Notebook: The Pathos of "Black Power"

...With tactics inadequate even for serious reform, he proposes then to construct what might be called "socialism in one ghetto...

...Carmichael proposes that the black and white poor be organized separately, so that at some future point they can coalesce...

...Through the Negro church, the SCLC has its base mainly among Southern Negro farmers and sharecroppers, and some middle-class elements...

...The only difference, it seems, is that we are to have the rhetoric of black nationalism instead of middleclass values...

...In Bakersfield, California, the scene of several days of racial violence last May, the voters decided overwhelmingly on November 8 not to participate in the federal antipoverty program...

...If Carmichael here is assertive, his ideas bear a disconcerting resemblance to those of white moderates like Charles Silberman and Irving Kristol who say that what is needed now is not major social change but an improvement in Negro attitudes and psychology, that is, a sophisticated version of "self-help...

...It is also used as an attempt at an answer to those who ask how a black minority in the U.S...

...But over the years, its composition has changed...

...To be sure, Carmichael writes: "Ultimately, the economic foundations of this country must be shaken if black people are to control their own lives...

...But it is the Negro masses that must pay the price for the damage done by the ideologues of "Black Power...

...Would this belief stir it into action...

...But he is trapped...

...Carmichael's moral vision is admirable, but his social understanding fuzzy...

...We want to see that the black ghetto residents demand that an exploitative storekeeper sell them, at minimal cost, a building or a shop that they will own or improve cooperatively...

...they can back their demand with a rent strike, or a boycott and a community so unified that no one else will move into the building or buy at the store...

...we are determined to win political power, with the idea of moving on from there into activity that would have economic effects...

...The nation is moving in a vicious cycle," a New York Times reporter observed, "in which Negroes riot because whites do not do enough and whites do not do enough because Negroes riot...

...A black economy, more or less hermetic, is not merely a highly improbable vision...

...Those who still argue that violence and riots help the Negro cause had better think again...

...Foremost among these political allies is the labor movement...

...In short, Carmichael's economic program is merely an adjunct to his "Black Power" ideology, and the necessary tensions between that double reality—blackness and poverty —get lost in the shuffle...

...They, rather than the whites, would then exploit the misery of the economy...

...SNCC workers, blocking the entrances of a few recruiting stations, tried physically to prevent Negroes from enlisting...

...The definitive answer to those who see riots as a "creative" strategy came, however, in the 1966 elections, with the election of men to Congress pledged to cut back the entire poverty program...

...A slogan is not a strategy, and certainly not a program...

...Can, however, the Negro worker in need of a better job, or an increase in minimum wages, or a decent apartment, wait until Carmichael and his friends find out what they mean by "Black Power...

...This kind of elitism is common among "vanguard" organizations...

...They cannot solve these problems because they remain within the limits of the ghetto, at best making more humane an intolerable situation...

...Since Negroes in the deep South are struggling to get their share of political power, how does it inhibit them if they are told that the 78 leader of the Mississippi AFL-CIO, Claude Ramsey, is openly advocating and working to forge a Negro-labor coalition against the state's racists and reactionaries...

...And interestingly enough, inherent in the views of white moderates and "Black Power" enthusiasts alike is the assumption that the masses of Negroes are apathetic and have to be "electrified" into action...

...Carmichael's utopian vision—for that is what it comes down to: Brook Farm in Harlem—is likely to be discarded by those who will try 73 to carry out "Black Power" in a more realistic way...

...A recent Newsweek poll of Negro attitudes, North and South and among all income groups, showed that almost 90 per cent still looked to Dr...

...But what does a Harlem worker or a Mississippi sharecropper have in common with a feudal prince...

...I say this not merely, or even primarily, because William Buckley expressed agreement with Floyd McKissick's defense of "Black Power" on TV...

...A strange comment for an advocate of "Black Power" to make about a Negro community whose revolution has already shaken up every institution in the country...

