Power

1965 marked an important turning point for the Black liberation movement. The hegemony exercised by the “old guard” leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., was finally broken. The movement had succeeded in defeating Jim Crow in the South, and the government passed civil rights and voting rights legislation. The center of the movement would shift to the Northern cities—where the majority of Blacks lived in 1965. Northern Blacks were inspired by and supported the civil rights struggles in the South, but the end of Jim Crow legislation did not directly affect them. Jobs, poor housing, discrimination, police violence, and substandard education remained fundamental problems.

These conditions would lead to an explosion of anger, just as Malcolm X had predicted in February 1965. “Nineteen sixty-five will probably be the longest, hottest, bloodiest summer that has yet been seen in the United States since the beginning of the Black Revolution, primarily because the same causes that existed in the winter of 1964 still exist in January, in February, of 1965. Now, these are causes of inferior housing, inferior employment, inferior education. All of the evils of a bankrupt system still exist where Black Americans are concerned.”1 The spring and summer months witnessed massive riots in every major city in the United States from 1964 to 1968. The immediate causes of the riots differed from city to city, but they shared a common characteristic. A white policeman shooting a fifteen-year-old triggered Harlem’s 1964 rebellion.2 A traffic arrest of a twenty-one-year-old Black man two blocks from his home sparked the Watts rebellion in 1965.3 The riot lasted six days and spread over forty-six square miles of Los Angeles. Property damage was estimated at $40 million. Thirty-four people, twenty-eight of them Black, were killed; more than one thousand were injured; and the police arrested some four thousand people.4

The Detroit rebellion the following summer was even larger. Forty-three people were killed; almost two thousand were injured. The federal government ordered fifteen thousand state police and National Guard members to quell the rebellion. Black anger was not aimed at random whites, but rather at symbols of authority and property. Blacks widely viewed the riots as a legitimate form of protest; some also viewed them as a rejection of the politics of nonviolence. When Martin Luther King, Jr., toured the riot area in Watts, a young man told him, “We won...because we made them pay attention to us.”5 In a survey of Watts, 58 percent of residents and 57 percent of those arrested thought the effects of the riot would be favorable, with only 18 and 27 percent, respectively, anticipating unfavorable results.6 Thirty-eight percent of residents and 54 percent of those arrested believed the riot “helped the Negro’s cause.”7

The riots also had a tremendous impact on activists. As SNCC member Cleveland Sellers recalled, “We were all very conscious of the fact that the axis of the struggle appeared to be shifting away from the rural South to the cities in the North. The totally unexpected rebellions in Harlem, Watts, Chicago and Philadelphia made a big impact on our thinking.”8 The riots also greatly influenced the thinking of the Johnson administration and the U.S. ruling class generally.

For those who had wished the problem away, they forcefully reasserted the importance of racism in U.S. society and drove home three key points: first, that the question of racism and civil rights could no longer be dismissed as purely a problem of the backward Southern states. Indeed, the riots helped spur the civil rights legislation usually credited exclusively to the work of Congress and the president.

In the wake of the riots, the federal government set up the President’s National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders—known as the Kerner Commission after its chair, Illinois Governor Otto Kerner—to study the root causes of the urban rebellions. In 1968, the commission issued a report, which concluded that the United States was “moving toward two societies, one Black, one white—separate and unequal.”9

“Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans,” the report stated. “What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”10

The impacts of the civil rights movement and of the riots across Northern cities can be measured in part by examining the changed rhetoric adopted by government officials when talking about poverty and racial oppression. “The only genuine, long-range solution for what has happened lies in an attack—mounted at every level—upon the conditions that breed despair and violence,” President Lyndon Johnson said in a nationwide address on July 27, 1967, when he announced the appointment of the Kerner Commission. “All of us know what those conditions are: ignorance, discrimination, slums, poverty, disease, not enough jobs. We should attack these conditions—not because we are frightened by conflict, but because we are fired by conscience. We should attack them because there is no other way to achieve a decent and orderly society in America.”11

