CHAPTER SIX

BLACK BRAHMINS: THE UNDERDEVELOPMENT OF BLACK POLITICAL LEADERSHIP

there’s only two parties in this country

anti-nigger and pro-nigger

most of the pro-niggers are now dead

this second reconstruction is being aborted

as was the first

the pro-niggers council voting

the anti-niggers have guns. ..

—Nikki Giovanni, Black Feeling, Black Talk, Black Judgement (New York: William Morrow, 1970), p. 83.

It sometimes happens in a nation where opinions are divided that the balance between parties breaks down and one of them acquires an irresistible preponderence. It breaks all obstacles, crushes its adversary, and exploits the whole of society for its own benefit. But beneath this apparent unanimity deep divisions and real opposition still lie hidden. That is what has happened in America . . . It is easy to see that the rich have a great distaste for their country’s democratic institutions. The people are a power whom they fear and scorn.

—Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Anchor, 1969), pp. 178-179.

I

There is something essentially absurd about a Negro politician in racist/capitalist America. The political apparatus was designed originally to exclude him/her. The rhetoric of the system is democratic, almost egalitarian: the practices are bluntly discriminatory. Any state cannot exist in and of itself; it rests upon the material base of a particular productive process, and in the last analysis, acts decisively to protect the propertied and powerful classes of that society. The Black majority has no real structural power, other than the productive capacity of its own hands. The Black elite retain the illusion of power, but are invested with little authority in its own right. The Black politician is locked in a world of meaningless symbols which perpetuate the hegemony of the white ruling class but that are not in themselves sufficient to maintain legitimacy. The Black elected official is essentially a vicar for a higher authority, a necessary buffer between the Black majority and the capitalist state, a kind of modern voo-doo priest, smelling of incense, pomp and pedigree, who promises much but delivers nothing. Frantz Kafka wrote of such people in this manner:

They were offered the choice between becoming kings or the couriers of kings. The way children would, they all wanted to be couriers. Therefore there are only couriers who hurry about the world, shouting to each other—since there are no kings—messages that have become meaningless. They would like to put an end to this miserable life of theirs but they dare not because of their oaths of service.1

The instant that the Black politician accepts the legitimacy of the State, the rules of the game, his/her critical faculties are destroyed permanently, and all that follows are absurdities. Black petty bourgeois politics is by definition and practice an attempt to channel goods, services and jobs to Black voters. In this endeavor, not a single white corporate executive or power broker would raise a veto. The Black Brahmin, the representative of the Black elite in politics, is praised for his/her responsible activities, or is perhaps criticized for being “too liberal”; but all discourse takes place within the parameters of the system as it exists. After a period of years, the Black elected official actually believes that the meager level of services he/she provides for a constituency actually produces fundamental change for the Black masses. Perhaps bourgeois democracy is colorblind, after all. . . The Black majority, viewing the sordid process from the bottom up, retains few illusions about its inherent equality. But real political power is not yet in its hands. So the macabre dance of the absurd continues. And the agony of the masses is increased.

The hopelessly symbolic power of Black elected officials and politicians was never more apparent than in the wake of the election of Ronald Reagan to the Presidency in 1980. Most Black leaders immediately attacked Reagan’s budget cuts and gross expenditures in military hardware as socially unproductive. But on fiscal policies, no real Black political consensus emerged as to the reasons for the emergence of Reaganomics at this time which could lead towards a general critique of modern American capitalism. Indeed, most Black politicians’ criticisms of Reaganomics were at best highly confused, lacking any basic comprehension of the capitalist prerogatives behind the public policies of the Reagan Administration. Testifying before Congress, Chicago Urban League director James Compton suggested that he “could support” Reagan’s agenda if it created “more employment opportunities for minorities.”2 The board of directors of the NAACP proposed the adoption of an alternative Federal budget which increased defense expenditures and resulted in a $55 billion deficit, but also raised the income tax exemption for a family of four to $10,000 annually. The general direction of the proposal was a fairly conservative form of Keynesianism, not unlike the austere 1981 budget of Carter.3 Some Black commentators suggested that Blacks themselves were somehow to blame for the economic mess. “With the Reagan budget cuts in full swing some middle class Blacks are beginning to feel the razor’s edge inching closer and closer to their necks,” columnist Joyce Daniels Phillips wrote in the Jackson Advocate. The solution was developing a new set of austere socioeconomic values: “cutting back on material possessions, monthly mortgage payments, exorbitant car notes, and numerous charge accounts.”4 A few Black politicians, such as Representative Harold Washington, attacked Reagan’s budget cuts and tax policy as “nothing more than a transfer of wealth back to the rich from the poor,” but professed no radical alternative program.5 Some Black politicians denounced Reaganomics by declaring that the President was racist—without a concomitant explanation suggesting why neither Nixon nor Carter, who were equally racist, had not advanced these specific fiscal policies. Still others asserted that Reaganomics was merely economic “evil,” and that “Reagan is the antichrist.”6

Many Black politicians had consoled themselves in the wake of the “Reagan mandate” with the thought that Blacks must inevitably pull together to confront the common enemy. However, it was Reagan’s Black friends that seemed to pull together first.

During the 1980 Presidential campaign, Reagan’s Black apologists were few and far between. But in December, 1980, barely a month after Reagan’s election, 125 Black academicians and business leaders caucused in San Francisco at a conference held by the Institute for Contemporary Studies to discuss the directions for Black conservatism. Organized by black economist Thomas Sowell, the conference featured Reagan advisors Edwin Meese and Milton Friedman as honored guests. This meeting marked a significant turning point for national Black politics, for it dramatized and made public the severe contradictions on major political, economic and educational issues which divided the members of the Black elite. By the autumn of 1981, differences within the elite had become so intense that any possibility of building a consensus position on major public policy issues was lost. Dissention within the ranks was the order of the day, as Black actors opportunistically seized the subordinated roles which were given to them. A new political current was born—Black Reaganism.7

II

Easily the most striking thing about Black politics during the Reagan Administration was the sudden ascendancy of Sowell, Hoover Institution professor and eminent Black conservative. It occurred at a moment in history when the veterans of the Civil Rights Movement had become disillusioned and defensive in their language and public policy activities; a period when U.S. corporate hegemony was declining, and both white business and political leaders were calling for a conservative, supply side agenda. At the same time Black activists and militant nationalists seemed out of step with the masses of Black people. In the midst of this confusion Sowell stepped forward along with other Black conservatives, not to condemn the Reagan Administration, but to praise it. In a series of media events and public forums the new Black spokespersons railed against affirmative action, spending for social programs, the minimum wage law, and a host of New Deal and Great Society programs long cherished as necessities by millions of poor and working class Black people. Sowell’s calculated program of submission and silence, his bombastic attacks on the NAACP, and his conciliatory demeanor toward the interests of capital won high marks from the most bitter and vitriolic opponents of the civil rights cause. We were told that the Black American professional and business elite would soon embrace the conservatives’ programs in full, and that this shift toward Black Reaganism was inevitable and even a healthy step toward Black political power.