...In a recent and vivid article, Carmichael writes: We have no infallible master plan and we make no claim to exclusive knowledge of how to end racism...

...Extreme status deprivation and frustration thus create fertile soil for black nationalism...

...We want to see the cooperative concept applied in business and banking...

...Had that been possible, the nationalist predecessors of "Black Power" all through the twenties and thirties would have succeeded...

...When Stokely Carmichael, Floyd McKissick, and New York CORE leader Roy Innis declared I.S...

...And for a movement that has by now begun to consider the basic changes necessary in the national economy in order to deal with the Negro plight, Carmichael's conservative proposals are a step backward...

...Make something of yourself . . . boy...

...And at this difficult movement, we would not be candid if we did not add that today "Black Power" advocates are becoming part of the problem, even as yesterday, under different banners, many of them were superbly part of the solution...

...Their fate, for better or worse, is linked to the economy as a whole...

...I don't mean to imply that he is indifferent to the Negro's economic plight...

...King as the foremost leader of the Negro revolution...

...it can yield a moment of satisfaction, but it does not yet give people a clue as to what to do next...

...As a tactic, separate organization may be temporarily necessary in parts of the deep South...

...The NAACP and the SCLC continue to command the support of the Negro masses, and their programs are more responsive to the thinking of the Negro community...

...In these two instances SNCC and CORE were substituting themselves for the Negro masses they claim to be responding to...

...Employers can exploit and use one group against the other...

...more than three-fourths still favored the NAACP as the major organization in the civil rights field...

...And for that, Negroes would have to take control of General Motors and U.S...

...This poll was borne out in the 1966 election...

...But myths die slowly...

...No boycott developed in the Negro community, where 94 per cent of the vote went to Brown...

...Consumer boycotts, rent strikes and such devices have been unable —they are inherently unable—to solve the fundamental problems of poverty and slum housing...

...The question is worth looking into...

...Exactly...

...Over 2 million Negroes have directly benefited from labor's fight for an increased minimum wage...

...At no point do the "Black Power" advocates raise fundamental demands that would challenge, or seriously modify, the economic status quo...

...Elitism and failure to put forward a concrete economic program are symptomatic of this divergence...

...Cynics say that radical intellectuals, be they black or white, always march to a different drummer than the masses...

...Now it is true that some special programs were initiated in Watts, though actually there was a minimum of money expended and a maximum of rhetoric...

...More important is the question: what would be the effect on the Negro community if it were to accept the idea that it has no white allies...

...And even where separate organization may be necessary, SNCC's style and ideology hinders the future unity of the black and white poor...

...no, he is poignantly aware of it...

...As Martin Luther King said, "the cry of 'black power' is at bottom a reaction to the reluctance of white power to make the kind of changes necessary to make justice a reality for the Negro...

...SNCC cannot spell out the full logistics of self-determination but can only address itself to the problem of helping black communities define their needs, realize their strength, and go into action along a variety of lines which they must choose for themselves...

...Then radicals played a prominent role, not only in sparking the early organizing drives, but also in consolidating the strength of the unions...

...In the end, the militant-sounding proposals for a buildityourself black economy (a black economy, alas, without capital) reminds one of . . . precisely those white moderates who preach self-help to the Negroes...

...They declare in favor of "letting the people decide," but their impatience and ideology drive them to try to decide for the people...

...One would have supposed that this myth had died after all that has happened these past several years: after the March on Washington, after Birming71 ham, after Selma...

...Medicare is not for whites only, and neither is increased unemployment insurance, workmen's compensation, or a larger antipoverty budget...

...There was an interpenetration of ideas and influences...

...At the beginning of the civil rights revolution these young militants put their bodies on the line, and, by heroic example, touched the conscience of America...

...I I The irrelevance of the economic program put forward by what has been called the "Left Wing" of the Negro movement invites a look at the social composition of CORE and SNCC...

...He writes: "We should begin with the basic fact that Black Americans have two problems: they are poor and they are black...

