The Negroes Enter Southern Politics

...Since then, the emphasis has been on politics...

...But there are other aspects to the situation...

...Only in Tennessee, with both candidates acceptable to Negroes and one of them, John J. Hooker, talking a kind of neo-Populism (perhaps pop-Populism), did gubernatorial politics live up to expectations...

...The SNCC strategy was rejected, then, in Alabama, as it had already been in Mississippi with the virtual demise of the once powerful Freedom Democratic Party...

...But register they did, and often in the face of threats, violence, and economic intimidation...

...Direct-action has not ceased...

...It also seems to fly against the advice of an old SNCC saint (perhaps now old hat), C. Wright Mills, who said to look for the young intellectuals, not the poor people, as the vehicles for revolutionary change...

...The next 25%, however, will be largely from the lower class, and it is they to whom the black-party appeal is chiefly directed...

...SNCC and CORE, the youngest and most radical advocates of direct-action—once, with Martin Luther King's SCLC, the most idealistic element in the South— have fallen on lean days...

...Their plight is desperate enough now...

...But in other counties, where the count was considered impeccable, some whites won over Negroes despite a Negro voter majority...

...One has to read back over two years of their weekly reports to know the extent and existential quality of what they and the powerless Negro people suffered in the name of democracy, getting the vote...

...The main message in the SNCC papers and its new departures from the mainstream of the movement is that it is through working with whites and white institutions toward integration...

...And one has to read the clippings over, too, about Atlantic City for the startling sudden recognitions— the hurriedly called Johnson press conference that interrupted the televised testimony of Mississippi Negroes before the Credentials Committee, the capture of liberals, the division of their forces...

...The program sounded as ambitious as SNCC of old...

...But the movement is a tiny, mainly symbolic task force in the South...

...In many ways, the South, with its poverty, its race problem, its emerging democracy, reflects—in Americanized configurations—America's difficulties around the globe...

...This occurred despite a plea that Carl Elliott was just as sympathetic, but was being quiet so as not to lose white support...

...Wallace into a run-off (and in the get-to-win context of southern politics, that might have been enough to shake her husband out of power, certainly enough to diminish the lethal fall-out of racism over the rest of the South...

...There was tentative talk that black-party organizational efforts would be made by SNCC in all Southern areas where Negro majorities are possible, and in northern and southern cities where Negro political control seems likely or Negro problems are pressing...

...SNCC opposed the Flowers strategy...

...At their worst, these papers set up an exclusiveness of cultural superficialities, reasoning that, because a white might be unable to relate to the music or the religion or the magic grease-soul food, pig knuckles and hog snouts, he is incapable of the new, not fully learned art of organizing the Negro poor in behalf of their own self-interests...

...and of late, SNCC has not even been talking big...

...The ballot and the jury, bedrocks of self-government—would they be fully grasped in time...

...SNCC maintains that its rapport with the rest of the "new left" has not been hurt by its whites-get-back policy, that the "new left" understands this and sympathizes with it, which is probably true...

...It was also a sign to other wavering states that racism might not be a dead issue after all...

...SNCC is no longer fooling with the white college volunteers, nor CORE to any extent, though it is apparently willing to consider individual cases...

...he carried Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Louisiana...

...Meanwhile, assuming that SNCC might be even partially successful in developing black parties in all the locales where black majorities exist, how much power would this be...

...This is possible...

...too much of magic revitalization of democratic institutions has come out of the South in the past five years, out of the movement's leadership, for us to fear now that democracy will provide nothing better down here than it has in Watts...

...But it's not a certainty...

...A part of the movement in the past year has acted on the assumption that they would...

...How did it happen...

...if occasionally hate with the smell so long familiar to Southerners speaks out aloud in the young radical deliberations, far more often it is disappointment, hurt, and despair...

...The future of the mainstream of the movement is wedded now to politics, and politics must provide the sources for such work as a real poverty program, just as politics must provide a leadership that will sound the economic issues, the other real issues...

...The attainment of the Voting Rights Act ended the need for the movement to rely solely on demonstrations and boycotts to achieve its political ends...