Black conservatives do not represent a monolithic political/social force, but rather have evolved from radically different sectors of Black society. In brief, there are at least four overlapping categories of Black Reaganites: conservative Black politicians; Black philosophical conservatives; Black corporate executives, business managers and Reagan administrative appointees; and former Black Power activists and nationalists who have not fully embraced Reaganism but nevertheless have become so closely aligned with this rightist trend that they merit the obloquy “fellow travellers.” Some of the most prominent Black Republicans of the past two decades have been the late W.O. Walker, publisher of the Cleveland Call and Post and head of the national “Blacks for Reagan-Bush” organization in 1980; James Cummings, leader of the National Black Republican Council; Art Fletcher, former executive director of the United Negro College Fund and Labor Department officer under Nixon; Samuel Pierce, Reagan’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; and William T. Coleman, Ford’s Secretary of Transportation. These Blacks were subordinates within the Rockefeller wing of the Republican Party during the 1960s and early 1970s. During the Nixon Administration they consistently sup­ported affirmative action programs, civil rights legislation and Federal assistance to Black-owned businesses. Coleman had been part of the legal team which successfully challenged school segregation laws in the 1954 Brown decision. Like other liberal Republicans, notably former New York Senator Jacob Javits and Illinois Senator Charles Percy, they strived to reconcile their belief in limited Federal government and unfettered capitalism with the desegregation of white civil society and equal opportunity legislation to promote the development of a Black petty capitalist class.8

The philosophical conservatives properly belong to the rabid right wing of the Republican party, advocating Milton Friedman’s version of laissez faire capitalism, state’s rights, and a dogged hatred for left-of-­center politics. This militantly rightist faction includes Walter Williams, professor of economics at George Mason University; J.A.Y. Parker, a former official of the anticommunist Young Americans For Freedom and currently president of Lincoln Institute and Educational Foundation; and Wendell Wilkie Gunn, assistant treasurer of Pepsi Corporation. The titular leader of this tendency is Sowell, Ronald Reagan’s favorite “House Nigger.” After serving in the Marines, Sowell attended Howard University. Considering himself a Marxist, Sowell eventually received graduate degrees at the University of Chicago and Columbia. As he moved up the academic ladder his ideological views grew increasingly conservative. By the late 1960s he had become a Goldwater Republican and a bitter opponent of the welfare state. He condemned the emergence of Black Studies and Black campus activism. By the election of Carter, Sowell had come to repudiate most of the ideals of the Civil Rights Movement. He condemned affirmative action legislation as detrimental to Blacks’ interests. His prescription to the plight of poor education within the ghetto was the imposition of “strict discipline” and mandatory expulsion of “rowdies who disrupt education for the majority.” Sowell attacked the NAACP/civil rights leadership as a “light-skinned elite” whose policies served to provide “access to whites” for themselves but not for the Black poor. In a major advertisement paid for by Smith Kline Corporation in 1981, Sowell praised capitalism as the vehicle for Blacks to gain acceptance and upward mobility. ‘The rich are a red herring used by politicians to distract our attention,” he declared. “There aren’t enough rich people to make any real economic difference, whether they pay high taxes or low taxes. The great majority of the government’s money comes from the great majority of the people.” Like Reagan, Sowell believes that inflation, not unemployment, is the real problem within America’s political economy. “Balancing the budget is not enough,” Sowell warns. “Whether we yearn for government giveaways as the answer to our problems, we have to realize that every giveaway is also a takeaway. Anything the country can’t afford without the giveaway, it can’t afford with it.”9

Potentially the most influential faction among Black Reaganites are the coterie of Administration officials and middle level executives from major corporations. In the executive branch of government, the list includes Thelma Duggin, formerly the Republican Committee liaison to the National Black Voters Program in the 1980 election and currently serving as deputy to Presidential advisor Elizabeth Dole; Melvin Bradley, Senior Policy Advisor to Reagan, responsible for developing “public policy recommendations in the areas of food and agriculture, minority business development, urban affairs, free enterprise zones, small business administration, and Black colleges and universities”; and Thaddeus Garret, Vice Presidential assistant in charge of domestic policy and programs. Major Black corporate sup­porters of Reagan’s policies include Gloria E.A. Toote, a New York attorney and millionaire real estate developer; William Pickard, owner of a lucrative McDonald’s franchise in Detroit; Arthur McZier, president, National Business Services Enterprises, Inc.; Constance Newman, president, Newman and Associates; Abraham Venable, Vice Chairperson of the Business Policy Review Council and director of General Motor’s Urban Affairs Division; Fred Blac, Business Policy Review Council Chairperson and corporate executive in General Electric; Cyrus Johnson of General Foods; Philip J. Davis of Norton Simon, Inc.; and John Millier of the United States Brewer’s Association. These Black corporate executives and bureaucrats had no ideological commitment to civil rights, affirmative action, or to the defense of any traditional institutions within the Black community. They favor Reaganomics because it will generate greater profits for their client industries and monopolies. These corporate Black Reaganites are even more dangerous than Sowell, because their blatant and vigorous support for consevative public policies is rooted not in any ideological commitment, but is grounded purely in their own vicious desire for money and their hunger for power.10