But the liberal acknowledgement of the problems of racism, of urban ghettos, and of Black poverty and unemployment only went so far. Because, at heart, liberalism believes that the American society and economy is not fundamentally unjust or unequal. Rather, it believes “social problems” like poverty and racism can be ameliorated with social programs that aim to fix problems on the margins of the system. So on the one hand, this led to a proliferation of programs intended to address discrete elements of inequality in education, housing, and health care. On the other hand, this led to a series of theories seeking to blame Blacks themselves, rather than the government or structural racism, for their conditions. Academics and politicians began to attribute the problems of Black life to a “culture of poverty.”12 Among the most prominent of these blame-the-victim views was the idea that the root of the problem could be found in the breakdown of the Black family.

While paying lip service to the questions of poverty, lack of jobs, and housing, for example, President Johnson said,

Perhaps most important—its influence radiating to every part of life—is the breakdown of the Negro family structure....

It flows from centuries of oppression and persecution of the Negro man. It flows from the long years of degradation and discrimination, which have attacked his dignity and assaulted his ability to produce for his family....

The family is the cornerstone of our society.... And when the family collapses it is the children that are usually damaged. When it happens on a massive scale the community itself is crippled.

So, unless we work to strengthen the family, to create the conditions under which most parents will stay together—all the rest: schools, and playgrounds, and public assistance, and private concern will never be enough to cut completely the circle of despair and deprivation.13

The authors of Johnson’s speech were Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan and presidential assistant Richard N. Goodwin. The speech was largely based on a report, written by Moynihan, entitled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. The central contention of Moynihan’s report was that Black men had an aversion to work and to taking responsibility for their families. In addition, the alleged criminality of Black men, which featured prominently in the report, further compounded the problems of the ghetto. “It is probable that at present, a majority of the crimes against the person, such as rape, murder, and aggravated assault are committed by Negroes,” the report reads, while then going on to acknowledge, “There is, of course, no absolute evidence.”14 These racist theories of the “culture of poverty” became one of the underpinnings of the conservative assault on the social safety net after 1980.

As much as the riots shook up the Northern liberals, they also represented the mobilization of new forces in the civil rights struggle and the crystallization of a new political mood, best summed up by the slogan “Black Power.” Stokely Carmichael launched the slogan during a 1966 civil rights march through Mississippi. “This is the twenty-seventh time I have been arrested—and I ain’t going to jail no more!” Carmichael told a rally of supporters. “The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin’ us is to take over. We been saying freedom for six years and we ain’t got nothin’. What we gonna start saying now is Black Power!” As the crowd chanted back “Black Power,” Carmichael continued, “That’s right, that’s what we want. Now, from now on, when they ask you what you want, you know what to tell them. What do you want?” “Black Power!” “What do you want? Say it again!” “Black power, Black power, BLACK POWER!”15

The slogan became widely popular among radicals, but was sharply denounced by the conservative leaders of the civil rights movement. Speaking before the NAACP convention in July 1966, Roy Wilkins, the organization’s executive secretary, proclaimed, “No matter how endlessly they try to explain it, the term ‘Black Power’ means anti-white power.... It is a reverse Mississippi, a reverse Hitler, a reverse Ku Klux Klan.” A “quick, uncritical and highly emotional” slogan, he said, it would only lead to “Black death.”16 King tried to defuse the split between left and right, calling the slogan an “unwise choice of words.”17 Still trying to maintain some connection with the radicals, King acknowledged that Black Power “had ready appeal,” but “beneath all the satisfaction of a gratifying slogan, Black Power is a nihilistic philosophy born out of the conviction that the Negro can’t win.”18

Not all civil rights leaders rejected the phrase Black Power. Floyd McKissick of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), an organization founded by University of Chicago students George Houser and James Farmer in 1942, adopted the slogan, arguing, “1966 shall be remembered as the year we left our imposed status of Negroes and became Black men...1966 is the year of the concept of Black Power.”19 CORE’s 1966 convention adopted a resolution stating that CORE was no longer in favor of integration. CORE further announced that nonviolent direct action was “a dying philosophy,” and told whites they were no longer welcome as members of the organization.20 In 1966, Stokely Carmichael took over the leadership of SNCC, and the organization likewise adopted Black separatism, and expelled its white members.

