Where Is the Negro Movement Now?
Howe, Irving & Kahn, Tom & Feldman, Paul & Rustin, Bayard
The following conversation was taped toward the end of August, 1968. In addition to BAYARD RUSTIN, the well-known civil rights leader and ExecutiveSecretary of the A. Philip Randolph Institute,...
...HOWE: The mere fact of geographical concentration and physical concentration .. RUSTIN: That's what makes the violence .. . HOWE: .. . much more possible...
...First, I wish you'd say something, Bayard, about one of the arguments I encounter over and over again in the academic world, and I'm sure you find equivalents of it everywhere...
...Because, you see, I think the white children need examples of Negro teachers and principals .. . KAHN: At least as much as the black...
...It has some 450,000 members, and it is the only organization in the Negro community which raises anything in the millions from Negroes...
...So I think the question is not whether a Negro leader has relations with white people, or whether he tries to get something for the community from white people...
...Let's stay with the point Tom raised...
...HOWE: What would that mean...
...HOWE: Would you say that in any major urban communities CORE represents a significant force in the Negro world...
...I think the present mood of the whites—and this seems to me probably to run a very considerable gamut, all the way from liberals to reactionaries—is this: since the blacks are making trouble, we'll buy them off, let them have their mess, do what the hell they want with the schools...
...There are approximately 1 1/2 million to 2 million Negroes in the American trade unions...
...I wonder whether part of what is happening in the Negro community may be a similar phenomenon...
...RUSTIN: Well, Negroes already know this, and among the most despised Negroes in the ghettos are the people who work for the government, O.E.O...
...RUSTIN: Right...
...But that's not an argument against the kind of leadership he's provided...
...He does not live in a slum...
...Steel, to raise steel prices 5 per cent can have a much greater impact on the value of the dollar in the Negro community than a hundred neighborhood corporations employing thousands of people (if it ever got that far) trying to improve community services...
...These are things which we, as radicals, must be fighting for—not this black capitalist stuff, which essentially is going to benefit only a small class within the Negro community...
...HOWE: This seems so important, I want to see if I can repeat it in a more general way...
...Four or five years of agitation about this, and nothing happens...
...RUSTIN: No, I don't think CORE is a mass movement anywhere...
...But I think that, from one extreme to the other, all Negro leadership has that characteristic...
...What I am trying to point out here is that, socially speaking, we sometimes "believed" we were children...
...IRVING HOWE: One of the things that strike people not directly involved in the Negro movement is the tremendous difference between the way it looked in 1963 or '64 and the way it looks now...
...Thank God I got over that...
...The pendulum has swung from understatement to overstatement...
...If ever there was a form of corporate liberalism, this is exactly it...
...On two occasions, I joined the workers in marching on the picket lines, whereupon one day, a man in Harlem who has a substantial business pulled me aside and said, "Mr...
...The progress that the Negro industrial worker has won through the unions has served to remove him to some degree from the problems of the ghetto...
...What's happened in Detroit is that the Negroes in the UAW are splintered over political candidates, and only recently have they begun to work together in the union...
...KAHN: But there is a new twist...
...You don't get concessions until there's been trouble...
...In part this explains the quick turnover in the CORE leadership...
...HOWE: You were beginning to talk about the NAACP and the Urban League...
...And there is considerable internal organization of Negro workers in the trade unions, some of it informal, some of it formal through the Negro American Labor Council...
...And they beat it up to West End Avenue...
...RUSTIN: Which the government should be doing anyhow...
...Often those Negroes who are best off spout the most extreme rhetoric, and I think this has to do with their being ashamed of having "made it," when others haven't...
...And the black power people today play that role even more than the Uncle Toms did, because their role depends almost exclusively on their ability to scare white liberals and white moderates into granting concessions...
...RUSTIN: This is one of the ambivalences of the situation...
...I mean, just as, for example, foundations are willing to give money to all kinds of projects within the ghetto, I think there will be money, too, for some of the schools, even though we may wonder what the quality of education is going to be in those schools...
...Another way to put it is that if Negroes had been taught over 300 years that we were "children" and somewhat believed it . . . I can remember the time when I was a young man who went from city to city...
...And the reverse is also true—that people who are really able to help run the schools are going to abandon them because they know they cannot win in this setup and they do not want to become targets...
...It was the uprooted slum proletariat...
...This becomes very heartrending to me...
...HOWE: I guess this is a good place to end...
...By contrast, the proposals we make should be to get the money down to the people through public works and guaranteed income of some kind...
...I am for the community having a strong voice in the schools...
...Let us concentrate on building a black capitalist structure within the ghetto...
...It has 1600 branches...
...You don't have a Negro union...
...It seems to have a semiinsurrectionary character...
...The third point is that this is beginning to change...
...Many of the leaders of groups like SNCC and CORE cast their programs in terms of hope, but if you talk to young Negroes on the street, the underlying emotion is disappointment, and the pride they try to assert...
...RUSTIN: Right...
...Where I become disturbed is when they attempt to use the frustration methodology as a means for social change...
...It's a question of what he is trying to get...
...RUSTIN: I think that's right...
...Furthermore, the black child is going to have to live in an interracial society and he needs not just black teachers but black and white teachers...
...He, in effect, said, "We have to behave like a subjugated people, but nevertheless, within those limits, to improve our conditions...
...We are never going to make it in that world, or in that part of New York...
...KAHN: You're getting all kinds of proposals to set up corporations in the ghetto...
...Money isn't everything, but you can't do anything without it...
...He had a basic feeling of disappointment, a desire to pull back...
