The Agonies of Black Militancy

...They have also created more space in which blacks can maneuver themselves to the levers of American power...

...Though not everybody sees it that way, the sixties do not seem now to have been the best time to inaugurate new things —except, as it turned out, buildings and highways in memory of dead men and murdered hopes...

...Whether it be the movement to salvage and revaluate black history, build up black studies, or talk up the black experience...

...As John Corry put it in a recent article in Harper's, "One way or another, white America will try to turn blacks into song and dance men...

...but it was not absolutely different...

...Then came the years between 1963 and 1968 when that belief was shattered by a series of bullets, and the country has not been quite the same since...

...T T HERE IS HARDLY ANYTHING to be said about the Panthers that hasn't already been said or that everybody doesn't already know...

...Are there not others who appear to be in greater need of the reminder...

...The general view of such help or such entertainment is that it is after all what blacks do best, almost the only thing they do well, and of considerably less consequence than the role of whites in the life of the culture...

...He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both Negro and American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed in his face...

...And they were referring to black militancy not in the sense of black nationalism but in the sense of a movement whose controlling impulse was to break down barriers that stood in the way of a full and equal participation in American society, barriers that began to seem quite vulnerable at the turn of the decade...

...Bravery and arrogance express themselves in a kind of existential revolutionary theater: living dangerously, threatening destruction, cultivating extreme experiences, risking themselves in extreme situations...

...However irritating most of this may have been to the country, it was somewhat within the American grain...

...Only one aspect of this resemblance will be considered here...

...W W HILE IT IS NOT the first time that frustration has forced a large number of blacks to withdraw into themselves—and while the black nationalist movement of the twenties was larger than anything that exists today—this is the first time that the withdrawal has appeared so calculated and considered...

...The Negro mind," wrote Alain Locke in 1925, "reaches out as yet to nothing but American wants, American ideas...

...Since the slave rebels, only a handful of black men have felt the call to live this way—politically...

...If that is so, however, it suggests something quite important about that stage of the sixties: that it encouraged more hopes of a breakthrough into freedom, and thus stirred more black activism, than any previous period in the century...

...The first is marked by a set of attitudes which, shared by a variety of individuals and groups, is defined roughly as "nation-building" or cultural nationalism...

...And the same smoldering resentment most blacks feel against the effort to keep them secondclass citizens marks their refusal to be considered no more than the song-and-dance men of American culture...

...Why—since American culture is so "patently and irrevocably composite"—have the experiences and contributions of blacks been ignored, distorted, or otherwise treated so shabbily in American history books...

...One cannot by sheer fiat or a simple act of will undo the complexities and continuities which have been in process since blacks were transported into the Western experience...

...to define and impose standards...

...There are no more articulate and formidable proponents of this point of view than Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, both of whom operate out of a deep sense of the inescapable interconnections of black and white American life...

...One only has to look at LeRoi Jones's political activities in Newark and his new proximity to the levers of power in that city to realize the uses that may increasingly be made of conventional political avenues to power...

...Were they to oblige, it would be almost like saying that one way or another blacks will acquiesce in America's efforts to keep them second-class citizens...

...It's time we all stopped believing it...

...But what one knows as well is that experience also teaches us that pain cannot or should not be contained forever, and that a continual deflection of racial provocation may well be achieved at the cost of some awareness of and regard for who and what one is...

...of their claims to be the vanguard of an armed black revolution...

...Cleaver: "We shall have our manhood or the earth shall be leveled in our attempts to gain it...

...their breakfast programs and shoot-outs with the police...

...I ain't conceding that to no body...

...We did not develop as a people in isolation...

...As early as the turn of the century, W. E. B. DuBois was expressing the painful contradictions of the black American cultural situation in these words: He [the American Negro] would not Africanize America for America has too much to teach the world and Africa...

...What sense therefore in continuing to believe in promises or in retaining their ties to American idealism...

