The Riots and the Radicals
Kahn, Tom
Within this issue we print some comments on the riots by Bayard Rustin, comments with which I agree. We shall also have before long the inevitable, and hopefully useful, studies by the...
...It is not the reactionaries who burn up in their apocalypse...
...And with its disappearance, the movement has come to maturity...
...Aren't the Negroes' real problems—family instability, demoralization, alienation, pathology—beyond the reach of "mere" social and economic programs...
...now it has vanished...
...Guilt is assuaged and, simultaneously, withdrawal justified...
...They are either defeated in internal struggle or, it they prevail, they reveal their character by wrecking the union...
...and a "lesson" handed down by Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants...
...And meanwhile—unwittingly, with the best of intentions— this kind of liberal or radical verges on the cop-out now sweeping American society: the cop-out of saying, "give the Negroes lots of help, social economic and psychiatric, but let them stay in their own limits...
...Second is the "black backlash," by which I mean a revolt within the Negro community against destructive rioting...
...That fairly affluent Negro ghettos exist in some suburbs is not to the point...
...The "liberal backlash" is a so-far barely noticeable shift to the Right among some white liberals and radicals who, more out of habit than intent to deceive, continue nevertheless to express their frustration in radical terms...
...Those forces which only a few years ago did lead to victory by and for the Negroes, even if victory insufficient in quantity and kind, must be reassembled for a struggle to fulfill the promise made in the name of the Great Society...
...A movement for certain principles can disagree only over tactics and strategy...
...But let us return Negro suffers most from "powerless-the word "powerlessness" to whatever ness," from lack of identity and com-underdeveloped science gave it to us...
...They are more interested in quality schools for their kids than they are in the color of the principle or of the student body...
...Their sentiments are akin to Abraham Lincoln's following the Civil War: believing that Negroes should be free but despairing of their ever finding a place in American institutions, lie saw no alternative but their emigration to Africa...
...it sought the advancement of a certain class of people—as the labor movement seeks the advancement of workers, not of certain wages and hours...
...power to the socially oppressed means primarily having the conditions of their lives changed...
...And of course there are various independent liberal forces in the academic and professional worlds...
...In an earlier DISSENT Paul Feldman suggested that "Black Power" (as distinct from black power) had a way of letting white liberals off the hook...
...Would Messrs...
...What they disclose is a flirtation with separatism that until recently would have been unthinkable among liberals and radicals...
...If the socio-economic status of the Negro were to become equal to that of the white, the class basis for his separation would disappear...
...segregation and discrimination will victimize all Negroes, including the well-to-do, until the vast majority of Negroes have achieved a least an approach to socio-economic equality as a fact of life...
...Unlike most whites, however, the liberal cannot justify his alienation, his separateness from the Negro community with anger...
...but it does reflect a mood among some people on the Left, a mood intensified by the riots...
...While the conservatives do not want the huge federal programs required to abolish the slums, the liberals despair of getting them...
...What does the radical movement have to say to these people in 1968...
...Incidentally, 48 per cent said they would like to move into a public housing project...
...They would still receive the crumbs—no, the garbage—from the table of this affluent society, but they would take title to that garbage...
...evicted by urban renewal boards...
...it accepted both as given and demanded only that they be controlled by black people...
...We must develop new po-tuals, because they see themselves as litical arrangements wherein Negroes separated from power, are too eager can have a sense of controlling their to apply that perception, unmodified, own destiny...
...They are of enormous importance...
...compelling their use is the immediate and crucial task facing the democratic Left...
...But then at what point does this voguish pooh-poohing of integration mean anything...
...They want victories, as their voting patterns in the South have shown...
...He goes on to quote Columbia sociologists Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward as saying: "The Achilles' heel of housing programs has been precisely our insistence that better housing for the [Negro] poor [should] be achieved by residential desegregation...
...And what is so high-minded about Senator Fulbright—who has consistently voted against civil rights, minimum wages, medical care, etc.— when he now declares that we must divert Vietnam war-spending to help Negroes and our cities...
...4) Let us, for God's sake, stop using the Negro as a political football—more accurately as a footnote to theses on Vietnam...
...Any proposal in respect to the urban ghettos which does not center upon insisting that the United States government fulfill its economic and social responsibilities to the Negro masses is a cop-out—no matter how militantly phrased...
...It is time to be militant and time to be sober...
...I am not wanted by the Negro, and do not deserve to be...
...But even the more sophisticated create confusion by counterposing false alternatives...