...The rhetoric is very "radical," but their behavior just the opposite...
...KAHN: Where was this...
...Their leadership depends much more on the white television and the white newspapers than was ever true of Booker T. Washington or DuBois, or Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young, for that matter...
...It is subject to the same economic pressures...
...This is potentially a tremendously powerful force...
...Now comes what A. Philip Randolph rightly describes as the "cultural revolt," asserting the Negro's sense of manhood...
...Of course, all this rarely takes place on a conscious level...
...And in an atmosphere where everyone's civil liberties decline...
...The argument is: "We know in principle that it's not a good thing...
...Bayard gave an example of Detroit with TULC's very impressive black workingclass operation...
...So the ambivalence of some of the militants might rest on something more complicated than a recognition of defeat...
...Organization has moved to the grassroots level...
...RUSTIN: Some do...
...I'll bet if you looked at the NAACP membership in Detroit you'd find it very heavily influenced by members of the UAW...
...It even seems to me possible that there will be money...
...It was those in the Negro community who live by their wits, the hustlers, the whores, the pimps and others, around whom the riot got started...
...I suspect that some sense of achievement and hope is a prerequisite for pride, and when these ingredients are supplanted by cynicism and frustration, pride is transformed into the kind of pathetic arrogance that has recently become so familiar in the ghettos...
...You see, what Tom is suggesting is interesting, that Young may be pulling a double switch, first to establish a connection with the blackpower people, and then to use it with his own clientele in the industrial community...
...It's a teen-age way of doing things, where the boys say, "Okay, there are nine feet between these houses," and you see the kids jumping across them all the time...
...HOWE: That's exactly what Jewish employers always said...
...A lot of the New Left have denounced corporate liberals, people like Tom Hayden, for example—I wonder what their reaction is to this latest development...
...King and I go out to Watts and they're falling all over themselves talking about a transportation system--not before the riot even though the need was there, but after...
...What would you say are some of the main reasons for the change from '63 to today...
...The attitude of liberal condescension that you're talking about simply sets the stage later-on for a worse racial conflict in the country, because among the majority of white people there'll be a growing resentment toward the young Negro admitted to college whether he has the grades or not . . HOWE: It also lays the basis for a pseudoconfirmation of the idea of Negro inferiority...
...In the days of Washington, for example, there was hope among certain Negroes, because there was a group of white industrialists and philanthropists who had made it pretty clear that if "you go along this road there is going to be success at the end of it...
...HOWE: I wonder how true that is though, Tom, because first, my guess would be that although obviously the conditions of Negro workers in Detroit have improved, their mobility has not been as great as that of white workers of an equal economic level...
...One is that they're isolated...
...One of the justifications that I hear —which is a very tricky thing, because it involves both realistic social observation and a new kind of liberal condescension toward Negroes—is this: "Look, we know that many of the things that are going on, or that CORE says are nonsense...
...KAHN: He's got a bunch of businesses, and there's no doubt that when boycotts of white stores are called in Mississippi, he gains...
...There has to be a tremendous education of rank-andfile Negroes, so that they'll take the time and energy to attend union meetings and vie for elected positions, which would then give them a base from which to operate...
...That is, the role of these unionists in the community...
...HOWE: How about the other way around, though...
...Almost all the Southern delegates supported Wilkins...
...KAHN: The NAACP, by virtue of its size and structure, is able to make internal concessions, without having to undergo an upheaval in the national office...
...No hospital, no transportation system...
...So I say that the slogan ought to be "Integration where possible, and improvement where integration is not immediately possible...
...So I'd say I understand the entrepreneurial urge, I feel it must be done because it's psychologically necessary, but it can't be the economic salvation of the Negro, or a way to clean up the ghetto...
...I'm for this because Negro youngsters should see Negroes owning business...
...and where you got revolt was out of such places as St...
...It is going to deepen the class conflict within the Negro community...
...it's extremely defensive...
...They turn to whether you call yourself Negro or black...
...That's in regard to riots, violence, etc...
...And I believe that there's no need to decry that...
...PAUL FELDMAN: This is based on the assumption that the Negro movement has suffered a total defeat over the last eight years, that there's a feeling of total hopelessness...
...This won't get you very far right now...
...You have to understand there will be emotional outbursts and excesses, and actingout and self-dramatization...
...Tom KAHN: I think the problem is not just that this approach is morally objectionable, but that it's simply not going to work—and for two reasons...
...It's probably inevitable...
...I believe that if for 5, 10, 15 years there are going to be schools which are predominantly Negro, then they should be improved...
...HOWE: Let's stay with the school issue for a few minutes...
...What they're saying is, I'm not in favor of revolution, none of that nonsense, but in order even to achieve what you or the reformists or liberals want, the only way to do it is through violence...
...We know that much of the rhetoric of Rap Brown is nonsense...
...Unless we're to suffer total demoralization, what else can we do except try to build our own enclave in our own world and even if we know it's a little artificial to look to African languages, to which we have no real organic connections, still we've got to try to find symbols by which to express this ghetto culture...
...I was talking last night to a young fellow whom Bayard knows, who was saying, "Well, look what happened to Martin Luther King...
...And it's possible that the less well-trained, Negro teacher, because he has a strong incentive, will be able to arouse the kids to learn in a way that the better trained whites may not be able to arouse them...
...KAHN: The other limitation is that there's no way to escape the consequences of decisions made by the white corporate power structure...
...Now if you will look at who it is that is leading the fight for the Negro to completely take over the schools in the ghetto, it is not the working poor, it is not the proletariat, it is not those who have decent jobs because they're organized in labor unions...