The rise of Black nationalist politics represented a further radicalization of the movement. But the idea of Black Power, while popular, was also very vague. Who would exercise this power and to what ends? Initially an expression of revolt, Black Power meant different things to different people. Stokely Carmichael and political scientist Charles V. Hamilton, authors of the book Black Power, gave this definition:

The concept of Black power...is a call for Black people in this country to unite, to recognize their heritage, to build a sense of community. It is a call for Black people to begin to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations and to support those organizations. It is a call to reject racist institutions and values of this society.

The concept of Black power rests on a fundamental premise: Before a group can enter the open society, it must first close ranks. By this we mean that group solidarity is necessary before a group can operate effectively from a bargaining position of strength in a pluralistic society.21

But while Carmichael drew radical Black nationalist conclusions, others would interpret the idea quite differently. The Black Power slogan became the springboard for both a move to the left and a move to the right. Four interconnected interpretations of Black Power emerged: (i) as Black capitalism, (ii) as Black electoral power, (iii) as cultural nationalism, and (iv) as radical Black nationalism.

The adoption of Black Power as an expression of Black capitalism grew very quickly. A key organizer and chairperson of the first major Black Power conference, held in July 1967, in Newark, New Jersey, was lifelong Republican Nathan Wright, Jr. Wright supported Nixon’s election—and later in life was an ardent supporter of Ronald Reagan. The conference concluded that Black Power was really about getting a “fair share” of the pie, that is, U.S. capitalism. The next conference was formally cosponsored by a white-owned corporation, the Clairol Company. Clairol’s president addressed the meeting and endorsed Black Power. The phrase, he declared, meant Black “ownership of apartments, ownership of homes, ownership of businesses, as well as equitable treatment for all people.”22

The ambiguity of the phrase Black Power even allowed the enemies of the Black struggle, such as President Richard Nixon, to use it. In a 1968 speech, Nixon defined Black Power as “the power that people should have over their own destinies, the power to affect their own communities, the power that comes from participation in the political processes of society.”23 In a later speech, he said:

[M]uch of the Black militant talk these days is actually in terms far closer to the doctrines of free enterprise than to those of the welfarist thirties—terms of “pride,” “ownership,” “private enterprise,” “capital,” “self-assurance,” “self-respect.”... What most of the militants are asking is not separation, but to be included in—not as supplicants, but as owners, as entrepreneurs—to have a share of the wealth and a piece of the action. And this is precisely what the Federal central target of the new approach ought to be. It ought to be oriented toward more Black ownership, for from this can flow the rest—Black pride, Black jobs, Black opportunity and yes, Black power....24

Along with encouraging Black capitalism, the concept of Black Power was also connected to electoral power. But far from challenging the system, these efforts were intended to help contain Black anger. The politics of CORE’s director, Floyd McKissick, and his successor, Roy Innis, typified this trend. McKissick had vocally supported Carmichael’s use of the Black Power slogan, and the organization officially declared itself “Black nationalist.” But its Black nationalism did not include refusing financial support in the form of government or corporate grants.

In July 1967, the Ford Foundation announced that it was giving $175,000 to the Cleveland CORE chapter to support voter registration efforts, exploration of economic development programs, youth and adult community worker training, and attempts to improve program planning among civil rights groups.25 The Ford Foundation’s seeming generosity was an indication that one section of the ruling class was eager to see the incorporation of middle-class Blacks in order to isolate and reduce the influence of the militant wing of the movement. CORE was chosen to receive the grant because it was considered to be a militant organization that had a hearing among Blacks who rejected the conservatism of the NAACP and the Urban League. CORE combined very militant rhetoric with an equally conservative practice.