...What stands between SNCC's enclave in Lowndes County, Alabama, and Governor Wallace's state troopers and militia...

...Nor merely because the right-wing Free Society Association, headed by Barry Goldwater, announced that "Black Power could become a constructive political force under responsible leadership," since "it has at least the virtue of calling upon the Negro to think and do for himself...

...Who wants to become a part of a phony society...

...While CORE's economics is the kind of "storekeeper capitalism" preached by Elijah Muhammed, with a harsh Calvinist ethic that may help capital accumulation among the economically deprived, SNCC advocates a kind of black utopian socialism...

...Left-wing intellectuals were forced to recognize the day-to-day needs of a mass movement, while workers were influenced by the social vision of the intellectuals...

...If Caunichael's views were widely accepted, it would probably lead to retreat in the Negro community...

...Key policy-makers come from Howard University, the leading Negro college, whose graduates are part of what W. E. B. DuBois used to describe as the "talented tenth...

...This is one reason why SNCC lost the base it had built up in Mississippi, and CORE lost the following in the Northern ghetto it had developed with its rent strike program...

...With the departure of one of the original leaders of the Nashville sit-ins, its chairman, John Lewis, and Julian Bond, another indigenous Southerner, the new leadership, including Carmichael, is mainly from the North...

...Separate organization presents the same problem for the poor as dual unionism for the labor movement...

...But the group that provided the leadership for SNCC and CORE got hung up in their own social, ideological and identity crises...

...Black Power" may well become, as in part it has already, the slogan for Negro businessmen...

...When the SNCC leader talks about the need for local black people to control and make decisions about spending poverty money, he does not tell us (but we have to assume) that somebody outside of Lowndes County is fighting to expand, or at least maintain, the poverty program...

...In the labor movement, radicals could establish an institutionalized relationship with masses of working-class people...

...201 "a national battleground of 'Black Power' " and called for "Black teachers for Black children," over two-thirds of the students passed the picket line, which, in the heart of Harlem, could muster little more than 50 people...

...Meanwhile, however, what are the Negro masses to do...

...And this leads to the question of alliances and coalition politics...

...They became fixated in the first stage of the movement...

...In that sense, the Watts riot merely led to a redistribution of inadequate funds...

...Because I favor the substance of black power, I am dubious about the slogan "Black Power...

...Would it stimulate hope...

...They say that only after the riots in Watts did the federal government pay any attention to Negroes in that area...

...such action can be had if enough pressure is brought to bear...

...Malcolm X was an admirer of feudal leaders like Prince Faisal...

...To Negro workers, who must go to the factories "downtown" in order to earn their living, it can mean very little...

...Where Malcolm X's speeches are guides for black nationalists in CORE, the SNCC ideologues have to apply to the American context the more sophisticated thinking of Frantz Fanon...

...Much more serious are the comments of I. F. Stone...

...But as layer upon layer of the Negro community entered the struggle—today there are more Negroes active in politics, community improvement, and antipoverty projects than ever before—"the cutting edge of the movement" was called upon to play a different role...

...It would be absurd to blame Stokely Carmichael and other "Black Power" advocates for the "white backlash," which has its roots in American institutions and their failure...

...The clichés of the mass media—that these organizations represent the aspirations of economically deprived masses while the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference reflect the demands of the Negro bourgeoisie—has been too readily accepted...

...The new leadership of SNCC has also campaigned to convince Negroes to refuse army service during the Vietnam War...

...Coming from a white, this lack of confidence in the ability of the Negro movement to cope with other social forces might sound condescending...

...SNCC and CORE, operating as cadre organizations, can often be out of touch with community sentiment, or at least respond only to a narrow segment of it...

...As a result, he must make an enormous leap from revolutionary rhetoric to extremely mild and conservative tactics of ameliorism...

...They share with middle-class white youth in SDS their feelings of discontent and rebellion against American culture—"Who wants to integrate into a burning building...

...76 They moved tens of thousands of Negroes and whites into action...