...So to some extent Negro workers in these unions are removed from the ghetto itself and from its day-to-day problems...
...I think of Washington as a leader of a defeated people...
...RUSTIN: I think it's also personalities...
...And you have to separate their rhetoric from their behavior...
...But when you have a society that is not susceptible to pressure or moral appeals, the only way you can get them to pay attention is through an equivalent of guerrilla warfare...
...The logic of the violent rhetoric and talk of future violence is destructive at two points...
...Lynch can call for a still more militant stance— yet work for the Urban Coalition, which is establishment if there ever was one...
...Because they simply don't want any longer to be bothered with all the problems involved in attempting to integrate our schools...
...KAHN: Yes, the problem is one of accumulation of capital...
...it is a part, psychologically, of the maturation process...
...HOWE: If we look for an analogy, it might really be with the socialist movement in its earlier phases when it became in part a training school which prepared a large section of the Jewish intelligentsia for roles in trade unions, the academy and government, and middle-class institutions...
...But there's not enough money to overhaul the school system and provide quality education—not from private sources...
...He wasn't talking in terms of hope...
...Cast down your buckets where you are...
...Number two, trade unionists in general, whether they're black or white, do not tend to participate in community affairs as trade unionists...
...Both the Urban League and the NAACP have within them elements reacting to the black-power movement...
...RUSTIN: Right...
...The next step is, "You say you want to shoot a white man...
...HOWE: One last question...
...HOWE: That has been justified by some people (apart from the rhetoric of local democracy) as realism...
...I was in on the planning of the Urban Coalition but 1 can assure you the only reason it was founded was because of the rioting...
...Perhaps, 10 years from now, for the first time they will be able to tell you honestly what they think without overstatement...
...Nevertheless, whether for good or for bad, at least in some places Negroes are going to be running the schools...
...But this year neither the Negro community nor the Negroes' white allies could become excited for the reason that deep in their minds, though erroneously, they felt there had been so much talk of young Negroes using guns that some people thought maybe they did shoot at the police first...
...First of all it's destructive in terms of the ultimate protection of innocent Negroes...
...for example, that in the big Detroit riot of last summer, according to research that has been done, it was not the declassed elements that were dominant...
...RUSTIN: Because I believe that the effort on the part of liberals as well as conservatives now, merely to turn over the schools and let Negroes handle them themselves, really means that whites are going to abandon the city with its bad tax structure and with less and less money for these schools...
...RUSTIN: Well, my feeling is simple...
...There was a very considerable number of Negroes with relatively decent jobs who were involved in the riot...
...In other words, "there has to be some kind of emotional wildness, which you rational social democrats, socialists, liberals, etc., don't appreciate" RUSTIN: Oh, I fully appreciate this, and I think that a good deal of what appears to be irrational is not really so irrational...
...They're organizing around health facilities, education, all kinds of committees set up trying to find jobs, housing committees, improvement committees, people cleaning up the neighborhood, making vest-pocket parks...
...HOWE: Somewhere very deep down in their feelings there must be some sense that they just have to raise hell to the point where attention will be paid and concessions offered...
...I always give the example of Randolph setting up a committee to get a Negro policeman appointed to captain over the Harlem district...
...There's enough money around to provide some Negro professionals with $18,000 a year salaries as school supervisors...
...He owns stores and a hotel and...
...Why can't it, after all, end up with a lot of Negro mothers chipping in and helping out the devoted Negro teachers, inspiring the kids, and maybe making a good school out of it...
...He's got to do something to offset that...
...RUSTIN: Look, I agree with everything you've said, and I think this is the basic danger, in a multiracial society, of attempting anything which has as its ultimate objective racial separation...
...RUSTIN: The businessman would prefer to engage the energies of the black-power elements in all kinds of propositions where he can get tax rebates, tax guarantees and write-offs—as against what is really radical, the kind of changes in priorities and basic social change, as in the Freedom Budget...
...Where people feel, as in the South, that they are making some political or economic progress, you get one sort of an attitude...
...And I think that another period in our history when this happened was after World War I, when the Negro had expectations, came back and found lynching and unemployment...
...They turn toward how you wear your hair—and not to whether you are prepared to join some group such as NAACP in integrating schools...
...Yet that is not true...
...The employers made the same kind of ethnic appeal: "We have something in common, and don't get mixed up with the gentile trade unions, we'll work it out, we'll go to the rabbi and adjust it peacefully, but don't organize a trade union...
...For example, does CORE still re present a significant movement, to the extent that it once did, or is it down to a tiny minority of black nationalists...
...Stokely Carmichael, I suspect, is going to have to get a little more militant now that he's bought a $70,000 house...
...And this is where I wonder whether what you said might not require some modification...
...I think we have to see that the rioting is usually triggered by an incident that involves the lumpenproletariat or working poor...
...Among the tenants were black nationalists, but some of the black landlords were also black nationalists...
...So he buys a gun...
...He said, "Sooner or later, they'll be picketing and trying to organize my building...
...HOWE: But there's one new factor— violence...
...Now, there are all kinds of people who want to fight for "decentralization" but who do not see the need to fight for money...
...Become nice people...
...So what you end up with is a social rationale for increasing your profits...
...Yet, sadly the situation is that if you talk with them now, they still cannot tell you the truth...
...HOWE: This is a good transition point, maybe, to come to some description of what is the current position of the Negro movement...
...But even if Stokely does not talk to a single white person (and of course he does), his effectiveness lies in his ability to frighten the white moderates into granting certain kinds of concessions...