CORE’s voter registration drive in Cleveland was especially important to the Ford Foundation because it hoped to channel Black anger into an electoral campaign. A Black urban rebellion had rocked Cleveland in 1966. “It was predictions of new violence in the city that led to our first staff visits there in March,” explained Ford Foundation director Mc-George Bundy.26 In November 1967, Carl Stokes was elected mayor of Cleveland, the first Black mayor of a major American city. The Ford Foundation and CORE had been successful in their efforts. While his election was seen as the dawning of a new day for Cleveland’s Blacks, Stokes established a pattern that has become the norm in subsequent elections of Black mayors. As Lee Sustar describes it:

Black Clevelanders soon found out that the new mayor was more interested in making a deal with the Democratic machine than with the progress of the movement. Only two of Stokes’ first ten appointments went to Blacks.

The new mayor hired sixty-seven-year-old right-winger Michael Blackwell as police chief—a shock to Blacks who had endured days of police terror in the [1966] Hough rebellion.... Stokes’ commitment to “law and order” won him the renewed backing of local business and the media and national Democrats in his re-election campaign of 1969.27

The other important current to emerge in the Black Power movement was that of the cultural nationalists. Unlike other Black nationalists, the cultural nationalists rejected political struggle, instead stressing the importance of a distinct “African” culture. This trend was best represented by Ron Karenga, organizer of a group called (ironically enough) US. “We must free ourselves culturally before we can succeed politically,” argued Karenga.28 This didn’t prevent him from launching a ferocious, and often violent, campaign against the Black Panther Party, which he opposed bitterly. His upholding of African tradition was likewise utterly reactionary. “To go back to tradition is the first step forward,” argued Karenga, paraphrasing an African proverb. But for women especially, Karenga’s “tradition” was certainly a step backward. According to Karenga,

What makes woman appealing is femininity but she can’t be feminine without being submissive.

The role of the woman is to inspire her man, educate their children and participate in social development.

Equality is false; it’s the devil’s concept. Our concept is complementary. Complementary means you complete or make perfect that which is imperfect.

The man has any right that does not destroy the collective needs of his family.29

Karenga and US even opposed birth control, sparking a protest from a group of poor Black women whose campaign specifically targeted the middle-class politics of the cultural nationalists.30 Karenga didn’t so much want to transform U.S. society as to carve a niche in it. The Wall Street Journal astutely observed that Karenga was “typical of many militants who talk looting and burning but actually are eager to gather influence for quiet bargaining with the predominantly white power structure.”31

The electoralists and cultural nationalists were able to adapt the Black Power slogan to their own ends in part because of the complete confusion displayed by the radical proponents of the slogan, including Stokely Carmichael himself. At times, Carmichael appeared to be moving away from a purely racial analysis of U.S. society only to sharply move back in that direction. Thus, for example, at a meeting in Cuba in 1967, Carmichael said, “We greet you as comrades because it becomes increasingly clear to us each day that we share with you a common struggle; we have a common enemy. Our enemy is white Western imperialist society.”32 Within a few months of this speech, Carmichael dropped any mention of capitalism and imperialism, stressing instead, “We are talking about a certain type of superiority complex that exists in the white man wherever he is.... The major enemy is the honky and his institutions of racism.”33

The Black movement had reached an impasse. It was no longer possible to use the slogans of 1965–67 to advance the struggle in 1968 and beyond. Much of what had been accepted as truth by a majority of activists was now either being questioned or rejected. The sense of forward advance felt by hundreds of thousands of participants in the civil rights movement had been replaced by anger, frustration, and doubt about the prevailing strategies being advanced by the movement’s leadership. The coalition that Martin Luther King, Jr. had relied on for the desegregation struggles in the South had come unstuck as the battle moved to the North. Leaders of the civil rights and Black Power movements began to see through the hypocrisy of many of their liberal allies who had supported the Southern desegregation struggles, but refused to support the struggles in the North.34

MLK’s Response

Martin Luther King, Jr., in particular, began to reassess a number of his previous assumptions and started to criticize the character of U.S. society itself. In his address to the 1967 SCLC convention, King declared:

We must honestly face the fact that the Movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. There are 40 million poor people here. And one day we must ask the question, “Why are there 40 million poor people in America?” And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life’s market place. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. You see, my friends, when you deal with this, you begin to ask the question, “Who owns the oil?” You begin to ask the question, “Who owns the iron ore?” You begin to ask the question, “Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that is two-thirds water?” These are questions that must be asked....