The “fellow travellers” of the Black Reaganites include a number of would-be Black militants who are disenchanted with liberalism and protest politics. At the top of the list are Charles V. Hamilton, professor of government at Columbia, and Black media commentator Tony Brown. Both Hamilton and Brown attended the San Francisco Conference of Black conservatives. The co-author of Black Power, Hamilton has experienced a radical metamorphosis since his days as mentor to Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture). Since Blacks are a “relatively powerless minority,” he informed the New York Times, the rise of a new Black conservative trend was essential. “Frankly,” Hamilton admitted, “I’d be very worried if we didn’t have them.” Brown criticized the NAACP’s “hostile behavior towards President Reagan” when he appeared as a guest at their annual convention in Denver in 1981. Brown thought that Reagan really wants “to economically emancipate Black ghettos,” and that the President’s brutal budget cuts were tantamount to a request for Afro-Americans to “return to the fundamental nationalism of their past. Ironically,” Brown explained, “Reagan’s philosophy of a sound economic power base for Black America is more compatible with past Black leaders such as Marcus Garvey, Booker T. Washington, Elijah Muhammad and Frederick Douglass, than are the modern-day disciples of the Black establishment.”11 This massive distortion of Black history by Brown scarcely masked his overt appeasement toward the forces of racism and political reaction.” What all four tendencies hold in common is a firm belief that racism, in words of Reagan apoligist Nathan Wright, Jr., no longer has “a damn thing” to do with Black underdevelopment; that socialist, Marxist, Keynesian and/or liberal economic programs will not work; and that Black advancement is best served by initiatives of U.S. monopoly capitalism.

The emergence of a Black neoconservative tendency had not accompanied the reelection of Richard Nixon eight years before, despite the fact that Nixon had carefully cultivated a token program for Black Capitalism, and had even appointed a liberal Black Republican, James Farmer, to his cabinet in 1969. The sudden rise to prominence of the Black Reaganites can be explained, in part, by a decline in the internal organization and prominence of the Congressional Black Caucus during the interval between Watergate and the 1980 elections. In 1969, Charles Diggs, a progressive Democrat from Detroit, had initiated the process which culminated in the creation of the Caucus two years later. In the early 1970s, many Caucus members were either active or directly supportive of the Black nationalist political renaissance. Diggs served as a leader in the staging of the National Black Political Convention at Gary, Indiana, in 1972, was the influential vice chairperson of the House Committee on Africa, and chaired the House Committee on the District of Columbia. Walter Fauntroy of Washington, D.C., and Ron Dellums of Berkeley-Oakland, California, were also active at Gary; indeed, Dellums’ close relationship between militant Black nationalists and the key organizers of the National Black Political Assembly, continued throughout the 1970s. The left wing of the Caucus, Dellums and Michigan Congressperson John Conyers, were open advocates of democratic socialism, and had little reservations in challenging the white leaders of their own party from the left on both foreign and domestic public policies.

Although the Caucus continued to exist (as of this writing), by the late 1970s it began to fracture internally due to ideological differences, egotistic power plays, and from external criticism from many moderate-to-conservative Black elite leaders. Critics pointed out that the Caucus was woefully inept in securing legislation favorable to minority interests. In the Ninety-fourth Congress, for example, of the 729 bills which became law, the Caucus members had sponsored only 16. Caucus efforts to identify itself as the “collective voice of the national black community” met opposition from nonelectoral Negro politicians and civil rights leaders, who jealously protected their political turf. Membership in the group was an unstable fact of life. During the Ninety-fifth Congress alone, two members resigned, one died, and another was defeated. Diggs was “forced from office by a prolonged scandal and finally a conviction for misappropriation of federal funds.” The Caucus’ most important achievement in their 13 year existence, the Humphrey-Hawkins Bill, was so “watered down” to meet the preferences of labor, liberals and moderates that it represented at best a defeat for the concept of universal employment. By 1980, seven Black Congress-persons had lost over 20 percent of their respective districts’ populations during the decade, and were threatened with the very real prospect of losing their seats through redistricting. Shirley Chis­holm’s decision not to run for reelection in 1982 was dictated partially by the sobering loss of 32.1 percent of her Brooklyn constituency. By Reagan’s election, a few Caucus members had climbed aboard the neoconservative bandwagon by supporting the latest corporate give-away project, the “free enterprise zones.” With the outstanding exceptions of Dellums, Conyers, and Caucus new­comers such as George Crockett of Michigan, Gus Savage and Harold Washington of Chicago, the Caucus as a whole did not represent a coherent left bloc which could have pushed the Black Reaganites from media attention and public discourse.12

The Old Guard civil rights leadership, likewise having been challenged effectively from the right, was also forced to move to the left in the early 1980s. Jesse Jackson, Southern Christian Leadership Conference president Joseph E. Lowery and Coretta Scott King participated in demonstrations involving 9,000 people in Mobile, Alabama on April 26, 1981, and 3,000 people in Montgomery, Alabama on August 9, 1981, to protest Congressional moves to repeal the Voting Rights Act of 1965.13 Georgia State Senator Julian Bond and the Institute for Southern Studies led a thorough investigation of the murders of the Communist Workers Party members in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1979, charging the police with “gross negligence.”14 Benjamin Hooks, executive director of the NAACP, Vernon Jordan, Urban League head, and Coretta Scott King were speakers at the massive Solidarity march in Washington, D.C. on September 19, 1981, attracting hundreds of thousands of trade unionists and political opponents of Reaganism.15 One of the most publicized efforts of the Old Guard was the boycott of Coca-Cola products. Jesse Jackson’s PUSH organization published information on the nonexistent affirmative action record of Coca-Cola, pointing out that not a single one of Coke’s 550 bottlers or its 4,000 fountain wholesalers was Black. The corporate giant had on deposit only $254,000 in ten Black banks. When Coke executives balked during negotiations, PUSH and others initiated a Black nationwide boycott of the soft drink on July 11, 1981. Coca-Cola was removed from the shelves of four Black-owned Seven Eleven franchises in Washington, D.C., and white-owned franchises in that city did the same. Gary mayor Richard Hatcher, chairperson of the Black mayors conference, authorized a move to ban Coke machines from 194 Black controlled city halls. When more than one hundred stores in Chicago’s metropolitan area joined the boycott, Coke president Donald R. Keough announced his readiness to give Black entrepreneurs “a piece of the action.” The agreement represented a “promise that the free enterprise system can do more to develop opportunity for all elements of society.”16