...No liberals or radicals have so far publicly proposed this solution to the "race problem...
...The liberals who flirt with "Black Power" are willy-nilly accommodating to that status quo...
...But one thing seems clear: the events of this summer have destroyed the idea of a one-issue politics...
...In truth, the integration issue in this context is a straw man...
...The various brands of "Localism" now in vogue, "Black Power" being one, may well give people a heightened sense of participation, of being heard—and that's fine, up to a point...
...Increasingly people who in 1965 or '66 might have felt the riots were giving the country a needed shaking-up are beginning to feel that the damage far outweighs the alleged benefits...
...3) The riots have brought "the Movement" to the end of innocence...
...What could be more futile and misleading than to engage now in a debate over the location of housing that doesn't exist...
...The liberal attraction to "Black Power" is somewhat different...
...To me it appear clear that it would...
...Alsop, Piven, and Cloward propose that new housing sites be chosen and standards for admission be drawn so as to avoid integration...
...Such a polarization would occur around two issues: heat up the Vietnam War, shoot down the Negroes in the streets...
...A movement for the advancement of a class of people will contain disagreements over principles as well...
...Are not Negroes in some sense a separate nation after all...
...We now see the Negro movement as a full-fledged social force, pursuing race class interests, and involved in decisive political and economic issues...
...5) There is no way to discuss the riots without a word about the 1968 elections...
...First is the "white backlash" as conventionally defined—i.e., a shift to the Right among people at the Center and Right...
...There are the progressive religious forces, more deeply involved in social and political problems today, including opposition to the Vietnam War, than at any time in memory...
...One wonders who would govern Negroes who have wandered into the suburbs...
...Meanwhile, a reaction against the rioting and those advocating it is building up within the Negro community...
...If such housing were being built, the logical place to start putting it would be where the need is greatest—in the ghettos...
...In addition, anyone who has seen some of the armed, uniformed young Negro men who hurl anti-Semitic epithets and who are imbued with authoritarian discipline cannot but feel himself in the presence of a fasc...
...2) Who are they...
...Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael may continue to be heroes to some uprooted militant youth, and their capacity to inflame already smoldering situations may be undiminished...
...they may see a right-wing victory of considerable proportions...
...to the socially oppressed...
...it should be broadcast through the streets, where disastrous history is now being made...
...Such a confrontation could only encourage, on both sides, the hell-bent forces who wish to plunge this country into repression and "insurrection...
...It makes more sense to recognize that we have achieved neither uplift nor integration than to blame the absence of one on preoccupation with the other...
...I submit that this is nonsense, and dangerous nonsense at that...
...Are they suggesting—one assumes they are not —that the moment white middle-class suburbanites protest the building of low-income housing in their neighborhood the plan be immediately withdrawn so as not to make integration an issue...
...Admittedly, the problems we face are enormously difficult, and I do not propose to lay down a "line" here, if only because some of the necessary information is not yet at hand...
...Small groups have emerged in the Negro community with conspiratorial fantasies...
...ply to denounce this line of thought...
...If that seems a narrower label, it is in fact much broader...
...But they will not be able to organize the constituency they seek to lead, and within the larger Negro community they will become more isolated...
...The NAACP was not named the National Association for the Advancement of Certain Principles...
...The means for satisfying these needs are at hand...
...Is equality necessarily tied to integration...
...It does not decentralization and, yes, participatory advance analysis...
...It is Negroes—their bodies, their homes, their hopes for change...
...seemingly an echo from the American frontier...
...Yet, already have been enacted by the New again to some liberals and radicals, Deal...
...they Among these is the view that the are pushed around...
...We shall also have before long the inevitable, and hopefully useful, studies by the sociologists...
...At practically no point in the making of concrete policies...
...In Detroit the Negro press and prominent leaders criticized the police for not acting swiftly enough...
...But let us suppose that I am wrong in my "oldfashioned" and here necessarily oversimplified belief that integration will follow on the heels of equality more or less automatically and rapidly (over, say, one or two generations...
...Third is the "liberal backlash...
...Some of these interpretations are incom patible with the necessities of trade union development...
...Then, the feeling on the part of Negroes that despite their equality in every measurable degree they are still separated, now on grounds of color alone, will intensify racial frustration...
...I believe this feeling will grow as the political repercussions of the rioting become clearer with the approach of the 1968 elections...
...violence erupted...
...What do they want...
...The self-governing colonies would be not in Africa but imbedded in the center cities...
...If the goal is to rebuild the ghetto, population density must be reduced...