When I say question the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are tied together.... A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will “thingify” them, make them things. Therefore they will exploit them, and poor people generally economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments...and will have to use its military might to protect them. All of these problems are tied together. What I am saying today is that we must go from this convention and say, “America, you must be born again!”35

King’s questioning of the character of U.S. society led him to more and more radical positions. On November 11, 1967, King flew to Chicago to address an antiwar group. In a private discussion with Reverend D. E. King, he said, “D. E., I haven’t discussed this with the Board [of SCLC], but I have found out that all that I have been doing in trying to correct this system here in America has been in vain.” He added, “I am trying to get to the roots of it to see just what ought to be done.... The whole thing will have to be done away with.”36

King recognized that formal equality under the law was not the same as real equality. Speaking of the “golden age” of the civil rights movement, 1954 to 1965, King said, “This period did not accomplish everything. Even though we gained legislative and judicial victories...these legislative and judicial victories did very little to improve the lot of millions of Negroes in the teeming ghettos of the North.”37 In fact, he said, “The changes that came about during this period were at best surface changes; they were not really substantive changes.”38

Summarizing the change in King, Michael Eric Dyson writes:

[D]uring the last three years of his life, King questioned his own understanding of race relations. As King told journalist David Halberstam, “For years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of the society, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values.” King also told Halberstam something that he argued in his last book, Trumpet of Conscience: that “most Americans are unconscious racists.” For King, this recognition was not a source of bitterness but a reason to revise his strategy. If one believed that whites basically desired to do the right thing, then a little moral persuasion was sufficient. But if one believed that whites had to be made to behave in the right way, one had to employ substantially more than moral reasoning.39 King also showed frustration, questioning his methods and assumptions. “I’m tired of marching for something that should have been mine at birth,” he said in Chicago, openly wondering if the U.S. had given up on trying to confront its social ills.40

Importantly, King also publicly spoke out against the U.S. war in Vietnam, rejecting the idea that civil rights leaders should only speak on questions of domestic injustice and discrimination:

They applauded us in the sit-in movement when we nonviolently decided to sit in at lunch counters. They applauded us on the freedom rides when we accepted blows without retaliation. They praised us in...Birmingham and Selma, Alabama. Oh, the press was so noble in its applause and praise when I would say “Be nonviolent toward Bull Connor.... Be nonviolent toward Jim Clark.” There is something strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press that would praise you when you say, “Be nonviolent toward Jim Clark,” but will curse you and damn you when you say, “Be nonviolent toward little brown Vietnamese children.”41

King began to see the connections much more clearly between racism at home and racism abroad, in particular between the economic inequities at home and the war budget. King also started to rethink his understanding of violence. He was keenly aware that the growing urban unrest in the North was an expression of the frustration and impatience that existed among Blacks—and a corresponding sympathy and openness to more radical solutions. After the Watts riots, King declared, “It was a class revolt of the under-privileged against the privileged.”42 In 1967, he concluded, “after Selma and the voting rights bill we moved into an era which must be an era of revolution.... The whole structure of American life must be changed.”43

King now made clear that there was a great deal of difference between the violence of the U.S. state and the violence of those rioting in urban centers across the country, and he began to use a different vocabulary to describe his tactics, referring to “massive nonviolence,” “aggressive nonviolence,” and even “nonviolent sabotage.”44