...Nevertheless no American whose involvement with the question of identity goes beyond the sterile category of race can afford to overlook another fact that is no less essential to his fundamental sense of nationality no matter how much white folklore is concocted to obscure it: Identity is best defined in terms of culture, and the culture of the nation over which the white Anglo-Saxon power elite exercises such exclusive political, economic, and social control is not all white by any measurement ever devised...

...As the latest stage in the continuum of black radicalism, the Panthers are as much in reaction against the society's continued frustration of black hopes as against the failure of the civil-rights protest movement to fulfill these hopes...

...Indeed for all their traditional antagonisms and obvious differences the so-called black and so-called white people in the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other...

...I think...

...to promote values and pass judgment...

...that blacks began entertaining— at least expressing—an interest in guns and black power...

...THIS FEELING OF TENSION with the majority elements in the culture is connected not only with periods in the past but also with a tradition of skepticism quite as respectable as the intellectual tradition that supports the idea of cultural integration...

...its moral language largely discarded...

...We developed within a context of white people...

...And part of what perished as well was that spirit we had come to identify as black militancy...

...The increase in registered voters, the training of young people as political organizers, the striking down of many of the legal obstacles blocking the way to an open society, the continued if incomplete integration and democratization of the trade-union movement, the election of black candidates to political offices across the nation—all of these have been enabled by the limited but genuine accomplishments of the civil-rights movement...

...Ironically, the opportunities for political involvement to which a large number of young blacks may yet turn in the seventies were created by the efforts of the much maligned civil-rights movement...

...If this is so, then, perhaps the country only has itself to blame that the only possibility for the continuation of black radicalism today lies in the areas of irrationality and violence, or—as Joseph Conrad said in a book that has some relevance to our present political experience— madness and despair...

...Much of what describes JERVIS ANDERSON the reaction of the cultural nationalists may be applied politically to the Panthers...

...Well, damn it, that literature is built oft our folklore to a large extent...

...Who's to say what attractions young and embittered black soldiers returning from Vietnam may find in the Panther movement...

...Whether such a feeling may have developed in any case—even if blacks had long been accorded what they conceived to be their rightful status in the society—it is hard to say, though it may be worth speculating upon...

...Sometimes that even delays the mail, and often it is delivered at inconvenient times...

...It is also a position that ignores the solid accomplishments of the protest movement in the early sixties, accomplishments that dramatically widened the frontiers of black freedom...

...Ellison's ideas, stated and restated in much of his writings, were recently quoted in part by James Alan McPherson in an article, signed by both men, in the Atlantic Monthly (December 1970) : I think that too many of our assertions continue to be in response to whites...

...but the effort they make to cut themselves off from the general culture, withdraw into a cultural community of their own, and cultivate the African strains in their historical background, all of this may represent their refusal to be seen merely as the song-and-dance men of the culture...

...But it is not so much the reality itself which troubles those young people who now want to consider themselves cultural nationalists as it is their experience at the hands of the reality...

...It does not seem now to be any accident that it was between those years, '63 and '68, that American cities started going up in flames...

...that the escape from reality found its most comforting haven in drugs...

...And be sure to keep a carbon of all manu scripts...

...One last word, though, about the Panthers...

...Stated simply, perhaps too simply, the black cultural tendency holds a greater feeling for its connection to African cultural forms and roots than for its development within the community of white history and values...

...to determine what is of consequence and what is not...

...But such a person should try to remember who were the militants then, JERVIS ANDERSON what forms their activism took, and what spirit sustained them...

...THE AGONIES OF BLACK MILITANCY Why is it that most whites are able to get away with forgetting it...

...To them the term black Amercan or Negro American is not merely a convenient political combination, but a fine fusion of culture and consciousness and historical experience...

...An inordinate amount of their rhetoric seems aimed at expressing the essential quality of black manhood which has been denied—a certain To Our Confribufors In sending manuscripts, letters, and other material, please do not use special delivery...