...Obviously the Negro in the trade union movement is going to behave pretty much the way all union members behave, and I think it's to the credit of people like Sheffield that they've set up their street academies and clubs, and gone into neighborhoods to get the boys into the trades...
...Right now, if you were to get even more through persuasion, political education and political action they'd reject it...
...That is then followed by excessive police force which then gives the whole community a justification: they brought in too much force, we ought to strike back in the way we can, go on looting...
...HOWE: Those all seem cogent reasons, but take a place like Detroit, where the Negroes now form something like 40 per cent of the population, and where their percentage within the UAW in Detroit must be a third...
...As long as they don't come on my block!—that seems to be, at the present time, the essential view of whites...
...You are saying there is, tactically speaking, a certain shrewd perception in the idea that if you want to get something, you can do it by force or the threat of making trouble or the reality of making trouble, and this would get certain things .. . RUSTIN: Has gotten . . . HOWE...
...Yet as it appears to an outsider, the Negro trade unionists within the Negro world don't seem to play a role commensurate with their numbers, their social stability, their potential strength...
...There have already been some instances, along these lines, of an exacerbated conflict on economic grounds within Harlem...
...The tacit precondition is to end the drive toward integration...
...KAHN: I don't want to get too far away from the question of the Negro trade unionists...
...Where I disagree with some "militants" is with their abandoning the ultimate solution, which is integration...
...If you are the detached social psychologist or cultural historian, the kind of approach you've just outlined makes sense and you can have a certain amount of detachment and understanding and sympathy...
...If in 1963 in a North Carolina college three Negroes had been shot and many wounded by the police, there would have been a hue and cry in this country...
...Is there any place where it resembles a mass movement...
...You haven't got a gun...
...The same argument's going to be used in the ghetto...
...HOWE: Why should the immediate victories plague you...
...In this new period, where our aspirations are very high precisely because there has been some progress, Negroes can now see themselves as utilizing violence...
...It's a mixture, and the important thing is to find out what the blend is...
...and PAUL, FELDMAN, editor of New America...
...That is to say, unlike Jewish groups...
...The Urban League is not a mass Negro organization, it does not have a substantial membership...
...He knew that defeat was unavoidable, there was nothing you could do about it...
...But in its ideology and verbal militancy and the kind of people it puts forward, CORE just fits the present mood of the foundations, city establishments, and the like...
...KAHN: For a long time, militants have labelled as Uncle Toms those Negroes who played the role of a broker, those who go out to get something from white people...
...He got a little bit of patronage from Teddy Roosevelt...
...Same thing in Watts...
...Then the criminal element moves in to exploit it, and I mean the minor criminal element, because if there's anything that organized crime hates it's a riot...
...but as I said earlier, they're organized around committees in the local community, sometimes a block group...
...Other roads had been closed off...
...RUSTIN: Well, I think there are several reasons for this...
...Maybe they're not the best educators and maybe they want to use this for propaganda rather than education, but still, Negroes will be running the schools...
...Third, and quite honestly, many of them are in appointed positions, which means they are required to carry out the will of the various Boards...
...say, "Oh, well let's not be chicken...
...RUSTIN: Certain elements of the Negro community are not unaware of the problem which you have mentioned...
...KAHN: Wouldn't you say it's also that in many of the areas they come from they're under constant attack from the CORE and SNCC people...
...It depends which hat you wear...
...HOWE: The comparison you made between the Booker T. Washington period and the present one seems to me to hold, but only up to a point...
...I fear what's going to happen in most of these cases is that whoever screams the loudest, regardless of his qualifications, is going to be put on the Boards to run the schools...
...Norman said that the landlord appealed to the tenants not to join a rent strike because it was a white honky union coming in to disrupt the black community...
...That's good for psychological reasons...
...FELDMAN: Norman Hill gave an example when he was working for the UAW community unions...
...he must reject those on whom he's dependent...
...RUSTIN: This is a process that's been going on for some time, and I'll give you two illustrations...
...Now what is happening in the Negro community is that we have become a bit like social teen-agers...
...He went in to organize rent strikes, and some of the buildings were owned by black landlords...
...KAHN: In every movement, there's a mixture of hope and despair...
...Only through exploiting black workers...
...So what you'll get is not a solution of the problem, but a postponement of it, and thereby a worsening...
...What we are saying is that those who propose black capitalism as an economic way out for the Negro community as a whole are mistaken...
...But I think you have to see what really happens at the NAACP...
...That finally, screaming, yelling, bitching, the white society is going to be made to accept it .. . RUSTIN: Well, I'm all in favor of Negroes opening co-op stores and shoe shops and groceries in Harlem...
...HOWE: As a subpoint here, what do you make of these new things, both in Cleveland and Brooklyn, where there seems to be something beyond riots...
...But if you're talking about the economic emancipation of the ghetto, it cannot be around little grocery stores, where an A & P can move in the next day and put them out of business, or in a situation where everybody knows that one of the economic trends of this nation is that small businesses are forced out and large combines taking over...
...HOWE: But suppose somebody said, "All right, let's assume everything you say is true...
...One is that to some extent if you look at the situation objectively they're right...
...Why did Whitney Young come out at the CORE convention with something that sound ed like black power...
...In the ghettos, where things don't seem to be changing, they have all these pressures on them that Tom and I were just talking about...
...The second tragedy is this: Let's say there're 15 of us who've been sitting around for a year now talking about how devilish the white man is and how he won't do anything unless you shoot him or kick him in the nuts...
...Young made a statement recently suggesting that corporations supporting the Urban League had pushed the Urban League in the blackpower direction, and he turned around and said, "You are the guys who pushed us in this direction...