...And over it all, hovering, the really obscene thing the Republican Party had done to the nation: the closing of alternatives...

...These peculiarly southern problems, along with such national ones as the inability of the poverty program to catch hold (like those old machines we used to put nickels in and then try to pick up a gleaming camera with clumsy steel jaws), unemployment, automation, and the ever-present, growing unstructured racial hostility —all these, unless solved, will encourage black-party politics...

...Such a policy, he said, does risk black nationalism, but calculatedly, on pressing need...

...These are social and economic problems, summed up in the fact that the South is the poorest section of America...

...During direct-action, hope in metaphorical flashes—freedom now—sustained these people...

...Negroes needed only about 73,000 more votes to put Mrs...

...The move into the North, if it comes off, would be the first of any significance by SNCC...

...who can say what their political inclination might be if there should descend on the South another four years of dark-age racist oppression similar to the late 1950's, or a failure to really reform southern justice...

...Skeptics said Negroes would not register, even with the new law's destruction of all the old procedural blocks...

...The old innocent ways were destroyed not merely by racism but by the inability of the American culture to take really seriously such profound, such intense religious and political idealism as the Negro South, led by the youthful radicals and the older radicals of SCLC, offered for a brief time toward the healing of hurt and guilt in America...

...Registration between August, 1965, when the Voting Rights Act went into effect, and early spring 1966 climbed from 44% to 49.4% of the Negro voting potential in the South...

...Like the old witch-hunt worry about SNCC's attitudes regarding international Communism, the question of racism has to be approached in terms of its individual members and in terms of the real questions, not hysteria—questions of respect for the individual and for human freedom...

...If democracy can be made to work in the solution of these two historical problems in the South, we will have something to tell the world about...

...In Alabama and Mississippi, where repression had been heaviest, there was a dramatic climb from 23.6 to 48.9% and from 6.7 to 27.8% respectively...

...Negroes will likely have that many more votes the next time in Alabama...

...In a movement which has always been somewhat crippled by its inability to attract the best educated Negro Southerners (neither students nor teachers), this seems a shame...

...In other counties the NAACP, SCLC, and local leadership supported and the people voted for biracial slates...

...But now direct-action or the mere threat of it is tied to voting strength...

...There, the hopeful elements marshalled the hopeful new Negro votes for Richmond Flowers, the only candidate in the recent history of that sad state to dare openly to ask for the Negro vote and support Negro aspirations...

...One reads these with occasional pangs of almost the same pity and regret that it is possible to feel while reading the equally ingenuous, equally unpersuasive rationalizations of certain old intellectuals defending southern white supremacy...

...No one had a kind word for SNCC then...

...Selma and the March to Montgomery, so full of the hyperbole of hope, the promise that democracy would at last come to the South, marked an end to the direct-action phase of the civil rights movement...

...the agony of poverty in the South is so great...

...There an all-black Black Panther slate will oppose white Democrats in the general election...

...When you ask them about it, they always go back to Atlantic City...

...This began two years ago with its announcement that whites were welcome as workers, but the leaders had to be black...

...Like, which side are you on, man...

...The old rituals of innocence are still carried out in the beautiful little churches where, in an age of unbelief, people sing and pray their belief...

...We need to have the humility to try to understand why, and to study how to keep from losing any more of the movement, and of its followers in the South...

...Alabama illustrates the situation of the movement in the South...

...It will work with black people to develop political and economic power, with no apparent goal beyond making them less vulnerable in what it considers a racist society...

...SNCC thinks otherwise...

...Their voting totals keep building...

...Atlanta, New York, Chicago, Watts, and Cleveland were mentioned...

...But the Wallace victory, so overwhelming a statement of white racism and irresponsibility, was what SNCC had predicted...

...He cited the sad spectacle of an old Negro man saying of a white college stripling, "He's like a daddy to me...

...There are only 80 such counties in all the eleven states of the South...

...SCLC has shown itself quite skillful at voter registration and political organization—which is perhaps not so surprising when one remembers that its use of direct-action was always keyed to national politics rather than to those local problems which usually consumed the energy and anger of SNCC and CORE...