...And perhaps it was way back there that the possibilities for rational radical action among blacks began to be exhausted, because the black radical movement of the twenties turned out to be pretty much a spectacular failure...

...and vines are climbing over the raw masonry and unpainted woodwork...

...One can well understand how deepseated in the white American imagination is the image of silent and noble black endurance— in fact we know this because it is one of the perceptions forced upon us by the power of the majority culture...

...The answer may well have something to do with power, particularly with those who have it: the power of the majority culture to see as it pleases...

...It may be one thing for them to see that American culture is indeed a composite to which blacks have contributed some of the most vital elements...

...Not immediately, of course, for the memory of the more recent frustrations are still too fresh in our minds...

...Much of what the young people did then seems rather tame today...

...they are precisely where the American experience has driven youthful idealism and activism for the foreseeable future...

...its political sensibility held in contempt...

...But at the time it caused many of their elders in the freedom movement to tear their hair: it was "too provocative" and it could possibly be "counterproductive...

...That certainly seems to be the cultural reality of the United States...

...Urban guerrilla warfare led by Panthers, the young black lumpen proletariat, embittered exsoldiers and exconvicts may THE AGONIES OF BLACK MILITANCY be a nightmare from which it could take a long time to recover—and which many, of course, many of us may not survive...

...Some of those who had hoped to find a home in the house have lost faith in banks...

...that this war drove at least half of America out of its skull...

...that we've looked at our relationship to American literature in a negative way...

...These intellectuals do not so much advocate cultural integration— though the advocacy is clearly implied —as they assert it to be a fact: that there is neither a black nor a white American culture but that the one has been irrevocably shaped and influenced by the other...

...And, even more important, it is a fantasy that has done its part, a very large part, in helping to maintain the status of race relations in this country and the contradictions in the social and political experience of blacks and whites...

...and their cerebration by the intellectuals of chic, machismo, and cultural fashion...

...an attempt, fairly successful on the whole, to convert a defensive into an offensive position, a handicap into an incentive...

...In pointing out these interconnections within black and white culture Ellison and Murray are absolutely right, of course...

...that young middle-class whites started embracing what have been called un-American heroes and un-American ideologies...

...Victories in these areas are measured in martyrdom, in suicide, and in how much of the society a rebel takes with him at the moment of his destruction...

...In his book The Omni-Americans Albert Murray writes: White Anglo-Saxon Protestants do in fact dominate the power mechanisms of the United States...

...its racial promises revoked or betrayed...

...And the second, a set of political attitudesrougly described as revolutionary nationalism— is represented most spectacularly by the Panthers...

...whether it be the search by young writers and literary intellectuals for a "black aesthetic," different in method, sensibility, spirit, THE AGONIES OF BLACK MILITANCY and values from the "white Western aesthetic...

...It was certainly what the country seemed to ask of young people then: that they work for change and express their militant energies within the framework of American values...

...mixture of bravery and arrogance...

...People like the Panthers are witnessing to the madness that all blacks have felt at one time or another—and to the despair that many of us have avoided only by dint of some tragic and incredibly hopeful conception of the world and of our experience...

...Some of them, black militants of the sixties, seem to recall that this sort of thing happened to their forebears several times before...

...Much or all of this, however, is in conflict with the ideology of cultural integration held by a more traditional school of black literary and cultural intellectuals...

...Not everybody will want to go in the direction of the cultural nationalists...

...It seems to be the outcome of the reaction to proscription and prejudice...

...Almost everyone has heard about their founding in Oakland...

...whether it be the claim that black culture is a distinct, independent, and viable element within American society—whether it be any of these, there now seems more intellectual energy and seriousness than ever in the bid to reconsider the blacks' relationship to the society, to define the grounds for dissociating from the culture, and to create "new black men...