Coke’s “moral covenant” with PUSH included the following provisions: increase the number of Black-owned distributors to 32 within 12 months, establishment of a venture capital fund of $1.8 million for Black petty capitalists, the elevation of a Black to Coca­Cola’s Board of Directors, double the amount of advertising capital spent with Black agencies, quadruple the amount of financial deposits within Black banks, and the hiring of 100 Black blue collar employees. The total package amounted to $34 million. Black newspapers widely publicized the boycott, calling it a “wonderful reunion fellowship” of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s old colleagues, including Mrs. King, Lowery, Hosea Williams, Andrew Young, Maynard Jackson and Jesse Jackson. Black columnist William Raspberry, never at a loss for words, proclaimed the historical deal “as important to Black America as the boycott of the Montgomery, Alabama, bus company a quarter of the century ago.”17 The reality behind the rhetoric is somewhat different. Coke’s white investors were furious with what was de­ scribed as “outright blackmail” and “a $30 million giveaway plan.” On September 3, Coca-Cola President Keough informed the Atlanta Constitution that the corporation had neither bowed to “pressure” from Black leaders, nor had given the boycott more than “two minutes attention because we never considered it a real issue.” By October, 1981, Coke officials informed the media that any money lent to Blacks for venture capital would be at high market rates. No forced changes in bottling franchise ownerships would occur. Black advertising was increased to only $2 million from the previous $1.2 million figure. No loans would be made to Black-owned banks except at competitive rates. Even the one hundred additional jobs would not materialize, because Coke “might be replacing Blacks with Blacks,” declared a company executive. The conspicuous failure of the Coca-Cola boycott symbolized more than ever before the utter bankruptcy of “Black Capitalism.”18

The lack of any basic grassroots orientation or support of the Old Guard was illustrated at the 11th annual Congressional Black Caucus weekend in Washington, D.C., on September 25-27, 1981. The self-described “Black leadership family” included over 1,000 Black doctors, lawyers, politicians and bureaucrats. One participant suggested that the Black struggle in the 1980s would be led by “cadres of Black professionals.” Joe Madison, an NAACP official, stated that the militancy of the old days “during the Montgomery bus boycott” were passe. “We’ve got to develop technical militants out of these middle class affluent Blacks who have received training, acquired good educations and have worked themselves into the mainstream of economic life.”19 Neither the multitude of fashion shows nor the $150-a-plate awards banquet could provide the cultural cohesion necessary to forge new unity among this “Untalented Tenth.” Frequently they quarreled among themselves on a variety of public issues. Representative Gus Savage correctly denounced Vernon Jordan, publisher John H. Johnson, NAACP president Margaret Bush Wilson and Rev. Leon Sullivan for sitting on corporate boards and sharing in the “ill-begotten super profits” from doing business in “fascist South Africa.”20 At state levels, Black Democrats joined forces with white Republicans in reapportionment cases to increase the percentages of Blacks and/or whites within their respective Congressional districts. The most vocal advocate of the growing legislative detente between these unlikely forces is Julian Bond, a democratic socialist and the most “progressive” Black elected official in the South. The Atlanta Constitution charged that “the cynical coalition” of “ghetto Black politicians and country club Republicans” sought “to gut Atlanta for the sake of electing (Bond) to the Congress,” while simultaneously extending GOP hegemony across the state.21

Although the Black Reaganites and the civil rights leaders were at odds over public policy, both factions had greater similarities than either would acknowledge publicly. Both tendencies were firmly entrenched within the Black middle class, and received the greatest percentage of their financial support from dissenting sectors of the white establishment. Both tendencies were committed to political activity within the capitalist state and economic order as it exists. Both were clients of more powerful political interests which found it necessary to develop Black constituencies for their own public agendas. Black Democrats relied on the rhetoric of resistance, but in practical terms, tended heavily to favor tactical compromises and accommodation with powerful whites. Black Reaganites parroted the slogans of Milton Friedman and the Reagan Administration to facilitate their own socioeconomic mobility, at the expense of the Black masses. Neither tendency actually embodied in practice an effective social program which called for the structural or radical transformation of the inherently racist/capitalist state. The Black Brahmins waged war against each other, but not against the system that allowed them to exist.

III

Theoretically and programmatically, the sudden prominence of the Black Reaganites raises anew the historical question of accommodation and conservatism within Black America. In the 1960s, many Black and white social scientists and activist-oriented scholars tended to identify the cultural and social tradition of Black nationalism with political independence, public protests and militancy, while integration was portrayed as inherently a conservative and gradualist strategy to separate the Black elite from the Black working masses. Much of the political literature since Black Power has described the entire evolution of Black U.S. history as a clearcut division between Black nationalists and integrationists. According to this view, Black nationalists were rooted within the bowels of oppression, the leaders of Black workers and the poor, whereas integration was the aesthetic and cultural outlook of upper class Negroes. Black nationalist movements appealed to large audiences, with the primary cornerstone being Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, and integrationist organizations were elitist and small (e.g., W. E. B. Du Bois’ and W. Monroe Trotter’s Niagara Movement or the National Urban League). Post-Black Power scholars describe integration itself as innately reformist, since its programmatic goal, the obliteration of barriers in political and social life that segregate Blacks from white Americans, is not a revolutionary demand. The nationalists identify their heroes as the real children of Martin Delany, Garvey and Malcolm X, while the integrationists remain adrift from the masses, hopelessly struggling for white recognition.22

This dichotomy creates more problems than it resolves. First, it does not explain the career and legacy of the influential educator/politician, Booker T. Washington. Garvey constructed his economic and social program on the philosophy of Tuskegee, as we know. But what does this tell us about Washington, when we recognize the Garveyism was the highest expression of militant Black nationalism in the first half of the twentieth century? A closer reading of the subject also calls into question the Black nationalists’ rejection of Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr. Both men were committed to social equality and a closer sociocultural relationship between the races, but neither can be termed accommodationist in their political practice or “conservative” when contrasted with their contemporaries. More problems surface when the checkered and ambiguous careers of Congress of Racial Equality leaders Floyd McKissick and Roy Innis are reviewed. In 1966, McKissick demonstrated against the Vietnam War, and stood second only to Stokely Carmichael as the most articulate proponent of militant Black separatism. By 1972 he had endorsed the reelection of the politically and racially conservative Richard M. Nixon. Innis still advances a strong race-first philosophy, but combines his activist rhetoric with a close and cordial relationship with white capitalists and conservative corporate managers. When one surveys the single organization that is closest to the masses of Black people, the Black Church, one finds that the majority of Black religious leaders from the mid-nineteenth to late-twentieth centuries have been pragmatic or accommodationist in their politics, integrationists, and at times, profoundly conservative. Few ministers would hold much credence in the exhortations of Thomas Sowell or Ronald Reagan, but not many would consider themselves the descendents of Nat Turner or Malcolm X.