...There are millions of Negroes, not in the least represented by Stokeley Carmichael, who want substantial change, not token protest however shrill...
...Are they saying that rent subsidy programs to support low-income Negro families in middle-income housing should be opposed or ignored because these raise the issue of integration...
...but it must be squarely faced by those whose proposals for upgrading the ghettos while abandoning integration are advanced as . . . antidotes to rioting...
...It is no more possible to take an electoral stand based solely on the Vietnam issue than to take such a stand based solely on the issue of riots in the cities...
...But if our goal is to go beyond class therapy to institutional change, local efforts at autonomy can take on substance only if infused with national resources...
...My two remaining observations concern the posture of the radical movement in these times...
...Now one would suppose that fulfillFor some years now Rustin and ment of a prophecy draws attention other Negro leaders have warned that to its premises, that in this case atthe problems in the ghettos were get-tention would be drawn to the urgency of providing full employment this list of social priorities has become at decent wages, of constructing mil-tedious, commonplace, unoriginal—as lions of new housing units, of increas-if the constant recitation of a need ing investment in quality integrated were synonymous with implementaeducation...
...But sharing in various notions of "Black Power" enables him to invest these feelings with virtues they do not possess...
...Increasingly we think of it, not as the civil rights movement, but as the Negro movement...
...These are what I want to consider in the following observations: 1) During the next period the political atmosphere in the country will be largely determined by the intensity and duration of three "backlashes...
...A labor movement may contain Communists, Socialists, anarchists, liberals, even Fascists—all advancing their own programs for the movement, their own interpretations of what its principles and goals should be...
...A poll by John F. Kraft, Inc., reprinted in The New York Times of January 15, found 84 per cent of Harlem's residents would prefer to see the slums torn down rather than rehabilitated...
...it mystifies...
...The proposal for a "peace candidacy," even apart from the nature and limitations of the forces now inclined to support this proposal, must be examined with the greatest sobriety in terms of its likely consequences in American politics: would it signify giving tacit aid to Republicans whose major campaign stress is likely to be "order in the cities" (and all the reactionary implications behind that stress...
...There is the labor movement, determined to cash in on management's mushrooming profits...
...Substantial progress was I should like to offer some elabora-not made...
...The Negro movement has come to a comparable stage...
...only 17 per cent said they would like to stay in Harlem if they had to move...
...What seems terribly ominous about the forthcoming election is the prospect of a "polarization" which would satisfy William Buckley, on the one hand, and Stokely Carmichael, on the other...
...tions of my own...
...In fairness, not all liberals leaning toward "Black Power" fail to see be yond the struggle for independence to the problems of economic develop ment...
...Black people would then acquire possession of their own slum tenements, control their own crowded and segregated schools, do battle with their very own rats...
...New housing must be built outside the ghettos as well as within...
...While awaiting their reports, however, we need not delay moving toward certain political conclusions, some of which bear heavily on the prospects of the democratic Left in America...
...It is no longer the monolithic moral crusade it once seemed, a marching phalanx holding aloft Christian nonviolence and the Constitution, defending violated American ideals, saving the national soul...
...Before we get trapped in this Alice-in-Wonderland discussion, let's get out...
...This image was always superficial and naive...
...Within this issue we print some comments on the riots by Bayard Rustin, comments with which I agree...
...The point is that a a redefining of goals is inevitable and absolutely imperative...
...What could be more absurd, in a society where segregation is increasing, than to argue that the bar to Negro progress is an excessive zeal for integration...
...When we stop inventing new grand-scale theories to explain simple political failure we may come closer to understanding the causes of defeat...
...White liberals feel hurt by the riots, almost personally...
...Answers are not firmly given...
...The first two I will discuss later...
...The Negroes of Harlem are more interested in having decent jobs than in serving on poverty boards...
...This possibility need not greatly concern Rap Brown...
...Intellecdemocracy...
...The failure of our housing programs is that we are not building enough housing for low-income groups, not that we are hell-bent on integrating...
...they are speculated upon, toyed with, discarded and taken up again...
...Its victory in 1968 would bring neither peace in Vietnam nor reconstruction of our cities...
...At a time when cities are in flames and the Negro people cry out for relief, what is particularly moral about I)r...
...Both involve a kind of parochialism, and the problem we will face is to find ways of linking constructive proposals in regard to the two or, in some extreme cases, weighing one against the other...
...The prediction seemed melodramatic to me at the time...