...What they want to know is—Did you get it by being nice, or by calling him a son of a bitch...
...Couldn't it be argued that taking over some of the schools, even if in the short run it means suspending integration, would at any rate have the desirable effect of increasing pride...
...RUSTIN: Right...
...All that the Negro entrepreneur can determine is how large a profit margin he wants to make...
...Now, when it comes to the conflict within the NAACP...
...In other words, they want to be free to act out their role before the television cameras in the way that they want to act it out...
...These issues provide an outlet for their status needs...
...It's a patronage which is very different, say, from that which Negroes could get from Mayor Daley or through Tammany Hall...
...HOWE: What's likely to come of this revolt in the NAACP...
...Essentially, Young's program has always been to try to get jobs for Negroes in white industry, things of that sort .. . RUSTIN: That's right...
...And there's a marvelous story that Norm Hill tells of Newark, where this well-dressed Negro woman who looks like a schoolteacher stands in front of the store for 15 minutes pleading with these young Negroes not to loot the place, but who finally walks out with a small television under her arm...
...On the political side, there's a real danger of the appearance of a new elite in the Negro community, an elite which will be based not on a tradition of struggle, such as, for better or worse, say the people around Martin Luther King were, but an elite which would consist of the guys who will set themselves up as the self-appointed spokesmen, and the guys who can deliver a certain amount of social peace and maybe votes, and who in turn will be decidedly well rewarded...
...They then got out their shotguns to keep the rioters from near those $25,000 homes...
...You know, it seems reasonable: if you can't transform America, at least do something about your own school...
...But if you have a situation of a people that has been so very long subjugated, and suffered the indignities the Negroes have, then you can't expect that the process of self-liberation is going to be purely rational, or that it's going to conform to all your humane or humanistic preconceptions...
...RUSTIN: Well, my own view is that sufficient concessions will be made to contain it...
...Another example would be Watts, where the IUD has started to organize the union members in the area to go into the community and play a role in political and economic struggles...
...Okay baby, you got your gun, I've got mine, who else is going to go with us...
...HOWE: The same kind of thing happened 50 years ago, when the Jewish garment unions were first formed...
...Second, in several unions which have increasingly high Negro membership, like the ILGWU, they're women who have to run home after their eight hours of work and make a meal and look after children, and who therefore do not attend union meetings, cannot be prevailed upon to serve on committees, and do not develop much power in the union...
...there are some people in there who think Roy Wilkins speaks too softly...
...In 1963 the movement had a coherent structure, there were a number of national organizations...
...My experience in the community is that once there is wide-spread looting, people of all classes ultimately get involved in it...
...At the same time, there is appearing a generation of young Negroes who are bright, articulate, enraged, intelligent, but who don't really have a way into the society...
...HOWE: CORE functions more like a leftwing ideological sect...
...HOWE: Or improvement in any case...
...Now, you talk about black capitalism, which makes everybody feel good...
...Do you see the revolt within the NAACP as another version of what you were speaking of earlier, namely a turn toward a kind of rhetorical excess, an impatience with traditional forms of protest...
...They can no longer endure the struggle outside, and turn the struggle inward...
...RUSTIN: There's another factor here, which is internal: sooner or later the degree, small as it is, of Negro unity in making demands on the whole society will be splintered, instead of congealing around a fight for political and economic objectives...
...When you try to get into the larger world, look what happens to you...
...HOWE: The problem is the one you touched on earlier...
...You want a larger outlet, something with more impact...
...Now, this is a very tricky argument, because it really justifies quasi-revolutionary or quasi-nihilist violence in the name of a reformist objective...
...They are now adopting the worst concepts of capitalism and attempting to apply them to the ghetto, a sort of pettybourgeois small-business entrepreneurism that is presumably not affected by capitalist society as a whole...
...For while the internal life of a Negro co-op might be better than that of a business owned by an individual Negro, the co-op, as a unit in relation to the economy as a whole, has to function pretty much in the same way as a capitalist company...
...Now the one thing you know about the maturation process is that as many things will be done that are stupid, frustrated, and dangerous, as things that are creative and imaginative...
...we don't care whether they teach Swahili or post-Russell symbolic logic, or whether they can spell or can't spell, they can do anything they want as long as they stay on their own turf...
...RUSTIN: Oh, sure, this is possible in certain circumstances...
...Now I'll give you an equivalent...
...Without it we would be in serious trouble...
...There won't be enough resources made available to change these institutions basically...
...If you remember, Bayard, you used to say all the time, "A movement needs something—victories— that's one of the reasons we're going to do this and we're going to do that, we need to inspire the people to continue the struggle...
...So that the Negro is really in the middle of a maturation process, moving as a group toward social manhood...
...And I think here of the argument that the authoritarian process of accumulating capital is justified on the grounds that a surplus is needed for social development...
...Louis, New York, BedfordStuyvesant, and the troubled ghettos...
...So that the NAACP, no matter what anyone says, is the one solid, basic organization in the Negro community...
...The defeat hasn't been total...
...Many of them are much more concerned with debating whether you should be called Negro, Afro-American, or black...
...RUSTIN: I think that you've selected a good example because people like Horace Sheffield in the UAW and others have had a tremendous effect in Detroit through the TULC, the Trade Union Leadership Council...
...RUSTIN: Not CORE nor any of the black nationalist groups, who would have been out there by the dozen if a white man owned the Amsterdam News, not one of them showed up on that line to support that strike...
...SCLC is not an organization, it's a collection of ministers who raise money and do projects...