...While neither of these reactions implies or advocates cultural separation, they have a good deal in common with the reaction of those who today are in effect crying out as DuBois did against the agony of being an integral part of a culture that nevertheless spits in one's face and declares one not yet worthy of being taken seriously...

...that almost an entire generation of young people turned to the politics of selfindulgence, self-righteousness, irrationality, violence, and despair...

...their trials in and out of court...

...They certainly do...

...its moral sense driven up against the wall...

...But it is simply another fantasy built upon wishfulness and contempt...

...More people seem to have been militant in the early sixties than ever before...

...WHATEVER HAPPENED to the black militancy of the sixties, or the mood that sustained it, is precisely what became of the sixties themselves...

...its outlook upon the world withdrawn...

...This is of course a hard position to take against the protest movement, since the power of that movement is simply to persuade and not to act...

...I tell white kids that instead of talking about black men in white society, they should ask themselves how black they are because black men have been influencing the values of the society and the art forms of the society...

...The majority of the black population itself represents no more encouragement to the prospect of a revolutionary radical future than America itself does...

...However, the style and personality of the sixties turned out to be more perishable than most of us could have foreseen...

...People who still use the term are mostly those who think that nothing much has changed, or those who find it the most convenient catchall for whatever goes on in the precincts of black radicalism...

...Out of this, where alienated blacks are concerned, two predominant tendencies have taken shape...

...Some who do not regard it that way, but mourn it nonetheless, see it as a halffinished house on a deserted road: not a nail has been driven in since the bank cancelled its notes...

...When people started speaking of black militancy, they were not naming the tradition of black militant activity itself, but a mode of activism that seemed to be distinctly part of the style and personality of the sixties...

...That, of course, is not true...

...And the tactics they used were sit-ins, freedom rides, disruption of facilities, and a generality of activity described as nonviolent direct action...

...Yes, we have a special awareness because our experience has, in certain ways, been uniquely different from that of white people...

...As the seventies grow older, this could even get worse...

...What most marks the response of whites in such situations is an enjoyment that rests upon a certain fundamental contempt for those who provide it...

...In any event, most blacks had only one way of seeing it: once again white racism had cast its veto over social and racial progress in America...

...their alleged connections with international Communist conspiracies...

...Why is it that remembering it does not seem to make much difference in black's experience...

...To be a part of the radical spirit of today, however, is to share in the ideology of instant gratification and to hold a contempt for strategies and tactics that may achieve gratification a twinkling later...

...If it turns out—and as it appears—that no viable rearrangements are possible within the present reality of American culture, the function of intellectual leadership may well be to speak compassionately to that condition, to provide the rationales by which blacks may confront the stubborn irony of it and make some tragic peace with it...

...The point of all this is not that cultural nationalists are justified in their attempt to withdraw into a cultural enclave of their own or that this is even possible in America...

...That may be true—though God knows it is hardly a tradition one would choose if he had anything to say about it...

...Today, if there are young blacks who still consider themselves militants, a look at whatever they are "into" will reveal that they are considerably less militant than people who consider themselves something else—people who say that what they are "into" now are things like revolution, liberation, self-determination...

...I think that we're polarized by the very fact that we keep talking about "black awareness" when we really should be talking about black American awareness, an awareness of where we fit into the total American scheme, where our influence is...

...How many of their parents fell in love listening to Nat King Cole...

...How many young exconvicts may be inspired and emboldened by the revolutionary examples of Cleaver and George Thomas...

...that the Vietnam war was escalated into a metaphor of contemporary brutality...

...Thus—although almost every bit of racial progress this century has been achieved by the civil-rights movement—it is now held to have temporized and compromised too much, to have wasted its time fighting for integration, to have bitten its tongue in the presence of the white establishment, to have asked for what it could get rather than demand what it was entitled to, to have sold out on black manhood...

...Finally, as periods of black politics have followed periods of intense radical or protest activity, so may the Panther period, as it has been christened by admirers, give way to renewed political activity among many young blacks...