The singular service that the Black Reaganites provide is a new and more accurate understanding of what exactly constitutes conservatism within the Black experience. Generally speaking, conservatives from the Civil War to the present have agreed on a philosophy which can be outlined accordingly: first, a theoretical and programmatic commitment to capitalism as an economic system in which Blacks can take part as full and equal partners. Black conservatives are traditionally hostile to Black participation in trade unions, and urge a close cooperation with white business leaders. Hostile to the welfare state, they call for increased “self-help” programs run by Blacks at local and community levels. Conservatives often accept the institutionalized forms of patriarchy, acknowledging a secondary role for Black women within economics, political life and intellectual work. They usually advocate a specific social hierarchy within the Black community, and have a pronounced bias towards organizational authoritarianism and theoretical rigidity. Black conservatism as a definite ideological force can be found within both Black nationalism and integrationism. Conversely, a militant or political activist can be integrationist, particularly during periods when the consensus of white American society swings toward strict Jim Crow or racial segregation public policies. The internal logic of a Black nationalist who also is a rigid conservative, for example, is embodied in apartheid. But conservatism, in itself, should not be directly corrolated with accommodation as a political style. The entire terrain of Black politics since the Civil War can be characterized by a broad and uneven distribution of nationalists and integrationists at every end of the spectrum on questions of class, economic organization and state power. (See Table XXVI)

What few historians appreciate is that the contemporary foundations of Black conservatism and accommodation are not the responsibility of Booker T. Washington alone. The Tuskegee “wizard” (as his underlings called him) was neither a political theoretician nor an original thinker. Accommodation was a definite political response to the Compromise of 1877 and the extreme racist violence that accelerated across the South in the 1880s and early 1890s. J. C. Price, the president of Livingstone College of North Carolina and an influential Black postbellum leader, advanced a program in the 1880s that pro­posed the “sacrifice of nonessentials,” such as Black political independence. Price’s “mildly conciliatory policy toward the South” was also championed by C. H. J. Taylor. A newspaper editor in Kansas City and Atlanta, lawyer and minister resident in Liberia during Grover Cleveland’s first administration, Taylor condemned Black advances achieved by radicals during Reconstruction. In his 1889 accommodationist polemic, Whites and Blacks, he urged Blacks to “(cease) exhibiting prejudice towards whites” and to accept “the olive branch of peace” offered them by political conservatives. The root of Black oppression, he declared, was the singular disaster of Afro-American politics during the 1865-1877 period. Blacks “voted in the white political scum they thought to be their dearest friends, but who . . . proved to be their greatest enemies.” Like many conservative cultural nationalists a century later, Taylor chastized Blacks for hating the race, and urged an end to bleached skin and straightened hair. “We have no reason to complain until we take more pride in our own,” he stated.23

Black property owners, affluent small entrepreneurs and politicians helped to establish the conservative political terrain which made the subsequent rise of Booker T. Washington possible. These men adopted the aggressive, expansionist capitalist philosophy of Henry Grady by the mid-1880s. Black Mississippi planter Blanche K. Bruce resisted the “Republicans-only” politics of Frederick Douglass in 1876 by advocating the deliberate division of the Black vote in order to acquire leverage in both parties. By 1880 Bruce encouraged Blacks to deemphasize political work entirely, declaring in a series of public speeches “that the race needs now more than anything else . . . material and educational growth.” In 1892, a meeting of Black educators and politicians at the Bethel Literary and Historical Association in Washington, D.C., advocated the immediate development of Black­ owned banks, insurance companies and service-related businesses as a means to promote racial uplift. All too frequently, this pro-business philosophy combined with a revisionist interpretation of slavery itself, leading its promulgators into a firm political coalition with white supremacy. A typical example of this is provided by a wealthy Black Mississippi landlord, Gilbert Myers. Testifying before a Senate committee only two years after the Compromise of 1877, he defended his decision to support the conservative Democratic party: “The South has always been kind to me. My master that I lived with I nursed him and slept at his mother’s feet and nursed at her breast, so I thought my interest was to stay with the majority of the country who I expected to prosper with.”24

This is not to imply that the accommodationist philosophy was hegemonic before the demise of Populism and the Depression of the 1890s. The majority of Black Republicans and Democrats resisted whites’ attempts to undermine the gains of Reconstruction throughout the period. Perhaps the leading Black militant of this era was T. Thomas Fortune. As editor of the New York Age, Fortune urged Blacks toward an independent political posture with the slogan “Race First: then party.” Fortune condemned Isaiah Montgomery, founder of the all-Black city of Mount Bayou, Mississippi, for tacitly accepting the loss of the Black franchise in his state. He supported the creation of trade unions, and declared that “millionaires (were) the most dangerous enemies of society.” As the founder of the Afro-American League in 1890, he revived the protest traditions of Martin R. Delany, declaring that “it is time to face the enemy and fight inch by inch for every right he denies us. Let us stand up like men in our own organization where color will not be a brand of odium.” With the emergence of radical farmers and workers’ movements, Fortune stood uncompromisingly on the side of liberation. “The revolution is upon us,” he told his readers, “and since we are largely of the laboring population, it is very natural that we should take sides with the labor forces in the fight for a juster distribution of the results of labor.” By the mid-1890s, Fortune’s revolutionary ardor had cooled considerably. He began to accept financial contributions from the Tuskegee politician, and soon his militant voice was muted. With Fortune’s active cooperation, Washington successfully plotted his election as president of the Afro-American Council and ratified an accommodationist program at the organization’s meeting in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1902. Black accommodationist Fred R. Moore was placed by Washington on the Age’ s editorial staff in 1904, Three years later, Moore became editor; Fortune’s career as a progessive spokesperson in the cause of Black civil rights was effectively ended.25

