Ethnic Power
Davis, Jefferson
ETHNIC POWER In 1963, Malcolm X issued a call for Black Power by "any possible means." This same appeal to hate was echoed in 1965 by Stokely Carmichael, and, in 1967 H. Rap Brown hawked the...
...So, with ethnic power, that's what's happening, baby...
...Brown and Carmichael were linked directly to the trouble in Nashville and Cincinnati...
...Actually, to speak of growing poverty among Negroes is to dally in mythology...
...When the Insects began their career they amplified their grunts to the yea-yea advocates of 3.2 music, always slopping ridicule on their fatuous audience, so as to distinguish themselves from the nitwits enthralled at their feet...
...This same appeal to hate was echoed in 1965 by Stokely Carmichael, and, in 1967 H. Rap Brown hawked the same call to arms...
...Television and other instant communications media have added greatly to the loss of responsible Negro leadership, and the subsequent decay of the civil rights movement as a recognized and legitimate force...
...The target of the civil rights movement was honorable when it sought equal rights, protection, and opportunity under the law...
...Shades of Lowndes County...
...He has achieved a gain in both his absolute economic position as well as in comparison to his white neighbor...
...Television furnishes a nationwide audience for malevolent goofballs such as Carmichael and Brown, and thereby projects them to a position of national prominence...
...Forman replied, "There are no points of order...
...The news media have inflamed an already tinderbox situation either by quoting public officials out of context, or by emphasizing statements which were not originally intended for an undereducated audience...
...Perhaps the fact that Johnson used an unfortunate choice of words in saying "Revolution" when he meant evolution, was clear to his immediate audience...
...Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" the Insects have interrupted a trend of lyrical tommyrot and recorded several acceptable yodelings, but for the most part the civilized ear will remain wondering if the album's grooves circle in the right way...
...With rare exceptions their latest album manifests this enduring lesson...
...He has taken New York for his capital and made the Insects this decade's Piggy Logan by extolling them in a hurricane of ethereal encomiums...
...If the Insects learned anything from their American tours, it was the American politician's facility for expressing absolutely nothing in the most meaningful terms...
...SNCC leader James Forman delivered a fiery Black Power speech to the throng, saying, "we're going to liberate you whether you want to be liberated or not...
...pro-Communist and professional black nationalists...
...Unfortunately, the Negro leaders who have maintained their perspective, such men as Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, and George Schuyler, go unheralded in the press, and the cries of "burn, baby, burn" prevail...
...Why is it the Carmichaels, the minions of domestic Reds, and ideological southpaws must go outside the country to bolster their faith...
...Stokely is not the only revolutionary to have had to go abroad to deliver orotund obloquies...
...Americandoxy as portrayed by the hate mongers does not merely have inherent social injustices — in their jaundiced vision tantamount to slave trade — but Americandoxy also implies capitaldoxy, which Carmichael has avowed to destroy...
...and the SNCC leader's well reasoned reply came, "Yes, and I am the dictator...
...Police officials from Cincinnati, Nashville and Cambridge, Maryland, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, stated that riots in their cities this year were fomented by SNCC...
...Credence is lent to the black revolutionaries' claims of being the Negro leaders who get things done when forty-five courageous Republican Congressmen and seven brave Democratic Congressmen acquiesce to the mobdoxy as preached by Jesse Gray and a pack of "Fun City" thugs, and reverse themselves on the 8 "Rat Control Bill...
...In "Sgt...
...Still dressed in African robes, Forman asked for and got voice and standing votes on resolutions he introduced personally...
...today our pusillanimous politicians try to dissolve domestic problems with a check...
...To which someone shouted, "Is this a dictatorship...
...While Stokely, presently on a world tour of ill will, and Robert Williams, fancying himself as a Communist Chiang Kai-shek preparing to stage a mainland invasion of the United States, were out of the country, one of the most heinous gatherings of stooges ever to meet, assembled in Chicago's Palmer House...
...In replying to smarmy liberals' rationalization that rioting is caused by poverty and cultural deprivation, George Schuyler, a respected Negro author and journalist, says rioting ". . . rarely occured anywhere prior to the onset ten years ago of the campaign of agitation and incitement by Negro activists...
...Nothing is freighted with more meaning for our own destiny than the Revolution of the American Negro...
...That many of the leaders of the Black Power movement are pro-Communist should surprise no one...
...Robert Franklin Williams, founder of RAM (Revolutionary Action Movement), now plans to return to America...
...Who are these other enemies...
...Today the ridicule lingers...
...It is the establishment U.S.A...
...Schuyler further explains the sociological damage effected within the Negro community by agitators who have caused an exaltation of the jobless, uneducated and violence prone Negro, and the condemnation of the successful Negro as a self-seeking opportunist...
...We should not level our critical artillery solely against Negro leadership for promoting civil disorders...