...The Negro UAW member in Detroit is a homeowner...
...But meanwhile, goes the message, "stay away from my suburbs...
...There's no reason to believe that black capitalism will bring lower prices or better wages to the ghetto...
...Thus far there have apparently not yet developed well-known trade-union Negro leaders...
...Rustin, I don't think you ought to picket the Amsterdam News, which is owned by a Negro...
...That is, the ambushing of cops in Brooklyn...
...This doesn't at all impugn the sincerity of the people who are involved any more than we're trying to impugn the sincerity of the people in CORE...
...I mean objectives that can make their block on 122nd Street look and feel different...
...Is it like the kids in the Sorbonne...
...HOWE: Recently I heard that the rebelliousness among the French students was among those who were in the humanities and the social sciences, that is, in the "vague" disciplines...
...This would be part of the view that says we have to, in effect, "carry along" Negro students, whether they have been properly taught or not, and this is part of the social cost of a major transformation...
...RUSTIN: There are two tragedies here...
...Whereas in the South they were spread out and the Ku Klux Klan could ride at night with sheets over their heads, and economically they could be frightened because they were sharecroppers...
...Rather, they tend to identify these social concerns with their own economic advancement and mobility, with their own professional careers...
...RUSTIN: No, not in the riots, but in the looting...
...Now when the riot began in Cleveland, the Negroes living up on the hill took the attitude: thank goodness our young people are not just going to take it lying down...
...Nevertheless, I have an obligation to understand why it happens...
...And why...
...Some of them are rising in the tradeunion structure...
...HOWE: That seems a classical example of political schizophrenia...
...But if you're involved, say, as you, Rustin, are in day-to-day politics, then there is, I would guess, a tremendous conflict between your understanding and impatience or despair at what may be the unhappy political consequences...
...Corporations moving into the social arena to encourage a form of black power—that's a form of intervention the New Leftists themselves have deplored...
...HOWE: Yes, and the argument seems to apply even to Negro co-ops, which I'm sure we all would favor far more than Negro small businesses...
...We ought to be approaching the matter another way...
...There are several significant points about the NAACP...
...HOWE: Raising the ante indefinitely isn't going to work .. . RUSTIN: Right...
...He set up schools for occupational training...
...I don't want to choose between these two things...
...The second tragedy is that although we will receive minor concessions from the establishment, once the rioting reaches a certain point there will be repression against the entire Negro community...
...It didn't work...
...has gotten certain things, but that it is like playing with fire, something like Russian roulette, because it raises in the minds of some Negroes the idea that if you can get a small concession with a small riot, maybe you can get a big concession with a big riot, or with more than a riot...
...Many are in existence for some time, many for a few months...
...Let me add that the reason usually given—that Negroes were made promises and the promises were not delivered—while it has some truth, doesn't seem a sufficient explanation...
...Tom KAHN, executive secretary of the League for Industrial Democracy...
...To be more precise, I am not saying that they have no ideals, that they are indifferent to the children and the need for better education...
...Suppose you turn to young Negroes now, saying, "Your problems are political...
...and thus, instead of being interested in NAACP or Urban League, they begin to be interested in their block associations, their tiny little teachers' and parents' groups...
...That's the problem...
...A number of the black-power conferences have been financed by the large corporations like the Bell Telephone Company...
...But it really strikes me as an incredible failure that if this is true of Watts and Detroit, nobody knows it...
...I have three or four more questions which I think are important...
...Go back to Africa...
...What is a black man...
...RUSTIN: A filling station, I think...
...It usually depends on whether there's a key person around who can keep the thing going...
...A simple decision, for example, by U.S...
...A profound distinction...
...The final tragedy is that while political action to achieve our goals, I would be the first to say, has not achieved enough, and while the coalition of forces required to achieve them has not been strong enough, that coalition will be completely decimated if the rioting continues to escalate...
...I think it's also the fact that there's a genuine feeling that the NAACP board has too much power, and they want to cut that down...
...A small section of the middle-class Negroes clearly is improving its position in the society, getting jobs in corporations, in universities, etc...
...There's something about people, they can't stand around seeing somebody get something for nothing without getting involved...
...In the long run, their impact may be greater than that of the TV desperadoes...
...And as a force within the community, the Negro unionists there don't seem to play a major role—or do they...
...Shut your fuckin' black mouth...
...In the Washington period Negroes felt so utterly defeated, they could not even allow themselves to think in terms of violence...
...HOWE: Your point is that while they use a very extremist or "revolutionary" vocabulary, their real idea is that of trying to make the best of what they inwardly look upon as a defeat...
...Suppose a lot of Negro militants or young Negroes feel something like this, "Well, we tried...
...and Haryou Act, making $18,000, $20,000, $25,000...
...RUSTIN: Just so there's no misunderstanding: we all agree that for psychological reasons, Negroes certainly should try to own businesses in the ghetto...
...RUSTIN: They have two white employees, out of what must be a hundred...
...With the movement now turning inward, I think that what we are seeing in many places is not a genuine self-confident pride, but a defensive, compensatory, and abrasively insecure imita tion of pride...
...But the students in the professions where there was hard, concrete knowledge, discipline and mastery required—science, engineering—were not involved in these rebellions, because they feel that they have an assured future in the increasingly technological society of France...
...The white liberal opts out of the struggle and ends in the same camp with the reactionary, both of them saying: "Let them have their own schools, let them do with them what they will...
...KAHN: That's a very important point...
...And you can begin to see this, I think, in relation to certain Negro leaders and the foundations, in the political parties and the more progressive city administrations...