Many historians have explored the striking prominence of Booker T. Washington, who it can be said was the most effective and influential politician that Black America has yet produced. In the light of Washington’s eventual failure to achieve an “historic compromise” between the divergent interests of Southern conservatives, Northern capital, and the nascent Black middle class, he is sometimes accused of being simply the creature of white racism and oppression. His infamous Atlanta Compromise of 1895, close relationship with white millionaires like Collis P. Huntington and Andrew Carnegie, and his deprecating and even sycophantic remarks on the race question before white audiences seem to seal his fate before neo-abolitionist critics. Before we bury Booker T. as merely the compliant tool of racist reactionaries, let us make a few comments beside his grave. First, as illustrated above, Washington was the most successful practitioner of accommodation, yet the foundations of his success were forged in the years of defeatism and doubt after 1877. Without the C. J. Taylors and J. C. Prices, Washington’s labor would have amounted to a futile and self-destructive errand in the political wilderness. Second, Washington’s political genius was less “conservative” than tactically “accommodationist.” He secretly funneled capitalists’ donations for Tuskegee to a variety of civil rights causes. He paid his dues to white leaders by hiring a staff of talented ghost writers including Max Thrasher and Robert E. Park to articulate the cautious, conservative public policies of the age. For his public concessions, he achieved extraordinary influence in Federal appointments for Black members of his Tuskegee Machine. Finally, it must be emphasized the Washington was a popular figure within a significant segment of the Black community, an educator who inspired the development of schools based on the model of Tuskegee Institute in India, Panama, South Africa, Kenya, the Gold Coast and across the Black Belt South. Supporters of Washington’s political organization included James Weldon Johnson, who later became Secretary of the NAACP; Benjamin J. Davis, Sr., the founder of the Atlanta Independent; W. H. Steward, a leading Black Baptist; and J. W. E. Bowen, president of Gammon Theological Seminary from 1906 to 1912 and senior editor of the influential Voice of the Negro.

The distinction between accommodation and cooptation must be emphasized here. In the light of history, we must judge the Tuskegee philosophy of tactical compromises and secret agitation against segregation a failure.26 Its achievements in the context of that bloody era—the creation of Tuskegee Institute, the appointment of Black officials in the Roosevelt and Taft administrations, the establishment of the National Negro Business League—should not be dismissed lightly, but in the end, do not and cannot make sufficient restitution for the forces of racist violence it also unwittingly unleashed. Washington’s power was both real and an illusion; its inherent weakness was rooted not in his own body of politics, but within the racist practices of U.S. capitalism. Washington failed; but that does not make him an Uncle Tom. Had Washington’s program been as servile as its critics claimed, it could not have inspired the development of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, or John Langalibalele Dube’s African National Congress. Washington was a product of late nineteenth century Black cultural life, indeed as organic as the evolution of the blues at that identical historical moment.27

Black American history’s central axis is the tension between accommodation and struggle. Most prominent Black political spokespersons have embodied both contradictory positions within their respective programs. But a few “leaders” from the very beginning, went beyond accommodation and tactical concessions with racism, into what could properly be defined as true Black conservatism: a defense of the racist status quo as it exists. The Black conservative does not desire power; he/she has no independent program worthy of the name. The interests that the Black conservative defends have little or nothing to do with the realities of Black material and social life. No public position is too extreme, no statement is too ingratiating, no act too outrageous for the Black conservative, if in some minute way it serves the interests of whites in power. Accommodation as a political tactic is genuinely foolish, because tactical concessions and quiescent rhetoric seldom achieve long term gains. “Those in power never give way,” C.L.R. James wrote in Black Jacobins, “and admit defeat only to plot and scheme to regain their lost power and privilege.” The conquest of effective power may begin within the confines of parliamentary debate and moral suasion, but inevitably must end in the streets. “The struggle of classes ends either in the reconstruction of society or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”28 Accommodation begins with the germ of doubt, a defeatist attitude which has afflicted the Black working class as well as the Black middle class. Conservatism is more clearly the attitude of sectors of the Black petty bourgeoisie, those who actively cooperate with the dominant white elites to oppress Blacks. Accommodation is “puttin’ on ole massa”; conservatism for Blacks is actively doing “ole massa’s” work. The former is an opportunist; the latter is a traitor.

During the “Age of Washington,” the leading Black conservative was undoubtedly William Hooper Councill. After slavery, Councill became a leading Black Democrat in northern Alabama. He served as secretary for the National Equal Rights Convention in 1873, and three years later became president of the Black segregated state school at Huntsville. In 1887, he was excluded from a first-class railway car, and he appealed the case to the Interstate Commerce Commission. Alabama whites swiftly replaced Councill at the school, and he was prepared to retract his appeal. Reinstated as president, Councill began speaking out against integrated public facilities, railroads and accommodations. At the highpoint of lynchings, he praised the “love and attachment between the races at the South.” He urged Blacks to accept positions as household workers, and he declared that employment discrimination toward Blacks was only “friendly advice” to start their own segregated establishments. Councill was as bankrupt morally as he was in politics: in May, 1885, he was charged with the rape of a twelve year old Black girl and the shooting of her uncle. Louis R. Harlan writes of Councill:

At the end of Reconstruction, Councill sold his Black soul for white Conservative favor. In return for his office he agreed not merely to stay out of politics but to speak out for the Democrats. This faustian bargain gave him great power, for he fulfilled the Alabama white man’s conception of a Negro leader more com­ pletely than Washington. He could condemn the Yankee radical and proclaim the Southern white man to be the Negro’s best friend without the restraints that inhibited Washington. He could out-Booker Booker, and he frequently did.

Washington could hardly tolerate the man. In 1899 he even informed a colleague that he could not bear to sit at the same public forum with Councill, because he “has the reputation of simply toadying to the Southern white people.”29

At the level of popular politics, Black electoral behavior is often characterized as monolithic behavior, with Afro-Americans casting their ballots for the Republicans between 1865 and the 1930s, and for the Democrats afterwards. In reality, the voting patterns of Blacks were uniform nowhere. The conservatives within the Black community tended to align themselves with whichever major party was ideologically and programmatically further to the right at a given time. Accommodationists, on the other hand, sought coalitions with the political party which controlled their own primary constituency’s area. In the 1900s Washington quickly developed a strong national alliance with the Roosevelt administration, because the Republicans had become the majority party in the country by 1896. Locally, however, he supported Alabama conservative Democrats over Populists and the more radical agrarians from the poor white and Black classes. In the 1890s Black Republican leaders of Cincinnati threw their support to a local white Democratic boss, in order to gain petty patronage and economic development within that city. Black Republicans in Kansas City, Missouri consistently voted for the Democratic machine of Jim Pendergast, who repaid their allegiance by offering them local benefits to the city’s services. For almost four decades, the Crum Democratic machine of Memphis controlled the Black vote in that city. A series of Black Republicans, the most prominent being Robert R. Church, consistently followed an accommodationist strategy by casting their weight behind local white segregationists. At the national level, a core of Black independents and former Republicans created the Negro National Democratic League in 1900, and actively attempted to increase among Blacks a new electoral loyalty for white Democrats. Even DuBois, in a rare moment of political confusion, endorsed the presidential candidacy of the Democratic governor of New Jersey, Woodrow Wilson. DuBois’ support was repaid when Wilson ordered the most extreme racial segregation policies that had ever existed in the Federal government. The bitter fruits of Black accommodation to the Democratic Party during these years are illustrated by the single fact that not one Black delegate ever appeared at a national Democratic convention until 1936. It was not until 1948 that the Democratic party even took a lukewarm, public stand in favor of civil rights for Blacks.30