...Goldwater's vote pinpointed where they existed in 1964...

...Its activities had been reduced mainly to the Lowndes County operation, to its differentstyled, more sophisticated project in the Arkansas Delta, to its vastly curtailed Mississippi project which centers on self-help efforts, and to such attempts as the Atlanta project (which sometimes seems mainly like an operation SNCC used to accuse everybody else of—moving in on a going activity for the sake of publicity...

...Traditionally, these middle-class voters would be expected to follow the NAACP and even SCLC over SNCC...

...It told the Negroes to forget statewide politics, to concentrate on those counties where a Negro majority could elect an all-black government...

...They had put their lives on the line when most of us wouldn't even put our livelihoods, but we presumed to lecture them on the realities of politics, the give-and-take of this democracy business they and their followers had suffered for so...

...Thus, Alabama Negroes served notice that they would support politicians with guts enough to support them openly...

...The political arm of SCLC and the main statewide political Negro organization, dominated by NAACP people, supported him, as did most Negro leaders...

...The best guess is that the normal channels, the regular parties, will for the immediate future answer the needs or at least maintain the attention of the Negro South...

...circulated in SNCC circles...

...In the year since Selma the movement has reflected the new reality in mostly predictable ways...

...and the mainstream of the movement and presumably most of its followers are willing at least to give the newly-come democracy in the South, such as it is, a chance to work along conventional lines...

...What SNCC wants is power...

...This was attributed to a combination of fear, confusion, and genuine conviction that the white candidate was better qualified—the latter a mark of political maturity achieved by few whites anywhere in the South...

...This was the most hopeful outlook, and even so, it was taken with awareness that a race against time was involved, a calculated risk...

...As always, the NAACP covers more territory, and SCLC has done more in the way of local community organization work in the past year than ever before...

...this includes those of the countryside who are cut off now, with their white counterparts— by automation and federal agricultural policies—from even the agony of sharecropper existence...

...There are two such congressional districts—a limited power-base in terms of electing candidates...

...This was one of the first, important contributions of the new Negro voting strength to southern political life...

...it is not nearly large enough, for example, to do what every student of the situation eventually comes to see is needed—a kind of patient, caring, self-help, organizational work that aims at individuals over years of time...

...SNCC, skulking in an essentially hopeless strategy (outside a few specialized locales), is for all practical purposes lost to this larger effort...

...It proved everything we've been saying," a SNCC man fairly chortled...

...The rationale was set out recently in a series of essays (white-black papers...

...And SNCC—if it can reassert or regain its old knack for putting bodies where truth is—may, by taking away just enough Negro votes to block centrist government in other states, force the South and the nation to deal with the problem of white racist majorities wherever these exist...

...Stokely Carmichael, organizer of the Black Panther Party in Lowndes County, Alabama, was named new SNCC chairman...

...Its spokesmen have endorsed the black-party concept where feasible, but have also showed a willingness to work within normal party frameworks where feasible...

...everybody was indignant when they refused what was really in their terms an insulting compromise...

...Integration, its new chairman says, is irrelevant...

...At best, these essays describe the need for Negro self-identity, self-respect and political consciousness which must develop independently of the best-intentioned white help...

...But this assumes a center to push, and that, in terms of the white vote, was precisely what was lacking in Alabama...

...Another part seemed to say that even if they should, it would be in no better, no more hopeful a way than in the rest of America where the mindless fury of the ghetto riots seethes on, unattended...

...There were complaints by Negroes and requests for court action in several counties over legality of the vote count...

...All of the movement will always feel that in those desperate five years from 1960 on, the federal government failed in its duty to protect the field workers...

...Surely it is more typical than Alabama...

...They could stay on in other capacities, but few have...

...In recent months whites have been excluded from any organizational work in Negro communities...

...The fact that SNCC bothers to deny that its new stance is black nationalism or racism is important...

...The conditions which have spawned the anguished outbursts of fury from Negroes in the North are as nothing to the poverty, the economic hopelessness and misery of the majority of Negro Southerners...

...and the NAACP, which has not had much success with them, is not likely to bring them in wholesale...