...Of itself, this is not an unreasonable desire...
...Johnson blamed Congress after the Detroit riots for not approving this rat control bill and timourishly cried for more welfare to buy off urban barbarians...
...Consider, for example, these remarks from a speech by President Johnson in June 1965 to the graduating class of Howard University: "Our earth is the home of Revolution...
...Jefferson Davis REVIEWS Sgt...
...This attack on the capitalist system, presumably in favor of commundoxy, signifies a notable shift in the goals of the civil rights movement...
...Yet, the civil rights movement, more than ever, is now relying on violent means of expressing grievances...
...But, statements such as these are hardly innocuous when delivered to undereducated and non-discriminating masses in Harlem, Watts, or the ghettos of a dozen other cities...
...This viewpoint cites the increasing internecine violence in the cities as evidence of growing poverty among Negroes...
...In connection with the Negro struggle, such patriotic gambits as, "The only whites we can use in our struggle are those who are ready to pick up guns with us to destroy the capitalist system," just are not compelling to the aggregate America...
...The "burn, baby, burn" leadership of the civil rights movement has thus alienated the successful Negro from its support, has destroyed the incentive for self-betterment within the Negro community, and has removed the support of the majority of whites so that only the most fulsome and condescending of Liberals remain...
...Investigators of the House Committee on Un-American Activities say that many of the riots in the past year were staged by the proPeking Progressive Labor Party (not to be confused with the Bloomington based Progressive Reform Party), SNCC, and other Black Power groups — i.e...
...Since the convention was not in formal session, a white girl delegate rose and called "point of order...
...Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band In You Can't Go Home Again Thomas Wolfe spoke of mountebank Piggy Logan, whose offbeat manners and gaudily painted circus of wire dolls, entranced the prop-propelled jet set phonies of the 'thirties and certified these cultural Bedouins' penchant for canonizing what is nothing more than ridiculous, insipid, demeaning, and significant solely for its absurdity...
...The noted economist Henry Hazlitt remarks that the Great Society sees "poverty and despair" as the forces driving ghetto dwellers to riot...
...Many leaders, both white and black, whether misguided or malicious, represent the lot of the Negro as toboganning towards debasement...
...George Kennen has criticized Americans for trying to dissolve foreign policy problems by writing laws...
...Williams, widely known for his enlightening broadcasts from Cuba preaching black rebellion in the United States, now lives in Communist China...
...It should be remembered that it was Williams' RAM followers in the United States who have been charged with attempting to assassinate Negro moderates, as well as planning the poisoning of thousands of Philadelphia policemen and city officials in the event of a racial outbreak in that city...
...In what is now ancient history, the National Conference for New Politics granted the Black Power groups the type of representation they seem to feel is commensurate with their position...
...Under current leadership the Negro's position may well go into declivity, but this would contrast sharply with the Negro's position in the past two decades...
...Is there not reason to worry about the radicals' indulgence in a self-proclaimed right to riot, and should not something be done...
...Yet, the fact remains that in achieving these aims by conventional social and economic means one must proceed slowly, and therefore collide with the "now" leadership...
...The record speaks for itself...
...Namely, this collection of Communists, beatniks, anti-poverty types, and several Indiana University pupils, voted to give the Black Caucus of two-hundred delegates voting strength equal to the twenty-one hundred white delegates...
...Put simply, rhetoric incorporating such references as "white monkeys" and "honky" do not receive favorable audience in America...
...Concurrent with this development, responsible Negro leadership acquiesced by condoning the nihilistic doctrines of the Stokely Carmichaels and, if they decried such irascible asininity they were silenced by the odious epithet, Uncle Tom...
...only the audience is even more ridiculous, since the contemporary Insects are writing for (Continued on Page 11) 9...
...It is indeed interesting to see the uses to which the Black Power tribe put their power, once they had gained it at the NCNP convention...
...While the dollar income of the Negro family remains below that of the white family, the bitter axiom of the rich growing richer and the poor becoming poorer is today less than tenable...
...Swirling about the trumpeting of such warped racists as Carmichael and Brown, there is incessant badgering against the "honky whites and other enemies...
...From 1947 to 1965 the median dollar income of white families rose 127 per cent, while that of non-whites advanced 146 per cent...
...The super-serious cultural idiot who patronized Piggy Logan is more active today than ever...
...With Malcolm X, Negro leadership was amplified from the mouths of radicals, cajoling their followers with exhortations to liberation...
...Whether from their limited talent or constipated philosophy, the Insects' new album will appeal only to cultural cave dwellers and the Eoanthropic boomers of Time, the dilettante's delicatessen...
...Yet, this aim has been superseded by a philosophy best described as one of equal wealth...
...The Negro has shared disproportionately in this country's economic advancements in the past twenty years, and this might give him reason to hope for a more bountiful future...
Vol. 1 • October 1967 • No. 2