...It disrupts its procedures...
...Now we want the money to carry out the program...
...You set up a couple of profit-making enterprises, and the profits are supposed to support various social services in the community, like day care centers, etc...
...Every time CORE decides on a policy change, a new executive director has to be brought in...
...They don't want any centralized control over what they say or do...
...What's the significance of the rebellion within NAACP...
...RusTIN: Right...
...Instead of thinking in grandiose terms about transforming America—"I have a dream" and all that —a fellow on 122nd Street decides at least he's going to transform his school...
...Also, in the Booker T. Washington period, you had about 90 per cent of the Negroes in the country living in the South, while now the violence is made possible by urbanization and industrialization, which throws them into large black communities in Northern cities...
...In times of frustration, there is a turning inward...
...And to go a step further, it's conceivable that even if the educational levels drop, nevertheless, kids who come out of these schools will be admitted into colleges—even if they haven't been very well taught...
...The other organizations can't do that...
...And I can give you a good illustration...
...Why does NAACP, which still has over 400,000 members, maintain the image in the white community as still the most adaptive Negro organization...
...It is now the only national organization with a considerable membership...
...Both sides need to be trained for the kind of society they're going to live in...
...KAHN: Most of the employees on the Amsterdam News are Negro...
...They would do the same things he does, except in a more militant style...
...and many of the organizations, including CORE and SNCC, are encouraging that kind of debate as against doing the real job...
...We know that teaching Negro kids Swahili, who don't even know where Africa is, that that's nonsense...
...The teenager is caught in a maturation process...
...He must do certain things...
...Though the demands of some "militants" may finally not be very different from those of Booker T. Washington—you know, having a Negro finance company, setting up little cooperative dry goods stores, just the kind of thing that Washington would have favored . . . nevertheless there's also the element of riots and even now the beginnings of something resembling guerrilla action...
...KAHN: Are you saying that people who riot in ghettos have this as a conscious purpose...
...But the difference between then and the present period is, I think, that he Fet himself a series of very limited, practical goals...
...Martin Luther King, he represented symbolically the whole push for integration...
...The Booker T. Washington movement was up against a situation where there could not be victories in voting...
...Therefore, let's concentrate on building new black schools with a black culture within...
...Henry Kaiser, when he was free, white, 21, and a millionaire, at the end of World War II tried to break into making cars, but he soon realized that it was too late, the boys had the thing under control and could squeeze him out...
...You've got to get money for that...
...I mean, do we have to assume that any place, like 201, or Brownsville, has to be a fiasco or a disaster...
...There could not be real economic integration...
...Now let's take the major organizations...
...The most authentic and impressive manifes tations of pride came during the early sit-ins and the Montgomery bus protest...
...HOWE: You mean it's become pretty much, for better or worse, the home of a range of black nationalists...
...There will be private money available, but not enough money...
...In addition to BAYARD RUSTIN, the well-known civil rights leader and ExecutiveSecretary of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, the participants included IRVING HOWE, editor of Dissent...
...Now we're moving into a situation where the rhetoric means we're not even going to be able to defend innocent people...
...And instead of white teachers and white principals the kids will be seeing black teachers and black principals, who'll be set up for them as models...
...Periodically some kid falls and dies...
...KAHN: Negroes in the large industrial unions like the UAW, Steel, and others, have experienced pretty much the same kind of transformation in their lives that white workers have...
...But I am not for certain plans which have been devised, because they give the Negro a voice but no money with which to work and therefore, I think the result of that kind of decentralization is going to be the deterioration of the ghetto school...
...And finally we all...
...While- they hold onto their sports cars and split-level homes, they go on with the extreme rhetoric...
...BAYARD RUSTIN: The major factor is a psychological one: not being able to achieve what Negroes consider—this is over and above the question of whether there was progress— their objectives...
...if there are jobs for supervisors, Negroes get them...
...From some of the polls I've seen, there's a feeling among a large section of the Negro community that progress in some areas is being made...
...But I wonder if that's really the mood that exists...
...Just about every one of CORE's executives, no matter what his political position, has gone out into the larger white world and tried to get a position there...
...Maybe it's a problem of responding to a new situation...
...RUSTIN: The wealthy Negroes who only the day before had been applauding the rioters...
...This is a fight on the part of the educated Negro middle class to take over the schools, and I maintain that by and large they want to take them over not in the interest of black children, or a better educational system, but in their own interest, because they have nowhere to go economically...
...And this goes right back to what I called the maturation process...
...RUSTIN: Well, the two groups which got out of CORE are led by very strong-willed men, Carson and Lynch...
...We were pushed back...
...I would go up and down the main street of the city, looking in every restaurant, and I didn't go in until I saw another Negro there, because it was too painful continuously to face insult...
...So long as Negroes are an oppressed, segregated minority, which depends on what's happening in the larger society, any Negro leader is going to have to play the broker role...
...SNCC and CORE are very small...
...RUSTIN: Yes, and it does something else too...
...The Panthers, they're too far-out...
...It wasn't all despair in the days of Booker T. Washington, and it is not all despair today...
...We ought to be fighting so that more qualified Negroes be made principals and supervisors wherever there are openings...
...What do you mean, chicken...
...That's because many times these creative projects don't get written up...
...KAHN: One of the problems they have in an organization like CORE is that once you take it over and you're running it for a couple of years, your ambition grows...
...RUSTIN: I think you've pointed out the essential difference between the Booker T. Washington period and this period...
...The NAACP is looked on with a kind of contempt...
...And he made a great appeal to me on the basis that he didn't have the capital people had downtown, he couldn't afford a labor union coming into his place...