...How many more cities must explode before certain friends in the peace movement will abandon their deprecation of every economic propo sal that does not simultaneously call for an end to the war in Vietnam...
...On the other hand, there are still potent forces for social progress...
...If the slums are rebuilt, the ghettos cannot last long...
...It contains a wing —associated with Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown—which, by identifying the movement with the riots and advocating a Castroite insurrectionary violence, seeks to change the fundamental character of the movement...
...Those who, out of sentiment for the old SNCC or nostalgia for their own youth, pinned some part of their hopes for social reconstruction on the Stokely Carmichaels and the Rap Browns must now surely know that their road leads to a dead-end...
...this year will see a record number of strikes...
...Who wouldn't be...
...Are we thinking about this or waiting until it is too late to have an effect on anybody...
...It did not challenge the federal government to tear down the slum ghettos and end de facto school segregation...
...Reformers must [instead] apply what political pressure they have to secure relief in the ghetto itself...
...they may think they are embracing a new Negro militancy, but in reality they are accepting, however reluctantly, the givenness of the segregated society...
...This lesson applies, even if in different ways, to elements in both the peace and the trade union movements...
...Spock's assertion that the riots are "inevitable" so long as the war continues...
...In the 1966 Congressional elections, which marked the beginning of the right-wing political resurgence, the danger was minimized by some radicals who saw Republican victories as a positive sign of dissatisfactions with Johnson's Vietnam policies...
...The latter action symbolizes what the right wing really feels and wants...
...Power to the intellectual may mean having his views heeded...
...It won the endorsements of Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley, who recognized that its emphasis on selfhelp, local initiative, and race pride was a rehash of Booker T. Washington's prescriptions...
...The facade of unity broken, internal debate should no longer be muted behind closed doors...
...And as between repression and "insurrection," it takes no great wisdom to realize that repression would triumph overwhelmingly...
...They are more interested in decent homes than in "controlling the ghetto...
...And in fact, among signifi-tion...
...And so we turn to notions that are Negroes are victimized by bureau" novel," even if they are also more cracies, brutalized by the police, misty and vague...
...When Stokely, Rap, and I were at Howard, we arranged a debate between Bayard Rustin and Malcolm X. Rustin repeated to Malcolm what he had said to Robert Williams some years before: that the Negro leader who advocates violence will end up in one of three ways—assassinated, imprisoned, or in exile...
...Thus proposals that have never been effected are assumed to have I do not mean to ridicule or simfailed, or at least to be badly dated...
...they are stunned and pained by the depth of anti-white hostility expressed by "extremist" speakers, by the epithet "honkey...
...They must be drawn in the radical movement, too...
...stic element...
...In a recent column (August 2) Joseph Alsop identifies himself with "those who want to put the practical horse—the horse of radical improvement of Negro housing, education and job opportunities inside the ghettos—ahead of the moral cart, which is desegregation and integration...
...In the August 13 New York Times ting worse, that unless substantial Magazine Bayard Rustin referred to a progress was made in employment, trend toward "mystification" among housing, and education, violence might some white liberals and radicals, and well erupt...
...Otherwise we shall all suffer consequences too terrible to contemplate...
...But the Left fascina tion with the cry for black control of the ghettos is a rough modern equiva lent...
...They have been induced by the riots to question the most basic premises of race relations: can we really have integration or should we settle instead for a kind of coexistence...
...When will they end their haughty insistence that nothing can be done on the domestic front unless everybody pulls out of the domestic reform movements to join the peace movement...
...The lines must be drawn...
...Let them do what they want, unburdened by my advice—so irrelevant in the past...
...Meanwhile, since we are back to first principles, let me state my own conviction that social equality and integration are inseparable—not simply as ideals but as sociological realities...
...The conservatives are at least defending a principled position, the status quo...
...munity, and that the answers to these It is now about as useful as the overafflictions lie in social experiments in worked "Establishment...
...The reaction of this political cant political groupings in the country type to the massive programs of, say, (the mayors, for example) these needs the Freedom Budget is that they must are being voiced increasingly...
...My own tentative bias is to urge liberalleft emphasis on Congressional elections...
...But despite the vaunted "liberalism" of some Republican victors, the result of the election was to re-establish the DixiecratRepublican coalition, which proceded to wreck rent subsidies, slash "Model Cities," cut back the war on poverty and aid to education, and even defeat the Administration's antirat bill...
...The mainstream tendencies in the movement, among whom there are also differences, are well known...
...Negro mothers and housewives will become more outspoken...
Vol. 14 • September 1967 • No. 5