The New Deal brought a general realignment to Black politics. Local Black Republican bosses, like Atlanta’s A. T. Walden, shifted their organizations behind the Democratic Party. The percentage of Black votes for the Democrats increased dramatically in a remarkably short period of time. In Chicago, Democrats obtained 7 percent of the Black vote in the mayoral election of 1927, 16 percent percent in 1935. As early as 1932, 45 percent of Black voters in Baltimore were Democrats, 53.3 percent in Pittsburgh, and 79.8 percent in Kansas City. By 1936 the Black vote for Franklin Roosevelt exceeded 50 percent in most cities, and climbed to 75 percent in a few urban areas by 1940. As the Black working class shifted to the Democratic Party, Black accommodationists quickly followed suit. Chicago Black politician William L. Dawson had served as a city alderman from 1935 to 1939 as a Republican. Recognizing that political realities had changed, Dawson became a Democratic Ward Committeeman, and an ally of Chicago boss Edward Kelly. In 1942 he ran successfully for Congress, replacing another South Side Black Democrat, Arthur W. Mitchell. As Chuck Stone observes, “Dawson, a loyal ‘organization man,’ learned quickly that the organization was the wellspring from which all progress, jobs and favors flowed. Dawson exercised his power carefully, prudently and patiently. He quietly built a Black political machine that was as efficient and vicious as the city-wide Democratic machine.” Like Booker T. Washington, Dawson’s power was repeatedly compromised by the realities of racism and by the conformist demands that were placed upon him by whites. Dawson refused to support civil rights legislation, and was silent about the Emmett Till lynching. “As the Civil Rights Movement gathered,” Stone writes, “Dawson retreated further into silence. He continued to do just three things: win re-election, control Black patronage in Chicago and keep his mouth shut.” Through Dawson, the Tuskegee strategy was reborn within the Democratic Party.31

For white Democrats after 1940, the Negro vote was not desired out of any abstract or altruistic commitment to social justice: it was born of the realization that Blacks now constituted what Henry Lee Moon termed “the balance of power.” The implications of this were apparent as early as 1944, during the Roosevelt-Dewey election. Herbert Brownell, Jr., Republican National Committee Chairman, stated that a “shift of 303,414 votes in fifteen states outside of the South would have enabled (Dewey) to capture 175 additional electoral votes and to win the presidency with an eight electoral vote margin.” In over half of the states mentioned by Brownell, Blacks comprised a significant and even decisive margin for Roosevelt’s victory. In Michigan, Black voters cast 41,740 ballots for the Democratic nominee and Roosevelt carried that state by 22,500 votes; in Maryland “the 50,000 votes which Negro citizens in Baltimore alone cast for F.D.R. were more than double his 22,500 state plurality.”32 Any effective power in which Blacks as a group could exercise electorally depended, of course, on whether white voters were evenly divided on the issues or candidates. In 1960 and 1976, Black voters did decide the Presidential election. About 77 percent of all Black voters supported Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy over Republican Vice President Richard M. Nixon in 1960, and in seven states—Illinois, Mississippi, New Jersey, Michigan, Texas, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania—the Black vote was greater than the Democratic candidate’s margin of victory. Jimmy Carter received about nine out of every ten votes cast by Blacks in 1976. Democratic leaders had literally no other choice except to court the Black vote, particularly after the mid-1960s, as the New Deal coalition of organized labor and the South began drifting toward the Republican party. But white bosses, from Kelly’s successor in Chicago, Richard Daley, to Democratic Senate leader Lyndon Johnson, mistrusted Blacks who expressed even modest tendencies towards political independence and militancy. They preferred to cut deals with Black pragmatists and accommodationists, Blacks clearly dependent upon the white power structure, men or women who understood and acquiesced to the rules of the game.33

The tradition of accommodation had become so firmly grounded within Black politics that it affected even the most progressive Blacks elected to national office. Adam Clayton Powell’s entire career stands as the greatest testimony to this unfortunate fact. Like Fortune, Powell began his political life as an uncompromising militant. In the depths of the Great Depression he led a series of successful boycotts of Harlem stores that refused to hire Blacks. Powell was frequently in the streets organizing Black workers, and set in motion a successful boycott of a bus company almost two decades before Martin Luther King, Jr. repeated the tactic in the Deep South. In 1941, Powell was elected to the New York City Council, and three years later won a Congressional seat from Harlem. Between 1945 and 1965, Powell was undoubtedly the most influential Black elected official in the country. Unlike Dawson, Powell won the praises of almost every major sector of the Black community. For older Black nationalists, Powell’s streetwise rhetoric was reminiscent of earlier Harlem nationalists, from Hubert H. Harrison to Marcus Garvey. Integrationists from the Black middle class pointed out that Powell’s leadership in the House Education and Labor Committee led to the adoption of sixty major bills which included increases in the minimum wage, school lunch program, Federal aid to public schools and the war on poverty. Black men with no discernable interest in electoral politics could identify with Powell’s bombastic joi de vie, his succession of wives and mistresses. Even the most politically advanced spokesperson that Black nationalism produced in the 1960s, Malcolm X, considered Powell a true proponent of Black independence and activism. But throughout his public life, Powell made a series of questionable tactical concessions and compromises with the white power elite. In 1956 Powell endorsed the reelection of Dwight Eisenhower, although the former general had done virtually nothing in the area of civil rights. In return for the chairmanship of his Congressional committee, Powell endorsed the Presidential candidacy of Lyndon Johnson, a political protege of House Speaker Sam Rayburn. Powell’s 1959 endorsement was a shock to most Blacks, since Johnson was a known southern segregationist. Despite his erratic and sexist personal conduct, Powell’s eventual undoing may have had more to do with his inexplicably infantile attitude toward power. Had he possessed the seriousness of a Washington, who made accommodating overtures towards whites without ever forgetting once that covert action resided at the center of successful petty bourgeois politics, Powell would have never fallen in disgrace. Powell was no accommodationist certainly, but his claim to the credentials of militancy seems seriously inflated.34