...The creation of a national 'Black Panther Party' must come about...

...According to the New York Times, "Most of the benefits of the poverty programs now in effect . . . go to Negroes...

...different groups will work in their own 70 different ways...

...But this is precisely what he does not do...

...whereas Negroes exist as an exploited minority in a complex industrial society...

...By opposing the slogan of "Black Power," I mean that any course leading to a prideful but damaging withdrawal into—and thereby, in effect, acceptance of—the ghetto can only result in powerlessness...

...But if the definition is broadened to include those who have a common inter77 est with the Negro community in progressive economic and social change, then he is tragically wrong...

...In describing America's ghettos as colonial territories, they are attempting to internationalize the Negro struggle and to tie it to the anticolonialist revolutions in the Third World...

...Any program to end racism must address itself to that double reality...

...In California "New Leftists" and Negro nationalists urged a boycott of Pat Brown, while mainstream civil rights groups like the NAACP supported him...

...Now the problem of Negro deference is real enough, but it cannot be eradicated through threatening speeches or new "images...

...By power for Negroes, I mean grass-roots organization to strengthen "the Movement" and spur allied progressive forces—unions, churches, students, liberals—into renewed common action in behalf of a major economic program...

...With the burgeoning of the civil rights movement, and especially during the Freedom Rides, CORE expanded and its membership cut across racial and class lines...

...Besides the pride that comes from identification with Afro-Asian leaders, it provides stimulus for flagging morale...

...I If If Carmichael limits his definition of allies to those outside the Negro community who agree with his ideology of "Black Power," then he is right: except for a handful of intellectuals, he has no allies...

...All other problems arise from this two-sided reality...

...it is a society in which the spirit of community and humanistic love prevail...

...They have already experienced considerable social and cultural integration and express, in a way, some of 74 the same alienation common among American intellectuals...

...Confidence can be achieved in the Negro community in one way alone: through struggle, through concrete victories...

...There is no reason why Negro groups should not join labor in these struggles, even while continuing to criticize labor's failings Carmichael writes: ". . . there is in fact no group at present with whom to form a coalition in which blacks will not be absorbed or betrayed...

...The list could be continued, but apparently these "bread-and-butter" issues are more impressive to Negro workers than to some radicals...

...King's SCLC speak for the mainstream of Negro thinking in regard to integration, black power, non-violence, and white allies...

...But there is an important quality that makes them different...

...and the pressure can be brought to bear if a coalition of forces like that which initiated the March on Washington is reactivated...

...What is most striking about Carmichael's statements is their paucity of economic thinking...

...For all its rhetorical urgency, "Black Power" has a strangely quietistic effect, and that may be the reason it wins favor with both conservative politicians and the kind of radicals who talk grandly about "peasant revolutions" in the Third World but are indifferent to raising the minimum wage in the United States...

...those needs can be satisfied, or at least importantly eased, by federal and local action right now...

...The difference between the social strata leading SNCC and CORE is reflected subtly in their ideologies, styles, and economic programs...

...If Harlem and Roxbury "seceded" . . . and set up their own "government," it might bring worry—and action—in high places...

...and almost the same percentage 75 were opposed to leaving the Democratic party and going it alone in an all-black party...

...Another, perhaps more important reason is that they could not win the concrete victories necessary to maintain organization among the poor...

...Black control of the ghetto" has replaced "Integrate" and "Jobs and Freedom Now" as the rallying cry for a narrow section of the Negro movement...

...But it has a particular development in SNCC and CORE...

...This kind of deracinated talk leads not to concrete action involving large numbers of Negroes, but to quietism and copping-out...

...If Negroes set up their own "police force" in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the Attorney General might begin to rethink his narrow view of "federalism...

...But the historical lesson is that in the long run this can't succeed...

...Carmichael, however, is contemptuous of such ideas, since he has painted himself into a corner with the notion that the whole of American society is racist, there are no reliable allies, and nothing remains but to "go it alone...