...twenty-three Negroes received enough votes to get into the run-off for important posts—sheriff, county commission, legislature...

...SCLC, which had more than 1,000 of them down last year, would not have many this year because of organizational rather than racial problems...

...The Democratic primary victory of the moderate Robert King High over Governor Haydon Burns, who reverted to racist form in the run-off campaign, fit the new hopeful pattern...

...CORE, with its main southern bases still in Louisiana and Florida, has been hampered by lack of funds and the difficulty of adjusting to the new context of southern protest...

...It has been common to ascribe to SNCC and related radicals a role of essential powerlessness in the developing new southern political arena —a gadfly role, pushing the center from far-leftist positions, a kind of push long needed in the South, if for nothing else, to counteract the far right...

...Governor Wallace's victory, won despite white Alabama's normal inclination to keep women as well as niggers in their place, was more than an underscoring of the hold of the worst white racism in that worst of all southern states...

...Since then, many have put their hope in politics...

...There, they asked the morally perfect but politically impossible of the Democratic Convention, the ousting and humiliation of the white racist Mississippi regular party...

...Perhaps not altogether by chance, SNCC announced a few weeks later the first major turnover in its officialdom since the early days of direct action, with strong advocates of the black-party strategy emerging in control...

...But the race riots that southern police chiefs begin to feel coming in their bones every spring, that James Baldwin was predicting calmly in 1959, could erupt in nearly any southern city at any time, or in the countryside where armed self-defense units of Negroes face, across a no-man's land of collapsed law enforcement, terrorist whites...

...The Wallace victory was surely a shot from the dark of the past...

...This SNCC strategy on local races prevailed only in Lowndes County...

...Thus the whole South might escape at last the racist paranoia...

...Akin to SNCC's black-party strategy is its move toward an all-black worker position...

...But will they all be willing to back a Flowers-type candidate...

...There has also been some probing of the possibility of work in self-help, community organization, cooperatives and the like...

...One thing that came of it, when it was practiced so beautifully by the young radicals of SNCC and CORE only two years ago, was murder and all the southern anger...

...It proved what the white South has never learned —that, as Gunnar Myrdal writes, "political actions, which for the moment amount to little more than demonstrations and which may actually cause a reaction in the individual case, in the long view may have been tremendously important as powerful stimuli to progressive thinking...

...With southern politicians courting these new voters, it became possible to think a transitional time had come already, of white-Negro support for moderate white candidates for statewide and congressional offices, and for election of Negroes to county offices and state legislative posts...

...it is, so to speak, in the numbers of new Negro registration...

...One could then envisage—with race eliminated as the single powerful issue of southern campaigns—that great day of the old Populist dream when the poor people of both races would begin to vote together (probably without even meaning to) for men who would address themselves to the real problems of the South...

...Perceptible changes for the worse in the tone of gubernatorial campaigning followed almost immediately in Georgia and Florida, and the candidacy of Ross Barnett in Mississippi was surely encouraged...

...But the largest effort has been in voter registration...

...So far, the registration is generally considered to be largely middle-class...

...What, for example, became of "black and white together...

...it has become more sophisticated...

...Congress, meanwhile, was expected this year to enact the beginnings of that other desperately-needed procedural reform for the South, in law enforcement and in the administration of justice...

...The NAACP, born and bred in the briar patch of conventional politics, has regained prestige...

...If whites want it, let them work toward it with their own people...

...In five other states Goldwater would have won, had it not been for the Negro vote—leaving only his home state of Texas, where President Johnson carried a clear majority of white votes...

...To bemoan the passing from SNCC of "black and white together" is like bemoaning the abandonment (in all but lip service) by Negro Southerners of their beautiful, heartbreaking belief (it was there for a time) in nonviolent redemptive love...

...This is almost by definition, since the Negro middle class in the South (where normal roads to affluence have been blocked to Negroes) is largely a matter of standards and aspiration, not economics...

...The work goes on with that assumption—voter registration, community organization, political action, self-help enterprises...

...A CORE spokesman, discussing a similar exclusion of white student volunteers, said it better than the SNCC papers...