Since the Eisenhower Administration of 1953-61, many Black accommodationists and virtually every Black conservative joined the Republican Party. The most prominent Republican, and certainly the most successful, was Edward W. Brooke of Massachusetts. Brooke was “an authentic member” of the “Black bourgeoisie.” After his graduation from Boston University, Brooke decided to run for the Massachusetts state legislature in both the Democratic and Republican primaries in 1950. Defeated in the former, he therefore became a Republican. After a series of electoral defeats, Brooke finally was elected Massachusetts attorney general in 1962. In 1966, Brooke campaigned and won a seat in the U.S. Senate over Endicott Peabody, a man described by observers as being “far more liberal on civil rights for black people than the black candidate himself.” Of course, it may be unfair to classify Brooke as a Black politician, since he never made any attempts to identify himself as one. Stone condemned Brooke as “Mr. Non-Negro Politics,” “the answer to the white man’s prayers,” “a political anomaly, (and) almost a political freak.” After his election to the Senate, he hired only two Blacks out of a nineteen member staff. Brooke found little difficulty in campaigning for Nixon or Gerald R. Ford, despite both white politicians’ antipathy toward Black political rights and socioeconomic progress. Unlike Thomas Sowell and the Black Reaganites of the 1980s, however, Brooke consistently obscured his essentially conservative economic and political philosophy by relying on the rhetoric of integration and civil rights. Even at the end of his career in 1978, when Massachusetts residents finally voted him out of office, Brooke used whatever leverage his “race” created for him within Back activist circles. Indeed, a group of Black nationalist militants from the Na­tional Black Political Assembly went so far as to campaign for Brooke that year, justifying their support solely on racial terms.35

In How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney observes that the most destructive idea within the expansion of Western societies into the nonwhite world was the concept of individualism. “It is a common myth within capitalist thought that the individual through drive and hard work can become a capitalist. The acquisition of wealth is not due to hard work alone,” Rodney notes, “or the Africans working as slaves in America and the West Indies would have been the wealthiest group in the world. The individualism of the capitalist must be seen against the hard and unrewarded work of the masses.”36 Individualism as an expression of Black politics is expressed as a commitment to oneself alone, a desire to transcend socioeconomic obstacles in order to become a power broker within the system. Blues artist B. B. King makes the point aesthetically: “You’ve got to pay the cost, to be the boss.” Black accommodationists and many reformers with accommodationist tendencies such as Powell, acknowledge the centrality of individualism within their political practice. They developed a series of practical solutions, or answers, to resolve the dilemma of Black underdevelopment, from the placid politics of Dawson, to the Machiavellian agenda of Washington. Their basic flaw was that they had no theoretical or systemic analysis of what was to be done: they were asking the wrong questions. After a century of tactical compromises, Black accommodationists still retain an individualistic faith in the inherent justice of America’s economic and social order.

Black conservatives from Councill to Sowell should not be considered accommodationists. They ceased asking any questions which relate to meaningful social and economic change for the Black working class and poor people. They are not willing to “pay the cost,” because they do not wish to be the “boss”—that is, to transform the existing undemocratic, racist hierarchy in even miniscule ways. Like the Black radical journalist of the Harlem Renaissance, George Schuyler, some of the contemporary Black conservatives began their intellectual lives as socialists or militant reformers and gradually succumbed to anticommunism and a nihilistic view of Black activism as they reached middle age.37 Energetically, Sowell and his fellow Black conservatives—most notably Wendell Wilkie Gunn of Pepsi corporation, Black Republican leader J.A.Y. Parker and economist Walter Williams—claim to represent a “new” and unprecedented political tendency which has the potential for becoming dominant within Black civil society in the years ahead. But the Black majority recognizes that their agendas are not ours; their “supply-side” ideas are unoriginal; and their politics are simply the program of those forces that would crush the collective life from Black America. Black Reaganism is not an accommodation to white power, but a complete capitulation to racism. Thomas Sowell’s extensive theoretical work is an apology for racism and Reaganism.38 Sowell does not even merit the mantle of Washington.

IV

History illustrates that the petty bourgeoisie of an oppressed nation or nationality is incapable by itself of struggling to achieve political and economic equality undercapitalism. In Class Struggle in Africa, Kwame Nkrumah asserted that during national liberation efforts the Black elite responds in three ways. “Firstly, there are those who are heavily committed to colonialism and to capitalist economic and social development.” The second category, the nationalists, “want to end colonial rule” but oppose “a transformation of society.” The third group simply “sits on the fence,” supporting the militant actions of Black workers and the peasantry when it suits their own narrow interests.39 Politically, the Black Brahmin will go so far as to subvert its own institutions, betray its own representatives, and coalesce with the most vicious racists if conditions for progressive change seem temporarily remote. The modern “realignment” in Black politics is essentially a repetition of this classical pattern of petty bourgeois opportunism and accommodation.

The goals of the Civil Rights Movement, which promoted the necessity of social democratic reforms (e.g., food, public health care, child care, job training, free education, etc.) have been abandoned by major sectors of the Black elite. It becomes the task of Black progressives and Marxists in this period to complete this interrupted “revolution” for civil rights and social equality within the framework of the existing system. The burden of our history is two-fold. We must advance “reformist” programs within communities which reinforce Black owned socioeconomic and cultural institutions, advocating the maintenance of needed social service programs that affect the Black working class and the poor. But we must insist uncompromisingly that the social crises confronting Black people reflect a more fundamental contradiction created in part by the crisis of capital accumulation. Self-determination for the Black majority cannot be forged unless our politics, in theory and in practice, also opposes sexual exploitation, imperialism, and monopoly capitalism. The revolt for reforms within the capitalist state today transcends itself dialectically to become a revolution against the racist/capitalist system tomorrow.

Given this critique, the next logical question is—which sectors of the Black elite have the greatest potential for participating in the democratic reconstruction of capitalist America? As illustrated in chapter five, the Black entrepreneurs and executives are the greatest internal barrier to the achievement of a socialist political consensus within the Black community. The Black politicians, taken as a whole, are either clients of larger corporate interests, or excel in the electoral game for personal profit and ego gratification. We turn next to the Black Church for leadership, and find as with the politicians, a divided legacy—a history of struggle and accommodation.