...they must assume the presence of allies, or at least that not all the social forces outside the Negro community are one big reactionary and racist mass...

...can alone make the kind of revolution that SNCC is talking about...

...Some Negro intellectuals identify even with those African leaders, like Nkrumah, who come into conflict with the masses...

...In practice, SNCC and CORE cannot act according to their rhetoric...

...can we deny that only the fear of race war can force 79 us finally to gird for Negro rehabilitation and reconstruction as we gird for war abroad, on a giant scale and with a generous hand...

...Thus a dynamic relationship does not today exist between the alienated black intellectual and the Negro masses...

...Black Power" and New Left spokesmen have argued—and evidently, convinced some liberals—that the only way in which Negroes could wrest anything from the power structure was by violence and rioting...

...And why should this kind of alliance not become a constructive pattern for the rest of the South...

...But SNCC and CORE, which express this outlook, have not yet offered any program—good, bad, or indifferent—for resolving the contradictions that doom more than 40 million Americans, a large share of them Negroes, to poverty...

...At this point, a few words should be said about those white intellectual patrons of "Black Power" who are encouraging Negro militants like Carmichael...

...Their tactics were vital in the first stages of the revolution...

...What we are not told is how a national political party can be built by organizing Negroes around the woolly concept of "self-determination," which could, at best, apply only to a colonial people...

...Elijah Muhammed's favorite phrase is an invocation of the bourgeois ethic: "Wake up, clean up, and stand up...

...Instead he writes: 72 When we urge that Black money go into Black pockets, we mean the communal pocket...

...Black Power" is conservative because it signifies a turning inward of the Negro revolution, a form of economic separatism which, under the best of circumstances, would leave the ghetto intact and still at the mercy of overwhelming social forces...

...IH By comparison, the NAACP and Dr...

...But a separatist black economy—unless it were to be no more than a carbon copy of the poverty that already prevails—would need black steel, black automobiles, black refrigerators...

...Now as it moves toward black nationalism, its composition changed again and now, except for a thin layer of unemployed Negro youth, it is composed mainly of lower middle-class Negroes striving for self-expression in a context that enforces scarcity of social and economic opportunities...

...Is Charles Weltner of Atlanta, who resigned from Congress rather than support Lester Maddox, an enemy of civil rights...

...We are not told, but we must assume it is Washington, or at least liberal pressures on the Johnson Administration...

...By contrast, I want to advance the proposition: the major problems lie not in Negro "attitudes" or "values," they lie in socio-economic institutions that need to be changed...

...But this was not true, or wholly true, when the CIO was built in the thirties...

...It wants to replace Negro feelings of inferiority with race pride...

...He writes in the August 18, 1966, issue of the New York Review of Books: His [the Negro's] racism answering ours, is a necessary step toward our ultimate reconciliation...

...The result has been a tremendous loss to the Negro revolution...

...The society we seek to build among black people, then, is not a capitalistic one...

...I think not...

...I don't mean to imply that Carmichael doesn't have a better grasp of the economic realities than his article suggests...

...But first, writes Carmichael...

...For "Black Power" can mean different things to different people...

...Their economic needs are immediate and urgent...

...The racism and hatred of the oppressed cannot be equated with that of his oppressor...

...The riots—and they will become worse—have a logic of their own...

...I doubt it...

...Yet the experience of these Negro radical intellectuals is also very different from that of the slum dwellers: they are black, but they can at least partially find their way into middle-class white culture...

...Their intellectual and organizing skills were needed to consolidate the gains of the Negro revolution, to broaden it and help it deal with the intricate problems related to economic issues and social change...

...it could not, even if realized, significantly improve the life of the Negro masses...

...Proposals toward this end range from classes on Negro history, to self-help programs, to black control of the ghettos...

...A quarter of a million Negro unemployed have an interest in labor's advocacy of a full-employment economy and its endorsement of A. Philip Randolph's $185 Billion Freedom Budget with its job-generating and ghetto-rebuilding public works program...