...HOWE: Wait, before you go ahead...
...FELDMAN: In Chicago...
...We all understand why Negroes hate cops, but one possible consequence of this is that cops are going to stop heeding any calls in Negro neighborhoods and that the person who will then suffer most is some perfectly innocent Negro woman who has her purse snatched or some black storekeeper who's held up and has no protection...
...I believe that a good deal of this is a substitute for failure on the outside .. . HOWE: A kind of compensation...
...What the Negro community is going to discover is that the Negro businessman will ultimately be a businessman before he is a Negro, just as white businessmen are businessmen before they are white...
...RUSTIN: Well, the first thing you have to understand is that if you talk about Negroes organized in movements, there are probably many more than ever before...
...So Washington said, "Turn in on yourselves...
...HOWE: Let's not move too fast...
...Associate yourself with the Africans...
...You will have created a political atmosphere wherein the Right will increasingly take over...
...They hold down regular jobs...
...and I really believe that Whitney Young's program for "going into the ghetto" is not substantially different from what Whitney Young has in fact been doing all along...
...Many of these organizations know what they're doing, many of them don't...
...The Garvey movement was tailored for this situation...
...CORE seems to be the organization to which the liberal white establishment is most responsive...
...Charles Evers in Mississippi is an entrepreneur...
...What's happened to SNCC...
...But as the riots approached their $25,000 homes, they .. . FELDMAN: Whose $25,000 homes...
...FELDMAN: What is the significance of the split in CORE...
...He has a business and Stokely Carmichael does not have a business...
...That is, through raising hell...
...They have higher morale...
...If a group of Negroes were sitting in a room with white people 10, 15 years ago, having been taught to be fearful, taught that they weren't equal, they tended always to play games and understate what they felt...
...Nixon picked it up, CORE's picked it up, but in regard to basic economic construction, steel, automobiles, etc., what is there that the Negro community as such can invest in and make go...
...he must overstate his case...
...To that extent, they are very much like Booker T. Washington...
...RUSTIN: Another illustration: For seven weeks the Amsterdam News was on strike...
...RUSTIN: I don't think what they have concretely in mind is very important...
...That's number one...
...Well, whether that was right or wrong .. RUSTIN: What some of the "militants" are saying is very similar, really...
...they participate in community affairs as members of NAACP and not as members of the UAW...
...But as you look back upon it, the Jewish socialist movement served as a kind of waystation through which people could move into the established society...
...not the first time this has happened...
...We have now got to get a Congress that will really bring about the kinds of social change, the redistribution of wealth, that is necessary to improve the ghetto...
...they are getting more and more important posts in the unions...
...There is now a new kind of patronage which was not available in the traditional political machines...
...Whitney is trying to wrap his basic program in black-power Christmas paper, hoping that it will sell better...
...Let me say one final thing, and that is that the chief social characteristic in the United States is grasshopping, whether you're white, blue, or pink...
...HOWE: The premise behind all you've been saying, Bayard, is that somehow the drive toward integration, with whatever difficulties, is virtually inevitable, inherent in the situation...
...After all, these are people who within the Negro community have relatively better conditions of life...
...Anybody who expects the Negroes who are making it economically not to want to get out of these God damned ugly cities just doesn't know the grasshopping nature of the American...
...HOWE: To use an old-fashioned vocabulary, this may even intensify the class struggle within the Negro community...
...That at least will raise morale...
...The white workers are more and more becoming suburbanites, more and more becoming home owners, moving out of the old central city neighborhoods that they used to live in...
...RUSTIN: I think their role in Detroit has been very profound...
...as they developed, they didn't have unions which were predominantly Negro...
...where no genuine progress in the redistribution of wealth, no putting people back in school and getting them educated can take place...
...Ghetto enterprises are all, or practically all, retail outlets...
...It is the well educated Negro middle class, more interested in the fact that if there are jobs for principals, Negroes get them...
...Some of the things many of these people say, probably, if you get them alone, they laugh about and realize it's not really serious...
...Another illustration is in regard to the schools...
...whereas today there seems to be considerable disintegration of the main groups...
...HOWE: Unless he's totally powerless .. KAHN: Unless he's totally powerless...
...RUSTIN: No...
...equally important, to repress one-tenth of the population will require an assault on the civil liberties of everyone...
...They have to purchase their goods and equipment from white companies at the latter's prices...
...You know, you were, just before, describing the idea of Negroes turning inward...
...They are happy if you got it by frightening whitey, cursing him and threatening him...
...KAHN: How do you accumulate that kind of surplus...
...We don't approve of it...
...The minute there's a riot they appoint him...
...And this need for investment capital will encourage him to expand that profit margin, not reduce it...
...You've got to accumulate as large a surplus as possible in the interests of supporting these various social services...
...And they also were asking that McKissick's and Innis's desire for a more centralized structure be rejected...
...Now it's the same today, but now the underlying feeling is one of withdrawal...
...But I'm less interested in this or that example than in how you achieve social goals—as against immediate victories which may plague you...
...And they have been calling for some time for a more militant expression even than Innis and McKissick...
...The minute Jews could get out of Allen Street, they got out...
...At a certain point it boomerangs...
...RUSTIN: Right...
...So there may be a very curious alliance—in fact you already see the beginnings of it politically—between the Negro nationalists who say "we want our own schools, we want to control the police," and the conservative whites...
...Whereas if we were really mixing the thing up and getting some Negroes into the suburbs and their schools, I think you'd have a better tax base...
Vol. 15 • November 1968 • No. 6