...The last time that black radicalism was so strident in tone—though more intelligent, more thoughtful, and less sanguinary—was in the years between World War I and the middle twenties when the black economic radicals led by A. Philip Randolph attacked American society and the traditional black leadership with a racial militancy and an ideological vehemence that probably still has not been surpassed...

...The term is still used, to be sure—however quaint a throwback it may sound, however it may have the forced and somewhat square ring of language no longer quite in fashion...

...It is quite another thing for them to realize that those who dominate the cultural composite take no more serious and consequential a view of the blacks' part in it than a white household takes of the traditional black help, or a white audience of black entertainment...

...But madness and despair were not embraced voluntarily...

...Why has it been left to blacks to salvage much of their past and their pride from the cutting-room floors of white historians...

...They were mostly young people and mostly students...

...They are paying an enormous human cost in madness and despair...

...And almost two decades later, during the Harlem Renaissance, Alain Locke noticed a cultural reaction similar if not identical to that of today: This deep feeling of race is at present the mainspring of Negro life...

...Whites "do in fact dominate the power mechanisms of the United States," Murray says...

...As to the mood that sustained the activism, it was one of optimism—belief that the country was ready and able to respond favorably to demands pressed upon it within the spirit of its own professed ethics...

...They belonged predominantly to SNCC and CORE, almost the only groups that offered black and white American youth an opportunity to participate constructively in the passions of their time and help set right a society that had long been out of joint...

...Not all blacks will oblige...

...To a large number of people, and mainly the young, the decade seems now to be littered with the ruins of great expectations: many of its more decent commitments dismantled...

...Even those who believe that blacks can at best share equally and democratically in American power, rather than seizing it, are in no position to carp too cheaply at the Panthers...

...The point is, though, that there has been a good deal of anguish felt and a good deal of contempt suffered by blacks while trapped in the cultural crucible of these centuries...

...Or as someone less prominent said more recently, the only thing young blacks are prepared for in this country is to destroy it...

...the fascination they hold for rich ladies in pants suits...

...It's time we all realized that humanity may consist more in giving utterance to one's suffering than in containing it, resisting racial provocation than in deflecting it, raging against an unjust status than in accepting it...

...shrubbery has grown up all around it...

...That is, we've looked at it in terms of our trying to break into it...

...He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world...

...American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is incontestably mulatto...

...The point too is that they are entitled to bawl, and deserve to have some attention paid to the cause and nature of their pain...

...There is also," Ellison writes, "an American tradition which teaches one to deflect racial provocation and to master and contain pain...

...Thus too it has come to appear that one of the principal issues around which the Panthers are in motion is the issue of black manhood...

...And what is more, even their most JERVIS ANDERSON extreme and violent polarities represent nothing so much as the natural history of pluralism in an open society...

...ALTHOUGH BLACK MILITANCY has been one of the veins of American radicalism at least since the abolitionists, it was only during the early sixties that most people started paying much attention to it or even calling it by that name...

...Regular mail will, as a rule, be adequate...

...Why, anyway, is it blacks who are constantly being reminded that American culture is a composite...

...What seems clear is that the feeling has come about in direct response to a long history of denial in American society...

...Anyone who has been raised to respond hysterically to anything with the word black in it—or to find no consoling distinctions between one form of black radicalism and another—may be astonished to hear black militancy associated with the public idealism of the sixties...

...One cannot recall a time when so many among the educated black young and the lumpen intelligentsia of the streets appeared so utterly at odds with the idea of America, when there appeared to be such a deep and conscious spirit of disaffiliation with the things and processes of the general culture...

...Considering whom the bullets struck, they appear to have been aimed directly at the aspirations of the young, the black, and the poor...

...And those mechanisms include culture, which in turn includes the power to dominate and influence the shape of a minority's sense of itself...

...Whatever insufficiencies the Panthers have been victimized by, they do not include an insufficiency of publicity...