...This may seem a bit modest—and less than frank—after he also discloses that "in some places, such as Alabama, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, and New Jersey, independent organizing under the black panther symbol is in progress...

...The white middle class can afford the luxury of being titillated by the derring-do of its children in the New Left...

...But again the results were nil, and almost no community support developed for this action...

...Their reply is, "People of color are a majority in the world...

...While the NAACP (whose membership is over 90 per cent Negro), is led mainly by Negro middle-class elements, the majority of its approximately 475,000 members are stable working-class Negroes...

...The Southern Populist movement, in which poor whites and Negroes were organized into separate groups, floundered on the rock of race prejudice— and also because this agrarian movement could not deal with the problems related to the industrialization of the nation...

...And even there it is not a great difference, since the two— black nationalism and middle-class values—are similar in many ways...

...Both envisage changes in style, rhetoric, language, morals —in everything but economic condition...

...After World War I, when Negroes really were without allies and a reaction set in against their previous minimal gains, their response was not militancy but Marcus Garvey's "back-to-Africa" movement...

...One reason for this is that they are broadly based organizations...

...Because of the deprivation in the Negro community, these educated youths were a vital resource...

...But Negro storekeepers may find it helpful in driving out white competitors and taking over tertiary aspects of the ghetto economy...

...New York Review of Books, Sept...

...they have had a first-hand experience of Southern brutality, and they know that their black skin ties them to all other Negroes...

...So far, the effects of the "Black Power" slogan on the white poor has been a disastrous relapse into racist violence...

...But how does this sort of thing change or even affect the basic troubles of the Negro masses...

...SNCC started as the organization of Southern Negro college students who led the early sit-ins...

...The programs, by the way, were not funded with new appropriations but came out of the money that had already been earmarked for antipoverty programs in other Negro ghettos...

...The closest we get to an answer is that SNCC will organize the ghetto on the basis of a "black consciousness...

...In a number of its implications, "Black Power" is a conservative position...

...22, 1966...

...SNCC's use of what is primarily a racial rather than an economic approach contributes to undermining the possibilities for a future alliance...

...Not a white suburbanite in the country, looking on from a reassuring distance, would care to disagree...

...What alternative does Stokely Carmichael offer to the A. Philip Randolph program for a $185 billion Freedom Budget and its implementation through a strategy of coalition politics to gain a majority in Congress...

...Ultimately...

...To be sure, Chicago Negro communities got sprinklers on their fire hydrants after the riots—but not much else...

...His refusal to work for coalitions that would cross racial lines is in practice a way of foregoing fundamental economic change...

...In the early stages of the Negro revolution, when the masses were in the streets, a similar situation developed, but then the bonds were weakened as the Negro struggle had to confront economic and political issues...

...over 80 per cent disagreed with the idea of dropping white allies...

...One of these, Professor Howard Zinn, writing in the Nation (September 5, 1966), layed out a strategy of "a kind of political guerrilla warfare" as an alternative to coalition politics: Setting up Parallels to unsatisfactory official bodies and new ones where they are needed (right up to Congress, the Supreme Court and an international war crimes tribunal) has infinite possibilities...

...Steel: hardly an immediate prospect, and utter fantasy as long as Carmichael proposes to "go it alone...

...More of the money would stay in the ghetto and a bit might even trickle down—who can be "against" Negroes having an equal right with whites to exploit Negroes...

...We want to see the money go back into the community and used to benefit it...

...Floyd McKissick, the new chairman of CORE, reflected the sentiments of this group in a recent remark that one example of "Black Power" would be for a Negro to sit on the Stock Exchange...

...As Bayard Rustin has written: Floyd McKissick and Stokely Carmichael may accuse Roy Wilkins of being out of touch with the Negro ghetto, but nothing more clearly demonstrates their own alienation from ghetto youth than their repeated exhortations to these young men to oppose the Vietnam War when so many of them tragically see it as their only way out...