Trying to overcome the collapse of the coalition he built to challenge Southern segregation, the apparent failure of the movement in the North, and the growing impatience among Black activists and Blacks more generally, King formulated a new strategy:

Nonviolence must be adapted to urban conditions and urban moods. Non-violent protest must now mature to a new level, to correspond to heightened Black impatience and stiffened white resistance. This high level is mass civil disobedience. There must be more than a statement to the larger society, there must be a force that interrupts its functioning at some key point.... To dislocate the functioning of a city without destroying it can be more effective than a riot because it can be longer lasting, costly to the larger society, but not wantonly destructive. It is a device of social action that is more difficult for a government to quell by superior force.... It is militant and defiant, not destructive.45

King’s most powerful indictment of the war came on April 4, 1967, exactly one year before he was murdered. In a speech at New York City’s Riverside Church, aptly titled “A Time to Break Silence: Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam,” King declared:

Since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both Black and white, through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the Black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years, especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, “What about Vietnam?” They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.46

These kinds of views were not welcomed by many of the liberals who had previously praised King in the struggle to end Jim Crow. As Dyson observes,

King’s assault on America as the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” elicited a predictably furious reaction from the White House. The news media was even harsher.... Richard Lentz notes that Time magazine had, early in King’s opposition to the war, characterized him as a “drawling bumpkin, so ignorant that he had not read a newspaper in years, who had wandered out of his native haunts and away from his natural calling.” Newsweek columnist Kenneth Crawford attacked King for his “demagoguery” and “reckless distortions of the facts.” The Washington Post said that King’s Riverside speech was a “grave injury” to the civil rights struggle and that King had “diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country, and to his people.” The New York Times editorialized that King’s speech was a “fusing of two public problems that are distinct and separate” and that King had done a “disservice to both.”47

Soon thereafter, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had gone to support a sanitation workers’ strike.

Martin and Malcolm

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, assassination signaled the end of an era. For many, his assassination graphically showed that there was little hope of achieving real change in the United States by pursuing a strategy of “loving thy enemy” and turning the other cheek.

It was also painfully obvious that the two most capable leaders of the Black freedom struggle—Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.—had been cut down, just as they were beginning to challenge the very roots of economic and racial inequality built into U.S. society.

Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. started from very different political positions. Their politics in the early 1960s were sharply at odds. But in the months before they were each murdered, they drew very similar conclusions about the character of the system, the limitations of reforms under capitalism, and, crucially, that the United States needed a profound structural transformation if racism and Black oppression were to be overcome.

Of course, there remained considerable political differences between them. Malcolm X became the inspiration for a new generation of Black activists—indeed, a whole new generation of revolutionaries. King, by contrast, was seen as too accommodating to liberalism and his politics of nonviolent civil disobedience had proved unable (as King himself admitted) to transform the North—that is, a non-Jim Crow capitalist society.

But whatever their differences, they both, in distinct ways, stand out as principled fighters for Black liberation. They certainly stand head and shoulders above anyone who succeeded them. And they also shared a common fate in the attempt to blunt and sanitize their politics. Malcolm X, who was denounced as a fanatic by the New York Times at the time of his death, has become an accepted figure—even among some liberals. King is the toast of right-wing Democrats and Republicans who stand diametrically opposed to what he stood for.

This is not because of some failing by either King or Malcolm X. As the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin wrote in 1917 about the fate of Karl Marx in his book State and Revolution,

What is now happening to Marx’s doctrine has, in the course of history, often happened to the doctrines of other revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes struggling for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes have visited relentless persecution on them and received their teaching with the most savage hostility, the most furious hatred, the most ruthless campaign of lies and slanders. After their death, attempts are made to turn them into harmless icons, canonize them, and surround their names with a certain halo for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping them, while at the same time emasculating and vulgarizing the real essence of their revolutionary theories and blunting their revolutionary edge. At the present time, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labor movement are co-operating in this work of adulterating Marxism. They omit, obliterate, and distort the revolutionary side of its teaching, its revolutionary soul.48